IVON

by Michael Aylwin

  The officers exchange a look, but it is enough for Dusty to notice.

  ‘You know him. Syracuse Garbo. You know Syracuse Garbo!’

  The first officer smirks at Dusty and steps aside. ‘On your way, Mr Noble. On your way.’

  Dusty takes a breath to lobby them further, but then lets it out again. If they really are in league with him, Syracuse Garbo will be informed of this encounter.

  ‘Tell him I know about Gower.’

  The first officer’s smirk develops into another smile, but otherwise he remains unmoved.

  Dusty has been offered a dignified retreat. He decides to take it.

  XIII

  ‘More comms from Ivon?’

  Alanis opens her eyes and sees Adriana standing over her. Is her distress as obvious as that? She notices now that her hand is resting, palm upwards, across her forehead. She removes it and levers herself up on the couch into a more upright position.

  ‘Five times yesterday, twice in the evening. I’ve blocked him, of course. But still…’

  Adriana throws herself on the adjacent couch. ‘Wow! That is seriously misaligned.’

  ‘I know. I can’t think what to do. I suppose I should report it. But, well, it’s Ivon. He’s new here. He doesn’t understand.’

  ‘What’s there to understand?’ scoffs Adriana. ‘You don’t invade an individual’s personal space. I mean, we’ve all had days when we’ve made a few comms. But never to the same person. Next, he’ll be trying to get into your home!’

  Alanis laughs, but she is not in the mood for jokes. ‘It’s such a shame. He’s so productive in the cots.’

  ‘And just imagine how productive he’d be if he were properly aligned. You owe it to the commune to report this.’

  Alanis squirms. The threat of Assimilation for Ivon has preyed on her mind. ‘Oh, Adriana! He deserves the chance to align himself, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Why?!’

  ‘He’s new! He’s an elite!’

  Adriana looks at her askance. Almost as if she suspects Alanis herself of Misalignment. Should she suspect her? Alanis has asked herself the same question. Why does she feel protective of Ivon?

  ‘He never turned up yesterday for the bout you booked us,’ says Adriana, leaning back into her couch.

  ‘What?!’

  ‘Didn’t even ratify it.’

  ‘Oh my joules!’

  ‘I’m an elite!’ cries Adriana, sitting forward again, before composing herself. ‘I had to go with Harvey Cockerill in the end.’

  ‘Adriana, I’m so sorry! I thought the two of you would be so productive together. You will be!’

  ‘Well, he’ll have to get himself in alignment first. If he’s so productive, he has a responsibility to everyone. Not just to you.’

  Alanis sighs. ‘Maybe I should report it. But it just doesn’t feel right.’ She clocks another sceptical look from Adriana. ‘It’s not as if I’m afraid to do that kind of thing. You know Dexter Eco. I was the one who had him fixed.’

  Alanis notices Adriana’s eyes widen further and flit urgently to somewhere above her head. She nods in the same direction.

  Alanis turns round to see Ivon himself standing over her. She jumps to her feet and splutters his name. He does not reply or move. Something about his bearing makes her glad there is a couch between them. The green of elite suits him, she finds the presence of mind to notice. He is looking fit.

  ‘You cancelled our date yesterday, Alanis. I’d been looking forward to that.’

  He’s looking at her in that same way he did under the showers a few days ago. As if he’s trying to see into her.

  ‘Oh, I know! I just felt we’d been seeing a bit too much of each other lately and that it would make sense for you to have a bout with someone else. Now that we’ve cleared your diary of all those suspicious bookings…’ She tails off as he begins to come round to her side of the couch, his eyes fixed on her. ‘Adriana, here, is an elite of the most impeccable credentials. I thought you’d go well together. Why didn’t you even ratify her?’

  He is standing barely a metre away now. He wears the faintest hint of a smile.

  ‘How could we ever see too much of each other? You helped me clear the diary so we could spend more time together. You’ve got me, Alanis. Here.’

  He pats his chest lightly, but the movement is fast enough to make Alanis jump.

  ‘But you haven’t tried a cot with anyone else. Why don’t you try now? Adriana’s free. Aren’t you?’

  She turns her head in Adriana’s direction, without quite taking her eyes off him.

