Game Control (16 page)

  Eleanor folded her arms in stolid silence.

  'I will give you this much credit,' said Wallace. 'I do not believe you have any idea who, or what, you are contending with. If you did, you would run a mile. By now it is much harder to get out. Soon it may be impossible. You're a woman. Any woman wants to love one man more than all humanity, and she will sell her entire race down river for his sake. You have to know this about yourself and be watchful. In mountain climbing, there is a move any climber knows well: the kind you can make in one direction but cannot take back. You can get quite stuck this way, out on ledges from which there is no return. If you think several moves ahead, however, you predict the danger and avoid it. You can step somewhere else.'

  'That's just what I've been saying about population.'

  'You see, your illness is already advanced. I am talking about your soul, and you are talking population growth. So tell me: how bad is it?'

'Nothing is bad.'

  'You just told me everything is bad. I believe you. My dear lady, why did you come here today?'

  Eleanor rubbed her face. 'Things have been happening lately. I'm changing—I think it's necessary, but I'm nervous. I'm not as
nice.
For some obscure reason, I thought you'd understand.'

  Wallace nodded. He was used to seekers making pilgrimages to his camp for spiritual advice. 'How deep in are you, Eleanor? Have you made the fateful move yet? Or can you still get back?'

  'I don't want to get back.'

  'I know you don't. I realize he is, on the face of it, handsome and even charming. But inside that head is a fetid, cankerous sore. He had already infected you, and if you let him he will destroy you. Calvin Piper is an evil man.'

  'You throw around
evil
a bit too casually for my tastes.'

  'I use the word rarely,' said Wallace, taking a moment to reflect that this wasn't exactly true, though he didn't use it nearly as often as he wanted to. 'You would at least concede that Piper is a racist?'

  'Calvin's not a racist. He hates everybody. Besides, he even had an African lover, didn't he?'

  'If you regard seducing the servants as a sure sign of racial openmindedness, most of the slave owners of the American South would qualify as founding members of the United Negro College Fund. Furthermore, your friend Calvin is a sadist.'

  'Rot!'

  'I've known him longer than you. We first met in Kenya, when Piper was involved in that Ugandan culling scheme. I'll tell you this much: he enjoyed it.'

  'I'm sure he liked the bush, the planes, the camaraderie. He has said you couldn't remain heartbroken and get the job done. That's a far cry from finding it fun.'

  'Hunters enjoy killing. That's what the sport is about.'

  'Not Murchison Falls. Without culling, all the elephants would have starved. However paradoxically, cropping was an act of love.'

  'You poor duped little lamb! I would submit to you that Calvin reviles elephants.'

  'Wallace! I'm sorry, but we seem to be talking about two different people. It's true he has a warped sense of humour, and some of his opinions are extreme, but they're for effect. He likes to offend to make people think, and rhetoric doesn't hurt anybody—'

  'Don't be so sure.'

  'He is also, despite what sounds like vitriol, very warm. I came here knowing hardly anybody, and he's been wonderful to me—'

  'I'm sure he has.'

  'I didn't mean in some sleazy, filchy way.'

  'No, that's not what Piper wants—or all he wants. You have minion-potential.'

  'What a lovely thought.'

  'Piper loves followers. He has plenty, more than you realize. But they curl up over time, into distorted, boggy little gnomes. I've watched them grow physically shorter.'

  'Hold on, Calvin is a friend of mine—'

  'You're aware Piper and I were once good friends as well?'

  'No, I wasn't. I admit he doesn't talk about you as a long-lost brother either.'

  'So if I were you I would assume something happened. Something did. To Piper. He once had a markedly different personality. On the outside, he maintains a magnetism, though I myself am repelled. Young, he was full of life: Africa was his garden. There was always, however, a little spoiled spot in him. He was never able to accept defeat, injury, disappointment. He still can't, and that makes him vengeful. The spoiled spot has spread over the field of his mind like potato blight. If you could reach behind his eyes, you would find nothing but noxious brown ooze.'

  'I think he's sad.'

