The driver let out a ripple of curses as soon as the boat was out of earshot, whilst the other passengers grumbled. Vikram watched the forlorn figure of the woman left behind growing smaller. She was arguing with the officer. He hoped they wouldn’t hurt her. They always had that hunger in their eyes. As the waterbus crossed over the border, he had to fight back creeping tendrils of fear. The last time he had been at the mercy of Citizens, they’d put him underwater.
The old song came to him:
He knew what it was like to disappear.
“I’m half an hour late now,” one man said irritably. Yet again, Vikram checked his watch.
The passengers retreated into silence. Trust was a risk: best stick to your own problems. Vikram returned to the rail. The morning’s brightness had already dissolved and a fine rain was beginning to fall, dampening his clothes. The cold burrowed deep into his gloveless hands.
He watched a covered ferry glide past. The boat was in good repair, but passengers looked cross and miserable with their lot. Glancing up, Vikram saw the preferred highways: shuttle lines weaving from scraper to scraper, another network every twenty floors, all interlinking to form a vast, complex web. Within their translucent skeins, shuttle pods moved like beads of mercury on a string. He tried to imagine what it must be like to cross the city in one of those tubes, the feeling of enclosure, of privilege.
Ahead, the terminus was in sight. Vikram took a second waterbus, and within minutes found himself walking up one of the ten platforms which extended from 900-East like the points of a star.
The Eye Tower was the tallest skyscraper in Osiris and the most magnificent. Vikram had only ever seen pictures of it. Upon entering, he was thoroughly scanned and searched. Vikram showed the letter once again. Released into the building, he climbed two empty floors. It was a standard flood control device, although he saw no signs of water intrusion.
At the lobby, he stopped.
The riot of colour before him was giddying. Sunk into the floor was a vermilion mosaic, reflected many times over in the gigantic, gold-hued mirrors. Coniferous trees stretched up into the open core of the tower. Vikram stood on the mosaic tiles, under the trees, gazing up at the rough patterns of their bark, the slender needles that looked like tufts of hair. He touched one. It pricked his finger. It was real.
Surrounding the central lifts was an aquarium, two metres thick and fat with wildlife. As high as Vikram could see, the spiralling stairways and balconies looked in upon its undulating creatures.
He stepped into the lift with a bundle of people. He was the only one dressed in outdoor clothes. After initial glances at him, the Citizens averted their eyes diplomatically, one woman patting down her pale pink blouse as if it might have been dirtied by their brief proximity. As the lift swept upward he watched the fish floating in their glass jail. They were every colour of the rainbow: beautiful, darting things, but Vikram had an instant antipathy to the aquarium. It was still a cage.
He checked his watch furtively. In just under an hour he would be delivering his statement, persuading the Council that west Osiris was not just a convenient scrap heap, but a valid part of the City’s society. Could he describe the daily life of westerner? How could he explain freezing to death to people who had never been cold? The question occupied him all the way to the hundred and eleventh floor, through further security checks, into reception and within eyeshot of the vast doors to the Chambers, which were flanked by four uniformed guards.
He waited for nearly two hours before they admitted him. A receptionist told him that talks had been going on since ten o’clock, but offered no explanation for the delay. She showed him to a quiet room with a bowl of fruit piled luxuriously high and a machine that pulped the fruit to a juice. He peeled an orange. Its scent filled the air. He ate the fruit slowly, remembering that the few times Mikkeli had been able to get an orange, she insisted on removing the peel in one long coil whilst they all waited for a share, intoxicated by the scent.
“They’re ready for you.”
The interruption startled him. A woman stood in the doorway, looking expectant. She took his arm and steered him carefully, as if she expected him to break and run.
“The speaker will announce you,” she whispered. “Then you can speak. You have a presentation prepared?”
Vikram nodded. Of sorts. “I wasn’t given much notice—”
“I hear you’ve been writing letters for quite a time! I’m sure you have plenty to say. Turn and smile, will you?”
She swung him around. There was a flash. Vikram realized he had been photographed. He winced instinctively.
“That’s great, Syrah,” said a young man with floppy hair. They moved on.
“After your presentation, do not speak. The Council will debate. You don’t speak. Understand?”
“But what if I—”
“It’s protocol. Understand? It’s very important that you understand before I let you in there.”
He forced a smile. “Don’t speak. I get it. Thanks for the briefing.”
“You’re welcome.” She brushed his jumper down. He was acutely aware of its fraying edges and the grease he couldn’t wash out. “You look — oh well. You first.” She gave him a little push.
When he walked into the Chambers, his shoes cast hollow echoes. The room was round and windowless, formed entirely of pale stone with a smooth, polished texture and darker capillaries. Slender columns supported an empty balcony running its circumference. The ceiling arched up and up into a perfect dome. There were paintings on its panels, of sirens and dark-finned fish. He had never seen anything like it, and the thought that he might never again made him sad in a way he did not recognize.
The woman hassled him forward. He was taken to a podium. Now he saw the austere faces of the Council, assembled in rising crescent rows. The Speaker’s voice boomed from somewhere above and behind him.
“This is Mr Bai, who has requested to address you on some of the issues concerning west Osiris. He speaks on behalf of pressure group Horizon.”
It annoyed Vikram that they labelled it a pressure group rather than a reform group, but as Horizon’s sole remaining representative, he was hardly in a position to argue. From Eirik’s lessons, Vikram knew that the last group to be granted a hearing with the Council was the now dissolved Osiris Integration Movement, and their history was blemished.
As for the title, Vikram had no surname as far as he knew. He had made one up for his previous communications and for the purpose of today. In jail, like Eirik, he had been allotted a number.
“Please begin, Mr Bai,” said the Speaker. Vikram resisted the temptation to turn around.
“I’m not going to speak about Eirik 9968 today,” he said. When he spoke Eirik’s name a flicker of distaste ran around the Chambers, but Vikram’s voice remained steady. That gave him the courage to continue.
“Our opinions will hardly be the same and it seems pointless to resurrect a debate which has already been decided. Instead, I’d like to tell you about the real west — the west you know nothing about.”
He found that the acoustics of the Chambers carried his voice well. After a few minutes he almost forgot that he was addressing the Council, Osiris’s ruling elite. As their faces separated into individual imprints, he tried to force them out of their aloof curiosity. Primarily he spoke about poverty. He told them of diseases that scurried through the shanty towns and raced up the towers, claiming children and adults alike. The people he had seen coughing up their lungs with tuberculosis. The shortages of food and clothing. He described how a man looked when he froze to death. He told them of the hospice that struggled to care for those who had lost limbs to frostbite. He didn’t linger over crime, but told the Council what they already knew, that it was fuelled primarily by the needs of people who had nothing, and would not decrease until they had something. Then he laid out his arguments: what was needed now. An emergency winter aid programme. More accommodation, repair works and insulation for the uninhabitable buildings.