In World City

by I. F. Godsland

  She shrugged and smiled.

  Too confident, Dion thought.

  Later, after he’d told her he’d prefer to stick around Dusseldorf for a few days, Dion watched Miranda’s white Mercedes disappear down the canyons of steel and glass. He thought she looked vulnerable.

  23

  William Burger fucked Sylvie Lacombe with deliberate ferocity. This gave him some satisfaction. For a start – as he saw it – Sylvie, vain to the last, mistook his fury for passion. Further, she sustained her self-deception by never looking him in the face when they had sex. Instead, she liked to look at herself in the mirror – her face – the positions she adopted. William felt nothing for her, apart from mild distaste. He did, however, feel something for the images that crowded his mind while he was on the job. Mostly hate: his wife, cold paragon of propriety, not much good for anything except keeping things clean; but mainly it was Miranda Whitlam he thought of.

  “What are you thinking of, William?” Sylvie asked the ceiling. “You are so withdrawn after we have made love.”

  He wished they both smoked. Then they wouldn’t have to talk to cover the space between them. Usually she told him how wonderful he had been, so he was disturbed by this personal note. Presumably she wanted him to say it was her he was thinking of, so he replied with an honesty he hoped would be brutal, “Whitlam.”

  Sylvie’s self-regard was entirely unshaken. She laughed and said easily, “She intrudes in everything.”

  That much was true, William reflected. She was even trying to intrude in the very stuff of life. He was still mystified by how unconscious it was with her; not so much a part of any deliberate programme as a reflex or appetite – a need for air or water. She seemed possessed by an unrecognised assumption that the world was there for her to do with what she wanted. Her continual interference did no more than confirm that. But so strong was her hunger she had pushed back the boundaries of her interventions so far that she had finally hit on DNA, the stuff of life.

  William identified with the stuff of life. He felt his own vitality beating against every constraint that had ever been imposed on him: his unremittingly middleclass upbringing, his competitive education, his conventional marriage, his employment in somebody else’s institute. When he had first seen Miranda Whitlam on that primitive island where her father had holed up, he had recognised immediately someone who was and would be entirely free of such constraints and he had clutched at her like a straw. Sometime after, she had allowed herself to be grasped but had then slipped his grip, moving instinctively away from the dead weight of limitation he knew he carried, then turning on him and laying another weight of constraint with the outrageous salary she offered. Thus he became another piece of the world to be worked by her. He resented this like hell. So, when Sylvie Lacombe came and told him she had found out Miranda Whitlam was arranging for the construction of human-specific viral vectors, his resentment found a cause to focus on. Miranda Whitlam was aiming to step beyond the bounds of the acceptable and she knew it. He knew she knew it because she entirely omitted to say anything about it to William Burger, her deputy director.

  Sylvie shifted closer to him. “She is not here, William. She is not here. She has no idea that we are here. Her thoughts are not on us.”

  William felt her hand move up the inside of his thigh. He clenched his teeth as she started to massage his limp, spent penis. “She’s not here, William,” Sylvie whispered teasingly. She kept on rubbing him and he lay there waiting for her to lose interest.

  “William,” – still grinding her palm into his genitals, “something happened on Friday. I got significant discrimination on three of her five radical damage markers.”

  “What?” Burger bellowed, reflexively trying to roll over and get above her. He flopped back, however, as giggling Sylvie tightened her grip, threatening to dismember him if he tried any dramatics. “Three out of five?” he questioned, more controlled. “What’s the breakdown?”

  Sylvie relaxed her grip and in a single movement was straddling him, still keeping up the massage, but with abrasive downthrusts of her crotch. Burger winced.

  “Twelve and twelve,” Sylvie murmured, each number being accompanied by a more forceful thrust. “Twelve and twelve,” she repeated. “Twelve and twelve.”

  Easing up on the force, she made her movements more sensual, her voice softening into a sing-song moan. “Twelve and twelve. Our Miranda has two groups there, William: good boys and bad boys. Good boys going through puberty just like she said on the ethics application. Bad boys going through puberty too, but they’ve had something done to them, William. They’ve been interfered with, William. They’ve had something injected into them. That wasn’t in what the ethics would allow. That wasn’t in the guardians’ checklist. Bad boys out there, William, with no one to say ‘no’ when the needle goes in. Bad boys with no one to look after them. Where does she go, William? Where does she go when she says she’s visiting her little group of twenty-four children? She’s gone for days, William. Where does she go? Twelve and twelve. Who are the twelve bad boys, William?”

  William Burger began to catch fire. Miranda Whitlam was delivered unto him. Here was the proof he had been waiting for ever since Sylvie Lacombe had come to offload her conscience onto him. She had wanted no responsibility for her knowledge of those human-specific vectors – she was too much into her career to want to risk being associated with a scandal. She had come to William and made it his responsibility and he had been only too willing to shoulder the load. He rose bodily, tipping Sylvie off him and onto her back. She pretended to struggle the better to fire him up still more. Then, when he had her properly pinned down, she started fighting in earnest. This was the way it went when they became most excited. If William had thought, he might have concluded that since she came back for more she liked it that way. But he was too taken up with fury to give a damn what she felt. He thrust into her with all the force he could concentrate into his normally sedentary pelvis. Sylvie screamed and he felt the constraints loosen. Thoughts dimmed. Control went. When he came and whether she came he had no idea but, somehow, it was suddenly all over and they were lying apart, drenched in sweat, breathing hard.

