A Second Chance at Eden

by Peter F. Hamilton

  ‘Oh. I should check my facts more thoroughly. Sorry.’

  ‘Hell, Harvey, you frightened me. Don’t do things like that.’

  I managed a weak smile. ‘See, people would be afraid if the chimps developed intelligence. There’s a healthy xenophobic streak running through all of us.’

  ‘No, you don’t. That wasn’t xenophobia. Shock, maybe. Once the initial surprise wore off, people would welcome another sentient species. And only someone with a nasty suspicious mind like yours would immediately assume that the chimps would resort to vengeance and murder. You judge too much by your own standards, Harvey.’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘You know you’re completely shattering my illusions about policemen. I thought you were all humourless and unimaginative. God, sentient chimps!’

  ‘It’s my job to explore every avenue of possibility.’

  ‘I take it this means you don’t have a human suspect yet?’

  ‘I have a lot of people hotly protesting their innocence. Although the way everyone keeps claiming they overlooked Penny Maowkavitz’s infamous Attitude because of who she was is beginning to ring hollow. Several individuals had some quite serious altercations with her.’

  Corrine’s face brightened in anticipation. ‘Like who?’

  ‘Now, Doctor, the medical profession has its confidentiality; we humble police have our sub judice.’

  ‘You mean you don’t have a clue.’

  ‘Correct.’

  *

  I wasn’t back in the house thirty seconds when the twins cornered me.

  ‘We need you to authorize our implants,’ Nicolette said. She held up a hospital administration bubble cube. Her face was guileless and expectant. Nathaniel wasn’t much different.

  Fathers have very little defence against their children, especially when they expect you to be a combination knight hero and Santa Claus.

  I glanced nervously at the kitchen, where I could hear Jocelyn moving about. ‘I said, next week,’ I told Nicolette in a low voice. ‘This is too soon.’

  ‘You had one,’ Nathaniel said.

  ‘I had to have one, it’s my job.’

  ‘We need them,’ Nicolette insisted. ‘For school, for talking with our friends. We’ll be ostracized again if we’re not affinity-capable. Is that what you want?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘It’s Mum, isn’t it?’ she asked, sorrowfully.

  ‘No. Your mother and I both agree on this.’

  ‘That’s not fair,’ Nathaniel blurted hotly. ‘We didn’t want to come here. OK, we were wrong. Bringing us to Eden was the greatest thing you’ve ever done for us. People live here, really live, not like in the arcologies. Now we want to belong, we want to be a part of what’s going on here, and you won’t let us. Well, just what do you want us to do, Dad? What do you want from us?’

  ‘I simply want you to take a little time to think it through, that’s all.’

  ‘What’s to think? Affinity isn’t a drug, we’re not dropping out of school, the Pope’s an idiot. So why can’t we have the symbiont implants? Just give us one logical reason.’

  ‘Because I don’t know if we’re staying here,’ I bellowed. ‘I don’t know if we’re going to be allowed to stay here. Got that?’

  I couldn’t remember the last time I’d raised my voice to them – years ago, if I ever had.

  They both shrank back. The shame from watching them do that was excruciating. My own kids, fearful. Christ.

  Nathaniel rallied first, his expression hardening. ‘I’m not leaving Eden,’ he snapped. ‘You can’t make me. I’ll divorce you if I have to. But I’m staying.’ He very deliberately put his bubble cube down on a small table, then turned round and stalked off to his room.

  ‘Oh, Daddy,’ Nicolette said. It was a rebuke that was almost unbearable.

  ‘I did ask you to wait. Was one week so diffcult?’

  ‘I know,’ she said forlornly. ‘But there’s a girl; Nat met her at the water sports centre.’

  ‘Great. Just great.’

  ‘She’s lovely, Dad. Really pretty, and she’s older than him. Sixteen.’

  ‘Pension age.’

  ‘Don’t you see? She doesn’t mind that he’s a few months younger, that he’s not as sophisticated as she is, she still likes him. That never happened to him before. It couldn’t happen to him, not back on Earth.’

  Sex, the one subject every parent dreads. I could see Corrine’s face, leering knowingly. Eden teenagers use affinity to experiment. Thoroughly.

