‘The rotten result of a rotten system.’ Of an uncontrolled system, Campion thought, and found himself under attack. ‘Why do you need files from the cradle to the grave?’
There was an easy answer, the only one he had, but a dozen incidents had undermined his confidence in it. ‘Statistics. All information goes to Central Studies in the capital cities for analysis and the analyses are cross-correlated through Security computer libraries throughout the world. For every crisis we have some relevant statistical analysis to help us deal with it. Plague, earthquake, fire, flood, city planning, traffic control, population movements or what you will – we have information that covers masses as well as individuals and analyses that probe down to effects on typical and atypical citizens. Can you disapprove?’
‘While it’s all in disinterested hands, no.’
‘But you can’t believe in disinterest?’
Raft circled the room, peering at titles, poking at unfamiliar machinery; Campion recognised the Commander’s instinctive misdirection while he prepared assault. ‘I begin to believe in it but anyone born in my battleground of history, where the only good friend was a dead enemy, would find it hard to believe in acute intelligence backed by primal innocence. However well-intentioned you are, it takes only one bent man to misuse the dedication of nations. And what can be usually will be, sooner or later. We can’t see eye to eye; we live in different parameters.’
Campion watched Hunter observing Raft with a stony curiosity, as though he talked rubbish. Only days ago I also … Deliberately he pushed the point. ‘As with the clone?’
‘Why not, “As with Security”?’
He had asked for it; he was not hurt. But Hunter’s disciplined stolidity was pierced by signs of anger and argument; there would be peculiar talk in his mess today. He hoped it might do some good, in some measure prepare them for the ideas troubling their Commissioner.
Without warning Raft dismissed the subject and came to his own business. ‘The clone knows I’m alive, so Gangoil knows. Hiding’s lost its point, so I want to get outside, to see and talk to people who don’t wear uniforms.’
‘Why not?’ He had anticipated and thought about it. ‘It may help adjust your ideas.’
Neither of them believed that.
‘I’ll need civilian clothes.’
‘The Audit Section will let you draw on the Ombudsman’s emergency account.’
‘Thank you. Another thing: I want to talk to my crew. They were rushed out of the country without so much as kiss-my-arse and I want to know how they’re getting on. I’m told that people anywhere in the world can be located easily.’
‘As a rule. Arrange it, please, Hunter. Put the charges on a COM 2b for Mister Colley’s signature.’
‘COM 2b! Some things never change.’
Campion and Hunter smiled slightly but Raft could not fully appreciate his own irony; the calls on a COM 2a would not have been monitored.
When Raft had gone Campion called Colley and gave him his instructions, and Colley complained furiously of the drain on his complement; arranging the bugging of civilian clothes at the point of purchase called for precision, speed and squandering of manpower. Campion insisted; it would not be possible to install a personal network as sophisticated as the equipment of the black uniform, but he did not want Raft out of surveillance at any time.
Raft, loose in the streets, apparently unguarded, might be sufficient bait to rouse whatever capacity for action remained in Gangoil.
Raft would be safe enough, he considered, with the protection an alerted Security could give him, and Gangoil must be tempted into action if it were to be located without an inch by inch search of three million square miles of territory. He would as coolly have staked himself out as a tethered goat had the circumstances required it; he would have hated and feared the requirement, but he would have done it.
He knew Raft worried in his cool fashion over Lindley, but nothing could be done there until Gangoil was located.
As if he were not embroiled in complexities enough, another came to him with the urgency of fate, the one which was finally to strip a lifetime’s blinkers from his brain.
He had not given thought to Raft’s crew. He had done what seemed best for them and removed his attention; now the placement of Raft’s international calls brought them to the centre of his fermenting mind.
None of the calls could be placed; nobody in their countries knew where the starmen were. Or nobody would admit to knowing.
‘Information!’ he bellowed at a protesting Colley. ‘Hunt, dig, coerce, buy, but find out!’