  After a while, Sylvie said, “What do want me to do, William?”

  “How much does she know?” Burger grunted.

  “I’ve held back the last six months’ data. There was a trend just beginning. I told her we needed to do the assays in six month batches to optimise quality control.”

  “Make the trend disappear. Don’t let her see even a hint of significance until I say.”

  “What will you do?”

  “What I want, Sylvie dear, is for us to find out exactly how it works and work out how to mimic that in a way that does not involve screwing around at the DNA level. When we have that ready to run, you start giving her figures that make the trend come back. That gets her excited and we let that excitement build till she believes she’s about to take over the whole Ageing Initiative.”

  Sylvie laughed. “You hate her so much, William. Do you still want the directorship?”

  Burger didn’t answer. It would serve no purpose to tell Sylvie that the directorship was a secondary concern now. What William Burger wanted was to break into that unquestioning operator attitude that pervaded every cell of Miranda Whitlam’s wretchedly beautiful body. He wanted her to feel that attitude of hers for the first time just as it was about to disintegrate. Simply, he wanted to see her suffer.

  Sylvie stretched with cat-like complacency. She eased herself up and looked down on William Burger. What did she care? She would be into another job within two or three years with her passion for what the man had to offer burned out. At present, he suited her perfectly; absolutely no threat of involvement and excitingly brutal in his sex. She adored the inarticulate, impersonal fury that could come over him when they were in bed together. Quite what he got out of it she wasn’t sure: a different kind of release presumably. As for the information she brought him, his inte
ntions were entirely clear. More than that, he paid her a substantial bonus out of his own pocket. William suited her. She went to take a shower.

  With Sylvie out of the room, William Burger managed to smile for the first time in the twelve hours they had been together. And he was still thinking of Miranda Whitlam. She had once asked him, ‘Why are you so interested in longevity research, William?’ He had said something conventional, like, ‘Because it’s an area with the greatest potential,’ or, ‘Because it’s the last great frontier of investigation.’ But if he had been honest with himself, he would have said, ‘Because I need more time.’

  He understood well enough now his need for more time. The need grew with every passing year and its reinforcement of the limits of his existence. He needed those limits pushing back and one way of doing that was to acquire a controlling position in longevity research. He thought he’d got it when Prof Joe died but Whitlam had stepped in with her absurd wealth. Still, he had guessed even then that if he gave her enough rope she would eventually hang herself on some point of ethical practice that her pride – or whatever the hell it was about her – would lead her to overlook. She had never fully taken on board what a sensitive area they were working in. When Prof Joe died, Miranda Whitlam had been left with no constraints. William had seen this at the time and had decided constraint would be one gap he would not fill for her.

  As for the rest, he would continue his animal work and use the knowledge thus gained to develop strategies for use in humans that did not impinge on their precious genetic material. It was still a dangerous approach; he would have to tone down how much had been gleaned from the animal studies. But that was a minor consideration compared with what might be gained. William had made no secret of the fact that this was his chosen strategy. He had, in fact, used it as a platform from which to launch his bid for the directorship. But Whitlam’s wealth had shouted loudest. And she had no time for such niceties as the rest of humanity’s ethical scruples. ‘William, when they see life stretching before them, perhaps forever, they won’t give a damn about their precious genetic identities.’

  But William Burger had been with the Ageing Initiative managers and he knew for a fact that, despite their soaring enthusiasms, they did give a damn. And, when the time came, as it surely would, and they started to waver, he would be there with an effective alternative and he would be thundering out into every media ear fire and brimstone for anyone who so much as touched the sacred genome.

  “I have to go now,” Sylvie said, coming out of the shower. She didn’t really, but she’d had what she wanted from William Burger. Next day – a Monday – they would resume the relationship that others saw, acting as if nothing had passed between them beyond the mutual daily concerns that their work brought. She dressed, said, “See you tomorrow,” and left. They always arrived separately, took separate rooms, and always left separately. It sustained the illusion of a business arrangement – which maybe it was.

  William propped himself up on his elbows preparatory to climbing off the bed. He paused in mid-movement, eyes suddenly fixated on the dull square of curtained window. If grey could radiate, that was what was coming from the single source of outside light. He felt completely spent, used up by Sylvie’s hungers. She had saved up the information on Miranda’s project just for the moment when he had nothing left. Then, with her news, she had charged up the excitement in him, only to take it all back into herself. She had left him doubly discharged. All this William saw as he stared momentarily at the grey rectangle. He dragged his legs over the edge of the bed, walked to the window and drew back the curtains. He looked out of the rear of the small country hotel they had chosen. It was thirty kilometres outside Basel, in thick woodland that stretched up to the Jura. There was a fine drizzle and a mist down on the approaches to the low mountains.

