‘Not more food!’ said Hortense, but took her place again, resignedly. ‘Altruism isn’t incompatible with the selfish gene,’ Taffy was saying. ‘The thinking is that it can serve your best interests to do unto others as you would be done by.’
‘But that’s exactly what’s broken down,’ Kim put in. ‘That economy of reciprocity and care. Remember the story about the kid whose father tells him, “Trust me, trust me, I’ll catch you”? The kid doesn’t want to jump into his father’s arms. He stands there, scared his father’ll drop him. But Dad insists. Dad promises, Dad gives his word, the word of a father that he’ll catch the boy. So the boy jumps.
‘And Dad doesn’t open his arms and break his fall. He just lets his son crash to the ground. “There,” he says to the lad who’s lying there moaning, “That’ll learn yer. That’s the real lesson a father has to teach his son. Never trust anyone.”
‘That’s what’s happened to us, since – ten, fifteen years – since I was little. That’s what we’re up against.’
‘But how do we switch into reverse?’ Gramercy was plaintive.
‘We don’t go back,’ Kim replied. He was flushed and spoke quickly. ‘We go forward, we start again. Evolution? We’re going to have to make one of those blips happen that suddenly fast forwards the universe into a higher phase of consciousness.’
Taffy picked up the theme: ‘Did you hear the story about the little old Jewish clockmaker living in × – who gets taunted by schoolboys every day when they come down the lane past his house? And manages to stop them . . . ?’
Gramercy began humming in an undertone to the company, ‘Tell me another one Not just any other one Tell me a better one, do.’
‘Ah yes,’ said Monica. ‘I’ve heard this one – I think – go on.’
‘It’s an Isaac Bashevis Singer story – if you know it, you tell it!’
‘No, no – I’m making the coffee.’
‘Go on. I’m always talking too much – too loud.’ Taffy gave out a great gust of self-delight and passed the storytelling on to Monica, who began, ‘Okay. It goes like this – interrupt if I get it wrong!
‘The boys go past the clockmaker’s house every afternoon after school and they call him names and throw stuff. I shan’t repeat it, you all know the kind of thing. He comes out and thanks them, very politely and gravely—’ Monica put down the cafetière in her hand and acted out the courtesy – ‘and he offers them a silver coin, with his profound thanks. So they can’t believe their luck and they rush away hooting with delight.
‘The next afternoon, the same thing – and so it goes on.’
Taffy couldn’t help himself, but roared out, ‘But after a few days, the crafty bugger begins doling out a bit less, then a bit less and a bit less . . .’
Monica chuckled, waved him on, and Taffy accepted her cue: ‘They look at the money, and they feel dissed, don’t they? “Wot’s this then,” they say. “Why aren’t yer paying us like yer used to?”
‘And he says, “Because that’s the limit of what I’m prepared to pay now.”
‘And so it goes. Every time after that, he just gives them a little bit less again, until one day, they look at his old pennies in disgust and throw the money back at him, shouting, “If yer think we’re going to come and do it for this lousy sum, you’ve another think coming. Mister!”’
Gramercy exclaimed, ‘Oh, wicked!’
Monica, passing round coffee, was chuckling to herself.
Kim was thoughtful. ‘Hmm. Carrot and stick,’ he said. ‘Don’t like it. There’s got to be another way.’ His head flicked to one side in dissent: like a robin, Gramercy thought. I wasn’t right, his movements aren’t like clockwork. He has this way of appearing to skip a frame, but it’s bird-like, not mechanical.
Hortense noted, not for the first time, that Kim was completely humourless, and leant towards him. ‘Kim,’ she coaxed. ‘You’re among friends. You don’t have to shoulder the world’s ills here.’
Kim’s face twisted with puzzlement, but he didn’t answer, as Taffy surged on: ‘Survival of the canniest. But what’s canniest? Do you lot know the Prisoner’s Dilemma? It’s a game, invented by scientists – neo-Darwinists, evolutionary biologists, that little lot. It’s designed to test the limits of self-interest, to put a spin on arguments about survival of the fittest, about natural selection favouring the strong and randy or the unscrupulous and criminal types. It’s about knocking the selfish gene on the head. C’m’on, let’s play!’
