The Happier Dead (9 page)

The air was slightly humid, and Oates could make out, through the distortions of the curved glass surfaces, workers in white overalls moving silently between the casks. He became aware as he moved further into the room of a deep throbbing, as of an engine buried somewhere in the floor. It was as if he had entered the bowels of some huge ocean liner far beneath the level of the sea, where the pistons turned the great propellers.

The vats themselves were fifteen feet in height with a flat top sealed in metal, tapered to a rubbery teat beneath. Within the liquid, suspended with no part of them touching the glass, were the bodies of the new-young. Oates stood in front of one of the curved surfaces, and looked into the face of a famous actress.

She had stalked the silver screen since Oates was a kid, although her name was a stubborn blank. He had snuck into an 18 at the local cinema to marvel at her tits when he was fourteen years old. By the time he made Detective Sergeant, she was playing the hot mother of teenage kids in big-budget dramas. When Mike was born, she was clocking up awards as a mad matriarch in a big TV show. Shortly after that she’d had the Treatment, and was back to playing sex kittens. The papers had been awash with the return of a big screen idol, and Oates had been pulled up by an erotic déjà-vu quick enough to give him whiplash.

She was quite naked in the amniotic sac, her knees drawn slightly up to her chest, her arms positioned defensively with the loosely clenched fists almost touching her cheeks. Her nudity made her look more perfect and less human. He was so used to seeing her on screens, in the flesh she looked not quite to scale. Down the length of her forearm there ran a tattoo in gothic script,
omnia causa fiunt
, the colour of the ink enriched by the surrounding jelly. He moved closer to the glass, fascinated by this opportunity to observe such a famous face at close proximity, without the fear of her looking back.

He could make out the tiny declivities of the piercings in the lobes of her ears. As he gazed at her smooth face, he realised the reason for the unnatural sense of stillness. She wasn’t breathing. He could see the tiny pulse of blood in her carotid artery, but her chest was motionless, and between her lightly parted lips he could see the golden jelly filling her mouth. A metal tube coiled its way through the fluid, and passed up one of her nostrils, taped in place with a piece of white surgical tape. All at once one of her tawny arms twitched, and he started from the surface of the vat, almost spilling backwards.

“This is one of our missing guests. Do you still propose to interview her?” Miranda asked.

“Is she awake?”

“We have repressed her higher brain functions. She is in the state that exists before consciousness, a kind of deep sleep.” Miranda put her hand on the glass, and gazed fondly at her guest.

“She looks like she’s having bad dreams.”

“She is not having dreams of any kind. What you see is reflex motion, similar to a baby kicking in the womb, establishing muscle tone.”

“How long do they stay in here?”

“Ten days, immediately after their arrival. Would you like to see a birth taking place?”

“No thanks. I was there for my eldest and that was enough. You have any kids?”

“No.”

“I didn’t have you figured for a mum.”

“I’ve always thought it a neat trick, the way nature infuses the reproductive process with morality. We think we are being selfless when we take care of our children. We hold the loving mother as a symbol of moral rectitude. And yet all we are doing is protecting the passage of our genetic material. The Treatment relieves one of that particular hypocrisy.”

“There can’t be more than forty in here,” Oates said, assessing the ranks of vats. “My Sergeant reckons he’s yet to see almost a hundred. Where are the rest?”

As they left, from somewhere in the depths of that humid room, he heard the coughing and screaming that accompany a first breath of air.

T
HEY EMERGED INTO
an internal corridor, windowless but with many doors leading off at intervals of about ten feet. There were no portals in these doors, and Oates followed Miranda as she opened the first one on their left, and led him into a small cubicle. Inside was a politician Oates recognised. He had been a senior figure in the cabinet of the previous government. Politicians never had the Treatment whilst they were still contesting elections. Nothing makes a man seem more out of touch than becoming immortal. But straight after they’d been chucked out of office, they’d disappear from view for a while, a few years a least. You’d lose sight of them, until one day they popped up on some speaking tour or charity fundraiser, all the wrinkles and grey hair smoothed away by the gentle hand of Nottingham Biosciences. Because the Home Office were in charge of granting Treatment licences, immortality had become like the honours system, a perk of long public service.

