by Adam Roberts
An R2 trundled along dispensing drinks.
‘Mad Nic Neocles,’ Dot said, as if they had never been interrupted. ‘He thought he was giving the world a great new gift. And it’s true that you can live a long life with his New Hair, provided you get water to drink, and don’t mind nibbling the odd creepy-crawly from time to time. But here’s what you can’t really do, if the New Hair is your only source of blood sugar. You can’t carry a pregnancy to term.’
‘Really?’ said George. ‘I never knew that.’
‘Often you can’t even get pregnant in the first place. If you do then you’ll almost certainly spontaneously abort long before term. With only hair to generate blood sugars, a woman’s body doesn’t have the level of nutrient to keep the foetus viable.’
There was something revolting about the clinical way this woman used such language. ‘When I got out of bed this morning,’ George said, ‘I had no idea you even existed. Now you’re discussing these very unpleasant things with me like—’ He was going to say: like we were lovers, but that seemed too forward. So instead he said: ‘Like we’ve known each other for years.’
‘You need to know this stuff, Mr Denoone. Growing a baby in your uterus is a huge drain on a human body. It’s touch-and-go even in wealthy women with all the food-calories in the world to draw on. But if peasant women can’t have babies, then how do new generations of peasants come into the world for the bosses to exploit? That’s the question.’
‘You’re language is very,’ George said, crinkling up his brow and waving his right hand. He couldn’t think of the word.
‘Because obviously new generations of peasants do arise, for the bosses to exploit.’
‘—very loaded,’ he said. ‘Very ideological.’ He pulled both his earlobes with two hands simultaneously. ‘And “exploit” is a loaded term, isn’t it, though?’
‘This is what makes the world work,’ said Dot, blandly. ‘Because naturally the women want to have babies, so they don’t die childless; and naturally bosses want them to have babies, so the source of their wealth and power doesn’t vanish with the passing generation. So people find ways of making it happen. Some women do it by working: digging trenches for corpses, for instance, or any job that pays – they do it by working to earn money, so as to buy food to tide them over through their pregnancy. This is important.’
‘Important,’ said George. He had distracted himself with the fleeting thought of his unspoken as if we were lovers. He wondered what it would be like to go to bed with this slight, intense woman. The thought was exciting, though distant.
‘It’s important because it means women are prepared to work, indeed eager to work, in a way the men aren’t. Plenty of peasant men are content simply to loll in the sun. If a boss wants a ditch dug, he goes to a woman. There’s little point in going to a man. He lacks the motivation to do strenuous physical labour for you. But a woman needs to scrimp and to save.’
‘I see.’
‘Do you? Good. Because it’s the most important of Mad Nic’s unintended consequences. His invention made men idle and made sure that all the heavy lifting passed to women. Not,’ she added, looking darkly at George, ‘that that wasn’t pretty much the case before.’
‘I don’t know why you keep looking at me as if,’ said George, peevishly, ‘as if it is my fault.’
‘Bosses leverage their women’s desire to have babies into many years of grunt-hard work; the women do it to stockpile enough protein powder to see them through pregnancy and breast feeding. And when that kid grows its hair and can loll about in the sunshine like its fathers and uncles, it’s back to work she goes, to save up powdered milk or milled grain for the next one. Thus turneth the wheel.’
‘Wheel?’
‘The wheel of work. In the villages, the bosses pay just enough to allow this to happen. That’s called capitalism. It used to be that the bosses paid peasants just enough to stop them starving; now they pay peasants considerably less – just enough to keep one fraction of a family in milk-powder for a year or two. That way the bosses make more money and keep more money. Which means that people like you or I, higher up the pyramid, have more money.’
‘It’s hard,’ said George, haughtily, ‘to feel a personal responsibility. I’d never treat another person so cruelly.’
Dot ignored this. ‘Carrot, paying the women’s pittance. Stick, shaving delinquent heads. Not everybody shaved dies, but most do. If your husband got his head shaved, would you give up your baby powder to keep him alive until the hair grew back? You can always get another husband – the village is full of idle men. They are literally lying about.’
