The effect was stupefying.
Behind The Lady the clone-brothers attained the faces of fiends as their fine bodies tightened in an instantaneous petrifaction. And as suddenly relaxed. The demonic expressions vanished. They crossed glances with communicative vividness and with accord turned on the woman’s back matching smiles of contempt overlying a stabbing anger.
Her reaction was both restrained and total. Shock was powerful but contained, diverted almost unnoticed into a flowing setting down of her teacup; her eyes widened enormously and were at once veiled by lids. Her attention was not on Lindley’s monstrous impudence but on the men behind her; she dared not betray fear by turning but strained as if for psychic knowledge. She was most intensely frightened.
It came to Lindley only belatedly that he had announced to the brothers that the woman, to whom it seemed they owed devotion, had planned and ordered the killing of their … How would they regard him? Father?
‘I had no hand in that!’ Her voice snapped without quiver; self-command was absolute; there was more power in her than he had granted.
Perhaps she told truth – it had been random firing on his part – but he had seen her terror and did not believe her. Nor, he saw, did the brothers, whose reactions evaded reason until painfully he sorted and thought he understood them. Plainly the news of Albert’s death had not reached this pair – he thought of them, a little shamefacedly, as units, not quite as persons, certainly not as individuals – until he spoke; then initial shock had at once been killed by the realisation that they had not, as that other one had said, ‘felt’ him die. The accusation of her responsibility even for an attempt was what fed their animus. Whatever the nature of their loyalty they believed her capable of it.
Fearful or not, she was swinging at once into attack, demanding, ‘What could I gain by his death?’
He did not know but was sure he had her measure. ‘Your idiot intrigues aren’t my affair, but I know you ordered him dead.’ He invented rapidly, over a corrosive wonder what this impudence might later cost him, ‘I was there when they came for him. I was struggling through that mob of drugged kids with murder on their minds and your name in their mouths. They killed for The Lady and they yelled it aloud. By now the whole city knows it.’ (He had not absorbed what they yelled – something about a ‘traitor brother’ – but he was committed to maintaining pressure.)
The rapt faces of the brothers accepted the lie. The relationships here were too complex for his guessing, but he had succeeded in creating enemies for her.
(Something unsleeping in him heard England a little avenged. It did not matter who paid so long as there was payment. Continually.)
Yet now she surprised him. With extreme speed of decision she assumed equanimity, accepted exposure, determined her course of action, raised her teacup as a symbol of suavity and said, ‘It was necessary.’
The admission was surely courageous while she dared not risk a revealing glance behind her. The brothers smiled at – probably – their secret knowledge. Lindley repeated contemptuously, ‘Necessary!’
‘Yes!’ To question her decision was presumption. Defeat was temporary; she remained The Lady.
‘Are you sure you succeeded? The thing on the plane seemed to have doubts.’
The spontaneous pejorative was unforgivable and she picked him up for immediate discipline. ‘Don’t derogate the clone. That is a warning.’ She paused, cold-eyed, for him to consider and remember. ‘As for certainty –’ She gestured over her shoulder. ‘They know.’
Her head whipped round to assess their feeling; he had given her the opportunity and she had seized it. She saw only instant sadness on faces of suffering reserve. They knew her and had been ready for her, and with silence lied to her.
She repeated, gently, coaxingly, ‘Necessary, brothers. He was spoiled, not truly one of you.’
They bowed their heads, accepting. Only Lindley saw the return of malice when she turned back to him and he asked her, out of his genuine ignorance, ‘Why?’
She watched him over the rim of her cup, satisfied that a menace had been averted by swift thinking, talking between sips. ‘Grand-daddy Jackson just happened to be with him, so he’s dead too,’ sip; ‘that was accident, but the Raft man had ruined a beautifully planned action.’ A long sip and the beginning of a threat: ‘You had best not attempt interference of any kind.’ Sip and the end of the threat: ‘If you do I shall have you killed.’
The brothers concurred in minute headshakes. He need not fear her. He protested, ‘But what is all this drugging and killing about? What do you want?’
