Only Denny could think of food at a moment like that.
Central Administration, Edison
12/12/101 Standard
GASTON
‘We’ve got her!’ Kennedy burst in through the door without knocking. ‘The DNA scan came up with a perfect match. There’s absolutely no doubt. She scored a new identity.’
‘Which is?’ Gaston didn’t try too hard to mask his impatience.
‘Leani. Jane Leani. She didn’t even bother to change her first name. But there’s something weird . . .’ Gaston raised an eyebrow as Kennedy continued. ‘She had a cred account of just on a hundred thousand, which according to the records had been there for over ten years. She’s only been on the planet a fraction of that time. Anyway, the strange part is that she hasn’t used her ID and she hasn’t touched the account since almost a month ago – then all of a sudden, last week, the whole hundred thou was transferred to a different account.’
‘Another identity?’ Gaston put in.
‘I don’t think so, sir. You see, this time the account was in a man’s name. He took out all but a few thousand, and it disappeared.’
‘Black Market?’
‘It looks like it. They’re the only ones who can cover a cred trail that well. The man’s name is’ – he consulted his file – ‘Hans Albrecht. But he seems to have disappeared too.’
‘This is getting to be a habit.’ Gaston watched his Security chief’s face. There was more. ‘What is it, Kennedy?’
‘The DNA scan, sir. There was something else. You see . . .’ He seemed to be searching for the words. ‘You see, Ms Sukoma-Williams . . . the scan picked up a small genetic variance. It appears she has one gene-cluster that is—’
‘Out with it, man.’ Gaston could feel his blood pressure rising as Kennedy fumbled for the right word.
He drew a deep breath. ‘One of the clusters is Elokoi. She’s a hybrid. She’s one of them.’
22
DREAM
The Fringes (Edison, Southwest Sector)
14/12/101
SAEBI
Outside, the wind howled and raked its sandy claws across the skins.
Here on the edge of the Great Desert it was at its most ferocious, its indomitable anger surging in from the vast waste of sand and rock, where nothing stood up before it. But still the shelter held. The frame of supple Ocra stems gave with the heavier gusts and sprang back in the lulls, and the vines that anchored it were held securely by the strength of the bedrock.
Inside, a different kind of storm was raging.
Cael lay still, painting his Pictures on the Wall of his own imaginings, watching as it stretched back into infinity: the history of his race, set out upon the stone in all the colours of the land. But as he dreamed, Saebi lay awake.
For what had come to her in the darkness, with the feral wind howling outside and her mate asleep beside her, was a Truedream. A Thoughtsong that sang its truth with all the force of destiny; a truth which was certain to be. As unchanging as the past, as unavoidable as death. And the power of it scared her.
Saebi trembled. For she knew that when she sang it, as she must, within the Ring of Elders in each village that they touched . . . that when they heard it, when they let it speak its truth into them, they too must follow where it led.
And where it led was further than any of their kind had travelled in a hundred centuries.
For the Dream spoke of the Returning . . .
23
THE FIX
Carmody Island
Inland Sea (Eastern Region)
14/12/101 Standard
DENNY
‘So, what do you intend to do? Sit on the island until you all grow old and die, or until someone tracks you down here?’ Denny was agitated. He had only a couple of days left before his leave ran out. Then his bosses at the Corps would start asking questions. If these people didn’t start trusting him soon and let him take off, it would be impossible to ever go back.
‘Look,’ he went on, probing for a weak spot, ‘it wasn’t exactly difficult to find you, you know. And if I could do it, sooner or later one of the bad guys will do it too. If you’d just let me go back, I could be pretty useful. An ear inside the enemy camp. Think about it. If I’d been working with them, and they had a chance like this to get you all at one time, why haven’t the stormtroopers landed? At the moment you’re safe. If I don’t go back and they start looking for me, it’s just one more thing for you to worry about.’
Hendriks and Gwen looked at each other. There were perhaps fifteen people in the room, but it was clear that any decision would be made by these two.
Gwen spoke. ‘He has a point. And we have Jane’s story to back him up. Sooner or later, we’re going to have to start trusting some outsiders, or we’re going to spend the rest of our lives imprisoned on this damned island.’
Denny stopped pacing and looked at her. She still thought of him as an outsider, but now her expression was a little less cold. She continued, ‘I think we have to let him go. They don’t suspect him, and he might be a valuable asset inside.’
Hendriks nodded, and it was decided.
Afterwards, when the others had gone and he was alone with the two of them, Denny asked the question that had puzzled him since the evening of the break-in in Jane’s room.
‘Why did you go to all that trouble?’
Hendriks looked up, trying to determine his meaning.
Denny attempted to make the question clearer. ‘If you wanted to get your hands on Jane’s bag so badly, why didn’t you just knock her over the head and take it? Or send Gwen over to shake her hand – that’s always pretty effective. Why the whole bit with the ether-link and the bogus Security guard? Don’t you think it was unnecessarily complicated? That was what gave you away, you know.’
