Arthur Clarke - Imperial Earth

Consider: Karl had always been daring and adventurous, willing to run risks for what he believed sufficiently good reasons. As a boy, he had taken positive delight in circumventing regulations—except, of course, those basic safety rules that no sane resident of Titan would ever challenge.

If titanite had be discovered on one of the other satellites, Karl would be in an excellent position to take advantage of it. In the last three years, he had been on half a dozen Titan-Terran surveys. To Duncan’s certain knowledge, he was one of the few men who had been to Enceladus, Tethys, Rhea, Hyperion, Iapetus, Phoebe, Chronus, Promethius. And now he was on remote Mnemosyne...

Already Duncan could draw up a seductively plausible scenario. Karl might even have made the find himself. Certainly he would have seen all the specimens coming aboard the survey ship, and his well-known charm would have done the rest. Indeed, the actual discoverer might never have known what he had found. Few people had seen raw titanite, and it was not easy to identify until it had been polished.

Then it would have been a simple matter of sending a small package to Earth, perhaps on one of the resupply ships which did not even call at Titan. (What would be the legal situation then? That could be tricky. Titan had jurisdiction over the other permanent satellites, but its claim to the obvious temporary ones like Phoebe & Co. was still in dispute. It was possible that no laws had been broken at all...)

But this was sheer speculation. He had not the slightest hard evidence. Why, indeed, had he thought of Karl at all in this context?

He reread the message, still glowing on the Comsole monitor: MAJOR DISCOVERY ON OUTER MOON. ASKING HELMER... That was what had triggered this line of thought. Guilt by association, perhaps; the juxtaposition might be pure coincidence. But the Makenzies could read each other’s minds, and Duncan knew that the phraseology was deliberate. There was no need for Colin to have mentioned Helmer; he was sending out an early warning signal.

It was ridiculous to pile speculation upon speculation, but Duncan could not resist the next step. Assuming that Karl was involved— why?

Karl might take risks, might even get involved in petty illegalities, but it would be for some good purpose. If—and it was still an enormous “if”—he was trying to accumulate funds on Earth, he must have a long-range objective in mind. The most obvious was the establishment of a power base—precisely as Duncan was doing.

He must also have an agent here, someone he could trust implicitly. That would not be difficult; Karl had met hundreds of Terrans—

“Oh, my God,” Duncan breathed. “ That explains everything...”

He wondered if he should cancel his trip to Zanzibar; no, that took priority over all else, except the speech he had come a billion kilometers to deliver. In any case, he did not see what more he could do here in Washington until he had further news from home.

He was still operating on pure guesswork, without one atom of proof. But there was a cold, dead feeling in the general region of his heart; and suddenly, for no good reason at all, Duncan thought of that solitary iceberg, gliding southward on the hidden current toward its irrevocable destiny.

El Hadj’s deputy, Dr. Todd, was one of those medical men who seem, not always justifiably, to radiate an aura of confidence. This despite his relative youth and informality; for reasons which Duncan never discovered, all his colleagues used his nickname, Sweeney.

“I’m sorry you won’t meet El Hadj this time,” he said apologetically. “He had to rush to Hawaii, for an emergency operation.”

“I’m surprised that’s necessary, in this age.”

“Normally, it’s not. But Hawaii’s almost exactly on the other side of the world—which means you have to work through two comsats in series. During telesurgery, that extra time delay can be critical.”

So even on Earth, thought Duncan, the slowness of radio waves can be a problem. A half-second lag would not matter in conversation; but between a surgeon’s hand and eye, it might be fatal.

“Until twenty years ago,” Dr. Todd explained, “this was a famous marine biology lab. So it had most of the facilities we need—including isolation.”

“Why is that necessary?” asked Duncan. He had wondered why the clinic was in such an inconveniently out-of-the-way spot.

“There’s a good deal of emotional interest in our work, and we have to control our visitors. Despite air transportation, you can still do that much easier on an island than anywhere else. And above all, we have to protect our Mothers. They may not be very intelligent, but they’re sensitive, and don’t like being stared at.”

“I’ve not seen any yet.”

“Do you really want to?”

That was a difficult question to answer, for Duncan felt his emotions tugging in opposite directions. Thirty-one years ago, he must have been born in a place not unlike this, though probably not as spectacularly beautiful. If he had gone full term—and in those days, he assumed, all clones did so—some unknown woman had carried him in her body for at least eight months after implantation. Was she still alive? Did any record of her name still exist, or was she merely a number in a computer file? Perhaps not even that, for the identity of a foster mother was not of the slightest biological importance. A purely mechanical womb could have served as well, but there had never been any real need to perfect so complex a device. In a world where reproduction was strictly limited, there would always be plenty of volunteers; the only problem was selecting them.

Duncan had no memory whatsoever of his unknown foster mother or of the months he must have spent on Earth as a baby. Every attempt to penetrate the fog that lay at the very beginning of his childhood was a failure. He could not be certain if this was normal, or whether the earliest part of his life was hidden by deliberately induced amnesia. He suspected the latter, since he felt a distinct reluctance ever to investigate the subject in any detail.

When he formed the concept of “Mother” in his mind, he instantly saw Colin’s wife, Sheela. Her face was his earliest memory, her affection her first love, later shared with Grandma Ellen. Colin had chosen carefully and had learned from Malcolm’s mistakes.

Sheela had treated Duncan exactly like her own children, and he had never thought of Yuri and Glynn as anything except his older brother and sister. He could not remember when he had first realized that Colin was not their father, and that they bore no genetic relationship to him whatsoever. Somehow, it had never seemed to matter.

He appreciated, now, the unobtrusive skills that had gone into the creation of so well adjusted a ‘family’; it would not have been possible in an age of exclusive marriage and sexual possessiveness. Even today, it was no easy task. He hoped that he and Marissa would be equally successful, and that Clyde and Carline would accept little Malcolm as their brother, just as wholeheartedly as Yuri and Glynn had accepted him...

“I’m sorry,” said Duncan. “I was daydreaming.”

“Can’t say I blame you; this place is too damned beautiful. I sometimes have to draw the curtains when I want to do any work.”

That was easy to believe—yet beauty was not the first impression to strike Duncan when he landed on the island. Even now, his dominant feeling was one of awe, mixed with more than a trace of fear.

Starting a dozen meters away, and filling his field of vision right out to the sharp blue line of the horizon, was more water than he had ever imagined. It was true that he had seen Earth’s oceans from space, but from that Olympian vantage point it had been impossible to envisage their true size. Ever the greatest of seas was diminished, when one could flash across it in ten minutes.