‘The world,’ she said. ‘Have you finished your tea?’
He had not and his hand shook too much for him to risk the fragile cup; he strove to manage his voice. ‘In all history no revolution ever succeeded as the revolutionaries planned. They tended to die in their own victory fires.’
‘History has no rules. If it had, they could be changed. The superior human understands that.’ Her expression changed to secretive cunning. ‘You might say that I specialise in superior humanity.’
He did not understand. Perhaps she meant the clone. Before he could ask, she made lightning transformation into gracious hostess dismissing boring guest. ‘Now you really must go and see John. The poor dear gave me no peace until I sent for you. Francis is out there; he’ll show you where to go.’
He took up his cup, still half full, and her brittle mood broke. ‘You don’t have to finish that! I’m sick of you!’ Reasonless spite followed him to the door. ‘You’re a boor and a bore. Get out! Go on, get out!’
As he left her, with his dignity in rags, he saw that the two clone-brothers moved quietly behind a curtain and vanished. He suspected that The Lady was now more alone than she knew.
2
Francis was sympathetic. ‘Bored it up you, did she? A very difficult woman; it took years to learn what I could get away with.’
‘She’s mad.’
‘Don’t bet on it. Unpredictable, but not mad. She has a keen intellect.’ He was serious, not playing satirist.
‘That’s common enough in specific types of insanity.’
Francis looked as if he might argue, but reverted to fairy floss. ‘You’re the doctor, duckie. I wouldn’t have a clue about psychobatics.’
‘You’re no intellectual butterfly either.’
Fleeting bleakness peered from the careless eyes. ‘I try to keep it light. Being bred in a concrete box isn’t all uplift and gaiety. Come on, now; John’s waiting.’
‘Now? At one in the morning?’
‘Night and day are interchangeable in the termitary; the metabolic clock gives up chiming after a while.’
They turned into yet another corridor of paintings. Lindley’s dazed recognition lingered over familiar canvases from a dozen countries until he forced himself back to the need for information.
‘Are there no other women in Gangoil?’
The answer came with a snicker. ‘Lots, but not in this area. She won’t have women around her; there is no competition in her sector.’
‘A closed market?’
Francis turned on him a brilliant smile. ‘Duckie, I could tell a tale or two! But she seems to feel my kind don’t count, and if she’s happy with the setup who am I to wave the facts of life at her?’
They continued in silence until Francis opened a door and cursed quietly at an empty room. ‘The bloody old relic’s not quite with us most of the time. Wait here while I find him.’
He vanished through a curtained arch presumably leading deeper into what must be a private suite.
Lindley found himself alone in a Victorian gentleman’s spacious den – library, office and lounge in one – and he examined it with amused appreciation. The lack of windows increased the air of snugness; it was a nineteenth-century illustration faithfully copied, with the addition of concealed lighting and a television set. But the lighting was for convenience only; atmosphere was preserved by splendid brass and porcelain kerosen
e lamps, and the television simpered a little in a William Morrisish cabinet equipped with a veiling curtain. Such details were marginally funny but in fact fitted without incongruity; this was no vulgarity in the style of The Lady’s brazen display.
The floor was a halcyon sea of pile, subdued blue and green flowing over slumberous red and brown, Persian-patterned; furniture, lustrous in mahogany and rosewood, floated like polished rafts. A vast roll-topped desk in stained cedar squatted commonsensibly in a corner. Two grandfathers of all fireside chairs, winged and high-backed, guarded an immense fireplace with a laid fire which surely never was lit. Opposite stood a monstrous buffet displaying crystal goblets within and crystal decanters without its curving glass doors.
Heathcote, praise be, did not go in for old masters but there were clusters of old English sporting prints, genuine and breathtakingly precious, and a drum-shaped tumbler rack of Australian washes and drawings from colonial days.
Paranoia behind and schizophrenia coming up. A blindingly good bio-chemist with a soul in the 1850s backed by an escapee from a surrealist harem. And these two oddities are out to capture a planet!
