Beloved Son Read online

  Beloved Son

  George Turner

  www.sfgateway.com

  Enter the SF Gateway …

  In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:

  ‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’

  Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.

  The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.

  Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.

  Welcome to the SF Gateway.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Gateway Introduction

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Website

  Also by George Turner

  Dedication

  Star Fire

  About the Author

  Copyright

  The Truth About History

  Nearer and nearer draws the time, the time that shall surely be,

  When the earth shall be filled with the glory of God as the waters cover the sea.

  From a hymn by A. C. Ainger

  If I had been present at the creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better arrangement of the Universe.

  Attr. to Alfonso the Wise, King of Castile

  Great men are almost always bad men.

  Lord Acton: Historical Essays and Studies

  Chapter One

  AD 2032—A Reprise

  ‘I wouldn’t go into biology if I were starting again now. In twenty years’ time it is the biologists who will be working behind barbed wire.’

  Fred Hoyle from a conversation quoted by G. Rattray

  Taylor in The Biological Time Bomb

  1

  The Security Ombudsman for the Australasian Sector of International Security was tall but stooped, unmuscular and skeletally thin. His teeth were false; he wore glasses; he was quite bald and his skin, mostly bared in the manner of the time, was entirely hairless. He was unevenly brown – piebald, though no one used the word to his face – in the manner of an earlier time when bouts of exposure to hard radiation were a daily hazard. A greyness tinged the brown and with his splayed nose attested the quarter of aboriginal strain contributed by a tribal grandmother.

  Wherever he went he would be recognised as a member of the pre-Collapse generation and an Ombudsman: only an Ombudsman could be so old – and be deferred to. Up to a point.

  One such point was that they had not allowed him to breed. The youngsters (as he still privately thought of them) would concede much, even beyond reason, but not that. His genetic record was an outrage of damage and mutated combinations which even reverence could not tolerate. Because they had looked after him well he was healthy and potent, but the issue of his fatherhood would certainly have been abominable.

  He was sixty-eight, a rare age in the Reconstruction Years; that he had been permitted to live was a permission which entitled him to great respect.

  He lived by reason of his intelligence, his devotion and his special knowledge; he was needed in this world belonging to the young and they knew it. (Though it was daily growing more accurate to say that he had been needed and they were becoming aware of it.) His kind were the anchors of the Reconstruction, the repositories not of knowledge in the factual sense, for that was plentiful and growing exponentially, but of the experience of the effects of the misapplication of knowledge, which was scarce in a generation still scrambling out of planetary disaster.

  The role of the Ombudsmen – the original meaning had been distorted and lost – was to prevent mistakes happening twice and in spite of fallibility they had been more successful than otherwise. Else they would have been disposed of (gently but finally) long since, for the youngsters were not sentimental about incompetence.

  This one’s name was Jackson and he pushed at the plump folder on his desk. ‘I don’t see why it should be my business.’

  The man who had placed it there was, at thirty-four, a Commissioner of International Security and his charge was the Australasian Sector. He answered familiarly, as an equal (which he was not, for he commanded far more than Jackson’s fluid and undefined authority) and yet with the tinge of automatic deference which was an Ombudsman’s tribute from high and low.

  ‘Read it. These people – Raft and the rest – will need someone to lean on, someone who remembers their world to interpret this one to them. We can’t assess the impact of cultural changes; you can.’

  ‘In some things.’ The youngsters, for all their steelbright intellects, were a mixture of doubts and certainties, of truths and half-truths and outright myths; shrewd enough to reject his advice at times, they could be naïve in their assessment of his capacities. ‘I was twenty-six when Columbus took off for Barnard’s Star, twenty-eight during the Five Days, and at that age one didn’t understand the world so damned well; great areas of my memory must be subjectively distorted. Besides, I haven’t the time to devote to individuals.’

  ‘In your age group—’ the Commissioner used the phrase hesitantly, for the implications of it were both honourable and shameful ‘—I suppose there isn’t much time for individuals. But this Albert Raft is one to be treated with kid gloves – whatever they were. Read the folder and you’ll realise he’s a problem, perhaps a whole horde of problems.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Read it, Stephen; read it.’

  Jackson smiled. ‘I believe you’re scared.’

  ‘Uneasy.’

  ‘Ready to be scared. Raft commanded Columbus, I recall, but the rest were scientists. I’d have thought them more of a problem.’

  The Commissioner’s gesture dismissed them. ‘They’re out of date; show them a modern laboratory and they’ll unhinge their psyches trying to adjust. Raft is the worry.’

  ‘But Columbus returned ten days ago. Why this only now?’

