Game Control (20 page)

  He grunted. 'We're still drafting.'

  'So you're hot air, too. Like the rest.'

  'I have never at any point in my career been hot air.'

  'Oh, man of action,' she jeered. 'Great White Hunter of the population game.'

  'We have to get our parameters straight. They are nearly complete. If
who
is not solved before
how
, the whole scheme could end up a hash.'

  '"Parameters—?"'

  'You didn't get to read much in there, did you?'

  She answered honestly, 'No.'

  'The issues are stupendously complex,' he began, no longer able to remain seated and beginning to pace. 'How much of the reproductive age to target, how much to trim off the bottom and the top so we're left with a viable society and not just a crop of kids and their grandmothers. That's one of the problems of AIDS, you see: too centre-cut. Or economics: maintaining enough of an adult labour pool, keeping agricultural and industrial capacities viable. In all these calculations, there has to be a wide acceptable margin of error. And there will be sacrifices, even cock-ups—we're resigned to that. Sectors of some economies, or possibly whole countries, may fall out. Yet they will, based on research of earlier cataclysms—wars, natural plagues and famines—recover with astonishing rapidity.'

  Eleanor was beginning to feel physically strange—carbonated and lifted above the sofa. She felt obscenely calm. The room had scooped and upended, as if reflected in a spoon. Calvin, worked up now, wanting to explain the
complexities
, sounded like a small boy piping about his go-cart. Eleanor was trapped humouring this
enfant terrible
when she would prefer to slip over and gossip with Panga. She wanted to tittle

tattle about boyfriends. Did he tell you about his work, Panga? Could you make head or tail of it? Eleanor had been a precocious child, an articulate woman, but just now she would like to be a pea-brain. She defended herself with all the feeblemindedness she could marshall, but intelligence, like information, cannot be defeated; it is simply there. So she knew. She had not said it to herself in so many words, but she knew. She wondered when she would have a reaction.

  'The stickiest wicket is politics,' Calvin was exhorting. 'It would have been more ideologically convenient to move twenty years ago, when growth rates in the First and Third World weren't quite so disparate. But now the First World barely has a growth rate. Yet if we strike only in undeveloped countries, we create a politically destabilizing situation of astounding proportions. Therefore, we must take a token shave off the US, Europe, Russia. And more than a shave off China, that goes without saying. They're already backing us heavily, and they've more than a clue what we're up to.'

  'Calvin,' she asked nicely, 'how many?'

  'Good question. Ehrlich thinks a steady-state of three is ideal. But we think that's a bit low, and besides, probably overly optimistic on the technical side. We could see ending up at five, about where we are now—crowded, but a damned sight preferable to fourteen. We may even be stuck with six, at the end of the day. But to finish up at six, you've absolutely got to cut back to four by the turn of the century. So that means taking two, minimum, off the top. We're setting our sights on 1999. We thought Nostradamus would be pleased.'

  'Have you noticed,' she inquired, 'that when you quote these figures you leave off the
billion
part?'

  'Even great white demographers have their shy side.'

  'There's another word you're not using. It's ordinarily such a favourite.'

  'Which is?'

  'Death. Or,' she corrected, '
mortality
. Since death gets on your hands, doesn't it?
Mortality
happens only on paper.'

  'What are you getting at?'

  'I want you to do me a favour. I want you to say out loud—' She took a breath. 'Out loud to my face:
in 1999 I plan to murder two billion
people
.'

  'Mmm,' he hummed noncommittally. 'I am devising a strategic, first-strike cull of the human race. In the interests of preventing extinction; or worse, the devolution of the species to head lice.'

  'No. Say it. The way I said it. I don't ask for much.'

  He shrugged. 'Very well. In 1999 I plan to murder two billion people. Happy?'

