Collision with Chronos Page 7

  “But, Grandfather, wouldn’t you like to see what it’s like up there?” Su-Mueng asked. “Believe me, it’s so different. They live so much better than we do … everything’s so luxurious. You ought to see it.”

  The older man laughed gently, tolerantly. “Your father certainly has something to answer for,” he chuckled. “You tell me they live better – I don’t think so.” He made a wry face. “No work, nothing really productive. Life would seem useless. I like it better here.”

  Yes, Su-Mueng reflected, that was precisely the secret of how the system was able to perpetuate itself: neither side of the split city envied the other. The inhabitants of the Leisure Retort were scarcely aware of the workers who served them, and the workers, in their turn, regarded the participants in the aesthetic leisure culture as idle drones who would probably have been happier doing something useful.

  One might have expected that over the passage of centuries some sort of resentment would have built up. But Retort City had neatly circumvented this possibility, by the practice known as the Alternation of Generations – a weirdly democratic principle that for cunning and ingenuity was probably unique. For while the work and leisure classes were strictly segregated, their separation was on a non-hereditary basis. Each babe was taken from its mother a few hours after birth and transported to the opposite retort, usually to be reared by its paternal grandmother – who previously had surrendered her own child … now the babe’s father or mother.

  The arrangement was made even more perfect by virtue of the fact that the double exchange could be made simultaneously, even though in real terms a time lag of decades was obviously involved. This was because of the flexible phasing of the two retorts in time. On the same day that a couple parted with their new-born child, they received that child’s own offspring … their grandchild.

  It all had a simple, basic ethic: a man might be fated to spend his entire life in the Production Retort, but he had the satisfaction of knowing that his children enjoyed the luxury and sophistication of the Leisure Retort. Conversely, an inhabitant of the Leisure Retort who was obliged to send his children to a life of work and discipline in the Lower Retort was compensated by being able to educate his grandchildren in their stead.

  In practice, however, such a rationalisation was unnecessary. Family attachments were weak; people harboured no feelings for the children they never saw, and experienced neither envy nor pity in regard to their lot. In centuries there had been no questioning of the social order, and very few defections.

  “Come, now,” Su-Mueng’s grandfather chided, noticing his continuing long face. “Life’s all right here, isn’t it? Don’t worry your head about life up there. Let them live it. This is good enough for me.”

  Su-Mueng didn’t answer. Yes, he thought, it all ran perfectly – as long as the two cultures never met.

  Which was why it didn’t run perfectly with him.

  For he was a product of one of those few defections, the only one, to his knowledge, in recent years.

  His father was Hueh Shao, once an official of high rank – a cabinet minister, Su-Mueng believed – in the Leisure Retort. There must have been something badly maladjusted about Hueh Shao, for in a society where for centuries everyone had been faultlessly conditioned into accepting the long-established custom, he had been unable to bear the thought of sending his newborn son down into the Lower Retort. He had broken the law, secretly keeping the babe and representing it as his grandson sent up from below.

  It seemed incredible that the deception could go undetected, let alone that Su-Mueng’s absence from his proper place could go unnoticed, but somehow Hueh had managed it for ten full years. Then his crime had come to light. And the law was the law: there could be no exceptions. Su-Mueng, having been raised in what was probably the most refined culture the galaxy had to offer, and despite his tender years, had been sent down to live with total strangers in a different, cruder environment.

  The first few years had been nightmarish; and though he had eventually adjusted to some degree, he had conceived a burning sense of resentment against the divided form of society.

  And his father – the son of the man who sat opposite him – had been punished. Was still being punished.

  He glanced at his grandfather, realising that he was something of an embarrassment to the old man. He had arrived too late, like a messenger from another world.

  They had no right to do that, he thought. They should have let me stay where I belong.

  He got up from the table and slid aside one of the screens that divided their small dwelling, entering his minuscule home workshop. From a slender cradle he picked up a model of Retort City he had made: two bulbous glass vessels, cinched in the middle with a metal girdle, glittering within like a tinselled tree of metal components.

  He had spent the best part of two years working on that model. It was not, in fact, a model – that was simply a disguise. It was a machine. He had put his utmost into it, all his skill, all his ingenuity and patience. One thing they did in the Production Retort was train you well.

  This device was going to help him go back where he belonged, to his father.

  He spent the next few hours checking it over with the instruments on his workbench. Eventually he heard his grandfather retire to his sleeping mat, followed by his gentle snoring. Su-Mueng made one last test, then slipped to his own cubicle where he changed into a loose, flowing tunic with a high collar. Then he put his model of Retort City in a cloth bag and left the house.

  Minutes later he was on a high-speed elevator heading for the transporter end of the Production Retort, the great metal girdle through which all commodities passed to their destinations in the other half of the city. He swept past scenes that, in most circumstances, would have been fascinating: great shining structures of steel, aluminium and titanium that comprised an ascending industrial process terminating in the delivery area.

  No one paid any attention to him when he left the elevator and picked his way across the shunting yards where big cylindrical carriers were pushed through the metal neck into the other retort. He went up a narrow passage, little used, that passed behind the main control junctions. He went through a series of doors and soon was in semi-darkness, climbing a spiral staircase that went up and up interminably.

