Game Control (21 page)

  'Well…' For the first time he showed visible signs of embarrassment and met her eyes with effort. 'It's been impossible to get around, you know. Especially in the Third World. Age structure. There's not much choice. And we've thought about it—morally—there's no difference. It sounds bad. But there are no special classes of humanity that it is particularly villainous to kill.'

  'Who?' she asked dully, only wanting to sleep.

  'Children.' His eyebrows took a brief, apologetic shrug. 'Not only. But well over half, according to the computer, should be under the age of fifteen. In principle I don't think it matters a jot. But it's bad PR.'

  Finally she allowed herself to laugh. 'You're going to rub out two billion people and you're worried about your
image
?'

  'Of course. I'm not qualified in microbiology, so while QUIETUS is my brainchild my major role is fund-raising. You remember the hoo-ha at my suggestion that we eliminate infant mortality and child survival programmes in Africa.

Even among the ruthless, you find these maudlin areas. So we've kept this parameter quiet.'

  'I'd think you'd keep the whole proposition quiet.'

  'Only a small central core know the full scope of our campaign. So welcome to the inner circle—whether you like it or not.'

  'Forgive me if I feel less than honoured.'

  'I never meant to drag you in. This enterprise is a bit of a millstone.'

  'I'll say.' She allowed herself, for a good thirty seconds, to shut her eyes.

  'There's one other matter—' again, a tinge of chagrin—'which we don't often raise. It has played a role in our mathematics, though the effect is difficult to gauge.'

  'What?' She really didn't want to hear any more.

  'Um. Bodies.' He coughed. 'There will be scads. Disposal will be problematic. A subsequent outbreak of opportunistic infections is inevitable.'

  'Put the fat people on top,' she slurred. 'The grease drizzles down and makes the whole pile burn better.'

  'We're not concerning ourselves with this,' he hurried. 'Dust to dust and that. Over time, the problem solves itself. Yet including the physical remains in our calculations is understandably unpleasant.'

  'Why not can the meat? Isn't that what you did with elephants?'

  'I can see you're going to be a great help.'

  'You imagine you could live with yourself afterwards?'

  'Living with myself is already rather tedious. Of course it will be tempting to leap from a Nyayo House window. But that would be selfish.'

  'How so?'

  'A scapegoat is a sociological necessity.'

  'Do you ever suspect yourself of a Christ complex?'

  'A mass murderer makes an unlikely Messiah. And my martyrdom will be no great sacrifice. I shall find my trial terrifically
interesting
.'

  'Neutrality.'

  'About my own death I have no feelings whatsoever.'

  'I do.'

  'Save your concern for the more deserving. I'm just a binman. I take out the rubbish so the rest of the world can get on with symphonies. It has to be done, Eleanor. And I don't care how they damn me later. You may imagine my designs as egotistical. On the contrary, if the death of two billion don't matter, I can at least follow the logic that mine doesn't amount to much either. And if QUIETUS succeeds, I will be only too happily boiled in oil. If I fail, we should both find bare bodkins. Because I have seen into the future if no one hacks back on our profusion while there's time. You will not want to be alive then, Eleanor, though the worst will occur in your lifetime. Especially in Africa. If population is allowed to take its natural course, a hundred years from now
the death of two billion will be
nothing
.'

  Calvin truly believed what he was saying, and this kept her from despising him. Then, she was not so inclined. Instead, she felt more sorry for him than ever, motherly. She drew him over to the couch. 'I know you don't want me to care for you. But I do. And now, more than ever, it looks as if you and I are stuck with each other.'

  Calvin put his head in her lap, and she stroked his thick black hair. 'There's only one thing you must tell me,' she said. 'And I want you to be honest.'

  'What's that?'

  'Is this a joke?' It was her last chance.

  He sighed. 'I am not pulling your leg, but all these parameters: they are difficult to satisfy. There is only a small percentage chance we will solve Pachyderm. If we do not, we sit tight. In the meantime, there are mattressfuls of money about. We may accomplish nothing, my darling, but we will live nicely.'

