Tomorrow’s Heritage

by Juanita Coulson

  This part of the Enclave had been a natural outcome of the Death Years, the Chaos, and the plagues. Gene pools dwindled or died out completely in many areas of Earth. Family lines which had existed for generations ended. Some previously established tissue banks had been destroyed in the wars or contaminated, the genetic materials lost. When Ward Saunder first proposed the Enclave, it had seemed the ideal solution: neutral territory, honored by every combatant, a land where even valuable minerals were too costly to extract. There was nothing the Antarctic had that the warlords wanted. But science, and Earth’s heritage for tomorrow, did want it, and the Saunders had made it available for their use.

  The collection process was by no means complete; would never, in theory, be complete. But so far more than a billion samples had been gathered and stored here. More and more nations were taking advantage of the proffered service every year. Todd’s own tissue samples were on store here.

  “. . . a form of insurance, a guarantee against future disaster,” the supervisor was saying.

  “If that terrible alien invasion kills most of us, we’ll still be able to reproduce and fight back.”

  Pat’s propaganda, following him even here. The original intent of the Enclave’s tissue banks was being lost in the new wave of anti-alien paranoia.

  “If necessary, perhaps we will perfect cloning and produce perfect warriors to fight the aliens in space.” The Committee member didn’t use his translator, but his strong Rift Country accent still identified his origins. The comment brought protests from a United Theocracies country member. “Cloning is against nature. It must not be done.”

  The lab techs hastened to explain that human cloning was decades in the future. The Enclave had only recently received P.O.E. permission to begin the simplest experimentation that might, eventually, lead to genuine human cloning many years ahead. The near-fanatic United Theocracies adherent didn’t believe them. He kept questioning, trying to catch the techs in a lie.

  “Cloning feeds my people,” an Indian representative said. “The earlier cloning of plants and fish and fowl . . .”

  “We are not talking of plants and fish and fowl,” the religious hothead retorted. “We are here to guarantee the sanctity of human life!”

  The techs tried to calm him. “What this gentleman says is true. Cloning has fed millions, and clothed them as well. The technique produces quick-maturity fowl and fish and a variety of grains, edible crops, and fibers, as listed in your briefing tapes. Nowhere here will you find human embryos in vitro, as your propagandists claim . . .” A few others, like Todd, were staying out of the argument, moving up and down the aisles, peering curiously at the labels and readouts on the storage chambers. It wasn’t that cold in the labs, so the impulse to stick together for warmth was gone. None of the guides was paying close attention to them. Instead, they were preoccupied with the noisy United Theocracies Committee member.

  Todd glanced around warily. No Enclave personnel or other members were in sight, and he was near an auxiliary door to the maintenance corridors. The hyperendors he had consumed put his memory at top power. A map of the Enclave shaped in his mind. That way, and then to the right, and down a narrow passageway. Maintenance Suitup. There ought to be some insu-suits there!

  It was almost too easy. Gib Owens and the Goddard allies who had “disappeared” might have thought their jobs were equally easy. Reminded of that, Todd kept his guard up as he made the run down the empty corridors. Finding the suits was no problem. The adaptafabric outfits weren’t name-tagged, and there were plenty of them. That lessened the chances that someone would take a spot inventory and notice one was missing. Once he was suited up, his face was partially hidden. That, too, would be a help. Even so, he waited until a duty watch of lab techs went by the outer door before he slipped out into the hall.

  The big question—had there been some secret updating in security? That was a gamble, had been from the beginning, one he had to take. No scans. None in sight. No ident print locks, either. Those hadn’t been developed when the Enclave was constructed. None had been installed since. Theft and break-in weren’t high-priority problems here. There was little need to demand print identification from the regular Enclave staffers, most of whom lived here for six months or more on a duty tour.

  Todd avoided the trav-carts. Those were likely to be inventoried and tied in to the main computer logs. He had neither the time nor the patience to tinker with one’s guts and block out the tracking system. Clad in an insu-suit, he would be warm enough, especially while exercising. He had made good time getting around the Enclave years ago. He still could, if he had to, and he did.

