A Second Chance at Eden (8 page)

‘I won’t. But I know people who will.’

‘Who?’

Her grin had returned. ‘Don’t tell me Zimmels didn’t leave you a bubble cube full of names.’

My turn to grin. ‘He did. What nobody has told me is how widespread Boston’s support is.’

‘Not as much as they’d like. Not as little as JSKP would like.’

‘Very neat, Doctor. You should go into politics.’

‘There’s no need to be obscene.’

I stood up and walked over to her window, looking down into the small courtyard at the centre of the hospital. There was an ornate pond in the middle which had a tiny fountain playing in it; big orange fish glided about below the lily pads. ‘If the company did send a covert agent up here to kill Maowkavitz, he or she would have to be very biotechnology literate to circumvent the habitat personality’s observation. I mean, I couldn’t do it. I don’t even understand how it was done, nor do most of my officers.’

‘I see what you mean. It would have to be someone who’s been up here before.’

‘Right. Someone who understands the habitat surveillance parameters perfectly, and who’s one hundred per cent loyal to JSKP.’

‘My God, you’re talking about Zimmels.’

I smiled down at the fish. ‘You have to admit, he’s a perfect suspect.’

‘And would you have him arrested if he is guilty?’

‘Oh, yes. JSKP can have me fired, but they can’t deflect me.’

‘Very commendable.’

I turned back to find her giving me a heartily bemused stare. ‘But it’s a little too early to be making allegations like that; I’ll wait until I have more data.’

‘Glad to hear it,’ she muttered. ‘I suppose you’ve also considered it could have been a mercy killing by some sympathetic bleeding-heart medical practitioner, one who was intimate with Penny’s circumstances.’

I laughed. ‘Top of my list.’

*

Before I went for the implant, they dressed me in a green surgical smock, and shaved off a three-centimetre circle of hair at the base of my skull. The operating theatre resembled a dentist’s surgery. A big hydraulic chair at the centre of a horseshoe of medical consoles and instrument waldos. The major difference was the chair’s headrest, which was a complicated arrangement of metal bands and adjustable pads. The sight triggered a cascade of unpleasant memories, newscable images of the more brutal regimes back on Earth. What one-party states did to their opposition members.

‘Nothing to worry about,’ Corrine said breezily, when the sight of it slowed my walk. ‘I’ve done this operation about five hundred times now.’

The nurse smiled and guided me into the chair. I don’t think she was more than a couple of years older than Nicolette. Should they really be using teenagers to assist with delicate brain surgery on senior staff?

Straps around my arms, straps around my legs; a big strap, like a corset, around my chest, holding me tight. Then they started immobilizing my head.

‘How many survived?’ I asked.

‘All of them. Come on, Harvey, it’s basically just an injection.’

‘I hate needles.’

The nurse giggled.

‘Bloody hell,’ Corrine grunted. ‘Men! Women never make this fuss.’

I swallowed my immediate short-and-to-the-point comment. ‘Will I be able to use the affinity bond straight away?’

‘No. What I’m going to do this afternoon is insert a cluster of neuron symbiont buds into your medulla oblongata. They take a day or so to infiltrate your axons and develop into operational grafts.’

‘Wonderful.’ Sickly grey fungal spores grubbing round my cells, sending out slender yellow roots to penetrate the delicate membrane walls. Feeding off me.

Corrine and the nurse finished fixing my head in place and stood back. The chair slowly tilted forwards until I was inclined at forty-five degrees, staring at the floor. I heard a hissing sound; something cold touched the patch of shaved skin. ‘Ouch.’

‘Harvey, that’s the anaesthetic spray,’ Corrine exclaimed with some asperity.

‘Sorry.’

‘Once the symbionts are functioning you’ll need proper training to use them. It doesn’t take more than a few hours. I’ll book your appointment with one of our tutors.’

‘Thanks. Exactly how many people up here are affinity capable?’

She was busy switching on various equipment modules. Out of the corner of my eye I could see a holographic screen light up with some outré false-colour image of something which resembled a galactic nebula, all emerald and purple.

