‘I want you to do me a favour. I want you to say out loud—’ She took a breath. ‘Out loud to my face: in 1999 I plan to murder two billion people.’
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‘Mmm,’ he hummed noncommittally. ‘I am devising a strategic, first-strike cull of the human race. In the interests of preventing extinction; or worse, the devolution of the species to head lice.’
‘No. Say it. The way I said it. I don’t ask for much.’
He shrugged. ‘Very well. In 1999 I plan to murder two billion people. Happy?’
She looked at him in dull disbelief. She felt—well, she felt absolutely nothing, if she was to be honest. The concept was too big and bizarre to get her head around. It remained a sentence. She had no response besides, What?, an insipid compulsion to ask him to say it again when she had heard him the first time. In fact, her strongest impulse was to laugh. Curiously, had Calvin confessed plans to kill a single rival—say, Wallace Threadgill—she would be up in arms, telling him to be sensible, that there were limits. If he proposed killing two billion instead she couldn’t come up with a reaction of any description. Who could take this seriously? But look at him. She had never seen him more serious in his life. Is this neutrality, Calvin?
Have you sucked me to Andromeda as well?
Abruptly a great deal of what had always seemed unfathomable to Eleanor now made sense. How many autocrats had supposed about earlier nuisances, ‘Don’t you sometimes want them to go away?’
It was easier to eliminate six million than 6,000, or six—somehow, the more zeros the better. Calvin had added nine of them.
Numbly, she asked the logical next question. ‘How?’
‘QUIETUS—’
‘What’s that?’
He looked at her sharply.
‘I mean,’ said Eleanor hastily, ‘what does it stand for?’
‘Quorum of United International Efforts at Triage for Ultimate Sustainability. QUIETUS has code-named the apparatus Pachyderm.
We’re exploring viruses, fast-acting poisons, microbes. But the technical parameters—’
‘More parameters,’ Eleanor moaned.
‘Are staggering. Pachyderm has to be quick, single application, taking no more, say, than a week, ideally overnight. Can’t allow time for some beneficent to cook up a cure. And 134
we are opposed to suffering. Most deaths are painful, that can’t be helped, but prolonged moribundity is unacceptable. The most difficult engineering feat, however, is to target the proper percentage of the population. We need an ailment to which 30 to 35 per cent are susceptible and the rest immune. And Pachyderm has to slice the proper age groups. Still, you’d be amazed, with a grasp of DNA, what’s possible. How tailored a virus can be.’
‘But you’re no epidemiologist.’
‘I know epidemiologists. Just as I know economists, biologists and more sophisticated demographic modellers than I. Believe me, I know the best of them all.’
‘Surely no scientist of integrity—’
‘You’d be surprised.’
She was not surprised, or only at herself, at her capacity to pursue like a thorough journalist with a micro-cassette, ‘You’re not getting involved in eugenics, are you?’ How could she even think of such questions? What had Calvin done to her?
‘We toyed with eugenics at first. But the demographics alone are formidable. We had to stick to our purpose—quantity, not quality.
It was not out of the question, I suppose, to design an organism that only attacked stupid people. But I have a soft spot for stupid people; some of the most endearing sorts I’ve met have been pig thick. It’s the clever ones cause all the trouble.’
‘Like you.’
‘Like me.’
‘I don’t understand your angle on this whole thing.’
‘I have lots of them. I find it likely, for example, that I am a ghastly mutation that must be stopped. In which case, someone must stop me. But that’s not my job. I don’t have to do everything, do I? Perhaps it’s yours, Eleanor.’
‘I haven’t applied.’
‘Anyway, eugenics?’ he resumed gamily, tossing one of Malthus’s chewed-bald tennis balls up and down. ‘I suppose if we’re to dwell in the realm of fantasy—’
‘Which we have been doing all night—’
‘It would be attractive to target the chromosome of sadistic devi-ance—to concoct a little nostrum that eradicated all the horrible people.’
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‘Everyone’s horrible some of the time.’
