Beloved Son

by George Turner

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Genetic Engineering

Synopsis

Forty years after his starship escapes from an apocalyptic Earth, Commander Albert Raft and his crew return to a much younger and violent Earth society that wants to embrace Raft as a god because of his telepathic powers.

Release date: January 10, 2019

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 403

Sample

‘I wouldn’t go into biology if I were starting again now. In twenty years’ time it is the biologists who will be working behind barbed wire.’

Fred Hoyle from a conversation quoted by G. Rattray

Taylor in The Biological Time Bomb

1

The Security Ombudsman for the Australasian Sector of International Security was tall but stooped, unmuscular and skeletally thin. His teeth were false; he wore glasses; he was quite bald and his skin, mostly bared in the manner of the time, was entirely hairless. He was unevenly brown – piebald, though no one used the word to his face – in the manner of an earlier time when bouts of exposure to hard radiation were a daily hazard. A greyness tinged the brown and with his splayed nose attested the quarter of aboriginal strain contributed by a tribal grandmother.

Wherever he went he would be recognised as a member of the pre-Collapse generation and an Ombudsman: only an Ombudsman could be so old – and be deferred to. Up to a point.

One such point was that they had not allowed him to breed. The youngsters (as he still privately thought of them) would concede much, even beyond reason, but not that. His genetic record was an outrage of damage and mutated combinations which even reverence could not tolerate. Because they had looked after him well he was healthy and potent, but the issue of his fatherhood would certainly have been abominable.

He was sixty-eight, a rare age in the Reconstruction Years; that he had been permitted to live was a permission which entitled him to great respect.

He lived by reason of his intelligence, his devotion and his special knowledge; he was needed in this world belonging to the young and they knew it. (Though it was daily growing more accurate to say that he had been needed and they were becoming aware of it.) His kind were the anchors of the Reconstruction, the repositories not of knowledge in the factual sense, for that was plentiful and growing exponentially, but of the experience of the effects of the misapplication of knowledge, which was scarce in a generation still scrambling out of planetary disaster.

The role of the Ombudsmen – the original meaning had been distorted and lost – was to prevent mistakes happening twice and in spite of fallibility they had been more successful than otherwise. Else they would have been disposed of (gently but finally) long since, for the youngsters were not sentimental about incompetence.

This one’s name was Jackson and he pushed at the plump folder on his desk. ‘I don’t see why it should be my business.’

The man who had placed it there was, at thirty-four, a Commissioner of International Security and his charge was the Australasian Sector. He answered familiarly, as an equal (which he was not, for he commanded far more than Jackson’s fluid and undefined authority) and yet with the tinge of automatic deference which was an Ombudsman’s tribute from high and low.

‘Read it. These people – Raft and the rest – will need someone to lean on, someone who remembers their world to interpret this one to them. We can’t assess the impact of cultural changes; you can.’

‘In some things.’ The youngsters, for all their steelbright intellects, were a mixture of doubts and certainties, of truths and half-truths and outright myths; shrewd enough to reject his advice at times, they could be naïve in their assessment of his capacities. ‘I was twenty-six when Columbus took off for Barnard’s Star, twenty-eight during the Five Days, and at that age one didn’t understand the world so damned well; great areas of my memory must be subjectively distorted. Besides, I haven’t the time to devote to individuals.’

‘In your age group—’ the Commissioner used the phrase hesitantly, for the implications of it were both honourable and shameful ‘—I suppose there isn’t much time for individuals. But this Albert Raft is one to be treated with kid gloves – whatever they were. Read the folder and you’ll realise he’s a problem, perhaps a whole horde of problems.’

‘Such as?’

‘Read it, Stephen; read it.’

Jackson smiled. ‘I believe you’re scared.’

‘Uneasy.’

‘Ready to be scared. Raft commanded Columbus, I recall, but the rest were scientists. I’d have thought them more of a problem.’

The Commissioner’s gesture dismissed them. ‘They’re out of date; show them a modern laboratory and they’ll unhinge their psyches trying to adjust. Raft is the worry.’

‘But Columbus returned ten days ago. Why this only now?’

‘We didn’t know the facts about him. So much history has been lost, so many records destroyed. Do I have to tell you that?’ He tapped the folder. ‘Most of this comes from the starship’s own records and some of it is appalling – the picture of world conditions in 1990; the spying and back-stabbing and double dealing; the treachery and distrust and duplicity.’

