Back in his hotel room Joshua spent the hours before sleep scanning TV news channels and a partially functioning web service, trying to get a sense of a world he rarely visited. Datum Earth wasn’t recovering any that he could see. The news channels, underfunded and competing for sensationalist stories, told lurid tales of wars in the Middle East, brushfire battles over water in central Asia.
There was one peculiar item about the satellites in space. Over time many of these had fallen silent, and were one by one being dragged down into the Earth’s atmosphere by friction with the air, where they burned up. The International Space Station had been the latest casualty. Long abandoned – the last crew had come back to Earth just days after Yellowstone – there had, at last, been no more propellant to sustain its orbit. The news report said that people had come stepping back to the Datum, to the track of the station, just to see it fall. Joshua saw sketchy images from handheld cameras of streaky fire in the sky.
He flicked through the channels until he found a recording of a soccer match: Liverpool versus AC Milan, a recording from a vanished, more colourful age. There was something else Step Day and Yellowstone had ruined, he thought sourly: organized sport. Still, the game was an exciting one.
Joshua dozed off with the match still unfolding on his tablet. He slept uneasily, immersed in the pressure of too many minds.
In the morning he went back to Trafalgar Square. And here Nelson Azikiwe met him, appropriately enough at the foot of Nelson’s Column.
Nelson was bundled up in furs like a bear. ‘The headquarters of the Royal Society is just a short walk from here. Carlton House Terrace.’
They set off through the frozen streets.
‘I did have to make a special request to get into this archive, and have it opened for your visit.’
‘I appreciate all this. But I hope you’re not spending too much, Nelson.’
‘Oh, good Lord, no, don’t worry about that. I have a connection in the office of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and he has connections everywhere else. Also, ask your mentor Sister Agnes about Miss Guinevere Perch some time. Besides, some of Lobsang’s own researches gave me a good steer. And there’s always the thrill of the chase! You know me, Joshua. And wait until you see what I’ve discovered . . . So what do you make of London?’
‘Kind of surprised it’s still functioning at all.’
‘Well, nothing is as it was, Joshua. Most people who live here now work for the government, or one of its contractors. The main task is simply to keep the city alive, to preserve its architectural and other treasures. And then there are others who have chosen not to leave their homes, and survive as best they can. London, in fact, is slowly reverting back to a state your own ancestors might have recognized.’
‘My ancestors?’
Nelson smiled enigmatically. ‘You’ll see. Ah – here we are . . .’
The frontage of the Royal Society was relatively modest, Joshua thought. In a front yard enclosed by railings, a narrow track had been blasted clear, and they walked between walls of dirty snow and ice heaped feet high. A London copper in thick winter gear nodded as Nelson produced a pass of some kind, and allowed them through the door.
In the unheated reception area the tattered remnants of posters for long-ago conferences still stood on stands, and the marble floor shone, frosted over with old ice. The only light came from the windows, and from a few electric lamps connected by insulated cables to a generator that chugged in the distance.
Nelson, carrying a battery lantern, led Joshua deeper into the building, and down a broad staircase. ‘Watch your step. Supposedly they keep this clear of ice, but . . .’
Another doorway, another stair downward, and they reached a corridor, much more cramped, darker yet, along which Nelson strode confidently, though he studied a map he drew from his coat pocket.
‘What is this place, Nelson?’
‘Why, it’s the Royal Society’s archive. Their secret archive.’
The anonymous door at which they finally stopped was labelled obscurely: ARCHIVE ROOM 5/1/14 R.S. PARA. The door itself was sticky but opened with a push. Within, Nelson flicked a light switch to no avail, tutted, and held up his lantern. Joshua saw rows of shelves heaped with dusty documents, in file boxes, folders, even a few scrolls.
Nelson led Joshua into the room. ‘Of course the Society was always ferociously rationalist, but among the wags on the governing council this room is known as the Reliquary. Where the Catholics keep the bones of their saints, you see? This is where they kept the stuff that never quite fit the prevailing world view – and stuff that had some bearing on national security.’
