Beloved Son Page 5

  So had I until Joe and Pete pointed out simultaneously that specialised genetic pools tend to regress to the racial norm.

  And Albert gave a short, sad laugh that seemed to be a comment without a point.

  Politics reared its head with some talk of international socialism and Pete, of all people (he is a staunch communist), said, ‘That means only a central idea rent by national schisms and schisms within the schisms – like religion. The world has burned enough witches.’

  Albert showed some of his ungenerous impatience: ‘It will burn more yet. Probably biologists.’

  That was close to the bone and Pete, who once would have lost his temper, pretended not to hear. Joe commented neutrally that every discipline has potential for harm and, to divert argument, turned to Ewan. ‘Except yours. The star-watchers harm nothing but their eyesight.’

  ‘But our neighbours, the space physicists, have some capacity for damage. There was a project for making alterations to the Van Allen belts by shooting neutrons into them; it was pretty sticky and I hope nothing came of it. Or that it turned out harmless.’

  At about this point Albert’s restlessness really registered with me. He glanced from face to face with compressed lips and took short, quick sips at his drink; some contempt coloured his grimness as though he alone had an opinion worth giving but didn’t intend to waste it on pigmies.

  Joe thought that if the Van Allen thing had been feasible it would have been tried. ‘It was an age of interference; a project did not have to be useful, only possible. I am more concerned about pollution control. The influences against total success were powerful. Such greed and obstinacy!’

  Pete suddenly made a speech in his pedantic English. ‘They succeeded or they are dead, or returned to tribalism. Powerful nations were frightened and when that point arrives something is done; big, drastic steps are taken. Pollution will have been beaten at the eleventh hour but the price will have been the changing of the shape of life. Cities, traffic, factories, the very wrappings of our goods – these things had to be controlled, modified, even eliminated before we should perish, and these things were the very shape of our lives. Forests, seas, fields, the air itself may all be new and strange.’

  Ewan, who never took these speculations very seriously, said, ‘If they’ve altered the women I’ll have a sharp word with the man in charge.’

  Albert told him harshly, ‘They’ll be changed too.’

  Ewan was undisturbed. ‘Depends how. Bigger tits and more extended frenzies? Let’s never despair over that.’

  Albert stood up. Angry. Dominating. He blazed with purpose like a man who has taken all he can and means to bring the mob to order, half exalted, half paranoid.

  ‘These little things!’ Only the recording can carry the sound of his contempt; it threw every word so far spoken on the intellectual rubbish heap. I noted Ivan relaxing, settling back – his sign of alertness. Too late of course. ‘War, pollution, politics, boundaries! They aren’t the point and never were. The point is not environment but the people in it. Look at the facts of human evolution – our personal, hellbent, self-powered evolution – and start wondering what has been done to men and women. To their bodies and their minds. Think of things that began in the sixties and by the time we left had become snowballing horrors that governments were trying to sweep under carpets!’

  He was raging. Lecturing a gaggle of incompetents. Revealing the Tablets of the Law.

  ‘Artificial inovulation and insemination, to begin with little harmless things. Hope for sterile parents and gene-defectives! Away with phenylketonuria! Great news for haemophiliacs! Let ’em have nice, normal kids; let ’em increase and multiply in a world already in progressive starvation! Biology’s gift! There were consequences – emotional and legal traps that still hadn’t been sorted out thirty years later. Who is Mum and who is Dad? Maybe neither is the one you’ve been taught to call so, and you don’t find out until one of them dies that you can’t inherit because legally you’re a bastard and your particular administration hasn’t got round to sorting out the responsibility. So much for biology’s gift; it could be done so they did it, but no one thought of the consequences. Just as they didn’t think until it was too late of the genetic consequences of the ‘clean’ bomb, the one that didn’t load the atmosphere with strontium 90 and all that harmful rubbish but released mainly mild old carbon 14. Not at all dangerous with that contemptible little emission, save that it will hang round for thousands of years instead of a decade or so and eventually do more damage than all the other bomb products put together, because radiation damage is cumulative. The bloody biologists knew, but did they say a word? They knew the old runaround: You can’t stop progress so throw up your hands, look distressed and think up arguments for saying it won’t be so bad after all. Don’t get together and put out warnings so pungent they’ll terrify governments; don’t set up a united front. Then you’ll have all those beautiful genetic variations to play with for generations to come – so long as you don’t rock the fucking boat!’

