Heaven is a Place on Earth (27 page)

“
Ms Galton – may I call you Virginia? – I wanted to be the first to call and tell you the good news.” Ginny watched the smiling face with grim foreboding. “Our grant from the Rice Consortium has been approved. Honestly, I'd forgotten we'd even applied for it, but it's extremely generous. It allows us to commission works from three of the country's most promising emerging composers. Several names were proposed and evaluated by a most eminent international panel of experts as part of the grant process, it seems, and yours, I'm pleased to say, was top of the list. Congratulations, Virginia! The terms of the grant are quite spectacular. They not only fund your own time for the next two years to produce a substantial orchestral work, but will pay for our rehearsal and production costs to run a series of performances around the country at top venues – already booked and scheduled, by the way! It's really very exciting and an amazing opportunity for you.” He drew a breath as if to settle his fluttering heart. “We need to meet, of course. I'm so looking for – ”

She cut it off.
Another miracle
. She slumped into the sofa and closed her eyes. Somewhere in the past few days – or even weeks – reality had become unglued. She had her suspicions but she needed to know just when it had happened.

She called Rafe but there was a message saying Rafe Morgan was no longer at that Net address and for further information she should contact the Federal Police Service, Department of Missing Persons. So she called Dover Richards, the man who had shot her.

“Missing Persons.” The face in the display was that of a pretty woman in her mid twenties. A construct if ever Ginny had seen one.

“
I'm trying to reach a tagger called Dover Richards.”

“
I'm sorry, Detective Inspector Richards is on sabbatical. Would you like me to redirect your call to another officer?”

Ginny shook her head and hung up. Was Richards there or not? Was he really on sabbatical? There was absolutely no way to know. Her only certainty was that everyone she called about it would give here the same story. For a wild moment she imagined finding out where Richards lived and staking out his home until he showed up. But how would she get his physical address when every directory, every person she might ask, may be deliberately misleading her?

She put her wrists to her temples and pressed hard.
Is this how it feels to be paranoid? Is that what I am? Have I gone crazy?

Whatever the answer, Richards was a dead end. He had either been removed, or hidden from her. In a sudden burst of anger, she stomped into the kitchen, grabbed up the roses and threw them into the waste chute. Cal was behind this. Cal had been working her like a puppet from the start. She pulled open a drawer so hard the assorted cutlery and cooking implements jumped and crashed. She grabbed the rolling pin and yanked it out. Stupid bloody thing. She'd bought it on impulse ten years ago and had never used it even once. But now she'd thought of a use for it. She grabbed it by one end, took aim at the food printer and swung it back, shouting, “I don't want your fucking roses, you sick creep!”

“Would you prefer chocolate?”

She screamed and dropped the rolling pin, jerking herself round to see who had spoken.

“I didn't mean to scare you,” Cal said. “I just didn't want you to break your new toy.”

She goggled at him, her heart pounding. “How did you get in here?”

He gave a wistful smile. “I'm not really here at all. It's just a projection in your – ”

She didn't want another lecture on his damned technology. “What the hell is all this?” She wave
d a hand at the world in general. He seemed to understand.

“
I wanted to do something for you. To make up for...” The sentence drifted off with a sigh and a helpless gesture.

She narrowed her eyes and tightened her lips. “It worked, didn't it? The vote was in favour of the bill. It passed. And moments later, you flipped the switch and down came your curtain of lies and corruption.”

“You can still join me, Ginny.”

“
And the very first lie was that the vote went the other way. Then the bastard Government calls a double-dissolution election so that they can all step out of the limelight and let a bunch of mugs get elected who have no idea that they're not really running the country at all.” She felt tears running down her cheeks and hated herself for crying. “How could you be part of that? How could you help them turn the world to shit like that?”

He took a step forward, as if he meant to comfort her. She took a step back and looked for the rolling pin.

“No-one will even notice the difference. You'll see. It's always been like that. The people in power define reality. The victor gets to write history, but they also get to write the present, and the future. Democracy has been a sham since... well, always. It's better to be on the inside.”

“
Better for you and your criminal friends.”

He stopped talking and pursed his lips. “I just wanted to give you another chance to consider it.”

“And if I say no, do you take away my dad's job, my mother's exhibition? Is that the deal?”

His eyes widened. He looked genuinely shocked. “No, no. Those are just... I just wanted to help your family out. I wanted to please you.”

“By giving me a commission I didn't earn?”

She could see from his alarm that he really didn't understand what he'd done.

“People get preference because of their family and connections all the time, Ginny. Almost everybody with power and wealth got a leg up from someone else with power and wealth. It's the way the world works. You could go all your life trying to 'earn' success and, like almost everyone else without the right connections, you'll fail. I just tipped the scales in your favour a little. People hardly ever deserve their successes in this world, Ginny. There isn't a cosmic karma operating that rewards the good people and punishes the bad. Take the commission. Write something beautiful. You don't get opportunities like this except by the luck of being born in the right circles, but anyone can blow it, no matter who they know.”

She wasn't really listening to him. Her mind was in the Public Gallery, with Tonia desperately working at inserting the virus and Dover Richards swinging his gun round towards her. “When did it stop being real?” she asked. “For me, I mean. Did I really go to Sydney to see Della? Did Sorenssen really die? And Chu? Was I ever with you at that oversized mansion of yours?”

He looked a little shifty. “All of that was real. All of it.”

“
But not when I thought I'd woken up in Canberra and we went to the Parliament worldlet.”