  She looked at him in dull disbelief. She felt—well, she felt absolutely nothing, if she was to be honest. The concept was too big and bizarre to get her head around. It remained a sentence. She had no response besides,
What
?, an insipid compulsion to ask him to say it again when she had heard him the first time. In fact, her strongest impulse was to laugh. Curiously, had Calvin confessed plans to kill a single rival—say, Wallace Threadgill—she would be up in arms, telling him to be sensible, that there were limits. If he proposed killing two billion instead she couldn't come up with a reaction of any description. Who could take this seriously? But look at him. She had never seen him more serious in his life. Is this
neutrality
, Calvin? Have you sucked me to Andromeda as well?

  Abruptly a great deal of what had always seemed unfathomable to Eleanor now made sense. How many autocrats had supposed about earlier nuisances, 'Don't you sometimes want them to
go away
?' It was easier to eliminate six million than 6,000, or six—somehow, the more zeros the better. Calvin had added nine of them.

  Numbly, she asked the logical next question. 'How?'

  'QUIETUS—'

  'What's that?'

  He looked at her sharply.

  'I mean,' said Eleanor hastily, 'what does it stand for?'

  'Quorum of United International Efforts at Triage for Ultimate Sustainability. QUIETUS has code-named the apparatus Pachyderm. We're exploring viruses, fast-acting poisons, microbes. But the technical parameters—'

  'More
parameters
,' Eleanor moaned.

  'Are staggering. Pachyderm has to be quick, single application, taking no more, say, than a week, ideally overnight. Can't allow time for some beneficent to cook up a cure. And

we are opposed to suffering. Most deaths are painful, that can't be helped, but prolonged moribundity is unacceptable. The most difficult engineering feat, however, is to target the proper percentage of the population. We need an ailment to which 30 to 35 per cent are susceptible and the rest immune. And Pachyderm has to slice the proper age groups. Still, you'd be amazed, with a grasp of DNA, what's possible. How tailored a virus can be.'

  'But you're no epidemiologist.'

  'I
know
epidemiologists. Just as I know economists, biologists and more sophisticated demographic modellers than I. Believe me, I know the best of them all.'

  'Surely no scientist of integrity—'

  'You'd be surprised.'

  She was not surprised, or only at herself, at her capacity to pursue like a thorough journalist with a micro-cassette, 'You're not getting involved in eugenics, are you?' How could she even think of such questions?
What had Calvin done to her?

  'We toyed with eugenics at first. But the demographics alone are formidable. We had to stick to our purpose—quantity, not quality. It was not out of the question, I suppose, to design an organism that only attacked stupid people. But I have a soft spot for stupid people; some of the most endearing sorts I've met have been pig thick. It's the clever ones cause all the trouble.'

  'Like you.'

  'Like me.'

  'I don't understand your angle on this whole thing.'

  'I have lots of them. I find it likely, for example, that I am a ghastly mutation that must be stopped. In which case, someone must stop me. But that's not my job. I don't have to do everything, do I? Perhaps it's yours, Eleanor.'

  'I haven't applied.'

  'Anyway, eugenics?' he resumed gamily, tossing one of Malthus's chewed-bald tennis balls up and down. 'I suppose if we're to dwell in the realm of fantasy—'

  'Which we have been doing all night—'

  'It would be attractive to target the chromosome of sadistic deviance—to concoct a little nostrum that eradicated all the horrible people.'

'Everyone's horrible some of the time.'

  'Most of the time. There'd be no one left. But if I could be selective? I would save the contented. Ordinary, pleasant people, not very thoughtful and with no ambition and hopelessly in love with someone who loved them back. Only a handful would remain, but that might be a planet I could stand.'

  'You would never qualify.'

  'The very attraction of the vision is as a world where I wouldn't belong. Groucho Marx.'

  He bounced the ball medatively on the wooden floor,
pong, pong.
'We shelved the eugenics angle early on. It was a biological can of worms and a moral hornet's nest.'
Pong
. 'Instead, we will design Pachyderm to imitate nature: gross, random unfairness, with no regard for excellence or good behaviour. The trouble is—'
Pong, pong.
'Nature hasn't been doing a good enough job, though she will eventually move in if we don't, and—'
pong
—'without
parameters.
Nature doesn't care about suffering. Smallpox, leprosy, plague? Only humans have invented injections and overdoses of sleeping pills. Mind, I don't especially want to kill anyone.'
Pong
. 'I just don't want them to be there any more.'

