Skyfall

by Anthony Eaton

  His father’s words, coming from his mouth.

  But still, he’d be willing to bet that, while he was magging across to DGAP, his little copygen brother was still tucked up fast asleep in bed, all worn out from another day of doing nothing.

  Janil shook his head slightly. He’d never understood his brother. Sky, he’d never even really been told why his brother existed in the first place, just that his mother wanted another boy for some reason, and so when the other boys in his class talked about their sisters, all Janil could do was sit silently and hope nobody found out.

  They did, of course. Kids always do.

  Janil’s got a brother! Janil’s got a brother …

  He could still hear them. Even now those childhood taunts came back. Luckily, he hadn’t been in school all that long, so he’d only had to endure it for a few short years.

  Port North Central. DGAP hub.

  The lift surged upwards for a couple of seconds and then slowed. The foyer of the great scientific co-op was darkened and deserted at this time of the morning, the only light coming from the enormous, red-backlit sign which stretched across the grey plascrete wall behind the reception area:

  DARKLANDS GENETIC ADAPTATION PROGRAM

  Janil sighed, and his footsteps echoed around the empty space with its hard surfaces. The moment he stepped from the lift, his wristband chimed. There was a terminal behind reception and Janil logged in there.

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘Are you here yet?’

  ‘Just arrived. I’ll be up in a moment.’

  ‘Don’t. Meet me on the hangar deck.’

  ‘The…’ Janil stopped, mystified. Their father hadn’t been anywhere near the flyers in years. Not since their mother disappeared.

  ‘Don’t say any more. Just meet me down there. Now.’

  Shrugging, Janil made his way across to the internal lifts and scanned in, arriving downstairs before his father.

  Most of the third and fourth shift patrols were already back, the flyers parked in two long rows, stretching away along the length of the vast hangar. Voices floated out from the ready room, where a couple of field agents were de-suiting, but otherwise the hangar was deserted. Sparse lighting from optic diffusers high in the roof gleamed off sleek black nosedomes, giving the flyers a vaguely sinister appearance. Down the far end, mired in gloom, crouched the few remaining intercit flyers, a relic of days long-gone, from when travel between the great skycities was still necessary.

  It must have been incredible down here, Janil thought, when DGAP was big enough to warrant all these flyers – when they actually had enough personnel to put them all into the air at once. Nowadays they could manage a hundred, perhaps not even that. They’d got forty-three into the air the previous night, using a tip-off from a Subject as an excuse for a search and recover exercise, but of course there’d been nothing worthwhile out there. There never was.

  Admittedly, the exercise had been a strange one, and interesting in its own way – they’d chased down a bunch of subjects right out near the western wall, where you barely ever saw anyone. They’d picked up their informant – strapped across the back of one of those animals they rode and babbling like a madman. He kept talking about a girl, but none of the other teams found anyone younger than about sixty out there. In the end they’d just tranqued him and dumped him back at the nearest town.

  Janil sighed. Thinking too hard about the state of things in DGAP nowadays, or, indeed, the state of the skycities in general, was never a good idea. The focus of a thousand years of scientific observation – the longest running socio-cultural experiment ever conducted in the history of the human race – had been reduced to a couple of tribes squabbling in a desert.

  ‘Still, I guess that’s how it all started, too,’ he muttered.

  ‘What was that?’ His father emerged from the lift and threw him a quizzical look.

  ‘Nothing, Father.’ Janil shook his head slightly. ‘Just thinking aloud, that’s all.’

  ‘Right. Well then.’ His father glanced nervously towards the enormous, irised outer doors of the hangar.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Janil stared. Dernan Mann was actually smiling. Sure, it was a tiny, twitching smile, but definitely a smile, nonetheless.

  ‘The perimeter patrol called in forty-five minutes ago. They got her.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The girl.’

  ‘The …’ Janil’s face must have spoken for him, because his father nodded.

  ‘That’s right. The girl who doesn’t exist. She’ll be here in’ – he glanced at a timer mounted above the ready room door – ‘ten minutes.’

