The Night's Dawn Trilogy (99 page)

The noise of the spaceplane’s compressors was becoming strident.

“There’s no room on board. Go home before anyone gets hurt.”

Kelven and Murphy started backing towards the space-plane. A young brown-skinned woman who had crawled under the BK133 straightened
up, and walked towards them defiantly. She was holding a small child in front of her, it couldn’t have been more than two
years old. Plump face and wide liquid eyes.

Murphy just couldn’t bring himself to point the Brad-field at her. He reached the foot of the spaceplane’s aluminium stairs.

“Take him with you,” the woman called. She held the child out. “For Jesus’s sake, take my son, if you have a gram of pity
in you. I’m begging you!”

Murphy’s foot found the first step. Kelven had a hand on his arm, guiding him back.

“Take him!” she shrieked over the swelling compressor efflux. “Take him, or shoot him.”

He shuddered at her fervour. She meant it, she really meant it.

“It would be a kindness. You know what will happen to him on this cursed planet.” The child was crying, squirming about in
her grip.

The other people on the roof were all motionless, watching him with hard, accusing eyes. He turned to Kelven Solanki, whose
face was a mask of torment.

“Get him,” Kelven blurted.

Murphy dropped the Bradfield, letting it skitter away across the silicon roof. He datavised a codelock into its controlling
processor so no one could turn it on the space-plane, then grabbed the child with his right hand.

“Shafi,” the woman shouted as he raced up the stairs. “His name’s Shafi Banaji. Remember.”

He barely had a foot in the airlock when the spaceplane lifted, its deck tilting up immediately. Hands steadied him, and the
outer hatch slid shut.

Shafi’s baggy cotton trousers were soiled and stinking; he let out a long fearful wail.

Including Tranquillity, there were only five independent (non-Edenist) bitek habitats to be found within the boundaries of
the Confederation. After Tranquillity, probably the most well known, or notorious depending on your cultural outlook and degree
of liberalism, was Valisk.

Although they were both, technically, dictatorships, they occupied opposite ends of the political spectrum, with the dominant
ideologies of the remaining three habitats falling between them, a well-deserved mediocrity. Tranquillity was regarded as
elitist, or even regal given its founder: industrious, rich, and slightly raffish, with a benevolent, chic ruler, it emphasized
the grander qualities of life, somewhere you aspired to go if you made it. Valisk was older, its glory days over, or at the
very least in abeyance: it played host to a more decadent population; money here (and there was still plenty) came from exploiting
the darker side of human nature. And its strange governorship repelled rather than attracted.

It hadn’t always been so.

Valisk was founded by an Edenist Serpent called Rubra. Unlike Laton, who terrorized the Confederation two and a half centuries
later, his rebellion was of an altogether more constructive nature. He was born in Machaon, a habitat orbiting Kohistan, the
largest gas giant in the Srinagar star system. After forty-four years, he abandoned his culture and his home, sold his not
inconsiderable share in his family’s engineering enterprise, and emigrated to a newly opened Adamist asteroid settlement in
Kohistan’s trailing Trojan cluster.

It was a period of substantial economic growth for the star system. Srinagar had been colonized by ethnic-Hindus in 2178 during
the Great Dispersal, a hundred and sixteen years earlier. Basic industrialization had been completed, the world was tamed,
and people were looking for new ways of channelling their energies. All across the Confederation emerging colony planets were
exploiting space resources and increasing their wealth dramatically. Srinagar was eager to be numbered among them.

Rubra started with six leased interplanetary cargo ships. Like all Serpents he was a high achiever in his chosen field (nearly
always to Edenist embarrassment, for so many of them chose crime). He made a small fortune supplying the Trojan cluster’s
small but wealthy population of engineers and miners with consumer goods and luxuries. He bought more ships, made a larger
fortune, and named his expanding company Magellanic Itg—joking to his peers that one day he would trade with that distant
star cluster. By 2306, after twelve years of steady growth, Magellanic Itg owned manufacturing stations and asteroid-mining
operations, and had moved into the interstellar transport market.

