‘Is that what made you so bitter and perverse? I wish now I’d never destroyed that contract and dragged you down into squalor.’
‘It was the only real thing you ever did.’
‘And what’s so wonderful about reality?’
Ben comes in, and raises his eyebrows when he realizes we have a virtual visitor.
Then, as if she senses his presence, she says, ‘Abbie, tell me about Ben. I can’t hear him or see him but I assume he’s there. Is he still writing poetry?’
‘He never stops writing, although there aren’t any readers left. He writes for a couple of hours each morning and then goes to help in the fields or strengthen the dam. I wish you could see how red and blistered his hands are.’
She shudders. ‘Don’t make me think about raw hands, grizzled hair or aging faces.’
I’m glad they can’t see or hear each other as I turn to him and say, ‘She’s been trying to persuade us to go and join them on Planet Narcissus.’
‘Don’t think we’d fit in. We’re too old and ugly. Tell her we’re just about to eat.’
I say goodbye.
‘Goodbye, my darling,’ she replies.
I’m close to tears as their images fade. Always now, I’m afraid it will be the last time I see my daughter. When the pool is empty I look down at my own reflection in it and see a tall, slim woman in a long, dark dress, the night sky behind me shimmering in the ripples of water. Around me is the ingenious Mediterranean summer night of Luna Minor: the fireflies shimmering in the mild, seductive air, the softly illuminated fountains in the gardens where metamortals walk and talk and flirt. There are no mosquitoes or thunderstorms or tourists.
As I enter our transparent dome-shaped house the door asks me what I want for supper and reminds me to renew my cell-regenerating implant. Inside, a Chopin waltz plays as the artificial candles on the marble dining-table light themselves, the partition between the dining-and living-rooms slides back and the house becomes a planetarium. The telescopic lenses in the transparent walls of our house produce wonderful effects as the stars dance.
On Luna Minor the eye is always tricked and delighted. I often wonder how I’d feel about living here if I hadn’t had my sight restored by ultrasound waves and tiny cameras in my retina soon after I returned to Leo. If I was still blind, locked in my inner life – which proved to be a surprisingly well-furnished secret room – I might have become an organicist like my daughter. So many people who were once homeless have chosen to stay down there; the poor have inherited the earth, simply because the rich no longer want it. The homeless and the dispossessed found their voices for the first time; they came pouring out of tunnels, roaring and bellowing, and overpowered the city. Now they’re all over the world, and they’re hungry for the future. Their anger was like the hum of ten million bees, and they were a force that cut across race and government and nationality. The have-nots decided they’d had enough.
Sometimes I can imagine an alternative life, in which I stayed down there with Abbie and Ben and their children, dying naturally. But simplicity has never appealed to me for longer than a daydream. So I joined Leo up here, where beauty and artifice and ingenuity have almost routed that bitch nature.
When the first global-warming disasters struck, causing famine all over Asia and Africa and flooding all the low-lying cities of the world, when the wars that nobody wanted destroyed London and New York and Paris and Berlin, those of us who had power and money weren’t unprepared. It turned out that the space programmes governments had been mysteriously engaged in for decades made it possible for a small international élite to flee the dying planet. Once it became clear that nature was turning on people even more viciously than they could have turned on each other, Leo began to bring brochures home to the big house near Primrose Hill where we had lived for more than thirty years.
There was a military colony on Pluto, where murderers and psychopaths were exiled to fight out wars vicariously, like medieval champions; a group of redundant international politicians were fleeing on a star-cruiser to another galaxy, so far away that it would take over a century to reach their destination. They had volunteered to be put into a state of hibernation, but while they were waiting they kept arguing about who would be president of their new galaxy and assassinating each other, so there were empty places on their starcruiser; various multinationals had combined to create Planet Joy, where exiles from earth could live in oxygen-regulated capsules and be fed intravenously with perfectly balanced nutrients and drugs that kept them in a state of permanent ecstasy while their brains were attached to interactive pornodreams.
