A Creed for the Third Millennium (5 page)

Every night she dealt as efficiently with
her bed as she did with the house. First the hot-water bottle, filled to the
last gasp of steam with
boiling
water, the hell with what they said about
leaky caps; she screwed hers down and then tightened it by sticking a
spoon handle through the loop in its top and
levering it an extra half-turn. Next she wrapped it in a thick towel, two layers
of terry between the scalding rubber and her skin, and fixed the fabric securely
around it with diaper pins. And after that she put the bottle right near the top
of the bed, just where her shoulders would rest, placed her pillow over it, and
pulled the covers over the pillow. Five minutes by the clock, and down would go
the bottle by its own width but leaving the pillow behind, down would go the
bottle five minutes at a time all the way from where her shoulders would rest to
where her feet came. At which moment in time she took off cardigan, sweater,
skirt, petticoat (she detested trousers and only wore them outdoors), undervest,
long woolly drawers, thick pantyhose and bra, sliding like an eel — nothing
middle-aged about the movement, either — into the fleecy nightgown she wore in
defiance of the cold. She would not wear Dr Denton's. Dreadful things they were,
like long johns with feet; though she would not admit it even to herself, she
was beginning to suffer from urgency of micturition in the very cold weather,
and not for anything would she have permitted herself to soil a garment while
fumbling with its trapdoor.

The last task was to lever the top
bedclothes back just far enough to insert herself beneath them and
simultaneously to turn upward the warmed underside of her pillow. Then into the
bed like a flash, and warm warm warm warm
warm.
The greatest luxury of
the day, contact of herself with an actual radiator of tangible heat. She would
lie, mindless in bliss, and let the warmth soak through her skin and flesh into
her bones, as ecstatic as a child with its first ice cream. And then, with her
warmed feet encased in knitted bootees, she would ease the hot-water bottle
slowly up the bed until she could reach to drag it, beautiful warm radiant
thing, up across her chest, where it remained cradled within her arms for the
rest of the night. In the morning she used it, still
faintly tepid, to wash her hands and face.

Yes. He was growing into his strength at
last. He was a great man, this senior son. From the moment she had known he was
conceived she had also known that no matter how many other children came out of
her body, he was the
one.
And so she had geared her whole life, and the
lives of her other children, to a single purpose — assisting her firstborn to fulfil his destiny.

After Joe died it had been hideously hard
— oh, not so much from the money point of view, because Joe's people had money
and she came into his share of it, but from the fact that she was not by nature
cut out to be father as well as mother. Still, it had been done, the paternal
aspect of her troubles largely solved when she thrust the role of father onto
Joshua almost immediately. And undoubtedly that had helped Joshua develop by
obliging him from early childhood to assume the role of man rather than boy. Not
ever one to shirk responsibility, her firstborn. Not one to complain,
either.

And in the big front room of the second
floor (he shared this floor with his mother and sister, leaving the top floor to
be divided between his married brothers), Dr Joshua Christian prepared for bed.
His mother always put a hot-water bottle in the middle of it, but the moment he
climbed in he always shoved it down indifferently to his feet and lay without
feeling the cold, even on the thirty-below nights when on waking he found his
hair frozen to the fabric of his pillow. He did wear his Dr Denton's, and a pair
of hand-knitted socks, but no nightcap ever invented remained on his head, and
his sleep pattern was so restless his mother had been obliged to deal with his
down bedclothes by sewing them up into a kind of sleeping bag, much narrower and
more confining than the German down cocoons the rest of the
family — and the rest of America — used.

Someone had to tell them, all those
bewildered people wandering out there afraid and crying in this craven new
world. If you cannot grow babies, grow potted plants in the winter and
vegetables in the summer, find work for your hands and plenty of challenge for
your brains. And if the God of your church no longer seems to bear any
relationship to your plight and your way of seeing the universe, have the
courage to strike out to find your own God. Don't waste your years in grief!
Don't curse a central government that has no choice, only remember that the
choice was forced upon it. Only remember that you can keep yourself and America
alive if you give the children of the future an ethic and a dream tailored to
suit
them.
Don't wish for what might have been, for what your mother and
grandmother had in plenty and your great-grandmother in excess. One is
infinitely better and greater than none! One is a hundred percent more than
zero. One is beauty. One is love. One perfect one is worth a hundred genetically
warped ones. One is one is one is one is one is…

There had been a faint powdering of snow,
but nothing slippery enough to slow the buses down, and the temperature hovered
just sufficiently above freezing to take the fear out of walking.

