Reason is sleeping: and in a world with too many children, here’s a child that all the world can welcome.
Planned even to genetic level, every building-block examined and found good, he has Nobel prizes and Olympic golds in his near ancestry, beauty and vigor and health. His immaculate conception occurs under a microscope, under the eyes of the foremost specialists; his host-mother has passed every selection test they could devise, physical and psychological both. She spends all the months of her pregnancy in an exclusive nursing-home, constantly monitored, her exercise and diet rigorously controlled.
Brought forth by Caesarean at the optimum time, he is named—after long argument—Nathaniel; but that’s disingenuous. No gift from any God, he. They made him themselves, nor do they intend to share the praise. His host-mother is sewn up and sent away, much the richer and legally bound.
His foster-parents have been similarly chosen. Nothing overlooked, nothing left to chance: here are two people well paid to be perfect, nor will they fail in that. Conceived in glass vessels, Nathaniel will be raised also under glass, the epitomic hothouse child, encyclopedias in his cot and the total concentration of two adults through all his crucial years.
It’ll be the best and most challenging life that money can buy, for the best lad that humankind can create …
Reason is sleeping: five hours a night were enough. Even here, even in this wretched company his discipline held good. He had come to bed with the others, he’d slept his regular time, and now he was awake again.
And had hours to fill before the six o’clock reveille; and while he wasn’t bored, while he’d never understood how that was possible, still it wasn’t easy to find a use for dead time in the darkness, too far from his books and computers, his TV and his radio.
All he had with him was his pocket chess, running on a program he’d written himself. Start stupid, learn fast: every game the computer played it got better, it learned from his victories and its own mistakes. So that’s what he was doing now, he was tutoring his chess set, playing it game after game and letting it learn.
But he could still do that on autopilot, it wasn’t smart enough yet to give him any kind of contest. As his fingers played, his mind moved on other pathways, considering the values of things. As of the softly glowing symbols in his lap, the knight and the bishop and the rook, each ascribed a value according to what it could achieve. And the queen, of course, strong and beautiful and by far the best of them, head and shoulders above the rest. Power and responsibility, the farsighted strategist with a fist of iron …
He teased White’s queen into what seemed to him a ludicrously obvious trap, and took it with a pawn.
Not good enough, he thought sadly; and in honesty, he thought, she never would be. The fault lay with the piece, not the player. The most powerful piece on the board, yes—but still it wasn’t enough if a pawn could bring her down, if stupidity could undo her. Not good enough was the doom of most things, was certainly his own.
Six o’clock, and a whistle blew; and Nathaniel was instantly out of his bunk and pulling on his tracksuit, neat and efficient and fast. Feet into running shoes, velcro fasteners and he was off. Five compulsory laps of the camp, about four miles in all: and if he was first out, he could run alone all the way so long as he remembered to hold himself back after the first mile, not to catch up with the stragglers. Alone was easier, alone was always easier.
So he ran, and he came in from running breathing easy, running down. Into the shower and a fast shampoo and he was finished, he was coming out as the others started to arrive.
Even amid their hot jostling bodies, he avoided their eyes. He was good at that, too. Programmed for it, by now. Start stupid, learn fast.
Not possible at breakfast, though, at communal tables with plates and dishes and jugs constantly passing, the day’s teams to be selected and projects to be announced. Best he could manage here was to be quiet, amiable, inoffensive.
Not easy sitting next to Raoul, who had been frightened on the mast of the training ship over the weekend, who had needed Nathaniel’s cool strength to help him down, who had refused to swim underneath the hull and cost their team points all along the line.
Or sitting opposite Charlotte who was national chess champion at fifteen, who was acclaimed the best player the nation had so far produced, who had lost three times to Nathaniel in one afternoon and wouldn’t play him any more, saying that she couldn’t understand his game, it was too deep for her, too different.
Or sitting at the same table or the next table or simply in the same hall as Peter and Annie and Josephine, Tarian and Michaela. Three weeks he’d been here, and in that time he’d upset or embarrassed or offended almost everyone he’d come into contact with. None of that was of his making, except that he couldn’t lie and wouldn’t dissemble. If a thing was so, he would say so; if not, again he would say. If a game was to be played, he would play it as best he could within the rules. If he was better or faster or stronger than the others, then he would win.
And he was better, faster, stronger, as he always had been: that was simply the way the world was. And the others resented it, some of them hated him for it; and that too was the way the world was, and always had been.
And it didn’t matter how good he was, he still wasn’t good enough. That was inherent in the piece. He’d been trained to command and trained to follow orders, but something was missing in him, something he lacked to make them love him.
And he only knew one way to find it, as he only knew one way to live: to be better, to try harder, to learn more and win by a greater margin. It was the constant theme of his childhood, playing on in his adolescence. Not good enough, you must shine more brightly. So much potential, it must not be wasted; but only you can drive yourself to your limits. We can’t reach that far. What you achieve is in your own hands now, all we can do is make opportunities.
