‘Open up,’ Raft said. ‘We’d better be sure it’s Parker.’
David nodded moodily to the pilot and the door gaped.
Raft, stepping out on to the platform of the lift he could see only as smooth soil, felt he moved on a radiant seabed. Indistinct figures solidified at the limit of his vision, darkened and thickened as they approached, became clearly men.
‘Parker?’
A dark column took a pace forward, became familiar in the haze. ‘Commander Raft?’ Always punctilious.
‘Come to see the sights?’
‘As you say.’
‘And keep a restraining hand on Albert?’
‘As you say.’
‘And do I see a bodyguard?’
‘Call it that. Three men, adequately armed. Perhaps excessively, but we shall see.’
‘Wasted preparation, Controller. Gangoil wants only your good will. Shall we enter Aladdin’s cave?’
‘I came for that. Doctor Lindley made it sound most interesting. We, er, met – at the parish hall gate.’
‘And?’
‘I found your appreciation most estimable and sent him on to Campion as you suggested. And I kicked your barrack waiter’s arse as punishment for the sin of naïvety.’
David said peevishly, ‘It is wet and cold out here.’
‘Who’s he?’
Raft made the introduction.
Parker stared into the flinching face. ‘As a biologist you are a global nuisance; as a chief administrator you shall offer us hospitality. How do we get in?’
A clone-brother spoke into a hand mike and the lift eased down into the mountain; it was as if a football ground sank out of the landscape with ’copter and men in a huddle in centre field. It passed the ceiling of the sunken hangar and light flooded in as it dropped into a space to dwarf cathedrals and lit with the profligate brilliance of unlimited power.
Parker and his policemen took in the sight with grim unease, appreciating immense resources. The young men’s impassivity failed momentarily; they made unconsciously reassuring motions at their concealed arms.
They saw – helicopter jets, including two immense transport vehicles, all of old-world design, all well-used and ready for further use
—commercial trucks and personnel transports, duplicates of official originals in use in the outside world, probably built on the spot
—a group of flying machines with folded wings, swathed in plastic whose ground-in discoloration said they had never been unsealed; beneath the covers they probably still carried their packing grease (Parker could not recognise the lines through the sheeting; Raft could – fighter planes, the most modern of his day – Gangoil had fangs unused)
—solo transport of all kinds – bicycles, motor bikes, twentieth-century cars and trucks, even canoes, most seeming little used, probably prepared against anciently conceived eventualities which had vanished in the storms of disease, radio-active dusting and famine.
Gangoil had been designed not only to hide from the world but to make use of the world in its good time.
Parker wondered what had become of the young men assigned and trained to use this material. Dead? Grown old and efficiently disposed of as unproductive consumers?
He said contemptuously, ‘Tinware! Biology – life and murder hand in hand.’ He considered the lift platform and the huge hydraulics below it and the wastrel wattage of lighting and murmured to David, ‘A small nuclear plant? Power to burn?’ David nodded, as much intimidated by the narrow-faced policeman as he had been discomforted by Raft. ‘We must not forget to see your very efficient heat disposal arrangements. I had a satellite take thermal readings and it couldn’t pinpoint the area. You are efficient, in your fashion. I have a swag of your hypnoed people under question—’ David winced ‘—oh, they know precious little; your field organisation also is excellent.’
‘Not mine.’ Eagerly David found an involvement to disclaim. ‘The clone administrates outside operations.’
Parker shifted his smile to Raft. ‘I should have known. The family touch, including the highly individual morality.’
Raft’s glance promised a reckoning, instantly veiled.
At the far end a door opened and a man came unhurriedly towards them; his green shirt and sandals, and shorts the colour of sunflowers, were opulent in the stark hangar. Closer, he emerged as a big man, taller than Raft and slimmer, but plainly powerful. He advanced with the deliberate stride of one who is worth a second glance and intends to get it, but the effect was rendered bizarre by plucked eyebrows and bright green toenails. He favoured the uniformed police with a skilled insolence: ‘Glory be, the cops! It’s a raid!’
David squeaked, ‘Behave yourself, Arthur! Have you a message?’