  Ivon laughs. ‘I don’t want anyone else!’

  Alanis blushes. She is aware of others in the lounge, so many elites, so many role models. She hopes none has picked up on this outburst from Ivon. Her eyes flick to Adriana, whose face is shot through with astonishment.

  Ivon breathes out a heavy sigh. His chest falls; his head flops for a moment. Alanis enjoys the freedom of the break in eye contact. When he lifts his head again to look at her, it is with a vulnerability that strikes her as absurd.

  ‘Let’s take a cot now. You and me. Not for…that…just to talk. Let’s just go…somewhere.’

  He takes her hand unannounced, unsanctioned, from the underside. She snatches it away as if electrocuted and squeals at the transgressive contact. ‘No, Ivon! No, I will not go with you! I cannot! I have a bout booked with Andrew Catt. It’s too much!’

  She breaks away from him and heads towards the foyer, although it could be anywhere for all she cares. Andrew Catt appears at the far end of the lounge. She likes Andrew, even if middle-distance runners tend not to be the best for wattage. They greet with a proper handshake.

  ‘Are you ready?’ he says.

  She nods. He leads the way to the corridors, but before she follows an instinct makes her turn to Ivon one last time. He is where she left him. Adriana is saying something to him, but Ivon stares fixedly in Alanis’s direction, a brilliant-haired figure of strength, tall above the murmuring elites on their couches. He shakes his head, softly, slowly.

  There is something about the way Ivon looks at her. And the look is changing. She walks away from the lounge troubled.

  Dusty sighs as he watches the pod close on Austin Michael. It’s the first time he has escorted to stasis a citizen he knew personally. Austin was a tertiary-level batsman, who occasionally trained with the elites. He might have been an elite himself, and thus granted another five years before stasis, but for a deficit in his trajectory-imaging processor speed. In particular, this manifested itself in a tendency to be late with his pulls and hooks. But he was a good man, who loved the commune.

  ‘Farewell, brother,’ says Dusty softly, as he places a lingering palm on the lid of the pod, before it slips away to holding. A tear swells in his eye, which he wipes away with the back of his hand.

  ‘It must be hard,’ says a thin but jaunty voice behind him.

  Dusty spins round. Silhouetted against the window that looks out across ReSure’s great entrance hall stands Syracuse Garbo.

  ‘To be constantly in the presence of comrades on the brink of stasis. For them, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime transition. But you. You have to go through it with them… How many times a day, is it? I’ll bet facing the Yorkshire attack was positively uplifting in comparison.’

  ‘I faced them then. I’ll face this now.’

  There is silence. Did Garbo notice the tear?

  ‘You weren’t really going to enter Ivon’s home, were you, Dusty?’

  Dusty stares dumbly at him. Finally, he has an audience with Garbo, and he stares dumbly at him.

  ‘Could it be that your discipline has finally given way?’

  ‘Who is David Gower?’

  The light is behind Garbo, but Dusty can hear him chuckle. He steps into the room, and Dusty catches a glimpse of that nose and the hideous wrinkles as he saunters over to one of the portals and the track leading into it.

  ‘I wonder when it’ll be my turn,’ Garb
o says. ‘There’s a lot to be said for the conventional route. For knowing when your end will come. Once you’re exempt, you go from year to year. I’ve got my annual review in August.’ He leans over and peers at the point where the track disappears into the portal. Then he straightens up sharply and quips: ‘I’m confident!’ He nods his head, as if convincing himself, and repeats more thoughtfully: ‘I’m confident. There’s a few years left in me yet!’

  ‘Gower.’

  Garbo laughs again, more heartily. ‘Ah, yes! Gower! Well, you tell me, Dusty! What do you know of the great man?’

  ‘I know he’s in here,’ says Dusty, tapping his temple.

  ‘And how do you know that?’

  ‘Because I’ve seen him. I’ve read his story. He was our skill host, wasn’t he? The TMS procedure of 2111. You were the supervisor. What happened?’

  Garbo sits down on the end of one of the pod tracks. ‘I suppose you’re owed an explanation. Sabotage. Sabotage is what happened. It was a delicate period for TMS. You were guinea pigs, to be blunt, for the most advanced cerebral procedure of the time.’