  I must have groaned, because Nicolette was resting her hand on my arm, concern sculpted into her features.

  ‘Dad, are you all right?’

  ‘Bad day at the office, dear. And what about you? Is there a boy at the sports centre?’

  Her smile became all sheepish and demure. ‘Some of them are quite nice, yes. No one special, not yet.’

  ‘Don’t worry, they won’t leave you alone.’

  She blushed, and looked at her feet. ‘Will you speak to Mum about the symbionts? Please, Dad?’

  ‘I’ll speak to her.’

  Nicolette stood on tiptoes, and kissed me. ‘Thanks, Dad.

  And don’t worry about Nat, his hormones are surging, that’s all. Time of the month.’ She put her bubble cube on the table next to Nathaniel’s, and skipped off down the hall to her room.

  Why is it that children, the most perfect gift we can ever be given, can hurt more than any physical pain?

  I picked the two bubble cubes up and weighed them in my palm. Sex. Oh, Christ.

  When I turned round, Jocelyn was standing in the kitchen doorway. ‘Did you hear all that?’

  Her lips quirked in sympathy. ‘Poor Harvey. Yes, I heard.’

  ‘Divorced by my own son. I wonder if he’ll expect alimony?’

  ‘I think you could do with a drink.’

  ‘Do we have any?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Thank Christ for that.’

  I flopped down in the lounge’s big mock-leather settee, and Jocelyn poured me a glass of white wine. The patio doors were open wide, letting in a balmy breeze which set the big potted angel-trumpet plants swaying.

  ‘Now just relax,’ Jocelyn said, and fixed me with a stern look. ‘I’ll get you something to eat later.’

  I tasted the wine – sweet but pleasant. Shrugged out of my uniform jacket, and undid my shirt collar. Another sip of the wine.

  I fished about in the jacket for my PNC wafer, and accessed the JSKP’s personnel file on Hoi Yin, or Chong’s bimbo, as Caldarola had called her. I’d been curious about that ever since.

  Surprisingly, my authority code rating was only just sufficient to retrieve her file from the company memory core; its security classification was actually higher than Fasholé Nocord’s. And there I was thinking my troubles couldn’t possibly get any worse.

  *

  My fourth day started with a re-run of the third. I drove myself out to Wing-Tsit Chong’s lakeside retreat. Eden confirmed Hoi Yin was there, what it neglected to mention was what she was doing.

  I parked beside the lonely pagoda and stepped down out of the jeep. The wind chimes made a delicate silver tinkling in the stillness. Chong was nowhere to be seen. Hoi Yin was swimming in the lake, right out in the middle where she was cutting through the dark water with a powerful crawl stroke.

  I would like to talk with you, I told her. Now, please.

  There was no reply, but she performed a neat flip, legs appearing briefly above the surface, and headed back towards the shore. I saw a dark-purple towel lying on the grass, and walked over to it.

  Hoi Yin stood up just before she reached the fringe of water lilies, and started wading ashore. She wasn’t wearing a swimming costume. Her hair flowed down her back like a slippery diaphanous cloak.

  There’s an old story which did the rounds while I was at the Hendon Police College: when Moses came down from the mount carrying the tablets of stone he said, ‘First the good news, I
managed to get Him down to ten commandments. The bad news is, He wouldn’t budge on adultery.’

  Looking at Hoi Yin as she rose up before me like some elemental naiad, I knew how the waiting crowd must have felt. Men have killed for women far less beautiful than her.

  She reached the edge of the lake and I handed her the towel.

  Does nakedness bother you, Chief Parfitt? You seem a little tense. She pulled her mass of hair forwards over her shoulder, and began towelling it vigorously.

  Depends on the context. But then you’d know all that. Quite the expert, in fact.

  She stopped drying her hair, and gave me a chary glance.

  You have accessed my file.

  Yes. My authority code gave me entry, but there aren’t many people in Eden who could view it.

  You believe I am at fault for not informing you what it contained?

