The O.D. (33 page)

Awareness of you is well over 60% among your contemporaries. Most people’s idealism has evaporated by their thirties, but you’ve managed to keep it stoked up for a lot of them. Apart from the old stand-by flirtations with basic environmental and social issues, they’re beginning to seek out and attack the hidden sources of what they perceive as the rot around them. They don’t approach them through organized pressure groups, but are challenging their friends and associates as unaffiliated individuals. That way, nobody gets called a subversive, a terrorist or an anarchist, and the catalysts of change stay out of public scrutiny, just like you hoped they would.

To wrap this up, Lonnie, I know it’s just a sample of 10,000 people out of 400 million, but when looked at from a distance, the results are encouraging. The questions now are: How can you continue to inspire your current supporters
and
win new ones; and, What can you do to fashion the trends we’re seeing into something longer-lasting? Our Thinkers
want
you to have influence in the world, even if you haven’t got it yet. To me, that’s as good as having it. I sense that in Western Europe, Japan and the Antipodes, the trend is the same. There are some chinks of light beginning to appear in India and China, but the Middle East doesn’t figure in the equation owing to religious and cultural interpretations. And there’s too much strife in Africa for any meeting of minds there. The important point is that, in the U.S. at least, you’ve crossed over into the realms of possibility.

– Bart

Pilot set the report down and pondered over what he had just read. Macushla had yet to cross into the realms of possibility as far as her own baby was concerned, being only two months pregnant. It was an interesting parallel. A baby born prematurely, although viable, would have difficulty surviving, and if it did, could possibly have inherent long-term defects. Conversely, although his own plan for Phase Two had its framework in place, the details in the blueprint had been changing with world events for the past ten years. He couldn’t give birth to his Big Idea now even if he wanted to.

If his Great Aunts’ maxim was, ‘Anything for a simple life’, Pilot’s was, ‘Nothing
without
a simple life’. The stage on which he now played out the role of leader of the world’s smallest nation was providing him at last with an environment and a simplicity conducive to clear thinking and creativity: the womb-like comfort of their geodesic dome; the solar heating orb dispensing warmth like a stout grandmother; his partner spinning schemes with him at all hours; and best of all, unhurried sexual marathons under diffused moonlight to the music of wind chimes.

XX

In
a
penthouse
apartment
in
São
Paolo’s
plushest
apartment
building
,
Diogo
was
slaughtering
the
last
of
the
family’s
pigs
in
the
bathtub
.
Blood
spattered
the
gold
taps
and
lay
in
sticky
pools
at
the
bottom
of
the
bath
.
Mains
water
to
wash
it
down
had
disappeared
a
few
days
after
the
power
required
to
fill
the
building’s
water
tanks
was
lost
,
and
the
water
in
the
plastic
containers
they’d
hauled
up
37
liftless
floors
was
too
precious
to
waste
on
cleaning
.
A
makeshift
barbeque
pit
in
the
kitchen
sink
,
using
splinters
from
a
smashed
up
antique
armoire
,
was
being
tended
by
Diogo’s
wife
.
None
of
the
windows
in
the
penthouse
was
designed
to
be
opened
,
so
they’d
had
to
break
one
.
With
the
building’s
ventilation
system
dead
,
the
smoke
from
the
fire
rolled
across
the
ceiling
and
over
the
powerless
extractor
fan
and
smoke
detector
towards
the
opening
like
a
grey
undulating
sea
.
In
the
dining
room
,
thirteen
Rosenthal
dinner
plates
had
been
set
in
preparation
for
the
feast
to
come
.
The
couple’s
seven
children
played
happily
in
a
back
bedroom
the
size
of
a
squash
court
,
while
their
three
surviving
grandparents
took
in
the
magnificent
views
of
São
Paolo
from
the
living
room
,
coughing
occasionally
when
the
smoke
dropped
too
low
.

