Beloved Son

by George Turner

  Like a mouth the crowd opened before Campion and his check was too late; they closed round him, sucked him in. Raft saw his gun rise and fall, clubbing, and heard the sound of shots. The man’s whole body was for an instant visible, heaved on shoulders out of the press, struggling, shouting; then he was drowned under the weight and the tearing. Raft saw women there too, screaming in an exultation of violence.

  Suddenly, most weirdly, it was over.

  The scene slipped into quiet, retarded motion.

  Bodies tripped, stumbled, fell. Savagery died.

  The gas pistols were at work.

  The youngsters still on their feet ran back to and across the fallen fence, some supporting others, and slowed to a stroll at what they apparently knew to be safe range. Perhaps fifty lay motionless on the field, many of them in grey and black.

  Incredulously Raft heard Matthews, hard as nails and unimpressionable, enthusing over the soporific that operated so effectively in open air.

  The Techs and police still on their feet were those who had managed to slip small nosegrip masks over their faces. They seemed stunned by the happening, unable to act further; they stared apprehensively after the retreating mob or knelt futilely by the fallen.

  Then one, capless, dishevelled, took command and unbelievably Raft recognised Campion’s red hair. Through his creeping sickness he heard his own sigh of relief and wondered at it; he had nothing to thank the man for, but he had thought him dead.

  Campion marshalled his men into some sort of mobility, set them to first-aid measures and returned to the bus. With torn clothes and bleeding scratches, gasping and red with exertion and sweat, he growled, ‘Leave them alone till the gas degrades. Only a few minutes.’ He waved his arm at the crowd in a gesture curiously like a salutation. ‘They’re getting out anyway. It’s over.’

  Peculiarly, the mob was in fact dispersing. Raft found the leaving hard to credit; no one hung around, not even the customary ghouls fascinated by blood. They thinned, faded, went away into the trees, as if the thing to be done had been done and there was nothing to wait for. Yet they seemed to have achieved nothing.

  If only, Raft felt, they would go right away, quickly. His nausea increased and the eyes of the mind still watched.

  Jackson came out of paralysis. ‘Radio for ambulances!’ Raft supposed somebody did so and Campion croaked, ‘Get out now. Let the wounded lie for the medics. There’s enough there to look after them.’

  Raft’s seizure was becoming unbearable, the urge to vomit mounting. Campion sat in beside him, the bus moved across the shambles of the field, and a new factor entered Raft’s revulsion – a deep anger which had nothing to do with what he had seen and everything to do with the presence of ghostly eyes. He grasped at last what had been the point of the riot.

  A touch on the wrist startled him, but it was only Campion saying, ‘All right, Albert?’

  Holding down sickness he nodded. ‘Albert’, indeed.

  Campion’s sweat and dirt opened into a tired smile. He said, as if this day’s work meant something which only he had understood, ‘I think everything will be all right now.’ His smile was intimate, conspiratorial.

  The bus entered a highway, tree-lined, and opened up speed, silent as a bird. Raft swallowed bile to clear his mouth and called out, ‘Stop! Stop the bus!’

  Heads swivelled. He stood up, swaying, bawling, ‘For Christ’s sake stop!’

  Jackson muttered; the bus glided to the side of the road. Raft asked, controlling his spasming throat, ‘Are we safe here?’

  Jackson surveyed him pensively. ‘I think so. Ian?’

  ‘Of course. Are you ill, Albert?’

  ‘I am ill.’ He called out to Jackson, to all of them, ‘This thing beside me isn’t Campion.’

  Then he collapsed, put his head between his knees and heaved his stomach on to the floor.

  He lifted his congested face to Matthews hugely enjoying uproar, to the Techs at a puzzled loss, to the star crew gabbling excitement and to Jackson, very thoughtful and self-possessed, gazing at the man who looked like Campion. With a forcing of will to the man himself.

  Campion’s eyes, voice, hair. Yet he was clone-brother.

  And clone-brother was in shock, static, glazed. Something unbelievable, too incredible to assimilate had happened to him and he had withdrawn. Raft’s denunciation had shaken him out of sense, as though a fundamental belief had been wrenched about and distorted into a weapon against him. It was possible he neither saw nor heard nor felt.

