‘I do.’
‘I like your wife, by the way.’
It was unexpected. ‘Oh? Which one?’
‘Mary. You were married to her sister, weren’t you?’
He nodded. Then, quietly, ‘Kate died, you know. They killed her.’
Alison nodded sadly. ‘I know.’
Jake blew out a breath. ‘Well then…’
The words seemed to galvanize her. ‘Right. I’ll leave you now. The steward will see you back to your rooms. And I’ll see you in the morning. Ten, shall we say?’
‘Ten sounds good. Sounds civilized.’
She smiled again. ‘Then ten it is.’
Jake slept like the proverbial log and woke to find the steward in the room with him, bearing a full cooked English breakfast on a silver tray, complete with coffee and a chilled glass of freshly squeezed orange.
Alison’s doing, he thought, remembering how she’d used to treat him, at College, back when they were students. She remembered.
It was a nice touch – the first of many that day.
She was there at ten precisely, and he was waiting for her, showered and changed and ready for the off.
‘First off I’ll take you to see “the Farm”,’ she said. ‘It’s a bit of a circus, but then it is our showcase. This is where we bring all the big clients. We give them the tour. Show them what’s possible.’
The Farm was even more impressive than he imagined. It was situated in a separate stack, into which they entered via a ‘seal’, a massive portal, half airlock, half safe door. There were only six such entrances to the whole of the stack, all of which were operated under the strictest guidelines. Guidelines drawn up by Tsao Ch’un himself. If anything escaped, the whole damn thing would be shut down, the special edict granted to GenSyn for this purpose revoked and their creatures destroyed.
It was like entering a high-security prison. There were masked guards everywhere, and, high up on the walls – which Alison pointed out to him – the jets through which the sterilizing gases would be pumped into the facility, should it ever prove necessary.
‘It was a lot smaller when I first came here,’ she said, almost wistfully. ‘Just a single deck, that’s all we had. And less than a hundred different creatures. Now this is one of four such facilities, all of which take up a whole stack. And we number the creatures we produce in the tens of thousands.’
The first section they looked at was named simply ‘Extinct’, the word striking Jake as being as ironic as you could possibly be, considering that Tsao Ch’un, if he had his way, would make the whole of nature extinct.
‘This is our most popular range,’ Alison explained, as they stood there, staring through a one-way mirror at the most famous extinct bird of them all, the Dodo. ‘It’s mainly creatures who’ve become extinct before the last hundred years. Totemic creatures that they can impress their friends with.’
‘The rich, you mean?’
She nodded. ‘And you have to be very rich indeed to afford one of these, because it’s not only the cost of purchasing the animal, you have to sign on for the aftercare service. And then there’s the construction and maintenance of the creature’s environment.’
She looked to Jake and smiled. ‘Well, we can’t have them running around loose, can we? So whoever buys them has to guarantee to keep them isolated. We have a “look but don’t touch policy”. If they break the agreement then we take the creature back. And no refunds.’
Jake nodded. The Dodo looked real. It didn’t look like a manufactured creature. But then, why should it? It was, to all intents and purposes, the real thing. Only it couldn’t breed. None of these creatures could. That was part of the deal. Once it died it was dead and you had to buy another one. If you had that kind of money.
There were mammoths here, too, and sabre-toothed tigers – these last the most expensive item in the section. Jake asked what expensive was in round figures, but Alison wasn’t going to say.
‘Not unless you join us,’ she said, smiling. ‘Then you get to know everything.’
‘Everything?’
‘Well, almost everything. You’d be senior management, Jake. A decision-maker. We’d put you on the board, if you wanted.’
He wasn’t sure he did, but it was nice of them to offer.
‘What’s next?’ he asked, as they stepped through into the connecting corridor – a small airlock in itself – and waited for the door behind them to be sealed.
‘My personal least-favourite. Creepy crawlies.’
‘Insects?’
‘And other things. Quite inventive, some of them, as you’ll see.’
The door ahead hissed open and they stepped through. Into a massive hall, filled with glass cases.
‘Each one is a tiny environment,’ Alison explained as they walked up to the nearest of them. ‘Most contain only a single species, but others… they’re complex little ecosystems. Some contain over a hundred different types of insect.’
Jake crouched down, resting his fingertips against the glass of the case. It was like an exhibit in a zoo; a cross section through the earth, showing the insects’ tunnels and nests. As he watched, something scuttled away into the dark of the interior – something winged and clawed and black as night itself.
‘Are these all taken from nature?’
‘Some are. But we like to customize, for our richer patrons. We can have their company logos imprinted on the tiny creatures. Built into them, if you like. On their wings, for instance. And we can play about with the colour of them or the shape. Truth is, there’s little we can’t do.’
‘But that “little” worries the Eberts, right? They want to be able to do it all, yeah? That’s why I’m here, right?’
She stared at him, surprised that he’d worked it out so quickly.
‘Partly.’
‘One question,’ he said, straightening up, then turning to look at her. ‘What exactly are you going to use the datscape for?’
She looked down, the gesture ancient in his memory. People didn’t change. Not in their essentials, anyway.