That four men should disappear from Security’s sight was an insult but could be dealt with. What pierced him was a consideration of their homeland systems and the reasons which might lie behind disappearance. And the political ethic which would prevent him acting.
While Security Communications began a manhunt in four countries, his mind surveyed what he knew of those countries. Never before in his life had he found himself in the position of observing his world from the viewpoint of one who dwelt in it. Security dealt in masses and movements, watched from the eagle’s eyrie and never saw from ground level; the new perspective shamed and frightened him and finally stripped him naked.
7
Lindley’s cardinal error with Alice White had been his assurance that a night’s hysterical intimacy preluded an easy liaison. She repulsed him impassively. When he protested (and was horrified to hear himself protesting) she told him she liked him well enough but preferred for a while to set emotion aside until her internal warfare found peace.
She talked without much animation on neutral subjects and turned conversation away from herself, but at least she talked. She smiled at his humour but did not try to cap it. She was an intelligent companion when he sought her out, but she did not seek him.
Violent persuasion, which startled him as it slid into his mind, was outside his civilised range and the sexual urge, which had been small problem while opportunity lacked, became an irritation.
Trying to scrape acquaintance in the corridors, the dining-room, the community lounges, he discovered that everyone knew who he was and wanted nothing to do with him beyond the exchange of common politenesses. He was he decided, under tabu. As a useless eruption he was unwanted and possibly resented in the inturned and tight-mouthed community; perhaps the word had gone out that he be socially neutralised until a role had been decided for him.
The clone was little in evidence and seemed to preserve an unpopular apartheid.
Heathcote might have forgotten his existence.
Then his position was rationalised, after a fashion, at a moment when he was not seeking it. It happened on a day when he could not know that in Melbourne Town Raft was relinquishing his uniform while Campion agonised between new insights and old conditionings, and the whole planet’s status quo shifted imperceptibly under the gathering thrust of small incidents and private thoughts.
It was his third visit to the corridors around The Lady’s quarters – or museum or bordello or pleasure dome or whatever. Having no taste for poverty-stricken delusions, he hoped not to see her. He wanted to view the paintings, to wallow and luxuriate and bow before them. Before canvas and ceramic, marble and bronze he dissolved in wonder.
There were four long corridors flaunting the rape of nations and centuries. Conquerors had always looted the art of the vanquished but this garbage-wife had ravaged the heritage of the crippled and dying.
After the surfeit of staring, consuming, absorbing, came the anger. That she should have dared! No right, no right … If Jesus himself returned to ransack the world of the only real glories it contained they should be wrested from him; though these corridors contained only a fraction of the planet’s whole, they were worth a season in hell.
Then he played a sequence of his mental calming game because he saw he was not alone.
A man in a laboratory coat had entered his absorption and stood a few feet from him, not looking at him but ob
serving him. He appeared to gaze at the huge painting in front of him but did not; the Pollock Blue Poles, its enmeshed surface streaming across the wall, carried eyes and head helplessly in patterns of observation; Lindley’s observer was too still to be seeing what was before him.
Middle-aged – if that had meaning in bio-fantasy land – tall, dark, slim and unhandsome, almost chinless, he looked like somebody’s lab assistant stealing a moment for his hobby. Under Lindley’s gaze he ceased pretending and waved a hand to take in the entire display.
‘Well?’
Was gushing appreciation required, breathless admiration? Lindley snapped, ‘The accumulated tastelessness of a clown.’
‘Indeed!’ Oh my, oh my, oh sacrilege! ‘I would have thought – This is a collection of the world’s great paintings—’ The chinless amateur ran down, ruminated and tried again. ‘You mean, perhaps, that no definite line of taste is exhibited? A hodge-podge?’
‘Magnificence can’t be called that, but the collection brands its collector a tasteless magpie.’
Extremely pale eyes – probably weak, Lindley noted automatically – surveyed him as though they might blaze to burn holes in defences. ‘You are Lindley, the psychiatrist who wasted his time and talent on Barnard’s Star. What do the corridors tell you about the – um – clown?’
