Game Control (35 page)

When Eleanor started shelling out her quarters, Calvin scowled. 'What are the chances that a single one of these moochers has anything worse than scabies? Next week stage a conference on malaria and the same crowd will arrive Mercurochromed with tropical mosquito bites.'

  Of the file of scientists milling from the Marriott under the stern eyes of both each other and the roving TV cameras, Calvin was the only incorrigible who failed to contribute something, until hats on the walk packed with dollars and overflowed. Even Eleanor stopped groping her pockets by the end of the line, remarking, 'This is more of a goldmine than the Karen Provision Store.'

  Assembling 12,000 delegates and 3,000 journalists was tantamount to founding and breaking down a small town in four days, so the circus had the latest technology at its disposal—vast photocopying resources and computerized message boards, with which Eleanor promptly left callbacks for Roy Anderson, John Bongaarts and Peter Way. The impromptu city may have convened for the discussion of immuno-deficiency, but its atmosphere was celebrative, like an airless, upscale Woodstock in the windowless underground of the massive Mascone Conference Center. At every level were booths for croissants and freshly baked biscuits, sales counters for AIDS Tshirts, with the silk-screened viruses in a selection of colours. Lobbies criss-crossed with physicians nervous about being late to the workshop on 'Varying Rates of Decline in CD4 Cells in Male and Female PWAs' the way an earlier generation had feared missing Earth, Wind and Fire. On ground level, rows of leaflets advertised forthcoming AIDS conferences, epidemiological travel brochures:

festooned with photos of the Taj Mahal.

  Eleanor and Basengi plunged into the event with rolled-up sleeves, huddling over the schedule, debating which sessions to attend like children agonizing over a menu of puddings, and regularly queuing at the message centre to leave more and more urgent appeals to their computer modellers, until they were plotting to waylay their victims as adolescents might plan an ambush of the New Kids on the Block. 'You're probably the only woman in America,' Calvin quipped, 'who wants Roy Anderson's autograph.'

  Ever the Good Student, Eleanor attended seminars nine to six every day, and Calvin was irascible: 'Not one of these prolix panels has anything to do with
demography
. You're losing your bearings, Merritt. We don't care about needle exchange programmes, condom distribution in Zaire, or seroconversion among health care professionals—
all
we're concerned with is how many scurfy undesirables this disease sweeps from under foot. You're not an AIDS flunky, you're a population spy, remember? We're at cross-purposes. They want to save the varmints and we want to exterminate. This is the camp of the enemy, and you should be keeping your head low.'

  'You're envious,' said Eleanor. 'AIDS is a catastrophe and it's not yours.'

  'Hardly. I think AIDS is the best thing since sliced bread. It's inadequate, that's all. I've scanned these papers. The statistics they're quoting are pitiful. Up to ten million sero-positive worldwide? A drop in the bucket! The race coughs up that many extra babies in six weeks! We do better than this sad little virus with malnutrition and the runs.'

  '
And
,' Eleanor continued, 'you can't stand attending any international conference you don't chair.'

  There was some truth to this. Calvin remained aloof, disdaining their hand-wringing about vertical transmission when the real problem was it wasn't high enough. Once he'd exhausted his appointments with all the reputable demographers in California, he spent the last two afternoons in a Mascone coffee shop reading
The
Last Gasp
, a little put out that no one had recognized him. He was used to being scorned, but never ignored.

  So he wiled away his hours imagining the Sixth Annual
Pachyderm
Conference—since after 1999, no one would give AIDS the time of day. He hadn't considered the T-shirt market…or swanky sportswear, with a little elephant carcass on the breast instead of a croc? Why, the commercial opportunities would be rife! Pachyderm coffee mugs and lunch boxes; Pachyderm loo roll and undershorts; Pachman video games! Take your turn for a quarter, eliminate a third of humanity and win an extra game! A Pachyderm Conference, that's one he'd attend. Too bad he'd be dead.