  ‘They actually found her out there?’ Janil’s voice was incredulous.

  ‘Near the western perimeter wall. Right where you were last night.’

  ‘Then why didn’t we pick her up? We had forty-three flyers up there. We scanned every inch of that desert with IFR, UVA—’

  ‘I don’t know, Janil,’ his father interrupted. ‘But tonight they found her just standing there. Almost as though she was waiting for them, they said.’

  ‘Who’s bringing her in?’

  ‘Flynn and Cutty.’

  ‘Shi! They’re the two biggest mouths in the field division. They’ve probably woken half the city with the news already.’

  ‘They haven’t. After their initial report they were ordered to shut down all coms and maintain complete silence until they returned. I’ve been monitoring ever since.’

  ‘So the webs have no idea …’

  ‘We don’t think so. She’s ours, Janil. All ours.’

  ‘Have you prepped the chamber?’

  ‘It’s being done as we speak. I’ve got Clarke running tests on the radiation diffusers, making certain they’re still up to spec. I haven’t told him why, though.’

  For a couple of moments the two stood facing each other. Janil’s head reeled. He understood his father’s excitement now. Understood the need for secrecy, too. It was incredible. Immense. Possibly the biggest thing to happen in DGAP in three hundred years, certainly in the few short years he’d been with the agency.

  ‘Here they come.’

  On the far wall of the hangar one of the giant portals was slowly winding open. As it slid back, a warm, dusty breeze slipped into the hangar. Janil sniffed.

  ‘I hate that smell. Outside air always tastes so … old.’

  ‘That’s because it is.’

  He was surprised to see how light it was, already. The sun was clearly close to the low horizon, because out beyond the domes and spires the sky glowed a bloody crimson.

  ‘They’re cutting it close,’ he commented.

  ‘We’ll forgive them, this once. They hadn’t expected to be doing a recovery. We should suit up.’

  ‘Is that necessary?’

  ‘Absolutely. Level one quarantine for this one. Let’s face it, she’ll be our last chance, so I don’t want to risk either us or her.’

  Janil followed his father over to the ready room, where two field agents were sitting on the benches, talking and relaxing after their long night. Both leapt to their feet, startled to find the head of research division there, of all places.

  ‘Good morning, gentlemen. I’m afraid I shall have to ask you to leave.’

  ‘Of course, Dr Mann.’

  The men were gone in seconds.

  ‘If I didn’t know better, Father, I’d think you enjoyed that,’ Janil observed dryly.

  They pulled on a couple of flight suits from the clean locker.

  ‘Helmets too?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Janil had just locked his into place when, with a resonant, high-pitched hum, the flyer rose up sharply and threaded through the portal, which immediately began closing behind it. Janil and his father stepped back out into the hangar as the pilot hovered slowly across to his place in the line, lowered the flyer onto its three stumpy legs, and shut down power. Slowly, the whine died away to silence.

  ‘Well, Janil.’ Even through
the suit com, his father’s voice was trembling with barely concealed excitement. ‘Shall we go have a look at her?’

  Lari crossed the common to the hub, joined the allocation queue and, when it was his turn, waved his wristband over the destination plate.

  ‘Dome 750 South.’

  The reader chimed and he moved across to stand with the small group waiting for a southbound lift. As he joined them, a middle-aged woman nudged the man she was standing beside and Lari caught the almost imperceptible nod she threw in his direction.

  He knew that gesture well. He’d been living with it as long as he could remember.

  Look, that’s Dernan Mann’s youngest son. He’s a copygen.

  Lari often wondered why his parents had decided to go against protocol and have two sons instead of the mandatory son and daughter, but on the one occasion he’d nerved to ask, his father had been evasive.

  ‘It was our decision, Larinan, and not a matter you need concern yourself with.’

  But in Port these things mattered, if not to his father then certainly to everyone else. All his childhood, Lari had been aware of the whispers, the comments whenever the four of them were seen in public together.

