‘Good evening, metamortals. This is your hourly feel-good update. Fighting, floods and plague continue to rage on earth. The city of Venice, Italy, was today covered by water just a few hours after historians completed the virtual replica. This week’s world president was assassinated this afternoon when rebels bombed the Washington Archipelago. Four million organicists died, but no metamortals were reported injured. The weather will be whatever you want it to be …’ I turn her off, the bland voice of compulsory joy. We have made our Utopia, and we must lie in it. Yet there are moments when honesty tugs at my heartstrings and I have to speak to my daughter.
In the courtyard of our house there’s a pool. During the day we swim at least a hundred lengths to keep our plastimuscles toned, and in the evenings we use our pool for virtual visiting. The synthetic blue-green waves make a beautiful frame to grim visions of the battered earth.
I walk through my English country garden in the artificial sunset, staged each evening to make us exiles from earth feel at home. Then I watch the planetary tantrum that precedes the purple night of Luna Minor, our exclusive retirement colony for metamortals, a cylinder city that orbits the moon. It’s always dark on the moon, but the lifestyle engineers who designed Luna Minor knew that we’d need light and views and so they have created them. I gaze out at a vast panorama of stars and planets, among them the one on which I was born.
Even now, years after my sight was restored, it still moves me very much to see Abbie, who is sitting in the shabby wooden hut that is all that remains of our mansion near Primrose Hill, above the flooded ruins of London. The house Leo bought so that we could all be together again. My two-year-old great-great-granddaughter Ella sits placidly on Abbie’s knee, and as she becomes aware that I’m watching her my daughter reaches up to smooth her coarse grey bun. Her wrinkled brown eyes are calm as she stares back at the masterpiece that is my face.
I do find these virtual visits a strain; I often wish she didn’t have eternity on her hands. From my window I can see the moon, which still looks poetic but is in fact completely colonized. I’m glad the journey is still too tedious to tempt my indefatigable mother very often.
‘You look tired, my darling. No more plagues?’
‘We heard rumours of an outbreak of radiation flu, but we’re OK.’
‘With all those small children around – why don’t you send them up here for a few months? We could get a special visa for Terrestrial Victims. We’d love to have them.’
‘I know you would, but they’d come back so lunified it would take them six months to adjust back to life here.’
‘And what are great-great-grandparents for if not to spoil children?’
‘You have to admit you and Leo are confusing for them. For a start, you look sixty years younger than me.’
‘There’s no need to sound so resentful. I’ve always told you, I’ll pay for you to have everything done. All you’d accept is that little brain implant …’
I sigh and touch the side of my head. I often wish I could tear out this bloody implant, which allows my mother to intrude whenever she wants to, so that I can’t avoid seeing her holographic image and hearing her voice. ‘You used to be so attractive, darling. And you could still leave here looking fabulous. It would probably give a new boost to your career.’
‘What career? You know my voice has cracked, and anyway there aren’t any more theatres or concert halls. I just sing for friends and family sometimes.’
‘Well, up here science has caught up with mythology, and I think you’re crazy not to make the most of it.’
‘Let’s not start that again. Please. We want to live and die down here, naturally, that’s all.’
‘But there’s no need to die at all!’ Her reconstructed face, a marvel of smooth pale curves – as long as you don’t look too closely – peers anxiously, as if she expects to see an aggressive virus carry me off.
‘It’s no use looking at me like that. I don’t want to be like you two.’
She sighs. ‘How’s Ben?’
‘Old and tired, like me,’ I say with satisfaction. ‘And when we’re on our deathbeds I don’t want you sneaking down here injecting us with resurrection juice or whatever it is – oh, stop crying! All that glop you spray on your face instead of skin will congeal.’
‘Of course I’m crying. I dedicate myself to the pursuit of eternal happiness and you don’t want anything to do with it. You’re determined to break my heart by dying an anachronistic and unnecessary death. What about your children? Don’t you want to live for them?’
‘They’re all in their fifties and sixties, for God’s sake. They’ll miss me and Ben, I suppose. It’ll be sad. But there’s no room for us all, Mum. Only in your crazy little heaven. Down here there’s barely enough food, the floods come every spring, we’ve no real medicine since all the governments and multi-nationals abandoned the planet –’
‘Oh, don’t start lecturing me again about your heroic pioneer spirit.’
‘Pioneers start something, we’re in at the end. Pretty soon after Ben and I die people will either flee to other planets as refugees or choose to die with the poor old earth.’
‘London used to be such a fabulous city.’
‘There are lots of fables about it. But there are no theatres, shops, restaurants or parks now, Mum. Anyway, if you remember, our life here wasn’t always so fabulous.’
‘Is that what made you so bitter and perverse? I wish now I’d never destroyed that contract and dragged you down into squalor.’
‘It was the only real thing you ever did.’
‘And what’s so wonderful about reality?’
Ben comes in, and raises his eyebrows when he realizes we have a virtual visitor.
Then, as if she senses his presence, she says, ‘Abbie, tell me about Ben. I can’t hear him or see him but I assume he’s there. Is he still writing poetry?’
‘He never stops writing, although there aren’t any readers left. He writes for a couple of hours each morning and then goes to help in the fields or strengthen the dam. I wish you could see how red and blistered his hands are.’
She shudders. ‘Don’t make me think about raw hands, grizzled hair or aging faces.’
I’m glad they can’t see or hear each other as I turn to him and say, ‘She’s been trying to persuade us to go and join them on Planet Narcissus.’
‘Don’t think we’d fit in. We’re too old and ugly. Tell her we’re just about to eat.’
I say goodbye.
‘Goodbye, my darling,’ she replies.
I’m close to tears as their images fade. Always now, I’m afraid it will be the last time I see my daughter. When the pool is empty I look down at my own reflection in it and see a tall, slim woman in a long, dark dress, the night sky behind me shimmering in the ripples of water. Around me is the ingenious Mediterranean summer night of Luna Minor: the fireflies shimmering in the mild, seductive air, the softly illuminated fountains in the gardens where metamortals walk and talk and flirt. There are no mosquitoes or thunderstorms or tourists.
As I enter our transparent dome-shaped house the door asks me what I want for supper and reminds me to renew my cell-regenerating implant. Inside, a Chopin waltz plays as the artificial candles on the marble dining-table light themselves, the partition between the dining-and living-rooms slides back and the house becomes a planetarium. The telescopic lenses in the transparent walls of our house produce wonderful effects as the stars dance.