So much authority, Jackson thought, so much competence but so much youth without a tradition. He asked, ‘Do you think your world is so different?’

The Commissioner was startled and showed it; in a life devoted to brave new beginnings the idea of such a primitive resemblance was outside his thinking. He returned to the safety of the Raft problem (but the question remained with him and rankled and burned): ‘Have you heard rumours that someone called Heathcote is still alive from pre-Collapse days?’

‘Is this germane? Of course I’ve heard the coffee-bar yap; he’d have to be a very old man, probably centenarian, which is dismissably unlikely. Do you believe it?’

‘True or not, a pointless rumour matters. A symptom of unrest. The folder bears on it.’

Jackson opened the folder, still thinking of Heathcote, whose existence he barely remembered; the rumour made him some sort of scientific messiah but his shaky recollection fixed the man as obscure save for some connection with the Columbus flight.

First on the heap was a transparent plastic envelope containing something he had not seen in forty years.

‘Recognise it?’

‘A pre-Collapse video-cassette.’ He felt unreasonably ashamed of its bulky clumsiness as though the world of his youth had betrayed him. ‘Where did you get it?’

‘Canberra archives. There’s a machine coming up that will project it. We had to have it made in a hurry and then view useless hours of the stuff because we had only the file labels for identification.’

As if the old artifact had rolled back time for him Jackson recalled Heathcote’s connection with the starship. So! And if he is alive, where is he? How could he have hidden so long? And why? All bloody nonsense!

As if on cue a young man trundled in a bulky, untidy machine on a trolley, something conjured into existence from electronic theory and study of eroding museum relics.

‘The projector.’ The Commissioner stood. ‘I’ll see you in an hour or so.’

Jackson hurried after him into the corridor, out of earshot of the projectionist. ‘Where are the complement of Columbus?’

‘On board their ship. In orbit. Quarantined. Out of the way until we have some idea what to do.’

‘After forty-two years they return and … For God’s sake!’ The name of God was no longer a commonplace but the youngsters knew his habits. And most of the Security men had read the New Testament as a part of Hist. Phil.

‘We simply don’t know what to do with them, Stephen. We’ve fed them a tale of immunisation against mutated bacteria and protection of ourselves against whatever old-time beasties they may harbour. Satisfactory?’

‘As they knew biology, probably. But possibly not; the twentieth century was not just a planetful of idiots.’

‘The evidence says differently.’ Jackson would not argue over that but he had placed a previous dart into the Commissioner, who needed to ease its itch. ‘Is our world so bad? Even half-created as it is?’

Jackson said immediately, ‘No,’ because that was a brand of doubt the youngsters could do without. ‘In general it’s an improvement, but the Columbus men won’t see it so.’

‘Surely they’ll adjust?’

‘They will conform; that’s not the same thing. I grew up with the changes and have never finally adjusted to many of them.’ He considered a blow below the belt. And delivered it. ‘My prediction is that they will loathe your generation.’

The Commissioner absorbed that a word at a time; avoidance of over reaction was drilled into the service types; he did not speak until he thought he understood Jackson’s point. ‘That will be very unfair. It was not our generation who carried out the Weeding.’

‘No,’ Jackson said straightly, ‘it was mine.’ If he felt shame or regret or satisfaction no one was to know it. ‘They will realise that, in time, but their first reaction will be simply that this world killed theirs. Literally. And to them this world will be your generation.’

The Commissioner made the small gesture of respect, a token movement of the hand towards the heart, almost a ritual, given when an Ombudsman offered advice. ‘I will remember.’

He went off, very smart in black uniform, very efficient to the approving eye and very self-assured, which Jackson knew that at this moment he was not.

The young man had erected a screen and fed the cassette into his scrapyard machine. He seemed unusually young for his role even in this age of precocity.

‘How old are you?’

‘Seventeen, sir.’

‘Technician?’

‘First Class, sir.’

At seventeen! ‘Are you cleared for classified material?’

‘To a degree, sir.’

The cassette had come in a folder colour-coded black – Commissioner’s Discretion Only. Sometimes he really feared the capabilities of these super-educated fledglings. From junk and theory they had built this machine, with an improvement to allow projection on a large screen, in a matter of days.

