The Ambassador (30 page)
Strether would not be distracted. ‘Our answer to those conundrums in the USA was simple. We banned it. The whole caboodle.’
Marius spread his hands. ‘An impolite European would say, “More fool you.” The ends justify the means here, Bill. Anyway, the means themselves aren’t seen as posing any tricky moral dilemmas. Honestly. Instead, depending on the person’s standpoint, they’re regarded as ranging from the miraculous to the humdrum. You might as well question the mechanisms by which the electricity is generated that drives this car. Nobody’s the least interested, as long as it moves when the buttons are pushed.’
‘You’re saying they don’t give a damn. I see. Doesn’t that strike you as morally shallow? Shouldn’t somebody care?’
Marius paused. ‘Most people don’t care. They don’t care about anything, much, provided life treats them well. But if anyone attempted to close or scale down the programme, Bill, there’d be an outcry. It’s a source of immense pride to the Union authorities and its citizens. Who doesn’t want to be healthy? Who doesn’t want a healthy child? You start voicing doubts out there, and you’ll get laughed out of court.’
‘The “authorities” are all beneficiaries, I suppose. And had the hypocrisy bred out of them.’ Strether was aware that he sounded caustic.
Marius murmured an amused, ‘Well, not quite.’ Then he frowned, and spoke more slowly, accompanying his words with emphatic hand movements.
‘Bill, understand. History is against you. Even oppressed people seldom rise up, and our citizens are among the most contented on the globe, every opinion poll says so. Change only comes when a leader decides. The Roman empire, which two thousand years ago built the die-straight road we are travelling on, would have carried on worshipping Jupiter if
Constantine hadn’t declared for Jesus. England might never have had the Reformation if Henry VIII hadn’t lusted after Anne Boleyn. And the old USSR could have been a superpower for another century if Gorbachev had never uttered the word
perestroika
. Change requires leadership. Forget that stuff about power coming from the people. It’s crap. Forgive me.’
They must be nearly there: that last junction had been for Buckingham. The vidphone on the dashboard beeped. Strether glanced at Marius, who turned politely away.
‘Hello?’
The screen buzzed into focus. It was Lisa.
‘Oh, Bill, is that you? Can you talk? I heard you were on your way to Milton Keynes. I’m here anyway. Can I join you?’
Her voice floated round the car interior. Strether was about to answer when Marius touched his sleeve. The Prince was mouthing, ‘
No
.’ The Ambassador looked quickly to his companion, who hissed, ‘It might be dangerous.’
‘Well, I’m not sure,’ was the best Strether could manage, aware that Lisa could see his expression. They were on the outskirts. Signs pointed to the main tunnels, over which ‘Welcome to Milton Keynes’ billboards had been erected, complete with oversized holograms of John Milton and John Maynard Keynes. As they travelled downwards the vidphone flickered and cut off; the vehicle must be between transmission points.
By the time the car had reached a level again, however, the transponder was blinking. She must be using her instrument to track them. They could not evade her, if she were quick enough.
After Lisa had left, Winston sat another few minutes at the cafe table. He brooded on the sheets of hieroglyphics before him and brushed drops of carob milk-shake off the thin paper. A powerbook would have performed as well, but just as he felt at home in an antique
stone-built
farm cottage, there were times when paper and pencil (though those had to be hoarded when they could be found) were the best.
He had not managed to discover much that was new. Though Lisa’s loss had been reconfirmed – and that could itself be counted as progress – the trail of exactly what had happened to the material on which she had been working was as cold as before. They had encouraged each other, however, with a recognition that they were no longer hunting missing documentation. The jigsaw-puzzle exercise on the terrace of the Commons, in which scraps of information had been tentatively merged from a variety of sources, had established firmly that some devious activity was under way, and not a mere paperchase.
Winston had spooned cottage cheese and salsa into his mouth as he had spoken; Lisa had seemed too worried to eat, but with some prodding had fetched bread and cereal bars for herself. She had lost weight and looked drawn and tired.
‘It seems to me,’ Winston had suggested eventually, ‘that at least two different private projects are in hand. Number one: the senior NTs are hoping, in a couple of decades, to be able to put distance between themselves and the rest of us. That’s long-term planning on a grand scale, but they’re experts at it. Nobody would complain about further enhancement – it’s the cut in IQ which is so objectionable. I’d like to bet that in a year or two the instruction will come to increase the degree of affability among the lower orders by a percent or two.
