‘Never underestimate God as a publicity gimmick. Mysticism always looks like a gate to greener pastures.’
Despite Parker’s open contempt for a deliberate vulgarity he was sure that both of them would absorb the suggestion.
Parker, never satisfied that human beings would do what was expected of them, waited a quarter of a minute before he checked that Raft was not listening from the corridor.
Then, ‘Beloved son,’ he said. It was a question.
‘I don’t know. Some joke-reference so deeply buried it could emerge only under question. His sense of humour is mordant. Perhaps a sneer at biology; he detests biologists.’
‘I also. Is he your father? The likeness is too close for a grandson; it would be a one in a million chance.’
‘In any sane probability it’s too close for a son. The million to one chance has come off. His “grandfather” is only a guess, perhaps no more than an expression of his need for contact in an alien world.’
‘He doesn’t strike me as one who needs people so long as he has Albert.’
‘Prejudice.’
Parker said bluntly, ‘He’s a psychopath.’
‘That has begun to show since the therapy session, but it can be ironed out when the clinic has time; it isn’t urgent while they treat the kids Gangoil has maimed. And “psychopath” doesn’t mean “mad”; in fact he’s been very useful to me in clearing my thinking.’
‘You like him well.’ The tone of reproof inferred that Campion had no right to the attachment.
‘Why not? You like people in spite of their deficiencies; you admire perfections but you don’t love them.’
Parker wondered did he know about the murder of Fraser, but this was not the time for wrangling. He could not refrain from sniffing, ‘I am not a sentimental man.’
Campion, who equated religious dedication with sentiment and in any case found Parker’s religiosity something of a jesting paradox, kept his smile to himself. ‘Albert has served a purpose; we can forget him for the time being.’
Parker would not forget Albert, and he intended to seek methods of removing a man capable of paranoid murder, but it would pay now to consolidate this improbable alliance. He had no illusion what they were about; he had forced this meeting for the plotting of treason on an ultimately global scale, and Campion was willing. So, to business.
‘Gangoil is an excavation in the heart of Mount Bogong, built by the last of the old federal governments to house Heathcote and his research teams. Canberra is gutting Archives for clues, but nothing has come up yet. We have picked up some of their men, drivers and ’fly pilots. Under question they know nothing useful; they’re simply used and kept under control. Some of them have reached a point where reality and post-hypno orders are moving into a double-vision view of the world which they accept because both visions seem rational – schizophrenics with realities successfully merged. The clinics will love sorting that lot out.’
‘Unfortunately they will love it; too many of us live for our jobs and never look at the jobs from an outside standpoint.’
‘You’ve been looking at yours?’
‘For some days. Go on.’
‘We still don’t know what the place was built to hide.’
‘Heathcote’s clone?’
Parker snarled impatience. ‘Was that important? Do you believe it?’
‘No. I know it wasn’t so. I’ve had a man combing the scientific literature of the time. In 1990 cloning was not a confidential research; the possibility had been a commonplace for some years and a dozen research groups were racing to be first to clone a human being. Heathcote won, apparently by accident as much as intention; he seems to have been regarded as a mediocre talent with luck and a first-class team. No, it wasn’t the clone.’
‘So?’
Their eyes fenced. Campion said, ‘I’ll trade my idiot guess for yours.’
Parker replied instantly, ‘Telepathy.’
‘No trade. We agree.’
‘Raft says not, and I believe he thinks not.’
‘So do I.’
‘There’s no real evidence, only that sensitivity of the clone, but what else can it mean?’
Campion eased his whole body minutely, stretching muscles in their casts, twisting his frame where he could in his comfortless chair. He said with a gasp of pain and relief, ‘I’ve had a couple of clone-brothers under question.’ Parker cocked his head. ‘Limit question.’
‘Illegal.’
‘Towards whom? According to the census printout they don’t exist.’ He paused, but Parker was not touched by cynicism. ‘Do you know it took me half a day of mental wrestling to break the ethic and order it? Once it was done I felt I could break every convention we live by, just for the devil of it.’