Luna Minor was the most comfortable of the ex-planetary colonies. Many of the directors of the Metaphysical Bank were sibyls and magi who had known for centuries that the earth would become uninhabitable and had devoted their vast resources to planning and building their island in the moon. ‘Not the cheapest or the most accessible of the new worlds. Only those with strong links with the Metaphysical Bank will be considered, and preference will be given to those with an association of at least five hundred years. But if you are successful we guarantee you an eternity of gracious civilization. Luna Minor. The best of all possible worlds.’ As the floodwaters lapped against the windowsill of our kitchen in Primrose Hill I was seduced by the vibrant baritone of the sales video and agreed to accompany Leo.
I know Abbie despises the way I live – the fact that I’m alive at all – but, then, who wants to be natural and dead? There are still moments when my pleasure in life is as intense as it has ever been. When I’m invited to lecture in the Metaphysical Theatre to the other spareparters on Infinite Vitality, I whisper to my adoring audience that my secret is to enjoy small things every day. Then I raise a laugh by ending my lecture with one of my old dance routines, ‘Roses in Picardy’. Yes, little daily pleasures: after dinner tonight we’ll watch a series of spectacular volcanic eruptions on Io, Jupiter’s moon. I’ve selected three Greek taverna meals, as Pierre is staying to supper after he and Leo finish their chess game.
Leo comes hobbling downstairs with Pierre, who was a barber-surgeon in Paris before the French Revolution and is now one of the most successful trackless-robot surgeons in the universe. Leo is complaining, as usual.
‘It’s the El Cid factor,’ Pierre explains. ‘You and Jenny are spare-parters. It’s not your fault. You were already mature when they began genetic screening at birth. So of course bits of you need replacing all the time.’
‘For two thousand years I never had so much as a headache; now I’m a decaying mass of aches and pains. Could you do me a new spine?’
‘There’s nothing wrong with your back. You should just swim more. You’re such a hypochondriac,’ I say affectionately. Leo, like me, is a handsome patchwork, just about recognizable as the man I met before the First World War. Pierre opted to have one of the first triple-brain transplants, and his medical, musical and mathematical knowledge bulge like an extra ribcage in his forehead, above his long, pale face.
‘It is, of course, possible to replace every inch of you every few years, like a Japanese temple, but at a certain point you might as well give up on the dubious privilege of being human, as I have done, and accept the superiority of machine life. I haven’t a single cell or organ that was in me in Paris in the 1790s. Some of us are thinking of suing the Metaphysical Bank for a misleading description in our contract. After all, eternity should mean eternity. These new kids who’ve been genetically screened since birth are still only in their seventies, so it’s too soon to say if they’ll really live for ever.’
‘Eternity. For ever,’ Leo says gloomily. ‘I don’t know why we bother. What you get isn’t really life at all. Look at this olive. Greek taverna, my foot. This olive bears no resemblance to the ones I used to eat on Crete a couple of thousand years ago. Might as well be made of plastic. It probably is. And this retsina tastes like bleach.’
I defend my skill with the meal-selector button. ‘Considering how far away we are from Gre
ece, it’s not too bad.’
‘Ah, Greece. I miss the earth, you know. Sometimes I think those organicists like Abbie and Ben have got it right: suffer and work and eat real food for a few years and then die.’
‘They will. Quite soon,’ I say, my eyes full of tears.
‘I’m going to start a revolutionary movement here: dying is good for you. This place needs a few funerals to liven things up. Jenny?’
‘What? Will I join you on your revolutionary funeral pyre? No thanks, there are still lots of things I enjoy.’ I suddenly realize we’ve been leaving Pierre out of the conversation. ‘Who won your chess game?’
‘Me, of course. My brain capacity is equal to six chess champions, and I can do as many operations in a day as the old city hospitals could in a week. Yet when you talk and laugh like that I don’t understand. Shall I demonstrate my social skills by telling you a joke?’
‘That would be nice,’ I say politely.
‘It’s not very funny. What do you call a dysfunctional interplanetary pilot?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say in an encouraging voice. ‘What do you call a dysfunctional interplanetary pilot?’