‘Just about all seventeen thousand of us,’ she said. ‘They have to be, there’s no such thing as a domestic or civic worker up here. The servitor chimps perform every mundane task you can think of. So you have to be able to communicate with them. The first affinity bonds to be developed were just that, bonds. Each one was unique. Clone-analogue symbionts allowed you to plug directly into a servitor’s nervous system; one set was implanted in your brain, and the servitor got the other. Then Penny Maowkavitz came up with the idea of Eden, and the whole concept was broadened out. The symbionts I’m implanting in you will give you what we call communal affinity; you can converse with the habitat personality, access its senses, talk to other people, order the servitors around. It’s a perfect communication system. God’s own radio wave.’

‘Don’t let the Pope hear you say that.’

‘Pope Eleanor’s a fool. If you ask me, she’s a little too desperate to prove she can be as traditionalist as any male. The Christian Church has always been antagonistic to science, even now, after the reunification. You’d think they’d learn from past mistakes. They certainly made enough of them. If her biotechnology commission would just open their eyes to what we’ve achieved up here.’

‘There’s none so blind . . .’

‘Damn right. Did you know every child conceived up here for the last two years has had the affinity gene spliced in when they were zygotes, rather than have symbiont implants? They’re affinity capable from the moment their brain forms, right in the womb. There was no pressure put on the parents by JSKP, they insisted. And they’re a beautiful group of kids, Harvey, smart, happy; there’s none of the kind of casual cruelty you normally get in kindergartens back on Earth. They don’t hurt each other. Affinity has given them honesty and trust instead of selfishness. And the Church calls it ungodly.’

‘But it’s a foreign gene, not one God gave us, not part of our divine heritage.’

‘You support the Church’s view?’ Her voice hardened.

‘No.’

‘God gave us the gene for cystic fibrosis, He gave us haemophilia, and He gave us Down’s syndrome. They’re all curable with gene therapy. Genes the person didn’t have to begin with, genes we have to vector in. Does that make those we treat holy violations?’

I made a mental note never to introduce Corrine to Jocelyn. ‘You’re fighting an old battle with the wrong person.’

‘Yeah. Maybe. Sorry, but that kind of medieval attitude infuriates me.’

‘Good. Can we get on with the implant now, please?’

‘Oh, that?’

The chair started to rotate back to the vertical. Corrine was flicking off the equipment.

‘I finished a couple of minutes ago,’ she said with a contented chuckle. ‘I’ve been waiting for you to stop chattering.’

‘You . . .’

The smiling nurse began to unstrap me.

Corrine pulled off a pair of surgical gloves. ‘I want you to go home and relax for the rest of the afternoon. No more work today, I don’t want you stressed; the symbiont neurons don’t need to be drenched in toxins at this stage. And no alcohol, either.’

‘Am I going to have a headache?’

‘A hypochondriac like you, I wouldn’t be at all surprised.’ She winked playfully. ‘But it’s all in your mind.’

*

I walked home. The first chance I’d had to actually appreciate the real benefit of the habitat. I walked under an open sky, feeling zephyrs ripple my uniform, smelling a mélange of flower perfumes. A strange experience. I’m just old enough to remember venturing out under open skies, taking backpack walks through what was left of the countryside for pleasure. That was before the armada storms started bombarding the continents for weeks at a time. Nowadays, of course, the planet’s climate is in a state of what they call Perpetual Chaos Transition. You’d have to be certifiable to wander off into the wilderness regions by yourself. Even small squalls can have winds gusting up to sixty or seventy kilometres an hour.

It was the heat which did it. The heat from bringing the benefits of an industrial economy to eighteen billion people. Environmentalists used to warn us about the danger of burning hydrocarbons, saying the increased carbon dioxide would trigger the greenhouse effect. They were wrong about that. Fusion came on-line fairly early into the new century; deuterium–tritium reactions at first, inefficient and generating a depressing quantity of radioactive waste for what was heralded as the ultimate everlasting clean energy source. Then He
₃
started arriving from Jupiter and even those problems vanished. No more carbon dioxide from chemical combustion. Instead people developed expectations. A lot of expectations. Unlimited cheap energy was no longer the province of the Western nations alone, it belonged to everybody. And they used it; in homes, in factories, to build more factories which churned out more products which used still more energy. All over the planetary surface, residual machine heat was radiated off into the atmosphere at a tremendous rate.

