Overnight Campion had become a godlet. With private satire for his man of straw Lindley had resurrected a forgotten word, ‘superstar’, and seen it run wildfire across the country, irrespective of meaning. In a week it had leapt the ocean and was heard in the greater world.
Consideration of the greater world frightened him. It had been simple in Australia, protected by ocean and remoteness, but would it be so simple in the American Soviet or the ferocious Kremlin Hegemony or mysterious China? Might these not combine to excise a cancer in the south? Security was not likely to help or protect; present prognosis was that Security would, in such a case, abandon Australia, placing it under a trustful quarantine which any predator with transport and a gun could breach … unless Ian were proved right again and Security collapsed throughout the world once its dependence on co-operation was underlined. With the nations left to fend for themselves – and this was, after all, one major aim – there might be breathing space to be turned to advantage.
Faster and faster the tiny, tinny campaign moved towards a proliferation of ‘if’ and ‘maybe’.
The Prime Minister – who traditionally had little personal power and depended on the support of a now dumbstruck cabinet – had made his single attempt at control in the middle of Campion’s second broadcast address – the reasoned explanation which bid fair to scramble the wits of his hearers. He had reached for his sole weapon of strength, the Police Force, to be told by a pokerfaced Parker that his men could not interfere with freedom of expression, any more than Security could interfere with the man who abused it in public. Campion was within the law. As Parker understood it and said, authority challenged must justify itself, not seek to apply a gag.
Reaction gave shocked tongue: Chaos is come again!
Not so, Parker assured; his police would prevent that. Which told them what Parker had refrained from spelling out: that the only remaining legal – and armed – authority in the country favoured Campion.
Lindley wondered, with a lifetime of violent political memories crying out, whether Parker’s grim young men would be able to adapt to new power and a new style of law-keeping. Parker said ‘Yes’, but Parker was a fanatic.
3
‘HQ’ was a group of tents by the artificial lake in what had once been ‘Albert Park’, was now known as ‘Public Recreation Area 3’ and usually referred to as ‘down at the lake’.
As advantages, it was within walking distance of the town proper and it was a popular sporting and slap-and-tickle venue for the teenagers who were the main target of Campion’s ideas. Also the lake, filled and cleaned by the Town Instrumentality, solved a water problem which would have been acute if he had moved into a disused dwelling with no public supply connections save the rusted dead ends of dead years.
Use of public demesne for private purposes was not illegal simply because no necessity for prohibition had arisen, but was frowned on as a breach of propriety; a public frown accompanied by modest social sanctions was enough to bring an offender to heel. Campion was not frowned on; he had counted, accurately as usual, on the goodwill of the youngsters to checkmate their elders, and now the elders also were observing from a distance and making tentative overtures.
Light and power could have been impossible luxuries had it not been for the overnight appearance of a dozen linked arrays of the tiny, longlife batteries which powered the public transport system. Lindley located one whose identification had been not too thoroughly removed, pointing to the Department of Civil Police as the donor; he knew better than to question Parker, but observed that failing cells were replaced by kindly fairies overnight. But there were always police around the place to keep a governmental eye on the strict legality of Campion’s activities, to break up the frequent confrontations between the youngsters and their elders (incidents telling their own tale of societal misdirection), and to maintain unobtrusive communication between Campion’s HQ and Controller Parker.
A final advantage was the open space permitting occasional use of an all-purpose vibrationary blind to block long-range bugging. The dampers were not illegal – for anyone who could afford the power load – but tended, in untrained hands, to overheat metal roofs and fittings, powder glass and loosen the bonding of cement. Tents were ideal.
Money had never been seriously lacking. By the time Campion’s savings and severance pay had run out Lindley had become a major television attraction with personal reminiscences of the old world and tart commentary on the new; also, historical foundations across the planet inundated him with questionnaires whose general naivety was mixed with queries which showed him how much he never had known about his own age. (The astronomers, he noted, were not interested in a psychiatrist’s impressions of another solar system and the psychiatrists were not interested in him at all.) But simple income was inadequate for the expense of Campion’s television campaign appearances, until the contributions of the youngsters began to flow. The kids had little money, except for the super-talents who had moved into top jobs at impossible ages, but a few cents a day from each of several thousands became impressive in a culture where nothing cost more than it reasonably should.
Unexpected faces began to appear in HQ area and new tents were erected.
The defection of stolid, dedicated Senior Tech Colley caused greater uproar in Australian Security than the resignation of Campion. Campion had resigned alone; Colley brought three other Techs with him.
Lindley and Francis returned to the camp for breakfast. Lindley went directly to Campion’s administration tent, rankling with Parker’s interference with his programme.
A member of the gay clone came from one of the sleeping tents as he passed. Similar dress made them unidentifiable as individuals, but this one’s skin was pale where the others had taken sunburn.
Lindley stopped. ‘Hello, Lazarus.’
Arthur smirked lazy recognition. ‘I’m told I was much the best-looking exhibit in the slow chambers.’
Death had altered little there. ‘Fully recovered?’
