Walking Dead (12 page)

“OK,” he said. “I suggest you take a few minutes to think about it. I'd better remind you that I'll need to be satisfied that anyone who volunteers is doing so because he wants to, not because he's been ordered to.”

Foxe strolled away, trying to undo by his walk the mischief he'd done by producing Quentin. He ought to have been frightened; it looked as if he'd now be faced with a batch of prisoners too scared of Quentin to volunteer, and it would be the harbour for Foxe, or the poison, or perhaps a fall from a helicopter … He didn't care much. It wasn't because he was too tired to care—in fact, despite his exhaustion, he was full of a strange eagerness to begin. His mind was like a student's on a first project, running ahead in an undisciplined way to future details, with none of the groundwork cleared. But a lot of the groundwork was irrelevant in this loony set-up—most of the logical safeguards for a start—you couldn't even arrange for a double-blind system, with only Foxe to do all the work … Games … he'd used the word almost unthinkingly, but now it flashed on him that it solved huge problems. In the world of games there is only one vice, which is cheating … Cheating should be measurable, if the rules were clear enough … they'd have to think they were being tested for something else, of course—it wasn't Foxe's field, but he'd once shared a flat with a psychologist who was interested in competitiveness and was telling his subjects that he was testing their hearing acuteness … so you'd need games which seemed to measure something else, but you wouldn't even tell them that … let it slip, perhaps, and see who passed the word to whom … no dice, that'd be measuring group-loyalty against rule-acceptance … no, keep all aspects, both apparent and real aims,
inside
the games … Umm, umm … Doctor Trotter wasn't going to fancy any of this … what he'd liked about Foxe's original story was the stress, the breakdown of social behaviour, the mindless blood and dirt; and that was what he wanted here, more stress, more starvation, the legitimised torture of his enemies in the name of science. Well, he wasn't bloody going to get it. He was going to get games—not for reasons of morality, or of cowardice, but because they'd work. Games.

Vaguely as he strolled around Foxe took in details of the Pit, rather as if he'd arrived too early for an interview in a strange town and was wandering about, his main attention fixed on the coming encounter, but still subconsciously registering elements which combined into an impression of a life-pattern. The walls were rough rock, their monotony relieved here and there by sharp-shadowed crevices into which even the two dozen arc-lights did not shine. It was only rock, and the light only light, and the darkness overhead an unmysterious space beyond the light; but in the arena itself a life-mode had evolved, parts of it—for instance where he passed a block of improvised patched screens from which came the sharp odour of latrines—obvious, and parts alien. Foxe, without much thinking about it, realised that the sand which floored the Pit was not its natural surface, but was brought in to provide some sort of cleanliness. He halted, still considering the problem of games and cheating, and stared at a patch of this sand, one of the alien bits of Pit life, where the surface had been carefully smoothed and covered with a pattern of symbols through which footsteps threaded a spiral path.

“We ready, then,” said a voice.

Foxe looked up and saw a gaunt young man with a pocked face had come up.

“Fine,” said Foxe. “Any volunteers?”

“All the lot of them, man.”

Foxe didn't sigh or shrug, though the news should have been no less irritating than it had been ten minutes before. But now, OK, he'd lost a point, but he'd got his volunteers.

“You think it will work?” said the young man in a low voice.

“I don't know. It's pretty difficult. This isn't really the right place—and as far as I know nothing like it's been tried before.”

“Seems it begun working this same morning,” said the young man.

“Umm,” said Foxe. He was half way back to the group of volunteers before he was far enough out of his abstraction to realise that the man had been talking not about the experiment but about the pattern on the floor.

4

F
oxe lay on a huge soft bed dreaming that he was looking for Lisa-Anna in a strange city. It should have been an anxiety dream, but had none of that feel about it because he was certain of reaching her in the end, and was bitterly disappointed when a voice woke him, speaking close beside his ear.

“Doctor Foxe, you there?”

“I suppose so,” he muttered.

“The President dining in forty minutes. Request your company, uh?”