There was a flurry of sighs and appeals; but Taffy plunged on: ‘You’ve been arrested,’ he looked at Hortense. ‘And you have too.’ He pointed at Gramercy. ‘For something you did together. I’m your jailer, sweeties, your interrogator, your judge, all in one, and I tell Hortense that if she talks, and gives evidence against Gramercy, she’ll walk free and Gramercy’ll get ten years. But only if Gramercy doesn’t make the same choice.’ He paused. ‘I also tell you that if you both sing dumb, there won’t be enough evidence, and I’ll be able only to get you both sentenced to two years.’
A hubbub followed; they were pressing him to go over it again.
Monica said, ‘It must be in their interest to betray each other. It’s the only rational choice.’
‘At first,’ Taffy crowed, ‘that’s the obvious solution. But remember, Gramercy has to make a different choice.’
‘I know!’ said Hortense, ‘The jailer double-crosses them both, and they both get ten years.’
Taffy laughed. ‘No, no. The game doesn’t work like that!’
‘Right.’ Kim was excited. ‘There’s a lot on the web about this. It’s a zero-sum game. If they stop and work out a strategy between them – and think ahead – then betrayal turns out not to be the best option, after all. Isn’t that it?’
Hortense asked, ‘They’re allowed to talk to each other?’
‘In some versions.’
Taffy added, to Kim: ‘I don’t think there is an “it” – it’s open-ended, endless.’
Gramercy offered, slowly, her solution: ‘They make a pact, and then they both do less time.’
Taffy, more softly, continued: ‘It does seem to be the case that if you play it many times, even with computers who have no consciousness and no fellow feelings, then cooperation – not defecting – is ultimately always the best decision.’
‘I wish you’d bring those computers to speak to my colleagues,’ Hortense said. ‘With this Leto project – they’d all cheerfully disembowel me, if the director wasn’t behind it.’
Kim continued, carefully: ‘Here’s another thing I want you to think about. There’re these bats – in equatorial jungle. Vampire bats.’ He looked at Hortense and she saw that he was making an effort to lighten up.
‘Mmm,’ cooed Gramercy, putting out the tip of her tongue to lick her upper lip.
‘They all need a nice long drink of blood every three days at least. But the supply’s unsteady, and some of the bats are weakened by hunger and can’t go out hunting. Sometimes, it’s hard to find the right prey – this species is particular. You don’t just drink any blood.’ Kim lifted his glass of red wine, eyed it, and drank.
Gramercy clutched herself, half-mewing her pleasure at this new side of Kim. ‘Gruesome.’
‘The older bats are dab hands at locating food sources – they strike lucky nine times out often. But the youngsters keep failing to satisfy their cravings and they often need help . . .’
Taffy gave Gramercy a bluff look: ‘Sounds familiar.’
‘So the successful vampires,’ Kim went on, ‘drink more than they need and come back, all full up. They regurgitate the surplus to feed others – selected others.’
A stir of mixed delight and revulsion greeted these words, and Monica began passing the coffee cups – to Kim and to Taffy; Gramercy was pouring water straight from the kettle on to sachets of fruit and spice for the others. Taffy lit a cigar, puffed a blowtorch of smoke and flame, and waved another in front of Kim, who took it.
‘Better than a nice
deep drink of blood?’ laughed Taffy.
General murmurs coaxed Kim to go on. ‘So who gets to be fed? Some of the bats try and cheat, and pretend they’re all weak and feeble so as not to have to give away any of their private feast. But ze colony haf a vay of detecting zeese deviants . . . These bats go in for grooming one another – and they concentrate especially on the tummy area. They can tell from a bat’s belly how much it’s imbibed. And they don’t let it get away with any dog-in-the-mangerish behaviour. They know who’s been generous and who hasn’t, and that makes a big difference later, when it’s the hoarders’ turn to be hungry.’
‘I get it!’ Gramercy put out a hand to give Kim five – but he didn’t meet her gesture, so her hand fell on his arm, which she found herself stroking instead. ‘Tit for tat!’