‘Albert. You didn’t laugh. Nobody ever does. I know two thousand four hundred and seventy-two more jokes.’
‘Let’s save them for another night. In a few moments Io will be erupting. I’ve maximized the telescopic lenses so we can see. Look! Isn’t that fantastic?’ We stare in silence through the transparent roof at the stunning display of white-hot lava swirling with dazzling colours. ‘There’s a starcruiser full of artists moored just outside the radiation belt of Jupiter. We’ll have to buy some of their pictures when they come back. Tomorrow night there’s another earthquake in Japan. We can watch that, too. Did you see the hurricane in Florida last week? That was incredibly beautiful. More coffee, Pierre?’
‘No thank you. My caffeine and alcohol levels are high enough. I must go home now.’
‘He was more fun before his brain was perfected,’ I say as soon as the door slides shut.
‘He was a lot more fun in 1815 when I first met him as an abortionist in Whitechapel – come to think of it, I was more fun in 1815, too.’
‘Well, I wasn’t even born then.’ I’m still proud of being several thousand years younger than my lover. ‘You’re miserable tonight.’ I reach out to hold his hands, which, like my own, are seamed with ropelike veins. When we touch there is still a sexual charge between us; Leo reaches out to stroke the curve of my shapely plastibuttocks.
‘I’m not really unhappy. How could I be? My health monitor would simply raise my serotonin level. Yet this place brings out my most perverse and bloody-minded side. I don’t know why.’
‘Perhaps it’s because you’re a sort of illegal immigrant here. You only got in by lying about your past. Strictly speaking you ought to be up on Pluto, fighting out proxy wars with all the other criminals and psychopaths.’
‘I wasn’t that bad, was I? I forget.’
‘Oh, Leo, how convenient your memory implants are. I wish I could forget as much as you do.’
‘I’d have gone mad long ago if I had to keep remembering it all.’
‘Murder, swindling, drug dealing …’
‘Well, we’re none of us perfect. Do you wish you’d never met me?’
‘No, I’ve never wished that.’
I try to relive my own feelings: the fear and disgust that drove me to steal my contract from the vaults beneath the Metaphysical Bank eighty years ago. Rather than stay with Leo I was prepared to risk death and expose Abbie to terrible danger. I can see myself in the hotel room, my beauty suddenly demolished, the horror of realizing I was blind – I remember it all, can’t pretend like Leo to have forgotten. These pictures are with me for ever, but the feelings, complexities and doubts behind them are lost. My past is a story I’ve told myself too often, tidying and justifying. If you live for ever you also lie for ever, desperately adjusting your self-image until you find one that is bearable. I look down at our four hands, clasped together in the volatile present.
Organicists
Since Ben’s death I have envied him and cursed my inheritance. I’m glad I embarked on this great adventure in the ruins of London. But I’m tired now. I’ve had enough.
When Jenny and Leo told me I couldn’t be Ben’s sister there was a family conference. David and Muriel wanted their son to stay at university, and Jenny and Leo expected me to resume my apprenticeship as a princess. Leo bought the mansion that backed on to Primrose Hill and showed it to me with a flourish. But Ben and I didn’t want their world, so we ran away together. We ran from London and childhood, from home and homelessness and education. The anger against my mother that I couldn’t show when she was poor and blind and helpless flowed out of me in a great tidal wave that carried me with Ben to India and South America.
For years Ben and I were so fired by the heat of the forge in which we were reinventing ourselves that we never wrote to our parents or even telephoned them. We travelled furiously, sleeping rough or staying in farming cooperatives. When we were hungry we didn’t ask our daddies for money but sang the songs we wrote. At first we were paid in rice and maize and free beds, but then we were invited to sing at the first anti-globalization events. It turned out that being against multinational companies and banks – metaphysical and otherwise – meant that we were part of a movement, although I always felt we were joining on false pretences: when I sang about eternal youth and midnight transformations and global conspiracies they all praised my brilliant imagination.
