Beloved Son
Page 6
In the outside sky a cloud moved. A shaft of sunlight touched his profile, highlighting the long, hard nose and wide mouth. He looked enormously dangerous. So he was; that was his training.
He continued, ‘We need from you, first, historical advice. What do memory and experience tell you of the nature of insurrectionist movements? Which are the soft areas they attack first? What is the philosophy, the rationale of mass violence? The prognosis is that that could come, unlikely as it sounds.’
‘Unlikely? Try to remember that human instincts are under the leash of a saner outlook but they are not dead. Violence is always possible.’ Watching Campion’s hard profile he said slowly, while he thought of something else, ‘Some thought will be necessary to reduce a mass of memory to essentials. A total recall session may be needed for me.’
He wrote the note as he spoke: ‘Most Strictly Confidential. Obtain complete details of S/C Campion’s background: birth, parents, associates, private interests and activities. Most Urgent.’
He buzzed his secretary and Campion asked, ‘You’ve thought of something?’
‘Unfinished business. I want my desk completely clear to concentrate on this affair.’
When the girl came he handed her the note. ‘See to this for me please, Alice.’
She read it, showed no reaction – that was her training – and left them alone. Campion turned from the window and Jackson felt a tremor of excitement at the investigation he had just begun. The hair colour and distribution were wrong; the eye colour was wrong; but these were matters easily arranged by a man who wanted to hide – or by those who wanted to hide him. Campion seemed a little thinner also, but that might be a matter of relative diets and activities.
And he, Jackson, who had had that profile with him for several years, had not at once recognised it. The invisibility of the familiar. He was visited by a peculiar idea: was it possible Campion did not know who and what he was?
Also it might be no more than remarkable coincidence, but he did not believe that; he was too thoroughly poisoned with fear for the young world he and his kind had built and preserved through its insecure years.
And Campion was speaking while Jackson brooded and worried and failed to hear, except at the end.
“… and then it may all be coincidental – there is no Heathcote and no plot and all the clones – or is clone a collective noun?’ Jackson listened to the sharp edge of strain becoming clear. ‘Perhaps the clone died in its humidicribs and we have inherited too much fear. Do we start at shadows, Dad?’
‘Often. But a shadow that shouldn’t be there is worth investigating. There used to be a saying about the price of freedom being eternal vigilance.’
Campion’s gaze was questioning and his manner increasingly nervous. ‘You people liked your sayings, didn’t you? “Tomorrow never comes” and “dreams go by contraries” and “let sleeping dogs lie”. Are those what destroyed you? Did you believe them too much?’
‘Don’t mock.’ Or was he being obliquely threatened? ‘Our little defensive saws played their part, no doubt.’ But he’s only thirty-four and he has to be forty-two. And at once came the counter-thought, But is he? Like Albert, the split tuber, the budded forefather, he looked older than his years. Alice would find out. Wary of too much silence he asked, ‘What will you do with them?’
‘With all the little Rafts, if they exist? Nothing. They’re no danger. What made them is dangerous; they may lead us to that.’
‘Depth questioning?’
‘Later, perhaps. Now, nothing.’
‘Then why rope them in?’
‘Did I say we would? We’ll not touch them till there’s a reason. We want to know who they are and where they are, to see who else looks for them, who their contacts are.’
‘Of course. I’m no tactician.’
‘But it’s you and all you Dads who may have to advise us what to do with them. We don’t want to harm them; it isn’t their fault they were born, or bottled or whatever.’
He turned back to the window and his profile dominated the light. He waited a long minute before asking, ‘Have I stood here long enough?’
‘Meaning what?’
‘No tactician and a poor evader. I have been told about my profile. Haven’t you noticed?’
‘I’ve noticed.’
‘And you are having me investigated? The note to Alice?’
‘I told you about that.’
‘Dad, Stephen, Mister Ombudsman, you lied. If you didn’t you’re a fool. I’m having myself investigated; we can compare notes. I don’t know much about my origins; how many of my generation do? But I’m too young for the role, aren’t I?’
‘Are you?’
He came to the desk. ‘I could swear it, but would that mean anything? Age is no guide; clone can be cloned in its turn, I suppose. There could be thousands of all ages, spread around the world.’
Jackson decided for an impersonal approach, the only one emotionally possible. ‘If that’s so, somebody spread them, and knows how to call them in. You may be contacted.’
‘No. I’m Security, which could be a development they didn’t foresee. I have no nation, no loyalty except to the world. They wouldn’t risk coming to me.’ But he was not sure and it showed. He said, so earnestly that suspicion rocked, ‘Stephen, if I’m a danger I want to be killed.’
Jackson cut that away stolidly. ‘In your position that’s the line I’d take.’ Saying the words hurt them both.
‘Are we enemies, Dad?’ He stepped back. ‘Enemies, Mister Ombudsman?’
‘Not yet.’
But they had become cautious of being friends.
6
The next morning he received a note from Campion, uncharacteristically skittish, the posturing of a wounded and worried man.
