The Emerald Forge (Pilgrennon's Children) (37 page)

His voice had tailed off, as though he expected her to make a logical inference. Dana felt sick, remembering the thought of people digging in Alpha’s grave, stealing from what should not be disturbed. “You want me to take Gamma’s place? You want the RAF to win the fight outside against the animal machine constructs you made?”

“Perhaps you will understand my situation better if you see for yourself.”

He reached into his pocket and took out a flat, black, rectangular object. It took several seconds before Dana realised it was a phone — she was still wearing the helmet and couldn’t sense the signal that normally accompanied one. Like most modern phones, the full face of it was a screen with a few basic buttons to control it on the edges and back. Sanderson set it on the table in front of her, and a video began to play.

A man and woman looking to be in their late forties sat on chairs in a room. They looked stiff and formal, their expressions serious. Facing them and leaning in a much more casual manner on a desk, was a man, and recognition sent a bolt of adrenaline through Dana’s heart. He was a young man, smooth-faced, his curly and neatly parted hair a bright sandy brown, his broad-shouldered physique looking not quite at ease in a white shirt with the sleeves crumpled up around the elbows and a badly done tie with cartoons on it fastening the collar, but
undeniably
he was Ivor Pilgrennon.

The woman spoke, her face sceptical and Ivor’s intense. “I have talked to six different consultants. All of them told me the same thing: that I could not have children of my own. The eggs in my ovaries are all used up. But you are saying you can make an embryo in a test tube that will really be ours?”

“Yes. The technology we’re developing allows us to make germ cells — eggs and sperm — from normal cells taken from the body.” His voice, although rendered flat and thin through the phones meagre speakers, sent an electric prickle up Dana’s back. “There will be no hormone injections, no painful procedure to collect ova, just a simple cheek swab. The child will be genetically yours and your husband’s.”

The conversation continued, the woman leaning forward in fascination, as Sanderson spoke over it. “Mr and Mrs Percival. Career people. People who didn’t stop to think about when to have a family until it was too late. Pilgrennon is lying, of course. The embryo he implanted in Mrs Percival was not from an ovum generated from her cells, and it certainly was not fertilised with the sperm of her husband. The ovum came from a female patient at his institute; the sperm came from that Frankenstein cloning experiment of his. The Percivals were nothing more than a free surrogate for an experiment to him. Of course, I had to provide the surgical expertise to implant the transceiver in it when it was large enough. Pilgrennon wrote the Greek letter Gamma on the container the zygote was cultured in. Mrs Percival seemed rather taken with it, because when a daughter was born, she named her Gemma.

“When Pilgrennon disappeared, I never found out what happened to the other four children. Pilgrennon set off a Compton bomb and destroyed the computers with all his records on, so I couldn’t find the Percivals’ address. When I did eventually track them down, they were childless once more. I managed to get hold of Gemma’s NHS health records. As it turned out, she was not growing up normally. She had autism, certainly, but there seemed to be some kind of psychotic condition in addition that none of the experts could agree on a diagnosis for. Some said it was schizophrenia. By this time, Gemma had grown to look nothing like her parents, and the Percivals must have realised Pilgrennon was a fraud, and had a genetic test done to find out if they really were her parents. When they discovered they weren’t, it seems they disowned her and abandoned her in an institute.”

Abandoned. Dana considered this. She’d considered herself and Cale to have been abandoned by their real parents, before she’d hit her head and Jananin Blake had abducted her from the hospital, and another truth had been revealed to her. But that Gamma should be abandoned by these people who’d said they really wanted a child, put into that awful hospital where they used to tie her to a bed, that seemed far worse.

“Gamma is functional, but she is damaged. I don’t know if she would have turned out that way whatever the circumstances, or if it’s more a result of the way she was brought up, and her obsessive parents dragging her in and out of hospitals constantly. It is very difficult to work with her when she insists what we make be made to look and function like imaginary animals she reads about in mythology books. If Prendick and I refuse, she refuses to control the finished products. You seem rather more reasonable.”

