But you would like to, excluded little boy. Impertinently Jackson prodded, ‘Ian?’ and was smugly pleased to catch Raft off balance.
The starman said sharply, ‘I am interested in him, but the circumstances are unusual; I can’t identify the interest in emotional terms. How did Jeannette die?’
Jackson laid down his knife and fork. ‘Of starvation,’ he said.
Raft grimaced. ‘The Five Days?’
‘Their aftermath. I’ll try to explain the background to you but you’ll have to read and to see the tapes to get the feeling of it. It wasn’t a war; it was multiple disaster.’
Working in smock and plastic gloves, Alice White prepared the envelope with Lindley’s name on it, typed because he would be familiar with Raft’s handwriting.
She brushed the envelope lightly with fluid from the first of the tiny bottles they had provided. In a trusting world they had had no trouble getting them to her. The youth – completely unwitting, hypnoed to the gills but not too obviously unless you were looking for it – had asked for her at the desk and she had told the clerk to send him to her office when he used the agreed form of request for her recognition. She had blanked the recorders and listened while he spoke his little piece, gave her the bottles and walked out.
She wondered could it have been done so easily in the old world. There the transaction might have involved all sorts of evasions of security measures. ‘Security’ seemed to have had a different meaning then; mutual trust had been nonexistent. How had such a civilisation persisted so long? If no trust, how progress in a maelstrom of secrets?
That she was herself engaged in deception did not colour her thinking. The knowledge loitered somewhere in the recesses of thought, but obscurely; another knowledge, firm and incontrovertible, assured her that what she did was for a great and necessary purpose.
She stripped off her smock and gloves and painted her hands from the second bottle, the protective fluid, which would be precaution enough once there was no danger of splashing. The liquids were on the Relegated List, naturally, and though as Jackson’s secretary she had known of their existence she could not have obtained them for herself. The Gangoil people were everywhere, had access to everything it seemed. Yet there were not so many of them; the use of hypnoed dupes gave the illusion of numbers.
The envelope dried more slowly than she had hoped, and Jackson and Raft would not stay in the dining-room for ever.
Best to act immediately.
‘Multiple? A sort of general collapse? Civilisation turning the neurotic corner and crashing?’
‘That corner was turned before you and I were born. All we needed was a push and we got it. What is your memory of the planet you left?’
Raft said readily, ‘Wars – small, bloody, hot wars between small nations and large, confined cold wars between big nations. Knife-edge politics. Art sterilising itself in revolt without vision. Protest, disillusionment, starvation and grinding poverty.’
‘Hopeless?’
‘Appalling but not hopeless.’
‘Details?’
‘What do you want? That I condemn my world before you begin?’
‘I want you to prepare yourself for the facts. Forget politics, economics, art; those are transitional states. Talk about final things.’
Raft considered sombrely. ‘Ecology. Over-population. The plundered planet. Arable land was falling to ruin; with super-fertilisation we could have fed ten billions, they said, save that the rains leached the nitrates out of the soil and dumped them in the rivers and poisoned the water supplies and the ecology became still more lopsided. We had been afraid of fishing out the sea but instead we were killing it; back in the sixties Nasser’s dam spoiled the Nile delta and the Mediterranean fisheries. Fresh water itself was in short supply in Europe and North America; industry used too much, but throttling industry back meant increased poverty, increased starvation. Ecology was too complex for effective foresight. There were plans, but damage had reached the point where centuries of natural processes were needed to re-establish balance. We knew that no matter what we did our children might starve. And their children.’
‘There were plans for population control.’
‘How could they work, with half the world refusing to admit what had happened to it and the rest putting its silly faith in God? In any case, it wasn’t stabilisation that was needed but an active cutting-back.’
‘And there were other things.’
‘Heat pollution, for one. And weather control was becoming a major industry, with no explanation of how to put desirable weather in one place without stealing it from another. The problems of scientists became power struggles between politics and money.’
‘A wrong division of responsibilities coupled with blind self-seeking. Hopeless.’
‘We didn’t think so. There would be bad times but not ultimate disaster. But there was disaster. What caused it?’
‘Specifically, starvation and bio-chemistry. And fear. Don’t you remember the fear?’
‘I don’t think so. Or do you mean subliminal anxieties? It was a neurotic civilisation.’
‘Psychotic. Never a day without war in centuries of history; little flares and big flares, in our time desperately contained by terror of a final flare.’
‘The Five Days?’
‘That was a by-product. There was no final flare; we are still here.’ Jackson looked sick and he looked – with a leaping suspicion Raft identified the emotion behind the eyes – terrified. ‘That is, some of us are here. Nothing happened as predicted, but the end was little better for that.’ His hands shook, remembering, and he could not eat. ‘Starvation and bio-chemistry. And someone’s attempt to rule the ruins.’
Raft laughed shortly. ‘Oh, no! Not a world conqueror! Ming the Merciless?’
‘Napoleon and Hitler had dwindled to names in books, but what is so new about a man who wants everything?’
‘Nothing, I suppose. The melodrama shook me.’
