In World City (11 page)

Miranda Whitlam continued with her studies in biotech while, under cover of rapid progress, she extended her investigations into the various meanings that had been ascribed to the DNA model of living processes. Thus, while the biotech consultant waited for her to come up with a philosophy, Miranda was finding any number, not all of them commercially directed.

When they next met, she said, “What you were telling me was that DNA acts as a kind of model of living things and if you change the model, you change the thing. That's what makes it a focus for idealist thinking – it's the form at the source of all living appearances. But there's a mechanical equivalent to all this: there's the process itself – translation of model into appearance – and there's the way the process can generate new appearances. Evolution's very clever, isn't it; because when the model gets changed, the living thing gets changed, but the change in the model only gets to survive and perpetuate if the changed thing survives successfully. Evolution can't help but work. I wondered about making that the basis of my philosophy, but it's entirely impersonal, deterministic and without meaning. It may be true, but people aren't going to buy into that: it completely excludes them.”

The biotech consultant looked at her, but only said, “So, are you anywhere nearer a position for your company to take?”

“I think so, but I need to get clear about exactly how biotech-based energy production works before I finalise it. Can you reschedule my screen-learning so I can get on with the energy issues? Most of what I'm dealing with at the moment is about cows and rainforests.”

Miranda was already aware that energy-centred biotech would involve engineered microorganisms, and these would be set to work on raw materials it had hitherto been uneconomic to oxidise. She needed to find some detail, though, that would provide the link with the philosophy she had in mind. But as her understanding of biotech-based energy production expanded, it soon became clear the link was evident in the principle of the thing itself rather than any fine detail. People and microorganisms ran along the same lines and that fact was all she needed.

At their next meeting Miranda said to the biotech consultant, “If people are worried we're going to exploit and spoil the core of their being in some way, we take them at face value. We run a line that DNA really is the core of their being and instead of exploiting and manipulating, our company has chosen to be instrumental in a great expansion in what that core can do. We run images that tell people they have a core that is a source of infinite energy and all their dreams will come true if we can release the energy from that source and channel it in the right direction. In the campaign, we emphasise how the energy we will produce will be the same energy that provides warmth and light for their children, puts food on their tables, powers hospitals and ambulances. Only this energy doesn't come from some outside source, something you dig out of the ground, it comes from the same source that lies at the core of their being. So they share in the source of this energy. We tell them the active ingredient in all this is something they share with the whole of the living world, something they are participants in – our company is then merely the benefactor that enables them to do so.”

The biotech consultant waited some moments, then said. “That seemed to come very easily to you, Miranda. You've not picked up on this from somewhere else, have you?”

“No, I haven't. And you'll know from the last time we talked it's not the first line I've considered. But what really interests me is the way DNA can act as a model, and the way we can make changes in how things look by changing DNA. DNA is acting like the executive programmes that put up all your interests on a single screen and let you make changes to your business merely by changing the lines of relationship. DNA is what you reach out and touch when you apply the power to make things different. It's as if there are twin descriptions of the way things are, and DNA is the real one because it's at the source.”

After that, the biotech consultant called Miranda Whitlam his closet idealist.

‘I'm not ashamed of it,' she'd say, and he'd say she ought to be.

*

The philosophy took some time to develop as a practical proposition. First, the research base and production facilities had to be structured as community rather than corporate-fronted. Then there had to be a learning programme developed for the sales and customer services staff, one that emphasised involving people themselves in the project rather than merely having them as paying recipients of the company's bounty. Miranda's philosophy was novel enough to necessitate everything being designed anew, from the staff image to the door handles on the bioreactor facilities. And there were the engineering and legal substructures to be worked out that could enable the new production system to be accommodated within the peculiarities of any existing national or international energy grid.

Miranda's company borrowed an unprecedented amount of virtual capital to fund the plan, but, as the biotech consultant commented, there had never been such an idea in the school before. Some of the consultants, getting wind of what was happening, were even prepared to invest real capital in anticipation of a saleable outcome. It gave the development an added edge for Miranda's company to know there were real accounts set up that they were drawing on in order to further the project. And it meant they were able to extend their facilities and call on outside consultants. Normally, this only happened on an individual level in the final year, and then it was carefully limited to avoid losses that might hurt. Now, for the first time, a school company was working on an idea that many felt justified genuine risk investment.