  He ducked under the monitor screens lining the corridors, running in a crouch until he could straighten and lope along. So much to do! So damned little time! When he reached the heat lock, he was breathing hard. Warmed and filtered air sucked into the helmet, whistling in his nostrils. He rushed past the monitor screens and past the second heat lock, out into the preservement chambers.

  Slowing, Todd moved onto the balcony near the catwalk, gazing out over hundreds of hectares of gleaming coffins for the living. The eerie sensations of a couple of hours earlier returned, intensified. Then, he had been with other persons. Alone, the immensity of the Enclave struck him even more powerfully and roused atavistic fear.

  He had been very much alone before, in a spacesuit, hanging outside a shuttle in orbit, the only living being within thousands of kilometers. This emotion was stronger. No high vacuum, though minus eighty degrees centigrade was sufficient to kill him fairly quickly. Gravity, and plenty of air for the insu-suit to warm and filter through to him. He was alone, and yet he was not. He was the only breathing, mobile human being here, surrounded by thousands of helpless, frozen men and women. He was alive, and they were utterly at his mercy. Sophisticated equipment linked them with revival and a future existence. But Todd Saunder—and many other people at the Enclave—had the technical knowledge to disconnect those links and destroy these, sleeping prisoners.

  I could kill them. All of them, or some of them. At my whim.

  The sense of omnipotence shook Todd as few concepts had save the discovery of the alien mesienger. To his horror, he knew a momentary thrill, an almost perverse, gloating feeling of power he hadn’t realized was in his nature. Aghast, he slammed a lid on that monster in his being and hurried to the edge of the catwalk and the maintenance ladders leading to the lower floor.

  The instant of temptation and ugly self-knowledge was gone. Todd was back in business, scrambling down the ladder. He hesitated, searching his memory and looking around. Then he climbed over the low reminder shock barrier, set to keep maintenance crews from accidentally carrying certain equipment out into the cubicle aisles. He started running down those aisles, scanning the section monitor readouts, hunting for particular, pre-chosen chambers.

  Sounds were mildly distorted by the insu-suit. The steady hum of the buried cryo machinery was like a million heartbeats throbbing in unison. Now and then, far away, there were cracking noises, shiftings in the ages-old ice man had invaded. Nothing to cause alarm, the engineers had promised. But those natural complaints from the glacier would stay with the Enclave. If humanity wanted to use the Antarctic, that was part of the worrisome price.

  Individual shock barriers surrounded each cubicle. Todd ran carefully down the middle of the aisles and cross-aisles, not ready to cross those invisible fences yet. The secondary barriers were the last reminders Maintenance would get, and they were guaranteed to prevent accidents. They could bite, and hard.

  From the corners of his eyes, he saw the frozen faces as he ran. Men and women, dark and fair, red and yellow and black and brown, every nationality and genetic strain and ethnic type. Monitors tabbed their names and conditions. Row upon row of living ghosts—waiting, waiting . . .

  Limbo. The opponents of Ward’s Enclave concept had flung rougher expressions than that at the Saunder quasi-nation when Protectors of Earth was considering franchising the facility.
Ward had turned the rebuttals over to Jael, and she had done a thorough job of crushing the opposition, as usual. Not limbo but hope, she had said—and was not hope preferable to certain death?

  Not everyone could afford the privilege. Not everyone was fortunate enough to have a sentence commuted to open-ended imprisonment in the Enclave. Executions still happened, in some countries. But far fewer now than then, thanks to the Enclave and to the militant Spirit of Humanity religious movement.

  Yet death was not vanquished. Ward Saunder had never said it would be. He offered a scientific tool to hold it at bay, no more.

  An item from a historical tape flashed in Todd’s thoughts. Alfred Nobel. Another genius inventor. He, too, thought his invention would free mankind from its own violent nature.

  Todd’s steps slowed. He was beyond the privileged sections, into the far vaster ones holding unwilling confinees. The first cubicle to his right contained a woman. She was young, not pretty, African. Strong features, rigid with defiance. Elizabeth Gola, author of the Right of Independency Manifesto. She wasn’t one of the eighteen on Goddard’s list. But her face and form attracted Todd. He had to look up at the cubicle. The body was suspended a few centimeters above his head, resting on the life-giving support stem channeling down to the cryo machines and temp regulators.