  ‘So why was a Lapsed Era batsman chosen as the skill host?’

  ‘Oh, he wasn’t, he wasn’t! We’d identified as skill host an exemplary citizen with an immaculate cover drive. We had to be careful. Although we’d learned to isolate the skill back then, the procedure was not perfect. At the turn of the century we had discovered the seat of memory, the location in a human brain of the continuous record of a person’s life – in essence the recording of everything that person had seen, heard, touched, tasted and smelled. But every instant of that record is rooted in a myriad of different places. Crudely speaking, to extract a coherent memory is like trying to pluck a flower whose roots spread deeply into the soil and in many directions, intertwining with many other roots. One isolated memory – of a cover drive, for example – might contain within it traces of interference from others picked up either from its place in the seat of memory or from its journey there through the hippocampus. When you’re downloading thousands of cover drives from a skill host’s memory bank, the potential for contamination becomes significant. The Swanton-Axelby screen has purified transference since, but in 2111 that technology was not available. That’s why we were so careful with our choice of skill host. We thought we had eliminated most of the risk of contamination, but you could never be sure. In the event of any transferral interference, our skill host had to be devoid of thoughts or personality traits that might corrupt our subjects.’

  ‘And a batsman from the Lapsed Era was not what you had in mind.’

  Garbo shakes his head. ‘The skill host we chose was of sound temperament, but my assistant turned out to be less than the model citizen we had taken him for. It later transpired he had been recruited to an underground cult dedicated to the undermining of the Perpetual movement. An ancient cricketer by the name of David Gower was the figurehead of their cause, the representation of all they held dear. Fun, style, excellence…’ Garbo drifts off for a moment, before resuming his tale with urgency. ‘And these people had an upload of Gower’s brain! It had been captured right at the dawn of the neuro-archiving age. Gower was by then a very old man. You can imagine how crude the rendition was.’

  ‘We didn’t stand a chance.’

  ‘I’m afraid you didn’t. When it came to transmigration, Konig – my assistant – substituted Gower as the skill host, and I think we can safely say he had been less than meticulous in isolating the relevant skill. Indeed, he had wilfully polluted it. The transmigration was contaminated with all manner of impurities from Gower’s soul. Every one of you on the tables that day inherited something of his subversive nature. As well as his smooth cover drive.’

  Dusty can feel the tears begin to visit him again. The faces of his former comrades swirl through his head. Dee, Ricky – how innocent you were of your deteriorating attitudes! Daniel Attention, your Exaggerated Peripheral Sensitivity was that of another man from another time. Dusty wants to weep for them, so blameless were they. And yet he recognises, too, what that corruption of personality has done for the lives of Ricky and Dee. He recognises what it has done for himself, his thickening whimsy more precious to him the more it overtakes and undermines him.

  ‘What happened to us?’

  ‘Most of you were hopelessly corrupted. Lapsed Era attitudes are insidious. Their twisted tentacles reach into your soul. Once they have you, they are incredibly difficult to remove, even with today’s technology, more so than memories. Assimilation thirty years ago was clumsy and brutal, at best a temporary solution.’

  ‘So you offered exile.’

  ‘We waited to see how things panned out. This was new to all of us. To a scientist, it was fascinating. To the authorities, it was a potential crisis, the release of a virus into the system. Konig was removed and shut down, but the rest of you – you were too important.’

  Garbo shifts his weight further back onto the track, sitting like a kindergarten coach on the edge of his desk. ‘Daniel Attention was the first to threaten the integrity of societal order. We tried to assimilate him, but it was hopeless. His indolence was so ingrained, our procedures seemed no more sophisticated than torture. They wanted to shut him down, but I’m pleased to say I won him an alternative. He was offered exile.’

  ‘So Daniel Attention is still active?!’

  ‘Oh yes. He chose Australia. As did Chad Meninga.’

  Dusty wipes a tear from his left eye, but another forms to replace it immediately. And now his right hand is needed at the other eye, which is also brimming. He leans back against the window and looks towards Garbo. A softness has settled across the corners and crevices of the old man’s face, so that he seems open to Dusty for the first time. It is the prompt for further tears, which begin to arrive with more confidence now. Dusty can no longer hold out. He buries his head in his hands and feels his body tremble with those same convulsions that seized him when he was with Dee in Wales.