But, the biotech consultant was interested to note, Miranda Whitlam – who should have remained at the core of developments, accruing status and position – took an increasingly back seat as the project built up its own momentum. It was not that she disengaged exactly, rather she treated it more as a job to be done, something to be seen through in as professional a manner as possible. Seeing her own idea becoming realised seemed to give her none of those god-like peaks that others would have been elevated to. Again, the biotech consultant found himself wondering what was missing in Miranda Whitlam.

“Do you realise you could stand to make a very substantial amount of money indeed out of this, Miranda?” he said to her. For all her apparent detachment, he had noted from the start that she had been extremely quick to sort out the intellectual property rights and her claims to them.

“Yes, I do realise that,” Miranda replied. “The money could be useful. It could give me the space to go after what I'm really interested in.”

“Which is...?” – As if he didn't know.

“DNA as a model that can be manipulated to change living forms.”

“But what are you planning to do with that model?”

“I'm not planning anything yet. Something'll come up though.”

*

The year turned through another full cycle and William Burger sent his usual Christmas card. Miranda still couldn't think why and still didn't send him one in return. Again, she felt the year's passing as a peculiar, disturbing undertow. She told herself she ought to be used to this recurrent feeling the yellowing leaves and the chilly morning air gave her but something happened about this time of year: the school's tasks would become an empty ritual; she would feel unusually tired; she would find herself worrying about her health. At her lowest ebb she would wonder if she would still be alive the next spring. As the year deepened still further, Miranda stood with bare feet on the cold wood of her veranda looking down on the tatters of leaf on the trees in the valley and up to the dark grey-green of the firs and the increasingly white mountainsides. She felt herself dying with the year and, rather than concentrate on developing a new project proposal, she focused what little remaining energy she had on going somewhere warm and bright for the winter.

Her father, she knew, would want to stay in his manor to make the most of the party season and the business opportunities it offered. She told him she had been invited by one of her school friends to fly out to South East Asia for Christmas. Her father understood the value of accepting such offers and acquiesced readily. With the elevation in status her project accorded her, it was then no problem to find an appropriately placed fellow student. Spending vacations with colleagues was, in any case, an accepted norm. It was about cultivating connections rather than deepening friendships and Miranda's take-it-or-leave-it attitude to other people fitted this well. Most of the children she found herself among had spent their lives moving with their families between interchangeably luxurious houses and apartments, kept by the giant corporations whose appetites their parents were the best able to feed. Who and what were important were the things they were brought up to attend to. Putting down roots, either in places or amongst people, was simply not part of the children's experience.

So, successfully anaesthetised by Malaysian heat and light, Miranda spent the Christmas break better than she would have had she spent it with her father. Coming back to the northern winter was uncomfortable, but more bearable than it had been. Then, in spring, when the undercurrent of disintegration had passed and Miranda could barely understand how she could have felt the dying of the previous year so acutely, her idea for selling biotech-based energy production was at last let loose on the market simulators and was, as expected, a runaway success.

“We're selling a philosophy rather than a product,” was her final summing up. “Get them to buy the philosophy and they'll buy the product simply as an expression of their own most deeply-held values.”

Once the simulations had run successfully, the package of strategies they had developed was sold to the front-runner in the race to establish bioenergy as a viable market. Miranda Whitlam, on the strength of a pre-established bonus scheme, became one of the ten youngest ‘millions' the school had fostered and, having paid all fees likely to accrue during her time there, was thus free to pursue her more personal interests.

It was a kind of early retirement.

Dion walks towards the slit of light where the window screens have a few more millimetres to close and reaches to one side for the draw button. The steady trickle of runners sounds and a dull light suffuses the room. When the gap has widened to a metre, he leans on the sill and looks out. Rain is just beginning in the late afternoon. Below him at the foot of the hotel wall there is a strip of grass. The meagre foliage looks tired and ready for winter. A Doberman, attention caught by the movement above, glances up at him then turns away. Beyond the grass are two fences, the first elegant, architect-designed, the second a maze of high-tension wire. On the far side of the fences is a deserted street.