  
Thwap
. The tennis ball hit the carpet. To Eleanor's relief, he left it there; its relentless punctuation had been driving her mad. Maybe it was true, then, that only the little things got under her skin.

  'You don't want a virus,' she said, nudging the ball out of his reach with her toe. 'You want an eraser.'

  'With what's feasible now, an eraser's not far-fetched.' His eyes ranged the table for another object to torment. His hands clawed at each other's already clean, pearly nails, until they discovered the glasses in his shirt pocket, and set about furiously de-smearing their lenses with the tail. It would take one thorough burnishing, Eleanor reflected, to get Calvin Piper to see straight.

  'Though we have faced logistical limits,' he admitted, the shirttail circles becoming obsessively tinier. 'At the outset, we investigated substances which merely created a percentage persistence of infertility. We came up against a technological brick wall. It is our command of death that has advanced in

this century, well beyond research in contraception. I don't need to tell you that this species has designed a hydrogen bomb, but not a birth control pill without side effects.' He tried on the spectacles and didn't seem to like what he saw; he took them off and sat down.

  'We also pursued libido suppressants,' he proceeded, holding his frames up to the light and squinting. He seemed to be talking to himself; no doubt he did talk to himself like this all the time. No wonder his coffee got cold. 'Benperidol, ethinyl oestradiol and cyproterone acetate—drugs that were originally developed to administer to convicted perverts. But they had almost no effect at all on the sexual enthusiasm of test populations. Did you realize,' he raised brightly, with the amiable informativeness of a cocktail party anecdote, 'that the main reason people copulate is not to orgasm?'

  Eleanor was all too aware she was not at a party. 'You said eugenics was a "moral hornet's nest". Do you mean QUIETUS is considering the ethics of Pachyderm at all?'

  'Almost nothing but. Find it ironic as you like, but QUIETUS is my very purchase on morality. Its sole purpose is the perpetuation of the human race in some form any of us can tolerate. This is not
neutrality
, my dear. This is Calvin Piper with his feet on the ground.'

  Calvin's feet were propped high on his elephant bone.

  'Now, I concede we run into ends-means problems.' Calvin rose and began to pace again, professorial. All he lacked was a pointer and a blackboard, and he glanced over at his student's increasingly lassitudinous sag on the sofa as if annoyed she was not taking notes. 'But that has always been a bugbear for ethicists, hasn't it? Thou shalt not kill, and then you let the Japanese help themselves to Hawaii? If someone doesn't do something about population, we are headed for a brutal, cramped, cultureless, cut-throat
sty
. I believe that, Eleanor, it is all I believe. I'm willing to prevent it, even if the cure is cruel. Ends have justified means from the year dot. Doctors routinely amputate a gangrenous limb to save the whole body from a lingering, terminal rot.'

  'You're staking so much on being right.' Eleanor refused to follow his back and forth, and picked up the mauled, sickly chartreuse tennis ball, cupping it protectively in her hands.

Tossing it up and down, bouncing it around his rarified cloister—that was what Calvin did with an entire
planet
. 'What if Wallace has the ticket after all?' she pursued, smoothing the remaining tufts of the tattered toy. 'What if population is a bogyman? A fashionable fable of our times, like blood-letting?'

  'Everyone always thinks they're right.'

  'That's what I mean.'

  'Follow that thinking and you never do anything, ever, your whole life. You're recommending self-doubt so deep that it amounts to permanent paralysis. It is always possible that you are wrong. But you can only proceed with a life on the assumption that you are right. Otherwise you sit eighty-five years in a chair.'

  It was still only the middle of the evening, yet Eleanor found it impossible to rouse the liberal indignation that Calvin required from her—positively craved, since he could no longer rouse it from himself; what is more, she felt narcotically tired. Her lids were heavy. Her chin kept dropping to her chest. The tennis ball rolled from her hands and dribbled towards the monkey, and even Malthus could not be bothered to play with it. 'Calvin.' Her tongue was thick. 'This target population of yours. Of whom is it largely comprised?'