After a decade of worsening hurricanes, the first real mega-storm struck the Eastern Pacific countries in February 2071. It lasted for nine days. The UN declared it an official international disaster zone; crops ruined over the entire region, whole forests torn out by the roots, tens of thousands made homeless. Some idiot newscable presenter said that if one butterfly flapping its wings causes an ordinary hurricane, then this must have taken a whole armada of butterflies to start. The name stuck.

The second armada storm came ten months later, that one hit southern Europe. It made the first one seem mild by comparison.

Everybody knew it was the heat which did it. By then more or less every home on the planet had a newscable feed, they could afford it. To prevent the third armada storm all they had to do was stop using so much electricity. The same electricity which brought them their newly found prosperous living standard.

People, it seems, don’t wish to abandon their wealth.

Instead, they started migrating into large towns and cities, which they fortified against the weather. According to the UN, in another fifty years everybody will live in an urban area. Transgenic crops were spliced together which can withstand the worst the armada storms throw at them. And the amount of He
₃
from Jupiter creeps ever upwards. Outside the urban and agricultural zones the whole planet is slowly going to shit.

Our house was near the southern edge of Eden’s town, with a long back lawn which ran down to the parkland. A stream marked where the lawn ended and the meadowland began. The whole street was some tree-festooned middle-class suburb from a bygone age. The house itself was made from aluminium and silicon sandwich panels, a four-bedroom L-shape bungalow ranch with broad patio doors in each room. Back in the Delph arcology we had a four-room flat on the fifty-second floor which overlooked the central tiered well, and we could only afford that thanks to the subsidized rent which came with my job.

I could hear voices as soon as I reached the fence which ran along the front lawn, Nicolette and Jocelyn arguing. And yes, it was a picket fence, even if it was made from spongesteel.

The front door was ajar. Not that it had a lock. Eden’s residents really did have absolute confidence in the habitat personality’s observation. I walked in, and almost tripped on a hockey stick.

The five white composite cargo pods from the
Ithilien
had been delivered, containing the Parfitt family’s entire worldly goods. Some had been opened, I guessed by the twins, boxes were strewn along the length of the hall.

‘It’s stupid, Mother!’ Nicolette’s heated voice yelled out of an open door.

‘And you’re not to raise your voice to me,’ Jocelyn shouted back.

I went into the room. It was the one Nicolette had claimed. Cases were heaped on the floor, clothes draped all over the bed. The patio door was open, a servitor chimp stood placidly outside.

Jocelyn and Nicolette both turned to me.

‘Harvey, will you kindly explain to your daughter that while she lives in our house she will do as she’s told.’

‘Fine. I’ll bloody well move out now, then,’ Nicolette squealed. ‘I never wanted to come here anyway.’

Great, caught in the crossfire, as always. I held up my hands. ‘One at a time, please. What’s the problem?’

‘Nicolette is refusing to put her stuff away properly.’

‘I will!’ she wailed. ‘I just don’t see why I have to do it. That’s what it’s here for.’ She flung out an arm to point at the servitor.

I fought against a groan. I should have realized this was coming.

‘It’ll pack all my clothes away, and it’ll keep the room neat the whole time. You don’t even need bloody affinity. The habitat will hear any orders and get the chimps to do as you say. They told us that in the orientation lecture.’

‘That
thing
is not coming in my house,’ Jocelyn said flatly. She glared at me, waiting for back-up.

‘Daddy!’

The headache I wasn’t supposed to be having was a hot ache five centimetres behind my eyes. ‘Jocelyn, this is her room. Why don’t we just leave her alone in here?’

The glare turned icy. ‘I might have known you’d be in favour of having those creatures in the house.’ She turned on a heel and pushed past me into the hall.

I let out a long exhausted breath. ‘Christ.’

‘I’m sorry, Daddy,’ Nicolette said in a small voice.

‘Not your fault, darling.’ I went out into the hall. Jocelyn was pulling clothes from an open pod, snatching them out so sharply I thought they might tear. ‘Look, Jocelyn, you’ve got to accept that using these servitor creatures is a way of life up here. You knew about the chimps before we came.’

‘But they’re
everywhere
,’ she hissed, squeezing her eyes shut. ‘Everywhere, Harvey. This whole place must be ringing with affinity.’