A Second Chance at Eden (30 page)

Laurus has a collection of books at his mansion, leather-bound classics imported from Kulu. He knows of no one else on Tropicana who has books. Everyone else uses space chips.

The girl is crouched beside an ancient hospital commode, her arms thrown protectively around a small boy with greasy red hair, no more than seven or eight. A yellowing bandage is wrapped round his head, covering his eyes. Cheesy tears are leaking from the linen, crusting on his cheeks. His legs have wasted away, now little more than a layer of pale skin stretched over the bones, the waxy surface rucked by tightly knotted blue veins.

Laurus glances round at the enforcer squad. Their plasma carbines are trained on the two frightened children, hounds quiver at the ready. The girl’s wide green eyes are moist from barely contained tears. Shame tweaks him. ‘That’s enough,’ he says. ‘Erigeron, you stay. The rest of you, leave us now.’

Laurus squats down next to the children as the squad clumps out. His creaky joints protest the posture.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked the girl. Now he’s face to face with her, he sees how pretty she is; ragged shoulder-length ginger hair which looks like it needs a good wash, and her skin is milk-white and gently freckled. He’s curious, to retain that pallor under Tropicana’s sun would require dermal tailoring, which isn’t cheap.

She flinches at his closeness, but doesn’t relinquish her hold on the boy. ‘Torreya,’ she says.

‘Sorry if we scared you, Torreya, we didn’t mean to. Are your parents around?’

She shakes her head slowly. ‘No. There’s just me and Jante left now.’

Laurus inclines his head at the boy. ‘Your brother?’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s the matter with him?’

‘His daddy said he was ill. More ill than his daddy could cure, but he was going to learn how. Then after he cured Jante and himself we could all leave here.’

Laurus looks at the blind crippled boy again. There’s no telling what has ruined his legs. Longthorpe is riddled with toxicants, a whole stratum of eternity drums lying below the crumbling topsoil to provide a stable foundation for the large industrial buildings which were supposed to rejuvenate the area’s economy. Laurus remembers the council-backed development project from nearly eighty years ago. But eternity has turned out to be less than fifty years. The factories were never built. So Longthorpe remains too poor to have any clout in the council chamber and thus insist on clean-up programmes.

Jante points upwards. ‘Is that your bird?’ he asks in a high, curious voice.

Ryker is perched on the edge of the grubby skylight, his huge menacing head peering down.

‘Yes,’ Laurus says. His eyes narrow with suspicion. ‘How did you know he was there?’

‘His daddy gave us an affinity bond,’ Torreya says. ‘I see for him. I don’t mind. Jante was so lonely inside his head. And it was only supposed to be until his daddy understood how to cure him.’

‘So where is your father now?’ Laurus asks.

Her eyes drop. ‘I think he’s dead. He was very sick. Sort of inside, you know? He used to cough up blood a lot. Then it started to get worse, and one morning he was gone. So we didn’t see, I suppose.’

‘How was your father going to learn how to cure Jante?’

‘With the candy buds, of course.’ She turns and gestures into the darker half of the room.

The machine is a customized life-support module. A graft of hardware and bitek; metal, plastic, and organic components fused in such an uncompromising fashion that Laurus can’t help but feel its perversity is somehow intended to dismay. The globose-ribbed plant growing out of the centre has the appearance of a glochidless cactus, over a metre high, as hard and dark as teak.

At the centre, its meristem areola is a gooey gelatin patch from which the tiny candy buds emerge, growing along the rib vertices. They look like glaucous pebble cacti, a couple of centimetres in diameter, dappled by mauve rings.

One of Laurus’s biotechnicians examined the candy bud obtained from the
Thaneri
officer before he ate it. The man said its cells were saturated with neurophysin proteins, intracellular carriers, but of an unknown type. Whatever they were, they would interact directly with a brain’s synaptic clefts. That, he surmised, was how the memory was imparted. As to how the neurophysins were produced and formatted to provide a coherent sensorium sequence, he had no idea.

Laurus can only stare at the bizarre living machine as the forest journey memory returns to him with a vengeance.

‘Are these the candy buds you’ve been selling?’ he asks. ‘The ones with the forest in them?’

Torreya sniffs uncertainly, then nods.

Something like frost is creeping along Laurus’s spine. There is only the one machine. ‘And the candy buds with the prehistoric animals as well?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where did this device come from?’ Although he’s sure he knows.

