The number at the other end was a long time answering, and she sat with the receiver against her ear, staring across the desk at me.
I said: “Do you work here alone?”
“There’s usually the manager and two other girls. We’re supposed to be closed today. It’s a public holiday—Hello!” I heard a voice at the other end, sounding tinnily across the quiet showroom. “Lotterie-Collago. I’m checking the reservation for Robert Sinclair. Do you still have it?”
She grimaced at me, and stared out of the window with that vacant expression worn by people waiting on the phone.
I got up and sauntered about the office. Hanging on the walls were a number of colour photographs of the Lotterie’s clinic on Collago; I recognized some of the pictures from my glance through the brochure. I saw clean modern buildings, a number of white-painted chalets set out on a lawn, flowerbeds, jagged mountains in the distance behind. Everyone seemed to be smiling. Several photographs were of lottery winners arriving at or leaving the island, handshakes and smiles, arms around shoulders. Shots of the interiors revealed the antiseptic cleanliness of a hospital with the luxurious appointments of an hotel.
I was reminded of the sort of photographs you sometimes saw in brochures for holidays. One I remembered in particular: a ski resort in the mountains of northern Faiandland. It had exactly the same overstated atmosphere of jollity and friendship, the same garish colours from a salesman’s samples book.
At the far cud of the office was a waiting area, with several comfortable chairs surrounding a low, glass-topped table. On this there was a package of lottery tickets, placed there to be found and looked at. I picked them up and flicked through them. Each one had been neatly defaced with an overprinted legend (SAMPLE, NOT FOR SALE), but in every other respect they were the same as the one that had won the prize for me.
At that moment I managed to identify at last the vague feeling of unease I had had ever since winning.
The lottery was something that existed for other people. I was the wrong person to have won.
Lotterie-Collago gave athanasia treatment as its principal prize: genuine immortality, medically guaranteed. The clinic claimed a success rate of 100 per cent; no one who ever received the treatment had yet died. The oldest recipient was said to be one hundred and sixty-nine years old, had the physical appearance of a woman in her mid-forties, and, it was claimed, was in full possession of all her faculties. She was often featured in the Lotterie’s television advertising: playing tennis, dancing, solving crosswords.
Before all this I had sometimes made the sardonic comment that if eternal life meant a century and a half of crossword puzzles, I was content to die of natural causes.
There was also a feeling I had never entirely thrown off, that the award always went to the wrong kind of person: in short, it went to people who entered lotteries, who were deserving only of luck.
In spite of what I now knew was the Lotterie’s advice, prize winners were sometimes given a great deal of publicity. More often than not, under media examination these winners turned out to be dull, ordinary people from narrow backgrounds, who lacked ambition or inspiration, and who were patently incapable of envisaging themselves living forever. In interviews they would usually come out with homilies about devoting their new lives to good or public works, but the sameness of these sentiments seemed to indicate that they had been prompted by the Lotterie. This aside, their main ambition was generally to see their grand children grow up, or take a long holiday or retire from work and settle down in a nice house somewhere.
Although I had derided the prosaic aspirations of such innocent winners, now that I had become one myself I found I had not much more to offer. All I had done to deserve the prize was to take temporary, and ultimately meaningless, pity on a crippled soldier in a park. I was no less dull or ordinary than any of the other prize-winners. I had no use for a prolonged life. Before the lottery I had lived a safe, uncontroversial life in Jethra, and after the athanasia treatment I should probably continue it. According to the publicity, I could expect to do so for at least another century and a half, and possibly as much as four or five hundred years.
Athanasia increased the quantity of life, but offered nothing for the quality.
Even so, who would turn down a chance of it? I feared death rather less now than I had done when I was an adolescent; if death was a loss of consciousness then it held no horrors. But I had always been lucky with my health, and like many people who escape illness I dreaded pain and disability, and the prospect of actually dying, of going through a helpless decline, suffering pain and immobility, was something I could not think about without shrinking away. The athanasia clinic gave treatment that totally cleansed the system, that controlled cell regeneration in definitely. It gave immunity from the degenerative diseases like cancer and thrombosis, it protected against viral diseases and it ensured the retention of all muscular and mental abilities. After the treatment, I should remain forever at my present physical age of twenty-nine.
I wanted that; I could not deny it. Yet I knew the unfairness of the Lotterie system, both from my own short experience of it and from the many passionate criticisms that had been voiced in public. It was unfair; I knew I was unworthy of it.
But who was worthy? The treatment effectively provided a cure for cancer, but hundreds of thousands of people still died of the disease every year. The Lotterie said that cancer could not be cured, except as a by-product of their treatment. The same was true of heart disease, of blindness, of senility, of ulcers, of a dozen serious ailments that marred or shortened the lives of millions of people. The Lotterie said the treatment, expensive and difficult, could not be given to everyone. The only fair way, the only unquestionably democratic and undiscriminating way, was by lottery.
Hardly a month passed without the Lotterie being criticized. Were there not, for instance, genuinely deserving cases? People who had devoted their lives to the care of others? Artists, musicians, scientists, whose work would be curtailed by the inevitable decline? Religious leaders, peacemakers, inventors? Names were frequently put forward by the media, by politicians, all intending to further the apparent quality of the world.