Foxe groaned, opened his eyes and half sat up. There was no one in the room.

“You hear me, suh?”

The voice came from among the luminous press-buttons on the console beside the bed.

“OK, I'll be there,” said Foxe. “I haven't got much to wear.”

“Tuxedos, suh. Plenty clothes in closet. Guests assemble at twenty-forty hours in ante-room to left of elevator lobby, first floor.”

The speaker ceased its subliminal hum. Foxe peered at the luminous buttons and pressed the one with the lamp-symbol on it. Light began to glow through the room, increasing in intensity while he kept the button pressed and stopping when he released it. Another button slid the window-shutters away, revealing equatorial stars over the oily harbour and the black hulk of cliff that hid his new laboratory. Yet another, with a temperature-setting knob beside it, started to run a bath next door.

Foxe rose and walked to the clothes-cupboard, which disappointingly opened with a manually operated catch, but turned out to be as large as a fair-sized room. Rack on rack of clothes, male and female, seemed to inspect him as he entered. It was like a roomful of ghosts, no, not ghosts, for these presences were nothing if not material, hanging there, waiting to be reanimated. For a moment Foxe, perhaps because his mind was still full of Lisa-Anna who had enjoyed playing with such notions, considered the possible combinations of spirit, flesh and clothing. There are seven in all, one with the set complete, the living man, three with one element missing and three with two. They had names, moreover, even the two-combinations: spirit and clothes were the ghost; spirit and flesh were the savage; clothes and flesh the corpse—no, you'd got the corpse already, as a one-combination. Clothes and flesh were the walking dead.

Foxe made his face grin at the idea, as if to appease Lisa-Anna's ghost. He deliberately didn't look to see whether any of the dresses would have suited her, but went and found a white suit of roughly the right size, a new shirt, tie, socks, shoes even, and carried the loot back to his bed, shutting the ghosts away. As he dumped them something scuttered close by. His heart gave a nervy flicker, then he remembered what it must be and opened the drawer of the bedside table. Quentin peered up at him, jet-eyed.

“Sorry, mate,” said Foxe. “I forgot. I should have taken you with me—you wouldn't have let me muck around with that sort of stupid fancy, uh? Come and have a bath.”

As he spoke it occurred to him to wonder whether the room was bugged. Probably. In which case he had added yet another involuntary pebble to the cairn of Quentin's supposed magic powers.

The bath-taps might or might not have been gold. The gadget by the bed had got the temperature wrong, so Foxe adjusted it by hand, then climbed in for a long soak. Quentin skated round the bath's wide rim but never quite slithered in. He ate some pink soap which sadly didn't make him froth at the mouth. Foxe watched him, and continued his line of thought. Was he in fact, subconsciously but deliberately, engineering incidents which built up Quentin's reputation? The way he had used him in the Pit had, at a rational level, been fairly childish, and at the same time the subconscious motive had been close enough to the surface for him to be vaguely aware of it. In fact his subconscious might long ago have registered the magical symbol on the walls of Back Town, and made the connection with the letter Q. It was even possible that that had influenced him in deciding that Quentin was a nutter … And thus made Quentin a nutter? Quentin, for reasons beyond research, was now trying to drag a large sponge to the corner which he seemed to have decided was his own territory. Foxe watched him with considerable affection, a sentiment strong enough to draw attention to itself. He, Foxe, also seemed to believe in the power of the rat, not as a bearer of mighty magicks, but as a charm, a totem. He remembered how the touch of fur had broken the Prime Minister's hypnotic hold. It was only natural: his subconscious, much-repressed, would reach out for symbols of help from the region in which Foxe really did have power. On perilous journeys it would seek to take with it a piece of Foxe's home territory, where the kindly and predictable gods of science ruled. A lab-bred rat, for instance.

