Imperial Earth

by Arthur C. Clarke

  That he been the end of Mortimer Keynes's active career. The famous clinic he had established was closed down, though he still kept his Harley Street office and did a little consultation. His ex-partner, who had a remarkable gift for acquiring public and private funds, promptly established a new base and continued his experiments.

  As Duncan read on, with increasing curiosity and excitement, he realized that here was the man he needed. Whether he would take advantage of the high-speed cloning technique he could decide later; it was certainly interesting to know that the option existed, and that if he wished, he could return to Titan months in advance of his original schedule.

  Now to locate Sir Mortimer's ex-colleague and successor. It was lucky that the search did not have to rely on the name alone, for it was one that occurred in some form or other half a million times in the Earth Directory. But he had only to consult the Classified Section — often referred to, for some mysterious reason lost in the depths of time, by the utterly meaningless phrase "Yellow Pages."

  And so, on a small island off the east coast of Africa, Duncan discovered El Hadj Yehudi ben Mohammed.

  * * * * *

  He had scarcely made arrangements to fly to Zanzibar when a small bombshell arrived from Titan. It bore Colin's identification number, but he was unable to make sense of it until he realized that it was both in cipher and the Makenzie private code. Even after two processing trips through his Minisec, it was still somewhat cryptic:

  PRIORITY AAA SECURITY AAA

  NO RECORD OF ANY SHIPMENT TITANITE REGISTERED BUREAU OF RESOURCES LAST TWO YEARS. POSSIBLE INFRINGEMENT FINANCE REGULATIONS IF PRIVATE SALE FOR CONVERTIBLE SOLARS NOT APPROVED BY BANK OF TITAN. PERSISTENT RUMOR MAJOR DISCOVERY ON OUTER MOON, ASKING HELMER TO INVESTIGATE. WILL REPORT SOONEST. COLIN.

  Duncan read the message several times without any immediate reaction. Then, slowly, the pieces of the puzzle began to drift around into new configurations, and a pattern started to emerge. It was one that Duncan did not like at all.

  Naturally, Colin would have gone to Armand Helmer, Controller of the Resources; the export of minerals came under his jurisdiction. Moreover, Armand was a geologist — in fact, he had made one small titanite find himself, of which he was inordinately proud.

  Was it conceivable that Armand himself might be involved? The thought flashed through Duncan's mind, but he dismissed it instantly. He had known Armand all his life, and despite their many political and personal differences, he did not for a moment believe that the Controller would get involved in any illegality — especially one that concerned his own Bureau. And for what purpose? Merely to accumulate a few thousand solars in some terrestrial bank? Armand was now too old, and too gravity-conditioned, ever to return to Earth, and he was not the kind of man who would break the law for so trivial a purpose as importing Terran luxuries. Especially as the chicanery was always discovered, sooner or later; smugglers could never resist displaying their treasures. And then there would be another acquisition for the impecunious Titan Museum, while the criminal would be barred from all the best places for at least a month.

  No, Armand could be excluded; but what of his son? The more Duncan considered this possibility, the more likely it seemed. He had no proof whatsoever — only an array of facts all pointing in one direction.

  Consider: Karl had always been daring and adventurous, willing to run risks for what he believed sufficiently good reasons. As a boy, he had taken positive delight in circumventing regulations — except, of course, those basic safety rules that no sane resident of Titan would ever challenge.

  If titanite had be discovered on one of the other satellites, Karl would be in an excellent position to take advantage of it. In the last three years, he had been on half a dozen Titan-Terran surveys. To Duncan's certain knowledge, he was one of the few men who had been to Enceladus, Tethys, Rhea, Hyperion, Iapetus, Phoebe, Chronus, Promethius. And now he was on remote Mnemosyne...

  Already Duncan could draw up a seductively plausible scenario. Karl might even have made the find himself. Certainly he would have seen all the specimens coming aboard the survey ship, and his well-known charm would have done the rest. Indeed, the actual discoverer might never have known what he had found. Few people had seen raw titanite, and it was not easy to identify until it had been polished.

  Then it would have been a simple matter of sending a small package to Earth, perhaps on one of the resupply ships which did not even call at Titan. (What would be the legal situation then? That could be tricky. Titan had jurisdiction over the other permanent satellites, but its claim to the obvious temporary ones like Phoebe & Co. was still in dispute. It was possible that no laws had been broken at all...)

  But this was sheer speculation. He had not the slightest hard evidence. Why, indeed, had he thought of Karl at all in this context?

  He reread the message, still glowing on the Comsole monitor: MAJOR DISCOVERY ON OUTER MOON. ASKING HELMER... That was what had triggered this line of thought. Guilt by association, perhaps; the juxtaposition might be pure coincidence. But the Makenzies could read each other's minds, and Duncan knew that the phraseology was deliberate. There was no need for Colin to have mentioned Helmer; he was sending out an early warning signal.

  It was ridiculous to pile speculation upon speculation, but Duncan could not resist the next step. Assuming that Karl was involved — why?

