Strings (12 page)

The rest of the company were leaving the interview to Quentin but watching the Secretary General’s reaction.

When no other question followed, Cedric turned back to gaze adoringly at Eccles again. As though that had been a signal, Quentin spoke. “Your parents were lost through a broken string incident?”

“Yes, sir.”

“A world called ‘Oak’? That was its code name—Oak?”

“You remember it?”

Quentin shook his head impatiently. “No, lad. You’re on file.”

North had warned Jathro about just this. Cedric had been researched already, 5CBC would undoubtedly have a library second to none, and Quentin would have an earpatch.

“They had been overnighting?”

Alya recognized the cross-examination technique, but apparently Cedric did not, and he continued to agree blithely as detail after detail was cautiously added.

“So—they were overnighting on a Class Two world, code name ‘Oak,’ a party of six, and the next window failed to appear. Contact was never reestablished?”

Belatedly Cedric reached for caution. “So I’ve been told, sir.”

Quentin sprang his trap. “And what was an agricultural worker doing on a Type Two world?”

“Agri—my father was a ranger!”

Quentin shook his head. “Not according to the files.”

Cedric’s head swung around so fast it seemed his skinny neck would snap. “Grandfather?”

Willoughby was toying with his now-empty glass, twiddling the stem in his fingers. “He was a ranger trainee.” Then the old man chuckled, eyeing Quentin inscrutably. “These youngsters won’t remember what it was like, Peter, but you should. The transmensor was very new then. So was the Institute. There was no big corps of professional rangers in those days. First planetfall was only made in ’twenty-two, remember, and we were not as skilled at zapping from one to the other as we are now—as Agnes’s minions are, I should say.”

He glanced around the group. Cedric was nodding, and so were some of the others. “We kept finding all these juicy little worlds, and every one was always going to be the Second Earth. You hotshots used to announce them on the news programs! When’s the last time you mentioned a Class Two world, Peter, huh?”

He had them grasping at every word—true mastery! “So all sorts of people got involved that wouldn’t nowadays. My son was a rodeo cowboy, as a matter of fact—not an unbroken bone in his body. Nor in his head. But Oak had big grassy prairies that we thought should be looked at, and some horse-type beasts.” He paused, then added quietly, “It also had lethal concentrations of antimony everywhere. We didn’t find that out until too late, after the string broke.”

Quentin stayed with easier prey. “But you, Cedric—you don’t remember any of this?”

“No, sir. I was only a baby.”

“Were you, though? The Oak disaster was in 2026. That’s twenty-four years ago, sonny.”

Some of the listeners seemed surprised, but most of them had obviously been waiting for it. Again Cedric’s head flashed around to look at his grandfather…who was accepting a refill of champagne. And sipping it.

“That’s right, Peter, now that I think about it,” the old man replied. “It happened while the second South African thing was on—2026.”

“But, Grandfather—”

Hastings stopped him with an uplifted palm. “This is no time for a lecture on the birds and the beasts, Cedric. Ask your grandmother—she’s better on that technical stuff, anyway.”

Cedric recoiled, staring, amid the laughter.

Cruel! Alya thought. How could the old man treat his own grandson like that?

Who else could he be?

There was a resemblance, certainly, yet not as much as she would have expected if Cedric was what the media people obviously suspected he might be. Illicit cloning was a major crime, and greatly condemned, since only the very rich could afford it. There would be an enormous scandal. Hastings would fall, and he might well drag down the whole fragile structure of U.N. hegemony.

The old man had put this off the record. He could hardly put Cedric himself off the record, not now.

So the boy could not be a clone—but he might not know that, for he had gone very pale.

Then pompous, balding Frazer Franklin intervened. “You seem to be a bit of a mystery, lad.” Cedric turned toward him, much more warily now. “Since we are off the record—where have you been all these years?”

The question fetched a few angry mutters, but Cedric did not seem to notice. “A place called Meadowdale, sir. Out west, in the mountains.”

Frazer nodded meaningfully. “What state?”

“I don’t know. They wouldn’t tell us.”