On Luna Minor the eye is always tricked and delighted. I often wonder how I’d feel about living here if I hadn’t had my sight restored by ultrasound waves and tiny cameras in my retina soon after I returned to Leo. If I was still blind, locked in my inner life – which proved to be a surprisingly well-furnished secret room – I might have become an organicist like my daughter. So many people who were once homeless have chosen to stay down there; the poor have inherited the earth, simply because the rich no longer want it. The homeless and the dispossessed found their voices for the first time; they came pouring out of tunnels, roaring and bellowing, and overpowered the city. Now they’re all over the world, and they’re hungry for the future. Their anger was like the hum of ten million bees, and they were a force that cut across race and government and nationality. The have-nots decided they’d had enough.
Sometimes I can imagine an alternative life, in which I stayed down there with Abbie and Ben and their children, dying naturally. But simplicity has never appealed to me for longer than a daydream. So I joined Leo up here, where beauty and artifice and ingenuity have almost routed that bitch nature.
When the first global-warming disasters struck, causing famine all over Asia and Africa and flooding all the low-lying cities of the world, when the wars that nobody wanted destroyed London and New York and Paris and Berlin, those of us who had power and money weren’t unprepared. It turned out that the space programmes governments had been mysteriously engaged in for decades made it possible for a small international élite to flee the dying planet. Once it became clear that nature was turning on people even more viciously than they could have turned on each other, Leo began to bring brochures home to the big house near Primrose Hill where we had lived for more than thirty years.
There was a military colony on Pluto, where murderers and psychopaths were exiled to fight out wars vicariously, like medieval champions; a group of redundant international politicians were fleeing on a star-cruiser to another galaxy, so far away that it would take over a century to reach their destination. They had volunteered to be put into a state of hibernation, but while they were waiting they kept arguing about who would be president of their new galaxy and assassinating each other, so there were empty places on their starcruiser; various multinationals had combined to create Planet Joy, where exiles from earth could live in oxygen-regulated capsules and be fed intravenously with perfectly balanced nutrients and drugs that kept them in a state of permanent ecstasy while their brains were attached to interactive pornodreams.
Luna Minor was the most comfortable of the ex-planetary colonies. Many of the directors of the Metaphysical Bank were sibyls and magi who had known for centuries that the earth would become uninhabitable and had devoted their vast resources to planning and building their island in the moon. ‘Not the cheapest or the most accessible of the new worlds. Only those with strong links with the Metaphysical Bank will be considered, and preference will be given to those with an association of at least five hundred years. But if you are successful we guarantee you an eternity of gracious civilization. Luna Minor. The best of all possible worlds.’ As the floodwaters lapped against the windowsill of our kitchen in Primrose Hill I was seduced by the vibrant baritone of the sales video and agreed to accompany Leo.
I know Abbie despises the way I live – the fact that I’m alive at all – but, then, who wants to be natural and dead? There are still moments when my pleasure in life is as intense as it has ever been. When I’m invited to lecture in the Metaphysical Theatre to the other spareparters on Infinite Vitality, I whisper to my adoring audience that my secret is to enjoy small things every day. Then I raise a laugh by ending my lecture with one of my old dance routines, ‘Roses in Picardy’. Yes, little daily pleasures: after dinner tonight we’ll watch a series of spectacular volcanic eruptions on Io, Jupiter’s moon. I’ve selected three Greek taverna meals, as Pierre is staying to supper after he and Leo finish their chess game.
Leo comes hobbling downstairs with Pierre, who was a barber-surgeon in Paris before the French Revolution and is now one of the most successful trackless-robot surgeons in the universe. Leo is complaining, as usual.
‘It’s the El Cid factor,’ Pierre explains. ‘You and Jenny are spare-parters. It’s not your fault. You were already mature when they began genetic screening at birth. So of course bits of you need replacing all the time.’
‘For two thousand years I never had so much as a headache; now I’m a decaying mass of aches and pains. Could you do me a new spine?’
‘There’s nothing wrong with your back. You should just swim more. You’re such a hypochondriac,’ I say affectionately. Leo, like me, is a handsome patchwork, just about recognizable as the man I met before the First World War. Pierre opted to have one of the first triple-brain transplants, and his medical, musical and mathematical knowledge bulge like an extra ribcage in his forehead, above his long, pale face.
‘It is, of course, possible to replace every inch of you every few years, like a Japanese temple, but at a certain point you might as well give up on the dubious privilege of being human, as I have done, and accept the superiority of machine life. I haven’t a single cell or organ that was in me in Paris in the 1790s. Some of us are thinking of suing the Metaphysical Bank for a misleading description in our contract. After all, eternity should mean eternity. These new kids who’ve been genetically screened since birth are still only in their seventies, so it’s too soon to say if they’ll really live for ever.’
‘Eternity. For ever,’ Leo says gloomily. ‘I don’t know why we bother. What you get isn’t really life at all. Look at this olive. Greek taverna, my foot. This olive bears no resemblance to the ones I used to eat on Crete a couple of thousand years ago. Might as well be made of plastic. It probably is. And this retsina tastes like bleach.’
I defend my skill with the meal-selector button. ‘Considering how far away we are from Greece, it’s not too bad.’
‘Ah, Greece. I miss the earth, you know. Sometimes I think those organicists like Abbie and Ben have got it right: suffer and work and eat real food for a few years and then die.’
‘They will. Quite soon,’ I say, my eyes full of tears.
‘I’m going to start a revolutionary movement here: dying is good for you. This place needs a few funerals to liven things up. Jenny?’
‘What? Will I join you on your revolutionary funeral pyre? No thanks, there are still lots of things I enjoy.’ I suddenly realize we’ve been leaving Pierre out of the conversation. ‘Who won your chess game?’
‘Me, of course. My brain capacity is equal to six chess champions, and I can do as many operations in a day as the old city hospitals could in a week. Yet when you talk and laugh like that I don’t understand. Shall I demonstrate my social skills by telling you a joke?’
‘That would be nice,’ I say politely.
‘It’s not very funny. What do you call a dysfunctional interplanetary pilot?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say in an encouraging voice. ‘What do you call a dysfunctional interplanetary pilot?’
‘Albert. You didn’t laugh. Nobody ever does. I know two thousand four hundred and seventy-two more jokes.’
‘Let’s save them for another night. In a few moments Io will be erupting. I’ve maximized the telescopic lenses so we can see. Look! Isn’t that fantastic?’ We stare in silence through the transparent roof at the stunning display of white-hot lava swirling with dazzling colours. ‘There’s a starcruiser full of artists moored just outside the radiation belt of Jupiter. We’ll have to buy some of their pictures when they come back. Tomorrow night there’s another earthquake in Japan. We can watch that, too. Did you see the hurricane in Florida last week? That was incredibly beautiful. More coffee, Pierre?’
‘No thank you. My caffeine and alcohol levels are high enough. I must go home now.’
