Every new savagery is unbelievable at first. He bit his lips, chewing this one over, to ask at last, ‘How do they manage, the old, the sick, the little kids?’
Knowledge has its arid patches. ‘If they’re on the high levels and healthy they climb the mountain when they must. The old and sick stay put in little groups of two or three floors and live their lives there.’ He shuddered and I turned the screw a little tighter. ‘They’re no worse off than Sweet are in a home for the permanently crippled.’
When that had sunk in he asked, ‘How do they get food?’
‘Lower floor groups collect all the coupons and get food for a whole floor group, than pass it hand to hand from street level to the top, five or six levels at a pass. Takes time but it works. Gives the unemployable something to do.’
He saw some light there. ‘They work like a community?’
One shouldn’t be starry-eyed about people. ‘It isn’t love that drives them, they aren’t sentimental outside the family group. If somebody won’t help, his neighbours have ways of hurting him. Or her. Ostracism is the simplest. Cultures are founded on group necessities, so they co-operate and kick the shit out of anyone who won’t play.’
‘It would take a lot of organizing.’
‘Ask your favourite Tower Boss about it. He gets the blame when the system breaks down. Ask Billy Kovacs.’
His sympathy vanished at the mention. ‘Any rabbit can say sorry, my fault. Kovacs says the way Francis turned out is his fault but does that mean he does anything about it?’
It was than that I saw the obvious, that Billy was the ideal agent for keeping an eye on Francis.
2
Though I dressed right and smelled right and spoke right, I was never at ease moving solo in the towers except on my own family turf. A few of Billy’s boys knew who I was and would lend a hand if my stranger’s face started a ruckus, but going openly into Twenty-three was still a little chancy.
(Time erodes. I was no longer at ease with my family, either. They did not share the Kovac’s obsession with cleanliness, and their smell and grime set them at a distance that I dared not acknowledge. The scent of Sweetness corrupts us all.)
I made sure that Billy expected me: you’d never catch that busy grasshopper without an appointment. The flat was full of grandchildren that day, brats playing around and under the beds and greeting me in derisive Swill until Vi screamed at them not to use that talk in the house – in the street, yes, but not inside! The family was effectively bilingual. It was also present at discussions – nobody told the kids, Go out and play. There were no secrets in the flat: the kids had to learn from the beginning what was gossip and what was ‘family talk.’ The older ones were inducted into Billy’s network as soon as they could be trusted, which was pretty young. He was setting up a dynasty.
This flat held his real life. I saw Alison Conway as a fantasy life that he desperately needed in order to sustain the load of leadership and doubly double-crossed morality; with her he was the man he wanted to be, with Vi the man he must be. A facile reading, perhaps, but close to the truth.
Vi made real coffee, playing hostess (courtesy the Ma’am) while the kids played around us, quietly but otherwise as if we weren’t there. At first I was diffident about speaking of the Conways but she did not let bias show. She and Billy must have worked out their truce ground long ago. How, I couldn’t imagine. In her place I’d have killed the bastard.
It was she who asked, after my explanation, ‘But what can the Francis brat do that’s dangerous?’
Billy said at once, ‘Sell himself.’
‘How? It’s not like when there was money. Everybody knows what you should have and too much of anything is suspicious.’
‘He can sell his arithmetic to somebody higher up, with more influence than the Ma’am. And then to somebody higher yet till he gets as high as he can go.’
She considered that, her fat, intelligent face working while her gross body relaxed. ‘But what does he get by it? Does he want to be prime minister?’
‘Security,’ Billy guessed, cocking his head at me.
‘Right,’ I agreed. ‘He was brought up Swill-frightened. Then his father—’
Billy cut in. ‘There was a nasty thing his first day in the Fringe. Frightened the guts out of the poor little tyke.’
I hadn’t known that, but it fitted. ‘He wants a safe place that he can’t be kicked down from. There’s no such place but that won’t stop him clawing higher and higher, and what I’m told of him suggests that he won’t care who gets trampled on his way up.’
