Firechild

by Jack Williamson

  A GRAND ADVENTURE BY A GRANDMASTER OF SCIENCE FICTION

  “A marvelously entertaining book, a genuinely taut thriller, but interesting on another level because it reads like a collaboration between the brash pulp writer who wowed ‘em with The Legion of Space in 1934, the more mature, post-Campbell author of The Humanoids (1948), and the thoroughly sophisticated Williamson of the ‘80s. (Four stars.)”

  — Aboriginal SF

  “The lively, leapfrogging progress of its thriller form doesn’t preclude a distinctive Williamson concern with ethics and with families.”

  — Publishers Weekly

  “One theme that has been almost non-existent for a decade now is the homo superior novel, that which concerns man’s successor as a species either naturally or by scientific manipulation. This is the idea behind several great novels of the past. Old master Williamson has updated the idea in his latest novel, Firechild, and it’s good to see the old idea with modern trappings.”

  — Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine

  “This pulp-era story, related in modern toned-down prose, will certainly keep most readers turning pages … Sure to please Williamson’s fans.”

  — ALA Booklist

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed i this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  FIRECHILD

  Copyright © 1986 by Jack Williamson

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  Reprinted by arrangement with Bluejay Books

  First Tor printing: August 1987

  A TOR Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc. 49 West 24 Street New York, N.Y. 10010

  Cover art copyright © 1986 by David B. Mattingly

  ISBN: 0-812-55800-6 CAN. ED.: 0-812-55801-4

  Printed in the United States of America

  098765432 1

  In Memory of Blanche

  Prologue

  Alphamega’s history might begin with a small child in rural Ohio, the free-minded boy who left the footprints of his country-doctor-father to become a creator of something like divinity. It might begin with the sordid years of child abuse and festering hate that deformed a less fortunate child into the iron man who fought to stop that creation. It might begin on a bleak day in midwinter Moscow, with a lovely woman receiving orders from her KGB superiors to assassinate the American monster-makers.

  Skipping back in time, it might begin four billion years ago on a long-gone savage planet near the young galactic core, with the hatching of a mutant predator, an unlucky hunter that died because it couldn’t kill and lived again through the ages in the accretion disk of a spinning black hole as the Father-Mother of the people of fire. A better starting point might be at the EnGene Laboratories in the unlucky little city of Enfield, with the Petri dish where the first spark of Meg’s brief and tragic life on Earth was lit.

  However begun, her story belongs to our own uncertain time.

  1

  The Soldier

  of God

  Clegg liked people to listen.

  He never made it easy. He was a gaunt, big-boned man with fire in his eyes and an air of righteous might. His thick black hair had receded to show an imperial forehead, splashed with a big, wine-red birthmark. Gommonly hidden under by a brown beret pulled low, the mark looked like the print of a bloodied hand.

  A sense of holy mission drove him.

  On a windy spring morning, he arrived at the Enfield municipal airport in a sleek Learjet. Marching from the plane to the terminal building in a slept-in brown business suit, he took a taxi straight to the EnGene plant. That was a long brick building once used by a maker of radio and TV receivers, back before those industries went overseas. A tall woven-steel fence surrounded it now, topped with barbed wire. The gate carried a neat green-lettered sign that read ENGENE LABORATORIES, INC.

  The guard stopped him there. He produced an embossed business card that identified him as Adrian Clegg, Director, Bioscience Alert. He asked to see the management. The guard knew what to say.

  “Sorry, sir. With no appointment, you can’t see anybody.”

  Not visibly ruffled, Clegg went on to his hotel. The taxi waited while he checked in, changed into a neat black suit, and spoke on the phone. He returned to the plant. He had left the beret in the room, but the birthmark was covered by his heavy gray makeup.

  An apologetic security officer was ready by then to give him a badge and escort him to the staff lounge. Research people had gathered to wait for him there. They wore clean white smocks embroidered in green with the EnGene logo.