Under such pressure, the Lotterie had several years before proposed a scheme designed to counter the criticism. A panel of international judges was appointed to sit annually, and every year they nominated a small number of people who, in their opinion, were worthy of the elixir of life. The Lotterie then undertook to provide the treatment.
To the surprise of most ordinary people, almost all of these laureates declined the treatment. Notable amongst them was an eminent author named Visker Deloinne.
As a result of his nomination, Deloinne later wrote an impassioned book called Renunciation. In this he argued that to accept athanasia was to deny death, and as life and death were inextricably linked it was a denial of life too. All his novels, he said, had been written in the knowledge of his inevitable death, and none could or would have been written without it. He expressed his life through literature, but this was in essence no different from the way other people expressed their own lives. To aspire to live forever would be to acquire living at the expense of life.
Deloinne died of cancer two years after Renunciation was published. It was now recognized as his greatest work, his highest literary achievement. I had read it while still at school. It had had a profoundly moving effect on me, yet here I was, halfway to Collago, halfway to eternal living.
At the other end of the office I heard Seri put down the telephone receiver, and I turned towards her.
“They had to let your reservation go,” she said. “But they’ve booked you into another hotel.”
“Can you tell me how to find it?”
She picked up a raffia basket from the floor, and placed it on the desk in front of her. She took off her red jacket, and laid it down between the handles.
“I’m leaving now. I’ll show you where it is.”
She locked the desk drawers,
checked that an inner door was closed, and we went out into the road. Heat assaulted me, and I looked around and above me in a reflexive gesture, thinking stupidly that some hot-air vent must be blowing out from above. It was just the climate, the tropical humidity. I was wearing only light slacks and a short-sleeved shirt, but with my holdall I felt totally unadapted to this place.
We walked to the main street and headed through the crowds. The shops and doorways were open, lights were blazing, and the traffic rushed past in a bedlam of noise and speed. It was all vested with a purpose I had never noticed at home; everyone seemed to know where they were going, and obeying the chaotic rules of this unreal place.
Seri led the way along the densely crowded pavements, passing restaurants, coffee shops, strip clubs, bookstalls, cinemas. Everyone seemed to be jostling or shouting, no one moved slowly or silently. On several corners, open-air kitchens were selling skewered meat on rice, served in flimsy paper wrappers. Meat, bread and vegetables lay bare to the hot air in the open-fronted shops, attracting hundreds of flies. Transistor radios, strapped to the wooden uprights of stalls, gave crackling, distorted pop music to the uproar. A water truck roared down the road, sluicing the street and pavement with total disregard for anyone there; afterwards, vegetable peelings collected in the gutters. Through it all, a sickly, pervasive scent, far too sweet and unwholesome: perhaps it was rancid meat, or incense burned to smother the smell of dung. It had an intangible “hot” quality, as if the climate brought the perfume seeping from the walls and streets themselves.
Within a few moments I was drenched with sweat, and it was almost as if the humid air were condensing on me. I paused once or twice to switch hands on my holdall. When we reached the hotel we went straight inside, into the welcome cold of air conditioning.
Checking in was a brief formality, but before giving me the room key, the clerk asked to see my passport. I handed it over to him. He placed it, without looking at it, behind the counter.
I waited for a few moments, but there was no sign it would reappear.
“What do you want the passport for?” I said.
“It has to be registered with the police. You may collect it on your departure.”
Something made me suspicious, so I moved over to where Seri was waiting.
I said to her: “What’s going on?”
“Have you got a ten-credit note?”
“I think so.”
“Give it to him. Ancient local custom.”
“Extortion, you mean.”
“No…it’s just cheaper than the police. They’ll charge you twenty-five.”
I returned to the desk, passed over the bill and got my key and passport in exchange; no regrets, no explanations, no apology. The clerk impressed a rubber stamp beside the Archipelago visa.
“Are you going to stay and have a drink with me?” I said to Seri.
“Yes, but don’t you want to unpack?”
“I’d like a shower. That’ll take about a quarter of an hour. Shall we meet in the bar?”
She said: “I think I’ll go home and change my clothes. I live just a short way from here.”
I went up to the room, lay on the bed for a few minutes, then stripped off my clothes and showered. The water was pale brown and felt very hard; the soap barely lathered. Some twenty minutes later, refreshed and wearing clean clothes, I went down to the bar at street level. This was actually outside the hotel, opening on to a side road, but there was a glass canopy and a number of high-pressure fans kept the air cool around the tables. Darkness had fallen while I was inside. I ordered a large beer, and Seri arrived shortly afterwards. She had changed into a flared, loose fitting skirt and semi-transparent cheesecloth blouse, looking less like a company stereotype and more like a woman. She ordered a glass of iced wine, sitting across the table from me, looking relaxed and very young.