‘To talk of human lives in so cavalier a manner,’ George began but vaguely, unable to inject any actual outrage into his voice.
Dot nodded, as if this were fair comment. ‘Now, the bosses aren’t stupid,’ she went on. ‘And women aren’t stupid. Easier to grab a child than carry it two thirds of a year in your womb. The women get a kid; the bosses get their population of serfs renewed. That’s why they’re so reluctant to intervene. If a Turk or Iranian had stolen your gold-plated Fwn, then the police would’ve run the news round the local villages, a boss would have shaved a couple of heads, pocketed the reward and the trinket would have come back to you. But the bosses make a point of not getting involved where child theft is concerned.’
George was discomfited, though in a distant sort of way. It was some small thing that gnawed at his thoughts. Or else it was an ocean pivoting about on the hinge of its tide deep in his soul. He wanted to ignore it. He knew the way his world worked, which meant he knew the way the world worked. Surely. ‘It’s,’ he said, searching for the right word, ‘monstrous.’
‘It’s what makes the world go around. Usually children get grabbed from the moderate-poor in the cities. Pretty much, rural life is too closed and known to get away with stealing from a neighbouring village. But kids disappear from cities all the time. It is rarer to steal from the wealthy, such as yourself. Though the kids they get that way tend to be stronger – good long bones from years of actual nutrition. Have you seen how stunted kids arms and legs get when they’re raised on pure sunshine?’ Of course George had not seen this, and of course Dot knew he had not. So she pressed the point. ‘Kids raised on nothing but sunshine and a little clean chewed mud? Small. Height is an index of beauty, in this day and age. Just like body fat. A hundred years ago beauty was thin. Not any more.’
‘Leah was in the ninetieth percentile for height,’ George said, not really focusing on what he was saying.’
‘There you go. That’s why she was nicked.’
‘What do you mean, nicked?’
‘Stolen, I mean. Nicked means stolen.’
‘Is that a Britishism? I thought you mean she had been cut,’ said George, blinking.
‘It’s the hidden economy. But knowing all that doesn’t make it any easier to locate her. Bosses won’t talk, and of course the peasants won’t. If she really stood out from the other kids – if she were Chinese, or black. But she’s Jewish – yeah?’
‘Her mother.’
‘Semitic, right, so I daresay she’ll look more or less like all the other kids in her village. Taller, sure. But the girls are usually taller than the boys anyway – they’re fed for longer, nurtured more. They’re more valuable, of course. Beyond that they’ll have fed her the New Hair bug, the Neocles seed, and then weaned her off actual food for a few months. By now she’ll be living like all the other kids; soaking the sun, scratching in the vegetation for worms.’
‘Oh God,’ said George. But he couldn’t seem to get the word to come out with the appropriate force and heft. He couldn’t, somehow, insert enough grandeur and woe into the syllable. He tried again, launching it from deeper in his chest. ‘God.’ Still no good. He tried bending the ‘o’ around his mouth, with a quavery thrum. ‘God.’ No.
‘You need to understand the reality of the situation,’ Dot drawled. ‘Is why I’m telling you. I will look hard for your gi
rl. Believe I will. But it won’t be easy. I can’t promise I’ll find her. But – and you can allow yourself to hope – I may do.’
‘Leah,’ said George, more quietly this time. He felt as if he ought to be crying, now. He felt, that is to say, that tears would be an appropriate reaction. But his face wasn’t putting out any tears. He wasn’t skilled in forcing them out.
‘I’ll need data on your girl,’ Dot said,
‘What data?’
‘Pictures, flash, physical details, medical details.’
George brought out his Fwn. ‘I’ll send you everything,’ he said.
15
Marie received the news that ‘a professional’ (which was what George decided to call Dot) was searching for Leah and offered no reaction, neither good nor bad. She called up Wharton, took Ezra from her and, despite his wriggling protest, clutched him close to her. ‘I don’t care what you do,’ she said. ‘Only I’m never going back to that place. Do you understand?’
