Once again I faced the elders in the austerity of the council hall, and once again the elder Robert asked me to confirm my identity. He then proceeded to give the date of my conception, the date of my transfer from the incubators to the nursery at Silver Spring, and the dates of my accession to primary dorm, junior dorm and senior dorm. Each date was accompanied by a reference to the pertinent Act: the Genetic Diversity Act, the Population Distribution Act, the Child Rearing Act, and so on. It was tedious but over with relatively quickly. Finally he gave a resume of my childhood at the commune leading up to my departure for the Institute. He then acknowledged that I had reached the age of twenty seasons and he asked me if I was prepared to take on the full responsibilities of adulthood.
“I am.”
(Of course I am, I thought impatiently. Why else would I be here?)
This admission was followed by another tedious enumeration, this time of the twenty-four main tenets of the Gaian Constitution to which, as a full citizen, I would be expected to adhere. I stood there, numb with boredom and hardly listening until Robert said: “Do you so agree?”
“Yes.”
“Step forward.”
I approached the table, Robert opened a small metal box and produced a device which looked like a pair of pincers with circular pads attached to each jaw, He motioned to me to lean forward and when I did so, he clamped the jaws about the lobe of my right ear. I felt a brief sensation of heat and then he removed the device. My ear lobe tingled. Robert passed me a small oval hand-mirror and I examined the underside of the lobe. My birth number had been eradicated.
A black-rimmed envelope lay on the table. Robert picked it up and handed it to me. It bore the logo of the Incubator Centre. I broke the seal and removed the card inside. The name at the top, my name, was david white.
Immediately below the name was a list of encoded information detailing my blood-type, my fingerprint patterns, my voice profile, and so on—a physical and biochemical compendium of me. The back of the card was divided into two. The left-hand side was filled with closely printed type which gave brief biographies of my forefathers back to the time of the colonization. My father’s name was Daniel and he was still living, a bargemaster by profession. At the root of my family tree was the name of one William White, an agronomist born in Gloucester, England, who had evidently gained passage on the Auriga by virtue of his experience of semi-arid land husbandry. The development of high-resolution Kellman spectroscopy at the turn of the twentieth century had enabled astronomers on Earth to determine the approximate conditions on the surface of Gaia long before the departure of the Auriga, and the colonists had been carefully selected according to their findings.
The right-hand side of the card contained only a few lines of information, none of which was comprehensible to me, for it was the shorthand of the incubator authorities. The ovum from which I had been conceived had been drawn from the Auriga’s gamete banks; my mother was a citizen of Earth, long dead.
Robert took the card from me, examined it, and gave it back. He gripped my shoulders. “Welcome to adulthood, David White.”
Once again I shook hands with each of the elders, and then we departed the hall for the feast. A sheep had been roasted for the occasion and a consignment of new potatoes had been received from the Plains. The eider Arthor was particularly lavish in his praise of the cuisine. Evidently the menu suited his stomach, for there was not a hint of flatulence about him on this occasion.
Afterwards Erik visited me briefly. He was courteous but somewhat remote, and I was glad when he left to attend to the afternoon’s harvesting. Later, when Caril was leading me up the mountainside to the crypt, she explained, unbidden, that Erik disliked the city and its inhabitants and that he had probably been curt with me because he now considered me an urbanite. I merely nodded; it did not really matter that much to me.
We reached the crypt, a vault of stone set into the ground on the lichen-crusted ridge high on the north face of the valley. Caril and I swung back the brass-plated trap-door and descended a flight of stairs into the cool, dark air. Caril activated a strip of bluish neon beside the entrance, bringing the vault into sudden, stark focus.
Hundreds of small aluminium urns sat on ledges along the walls and on shelves which demarked three corridors down the long, narrow chamber. We walked down the central corridor and stopped halfway, where the rows of urns ceased abruptly and the shelves were bare. Caril checked along the highest occupied shelf and examined several urns (the light was poor) before finally passing one to me. It bore only Annia’s name, birth number, and the dates of her conception and death. I removed the lid and peered inside. A small pile of livid ash lay at the bottom of the vessel.
I replaced the urn on the shelf and prepared to leave. But Caril took my arm and led me further down the chamber into a larger, squarer room where the darkness once again prevailed. She switched on another neon light and I saw that here the walls held not shelves but lockers.
“Sometimes,” Caril whispered, “the older people request that mementoes be stored here after they die. It was once an established practice amongst the ancient civilization of Earth, I believe.”
I nodded.
Caril went over to one of the lockers, took a key from her pocket and opened it She returned with a small white plastic box which I recognized as having once belonged to Annia. She opened the box and removed a glassy orb which glowed a dim reddish-brown; it was the. M’threnni gasglobe.
“I discovered this amongst Annia’s belongings after her death,” Caril said, passing it to me. “I knew that the elders would not take kindly to alien artifacts on the commune, so I decided to hide it here until you returned.”
I rotated the globe, watching the gently swirling wreaths of colour. It did feel faintly warm, as Annia had once suggested.
“Will you take it?” Caril was asking. “I’d prefer to have it off my hands.”