Drive he had in abundance, and motive too. The race is to the swift, and the battle to the strong; only winners got the glittering prizes. If he outreached even the ambitions held for him, if he could shine blazingly bright, surely then he’d earn more than a nod of satisfaction and a harder challenge next time round …
The camp leader was generally held to be a bastard. A softspoken, smiling man, he was softly and smilingly unbending even to his favorites, and pitiless on defaulters.
Today at breakfast he left them eating longer than usual, until appetites were sated; then a single stroke of his little bell, and those few who weren’t already watching him turned as he rose to his feet, interest and apprehension mixing on their faces.
“Well,” he said, “I think we’ve mollycoddled you long enough.” And smiled, spread his hands disarmingly, paused a moment. Didn’t seem at all perturbed that his little joke raised not a smile, broke no one’s concentration. “You’re all fit,” he went on, “you’re all intelligent and adaptable; you were demonstrably self-reliant and you already understood something of teamwork, or you would never have been accepted here. These last weeks, I hope we’ve underlined what you knew before, honed your bodies to a sharper edge and taught you a little more about yourselves and each other.
“Today, we really start to test you.
“From now on, it’s for real. Special risks, special opportunities. You’ll be divided into teams, and given various targets to achieve. For the next fortnight those teams will eat together, work together, sweat and suffer and weep together. Sleep together if you want to, but only if your leader thinks it’s good for the team.
“Each team will have a leader, chosen by me: this is not a democracy. But here on in, there will be no supervision. You’re on your own out there. Your safety will be entirely in your own hands; there will be no staff looking out for you, no one to step in and rescue if you’re stupid.
“So don’t be. We’ve had accidents every year, you must expect emergencies and disaster; and while we’ve never lost a camper yet, it’s statistically certain to happen sometime. Every year that passes, t
he odds get worse. Remember this. The odds are not in your favor out there; so take every precaution you can think of, take care, don’t be stupid.
“But don’t fail, either. Don’t be weak.”
The team selection might not have been deliberately malicious, but Nathaniel thought that quite probably it was. The staff liked him no more than the other campers; they envied his future, he thought, his bright and burning future, and so sought to make his present as difficult as they were able.
Nothing new there. Sometimes he wondered when this supposed future would finally begin. Ten years ago, he’d been sure to have achieved it by sixteen; from here it seemed as far away as ever, a golden dream blocked off by a wall of days, dark days heaped one upon another.
But be it accident or design, Nathaniel found himself teamed with Raoul and with Charlotte, with Peter and Josephine, Tarian and Michaela. Almost his entire roll-call of the ill-disposed; and no, surely this couldn’t be accidental. The staff watched them too closely to get it so very wrong.
Nor was Nathaniel appointed leader, though his record at the camp must have required that. Best at everything but still not good enough, huh? he thought ruefully, as the job went to Josephine.
Perhaps he maligned them, though. On his way back to the dormitory to pack—“just one bag, and bare essentials only. Remember, you’ve got to carry it; but remember, you can’t come back for what you’ve forgotten or thought you wouldn’t need”—he was taken aside by one of the climbing instructors, a man he liked better than most.
“Here,” the man said, “I want you to carry this, in case of an emergency. Every team gets one; but don’t tell your team leader, or anyone else.”
“What is it?” The question was instinctive, but actually, taking the device and turning it over in his hands, Nathaniel knew already what it was. A small black sealed unit on a stiff cord, a light amulet of rubberized plastic, no marks on it, no distinguishing features—in the circumstances, there was really only one thing it could be.
“Panic button,” the man said, a beat behind Nathaniel’s mind. “We do have responsibilities. There’ll be a helicopter standing by, never more than half an hour’s flight away. Better if the team doesn’t know that, though. A promise of rescue makes people careless.”
“Why choose me?”
The man shrugged. “Because you won’t tell the others. And you’re better equipped than most, to decide what constitutes a genuine emergency. You won’t panic, and you’re not too proud to know when you do need help. Get out by yourselves if you can, of course; but call for us if you must. Whatever the leader says, we really don’t want a fatality. Not good for business.”
Nathaniel nodded. “How does the button work, then, just with a squeeze?”
“Squeeze and hold. There’s a switch inside, but it needs constant pressure for a couple of seconds, or it won’t activate. That’s just a precaution against accidental knocks. Then it triggers an alarm here, which is constantly monitored; and after that it acts as a radio beacon for the helicopter. Wear it round your neck; there’s an aerial inside the cord. Try not to get separated from your team, or you’re the only one we’ll find. And just getting separated, getting lost does not count as an emergency. Understood?”
Nathaniel nodded, slipped the cord over his head and tucked the button inside his T-shirt.
Two hours later, with wet suits and waterproof packs, he and his team sat in a flat-bellied Zodiac being bumped across a hard and rising sea.
The shore was lost behind them, in a mist of spray and grey cloud. Shadows ahead and to either side resolved themselves as rocks or clusters of rock; occasionally the wind whipped a hole in the mist long enough for Nathaniel to think he could see a longer, bulkier shadow on the near skyline, the promise of an island. Certainly there ought to be islands. Orientation wasn’t easy in this enveloping murk, but he knew how long since they left camp, he knew the direction roughly and the top speed of a Zodiac; after three weeks here he knew the coastline and the maps. Yes, there ought to be islands all around them.
