Deucalion (6 page)

Then I felt the explosion. That close to the centre, it isn't a noise, it's a wall of energy, thumping into the back of your seat, tearing it from its mountings and hurling you out, clear of the flyer, with the rock face hurtling towards you.

I closed my eyes and waited for the impact, but the seat was spinning, and instead of smashing me face-on into the rock, the momentum carried me around, so that the reinforced seat-back took the force of the collision. I felt it crack, and the breath was driven from my lungs, but nothing snapped. I felt none of the searing pain I was expecting. The seat bounced away from the huge boulder, and I tumbled with it. The crash-bars had held, and with my head secured, and the microlite cage between the ground and me, when I finally came spinning to a halt, the only injury I could sense was the bruising where the crash-bars had pressed into me.

I was lying face down, with my eyes about ten centimetres off the dirt. And that was where I was going to stay. My right hand was caught between the bars of the crash-cage and I couldn't reach the release button. I was straining and cursing when I heard the second explosion. The ground shook, and a shower of rocks and debris rained down around me, rebounding off the broken back of the seat, so that it saved me again.
Two explosions
.
A strange suspicion began to grow somewhere in the back of my mind, but at that moment I was far more concerned with how I was going to get out of my new predicament. How many others had survived? I knew how lucky I was to be still breathing. The crash-cage was never designed to protect you outside the flyer. If I'd struck that boulder face on, instead of turning . . .

But I was
alive
. . .

I remembered the explosions. How many had survived the impact, only to be blown apart in their seats, just as they were congratulating themselves on their good fortune?

I struggled again to free my hand, but it was no use. Unless someone was still alive, I was there until the rescue flyers arrived. I could survive that long. Jacklin would have punched the automatic distress signal, and Edison was only a hundred or so clicks to the east. All they had to do was home in on the coordinates relayed with the distress call and they'd be here in maybe fifteen minutes Standard.

That's
if
Jacklin had sent the signal. I remembered him battling to keep the flyer in the air. He was a professional, but what if he'd forgotten to send the signal?

One of the last things I'd done before we hit was to look at my chrono. Why, I don't know. I guess some habits are hard to break, even when you're about to die. But lying there face down, not knowing how long I'd have to stay like that, I began to do some calculations. It was just on four when we came down. An hour from midday, and already the heat was oppressive. But the vagaries of the climate in the Central Desert meant that in the next seventy or eighty minutes, it could rise by another 20 degrees, and by five, midday, if no one arrived to get me out, I might be wishing I'd bought it in the crash with everyone else. Boiling to death is a particularly hideous way to go.

Two explosions
. . .

The thought crept back.
One
explosion could have been the fuel tank for the thrusters. But
two
?

Suddenly, the suspicion that had hovered around just out of reach for the last few minutes came clear. The accident was no accident. The impossible had not happened by coincidence. Fail-safe systems simply don't fail. Someone had planned the crash. Wiped out . . . how many people? Just to get at Johannsen. But to do that, they would have to bypass the operational safety checks. Rig the flight computers. And if they were that good . . .

Suddenly, lying there watching the sand get hotter, I realised. There would be no rescue flyers. No one knew we were down. No one would miss us for another hour, and even then they wouldn't have a clue where to look. Our search for a safe landing spot had taken us off our course, and in that part of the Ranges you could fly within a few hundred metres of a crash site and completely miss seeing it.

Unless I could find a way of releasing the cage . . .

For the first time since the whole thing began, I started to feel really scared.

5

ELOKOI

(Extracts from the works of AJL Tolhurst transcribed to Archive Disk with permission of his estate: 2/7/2325 Earth standard)

From:
The Elokoi: A Sociological Study (
Chapter Seven
)

. . . Few of the subtleties of Elokoi culture meant very much to the materialist sensibilities of the early ‘offworlders'. On Earth, the last of the stage-one tribal cultures had disappeared at around the end of the twentieth century, taking with them not only the oral tradition, but the ethic of family and community that went with it, replacing the tribal group with ‘the state' and the elders' traditions with a ‘universal education' modelled on that of the dominant industrialised nations.

To colonists with such Old Earth values, a society which lived by hunting, gathering and the cultivation of such simple staples as Ocra, Capyjou and Injot, a race that shared the work and the rewards without dispute, and passed on its knowledge, traditions and history through stories, Thoughtsongs, dances and sacred works of art must have seemed unspeakably primitive.

The most obvious example of this clash of values can be seen in the export of Elokoi sacred art. The hand-carved artefacts, and even whole walls of sacred paintings, were exported to Earth, fetching huge sums at auction, with little or no thought being given to the effect of such actions on the Elokoi themselves, or on their culture.

Few of the decisions made on Deucalion in those years showed any consideration of the Elokoi as civilised beings. The Elokoi's oral history, the Telling, had already been largely destroyed through the slaughter in the early years of so many of the Tellers, and the wholesale export of culturally significant artefacts compounded the injury.