‘He was more fun before his brain was perfected,’ I say as soon as the door slides shut.
‘He was a lot more fun in 1815 when I first met him as an abortionist in Whitechapel – come to think of it, I was more fun in 1815, too.’
‘Well, I wasn’t even born then.’ I’m still proud of being several thousand years younger than my lover. ‘You’re miserable tonight.’ I reach out to hold his hands, which, like my own, are seamed with ropelike veins. When we touch there is still a sexual charge between us; Leo reaches out to stroke the curve of my shapely plastibuttocks.
‘I’m not really unhappy. How could I be? My health monitor would simply raise my serotonin level. Yet this place brings out my most perverse and bloody-minded side. I don’t know why.’
‘Perhaps it’s because you’re a sort of illegal immigrant here. You only got in by lying about your past. Strictly speaking you ought to be up on Pluto, fighting out proxy wars with all the other criminals and psychopaths.’
‘I wasn’t that bad, was I? I forget.’
‘Oh, Leo, how convenient your memory implants are. I wish I could forget as much as you do.’
‘I’d have gone mad long ago if I had to keep remembering it all.’
‘Murder, swindling, drug dealing …’
‘Well, we’re none of us perfect. Do you wish you’d never met me?’
‘No, I’ve never wished that.’
I try to relive my own feelings: the fear and disgust that drove me to steal my contract from the vaults beneath the Metaphysical Bank eighty years ago. Rather than stay with Leo I was prepared to risk death and expose Abbie to terrible danger. I can see myself in the hotel room, my beauty suddenly demolished, the horror of realizing I was blind – I remember it all, can’t pretend like Leo to have forgotten. These pictures are with me for ever, but the feelings, complexities and doubts behind them are lost. My past is a story I’ve told myself too often, tidying and justifying. If you live for ever you also lie for ever, desperately adjusting your self-image until you find one that is bearable. I look down at our four hands, clasped together in the volatile present.
Since Ben’s death I have envied him and cursed my inheritance. I’m glad I embarked on this great adventure in the ruins of London. But I’m tired now. I’ve had enough.
When Jenny and Leo told me I couldn’t be Ben’s sister there was a family conference. David and Muriel wanted their son to stay at university, and Jenny and Leo expected me to resume my apprenticeship as a princess. Leo bought the mansion that backed on to Primrose Hill and showed it to me with a flourish. But Ben and I didn’t want their world, so we ran away together. We ran from London and childhood, from home and homelessness and education. The anger against my mother that I couldn’t show when she was poor and blind and helpless flowed out of me in a great tidal wave that carried me with Ben to India and South America.
For years Ben and I were so fired by the heat of the forge in which we were reinventing ourselves that we never wrote to our parents or even telephoned them. We travelled furiously, sleeping rough or staying in farming cooperatives. When we were hungry we didn’t ask our daddies for money but sang the songs we wrote. At first we were paid in rice and maize and free beds, but then we were invited to sing at the first anti-globalization events. It turned out that being against multinational companies and banks – metaphysical and otherwise – meant that we were part of a movement, although I always felt we were joining on false pretences: when I sang about eternal youth and midnight transformations and global conspiracies they all praised my brilliant imagination.
Our life was peripatetic. Often we had to go into hiding, and we trusted nobody except each other. I remember a night when we clung together in a granary in Afghanistan, buried under sacks. Inches away, we could hear soldiers searching for us, paid by the local warlord who resented a song we’d been singing about his drug and weapon deals. Lying in the dark with Ben’s heart beating next to my own I wondered if my special powers, my ‘martian arts’ as Rosa used to call them, had any existence outside a little girl’s fantasy. We were unarmed, and the soldiers tramping towards us had guns and knives.
When the soldiers left Ben and I were violently sick. We weren’t heroes, we didn’t want to fight or die. Ben wanted to learn how to farm so that the poor – us included – could eat. Those years of travelling nourished in me a fierce, almost perverse, simplicity. I wanted to dig and burrow into the earth my parents had skimmed above, to live with my face and body as it was, to love one man with all my heart.
In my late twenties, when I became pregnant, my childhood came rolling back like a ball I had chucked away over a high wall. Ben and I were singing at an open-air concert in Africa, where farmers had realized indigenous landowners were just as good at exploiting them as colonials. The crowd was dancing and swaying, and Ben and I were high on the dangerous illusion that art changes the world. The night throbbed with music and colour and a thousand people singing of love and peace and hope.
The first shots sounded like fireworks. Then I heard screams and saw blood spread across the white cotton dress of a woman who had been dancing a yard away from the stage. She slid to the floor as Ben and I registered what was going on and heard more shots and screams.
Well, as I said, I never was a heroine. My voice shook and fled before my legs followed it. Ben dropped his guitar as we held hands and ran to hide under the jeep we had arrived in. I clutched Ben, and the baby swelling under my breasts, and the British passport that meant the mad dictator’s soldiers might think for a second before they killed me. We lay and watched as feet that had been dancing a few minutes ago were dragged into a pyramid, doused with paraffin and barbecued. Don’t let me die, I prayed all night from my worm’s-eye hiding place. Prayed to my mother, whom I hadn’t seen for fifteen years, who might in fact be dead – although staying alive had always been her most noticeable attribute.
The next morning Ben and I were arrested. We were abject by then, dizzy with hunger, sick at the stench of charred human flesh, terrified that the baby inside me would be bayoneted out.
After two days in a filthy cage we were collected by a British diplomat, our man in Hades. He knew my father, who had phoned him and explained that his daughter and her boyfriend were playing silly buggers.
Ben and I were loaded on to a plane, then another, still shaking with dysentery and terror. At Heathrow we were met by my parents and an ambulance that rushed me to the Royal Free Hospital.
So I held my daughter in my arms when I sat up in bed and stared at my mother. She looked about my age. Her face was like a rare and valuable vase that has been shattered and then mended, not quite invisibly. Her features were all there – the large dark eyes, the strong but elegant nose, the generous mouth, the harmonious curves of her lovely cheekbones and jaw line. She even had her shining black hair again, thick waves of it tickling my cheek and brushing against the bald head of my baby. She was the mother whose beauty I had longed to inherit when I was a little girl, whose clone I had fervently wanted to be. She was embracing us, three generations together, and I gave myself to her arms until I opened my eyes and saw the cameras and microphones surrounding my hospital bed.
Suddenly I was aware of my ratty hair, blotchy unmade-up skin and the blood and vomit stains on my hospital gown. I pushed her away, and she tottered backwards on her stiletto heels, smiling as she posed one more time for the cameras, twirling to show them her tailored orange-linen suit with its very short skirt. ‘She’s a little overwrought,’ Jenny murmured to the assembled journalists and cameramen. ‘Perhaps you should come back later.’