  'And you're going to make him happy?' asked Wallace sardonically.

  'It's true he's sad about women. But he's also profoundly disturbed by what's happening to this continent and this planet. He and I share a deep concern over the growth of population and the fate of our ecosystem—'

  'If you believe that, you are not only under Piper's spell, you are an imbecile.'

  'Well, thank you very much!' She stood up.

  'You cannot imagine for a minute Calvin Piper is a philanthropist. And sit down. The fact is, "over-population" is a chimera, and without it Piper is a nonentity. As the man himself begins to have doubts, the more drastic he'll become. Piper's about to fly out of orbit, mark my words.'

  'What in God's name can be so dangerous about a
demographer
?'

  'Darkness does not distinguish between professions.'

  'The most untoward thing Calvin ever did was ship contraceptives and vacuum aspirators to countries where they were illegal. So he disguised copper-sevens as Christmas ornaments. As a result he lost his job. But he was still supporting something I believe in.'

  'All right. Why don't you find out something for me, then? I've been digging in data bases. Mind, his name was not on the top—minions—but Piper was definitely behind it. Why don't you discover for me why Piper has a grant from the WHO, quite a large one, and what it is actually for.'

  'Population research, I assume.'

  'No, no. This grant is from the AIDS programme.'

  She faltered. 'That's odd.'

  'I thought so as well. Isn't Piper the mad magus of mortality? So why would he do AIDS research?'

  'He did say,' she remembered, 'it wasn't the right disease.'

  'The right disease?'

  'But he was joking.'

  'Or so you assumed.'

  'Then he is a philanthropist.' She recovered. 'You just don't like the idea of his working on AIDS. It doesn't fit your portrait. And it's your adoptive hobby, isn't it? He's butting in.'

  'I hope the explanation is benign as that.'

  'You are one melodramatic mawk, Wallace.'

  'I have come to believe that in the twentieth century it is now impossible to be melodramatic.'

  'That's Calvin's line: no one can write science fiction any more. It gets surpassed by history.'

'Maybe because Piper has taken up writing it himself.'

'Science fiction?'

'History.'

  He saw her to her car. 'You will try to find out about that grant?' he reminded her. 'Though asking directly will probably get you nowhere. He'll lie. But a little nosing about might turn up some surprises.'

  'I can't see why Calvin would have anything to hide.'

  'On a personal note…' He paused decorously. 'I could suggest that semen is a powerful fluid and can accomplish the most insidious septicaemia, and you would dismiss me as mystical. In our current medical climate, however, the concept is no longer absurd. I don't know what habits he keeps lately, but there was a time Piper was quite a lady's man. These are hazardous times.'

  'I believe his habits are quite conservative,' she said icily. 'Thank you for your concern.'

  'All the same, we don't know what work he's about, do we? I guarantee you that man is toying with viruses. You're aware he keeps a lab?'

  'I know nothing about it.'

  'For such a close friend, we're not too clued in, are we? But no one knows where it is, you see. That would be interesting to discover as well. Find the lab.'

  'Why do you keep thinking I'm working for you?'

  'In your heart, you are still on my side.'

  'There are no sides that I'm aware of.'

  'That you're aware of.' He placed two fingers on her arm. 'It may be hindsight advice, but I would ask Piper to get tested.'

  'Thanks.' She didn't sound very grateful.

  'I would like to say you are always welcome. But there may come a point where I cannot retrieve you to the light. Then, while I find you an ingenuous, provocative guest, I will have no choice but to smite you with the worst of them.'

  Eleanor looked at him dully. She couldn't engage on this level, of course. He was soothing his own conscience; in future he could tell himself he tried.

  'As for Piper's deep affection for humanity,' Wallace added as an afterthought, 'why don't you ask him what happened

to his African girlfriend. It was his fault. You ask him what happened to Panga.'

  In the dust of her accelerating anger, he coughed and considered the truth of the matter: she wasn't as nice.

