Deucalion

by Caswell, Brian

  I can still see the look on his face as he spoke. It was a strange expression, somewhere between guilt and embarrassment.

  ‘Hell, I went along with it for the first few weeks. It was the first time I’d been around the Elokoi for more than a couple of minutes, and it was easier, I guess. To go along with it, I mean.

  ‘Anyway, this one day, we were escorting this power-dresser from New Geneva around the village. The guy stopped outside Rael’s hut and started talking down to him. You know, like he was retarded or something. He even put his hand on Rael’s head. That’s a definite strike out. Even Elokoi don’t touch each other, until they’ve been accepted as nyassa, which is a kind of honorary family member.

  ‘But Rael, he didn’t react. He just put a hand on the guy’s arm, and mimed for him to wait. Then he went inside the hut. Of course, the dumb jerk waited. He was there for a “photo-opportunity” and here was one of the little creatures being cute. I felt like strangling him right there. I figured it would have made a much better shot for the late news.

  ‘Then Rael came back. He had a bowl in his hands and he handed it to the guy. I knew what was in it. I’d been on duty at the village long enough to learn a bit of what went on. I should have warned the jerk, but I wouldn’t have missed what was about to happen for a month’s salary.

  ‘The bowl was full of Yorum meat. The guy was caught with a mouthful of the vilest tasting crap you ever ate, but the cameras were running, and they were ether-linked to all the tube networks, so he didn’t dare spit it out. His eyes were watering and I really thought he was going to throw up. He swallowed and tried to hand back the bowl, but Rael just kept pushing it back into his hands, so that he was forced to take another mouthful. And another.

  ‘In the end I had to put him out of his misery. I took the bowl and gave it back to Rael, and as I leaned over, I winked. I didn’t think he’d understand, but just as I was straightening up, the old fox winked back.

  ‘After that, I spent a lot of time in the village. I taught Rael a bit of Standard, and he taught me a few Elokoi speechwords. Then one day I found the two stone carvings at home, and I figured they might interest Rael, so I took them along. When I handed them to him, I thought he was going to keel over on me. You’d think they were made of gold. Before I knew it, I had all the Elders around me, and each one of them touched me on the face. I didn’t know what it meant at the time, but . . . Well, put it this way, I don’t think we’ll have any trouble getting you bed and breakfast for a few days. Just check out what they’re having for breakfast, though.’

  And that’s how it was. Rael took me in, and Leani sent Taek, her fourthmate, to stay with friends, until I didn’t need his bed-platform any more. I would have been embarrassed about it, except that he looked quite pleased to go.

  It was a bit late for Denny to go back to Edison, so he spent the night on the floor, near the cubs’ bed-platform. The poor guy was probably beginning to forget what a bed felt like. But he didn’t mind. I could tell he felt at home, and I could tell it wasn’t the first time he’d spent the night on that particular piece of floor.

  My bed was a little short, naturally, but it was comfortable. I lay awake for a while, listening to the Elokoi sleeping, and to Denny snuffling around, getting comfortable. Then suddenly I wasn’t listening to anything, and when I woke up it was morning.

  Actually, I didn’t wake up. I was woken. By the sound of Denny being jumped on by Leani’s two youngest. It was a game they’d obviously played before, but it didn’t dampen their enthusiasm, or Denny’s screams. One thing was interesting, though. For all their wrestling and rolling on the floor, they hardly made a sound. The noise that woke me was all from Denny.

  During the next few days, I would notice the same sort of thing over and over. I would notice a lot of things I hadn’t picked up on my first, formal visit. And I realised something that took me a long way along the road to understanding the Elokoi. Just because an Elokoi will never tell you a lie doesn’t mean that you’ll get more out of one than he or she is willing to give.

  The first time I was a sort of official visitor. Maybe not as patronising and obnoxious as the one in Denny’s story, but not . . . nyassa. This time I was Denny’s friend. I shared their home and their food – well, some of their food. I wasn’t there to study them and they knew it.

  I guess I noticed it most in Leani. The first time, she had sat outside the hut and barely acknowledged me. Now, she took trouble with little things – like making sure that my meal didn’t include some of the more . . . tasty examples of Elokoi cuisine. She was a tough customer, and she ruled the family with a look or the slightest of body movements – and probably a whole lot of thoughtspeech that went, quite literally, right over my head. But she had a warm side that I’d not been allowed to see during my first, short visit. And she had a wicked sense of humour. I could see why Rael was so devoted to her.

  When I remembered the ignorance that my Earthside research notes had revealed, I curled up inside. For the first time since my arrival, I was thankful for the chance I’d been given. To start again, to wipe out the past – if not completely, then at least in ways that mattered. I liked the person I was becoming. I just hoped that I could survive long enough to get to know her.

  Before he left, Denny guided me aside and took hold of my hand. ‘You realise this could be the end of two promising careers.’

  Two? I must have looked confused. I know I felt it.

  He smiled. ‘Well, you’ve already done a fair job of burning your bridges, and I’m about to do a little freelance Security work that’ll get me canned if they catch me. But what the hell. I never liked the damned job in the first place.’

