Beloved Son

by George Turner

  They leapt on him, clawing. ‘We haven’t the scanning techniques—’ ‘We haven’t a computer complex enough—’ ‘We haven’t the math—’.

  He answered them quietly. ‘We haven’t the hardware and we haven’t a suitably cheap power source, but the math was worked out in ’eighty-eight, just two years ago.’

  Was it indeed? Then there’ll be some ratting of archives to see if those papers still exist.

  It silenced them for a moment. From math to hardware is notoriously a short step and getting shorter, and Fraser’s inside knowledge gave him an unfair advantage in augury.

  While a little resentment spilled off on Fraser, Jim Lindley asked me, ‘What do you think, Old Silence?’

  I don’t mind that from Jim; his mockery is friendly and gentle, a long remove from Fraser’s bouts of studied insolence. I said, perhaps feeling mildly fed up with their caution, ‘I don’t waste time on it; technical change is too fast for prophecies. The face of the world – which isn’t the part of it that matters – will probably be unrecognisable. Entering a room in 2032 we won’t so much as know where to look for a light switch – if they still use anything so cumbersome as a switch – and if we can recognise a wall-less, electronically defined space as a room.’

  An effective gabble-stopper. It served pusillanimity right.

  A touch of arrogance, Albert? Inferiority yelping? However, E for Effort, though we do use light switches and we prefer walls round our rooms, but the world will be strange to you. In unexpected ways, old ‘shitheap’ Raft.

  There was an aftermath; Lindley paid me a visit in my cabin.

  I suppose I am a cold man; I have no feeling of closeness with Columbus’s complement and an active dislike for one of them. And only for Jim Lindley a positive liking. It is not as deep as friendship but at least it is positive.

  He curled his narrow body (he’s a most elegant scarecrow) in the spare chair and said, ‘I have a problem.’

  ‘Administrative?’

  ‘Yes no maybe.’

  ‘Personal?’ I had to grin – my last grin for a while. ‘Not a psychiatrist Dorothy Dixing the Commander!’

  He smiled back, joylessly, and that was a warning. Within the limits of his professional competence he has therapeutic authority before which I must bow or show excellent cause why not.

  He said, ‘You’re the problem,’ and waited, giving me time to erect defences against everything except the weaknesses I wasn’t aware of, then referred to the discussion in the lounge. ‘You dropped that silly symposium in its tracks.’

  Naughty Albert! But I wasn’t prepared to play erring child to his father figure. ‘They talk like schoolboys; the obvious passes them by.’

  ‘Such as?’

  Though the trap was laid in the sight of the bird I wasn’t about to flutter away from simple fact. ‘Biology is the shadow over the world, but nobody mentioned biological advances.’

  ‘Which are not necessarily advances?’

  ‘You know it.’

  ‘They won’t be mentioned for a while. Nobody will risk politics until the tribal instinct overcomes national distrusts.’

  ‘You agree that biology is politics?’

  ‘It will be by the time we get home.’

  ‘Nice to know somebody sees it.’

  Then, having agreed with me, he hit me just as he had intended. ‘Albert, nobody could live with you through years of training schools without knowing your animus against biological research. It sticks out like a warning sign and the subject will continue tabu in your presence. A simple social safeguard.’

  What could I say? Offer reasons? Betray secrets? You don’t betray secrets without great thought, certainly not in the early days of a voyage years long.

  I tried with the slightest of shrugs to turn the matter off as unimportant, but I am an amateur and Jim is a good professional. He said, ‘And if you make a habit of killing conversations they won’t speak in front of you at all. Tonight wasn’t the first time.’

  ‘What I said wasn’t much.’

  ‘You didn’t hear your tone.’

  ‘I didn’t intend contempt.’ It had been a weariness of profitless talk.

  ‘Oh, but you did.’

  Only an idiot contradicts an expert. I waited.

  ‘Think of it,’ he suggested, ‘as a defence mechanism.’

  ‘Against what?’