  Six men and a woman, most of them with names known to him as enemies of God, however revered they were by their ungodly peers. They fell silent when he entered, rising to meet him with an air of uncertain concern. Seven devils, as he saw them, gathered in this unholy coven devoted to the Satanic arts of genetic engineering:

  Dr. Victor Belcraft, the slight, myopic little man who was said to think and even dream in the four-letter language of the double helix.

  Dr. Nick Blake, the restless biochemist whose fingers were always busy, forever stringing bright plastic beads into experimental models for new shapes of DNA, toylike patterns for experimental life.

  Dr. Glendel Endrich, heavy-eyed and lazy-bodied, sitting motionless as Buddha, playing his own ceaseless mental games of nucleotides and codons with the silent concentration of a blindfolded master moving chessmen.

  Dr. Aristide Sorel, the gangling mathematician who dwelt among the multitudinous dimensions of his own private hyperspace and blinked with seeming surprise when anybody told him that his abstruse equations had revealed some new law of life.

  The doll-dainty woman was Dr. Carole Bliss, a specialist in electron microscopy before the laboratory accident that had left her wide blue eyes half blind, her mind undimmed. Listening to her colleagues tossing off untested new ideas, she held her place among them with an uncanny instinct for false trails and true ones.

  The other men were Arnoldo Carboni and Dr. Bernard Lorain. Arny ran the computers. A moody, owl-eyed youth, he had no degrees at all and seldom much to say. Absorbed in writing his own computer games when the press of work allowed, he seemed to find his machines better friends than people.

  Lorain was the arch-fiend, as Clegg saw him, the leader who had recruited and organized the team. Bliss called him their catalyst. Soft-spoken, almost shy, he had a rare ability to crystallize all their gifts into unexpected new potentials.

  One by one, they came to shake Clegg’s muscular hand and then settled back to the clutter of coffee cups and soft drink cans around the long table, watching him in puzzled expectation.

  He wanted no coffee, no Coke, no Danish or doughnut. With no time to sit, he stalked to the end of the table, planted a thick black brief case like a rampart before him, and stood scanning the group as if searching out their sins.

  “Dr. Clegg?” Lorain broke an uneasy silence. “May we ask your field of expertise?”

  “I am a soldier of God.” Clegg cleared his throat, a short, harsh, bark. “I have been a student of divinity and a West Point cadet, but I hold no degrees. I retired from the Army as a colonel to set up Bioscience Alert.”

  He paused, waiting for them to wonder.

  “We are’ an informal watchdog group. Volunteers concerned with the ethics and morality of what we believe you are doing here. Even more gravely concerned with a terrible public danger.”

  “Danger?”

  “If you are blind to danger—” A tone of icy accusation. “We have information that you are prying into the most sacred secrets of creation.”

  Lorain came half to his feet, but sat back silently
, trembling with emotion he failed to conceal.

  “We’re doing genetics research.” It was Sorel who spoke, concealing whatever he felt behind a sleepy-seeming mask. “Do you object to that?”

  “It frightens us. Because of what you are trying to create.”

  “We are not creating anything,” Sorel protested. “Not yet, certainly. Rather, we’re revealing truth. Do you call that a danger?”

  “We do.” Clegg bristled. “Because we foresee the outcome of your wickedness.”

  Carole Bliss gasped and shrank from a sudden raw savagery in his voice.

  “Who knows the outcome of anything?” Sorel shrugged. “Faraday once inquired what a baby is for. We’re doing pure science, which requires no end except itself.”

  “Pure?” A snort of contempt. “Prying into God’s forbidden powers! Can you call that innocence?”

  “Sorry, sir.” Sorel waved a lazy-seeming hand. “The actual facts of life were never the monopoly of any god. Through all the ages of evolution, they have been written into the DNA of every living cell, lying open to anybody with the wit to read them. That’s what we’ve learned to do.”

  “Evolution!” Clegg mouthed the word like something foul. “Our information suggests that EnGene was established to invent new kinds of life.”

  “Perhaps.” A bland Buddha smile. “No law forbids it.”