‘Surely.’
‘Never going back to that beastly place.’
‘She said not to get our hopes up. But she knows what – she knows what’s she’s doing, I think.’
It was hard, though. For two days, the thought that this woman was ‘out there’, shaking things up and actually looking for Leah blimped up George’s spirits. He felt as if he had woken from a slumber, felt energy fizzing within him. By the third, his spirits had sunk again. And for a time it was worse than it had been before. He knew he was skirting around the truth of things – that his daughter was gone, and he would never see her again. But it was too terrible to confront that fact. So he busied himself, and ignored it, or tried to.
He moved up to level 7 of his assertiveness therapy. His therapist was a completely bald woman with a chessboard pattern inscribed on her scalp, and a cleverly parsimonious manner with her smile. She lost no opportunity in touching him – laying a dry palm on his shoulder, or even his neck; letting her fingers touch the back of his hand as it lay on the table. George wondered if she were playing some complex therapeutic game, encouraging him to make a pass at her so that she could demonstrate her healthily assertive mode of turning him down. And in turn he wasn’t sure if he were supposed assertively to own his randiness and make the pass, or whether he were supposed assertively to deny his urges. Still, he was pleased to make level 7. It felt like a real achievement.
Life had to go on, didn’t it?
Ezra picked up an infection from somewhere – from where precisely, George had no idea; because his preschool was all virtual, and Wharton rarely took him further afield than Central Park. It wasn’t a problem in itself, of course; except that the machine the doctor put in the lad’s bloodstream to tag the infection and boost his immune kickback produced a pseudoallergic reaction. This, the doctor told them, was similar to a traditional allergic reaction in every external respect, but followed some arcane internal pathological route that meant standard treatments were not appropriate. Poor little Ezra’s lips became swollen and hard as mug handles, and his eyes went so dark red it was hard to see where the ‘whites’ ended and the pupils began. He whimpered continually, and writhed pitiably, so that Marie couldn’t bear to be with him, and gave up her usual breakfast and evening sessions with him entirely. Indeed, Marie took this development extremely hard, retiring to her bed and watching whole series-runs of bright-coloured storybooks over and over. But, with the help of some expensive neutral machines, the original batch was purged, and older medical antivirals cleared away the infection, and within a week Ezra was back to his old self.
Dot submitted weekly reports on her progress. George read them without too much attention, for they were full of detail that added up to very little, and he found his attention wandering. Marie avoided them altogether.
They all took an Easter holiday in Tokyo, their first since Leah’s evanishment. They didn’t do very much more than stay in the Superhotel Suzuki: playing in the forty-storey flotation cube, citywatching from the rooftop observation platforms. Wharton brought Ezra everywhere George and Marie went, without exception. Some of Marie’s anxiety about Ezra seeped into George’s sleeping mind, such that he found himself waking at odd moments in the dead night. But generally they agreed it was a success. Life had to go on. Life went on, at any rate. Even Marie understood that, at some subterranean level of her grief.
Then it was spring in New York, and the trees were pushing cottony blossom out at the end of stiff tentacular branches. The chill faded from the outside air. Ergaste called through on the Lance to propose a spring party – which was, George presumed, an English tradition. ‘Em and I, but also Ysabelle and Peter. Let’s get together. You’ve been through hell,’ he said with enormous emphasis on this last word. ‘You and Marie both. We want to show you we’re right there with you – solidarity, yeah?’ Despite his new level 7 status, he couldn’t think of a way of saying no to this offer; of, that is, communicating his fear that Marie would detest such a get-together. But after he had agreed he equivocated with himself, maybe it would do her good to be confronted with it? Didn’t she need to take properly assertive ownership of her trauma? Not to carry on fleeing it. At any rate, it was agreed that the other four would fly to New York, and that the six of them would have a meal together.
