He lay still for perhaps half a minute, until he breathed normally, then said, ‘Get off me.’ Arthur rose, dusting his knees. The police hesitated until Parker said, ‘Let him up. Watch him.’
He stood. He turned, stone-faced, to where his mother scowled and muttered, alternating between struggle and collapse in the grip of the red-and orange-clad figures who managed her with practised gentleness. In the moments of struggle they needed all their strength not to hurt her, and the orange-clad one finally seized an opportunity to jab a needle into her upper arm. Her son watched, unmoved, as she relaxed and they guided her to the couch; then he turned his back on her and dismissed her from his universe.
He found Arthur at his side, surveyed him appraisingly and offered a compliment as condescending as an insult. ‘Surprise packet, aren’t you? Quite the manly young feller, eh?’ Getting no reaction, he said, ‘I need to clean up.’
Arthur replied from depths of boredom, ‘That you do.’ He pointed. ‘There’s a washroom across the passage.’
‘Thanks.’ Raft jerked a thumb over his shoulder to where his mother sank into sleep. ‘So you do have a job of sorts.’
‘Job? It is something we choose to do.’
‘To look after a maniac? Why?’
Arthur wasted no effort on hiding contempt. ‘We have pity. What did they have in your day?’
‘Don’t push your luck, Arthur-boy.’ Raft thrust by him and came face to face with Parker. Very softly he said, ‘I’m not forgetting you called me mad.’
As if he had not heard, Parker spoke across him to Arthur. ‘Your lot would make useful policemen. Think about it.’
It was a mistake; Arthur’s acceptance of him stopped short of blarney. ‘That’s sweet of you, but I’m going to grow up to be a criminal.’
Parker acknowledged failure but Raft guffawed and pushed through them all until he came to David, in the corridor, apprehensive of bullying and now getting it.
‘Why didn’t you tell me? You knew who she is, didn’t you? You knew damned well.’
David nodded miserably and looked to the others for protection, but Raft only ripped at his incompetence. ‘You thought you could stage a mother and son reunion, all tears and slop – sentimental son forgives murderous bitch and scatters goodwill to all Gangoil. Either you didn’t know the facts of you were out of your idiot mind. Well, you’ve earned me a faceful of fingernails and a smack that made my brains ring. If you’ve any more ideas, tell me first.’
David was certain he would be knocked down and not a person present would move to help him. But he was not a prime target or even a subject for action; Raft pushed past him into the washroom and slammed the door.
Arthur looked round the group. ‘I’ve never seen so many stunned ducks in one pond. It all makes you wonder about that motherlove line the psychs hand out, doesn’t it? Well, I suppose somebody had better see he doesn’t rip the plumbing out.’
He followed Raft.
5
A common distaste for what they had seen had edged the group into the corridor, where Parker might have restrained Arthur but thought better of it. ‘He’s right and rather him than me. Is there another way out of there? No? That man’s a case for total rehandle – limit question and remake.’
David was apologetic. ‘How could I know? Lindley should have told me.’
‘He didn’t know either. Raft has had question therapy; he’s probably a trigger case.’
‘We don’t use the question techniques here.’ He made it very superior and virtuous. ‘Is it a trauma affecting personality traits?’
‘Basic traits, naked, nasty. We’re seeing the real Raft, with the overlay wearing thinner every time he’s jolted – the Raft who murdered Fraser.’ David’s mouth opened and closed. ‘You didn’t know? Didn’t you think my office worth a snoop? Yet you must have known your confrontation would be a failure; Lindley says you have a recording of Raft’s therapy session – the “beloved son” dialogue and the wish fulfilment about killing mama.’
David said unhappily, ‘Nothing of his mother. Only a maddening snippet neither Lindley nor I could understand. We did not know it belonged in a therapy session.’ There were no certainties left for him.
‘Where did you get your snippet?’
‘From the clone. They control the outside contacts.’
‘And they selected what they wanted you to know. I wonder why.’
