Beloved Son

by George Turner

  Heathcote buried his face in his hands. Raft stood over him without love, his judgement made. ‘I must be sure what you are. Are you a rejuvenated John?’

  From between his hands Heathcote answered extraordinarily, ‘Not quite.’ He lifted his head and a young man looked out, as if a switch of bodies had been made under their noses. Old John had been retired to lick his wound in another place. ‘I am cloned from him and I have most of his memories. That is another process. Having memory, I sometimes think I am he.’ Something appeared of a bleak Victorian formality. ‘I regret having submitted you to indignity, Commander. Shock and emotion unbalance me. I confuse the living man with the dead.’

  ‘Old John is dead?’

  ‘A body dies – so we say. John Heathcote’s body died – as you might say. I have his mind. I have all his mind and most of his memories – not knowledge of him as another man, but memories. Tell me, Albert – Commander – who am I? Who is dead?’

  Raft said coldly, ‘I couldn’t care less, nor am I interested in ambivalent mockups.’ He turned restlessly, heel and toe, to scrutinise the room. ‘All this … The old man collected Victorian junk but he wasn’t so far sunk in it as to retire physically into another age. Your clothes—’ he searched for the word ‘—are Trollopian. He would not have done that.’

  ‘He did. The collapse of the world unbalanced him; his interests became obsessions. Sometimes I am aware of obsession; at others I am Old John and see nothing abnormal in these surroundings.’

  All of this might have passed unheard by The Lady, who said patiently, ‘John, I insist that you listen to me.’

  The young face surveyed her with a suppressed emotion Parker could not read.

  ‘I remember you clearly now; Doctor Lindley supplied the triggering information. You are Mrs Raft.’

  The unfamiliar address roused her. ‘I am The Lady!’ She stretched her hands to him. ‘And you loved me, John.’

  Parker’s mind gave a comprehending oh-oh as more jigsaw fell into place and Heathcote said, ‘I have remembered it.’

  ‘We can love again!’ The actor’s inflexion was mechanical; her dulled mind was dredging up weapons of habit, abridged and simplified to naïvety. ‘Remember, John!’ She threw back the fur from her shoulders and lowered her hands to allow the wrap to slip down her body to the floor and stood naked before him, erect and in her manner appealing, an over-ripened Venus arising from a pool of trampled cloth.

  To the spectacle of his mother as vaudevillian courtesan Raft gave only impatience, and Heathcote said with embarrassment, ‘It ended.’

  ‘To begin again!’ Siddons, Bernhardt, Duse.

  Heathcote, his own rejection still burning, answered with precision. ‘Love does not begin again, and our ages are no longer compatible with dalliance.’

  The cruelty, Parker saw, was meaningless. The Lady, wanting only a tool for the humiliation of Raft, was as unable to observe her own emptiness as to realise that Raft was out of her reach for all time. She would not suffer.

  Only her stung vanity reacted to turn the grotesque into comedy. She sat down roundly on her ample backside, squawking bitterness, and burst into rowdy tears.

  Heathcote turned his back on her. ‘This is most distasteful. Cannot her catamites come for her?’

  Raft said, ‘Let it wait. I have a question.’ His blandness promised no pleasure.

  Heathcote made a plea curiously like a warning. ‘Remember, Commander – Albert – that to me, in any persona, you are the boy I raised and loved and sent away for his safety. And waited for.’

  Raft inclined his head curtly, recognising the man’s right and discarding it. ‘I am no longer the boy. I imagined I needed your affection. I don’t.’

  Dimly Parker sensed the intolerable nature of the renewed blow, and gropingly sympathised. And there was more to the young Heathcote than a creature of confusions; he was able to admire the man who now shook off his reverse in a single display of pain and submerged it in dignity.

  ‘Ask your question.’

  ‘Who is Ian Campion?’

  Parker felt he had no right to surprise; he should have guessed it. Yet the time elements were incompatible … He saw no surprise in Raft.

  ‘Yes. Anything else was genetically impossible – mathematically improbable. So you kept faith. But how? Who was the mother?’