  Bloody hell, Hoi Yin, you know you’re at fault. Christ Almighty, Penny Maowkavitz designed you for Soyana, using her own ovum as a genetic base. She altered her DNA to give you your looks, and improve your metabolism, and increase your intelligence. It was almost a case of parthenogenesis; genetically speaking, she’s somewhere between your mother and your twin. And you think that wasn’t important enough to tell me? Get real!

  It was not a relationship she chose to acknowledge.

  Yeah. I’ll bet. Quite a shock for her, I imagine, finding you up here with Chong. She ignored nearly all of Calfornia’s biotechnology ethics regulations to work on that contract; and indenture is pretty dodgy legal ground even in Soyana’s own arcology. Your file says you were created exclusively as a geisha for all those middle-aged executives, that’s why you were given Helen of Troy’s beauty. Maowkavitz considered you an interesting organism, nothing more. You were a job that paid well, and twenty-eight years ago Pacific Nugene needed that money quite badly. Everything which came later, her success and fortune, was all founded on the money which came from selling you right at the start, you and Christ knows how many other sisters like you. Then you came back to haunt her.

  Hoi Yin wrapped the towel around her waist, and tied a knot at the side, just above her right hip. Droplets of water were still glistening across her torso and breasts. Oh yes, I noticed. Christ, she was magnificent. And completely composed, as if we were discussing some kind of financial report on the newscable. Emotionally divorced from life.

  I did not haunt Penny Maowkavitz. I made precisely one attempt to discuss my origin with her. As soon as I told her who and what I was, she refused to speak to me. A situation I found quite acceptable.

  I don’t doubt it. Your mother, your creator, the woman who breathed life into you so that you could be condemned to an existence of sexual slavery. Then when you do meet, she rejects you utterly. And yet she made you more intelligent than herself, compounding her crime. Even when you were young you must have been smart enough to know how much more you could be, a knowledge which would grow the whole time you were with Soyana, all those years gnawing at you. I don’t think I could conceive of a situation more likely to breed resentment than that. It wouldn’t even be resentment at the end, just loathing and dire obsession.

  Do you believe I murdered Penny Maowkavitz, Chief Parfitt?

  You’re the alleged psychology expert. Why don’t you tell me what a girl with your history would feel about Penny Maowkavitz? Have you got a candidate with a better motive?

  I can tell you exactly what I thought about her. If I had met her ten years ago I would have killed her without even hesitating. You cannot even begin to imagine how vile my life was, although you were correct about my heightened intellect. My mind was the supreme punishment Penny Maowkavitz inflicted upon me, it set me aloof, forcing me to watch the uses to which my body was put by Soyana, understanding that there was never to be any escape, and that every thought which I had for myself was utterly irrelevant. Ignorance and stupidity would have been a blessing, a kindness. I should have been a dumb blonde. But instead she gave me intelligence. The other girls and I were kept out of the way in an arcology crèche until we reached puberty, and our education covered just one topic. Was that in my file, Chief Parfitt? Did you read how the joyful spirit of a five-year-old girl was meticulously broken to prepare me for the life I was to lead? I only learnt to read when I was fourteen. I found an entertainment deck’s instruction booklet at the home of my master, and asked him to explain it to me. It was in German, the first written words I had ever seen. He taught me the meaning of the letters because he thought it was amusing to have me talk in German, another trick in my repertoire. In one month I could read and speak the language better than he. Her back was held pridefully rigid, shoulders squared. But those wonderful gold-brown eyes weren’t seeing anything in this universe, they were boring straight into the past. Tears had begun to trickle down her cheeks.

  ‘Oh, Christ.’ I was beginning to regret ever coming out here. You just can’t imagine anything bad happening to someone so beautiful. The data was all there in her file, but that’s all it was: data. Not living pain. And Chong took you away, I said gingerly.

  Yes. When I was sixteen, I was assigned to the Vice-President of Soyana’s Astronautics Division. Wing-Tsit Chong was his guest for dinner on several occasions. This was the time when Eden’s seed was being germinated out here, his last trip to Earth. He was kind, for I was so ignorant, yet I thirsted for knowledge. It surprised him, that a simple geisha should understand the concepts of which he spoke. I had learnt how to operate a terminal by then, it was way of exploring the world beyond my master’s house, beyond the Soyana arcology. The only window my mind had.

