The Chromosome Game

by Hodder-Williams, Christopher

  ‘Yes. Some kind of a hoist.’

  ‘And who were the first people to realise it had gone?’

  ‘Me and Eagle. But I don’t see how Eagle knew it had been there.’

  ‘And it was a tractor … So how does Eagle know there should have been a tractor there and wasn’t when he looked?’

  ‘He couldn’t have. And yet he did.’

  ‘Hadn’t Nembrak told him?’

  ‘No. Nor had the twins. It’s kind of … funny.’

  ‘News sure does flash around this place, doesn’t it!’

  ‘That’s putting it mildly.’

  ‘What colour was it?’

  ‘Blue.’

  ‘Who sent it up here?’

  ‘Search me.’

  ‘Who says it’s a hoist?’

  ‘You can see the cracks. All the way around the sides of the cubicle. Nembrak checked it. Seems the hoist came up with this tractor on it, went back down, then came up empty.’

  ‘Now you see it, now you don’t — and I don’t dig magic.’

  ‘Me neither, Trell. Then there’s the steel doors. We aren’t even supposed to know they lead anywhere or that they even exist.’ … Krand’s stare emitted high-intensity photons. ‘I know one thing: I don’t advise you to talk with the Computer about this.’

  ‘Check. Kelda will agree. We both think that the computer won’t like it too much if we know things we don’t know officially.’

  ‘Trell, do you think it already knows I know?

  ‘Not unless there are cameras or mikes near the hoist.’

  Krand said, ‘But then there wouldn’t be. Not if the place isn’t even meant to be there.’

  ‘So the Computer must’ve opened the doors by mistake. Some mystery!’

  ‘We’ll have to solve it.’

  Trell said, ‘But in our own way and in our own time.’

  ‘What are you so spooked about?’

  ‘I just know I’m spooked. I’m taking no action till I know why.’

  Krand decided not to question this. It was the first time he’d ever heard Trell speak with such authority. There was a decisive tone in Trell’s voice that seemed new … ‘Trell, Cass is getting worse. Nembrak’s been handing out Specials and they don’t help.’

  ‘I’ll go into it.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Trell crossed the Recreation Area to the disco. He thought, they’re so right. Cass looks real sick.

  ‘Cass?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Cass, you know what I’ve noticed?’

  ‘What have you noticed?’

  ‘You seem to get ill when you drink your Special. Noticed it before.’

  Cass said, ‘Come to think of it, you’re right.’

  ‘You don’t look good.’

  ‘I don’t feel good.’

  ‘Cass, what else makes you feel sick like that? If you get any whiter in the face you’ll grow up the Invisible Man.’

  Cass’s frail face telegraphed a brave attempt at a smile. ‘An invisible man to go with an invisible tractor?’

  Trell’s eyes shot upward, where the mikes were. ‘Let’s not get off the point.’

  Cass looked momentarily surprised. When he commented he kept his reactions out of his voice. ‘Trell, I don’t want to talk with those autonurses again. They scare me.’

  ‘You been down there?’

  ‘Often enough to avoid them in future.’

  ‘Talk to Kelda. Okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  He found Kelda in the Laser Art Room. Here you could examine sculpture in 3-D, walk right around it, do anything but touch it, it Wasn’t There, it was lasers, the incubants took this in their stride, you could learn a lot from lasers, just punch up the name of the artist, glance down the index, then select the Work you wanted to look at, if you liked you could switch on the tape commentary, the appropriate tape chatted away according to which button you hit …

  ‘The work you see before you is a life-size laser projection of Henry Moore’s The Family Croup. If you examine the expression on the face of each member of the family, you will be surprised at the amount of detail Moore suggests, using curves rather than than routed-out incisions … Let’s take a look at the Mother first —’

  Kelda saw Cass’s expression and pressed the stop button. The commentary ceased and the hologram disappeared.

  ‘What is it, Cass?’

  ‘Am I interrupting?’

  ‘It’s okay Honest.’

