Dislocations Read online

  DISLOCATIONS

  ERIC BROWN & KEITH BROOKE

  TRAVIS

  TRAVIS DENHOLME LEFT HIS RENTED COTTAGE ON THE outskirts of Ely at three and arrived at Lakenheath Base forty-five minutes later. Dusk was falling, presaging another subzero January night. Even from a mile away, the halogen arrays illuminated the base with a glare that spread across the surrounding forest and obliterated any sign of the stars overhead.

  The usual crowd of protesters was stationed on the approach road, their numbers increased due to the imminence of the launch. The local police and security guards drafted in by UNSA had done their job, and the two hundred noisy protestors were kettled behind carbon-fibre fences well back from the road. Even so, the din of their voices increased as his car approached; just last week an activist had scaled the fence and flung herself in front of the little VW. The car’s systems had braked too late, and the woman had thumped into the grille and rolled over the bonnet, screaming her hatred through the windscreen. She’d dropped to the tarmac, picked herself up, and staggered off, seemingly unhurt, but Travis had been shaken by the incident.

  As he neared the gate of the base, he passed the area to his right reserved for the protest leaders and their guests: B-list celebs attempting to up their failing profiles by identifying themselves with the Allianz. A dozen men and women stamped their feet around a plasma-burner, trying to ward off the Arctic blast, one or two of them turning to stare at his car as it braked before the gate. Beyond the small group, banners and placards gave voice to Allianz discontent: Project Kon-Tiki a Big Con, and Anarchists Against Colonisation.

  Ute was there, as ever; tiny and looking perished in her green puffa jacket, a woolly hat pulled down over her ears. For a second, it seemed that their eyes connected, but he reassured himself that she wouldn’t be able to make him out through the side-window. He stared straight ahead at the slowly opening gate, wondering if he would have been on this side of the fence had Ute not finished with him ten years ago.

  The car rolled through the gate, braking before the second gate as the first closed behind him. A security guard stepped from a lighted kiosk, and Travis wound down his window and presented the biometric chip embedded in his metacarpus.

  “Evening, Dr Denholme,” the guard said, scanning his hand. “There we go. Enjoy the party.”

  Travis smiled. “I’ll do my best.”

  The second gate slid open and the car drove on, Travis aware that he was moving from one world to another, from a world of deprivation and conflict to one of privilege—and, like a symbol of that privilege, a mile away across the frost-encrusted apron, the towering form of the shuttle stood beside the launch gantry. In four days the eighteen specialists would depart Lakenheath Base for the starship parked in geo-sync orbit, and a week later the Kon-Tiki would light out for the stars.

  He smiled as he realised his lapse: it was not the specialists themselves who were leaving for 19 Draconis, but their clones. The eighteen experts in fields as diverse as engineering and cell biology were too valuable a resource to be banished from Earth—but the advent of clone technology had offered a solution: mimetically imprint the identities of the eighteen specialists upon the minds of the clones and send them to the stars instead.

  The VW came to a halt before the lighted geodesic where, on an upper level, the party was already in progress.

  He fumbled in his jacket for the flask and took a shot. The precious single malt warmed him and soothed his anxiety. The prospect of socialising with Kat Manning in a non-work context was playing on his nerves. He’d been steeling himself to ask her to dinner during the course of the past week or so, and he reckoned the ideal time would be at the party. Everyone would be uninhibited by drink and, maybe, Kat would see past their professional relationship and agree to his invitation.

  Or was he deluding himself?

  He climbed from the car and stood in the icy wind, still clutching his flask. At one time the journey from Ely would have been easier, but with the flooding of the Fens over the past decade, what had once been rich farmland had become a network of sea and lagoons again, and the road network had been limited to a few main routes protected by levees. The current icy wind from the east only made the journey more treacherous.

  And while such extreme effects of climate change and resource depletion had spurred UNSA’s efforts to send humankind to the stars and settle new worlds, they had also given rise to the groups protesting against the expenditure, arguing that the time, money and expertise would be better spent on focusing inwards to correct the many ills that afflicted Planet Earth.

  Travis could see both sides of the argument, and wished for his peace of mind that he couldn’t.