  A good deal of poring over maps and schematics, and a good deal of exploring, had gone into his discovery of this route. There were in fact several such routes: the area between the retorts was riddled with service access passages. All one needed was patience and the right equipment.

  At length he came to the top of the staircase and into the galleries surrounding the massive coils that ringed the interior of the metal girdle between retorts. Already peculiar sensations assailed his body, warning him that he was approaching the influence of the stupendous field of variable time that separated the two societies. There was a feeling of tension across the bridge of his nose; his eyes went slightly out of focus; and his heart gave a cautionary jump.

  If he had smuggled himself into one of the freight containers and got himself carried through that way, the steeply graded time difference would have killed him whatever precautions he took. This way, threading himself through the surrounding machinery like a needle through half a dozen holes, he stood a good chance. He took the fake model out of the bag and touched some studs fused onto its base. Within, a ragged pattern of subdued lights, amber, green and white, glowed.

  He touched the studs again, making adjustments. The model had now taken control of his personal “now-moment”, protecting him from the ravages of the energies in the giant coils; it would synchronise him more gently with the gradient, hopefully making the transition without injury to himself.

  He went forward. He was in a place which, though cavernous, was so chock-full of machinery that it seemed like a solid mass. He squeezed between cabinets and stanchions, the hum of the machinery becoming louder in his ears. Once or twice he paused to make further adjustments to his device, and event
ually the instrument told him what he already guessed.

  He was through the time barrier – synched with the time of the Leisure Retort.

  There could be little to stop him now. He continued worming his way through the time-control apparatus, and finally was able to switch off his gadget altogether. But here he came to a slight difficulty. There were no maps or schematics of the Upper Retort available where he had been living for the past ten years. He had hoped that the receiving area would be, to some extent, a mirror image of the delivery area and that therefore there would be a descending staircase in a corresponding position to the one he had come up by. But where was it?

  He searched, and located, not a staircase, but a small riding platform. This took him beyond the region defined by the metal girdle; he was in the Leisure Retort.

  Below him stretched the retort’s receiving area for all the goods supplied by the city’s willing slaves. It was a shunting yard pretty much like the one he had left, except that everything appeared to be under cybernetic control and the canisters were already being broken open, their contents being transferred to smaller trolleys for dispatch to ten thousand different destinations.

  Su-Mueng swung himself down from a gantry and strode confidently forward. He had nothing to fear. No one would stop him or question his presence; no one questioned anyone in the Leisure Retort.

  And as he walked he already noticed, with a feeling of excitement, the difference between here and the place he had just left. The air was different; he had ceased to notice, during his long years as a worker, that everywhere in the Production Retort the air smelled faintly of oil and namelessly subtle industrial substances. Here there was only a faint suggestion of perfumes, of anything that pleased the senses.

  Many times he had reconstructed in his mind the layout of the retort. He decided that he would not delay, but proceed immediately to execute his mission.

  The next half hour was, to him, delirious. He passed through the gorgeous gardens and concourses that had grown faint in his memory. Past the people who went calmly, serenely, about their unhurried business – unfettered by any regime or timetable, but given to the abstracted, civilised pursuits of art and philosophy, of every kind of cultured subtlety. Here was life at the peak of refinement, a life incomprehensible to those in the Production Retort who had not been educated to appreciate it. But Su-Mueng had been so educated, and then it had been torn from him. As the aura of the Leisure Retort seeped into him his existence down below began to fade to the aspect of a dream. … Su-Mueng pulled himself together. He could not say how long he might manage to stay here, and he was bent on a task that to him was of great importance.

  He entered a quiet part of the retort that was used chiefly as a precinct of government. No one accosted him as he walked through the fresh-scented corridors, decorated in shades of orange and lime green, that led to a group of apartments terrible to his memory: the place where his father was incarcerated.

  Ten years ago he had witnessed the beginning of Hueh Shao’s imprisonment. The Retributive Council had ordered that horror, in acknowledgement of the seriousness of his offence. Su-Mueng was not surprised to find the environs deserted; all would shun such a place.

  The lock on the door was a simple one, though it could not be opened from the inside. Su-Mueng took a small device from his carrying sash, and after a little experimenting sprung it. Stepping inside, he found himself in a glass-walled foyer looking into the offender’s prison: a dwelling-place something like that in which Su-Mueng and his grandfather had lived, but larger and much, much more luxurious. It appeared to be untenanted. Su-Mueng examined a panel set into the rear wall of the foyer, replete with strip-dials, access sockets and so forth. He took his time-phase controller out of the bag he carried, waved it in front of the panel and observed the interior of the glass vessels, touching one or two of the external studs.

  Then he picked up a microphone and spoke into it, trying to keep his voice calm and unemotional.

  “Honoured father,” he said. “I know that you can see me, although I cannot see you. I am your son, Su-Mueng. I have returned to release you, if I can.”

