“We’ve come home,” Genevieve murmured in delight.
Ivanov stopped the jeep in front of the porch. “You’re on your own now,” he told them.
When Louise shot him a look, he was staring ahead, hands gripped tightly on the steering wheel. She was just about to tap him on the shoulder, when the person waiting in the porch stepped forwards. He was a young man, about the same age as Joshua, she thought. But where Joshua’s face was lean and flat, his was round. Quite handsome though, with chestnut hair and wide green eyes. Lips that were curved somewhere between a smile and a sneer. He was wearing a white cricket jumper and tennis shorts; his bare feet shoved into shabby sneakers with a broken lace.
He put a hand out, smiling warmly. “Louise, Genevieve. We meet at last, to coin a cliché yet again. Welcome to my home.” A black Labrador padded out from the house and snuffled round his feet.
“Who are you?” Louise asked.
“Charles Montgomery David Filton-Asquith at your service. But I’d really prefer you to call me Charlie. Everybody here does. As in right, one expects.”
Louise frowned, still not shaking his hand, though he hardly seemed threatening. Exactly the kind of young landowner she’d grown up with, though with a good deal more panache admittedly. “But, who are you? I don’t understand. Are you the one that summoned us here?”
“ ’Fraid so. Hope you’ll forgive me, but I thought this would be an improvement on London for you. Not very jolly there right now.”
“But how? How did you get us out through the curfew? Are you a policeman?”
“Not exactly.” He pulled a remorseful face. “Actually, I suppose you could say I rule the world. Pity I’m not making a better job of it right now. Still, such is life.”
There was a swimming pool on the other side of the ancient house, a long teardrop shape with walls of tiny white and green marble tiles. It had a mosaic of the Mona Lisa on the floor of the deep end. Louise recognized that, though she couldn’t remember the woman flashing her left breast in the original painting. A group of young people were using the pool, splashing about enthusiastically as they played some private-rules version of water polo with a big pink beach ball.
She sat on the Yorkstone slab patio with Charlie and Gen, relaxing at a long oak table which gave her an excellent view out over the pool and the lawns. A butler in a white coat had brought her a glass of Pimms in a tall tumbler, with plenty of ice and fruit bobbing round. Gen was given an extravagant chocolate milk shake clotted with strawberries and ice cream, while Charlie sipped at a gin and tonic. It was, she had to admit, all beautifully civilized.
“So you’re not the President, or anything,” she enquired. Charlie had been telling them about the GISD, and its bureau hierarchy.
“Nothing like. I simply supervise serious security matters across Western Europe, and liaise with my colleagues to combat global threats. Nobody elected us; we had the ability to dictate the structure and nature of the GISD back when continental governments and the UN were merging into Govcentral. So we incorporated ourselves into it.”
“That was a long time ago,” Louise said.
“Start of the Twenty-second Century. Interesting times to live through. We were a lot more active in those days.”
“You’re not that old, though.”
Charlie smiled, and pointed across at the rose garden. A neat, sunken square, divided up into segments, each one planted with different coloured rose bushes. Several tortoise-like creatures were moving slowly among the tough plants, their long prehensile necks standing proud, allowing them to munch the dead flowers, nibbling the stem right back to the woody branch. “That’s a bitek construct. I employ twelve separate species to take care of the estate’s horticulture for me. There’s a couple of thousand of them here altogether.”
“But Adamists have banned bitek from all their worlds,” Gen said. “And Earth was the first.”
