The main cabin of the Trooperbus was designed to hold forty passengers; this one was fitted with ten very comfortable leather upholstered swivel chairs. There was a toilet and small galley at the back, and a three-seat cab at the front. Their driver introduced himself as Yves Gaynes.
“No stewardess on this trip,” he said, “So just have a rummage round in the lockers if you need anything to eat or drink. We’re well stocked.”
“How long is this going to take?” Louise asked.
“Should be there for afternoon tea.”
“Where exactly?”
He winked. “Classified.”
“Can we watch out of the front?” Genevive asked. “I’d love to see what Earth’s really like.”
“Sure you can.” He gestured her forward, and she scrambled up into the cab.
Louise glanced at Robson. “Go ahead,” he told her. “I’ve been outside before.” She joined Gen in the spare seat.
Yves Gaynes sat in front of his own console and initiated the startup routine. The hatch closed, and the air filters cycled up. Louise let out a sigh as the air cooled, draining out the moisture and smell. The Trooperbus rolled forwards. At the far end of the garage, a slab of wall began to slide upwards, revealing a long carbon-concrete ramp saturated in sunlight bright enough to make Louise squint despite the heavily shielded glass.
London didn’t end along the perimeter of its nine outer domes. The arcology itself was principally devoted to residential and commercial zones; while the industries sited inside were focused chiefly towards software, design, and light manufacturing. Heavy industry was spread around outside the domes in underground shelters ten kilometres long, with their own foundries, chemical refineries, and recycling plants. Also infesting the dome walls like concrete molluscs were environmental stations, providing power, water, and cool filtered air to the inhabitants. But dominating the area directly outside were the food factories. Hundreds of square kilometres were given over to the synthesis machinery capable of producing proteins and carbohydrates and vitamins, blending them together in a million different textural combinations that somehow never quite managed to taste the same as natural crops. They supplied the food for the entire arcology, siphoning in the raw chemicals from the sea, and the sewage, and the air to manipulate and process into neat sachets and cartons. Rich people could afford imported delicacies, but even their staple diet was produced right alongside the burger paste and potato granules of the hoi polloi.
It took the Trooperbus forty minutes to clear the last of the vast, half-buried carbon-concrete buildings full of organic synthesisers and meat clone vats. Strictly rectangular mounds, sprouting fat heat exchange towers, gave way to the natural rolling topology of the land. The sisters stared out eagerly at the emerald expanse unfurling around them. Louise was struck by growing disappointment, she’d expected something more dynamic. Even Norfolk had more impressive scenery. The only activity here came from the long streaks of bruised cloud fleeing across the brilliant cobalt sky. Occasional large raindrops detonated across the windscreen with a dull pap.
They drove along a road made from some kind of dark mesh which blades of grass had risen through to weave together. The same vivid-green plant covered every square inch of land.
“Aren’t there any trees?” Louise asked. It looked as though they were driving through a bright verdant desert. Even small irregular lumps she took to be boulders were covered by the plant.
“No, not any more,” Yves Gaynes said. “This is just about the only vegetation left on the planet, the old green grass of home. It’s tapegrass, kind of a cross between grass and moss, geneered with a root network that’s the toughest, thickest tangle of fronds you’ll ever see. I’ve broken a spade before now, trying to dig through the stuff. It goes down over sixty centimetres. But we’ve got to grow it. Nothing else can stop soil erosion on the same scale. You should see the floods we get after a storm, every crease in the ground turns into a stream. If they’d had this on Mortonridge it would have been a different story, I’ll tell you.”
“Can you eat it?” Genevieve asked.
“No. The people who sequenced it were in too big a rush to produce something that would just do the job to build in refinements like that. They just concentrated on making it incredibly tough, biologically speaking. It can withstand as much ultraviolet as the sun can throw at it, and there’s not a disease which can touch it. So now it’s too late to change. You can’t replace it with a new variety, because it’s everywhere. Half a centimetre of soil is enough to support it. Only rock cliffs defeat it, and we’ve got limpet fungi for them.”
Genevieve puckered her lips up and pressed herself up against the windscreen. “What about animals? Are there any left?”
