Destiny Makers

by George Turner

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

Synopsis

In the era of "the big squeeze" - when an environmentally ravaged Earth groans beneath the weight of twelve billion people - two men control the destiny of humankind. One was recently senile...the other is going insane. In the year 2069, with the Earth's population dangerously out of control, procreation and the medical treatment of terminal illness are the two most heinous crimes against society. But behind the doors of the top secret Biophysical Institute, an old man has been illegally cured of the ravages of Alzheimer's disease and made artificially younger - to serve the unspecified purposes of Premier Jeremy Beltane, one of the world's most powerful leaders. A member of the underprivileged "Wardie" class, Detective Sergeant Harry Ostrov has been assigned to serve as a guardian to the mysteriously rejuvenated nonagenarian - and entrusted with a devastating secret that could topple the unstable "Minder" government. But once within the confines of the Beltane family enclave, the dedicated police officer is dragged deeper and deeper into a lethal mire of scandal, corruption, political outrage, and moral dilemma - sworn to silence even as he observes his nation's ruler, a man ultimately responsible for the future of civilization, descend steadily into depression, uncertainty . . . and madness.

Release date: December 18, 2018

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 278

Sample

From Commentaries; Decay of the Family Nexus: “The psychological shortcomings and emotional unrest of ‘Harry’ Ostrov are echoed today as parents, with the best intentions, strive to rear their offspring in the straitjacket of their own ideas of right and wrong. In any culture with rapidly changing values it cannot be done. The lectured and pressured children rarely rebel; they simply fail to conform.”

There has been too much stupid talk about what went on in the Manor in those last days of Beltane’s premiership; there was melodrama enough without the idiocies propounded by the channels and the amateur psychologists. I can tell you exactly what happened. I was there.

I was born into the mid-greenhouse generation, when the big weather problems were understood, and to some extent under control. The food situation was easing, and no more than two thirds of the world’s nine billions were undernourished (or starving outright) at any given time. If the population growth could have been halted then, in 2039, we might have come through the century relatively unscathed, but even slowing the growth, so simple in theory, seemed impossible in application.

We kids didn’t realize why this should be so until our body’s hungers came to plague and exalt adolescence, but we were born with population warnings in the air we breathed and we accepted them as part of life. There were too many people in the world, and we had to put up with them. That they also had to put up with us was their worry, not ours.

Being kids, we played “cull” games. (That word was already being spoken as a prophecy of some distant future but not as a present threat.) In our games one side was picked to be culled and was hunted down by the “real Aussies.” Those to be culled were called by the most offensive names we knew—Chinks, Wogs, Nignogs. The names had little real meaning save as denoting outsiders, non-Australians. Our own black, brown, yellow and mixed nationals (about half the population) were “real Aussies,” no matter what their origins, but Chinks, Wogs and Nignogs represented the rest of the world, that place somewhere outside, full of people to be got rid of someday. In that way we prepared a chauvinism that bided its time to come home to roost.

All over the world kids played cull games like ours, games dreamed up from odd scraps of parental conversation in the home. Kids, though they may not absorb the words properly, hear the hates and fears behind them very clearly. And sublimate the uneasiness in games. Games keep the fears at bay, trivializing them. We “real Aussies” could never be the culled ones. As we grew older the hardening of familiarity set in, and as adults we didn’t talk seriously about the cull at all. At any rate, not in public.

In public we made black jokes about it—

I have begun in the wrong place. Already I am caught up in ends rather than beginnings.

I am a policeman, Detective-Sergeant Harry Ostrov of Melbourne, Australia, a fairly ordinary sort of policeman whose promotions have come through attention to detail rather than through professional brilliance. It may have helped that I never let myself fall into the traps of easy corruption that elevate some to shaky heights and put others into jail with their seducers and victims.

I was brought up the old way, with strict ideas of good and evil, right and wrong—

Another false start, but there has to be some background.

My parents met and married in 2039, at the end of what social historians have dubbed the Dancing Thirties, that last decade of nonsense and thin-ice gaiety before history tightened its grip around the human race.

Perhaps my mother, Arlene, and father, Bill, had reason, along with everybody else, to throw their caps in the air and their brains after them and see life as a ballroom where the dancing would never stop. Everything was on the up-and-up, wasn’t it? Man had the greenhouse effect and the ozone holes under an endurable measure of control, had damped down pollution to manageable levels and tamed the environmental vandals, had developed weather forecasting to the point of keeping crops and destructive shortages a step ahead of the brutal fluctuations of rainfall and storms and the complex temperature variations of the oceans. The planet let out the breath it had held for forty years and gave itself a party. (There were doomsayers, but who listened?) That generation seems to have been a meretricious lot whose gaiety was too often nit-brained inanity, but their party was a wing-ding while it lasted.

