Tomorrow’s World (7 page)

Making myself comfortable on the bike—or as comfortable as it's possible to be on a bicycle seat—I decided not to be childish, and just to go at my own pace.

But of course, once I got warmed up, I inevitably found myself going faster and faster in a futile effort to match the Numbers on either side of me. I never learn.

The Number on my right turned to sneer at me. It was a Pareto. I don't know if it was the same one who'd shown up in Doug's apartment that morning—they really do all look the same to me. He certainly had the same sneer. That sneer was like a challenge laid down, and I'd no choice but to accept it.

What followed was the work-out equivalent of a staring match. I'm in pretty good physical condition, but I couldn't live with him for more than five minutes. And I was only working at level eight resistance, while he'd be on level ten. They always work at level ten. With my legs turning to jelly, I had to slow down. In a pathetic attempt to save face I turned my head to one side and pretended I'd just got a call on my hear-ring. I went so far as to pant, “Okay, I'll be right there.”

The Pareto was watching me and sneering big-time now. He knew there hadn't been any call, and he knew I knew he knew, and I knew—

Well, you get the picture.

I couldn't meet his eye any more than I could match his pedaling power. Feeling every one of my forty years, I got off the bike and walked slowly to the showers. My little act should have involved rushing, but I couldn't have managed that even if Perfect Paula had been waiting for me in the showers, ready to express a heretofore stoically suppressed love with enough passion to turn ice-cold jets of waters into clouds of steaming mist.

The shower cleansed the sweat from my skin but not the lactic acid from my muscles, so I had to take the elevator, although it cost me pleasure points I'd rather have spent on a timesphere trip. I was about to tell the lift to take me to level two, because that's where my apartment is, but on the spur of the moment I said, “Three.” I wanted another look at Doug's flat to see if I'd missed anything first time around.

When I got there all his personal possessions were gone, which was a bit strange. It usually takes longer than that to clean out the apartment of a deceased. I tried imagining where everything had been. First I envisaged the body, then the plants.

And as soon as I thought about the plants I again had the feeling of something being not as it should be, just like when I'd looked at Doug's rolled-down sleeve. I don't know how long I stood there, trying to put a finger on what was bothering me, but it was long enough to realize I could stand there all night and not get any further forward.

And it was long enough to start thinking about Paula. Not about anything she'd said while we were in the apartment that morning, but how she'd looked as she stood there. I seem to have been ending every day by thinking about Paula lately. I used to think about her to stop thinking about Jen, because it hurt too much to think about Jen, and because Paula was an ideal object of desire—physically beautiful yet so emotionally cold I could never get close enough to be hurt by her.

However, somewhere along the line I'd started thinking about Paula in her own right, rather than as a distraction from Jen. I started looking for things in her eyes, signs that she had thoughts and feelings I could relate to. Most of the time I only saw the same gemstone coldness or mocking sneer that was present on the face of every other Number.

But increasingly there were times when I thought I saw something else—a look that might have been longing, though for what I don't know. Then again, it could have been a figment of my imagination. Whatever, it never lasted long enough for me to be sure it had really been there; it changed into that gemstone coldness the instant she realized I was watching her.

I thought about Paula's response to the Pareto that morning; the way her eyes moved over his body, and his moved over hers. There was no getting away from it. I was jealous. I felt a sliding sensation in my guts. The kind that comes from facing up to an unpalatable truth. I'd always had a crush on Perfect Paula, but it had been a purely physical thing. Now it was turning into something more, which frightened me for all sorts of reasons.

Firstly, I've had my heart well and truly broken once before, and I've no desire to go through anything like that again.

Secondly, if there's one thing I'm sure about, it's that a Name wanting anything more than a one-night stand of no-holds barred carnal knowledge with a Number is asking for a world of trouble. I've seen it so often in my work. I'd say 90% of crimes cross the genetic divide, and about 90% of those also cross the gender divide. It's a case of opposites attracting—briefly and unequally—and then repelling with far greater force than they attracted. The conventional wisdom is that, due to their superior physical condition, Numbers are better lovers. Because of that, and their physical beauty, they're sought after by Names. Where
we
score is in being far more emotionally responsive, which apparently never fails to amuse and strangely arouse Numbers. On the face of it, that should mean everyone is happy.

However, the resulting matches are made in Hell rather than Heaven. Numbers are apparently incapable of matching their lovemaking with affection, and their contempt and sense of superiority always show through. Once they've made love with a Name, the novelty wears off and they get bored. They're simply incapable of connecting emotionally—probably because they've no hidden hopes and dreams to share. So the morning after, while a Name might experience the kind of crush you can have for physical perfection, the Number is bored and ready to move on. The kindest interpretation is that Numbers don't care about whatever hurt the subsequent brush-off involves for their Named partner. But I'm pretty sure they actually enjoy toying with our emotions, which they can do with impunity as they can't be hurt this way in return.

I think it's another way in which they try to make themselves feel better for not having our capacity to love, dream and wonder—they try to make those things seem like worthless, pathetic self-delusions born of weakness and need, and so convince themselves they're better off without them. They build themselves up by constantly bringing us down, never missing a chance to find fault with us or mock us; to point out our illogicalities, frailties and foibles. In other words, the things that make us human.

And nothing makes us more human than love.

Whatever else we are, we're not stupid and we know it'll end in tears. But our hearts rule our heads—I suppose that's the difference between us and them in a nutshell—and we're capable of loving people who we know can never love us back. Sometimes I think that might even make them more attractive to us. I know it makes Paula more attractive to me.

