Prisoners of Tomorrow (81 page)

“That would be quite all right,” Celia said.

“We’ll manage,” Veronica promised. “They’re more awkward than heavy. You worry too much.”

Mrs. Crayford glanced at the clock display on the room’s companel. “Well, then, I really must be getting along. I did so enjoy the trip and the company. We must do it again soon.” She heaved herself to her feet and looked around. “Now, where did I leave my coat?”

“I hung it in the hallway,” Veronica said, getting up. She walked ahead and out the door while Mrs. Crayford waddled a few feet behind. “Don’t bother bringing anything out, Celia,” Veronica’s voice called back. “I’ll come back in for the things.”

Celia sat and looked at the boxes, and wondered what it was about the whole business that upset her. It wasn’t so much the spectacle of Mrs. Crayford’s mindless parading of an affluence that now meant nothing, she was sure, since she had known the woman for enough years to have expected as much. Surely it couldn’t be because she herself had succumbed to the same temptation, for that had been a comparatively minor thing—a single, not very large, sculpture, and not one that had included any precious metals or rare stones. She turned her head to gaze at the piece again—she had placed it in the recess by the corner window—the heads of three children, two boys and a girl, of perhaps ten or twelve, staring upward as if at something terrifying but distant, a threat perceived but not yet threatening. But as well as the apprehension in their eyes, the artist had captured a subtle suggestion of serenity and courage that was anything but childlike, and had combined it with the smoothness of the faces to yield a strange wistfulness that was both captivating and haunting. The piece was fifteen years old, the dealer in Franklin had told them, and had been made by one of the Founders. Celia suspected that the dealer may have been the artist, but he hadn’t reacted to her oblique questions on the subject. Were the expressions on those faces affecting her for some reason? Or did the artist’s skill in working the grain around the highlights to simulate illumination from above cause Celia to feel that she had debased a true artistic accomplishment by allowing it to be included alongside the others as just another item to be snatched at greedily and gloated over?

Veronica came back into the room and began picking up Mrs. Crayford’s boxes. “It’s all right. You stay there, Celia. I can manage.” She saw the expression on Celia’s face and smiled. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I know—awful, isn’t it. It’s just a phase. She’ll get over it.”

“I hope so,” Celia murmured.

Veronica paused as she was about to turn toward the door. “I’m beginning to miss being thrown out in the middle of the night. How’s your handsome sergeant these days? You haven’t finished with him, have you?”

Celia gave her a reproachful look. “Oh, come on . . . you know that was just a diversion. I haven’t seen him for a while now, but then, everyone has been so busy. Finished? Not really . . . who knows?” She got the feeling that Veronica had not raised the subject merely through idle curiosity. She was right.

“I’ve got one too,” Veronica whispered, bringing her face close to Celia’s ear.

“What?”

“A new lover. What do you think?”

“Anyone I know?”

Veronica had to bite her lip to suppress the beginnings of a giggle. “A Chironian.”

Celia’s eyes opened wide. “You’re kidding!”

“I’m not. He’s an architect . . . and gorgeous! I met him in Franklin yesterday and stayed last night. It’s so easy—they act as if it’s perfectly natural . . . And they’re
so
uninhibited!” Celia just gaped at her. Veronica winked and nodded. “Really. I’ll tell you about it later. I’d better go.”

“You bitch!” Celia protested. “I want to hear about it
now.”

Veronica laughed. “You’ll have to eat your heart out wondering. Take care. I’ll call you tonight.”

When the others had gone, Celia sank back in her chair and started brooding again. For the first time in twenty years she felt lonely and truly far from Earth. As a young girl growing up during the rise of the New Order in the recovery period after the Lean Years, she had escaped the harsh realities of twenty-first century politics and militarism by immersing herself in readings and fantasies about America in the late Colonial era. Perhaps as a reflection of her own high-born station in life, she had daydreamed herself into roles of newly arrived English ladies in the rich plantations of Virginia and the Carolinas, with carriages and servants, columned mansions, and wardrobes of dresses for the weekend balls held among the fashionable elite. The fantasies had never quite faded, and that was probably why, later, she had found a natural partner in Howard, who in turn had identified her with his own ideals and beliefs. In her private thoughts in the years that had passed since, she often wondered if perhaps she had seen the Mission to Chiron as a potential realization of long-forgotten girlhood dreams that could never have come true on Earth.