‘Most of the time. There’d be no one left. But if I could be selective?
I would save the contented. Ordinary, pleasant people, not very thoughtful and with no ambition and hopelessly in love with someone who loved them back. Only a handful would remain, but that might be a planet I could stand.’
‘You would never qualify.’
‘The very attraction of the vision is as a world where I wouldn’t belong. Groucho Marx.’
He bounced the ball medatively on the wooden floor, pong, pong.
‘We shelved the eugenics angle early on. It was a biological can of worms and a moral hornet’s nest.’ Pong. ‘Instead, we will design Pachyderm to imitate nature: gross, random unfairness, with no regard for excellence or good behaviour. The trouble is—’ Pong, pong.
‘Nature hasn’t been doing a good enough job, though she will eventually move in if we don’t, and—’ pong—‘without parameters.
Nature doesn’t care about suffering. Smallpox, leprosy, plague?
Only humans have invented injections and overdoses of sleeping pills. Mind, I don’t especially want to kill anyone.’ Pong. ‘I just don’t want them to be there any more.’
Thwap. The tennis ball hit the carpet. To Eleanor’s relief, he left it there; its relentless punctuation had been driving her mad. Maybe it was true, then, that only the little things got under her skin.
‘You don’t want a virus,’ she said, nudging the ball out of his reach with her toe. ‘You want an eraser.’
‘With what’s feasible now, an eraser’s not far-fetched.’ His eyes ranged the table for another object to torment. His hands clawed at each other’s already clean, pearly nails, until they discovered the glasses in his shirt pocket, and set about furiously de-smearing their lenses with the tail. It would take one thorough burnishing, Eleanor reflected, to get Calvin Piper to see straight.
‘Though we have faced logistical limits,’ he admitted, the shirt-tail circles becoming obsessively tinier. ‘At the outset, we investigated substances which merely created a percentage persistence of infertility. We came up against a technological brick wall. It is our command of death that has advanced in
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this century, well beyond research in contraception. I don’t need to tell you that this species has designed a hydrogen bomb, but not a birth control pill without side effects.’ He tried on the spectacles and didn’t seem to like what he saw; he took them off and sat down.
‘We also pursued libido suppressants,’ he proceeded, holding his frames up to the light and squinting. He seemed to be talking to himself; no doubt he did talk to himself like this all the time. No wonder his coffee got cold. ‘Benperidol, ethinyl oestradiol and cyproterone acetate—drugs that were originally developed to administer to convicted perverts. But they had almost no effect at all on the sexual enthusiasm of test populations. Did you realize,’ he raised brightly, with the amiable informativeness of a cocktail party anecdote, ‘that the main reason people copulate is not to orgasm?’
Eleanor was all too aware she was not at a party. ‘You said eugenics was a “moral hornet’s nest”. Do you mean QUIETUS is considering the ethics of Pachyderm at all?’
‘Almost nothing but. Find it ironic as you like, but QUIETUS is my very purchase on morality. Its sole purpose is the perpetuation of the human race in some form any of us can tolerate. This is not neutrality, my dear. This is Calvin Piper with his feet on the ground.’
Calvin’s feet were propped h
igh on his elephant bone.
‘Now, I concede we run into ends-means problems.’ Calvin rose and began to pace again, professorial. All he lacked was a pointer and a blackboard, and he glanced over at his student’s increasingly lassitudinous sag on the sofa as if annoyed she was not taking notes.
‘But that has always been a bugbear for ethicists, hasn’t it? Thou shalt not kill, and then you let the Japanese help themselves to Hawaii? If someone doesn’t do something about population, we are headed for a brutal, cramped, cultureless, cut-throat sty. I believe that, Eleanor, it is all I believe. I’m willing to prevent it, even if the cure is cruel. Ends have justified means from the year dot. Doctors routinely amputate a gangrenous limb to save the whole body from a lingering, terminal rot.’
‘You’re staking so much on being right.’ Eleanor refused to follow his back and forth, and picked up the mauled, sickly chartreuse tennis ball, cupping it protectively in her hands.