For many years it seemed that the culture of the Elokoi was in danger of disappearing completely, in the same way that the tribal cultures of Old Earth had disappeared two centuries earlier . . .

Fragment from:
Thoughtsong of the Great Trek, Canto 5

(Transcribed into wordspeech by Saebi t-Aiby-el-Rhae, circa 163, translated into Standard by RJ Tolhurst. Used with permission.)

. . . And through the season of the Demon-wind,

Across the Waste of Sand, Gaita led them on.

Though many begged her stop, and some turned back

Before their creeping fear of the unseen,

To miss their way, and perish,

Lost among the trackless dunes.

For there could be no turning back, and eastward

Towards the rising sun she faced each morning,

And spoke the Dream aloud, and led them on.

And when the wind howled hungrily and scratched

Its sandy claws across the shelter-skins,

She sang to them the Thoughtsong she had Dreamed,

And they believed again . . .

JANE

It was like a dark shadow, drifting across my past. And where it touched . . . nothing.

It's strange. You don't miss the memories. How can you miss what you never remember having in the first place? But still there is an inescapable sense of loss. Knowing that there are things that were a part of who you are, things that made you the person you are, that are gone for ever.

At first it was just little things: a name, a moment from some past experience. Then the gaps began to grow wider. Whole years, the face of someone close, the way it felt to . . . lose someone. For a while I could remember my father's funeral, but not how it felt to be there. I could remember his hands, but not the way he laughed. Then I couldn't even remember my father.

I kept a diary, and wrote down all the things I wanted to remember. But it wasn't any use. A name is no use without the memory of the face to go with it. Even a picture is pretty useless if you have no recollection of the person – or how that person made you feel. That was the worst of it. The feeling that the past stretched out behind you like some emotional vacuum.

For a while I was like a little kid, lost in a world I only half understood. I don't know how close I came to going completely mad. I do know there were times when I threw things around the room and screamed at the walls, while everybody said reassuring things that only made me more angry. There are counsellors specially trained to deal with Nixon's Syndrome victims. They help with retraining in the basic social behaviours. Like how to use a knife and fork at dinner, or how to respond politely to a compliment when you know the person doesn't mean a word of what they're saying.

For some reason, the memory loss doesn't affect the speech or language centres. Which is a real bonus. It would have been just about impossible for them to help me adjust if I couldn't understand what they were saying. But it was weird. I could tell you the name of an object if you showed me a picture of it, but I couldn't remember ever having seen it before.

Still, they got me through it somehow.

I think it was my work that helped most. Once they'd convinced me to stop fighting the inevitable, to let the past go and concentrate on building a new set of memories, a future, I threw myself into re-learning all I'd need to know to do the job the Council had sent me out to do.

Whatever that job was.

With hypnotherapy and sleep-tutoring, they crammed me full of the theory and background that I'd learned during my years at school; it came as easily the second time around as they assured me it had the first. Within a few months, I was ready to start work at the Genetics Facility in Edison.

That was when I came across the Elokoi again.

I was busy re-reading all my notes from the year or so before I boarded the freeze-liner. There were huge holes in my recollection of the experiments, of course, but luckily my research technique was first-rate. I can say that without feeling at all big-headed, because it's really like giving compliments to some total stranger. Anyway, the notes were pretty comprehensive, and it was all slowly coming together.

Someone called Hakawa had succeeded in splicing some particular gene-clusters from this alien species into the genetic material of domestic rats, and the results had been remarkable. Most of the gene-clusters had resulted in mutations which failed to make it beyond the earliest stages of foetal development, but in the case of one particular cluster, not only had the creatures survived to birth, but the new genetic material had produced the most amazing effects.

In simple maze experiments, individual animals showed a statistically significant enhancement in their ability to solve problems and gain the reward, when compared to the performance of a control group – a fact which would have been remarkable in itself. But the really amazing development showed up when another rat from the same genetically altered batch was introduced into the experiment.

If the maze was different, the time required to solve it was pretty much the same. If, however, the new subject was given a problem previously solved by one of its siblings, the time taken to solve it was significantly reduced. I could see why we would have got so excited about it, though I couldn't actually remember the experiment, or my reactions.

Unfortunately, there was a downside. The subjects demonstrated a drastically reduced life expectancy. The notes showed a premature mortality factor of around 2.1. But while they only lived half as long as the rats in the control group, they certainly made up for it in other ways. Of course, because they couldn't talk, there was no way of really knowing just what was going on. The increased intelligence was obvious, but were they really showing signs of a primitive telepathy? Or was there some other explanation for the apparent group-learning phenomenon?

That was about the point we'd reached when I got my transfer orders.

Reading the diary entries, I could tell how less than impressed I'd been with being ordered to Deucalion. I mean, Osaka was where it was all at, and I was on the rise.

So, why did I take it? Simple. I had no choice. It was all in the contract I'd signed when I accepted Funding. It gave the Grants Council the right to move me to any of the Research Facilities under its direction. Of course, for everyone else that just meant on Earth. I mean, no one had ever been sent offworld under the location clause. I hadn't even considered the possibility when I'd signed the contract. But Edison was founded under the umbrella of the Council, and they had the right to order me there . . .
here
.

