Deucalion

Since 1989, Brian Caswell has written 31 books including the best-selling A Cage of Butterflies. His work has received numerous awards and shortlistings, including the Children’s Peace Literature Award, the Vision Australia, Young Adult Audio Book of the Year Award, the Aurealis Award, the Australian Multicultural Children’s Literature Award, the Human Rights Award, the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards (four times), and he has been included in the prestigious International Youth Library’s ‘White Ravens’ list four times. All his published novels have been listed as Notable Books by the Children’s Book Council of Australia.

He also researches and designs ‘cutting-edge’ educational and personal-development programs, listens to all kinds of music (usually far too loud), watches ‘an excessive number’ of movies and DVDs, and reads ‘anything with words on it’. Brian lives on the NSW Central Coast with his wife, Marlene, and his dog, Indy. He has four children and 13 grandchildren.

Deucalion was shortlisted for the Children’s Book Council of Australia, Book of the Year, Older Readers, 1996.

Also by Brian Caswell

Deucalion Series

The View from Ararat

The Dreams of the Chosen

Young Adult

Merryll of the Stones

Dreamslip

A Cage of Butterflies

A Dream of Stars (short stories)

Asturias

Double Exposure

Loop

By Brian Caswell and David Phu Au Chiem

Only the Heart

The Full Story

Younger Readers

Mike

Lisdalia

Maddie

Relax Max!

Alien Zones Series

Teedee and the Collectors or How It All Began

Messengers of the Great Orff

Gladiators in the Holo-Colosseum

Gargantua

What Were the Gremnholz Dimensions Again?

Whispers from the Shibboleth

For all those who were unlucky enough to be there first

PROLOGUE

SOMETHING NEW AND EXCITING . . .

Those who cannot remember the past

Are condemned to repeat it.

George Santayana

Osaka Genetic Research Facility

Asia/South-East Sector, Old Earth

July 27, 2215

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Hakawa entered the room positively beaming.

‘Jane, I thought you’d want to know the results right away.’ He paused for effect.

His young superior turned to face him. She waited a moment longer before prompting him. ‘Well?’

‘Well, we ran spectro-analysis and an electron-microscan of the frozen blood samples they warped in from Deucalion. DNA configuration is remarkably similar to Earth-type. We didn’t even have to recalibrate before we had M.A.B.L.E. run up a genetic code-map.’

Jane Sukoma-Williams nodded patiently, and moved around to sit behind her desk. Hakawa was telling her nothing new, but she knew that there was no point in interrupting him. He was a brilliant geneticist, but totally channelled. He was temperamentally incapable of delivering a digest-version of anything, so she resigned herself to suffering a detailed description of every painstaking step of the process.

‘Of course’ – as he continued, the middle-aged scientist wiped an imaginary stain from the lapel of his spotless lab-coat – ‘it would have been far more satisfactory if we could have had a live specimen to work with. There are certain procedures—’

‘Yes, Hakawa, I realise all that. But you know the regulations. Protection of native fauna, and all that. The Elokoi are a protected species under the Act. If we’d tried to bring in a live specimen, the Grants Council would have been down on us like . . .’ She paused, as the bureaucratic nightmare of form-filling, Senate hearings, and the inevitable media feeding frenzy flashed across the screen of her mind. ‘Anyway, if you remember, they tried transporting a couple of the creatures in the early days, before the legislation outlawed the practice. They reacted very badly to the freeze-sleep. When they were revived, they remained catatonic until they wasted away and died. Apparently the freeze doesn’t shut off the part of their minds that controls the telepathic faculty. Instead of sleeping, they spent the entire fifty years of Jump-Time trapped inside a comatose body, fully conscious the whole time, without a single physical sensation, surrounded by light-years of . . . nothing. How could they help going completely insane?’

She looked at Hakawa. He was nodding, but she could tell he had no concept of the utter horror she was describing. He was waiting patiently for her to finish, so that he could continue his explanation. She reached for the coffee cup on the desk and took a sip. It was cold. She indicated the chair in front of her. ‘Sit down, Hakawa. And continue . . . please.’

The scientist did as he was asked. ‘As I said, M.A.B.L.E. has managed to construct a genetic code-map. It is a little exotic, of course. The chromosome structure is made up of three basic strands instead of the binary configuration we’re used to, and some of the gene complexes match nothing we’ve seen before. But we’ve isolated the areas of similarity, and we’re ready for stage two.’