“Nobody’s really sure. I’ve seen things moving round out there, but not close, so it could just be knots of dead tapegrass blowing about. There’s supposed to be families of rabbits living in big warrens along some of the flood-free valleys. Friends of mine say they’ve seen them, other drivers. I don’t know how, the ultraviolet ought to burn out their eyes out and give them cancer. Maybe there’s some species that developed resistance; they certainly breed fast enough for it to evolve, and they always were tough buggers. Then there’s people say pumas and foxes are still about, feeding on the rabbits. And I’ll bet rats survived outside the domes if anything has.”
“Why do you come out here at all?” Louise asked.
“Maintenance crews do plenty of work on the vac-train tubes. Then there’s the ecology teams, they come out to repair the worst aspects of erosion: replant tapegrass and restore river banks that get washed away, that kind of thing.”
“Why bother?”
“The arcologies are still expanding, even with all the emigration. There’s talk of building two more domes for London this century. And Birmingham and Glasgow are getting crowded again. We’ve got to look after our land, especially the soil; if we didn’t, it would just wash away into the sea and we’d be left with continents that were nothing more than plateaus of rock. This world’s suffered enough damage already, imagine what the oceans would be like if you allowed all that soil to pollute them. It’s only the oceans which keep us alive now. So I suppose it boils down to self-interest, really. At least that means we’ll never stop guarding the land. That’s got to be a good result.”
“You like it out here, don’t you?” Louise asked.
Yves Gaynes gave her a happy smile. “I love it.”
They drove on through the wrecked land, sealed under its precious, protective living cloak. Louise found it almost depressingly barren. The tapegrass, she imagined, was like a vast sheet of sterile packaging, preserving the pristine fields and spinnies which slept below. She longed for something to break its uniformity, some sign of the old foliage bursting out from hibernation and filling the land with colour and variety once more. What she wouldn’t give for the sight of a single cedar standing proud; one sign of resistance offered against this passive surrender to the unnatural elements. Earth with all its miracles and its wealth ought to be able to do better than this.
They drove steadily northwards, rising out of the Thames valley. Yves Gaynes pointed out old towns and villages, the walls of their buildings now nothing more than stiff lumps drowned under tapegrass, names decaying to waypoints loaded into the Trooperbus’s guidance block. The Trooperbus had left the simple mesh road behind a long time ago when Louise went back into the main cabin to heat some sachets for lunch. They were driving directly across the tapegrass now, big wheels crushing it to pulp, leaving two dark green tracks behind them. Outside, the land was becoming progressively more rugged, with deepening valleys, and hills sporting bare rock crowns clawed by talons of grey-green lichen and ochre fungus. Gullies carried silver streams of gently steaming water, while lakes rested in every depression.
“Here we are,” Yves Gaynes sang out, four hours after they left London.
Ivanov Robson squeezed his bulk into the cab behind the sisters, starin
g ahead with an eagerness to match theirs. A plain geodesic crystal dome rose out of the land, about five miles wide, Louise guessed; its rim contoured around the slopes and vales it straddled. The dome itself was grey, as if it was filled with thick fog.
“What’s it called?” Genevieve asked.
“Agronomy research facility seven,” Yves Gaynes replied, straightfaced.
Genevieve responded with a sharp look, but didn’t challenge him.
A door swung open at the base of the dome to admit the Trooperbus. Once the door closed, a red fungicide spray shot out from all sides to wash away mud and possible spores from the vehicle’s body and wheels. They rolled forward into a small garage, and the hatch popped open.
“Time to meet the boss,” Ivanov Robson said. He led the two girls out into the garage. The air was cooler than inside the Trooperbus and the Westminster Dome, Louise thought. She was wearing only a simple navy-blue dress with short sleeves. Not that it was cold, more like a fresh spring day.
Ivanov beckoned them forwards. Genevieve double clicked her heel, and glided along at his side. There was a small four-seater jeep waiting, with a red and white striped awning and a steering wheel. The first one Louise had seen on this planet. It made her feel more comfortable when Ivanov sat behind it. She and Gen took the rear seats, and they started off.
“I thought you didn’t know this place,” Louise said.
“I don’t. I’m being guided.”