Billy showed concern. ‘Like the Ma’am?’
Vi didn’t see it. ‘How?’
I had to explain something of the mutual dependence network that Mrs Parkes could not break out of, and of the precarious balance of corruptions – individually small but in total monstrous – underlying the administration.
That amused her. ‘You mean the State puts up with it because that’s easier than putting it down?’
‘More advisable. The corrupt are also the talented.’
‘And that scared fleabite could bring it all down by putting his boot in the wrong face?’
‘Not all of it, but dislodging the Ma’am would tumble a few of her contacts, and each one of them – like dominoes.’
‘Mustn’t happen,’ she decided. ‘Things can get worse than they are. Lots of countries are worse off than us so there’s lower to fall. Would what the Sweet get away with make any difference if it was shared out?’
Smart question. ‘Among millions you wouldn’t notice it.’
‘Well,’ she said over the lip of her cup of illegal coffee, ‘we take a bit of graft ourselves.’
Billy objected, ‘We earn what we get.’
She winked at me. ‘Billy likes to feel honest. You’d better word the Ma’am, Billy.’
‘She’ll know for herself.’
‘Just in case.’
‘All right.’
They understood each other exactly: in four sentences discussion had taken place and agreement had been reached. I said, ‘You’ll have to watch him yourself, though.’
‘You think I won’t? What goes bad for Francis goes bad for me, doesn’t it? So greedy Billy will watch it, won’t he?’
Vi said, ‘You say he’s pretty sharp, Billy. What if he decides to take care of you? You’ve had a knife in your gut once before. And from a teenager.’
I needed a clearer picture of Francis. ‘Would he go that far if you frightened him?’
Billy’s mouth opened and shut on the shock of having to find an answer. Vi watched quizzically until he said, ‘He’s not that bad.’ It was a mumble without conviction. ‘He’s my boy, after all.’
Vi said sharply, ‘He was while you were useful. Children aren’t pets – they’re little animals that have to be watched as well as loved.’
There was muscle under her fat. I asked Billy how he would put it to the Ma’am and he turned sulky. ‘Have to think about it.’
‘OK. Tell me what she says.’
‘I’ll do that.’
We had more coffee while Vi ticked him off for being surly and I wondered how the tower folk would react to seeing their tough Boss at home.
Then Vi said, ‘Tell him about the soldiers.’
I got the impression that this had been on both their minds, if only because Billy hesitated and wavered. ‘Not Nick’s department.’
‘He can find out, though. He can ask around.’
I was to earn my pay. Push-me pull-me in action.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘There’s people getting sick. Too many.’
In the towers that could be dangerous: epidemic in the close environment was a fear the Med Section monitored constantly. ‘What do the meds say?’
‘They don’t say anything.’ Then he scared the wits out of me. ‘They just take them away.’
‘To the hospital at Army?’
‘Out of the Enclave.’
My reflexes cried pl
ague while my brain tried to concentrate on essentials. ‘Vi said soldiers. What have they to do with it?’
‘At first it was the soldiers that got sick. Next was our girls that fucked with soldiers. Then a few neighbours.’
Trust Billy to have nosed out an intelligent picture of the spread, ‘How many?’
‘Seventeen so far in this tower.’
‘In how long?’
‘About a fortnight.’
Not too bad but bad enough. ‘Any quarantine?’
‘In the tower? No.’
‘So it’s a contact infection. Venereal?’
His shoulders humped and fell. ‘They don’t say, but it comes from the soldiers through their pick-ups, though the army is supposed to be bio-clean. Maybe they get it through second-hand contact, the way cholera spreads through shit.’
Vi said, ‘Language!’ in a schoolmistress voice. Behind every successful man, somebody has said, is a stand-over woman – or something to that effect.
I asked, ‘Symptoms?’
