‘Then why are we here?’
‘Really, hasn’t anybody told you anything? I don’t know about Alice-girl; I think she’s just an accident that got tagged on to you.’ He offered a pensive parenthesis, ‘Sometimes I think the organisation here is positively childish and sometimes I think there just isn’t any. Where was I? The Old Bitch had you brought for her Johnny, the youngest geriatric in captivity, but he’s probably forgotten what he wanted by now.’
‘I met him last night.’
‘Then you’ll understand. The Old Bitch gets sentimental fits, so what Johnny wants, Johnny gets. There’s a story that they used to have it off together back in the dark ages but we really don’t know and I’m not one to point the finger.’
‘And who is the Old Bitch?’
Arthur shrugged elaborately, setting his decorations in suggestive movement. ‘Who knows? Big mystique business. But I’d say that’s all shot now; her latest antics have been too upsetting and killing Albert was disgraceful.’
‘How old is she?’
‘What a question! If you ask me she was probably around for the building of the pyramids but I can’t prove it. Now, please, we have to be strict about meal times.’
‘One more question.’
Arthur raised pleading eyes to heaven. ‘Give me strength! But I suppose Barnard’s Star is a bit out of touch.’
But Gangoil, by all signs, was not. ‘Does your clone-group have strong empathetic bonds, awareness of each other?’
Arthur stood up, bridling. ‘You mean like that Albert-pack of simultaneous dancers? No, duckie, we’re normal. Is that a joke, I think? We were cloned for a specific purpose.’
‘What purpose?’
‘Checking a possible heredity factor in homosexuality. Six husky little darlings, each with what was suspected of being a homo-influencing gene combination built in and all raised separately under widely differing circumstances. Well, it seems the heredity factor exists, at least in some cases, though Eric did his best to bugger the results with some slut in Hormone Research. Much good the knowledge will do anybody.’
‘It could be of vital importance.’
‘If you say so, but we can’t stay tattling. Back in ten minutes and if you aren’t ready you don’t eat.’
He went out.
‘Does food attract?’
Alice turned her face as to a stranger and said with little interest, ‘I can eat.’
There was running water in the room and a towel. They shared them, she slowly and remotely, he with a vitality rising to the fantasies of Gangoil. She surprised him by saying, ‘I’m glad they aren’t going to recondition me.’
He discarded a dozen replies and selected, ‘It will be hard going at first. Major readjustments aren’t easy. You will suffer.’
‘At least I will know who is suffering.’
He applauded silently and after a while she asked inconsequentially, ‘How old are you, James?’
Under the disinterested scrutiny he felt centenarian. ‘Forty-six.’
She smiled, in comment rather than amusement. ‘You don’t behave like an old man.’
Almost it took away his appetite.
When Arthur returned Lindley remembered a question he should have asked earlier. ‘Who is the Davey you said quarrelled with The Lady?’
‘Doctor David? He’s the head of the biology faction. I suppose you’ll see him around.’
‘You said “faction”.’
‘And, duckie, I meant it. The place is a worms’ nest, and it seems you started an extra writhe last night when you let the clone know it was the Old Bitch that ordered Albert killed. Did you know what you were doing?’
‘No.’
‘Well, her boys have deserted her for trying to kill their clone-daddy. Allegiance strictly to dithering Johnny now. That makes her a faction of about one.’
‘And to whom is your allegiance?’
Arthur’s reply did nothing to restore semblance of order to the internal affairs of Gangoil. His old-fashioned leer was horrendous. ‘I try to be all things to all men.’
They were given eggs and bacon (both fresh, which set Lindley puzzling) and coffee (also fresh but faintly ersatz) in a huge communal dining-room where several scores of people – dressed in laboratory coats, overalls, informal clothes or personal freakeries – ate cafeteria style.