  Karl might take risks, might even get involved in petty illegalities, but it would be for some good purpose. If — and it was still an enormous "if" — he was trying to accumulate funds on Earth, he must have a long-range objective in mind. The most obvious was the establishment of a power base — precisely as Duncan was doing.

  He must also have an agent here, someone he could trust implicitly. That would not be difficult; Karl had met hundreds of Terrans—

  "Oh, my God," Duncan breathed. "That explains everything..."

  He wondered if he should cancel his trip to Zanzibar; no, that took priority over all else, except the speech he had come a billion kilometers to deliver. In any case, he did not see what more he could do here in Washington until he had further news from home.

  He was still operating on pure guesswork, without one atom of proof. But there was a cold, dead feeling in the general region of his heart; and suddenly, for no good reason at all, Duncan thought of that solitary iceberg, gliding southward on the hidden current toward its irrevocable destiny.

  31

  The Island of Dr. Mohammed

  El Hadj's deputy, Dr. Todd, was one of those medical men who seem, not always justifiably, to radiate an aura of confidence. This despite his relative youth and informality; for reasons which Duncan never discovered, all his colleagues used his nickname, Sweeney.

  "I'm sorry you won't meet El Hadj this time," he said apologetically. "He had to rush to Hawaii, for an emergency operation."

  "I'm surprised that's necessary, in this age."

  "Normally, it's not. But Hawaii's almost exactly on the other side of the world — which means you have to work through two comsats in series. During telesurgery, that extra time delay can be critical."

  So even on Earth, thought Duncan, the slowness of radio waves can be a problem. A half-second lag would not matter in conversation; but between a surgeon's hand and eye, it might be fatal.

  "Until twenty years ago," Dr. Todd explained, "this was a famous marine biology lab. So it had most of the facilities we need — including isolation."

  "Why is that necessary?" asked Duncan. He had wondered why the clinic was in such an inconveniently out-of-the-way spot.

  "There's a good deal of emotional interest in our work, and we have to control our visitors. Despite air transportation, you can still do that much easier on an island than anywhere else. And above all, we have to protect our Mothers. They may not be very intelligent, but they're sensitive, and don't like being stared at."

  "I've not seen any yet."

  "Do you really want to?"

  That was a difficult qu
estion to answer, for Duncan felt his emotions tugging in opposite directions. Thirty-one years ago, he must have been born in a place not unlike this, though probably not as spectacularly beautiful. If he had gone full term — and in those days, he assumed, all clones did so — some unknown woman had carried him in her body for at least eight months after implantation. Was she still alive? Did any record of her name still exist, or was she merely a number in a computer file? Perhaps not even that, for the identity of a foster mother was not of the slightest biological importance. A purely mechanical womb could have served as well, but there had never been any real need to perfect so complex a device. In a world where reproduction was strictly limited, there would always be plenty of volunteers; the only problem was selecting them.

  Duncan had no memory whatsoever of his unknown foster mother or of the months he must have spent on Earth as a baby. Every attempt to penetrate the fog that lay at the very beginning of his childhood was a failure. He could not be certain if this was normal, or whether the earliest part of his life was hidden by deliberately induced amnesia. He suspected the latter, since he felt a distinct reluctance ever to investigate the subject in any detail.

  When he formed the concept of "Mother" in his mind, he instantly saw Colin's wife, Sheela. Her face was his earliest memory, her affection her first love, later shared with Grandma Ellen. Colin had chosen carefully and had learned from Malcolm's mistakes.

  Sheela had treated Duncan exactly like her own children, and he had never thought of Yuri and Glynn as anything except his older brother and sister. He could not remember when he had first realized that Colin was not their father, and that they bore no genetic relationship to him whatsoever. Somehow, it had never seemed to matter.

  He appreciated, now, the unobtrusive skills that had gone into the creation of so well adjusted a ‘family’; it would not have been possible in an age of exclusive marriage and sexual possessiveness. Even today, it was no easy task. He hoped that he and Marissa would be equally successful, and that Clyde and Carline would accept little Malcolm as their brother, just as wholeheartedly as Yuri and Glynn had accepted him...

  "I'm sorry," said Duncan. "I was daydreaming."

  "Can't say I blame you; this place is too damned beautiful. I sometimes have to draw the curtains when I want to do any work."

  That was easy to believe — yet beauty was not the first impression to strike Duncan when he landed on the island. Even now, his dominant feeling was one of awe, mixed with more than a trace of fear.

  Starting a dozen meters away, and filling his field of vision right out to the sharp blue line of the horizon, was more water than he had ever imagined. It was true that he had seen Earth's oceans from space, but from that Olympian vantage point it had been impossible to envisage their true size. Ever the greatest of seas was diminished, when one could flash across it in ten minutes.

  This world was indeed misnamed. It should have been called Ocean, not Earth. Duncan performed a rough mental calculation — one of the skills the Makenzies had carefully retained, despite the omnipresent computer. Radius six thousand — and his eye was about six meters above sea level — that made it simple — six root two, or near enough eight kilometers. Only eight! It was incredible; he could easily have believed that the horizon was a hundred kilometers away. His vision could not span even one percent of the distance to the other shore...

