Bang (18 page)

But before Delilah and the lift designer, also known
as an elevator maker, got to it, the lift’s doors hissed open, mouthy as usual,
and, knocking the big-headed popcorn seller and his popcorn flying, the
Whipping Boy exited them and entered Remand 111. His
Voltaire
was
holstered, and he was sullen and depressed: yesterday had been his birthday and
today he’d failed his calculus exam. All the same, his were eyes scouting,
Delilah knew, for her.

‘Hide,’ she said. ‘Quick.’

‘No, no,’ said the lift designer, in a purring voice
and brushing aside Delilah’s warning with a confident voice. ‘I can’t resist
it.’

‘Resist what?’ hissed Delilah, tugging at his uniform.
‘Hide, fast.’

‘Nonsense. The warden has come good. Huh-loh ...’
called the lift designer, now making his way over to the Whipping Boy. ‘Hullo,
hullo ...’ Delilah put her hands over her face. The lift designer bent forward
and asked, ‘Little boy, would you like some sweeties?’ Delilah looked through
her fingers.

‘You talking pills?’ replied the Whipping Boy, who
felt it his duty to test competitor’s pills before disposing of them, the
competitors.

‘Not exactly,’ suggested the lift designer. ‘But I do
have some lovely sweeties in the trouser pocket of my uniform. Why don’t you
take a look. Here.’ He gently took the Whipping Boy’s wrist and guided his
hand. ‘Have a feel,’ he said. ‘Bit deeper. Yes, that’s right ...’

Oh no, thought Delilah, still looking through her
fingers. The Whipping Boy, twigging what was going on – who while in some
matters was ahead of his years, in others was still only ten, or eleven as of
yesterday – freed himself with his surprising strength from the lift
designer and stepped back. He unholstered his
Voltaire.
‘What do you think
of
this
?’

‘I very much like whips,’ whispered the lift designer,
thrilled, unaware of what was about to happen.

‘This is a
Voltaire
,’ said the Whipping Boy.

‘Is it now, my pretty one? That’s a nice name for a
whip. And isn’t it so very
long
. We will have lots of fun together. Now
let me show you
my
whip …’ The lift designer began going for his
fly … but the next moment his eye was gone.

‘I did it,’ shouted the Whipping Boy. The lift
designer was yet to scream. ‘I did it. I did it!’

The lift designer screamed. Delilah moved her hands
from over her eyes to over her ears. She couldn’t stop herself from listening,
though.

The Whipping Boy was jubilant. ‘First time once again.
I thought I’d lost it. But I got his eye out first time. Just like I used to.
Hole in one!’

Then the screaming lift designer’s other eye was gone
too – or nearly. For on a dangle of nerve it swung from its socket, and
the lift designer, or elevator maker, desperate to escape, had no choice but
follow escape routes this dangling eye offered, which were generally down
toward the floor, or left, or right, depending upon the swing. He soon fell
over. Couldn’t get up. Delilah watched dismayed as the Whipping Boy used his
ears for target practice. ‘You
next,’ said the finger that pointed at
Delilah when the Whipping Boy paused briefly for breath. She edged toward the
lift, slowly, surely, unimpeded. Then, just about to make a leap for its open
doors, she was grabbed from behind and taken by a powerful force. Darkness
next.

11
–
A Kidnap

‘You’ve been kidnapped,’ said a voice.

Great, thought Delilah, just my luck.

‘By the two genetics students. You may have heard of
us.’

Nope, thought Delilah.

‘We’ve heard of you, in any case.’

‘Otherwise we wouldn’t have kidnapped you.’

‘We’d have kidnapped someone else.’

‘We can take the bag off her head now.’ While doing so
they stepped out of their painters’ overalls, unnecessarily complicating the
whole procedure, because they could easily have done this before or after. From
somewhere distant came a clunky bang. Over in a corner stood a suitcase, which
seemed to be humming and at which the kidnappers were smiling. Whenever I’m
about to escape, thought Delilah dejectedly, something bad happens.