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Tossing it up and down, bouncing it around his rarified cloister—that was what Calvin did with an entire planet. ‘What if Wallace has the ticket after all?’ she pursued, smoothing the remaining tufts of the tattered toy. ‘What if population is a bogyman? A fashionable fable of our times, like blood-letting?’
‘Everyone always thinks they’re right.’
‘That’s what I mean.’
‘Follow that thinking and you never do anything, ever, your whole life. You’re recommending self-doubt so deep that it amounts to permanent paralysis. It is always possible that you are wrong. But you can only proceed with a life on the assumption that you are right. Otherwise you sit eighty-five years in a chair.’
It was still only the middle of the evening, yet Eleanor found it impossible to rouse the liberal indignation that Calvin required from her—positively craved, since he could no longer rouse it from himself; what is more, she felt narcotically tired. Her lids were heavy.
Her chin kept dropping to her chest. The tennis ball rolled from her hands and dribbled towards the monkey, and even Malthus could not be bothered to play with it. ‘Calvin.’ Her tongue was thick. ‘This target population of yours. Of whom is it largely comprised?’
‘Well…’ For the first time he showed visible signs of embarrassment and met her eyes with effort. ‘It’s been impossible to get around, you know. Especially in the Third World. Age structure.
There’s not much choice. And we’ve thought about it—morally—there’s no difference. It sounds bad. But there are no special classes of humanity that it is particularly villainous to kill.’
‘Who?’ she asked dully, only wanting to sleep.
‘Children.’ His eyebrows took a brief, apologetic shrug. ‘Not only.
But well over half, according to the computer, should be under the age of fifteen. In principle I don’t think it matters a jot. But it’s bad PR.’
Finally she allowed herself to laugh. ‘You’re going to rub out two billion people and you’re worried about your image?’
‘Of course. I’m not qualified in microbiology, so while QUIETUS
is my brainchild my major role is fund-raising. You remember the hoo-ha at my suggestion that we eliminate infant mortality and child survival programmes in Africa.
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Even among the ruthless, you find these maudlin areas. So we’ve kept this parameter quiet.’
‘I’d think you’d keep the whole proposition quiet.’
‘Only a small central core know the full scope of our campaign.
So welcome to the inner circle—whether you like it or not.’
‘Forgive me if I feel less than honoured.’
‘I never meant to drag you in. This enterprise is a bit of a mill-stone.’
‘I’ll say.’ She allowed herself, for a good thirty seconds, to shut her eyes.
‘There’s one other matter—’ again, a tinge of chagrin—‘which we don’t often raise. It has played a role in our mathematics, though the effect is difficult to gauge.’
‘What?’ She really didn’t want to hear any more.
‘Um. Bodies.’ He coughed. ‘There will be scads. Disposal will be problematic. A subsequent outbreak of opportunistic infections is inevitable.’
‘Put the fat people on top,’ she slurred. ‘The grease drizzles down and makes the whole pile burn better.’
‘We’re not concerning ourselves with this,’ he hurried. ‘Dust to dust and that. Over time, the problem solves itself. Yet including the physical remains in our calculations is understandably unpleasant.’
‘Why not can the meat? Isn’t that what you did with elephants?’
‘I can see you’re going to be a great help.’
‘You imagine you could live with yourself afterwards?’
‘Living with myself is already rather tedious. Of course it will be tempting to leap from a Nyayo House window. But that would be selfish.’
‘How so?’
‘A scapegoat is a sociological necessity.’
‘Do you ever suspect yourself of a Christ complex?’
‘A mass murderer makes an unlikely Messiah. And my martyrdom will be no great sacrifice. I shall find my trial terrifically interesting.’
‘Neutrality.’
‘About my own death I have no feelings whatsoever.’
‘I do.’