  ‘As I suspected,’ says Garbo, but his voice is gentle, the sneer smoothed out. ‘It has you too. Finally. Even Dusty Noble has succumbed.’

  ‘I don’t understand!’ cries Dusty between his sobs. ‘Why wasn’t I affected before?’

  Garbo shrugs. ‘Maybe you were. All we know is that you managed to handle it. Channel it even, which is what I hypothesise you did.’

  ‘But it had no effect on me.’

  ‘You have always been a remarkable citizen, Dusty. If we were given to the elevating of individuals, as the Lapsed Era was, everyone would know your name. The authorities, certainly, hold you in the highest regard, as does the scientific community. You are a pillar of the commune – more than that, a wellspring. Your cover drive is on the national curriculum and your mind on order for upload come stasis. You know all that. But what you might not realise is the extent to which your progeny populates the ranks of London cricket.’

  Dusty removes his hands from his face and peers at Garbo through bleary eyes. Why should this surprise him? He has lost count of the number of procreation certificates he has been issued with over the years, or the number of sperm deposits he has surrendered. He knew what it was all for, and yet to be confronted with the reality is to fuel his tears further.

  ‘You know some of them,’ says Garbo. ‘Marius Amstrad?’

  Dusty nods slowly as he recalls the elegant youngster. They shared a century partnership against the East Midlands, he thinks.

  ‘Yours. Percy Sabatini, John Lawes, Vernon Goff… I could go on.’

  Another paroxysm of weeping overcomes him.

  ‘The point is,’ Garbo continues, ‘you have always been strong – the very model of a Perpetual citizen. An infusion of Lapsed Era impurities did not seem to shake your constitution one iota. Your discipline was ironclad. It is only now, after decommission, with the ills of diminishment creeping upon you, that we find it wavering. Six other elite athletes suffered the same dose as you in 2111. To greater or lesser extents, they were all corrupted, all t
aken out of the system.’ Garbo hesitates. ‘Well, apart from Leanda…’

  ‘Killed in an aero,’ says Dusty. ‘So that was true.’

  Garbo nods, his focus glazing briefly. ‘She might have ­flourished. She’d acquired a certain bravado from the infusion, a wickedness, which enhanced her productivity. But she drove the aero far too fast. Couldn’t help herself. Misalignment.’ He shakes his head at the memory. ‘But you, Dusty, you were never thrown off course. What’s more, it’s my hypothesis that you were enhanced by the spirit of Gower, by a hint of the unconventional. As if you knew that this was not all there was. Did you ever feel that?’

  Dusty dries his eyes as best he can. His fit has passed physically, but it leaves hanging over him a dreadful pall of melancholy. He wants to believe that he was a maverick all along, just as he wants to believe that that tendency was his alone and not just an inheritance from a Lapsed Era cricketer. He has been corrupted, as if by a disease, but how elegantly the disease corrupts its victims by rendering them possessive of it. If only he could say he’d had mischief on his mind.

  And then it occurs to Dusty that Garbo is pleading with him. ‘You’re one of them, aren’t you?’ he says.

  Garbo sits with his hands resting under his thighs. His shoulders are hunched forward, accentuating a hollow chest. He studies Dusty, a faint smile on his lips, his head tilted to one side.

  ‘This underground cult. Ivon’s told me about it. You gave him Alcohol. The night before his elite debut.’

  Garbo eases himself off the track. He walks to the window and looks down over the entrance hall, lit through the skylights high above by the last rays of sunshine a London citizen will ever see.

  ‘After the sabotage was uncovered, I was part of the working party set up to investigate this cricketer, David Gower. The more I researched him, the more I could see how incompatible his values were with those of the Perpetual Era, how much of a disaster to society the infusion of his spirit might become. And yet the more I researched him, the more intrigued I ­became. Oh, I was never much good at sport myself. I made it to secondary level as a high-jumper. It was my IQ that marked me out. And in my life as a scientist I have encountered the entire spectrum of what we know, from multiverse to preon. Set within that great sweep, how can sport be conceived of as anything more important than a game? How can humanity? We are fleeting, contingent, ephemeral. Like laughter.’