In World City

F. Godsland I.

Description

Dion Lefevre, witnessing his grandmother perform an act of sorcery, experiences a moment in eternity. Miranda Whitlam, chancing to see a filmed death, experiences the end of everything. Both are set on courses that will interweave long afterwards: one searching to recover the immortality he has known, the other struggling to hold back the death she believes inevitable. They first meet as children on a remote Caribbean island. Looking for a place where he can live forever, Dion chances on Miranda and experiences, if only briefly, the moment in eternity he has been trying to recover. But Miranda sees in Dion only a threat to the absolute control she believes will hold back death. It is in World City - the vast vacuum of industrial Europe - that their tracks finally converge. Dion's father takes him there for a better life, but Dion rejects everything his father stands for and grows up a criminal. And it is in World City where Miranda, searching for the power to banish death, is driven to embark on illegal research. She needs children for her experiments and Dion has twelve desperate street kids he needs work for. As their lives collide, Dion and Miranda must experience the disintegration of all they have believed before he can guide her past the finality of death and she can give him back the eternity he has been seeking...In World City tells the story of two desperate people, driven together by the oldest dream there is: eternal life.It will appeal to fans of speculative and literary fiction.

Sujets

• Fantasy (canción de Mariah Carey)
• Contemporary fantasy
• Fantasy

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 28 mai 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781784625962
• Langue: English

Extrait

In World City
I.F. Godsland

Copyright © 2015 I.F. Godsland
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study,
or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in
any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the
publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with
the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries
concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
All characters in this book are fictional and any resemblance
to persons living or dead is purely coincidental
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ISBN 9781784625962
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Converted to eBook by EasyEPUB

Thanks to Maggie, for taking me to the Island
Contents

Cover


Life and Death


Handelmann’s Hotel...


1


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3


Handelmann’s Hotel...


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Handelmann’s Hotel...


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Handelmann’s Hotel...


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Handelmann’s Hotel...


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Handelmann’s Hotel...


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Handelmann’s Hotel...


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Handelmann’s Hotel...


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Handelmann’s Hotel...


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Handelmann’s Hotel...
Life and Death

“The purpose of death is to teach us to give life our unconditional support.”
Apostate Scientist
Handelmann’s Hotel...
In the best World City caravanserais, right of access to your room can be gained only by offering the lock card dispenser something uniquely your own: a voice, a handprint, the patterns on your iris. Dion prefers immunotype, which is the most hidden and so safest of all. For this is Handelmann’s, that peculiar offshoot of the international chain, set hard against the crumbling concrete high-rises of the ancient Eastern Bloc, where somebody has seriously misjudged developments and built the luxury hotel isolated like a lotus in excrement. Still, it has remained open, despite – or because of – an increasingly unusual reputation; which it has acquired thanks to the likes of Dion, who walks through the artificial breeze that whispers in the tropical lobby jungle, thinking all the while of turning back out the door and into the Waste. Back into all that is not World City.
He finds the lock card dispenser set in the ceramic reception desk, presents his credit chip and places his hand on the sampler deck. There are discreet sounds, then the slight sting of tissue being taken. The processor identifies the unique configuration of relevant loci and the card emerges: room 243. Dion observes his participation in the ritual. He stares at the immaculate desk top and his hand resting on its sterile surface. He sees his hand take the lock card but his gaze remains on the desk top. He imagines it cracked and dusty, the tropical creepers that festoon the lobby forcing their way into the joins in the marble, splitting the blocks apart with their slow, inexorable growth; refashioning the material structure of the hotel into a fantasy image of jungle ruin. He imagines the pools and fountains overflowing, rivulets of the water coursing through the building, wearing away its foundations, dissolving the roots of World City, until nothing is left but earth and water and jungle.
But, as he follows the porter across the concourse, it is the building that closes to enmesh him. For, as in airport departure lounge or privileged-access shopping mall, here at Handelmann’s is the World City signature: the spotless surfaces, the entrancing gloss, the perfection of appearance that entirely captures the attention. Dion feels his submission as a relief. The images of decay that threaten to overwhelm him are cast back into the shadows for a few moments more. He doesn’t want to think about death and dissolution. He wants the light anaesthesia of World City to carry him through to the next deal and the next, further and further away from anything that might really matter, on and on towards a life that lasts forever. But neither does he want to think about life eternal – which is difficult; because, whether he likes it or not, a crack has formed in his barriers against that. Dion wonders whether the crack will widen. It all depends on the ingenuity of the salesman – her salesman – Miranda Whitlam, when he had last known her.
1