“The public can’t use it,” Charlie said. “But I can. Bitek and affinity are very powerful technologies; they give B7 quite an advantage over would-be enemies of the republic. It’s a combination which also allows me to live for six hundred years in an unbroken lineage.” He waved a hand over himself in a proud gesture. “This is the thirty-first body I’ve lived in. They’re all clones, you see; parthenogenetic, so I retain the temperament for the job. I’m affinity capable, I had the ability long before Edenism began. I used neurone symbionts at first, then the affinity sequence was vectored into my DNA. In a way, the immortality method which B7 uses is a variant on Edenism’s end-of-life memory transfer. They use it to transfer themselves into their habitat neural strata. I, on the other hand, use it to transfer myself into a new, vigorous young body. The clone is grown in sensory isolation for eighteen years, preventing any thought patterns from developing. In effect, it’s an empty brain waiting to be filled. When the time comes, I simply edit the memories I wish to take with me, and move my personality over to the new body. The old one is immediately destroyed, giving the process a direct continuity. I even store the discarded memories in a bitek neural construct, so no aspect of my life is ever truly lost.”
“Thirty-one bodies is a lot for only six hundred years,” Louise said. “A Saldana lives for nearly two centuries these days. And even us Kavanaghs will last for about a hundred and twenty.”
“Yes,” Charlie said with an apologetic shrug. “But you spend the last third of that time suffering from the restrictions and indignity of age.
An illness which only ever gets worse. Whereas as soon as I reach forty I immediately transfer myself again. Immortality and perpetual youth. Not a bad little arrangement.”
“Until now,” Louise took a drink of Pimms, “those previous bodies all had their own souls. That’s quite different from memories. I saw it on a news show. The Kiint said they’re separate.”
“Quite. Something B7 has collectively ignored. Hardly surprising, given our level of conservatism. I suppose our past bodies will have to be stored in zero-tau from now on; at least until we’ve solved the overall problem of the beyond.”
“So you were really alive in the Twenty-first Century?” Gen asked.
“Yes. That’s what I remember, anyway. As your sister says, the definitions of life have changed a lot recently. But I’ve always considered myself to be the one person for all those centuries. That’s not a conviction you can break in a couple of weeks.”
“How did you get to be so powerful in the first place?” Louise asked.
“The usual reason: wealth. All of us owned or ran vast corporate empires during the Twenty-first Century. We weren’t merely multinationals, we were the first interplanetaries; and we made profits that outgrossed national incomes. It was a time when new frontiers were opening again, which always generates vast new revenues. It was also a time of great civil unrest; what we’d called the Third World was industrialising rapidly thanks to fusion power, and the ecology was destabilising at equal speed. National and regional governments were committing vast resources into combating the biosphere breakdown. Social welfare, infrastructure administration, health care, and security—the fields government used to devote its efforts to—were all slowly being starved of tax money and sold off to private industry. It wasn’t much of a jump for us. Private security forces had guarded company property ever since the Twentieth Century; jails were being built and run by private firms; private police forces patrolled closed housing estates, paid for out of their taxes. In some countries you actually had to take out insurance in order to pay the state police to investigate a crime if you were a victim. So you see, evolving to an all-private police force was an intrinsic progression for an industrialized society. Between the sixteen of us, we controlled ninety per cent of the world’s security forces, so naturally we collaborated and cooperated on intelligence matters. We even began to invest in equipment and training at a level that would never bring us a fiscal return. It paid us, though; nobody else was going to protect our factories and institutions from crime lords and
regional mafias. The crime rate actually started to fall for the first time in decades.
“After that, we made the decision to bring about Govcentral, along with its centralized tax laws, which were slanted in our favour. Our lawyers were parachuted into senior advisory positions to cabinet ministers and state executives, our lobbyists helped steer parliaments and congresses through controversial legislation. B7 was just the formalization and consolidation of our position.”
“That’s monstrous,” Louise said. “You’re dictators.”
“As is the landowner class on Norfolk,” Charlie replied. “Your family is the same as me, Louise, except you’re not quite so honest about it.”
“People came to Norfolk after the constitution was written, they didn’t have it imposed on them.”
