– Your name . . . is Jane?
The words formed in my mind and the buzzing returned.
– I feel your thoughts, but they are . . . strange. Weak, and hard to read. Why are you here, Jane?
As I watched, a young woman stepped around the flyer and into the pool of light formed by one of its landing lights. She was looking straight at me – straight into me – and as I looked back, I felt a strange . . . peace spread over me.
– Do not be afraid. We are . . .
At that moment, she caught sight of Denny stranded halfway between the flyer and the safety of the bushes. He was only a few metres from her, and as she approached him, he stood to face her. But there was no struggle.
The girl approached almost casually, and reached out her arm as if she wished to shake his hand. But as he raised his own, I saw a bright blue flash leap from her hand to his, and he collapsed. For a moment I was frozen to the spot. Then I started running towards them. I reached her, pushed her away, and fell to my knees over him.
‘What have you done to him?’ I shouted the words as I turned to look up at her.
There was no emotion on her face as she replied, ‘He will be fine. A small taser charge. In an hour or so he will come around, with nothing more than a headache. But you . . . we knew nothing about you. How did you know where to find us? We—’
She got no further. Suddenly, my fear and anger exploded and I leapt at her, my fingers grasping for her throat.
As if she knew my intention, she simply swayed backwards and placed her leg out in front of me, so that my momentum carried me over it, and I found myself sprawling at her feet.
She leaned over as if to help me up, but as her hand came close, I saw the small black box she held in her palm. She depressed a small button, and everything went black . . .
17/11/101 Standard
DENNY
The world swam into focus, and the first sensation he could feel was the dew soaking into his shirt, as he lay on his back, staring at the sky.
He tried to get up, but he was still paralysed. He felt a fleeting moment of terror, then forced it down. It was not permanent; with effort, he could move his fingers. Just a touch, but the movement was coming back. It was another fifteen minutes before he could struggle to a sitting position and take stock of what had happened.
The flyer was gone, of course. And so was Jane. The knowledge sat in his heart like a piece of glass. She should never have come. You should never have asked her. The small voice of self-accusation sounded in the back of his mind, but he pushed it away. Time for the guilt trip later. Right now he had to think. He had to find a way to get her back.
They had taken her with them, that was obvious, so they had a reason for wanting her. That meant that she was almost certainly still alive. They had not killed him, so they were unlikely to do worse to her. Breathing space. But why Jane? Why not him? Why not both of them?
He dragged himself across to where his backpack lay beneath one of the bushes. His legs were still too rubbery to take his weight, and he sat rummaging through the sack, looking for the location-finder.
Taking it out, he keyed in the activation sequence. Almost instantaneously, the vid-screen lit up. But instead of a set of coordinates, there was a message: Unit is not operational at this time . . .
Not operational. Damned microchip double-talk! What did that mean, ‘Not operational’? That they’d found the beacon and destroyed it? Or that they were still on the move, and the motion-detection screening was preventing the signal from getting through? There was no way of knowing. All he could do was keep trying. And hoping.
But why Jane? Why immobilise him, and take her? It didn’t make sense. Which should come as no surprise. Nothing about this whole mess made any sense.
He tried the screen again, but the message was the same. Unit is not operational at this time . . .
Placing the instrument back into his bag, Denny Woods reached down and began trying to massage the life back into his legs.
18
QUESTIONS
(Extracts from the works of RJ Tolhurst transcribed to Archive Disk with the author’s permission: 12/14/165 Standard)
From: Memoirs of a Teenage Revolutionary (Chapter Three)
With the assassination of Karl Johannsen, the self-styled ‘People’s Choice’ candidate, only weeks before the inaugural elections, the ‘people’ had to choose someone else.
Years of rule from above by the Earth-directed Council saw a society poorly prepared for the sudden responsibilities of democratic government. It was a conservative society which voted overwhelmingly for the status quo, in spite of pre-election indications that the new ‘People’s Choice’ Party would poll strongly. Or so the analysts judged when the make-up of the first Congress bore such a striking similarity to that of the old Ruling Council.
Johannsen himself had always been something of an enigma, rising to power on the Council despite his often public anti-Earth stance. A self-made man, he liked nothing better than to embarrass the Council with pronouncements about the inequity of inherited wealth, and the unique opportunities offered by the ‘new frontier’.
It was even rumoured that once in power, he would lead the movement towards an independent Deucalion, a republic, responsible to no outside power, especially not a mother-planet half a galaxy and half a century distant. A planet which cared nothing for its far-flung sons and daughters, but only for the wealth they could produce and warp back.
While those close to him spoke later of a ‘driven’ man, a selfish and self-centred individual who saw it as his preordained right to rule, it was clear that at the time of his sudden death, Karl Johannsen would easily have carried the Presidential election of 101. Which is why it came as such a shock to analysts when the party he had formed polled so badly just a few weeks later. The victorious Consolidation Party pointed to the people’s ‘sensible belief in a stable and productive society threatened by talk of independence’, and moved to enshrine in law Deucalion’s obligations to honour the debt it owed to Old Earth for its very existence.
