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On Ice Pythia Chapter Six |
"A ship. She promised him a ship?" Martyn stared at me with utter disbelief. I nodded, sinking into the comfort of my couch and heaving a troubled sigh.
"Exactly. And not a magical, artifact of the gods, sailing ship either. A starship. Apparently, she told him she could send someone to get him off earth and safely to wherever she and the rest of her pantheon are lurking these days."
My lover eased himself down next to me and gave me the look I was expecting from him; a patient, now what do we do kind of look. I quirked a wry smile. "That’snot all. If it had been, I’d just assume he’s been spending too many late nights reading FK Brown’s Galactic Exploration. I wish he had. We could explain how many pieces of red-tape it takes to get passage off-world. Not to mention the cost."
"They take colony volunteers for free," Martyn noted with heavy irony. I punched him lightly in the shoulder.
"And they spend the rest of their lives working for the company that transported them. That’s no way of escaping anything. Unless – " I held the thought for a moment and he raised an eyebrow to encourage me to continue. I sighed a second time. "Unless – you know where to go to find a Free Trader who’ll take you without papers. Who’ll accept payment in kind – and who won’t ask questions."
He snorted. "Yeah – if you’re prepared to risk going into the badlands, that is. They don’t license Free Traders to land at the registered ports. Most of the ones that come to Earth these days aren’t real Free Traders anyway. They’re just as likely to be slavers - or the kind of opportunist who’ll take your payment and throw you out of an airlock over Mars." I gave him a wary look and he squirmed a little. "I – uh – smuggled in a few artifacts, back when I was still a struggling graduate. Private collectors will pay for that kind of thing. There was a – runner or two, I hooked up with. They worked out of Houston but did stopovers in the badlands …"
I grimaced at his confession, thinking that I’d found the answer to my mystery. "So you were the one who told him about Antarctica."
Martyn gave me a puzzled look. "Told Iolaus? No way. Ellen – you’ve got ‘corders running all over in there. What I just told you – I could get fired for that. Or worse."
That was true enough. I reached over and squeezed his hand, gratified that he trusted me enough to share the secrets of his past. "Well," I considered slowly, "if you didn’t mention it, and I didn’t – how would know to say ‘Dite thinks she can arrange a ship within three or four weeks – but I’m going to have to get to some place called Antarctica to meet it.’"
"He said that?"
I nodded. "He said that. Exactly that. Martyn – there was nobody there. How could he get that kind of information talking to thin air?"
He thought about it, frowning round the problem and weighing up the options with studied concentration. I love to watch Martyn think. It’s a symphony of expression, all by itself. "Maybe," he suggested at last, "it’s an intuition thing."
"Intui – you thinks he’s an esper?" I’d never thought to check our hero for any signs of psi-factors. The skill is rare at the best of times, and it has to be caught soon after birth or it quickly burns out, overloaded by the impact of other minds.
"A unconscious one, perhaps." Martyn was rolling the idea around in his head, intrigued by the possibilities. "He was born into a world a lot less crowded than this one. Maybe some of the myths stem from natural talents that were able to develop before they became overwhelmed. You’ve seen him spar with me – he picks up on my moves almost before I make them. Maybe he’ll never make a TP or a truth speaker but - he still might have enough talent to read a little more than just surface impressions. He’s probably not even aware that he’s doing it. Couple that with three days spent fasting and going without sleep – well," he concluded with a shrug, "it’s as good an explanation as any."
"It’s an excellent explanation," I said, looking at him with decided respect. "Why haven’t you been awarded a Professorship yet?"
"Because I’m unconventional, I don’t always toe the party line – and I’m a man," he pointed out with a grin. I grinned back. All three of those reasons also happen to be three of the reasons I love him.
"So," I sighed, leaning back into his arms and returning to the problem at hand, "instead of invisible gods, we have an ancient Greek hero with an unconscious psychic edge who simply thinks he sees gods. Is that much of an improvement?"
"Iolaus doesn’t look at things the way we do," Martyn said. "He wasn’t brought up to think of life in terms of hard facts and science. He believes in gods and miracles and magic – you ever wondered why he didn’t freak out the first day we took him into the dome? How he manages to take in all the stuff we’ve been telling him? If he’d been born – oh, let’s say anything later than the ninth or tenth century – then he’d have been screaming devilry and witchcraft at every little thing that he didn’t understand. He’d think we were demons and probably be huddled in a little frightened ball somewhere. But he was raised in a world where anything was possible. Where science and magic sat side by side without conflict or contradiction – and where the power of the gods and the inventiveness of man was limitless. He was taught how to think; how to analyse and philosophise, how to reason and how to extrapolate – and yet he can accept impossible things with the wonder and the delight of a child. If a few more people on this planet could see gods the way he does – maybe it would be a much better place to live."
He had a point. But it didn’t solve my problem. Which was what to do with an ancient Greek hero and his psychic edge who was now perfectly convinced that his long lost partner was still alive somewhere – and that all he had to do to begin the journey to find him, was somehow escape from the Institute, make his way to the badlands and hook up with a non-existent Free Trader that a goddess had promised would be there to collect him.