Louise datavised a net processor access request, but got no response. Ivanov drove them into a curving concrete tunnel a couple of hundred yards long, then they were abruptly out in full sunlight. Gen gasped in delight. The agronomy research dome covered a patch of countryside which was the England they knew from history books: green meadows flecked with buttercups and daisies, rambling hawthorn hedges enclosing shaggy paddocks, small woods of ash, pine, and silver birch lying along gentle valleys, giant horse chestnuts and beeches dotted across acres of parkland. Horses were grazing contentedly in the paddocks, while ducks and pink flamingos amused themselves in a lake with a skirt of mauve and white water lilies. In the centre was a sprawling country house that made Cricklade seem gaudy and pretentious in comparison. Three-storey orange brick walls were held together by thick black oak beams in traditional Tudor diagonals, though they were hard to see under the mass of topaz and scarlet climbing roses. Windows of tiny leaded glass diamonds were thrown wide to let the lazy air circulate through the rooms. Stone paths wound through a trim lawn that was surrounded by boarders of neatly pruned shrubs. A line of ancient yews marked the end of the formal garden. There was a tennis court on the other side, with two people swatting a ball between them in an impressively long volley.
The jeep took them along a rough track over the meadows round to the front of the house. They turned in through some wrought iron gates and trundled along a cobbled, mossy drive. Swallows swooped mischievously low over the grass on either side, before arrowing back up to the eaves where their ochre mud nests were hidden. A wooden porch around the front door was completely smothered by honeysuckle; Louise could just see someone waiting amid the shadows underneath.
“We’ve come home,” Genevieve murmured in delight.
Ivanov stopped the jeep in front of the porch. “You’re on your own now,” he told them.
When Louise shot him a look, he was staring ahead, hands gripped tightly on the steering wheel. She was just about to tap him on the shoulder, when the person waiting in the porch stepped forwards. He was a young man, about the same age as Joshua, she thought. But where Joshua’s face was lean and flat, his was round. Quite handsome though, with chestnut hair and wide green eyes. Lips that were curved somewhere between a smile and a sneer. He was wearing a white cricket jumper and tennis shorts; his bare feet shoved into shabby sneakers with a broken lace.
He put a hand out, smiling warmly. “Louise, Genevieve. We meet at last, to coin a cliché yet again. Welcome to my home.” A black Labrador padded out from the house and snuffled round his feet.
“Who are you?” Louise asked.
“Charles Montgomery David Filton-Asquith at your service. But I’d really prefer you to call me Charlie. Everybody here does. As in right, one expects.”
Louise frowned, still not shaking his hand, though he hardly seemed threatening. Exactly the kind of young landowner she’d grown up with, though with a good deal more panache admittedly. “But, who are you? I don’t understand. Are you the one that summoned us here?”
“ ’Fraid so. Hope you’ll forgive me, but I thought this would be an improvement on London for you. Not very jolly there right now.”
“But how? How did you get us out through the curfew? Are you a policeman?”
“Not exactly.” He pulled a remorseful face. “Actually, I suppose you could say I rule the world. Pity I’m not making a better job of it right now. Still, such is life.”
There was a swimming pool on the other side of the ancient house, a long teardrop shape with walls of tiny white and green marble tiles. It had a mosaic of the Mona Lisa on the floor of the deep end. Louise recognized that, though she couldn’t remember the woman flashing her left breast in the original painting. A group of young people were using the pool, splashing about enthusiastically as they played some private-rules version of water polo with a big pink beach ball.
She sat on the Yorkstone slab patio with Charlie and Gen, relaxing at a long oak table which gave her an excellent view out over the pool and the lawns. A butler in a white coat had brought her a glass of Pimms in a tall tumbler, with plenty of ice and fruit bobbing round. Gen was given an extravagant chocolate milk shake clotted with strawberries and ice cream, while Charlie sipped at a gin and tonic. It was, she had to admit, all beautifully civilized.
“So you’re not the President, or anything,” she enquired. Charlie had been telling them about the GISD, and its bureau hierarchy.
“Nothing like. I simply supervise serious security matters across Western Europe, and liaise with my colleagues to combat global threats. Nobody elected us; we had the ability to dictate the structure and nature of the GISD back when continental governments and the UN were merging into Govcentral. So we incorporated ourselves into it.”
“That was a long time ago,” Louise said.
