Genevieve puckered her lips up and pressed herself up against the windscreen. “What about animals? Are there any left?”
“Nobody’s really sure. I’ve seen things moving round out there, but not close, so it could just be knots of dead tape-grass
blowing about. There’s supposed to be families of rabbits living in big warrens along some of the flood-free valleys. Friends
of mine say they’ve seen them, other drivers. I don’t know how, the ultraviolet ought to burn out their eyes out and give
them cancer. Maybe there’s some species that developed resistance; they certainly breed fast enough for it to evolve, and
they always were tough buggers. Then there’s people say pumas and foxes are still about, feeding on the rabbits. And I’ll
bet rats survived outside the domes if anything has.”
“Why do you come out here at all?” Louise asked.
“Maintenance crews do plenty of work on the vac-train tubes. Then there’s the ecology teams, they come out to repair the worst
aspects of erosion: replant tapegrass and restore river banks that get washed away, that kind of thing.”
“Why bother?”
“The arcologies are still expanding, even with all the emigration. There’s talk of building two more domes for London this
century. And Birmingham and Glasgow are getting crowded again. We’ve got to look after our land, especially the soil; if we
didn’t, it would just wash away into the sea and we’d be left with continents that were nothing more than plateaus of rock.
This world’s suffered enough damage already, imagine what the oceans would be like if you allowed all that soil to pollute
them. It’s only the oceans which keep us alive now. So I suppose it boils down to self-interest, really. At least that means
we’ll never stop guarding the land. That’s got to be a good result.”
“You like it out here, don’t you?” Louise asked.
Yves Gaynes gave her a happy smile. “I love it.”
They drove on through the wrecked land, sealed under its precious, protective living cloak. Louise found it almost depressingly
barren. The tapegrass, she imagined, was like a vast sheet of sterile packaging, preserving the pristine fields and spinnies
which slept below. She longed for something to break its uniformity, some sign of the old foliage bursting out from hibernation
and filling the land with colour and variety once more. What she wouldn’t give for the sight of a single cedar standing proud;
one sign of resistance offered against this passive surrender to the unnatural elements. Earth with all its miracles and its
wealth ought to be able to do better than this.
They drove steadily northwards, rising out of the Thames valley. Yves Gaynes pointed out old towns and villages, the walls
of their buildings now nothing more than stiff lumps drowned under tapegrass, names decaying to waypoints loaded into the
Trooperbus’s guidance block. The Trooperbus had left the simple mesh road behind a long time ago when Louise went back into
the main cabin to heat some sachets for lunch. They were driving directly across the tapegrass now, big wheels crushing it
to pulp, leaving two dark green tracks behind them. Outside, the land was becoming progressively more rugged, with deepening
valleys, and hills sporting bare rock crowns clawed by talons of grey-green lichen and ochre fungus. Gullies carried silver
streams of gently steaming water, while lakes rested in every depression.
“Here we are,” Yves Gaynes sang out, four hours after they left London.
Ivanov Robson squeezed his bulk into the cab behind the sisters, staring ahead with an eagerness to match theirs. A plain
geodesic crystal dome rose out of the land, about five miles wide, Louise guessed; its rim contoured around the slopes and
vales it straddled. The dome itself was grey, as if it was filled with thick fog.
“What’s it called?” Genevieve asked.
“Agronomy research facility seven,” Yves Gaynes replied, straightfaced.
Genevieve responded with a sharp look, but didn’t challenge him.
A door swung open at the base of the dome to admit the Trooperbus. Once the door closed, a red fungicide spray shot out from
all sides to wash away mud and possible spores from the vehicle’s body and wheels. They rolled forward into a small garage,
and the hatch popped open.
“Time to meet the boss,” Ivanov Robson said. He led the two girls out into the garage. The air was cooler than inside the
Trooperbus and the Westminster Dome, Louise thought. She was wearing only a simple navy-blue dress with short sleeves. Not
that it was cold, more like a fresh spring day.
Ivanov beckoned them forwards. Genevieve double clicked her heel, and glided along at his side. There was a small four-seater
jeep waiting, with a red and white striped awning and a steering wheel. The first one Louise had seen on this planet. It made
her feel more comfortable when Ivanov sat behind it. She and Gen took the rear seats, and they started off.
“I thought you didn’t know this place,” Louise said.
“I don’t. I’m being guided.”