Alison looked up, meeting his eyes again. ‘Much of our work here – the research work, that is – is done at a microbiological level, using electron microscopes and the very finest gauge waldoes.’ She smiled. ‘To put it crudely, Jake, we play about with proteins. Only… what we want to do – and we’re not even sure yet that it’ll work – is to duplicate what happens at the nanotechnological level on a much larger scale within the datscape, so that we can, quite literally, walk around it and through it and view it from every possible angle.’
Jake smiled. ‘I like that. It’s a good idea. Who thought of that?’
‘Gustav, of course. He bought the datscape at auction. There are only four of them left. The rest were all destroyed.’
‘Ah…’
‘Oh… it’ll be a lot more complex than the original datscape, if Gustav has his way. He wants to replicate nature in there.’
‘And his brother?’
She smiled. ‘Wolfgang only worries about the cost, the likely profit.’
‘Will I get to meet them?’
‘If you join us, yes.’
‘I see… And my role will be what? To train people up? I know that… But what else?’
‘To be an enabler. And a consultant and… well, whatever else takes your fancy.’
‘Carte blanche…?’
‘Not entirely. But pretty free. Providing you’re on call all of the time.’
‘They’re very demanding, then, your bosses?’
‘Very. But then that’s the challenge.’
He hesitated, then asked what had been nagging him, at the back of his mind. ‘Did you approach Lahm?’
‘No. Lahm came to us.’
‘And before that?’
‘I didn’t even know you still existed. It was a very pleasant surprise, Jake.’
Jake looked at her briefly. She seemed to mean that. There was certainly a warmth there in her eyes.
‘And your bosses… what do they want?’
‘They want things up and running. So the sooner I sign you the better.’
‘Ah…’ He changed tack. ‘Can I ask you something. Something personal, I mean…’
She shrugged. ‘If you must.’
‘Why did you never marry?’
‘I did.’
‘But I thought…’
She smiled. Faintly amused by his query, it seemed. ‘You’ve been looking me up, haven’t you?’
He nodded. ‘So what happened?’
‘He died.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry. I…’
Alison looked down, fragile suddenly, more like the Alison he’d known, long ago. ‘He was on a craft that got shot down. Terrorists. Not surprising, really, the places he went.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘He was in Security. A Police General.’
‘Ah…’ That surprised him more than anything else she’d said. ‘But no children, right?’
‘Wrong. We have a son.’
‘But it said…’
She met his eyes, a certain hardness in her own. ‘Don’t believe everything you read, Jake. My son isn’t in the record for good reason. Because it would make me vulnerable. If he were taken hostage…’
The tightness in her face betrayed her fear of it. But then she smiled again. ‘He’s eighteen next week. And very like his father. Tall and dark-haired. A bit like you were, Jake, when you were his age.’
He studied her a moment, re-evaluating her. Then, very softly, ‘And you didn’t remarry?’
‘No.’
She looked to him, then looked away again. ‘I guess I didn’t want to take the risk. Not after that. It’s hard enough having your heart broken once, let alone twice in one lifetime.’
Two hours later, they had worked their way up to the topmost level of the stack. There, in an elegant First Level mansion that would have been the pride of any billionaire, were the real stars of the Farm: Gustav Ebert’s world-famous talking goats – man-sized creatures who stood upright on their hind legs, wore clothes, drank wine and smoked cigars, just like normal human beings.
Jake had heard of them – he couldn’t remember what the story was, but they had been on the news quite recently. But encountering them face to face and with no one-way glass partition was quite intimidating. There was nothing to make him feel safe and something feral and inhuman in their eyes. When he shook their hands – tiny, trotter-like hands that could still hold a glass and use a pen – he was surprised by the sheer strength of aversion he felt towards them.
A shrinking back into his skin.
They were politeness itself, but he… he could barely say a word. All he wanted was to be out of there.
Afterwards, as they waited for the seal to open, he looked to Alison and shuddered.
‘Am I the only one…?’
‘To loathe the creatures? No. It’s a common reaction. Gustav thinks it’s rooted at the most primal of levels. We look into those eyes and something’s triggered. But it’s not only that… it’s the smell of them.’
Jake frowned. ‘I didn’t think…’
‘The perfume masks it. But again, at some deeper level, it registers. Their animal scent. Some people say the goats remind them of the devil… or rather, the King of Hell.’
‘And yet they buy them.’
‘And maybe even for that reason.’ As the door ahead of them hissed open, she looked to him. ‘You hungry, Jake?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then let’s have some lunch. I’ve a couple more things I want to show you, but they can wait. Besides, we need to talk.’
‘Haven’t we been talking?
She glanced sideways at him. ‘I mean talk. I’m still suffering from the shock of finding you’re alive.’
Lunch was roast beef and Yorkshire puddings, courtesy of Alison’s own chef.
Jake sat there, in her old-fashioned farmhouse kitchen, looking about him, recognizing what she’d done there, and thinking that he was probably the only one in the world who did.
‘Your mum and dad’s place… in Chobham.’
She smiled but didn’t meet his eyes, concentrating on opening the bottle of 1982 Chateau Cissac. ‘You remembered,’ she said.
‘I couldn’t really forget, could I? Those were good times.’