A spokesman said at once, ‘To prepare Doctor David’s acceptance of the supreme importance of Albert and of Ian Campion. But he thinks the future will emerge from his glass wombs and incubators.’ The disinterested contempt would have withered grass.
‘Why Campion?’
The clone-brother appraised him as if revising a judgement. ‘You who know him, you ask that?’
‘He is thought to be the Commander’s grandson.’
‘Thought?’ The four glances flicked each to each, opened into smiles. ‘Some of us took wounds protecting him from the drugged children. It is our shame that he was hurt. Thought to be grandson?’
The smiles faded. He felt he had been grouped with David and all idiots. So – not a grandson. Then what? Did it matter except as a quiddity in the web of cross-purposes while there were nearer worries?
‘Yet you left him by the roadside to die.’
‘To be found. Failing Albert’s love—’ the face convulsed momentarily ‘—he was best left in Melbourne Town.’
Their loyalty was brick-hard with practicality, Parker decided, but in its abominable way it achieved results.
‘Why did you conceal his child-wish to kill The Lady? You knew of it from the therapy recording.’
‘Conceal?’ The word shrank Parker to smallness. ‘This was a clone matter, concerning no others.’
‘God give me strength!’ He asked David, without change of pace, ‘Is Raft carrying a weapon?’
Almost it worked, but he had half-turned his back to the clone and missed the instant blaze of threat and warning that cancelled David’s desire to please. The biologist, sure that whatever he did could only intensify disaster, said unhappily, ‘I don’t know.’
‘Nobody knows any damned thing that matters.’
David wished he knew what mattered to the clone-brothers. Albert, as clone-father, must not be interfered with; so much would be axiomatic in their system of involuted loyalties … or perhaps only the clone might interfere. So if Albert carried a gun it must be allowed that he had reason. But if Parker said he was insane, that could not be allowed as reason because the clone-father was not subject to the conclusions of outsiders. The clone breathed an atmosphere of perfumed unity – togetherness at smothering point.
Parker asked their bland faces, ‘Is he armed?’
‘He did not tell us.’ Another said, ‘We did not ask,’ and a third, ‘We do not question the clone-father.’ The fourth showed marginal life in the lift of an eyebrow and murmured, ‘Who can know what Albert does when Albert is solely Albert?’
Parker reddened; he could take Arthur’s cheek better than the clone’s contemptuous play. He would get nowhere with them, but had to try.
‘You know his mind. You all know each other’s minds.’
‘Not so.’ This was no flummery; a spokesman had been instantly elected.
‘Yet one speaks for all of you, without conference.’
‘On matters of total agreement only.’
‘Telepathy.’ His tone said, ‘Deny it if you can.’
‘Not so!’ Sharply emphatic. Parker believed him – believed, that is, that the clone did not recognise the talent as telepathy. ‘It is a stupidity which John once embraced because we think alike and in simple matters no speech is needed. One way of thought can have only one ending. Only scientists scratch for the intricate and difficult while simplicities escape them; truths are simple but their minds demand complication.’ He glared at David. ‘The clone could live with telepathy; you snivelling liars could not.’
Parker gave it up. Ask a silly q
uestion and get more answer than you bargained for, none of it useful. He closed his eyes to shut them all out while he considered Raft as the ‘father of tomorrow.’ And then Campion as a further development … and Campion’s children and children’s children, all further developments … of what and towards what?
He opened his eyes to ask forcefully, ‘Will you have the future of men grabbed by the descendants of a mad mother and a mad son?’ The clone faces did not change. ‘He is mad – dangerously, fixatedly, paranoidally mad. In the manner of his screaming mother, blinded by the light of a supernal ego!’ The clone did not react; David made motions of distress like a harassed host with a rumbustious guest. Parker remembered the clone’s pinnacle of moral purity and launched a torpedo at its base. ‘Your Albert murdered his crewman. The clone does not kill – but Albert kills.’