‘Tomorrow has come, the dream has usurped its contrary and the sleeping dog has wakened. Two possibles in America, one dead ringer in France and one little Albert right here in Melbourne Town. We’re going to bring the starman home and lay him out for bait.’
From a back-of-the-mind ambush emerged a thought that should have come much sooner. Could Heathcote really have expected to survive as a practising biologist for the forty-two years necessary to Raft’s homecoming? And it seemed there was an essential silliness in waiting for the control to return, for if all members were identical did a control matter? Minor divagations could be checked for frequency and causation by further cloning of the clone members. The statistical approach would be sufficient; Raft was not necessary.
Then why had so doubtfully suitable a man been sent out …? Raft’s writings exuded the stink of complicity in high places. But why the complicity?
To get him out of the way?
If so, again why?
Because there was more to it than cloning, and the key lay in Albert rather than in the clone. So: what might lie in that solitary, bleak, unsocial mind?
Something he knew?
Probably. But quite possibly something he didn’t know he knew.
Even something he didn’t know at all.
He’ll have to be scanned, cell by protesting cell, poor bastard.
While Jackson wondered, Campion agonised, in a fashion that would have surprised the Ombudsman greatly.
His stupefying resemblance to Raft was his lesser trouble, one that must find its explanation in a simple fact they would curse themselves for not having perceived. This he frenziedly needed to believe, and whatever the relationship turned out to be he had no urge to continue as anything but what he was, a guardian of the flowering world.
His work was the entire meaning of his life, and Jackson had stolen grace from it when he asked, ‘Do you think your world is so different?’
For Campion it was a penetrating, unbalancing question which between them they had evaded answering until he, Campion, had returned to it to ask, ‘Is our world so bad?’ and had not fully believed Jackson’s immediate, too kindly ‘No’.
The thing had dropped between them, but no
t out of sight. It stuck with the permanence of an idea fitted precisely into a moment prepared for it, and in fantasy he followed the conversation through the course it might have, should have taken, had he found the right words when they were needed.
‘Do you think your world is so different?’
Himself, smiling, refusing to be baited: ‘Oh come, Dad, this is the world you Ombudsmen built to cut away the rubbish of history. You can’t question it.’
Jackson, sombre: ‘You have trusted us too far.’
No, that was not it. Too late his fantasy tried to recall, rehandle, but the dialogue had in the first exchange broken from his control. He fended desperately: ‘But where would we have been without you?’
And heard his mind betray him again: ‘Where are you with us?’
‘Where it might have taken a century to arrive if you and all the world’s Dads had not taught and guided.’
The old face whispered inexorably: ‘Then what do you say of the American Soviet and the Kremlin Hegemony and the blood-feud systems of the Mediterranean groups? They also are the world we made.’
Ah, he had the old man there! ‘You didn’t expect perfection and it wasn’t expected of you. These things have to work themselves out; they are the internal problems social groups have to evolve into workable systems. Security can’t intrude. That’s the ethic: freedom to seek and perfect their own systems.’
‘Yes, we gave you the ethic of non-interference. Is it right? Was it ever?’
‘It must be right!’ He could not see how his simple dialogue had reached this point of no return, of erupting answers to questions he had not known were in him. For peace of mind he must nail the problem for ever. ‘If it isn’t right, our whole world is a sham. If the ethic doesn’t hold, then the creation of Security was a vast error, and the national groups should have been left to their blood and savagery. And our system and all our lives have been wasted time.’
That was unanswerable; the fundamental fabric of the universe cannot be challenged. He cut the mental tape while he had control, refusing to hear Jackson’s fading whisper, ‘They have; they have.’
Chapter Two
Planetfall
There’s no place like home.
J. H. Payne: Clari, the Maid of Milan
1
Between a gargantuan Earth and a resplendent moon Columbus pottered through a twenty-four-hour orbit.
The Security Techs (technicians? technologists? or whatever else within the language shift of four decades and a disaster) were polite and totally reserved. They imposed no restrictions (but the ship’s controls were sealed in rock-hard plastic blocks), spoke only when spoken to and then only in variations of ‘Sorry, but we are not permitted to give information.’
This, and indeed the very fact of their presence, did not sit well with the official quarantine story which Streich and Kulayev derided to their faces, pointing out that such viruses and bacteria as Columbus harboured would be relatively unmutated and amenable to remedies freely available in medical literature. But somebody with a caduceus on the breast-pocket of his black overall came aboard to give them hypodermic shots which he claimed would stimulate their abilities to manufacture antibodies; Earth’s diseases would have mutated and they were not immune to those. Streich and Kulayev were on him like wolves but he was only a medical assistant and had no technical information.
The biologists admitted, with reservations, the validity of this attention, but scouted quarantine as a reason for incommunicado confinement. They insisted that politics lay at the bottom of it, that shifts in the balance of power had upset the administration of the star flight. But they were by background and breeding children of state intrigue, seeing politics in everything.