  Raft shouted through his dribbling, ‘Get another bus.’

  Matthews raised his sharp-soft drawl: ‘He means it; he can’t stay cooped in with that man.’

  Jackson said clearly, ‘Prove to me first that this is not Commissioner Campion.’

  ‘If Albert says so, it’s right. Get them apart before he becomes a cot case.’

  The man who was not Campion began to emerge from rigidity, and sighed; a spasm of sound, infinitely wretched. Raft flinched away, crowding the Tech on his other side. Jackson muttered, ‘I don’t know.’

  The simulacrum’s gaze came slowly alive, fastened on Raft with an incredulity which faded into bewildered sadness. Jackson seemed to find expression there which convinced him, perhaps a flicker, a subtlety of line which was not in the Campion register. He opted for immediate action. ‘Arrest him. For an hour I override.’

  Whatever that phrase meant, it was effective. The Tech with vertical bars repeated, ‘One hour’, and the six of them came to life. One reached across Raft and slipped his hand inside not-Campion’s jacket, brought it out with gun and gas pistol; another called quietly into a radio for more transport. All of them, with their prisoner, climbed out on to the road.

  Raft struggled out on the other side of the bus, widening proximity, aching for air. One of the Techs opened a rear compartment, produced a water can and a bunch of waste rag and began impassively to clean the floor.

  Not-Campion stood quietly in defeated sadness until without warning, jolting them all into a sense of the alien and the unknown, he lifted his face and screamed to the sky, to the world, to the desolation of his soul, ‘Why, Albert, why?’

  It sounded not so much of misery as of bitter accusation; he had been betrayed where he trusted utterly. No pretence now; it was Raft’s voice crying back at him, not Campion’s. Jackson at last showed personal feeling, finally sure that he must count his dead. ‘I override until overruled.’

  The Senior Tech hesitated a second, evaluating situation and demand and answered reluctantly, ‘Conceded.’ Raft could only guess that he was loath to surrender authority but agreed that some special expertise of Jackson’s was here required. The agreement was sealed with a touch of fingers to heart. Some local ritual. Cross my heart and hope to die, Raft thought erratically.

  Removed from close contact he felt marginally better. At least there was only one of them; he was no longer the centre of a forest of eyes.

  He heard Lindley murmuring, ‘Limited transfer of authority without argument. Very trusting, very civilised. Or just plain naïve?’ Lindley’s mood would see no good in anything.

  Jackson ordered, ‘Two of you take the bus back to the field and find Ian. Or his body.’ His voice quivered. Without discussion two black uniforms separated themselves from the group and in a moment the bus vanished back along the road.

  Not-Campion sat down, hard, as if his legs failed, and wept. An unnerving but not a pitiable sight. Jackson walked across to him and spread his feet with care, a suddenly ancient man shuffling for balance, and asked, ‘Who are you?’

  Not-Campion did not seem to hear him.

  Jackson turned away. ‘Doctor Doronin, Doctor Lindley! You are psychiatrists; what do you make of this?’

  Lindley offered one word, like a sneer, ‘Agape.’

  Doronin took it quite seriously. ‘Probably. And individual influences.’ Jackson frowned, not seeing their trend. ‘We cannot commit ourselves without questioning the prisoner, which would be use
less at this point.’

  But Raft understood at least partly and asked savagely, ‘What’s the guess?’

  ‘Wait, Albert; we cannot afford to be wrong. But broadly it may be that you are the variant, not he. You may be the only clone-member with adverse psycho-pathological reactions. We will have to do something about it or your life will become unendurable.’

  ‘I’ve had enough attention from both of you these past weeks; you haven’t been subtle about it.’

  ‘We did not intend to be. Now it may all be gone to waste in a single premature contact.’

  Jackson was testy. ‘If you can diagnose, we can attend to the rest. Psychiatric treatment is mostly chemistry and electronics.’

  Kulayev snorted a long cherished triumph. ‘Eight years ago – forty-two years ago, how you will – I told you so.’

  Lindley sniped. ‘Hundred per cent effective of course, Mister Jackson?’