Forty
miles
to
the
east
,
the
owners
of
the
apartment
,
Brazil’s
top
eye
surgeon
and
her
husband
,
were
climbing
into
their
Cessna
TT
at
São
José
dos
Campos
airport
for
their
planned
breakout
to
Argentina
,
unaware
that
the
plane’s
fuel
had
been
siphoned
out
that
morning
by
an
enterprising
teenager
and
sold
to
another
pilot
whose
tank
he
had
emptied
the
night
before
.
So
far
,
this
little
scam
had
netted
him
a
small
fortune
in
jewelry
and
expensive
handbags
–
Brazilian
currency
having
become
worthless
.
His
stash
would
soon
be
augmented
by
the
eye
surgeon’s
diamond
wedding
ring
…

The situation in Brazil was as would be expected in any fragile society whose structure suddenly collapses. Having relied almost entirely on packaged foods which were suddenly nowhere to be found, and with international food aid falling woefully short of their needs because of shortages elsewhere, Brazilians in their thousands, faced with the ultimate inconvenience of starvation, had been leaving the cities and towns in a vain search for land on which to grow food. Those who hadn’t been part of the initial surge north into Central America and Mexico before those countries had secured their borders, now found themselves imprisoned by ocean to the east and the troops of Brazil’s continental neighbours to the west, north and south.

The middle and upper classes had taken flight. In their attempts to reach the US and Europe, and with no commercial flights out, many well-heeled refugees had taken to their private planes and luxury yachts, often with inadequate supplies and non-existent navigational skills. It had followed that many of these wealthy Brazilian Boat People had been swept down by the prevailing current into the South Atlantic Gyre and a languishing death through cold and thirst. The last known sighting of the President of Brazil himself had been at Rio’s most exclusive marina.

The rot had begun to set in years before with the cancellation of the Olympic Games due to global instability. This event had landed the knockout blow on Brazil’s fragile glass jaw. Her collapse – not just on paper, which happened to countries all the time, but in real and tragic terms – had been no surprise to Lonnie Pilot. He had followed the news knowingly as 220 million people had been thrown back in time a thousand years – a far bloodier version of what had already taken place in Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal. Only the millions of shanty town and slum dwellers were experiencing a happy upturn in their standard of living. Many from the favelas now occupied the empty hotels and luxury apartment blocks of Rio de Janeiro and São Paolo, albeit without utilities. But that was nothing new for them. Dysentery and cholera were rife. That was nothing new either.

The outside world had been conspicuous by its absence during the disastrous chain of events in Brazil. While this much-respected member of the Country Club jigged and foamed in the throes of a fatal fit, the other members could only look on in mute horror.

The citizens of Eydos, by contrast, were seeing it as another arrow for their quiver…

XXI

Steven Schwartzman, like Harvey Giles, had decided to settle on the island after his contract had expired. But, unlike Giles, who had brought his long-time lover to the island to work as a physiotherapist, there was no woman in Schwartzman’s’s life, just his plants, foremost among them Jane Lavery’s bonsai tree, which he had adopted and lovingly nurtured over the years. Lately, he’d been experimenting with new varieties of edible flora, aided by the recent installation of three vast greenhouses to replace the Island’s weather-beaten polytunnels. (The greenhouses had been donated by Clarence Drance, former Disciple of the Seraphic Prodigy, who had derived material salvation in California from a chain of cycle-through juice bars.)
One entire greenhouse, plus half the other, was given over to Paola Rendina and her team of gardeners, with a small section reserved for the horticultural education of the island’s children. Doctor Steve was allowed free rein to potter about in the remaining half. He was well aware of Rebecca Schein’s sauce experiments, but as for people not liking the taste of his plants, Schwartzman considered it more of a challenge than an insult and he was determined to come up with something novel and nutritious which could be eaten without being smothered in sauce first.

The answer lay in kelp, laver and, most of all, rock tripe, a strange lichen that had begun growing in dense mats over the rocks and was nourishing if not tasty – something like licorice-flavored tapioca pudding. To improve the palatability of these abundant natural food sources, the Doctor had begun cultivating samphire, coriander, wild basil, corn mint, fenugreek, lovage, parsley and sand leek, a relative of garlic.

Before the arrival of the greenhouses, only lentils and other leguminous plants had been grown with any success outdoors and in the hoophouses, but now everyone looked forward to regular harvests of Rendina’s aubergines, peppers, marrows, tomatoes, spinach, French beans, and lettuce. The third greenhouse was a living, hydroponic memorial to Jane Lavery, with Moringo oleifera leaves being harvested by the bushel-load.