The room emptied. Then I saw Leo, who also had that newly cobbled look. The opposite of youth isn’t age but metasurgery. My father sat beside my bed, kissed my brow and nervously held out a finger to his granddaughter. Ben came forward, looking pale and exhausted and real. I held out my arms to him and sheltered in our private, unphotogenic love.
‘I didn’t ask them to come, darling. They insisted. So I thought we might as well sell the story to Beautiful People and put the money in trust for – is it a boy or a girl?’
Inside the warm circle of my lover and baby I felt strong enough to face my mother. ‘Girl. Gina. You can see,’ I said with wonder.
She smirked, showing off her spiky dark eyelashes. ‘Leo’s been so sweet. He just couldn’t bear to let me go. So we got my eyes done in Switzerland, my kidneys and heart in Acapulco, my face in San Francisco. Leo’s had quite a few ops, too, haven’t you, darling? When it came to the point we realized we’d been foolish to throw away eternal youth. Old age and death are really only for failures and masochists.’
‘Don’t worry about anything,’ Leo said benevolently. ‘We’ll look after you now.’
And they did. This house was still a modernized Victorian mansion then, much photographed by glossy magazines. Leo and Jenny were famous for being rich, glamorous and fashionably philanthropic. Leo kept his promise and allowed abandoned children to move in with us. Jenny’s original lost children had grown up and disappeared, but there were always more. Half of their enormous house was a refuge for homeless kids. Ben and I lived there, and our children – I had four eventually – grew up thinking that communal life was natural.
Many of the rich followed Jenny’s and Leo’s example. Their houses were less likely to be burgled or looted, and there was even a word for it: compassionalization. There were tax breaks and compassionalized houses were safer, even if they were rather overcrowded. By the 2030s overcrowding was a comfort. It was the bodies of solitary men, women and children that you found floating on the waters or stranded like garbage on rooftops when the floods went down.
When I was about forty I had an infuriating conversation with my mother, who offered to remake me in her image. She sobbed that she couldn’t bear to see my grey hairs and cellulite and stretch marks. I stared back at her, at the face and body I had longed for as a little girl, which she was now offering to buy for me. Perhaps I became an organicist at that moment. Although – as Ben used to tease me – I did accept this damned brain implant, so that in a sense I’ve always remained Mummy’s and Daddy’s girl, living in their house, my life saved on numerous occasions by their intervention. My final gesture of independence will be to be allowed to die.
For years none of us heard from Annette. She lost her seat at East Plumford, resigned from the Labour Party and quarrelled with everybody. There were rumours that she was living alone in a house near the sea in Dorset. Jenny and I searched for her and found her at last in a tiny house outside Weymouth, living alone and drinking heavily. She was old and lonely and incoherent. As I watched her make us tea with shaking hands, I thought, she’ll never change the world now. We stayed for an awkward hour, but her conversation – self-pity and bitterness punctuated with incoherent prophecies – was so disturbing that we were relieved to escape.
Then, five years later, her book was published, and it was a revelation. Every great movement needs its bible, and Life After Government brilliantly combined anarchism, ecology and feminism. It managed to be both critical and hopeful, and for millions it became a blueprint for how we should live in a disintegrating world. She coined the word organicist to describe someone who ‘channels her energy and intelligence into living with, not opposed to, nature in all her capricious moods’. Annette advocated huge non-violent protests against war, tax, pollution, debt and the global economy and insisted that resources, rather than employment, should be taxed. She ransacked history to find quotes and slogans, such as this one from the seventeenth-century Diggers: ‘This earth we will make whole so it can be a common treasury for all,’ which Ben and I turned into a successful song. Soon after Annette’s death her book became an international best-seller, just before all the bookshops disappeared. The following year my parents decided to abandon the planet.
Nobody knows how many died in the wars against terrorism or the accidental nuclear wars or the cyberwars or the catastrophes the earth threw at us, like a mother who has lost her temper with her children. People just disappeared – Rosa, Kevin, Jonathan, Alice and dozens of other friends and relations. Ben and I were instinctive anarchists, and at first there was a kind of joy in our new freedom. No more taxes, statistics, banks, schools, police, television, newspapers, supermarkets or public transport. The infrastructure didn’t melt away at once but so gradually that it was almost poetic, a slow ballet of decay. Rumours spread in frantic emails on the computers many of us still kept even after the cyberwars and via the crackly local radio stations that sprang up. The tube stations all closed, although they were covered with signs that said they would reopen as soon as possible. Then those signs went, too, and we knew the tunnels were flooded with sewage, the rails rusted, rats and maggots feasting on the last commuters.
I remember the last time I took my grandchildren, Jack and Ahmed, to school, one April morning when the floodwater shimmered from the fields of Regent’s Park to the broken, ragged eggshell of St Paul’s. It should have been a fifteen-minute walk, but there were potholes and bomb craters in the roads and pavements and our way was blocked by abandoned cars, buses and lorries. Beggars and refugees mobbed us when they saw we were carrying bags and wearing clothes that had once been expensive. We arrived at the playground – minus the children’s lunch-boxes and Jack’s trainers – to find a notice telling us the school would be closed ‘until the end of the emergency’. The mob that had followed us shrieked with delight, and in a few minutes they occupied the empty playground and school buildings. As far as I know they’re still there.
It’s years since I’ve ventured that far. Ben and I were so close that sometimes even our children and grandchildren were jealous. We all lived here comfortably enough, a self-sufficient community. The house has a huge garden where Ben, who loved gardening, grew vegetables. Suddenly your survival depended on something as arbitrary as whether you lived in a basement in Lambeth or a top-floor flat in Muswell Hill. Estate agents tried to advertise London as the New Venice, with its quaint watery streets and flotillas of rowing boats and dinghies. Then the houseboats and floating houses began to appear. Some of them are just corrugated-iron shacks bolted to rotting wooden platforms; others are floating palaces used as holiday homes by Lunies.
Those of us who lived on the high ground built higher and higher walls and stockpiled food and weapons. Non-violent direct action was all very well, but those of us who thought we were liberals found we were quite capable of killing to protect our children and ourselves. Our extended family was a kind of ready-made community – or tribe – or private army.
