‘I’m sorry?’ The question made no sense.
‘For the hard-copy. How did you know there was hard-copy on this Icarus Project in Storage, if there was no record on the central database?’
Finally she understood. ‘It was just a fluke. I was going through some of Singh’s data on hybrid strains – you know, the work he did on fruit trees. Well, anyway, he was rabbiting on about the possible application of new hybridising techniques to animal experiments, and he made a passing reference to something called “Icaruss” – with a double “s”. But when I cross-referenced, I came up with a blank.’
She paused, but Hendriks remained silent. ‘I checked Singh’s personal data-files, just in case there’d been some sort of glitch in the downloading. Nothing there either. I nearly dropped it right there, but I was feeling stubborn, so I made the trip to Storage and accessed the library catalogue. Of course, there was no “Icaruss” there either. So I did it by author and requisitioned hard-copies of all Singh’s notes. That’s where I found these.’
Hendriks stood up and walked across to the window, looking down on the gardens which ringed the complex. ‘I don’t understand. It’s impossible to have hard-copy in the repository without the originals being on ROM-file. Unless . . .’
The realisation hit them both at the same moment.
‘Unless,’ Jane interrupted, ‘the files were deleted from the mainframe on purpose. It’s the only explanation. After I found these notes, I did a search through all the files on the computer. I put in “Icarus”, and had it look for any reference to the project, any mention of it at all. A complete blank. Think about it. This is a pretty tight community. What project is so damned secret that no one in the whole Facility knows about it?’
Hendriks shook his head, and she went on. ‘Nothing is that secret. So the only other answer is that there were references to the project, but that someone systematically erased any mention of it from every one of the files. It wouldn’t be that hard to do. Just run a search like I did. Then, every time it came up, doctor the file, and soon . . . the project never existed.’
‘But what about the fail-safes?’ He turned to face her. ‘You can’t just edit or delete ROM-files. Not without high-level clearance.’
‘It’s a machine! Any safeguard you can think up, they can get around – if they have someone who’s good enough with computers. And in this place, there would have to be at least two hundred candidates.’
‘So how come you could find it?’ Hendriks seemed to be struggling to understand. ‘If they did that, how come—’
‘Like I said. Pure fluke. Singh must have used a keyboard instead of voice-activated dictation. What I found was a simple typing error. “Icaruss” with a double “s”. Whoever did the search got sloppy. They must have programmed the correct spelling, but they didn’t allow for human error, so they missed that particular reference, and it stayed on file.’
‘But . . . If they went to all that trouble to get rid of any file references, why would they leave the hard-copies? It doesn’t make sense.’
‘It makes perfect sense. All the computers and the peripherals are linked, you said so yourself. They could doctor the files by remote control – and remain totally anonymous. They even doctored the library catalogue. But the hard-copy files were different. You can’t get rid of them without physically breaking in and stealing them. Or destroying them. They probably considered it, then decided it wasn’t worth the risk. After all, with no references on the mainframe, and nothing on the Storage-library catalogue, who was going to know the files were there? Have you ever been to Storage?’
Hendriks shook his head. ‘I never had any reason.’
‘I can tell you, they’d have every reason to feel safe. There’s mountains of information. Everything’s filed under alphanumeric codes. You couldn’t find a thing in there without a catalogue reference. A file could stay there for a thousand years without anyone ever coming across it. I don’t think the important question is “how?”. What we really need to ask is “why?”. What’s so important about this Icarus Project, that they’d go to so much trouble to hide it?’
Hendriks made no attempt to answer. He was staring out of the window again, thinking.
She went on, ‘What do you know about Singh?’
He spoke without removing his gaze from the gardens. ‘Not much. He died just after I arrived on Deucalion. Some kind of flyer accident. I’ve read his papers on genetic hybrids and high-yield agriculture, of course. They’re classics. But the man himself . . . nothing.’
