Chapters Twenty and Twenty-one

We checked Eran’s quarters, his lab, Jordi’s quarters, and the garden.  We split up for a quick recon of the Club Deck.  No luck.  Eran was nowhere to be found, his communicator was off, and we were running out places to look.  Lu suggested we ask around but like Lexi said, you can only accost so many people before someone gets curious.  Curious we didn’t need.  So there we were, caught between dire circumstances and a screaming need to do something, when I remembered the library.  Sure enough, that was where we found both Eran and Jordi, noses buried in a volume of Kant.  Up on the balcony, Liriene hummed happily as she replaced books on the shelves.

They had news, Eran whispered when we joined them at the table.  So did we, murmured Lu with uncharacteristic discretion.  Given what we had been through over the last couple of hours, I rated her self-control darned near superhuman.  Trying to keep it casual for Liriene’s benefit, I suggested we meet in my quarters in half an hour to swap news over coffee.

Maintaining appearances and making relaxed conversation beat falling apart in public, but I’m here to tell you, it took everything we had.  Small wonder we didn’t possess an ounce of restraint by the time the two men showed up at my place.  The portal no more than closed behind them, when we started rapid-fire reporting, tag-team style.  Our narrative was frantic and fractured, but Jordi and Eran quickly caught the drift.  Their reaction was volcanic and profane.

“I absolutely cannot believe this!” I exclaimed a while later, chin resting on the upturned end of the gold bolster I was hugging like a teddy bear.  Tempers hadn’t exactly cooled, but they had settled into a sullen simmer.  “I can’t believe they’re actually going to subject Ke-Ling to something so … so …”

“Vicious?” Lexi suggested.

“Vicious, brutal … take your pick,” I muttered.

Sitting on the carpet, legs lotus-folded and back resting against the same divan I was curled up on, Lu shook her head.  “It’s vile, that’s what it is.”

“According to Enid, the Primes wholeheartedly embraced Alpha Genesis.”  I snorted derisively.  “I seriously doubt anyone with a clear grasp of this so-called therapy would,” I sketched quotes in the air with my fingers, “wholeheartedly embrace something that primitive, that inhumane.”  I glanced at my friends.  “You do know it was adapted from a process originally developed to rehabilitate the criminally insane?”

Lexi scowled ferociously.  “This business of forcibly ripping a person’s mind apart is fascism, pure and simple!”
That got the boil rolling again, and off we went, each taking a turn to vent.  Once we blew off this last head of righteously indignant steam, calm determination gained the upper hand.  We needed a plan, and we needed it now.  But first things first:  We had to warn Ke-Ling.  Since the net about to be dropped over him could just as easily catch the rest of us, Eran suggested we deliver the news as a group.

“In the first place, it will be a physical demonstration of the fact that Ke-Ling isn’t alone,” Eran explained from his seat next to me.  “We stand together.  Secondly, he needs to know none of us blames him.  Finally, we stand a far better chance of brainstorming a workable strategy as a group.”

“Of course,” agreed Jordi.  He and Lexi sat on the opposite divan, holding hands.

An hour later, the five of us were clustered around Ke-Ling’s portal when it opened.  Aside from an almost imperceptible widening of his dark eyes, he didn’t act particularly surprised to see everyone and his brother, despite the fact that Eran was the only one who had pressed the scanner, making him the only visitor announced.

Ke-Ling simply stepped back and waved us through the short, shadowed entryway into the living room beyond.
“Welcome, my friends.  Please, come in and make yourselves at home.”

We trouped in and milled awkwardly for a few minutes, acting like the first arrivals at a party, admiring our host’s decor and waiting for someone to break the ice.  Ke-Ling’s tastes ran to minimalist.  I appreciated the clean, Spartan lines of his streamlined furniture, the fog-and-smoke palette.  A few dramatic touches completed the elegant effect, among them a bonsai tree sprouting from an impossibly small red-clay bowl atop a tall side table.  The diminutive juniper’s pale trunk twisted up, spreading into delicate, gnarled branches fringed with tiny, deep-green leaves.

“Lu, check this out.”  I wandered over to stand in front of a long, rectangular canvas mounted on the bulkhead.  It depicted a muscular dapple-gray reared up over a brawny black-and-white horse prancing combatively in the foreground.  Eyes washed pale red, the gray radiated joyous, untamed strength as its sharp hooves slashed down toward the pinto.

“Isn’t that wonderful?” breathed Lu.  “I’ve always been partial to Chinese art.  I envy the power evoked with a few graceful brush strokes.”

“What does it say?” I asked Ke-Ling, nodding toward the Chinese characters trailing down the right edge.

“The artist honors the horse as a symbol of persistence, swiftness, and intelligence.”  He paused, then added almost as an afterthought, “I was born under the sign of the horse.”  On that note, any attempt at chit chat sputtered and died.