  ‘We didn’t know the facts about him. So much history has been lost, so many records destroyed. Do I have to tell you that?’ He tapped the folder. ‘Most of this comes from the starship’s own records and some of it is appalling – the picture of world conditions in 1990; the spying and back-stabbing and double dealing; the treachery and distrust and duplicity.’

  So much authority, Jackson thought, so much competence but so much youth without a tradition. He asked, ‘Do you think your world is so different?’

  The Commissioner was startled and showed it; in a life devoted to brave new beginnings
the idea of such a primitive resemblance was outside his thinking. He returned to the safety of the Raft problem (but the question remained with him and rankled and burned): ‘Have you heard rumours that someone called Heathcote is still alive from pre-Collapse days?’

  ‘Is this germane? Of course I’ve heard the coffee-bar yap; he’d have to be a very old man, probably centenarian, which is dismissably unlikely. Do you believe it?’

  ‘True or not, a pointless rumour matters. A symptom of unrest. The folder bears on it.’

  Jackson opened the folder, still thinking of Heathcote, whose existence he barely remembered; the rumour made him some sort of scientific messiah but his shaky recollection fixed the man as obscure save for some connection with the Columbus flight.

  First on the heap was a transparent plastic envelope containing something he had not seen in forty years.

  ‘Recognise it?’

  ‘A pre-Collapse video-cassette.’ He felt unreasonably ashamed of its bulky clumsiness as though the world of his youth had betrayed him. ‘Where did you get it?’

  ‘Canberra archives. There’s a machine coming up that will project it. We had to have it made in a hurry and then view useless hours of the stuff because we had only the file labels for identification.’

  As if the old artifact had rolled back time for him Jackson recalled Heathcote’s connection with the starship. So! And if he is alive, where is he? How could he have hidden so long? And why? All bloody nonsense!

  As if on cue a young man trundled in a bulky, untidy machine on a trolley, something conjured into existence from electronic theory and study of eroding museum relics.

  ‘The projector.’ The Commissioner stood. ‘I’ll see you in an hour or so.’

  Jackson hurried after him into the corridor, out of earshot of the projectionist. ‘Where are the complement of Columbus?’

  ‘On board their ship. In orbit. Quarantined. Out of the way until we have some idea what to do.’

  ‘After forty-two years they return and … For God’s sake!’ The name of God was no longer a commonplace but the youngsters knew his habits. And most of the Security men had read the New Testament as a part of Hist. Phil.

  ‘We simply don’t know what to do with them, Stephen. We’ve fed them a tale of immunisation against mutated bacteria and protection of ourselves against whatever old-time beasties they may harbour. Satisfactory?’

  ‘As they knew biology, probably. But possibly not; the twentieth century was not just a planetful of idiots.’

  ‘The evidence says differently.’ Jackson would not argue over that but he had placed a previous dart into the Commissioner, who needed to ease its itch. ‘Is our world so bad? Even half-created as it is?’

  Jackson said immediately, ‘No,’ because that was a brand of doubt the youngsters could do without. ‘In general it’s an improvement, but the Columbus men won’t see it so.’

  ‘Surely they’ll adjust?’

  ‘They will conform; that’s not the same thing. I grew up with the changes and have never finally adjusted to many of them.’ He considered a blow below the belt. And delivered it. ‘My prediction is that they will loathe your generation.’

  The Commissioner absorbed that a word at a time; avoidance of over reaction was drilled into the service types; he did not speak until he thought he understood Jackson’s point. ‘That will be very unfair. It was not our generation who carried out the Weeding.’

  ‘No,’ Jackson said straightly, ‘it was mine.’ If he felt shame or regret or satisfaction no one was to know it. ‘They will realise that, in time, but their first reaction will be simply that this world killed theirs. Literally. And to them this world will be your generation.’

  The Commissioner made the small gesture of respect, a token movement of the hand towards the heart, almost a ritual, given when an Ombudsman offered advice. ‘I will remember.’

  He went off, very smart in black uniform, very efficient to the approving eye and very self-assured, which Jackson knew that at this moment he was not.

  The young man had erected a screen and fed the cassette into his scrapyard machine. He seemed unusually young for his role even in this age of precocity.

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Seventeen, sir.’

  ‘Technician?’

  ‘First Class, sir.’

  At seventeen! ‘Are you cleared for classified material?’

  ‘To a degree, sir.’

  The cassette had come in a folder colour-coded black – Commissioner’s Discretion Only. Sometimes he really feared the capabilities of these super-educated fledglings. From junk and theory they had built this machine, with an improvement to allow projection on a large screen, in a matter of days.

  Aside from the brilliantly effective instructional techniques there were most secret and tightly restricted drugs for the enhancement of natural intelligence, the small beginnings of which had been known in his own young day, and plainly youth rather than maturity would furnish optimum test material. The damned biologists and bio-chemists; behind screens of secrecy and silence, what were they doing? Was there anything they were not doing, any area of human pursuit they might not bless or blight?