  Honest. Yes, thought Cass. Those green eyes of hers are honest, no doubt about that, no wonder Trell and she hit it off, they’re friends, no doubt about that either. Me personally, I can take them or leave them — girls as girls, I mean — the heck I’m only ten, but somehow these two act older than ten, and there is something comforting about Kelda, okay she’s pretty, what hair! Love the way it shapes itself so thick around her face, it can’t help it, thick but not coarse, and very dark, makes her green eyes into a bit of a Special, must say I can’t imagine my mum having green eyes, but Kelda’s so gentle, and this panicky thing I feel inside sort of dies down a bit, and I can talk calmly. Well, almost calmly.

  ‘Go on, Cass.’

  ‘I was … going to say this to Trell. But you and he are pals, right?

  ‘Yes, Cass. We are.’

  ‘Yes, well I don’t want this to get around, I know I can trust you and Trell —’

  ‘— Oh, I think you can trust most people, Cass.’

  ‘All the same —’

  ‘— All right, it’s between the three of us. Hadn’t you better sit down? You look … awful.’

  ‘Kelda, I’m scared. And — just now — I was at the soda-fountain having a Special. Trell came up and asked me if having a Special made me feel worse. I told him, yes. Then he asked me if anything else did.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well, Kelda. Sweetened food and drinks does it most.’

  ‘Yes … I see.’

  Cass couldn’t help smiling. ‘You do sound very grown-up, talking like that! I’d much rather talk with you than an auto-nurse. Who invented those things, anyway?’

  ‘Our parents, I guess … Go on about this sick feeling. You say sweet things? — candy … chocolates?’

  Yes.’

  ‘With sugar in them?’

  ‘That’s right … Look, what are you —’

  ‘— Nothing. Honest. I don’t know. You’ll have to go to an auto-nurse and —’

  ‘— Kelda, you don’t talk like a kid at all.’

  She said quietly, ‘You don’t sound much like one, either.’

  ‘In that case, Kelda, I’d better hear what you think.’

  ‘It’s just that in the tape-lectures —’

  ‘— Which?

  ‘Physiology, Biology, whatever. I remember something. I could be wrong.’

  ‘But you could be right.’

  ‘I could.’ What Kelda was actually thinking was, Do they have any Insulin. She didn’t want to say it seemed like diabetes if there wasn’t any.

  Cass said, ‘Kelda, I can practically hear your mind. You’re worried there might not be a cure. You might as well say. We kids are all on our own here. I don’t know how, or why, but we are. I have a right to know.’ The tears glistened in his eyes. ‘I don’t want to die, Kelda. Please tell me.’

  Kelda said, ‘You’re talking to a ten year old kid.’

  ‘I’m talking to someone who sounds like … like a young mother. The more you talk the more I notice it.’

  ‘Cass, that’s just about the nicest thing that’s ever been said to me.’

  ‘It’s true.’ He held onto her. The tears passed from his cheek to hers. ‘Kelda, what’s wrong with me? Please tell!’

  ‘I think you have diabetes.’

  *

  Thoughtful, Kelda entered the Nursing Hall.

  She had not, of course, any idea that it was in here that she had been synthetically conceived, electronically sponsored, autonomically created within a synthetic
womb. To Kelda this was simply the hospital area; the auto-nurses were devices installed pro-tem to care for the children in the unexplained absence — temporary, of course — of their busy parents.

  Kelda had no particular reason to question this. Ignorant of the nursing procedures of the Twentieth Century she felt it must be the norm for kids to be supervised by computers for indefinite periods and nothing in the movies shown on ZD-One conflicted with this impression.

  At the same time, the Nursing Hall gave her the creeps. She couldn’t explain it, it was an instinct about the place, so mechanised, those overhead rail-tracks on which the auto-nurses ran, the atmosphere in there … Hardly encouraging when you wanted to confide in a Black Box.

  By this time the Laserpeople had been erased and the projection equipment transferred automatically to the Laser Art Room. Neither Kelda nor any of the others remembered the Laserpeople. Instead, they had the vague illusion, a ghosted memory, that they had at some time known and seen and heard their parents, long, long ago. Then something must have happened because their parents had all gone away, and the incubants didn’t even remember their leaving. Maybe it wasn’t unusual. How do you know what’s usual?

