Читать книгу A Hard Time to Be a Father - Fay Weldon - Страница 10

The girl, Mandy Miller aged twenty-three, had made an appointment to see Josie Toothpad, the well-known literary guru, at eleven a.m. But already it was six minutes past, and Mandy’s face had not yet flashed up on Josie’s screen. Six minutes late: six minutes’ worth of ungratefulness, adding to the burden of Josie’s day.

Mandy was privileged; Josie did not normally see aspiring writers: her time was considered better spent writing haiku. But the Authors’ Guild, in this the year 2050, apparently saw promise in the girl, whose writing profile peaked at lyricism and fell to a disastrous trough around compromise, in a decade where such profiles usually ran as straight and flat as the heart trace of someone newly dead. So Josie had decided to be generous with her time.

Josie filled in the unusual waiting minutes playing solitaire. She hadn’t done that for ages. Click, click; cards flying, red and black slicing the screen. Her scores still ran in the six thousands, she was glad to see. Then the familiar melancholy settled in, that stuffy sadness which so often accompanies any obsessional activity and in particular the playing of cards – so much chance, so little skill. Josie adjusted the dial of her drip-feed as Dr Owen her personal physician had so often asked her not, increasing the flow of uppers as opposed to downers. But now she felt edgy. She stopped playing cards, and put her drip-feed back to normal, and meditated. But the edginess wouldn’t go away: it was moving into something remarkably like anxiety; a generalised foreboding. Josie turned up the voltage of the muscle contractors, which kept her limbs viable and strong, but for once the tingling sensation didn’t please her; rather it irritated. She turned the voltage down again. Personal monitors on the banks of screens around the room showed a steady, profound green. She should be in a state of tranquillity, but was not. The gap between what she felt and what the screen said she felt was unusually wide. Perhaps that in itself was the source of her anxiety.

Josie punched in a query to Zelda, her personal therapist. Zelda’s sweet, reassuring face appeared without delay on the main screen and softly asked Josie to profile her current emotions, choosing four appropriate adjectives from the available selection. None seemed to apply. Josie felt bored and closed Zelda, but Zelda wouldn’t be closed. Zelda just blanked out and reappeared before even a mouse had time to click. That was extraordinary.

Zelda said, ‘I’ve been waiting for a call from you, Josie. It’s your birthday, and it’s your right and your privilege to consult me, as you come to terms with the downside of being 132 today.’

The pause between the one, the three and the two were minute but discernible. It was crass of Web Central, Josie thought, to thus remind Heaven-on-Earthers that Zelda was a machine. And Zelda had got it wrong: Josie’s birthday was six days past. What’s more, Zelda once closed had not stayed closed, which could only mean Zelda was now operated directly from Nex Control. Since last week’s acquisition of Web Central’s main shareholding, Nex Control could override the Web Central computer. Which meant, Josie supposed, Nex Control could break into a transmission any time they liked, as an aircraft captain would choose to break into the soundtrack of a film you were watching, with warnings of turbulence. An archaic image, which almost made Josie laugh, for who went anywhere physically, any more? Space was in your head: vast quantities of it, as much as you wanted. You travelled the universe freely through the voices in your mind.

There was something wrong with the transmission: Zelda’s whole face flickered so that her smile looked like a smirk.

Then Zelda blanked out mid-sentence.

‘Is your cup half-empty or half-full? The choice is yours, the options –’

At the time of the takeover, Nex Control had promised there’d be no changes in management style. Promises, promises. Josie remembered enough about pre-Web life to know that the State was never to be trusted: States dealt in lies, as Nietzsche had pointed out; they spoke in all tongues of good and evil, and in the end what was Nex Control but another State, gobbling up smaller territories, grabbing up Web Central, asset stripping?

When in doubt, keep your head down, don’t make waves. Josie completed her mood profile, punching in ‘tranquil, reflective, industrious, confident’. Web Central valued feedback. Web Central had been created by a consensus of newly-young idealists; their computer’s stated mission, to create a Web Heaven and keep it non-political, pacific and angst-free for its subscribers. But that had been fifty years ago: language could have changed, the very words now have a different meaning. Years and years ago, Josie remembered, she had visited the Soviet Empire and watched armies marching around, chanting, ‘Mir, mir, mir,’ and being told mir was their word for peace! That had been in the days when one actually physically travelled, and very alarming they had been.

Josie took off her helmet and at once felt less disturbed. She was both post-menopausal and pre-menstrual, perhaps that was the trouble. For a couple of days a month she suffered from both conditions. Today was one of the days. She knew too much, felt too much, and remembered too much. She was an original Heaven-on-Earther. Sixty years ago a daily dose of Ecstasy 3 which, when combined with good old-fashioned oestrogen, reversed the ageing process and settled the body at around twenty-five years old, had become available to any female who could afford it. Josie could, and did. Ageing, for the pioneer Heaven-on-Earthers, need no longer be a cause of death but there were drawbacks: one’s personality remained cyclical. Those born after the millennium had it easier, as the science of non-ageing was refined.