Lindley decided to enjoy himself; opportunities were rare. ‘There’s nothing here that wasn’t reproduced in cheap print so often that any illiterate could know it was supposed to be great art – Murillo beggar boys and a clutch of Rembrandt self-portraits, Van Gogh grainfields and pairs of boots, Turner sunsets and Canaletto pink palaces – everything that has been cheapened by over-exposure and the yammerings of suburban aesthetes. A safe player, the clown; everybody says it’s good, so we’ll have it. But what about the stuff that isn’t here? In four hundred yards of splendour do you see a single woman, except as a member of a group? Oh, yes, the Duchess of Southampton hung opposite her door, probably because there’s a faint facial resemblance. But do you see a religious group or triptych among all the rat-pickings of Europe? A Pieta, an Annunciation or a Descent From The Cross or a Madonna And Child? About half of the great art preserved in the world was religious, but our clown isn’t religious, so the whole lot is disregarded because she has no taste and no appreciation, only preference. “I just know what I like”, says the clown – and chooses what everybody else likes. No women, notice, but plenty of naked studs, all the big muscles where Lautrec’s acrobats limber up, and even Goya’s figure of Panic! It’s a wonder she didn’t have them strip the Sistine ceiling for Michael-angelo’s athletes. Perhaps they didn’t know how. And do you see any Dürer or Brueghel or Bosch or any of the great reminders of mortality? She’s been rejuvenated to the eyeballs and beyond, but she’s scared of death.’
His listener was entranced, whether by the performance or the content he could not tell; he took a breath and carried on. ‘She picked this lot out of catalogues and art magazines and coffee-table books. Ticked ’em off with a pencil – I’ll have that an’ that an’ that an’ that … Do you know something? Every damned one of them is from a museum; none from private collections or small unpublicised galleries. The art lover knows where every last worthwhile picture in the world belongs and I can tell you where every inch of canvas on these walls was stolen from, and I hope some day they’ll go back where they belong instead of hanging here like a harlot’s payroll, under a floorboard where the snoopers won’t get at it.’
The laboratory man clapped his hands in sudden pleasure but Lindley tiraded across him, gesturing at the Pollock. ‘Canberra, that one, and a whole pile of canvases from Melbourne in her brothel-boudoir.’ He tugged the other after him down the corridor, chanting a litany of pillage. ‘The Munich Pinakothetek, the Uffizi, the Louvre, the Musée d’Art Moderne, the Prado, the Berlin Museum, the Rijksmuseum. Name it and she’s had the packrats in. But nothing from America; must have struck trouble there. Competition, maybe?’ But his throat refused to cry out that her plunderers had been afraid also to enter poor, deadly Britain. ‘The only one missing from the scouring of Europe is the Hermitage.’
‘I’ve heard her speak of it. It was in old Russia, I think.’
Lindley swung on him. ‘Was?’
The mouth pursed, indifferently apologetic. ‘The Five Days. It was – uh – indiscriminate.’
‘Jesus!’
‘A shattered gallery disturbs you so much?’
‘The shattering of that one is a tragedy for civilisation.’
‘Oh, be sensible, man!’ The sudden contempt would have split glass. ‘The world has a million generations of art ahead of it. By the time the end comes these will be no more regarded than the cave paintings of our louse-infested ancestors.’
‘The cave paintings were highly regarded and will be again.’
‘Very well; I’ll not quarrel. Art isn’t my subject, but I’m damned if I see that much of it matters. That Blue Poles arrangement for instance …’
‘And if you don’t see it, there can be nothing to see?’
‘Touché.’ But he did not mean it; he had had his entertainment and was losing interest in the subject. ‘You’d better come to my office, Doctor Lindley. I’ll have to talk to you sooner or later.’
‘And who are you?’
‘I am Doctor David. You could say I run this place. If anybody runs it.’
