There were seven new children and the principal talked to them in her reception room over what she called a ‘working breakfast’. They were not to be assigned to classes in the way Miranda had read about in the school stories Lissel had given her. Instead, they were each to join a company. The chalet where her room was located belonged to a company, and she would eat with her company, talk with her company and work with her company. For their first year, each new recruit would be considered a trainee, regardless of their age on joining. After that, they rose in their company hierarchy according to ability, still regardless of age. The principal explained that they would be promoted according to the scale of the operations they were capable of managing and the success of the innovations they made. If they didn’t become CEO before they finished, each one of them was at least expected to leave having made enough credit to cover their entire education. The teachers were called consultants and expected to be treated as such.
Miranda spent her first term getting the feel of the place. She noticed how the steady pressure that operated in the companies suited her. There were no opportunities for boredom and she would willingly work far into the evening. Labour was divided within a company so there was little personal competition to irritate her. There was, however, intense competition between companies as they vied for hegemony within the programmed market simulations that provided a safety screen between their own efforts and the real world of profit and loss. Miranda was told that in their final year the screen was taken down and they were expected to operate for real as an associate in one of a range of businesses that cultivated the school. The few who were incompetent or couldn’t be bothered had been quietly excluded by then, so those that remained were a genuine asset to any organisation that took them on. That was when they were expected to make up the costs of their education. With all this in mind, Miranda was disturbed by how immature some of the younger ones seemed, but she was also aware how the steady peer pressure of the company organisation sorted them out fast. The majority of the pupils appeared sensible.
There was something else Miranda noticed in her first months, which she found unaccountably disturbing and which had nothing to do with the education she was absorbing so readily. It was simply the feeling of the year passing in the alpine valley. First the clear light of late summer with its warm sun and cool air. Then the early morning mists hanging over the trees lower down the valley, the yellowing of the leaves, and the first grey rains sweeping across the meadows. And finally, shortly before she was returned to her father’s estate, the sharp night frosts, followed by the great, intimate blanket of Christmas snow that whirled past the windows for days on end.
At night Miranda walked barefoot out onto her veranda to feel the snow between her toes. Snow was everywhere and she could hear it slithering off the trees with soft, powdery thumps. She would stand watching her breath mist in the icy starlight barely conscious of the pain from the coldness on her feet. Then she would shake the spell from herself and scurry back to the warmth and light of her room.
Just before she was about to return home, Miranda received a Christmas card. It had on the front a painting of a town covered in snow, with a broad river curving through its centre. The text inside told her this was Basel, painted a long time ago by someone she had never heard of. The writing on the other side of the card wished her season’s greetings from William Burger.
Who was William Burger? The name sounded familiar, but a kind of block came up when she tried to remember him. Miranda felt slightly unnerved to have been sent a card by someone she didn’t know, at a place where few people knew she was. She concentrated on the feeling of being unnerved and finally remembered the island and the young man who had come with the two older men. That had been William Burger – the one who had told her he was working on making people live forever.
Why should William Burger remember her? She had barely remembered him and she was sure she had made even less impression on him than he on her. Miranda wondered whether she should send him a card in return. But there was no address. She could remember her father telling her the name of the institute where Burger was working, but she couldn’t remember what the name was, and she didn’t feel like bothering her father to find out. It was odd though that William Burger should have taken the trouble to find out where she was.
*
At home for Christmas, Miranda noticed how different the house felt from the agitated time before they had left for the island. Her father seemed relaxed and in good humour. He had a lot visitors and dinners and there was a woman who spent more time with him than the other visitors did. Miranda didn’t like her. She was beautiful and young, and said things that didn’t sound sincere. Miranda was relieved to get back to school where, for the remainder of her first year, she play-acted being her father, adopting the mannerisms she had seen him use while at work in his study. Beneath this appearance, however, she was developing her own style and beneath her developing style, there was an expanding intelligence. This intelligence was too much a part of her for Miranda to be conscious of, but the school had identified it rapidly and ensured Miranda received appropriate opportunities. During the spring term, she was given a clothes factory in West Africa to manage, which she did so well that for the summer the executive board of her company gave her an electronics production facility in one of the outer islands of Indonesia to set up. After an initial setback arising from her failure to take into account some local traditions regarding the proposed factory site, she did well at that too. She was told she would make project-management executive at the start of her second year, and she accepted the anticipated progression as a matter of course. Why shouldn’t she be a project-management executive? – Or CEO for that matter? She didn’t doubt that she would be equal to the task.
But none of this was about changing the world by moving glittering lines on a screen. She mentioned to her company’s executive vice-chairman what she had seen her father do. He said, “Oh, you don’t need to bother with that yet. It’s a handy convenience if you’re trying to keep personnel light at the top end, but it’s no more than that. The IT consultant’ll give you a run-down if you want.”
