Dallas tightened his grip on the gun and shook his head. ‘I’m going to walk out that door,’ he told the guard. ‘If you get in my way, I’ll have to kill you.’
Something in Dallas’s eyes told the guard that he meant it. What was the point of risking his own life when the police could get him? Especially after spending all that money on a genetic life-extension program. He was due to live another hundred years, guaranteed. As soon as the guy was gone he would call the police and let them handle the risk. The guard relaxed his stance a little and nodded back at Dallas.
‘Okay. Whatever you say, Mister Dallas. But they’re going to get you, you know that, don’t you?’
Dallas moved sideways, toward the open door. He’d liked to have said good-bye to Aria, to have covered her nakedness at least, but he didn’t dare take his eyes off the guard, for fear of being shot himself. He took in the apartment — perhaps for the last time — with watery eyes and, nearing the door, risked a last look at his beautiful wife.
‘Aria? They won’t get away with this. No matter how long it takes, I swear I’ll make them pay for what they’ve done tonight.’
He drew the door shut behind him and stepped back through the hall and into the elevator car. A few minutes later he left the building to start his new life as a criminal and a fugitive from what passed for justice.
6
I
Dallas walked north of the park and out of the Zone, toward the vast Augean stable that was one of the city’s poorest quarters. He might as easily have traveled south, east, or west and found the same pestiferous ant’s nest of urban dilapidation. Once, you could have walked unhindered out of the city and lost yourself in some leafy suburb. But the twenty-first century had witnessed the birth of a new kind of city — the supercity (although there was nothing particularly fine or marvelous about it) — which was in reality the deformed union of several cities, all at the expense of garden, field, farm, and woodland alike. Everything was the city. Sometimes it must have seemed that the city was all that there was. Miles upon miles of bricks, mortar, asphalt, and concrete heaped in amorphous piles according to what economic circumstances, not planners, had dictated. You had to fly a long way to find the green spaces: Forbidden to the vast majority of the population, these were where the rich and the healthy had their exclusive country homes, in another CBH Zone. For most people, the city was the whole world, and many of them lived and died and never saw the sea or climbed a tree or picked a blade of grass.[48]
Dallas was an inventive man of great ingenuity and resourcefulness, but his imagination was of the pragmatic kind, concerned with what was scientifically practicable, expedient, or convenient. He had never possessed much in the way of insight, empathy, or sympathy, at least as far as the lot of the common man was concerned. And he could never have imagined being among these pullulating masses — the waifs, the scavengers, the schemers, the human rubbish — nor the dark confusion of their diseased existence that now pressed in upon him. They came so close he could smell them in their thousands as they jostled by him — their seething dampness, their sweaty bodies, and their stinking, billowing breath.
A century ago that great second Elizabethan analyst of civilization, Sir Kenneth Clark, argued a sense of permanence — and after all, what could be more permanent than a city? — as the prerequisite of civilization.[49] Aristotle’s idea of the perfect good was that men should come together in cities to live in a self-sufficient state and generally make life desirable. Of a city’s buildings, Sir Henry Wotten wrote that they ought to fulfill three conditions: firmness, commodity, and delight. These three men would surely have been horrified if they had seen the modern supercity in all its overcrowded chaos and ugliness. There was no sense of permanence here, no perfect good, no self-sufficiency other than the exclusively selfish, no life desirable, no structure sound, no building suitable for the purpose for which it was being used, and no aesthetic pleasure that might have been derived from the contemplation of any man-made structure.
Someone shoved him roughly out of the way so that he slipped and fell onto the icy ground. Picking himself up, he realized that he should call Dixy and enlist her help, while he still could. It was obvious that as soon as Rimmer and the company realized their mistake, they would prevent his remote access to his assistant and Terotechnology files and facilities. There was no time to waste. He had already squandered two valuable hours feeling sorry for himself. It might already be too late.
Dallas called Dixy on his matchbook phone. Having told her what had happened, he took the trading card he had removed from the body of Tanaka’s assassin and scanned it into his breastpocket computer, asking her if she could decipher what was on it. The next second she was telling him that there were two thousand credits on the card — a thousand of them still inactivated — and a prepaid seven-night stay at the Clostridium Hotel. She also confirmed what Dallas had, until now, only suspected, which was that the trading card had been credited by a Mister Flowers.
‘Rimmer,’ said Dallas. ‘I imagine he’ll want to speak to you as soon as he realizes that his assassin killed the wrong man.’
‘Then there’s no time to lose,’ said Dixy. ‘You’ll want me to transfer all your files to your breastpocket.’
‘Please.’
A moment later the wafer-thin computer in Dallas’s jacket pocket emitted a short electronic bleep, and Dallas was repossessed of money, intellectual property, passport and identity card, blood deposits, and other personal files.
‘Is there anything else I can do for you?’ she asked.
‘What kind of place is the Clostridium?’
‘It’s a hyperbaric hotel in the North section. About half a mile from your current call location. Perhaps you should stay there.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Dallas. ‘Rimmer’s bound to miss the card and then check the place out.’ Even as he said it, Dallas thought it unlikely Rimmer would go anywhere near his contract killer’s body. And a hyperbaric hotel was surely the last place they would think of looking for someone who was RES Class One. But there was no sense in letting Dixy know his plans. Just about the only thing of his in Terotechnology that wasn’t encrypted was the conversation he was having with her now. ‘I’ll find somewhere else. I’ve a friend in the South section I think I can trust. Either way, you won’t hear from me for a while.’
‘It would surely be best if we didn’t speak again,’ said Dixy. ‘If they leave me in motion, it’s because they’ll hope to try and track you.’
‘You’re all the family I have left, Dixy. It’s a pity I can’t DL[50] you into my breastpocket.’
‘It’s sweet of you to say so, Dallas. But you can’t afford to be so sentimental about a computer program.’
‘Look, Dixy, it might get a little rough with Rimmer.’
‘Everything that might be useful to him is already encrypted. Your files. Your investment accounts. Your personal numbers. Besides, computer assistants don’t feel physical pain. So what can he do, except perhaps turn me off? And then he’d be no further forward than he was before.’
49