Evensong

They took the main road out of Rijeka, a journey of about thirty miles and twenty-five minutes. By the time they reached the town centre of Opatija it was still only late afternoon, a good time of day to see the town. In the nineteenth century, when Croatia was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Hapsburgs had used Opatija as a holiday resort. Levin, whose other identity in the real world was founding partner of a large architectural practice, studied the ornate and elegant Hapsburg buildings. He thought of the long slow circlings of history: in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Hapsburgs had been targets for nihilist groups like Black Dawn. They continued for a few minutes along the palm-lined main boulevard until they reached the gates of the Villa

Angiolina Park. From there they turned left and up into the foothills of Mount Ucka, the national park to the north of

Opatija. Roadside buildings fell away as they climbed higher, and were replaced by dense laurel woods and cypresses. The smell of their leaves and resin hung in the air. It was still only late afternoon.

The villa stood in a clearing in the laurel woods. It was surrounded by cypresses, dark verticals to the villa’s white horizontal, and it looked large and expensive. Levin thought, Does Slovan Soldo own this? Rape pays well here.

The car stopped, and the driver—they had not exchanged a word since Rijeka—stayed put. Levin got out, walked up to the front door and rang the bell. It opened, apparently automatically, into a large reception room. He walked in, immediately killing his shock and smiling a greeting at those inside. Never look surprised was one of his maxims. As if they shared it, those inside smiled back. 

2

Anwar was back at his house in northern Malaysia. He’d activated an immersion hologram in his living room, making it a dark and dripping alley. It was an expensively detailed hologram: smells of wet pavement and urine, sounds of running water and rodent scurryings. It suited his mood.

Do I have to guard her cat as well?

Arden Bierce had given him the usual crystal bead containing Rafiq’s detailed briefing. He could have played it at

Fallingwater, but preferred to take it back home. He pulled up a chair—in reality it was a black and silver Bauhaus original, but in the hologram it was a damp stained mattress—and settled down. He pressed the bead into his wrist implant, and watched the headup display resolve on the inner surface of his retina, a simple full-face shot of Rafiq.

“Thirty years ago,” Rafiq said, “this summit would have been about fossil fuels—oil,gas, maybe coal and shale. But alternative energy sources are now commercially viable: wind, sun, tides, high-atmosphere turbulence, nuclear fusion, hydrogen cells, even continental drift.”(Yes, Anwar thought, and I know how much you’ve made the UN invest in them. You always play long.) “This summit is about something much more basic, ever-present but ever-scarce where it’s most needed: water. It will be difficult. Some of the member states going to Brighton have been, or still are, at war over water rights.”

A tramp was pissing copiously against the wall of the alley.

It steamed and frothed on the mouldering brickwork. All the tramps who came and went in this hologram were different,

Anwar noted approvingly. It never quite repeated itself.

He liked immersion holograms. He had once turned his family living room (and later, his school gym) into the UN

Security Council Chamber, complete with all the then members, except that he made them naked. He enjoyed imagining what they were like under their clothes. He gave them liver spots, varicose veins, pimples on buttocks, local accretions of fat. And he made them carry on debating exactly as if they’d been clothed. In his hologram they were debating water rights—then, as now, a big issue.

He switched his attention back to the inner surface of his retina. Rafiq had been listing some more details of the summit, its proceedings and participants, then turned to the subject of its location.

“Brighton Cathedral…your friend Levin would like this. It’s a full-size replica of Brighton’s Royal Pavilion, one of

Europe’s most eccentric buildings. The New Anglicans’ parish churches are all new designs, commissioned from contemporary architects—Levin’s partnership designed two of them— but they decided that their Cathedral should echo the style of

Brighton’s greatest symbol.

“The original was built in the eighteenth century by the Prince Regent, but the New Anglicans have built theirs at the end of a two-mile-long ocean pier. The Cathedral is surrounded by other buildings, architecturally matching, to house conference facilities, hotels, function suites, and media centres.

There are also commercial offices, studios,shops,restaurants.