by Ivo Stourton
He set out from the door of the headmaster’s lodge into the court. He stumbled with his first step, having underestimated the depth of the water. Already the cobbles were invisible beneath the surface. When he first set out, he was unsure of where to go, but when he looked up he knew. There, on the roof of the buildings of the court, standing on the lead sheeting above the level of the red brick battlements, he could see two silouettes. They could have been statues, for they were motionless, looking out across the dome. One was a slender young woman, and by the hand she held a child.
Oates tried to run across the court, but with the water reaching up to his thighs he had to jump with each step to reduce its drag. He crossed the line from the dry half into the storm. As he tasted the rain, he found it faintly chlorinated. All around him the other denizens of the dissolving world pursued their own chaotic plans, but they paid no attention to Oates, and he paid no attention to them. He knew that Miranda must see him coming, and he kept his eyes away from her, fixed on the water in front of him. He knew somehow that she would not do anything whilst he looked away. Whatever was to happen on the roof, it would be for his benefit. He made for the opening into the stone staircase closest to her position, which was about twenty metres from the gatehouse.
The room into which he came on the top floor was a classroom with the ghost of a chalk equation still haunting the blackboard. He opened the little casement window, and squeezed his body out onto the roof. The run through the water and the climb up the narrow stairs had squandered his puff. He raised himself panting to his feet, standing high above the spreading riot. He had doubled back on himself in climbing the stairs, and had bisected once again the border of the storm. Where Oates stood, he was quite dry. Miranda, only perhaps ten feet away, was whipped by the wind and the tropical rain.
She was facing out over the court, looking down in the direction of the churning river and the swallows spiralling up in their giant cage. Harry stood beside her, holding her hand without the slightest sense of danger, his eyes widening in an effort to take in the meaning of the world below. She did not turn to look at Oates when he finally clambered to his feet.
Confronted with her profile, he was struck again by her extreme beauty; yet she no longer seemed young to him. She seemed in fact to have stepped out of age altogether, to have become an avatar for some quality as old as time. The symbols and ideas in her had swollen like tumours, pushing her humanity out through the pores. The instant he saw her, he was dismayed; if she was no longer human, there was no hope of dissuading her from an inhuman act. As he stood there, Harry sensed his presence and turned. He beamed at him, but made no attempt to leave Miranda’s side. Oates waved, and his son waved back with his free hand. He was about to start moving towards them across the roof when Miranda spoke. She did not shout, but raised her voice so that he would hear her through the storm.
“Do you know, I haven’t left this place in four years? I haven’t seen it without the sky in three. It’s almost more beautiful, don’t you think? You can see the genius of it, the wonder of the engineering. Really perfect technology hides itself. You never know it’s there, until it goes wrong. I’d forgotten this was under everything. I’d forgotten how much I missed it.”
“It’s over, Miranda.”
She shook her head.
“It’s falling apart. We need to get you out of here.”
“It doesn’t matter, Inspector. This place has served its purpose. We can discard it.” She gestured with her hand out over the water, her fingers taking wing and lifting at the wrist into a glorious future.
“Then let the lad go.”
She shook her head again, sincerely regretful that such a thing could not be done.
“It’s alright Dad. I’m not scared anymore. It’s amazing.”
Miranda swung fondly on the little arm.
“Then take me,” Oates said, “I’ll jump off this bloody roof myself.”
“That’s not enough, Inspector. Now, I asked for a clever policeman, and that is what I got. Can you understand why?”
“Harry, wouldn’t you like to come back with your dad?”
Harry nodded, but made no move to come back to Oates. He was transfixed by the scene in the court below. The three of them stood, a frozen tableau in the cold and shadowless light of the dome. Again, the voice from the heavens intoned the evacuation.
“If you just let him come to his dad, I’ll have your bloody Treatment. If that’s what you want, you’ve got my word…”
“It doesn’t work like that, Inspector. As I explained to you, the process has to be voluntary. Do you think I want to do this? I have to set you free.”
Oates remembered the way that Chris Rajaram had mentioned, almost in passing, that the Tithonus Effect could amount to psychosis. Miranda must be one of the oldest women who had ever lived. She had been an early adopter of the Treatment she had herself helped to develop. Charles had said she was a student doing her doctorate at Cambridge before he was born. That could make her over a hundred. Clearly the operation of her mind was disturbed, but she was not insane. There was cold, hard rationality in her, untempered by any empathy.
He tried to think about her like any other criminal, to reconstruct her thought process from first principles. He thought back to everything he knew about her. In their very first interview in the spa, she had tried to recruit him to her vision. He had disappointed her with his failure to understand. She had chosen him because… because of his suffering. And he had disappointed her because he bore it. He had not wanted to escape his life, he had not wanted to lengthen it. He had just wanted to live it. It was not enough for Miranda, but why?