Couldn't I just resign? Sure I could. If I could afford to buy out the contract. Which involved paying back all my educational expenses from the age of six, with interest, giving up my accommodation and transportation allowances, and paying the breach-of-contract bond. All up, about half a million creds. Which I'd have had to raise without a job and without any real prospects, because without Funding there was no research, and no other job on the planet paid more than survival wages. That was the irony. If I did resign, the only possible way I could have survived was to apply for resettlement to wipe the debt. So, I'd have ended up on Deucalion – or worse – anyway. You can see why I followed orders.

Reading the diary account I wrote at the time, I could understand why I was so angry. I mean, being forced to give up everything I knew and ship out with no real chance of returning, and the likelihood of being totally out of date if I did. A year is a long time in Research – let alone the best part of a century.

But now I couldn't feel angry. I guess that was the one great advantage of developing Nixon's. How could I miss what I did not remember? How could I be angry at being robbed of something that had belonged to someone else?

That other me, the one who ranted and raved on the pages of her diary, was someone else. She died somewhere between Old Earth and Deucalion, somewhere out there in the void of space and the living death of the freeze-sleep, when the change began inside her sleeping brain. The new me could recognise the injustice of the Council's demand, but it was like hearing about it on some talkback panel on the tube. I could feel sorry for the poor victim, but I couldn't feel involved.

I was far more involved with the Elokoi.

There was very little about them in the experimental notes. Which was understandable, when you think about where we got the genetic material in the first place. Blood and tissue samples, frozen sections, warped across in the freezer-hold of one of the ore-shuttles.

To us, the Elokoi were just the source of some exciting experimental biochemical elements, not living, breathing, thinking beings. Of course, it was important that they possessed an ability as exotic and potentially rewarding as mind-speech, but we were . . . channelled, I guess. If you stare long enough at the read-out screen of an electron microscope, if your whole world consists of analysing the infinitesimal strings of DNA that hold the key to the structure of life, you tend to lose sight of the big picture.

But on Deucalion it was different. Whoever I'd been on Earth, whatever attitudes I'd had, were gone. I'm not so sure it wasn't a good thing.

The information on the Elokoi had been available in Osaka, even if the creatures themselves weren't. But nowhere in the notes – or in the diary entries – did it mention trying to find out much about them. Apart from the search for the particular gene-cluster that made them ‘special' (translation: ‘able to do something that we couldn't'), it seems I hadn't been interested in them in the slightest.

How do you figure that?

I mean, I was just on nineteen years old . . . sorry, fifteen and a half Standard. You'd think something like that would have interested me, at least a little. What kid
isn't
interested in aliens?

That's what I meant by channelled.

Anyway, pretty soon after I got to Edison, I started reading up on them. Not the biological information, but the Elokoi themselves. Their history and their stories. I actually went to visit the Reserve outside of town to meet them. I had to get clearance, of course, but being Council Funded opened a lot of doors.

I don't know what I expected. I'd spent the best part of nine Standard months in the hospital and the retraining facility, among mostly first- and second-generation Deucs. Their attitude to the Elokoi is nowhere near as bigoted as the Old Earthers, but better or not, they didn't show much understanding or interest in a race that had existed on Deucalion for at least as long as there had been humans on Earth.

My guide was Rael, an old Elokoi who had once worked in the Ocra plantations near Williamsburg. His use of Standard was a little bizarre, but I could make out his meaning most of the time. He introduced me to his family. He was firstmate to a powerful-looking female called Leani, who sat outside their dwelling and watched me without saying a word. She had three other mates, Rael informed me, but two of them were out hunting Yorum along the Fringe. Taek, the fourthmate, was working on the communal Capyjou plantation over on the other side of the Reserve.

Leani was unusual for an Elokoi, because she had mothered more children than she had mates. Rael introduced me proudly to his two offspring, a son named Sianti and his daughter, Kieta. Their siblings, two boys and another girl, were with the teachers. I thought maybe I would meet them later.

As it turned out, I didn't. Not on that day. The Reserve's main village was incredibly quiet. There were a few hundred Elokoi there during the middle of what was a pretty hot summer's day, cooking outside their dwellings, carving, weaving, or just sitting in the sun together. There was hardly a sound from any of them.

Even the few young children who were not with the teachers played silently together, running, hiding, even wrestling, but without the cries and laughter of human children. The Researcher inside me wondered what kind of noise I might be hearing if I could pick up the mind-speech I knew must be buzzing around us as we walked.

But what hit me most was the sense of . . . peace. Not silence, but peace.

I looked at the buildings and the primitive conditions. It wasn't as if the offworlders had gone to any expense when they set up the Reserve. But it didn't matter. I spent a couple of hours wandering around with Rael, and he didn't once point out a building or an object to praise it, or criticise. But I learned a lot about the members of his family and about his Clan.