A Second Chance at Eden

  ‘What’s the date?’

  ‘April nineteenth, 2549.’

  ‘Jesus Christ, a hundred and two years. Is the Confederation still intact?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ She gave him an awkward grimace. ‘Mr Eason, Grandma’s waiting.’

  ‘Grandma?’ he asked cautiously.

  ‘Althaea.’

  He stopped at the foot of the stairs. ‘That wasn’t the deal.’

  ‘I know. She says she’ll understand if you want to jump back into the pod for another few days. She doesn’t have long to live, Mr Eason.’

  He nodded thoughtfully. ‘Always knew what she wanted, did Althaea. I never said no to her back then.’

  The girl smiled, and they started up the stairs.

  ‘So you’re her granddaughter, are you?’

  ‘Great-great-granddaughter, actually.’

  ‘Ah.’

  He recognized the layout of the house, but nothing more. It was full of rich furnishings and expensive artwork. Too grand for his taste.

  Althaea was in the master bedroom. It was painful for him to look at her. Two minutes ago she’d been a radiant seventeen-year-old a week from her wedding day.

  ‘Almost made a hundred and twenty,’ she said from her bed. Her chuckle became a thin cough.

  He bent over and kissed her. Small black plastic patches were clinging to the side of her wrinkled neck. He could see the outline of more beneath her shawl.

  ‘Still want to fight dragons for me?’ she asked.

  ‘’Fraid not. I was rather impressed by that great-great-granddaughter of yours.’

  She laughed and waved him into a seat beside the bed. ‘You haven’t changed. Mind you, you haven’t had the time.’

  ‘How’s Mullen?’

  ‘Oh, him. Been gone five years, now.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘We had a century together. That’s why I wanted to see you again. I wanted to thank you.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘For doing what you did. For leaving us alone.’ She tilted her head towards the open window. ‘I loved him, you know. All the time he was alive, and even now, a whole century of love. It was an excellent life, Eason, truly excellent. Oh, I wasn’t a saint; I had my share of fooling around when I was younger, so did he. But we stayed together for a hundred years. How about that?’

  ‘I’m glad.’

  ‘I lied to you about the children. Remember the day after you arrived I said I wanted ten.’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘Course you do; it’s only been two months for you. Well, I only had eight.’

  ‘That’s a shame.’

  ‘Yes. But, ah, what they achieved. Take a look.’ She flicked a pale finger at the window. ‘Go on.’

  So he did. And there was his dream waiting outside. The neat ordered ranks of fruit trees stretching right round the island, a fleet of tractors buzzing down the grassy avenues, and Edenist-style servitor chimps scampering through the branches in search of the bright globes. The red-clay rooftops of a small fishing village; boats bobbing at their moorings along the seven jetties. People walking and cycling everywhere. Adults and children setting up tables and parasols in the garden ready for a party. And, as ever, the firedrakes, noisy flocks of them spiralling and wheeling overhead.

  ‘That’s all thanks to you,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what would have happened if you’d stayed around. I was so torn. I loved Mullen for a century, but I kept the guilt, too.’

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ he said.

  ‘You can stay if you want. I’d like you to enjoy it.’

  ‘No. My time here is over.’

  ‘Ha! That’s Mother talking.’

  ‘She told you?’

  ‘Oh yes. Mind you, I never told Mullen. It was too weird.’

  ‘She was right, though, wasn’t she? You two were made for each other.’

  ‘Yes, damn her, she was right. But that guilt always made me wonder.’

  *

  It was called the Torreya Memorial Clinic, a mansion sitting astride the foothills above Kariwak. Long since converted from a private residence, its main wings provided free health care for the city’s poor. Of course, such charity was expensive, so the foundation which ran it also provided first-class treatment for those who could afford it. As well as standard medical facilities there was an excellent rejuvenation centre, and for those who wished to give their offspring the best start in life, a geneering department.

  Eason waited for Dr Kengai to complete his credit checks, remembering the last time he was in an office, facing down agent Tenvis. The doctor had a much better view over Kariwak than the old Kulu Embassy provided. Although the city was much the same size as it had been a century ago, he was disappointed to see the number of skyscrapers that had sprung up. The sequoias were still there along the central boulevard, and prospering, tall green spires waving gently high above the clutter of white buildings.