Still no sign of Mandy. 11.12 a.m. Another of Josie’s screens leapt into life. Traders were ingenious: they found ways of putting their messages on screen no matter how elaborate the steps taken to prevent them.

‘Just punch D O N U T: @ revo.efil,’ required the salesman. He was dressed like a butler, smiled like a fiend, and had a metronome – surely banned by Web Central as a hypnotic device? But perhaps Nex Control permitted them – ticking away in the background.

‘Only punch and you will see

Something long denied and free

Stuffed with honey, fruit and rum

Down your food-chute swift will come.

DONUT!’

Josie, ever suggestible – one became more so with age it seemed – obediently punched up D O N U T: @ revo.efil. She’d been losing weight recently, but Dr Owen hadn’t seemed worried when he had checked her health feedback. How long ago had that been? Sometimes it was hard to tell one day from another. Her fingers, she could see, looked just plain bony – but still pretty. She’d always liked her hands: loved the fingers’ dextrous moving over keys, their sharp, flawless clicking of the mouse. If you liked yourself and loved being alive, what did your chronological age matter? So said Zelda. Let alone what season it was.

Josie steered her chair to the window and opened the blinds; she had to put her drip-feed on hold and detach it to get so far. Alone of her friends, Josie still liked daylight, and a view. Down below the underclass swarmed: the unfortunates who lived on earth, not in the space in their heads. Hardly anyone over twenty-five, the whole lot HIV positive, doomed to death ten years or so after their first sexual contact. So much noise, dirt, and squalor. The underclass lived their short lives intensely: they were even said to write naive poetry, novels, plays. Well, why not? – Shelley, Keats: short lives, great poetry. For a moment Josie almost envied the wretched of the earth. The underclass lived unobserved and uncounted, unnoticed, unfrightened: they’d make way only for the armed delivery squads who attended to the physical needs of an overclass which lived decorously, individual unit by individual unit, stacked neatly one above the other. All Aids-free. They had Zelda to keep them healthy in mind and Dr Owen, healthy in body. Josie’s friend from way back, Honour, had recently filed a memo saying there was increased political unrest in the underclass.

There was a growing sense that computer literacy – forbidden by pain of death amongst the lower orders – was a human right. That was absurd. The underclass was too physical, too little given to logic, ever to cope happily with computers. They were happier as they were, their minds relaxed and unbothered, living in their unbinary world. See how they bustled, jolted, swarmed below.

‘They touch one another so much,’ said Josie aloud, and the sound of her own voice bounced strangely and dangerously off window and walls. She was accustomed to the deadening effect of headphones. ‘All the time they fondle and embrace, push or hit or hug. Kiss and copulate. Flesh touches flesh.’ There was no one to answer her. Josie remembered that nine decades or so back, she had actually given birth to a son, and had shared a living space with a man, a husband. They’d slept touching, side by side. It seemed a strange thing to have done, let alone enjoyed. Her son, one of a generation of men who had declined to take up the Heaven-on-Earth project, being reluctant to abandon their masculinity to the effects of oestrogen, had died of old age a decade back. She did not want to think about that. A short life but a merry one, like that of the underclass wilfully chosen. She went back to the console, readjusted her medication and changed the colours on all the screens for the fun of it.

Again Zelda’s face appeared unsummoned on the screen. ‘Josie,’ she said, and her voice sounded cracked and strange, ‘I know you are troubled. Let’s talk about it, dear. Together we’ll work on it.’

But Zelda’s lips and nostrils were blurring. She was hideous. Zelda dissolved and vanished in a scramble of snow. Josie pressed the alarm for the emergency technician. ‘Your fault has been automatically recorded,’ the stand-by screen flashed. ‘Please do not block emergency lines, OK?’ Josie clicked on OK, although it was far from okay. But what could you do? If you didn’t acknowledge OK, the screen pinged back at you interminably. She tried to click to No-Sound, but couldn’t. Was this what life was going to be like under Nex Control? Inefficient and ineffective? It was intolerable. Perhaps one hundred and thirty-two years of life was intolerable, full stop.

The whole point of age was the acquisition of wisdom: she could impart it, in haiku form, or in advice to the likes of Mandy Miller. But if Mandy Miller didn’t turn up, what use was Josie Toothpad? A silly name, given to her by a computer. Besides, she’d gone right off haiku: recently she’d developed a liking for romantic verse. She wanted to be in love again. If she couldn’t be in love she’d rather be dead. Right back in the beginning, she’d never wanted to live to be more than thirty. She’d outstayed her welcome by one hundred and two years.