I was two months old when the earthquake that had slept for a century tore Tokyo apart, leveled its stock exchange and destroyed the most powerful financial empire in history—and tossed the dancing planet down to penury in its wake. Overnight the full bellies of the major powers became as close to empty as were the tormented guts of the Third World billions. The world learned, the hard way, what it had always known but refused to face—that shares, investments and IOUs, those computer records and pieces of paper pushed around the world by economists and financiers are not, when all the debts are called in at once, wealth. They may be “money,” though even that is doubtful, but they are not wealth. Wealth is what your country can provide to satisfy its people’s needs; surplus wealth is what you can trade with. When the spree was over and there were nine billions to provide for, who had surpluses? Money became again the solid stuff you grab and hold; creative exchange of paper promises died for lack of resources to back them.

Australia, that perennially lucky country, as usual suffered less than many others because it was able, by way of a grinding austerity, to feed itself at a borderline sufficiency and by the late sixties was in a condition of penurious stability. We were by then living a good life in comparison with many other nations, but in fact our standard of subsistence would have shocked our grandfathers. Or would it? We had the necessities; what we hungered for were the unattainable extras.

As a child I resented the rich and could not forgive their existence. It takes time and education to learn of the failures of communism, socialism, anarchism, and all the other fantasies based on egalitarian concepts that cannot exist while human IQs vary over a range of more than a hundred points and individual needs can’t be measured on a common scale. So we are stuck with basically capitalist systems with all their faults, and the rich are always with us.

The rich have always been, in one way or another, the rulers of the world, and I had my day among them—which is how this story happened for the telling—though it was a short day and a humiliating one. I didn’t ask for it to happen, just as I didn’t ask to be a policeman or to be seconded to the Jackson job or even to wear the damnfool name my giddy parents wished on me.

What parents they were, still are! In the thirties they both had jobs, the world was a fun park, and they frolicked with the minor glitterati of their day. They met, married, and raced into having their permitted child (the new procreation laws were a prescient warning that nobody took too seriously, a temporary restriction until the planet sorted itself out) whom they named, with rhythm, rhyme, and a heady giggle, Ian Juan Ivan John. Their friends applauded the whimsy. Tacked on to the family name of Ostrov it made me sound like a multicultural stew.

Even the Ostrov was, if not a whimsy, not quite genuine. Bill’s Ukrainian great-grandfather had adopted it for political reasons when he escaped to Australia by the skin of his gritted teeth. It was an anagram of his birthplace, Rostov.

If my parents sound featherheaded they were only reflecting their time, but when the Tokyo crash caught the working world knock-kneed in the face of sudden poverty they showed mettle. From the mild affluence of two jobs they dropped to no jobs and a hungry boy. Arlene, who had been a secretary, found servant work in the households of those who could still afford the hire of status symbols at Scrooge wages. Bill had been an emporium sales supervisor—in his own description, a “superior counter-jumper.” He spat on his hands, bore with his blisters, and made do with sporadic laboring jobs in spite of a slightly crooked spine that had not troubled him until he became a manual worker.

They clung to the fetish of education as the road to success and pushed me down it as far as their tight purses could allow. It was their luck and mine that I was what theatre folk call “a quick study” who could soak up information with minimum effort. That is only a minor talent; it does not equate with high intelligence.

From their thirties gaiety they retained a deliberate, strained cheerfulness that drove me half out of my mind in surroundings that rarely included enough chairs to go round, clothes to wear or food to eat. My four variations of the one name were considered a risible affectation by my school ground peers until at age twelve, in a fury of domestic rebellion (a single outburst, never repeated) I reviled my parents for their unthinking cruelty in a storm of yelling, stamping and foul language.

My mother, instead of smacking my scarlet face, put a hand to her lips and murmured, “Oh, you poor darling.” My father, more alive to tactics, asked what name I would like to be called by. I had not planned so far ahead but reached for the first available fantasy and produced the name of a favorite vid cartoon character, Harry the kung fu Mouse, and Harry I became without further fuss. They really were good people. The kids at school took more convincing, but I grew solid and strong and able to make my decisions stand.