The man was curled on his side. Beneath his body was a long foam bench, the cushioned surface cupping his hips and shoulders. His head lay awkwardly in the arms of a large middle-aged woman. His face was turned in towards her chest, and her arms were wrapped around his muscular torso. She was rocking him gently, and whispering to him. One of her great breasts swung free from the nurse’s smock she wore, and sat squashed between her ribcage and his cheek. Oates watched as the man’s cheek, slightly blue from a recent shave, undulated with a rhythmic sucking. The woman looked up at them and smiled pleasantly.

“How is Clarence?” Miranda asked.

“He’s been ever so good. And such a hungry boy!”

The man shifted slightly at the disturbance, and his nurse returned to shushing her charge.

“We teach them to suckle,” Miranda said to Oates. “We teach them to soil themselves again, to cry out for assistance rather than helping themselves. We teach them to dispense with any conception of personal dignity, with any conception of self-reliance.”

The politician turned to look at Oates, and his eyes were glassy. The long wet teat slipped from his lips. His dimpled chin and his nose glistened with thin milk. The smell of that milk was everywhere in the room, and, with the warmth in the air, Oates could feel the drowsy pull of it. He felt comfort settle on him like a hand on his shoulder, and the very next second a wave of nausea made more intense by the contrast. Minister for Education. That’s what the man had been. He’d been a fat, bald statesman with bushy eyebrows when Oates had last seen him on the news. Returned to his twenties he was quite handsome. He raised a hand to Oates, and smiled a gurgling smile. When his lips parted, Oates could see he wore rubber caps on his teeth, presumably to spare the nipples of his wet-nurse from adult incisors.

“If I spoke to him, could he understand me?”

“Have you ever felt very drunk, and then something terrible happens, and you suddenly find yourself stone cold sober? That would be the effect on one of our guests if you were to interrupt any given stage of their upbringing. We do not interfere directly with the mental process, beyond the soporifics administered in the womb stage. We rely on the primal memories to re-emerge of their own accord. These first two weeks lay the foundation for the rejuvenating effects of their fortnight at St Margaret’s. It cleanses the soul of experience. Do you remember the children’s story about the wind and the sun? Each of them wants to make the man take off his coat. The wind blows and blows to force it off, and the man just pulls it tighter and tighter. Then the sun comes out and warms him, gently, gently. And in that blissful warmth, he gladly shrugs it off.” She reached down to touch the man’s face, with a genuine tenderness that surprised Oates.

“The adult personality is like the coat we wear against the world. The men and women here tend to be the strongest, the most powerful, the ones who have had to clasp their coats very tightly against the gale. Then they come here, into the warmth, and we help them to take it off.”

“Why? Why would anyone want this?”

“To be young again.”

They walked out through the door and back into the sunshine. Oates took a deep breath. Despite the warmth of the artificial sun, he shivered. He felt as if he had just walked through a spider’s web, and even after he had brushed it away there was still the feeling of the residue on his skin, and the suppressed fear that maybe the spider itself had come with him somewhere just out of sight, on the back of his coat or in his hair. He took out one of the old-fashioned cigarettes, and lit it. They stood silent for a few minutes, Oates trying to regain his composure, and Miranda waiting patiently for him to do so.

“I had a case once,” he said at last. “Rich bloke used to pay this woman in the West End to walk up and down his back with great big stilletoes on.”

“That hardly seems the kind of peccadillo requiring the attention of the police.”

“She used these railings either side to hold her weight. One day she slipped. She was a big girl. The spike went right through his ribs. It took four lads just to unpin him from the floor. That’s what that reminded me of. Those businessmen who like to be spanked.”