He shook his head. “I'm sorry. That got... out of hand.”

Ginny felt a bitter amusement at her own gullibility. “I turned you down and you put me through that charade in a fit of pique, didn't you?”

He fidgeted and seemed irritated at having to defend himself. “I wanted to show you just how much I could control reality if I wanted to, how easily I could fool you, or anyone. I just let it play out too long. I didn't know you were so determined to be a hero.”

I should have known
, she told herself.
When Tonia agreed to help, I should have known. When Rafe was so brave. When everything unfolded the way I wanted it to
. Except for the ending. Cal had let his simulated Dover Richards shoot her.
Because Cal was angry? Because he'd seen enough?

“
You should go now,” she said.

He nodded. “I'll keep an eye on you.”

“What, like you're Superman to my Lois Lane?”

He gave a wan smile. “Something like that.”

“Don't bother. I can look after myself.”

He regarded her with sad eyes for a long time. Eventually, he said, “I still love you, Gi – ”

“Oh for God's sake, just go!”

He blinked out of existence before she'd finished the sentence. She grabbed up the rolling pin from the floor and threw it at where he'd been, screaming in anger and frustration, tears dripping from her chin. It crashed into the wall in the lounge room and left a dent in the plaster. She was trembling all over. She sat down on the kitchen floor with her back to the counter and wept into her hands.

After a while, the doctor that Della had arranged called to set up an appointment. She told it to go screw itself and the AI politely went away. Later, Della called but Ginny had set her phone to 'busy'.

-oOo-

It was a long time before she got up again. From the light, she judged it to be late afternoon. She was tired and flat and felt hollowed out by her crying. She'd spent a lot of time trying to piece together all that had happened, who the various players had acted for, who had known what and when. It seemed to her that there had been times when the Consortium had acted according to its own agenda, not Cal's. For a moment she actually worried whether Cal was in danger. Then she wondered why the hell she should care. If there was ever someone who had played with matches, it was Cal. But perhaps he had found ways to continue to be useful to the various factions behind the curtain. He'd had ten years to plan this, after all.

She went to the window and looked out. It was showing a peaceful ocean view of white sands framed by pandanus trees. She felt an urge to be there and promised herself a vacation at the seaside, up the coast maybe, where it was warm and secluded, but somewhere with great restaurants for the evenings. She imagined meeting a tall, suntanned guy and having carefree sex in a beachfront cabin with the waves pounding and the cicadas singing. She let the fantasy absorb her for a long, long time while the sun went down and the light grew dim.

There was only Della left in the world she could talk to about what had happened – and Cal, of course. She decided right there that she would never tell Della what she knew, that it would be wrong to burden her friend with an understanding of how their world had changed. It scared her how alone she would be with the knowledge she had. It would forever seal her off from everyone she might meet.
My own virtual curtain
, she thought.
With only me inside and everyone else outside.
The thought started her crying again.

Ages later, she ate a pizza from the food printer, thinking,
What the hell, it's just a machine
. She found a bottle of beer in the fridge and drank it with her meal. On impulse, she checked her bank balance and found, as she knew she would, an astonishing amount of money had been deposited there. So her bank manager had not wanted to talk about her overdraft after all. He probably just wanted to tell her what a valued customer she was, and to sell her a financial services package. It felt strange to know that the expensive vacation she had imagined could be real, that she could turn down the ACO commission if she pleased and still spend the rest of her life writing music. Never working again was a perfectly feasible option. What's more, she suspected that if she blew the money in a Gold Coast casino, or gave it all to charity, the next day she would find her account had magically topped itself up again. And it would keep happening until Cal grew bored with her, or became sick of the sight of her screwing tanned strangers at tropical resorts. She laughed at the idea that she had become a kept woman, like a courtesan from pre-liberation times, only she didn't want it and her benefactor got nothing for his troubles. Not the way she had expected her life to go.

The up-side was that she would never need to deal with those little pricks at UnReality ever again. In fact, she probably had more than enough to buy up the company and sack them both, just for the fun of it. She smiled at the idea as she imagined their faces when she broke the news.

She stood up quickly and took two steps across the room in agitation, her smile wiped away in an instant by the realisation that her little fantasy was exactly the same as Cal's and his colleagues', the exercise of power over other people for personal gratification. It was sobering and frightening. Within minutes of discovering all that money at her disposal, she had begun thinking about hurting people with it. Was corruption so easy? So insidious? Was she no better than Cal and the rest?

She grappled with it as the evening wore into night, hating herself, hating Cal, hating all the selfish, grasping people that made the world so bad when it could easily be so good. She woke up at three AM, curled up on the sofa, uncomfortable and cold, surprised that she could have fallen asleep. She stumbled to her bed and climbed in but slept only fitfully after that until the morning came.

With the new day came a new resolve. She ate eggs benedict from the printer, something she'd never tried before. The she called Bernard Recszyk.

“
What if you don't like my stuff?” she asked, without preamble.

The ACO Director was fluster for a moment before regaining his professional smoothness. “Better minds than mine have judged your talent, Virginia. I have no doubt you deserved your win.”

“But what if I'm crap?”

His compassionate smile was one he must have used on many a great artist who had succumbed to self-doubt. Part of his job must be to keep these sensitive souls on the rails. “Why don't we let the audiences decide that, Virginia? I'm sure you'll be pleasantly surprised.”

“If I don't accept the grant, does someone else get a go?”