Deucalion (13 page)

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 soon 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.

I asked the question that had troubled me since we landed. ‘Why have we stopped here? This isn't where we're going, is it?'

Gwen shook her head, and her dark hair shimmered in the late morning sun. ‘No, it isn't. But there was a change of plan. We have an unauthorised passenger, and a new recruit who won't go without him. So we have to wait.'

‘For what?' I asked.

‘Not what.' Now she stood up, and looked back towards the flyer nestled close to the rock face, with the camouflage net thrown over it. ‘Who. We have to wait for Dr Hendriks to arrive.'

PART TWO

REPUBLIC

As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.

Abraham Lincoln

‘Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel:

Let my people go, that they may

celebrate a feast to me in the desert.'

Exodus 5:1

14

FOR THE TELLING . . .

(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 One
)

The year 101 was always intended to be a turning point in the history of the human settlement on Deucalion. It was the year of the inaugural elections, when for the first time the power was supposed to shift from the Earth-controlled Ruling Council to a President and an independent Congress.

In a busy and productive century since the arrival of the first C-ship, the human population of the planet had grown from the original thirty thousand to something approaching thirteen million, spread out in a few oversized cities, and a large number of small mining communities and agri-centres. Almost all of these could be found in the narrow, habitable strip of coastal land which stretched down the eastern coastline of Deucalion's single huge continent, and on the Fringes of the Great Central Desert.

Of course, not all these people had their origins on Old Earth. Three generations of ‘Deucs' had swelled the population by at least as much as the two or three C-ships that arrived in orbit over New Geneva each year. ‘Native Born Deucalions' was the official terminology – which, typically, totally ignored the fact that there was already a race of ‘native' Deucalions in existence well before the human race found its way down out of the trees. It was the very nature of this population which created such problems for the World Government back on the mother-planet.

Deucalion was a pioneer society, which is to say that the people expected life to be pretty hard. Of course, there were exceptions: members of the Ruling Council, executives of the Deucalion Mining Corporation, and a few wealthy immigrants, whose reasons for making the one-way trip were shrouded in rumour and speculation. But, in general, the people were drawn from the ‘working classes' of Earth's economically segregated society.

Planetary colonisation was seen as a way of ridding the community of a number of major problems, with the added bonus that the new colony would provide access to the untapped mineral reserves of an entire world, just at a time when over-consumption had bled the old world dry. It was expensive, but it was cheaper than fighting interminable wars over ever-diminishing resources.

It is ironic that, in the end, war on Earth was ended, not by the international peace movements that had marched and protested – and even assassinated – in the name of world peace since the end of the twentieth century; nor by the ‘Balance of Terror' or the final dominance of one martial power, but by DiBortelli's discovery of the warp. It was no ‘swelling of public opinion worldwide' – even though that was how the World Government portrayed it in its Charter. The end of war, like its cause, was ultimately purely economic.

The profits which were there to be made through the use of warp technology from the exploitation of Deucalion's (and other planets') untapped resources were even greater than those to be made from weapons and warfare. As a result, almost overnight the rivalries dried up and new, cooperative ventures were born – not between countries, but between those individuals and corporations who had the wealth to bankroll the exploration.

A great idea. If you can keep control of the colony you are exploiting. The problem was that no one took too much notice of history.

My grandfather was a historian. He wrote ten or eleven books on Deucalion, which were included on the Universal Database. He lived here and he loved the place – and the people. All the people, human and Elokoi. I remember as a child listening to him as he spoke to my father.

‘People don't read history any more,' he said. And he was right. Then he asked, ‘How can they hope to work out what is going to happen, if they don't know how to read the signs?'

I was too young to understand his words at the time, but they came back to haunt me during the events that followed the ‘phony' elections of 101 . . .

Roosevelt Ranges

Edison Sector (South)

15/11/101 Standard

SAANI

Saani, the old Teller, stood in the entrance to the living-cave and watched the approach of the two young Elokoi. They were coming, as she had known they would, following the Dream, obeying the call of the
haaj
,
as she herself had done so many years before.

Four mooncycles she had waited for them, and watched the mountain paths for their approach, seeking in her failing memory for the songs that she had learned so many years ago. The young one was quick. She would learn the colours of a song and sing it back, and it would live within her for the Telling. And when the learning was complete, and all the Dreams and all the songs and all the stories were passed safely on, only then would Saani rest. Then she would close her eyes, and let the Worldsong sing its colours to her soul, and carry her away. Beyond.

A Change was coming. But Saani the Teller, for all that she had clung to life so long, knew that she would not live long enough to see it. And yet, she sensed . . . a certain symmetry. Beginning and end. Life and death. A journey forward to the future, backward to the source. Another turning of the Circle. The Worldsong called its colours to her like half-remembered echoes, but she pushed them back. Not yet . . . Just one more moonlife, for the Telling.

The child was young, hardly more than a cub, but she had the Dream. She was the one. Again, Saani looked down at the two young journeyers as they climbed.

They were close now. Saani moved out into the glare of the morning sun, and touched her face in the sign of greeting. Then, turning, she led them inside . . .