This Other Eden (30 page)

The cab
took nearly five hours to reach the airport. This was not because Max
instructed the driver to dawdle, or visit the fleshpots, but simply because
that was how long it took for the man to stumble upon the correct destination.
London is the only city in the world which really takes its taxi driving
seriously, and considers it a genuine profession for which a person must be
trained. All other cities treat the art of people-moving with various degrees
of contempt, ranging from mild to utter. In Los Angeles it goes beyond that. It
is almost as if being completely lost all the time is a qualification for the
job.

In
truth, the only actual job qualification to be a cab driver in most cities is
being able to drive (ish). If you can drive a car, you can drive a cab. That’s
it, no special skills are required. In LA, people often take up the profession
on their first day in town, simply in order to get in from the airport. It’s a
curious situation; no other profession takes such a relaxed view as to what is
required to enter its ranks. The fact that a person is able to work a stove
does not mean they can readily find employment as a chef. Most people are
capable of lifting a scalpel and, no doubt, would be equally capable of
plunging it into somebody else’s flesh, yet this is not generally considered
sufficient justification for allowing them to practise as surgeons. But cab
driving insists on no such niggling restrictions. If you’ve got a car and can
turn it on then you’re away.

By
luck, endless references to the map, appeals for help over the radio and
shouted suggestions from passers-by, Max’s driver eventually managed to get him
the six miles from one of LA’s premier residential districts to the airport.
Max always gave cab drivers the same tip.

‘You’re
in America,’ he said and entered the departure hall.

Into
Africa.

The passport trick worked
at LAX and after the rigours of the cab-ride, Max hoped that he was finally on
his way. Unfortunately, the flight took a little longer than expected. It was a
sub-orbital, which normally involved a vertical take-off, a brief suspension in
the stratosphere whilst the Earth spun beneath it, followed by direct dropdown
to one’s destination: two hours on the schedule. But as Max’s flight commenced
its descent into Dublin it got hit by a pressure drop and blown out of
alignment.

This
sort of thing happened all the time. The weather hadn’t been right since they
replaced all the real forests with acidic little fern numbers. Billions of
Christmas trees just didn’t get the job done. Areas of high and low pressure
drifted all over the place and the average conventional flight was punctuated
by more altitude variations than a roller-coaster. Passengers would, without
warning, find their planes dropping thousands of feet in seconds, causing their
backsides to shoot upwards and hit the lockers above them. Some aeronautical
experts claimed that there had been instances where terrified passengers had
actually managed to crap on top of their own heads.

Anyway,
a huge squall over Europe meant that nothing was landing for a while and Max’s
flight got diverted into North Africa to wait out the weather. It was a bad day
to land in Addis. Sensational news had just been leaked. The locals had
discovered that the vast debt-funded constructions to the north of the city
which, it had been popularly presumed, were hospitals, power plants and food
research centres, were nothing of the kind. What had in fact been built was a
vast armoured Claustrosphere complex, into which the government and its
business friends would scurry should the Rat Run ever occur.

This
type of centralised Claustrosphere ‘town’ was becoming increasingly common in
the poorer countries of the world. Countries where there was no question of
universal eco-cover, but still plenty of rich and powerful people around who
didn’t want to die. Obviously, in the event of Earth death, isolated elite
eco-shelters would be extremely vulnerable to terrified dying people. The
answer was, of course, collective security.

The
Ethiopian president had tried to reason with the angry crowds. He had been
disarmingly frank.

‘Come
on!’
he said, his voice full of genuine surprise. ‘What’s the problem? Some of
us are rich, some of us are poor. What’s new? I’ve got a car, you haven’t. I’ve
got enough food, you haven’t. That’s always been the case, it didn’t make you
riot then. Why riot now? It’s bloody obvious that anybody who can afford a
Claustrosphere is going to get one. Just the way anybody who can afford decent
housing and medical care has always got it. There’s no difference. What’s all
the fuss about?’

It was
a powerful argument. The furious masses paused for thought and the president
pressed home his point.

‘Besides
which, the honkies and the Japs won’t lend us any money unless we use it to buy
their products. Well, we don’t want any more dams, do we? The ones we’ve got
turned the country into desert. We’ve got enough guns and helicopter gunships,
surely? So I bought Claustrospheres. What did you want me to do? Turn
down
the
money! Say no to billions and billions of dollars and ECUS and Yen? Are you
stupid or something?’

The
disturbances did not actually reach the airport where Max’s sub-orbital was
waiting. The populations of the poor countries had been so decimated by decades
of ever-encroaching land-death that there weren’t that many of them left to
riot, and those who did were not over fit. In the latter parts of the twentieth
century, world leaders had been greatly worried about what they saw as the ever
increasing population. They predicted that pretty shortly there would be tens
of billions of people wandering about the world wondering why they should be
the ones who were starving to death. Great barriers were erected in
anticipation of the day when the majority of the world’s population would
arrive uninvited at the door of the minority of the world’s population and ask
to stay for dinner. The Mediterranean Sea became a battle-line, all guns facing
south. The Panama canal was similarly armed, as were the Ural Mountains and the
borders of the nations of the Pacific rim. In the end, however, the problem
never arose. Deforestation, salination and desert growth provided a solution.
As large areas of the Earth died, so did the population who had lived upon it.
The much feared south-north population shift withered on the vine.

Scenic
route.

When Max finally arrived
in Dublin, he hired a car and drove straight out of the city, heading
north-west.