In his victory speech, the President-elect, Dimitri Gaston, was in great form. No truly independent society, he said, could be based on the abrogation of responsibilities, the tearing-up of legal contracts and the theft (as had been advocated by the more radical elements of the ‘People’s Choice’ Party) of all the holdings of the DMC. After all, wasn’t the Corporation almost entirely responsible for the establishment of the colony in the first place?
And when, in bars and workplaces all up and down the east coast, workers got together and asked themselves how so many could have voted as they did, when everyone they knew had voted differently, the Independent Press (owned and operated by the media wing of the DMC) ran stories about the importance of examining the ‘major trends’ and ignoring ‘local irregularities’.
I was about sixteen at the time, and I still remember what my grandfather said about it. He was talking to my father, and as usual, they didn’t exactly see eye to eye.
‘They rigged it,’ my grandfather said. ‘They must have.’ He was referring to the election result and I nodded silently in instinctive agreement, from my customary observer’s position in the corner.
Always the same argument. The topic might change, but the argument remained the same.
‘That’s just because you didn’t get the result you were hoping for,’ my father replied.
My grandfather the historian. His son, my father, the Researcher. They looked at the world through different eyes. I think I took after my grandfather. He never took anything on face value. In politics – and in life – there was always room for a good conspiracy, and it was the job of every thinking man and woman to keep the bastards on their toes. It doesn’t matter who you vote for, you always end up with a politician. Assume the worst, and you’ll rarely be too far from the truth. My grandfather’s philoso
phy. It may sound negative, but if you think like that, you never really get disappointed, and if things turn out better than you expected, it’s a pleasant surprise.
But my father was comfortable. He had a good job and a good life, and he didn’t believe in rocking the boat.
‘Where’s your evidence? You can’t make claims like that without evidence. The votes are cast directly onto the electoral computer, and the results are calculated automatically, without any individual having any contact with the process. It’s impossible to tamper with the computer, and it’s impossible to “rig” the vote.’
Evidence. Prove your case. Support your opinion with facts. My father was nothing if not disciplined.
But my grandfather was right.
I was sixteen, and I knew he was right, even if there was no evidence. Sometimes you don’t need the evidence of your nose to smell a rat. You just know . . .
Carmody Island
Inland Sea (Eastern Region)
17/11/101 Standard
JANE
They didn’t treat me like a prisoner. In fact, from the moment I woke up on the flyer, they tried to ease my pains – and my fears – and make me as comfortable as possible. But they wouldn’t give me a direct answer to any of my questions, and they wouldn’t turn the thing around and take me back.
Mariella – Marrie – was almost three years old, and as cute as . . . an Elokoi cub. She appeared to have forgotten, for a while, the loss of her mother. Kids can do that sometimes. Wipe what they can’t understand completely from their minds, and act as if it never happened.
She talked to me for a while, asking me if I was coming to their new home too. And did I like trees? Because they’d promised her there were lots of trees, and she could have one of her own to climb when she was a bit older. Her brother, Jonathon, was too young to have a tree of his own, she said, but when he got older . . .
We talked for half an hour before she fell asleep on my shoulder. I looked across at her father and he smiled a grateful half-smile. On the seat beside him, his baby son slept peacefully. I tried to think of some way to start a conversation with the man, but the look of loss that I saw in his eyes prevented me.
I thought of Denny, waking up alone on the grass of the Greenspace. What would he be feeling? I, at least, was on the verge of solving part of the puzzle. He would simply be more confused than ever.
But then again, he wasn’t trapped on a mystery flyer, like I was, heading God-knows-where, with a group of people who refused to tell me anything except that I wasn’t in any danger, and that I was lucky it was them who’d found me.
Funny. I didn’t feel lucky . . .
Residential (North Wing)
Genetic Research Facility, Edison
17/11/101 Standard
DENNY
Finally, the signal connected and the coordinates lit up the small screen. The tag was still working. They hadn’t found it. He could trace them to where they were holding Jane.
Carrying the unit across to the desk where he kept his punchboard, he selected the atlas database and punched in the coordinates, reading them from the screen. Before his fingers had left the keypad, the monitor was filled with a coloured map of the northeast quadrant of the inland sea, with a bright red cursor flashing somewhere inW its centre. He touched the screen directly above the cursor, and the map refocused, enlarging the area immediately around the point he had selected, and providing at the bottom a small information window.
Carmody Island
Area: 90,000 ha.
Population: Uninhabited.
Development potential: Extremely low priority. (See satellite
geospectrometer reading, 6785490AX, 13/12/65 Standard)
The resource database entry revealed more. Carmody was a small island a few hundred clicks west of the Skeleton Coast, in the centre of the mid-ocean rainbelt. The rainbelt was caused by a warm ocean current running parallel to the coast, which created a low-pressure zone, driving the moisture-rich air upwards until it met the colder air of the upper atmosphere, where it condensed and dropped as rain before it reached the land. It was this rainbelt which was largely responsible for the desert conditions between the Skeleton Coast and the Ranges. Geological records suggested that the volcanic upheavals of circa 10,000bs were responsible for both the existence of the current and the rainbelt.
