Emergence

by Hammond, Ray

  Deakin glanced at his LifeWatch. ‘Well, he’s due to be married an hour from now, so I suppose he’ll be a little busy. Anyway, we have some news. Mike?’

  Michael Chevannes rose to his feet.

  ‘I’ve just got back from South Africa,’ he explained. ‘I flew over there to visit a boy called Reon Albertyn. He’s fifteen – or rather, he was. He died while I was there. His story was uncovered by UNHCR and I’ve turned all the relevant material over to Rima Berzin and the WHO team.’

  Professor Berzin took the floor. ‘If we could turn the lights down . . .’

  The room dimmed as she walked towards the wall screen. A video image of a wizened old white man with a hugely swollen head appeared. He was sitting on a bed.

  ‘Believe it or not, this was Reon Albertyn,’ Rima Berzin explained. ‘He was suffering from a condition initially identified as progeria, a very rare ageing disease. Victims in their teens start to look like they are ninety years old. And there’s another strange thing . . .’

  The image changed to a middle-aged black woman seated at a table in a hospital room.

  ‘This is Reon’s mother,’ she continued. ‘As you can see, she’s black, while Reon was an albino – a black man with a genetic abnormality that produced white skin. You’ll now hear Mrs Albertyn’s sworn testimony.’

  They watched and listened as the grieving mother explained how she had been recruited to work for the Erasmus Corporation sixteen years before. She described the tempting fee she was offered to be a surrogate mother and how, after the doctors had finished their tests on her newborn white baby, they had paid her fifty thousand US dollars and had returned her son to her.

  She wept as she recounted how her husband had beaten her and how her family had turned her out with her baby because it was white. She described Reon’s unhappy childhood of alienation and the first obvious symptoms of his disease at the age of twelve. Then he had been convicted and imprisoned for stealing a car in Zimbabwe. She had been reunited with him only after the UNHCR secured his release from the Harare jail and had placed him in the Steve Biko Memorial Clinic in South Africa.

  As Professor Berzin fingered the remote, the audience saw the text of a pathology report.

  ‘He wasn’t actually suffering from progeria. In fact, he was an early human clone, an experimental embryo given a number of so-called genetic enhancements. Lily Albertyn was used as a surrogate embryo carrier, one of many,’ she explained. ‘But in this particular clone the telemores, the ends of the chromosomes, were too short. He was ageing at five times the normal rate from the moment he was conceived and implanted in Mrs Albertyn. Reon was identified in the Erasmus files as Alpha 41.’

  ‘So that’s what we’re going with?’ asked Martha Rose. ‘But does it connect with Thomas Tye directly?’

  ‘He was chairman of Erasmus Inc. then and he still is,’ said Chevannes.

  The lawyer nodded. ‘Do we have any further evidence?’

  Chevannes patted a pile of paper and a wallet of memory sticks in front of him. ‘There’s stacks of it. We’ve got all the Erasmus reports from that time, although they may not prove admissible because of the way we obtained them. But there’s also the circumstantial evidence from Mrs Albertyn herself and other mothers contracted to be surrogates at the time. We’re following their children up now.’

  Martha Rose considered. She would need plenty of direct evidence as well as the circumstantial. ‘We can issue writs of duces tecum on the various documents we know about,’ she reasoned. ‘We can force Erasmus to bring the originals to court. We don’t have to show the versions we intercepted – just knowing they exist will be good enough. I’ll be looking at a prosecution under the forty-fifth, seventy-eighth and one-hundred-and-twelfth Articles of the 1945 UN Declaration of Human Rights and under Article Sixty-four of the 1986 African Charter on Human Rights.’

  ‘What do you think, Mr Olliphant?’ asked Amethier. ‘How will the world vote on that?’

  ‘At the risk of sounding heartless, it’s perfect,’ declared the senior image-perception adjuster. ‘Even with this Ethiopian stunt going on, the images of this boy and his mother are very powerful. Can we release details about the boy – the clone – that Tye has with him on his island?’