Even after the house was bombed we stayed here and built huts and shacks in the ruins. We looked after each other and laughed at the politicians who tried to control us. After computer voting was exposed as a scam there were no more elections or nation states. Now that there is no transport, the world, that used to be as small as it was in the song I once heard in a toy shop, has become unimaginably big again. Last winter a group of refugees came from Highgate, with tales of starvation and fever. We let them stay, in return for help in the fields, as they were all skilled people and able to build their own shelters. As for further afield, for all I know there be dragons in France and India and the United States. My mother tells me of endless wars and bloodshed – she watches our disasters as after-dinner entertainment. I suspect that most people, like me, are delighted to have got rid of their beloved leaders and are quite capable of organizing their own modest resources. Individuals are kind, but governments are callous, or so I’ve always believed. So we survive. Only I don’t want to any more.
‘Darling, you mustn’t give up.’
‘Why shouldn’t I? And how dare you listen in to my thoughts like that!’
‘I’m so worried about you. Of course, I understand how much you must miss Ben. He was a sweet boy –’
‘He was ninety-five.’
‘But you could go on for ever, like me.’
‘I don’t want to be like you!’
‘I can’t bear to think of you dying. I’m coming, Abbie. I’m getting the first shuttle. Leo will come with me. You must come back here with us, have a break from all that squalor. You’ve been overdoing it. You need to see how beautiful life can be. Have a facial refurbishment, a jab of amnesiac, a hormonal renaissance – anything.’
‘No!’
I hold my head to stop her voice from splitting it, rocking with pain and grief. Around my chair the younger people bustle, preparing supper and putting children to bed. From the window of the hut I can see the moon, threatening me. They will come; she’s probably packing at this moment. Her virtual visits are bad enough, but this time she’ll be physically here, criticizing my life and flirting with her great-grandsons. Her voice has gone, but I can feel her will, and Leo’s, quivering in the moonlight.
Once I loved my parents, but they are not real, and I can’t love unreality. I love my children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, but they don’t need me any more. All my deepest feelings are concentrated on Ben, and he is dead.
Tonight I decided to die.
Pierre warned me that I might feel ill as I re-entered the earth’s atmosphere, but I’m not prepared for this assault of vomiting, headaches, dizziness, anxiety.
‘You’re such a valetudinarian!’ Jenny says as she strokes my forehead.
Her arm is the only part of her she can move. We lie side by side like two hieratic figures on a tomb, strapped down, bristling with tubes that feed us intravenously and bags that catch our fluids.
‘Don’t you feel ill? You’re so tough!’
‘I’d put up with anything to see Abbie. We must persuade her to come back with us. I’ve tried talking to her, but it’s not the same. She has to see us to realize how marvellous life can be. I want to show her our house and the gardens and the fountains, introduce her to some charming people. Perhaps she’ll find a new partner and stay up there with us. For years now she’s known nothing but suffering, grief, disease, poverty. Naturally she’s depressed, but we can soon fix that.’
I gaze at the other horizontal figures on the shuttle. Most of them are metamortals, who have been sent down by their therapists to remind them how happy they really are. They will be shuttled from war zone to flood to ruined city; they will see and even, if they can bear it, touch the diseased and starving refugees. The more intrepid ones will leave the ship for a week on a Local Colour houseboat moored on a lake in what used to be London or New York. They will all be forced to holiday until they beg to be allowed to return to Luna Minor, refreshed and rejuvenated, ready to enjoy a few more centuries of pleasure.
One of the interplanetary nurses makes us all do exercises for our circulation and muscles. The other passengers look at us suspiciously. When we were questioned by the Perpetual Police at the terminal at Luna Minor we admitted that we were going down to earth to visit family, and the news that we are actually going to stay with the natives has produced a frisson of shock. I know the story that I loved Jenny so much that we gave birth to a child has become a popular legend – it was turned into a genetic opera and performed at the Metaphysical Theatre only last year – but our visceral connection with the old world is not at all romantic. I see several of the women stare at Jenny in disgust; not only did she allow a flesh-and-blood baby, a nature brat, to pollute her body, but she is returning to her primitive and unhygienic origins.
Jenny has never cared what other people think. We gather our bags of food and presents and ignore the stares that follow us to the escape chute. They whisper fastidiously as the shuttle hovers above the green hill seething with tents, huts, vegetable patches, children and animals. A nervous titter spreads as the ship flies so low that we can see a woman in a green dress breast-feed her baby, surrounded by people in rags who stare up, shouting and pointing – a gratifyingly dramatic entrance.
There’s no longer enough technology down here to build a terminal, so we are simply dumped, like manna in the wilderness. These biblical associations still pop into my head occasionally. Actually, a more appropriate simile is a helter-skelter on Brighton Pier. One sunny afternoon in about 1920 Jenny and I climb a dark wooden ladder, sniff the aroma of hot dust and seaweed and doughnuts and fried onions, sit on a couple of coconut mats and propel ourselves out and around and around, in exuberant spirals of sea beach and sky. She is between my knees, where I can bury my nose in her glossy black hair and the delicate curve of her neck and feel her lovely arse press against my cock, which twitches with the knowledge that in an hour we’ll go back to our sleazy boarding-house and make love. Jenny’s youth is an incantation that preserves a cheap fairground ride in poetic aspic.
We sit at the top of another chute and, again, Jenny sits in front of me. There is still an erotic charge between us, even if a hundred and fifty years have nibbled at her charms. The other passengers watch distastefully as we launch ourselves down to brutality.
A smell of fresh grass and shit; wind in a frighteningly uncontrolled sky; uncultivated faces coming nearer, gawping, yelling; Jenny between my knees and in my arms as we collapse on to the inflated bags at the bottom of the chute. We roll over on to the grass as the shuttle draws the contaminated chute back into its metal belly, like an aristocratic lady who has trodden in sewage, and takes off again.
I have to remind myself that some of these little barbarians are my descendants. I feel no connection with any of them but maintain my visiting-dignitary smile as I pull Jenny to her feet and face a barrage of impertinence.
‘Greedy-weedy Lunies, fled to the moony, live for ever, think you’re clever, greedy-weedy Lunies.’
‘The goons in the moon send us all their typhoons …’
‘Why did you steal our resources?’
‘Why did you steal our future?’
‘Why didn’t you stop the wars?’
‘Why don’t you send us food?’
‘Why don’t you help us clean up the water supply?’
They surround us, their faces vibrating with spite. If they really are related to us they’re surprisingly ugly. I still can’t speak, I’m suffering from Earth Returnee Trauma: the smells and sights and emotions and noise down here are, literally, unspeakable.
But Jenny, beside me, sounds quite composed. ‘We’re Abbie’s parents and we want to see her.’
They all start to yell again, and some of the faces grow wet and red and blotchy. They move even closer, we try to back away, but there’s no escape from their stinking pressing bodies.
Silently I hold out the bags of food, medication and warm clothing we have brought with us. I had planned a dignified aid-presentation ceremony, but I’m afraid we’ll be torn apart if we don’t distract these ferocious creatures.
