The Chromosome Game

by Hodder-Williams, Christopher

  So, where Trell-484 feels independent and pushing manhood and is — possibly — sensing some kind of leadership role yet to come, Eagle-100 is not tempted to be precocious: he does not feel the need. Instead, he elects to grow up in his own good time, mixing-in with everybody and learning, through the relaxed process of elimination, what sort of person he’s finally going to be.

  He likes Trell and he admires him. Eagle thinks, ‘This washroom is really a Pumping Station by a lake; the whine from the electric dryer is a turbine; the temperature gauge on the wall indicates the water pressure that serves a huge community. I’m glad to note that it reads satisfactorily.’

  And when Eagle has finished brushing his teeth he says to Trell, ‘The twins have got a new game.’

  ‘Oh? What are they up to?’

  ‘You can never tell what girls are up to.’

  Trell finishes drying his hands. ‘The twins,’ he explains, ‘like secrets.’

  *

  Sakini and Inikas, lively objects of Eagle’s passing interest — straight out of Japanese traditional art — careened down the fun-slide in the Adventure Playground and landed, giggling, on the mat below.

  They were the only twins among the whole incubant community. Inseparable as the two ends of a single piece of string, they were almost a two-girl community in themselves, learning things together, sharing their computer-gifts, even singing simple duets in near-ultrasonic coloratura voices.

  Like everyone else on ZD-One they were just over ten years old.

  They spoke only English because there were no Japanese tapes. It didn’t bother them because they were not aware of any cultural differences to be expressed in the way they should think or write things down. Although both of them noticed that, for some reason, their eyes tended to go down a written sheet of paper rather than along it, this didn’t bother them because practically nothing did.

  They brought their discovery to Nembrak The Inventor.

  Nembrak The Inventor was famous on ZD-One. He was the guy who had fixed the Specials drink-dispenser so that you could always get one extra milk-shake for every three it was supposed to serve. Just how long the thing would go on doing this no one knew. Nembrak thought the computer must know about the trick by now but so far the machine obliged.

  It stood, along with various bits of entertainment gear — like the flight simulator (very realistic, that was) and the Star-Wars game and the TV gadget that could do anything from tennis and squash to baseball and superchess — it stood right there in the Mini-Disco.

  Nembrak and his cronies were discussing technological matters at the tiny bar-top. Here, four at a time, you could sit and drink the ‘Specials’ and plan your day. Apart from the compulsory periods spent with the teaching machines in the various booths that ran all the way down the perimeter of the Adventure Playground, there were enough things to do with the kit provided to keep you more than occupied for the day.

  The girls said something to Nembrak and he thought about it and said something in reply, but you couldn’t hear a word of this because pop music was screeching out of the speakers overhead, till one of Nembrak’s friends — well, they formed a kind of club, really — turned the sound off and Sakini said, ‘Careful about the baby-alarms. The computer might be listening.’

  And Nembrak laughed outright and said, ‘Do you kids still call those things baby-alarms? They’re mikes.’

  Inikas said, ‘Whatever they are, they listen.’

  Nembrak couldn’t argue with that. So he followed the twins back through the gymn to an area beyond it.

  Actually, Nembrak couldn’t help being a bit irritated because the twins couldn’t stop giggling and he personally couldn’t see what was funny about discovering things, which they made an unnecessary mystery out of, Nembrak thought, why couldn’t they just say what they’d seen? — Inventors discover things all the time.

  Sakini said, ‘Through here. Through these steel doors.’

  Nembrak seemed surprised. ‘First time I noticed there were any doors this end.’

  Inikas said, ‘Well, they kind of disappear into the wall.’

  Nembrak translated this into proper ten-year-old technology. ‘I think you mean that the steel doors seemed hidden because they were flush with the bulkhead.’ — And he felt quite proud of being the engineer on the job.

  The three of them went through the gap in the bulkhead and there it was — in a cube-shaped place like a garage. And the twins stopped giggling and were silent.

  Nembrak said, ‘Why didn’t you say? That’s a farm tractor. What’s it doing there?’

  No way could you give an answer to a question like that.

  Nembrak went on, ‘I think Trell should know about this. He talks to the computer more than any of us. Why don’t you go find him?’ — and the twins said, Okay, but Krand was the best one to talk to Trell … They didn’t realise it but even then there was a chain of command. Before we shadow-observers can evaluate the curious appearance of a tractor (a computer error, by the way, since its appearance was years ahead of time) we have somehow to make the three hundred year jump and realise that the molecules of which our own bodies consist will be, as it were, transplanted. Because of the processes of Genetics — whether artificially engineered or not — the people we are viewing aboard Kasiga are, despite a gap in time, our own progeny. To some extent they are Us. We therefore know them better than we think.

  Take Krand. Inevitably he, too, is a ten-year-old. He reckons things out our way — if perhaps rather more astutely.