'That man is certifiable,' Eleanor railed, once more in Calvin's clipping den. While she spent single nights in her cubicle of wall-to-wall Formica to prove her independence, most of the week she slept at Calvin's. The evenings she endured New Jersey proved nothing to Calvin, who didn't seem to notice, and to Eleanor those long neon vigils proved only that she couldn't live without him. 'Why is Wallace so obsessed with you?'

  'Maybe he's homosexual, though that's a bit of a bore. He used to doggie after me in the sixties. Plagued my regular Nairobi bars. Where do you think he got the idea to go into demography in the first place?'

  'Is that why he's so consumed by your
minions
? That he used to be one?'

  'Minions, is it?' Calvin laughed. 'Maybe. But there are two sorts of minions, aren't there? The kind that truly want to trot after you and wish only to be tolerated; and the other kind that really wish to
be
you and haven't the flair. If Wallace was a minion he was the latter variety, and they always turn on you in time. In Washington, he was competent, but undistinguished. Meanwhile, to his consternation, I got the USAID post. Then he hit on this inspired gambit of rampant cheerfulness. For all his whinging about having his grants withdrawn, Threadgill made quite a splash—guest appearance on
Firing
Line
. These days you can't achieve any notoriety at all by pointing out the world is in the toilet. Everyone knows we're in the toilet. It's optimism that's become outrageous. Addled rays of sunshine have co-opted the avant-garde.'

  'He unnerves me. There's something ghoulish about the man. Those cadaverous bags under his eyes.'

  Calvin eyed her as she kept rearranging the new clothes she was still not used to. 'What did he say that's got you so rattled?'

  'I dislike hearing anyone tear into you like that.'

  'You have got to stop leaping to other people's defence. Leap to your own.

  'All right. He wasn't very sweet to me either.'

  'Into which soft spot has he sunk his shaft?'

  'He's got this weird—he thinks you're programming me or something.'

  'That would only upset you if you thought it was true. You have changed, haven't you?'

  'I suppose,' she said glumly.

  'Do you want me to fetch your plaid dresses that button to the chin? Return to regaling me about the CIA in Nicaragua?'

  'Just—that's not what you think of me, is it?' she burst out. 'That I "trot along after you" and "only want to be tolerated"?' She all but asked,
you don't think I'm growing shorter?

  'Don't be touchy. It's unbecoming.'

  'Calvin—' She stopped.

  'Mm?'

  'Could I have a whisky, please?'

  Eleanor got up and fidgeted, and while she scanned the titles of his pulp sci-fi, her attention was more on the adjacent armchair. Panga was watching. She smirked at this smart, sleek dress, at the increasingly abrupt and impatient way the new girlfriend moved, and seemed satisfied by the peculiarly callous remarks that were beginning to lash from the mouse's throat. Eleanor herself had noticed a growing capacity to demand, where not a few months before she would have sat in a man's living room all evening and never asked for a drink if it wasn't on offer. The
sing-swish, sing-swish
edged the air again.

  Calvin was bringing her a drink, and she'd have to ask him. It explained too much—the absorption with
mortality
. But one thing most of all.

  'Calvin—' She took a swig. 'The reason we don't make love. You're not—trying to protect me, are you?'

'Certainly not. I'm protecting myself.'

'From what?'

  'I thought we'd discussed this,' he said irritably. 'If you're not prepared—'

  'Calvin, you don't have something, do you?'

  'Have what?'

  'You're not—infected with anything, are you?'

  'Anything
like what
?'

  'Anything—sexual, anything—contagious.'

  Finally Calvin raised his head, light-bulb. 'Threadgill!'

  'This has nothing to do with Wallace.'

  'It has everything to do with Wallace! First I invented it and now I carry it! Obsessed? There's only one thing he's more obsessed with than me and that's his pet virus! And now he's convinced you I'm sero-positive!'

  'You mean,' she pressed shyly, 'you're not?'

  Calvin picked her up by the waist and swirled her a full turn. With those strong slim hands on her rib-cage Eleanor experienced a surge of desire like nausea. 'My darling,' he confessed gleefully, 'I am infected with death itself. I do not have disease. I am disease.'