Whether as a result of envy or contempt, or more likely a mixture of both, Paula said, “Well, quit daydreaming because we’ve got work to do. Meet me in 331, ASAP.”
I pushed the door open and said, “Okay,” into my i-band.
Paula, who was standing in the middle of the apartment, facing the other way, turned around to look at me. She shook her head at my childishness, and rolled those silvery-blue eyes that are as beautiful as the blossom of any flower.
My heart skipped a beat. It’s started doing that every time I look at Paula, which is strange given the way I feel about Numbers. I suppose it comes down to how achingly beautiful she is. All her kind are, but I’m beginning to think Paula’s different. Her eyes aren’t quite so cold, and she doesn’t seem as certain about absolutely everything as the others do. Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking on my part.
Whatever, I looked at Paula for longer than I meant to.
Then I looked past her. A lifeless arm dangled over the side of an armchair. I walked around my perfect partner to get a look at the head that went with the arm, hoping I wasn’t about to see the face of Doug MacDougall.
CHAPTER 3
DAFFODILS
THE HEAD WAS SLUMPED FORWARD AND THE FACE hidden, but the mane of brown hair and grizzled beard told me all I needed to know. I’ve lost count of how many dead people I’ve walked in on, but I still feel something at the first sight of a body. I don’t feel as much as I once did if it’s a Name, but I feel more than I used to if it’s a Number. I hate to say that what I feel if it’s a Number is best summed up by the words ‘good-riddance.’ Doug MacDougall was everything Numbers aren’t, however, and as I looked at him I felt a sense of loss and sadness. I let out another of those long sighs. I was aware of Paula looking at me. Numbers always look at us when we sigh, as if it’s an alien sound they can’t comprehend. I’ve never heard one of them let out a sigh of sorrow, longing or wistfulness.
Paula looked from me back to Doug MacDougall, and I looked at Paula. I hoped to see some sadness on her face, but all I saw was disapproval of Doug’s long hair and beard. Incidentally, Paula also disapproved of my shaved head and designer stubble goatee. All Numbers do. That’s one of the reasons I shave my head and design my stubble.
“What happened?” I asked.
“OD.”
Not, ‘looks like he took an overdose,’ or he ‘oh-deed.’ Just ‘OD.’ Numbers rarely use idiom or metaphor or add any of the small words that perform no real function but add fluidity to a sentence. They have no grasp of the poetic, even when they’re talking about subjects that lend themselves to poetry a little better than a drug overdose.
A drug overdose. I looked at the lifeless body and tried to relate it to the owner of The Plant Place. “No way,” I said.
Paula pointed to a small tube on the couch beside Doug. A compressed-air syringe.
“He’s the last person who’d touch drugs,” I said.
“You knew him?”
“Just from his shop. He owned The Plant Place. If he wanted a hit he’d bend down and smell one of his flowers. He’d get more of a high from that than any drug.”
“Apparently he wanted to end a low, not reach a high.”
“You’re trying to say this was suicide?” That was even more incomprehensible to me than the notion Doug MacDougall had accidentally overdosed.
“He said it himself,” Paula told me. “There’s a note on his screen.”
I walked over to the wafer-thin computer screen on the flat-topped carbon-fiber arch-desk in a corner of the room. Putting my hands on the back of the matching seat for support, I leaned forward to read the words shimmering on the screen: I was cloud lonely and there weren’t even any daffodils. Maybe the grass will be greener on the other side.
I shook my head in disbelief. Paula must have been watching me, because she said, “I don’t understand what you don’t understand.”
As I said, they’ve no sense of linguistic aesthetics.
“Doug MacDougall would never write something like this,” I told her. “He mourned what was lost, but it made him appreciate what remained all the more. He saw beauty in even a thorny cactus. If you went in his shop on the day before a plant hunt he could hardly contain his excitement at the prospect of what he might find. Then, the next time you went in, he’d talk about his latest discoveries for as long as you’d listen.”
“Apparently you didn’t know him as well as you thought you did.”
