Lindley had decided his course. ‘Does it matter? You must have heard the news of Albert.’
‘That Security has him? That is nothing.’
‘That he is dead.’
Brandy splashed on the carpet; the balloon glass bounced and rang faintly and did not break. The ancient voice made sounds before it found a word. ‘No!’
‘He is dead.’
His face contorted and he wept. ‘How? How?’
‘The Lady did it. The old bitch had him murdered. She had him blown apart with a bomb.’
The sobbing ceased abruptly. ‘She?’
‘I think she feared him. I don’t know why.’
‘She!’
Rage and hatred shaped themselves clearly in the voice of desolation. ‘For forty-two years I have waited for my boy to return. That memory they gave me early, one comfort alight in suppression and dimness. Albert was my boy, never theirs. They were useless to him.’
Some other ‘they’? ‘His parents?’
‘His progenitors! Mere bodies for the spawning of a marvellous child, never parents.’
Plain curiosity asked, ‘What were they like?’
Heathcote stared blindly. ‘So little memory. There is a gap full of glimpses, of feelings, but no memory. I know they nearly ruined him with neglect and selfishness, but it is knowledge in a void, part of a pattern not released. To these new ones it is inessential to their purposes.’
A long, comfortless silence was broken once by an explosive, ‘She!’
He groped for the fallen glass and placed it on the mantel. With firm, old-world and wholly successful dignity he said in the misplaced tone of youth, ‘Please pardon my disturbance, Doctor Lindley; remember that at times I am an old man and always a divided one. I am not fit to talk further now. The Francis-thing will be waiting for you outside.’
3
Francis levered himself from the wall. ‘After all the fuss about getting you here that didn’t take long.’
‘Why conceal Albert’s death from him?’
‘Didn’t he know? I suppose nobody thought to tell him. He doesn’t bother with the newsbands and we don’t bother much with him. Silly old nit; he’s not much more than an experimental animal these days, after all. Did he perform? He had this big thing about Albert Raft – oh, purely paternal, I’m sure – but he’ll get over it. Where to now? Couldn’t you just go to bed?’
‘Are you supposed to look after me?’
‘Yes, for my sins.’
‘Then please arrange for me, and the sooner the better, which means now if possible, a summary history of the last forty years. I may get some idea what your nonsensical politics and violence are about.’
Francis exhibited a genuine emotion, cool dislike in an appraising glance. ‘I’m assigned to you because that’s my specialty period. Shall we go to your room?’
The room, limited to the provision of essentials, was comfortable in its sparse fashion; Francis appropriated the only chair without apology. Lindley stretched on the bed and discovered himself being lectured with a clarity and precision much at variance with the bored jester personality.
‘You would have had no chance to observe it, but your civilisation was under final attack when you left Earth. Before you were a light year on your way to that useless star the planet was a shambles …’
Lindley listened without question or comment. The botanic-genetic approach to warfare had been an old forecast by the eighties and had, like all future discomforts, received the fat cats’ Cassandra treatment; nothing new there. The rise of a youthful intelligentsia came as no surprise; his generation of psychologists and educationists had been fully alive to the possibilities. Only the rapid evolution of the Ombudsmen from organisers to neoshaman status was a fresh twist to a gaggle of old tales. The swift resurgence of technology was less remarkable than gratifying in its justification of his own ideas; he had never believed in the likelihood of final blackout or reversion to a primitive dark age.
The cold-blooded removal of the old and unfit was revolting in its completeness but told him nothing of human nature that a reasoning man could not have anticipated, however it was here that his attention became concentrated on the emotional overtones of Francis’s voice and phrasing. He listened for bias, for the questionable, if unintentional, misdirections.
‘… that the Ombudsmen were primarily responsible for the murder of a generation is pretty well established. They advised it; that much we are sure of. When you consider the influence they wielded as mature men among troubled and fearful kids, their advice was tantamount to an instruction. They weave and dodge when they are reminded of it, but their true role was patriarch, authority unquestioned. The moral problem lies not so much in responsibility for mass murder as in the reasons for it. The Ombudsmen can claim that they freed the young from an intolerable burden of the physically useless and this has the advantage of being perfectly true. But it is not the truth. In fact the Ombudsmen were embarrassed by those peers in age and experience who could oppose them on an equal footing; their authority could be and probably was called in question, so they had to secure themselves and their vision of the new world or become one with the whole generation that was to be pushed to the wall. I suppose that in any emotional framework the way they chose was monstrous, but it was effective and we don’t feel it our business to be eternally bowed down because we owe our chance in tomorrow to a guilt we had no hand in …’
At the end of half an hour Lindley felt that, discounting bias, he had a reasonable idea of the world’s convulsion. Most notably Francis’s attack on the Ombudsmen, a series of believable inferences with little adduction of verifiable fact, struck him as being the philosophical basis of the Gangoil group, as the act of faith on which action was founded.
Of course they might be right. At any rate he agreed that the dead should bury their dead and that the verdict of history should wait on history; what mattered now were the happenings of now.