Dion knows the world on both sides of the wire. He stares out from behind the armoured glass and empty, broken windows opposite stare back at him. He sees the corroding metalwork of street signs hanging on the decaying concrete, like leaves about to drop. He thinks of lying down under some old tree and letting the leaves and months fall where they will, covering him with what is decayed and discarded, then frost and snow, freeze and thaw, his body dissolving into the winter ground. With his mind's eye, he watches dispassionately the disintegration of all that he appears to be.

Whatever she is sending is out there beyond that line of derelict buildings confronting the hotel – Miranda Whitlam when he had last known her. He can just recall her raving mad in a squalid apartment piled high with discarded electronics. It was somewhere on the edges of World City. Three of the young men she had interfered with were standing by like guardian angels.

Dion spent a month trying to persuade his gang boys it would be worth making the crossing into what called itself the Waste. The boys said things like, ‘There's nothing there,' or, ‘They don't even have shops out that way,' or, ‘I heard they kill strangers – sacrifice them some say. They're weird out that way.'

Dion insisted that this was all crap. “That's all just stories the grown-ups tell you. There isn't anywhere where people get sacrificed. It's just poor out there. It's where the poor people live. I've been in places like that. It was like that where I came from.”

Since seeing the scrawled words, ‘Welcome to the Waste,' Dion had been reconstructing his past. In the dissociated, isolating world his father had brought him to, his earlier years were acquiring the quality of myth. There was a glory about them and when he felt this glory he felt he could bear anything. And now he had a word for that world of myth – the Waste. The Waste was what he called the memories he returned to each evening as he shut his bedroom door and lay back on his bed, staring at his poster. The Waste was the warm, green island he imagined himself on, surrounded by animals and plants and ordinary people who could spend a day doing nothing and come out feeling the richer for it. The Waste was the perfect opposite of the World City his grandmother had warned him of, the World City his father so valued, and from which he retreated behind his bedroom door each evening. He remembered the little room his grandmother had occupied in their house on the island, the house he had called home and his father said would have been pulled down by now. He was becoming his grandmother in the eyes of his parents – he recognised that now. They treated him with the same grudging tolerance, the same distance, the same carelessness. He withdrew all the more, away from World City, seeking the warmth of his memories, refashioning them with every contrast he could think of.

Accordingly, still trying to persuade the gang he had determinedly fashioned around himself, he said of the Waste, “It was like that where I came from. People were poor but they knew things these people don't know nothin' of,” – said with a dismissive toss of his head that took in the entirety of Northern Europe. “It's going to be the same in the Waste. Maybe they won't have much, but I bet they know things we don't. I bet they do things differently there. Your parents only say you'll get killed because the cops don't reach out that far. You'll only get killed if you set yourself up for it. Come on, let's go. I want to see what's really there.”

Dion told them that if they were going to stick together as a gang, they needed to do things together, face challenges together, have adventures together. They had to go and they had to go soon. Then, in the face of their continuing resistance, he made it clear he was going whether they came with him or not. He'd find himself another gang, with boys in it that weren't so shit scared and didn't think they could just go home each evening, whatever they got themselves into.

For all his talk, he was disappointed when only two would join him.

*

At the border, it seemed important to Dion that they show no hesitation in making the crossing. So they walked straight through the band of dereliction, under the flyovers and out the other side, a small phalanx of ants crossing a rubble-strewn path. Dion was reassured to see the crude, angry letters still shouting out their welcome to the Waste. He gave them a nod of acknowledgement as he and his two companions scuttled into the sheltering gloom of a narrow street. The decaying buildings enclosed them like a forest. After the steady roar of the traffic pouring across the interchange behind, it was very quiet.

“Look like you belong here,” Dion whispered, “Don't catch anybody's eye.”

They walked past boarded shop fronts, picked their way along broken pavements, ducked under toppled lamp posts and looked straight ahead when a figure hurried by on the opposite side. As they penetrated deeper into the chaos and decay, Dion felt his spirits rising. He began looking around more confidently and noticed a feeling of familiarity with the scene around him. He looked at the fallen lamp posts and thought of broken trees; the fragmented pavement reminded him of churning jungle soil; and the boarded shop fronts were the wall of vegetation his grandmother had led him noiselessly into in the course of their walks together. He half-expected to see her appear round a corner, eyes open to everything around her, moving like an animal, entirely a part of it all. He imagined himself as her, entering into a new corner of the island for the first time, entering into somewhere with a life of its own; mysterious, unpredictable but worth getting to know.

