‘So there is no purity, only compromise with good and evil?’
‘And who knows which is which?’
I would not argue with a jesting Ultra, particularly as I was not sure that he jested. He was outrageous but not easily countered. I contented myself with smilingly hostessing my little cabal of corruption. If he was right (and he possibly was) then we existed in a state of scrambling from crisis to crisis, preserving our good opinions of ourselves by hailing the expedients of desperation as moral and intellectual triumphs.
In his terms, our twenty-first century made sense only as a race to stay ahead of the consequences of its own corruptions – the Greenhouse Effect among them – and hope that the future will find room for a directionless humanity.
It was a wonder that we ever found cause for laughter, but day after day we did. So, even if he was right, it didn’t matter. Only when the laughter stopped would it be time for tears.
Not until later did I see that he had not been cutting an awkward exchange with a running jest but telling me that we must look straight at good and evil, right and wrong if we are to understand not only what we are but what we can be.
I was not impressed with Nikopoulos when he came after lunch. I must correct that: he was impressive in an animal fashion, of only middle height but obviously powerful, with the etched Mediterranean features that promise a strong personality but rarely deliver it, and the quiet voice that might have force in reserve or might not. Also, he had the cool eyes of controlled fanaticism. My instinctive reaction was ‘grossly physical and intellectually devious,’ not a man for Teddy to look up to.
When Teddy introduced him he scanned my face, though without insolence, and seemed satisfied as if a guess had been confirmed.
I offered coffee, which he took without milk, smiled and said, ‘Royal Papuan beans, Lae district. They come in through Nola Parkes’ Department and don’t often filter down to the Fringe.’ That was plain showing off but he was also telling me that today he was as civilian as his informal dress, not a policeman. I replied, acknowledging the message, ‘The wages of sin,’ and stepped plump into his net.
‘The wages of Francis,’ he corrected, never losing his smile, ‘whom we must discuss. Teddy will have told you I am interested in him.’
‘No, he hasn’t.’ I was at once frightened; I tried not to think too often of Francis but – I was frightened. And Teddy avoided my eyes. ‘What has Francis done?’
‘Why, nothing yet. It is what he may do. Billy?’
Billy had told me nothing, either. Now he described his visit to Mrs Parkes and ended with, ‘She’ll keep an eye on him but I reckon he’s smart enough not to raise suspicion. Silly smart,’ he amended, ‘enough to get what he’s after but not enough to see the consequences.’
He sounded practical but I knew that his not-so-rational heart bled for the Francis he had loved. Francis had never really been a lovable child but Billy, loving me, had given his affection to the boy as a step toward my acceptance of himself. Emotion drives us on twisted tracks.
‘Send him home! I want him back!’ That half-screech, between rage and pain, was mine but I did not care.
Billy said sadly, ‘He wouldn’t stay, he’s too far gone. He’s as scared of the Fringe as he is of the Swill.’
‘I’ll keep him! I’ll make him stay!’
They gave me the patience of repressed pity, too well-mannered to treat me as the fool I made of myself.
‘I’ll make him stay,’ I repeated, defying them while my throat closed on a defeated whimper because my chance to hold him had vanished in sexual haze three years before.
Nikopoulos put out his hand – a surprisingly small, delicate hand, no peasant paw – to take mine. ‘Social fear is hard to overcome. Coppers call it the Sweet Dream, fear of falling.’
The fall is terrible. Even half a fall, like mine, not all the way down . . .
Arry, having no personal interest, suggested, ‘Hit him with a bigger fear. Make him run home for safety.’
To him it was a simple problem in behaviour, amenable to an easy solution. Billy did not respond but Nikopoulos said, ‘It’s worth a thought. Save it. Let’s deal with immediate things.’
My semi-hysteria rebelled at this damnable switch of attention. I squalled at him, ‘I want my son!’
The sharp lines of his face shifted; he became saturnine and forceful. ‘And I want you to have him. He won’t be forgotten.’ I liked him no better but I stopped feeling like a child offered a sweet and then denied it – until he said, ‘But Francis is not the present problem,’ and turned to Arry, switching me out of the circuit. ‘This is your meeting, Arry. What do you want?’
