‘Perhaps he’s found Gangoil.’
Campion’s eyes sparkled. ‘It doesn’t matter now.’
‘It matters. Everything matters. Get the stars out of your eyes, boy! Our family doesn’t have the stuff that makes evangelists.’
No? Raft would learn.
3
Heathcote possessed a gun. This unlikely property was probably the only lethal weapon in Gangoil, if one discounted the Bitch’s collection of romantically jewelled daggers filched from round the world.
He kept the abominable thing because it was connected vaguely with Albert, belonging to a memory sequence not yet restored,’ one of the sequences of no importance to David and his mind-fornicators; all they wanted was the detail, down to the last flush of thought, of his experimental and theoretical work so that no nuance should go unexplored in their basement of miracles. That he, old and young and incomplete, wanted his life returned was of no moment.
The gun must once have belonged to Albert, he supposed, to wrong-headed, loved and angry Albert. And now dead Albert. For whose killer hell would gape.
Old John opened the drawer occasionally but he never touched the gun.
Young John, however, was not settled into prejudice and aged fastidiousness. He took it out occasionally, appreciating it for a beautiful thing in its repellent way. His imperfect memory could not recall any weapon like it in what he thought of as the ‘Albert period’ of earlier life (and did not too often think of because Old John would obtrude doddering emotionalism) but the connection with Albert dated it.
It was not an ordinary gun. It was long-barrelled, like the Mausers which he did remember, and had a blade foresight and a ring rearsight but, inexplicably, no range slide. It was much thicker in the barrel than the fifteen-millimetre bore required. Set in the circle of the muzzle was an annulus of what seemed to be soft iron, but the main portion was, he felt sure, aluminium. Which was ridiculous. And the bore was unrifled, which was more ridiculous still.
So, possessing as it did a bulbous but hand-fitting butt, the thing was grossly unbalanced; such a weapon must be nearly recoilless if it were to hit anything aimed at, but he had never tested it, any more than he had fiddled with the unusual group of thumbcatches set in the butt.
He was innately scared of weapons. At most he would lift the little monster from its drawer, using both hands in cradle, and deposit it carefully on the writing slide of his rolltop desk – and look at it, admiring beautiful workmanship and revolted by the implications of murder.
He did not wish to know its secrets. If he learned how, he would undoubtedly kill Her; he, most civilised of men, would join the brutes.
He extended a finger, pushing it round to view it from another angle, mourning and wondering how it had come to him and what was its connection with dead Albert …
… when a voice spoke behind him, ‘Fancy you keeping that all this time.’
His hands flew to his mouth in an old man’s gesture of shock and the breath drew sharply in his suddenly old throat.
Lindley – the starman bringer of death news – reached past him, took up the little monster in his right hand, cradling the barrel on his left forearm, applying his eye to the ring-sight, saying, ‘It’s a sweet thing, the last word in sidearms,’ laying it down again, smiling with a wolf’s happiness, saying, ‘A breath of yesterday; something from home.’
Old Heathcote whimpered, ‘What are you doing here? It was unmannerly to enter unannounced.’
The wolf said, ‘I didn’t want to be announced. This call is private.’
‘You are no gentleman! Sir, to invade—’ He could not go on; he was dimly terrified that the gun’s existence must now become public knowledge.
The wolf took him by the shoulders, shaking, shaking. ‘Come to your senses! Bring the young John forward!’
Old John could only gape in anger and fear.
‘Listen, if there’s a brain in your mixture of heads. Albert is not dead. The news was premature. He is alive.’
Old John fainted.
Heathcote’s split-personality problem, Lindley mused as he applied the conventional slapping of cheeks and rubbing of wrists, lay in thinking that he was still himself, which was at least a sprightly variation on the classic definitions. Complicated by an ingrown identification with Victoriana it presented a case which might make a famous monograph despite modern computerised psychology. After all, he could bring to it a background authenticity unique in this century …
Young John pushed him away and sat up. ‘Sorry I made a fool of myself; you shocked me while personality confusion was ascendant.’ He stood, dusting himself finically, still primly precise in his youthful version. ‘It is difficult to realise always that I am not John Heathcote but only contain him. Or much of him, not all. Are you sure?’