He said, ‘It’s a fascinating world conception, wholly experimental societies trying out social formulas in something like laboratory conditions. But is it really the ultimate aim to examine all these isms and ologies like modern Pericleans and select one as the world model?’
‘I doubt whether there is any ultimate aim. How likely is it that one social formula will satisfy everybody, or even anybody? Give them a generation or two and there’ll be wars and tyrannies and empires and slavery. Security had to be invented to keep the groups’ hands off each other’s throats; half the Ombudsmen aren’t on speaking terms. What is the viability of such a mess?’
‘Much the same as it always was; it should be worth watching for a few decades. But you and yours don’t intend it to last. You won’t give them the chance.’
Francis eyed him with speculation and indecision. ‘Order,’ he said sullenly, like a last-ditch invocation, ‘order and the rebirth of man.’
Lindley thought about it and translated, ‘A single social system, whether they like it or not, and the bio-sciences for ever! Now there’s a programme!’
‘You haven’t seen enough to risk a sneer.’
‘But have I got it right?’
Grudgingly, ‘More or less.’
‘What system?’
‘Something like what you called socialism.’
‘State ownership of resources?’
‘Common ownership.’
As with The Lady’s art gallery? He suppressed a sharp remark on the confusion of words with the things they represented. ‘And the new man will be built in the bio-labs? Heathcotian man? Healthier, better designed, more intelligent?’
‘We can do it.’
‘With co-operation and determination we could have done it ourselves; however we saw disadvantages.’
‘You had no dream, only self-seeking and mutual distrust. We have John’s men to design the beautiful children who will come after us and,’ his voice changed perceptibly, ‘design and guide the new world that will belong to their children.�
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Lindley took his risk cheerfully, giving it the throwaway technique: ‘It’s an insane vision, you know.’
Francis coloured. ‘The difference between insanity and a freed vision was something your mind-butchers never detected.’
Lindley laughed and opened up the insult. ‘Oh, we had LSD.’
Francis stood. ‘I’ll leave you before I am tempted to beat your gutter-bred mouth into blood.’
Alone, Lindley would have laughed at absurdity, but there was no profit in mere philosophic superiority over a group which had plucked him from Security as neatly as a pea from a pod. Pondering what might yet be his fate as grist in a mill of nonsense he suffered a period of panic and emerged from it unnerved.
He discarded thought of escape. The camouflaged entrances to Gangoil were only porticoes for the series of doorways whose masses were unguessable tons of steel and concrete, cell beyond cell, built to survive everything but the direct impact of a nuclear blast. No doubt huge air ducts existed and no doubt they were as impassably structured as the entrances, all baffles and filters and deflectors. Useless even if he knew where they were or possessed the fortitude for the undertaking, with its probability of ending sliced in the blades of a roaring circulation fan …
He tried the door and it opened. They had no fear of his movements or, consequently, of his escape; his name already printed on the door panel implied extended residence.
This corridor was uncarpeted and undecorated, possibly part of a little-used area, a bird-of-passage section. There were names on other doors hiding unguessable people and it was no surprise to discover Alice White’s.
It was late but he did not imagine her feverish mind would be sleeping. He knocked. She was still dressed, in the simple fashion reminiscent of his lost time, and stony calm had followed disintegration. She did not speak but indifferently swung the door wide.
He entered a duplicate of his own functional room and joked that cheap hotels had changed not at all. His wit fell as flat as it deserved; he tried again with ‘You’re feeling better?’ as a matter of starting somewhere.
‘Better?’ Her tone judged him mad.
‘Well, coming to terms with realities.’
‘Submitting,’ she corrected. ‘Waiting.’
He sat on the end of the bed, pushing familiarity an inch or two. ‘You haven’t seen a therapist yet?’
‘No.’
‘Haven’t they even offered a sleeping pill?’
‘Yes. I’ll take them later. I’ve been trying to think.’
‘What have you thought?’
‘Nothing.’
He suggested cautiously, ‘We’re allies now.’
‘Until morning and therapy.’
‘Yes. I’ve been under strain, as you have; perhaps we can observe each other more impartially now.’
She said listlessly, ‘I suppose you’re all right. It doesn’t matter; I’ll be traitor Alice again in a few hours.’
‘How is it done?’
‘Oh, various ways. Drugs and post-suggestion for short projects; they rope in bunches of kids by having them handle impregnated surfaces, as I did you. And simply tell them what they are to do.’
Like all effective activities it was blatant and simple and a cold-blooded misuse of knowledge. With such intellectual sheep, innocent with dreams, to work on, misuse was inevitable, if not by The Lady then somebody else. If a thing can be done, it will be.
He offered empathy as a beginning of comfort. ‘I knew what I did when you took me, and couldn’t refuse; now I feel degraded. But how must the kids feel when they wake up to the knowledge of murder?’
‘They have post-commands. Forgetfulness.’
‘So The Lady has some pity for her puppets.’
Something like emotion was roused in her. ‘Tactics! Self-preservation! I think she has no pity.’
‘What is she like?’
‘I thought you saw her.’
‘Only for a few minutes.’