It was all nonsense - and it was scaring me half to death. Because it meant that what I had been pretending to be a place of safety had now been revealed as the cage it truly was. Whatever I said, whatever I did, Iolaus would pursue his dream of freedom – and all I could see was the walls of the labyrinth closing in around me, closer and closer, until there was no way out at all.
Two days later, the Board dropped its bombshell. They’d held the annual programme review, assessed the funding, considered resources – and voted to suspend two of my projects, pending a full assessment and review of the outcomes already achieved. One of them was a mapping scheme, which had been painstakingly plotting the layout of drowned London from a series of underwater scans and photographs. Since much of what had identified so far matched the twentieth century ordinance survey digital maps fairly closely, I could understand the decision to suspend any further work.
The other project was Iolaus.
Josephine Adams came to tell me the decision personally. She felt it would have been inappropriate to break the news via my p-comm, and had come to reassure me that the Board had taken my best interests into account, along with those of the Institute.
"You’ve worked so hard this year," she gushed, barely able to conceal her delight in having been instrumental in the outcome of the vote. "Gathered so much data – you can barely have had time to assess even a portion of it. And that’s part of the problem. You see – the balance between the funding input and the generated income doesn’t really reflect the benefit you originally predicted. We know there’s been slippage, and – well, there always is on a project like this – but the Board felt we should shelve the work for the time being, take the opportunity to examine the data, assess the assets, re-consider the marketing and the long term investment – just reshape the scheme altogether. You know you need time to catalogue and cross reference what you’ve already got. This will give you the time you need."
There was more; a whole slew of cost benefit analysis issues, something about utilising resources more effectively, and the rest of the usual committee speak that people like her relish because only they understand it. I wasn’t really listening. There was a cold weight in my stomach and a sharp, savage pain in my heart. I had given them a miracle – and all they could see was balance sheets and profit margins. How do you account for a human soul? What value can you put on something that is infinitely precious – and so utterly unique?
"Professor Akra has put in a proposal that requires the use of the bio-dome – something to do with thermal adaptations in arctic species I believe. So you won’t have a lot of time to finalise the close down phase. A few weeks at most." She was smiling at me with sisterly sympathy. "I suggested that the Board allocate you a little vacation time over Christmas – in recognition of all your hard work this year. So you won’t have to be here when we put the specimen in storage. I think that’d be for the best, don’t you?"
"Storage?" I must have looked confused, because she reached over and wrapped her hand over mine.
"You see how tired you are? It’s all in the report. The habitat is being re-allocated, so we all agreed that the sensible thing to do was return the subject to stasis while the scheme is re-evaluated. Far more cost effective and – kinder don’t you think? It’s been nearly nine months and this savage of yours really hasn’t adapted well to his new environment. Primitives like that – well, they don’t, do they. Why," she laughed politely, "I’ve even heard reports that he’s taken to talking to himself. Now, that’s not a good sign, is it?"
"He’s been praying," I corrected almost abstractedly. I felt oddly numb; divorced from the conversation and the events it was describing. She spoke of Iolaus as though he were nothing but a thing, a specimen to be put back on the shelf and left for others to study when they could find the time. We had lifted him out of an eternal sleep and now they were proposing to return him to it, to condemn him – not to death, but to endless oblivion. It was cruel enough keeping him where he was, imprisoned in a reflection of his past; crueler still to offer him up for public inspection and display. But this … This was unthinkable.
"Really? How – archaic. Of course, the Institute recognises how important and valuable he is; we intend to take very good care of such a unique specimen. There’ll be a little overhead in maintaining monitored stasis, but the sponsors will take care of it – and he’ll be a lot safer, locked away like that."
Sponsors … Somewhere under the numbness of my shock and disbelief, a cold, deep anger began to take root in my heart. This wasn’t about the value of my project, or protecting a witness to history. This was about the Board protecting their positions and their pet projects by making a contemptible deal. This was about greed and profit and exploitation.
This was the outcome of that raid on the Institute.
They weren’t just going to lock Iolaus away. They were going to sell him. Piece by piece.
Josephine Adams went on talking, unaware that I’d just seen right through her. "Dr deSilva is to be reassigned in the new year, so I suggest you make the most of his assistance while it’s still available to you. You still have three or four weeks to complete this phase of the research; I’m sure you’ll use them wisely." She stood up, preparatory to leaving and smiled down on me with benevolent assurance. "You should take a trip, Ellen. Get yourself out of the Institute for a while. It’ll do you a world of good."
I sat staring at the door for a long time after she left. My heart was a battle zone, fought over by anger and grief; my mind, on the other hand, had suddenly gained a clarity which it had never had before. Up until then, I’d trusted the system. I’d defied it a little, circumnavigated it a fair bit, and occasionally used it for my own ends, but I had always believed, right up to that moment, that my world was fundamentally fair and just.
It was a lie. And it was a lie I knew I didn’t want to be part of anymore.
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