‘Better than the original, actually. It appears I would have died even if I hadn’t broken my silly neck against great-great-grand-uncle Albert’s breastbone, because it was the biggest effort I’d ever made and it brought on a heart-seizure. So that unpleasantly attractive policeman of yours told David to do something about it, and so I’ve been provided with all sorts of ingenious muscular heartwall reinforcements and the poor thing can take any strain I’m likely to put on it.’
‘That was Parker’s way of saying thank you.’
An eyebrow twitched. ‘That one doesn’t give even thank you for nothing; he’ll find a way to get value out of me.’ Lindley had no doubt of that. Arthur added, ‘Albert’s here too.’
Lindley was struck with nostalgic affection for this last scrap of his world, changed though he might be. ‘Where?’
‘Somewhere around, you’ll run into him. You’ll find him different.’
‘How?’
Arthur studied him a moment before he asked, ‘Were you close friends?’
Quite a question. Did Albert have close friends? ‘I suppose we were. In a way.’
‘Then be prepared to meet a stranger.’
He shied from all but the most minor implication. ‘Memory impaired?’
‘No more than mine; they stopped degeneration pretty quickly. But Parker had him brought down here for a few days as soon as he could be moved. I don’t suppose he told you.’
‘He didn’t.’
‘Devious bastard, isn’t he? I suppose you know about the Gangoil happenings – the god-delusions and what have you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Parker had all that ripped out of him under deep therapy – memory channels repressed, emotional centres rebalanced, full scale rehandling to short-circuit the childhood traumas that drove him.’
Lindley felt again the despairing anger that had taken him when they told him England was dead. ‘What’s left? A vegetable?’
‘Nothing like that. He’s a ch
arming and delightful man; you can’t credit how different. Of course he no longer knows about the Gangoil débâcle.’
‘I see.’ No, he didn’t see. He didn’t see Parker’s motive.
‘I only thought I should warn you the mental scenery is changed.’
‘Thank you, Arthur.’
With generalised anger degenerating into personalised hatred he went on to the admin tent. This thirty-foot marquee had been borrowed, stolen, smuggled from place unspecified. Most of the more expensive equipment testified to Parker’s opportunist morality and Campion’s ability to let him sleep. The attitude that good end justified arrogant means was the great link between all the revolutionary movements of history; it had much to do with Lindley’s lost ability to identify with the work he had begun as an intellectual jeu d’ esprit.
Campion was breakfasting as usual with casual company. Policemen, clone-brothers, assistants from the younger groups, news media people – he made himself approachable and hospitable at meal times.
This was to Lindley a new and unlikeably political Campion, though he knew that the character changes seemed great simply because he had not known the man well; they were not very apparent to those who had known better what to expect of him. Nonetheless his professionalism could not override the human sense of having been tricked, of having fallen into comradeship with a false face. The swift declension of the apostolic visionary into the planning, coldly seeing, often double-dealing administrator had impinged as creeping shock. He no longer liked Campion. He knew himself unreasonable, but a psychiatrist’s emotional life is no more rational than the human norm and knowledge could not overcome his aversion for the revealed demagogue.
Possessed with his angers, he did not so much as look at the company as he strode from sunlight into comparative dimness. ‘What has Parker done to Albert? What have you bastards been at behind my back?’
Campion, thinner now and drawn with nerves but still unmistakably a red-headed Raft, rose to face him. ‘You have seen Albert?’
‘No. I’m told you had him deep therapied.’
‘Not I; the Controller. It was necessary. Do you think I would have my father treated any way but well?’
Lindley rejected the emotional gambit; Campion had displayed much talent for that manner of persuasion. ‘I think you people – not only you but your whole nursery culture – would do anything to anybody where it served your purpose.’
Campion refused the quarrel. ‘It seems like that, Jim, because your illusions are not ours. Wait until you have met Albert again. In the meantime we must not expose guests to our disagreements.’
As his eyes adjusted Lindley saw that Campion did not entertain his usual company. Instead he played host to a group which in these years must be as rare as summer snow – three lined and ageing men, all probably septuagenarian. He was saying smoothly, ‘Our meeting has excited interest. Some major national groups have sent Ombudsmen to observe and report. It makes a great opportunity for us.’ He drew Lindley forward. ‘Gentlemen, this is Doctor Lindley, formerly a psychiatrist aboard Columbus, but who now calls himself my campaign manager. I hope the term is more familiar to you than it is to me.’
The short and fleshy one with mottled cheeks, wearing his age, as they all did, with the panache of gerontological buttressing, said without friendliness, ‘A campaign manager was a paid liar who prepared the way for a confidence trickster.’
Lindley noted the tiny cross on the chain round the neck. ‘As, for instance,’ he suggested, ‘John the Baptist.’
Surprisingly the old devil laughed. ‘You see that we had to be quick on the uptake in those days, Ian! Well, Doctor Lindley, I’m Bellamy, Ombudsman to the Prime Minister, and you are one of the current pains in my neck.’
‘I recognise all of you, I think, from photographs. The gentleman on your left will be Mister Fomin of the Kremlin Hegemony. Or should I say tovarich?’