‘Yeah. But the real point,’ Kim continued, ‘is that the bats remember: this data about who owes what to who has made their brains bigger and more efficient. They’re survivors because they’re clever as a group, not because each of them is out there on its own, taking what it can get for itself. And the ones who share survive more than the ones who don’t – so those genes get bred in and the selfish genes bred out . . . it’s another spin on the prisoners’ dilemma—’ he gave a short laugh. ‘I think I’ve visited the same website as Taffy!’
‘I produced the bloody film that’s got everyone interested in this stuff. Didn’t I bloody well see it a hundred times! It won the something or other award, didn’t it?’ He was flushed with bonhomie. But he gave Kim a sharp look, and challenged him, ‘But how do you get to be a member of the colony in the first place? Come off it, you’ve got to face it – it’s blood, it’s tribe, it’s kin.’
‘They’re bats,’ retorted Kim. ‘We’ve gone and evolved bigger ’n’ better brains, haven’t we? So we get to choose who we want to be kin.’
Hortense was weary of all this talk, far from subjects she knew something about; she was longing for quiet and solitude and beginning to think that she’d soon go to the calm bedroom she’d been given for the night, but then she found, to her fury, that she was reluctant to leave Kim drinking at the table, grafted to the company – to Gramercy.
Meanwhile Taffy was striking back at Kim, ‘Utopians! I don’t know which is worse, liking your own kind for their own sake, or having to cast about for like-minded folks.’
Kim muttered, ‘Not if you don’t belong anywhere.’
In response, Taffy shouted: ‘What’s your solution for all those who don’t see it your way? No blood for your breakfast!’ His mood was still genial, though he was shaking his heavy head.
Hortense managed to get to her feet, and announce that she was going up. She looked over to Monica, who nodded back, kindly.
‘I’ll set the alarm, don’t worry. And I’ll run you to the station in time for your train.’
‘Please stay,’ wooed Gramercy. ‘We haven’t hardly begun.’
‘I’ve got to be at work,’ Hortense was starchy. ‘Some of us don’t have school holidays.’
‘Aw, Hetty,’ Kim smiled up at her. ‘We haven’t even heard the tape yet.’
Taffy supported this, warmly: ‘Come on, sweetie, we’ve come for this. This wining and dining’s great, but let’s hear it from you, girl!’
‘I want to go out, to the garden,’ protested Gramercy. ‘Look at the moon!’
But Monica took charge and patted her on the shoulder, and fortified her, and they trooped off to her music studio, with its twenty-four track recording console, its looped webs of cable and tassels of plugs, keyboards, and litter of beaten metal percussion pieces, rain-sticks, tamla finger drums, stringed instruments from around the world. They settled themselves down here and there in the room to listen, Hortense included, resignedly.
Gramercy’s fey fluting voice floated out around them; she’d doubled herself in a new version of ‘Angel of the Present’, singing a descant over a rendition of ‘Jerusalem’ which she intoned so slowly and so dejectedly that it sounded flat, vacant, terminally sad; it croaked along under her anthem.
‘I wanted it to sound like those funerals in the steppes—’ she began to explain. ‘The female mourners round the corpse – keening.’
‘I thought we were going to hear new stuff,’ Taffy objected, after a silence.
‘That is new,’ Monica rejoined.
‘A new arrangement, yes. But, where’s the Leto stuff?’
Monica came back quickly, ‘You know very well Gramercy’s not going to let people hear something until it’s perfect – she’s an artist.’
‘There’s a lot of new ideas floating about,’ said Gramercy, ‘But nothing’s really finished enough to put out.’
But they pressed her, hard, and Taffy looked so bearish that eventually she let herself be begged. On the demo, so far, her thin voice implored and railed; she’d searched out cadences from home-grown chapel services and marching music and even brass bands, which she’d drawn out with angry irony beneath passages taken from private lamentations in Tirzah and other elsewheres, from the wordless, grieving lullabies of mountain women over the female baby nobody prizes, from the prescribed ululations of professional mourners at the deaths of patriarchs. They sat, trying to pick out the words: in ‘Chronologies’, Gramercy waveringly tracked the life of ‘a woman you could know’, giving dates and events of world significance in a digitalised voice, ‘like those telephone menu messages’, beneath a chronology of ordinary birth and marriage and struggle and illness and old age.