For a few minutes it works. They stop taunting us and turn their brief attention spans to the exquisitely wrapped packages that they tear open, hurling the contents on to the grass where pills, powerfood, sweaters, coats and shoes rapidly disappear. There are more people than presents, and they start to fight, rolling on the ground and chasing each other, tearing and breaking and crushing the objects of their desire.
Jenny and I stand at the periphery of this riot our goodwill has caused. We look around for our daughter. No doubt she has been coarsened by her years in this appalling place yet she is still … I never expected to feel sentimental about a substance as gross as blood, but I do long to see Abbie.
I remember walking with her on this hillside, just after she and Ben returned from their travels, when she was a young mother and Primrose Hill was one of the green oases of a prosperous bourgeois city, when we used to stand here with her little daughter Gina and Johnny’s successor and look back at the walled mansion I had bought for us all. I wanted to live there for ever, or for as long as science granted me – a well-preserved patriarch, surrounded by my grandchildren, enthroned with Jenny who, satisfyingly, owed me everything again. Sharing my wealth with the homeless Jenny and Abbie were so eccentrically obsessed with seemed a marvellous way of having it all. Smug? Well, I certainly got my comeuppance. I can hardly bear to look around at this shanty town, let alone at the rest of London.
The Zen-like calm that encases me at home on Luna Minor has been shattered by the unsubtle chaos of earth. Memories assault me like these children’s voices and the oafish weather they have down here. I remember Abbie as a little girl, coming into my laboratory and staring up at me. She used to hug me, kiss me, talk to me as if I was human. I love you, Daddy. In this gallery of memories I am always in the same frame while Abbie changes from detested baby to beloved child to desperately missed adolescent runaway. With a deep breath I prepare to meet her in her hideous old age. The virtue of virtual visiting is that all this ghastly emotion is edited out.
I turn to Jenny. But while I’ve been grazing on the past something has happened. Her face is a distorted mask of grief, and the children are dancing around us again.
‘Dead.’
‘She was old.’
‘She couldn’t walk properly.’
‘You two can’t be her mum and dad. You’re not old enough.’
‘The Earthkeeper will take her away.’
‘Before she starts to stink.’
‘Earthkeeper come, take away stinkybum. Earthkeeper say, death come for you some day.’
Then Jenny collapses in my arms and I think I collapse, too. The children whoop and snap at our ankles as they lead us to the hut where Abbie lies.
Much later a middle-aged woman brings us bowls of vegetable stew and flat bread. ‘I’m Gina,’ she says, standing awkwardly in the doorway of the hut.
Another child grown tastelessly old. I used to bath her when she was about three, in the green-tiled bathroom at the top of the house that stood where this hut is now, before these houses were bombed by the Sharia Faithful or the Christian Fundamentalists or the Hampstead Separatists. Gina doesn’t look as if she baths much now.
The three of us sit on the earth floor around the table where my daughter is laid out and have a macabre picnic.
‘I think she wanted to die. She missed my father and she was tired. She hated to think she’d be dependent on us all. My mother was a wonderful person but very proud; she couldn’t stand being pitied. By the way, I’m sorry if the children gave you a hard time. They are a bit wild.’
I almost choke on my soup at this understatement and glance at Jenny who sits beside me, cross-legged on the floor. She hasn’t touched her food or said a word since we entered the hut.
Gina touches her arm nervously. ‘I’m sorry, Grandma.’
Jenny reaches out for Gina’s hand and kisses it, staring hungrily at this dumpy, brown-eyed, middle-aged woman who vaguely resembles Abbie. As Jenny kisses the coarse red hand her tears begin. She and Gina embrace, and it looks as if Jenny is hugging her mother.
I go outside the hut, leaving them together. I have changed, but, really, family clinches are not my thing. I have my own way of mourning Abbie.
In the farmyard encampment to which my real-estate investment has dwindled, children and adults and pigs and cows and hens are settling down to sleep in huts and tents and treehouses. They go to bed with the sun like medieval peasants – my descendants are medieval peasants. Restlessly, I pick my way among the shelters, dung, vegetable patches and compost heaps to the top of the hill.
This new London shimmers in the light of a full moon that is surrounded by a rainbow-like halo. One of those tricks played by the intemperate skies of this planet – on Luna Minor we can choose the sky that suits our mood. Down here, now that there is no electricity, stars can be seen again; they have reclaimed the sky as plants and water and animals have reclaimed the streets. Reflected in the floodwater that surrounds the hill is the ragged silhouette of the new skyline: broken towers, bombed-out terraces, heaps of rubble. Although there is no traffic the night is full of cries and screams and yells that could be human or animal or both. I can smell shit and grass and – surely another sort of grass, as well?
A cough behind me makes me whirl around. A tall young man is standing on the concrete platform where the ack-ack guns stood during the Second World War. He’s pointing a gun that looks at least a hundred years old at me and smoking a joint. ‘Sorry, mate. Thought you was a looter.’
‘What do they loot?’
‘Food, animals. They call us the fat cats; everyone wants to live up here.’
‘Really,’ I reply sceptically. We stare at each other. He must be about the age I look, and the resemblance is absurd, except that he’s much darker-skinned than me.
He passes me the joint and nods amiably. ‘Ahmed. Dunno what to call you really. Grandma always said I looked just like you.’
‘Is Ahmed a common name now?’
‘Dad got gang-banged by one of them Muslim-Feminist mobs. Left him unconscious, and nine months later a baby was left at the bottom of the hill: me.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Not your fault. Well, of course, in a way it’s all your fault.’
‘Is that what you think?’
‘Well, it’s true, innit? All that messing about with staying young and buggering off to the moon and that. Not natural, is it?’
‘No, I’ve never wanted much to do with nature.’
‘Mind you, Grandma was way up there above the floods.’
‘Is that a compliment?’
‘She wouldn’t take no diss. Once when I was little I wouldn’t go to bed, and I bit her, and there was this sort of explosion, and it pushed me right through the wall of the hut. Still got a scar on my cheek. See? Special powers she had. Everyone said so.’
‘What about you? Do you have special powers?’
‘Don’t think so. I’m just ordinary. We heard about you, though. Flying and doing magic stuff.’
‘Do people still remember that?’ I ask, flattered.
‘All our bedtime stories was about you and Jenny. She’s still a bit of a looker. Must be going on for two hundred, innit?’
‘Oh yes. She’s a remarkable experiment.’
‘’Course, she’s Grandma’s mum. Can’t get my head round that. Doesn’t look like a mum, somehow.’
‘I think she feels like one tonight.’
‘I’ll miss the old bag.’
‘So will I.’