Evidence compiled by the geological survey satellite concluded that the island was an igneous upthrust, with little in the way of exploitable minerals, and though the soil was rich, vegetation abundant and rainfall well above average, given the expense of clearing the land and the cost of transportation, agricultural development of the site was economically unviable in the foreseeable future.
An ideal hide-out.
But for whom? Knowing where they were located did nothing to clear up the mystery of their identity. Were they the assassins who had sabotaged Johannsen’s flyer? Was that why they had kidnapped the two from the hospital? But if they had gone to all the trouble of organising the kidnapping, why try to poison the girl beforehand? And how did Hendriks fit in, or the man in the park with his two kids? Or Jane?
Questions . . .
He would find no answers on the data-screen of his punch-board. There was only one way to get answers, and that was to go there. And to make it there undetected would take every credit of the fortune he had recently ‘liberated’. He would need the right equipment to play these mysterious people at their own game.
19
THE COLOURS OF THE WORLDSONG
Roosevelt Ranges
Edison Sector (South)
11/12/101 Standard
SAANI
It was finished. The Song echoed in the part of her mind that existed for the memories of the Telling. It was the Lastsong, the final act of love that made her a Teller.
Saani lay back and watched Saebi. There was a smile on the old Teller’s face, and she held Saebi’s attention with a gentle control.
– It is my time, Saebi. I hear the colours of the Worldsong singing me Beyond. No . . . Do not try to catch them. They will come to you soon enough, when your Lifesong is ending. Hold to Cael, and follow the haaj – wherever it calls. I saw it in you both when you first came to me in the homespace of the Wieta. Something in you is special, but the signs are unclear. Follow the call, and you will come to it together.
Suddenly tired, she closed her eyes for a moment. When they slid open again, they were looking somewhere far beyond the limits of the cave. And as the smile crept slowly over her face, Saani drew a long breath.
– Such colours . . . so beautiful. So . . .
She stared in silence for a long moment, then her vision focused again, and she spoke aloud. Two words. ‘Be free.’
Her eyes closed for the final time, the breath she had been holding sighed slowly away. Saani lay still.
Unmoving, Saebi stared at the old Teller, and a sense of great peace settled over her. Slowly she came back to herself, and turned her head to see Cael staring at her, the painting stick held loosely in his fingers. Behind him, the wall was half-completed. This time she knew it would stay that way. Forever.
Without a word, he dropped the stick onto the floor and moved across to where she sat . . .
20
TERMINATION PROCEDURES
Central Administration, Edison
11/12/101 Standard
GASTON
‘The last recorded contact was in Roma, about a month ago.’ Kennedy stood nervously before Gaston’s desk and read from the file in his hands. He knew its contents by heart, but the act of reading them meant that he didn’t have to hold his superior’s gaze. ‘She called the Genetics Facility from her mini-comm, but received no answer. We’ve heard nothing of her since.’
‘And doesn’t that strike you as just a littl
e odd?’ Gaston’s tone was too quiet; Kennedy knew from bitter experience that the older man was at his most dangerous when he sounded calm.
‘Of course it’s odd,’ he began, then realised he was raising his voice. He drew a nervous breath and watched the sudden fire die away again from Gaston’s tiny eyes. ‘I mean, it’s impossible for someone to live anywhere on Deucalion without coming to our attention in some way—’
‘Unless she has help. Or . . .’ Gaston paused, like an elementary-school teacher waiting for an answer. Kennedy remained silent, trying to decide on the correct response. ‘Come on, Kennedy. You’re the head of Presidential Security now. Don’t tell me I have to spoonfeed you for the rest of your life.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘Unless she has help. Or?’
Finally, Kennedy realised what the old man was getting at. ‘Or unless she has a new identity. But I thought we decided that she couldn’t have made the necessary contacts in the short time she’s been here. It takes years to gain that sort of trust from the Black Market. It just isn’t possible.’
‘It’s just as possible as her being able to remain invisible for . . . how long is it? Five months? Apart from a few tantalising comm calls, which I’m beginning to think weren’t so accidental.’ Gaston came to the point. ‘I want you to run a DNA-match. Top priority. If she has managed to create a new identity, let’s find out just who it is we’re looking for.’
For a moment Kennedy did not reply. Then the words came slowly.
‘A . . . DNA-match? Do you have any idea what that will—’
‘Cost?’ Gaston laughed. ‘Why should you worry? It’s not your money. It’s not even my money. It worked when we were looking for the Icarus brats, didn’t it? We didn’t have a clue who they were, but we found them through the DNA-trace. And it was a lot harder that time, because we had to do it in secret, a few hours at a time. What do we have the damned information on file for, if we aren’t going to use it?’
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