In the middle fifties, when “recession” began to seem a permanent condition, my parents learned the bitter lesson that the world belongs to the young; “too old at forty” was the reality. They stopped pretending that tomorrow would ever come. We became Wardies, the sour-joke word for those who became “wards of the state,” our income the Sustenance Payment, the monthly dole, the Suss. I think that Minders, as a description of the administrative classes whose supposed social responsibility was the welfare of the less fortunate, came into jeering existence at the same time. With use its spiteful edge became dulled and it passed into the language of social description, establishing “us” and “them” and the gulf between.

Then, at sixteen, I passed the Grading Paper of the General Employment examinations. Rejoicings, chez Ostrov! A working son, even an apprentice, would render the logistics of housekeeping less inhuman.

I knew what I wanted to do; age sixteen had it all worked out. When I was given my Career Choice sheet I wrote in the Preferred Training section, “Electrical and computer wiring and installation,” confident that my excellent marks in math and manual skills would guarantee acceptance. Installation and wiring cannot be wholly automated even in the age of computerized handling; a specialized manual skill was tantamount to a job for life.

The selection board approved my qualifications. Then it checked my physique, read my genetic print, calculated my ultimate physical development on an optimum diet—and offered me a police training course.

Received Wardie wisdom was that Police Are Bastards. We hated them as Minder menials.

I protested.

The board pointed out that the apprentice lists were crowded with applicants as well equipped manually and intellectually as I (a blow to vanity), whereas my projected strength, physical fitness, learning speed and unusually wide general knowledge (the damnable gift of cultured parents) qualified me for a physically and mentally demanding profession.

The board reminded me, too, of comparatively high wages and a pension entitlement (pensions were a rarity) and of the fact that my parents had made sacrifices, etc. … and didn’t I think they were now entitled to my support?

Yes, sir, but I can support them as well on an electrician’s—

The board feared that times of national exigency made it necessary that capable men and women be allocated to the niches they could best fill, and that I …

Outside the interview room I had the last and worst crying fit of my adolescence, then went home and told my Wardie parents that they had a copper in the family.

Bill—I was calling him Bill by then—cried, “Chin up, Harry boy! You’re made!” My mother, closer to social issues and neighborly attitudes, said little.

The neighbors gave them a rough time for a while. Cops were bloody lackeys to the bloody Minders; justice was for the wealthy, and Wardies never got a fair go because the coppers were corrupt and vicious; no good ever came of associating with … then they realized that some good might be squeezed out of knowing a rotten bloody copper who just might do you the odd good turn if you kept on the right side of him. After all, it wasn’t the Ostrovs’ fault if they’d reared a bad ’un, was it?

The pressures on Mum and Dad relaxed, and the unruly natives treated me with expectant civility.

At the Police Training College it was pointed out to me that my initials were I. J. I. J. and I would not be known as Harry, so I began with hatred in my heart.

Fate laughed, of course. Manipulated by instructors who knew just how I felt (hadn’t they been through it?) I walked headfirst into their traps of ego building and indoctrination. By the end of the first month I and my whole intake group were in love with the service and with ourselves, gentled and jollied into proud, elitist, one-for-all-and-all-for-one police tribesmen, dedicated to the protection of a graceless, ingrate public.

Later I saw that it was not all crafty psychological cat crap. We did become a welded, supportive group; we did learn disciplines, official and social, that gave us small behavioral advantages in a depressed society; we did learn pride in ourselves and our service.

In time we were parceled out to stations to join the rough and tumble of no-nonsense fellow cops who had had street wisdom beaten into their often bloodied heads and now served it back to us good and hard. That, with the sickening and wholly realistic view of the truths a policeman finds behind the facades of bland family lives, refashioned the world for us.

Some of us grew unpleasantly tough, some went rotten, some went under. Most of us grew an extra skin, tried to stay sane and not be the bastards off the job that we often had to be on it; we compensated resentments with a snarling pride and a steadily hardening sheath over the mind. I thought myself an averagely good, honest copper and learned to distance myself from the corrupt (of whom there were enough to tar all of us) and keep to the code of shamed silence that binds men and women whose lives may depend on group loyalty.

I was twice tempted to marry and twice surprised how little heartbreak endured when the romances fell through. I decided on a single life until seniority should lift me out of the daily rottenness and into the calmer air of administration. Time enough then to seek out love and father the child we would be allowed.