To his surprise, Marie seemed pleased at the news; and took the opportunity to have a complete vanity workover. They met at Frye’s, and the meal went well. For one thing, although Marie insisted that Ezra (and Wharton) stay in the car parked directly outside the restaurant, she did not, as George had thought she might, repeatedly interrupt the eating in order to run out and check that things were OK. They ate granules of beef in tequila sauce, and carrot tips threaded on strings of noodle. Then they had thimbles of gin-broth, little saucers of flavoured salt, and finally tubes of choco-rich. George drank plain red wine, congratulating himself, inwardly, on his monkish restraint. The others drank sugar cocktails mixed so that the colours shifted according to ad-sense kaleidoscopic. Ergaste was on surprisingly diplomatic form. He hardly boomed, or bullied, at all. Instead, producing an unexpected tenderness out of his manner like a conjurer, he prompted Marie to general conversation, and from time to time squeezed her hand. Ysabelle, after some bland pleasantries with George, focused all her attention on Ergaste, breaking into a weird brakepad-friction laugh from time to time, in an exaggerated way. It was as if she had never had sexual intercourse with George. George, for his part, was happy to go along with that. Peter kept checking in on some sporting fixture or other on his Fwn, but seemed generally in good humour. Emma, it turned out, was also in assertiveness therapy.
‘I knew you were in the therapy!’ she told George, in her singsong voice. ‘I could sense it.’
‘Really?’ he said, rather pleased.
‘Oh yes. You have a splendidly assertive manner.’
‘I do.’
‘It shines from you.’
‘Do you really think so?’ he replied. He was milking it, he knew. But the cactus craves the tiniest moisture drops. It was hard to believe that Emma, this timid woman, was also undergoing the therapy. How did she possibly get by? The way she sucked the left portion of her lower lip into her mouth, or folded it outwards into a little crease between her fingers. The way her eyes would never settle, darting continually from sinister to dexter and back to sinister. She was the least healthily assertive individual he knew. But of course courtesy required he repay in kind. ‘And, ah! You too, of course,’ he said, in an unconvincing voice.
‘I’ve been going for years,’ she told the tabletop.
‘Really?’
‘It’s so obvious to me now that true mental health is a superstructure built upon the base of a properly assertive being-in-the-world,’ she said, lifting her mouse-grey eyes to look at George. She dropped them again.
‘Just so,’ said George. He wondered if it was polite to ask her what level she was at, aware that he’d be doing do only to brag about his own recent ascent. But just as he dec
ided that he couldn’t raise the subject, she volunteered the information. ‘I’m level seven,’ she said.
‘Oh,’ he said, feeling a shock of disappointment.
‘Er thinks it’s a waste of time,’ she added, gesturing twitchily with her head. George heard this as ‘her thinks’, assumed it was a British idiom. ‘Who does?’ he asked, following the direction of her gesture. ‘Ysabelle?’
‘Ergaste,’ she said, in a low voice. ‘He says I’m no more assertive than a clod. But I explained to him – you understand this, I know – that it’s not about turning yourself into a bully, into a blustering oaf – like – like some people I could mention. It’s inner assertiveness. It’s spiritual, really.’ She put her attention into an intimate examination of the streaks of choco-rich still adhering to the side of her little half-sphere bowl.
For George, who assumed that assertiveness therapy did indeed translate into more forceful external behaviour, held his peace. ‘I’m sure,’ Emma said, after a while, ‘that it’s been a help.’
‘Help?’
‘Dealing with your horrid, your foul, your tragic, rather, thing. Your tragedy.’
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I guess. Sure.’
‘You’re certainly dealing with it really well!’
At this point the six of them went up to the building’s roof. Frye’s had installed diffraction projectors all round the rim, to block out the city lights and create a sort of funnel of darkness – the point, of course, was to make the stars visible mid-city. So they all stood for ten minutes with their heads cricked backwards like pez-dispensers, gazing upwards. ‘Never fails,’ boomed Ergaste. ‘Never fails to amaze!’
Ergaste, Peter, Ys and Marie wandered to the far corner. But Emma crept up close to George, she said: ‘Oh, look at the stars! Aren’t those stars simply splendid?’
‘There’s rather more of them,’ George said, ‘than is absolutely necessary, I’ve always thought.’