‘Cloning?’ Jane spoke to prevent him explaining the obvious, and outlining stage two for her.

‘Exactly. Actually, it’s amazing that some creature from a planet so far away should be so close, genetically speaking. By tagging the genes whose functions we can reasonably predict, we’ve been able to isolate thirteen that might hold the key to what you are seeking.’

‘Only thirteen?’ For the first time in the whole conversation, Jane sounded surprised.

So few. Suddenly, the prospect of years of painstaking analysis and dead-ends was reduced to the possibility of a few short months.

Hakawa stood up and spread the print-out he was holding across the desk in front of her. It contained a colour-coded genetic map, with the genes in question highlighted.

‘As you can see, they are grouped in complexes of three or four at specific points along the strand, which would indicate that they function as units. If we can splice them into existing chromosomes – we thought we might start with rats – it shouldn’t be too long before we can isolate exactly which group does what. Then . . .’ He trailed off, and she saw that he was already contemplating the possibilities.

‘Stage three.’ She finished the thought for him.

New Geneva, Deucalion

15/14/99 Standard

Karl Johannsen looked down from the window that filled the entire external wall of his huge office.

President! He could almost taste the thrill of success on his tongue. In a month and a half, they would begin celebrating the Centennial: fifteen months of patriotic drivel and flag waving. And no one waved a flag better than Karl Johannsen did. Especially not that oily toad, Dimitri Gaston, who was already more than ten points behind in the polls, and slipping. By the time the election came around in two years’ time, the Presidency would be in the bag.

Silently, the door slid open behind him and a young man entered the room.

Johannsen turned in annoyance to face the intruder, his dreams of grandeur dissipating. ‘Jacklin, how many times have I told you to buzz before you come barging in on me? What is it this time?’

‘Sorry to bother you, Chief, but I thought you might like to know. The warp-shuttle has just arrived.’

‘Any news?’ But the arrival of a shuttle from Old Earth was news in itself. A chance to catch up with what was going on thirty-four light-years away. Details that were just a little more than a year out-of-date.

‘It only just docked. It’ll be a few minutes before they can download the information. It’s sort of sad, isn’t it?’

Johannsen looked down at the young man. Jacklin was second-generation Deucalion, and it showed in his naive attitude to just about everything. In fact, that attitude was more of a giveaway than the fact that he was so short. ‘What’s sad?’

‘Well, the fact they can send just about anything by warp-shuttle and it arrives so quickly, but people have to travel by freeze-liner at sub-light-speed. By the time they spend forty or fifty years in freeze-sleep to make the trip, most of what they remember back home is already gone. And if they make the return trip, they end up almost a century out of date. I was just thinking, it’s a pity we can’t use the warp.’

Johannsen smiled. He remembered how it felt to leave Earth, knowing he could never return.

Great. That’s how it felt! A stagnant civilisation on a dying planet, still going through the motions, still trying to make the best of things. Unless you were in Funded Research, or you inherited a bundle, life on Old Earth was the pits. What did it matter how long you were in stasis, if you had no intention of going back anyway? You didn’t age a minute and you didn’t feel like any time had passed, so you certainly didn’t lose anything in the process. On Earth, Old Money ruled. On Earth, you could never run for President. On Deucalion . . . the sky was the limit.

It’s a pity we can’t use the warp . . .

He smiled again. ‘Come on, Jacklin. You understand warp-physics – the difference between Real Time and Sub-Dimensional Time. It takes a year, Real Time, for the shuttle to shift the thirty-four light-years between Earth and Deucalion, but for anything – or anyone – travelling on that shuttle—’

‘The Time-elapse is closer to a thousand years.’ The young man finished off the elementary warp-travel paradox.

The greater the distance travelled under warp conditions, the less Real Time it took to complete the Jump. Which sounded great on the surface – until you realised that the Time-elapse for objects or creatures actually involved in the warp-jump increased at an exponential rate. The leap of thirty-four light-years to Deucalion might take a year, Standard, to complete, but the Time-elapse stretched for a thousand, when viewed from inside the shuttle. And a leap of sixty light-years, requiring a little over eight months Real Time, aged the occupants of the shuttle over four thousand years.