Parker knew the exaltation; he had crashed through that hedge of thorns years before. He commented, ‘You and I are already on our way to being the kind of people the world will have to protect itself against. What did you get out of them?’
‘Nothing. They don’t believe in telepathy either. Perhaps it’s rudimentary and they don’t know what they are doing, but if you could sit with a crowd of them and hear one suddenly speak for all …’
In the silence of agreement they contemplated a human possibility whose implications reduced all their gadgetry to scrap.
Chapter Seven
The Basement of Gangoil
I the heir of all the ages, in the foremost files of time.
Tennyson: Locksley Hall
1
In the terrain of strong visual dreams, with submerged truths shouting where the mouth would not whisper …
… he addressed a vast crowd in a vast space. It was not clear who they were, or where, but only the voice mattered, his voice …
‘… in a life where all privacy is void, where thought itself prints sparkling on a spool—’
‘Sparkling’ was beautiful. It meant – oh, the meaning was to be felt rather than understood.
‘—where nothing of you stirs but is recorded—’
Now a change of rhythm; hard prose. And he seemed to be speaking of something else. No matter.
‘Ombudsmen promised a new heaven and a new earth, but where did they hide them while the ethic dreamed?’ The sigh of raw breathing was his hold on them made manifest. ‘The ethic protected killers while they killed my friends. My friends!’ He gathered his superb anger to shout, ‘I am a jealous God!’
Ian’s face swam in the mass. With simple will he flooded the boy with light and turned all enslaved eyes to see.
He cried, ‘This is my beloved son!’ and boomed out genial and genuine laughter, allowing them to comprehend that he both loved and owned, and finished the quotation in a burst of triumph, ‘Hear ye Me!’
And woke in a sweat of terror, with a sense of having trodden a precipice – and fallen.
The dream vanished in physical distress. Details faded. Something remained of vast sound and anger and an irrational conviction that a clamour in his deepest mind had been outrageous and wrong. He did not commonly remember dreams and was not given to nightmares; not since Fraser had there been phantoms to shake him into sweat.
But it was morning and the time to dwell on what the day might bring.
Bring something it would. Joe was an innocent but that young Peter, the expert with quick thoughts and rapid speech, had more than sociology on his mind. Raft would be disappointed with less than an attempted kidnapping. With the joke-like Lady in the limbo of the over-zealous and with John in charge, Gangoil needed him.
Just as he needed John … who would now be a very old man.
But there would still be room for the homing starman in that ancient tenderness.
2
Joe the Innocent believed with Poe that the obvious is the unnoticeable and, in 2032, he was possibly right. The note at Raft’s breakfast setting read: ‘Gate. 0900. J.’ and nobody at the table queried what in a subversion-alert 1990 would have evoked at least an obliquely searchi
ng comment – his relationship with a civilian employee.
From the gate he watched heavy cloud scud in from the west, weighting the air, enclosing the heat, threatening half-darkness by day. I had forgotten the smell and feel of rain. A few bullet drops, ranging shots, did not deceive a man who knew his Melbourne weather; the downpour would hold back until humidity and tempers reached trigger-touch, then in moments swell the gutters to flash flood. Against the unholy competence of man a few traits of nature defied change.
Joe was waiting for him – and waiting, no doubt, like all his peers for his chance at running the world so eagerly prepared for him. Joe and peers would learn soon enough that what waited for them was involvement in nightmare. But the kids had always been used to fighting the wars; that was youth’s place in history.
‘You’re the one,’ Joe was saying, ‘who can see this time from the outside, not caught up. That’s why the kids look to you; they want to know what you see when you look at the world.’
Did gadgeteer Peter want that? He thought not. He said, ‘I see a lot of indiscriminate violence.’
Joe took time to realise what he meant. ‘That’s a funny one. There’s always brawling among the brat types, but you expect that.’
