The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (123 page)

Of course.

There was a flitter park on the Juhu dyke, and I left the car, and driver, there, and started walking. Forty degrees of heat – mild, I was told, for the season. The sky blue like a gemlike flame. It poured heat down upon the world. The air smelt of several things at once: savoury smells and decaying smells, and the worn-out, salt-odour of the ocean.

I don’t know what I expected. I think I expected, knowing Nic, to find him gone Hippy; dropped-out; or a holy hermit chanting Japa. I pictured him surfing. But as I walked I noticed there was no surf. There were people everywhere: a rather startling profusion of humanity, lolling, walking, rushing, going in and out, talking, singing, praying. It was an enormous crush. The sound of several incompatible varieties of music wrestled in the background: beats locking and then disentangling, simple harmonic melodies twisting about one another in atonal and banshee interaction. Everybody was thin. Some were starvation thin. It was easy enough to pick out these latter, because they were much stiller: standing or sitting with studied motionless. It was those who could still afford to eat who moved about.

The bay harboured the poking-up tops and roofs of many inundated towers, scattered across the water like the nine queens in the chessboard problem, preventing the build-up of ridable waves. These upper floors of the drowned buildings were still inhabited; for the poor will live where they can, however unsalubrious. Various lines and cables were strung in sweeping droops from roofs to shore. People swam, or kicked and splashed through the shallower water. On the new mud beach a few sepia-coloured palm trees waved their heavy feathers in the breeze. Sweat wept down my back.

And then, as arranged, there was Nic: lying on the flank of the groyne with his great length of hair fanned out on the ground behind him. The first surprise: he was dressed soberly, in black. The second: he was accompanied by armed guards.

I sat beside my friend. It was so very hot. “I think I was expecting beach bummery.”

“I saw your plane come over,” he said. “Made quite a racket.”

“Airbraking.” Like I knew anything about that.

“I’m glad you’ve come, though,” he said, getting up on his haunches. His guards fidgeted, leaning their elbows on their slung rifles. They were wearing, I noticed, Marathi National Guard uniforms. “Good of you to come,” he clarified.

“People in Denver are pretty pissed.”

“There’s not many I’d trust,” he said. He meant that he did, at least, trust me.

“These boys work for you?” I asked.

“Soldiers. They do. The Marathi authorities and I have come to an understanding.” Nic hopped to his feet. “They get my hairstyle, and with it they get the popular support. Of the poor. I get a legal government to shelter me. And I get a compound.”

“Compound?” I asked, meaning: chemical compound? Or barracks? The answer, though, was the latter, because he said:

“Up in Bhiwandi. All the wealth has moved from the city, up to the mountains, up East in Navi Mumbai. The wealthy don’t believe the sea has stopped coming. They think it’ll likely come on a little more. The wealthy are a cautious lot.”

“The wealthy,” I said.

“So you can come along,” he said. “Come along.”

I got to my feet. “Where?”

“My flitter’s back here.”

“Are you allowed to park a flitter down here? I was told flitters had to be parked in the official park, back,” I looked around, vaguely. “Back up there somewhere.”

“I have,” he said, flashing me a smile, “special privileges.”

V

“What is it we do?” he asked me, a few minutes later, as the flitter whisked the two of us, and Nic’s two soldiers, northeast over the Mumbai sprawl. He had to raise his voice. It was noisy as a helecopter.

“Speaking for myself,” I said, “I work for the company. I do this to earn enough to keep the people I love safe and healthy. I include you in that category, by the way, you fucker.”

“And,” he said, smiling slyly, “how is Kate?”

I’ll insert a word, here, about Kate. It is not precisely germane, but I want to say something. I love her, you see. I’m aware of the prejudice, but I believe it goes without saying that she is as much a human as anybody. She has a vocabulary of 900 words and a whole range of phrases and sayings. She has a genuine and sweet nature. She has hair the colour of holly-berries. You’d expect me to say this, and I will say this: it is a particularly strange irony that if the same people who sneer at her personhood post treatment had encountered her before treatment, it would never occur to them to deny that she was a human being. In those circumstances they would have gone out of their way to be nice to her. And if before, why not afterward? Kate is happier now than she ever was before. She is learning the piano. Of all the people I have met in this life, she is the most genuine.