  ‘Your financial status appears quite impeccable, Mr Eason,’ Dr Kengai said happily.

  Eason grinned back with equal sincerity. ‘Thank you. And you’ll have no trouble providing the service I want?’

  ‘A parthenogenetic clone is a relatively straightforward procedure. It poses no difficulty.’

  ‘Good.’ He unclipped the silver chain around his neck, and handed over the locket. ‘Is there sufficient genetic material here?’

  Dr Kengai removed the tuft of gold-auburn hair it contained. ‘You could reproduce several million of her from this.’ He teased a single strand loose, and returned the locket.

  ‘I only want one,’ Eason said.

  ‘I understand you don’t intend to raise the girl yourself?’

  ‘That is correct. I’m going to be away travelling again for a few more years, my ride isn’t quite finished.’

  ‘Unfortunately, we do have to reassure ourselves that the child will have a viable home to go to once she is removed from the exowomb. The clinic is not in the business of producing orphans.’

  ‘Don’t worry. My lawyer is currently seeking a suitable set of foster parents. A trust fund will pay for her to be brought up out in the archipelago for seventeen years.’

  ‘Then what will happen to her?’

  ‘I’ll come back, and she’ll marry me. That’s when she loves me, you see.’

  Timeline

  2550 Mars declared habitable by Terraforming office.

  2580 Dorado asteroids discovered around Tunja, claimed by both Garissa and Omuta.

  2581 Omutan mercenary fleet drops twelve antimatter planet-busters on Garissa, planet rendered uninhabitable. Confederation imposes thirty-year sanction against Omuta, prohibiting any interstellar trade or transport. Blockade enforced by Confederation Navy.

  2582 Colony established on Lalonde.

  Escape Route

  Sonora Asteroid 2586

  Escape Route

  Marcus Calvert glanced at the figures displayed on the account block, and tried not to make his relief too obvious. The young waitress wasn’t so diplomatic when she read the amount he’d shunted over from his Jovian Bank credit disk and saw he hadn’t included a tip. She turned briskly and headed back to the Lomaz bar, heels clicking their disapproval on the metal decking.

  It was one of life’s more embarrassing ironies that the owner of a multi-million fuseodollar starship didn’t actually have any spare cash. Marcus raised his beer bottle ruefully to his two crew-members sitting at the table with him. ‘Cheers.’

  Bottle necks were clinked together.

  Marcus took a long drink, and tried not to grimace at the taste. Cheap beer was the same the Confederation over. He was quite an expert on the subject now.

  Roman Zucker, the Lady Macbeth’s fusion engineer, shot a mournful look at the row of elegant bottles arranged behind the bar. The Lomaz had an impressive selection of expensive imported beers and spirits. ‘I’ve tasted worse.’

  ‘You’ll taste a lot better once we get our cargo charter,’ said Katherine Maddox, the
ship’s node specialist. ‘Any idea what it is, Captain?’

  ‘The agent didn’t say; apart from confirming it’s private not corporate.’

  ‘They don’t want us for combat, do they?’ Katherine asked. There was a hint of rebellion in her voice. She was in her late forties, and like the Calverts her family had geneered their offspring to withstand both free fall and high acceleration. The dominant modifications had given her thicker skin, tougher bones, and harder internal membranes; she was never sick or giddy in free fall, nor did her face bloat up. Such changes were a formula for blunt features, and Katherine was no exception.

  ‘If they do, we’re not taking it,’ Marcus assured her.

  Katherine exchanged an unsettled glance with Roman, and slumped back in her chair.

  The combat option was one Marcus had considered regrettably possible. Lady Macbeth was combat-capable, and Sonora asteroid belonged to a Lagrange-point cluster with a strong autonomy movement. An unfortunate combination. But having passed his sixty-seventh birthday two months ago he sincerely hoped those kind of flights were behind him. His present crew deserved better, too. He owed them ten weeks’ back pay, and not one of them had pressed him for it yet. They had faith in him to deliver. He was determined not to let them down.

