Manalone (10 page)

Caine’s club
was a bad choice of venue. The bar was full to capacity; all the stools and benches in the lounge were occupied; and in the dark caverns beyond, a couple of musicians fought their complex electronic instruments to produce a range of acoustic tones which froze out any attempt at constructive thinking. Without enthusiasm, Manalone edged his way to the bar and bought a drink. He pointedly ignored his habitual corner and returned to the loud, exotic darkness to find elbow room in which to drink it.

The dance floor was crowded, and the writhing bodies of the couples, illuminated only by the thigh-level psychedelic panels mainly responding in the reds, produced a scene which could have been an on-line transmission straight from Hell. The only place he could find to rest his back was adjacent to the battery of sound transducers, from which the musical notes issued like brilliant spears, striking with laser-sharp edge and nearly unendurable intensity. The air was uncomfortably hot, lacking in oxygen, and full of alcoholic vapours. The complexity and weight of these impressions cumulatively loaded on to the previous events of the evening caused Manalone to reel, fighting off the hypnotic clamp which was beginning to take over his imagination.

‘The common factor, Manalone. You’re looking for the one link which will make sense of all the bits and pieces. Sure it exists, but you don’t begin to have an idea of what shape or form you’re looking for. Perhaps you can’t see it because you’re standing too damn close. What if it’s a matter not of detail but of perspective?’

He remembered then the envelope he had found by Raper’s body. In his haste to escape from the scene he had thrust it into a pocket. He struggled now to pull it out and open it. The available light was very poor, but he managed to discern the words. If he had hoped for something exceptional, he was disappointed. It was simply a list of references to books and articles, the type of list which Paul Raper had frequently supplied to Manalone to provide a broad-based background to an interesting line of enquiry.

Puzzled, Manalone
thrust the papers back into his pocket, although his mind continued to dwell on a few of the titles he had just read.

These were all popular-magazine references. Doubtless all good and rather superficial pop-technology rewrites of more seriously researched studies. None of them would be seriously informative. If the list had any significance it must lie in the choice of subject rather than in the content of the individual items.

The music blazed to a startling crescendo, the mood shifting for a few bars out of the exotic reds to a sudden starburst of sheer white noise. The psychedelic projectors handled the transposition masterfully. For three whole beats the scene was flooded with a sheer white light which broke and ran into a thousand chromatic hues as the harmonics filtered out from a statistical wave disorder which it was impossible to maintain.

But in those seconds Manalone’s slightly fuddled intelligence had been raised to a new level of perception. In that one fantastic blaze of light he had seen the reality before him in an entirely new and sobering way. Catching the concept, he held on to it deliberately; fearful lest it should slip away, yet at the same time acknowledging the screams from the more logical parts of his mind which told him it was all an illusion.

As the lights re-synchronized with the tempo of the music, he was white and sweating but knew that he had just achieved a cataclysmic breakthrough in perspective. It was a terrifying and illogical alternative for his accustomed view of reality, and its implications were so hideous and far-reaching that he hardly dared explore them. He almost wished the instant had passed him by. The dark, wet world which he found outside Cain’s door was potentially a very different place from the one which had been there when he entered.

His elation
was short-lived, however. The cold drizzle of the outside world coupled with the trials to which he had subjected himself during the day, brought on a mood of profound depression. By the time he reached home, his eager revelation had been derated to the status of mental aberration. The reality was here and now – not in a flight of oxygen-starved, alcohol-interpreted, psychedelic fantasy.

‘Isn’t it, Manalone? Isn’t it?’

The following day started without event. Sandra woke no more bitchy than usual, and began to prepare herself for another festiv. Manalone rose unwillingly with a killing hangover, and was barely in time for the contract autram which arrived mindlessly to take him to the Mills. Reflecting unkindly on the inhumane nature of the machine culture in which he lived, Manalone allowed himself to be transported to work against all the instincts which insisted that his day would be more humanly profitable if spent in bed.

At the Mills, also, things seemed relatively quiet. Manalone was able to immerse himself in his work almost without interruption. Maurine van Holt delivered some letters to him but made no attempt to follow up their previous conversation. Her face was impassive, with just a slight hint of strain. Manalone speculated that her overnight session with her MIPS superiors could have been a rather stormy affair.

When he had time, he again pulled out Paul Raper’s letter and studied it in detail. Again he could find nothing exceptional in it. There was an underlying connection between the references, in that they all seemingly referred to the eco-crisis of human overpopulation. That was all. With characteristic thoroughness, he dialled the National Library computer and received an immediate printout of the abstracts. These, too, contained no more than he had expected.

Baffled by his inability to gain anything from the exercise which he did not already know, Manalone began to concentrate more carefully.

‘You’re losing your touch, Manalone. Paul meant you to have this list. He wasn’t carrying it himself just to save on the stamps. Ergo – it’s important somehow. There just has to be a message in it!’

Methodically, Manalone
checked the abstracts again, looking for coincidences or anything which might develop the latent information he was certain they contained. The dates of publication varied. Nothing there. The authors …

He reached again for his terminal keyboard and this time contacted the National Archive computer. His rapid series of questions produced the type of response he had been looking for. All the biographies on the list terminated with the singular phrase: ‘Current whereabouts unknown – presumed dead.’

‘How about that, Manalone? A series of articles on population-related subjects written by a league of missing men. Hardly a coincidence. Either the subject doesn’t pay too well, or else something else about it makes you a bad insurance risk. I wonder how they explain the actuarial tables on that one?’

The more he considered the matter, the more he could see that what he had gained from the exercise was not a set of answers but a new series of questions. It was not so much who were the missing men or where they went missing to – but why it was necessary for them to be missing at all.

