The Dreaming Dragons Part 8

Animals living on the ocean floor, at depths of more the 1000 metres, experience as constant an environment as any on earth, yet they possess just as much genetic variability as species living in shallow water on land.

With high excitement, he took a thick pink bundle from the folder. This was headed: _Unedited copy of material written with great speed in pencil, Dec. 14_.

'life of body social likened to life of social body as organism springs from heredity and environment working jointly and separately thru mech of genetic determination and ecological adaptation so social group [two lines unintelligible] social noosphere like unto genes specifying poss of individual within inhibitory selective influence of phys environ social innovation and choice akin to mutation and creative adaptation permitting breach of rules of universe of discourse bounded by prevailing order thus social phenotype mutable under influence of individual genotype and individ phenotype sculpted by changing social genotype while influence of mutation governed by control mech insects more phylogenetically stable than mammals cf societies capacity to permit polymorphic and polytypic variation itself element of social genotype in turn mutable in different degrees vector of prevailing level of immunity vigour of world 3 mutagenic agent metasocial environ in crisis culls ill adapted social genotype in favour of lowlevel now viable line viability of mutagens and social immune rejection systems restraining them cf clonal inhibition of disease immunity secured by exposure of young to dead ideas'

Jesus, he thought. This is no _tour de force_ of mnemonics. Fedorenko is right. The kid's a conduit, a leaking valve. From what? Not some alien presence in the Vault. The others, here, on the Project? The collective unconscious? And the child is telling us something, he knew with enormous certainty.

Out-of-body-experience, Bill thought. That soaring moment of cosmic awareness, the light, the terrible disjuncture from the body's limitations. Somehow the gluon shield triggered it. Somehow the Vault's defensive Zone works some still more radical breach. And drives men mad. Unless, he realised, the intruder is already without barriers, lacking ego boundaries. Fearfully, he thought: Like the autistic boy, Hieronymus Dean.

Sevastyianov rapped on the table, bringing them to order. 'Gentlemen, I think any remaining items on the agenda can wait until after luncheon. Thank you.' He gestured to delFord. 'I would like you to see the boy now, Doctor,' he said in a tone which did not carry to the others straggling from the conference room. 'I find your approach refreshing, delFord. To be candid, your colleague Dr Lowenthal gives me a pain in the a.s.s.'

Bill laughed aloud. He knew it was true, but he hadn't expected to hear it. If he'd been wearing a uniform things might have been different. Or would they? Civilians were s.h.i.t, weren't they?

'I appreciate it, General.'

Hugh was waiting for him at the door. Somewhere in the dome, the weird kid was doing a Joseph Smith, translating the golden discs with the prism of his flawed mind. Bill delFord burned with eager happiness.

*7. Uluru*

Although it was termed a dining room, the place was undeniably the officers' mess. Carpet softened the floor's concrete, grained timber panelling attempted to persuade the hungry that they were not under the arch of a prefabricated dome anch.o.r.ed in a waste of sand. Tables wore spotless linen, highlights gleamed from wine gla.s.ses. Bill sat down with Hugh and Alf, and their orders were taken by an un.o.btrusive fellow who clearly knew his stuff.

A palpable line segregated the Russians and Americans, except at one boisterous table where fists brandished calculators as often as booze. There was a boom of voices in dispute, friendly and pa.s.sionately obscene, and a confusion of simultaneous translations.

'The engineers,' Lapp explained. 'A primitive species, bereft of the niceties of nationality.' Pondering the menu, he nominated soup, schnitzel, and a complex dessert that involved a mango and an architecture of gooey flourishes. Alf Dean shuddered, and settled for chicken salad. Bill agreed with him. 'Wine?'

'For lunch?' The Australian regarded him with horror. 'We'll have Carlton Draught,' he told the waiter with enormous conviction.

The beer's bitter chill harrowed Bill's root ca.n.a.ls. Alf drained his own gla.s.s with a dexterous wrist, but stared gloomily at his salad. 'This place has murdered my appet.i.te. A couple of months ago I'd have eaten a brace of astronauts under the table.'