  Campion, the Commissioner, might know and could safely be asked. Whether or not he would reply was another matter; he placed limits on confidence. Politics revolved around different possibilities in this era but they were still politics, ultimately concerned with protection and power and deviousness. And secrecy.

  ‘Are you ready, sir?’

  Caught dreaming, he said stiffly, ‘Yes, thank you.’

  The youngster told him conversationally, ‘This is from some collection of historical records, a bloody great batch of newscasts about Columbus.’ With the job begun, enthusiasm forgot to be deferential and Jackson wondered, like old men down the centuries, what these polite kids were really like. ‘The Commissioner picked this one to show you.’

  ‘To show me what?’

  ‘Don’t know; it seems pretty ordinary. Just interviews.’ So I’m supposed to catch on to whatever Ian caught on to. ‘But this one has been tampered with. We think this is the full record but that some sections were not shown on the newscast and the thing was later reassembled for preservation. They must have had a strong historical sense.’

  Ah, you trusting child! ‘Lord, boy, they recorded everything down to their retinal patterns; by the time of the Collapse they were literally bugging themselves for posterity.’ Actually for self-protection, but that would take too much explaining. ‘Can you recognise the doctored sections?’

  ‘I’ve got them noted.’

  ‘Call them as we go.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘What’s the date of this thing?’

  ‘March 11, 1988.’

  He had been twenty-four years old; he might well have seen this newscast. Within minutes he knew he had; his visual memory was tenacious but this returned with a clarity quite extraordinary after forty-four years.

  A blare of theme music, four decades forgotten, set the period. A familiar pattern of dancing geometry capered, split, reformed into letters: MATTERS OF MOMENT.

  Saturday night – Channel 2 – Melbourne. He was seized by a violent, unhappy nostalgia. Melbourne my lovely old monster! But we had to kill you; it was necessary.

  The voice-over (name eluding him) said, ‘We – the camera crew and I – recorded this in America only hours ago. It’s another Matters of Moment scoop!’

  COLUMBUS SIX screamed the title, brilliant scarlet against stars and darkness. Six? Of course; there had been all those miniature unmanned test vehicles.

  The title skittered off into infinity past a cratered Luna and a ringed Saturn. Standard, recognisable objects; after, three decades of space most still hadn’t appreciated the difference between a planet and a star. The camera cut to a medium shot of Columbus, a tracery of metal struts sunlit against the stars. (Doctored, of course; actually the thing would have been hard to see.)

  It was
an ugly structure. ‘Blowing your way to heaven on a klaxon’ had been the joke of the day, and it fitted. Columbus resembled nothing so much as the skeleton of an old-fashioned motor horn of the early years of the century, with the great flare of the monopole rim tapering to a wasp waist and expanding to a cylindrical bulge at the rear end. The bulge, housing quarters and nuclear plant, was solidly metal-walled but the rest was spiderweb, a frame surrounding emptiness. Wrap a sheath of polished brass around it and there would be your klaxon. And blow, Gabriel, blow!

  The ship shrank swiftly into a lower corner of the screen and from its flare a shatteringly green line leapt across space, shimmering in an illusion of speed. The words BARNARD’S STAR appeared in at first tiny letters at its far end, theft swelled to fill the screen.

  The view cut to a studio technician’s idea of Barnard’s Star (or any goddamned star, what the hell?) – a slumberous coal in the womb of night, crimson, menacing. A red dwarf. Round it, at accelerated speeds and in impossibly close orbits, swung two globes which, for an eyecatching composition, the technicians had lit in ice-blue and striated bronze.

  ‘Barnard’s Star!’ cried the off-screen voice, building urgency as if the world was not fed to the teeth with similar spacecasts. ‘More than fifty million million kilometres from Earth! Already known to be circled by two huge planets and who knows how many more? The goal of Columbus!’

  Cut to a shot of Earth from space (authentic, from the library, cyclone whirling like mad over the China Sea); cut to the announcer in the studio.

  Barnes Falworth. The slightly soupy voice clicked recollection into place. Poor glamour boy – gone with the wind, the pestilence, the famine, the March of Man. The staggering stumble of man.

  ‘You may think the last possible drop of interest has been drained from the starship while we have watched it building, strut by plate by bolt by weld, for three years. But tonight we have the final factor which brings the years of preparation home to us as human beings.’ Pause for a last squeeze at non-existent drama. ‘The names of the star travellers have been released!’ Pause again, with small smile of promise. ‘And we bring you, first in the world to interview them, their faces and voices. Here they are – the fabulous men!’