Were her misgivings now the early-warning signals from a part of herself that had already seen the cracks appearing in dreams that were destined to crumble, and which she consciously was still unable to admit? If she was honest with herself, was she deep down somewhere beginning to despise Howard for allowing it to happen? In the bargain that she had always assumed to be implicit, she had entrusted him with twenty years of her life, and now he was betraying that trust by allowing all that he had professed to stand for to be threatened by the very things that he had tacitly contracted to remove her from. Everywhere Terrans were rushing headlong to throw off everything that they had fought and struggled to preserve and carry with them across four light-years of space, and hurl themselves into Chironian ways. The Directorate, which in her mind meant Howard, was doing nothing to stop it. She had once read a quotation by a British visitor, Janet Schaw, to the Thirteen Colonies in 1763, who had remarked with some disapproval on the “most disgusting equality” that she had observed prevailing on all sides. It suited the present situation well.

She swallowed as she traced through her thoughts and checked herself. She was rationalizing or hiding something from herself, she knew. Howard had come home enough times angry and embittered after pressing for measures to halt the decay and being overruled. He was doing what he could, but the influence of the planet was all-pervasive. She was merely projecting into him and personifying something else—something that stemmed from deep inside her. Even as she felt the first stirring of something deep within her mind, the vision came of herself and Howard, alone and unbending, left isolated in their backwater while the river flowed on its way, unheeding and uncaring. After twenty years, nothing lay ahead but emptiness and oblivion. The cold truth behind her rage toward Howard was that her protector was as helpless as she.

Now she knew why Earth seemed so far away. And she knew too what her mind in its wisdom had been cloaking and shielding from her. It was fear.

Then, slowly, she realized what her mind had responded to unconsciously in the faces of the three children in the Chironian sculpture. The artist had been not merely an expert, but a master. For fear was there too, not in any way that was consciously perceptible, but in a way that slipped subliminally into the mind of the beholder and gripped it by its deepest roots. That was why she had felt disturbed all the way back from Franklin. But there was still something else. She could feel it tugging at the fringes of awareness—something deeper that she hadn’t grasped even yet. She turned her eyes to the sculpture again.

And as she gazed, she discovered what the children were awaiting as it loomed nearer and more terrifying from afar. The realization tightened her stomach. Even from fifteen years ago . . . it was she—for she had come with the
Mayflower II.
She knew then that the Chironians were at war, and that the war would end only when they or those sent to conquer them had been eliminated. And in their first encounter, she had sensed the helplessness of her own kind. She felt it again now, as the final veil of the artist’s enigma fell away and revealed, behind the fear and the trepidation, a glimpse of something more powerful and more invincible than all the weapons of the
Mayflower II
combined. She was staring at her own extinction.

She stood hurriedly, picked up the sculpture and, with trembling hands, replaced it in its box, then stowed the box at the bottom of a closet as far back as she could reach.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Port Norday was twenty-five miles or so north of Franklin, beyond the far headland of Mandel Bay, on a rocky stretch of coastline indented by a river estuary that widened about a large island and several smaller ones. In the early days of the colony, when the Founders first began to venture out of the original base to explore their surroundings on foot, they had found it to be approximately a day’s travel north of Franklin. Hence its name.

It had grown in stages from constructions that began toward the end of the colony’s first decade, by which time the Founders, having profited from reflections on some of their experiences at Franklin, had been more inclined to follow the blunt admonition offered by the machines, which had amounted to, “It’s going to be an industrial complex. If you mess around with it, it won’t work.” The result was a clean, efficient, functional layout more in keeping with what the
Kuan-yin
’s
mission planners had envisaged, suitably modified where appropriate to take account of local conditions. Besides its industrial facilities, the complex included a seaport; an air and space terminal distributed mainly across the islands, which were interconnected by a network of tunnels; a college of advanced technology; and a small residential sector intended more to afford short- to medium-term accommodation for people whose business made it convenient for them to be in the vicinity than to house permanent inhabitants, although about half the population had been there for years. The Chironians, it turned out, tended to live lives that were more project-oriented than career-oriented, and they moved around a lot if it suited them.