'A girl I know did just that,' Hugh said, pushing his soup bowl aside. 'Right in the middle of the banquet she got down on her knees -- '

'You're an oral deviate, Lapp,' Bill told him. 'How in the name of all that's decent did you manage to raise a pa.s.s score on the psych profiles?'

'I may have gone down on that score,' Hugh said instantly, 'but I finally got my problem licked.'

Bill found himself choking, and tried the beer again. 'I've drunk worse,' he decided. 'What is it, kangaroo p.i.s.s?'

'That was the original formula,' Alf said, with a slow smile. 'Unfortunately, a retired gentleman from Kentucky bought up the last of the animals for his burger chain.'

'I always wondered why they called it fast food. Alf, I take it you're not on the best of terms with another colonel from the home of the brave.'

'Chandler has an aversion to uppity colonials.'

'The Ugly American? I'm sorry, Alf. "There's one in every outfit".'

'They've specialised in them here,' Hugh said. 'Wait till you meet Sawyer.'

'The guy in charge downstairs?'

'Yeah. He's a Good Old Boy, with a bazooka and a Bible.'

The salad dressing was superb, and the fowl virginal. Alf was still fooling at the margins of his. 'I suppose you get used to being the policemen of the universe,' Bill said. 'And they'd hardly send any soft-liners to run a joint mission of this magnitude.'

'I can appreciate the dynamics of it,' Alf said, 'but Chandler's att.i.tude gives me the s.h.i.ts. G.o.d d.a.m.n it, my people have been here since Chandler's ancestors were poaching from the Neanderthals. I don't recall any of us swearing an oath of allegiance to the Stars and the Stripes.'

'They're always telling us Australia's a new country,' Hugh said. 'Me, I'm authentic first-generation American. If there hadn't been a brisk wind behind the boat they'd have had to register me as an Atlantean.' He gestured for his dessert.

It arrived snappily, and the astronaut monstered it while Bill forked up the last of his cuc.u.mber and yoghurt. 'Don't they have a weight limit for Shuttle crew?'

'Keep us on Tang for the final three weeks before liftoff.'

'You remind me powerfully of my son, Lapp. He eats like a pig and has a smart mouth. Do you have any kids of your own, Alf?'

'No.' From the second bottle he'd had uncapped at the table Alf was pouring his third hefty beer, carefully monitoring the foamy head's dimensions and density.

'Married?'

'It broke up two years ago.'

Bill waited. 'Bad, huh?'

'I sent her packing. She had a big mouth.' The anthropologist glanced grimly at Hugh, but the astronaut maintained a guileless expression. Rotten puns under control, Bill noted with approval. 'Karen was always fronting people she hardly knew and asking for their life histories.'

In a perfectly natural movement, Hugh Lapp was out of his seat and leaning relaxed on the table. 'Got to run, gang. I'll check on Mouse and tell them to expect you shortly. No, no, finish the bottle. You won't get lost, Bill, Alf knows the way.'

The engineers had departed, and a group of Russians were seating themselves, shouting for the menu. Not Army men. It's a habit they contract, Bill remembered. If they don't bellow at home it takes all day. 'I'm not prying, Alf. Mouse is my primary concern. I need to know everything I can get about his background and I gather his background is mostly you.'

'Yeah.' Dean brought one hand down over his face. 'Sorry. Ask away. Medical stuff?'

'I can get that from the files. To be blunt, I'm wondering how a blonde European adolescent has an Aboriginal uncle. Mouse is your sister's boy right?'

'Eleanor is my step-sister. I was adopted by Iain Dean several months after I was born.'

'Ah. The genetics of it did seem rather improbable. Are such adoptions customary?'

'Far from it.' Dean snarled. 'The rule in this racist s.h.i.theap has been to segregate the tribal blacks from the part-aboriginals wherever possible, and to keep both groups out of sight in case our repulsive presence frightens the women and children. Under the Act, blacks were detained by the authorities on reserves and compounds "for their own good". Vested interests, of course. We had no economic value, so they tried to exterminate us. There were no cotton plantations here, Doctor. At least the African slaves in America were housed and fed at a level comparable with other livestock. We weren't allowed to vote, of course, though they shovelled the gentle Jesus meek and mild c.r.a.p down our throats. I was an adult before a referendum got us included in the national Census.'

