In World City (17 page)

Miranda Whitlam lived in a royal castle high above the Rhine, or at least that was how it seemed to her sometimes. The penthouse suite of the most expensive apartment block in Basel was a suitable modern equivalent and she had on call all the servants she might ever need. A message to the underground garage would have her carriage ready in minutes, with a driver to take her anywhere she could wish, be it to the secret laboratories where her minions worked to distil the elixir of life, or to her poorer subjects out beyond the edges of the civilised world, grateful recipients of her beneficence and willing tools in her great designs.

And in her royal castle she lived quite alone. There had once been a man in her father's retinue with whom she had permitted a dalliance: William Burger, who got too serious. That was the trouble with men; they all wanted to possess you in some way. So she lived alone, by choice, the better to not be possessed, thinking about the value she had been taught to place, first by her father and then by her school, on anonymity.

‘Get yourself known and you bring down on you all kinds of self-seeking trash, people who just want to use you or set you up to knock you down,' had been her father's way of putting it. The school's judgement had been only slightly different. ‘Power that is built on fame is no power at all. Those stars everyone looks up to are no more than the pawns of others. Real power is economic. There's a certain level of such power that can't help but draw attention to itself, but that attention should never be sought. It is unnecessary and, as such, can only get in the way.'

Miranda had known from the outset that her work on longevity made her one of the exceptions to the rule of economics. The attention of others would be drawn not by any riches she might have but by the very nature of the business she was engaged in. Prof Joe had known this too and it had always been one of the few things over which he and her father had been in complete agreement: the need to keep the Hollenbeck Institute as low profile as possible, hiding in the dense undergrowth of the Ageing Initiative, accountable only to the most unavoidable of the regulatory agencies and definitely not with a website.

So, when Dion uttered her real name, when there should have been no way he could have known it, and when, having broken open her memories and made an undeniable connection between the two of them, he told her the most closely-guarded secret she had – the secret of what she was doing with the children – the one secret she believed she had successfully kept from everyone – he took her world apart in a way he could never have anticipated.

“Nobody told me,” he said to her, in response to her panicked, desperate questioning. “I just knew. I just absolutely knew. Now, tell me, how long does this experiment really last?”

“Ten years. It lasts ten years. I'm sorry about what happened when we were kids. I don't know. Maybe I got scared. I don't know what I was thinking of. It's a long time ago now.”

*

Most of the time, while Dion's company men came and went, the children chased around the playground space of the derelict square Dion had inherited from Leo. They chased hardest when the weather was coldest and in the weeks following Miranda's visit it was as cold as it had ever been. The company men closed in around the fire, keeping it burning more fiercely than ever in the great open space, their breath rising in clouds.

They watched the children racing back and forth indulgently, knowing that Dion had good money coming in from them now and that this money was making new things possible in their work. No one knew for certain what the children did to bring in so much. Pornography was the usual explanation, although that was hard to square with the accounts the children gave of this rich lady who took blood from them. Maybe it was just some particularly heavy shit Dion had got them into, but the children looked happy enough and had colour in their cheeks. Dion only put it about that they were part of a scientific experiment.

The weather eased and repairs had to be made where frost had cracked the concrete of Dion's Place and started letting water in again. As the thaw set in, the children scattered, the accumulated pressure of their energies sending them flying like sparks from a Catherine wheel. A few missed the March appointment, but Miranda said she would keep coming back until they showed up. Two months before, she would have been furious at the insufferable waste of her time. Two years before, she had felt her plan as her own execution, something she was simply going to have to go through with that would mean an end to everything. Now she was intrigued by the prospect of her excursions into the Waste. She felt oddly at ease there. She told herself she was committed to ten years of illegal work at the end of which there was no knowing what might happen, so she might as well make the most of it. She had to do it. The thought of putting her plans off until there was a more sympathetic ethical climate, or even shelving them altogether and waiting on some unforeseen breakthrough from Burger's animal work had filled her with an intolerable anxiety. Casting herself beyond the bounds of the acceptable had been the only course open.

The shock of Dion's attack had woken her to just how ridiculous had been her dream of lifting the children out of the Waste. There were a hundred prying eyes on every street corner in World City and it would have been no time before someone decided to get concerned about the origins of a strange kid and only a little more time before people got together and concerned themselves about twelve strange kids. She had merely held on to the idea to avoid facing up to how committed she really was.

And, anyway, Miranda found she rather liked Dion. After screaming at her that she should at least recognise who he was and treat him like a human being, he had asked nothing further of her. He made no demands on her and certainly wasn't trying to possess her. She remembered now, way back beside that pool, how he had held up against the beating Donnell had given him. She had been impressed by that, even then.

*

It took a few weeks for the children to come trickling back and, in the times between, Dion walked Miranda Whitlam through the Waste, now so prematurely warm that if there had been any trees left, they would have been coming out in blossom. He took her new-found accessibility carefully, talking to her at first about neutral matters such as Our Lady of Luck and the matrix of social cohesion she provided in the midst of extreme poverty. He told her about the subsistence economy handed out from World City, and the criminal brotherhoods that ducked and dived through the dark fabric that was all that was not World City. The attention she gave him held through all this, so he risked moving onto something that might matter more. He had recognised the purpose of her project in a way that was entirely intuitive and he wanted to firm up on that now. He wanted to know how it was done.

“So what was really in the injections?” he asked.