‘Jante’s father grew it,’ Torreya replies. ‘He was a plant geneticist, he said he used to develop algae that could eat rocks to refine chemicals out of it. But the company shut down the lab after an accident; and he didn’t have the money to get Jante and himself fixed in hospital. So he said he was going to put medical information into the candy buds and become his own doctor.’

‘And the fantasy lands?’ Laurus asks. ‘Where did they come from?’

Torreya flicks a guilty glance at Jante. And Laurus begins to understand.

‘Jante, tell me where the fantasy lands come from, there’s a good boy,’ he says. He’s smiling at Torreya, a smile that is polite and humourless.

‘I do them,’ Jante blurts, and there’s a trace of panic in his high voice. ‘I’ve got an affinity bond with the machine’s bioware processors. Daddy gave it me. He said someone ought to fill up the candy buds with something, they shouldn’t be wasted. So Torry reads books for us, and I think about the places in them.’

Laurus is getting way out of his depth. His own biotechnology degree is ninety years out of date. And an affinity bond with a plant is outside anything he’s ever heard of before. ‘You can put anything you want into these candy buds?’ he asks hoarsely.

‘Yes.’

‘And all you do is sell them down at the harbour?’

‘Yes. If I sell enough I want to buy Jante new eyes and legs. I don’t know how many that will take, though. Lots, I suppose.’

Laurus is virtually trembling, thinking what would have happened if he hadn’t found the children and their machine first. It must incorporate some kind of neurophysin synthesis mechanism, one that was programmable. Again, like nothing he’s heard of.

The market potential is utterly staggering.

He meets Torreya’s large green eyes again. She’s curiously passive, almost subdued, waiting for him to say what is going to happen next. Children, he realizes, can intuitively cut to the heart of any situation.

He rests his hand on her shoulder, hoping he’s doing it in a reassuringly paternal fashion. ‘This is very unpleasant, this room. Do you enjoy living here?’

Torreya’s lips are pursed as she considers the question. ‘No. But nobody bothers us here.’

‘How would you like to come and live with me? No one will bother you there, either. I promise that.’

*

Laurus’s mansion sits astride a headland in the mountains behind Kariwak, its broad stone façade looking down on the city and the ocean beyond. He bought it for the view, all of his domain a living picture.

Torreya presses her face to the Rolls-Royce’s window as they ride up the hill. She is captivated by the formal splendour of the grounds. Jante is sitting beside her, clapping his hands delightedly as she gives him a visual tour of the lawns and statues and winding gravel paths and ponds and fountains.

The gates of the estate’s inner defence zone close behind the bronze car, and it trundles into the courtyard. Peacocks spread their majestic tails in welcome. Servants hurry down the wide stone steps from the front door. Jante is eased gently from the car and carried inside. Torreya stands on the granite cobblestones, turning around and around, her mouth open in astonishment.

‘Did you really mean it?’ she gasps. ‘Can we really live here?’

‘Yes.’ Laurus grins broadly. ‘I meant it. This is your home now.’

Camassia and Abelia emerge from the mansion to welcome him back. Camassia is twenty years old, a tall Oriental beauty with long black hair and an air of aristocratic refinement. She used to be with Kochia, a merchant in Palmetto, who has the lucrative franchise from Laurus to sell affinity bonded dogs to offworlders who want them for police-style work on stage one colony planets. Then Laurus decided he would like to see her stretched naked across his bed, her cool poise broken by the animal heat of rutting. Kochia immediately made a gift of her, sweating and smiling as she was presented.

Such whims help to keep Laurus’s reputation intact. By acquiescing, Kochia sets an example of obedience to others. Had he refused, Laurus would have made an example of him.

Abelia is younger, sixteen or seventeen, shoulder-length blonde hair arranged in tiny curls, her body trim and compact, excitingly dainty. Laurus took her from her parents a couple of years ago as payment for protection and gambling debts.

The two girls exchange an uncertain glance as they see Torreya, obviously wondering which of them she is going to replace. They more than anyone are aware of Laurus’s tastes.

‘This is Torreya,’ Laurus says. ‘She will be staying with us from now on. Make her welcome.’