Do you know what? I don’t need to defend my love to you.

“She is very well,” I said, perhaps more loudly than I needed to. “Which is more than I can say for your portfolio.”

“A bunch of houses and cars and shit,” he shouted, making a flowing gesture with his right hand as if discarding it all. His was, despite this theatricality, an untterly unstudied insoucience. That’s what a lifetime of never wanting for money does for you.

“We could have saved more than half of it,” I said, “if you hadn’t absented yourself from the court the way you did.”

“All those possessions,” he said. “They were possessing me.”

“Oh,” I said. I could not convey to him how fatuous this sounded to me. “How very Brother Brother.”

He grinned. “Shit it’s good to see you again.”

“This hair thing of yours,” I asked him, having no idea what he meant by the phrase but guessing it was some nanopeptide technology or other that he had developed. “Is that a company patent?”

“You know?” he said, his eyes twinkling and his pupils doing that peculiar cycling moon-thing that they do, “it wouldn’t matter if it were. But, no, as it happens, no. As it happens.”

“Well,” I said. “That’s something.”

He was the hairstyle man, the saviour of the world’s poor. “I’m a benefactor now,” he boomed. “I’m a revolutionary. I shall be remembered as the greatest benefactor in human history. In a year I’ll be able to put the whole company in my fucking pocket.”

The flitter landed: a little series of bunny hops before coming to rest, that telltale of an inexperienced chauffeur.

We were inside his compound: a pentagon of walls thick-wreathed with brambles of barbed wire. Inside was a mass of people, and verybody without exception – men women and children – had long, ink-black hair. People were lain flat on the floor, or lolling upon the low roofs, or sitting in chairs, all of them sunbathing, and all with their hair spread and fanned out. A central tower shaped like an oil derrick with a big gun at the top – impressive looking to a pedestrian, but like a cardboard castle to any force armed with modern munitions. There was plenty of space inside the walls, but it was crowded fit to burst. Nic led me along a walkway alongside the central atrium, and the ground was carpeted with supine humanity. They were so motionless that I even wondered whether they might be dead: except that every now and then one would pat their face to dislodge a fly, or breathe in and out.

“Sunbathers,” I said.

And then, just before we went in, Nic stopped and turned to me with a characteristically boyish sudden spurt of enthusiasm. “Hey, I tell you what I learnt the other day?”

“What?”

“Crazy that I never knew this before, given all the work I’ve done. Discovered it quite by chance. Peptides, I mean the word, peptides, is from the Greek
πεπτιδια
and that means little snacks. There’s something you never knew. Means nuts, crisps, olives stuffed with little shards of sundried fucking tomato. Peptides means scoobisnacks.”

“Extraordinary,” I deadpanned. “And you with your Greek heritage,” I said, knowing full well that he possessed no Greek language at all.

At this he became once again solemn. “I’m a citizen of the world, now,” he said.

We went through: up a slope and into a seminar room. Inside was a horse shoe seating grid with room for perhaps sixty people. The space was empty except for us two. The room put a single light on the front of the room when we came in.

I sat myself in a front row seat. Nic stood before the screen, fiddling with his hair, running fingers through it and pulling it. “Why do you think you’re here?” he asked, without looking at me.

“Just to talk, Nic,” I said. “I have no orders. Except to talk. Man, we really ought to talk. About the future.”

“Hey,” he said, as if galvanized by that word. He flapped his arm at the room sensor and the screen lit behind him: the opening image was the Federal flag of India. “OK,” he announced.

The image morphed into diagrams of the chemical structures of self-assembling peptides that filled the screen: insectile wriggles of angular disjunction wielding hexagonic benzene rings like boxing gloves.