“It was worth coming today for this alone,” I said.
I left the commune an hour after zenith. No shuttle was due at Silver Spring until dawn the following day, but the elders had graciously offered to provide me with transport to New Kentucky in the Low Valleys, where a shuttle departed for the city at dusk. The battered old electric wagon used by the elders for courtesy visits to neighbouring communes stood on the asphalt road outside the main adult dorm as I made my farewells. When I saw the driver, I smiled with pleasure; it was Diane.
The journey down to New Kentucky took over five hours. Neither the wagon nor the tortuous mountain road was designed for speed, so we made slow but steady progress down the valley in the mellowing afternoon light. Diane was good company; as one of the elders’ personal attendants, she was privy to their secrets, and she described in graphic and amusing detail their various idiosyncrasies while the wagon purred softly along the road. Robert, for example, always felt a chill at night and insisted that a hot-water bottle be placed in his bed before he retired, no matter what the season. He was constantly plagued with heat-rashes as a result, and was fondly known as The Scratcher. Leah was obsessive about the upkeep of her fingernails; she favoured daily manicures and frequently wore gloves for the most innocuous of tasks. Fritz, whose work involved the maintenance of the chicken-coops, was so enamoured of his fowl that he often slept with them and consequently stank of their ordure. Rila was extremely superstitious and prone to bizarre behaviour which she would later explain as having been necessitated by some ill omen or auspicious event. Diane seemed to have an anecdote for every one of the elders, and while I’m sure she elaborated her stories for my entertainment, I could not help but be amused.
We made two stops, at Milesville and Dennerton, for refreshments during our journey. The steep valley sides slowly flattened and broadened as we descended, while the stream widened, was joined by other tributaries, and became a full-blooded river. Finally we rounded the crest of a hill and below us, at the confluence of the northern and southern branches of the Tamus, stood New Kentucky. It was a larger commun
e than Silver Spring, with a population of over a thousand. The commune buildings were mostly grouped in the fork between the two tributaries, while the cultivated fields and pasture-lands filled the bowl-shaped valley further downstream. Goats and sheep grazed unattended on the upper slopes.
“We have almost an hour before the shuttle arrives,” I said.
“Indeed,” Diane agreed with a smile, slowing the wagon.
“How about there?” I said, indicating an outcrop of white rock overhanging the road just ahead.
We parked in the shadows beneath it, climbed into the back of the wagon and strung the canvas sheeting over the frames. I made my flight with only minutes to spare.
Chapter Six
Now that we had both attained adulthood, Wendi and I notified the authorities that we wished to enter formal liaison. We visited a registrar, and ten days later received our contract. Five days after that, we were granted accommodation at a villa on a plush estate beside the Tamus—one of the very houses I had admired only a cycle before during my last visit to the city with Annia and Jax.
The villa, a single-storeyed building of mock-Roman design, was surrounded by castellated walls which enclosed a patio at the front and a spacious garden at the rear. Soon after moving in, Wendi developed a passion for horticulture and she began to stock the garden with a wide variety of plants. She cultivated the delicate mistflowers bred by Gaian growers, planting them just outside our bedroom window so that each morning when the cupped white blossoms opened to the sun, their fragrant, gaseous emissions drifted like wreaths into the room to greet us from sleep; she planted the indigenous rope-ivy, which soon found vigorous purchase on the walls; she seeded the ornamental pool with lilies. But her particular pride were the sapphire roses which had originated on Earth and did not commonly grow well in Gaian soil. For Wendi, they blossomed. She laid them out in crescent-shaped beds on either side of the pool and they were much admired by our neighbours. Hardly a day went by when she did not spend at least an hour in the garden, watering, pruning or manuring. I played no part in her endeavours, for they reminded me too strongly of the chores of my youth, Instead, I took to the roof, converting our tiny attic into a mini-observatory where I spent many evenings star-gazing.
My probationary period at the Complex was now over and I was transferred from data storage to compilation. The job involved gathering information for the endless stream of reports and documents which issued from the Complex; I became mobile, travelling all over Gala. The work was interesting and varied, since it brought me into contact with a wide range of people from the gruff, taciturn quarryworkers who laboured sixteen hours a day in the arid, dust-choked ravines of southern Gaia to the rich businessfolk and high-ranking administrators who frequented the exclusive ski-lodges on the north-western slopes of the Crescent Mountains. After three months of this, an additional post became vacant with the death of the previous incumbent, and I immediately applied for it. The post was unpopular and there were no other applicants. After due consideration, my superiors appointed me to the position of Inventory Clerk for Offworld Cargoes.
The post was unpopular because it entailed accompanying the haulage teams to Round Island whenever a shipment from the M’threnni homeworld arrived; few people would submit voluntarily to making regular visits to the island. But for me, the prospect was enticing; I nurtured the faint hope that I might see an alien again. It was the very elusiveness of the M’threnni which made them fascinating to me at that time.
