‘We think Raft predicted the move.’ He paused for reaction, received none and explained patiently, ‘Security knows little about violence because it has never been attacked on equal terms; it thinks only of giving orders on an ethical basis and seeing them obeyed on a culturally conditioned one. Security, meaning Campion in this country, can’t think in real terms, so we think your Albert is thinking for him.’
Lindley prodded ironically, ‘So you are about to offer me a job. The enemy has an unfair tactical advantage, so you feel the need of an adviser who knows how Albert thinks. But I see no reason to tie myself to you rather than another.’ David merely closed his eyes, prepared to wait. ‘First I want some answers. Was Albert hurt?’
‘Untouched. Jackson died.’
‘The old Ombudsman? Pity; he was good in his way.’
‘What way? Do you mean that stupidity is not culpable?’
‘Point taken. Still, I’m sorry he died because of us. Why the hell did she do it?’
David opened his eyes. ‘I don’t know what she had in mind – if anything, I think it was idiot revenge and nothing else. She had lost self-control. It was John who raised the clone and conditioned them and taught them his naïve philosophy, and unfortunately he taught them to revere her. You see, he was once her lover, though his present version doesn’t know that yet and she isn’t interested in reminding him. Then he became senile and incapable and we decided to clone him and attempt the memory transfer procedures; he was of no other use as he was. It was only when she emerged as controller of the clone that mania showed its shape. We didn’t take her seriously; who the devil would imagine a raving nymphomaniac trying to undermine the world system with a brotherly love campaign? When she graduated to universal love via violence and drugs it was time to stop her. But how?’
Lindley said disgustedly, ‘Shoot her.’
‘With what?’
‘Are you saying you have no weapons?’
‘Why should we? This is a biological laboratory complex and was never meant for anything else.’
Lindley laughed till he wept. The situation was beyond rational credence; he stopped when breath failed and he doubled in pain. David was furiously unamused but he could not transmit to him the monstrous humour of a memory-snarled scientist’s ex-popsy planning world revolution without weapons and a mystically befuddled clone for insurgent army.
David said sharply, ‘Straighten your ideas. She’s mad but she’s not a fool; she got weapons when she needed them. Not here, because the clone wouldn’t stand for it; they were raised to believe they could conquer the planet with soft words and a gentle smile. But they didn’t feel called upon to interfere with the violence of others. Those men have had forty years of conditioning from The Lady’s manipulative experts – your type, Lindley – and they can believe black’s white without blinking.’
Frighteningly, it was a practical psychological paradox. Lindley murmured restlessly, ‘Six impossible things before breakfast,’ and saw David’s incomprehension. ‘Forget it; go on.’
‘When she opened the hypno-drug offensive the clone became recruiting agents; it was all for the eventual good of the people, you see. So, if she wanted something done she could arrange for outsiders to do it; the clone drugged them as temporary recruits and their ethic didn’t even quiver. She built the thing into an octopus of a group, tentacles everywhere – people like Alice White, believing they were revolutionaries, absorbing all manner of bizarre dogma and doing dirty work the precious clone couldn’t bring itself to touch. The short-term hypno-raids when Columbus arrived were sheer impudence; perhaps she thought they would reinforce confusion but she also thought she had the game in her hands. She damned nearly did.’
‘I don’t see it.’
‘If it hadn’t been for Raft’s rogue-conditioning the attempt to replace Campion would have worked.’
‘Even so, one man!’
‘The right one. Within hours he would have neutralised Security by dispersing operative Techs all over the country on fake alerts from the hypno-groups, who at the same time would have caused diversions enough to tie up the city police, the only other source of weapons. Simple then to arrest the Prime Minister and announce a pro tem government on public TV. Add the clone, coming into the open, preaching The Lady’s revolution and creating a hypno-puppet every time a wafer touched bare skin. The fifteen to twenty-five age group constitutes a third of the responsible population and their elders will as often as not do what the kids want because the ethic is that tomorrow is for the young – that pro tem cabinet would roll into office on sheer enthusiasm. If you suspected half what I know about adolescent restlessness you’d see that it could have succeeded on simple hysteria.’