The old woman stepped, with careful, conscious grace, up the long, steep path that led to the gun emplacements. Clear after rain, the early evening sky was like some great jewel arcing over the island. She paused halfway to take in the sky and the freshened air, so transparent that the peak of Morne Diablotin, nine miles distant, was like a picture she could reach out and touch. The conditions were not ideal. She would have preferred the atmosphere closer, heavier; charged like it had been the night before. Clarity and freshness were fine for the Catholics, and anyone else who liked to look heavenward, but she wanted her attention on the earth. She wanted the density of rain and thunder, vapour rising from the ground, the smell of wet, decaying vegetation. But it was clear and fresh, so clarity and freshness would have to do.
A single, corroded cannon remained at the top of the path, its barrel still poking impotently out towards the deep twilight-blue of the Caribbean Sea. Stopping beside it, she wondered how long since the weapon had last hurled out anything in anger. An image came and she felt a dead weight flying through the air, curving down towards some vulnerable little craft in the bay below. She muttered a brief invocation and another image came to her, this time of a sizeable splash of water. She smiled then lifted her eyes away from the bay and back to the mountains, now purple in the dusk. The white cockerel she was carrying gave a furious squawk and began flapping wildly. She shook it by the legs and it quietened, hanging inverted in her grip, its mad eyes casting about in the upside-down world for something to rekindle its rage. But her eyes never left the mountains and for five full minutes she breathed in their deepening colour. The mountains were a strength – obviously – but who bothered to use that now?
She headed along the path a little way further then turned into the trees that now formed the back wall of the derelict fortifications. Another short walk and she was in a clearing that had once been the parade ground. To one side were ruined stone buildings that had once been the barracks and guardhouses. Their windows were now empty and they were roofed by trees that grew from gaps between the jumbled flagstones, their walls no longer held together by mortar but by the binding strength of knotted creepers that crawled across the facades.
The old woman walked directly to the middle of the clearing and casually dropped the cock and her bag of accessories. Then she stepped back along the path she had entered by, turning off after a hundred yards to commence a long, circular sweep around the perimeter of the derelict military base. She muttered as she went and kept her eyes resolutely fixed on where she would place her next step. Her muttering was like some natural sound – the waves on the rocks below or the wind in the leaves of the trees – and the track she created through the tropical vegetation was like that of an animal pacing out some instinctive territorial ritual, entirely a part of the world it moved within.
After about ten minutes she was back at the path and she stopped briefly to close the circle. The Cabrits was a popular enough place, although at twilight only a tourist would be stupid enough to go scrambling among the ruins. There were tourists, however, and with the circle in place she could be sure of remaining undisturbed. Anyone who might follow her track would find their intention diverted: some other path would seem more appealing; they would remember something they urgently needed elsewhere; they would decide to go for a drink.
She shuffled back into the centre of the barracks’ square and began tugging at the objects jumbled together in her bag, the trussed cock watching her all the while with careful malevolence, as if she were some more powerful rival that could only be lacerated by subterfuge. She placed the objects somewhat haphazardly in a half-circle small enough for her to stand in and reach out to each one. She surveyed in turn a tiny bone, a child’s plaster Nativity model, a family photograph, some seeds, a doctor’s letter and a battered white rose. Softly, she began to hum a gentle, directionless thread of half-tones, accentuating in her awareness the qualities each object evoked. She let the sound build more strongly and with it her sense of the small collection of emblems. As the sound meandered, she began to release from her hand a carefully measured stream of white powder. It fell within the half-circle of emblems and created a curly pattern like wrought iron. When her design was completed, she stopped to consider it. Everything was placed as it should be. Nothing intruded that might call down anything other than the one she wanted. She let a stillness in her begin to build.
Then, abruptly, she looked up. Shocked momentarily, she found her gaze swinging wildly around the clearing. Aware of her disorder, she deliberately set up a slow, steady rhythm of breathing, allowed the stillness to return and let her gaze come to rest. She looked where her gaze led, di