  Amethier nodded. ‘We can – we’re very serious about this. Jack Hendriksen has brought us pictures of the boy – Tommy, he’s called – and I think we should go with the lot. Can you get a preliminary indictment, a few specimen charges, up by tomorrow, Martha?’

  The international attorney looked flabbergasted. ‘No way, Jan,’ she protested. ‘Not if we want to do this properly.’

  ‘Timing, Rose, timing. I want to make an announcement tomorrow, on the day that it is supposed to rain in Ethiopia. I want the world to know that the United Nations Commission for Human Rights is charging Erasmus Inc., the Tye Corporation and Thomas Tye personally with responsibility for the death of Reon Albertyn and an unknown number of other children in Southern Africa. That will produce the maximum impact.’

  ‘Agreed,’ confirmed Edward Olliphant, nodding. ‘I’ll leak it to the New York Times for Monday’s first edition.’

  ‘We’ll get right on it,’ sighed the lawyer as she rose. ‘We’ll need everything you’ve brought back, Mike.’

  *

  Tommy’s blue suit had been made at the little tailoring boutique in Hope Town. Calypso had ensured that it was more restrained than many American page-boy outfits and it made him look very mature.

  ‘So grown-up,’ Calypso observed as she stood behind him and savoured their reflections in the mirror. ‘What do you think Biya?’

  ‘Nice,’ grinned the small girl in her cream-and-white flouncy dress. In the few weeks that she had been receiving Calypso’s tuition she had started adding adjectives to her stock of English nouns, although she was not yet stringing many of the words together.

  ‘Can you see us, Mum?’

  Mrs Browne was sitting on a chair behind them, dressed ready for the ceremony, Roger on her lap. The CatPanion was wearing a silver collar in honour of the occasion. Calypso walked over to them. The old lady ran her hands over the cream lace dress that Calypso had chosen. Then she pulled her daughter’s head down, felt her face and kissed her.

  ‘You are happy,’ she smiled. ‘God bless you.’

  ‘I hope I am coming?’ asked Jed, from the top of the dressing table.

  ‘Of course you are,’ laughed Calypso. ‘I’ve got a flower for you to wear. Now, how do I look?’

  None of her small audience were qualified to judge; none of them could look with adult human eyes. To be more specific, none of them could look with adult male eyes.

  ‘Very nice,’ said Jed appropriately.

  ‘Yes, very nice,’ agreed Roger.

  ‘Very nice . . . Mummy,’ said Tommy. Then he collapsed into a fit of laughter and threw himself face down on the bed to hide his embarrassment. Tom had explained that he would be able to call Calypso that after the wedding.

  ‘You’ll mess up that new suit,’ smiled Calypso. ‘Biya’s keeping her dress so nice. There isn’t long to go.’

  ‘Nervous?’ asked Jed.

  Once again, Calypso shivered. She knew that Professor Keane insisted the Furry companions produced their language from vast databases triggered by key words – like wedding, she presumed – but she still found this companion’s apparent cognition unnerving. She wondered if the professor really understood what she was doing.

  ‘I am, a bit,’ she admitted.

  There was a noise behind them.

  ‘You look really beautiful, Calypso,’ announced Connie from the doorway. ‘In fact, you all look wonderful.’

  The matron of honour entered the room and put her small bouquet down on a table. ‘Are we ready? she asked.

  *

  ‘I’ve never seen anything like it, Ron.’

  They were drinking coffee in Lynch’s sub-basement. Most of the team had grabbed some sleep in the adjacent Marriott hotel, but the
computer scientist had had no relief and he looked dog-tired. It was nearly noon.

  ‘The networks function one minute, then there’s data delay of an hour or more. It’s like they’re seizing up.’

  ‘Which networks do you mean, Al?’ asked Deakin.

  ‘As far as I can tell, everything using a satellite link – which includes almost every network these days. Even the undersea fibre optics connect up to the satellites for continental hops.’

  The UNISA Exec nodded. ‘What do you think’s causing it?’

  ‘I assumed it was overload,’ replied Lynch. ‘So I’ve shut down all my artificial message-generation, but even at ultra-low bandwidth there’re real problems. And it’s Saturday. Traffic normally halves at the weekend.’