  “Why not, Dr. Clegg?” Victor Belcraft was a brown little imp, grinning now through thick-lensed glasses as if amused. “Natural evolution has been creating new forms of life every day for several billion years. Ever since the first mutation of the first protoform.”

  Clegg stiffened, his big hands gripping the briefcase tighter.

  “Suppose we should master the craft of creation?”

  Belcraft met his cold stare with a wider grin. “Look at mankind. Don’t you think our defects ought to be removed? Our behavior improved?”

  “If that is what you are up to—” Clegg shook his dark-maned head and paused to scowl into their faces. “Have you forgotten that you—even you!—were created in the holy image of God? Can you do better than God?”

  “Not yet, Dr. Clegg.”

  “But someday—” Sorel smiled his Buddha smile. “Someday we will.”

  “Not if we can stop you.”

  “Please!” Lorain rose, protesting with a soft-voiced eloquence. “Let’s keep the peace. We aren’t attacking God. We don’t know where our research may lead us —we could hardly call it research if we did. But what we hope to learn can benefit all mankind. Applied by future generations of genetic engineers, it could create new food plants, new medicines, new industries. Its best creations may be new weapons against hunger and pain and death.”

  “We’re sick of your sophistries.” Clegg glowered into Sorel’s bland serenity. “You may laugh at me now, but you won’t laugh long. I speak for God.” He stopped to glare at Belcraft, whose hand had lifted as if he had been a doubtful schoolboy. “Do you challenge God?”

  “The God you claim to speak for, I do.” Belcraft nodded. “He was invented by primitive men who had to explain their world and its life. We have gained powers of creation they never even claimed for Him. Perhaps we can do better—” He paused to smile, eyes shining through the heavy lenses. “If He was the maker of men, perhaps we can be makers of gods.”

  The birthmark darkened.

  “You—you—” Clegg caught his breath, and that first startled stutter turned to booming fury. “If I speak for God Almighty, you squeak for Hell. The new Lucifer? Daring to battle your own creator, and destined to fall behind your Satanic master into the eternal fire!”

  “You honor us too much.” Belcraft’s impish grin grew wider. “If you credit us with rebellion in Heaven—”

  “Hellish rebellion!” Clegg shook a quivering fist. “Arrogant insolence that will damn your pitiful souls forever! But I warn you now that I won’t let your judgment wait for God. I intend to stamp your insane deviltry out, and I don’t stand alone. Bioscience Alert commands human power, enough to burn your whole nest of demons in the holy fire you seem to crave. Get me?”

  “Just give us time.” Belcraft turned graver. “I think we’ll get you.”

  Sorel had chuckled, and Clegg responded with a scowl.

  “Remember King Knut?” With an air of lazy innocence, Sorel murmured his query. “The story that he tried to sweep back the tide with a broom? Not quite biblical, but still a lesson you might look at. Whatever devil has got into your soul, I doubt that you can command the ocean. The secrets we look for are contained in every living cell. Genetic research will surely go on, and not just here. What we learn—all of us, everywhere —will be a tide of knowledge old Knut never imagined. God or not, new science will sweep your kind away.”

  “Blasphemer!” Clegg’s birthmark showed through his makeup as his face reddened with anger. “We don’t debate Satan’s vile disciples. And we aren’t naive.”

  He stopped to frown at each of them in turn, as if to memorize their faces.

  “We know genetics enough to foresee the Armageddon your folly is inviting. If you persist in this mad infamy, we can mobilize force enough to stop you. We can pass laws against you. We can rally the media to warn the nation. If you force us into action, we have measures to take that even you will have to understand.”

  “Mr. Clegg—” Trembling, Lorain was back on his feet. “Is that a threat?”

  “Ignore our warning, exhaust our forgiving grace, and you’ll find out.” Clegg swept up his briefcase and swung to the security officer waiting at the door. “I’m ready to go.”