‘And in the morning Security would have come home with blood in its eye and upturned the whole works again.’
‘How? With public backing of the new cabinet, Security couldn’t touch the situation. It would be an internal quarrel, a family affair.’
‘Dear Jesus!’
‘Ethics as the philosopher’s bastion and the bandit’s weapon! With the Melbourne Town youngsters on top and enough TV noise and hypno wafers, the country rolls over paralysed while the new order moves into gear.’
‘And tomorrow the world?’
‘Why not? But your Albert buggered the play in a manner nobody could have foreseen.’
‘So she decided to kill him, and only succeeded in bringing Albert down on the side of Security. What now, with every play blocked?’.
David made a brushing-off gesture. ‘The clone reacted with something like a mass neurosis when you let it out that she had tried to have their template murdered; they hadn’t been directly involved in that and hadn’t known the purpose. So she lost her entire operating force in a matter of seconds. She’s finished.’
‘And you?’
‘The clone is loyal to John and I think the new John will see reason. He’s been out of the thing during the regrowth period, if he was ever really in it, and doesn’t know much about these events.’
‘Don’t you want to be emperor of the Earth?’
‘Either you’re mad or you think I am. I want to stay alive.’
‘Who threatens?’
‘Security.’
Lindley shook his head. ‘Why? You don’t seem to have been willingly involved. Duress. They’ll be rescuing you.’
David’s smile came from the heart of winter. ‘Revolutionary Gangoil may be a joke, but Gangoil itself is not. This complex was built to take secrets literally underground, by a government that fell to pieces and vanished. They hoped Gangoil would survive bombing but it survived the entire Collapse and the secrets are still here.’ He added thoughtfully, ‘They aren’t quite the secrets they buried; we’ve had forty years or so to work on them. If Security smells out what is in the basement laboratories they’ll close us down and destroy our records.’ His smile shook a little. ‘And probably find excuse to kill the lot of us.’
Lindley stood, stretched, said, ‘Then you’re as good as dead. Now they know Gangoil exists, they’ll find you.’
‘Yes.’
‘This, I think, brings us back to the job you are offering me.’
David’s uncontrollable face jerked; he was frightened and desperate but what he wanted seemed to Lindley a reasonable need in the circumstances. ‘Raft has great influence with Campion if he cares to exercise it; I need it on the side of Gangoil. You in turn can influence Raft where I doubt if anyone else could. Given his backing we might survive.’
Lindley was sure of himself now. ‘What’s in the basement?’
‘The future.’
‘Heathcotian man?’
David attempted impassivity but his face was a nervous tic. Lindley sat on the edge of his desk, grinning down as he called the play.
‘You offer me the job of courier between two disorganised rabbit warrens. Why should I work for you? What can you offer that Security can’t top? What have you that can buy my loyalty? The future? You have
n’t even a decent present to build on. Take me to the basement. If I like your future …’
He let it hang.
David fumbled in a drawer, shut it, put his hand to his mouth and swallowed. Lindley realised belatedly that the man fought physical exhaustion; he must have been labouring nonstop to obtain an orderly decision in this shattered complex of faction and failure.
Chapter Six
Idealists at Work
As dynastic Chinese worshipped their ancestors, so the present dynasties of the West are inclining towards descendant-worship … Rightly, we begin to fear about the sort of world we are bequeathing our grandsons.
Brian W. Aldiss: The Shape of Further Things
1
Raft insisted on going alone into Town Centre. He preferred not to be professionally told what he looked at, but to observe and enjoy and casually stop the passer-by for information.
Since Campion had confirmed, over protest, that the man must not feel himself observed, this created perplexities for his guardians, requiring far too many men in civilian dress for a simple surveillance behind and before, carefully unnoticeable, passing him from hand to hand.