Dr Judith Carriol sat about halfway down
the cold and stuffy bus, her furs wrapped about her tightly. Inside them she was
too warm, but they were a barricade against the man pressing himself hard along
her thigh. Her stop was approaching; she reached a gloved hand up to pull the
bell cord, then rose to give the man battle in earnest. Sure enough, he was not
about to let her climb across him unmolested, his hand was groping under her
sable hem while his eyes stared straight and innocent ahead. The bus was slowing
down. Her foot encountered his, and she brought the full force of her thin high
heel down on the base of his toes. He had guts, give him that. He didn't scream,
only jerked his foot away and withdrew himself from all contact with her. From
the aisle she turned to quiz him derisively with brows and eyes, then sidled
between the seats to the front of the bus as it came to a final squealing
halt.

Oh, for a car! Insulation against the
likes of the smarting predator back there in the bus alone. When a man boarded a
bus empty save for one woman, and sat himself down next to that woman, she knew
exactly what she was in for; an uncomfortable ride, to say the least. And it was
no use appealing to the driver for help, he never wanted to know.

Half expecting the man to make a
last-minute leap off the bus, she stood militantly on the sidewalk at the stop without moving until the
lumbering vehicle

pulled away, unpleating its accordion
middle with a groan. His eyes were glaring at her through the grubby window; she
raised her hand to him in a mocking salute. Safe.

The Department of the Environment
sprawled across the entire acreage of its very big block. Dr Carriol's bus
dropped her on North Capitol Street near H Street, but the entrance she used was
on K Street, which meant she had to walk right up North Capitol Street, past the
main entrance, and turn the far corner into K Street.

A small crowd had gathered about the main
entrance and was too involved with whatever lay at its middle to spare her a
glance as she strode by, tall and fashionable and elegant though she was. Her
sideways glance was cursory, her mind scarcely recording the fact that Security
was dealing with another suicide. The grandstand brigade all came to
Environment's environment to state their cases in the most forceful way they
knew how, convinced within the darkness of the tiny corners into which they had
boxed themselves that it was all Environment's fault, and therefore Environment
ought to see with its own eyes to what agonized abyss they had come. Dr Carriol
felt no urge to check whether this one was throat or wrists, poison or drugs,
bullet or something more novel. It was her job — given to her by the President
himself — to remove the reason why people needed to come to this squat vast
white marble building in order to put paid to existence.

Instead of a uniformed battery of
attendants manning a battery of telephones, her entrance door had a combination
lock triggered by voice, and the phrase varied day by day to a code gleefully
chosen by that arch joker in high places, Harold Magnus himself. Secretary for
the Environment. Surely, she thought sourly, the man could find better things to
do. But then she was prejudiced against him. Like all permanent career public
servants with real seniority, she dismissed the titular head of her department
as an incubus around the Departmental neck. A political appointee, he came with
a new President, was never a career public servant himself, and went through a
predictable sequence from new broom to worn-down stubble —
if
he lasted in the job. Well, Harold Magnus had
lasted, and lasted for the usual reason; he possessed the good sense to let his
career people get on with their jobs, and on the whole was secure enough within
himself not to be causelessly obstructive.

'Down to a sunless sea,' she said into
the speaker buried in the outside wall.

The door clicked and swung open. Crap.
Useless shit. No one in the world could have duplicated her voice well enough to
fool the electronics analysing it, so why have a changing password? She disliked
the sensation it gave her of being a powerless puppet hopping up and down at
Harold Magnus's slightest whim; but that of course was why he insisted upon
doing it.

