Strings (38 page)

“Umph!” Cedric said, then quietly added, “Thanks.”

Abel poked him with a finger. “And because you’re wondering, yes, I do know what I’m talking about. Because for the last three years I’ve been her backup with the organages. That was why all the Cedric clones, see? She’s been working on this for twenty years. The clones gave her access. Whenever she handed over a clone to be reared, then she became one of the gang; she was trusted. You see?”

Cedric nodded reluctantly.

Choosing his words with care, Abel said, “You’re not unlike Willoughby, you see. At three or four weeks old, you’re a quite believable baby Secretary General.”

“Too believable for comfort! The organages all thought she was fronting for Hastings?”

“Of course. And of course she had help. There were others in this with her—have you seen the Iskander girls? Four of them? There’s a couple of other sets around. Anyway, she’s old, so she appointed me deputy in case anything happened to her. I’ve been keeping an eye on you all. I liked what I saw.”

“Damned spy!”

“Yes,” Abel said, unruffled. Of course, it would take the kid time to adjust. “I was glad to hear you were coming along on this jaunt. Or might be coming along. She had some uses for you first—”

Cedric grunted angrily. “Even if ends justify means, the means don’t have to like it!”

“Maybe not.” Abel shrugged. He had done about all he could.

“And if she planned that, then why did she tell Alya that I wasn’t coming?”

“Dunno. Maybe she didn’t want emotion messing up intuition? I know she was mad as spit at Alya for turning up in public at HQ. But she’s truly your grandmother and you’re truly what she said—the son of Hubbard John Hastings and Dickson Rita Vossler. The one and only. The real McCoy.
Bona
very
fide
. Conceived in utero. All others are imitations.”

Cedric made an odd noise that seemed to express both satisfaction and surrender. “Awright! Thanks, Abe. Thanks for telling me. And just for that, I will wait around and say goodbye to the old bag. She can thank me for saving Cainsville, if that’s what she wants. I may even thank her for breaking up the organage racket. But I won’t say I love her, because that wouldn’t be true. Or that I forgive her for the way she used me.”

“I don’t think she’d believe you if you did.”

“Likely not. But I’ll talk with her. Besides, there’s something else I want to ask her about. G’night.” Cedric turned and started walking away into the dusk.

Oops
!

“And what might that be?”

Cedric stopped. He rubbed his chin. “Well…Now I can see roughly what she was up to. She paraded me like a purple poodle at that press conference—but Alya says she was passing different messages to different people. She made me look like a retarded hayseed, and herself not much better—senile old woman doting on idiot grandson. That was one feint, and she maddened the media. That was another. At the same time, she was using me as a red flag over the organages, hinting at clones and going public and so on—threatening hundreds of important people. Thirdly—or ninthly? I’ve lost count…Lastly, then, she was planning to go fishing for the murderers. The poison time capsule was the bait, I was the bent pin, and when they bit, she was waiting to haul in the string.”

“So?” Abel inquired cautiously, surprised at how well Alya had worked it all out.

“And the worse mess I made of things the better, from her point of view, right?”

“I suppose.”

“Devlin would never have gone to Nile without me along. And you, because he knew you were important to the Tiber mission.”

Devlin had known more than that. “Thanks,” Abel said.

“But I’m still wondering,” Cedric concluded quietly, “why she gave me Grade One rating on System? I mean, it came in damned handy at the end, against the Earthfirsters, but even Gran couldn’t have foreseen that!”

“Um.”

“It just seems out of character somehow.” Cedric’s voice trailed off uncertainly. “Well—I’ll ask her. Night, Your Majesty.”

And it was out of character for Cedric to have thought of the problem in the first place. Obviously it was Alya’s thinking—which made no difference. “Wait!” Abel said. It could not matter now, anyway. When all else fails, be honest. “I would really be much happier if you didn’t bring up that subject with your grandmother, Cedric. Please?”

“Why not?” Cedric demanded, bristling. His assertiveness and confidence were growing day by day. Pairing with a girl like Alya would do exhilarating things to a man’s self-esteem, of course.

“Because Mother H. knows nothing about it.” Abel sighed. “She assigned you straight nines—personal grade and work grade both.”

“Then who—”

“In confidence? No one else knows this.”

“Sure. I may tell Alya, of course.”

“I’m sure you will. It was me.”

“What? Why? How?” After a spluttering sound, Cedric added, “When?”

“When? Just as you were flying in with Bagshaw. How? It was easy enough. I grew up around Cainsville and Nauc HQ. Nobody else—nobody!—knows this, but I broke System’s master code when I was thirteen.”

“Bullshit,” Cedric said calmly.

“No.”

“It’s impossible—how?”

“I hid under a bed and overheard some very high-rank passwords being used.”

Cedric’s answer was a grunt that stopped just short of expressing more disbelief.

Abel chuckled. “I can’t make it do everything I want—like I couldn’t find you anywhere that night when she took you off to meet Cheung and Grundy—but most things I can get by.” He grinned at the memories. All through adolescence he had used System as his personal genie for voyeurism, practical japing, cheating—Lord, it had been fun! “I could see you in bed with Alya that morning. You were lying on your belly and you pulled the sheet over your head.”

“Bastard!”

“You don’t sound very grateful.”

“Well…Then she didn’t know…” Cedric started to laugh, then stopped suddenly. “Why d’you do it? You go around giving Grade One to all your friends?”

