The Zul Enigma (69 page)

‘I don’t know if you
know,’ Scott went on, ‘but the shock doctrine arose out of the same logic on
which electric shock treatment for mentally ill patients is based. Of course,
when used on a large group of individuals, just over one billion of us, it not
only diverted our attention away from how the control of the world was
irrevocably changed bit by bit, but also rendered our minds more open to
conditioning.’

‘Even so…’ Rachael
lowered her voice, ‘you must have had some idea what was going on.’

‘Yeah,’ he gave a stiff
nod, ‘deep down I suppose I did.’

‘And you knew who was
behind it.’

He shook his head. ‘Not
at first.’

‘But you guessed,
right?’

He made another abrupt
nod. His lips were a thin, pale line.

‘And if you could guess,
then there must have been others who could, too?’

He paused before
answering and then breathed out his reply so quietly Rachael had to lean
forward to catch it. ‘Yeah.’

‘But no one said
anything. Why?’ Scott started to open his mouth, but Rachael cut him off. ‘You
know what I find unbelievable, Scott?’ She looked him directly in the eye, her
face taut, her eyes hard, ‘that you’re calmly sitting here in front of me,
telling me you and others knew who was responsible for the deaths of billions
of people but no one did a damn thing about it. You told me you believed my
father was innocent. That Barbara thought so too. So why didn’t you speak out
when he was arrested? Or after he was murdered? You said yourself the Tribunal
had no evidence against him. There was no trial and yet he was branded the
villain in all this. Why didn’t
anyone
try to defend his name?’

‘Rachael, they killed
six billion people. Do you think they’d have thought twice about killing
someone who tried to expose them?’

‘But…’

‘I know those of you who
are too young to remember hate to hear us old fogies saying it over and over
again. You even said it yourself, and believe me, it’s true,’ Scott gripped the
arms of his chair. ‘It’s
impossible
for you to imagine what it was like
for us… it was brutal.

‘It was excruciating
enough that people witnessed what happened on their own doorsteps, but the
added agony of seeing what was going on in countries worse off than their own?
You worked for GRS… you’ve got a better idea than most… but I want to show you
something.’

Scot activated a screen
incorporated in the fabric of the living room wall. ‘Take a look at this. It’s
classified archive footage put together by the US government in February 2013.’

Rachael watched in
silence as teams of men, dressed in white protective suits, carried bodies out
of a poor housing area in Northern Manhattan, New York, and laid them on the
street. Babies, children, teenagers, adults. Men and women. The majority were
African Americans and Latinos. A few were white. The video cut to a heap of
bodies. Hundreds of them. A bulldozer loaded them onto a truck.

Next was Africa.
“Matadi, The Democratic Republic of the Congo”, the sub-title read at the
bottom of the screen, DR Congo’s largest port. A line of dumper trucks were
queuing up, waiting in turn to deposit their cargo into an oil tanker, one that
had been converted, since the cargo was not fluid like oil. It was human
bodies. Thousands of them. Millions of them. The narrator explained that few
countries outside Australasia, Western Europe and North America had the
facilities to incinerate all their losses. Dumping bodies at sea was a
preferred method of disposal. The sharks did the rest.

The commentary droned
on. It spewed out facts and figures Rachael could hardly take in. How five per
cent of survivors worldwide subsequently died due to disease. How only ten per
cent of cities in Africa and South America were cleaned up because it was an
impossible task to extract so many bodies. It was more efficient to evacuate
survivors. How in the impoverished countries bodies were left to decompose or,
as in equatorial areas like DR Congo, natural disposal methods, like
crocodiles, cleaned up. How governments declared huge areas of their countries
unsafe to visit because they were littered with remains.

There was more footage
of queues of trucks. This time accessing abandoned mines and quarries in Chile.
Instead of taking mineral wealth away, though, the trucks brought bodies in to
be covered later with earth. Bodies heaped upon bodies. Limbs intertwined with
limbs. No refrigeration. Hooded, suited drivers. Rachael could not imagine the
stench.

The film finished and
Scott deactivated the screen.

‘And the Tribunal said
one man was guilty of all that. Your father. You’ve read everything written
about him… you know at first some journalists claimed he’d been framed. But
they didn’t stand a chance.

‘Remember what I just
told you about the Council on Foreign Relations? They
owned
the media!
Not one unaligned view was allowed to filter through to the public for long,
without being sneered at or smothered. Anyone who spoke out against the
Tribunal was branded “unpatriotic”. No one wanted that, especially not at that
time. When something that catastrophic happens, people just want to huddle
together. Only a very few were brave enough to publicly come out and say what
they really thought… and they were dealt with… every single one. The cabal had
us exactly where they wanted us, that’s the truth, and not one single coherent
conspiracy story was ever allowed to emerge.’ Scott jiggled the ice in his
glass. ‘The people responsible will all be dead by now, anyway.’

‘But their dynasties
live on. I find it… well… unbelievable. You know something? Even the first time
we talked, I couldn’t understand how you could stand by and do nothing when the
Tribunal arrested my father – but now – now you’ve admitted you
knew who was behind it… I’m… well… I’m speechless. How anyone could target
every single person living in poverty on the planet and murder them… I tell
you, they were animals. But how much better were the rest of you?
You
all sat back and accepted it.’

‘We
never
accepted
it.’ Scott growled. ‘We had no choice but to live with it.’ He tilted his head
towards Rachael. ‘And you have no idea how hard that was.’

‘And you don’t feel
guilty? At all?’