Dana stared at him. “You want me to help you make animals into intelligent robots, and
control them?
”

“For the greater good, of course. We wouldn’t have to fight the Meritocracy. All I ask is that you call off the battle and tell them Prendick and I have already left. We can rendezvous somewhere else later.”

“And what would happen to Gamma?”

Sanderson shrugged. “Either leave her to the Meritocracy to deal with, or do to her what she did to you: use her as a source of the moiety.”

Dana tried to solidify what she felt about this into something meaningful, but what she felt about Gamma didn’t make sense. On the one hand, she had felt the misery and self-pity of the individual trapped in the hospital. On the other, she could not reconcile this with the ruthless person who tortured and maimed and had no compassion for anyone, inflicting that same suffering on others. “But why do you need an army made of mechanical animals?”

Sanderson leaned toward her, eyes wide and bright. “
Don’t you see?
This is Pilgrennon’s work. This is the sort of breakthrough that started the revolution that destroyed the old ways and brought the Meritocracy to power. The Meritocracy has ANTs — powerful computers that have transformed the function of society. Think how the function of society could be improved with this technology at its disposal.”

“But Jananin Blake stopped Pilgrennon. It was her that supported the Meritocracy. Pilgrennon said he didn’t agree with it. And Blake said Pilgrennon’s work would lead to autistic people being exploited if it went public.”

“
Blake is a genius
, but she won’t see things through all the way. She’s too besotted with the equality side of the Meritocracy and the idea of everyone having a say no matter how insignificant they are. The null tier was an excellent idea — that people who can’t support themselves can forfeit their right to a vote in exchange for benefit money — but they should have pushed it harder. Is it right that someone on null tier should be able to sit in social accommodation doing nothing, making a career out of breeding more null tier people? The stupid and the worthless will always outnumber the intelligent and the constructive, unless we end this subversion of Darwin’s laws and let the natural equilibrium rebalance itself.”

Dana wasn’t sure how this fitted with what she understood — something about the first-tier people being so numerous that if all of them voted one way on any particular referendum, they would outnumber the higher-tiered people no matter how they voted. Jananin had said nothing about the null-tier people. Dana knew who they were, of course; people living in council houses who couldn’t find jobs, and didn’t vote in referenda because they’d been given money to live on and a house to live in by the Meritocracy. Did that mean Jananin didn’t think they were important either, as Sanderson seemed to? How many null-tier people were there, compared to how many first-tier people?

“And the Meritocracy’s stance on the threats from foreign powers is deeply lacking. America. Land of the free.” Sanderson scowled and turned his head to spit on the floor. “Land where a minority of intelligent people work in state-of-the-art facilities to advance scientific understanding, so their majority of obese illiterate religious-fundamentalist rednecks can have weapons of mass destruction to go with their fast food meals. We could put an end to that. The European Union, for too long has that Nazi power axis been a thorn in our sides. Before the rise of the Meritocracy it robbed the public coffers, flooded us with immigrants, and interfered in the affairs of private citizens and businesses; now the Meritocracy has come to power, the bureaucrats sit in Brussels making hollow threats and clogging up our trade routes with their red tape. We could destroy it.”

“But those aren’t part of this country.” Dana knew little of these foreign places. She’d never been abroad. America was a place from the television, where a black man with a photogenic smile sat in a white temple, under a stripey banner with a rectangle of stars in one corner. The European Union was some kind of government that controlled a lot of countries in the east. She didn’t know who led it, only that it used a symbol that was a circle of stars, and it made lots of laws and the emblem was stuck to a lot of imported things made there. Ireland had recently left it, and so had the UK when the Meritocracy had risen to power, so if countries could leave as and when they wanted, surely that was up to them. “Isn’t it up to the people who live in them how their country is run? It’s not up to the Meritocracy to go there and change how they do things.”