Speculation died for lack of facts. There was only dullness with the Techs haunting the corridors like black ghosts. They realised the mass of boredom stored after years in each other’s company and began to keep to their cabins. Only Matthews was professionally busy, hacking away at the immense backlog Fraser’s death had wished on him; the computers, apparently considered harmless, had been left available, though the personnel record banks had been sealed.
Raft had his own ideas about their imprisonment and his inbuilt sensors told him what possibilities breathed on the planet below. The awareness amounted to little more than prickling apprehension and, save with Lindley, he kept these speculations to himself.
Lindley thought it likely that the ‘awareness’ had imprinted itself so deeply that Raft would have it all his life, whether his ‘others’ existed or not, for he had suffered a shock unique in history. He could not credit a vestigial awareness persisting so far away as Barnard’s Star; it raised questions which clawed at the cornerstones of physics and he was not prepared to accept chaos while simpler explanations existed. He did not express these doubts to Raft, seeing no profit in arguing against a delusion which took light years in its stride. If, he conscientiously allowed, it was a delusion.
Raft busied himself with the log until on the third day this also was taken from him in an act of vandalism.
Small rocket ships – shuttles – flitted up from Earth and clustered like flies along Columbus’s flanks, and pressure-suited Techs came hand-over-hand on tielines because the shuttles’ docking nodes could not lock into the starship’s older design. Then they swarmed through her, general and private quarters alike, confiscating films, tapes, documents, journals, diaries, leaving nothing that recorded a moment of the voyage.
Raft protested officially and bitterly and met politeness: ‘Orders, sir’. They knew what they wanted and they stripped Columbus clean, down to the most personal private papers. That most of their plunder could be reconstructed by the computers seemed not to concern them. They went, loaded, as swiftly as they had arrived.
Raft recognised helplessness but the others gave him the brunt of their fury as though he could pull administrative rabbits out of his authoritative hat; but he had no rabbits and they knew it, so they talked coals of fire, then cooled and sulked. He began a journal of this maddening interregnum, and that set him thinking over the few clues available. Eventually he formed an aggressive idea of how he might split the wall of silence.
On the twelfth day opportunity arrived in the form of the Senior Tech, whose rank was displayed in two vertical bars shining silver against the black breast-pocket. At the open door of Raft’s cabin he stood briefly to attention.
‘An official communication, Commander.’
Raft, writing, did not look up. He completed a paragraph, read what he had written, made a correction, laid the sheet aside and casually met the man’s patient gaze. And waited.
The Tech said, ‘Commissioner Campion will come aboard at 1400 hours. He requests that your party be prepared to leave for Earth immediately afterwards.’
Expecting questions, he received not so much as a nod of comprehension. He continued sullenly, ‘Personal effects only can be transferred at this stage. You are requested to limit yourselves to six cubic feet of property per man.’
That contained an ambiguity which forced Raft’s tongue. He allowed one word: ‘Mass?’
It took the Tech by surprise. ‘I don’t – ah, I see. Weight is not important, only the available space.’
To one who knew intimately the mass-ratio problem of space flight it was a remarkable statement. Back in character as regurgitative mechanism the Tech said, ‘Other possessions will be ferried down within twenty-four hours,’ came briefly to attention again, turned smartly about – no mean manoeuvre in a null-g environment – and reached the door before a bored voice halted him insultingly.
‘And who the hell is Campion?’
He repeated the about turn, less steadily, red-faced. ‘Commissioner Campion is head of the Australasian Sector of International Security and in charge of operations concerning this ship.’
Raft turned the words over without pleasure. ‘Do you know,’ he asked, ‘that you have just answered two questions without a struggle?’
Alone he pondered the words ‘Australasian Sector’. So this quarantine hoo-hah concerns me, uniquely me … and only one thing about me can interest Security, local or global … if they have lighted on that half-drunken tape …
He had reacted violently against the cloning business as its implications became belatedly clear to him, had warned Heathcote to quarrelling point that what he proposed was more than a spectacular biological flourish, that the consequences could be catastrophic. And here came the consequences to greet him, with full Security honours. He could do nothing but set it to one side of his mind and remember his obligations as Commander.
He called the other five into the wardroom and told them of Campion’s visit and how he planned that visit should run. They were curious, then amused, seeing well enough that simple nuisance making might achieve nothing, yet feeling the need for assertion. What Raft told them boiled down to: ‘Where you see a chance to needle, take it; if I give you a lead, follow it. They have to realise we aren’t antiques to be stored until wanted.’
In the sense of mere mischief, after days of restraint it appealed.
Columbus, having no fuel capacity problems, featured structural luxuries that were profligate by rocket flight standards. Among these was an extravagant wardroom which, lying against the outer shell, projected a blister window into space, allowing a full 180-degree view. From the blister Raft watched the Commissioner’s arrival through a pair of filter-binoculars Matthews had produced from the Astronomy Store. They cut sunglare to a minimum and he had an excellent view of the two shuttles that matched speed with the starship with a precision arguing marvellously flexible control.