  He took another mouthful of whisky and stared up into the night sky.

  It was hard to imagine that five thousand colonists occupied the cold-sleep nacelles aboard the Kon-Tiki starship, somewhere up there: over the course of the past three months they had been ferried up to the Kon-Tiki and eased into suspended animation, to be joined by the eighteen specialists in just four days from now. For the past three years, Travis had trained the xeno-biological team—indeed, for the first two years of that tenure he’d been a prospective colonist himself, until the powers that be had made their selection and he was demoted to the B-list, the backups who would be on standby in case any of the A-listers faltered at the last hurdle.

  Travis’s reaction to missing the cut was an odd sense of relief. One part of him had wanted to be part of the colonisation of a new world, but another had been quite content to remain on Earth and try to fix what was broken.

  He slipped a peppermint pill into his mouth to settle his stomach after the burn of the whisky, pulled his collar up around his ears and crossed the car park to the dome. Swiping his wrist across the lock, he pushed his way inside. He climbed a flight of steps to the first floor, an open-plan area of desks, smartsurfaces and com-terminals. At the far end of the circular space, desks had been pushed back and some people were dancing; music and the hum of conversation, along with the occasional burst of laughter, reached him. Bracing himself, he crossed to the gaggle of fifty or so co-workers.

  “Where the hell have you been, boy?” Daniel said. “The party started an hour ago!”

  “Had a few things to do back at the cottage…” The lie came easily: he’d not wanted to arrive early and spend an hour in stilted conversation with colleagues.

  He felt the arm around his shoulder like a yoke as he was a dragged into a knot of drinkers. Daniel DeVries was a big man, bearded and bearlike, towering a good head and shoulders above Travis—and, like Travis, the psychologist was on the B-list, playing second fiddle to Kat Manning, much to his chagrin.

  In his younger days, Travis had found the South African’s expansive, proprietorial gestures reassuring, a sign of his being accepted. These days they struck him as intrusive: Daniel’s way of making himself the centre of attention in a crowd by performing acts of physical appropriation.

  Daniel splashed cheap Indian whisky into a beaker and thrust it at Travis. “A toast. To the success of the imprinting!” he laughed, raising his own drink.

  By the tolerant expressions of some of those in the group, Travis guessed that this was not the first such toast that Daniel had proposed. Everyone drank.

  Travis glanced around the group, smiling and nodding at Sanjeev, whose clone would be the mission’s chief medical officer. Next to the scrawny Indian was the statuesque figure of Anna Eriksen, whose clone would be the Kon-Tiki’s captain; Travis found her physical presence—never mind her intellect—daunting. She was chatting to Petra Schlesinger, the quiet German physicist who Travis had never really got to know. David Vine, a thickset New Zealand biologist wa
s whispering something to his lover, the ship’s chief engineer Connor Brady, a dour Ulsterman whose dry sense of humour accorded with Travis’s occasional cynical temperament.

  He sipped the foul-tasting whisky and looked around the room for Kat. He was relieved to see that she was not amongst the gyrating dancers, and winced at himself for his shallowness. She had every right to enjoy herself with others, but he acknowledged that it made him uncomfortable. She wasn’t in the group by the curving wall of the dome, nursing their drinks and watching the breaking news on the vast surfacescreen above their heads.

  Daniel nudged him and said, “Looking for the luscious Kat?”

  “Where is she?”

  “Had the day off. Spent it at her place up on the coast. She said she’d come later.”

  Travis’s impulse was to ask Daniel how he knew this, but he stopped himself; he knew that his friend had the hots for Kat, too. He just hoped that Kat had been put off by the rumours that had circulated around the base, last year, about Daniel’s conduct with last woman he’d dated.

  Daniel said something about the ‘scum’ of protestors outside the base, and Travis switched off, nodded from time to time, and watched those around him in the little group. He wondered how they felt at the prospect of having their identities copied into the pristine bodies of their clones: these people were the ‘left behind’, the specialists who would continue their careers here on Earth, while their doubles broke new ground amongst the stars. The psychological effects that would afflict these people had not been overlooked by the mission planners—which was where Kat Manning’s specialism came in. As an expert on psychological dislocation, she would help the specialists adjust to being left behind on a faltering Earth as their doubles headed out for the stars…Some were taking it badly, even now: Sanjeev, for instance, the nervous, hypochondriacal doctor. Just last week he’d talked drunkenly to Travis about getting away from it all and finding a practice on some sequestered Scottish isle.