Again, Foxe's attention was caught by his own mental processes, by the fact that he had for once let his subconscious out of the dungeons for exercise and air, had even allowed it a momentary vote. The process gave him an odd feeling of being two people, one of whom lived and moved so precisely in the same space as the other that it was normally invisible, but now for the moment had shifted a little, so that its shadowy outline was there, like an image on an ill-tuned television, like Foxe's own reflection in the doubled glass of the laboratory window, that day when he had waited for the Prime Minister to come and had watched the gardener killing the snake.

“Do you think I'm becoming a bit schizo, mate?” he said. “They say it's a common response to stress.”

Startled by his voice Quentin let go of the sponge. Because his paws got no grip on the glassy surface he had been using the curve of the rim for leverage and now, without the sponge's weight to hold him back, he fell with a plop into the bath.

“Twenty-thirty-five now, suh,” urged the voice from the speaker.

“Coming,” said Foxe.

He picked Quentin from the huge warm towel on which he'd been grooming himself dry and put him in the pocket of his dinner-jacket. It was a tightish squeeze, but Foxe didn't want him nicked by some magical power-maniac. And besides that, he thought, I'm scared, so I take my totem along.

The lift worked. The white-jacketed prisoner-slave in the lobby where Foxe had been told to wait made an excellent Martini. The air-conditioning was well-tuned, producing an atmosphere that smelt and felt like fresh air and yet was cooler than a tropic evening. In a way this was a contrast with the outside world even more striking than the one between the luxury of the palace and the emaciating poverty beyond. That it should actually be possible to buy efficiency here! But why not? It was ridiculous to suppose that nothing on the Islands ever worked properly. Captain Angiah, for instance, gave an impression of dedicated efficiency, and according to Dreiser the secret police did their work with skill … It was even possible, Foxe thought, that Doctor Trotter regarded efficiency as a luxury, to be enjoyed by the few, that for the masses he
preferred
the bus services to be erratic, the electric supply to keep failing. His bent, certainly, was towards chaos.

For at least twenty minutes Foxe waited, gazing out of the window at the dockyard scene. Gangs of men were still unloading the ships, sharp-shadowed under bluish floodlights. Above the castle's silhouetted crenellations the same acid light glowed, a Satanic aureole, showing that the courtyard, like the docks and Pit, knew no proper dark. While he watched the gesticulating derricks a fresh shift arrived from the castle, so he guessed the work went on all night. Soon after that the steam-engine started another run, its fountain of smoke glowing orange and pricked with upshot sparks. The previous shift staggered away into the dark, one or two of them leaning so heavily on comrades' shoulders that they were really being carried. At last came the sigh and suck of a moving lift and the whisper of doors. A familiar voice filled the air.

“… when I say bad time coming, then bad time do be coming. That's sure. Here you are, my clever honey boy, condriving yourself to be Prime Minister and this and that, and still you never know to be serious. Who's an empty man?”

Her voice was blanketed by the Prime Minister's laugh. Nape prickling, Foxe turned and watched her waddle towards him.

“Hi, Foxy!” she cried. “Coming home special for to see you!”

She was wearing an extremely décolléte long dress of coffee-coloured satin, covered with seed-pearls and sequins. A display of opals lay on the broad shelf of her bosom, as if being proffered for Foxe to choose from. Strings of pearls and other jewels threaded the amber stook of her hair. She was still wearing her reflecting sunglasses in which Foxe could watch himself, double and miniaturised, bowing like a stage count. At the same time he registered that her greeting, if taken at face value, meant that she at least hadn't been expecting him to arrive that day, so that if Ladyblossom's death was part of a long-planned plot to trap him onto Main Island, she was not in the plot. Small comfort.

“It's an honour to meet you again, ma'am,” he said.

“Just the family tonight, Doctor,” said the Prime Minister. “Come along, Mother, we mustn't keep His Excellency waiting.”

“You take my arm, Foxy,” ordered Mrs Trotter.

She hauled him close against her side, like a liner warping a tender to her. Foxe was thankful that Quentin was in his opposite pocket or he would have been pulped against her corsetry.

