The barrel itself split further into four short cylinders. He held one to the light, curious as to the shape of its bore and lands. What he saw caused him to laugh immoderately. ‘Didn’t Raft examine this thing before he fired it?’
‘I shouldn’t think so. He disassembled and reassembled it in front of me as a threatening exercise, but never once looked at it. He held my eye, demonstrating his dexterity, showing superiority, trying to overawe.’
Succeeding, too. ‘So he was familiar with it?’
‘Most. He had it apart and together again in seconds.’
‘An artifact from the old world.’
‘I suppose so.’
Parked tossed him a section of the barrel. ‘Look through it.’
‘It seems very dirty.’
‘Very dirty. Notice that he called it a monopole gun and that the only part of the weapon which is not aluminium is the barrel core itself, a sleeve of steel – monopoled steel I suppose – an annulus to channel the round. Assume that Lindley got it from Heathcote, your own artifact from the old world – peaceable Heathcote who would have had it lying around unused, possibly untouched, certainly uncleaned, for forty years. Think of that steel sleeve exposed to atmospheric humidity all that time! It wasn’t merely rusted when he fired it, it was thick with rust. A bullet belted through it at high speed and had to push the grit out ahead of it. It’s a wonder it didn’t jerk clean out of his hand.’
‘So he died of vanity. Now I am puzzled as to why you want these unconscionable thugs reanimated.’
‘You could say that Arthur deserves some life, for services rendered.’
David stiffened. ‘I shall have some unpleasant dealing for him. I very much want to know how he was able to develop beyond the point where his project had been discontinued as a failure, and why he chose to hide the fact.’
‘As to how, I don’t know and will be as interested to learn as you. As to why – you shouldn’t have treated very intelligent young men as menial scrap material. As to unpleasant dealings, remember that relationships have altered; it may be they who deal unpleasantly with you.’
The clone brothers laughed in chorus. David coloured and banged his hand on Raft’s carapace. ‘And this one, mad and murderous?’
‘You save his body; I’ll attend to his mind.’
‘Save it for what?’
‘There’s work for him.’ He gathered the clone in a jerk of the head. ‘Perhaps for all of them. Now it’s time we went; Campion will be chafing. Sleep tight, Doctor, in the knowledge that your telepaths have just ushered in the destruction of civilisation for the second time in forty years, and that the murdering madman under your care has shown us how to begin to cope with it. You! Clone-brothers!’ They attended, stony-eyed. ‘I leave you responsible for the welfare of Albert and Arthur. Are there enough of you in Gangoil to maintain control until Security takes over?’
‘Enough. Gangoil is not hysterical Melbourne Town.’
He had reached the lift door when David called out, ‘What will happen to Gangoil?’
‘I’m damned if I know. As everyone keeps insisting, knowledge once discovered can’t be destroyed, so I suppose we’ll keep the place going for a while.’
He saw with disgust that David blinked back a manly tear of relief; the idiot hadn’t a single human clue to the meaning of his telepaths in the world outside. The clone-brothers also had little interest beyond themselves and Arthur; one asked him what work he had in mind for them.
‘Who better to crew Columbus and more like her?’
A policeman had experimented with buttons until the lift doors opened; he kept them open while David protested, ‘You don’t really mean you intend to reopen that wasteful business of stellar exploration! The world hasn’t time for nonsense.’
‘This world, it transpires, hasn’t found time for much else. As for stellar travel—’ he glanced disapprovingly round the most advanced biological laboratory in all of terrestrian time ‘—your trouble is that you have a conventional mind.’
The lift doors closed.
Chapter Eight
But Tomorrow Will Be Better …
We will now discuss in a little more detail the struggle for existence.
Charles Darwin: The Origin of Species
1
The spires of St Paul’s Cathedral in Melbourne Town acknowledged God with a touch of brio when the demolition of their multi-storeyed neighbours allowed them to soar as the architect had intended. Not so high, as such ecstasies go, they reached high enough to hide from the viewer on the ground the existence of rampart balconies at those points where the square pediments gave way to the spires proper.
Soon after sunrise Lindley and Francis – or perhaps Eric or Donald, for the gay clone traded identities in the interest of personal convenience now that their colour-coding had been discarded – ascended the narrow intramural stair to the south-west balcony. Francis – Lindley was prepared to believe ‘Francis’ rather than risk a comedy-of-errors enquiry – carried the Allocation Board with its flags, buttons and name-wafers.
In a dawn whose clarity mocked his memory of louring cities Lindley surveyed the rally area. The city block facing the west porch had been cleared of debris, razed flat, as had the space diagonally to his left, once occupied by one of the world’s busiest and ugliest railway stations.
Where the earthmoving machinery for this heroic task had come from he had not been told but he suspected Parker’s unsubtle management. Parker, when he required action, had the morality of a mugger and the blunt charm of a successful blackmailer. As Controller of Police he was a breath of old-world corruption and a damned good policeman with it; as a noisily practising Christian he was less believable in his ability to reconcile his ethics with his actions. But there was nothing new in that.