The beer was abreacting Dean's hostility into loquaciousness. 'Fully grown men and women were wards of the State. They needed permission to marry. I know this isn't answering your question, Bill, but it's the background. Half-castes -- "yellow-fellers" -- sometimes got raised in a white household, out of conscience or kindness. A lot of them were abducted from their mothers and sent south to orphanages, and sometimes whites adopted them. After all, they had halfway human genes. There was a trace of hope for them. But not for my kind.'

Bill watched the dark face, its pa.s.sion, its force. 'You're a full-blood, I take it.'

'Special case. Iain Dean was a young Army doctor with stars in his eyes. He was posted to Darwin during the war. His wife thought I was the cutest thing she'd ever seen. They'd had to cut me out of my mother's belly.'

The double jump took Bill by surprise. Let the man tell it his own way, he decided.

After a lengthy pause, Alf Dean went on: 'I went back later, you see. I wanted to know why my parents had given me away. They hadn't, the poor b.u.g.g.e.rs. A j.a.panese bomb had blown my father to pieces and left my mother so revoltingly injured that she died three days later. A f.u.c.king j.a.p bomb, in someone else's war. They're all white to us, delFord. Puyungarla, his name was. Ngularrnga tribe. Most of them are gone now, just a few dirty old men and women hanging around the periphery of town eating sc.r.a.ps and drinking themselves blind.' His voice faded. 'Wanntakgara. She was beautiful. A beautiful black wife.'

Dean's hand lost its loose grip on his beaded gla.s.s. The dishes had been taken from the table. Bill ordered coffee for them both.

'Do you regret your adoption?'

'Ungrateful, aren't I? Here I am, the best educated boong in the whole country. The rest of them are lucky if they make it through high school. While whingeing stolen-generation Alf Dean teaches anthropology from the fine paper podium of a PhD.'

Boong. A hideous word. Bill had heard it used several times since he'd arrived. A black human is not a human, but a boong. His heart went out to Dean. Compared with this man's horrific background, for all its superficial felicity and good fortune, his own battle up from the docks of Liverpool had been conducted by gentlemen's rules.

He prompted Alf. 'The Deans had a child of their own sometime later?'

'Yeah. Resurgent fertility. Eleanor came late, change-of-life kid. And of course she resented me. Backlash. It was wonderfully baroque when she was little, having a black brother. By the time she was adolescent I was compet.i.tion. She needed to go further out by her own efforts than I'd managed just by being born. So she finally hit the dope trail and never came back. Mouse was an occupational hazard.'

Mouse could wait. Bill diverted him back to his own history. 'You went looking for your natural parents, and stayed to be initiated? I noticed the cicatrized marks on your chest.'

'The Deans wouldn't tell me. But the Ngularrnga knew who I was. They told me what skin I belonged to, my totems, gave me a list of my potential brides. Pity about that, there were only two of them, both over forty. One had syphilis. I think they were relieved when I told them I was already married. But I stayed for six months. Ate dog food out of tins and drank muscat out of plastic flagons. They put me through initiation. I'd been circ.u.mcised in maternity hospital, so they covered me instead with these pretty decorations. You're looking at a Man of Silence, Bill. Alf Djanyagirnji. I can't hunt worth a d.a.m.n but I've danced the Lorrkun and Yabudurawa corroborees.' He looked away. 'They hate the dead, you know. Sing them off in the Lorrkun, beg them not to come back from 'Nother Place. _Cooma el ngruwar_...'

Carefully, Bill said, 'But you didn't join them. A black American in your situation might have become, oh, a Panther spokesman, a civil rights leader...'

Alf acted as if he hadn't heard. 'Christ, they brew a good pot of coffee here, I'll give them that. I can't hold my grog any more. That f.u.c.king thing down there has knocked the s.h.i.t out of my metabolism.'

