‘All right,’ Sunday said, holding her hands up to forestall an argument. ‘I was just saying.’
Over coffee the conversation headed back into less treacherous waters: Sunday and Geoffrey trading stories about their childhood in the household, encounters with animals, encounters with Maasai, funny things that had happened between them and Memphis, Jitendra putting on a good impression of being interested and inquisitive.
When Sunday had picked up the tab and they went out onto the restaurant’s circular roof, the air had cooled and with the dimming of the ceiling lights the nocturnal effect was complete. Not that there was any sense that the city was winding down for the night, judging by the continued traffic sounds, music, shouts and laughter billowing up from below.
Sunday pointed out landmarks. Older buildings, newer ones, places she liked and didn’t like, favoured restaurants, disfavoured ones, clubs and places neither she nor Jitendra could afford. Or rather, Geoffrey thought, places that she chose not to be able to afford, which was far from the same thing. Sunday had spurned Akinya money, but that didn’t mean the floodgates couldn’t be opened at a moment’s notice, if she ever changed her mind. All she would have to do is renounce her decadent artistic ways and agree to become a profit-sharing partner in the collective enterprise.
As, indeed, could he, just as easily.
‘We’re going that way,’ Sunday said, pointing to a wide semicircular hole in the far side of the cavern wall. She was, Geoffrey realised, much less intoxicated than either of her two companions. He began to wonder, with a sense of dim foreboding, whether she had been softening him up for interrogation.
At street level they came out into some kind of all-night souk, a place of winding, labyrinthine passages roofed over with strips of tattered canvas and latticed bamboo. Food, animals, garments, consumer goods, cosmetics, surgical services and robotics parts lined the lantern-lit stalls and booths. Huge muscled snakes like coiled industrial ducting extruded from lurid green and yellow plastics. Jewel-eyed seahorses, dappled with spangling iridophores. Tiny, dollhouse-sized ponies, pink and blue and anatomically perfect. Vendors selling what Geoffrey at first took to be sheets of black, brown and pink textiles – dress fabric, curtains, perhaps – until he realised that he was looking at custom skins, vat-grown flesh sold by the metre. New skin, new eyes, new organs, new bones. Most of these commodities, being illegal elsewhere, must have been fabricated in or around the Zone itself. There was industry here, as well as artistry and anarchy. Like Dakar or Mogadishu, a hundred or more years ago: the dusty, squabblesome past that every clean, ordered, glittering African city was trying hard to put behind it.
They jostled through the souk’s crowds. Jitendra spent several minutes digging cheerfully through plastic crates of salvaged robot parts, picking up a piece then discarding it, rooting out another, holding it up to the lantern light with narrowed, critical eyes.
‘Watch your bag,’ Sunday said as they waited for Jitendra to strike a deal. ‘Thieves and pickpockets abroad.’
Geoffrey swung the sports bag around, clutching it to his chest like an overpadded comfort blanket. ‘Really? I’d have thought most of your fellow citizens went through Mandatory Enhancement screening at birth, the way you and I did.’
‘That’s true,’ Sunday conceded, while Jitendra continued his haggling, ‘but there isn’t some handy colour-coded brain module labelled “the impulse to commit crime”. What is crime, anyway? We might both agree that rape and murder are objectively bad things, but what about armed resistance to a despotic government, or stealing from the rich to feed the poor?’
‘The last time I looked, there was a distinct shortage of both despotic governments and poor people.’
‘Crime has a social context. In the Surveilled World, you’ve engineered criminality out of society using mass observation, ubiquitous tagging and targeted neural intervention. Good luck with the long-term consequences of that.’
Geoffrey shrugged. ‘Locksmiths find another line of work.’
‘I’m talking about societal timescales. Centuries, thousands of years. That’s what we’re concerned with here; it’s not all about being crypto-anarchists and throwing wild parties.’
‘You think criminality’s a good thing?’
‘Who knows? Maybe the same clusters of genes that give rise to what we loosely label “criminality” may also be lurking behind creativity, the impulse to experiment, the urge to test social boundaries. We think that’s quite probable, even likely, which is why we’ve gone to such lengths to re-engineer the public space to make crime viable again.’
‘Have fun.’
Sunday tapped a finger against her head. ‘There are Recrim clinics here where they’ll undo at least some of the work carried out by the Mandatory Enhancements. People who’ve been recrimmed can’t easily leave the Zone again, and if they do they’re treated like time bombs waiting to go off. But for some, it’s a price worth paying. I was deadly serious when I mentioned pickpockets. There are people around here who are not only fully capable of committing crimes, but who regard it as a pressing moral duty, like picking up litter or helping people when they trip over. No one’s talking about letting off nerve gas, or going on killing sprees. But a constant, low-level background of crime may help a society become more robust, more resilient.’
‘And there I was, thinking they hadn’t really got to you yet.’
‘It’s the Zone, Geoffrey. If it was exactly like everywhere else, there’d be no point having it.’
It was that same old spiralling argument, and again he didn’t have the energy to fight his corner. ‘When you put it like that, I guess it doesn’t sound too ridiculous.’
‘You’re just humouring me now.’
‘How could you tell?’
After a moment, Sunday said, ‘Didn’t mean to put you on the spot back at the restaurant.’
‘You had a point. But I’m not here with a begging bowl.’
‘Well, good. Not that I wouldn’t like you to get more money, of course. And it’s nothing to do with Eunice?’
‘Why would it be?’