In other areas things were also coming together. Ten crew had been apprenticed to a retired fisherman from Newlyn, who had spent two months teaching them how and where to fish. The boat Pilot had purchased from him was a traditional Newlyn trawler with a difference – it carried no nets. Pilot had no intentions of joining in the gang rape of the North Atlantic. All their fish would be caught by handlines. It was a time-consuming process, owing to decimated fish stocks off Nillin. As a result, every single line-caught fish was given reverential treatment when it reached the kitchen.

The fish and the newly arrived herd of goats were bringing welcomed variety to the Nillin menu. As was the case with the male lambs, which could not be milked, the male kids also posed a dilemma. The solution was considered cruel by many. But it did furnish the settlers with a different tasting source of protein. Only a few people knew the identity of the volunteer who had come forward to take on the unpopular job of dispatching the young animal
s−
a task she performed with skill, speed and compassion.

Then there were the orchards. For three years, Harvey Giles had been struggling with the problem of how to make fruit trees grow on the island. From his early experiments he had determined which varieties did and did not like living in sediment and had then instituted a massive grafting project. Large pockets of deep, rich sediment had been discovered in sheltered areas sixteen miles southeast of Nillin and it was in these that the orchards had been planted – apple mainly, but also some plum, pear and peach stocks. They had their first fruit harvests after three years. After ten years, the orchards were well-established and productive enough to allow Eydos to cancel its apple imports from the Duchy of Cornwall.

The island’s face was filling out daily, due mainly to the achievements of the lichen spores, grass pollens and other windborne immigrants. Ten years and eight months after emerging from the sea, less than a quarter of the shelf remained in its original grey and barren bleakness.

The other great natural gift to the island – its wind – was being harnessed by a new form of generator developed by one of Forrest Vaalon’s companies. Instead of a machine of the windmill variety, this one, set atop the basin rim above Nillin, comprised an intake duct fifty metres across by eighteen inches high. Inside, over a thousand small propellers generated electricity at any wind speed over three knots. Being so low to the ground, the Wide Mouth Generator was visually unobtrusive, was far less prone to wind damage than blades on towers, and supplied more than enough power for the settlement’s meager needs.

There was, however, one conventional wind turbine on the island, and this was being used with good effect at the barge landing site. The reason it had been erected there was to provide electricity for some very important visitors. The idea to turn the convoy into a ‘sponge’ with which to soak up knowledge and information of particular relevance to the Big Idea had been Macushla Mara’s. “When it comes time to act, we can’t afford to come across as ill-informed tree-huggers with no grasp of reality and no real understanding of the issues,” she had argued. “And the best way to get inside the human machine is to talk to it… without giving too much away, of course.”

Work parties had spent nearly a year preparing the site for its first guests. A large table with seating for twenty-four had been built inside
Bimbo’s
Kraal
and skylights installed in the deck above it;
King
Solomon
was now a comfortable library containing books in sixteen languages; a cloister had been fashioned around the inner three barges of the middle row; flowers had been planted in cavities and crevices throughout the wreckage where none were growing wild already; and the canteen and mess room had been spruced up to two-star hotel standard.

Because of the angle at which
Ptolemy
was lying, it had been necessary to adjust her bunks and table tops to the horizontal, and this task, followed by the redecoration of all the cabins, had taken four months. A separate suite comprising bedroom, study, bathroom and kitchenette had been built in
Fort
Lowell
to accommodate a person whose identity the crew knew, but were forbidden to reveal to outsiders.

Twenty peopl
e−
identified by Forrest Vaalon as being in the vanguard of their respective fields of finance, medicine, climate change studies, industry, ecology, demographics, information technology and policy-makin
g−
were scheduled at monthly intervals to come to the island for two or three days to have their brains harvested through ‘friendly inquisition’, as Mara called it.

The first to arrive was a high-ranking Japanese executive from Toyota. Pilot wanted to know how malleable the motor industry was to change, what the main blocks to change were, and how these could be overcome. Although unable to speak for the other automotive giants, Mr. Takada was able to impart invaluable information, only some of which was encouraging.
All
information was welcomed, though. After fifteen meetings, the Islander
s−
individually and in their respective task group
s−
had received an education money can’t buy, or in this case, through Forrest Vaalon’s bottomless pockets,
did
buy.