‘You might have noticed …’ said one of the students,
and left it at that. He was long-haired and had a low-income look. His partner
(neither could have been much older than Delilah) had neat dark hair and
forwarded the impression of wealth and travel. He ran a hand through his
partner’s hair as if it were his own, and said, ‘… that whenever you’re about
to escape, something bad happens. Perhaps you hadn’t noticed. But this is the
way of the System. You can’t escape. They have to
let
you out. Even if
they don’t want to. They’ll have to let
us
out, and they certainly won’t
want to do that. Which is where you come in.’ He ran his hand through his
partner’s hair again and scratched his scalp, then displayed relief on his own
face.

The long-haired student said to him, ‘Get off me, I
don’t like when you do that.’ Then to Delilah, ‘You’re quite a name down here.’

‘Right, let’s call them, where’s that Life?’

They juggled the Life then made the call. ‘We have
shown what we can do. Give in to our demands or we kill the prisoner. That’s
right, put a bullet through her brain. A brain bullet.’

Delilah braced herself at this unfortunate
development. She widened her big eyes.

A reply came back on the Life, ‘Do away with her. We
agreed to that anyway. You have no bargaining tool. You have shown us nothing.
Surrender yourselves, students. You don’t stand a chance.’

‘We have killed many prisoners,’ said the
foreign-sounding neat-haired student. ‘Do not mess up with us, matey.’

He was laughed off: ‘Ha ha.’ From the sounds of it,
Warden 111 conducted these negotiations.

The student stated, ‘By execution of a carefully
engineered piece of biological terrorism we have mass-murdered. Give in to our
demands or worse will follow.’

There was silence this time, then laughter again, ‘Ha
ha.’ Then, ‘Wait one moment, my boots are itching.’

‘Never mind your boots! Our creation the bloodbottles
laid their eggs in the feast. Many ate of this feast and died. Their death
belongs to us. We can recreate such an incident at will. We are progenitors of
doom. We are calling the shots now, Warden 111, and you’d better believe it.’

There was silence this time, then no laughter.

‘That’s made them think,’ said the poor student,
flinging the other student’s hand from his hair and arranging it into a
ponytail and tying it back, so that his forehead got stretched taut and his
eyes bulged. His T-shirt claimed
I’ve seen 333
, which he hadn’t, it was
an outlandish claim typical of students that didn’t fit easily into society,
one that put them at risk of making the very visit they claimed they’d made but
hadn’t.

‘We didn’t know about the flies,’ said the warden.
‘Rather, we did. But we did not know we knew until just now when you told us.
What are your demands? Tell us so that we may engineer a way of not meeting
them.’

‘Not so fast, warden. We will get back to you.’ The
student held a buzzing bloodbottle by its legs to the Life. There was a gasp at
the other end and the student hung up. The suitcase still hummed.

‘So you intend to kill me,’ said Delilah, rather
flatly, not wishing to excite the kidnapper students by her tone into
sacrificing her a moment earlier than necessary.

‘Not unless we have to. They want us to kill you. It
would save them from doing it, save your court case too. Down here in the
System, life is judged against drifting parameters.’ The rich one said this in
his foreign-sounding accent, which was odd: compulsory ‘accent and diction’
lessons at school were intended to iron out such accents and remove dialectal
confusion (confusion being property of the Center of Disinformation). He had quite
a high opinion of himself too, thought Delilah, not particularly enamoured of
her kidnappers, wondering why everything always went quite so wrong and whether
she was in some way to blame.

‘I was about to escape. Until you idiots came along
and ruined it. The lift doors were open, waiting for me. I’d have tickled the
lift and made it take me to the top and been back in the salon by now, doing my
job, earning tips, repairing this –’ she grabbed a fist of her hair and
shook it.

‘Escape? I don’t think so. We overheard discussion of
the whole sorry affair when we were lilac painting – you can get anywhere
in the System disguised as lilac painters. Everything you did, they knew you
would do, every move a foregone conclusion right from the start. In the System,
possibilities, all possibilities, are worked out long in advance and predicted.
Your behaviour, for instance, was so clear, especially with your being a
hairdresser, that nothing you could do would surprise the System. Other than
that time you put your hands between your legs and went Ooh. They weren’t
expecting that. But after it happened they knew, looking back, that they knew
it would happen. And then they knew that they had known it would happen.’