“We have to talk.”  Eran’s tone was unenthusiastic but level.

“Something has happened.”

“Yes.”

“Something serious.”  Eran nodded, once.  “I suspected as much.  When you called,” he explained in reply to Eran’s puzzled expression, “both your expression and your voice betrayed your agitation.  You seemed tense, worried.”  Lips curved in the sad, secretive smile he always seemed to wear lately, he motioned toward a long black sofa and matching loveseat.  “Come, sit.”

Eran sat on the sofa with Lexi and Jordi, while Lu and I took the loveseat to the left of the swept-back chair chosen by Ke-Ling.  Eran gave him the straight, unadorned facts.  I watched the geneticist carefully, trying to gauge his reaction.  He didn’t so much as blink.  He simply sat there—inscrutability personified—not a wrinkle in his dark slacks, not a bead of sweat dampening his brow or his crisp white, button-down tunic, which was open at the throat, sleeves rolled above his elbows.  His surprisingly muscular forearms didn’t tense; one flawlessly manicured hand continued to rest placidly atop his crossed knee, the other on arm of the chair.

“I misjudged the strength of their resistance,” he murmured almost to himself when Eran finally fell silent.  His gaze, still strangely calm, had grown distant.  “But I believed … that is, I hoped, I could at least make my colleagues understand, if no one else.  Abila and the others are scientists, after all, trained to search out truth.  Every scientist knows the truth is not always expected.”

“Why, bless your heart, Ke-Ling,” Lu sympathized, “no one blames you for wanting to share the truth!  I was itching to tell one and all the moment I figured it out.  Kai wouldn’t let me, thank goodness.”

Again the smile.  “Obviously, not everyone is ready or willing to hear it.”

Lu nodded sagely.  “Kai-Lee’s very words.”

“I thought the facts, the logic of my argument, would compel people to listen.  First my colleagues, then the Council … everyone.”  He blinked, his eyes focusing on us again.  “So, an intervention is planned.  When?”

“We don’t know,” I said.  “Soon.”

Eran spoke up.  “You’re not surprised.”  Ke-Ling slowly shook his head.

“Or worried,” I added, bewildered by the realization.

“I suspected this might occur.”

Jordi cocked his head.  “You went ahead, in spite of Alpha Genesis.”

“I felt I had no choice,” Ke-Ling explained calmly.  “Someone had to speak up for the good of all.  For the truth.”

“Ah,” said Jordi, casting a what now? glance at Eran.

“Let’s get down to brass tacks, shall we?” Eran interjected.  “Alpha Genesis exists, and it poses an immediate threat to one of us, a potential threat to us all.  What are we going to do about it?”

“I would never have undertaken the course of action I chose,” replied Ke-Ling, “without preparing for every contingency.  You need not worry on my account.  As for you, my friends, I have taken great pains to make sure you will not be implicated.  Your names were never mentioned in this connection, nor will they be.”

Eran shook his head firmly.  “Wrong tack.  We are your friends, and we’re not about to abandon you simply to save our own skins.”

“Absolutely not,” Lexi agreed.

“Don’t even go there, Ke-Ling,” warned Lu.  “Besides, everyone knows we’re your friends.  They’ve seen us together, for heaven’s sake.”

“They have seen me with many people.  You will not stand out in anyone’s mind as my particularly intimate associates.  So, you see, you are in no danger.  You must trust me.  You must not interfere with my plans!” he insisted, showing the first crack in his usually unperturbed demeanor.  “Your discretion is of the utmost importance!  If you value this new life we have found, you will remain silent.  Knowledge of the truth must be preserved, and that will only be possible if no one is able to connect us.”

“Ah, but I’m afraid someone already has, Doctor.”

We froze.  My heart stopped dead before lurching into a painful, panicked gallop as our five heads turned in slow, disbelieving unison toward the darkened entryway.  Security Chief Rune Gaspar was smiling when he stepped out of the shadows and into the light.

Ω

Chapter Twenty-One

Time screeched to a halt.  Worlds everywhere stood still on their axes.  We were trapped, not an O2 molecule between the five of us, and our lives were over.  I could almost feel the restraints cuff my wrists and the Alpha Genesis chip start to heat up my brain.

Those thoughts were a modest indication of the hysteria mounting steadily inside me during the interminable two minutes following Gaspar’s appearance.  I even entertained a fleeting, crazed suspicion that he wasn’t human, because no mere mortal could materialize out of nowhere the way he had.   Meanwhile, Rune stood there smirking, one hand tucked casually in the pocket of his black jacket.  Far from being in a hurry to break the excruciating silence, he seemed to savor the moment.

“How?” Ke-Ling finally croaked.

“How did I find out?”