'Give me your wrist. Hmm, a bit sluggish. Your pupils are contracted rather more than they ought to be. I advise you to get some rest.'

'Hang on, I'm all right. Anyway, I can't leave you to wander off through this place without a guide. It's a b.l.o.o.d.y maze.'

His dereliction with Mouse? 'Hugh'll roust me out. Come on, feller, I'll see you to your room.'

'I haven't finished the Dean family saga. I'll spare you the heat-death of my marriage. Mostly I was off in remote places doing field work, and my nice white wife Karen didn't want a baby. She considered absentee fatherhood an inappropriate way to raise a kid. Then my imbecile sister Ellie got herself pregnant and burned out the baby's brain with ma.s.sive doses of acid. Since then, she's spent more time in the looney bin than out of it. My mother looked after Mouse for the first couple of years but he got too much for her, and we started taking him at our place two or three days a week. When I got my lectureship I heard of a special program the Neuropsychiatric Department was starting for brain-damaged kids. We brought Mouse down to stay with us, and of course Karen copped most of the responsibility.'

A tremor went through Alf's body. 'I never understood how much she resented it. She certainly didn't take her anger out on the boy. Well, finally she shot through, and I got stuck with Mouse. f.u.c.k.' He jerked his eyes up and shook his head wildly. 'That's not what I meant. I love that kid, I really do. And now he's stuck in a gla.s.s cage with wires in his head. Jesus.'

'Right,' Bill said briskly. 'Point me toward your room. You need sleep more than I need information.' Hoisting Alf to his feet, and waving away offers of help, he steered the ill man out under the struts of the main corridor which circled the dome's perimeter. 'What's your room number?'

'North quadrant, 47. I'm bunking with Mouse. Around to your right, there's a bilingual sign.'

A crewcut Pfc paused, appraising them. Bill told him: 'Private, get a medic to meet us in Dr Dean's quarters. And if you can find him, I'd like Captain Lapp to join us there.'

'Yes, sir. Do you need any help?'

'I can manage.'

The side corridors were numbered with unusual rationality. Breathing hard, Bill opened the door marked N-47 and eased Alf onto the closest bed. A lieutenant with medic's flashes appeared almost immediately, with Hugh on his heels.

'Sorry, Bill, I should have alerted you. It clobbers him from time to time. I'm told there's no obvious organic cause for it. My hunch is, he's in resonance with Mouse. Keep us informed, Lieutenant, we'll be at the Cage.'

They walked quickly through the maze. Rain drummed dismally, grey noise from the high dome. In a low tone, over the clash of their boots on concrete Hugh said: 'The kid's scribbling like Dumas _pere_ on a writing jag. It'll knock you out.' He fished in a breast pocket. 'Better wear this or we'll hear every klaxon in the building.' A large heat-sealed ident.i.ty card bore Bill's photograph, thumbprints, and security rating. He pinned it on.

'We run Mouse in a shielded room,' Hugh told him. 'Don't ask me why, the physicists consider it a failsafe precaution.'

'Stuck in a gla.s.s cage with wires in his head,' Bill quoted.

'Not exactly. It's a triple-walled Faraday cage. Copper interleaved with polystyrene acoustic foam, and NASA telemetry access. You get 150 decibels of attenuation on radio frequencies from 15,000 cycles up to about a billion. Magnetic fields are cut by about 70 decibels at 15 kilohertz, though it drops off as you get down to 60 cycles. h.e.l.lishly expensive getting it here, and it doesn't faze the kid for a moment.'

'Try a gluon field.'

'Nah, too risky. He's an international resource.'

An armed guard inspected Bill's credentials with more than pa.s.sing interest, and did the same with Hugh's.

'Didn't you just come out of here?'

'S.O.P., Bill. That kid might turn out to be the super-weapon of World War Three.'

'Oh, for crying out loud.'