  Deakin yawned. ‘Well, it shouldn’t matter too much. We’ve got what we need.’

  *

  Calypso had particularly asked to be married under Rembrandt’s all-knowing, all-understanding, all-forgiving gaze. Since moving into the main house she had spent hours in its great marbled reception hall staring at this rich, dark painting. It had been painted in 1661, shortly after the greatest of all painters had been widowed and made bankrupt. He had been fifty-five when, once again, he had looked into and exposed his tired, omniscient soul with brutal honesty. Tom had informed her that it was the last of the artist’s self-portraits still outside of a museum and he had been forced to outbid both the Getty Museum and the Rijksmuseum to acquire it.

  She knew the painting well, from her father showing a slide of it when he was teaching late-twentieth-century English literature. He would project the portrait as he quoted one of his favourite opening lines, a sentence written by the novelist John Fowles, a line deliberately created for its rigour, opacity and unyielding abstruseness. The author was describing this portrait:

  Whole sight; or all the rest is desolation.

  Whole sight indeed! thought Calypso as she arrived at the wide doors leading into the vast hall. She wondered what her missionary-trained schoolteacher father would have thought of her. But Rembrandt would have understood, even today.

  She waited in the high double doorway while her eyes adjusted to the brilliance of the television lights within. In response, a magnificent rivière of diamonds and sapphires at her neck created scores of lens flares that sent hands flying over the boards in the control room that the TV production team had set up next door.

  The groups of sofas had been removed and the large sculptures – a collection she now knew included a Rodin, a Donatello and even a battered Praxiteles from ancient Greece – had been moved to one side, creating the appearance of a long gallery. A red carpet stretched in front of her, laid down specially for her bridal procession.

  Calypso could see Tom waiting for her in front of the low brass rail erected in front of the wedding dais. Neither of them was religious, but both had agreed they wanted a feeling of ceremony. The television lights flared off the white marble and made the great room and its art seem brighter, larger than life.

  Like everything from now on.

  She could hear Tommy, though she couldn’t see him from where she now stood. There had been only one choice for their wedding anthem. Tommy himself was playing ‘It’s Our Planet’ on a new double-manual digital synthesizer with 32-bass pedal-board. It had been programmed with a complete sample of the sounds belonging to the great Bruckner organ in the ancient monastery of St Florian in Linz, Austria. Tommy had been in a state of huge excitement as he had explained to Calypso how Anton Bruckner had been Tommy’s own age when he had played that organ for church services. Equally precocious, Tommy had rearranged the corporate march as a delicate nocturne to take full advantage of the many fine upper-register pipes that, at one remove, were providing his palette of sound.

  Calypso turned to look at ever-cool Connie and then smiled down at little Biya. The girl was all wonder with her huge eyes, cream lace flouncy dress and shiny shoe buckles. Calypso reached down and took the child’s hand.

  Seeing the floor manager’s cue, she took a deep breath and stepped forward.

  Suddenly the music changed to a series of staccato, chiffed, ascending, triumphal notes, not at all as had been planned or rehearsed. They had earlier agreed with the TV people that the corny and the clichéd would have no place in this ceremony, which was being recorded only minutes before it would be seen by billions all over the world. That network mass-cast was scheduled for two p.m., the optimum viewing point for audiences across the Americas, Europe and the Middle East. Meanwhile, many Asian, Australasian and Pacific viewers would be sitting up late to see the event as near real-time as possible. The rest would digest it with their breakfasts. Then it would be replayed over and over again and downloaded countless times, continuing in the suspended immortality of global virtuality.

  Finally the attention-demanding series of heraldic-trumpet voices broke into a giant wash of thundering, descending, octaphonic chords that blasted from the full range of the organ’s mighty pipes to announce Calypso’s entrance. Tommy had ignored his instructions and pulled out all the stops. A broad smile lit Calypso’s face: it was right. It was Mendelssohn’s’ famous Wedding March from his incidental music to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Nights Dream. She recalled that the music celebrated the marriage of Theseus, duke of Athens, to Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons. She felt the first tears cloud her vision. She loved Tommy so much. How could he have known this would be so right?