… expect it …
How did they see it? Young blood, rising sap – those hardy excuses? Would they understand that dragooned, channelled intelligences sought outlets from repressions that had no easy psychiatric names? That revolt could be so disguised by the ethic of laissez faire that its very presence went undetected? Even the most primitive communities had not tolerated extreme outbreaks amongst their young, but neither had they suffered the modern pressures that caused them. Increasing sophistication and intellectualisation grew ever more complex blinkers.
And this repressed but articulate, confident but emotional, educated but ignorant material was tailored for Campion’s and Parker’s visions. All the young Joes, open-minded with the naïve hunger that gulps without question, would follow nose-to-tail like the marching caterpillars. Roll up, suckers – but it’s a shame to take your money.
Guidance would be needed. Strong, unswerving, clear-sighted guidance.
The bus arrived with Peter whistling and gesticulating from a window, very much the high-spirited youngster at play.
It was a regular public transport vehicle carrying passengers whose glances flickered over Raft, recognised the publicised features and flickered away in that agreement on privacy as discomforting as a frank stare. Their presence spoiled his intention of a barbed dialogue loosed on the boys, and the necessity for small talk irked his impatience to be doing.
The bus turned left into the old Princes Highway. That name still, with all royalty long perished … or had some Ombudsman cherished a dream of orb and sceptre? No archetype was impossible where a huge democracy had collapsed into communism and the communist empire had withered away into a puritan theocracy.
He restrained a bursting surge, as if within him another cried for light and air; he focused his will to a stringent determination on absorbing and understanding.
The grass strips and trees flaunted the high green of summer; they had been preserved but the power lines had been torn down and the road’s edges petered uncertainly at the footpaths where screens of trees concealed the decay beyond. In glimpses through gaps he decided that the destroyers had not rumbled their bulldozers and lasers and explosives through this area because it had been purely residential and not worth mass plundering. The houses had been screened off to rot. How much history, tradition and knowledge was crumbling because neither the time nor the manpower could be spared to save them?
The bus halted, he judged about three miles up the road. Peter said, ‘Out, fellers,’ and they were standing on a disintegrating, weed-penetrated footpath while the bus whipped silently on its way.
A few huge raindrops burst at their feet.
There was a sheet-iron fence, head-high, which once had been painted and now was a tatter of rust hanging from wooden posts and runners; behind it an enormous pittosporum hedge blocked the view, its mirror leaves clouded with summer dust. A gate had been knocked down or fallen down and been dragged aside; it opened on what had been a gravel path and was now a meander of small weeds and grasses through the tall desolation of a one-time garden.
To the right, beyond another ruined fence, rose a church, its grounds tended, itself plainly in use. Ahead of them was what once had been the church hall, its grounds overgrown, itself plainly out of use.
Peter said, ‘There are lots of these old halls. We use them. Nobody cares.’
Like kids of yesterday playing secret societies in deserted houses. ‘And old churches, obviously furbished and attended?’
‘Plenty. The Christ crowd look after them. They really mean this religion gimmick.’
Some cared about Christ and some about tomorrow; the kids cared about their grievances and their elders cared about their ethical rectitude. But nobody cared about the totality of the world; that was Security’s business.
Because nobody cared, you could plot empires to ruin in the middle of the street and probably at the top of your voice.
He knew what he would find in the mouldering hall – a floor for dancing and games, a tiny stage for concerts and the local amateur group, a store room for pews and seats and ping-pong tables and sporting gear, a pantry for tea-making and washing up, but mostly empty space waiting to be decorously filled – the parish hall the world over.
Lightning flashed, the air stilled expectantly for the thunder, and when it came the rain came with it, a dense, warm outpouring from the burst bag of sky.
They ran.
It was Joe, laughing and whooping in the rain, who threw open the door and stopped dead.
Raft, peering over his shoulder, saw Lindley’s face and knew he had guessed dead centre. He pushed Joe inside. ‘Get in, lad.’
