The Chromosome Game (16 page)

Despite all; despite the horror that all of this implied, Krand managed a grin of approval. In a mild voice he said, in his most managerial style, ‘You’re hired!’

Trell managed an appreciative grin but it soon went. He asked Eagle, ‘So what’s next?’

‘In my opinion you’ll have to interrogate the computer in a way it can’t evade. Get at the truth in one go.’

Trell said: ‘Check. I’ll tell it we don’t buy the crap about Metal Disease and ask it what gives. With supplies as low as they are aboard this battered wreck of a millionaire’s yacht we need to get action.’

Krand said, ‘Let’s get the right kind, though.’

Trell said, ‘Unpredictable. We have to chance it.’

Krand said, ‘I prefer to know what’s in the crater before I risk turning medium-rare in a live volcano.’

‘We’re already in it. You think we can afford to wait till it erupts?’

‘No. Guess you’re right, Trell. If we don’t take the initiative now, someone else will.’

*

The Computer said to Trell, ‘So you don’t believe me?’

‘Do we hell!’

‘I advise you to watch how you speak to me.’

‘Prove you’re a Truth Machine and I might.’

There was a terrible menace in the Computer’s voice by now. ‘Sit down, Trell 484.’

‘I think I’ll do just that.’

‘Clearly you are accusing me of something. What?’

‘I don’t know which to cover first. Let’s begin with your intrusions into human affairs. Krand and I are quite capable of dealing with Sladey — without resorting to electronics, thanks all the same.’

‘484, you are thinking purely of the episode with Helen-043.’

‘Okay, if there’s more we’ll deal with that, too. Lay off people, Controller. Pick a computer your own size.’

‘May I speak, 484?’

‘As long as it’s not your usual doubletalk, go ahead.’

‘I would advise you to drop that tone with me.’

‘Consider it dropped.’

‘Scorda and Sladey became aware that supplies here were low. They planned to grab what they could for themselves and their privileged friends … at the expense of the rest of you.’

‘I guessed that.’

‘They are therefore at this time being tortured by the auto-nurses.’

‘Crazy.
Crazy
!.
You
— and those who programmed you in the first place — are implicated in the supply shortages. You could have let us off this ship earlier in any case, so that we could have started to forage before people panicked. In other words you are torturing others for your own sins.’

‘Was it my sin that brought about the malicious attack on Helen-043?’

‘More double-talk! Sladey has a quiet little chat with you, on a topic he suddenly knows a great deal about —’

‘— which topic?’

‘Race. Up till now I thought that was a thing you did with horses, Formula II cars, stuff like that. Sladey knows otherwise — after his latest intimate intrigue with you, Controller — then proceeds to beat up Helen.’

‘And are you suggesting he should not be punished?’

‘I’m suggesting that Krand should place a few bruises on the guy you are now pretending is not your favoured stooge. I guess you can fix him up okay with some filth-type pain so that he obeys your every whim. Great. Cold-blooded torture may appeal to your precision tooled hardware but it’s not only inhumane, it’s liable to backfire.’

‘You are being childish, Trell.’

‘Sure. I’m fourteen years old. Hang on a sec, will you, Controller?’

Trell grabbed a microphone and plugged it into the loudspeaker system. ‘Emergency, emergency, this is Trell, repeat, Trell. Calling Krand. Eagle, Nembrak and your team; Sakini, Inikas: Please go to the Nursing Area immediately. Release without delay those who are being brutalised by the auto-nurses, repeat,
without
delay
, and take the injured to Kelda for medical treatment. Sakini, Inikas, please assist Kelda. I will join you shortly. End of message.’

Trell put the mike down.

There came a long silence.

Trell broke it. ‘Just what prejudices are built into your software that I don’t know about, Controller?’

The tone of the reply was so ugly that Trell felt an electrical sensation in his spine. The Controller said, If ever you interfere with my actions again, 484, you will meet with a punishment far more severe than that meted out to these hooligans’

‘You helped to make them hooligans. But — who knows? — tomorrow they’ll be your angels again. It’s kind of hard to keep up.’

‘Adolescents — yourself included — are not always predictable.’

‘Apparently computers suffer from the same disorder. I understood that computers dealt not in malice, but facts.’

‘Then perhaps, Trell, it is time you knew some of them.’

‘No kidding. All these people need to know where they stand. They can’t, because — talking of races — you keep backing a different horse. The result is a deplorable state of emotional insecurity throughout the community.’

‘I promise you that the facts themselves will hardly improve that aspect of the situation, 484.’

‘Try me.’

‘Not if you’re going to bandy them around.’

‘Why not leave that to my judgement, Controller?’

‘And Kelda’s, I suppose?’

‘Sure. And Kelda’s.’

Are you prepared for a shock?’

‘I seem to get a good many and I’m still going strong.’

‘Try this one on for size, then.’

‘Don’t let’s be spiteful, Controller.’

‘Agreed. Just the plain facts. Now. Listen …’

*

‘Talk in whispers, Kelda. Tiny whispers. We must be heard by nobody. Understand?
Nobody
!’

‘What on earth’s happened?’

‘I don’t know where to begin.’

‘Try the beginning.’

‘It seems there wasn’t one.’

Trell, you’re not making any sense! Tell me —’

‘— Voice
down
! They mustn’t hear!
Murmur
, only.’

‘Right. Keep going.’

‘This is going to strike you as quite horrific.’