“Three designer viruses. Each acts as a vector for a different aspect of the therapy. One vector carries an enzyme system that minimises free radical damage; one produces factors that augment the activity of the DNA repair mechanisms; one improves on the ability of the immune system to recognise degenerate cell types. Each vector has its own independent control system but they all slot into the same place, into the uncommitted stem cells of the haemopoietic system. All they really do is magnify the existing life extension mechanisms.”

Dion saw her look at him curiously, almost hopefully. He looked back, mostly uncomprehending but still interested.

“You see,” she went on, “there's never been any selection pressure to refine the mechanisms to the extent that I have. Every organism that's going to pass on its genetic legacy will have done so long before longevity refinements of the kind I'm inserting could make any difference.”

To Dion, most of this was secret language and he wondered whether it was a language worth the struggle to master. He knew something of the secret language of electronics, but you only needed that if you were buying or selling. Miranda Whitlam wasn't buying or selling, not to him anyway. So Dion let it pass. All the same, he was pleased to know she was willing to speak to him that way. He found it odd, though, to think of longer life as a technical issue.

“Why don't you tell people to pray if they want more life?” he asked, half-joking, and was surprised when she answered seriously.

“The dynamics of prayer are too far removed from the level you need to work on. Degeneration leading to death takes place in the fabric of the human body. It's that fabric that generates the act of prayer, and I know of no evidence it can work the other way. People's capacity for prayer or thought or feeling, or anything like that, degenerates as the human body degenerates. That's why I'm going for the structure rather than the function. The function of the structure is to generate the capacity for prayer. I want to sustain the structure that can perform that function.”

Dion raised an eyebrow and took a deep breath of the mild air that was blowing through the Waste. There seemed to be a lot of structure in all this. Thinking about it, he recognised he was easy enough with structure as it applied to electronics but talking about the structure of life was unreal. Structures were made out of substance and substances were made of material and material was part of the world of appearances – things to be seen and observed. That wasn't what life was. Life was lived and felt, not seen and observed. He could still remember enough of his grandmother's teachings to know that appearances were no more than clothing for the qualities they expressed. So Miranda Whitlam, for example, was for him some kind of light, dressed in appearances to make bearable her dazzling immediacy of being. He wondered if she was tempting him – trying to have him believe she was something other than the beautiful, otherworld creature that, now his guard was back down, she so evidently was.

Another time, after a session, with only the two of them left in Dion's Place, he said, “Viruses cause diseases. Why are you using things that cause disease?”

“Viruses are molecular machines. They're not even living. They're a set of instructions and a vehicle for ensuring the instructions find their way to somewhere they can be acted on. They're instructions for making instructions. They don't sustain their own energy, so they're not alive.”

For Dion, this stress on her chosen tool not being alive connected with her earlier emphasis on life as structure. She really did seem to be trying to establish a mechanical procedure for prolonging life. This puzzled him. Mechanical procedures were applied to the dead, yet here was this more than living being proposing to extend life by applying herself as if to the dead. In the sepulchral space they occupied, lifted to the sky by two hundred feet of rotting concrete apartments, Dion felt uncertainty.

Miranda saw this, but saw in the cast that came over him an implicit criticism of her procedures. She added, “Viruses that cause disease are usually newly evolved. They've not been through the selections necessary to ensure they don't kill the organism they infect. Disease is a maladaptation on the part of the virus – although many viruses get away with it because they manage to infect another host before their current one dies. So they've not been forced to invest too much in keeping alive the body that supports them. But they're just like any other DNA, yours and mine included. Our DNA has to invest a bit more than the viruses. DNA has to do that in order to ensure the body that carries it keeps going long enough for it to be passed on to the next generation. But it's the same process really. The viruses I use are designed to be self-limiting in their spread through the body and they don't compromise the body's survival.”

Dion thought about this. She was talking about a dead tool that clothed itself with life for no better reason than to make more of its own kind. She seemed to be saying there was a hard core of death in the centre of the life she was trying to bestow. She was spreading death to further life. It was as if she was proposing to make of longer life a simulacrum, a dark twin, something that would have all the appearances of extended life whilst all the while it was simply confirming the death that lay at the core of everything. He could feel her viruses spreading their mechanical inevitabilities and sensed settling over him a strange dissociation between the wonder he felt towards her and the language that she spoke.

Dion's next question was, “How will you know it's working?”

“It'll show up in the samples I'm taking; the subdermal matrix. That's the cells that support the surface skin. They're about the most sensitive indicator of ageing there is. There are microdegenerative changes that can be detected very early. If I see a higher level of preservation developing in the matrix from the children's samples, I'll know it's working.”

Whilst on a trip into World City, Dion looked in on a mall that specialised in health foods. He looked at shelves that offered a bewildering variety of life extension and anti-ageing mixtures. What was she trying to do that was different from all this? Later, he asked, “Haven't other people offered ways of prolonging life? What are you doing that's different?”

“There's only a limited gain to be made from overdosing on vitamins and antioxidants and people mostly start taking them after too much damage has already been done. There's also the work on calorie restriction but that's only any good if you like being puritanical. Others have identified genes that limit protein oxidation and cross-linking and I've incorporated some of that work into what I'm doing. There are some substitution or replacement systems as well. But these are all hit-and-run tactics. There's no other coordinated system that anyone's worked out, apart from the one I'm testing.”

Dion heard the phrase ‘hit-and-run tactic' and conceived an image of the death she was trying to postpone as one of the retail outlets he set his company men to work on. He decided she had Death down as a purveyor of material goods. That was why she attacked Death in the way she did, with tools and mechanisms and material. She knew Death had to be attacked on His own terms. She must know Death well to be so sure of the weapons she was using. But how sure could she be?