The faces registered contemptuous unbelief. A spokesman said, ‘As policeman you need a scapegoat. Albert is human. Humans do not kill.’
He conjectured dazedly that if humans – meaning the clone – do not kill, then they classify the rest of us as animals. In the midst of the dissolution of Gangoil the clone could speak of men as a species already supplanted.
The facts, then, were still to come, and they rested with a pack of philosophic amateurs who knew biology and who knew nothing, nothing, nothing else. He spoke on a note of hopelessness to David. ‘I can only do what I must. Remember that I don’t want to kill him.’
David merely looked outraged.
The scratches were long but superficial. Arthur produced something like a styptic pencil from a wall cupboard and applied it with finicky precision, talking all the time: ‘—nobody believes she really wanted to rule the world. She just wanted to be top girl with no let or hindrance, and, with the clone to strongarm anyone who objected, she had the run of all the equipment in the place. Chin up!’ Raft lifted his head for an application where talons had caught in the angle of the jaw. ‘She really hated the clone, but mad and all she had her head screwed on straight and didn’t let it show; she knew that without them she was nothing. They knew, of course – those bastards know everything – but power suits them. Would suit you too. Yes?’ Raft’s smile was any answer Arthur cared to make it. ‘And then, whether they liked it or not, they had this built in reverence thing, but that took a mighty tumble. No wonder she burst at the seams when they rated you above her! There; you’ll do.’ He tossed the coagulant into the cupboard. ‘Not that you’re my charismatic dream of the new Adam.’
‘You think that’s what I am?’
‘Scandal says.’
‘But you like your father figures more glamorous?’
‘Let’s say, more self-controlled.’
‘You’ve got a brass nerve; it’s a pity about your bitching tongue.’
Arthur followed him from the washroom, reflecting that like the rest of the simultaneous dancers Raft cared that people should fear him. He was more open about it; a sort of primitive simultaneous dancer, before civilisation set in. Pity, really.
They found the corridor rippling with mixed uncertainties. Parker, domineering but not in control, faced David, sullenly cowed; round them the police and clone-brothers manoeuvred fractionally, observing each other, unbelligerent but snapping small tactical advantages of position.
The strategic waltzing stilled as The Lady’s door opened and into the tableau sailed the woman herself, unruffled as though she had never in her life screamed abuse or unsheathed a claw. Whatever tranquilliser had been given her had been no more than a suppressive of excess energies; she looked an ordinary, plumpish, not unattractive woman. Her hair had been rapidly arranged; she had lost the maenad appearance. She was clothed now, in high-heeled bedroom slippers and a white evening wrap trimmed with fur enough to winter a flock of ermine. But she had lost majesty; with eyes damped to dullness she was uncompromisingly vulgar. Behind her Eric and Francis attended in boredom.
At sight of Raft she slowed her progress, assumed an expression of resigned suffering and spoke gently. ‘You have been a great disappointment to me, Albert; a great disappointment.’ The lip of the distressed mother trembled bravely. She was incredible.
Raft had recovered some equilibrium; he said cheerfully, ‘You stupid bitch, you hardly ever noticed me.’
In fact she hardly noticed him now, but continued in character, ‘Your father never could control you, but he was a weak man who disapproved of corporal punishment. I feel it was a mistake.’
‘When you did notice me you belted me enough for both.’
His statement did not exist. ‘And as a woman it was not my place to discipline a rebellious child.’
‘Rebellious, is it? I didn’t dare open my damned mouth.’
She completed her thought. ‘Only John could handle you. I must talk with John.’
‘Let’s both talk with John.’ He extended his arm in mocking escort. She seemed then to see him clearly and started back with a revulsion which blazed an instant through the tranquilliser and went out.
She turned down a side corridor and all of them followed, like a retinue, with Parker grinning to himself at Raft’s expression as his mother’s moment of recoil ripped his self-possession like a switch-blade. Young conditioning dies hard.
It was a short progress. She came to a door and would have gone straight into Heathcote’s apartment if Raft had not heaved close, between her escorts, and made to enter with her.