The longest recorded successful warp-leap, using an automatic-return shuttle, had measured 380 light-years, requiring just two weeks of Real Time. But a nuclear-powered quartz-crystal chronograph on board had ceased functioning at some stage during the warp-leap, at an elapsed time of 2,700,000 years. Theoretically, there was no limit to the distance that could be travelled in a warp-jump. In fact, the further you sent the shuttle, the sooner it returned with its data. The only problem lay in designing equipment that didn’t cease to function in the thousands – or millions – of years that would pass within the shuttle during the journey.

‘Exactly.’ Johannsen enjoyed dominating a conversation, and Jacklin was so easy to control. ‘A thousand years, give or take a week or two. And as the longest freeze-sleep they can guarantee is about a hundred years’ – he looked down at the younger man with a condescending smile – ‘I’d estimate that you’d come up about nine centuries short. I doubt that there would be much left of you by the time the shuttle docked at the other end.’

‘I know all that.’ Jacklin felt suddenly like an ignorant schoolchild. He struggled to deflect the patronising tone in the older man’s voice. ‘I just . . . It’s just a pity, that’s all. Think of the possibilities, if we weren’t so cut off out here . . .’

Johannsen allowed the young man to pause for a moment. He was busy remembering his early years back on Earth. ‘Just be thankful you are cut off. Deucalion is the new frontier. Out here, we have the chance to start again, to build something new and exciting.’

Another election speech coming up. Jacklin shifted uneasily from foot to foot. I’m not the one you have to convince, you old fart. I work for you, remember? So why don’t you just give me a break and save the speeches for the voters? They don’t have to put up with you every day. The words he would love to say to the old egomaniac, with his Old Earth ideas, and his so-damned-superior attitude. Ritchie Jacklin savoured them in silence as Johannsen began to warm to his tired theme.

But the expression on the young man’s face never altered.

PART ONE

COLONY

A man’s memory is all that stands

between him and chaos. AL Korsakoff

Art is a delayed echo. George Santayana

1

CENTENNIAL

Neuenstadt

Central Desert (Western Fringes Sector)

1/1/100 Standard

CAEL

Peering through a gap in the underbrush, Cael watched the preparations. The wide Greenspace was filled with brightly coloured structures, which the offworlders had assembled by stretching what looked like huge, patterned sail-sheets tightly over light tube-metal frames, anchoring them with slender cables of their flimsy-looking but unbreakable microlite.

From a distance, the structures resembled the shelters the Ancestors had shaped from the supple stems of the Ocra, during the era of the Great Trek. He had seen them in the pictures on the sacred wall, before it was destroyed. Of course, having no access to offworld synthetics, the Ancestors had used only Yorum-skin to keep out the searing desert winds. The shelters they had built were a dull grey, with none of the brilliant patterns and hues that he now saw before him.

The day was hot; as Cael lay there, hidden and watching, he felt his thoughts drifting . . .

He remembered his mother’s firstmate, Ielf, reach out a trembling arm to touch the images on the Wall. He remembered the light, filtering in through the Cave entrance, the way it made the fur gleam on the back of Ielf’s long-fingered hand. But mostly, he remembered the Pictures themselves.

Young as he had been – no more than seven or eight cycles – he had known them for what they were. Old Magic. Small, coloured fragments of the Time before the Arrival; before the end of all Telling. And he had known what he must do as surely as if the spirit of the Ancestors had instructed him.

He had returned many times, following his own trek, marking his passage to selfhood by the visits he made to the Wall. Staring at the sacred paintings until they burned their patterns into his soul. Until the last time.

The offworlders had found the Sacred Cave, as in the end they found everything, no matter with what care it was hidden. They had entered its silent shadows with their lights and loud voices, and they had cut the pictures from the living rock. Saebi had watched from the cliff-top as they carried them, one by one, to the waiting flyer. Then they were gone, flying towards the sunrise, Saebi said, towards the tower-city they had built far away beyond the mountains, beside the deepwater.

Cael had returned home and told the news.

Rhae, his mother, listened without speaking a word. As usual, she kept her thoughts to herself, but Cael noticed that she left her meal untouched.

Toev, his mother’s thirdmate, was speechless, too, but only because he was filling his mouth with food, as usual. He had no love for the Old Ways; their passing caused him no pain. During the cycles he had shared her house, Toev had been Rhae’s greatest disappointment. Perhaps that was why she had mothered him no children.