Our life was peripatetic. Often we had to go into hiding, and we trusted nobody except each other. I remember a night when we clung together in a granary in Afghanistan, buried under sacks. Inches away, we could hear soldiers searching for us, paid by the local warlord who resented a song we’d been singing about his drug and weapon deals. Lying in the dark with Ben’s heart beating next to my own I wondered if my special powers, my ‘martian arts’ as Rosa used to call them, had any existence outside a little girl’s fantasy. We were unarmed, and the soldiers tramping towards us had guns and knives.
When the soldiers left Ben and I were violently sick. We weren’t heroes, we didn’t want to fight or die. Ben wanted to learn how to farm so that the poor – us included – could eat. Those years of travelling nourished in me a fierce, almost perverse, simplicity. I wanted to dig and burrow into the earth my parents had skimmed above, to live with my face and body as it was, to love one man with all my heart.
In my late twenties, when I became pregnant, my childhood came rolling back like a ball I had chucked away over a high wall. Ben and I were singing at an open-air concert in Africa, where farmers had realized indigenous landowners were just as good at exploiting them as colonials. The crowd was dancing and swaying, and Ben and I were high on the dangerous illusion that art changes the world. The night throbbed with music and colour and a thousand people singing of love and peace and hope.
The first shots sounded like fireworks. Then I heard screams and saw blood spread across the white cotton dress of a woman who had been dancing a yard away from the stage. She slid to the floor as Ben and I registered what was going on and heard more shots and screams.
Well, as I said, I never was a heroine. My voice shook and fled before my legs followed it. Ben dropped his guitar as we held hands and ran to hide under the jeep we had arrived in. I clutched Ben, and the baby swelling under my breasts, and the British passport that meant the mad dictator’s soldiers might think for a second before they killed me. We lay and watched as feet that had been dancing a few minutes ago were dragged into a pyramid, doused with paraffin and barbecued. Don’t let me die, I prayed all night from my worm’s-eye hiding place. Prayed to my mother, whom I hadn’t seen for fifteen years, who might in fact be dead – although staying alive had always been her most noticeable attribute.
The next morning Ben and I were arrested. We were abject by then, dizzy with hunger, sick at the stench of charred human flesh,
terrified that the baby inside me would be bayoneted out.
After two days in a filthy cage we were collected by a British diplomat, our man in Hades. He knew my father, who had phoned him and explained that his daughter and her boyfriend were playing silly buggers.
Ben and I were loaded on to a plane, then another, still shaking with dysentery and terror. At Heathrow we were met by my parents and an ambulance that rushed me to the Royal Free Hospital.
So I held my daughter in my arms when I sat up in bed and stared at my mother. She looked about my age. Her face was like a rare and valuable vase that has been shattered and then mended, not quite invisibly. Her features were all there – the large dark eyes, the strong but elegant nose, the generous mouth, the harmonious curves of her lovely cheekbones and jaw line. She even had her shining black hair again, thick waves of it tickling my cheek and brushing against the bald head of my baby. She was the mother whose beauty I had longed to inherit when I was a little girl, whose clone I had fervently wanted to be. She was embracing us, three generations together, and I gave myself to her arms until I opened my eyes and saw the cameras and microphones surrounding my hospital bed.
Suddenly I was aware of my ratty hair, blotchy unmade-up skin and the blood and vomit stains on my hospital gown. I pushed her away, and she tottered backwards on her stiletto heels, smiling as she posed one more time for the cameras, twirling to show them her tailored orange-linen suit with its very short skirt. ‘She’s a little overwrought,’ Jenny murmured to the assembled journalists and cameramen. ‘Perhaps you should come back later.’
The room emptied. Then I saw Leo, who also had that newly cobbled look. The opposite of youth isn’t age but metasurgery. My father sat beside my bed, kissed my brow and nervously held out a finger to his granddaughter. Ben came forward, looking pale and exhausted and real. I held out my arms to him and sheltered in our private, unphotogenic love.
Loving Mephistopeles Page 35