Aside from the brilliantly effective instructional techniques there were most secret and tightly restricted drugs for the enhancement of natural intelligence, the small beginnings of which had been known in his own young day, and plainly youth rather than maturity would furnish optimum test material. The damned biologists and bio-chemists; behind screens of secrecy and silence, what were they doing? Was there anything they were not doing, any area of human pursuit they might not bless or blight?

Campion, the Commissioner, might know and could safely be asked. Whether or not he would reply was another matter; he placed limits on confidence. Politics revolved around different possibilities in this era but they were still politics, ultimately concerned with protection and power and deviousness. And secrecy.

‘Are you ready, sir?’

Caught dreaming, he said stiffly, ‘Yes, thank you.’

The youngster told him conversationally, ‘This is from some collection of historical records, a bloody great batch of newscasts about Columbus.’ With the job begun, enthusiasm forgot to be deferential and Jackson wondered, like old men down the centuries, what these polite kids were really like. ‘The Commissioner picked this one to show you.’

‘To show me what?’

‘Don’t know; it seems pretty ordinary. Just interviews.’ So I’m supposed to catch on to whatever Ian caught on to. ‘But this one has been tampered with. We think this is the full record but that some sections were not shown on the newscast and the thing was later reassembled for preservation. They must have had a strong historical sense.’

Ah, you trusting child! ‘Lord, boy, they recorded everything down to their retinal patterns; by the time of the Collapse they were literally bugging themselves for posterity.’ Actually for self-protection, but that would take too much explaining. ‘Can you recognise the doctored sections?’

‘I’ve got them noted.’

‘Call them as we go.’

‘Right.’

‘What’s the date of this thing?’

‘March 11, 1988.’

He had been twenty-four years old; he might well have seen this newscast. Within minutes he knew he had; his visual memory was tenacious but this returned with a clarity quite extraordinary after forty-four years.

A blare of theme music, four decades forgotten, set the period. A familiar pattern of dancing geometry capered, split, reformed into letters: MATTERS OF MOMENT.

Saturday night – Channel 2 – Melbourne. He was seized by a violent, unhappy nostalgia. Melbourne my lovely old monster! But we had to kill you; it was necessary.

The voice-over (name eluding him) said, ‘We – the camera crew and I – recorded this in America only hours ago. It’s another Matters of Moment scoop!’

COLUMBUS SIX screamed the title, brilliant scarlet against stars and darkness. Six? Of course; there had been all those miniature unmanned test vehicles.

The title skittered off into infinity past a cratered Luna and a ringed Saturn. Standard, recognisable objects; after, three decades of space most still hadn’t appreciated the difference between a planet and a star. The camera cut to a medium shot of Columbus, a tracery of metal struts sunlit against the stars. (Doctored, of course; actually the thing would have been hard to see.)

It was an ugly structure. ‘Blowing your way to heaven on a klaxon’ had been the joke of the day, and it fitted. Columbus resembled nothing so much as the skeleton of an old-fashioned motor horn of the early years of the century, with the great flare of the monopole rim tapering to a wasp waist and expanding to a cylindrical bulge at the rear end. The bulge, housing quarters and nuclear plant, was solidly metal-walled but the rest was spiderweb, a frame surrounding emptiness. Wrap a sheath of polished brass around it and there would be your klaxon. And blow, Gabriel, blow!

The ship shrank swiftly into a lower corner of the screen and from its flare a shatteringly green line leapt across space, shimmering in an illusion of speed. The words BARNARD’S STAR appeared in at first tiny letters at its far end, theft swelled to fill the screen.

The view cut to a studio technician’s idea of Barnard’s Star (or any goddamned star, what the hell?) – a slumberous coal in the womb of night, crimson, menacing. A red dwarf. Round it, at accelerated speeds and in impossibly close orbits, swung two globes which, for an eyecatching composition, the technicians had lit in ice-blue and striated bronze.

‘Barnard’s Star!’ cried the off-screen voice, building urgency as if the world was not fed to the teeth with similar spacecasts. ‘More than fifty million million kilometres from Earth! Already known to be circled by two huge planets and who knows how many more? The goal of Columbus!’