  I wanted to stop him, to tell him he didn’t have to do it, that he’d taken enough risks for my sake already, but one look at his eyes and I knew it would do no good. He was enjoying all this. And now that I had seen him with Leani’s cubs, with the whole family, I realised that what I’d told him about the little I knew of the Icarus Project must have been eating away at him.

  It’s strange. All the time, since I’d found Singh’s notes, I’d been angry. Shocked even. At the thought of experimenting with human genes. That was what the laws had been written to guard against. That was the . . . crime. But what about the other side of the equation. What about the Elokoi genes?

  Perhaps it was an improvement on my old self that I could be shocked at all. I’m not sure the person who wrote up the research notes, or bitched about her future in her diaries, would have been shocked at what I’d stumbled upon, except maybe to be peeved that someone had got there before her. But improvement or not, I’d still fallen into the trap of looking at the Elokoi as something alien; something less than human. Cute. Loveable even. But not the intelligent, open-hearted . . . civilised creatures I’d met last night.

  Denny would never have made that mistake. And now that he knew what I knew, it was personal. He would never let it lie. I might have known him for only a few days, but I was totally certain of that.

  ‘What exactly are you planning to do?’ I asked.

  He smiled a cryptic smile. ‘Well, for a start, I’m going to steal someone’s mini-comm. I’d use yours, but they’ve probably got it tagged. They’ll be waiting for you to use it, so they can home in on you. Which gives me an idea. Before I go, give it to me. I might have a use for it yet.’

  ‘Why do you need a mini-comm? Don’t you have one?’

  I spoke to get him back on track. One thing I’d learned about Denny was that he had a mind like a grasshopper. He’d forget he was trying to explain something to you and fly off at a tangent. It was one of the things I liked about him. He kept you on your toes. But it was also incredibly frustrating at times.

  ‘Of course I have one. But I’ll need that to call people with. I’ll need the other one for this . . .’ He pulled a small plastic envelope out of the pocket of his tunic. Inside, I could make o
ut the tiny shape of the ether-link he’d removed from the communicator in my room.

  I asked the obvious question. I knew he was expecting it and I didn’t want to disappoint him. ‘What are you going to do with that?’

  His face lit up, and I knew he was pleased with himself. ‘I’m going to listen in on them. See what I can pick up. Whenever they activate the loop, this little baby will link any comm it’s connected to into the system. And the beautiful part is, if I set it to receive, they’ll never know I’m listening. We’ll play them at their own game.’

  ‘And what makes you think they’ll use it? Maybe it was just set up for my benefit.’

  He shook his head. ‘No way. It’s much too sophisticated. If they’ve gone to all this expense, you can bet they use the network all the time. It’s totally secure – unless someone happens to have one of these babies. Anyway, I’ve got to go. I’m on call in two hours, and I don’t want them canning me too soon. I might need to use a few of Security’s little toys . . .’

  13

  ORIGINAL SIN

  Skeleton Coast

  Inland Sea (Northeast Quadrant)

  26/7/101 Standard

  ELENA

  You have to understand. It was like I’d been half-asleep all my life, and then, at eight years old, in the space of a few days, I was suddenly wide awake. The whole world as I knew it had ceased to exist, and I was thrown into a situation that even an adult would have had trouble coming to terms with. For the first couple of days after the crash, I was in total shock. The memory of my mother . . . sitting there next to me one minute, holding my hand and trying to sound comforting, then . . . gone. Torn away from me as the side of the flyer ripped open and my seat was hurled out by the blast.

  Looking back now, I think I was fortunate in one thing. At the moment of the first explosion, I was looking nervously out of the window, trying to work out what was happening, so I didn’t see what happened to my mother. If I’d actually seen her die, I don’t think even Saebi could have brought me out of the state it would have left me in.

  I was eight years old.

  I know I keep on saying it, but it’s important. There is no ‘right’ age to lose your mother, but eight is probably the worst. Any younger and you’re probably too young for the significance of the loss to register. Any older and you can probably find ways to deal with the grief. But at eight, you simply aren’t equipped.

  And my mother had been my whole life. From the moment I was born, it had been just her and me. There was never anyone called ‘Dad’. There were men, of course. My mother was beautiful and smart, and she had a smile that . . . well, everyone who met my mother loved her. But there was no one permanent. Every time my mother introduced me to her ‘latest’, it meant that the man I’d just got used to having around had disappeared from my life for ever. I didn’t mind. They were all pleasant men. Kind to my mother and to me. But they were never an important part of what we had. The world rolled on around us, and we remained there at the centre.

  But in one moment there was no more ‘we’; she was gone. The centre of my existence, my one constant in a meaningless world of adults and their rules and their unfathomable expectations.

  I know I went into shut down. I remember nothing of the first days of our journey across the Ranges. Daryl told me I just stared. I said nothing, I ate if they put food to my mouth, and I walked if they told me to. But I wasn’t there. I was down inside myself somewhere, hiding. While the storm of confusion and anger – and fear – raged around me, and I waited for my mother to come back and make it all better.