The Department of the Environment was an
amalgamation of several smaller agencies like Energy that dated back to the
preceding century's second half. It was the brainchild of that most remarkable
of all chief executives, Augustus Rome, who had dealt with the people and both
Houses so deftly they had empowered him to serve four consecutive terms as
President of the United States of America. Thus he had guided the country
through its most troublous of all times, between Britain's entering the
Eurocommune, the series of bloodless popularly acclaimed leftist coups which
brought the entire Arab world under the Communist umbrella, the signing of the
Delhi Treaty, and the massive internal adjustments which came out of that
action. There were those who said he had sold them out, there were those who
said only his ability to give ground had preserved and cemented
the United States of America's sphere of influence in the much-closer-to-home
western hemisphere; certainly the entire western hemisphere from pole clear to
pole had swung markedly towards the U.S.A. in the last twenty years, though
cynics said that was simply because there was no alternative.

The present Department of the Environment
had been built in 2012, replacing the scattered suites of offices it used to
occupy all over town; it was the physically biggest of all the federal
departments, and it alone among them was housed in a comfortable state of energy
conservation. The waste warmth from its computer-filled basement fuelled an
air-conditioning unit that was the envy of State, Justice, Defence and the rest,
trying to achieve the same end result in structures never designed for the
purpose. Environment was white, to obtain maximum illumination from its
lighting; low-ceilinged, to save on space and heat; acoustically perfect, to
reduce noise neurosis; and utterly soulless, to reassure its inhabitants that it
was after all an institution.

Section Four occupied the whole top floor
along K Street, and incorporated the offices of the Secretary himself. To reach
it Dr Carriol walked easily up seven flights of chill stairs, down many
corridors, and through yet another voice-triggered door.

'Down to a sunless sea.'

And open sesame. As usual Section Four
was in full swing when she arrived; Dr Carriol preferred to work at night, so
she rarely appeared before lunch. Those she encountered were respectful but not
familiar in their greetings. As was meet. She was not only extremely senior in
Environment, she was also the head of Section Four, and Section Four was the
Environment think tank. Therefore Dr Judith Carriol was an enormously powerful
woman.

Her private secretary was a man who had
to endure the most ludicrous misnomer in the whole
Department. John Wayne. Five feet two, eighty pounds, astigmatic myopia and a
mild Klinefelter's syndrome that had prevented his attaining full sexual
maturity, so that he sported no beard and spoke in a childish falsetto. The days
when his name had been a hideous burden to him were long behind him now; he had
long ceased to rail against the fate which had decided that the original owner
of his name should outlast almost all his movie contemporaries to become
something of a modern cult figure.

He lived for his work and he was a
fantastic secretary, though of course he rarely did any basic secretarial work;
he had his own secretaries for that.

He followed Dr Carriol into her office
and stood quietly while she divested herself of the cuddly masses of sable
bought at the time of her last promotion and just before she ceased to buy
clothes in order to buy a house. Below the furs she was wearing a plain black
dress unrelieved by jewellery or other ornamentation, and she looked stunning.
Not pretty. Not beautiful. Not attractive in the usual connotation of that word.
She exuded sophistication, calm elegance, a touch-me-not-quality too daunting to
permit of her name's being on the list of Departmental lovelies. A touch-me-not
quality that meant her occasional dates were invariably with men who were
extremely successful, extremely worldly and extremely sure of themselves. She
wore her faintly wavy black hair like Wallis Warfield Simpson, parted in the
middle and drawn softly into a chignon on the nape of her neck. Her eyes were
large, heavy-lidded and an unusual muddy green, her mouth was wide, pink, well
sculpted, and her skin was densely pallid, too opaque to show the veins beneath
and without any bloom of colour anywhere. This interesting paleness against the
black hair, brows and lashes endowed her with an alluring distinction she was
well aware of, and used. The spatulate fingers of her very
long slender white hands were slender also, the nails kept short and
unvarnished, and they moved like a spider's legs; but her body, long in the
trunk and neither hippy nor busty, moved with a sinuous strength and unexpected
celerity that had given her the Departmental nickname of The Snake. Or so people
explained defensively when taxed with reasons why.