View from Ararat

by Caswell, Brian

  – But you must wait until tomorrow, at least.

  Loef touches her shoulder and gently guides her towards the residentials.

  – Come, we will show you where we sleep . . .

  For a moment Jules stands and watches them as they make their way back across the landing-field.

  Genetic Research Laboratory

  Carmody Island

  Inland Sea (Eastern Region)

  15/1/203 Standard

  KAZ’S STORY

  I think I’d expected the request. The way things were going in Edison, and after the developments in the camp, it was a reasonable bet that Charlie would be making ‘contingency plans’.

  But that didn’t mean it was an ideal solution.

  ‘I don’t know, Charlie,’ I began. ‘We usually stick pretty much to ourselves. You know that. It’s safer that way. Something like this could draw a lot of attention to the island . . .’ I watched my cousin’s face in the view-screen. ‘There’d be no worry if it was just you, but Galen isn’t . . .’

  ‘One of us?’ Charlie finished off my thought. She brushed her hair back from her face and leaned in towards the pick-up. ‘Look, I know it’s a risk, Kaz, but . . . Well, you have to know him. Galen’s the last one we’d have to worry about. Hell, it’s not like we’ve never told anyone. And you know I wouldn’t consider it unless there was an emergency. But we have to be prepared.

  ‘You’ve seen the data, Kaz. If CRIOS escapes from the camp, it’ll be just about impossible to keep it out of Edison – or anywhere else on the mainland. Carmody’s about the only place outside of the major population centres that’s set up for the kind of data-crunching we’re going to need to beat this thing. And it’s already ether-linked to the labs here and in New G. What do you say?’

  For a moment I sat silently, staring at her expectant face on the screen in front of me.

  We’d grown up together and shared everything, until they’d accepted her at the Institute in Edison. I missed her smile – and her mind. It wasn’t working my shifts in the med-centre on the island that got on top of me. I could handle that. It was the Research programs I could have used her help with. She always had a way of looking at problems that went straight to the core.

  Which was exactly what she was doing now. Why wait for the roof to fall in before you looked for an alternative shelter?

  She was waiting for an answer.

  ‘Look, I’m only a spear-thrower around here. I’ll run it by Hoskins and see what he thinks.’ I paused again. I had to ask the question. ‘Charlie, do you think it’ll really . . .? I mean . . .’

  ‘Galen reckons it’s not “if” but “when”. We don’t know nearly enough about this thing, so how in hell are we going to keep it controlled? If those bastards at GHO hadn’t been so damned keen to keep a lid on it at the start, there might have been some hope. We might have a cure already. Or some way of fighting it, at least. But we’ve got squat – and it’s spreading through the camp like a bloody bushfire.’

  ‘So what do you intend to do?’

  Again Charlie pushed at her hair. ‘What can we do? We just have to keep going over what little we’ve got, until someone has a brainwave.’

  ‘Mind if I have a go? I mean, I haven’t got your—’

  ‘At this stage, Kaz, I’d accept help from the ghost of Dimitri Gaston. You’ve got all the files we received from Hansen already. I downloaded them for Hoskins to look at last week. If you like, I’ll send you what Galen and I have been working on. It may give you somewhere to start. But don’t let it limit you. If you want to try a new tack, go ahead. We don’t seem to be getting all that far. You know, cous, I never could figure out why you didn’t try Edison. You’d have done great here.’

  I stared at the screen for a few seconds before answering. It was something I’d considered myself a thousand times.

  ‘Maybe . . .’ I began. ‘I guess I just never liked crowds. Besides, there’s lots to do here. We’ve got the best Research set-up outside of Edison, and what we still don’t know about hybrid genetics could fill the Central Desert. I keep busy.’

  Charlie smiled, but it was unconvincing. She looked exhausted, and so much older than she’d looked just a few weeks earlier.

  ‘Well, get ready to get a whole lot busier. And please try to convince Hoskins. The way this is shaping up, it’s going to get a damned sight worse before it stands a chance of getting better.’

  She broke the connection and I was left staring at an empty screen.

  CHARLIE’S STORY

  Carmody Island is about three and a half thousand clicks from Edison, and almost the same distance from New Geneva. About the only place it’s remotely close to is the Elokoi state of Vaana, which, at its nearest point, is about 500 clicks to the east, and isn’t exactly a high-density population area anyway.

  Except for the Martinez Oasis, which is stuck out somewhere in the middle of the Great Central Desert, Carmody is the most remote piece of inhabited real estate on the entire planet – and that includes the isolated mining towns of the Fringes. So when you think about it, if you imagined the most unlikely place to find a top-flight school and one of the most amazing laboratory set-ups on the whole of Deucalion, Carmody Island would have to be it.

  The oddness of it had probably crossed the minds of a lot of people at the Academy in Edison, when such a high proportion of its intake in specialist disciplines like genetics and biochemistry, as well as significant numbers in areas like law and government, came from the island.

  But wondering was about as far as it went. I guess they figured that if people wanted to go to the trouble of sending their kids to a fancy boarding school on an island thousands of k’s from anywhere, where they probably had a whole lot fewer distractions, they deserved any results they might achieve.