  In the end it wasn’t my mother. It wasn’t even Daryl, who was the only human being left alive within . . . how far? A hundred, a hundred and twenty kilometres? In the end it was Saebi. Somehow, she found a way through the fear and the confusion, and sang a song of peace which touched me down where I was hiding, and told me that things would be all right.

  And for the first time, I knew. That my mother was gone. That she would not be coming to help me. Ever. That there was no ‘we’ any more. Only ‘me’.

  In my grief I called to her, staring up into the morning sky, as if my words could reach her where my outstretched arms could not.

  The Elokoi are not people.

  Ask anyone. They don’t build cities. They don’t own things, they have no great literature. And they’re lousy fighters.

  They aren’t people.

  But what’s so great about people?

  Ask some people, and they’ll say that hybrids aren’t people either. They’ll say they’re abominations. Science gone mad, the original sin of Genetic Research. Not people. Not really.

  And maybe they’re right. I don’t know anyone who can see into the mind of God, to know what He thinks. All I know is that you are what you are, and if you look human, and you feel human, and you’ve spent your whole life looking and feeling human, then it comes as a huge surprise to find out that some people think you’re not.

  We’d flown all night, heading southwest from Edison, after the flyer had plucked us from the forecourt of the hospital. I’d slept for most of the trip, leaning against Daryl, who was leaning against the window. For some reason we were both feeling just a bit tired. I guess almost dying, then walking for nearly a week from the Fringes through the mountains to the lowlands, then surviving a murder attempt, only to be hijacked and flown further away than you’d ever been in your life would tend to make you a little weary.

  Then, at about three-ninety, we landed. Gwen put the flyer down a few hundred metres from the beach on a desolate part of the coast, and for a moment everything was still. I suppose it’s a bit of a redundancy to say it was a desolate part of the coast. When it comes to describing the whole eastern edge of the inland sea, ‘desolate’ is about the only word that fits.

  Of course, it wasn’t always that way. The area where we landed was one of the most fertile and heavily populated on the whole of Deucalion’s single great continent, until about ten thousand years ago, just before the Great Trek. But the ecological balance was always pretty fragile, and the period of volcanic activity and climate changes that followed the huge earthquakes and tectonic shifts of the tenth millennium bs destroyed it so completely that by the time we arrived in our flyer, and landed just back from the beach, there was nothing much to see except for a few salt-resistant bushes and an awful lot of sand.

  The reason we know all this is through the work of the early surveyors and prospectors. They were the ones who named the area. Skeleton Coast. It seemed that wherever they dug, wherever they ran their surveys, they found the remains of villages. Tools, artefacts, skeletons.

  Somebody once estimated that there must have been five hundred times as many Elokoi living just around the shores of the inland sea before the first of the major quakes, than were living on the whole east coast when the first C-ship arrived ten thousand years later. Of course, at eight years old, I wasn’t aware of any of this. To tell the truth, none of the major research had been started by then, so I guess I’m getting a little ahead of myself. But it’s hard to know what to put in and what to leave out.

  And in order to understand what we were up against in those early days, you have to realise just how little we really knew. About anything.

  In a way, being so young I was in a better position to come to terms with what was to happen than Daryl was. After all, I’d already learned a lot about myself from Saebi and the Elders of the Wieta Clan, and I was about to learn a whole lot more. But for Daryl, what was to come would be a total surprise.

  Of course, he would not be alone. It will probably take historians another hundred years to work out exactly what was going on in the lead-up to the Revolution.

  All I really knew at the time was that Gwen and the others were like me, in a way that perhaps only Cael and Saebi and the Clan Elders might understand.

  I didn’t know what it meant, but as soo
n as I stepped out of the flyer, and breathed the hot air, and looked out across the desolate landscape towards the sea, I knew that I was almost home.

  Suddenly, Gwen was behind me. I knew it was her, without turning around. She was looking out over the sea, in the same direction as me, and I felt her slip into my mind.

  – I felt the same way the first time. And you know, Elena, I’ve never really lost the feeling.

  I looked at her, and tried to talk with her totally, mind to mind, as I had with Saebi and the Elders, but she touched my hand and smiled gently.

  – Slowly. It takes a while to use anything but the words. Just concentrate on images, feelings. It will come.

  And with that, I felt a warm glow begin deep inside, spreading slowly through me, like . . . peace. I sat down and she crouched beside me, looking out to sea again. Out here, alone, she was nothing like the short-tempered, efficient pilot who had plucked us from the centre of Edison and brought us out alive. I told her as much, and she just shrugged.

  ‘You do what you have to,’ she said aloud. ‘There was no time for conversation. Especially with a Security officer who wasn’t supposed to be there in the first place. We were only sent for you, you know.’

  ‘I know. They told me.’ I tore my gaze from the horizon and faced her. I didn’t want them to think of Daryl as just ‘a Security officer’. He was my friend. We’d been through so much together, and I trusted him. And I had seen inside the mind of an assassin. I knew the danger Daryl was in if he stayed. Especially if I was gone. ‘But I couldn’t leave him,’ I finished lamely.

  ‘I know. They told me.’ She smiled again, and the warmth I’d noticed lit up her eyes. She wasn’t very old herself, but she was old enough to talk down to me if she’d wanted to. She didn’t.