  He stopped, breathing hard and gathering a fresh avalanche, and Pete moved into the gap, piqued and taking it very personally. ‘Science is not criminal. These things are amenable to informed legislation. Governments are slow by nature, but by 1990 much had been done.’

  Albert’s anger hooked into him like a claw. ‘You men of good will! How about your interferences less easily legislated away?’

  He wanted an answer; he wanted a biologist to convict his own calling. And Pete should have known that soft answers magnify wrath.

  ‘There were admittedly dangerous experiments. That was known. They were not hidden.’

  ‘Never?’

  And Pete, knowing he had trapped himself, muttered defensively that exchange of knowledge had been very free after the Paris Conference of ’82.

  ‘It was? Then tell me what Heathcote was doing when he stumbled on slow met!’

  That promised excitement. The man had dropped so suddenly from public view. There had been a misty hint of aversion to publicity, some reference to health, then nothing. Most of us had decided that it was connected with the nature of his research because secrecy of research was a fetish of the eighties, despite the Paris Conference. Then we had forgotten him.

  Joe said, ‘We do not know that. Nobody knew but many thought, and I think now, that your government suppressed the information.’

  Albert turned his ferocious grin on him, the tiger ready for its meal. ‘You can bet your Teuton balls it did. And how many other governments sat on information? Just how far did England and America get with gene manipulation? One major breakthrough after another – then silence, as if all the micro-surgeons had dropped dead. Why suppress knowledge unless secrecy promises power and domination and war potential?’

  Even Ewan was interested enough now to protest. ‘Like Joe said, all things are potentially lethal.’

  Albert faced him like a fighter. ‘What’s merely potential about, say, mind control? I don’t mean the simple-souled techniques of brainwashing; I mean the ability to alter minds permanently, or even create them from scratch.’

  Pete muttered irritably that nothing much had been considered practicable in that line, but I for one didn’t believe him and I don’t think the others did. The world’s journals had gone suddenly mute on that, allowing twenty years of work to fade out of mention.

  Albert laughed at him. ‘Then why did the planarian worm experiments go out of circulation when your country – your country this time – announced that acquired characteristics could be transferred on a more complex scale than mere learning ability in far more complex organisms than a lowly little notochord? Lysenko must have giggled in his grave when he heard that one. He’d been on the wrong track but not that bloody far wrong.’

  ‘Those experiments were conducted with bees and mice. You cannot equate them with work on a human subject.’

  ‘No? Listen while I do it. A step with a mouse, then a step with a pig – and the next must be
taken with an ape. And the one after that?’ He was harsh with hate and disgust; only sudden violence could have stopped him. He had sought some enormous relief and would not be denied, and now he asked a question that pointed directly to it. ‘Did you never wonder why I was sent on this trip when a thousand better men were available?’

  Impossible question; there is a powerful inhibition against open criticism of a commander. But I answered it; I was caught up and couldn’t help myself. ‘We wondered.’

  Anger and violence deserted him; he had reached the point of release and the struggling was over. He sat down.

  ‘I was put aboard so that in the year 2032 I would be the same physiological age, forty-two years, as some others born – if that’s the word for it – in 1990.’

  Joe leapt on it. ‘A control! Do you mean that experiments in transfer of acquired characteristics were carried out with human foetuses and –’ he broke off, worrying at it. ‘No, it could not be done with the foetus. The abilities would have to be in your sperm, which they are not. The chains cannot—’

  Pete interrupted him. ‘We have known since 1970 that DNA and RNA are not the only structures which influence genetic information. But that is not the same thing. Nor is a foetus, even one grown parthenogenetically, the same thing as a sectioned worm.’