  William struggled against the smothering greyness. If what Sylvie had said was true, his future was assured. So was Miranda Whitlam’s. She was finally about to overreach herself. Timing would be critical though. She could not be allowed to think she had succeeded until he was ready with the alternative. And, by the time he was ready with the alternative, those fund managers he was dealing with would have been imbued with a mortal horror of DNA-based manipulations. They were wary enough already, but that was more out of concern for their public standing than any deep conviction they felt. William would be supplying them with all the conviction they could take, and more.

  He stepped back from the window and began dressing. Sylvie would have to be kept happy for a while longer, long enough to see her lined up with some comfortably tenured professorship on the other side of the world. For a moment, he wondered what she saw in him. When he thought of her at all, he thought of his own sense of rage and exhaustion and, it had to be said, some sense of release.

  William finished dressing, packed his overnight bag and checked out. He would stop off for a drink and arrive back for an early Sunday meal with his family having been, he would say, to just another dull conference, a duty in his line of work.

  24

  A year turned as Dion went on listening to Miranda being too confident. Into winter and out the other side he listened to how there was already a trend beginning to appear in the data and how it was only a matter of time before it hit statistical significance. In spring, he listened to her talking about how she would soon be holding the whole of the Ageing Initiative in the palm of her hand and in summer it was all about how rich Dion and the boys would become.

  None of this Dion trusted. It was not that he didn’t believe it would happen. Riches might come from the project, or they might not. It was just that she was too confident. When she talked confident she didn’t feel in touch. She sounded like one of Dion’s corporate traitors when they came to him for the first time, high on the sudden freedom that turning against their employer had given them. Then, when the days had shortened and the wind was beginning to whip leaves from God knew where in the godforsaken Waste, Dion finally lost patience with her. “Miranda, there’s somebody going to mess you up over all this. You are too fucking confident. I can feel it.”

  “Dion, don’t worry. You can’t imagine what they’re like, the people who are running the Ageing Initiative. William Burger gives me an update on them each week. They’re pushing us with everything they’ve got. They want results. Any results. Anything. They’ll be over the moon about what we’re doing here.”

  Dion kept on with his protests, trying to chip away at her resistance, trying to ease his growing anxiety. He began to doubt if he was ever going to get through to her.

  But, with years now spent beyond the edges of World City and with the dissolving rains of autumn beating against the stained, concrete tower blocks of the Waste, Miranda Whitlam was finally becoming capable of getting through to herself. She just needed the right kind of push. It came from one of the boys, one called Mysté.

  Mysté was very careful to let people know how they should pronounce his name. It wasn’t Misty, it was Meestay, and people either got it right or, if they couldn’t be bothered or forgot, Mysté would put them right. His reprisals were delayed, personal and humiliating, which meant that it was usually only the transgressors who noticed they were being put right and they didn’t much feel like telling anyone about it afterwards. So Mysté carried no safety warning, and if someone was foolish enough to continue pronouncing his name wrong, there was no culture of caution to restrain them.

  One of the boys, Ferrie – a year or so younger than Mysté – was the next one not to pronounce Mysté’s name right. Worse still, Ferrie did it deliberately.

  “Hey, Misty – why don’t you call yourself Misty?”

  “Ferrie, you call me Meestay. That’s all.”

  “Stupid fuckin’ way to say it. Makes you sound like a fuckin’ hairdresser. Like you’re some kind of queen or something. Why don’t you see if you can pick something up at one of those pretty places just over the border? Pick something up – ha, ha – I was thinking of hardware, bu
t maybe you go for software instead. Software – you know? – Kind of meaty. Maybe that’s what you’d like.”

  “You call me Mysté, Ferrie. That’s all.”

  But there was something about Mysté that had got to Ferrie – as if having what it took to dictate what others called you was an insufferable provocation. Ferrie wanted to damage that self-possession. So he didn’t let up. He went on about it, and on.

  Ferrie went on about it so much that the kind of private settlement Mysté generally made became increasingly inappropriate. It became a public matter and others started getting uncomfortable. “Leave off, Ferrie,” said the strong and normally silent Mayer. “You’re not being funny.”

  Ferrie gave Mayer a line about how he should stop acting the big brother and went right on baiting Mysté. But Mayer wasn’t being anyone’s big brother, though he fitted the part quite well. His inwardness opened him up to how dangerous things were getting and he just didn’t want to see anyone damaged.

  Others were more explicit. “You’re going to get your head kicked in, Ferrie, if you keep on like that,” warned Dom, one of the younger ones.

  “You want a fight, Ferrie? You jus’ goin’ to get a fuckin’ knife in your back,” pronounced Jetter.

  “You tell me when you’re going to have it out. I wanna be there to watch,” Juan urged.

  Dion watched, wondering whether he should shut Ferrie up. Something had got into the boy, some kind of itch. From his own point of view, Dion wasn’t too worried by the damage that might be done. He was just afraid that however much it was it might mess up the experiment. He thought back to himself and Maskel and how Leo had handled that and decided Ferrie and Mysté would have to work it out themselves. But they wouldn’t do to each other what he did to Maskel; they were too equal. There wouldn’t be too much injury involved.