Cut to a shot of Earth from space (authentic, from the library, cyclone whirling like mad over the China Sea); cut to the announcer in the studio.

Barnes Falworth. The slightly soupy voice clicked recollection into place. Poor glamour boy – gone with the wind, the pestilence, the famine, the March of Man. The staggering stumble of man.

‘You may think the last possible drop of interest has been drained from the starship while we have watched it building, strut by plate by bolt by weld, for three years. But tonight we have the final factor which brings the years of preparation home to us as human beings.’ Pause for a last squeeze at non-existent drama. ‘The names of the star travellers have been released!’ Pause again, with small smile of promise. ‘And we bring you, first in the world to interview them, their faces and voices. Here they are – the fabulous men!’

Forgotten. All those years out there, and forgotten. Poor bastards.

The camera cut to an austerely military lounge-room and seven unfabulous-looking men. Two were playing chess, two reading, two chatting; one, a little separate from the others, merely sat. All save the last tried to look as though failing to be aware of a camera was their normal way of life; he simply looked uncomfortable.

The camera inspected the chess players. Falworth purred, ‘Doctor Ivan Doronin, physician-psychiatrist—’ Doronin looked up on cue, smiled, nodded, looked down and moved a piece ‘—and Doctor Piotr Kulayev, biologist and radiologist—’ Kulayev managed an abstracted smile while he scanned Doronin’s inroad on his middle game ‘—both of the USSR.’

The view moved to a thin blond gent with a pipe and a book which he laid on his knee before the camera could kick it out of his hand. ‘Doctor James Lindley, surgeon-psychiatrist. Of Britain.’ Lindley gave a clear ‘Good evening’ in a voice as English as Oxford, money and a distaste for the camera could make it.

Two armed-forces types, clean cut and crew cut but not much at ease, were ‘Doctor Ewan Matthews, astronomer-physicist, and Doctor Gordon Fraser, astronomer-mathematician. Both of the USA.’

Matthews offered a strained ‘Hi!’ in a voice that owed something to education and something to the Bronx – the old, forgotten, pounded-into-rubble Bronx. Fraser said, ‘Howdy,’ trying to be gracious-relaxed. Despite his name the voice recalled a boyhood spent in the environs of Yoknapat-awpha County. And who, save for an unlikely specialist in literary archives, remembers Yoknapatawpha County?

A slightly fleshy gentleman with spectacles and bushy eyebrows was Doctor Joachim Streich, bio-chemist and neuro-surgeon, of Germany. He gave ‘Good evening’ in nearly accentless English.

The lens examined the man sitting apart more thoroughly, from above and below and both sides. He was notable for an ugly face whose individually acceptable features seemed clumsily mated and for the fact that of the seven only he wore clothes he might have slept in. And for the additional fact that, forty-four years later, Jackson remembered him. And then thought, It isn’t memory; I have seen him somewhere. Recently. And that’s not possible. Or is that one of the things I’m supposed to catch on to?

Falworth positively smirked his climax. ‘Last and not at all least – Senior Officer Albert Raft, Commander of Columbus.’

Raft opened his mouth, thought of nothing to say, glared at the camera with demented self-control and finally made a strangled sound of greeting.

Falworth moved with relief into a sequence better than a round of name calling and Jackson’s curiosity noted that he made no reference to Raft’s outstanding peculiarity – that alone in this galaxy of bi-disciplinary professionals he was credited with no scientific standing.

‘Commander Raft is more than simply another member of an illustrious complement. He is the living symbol of a long-kept secret, for “dinkum cobber” Raft’ (Raft flinched visibly) ‘is an Australian, and with him Australia makes her début in the great adventure of star travel. She enters right at the top, in command of the most tremendous voyage in history. And Australia has earned her right to this accolade for – and this is the long-kept, well-kept secret – the discovery of the slow-metabolism technique which alone makes this voyage possible for human beings is the work of an Australian biologist, John Heathcote.’

Well, well. But why a secret, well-kept or any other kind? Memory scraped a few vague impressions regarding the man, who had made no splash in his time. A rumoured connection with the starship … rumour again! But to the world he had been a nobody.