‘I know, Jane filled us in on that part.’ Hendriks smiled. ‘She forgot to mention the tag you placed on Gwen’s flyer, though.’
Denny returned the smile. ‘Must’ve slipped her mind. But you didn’t answer my question. Why so complicated?’
‘You have to understand something, Denny. It’s death for any of the kids to be caught in Edison or anywhere else. They’re ‘non-persons’; they have no rights. Summary termination – no trial, no questions. Gaston has an obsession with them. By lifting the bag in her apartment, there was no chance of accidentally creating a scene and alerting Security. By the time you arrived, our ‘courier’ was long gone. Besides, we didn’t put the link in just for that sting. It was there long before that. You forget, I was in charge. I could allocate rooming the way I wanted. When Jane arrived, I wanted to know as much about her as I could. She might have been a plant. The link allowed me to monitor her, so that I knew how much to give her access to.
‘And even if she wasn’t a plant, when she showed me the information on Icarus, it was all I could do to stay calm. I wasn’t sure what was in it, and when Gaston had his goons break in to try to find it, I knew he must have bugged my office – or hers – and it was only a matter of time before he got his hands on it. I wasn’t sure what advantage it might give him. So the sting was a calculated risk.’
He was pacing slowly up and down, as if recalling the incident made him nervous. ‘I knew all about Gaston back on Earth, before I left. He was head of Internal Security for the Grants Council. It was his job to terminate the Icarus Project – including the kids. And he failed. We managed to sneak them offworld right under the noses of the Corps, change their ID files, and give them a fresh start. I don’t think he ever forgave us for that. But there’s a far more important reason why he wants to get rid of anyone connected with the project.’
Denny obliged. ‘And what’s that?’
‘He thinks we might find out that he’s a front for the Corporation and its big money investors back home. He’s scared of the idea that there might be someone in e
xistence who can read his mind and know the deals he made, and the way the election was rigged.’
‘You mean—’
‘I mean, the votes that were cast in the election were not the ones the computer counted. It’s what happens when you place all your trust in technology. The electoral computer operates on a fail-safe, closed-loop system. The votes are cast on specified keypads, but that is the only information that will be allowed to enter the loop. If any breach is detected, as little as a single byte of information, the system shuts down and a duplicate loop cuts in, re-routing around the intruder but losing none of the votes. It was designed to control elections on Earth, where the politics are a lot more volatile, and it never failed. That’s why we imported the technology intact.’
The realisation dawned. ‘We . . . imported it?’
‘Lock, stock and microprocessor. Only trouble was, no one bothered to check who actually manufactured the damned thing. Cybertek. Which, you may be surprised to learn, is a subsidiary of Danzig/Ahmet/Fusima, which just happens to own a considerable majority share in the Deucalion Mining Corporation.’
He paused for a moment to allow the information to sink in. Then he went on: ‘The electoral computer has the best fail-safes modern technology can design. But it also has a secret fail-safe override, which only two people on Deucalion – apart from us, and now you – knew anything about. It had to be that way. They couldn’t program the result on Earth two or three years ago, when the thing was assembled. They had to do it on the night before the vote, so that it matched the situation at hand.’
‘So the votes that were actually cast—’
‘Never made it to the data-file. The override simply wiped them and replaced them with the ones that Gaston – or Kennedy – programmed before the first vote was even cast.’
‘But why?’
‘It isn’t too hard to work out. Left to its own devices, Deucalion was going to elect Johannsen and his “People’s Choice” candidates. Or some other group like them. There was nothing the DMC, the World Government or the Grants Council could have done, legally, to stop it. They were too far away to threaten us, but they depend too much on what we produce to allow the new Congress to vote for independence, which would give us control over our own resources, and give a trade monopoly to a society which grew directly out of their own rejects. And that’s the way the vote would have gone, don’t doubt that. What do most of the population of Deucalion really owe to the mother-planet that sent them – or their parents or grandparents – out here? They were never anything more than slave labour, and all the promises they were fed, and all the contracts, were never worth the plastic they were written on.
‘But what could the mother-planet do about it? They couldn’t even refuse to allow the elections. They were too far away to enforce the ban, and their knowledge of history would have shown them the inevitable result. Remember the slogan of the American Revolutionaries? “No Taxation without Representation.” And they stood to lose a lot more than their supply of Ocra tea. Ours would have been the shortest War of Independence in history. How do you stop a revolution when it takes your army fifty years even to get to the battle, and they’re all asleep when they arrive?’
Now Gwen cut in. ‘So if you can’t win the game playing by the rules, you stack the deck. The Consolidation Party is really just a rehash of the old Council. Conservatives and people with vested interests who want things to stay pretty much as they are. They aren’t in on the scam, but they don’t need to be. They’re just sitting back and thanking the Lord they managed to get enough votes. Gaston has the team he needs to carry part two of his plan – commit the government to a continuation of the status quo, and bring in a constitution which makes it just about impossible to move for independence any time this side of the end of the world.