They ate in what Foxe guessed was the state banqueting room, just the four of them sitting along one side of the table on the end dais and looking down the length of two more tables, all set with cutlery and plates and glasses for something like a hundred diners, and decorated with gushers of exotic flowers and ziggurats of fruit and tall candles, every one of them burning. Some twenty of the prisoner-servants stood around the walls, as if ready for an inrush of guests; in fact Foxe wondered whether a hundred servings of the nine or so courses which he was offered had been prepared. He drank champagne, then hock, then better claret than he'd ever tasted, then port of the same snob-value. The Prime Minister and Mrs Trotter drank milk and the President Coca-Cola. At first Foxe thought that this had been laid on as part of the Prime Minister's deliberate caprice, a super-luxurious prelude to some new degradation of him; but slowly he came to perceive that it was normal, that even when the others were away the President would dine thus alone, humming and fidgeting.

The President said nothing throughout the meal and appeared not even to notice Foxe sitting on his right. He showed himself quite capable of handling a knife and fork, if with rather messy results, but mostly his mother, sitting on his left, would lean across and cut up his food for him and then feed him mouthful by mouthful. A couple of times she opened her reticule and withdrew a little sachet of paper from which she sprinkled a powder on his food. While she did so she muttered rapidly. One of these ingredients sent the President into a convulsion of coughing, and Foxe saw out of the corner of his eye the President's attendant—the same whom he'd seen that morning—moving forward with an enamel basin but it wasn't needed.

Mrs Trotter treated all these distractions as negligible, talking almost continuously either across the President to Foxe or across both of them to her other son. Foxe was naïvely surprised how much of the world she'd seen, and what a collection of notables she had met. For instance, she was critical of the decor of both Buckingham Palace and the White House, but considered the Shah of Iran “discriminading.” She spoke at length of a meal she'd had in Taiwan as “best in the world, better than the President of France giving me.” This was all small-talk, but had to be listened to, as she snapped for attention the moment Foxe's mind began to wander.

Somewhere around the middle of the meal—after a course of plump little birds which had been delicately boned and then stuffed, so that they could be eaten whole—the President gave a long, gargling sigh and fell asleep. Mrs Trotter patted his cheek fondly, then nodded to the attendant, who brought up a gadget like a small fork-lift truck, ran it under the President's chair and wheeled him away.

“The Lord give,” said Mrs Trotter, her voice thicker than ever with solemnity and emotion, “and then He rob you blind with His free hand. He give me one clever son and then He say, ‘That's enough for this old witch,' and he give me one stupid son. You think I treating the boy right, Foxy?”

“Well, how are you treating him, ma'am?”

With an eager sweep of her arm she shoved the President's remaining cutlery to one side, like an old general clearing a space to demonstrate how he fought his last campaign, and emptied her reticule onto the table—leaves, sachets, ampoules, pill-boxes and withered shreds of what looked like skin and sinew.

“Lord, Lord,” she croaked, “the things a woman carries round. That marra root stale, for sure. What this bit? What you think this bit, Foxy?”

She had been peering at the collection with her nose a scant couple of inches from the table, but still didn't remove her glasses, which must have been almost opaque in the candle-light. Foxe looked at the leaf-like scrap she poked towards him. How on earth could he be expected … but there was something familiar about it.

“Some kind of ear,” he said, decisively. “Not a rat's—it's too large and thin. A bat's, perhaps.”

“Right. Bat-ear,” she mumbled, snatching it back. She had known, of course, and wanted to see if he knew. “Still good, but don' give him that, for sure. Snake-apple—that last forever …”

“Mother, you're not carrying snake-apple round with you?” said Doctor Trotter in a teasing voice. “There's a law against that, you know. Interesting plant, Doctor—at one time I hoped your Company might find a pharmaceutical use for it, but it seems that the Creator planted it for no other purpose than to kill people.”

“So I gather …” began Foxe, but missed his moment.

“Foxy know all that,” snapped Mrs Trotter, as if calling an unruly meeting to order. “Now
this
I give my boy Mondays, 'cept when the moon full.”