Phoenix

by Richard Cowper

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

In the 24th Century, mankind lives in Utopia. Everyone is happy, apart from one man. 'A misfit, a throwback, a genuine freak' is how eighteen year old Bard (with typical eighteen year old romanticism) describes himself. 'The Last Romantic' was full of bravado, for in the perfect society individualism was not encouraged, and the threat of 'rehabilitation' was ever present. But Bard had a plan - he would enter the Caves of Sleep until he was twenty-one, his own man without let or hindrance, and in control of a fairly large fortune. But even in Utopia, plans have a way of going awry.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 192

Sample

LIKE a match struck up to the zenith of the northern sky the rocket flared, dwindled, and was lost behind the thin scrapings of cirrus. Within minutes the silver-white smoke of its trail, nudged to the east by the prevailing breeze, had crooked outwards into a colossal question mark which slowly melted away. Long after all trace of it had disappeared, Bard still leant against the railing of the penthouse balcony, gazing upwards with unfocused eyes.

Three hundred feet below him the evening exodus was beginning. The express track of the pedaway was already sprinkled with homeward-bound commuters speeding out towards Hendon and Golders Green, while the mono-rail cars from the Baker Street terminal, pinned by the lancing shafts of sunlight, wriggled like slim silver-fish as they squirmed their way through the reticulated traceries beyond Regent’s Park. To Bard all this familiar activity appeared supremely irrelevant, indeed he was scarcely aware of it. Ever since his spontaneous decision not to go to the skyport to see Andrena off, he seemed to have transferred himself bodily onto an altogether higher plane of existence; he had become the hero of his own tragedy. That Andrena herself had resolutely refused to accept him in the role had amply confirmed him in it. A vast sigh heaved itself up from somewhere in the region of his knees. Lowering his upturned face he rubbed the stiffness out of his neck and turned away from the balcony in time to hear the elevator gates whirr and click.

He stepped into the living-room from the roof garden at the same moment that his fourteen years old cousin Daphne entered from the hall. “Hello, loverboy,” she grinned. “How’s the broken heart?”

“Go and suck a tit,” muttered Bard.

“‘Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part’,” chanted Daphne.

“‘Nay, I have done, you get no more of me,

And I am glad——’ Ow! Let go! You’re hurting!”

“I warned you not to poke your nose in where it wasn’t welcome,” grunted Bard, thrusting her wrist up between her shoulder-blades.

“But you left it open on your desk,” she protested. “Ow! Ow!”

Abruptly Bard released her, at the same time propelling her away with his sandalled foot so that she stumbled across the room and nose-dived into the divan. “Barbarian,” she moaned histrionically, then, squirming round so that she was reclining on one elbow, she brushed her tumbled hair up out of her eyes and enquired in a quite different tone of voice: “What are you going to do now, Bard?”

It was the question he had been carefully evading ever since Andrena had informed him—with a casualness which even now gave him cold prickles to recall—that she was accompanying her husband to Mars. As the sage remarked: when a man knows that he is to be hanged in a fortnight it concentrates his mind wonderfully; and for Bard these last two weeks had been the quintessence of a distillation of his worship of Andrena Klemp. Everything else had gone overboard—lectures, seminars, even the first of the examinations. Faced with the inevitable reckoning he snatched for a lurching moment at the possibility of persuading Marcus to hypnocram him with enough civics to enable him to bluff his way through, but the mere idea was so unpalatable, so infinitely out of harmony with his present attitude of mind, that it was rejected even as it was considered.

“Well,” prompted Daphne, “what are you going to do?”

Bard revolved slowly on one heel and contemplated her darkly for a long moment. “S.A., maybe,” he said quietly and watched to see her reaction.

Daphne’s mouth slowly drooped open until he could see the tip of her very pink tongue and the neat line of her lower teeth. “Oh, Bard,” she whispered at last. “You’re not!”

“What’s to stop me?”

Daphne ignored this. “Was it her idea?”

“That proves how well you know Andrena,” he retorted moodily.

“But why, Bard? What good would that do?”

Bard shrugged. “I can’t exactly see myself crawling back to the Council to plead for a chance to be allowed to take my finals next year.”

“But they’d let you, wouldn’t they?”

“Oh, they’d let me, all right—Lawrence and Fiona would see to that—and they’d make their conditions: two months in an Adjustment Centre and a signed undertaking from Lawrence that I’d complete the course. But that’s not the point.”

Daphne waited for him to go on but he seemed to have lost himself in the labyrinth of his own gloomy thoughts. “Well, what is the point then?” she demanded.

He frowned. “The point?” he repeated vaguely and then his eyes cleared. “The point, you pinhead, is that there is no point—none at all. That’s what I’ve learnt in these last six months. You can’t plan out a human life as though it’s a production unit designed to maximize potential happiness. If the system worked there wouldn’t be any need for Adjustment Centres, would there? As it is they can’t build new ones quickly enough.”

“That’s just campus gossip.”