Only Ielf had shown his sorrow, and his anger, wordspeaking his curses on the offworlders, wishing them ill-luck and barren wombs. Cael had stared at him, shocked by the power of his feelings. Ielf had not fathered him, but as firstmate to his mother, he had accepted the fathering role when Kien, her secondmate and Cael’s truefather, had not returned from the hunt. Ielf was gentle in his actions and his thoughts; the bitterness he now spoke sat strangely on him. But Cael, too, had felt the pain of the loss deeply, and understood.

‘Native artefacts’ – that was what the offworlders had called them. Saebi had crept in close enough to hear them talking and laughing, as they took away the last of the pictures.

That word again. ‘Native’. What did it really mean, native?

In the books that told the meanings of the offworlder speechwords, ‘native’ spoke of ‘belonging to a country or place’. Why then was the word spoken always like a curse? Why was the colour of the thought-tone that accompanied the word always one of such superiority and hate? And why, if it ‘belonged’ to a place, was anything they called ‘native’ always taken away from that place?

Toev said that it was ‘basic economics’, ‘supply and demand’. The Pictures were rare, which gave them great value. He worked for the offworlders on the Ocra plantation, and he peppered his wordspeech with offworlder ideas. The Pictures were worth huge credits in the homeworld, he said. And why complain? The offworlders paid a royalty fee of three per cent for every piece exported, and that money helped pay for the food, clothing and shelter they supplied.

But did we not eat and clothe and shelter ourselves before the offworlders arrived? And did we not have the Pictures then, too? The thought rose in Cael’s mind, but he kept it to himself. Toev, for all his faults, was still his mother’s thirdmate and must be shown respect.

Rhae, of course, felt bound by no such restrictions. She bespoke her thirdmate silently in mind-speech, and he stood up angrily, stalking from the room and slamming the door. Cael watched him through the window, striding away to spend his credits on offworlder liquor. He would not be back for a long time.

Later, when it was dark and they thought Cael was sleeping, he had caught a scrap of his mother’s unShielded mind-speech from Ielf’s bed-platform.

– . . . I told him I regretted ever mating with him. That I could as well have shared my bed with an . . . offworlder . . .

At that point Cael had stopped listening. Sometimes, when you caught unguarded thoughts, you learned things about people that shocked you. In the dark, he had closed his eyes, and traced the Pictures again, on the Wall of his mind . . .

There was a sudden flurry of activity outside one of the structures on the Greenspace, and Cael focused his wandering attention. The memories faded; he was watching the crowd of offworlders, as they filed into the wide entrance. Inside, someone was speaking, and there was the sound of offworlder music, but he was too far away to hear what was being said.

DARYL

Johannsen was making one of his usual election speeches. Not that it was supposed to be anything of the kind – this occasion was supposed to be a celebration, not a rally. The guy just couldn’t help himself. Once a politician, always a politician, I guess.

I’d just as soon have been back in New Geneva, celebrating in comfort, but I’d drawn bodyguard on the work roster, and having blown a week’s credits backing my ego in a game of mahjong against Tieu, I needed the job.

What the J-man was doing, speaking at a celebration in a hick mining centre like Neuenstadt, I’ll never know. But then one thing I’ll never be (up there with rich, popular and white) is a politician. The party numbers-men must have decided it would mean more votes for Johannsen to be seen on the tube, celebrating the Centennial somewhere on the ‘frontier’.

What a joke! The only thing remotely ‘frontier’ about Neuenstadt is the fact that the Deucalion Mining Corporation is so tied up in ripping out as much profit as they can from under the mountains, for as little outlay as possible, that they haven’t even bothered trying to reclaim the desert, except for the couple of hundred hectares of Greenspace they use for all the ‘community’ stuff. Like Centennial celebrations, for example.

The Greenspace, and, of course, the Ocra plantation. Talk to most people who drink Ocra, and they won’t even be able to tell you where it comes from. They just think it’s some kind of pretty special – and expensive – tea. Actually, it’s made from the leaves of the Ocra tree. The Ocra’s a small evergreen, about three metres high, and the only place it grows is on the Fringes of the desert and, to a lesser extent, on the flatlands just east