After a while, the occasional isolated figures they had seen began to give way to small groups, mainly of three or four people, drifting through the streets, apparently lost in loose, many-stranded conversations. Dion heard comments and allusions being thrown between the figures, giving each group an air of independent life. On street corners, people were talking more animatedly, warming themselves over fires that burned in upturned metal drums. Dion listened as he passed each gathering. There seemed to be some kind of loose-limbed, tentacle-like discussion pervading the Waste.

Dion tried to catch familiar phrases – he could usually pick up the subject of an overheard conversation from a few sentences – but there was nothing he heard that he could find a fit with. He was aware, however, that these people were peculiarly non-threatening. Back on the outer edges of World City where they had crossed from, there was a dangerous hunger that came from people who had very little, people looking for something that would make themselves feel more substantial, anything that might alleviate the nothing their poverty made of them. But here it was as if the population had cut loose from the appetites Dion was familiar with and had simply drifted away. Perhaps this curious discourse he was hearing might be like new jungle growth; but, if so, it clearly had nothing to do with the material circumstances of the place, which were simply dissolving.

They walked the streets of the Waste in widening arcs, Dion always ensuring they returned to a fixed reference point. He counted it dumb to get lost – that was for kids. As the afternoon light began to fade, they came, in an area more derelict than most, to an expanse of cleared ground, marked out around its perimeter by the broken teeth of foundations sticking up from the earth. In the centre of the area was an open fire and assembled around the fire was a group larger than they had yet seen. Dion detected a more familiar kind of feel to the gathering. Rather than an even mix of both sexes, they were almost all men. And there was that hunger about them he had recognised on the edges of World City. They looked well-enough fed but their eyes were searching, looking for any chance that might present itself. To Dion, these were the most recognisable people he had yet seen in the Waste. He edged closer, his friends trailing behind at a distance. By now he was desperate to make some contact, however violent.

Two of the outer figures in the group were eyeing the boys speculatively. One turned back and threw a comment in towards the centre of the gathering. Dion saw several heads turn to a figure standing behind the fire. The figure shimmered in the heat and was veiled by sparks and smoke: a tall figure in a broad hat, seemingly watching them through the flames, not responding to the comments that were now coming from several of the men in the group. Then Dion saw the broad hat move abruptly to one side of the fire and the figure of a man resolve itself, pushing through and detaching himself from the throng. The man paused briefly to survey the boys then strolled towards them. He came within a few metres, stopped and looked them over. Dion looked back. He saw a dark, stained cape that reached from around the man's neck almost to the ground. A hat with a broad, floppy brim shaded the forehead. Between hat and cape was revealed a gaunt face, yellow-grey hair, grizzled stubble and glacial-blue eyes.

“You boys look clean,” the man said, “Too clean to be loose in a place like this. Better get yourselves back to World City.”

Dion felt electricity in his limbs. He had only ever heard his grandmother use that phrase.

“What's World City?” one of Dion's friends asked.

Before the man had time to answer, Dion cut in, “World City's where we come from. This is the Waste. The Waste is all that is not World City.”

The man laughed, the glacial-blue eyes glittering with amusement. “You sound like you know a thing or two,” he said. “Where d'you learn all that?”

“I was born in the Waste,” said Dion.

He was absolutely confident of this now: ‘that squalid little street on that squalid little island' was now entirely identified with the Waste. And the world his grandmother had shown him, that was assuredly the Waste. How could it be anything other than the Waste when it was so clearly all that was not World City?

“I want to go back there,” Dion added.

“Want to go back there, do you?” Glacial-blue eyes, level as an ice shelf, looked out at him. “You sound sure enough. Got a record, have you?”

“Record?”

“Criminal. Juvenile detention.”

“No, but I might get one.”

“Started already then?”

“Yes.”

“Think you can find your way back here?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Bring me something worthwhile and I'll take you on. If I'm not around, ask for Leo.”

Dion returned home to find his father waiting for him. The police had been round asking questions. Dion had not been in school.

“If they find anything against you, I'll throw you out of the house.”

Dion didn't wait to be thrown. He packed a few things, broke into his school, lifted an assortment of recently purchased electronics and went back to find Leo.