‘Not exactly, but John is practically pissing himself in anticipation of embracing his Albert and if we don’t produce the boy soon he’ll blow an artery. He really is being a bloody trial.’ His self-possessed gaze sorted them out and fixed on Raft. ‘What a relief that the original isn’t another plaster cast. Nobody will ever mistake you for one of the simultaneous dancers.’
The clone-brothers ignored him – really ignored him, did not admit his existence. Raft asked, ‘How so?’
‘Your face is alive. There’s a man behind it, not a conference.’
‘Thank you.’ He said to David, ‘Take me to John.’ David’s expression said nothing remained in his hands; Raft would do as he damned pleased.
Parker came to life. ‘One moment. You! Arthur!’
Arthur smiled a slow and exquisite insult. ‘Wanting something, policeman?’
David shuddered. Parker grinned like a wolf. ‘What’s your function here? Camp follower?’
‘Please don’t make tired old jokes. I am a member of an experimental clone.’ Even Parker’s control slipped before that hint of demented possibilities and Raft gave a hyena laugh. ‘Shall we go now?’
‘What’s your name?’
‘You know it. Arthur.’
‘Arthur who?’
‘You mean for checking against the census computer in the Town? Now, that’s difficult. You see, my mother was a humidicrib and my father was a set of genetic equations tagged to a flask of nutrient solution. Write me down as one who has had to learn sin instead of being born into it like the rest of you.’
Parker’s frown relaxed as though he actually appreciated this defiant comedy, but his mind had coolly separated from it the unlikely reference and he was not one to lose even a minor opportunity. ‘Are you a Christian?’
Arthur’s insolence softened to a cautious puzzlement.
‘I mean it. I want to know.’
Raft paid unwilling tribute; in a few phrases Parker had projected peace terms and a sincerity which Arthur suppressed his sardonic contempt to recognise and accept.
‘I don’t really know. This isn’t the environment for picking up cult affiliations, but I’ve read the New Testament and there are things in it I like. There’s that – I can’t remember which book, but there’s that part on the mountain, a sort of long sermon. It makes good sense.’
‘The fifth chapter of Matthew makes very good sense. Remember it in the months to come.’ He turned to Raft. ‘I don’t trust you an inch but I can take advice where I find it. God is a good gimmick. Now let’s get on to Heathcote, the young-old man with the imperfect memory.’ (David started, and his gaze rested sourly on Raft’s bugged collar.) ‘It is not given to all of us to goggle at the first exhibits of the imminent destruction of the human race.’
In the startled silence Arthur clapped his hands, slowly, twice. ‘At last somebody has begun to use his brains.’
The clone swung on him in stony anger; David’s twitching glare could have killed him; the police watched them all with hands urging to unseen weapons.
Parker murmured, ‘Cast your bread upon the waters, Commander, and find it snapped up in the most unlikely places.’
Raft urged Arthur away. ‘Let’s get to old John, feller, before this lot
declare open season.’
4
A passenger lift fell with them through floor below floor; only governments could be so profligate. Only a government terrified or paranoid, Parker concluded, could have initiated the monstrous undertaking at all.
He caught passing sight of men and women, mostly of a single age group, the middle thirties, variously dressed, from laboratory smocks to mere decorative swatches. There were a few children, mostly under ten, but few signs of an in-between group. The pattern was plain – the children were the second generation bred in an artificial cultural fragment whose purpose had vanished in disaster and whose pre-occupations had mutated in the eerily self-continent fashion of the isolated.
Eight floors down the lift stopped and the grille opened.
The clone-brothers marched – the only word for their concerted movement – straight down the long corridor ahead of them with David hurrying after. The five outsiders stepped out of the lift, saw what was before them and slowed for curious inspection. Arthur, last out, leaned against the wall, watching them with the patronage of an impresario approving a coup de théâtre.
This corridor was the first they had seen with a carpet, and the warm crimson spread wall to wall for three hundred feet ahead. The light here was not brilliant but diffuse and controlled, not the yellow of indoor lighting but approximating daylight. The light cylinders themselves were clamped to the upper edges of the frames of the paintings which stretched down the whole stunning vista of art.
