I had no need to stop it: I carry pen and notebook because the mnemonic training is good but not infallible. Arry went slowly enough to make transcription easy: ‘This high-rise lowdown is for your jug ears only. When you’re sure you remember it all, please destroy your notes.’
I remember it still.
1. The tower infection is basically an immune system depressant. It differs from the last-century AIDS in its preliminary symptoms – low temperature, low blood pressure, speech interference, memory loss and lymph blisters.
2. These pass in ten to twelve days but may mask other infections lying dormant in low body temperature. With immune suppression a common cold can kill. There are also some relapses, not yet understood.
3. Vectors are not yet established. Sperm certainly, saliva maybe and just possibly sweat. If the last is true, it’s an instant contact disease; would have to be because the virus dies almost at once when deprived of moisture.
4. Carriers don’t show symptoms, only antibodies. This could mean a long incubation period or could indicate some natural immunity that can be tracked down and used in treatment.
5. Three strains are known so far and Med suspects a high mutation rate. Makes a nasty treatment problem.
6. Definitely carried radially outward from army barracks in the Enclaves. Three Enclaves showing sign so far.
7. Difficult to isolate the carriers because the troops won’t admit to chasing sex among Swill kids. Social choke-up! Won’t admit to soiling their Sweet pricks on gutter girls! Half of them will drop into the Swill anyway when their terms are up and they can’t get jobs. The answer is to blood test every serviceman in the country. This is being done.
8. Big question – where did the army get it? Not via tourists because there aren’t any. You might nut something out. I want to know, too. I won’t stop visiting my friends in the towers unless I absolutely must.
9. Some lab folk are muttering ‘cull,’ that old bogey. The chiefs tell them to shut up and not be childish but my bet is that the chiefs thought of it first. But who would be culling whom? Maybe if you can find out where the soldiers pick up the virus . . . (His voice faded on the suggestion, then came back strongly:) I want some return for this. Fix a time and place and get Teddy to tell me.
He had earned whatever pound of flesh he might demand. I ran the wire back for replay. Silence. As he had said, it had cleared itself as it passed the activator head. I never did work out how that was done.
As for time and place . . . I sent for Teddy. ‘Take your Ultra friend to meet your family next Sunday afternoon. I’ll be there, too.’
I used the PI network to filter the appointment through to Kovacs. His presence was essential and I wasn’t going into the towers until some sort of prophylaxis had been worked out.
I thought about the secrecy that kept mention of the outbreak from the news channels. It would become public knowledge as it spread – when a couple of Sweet got it and screamed the place down . . .
But how would Sweet catch it? Via the soldiers on home leave, of course. Also, PI had frequent Swill contacts . . . and if it needed only a brush against a sweaty arm while on the job, the disease could be with the Sweet already, whittling away behind Med Section silence. But Med didn’t seem to know much beyond the symptoms.
On the Friday morning a General Instruction, Operational, Immediate, was promulgated by the Commissioner. All Intelligence and police penetration into tower areas was to cease forthwith. No reason given. Somebody had sense enough to be scared but not enough to be honest. The most secretive of cabals is a government pretending democracy – sometimes I think the State doesn’t give a bugger about people so long as its top dogs can cower in their kennels forever. No, that’s not fair; they just don’t know what to do as crisis piles on crisis.
18
Nola Parkes
AD 2050
Familiarity makes double dealing automatic, so acceptance of my position should become easier but does not. An anomaly upsets me until it is smoothed; the unexpected sets me shivering over possibilities of mouths unstopped, cracks unsealed. I live in latent alarm.
Behind my professional expression of polite inquiry I was asking, what can he want, this ‘father’ of my Fringe ‘nephew?’ He is not frivolous; his appearances have meaning.
He seemed a little older now – hard work, profligate sexuality and the abrasions of middle age overtaking him – but his slender frame moved as smartly as ever in the suit worn to the edge of the discard but clean and mended – the Fringe impersonation was excellent. The Conway groomed her ugly duckling with an eye to characterization.