Francis opened the folded board and leaned it against the grey-yellow stonework. A couple of name-wafers sprang loose and fluttered down to the silent street. ‘It’s the Sydney and Adelaide sections; I know where they belong.’ He made pencil marks in the appropriate areas.
‘Small contingents,’ Lindley commented. ‘I’d hoped for better.’
‘But each person represents a group of dozens. And there’s a surprise turn-up of New Zealanders; six of them flew in last night – as students, as if Security even pretends to believe that!’
‘Put them with the interstaters. One of your clone can nursemaid them; they’ll need someone to explain the banners.’
Those banners – yellow on black for maximum readability – upset him more than was reasonable. Not for the messages they carried, because the messages were valid, but for the memories they revived. They hung from crosspieces on long poles that held them high overhead; they would face the rally like military standards. They recalled old photographs of Hitler’s fabulous Nuremberg rally and made him unsure of the ultimate honesty of what he did. In the past months he had taught these political novices the alphabet of mass trickery, subversion and persuasion; he had become with natural ease the organising arm of the Campion movement, while Campion and his advisers watched admiringly what a manipulative psychiatrist coaxed from the forty-years-dormant techniques of rabble rousing and the lost expertise of Madison Avenue.
He was apprehensive of the power he had guided into the hands of a Campion who had unexpectedly displayed charismatic personality, bringing the youngsters to his feet while their elders looked on, appalled. He had said something of this to Parker, who had remarked without much interest that Campion could always be shot if he got out of hand. And that Campion knew it.
Lindley told Campion, who did know it – and laughed.
They could be terrifying men.
Mostly, however, Lindley had become emotionally removed from the operation. He moved the players, he mounted the speeches for emotional impact, he choreographed the confrontations and demonstrations – and always as a gamester playing on a board on which he could not be beaten. It was too easy. Each move succeeded because every simple pro
paganda putsch or dialectical gambit was new to people who had spent their lives following an undeviating line.
It couldn’t last; in the end the whole foolish campaign must crumble and be laughed out of history. The position of Campion and Parker was finally as ridiculous as that of the dotty Lady (now being subjected to massive mental reclamation somewhere in the Town) who had set out to conquer the world with an idea and a troupe of simultaneous dancers. (That phrase had spread and stuck and the clone-brothers were unforgiving of their gay cell-cousins, who despised them cheerfully in return.)
And conquering the world would be a damned sight easier than teaching it to follow the most difficult psychological philosophy ever invented. Which was what Campion and Parker wished it to do.
The world had not heard the whole rigmarole yet, but the youngsters had fallen on the first hints and promises with starved eagerness; more, they had seemed to divine the magnitude of the task and to welcome it. It was only the clone-brothers’ love-in-a-mist religion remodelled and updated and placed on a more secure emotional footing, but still … but still it couldn’t work.
Yet the youngsters …
To hell with the youngsters and Campion and the clones! Best to concentrate on the job in hand and hope to avoid being swallowed alive at inevitable doomsday.
The sun rose with more splendour than men deserved. Dawns and sunsets were noticeable events; people actually watched them, perhaps because no monster city expunged horizons. The hot core of summer was past but there would be sweat enough to stain the air when the thousands gathered. There had been no time to plant lawns – no money for it either – and dust would stir to mix with the sweat and emotion, of which there would be plenty. This was the first major rally, the first emergence on to a world scene of cameras and recorders, and correspondents. He must consolidate today or face a long and uphill grind.
‘Oh, he’ll win this one,’ Lindley said aloud.
Francis, as usual, picked the inconsequential reference out of the air. ‘But you don’t really believe it, do you?’ The gay clone missed little where human beings were concerned. ‘You scheme and make it work, but you don’t believe in it. You don’t really care. You look surprised when your foolproof arrangements pass off perfectly. As though continual success can’t be real.’
‘Your world isn’t real. It will blow down or fall down or melt. It shakes every time an old gimcrack con works on people who have forgotten how dangerous life is. I was born in a complex society; this toy-town stuff has no substance.’
‘We’re trying to give it some, aren’t we? And deciding how to handle a very substantial crowd is part of that. Which reminds me: Parker must get some of his horrible policemen out of uniform. Their presence is necessary but we don’t want them rammed down everybody’s throat. Nobody actually loves the bastards.’
‘I’ll suggest it.’ He added distastefully, ‘And put an extra chair on the stage; he has decided to speak today.’
Francis yawned. ‘Surprise, surprise! That’ll send their temperatures up. And what will Hawkeye-never-sleeps talk about?’
Lindley did not know and was quietly furious at the decision made without consultation, passed to him at second hand as if he were servant rather than ringmaster. He improvised, ‘Perhaps he’ll declare himself as a member of the movement.’
It was, tactically, too early for that, but he could not imagine what else might be on the man’s mind.
Francis was entranced. ‘Won’t that upset the PM’s Department! The poor dears will feel the state has been whipped from under them, all in the name of freedom of speech. And what will the hot gospeller do for an encore? The Sermon on the Mount?’
‘Why that?’
‘It’s the only bit of his book of fairy tales that makes sense. We’ve all told him that and he just says that if we understand that much, then we’ve got the game by the balls. Marvellous expression! I wonder where he got it?’