  'So if you don't find this perfect, painless, overnight, statistically precise organism to do your "rubbish collection", you just theorize.'

  'Right. Have meetings and lunches and clip newspapers. It's far less likely that I finish on a gallows than by choking on prawn pilipili at the Rickshaw.'

  He had finally said something to help her. Of course the proposition was lunatic. Would he ever do anything besides

con mean-spirited donors into paying his exorbitant dinner tabs?

'Put some music on,' he requested.

  She slipped up for Elgar. Though weary, she stayed awake, smoothing his forehead. They said nothing. The music was beautiful.

  At the pitch of an oboe cadenza, the CD cut clean off, along with the lights. The electricity died all the time now. In the subsequent silence, hyenas ka-rooed from the park; hyraxes screeched on the roof; moonlight hit the elephant femur, which glowed an eerie bluewhite. Panga grinned from the opposite chair and slid her
kukri
from its sheaf. Eleanor felt a sickly thrill, imagining what real social collapse might be like. It was clearly a life without Elgar. In Nairobi there was already a scarcity of electricity, water, natural gas and wheat. Further north, another famine was projected for Ethiopia, Somalia, the Sudan…The only complaint she could make about his predictions of approaching degradation was that so much of Calvin's future had arrived.

  'Have you read
Fahrenheit
451?' Calvin asked in the dark, after what seemed eons. Odd, how long time lasted without electricity, as if a stopped clock held you in its eternity.

  'No.'

  'It's another post-awfulness novel. A fascist government has burned all the books. There's a resistance underground, each member of which has memorized a work of literature cover to cover—
Alice
in Wonderland
. They've retrieved civilization by becoming walking libraries.'

  'So?'

  'I've wondered if you could save music the same way—with no more recording, or violin repairmen, scores long ago up in flames. Maybe I should start memorizing Mozart's Requiem. Learn to whistle the bassoon part or something.' He attempted a few bars, but couldn't overcome the animals outside and gave up.

Eleanor slept so deeply that waking was like crawling up a shaft. Half-way up, she could discern a dawning over its rim, the light an altered colour: something had happened last night. There was something she hadn't remembered yet and she sank back, hoping she could fail to remember a little longer.

  It was a familiar morning sensation. How many times had she cracked open puffy eyelids to shut them again, face tight, head pounding, mouth dry, trying to go back to sleep but unable to fight memory: right, X and I broke up last night, or Y is having an affair, and has been, it turns out, all year—and that is why my face is a mess and that is why my head hurts and that is why the pillow next to me is empty.

  But underneath her fingers was chest. There were arms around her. Why, she was intertwined with a handsome man, who was holding her closer than he had ever done, so that when she did recall he wanted to obliterate two billion people she was relieved.

  Calvin kissed her. 'Aren't you afraid of me now?'

  'I've always been afraid of you, Calvin.' She moved her knee between his thighs.

  Breakfast, however, was both warm and wary. Neither had an appetite. They sat on opposite sides of the table. Calvin didn't say much, drumming his fingers.

  'I want the disks back,' he said at last.

  'Disks?'

  'What can you possibly do with those files? Send them to the WHO and demand they rescind my funding for having

drawn it on false pretenses? They can't be authenticated. I could always claim I was writing a science fiction novel.'

  'I don't have any disks.'

  'You might try the Kenyan government,' he recommended. 'Moi would credit any Western skulduggery. Put the story in the
Nation,
it wouldn't even stand out. "American Population Expert Apprehended in Genocidal Subterfuge".' He flipped the paper on the table. 'Look here, we could fit it side by side with "USA, Shop-Window of the Earth's Evils".'

  'I did walk into your office yesterday, I admit. You left it open. I read a few book titles and looked at your disgusting photographs. The room gave me the creeps. I left. I took nothing. I read no papers, no screens. Everything I learned about your unhinged confederacy you told me last night.'

  'You mean, you didn't—'

  'You wanted to tell me, Calvin. Keeping it to yourself was making you lonely. And now we can discuss it, and it's all you want to talk about.'

  'When you came here yesterday, was the front door locked?'