She pondered. ‘Perhaps she is a very great woman, but she is not wholly human.’
‘She’s insane.’
It seemed not to have occurred to her. She admitted doubtfully, ‘I’ve never seen her, but I suppose anyone with an overriding idea is not normal. Not to be judged. Like your Christ or our Ombudsmen.’
That juxtaposition was no more unlikely than Gangoil itself, and Alice’s was probably the prototype rationalisation of The Lady’s followers.
‘How do you feel about the use of the youngsters?’ She shuddered and could not speak. ‘Yet all the time you abet these plans with revulsion in your mind.’
‘No, no, I have nothing to do with the drugging. There is a sense in which I know about it but it passes me by. How can I explain? As if I have knowledge but cannot react to it. But my business is with the clubs where the kids discuss the systems of the world.’ Poor bloody kids, playing at competitive ideology for their sport. ‘It helps fit them for choice if later they want to try some other way of life. We move among them and listen and fasten on the ones with malleable ideas; that’s how they found me, years ago. We guide them towards dissatisfaction and protest until they are ready for indoctrination; then we use hypnosis to strengthen selected modes of thought and suppress doubts.’
‘And always it seems that you are doing right?’
‘Yes.’
Hypnotic suggestion alone could never have achieved her. He guessed it was hypnotism used to open doors to areas of the mind where other manipulative techniques could be brought to bear, obtaining brute distortions impossible with a functioning consciousness.
Her empty voice continued, ‘The youngsters don’t know what is being done to them; they become part of a subgroup within society, primed for revolt, thinking it all springs from their own desires. By then perhaps it does. Some of the promising ones, moving like me into responsible positions become agents, part of the machine.’ Noisily, unexpectedly, she cried out, thrusting away guilt. ‘But not the violence. We didn’t do that. She has others for that.’
It would be necessary, he thought, for God to devise a special hell for The Lady and her advisers.
‘And we work willingly. That’s the dreadfulness – that it is willing.’
‘Until something disturbs your conditioning.’
‘Perhaps.’ She puzzled at it. ‘I haven’t heard of this happening before.’
‘What broke yours?’
‘How can I be sure? I began to have terrible feelings of being two people at once, of doing things I should not do while one of me looked on and doubted but did nothing to stop me. Then the killing … the killing frightened me.’
Activities against her basic instincts and possibly a less than wholly competent practitioner monitoring her. ‘Maybe your revolutionary feeling was more intellectual than emotional.’
She agreed bleakly. ‘The young are arrogant and easy to trap.’
‘The organisation must be immense.’
‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. They take people up and use them and put them down again.’
Yes; with memory-flushing you could do that.
There seemed no more to say and in the long silence her dreary self-possession broke and she wept remorse and shame at psychic rape.
He comforted her, at first professionally and later with an awakening warmth of pity.
Later still the thought arose that these were damned peculiar circumstances under which to be making love. But that was why I knocked on her door, wasn’t it? All the rest was window dressing. In the attempt to feel less like a dead bastard taking advantage of Poor Blind Nell, he ruminated that this was a more tender therapy than she would face in the morning.
4
Lindley awoke to a voice. He had meant to return to his room, playing the lecher tiptoeing off with the dawn, but full gravity and an exhausting day had clubbed him to sleep while Alice, overwhelmed at last by conflict, slept before him.
The voice complained, ‘So there you are! I’ve looked everywhe
re and never thought – But you’ve been on hand feeding all these years, haven’t you, and I suppose the real thing – Ah, well, it’s your business, but you did have me worried.’
Francis had elected to face the day in sandals and a bottle green ingenuity almost too attenuated to be a jockstrap; whatever it intended was barely achieved. The rest of him was decorated at strategic points with designs in green and yellow adhesive speckling. On his muscular figure the effect was neither laughable nor wildly camp, merely odd.
‘What the hell do you want, Francis?’
The thinned-out eyebrows stirred. ‘I am not Francis. My name is Arthur.’
‘A twin. Sorry.’
Arthur sat himself on the end of the bed, searched out the shape of Alice’s leg under the sheet and shook her ankle. ‘Wake up, love; time for breakfast. And I am not just a twin because there are six of us.’
‘A clone?’
Alice woke, glanced incuriously at both of them and remained quietly within herself, totally alone.
‘That’s right. Arthur, Bertrand, Charles, Donald, Eric and Francis. You tell us by our colour schemes; I’m green and yellow. Now please get up and dress; breakfast in ten minutes.’
Alice did not move. Lindley suggested, ‘Perhaps Miss White should not eat. I believe she is to have treatment this morning.’
‘Not that I know of. Why should she?’
‘Something to do with conditioning. Francis said—’
‘So that was what the row was about! Davey and the Old Bitch shrieking the shit out of each other at four o’clock in the morning about us pretties acting outside our province, and Francis looking as if he had his hand caught in the jam jar. He should have more sense; he did six months as an assistant in the drug labs and thinks he’s a bio-psych on the strength of it, always wanting to re-arrange people. There’s nothing planned for Miss White. Or you either.’
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