  ‘Of course not. Paranoia and adolescent growing pains are still major problems. Don’t try to bait me.’

  He might have retired into ruffled dignity, but Matthews applied a fresh needle. ‘Isn’t an Ombudsman some sort of protective middleman between authority and the poor sods on the bottom? A sort of honorary post? Ordering Security around seems pretty way up for a man in the middle.’

  True, Raft thought; the men in black did little but listen, and Jackson’s override seemed absolute. Then he noticed the small fiddlings with buttons and lapels and decided that every word and action was being recorded. Here was a check and balance system loaded against incompetence and Jackson would not be able to argue his way out of the consequences of a bad decision. He wondered how well it worked.

  Jackson said coldly, ‘Words change their meanings over the years. I am an adviser. And I am not in lecturing mood.’ After a while he asked, ‘How long must we wait?’ and a Tech told him twenty minutes or so. His eyes roved the road, pained and impatient, until the search bus returned. Then, he was given blunt words, spoken out of anger and shock.

  ‘Two Techs dead and four police,’ they told him, ‘but the Commissioner wasn’t among them.’

  Jackson’s response was spitefully human; he kicked the clone-brother in the head. The man gasped, shrank, recovered and gazed impassively ahead. The Senior Tech frowned but did not interfere.

  ‘I had thought you might want Commander Raft but you wanted the Commissioner. Why?’

  He was not answered.

  Lindley, still sneering, said, ‘That’s obvious.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘They didn’t need Albert; they thought they already had him. Agape. The League of the Philadelphi.’

  ‘Brotherly love? They depended on that?’

  ‘Depended! You saw his face in betrayal.’

  ‘You aren’t slow for a man out of his time.’

  ‘My time of violence and unrest? Perhaps in your upheavals some commonplaces have been forgotten, even by you who grew up with them.’

  ‘Your insight could be valuable, if you are willing to use it.’

  ‘Use it for whom? Why should your incomprehensible loyalties be preferable to any other party’s?’

  ‘True.’ Jackson turned his back on him.

  The clone-brother had ceased his comfortless weeping; his glance at Lindley was shrewd and assessing, all Raft.

  Jackson said to him, ‘God help you if the Commissioner is dead.’

  The man spoke. ‘The clone does not kill.’

  ‘With six dead men on the landing field?’

  ‘None killed by the clone. Your kind kill.’ He grinned as Raft sometimes grinned, roused and ready to snap. ‘It was your generation, old Ombudsman, that perpetuated useless death in the new world. Just as you killed the old one.’

  ‘Where is Campion?’

  ‘I don’t know. My business was to be Campion, not to guard him.’

  ‘But for a miscalculation you might have been him very well. Excellent training. By whom? Never mind; we’ll have it out of you later.’

  Raft complained, ‘He’s clone but he’s twin to the wrong man.’

  ‘Gene surgery.’

  Kulayev and Streich spoke together: couldn’t be done on a grown man, had to be achieved in sperm or ovum.

  ‘In your day,’ Jackson said. They looked excited rather than snubbed. Then the bus came from the town and the Techs shoved the clone-brother towards it.

  From the step he shouted, ‘You, Lindley! Englishman! This beloved Ombudsman is the type who killed your England. Lindley Lackland, remember it!’

  He was jostled inside and Lindley laughed at Jackson’s brooding. ‘I haven’t forgotten it, Mister Authority, nor shall I. But I can wait a little before making decisions.’

  Jackson grunted.

  Kulayev and Streich gabbled gene surgery in Russian, English and German.

  Matthews spat.

  Raft, dwelling on brotherly love and himself as the variant without it (but how could the original be without it?) was lost.

  Lindley touched his arm, saying not too bitterly, almost with wry appreciation, ‘Oh, brave new world, that has such bastards in it.’

  Jackson took the rear seat of the bus and called Lindley and Raft to join him. As the vehicle whispered down the road Raft said, ‘A thousand or so isn’t much of a crowd but it hit Campion like a bomb. I’ve seen Melbourne turn out half a million at carnival time.’

  ‘On a public holiday. I remember Moomba processions.’

  ‘Then why—?’