Lonnie Pilot coasted gently downhill on his mountain bike, its flywheel storing energy with every rotation. As he approached the convoy for his third meeting with a high-ranking officer from the World Bank, he marveled at a sight which never failed to impress him. So ugly on the one hand and yet strangely beautiful and powerful on the other. Fourteen massive, rusting barge carcasses rose up before him and exuded a comforting stillness and steadfastness from their dead weight. Colourful strips of wild flowers seemed to tape the rusting hulls of the barges to the grey-green rock on which they rested. Over the years, billions upon billions of nutrient-laden particles – the dead skin shed by continental Europe, Africa and the Americas – had been carried on the wind to their current resting place at the base of each exposed barge side. There they had rested until the time came for the sleeping seeds within to awaken and throw back their covers.

On his arrival, Pilot went straight to Ptolemy’s galley for some water. He was early and had three hours to kill before his meeting with the banker, but he had someone else with whom to kill them. Pilot finished his drink, climbed the ladder to
Fort
Lowell’s deck, knocked on the door of the wheelhouse and went in…

Pilot knew that something was amiss when Serman met him at the top of the escarpment above Nillin with a face like death. “What’s up, Aaron?”

“Josiah’s dead.” The words ripped through Pilot like bullets. Three seconds earlier, he had been brimming with purpose and hope, the rub-off from his productive meetings at the convoy. Now, all he could see were multiple images of Josiah Billy framed in black.

“How did… what happened?”

“He jumped off the cliff at the fjord entrance. Budd and Highbell were fishing just off shore and saw him drop,” Serman said. “We haven’t found his body yet. He left a couple of notes – one for us and one for Paola – plus this verse carved in wood, which we found at the top of the cliff.” Serman handed over a large canvas sack, along with the note, which Pilot read first.

I’m
sorry
it’s
come
to
this
.
Suicide
is
a
selfish
act
,
especially
among
such
a
small
and
close
band
as
we
are
.
You’re
great
people
and
I
was
proud
to
include
myself
as
one
of
you
.
This
voyage
we’re
on
is
an
impossible
one
,
though
.
That’s
how
I
see
it
.
We’re
going
down
with
the
rest
of
humanity
sure
as
eggs
is
eggs
and
there’s
nothing
we
can
do
about
it
.
I’ve
wrestled
for
years
trying
to
hold
on
to
hope
,
but
outside
events
keep
ripping
it
out
of
my
hands
.
That’s
the
reality
.
It’ll
soon
be
over
.
I’m
leaving
the
losing
game
early
by
way
of
the
coward’s
exit
.
That
in
itself
takes
courage
,
right
?

Pilot folded the note and handed it back to Serman. “How’s Paola taking it?”

“I don’t know. Macushla’s with her.”

Pilot walked his bike into Nillin with the canvas bag under his arm and went straight to Josiah and Paola’s dome. Inside, Billy’s distraught partner was lying on her back staring at the ceiling, her eyes red-rimmed from crying. She clutched his four-page letter in her hand, but no length of explanation could have lessened her anguish. Macushla was sitting in a chair next to the bed, her hands folded over her belly. Pilot went over and hugged her, then stooped down and kissed Paola on the forehead. No words were necessary. He sat down next to his partner and placed his hands over hers. When Rendina at last closed her eyes and fell into a shallow sleep, Pilot whispered, “I had no idea Josiah was so near the edge.”

“No one did. Not even Paola.”

“He never talked to her about it?”

“That’s what she told me.”

Pilot remembered something he’d read in Billy’s file – that he had attempted suicide once before after being dropped from the Ireland rugby squad – a flaw in his character that had now come back to bite them all. Then Pilot picked up the canvas bag containing Josiah’s final poem, took out a length of weathered driftwood and held it up so that he and Macushla could both read it at the same time. It was short but potent.

When the Earth was flat we had a fear
Of falling off the edge.
Now the earth is round we’ve lost that fear,
And all hope of staying on.