Deucalion (16 page)

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 philosophy. 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.

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 10,000
bs
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 little 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?'

Now Kennedy was on more secure ground. ‘It's designed to check an individual's identity.
One
known individual. If we suspect a forged ID we can take a drop of blood or a hair, and run a DNA-match to double-check. But in that case, it's only a one-to-one comparison. It takes just about no time. What you are asking for is a complete data-match of every personnel record on the mainframe. Thirteen million individuals, each with hundreds of thousands of DNA variables. Do you know how long that will take?'

‘Enlighten me.'

Kennedy picked a number out of the air. ‘Five or six days, at least.'

‘What about if we limited the match? Only females between, say, fifteen and thirty? That's how we limited the search last time.'

Kennedy shook his head. ‘At least twelve hours,' he said. ‘And it'll mean tying up the Security mainframe. You'd better hope there's no emergency while we're at it.'

Gaston stood up and stared into his Security chief's eyes. ‘Kennedy, this
is
an emergency. We don't know how much the bitch knows. About Icarus, or about us. And we don't know how much she'll be able to work out. She was one of the brightest Researchers at the Osaka Facility when she was there, which makes her at least a hundred IQ points too smart to mess around with. Besides, I have a feeling that if we find her, it might get us a lot closer to working out where the others disappeared to. Now get on with it. I have to get back to New G in a couple of days, and I'd like something concrete by then.'

Gaston stared at the door for a long time after his Security chief had left, seeing nothing. His thoughts were turned inwards, and backwards in time.

Back to where it began . . .

Genetic Research Facility

Seoul, Asia/Southeast Sector

July 6, 2199
ad

The technician was shredding the last of the hard-files when they burst in. Gaston cursed silently to himself. That meant that the computer records would already be history.

A single shot disabled the machine, and the technician was led away. She said nothing. There was no point. She knew why they had come, and they knew what it was she was shredding. He stepped forward and drew the half-shredded sheet from the hopper of the machine.

PROJECT:
ICARUS

STATUS:
CODE ALPHA (LEVEL FIVE CLEARANCE)

SITE OF DATA-SOURCE:
GENETIC RESEARCH FACILITY,
SEOUL, ASIA/SOUTHEAST SECTOR

FILE ORIGINATION DATE:
16/6/2199.

TOPIC:
TERMINATION PROCEDURES (CONTINGENCY PLANS)

The rest of the page was just so much confetti among the remains of all the others in the recycler fourteen floors below.

They were too late. Again.

Gaston watched a tiny wisp of smoke curling its way upwards from the damaged machine, drawn by the duct of the air-conditioner overhead.

Icarus.
The boy who learned to fly on borrowed wings.

It was a nice image. Whoever named the project had poetic tendencies. But perhaps they should have remembered the whole story. Sure, Icarus learned to fly – but maybe too well, because, in the end, the wings he borrowed failed him and he was killed. Maybe it would have been more realistic to call the project after another mythical character – Pandora.

Whatever – He screwed up the small piece of hard-copy and tossed it onto the floor.

The project was history, and the Researchers responsible would never work again in any Funded project. A disbarred Researcher was lucky to get a job as a lab-technician. It was the way of the world.

Now all that remained was to find the brats they had created, and terminate them, before they grew into the problem the Council's ‘worst-case scenario' computer simulation had predicted.

Fifty individuals, each carrying an unpredictable gene for telepathy. The little information they had been able to capture suggested the gene was not merely dominant, but . . . what was it the notes had said?
Super-dominant
?

Gaston was not sure exactly what that meant, but the experts on the Council were concerned. Cantrell from bio-ethics had tried to explain it by saying that a super-dominant gene actually altered its matching recessive on the chromosome pair – or, if there was no recessive, it replicated itself, so that not only would any offspring of that individual carry the gene and show the ability, but so would any offspring of any following generations. No matter how far removed.