  She moved forward steadily and slowly as the triumphal music reverberated around the vast marble hall. Tommy the classicist was now taking it ‘adagio’, very, very slowly, shunning the tumpty-tumpty, polka-like temptations of hick performance, and filling with gentle, magical, filigree agŕement notes as he welcomed his beloved Cally into his life for good. It had been one of Calypso’s several conditions that when the ceremony was complete, she would become the boy’s co-guardian and, as with all their other nuptial agreements, this would be ratified under Californian law. At the same time, the Tye Press Office would go public about Tommy’s existence. ‘A huge scoop to complete this fantastic weekend,’ the senior perception analyst had predicted. It would be claimed that his surrogate mother had demanded anonymity and privacy and so could not be named or involved. Since his unburdening, his momentous sharing, Tom had seemed surprisingly willing – Calypso might have said loving – on all such topics and there had been no hint of corporate or personal morganaticism in his attitude.

  She walked towards the rows of chairs set out for the very few, very privileged guests. Her mother sat with Roger on her lap in the front row to the left, her best friend and neighbour from Mayaguana sitting beside them. Calypso had also invited Nurse Pettigrew, Heather Garland from the school and, on impulse, Mario Ginola from her favourite pizza place down at the Little Venice marina. She could see him now, way at the back, crumpled in overawed wonder. Then she saw Miss Duckett, Tommy’s music teacher, sitting on the other side of the aisle, a broad grin on her face. Calypso smiled; she knew a co-conspirator when she saw one. The house staff and a few members of the corporate office staff filled the remaining seats. Marsello Furtrado, certainly not her idea of a best man, stood in a posture of concinnous elegance.

  Calypso arrived beside Tom and he turned his head to grin at her. She shot a glance at Tommy who was finishing on a sustained C major chord, including the contrabass of the giant pyramidon thirty-two-foot C natural pipe, the lowest note the Bruckner organ could deliver. The powerful speakers sent out a standing wave of sound that reverberated around the hall and rattled their chest bones. It felt as if the great pipes themselves had been transported from their gilded baroque basilica and were now ranged invisibly in this marbled bride-chamber. Finally, the organist lifted his hands with a flourish.

  Tommy looked across at her in delight and, forgetting the cameras, she crossed her eyes, sucked in her cheeks and mugged at him. He laughed, jumped down from his stool, leaped off the dais and ran over to help Mrs Browne to her feet. He was determined to be both
organist and page-boy, assisting Calypso’s mother as she gave her daughter away. Jed, who had been quietly singing along with lyrics of his own invention, watched from his perch on top of the keyboard.

  They had even flown in a Hollywood judge who moonlighted as a celebrity wedding notary, hoping that he would be accustomed to cameras and to famous faces. But the imposing silver-haired man in the dark suit still managed to hesitate slightly before stepping forward. He realized the global ratings for this wedding would be far greater than for any televised ceremony at which he had previously officiated.

  It had been decided that formal banns were superfluous: the whole world had been informed of this marriage and if anyone was going to have the temerity to object, there had been more than enough time to do so.

  The ritual moved forward as if in a dream. Calypso felt she was back on the catwalk again. Her performance was flawless. Bride and groom both said the words clearly and without hesitation, and professional smiles were exchanged, although she was aware that underneath there was unexpected emotion.

  It was Tommy who helped Mrs Browne step forward when the time came for her to give her only unmarried child away. Then, having brought forward a chair for her to sit down again, it was time for him to proffer the wedding rings on a blue velvet cushion.

  Calypso’s betrothal ring contained a salamstone sapphire from Sri Lanka surrounded by a baguette of the finest Kimberlite diamonds. The main stone had been cleaved in Amsterdam from an eight-carat cabochon earlier that week. She and Tom had watched on the networks as the delicate operation had been performed by a world-renowned glyptician. Her wedding ring was a Russian trinity of gold bands: red, white and yellow. Calypso privately considered this multiple appropriate for the basis of their union. Her groom relished the fact that the ore itself had come from Sybaria. A jet had been sent to collect the finished jewellery two days earlier.