  ‘You tell me.’ Before I could be resentful or impatient he said, ‘You aren’t running a shipload of incompetents.’

  That was outrageous. ‘How could I think of it? They’re frighteningly competent.’

  Just like that I tripped into his trap at the first prod, stumbling like a novice over the choice of an adverb.

  He didn’t bother to point it out, but went straight to the heart of it. ‘You’re the Commander; you don’t have to stand in awe of any of us. What are we? We’re good at our jobs but we aren’t research geniuses; our work is programmed, year for year of the trip, and we’re trained like robots to do it exactly, but you are the all-purpose handyman who actually runs the household. We can afford spiky personalities and petulant grievances, but you’re the one who has to put up with them and smooth them over and smack a recalcitrant bottom where necessary. You have to be final court of appeal, a little austere and removed as becomes the archetypal arbiter, but with warmth available. My bet is that they gave you the job because you are capable of those things.’

  I could have told him differently, but I said, ‘I can’t talk to them. I have a good lay knowledge of all the disciplines but with these men I can only stand at the foot of the ivory tower, shouting up.’ I had enough restraint not to add a bitter ‘just as it was at home’, but substituted something in retrospect nearly as bad: ‘My most profound comment on their work would be a naïvety.’

  ‘So you feel baffled.’

  It was wise in him not to say ‘inferior’. Or perhaps he knows by now that I feel inferior to no man. I nodded.

  ‘Because they don’t make the first approach?’

  ‘I’m the outsider, the non-specialist. And in fact I’m not much of a social animal.’

  ‘So that’s one part of the Commander personality, the removed and austere bit. Don’t let it dominate. For the rest, you are the supreme specialist aboard. You are the only one who can take us home when the course programming has to be corrected and the only one who can get us round Barnard’s Star in an orbit that will fit the research curriculum. Without you we are useless. Make us understand it.’ And while I stared, aware of exaggerations and suspicious of deviousness, he added, ‘But please do it gently.’

  It was an unconscionable buttering-up. Fraser is quite capable of the calculations and so is Ewan, but neither could manage them with the simplicity of approach that has been trained into me, and either would have to abandon much of his other work in order to handle them at all.

  Still, it adds up to an egalitarian aspect that hadn’t impinged previously, and he left me thinking about it. Under doctor’s orders to turn myself into a good Commander.

  Why did they choose such a man? There must have been good reasons and he knows them. But what is it he knows?

  Day 20 and the sun only a brilliant star. Life in a steel womb sighs with boredom and I am becoming a compulsive writer.

  The others are busy with their second round of activities and small tensions are developing over the allocation of computer time. Lindley and Doronin are probably attending to this – imperceptibly, as should be. The potential of a competent manipulative psychiatrist (I’m pretty sure they have both been trained in manipulative schools) is daunting, but sooner or later I will have to assert authority and require reports from them. And then try to decide what they have considered unnecessary – unwise? inappropriate? indiscreet? or plain contrary to private briefing? – to tell me.

  Oh, yes, there was private briefing. I had plenty that no one else did. And so, I’ll lay, did each one.

  What a bastard pack we were. In a condition of te
rrified peace we carried our wars underground – intrigue, espionage, counter-briefing – even in a UN project. At least we have gained freedom from that. But, dear Christ, the price was high …

  I took Doronin with me yesterday on web inspection, and we slid up and down and around the frame in our waldo shells – Inspection Arid Maintenance External Manipulation Capsules to you, sir – for two hours of irrelevant checking and testing.

  The purpose of this exercise is, of course, to give complement practice in identification and use of the magnetic tracks connecting the salient points where trouble might conceivably occur. Doing this six times a year, once with each member, will soon become a vast nonsense, but with Jim’s nasty little problem-and-answer session in mind I can use these dreary occasions to get closer to them, one by one. (Though there will be temptation, when his turn comes, to push Fraser under a passing meteor.)