The boy (so hard to remember that the urchin face was only eighteen years old) had something concealed in his skinny claw as he answered, ‘I want a piece of the action.’
That old phrase, or something like it, was still current in Swill jargon but I saw no present sense in it. Nikopoulos did, because he said, ‘Forget it. You’ll never make a copper, Arry.’ Then, watching Arry’s face, he saw reason and laughed aloud. ‘They caught you!’ Arry turned beefsteak red. ‘You’ve got the brains but not the field training, boy! You outsmarted yourself and they caught you at it! So now they want to use you to do a PI job for them. What is Med up to?’
Arry took it well. ‘I was being cunning, turning on the big sex act—’ That was hard to imagine but the most unlikely men have spectacular love lives; Arry may have scored where physique and good looks would have got him nowhere. I wondered what the girl was like. ‘—And she turned it back on me. I got the information all right, then the whole bloody Section ganged up on me and held the Research Secrecy Act over my head if I didn’t tell them who was picking their brains. I had to admit it was PI but I didn’t use your name, Nick. They’re on to something that has to be kept quiet but they haven’t the contacts to carry it through. So, if the interfering so-and-sos from PI can find out what Med needs to know there’ll be no report made about interdepartmental meddling. I have to produce the goods or we all go down the drain.’ He brightened to wipe an imaginary tear. ‘All our young careers blighted!’
Nikopoulos said wearily, ‘Bloody funny. What must I do to save your hide?’
‘Yours, too.’ He opened his hand to show a cylindrical tablet about two centimeters long, wrapped in clear polythene. ‘Find out where this came from.’
The pale green tablet was familiar, the reason for Billy’s often sweet-sour breath. Nikopoulos reached for it but Arry pulled back. Billy said, ‘Chewey. So what?’
‘But is it?’
‘Show me.’
Arry handed it over. ‘Don’t open it.’
Billy examined it closely with his weak eyes and produced a tablet of his own for comparison. Arry warned, ‘For Christ’s sake, don’t confuse them.’
‘Not quite the same. Yours is more bluey-green. What’s the difference inside?’
‘That yours is made in State factories and distributed for coupons while mine comes from God knows where and is handled by God knows who. What Med knows is that this one came from the pockets of a dead Swill – dead from violence, not plague – and the copper who checked the body knew enough to spot the colour. He turned it in for testing because black market cheweys have to be tested for narcotic level.’
Billy said, ‘The silly pricks make it too strong. Get caught every time.’
‘This time they haven’t been able to duplicate the colour exactly because the narcotic component is slightly different. It has to be to accommodate the culture medium.’
We all reacted sharply except Billy, who did not know the term. Nikopoulos and Teddy leaned over to look at the thing. I had to ask, ‘Are you talking about this new disease?’
‘Very much so. Chewey is the prime vector.’ He produced another tablet with a red marker, opened the wrapping and broke it in half. ‘This is a mock-up. See how it’s done? The narcotic and flavouring is contained in these honeycomb cells, the chewing action burst
s them open. That one—’ he nodded at the dangerous little thing in Billy’s hand ‘—contains also dormant viruses in a neutral medium. They come to life in the presence of saliva. They aren’t natural viruses, they’re laboratory constructs.’
There are ideas too large, too ramified, for immediate assimilation; you perceive their existence unemotionally, the impact comes later. So it was with a specious calm that I said, ‘But that means it is being spread deliberately.’
‘Doesn’t it just!’ He had accustomed himself to the idea, could be smart-alecky about it.
‘Killing people in such horrible fashion!’
‘Oh, but it isn’t killing anyone.’ His eyes danced with the possession of surprises. ‘They all recover. Even without treatment they recover. Some low temperature, a few days out of their dizzy minds, then a high temperature that mutates the virus into a harmless form, and it’s over. Some risk of secondary infection, like pneumonia, but that’s no sweat.’
Billy asked, ‘Then why haven’t any come back that the Meds took away?’
