‘Yet each man kills the thing he loves,’ murmured Carl May, as he paced his elegant office in the tower block in Reading which was the hub of Britnuc’s empire. The building had been designed to dominate the city skyscape, and so it had, but not for long. No sooner had the foundations settled, no sooner the first window cleaner toppled to his death – always the mark of a properly finished office building – than all around arose the thrusting towers of usurping empires – leaner, taller, glassier – but doomed to crumble and collapse, built on the hot and shifting sands of finance, not the rock of industry, the cold power of the atom. Carl May was neither shaken nor dismayed, though the arch of sky he loved was now the merest tent of blue, so high and near the false towers crowded. He knew they would not last.
‘What is that you said, my dear?’ enquired Bethany, looking up from her VDU, upon which she played computer games. He’d had the contraption carried up from a lower floor. In this calm and spacious room all was grey and pink and empty surfaces: uncluttered: all that was needed here was mind: no tools of trade, no paper, pens, or telephones: he was too grand for that. But Bethany must have her toys.
‘I was quoting,’ he said, ‘from The Ballad of Reading Gaol.’ It was Carl May’s joke. His empire, his prison! Oscar Wilde, once imprisoned for imprudence in Reading Gaol – still there, that gaunt grey building, still used, not a quarter of a mile away from where Carl May now had his throne – had through that imprisonment received his immortality.
‘Do you think,’ asked Carl May of Bethany, ‘anyone would have taken any notice of Oscar Wilde if he hadn’t gone to prison?’
But how was Bethany to answer a thing like that? She shrugged, and went on playing. He sighed. Carl May was restless. In the outer offices phones rang and minions ran; press officers dealt with queries concerning outfall and infall, becquerels and watertables, cladding and coolants, leukaemia and bone cancer, prevailing winds and drifting particles. Head Office personnel took calls from Britnucs A and D where staff threatened action over the recent tightening of various safety regulations, and from B and C where there was some anxiety that the tightening had not been sufficiently extreme. PR withdrew distribution to better facilitate the instant re-editing of an entire series of linked film for internal, external and educational purposes: no one could say Britnuc was not on its toes since Chernobyl went up; and the External Services division within the day had liaised with Concrete Casings – of which Carl May was also a director – to tender to the Soviet Union so many tonnes of special-grade radiation-resistant (though so far untested in the field) concrete for immediate shipment to Kiev.
Carl, confident in the efficiency and dedication of his staff, reserved his energies for the highest level – that is to say ministerial dealings; but the Government was, on the whole, wisely quiet, until such time as ignorance, panic and bad judgement in the lower levels were either cured, or covered up.
One female journalist did get through to Carl May that day by impersonating the Prime Minister’s voice, but that was the only entertainment in an otherwise boring morning for Carl May. Those who have perfected the art of delegation tend to suffer, in emergencies, from too much peace.
In Carl May’s childhood kennel, there had been a lot to do. Not only had he soothed the savage heart of Harry the bull-terrier but trained him to fetch him scraps of newsprint from the streets around: Carl May himself, being chained by a collar, was in no position to do so. Those were the worst days. But they had not been boring.
‘I never saw a man who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
Which prisoners call the sky’
said Carl May to Bethany, but her hand was upon the control stick, her eyes upon the screen, and she seemed not to hear. In theory she worked upon a special personal project of his, an Open Day for Britnuc two years hence, thus avoiding bad feeling amongst his other secretarial staff; it was an arrangement which he could safely cancel nearer the time. He liked to have her close. He realized he had been lonely, and resented his ex-wife Joanna for having by her behaviour rendered him thus, so sadly and for so long. With what great effort had he, Carl May, brought himself to trust a cruel world, and how she had destroyed that trust, completing what his mother had begun.
He wondered, as he sometimes did, whether to trace the clones of Joanna May, and see how they had turned out, and whether one of them might not do instead of Joanna, but he could see the folly of it. The capacity for infidelity, Carl May suspected, ran in the genes; it could not be in the rearing – for surely Joanna had had a calm, tranquil and orderly rearing; she had seemed neither too fond of her father nor too antagonistic to her mother, and yet she had succumbed – and all he would do was set himself up again for the same shock and sorrow. Joanna at half her age would still be Joanna.