The M’threnni shipments arrived at intervals of twenty-three days—an incongruous regularity believed to be related to the rotational period of the M’threnni homeworld. The freighters arrived at night, ghostly haloes of light which came and went almost without a sound. Surreptitious observations by “meteorologists” in “weather-balloons” hovering conveniently near the island and armed with infra-red viewers and cameras had failed to uncover any details of the unloading operations. As a freighter approached the terminus an opaque grey glow would envelop the landing strip, blocking off all observations until the freighter departed two to three hours later. The freighter’s cargo would be stacked at the centre of the terminus in white rectangular units the size of a small room (the units themselves were constructed of a tough polymeric material which was malleable under heat and was extensively used in the interiors of buildings). At dawn, the arched portal on the western arc of the black parapet which rimmed the terminus would dilate, and the haulage teams would move in, a fleet of highly-paid forklift drivers who had been selected for their speed of work and their phlegmatic attitude to things alien. The M’threnni tower stood diametrically opposite the portal, on the eastern end of the terminus.
I had been told that the atmosphere inside the terminus was strange, and when I rode in on the morning of my first assignment, I found this to be true. There was an excessive stillness and silence inside the black-walled arena, as if the natural world had been excluded or allowed only partial access to the island. We rode in on a bright, cloudless morning, but as we stepped out on to the obsidian-like surface of the arena, Capella’s light seemed muted and the sky was shaded towards grey. There was a complete absence of any wind, of any motion whatsoever, beyond that of the incoming trucks. I could not hear their engines until they were quite close; sound was dampened too.
“Is it always like this?” I whispered to Berenice, the forklift driver in whose truck I was riding; she was the senior member of the haulage team.
“Like what?” she said in an ordinary conversational tone which sounded frighteningly loud to me.
“So quiet.”
“Like a crypt,” she said. “Always.”
The cargo units had been stacked in four neat rows at the centre of the terminus. The units had evidently been designed so that the trucks could handle them easily—evidence that the M’threnni were well aware of the exact capabilities of human technology. They were lidless and curved at their edges like rectangular wash-basins. They bore no distinguishing marks.
While Berenice manoeuvred the truck for pick-up, I stared towards the tower, but there was no sign that anyone had emerged.
“Have you ever seen any aliens or Voices?” I asked her.
“I’ve seen a Voice or two a few times. They stand there like dummies, just watching. They never bother us.”
“Haven’t you ever felt the urge to approach one of them?”
“Never,” she said, slotting the forks beneath the nearest unit. “What would I have to say to one of them?”
The shipments themselves varied little in overall content. The bulk of the units contained crude metal ores and minerals, plastics, synthetic rubbers, and—most importantly—woods. Wood was scarce on Gaia, for there were few native ligneous plants and few trees of Earth-stock which grew well in our climate. Afforestation programmes in the Low Valleys had been only partially successful and the M’threnni wood—which varied from a dark mahogany-type to the aptly named white-wood—was much prized for furniture. The ores and minerals invariably required refining before they could be used—a sign that the aliens wanted to ensure that the colony had to work a little before it reaped the full harvest of the freighter shipments.
The utilitarian bias in the aliens’ shipments was, however, belied on each occasion by the inclusion of a single unit containing what were essentially luxury items—objets d’art such as the gasglobe; miniature abstract sculptures carved in semiprecious stone or moulded in rare metals; luminous rods (the so-called lightsticks) which gave off a pinkish radiance; larger items akin to the black rhombohedron at the Institute (they came in different shapes and different, though always dark, hues); and finally—the most prized items of all—a variety of luxurious fabrics. It was the “trinket box” which demanded my greatest attention, for I was required to make a detailed list of every item within it before it was loaded on board the transporter which waited outside the terminus.
I soon discovered that the contents of these boxes were plundered by high-ranking officials and pr
ivate citizens who were rich enough to forfeit the sums of money required for a unique piece of M’threnni jewellery or a length of fabric sheer enough to be made into a most exclusive gown. The more commonplace items—there were always gasglobes and lightsticks in the box—eventually found their way out into the open market.
On my third visit to the island, a dark, oval portal appeared in the tower’s base and two Voices emerged. The tower stood over two hundred metres away from the centre of the terminus, so I could not see them clearly, but both were male. Frozen like holocube figures in the mouth of the portal, they simply stood there, framed by its darkness, watching us until the last truck had left the terminus.
In the middle of Autumn, Wendi and I donated sperm and ova to the incubators for compatibility studies. Towards the end of the season we spent ten days holidaying at a ski-lodge in the Crescent Mountains. Wendi was captivated by the surroundings: the pristine white landscape, the cool, rarefied air, the heady atmosphere of affluent decadence. Most of the patrons were wealthy middle-aged or elderly folk, long-established in the Gaian society, and for the first few days we felt like intruders. Then, one evening when we were dining, a white-haired man who had been sitting alone at a table near by came over and introduced himself.
His name was Theo and he was a banker in Helixport. Was this our first visit to the lodge? It was. Were we enjoying ourselves? Yes, indeed. Would we care to join him for cocktails? We would. We made small talk for an hour or two, effortlessly and pleasantly, and before he left he invited us to a “gathering” at his suite the following evening.
Capella's Golden Eyes Page 11