Arthur showed them where to go and what to do and left them to it; he had his own brand of tact. No one else paid attention; they might have been familiar faces there for years past. Alternatively, Lindley felt, they might be unimportant to the point of invisibility. The idea of fresh faces arousing no curiosity among the members of a presumably secret organisation was no odder than anything else in the past twelve hours, but it was most isolating.
He began to mention it to Alice and let the sentence die because she did not hear him. She stared at her untouched food, not seeing it. He considered approaches; since they had been thrown together he must, if only professionally, make some move against her misery.
While he watched the tears came, easily, with no twisting of features and, he imagined, without much realisation on her part. He settled for sympathy and placed his hand over hers.
She jerked from the touch. ‘Leave me alone! For good.’
‘Don’t be bloody stupid; that was sympathy, not sex.’
‘Sympathy!’ The little shock had been sufficient to stem the tears. ‘What good is that?’
He answered casually through a mouthful of food. ‘I don’t know. Probably none. Wipe your eyes; you look forty.’ The word made her jump; braced against assault, she was vulnerable to the mild jab. Technique; cheap stuff, but effective. ‘I can tell fortunes.’
‘Don’t try to amuse me.’
‘I’m being professional. Shall I prophesy?’
‘That if I don’t take a grip on myself I’ll deteriorate into schizophrenia or depression? Save it.’
‘Balls. You won’t deteriorate into anything and you don’t need treatment; you certainly wouldn’t benefit from coddling by memory erasure or reinforced suggestion. There’s nothing wrong with you that a few good crying sessions won’t make bearable and when you’ve had those I’ll start teaching you the difference between right and wrong, voluntary and involuntary; it’s time somebody did. You’ve had a psychic shock but after a while you’ll stop shaking. For immediate purposes that’s all there is to it. Dammit, girl, you aren’t stupid. Or are you?’
‘I’m not stupid.’
‘So give over the drama and eat your breakfast.’
She was not offended. Her chaotic needs evaporated as fast as they arose. Obediently she picked at her food and eventually ate most of it.
Chapter Five
Quality of Life
I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Man’s.
I will not Reason and Compare; my business is to Create.
William Blake: Jerusalem
1
The Controller of Civil Police of Melbourne Town was no more than thirty, probably nearer twenty-five. The neat grey uniform might have been worn by a conservative hotel porter of the eighties but the face had been worn by the law through centuries – polite, helpful, uninformative and tough, tough, tough. Colley’s account of the era’s criminal therapies became, before that predator’s gaze, the wishdream of an idealist or the evasion of a politician.
Parker disliked Security and made no secret of it, nor was he impressed by Raft; his official politeness was not quite insulting.
‘Organised crime? No. The psychoclinicians have the major tendencies under fair control but they miss badly on individual proclivities. That’s why Security is on its virtuous arse over this business. They’d have done better to hand it to us right away but old Jackson was lost in dreams of sweet reason and he convinced the Prime Minister differently. And the PM’s not much better.’
Politics, Raft mused, might be rough and tumble when a senior public servant could be so outspoken; being PM to many like Parke
r could be a dog’s life. He said, ‘I suppose you’re right.’
‘You wouldn’t know.’
‘I know your kind; you could belong to my time.’ Parker was not amused. ‘It was meant as a compliment.’
The Controller grunted. ‘Bright boy Colley says you have ideas.’
Raft was unpleasantly conscious that the office was masked by an energy blind; the absence of outside noise was tomblike but it seemed the only efficient protection on a Paul Pry planet, and that he should warrant one indicated that this young thug took him seriously. Three other blank, tough young men sat at desks within hearing but did not move or speak unless required. It was dialogue among dummies.
He began, ‘We’ve a few things to go on. First, the Gangoil organisation has to be pretty big.’
Parker was ahead of him. ‘Not necessarily. We’ve dug a few scraps out of the kids under deep question and they’re recruited for a single job – hypnoed, post-suggested and dumped. And some bastard will pay for that.’