Bethany, thought Carl May; now Bethany was a different matter. She knew where her bread and butter lay. She had been bought. She acknowledged the transaction. He had taken, as it were, an option out on Bethany, body and soul. When it ran out, he would either renew on his terms, if he so chose, or let it lapse, and she would be free to go. He felt well disposed towards her. She gave him pleasure. He told her things he never told anyone. It would not last.
He did not want it to last. He felt humiliated as well as pleased, lessened as much as augmented. She was less than him in everything but youth.
‘It is sweet to dance to violins,
When love and life are fair,
To dance to flutes, to dance to lutes,
Is delicate and rare:
But it is not sweet with nimble feet
To dance upon the air –’
said Carl May aloud.
Bethany hummed a little song as she worked upon her game: little trills and tweets rose round her, as if flocks of tiny birds flowed from her machine: her red hair fell enchantingly upon her face.
‘Do you understand that?’ asked Carl May.
‘Understand what?’ she asked. Carl May felt a stab of displeasure: it cut between his ribs like a knife.
‘To dance upon the air is to hang,’ he said. ‘Love is a hanging offence.’
‘Why’s that?’ she said, not caring.
‘Because each man kills the thing he loves,’ he said, ‘which was where we began.’
‘You didn’t kill Joanna,’ said Bethany, ‘only her boyfriend, so what are you going on about?’ On her screen, in search of paradise, she dodged monsters and beheaded and delimbed her enemies with a sword which flailed every time she pressed the space key.
Carl May thought if he had Bethany cloned, he could perhaps undo the effects of her upbringing. If he got Holly to remove one of Bethany’s eggs, fertilized it in vitro with any old semen, removed the resultant nuclei and reinserted the nuclei of any one of Bethany’s DNA-bearing cells (which the new dehydrating technique had made just about possible), and then had the egg implanted in a womb as stable and orderly as that of Joanna’s mother – and such wombs could be found, now as then; their owners crying out for implantation – why then Carl May might create a perfect woman, one who looked, listened, understood and was faithful. If he reimplanted the egg in Bethany herself – but no, that would be hopeless; she was spoiled, sullied, somehow she would reinfect herself.
‘Shoo fly,’ murmured Bethany. ‘Shoo fly, don’t bother me,’ and ping, ping, wimble, doodle, cheep cheep, splat went the little fluttering doves and ravens, the electronic sounds of victory and defeat – he’d made her turn the volume right down but still the small inanities, the false excitements, trembled and hovered in the air, insistent. He decided the cloning of Bethany would be more trouble than it was worth: it would require more time and energy than he had available. She made him feel tired, and that was the truth of it. Old King David’s maidservant may have warmed his bed but she sure as hell carried him off quicker. He would be too old by the time Bethany was reissued, as it were, to get the benefit of it.
Now, if he had himself cloned, as he’d threatened Bethany – then the two younger versions of themselves could indeed pair off. But what use would that be to Carl May? Another body would feel the pleasure: another mind register it. Odd how the notion kept reasserting itself – that what one clone knew, would be known by all: what one felt, the others would feel; that to make clones was to create automatons, men without souls – soldiers, servants, deprived of will, decision. How could it be so? Did the common misconception suggest that the soul, whatever that was, would be split, divided out fairly amongst the repetitions – as if nature and God were indeed in some kind of partnership? For every new exercise in human diversity – a quarter of a million of them every day – God would dole out only one soul? They were in short supply? Nonsense! He wanted to talk to Joanna about it. Joanna the faithless, the betrayer: Joanna who mocked him, whispered about him behind his back, trapped and tortured him. Joanna Eve.
‘Shoo fly,’ murmured Bethany. ‘Shoo fly, don’t bother me!’
‘What are you singing?’ he asked.
‘Just something that goes through my head,’ she said.
‘What’s that?’ he asked.
‘It has no words,’ said Bethany, but she lied. The words were clear in her head. If you went on from ‘Shoo fly, don’t bother me, For I belong to somebody,’ you got to:
For an old man he is old,
And an old man he is grey,
But a young man’s heart is full of love,
Get away, old man, get away.
Bethany stopped singing. She felt sad, to be so young and yet so old, twenty-four going on forty-two.