“I know that life, all life, was precious to him in a way you’d never understand.”
I thought I saw a hurt look in her eyes. It was quickly replaced by a coldness I was more used to seeing. “I understand exactly what happened here,” Paula said.
“Go on, then, explain it to me.”
“You know as well as I do that Names often find it hard to cope. They act illogically, get themselves in situations they can’t handle, and can’t get out of them any other way than this.”
“What you’re trying to say is that we’re pathetically weak and hopelessly flawed.”
“Well put, Travis.”
“I know you’d like to believe that, to console yourself at not being able to dream and laugh and love like we can,” I said.
Again, I thought I saw hurt in her eyes, but it was quickly replaced by another of those cold stares. Just once I’d like to be able to out-stare a Number, make them blink or look away from me. However, I’ve come to the conclusion it’s not physiologically possible. The one consolation is that I don’t know of any other Name who can do it, either.
Come to think of it, that’s not much of a consolation at all. In fact, it’s the opposite.
“You honestly think I envy this?” Paula said, gesturing at the slumped body of Doug MacDougall.
I was desperate not to look away from her, because she’d take it as a sign she was right. I did my best to meet her gaze. When my eyes teared up and I couldn’t go any longer without blinking, I reached a hand up and brushed the end of my nose. It’s my ‘go-to’ play when all else fails in any confrontation with Paula. It might sound like an innocuous gesture, but my partner is somewhat sensitive about the fact her nose has a hint of an upturn. It’s her token physical flaw: every Number is given a slight physiological flaw in their genetic profile, and a psychological one in their emotional make-up. At first the Ecosystem presumed the logical thing to do was to make genetically-manufactured people as perfect as possible. But experience soon showed Names found those perfect people impossible to get along with. Not to mince words, they were a pain in the butt. As a result, each Number from the second generation onward has been given a random cosmetic and emotional flaw. Paula’s cosmetic flaw is her nose. I dearly wish I knew what her emotional flaw was—that’s the one I could really push her buttons with.
Anyway, the nose is better than nothing. I actually think it gives her character and makes her look even prettier, but the important thing is that it bothers Paula. Maybe she’s afraid it’ll make people think she a Name. If so, I could put her mind at rest: with the coldness of her eyes, her thin-lipped mouth and perfect proportions there was no way she’d ever be mistaken for a Name. Of course I’d never tell her that, just as I’d never tell her I think her nose is even prettier than if it was as perfect as the rest of her.
It may appear odd that a system which is so logical pairs Names and Numbers in LogiPol teams when they find it so hard to get along. Well, the explanation’s simple:
it’s a case of one and one making more than two. To continue the mathematical metaphor, pair a couple of Numbers and when they put two and two together they’ll always come up with four. If the correct answer happens to be five, for some strange reason, they haven’t a hope of coming up with it—and crimes tend to involve strange reasoning somewhere along the line. Numbers would have a one hundred percent clean-up rate for crimes involving only other Numbers. But most crimes cross the genetic divide, and as soon as a Name is involved, Numbers struggle. They lack insight, insti
nct, and the ability to form a hunch, let alone know whether it’s worth backing.
Pair a Named LogiPol officer with a Numbered one, on the other hand—ideally a man with a woman—and you’ll get a lot of friction but you’ll also get a team that’s more than a sum of its parts and capable of covering every angle.
That’s the theory, at least.
“Travis, grow up,” Perfect Paula said now in response to my nose rubbing.
I gave her a knowing sneer. I call it my ‘taste of your own medicine’ expression.
Paula reacted as she usually does in such situations—by giving me a command just to show who’s boss. In this case it was, “Bag the syringe.”
I have to admit, I kind of like it when she gets all bossy.
Anyway, I did what I was told like a good little boy, picking up the syringe with the bag to avoid contaminating the plastic tube with my paw prints, then fastening the seal and pocketing the evidence.