‘Quarantined for further observation. Med is into a very hush-hush operation.’
Nikopoulos muttered angrily, ‘Let there be no panic! Let the little victims play!’ He sniffed, lifting his head like a questing hound. ‘But they recover. There are no victims.’
‘Oh yes, there are! All of them, Nicky! Sterile – every last mother’s son and daughter.’ He made a cheerful guttersnipe’s grimace at Billy, ‘So there’s the cull they tell me you’re always on about. Very humane, top – not much worse than a bad attack of flu. And self-limiting by ensuring there’s no next generation to pass it on to.’ His good humour was irritating enough but what he said to Billy was horrible. ‘How does it feel to be the bloke who was right all the time?’
That was cruel. Billy put the poisoned tablet on the table and said nothing. Later, with only me to see, he would cry for his unholy rightness.
20
Nick
AD 2051
The gibe at Billy was unnecessary but Arry, whatever his intellect, was street Swill and street Swill don’t waste much sensitivity on each other. In any case Arry had little to waste. But Kovacs did; he was a mass of raw surfaces, forever acting tough because the man inside suffered; Alison Conway was his needed refuge.
I was not attracted by what lay below her glossy surface. A glance was enough to see what had taken Billy’s ambitious but simple-hearted fancy; her handsomeness was the aftermath of beauty but her unselfconscious confidence (called, in her Sweet world, ‘social poise’) spoke of an underlying hardness, calculation that allowed her to hold and probably manipulate him. She must have burst on him as a dazzlement, the embodiment of ‘class’ dropped within his startled reach while his Swill heart thudded like a bongo drum and his avaricious loins ached in rhythm. He was stolen property; poor Vi had no chance against the glamour. But poor Vi had Billy’s trust in areas Alison could not enter, Vi was the soldier’s battle mate, Alison the victory whore who had to make the best of her flimsy fortune.
While I thought of all that, she showed that as well as bed-worthiness she had some of Vi’s ability to look to essentials. With the barest hint of hostess coolness she said, ‘Arry, stop making drama and tell us why others must do your dirty work for you. Surely Med has its own field teams?’
Arry said, ‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But it won’t work like that.’
‘One reason,’ I told them, ‘is that all field teams are under a blanket order to stay out of tower areas.’
Billy banged on the table like a curse. ‘That’s why no meds for the past week or more.’
‘Don’t need ’em,’ Arry said. ‘Nobody’ll die. It’s the contact vector that worries them, makes it too likely they’ll carry it back into Sweet areas.’
Alison saw nonsense in that. ‘It must cross over. The soldiers go home on leave. We used to see them—’
‘No more they don’t, Mrs Conway, and nobody sees them. And they won’t until the virology teams give the word. The soldier boys stay in barracks in the Enclaves.’
She was outraged. ‘Are you saying that the Enclaves are being sealed off? To preserve the useless Sweet? Besides, we Fringers shop in the towers. It will cross.’
Arry regarded her with approval for her spirit if not for her brains. ‘So the Fringe becomes Swill,’ he said succinctly. ‘Quarantined. Always was, really. And the Sweet aren’t useless, lady – they run the show, to the work, keep it going. It’s the Swill that’s useless, have to be fed and housed and paid for by a bankrupt State and give nothing back.’
She said, ‘I’ve heard the voice of desertion twice in my own family. Yours has a familiar ring.’
His quick pallor showed that she had hit low. I should have paid more attention but Billy broke in with, ‘We’re expendable.’ He said it without animus; he had been raised in the idea. (But he and his were not expendable. Nobody was, ever.)
Arry said with gritty composure, ‘The towers can’t be overtly sealed off without starting a panic; they’re just withdrawing every contact they can.’ He looked Mrs Conway straight in the eye. ‘Sealing off the Swill is just the sensible way of cutting losses where they can be best afforded.’
‘Cold-blooded!’
‘How would you do it, Mrs Conway? Just give the disease open slather to sterilize the best brains in the State?’