‘Of Albert? Quite sure. David should have told you.’
Heathcote turned suspicious. ‘Have you talked with David? He is an evil man. And tells me nothing. I am only a memory-transfer experiment, a guinea-pig caged and fed. Not talked to.’
With his eyes on the gun Lindley said, ‘He’s not so bad. Too dedicated perhaps, but at least he’s not out to rule the world and he has some protective feeling for his staff.’
Young Heathcote snapped, ‘Who would wish to rule the idiotic planet? Even the Bitch did not really want that; she wanted the forms – adulation and wealth and choice of men; ruling would have bored her and exposed her incompetence.’
‘She tried to take over Melbourne Town and through it Australia.’
Heathcote waved a dismissive hand. ‘She’s pathologically romantic. The Francis catamite has told me something of the Melbourne Town matter.’ He made a furious parenthesis, ‘I am reduced to such informants for the most everyday news!’ and returned to the subject: ‘Someone formed the foolish plan and she embraced it as she would the plot of a romantic novel, seeing herself as Semiramis or Joan of Arc. Vanity engulfs her.’
‘It could have succeeded.’
‘What an extraordinary idea! But she taught the clone their insane philosophy which is beyond my power to reverse—’
‘No. You did.’
Heathcote gabbled, inarticulate in refusal and reproach, stammering down to a breathless, pleading, ‘No!’
Lindley wondered if these lapses into aged helplessness were not a useful diversion the personalities had worked out between them. ‘The clone say you taught them; I’ve spoken with some here though they are not very willing to talk. To them you are the god who created and taught them.’
Heathcote gazed silently, stricken.
‘But it occurs to me that you’ve been some twenty years a-growing and had become senile before that, so the clone you taught were at best teenagers. I think that you brought the kids up in your own tradition of goodwill and human-kindness and that the rest – the inability to recognise right from wrong, the clone arrogance and assumption of inherent superiority – were taught them later. Possibly by The Lady, serving her own cloudy ends. Or even that the boys, left without your guidance and influenced by their own uniqueness, created these ideas logically from their misunderstanding of what you taught, and credited them to you. Gods get blamed for everything, you know.’
Heathcote groaned – like a Trollope hero, Lindley guessed between amusement and irritation. ‘I hope you are right, Doctor Lindley; God grant you are right.’
Lindley wondered who was speaking. Possibly the Warden of Barchester. A change of pace was called for; he asked, ‘Who is The Lady, anyhow?’
Like every other whom he had asked, Heathcote shook his head. ‘She seems always to have been here. That memory is somewhere in my head, waiting for related information to trigger it. My brain does not contain all the synaptic cross-references of the old Heathcote’s; many connections are made only by chance.’
Trigger, Lindley thought; he should try a random shot. Had she created the legend of namelessness herself, guarded by the invaluable clone from being disposed of as an unproductive nuisance?
‘They say you were once her lover.’
The target certainly rattled. Heathcote squealed protest. ‘No! No! No no no! She is repellent! Vile! Who says it, Lindley? Who says it?’
‘David.’
‘That man!’ But his contempt was uncertain; the name troubled him. David was of the older brood who might have heard rumour while it was still truth.
‘He doesn’t strike me as a liar; at any rate, not a scandal-mongering liar.’
Heathcote said mutinously, ‘I loathe the woman; she tried to murder Albert.’
‘But did you always loathe her?’
The confused eyes did not know, and Heathcote was Victorianly rigid in the habit of truth. ‘It could have been so. Her physical type … I am attracted by—’ He drew his face tightly together, finding the dignified phrase, ‘—well-fleshed women.’
From him the statement was positive pornography, with Lindley trying unsuccessfully to visualise a prim, aseptic sexual encounter. ‘But your memory doesn’t stir?’ And, if it did, a gentleman of the old school simply doesn’t discuss …
‘That will require patience. Hours pass, sleep intervenes, associations work in their own time, like dreams. Perhaps tomorrow I shall have gathered recollection from your nodal facts. And perhaps not. But tell me about Albert; those are memories I urgently wish to recover.’