“Wait,” said Nic, looking behind him. “That’s not right.” He clicked his fingers. More snaps of his molecular tools-in-trade faded in, faded out.

“How very barnum- bailey,” I said.

“Calmodulin rendered in 3D,” he said. “I always think they look like party streamers. Although, in Zoorlandic iteration, they look like a starmap. There’s just so much empty space at the molecular level; our representational codes tend to obscure that fact. There, that there’s lysine.” He danced on the spot, jiggling his feet. “Lysine. A lot of that in your hair. NH2 sending down a lightning-jag of line to the H and H2N link, and O and OH looking on with their mouths open.” Images flicked by. “One of the broken down forms of lysine is called cadaverine, you know that? The molecule of fucking decay and death, of putrefying corpses. Putrescine. Cadaverine. Who names these things?”

“Something to do with hair?” I prompted.

“Lysine,” he said. “Hair.” He held his right hand up and ran his thumb along his other four fingers: the display flicked rapidly through a series of images. “What is it we do?”

“You asked that before,” I said.

“Innovations, and inventions, and brilliant new technological advances.”

“I’m just a lawyer, Nic,” I said. “You’re the innovator.”

“But it’s the Company, isn’t it? The Company’s business. These technological advances to make the world a better place.”

I suppose I assumed that this was another oblique dig at Kate; so I was crosser in response than I should have been. “So they do,” I said. “Don’t fucking tell me they don’t.”

He looked back eyes wide, as if I had genuinely startled him. “Of course they do,” he said, in a surprised tone. “Man, don’t misunderstand. But think it through. That’s what I’d say. This is me you’re talking with. Technological advance and new developments and all the exciting novelties of our science fiction present. It’s great. You get no argument on that from me.”

“I’ve just flown from Denver to Mumbai in an hour,” I said. “You’d prefer it took me three months sailing to get here?”

“You have grasped the wrong stick-end, chum,” he said. “Really you have. But only listen. Technological Advance is marvellous. But it is always, ineluctably a function of wealth. Poverty is immmiscible with it. People are rich, today, in myriad exotic and futuristic ways; but people are poor today as people have always been. They starve, and they sicken, and they die young. Poverty is the great constraint of human existence.”

“Things aren’t so bad as you say,” I said. “Technology trickles down.”

“Sure. But the technology of the poor always lags behind the technology of the rich. And it’s not linear. There are poor people on the globe today who do not use wheels, and drag their goods on sleds or on their backs. Some armies have needleguns and gelshells; and some armies have antique AK-47 guns; and some people fight with hoes and spades.”

“This is how you got the government of Marathi to give you this little castle and armed guard?

“The hairstyle stuff,” he said.

“And that? And that is?”

There is a particular variety of silence I always associate with the insides of high-tech conference rooms. An insulated and plasticated silence.

“It’s a clever thing,” he said to me, shortly.

“Of course it is.”

“It is a clever thing. That’s just objectively what it is. Works with lysein in the hair, and runs nanotubes the length of each strand. There’s some more complicated bio-interface stuff, to do with the bloodvessels in the scalp. When I said that none of this utilised Company IP I was, possibly, bending the truth a little. There’s some Company stuff in there, at the blood exchange. But the core technology, the hair-strand stuff, is all mine. Is all me. It’s all new. And I’m going to be giving it away. Pretty soon, billions will have taken the starter pills. Billions. That’s a big . . .” He looked about him at the empty seats. “Number,” he concluded, lamely.

“Hair?” I prompted.

“I’m genetically eradicating poverty,” he said. And then a gust of boyish enthusiasm filled his sails. “All the stuff we do, and make? It’s all for the rich, and the poor carrying on starving and dying. But this—”

“Hair . . .”

“Food is the key. Food is the pinchpoint, if you’re poor. Hunger is the pinchpoint, and it’s daily, and everything else in your life is oriented around scraping together food so as not to starve. The poor get sick because their water is contaminated, or because their food is inadequate and undernourishment harasses their immune system. The future cannot properly arrive until this latter fact is changed.”