  Ten days after he met me, Wing-Tsit Chong asked that I be assigned to him. Soyana could not offer me to him fast enough; after all, the company fortune was built on the foundation stone of affinity.

  And you’ve been with him ever since, I said.

  I have. He told me later he accessed my record, and saw what I was. He said he was angered that a life such as mine should be so wasted. It is he who birthed me, Chief Parfitt, not Penny Maowkavitz. My mind is free now thanks to him. He is my spirit father. I love him.

  Hoi Yin, all you’ve told me . . . it just makes you look even more guilty.

  I am guilty of one thing, Chief Parfitt; I have not yet reached the purity of thought to which Wing-Tsit Chong has tried to raise me. I will never be worthy of his patronage, because I hate. I hate Penny Maowkavitz in a fashion which shames me. But I can never exorcize the knowledge of what she did. And that is why I would never kill her. I don’t follow.

  Hoi Yin wiped the tears with the back of her hand. It was such a delicate childish action, betraying her terrible vulnerability, that I ached to put my arms round her. I wanted, needed, to draw the hurt out of her. Any male would.

  I would not kill Maowkavitz, because she was dying of cancer, Hoi Yin said. Her last months of life were to be spent screaming as her body rotted away. That, I thought, was Kamma. She would have suffered through it all, for she is a soulless inhuman selfish monster, and she would have fought her decay, stretching out her torment at the hands of those clinically caring doctors. If today I could save her from that bullet wound I would do so, in order that she might undergo that horrendous final ordeal which was her ordained destiny. Penny Maowkavitz never deserved anything so quick and clean as a bullet through the brain. Whoever did that cheated me. ‘They cheated me!’ she yelled, face screwed up in passionate rage.

  I stepped up to her as she started sobbing, cradling her as I often did Nicolette. She was trembling softly in my embrace. Her skin below my hands was textured as smooth as silk, I felt the warmth of her, the residual dampness. She clung to me tightly, open mouth searching blindly across my chin. Then we were kissing with an almost painful urgency.

  She pulled my uniform off as we tumbled onto the thick grass. Her towel came free with one fast tug from my hand. Suddenly we were locked together, rolling over and over with her hair flying free around us. She was strong, and magnificently supple, and dangero
usly knowledgeable. And affinity was blinding me with desire; I could feel my hands squeezing her breasts and stroking her thighs, and at the same time I could taste the rapture each movement brought her as she surrendered her thoughts to me. All I could think of was doing whatever I could to bring her more ecstasy. Then I let her discover my enjoyment. The whole world detonated into orgasm.

  *

  I woke to find myself lying on my back in the grass beside the lake. Hoi Yin was snuggled up beside me, one finger stroking my chin.

  She smiled lazily, which was like watching sunrise over heaven. ‘I haven’t done that for twelve years,’ she said huskily.

  ‘I know the feeling.’ Christ, what was I saying.

  ‘And I have never been with a man from my own choice before. Not once. How strange that it should be you.’ She kissed me lightly, and ran her finger along the line of my jawbone. ‘Don’t be guilty. Please. This is Eden, only one step down from paradise.’

  ‘And I’m one step from hell. I am married, Hoi Yin.’

  ‘I won’t spoil your happiness. I promise, Harvey.’

  First time you’ve called me that.

  Because this is the first time you have been Harvey to me. I’m not entirely sure I like Chief Parfitt. He can be cold. Her lips started to work down my throat.

  ‘You don’t love me, do you?’ I’m not quite sure for whose benefit the hopeful tone was included in that question. The confusion raging round in my mind made clear thinking very difficult.

  No, Harvey. I enjoy you. At this moment we are right for each other. Yesterday we were not. Tomorrow, who knows? But now is perfect, and should be rejoiced in. That is the magic of Eden, where human hearts are open to each other. Here honesty rules.

  Ah.

  Do you enjoy me, Harvey?

  I’m old enough to be your father.

  A very young father. Her tongue put in an impish appearance at the corner of her mouth. I accessed your file long before you accessed mine. Wing-Tsit Chong’s authority can open any JSKP file for me.

  Christ.

  So answer the question, do you enjoy me?