Still in black overalls he stepped into summer sunlight out of an enamel sky; summer at least had not changed. He needed a gesture, a raising of hands to smooth the light over face and shoulders; if others had not been coming and going he might have done it. But in St Kilda Road, with its island lawns and quadruple avenue of trees, excitement took him. He walked in a state close to hallucination, breathing air remembered from paradise, wondering at grass and flowers grown from dreamstuff, tempted to return the laughter when a kookaburra derided the world from overhead.
When had anyone last heard a kookaburra laugh in the city? Chalk it up to the new men that they had brought back something of the real world.
Like a boy he had energy begging release. He broke into a run, regardless of stares, until sweat and breathlessness and the drag of Earth slowed and halted him. He sat on the grass verge, feet in the gutter, red-faced, panting and full of life.
Some kids in early teens galloped over the grass strip in the middle of the road, playing a game involving the passing, on the run, of red and white balls in a rapid cross-fire pattern he would have thought too complex for spontaneous sport. Their faces were intent and calculating; perhaps it was not so spontaneous.
They stopped when they saw him. He supposed that an insane Security Tech snorting like a grampus in the gutter made a break in a routine day, but he was not prepared for one boy to cross the traffic lane and approach him with grave courtesy to ask, ‘Are you all right, sir?’
Sir, indeed! The archaic courtesy made him uncomfortable, but though the boy might have been thirteen his expression was formidably adult, with nothing soap-opera cute about the grownupness. Jackson had said that the kids still had a childhood, and that energetic game had seemed some sort of evidence; but they had a forced life as well and the sign of it peered from this cool face. He felt constricted, unable to be outgoing, to smile; he was too conscious of appraising stares and of the pre-packaged adulthood in all of them.
He said as amiably as he could that he was all right and the boy replied with his intolerably perfect manners, ‘I hope I don’t sound foolish, offering advice to a Security officer, but I think you should lie on your back and follow through a relaxation procedure.’
It was blackly funny but Raft dared not laugh. ‘It’s nothing; I just haven’t got my g-legs back yet.’
The boy caught on at once. ‘You’re that one? I am honoured to meet you.’ But he wasn’t really surprised or impressed, merely polite. ‘Was it horribly boring out there?’
‘No; not really.’ And they had nothing more to say to each other.
Jackson, you lied. The kids have been short-changed. Or is it possible you believed the nonsense you told me?
The encounter bled some splendour from the day; he walked to the edge of Town Centre through a sweaty Melbourne summer, dissatisfied and depressed, until he came to the river and a memory preserved – Princes Bridge.
It was little changed – the disused tram tracks remained sunk in the surface though the overhead power lines had gone – nearly two centuries old but at last empty of packed, sounding, stinking traffic. A few bicycles crossed it, a few transport vans, a few pedestrians. When he looked over the water, to the far bank where the city towers had heaved and crowded, he wondered that anyone crossed it at all.
The new Melbourne Town had been built on the near bank, stretching south on his left over what had been a factory area. The fortress-like National Gallery still stood at its border, stark without the needle spire which had been razed for its ribs and priceless copper sheathing. The grey building brooded over the spreading, low-built heart of a lively country town.
On the other side of St Kilda Road the complex of Domain gardens still reached down the river bank and up the hill, changed from his memory of it, replanted and redesigned, but part of his past.
Across the river –
They had destroyed it, smashed it down, taken what they wanted and left the rest in rubble, forty city blocks of shapeless and heartless trash heaps of brick and concrete, plaster and tile and splintered glass. Vaguely he had expected that the area would have been cleared, but there had been too few people and all of them too busy for the gigantic garbage operation; they had not had leisure for disposal of millions of tons of rubbish and possibly nowhere to put it. There is little to be done with a dismantled city save leave it to time.