  ‘Why a crowd at all? A few sightseers, perhaps, but you are not Gagarin or Glenn in their day; nobody cares except for a few scientists.’ He mocked, ‘Am I being unkind?’

  ‘We’re getting used to the idea. When we started calling from ten million miles out we got told, “Get off my bloody band; it’s on priority!” When I identified us he asked, “What the hell’s all that about?” When I explained he suggested we try bands 23 to 26; somebody on those might have a clue. Then we had to find out what that meant in megahertz and he didn’t know and screamed like a madman for a specialist to tell us and farewelled us with a curse. Yes, we’re getting used to it.’

  ‘Deflating. He was a Lunar astronomer at Tycho talking down a three-way record of a solar flare with field stations. You spoiled his day.’

  Lindley insisted, ‘The crowd; the tiny crowd.’

  ‘There should have been no crowd. Ian was rightly concerned.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I had envisioned a possible attempt to get to you, Commander, but not such organised violence. We have become … unaccustomed.’

  ‘So a pressure group of sorts has formed around the clone. Its object?’

  ‘We don’t know. Revolution, possibly. Security can’t grasp that idea except as something from a historical novel. Minority protest they recognise and control, even guide at times, but this is beyond them. I hope their moment of truth has taught them. It might have worked – a substitute controlling a sixth of the world’s Security, if only for a few hours, with the Commander built up as a publicity symbol. They could have achieved something, if only a useful confusion.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘First we must have information from the clone-brother.’ He jerked upright, suddenly urgent. ‘How did they get Ian away? Did nobody see?’

  Lindley suggested that a dozen cars with sirens screaming could have left unnoticed while the brawl lasted.

  Jackson lay back again. ‘There are only twenty-two private cars in all Melbourne Town, no more than two hundred in the entire country. Only special people have them; it is a signal honour. We have cleared the roads of those damned things.’

  ‘But a car is possible.’

  ‘If an honoured man is dishonest.’

  ‘A stolen car.’

  ‘A private vehicle will start only for its owner.’

  ‘With a gun at his head?’

  ‘Ah. Of course.’ He closed his eyes, sad and tired.

  Raft found these apprehensions and arguments valid but remo
te; he needed some simple, recognisable thing – a petrol bowser or a newsboy – to convince him that this was the world on which he had been born.

  He was roused by the unexpectedness of half a dozen kangaroo hopping across the road in front of the wildly braking bus, but the sight was exotic, untrue to memory; kangaroo are not seen so close to a city, to that Melbourne they kept calling Melbourne Town as if it were still Batman’s ‘spot for a village’.

  The countryside was interminably the green-brown of Australian summer and …

  ‘A house!’ he said. One house, in fact, with a garden, in a paddock at the foot of a hill, with a cow. A cow! It was little more, externally, than a roomy box without individuality – the original machine for living in. It was bare, unlovable, but a relief from the surfeit of organisational man, a promise that real people existed still.

  They passed more solitary homes, then clusters of them, little different from the first, even to the ubiquitous cow; then side roads appeared and sparse traffic in the form of long, low buses similar to their own. Some of these carried passengers but the majority, enclosed in commercial bodies, he assumed to be freighters; they bore insignia, presumably with meaning for those who used them, but not business names or descriptions. All transport centrally controlled? Logical, given certain circumstances – such as the elimination of monolithic commercial structures.

  The first few bicycles did not strike him unfamiliarly; the resurgence of the bike had begun in the seventies. But soon the sheer number of them – single, tandem and parallel – crowding lanes set aside for them, made him exclaim, though it did not need Jackson’s sour comment to remind him that what oil remained to the world was too valuable for private use. He was more interested in the riders. He distinguished no specific fashion in clothes; men and women wore trousers, kilts, skirts, wraparounds and a score of personal styles indiscriminate of sex, determinedly brilliant in colours that burned in the sun. The riders confirmed his impression of general youthfulness; few seemed more than thirty. Despite Security and the landing field he was much taken with the idea of a young and colourful world.

  Was it all so colourful? He supposed they were at the outskirts of the city but the dispiriting sameness of pattern-cut houses did not change; three or four basic designs and a scatter of personal touches made a depressing show.