  'Come to think of it—no.'

  'I thought I locked my office. I was sure I had.'

  'What's the problem?'

  'A box of floppies has been lifted.'

  'You didn't lose them?'

  'You've seen my office. Does it look like the kind of room where important files would get mislaid?'

  She remembered the methodical stacking of every print-out, each pen in its place. 'Well, no. But who on earth—'

  'Threadgill.'

  'But why—?'

  Calvin was inaccessible for a minute or two.

  'You said I couldn't do anything with those files; QUIETUS is too preposterous. Threadgill would confront the same incredulity.'

  'I am not concerned with Mr Jolly-hockey-sticks turning to an authority. But he could be a force to be reckoned with in his own right.'

  'I got the impression he was an eccentric, hermetic guru in a tent. A bit of a fruit—like you. I don't see why he'd worry you.'

  'Wallace is a tit, but he keeps a hand in. These fluffernutters, they club together and agree how everything is pink and how very, very much pinker the whole world is going to be next year. And they have a hit list; they have it in for Garret Hardin, Paul Ehrlich and Calvin Piper. Threadgill's convinced it's his job to save the race from the anti-Christ. Don't let the
kikoi
and the campfire fool you. He's certainly an idiot. But he could be a problem.'

  'What do you think he'll do?'

  'Get underfoot. I was worried he'd more or less twigged. But it doesn't help he has the
parameters
in print…Where are you going?'

  'It's Thursday. I'm going to work.'

  'Maybe you shouldn't.'

  'Maybe I should.' Eleanor stood up. Calvin stood up. 'Calvin Piper. If I went around the office gibbering about what you told me last night, I'd be laced in a strait-jacket by lunchtime. And you're not going to strap me here, like Malthus, on a leash for ten years. I'm going to the office.'

  Calvin looked helpless. He was actually a mild-mannered man who could decimate throngs with his
delete
key, but couldn't lay a hand on a single underfed young lady. 'Oh, go on,' he said feebly. 'Only, come back here, would you? We may pay a call on His Ebullience tonight.'

  'What good would that do? Even if he did swipe the disks, he's scanned them by now and he's unlikely to bow his head and say he's sorry, he knows it's wrong to play with other children's toys without permission. And look at you: you can't even strong-arm a family planning worker. What are you going to do to Wallace? Magic Marker his teddy bear?'

  'A skip down the yellow brick road would give me a little exercise. I feel like a spar, and you won't put your mits up. And he's browned me off frankly. Burglary is hardly above board.'

  Eleanor choked. 'Above board! You're playing video games with life and death and then you get peevish when your opponent
cheats?
Is this a conspiracy or checkers?'

  'The game,' said Calvin coldly, 'is the highest form of civilization. Life is sport.'

  Eleanor rolled her eyes. 'Pardon me, but the normal person has to go to work. I hope the two of you have a delightful day wreaking international havoc on paper. Goodbye, my darling psychopath.' She kissed him and shouted behind her, 'So long, Panga!'

Once Eleanor left, Calvin felt petulant. Panga ignored him, endlessly sharpening her
kukri
the way some women filed their nails. He told himself to be grateful. Eleanor's arch relation to QUIETUS was convenient. If she dismissed his enterprise as a fanciful, fatuous delusion, she was less likely to squeal. Calvin was offended all the same. He felt obliged to prove to Eleanor he was not a crackpot. She should have been aghast. 'But she laughed!' he smarted out loud.

  'I tell you before,' said Panga,
scrish-scrash
. 'This girl is not how you see. Eleanor and Panga, I think we get to be
msuri rafiki
.'

  'Just what I need,' said Calvin. 'Both you birds ganging up on me.'

  'We think you are funny,' she announced, inspecting the blade in the morning light, and pressing the feather-edge on Calvin's coffee table—damn it, she would leave marks.

  Reaching for one ally in this household, Calvin retrieved Malthus, who clung to his neck and hissed at the poltergeist. Malthus was none too keen on Panga. Malthus was none too keen on anyone, discernment Calvin could only applaud.