And then it dawned on me: maybe Doug MacDougall had lost his heart to a Number. He had a lot of heart to lose, and maybe he hadn't been able to go on living without it.

Try as I might, I couldn't imagine Doug falling for a Number—he'd fall for a Jen.

But then again, I'd fallen for Jen, and was also on the brink of falling for Paula.

Go figure.

Unrequited love of a Number wasn't a satisfactory explanation for Doug MacDougall's death, but it was the only one I had. If it hadn't been for what happened when I got back to my apartment, I might have settled for it.

It's funny, you can bring all your experience and analytical powers to bear on a problem to no avail, and it's when you've given up and are doing something else completely that the answer finally comes to you. I'd made my final cup of coffee for the day and was about to pour the last of it into my pot plant when it hit me. Not the pot plant, but the thing that hadn't been right about Doug MacDougall's apartment.

D
OUG HADN'T WATERED HIS PLANTS.

There was undoubtedly much I didn't know about Citizen MacDougall, but there was one thing I could be certain of—he would have watered his plants before killing himself.

Now I was sure it wasn't suicide.

Unfortunately, I was equally sure Paula wouldn't be convinced by my certainty. She wouldn't understand Doug MacDougall's love of living things. She wouldn't understand that, even if he was capable of harming himself, he'd never have harmed the precious plants he'd gathered around him. Not even by a sin of omission like failing to water them before he took his own life.

I was nowhere near establishing a case, let alone breaking it, but I came painfully close to breaking the only piece of evidence. The syringe. Paula had obviously dismissed it from her thoughts as an irrelevance. I'd simply forgotten all about it. I didn't remember again until I was getting dressed for work the next morning and put both feet in the same leg of my coveralls. I barely managed to get a hand out in time to break my fall and avoid crushing the little plastic tube in my pocket.

My excuse for forgetting about the syringe is that the call-out to the apartment of the Slo-Mo lovers came right after I put it in my pocket, and what we found in the apartment was enough to make anyone forget about anything.

My excuse for putting both feet in the same leg of my coveralls is that I'm not a morning person, even after a good night's sleep—and, instead of a good night's sleep, I'd had a dream that was nearly as messed up as the world at the end of the Old Days.

In the dream I was in Rio, going around the places mentioned in my favorite travel article. As so often in dreams, things had gone crazy somewhere down the line. For instance, the giant statue of Christ the Redeemer on top of Corcovado was in fact a statue of Doug MacDougall, and when I walked along Ipanema beach it was with Paula, not Jen.

Jen did put in an appearance, as a mermaid washed up on the beach. Her hair was entwined with seaweed, and she stared up at me with sightless eyes that were like holes in the fabric of humanity.

Paula stepped over Jen as if she was a stranded jellyfish. She tugged my hand to get me to follow, but I was transfixed by those sightless eyes that were seeing nothing and everything.

I don't know how the dream would have ended, because the imaginary Paula jerked my hand hard enough to wake me up.

When I got to the station house I didn't mention the dream to Paula. Or the fact I'd fallen over while getting dressed. I didn't mention the syringe, either. Since the case was closed she would have asked me to hand the syringe over for recycling, and I didn't want to do that until I'd had it checked for prints.

Because it wasn't strictly official business I had to conduct the check in my own time. Lunchtime, to be exact. While Paula headed to the haven canteen—all meals are served there, to simplify food rationing and distribution—I headed for LogiPol HQ in Community Central.

It's quite funny; I can remember hearing a line in an Olden Days movie where an office worker says he's stepping outside for ‘a breath of fresh air.' Nowadays if you step Outside for anything more than a few breaths the air is so far from fresh you need a filtermask. There's a dispenser next to every Outside door. The dispenser looks like a box of paper handkerchiefs tacked to the wall, and the filtermasks are like ultra-thin tissues. You spread one out on the palm of your hand, put your hand over your mouth and nose as if you're about to sneeze, then breathe on it. The heat and moisture of your exhalation softens the mask and turns it into a translucent membrane that lets you talk and breathe but filters out the worst of the pollutants in the air. After about thirty minutes you notice an acrid smell and a metallic taste, and that tells you the filter's saturated with toxins. If you don't change it, the protective membrane darkens, dries out and falls off, and the same things that turned it toxic go straight into your body.

Prolonged exposure to those toxins does all manner of nasty things, from impairing your lungs to screwing up your immune system and DNA. That's why Numbers and the more sensible Names never go Outside unless they have to. It's also why the Ecosystem has designed havens to be as self-sufficient as possible, and laid out each community to make sure its central zone is within a short walk of all surrounding havens. These central zones contain all the things that won't fit in a haven. Like a hospital, university, pleasure dome, and the civil service building. The latter houses, among other things, the Justice Department, including the Community Police and LogiPol headquarters, and the forensic labs.

There was no queue at Haven Nine's filtermask dispenser. It's only at night, in the hour before the Pleasure Dome opens, that a queue forms. I slotted my card in the reader. Ten points came off my account and a filtermask came out the dispenser. I slapped the membrane over my nose and mouth, fought back the urge to gag at the antiseptic smell, then retrieved my card and waited for the first set of doors to open. When they did I walked through them. The inner doors closed behind me before the outer ones opened. There was a slight hiss as the pressure equalized; the havens are sealed units. There's only one air intake for each haven, and all of the air it takes in is purified before being circulated.