A Second Chance at Eden (23 page)

He is approximately two hundred metres in from the cavern, thirty metres above you,
Eden said.

Rolf, do we have gas masks?

No, sir. But we could use spacesuits.

Good idea, though they’re going to restrict—

The cry which burst into the communal affinity band was awesome in its sheer volume of anguish. It contained nameless dread, and loathing, and a terrified bewilderment. The tormented mind pleaded with us, wept, cursed.

Wallace Steinbauer was standing, slightly stooped, in a cramped circular tunnel. It was illuminated in a gloomy green hue, a light emitted by the strip of phosphorescent cells running along the apex. Its polyp walls had a rough wavy texture, as if they’d been carved crudely out of living rock.

He was retching weakly from the appalling stench, hands clutching his belly. Lungs heaved to pull oxygen from the thick fetid air. The floor was inclined upwards at a gentle angle ahead of him. Wide bugged eyes stared at the tide of muddy yellow sludge which was pouring down the tunnel. It reached his shoes and flowed sluggishly around his ankles. Immediately he was struggling to stay upright, but there was no traction; the sludge was insidiously slippery. Cold burned at his shins as the level rose. Then blowtorch pain was searing at his skin, biting its way inwards. His trousers were dissolving before his eyes.

He lost his footing, and fell headlong into the sludge. Pain drenched every patch of naked skin, gobbling through the fatty tissue towards the muscle and bone beneath. He screamed once. But that simply let the rising sludge into his mouth. Fire exploded down his gullet. Spastic convulsions jerked his limbs about. Sight vanished, twisting away into absolute blackness.

Coherent thoughts ended then. Insanity blew some tattered nerve impulses at us for a few mercifully brief seconds. Then there was nothing.

Minds twinkled all around me, a galaxy misted by a dense nebula. Each one radiating profound shock, shamed and guilty to witness such a moment. The need for comfort was universal. We instinctively clung together in sorrow, and waited for it to pass.

Father Cooke was quite right: sharing our grief made it that much easier to endure. We had each other, we didn’t need the old pagan symbols of redemption.

*

The fifth day was mostly spent sorting out the chaos which came in the wake of the fourth; for the Governor, for the newscable reporters (in a confidential report), for the JSKP board, for the police, and for the rest of the shocked population. Pieter Zernov and I organized a combined operation to clear the inspection tunnels and recover the body. I let his team handle most of it – they were welcome to the job.

Fasholé Nocord was delighted the case had been solved. The general public satisfaction with my department’s performance added complications to Boston’s campaign. We had proved beyond any shadow of doubt the effectiveness and impartiality of the UN administration. Not even a senior JSKP employee could escape the law.

Congratulations all round. Talk of promotions and bonuses. Morale in the station peaked up around the axial light-tube.

The one sour note was sounded when Wing-Tsit Chong collapsed. Corrine told me he had badly overstressed himself in helping us overcome Steinbauer’s distortion of Eden’s thought routines. She wasn’t at all confident for his recovery.

All in all, it allowed me to, quite justifiably, postpone making any decisions about Jocelyn and the twins.

*

I used the same excuse at breakfast on the sixth day, as well. Nobody argued.

At midday I took a funicular railway car up the northern endcap, and headed down the docking spindle to inspect Steinbauer’s dragon hoard. The pressurized hangar I had requisitioned was just a fat cylinder of titanium, ribbed by monomolecule silicon spars, with an airlock door at the far end large enough to admit one of the inter-orbit tugs. A thick quilt of white thermal blankets covered the metal, preventing the air from radiating its warmth off into space. Thick bundles of power and data cables snaked about in no recognizable pattern. I glided through the small egress airlock which connected the hangar to Eden’s docking spindle, tasting a faint metallic tang in the air.

The Dornier SCA-4545B hung in the middle of the yawning compartment, suspended between two docking cradles that had telescoped out from the walls. It was a fat cone shape with two curving heavily shielded ports protruding from the middle of the fuselage. Every centimetre had been coated in a layer of ash-grey carbon foam which was pocked and scored from innumerable dust impacts. An array of waldo arms clustered round its nose were fully extended; with their awkward joints and spindly segments they looked remarkably like a set of insect mandibles.

Equipment bay panels had been removed all around the fuselage, revealing ranks of spherical fuel tanks, as well as the shiny intestinal tangle of actuators, life-support machinery, and avionics systems. Shannon Kershaw and Susan Nyberg were floating over one open equipment bay, both wearing navy-blue one-piece jump suits, smeared with grime. Nyberg was waving a hand-held scanner over some piping, while Shannon consulted her PNC wafer.

I grabbed one of the metal hand hoops sprouting from the Dornier’s fuselage, anchoring myself a couple of metres from them.
How’s it going?

Tough work, boss,
Shannon replied. She glanced up and gave me a quick impersonal smile.
It’s going to take us days to recover all the gold if you don’t appoint someone to assist us. We’re not really qualified to strip down astronautics equipment.

You’re the closest specialist I’ve got to a spacecraft technician, I can hardly give this job to a regular maintenance crew. And you should think yourself lucky I gave you this assignment. I was in the cyberfactory cavern yesterday evening when the recovery team finished flushing the enzyme goop out of the inspection tunnels. It took Zernov’s biotechnology people eight hours to restore the organ and its ancillary glands to full operability. Then we had to wait another hour while the tunnel atmosphere was purged.

Did you get the body?
Nyberg asked.

Most of it. The bones had survived, along with the bulk of the torso viscera. We also found the pistol, and some of the buttons from his tunic. Those enzymes were bloody potent; the organ employs them to break down bauxite, for Christ’s sake. We were lucky to find as much of him as we did.