She asked me a number of questions about myself: how I had come to buy the lottery ticket, what I did for a living, where my family came from, and various other questions that people ask each other when they have just met. I was having difficulty making her out. I was unable to tell whether these harmless personal questions were prompted by polite, genuine or professional interest. I had to keep reminding myself that she was my Lotterie-Collago contact here, that she was just doing her job. After the celibacy of the ship, aggravated by Mathilde’s evasions, it was disconcerting to be sitting casually with such an attractive and friendly woman. I could not help looking at her appraisingly: she had a small, neat figure, and a pretty face. She was obviously intelligent, but holding something back, keeping a distance, and I found it very enticing. She made conversation with apparent interest, leaning slightly towards me, smiling a lot, but there was also a sense of withdrawal in her. Perhaps she was on overtime, hosting a company client; perhaps she was merely being cautious with a man she had only just met.
She told me she had been born on Seevl, the sombre island that lay offshore from Jethra. Her parents were Jethrans but they had moved to Seevl just before the war broke out. Her father had been an administrator at a theological college there, but she had left home in her early teens. Since then, she had been moving about the islands, drifting from one job to another. Both parents were now dead. She said little, changed the subject quickly.
We had two more drinks each, and I was starting to feel hungry. The prospect of spending the rest of the evening with Seri was very appealing, so I asked her where we could find a good restaurant.
But she said: “I’m sorry, I’ve got a date this evening. You can eat at the hotel. It’s all on the Lotterie. Or any of the Salayan restaurants around here. They’re all excellent. Have you tried Salay food?”
“In Jethra.” It was probably not the same, but then eating alone would not be the same, either.
I regretted suggesting the meal because it had obviously reminded her of what she was doing for the rest of the evening. She drank the remainder of her wine, then stood up.
“I’m sorry I have to leave. It was nice to get to know you.”
“Same here,” I said.
“Tomorrow morning, meet me at the office. I’ll try to book you a passage to Collago. A ship leaves about once a week, but you’ve just missed one. There are a number of different routes. I’ll see what’s available.”
For a moment I glimpsed the other Seri, the one who wore the uniform.
I confirmed I would be there, and we said goodnight. She walked off into the perfumed night and did not look back.
I ate alone in a crowded, noisy Salay restaurant. The table was set for two, and I felt more isolated than I had done since leaving home. It was weak and stupid of me to fix on the first two women I met, but I had done so and there was nothing I could reverse. Seri’s company had successfully rid me of thoughts of Mathilde, but she seemed set to become a second Mathilde. Was her date tonight just the first evasion of me?
After the meal, I walked through the rowdy narrow streets of Muriseay, lost my way, found where I was, then returned to the hotel. My room was air-conditioned to the point of refrigeration, so I threw open the windows and lay awake for hours, listening to arguments, music and motorbikes.
8
I overslept, so it was late morning by the time I walked around to the Lotterie office. I had awoken to a feeling of indifference about Seri, determined not to start another pursuit. I would accept her for what she was, a Lotterie employee doing her job. When I went inside the office Seri was not there, and I felt a quite distinct pang of disappointment, making a fraud of my new determination.
Two other young women, both wearing the smart company outfit, were working behind desks: one was speaking on the telephone, the other was typing.
I said to the one at the typewriter: “Is Seri Fulten here, please?”
“Seri isn’t coming in today. May I help you?”
“I was supposed to be meeting her here.”
“Are you Peter Sinclair?”
“Yes.”
The girl’s expressio
n changed; that subtle shift from formality to recognition. “Seri left a message for you.” She tore a sheet from a notepad. “She asked you to call at this address.”
I looked at it but of course it meant nothing to me. “How do I find this?”
“It’s just off the Plaza. Behind the bus station.”
I had crossed the Plaza during my late-night walk, but no longer had any idea how to find it.
“I’ll have to go by cab,” I said.
“Would you like me to call one for you?” she said, and lifted the telephone.
While we were waiting for the car to arrive, the girl said: “Are you a lottery winner?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Seri didn’t say.” The girl smiled, hinting at intrigue, then looked down at her work. I went to sit at the glass-topped table.
A man appeared from the inner office, glanced briefly in my direction, then went to the desk Seri had been using the day before. There was something about the office-life quality to the Lotterie that made me uneasy, and I remembered how my doubts had been focused when I was here before. The bright and reassuringly confident image projected by the staff and their surroundings made me think of cabin crew on aircraft, who attempt to calm nervous passengers with professional blandness. But the Lotterie’s product surely did not need to be backed up with reassurances? It was paramount that the treatment was safe, or so it was claimed.
At last the taxi arrived, and I was taken the short distance across the centre of town to the address Seri had left.
Another side street, bleached by sunlight: shops were shuttered, a van waited by the kerb with its engine running, children squatted in shadowed doorways. As the taxi drove away I noticed fresh water was running in the gutters on both sides of the street; a dog limped forward and licked at it, glancing to the side between gulps.
The address was a stout wooden door, leading through a cool corridor to a courtyard. Unclaimed mail was scattered on the Hoot and large containers of household waste spilled out across the uncut grass. On the far side of the courtyard, in another corridor, was an elevator, and I rode up in this to the third floor. Directly opposite was the numbered door I was looking for.