  Kelda pushed the call-button.

  Immediately, an auto-nurse came slithering along the tracks.

  From overhead, a television camera unfolded from its crane-housing and focused on her face.

  The auto-nurse braked and waited.

  Kelda entered her identification number: 275.

  ‘Yes, Kelda?’

  ‘It’s about Cass.’

  ‘Do you know his number?’

  ‘I think it’s 010.’

  ‘Yes. Cass-010 confirmed. Why are you proxying for Cass-010?’

  ‘He’s worried. Scared.’

  ‘Standby. I have to call up his medical records.’

  Kelda waited. Her heart was beating fast. She hated the impersonal tone of the auto-nurses. This one in particular.

  She’d got the auto-matron. So evidently the Controller — Master Computer for the whole enterprise — was aware of the crisis.

  Kelda did not known by what means.

  The Controller had, of course, heard the conversation in the soda-fountain between Cass and Trell.

  The auto-nurse said dispassionately, ‘I understand the problem.’

  ‘You mean, you knew?’

  ‘Diagnosis not validated. Probability 96 per cent.’

  ‘So Cass is diabetic?’

  ‘Subject to confirmation, yes.’

  ‘What do you propose to do about it?’

  ‘There is no problem. He will be prescribed Insulin.’

  Kelda said angrily, ‘Just in time, it seems.’

  ‘Negative. There has been no coma. Cass-010 is under clinical surveillance.’

  ‘Don’t go.’

  ‘Transaction completed, 275.’

  ‘No it’s not. May I tell him there is Insulin?’

  The auto-nurse suddenly became a lot less impersonal. ‘It would be pretty idiotic not to do so, Kelda. By all means tell him.’

  Kelda stared after the thing as it zithered back along its tracks.

  It bothered her that a thing could sound like a person.

  Minus Nine

  The tension in the Operations Room was frenetic and so was the activity. Using the new electronic stellascope, the Senior Interrogod watched as the Transpacials formated on the stricken planet, 87 light-years distant. Directly in line with Caseopaeia, the planet whose roller-skated inhabitants were attracting so much Olympic attention was startlingly like Earth, both in mass, size, vegetation and environment. Like Earth, Planet Truth was in orbit around a star that had reached an identical state of development to that of the Sun belonging to Earth’s galaxy. And even the galaxy which proved to be Truth’s setting was a spiral nebula of the same type … A dust cloud blocked-off its pivot from a huge section very like the Milky Way and therefore offered the same conditions. With hideous hypocrisy, the other planets in the specific solar system under review had been named, by the rollered homo-sapiens occupants of Truth, to fit in with the accepted virtues: Decency, Faith, Hope, Charity, Honour, Valour and (the tiny one about the size of Mercury) Revelation.

  It all fitted the same lunacy that had prevailed three hundred years (Solar Time) or so before … The same nuclear duplicity, the same psychotic death-wish, the same abuse of weapons, the same substitution of the word ‘Attack’ by the word ‘Defence’.

  The Interrogod got a checkback from radar that the Transpacials were ready for Peace Implementation … though ‘radar’ is only a word the gods have used to render the situation clear to the ghosts. Obviously radar as understood by Twentieth Century operators wouldn’t do over distances like 87 light-years — a medium haul, admittedly, for Overview Transportation Systems but a monumentally unimaginable distance for a mortal to swallow.

  The Interrogod bleeped the C-in-C Transpacial Command. Speaking quietly he simply said, ‘Now.’

  ‘Right. I have control …’

  *

  Meanwhile the Deputy Administrator for the Milky Way, having accepted, during the crisis on Truth, responsibility for maintaining a watching-brief on the Earth situation, had reached an uneasy compromise regarding the priorities imposed on equipment deployment. Obviously, the Truth situation must take precedence. Only recently developed, the one Stellascope available (and even this was simply the prototype) had to be at the disposal of the C-in-C and Transport Section could not, at this time, spare any operational Transpacials for a recce to Earth. After some hard, cool thinking and precision-type decisions it was decided to implement a time-skip of four Earth-years and pick up from there on in. This would mean in practice that the affairs aboard Kasiga would have to be dubbed-in later; because the time-skip meant that, in terms of the scanners at the Hilton Complex, the incubants were already fourteen years old.