  I did well with Ivan once I had noticed his unwillingness to move without me close behind him; he is mildly agoraphobic and the sheer size of night sparks his discomfort. He asked too many artless questions about the magnetic tracks and the failsafe mechanisms of his shell; in all this emptiness his trust in the infallibility of engineering is diminished. It’s a safe bet that he was repressing a vision of tiny Ivan floating helplessly away from the web, slowly starving while the inexorable air recycler refused a gentle death by anoxia.

  We were almost chummy after an hour or so of permitting myself a shadowy role of daddy walking sonny boy. I didn’t make him look to me; he wanted to, so I let him.

  I won’t tell Jim. He wouldn’t appreciate me as professional competition, and I want his good will.

  All the time out there I was haunted by the old ‘blowing your way on a klaxon’ chestnut. It is too bloody accurate. The monopole flare may be a thousand feet in diameter and the horn a monstrous mile long, but the klaxon shape is there. It serves to remind that man’s supreme technological achievement is a clumsy agglomeration of mostly inefficient junk.

  We went up past the steering jets to the limits of safe approach, a metre or so from the lip of the flare and its magnet rim. There, looking forever into the starfield, I realised Columbus as she really is …

  Not a ship of metal but a shape of forces.

  A blind, hungry maw, with the cone of the monopole extending the insatiable throat thousands of miles ahead, trapping and ingesting dust and gas and charged particles – sucking in and accelerating them and feeding them to the smaller monopoles in the body of the horn, to be whirled in the vortex which makes of the whole structure a helical accelerator until, concentrated in a white-hot stream of brutally enhanced mass and velocity, they are ejected through the tail vent at almost the speed of light.

  And so Columbus moves.

  Then the cartoon strip of seven self-satisfied little men puffing along intervened, and with it the incredulous amusement of the cosmos.

  That was the end of the Raft clip.

  Some introspection and a bundle of mystification; much arrogance muffling itself in ‘self-knowledge’. Even a paranoid touch, or is that the occupational disease of command? Not a very nice man, I suspect – but which of us is in his moments of unwitting revelation?

  Writes well; even stylishly. No doubt the whole journal makes a useful record. Well, well, continued in our next.

  He took up the next clip.

  3

  From the mentascript recording of Doctor James Lindley, surgeon and socio-manipulative psychiatrist:

  (Collator’s Note: We did not think that the twentieth century had done more than conceive of the possibility of direct thought-recording. The Columbus instrument is crude, possibly an experimental model; no mention of its existence has so far been located in archives. The recording is loaded with mental noise which has been sifted with some difficulty; it was necessary for the user to sub-vocalise to establish a recording line strong enough to override his own background noise. Transcription was by print-out; direct feed to another brain was not possible with this machine.

  Lindley was not an experienced operator, as is witnessed by the rambling nature of the recording which he seems to have used as a personal journal as well as for notes of observations, with little separation of the two. Punctuation and paragraphing are by the transcribing technician.)

  Oh, the indignant tone! World cataclysms don’t change the urge to oneupmanship. Now, Mister Lindley …

  Hello, little machine, disgusting snooper in a black box! You photographer of souls, you make man at last the pilferer of his own mind; in you the fleeting thought becomes evidence and menace; privacy is finally dead. I use you of my own will (albeit unwillingly) but how soon will your electrodes be clamped on some protesting head? One thing a man cannot do is stop thinking. There is no defence.

  I had never heard of such a machine until this one was so slyly added to my equipment list, but I wonder if Doronin has one like it. Surely the spies spy on each other and silently jot their secrets. Quis custodiet …? They do it themselves, of course.

  To be safe in 1990 ‘don’t move’ is no longer enough.

  Don’t think.

  Better still, don’t live.

  But that won’t be enough; soon they’ll be able to extract knowledge from corpses. Wonderful biology, and its new handmaiden, psycho-electronics!

  Perhaps by 2032 the whole place will be a radio-active puddle, and that may be for the best.

  How nearly you were right. But there are worse things than radio-activity – equally lethal and infinitely more degrading. You’ll be a sick man when you find out what we did.