I waited for him to begin the bout. It was always a bout, gentlemanly on both sides with consensus sought rather than a points decision. I had time to note how the animal sexuality (wearing a small boy smile with wolf teeth behind the lips – virgins beware!) enlivened the unprepossessing face. As a younger woman, with less dangerous responsibilities requiring circumspection, I might have been tempted to try a fall.
He said, respectfully for a man of such authority in his own domain, ‘You know Mr Nikopoulos, ma’am?’
‘I remember him,’ He had promised not to blackmail me. Had the promise run out?
‘He sent me.’
‘Could he not come himself?’
‘He thought it was my job.’ Were my nerves plainly jumping? He soothed quickly, ‘Not trouble, ma’am,’ then thought better of it. ‘Not yet, anyways.’
I waited for the self-correction. A slight frown recognized the error but he let it lie. La belle Conway, I suspected, was coaching him into accepting his freaks of grammar instead of straining after pedantry. An intelligent woman.
He said, ‘It’s the boy.’ Of course it was the boy. It was always the boy. I wished I had never seen Francis or let myself be talked into adding an exotic to my staff; the gain had been great but the added pressures greater.
He went on, ‘You want to watch what he does,’ and his voice died down to a hangdog shame. This lingering affection for Francis did not fit his toughness, but sentimentality and pragmatism are common partners of the mind, each a refuge from the tyranny of the other.
‘I do watch, Mr Kovacs. What have you in mind?’
‘He’s got secrets, hasn’t he? Your secrets.’
‘Some.’
‘Enough, I reckon. He can tell them.’
‘To whom?’
‘People with more influence than you.’
Of course, of course. ‘Is this Nikopoulos’ idea?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’ And, unwillingly, ‘Mine, too.’
‘You don’t trust Francis?’
If he had had tears he might have shed them for the son-who-never-was. ‘He’s only a kid and all he’s got behind him is Fringe and Swill. He’s afraid of the gutter.’
‘I know it.’
‘Ma’am, send him home! His mum and me will straighten him out!’ Billy, your grammar and your shameless pleading! Poor little Tower Boss, cursed with human weakness.
The request came too late; I had to be open with this man whom I had learned to trust. ‘If I send him back to you he will run away. He knows where else he would be welcome. He would leave me today if he were not uncertain of my ability to drag him back. One day he will do it.’
‘Run where?’
‘To someone with, as you said, greater influence, who can protect him from the long fall. You think of me as a State servant with power but I am a very small power and can be coerced by others who also have a second set of accounts hidden from the computers. I held back his services but finally I was forced to – lend him out. Now he has connections a stratum above me.’
His teeth, greyish with the clinging chewey stain, bit into his lower lip as he suffered. ‘I thought I was doing the best for him, giving him a chance to get on.’
‘You were and he has taken it. But he is selfish and selfish people snatch at what they want, and make the mistakes of hurry.’ He saw my drift and took in breath with a hiss. ‘He c
ould try to use his knowledge to extract concession from some less malleable employer. He hasn’t the courage for that yet but it may happen as he gains confidence.’
He said, ‘They’d kill him,’ as if that were a commonplace.
I said, ‘They would arrange his disappearance,’ as if that softened the meaning.
He was awash with self-punishment. ‘I got him into this!’ And, like a frightened schoolboy, ‘I daren’t tell his mother.’
That would frighten me, too. ‘I can head him off if I see trouble coming but he will take care that I don’t see. And he might not listen to me. Fear and greed are not rational.’
Suddenly he seemed almost cheerful. ‘I might be able to fix that – give him something to be more frightened of.’
‘Yourself?’
He grinned hugely. ‘No, ma’am, his brother.’
I did not like the sound of that. ‘The PI man? He is young and probably still in the dedicated stage; he might double the danger for myself and others.’
‘No, na, na-a-ah, ma’am!’ I had not heard such a raucous Swill sound from him in years. ‘Teddy’s on our side. So’s his boss, Nick.’