“Start of the Twenty-second Century. Interesting times to live through. We were a lot more active in those days.”
“You’re not that old, though.”
Charlie smiled, and pointed across at the rose garden. A neat, sunken square, divided up into segments, each one planted with different coloured rose bushes. Several tortoise-like creatures were moving slowly among the tough plants, their long prehensile necks standing proud, allowing them to munch the dead flowers, nibbling the stem right back to the woody branch. “That’s a bitek construct. I employ twelve separate species to take care of the estate’s horticulture for me. There’s a couple of thousand of them here altogether.”
“But Adamists have banned bitek from all their worlds,” Gen said. “And Earth was the first.”
“The public can’t use it,” Charlie said. “But I can. Bitek and affinity are very powerful technologies; they give B7 quite an advantage over would-be enemies of the republic. It’s a combination which also allows me to live for six hundred years in an unbroken lineage.” He waved a hand over himself in a proud gesture. “This is the thirty-first body I’ve lived in. They’re all clones, you see; parthenogenetic, so I retain the temperament for the job. I’m affinity capable, I had the ability long before Edenism began. I used neurone symbionts at first, then the affinity sequence was vectored into my DNA. In a way, the immortality method which B7 uses is a variant on Edenism’s end-of-life memory transfer. They use it to transfer themselves into their habitat neural strata. I, on the other hand, use it to transfer myself into a new, vigorous young body. The clone is grown in sensory isolation for eighteen years, preventing any thought patterns from developing. In effect, it’s an empty brain waiting to be filled. When the ti
me comes, I simply edit the memories I wish to take with me, and move my personality over to the new body. The old one is immediately destroyed, giving the process a direct continuity. I even store the discarded memories in a bitek neural construct, so no aspect of my life is ever truly lost.”
“Thirty-one bodies is a lot for only six hundred years,” Louise said. “A Saldana lives for nearly two centuries these days. And even us Kavanaghs will last for about a hundred and twenty.”
“Yes,” Charlie said with an apologetic shrug. “But you spend the last third of that time suffering from the restrictions and indignity of age. An illness which only ever gets worse. Whereas as soon as I reach forty I immediately transfer myself again. Immortality and perpetual youth. Not a bad little arrangement.”
“Until now,” Louise took a drink of Pimms, “those previous bodies all had their own souls. That’s quite different from memories. I saw it on a news show. The Kiint said they’re separate.”
“Quite. Something B7 has collectively ignored. Hardly surprising, given our level of conservatism. I suppose our past bodies will have to be stored in zero-tau from now on; at least until we’ve solved the overall problem of the beyond.”
“So you were really alive in the Twenty-first Century?” Gen asked.
“Yes. That’s what I remember, anyway. As your sister says, the definitions of life have changed a lot recently. But I’ve always considered myself to be the one person for all those centuries. That’s not a conviction you can break in a couple of weeks.”
“How did you get to be so powerful in the first place?” Louise asked.
“The usual reason: wealth. All of us owned or ran vast corporate empires during the Twenty-first Century. We weren’t merely multinationals, we were the first interplanetaries; and we made profits that outgrossed national incomes. It was a time when new frontiers were opening again, which always generates vast new revenues. It was also a time of great civil unrest; what we’d called the Third World was industrialising rapidly thanks to fusion power, and the ecology was destabilising at equal speed. National and regional governments were committing vast resources into combating the biosphere breakdown. Social welfare, infrastructure administration, health care, and security—the fields government used to devote its efforts to—were all slowly being starved of tax money and sold off to private industry. It wasn’t much of a jump for us. Private security forces had guarded company property ever since the Twentieth Century; jails were being built and run by private firms; private police forces patrolled closed housing estates, paid for out of their taxes. In some countries you actually had to take out insurance in order to pay the state police to investigate a crime if you were a victim. So you see, evolving to an all-private police force was an intrinsic progression for an industrialized society. Between the sixteen of us, we controlled ninety per cent of the world’s security forces, so naturally we collaborated and cooperated on intelligence matters. We even began to invest in equipment and training at a level that would never bring us a fiscal return. It paid us, though; nobody else was going to protect our factories and institutions from crime lords and regional mafias. The crime rate actually started to fall for the first time in decades.
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