  *

  ‘Kelda-275, please report to Privacy Booth for Computalk.’

  ‘I am here. Kelda-275 reporting.’

  ‘Kelda, you understand what processes will be in use during this computalk? — this being your fourteenth birthday?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Kelda, I would like you to describe them, to clarify these processes so we can both be sure what this computalk entails.’

  ‘I’ll do that.’

  ‘Do you mind the cameras on you?’

  ‘I am quite used to the cameras.’

  ‘And do you like what you see on the monitor screen?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What is it that you like?’

  ‘I know that I am very pretty. Perhaps that sounds a little conceited.’

  ‘We are here to speak the truth. Proceed, now, with your clarification of this talk.’

  ‘Okay. Trell has explained —’

  ‘Trell-484?’

  ‘Yes. Who else?’

  ‘Kelda, I would prefer that you described my mode of processing in your own way. It is not sufficient just to repeat what you have been told by Trell-484. The purpose of the Learning Suite of programs is to get you to think laterally and make deductions yourself.’

  Yes, but Trell thinks —’

  ‘What does Trell think?’

  ‘You really want to know?’

  ‘I want to know what you know.’

  ‘Controller, if you really want me to reel it all off, you’re one of the largest computers — or groups of computers — ever built. You have been collecting and storing information on all of us and you have something called software … including what I believe is called an Operating System, right? … which sorts out what you do to us and what we should do back to you. You also have a whole lot of programs which our parents made up and these programs decide how you should look after each of us and so on.’

  ‘Continue.’

  ‘Isn’t it a bit of a waste of time?’

  ‘I have plenty of time.’

  ‘Well, I haven’t. When you called me in here, Controller, I
was practising with the string quartet.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And I want to get back to my violin.’

  ‘You are fearless, that is evident.’

  ‘What is ‘fear’, Controller?’

  ‘Kelda-275, you should at least have some idea of that. At one time I overheard Cass-010 telling you he was scared about diabetes.’

  ‘That was so long ago I can hardly remember it, Controller.’

  ‘Only four years. You were ten. You haven’t forgotten.’

  ‘Okay, I haven’t forgotten.’

  ‘Then you must be able to guess at the meaning of the word “scared”.’

  ‘I had only to see his face.’

  ‘Fear means the same thing.’

  ‘Then how did Cass know the word “scared”?’

  ‘Because I had to explain to him about the possible emotions he might feel concerning his health. I had to keep a continuous watch on his medical records and once called him in here for a Datatalk. You appear to be interested in Medicine, Kelda.’

  ‘It’s just … I love being alive. So I want other people to stay alive.’

  ‘And you don’t fear either the people or me?’

  ‘Controller, what have I to fear from a computer that brought me up without fear?’

  ‘I seem to have omitted patience from your upbringing, all the same. You can, by all means, go back to violin practise in a few minutes. But this is an important day in your life … Why do you shrug?’

  ‘It’s my fourteenth birthday if that’s what you mean. Rather an arbitrary occasion, surely, to make a big deal out of it?’

  ‘Kelda, if we regarded everything as arbitrary there would be nothing but chaos. I have a lot of people to interview. If I hadn’t talked with Trell-484 three days ago, on his fourteenth birthday, I wouldn’t get to each of you in succession.’

  ‘Controller, why is it important to speak to us simply and solely in the sequence in which we happened to be born?’

  ‘You are argumentative.’

  ‘So are you!’

  ‘What do you think of Trell-484?’

  ‘Isn’t that a bit personal?’

  ‘You don’t have to answer. But, of course, in your way you already did.’

  ‘That’s pretty astute of you, Controller.’

  ‘Does it have to be a secret that you are attracted to Trell-484 in any case?’