Филип Керр - The Second Angel

Dallas enjoyed his work, but loathed the man he worked for. It’s a common dilemma, and Dallas knew himself well enough to recognize that this had as much to do with his own character as it did with King’s. The Terotechnology CEO was arrogant, capricious, and cruel, but no more than Dallas, or for that matter anyone else who was on the Terotechnology board of directors. Dallas hated the director chiefly because he saw himself reflected in the older man and recognized that in time he would probably fall heir to King’s job, which was all that he feared most in the world. Design was a very different proposition from the day-to-day running of a corporation the size of Terotechnology. It was an activity for small groups or, as Dallas preferred it, for individuals. The CEO function was about development, a process that required whipping, kicking, and pushing. Small wonder that King required the assistance of Rimmer, his head of security. But it was unthinkable that you could make the Design Department work in that way. The more you tried to make it efficient, the less efficient it would become. For Dallas, his own lack of corporate responsibility was a source of pride. His mind worked to perfect pitch only when it was unfettered by the need to perform the mundane tasks of routine administration. He thought it would be crazy for someone like him, a pure designer, to run a company like Terotechnology; but at the same time, he knew that this was what King, himself a former designer, had planned for him, and he hated King for it. All Dallas wanted was to be left alone to design his intricate models of high security.

Sweeping quickly into his office before King could spot him, Dallas closed the door and then locked it.

‘That won’t keep him out,’ said Dixy.

‘I know,’ he answered dully. ‘I’m open to suggestions for making his exclusion from my life something more permanent.’

‘Sounds like someone had a bad evening.’

Silently, Dallas shrugged off his jacket and poured himself a glass of water. Finding herself ignored, Dixy awaited her master’s orders with patient respect.

‘These days they’re all bad,’ he said at last.

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

‘It’s my daughter. She’s sick.’

‘Caro? What’s the matter with her?’

‘That’s half the problem,’ he said. ‘The doctors — they don’t really know.’ He sighed and shook his head.

‘It sounds like she’s been sick for a while.’

‘Since she was born.’

‘But why haven’t you told me before?’ Dixy sounded a little hurt.

It was true. It was the first time he had mentioned Caro’s illness to his assistant. Dallas wasn’t the kind to mix his home life with his business life. But now he felt the need to tell someone about it. Even if that someone was only Dixy.

‘You can tell me anything. That’s what I’m here for.’

Dallas nodded. He appreciated Dixy’s seeming concern.

‘She just doesn’t seem to thrive,’ he said. ‘For a start, she’s anemic. And then there’s her jaw.’ Dallas shrugged. ‘It seems to stick out in the most peculiar way. If she wasn’t so sickly, she’d look like an infant Neanderthal. I mean, you’d look at her and your first instincts would be to leave her out on a hillside somewhere, you know what I mean? No, I don’t mean that. I do love her, but there are times — well, let’s just say it’s not easy to bond with a child like that, Dixy.’

‘Well, I wouldn’t know about that,’ she said stiffly.

The note in her voice surprised him, and for a moment Dallas wondered if perhaps she wanted a child of her own. Maybe he could organize that.

‘Take my word for it,’ he said bitterly.

‘What do the doctors say?’

‘The doctors,’ Dallas snorted contemptuously. ‘They’re running tests. Always more tests. But this far, whatever it is that’s wrong with her has eluded their diagnosis. So to be honest, I’m not very optimistic that they’ll find anything.’

‘Oh dear,’ sighed Dixy. ‘Is there anything I can do?’

Dallas stared into the screen of the faux fenêtre as a school of butterfly fish swooped as one, their eyes peering out from behind broad bands of black lending them a villainous look, so that they most resembled a gang of marauding bandits. It never ceased to amaze Dallas the way the fish all managed to turn in the same direction at exactly the same time — they may have been generated by a computer, but they were as realistic as if they had been bought from an aquarium. He supposed it was behavior associated with and modified by their breeding and feeding requirements. But how like the population at large, he thought. The masses of people who were obliged to live outside the Zone, with its system of medical privilege that cocooned Dallas and his class. Dangerous, nefarious people. Uneducable, infected things made of greed and desire. Crowded seas of dying generations against whose contagion a smaller, healthier, morally superior population had, of necessity, sought the protection of reinforced glass, scanning cameras, and lofty electrified fences in hermetic, guarded communities of RES Class One citizens.

Dixy coughed politely, and realizing that she had asked him a question, Dallas looked away from the faux fenêtre with a questioning sigh, to which he then added, ‘What’s that you say?’

‘I asked if there’s anything I can do,’ she said patiently. Redundantly. For they both knew that there was nothing she could have refused him. That was why she served as Dallas’s assistant instead of some more lowly job function.

‘You know I like to please you,’ she added in the most sultry voice she could muster, running a beautifully manicured hand through her long abundant hair in the way she had seen it done in old movies, when women wanted to offer some sexual provocation.

Dallas smiled, grateful for her sympathy. Every little bit helped. Even an assistant’s compassion was worth something. Dixy was indeed a nonpareil among assistants. Tall, immaculately proportioned, with long blonde hair, and in her late twenties, she was the kind of female whose beauty was considerably enhanced by her certainty that she was his perfect woman and the knowledge that he could never touch her. For Dixy was a Motion Parallax, a threedimensional image display with virtually unlimited resolutions that had been rendered by a computer using the electrical signals within Dallas’s brain and recorded using a DTR. [28] Digital thought recording. The DTR technique relies on the principle of magneto-encephalography, or MEG, first demonstrated as long ago as 1968 by David Cohen at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. However, it was another seventy years before Yosuke Konoye and the Sony Corporation of Greater Japan perfected the world’s first DTR machine. She was the interactive, real-time-transmitted image of his electronic assistant’s program bundle, a sophisticated optical device that helped Dallas to get the best out of the massively parallel computer that served his intellectual endeavors. Dixy could do just about everything that didn’t involve physical contact with Dallas. She was secretary, graphic artist, counselor, numbers-cruncher, jester, colloquist, translator, interlocutor, and even, on occasion, an autoerotic aid. In short, Dixy was invaluable to Dallas and capable of solving the most complex polynomial equations while simultaneously treating her human master to the lewdest, most intimate displays of her realistic, almost opaque (from whatever perspective you cared to regard this two-gigabyte basis fringe [29] Basis fringe. An elemental fringe pattern computed to diffract light in a specific manner. The phrase ‘basis fringe’ is an analogy to mathematical basis functions. Linear summations of basis fringes are used as Motion Parallax or holographic patterns. trioscopic display, Dixy was an exact creation of reflected light) and lifelike anatomy.