“It may look disgusting to you. A medical intervention is seldom attractive. I dare say you might find bowel surgery or an open-heart transplant equally repellent. But believe me, we give these people relief from their suffering. They can have a second first kiss. For a time, they can take pleasure in life again.”

“How many more rooms are there like that one?”

“Another fifty. We are expanding, of course.”

“And how long do they stay here?”

“A fortnight in this induction block, and then straight into school. The first day or two they are a little shaky, but the mind gravitates very quickly to that perceived ideal of happiness in late adolescence. The only problem is time and expense. It costs a tremendous amount to take a guest through a full upbringing. We use the double-day cycle within the dome to alter the guests’ perception of the passage of time, but it never seems long enough. They are always so reluctant to leave. And the effect is temporary.”

Oates recalled the sight of the new-young men and women he had seen playing cricket on his arrival, and knew what it was that had been so uncanny. The way they moved wasn’t right. If you looked closely at one of the new-young, you could see in the way they held themselves something distinct from the real-young. Although they might be no more than twenty or twenty-five biologically, they carried in their flesh a memory of the little injuries which begin to accumulate in age, and from which recovery is incomplete.

Oates had felt them himself, these little intimations of death. His right ear sometimes clicked from having a rifle fired against it for so many years, and the cochlea shrank from the siren. Another decade, two maybe, and he’d be starting to go deaf. A young man knows he will live forever the way a fanatic knows there’s a god, whatever the evidence to the contrary. Oates had been an immortal in his own mind when he first went to war. But as he had aged, his body had told him different.

The new-young, most of them at least in their seventies, had heard those intimations of doom. Sometimes on a news programme or a TV show you’d see them from behind, and they would look old for a fraction of a second, despite their agile figures. Deep in their fresh new bones was buried the memory of what it meant to get arthritis in the fingers, to lose your sight, to feel your knees when you climbed the stairs. It made them cagey of their perfect bodies where a healthy young man or woman was generous with their strength and beauty. They believed in death, these rich immortals, in a way the real-young never could, though the real-young would be in the ground soon enough when compared to the new-young’s eternity.

Yet it was not this instinctive care which Oates had seen out on the playing fields, and on the tennis courts that morning – rather its opposite. The twenty-somethings on the playing fields ran and called and tumbled over in a bundle of flailing limbs. The way they moved had not only the sureness of young adulthood, but even the coltishness of late childhood. Their running was undisciplined, experimental, as each new step provoked fresh amazement. They were testing their powers like pubescent girls with their new beauty, pubescent boys with their first muscles.

“I’ll need to speak with everyone who might have had any contact with Mr Egwu since he came into the spa.”

“None of these people could possibly have met Mr Egwu.”

“I want them all out of their tubes.”

“You would be destroying millions of pounds worth of therapy, as well as upsetting some of the most powerful people in the world. And, as I told you, as you have seen for yourself, it would be pointless. Our phase 1 guests are quite unconscious, and our phase 2 guests will have very limited recall.”

“I couldn’t care less about their fucking holiday.”

“Detective Chief Inspector, as I have tried to explain to you, this is not just some leisure exercise. These people are really suffering. You have no idea what the Tithonus Effect can do to the mind. It must be stopped in its early stages. It is horrible. It is horrible!”

Miranda’s voice had risen in volume as she spoke, and her final words rang out in the empty clearing. Oates felt a surge of satisfaction. For the first time, he felt her entire attention alight on him. Had he been pushing her, unconsciously, for just this engagement?

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re not sorry. You are pleased. Is there something here that has angered you? Do you wish to punish these people? Are you jealous even? Or do you think they deserve it?”

“I’ve got a job to do and I’m going to do it.”

Miranda nodded, and the flash of passion was gone in an instant. Her air of distraction returned, and whatever luminous element of her consciousness had briefly turned on Oates, its light passed again into the interior of her thoughts.

“We’ll see. You are an admirer of classical mythology, Inspector. Did you ever wonder why the ancient gods were so cruel? Why they were so violent?”

“No.”

“No?”

“It just made sense to me. More than a loving god anyway.”