‘After that, his job is basically done. He organises a strong police state to deal with troublemakers and sits back. He already controls most of the media, so he can rely on good press. His backers are happy, and things remain as they are. A phony election every few years, with no one any the wiser.’
Denny sat down. ‘Does Jane know about this?’
‘Everyone on the island does.’ Gwen was looking out of the window, watching Elena playing with a couple of the younger children.
‘And how do you know all this?’
The obvious question.
Hendriks smiled. ‘Because Gaston was right about one thing. He was in danger of being found out. We have managed to get one of the kids onto his staff.’
‘Gaston’s staff?’
‘Of course. It was a voluntary assignment, but we needed to know as much about what Gaston was planning as we could. Our man’s quite safe, as long as no one decides to run a DNA scan. One advantage of his . . . ability is that there’s no hardware for Security to stumble over, and they can’t overhear him passing on information over the comm. He just goes shopping, someone stands near him in the checkout, and it’s done.’
For a moment, he looked sad. Denny caught the expression. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘We had an operative on Johannsen’s staff, too. He died in the crash. It’s ironic. He would probably still be alive if we hadn’t tried to use the trip to get Elena and her mother to Edison, so that we could pick them up more easily. Gaston would have gone after Johannsen eventually, but not in such an obvious manner. He’d probably have ended up with a DTX-induced heart attack, if Daryl or someone like him had got careless and let them in.
‘But with the two of them on the flyer with him, it was an opportunity too good to miss. What they didn’t realise was that they were getting rid of Ritchie at the same time.’
‘Ritchie?’
‘Ritchie Jacklin. We’d created an almost foolproof identity for him. Second-generation Deuc, just “flexible” enough to play the game without getting too caught up in it. He was a natural – clever, politically aware. We were grooming him to take over from Johannsen, so that we’d have someone at the centre of power if we could manage to help the old man win the election. We didn’t know the fix was in at that stage. Ritchie was on the rise. And then they go and blow him away, aiming for someone else . . .’ He trailed off, talking more to himself than the other two.
The best laid plans . . . The words sprang to mind, but Denny couldn’t remember the rest of the ancient quotation.
24
SONG OF RETURNING
(Extracts from the works of AJL Tolhurst transcribed to Archive Disk with permission of his estate: 2/7/2325 Earth standard)
From: The Elokoi: A Sociological Study (Chapter Eleven)
. . . Demographic studies of the Elokoi undertaken during the years following the establishment of the exclusive Reserves revealed that, while the rate of persecution fell dramatically, an unforeseen consequence threatened, in the long run, to wipe out the entire native population. The first five years saw a decline in the Elokoi birthrate of about six per cent, and the rate of decline continued for the next four decades before levelling out. The end result was that by the turn of the First Century as, the birthrate had slipped significantly below the death rate, and the population of all Reserves was in alarming decline.
Many reasons were proposed for this decline, but in the final analysis no one could really explain the phenomenon. Perhaps the most convincing argument was that for a race which had spent its entire history roaming in a semi-nomadic way, within wide but well-defined territories, the confined nature of the Reserve was an unnatural and ultimately destructive environment.
Reports were commissioned, studies were undertaken and committees were formed to look into the problem, but as no viable solution to the ‘Elokoi problem’ – other than the establishment of the Reserves – had been suggested, the expensive exercise added nothing of value to the discussion. (The Reserves were originally called ‘Homelands’, a name which was discarded early because of negative historical connotations
relating to a well-documented colonial state on Old Earth.) The individual’s life expectancy in the Reserves was not declining; in fact, it may have risen fractionally with the removal of the threat of violent death at the hands of human settlers. It was the low birth-rate that was the problem, and, predictably, the fate of unborn Elokoi assumed a low priority in the scheme of things.
In the end, the solution to the problem came from an entirely unexpected source . . .
Elokoi Reserve, Wieta Clan
Edison Sector (East Central)
17/12/101 Standard
SAEBI
The Ring of Elders was silent. The young Teller sat, head bowed, in the centre of the Ring, as she had for the past few minutes. But there was no impatience. The Telling would come in its own time. They would wait. It was the way.
The two young ones had returned from the southern highlands that morning, and even the slowest of cubs had recognised that a Change was at hand. First news of the happening had spread out from the centre, like a pebble dropped in a still pool.
Saebi had said nothing, Cael very little, but the air of expectancy had been growing for hours. Word was sent to the Capyjou plantation, where Rael was overseeing the harvest, and to the river, where some of the Elders were meeting in commune. A hut was made ready, and the two journeyers were led inside to rest and await the return of the Elders. And the fall of dark.
Now, with the waxing moons facing each other across a small expanse of violet sky, the Elders sat in the flickering flamelight and waited patiently.
Finally, Saebi raised her head and stared into the fire. For a moment longer the flames danced in her eyes. Then she opened her mind to the gathered Elders, and they shared her Truedream; the Thoughtsong that had visited her in sleep while the desert wind howled and moaned around the shelter. They Shared, and they knew; the Change was upon them.
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