They entered a dim room crammed with instruments, oscilloscopes gibbering blue and white pulses, little panel lamps flickering on and off like holiday ornaments. Two TV screens showed a teenage boy with a medusa scalp of delicate wiring. His face could not be seen but his posture was relaxed, almost torpid. The swift mechanical sweep of his right hand seemed something detached, tracking back and forth without cease across a flat, braced illuminated board. Beside him in a comfortable chair a bored attendant sat partially in view. A boom mike hung above Mouse's head; his regular breathing was just audible.

'There's no point going in, all the gripping stuff is piped through this room. The big computer's at the centre of the dome under a mess of thermal insulation, but these word processing peripherals are the major output systems. Copies of everything are slaved immediately to permanent file in the US and Russian sectors, but the snoops don't have any executive capability.'

'I somehow imagined he used a blunt pencil.'

'He did at first, before we got this little number installed. Mouse can't be persuaded to punch a keyboard, which is a drag, but I guess for a kid with half a brain he's not doing too badly.'

A flatscreen visual display unit in the observation room was showing a line-by-line update on the boy's scribbling, transliterated on an adjacent screen into a legible font. With a jolt Bill saw that the characters were Cyrillic. A third display came alive as he watched, presenting lines of English that rolled up and off the screen. An operator suddenly grunted.

'My G.o.d,' Bill said, 'the child's a Slavophile.'

'Three days ago he gave us a piece of poetry in Urdu. It threw the computer into some confusion. Didn't worry Lowenthal, though, the dumb p.r.i.c.k. He still attributed it to trick memory.'

'A computer program is doing the translation?'

'Right. See that board he's writing on? It's pressure sensitive -- digitises his efforts, and outputs a fair copy to the displays. Then the translating programs do their stuff, throwing preliminary English or Russian versions. If it's over their heads they call for human intervention. Which happens surprisingly rarely -- these Kurzweil programs are _good_. The Russians cream their jeans every time they see our hardware, and weep at the software.'

Bill had located the biomedical instrumentation, and was emitting little bleats of pleasure. A twelve-channel EEG fizzed in harmony with the electrical activity in Mouse's brain: right hemisphere pulses flat and fast, with no spindles, left hemisphere equally desynchronized and hardly more active. A Fourier wave a.n.a.lysis was displayed in a histogram below the individual channels, confirming an absence of OOBE alphoid waves. But the pseudo-beta pattern Bill recognised instantly from studies on the psychic Ingo Swann. Mouse _wasn't_ awake, but he wasn't dreaming either, and he had none of the slow, high-voltage theta or delta waves of coma or non-dreaming sleep.

'He's out of the body, I'd swear it,' Bill said, grinning with satisfaction. All the vital signs from autonomic sensors seemed completely normal: pulse a steady 70; basal skin resistance, from the thenar eminence of the left palm and the left forearm, at the expected level; respiration consistent with the modest effort involved in writing automatically, no GSR anomalies. It certainly wasn't the profile of an autistic youth under stress.

'Captain,' said one of the shadowed computer operators, 'I think you'd better take a look at this.' The other operator glanced up quickly. Bill peered at his insignia. A Russian. The man flicked a switch and began punching swiftly on his keyboard. Black computer script continued to flow upward across the display screens.

's.h.i.t. Give me a hard copy.' Hugh Lapp leaned on the American soldier's shoulder, and took up the paper as it slithered from a printer. A buzzer sounded.

'We have a hold on the translation,' the American operator muttered. He ran a cursor across the screen. 'Looks like idiomatic material.'

'Here, let me in.' The man rose and Lapp slid into his moulded seat. He stared intently at the screen for a moment, keyed in an identifying header, and began hammering the input. The man at the adjacent terminal called a hard copy of his own and started to get out of his chair. Without looking up, the astronaut barked authoritatively in Russian. Undecided, the operator hesitated, nursing his pile of printout paper protectively. Again he stood up and began to push past Bill, who watched with a paralysing sense of foreboding Hugh came to his feet and blocked the door. He said something cold and definitive, keeping his hands at his sides. The operator shrugged and went back to his place. Hugh sat down and finished his task. The printer hushed, and gave him more paper.