At this point Rubra germinated Valisk in orbit around Opuntia, the fourth of the system’s five gas giants. It was a huge gamble.
He spent his company’s entire financial reserves cloning the seed, mortgaging half of the starships to boot. And bitek remained
technology
non grata
for the major religions, including the Hindu faith. But Srinagar was sufficiently Bolshevik about its new economic independence
from its sponsoring Govcentral Indian states, and energetic enough in its approach to innovation, to cast a blind eye to proscriptions
announced by fundamentalist Brahmians on a distant imperialist planet over two centuries earlier. Planet and asteroid governments
saw no reason to impose embargoes against what was rapidly evolving into one of the system’s premier economic assets. Valisk
became, literally, a corporate state, acting as the home port for Magellanic Itg’s starship fleet (already one of the largest
in the sector) and dormitory town for its industrial stations.

Although Valisk was a financially advantageous location from which Rubra could run his flourishing corporate empire, he needed
to attract a base population to the habitat to make it a viable pocket civilization. Industrial stations were therefore granted
extremely liberal weapons and research licences and Valisk started to attract companies specializing in military hardware.
Export constraints were almost non-existent.

Rubra also opened the habitat to immigration for “people who seek cultural and religious freedom”, possibly in reaction to
his own formal Edenist upbringing. This invitation attracted several nonconformist religious cults, spiritual groups, and
primitive lifestyle tribes, who believed that a bitek environment would fulfil the role of some benevolent Gaia and provide
them free food and shelter. Over nine thousand of these people arrived over the course of the habitat’s first twenty-five
years, many of them drug-or stimulant-program addicts. At this time, Rubra, infuriated with their unrepentant parasitical
nature, banned any more from entering.

By 2330 the population had risen to three hundred and fifty thousand. Industrial output was high, and many interstellar companies
were opening regional offices inside.

Then the first blackhawks to be seen in the Confederation began to appear, all of them registered with Magellanic Itg, and
captained by Rubra’s plentiful offspring. Rubra had pulled off a spectacular coup against both his competitors and his former
culture. Voidhawk bitek was the most sophisticated ever sequenced; copying it was a triumph of genetic retro-engineering.

With blackhawks now acting as the mainstay of his star-ship fleet, Rubra was unchallengeable. A large-scale cloning programme
saw their numbers rising dramatically; neural symbionts were used to give captaincies to Adamists who had no qualms about
using bitek, and there

were many. By 2365 Magellanic Itg ceased to use anything other than blackhawks in its transport fleet.

Rubra died in 2390, one of the wealthiest men in the Confederation. He left behind an industrial conglomerate used as an example
by economists ever since as the classic corporate growth model. It should have carried on. It had the potential to rival the
Kulu Corporation owned by the Saldana family. Ultimately it might even have equalled the Edenist He3 cloud-mining operation.
No physical or financial restrictions existed to limit its inherent promise; banks were more than willing to advance loans,
the markets existed, supplied by its own ships.

But in the end—after the end—Rubra’s Serpent nature proved less than benign after all. His psychology was too different, too
obsessional. Brought up knowing his personality pattern would continue to exist for centuries if not millennia, he refused
to accept death as an Adamist. He transferred his personality pattern into Valisk’s neural strata.

From this point onward company and habitat started to degenerate. Part of the reason was the germination of the other independent
habitats, all of whom offered themselves as bases for blackhawk mating flights. The Valisk/Magellanic Itg monopoly was broken.
But the company’s industrial decline, and the habitat’s parallel deterioration, was due principally to the inheritance problem
Rubra created.

When he died he was known to have fathered over a hundred and fifty children, a hundred and twenty-two of whom were carefully
conceived
in vitro
and gestated in ex-owombs; all had modifications made to their affinity gene, as well as general physiological improvements.
Thirty of the exowomb children were appointed to Valisk’s executive committee, which ran both the habitat and Magellanic Itg,
while the remainder, along with the rapidly proliferating third generation, became blackhawk pilots. The naturally conceived
children were virtually disinherited from the company, and many of them returned to the Edenist fold.

Even this nepotistic arrangement shouldn’t have been too much trouble. There would inevitably be power struggles within such
a large committee, but strong characters would rise to the top, simple human dynamics demanded it. None ever did.