  His reverie was interrupted when Lauren Miekle and Ward Richards staggered from the dance floor, sweating and doing their best to hold each other upright. Travis smiled to himself. It was nice to see Lauren, the normally so strait-laced Danish mission administrator, let her hair down. The rumour was that she and Ward Richards, who was the head of clone technology and almost twenty years her junior, were conducting a clandestine affair.

  The pair joined the group, and Lauren released Ward’s hand and sniffed suspiciously at the beaker Daniel had given her. “Are you people still swilling this fire-water? Wait a sec.”

  She hurried across to a desk, slipped a bottle from a drawer, and returned.

  “I’ve been saving this for a special occasion,” she announced, to a small cheer from the group. “Twelve year-old Glenmorangie. Any takers?”

  Travis quickly drained his beaker and held it out to be filled with the real McCoy.

  “And what better occasion can there be than this,” Ward said, “the eve of the great imprinting?”

  Ward Richards was a slick, handsome whiz kid in his late twenties, the proud recipient of an Oxford degree and a doctorate from MIT. Travis had to admit that the man was a genius, even if he found him more than a touch arrogant.

  “How does it feel to know that your identity has been copied and is now, as I speak, sitting in storage like any other data on the UNSA network?” Ward directed his enquiry at Sanjeev.

  The little Indian doctor shrugged. “Intellectually I know it happened, and I understand the technological process that brought it about…But”—he shrugged again—“it is a little hard to take on board the fact that an exact copy of me exists in nothing more than a series of ones and zeroes, ready to be imprinted on a blank physical copy of my body.”

  Beside Travis, Daniel grunted. “It doesn’t accord with your Hindu belief system, San?”

  Sanjeev bridled. “What Hindu belief system, Dan?” He stared at the South African; everyone knew that Daniel disliked the diminutive of his name. “I’m as secular as you are—”

  “Hey, boy,” Daniel laughed, making a joke of it, “I’m from good old Dutch Calvinist stock, I’ll have you know.”

  “Always had you down as a Boer,” Sanjeev said, deliberately pro-nouncing the word ambiguously so it may have been ‘bore’ and tempering the barb with a smile.

  Travis heard no more, even though the edgy banter continued between the two men, as across the room a door swung open and Kat Manning strode towards their group.

  There could be no doubt about it, he thought; she really did fill the room with her presence. And he was sure that it wasn’t just his subjective reaction to the woman: several others looked up and smiled when they saw her, and one or two people moved aside so that the tall, blonde psychologist might take her place beside them.

  Dr Kat Manning was broad-shouldered and confident, and emanated a watchful quietude that some people found off-putting. Travis had known her for over a decade, since their student days at Cambridge, worshipping from afar at first and then, five years ago when they started working together on Project Kon-Tiki, becoming friendly with her.

  He found the whisky bottle on a desk and gestured with it to Kat; she had slipped in between Daniel and Lauren Miekle, and smiled across at Travis, mouthing, “Yes, please.”

  With a shaking hand he poured a couple of inches into a beaker and interposed himself between Kat and Daniel. The latter made a show of quick-stepping sideways, laughing ironically to himself.

  Kat accepted the whisky with a warm smile.

  He filled her in, “Ward was just asking Sanjeev what it felt like to have a copy of himself in the lab.”

  Connor Brady said, “And Sanjeev’s not the only one to find it hard to accept the reality of it.” He took a mouthful of Scotch. “I don’t even pretend to understand the science behind it!”

  Lauren Miekle pulled on Ward’s arm. “What, are you saying that Ward is a magician, Connor?”

  Everyone laughed.