In response to Gaston's blank look, he had tried again. ‘Look at it this way, Dimitri. We have, as far as we can work out, about fifty of these . . . hybrids. Now, assuming we don't find them, and even as few as seventy per cent of them grow up to adulthood, that's thirty-five individuals. With me so far?' Without waiting for his companion's nod, he had continued. ‘Now, the effect of this gene's ‘super-dominance' is that every child produced by each one of those individuals, regardless of who the other parent is, will have the power of telepathy – with no recessive gene. And every grandchild, and every great-grandchild, and on and on, the numbers doubling every twenty years or so.'

‘That's not so many.' Gaston stated what he thought was the obvious. ‘Even in a hundred years' time, that would produce somewhere between five hundred and a thousand individuals. Among a population of billions, it doesn't seem such a great problem.'

‘Maybe not, Gaston, but the Council sees it differently. If it were a gene for, say, green hair, or something equally harmless or obvious, it wouldn't be so bad – but telepathy? You can't see it, you can't tell who has it. And you don't know if they can read your thoughts. You've got ambitions; what if I were to tell you that one of your opponents was a hybrid who could read every one of your thoughts and knew your every move in advance and all your guiltiest secrets? What if that opponent could know what every voter was thinking, and campaign accordingly?

‘And forget about politics. What about the Corporations? Competition's cut-throat enough now. What business could survive if its opposition knew all its secrets?

‘Who do you think would end up running the Council? Or the Government? Or the economy? And what makes you think they'd limit themselves to actually having kids? With organisation, they could clone as many hybrids as they wanted, and stack the key positions in Research and all the other essential areas. In two or three generations, they'd be making all the decisions.
Homo Superior.
We'd be as obsolete as the dinosaurs – and we wouldn't even know it.'

Poor Cantrell. He was one of the scapegoats who took it in the neck when the remaining Icarus brats suddenly disappeared. He didn't have the survival instincts – or the will – to get away with his skin intact. The storm was building, but he thought he could save his career if he just rode it out.

Dumb jerk!
He'd climbed the ladder. He knew the drill. One slip-up and you took the fall; there were too many young hopefuls following you up. A screw-up like the Icarus incident was bad enough – if you were in the position of being responsible for stopping things like that from happening. But to ‘lose' the hybrids into the bargain . . . to let some faceless group of bleeding hearts save them from termination. That was career-suicide.

Gaston had known it. Just before it all hit the fan, he had taken the smart option. Early retirement from Grants Council Security, and a passage on the next C-ship out. He had his severance pay, plus every cred he could lay hands on invested in low risk bonds, programmed to mature a year before the C-ship docked, giving him fifty years of interest: a fortune with which to begin his new life.

No more following orders. With that kind of cash and his . . . experience, he would soon be making the rules. Politics, government; and a chance at the power that, realistically, would never have been within his reach on Earth.

Maybe the whole Icarus affair was fate. Destiny. Maybe it was just that he was smart enough to turn adversity to his own advantage. Yes. He liked that one.

President Dimitri Gaston. Step one of the plan was complete, and his backers were happy. Step two should be just a formality.

And yet in the back of his mind, he recalled the words of his doomed friend.
You've got ambitions; what if I were to tell you that one of your opponents was a hybrid who could read every one of your thoughts and knew your every move in advance and all your guiltiest secrets?

Well, none of the brats was in any position to cause him trouble at the moment. Once he had realised where they might have disappeared to (right here on Deucalion) and once he had followed the hunch, run the DNA-match and discovered their new identities, he had set about carrying out the termination order. Not through any sense of loyalty to his old bosses, but through loyalty to the only person who really counted. Himself. And those he had missed were in hiding, so
they
were not likely to come nosing around, checking up.

The votes were in. The computer had pronounced him President and his party the majority government. What he didn't need now – especially not now – was some telepathic . . .
freak
reading his mind, and finding out how the whole thing had been rigged. From the outside, no one could penetrate the scam. How could they anticipate the scale of the deception? But if they knew exactly how it had been done . . . maybe they'd be able to prove what a lot of people already suspected, and then he'd be in real trouble.

Exposure was something his backers would definitely not appreciate. And if you screwed up on those guys, you lost a lot more than just your job.