  Only Krand has been brought up very differently from the way we ourselves were reared. Indeed, the method of educating him is infinitely more estranged from normal childhood than he can possibly imagine. And though Krand does not have the verve and vitality and lightning reaction-time that Trell-484 will soon be showing (just skip a few videotapes and check this out) he does possess qualities vital to the tiny community in which he finds himself.

  Krand, for his years, is heavily-built, almost stolid-looking. Though quite striking, he does not have the easily-spotted appeal that (for instance) Kelda-275 will shortly be able to observe in Trell.

  Remembering, also, that you don’t stare at a piece of videotape and expect it to show you anything, until such time as it is run through a suitable machine, equally you can’t look at an entire settlement at one instant in time and expect to understand why the sudden appearance of a tractor is simply amazing.

  You need a catalyst. And you couldn’t find a better one than Krand himself. For although Trell-484 has, by his time, undergone a subtle form of awakening, Krand has not only been through this gate long before but has done so consciously. Each step taken has been noted in his watchful mind; and not for one moment has he used any process so boring as logic. (That’s not entirely a fair statement since one of his closest friends, Cass-010, is in the course of doing just this … though it’s a slow, laborious process that will leave him far behind.) Krand knows he is an animal, a part of supernature: a creature linked directly with the evolving animals outside Kasiga. The only problem is that he doesn’t yet know they are there.

  Are they, in any sense, aware of him?

  *

  Supernature being just another word for instinct, it cannot die merely because Mankind has chosen to end his own epoch. Horses remember their riders through the same phenomenon of race-memory as the Jews remembered how they had been driven from Israel. Even though the new ponies are recognisably different from their progenitors they vaguely miss the weight upon their backs.

  The supergulls circle overhead; and something still lodged in their dynastic heritage tells them that there should be ships. Where are the pickings that used to be slung over the side? — the stale bread, the scrapings from the plates, the potato peelings, the bean pods? Such delicacies are not only their right, earned over the centuries before the anti-miracle so inconveniently closed this maritime supermarket; but they are essential during a long-haul flight. Though the gulls are now equipped wit
h delta wings, they belong to a long line of other gulls that weren’t. The memory lingers but the explanation is not forthcoming.

  And the common African monkey is simply furious. Bad enough that for as long as Mankind had been around, to peer at him idiotically through the bars of cages in the zoo, or brandish everlasting movie-cameras from jeeps and Land Rovers with all the dedication of the mentally-retarded voyeur; worse yet that Man, on the verge himself of removing himself abruptly from the scene, had the bloody nerve to ship jungle-loads of monkeys from Africa and dump them in Provence. Whatever for? By what Charter and with whose consent? Certainly not theirs.

  Is the monkey supernaturally indignant because he feels that Man thought there’d better be some primate around and the monkey was the next best thing? … The females are not equipped to ponder this, in a way analogous to the way Philosopher Krand ponders it out, as they wait, patient and pregnant, to scatter their young in terrain very far from ideal for their needs. The squirrels get most of the nuts and the babies, once off the milk, have to content themselves with the salad … a tedious diet when unrelieved by something you can crunch.

  So the wiser of the monkeys sense that there must be an answer to all this. There has to be. They want back to Africa, if you don’t mind.

  Then there is the strange, conscious sea-weed. It doesn’t reason in a manner even the gods of the universe provide us with the authority or the allegory to describe. It knows; as only seaweed knows. Some of it touched the hull of Kasiga as the submarine lounged past. The sea-weed didn’t like it, either. For unlike the derivatives from species recognisable to the extinct Third World, it has no real roots in the past that link it with any knowledge of humanity. Indeed, the very presence of Kasiga is an inconvenient challenge to a certain sense of authority. Sea-weed just doesn’t want to know about people.

  All the same, it responds. There is a question-mark in the Biosphere; and Nature is taking stock. In a way — don’t ask the gods to explain it! — Nature is sending messages to Krand. He knows, in a way very different from the way the sea-weed knows, that there is more to life than merely existing in a vacuum defined by a particular species. He also knows what Trell only suspects: there is more to life than just one tin box called ZD-One.

  Now he will try to plumb the mystery a little more overtly, without revealing too much of his hand. After all, the responsibility of a philosopher — even if he is only ten — is to time the unrolling of information so that it is acceptable to the community. Otherwise you are liable to end up in the bin.

  *

  To the same extent that Trell was a potential man of action, Krand was a ten-year-old man of thought. He had already learned to be circumspect because supernature — unheard and unseen — was teaching him.

  He therefore didn’t go tearing up to Trell with portents of peculiarity until he had worked out the best way of analysing the phenomenon of the Tractor and then presenting the matter to his closest friend Trell. Brand-new tractors just don’t appear on a hoist for no reason, even if the reason is the wrong one. Certainly they don’t abruptly materialise without motive — even if that motive is attributable to a computer.

  Wedged in the middle of the more positive human relationships in ZD-One was child-man Eagle. Krand always found that Eagle had an original way of looking at things. Whilst apparently merely amusing himself with a stack of Lego bricks, Eagle spent hours working out his own future … acting-out in dreamplay the equivalent of what he was doing, apparently in the form of recreation, for future reference.