There were a few smiles at that, and again they were lost on the youth. He looked to Eccles Pandora, and Alya saw a dreamy expression soften his bony profile. “I know Glenda, of course, Dr. Eccles. How is she?”

Eccles Pandora dropped a canapé. Mild confusion upset the conversation for a few minutes while a waiter arrived with a napkin and Pandora twittered about how careless she was. Then order was restored. “I just cannot
stand
this suspense!” she proclaimed. “The excitement is—”

“Answer Dr. Hubbard’s question, Panda dear,” Frazer said loudly. It was the first time he had spoken to her, so far as Alya knew.

“What?” Pandora seemed to flutter feathers. “But I want to ask the Secretary—”

“Cedric asked you a question.” Franklin’s voice was louder. “About someone called—Glenda, was it?”

Cedric nodded, his coxcomb waving. “Garfield Glenda, Dr. Eccles’s cousin. We were close…we were friends.” He blushed scarlet and gazed hopefully at Pandora.

Pandora had turned pale. The room was very still.

If the youth had begun to sense the tension, he was merely puzzled by it. “She left about six months ago. She sent word the next day that she was going on a world cruise.” Abruptly his voice went very small. “How…is…she?”

Pandora was chalky white. Faint pink scars showed on her neck.

Franklin took a celebratory sip of champagne. “Six months ago? Is that where you disappeared to, Panda? I knew you’d been on vacation somewhere. We all thought it did you good. You came back looking like a new woman.”

In the awful silence, Pandora raised shaking fingers to her cheek, and surely did not know she was doing so. Alya felt sick. Cedric had also gone pale—very pale.

“Oh…oh God,” he whispered. “God God God
organage
! That’s what it means…”

Had he gazed into those eyes? Alya wondered. Had he kissed those lips?

He made a choking noise, as though he were going to throw up.

Only Frazer Franklin was smiling.

And at that moment the door opened to admit Hubbard Agnes.

The director’s powder-blue suit was not as clinging as most in the room, but it was snug enough to show that she had kept her figure. Her complexion was beyond reproach, and her coiffure might have been freshly crafted on a silversmith’s bench. Age showed only in a certain cautious rigidity, and perhaps in the rrogantly upright way she held her head. Hubbard had Presence, and the company rose to acknowledge it. Alya had seen fanatic Banzaraki royalists fall on their faces for her brother, and yet she was impressed by that unrehearsed compliment from an antagonistic, hard-headed group.

Cedric had farther to go than anyone, but he sprang from the floor in a whirl of ungainly green limbs and crossed to the lectern in four enormous strides like an alarmed giraffe, starting to speak almost before he had turned.

“Honored guests ladies and gentlemen Director Hubbard!”

He flashed his grandmother a shaky smile and began to move. Stepping forward, she stopped him with a magical gesture like a witch in a children’s holo fantasy, rooting him to the floor and freezing an expression of dismay on his face.

Hubbard had no notes. If there was a prompter in the lectern, she did not seem to use it. She laid her hands there and nodded. The world’s press sat down obediently to wait for enlightenment.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the media.” Her voice was high-pitched but incisive. “I must begin by thanking you for coming at such short notice. It seemed appropriate to me for personal reasons to hold this meeting today, April seventh.”

The only person who did not seem to be hanging on her words was Cedric. Smile discarded, he stood restlessly a couple of strides away from her, glooming anxiously at the audience and belatedly running fingers through his hair.

“To review very briefly the history of the International Institute for Interstellar Investigation—”

Someone at the back groaned, but she did not seem to hear.

“…although superstring theory had been developed as a branch of particle physics as early as the 1980s…in 2002 the work that established the theory of the transmensor…classic paper in
Physical Reviews
by Chiu Pak and Laski Jean-Marc…”

She swept a professionally catered smile around the room like a flashlight. Alya could hear nothing but a quiet rattle of breathing from Hastings Willoughby at her side.

“The possibility of interchanging one of the familiar four dimensions of space-time with any of the additional superspace dimensions not normally expressed…” She droned on. Some men at the back started coughing. She raised her chin like an archetype schoolmarm and waited until they stopped.