“I might argue that with you, but I completely understand your sense of outrage, probably better than you do yourself. I’ve encountered it enough times down the centuries. All I can ask is that you judge the means by what it achieved. Earth has a stable, comfortably middle-class population free to live their lives more or less as they want. We survived the climate collapse, and we’ve spread out to colonize the stars. None of that would have been accomplished without a degree of strong leadership, the lack of which is the curse of modern media-accountable democracy. I’d say that was a pretty impressive achievement.”
“The Edenists are democratic, and they’ve prospered.”
“Ah yes, the Edenists. Our greatest accidental triumph.”
“What do you mean, accidental?” Louise couldn’t help her interest. For the first time she was getting to know the truth about the way the world was structured, and its history. The kind of real history that was never filed and indexed. Everything she was denied at home.
“Because we wanted to keep bitek for ourselves we attempted to have the entire technology prohibited,” Charlie said. “We knew we could never do it with a political declaration; our control over the legislative and legal establishment wasn’t total at that time. So we went with a religious condemnation, building up to it with a decade of negative publicity. We were almost there. Pope Eleanor was ready to declare affinity an unholy desecration, and the ayatollahs were falling into line. We only needed a few more years of pressure, and the independent companies would be forced to abandon further development. Bitek and affinity would have withered away, another dead-end technology. History is littered with them. Then Wing-Tsit Chong went and transferred his personality into Eden’s neural strata. Ironically, we hadn’t realized the potential of the habitats, even though we were experimenting along similar lines to achieve our own immortality. It forced the Pope’s hand; her declaration came just too early. There was still too much bitek and affinity in general use on Earth for her to be obeyed unquestioningly.
Its supporters emigrated to Eden, which by then had seceded from our control. We had absolutely nothing to do with shaping their society; after all, it’s not one our operatives could infiltrate.”
“But you laid down the law for everyone else.”
“Absolutely. We control the principal policy aspects of Govcentral, our companies dominate Earth’s industry, and in turn Earth’s economic power dominates the Confederation. We’re the ones who make the majority investment in every new colony world development company, because we live long enough to reap the rewards which come from share dividends that take two centuries to mature. Between us, our financial institutions own a healthy percentage of the human race.”
“What for? Nobody can possibly want that much money.”
“You’d be amazed. Proper policing and defence consumes trillions of fuseodollars. The Govcentral navy is like a financial event horizon. We still fund our own security, just as we always have. And in doing so, we safeguard everyone else. I own up to being a dictator, but plead that I am as benign as its possible to be.”
Louise shook her head in sorrow. “And for all that power and strength, you still couldn’t stop Quinn Dexter.”
“No,” Charlie admitted. “He is our greatest failure. We may well lose this planet, and all of its forty billion souls with it. All because I wasn’t good enough to outsmart him. History will brand us as the ultimate sinners, after all. Rightly so.”
“He really has won?” Louise asked in dismay.
“We hit him with an SD weapon at Parsonage Heights. Somehow he eluded that. Now he’s free to do whatever he wants.”
“So he followed us to London.”
“Yes.”
“You manipulated me and Gen the whole time, didn’t you? Ivanov Robson is one of your agents.”
“Yes, I manipulated you. And I have no regrets or remorse about that. Given what was at stake, it was wholly justified.”
“I suppose so,” she said meekly. “I quite liked Robson, though he was always a little too good to be true. He never made a mistake. People aren’t like that in real life.”
“Don’t concern yourself about him. He’s not an agent; I’m afraid I commandeered him after his trial. Such people are always useful to me.
But dear old Ivanov is not a nice man. Not as unpleasant as Banneth, I admit. She was just a human-sized virus, even managed to spook me with her deranged obsessions, and that’s not easy after all the atrocity I’ve witnessed in my life.”
“And Andy? What about him? Was he one of yours as well?”
Charlie brightened. “Oh yes, the romantic sellrat. No. He’s a real person. I never expected you to go and buy a set of neural nanonics, Louise. You are a constant surprise and delight to me.”