  Heathcote had no chance to reply. The Lady shrieked from the floor, ‘Your daughter! He had your sperm in bank and bred her back to you like a stud animal!’ Her mouth twisted in an attempt at virtuous horror. ‘Incest! Campion is your incestuous son!’ Satisfied with her performance, she patted her hair and commented primly, ‘He’ll go mad, of course. They always do.’

  Raft asked, ‘Where is she?’ and behind him David answered, ‘Thirty years dead. It was a time when many were still dying.’

  ‘Even in Gangoil?’

  ‘She stole the baby and left here. Escaped, if you like.’

  ‘With Ian? How did he come to – No matter; it will keep.’ He said to Heathcote, ‘I don’t give a damn about the ethics of incest though I might have shrunk from it in the flesh. The point is that the union was genetically successful. Wasn’t it?’

  Everyone in Gangoil, Parker thought, was larger than life or displaced slightly to one side of it – or was he seeing reality from an unaccustomed angle? Perhaps his own attitudes, logical to himself, disturbed and repelled others … but surely not so profoundly as Heathcote’s voice detailing cool matters of fact concluded before his young man persona was born. If a cutting could be said to have been born.

  ‘… the reinforcement of useful recessives in your gene complex … valuable additions from the girl’s mother … a multi-directional viability amenable to simple gene surgery …’

  Campion, it seemed, was more than he could possibly guess – a gene bank for supermen – and the young-old monster was saying it plainly in his pedantic whine. ‘I promised you would be the father of the future and Ian was the first fruit of that promise.’

  I think, Parker mused, that I also might be a little mad if someone had promised me that, and I believed him.

  Raft responded with suspicion. ‘I don’t forget your promises. But Ian was never brought back to Gangoil, was he? With him the matter ended.’

  ‘I grew old.’ It was neither apology nor explanation, only an enormous and pathetic regret.

  David intervened with an authority Parker had not heard from him, entering his own territory. ‘The work continued.’

  Heathcote snorted derision. Raft asked, ‘Under your direction, Doctor?’

  ‘Eventually. I was born in Gangoil; there were directors before me.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Campion was an experimental line which could be duplicated if need be. There were others.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Those are what you came to see.’

  Parker said, ‘What I also came to see.’ The balance of forces should be kept before their minds.

  An old Heathcote asked, ‘Who is that man?’ and Raft told him sharply, ‘He is a policeman. An ally of sorts, though I’d see him damned if I could. That will come. Doctor David, what have you to show me?’

  ‘The future.’

  ‘Large word. Where do we find it? In your laboratories? Then we’re wasting time.’

  David asked, ‘Will you come with us, John?’ It was only the routine politeness of the usurper to the superannuated star.

  ‘No.’ More than a refusal; the snapping shut of a mind.

  ‘John is upset by our neglect of the lines of research he laid down.’ Perhaps fortunately for his peace of mind he could not see Raft’s expression as he led the way to the door. ‘I have never been able to convince him that his routine was too limited.’

  They filed into the corridor, followed by The Lady’s giggling farewell: ‘Wait till you see what the doctor has for you!’

  Parker directed Francis – or Eric – to get his men back from the rear exit. ‘Then go in and collect y
our bag while she’s quiet.’

  There were too many tensions, he thought, pulling too many ways, and grotesques like Heathcote and Mother Raft only clouded issues. If one matter stood out as appallingly touchy, it was Heathcote-God’s promise to his clod of a Jesus. Who could wear the magnificence of a genetic messiah from the stars? Lindley had been insistent about the harmlessness of the place with The Lady’s authority broken, and he hoped his men would not need their weapons, but their presence comforted him.

  6

  The twelve of them not only fitted easily into the laboratory lift, designed for portage of supplies, but maintained their division into mutually watchful units, with David and Arthur as odd men out. Only Arthur appeared unconscious of cross currents, but in Parker’s view that sharp intelligence missed nothing and might in its sheer lack of commitment be of value.

  The lift crawled downward. And who need hurry in Gangoil, built just outside the wall of its culture’s time and space? David remarked, like a tourist guide, on the half-mile drop which would occupy six minutes. ‘That old Federal Government knew the value of what it hid.’

