Bella Cray laughed.
“Do you think you could do that for her?” she said.
After they had gone, Vesicle sat in his chair, repeating: “Do you think you could do that?” and, “You see a guy like that, we’re the first to know,” until he thought he had the intonation right. Then he went over to look at the tanks. He got a rag out of a cupboard and wiped the dust off them. He was wiping Chianese’s tank when he realised it was the warm one. “Who is this guy,” he asked himself, “the Cray sisters want him all of a sudden? No one ever wanted him before.” He tried to remember what Chianese looked like but he couldn’t. Twinkies all looked the same to him.
He went out to a stall and got himself another fish curry. “You see a guy like that,” he tried experimentally to the stallholder after he had paid, “we’re the first to know.”
The stallholder stared at him.
“The first,” Vesicle said.
New Men, she thought, as she watched him walk away up Pierpoint, one leg going out at an odd angle. What are they on?
Drawn by the radio and TV ads of the twentieth century, which had reached them as faltering wisps and cobwebs of communication (yet still full of a mysterious, alien vitality), the New Men had invaded Earth in the middle 2100s. They were bipedal, humanoid—if you stretched a point—and uniformly tall and white-skinned, each with a shock of flaming red hair. They were indistinguishable from some kinds of Irish junkies. It was difficult to tell the sexes apart. They had a kind of pliable, etiolated feel about their limbs. To start with, they had great optimism and energy. Everything about Earth amazed them. They took over and, in an amiable, paternalistic way, misunderstood and mismanaged everything. It appeared to be an attempt to understand the human race in terms of a 1982 Coke ad. They produced food no one could eat, outlawed politics in favour of the kind of bureaucracy you find in the subsidised arts, and buried enormous machinery in the subcrust which eventually killed millions. After that, they seemed to fade away in embarrassment, taking to drugs, pop music and the twink-tank which was then an exciting if less than reliable new entertainment technology.
Thereafter, they spread with mankind, like a kind of wrenched commentary on all that expansion and free trade. You often found them at the lower levels of organised crime. Their project was to fit in, but they were fatally retrospective. They were always saying:
“I really like this cornflakes thing you have, man. You know?”
Vesicle went back to the tank farm. The head-ends of the tanks protruded a couple of feet from their shoulder-height plyboard cubicles, like stupidly baroque brass coffins covered with cheap decorative detail. YOU CAN BE ANYTHING YOU WANT, claimed the shoot-up posters on the back wall of each cubicle. Chianese’s tank was warmer than it had been. Vesicle could see why: the twink was out of credit. He had maybe half a day left, this was according to readouts in the tank fascia, and then it was the cold world for him. The tank proteome, a mucoid slime of nutrients and tailored hormones, was beginning to prepare his body for the life he left behind.
Three-thirty on a grey Friday afternoon in March. The East River was the colour of puddled iron. Since midday, westbound traffic had been backing up from Honaluchi Bridge. Chinese Ed stuck his head out the side window of his ramrod Dodge, into the smell of burned diesel and lead, and tried to get a look at what was ahead. Nothing. Something was broken up there, the lights were out, someone had melted down; the people up there were on overload—office overload, 2.4 kids overload, shitcan overload—and had left their cars and were dully beating on one another to no good purpose. Who knew what had happened? It was the same old life. Ed shook his head at the futility of mankind, turned off the Capital traffic report and turned instead to Rita Robinson.
“Hey, Rita,” he said.
Two or three minutes later her peppermint and white candy-stripe skirt was up around her waist.
“Steady, Ed,” advised Rita. “We could be here some time.”
Ed laughed. “Steady Eddy,” he said. “That’s me.”
Rita laughed too. “I’m ready,” she said. “I’m ready, ready Eddy.”
It turned out Rita was right.
Two hours later they were still there.
“Doesn’t this just suck?” said the woman from the pink Mustang parked a couple of cars in front of Ed’s Dodge.
She looked in at Rita—who had pulled down her skirt and adjusted her garter belt and was now examining herself with a kind of morose professional intensity in the pull-down vanity mirror—and seemed to lose interest. “Oh hi, honey,” she said. “Just freshening up there?” Everyone had turned their engines off. People were stretching their legs up and down the pavement. A hot dog guy was working the queue, moving west ten or a dozen vehicles at a time. “I never knew it this bad,” said the woman from the Mustang. She laughed, picked a shred of tobacco from her lower lip, examined it. “Maybe the Russians landed.”
“You got a point there,” Ed told her. She smiled at him, stepped on the butt of her cigarette, and went back to her car. Ed turned on the radio. The Russians hadn’t landed. The Martians hadn’t landed. There was no news at all.
“So. This Brady thing,” he said to Rita. “What are they saying in the DA’s office?”
“Hey, Eddy,” Rita said. She looked at him for a moment or two, then shook her head and turned back to the mirror. She had her lipstick out now. “I thought you’d never ask,” she said in a matter-of-fact voice. The lipstick didn’t seem to suit her, because she put it away with an irritable gesture and looked out the window at the river running by.
“I thought you’d never ask,” she repeated bitterly.
That was when the big yellow duck started to push its head into the car through Ed’s open side-window. This time, Rita didn’t seem to notice it, even though it was speaking.
“Come in, Number Seven,” it was saying. “Your time is up.”
Ed reached inside his baseball jacket, the back of which read Lungers 8-ball Superstox, and took out one of his Colts.
“Hey,” the duck said. “I’m joking. Just a reminder. You got eleven minutes’ credit to run before this facility closes down. Ed, as a valued customer of our organisation, you can put more money in or you can make the most of what’s left.”
The duck cocked its head on one side and looked at Rita out of one beady eye.
“I know which I’d do,” it said.
7
The Pursuit of God
When Michael Kearney woke it was deep night outside. The lights were off. He could hear someone breathing harshly in the room.
“Who’s there?” he said sharply. “Lizzie?”
The noise stopped.
A single minimally furnished space with straw-coloured hardwood floors, galley kitchen, and a bedroom on the second floor, the apartment belonged to his second wife Elizabeth, who had moved back to the US at the end of the marriage. From its upper windows you could see across Chiswick Eyot to Castelnau. Rubbing his face, Kearney got out of the armchair and went upstairs. It was empty up there, with a drench of streetlight across the disordered bed and a faint smell of Elizabeth’s clothes which had remained to haunt him after she left. He went back down again and switched on the lights. A disembodied head was balanced on the back of the Heals sofa. It was wasted and ill-looking. All the flesh had retreated to the salient points of its face, leaving the bone structure prominent and bare beneath a greyish skin. He wasn’t sure what it belonged to, or even what sex it was. As soon as it saw him it began swallowing and wetting its mouth urgently, as if it hadn’t enough saliva to speak.