‘History is mostly melodrama.’
‘I’m not fighting you. Who was it?’
‘We don’t know. Perhaps that’s hard to believe but the fact is that we may never know, though the answer is probably somewhere in the millions of still unlooked-at documents of the time. If we find out we’ll probably suppress the knowledge; the results are beyond revenge. The final war had already begun before you left Earth; it was several years old but we didn’t know it, didn’t recognise it for what it was. There had been degenerative mutation among staple crops.’
‘That? I recall speculation about long term radiation effects; the background level was rising.’
‘But not to that extent. Then came foot and mouth disease, mutating from season to season, with medicine always a step behind new forms. Herds dwindled. Then mutating cholera and mutating measles. You were two years on your way before the pattern became clear; somewhere bio-chemists were at work and probably genetic surgeons. Somebody had a final solution: tear the world down and what’s left is ours. It was only what some of the stupider dropouts of our day wanted, wasn’t it?’
She rapped, and Lindley’s muffled voice told her to go to hell. She had to hope he was only exhausted, not totally unapproachable; this time she pressed the com button and spoke into the grille: ‘It’s Alice White. I have a message for you.’ Silence. ‘I think it might be urgent.’
The door opened violently. ‘The sex symbol! What’s your message, or are you touting?’
His contempt terrified her. She felt momentarily that she was in fact contemptible, that what she did transgressed and buried other manner of behaviour. But conviction held.
She offered the envelope. He did not take it.
‘From whom?’
‘Commander Raft.’
‘Tell commiserating Jesus I can do without tender sympathy.’
She floundered, ‘But he was –’ and thought again quickly. ‘He has been taken away; he said you ought to know.’
‘Taken where?’
&nbs
p; ‘I haven’t been told. Perhaps the note will say.’
Grudgingly he took the envelope, and was lost. ‘It’s damp.’
‘It was like that when he gave it to me.’
He tore it open sullenly and the stuff was on both hands.
‘It’s empty!’
‘How extraordinary!’ It would take only seconds now.
‘What’s all this about?’
‘How should I know? He said —’
His face changed slightly, relaxing, still puzzled but with resistance ebbing.
She said firmly, ‘I’m coming in now.’
There was only a flicker of bewilderment, which passed. She pushed by him into the room.
Jackson’s ruined face worked as his words fell. ‘It is just possible to imagine that somewhere, someone felt that humanity could be saved by doing for it what it would not do to itself. Too many people, too much psychic erosion, too much of everything bad! So put a stop to it, a complete stop! Imagine the fanatical lover of humanity, father confessor and master of forgiveness, paranoid to the steps of the throne of God, inflicting enormity in the intention of salvation. Perhaps it was like that; perhaps it was only the loosing of the demon beneath the skin. We don’t know.
‘By ’92 the plagues had reached genocidal proportions. The condition of the world is beyond telling; we don’t know the extent of it. But I know the shock when the rumour spread that these monstrous happenings were the outcome of deliberate planning, and how we reacted with panic when it became certain that this was true. What sparked final insanity was the realisation that there were parts of the world only minimally affected by scourge. Some whole countries were islands of life, suffering but not being murdered. Fortune or design? Australia was one, and was that the luck of isolation or the self-protection of guilt?’
He fell silent.
‘No,’ Raft said. ‘We didn’t. We didn’t do that.’
‘Somebody did. Why not we?’
‘No.’
‘My country right and incorruptible? Perhaps mere geography saved the worst of it. We didn’t suffer enough to quite destroy us. And it no longer matters. I mean that. To think now in terms of good and evil and blame and vengeance is only wasteful; it doesn’t matter now who was responsible or how it came about. All our science and politics and literature stank of the tensions and the Collapse was inevitable; only the date and the manner were to be determined.’
‘Or is that simple unwillingness to say, “If I did it I don’t want to know”?’
‘No one today will listen to that; they’re too much appreciative of their second chance. We taught them that – we, the Ombudsmen –’ and here Raft could not miss the note of defiance ‘– and we made it stick. The first generation born after the crash runs the world and the second is being groomed to run it better. They are too busy for old hatreds.’
‘Someone isn’t,’ Raft said, but cut the defence short. ‘Let philosophy rot. What was the Five Days?’
Jackson said instantly, in words prepared, ‘A vast incident, and only that. I suppose violence had to have its day; the big powers – with their people dying in millions, industry rumbling to silence, communication failing – saw intrigue and menace everywhere. Or perhaps, like you, they needed someone to blame, and so there had to be a crisis of hysteria. They fought in sullen and crude fashion, like men badgered into a fight and unable to back out of it, mostly with what we called conventional weapons. Nuclear weapons were used but not with the blind freedom that might have been expected; the atom was still a symbol of terror to user as well as used-upon. It was a short week of vast airstrikes, and whole cities dissolved in dust and fire.’ He grinned crookedly, making a mask of his burned-out face, and stabbed the air. ‘Can you guess what stopped it, why it simply petered out? Just that there was nobody willing to carry on. Famine had reached the stage where individuals killed only to stay alive, to steal another’s food.’ He paused, pinning Raft with snake’s eyes, defiant again. ‘I know; I did it.’