  Realising that they contradicted certainty they shut up and waited for him to speak, probably wanting to discover that he was talking hysterical nonsense.

  They had no chance. I saw the answer in perhaps the only real flash of intuition that has ever come to me – saw him twisting before the mirror and saw clearly the group of powerfully evinced characteristics which would make him the perfect directly observable control.

  I said, dead sure of myself, ‘Heathcote was engaged in cloning.’

  Joe made a little, private, disgusted sound of contempt for a specialist venturing outside his discipline, but the others were silent. Except Ewan who asked, ‘Growing people like buds or cuttings? Is that possible, like cutting a bulb?’

  Albert answered him, still a bit off his alcoholic balance but with the strain gone out of him. ‘Yes. You can save your snorting, Joe, because old John did it.’

  Neat and, I suppose, useful, but for what? A hundred Jack-the-Rippers at once would be hard to take – or a hundred Albert Rafts or a hundred anybody. Identical dolls. Robots. Completely deindividualised. I don’t see …

  With a crawling of flesh he did see – imperfectly, as in a haze – why the Commander loathed his body and himself. He asked in silent agitation, How many were there and did they survive? If so, where are they? Who has them?

  The biologists looked mulish but Albert went on for Ewan’s benefit. ‘You start with a group of cells from the parent body – me. A single cell is theoretically all that’s needed but in practice it doesn’t work, so John told me.’

  Pete glossed grudgingly, ‘The making of a human body requires some hundreds of thousands of orders from the RNA chain and one cell could not handle them all. Cells of the adult body are too specialised, though it is possible to make them do work they are not adapted for. If Heathcote really grew a clone he must have used a large cell-group. A thousand cells or a hundred thousand.’

  Albert nodded. ‘The cells were grown in nutrient fluid and the genetic chains stimulated – don’t ask me how because I don’t know – until a foetus formed. I think it was first done with a chip off a carrot.’

  ‘Steward; 1963.’ Pete again. ‘Practically an accident.’

  ‘John raised his foetuses in vitro, in glass containers. That wasn’t his own technique; if someone else hadn’t perfected in vitro gestation his work would have been impossible. The foetuses would have had to be implanted in host mothers and born in the usual fashion.’

  Christ, but they were good; we still haven’t caught up with some of their work. He was right to be afraid, though not sure of what.

  ‘At any rate the set he chopped out of me were timed to reach crisis – the point of normal birth – a few weeks before Columbus left and on my last leave before take-off he called me to the lab to see myself as a baby. Understand that I wasn’t keen. Apart from the eeriness of the idea of seeing myself only a few days old I’d begun to work up reservations about the whole line of research. But I was curious too.

  ‘I drove over and a bloody peculiar feeling came over me as I got near the place. I can’t properly account for it; I can only tell you. Like being alone and realising with the back of your neck that you aren’t alone at all, that somebody, else is there; you turn your head and there they are and the uneasiness goes away. This didn’t go away, because there was nobody there, and the closer I got to the lab the stronger it became. It was uncanny and profoundly unpleasant; it made me dizzy and I nearly ran the car off the road; finally I pulled up and vomited. And turned round and went home. I rang John and told him about it and he was as excited as all-get-out, yelling down the phone. He’d actually hoped for something like it. Hoped for it!’

  I asked him was he talking about telepathy, but he wasn’t.

  ‘A sort of awareness. A high-powered empathy perhaps. It’s documented in identical twins, though they don’t all have it and I think none so powerfully. The difference is that with me it’s a revulsion. I don’t want ever to see any of them or be close to them; I don’t think I could stand it.’

  Pete pointed out that the clone-children were experimental and born in extraordinary circumstances, that the chances were fair that they did not survive to adulthood.