The alteration Rubra had made to their affinity gene was a simple one; they were bonded to the habitat and a single family
of blackhawks alone. He robbed them of the Edenist general affinity. The arrangement gave him access to their minds virtually
from the moment of conception, first through the habitat personality, then after he died, as the habitat personality.

He shaped them as they lay huddled in the metal and composite exowombs, and later in their innocent childhood; a dark conscience
nestled maggot-fashion at the centre of their consciousness, examining their most secret thoughts for deviations from the
path he had chosen. It was a dreadfully perverted version of the love bond which existed between voidhawks and their captains.
His descendants became little more than anaemic caricatures of himself at his prime. He tried to instil the qualities which
had driven him, and wound up with wretched neurotic in-adequates. The more he attempted to tighten his discipline, the worse
their dependence upon him became. A slow change manifested in the habitat personality’s psychology. In his growing frustration
with his living descendants he became resentful; of their lives, of their bodily experiences, of the emotions they could feel,
the humanness of glands and hormones running riot. Rubra was jealous of the living.

Edenist visits to the habitat, already few and far between, stopped altogether after 2480. They said the habitat personality
had become insane.

Dariat was an eighth-generation descendant, born a hundred and seventy-five years after Rubra’s body died. Physically he was
virtually indistinguishable from his peer group; he shared the light coffee-coloured skin and raven hair that signalled the
star system’s ethnic origin. A majority of Valisk’s population originated insystem, though few of them were practising Hindus.
Only his indigo eyes marked him out as anything other than a straight Srinagar genotype.

He never knew of his calamitous inheritance until his teens, although even from his infancy he knew in his heart he was different;
he was better, superior to all the other children in his day club. And when they laughed at him, or teased him, or sent him
to Coventry, he laid into them with a fury that none of them could match. He didn’t know where it came from himself, only
that it lay within, like some slumbering lake-bottom monster. At first he felt shame at the beatings he inflicted, blood for
a five-year-old is a shocking sight; but even as he ran home crying a different aspect of the alien ego would appear and soothe
him, calming his pounding heart. There was nothing wrong, he was assured, no crime committed, only rightness. They shouldn’t
have said what they did, catcalled and sneered. You were right to assert yourself, you are strong, be proud of that.

After a while the feelings of guilt ebbed away. When he needed to hit someone he did it without remorse or regret. His leadership
of the day club was undisputed, out of fear rather than respect.

He lived with his mother in a starscraper apartment; his father had left her the year he was born. He knew his father was
important, that he helped to manage Magellanic Itg; but whenever he paid mother and son one of his dutiful visits he was subject
to moody silences or bursts of frantic activity. Dariat didn’t like him, the grown-up was weird. I can do without him, the
boy thought, he’s weak. The conviction was as strong as one of his didactic imprints. His father stopped visiting after he
was twelve years old.

Dariat concentrated on science and finance subjects when he began receiving didactic courses at ten years old, although right
at the back of his mind was the faintest notion that the arts might just have been equally appealing. But they were despicable
moments of weakness, soon swallowed by the pride he felt whenever he passed another course assessment. He was headed for great
things.

At fourteen the crux came. At fourteen he fell in love.

Valisk’s interior did not follow the usual bitek habitat convenience of a tropical or sub-tropical environment. Rubra had
decided on a scrub desert extending out from the base of the northern endcap, then blending slowly into hilly savannah plain
of terrestrial and xenoc grasses before the standard circumfluous salt-water reservoir at the base of the southern endcap.

Dariat was fond of hiking round the broad grasslands with their subtle blend of species and colours. The children’s day club
which he used to dominate had long since broken up. Adolescents were supposed to join sports groups, or general interest clubs.
He had trouble integrating, too many peers remembered his temper and violence long after he had stopped resorting to such
crude methods. They shunned him, and he told himself he didn’t care. Somebody told him. In dreams he would find himself walking
through the habitat talking to a white-haired old man. The old man was a big comfort, the things he said, the encouragement
he gave. And the habitat was slightly different, richer, with trees and flowers and happy crowds, families picnicking.