‘He was thought dead, and lives. That’s all I know.’
Heathcote became imperious, not ridiculously but like a man who could call on power. ‘He must be brought here.’
‘How?’
‘The clone, the clone! In concert they can achieve anything, no matter how prepared Security may be. They will want Albert, their clone-father. His rejection of them was traumatic.’
The damned clone! ‘Have you spoken with them in the last few days? Has no one told you?’
‘What?’
‘That the clone is a spent force. Security has eighteen of them and is alive to their ideas and capabilities. And Albert works for Security, circumventing them.’ He said gently. ‘All the dreams are over. That stupid and vicious woman precipitated disaster. There is nothing left to do but bargain for terms from Security; David knows better than to trust the national politicians.’
Heathcote accepted that with surprising equanimity; Lindley could not decide how much he really appreciated the crumbled situation of Gangoil, but the man frowned into his drink and said, ‘There were too many dreams, all vague and I suppose mostly foolish.’
It was an epitaphal comment.
‘What was your dream? Just Heathcotian man?’
Heathcote smiled his tired old-man smile. ‘Albert has many unusual capacities. His reflexes are abnormally fast and accurate – his audial and visual ranges are unusually wide – he has a natural measure of control of some autonomic functions – and his learning capacity is incredible.’
Some of this Lindley had been aware of. Physical control – he had been fascinated by a pianistic ability displaying a staggering exactness of fingering and control and an equally staggering lack of musical understanding. Streich had once described him as a man who could play the Minute Waltz in thirty seconds and might as well spend the time playing scales.
Memory – exact repetition of conversations heard weeks before.
Assimilation – retirement to the library to con an area of interest, and emergence with an avalanche of facts and yet a basic indifference and no deep grasp.
Inertia – no action taken until further inaction would be destructive, the action sudden and efficient … and cold. As when Lindley had pointed out a degenerating situation and within days Albert had become commander of the ship.
Albert played with minor art forms – mini-sculpture and slapdash painting – but only played. What did he want to do? Lindley did not know. What did he want of life? He did not know that either.
The tantalising quotation cut across his musing: ‘My beloved son …’ He sensed a clue but it was too plainly a clue to mental imbalance.
Heathcote still talked – old Heathcote, it seemed. ‘I sent him away, Lindley. To Barnard’s Star. Political blackmail – but that is an old, dead story. I did not want him here as a focus of hate when my work was finally revealed, because the father of the coming race might well be the murder object of those afraid of being supplanted. The people have no scientific vision. It was, in simple terms, a matter of isolating and strengthening genetic components, and a large experimental body was needed. Hence the clone, though eight-three was perhaps excessive, like one’s young enthusiasms. Still, if public anti-reaction occurred there would be a good chance of saving a useful number of them, and Albert’s characteristics would be preserved.’
Lindley considered hopelessly the contradictions possible to the human mind. Albert, love figure, must be saved even at the ends of the universe but all the other Alberts could be thrown to the dogs though each of them was in fact the first Albert. Or was he? Upbringing, environment …
He asked, ‘Are the clone only experiments to you? After all this time, un-people?’
Heathcote’s forehead creased. ‘Intellect tells me they are human beings; to all others they are human beings, but to me … You see, I know. I made them. Made them, Lindley. They are simulacra, facsimiles, laboratory animals. As I am also, yet I have not the feeling for them one has for one’s kind. They are works of art. If one dies, I grieve, as I might grieve for a perfect figurine dropped and broken. But I cannot love them, or care.’
‘But you care that the work goes on, that Heathcotian man is still in preparation.’
‘Is he? I don’t know that. David and his brilliant young men surpassed me long ago; I have not been in the laboratories in this body except as an object of study. I don’t know what new dreams they follow.’ He swung to childishness. ‘Nobody tells me anything!’