Miranda went to see the IT consultant who told her that what she had seen her father working with was no more than a handy convenience for keeping personnel light at the top end. Miranda insisted on a demonstration though, and spent an hour being the managing director of a pharmaceuticals combine. She found it hard to accord the prosaic transfers of personnel, materials and credit she found herself performing, with the powers and hopes she had invested in the procedure. She might as well have been issuing the kind of e-mails that her managers could have issued and she said so to the IT consultant. He looked surprised and told her that was essentially what the programme did. Most business situations, he said, embodied no more than a limited number of options, which could be handled by a limited number of formal instructions. All that the programme did was select the formal instructions appropriate to the move that had been made on the master screen, and make sure that those instructions found their way to the right people.
Miranda went away from the session disappointed. Yes, something might have changed in the world after she’d moved those lines on the screen, but really no more so than if she had picked up a telephone. The programme merely meant she was better able to run things from behind the razor wire she was surrounded by. The world beyond the wire was still there, mostly entirely beyond her reach. Something terrible could still happen out there. What Miranda had wanted from those lines was the power to change the world directly according to her will, but what she had got was a tool for issuing instructions. She felt the lifeline she had made of those glittering threads begin to unravel.
9
Home was supposed to be where his parents lived, but Dion was sick to the heart with memories of his island. His father put him in a mixed-language school with small classes where he could learn to understand the local people while keeping up his education at the sa
me time. Dion was interested in learning to understand the local people, but otherwise did badly in his first term. He would find himself losing the teacher in mid-sentence, his gaze drifting towards the window and the indeterminate grey of the sky beyond. Then a flood of memories would wash over him, leaving him aching with longing and entirely deaf to all that was being told him.
His classmates were mostly obedient sons and daughters of the professional couples who inhabited the district. The children received and regurgitated information during classes then, during break, demanded of Dion, in carping, self-satisfied tones, whether he or his parents owned certain things that were being considered essential to have that week.
He tried to play the game at first. He said, ‘Sure, we’ve got one of those on order,’ or, ‘Nah, it’s the next update I’m waiting for.’ Later, sitting in the apartment kitchen, watching his mother chop vegetables in her fussy, chaotic way, his frustration and discomfort finally broke through his vow of silence. He asked, “Mum, when can I have a VR game deck? All the kids at school have got one. I’m the only one who hasn’t.”
“That’s wasted money,” his mother retorted impatiently, as if Dion had been talking this way ever since they arrived. “Your father hasn’t come all the way here just to waste the money he makes on games for you. School work is what you need to be spending your time on. That’s what your father did when he was your age. He didn’t waste his time playing games or spending his parents’ money. He worked hard and it’s because of that that we’re here now.”
This did not encourage Dion, either to work hard or to fit in. His lies about what he owned became increasingly half-hearted and he concentrated instead on finding ways of getting out of school without being noticed. Since almost all the other children were white this was difficult, so he tried cultivating a low profile, burying himself in a book most breaks. This singled him out even further and he began to experience a developing hostility. The asides and occasional direct attacks were unpleasantly verbal. Anything physical he could have dealt with, but the words hurt more, being mostly about what a loser he was and how he didn’t have anything worth talking about. At the point when he was about to beat hell out of someone – anyone – he remembered a lesson his grandmother had taught him, seemingly odd at the time, but now presenting itself as a possibly valuable skill.
She had said, “What most peoples want, young Dion, is to be big and important. Bet you want to be big and important, yes? Basketball player on the cable, so all your friends shout, ‘Hey look, there’s that Dion,’ when they turn on. You like the thought of that? Hmm? Thought so. Now, listen to me. The ones that get onto that screen – they’re just the ones that didn’t get eaten on the way. That’s what happens to most. And the ones you see on the screen, they’re only at the top of the pole while they stay strong enough not to slip down. All slip down in the end, Dion. All get old and weak – all get eaten. But there’s another way you can do it. You do it like this.”
She took him on one of their longest walks together. When they set off, she had walked as any normal person might: heavily, purposefully, looking around herself, curious, slightly challenging, then apparently losing herself in some thought and blundering slightly in her steps. Only then had Dion realised his grandmother had never walked like that before – his father, yes, and his mother and teachers and, when he came to think about it, all the grown-ups around him, and most of the children. But his grandmother had never walked like that, not until now. He didn’t like his grandmother walking like that. It was unpleasant, out of character. But he stuck by her side, saying nothing.
As they continued together, his grandmother’s way of walking gradually became more like her own: quieter, more graceful, more inwardly-directed. Dion found himself falling into step. He wanted to find out what it felt like to walk like that. They continued together for some time, giving Dion a chance to get the feel of it. He began to sense a lightness about himself, a transparency, as if he might be blown away by the sunlight. His sense of himself as someone with things to do and places to go began to soften and blur. Thoughts stilled, to be replaced by an awareness that was increasingly drawn in on his surroundings. As each moment passed into the next, that awareness seemed to deepen and expand. It was unfamiliar but he felt okay, albeit peculiarly neutral, as if he could have gone on like that forever, as if nothing would ever again be able to intrude and deflect him onto a new course. But there seemed to be more in his surroundings than he had taken in before: scents, patterns of light, differently-shaped leaves, air breaths. He felt like he might as well take it all in. He concentrated on taking it all in and it was, therefore, some time before he realised his grandmother had disappeared completely. The shock of finding her suddenly absent brought him instantly back to his familiar self. Where was she? Why had she disappeared? Would he be able to find his way back?