“Ahh!” Abel stretched and yawned while he considered the question. It was a tough one. Why exactly had he thrown virtual control of Cainsville to that elongated hay-in-his-hair innocent? As a practical joke it had been going too far, even for him. Partly he had done it in a fit of anger. Baker Abel had lost his temper only twice before in his life, but that night he had been eaves-dropping on the scene in the President Lincoln Hotel bedroom—spying on what Hubbard and Fish were spying on—and he had been sickened. The strobe hypnosis itself, the ruthless ferocity with which it had been applied, and the beating that Bagshaw had then administered—apparently strong emotion right afterward was supposed to lock in the mind control, but it had still been a beating—all of those things had roused Abel to fury. The way the kid had resisted the treatment without buckling had won his heartfelt admiration.

Even so, Grade One rating had been going a bit far.

Abel’s yawn ended. “Dunno. As you say, you made good use of it in the end. Guess I just had a hunch, that’s all.”

Cedric snorted disbelievingly. “And I didn’t know you grew up in Cainsville!” He sounded hurt, cheated.

“Given the choice, I’d have taken Meadowdale. Any kid would.”

“Organage?” Cedric sneered. “That’s for clones, not real people.”

“Goddammit it, man! Forget that! There’s nothing wrong with being a clone.”

It must have been his tone, or else Alya’s brains were infectious—Cedric drew in his breath with a hiss. “Tell me!”

“Sit down.”

“No. Tell me.”

Abel sighed and leaned back against the tree to ease his leg. “Okay. Your grandmother’s a strange woman, lad. She doesn’t like failing, not at anything. And she failed at being a mother. She and John fought twenty-five hours a day, eight days a week. She dominated; he rebelled. He skipped when he was in his teens, and they didn’t speak for years. She finally located him when he won the world calf-roping championship.”

“Ah!” Cedric said, as though in sudden divine revelation. “He picked the sort of work she’d hate most?”

“Very likely. She tried to make up. She offered him a whole new planet—for him and his bride.”

“Oak?”

“Oak. And it killed him.”

A soft breath of wind brought a sudden odor of cooking wafting over the grassland. Sounds of children and distant singing or prayer came drifting up from the valley.

“And?” Cedric asked softly.

“She doesn’t like failure—I told you.”

“She tried again?”

“She tried again. She had a tissue sample on file. She had him cloned.”

The dim blur that was Cedric’s face nodded in the gloom. “So that was why Devlin insisted you go on the Nile trip? He wanted you along as insurance?”

“I guess so.”

“Then…then Hastings Willoughby’s your biological father? What did he say?”

“He doesn’t know. She never told him what she’d done. I found out from System, but of course I couldn’t tell anyone, even him, or they’d have wanted to know how I knew. When she did tell me—not very long ago—I decided not to bug him. He was too old to be interesting. He was a worse father than she was a mother, anyway.”

“That’s crazy! He must have seen you in the holo. The Marigold expedition? Or Buzzard. I knew you! Everyone knows your face!”

Abel sighed. “He’s old. He has no interest in other worlds. And he hardly knew his son—John, the first version. They seem to have met about twice after John grew up. I told you—he wasn’t much of a father. You’re not the only orphan in the family.”

“She wasn’t much of a grandmother to me,” Cedric said ruefully. “Even at a distance. I can’t imagine her rearing a son.”

“Oh, I fought, too! But not as bad, maybe. She’d learned a few things about mothering. I think my gawdawful sense of humor was my defense—it really used to rile her.”

More silence, then Cedric said, “But…”

“But what?”

“But if Oak killed John, how’d she ever let you be party leader for this Tiber planting?”

Jeez!
This kid was a leopard in drag
! “When you’re as old as I am, son,” Abel said, as calmly as he could manage, “you’ll learn that women are never predictable.”

“Mmph?” Cedric muttered, his voice oily with suspicion. “It wouldn’t have been because System was doing the evaluations, would it? That maybe none of the other candidates measured up—according to System? That you were the only possible choice—according to System?”

“Oh, I doubt that.”

Cedric chuckled dryly. “I think I know now who was really pulling the strings, though. Well…” He held out a hand. “Good night, er, Dad?”

“’Night, son,” Abel said. “See you in the morning.”

“Yeah.”

“Give Alya my love.”

“Not findangle likely! She’s got all of mine, and that’s as much as any woman can handle.” Hubbard Cedric stalked off into the dark, humming contentedly, and no doubt wearing that stupid grin again.

YES, VIRGINIA, THERE is a superstring theory. In fact there are several, and they disagree on how many dimensions there really are—I wish the physicists would get their facts straight so I could know what I’m twisting. Nevertheless, if you want to buy a transmensor, I suggest you check with your local hyperdrive dealer.

There are string theories in cosmology, too, but they’re different. That’s one type of string I didn’t manage to weave into the story.

The environmental stuff, unfortunately, is a lot more probable. I began this book in 1987, which turned out to be the warmest year on record, and moved the problem of atmospheric degradation out of the SF ghetto into the popular press. I’m writing these final lines near the end of 1988, which is going to be either the warmest or second warmest. By the time you read this, we’ll know about 1989. I’m very glad I’ll not be around to know 2050.

And without a transmensor, there’s no way out.

DAVE DUNCAN was born in Scotland in 1933 and educated at Dundee High School and the University of St. Andrews. He moved to Canada in 1955 and has lived in Calgary ever since. He is married and has three grown-up children.

Unlike most writers, he did not experiment beforehand with a wide variety of careers. Apart from a brief entrepreneurial digression into founding—and then quickly selling—a computerized data-sorting business, he spent thirty years as a petroleum geologist. His recreational interests, however, have included at one time or another astronomy, acting, statistics, history, painting, hiking, model ship building, photography, parakeet breeding, carpentry, tropical plants, classical music, computer programming, chess, genealogy, and stock market speculation.

An attempt to add writing to this list backfired—he met with enough encouragement that he took up writing full-time. Now his hobby is geology.