It was his stoicism that had violated her principles. It was that fragile part of him, alcohol under one shoulder, his family under the other, limping along, which endured a day like this one and still looked forward to the next. She had fallen out of love with life, and yet she could not conceive of herself as having failed. She could accept her ennui only insofar as she could convince herself that this was a basic operation of the human condition. She needed to feel that her weakness was not personal, but universal. By refusing her gift, Oates had threatened the logic by which she justified to herself the desiccation of her passions and her morality. He could bear his ageing, and his suffering. The thought of his death was not so offensive to him that he would pay the price of oblivion in exchange for immortality. But her soul’s logic would bear no exceptions – having once failed to recruit him, the only recourse was to increase his suffering until it became unbearable. That was where Harry came in. Harry and the edge of the roof. The dawn of this understanding must have shown in his face, because Miranda smiled at him. It was the sad smile of a parting couple, of two people united by their shared knowledge of something both unsought and inevitable.
He looked down at Harry. Harry held on to Miranda’s hand in absolute innocence, whilst his great intelligence worked its way through the apocalypse consuming the school, and his compassion encompassed the actors. Oates could imagine his thoughts, and the questions he would be formulating to confound his dad and all the philosophers. In that instant the sense of unreality was banished. He knew one certain thing. He loved his sons. All the rest of the world could warp and change. His senses and his memories might betray him, his principles collapse, the whole of England could become a TV show. But his love for his son was real. It was a thing that existed outside of him. An objective presence standing by his shoulder. It would exist after he was dead. It would exist when he was no longer there to feel it. He would die for it.
“Come on then,” he said.
Miranda hesitated, and a slight hint of confusion troubled the smooth marble brows.
“We’ll do it together,” he said. “You said it had to be voluntary. Well, I’m volunteering. You keep hold of his hand, and I’ll take the other. We’ll do it together.”
“You’re lying.”
“No. I thought I could go on. But I don’t want to. I need another push
, I know that now. To be free. And afterwards, I will need the Treatment, and MRT. Afterwards, I will beg you to help me.”
“Let me do it. Let me save you that at least.”
“If you do it alone, I won’t want to forget. I’ll only want to pursue you. I’ll live to destroy you. But if we do it together I can be free to have the Treatment. How can I live with it, if I’ve done it myself?”
He edged forward on the roof. He could see Miranda wavering. She wanted to believe him. She wanted to think he was weak. His ankle still throbbed from the fall in the sewers. Feet don’t fail me now, he begged himself, and as he moved, his begging became a prayer. He began to make promises. He would give up the job. They would leave London together. He would never go out on nights again. He would give up his dreams of his youth. He would be grateful every day. He would quit drinking. Never another drop. He would never hurt another man. He drew closer. He crossed the threshold of the storm. He felt the rain on his skin. Somewhere along the way, his thoughts became prayers. He would give his own life for Harry’s, give it gladly. He prayed to the love for his sons. The only thing that existed outside of him. The rain plastered his hair to his head, and streamed down into his eyes. As he edged closer, Nottingham Biosciences had fulfilled the promise of their slogan – he no longer lived in fear of his death.
He held Miranda’s eyes in his own like a hand in his. They were wild and skittish, the madness which her intelligence must have concealed for some time beginning to obtrude. She was desperate to believe in him. He sensed her need as he drew closer, her supreme loneliness drawing him in. He was whispering to her, not words exactly, but a sound like words, a comforting sound like the soft sound of the sea. He took Harry’s hand. It was tiny in his own. It was the answer to his prayers. Miranda’s eyes filled with gratitude as she pulled back to gather the momentum for the swing that would carry his boy out into the air.
For a fraction of a second, there was the consummation of their two beliefs, each one impossible if the other were to be true. In that single instant, Harry was both saved and sacrificed. But the impossibility could not hold. With a sudden yank, Oates tossed his son away from the ledge, on to the lead sheeting of the roof. At the same time, Miranda’s expression ignited with the knowledge of his treachery. He grabbed for her, and she screamed, the sound set to an eerie echo by the steel sky above and the flooded court below. He tried to pull her away from the drop, but the force required to save Harry had unbalanced him. She was tiny beside Oates, but her fury gave her strength. She caught hold of his outstretched arm, and jumped, and the two of them pitched over the edge into the storm.
15:00 HOURS
WEDNESDAY 27 NOVEMBER
2035 (REAL WORLD)
LONDON HAS HAD some bad mornings. Most cities don’t know what it’s like to wake up with whole streets, whole districts gone, but London does. Dawn on 6 September, 1666. Dawn on 8 September, 1940. And then the smaller outrages. The people with their riots, the prophets with their bombs, the developers with their diggers. It might be because the city is old, but there are older cities. It might be because the city is unlucky, but the streets of London haven’t felt the tramp of an invader’s boot in almost 1,000 years, and how many other cities in Europe can say the same?
Something in the city wants to rise and fall. Something wants to remind the inhabitants that what looks like permanence comes down in a violent minute. One day a building, and the next a patch of sky strung on the washing line between the two buildings either side. Whatever the reason, Londoners are good at tidying up and carrying on.