  And so, when Krand located Eagle-100 at the far end of the Adventure Playground it didn’t seem surprising that what Eagle had now constructed looked remarkably like a tractor itself. Krand, nodding to himself sagely, thought. Yes, that is how one would expect things to be. Messages pass: you don’t know why or how, but they seem to jump from one mind to another.

  Krand certainly didn’t know — at the age of ten — that yet another name for Supernature was Quantum Physics. It just didn’t seem in any way remarkable — even though no one had told Eagle what — until that morning — the twins had made their mutual secret.

  ‘What we have here,’ said Eagle, without looking up, ‘is a Super Bulldozificator.’

  ‘What’s it do?’

  ‘It does almost anything. Mostly it does what you decide it should do. It’s immensely powerful and has a nine thousand horse-power engine.’

  ‘Isn’t that rather overdoing it a bit?’

  ‘It has to be ready for everything.’

  ‘I see. You ought to show it to Trell. He’d be interested.’

  Eagle put the last brick in place. ‘Trell seems to be more interested in that girl.’

  ‘Kelda?’

  ‘Yes. Kelda. I think playing with girls is boring. They’re all right for when you’re an adult but they get in the way all right when you’re not. Trell goes all soft and daft when he’s talking to Kelda, haven’t you noticed? But Kelda thought Star Wars was rubbish, she doesn’t know anything, and that’s a fact.’

  Krand said, ‘I think you pretend not to like her.’

  ‘I,’ said Eagle, ‘pretend everything. For instance, Super Bulldozificators don’t do anything really. But this one is an extremely advanced model and very nearly does something.’

  ‘Well, Eagle, I want to show you something that really does.’

  ‘I’m a bit busy, Krand.’

  ‘It won’t take long.’

  ‘Okay, let’s see it.’ He put the Super Bulldozificator away carefully — so that the girls wouldn’t bust it apart — and followed Krand to the other end of the Adventure Playground and through the gymn and up to the sliding doors.

  The tractor wasn’t there.

  *

  For Krand, the instant that Eagle gazed into the now-empty hoist area — as it turned out to be — was a frozen point in time: an instant marked by the radioactive caesium clock that embossed the flow of events with a hammered-out hallmark — as tangible a Happening as the striking of a punch upon an anvil.

  As sensitive to atmosphere as an electroscope is to a static charge, Krand detected in Eagle’s gaze something which (much later on) Krand was to term ‘super-normal’ … and he chose that precise definition for a specific reason. What it meant was that Eagle was more normal than he. Krand — age ten — was already measuring, with some internal metering device in his own mind, the peculiarities of a time-gap embodied in the method of his conception that he could not possibly have known about. Naturally, the gods knew that Eagle had emerged from the ‘ice-trays’ exactly as Krand had. Krand knew nothing of the kind.

  Yet he sensed something different about Eagle and this difference manifested itself in a way — as Krand was to reason in secret much later — in a way that ‘could stop the clock’.

  Eagle said, in a perfectly normal voice, ‘There was a tractor in there. Wasn’t there?’

  Krand found his own voice oddly flattened. ‘How did you know that?’

  ‘I suppose someone must have told me.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I don’t know who.’

  ‘Have you spoken to the twins? — or Nembrak?’

  ‘No.’ Eagle’s smile, spontaneous and warm (and super-normal), was really just a question.

  Krand answered it. ‘No one else knows.’

  ‘Well, I do now. I don’t see the problem.’

  ‘The problem is I don’t see how you knew.’

  ‘Nor do I.’ Eagle smiled. ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘I guess not.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what does matter, Krand.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Cass is ill again.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I didn’t realise Cass was a friend of yours. Let’s have his identity number.’

  Eagle didn’t complicate matters by asking why this was necessary. He never did. ‘His number is 010.’

  ‘Right. Did he throw up, this time?’

  ‘All I
know is, Nembrak the Inventor got a Special out of the machine because he thought it would make Cass feel better.’

  ‘And did it?’

  ‘No. Milk-shakes make him worse.’ Eagle added matter-of-factly, ‘I knew that anyway.’

  ‘What flavour was the Special?’

  ‘Strawberry.’

  ‘Has Cass been checked by an auto-nurse lately?’

  ‘Cass doesn’t like the auto-nurses.’

  ‘Nor do I but we’ve got to do something, can’t just leave him getting sick all the time.’

  ‘That’s what I think, Krand. I was hoping you’d mention it to Trell.’

  ‘Sure I will. Why can’t you?’

  ‘You and Trell and Kelda go about together. You know things that I don’t know and you know how to say them.’

  ‘I’m not sure of that, either.’

  ‘You’re looking at me strangely.’

  Krand thought, I’m looking at you for the first time. Aloud he said, ‘I’ll make sure Trell knows. Got to see him anyway.’

  ‘About the tractor?’

  ‘I think he should know. I’ll go see him right now.’

  *

  Trell said, ‘And you’re saying this thing was on a hoist, Krand?’