“Boo,” said his grandmother, still walking close beside him. “You were almost gone. You done well there.”
She called it ‘vanishing’, and Dion had got to practice it several times with her before he was taken from the island. He practiced a lot more though after he found himself alone in the school playground with nothing but the memory of her lesson to hold on to. He practiced hard and soon he was able to be in or out of the place without anyone noticing the difference.
He used his freedom to take long walks along the tree-lined streets, past the neon-lit cubes he had seen on the evening of their arrival. They looked like places where people worked, not many people and all of them well-dressed. Dion noted down the names the neon signs spelled out and went to a community information centre close by. He asked the assistant how he could find out about the names he had noted. The assistant showed him how to operate the menus on one of several screens available for people to use freely. The commercial directory listed each of the names and gave brief details of their interests. Dion read about advertising agencies, graphic-design studios, specialist electronics and law partnerships. Many of the words were unfamiliar to him so he asked the assistant for a translator’s dictionary. Still, some of the words meant nothing, even when translated, so he asked the assistant about them. The information centre was very quiet and she willingly told him everything he wanted to know. When she asked him why he wasn’t in school he said his father was on a short-term contract and he was having private tuition.
Some days later, he went up to one of the neon-lit cubes, the one that did specialist electronics, and asked the man on the reception desk if they had any work at the weekend he might do – he wouldn’t want much money and he was willing to try anything. It took courage to do this, because the man behind the reception desk looked like Miranda Whitlam’s man, the one that had called him a filthy little nigger boy. The man behind the desk said he was sorry but they had nothing. He was polite and took Dion’s request seriously. Dion was relieved but still left feeling let down.
Apart from the information centre and the walk past the concrete cubes, Dion’s other main focus of attention was a small sandwich bar in among some shops. The sandwich bar had two games machines. On one, you could drive around the world at high speed dodging other cars and obstacles thrown in your path. On the other, you could journey out into space to try and find the lost world of Zarcon. Dion liked the lost world game best because not only did you have to fight your way past any number of aliens on the way, you also had to solve puzzles that would tell you which direction to take. If you finally made it to Zarcon, there was a whole new game to be played in a landscape full of dinosaurs, vast seas and ancient cities. A great and evil queen ruled the planet from the most spectacular of these cities and she was responsible for all the adversities he’d had to overcome to get there. When, after several months of playing, Dion finally reached the end of the game, he discovered that the great and evil queen was actually under the spell of a powerful sorcerer. When he had defeated the sorcerer, the queen was transformed into a beautiful, young princess who promised to be his forever for having released her
from the spell. Dion’s mother gave him a little money each day to buy lunch with at the school. If he went without lunch for two days, he could save enough for a game, a coffee and a sandwich.
He still thought of Miranda Whitlam and still didn’t hate her. He tried imagining her as the great and evil queen of the planet Zarcon, with that man who had beaten him up as the powerful sorcerer. Perhaps if he had fought and defeated the man, Miranda Whitlam would have been released and would have pledged herself to him for all eternity. Dion spun the fantasy around for a while. It developed to the point at which he decided it would make more sense if it was Mr Whitlam who was the powerful sorcerer. The man who had beaten him up was merely a minion – a demon guard. Mr Whitlam was the one who owned the demon guard, the one who had destroyed his home and had sent Dion and his family to this terrible place. He was the real power. Perhaps if Miranda Whitlam had not denied him, Dion would have been in greater danger still. If she had acknowledged that she might have become his friend, her sorcerer father would have seen him as too great a threat to his plans and would have had him killed. Perhaps, by making people believe he had been no more than a chance stranger, caught looking, Miranda Whitlam had saved his life. As time passed, Dion’s hurt smouldered less strongly, but the image of Miranda Whitlam’s face looking up at him still burned.
*
Dion gradually began to establish a life for himself entirely separate from the world he found himself in, a life of memories or fantasy, or both. He walked as far as he could, kicking at fallen leaves, sliding on iced-over puddles, holding his jacket tight around himself against the wind. But no matter how far he walked, Dion could find nothing that could reconnect him with his island. Nothing seemed to have a life of its own. He recalled his grandmother’s words, ‘... they work for appearances is all and appearances is what they make.’ Not knowing what it was to be without the rich underpinning of feeling and intuition that was the life of the appearances he had been familiar with, those words had meant little to Dion at the time; he hadn’t even known what appearances were. Now he knew. That underpinning of feeling and intuition had been pulled forcibly from him and he was left floating in a place that was nowhere.
In World City Page 9