The Happier Dead by Ivo Stourton

Author:Ivo Stourton [Stourton, Ivo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction
Publisher: Solaris
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

SEEN BY THE light of day, the Great Spa seemed less mysterious, but somehow no less threatening than it had in the small hours of the morning. In the dim sunlight the coloured bulbs glowed but faintly, and Oates could see brown streaks on the white flanks of the dome, and something which might have been a hawk or a falcon circling the pinnacle. The benthic calm of the floodlit plains around the perimeter became merely grubby: a fly-tipper’s paradise. The dome had shed that weird aura of the organic, and assumed instead a massive mundanity. Its dirty gigantism, its belittling of the private dwellings which surrounded it now seemed more like the fascist or communist architecture of the mid-twentieth century, mongrelled with the shopping malls of the twenty-first.

Yet it was not until Oates had driven off the motorway and turned into the drive of the Great Spa itself that he became aware of the most significant change. He drove past the turning to the service entrance that had deceived him on his first approach, and passed on towards the reception area he had left that morning. He was still perhaps a mile from the gates when he was brought to a halt by an impenetrable queue of traffic. Where last night there had been only the orderly desolation of the wasteland, now there was chaos. One or two of the vehicles he saw were news vans, another was a tow truck trying to rescue a spavined Mini rolled off the road by its owners, but the majority seemed to be the kinds of ordinary families Oates had passed on the road streaming out of London.

He wound down the window, reached up and stuck the detachable siren onto the roof of his car. The light alone did nothing to clear the way, so he switched on the wail. It seemed at first as if this too would be ignored, but gradually, with a bad grace the cars clogging up the approach began to nudge aside. Robocars were programmed to shift out of the way automatically in response to a signal from the siren, but they were hemmed in by the old fashioned manual vehicles in the crush. Even with the light and siren some drivers still seemed to begrudge him his wing mirrors, and it took almost fifteen minutes for him to reach the manned checkpoint and the barriers that separated the road from the private carpark within the steel ring of the fence, where the guests’ cars were arranged in their neat grid.

The guards, who were standing with their guns outside the barrier, paid no attention to his approach, and when he gestured to the man in the booth to lift the pneumatic arm and lower the mechanical teeth at the entrance, the man shook his head and waved at the crowd. Oates turned off the siren and got out, leaving the car parked on the road. The guards were arguing loudly with a couple of men, and one woman who held the bundle of a baby in her arms.

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