I found that I could not talk of my work with my mother. To her it was all “horrors and nastiness.” She loved me no less, but what she loved was her conception of me, the “nice” side of me.

I could talk with Bill, who brought me up standing at times with perceptions I had not suspected in my old-fashioned dad—as when he said, in one private moment, “We’re all born bare arsed, boy; it’s putting on fancy clothes that dirties our hearts.” I knew better than he what lay behind the triteness. A policeman grows away from the public he serves, tends to stand above it, looking down. And a policeman’s friends tend to be policemen. Everything conspires to separate him from society and identify him with an official viewpoint that sees moral questions in terms of legal right and wrong.

I could not afford, for my soul’s comfort, to admit to myself that I looked forward to the day of retirement when I could be reborn, bare arsed, into the humble world where a man could hold to a morality uncompromised.

I told Bill, long after the Jackson affair was over, that being aware of secrecy, corruption and manipulation is not enough. You deplore it in conversation, tut-tut suitably over the revelations of skulduggery on the vidnews, even play your part in apprehending the despicable and the villainous; but it registers as wickedness only at arm’s length, as the rottenness of others—until the day you find your own self trapped in the web of lies and hidden actions, enmeshed without warning or chance of avoidance.

I was thirty when the Jackson job came up, a detective-sergeant with a safe future if I kept my nose clean. (That is harder for detectives than for simple coppers; the temptations are constant and great and the rewards can be breathtaking.)

In December 2068 volunteers were called for a one day special testing stint with the College of Psycho-Biology—testing meaning “guinea pigging.” I was doing routine relief in a small, unbusy station on the city perimeter and, in what I took to be the local practice, was chosen to “volunteer.”

It was not the local practice. I was sought, pinpointed and chosen, but that was later knowledge.

The test was done in an indoor stadium. I estimated three hundred guinea pigs, male and female, in definable classifications—police, high-IQ students, longtime jobless Wardies, professional athletes, subteen children, over sixties and one lot that appeared to be mentally retarded. Whatever happened, we could be sure of one thing, that the tests would be free of danger or side effects; otherwise criminals would have been used to avoid compensation claims on a bankrupt Treasury.

The psychs and biochemists—there seemed to be a regiment of them—told us, without too much technical fiddle, that we were part of an experiment in hypnotic suggestion.

We police exchanged glances and sighs. The force had discarded hypnotism long ago; its occasional helpfulness was outweighed by complications and opportunities for error. Almost anyone can be hypnotized after a fashion; the problems lie in the questioning. You can’t tell, until you have wasted a month chasing false leads, whether you have been eliciting genuine memories, associational responses or mere subliminal garbage.

It seemed, however, that here was something new. What they were about was not hypnosis (so they said) but the effect of a combination of drugs designed to modify selected functions of the brain while sharpening others. There should be a temporary—no more than fifteen minutes—alteration of some facets of the personality, measured by reaction to key words and phrases.

We police at once suspected thought control; if that was in the wind we had better know about it. It sounded like hypnosis no matter what the boffins said, at least a pseudohypnotism, mind management on a measurable basis. It raised spectres of possible use by criminals—but that aspect would have to be weighed by the lawmakers and only then by us ordered-about lawkeepers.

The usual questionnaire occupied most of the morning until each group was computer sorted into subgroups for the action of the drugs to be observed on variously capable intellects. Not a really significant statistical sample, it was admitted, but a useful initial guide.

In the afternoon we were given our injections and interviewed briefly while “under the influence.”

My interviewing psych was of Southeast Asian extraction—Thai, Cambodian, Vietnamese, you can’t tell by looking at them. I thought myself culturally unbiased and had a high opinion of the Asians in the force. Outside the force, they were, according to the statisticians, a brainy addition to the cultural mix who did well in the humanities and sciences; according to us they were a brainy addition who created occasional havoc with ingenious variations on old rackets. On the whole they were no better and no worse than the white majority, who could be wicked in anyone’s language. This one got down to business without any fake reassuring palaver and for most of the time kept his eyes on a telltale board which he could see but I could not.

The effect of the drug cocktail felt like no effect at all; I thought that perhaps I might be a natural immune. The psych asked seemingly pointless questions while I wondered what the telltale told about my answers. I was not sure that the test had actually started, but it had because the psych said, “That’s all; you can go home.”

While I was still feeling surprised he raised his voice with a sudden sharpness. “Look at me!” With the habit of responding to command, I stared into his eyes, expectant but unsuspicious. “Do not discuss this test with anyone!”