She scowled at him over the Pimms. “What now? Why did you bring us here? I don’t believe it was just so you could explain all this to us first hand. It’s not like you’re going to apologize, is it.”
“You were my last throw of the dice, Louise. I had hoped Dexter might try and follow you here. I have one final weapon available which could work.
It’s called anti-memory, and it destroys souls. The Confederation Navy developed it, although it’s only in the prototype stage. Which means it has to be used at very close range. If he’d come with you, we might have had a chance to deploy it against him. It would have been my last noble stand. I was quite prepared to face him.”
Louise looked round quickly, her eyes sweeping the garden for any sign of the devil whose face she could never forget. A foolish reaction. But the prospect of Quinn Dexter doggedly pursuing her across the desolated countryside was chilling. “But he didn’t follow us.”
“Not this time, no. So I’ll be happy to take the pair of you along with me when I leave. I’ll make sure you get a flight to Jupiter now.”
“You stopped all my messages to Joshua!”
“Yes.”
“I want to talk to him. Now.”
“That’s another piece of unfortunate news, I’m afraid. He’s no longer at Tranquillity. He left with a Confederation Navy squadron on some kind of strike against the possessed; even I wasn’t able to discover exactly what their mission was. You’re quite free to send a message to the Lord of Ruin for confirmation if you want.”
“I will,” Louise said crossly. She stood up, and put her hand out to Gen.
“I want to go for a walk, unless that’s against your rules, too. I need to think about everything you’ve said.”
“Of course. You’re my guests. Go wherever you wish, there’s nothing that can harm you in the dome—oh, apart from some giant hogweed, there’s a clump growing by one of the streams. It stings rather badly.”
“Fine. Whatever.”
“I hope you’ll join me for supper. We normally meet for drinks on the terrace beforehand, around half past seven.”
Louise didn’t trust herself to say anything. With Gen’s hand clasped tightly in her own, she walked off across the lawn, angling away from the swimming pool and its happy crowd.
“That was all ultra stupendously incredible,” Gen gushed.
“Yes. Unless, of course, he’s the biggest liar in the Confederation. I’ve been so s
tupid. I did everything he wanted me to, just like some dumb clockwork doll set in motion. How could I ever have thought you and I would be let off with a police caution for trying to smuggle a possessed down to Earth? They execute people for less than that.”
Gen’s expression was puppyishly mournful. “You didn’t know, Louise. We’re from Norfolk, we’re never told anything about how things are on other worlds. And we escaped from Dexter twice, by ourselves. That’s more than Charlie ever managed to do.”
“Yes.” The trouble with her anger was that all its considerable heat was focused inwards, against herself. The B7 people had done everything they should have to protect Earth. Charlie was right, she was completely expendable. She hadn’t understood how big a danger Dexter was to the universe. Even so, not to have realized anything untoward was happening, other than a vague disquiet about Robson … Stupid!
They walked across the lawn and through one of the magnolia hedges, finding themselves in an apple orchard. The short trees were showing their considerable age through twisted trunks and gnarled grey bark.
Great clumps of mistletoe hung from their boughs, the parasite’s roots swelling the wood in lopsided bulges. Bitek constructs like miniature sheep with a golden-brown fur were grazing round the trunks, trimming the grass to a neat level.
Gen watched their placid movements for a while, fascinated by how cute they looked. Not exactly the devil’s spawn that Colsterworth’s vicar had condemned every Sunday from his pulpit. “Do you think he will take us to Tranquillity? I’d like to see it. And Joshua,” she added hurriedly.
“I expect so. He’s finished using us now.”
“But how are we going to get up to the Halo? The vac-trains and the towers are shut down, and people aren’t allowed to use spacecraft in Earth’s atmosphere any more.”
“Didn’t you listen to anything? Charlie is the government. He can do whatever he wants to.” She grinned and pulled Gen closer. “Knowing B7, this whole dome can probably blast off into orbit by itself.”
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