Once, while visiting West Africa, Alya had experienced the hot wind called the harmattan. It had brought enough static electricity to make her hair crackle. She was reminded of that now—the room was becoming charged. These people were not accustomed to being treated in so cavalier a fashion. She was convinced that Hubbard was deliberately baiting them. And so were they.

“…may remember the furor when the General Assembly granted our charter.” She smiled briefly over heads at Hastings Willoughby. “That was in 2020, so this year marks our thirtieth anniversary. It was on June third that the resolution was ratified and I was appointed director.”

She paused momentarily to relish the puzzled frowns. “But today happens to be my seventy-fifth birthday.”

The applause was thin as skim milk.

“This is obviously an opportune moment to review what has been achieved; and what must be achieved in future.”

No
! If Hubbard was about to announce her retirement, then all Alya’s future might change. She might never see what lay behind that word of fire on Jathro’s paper. She might have to stay here—but then she realized that no
satori
had come to warn her of danger ahead. So the news—when it finally came—would not be that.

“…have never had a destructive accident, nor a power failure. We have grown until we supply the entire Earth through a complex of twenty-four microwave relay satellites. Our research arm, the International Institute for Interstellar Investigation, has identified over fifty thousand nonstellar bodies. As of today, 1502 of these NSBs have been found to contain some form of life, and ninety possessed surface conditions so Earthlike that we categorized them as Class Two worlds.”

Somewhere a faint whisper said, “Get on with it!” But Hubbard was not to be hurried.

“Not one of those ninety proved capable of supporting human beings for any extended period. You all know the problems and disappointments we have encountered—heavy element contamination, dextroamino acids, virulent allergens. Personally, I know that time and again I have believed that I was on the point of making that long-awaited, epochal announcement, and every time some new, diabolical danger has surfaced in the lab reports.”

What of Etna? Alya thought. Or Raven? What about Darwin, and Halibut?

“The world we called ‘Paris,’ for example, taught us about carcinogenic pollen. ‘Giraffe’ had a complete absence of zinc, an essental trace element. We don’t know why. ‘Dickens’ was a world so like our dreams of Eden that it was unbelievable—and its primary was violently unstable. If you think our present UV problems are serious, you should see some of the radiation profiles we encountered there. Sol is a benevolent star compared to most.

“And our terrestrial mosquitoes are much friendlier companions than the lethal bugs on ‘Beaver.’

“It has begun to seem, over the years, as though nature has been conspiring to lock us up in this one sick little world.”

The listeners fidgeted slightly as she seemed to draw near to what they were waiting for. Alya heard “Class One” being whispered in several directions.

“This is also an appropriate moment,” Director Hubbard proclaimed, “to pay tribute to the eighty-six courageous men and women who gave their lives in this search…including my own son.”

She glanced around at Cedric, who nodded.

And then she took off on another slant altogether, as though all of her preceding remarks had been only a feint.

“You are aware, I am sure, that the Institute is organized in four main divisions, each having its own deputy director. Dr. Wheatland handles Personnel—our most precious resource, as you may guess. Dr. Moore, in Finance, and Dr. Fish, in Security—all these people have served long and loyally and well.”

She had to raise her voice slightly, over the hiss of puzzled whispers, growing angrier and more persistent.

“Dr. Devlin Grant is a relative newcomer, but he is doing great work as deputy for Operations.

“Nevertheless, it had been suggested to me several times recently that the Institute could do more to cultivate good relations with you, ladies and gentlemen—with the information business, the media. Some unkind persons have even suggested that I myself might have given you cause for annoyance on some occasions in the past.”

That fetched an ironic laugh, and Alya smiled, remembering stories that Kas had told her of the director’s abrasive tongue. Hubbard Agnes beamed blissfully at the reaction.

“I invited you here today, therefore, to meet my grandson, Hubbard Cedric Dickson, whom I have just rescued from an undeserved anonymity. And I also wish to announce that in future the Institute will have five deputy directors instead of four, and I have appointed Hubbard Cedric Dickson as the first deputy for Media Relations. If you have any questions, please direct them to him.

“Thank you for your attention.”

Then she turned and strode from the room.