‘Funny ones. Like a fever that comes and goes but the temperature goes down instead of up. Lowers the blood pressure. Then it hits the brain – they lose control of their speech and memory gets foggy. Next there’s blisters around the – what was it, Vi?’
‘Glands,’ she said. ‘Under the arm.’
‘Lymph glands.’
‘Yes, those.’
I could think of nothing like it among common diseases. ‘How many dead?’
‘Don’t know. None died in the tower but how can I tell?’
‘None brought back?’
‘None. They may be still in hospital. Or they could be dead.’
Probably a virus. Bacteria can be cleaned up in a day or two but a new virus could require recombinant techniques to provide a phage. ‘Many in the other towers?’
‘Some in Twenty-two and Twenty-four but I can’t get figures. Nobody dead, anyway.’ He complained disgustedly, ‘They got no organization over there.’
I said, ‘Something for you to attend to,’ but he would have none of that.
‘Like hell! I got them out of the shit with the Swains, didn’t I? When they do something for us it will be time to help them again.’
‘Very selfish people.’ Vi’s mouth was virtuously prim. ‘Not cooperative.’
‘Have you put the soldiers out of bounds to tower girls?’
‘Tried, but what can you do? How do you stop a hungry kid from trading a fuck for a bit of fruit or chocolate?’
‘Billy!’ Vi had decided on outrage. ‘I’ve told you before about language in front of the kids. I have to unteach them after you.’
‘Sorry, love.’ He didn’t sound repentant.
In the silence a childish voice said from a safe hiding place, ‘Fuck!’ and giggled at its own thrilling impudence.
Vi’s big head turned to the sound, antennae making radar search, limbs quivering in preparation for pursuit and punishment, and the room held its breath.
I said, ‘I’ll pick up what information I can,’ and got out before the lightning struck.
It was coincidence that on the way out I passed a uniformed Med team (the only Sweet who could move unmolested in the towers) running a woman out on a mobile stretcher. Their presence was sinister and their exit more so – a Swill tower epidemic and not a single public bleat from Med Section . . . or a word to the undercover men who worked in them . . .
3
Vi’s idea that I could find answers by simply asking around sprang from inexperience of administrative conduct outside the towers. Asking around, in the sense of buttonholing a prospect with What’s all the Med mystery? would gain me only pursed lips and possibly a blast from higher up: Police Intelligence will not, repeat not, initiate investigations into areas appropriate to other State Departments. Med Section could be prickly about its secrets and mistakes.
I was worried by the implications of a high risk of contagion. That, in an Enclave with youngsters feeling their oats and soldiers breaking the fraternization regulations for the kind of quick nick to be bought for half a ration pack, could spread like a riot. Seventeen cases in Billy’s tower could represent, if his were average, several hundred in Newport. And in other districts . . .
Not a word, not a hint in the weekly Confidential Bulletin. The PI Commissioner might know all about it but he was the kind who talked only to God and Cabinet.
If the indications were correct as I saw them, to hell with Commissioner and Cabinet. Their handling of Swill was tainted by the class fear their predecessors had created in their terror of the mob; they sat fearfully on secrets.
Ways to knowledge can be devious; private and personal contacts are useful. To siphon knowledge from the top you must sometimes insert your pipette through the bottom. Pun intentional. I sent for Teddy.
‘A small job for you. Unofficial, so relax.’
‘You need a message boy?’
‘Don’t be a brat all your life, I need your help. I’ll have to tell you more than I should and trust you to keep your mouth shut.’
That pleased him. To make people trustworthy, you must first trust them. I told him what Billy had told me, without the clinical detail, emphasizing that Med shifted the patients out of the towers. ‘Repeat this to nobody but the man whose name I will give you. Nobody else, not even your mother.’
He asked, ‘Did Kovacs do his act when he told you about it?’
‘Act?’
‘The Great Cull. How the population problem will be solved by induced epidemics. Kill off all the Swill and leave the Sweet to throw parties in the brave new half-empty world. He’s obsessed with it.’