  Her defiant face intrigued him, won his sympathy. Without intending to, Todd reached out, then caught himself before he touched the shock barrier. “Sorry,” he said, feeling foolish for talking to someone who couldn’t hear. “I don’t have the time. I’m not far enough. Need another eight frames . . .”

  He covered the distance at a jog. The exertion of touring earlier, without an insu-suit, was costing him. No problems with chill factor, but gravity bothered him. Todd smiled ruefully. Age and acclimation taking over. He was becoming too fond of spacing. Each time he went planetside it took longer to readjust. This time he had rushed it. Long enough, though, to pull this off.

  He stared up at the cubicles on either side of the aisle. Beyond, the containers reached to the sub-surface glacial horizon. He had a better viewpoint than he had had on the catwalk, and he had come deeper into the preservement chambers than he had up there when he tried to assess distance vision. Not real. Some of it was, but not all of it. The area wasn’t as immense as it had seemed. Part of that awesome distance range was holo-mode, damned good, too.

  Would the V.I.P.s on the Committee believe him if Ed Lutz said the endless horizon of cryo cubicles was exaggerated? Probably not. Even if he told them as Todd Saunder, there would be doubts.

  I’m not exactly Earth’s most popular person right now, thanks to the last wonderful news I brought them . . .

  He checked the section screens for confinees’ names. Prandathra, Swenson, and DeWitt. Bustamonte, Van Eyck . . . Djailolo. He had been one of the losers in the recently ended Trans-Pacific war. Todd recalled the Malaysian Lunar Base pilot, one of Gib’s friends, yelling in grief-stricken outrage when he had read Djailolo’s name on the confinee list during Pat’s speech. Djaiolo had not only made the mistake of opposing the winning rulers on his side, he had also been a booster of Goddard Colony and the Spacers, and he was on the list of eighteen names.

  “You’ve paid for supporting Mari and Kevin, didn’t you?” Todd sadly asked the man in the box. He stepped closer to the cubicle, studying it. Intuitive alarms went off. Something wasn’t right. Todd knelt, squirming under the shock barrier and the transparent coffin, examining the maintenance stem. The tiny readout monitors looked okay. Everything appeared fine. He had expected that. But his jangling, inner alarm didn’t shut off. It was tightening into a painful tension.

  He crawled back out into the aisle, then stood, staring up and down the files. Possible? All too possible. But where did it originate? In the maintenance stems feeding from the cryo machines? Or from the Core? If it was the latter, he would never get past the systems.

  Practicalities convinced him. Core mode would have taken a massive amount of special programming. Too hard to cover up the input from Saunder Enterprises’ supply sources. Much easier to tinker on site. Out here, past the shock barriers, working with the original system, selective removals and replacements would work best, and most efficiently and convincingly.

  Selective. The word sent a wave of revulsion through Todd’s viscera. He swallowed hard and forced himself to move along the rows of confinees’ coffins. They had thrown all the unfortunates together at random. A political gadfly who had never harmed anyone was placed beside a depraved mass murderer, a man too deranged to help with medico-psycho techniques, and too deadly to try to lock away from society and take the risk that he might escape.

  Who had made the selections? Who had put them together like this?

  Todd located three more of the names on the Goddard list and checked each maintenance stem for anomalies. He didn’t touch anything at first, until he had eyeballed thoroughly. Then he went to work. Disable was simple, if you knew what to look for, and he did. Ed Lutz might be capable of this, too, if he had been instructed. That could be an alibi, if needed. Again and again Todd glanced over his shoulder, peering out from under the coffin where he was working, hoping his insu-suit audio would pick up any warning sound.

  The half-buried circuitry yielded to his skilled probe. Same old casing. Same old guts. Eleven years old and still working superbly. Except for one small detail. Output for the obligatory holo-mode relay system—that eye of the world, demanded in P.O.E.’s Enclave charter. As Todd himself had tested, this relay was supposed to provide, instantly, a confirming three-dimensional view of any confinee—hero or dissident or criminal.