Later I return to the hut where Abbie is laid out. Jenny is lying on a heap of old blankets, her eyes wide open, still weeping. I lie beside her and take her in my arms. Our wake is wordless but the night seethes with memories of our daughter. At first light Jenny falls asleep.
I get up and wander back up the hill which is misty now, floating above the water and the shadowy blue ruins. I tap Ahmed on the shoulder. ‘You can go to bed now. I’ll take over.’
‘You sure? Fuckin’ animals, some of them looters. Wouldn’t want you to get hurt.’
‘It’s not likely. Go and get some sleep.’
‘Well – take care.’ He hands me the rusty old rifle and a half-smoked joint. ‘Earthkeeper’ll be here soon.’
It is pleasant to be alone as I watch the sun rise over the shattered breast of St Paul’s. The skyline is gilded with illusory prosperity and smoke rises as the morning begins. A little barefoot girl with huge black eyes and Jenny’s thick black curls runs up from the shanty town to give me a warm biscuit and a mug of herbal tea. Disconcerting, all these genetic mosaics. I dread being confronted with Abbie as she was when she was about seven. I love you, Daddy. Really, these memories are most disturbing, I shall have to talk to Pierre about editing them out.
Something squelches out of the water at the bottom of the hill and moves towards me. A tiny dark creature scurries up the hill. A child looter? I point the rifle and hope I won’t have to use it. As it comes closer I see the figure is old, of indeterminate sex, wrapped in soaking-wet brown robes. Out of a leathery walnut face sharp black eyes stare at me. ‘Good morning, Leo.’
‘Sibyl! What are you doing here?’
‘I might ask you that. I live here.’
‘You mean you stayed in London all these years? I always half expected you to turn up on Luna Minor. You should come. We have marvellous parties and entertainments up there. We have a beautiful house and garden – as we say up there, all the fruits of the earth without any of the worms. I’m sure you’d love it.’
‘I’d hate it.’ She folds her withered arms and glares up at me, blasting me with foul breath. Her robes are filthy, edged with green slime.
‘I see you’re determined to be organic.’
‘You think the earth is a fashion, to be abandoned when the whim takes you? I wouldn’t have bothered helping you and Jenny if I’d known how trivial-hearted you were. Narcissism burrows inwards, and yours has drilled right through you.’
‘There’s no need to be insulting. I have feelings.’
‘Not many.’
‘I hope you’re not going to come up with some obscure, depressing prophecy.’
‘I don’t do that any more. No riddles, no couches. These people have suffered terribly. They have to fight to survive, but they’re used to that – these are the people who fell through the bottom of the old society – and then, when they’ve finished fighting, they must die.’
‘Abbie has died.’
‘I know. That’s why I’m here.’
‘So you’re the Earthkeeper?’
‘One of my names.’
‘Well, I think I preferred you when you were Sibyl. It seems to me you’ve become very insensitive. Jenny and I are devastated by her death. Poor Jenny has been beside herself with grief all night.’
‘She’ll soon get over it, soon find another child.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I can’t help knowing.’
‘So, what’s this earthkeeping you do?’
‘I give people hope when they’re desperate or sick or dying. I warn them against the old ideas and the old technology and try to teach them new ones. I try to stop them killing each other, and, when they do die, I take the bodies to the water and help the people who loved them to say goodbye.’
‘So you’re inventing a new religion. And you have the nerve to accuse me of hubris!’
‘People need ritual and hope. It doesn’t matter what you call them.’
I follow her down the hill where my descendants greet her warmly and lead her to the hut where Abbie lies. When I come from the sunlit hillside into the hut my eyes are at first dazzled. For a few seconds I think there is only one woman in there, an animated corpse with three heads, whispering in the dark. Then my eyes adjust and I see that Jenny and Sibyl are washing Abbie. Her body is old, scraggy, covered with wrinkles and moles and sagging pouches of grey skin. I mourn the beautiful princess she could have been. For ever.
Jenny seems calmer now, as if Sibyl has comforted her. The children spend the day weaving dry twigs into a stretcher, and the adults prepare food – it smells most unappetizing, but I suppose I’ll have to eat it. After years of eating clean food, grown indoors in giant bacteria baths, it disgusts me to think of vegetables being grown in the earth, in all its filthy debris of sewage and decomposed bodies.
At sunset we all gather and carry Abbie, on the stretcher, down the hill. There are about a hundred of us, and I can’t help feeling a glimmer of patriarchal pride as I glance at their faces. Many of them wear odd features of mine or Jenny’s, like beads in a kaleidoscope making unexpectedly interesting patterns. At first I thought them all ugly, but I’m getting used to their faces now.
It’s windy, the oil-dark water churns and billows as we kneel beside it, Jenny and I and Gina in front of the others, to lay Abbie’s corpse at the edge of the water. Each of us in turn kisses her or murmurs a few words. Some of the children tuck wild flowers and pebbles into her long white robes. There are no speeches or sermons. As the last rays of the sun disappear behind the shattered buildings and drown in the floodwater we launch her. There’s a burst of sound, a chanting, wailing song full of grief and pain. Jenny and I kneel side by side, silent. We don’t know the tune; we don’t know the words.
Sibyl melts away into the darkness, and the rest of us go back for the funeral feast, which is as unpalatable as I feared: nettle stew and burnt oatcakes. Yet these people do have qualities I like: they are robust and honest. An idea begins to form. Jenny and I sleep in the same hut, where the table is now horribly bare. Before we fall into exhausted sleep I whisper my plan to her.
Perhaps I should have said something to Gina before I gathered them all together to make my announcement this morning. ‘Dear descendants – no, friends. I’ve come to appreciate you during these days we’ve spent together, mourning my beloved daughter. The horror of death, so final, so unnecessary. Some of you perhaps thought that Jenny and I and our eternal delight in each other were legends, tales told to children at bedtime. But as you see we are as real as you are – although, frankly, a lot more attractive.
‘Soon our shuttle will return and take us back to Luna Minor. To our transparent dome, where delicious food and exquisite music can be summoned at the press of a button, where there are perfectly controlled gardens and fountains and pools – nothing so crude as weather. Others like us, the eternally young, talk and frolic and entertain themselves and each other. Sometimes we even look down on you, on your ghastly catalogue of disasters, and wish we could do more to help you.
‘Jenny and I have thought of something we can do. We want you to choose one of the children you breed so prolifically to be adopted by us. Of course, we’d love to take more than one, but, as you’ll appreciate, immigration has to be controlled rather strictly. The younger the better, as it will be easier to wipe out traumatic memories of life down here. Boy or girl, the choice is up to you. If it’s a boy we’ll call him Ulysses because this time he will have made the right decision, choosing to live without ageing or death on a magic island.’