I can’t pretend that the revelation shocked me; I am no more fooled than any other by ideals of official probity, but I felt that I no longer understood the give-take relationship of Swill and Sweet. The idea of Kovacs’ spidery fingers reaching into the PI was unsettling. Or was PI creating a power base in the tower?
He said, ‘I think that’s all, ma’am,’ stood and hovered in case I had more to say.
I had nothing useful to add but, moved by fellow feeling for this man as hopelessly ensnared in his world as I in mine, I offered rough common sense: ‘Forget Francis. The boy you played father to no longer exists.’
‘No, the past doesn’t go away, ma’am. A little boy doesn’t die just because he grows up.’
Hopeless. I am sure that as he left he revolved plans for the Francis who is still nine years old in his heart.
Too late I thought of the question I should have asked: who is ‘our side’ and what is the PI interest in Francis?
He would have told me if it had been necessary; perhaps it was better that I should not know. As for Francis, what should I watch for? I could only hope my internal alarms would sound when something was not as it should be.
19
Alison
AD 2051
For a while after the water receded I saw little of Billy, but he had never been predictable; there had always been times when he dashed in and out again as if only to reassure me that I was not forgotten. He withheld his Swill life from me in mistaken kindness but I learned not to spend myself in worry when he came in with the effects of violence needing massage or mending. He never seemed badly hurt – one broken arm in six years was not much if I assessed his life correctly.
The absence did not worry me, but his behaviour when he did appear disturbed and then frightened me. It was not only that he had not stayed overnight in two weeks but that he had taken to kissing my cheek instead of my lips, and after a while I saw that he avoided touching my skin at all, embracing a bag of clothing rather than a body.
I thought the obvious, told myself – savagely – that six years was probably more than many women had had of him, and wondered why he hovered instead of bowing out. I had to bear with it in that hope that supposedly springs eternal.
Yet, when on a Saturday morning he popped in to inform me casually that Teddy would be bringing two friends with him the following day, I decided, without rationally choosing the moment, that enough was enough, and screamed at him that my house was not a bloody meeting hall and he could take his plot-hatching elswhere. What, I wanted to know, was wrong with planning his bastardries in his new girlfriend’s home? Or was she protected from the truth about him?
I carried on like a virago, uplifted with fury, raging to earn the backhander that pays out spitting bitches and thinking that the noisy relief of tension was worth a bruise or a loose tooth. The old pair in the other half of the house must have thought murder brewed; their door slammed and their key turned as they barricaded themselves against Armageddon.
Billy retreated from my anger with the dropped jaw of a startled boy until I realized, unbelievingly, that he did not understand what powered my ranting. In the end I planted feet apart and arms akimbo, the very cartoon of a termagant, and glared in breathless exhaustion while he mumbled and excused himself and made no sense, until I wavered in my doubtful victory. At last he told me, shamefaced as though it were his fault, of the disease in the towers, of his fear of infecting me because there was no knowing whether or not he carried it and of the rumour that it might be transmitted by the sweat of bodies in contact.
If ever there lived a brilliant, brutal idiot with a heart of soft porridge, it was my Billy.
‘Why didn’t you tell me, you stupid man?’
He looked old-maid-prim in his ratty way and said, ‘You don’t have to know about things like that.’
Protected, by God, against the awfulness of the real world! Are such moments for laughter or tears? ‘I’m not cut crystal that mustn’t be touched for fear of breaking.’
He said, ‘You are, you know,’ and I wanted to cry because in all our time together that was his nearest approach to I love you. Then, with an air of Thank Christ that’s over, he demanded a cup of tea and sat himself at the table.
Without really thinking about it I put my hands under his chin from behind and pulled his head back and kissed him full on the lips before he could struggle free. ‘If plague takes you off,’ I told him, ‘there won’t be much point in my hanging about. So I’ll have all of you while we’re still here,’
He said, ‘You’re mad,’ but kissed me back. Later I thought that I had been quite mad but had no regret. He stayed that night and I did not break out in blisters or run a low temperature in the following days. We did not despise Death in the Fringe or in the towers but we did not respect him either, so we took brash chances.