  Todd examined the program set, growing more contemptuous and angry by the second. No precautions taken at all. No feedback. No trigger mechanism to register at the Core. Why bother? Ward Saunder had designed the system so well, so intricately, one tiny adjustment would be undetectable.

  Unless you were Ward Saunder’s son and had watched him build the original device.

  Satisfied that he wouldn’t call down hordes of Enclave personnel on himself if he went further, Todd removed the small circuit trigger and cradled it in his gloved palm. He scooted back and stood up, facing Van Eyck’s cubicle.

  The computer would give him only a minute’s worth of looking. Now he could look as long as he wished, or until he was caught. But what was he looking at? Van Eyck, another Goddard supporter, accused—falsely, by Mari’s claim—of murder, convicted, and confined. He slept in icy suspension. Cryo support kept his body and brain safe for the future.

  Todd didn’t want to find out. He glanced down at his hand, at the circuitry base, his thumb moving, pressing the crucial set. Resisting what he knew he would see, he looked up once more at the cubicle.

  Van Eyck was gone.

  He had probably been gone for months, ever since he had been “confined.” He had been replaced by a holomode image. In that future he and his supporters hoped to see Van Eyck would have no part. Time was on the Enclave’s side, and on the side of Van Eyck’s enemies. The term of his sentence was indefinite, and, like most of those confined to the Enclave, his confinement could be pushed forward again and again to suit the politics of those who had sentenced him.

  Todd released the set trigger. Van Eyck was visible once more, secure and frozen.

  Todd replaced the circuit. Then he went up the aisles, quickly repeating the test. At first he checked the other names on the list, those people Mari was worried about, the names Gib Owens had given his life to deliver. He found more like Van Eyck. Too many more. He couldn’t cover them all. But of the six within this section, five were gone. People presumed safe and preserved in the Enclave, some for three or more years—gone. Gone while Goddard was being completed. Gone while the Trans-Pacific war went on, while the alien messenger was coming to greet a supposedly intelligent species.

  On impulse, Todd ran to an area that seemed restricted entirely to criminals. No political dissidents. No possibly moralistic motives for wanting
these people out of the way in order to save a country, a people from war or political disaster. If not for the Spirit of Humanity movement and Saunder Enterprises’ altruism, none of these criminals would have survived to reach the Enclave.

  They hadn’t survived after they had reached the Enclave, Todd discovered. None of them. The rate in these cubicles was one hundred percent. In these outer sections, the ones no Committee members ever reached, even via the catwalk, there were only rows of holo-mode images. The cryo machinery throbbed, sustaining nothing.

  The rows reached into the distance. Somewhere, another halo-mode form took over, projecting an illusion of endless distances. There was no reason why all the cubicle space couldn’t be used, and with minimal expense. But it wasn’t. Someone—for whatever reasons—had decided to turn off thousands of people. Wipe them out. Yet continued the sham, the lie to the world, that these thousands were humanely preserved, living into Earth’s future.

  His boots scuffing on the frosty floor, Todd walked back into the political sections, where there were fewer criminals and more innocent confinees. Djailolo was dead. Van Eyck was dead. Bustamonte was dead. Ngoro Kwami, Theda Ryan, Yuri Mikhailavitch, Toshiro, Pandrachagishipim . . .

  He had no heart to make a list. Enclave Core probably had one, locked and secur.ity-sealed. And somebody, somebody in authority, probably had one—the higher-up who had laughed at the Enclave’s charter and ordered these mass executions.

  They were executions. Maybe the world wouldn’t care overmuch about the dead criminals. Humanity was as much at war with itself over capital punishment as it had ever been, this past century or so. The Enclave cubicles given over to the murderers and saboteurs and terrorists were a compromise, a concession to shut up the tenderhearted. But the political losers, the artists who adopted causes their governments opposed—they, too, were dead. Honest and worthy people, some submitting bravely to their sentences, exhorting their followers not to rebel in their names and risk death. Time, they had said, would prove them right and their causes just. No blood must be spilled! Condemnation to the Enclave was not, after all, death. With pride, they had accepted confinement, a badge of membership and their heritage for the future. Someday, when Earth was free, they would awake and return to lead their happy people.