I realize this last bit is above their heads and sit down. Silence. I glance at Jenny, who is staring hungrily at the tiny children playing in the dirt and clinging to their filthy mothers. They all gasp and mutter, and I think they are overwhelmed by my generosity.
Suddenly they erupt into a wild barbarous stampede, even worse than the riot when we arrived. Jenny and I cling to each other and gaze up at the sky, willing the shuttle to come and rescue us. I realize I was a fool to expect rational discourse.
Our last few minutes on earth are rather confused. Perhaps Jenny and I don’t behave as well as we might. We are both grief-stricken, after all, battered by days of unrefined emotion, discomfort, awful food and, now, terrified by the threat of actual violence.
They chase us to the top of the hill, screeching and pushing and spitting. For a moment I think they’re going to shove us over the edge. Of course, we’d just roll to the bottom, but, still, it would be most undignified. I have my arm around Jenny’s shoulder, but she’s stretching out her arms to our attackers, in supplication, I think. There’s a roar above our heads, and we get ready to return to civilization. The chute is lowered towards us, and there’s a rush of cold air as the vacuum prepares to rapture us up.
Jenny makes a lunge into the mob, grabs two-year-old Ella from Gina’s arms and runs with her back to the chute of the shuttle. I help her to bundle the screaming, wriggling child in. After a few seconds of grief the child will be immeasurably better off. For ever. I admit this is an impulsive gesture, imperfectly considered. A mistake, in other words. The Welcome Machine at the threshold sniffs doubtfully at the nature brat. Ella’s germs, dirt, tears and yells send the needles wild. They are designed to measure suitability for metalife, and as Jenny and I squeeze past into the cabin of the shuttle the Welcome Machine delivers its terrible judgement on Ella. Metal pincers reach out to force her back down the chute, out of the purified air, back into the arms of her grandmother.
We made good time coming home. This time I was glad of the injection that allowed me to sleep dreamlessly throughout the journey. Long after it wore off I lay with my eyes shut, not wanting to face the curious eyes of the other passengers. I didn’t want to talk to anyone, not even you.
Home. I shall never go down there again. The gap between us is so much wider than when Abbie was alive. We use the pool for swimming, now. Nobody down there has a brain implant, one of many things that died with Abbie. I thought of offering one to Gina so that she could see and hear my virtual visits, but I don’t suppose she’d want to.
Since our return our little paradise seems different. I’m reminded of the period just after my sight was restored. For years I’d lived inside my head, among shapes that were imagined and guessed at and half remembered. I’d learnt to find my way around my head and to negotiate the outer world as well, tapping my stick. And when I first opened my sighted eyes again it was a terrible shock. I couldn’t distinguish the objects around me, the flat expanse of meaningless patches of darkness, light and colour. I kept falling over and bumping into furniture that wasn’t where my memory had placed it.
Now, again, I have that sense of displacement. The asteroid and meteor spectacles, the concerts and genetic art exhibitions at the Metaphysical Theatre, the dinner parties amid the fountains – somehow they’re not as marvellous as they were. I tell my therapist I’m mourning my daughter, and she offers to wipe out all memory of Abbie. But I want those memories, I say, as she smiles at me pityingly. You keep telling me to stop living in my past.
But there’s so much of it. I come out here alone to sit beside my pool. Up here they all despise the dead for dying, but I can’t help loving them and Abbie most of all. I even let myself remember the years when she didn’t love me at all – hated me probably.
Her disappearance was like a rehearsal for my bereavement now. So sudden, so brutal. As if I had to choose between you and Abbie, as if it was impossible for us all to live contentedly together. Of course, we had her tracked – there was a Metaphysical agent in Paraguay and others in Kabul and Nairobi – tracked her movements but not her feelings. I still don’t know how much she resented me. Perhaps it doesn’t matter. Parents have to be rejected – Sibyl would say – and children have to be loved. For fifteen years I followed every twist and turn of my daughter’s adolescent rebellion, and when we were reunited I never reproached her.
You come out and sit beside me. We dangle our long brown legs in the turquoise ripples of the pool and my finger traces the taut curve of your cheekbone beneath your clear, deep-blue eyes. Still young, like me. The artificial waves lap gently at our bare feet as we talk.
‘Still missing her?’
‘Of course. Don’t you?’
‘She was my daughter, too.’
‘I wish now we’d had more children. And taken the others up here so that we could keep them with us for ever.’
‘It’s not too late.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I have a complete set of her genes.’
‘But that’s impossible!’
‘Not at all. When she was about nine, when we were living in Phillimore Gardens and I realized you were going to leave me, I got the Metaphysical surgeons to come round and extract genes from both of you. Something to remember you by.’
I remember my nightmare visions of figures in white surrounding Abbie’s bed and mine. ‘So you weren’t carrying out evil experiments, after all.’
‘Reports of my evil were always vastly exaggerated.’
‘But, Leo, after all you did …’
‘People change. That’s the marvellous thing about them … us. Now, what kind of baby would you like?’
‘A girl, like Abbie.’
‘Exactly like her?’ I shut my eyes and remember the feel of her in my arms that first morning, the tiny, waxen face with the eyes that prefigured her unique personality. I can’t speak.
‘You can have any kind of baby you like. Unnatural selection. I have your genes, too, of course, so she could have your hair, for instance.’ You stroke it. It’s made of extruded squirrels but feels very soft.
‘No, I don’t want her to look like me, I want her to look exactly like herself. I even want to call her Abbie.’
‘A clone?’
‘Yes.’
‘A little genetocrat. Character?’
‘Just like … Well, actually, perhaps she could be just a bit less obstinate. After all, if she hadn’t been so intransigent she’d still be here with us.’
‘Intelligence?’
‘Enough to cultivate and appreciate the beauty of our life here but not enough to keep asking awkward questions about life down there. Perhaps she could have a talent for singing, too?’
‘We can download Abbie’s mind from our metacomputers and modify it slightly. I suppose you want her to be healthy?’
‘Oh yes. Perhaps just a few childhood illnesses so that we can show her how much we love her.’
‘And how do you want her to be born?’
‘Out of me.’
‘Really? A nature brat?’
‘Yes. I want to feel her heart beat under mine, to feel her kick, to feel the squelching astonishment as she shoots out of me.’ ‘All that blood and mess and pain?’ ‘Oh yes.’
‘What a primitive you still are, Jenny. It will cause quite a scandal, but I’ll talk to Pierre about it. Would you like our baby for the anniversary of our contract on the twelfth of October?’
‘That’s only eight months. That might affect her development. I want to carry her to term.’
‘I’ll try not to be so jealous this time.’
‘Yes, this time it will be perfect.’