Louise datavised a net processor access request, but got no response. Ivanov drove them into a curving concrete tunnel a couple
of hundred yards long, then they were abruptly out in full sunlight. Gen gasped in delight. The agronomy research dome covered
a patch of countryside which was the England they knew from history books: green meadows flecked with buttercups and daisies,
rambling hawthorn hedges enclosing shaggy paddocks, small woods of ash, pine, and silver birch lying along gentle valleys,
giant horse chestnuts and beeches dotted across acres of parkland. Horses were grazing contentedly in the paddocks, while
ducks and pink flamingos amused themselves in a lake with a skirt of mauve and white water lilies. In the centre was a sprawling
country house that made Cricklade seem gaudy and pretentious in comparison. Three-storey orange brick walls were held together
by thick black oak beams in traditional Tudor diagonals, though they were hard to see under the mass of topaz and scarlet
climbing roses. Windows of tiny leaded glass diamonds were thrown wide to let the lazy air circulate through the rooms. Stone
paths wound through a trim lawn that was surrounded by boarders of neatly pruned shrubs. A line of ancient yews marked the
end of the formal garden. There was a tennis court on the other side, with two people swatting a ball between them in an impressively
long volley.
The jeep took them along a rough track over the meadows round to the front of the house. They turned in through some wrought
iron gates and trundled along a cobbled, mossy drive. Swallows swooped mischievously low over the grass on either side, before
arrowing back up to the eaves where their ochre mud nests were hidden. A wooden porch around the front door was completely
smothered by honeysuckle;
Louise could just see someone waiting amid the shadows underneath.
“We’ve come home,” Genevieve murmured in delight.
Ivanov stopped the jeep in front of the porch. “You’re on your own now,” he told them.
When Louise shot him a look, he was staring ahead, hands gripped tightly on the steering wheel. She was just about to tap
him on the shoulder, when the person waiting in the porch stepped forwards. He was a young man, about the same age as Joshua,
she thought. But where Joshua’s face was lean and flat, his was round. Quite handsome though, with chestnut hair and wide
green eyes. Lips that were curved somewhere between a smile and a sneer. He was wearing a white cricket jumper and tennis
shorts; his bare feet shoved into shabby sneakers with a broken lace.
He put a hand out, smiling warmly. “Louise, Genevieve. We meet at last, to coin a clichÉ yet again. Welcome to my home.” A
black Labrador padded out from the house and snuffled round his feet.
“Who are you?” Louise asked.
“Charles Montgomery David Filton-Asquith at your service. But I’d really prefer you to call me Charlie. Everybody here does.
As in right, one expects.”
Louise frowned, still not shaking his hand, though he hardly seemed threatening. Exactly the kind of young landowner she’d
grown up with, though with a good deal more panache admittedly. “But, who are you? I don’t understand. Are you the one that
summoned us here?”
“ ’Fraid so. Hope you’ll forgive me, but I thought this would be an improvement on London for you. Not very jolly there right
now.”
“But how? How did you get us out through the curfew? Are you a policeman?”
“Not exactly.” He pulled a remorseful face. “Actually, I suppose you could say I rule the world. Pity I’m not making a better
job of it right now. Still, such is life.”
______
There was a swimming pool on the other side of the ancient house, a long teardrop shape with walls of tiny white and green
marble tiles. It had a mosaic of the Mona Lisa on the floor of the deep end. Louise recognized that, though she couldn’t remember
the woman flashing her left breast in the original painting. A group of young people were using the pool, splashing about
enthusiastically as they played some private-rules version of water polo with a big pink beach ball.
She sat on the Yorkstone slab patio with Charlie and Gen, relaxing at a long oak table which gave her an excellent view out
over the pool and the lawns. A butler in a white coat had brought her a glass of Pimms in a tall tumbler, with plenty of ice
and fruit bobbing round. Gen was given an extravagant chocolate milk shake clotted with strawberries and ice cream, while
Charlie sipped at a gin and tonic. It was, she had to admit, all beautifully civilized.
“So you’re not the President, or anything,” she enquired. Charlie had been telling them about the GISD, and its bureau hierarchy.
“Nothing like. I simply supervise serious security matters across Western Europe, and liaise with my colleagues to combat
global threats. Nobody elected us; we had the ability to dictate the structure and nature of the GISD back when continental
governments and the UN were merging into Govcentral. So we incorporated ourselves into it.”