Jane moved across to the desk. ‘There isn’t enough here to give much of an insight into what Icarus is all about, but I can see why it might be something they’d want hushed up.’
She glanced across to gauge her superior’s reaction. He turned towards her, a questioning expression on his face. Looking down, she picked up the top sheet from the pile on the desk in front of her. ‘It’s another hybrid experiment. But look at the DNA-configuration coding in the Primary Subject column. Notice anything familiar?’
Hendriks took the sheet she held out to him and she watched his face fall, as he struggled to make sense of what he read. ‘But it can’t be. No one would dare. If anyone found out, they’d lose—’
‘What? Their Funding?’
‘Everything.’
Sitting on the edge of the desk, Jane reached out and took the sheet from between his unresisting fingers. ‘I’m sorry, Stanley, but I’ve got news for you. Someone did dare.’
‘But human beings? The guidelines—’
‘I know. The guidelines have been in place for over two hundred years. Strict limitations on the manipulation of human genetic material. Correction of genetic defects, that sort of thing. Nothing more. But it wouldn’t be the first time they’ve been breached. I guess this opportunity was too big to miss. Did you happen to recognise the coding on the Secondary Subject column?’
‘No, I—’ Hendriks was almost beyond speaking.
‘I didn’t think so. I only recognised it because it’s one of my areas of specialty. The secondary genetic source is Elokoi.’
She paused, watching his reaction. He just sat silently, with his face buried in his hands, as she continued. ‘There isn’t enough data on the few hard-copies I’ve got to be able to work out exactly what they were aiming at, but I know what interested us back in Osaka. And I don’t think that anyone is likely to risk a ruined career and a long jail term just to find out what a human being would look like with silver-grey fur, or long flexible fingers.’
‘You mean—’
‘I mean, they were going for the pot of gold.’ Suddenly, her voice grew quiet and distant, barely more than a whisper. ‘I mean, why stop with rats?’
Hendriks looked up, confused, waiting for her to go on, but she was staring out beyond the window, lost in thoughts that spread an expression across her face which might have been guilt, but looked more like horror.
Genetic Research Facility, Edison
15/7/101 Standard
JANE
Just because it’s pointless doesn’t stop me trying. Yet it makes no difference. I still don’t remember what kind of a person I was before.
Just how channelled was I? I was only just nineteen when I left. How far removed from reality can you get in a life that short?
When I got back to my workstation, I looked at the evidence I had in front of me. It wasn’t much, I’ll admit, but it was enough for me to fear the worst. I sat at the desk and called up my old notes. The ones I’d brought with me from Old Earth. There was Hakawa’s data, and my plans for refining the techniques and the experimental method. And it was all written in such cold, objective terms. What kind of a person could write all that and not see where it would eventually lead?
We were all so damned brilliant. Technology had given us the tools, and we were so dazzled by what we could do with them, by
just how far we could go, that we simply forgot to consider exactly how far was far enough.
What is it that makes life any more than a series of biochemical reactions? At what point does it become just too precious to mess around with? Where do you draw the line? With the rats? Or maybe the dogs and cats? What about the apes? Why stop there? Nature takes a million years to evolve anything really useful. Why not jog her elbow a bit?
After all, if God hadn’t wanted us to have telepathy, he wouldn’t have given us the Elokoi – or gene-splicing . . .
I switched off the machine, and pushed my seat away from the desk. A year is a long time in Research. Who was it who said that? Who cares? It’s true.
What about fifty years? How far had they progressed with Hakawa’s work?
For the first time, it hit me just what it meant to spend the best part of half a century in freeze-sleep. Until that moment, I’d been able to block it from my mind. After all, I was still the same age, and I had the same job – even if I couldn’t remember what it had been like before.
It was easy to overlook the fact that Deucalion was a frontier planet. That even Edison, with all its technological know-how, would be a long way behind a place like Osaka. If they’d carried on along the lines I could see developing in my notes, if they’d found a way around the Human Genetic Manipulation Convention guidelines – or if they’d simply ignored them – people like Hakawa . . . like me . . . could be into their second or third generation of hybrids by now.