Her face said she would have loved to slap his unbridled mouth. ‘I suppose I would not. But if this is where investigation must begin, what does sealing off accomplish?’
‘Maybe nothing. Depends how you look at it. Government theorizes the stuff may be brought in from over the border. That’s sense because what does an Australian gain from sterilizing his own? So Med thinks one of the hush-hush agencies is working that angle without needing to go to the Swill. But Med also thinks we might get a quick trace in the towers.’
She asked, ‘Doesn’t it all frighten you?’
‘I’m Swill. I was born frightened, I just don’t show it any more. Survival first – there’s time to be frightened after.’
On the face of it the State position seemed reasonable but I hadn’t enough facts for judgment. Still, it could be an inside job – there were possible rewards for treachery.
She appealed to me. ‘Mr Nikopoulos, what does this young man want of you?’
Billy stood up and stretched like a lazy-tongs extending and told her, ‘Make a pot of tea, Mother. He wants what he said at the start, to find where this green shit comes from. We’ve been saying the soldiers give it to the girls, but how if it’s the girls that give chewey to the soldiers?’
Oh, how she was shocked! ‘But the soldiers are Sweet. They don’t chew.’
Arry told her coldly, ‘They do. They always did. Bored men sit around doing nothing – and chew.’
‘Depravity doesn’t stop at the towers,’ I said. ‘It hits its real high in Sweet territory. There are Sweet who make their own chewey at four and five times strength with a deodorant incorporated so that their intimates don’t catch the sniff. At that strength it’s addictive and can turn nasty.’
She went to fill the kettle and, with her back to us, apologized. ‘I’m still a snob. I still feel there are things Sweet don’t do. Forgive me.’
Billy said, ‘Sweet or Swill, shit smells the same. Sorry, love, but it does. Now, anybody got suggestions how I go about this?’
I said, ‘How we go about it. You could run into trouble if the wrong people realize what you’re up to.’
‘Me in trouble? Nicky, I’m the bloke that makes trouble. You can’t be in it, anyway. Field teams includes PI, doesn’t it? So you can’t go into the Enclaves without your absence being noticed. And if I make mistakes and raise a big public smell I’ll need you up there using influence to get me out from under.’
His faith in me was sourly touching but he was right in saying that I could not vanish for a few days.
Arry came in eagerly. ‘Most of my work is home study by terminal. I can be
away with no notice taken.’
Billy took him by the belt and lofted him shoulder high, more easily than I would have guessed. ‘What do you weigh? Fifty k? Maybe you’re mean with a knife but you need muscle if you get caught by a mob. I’ll take Teddy if Nick can cover for him.’
Mrs Conway cried out furiously, ‘No!’
‘Yes,’ Billy said. ‘It’s what he’s been trained for.’
‘Billy, he’s only a boy! Mr Nikopoulos!’
I told her, without any pleasure, ‘It is what he has been trained for, and I can cover for him. And believe me, Mrs Conway, he is far more than a boy.’
In the strained quiet I caught Arry looking curiously from face to face, observing that alien conception, a family, with its emotional hair down.
Teddy resolved the moment. He lay back in his chair, balancing perkily on the rear legs, and said equably, ‘I’ll enjoy working with Dad.’
Consummate actor or not, it was a triumph. I didn’t for a moment believe in the implied truce with Billy but I was proud of the way he got it exactly right. Billy’s face twitched and was still; perhaps he was fooled, perhaps not.
She, I think, was not. She said dryly, accepting defeat, ‘The kettle’s boiling.’
She surrendered gracefully, but both her sons were out from her protecting skirts and love and authority are both hard to give up. Still, I wouldn’t have cared to be Billy when she got him to herself later on.
21
Teddy
AD 2051
1
I had to agree to the partnership. Nick could not order it but he wanted it; it was a calculated arrangement wherein he sent me to learn the Swill ropes from an old stager whom he trusted to look after me. I knew (and writhed for it) that Kovacs would raise the towers against the army rather than see me harmed; Nick knew it too. Kovacs-Conway was a team he had planned long ago and was now setting to work.
The Sea and Summer Page 28