When I brought my hand out of my pocket there was a small digital camera in it. I was aware of Paula shaking her head and sneering, like she does every time I take out my camera. Her point of view is that the crime-scene team will shoot any photos that need to be taken; I’d rather grab some shots myself. That way I get exactly the ones I want, without having to rely on anyone else.
Besides, I find the challenge of taking photos an absorbing one. I first got interested in photography through the pictures that went with Calum Tait’s travel articles. It’s turned from pastime into passion over the years since then, to the extent I spend longer than I should Outside, taking photos of the ruins and looking for classic cameras and images of the Old World that were taken with them. Those antique cameras aren’t any practical use; they stopped making photographic film back in 2010. Still, I love to collect them. Everyone—well every Name—likes to collect something from the Old Days.
Wishing I held an Olympus OM3 Ti or Leica M6 in my hands rather than a generic digital, and that I was taking a photo of those beautiful sugarloaf mountains at the end of Ipanema beach instead of the body of a good man who’d died before his time, I switched the camera from automatic exposure to manual mode and pointed it at the carpet; the omnipresent shade known as logica gray is exactly half an exposure stop lighter than the mid-tone all automatic exposures are based on.
“Why are you taking a photo of the carpet?” Paula asked with unconcealed disdain.
“I’m not,” I told her. “I’m just getting an exposure reading.”
“Can’t the camera do that for you?”
“Yeah, but it gives an average, and clinically calculated averages lack heart and soul,” I said, talking about more than camera exposures.
I don’t know if Paula understood my dig, because I didn’t look up to see the expression on her face. I was too intent on taking photos. First, I took close-ups of the slumped body and syringe. Something about the scene bothered me—I mean, besides the corpse—but I couldn’t think what it was. I puzzled over it without success, then stepped back and zoomed the lens out, taking progressively wider shots to show the position of the body.
Then, from the doorway, I framed a shot that took in the whole apartment—including Paula, who stood shaking her head.
“Smile!” I said, and fired off a couple of shots of my partner scowling at me. After that I turned my attention to the personal possessions scattered around the apartment. I started with the biggest one: a bookcase. It was filled with oversized natural history titles. I switched the camera to panorama mode and took a shot of the shelves, then put it down and tilted my head to look at the individual books. I passed over the ones that obviously dated from the last days of old earth—Cacti of The Amazon Desert, The Flora and Fauna of Subtropical Britain, and The Temperate Arctic—and came to some even older volumes. I was drawn to one that must have been truly ancient, because it was called The Amazon Jungle. Curiosity made me take it out.
Flicking through the tattered pages, I was entranced in seconds. I forgot all about Perfect Paula and Doug MacDougall, all about Haven Nine and the community, about the ghost city it replaced and the ghastly world beyond. I was traveling back in time like I did in the sphere. I was exploring a world I could only dream about, with a pith helmet on my head and a razor-sharp machete in my hand. Each page took me deeper into that world and revealed a new wonder beyond my wildest imagining. It was a world of giant trees with shafts of sunlight slanting down between them, falling on flaming orchids, man-sized slotted ferns, and tangled vines and creepers. I heard the sighing of the wind through high branches, and the pitter-patter of rain falling from leaf to leaf; the chatter of a hundred monkeys, the songs of a thousand birds, the buzz of a billion beating insect wings. I saw monkeys with almost-human hands and faces; alligators that looked like creatures from prehistoric times, and snakes big enough to swallow them whole; butterflies of the most brilliant shades of blue, and humming birds whose brilliance put even the brightest butterflies in the shade. There were giant caterpillars and pygmy people, parrots as colorful as an artist’s palette, and a dappled gold and black jaguar that was wild nature embodied. There was life in countless forms.
And now nearly all of it was gone. Thinking about it as I stood there with the dog-eared book in my hand, I felt as sick as when I realized the flatliner in 331 was Doug MacDougall.
I also felt what Calum Tait once called an end-of-summer sadness. It’s what I feel when I think about Jen—a longing that’s too powerful to put into words, that comes from losing something irreplaceable, and knowing it’s gone forever.