‘This is good stuff,’ beamed Taffy. ‘I can see you now, drifting through some derelict cityscape, where there’s nought but trashed fridges and a few weeds – singing, looking like a dream . . .’
‘I think we’ve seen that. We want something much more . . . extreme.’ Gramercy was glowing hot from the effect of listening to herself through their ears; she wanted to hear Kim’s response to her new songs, so that she could tell him that he could use them, gladly, as he had before.
Taffy, still strewing film ideas this way and that, led them back to the wine and the fruit on the kitchen table. ‘We’ll film over the summer, edit late-August and have it ready for a prime slot in the autumn schedules. I think I can fix that – if the Museum can come in with the necessary . . .’
Drowsily, Hortense approved this: ‘We’ve got the Leto unveiling in the schedules for late September – that’ll give the schools time to prepare. Kim’s bringing his class but we want lots more – from teeny tots to teenagers, those are the director’s orders. A unifying symbol for fragmented times. Your bunch are a mixed lot, aren’t they? How many languages?’
‘It changes year to year,’ Kim answered. ‘But last year I had – I don’t know – thirty-two in the class and about fifteen different languages – some I’d never even known existed. But kids learn quickly. It’s teaching the mothers who never leave the flats, except to go to the health centre or the supermarket – that’s the problem.’
‘What a life.’ And this time, Hortense did manage to say goodnight, and left the room all heavy-limbed, like a long lap swimmer stepping out of a pool.
Monica followed soon after, and it began to look to Gramercy as if Taffy and Kim were set to talk all night, so she announced that she was going to bed too. Taffy jumped up to hug her, overwhelming her. ‘Gram girl, you’re such a star!’ Kim smiled a goodnight, with his head to one side. She gave them both a careless-seeming wave, though she was feeling anything but.
As she left, she heard Taffy push the bottle over the table to Kim, with the order, ‘Now, let’s hear it from you. You’re the one with the story, the man of mystery with the secret powers. Just tell it to me, as if you didn’t know who I was. Give it to me straight, like it’s the first time I’ve heard it. I need to know where all this loot’s going to . . .’
5
A Midsummer Night
Hortense hadn’t travelled to the country to hear a flipping pop singer pretend to save the world, she’d made space in her life to be with Kim, space b
eyond her ordinary world, well out of reach of her familiar surroundings, so that it could seem as if the act weren’t taking place at all. She’d arrived at understanding what Kim made her feel. Not love, not even lust, but freedom, as if she’d come out as gay and was picking partners – different partners – across all the usual boundaries of colour and caste and money and age and custom and the other regulatory norms by which she lived – and most of the people she knew likewise. Kim’s peculiar fervour was her own deep secret, and she liked the idea of it best when she was attending to the most formulaic aspects of her life: during her weekly phone call to her mother-in-law, or wrestling with a Museum colleague about the latest data maintenance questionnaire (‘How many members of the public have you spoken to?’ ‘Do they mean, “How do I get to the Bog Man?” Or “Where’s that Homeless Mummy?” Or don’t directions count?’). Through all such tiresome, trivial, recurring, and also comfortingly predictable routines of her existence, she fondled, deep inside her, Kim’s strange, exalted claims on her . . . She opened his messages with growing anticipation, only to close them instantly when the bold letters sprang up, announcing that yes, there was another e-mail from him. She’d consign it quickly to a separate, encrypted file, where she would read it later, in hiding, when her colleagues had gone.
But what did all this work on the Bundle mean? Or rather, mean to him? She understood less now than she had at first. The past was to be swept away. Yet there he was, digging deeper. It was a kind of scaffold for his fantasies: he’d once shown her, on her computer at work, a programme you could access through one of the default settings.
‘You double-click on these options – look,’ he’d said. Leaning over her shoulder and opening a spread sheet: he first pointed at one icon, then put in another command, then when that menu appeared, another. The screen flipped, spun and resolved itself into the pitted surface of some celestial body, over which she found herself skimming in a small spiky spacecraft.
‘And there you have it: you’re in the driver’s seat and you’re now heading out of our galaxy. Careful!’
The Leto Bundle Page 40