They reached a table on which a file box lay open, containing a book, a single volume. Nelson looked at Joshua, evidently expecting some reaction.
‘Nelson, I asked you to find my father. All this—’
‘To understand the present, Joshua, you must learn about the past. And that’s especially true when it comes to a family history as tangled and as deep as yours. I told you that Lobsang’s work gave me a steer. Why, he’s been looking for evidence of natural steppers practically since Step Day itself.’
‘That’s Lobsang for you. He was always quick off the mark.’ Joshua rummaged through his memory. ‘He told me about some of it. Percy Blakeney. Thomas the Rhymer. Some kind of small-time thief called the Passover—’
‘His agents found traces of him in Somerset, yes. And some of the individuals Lobsang identified led me, one way or another, to the conspiracy.’
‘Conspiracy?’
‘Joshua, I found roots of all this going back to the nineteenth century. There was an incident in 1871 when the official organization, such as it was, was terminated.’
‘What organization?’
‘Steppers, Joshua. A kind of league of natural steppers. At that time they called themselves the Knights of Discorporea. They’d been operating for some decades before they were shut down. The surviving records were judged to be of scientific interest and were stuffed down here rather than being destroyed – luckily for us. But there was one more significant meeting, in 1895. And that’s where the modern world was shaped – and your own life.
‘All of that explains why your father did what he did. Doesn’t justify it, doesn’t excuse it, and there can be no forgiveness for the way he abandoned your mother. But it does explain it. I will tell you all you want to know – well, all I can – but I wanted you to see this final piece of the jigsaw for yourself.’
‘I don’t understand any of this, Nelson.’
‘Read this.’ And he tapped the volume on the table.
Joshua pulled off his gloves and, reluctantly, picked up the book. Leather-bound and with smooth, creamy paper within, it must have been expensive once. He opened the cover to reveal a page bearing an inscription in an elegant but hard-to-decipher copperplate handwriting. He read the inscription, and his breath, which had been frosting in the cold air, caught in his throat.
MY ELUSIVE LIFE
BEING A FULL ACCOUNT
BY
LUIS R. VALIENTÉ, ESQ.
FOR THE BENEFIT OF MY BELOVED FAMILY
‘Take your time,’ Nelson said. ‘We can stay here as long as you need.’
34
THE CARD, INVITING Luis to lunch at the Drunken Clam in Lambeth, was dated the previous day – October 15 1895 – and was anonymous, signed only as by a ‘fellow traveller’.
Of course it was from Oswald Hackett. Even a quarter-century after that fateful encounter with Radcliffe in the dungeons of Windsor Castle, no matter how he had hidden his past – even to the extent of changing the family name – Luis had always known that Hackett would be able to find him, that such a summons would come. That his past would catch up with him some day.
And of course he felt compelled to attend.
It wasn’t hard to get away. Since the death of his wife Luis had lived alone, and his son and daughter, both grown, had long flown the nest, Ella to a comfortable marriage, Robert
to take up engineering for which he showed an unusual aptitude, marrying somewhat later in his life. So Luis travelled to London by train from Bristol, where his financial interest in various steamship companies was based – controlled by means of a layer of company holdings under a false identity, and with no trail back to initial investments under his own name before Radcliffe’s attempted entrapment of the Waltzers in 1871.
Indeed, Hackett had insisted that their birth names should not be used at this meeting. Luis had even considered going in disguise, cropping his whiskers or shaving his head or some such, but when he contemplated the prospect it seemed an absurdity for a man in his seventies. No, he was going to London for lunch with old friends at the Drunken Clam, and he’d defy any man who challenged him otherwise.
And if Radcliffe’s successors caught up with him at last, then to the devil with it all, for he’d had enough of skulking.
His train was delayed.