Perhaps it was intended some day to attack the vast eyesore, for a single clear street had been left through the ruins, keeping open the road to Sydney on the north side. And two buildings remained intact; at the far end of the bridge the twin spires of St Paul’s Cathedral kept Gothic dignity, and further away the saucer dome of the Public Library crouched like an old sea monster on the skyline. Some remembering Ombudsman had insisted that not all the past be destroyed, that something must remain to speak of origins, and they had allowed him these.
Raft had known, as all his generation had known, that their gluttonous, ravaging world must end, and soon, but the cold shame of the garbage pile was more than he could stand. There would be no crossing of the bridge to wander amongst memories. They had seen to that.
He turned left into the new town, the little, bustling, growing, self-satisfied country centre.
He had no trouble locating the shops named on his purchase orders and did not know that he was served by plainclothes Security men cursing secondment as counter-jumpers, or that everything he bought passed through a third pair of hands which inserted what might have been fine lengths of metallic thread invisibly into seams. He did not yet appreciate how completely microphones and transmitters – and even cameras and electronic weapons – could be miniaturised in almost any form by technicians with access to a forte-fed, information-hunting technology.
He was unsure of the conventions governing the startling personal tastes around him and settled for familiar grey shirt and shorts for immediate wear. Then they packed up his uniform and the rest of his purchases for delivery to the barrack and left him to wander.
In the street he was lonely; he needed someone sharing common attitudes. His submerged worry for Lindley surfaced briefly, but you don’t kidnap in order to kill out of hand, and in this day torture had been superseded. The concern languished because it could not lead to action, but it troubled his depths.
What could teach him most in the shortest time? The man who had lived eight years without knowledge of the world took minutes to recall a simple fact of life, the newspaper. He had not seen one in the barrack; it was a typical arrogance that Security, with its sophisticated information sources, paid little heed to a public press it assumed could only be less well informed than itself.
Where to get it? In this main street, shop-lined and busy with bicycles and pedestrians, he had not seen a recognisable news agency or a newsboy or a news stall. He was a hick from the stars who did n
ot know civilised usage.
Covertly he scanned people, as if one face might tolerate his ignorance more than another, and realised what had been subliminal before – that most of them recognised him. He had been photographed by what he had assumed to be news cameras on the day of arrival, and forgotten it, and these people were conscious of him – or perhaps they merely noted the remarkable likeness to a known public figure; in any case they neither stared nor flicked glances but with universal politeness left him his privacy. It did nothing to soothe his diffidence; he was still the new boy at school, fearful of unknown codes.
Gathering bravado he fixed on the oldest man in sight, still younger than himself. And was stopped by a familiar voice. ‘Lost something, Commander?’
It was the waiter from the barrack dining-room, dressed today in simple white shirt and kilt, Joe who had shown a flash of curiosity on the night Jackson died and thereafter remained the self-effacing steward, Joe unexpectedly friendly with his smile and touch on the shoulder.
Raft was instantly alert, perhaps unreasonably – and perhaps reasonably in the land of smooth surfaces and jagged depths. He said, ‘I think it’s me I’ve lost somewhere in the last forty years.’
He guessed Joe would be seventeen, like dozens of those hallucinated kids questioned after the raid. He had heard that the boy studied as a major subject something not quite graspable in the application of cryogenics to molecular information storage; his work in the barrack was a scholar-duty which helped pay for (or perhaps simply justify, in the hair-fine ethical reasoning of the day) his tutoring. Physically he was tallish and muscular, which seemed typical of the youngsters; the second generation had not starved, and Raft felt that their physical well-being had been cherished with dedication.
He saw, with a sense of discovery, that the new generation was a special entity and recognised as such, almost a separate species. No one spoke of kids or youngsters but of the kids and the youngsters, referring to a defined group within the body of society but also beyond it. He recognised the force of the unspoken consensus that tomorrow belonged to the new generation; the first cobbled together a basic world for the second to shape and develop. Even self-contemplating Security understood that; it was too well understood to require emphasis and until this moment had not touched his mind.
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