“Grow up, infant. The Europa welfare estimate for 2325 was five thousand million unos. What do you suppose they’re spending that sort of money on? Falsies for fairies?”

Daphne shrugged—economies was not her strong subject—and homed back on the question from which the conversation had digressed, “I still don’t see what good S.A. would do. Besides they wouldn’t let you take it. You have to have an incurable disease or something, don’t you?”

“Not any more you don’t.” Bard thrust his hand into his blouse and pulled out a black and silver folder which he flipped across to her.

Frowning slightly Daphne retrieved it from the floor at her feet. “The Caves of Sleep,” she read out. “Patroness Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Crome.” She opened out the folder and the coloured, three-dimensional mobile illustrations immediately began to glow with their own soft, imprinted illumination. It was a very sumptuous and tastefully designed production, obviously aimed at annual incomes of well above five thousand unos. “Where did you get it?” she asked.

“Andrena’s,” said Bard. “Someone sent Roger a copy. I begged it for the mobiles. They’re some of the best I’ve seen outside the Wolfson.”

Daphne nodded, enraptured by a vision of royal swans breasting through the ripples of the lake at Crome Park while above them clouds as white as the birds themselves scudded across an azure sky. So perfect was the illusion that she could not resist stroking the surface of the picture and she seemed mildly surprised to find that her finger remained dry. Other views showed the interior of Crome Place with elegant, pneumatic humanoids gliding about their appointed tasks of ministering to the needs of the guests, while the last two pictures were devoted to what was captioned: The Time Wing, a creation by Rixtophersen in extruded silica and magma laminate, one wall of which was dominated by an enormous mobile mosaic depicting a stylized phoenix rising, spread-winged, from a nest of subtly shifting flames.

The legend which accompanied the illustrations had obviously been designed for maximum impact and was prefaced by two quotations. The first read: Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.

The second:

Why are we weighed upon with heaviness,

And utterly consumed with sharp distress,

While all things else have rest from weariness?

The note thus sounded was sustained throughout the brochure with cunning amplifications of undertone at appropriate points, and with subtle transpositions from the major key of “weariness” to the minor one of “rejuvenation”. The reader was informed that the recently perfected techniques of Suspended Animation had permitted Man to steal a march on his most implacable enemy, namely Time. However, S.A. was in no sense to be regarded as an escape; it would be far truer to look upon it as a challenge, or at least as a period of truce in which the spiritual drives were enabled to replenish their energies in preparation for emerging, phoenix-like, from the ashes of the old self to take full advantage of all that the future had to offer. Furthermore the material advantages were by no means inconsiderable. A suitable sum invested at compound interest in selected Europa stocks would more than compensate for the initial outlay, and Caves of Sleep, Inc. would be happy to place their unique experience of long or short term investment prospects at the disposal of interested clients. And so on and so on.

Daphne read it to the end, looked once more at the pictures, and then handed it back to Bard. “I bet it costs a fortune.”

“Seven thousand, five hundred unos,” he replied, returning the brochure to his pocket. “Six thousand down, plus five hundred for each year taken, and the balance in adjusted value on revival. I suppose that’s to safeguard them against economic fluctuation.”

Daphne laughed. “Well, that takes care of that then. You haven’t even got seven unos, let alone seven thousand. Incidentally you owe me one.”

“I could borrow it,” said Bard.

“Borrow six thousand! You! Don’t make me laugh.”

Bard regarded her meditatively, seemed about to retort, and then apparently thought better of it. “Three years,” he murmured, “three years stuck up there on that godforsaken heap of grit. What on earth can have possessed her to do it?”

“There’s Fiona,” warned Daphne as the elevator purred and clicked. “You’d better not tell her about the Caves. She’ll think you’ve gone off your skids.”

For a moment they both listened to the sound of voices along the hall, the high, rather breathless tones of Daphne’s mother, and the deep, evenly-spaced replies of Woodberry the family’s humanoid. Bard walked across to the sideboard and poured himself a long draught of purple Aphrodite.

Daphne giggled. “It’s a bit late for that now, isn’t it?”

Ignoring her pointedly, Bard tilted back his head, closed his eyes, and swallowed the potion in four huge gulps. Then he thrust the goblet into the rinsing niche, walked along the passage to his own room, locked the door behind him and flung himself face downwards on the divan. He thought of Andrena, curled like an embryo in her cocoon of plastic foam, dreaming her way through the freezing interplanetary reaches, and his heart ached for what he had lost. With a groan he rolled over and stabbed one of the agate buttons inset on the cabinet beside him, then cradling the pillow-talker to his cheek he once more closed his eyes.

Delicate as a thread of gossamer the plaintive melody drifted into his ear, cool tear drops of sound that had first eased the anguish of a consumptive Polish exile five hundred years before. Presently the youthful sorrow lines faded from Bard’s forehead and he slept.