  ‘See, if you’re Dernan Mann you can break whatever protocols you like’

  ‘Must be nice to have that sort of power’

  ‘Most of us would end up as shifties if we did that’

  And when Lari had attended school or rec, the other kids reminded him constantly of his outlaw position in society with a simple nickname.

  ‘Pass it here, sister.’

  ‘Get lost, sister.’

  ‘Sister.’

  ‘Sister.’

  ‘Sister …’

  As he’d gotten older, the taunts had become more whispered. His father rose higher and higher in DGAP, his mother shone brilliantly and then disappeared, and Janil, the real brother in the family, began his own meteoric rise in her place.

  But the resentment hadn’t died; just gone underground.

  That’s Larinan Mann. That’s Dernan Mann’s copygen.

  The strong resemblance between him and his father didn’t help, either: the same dark eyes, the same long face and fair colouring.

  When his mother was there it had been easier. She’d understood. She’d always been there to stroke his hair when she caught him crying into his pillow, to squeeze his hand in silent sympathy when a well-pitched whisper floated out of a crowd, to wipe the blood from his knees and the tears from his eyes.

  And in the early mornings, when the low horizon was only just beginning to glow, she would return from her own work, wake her youngest son and lead him, still sleep-addled and dozy, down through the machine-crowded maintenance level and out into the sunrise, where the two would stand silently, watching the morning. Lari’s teeth would chatter in the chill wind that rippled around the circular balcony.

  ‘Everything happens for a reason, Lari,’ she’d whisper to him in the worst, darkest moments. ‘Everything. Even you. You’re more special than you know, not just to your father and me but to everyone. So, when they point and whisper and tease and poke, don’t ever give them the satisfaction of responding. Because, trust me, darling, the day will come when they’ll all look at you and say “Thank the Sky for Larinan Mann”.’

  It hadn’t happened yet, Lari thought. The woman in the queue was still staring and Lari met her eyes levelly. ‘Is there something you want?’

  The woman quickly looked away, embarrassed.

  A couple of moments later their lift arrived. He slipped into a chair exactly opposite the woman and her partner, enjoying their discomfort as they both studiously avoided looking in his direction, instead concentrating all their attention on the newspanel.

  It was exactly the sort of behaviour his mother had warned him against, but even so, Lari couldn’t suppress a small twinge of satisfaction.

  The other passenger, a man wearing a DGAP jacket, slipped into the seat beside Lari.

  ‘Morning.’

  Finally letting his stare slide away from the discomfited couple, Lari nodded back. ‘Hi.’ He vaguely recognised the man. He’d probably seen him at a dome social function or something.

  They gripped their handholds and the maglift dropped. Lari felt a slight lurch in his stomach every time the lift changed from a vertical to a horizontal shaft, but like all citizens of Port it was a sensation he knew so well that it didn’t even register in his conscious mind.

  ‘Off to class?’

  ‘No.’ Lari shook his head. ‘I’m finished.’

  ‘A bright one, eh?’ The DGAP man raised an eyebrow. ‘You go through the advanced school?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Figures …’ The man nodded. ‘You’re Dernan Mann’s youngest, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Good to see the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. I imagine you’ll get a research placement before a lot longer, then?’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘What are you hoping for? Genetics, Fieldwork, Sequencing? Any ideas?’

  ‘Actually …’ Lari sighed inwardly. He hated this discussion. ‘No. Still making my mind up.’

  ‘Very wise.’ Another nod. ‘Have a good think, that’s what I reckon. You don’t want to make the wrong choice at this point. Not with your prospects. I worked with your brother for a while last year. Brilliant bloke. You two planning on doing anything together?’

  ‘No,’ replied Lari, aware of the other couple listening intently to every word. ‘Janil and I have … different interest areas.’

  ‘Pity. What a team that’d make, eh? You two and your father. All the Mann boys working together. That’d move things along, no doubt about it. Still, as long as you’re in the family field somewhere, I suppose. What’s your field of expertise, then?’