  It was fantasizing at this table that Calvin spotted through the crowd the familiar flap of ratty yellow
kikoi
: son of a bitch. And still carrying that naff stick, in San Francisco. Of course it made sense he would be here, since the trendy bastard hadn't been able to resist latching on to the latest in global peril, with all its opportunities for implausible optimism. Despite the predictability of his attendance, however, the presence of Wallace Threadgill at this conference alarmed Calvin in instinctive areas of his head that the 'perfectly logical' Dr Piper refused to recognize he possessed.

Through the event, Calvin rarely saw Eleanor, who swished in and out of their hotel room and never seemed to stop talking. She'd managed to get appointments with both Bongaarts and Anderson. Typically female, she found the Bongaarts model increasingly persuasive because John was nicer to her at lunch. Nights she was out schmoozing with AIDS celebs, overall a slicker collection than the frumpy family planning bunch, whose cause was dé
classé
. These viral dandies were finger-on-the-pulse types, into fashionable cataclysm, and paraded their material like the latest in viscose.

  The last night, however, which was bound to be one big epidemiological booze-up, Eleanor insisted she and Calvin dine alone. She agitated through the meal, unusually inane. Once they arrived back at the Marriott, it was still early. Calvin reached for
The Last Gasp,
but Eleanor kept him talking. She was working herself up to something—about
feelings
, no doubt, an issue she had promised herself once and for all she would raise before they left San Francisco, and finally they'd reached now or never. Calvin put his book aside with a groan.

He determined this much: he wasn't going to help. If she had some kind of problem, she would have to bring it up herself.

  When she launched into Pachyderm, pacing the carpet in stockinged feet, it occurred to Calvin they had never once had a knock-down drag-out over his conspiracy. She might be working for him, but she didn't endorse QUIETUS, not really. She'd dismissed him as a fraud but never argued outright. Tonight, since there was some other subject she wished to avoid even more, she would risk the fight.

  'Isn't murder,' she proposed, 'a slippery slope? Even starting with abortion and euthanasia, don't you erode the whole foundation of ethical systems? If you don't respect the sanctity of human life, what's left? Don't you arrive in short order at Opah Sanders?'

  'Ethical systems are pious props of social systems,' droned Calvin, bored. 'They merely preserve order, and unless someone does something about population growth we are headed for worldwide
Lord of the Flies
. Moreover, I don't believe in the sanctity of human life. I'm a great fan of algae. Algae, for example, do not bayonet pregnant women and leave them pinned to a wall.'

  'There, that's evil. You recognize it when you see it.'

  'I see so much of it that I don't see the point of a concept that is merely descriptive of what most people do most of the time.' He lay on the bed, clasping one hand on his chest with the other, in order to keep them from straying to his paperback. He was dying to get back to his book.

  'But isn't Wallace right—aren't you yourself on your high horse, trying to save humanity? Isn't that the most pious conceit imaginable?'

  'On the contrary, I'm a demagogue,' he said blandly. 'If I were less well educated, I'd end up on top of a shopping mall with a machine-gun.'

  'You're being glib.'

  'I'm not.' He sat up, resigned to a fracas she obviously required. 'I spent my professional life cocktail-clinking and prawn-peeling, first-classed around the world all under the aegis of aiding the underprivileged. Having lost my cushy job and my sexy housekeeper, I've become a bitter middle-aged megalomaniac: raising money from pampered colonials to

slaughter a third of the world's population, using altruism as a cover for revenge. What's more, in my personal life I co-opt my lover into my own back-breaking employ, and give her not an ounce of affection in return. Doesn't that sound like evil to you?' He walked to the bathroom to brush his teeth.

  'You called me your lover.' She trailed after him.

  'My mistake.'

  'If
most
people are evil, who's in the minority?'

  'You are,' he mumbled through fluoride. 'You're compassionate. I may never have encountered this quality before. Then, you're unlikely to have children, and there goes the mutation—an intriguing Darwinian experiment, if failed.'

  'I wonder why your compliments always make me pale.'

  'But, Eleanor,' he continued, spitting and wiping his mouth, '
I do
not like people
. If you still don't believe that, you've seen nothing of me at all.'