And there was guilt, too, like I also felt over Jen. This time, however, the guilt wasn’t mine alone. I wasn’t to blame, like I was for Jen; it was an ancestral guilt, a knowledge of what the people who were part of my past, part of me, had done to the planet. As I do at some point nearly every day, I wondered how they could have been so selfish and short-sighted. I wondered how much of it was due to ignorance, and how much of it was down to knowing but not caring. How could anyone have believed the convenience offered by a motor car was more precious than the life of a single humming bird or butterfly?
Aware I was being watched, I looked up from the book to Paula. Her expression had no trace of the usual know-it-all look I’m used to seeing on the face of Numbers. Quite the opposite—there were a dozen questions in her eyes. Just as I was bewildered by my heritage, I think Paula was bewildered by me, by the way a book could transport me to another time and place.
Putting the oversized volume back on the shelf, I turned my attention and my camera to the pot plants that sat on every flat surface.
I hesitated after the first couple of shots. Something wasn’t quite right about the plants, just like something wasn’t right about the body. But, again, I couldn’t put my finger on it.
I moved to the nearest pot, containing a cheese-plant worth as many pleasure points as I earn in a month, and my unease deepened.
Aware of my puzzlement, Paula said, “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know, but something’s not quite right.”
The arrival of a Community Police officer prevented Paula from quizzing me further.
The CP are the equivalent of the old FBI. Each haven has a couple of LogiPol wardens like Paula and me, first-responders who handle the-day-to-day law and order issues. But if anything big goes down, the CP usually check it out. Most of them are Paretos. I think Pareto was the name given in the Old Days to some product that was perfect. Whatever, Paretos are ‘perfect people.’ Their flaw is that they have no flaws. No, seriously. Flaws are randomly generated, and because not having flaws is a flaw, occasionally you get a perfect person. If somebody’s perfect you’d think they’d be impossible not to like if you put your jealousy to one side. But, take it from me, they are the biggest pains in the butt imaginable. They have every infuriating trait of your average Number, but to the nth degree (I’m sure they can give you the exact figure rather than having to make do with a superscript letter). Just in case anyone’s in the sli
ghtest doubt about how cool and hard they are, they wear black jumpsuits rather than the dark blue of LogiPol. Paretos come in several varieties. This one was the blond male Caucasian model. There are a dozen of that type in our community’s CP. I couldn’t tell which one this was, because they all look identical to me: clean-cut, well-coordinated features; brush-cut hair the colour of white gold; eyes like sapphires; pearly white teeth, and a tight-lipped mouth that’s never learned how to express anything except a sneer.
From the way Paula looked at this Pareto, she knew who he was. I wasn’t sure how she knew, and didn’t want to think about that for too long. My dislike of the Pareto increased exponentially, and with a shock I realized I was jealous. I was used to only feeling unadulterated contempt for Paretos. I wasn’t used to being jealous of them. I had a feeling Paula was mentally undressing him. I’d never had the feeling she was mentally undressing me, which hardly seemed fair since I’d done it so many times to her.
The Pareto ignored me, which suited me fine, and addressed Paula, which I wasn’t so happy about. “SitRep,” he said.
So Paula gave him a situation report, if you can call two words and an abbreviation a report: “Suicide by OD.”
“Evidence for?”
“Note and syringe. No sign of struggle. No forced entry. Last authorized entry was by the deceased last night.”
“Evidence against?” the Pareto asked.
Paula looked at me, like she was daring me to say something.
I looked at Doug MacDougall, trying to figure out what to say. If my formless doubts hadn’t cut any ice with Paula, there wasn’t the remotest chance they would impress the Pareto. He was sneering at me bigtime as it was, and would cut me down mercilessly if I voiced the mix of hunch and intuition that made me think there might be more to this than met the eye. Still, I was going to voice my doubts anyway. I opened my mouth, not quite sure exactly what I was going to say.
Tomorrow’s World Page 3