The picture froze to a still. The young projectionist said, ‘Something funny here. That name – Heathcote – had a sound blur over it, as if it had been drowned in some background noise. It wasn’t easy to remove. They must have wanted it suppressed because the announcer’s voice had been tinkered with, too, re-handled to make a sort of downbeat as if the sentence ended at “biologist”. Was it worth that trouble?’

‘To them, apparently. Perhaps we’ll find out why.’ But they did not.

Falworth jerked back into speech. ‘I spoke to Commander Raft earlier in the day and of course we talked of the journey.’

The view cut to an unidentifiable country road where Raft and Falworth strolled in sunlight, Falworth impeccable in the featureless business suit of the eighties and Raft shambling and disreputable in timeless overalls. Grubby overalls.

Overdoing the common-touch Aussie bit. Or was – is – he really like that?

Falworth was hearty. ‘Your job puzzles me, Albert.’ Raft’s resentment of familiarity did not escape the camera. ‘As I understand it the course is computer-controlled throughout, yet you are listed as, among other things, navigator and pilot. Will you be called upon to do any actual piloting?’

Raft’s answering voice was identifiably Australian without being aggressively national, but his speech was slow and stilted.

The kind who can’t repeat a scripted speech naturally.

‘Quite a bit. The computer programming is only provisional for orbit. For one thing, we haven’t an exact figure for the mass of Barnard’s Star and satellites, so there will be corrections necessary to the basic orbit computed for rounding the star. That means the provisional course programmed for return to Earth will need corresponding correction. I’ll probably bring the ship in manually over the last months of the home stretch.’

It isn’t camera fright; he knows too much, and classified facts keep getting between his thought and his tongue.

Falworth cried fatuously, ‘So man still rules his machines! Now, what can you tell us about the flight in general?’

Still in the tone of one crunching through a balky set piece, Raft had scarcely begun with, ‘We’ll cover the first eight years at one-eighth g—’ when Falworth broke in on him.

‘Please, a question! Why only one-eighth g when the slowest rockets take off fifty times faster than that?’

This seemed unplanned and Raft showed some animation in replying. Animation and irritation. ‘Because that’s the best optimum acceleration we can depend on getting. Our fuel is interstellar dust and gas and it’s spread thin. And not evenly. We’d like a full g, but we must have as many constants as possible to keep formulae manageable, and one-eighth looks to be the likely consistent high. And that will give us a bloody sight higher final velocity than any rocket ever reached or could reach.’

‘Thank you. Now, the trip itself …’

‘Eight years at one-eighth g will bring us to eighty-seven L – that means eighty-seven per cent of the speed of light – and five-sixths of a light year on our way. Then we’ll coast for about four and a third light years – not quite five years travelling – and spend eight years slowing for orbit of the star. Same routine to get home.’

It was a flat recital; Jackson imagined Falworth seeing his scoop fall apart in sheer inertia. ‘Allowing a year for orbit, that makes forty-three years?’

‘I’m only figuring approximately, so it’ll actually be a month or so over forty-two years. We’ll sleep most of the time.’

‘In slow metabolism?’

‘Yes. We’ll have altogether thirty-seven years at ten per cent met. and a total of five years of waking periods each for the experimental work and observations.’

‘Let’s see – five years plus thirty-seven at ten per cent living rate’ – classical rendition of rapid calculation – ‘will make you all just eight and three-quarter years older than at take-off.’

‘A bit over eight. There’s time dilation. Apparent time slows to exactly half at eighty-seven L, and that cuts the coasting in half for those inside the craft. The effect before that won’t be much because it builds exponentially.’

Falworth was not getting himself into an on-camera tangle with time dilation. He mimed confusion and despair, probably genuine. ‘Please! I don’t begin to understand accelerated time.’

What’s all this scaled-down-to-the-public shop talk to me? For familiarisation with the face? Where have I seen it – or one like it?

‘Nobody understands it. It just is.’

‘I’ll take your word for it. And now the inevitable question: What sort of world do you expect to return to?’

Raft became ruminative. After ten paces he said, ‘There’ll be superficial changes, but they won’t matter much. Basics don’t alter in a short time; history only shows different facets of the human animal against different backgrounds.’ Then he delivered the line which earned him another nickname before he left Earth. ‘If there’s anything left at all, it’ll be the same old shitheap.’

That was how we felt. Cold wars, hot wars, pollution, overcrowding, hunger, diminishing resources, fragmenting ecology, corruption, violence, greed. How right he was, and how wrong.