And yes, sudden as a whale, there was an island dead ahead, the navigation reassuringly professional and precise.
Not much of an island, only a low silhouette with a softer outline than the rocks they’d passed already. Perhaps not a full-blown whale, then, perhaps only a calf; but every calf has a mother. He squinted to windward, thought perhaps he spotted her, though perhaps he only wanted to.
The man on the tiller edged the black craft through the surf, till Nathaniel felt its bottom scrape on rock. The air was drenched with spray here; he choked on salt, as the wind flung it against his teeth.
“Out you get, then,” the man shouted. “Don’t leave anything behind, I’m not coming back.”
“What are we supposed to do?” Josephine demanded.
“Survive, and keep moving. That’s all. Pick-up point is on Jamesay, forty-eight hours from now.”
“How the hell do we get there?” They knew Jamesay; they’d circumnavigated her in the three-masted schooner last week. At the time, they’d thought they were only learning to sail a big vessel in a contrary wind.
Nathaniel consulted a sketch-map in his head. Jamesay must be twenty miles south of here, and five miles further out to sea.
The man shrugged, uninterested. “That’s up to you. Out you get, now. Move it.”
Bewildered, angry or uncertain, they were all none the less obedient by now. One by one they jumped out into almost a meter’s depth of bitter water, feeling a steep-shelving stony shore below their feet. They hurried up out of the surf with packs clutched in their arms, then turned and stood in a tight group, unspeaking, to watch the Zodiac bounce away over the water.
The man on the tiller didn’t wave, didn’t call a farewell, didn’t look back.
What now? was the question no one asked, a confession of weakness and a pointless waste of breath.
“There’ll be something,” Josephine said. “There must be something, they don’t expect us to swim it. Split into two, we’ll go opposite ways around the shore. Meet on the far side, and report.”
So they did that, jogging for warmth and speed, as best they could on the treacherous ground. The two groups lost sight of each other fast in the haze, but the island was as small as Nathaniel had thought; they met up again fifteen minutes later.
“Nothing.”
“Us neither. Not a thing.”
So they climbed instead to the island’s crown, and from there could just make out all of its shoreline; and no, there was no boat, nor anything to build with.
“Ideas?” Josephine looked around her team; and when no one else spoke, Nathaniel pointed out what seemed so obvious to him, what surely shouldn’t have needed saying.
“The tide’s high.”
“How can you tell?”
“No high water mark. Where the surf’s reaching now, that must be its limit.”
“Okay. So the tide’s in. So?”
“So if there’s no boat and they’re not expecting us to swim, we can walk off. Or scramble, anyway. Look,” pointing, “there’s a bigger island to the east there. It’s hardly any distance, if we could see clearly. And the tidal fall is bound to be significant, in an environment like this. At low water, I bet we’ll be able to make our way over, pretty much dryshod. You can see, those rocks almost make a causeway already, or the start of one …”
He was right, and they knew it; and they weren’t grateful, but he hadn’t expected that.
They sheltered in the driest crevice they could find, where the island was split down to bedrock. Six hours more or less to kill, before they tried the crossing; and Raoul produced a knife.
“We’re a team,” he said, “we depend on each other. We need to bond. A sign, a symbol would be helpful. What I feel, you all feel also.”
And he laid the blade across the palm of his hand; but Josephine stopped him.
“No,” she said. “I’ll do it. I’ll do it for all of you. I’m leader.”
&n
bsp; She took the knife from him, held his open hand firmly in hers and drew the blade deeply through the pad of flesh below his thumb. He flinched but didn’t pull away, didn’t take his eyes from hers.
“Good,” she said. “You’ll feel that. But it won’t bleed for long in this cold, and the salt’ll keep it clean. Who’s next?”
One by one, they offered their hands to her knife, and their blood all mingled on her skin.
Nathaniel came last, thinking this foolish and unnecessary: why do the team damage, when it most needed all its strength? But it would be damaged more by his refusal; he kept his face neutral and held out his hand, already subvocalizing a mantra he had taught himself, a mental trick to suppress pain.
Josephine’s hard fingers closed around his, she looked into his eyes, she smiled; and the blade stabbed down, and the point drove through all the flesh of his hand, grating against bone and almost shaking him out of his mantric flux.
Almost, but not quite. Pain’s shout was lost in the murmuring of his mind; he held her gaze, and thought he saw more hurt in her than she would have seen in him.
He sat unmoving, until she jerked the knife free; then she held up her hand, and yes, she was bleeding too. The blade had gone all the way through his hand and into hers, as perhaps it had been meant to.
Correction: as certainly it had been meant to.
“If we harm each other,” she said—making a virtue, making a lie of it, though not one meant to be believed, by him or anyone—“we also harm ourselves. We’re a team, we’re bonded now. The team has primacy. Let’s remember that.”
At the tide’s turn, as Nathaniel had predicted, exposed rocks made a road from calf to mother, their small island to its far larger neighbor.
In the Shadow of Frankenstein: Tales of the Modern Prometheus Page 30