Rest ignorant a while longer. You’ll know soon enough the dreams I’ve seen crying on their beds in the basement.
Heathcote continued crisply, assuming youth. ‘Albert was against my work. He held that society obeys evolutionary laws, that the varieties of man are interdependent, forming a psycho-ecological web, and that interference would be disastrous. He feared for my safety much as I feared for his, but he had no alternate Columbus to ship me out on.’
Lindley picked up the monopole gun. ‘Is that why he gave you this? For self-protection?’
‘Did he?’ Heathcote’s face worked; he placed his head in his hands. ‘I cannot force memory; there is a closing of random circuits until one gives a result. How do you know he gave it to me?’
‘He told me. There was time for talk aboard the ship; we knew a lot about each other.’
He hefted the gun reminiscently. It glittered, darkly murderous in the apartment’s subdued light. ‘Only a few of these were made. Prototypes. They probably never reached production stage.’ He spun it and caught it. ‘This is the finest hand weapon ever made; powered by a tiny battery in the butt.’
Heathcote stared, revolted. ‘A battery – after forty years?’
‘It will work, now and in another hundred years. The muzzle ring is monopole iron. Squeezing the trigger powers the monopole and fires the round, which travels in the channel of a rotating monopole field. No trajectory; straight as a beam of light. Sight it and you can’t miss, but I’ve seen Albert pepper a target from the hip at five hundred yards.’
Without warning he tossed the gun to Heathcote, who put out his hands too late and fumbled it. Flushing, he bent to retrieve it gingerly in both hands.
‘ “This is my beloved son”,’ Lindley said. ‘Does that mean anything to you?’
Heathcote peered at him. ‘Mark, nine, seven,’ he said with seminary precision, ‘also Matthew, three, seventeen. Two separate occasions. I do not know if the repetition is coincidental or simply a matter of confusion in the disciples’ memories. I doubt it is exegetically important.’ He put the gun on the desk. ‘Do you feel it might be?’
With restraint Lindley said, ‘Albert used
the words about Ian Campion.’
Heathcote pursed his lips, disapproving. ‘It was unlike Albert to quote scripture. He was being sardonic, of course.’ To Lindley’s interrogative sounds he explained, ‘Well, he must have guessed at once who Campion is. The extreme physical duplication modified only by his daughter’s auburn hair and blue eyes would have alerted him.’
‘A grandson?’
‘With such replication? Both son and grandson. An interesting legal relationship, when you think of it.’ He did not seem aware of outrage.
‘Are you telling me that Albert had Campion by his own daughter?’
Heathcote packed the gun deliberately into the drawer. ‘He knew nothing about it; he had been gone about seven years when I decided to use his sperm-bank cartridge. It was necessary, you know; she had powerful characteristics from her mother which it would have been a crime to lose from the line. The combination turned out magnificent. Raft’s dominants, mated with a girl properly selected for complementary recessives, guaranteed a remarkable child.’ He pushed the drawer gently closed, as if the gun might snap at him. ‘It is a pity she died in the early years. Things were very bad, you know; even in Australia people died as the land sickened. In that chaos who would want to leave Gangoil? Yet she did; she developed great animus because she had not been informed of the mating given her. One does not give such information prematurely to a young mind still astir with prejudice and clouded viewpoint. She stole the boy – and, mother or not, it was stealing – and ran away. When eventually we located him Security already had him in the Youth Barrack and she was dead. And I was past original research. But we have always kept an eye on him, and he has done quite well in worldly terms, hasn’t he?’
He felt the weight of the starman’s silence and complained, ‘You are not disturbed by the incest factor, surely? It is always necessary to breed back occasionally to preserve specific strains, particularly rare recessives. If you had ever bred show dogs you would know.’
Between incredulity and sick-joke laughter Lindley said, ‘I’ll bet the Security Commissioner will love that comparison. Psychiatric practice taught me long ago that the sentimentalist, in matters where his selfish emotions are not involved, can be depended on for solid intellectual intransigence and no mercy or care for those outside his personal circle of slop.’
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