He swallowed. ‘You read
what your mother wrote. About Dr Roberts. How he didn’t want to talk about it?
Or analyse it? He just wanted to get on with his life… right? See, it was like
that for all of us. At the time all we wanted was an end to it. Can you not
understand that? What we saw. It was… it was… sometimes I think it would have
been better to have died with the others… because everything since has been
torture. Trying to carry on as if life is okay… as if we are okay…’

But Rachael didn’t
soften. She leaned in closer and said, ‘What you did was disgusting…
unforgivable…’

‘Rachael…’ Scott
whispered, but his words turned to sobs that racked his body and he hung his
head in his wrinkly, loose skinned hands while, for the first time during any
of their encounters, his façade of calm control buckled. Without it he shrunk,
dwarfed by the mass of the sculpting chair and looking every one of his
eighty-eight years. She waited in silence until he lifted his head. ‘Rachael… I
could never have been a party to planning such a thing. I could never have
taken part in making that outrageous, unspeakable, contemptible decision. And…’

‘And what?’

‘… and as the first few
weeks passed some of us did start discussing it. I spoke to Barbara. We traded
thoughts and ideas. When the Tribunal announced it was going to arrest your
father and the next day he was shot, that’s when we were pretty sure the shadow
government, as we knew it then, was behind the massacre. We talked about what
we could do,’ he looked at her, his arms outstretched, ‘but because we couldn’t
work out why… what had pushed them into it… there was always that doubt in our
minds. And there was always Zul. Remember, we didn’t know about global cooling
back then.

‘Then over the weeks and
months… as the shock doctrine took its toll… and with us having so much grief
to overcome… so much pain…’ his sentence petered out. ‘It was ten years later
they announced global cooling and by then… well… we were over our indignation…
we were over wanting justice… no one wanted to drag up the ugly past… that
monstrous, odious past… ever again.

‘Plus… truth is… where
would we be now if it hadn’t happened? Climate specialists tell us we have
another twenty to thirty years left on this planet. Fifty max. The way things
stand now, when the time comes to evacuate, the space stations will be finished
and we will all go. We’ll go up the Space Elevators, wave goodbye to our homes
and cherish the hope that one day in the future our descendants will live on a
terra-formed Mars or even return to a regenerated blue planet.

‘But,’ he took a slug of
his whisky, ‘with seven billion in 2012 and predictions that would have grown
to between nine and fourteen billion by the end of this century, what would we
do? What could we do? Answer me that?’

‘That’s not the point…’

‘What
would
we
have done, Rachael? As you yourself said, there’s no way all those people could
be saved. So who would have been chosen to survive and who would have been
chosen to stay and freeze to death? And who would have done the choosing? Or
would we have just fought it out?’

‘That doesn’t make it
right…’

‘I know it doesn’t make
it right. And all I can console myself with is that back in 2012 we’d been
warned that to save our galaxy we had to become better people. Everyone was
waiting, half expecting the population to be reduced. Radically. Of course, it
was up to each individual whether he believed Zul or not, but the fact was no
one knew if it was true or not, and none of the people who
did
believe
it knew who would go or who would stay. So it
was
all lies. But the
point is, we had months to think about it, to talk about it and to get
ourselves ready for something – whatever we believed – to happen.
We had a finite date and on that date we all knew there was a possibility we’d
die or our lives would continue in a vastly depopulated world. I know…’ he held
up both hands to stop her from interrupting, ‘I was there, damn you. I saw it
with my own eyes. And it
was
horrific. And of course it was
wrong
.
It was the worst thing I could ever,
ever
, have imagined. That said…’
and he lowered his voice, ‘it
was
quick and it
was
painless. And…
well… everyone had had the chance to prepare.’

‘How can you say…’

‘And
no one
had
to go through the agony of fighting to survive or of freezing to death.’

‘But that doesn’t makes
it right,’ Rachael repeated, her brown eyes sparking.

‘I know it doesn’t make
it right,’ Scott murmured, ‘but surely as long as you’ve had time to prepare
and there’s no suffering and it’s quick, it has to be a better way to die.’

‘And so,’ Rachael said,
her tone accusing, ‘you lied to me before.’

‘I…’

‘All that nonsense about
being immersed in your new job and just meeting Diane, that was a lie. So what
if you didn’t know about global cooling… you still knew who was behind the
massacre… the only group who could be behind it. The truth was you were too
scared to speak out. Scared for your own life, even after billions had given up
theirs to save you.’

Scott dropped his head.
‘Of course, you’re right.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me
all this before?’

‘What’s the point in
raking over the past? Of stirring it up again after all these years? After
finishing your mother’s diary last night, after reading her analysis? I let
myself get carried away. All of a sudden I was back in the day with a trainee
on my hands guiding her through a case.’ He laughed a bitter laugh. There was no
humour in it. ‘I’m getting old. Old and stupid. I should never have told you
about the cabal.

‘Thing is, I lived in
the former world. People tried communism, Marxism, dictatorships, democracies…
none of it worked. But this,’ he tried to smile, ‘it works. Look at us. We have
good lives. We’re all equal, the wealth is spread evenly, we have peace, and
mankind will survive.’

‘You have the gall to
try and justify what they did? How dare you?’

‘I’m not trying to
justify anything. But let me ask you something. Apart from the freedom to put
your passionate, inadequately formed, unsubstantiated ideas into action, what
exactly do you think is missing in your life?’

‘Other than the
massacred billions, you mean? And my birth parents?’

‘Rachael,’ Scott rubbed
his knees to loosen the joints. ‘You’ve had the privilege of an education. You
studied what you wanted, worked where you wanted, travel where you want. You
have your health. You spend your money how you want and you earn enough of it,
like all of us, to afford within reason all the luxuries you could ever desire.
During your life, materialistically speaking, you have lacked for nothing,’ he
stood up and shook his hands at her, ‘
nothing!
Nor has any other
individual on this planet. It wasn’t like this in the old days, you know.’