Most of the damage done by the rioters was cleaned up within the week. The police deployed rubber bullets and water cannons the night after the looting on Oxford Street, and the army were all ready to come in, but really the riot was spent. There had been a couple of bad fires in the East End, but architects were sharpening their pencils even as the last tendrils of smoke and steam wafted from the rubble. The only real casualty had been the Great Spa, which had been engulfed in flood and fire. The fate of the mighty dome hung in the balance, with structural engineers still poking in the foundations to see if it might be saved.
Certainly London seen through the plate glass windows of the café on the third floor of the National Theatre looked quite unchanged. The only sign of the rioting was on the front page of a copy of the Evening Standard, and even there the disturbances had lost their hold on the headlines, slipping to the bottom right hand column. A frenzy of opinion formers had descended on the events like carrion on the carcass of a beached whale, picking them apart with sharp little insights. Eventually there would be nothing left but the bones of history.
Eustace Morrison folded the paper and set it down on the metallic surface of the table in front of him. He stared out at the river. The tide was so low that the grey water had receded to reveal the mud banks below the stone parapet of the Embankment. White gulls circled against the white sky. A curtain of drizzle hung across the view like mild static across a television screen, as if Morrison and the world were not fully tuned in to one another.
He saw his contact running across the open space where the skateboarders practised their jumps, holding a folded newspaper up over his head. Morrison had bought him a cup of tea in anticipation, and he removed the saucer he had placed over it to keep it warm. He disappeared from view beneath the parapet, and a few moments later came to the table brushing water from the sides of his raincoat. When he sat down he had to remove his glasses, which were both steamed with the heat and flecked with raindrops.
“So?” he said taking up the tea without a word of thanks.
“I’m afraid that so far we’ve made very limited progress,” Morrison said.
“Five days and they haven’t managed to find a thing?” Putting the tea down, he scrubbed at the droplets of water with the end of his tie, but this served only to smear the lens. He squinted myopically to focus on Morrison, and it gave him a look of extreme skepticism.
“We’ve recovered equipment we believe may have been used. But nothing of MRT, either the results of the experiments or the scientific process itself.”
“But you’ve accessed the Avalon mainframe?”
“Yes.”
“Is it encoded? Erased, what?”
“We think it’s possible the information was never actually stored on computer.”
“That’s ridiculous. Everything gets stored on computers. And a process that complex, there must be documentation.”
“From the interviews we’ve conducted so far it would appear that the vast majority of the work on the project was conducted by Miranda exclusively, and performed from memory. She did use assistants, but on an extremely strict rotation, so that not one of them assisted with sufficient frequency to understand the wider context.”
“We expect the Chinese to have developed a viable alternative to the Treatment within the next three to five years. When the British government loses its monopoly on the granting of Treatment licences, we will have to rethink an entire generation of foreign policy.”
“May I be candid?” Morrison asked.
“No you may not.”
Morrison waited politely whilst his contact sipped his tea.
“I hate candour. It’s just another word for rude. Or rudeness, rather. Oh alright, fine, be candid if you must.”
“Our foreign policy will soon be someone else’s problem.”
“Ah yes. You’re taking retirement next year, is that right?”
Morrison nodded.
“What have you got planned?”
“Natasha and I are selling Oakley Street. We’re going to move down to our house in St Cezaire.”
“Permanently?”
“Well, not forever.”
“I see. Well, they say the climate’s good for old bones.”
Morrison smiled faintly.
“What about that man you had, Rob something?”
“Detective Chief Inspector Oates.”
“That’s the one. Sho
t that black boy right in the middle of One New Change. They love that at the Home Office, as I’m sure you can imagine.”
“He failed to retrieve any of the papers from the Mortal Reformers. But our intelligence is that he did at least try.”
“Does he know anything about MRT? He must have been the last person to speak to Miranda alive.”
“We haven’t had the opportunity to debrief him just yet. He’s only just come out of intensive care. He’s in Royal London Hospital with his family.”
“And your recommendation on the investigation into the shooting? Or would you prefer to wait until you’ve had the chance to interview him?”
Morrison nodded to himself.
“Play it straight.”
“Play it straight?”
“If he murdered the boy let him go down. But don’t make it so.”
“Well, alright. You are an odd fish sometimes.” He drummed his bitten nails on the table once. “I’d best be getting back. You’re sure you won’t stay with us? Compulsory retirement only applies where necessary. We could always arrange a Treatment licence…”
“But not for Natasha.”
His contact said nothing.
“It’s kind of you to ask me,” Morrison said, “But no. I think it’s time to leave.”
“Oh well. Are you having some sort of leaving do?”
“No.”
“No. Can’t say I blame you. I can’t stand that sort of thing either. Half of them are pleased to see the back of you, the other half couldn’t care less. The one or two who do care, you’ll see them again anyway. Keep well.”
“And you.”
“I just wish it wasn’t such filthy weather. Filthy weather and good news I could handle. Or bad news and a lovely clear day. But filthy weather and bad news… hmph!”
His companion left him sitting alone in the theatre café. Morrison watched him once again through the streaming plate glass window as he ran for the cover of Waterloo Bridge, heading past the rough sleepers in the direction of Whitehall. He had just disappeared from view when the lamps on the South Bank flickered into life. Outside, the clouds were hastening the end of a brief day.