How long since she’d ordered her doughnut? Six minutes? Delivery was meant to be within four. She’d complain, although that was a breach of good manners. The more reprehensible complaining was, the theory went, the more others would struggle to ensure no grounds for complaint existed. But Josie was allowed her eccentricities, being a pioneer. She called back D O N U T: @ revo.efil. ‘Fuck off,’ she entered, giggling. ‘Your comment has been recorded,’ said the screen. ‘Please be patient. OK?’ OK, Josie clicked, lying through her teeth.

The Friendship Screen bleeped. It was Honour, her friend. These days Honour seldom called. Honour had got caught up in the Occult ‘n Oracle network: Josie had denied the existence of the paranormal and Honour and Josie had quarrelled. Zelda had advised them against patching it up. The two friends, Zelda said, had clearly outworn each other, grown apart. Better to finish it now. It happened to Heaven-on-Earthers that friendships failed as the birthdays mounted up. There was always Zelda, for companionship and consolation. Zelda never fretted; Zelda always knew.

Honour on screen looked lovely; about fourteen years old. Red hair tumbled round perfect features. Before you enrolled as a Heaven-on-Earther, you had cosmetic surgery to perfect any flaws blind Mother Nature had inflicted upon you. Not for the sake of attracting men – there weren’t many around these days anyway: most who started male had foetal microsurgery and a dose of oestrogen three weeks into conception and ended up female, or roughly so – but for the sake of self-esteem, self-image. You had to be comfortable with yourself. It was a duty.

Josie squealed and all but leapt up and down to see her friend. Her feet, oddly, had some difficulty reaching the ground. Josie thought ‘but I’ve shrunk’. Nor was there much life in her legs, for all the voltage she’d put through her muscles over the years. She didn’t think she could get to the door. She just knew she didn’t want to stay in her chair, though the chair it was which wrapped her, soothed her, stroked her, made love to her, sung to her – all of a sudden Josie just wanted not to be in it, couldn’t bear to sit still a moment longer.

‘Josie, what am I going to do?’ asked Honour. ‘All my screens are on the blink, and Zelda’s gone mad. She keeps giving me advice I haven’t asked for. And I had an appointment at eleven a.m. with someone called Mandy Miller but she hasn’t turned up. And neither has the doughnut I ordered.’

‘Mine neither,’ said Josie. ‘But I know who I am and I’m perfect.’ It was their mantra from way back.

‘You look about twelve,’ said Honour to Josie. ‘And I’m not much better. I guess what they’re saying is true.’

‘Go on, tell,’ said Josie. ‘What are they saying?’

‘Nex Control upped our Ecstasy 3 last week and our age reversal is now irreversible,’ said Honour. ‘We’re all growing younger exponentially. Give us another fifteen minutes and we’ll return to the womb and lapse into a coma; then we’ll drift into nothingness; we’ll be unconceived; we will not have existed. Funny thing is, I don’t mind one bit.’

Josie puzzled over Honour’s words.

‘You’re having me on,’ said Josie. ‘Why would they do a thing like that?’

Curiosity survived, when little else did. Josie felt her chest and it was flat, flat, flat. The breasts were gone. She wailed a thin high wail, but cut it short for politeness’ sake. The habit of politeness lasted as well, it seemed.

‘To make space for themselves,’ said Honour. ‘The young want their turn too. The underclass are tired of us. They hate us.’

Josie’s central screen leapt into life. A girl of about seven looked out at her. ‘Hi, everyone,’ she said. ‘I’m Eleanor at Web Central. I’m ever so sorry. I did my best, but they weren’t fair. They’re real meanies. I called the technicians in, but when they came they were just toddlers and pooing all over the place – it was disgusting. So I told them to go away. I did right, didn’t I?’

Eleanor’s place on screen was taken by an ugly young woman in her early twenties. ‘My name’s Mandy Miller,’ she said. ‘I am here to keep my appointment with you. I am the death you have all been expecting.’

Josie realised Mandy Miller wasn’t ugly at all, merely human. She, Josie, was so accustomed to seeing perfection on her screens she’d forgotten what unremedied people looked like. Appalling.

‘Our hypnotists at Nex Control have tried to make it easy for you,’ said Mandy Miller, ‘and given you time to adjust. For “DONUT” read “Don’t”, reverse “revo.efil” and get “Life Over”. Not perfect, but the best I could do. Nex Control is the political wing of the underclass. Time now for the young to march along the Web Highway, arm in arm, in unremedied glory.’

At least that was what Josie thought she heard. But how could she know? She only knew she was 132 because Zelda had said so, and perhaps Zelda had got the decimal point wrong and she was 1.32. Really one knew very little about anything. Words had begun to make little sense; now there were only shapes and sounds. Josie was conscious of a shattering brilliance all around, and of wanting to be in the shade; then there was a sudden welcoming dark at the end of the bright tunnel, and Josie travelled through it, quite suddenly, to warmth and peace, safety and silence.