On the Sunday morning there was the usual trouble getting him dressed on what he called his ‘day off.’ His Sunday dress was at best a pair of shorts, at worst nothing at all. He would stand on the patchy back lawn in skeletal nakedness, ‘soaking up some sun,’ while old Mrs Sanders slammed the door to her part of the house and then hovered by the window to see what might be seen. (Not so very much, to tell truth.)
I wanted him to dress, to let me make an occasion of having an Ultra in the house (‘occasions’ were rarities – cakes and coffee and a touch of hostessiness) but he said, ‘Arry’s Swill, like me.’
‘Swill, but not like you.’
That started a fit of temper but brought a result – he shaved and put on trousers and shirt but no shoes or socks. Our few social arrangements usually foundered in crazy compromise.
The two boys came for midday dinner, allowing me to play housewife-hostess-mother to the limit with food that cried Parkes provisioning in every bite. At least the cooking was mine.
Teddy was, as usual, neat and reserved, still unsure how to talk easily with me and coolly polite to Billy, while his friend, Arry Smivvers (Smithers?) was barely describable. He was fully dressed despite the heat – shirt, jacket, slacks and heavy sock-shoes – and new-pin clean, but either he lacked any grain of taste or didn’t care what he wore as long as it looked expensive. I don’t think anyone else could have been unaware of the effect of red jacket, yellow slacks, mauve shirt and black and white sock-shoes. He was short and skinny and frail to the eye (how had he coped with those years of physical training?) and had the face of a quietly ferocious rabbit mated to the piping voice of a small boy.
He did not talk so much as natter on any- and everything; it was hard to credit that one of the finer intellects of the city was eating at my table. And he ate! He put the food away as if tomorrow held no more cakes and ale, and through it chattered like a magpie. Teddy had told me, ‘He only has brains when they’re needed for something,’ and I believed him.
<
br /> At some stage I asked did he know the Captain Nikopoulos who was to join us later. ‘Nicky? Known him for years. His father was my Tower Boss. Still is, in a way.’
That was unnerving. I had adjusted to the idea of Swill intellectuals but could not readily equate them with Police Intelligence. Surely it would be to give a hoodlum a gun! Thoughts like that have to be dragged out and quashed, so strong is all that early rearing.
Teddy read my confusion and mocked me. ‘Nick’s a gentleman.’
Arry raised a finger. ‘Sometimes! Nick’s a copper first and last, and when he’s being frank and open don’t wonder how much is still up his sleeve because you wouldn’t think one sleeve could hold that much. But in between first and last he’s got his own ideas about what a copper’s job is.’
‘You mean he’s part of the bribery circuit?’
Billy was shocked by my saying it openly but Arry snickered and looked cunning. ‘He doesn’t take bribes, Mrs Conway, but he gives them. He give himself, eh, Billy? Eh, Teddy?’ Billy was staidly disapproving and Teddy palely murderous. ‘He impresses you with what a terrific feller he is, so you believe it and you’ll do anything for him. Then he’s got you forever and he never lets go.’ He crimped his skinny fingers into a fist like a closing chicken claw. ‘That’s Nick.’
One can have enough of dominant personalities. I said lightly, ‘He won’t grip me, I’m bespoke.’
‘He won’t need you,’ said that direct little man. ‘He’s got Teddy. Eh, feller?’
Teddy flushed and was silent. So my self-sufficient son had a hero! So nice to know that he was still human, a romantic at heart.
I was surprised to hear myself faking the intellectualism of a woman of the world: ‘Your Nick doesn’t please me. One form of corruption is no more justified than another.’
Arry asked brightly, ‘But where would we be without it?’ then carried on in the changed tone of another side of his persona: ‘Every transaction is for gain on one side or both, and the transaction that pretends to fair play is corrupt by definition. Corruption is the normal state of a society that restrains its excesses by law or morality, both of which are corrupt in effect and in intention.’ He smiled at me with absolute wickedness. ‘We balance our security and happiness by manipulating corruptions, so perhaps it isn’t such a dirty word after all. It preserves us from the excesses of too much virtue – which is another kind of corruption.’
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