“It is if those places interfere with the Meritocracy’s freedoms, if they obstruct the rights of the Electorate.” Sanderson paused, his face intense. “We could raise an army out of the birds in the sky and the beasts of the land. We could make machines more powerful than anyone else can. We could build an alliance of life and technology that would stand undefeated. We could destroy corrupt governments and remake the world in freedom.
We
could
finish
what Pilgrennon
started
.”

With these words, something that made sense leapt from Dana’s confusion, and the memory of the moment in the helicopter before the jump, the icy water below, and the explosion high up in the sky above, accompanied by an aching sense of loss. Perhaps Ivor hadn’t really been there with her in the hospital room, but it was immaterial now. What that memory did give her was a feeling of surety and security, and she held on to it, the touch of his hand on her arm, the sound of his voice, his smell.

Pilgrennon had died off Cape Wrath all that time ago because he had made a choice, because he had made the right choice, to
end
what he had started. If Dana made this choice now, then Ivor’s death and everything he had done for her would be in vain. His sacrifice would be rendered meaningless.

“No.”

Sanderson straightened in his chair, moving his face away from hers. “No what?”

“No, I won’t help you.”

Sanderson apparently considered this for a moment, rubbing his finger between his top lip and his nose. Then he took hold of Dana’s arm and rose from his chair abruptly, pulling her with him back out of the room. He grabbed her other wrist as they emerged into the corridor and held her up by both arms, hauling her along sideways. “There’s no more to discuss,” he muttered.

Dana had become disoriented from the loss of signals, but from her memory of the building, she estimated he was heading for the long, high room where they collected the blood. Where was he taking her? To Gamma? It occurred to her that if she’d done as Sanderson had said, it might have been a much quicker and easier way to stop Gamma, stop the Compton bomb, and free Cale and Peter. She’d thrown it away by letting him confuse her.

“Okay, I’ll do what you say!”

“You’re lying. You’ve had your chance and made your choice. If we’re to work together, we need to be able to trust each other. The decision has to be made of your own free will.”

Sanderson reached the door to the hall and kicked it open. The long room was filled with sun stained green from the filters of the filthy windows.

“I shall say I cut too deep, I waited too long. She’ll be angry, but she’ll get over it.” He dragged Dana to the basin and kicked her feet out from under her. Her kneecaps crashed into the concrete floor so hard it felt like they’d shattered, and the pain was so terrible she couldn’t move to resist or fight back, only gasp for breath and struggle to think through it. Sanderson forced her down over the basin.

“Get off of me!” Dana managed to force the words from lungs that wouldn’t obey. She thought frantic distress signals, but nothing would transmit through the foil wrapped around her head. After everything, was this how it would end? That she would die here, unable to do anything, and Cale and Peter would die for her failure?

A blur of movement flashed into her peripheral vision. Something large and heavy crashed into the side of Sanderson’s head and the weight bearing down on her ceased. She pushed herself off the basin and fell on her back on the floor, drawing up her knees and pressing her palms against them to try to stop the pain. A buffeting draught from enormous wings rushed over her. She looked up to see Prendick’s eagle fly across the room, towards the windows, before she lost sight of it. Dana rolled onto her side, but her knees hurt too much to roll onto her front. Sanderson and Prendick were fighting, but Prendick’s bird mustn’t have been looking. The bigger man threw a clumsy punch. Sanderson ducked, and Prendick lurched, unbalanced.

With a grating screech, the bird launched itself back across the room, flying with its talons outstretched at Sanderson’s head. He flailed in desperation to defend himself, him and the eagle spinning like a hurricane of limbs and feathers. Dana put her weight on her elbow, trying to sit upright. Prendick hurled his fists into empty space, searching for the attacker he couldn’t see.

Sanderson by now appeared to have got hold of something. The enormous bird still pounded its wings, but he held it aloft, by the legs, his arm shaking under the weight of it. A triumphant grin spread over his face.

“Don’t hurt her, please.” Prendick’s voice came out thick and lispy through unyielding lips.

Sanderson turned to face Prendick, so his back was towards Dana. He held the bird higher and grasped its head with his free hand, bending it back like Ivor had done with the rabbits he meant to kill.