  Lari couldn’t help himself.

  ‘Art.’

  He stared at the man, daring him to ask.

  Art?’

  ‘Painting. Sculpture. That sort of stuff.’

  ‘Oh.’ The lift slipped into another hub as the man digested this.

  ‘Wouldn’t have thought there’s a lot of call for artists in DGAP,’ he finally ventured.

  ‘There isn’t. That’s the point.’

  ‘Ah.’ Another pause. ‘Genetics not your thing, then?’

  ‘Obviously not.’

  That killed the conversation and the only sounds were the throbbing hum of the lift’s magnetic resonators and the low murmur of the newspanel. The current story was about security cracking a terrorist cell that had been planning some minor act of vandalism.

  ‘Bloody shifties,’ the man muttered.

  Lari didn’t respond.

  … The city Prelate this morning praised the security personnel who put themselves in harm’s way to protect the wider community …

  ‘Makes you feel better though, doesn’t it? Knowing security are right on top of those bastards.’

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘Absolutely.’ The man hesitated as though making his mind up. ‘So, you’re hoping for a placement outside the family field, then?’ His tone was carefully casual.

  ‘If they make me. Don’t care, really.’ He knew that his father would be furious if this conversation got back to him, but right at that moment he didn’t care. Beside him, the DGAP man was looking thoughtful.

  ‘You know, son, I could probably find a position for you with me, in maintenance. It’s not research, I know, but at least you’d still be in DGAP …’

  ‘Thanks, but no.’

  After what seemed an age, the maglift finally surged upwards again, then slowed.

  Dome 832 South. Commercial.

  ‘This is my stop.’ The man rose. ‘Nice talking to you, mate. Say “hi” to your dad for me, eh? Ander Gunt.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘Thanks. Have a good day, now.’

  ‘You too.’

  Ander Gunt stepped out, the doors closed, and the lift dropped again.


  Voices. Detached, cold voices from the cold sky.

  ‘Temperature?’

  ‘Acceptable.’

  'Blood pressure?’

  ‘Acceptable.’

  'Respiratory function?’

  ‘Slight impairment. Nothing to cause concern.’

  ‘Cortex activity?’

  ‘Acceptable.’

  The words mean nothing. The voices betray nothing. She gets no sense of them being real. They’re spirits, is what they are. They’re the night spirits that Ma Lee used to warn her of. They’re wraiths of the nightvault. There’s no connection behind them. No trace of the earthmother.

  Once, she tried to answer the voices, hut her body wouldn’t respond. Her voice wouldn’t work. Only her mind, trapped in the cold, formed the questions …

  Where am I?

  Where is Jani?

  ‘Muscle response?’

  ‘Acceptable.’

  ‘Bone density?’

  ‘Acceptable. For a subject.’

  ‘Acceptable …’

  ‘Acceptable …’

  She falls …

  Janil was working the inscan and calling the results, which his father then entered into the data manager. On his terminal, the standard list for subject admission scrolled on relentlessly. This is the first time we’ve used this in years, Mann thought. In fact, he recalled, the last time they worked through this particular protocol was with the mother of the girl now lying tranqued on the podium.

  ‘Cortex activity?’

  ‘Acceptable.’

  Dernan Mann shook his head. He didn’t like to remind himself about that last one. Not after everything that happened afterwards. Bringing her in had marked the beginning of the bad times – Eyna’s obsession, Larinan’s birth, the increase in subject decline – all that and everything that flowed from it was put into motion the night they pulled that last girl out of her stinking hovel in Woormra.

  ‘Muscle response?’

  ‘Acceptable.’

  Mann watched his eldest son work, wondering if the boy had any idea how much this was going to change things. For all of them. The entire Mann family. Now that the excitement of discovery was wearing off, the enormity, the gut-wrenching significance of that skinny little sack of bones lying on the table was just starting to set in and Dernan Mann had to work to ignore a slight queasiness.