* * *

Sir Lawrence Cecil, E.C., O.P.D., slid the two visospools into his security wallet, said good night to his secretary and stepped out of his thirty-second floor office in the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries. The sorbo-surfaced pedaway whispered him sedately down a corridor in which the lighting was always mellow afternoon—symbolic of harvest, as Sir Lawrence had once suggested to a colleague in a moment of unusual levity—and deposited him before the elevator where he murmured a number into a microphone.

A passenger was already in the cage and Sir Lawrence, recognising Andrew Battersby, Senior Geneticist and head of the experimental Lincolnshire Fish Farm Project, nodded a greeting.

“Gud evening, Sir Lawrence,” responded Battersby, fixing his travelling companion with a sceptical Aberdonian eye. “Have ye no had a chance tae consider the report yet?”

“I have it here,” replied Sir Lawrence, touching the breast of his ministerial blouse. “It arrived from Waterways and Drainage ten minutes ago.”

Battersby nodded gloomily. “Aye, we’re anticipatin’ some opposition from that quarter. Yon Henderson’s a wee mite short on the vision. If there’s nae immediate return for his uno he’s wettin’ himself.”

Sir Lawrence permitted himself a carefully noncommittal smile. The elevator sighed to a stop. The two men stepped out and made their way across the almost deserted roof-top restaurant and out into the unfiltered evening sunshine. Battersby drew a deep breath and exhaled it raucously. “Ah, that’s great!” he exclaimed. “Just what the doctor ordered!”

Sir Lawrence glanced round at him, momentarily at a loss as to what had inspired this outburst, then took out the cap of dark red silk that was de rigueur for all Senior Civil Servants and eased it on to his skull. “Aren’t you off soon?” he enquired.

“Aye,” nodded Battersby, screwing up his eyes against the sunlight, “tomorrow morning.”

As though a child had puffed rainbow-tinted seeds from a dandelion clock, a small flurry of helicars rose from the roof of Parliament Tower. Glinting gaily in the sunshine they dispersed outwards over the city. “Sitting suspended,” grunted Battersby. “Time I was off too.”

“Where is it you’re taking your vacation?” asked Sir Lawrence. He was not really interested but suspected he had been told and did not like not remembering. “Stornoway?”

“Aye, the Northern Hatcheries,” nodded Battersby. “Rosenberg informs me they’ve been havin’ some remarkable results wi’ Porphyra. Agnes’s folks live up there, ye know.”

“Thus you combine business with pleasure,” murmured Sir Lawrence, acknowledging the approach of a green-overalled humanoid chauffeur. “Admirable dedication.”

Battersby chuckled. “And which is which, eh, Sir Lawrence?”

Recalling Agnes Battersby and deducing therefrom the probable nature of her family, Sir Lawrence wrinkled up his nose and gave a little whinny of amusement. “Bon voyage,” he said, and moved off in the direction taken by the humanoid.

“Can I expect a decision on the report when I get back?” Battersby called after him.

Sir Lawrence raised his right hand in a token gesture of acknowledgement but did not turn his head.

The geneticist was still standing on the area, gazing south towards the haze-hidden soya fields of Kent with the sunlight buttering his mop of grey hair, when the black ministerial helicar rose, humming serenely, and skimmed towards the Green Park air lane. While it hovered waiting for the entry signal, Sir Lawrence glanced down at the newsflicker on the Acriflex building and had time to note that Beryllium was down two points; Europadrugs up half a point; Consolidated Nickel unchanged at a hundred and two point six. A green light winked on the instrument panel and the chauffeur deftly slipped the machine into the arterial lane and headed it west “A pleasant evening, sir,” he murmured.

“Very,” responded Sir Lawrence, reaching forward to adjust the Polaroid sun-filter. As he leant back a small, scarlet and silver veetol airster darted in from their left, jinked across two yards in front of them and bored its way with maniac skill into the press of traffic ahead.

“Imbecile!” fumed Sir Lawrence. “Did you get his number?”

“I’m afraid I didn’t, sir.”

“Why they have to choose the urban arteries when they’ve got the whole of the Weald to play the fool over—It’s high time something was done about it. One of these days there’ll be a really serious accident.”

The humanoid expressed no opinion on the matter. Sir Lawrence sighed and peered downwards into the shadowed canyon of the Edgware Road. The exodus was now at its flood and the main pedaways, each fed by innumerable tributaries, were solid rushing rivers of humanity. He gave an involuntary shiver. At such moments London almost terrified him.

Gently as a closing eyelid the helicar settled on the airpark at the centre of Churchill Court, one of the five hundred colossal star-shaped blocks that fronted each other all the way from Baker Street down the length of the Finchley Road. Sir Lawrence pressed his signet on to the pad the chauffeur held out, nodded in dismissal and walked briskly across the parterre to the northern wing. Before descending the escalator which would carry him down to the top floor pedaway, he paused to exchange a word with a kneeling humanoid who was carefully pinching out errant side-shoots on a bed of tomato plants.

Albert had been tending the Churchill Court roof gardens for longer than Sir Lawrence had lived there, and between the two something one might almost call friendship had developed. Unlik. . .