Torreya tilts her head up, looking from Camassia to Abelia, seemingly awestruck. Then Abelia smiles, breaking the ice, and Torreya is led into the mansion, her bag dragging along the cobbles behind her. Camassia and Abelia begin to twitter over her like a pair of elder sisters, arguing how to style her hair once it’s been washed.

Laurus issues a stream of instructions to his major-domo concerning new clothes and books and toys and softer furniture, a nurse for Jante. He feels almost virtuous. Few prisoners have ever had it so good.

*

Torreya bounds into Laurus’s bedroom the next morning, her little frame filled with such boisterous energy that she instantly makes him feel lethargic. She has intercepted the maid, bringing his breakfast tray in herself.

‘I’ve been up for hours,’ she exclaims joyfully. ‘I watched the sunrise over the sea. I’ve never seen it before. Did you know you can see the first islands in the archipelago from the balcony?’

She seems oblivious of the naked bodies of Camassia and Abelia lying beside him on the bed. Such easy acceptance gives him pause for thought; in a year or two she’ll have breasts of her own.

Laurus considers he has worn well in his hundred and twenty years, treating entropy’s frosty encroachment with all the disdain only his kind of money can afford. But the biochemical treatments that keep his skin thick and his hair growing, the gene therapy to sustain his organs, cannot work miracles. The accumulating years have seen his sex life dwindle to practically nothing. Now he simply contents himself with watching the girls. To see Torreya’s innocence lost to the skilful hands of Camassia and Abelia will be a magnificent spectacle to anticipate. It won’t take that long for his technicians to solve the mystery of the candy buds machine.

‘I know about the islands,’ he tells her expansively as Camassia takes the tray from her. ‘My company supplies the coral kernels for most of them.’

‘Really?’ Torreya flashes him a solar-bright smile.

Laurus is struck by how lovely she looks now she’s been tidied up; she’s wearing a lace-trimmed white dress, and her hair’s been given a French pleat. Her delicate face is aglow with enthusiasm. He marvels at that, a spirit which can find happiness in something as elementary as sunrise. How many dawns have there been in his life?

Camassia carefully measures out the milk in Laurus’s cup, and pours his tea from a silver pot. If his morning tea isn’t exactly right everyone suffers from his tetchiness until well after lunch.

Torreya rescues a porcelain side plate as Abelia starts to butter the toast. There’s a candy bud resting on the plate. ‘Jante and I made this one up specially for you,’ she says, sucking her lower lip apprehensively as she proffers it to Laurus. ‘It’s a thank you for taking us away from Long-thorpe. Jante’s daddy said you should always say thank you to people who’re nice to you.’

‘You keep calling him Jante’s father,’ Laurus says. ‘Wasn’t he yours?’

She shakes her head slowly. ‘No, I don’t know who my daddy was. Mummy would never say.’

‘You have the same mother, then?’

‘That’s right. But Jante’s daddy was nice, though. I liked him lots.’

Laurus holds the candy bud up, her words suddenly registering. ‘You composed this last night?’

‘Uh huh.’ She nods brightly. ‘We know how much you like them, and it’s the only gift we have.’

Under Torreya’s eager gaze, Laurus puts the candy bud in his mouth and starts to chew. It tastes of blackcurrant.

*

Laurus used to be a small boy on a tropical island, left alone to wander the coast and jungle to his heart’s content. His bare feet pounded along powdery white sand. The palm-shaded beach stretched on for eternity, its waves perfect for surfing. He ran and did cartwheels for the sheer joy of it, his lithe limbs responding effortlessly. Whenever he got too warm he would dive into the cool clear water of the bay, swimming through the fantastic coral reef to sport with the dolphin shoal who greeted him like one of their own.

*

‘You were dreaming,’ Camassia says. She is stroking his head as he sits in the study’s leather chair.

‘I was young again,’ he replies, and there’s the feel of the lean powerful dolphin pressed between his skinny legs as he rides across the lagoon, a tang of salt in his mouth. ‘We should introduce dolphins here, you know. Can’t think why we never did. They are to the water what Ryker is to the air.’

‘Sounds wonderful. When do I get to try one?’

‘Ask Torreya.’ He shakes some life into himself, focusing on the daily reports and accounts his cortical chip has assembled. But the candy bud memory is still resonating through his mind, twisting the blue neuroiconic graphs into waves crashing over coral. And all Torreya and Jante have to go on is what she reads.