And then, once he’d arrived in London, he couldn’t resist a stroll around some of his old haunts. Oxford Street was now a grand thoroughfare lined with fine, spacious shops; Fleet Street a medieval alley chock full of traffic; Covent Garden Market crowded with more than a thousand donkey barrows, he estimated, and women with loads balanced precariously on their heads, its cobbles slick with crushed leaves; and at last Lambeth’s New Cut itself, with the costermongers in their corduroy clothing, and soldiers strolling with uniforms casually unbuttoned, and coachmen in their livery and tradesmen in their frock coats, the street packed as ever with stalls and vendors of fried fish and hot potatoes, and beggars and entertainers, even street mummers – and, yes, with shoeless children, as much as it had ever been – as if the great reforms of the age, in education and public health and trade unionism, had been but fantasies.
Distracted by all this, he was a little late getting to the oyster-house.
The other two were here before him, and they stood to greet him. Both had aged well enough, Luis supposed. Fraser Burdon, who was about Luis’s age, was as whip-thin and fit-looking as ever, with a leathery tan that told of years spent in warmer climes. Oswald Hackett was a decade older, in his eighties now, and it showed; Hackett had fattened up, was as bald as an egg, and could stand only with a stick, but he lumbered to his feet to shake Luis’s hand.
Then they sat. Luis observed two books sitting on the table before Hackett, one an academic tome he recognized, the other a novel he did not, with a fawn cloth-bound cover featuring a sketch of an idealized sphinx.
A waitress briskly took their order.
Hackett grinned, showing bad teeth. ‘Let’s introduce ourselves, gentlemen. Maybe we ought to write our “names” down; at our age it’s going to be easy to forget. And by Christ, sometimes I forget who I was . . . My name is Richard Foyle.’
‘Woodrow Boyd,’ said Burdon. His accent had a new twang to it, and Luis studied him curiously; maybe he had moved away from the old country – permanently to America, perhaps?
Hackett prompted Luis. ‘And you, sir?’
‘John Smith,’ said Luis.
Hackett snorted laughter. ‘Oh, for God’s sake, man, you almost deserve to be hanging by your thumbs in some cellar under Whitehall. Now, I know you both have children, Mr Smith and Mr Boyd. What have you told them of your, ah, past indiscretions?’
Luis said softly, ‘I took each of mine aside at their age of majority and told them the lot. Seemed to me the best way to equip them to protect themselves in future, and their own children who may be blessed with our strange faculty – or cursed. As to the name, it’s not an issue for Ella, who’s married now. Robert, though, insisted on reverting to the old family name. Proud of the family origins, he says. The young! What can one do? In any case I have a close friend, a lawyer; we cooked up a story about an adoption, and so that’s all above board.’
Burdon said, ‘But it leaves you damned exposed, man. If anybody’s still on our tail after all these years, which I doubt. I’d condemn you if not for the fact that my middle ’un is going down the precise same route. There’ll always be Burdons.’ He turned to Hackett. ‘It’s probably a risk for us to be gathering here in London – indeed, in one of your old haunts, if I remember your anecdotes correctly. Maybe you should get to the point.’
Hackett said, ‘Let’s get to the oysters first, for here they come . . .’
The service in the Clam was as brisk and friendly as ever, Luis thought, and the oysters just as relishable, even if, half a century later, the prices would have shocked the Great Elusivo.
Burdon, however, tried one and all but spat it out. ‘My God. How can you eat these things? As if the Thames is one great mucky spittoon and I just took a mouthful of phlegm.’ He tapped Hackett’s book. ‘This is a volume of Darwin’s Origin of Species, is it not?’
‘Yes, and it’s a first edition, man, so keep your greasy fingers off.’
‘If Darwin were here I’d demand to know what theory of “natural selection” can possibly have produced something as ugly and as useless as an oyster.’
Luis laughed. ‘I dare say he’d have an answer.’
Hackett grunted. ‘And I’d invite Darwin to speculate on our own peculiar condition – and our future. I have followed his work since his accounts of the voyage of the Beagle, you know. Saw the man speak a couple of times, but never met him. It’s to my regret now that I didn’t approach him when I had the chance; he died a dozen years back – or was it more? But in a way it was his ideas that made me resolve to bring us together again – the three of us, the first of the Knights. And the last, I fear, for I’ve found no recent trace of the others with whom we worked. We need a way forward – for ourselves and our descendants. We three may go to the grave skulking like whipped dogs, but that’s not good enough for our children – for, believe me, some of ’em are going to inherit our uncomfortable, umm, faculties, just as you say, “Mr Smith”. And what’s to become of them, eh? What are we to do for them?’