Raft offered no reaction; the old devil must find his own soft spots to land on. Jackson, deprived of shock effect, reverted to an offended, lecturing tone.
‘The Five Days was Earth’s last scream of mobilised hate; it ran out of breath. There was no fuel for the planes and no one to service them or fly them. No one would supply a parasitic armed service, and the servicemen deserted rather than starve. And starved anyway. The aim of the godlet was achieved; the world clattered to a halt. I suppose the godlet, if he existed, perished in his own cataclysm; at any rate he never stepped forward to claim his prize. What a prize! We were reduced to two necessities – food and shelter. Back to the Stone Age, to caves and scavenging. You might be surprised at how many found it a relief from civilised bedlam.’
‘I might have been one of them.’ Raft thought, He’s had forty years to grow a shell but I must be like an icepick in his gut. And so he meant to be; he didn’t enjoy making the old brute dredge recollection of guilt, but he needed it all. ‘It sounds as if half the world died.’
‘More, much more. The strong survived but in the western world, as we called it – and few today would know what you meant by it – medicine and technology had made it possible for the unfit to survive in their millions, so now they died in their millions. It was the price of borrowed life in an artificial environment. In that same western world, psychotic to the core, the family unit had degraded itself into a phrase, so when starvation became acute there was little desperation on the part of the young to save their parents and grandparents, whom they tended to blame for the mess anyway. It was very elemental; the old died. Procreation went on – apace, you might say – in the absence of TV, liquor and electric light, but most of the results died of malnutrition, neglect or sheer unfitness in a toughened world. In the oriental areas where starvation had always been a commonplace and family solidarity had more meaning there was probably less psychic degradation but sheer congestion bred disease – not just the created plagues, which turned out to have a genetically induced obsolescence factor – but the old-fashioned diseases of dirt and propinquity, cholera, typhus, bubonic. And of course malaria as insect control disappeared. The VDs ravaged everywhere; there’s nothing like unfettered morality and a dead pharmacopoeia to spread infection. Do you think I’m cynical about it?’
‘It probably helps; you need a defence.’
‘You bastard.’ It was a flat, indifferent curse; Jackson was scratching his sores with something like satisfaction. ‘Well, there you have it; communication vanished save by word of mouth and the whole structure was in fragments.’
They had warned of a period of shock and something close to withdrawal but she was unprepared for the reality.
He staggered as she pushed past him, reeling until the bed took him behind the knees and he sat, hard, like a drunk, his head cracking against the wall. He did not seem to feel it but stared at her, or at the space where she was, while sweat gathered and ran.
He would be unaware of her during this time but, unable simply to watch and wait, she dabbed at his forehead with a damp towel, her nerve rocking to failure point. He looked abominably ill.
The fast-working preparation was very different from the gentler, subtler drug used on the kids who had carried out the useless uproar at the landing field. Their enslavement had been effected in full daylight, in public, with finesse and no onlooker the wiser. But here time was a prime consideration, though the stuff was potentially lethal. It would not alter eventual outcomes if he died, but The Lady had demanded him and she must deliver alive if she could.
When his irises rolled upward and he became rigid and slug-white she wanted to scream, but could only wait in nerveless quiet.
Raft prodded, ‘What next? The old science fiction post-holocaust, with tight little groups fighting off marauding bands?’
‘You aren’t that kind of fool, Commander. There was some of that, of course, but not too much; there were needs that made gangsterism dangerous for gangsters. In fact thos
e with access to weapons were often service personnel with firm organisational backgrounds, and very soon there appeared islands of comparative calm; what emerged was a tremendous desire to regain what had been lost, if only because we had become people who could not imagine fulfilment without our pamperings. And there was more in our favour than prophets of doom had allowed for. For one thing, the day of the unskilled labourer was over, in the west, at any rate, and even the shrivelled remainder of the population was a vast reservoir of knowledge and technical skills; and in those patches of Earth which had not suffered ultimate violence they held out better against famine and disease and recovered faster. It was in those that the reconstruction began, and Australia was one of them.’
‘Hail the unconquerable spirit of Man!’
‘Balls to that, and you know it. Survival first, then the need to regain the lost.’
‘Not even the deathless, pioneering urge to conquer nature?’
‘Little, frightened, deprived but educated men and women who remembered their newspapers and central heating and supermarkets and wanted them back.’
‘And you really rebuilt the world on fright and pettiness?’
‘On resentment and nostalgia; would heroism have done a better job? You jibe too easily; what could we have done with heroic mouthfuls of “upwards and onwards”? We had scientists, tradesmen and organisers, out of work and needing a place to work in; to give it to them we had knowledge and intelligence and people who wanted their vanished lives back again. We had the huge rubbish heap of the world to ransack for usable artifacts and disassemble for usable materials. We had tremendous libraries that had survived partially and often totally and we had surviving machines to serve for blueprints. We had enormous advantages.’
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