‘It has to be big enough to run a first-class biological team and in Heathcote’s work that involves engineers, electronicists, computer technicians, maintenance staff, psychologists and a clone of unknown size. And why only one clone? There has also to be a planning and executive group to control and co-ordinate them and to design these aggressive operations; also field operatives to drum up mobs as needed, including some smart hypnoing legerdemain. And they have to be fed, which means transport and service staff. Put it down as an HQ of several hundreds.’
Parker was impressed, as if he saw solidity emerging from fog, but not overwhelmed. ‘Dispersion. Why in one place?’
‘Communications. Could they communicate effectively by radio or other systems without being detected? My bet is that all communications are thoroughly monitored; the Security setup stinks of it.’
‘No, they couldn’t. Open voice would be noticed at once and code would stand out like dog’s balls. Point to you, Commander.’ Sour, but honest.
‘So, a large HQ.’
Parker ruminated: ‘It would have to be a complex – laboratories, recreation facilities, transport sheds. It’s almost out of the question; the country’s mapped to the millimetre; every building is known and plotted. Where could it be?’
‘The depopulated areas?’
‘Mapped. Anything that moved, in or out …’
‘Then underground.’
‘Caverns?’
‘Lord, no; something thoroughly designed and structured.’
‘Couldn’t be built undetected.’
‘No? Pretend it could.’
Parker eyed him stonily, said unwillingly, ‘Very well, I’ll play. It couldn’t remain undetected. For one thing there would be heat loss; the area would radiate a degree or so above the surrounding country because of energy losses and the survey satellites would pick it up. The computers would squawk until it was investigated and explained.’
‘Heat can be shielded, drained, diverted, re-used.’
Parker jerked his head at the wax-museum pieces. ‘Possible?’
‘Difficult,’ said one, ‘but possible.’
‘You’re doing well, Commander. Go on.’
‘Consider the scale of the thing. Say three hundred personnel, and that’s conservative. How big a place?’
‘About a city block.’
‘You’re not a scientist. Much bigger. Question: how was it built and when?’
‘Not in the last twenty years; we’d have known. And before that the heavy equipment would not have been available.’
‘So it was built before the Collapse. Back in my day.’
Parker’s young men eyed each other, questioning. One said, ‘I’ve never heard of such complexes in Australia.’ The three heads shook and were still.
‘There was at least one. The federal government built an invasion retreat in the late eighties; where was not known, but its existence was an open secret—’
‘If the records exist they can be found.’
‘—but that isn’t the place I have in mind. Heathcote had become so important that the only credit he ever got for his Columbus work was an accidental mention on a censored newscast; so important that the government pushed him out of sight and isolated his laboratory. Nobody could get near him.’
‘You did, on your final leave. I’ve seen the Columbus file.’
‘I was a guinea-pig, as highly classified and incommunicado as he; I could get to him.’
Parker breathed out hard; the three policemen fixed Raft with eyes set to pierce. ‘And what did he tell you?’
‘Nothing, because he knew nothing. In social relations he was a gentle old ass. Nobody ever told him a secret, even about himself, because he couldn’t get to a phone fast enough to share it with fifty confidential friends. But if you had in your keeping a man who was set to rebuild the human race – that is, if you were sitting on a secret so big that every nation in the world would tear your country apart to get it – and if the world was in a vicious state of armed anger, ready to erupt, where would you put him?’
Parker nodded. ‘It could have been done in the couple of years after you left, before everything fell to pieces. It wouldn’t have needed to be a secret; they could have called it a defence project of some sort.’ His young men engaged in a swivelling of heads, rolling the idea round their circle. ‘But where? That would be restricted information and it could take months to locate a single classified folder – which might have been in the mountains of stuff destroyed before we started saving everything.’
‘They have to get supplies in from outside. How?’
The silent colloquy rippled, subsided. A policeman said, ‘Truck or dragonfly.’ Another disagreed. ‘Not trucks; they’d have to break journey and that would be detected at their home base. Dragonflies, I think.’
