The Happier Dead Read Online Free PDF

headmasters of St Margaret’s. On an impulse, he asked her: “You could build anything in here, right?”
    “How do you mean, anything?”
    “I mean you could build, I don’t know, somewhere far away. The Cayman Islands. Or ancient Greece if you wanted. Why this?”
    “When we began our market research, we asked people to remember the place where they had been happiest. And we quickly discovered that their references were more specific in time than in place. Generally they remembered the point in their school days where they enjoyed the maximum freedom with the least responsibility as their best, often coinciding with their first romantic and sexual experiences. There was also a more general nostalgia for the period immediately prior to the swift technological advances of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. We sought to evoke a generic space that would appeal to the majority of our market. Over seventy per cent of the 5,000 people to whom the government granted Treatment licences in the last year were of American or western European origin, between the ages of seventy-five and eighty, with an education completed to secondary school level or above. There were too many variations in educational background to produce a completely tailored experience. We can’t take everyone back to their own schooldays. So we sought to create an archetype of the English schooling system as it existed between 1970 and 1980.”
    “My school wasn’t anything like this.”
    “Yes it was.”
    “I haven’t seen anyone pregnant. Nothing’s on fire.”
    Miranda smiled politely. He had the feeling she was attending him with a fraction of her intelligence, whilst the remainder devoted itself to some purpose beyond his understanding. It was a feeling which put his back up.
    “Your school may not have been exactly like this one, but your experience of that school would correspond with the experience you would have here, and over the duration of your stay you would begin to align your personal history more closely with your current experience. People share a cultural memory, and a bias towards the idea of a pre-technological ‘golden age’. St Margaret’s is a composite, an archetype, designed to invoke that cultural memory to supplant and replace the personal.”
    “I should be getting on.”
    “I thought if you could understand a little of what we are doing here, it might facilitate your investigations.”
    “It would facilitate my investigations if I could see the crime scene.”
    Miranda smiled crookedly. “You think this is a leisure facility for the idle rich?”
    This was pretty much exactly what Oates understood of the Great Spa, though he might have expressed it in less polite terms. The implied subjectivity put him on his guard; he had no intention of being rude to this woman, or giving her or her paymasters (or for that matter his own) any cause for complaint. He stayed silent.
    “Are you familiar with the myth of Tithonus?” she said.
    “Yes.”
    He enjoyed the effect of this remark. In addition to the natural pleasure which anyone might feel at confounding a low expectation, he could see that Miranda was irritated with herself at having been seen to underestimate him.
    “And what do you remember of it?” she said, in a schoolmasterly tone.
    “Eos was the greek goddess of the dawn. She wanted Tithonus, a mortal man, for her lover. She asked the gods to grant him eternal life, and they did. But she forgot to ask for eternal youth, and he grew older and older with her forever, until he went weak and senile and she locked him away in a room to wait for the end of time.”
    “Very good. I asked your Superintendent for an intelligent policeman. Some people would say that’s an oxymoron, but I see he has been as good as his word.”
    She smiled at him again, apparently thinking he would be flattered by the assertion that he was less of an idiot than the calling to which he had given his adult life implied. He