  If we come home to holocaust we can always go somewhere else; fuel is the one thing we won’t run short of while entropy still dawdles down. That is, if there is anywhere else to go; how much chance of striking the one-in-a-million habitable world?

  However, back to my spying.

  The private quarters are, of course, utterly private. Each specimen has a retiring hole. For reading. Or keeping a diary. Or masturbating or whatever. Utterly private.

  Except that some lies have been told. At least one cabin is bugged, undetectably unless walls and ceiling are torn out to bare the leads. Camera and microphone are not objects but sensitised areas of those same walls and ceiling. The recording apparatus is in my cabin and the bugged cabin is Albert’s.

  The system is so new that no word has so far leaked to the journals or the electronic world. Which raises a question: who does it belong to? To Britain, whom I represent? To Australia, wishing to keep an eye on its man? To the UN which in frail, frail theory bosses all of us?. Or even to one of the others, playing a tortuous game? Due to the system of anonymity hilariously devised to give parity of authority to the participating nations I don’t so much as know from whom half my orders have emanated.

  But someone requires a report on Albert, psychological and physical, covering every aspect of his existence during the trip.

  What’s so special about Albert?

  Quite a lot, but not matters that would interest a government authority. But this I am sure of – that introverts are not the stuff of which great commanders are made. Albert will be effective because prod by jolt by coercion I will see to it; but he will be acting the role, not much taken with it.

  So why was he chosen? There must be compensating qualities.

  Qualities? Why not simple factual matters, unknown to us? Political wheels turn through a queer topology, even out here among the stately stars. Who, for instance, is making notes on James Lindley? Doronin? Why not Albert himself? Ha-bloody-ha!

  So let me consider Senior Officer (Commander) Albert Raft, non-scientist, pilot, navigator, mathematical and mechanical jack of all trades, mother superior in posse.

  Is he diffident of command? Fraser, our hotshot corn-pone astronomer, calls him ‘dinkum cobber’ to his face, and his pretence that it’s all in fun is only cover for his resentment of non-professional authority. Fraser is not stupid, merely self-ignorant. When I told him his imitation Australian slang is
two generations out of date he replied, ‘So is Albert,’ meaning that laymen are just not up with the world.

  Well, they never have been since the invention of politics, but neither have scientists. Fraser sees himself as a member of the coming intellectual élite when it arrives, as the portents say it will, but he may be in for a shock. IQ may not be the only requirement for membership.

  But Albert is quiet, speaks when he has something to say, offers opinions only on subjects he knows – and always knows them exhaustively. The others, establishing pecking order, find him hard to peck while he, allowing himself perhaps one peck a week, infallibly draws blood.

  He is capable of subtlety but some overt show of authority may soon be necessary, because nobody wants to be first to enter Slow Chamber.

  Each wants to see whether the first sleeper turns black and dissolves into slime. They know he won’t, but primitive fear asks proof.

  (Here there was a break, possibly indicating the end of a recording session or perhaps the excision of non-germane material.)

  At thirty-four, Albert is the youngest man aboard – another social strike against him; the older men feel they should be able to peck him.

  His father was a distinguished (as distinct from great or famous) mathematician, which may have some bearing on his facility for mental calculation. (Or is that Lysenkoism? Must ask Kulayev.)

  His mother was something of a social scientist in a classy amateur way, good enough and forceful enough to be a thorn in the comfort of a succession of Australian governments. Her work in the aboriginal cause created a whole series of electoral frenzies.

  My God, Annie Raft! That bitch his mother! She nearly drove the abos mad, too, in spite of the good she did. I think she wanted to be the Great White Queen of Black Australia. Poor bloody Albert.

  He talks little about them or himself, but some reading between the words indicates that they identified with their work and had little time or feeling for the deeper instinct of child rearing. I guess at a lonely child, smothering beneath the weight of public-figure parents, picking his way through an environment alien to a child’s needs.