David’s office belonged to no era or any era, containing a table-desk with voice-operated typewriter, closed-circuit communication, straight-backed chairs against the walls for the discomfort of bores, filing cabinets deep enough to swallow the secrets of nations and, for decoration and colour, a blaze of incomprehensible charts. David had come to seniority’s dead end, science forsaken against the need for administration of scientists.
Lindley sat without waiting for invitation. Assumption of equality might pay a dividend against an uncertain player. David might be that, slumped in his swivel chair – genuinely antique, genuinely comfortless – half-turned from Lindley and for the moment oblivious of him. His lips were closed but the muscles of his face flexed minutely; hints and flickers of expression made a classical exhibition of self-communion.
He settled his mind and opened a drawer, made rapid one-handed adjustments Lindley could not see from the far side – and Raft’s voice spoke from a point somewhere on the edge of the desk: ‘It is never safe to despise anything or any person.’
Lindley’s nerves screamed once and quietened to alertness. David looked smug.
An unfamiliar voice, young and amused, spoke, but to whom? ‘Safety hints for star travellers. Serves me right for clumsiness; I presented two subjects at once and he took the second.’ Then he plainly addressed Raft – but who else was there, wherever ‘there’ was? ‘Commander, are you willing to help Security as an adviser?’
‘Yes.’ No hesitation; decision already made. What was going on?
‘Why?’ Indeed, why?
‘To help Ian.’
‘Ian Campion?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
Raft said in an implausible, sentimental tone Lindley could not associate with him in any mood, ‘Because he is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased.’
Having said it he yelled with laughter as uncharacteristic as the inane quotation.
David’s hand moved. Click. No more speech.
‘Why “son”, Doctor Lindley? My information is that he claims to be Campion’s grandfather. But it’s a cultist quotation, isn’t it?’
‘In biblical speech the word doesn’t necessarily imply a blood relationship. Son of God? In Christianity so are we all.’
The acceptance of that breathtaking statement made him sure of David’s ignorance.
‘A universal family, with all the implications? Little wonder the creed slumped.’ He asked sharply, ‘Your analysis of the laughter?’
Play along? Why not, until direction showed? ‘Mockery, contempt and something like surprise at an unexpect
ed fact discovered. But it’s guesswork.’
‘But who is mocked?’
‘So Albert was not killed?’
David insisted, ‘Who is mocked?’
Very well, questions afterwards; but if Albert lived, David’s question was possibly booby-trapped. Lindley had some ideas about Raft’s bizarre pronouncement and liked none of them. So, a diversion, and quickly. ‘God is mocked.’
David’s face doubted, rejected, reconsidered. ‘Has he a religious – what used you to call it? – denomination?’
‘He is agnostic.’
‘Stupid; neither one thing nor the other. Such a man might mock God to calm his fear of God’s existence, eh? However, starship commanders are not stupid; I had thought of self-mockery.’
‘Albert never mocks Albert; he is the only person he takes seriously.’
‘Ah.’
If Albert’s psychology was a matter for concern, the less discussion the better until Lindley knew why. He leaned forward, all puzzlement and enquiry to bypass the subject. ‘But how the devil did you get that recording? Surely Security can’t be bugged?’
‘If by “bugged” you mean counter-wired, it can’t. Not without swift discovery. But we receive duplicate tapes of things worth attention. Miss White was not the only innocent agent in the barrack; with epidermal drugs the possibilities of control are limitless.’
And, Lindley thought, freedom of action is impossible … so progress eats its young and civilisation becomes monolithic – and freezes … and I have come home in time to see the end begin.
He suggested, feeling his way, ‘Yet substitution and murder both failed.’
‘And last night,’ David informed him expressionlessly, ‘the clone failed again in an attempt to seize control of Columbus. We needed the ship as a – a bargaining factor. You know its capacities for good and evil.’
‘But they failed, you say.’
Beloved Son Page 24