‘Nothing,’ Burdon said. ‘For we’ll be long in our blessed graves. Let the future take care of itself.’
Luis said, ‘But it’s thirty years or more since Origin of Species was published. What is it that’s prompted you to call us together now, Hackett?’
Hackett actually clipped him around the back of the head for that indiscretion. ‘Good question, “Mr Smith”. The answer lies in the pages of this little book.’
The second tome on the table by his plate was a novel. ‘The Time Machine,’ Luis read from the spine.
‘By some chap who writes for the magazines. Calls it a “scientific romance”. The book’s a sort of fairy story about Darwin’s scheme of selection. Or a nightmare. It shows a future in which mankind changes, evolves – bifurcates – over a span of hundreds of thousands of years. Becoming something quite different from the modern stock.’ He searched their faces. ‘D’ye see? That’s one root of my idea, my scheme. The other comes from dear old Grandpa Darwin, and if you’ve ever read his book, which I’m sure you haven’t, you’d know that an early part of it, and a deuced long section it is and written in a rather lifeless tone, is all about pigeons.’
‘Pigeons?’
‘The breeding of fancy pigeons for particular traits. That’s the key to his argument, you see. Just as a man will breed his pigeons or his dogs for colour or body shape or whatnot by consciously matching up the types he wants to promote, so nature, all unconsciously, selectively shapes its stock of animals and plants using the blunt scalpels of hunger, a lack of room to live, changes in the weather, and extinction.’
‘You’ve lost me,’ Luis admitted cheerfully. ‘Our oysters have gone extinct, by the bye. Shall I order another round?’
Burdon ignored him. ‘You haven’t lost me, “Foyle”.’ He leaned forward and lowered his voice. ‘You’re talking about cross-breeding our children, aren’t you? The way a man breeds his horses.’
At that word, cross-breeds, Luis saw it, all of a sudden, and forgot about the oysters. ‘My God, man. How can you conceiv
e of such a thing?’
Hackett sneered. ‘Thank you, Lord, for blessing me with companions of such small imagination! Forget horse breeders and pigeon fanciers. Think of arranged marriages. Haven’t our own aristocracy been pairing off their sprogs for generations? Not to mention the royalty. And I know for a fact, “Smith”, that the new mercantile rich you associate with are doing exactly the same thing now, purely to keep the wealth in a closed circle of families. All I’m suggesting is – let’s do the same. For our own protection, our families’. And,’ he added more ominously, ‘to improve the blood.’
Burdon said heavily, ‘You’d better tell us exactly what you propose.’
‘Simple enough. We establish an organization – a Fund, let’s call it, to be handled anonymously by one of the better banks – no, more than one, let’s spread the risk across institutions, indeed across nations – umm, “Mr Boyd”, you may be able to handle the American end. Now let’s suppose you have a grandson of marriageable age, “Smith”.’
‘Actually I do have a grandson.’
‘Good. While you, “Boyd”, might have a spare granddaughter of similar age. The Fund keeps a list of our families and others, the births and deaths and so forth – all quite above board, with operatives who have no idea of the true purpose. But when two eligible candidates pop up in the fullness of time, they are – approached.’
Burdon said, ‘Approached?’
‘It might work this way. Letters arrive, from a nominated bank. A meeting is arranged between the two youngsters. Each is told that if they would consider a liaison, then a gift would be available – call it a grant. We’d have to consider the wording; the only stipulation would be the birth of a sprog, of course, which is the point of the exercise. Perhaps there would be a sweetener to make the meeting in the first place: fifty per cent of the balance might be paid up at the marriage, and a further fifty per on the occasion of the first litter. But if the youngsters don’t hit it off, they can walk away with no harm done. D’ye see? There’s no compulsion, no hardship – everybody wins, including a young couple with an unexpectedly good start in life.’
The Long Utopia Page 23