  No one offered congratulations.

  Parker asked suddenly, ‘Who began the War of the Collapse? Who mutated the crops and diseases?’

  ‘Who knows?’ He sounded genuine. ‘And who wants to know? I was not born; to me it’s only an old horror story. Do you want to blame Gangoil?’

  ‘Gangoil might know. Such a long-term project must have archives. And trained archivists.’

  ‘My department,’ Arthur said. ‘That information is not in the archives, and I agree that it would be better suppressed if it were.’

  Parker suspected that he had been exquisitely evaded, but by then Raft had taken centre stage and history had to wait on exhibitionism.

  ‘Yesterday is over; forget it. Consider tomorrow.’ Having their attention, he told them amiably, ‘I am tomorrow.’

  The clone nodded in unison. The police remained stolid. Parker waited for revelation. David looked, for no obvious reason, uneasy. Arthur said, ‘Balls.’

  To Raft’s insulted rigidity he extended ultimate impertinence. ‘If it were true it would have to be altered.’

  Parker tensed for intervention but Raft had captured a more urgent aspect of the speech. ‘If? If? What does he mean, David?’

  David retreated into blustering panic. ‘Nothing! He means nothing! What in hell are you talking about, Arthur? You’re ignorant of the programme – ignorant!’

  The unrepentant Arthur could not be stared down but Raft was after all concerned only with Raft. ‘Forty-two years ago John Heathcote named me father of the future, and it was no metaphor. I hold Gangoil to the promise. Am I understood?’

  David made a gesture of cowed assent.

  ‘I want more than that, Doctor. We are about to inspect the children of my body. Is that what in fact they are – the children of my genes?’

  Definition of a madman, Parker thought, with his inner arm pressing on his shoulder holster: a man stripped to the naked ego.

  ‘Let me hear you, Doctor David!’

  David agreed desperately. ‘The children of your genes. Everything you will see – yours.’

  The clone gave their unison nod and a paternal smile. Arthur said, ‘I bet you’ll just love your pretties,’ and could not resist a swiping jeer: ‘Pack of bastards, I’d call them.’

  Clone breaths hissed inwards but Raft merely looked at David, who bleated with anger and fear. ‘He has seen some – some failures. His clone have acted as assistants in minor laboratories and he has seen – seen … in research there are always some failed results.’ He shook, convinced that he was being made answerable to a madman who could command the clone and that death could be dealt faster than Parker could prevent it. Arthur he himself could have killed, happily. ‘He knows nothing of the major laboratories. Nothing.’

  Raft flung over his shoulder, ‘Arthur, you make too much clatter with your cap and bells.’

  Parker speculated, in passing, what might be the reason for the existence of Arthur’s clone. Experimental what, besides the obvious?

  The lift halted gently and the doors opened.

  The laboratory covered the same immense floorspace as the vehicle park far above, but its long reaches were deceptive; white walls faded into each other’s planes and into the white ceiling, hallucinating depth. White smocks and shoes, white trousers and skirts moved against white tiles and cupboards and partitions. Splashes of flesh colour were hands and faces; instruments were glints of copper and chrome; glassware gave glitter to the ubiquitous white.

  Benches, tables, sinks, cupboards and aggregates of incomprehensible machines stretched in soldierly rows the entire length of the hall, with at their centre a raised and glass-walled structure where white-clad figures fluttered white paper and spoke into white administrative telephones.

  Only the grey-green filing cabinets were drab. From visits to Canberra archives Parker recognised them as relics of the old world public offices; no officer of his would put up with such arbitrary dullness in his work area.

  ‘This is the primary laboratory.’ David was home, his voice asserting territorial right. Near-by heads swivelled in recognition but their eyes fastened on Raft. As Arthur had said?, there was more than dress to distinguish him from the clone.

  Raft said loudly, ‘They know who I am.’ He was pleased.

  The faces turned away, detected in vulgar staring.

  The unremitting egocentricity affected Parker like a filed glass. ‘Everybody on the damned planet knows.’