The tone was to an insulting degree peremptory. Feeling pretty uptight, I told him that I could accept an instruction without having it screwed into place, but psychs are not impressed by their experimental animals. This one said, “Sorry, but it is important,” with his eyes back on the telltale board. He added, as a throwaway, “I don’t imagine you will want to discuss it.”

I wasn’t going to waste ill temper on a state automaton whose attention was on dials and needles and who had no interest in the reactions of a state guinea pig—or so I thought as I got myself out of the building to simmer down in the open air. How wrong you can be.

I crossed the road into the Exhibition Gardens and sat on the lawn as I experienced a moment of lightheadedness. Aftereffect of the drugs? (It was in fact a rebalancing of functions as the injected cocktail wore off.) The next moments were disastrous.

I discovered with a slow sickness why the psych had said I would not want to discuss the test.

In his few scrappy minutes he had turned me inside out with drugs that had split my self-awareness into unrelated strata. My ears had taken in what he asked and my mouth had spilled the terrible answers, but in the process my brain had failed to understand what was asked of it; I had been subjected to a pressing of mental buttons and the painless extraction of the secrets of a lifetime. He had taken from me the things that exist in all of us, hidden and suppressed and often unknown to our conscious selves. He had learned, with the ease of breathing, that overt love for my parents overlaid an impatient resentment close to contempt but never admitted to myself, that I had wept in the darkness of my bed when the more obscene pressures of police work became unbearable, that there had been in adolescence—and beyond—episodes of powerful homoerotic feeling endured in frightened silence and shame at the truth of what passes for hero worship, that I had occasionally stolen unimportant trifles simply because they were available and had not realized that such actions lodged like thorns in the complex mental paths between public and private morality, and that (somehow this seemed infinitely demeaning) I had an inborn fear of spiders and would break out in sweat at the approach of one—

And some other things I don’t trust myself even now to put in writing. I don’t want to look at them.

Under a hot summer sun I shivered in the horror of exposure, naked as a worm, to the mind of another. That secrets were surely safe in the doctor-patient relationship counted not at all. Were they indeed safe, or would they wait in some “protected” computer file, to be one day resurrected for prurient discussion by the judges of my career, my promotion, my future?

In the end I collapsed into helpless anger—at the man who had unfairly leeched truth out of me, at myself for harboring such meannesses in the corners of my mind and, at last, at the state system which had submitted me to such self-hatred without explanation or pity.

I sat there for two hours before I recalled the end of the interview and the cynicism of the psych’s final order. He was right; I could not even discuss self-disgust with my shuddering self.

Nobody, literally nobody, is proof against the secrets of his own heart.

It was late when I made for home, the huddling place, the refuge.

Mum had always made herself deaf to mention of anything more than the routine of my job, refusing to dip her mind into the human sewers, but Bill liked to get me alone and dig for drama; nothing could cure him of the delusion that I must have access to untold facts behind the cases on the vidnews. This time he asked, innocently enough, about the day’s work and my immediate impulse was to unload some of the angry jumble from my mind.

Secrecy provisions are expected to apply to family as well as to all others but in fact are often flouted in the home. It is a commonplace that policemen talk carelessly to their wives and policewomen to their husbands; authority knows this, has always known it and put up with it as a prohibition that cannot be enforced.

My lips were parted for a snarling complaint about invasion of privacy before I realized that complaint would involve giving reasons that I would not, could not give. Just living with self-knowledge is bad enough.

I said, clutching at words, “Nothing much,” but I was shaken badly and so, in another way, was Bill who, staring and concerned, cried out, “For God’s sake, boy, you’re sweating!”

So I was; so would have been anyone so shamefully hurt in secret places.

“Was it that bad, Son?”

My father’s worry was acutely shaming to my harshly revealed secret contempt for him. I could only evade. “Was what bad?”

“Whatever it was. Something unpleasant?”

“Nothing unpleasant, Dad. Just a day.”

Bill gave me the father-to-son I-know-better grin. “Secret stuff, eh?”

While Mum clung to her fairy floss view of life that ignored and in some fashion sublimated the dreary facts, Bill had buffered shock and disappointment by retreat into romance; he could shunt me into some hypothetical Secret Service with a flip of the mind. For once I was thankful for a father who could invent my lies for me.

At the station next morning I waited uneasily for someone to ask me what the guinea-pig job had been. but nobody did. I had prepared. . .