  I doubt if Galen had given it a second thought, which explained why he wasn’t exactly receptive when I raised the issue.

  ‘How can you even think of leaving here?’ he asked, turning his chair to face me. I’d dropped the bombshell while I was standing behind him massaging his neck. I guess I figured he’d be more amenable in that position. ‘Shit, Charlie. We’re having enough trouble doing the job here, with all the staff and facilities of Edison Research at our beck and bloody call. How do you expect to get it done on a freaking island?’

  ‘Don’t go completely feral on me, Galen,’ I replied, stepping back a pace or two. I was prepared for his reaction. I’d known him too long to expect anything else. ‘It’s a last resort, but it’s not as crazy as it sounds. Not if you know the story of the place.’

  Time for the history lesson.

  I pulled a chair around, and sat backwards on it, facing him. I was nervous. I took a deep breath. As I took hold of his hand, I noticed I was trembling slightly.

  ‘What do you know about the Icarus Project?’

  ‘Icarus?’ He didn’t have a clue and I knew it. It was just my opening gambit. A rhetorical question. I’d learned more than just biology from Parmantier.

  He waited. I swallowed, then launched in.

  ‘About a hundred and fifty years ago, on Earth, some scientists undertook a top-secret and highly illegal genetic-hybrid experiment . . .’

  ‘Icarus?’ He can’t help it. Even when he’s totally in the dark, he still has to be involved in the conversation. It’s an ego thing.

  I just looked at him. It was our unspoken signal.

  ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘I’ll just shut up.’

  ‘Thank you, Galen. This is going to be tough enough, without you second-guessing in the middle of every sentence.’

  I wasn’t angry. It was the nerves talking. I took a deep breath.

  ‘When the first settlers arrived here from Earth, the Native Species Protection Legislation hadn’t been enacted. Anyway in those days they couldn’t send the empty C-ships back through the
warp, like they do today, and when they returned it on auto-pilot, they put a couple of Elokoi into stasis and sent them back with it. No one considered the ‘creatures’ to be part of a civilised race, and at that stage no one even suspected that they were telepathic.

  ‘Unfortunately, the freeze-sleep, while it shut off the other body-functions, didn’t shut off the Elokoi’s telepathic capacity. They spent the best part of fifty years stuck inside a comatose body, without a single physical sensation, surrounded by the silent emptiness of the universe, unable to do anything but think. Of course, when they were released, they were totally and irreversibly insane, and they remained catatonic until they wasted away and died.’

  He nodded. Nothing new in all that. It was one of the first examples they gave in the freshman medico-scientific ethics lectures. He didn’t say anything though. He could tell I was just warming up.

  ‘Of course,’ I went on, ‘by that stage word had come back to Earth, via the shuttles, of the Elokoi’s particular “talent”.

  ‘The thing is, the creatures were dead but their genetic material was very much alive. And although it was illegal and totally unethical, a group of Researchers in the Seoul Genetic Research Facility managed to isolate the group of gene complexes responsible for the Elokoi’s telepathic ability . . . And they spliced them into human chromosomes—’

  ‘Human? But that’s—’

  ‘Against the law? It’s against everything, but they did it anyway. They produced about fifty children, using paid surrogates to bring them to full term, but before the children could grow up the project was uncovered. The Researchers were canned, and orders were put out for the kids to be found and terminated . . . Destroyed.’

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘But?’

  He attempted a weak smile. ‘There has to be a “but”, Charlie. If there’s no “but”, there’s no point to the story. So?’

  I smiled back. At least he’d managed to get me to unwind slightly. But what was about to come was the key. To a lot more than just this story.

  ‘So,’ I continued, ‘let me ask you a curly one. An experiment is unethical – and illegal – and you discover it. So, what do you do with the fifty or so kids produced as a result. Remember, they’re all under five, obviously functional, and perhaps possessed of a unique talent that could be either a boon or a curse to all humankind. Do you kill them, as you’ve been ordered, or do you hatch a plan to spirit them away to safety? What would you do?’

  He looked at me for a moment, then hedged. ‘I wouldn’t have created them in the first place.’

  I stood up and shoved my hands into my pockets, looking down on him.

  ‘That’s not the issue, and you know it. It’s a right-to-life issue. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the original experiment, you now have a group of kids who exist through no fault of their own. Do they have any less right to be alive because they are the result of an illegal act? Does a child of a rape victim deserve to die because of the crime of its father? Do these children forfeit their right to exist because a few of their genes are different? They do exist, Galen. They are there. And you have to make a decision. So . . . what do you do?’

  I had him trapped and he knew it.

  ‘Shit, Charlie. You already know what I’d do. Who am I, by the way?’

  ‘Stanley Hendriks,’ I replied. And paused.

  ‘The Stanley Hendriks? Genetic Hybrids and Agricultural Self-Sufficiency. That Stanley Hendriks?’