‘Pollution, population, the certain doomsday that didn’t happen … and Paul killed because he knew too much about something he knew so little about that he couldn’t even give it a name. What manner of happening could give rise to these sets of circumstances? What starts by raising doubts about physical constants and ends by crucifying men for holding bits of teapot? It has to be something very big. Like the end of the world … or perhaps the creation of a new one. And either way, doesn’t Humanity have the right to know what it’s gaining … or losing?’

Manalone now recognized his isolation was nearly complete. With the loss of Paul he had lost most of his contact with the outside world: From here on, whatever he wished to know, he was going to have to dig out for himself. Lacking Paul’s conversational skills and journalistic flair, he was going to find the exercise very difficult indeed.

Looking for a place to start, he wondered if there could be any further clues left on the raft, which Paul had frequently visited to
stay with Kitten, his mistress, who lived there. This reminded him also of a duty he had yet to perform. He felt impelled to pay Kitten a visit to express his sympathy and to make sure that Paul’s sudden death had left her in no immediate want. With these twin reasons for the visit, he saw no point in further delay. Although it was not yet time to leave, Manalone closed his office and walked thoughtfully out of the gates.

The tall
towers of the York Project ended abruptly at the Bognor seafront, and here the notorious raft began. Pollution drifting in from the now dead English Channel had long turned the once fine beaches into an abomination which the Town had wanted to forget. For this reason, opposition to the formation of the raft had not initially been overactive until the raft itself had become a problem of even greater magnitude. By then it was too late to raise objections. The raft had become a social problem with no solution.

It was the oil slicks of an earlier century which had given the raft its origin. The floating booms placed along the coast as a defence against the drifting tides of oil had germinated an idea. Ingenuity, population pressure, and sheer human desperation had done the rest. Some early pioneer, dispossessed of a place to live, had conceived the notion of living on a raft inside the area where the boom and the floating oil quietened the sea. Using plastic drums chained in loose association, and forming a flexible deck from matting interleaved with polythene sheeting, he had built thereon a hut which had served him as a home.

The idea had survived and grown. Increasing automation of industry had forced the rising tide of unemployment to unparalleled levels. Such a massive loss of jobs and revenue gnawed away at the taxation system which had underpinned the welfare state. Appalling poverty for the unemployed was the unavoidable result. Under force of the need to build shelter for a family, the scene had developed, raft by associated raft, until the dangerous, undulating, pathetic shanty town had developed outwards on the sea.

The authorities were staggered but powerless. By the end of the century twelve thousand families had taken to the raft, driven by the vicious rise in land prices to construct their own meagre dwellings on the seaspace. Inevitably the floating township was a slum, which stretched from Selsea in a tapered wedge as far as Littlebampton and beyond; watched by the glassy and averted eyes of the growing Bognor metropolis.

The raft was
‘illegal’ land. The Town tried to deny its existence; no rates could be levied without acknowledging its presence, and therefore it was the cheapest place to live. It had no streets, only dangerous alleyways between the shacks where new tenants had joined their rafts piecemeal on the seaward side of the old. Its only regular feature was the chain of floating breakwaters, frequently extended, which the government was forced to maintain around the exterior to prevent massive loss of life in periods of storm and heavy seas.

The raft was a place of anonymity, hence its attraction for Paul when trying to escape the MIPS. It was a place of anonymous alleys, anonymous structures, and anonymous people – a community drawn tightly together by an open rejection by and of Authority and the law. It was a place of refuge for criminals, psychopaths, and those whose earnest skills could no longer fetch an economic return; a place where the police would venture only in groups of three; and where the hunted could find ample warning of pursuit and ready assistance in escape.

Manalone sensed the unspoken wariness as soon as he set foot on the undulating raft. Fortunately, Paul had a year previously shown him the location of Kitten’s hut. Studiously ignoring his critical watchers, he strode purposefully through the filthy walkways. His outward show of confidence was probably the only thing that saved him from molestation. Strangers were not welcome on the raft, but among the generally purposeless inhabitants a display of purpose was something to be treated with caution.

His memory for detail served him well. He made his way straight to Kitten’s shack. This was one of the more durable structures on the raft – a one-roomed hut of heavy timber, with the walls and roof dark with a coating of blistered tar. Manalone knocked on the door with some indecision. He had suddenly become very unsure of how to phrase the things he had come to say.

‘Typical of you, Manalone! With machines you’re a bright-eyed genius … but when it comes to people … you haven’t got what it takes. Kitten scares the hell out of you. And why? Because she’s ten times the character you are.’

He had no
cause to revise his estimate of her when she opened the door. Her eyes seemed to have the power to look right through to his core, as though he was made of glass. They made him feel very insignificant and superficial – as if he was more of a cardboard mock-up than a person.

She, in contrast, was extremely real. Unkempt in a way much like the younger Breve, she had a strength of character and a presence which made it impossible to ignore her. She was the epitome of maturity; every line of her attractive sun-browned face spoke of understanding and compassion and strength. In spite of the raggedness of her clothing, Manalone felt instantly that he was in the presence of a very significant human being.

‘Which is odd in itself, Manalone. By what yardstick do you measure human significance? And assuming you’re correct, what is one doing on the raft?’

‘Come in, Manalone. I’ve been expecting you.’

She turned and led him inside the dark recess of the shack. Here cleanliness and order were tightly overseen by the rule of near poverty. Most of the furniture and fittings were of amateur construction, and all were sharply utilitarian. As Manalone entered, two bronzed children scuttled away to a corner and hid behind a curtain.