The huge bookcase covered an entire wall. Carlyle, Ruskin, Mayhew, Gibbon, Darwin, Thackeray (whom Trollope had rated above the otherwise quite excellent Mister Dickens) Tennyson, Byron (a mite daring, perhaps) George Eliot and that promising young buck, Meredith. Expectably, there was a complete Trollope, every one of the sixty-and-odd volumes showing, even on the bindings, signs of constant handling.
Dedication! Does he identify with the Duke of Omnium? Or would it be that nice Doctor Thorne?
From an adjoining room an elderly attempt at choler achieved only cracked peevishness. ‘And tell her not to send her beastly freaks on errands to me!’
The bang of an inner door was probably Francis’s answer.
The man who entered belonged to the room. He was short and thin and bony where his wrists protruded from the sleeves of a deep purple, velvet smoking-jacket. His white shirt glittered with laundered purity; his pearl-grey trousers, uncreased, were strapped under glacé kid slippers. It was a creditable attempt at the private déshabillé of a Victorian gentleman.
He came towards Lindley with the gentle shuffle of age, smiling with a hint of querulousness on his fleshless, fine, transparent face, his whole being redolent of a forgotten gentility.
He could not have been more than twenty years old.
Lindley caught at floundering credulity, disbelieving his eyes while his mind backed away to the point where it might believe anything at all.
The young gnome said in his frail old-gentleman’s voice, ‘I can’t stand them, you know. One admits their existence and their right to existence, but one should not be required to mix.’
He came further into the room with a suddenly youthful step, as though for an instant he had forgotten his age. ‘I regret having kept you waiting, Doctor Lindley, but there is much to be done and frankly –’ His head darted forward, returning to an old man’s birdlike motion. ‘Frankness is best, I feel. Do you not?’
Lindley’s bemusement contrived a whispered, ‘Yes, sir.’ He could not help the ‘sir’; it felt right – in period.
‘The truth is that I am presently in a peculiar mental condition. Please do not think I have called you here for professional consultation; my problem is not psychiatric, save perhaps in a contingent sense.’ He smiled on a Lindley who understood not a word, then fluttered, literally fluttered, as he recalled the requirements of hospitality. ‘But please be seated, Doctor. Here, here; this is an excellent chair.’
It really was an excellent chair and Lindley sat with gratitude while he hoped his stare was not of glazed idiocy.
Lunacy followed. ‘There are moments of considerable confusion when the memories conflict. And of course there are still gaps; the gaps are most disturbing.’
Lindley’s scalp crawled. He managed to ask, ‘Who are you?’
The young man was taken with an old man’s dim surprise. ‘I am Doctor Heathcote. Whom did you expect?’
‘Forgive me; I was prepared to meet a very old man.’
‘And so I am, so I am.’ Suddenly he understood Lindley’s situation and erupted in senile temper. ‘That Francis! That laboratory assistant’s catamite! It would fit his conception of humour to have you confront me without prior knowledge. I can’t credit that woman’s fascination with the type.’
Lindley took a deep breath and suggested that a taste for the outré and the grotesque was a common accompaniment of the dictatorial personality.
‘Is it indeed? Well, well, I am no psychologist. You would perhaps care for a drink? Scotch, gin, rum? I’m a brandy man myself.’
Brandy, port, cigars and a hot toddy nightcap. Taking a grip he said, ‘Scotch, thank you. I’m a later generation.’
The young man snickered appreciation but poured with a steady hand. ‘Now, explanation without further delay.’ If he closed his eyes Lindley could picture him as the Heathcote of his fancy – snow-white hair, deep lines, quivering shanks – from whom the slow sentences dropped in that utterly un-Australian accent from Dublin, reputed to have been the purest English in the world. ‘You must realise that I became senile and quite useless, quite beyond geriatric techniques as they were then, some twenty or so years ago. So I arranged to be cloned. Make no mistake, I am still John Heathcote.’ He chuckled. ‘Twice over, one might say.’
Absurdist theatre, Lindley decided, presented with unbecoming realism, for this ambiguous ancient was real. He grappled with his straight man role to ask, ‘And the … other … the remainder?’ In God’s name, what would be the correct word?