  He put down the microphone and returned to the wall panel; on one end of the model city was a metal plate which he placed against the panel. Magnetic bubbles circulated in the plate, inducing control currents in the apparatus within the wall.

  He would never be made to believe that his father deserved the punishment that had been inflicted on him. The Retributive Council had sentenced him to solitary confinement in past time. He was out-synched – his personal “now-moment” back-graded to minutes, possibly only to a few tens of seconds, behind the common “now-moment” of the Leisure Retort. His solitude could not have been more complete, and was scarcely mitigated by the concession that he was not permanently confined to his apartments – being permitted during certain periods to wander within a restricted area – for everyone’s time was ahead of his; he could see them, but they could not see him, or hear him, or respond to him. He was like a ghost, moving among people who ignored him.

  The mind of man, thought Su-Mueng, could not have devised a crueller exile.

  The lights within the glass bottle flickered and raced. Suddenly the apartment shimmered and the artificially retarded time-field was abolished. There stood Hueh Shao, staring at him amazed, but like Su-Mueng forcing himself to adopt an attitude of dignified restraint.

  The ex-minister bore a strong resemblance to his own father in the Production Retort – they were, in fact, of about the same age, a little under fifty – but the similarity was modified by the difference between the customs of the respective communities. He wore a long, wispy goatee beard and neatly cultivated mustachios that dropped down on either side of his mouth. The eyebrows were plucked, curved upward at their outer ends, and showed traces of cosmetic. The greying hair was carefully combed back, but was considerably longer than the cropped style affected down below.

  He continued staring with steady eyes while Su-Mueng unlocked the inner door and stepped into the apartment.

  “My son,” he said, “what foolishness is this?”

  And Su-Mueng stared back, unable to speak, unable to explain what foolishness it was. Incredibly, his thoughts had never ranged beyond this moment: the moment when he set the old man free. His father, a revered elder individual of intelligence and resourcefulness, would surely know what to do, his subliminal thoughts had told him.

  Only now did he realise that those thoughts were the thoughts of a ten-year-old boy, arrested at the moment when the law had torn him away from that father. His childish adoration had never died. And only now, as he faced Hueh Shao, did it come home to him that his father was as helpless and resourceless as himself.

  6

  A hush fell on the gathering in a quiet room in a derelict back street. Sobrie Oblomot stared at the tabletop, slightly embarrassed by the sympathy he felt emanating from the others.

  “Sorry, Oblomot,” the Chairman said, somewhat awkwardly. “But at least your brother died like a comrade. Went out with a bang. And took four Titans with him.”

  “That’s not as self-sacrificing as it sounds,” said Sobrie stiffly. “I’d commit suicide as well, rather than face what those bastards have waiting in Bupolbloc Two.”

  The Group Leader from Kansorn nodded. “The Titans have been coming down hard lately. I admit I wake up sweating sometimes. I never go without my s-grenade, either.”

  “I concur,” said the man sitting next to him. He wore a mask and spoke through a voice modifier, being a person of such public prominence, and besides this of such importance to the League, that his anonymity was deemed essential.

  “The League is reeling under the Titans’ blows,” he said. “Nearly three hundred people arrested in the past few months. The antipodean networks are practically destroyed. If this continues I fear for our whole cause.”

  The depression of the League members was palpable. The Chairman shuffled his feet and spoke more forcef
ully.

  “There is less cause for alarm than many of you think,” he told them. “The reprisals are a sign of our growing strength, not of our weakness. Remember what a low ebb we were at twenty years ago – at one time the Panhumanic League was down to about fifty members.” He smiled ruefully. “Its very name was a joke. That was during the wars. But, after a long period of peace, we’ve been able to expand our activities and increase our influence. It was inevitable that there would be a Titan reaction to our successes.”

  “That’s true,” the Kansorn Group Leader said. “Our only problem is how we’re going to meet it. Everything depends on our riding out the storm.”

  The Chairman nodded. “And that brings me to the main item of our remaining business. At the last meeting it was suggested that League membership should be barred to people of mixed blood. The reason for this, you will remember, was to protect our public image” – he spoke as if the words were distasteful to him – “so that we should not be characterised, as we have been, as an organisation of ‘squalid freaks and sub-men’. I take it we have all considered the motion?”

  “I’m against it,” answered one voice with passion. “It runs counter to all our ideals. It suggests that we too consider other subspecies of mankind to be inferior. We shouldn’t play the Titans’ racist game.”

  “I’m for it,” said the member from Kansorn, “merely on the grounds of tactics, as stated.”

  “How many of our people do have mixed blood?” Sobrie asked suddenly.

  The Chairman answered. “The statistical department gives a figure of twenty per cent. A significant proportion – one which can give weight to anti-League propaganda.”

  “Propaganda is the least of our worries,” grumbled the Kansorn Group Leader. “The Titan campaign against mixed blood is gathering pace, too. These half-breeds and octoroons give them a road leading right into the heart of the League. By moving against one, they move against the other.”

  “These people also see the League as their protection,” Sobrie pointed out. “If we expel them, we can hardly count on their loyalty. We’ll be twice as exposed as before.”