‘I can see
that
in your face! Don’t worry ’bout me. Talk.’

‘Right. All these movies, these holograms of sculpture, recordings of orchestras, stuff like that — ’

‘— Yes?’

‘Planted here on this ship. Three hundred years ago.
More
than
three hundred years ago!’

‘But …
us
!. What about us? We must have been —’

‘We
weren’t
. We weren’t born in the normal way at all.’

‘Trell, I think I’m going to go mad. Weren’t
born
?’

‘Not inside our mothers. They died. In some terrible war. Hundreds of years ago. Don’t tell me it’s incredible. It’s plain impossible. It happens to be true. There’s nobody left out
there
. No one!’

‘But … How?’

‘Quiet. For Pete’s sake,
quiet
!
’

‘Okay. How’d it happen?’

‘I don’t know all of it. Semen was somehow stored — living semen in the sense that it remained active all that time — and female ova … kept in things like ice trays, a thin membrane skin kept them apart, until … You know the startime clock —’

‘— caesium clock, Trell. This is no time for babytalk.’

‘— Irony in that remark, Kelda. Deep-level irony. You see, when the caesium clock triggered off the computer, everything picked up where it left off —’

‘ — Left off
when
?’

‘In the twentieth century.’

‘The
twentieth
century?’

‘That’s what I said.’

‘So our parents —’

‘— The parents probably never even met.’

‘And they belong in the history books. And … nobody survived anybody?’

‘Only us. Less than two hundred people. Only two hundred people in the whole world, all of them — us — the same age, give or take a few weeks.’

‘Trell, it just can’t be true! It
can’t
. I can’t even grasp it … How were we conceived? — brought up? How were we delivered as baby people?’

‘By machines.’

‘You know this for certain?’

‘For certain sure. I had a long talk with the Controller.’

‘I know.’

‘Kelda, I don’t want to heap on —’

‘— Just talk on. What I can’t seem to grab the first time around we can go back over.’

‘Kay. I’d say the Controller has a split personality —’

‘— Can that develop in a computer?’

‘Oh yes. That’s been known for some time. A lot of time, Kelda.’

‘Three hundred years of it.’

‘Plus the time they had to learn about the things until everything blew … You know chain reactions? … Like with the reactor that supplies the electricity for this place? … Basis for huge bombs. Unbelievable bombs.’

‘Trell, what in God’s name is a “bomb”?’

‘Sorry. Explosive device. For killing people with. There’s a word: Megadeath. Know what that means?’

‘Mega … That’s from the Greek, obviously. A million. A million … Trell, it means a million deaths!’

‘And that’s just the unit used for counting! Deaths to the nearest million. Had enough?’

‘I’m going to have to know but I … I feel … there’s something terrible happening inside my brain, Trell. It’s kind of seething, like it’s being hammered to pieces —’

‘Blown to bits. That’s how I feel, Kelda.
Literally
blown
to
bits
!’

‘You said not to raise our voices.’

‘Right. Right! I’ll try and take this cool. There was a war. The main part of this ship was stuffed full of refugees —’

‘— But how could they have stood a chance? Surely, in a world that must have virtually become the inside of a reactor —’

‘— That’s exactly it. Right first time. The world was
literally
the inside of a reactor … Fission products gone berserk … Strontium-90, you name it! … Iodine-131, Cobalt-60, Caesium-137 —’

‘— the very substances which —’

‘— which run our “startime-clock”, Kelda. Some star. No one could hope to survive in it. How could they?’

‘How can we?’

‘That was the idea of the three hundred years. Radiation disperses to a sufficient extent —’

‘— but there’s
nobody
else
! And this community … It’s bad enough as it is …
Tortureday
. that’s what the kids down here are calling it, just wait till I tell you what those filthy auto-nurses did to Sladey and his hoods … punishment is one thing! … Christ, I’ll tell you, but not now, I got to, well you know, just keep talking … the kids call it
Tortureday
and that’s all they are, Trell, just kids! And it’s all
we
are! So how do we cope? We’re just orphans in a deep-freeze, dinosaurs! —’

‘— The answer is we get out of here. There’s a reason and the Controller has got to face it — unless it’s gone completely mad: there’s hardly any food left, almost no fresh water.
Kasiga
will have to blow its top.’

‘And we manage out there
on
our
own? No adults? Nothing whatever to fill the gap between the twentieth century and now? Time ran out, so they left their eggs on a derelict ship!’

‘But we mustn’t sink.’

‘That’s right, we mustn’t sink. And it won’t matter, will it, not knowing … Why they did this, why they put all that effort in preserving some world for the future, instead of keeping their own world alive and safe, how crazy could they get? If they thought we could live, why didn’t they go on living? Why not megalife instead of megadeath?’

‘Kelda, we’ll never understand them. How can we? All I know is, the computer is steeped in their squalid propaganda. It’s sick, like they were.’

‘We aren’t, though. Trell, say we’re not sick, without knowing it?’

‘You’re not, Kelda. No way. Therefore I can’t be either.’

‘But … Trell?’

‘Yes?’

‘How do I know I exist?’

*

Using the experiment he had set up in the Fan Room, Eagle arrived at his own conclusions almost simultaneously with those of Trell and Kelda.

But in an infinitely different way.

Calling across a time/space of over three hundred years, he dialled a number on the telephone and waited.

He did, it is true, hear voices. And undoubtedly they were shrill with panic and distress. But nobody spoke back to him.