  Part of his predicament was due to the ruinous cost of cryogenic fuels these days. Starflight was not a cheap venture, consuming vast quantities of energy. Maintenance, too, cut savagely into profit margins. Flying to Sonora without a cargo had been a severe financial blow. It was a position Marcus had constantly reacquainted himself with throughout his career; the galaxy didn’t exactly shower favours on independent starships.

  ‘This could be them,’ Roman said, glancing over the rail. One of Sonora’s little taxi boats was approaching their big resort raft.

  Marcus had never seen an asteroid cavern quite like this one before. The centre of the gigantic rock had been hollowed out by mining machines, producing a cylindrical cavity twelve kilometres long, five in diameter. Usually the floor would be covered in soil and planted with fruit trees and grass. In Sonora’s case, the environmental engineers had simply flooded it. The result was a small freshwater sea that no matter where you were on it, you appeared to be at the bottom of a valley of water.

  Floating around the grey surface were innumerable rafts, occupied by hotels, bars, and restaurants. Taxi boats whizzed between them and the wharfs at the base of the two flat cavern walls. The trim cutter curving round towards the Lomaz had two people sitting on its red leather seats.

  Marcus watched with interest as they left the taxi. He ordered his neural nanonics to open a fresh memory cell, and stored the pair of them in a visual file. The first to alight was a man in his mid-thirties; a long face and a very broad nose gave him a kind of imposing dignity. He wore expensive casual clothes, an orange jacket and turquoise trousers, with a bright scarlet sash that was this year’s fashion on Avon.

  His partner was less flamboyant. She was in her late twenties, obviously geneered; Oriental features matched with white hair that had been drawn together in wide dreadlocks and folded back aerodynamically. Her slate-grey office suit and prim movements made her appear formidably unsympathetic.

  They walked straight over to Marcus’s table, and introduced themselves as Antonio Ribeiro and Victoria Keef. Antonio clicked his fingers at the waitress, who took her time sauntering over. Her mood swung when Antonio slapped down a local 5,000 peso note on her tray and told her to fetch a bottle of Norfolk Tears.

  ‘Hopefully to celebrate the success of our business venture, my friends,’ he said. ‘And if not, it is a pleasant time of day to imbibe such a magical potion. No?’

  Marcus found himself immediately distrustful. It wasn’t just Antonio’s phoney attitude; his intuition was scratching away at the back of his skull. Some friends called it his paranoia program, but it was rarely wrong. A family trait, like the wanderlust which no geneering treatment had ever eradicated.

  ‘Any time of day will do for me,’ Roman said.

  Antonio smiled brightly at him.

  ‘The cargo agent said you had a charter for us,’ Marcus said. ‘He never mentioned any sort of business deal.’

  ‘If I may ask your indulgence for a moment, Captain Calvert. You arrived here without a cargo. You must be a very rich man to afford that.’

  ‘There were . . . circumstances requiring us to leave Ayacucho ahead of schedule.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Katherine muttered darkly. ‘Her husband.’

  Marcus was expecting it, and smiled serenely. He’d heard very little else from the crew for the whole flight.

  Antonio received the tray and its precious pear-shaped bottle from the waitress, and waved away the change. She gave him a coy smile, eyes flashing gamely.

  ‘If I may be indelicate, Captain, your financial resources are not optimum at this moment,’ Antonio suggested.

  ‘They’ve been better. But I’m not desperate. Any financial institution would fall over themselves to advance me a loan against my next charter if I asked them for it.’

  Antonio handed him a glass. ‘And yet you don’t. Why is that, Captain?’

  ‘I might not have a good cash flow, but I’m hardly bankrupt. I own Lady Mac, and it took me a long time to achieve that. That means I fly her as I want to, how she’s meant to be flown. I’ve taken her on scouting missions beyond the Confederation boundaries to find new terra-compatible planets, risked my own money on cargos, and even piloted her into battle for dubious causes. If I want commercial drudgery I’ll sign on with a line company. Which is what I’d be doing if I took out a loan.’