  Albert seemed to have run down; he was sober now and sombre. ‘They did. Or some of them did.’

  I didn’t believe he could sense them at this distance and said so and he looked at me like a lost child. ‘This distance? It’s nothing. Out by Barnard’s Star the dregs of awareness were there. The fact of them never leaves me.’

  I could imagine a dozen counter-arguments to that conviction but he was in no state to accept reason; I kept my mouth shut. For the first time I really pitied him, living with a couple more hells than most of us.

  That was the end of the clip and the folder.

  5

  Could that be all? Out of what must amount to millions of words written and mentascripted over the years Campion had thought these alone mattered. Jackson closed his eyes, summing up.

  An experiment designed to come to conclusion forty-two years in the future … But the future they had counted on did not exist; history had stopped and begun again. Considering what had happened to hundreds of millions of people it was unlikely that a group of babies, unable to protect themselves, could have been brought alive through starvation and ruin.

  But – ‘Even out by Barnard’s Star the dregs of awareness were there.’

  Psychiatrist Lindley didn’t believe it but Campion, with more to be cautious about, apparently did not discount the possibility.

  So: What could be done with a dozen or a hundred Rafts?

  There are soulless bastards who would appreciate regiments of identically dependable, dull-minded, uncomplaining factory hands who could be specialised from birth for specific dexterities and simple needs – a fully predictable complement as smoothly turned as the machines they tended.

  But you wouldn’t waste Rafts on factories.

  You would clone for mental capacities as well as physical.

  You could produce …

  … powerful, high-stamina, high-dexterity, fully integrated, unbreakably group-indoctrinated – armies.

  Not a hundred or a thousand. Millions.

  All the uneasy tremblings of the experimental, half-formed, wholly vulnerable twenty-first century shimmered in his fears. He saw vividly the nature of the power latent in a process of endless, controlled duplication.

  If Heathcote lives, who has him? Who makes rumours, and why?

  He sat for two minutes frightening himself into paralysis, seeing his world crumble back into the wreckage from which it had risen. And for two more quietening himself after shock.

  He re
ached for querulous hope. Only one miracle was required, that Heathcote’s laboratory had been shattered, ruined, destroyed during the Five Days. Was that too much to ask of God? Probably it was; Old Testament God wouldn’t give a damn while some remained for punishment.

  Also, whatever had happened to Heathcote and his laboratory, something of his knowledge must be current still; otherwise the whole business of the rumours was fairy dust. Why should this historically obscure name be bandied in the streets when the very nature of his research was forgotten, unless someone or some group had not forgotten?

  The rumours, then, were deliberately propagated, timed to gather impetus with the homing of Columbus, timed to climax with the return of the clone-father. If that was the word – parent? brother? broodmaster?

  And Albert – hag-ridden, reserved, lonely Albert – would be the selected symbol of whatever movement was preparing its way. His willingness or unwillingness would not matter; any competent psycho-tech could handle that in minutes.

  So the urgent questions were: Who? How many? Where?

  Recalling his spontaneous recognition of Raft’s face his scalp crawled. They could be anywhere, dispersed among the nations. He needed Campion, quickly.

  Campion came at once.

  ‘Ian, bring me up to date. What has been done?’

  Campion leaned moodily at the window, looking out across Melbourne Town. Seeing what? In that direction lay only the great, squatting bulk of the Shrine of Remembrance on its garden hill. The rest of the city was gone long ago as all the great cities were gone, plundered for their metals and artifacts for the rebuilding of the world.

  He said, ‘Not much. I saw that material myself only hours ago. We’re looking for them, of course; there’s a world search for doubles of Raft. This Sector is in charge – meaning that I am – because Raft is the focus and he belongs to Australia. Special groups are tracking the origins of the Heathcote rumour; with total recall examinations we should know that soon. Archives are being ransacked for papers of his that may have been preserved in the Pending Rooms. That will take longer; there are mountains of records we’ve never got round to cataloguing, let alone reading.’