That’d make them more amenable and easy-going. Now wouldn’t that suit a governing race? Wouldn’t it just!’
‘Where do you get all this from, Winston?’ Lisa slowly chewed the bread.
‘That’s easy. I’m the poor bloody infantry that gets told to do it,’ he replied. ‘I can’t be the only one; and if I made a fuss they’d shift me or sack me, and get someone else. I’m not sure they realise I’ve cracked the codes. I certainly haven’t let on to anybody in authority – except you.’
Her face did not register any pleasure. ‘You said at least two separate projects. What’s the second?’
‘Oh, that’s obvious. With your material. That’s why it’s so damned important to find it and destroy it. A gang of teenage thugs with a propensity to violence would suit some purchasers down to the ground. It’s a crazy idea: defective genetics like that would be so unpredictable. I sure as hell wouldn’t want them working for me. Or anywhere in my vicinity.’
‘And the – the lorry?’
‘Umm … That’s a poser. Maybe nothing to do with the projects. Maybe simply a one-off mess somebody had to get rid of. Or p’raps it occurs quite often. Give somebody a lab, Doctor, and they’re going to start playing sci-fi games. Not all of which have an innocent outcome.’ He had pondered. ‘At least time is on our side. Whatever they’re playing at, it’ll take a generation to come to fruition. Existing adults can’t be altered, and that’s a blessing.’
‘True, but then nobody would destroy healthy infants either, even if they carried undesirable characteristics,’ Lisa pointed out. ‘So once this material gets out and starts to breed, the die is cast. We can’t be complacent, or tardy. We daren’t be.’
Then Lisa had risen with a determined air. ‘You have not cheered me up, Winston, but at least I feel I have an ally. You and the Ambassador. Thanks.’
Winston had grinned slyly. ‘And the Prince?’
‘The Prince? I’m not too happy about him. Such a strange character – all things to all men. And women. But, my God, if he decided to help, what might he achieve?’
‘You can’t come, that’s all there is to it.’ Marius had now issued the injunction in various forms three times. ‘It isn’t safe. At least, I don’t know what we will find down there, and I don’t know exactly who we will meet. I do not have their permission to bring you along, Dr Pasteur. And they are incommunicado.’
The three stood in the seventh-level car park near the hospital. Its gloomy lighting and echoing halls made it seem far more removed from the airy light above than the mere metres between themselves and the surface. However much thought had gone into the attractive shopping and working environment nearby, those few vehicle parks not demolished or converted to other uses were dingy and neglected.
In any fight between Lisa and Marius, Strether would have put his money on the female. He stood back and watched the body language between the two with increasing curiosity. Lisa was the smaller, but she was a coiled, intense and angry person, all her energies directed into the confrontation with the Prince. He, sombrely dressed with a casual jacket over his arm as if expecting to encounter cold, was on the defensive and leaned away from her. And yet when it was his turn to speak, he bent close to her and seemed to want to
conceal his remarks from Strether. It was as if the Prince sought intimacy with the young woman: as if he wanted to test her scent, or subconsciously to touch her.
‘Whatever you’re up to, I think I have to be in on it, Prince,’ Lisa was saying, with studied ferocity. ‘Those missing files, those damaged embryos, that ghastly heap in the back of the lorry: I cannot walk away. I cannot.’
‘Then I should keep your voice down, Lisa,’ Strether warned. ‘Your sense of responsibility is commendable. A sense of self-preservation would also be smart.’
She gazed around anxiously; a security camera was looking the other way. Marius caught her arm. ‘Okay, since you insist. If you carry on arguing you could put us all in peril by drawing attention to us. But, for God’s sake ’He brought himself up short and snorted. ‘I was going to say idiotic things like keep your eyes skinned and don’t make a sound. This stink of conspiracy is getting at me. I feel like a character in one of those banned children’s books – Enid Blyton, wasn’t it? The Famous Five. All we need is a girl called George and a dog.’
His semi-facetious comments went over his hearers’ heads. Marius pointed. ‘Down there. Door 7-14.’ He glanced about; they were alone. The camera was still aimed at the entrance; perhaps its ancient brackets were stuck. ‘Have you got your vidphones with you? Can you be tracked with them? Switch that feature off, but they might be useful. Come on.’