  And what he could see now was on the two-dimensional skin of an alien universe, teeming with strange life forms seeking whom they might devour. To Duncan, that expanse of peaceful blue concealed a world much more hostile, and more terrifying, than Space. Even Titan, with its known dangers, seemed benign in comparison.

  And yet there were children out there, splashing around in the shallows, and disappearing underwater for quite terrifying lengths of time. One of them, Duncan was certain, had been gone for well over a minute.

  "Isn't that dangerous?" he asked anxiously, gesturing toward the lagoon.

  "We don't let them get near the water until they're well trained. And if you must drown yourself, this is the place for it — with some of the best medical facilities in the world. We've had only one permanent death in the last fifteen years. Revival would have been possible even then, but after an hour underwater, brain damage is irreversible."

  "But what about sharks and all the other big fish?"

  "We've never had an attack inside the reef, and only one outside it. That's a small price to pay for admission to Fairyland. We're taking out the big trimaran tomorrow — why don't you come along?"

  "I'll think about it," Duncan answered evasively.

  "Oh — I suppose you've never been underwater before."

  "I've never been on it — except in a swimming pool."

  "Well, you've nothing to lose. Though we won't complete the tests for another forty-eight hours, I'm sure we'll be able to clone successfully from the genotypes you've given. So your immortality insurance is taken care of."

  "Thank you very much," said Duncan dryly. "That makes all the difference."

  He remembered Commander Innes' invitation to the Caribbean reefs, and his instant though unexpressed refusal. But those mere children were obviously enjoying themselves, and their confidence was a reproach to his manhood. The pride of the Makenzies was at stake; he looked glumly at that appalling mass of water, and realized that he would have to do something about it before he left the island.

  He had never felt less enthusiastic about any project in his life.

  * * * * *

  The night was beautiful, blazing with more stars than any man could ever see from the surface of Titan, however long he lived. Though it was only nineteen hundred hours — too early for dinner, let alone sleep — the sun might never have existed, so total was the darkness away from the illumination of the main buildings, and of the little lights strung along the paths of crushed coral.

  From somewhere in that darkness came the sound of music — a rhythmical throbbing of drums, played with more enthusiasm than skill. Rising above this steady beat were occasional bursts of song, and women's voices calling to one another. Those voices made Duncan suddenly lonely and homesick. He started to walk along the narrow path in the general direction of the revelry.

  After wandering down several blind alleys — ending up once in a charming sunken garden, which he left with profuse apologies to the couple busily occupying it — he came to the clearing where the party was in progress. At its center, a large bonfire was lofting a column of smoke and flames toward the stars, and a score of figures was dancing around it, like the priestesses of some primitive religion.

  They were not dancing with much grace or vigor; in fact, it would be more truthful to say that most of them were circulating in a dignified waddle. But despite their obvious advanced state of pregnancy, they were clearly enjoying themselves, and were being as active as was advisable in the circumstances.

  It was a grotesque yet strangely moving spectacle, arousing in Duncan a mixture of pity and tenderness — even an impersonal and wholly unerotic love. The tenderness was that which all men feel in the imminent presence of birth and the wonder of their own existence; the pity had a different cause.

  Ugliness and deformity were rare on Titan — and rarer still on Earth, since both could almost always be corrected. Almost — but not always. Here was proof of that.

  Most of these women were extremely plain; some were ugly; a few were frankly hideous. And though Duncan noticed two or three who might even pass as beautiful, it needed only a glance to show that they were mentally subnormal. Had his long-dead "sister" Anitra survived into adult life, she would have been at home in this strange assembly.

  If the dancers — and those others merely sitting around, banging away at drums and sawing on fiddles — had not been so obviously happy it would have been disturbing, perhaps even a sickening spectacle. It did not upset Duncan. Though he was startled, he was prepared for it.

  He knew how the foster mothers were chosen. The first requi
rement, of course, was hat they should have no gynecological defects. That demand was easy to satisfy. It was not so simple to cope with the psychological factors, and it might have been a virtually impossible task in the days before the world's population was computer-profiled.

  There would always be women who desperately yearned to bear children, but who for one reason or another could not fulfill their destiny. In earlier ages, most of them would have been doomed to spinsterly frustration; indeed, even in this world of 2276, many of them still were. There were more would-be mothers than the controlled birth rate could satisfy, but those who were especially disadvantaged could find some compensation here. The losers in the lottery of Fate could yet win a consolation prize, and know for a few months the happiness that would otherwise be denied them.

  And so the World Computer had been programmed as an instrument of compassion. This act of humanity had done more than anything else to silence those who objected to cloning.

  Of course, there were still problems. All these Mothers must know, however dimly, that soon after birth they would be separated forever from the child they were to bring into the world. That was not a sorrow that any man could understand; but women were stronger than men, and they would get over it — more often than not by taking part again in the creation of another life.

  Duncan remained in the shadows, not wishing to be seen and certainly not wishing to get involved. Some of those incipient Mothers could crush him to a pulp if they grabbed him and whirled him into the dance. He had now noticed that a handful of men — presumably medical orderlies or staff from the clinic — were circulating light-heartedly with the Mothers and entering into the spirit of the festivities.