Lindley had the grace to change the subject; Parker’s enthusiasm for imported twentieth-century gutter idiom was as marked as Campion’s austere refusal of it. ‘There’s word from Gangoil that Albert and Arthur are up and about.’
Francis said, ‘Arthur’s here; he came in last night.’ He did not mention Raft and Lindley detected a quickly glossed hesitation, but if the gay clone wished to withhold information their deviousness would baffle better men than he. Later he could ask Campion.
He asked, ‘Is he—?’ A precise word did not present itself.
‘Normal? Changed? Peculiar? Why do we feel death should do something strange to people? Arthur’s all right except for some memory lapses, and he went right off the giggling deep end when they tried to treat him as a hero. It was all a bit of a mistake really.’
‘Tell me.’
‘He underestimated Robert. Anybody might have, first up. He reasoned that at full speed he’d go through the hysterics so fast that there wouldn’t be much effect. He meant only to grab the gun and give Parker control of a wicked situation because he’d sized up our holy copper as a no-nonsense type with brains as well. But Robert’s tantrum turned out to be a mental earthquake. Arthur says it was like running into the middle of a bomb blast. At that speed he couldn’t stop, but he lost control of thought and action; he simply crashed into the Commander because the man was in front of him. He says there was a moment of most frightful pain.’
‘We’d wondered. He’s not the type to throw away his life.’
‘No? Clone-group attitudes to death are not yours.’
‘We’ll talk about it some time, but I’d like to know what explanation he gave David, if any.’
‘Why didn’t you ask before? Any of us could have told you that. You see, Gangoil is very inefficient; there just aren’t enough trained staff for all the work being done. Main lines only are followed; minor lines are discontinued unless some new application shows up, but how do you tell which is which before the answers are in? All six of us were gene-manipulated for various physical advantages. When the expected results didn’t show up by age five or six, the work was dropped.’ He smiled with huge enjoyment. ‘They kept us as unskilled labourers. Mistake, wasn’t it?’
‘A boo-boo, a clanger, a bomb-out – I make you a present of those. The implanted characteristics showed up later?’
‘It wasn’t straightforward. You know how you may have a perfectly formed throat and mouth but won’t sing properly unless you’re taught; the latent possibility has to be developed. In adolescence we discovered that we did have the abilities we were programmed for, in an embryonic way, but they had to be trained up. It took a lot of discovering how and why and what, but you can’t live in that place without learning scientific method. And we aren’t short of brains, you think?’
‘I think. But why the secrecy?’
‘Another thing you learn in Gangoil is what it means to be an experimental subject. Even looking after Great Bitch was preferable, and sooner or later there’d come a day when we could use our talents.’
‘Has it come?’
‘Not yet.’
‘What are the other five talents?’
‘Give us a new world we like and we may tell you. We don’t want power and we don’t want to live as freaks. So it’s up to the revolution, isn’t it?’
‘The revolution may be a disaster. Historically they usually were, one way or another.’
‘Then we can dance on the ruins. It’s a pity you don’t believe in what you’re doing. Why do it at all?’
‘I suppose I want change. Any change. I detest what the world has become.’
‘Perhaps,’ Francis suggested, ‘you should see a psychiatrist.’
2
Lindley knew, but refused to admit, that much of his unrest stemmed from basic lack of comprehension of the new world and from his resistance to believing that certain contradictory (to him) characteristics did in fact exist.
This rally, for instance.
He had wanted to hold it at night, to capture the drama of darkn
ess and searchlights, the mild mysticism of figures appearing and disappearing from a stage lit as an amber pool in shadows; he had thought of a torchlight procession.
Parker had given immediate ‘No!’ and Campion had backed him. Ideally, they pointed out, the meeting should be held in the late afternoon, when it would not interfere with working hours (extremes of politeness and consideration staggered Lindley at times) and would leave the night hours free for people to discuss and digest what they had heard.
Discuss and digest!
Campion assured him that would be the process, that it was the conventional, understood method of initiating change; a too radical departure might divert attention from the main theme.
Lindley began slowly to appreciate twenty-first-century education; it meant a thinking world. His conception of his usefulness changed – his business was to use special experience to expose and underline facts, not to hook suckers. (No? But who decided which were the facts?)
So be it. Psychiatrist Lindley knew people, but his two naïve revolutionaries knew these people.
They had not put a foot wrong since Campion, on the day of his return to full mobility, opened his campaign with the public announcement, through every available medium, of his resignation from Security – and followed it with the brief statement that Security was outmoded and should be disbanded. (Lindley’s part in that had been the brevity of the statement; Campion had favoured detailed explanation but had been persuaded to opt for impact, with explanation later. The impact of a statement tantamount to heresy had been explosive.) All else had followed in calculated series, with Lindley continually astonished by the reaction Raft had divined at first contact: the response of the youngsters. He had not expected their instant and furious understanding of Campion’s depiction of their world as a monster of repression and dogmatism and convention, of unthinking acceptance masquerading as civilised restraint. (But, he reflected, you could always rouse the kids, in centuries AD or BC, by mocking the ‘done thing’.)
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