She cried out, ‘Am I never to be free of you?’ and he answered like her mutinous child, ‘John has been more to me than he ever was to you.’
‘I suppose I cannot prevent you.’ She sighed with sublime self-pity. ‘I am too much a woman to use force on a man.’
Parker cackled, and to Raft’s glare remarked, ‘I’m coming in, too. My professional interest supersedes your jealousies.’
Raft grunted, ‘You’ll see John when I’m good and ready to let you.’
Parker snapped his fingers and guns appeared in the hands of the police. The clone-brothers tensed and at once relaxed; their eyes turned to Raft for orders; one said, ‘Albert should decide. He has first right with John.’
The Lady’s glance should have swept them out of existence but Raft accepted primogeniture and chieftainship without comment; if his contempt could not alienate them, so be it. ‘I think we could take your boys, Controller, guns and all, but we aren’t here for bloodshed and you have some right. But your men stay out here. And both clones.’
David protested that he should be included. ‘All this is by my agreement and you need me. I should be fully informed on all developments.’
Parker raised his eyebrows and Raft conceded, ‘Give an inch and you get a committee meeting. Let’s go in – Mother.’
She shrugged away from the word.
Arthur murmured in Parker’s ear, ‘There’s a back way out of John’s suite,’ and to his suspicious glance explained, ‘I wouldn’t trust that bull running loose any further than you would.’
‘Show two of my men the other entrance.’
Two clone-brothers detached themselves without apparent discussion and followed Arthur and the policemen. No one contested the arrangement; Raft observed, understood and pointedly ignored it.
Francis temporarily took over Arthur’s role of gadfly to remark on forty years of genetics achieving nothing better than a family brawl. One of the clone-brothers told him with uncharacteristic coarseness to keep his bloody mouth shut, surprising those who had not realised their individuals could occasionally speak for themselves.
Lindley had had neither the urge nor the time to lecture on Trollopian Victoriana, so Parker inventoried the huge room without understanding. Accustomed to light and colour and usuform practicality, he saw only a clutter of sombre and depressing furnishings; it was easy to ignore these oddities in favour of the apparition of Heathcote. He had gained from Lindley a sketchy idea of a gerontological miracle without evaluating the compressed and ambiguous facts; he was not prepared for fantasy.
&nbs
p; The young man raging in the centre of the ridiculously over-figured carpet could not, of course, be Heathcote; the aged and hysterical voice suggested that the youthful face was a mask.
‘I’ll not have it! Not have it! Entry without so much as token knocking! Doctor David, I’ll not have that woman tramping through my quarters at will!’ His ranting died in a reedy gasp as he realised that the clone face with The Lady was not one of her attendants.
‘Albert!’ His voice squeaked abominably. He ran down the room, arms outstretched, crying the name, almost weeping it, until he flung himself on the petrified Raft and to Parker’s amusement kissed the Commander on the mouth, then stepped back to hold him at arm’s length and slobber, ‘My boy, my boy!’
Raft seemed to doubt, like Parker, that this lunatic could be his ancient biologist. He faced David with ready accusation, then returned his eyes dumbly to Heathcote, recalling what he had been told and had passed over, absorbing now the impact of it. With a jerk of his body, a total reflex, he dislodged the grasping hands, rejected the ersatz creature; a burgeoning disgust invaded his face and vanished into an expressionless withdrawal.
‘No!’ he said, reclaiming a lifetime’s affection, taking it back for ever.
Heathcote’s pale fingers fluttered uselessly; his eyes took on unutterable hurt; old age looked out of him.
Into the gap of silence The Lady, impervious to everything outside her intention, entered dignified complaint. ‘John, you must assert some authority over Albert. He has become unmanageable.’ In her self-absorption she was as fantastic as the changeling Heathcote. ‘He actually struck me,’ she announced, and probably believed it. She pouted and posed as a forlorn little girl, her tranquillised mind incapable of subtlety.
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