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‘Save your concern for the more deserving. I’m just a binman. I take out the rubbish so the rest of the world can get on with symphonies. It has to be done, Eleanor. And I don’t care how they damn me later. You may imagine my designs as egotistical. On the contrary, if the death of two billion don’t matter, I can at least follow the logic that mine doesn’t amount to much either. And if QUIETUS succeeds, I will be only too happily boiled in oil. If I fail, we should both find bare bodkins. Because I have seen into the future if no one hacks back on our profusion while there’s time. You will not want to be alive then, Eleanor, though the worst will occur in your lifetime.
Especially in Africa. If population is allowed to take its natural course, a hundred years from now the death of two billion will be nothing.’
Calvin truly believed what he was saying, and this kept her from despising him. Then, she was not so inclined. Instead, she felt more sorry for him than ever, motherly. She drew him over to the couch.
‘I know you don’t want me to care for you. But I do. And now, more than ever, it looks as if you and I are stuck with each other.’
Calvin put his head in her lap, and she stroked his thick black hair. ‘There’s only one thing you must tell me,’ she said. ‘And I want you to be honest.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Is this a joke?’ It was her last chance.
He sighed. ‘I am not pulling your leg, but all these parameters: they are difficult to satisfy. There is only a small percentage chance we will solve Pachyderm. If we do not, we sit tight. In the meantime, there are mattressfuls of money about. We may accomplish nothing, my darling, but we will live nicely.’
‘So if you don’t find this perfect, painless, overnight, statistically precise organism to do your “rubbish collection”, you just theorize.’
‘Right. Have meetings and lunches and clip newspapers. It’s far less likely that I finish on a gallows than by choking on prawn pili-pili at the Rickshaw.’
He had finally said something to help her. Of course the proposition was lunatic. Would he ever do anything besides 140
con mean-spirited donors into paying his exorbitant dinner tabs?
‘Put some music on,’ he requested.
She slipped up for Elgar. Though weary, she stayed awake, smoothing his forehead. They said nothing. The music was beautiful.
At the pitch of an oboe cadenza, the CD cut clean off, along with the lights. The electricity died all the time now. In the subsequent silence, hyenas ka-rooed from the park; hyraxes screeched on the roof; moonlight hit the elephant femur, which glowed an eerie blue-white. Panga grinned from the opposite chair and slid h
er kukri from its sheaf. Eleanor felt a sickly thrill, imagining what real social collapse might be like. It was clearly a life without Elgar. In Nairobi there was already a scarcity of electricity, water, natural gas and wheat. Further north, another famine was projected for Ethiopia, Somalia, the Sudan…The only complaint she could make about his predictions of approaching degradation was that so much of Calvin’s future had arrived.
‘Have you read Fahrenheit 451?’ Calvin asked in the dark, after what seemed eons. Odd, how long time lasted without electricity, as if a stopped clock held you in its eternity.
‘No.’
‘It’s another post-awfulness novel. A fascist government has burned all the books. There’s a resistance underground, each member of which has memorized a work of literature cover to cover— Alice in Wonderland. They’ve retrieved civilization by becoming walking libraries.’
‘So?’
‘I’ve wondered if you could save music the same way—with no more recording, or violin repairmen, scores long ago up in flames.
Maybe I should start memorizing Mozart’s Requiem. Learn to whistle the bassoon part or something.’ He attempted a few bars, but couldn’t overcome the animals outside and gave up.
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10
A Drive to Bob’s Save-Life Bar
Eleanor slept so deeply that waking was like crawling up a shaft.
Half-way up, she could discern a dawning over its rim, the light an altered colour: something had happened last night. There was something she hadn’t remembered yet and she sank back, hoping she could fail to remember a little longer.
It was a familiar morning sensation. How many times had she cracked open puffy eyelids to shut them again, face tight, head pounding, mouth dry, trying to go back to sleep but unable to fight memory: right, X and I broke up last night, or Y is having an affair, and has been, it turns out, all year—and that is why my face is a mess and that is why my head hurts and that is why the pillow next to me is empty.
But underneath her fingers was chest. There were arms around her. Why, she was intertwined with a handsome man, who was holding her closer than he had ever done, so that when she did recall he wanted to obliterate two billion people she was relieved.