“No.  I mean, yes, of course, but …. How did you get in?  There was no announcement, and the portal was—”

“Locked?”  Ke-Ling nodded dumbly.  Smiling a bit wider, the security chief ambled into the room, slid his hand from his pocket, and gestured at the empty chair next to his unwilling host.  “May I?  Thanks.  Flat feet,” he sighed as he sat and stretched his long legs in front of him, ankles crossed.  “Occupational hazard.”  Lu and I traded terrified glances.  “Now, where were we?  Oh, yeah.  The locked portal.”  Folding his hands atop his washboard stomach, Gaspar dropped the smile and nodded pensively.  “I can see how you could find that confusing, the biometric lock being keyed to your particular genome and all.  Hell, a high-tech lock like that, tailor-made to respond to your specific DNA … you should be the only one who can open it, right?”  He paused, grinned, shook his head.  “Truthfully, Doc?  The explanation of how I got around that lock is so simple, I almost hate to give it to you.  But I will.  Call it … oh, a show of good faith.”

Ke-Ling and Eran exchanged sharp glances.  I sensed they had caught something I had missed, but before I could figure it out, Gaspar continued, drawing my attention back to his deeply bronze, hawk-like features.

“When your average citizen hears ‘genomic lock,’ he makes certain assumptions.  He trusts the technology.  The lock is calibrated to his DNA.  He touches the scanner, and open sesame.  No muss, no fuss, no uninvited guests, right?  As long as the equipment works the way it’s supposed to, he doesn’t give it another thought.  The thing is, way back when, a security expert designed that lock.  And maybe, just maybe, this expert built in a feature known only to him.”

“An insurance policy?” asked Eran.

“Something like that.”

“I think I begin to see,” murmured Ke-Ling.

“See what?” Lu asked.  Curiosity had obviously gotten the better of terror, at least temporarily.

“Every private cabin on this deck has one entrance,” Gaspar explained, “a portal equipped with a lock programmed to open only after it reads the legal occupant’s DNA.”  His lips curved slowly.  “Or mine.”

I cleared my throat, tried to come up with a way to put my question delicately.  “So what you’re saying is, you can—”

“—waltz into any cabin on this ship, any time I damn well please, because each and every biometric lock is programmed to accept my DNA, as well as the occupant’s?  Affirmative.”

“And nobody else knows about this?” Eran asked pointedly.

“Not another living soul.”  Gaspar paused meaningfully.  “Until now.”

“Why tell us?” Jordi wanted to know.

“Like I said, a show of good faith.  I want in.”

“In?”  Now I was completely baffled.  “In what?”

“I think Councilman Gaspar is saying he wants to be accepted into the fold,” murmured Eran, eyes fixed on the man in question.  “Am I right?”

The agent nodded.  “Yeah.”

“By the ever-loving Sage!” I whispered reverently.  My world was tilting toward seriously cockeyed.  Exactly how many shocks could a person—in this case, me—receive in the space of a few hours without going absolutely bonkers?

“I don’t suppose,” said Eran, “you would care to tell us how you came to … shall we say, see things our way?”

“Blame the Doc here.  He recruited me.”

Ke-Ling didn’t seem to know whether to be bewildered or aghast at the suggestion.  “I?”

“Not on purpose,” Gaspar conceded, “but the result was the same.”  He propped his right elbow on the chair arm and leaned on it, left hand lightly clasping his right wrist.  “Did you ever stop to ask yourself what a man in my profession does day after day, week after week, year after year, in an outfit like this?  No crime, no enemy at the gates … no gates to guard, period, because there’s nobody out here but us spacemen?”

“What do you do?” asked Lexi.

“Well, let’s see….  There’s the endlessly exciting genomic lock maintenance, of course.  Then, if I’m really feeling frisky, I can pull spot compliance inspections, rattle a few cages, make sure everybody toes the line security-wise.  Not that there’s been any threat to or need for security in the last four hundred years.  Oh.  I also sit on the Council.  The Doc here can tell you how productive those meetings are.  I don’t know about you, Doctor, but I’d rather watch paint dry.  So, in answer to your question, I guess you could say I’ve whiled away the hours as a combination bureaucrat, pork-barrel politician, and glorified night watchman.”

Useless, dead-end job.  Like Publius and Liriene, I mused silently.

Luana sighed.  “You poor thing.”

“Life was pretty grim,” agreed Gaspar.

“Was?” Jordi prompted.

“Past tense, yeah.  I got fed up a year ago, finally admitted I wasn’t cut out for dull and tedious.  I’m an intelligence agent, an operator, dammit! People like me need excitement, a challenge, that rush that you get from playing the game and laying it all on the line.”

“But since there was no game in town,” Eran mused,  “you decided to ….”