Parker’s reaction was first and perhaps predictable. ‘Luxury for the brass. Twentieth-century administrative morality.’
His policemen stared without understanding. Twenty-first-century art was either functional or colourfully decorative; they had had no time to assess the aesthetic past or even to look seriously at it.
Some of the canvases were huge, but Raft stopped at one of the smaller ones, some twenty inches high by forty wide, a surge of gold cut by a double ribbon of green, rising into what might have been a sky of impossibly dark blue laid on in heavy impasto, both gold and blue bearing on their surfaces black flying things like stylised bats or a child’s symbolic statement of birds.
Parker stared with him. ‘Some of that stuff – what did they call it? Surreal?’
‘No.’ Gently Raft touched the thickly pigmented surface, muttering, ‘It has to be a copy.’
‘No copies here,’ Arthur told him. ‘Only old masters for the old mistress.’
‘The Lady? She used catastrophe to plunder the world?’
‘You could say that. It was before my time; for me, the stuff’s always been here. Can’t say I care for it.’
Parker looked more closely at the work which had caught Raft’s attention. ‘What’s it supposed to be?’
‘I think it’s called Wheatfield With Crows, and I think it belonged in a museum in Holland.’
‘Wheatfield! Even you didn’t have wheat that colour, or a navy-blue sky. The bloody man must have been mad.’
‘He was. His name was Van Gogh and the progress of his illness can be charted in the handling of the brush strokes. He was one of time’s greatest artists.’
‘But your whole damned world was mad.’
‘Was it? If it helps your opinion, Van Gogh never sold a canvas in his life.’ He thrust his face into Parker’s. ‘But your go-ahead, hell-for-leather, Johnny-come-lately, plaster-and-patch culture has a long leeway to make up in some directions.’
Parker stepped back, refusing the quarrel. Arthur asked, ‘Is he the one who signed everything “Vincent”? They’re different; you can’t help noticing, there are so many. The Lady is very rapt in them. But then she turned out a bit bats above, too, didn’t she?’
Raft regarded him with what Parker saw as the look of yet one more madman. ‘A lot of Van Gogh?’
David, fifty yards ahead, wanted to know what held them up and Raft bawled at him that he wanted to see The Lady, now, this minute.
‘But Professor Heathcote is waiting.’
‘After forty-two years an hour won’t hurt him. I want to see this art-fancying priestess of the drug and clone scene.’
He was too excited to notice David’s kinetoscope performance of surprise, doubt, calculation and decision that the meeting might serve as well now as later.
David turned a corner. ‘Down here.’
Raft hurried, with Arthur after him scenting drama and determined not to miss a bar of it, and prodding, ‘There’s one outside her door she always fancied a bit like her. Wrong colouring, but it is a bit like.’
Raft flung over his shoulder, ‘Van Dyck’s full length of the Countess of Southampton? All draperies and peachy fat flesh?’
‘How did you guess?’
A hysterical edge sharpened the answering laugh. ‘It was hung in the Melbourne Gallery. She’d stand in front of it, loving herself.’ The laughter stopped abruptly; he snapped, ‘Which room?’
‘There.’
Parker, running and shoving through a congestion of clone and police, bellowed, ‘What are you doing?’
Raft ignored him and flung a snarl of contempt at the Countess of Southampton. He leaned an instant on the door, gathering anger to a head, then hammered on it with fists and feet. ‘Open the door, you blazing bitch! Open the door for not so dead Albert!’
An arresting, unnatural sound of outburst matched his through the panel, the voice of a woman whose range could roar like a man’s. ‘Why can’t you die? Must you live for ever?’ Her heavy panting was an animal’s, hunted to a stand; her mouth must have been pressed against the door jamb. ‘Go away! Away!’
The clone fell back in a common decision of neutrality; Parker pointed like a hound, scenting fresh truths; David watched with held breath as a plan exploded in his face.
Raft took a long breath and said with conversational menace, ‘Just open it or I’ll kick it in.’
A fascinated Arthur threw in the advice of the born meddler: ‘It won’t be locked.’