‘They were.’
He hesitated, then, ‘You know… this could be awkward.’
‘How d’you mean?’
‘You and me. Working at such close quarters.’
This time she met his eyes. ‘That’s presuming I want you in my life again. In that way.’
Don’t you? he thought. Only he didn’t say it aloud.
She poured two glasses of the blood-red wine, then handed him one. ‘No, Jake. Whatever relationship we’re going to have, it’s going to be a business one. We can be friends, sure, but it would be foolish and mistaken to think it could be anything else.’
She smiled. ‘Put simply, we fucked that up years ago. We don’t need to do it all over again.’
He raised his glass, toasting her. ‘Spoken like a woman who doesn’t need a man in her life.’
‘But I have a man in my life, and here he is…’
She was right. Her son did look like Jake when he was younger. For a moment he wondered if the boy could be his. Only he couldn’t. He was only seventeen.
Jake stood, offering his hand. ‘I’m Jake…’
The boy’s smile disarmed him. He looked to his mother, then put out his hand, clasping Jake’s firmly. ‘Nice to meet you, Jake. I’m… Jake…’
‘Jacob Paul,’ Alison said. ‘Paul after my father, of course.’
And Jake? Only, again, he didn’t say a word.
‘Ah…’ Jake looked down at the young man’s hand within his own, then released it.
‘You keep wrong-footing me,’ he said, looking to her, seeing how the situation amused her. ‘Why didn’t you say?’
‘That he’d be here? I didn’t think he would. He ought to be at the academy.’
‘They’ve given me the rest of the week off,’ the boy said hastily. ‘To revise.’
‘You’ve got exams?’ Jake asked.
‘History and Social Studies.’
‘Oh.’
He wondered what they taught today’s youngsters. Not the truth, that was certain. But did they believe it? Or did they know it was all a fiction?
Later, back in his rooms, Jake pondered that question. Was it true what Lahm had said? Was it only a matter of time before the likes of his Peter and Alison’s Jake would accept it all for gospel? Or would the truth still be there, handed on in whispers, like a seed in the earth, waiting to sprout again sometime in the future? Could Tsao Ch’un and his servants really erase it all, book by book and fact by fact?
He didn’t know. But they were having a damn good try. And just as long as something didn’t go dramatically wrong, a century from now it would all be academic. Because no one would care. There wouldn’t be anyone left alive who’d want to change it back.
That afternoon, Alison had shown him the future.
Food was part of it. Feeding the ever-growing masses of Chung Kuo. For there was no doubt that after the massive depletions of the past three decades, there would be an equally massive growth, and GenSyn wanted a share of that market. To that end they had developed all manner of clever creatures; animals that were safer and healthier to eat. But their greatest achievement – one for which they got a lot of press coverage – was the jou tung wu, the very plainly named ‘meat animal’.
The jou tung wu was basically a cow, though it looked as little like a cow as a rocket resembled a kite. Partly the result of breeding, partly of biological reconstruction, the great beast was a living slab of meat, without bone or sinew. Its huge weight and size were maintained artificially by the machines that lay beneath it and surrounded it on all sides. Looking down from the balcony above, Jake grimaced. Apart from the stench, it was visually repe
llent; a single, pulsating mass of pink flesh.
‘I know,’ Alison said, laughing, in reponse to his expression. ‘But think how efficient it is.’
‘It’s not aware of what it is, is it? I don’t see any heads.’
‘There is one, normal size, underneath there somewhere. We tried making one without a head, but it simply doesn’t work. That pulse is where we’re pumping air through it. And there are slurries on all sides.’
‘What do you feed it?’
‘Garbage.’
He looked at her, saw she was serious. ‘Oh, there are things it can’t eat, but anything organic is fine. You’ve heard of the Thousand Eyes? This is the thousand stomachs. Like the air, the garbage gets pumped in somewhere over… there!’
Alison pointed to where a huge flexible pipe hung down, disappearing into that great mound of living flesh.
‘Do you have to kill it, then, before you eat it?’
‘No. It gets carved once a week. We remove something like 20 per cent of its body weight, and then it grows back.’
‘So it’s endlessly renewable… once you’ve got it up and running?’
‘Not endless. It has a life span of something like eight years. But it’ll feed five stacks throughout that period. At least, give them the meat intake they require.’
Jake shuddered. So this was what they’d been eating.
They moved on, down a corridor and into a lift that went up and up until Jake was sure it could go no higher. And yet it did.
‘Where are we?’ he asked, as it slowed and stopped.
‘The Airy. It’s Gustav’s place. He isn’t here now, but he said I could use it.’
The lift door opened.
They stepped out into luxury and style. There were paintings on the wall that Jake knew at once were worth millions. He stopped before one.
‘This one’s a fake.’
Alison came up alongside him. ‘Really? How d’you know that?’
‘Because I used to have it in my bedroom. The original, that is. This one’s been doctored. Tampered with.’
He pointed to it. ‘This figure and that one there – the Hung Mao – they aren’t in the original. In the original they’re Han, like the rest in the painting.’
Jake concentrated, brought the name up out of dim and distant memory.
Daylight on Iron Mountain Page 11