Something struck me. A subconscious itch that I’d been too preoccupied to try scratching. Suddenly, it shifted into focus. Don’t forget, I knew only one calendar, one time-frame. All the habits of my past existence had passed away with my memory. For me, the year was 101 Standard. Old Earth time was the farthest thing from my mind as I scanned the hard-copies, trying to interpret the clues the unfortunate Singh had left behind him. Trying to fathom the extent of the insanity that Icarus seemed to represent.
Lying on the desk in front of me was the table of DNA-configuration codes that I’d shown Hendriks. I picked it up, but instead of looking down the various columns, I let my gaze focus, perhaps for the first time, on the file identification data at the head of the page:
PROJECT:ICARUS
STATUS:CODE ALPHA (LEVEL FIVE CLEARANCE)
SITE OF DATA-SOURCE:GENETIC RESEARCH FACILITY, SEOUL, ASIA/SOUTHEAST SECTOR
FILE ORIGINATION DATE:12/1/2195.
2195. Two years before I was born. For a moment, the page went out of focus and I felt my head spinning. It was impossible. Hakawa didn’t even start his work for another twenty years.
I checked the data again. There was no mistake. The gene codings in the Secondary column were Elokoi. Which meant that for twenty years before Hakawa and I began our research a secret project had been in place, which made all Hakawa’s work and most of my own obsolete. That Icarus was not some madness that one or two misguided Researchers had cooked up here in Edison. That it had been in operation on Earth for almost three-quarters of a century.
And as I struggled to come to terms with exactly what that meant, the whole insane universe that had been my home for the past months suddenly became just a little more insane.
8
JOURNEY
Roosevelt Ranges
Edison Sector (East)
19/7/101 Standard
Ahead, the eastern sky was streaked with the familiar violet tinge of daybreak. In another eighty or ninety minutes, the sun would burn its way above the foothills in front of them, and the temperature would start to rise. An hour after that, they would start looking for a place to shelter from the murderous heat. A cave, if they were lucky, or perhaps a depression in the shade of some wild Ocra trees, or, as a last resort, a clump of vile-smelling Capyjou.
Now that they had finally made it to the lower reaches of the Ranges, they could travel with reasonable safety during the cooler hours of darkness. For the past three days, they had not been so lucky.
The way across the central Ranges was treacherous even in daylight; narrow mountain paths strewn with boulders, loose crumbling surfaces, the ever-present threat of rockfalls – and always with the stomach-twisting view of the sheer drop just a missed step away. At night, it would have been suicide to move at all. So they had moved by daylight. With the merciless sun streaming down, and the rock face throwing back its heat at them. For three exhausting days.
DARYL
On the night of the crash, we’d slept in the cave where Cael was creating his latest wall.
During the year and a half since I’d last seen the two young Elokoi, more than just their appearance had changed. They seemed more . . . what? Powerful? Alive? Confident? I don’t know. Different, I guess. Of course, I’d only seen them for a few brief minutes, all those months ago, so it could have been all in my head. But I don’t think so.
Elokoi almost never leave their Clan to go off on their own. Their sense of community is too strong. But these two had never been ordinary. I’d sensed it that first time, when I’d caught Cael beside the Greenspace at Neuenstadt, and later in the cave where I’d first seen evidence of Cael’s amazing talent. I guess that difference was the reason I’d followed Cael there in the first place. There was a strength about both of them. It wasn’t anything I could put my finger on, but somehow I knew they were special.
Elena dropped off to sleep almost as soon as we were inside the cave. The horror of the day and her ordeal alone in the hot sun had drained the poor kid completely. I was worried about her. Something was missing behind her eyes when she looked at you, and she had said nothing since her first, desperate cry for help.