  ‘Bravo, Captain!’ Antonio raised his glass in salute. ‘May the grey men be consigned to hell for all eternity.’ He sipped his Norfolk Tears, and grinned in appreciation. ‘For myself, I was born with the wrong amount of money. Enough to know I needed more.’

  ‘Mr Ribeiro, I’ve heard all the get-rich-quick schemes in existence. They all have one thing in common, they don’t work. If they did, I wouldn’t be sitting here with you.’

  ‘You are wise to be cautious, Captain. I was, too, when I first heard this proposal. However, if you would humour me a moment longer, I can assure you this requires no capital outlay on your part. At the worst you will have another mad scheme to laugh about with your fellow captains.’

  ‘No money at all?’

  ‘None at all, simply the use of your ship. We would be equal partners sharing whatever reward we find.’

  ‘Jesus. All right, I can spare you five minutes. Your drink has bought you that much attention span.’

  ‘Thank you, Captain. My colleagues and I want to fly the Lady Macbeth on a prospecting mission.’

  ‘For planets?’ Roman asked curiously.

  ‘No. Sadly, the discovery of a terracompatible planet does not guarantee wealth. Settlement rights will not bring more than a couple of million fuseodollars, and even that is dependent on a favourable biospectrum assessment, which would take many years. We have something more immediate in mind. You have just come from the Dorados?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Marcus said. The system had been discovered six years earlier, comprising a red-dwarf sun surrounded by a vast disc of rocky particles. Several of the larger chunks had turned out to be nearly pure metal. Dorados was an obvious name; whoever managed to develop them would gain a colossal economic resource. So much so that the governments of Omuta and Garissa had gone to war over who had that development right.

  It was the Garissan survivors who had ultimately been awarded settlement by the Confederation Assembly. There weren’t many of them. Omuta had deployed twelve antimatter planet-busters against their homeworld. ‘Is that what you’re hoping to find, another flock of solid metal asteroids?’

  ‘Not quite,’ Antonio said. ‘Companies have been searching similar disc systems ever since the Dorados were discovered, to no avail. Victoria, my dear, if you would care to explain.’

  She nodded curtly and put her glass down on the table.
‘I’m an astrophysicist by training,’ she said. ‘I used to work for Mitchell-Courtney; it’s a company based in the O’Neill Halo that manufactures starship sensors, although their speciality is survey probes. It’s been a very healthy business recently. For the last five years commercial consortiums, Adamist governments, and the Edenists have all been flying survey missions through every catalogued disc system in the Confederation. As Antonio said, none of our clients found anything remotely like the Dorados. That didn’t surprise me, I never expected any of Mitchell-Courtney’s probes to be of much use. All our sensors did was run broad spectroscopic sweeps. If anyone was going to find another Dorados cluster it would be the Edenists. Their voidhawks have a big advantage; those ships generate an enormous distortion field which can literally see mass. A lump of metal fifty kilometres across would have a very distinct density signature; they’d be aware of it from at least half a million kilometres away. If we were going to compete against that, we’d need a sensor which gave us the same level of results, if not better.’

  ‘And you produced one?’ Marcus enquired.

  ‘Not quite. I proposed expanding our magnetic anomaly detector array. It’s a very ancient technology; Earth’s old nations pioneered it during the twentieth century. Their military maritime aircraft were equipped with crude arrays to track enemy submarines. Mitchell-Courtney builds its array into low-orbit resource-mapping satellites; they produce quite valuable survey data. Unfortunately, the company turned down my proposal. They said an expanded magnetic array wouldn’t produce better results than a spectroscopic sweep, not on the scale required. And a spectroscopic scan would be quicker.’

  ‘Unfortunate for Mitchell-Courtney,’ Antonio said wolfishly. ‘Not for us. Dear Victoria came to me with her suggestion, and a simple observation.’

  ‘A spectrographic sweep will only locate relatively large pieces of mass,’ she said. ‘Fly a starship fifty million kilometres above a disc, and it can spot a fifty-kilometre lump of solid metal easily. But the smaller the lump, the higher the resolution you need or the closer you have to fly, a fairly obvious equation. My magnetic anomaly detector can pick out much smaller lumps of metal than a Dorado.’