  ‘Who but not what, eh, Controller? Does it rankle, that your plans and Ian’s must make room for the father of tomorrow?’

  Parker cursed himself for making the opportunity, but Arthur stole the scene from both of them. ‘Really, Commander, what difference does it make who is Daddy? I get no special joy from being one of your fiddled-with offshoots, I can tell you.’

  ‘You!’ Raft began to absorb the implications of the relationships he himself had demanded.

  David rushed his explanation. ‘Commander, I said every experiment has been designed to preserve and strengthen your line.’ He added, with menace for Arthur, ‘Not all were designed for permanence; ancillary attempts were required for testing of theories. Arthur’s clone is six or seven stages of manipulation removed from the central line. It is a dead end, useful for service work in the complex.’

  The eagle let the rabbit go. ‘It isn’t important.’

  Arthur bridled. ‘Oh, but it is. Look what can happen to you with the slip of a molecule!’

  Parker stifled laughter, but assessed Arthur’s consistent playing with fire; he would surely need protection later, if not from Raft then from the clone, who registered venomous recognition of sacrilege. But Arthur feared neither Raft nor clone.

  With sharpened attention Parker measured Arthur’s body against Raft’s, point for point, and found the family resemblance inescapable there while it was lacking in the face. Arthur was perhaps not quite so big overall but where Raft’s physique – and his clone’s – was classically beautiful, Arthur’s flatter and longer muscles and slightly different shaping of muscle groups gave a curious impression of … his subconscious supplied, a little to its own surprise, ‘engineering efficiency.’

  He filed the observation with his puzzlement; his capacity for multiple observation was becoming impossibly stretched.

  Raft chose to behave now as if Arthur did not exist – possibly because the police guns were an unsolved problem – and asked David what was done in this hall.

  ‘Non-specialist work. Cell cultivation and observation, radiological research on multi-specimen projects, common pathology routines. These operatives are the specialists’ labourers, so to speak. There is little to see here.’

  He led them past the regimental benches towards a stair-head leading down.

  From the corner of his eye Parker caught a movement of something white across the floor between benches as one o
f his policemen gave a hoarse, choked exclamation. He turned his head swiftly enough to catch a photographic glimpse and forgive the lapse of training.

  It was about three feet high and mostly head, and it moved with the smooth flow of tiny footsteps on stumped legs under the floor-length gown. As it skittered between the benches it held aloft a kidney dish, like an offertory vessel borne from one research assistant to another.

  Parker saw the huge lunar face clearly before it vanished behind the woman who held forceps over the dish to drop something into it. The tiny mouth and splayed nose were lost in the dish-shaped visage; the face was a disk of skin under sparse hair, for there were no eyes, none at all, nor depressions where they might have been, only a soft pudding-crust of featureless flesh.

  He heard it mewling against the woman’s smock. She listened intently, then put her hand on the thing’s face, tapping and patting and soothing, and bent to whisper where the ears should be. The mewling stopped. It appeared, to race again to the opposite bench, kidney dish held high, to deliver the soggy scrap of contents to another woman who glanced indignantly at the intruders as she took the dish from its infantile hands.

  ‘What in hell’s that?’ Whatever its understanding, the thing recognised harshness and hid afresh from Raft’s voice; the second woman plainly wished them all to the devil as she repeated the patting and placating procedure.

  David said coolly, ‘An error. As you see, it is not unintelligent, and it likes to make itself useful within its limits. A sort of laboratory mascot, you might say.’

  Who might say it, Parker’s thought ran, was a soulless golem, but it was a pleasure to hear Raft again disconcerted, asking, ‘Why don’t you kill such things?’

  A fine sighing of dismay came from the clone-brothers, and phrases: ‘The living flesh!’ ‘All things part of us!’ ‘Part of you, Albert, of you!’ ‘Even the errors, sacred flesh!’

  Raft turned on them with insult in his eyes and it seemed to Parker that there might be hope for the man if shock penetrated deeply enough. But the eyes hardened; he absorbed the brothers’ attitude and accepted it. Parker’s inward scowling deepened; the man would accept anything which could be twisted into an adulation, a hint of godhead.