  “The real dislocation will come,” Kat said—and Travis noted that, when she spoke, everyone paused to listen—“when we encounter our clones in close-up for the first time. I know you say we can’t do that, Ward, but I really need to—”

  “Sorry, but no, that’s not on,” Ward said. “You know how strict we have to be about the quarantine. The clones are in an aseptic environment for good reason. If they were to come down with an infection now…”

  Travis could tell, from Kat’s superior smile, that she was about to trump the young man. She laid two patronising fingers on Ward’s arm and murmured, “But I had a quiet word with Director Patel, Ward, and she cleared me to watch the imprinting process of my clone tomorrow. Provided, of course, that I’m well scrubbed and suited up—just like you.”

  Ward shrugged. “Very well.” He smiled. “But I must warn you, there won’t be much to observe. I doubt that your clone will even regain consciousness for a few hours at least.”

  Travis asked, “Professional curiosity, Kat?”

  The psychologist nodded. “You could say that this will be a high-light of my career. I’m interested in cognitive dissonance—and more specifically the phenomenon of a clone’s awareness of self, when it becomes a separate entity from its ‘original’. I think I’ll be able to detect, upon interrogating the clone, the point I call ‘absolute divergence—’”

  “We…” Daniel interrupted drunkenly, “we’ve had long debates about this very point, me and Kat. She…” He waved his beaker. “Kat’s interested in divergence, the point where the clone begins to assimilate its differential state, and…and…”

  Travis smirked into his drink. How typical of Daniel—trying to ride the coat-tails of Kat’s brilliance and fouling it up!

  Kat pursed her lips, annoyed at Daniel’s inept paraphrasing of her ideas. “Not ‘differential’, Daniel. The point of divergence occurs when a clone is born into the awareness of its difference, its individual status. How does she or he apprehend itself in relation to her or his ‘original�
��? An ancillary interest of mine is for how long they can be really termed, psychologically, the same person.”

  “What about identical twins, though?” asked Sanjeev. “Nobody would argue that twins are the same person.”

  Kat shook her head. “No, that’s entirely different. Even identical twins diverge—not even at birth, but at the point of conception. Their experience of life, right from development in the womb, has already diverged. Our eighteen doubles are still us, though; and they will be right until that point of absolute divergence.”

  “Is that why cloning like this has been vetoed on Earth?” Sanjeev asked. “Because of the legal difficulties in determining the sovereignty of the individual?”

  Kat was nodding, immersed in the debate. “Exactly. Now it’s fine if we copy individuals and send one of them to the stars, but how could we have two of the same person extant on Earth? Two divergent individuals with a single, shared past…”

  The evening wore on, and Travis achieved that state of pleasant inebriation where even the thought of asking Kat out to dinner didn’t faze him. The group broke up and reformed with others, individuals moving and intermeshing like the choreographed tesserae of a kaleidoscope. At one point Travis found himself on the dance floor—an event unheard of—moving dysfunctionally to some beat-heavy approximation of music. Kat was deep in discussion with Lauren and Ward, and when the music segued into something much slower, Travis crossed the dome and joined them. Just as soon as he had her alone, he’d suggest a quiet meal at that new vegan place in Ely.

  Then someone shouted, “Hey! Cut the music…”

  Travis looked up as the music died, aware that everyone was gravitating towards the big surfacescreen on the curving wall. He caught up with Kat and the others and stared up at the breaking news.

  The anchor-woman was saying, “We cross to Bonn where news is coming through on what security agencies are calling a terrorist attack at the Project Apu spaceport…”

  A silence fell over the room. The image on the screen shifted from the studio to a night-time scene of flashing police lights and leaping flames. A ducking reporter, backed by a burning dome, shouted animatedly, “Reports indicate that eco-terrorists are responsible for the attack on an admin building here at the UN Space Agency’s base at Mendig, about twenty-five miles south of Bonn. I have been assured the shuttle itself, due to launch with the eighteen specialists aboard in just under a month, is undamaged in the attack, and first reports are that there are no casualties. However, this is a significant move for the Allianz, which to date has restricted its opposition to the colony missions to relatively peaceful protests. I have been informed that, in light of what has occurred here in Germany, security measures are to be stepped up at Lakenheath in England, and Batu Pahat in the Islamic Republic of Malaysia…”