Shannon screwed up her face in disgust. ‘Yuck!’
I think you’re right, we’ll just carry on here.

Excellent. How much gold have you collected so far?

Nyberg pointed to a big spherical orange net floating on the end of a tether. It was stuffed full of parts from the Dornier capsule – coils of wire, circuit boards, sheets of foil.
About a hundred and fifty kilos so far. He substituted it everywhere he could. In the circuitry, in thermal insulation blankets, in conduit casing. We think the radiator panel surfaces might be pure platinum.

I shifted my gaze to the mirror-polished triangular fins jutting from the rear of the Dornier’s fuselage. The billion-wattdollar spacecraft. Christ.

I don’t understand how he ever hoped to get it all back to Earth,
Nyberg said.

He probably planned to assign the Dornier to one of the tanker spaceships on a run back to the O’Neill,
Shannon said.
Plausible enough. Nobody seemed to query this capsule being withdrawn for maintenance so often. I checked its official UN Civil Spaceflight Authority log; the requests to bring it into the drydock hangars all originate from the Cybernetics Division. We all regard computers as infallible these days, especially on something as simple as routine maintenance upgrades. Which is what these were listed as.
She held up an S-shaped section of piping, wrapped in the ubiquitous golden thermal foil.

What’s the total, do you think?
I asked.

Not sure. Now Steinbauer has wiped the Cybernetics Division computer, all we have left to go on is that bogus log Maowkavitz downloaded earlier. I’d guesstimate maybe seven hundred kilos altogether. You’d think the Dornier’s crew would notice that much extra mass. It must have played hell with their manoeuvring.

Yeah.
I took the piping from her, and scratched the foil with my thumbnail. It was only about a millimetre thick, but it still had that unmistakable heavy softness of precious metal.

Shannon was burying herself in the equipment bay again. I hauled in the orange net, and shoved the piping inside.

Harvey,
Corrine called.

The subdued mental timbre forewarned me.
Yes?

It’s Wing-Tsit Chong.

Oh crap. Not him as well?

I’m afraid so. Quarter of an hour ago; it was all very peaceful. But the effort of countering Steinbauer’s distortion was just too much. And he wouldn’t let me help. I could have given him a new heart, but all he’d allow was a mild sedative.

I could feel the pressure of damp heat building around her eyes.
I’m sorry
.

Bloody geneticists. They’ve all got some kind of death wish.

Are you OK?

Yeah. Doctors, we see it all the time.

You want me to come around?

Not now, Harvey, maybe later. A drink this evening?

That’s a date.

*

The road out to the pagoda was becoming uncomfortably familiar. I found Hoi Yin sitting in one of the lakeside veranda’s wicker chairs, hugging her legs with her knees tucked under her chin. She was crying quite openly.

Second time in a week,
she said as I came up the wooden steps.
People will think I’m cracking up.

I kissed her brow, then knelt down on the floor beside her, putting our heads level. Her hand fumbled for mine.

I’m so sorry,
I said.
I know how much he meant to you.

She nodded miserably.
Steinbauer killed both of Eden’s parents, didn’t he?

Yes. I suppose he did, ultimately.

His death . . . it was awful.

Quick, though, if not particularly clean.

People can be so cruel, so thoughtless. It was his greed which did this. I sometimes think greed rules the whole world. Maowkavitz created me for money. Steinbauer killed for money. Boston intends to fight Earth over self-determination, which is just another way of saying ownership. Father Cooke resents affinity because it’s taking worshippers from him – even that is a form of greed.

You’re just picking out the big issues,
I said.
The top one per cent of human activity. We don’t all behave like that.

Don’t you, Harvey?

No.

What are you going to do about the stockpile? Give it to the board, or let Boston keep it?

I don’t know. It’s still classified at the moment, I haven’t even told the Governor. I suppose it depends on what Boston does next, and when. After all, possession is nine-tenths of the law.

My dear Harvey.
Her fingers stroked my face.
Torn so many ways. You never deserved any of this.

You never told me; do you support Boston?

No, Harvey. Like my spirit father, I regard it as totally irrelevant. In that at least I am true to him.
She leant forwards in the chair, and put both arms around me.
Oh, Harvey; I miss him so.

Yes, I know I shouldn’t have. I never intended to. I went out to the pagoda purely because I knew how much she would be hurting, and how few people she could turn to for comfort.

So I told myself.

Her bedroom was Spartan in its simplicity, with plain wooden floorboards, a few amateur watercolours hanging on the walls. The bed itself only just large enough to hold the two of us.

Our lovemaking was different to the wild exuberance we had shown out in the meadow. It was more intense, slower, clutching. I think we both knew it would be the last time.

We lay together for a long time afterwards, content just to touch, drowsy thoughts merging and mingling to create a mild euphoria.

There is something I have to say to you,
Hoi Yin said eventually.
It is difficult for me, because although you have a right to know, I do not know if you will be angry.

I won’t be angry, not with you.

I will understand if you are.

I won’t be. What is it?

I am pregnant. The child is ours.

‘What!’ I sat up in reflex, and stared down at her. ‘How the hell can you possibly know?’

I went for a scan at the hospital yesterday. They confirmed the zygote is viable.

‘Fuck.’ I flopped back down and stared at the thick ceiling beams. I have a gift, the ability to totally screw up my life beyond either belief or salvation. It’s just so natural, I do it without any effort at all.

After twelve years of celibacy, contraception was not something I concerned myself over any more,
Hoi Yin said.
It was remiss of me. But what happened that morning was so sudden, and so right . . .

Yes, OK, fine. We were consenting adults, we’re equally responsible.
She was watching me closely, those big liquid gold eyes full up with apprehension. My lips were curving up into a grin, like they were being pulled by a tidal force or something.
You’re really pregnant?