“That was a long time ago,” Louise said.
“Start of the Twenty-second Century. Interesting times to live through. We were a lot more active in those days.”
“You’re not that old, though.”
Charlie smiled, and pointed across at the rose garden. A neat, sunken square, divided up into segments, each one planted with
different coloured rose bushes. Several tortoise-like creatures were moving slowly among the tough plants, their long prehensile
necks standing proud, allowing them to munch the dead flowers, nibbling the stem right back to the woody branch. “That’s a
bitek construct. I employ twelve separate species to take care of the estate’s horticulture for me. There’s a couple of thousand
of them here altogether.”
“But Adamists have banned bitek from all their worlds,” Gen said. “And Earth was the first.”
“The public can’t use it,” Charlie said. “But I can. Bitek and affinity are very powerful technologies; they give B7 quite
an advantage over would-be enemies of the republic. It’s a combination which also allows me to live for six hundred years
in an unbroken lineage.” He waved a hand over himself in a proud gesture. “This is the thirty-first body I’ve lived in. They’re
all clones, you see; parthenogenetic, so I retain the temperament for the job. I’m affinity capable, I had the ability long
before Edenism began. I used neurone symbionts at first, then the affinity sequence was vectored into my DNA. In a way, the
immortality method which B7 uses is a variant on Edenism’s end-of-life memory transfer. They use it to transfer themselves
into their habitat neural strata. I, on the other hand, use it to transfer myself into a new, vigorous young body. The clone
is grown in sensory isolation for eighteen years, preventing any thought patterns from developing. In effect, it’s an empty
brain waiting to be filled. When the time comes, I simply edit the memories I wish to take with me, and move my personality
over to the new body. The old one is immediately destroyed, giving the process a direct continuity. I even store the discarded
memories in a bitek neural construct, so no aspect of my life is ever truly lost.”
“Thirty-one bodies is a lot for only six hundred years,” Louise said. “A Saldana lives for nearly two centuries these days.
And even us Kavanaghs will last for about a hundred and twenty.”
“Yes,” Charlie said with an apologetic shrug. “But you spend the last third of that time suffering from the restrictions and
indignity of age. An illness which only ever gets worse. Whereas as soon as I reach forty I immediately transfer myself again.
Immortality and perpetual youth. Not a bad little arrangement.”
“Until now,” Louise took a drink of Pimms, “those previous bodies all had their own souls. That’s quite different from memories.
I saw it on a news show. The Kiint said they’re separate.”
“Quite. Something B7 has collectively ignored. Hardly surprising, given our level of conservatism. I suppose our past bodies
will have to be stored in zero-tau from now on; at least until we’ve solved the overall problem of the beyond.”
“So you were really alive in the Twenty-first Century?” Gen asked.
“Yes. That’s what I remember, anyway. As your sister says, the definitions of life have changed a lot recently. But I’ve always
considered myself to be the one person for all those centuries. That’s not a conviction you can break in a couple of weeks.”
“How did you get to be so powerful in the first place?” Louise asked.
“The usual reason: wealth. All of us owned or ran vast corporate empires during the Twenty-first Century. We weren’t merely
multinationals, we were the first interplanetaries; and we made profits that outgrossed national incomes. It was a time when
new frontiers were opening again, which always generates vast new revenues. It was also a time of great civil unrest; what
we’d called the Third World was industrialising rapidly thanks to fusion power, and the ecology was destabilising at equal
speed. National and regional governments were committing vast resources into combating the biosphere breakdown. Social welfare,
infrastructure administration, health care, and security—the fields government used to devote its efforts to—were all slowly
being starved of tax money and sold off to private industry. It wasn’t much of a jump for us. Private security forces had
guarded company property ever since the Twentieth Century; jails were being built and run by private firms; private police
forces patrolled closed housing estates, paid for out of their taxes. In some countries you actually had to take out insurance
in order to pay the state police to investigate a crime if you were a victim. So you see, evolving to an all-private police
force was an intrinsic progression for an industrialized society. Between the sixteen of us, we controlled ninety per cent
of the world’s security forces, so naturally we collaborated and cooperated on intelligence matters. We even began to invest
in equipment and training at a level that would never bring us a fiscal return. It paid us, though; nobody else was going
to protect our factories and institutions from crime lords and regional mafias. The crime rate actually started to fall for
the first time in decades.