The rest was ten minutes of bland, uninformative interviews with the scientists. According to the youngster the thing had been chopped to pieces, apparently to eliminate even the most oblique technical references. Jackson could discover nothing worth hiding in the babble, but at that time he had been an Aboriginal Rights PR man, too close to protest and argument to pay much attention to science.

One amusing jolt of memory came at the end, as the youngster wheeled his gadget away. He recalled that his whole family had seen that newscast, and what returned to him was the remark of his teenage sister: ‘I could do a drool over the Englishman, but isn’t our Australian a drear?’

2

A note, signed by Campion, lay atop the papers in the folder: ‘Transcript of material found aboard Columbus. The whole FYEO at present. Ian.’ For Your Eyes Only, i.e. keep your yapping mouth shut.

The first clip of typescript was headed: ‘From the private journal of Albert Raft, Senior Officer (Commander) of Columbus Six, also Pilot, Navigator, Instrument Technician and Electrical and Mechanical Engineer.’ Raft was also multi-disciplinary in his highly practical fashion.

Jackson began to read.

Two days out after a flawless fare-thee-well. Much jubilation and radioed congratulation and a certain flatulence after meals, possibly due to the lightweight acceleration.

And so?

The great adventure may turn out to be the great boredom. I had a juvenile hope that some special feeling would emerge …

Nothing is changed – ‘Why, this is Hell; nor am I out of it.’

Oh, dear, a literary gent. Who’d have guessed it of shaggy old ‘dinkum cobber’? Like hearing the garbage collector toss off an aria on his round.

Marlowe said it for himself as well as for Mephisto. I know how he felt – like a rat in a trap. In my case, the parent trap.

Perhaps my childhood was better than many, but it was bad enough. I lacked identity, which every child needs, early. I remember the sensation sometimes of splitting, of divorcement from self and environment, while some other ‘I’ observed the unreality of me and my surroundings. It’s common enough, I believe, but most seem to forget it, to give in, to accept the illusory ‘me’ of dusty flesh as all there is.

I couldn’t forget. The only child of two near-geniuses (neither of them with the faintest conception of a child’s worth) has to find identity or be swamped by theirs.

An introvert’s holiday. Who were the parents? Should check. Newspaper files, perhaps? We were able to preserve more than most areas.

But identity recedes; the last mirage. But there are moments of near approach, as when they told me: ‘You will pilot the ship; the stars are yours.’

And excitement tore my silly heart loose from sense and Barnard’s Star became heaven in a red dwarf.

The uncertainties, the dangers, all Earth itself lost in the paradoxes of time dilation and slow metabolism, could not shadow the dream of the ultimate journey with identity inevitably at its end. When I came home I would know who and what was Albert Raft.

Then I learned why – the real ‘why’ – I had been selected and the walls of the trap snapped back around my hallucinated wishing.

My combination of talents and capacities could have been matched by dozens of men, hundreds. I felt the choice must have been a matter of millipoints of difference. Or mere chance.

It was neither.

I was chosen because physique and manual dexterity and a dozen characteristics not in themselves unusual are in me strongly defined. The list includes the shape of my nose (measured in three dimensions with nanometric exactness), the number of hair follicles in various parts of my body, the range of my colour and sound perception, my encephalograph readings, my IQ tests over a period of years, my endocrine readings and God knows what else.

Out here, in this incarnation of everywhere and nowhere, I am still what John made me – an experimental rat in a biological trap.

John? Heathcote? No pie without a biologist’s finger in it. I could almost hope there’s a Hell, just for their judgement.

They’re waiting on my return, after forty-two of their snailpace years, so that a new generation of cell carpenters and psychometrists can use me as a control for their examination of the others. Once and for all the great argument, environment versus heredity, will have its answer.

They must be damned sure we will actually get back. Ourselves think the odds are good but not all that certainly good.

As for those others, growing to manhood back there on the mudball, the less said the better. But how much will long remain private in this cul-de-sac of the cosmos? Before the years are through we will have investigated each other clear down to the synapses for lack of better amusement.

What others? Is this what we are after? Why can’t people write their journals for posterity instead of the blowing-off of private steam?

Day 10. Some four hundred and fifty million