The boy hung back, gasping, ‘It’s a trap!’
‘And I’m the eager mouse.’ He turned to Peter, who had hung back. ‘You too, young Judas. Inside.’
Peter muttered sulkily, ‘Nobody’s going to harm you.’
‘You bet they aren’t. They wouldn’t dare now.’
The appearance of the hall fulfilled Raft’s dreary projection. The youngsters who used it for their intellectual spasms – bull sessions, he substituted unkindly – had made some attempt at tidiness but the windows were grime-dark and the rotting floor would not be danced over again.
The human furnishings were more exotic.
Behind a small table in front of the curtainless stage sat a dark, thin man whose receding chin suggested weakness and whose eyes suggested authority. On either side, two right, two left, stood impassively alert clone-brothers; identically dressed in khaki shirts and trousers, they resembled marvellously modelled dummies.
There were none of the promised youngsters, but they had been only the bait of Peter’s rapid extemporising.
Behind them all, Lindley sat on the stage apron, long legs swinging cheerfully, essential boniness exaggerated by his dress of singlet, shorts and sandals. He lifted his hand in casual salute.
‘Hello, Albert.’
Nobody else moved.
Then Raft dragged Peter forward by the scruff of the neck and asked Joe, ‘Did it not occur to you that someone amongst your acquaintance must almost surely be a Gangoil puppet? The sin of this age is innocence.’
Joe lunged across him and connected once, crackingly, before Raft pushed him back. ‘Not his fault, Joe; it was done to him. It could have been you.’ Peter dabbed his bleeding mouth silently. Raft stared at the silent man at the table. ‘And who can question anyone’s loyalty with every one of you whittling at your own beliefs, night and day? Minds have to be made up.’
The man at the table smiled briefly and some tension eased from his stillness. Raft let Peter go and walked down the hall. He nodded to Lindley. ‘Hello, Jim.’
The clone-brothers exchanged their instantaneous glances and one spo
ke. ‘You are welcome, Albert.’
‘Shut up. You are of no importance. You never were.’
‘That is rancorous and untrue.’
Raft ignored them but addressed Lindley while he indicated the man at the table. ‘Who’s this rabbit?’
The dark head jerked and an extraordinary cinema film of emotions – shock, anger, mortification, self-restraint – merged in a revelatory tic. It was enough momentarily to distract attention, but in the background Lindley thought he recognised the role-playing Raft of Columbus and took the cue. ‘Commander Raft, meet Doctor David, head rabbit of the Gangoil biological warren.’
David’s mobile face contracted in instant agony of betrayal as he heard Lindley change sides before the game was properly opened.
Raft stared down at him. ‘What do you want?’
David did his best, as his planned approach collapsed around him, to answer coolly, ‘It is a question of balance of power, Commander,’ and got no further.
‘Tell me in three sentences or I walk out of here and the police can have you. They’ll get to you soon enough.’
That was a more dire threat than he realised, enough to frighten David into snarling, ‘You won’t walk out, Commander. The clone are as powerful and alert as yourself. As you know.’
Raft smiled at him; in the arc at the apex of his vision Lindley was nodding encouragement, mouthing at him to stay on top. He said genially, ‘But not, I imagine, trained in what we called the martial arts. And the clone does not kill. I will kill. With my hands and quickly.’ He felt he could slaughter these dummies without qualm, in sheer disgust.
The dummy faces twitched slightly in controlled hints of angry contempt. A spokesman murmured, ‘We don’t welcome death but we don’t fear it.’ He spoke as if explaining to a child. ‘With the seeds of immortality available in John’s laboratories, with even memory carrying on unbroken, why should we?’ Raft’s scalp crawled to an understanding of how far the Gangoil dreams had progressed, and Lindley’s solemn nod assured him of epochal truths. ‘And while you kill one, others will restrain you. You must come to Gangoil, Albert.’ With sleight of hand a small syringe appeared between his fingers and disappeared again into his palm.
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