As darkness fell on that first night, I was standing in the cave entrance, looking up at the ridge that separated us from the scene of devastation. I sensed a movement behind me, and turned to find Saebi watching me. She touched her face, in the Elokoi greeting of friendship, and I returned the gesture. She knew very little Standard, and I knew even less Elokoi, so we just stood there in silence for a moment.
Then she put her fingers to her mouth, in a pretty effective mime of eating something. And she spoke. ‘Laeda.’ A single word. And she repeated the mime.
Laeda. Food.
I nodded. ‘Laeda . . . food.’ And I mimicked her action.
Every journey begins with a single step . . .
CAEL
He had never been this far south. Or this far east. But when they set out all those months ago they had known that in time they would cross beyond the mountains, and even stand before the deepwater that legend said stretched on forever beyond the rocky shore of the land.
It was just that he had not expected it to be so soon.
Cael was not sure that he believed in forever. The Tellers had spoken of a time before Time, when all the world and all the stars had yet to be. And they had spoken of a time after Time, when again they would cease to be, and all things with them.
Such thinking was beyond him. Cael was an artist. Colour, shape and texture he understood; but time and space and forever . . . How did you capture forever on the surface of a wall? How did you carve it into the grain of a piece of wood?
Leave it to the Tellers.
Saebi was the thinker. She understood things in a way that he never had. And she remembered. Thoughtsongs from their childhood, the stories that Daana, the teacher, had filled them with in their early years. Even the teachings of the old Teller who had visited the village for a few precious days when Saebi had been no more than a cub. Saebi understood. And she wanted more.
To understand. To know. All that had been lost, and all that was yet to be discovered.
It was the reason for their Journey in the first place. The reason they had left the Reserve outside Neuenstadt in the earlylight all those months ago, with the blessings of Rhae and Ielf colouring their thoughts, and the memory of Toev’s derision fading beneath the
glow of what lay before them.
He remembered Saebi’s words on the day he completed the Wall. Standing back, he had laid down the painting stick for the final time, feeling suddenly tired, as if the energy that had sustained him during the months of activity had drained out of him. Almost to himself, he had whispered in wordspeech, ‘Kaalia te poas.’
It is finished.
And from the shadows, Saebi’s thought-tone had entered him. Pride in his work. Joy for the restoration of that which had been lost. And something more . . . ‘It is never finished, Cael. It is only begun.’ Then, coming forward from the shadows into the light, she had placed her hand upon him, and shared with him the beginnings of her Vision . . .
Lost in the memory, Cael set his gaze on the distant plain and moved on, leading the small group towards the rising sun and the distant haven of Edison.
ELENA
The three of them took it in turns to lead. And I followed. Looking back, I suppose I was in shock. I know I was. And why not? I was just a kid. How else could I have survived, except by blocking out the whole ordeal? I had no idea where I was or where I was heading. It was as much as I could do to follow where they led and force my feet to keep moving.
All these years later, the thing that sticks in my mind isn’t the horror of the crash, or that terrible period of waiting before Cael and Saebi arrived to rescue me.
What I do remember vividly is Cael and Saebi themselves. I was eight years old, and I’d never been that close to an Elokoi. Not really surprising. I’d lived all my life in New Geneva, with my mother. I might still be living there, if it weren’t for Ritchie. Ritchie . . . who? I don’t remember his last name, but I think it began with a ‘J’. I probably wouldn’t remember him at all, except that he was the reason we were on the flyer when it crashed. You see, he was my mother’s ‘latest’.
It was Ritchie who was piloting the flyer. He had some pretty important position on Karl Johannsen’s personal staff, and he’d managed to talk the old man into letting us come with him to see the Martinez Oasis. It was a sort of exclusive resort, built over a subterranean spring, right in the middle of the desert, with hotels and swimming pools and everything you could imagine – for a price. Only the richest and most successful ever got to make the trip, so, of course, my mother couldn’t say ‘no’ when we were invited.
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