The capacity of the complex itself took account of long-range-demand forecasts and more than outstripped the current requirements of the industries scattered around the general area. Its primary power source was a one-thousand-gigawatt, magnetically confined fusion system which combined various features of the tokamak, mirror, and “bumpy torus” configurations pioneered toward the end of the previous century, producing electricity very efficiently by blasting high-velocity, high-temperature, ionized plasma through a series of immense magnetohydrodynamic coils. In addition, the fast neutrons produced in copious amounts from this process were harnessed to breed more tritium fuel from lithium, to breed fissionable isotopes of uranium and plutonium from fertile elements obtained elsewhere in the same complex, and to “burn up” via nuclear transmutation the small amounts of radioactive wastes left over from the economy’s fission component, the fuel cycle of which was fully closed and included complete reprocessing and recycling of reactor products.

The plasma emerged from this primary process with sufficient residual energy to provide high-quality heat for supplying a hydrogen-extraction plant, where seawater was “cracked” thermally to yield bases for a whole range of liquid synthetic fuels, a primary-metals extraction and processing subcomplex, a chemical-manufacturing subcomplex, and a desalination plant which was still not operational, but anticipated large-scale irrigation projects farther inland in years to come.

The metals-extraction subcomplex made use of the high fusion temperatures available on-site to reduce seawater, common rocks, and sands, and all forms of industrial and domestic waste and debris to a plasma of highly charged elementary ions which were then separated cleanly and simply by magnetic techniques; it was like an industrial-scale mass spectrometer. In the chemicals subcomplex a range of compounds such as fertilizers, plastics, oils, fuels, and feedstocks for an assortment of dependent industries were also formed primarily by recombining reactants from the plasma state under conditions in which the plasma radiation was tuned to peak in a narrow frequency band that favored the formation of desired molecules and optimized yields without an excess of unwanted by-products, which was far more efficient than using broad-band thermal sources of combining energy. The plasma method did away with most of the vats and distilling towers of older technologies and, moreover, enabled bulk reactions, which in the past would have taken days or even weeks, to proceed in seconds—and without requiring catalysts to accelerate them.

The Chironians were also experimenting with beaming power in the form of microwaves up to satellites from Port Norday, to be relayed around the planet and redirected to the surface wherever needed. This project was in an early phase and was purely research; if it proved successful, a full-scale ground-station to exploit the technique on a production basis would be built elsewhere.

Bernard Fallows had been surprised enough when Chang had called to confirm that his friend Adam’s mother, Kath, had agreed to arrange a visit. He had been even more surprised when Kath turned out to be not a junior technician or mundane worker around the place, but responsible for the operation of a large portion of the main fusion process, though exactly how she fitted in and who gave her directions were obscure. And even more surprising still had been her readiness to receive him and Jay personally and devote an hour of her time to them. The comparable prospect of Leighton Merrick showing Chang and friends round the main-drive section of the
Mayflower II
was unthinkable. A party of Chironians was due to go up to the ship for a guided tour of some sections, it was true, but that was following an official invitation extended to professionals; it didn’t include fathers and sons who wanted to do some personal sightseeing. Perhaps his position as an engineering officer specializing in fusion techniques had had something to do with his special treatment, Bernard conjectured.

There didn’t seem to be any concept of rank or status here. Bernard had seen orders being given and accepted without question, sure enough, but the roles appeared to be purely functional and capable of being interchanged freely depending on who was considered best qualified to take command of the particular subject at issue. This seemed to be decided by an unspoken consensus which the Chironians appeared somehow to have evolved without the bickerings, jealousies, and conflicts that Bernard would have thought inevitable. As far as he could make out there was no absolute, top-down hierarchical structure at all. It was a microcosm of the whole planet, he was beginning to suspect. Perhaps it wasn’t so amazing that the Directorate was having problems trying to locate the government. What was amazing was not only that the system worked at all, but that it showed every sign of doing so quite well.