  He returned to his hotel. During the day a number of men in business suits came to his room, most of them grimly grave as he was. When he went out for dinner, a private car stopped at the curb to pick him up. After midnight a different car brought him back. He flew out of Enfield early next morning, his destination Denver.

  At the EnGene Labs, genetic research continued.

  2

  “The

  American

  Weapon”

  The long midwinter night had fallen over Moscow. Kutuzovsky Prospekt lay armored in black ice and nearly bare of traffic. The Hotel Ukrania brooded above it, wedding-cake towers dissolving into low-scudding clouds, Stalin’s red star only a rosy nimbus around its high pinnacle.

  Sleet rattled on the windows on the fourteenth floor, but the suite inside was stuffily hot. The man in the canopied bed was sensitive to chills. He was overweight and ill. Wrapped in a blanket and propped against a mound of pillows, he lay listening to the woman, pale old eyes watching her fondly.

  She sat very straight in a hard chair by the side of his bed, reading aloud from a volume of Shakespeare. Beneath a sheer white nylon robe, her fine skin shone from the heat. She was slender enough, with long platinum hair and a shape that had excited many men.

  ” ‘Methought I heard a voice cry, ‘Sleep no more!’ ” She had been an actress. She read with lively animation, and her accent had always charmed him. ” ‘Macbeth does murder—’ “

  “Pardon, mademoiselle.” The nurse spoke behind her. “Monsieur Shuvalov has arrived.”

  The man in bed wheezed for his breath, blinking indignantly. “Who’s Shuvalov?”

  “An official. From the Kremlin.” The woman laid her book on the coffee table, bent to kiss his lax old lips, and reached for a heavier robe. “Sorry, darling. He’s a man I must see. World-Mart business. I won’t be long.”

  The nurse had seated the caller in a gilt-columned reception room beside a table where a samovar was steaming. He was a stocky and heavy-bellied man, his blue-jowled face sleekly shaven and odorous with cologne.

  “My dear Miss Ostrov!” He came to meet her, scanning her with small shrewd eyes that took no part in his smile. “Fetching! More fetching than ever.” He liked to practice the English he had brought home from embassies and trade missions abroad, but he still had a thick accent. “Apologies, if I’m intruding.”

  Her own long eyes a
little narrowed, she offered tea.

  “Urgent business for you.” He shook his head. “The news you brought requires a quick response. You will return to America at once. The Center has new orders for your special cell.”

  “At once?” Her voice sharpened. “We can’t. Mr. Roman has trade negotiations all this week, and he wants to see Dr. Rykov. His emphysema—”

  He waved a heavy hand to stop her.

  “The trade discussions will be postponed. Dr. Rykov can call tonight. The Roman party is booked for New York on Aeroflot, leaving at noon tomorrow.”

  “Listen, Boris!” She was on her feet, her face grown white. “I’m not your slave—”

  “Anya, you forget that we made you.” He paused deliberately to pour his tea. “You were a failed actress. Your family was in disgrace. We took pity on you, saved you from Siberia, or worse, to make you what you are.” Gold teeth glinting, he gestured toward the bedroom. “Mistress of a great American industrialist, permitted to wallow in decadent luxury.” He paused to sugar and sip the tea. “Do not forget—you still belong to us.”

  “I don’t forget.” Trembling, she sat down. “But Mr. Roman will be unhappy.”

  “He must be persuaded.”

  “We can’t go till he feels better. His emphysema makes travel very difficult—”

  “Anya, dear, that’s enough.” He shook his head as if she had been a stubborn child. “Perhaps you failed to understand the disturbing implications of what you report.”

  “Computer printouts. Most of them from something called the engine laboratories.” She shrugged. “I can recruit and organize, but I am neither a chemist nor a computer programmer.”

  “You have been competent.” He squinted at her keenly. “But you must understand that this affair is going to require a most extraordinary effort. Frankly, comrade, we discussed replacing you with a more señor officer. I advised against that because you know your agents and they are already in place. However, you must learn more, know more than you seem to be aware of about the crisis—a very grave crisis—implicit in what you report.”