The three moved off, avoiding the puddles on the floor. The water table had risen throughout England; although Milton Keynes’ advisers had carefully checked forecast data for two hundred years, the climate change that had melted nearly half the polar ice packs had occurred faster than any prediction. So while the town’s residents enjoyed an enviable lifestyle underground with Christmas lunch on the lawn in the shade of their own vines, pumps to keep level seven dry were on the council agenda.
Door 7-14 was in a recess behind pillars. At first it appeared blocked by fire-fighting equipment: rusty reels of hosepipe, fire blankets, cylinders of foam. With some straining the two men managed to move enough obstacles to clear a path. Marius stood waiting quietly, as if under scrutiny. For what seemed an age nothing happened. Strether began to shuffle his feet. It was chilly. Then a tiny red light, hardly bigger than a pinhead, flashed on above their heads, once.
Marius placed both palms on the door and pushed. It opened slowly. He stood aside to let Lisa and Strether slip through, then followed. Behind him, the door slid to without a sound.
They were in a narrow, dank corridor, lit by small wire-caged lamps in the low ceiling above their heads. There seemed nothing to do but start walking. Ahead was pitch darkness, though as they walked sensors switched on the lights above them and turned off those behind. That made it impossible to judge how far they had to go or had come. The gloom was disorienting. Lisa saw Strether check his watch and begin to count paces, his lips moving silently.
She touched the walls. They were cold and felt wet. The lining was cheap concrete; in places chunks had fallen off to reveal older brick underneath, which effloresced in furry bulges with the damp. Above them pipes were slung, painted anti-corrosion red, with faint markings and tags. In places leaks ran down from encrusted welds, with ferns and sodden lichens in a greenish trail. Condensation dripped on to their heads.
The tunnel was too narrow for three to walk abreast but wide enough for the two slim ones, herself and Marius. She slipped back and let Strether go ahead.
‘Thank you for the flowers,’ she hissed. ‘I wasn’t sure what you meant by them.’
Marius chuckled. He coughed once; his breath hung in a misty fog about his face. It was getting colder. He pulled on his jacket, then looked at Lisa. ‘You warm enough? Would you like this?’
She shook her head. They were walking quite fast and she was panting slightly. ‘Fine for the moment. The exercise is sufficient. Prince, what the hell is this, please? Where are we going? Who – or what – are we hoping to meet?’
‘I can’t entirely answer your last question. But if I’m not mistaken we should make contact with the group the Ambassador was inquiring about on the terrace.’
‘Oh, those odd names. Solidarity? What does it mean?’
‘You are not a historian. Neither is our dear friend Bill. I had to spell it out for him as well. It was the name of a Polish protest organisation in the mid-twentieth century, as the Soviet Union was beginning to disintegrate. It had the backing of organised labour and the Roman Catholic Church – believe it or not, Poland was once profoundly religious. It was at the forefront of the fight for Polish independence, symbolising a struggle for freedom against tyranny throughout the world, and was totally successful. Until it became the governing party in its own right when everything turned sour.’
‘Is this Solidarity a religious group? If so, I’m not sure I’d have much in common.’
‘Can’t say. It has links with continental groups, but I don’t think the numbers are large. I pretend to my dear friend Strether that I’m a fount of wisdom, but you should realise, Dr Pasteur, that I’m somewhat of a fraud.’
She stopped dead, then saw the smile on his lips. ‘God, don’t tease.’ She shivered, and carried on rapidly. ‘If you’d seen what I saw in that horrible lorry – the way those little fingers reached out, as if pleading for help. I keep wondering what kind of body it might have had. It was a living creature, and it was human. Or it had started off human.’
‘A world away from roses,’ Marius said softly. ‘Or d’you think those were genetically engineered too?’ The quip had its desired effect; Lisa smiled back at him. ‘I can assure you nevertheless, Doctor, that they were sent to you with genuine and unadulterated affection. And respectful awe.’
‘You’re aware that I – we – ?’ Lisa indicated Strether with her thumb. Was this being disloyal? With the longest stride he was now ahead of them by some twenty metres. Yet what did she owe him, other than the consideration of friendship?