Fomin was bald and radiation-marred as Jackson had been. ‘Not tovarich. In English the form is “Brother in God”.’ He spoke plainly but haltingly, as in a language used long ago and laid by. ‘My Brother in God, Piotr Kulayev, greets you through me.’
It might have been pity that flashed and faded in the reptilian eyes.
‘Pete? Is he well?’
‘I have not seen him. I am only a messenger.’
Stonewall. He turned to the third man, dressed with strange conventionality in an approximation of the business suit of the eighties. ‘I know your face, sir, but not your name.’
The tall figure recalled portraits of Abraham Lincoln but the penetrating voice harked further back, to the Pilgrim Fathers and Salem. ‘Datchborn. Of the People’s Republic of New York in the Soviet of North America.’
Compulsively Lindley said the unforgivable: ‘And have you a greeting from Tovarich Ewan Matthews?’
Datchborn’s reply could not have been gentler. ‘I am not a citizen of the Soviet, Doctor, but an Ombudsman, beyond and outside citizenship. On Doctor Matthews I was not consulted. Nobody was consulted. There was no time.’
‘Do you believe that?’
‘Does it matter what I believe? The thing is done and men were punished for it. I believe the punishment served no purpose, but again does my belief matter? You, it seems, are taking strong action in an unfamiliar world. That matters. I hope you believe in what you are doing.’
He could not tell whether he had been intuitively detected or struck by a random shot. It hurt. He said dismissively, ‘A man can only do what he believes in,’ which was not evasion enough and nonsense to boot.
Campion took over the conversation, leaving him to dissatisfaction and silence, but even his half-hearted listening perceived that the Ombudsmen’s knowledge of the campaign was exhaustive. He had not thought about international espionage in this new springtime of history but saw that something of the sort must be well developed. Good luck to them, but there were shocks in store for spying eyes; Campion had not revealed his full batteries yet.
He was sickening of the whole affair. As soon as he decently could he pleaded pressure of work and escaped.
He had not thought that Campion would come after him, leaving his guests, but protocol was as yet undeveloped.
‘Jim! You’ll want to talk to Albert.’
‘Yes.’ He needed the only remaining fraction of his world. The Ombudsmen, changelings who had renounced birthright, did not count. ‘Where is he?’
‘Having breakfast, I imagine. And, Jim!’
Lindley’s suspicions came on guard. ‘What?’
‘Talk to him about Columbus. It’s important.’
So that was it. The father-son relationship had stabilised on a level of common sense; Campion, raised without parents, knew precisely what this parent was worth to him and his crusade.
‘You’re in a hurry to get him out to the stars again. Doesn’t a father mean a damned thing to you?’
‘That’s unfair, Jim.’
Yes, it was unfair. Campion had some affection for Raft, but his conception of the obligations of emotional attachment was the alien conception of another culture. Lindley had adjusted only to recognisably similar ideas in this time; its true basis was as hidden from him as the true faces of good and evil.
‘I’m sorry. Perhaps I’m upset.’
‘About anything in particular?’
‘You and Parker are interfering, planning without me. I’ve worked out this rally in detail and now Parker seems about to set it arse over tip.’
To his own ears it sounded petulant and Campion soothed maddeningly. ‘Everything you planned will be done, but also some things you didn’t plan.’
‘What things?’
‘Leave the extras to us, Jim. You’ve three men’s work on your shoulders.’
‘No more than I can handle.’
Campion’s patience wore thin. ‘We have to learn to run our own campaign sooner or later.’
But nothing about Parker’s intentions. He said, with prescience, ‘You’re goi
ng to show them the telepaths!’ He was right. Campion, averse to the outright lie, said nothing. ‘Ian, it’s too soon. The kids aren’t sufficiently prepared. You’ll confuse them.’
Pressured, Campion eyed him with dislike, became terse. ‘You know your repertoire of tricks but we know our people. Leave the kids to us.’
It was one thing for him to recognise his limits, another to be told the recognising had been done for him.
‘You’ll fail,’ he said as he moved away. ‘Story-book revolutionaries! I’ve always known the end must be failure.’
He did not look back as Campion told him, ‘And we have known that you felt so.’
He located a dozen clone-brothers at breakfast but could not see Albert. There was, however, a curiosity, a definite Raft but with sallow skin and straight black hair and brown eyes with the slight, tight slant of an epicanthal fold. He had heard of this small group whose racial traits had been remoulded to allow them to live undetected in foreign regions when The Lady experimented vaguely with pointless and unintegrated planetary reconnaissance. They were being quietly brought home by a sulking Security which feared their discovery abroad might cause complications, possibly violent complications. Albert 43 – they had never adopted names for themselves – had spent some years in Korea, prodding uselessly at the closed frontier of China.
He was an exotic, a curiosity, but none of them had ever been true Albert duplicates. It was an utterly unlike spirit which informed their repeating faces.
They made a noisy group at table, almost human when behaving as individuals; if clone-consciousness had not reduced them to the status of animated dolls it would have been possible to think of them as people. They stood apart from their race where the gay clone, lacking the strong hiving instinct, were fully part of it.
He had to raise his voice to get attention. ‘Have any of you seen Albert? Where is he?’
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