  ‘The same. Hendriks and a group of scientists managed to smuggle most of the Icarus children and their surrogate families aboard a C-ship to Deucalion, right under the noses of Security. And Hendriks came with them, just to keep an eye on their development. You won’t find any records – he carefully deleted them over the years. And he set up Carmody as an Icaran refuge just before the Revolution, when it looked like someone had discovered them and they were being secretly and systematically killed. At the same time he siphoned off Research Funds to establish the labs and Research units on the island – trying to find a solution to a premature-aging phenomenon associated with the children’s hybrid genetic structure.

  ‘So Carmody Island—’

  ‘Is an Icaran settlement. There are hundreds of Icaran families scattered around the different towns and cities, but the kids are sent to Carmody for an education – and to learn about their heritage and how to cope with their unique abilities. They harness their powers and learn Elokoi philosophy and history from visiting Tellers. They are part-Elokoi, after all, and they can develop a rudimentary understanding of the thought-tones, if they’re trained.

  ‘So you see, Galen, Carmody’s the perfect place. It’s too far away to be in direct danger of contamination. It has a fully equipped laboratory complex geared to medical and genetic analysis and linked to every data frame and Research establishment on the planet. And it has an intelligent, disciplined and well-educated population, with experience in all the experimental techniques necessary to develop a sustainable containment strategy. Any questions?’

  He looked at me for a long time.

  ‘Only one . . . Can you read my mind?’

  I returned the stare, then let out the breath I’d been holding.

  ‘Only if you give me permission. It’s part of the etiquette they teach us as children, on the island.’

  ‘Then how come you told me? If you didn’t read my mind, you couldn’t be sure which way I’d jump. Isn’t it supposed to be top-secret?’

  I moved around to stand next to him and took hold of his hand.

  ‘Trust. I’ve put up with you for seven years, Galen. I think I know you well enough by now.’

  He withdrew his hand and thumbed the chair control so that he was facing me. ‘You have permission,’ he said. ‘What am I thinking right now?’

  For a moment I stared directly into his eyes, and then I felt the tears begin.

  Kneeling down, I looked up at him. ‘I know you do, you idiot. I’ve known since the beginning.’

  And then I kissed him.

  Finally.

  11

  The Dead and the Dying

  Quarantine Camp, Old Wieta Reserve

  Edison Sector (East Central)

  18/1/203 Standard

  JEROME

  Jerome Hamita places a thumbnail-sized electronic beacon on the door of the silent hut.

  Inside, a family of four lies dead – husband and wife wrapped in each other’s arms, with two small kids lying together in a tiny cot. At a glance you might think they were just sleeping, until you looked at their skin, and at the dead man’s staring eyes.

  The tiny beacon marks the site for destruction. Every third night, an armed Security team moves through the camp, protected by isolation suits, and sets small incendiary devices on all the marked huts. From the windows of the infirmary he has watched the sudden flames rising into the night sky. It is useless, like spitting in the eye of the devil, but anything is better than inaction.

  So once every few days he follows the paths of the camp, marking the huts and attempting the impossible task of counting the dead.

  It is voluntary. Everything in the camp is. The others who remain in the relative safety of the infirmary control-centre say nothing about his excursions. What could they possibly say that would mean anything?

  There is more than enough death within that managed environment, without facing the fatal chaos of the camp itself, where the Crystal spreads like a cancer, malignant and uncontrolled.

  Enough . . . He draws on a lifetime of discipline and forces the thought away, unwilling to move in that direction. Control is precarious already.

  Time to head back . . .

  He moves slowly along the almost-deserted roadway between the silent huts. It is no more than a wide alley, really. He pauses and watches a young woman creeping along close to the wall of the hut opposite. She is
trying to keep as much distance between them as is humanly possible, without actually touching the potentially deadly surface of the wall itself.

  Surreptitiously he unclips the strap securing the weapon in his holster, but she is no threat.

  And suddenly the realisation strikes that what he desperately wants to do is cross the road and stand in front of her, take off his glove, hold out his hand and introduce himself.

  Anything to show her that he has no fear of her.

  But fear has become a two-way street. As desperate as his need may be, within the fences of the Wieta camp, fear is the only logical response. For them both. The Crystal Death is invisible, and its touch is painless.

  At first.

  It is the reason the streets are empty and the huts are full – some with the fearful, some with the dead and the dying.

  He stops and watches the woman.

  She passes, refusing even to raise her eyes and glance in his direction. No surprise.

  No one looks at you any more . . .

  It is the new fact of life in the camp. No one looks at anyone, as if to make eye contact is to open yourself to the horror of contagion.

  Unclean! The age-old cry of the leper. Ring the bell, shout out the compulsory warning. Stay away, protect yourself . . . Unclean!

  And though the street is silent, though the fear remains unspoken, you can read it in the language of the curved back and the hurried glance.

  He watches as the woman disappears around the corner, and he wonders why she risks being out in the open. Food, perhaps, or water. Nothing but hunger or thirst is important enough to drag people from the relative safety of their self-imposed prisons.

  He feels the sweat running down his back, and the skin on his gloved hands is clammy in the 40-degree humidity. Even the visor of his helmet is beginning to steam up. But anything less than total cover is tantamount to suicide.