‘See what I mean? All sanitized, all sham. Even the chimneys are sham — who needs chimneys now? And the jumps — you can see for yourself, they’ve all got safety shelves, and as for the Great Leap itself, there in the middle, they put a safety net under that.’
‘Yes, but be fair, Sofy, it’s still a hell of a course. I wouldn’t like to run it. They’ve made it less dangerous, yes, but they run it so much faster nowadays that there are nearly as many accidents anyway.’
‘I wasn’t telling her about the danger; I was talking about the reality of it. It isn’t real any more. It’s all stage-managed. Look for yourself! You can see! It’s lost all meaning now. It used to be a true honour to wear the red ribbon, but who cares now?’
As we went down again they said I ought to go and talk to the people at the Race Office, outside the Castle Gate. ‘Fair’s fair,’ they said, ‘go and see what they have to say.’
So I left them ordering more coffees at the café, and walked down the main arcade and out through the great gate (itself a sort of reluctant approximation of its medieval original). Immediately outside it, on a rounded corner building, a large sign said: ‘THE ROOF-RACE INITIATIVE 2012’. Display windows below were full of Roof-Race photographs, old and new, victors falling bloodied from the ramparts, art photographs of the Great Leap taken from below, groups of champions, Governors presenting the gold goblet surrounded by preposterously overdressed civic worthies, legendary winners from the past posed with laurel wreaths around their necks. In the foreground there was a photograph of some filmic celebrity holding above her blonde head a banner proclaiming: ROOF-RACE FOR THE WORLD!
I went inside. A man was sitting at a big desk, piled with pamphlets and carved in front with a gilded helmet. He was dressed in a Hav gallabiyeh and sported a black-and-white rosette. ‘Yes?’ he said.
‘Could it be’, I began, ‘that—’
‘Yes, yes, it could! Fatima told me to expect you!’ He jumped up from his chair (the back of it ornamented with maze-circles) and kissed my hand enthsiastically. ‘Dirleddy, what a pleasure to see you again. Do you recognize me? Do you honestly?’
I didn’t, to tell you the truth. He had been a slim, racy, perhaps rather wild young man: now he was the plump epitome of middle-aged Havian respectabililty, and he talked in a committee-room timbre.
‘No, I thought not. Ah well, one can’t expect it — age creeps up on all of us, does it not? Prosperity too! But sit down, sit down, how can I help you?’
I told him that he could explain to me first what all this Initiative stuff was about. Why 2012? He was only too pleased to explain. It was a campaign, he said, to have the Roof-Race recognized as an Olympic sport in time for the 2012 holding of the Games.
‘I must first tell you what has in recent years happened to the Race’ (and as that receptionist had audibly articulated the exclamation mark in ‘Lazaretto!’, so Yasin made it clear to me that ‘the Race’ had a capital ‘R’). ‘You may or may not know that since the year 2000 it has been thrown open to competitors from around the world. It is now a major event on the international sporting calendar. Like the Bull Run at Pamplona — just as an example, you understand — it attracts entries from everywhere, and our Government is anxious that it should become a universally recognized feature of modern Hav. With the Myrmidon Tower, it will be something that comes to everyone’s mind when Hav is mentioned.’
He sounded as though he had it by heart. ‘You’ve said all this before, haven’t you?’ I said.
He laughed and shrugged. ‘Oh Miss Morris, you’ve been in this game too long. But there we are, it’s my job. I’m no longer the young man skidding down the Staircase; I am a Myrmidonic Civil Servant Grade 3. Anyway, it’s like I say: they wanted it be a world-class event, and so when the Grand Bazaar was rebuilt they decreed that it must be reconceived too. Health and safety, don’t you know.
‘Actually they had first wanted it abolished altogether, but you know how much it meant to Havian people — there was such an outcry that the Perfects themselves intervened. But they did remodel the whole course, to make it generally acceptable to world opinion.’
‘They took all the character out of it, you mean. I’ve just been up to see it.’
‘That is not for me to say. I am only the Race spokesman. Suffice it to say that the course has now been judged, by independent international experts, to conform to the highest safety standards. This being so, the Government has decided that it should occupy a similar status to the Cresta Run at St Moritz in Switzerland. That’s also confined to a particular place, but open to all comers, and we feel confident that Hav will soon be ready to accommodate big sporting crowds — the new airport, Lazaretto and all that, all the necessary infrastructure.’
But, said I, St Moritz was a bit different because the Cresta was a winter sports event.
‘Quite true, and as a matter of fact we have thought of using artificial snow machines to make the Roof-Race a winter sport too. It was thought too risky in the end, so instead we are pressing for the Race to be accepted as a sport in the summer Olympics for 2012. We’ve hardly started the campaign yet. We’ve only just opened this office. But the Government is going to use all its influence, especially of course among our economic associates, to see that we win. It will be a triumph for Hav. Lazaretto is sponsoring it, and with the new Balad airport, and of course with Havberry products becoming household names around the world, it will put us on the map at last.’
‘You want to be on the map?’
‘Not much. But that’s my job.’ He looked at me a little wistfully, I thought. ‘But actually, Jan — I may call you Jan, mayn’t I? — actually I hate the whole thing. I’m just paid to say all this. For me the Roof-Race was always a private affair. It was just for us, us Havians. Also it was exciting — it was, wasn’t it? And of course the danger was part of it. Nobody complained in the old Hav about the danger, did they? It’s only since the Intervention, and all that — making a profit out of everything, giving Hav its proper place in the world, all that balls. Health and safety, all that nonsense.
‘I’ll tell you what I’d really like to happen. It’s too late to do anything about the Roof-Race. Trying to revive it as it was couldn’t work, and the new course means it’s something totally different and new, really nothing to do with the old one. But if they really must put Hav on the sporting map — give it a Cresta Run, as it were — I think they should have a car rally on the Escarpment. We’d call it the Escarpment Rally.’
Now he was warming up. ‘I know the country well, as you will remember — remember whizzing down to pick up my cousin, the first time we ever met? I know the country well, and I’ve already worked out a route. We can use the Tunnel itself. They’ve taken out all the rails — the Chinese bought the lot, to ship away as scrap metal. Think of it: all those hairpin bends inside the mountain!
‘I’ll tell you what, Jan. Are you free this afternoon? Why don’t I take you up there, and you can see for yourself? We will run our own Escarpment Rally.’
A great idea, I thought. Anything is grist to my mill, and besides, I hadn’t forgotten that he was one of the two young men who had taken me to the séance long ago.
‘Well then, suppose we meet here around two. My car’s in the multi-storey. OK? I’ve got a group coming any minute now from the airport, but I should be through with them by then. Ideology bring them in, you know, on their way to Lazaretto. Stay and hear my recitation, if you like.’