Raft asked, ‘Are some of those privately owned? I know you have practically banned private surface transport, but the air?’
‘Hundreds of them. Private. Not checked coming and going. Freedom of the citizen.’
Was that a straight-faced joke? Other times, other conceptions indeed. ‘So if you could detect dragonflies in quantity landing and taking off in some area where there’s no plain reason for such numbers …?’
Parker brooded on him with something like approval. To Raft the suggestion had been obvious but it was one which might have taken Parker time to arrive at for himself; his experience did not include the large-scale activities of an organised opposition. But when Parker said simply, ‘See to it,’ and the dummies took up their caps and left without further instruction he thought, A bloody efficient force, and shuddered. He said, ‘I hope they get quick results. I’m concerned for Jim.’
‘Lindley? I suppose so.’
The offhand tone made the starmen’s positions brutally clear. ‘You don’t give a damn, do you? To you we’re just bloody trouble-bringers.’
Parker’s face cleared subtly; the policeman vanished momentarily. The man was capable of pity. ‘Perhaps we care less about individuals than you did. Try to see that to us the past is hell, that all this Gangoil business is a resurgence of devils. You won’t understand this time until you realise that to the general population yours was an age of terror where individualism reigned and there were no great goals. Our goals mean more to us than the single bodies and souls.’
The face, trained to impassivity, looked as though nothing could terrify it, but the voice was racked; its sincerity pierced Raft’s obsession with his personal problems. The half-familiar humanities of this world were deceptions; beneath them lay modes of thought as unapprehended as the ideas of a new race. In the emerging century he was more alone than he had dreamed.
2
It had been dumbfoundingly easy to make an enemy of the friendly Colley. Raft’s blunt approach to the necessity of police co-operation had been touchy but still had underestimated the nature of the relations between Security and the very junior police service. When police were needed for minor clean
ing up, Security told Parker what he must do. That Parker’s men might possess individual and group superiorities had never been considered; they were tools, not rivals.
The elevation of Parker to full partnership had bruised Colley’s pride of service to the point of active dislike of Raft; Campion also had for a moment looked with less than favour on his presumptive ancestor. But Campion was an amalgam of men; the bureaucrat in him tasted gall but the politician recognised the value of the move and began to consider fresh relationships between the two forces.
However, when Raft came to him after two days with a request that had been inevitable from the beginning the starman found himself referred to Colley on the ground that the Senior Tech was Acting Commissioner and must be treated as such. Raft was to eat his peck of dirt.
With a setting of teeth he presented himself before Colley who said, without looking up, ‘Sit down, Commander,’ and continued writing. Raft, recalling Columbus, had the grace for an inward smile, but the smile itched.
When he was ready Colley laid down his pen, looked straight at him and waited, unforgiving.
Raft said, ‘You’re a hard man to get to, Senior.’ He should have given the man his courtesy title, but he thought of Campion as Commissioner and did not at once realise the unintended slight.
Colley snapped, ‘Probably. I haven’t time for—’ and bit back words in the interest of dignity.
Raft lost grip of good intentions. ‘For minor irritations? Sorry if I’ve become one but I think I’ve done no harm and possibly some good.’
‘Like a well-meant kick in the teeth. You have tacitly criticised my service as inefficient and given the police opportunity to crow over us publicly.’
Security’s monstrous pride would not be soothed, but Raft suggested, ‘Use them for the legwork; that was always the copper’s forte. Security must make the final moves and crucial decisions.’
‘Regaining face isn’t the point. It chokes me to admit’ – and he looked as if it did – ‘that you are the only useful adviser Security has in a situation outside its expertise. And you have achieved something; Ian and I have made reports, objective reports we hope, to World HQ about your points of view and it may satisfy you to know that the whole philosophic background of Security is in question. Given an unfamiliar circumstance we have handled it ineptly and a man from a civilisation we have been bred to despise is showing us what to do. Security doesn’t love you, Commander.’
Beloved Son Page 20