J.G. Ballard - Super-Cannes

'Are you sure?' Penrose's offhand tone surprised me. 'Why? Are they getting out of control?'

'No, but Eden II changes everything. What worked so well for a small group of elite professionals can't be applied to a huge population. Eden II will employ 20,000 people. I don't want to start a race war – or not yet. That Green pilot was a warning. Besides, we have to look ahead. A titanic battle is about to begin, a Darwinian struggle between competing psychopathies. Everything is for sale now – even the human soul has a barcode. We're driven by bizarre consumer trends, weird surges in the entertainment culture, mass paranoias about new diseases that are really religious eruptions. How to get a grip on all this? We may need to play on deep-rooted masochistic needs built into the human sense of hierarchy. Nazi Germany and the old Soviet Union were Sadeian societies of torturers and willing victims. People no longer need enemies – in this millennium their great dream is to become victims. Only their psychopathies can set them free…'

He drove cautiously down the hillside towards Grasse, allowing other cars to overtake us, waving them on with a large hand.

He seemed tired but at peace. I realized that he had conducted a private experiment, taking himself up to a high place and offering himself the kingdoms of the new earth. He had accepted the offer, and was already working out his strategy for dealing with the huge possibilities that Eden II brought with it.

When we reached Eden-Olympia he scarcely noticed the fresh graffiti aerosolled across the glass doors of the administration building.

He dropped me at the house, gripping my arm as I stepped from the car. 'I'm glad you came, Paul. You've helped me a great deal.'

'I hope not.'

'There's a small thing you can do. I'm worried about Frances. Some of my medical records have gone missing.'

'The videotapes?'

'Exactly. They're highly confidential; we wouldn't want them in the wrong hands. Do tell Frances that the therapy programmes are coming to an end.'

'She'll be glad to hear it.'

'Good. When are you next seeing her?'

'Tonight. I'm picking her up at Marina Baie des Anges. She'll be impressed.'

'Invite her out to dinner. Explain that it may take a little time. She's obsessed with David Greenwood, and nothing else matters to her. That's dangerous for us.'

'It makes sense. She loved the man.'

'So did I.' Penrose's smile slipped from his face. He stared at his hands, then pulled back his sleeves and exposed the scars on his forearms. 'It's true, Paul. I owe him my life.'

'You were on the target list, along with Berthoud. If he'd seen you he would have killed you.'

'He did see me. I never told you.' Penrose nodded to himself. 'He shot Berthoud through the glass door, stepped forward and saw me bleeding on the floor in the corridor. I can still remember his eyes. He wasn't in the least mad, you know.'

'Then why didn't he kill you? He certainly planned to. You were the architect of everything he hated.'

'I know.' Penrose gripped the steering wheel, listening to the throaty quaver of the sports car's engine. 'I've thought about it ever since. He wanted me to face what I'd done. For a few moments he was completely sane…'

Kurt Weill's ' Surabaya johnny' boomed from the CD player propped against the pillows. Jane swayed around the bedroom, a lurid figure in a spangled crimson minidress and stiletto heels.

A frizz of lacquered black hair rose in a retro-punk blaze from her forehead, above kohled eyes and a lipsticked mouth like a wound.

I sat among the debris of discarded underwear, admiring Jane's stamina and panache. Overwork and pethidine had coarsened her face, and she seemed a decade older than the young woman who had driven me down to Cannes.

'Jane, I love the costume. You look wonderfully… I'd say decadent, if that wasn't so passé.'

'Tarty.' She cocked a hip and pointed a carmined fingernail at my eyes. 'Miss Weimar, 1927.'

'The Delages will love it. You're going out with them?'

'On the town.' She began to bump and grind, and tripped over a pair of thigh-length boots. 'Hell, too many feet in this room. Where's my gin?'

'By the phone.' A full tumbler stood on the bedside table. 'Save it for later.'

'I'm the doctor here.' She swayed and smiled, as if recognizing me across a noisy room. 'Stop worrying, Paul. The human body's capacity for painkillers is almost unlimited.'

'How much pain are you in?'

'None. Wonderful, isn't it? Dr Jane is in control.'

'I hope Dr Jane isn't driving. Where are the Delages taking you?'

'Dinner at… somewhere terribly smart. They'll pretend I'm a poule they picked up in the street. Then an open-air costume party.'

'And you're going as…?'

'Can't you guess?'

She vamped around me, sitting on my lap and moving away before I could embrace her, a dizzying slide of silk and flesh. 'How was the ground-breaking ceremony?'

'Impressive. All the top brass were there. A plane pulling a Green banner dropped a small bomb on us.'

'How funny. And how sad. Nothing can stop Eden-Olympia. Wilder must have been thrilled.'

'A bit subdued. The Wild West phase is over. Life will be a lot quieter here. Any chance of you taking a long break?'

'Paul…' Jane glanced at me through the mirror, sympathetic but distant, like a mother watching a handicapped child. 'Go back to London? For what? Some health centre in Clapham?'

'Why put it like that? We'd be together again.'

'They need me here. The project is expanding.'

'Good. But they need you for other things.'

'Such as?' Jane switched off the CD player. 'Selling stolen pharmaceuticals? Doing female circumcisions for rich Sudanese?'

'It doesn't work like that. They're more subtle.'

'Paul… where drugs and sex are concerned, no one is that subtle.' She walked over to me and placed her hands on my cheeks. 'You've spent too long here. Take Frances to London with you. Now it's my turn to fly…'

I watched her hunt through a drawer and pick out her most garish handbag. She embraced me fiercely before she left. When I winced, uneasy with this bogus affection, she looked at me with sudden concern. 'Paul? Is your knee acting up? Start taking your shots again. You were happier then.'

'That was the problem.'

'Are you seeing Frances tonight?'

'We're having dinner at Tétou. There's some good news to celebrate.'

'Give her my love. And use my car. Sorry about the Jag. All this graffiti everywhere. Alain thinks the wrong people are getting into Eden-Olympia.'

Later, as I drove the Peugeot along the RN7 to Villeneuve-Loubet, I listened to the echoes of Lotte Lenya inside my head and remembered Jane's advice. With or without Frances Baring, I would soon be back in London. As Eden II spread its parks and artificial lakes across the Var plain a more workaday future would arrive. The winding-down of Penrose's therapeutic programme marked a defeat for him and the triumph of the contingent world, the inescapable reality of corridor rivalries and executive washrooms, the relativities of status and success. After a long day at Eden II, the notion of psychopathy would seem almost folkloric in its quaintness.

' Frances, there's good news…'

Using the spare key, I let myself into her apartment at Marina Baie des Anges. The standard lamp in the hall shone onto a clutch of financial journals, but the other rooms were in darkness. Her car keys lay in the silver tray on the hall stand. I opened the door into the kitchen, and caught an odd odour in the air, a medley of cheap aftershaves that were almost familiar.

' Frances…? I've booked Tétou.'

Was she in bed with another man, perhaps the pilot of the Green protest plane? An image formed in my mind of her lying naked beside her lover, both frozen with embarrassment, the man reaching for his shoes beneath the bed and coming up with one of my lost sandals…