‘You mean the template body?’
How cold-bloodedly right. He nodded.
‘Ah, there was a use for that!’ The insupportable archness of second childhood. ‘The old body was needed for the memory transfer process. It was placed in metabolic retardation to the point where awareness ceased but cellular degradation was inhibited; then the necessary organs were macerated for assimilation.’
Lindley supposed that what he heard was actually being said. Then unreality scattered before a notable fact, that the ‘old man’ voice had, in a couple of sentences, slipped into the faster, more precise tones of youth. He was listening now to the reborn biologist, the man who had with his assistants created a new and original dilemma for mankind: an old man and a young man who were (was?) both the same man and mentally confused as to which was who at any given moment. Not funny.
Young Heathcote continued rapidly, compressing horrific concepts into non-technical language which even a superseded psychiatrist could follow.
‘Memory, you must understand, is much more than a matter of the contents of the brain, which may be thought of as operative memories. There are deeper forces, the great basic urges of procreation and self-preservation, the intuitions of danger and apprehensions of the metaphysical, the primal memories from which actions stem and which have their roothold in all the body’s cells. Perhaps in the RNA chains, though I think not; they may belong to more basic combinings not yet observed. As a weak analogy think of the “memory” of still water, retaining in its molecules the recoverable volition of its last direction of flow. I postulate a residual memory of some such type. Factually we know only that the brain is not enough, that practically the whole of the visceral and procreative systems are involved. The Russians had worked it out long before you started on your voyage but they were keeping it to themselves.’ (Drink-loosened Albert shouting it at them during that revelatory session – and here it was, alive, talking.) ‘Starting from the planarian worm experiments they did marvellously well, and we were able to recover most of their records to establish the basic approach.’
Lindley nearly choked on his whiskey, thinking of the planarian worms fed to each other to establish the learning-memory chains. ‘Are you saying you ate him?’
Heathcote sniggered. ‘Ate myself? If only it were so simple. Cannibalism is too severe in a sophisticated
organism; the essential molecules will not survive our complex digestion. Much of the material was incorporated in the clone nutrient, so a form of feeding was involved, but most was injected after the brain was fully formed. Then there were long periods during childhood of chemical stimulants – amplifiers you might call them – and endless sessions with hypnotherapists seeking the basic memories and coaxing them into operation, seeking out triggering synaptic junctions to release whole areas of recollection. Those are still continuing. I have a considerable mass of the original John’s memory; I recovered his scientific work intact before I was ten. But much of the personal material remains dormant. They think the private memories unimportant to their purpose, which is simply research, but the gaps leave me with comfortless moments of indecision and blankness.’
‘Who are they?’
‘Scientists. The older ones may have been my youngest assistants, but I am not told; the younger ones were born here in the hive, raised and educated to carry on the work Gangoil was built for. I feel alone in their presence, and it is most confusing to be a battleground of warring instincts of age and youth, of experience and urgent desire. But one day I shall be whole.’
Lindley’s professional sense of order was revolted. Unable to comment on affairs so far outside his range he asked, ‘Are there no others of you?’
‘Only myself. I was far past the cellular climactic of maturity when the operation was decided upon and most of my regenerative faculty was already lost, so it was necessary to initiate a large number of buds. They lost all but one. And, as the young fellows so succinctly put it, there has been no need to bottle another batch while the memory transmission proceeds so successfully.’
The true end of John Heathcote: guinea-pig to his own techniques, reliving by virtue of the assistants who recreated him, one more experiment in the laboratory tunnelled to hide him under a mountain. It was as curious a destiny as might be imagined.
‘At times I have wished others had survived, when I see the emotional closeness of Albert’s clone. But I also realise that they may be unique in their empathetic sense; also they are impenetrable, caring for no one but each other. They care for me in their cool fashion, but it is veneration for a father-symbol, not for the man. They are not what Albert was.’ Without warning his voice reversed ages, taking on hardness and certainty. ‘And Albert, it seems, is not at one with his clone. That is why you are here, to tell me of Albert.’
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