  They squared in the awful neon of the tiny loo. 'You did like Panga.'

  'I loved Panga. That's different.'

  'Do you—like me?' Such a mild question, it seemed so brave.

  Calvin ambled back by the dresser, considering that hotel rooms were pretty wretched places at 9.30 when you didn't indulge in the only real entertainment they could afford. 'You—please me, sometimes, you do not often get on my nerves, I—do not dislike you, Eleanor, and this is—extreme, from me. I feel—gently towards you. And you press me,' he added vigorously. 'I like very much to be pressed.'

  Eleanor shook her head in incredulity, as if suddenly seeing this scene from afar: I cannot believe this is my life. Perhaps she was imagining the sweet Virginia duplex with a man who kissed her on the cheek when he came home, and sometimes they went to the movies, or any other of the multitude of credible, pleasant, if unimportant futures she might have drafted for herself that would have precluded conversations like this one. 'So you're evil, and everyone else is evil, except me. Is this what's known as being put on a pedestal? It's overrated.'

  'I said you were compassionate, not beyond rebuke.' He turned his back to the mirror, so she would have to face every

side of him. 'Why is Eleanor Merritt not evil? Perhaps you've missed the opportunity—one I may provide you. More likely, you merely lack the nerve. You're childlike in a manner not entirely to your credit. Isn't much of goodness cowardice? You won't steal biscuits because Jane would send you back to your loopy mother. You're only good because you're scared, and you treat people well because you want them to like you. You have a sycophantic streak. After all, don't you ever imagine you're being tested? Here a man you rather fancy turns out to be a psychopathic killer. What do you do?'

  'Humour him. You haven't so much as flayed a frog.'

  'But I shall. Come on. Do you think you're so righteous? Here's Charles Manson II, and you're actually doing his research for him because you think if you're ever so helpful you'll persuade him at long last to have intercourse. Is that a pedestal? You tell me.'

  Eleanor's face turned white, and he could tell by the checkmated look in her eye that he had just waylaid her main agenda for the evening: sex.

  Her voice was low. 'I can see why you find compassion such an extraordinary discovery, since you glimpse it so rarely in your shaving mirror. I have listened until it's coming out of my ears about humanity having
exceeded the carrying capacity of the land
. Carrying capacity? Well, what about yours?'

  'Please keep your voice down, these walls are thin. You may be weary of my work, but I am exhausted by these petulant scenes of yours, demanding that I come clean and confess my undying ardour for you. I am sorry, but I warned you long ago that my
only
ardour is for over-population—'

  '
Over-population
!' she shouted. 'There is no one on your planet but you! I cannot understand how you could possibly feel crowded!'

  'I've had visitors from time to time.'

  'Panga, I suppose? Because I'm sick to death of hearing about Panga—'

  'On the contrary, you bring her up all the time. I hardly ever mention the woman.'

  'You don't have to. She sleeps with us—or you. She's the only one who sleeps with you.'

  'Watch what you say. I think she's in the loo.'

  'Come on, neither of us could hurt that Kamba with a meat axe.' She pursued him around the bed, until he was cornered up against the coffee machine. 'How about worrying over the feelings of people in this room who are still alive? There are times that that romance seems a handy contrivance. She proves you're not a racist and keeps me at arms' length, and meanwhile you can act obnoxious and congratulate yourself on being
evil
and still feel sorry for yourself. The whole picaresque is too convenient. I wonder if you ever loved her at all—'

  'You have no right—'

  'I have every right to think of your sorry excuses as I please.'

  'Behind my back you may tinkertoy your tawdry American psychotheories, but you will hold your tongue with me.' He had grabbed her arm; the gesture was out of character.

  'I will say what I wish to you. You're my lover, you said so yourself; whether we copulate or not is a technicality. And your celibacy is insulting, it's bitter, manipulative and cruel. You keep yourself back on purpose—you're hurting me!'

  'You have noticed I sleep on my stomach to hide my throbbing desire for you?' He didn't let go.