‘Huh?’ said Delilah.

‘I do not see why, as a kidnapper, I should convey to
you our hard-earned information, while you slouch around in a black dress and a
victim’s posture expecting facts. How you ever got such a high opinion of
yourself I shall never know, not even if you tell me. You’re waiting for me to
give you the low-down simply because you want to use it to escape. As a victim,
you are the most selfish I have ever met, beyond selfishness, though what is
beyond selfishness I am none too clear.’

Delilah replied, ‘So don’t tell me then. Forget it.
Did I ask to be kidnapped?’

‘No, it is important that you hear. It is simple. Let
me ask you this. Have you ever had that sensation, often overbearing, that you
know you know something but don’t know what it is? You are about to have an
idea, for instance, but haven’t got it yet. Or, you know full well that
something is wrong with an idea, yet don’t know what it is. Try as you might,
you cannot discover what’s wrong. You can’t put your finger on it and it is
infuriating. This is the gap between what we know and what we know we don’t
know. We call this the data gap. Probably as a hairdresser you have not
experienced the data gap.’

‘I have.’

‘As brainy students we get it all the time, don’t we?’
he asked, scratching his partner’s face where a stray hair brushed over his
cheek, looking much relieved for it.

‘Don’t do that!’ snapped the long-haired student.

‘The System is the same, Delilah. While it knows
everything, it sometimes does not know what it knows at any particular time.
Thus it knew a particular fact, that you would act in a vulgar manner, and knew
that it knew, but, try as it might to know before, it could not, and only knew
after, when you triggered it into knowing that it knew before by the very act.
By this same process, it knew about the bloodbottles but did not know it knew,
not until just then when we told them. To get here, where we are today, we
exploited the data gap. Such exploitation requires great intelligence.’

There was a distant clunk, again a bang.

‘But that doesn’t just mean you can escape,’ said the
other student, now trying to draw Delilah’s attention to his hair by flicking
the ponytail over his shoulders, ‘by jumping through one data gap to the next.’

‘No, because you cannot establish what the System
knows it knows and what it doesn’t know it knows or indeed what it doesn’t know
it doesn’t know, or what it knows it doesn’t know but is trying to find out.
Clear?’

As a kidnap victim, Delilah felt hungry more than
anything, especially now she’d smelt food being prepared her. Her head spun,
too, from hunger or this data gap business she was sure. ‘As crystal,’ she
answered.

‘Stop. This is too much information for Delilah the
hairdresser to make sense of. In a moment her brain will overload and steam
will issue from her ears, making her believe she’s back in her hairdressing
salon under one of those hair-treatment units, and she’ll call out with her
rough voice for another cup of char and a digestible biscuit.’

Delilah said, ‘I’m not so stupid, you know. Even for a
hairdresser. I have a rough voice, granted, and it perhaps misleads you into
underestimating my brain power. But let me tell you this, when it comes to
untangling clients’ hair I am the quickest the salon has to offer. I work it
out up here, knots and all.’ She tapped her head. ‘I can visualise everything,
untangle it in my mind.’

‘Pah. Untangling hair? This is the System you’re
dealing with here. Untangling hair, forget it. Listen to her, my darling.’ He
scratched his friend’s scalp, where the ponytail pinched, and sighed, again
with relief, saying, ‘That’s better.’

‘Get off me!’

Delilah quietly said, ‘Not all people in jobs you
consider stupid
are
stupid.’ She wanted to cry now – something sad
had come at her from somewhere. ‘And I have the voice of an angel, too, when I
sing, despite how I sound when I talk,’ she continued miserably, letting out a
blub. Her food was brought over. ‘Thank you,’ she said on another blub, and ate
through her crying, ravenous, rib-achingly hungry. The poor student in the
t-shirt dropped a tear, too, then remembered he was a kidnapper and wiped his
eyes. Next he untied his ponytail and swung his hair in Delilah’s proximity,
secretly hoping for some advice on what to do with it. She was too busy eating
to pick this up, but had observed when he’d taken the bag off her head his
massed fuzz of split-ends, and wondered how he’d let it get so far into
disrepair.