'You did everything you could,' she said.
Curtis nodded. 'Yeah.'
Leaning forward he drew his gun from the clip under the belt at the back of his pants and then leaned back again, this time more comfortably. The black polymer grip made it seem more like something that he might have considered shaving with than a weapon. He thought he might as well have used an electric shaver on the door for all the damage the gun had inflicted. He remembered the day he had bought it.
'That's a nice gun you've got there,' the gunsmith had said. He might have been describing a friendly-looking labrador.
Curtis hefted the gun in his sweating hand for a moment, then threw it across the corridor.
When Helen Hussey called the atrium on the walkie-talkie to report that Nathan Coleman had shot himself to escape drowning, Ray
Richardson understood for the first time the gravity of their situation. For him the worst thing was the realization that what had happened was going to affect his whole future. He doubted that the Yu Corporation would pay the balance of his fees and wondered if anyone would ever commission a smart building again. Certainly he could not see how the Yu Corporation building would become anything but notorious. People already hated modern architecture, and this would confirm their prejudices. But even among architects themselves what was happening seemed destined to consign Richardson to some kind of professional wilderness. Gold medals for excellence were not handed out to architects whose designs were found to be responsible for eight, maybe nine fatalities.
Of course you had to stay alive to be able to defend yourself against your critics. Stuck on a baking hot atrium floor, without food or water, how long could they hold out? Richardson went to the front door and peered to see through the tinted glass. Beyond the empty piazza was the Babel-like landscape of downtown: the monuments of modern worship, monuments to function and finance, well-designed tools for the classification and efficient exploitation of labour, liberating the ground for the speedy circulation of the life-blood of capitalism, the office worker. He rubbed the glass clear of condensation and looked again. Not that he really expected to see anyone in the darkness out there. The only consideration given to what happened in these urban areas at night, when the last hot desker had gone home, armed with his portable phone and his laptop so that he might do some more work, was how to deter the poor and the destitute from coming there to sleep, to drink, to eat, and, sometimes, to die. It did not matter where they went, as long as they kept moving, so that by daybreak when the office workers returned to the area, their arrival might not be obstructed by those who lived on the Nickle.
If only he had not been so committed to the principle of design deterrence. If only he had not thought to add Choke Water to the fountain, or render the piazza's surface inhospitable to those who might have slept there. If only he had not made that call to the deputy mayor's office and had those demonstrators removed. He meandered around the base of the tree looking up towards the top. He kept walking until he remembered that one of the upper branches came very close to the edge of the twenty-first level. And the tree itself was covered in lianas that ran the whole length of the trunk, and were as strong as ropes. Could they climb up to the twenty-first level, to food and water?
'Are you thinking what I'm thinking?' asked Dukes.
'Incredible as that might seem, yes, I am,' answered Richardson.
'What do you think our chances are?'
'I dunno. How strong is your wife?'
Richardson shrugged. He was not sure.
'Well,' Dukes said, 'better than down here. Reckon I'm going to try anyway. I used to climb a lot of trees when I was a kid.'
'In LA?'
Dukes shook his head. 'Washington state. Up near Spokane. Yes, sir, I climbed me a lot of trees in my time. Never did see a tree like this one though.'
'It's Brazilian. From the rain forest.'
'Hardwood, I guess. What do you say we try and get some sleep? Take a shot at it in the morning.'
Richardson glanced at his watch and saw that it was close to midnight. Then he looked at the piano. It was playing another strange piece.
'Sleep?' he snorted. 'With that fucking noise? I've tried telling the hologram to put a sock in it, but no dice. It just goes on and on. Maybe the computer's planning to drive us nuts. Like General Noriega.'
'Hey, no problem,' said Dukes and drew his gun. 'To shoot the piano player, you just shoot the piano. What do you say? I mean, you're still the boss round here.'
Richardson shrugged. 'I'm not so sure about that,' he admitted, 'but go right ahead. I never did like the piano much anyway.'
Dukes turned, worked the slide of his Clock 17 automatic and fired just once into the polished black woodwork, dead centre of the Yamaha nameplate. The piano stopped abruptly, in the middle of a loud and hectoring finale.
'Nice shot,' said Richardson.
'Thanks.'
'But you missed your vocation. With an aim like that you should have been a critic.'
Fear crept down the corridors and along the atrium floor of the Gridiron like some psychotic night watchman. Most of those trapped in the building slept hardly at all, while others paid for their apparent lack of vigilance with vividly claustrophobic nightmares, their periodic cries and shouts echoing in the cavernous purgatory that was the dark, almost empty, office envelope. Buzzing with the memories of the day and the preoccupations of sudden mortality, all human brains stayed active until the dawn came, and light brought the false promise of safety.
Book Six
'Technology will offer us more control rather than less. The buildings of the future will be more like robots than temples. Like chameleons, they will adapt to their environment.'
Joan Richardson had a feeling for trees, especially this one. It had been her idea to have a tree in the atrium. The strength of a tree, she had argued to her husband and then to Mr Yu himself, would enter into the building itself. Never a man to do things by halves, Mr Yu had got hold of the biggest, strongest tree he could find and, in return, he had donated some enormous sum of money — paradoxically — to preserving several thousand acres of Brazil's rain forest against the slash-and-burn system of clearing. Joan had admired the gesture. But, more especially, she admired the tree.
'Ray, tell me,' she said, 'in all seriousness. Do you think that I can really do it? That I can climb it?'
Richardson, who wasn't sure at all she could do it, but was perfectly willing that she should try, placed both hands on his wife's shoulders and looked her squarely in the eye.
'Look, love,' he said quietly, 'in all the time we have known each other, have I ever been wrong about what you could and what you couldn't do?
Have I?'
Joan smiled and shook her head, but it was plain that she had her doubts.
'When we first met I told you I thought you had the potential to become one of the world's great designers.' He shrugged eloquently.
'Well now you are. You are. Your name, Joan Richardson, is a byword for excellence in graphics, lighting and furniture design, with awards to prove it, too. Major awards.'
Joan smiled thinly.
'So when I say that you can climb this tree, it's not because I think you ought to try, but because I know you can climb this tree. That's not bullshit, love. That's not just positive thinking. It's because I know you.'