Nor was it. They faced each other with the naked venom of twisted lives.
‘To the stars and back, and here’s Mother waving her handkerchief on the wharf! You might at least have dressed for the occasion.’
Her reply whickered down the long walls – a prolonged reptilian hiss. Yet for once the vulnerable nature of nakedness reached to her, equating with the stripped mind able to hide nothing from the one man to whom her nudity meant nothing; reflexively she cupped her hands before her and took a short pace back.
Raft leaned against the door, ablaze with a spite as bare as her flesh, and sniggered at her.
Behind her, at the back of the scented and cluttered room – posed like escaped caryatids, one each side of the huge, luxurious Tiepolo – stood replicas of Arthur. There was nothing hesitant or unmasculine in their wholly dangerous watchfulness, but Raft’s aggression centred in his mother.
He mocked her. ‘You look so well. Rejuvenation in this world beats resurrection in the next, eh? Think of centuries of bouncing the bedsprings – but not with Dad, I’ll bet. What happened to Dad? New life for him, too? Not if Mama could help it!’
The jeering stiffened her. She unclasped her hands and clenched them at her sides, straining upright for a rigid majesty, head withdrawn to strike, a sculpted rage under a monstrously frizzed, brilliantly red coiffure. She tried to force words from a congested throat. ‘Your father—’
Her face darkened, convulsed. Unable to continue, she spat, and ineffective spittle dribbled on her chin. From the back of the room Francis came to her side, wiped her face, placed a hand on her arm, spoke quietly into her ear, trying to calm her. She swung a closed fist at him without turning her head. He slipped the blow with quick ease, still murmuring.
She calmed appreciably, even managed a wraith of smile and performed a feat of mental acrobatics between deep breaths. He was not deceived; she had always been capable of it.
‘Your father and I separated after you left.’
‘After. It would have been bad p
ublicity before – bad for your career as patron saint of the aborigine cause.’ He took a step into the room and Arthur warned quietly out of hard-earned knowledge, ‘Be careful.’
Parker pushed forward to miss nothing; his impassive young men must have been bewildered by developments but for all they showed might have been another clone.
Raft was asking, ‘But why you? Why should John choose you for the gift of eternal – uh – middle age?’
The light of murder returned to her eyes and was as quickly replaced by a smiling, crafty triumph. For answer she drew her hands right and left across her full breasts and raised them above her head as if to challenge time. She could scarcely have chosen a less appealing, less erotic stance, fists flung up and legs stumpily apart, but she possessed sexual handsomeness, a touch of muted splendour that overrode flesh and muscle. Insane, evil or merely debased by indulgence, she breasted her world with a power of womanliness. If she was aware of watchers bewitched at the door she gave no sign; her victory smile was for Albert alone.
But he knew her; he could laugh. ‘You seduced old John? Really? Got him into bed and played strong-girl Delilah to little Samson? No wonder you wanted Dad out of the way.’ His chuckling turned ugly as he took another step towards her, his voice informed quickly with menace. ‘Did you do that to John? Pervert him and use him? Chisel him for a harlot’s sucker?’
She answered with effervescent impudence. She clipped her feet together, turned a sudden swift and steady pirouette and made a half-curtsey, leering for his applause. His restraint broke and he stepped close, reaching for her arm.
She shrieked, but not with terror, Her clenched fists opened and fingernails filed to points raked across his face, right and left and back.
He leaned away, taken by surprise, and bleeding. Then it seemed that he would attack her, with death in his hands, while she opened a screaming mouth and advanced on him without fear. She was beyond consideration of hurt or ending.
Several things happened together. Francis and Eric came swiftly from the rear to restrain her; Parker started forward to grasp at Raft but Arthur was before him, taking the starman by wrist and elbow to swing him off balance. Raft’s years of training operated reflexively, converting imbalance into a full turn and a fist lashing at the face so easily in reach. The face slipped the blow with amazing speed and instead he took a full-bodied punch, high on the cheekbone, that snapped his head aside and toppled him half across the room. Then Arthur and the policemen carried him down under them; his expertise heaved uselessly against weight and brute strength.
Beloved Son Page 33