Somewhere East of Life. Brian Aldiss
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had to be by the memorial in the park behind the Gellert Hotel in half an hour, when the package would be dropped off.
The arrangement sounded genuine. Burnell paced the room while his Dapertutto was away. Like Hoffmann, whose shadow was stolen from him in Offenbach’s opera, he was living a half-life and would do so until his memory was restored.
At least the Gellert management had been helpful. When Burnell disappeared, the hotel had collected his belongings from his room and handed them over to the police. After he had settled his outstanding bill, the manager had retrieved his belongings. His electronic diary yielded useful information. The address of his apartment in Frankfurt-am-Main, near the offices of World Antiquities and Cultural Heritage, was no longer a mystery. He could resume his job immediately, provided Monty Broadwell-Smith returned as promised.
Monty did return, looking flushed and – as far as habit allowed – triumphant. He had two EMV bullets, lying snugly side by side in a plastic box of standard design.
‘Here you are, old boy. Your bullets, the last in Budapest. Ready to be inserted into the projector. There’s one on the ground floor, as you may have noticed.’
When Burnell stretched out his hand, Monty produced only one of his coughing laughs.
‘No, no, my friend. Hold the line a tick. I didn’t obtain these treasures for nothing. I had to stump up to the despatch rider. Honest Injun. The dealer is no pushover. He rushed me twelve hundred and fifty Deutschmarks the pair – five hundred for the academic bullet, seven hundred and fifty for the amorous one. Sorry, but you’ll have to reimburse me. These babies contain your last ten years, remember! I’m just a poor exile, as you are aware …’ Raising an impoverished eyebrow, he gave Burnell a look of innocent appeal.
Trembling, Burnell paid up. Monty Broadwell-Smith touched his forelock, drained his gin glass, and disappeared. Burnell went immediately down to the EMV cubicle on the ground floor, clutching the little plastic box. It was vacant. He could regain his past time – and possibly his past wife. He fed the bullets into the apparatus, sat back in the chair, pulled the projector over his head, and switched on. Nothing happened. He turned up the intensity. Still nothing happened. The bullets were blank and Monty had escaped.
6
Soss City
Fragments of various post-Soviet wars were continuing. A truce was arranged in the Crimea between Russia and Ukraine. It was the sixth such truce. Heavy fighting was reported in the Caucasus region, where Alliance troops were involved. What had been a peace force was now engaged in counter-offensive operations. The UN met every day.
Radio reports from Tbilisi claimed that the Alliance was using chemical and bacteriological weapons in the Kutasi area. There, Azeri irregulars stiffened by units of the Turkish army were fighting Armenians. Questioned, American General ‘Gus’ Stalinbrass said, ‘What in hell else do we do? These assholes don’t give up that easy.’
On the previous night, four Georgian soldiers had found their way through a minefield to give themselves up to a British journalist, Dicky Bowden, 20. One of the soldiers was a boy of fourteen.
Bowden said, ‘Starved and disaffected troops such as these are all that stand between the Alliance and the Caspian Sea.’
He said he was confident that the war would be over in a week or two. Say a month. Maximum two months. Certainly by year’s end.
Burnell switched off the television news. He settled down to read his own book in order to regain some of the professional knowledge stolen from him. He had reinstated himself in his apartment in the Schäfer Building. It was evening in Greater FAM, as Frankfurt-am-Main was known among the travelling classes. Frankfurt, in becoming FAM, had taken its rightful place beside LA, HK, and KL, to be known by its initials like an American president of yester-year, when American presidents had power.
At twenty minutes to three, he rose, closing his book. His appointment with his superior at the WACH offices was at three o’clock. He took a lift to the ground floor and left the Schäfer, passing under the marble bust of Amanda Schäfer, where two lines of her poetry were incised in Carrera marble:
Lass das Tal der Finsternesse,
tritt in meinen Lichtkreis ein
It was no more than a brief stroll along a grass-fringed sidewalk to the building which housed the WACH offices. The block was situated behind the brown mass of the Xerox block, built to resemble a child’s interpretation of Viollet-le-Duc’s reconstruction of Carcassonne. All the blocks here, because they had no real context, were architectural abnormalities – to Burnell’s mind, the degenerate opposite of the structures that it was his duty to protect.
Walking here once with Burnell, a visiting friend had looked about him in dismay and exclaimed, ‘God had his reasons.’ But God remained unobtrusive in Sossenheim, unwilling to intrude on an elaborate organization.
Sossenheim City, its civic designation, was an aggregation within an all-embracing FAM, a grave accent stretching north-west from what remained of the Niederwald. Sossenheim was too big to be called a business park. It consisted of offices, shopping malls, urbstaks, hotels, apartment blocks, Bienenhäuser, parklets, autostaks, conference centres. These units might be expressed as three million square metres of offices, two million square metres of living accommodation, point nine million square metres of retailing, and point six million square metres of automobile parking. The population of Soss City was two point two million by day and point nine eight by night. Potted plants, point four million, static. Many official bodies – such as WACH, to name one of the poorest of them – had offices in Soss City.
Soss City possessed no centre, no spot where citizens might gather, should they be seized by such an aberrant desire. Of the old village, a community where once men gathered in the bars of the crooked streets, to discuss the relative merits of Eintracht Frankfurt versus Bayern München, and beat up their wives discreetly on returning home, nothing remained: the exception being a row of two-storey brick houses in Mombacher Platz. These had somehow escaped bombs in World War II and later the demolition gangs, and now formed part of a History Theme Park. The new city was divided, though in no systematic way, into national sectors. Giant Bienenhäuser or ‘beehives’ contained citizens of the member nations of the EU. In other hives lived Japanese, Korean, Malaysian, Californian, American, Arab, South African populations, and so on. All these hives, although basically engaged on international business, cleaved to their national idiosyncrasies, their national cooking – diversified in many cases by integral Indonesian and Chinese restaurants.
National diversity compensated slightly for ethnographic oddity. Everyone in Soss City was middle-class, aged between about sixteen and fifty-five. Retiring drones had to take themselves off elsewhere. Children were herded and not seen.
On his brief walk, Burnell passed not a single advertisement, such as enlivened the centre of cities everywhere. Nor did he pass another human being. Only armoured security vans prowled by.
The daily tidal flow of habitation was serviced by monorails, high-speed coaches, U-bahns and S-bahns. Most early traffic surged into the various centres of FAM, fish into a crocodile’s maw. The attraction of Sossenheim was that it offered safety without the necessity of neighbourliness. Burnell had always liked that; it mattered to no one whether or not he was around; he could come and go as he pleased. Also, none of the crime rampant throughtout much of the Western world affected Soss City. High-income residents invested in the best security systems.
Soss City needed no central meeting-place; the traditional square had disappeared beneath the power of indoor electronics. But in the gaudy Ginza Mall – where you showed an ID to enter – clowns and high-wire acts entertained punters every day, fountains splashed, bands played (strong on Mozart and Miles Davis), and two live white tigers were fed one live black pig every day prompt at noon, inside the Adventure Cathedral.
Organic cities of an older order are never completed, always in process, like the individuals who work and play in them. Sossenheim City was complete. A package deal.
It was no secret to Burnell that Soss City was