He had,
of course, only the vaguest idea of where he was going. If only he had taken a
little more notice of the journey he had taken with Rosalie in the back of the
Garda truck. On that occasion, however, Rosalie’s stare had absorbed his entire
attention and his one clear memory of the trip was a pair of fierce green eyes
drilling into his soul. Beautiful and splendid though those eyes were, they
were of little use as a landmark, and Max had little else to go on. The only
thing he could remember for sure was that Ruth and Sean’s cottage was about
three hours’ drive from Dublin, and that the route ended in a dirt track.

Sitting
in the plane on the tarmac at Addis, Max had tried to get his thoughts
together. He made a rough guess that the police convoy would have averaged
about thirty-five to forty miles an hour over the entire journey, which
suggested a distance of between a 110 and a 120 miles from the city. Max had
studied the map of Ireland which he found amongst the perfume ads at the back
of the unbelievably dull airline magazine. Ireland was a fairly small place and
it was clear that unless the Garda had driven by an extremely tortuous route,
which seemed unlikely, Max’s goal lay on either the west coast or in the
south-west of the country. He knew he could dismiss the North, because it had
been the Garda who had arrested him, not United Nations’ forces. Due to the
powerful Irish Catholic lobby in Congress, all Americans, even party-heads like
Max, knew that the UN kept the peace in the Six Counties, or attempted to, and
had done for decades.

Taking
up the little vanity bag with which he, as a first-class passenger, had been
presented, with compliments of Aer Lingus Orbital, Max removed the drawstring.
Using the scale on the map (one centimetre to ten kilometres) he measured the
string to approximate the 120 mile radius which he guessed would be the area of
his search. Then, tying a pen to one end of the string and pressing the other
end on to Dublin with his thumb, Max drew a semi-circular line on the map. The
line ran approximately from Sligo in the north-west of Eire, down through
Galway and then Limerick, ending up in Cork on the south coast. Max resolved to
begin at Sligo and weave his way down the country along this line, in the hope
that he might pick up a clue or landmark that he recognised.

At the
airport, a nice Avis car-hire lady asked Max where he was off to.

‘Sligo,’
he replied, suddenly feeling rather daunted by the task he had set himself.
Certainly, Ireland was small compared to the USA, but it was pretty big
compared with one not very large person. For a little while Max’s spirits
drooped and as he negotiated Dublin’s urban sprawl he pondered whether he might
not be on something of a fool’s errand. He did not even know whether Rosalie
was still in the country… she was on the run, after all, and he himself had
met her in California. On the other hand, Max was pretty certain that if she
wasn’t in Ireland, her grandparents would know where she was.

Once he
got away from the city, Max felt better. The bulk of the countryside still
operated under ‘day-time’, on account of the European-funded orbital sunscreen
and despite the ravages of acid rain the landscape still looked green and
blooming. What was more, the winds coming in off the porridge-like Atlantic
created a real (albeit false) impression of fresh air. Max, who had lived all
his life in a riot-torn super-city had scarcely realised that real green
pastures existed anywhere outside of old movies.

‘Now
this is cool and indeed righteous,’ he said to himself as he drove along with
the roof down. Had he happened to have a Geiger counter, he might have felt
differently. But what the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve over, not
until fist-sized tumours start popping up all over it, anyway.

Having
arrived at Sligo and mooched around the bay for a while, Max headed off slowly
towards Galway. He did not really know what he was looking for as he traversed
hither and thither along the little roads of West Ireland. He hoped that
perhaps something he saw might trigger some recognition. At first, he had
presumed that people who looked as disgustingly old as Rosalie’s grandparents
would be pretty notorious, but as he drove through village after village he
realised that craggy faces and hairy ears seemed to be quite fashionable that
year amongst the more mature citizens.

Suddenly
though, Max no longer felt in any particular hurry. Despite all the global
ructions which had become a part of daily life on Earth, there was something
about this part of the world that soothed the soul. It was possible to relax
amongst the ancient villages and hills. Max discovered new delights, like
lunch, for instance. Max could not remember the last time he had eaten lunch,
merely for the simple and private pleasure that could be got from it. In Max’s
world, lunch was a thing with which you cloaked your real intentions; getting
laid, getting a job, firing a close friend. To rediscover the delight of
lunching
alone
was a pleasure indeed. To be simply sitting with some
bread, cheese and pickle, pondering the trivia quiz on the back of a beer mat
was a genuine thrill. The pace of life was so much slower than in LA, although
Max wondered whether in the long run any less actually got done. Probably, he
thought, which was a very good thing.

Of
course, not everything about the Irish countryside is so relaxing or idyllic.
Socially, things can sometimes get a little more pressurised. It is not so
relaxing in this quiet world if you happen to want an abortion, or a divorce,
or to screw somebody other than your lawful spouse and perhaps adopt a position
other than the missionary. Max fell into none of these categories as he
meandered from one gorgeous view to another. Certainly, he would have liked to
have screwed Rosalie, and in any and every position she cared to favour.
However, since he was not in a position to do this, he confined himself to
drinking, eating and enjoying the scenery, and, hence, was made welcome
wherever he went. This was Max’s kind of country. You could get a pint of beer
in a post office and the licensing laws merely served to confirm the Irish
reputation for writing good fiction.

‘What
time do you close?’ Max had inquired on his first evening in Galway.

‘Well,
we close on the dot of midnight,’ the landlady had replied, ‘but you’ll be all
right for a drink until three or four.’

The pub
lock-in is a grand old tradition in rural Ireland, which the Garda often seem
to see as their duty to protect. As Max was shown out of the back via the
cabbage garden, he wondered whether he might not have found his spiritual home.