He wasn’t alone in that: the idea turned up every so often among the frightmongers. It was the sort of thing the half-informed Billy would come up with, but nobody with knowledge of the disgusting underside of international racism, poverty and starvation would swear that it couldn’t happen. Some cunning ploys were rumoured to have been invented, such as a self-limiting gene to prevent plague recoiling on its creators . . .
It was important to discover how the army men had contracted it. There had to be a vector, a contact peculiar to them.
I said, ‘Forget Billy. Are you still close with your little Ultra mate, Arry?’
‘We’re friendly.’
He wouldn’t admit affection for anyone. For Carol, perhaps? Interesting to be a fly on the wall to hear Teddy with his sexual hair down. Or nauseating. I said, ‘Ultras tend to talk mostly to each other where their specialist jargon and short-cut diction can be understood.’
He said sourly, ‘Perhaps he makes an exception because I can’t talk physics.’
He makes an exception for you, Snotty, because years ago he was told to instruct you informally in the practice and philosophy of Swilldom. He also likes you, I can’t think why.
‘I suppose not, but on the other side of his life he talks to lots of fledgling scientists like himself, and all the sciences sooner or later have to call in the physicists.’
He was ahead of me. ‘So if he has Med contacts . . . and can pick up some lab gossip around the coffee dispenser . . . You know they get real coffee?’ I knew – the gap between Extra and Ultra is insultingly great. ‘And I report back to you.’
‘He reports back to me. If he wants to do it. I can’t coerce him, he’s out of my reach. Don’t ask him for results, leave it to him to come to me, because every additional link adds a distortion and leaves a trail.’
He took that personally, of course, always on the lookout for a snub. ‘And it may turn out to be something you don’t want me to know.’
‘Could be.’
‘Bastard.’
He liked to get that in when we were being unofficial. It was probably equivalent to I love you too, Shithead, but that was more than he would ever confess.
Two days later he told me Arry was interested.
For a week I heard nothing and gnawed my nails. I was dependent on Arry’s goodwill, which in turn depended on such inta
ngibles as his liking for Teddy and the distant fact that Arry and I had got along well, as instructor and squaddie, in those training days upcountry after they had shifted me out of the Sweet camp and over to ‘safer’ ground.
Ultras can be curiosities when they open their high-powered mouths, however ordinary they look; Arry was a curiosity until he opened his mouth, when he reverted to the strikingly ordinary. He talked jargon only to his peers. He was one Swill who never forgot his origins: he kept up his tower contacts with genuine affection whereas many of them paid duty visits and developed a ‘Visitor’ self to be folded up and put away on return to the Sweet world.
He was also a physical curiosity, skinny, round-shouldered and only 155 centimetres tall. He had the streetwise face of a nasty boy and streetwise he surely was but in no way nasty; he was a triumph of head over environment, absorbing training with offhand ease without drowning his Swill personality in the bath of Sweet privilege. He would be one of those ‘new men’ I could not define, the kind who use all their life experience instead of taking shelter in professionalism, one who would be useful, no matter how the culture evolved.
I was losing confidence when one day he bumped into me, literally, in the street, apologized as he dropped something slight and slippery down the front of my shirt and passed on about his business – and I about mine with a little something rubbing against my stomach just above the belt buckle. It had been a perfect drop, really streetwise.
Back at PI, I examined one of the slenderest recording filaments I had ever seen, as fine as silk. I took it to the PI deadroom, the one area in the building which we hoped was proof against electronic spying. The technicians seemed familiar with the fine wire and found me a machine to play it. I used a dead cabinet with headphones and was 99 percent sure of privacy.
Arry is the only person I know who can speak Sweet with a Swill accent. His voice whined at me, ‘Matey, have you poked your finger into something! I know you take shorthand, so stop and get yourself pencil and paper. Don’t miss any because this tape will erase itself as each word is spoken.’
The Sea and Summer Page 26