Gaspar’s grin flashed in acknowledgment.  “Start one.  Rounded up my people—there are about twenty of us—gave them a real kick in the pants.  Ranted and raved about rusty skills and slow, sloppy thinking and flabby physiques; cussed a blue streak.  Bet them a thousand each a five-year youngling with a magnifying glass could pick up more intelligence than they could.  I cut them off at the knees.  You should have seen their faces; man, they were ticked!  Did my heart a world of good to see that fire in their eyes; it meant they hadn’t lost their spirit.

“‘We’re going back into business,’ I said, ‘as of today.  Pick someone, anyone, and get in his or her life.  Deep penetration.  I want to know what he/she has for breakfast and whether he/she flosses at night.  We’ve all got secrets, if only in our dreams.  Find out what they are.  Work up a profile, right down to shoe size.  I want it all, people.  This exercise will be graded, so you had better go at it like it’s the real thing.  But let anybody catch you snooping—especially me—and you’ll spend your days doing PT and your nights on a midnight-to-five all-decks patrol.’  Only the Council was off limits, I said.  They were mine.”

“And that was where I came in,” guessed Ke-Ling quietly.

“Yeah, but not right off.  No offense, Doc, but your average geneticist’s lifestyle doesn’t exactly make for scintillating surveillance.  I did workups on two or three others first:  Garan, Sofert, Daner.  A politician, a newspaper magnate, and a judge—ought to be something juicy there, right?”

Lu was literally on the edge of her seat.  “Was there?” she asked breathlessly.

“Depends on how you define juicy,” drawled Gaspar.

Ke-Ling blocked whatever seamy detour the conversation was about to take.  “Yet, you eventually did turn your attention to me.  Why?”

“Well, you know what they say about still waters.”

Ke-Ling frowned uncertainly.  “I beg your pardon?”

“They run deep,” I supplied.

Gaspar winked.  “There you go.”

“I’m afraid I still do not understand,” said Ke-Ling.

“There didn’t seem to be anything remarkable about you,” explained the agent.  “Not one thing.  Your work was your life, your routine hardly varied.  You didn’t have a social life to speak of.  Everything about you seemed pretty straightforward.  Still waters.”

“Ah.”

“On the surface,” Rune added.  “But I’m a curious guy, and before too long, the absence of ripples got my attention.  ‘Come on, Gaspar’ I said to myself, ‘nobody’s life is that uncomplicated.’  There had to be more to you than met the eye, and I decided to find out what.

“I almost gave up,” he admitted wryly, “six months into the op.  Council meetings started to seem like a laugh a minute, compared to surveiling you.  I searched your quarters, hacked your computer, tapped your comms.”  The agent stood and ambled over to the side table.  He ran an index finger lightly over the delicate leaves of the bonsai tree and continued, “I got bupkis.”

“Nothing,” Jordi translated for Ke-Ling’s benefit.

Gaspar turned to face us again, sliding both hands in his pockets and leaning against the table behind him.  “Then, right about the time I decided you were exactly what you appeared to be and had resigned myself to looking elsewhere for my entertainment, you handed me the mother load.”

“His conclusions about the Known Span,” said Eran.

“Yeah.  From still waters to tsunami in sixty seconds flat.”  Rune’s lips curved in a lopsided smile as he shook his head in bemused admiration.  “Damn, Doc, didn’t anyone ever tell you you’re supposed to pick your battles?”

Ke-Ling shrugged.  “Unfortunately, to stand or retreat is not always the choice presented to us.  The truth is what it is; I cannot change it and to deny it would be insupportable.”

“Well, you sure got my attention—not that I believed you at first.  I didn’t want to believe you, because believing you would foul up everything.  But after monitoring the heated discussions between you and your colleagues, I couldn’t be absolutely sure you were wrong.  Since I figured the answer lay with you, I stepped up my surveillance.”  He nodded toward the rest of us.  “That’s when these five popped up on my radar.”

“And what you have seen and heard since has convinced you?” Ke-Ling asked.

Gaspar grimaced wryly.  “That and my gut.  Look, I was tracking six people from different walks of life.  More or less separately, they had all come to the same conclusion.  Coincidence?”  He shrugged.  “Not likely, but anything is possible.  Except the conclusion they all arrived at appears to be supported by empirical evidence.  Still, I might have my doubts, given time.  The one thing I never question is my instincts.”

Eran cocked his head.  “And what, exactly, are your instincts telling you these days?”

“You want me to lay it all on the line, is that it?”

Eran’s lips curved slightly.  “You did say taking a gamble appeals to you.”

“Touché.  Okay, on the line it is.  My gut tells me living forever by cloning is a crock, the Protocols are pure propaganda, and while we sit around congratulating ourselves on living forever, life is actually passing us by.”

Ω

© 2010, Kathy DiSanto, all rights reserved