New Atlantis Bundle, Books1-3 Page 25

  Maggie’s eyebrows rose, but she said nothing in response to his revelation for a few moments. When she did speak, it was by carefully selecting her words. ‘I do not see you as a rapist, Julio. Or is it more that you plan to seduce her, and then cast her aside as just another conquest?’

  Julio stared at the woman as if she’d grown another head. He hadn’t planned to clarify his intentions. In fact, he was so distressed by his contradictory and erratic thoughts and behaviours, he couldn’t even clarify his intentions to himself. ‘I do not want to hurt Jane. That is the point. I have initiated … a kiss… twice, without meaning to. What else might I do without meaning to?’

  ‘I seem to remember being carried away by passion, as a young woman. Going further than I may have meant to go. But that is part of the experience, isn’t it? None of us operates rationally when our emotions are engaged.’

  ‘I would not know. I have never been carried away by passion, as you put it. This is all new to me. I have been acting in irrational ways from the first day I met her. But it is not love.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘No, I am not sure of anything. I have lived over two hundred years and have never felt romantic love for anyone. Love is just a word to me.’

  ‘But that does not mean you cannot love. I think you need to give yourself a chance with this, Julio. Give Jane a chance. She is already half in love with you. All you have to do is look at her. It is probably bad timing, but then love has a habit of bad timing.

  ‘If you feel something for the girl let it unfold as it will. As long as you do not intentionally mean to hurt her, that is the most you can promise. Girls her age suffer broken hearts as part of growing up. If that is what comes of this, then she will survive. But if you deny yourselves the experience, out of fear, then you may as well not be alive. We had a saying in my time “It is better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all.”’

  Julio wasn’t sure what to make of Maggie’s advice. It seemed sensible. But this was Jane they were talking about. She was so inexperienced with men, or possibly experienced in the wrong ways. How could he navigate this unknown territory for both of them? It was all well and good to talk about being better to have loved. But he didn’t know that for sure. And Jane was dealing with a whole lot of challenges no ordinary girl falling in love would need to deal with. Yes, it was an understatement to say that it was bad timing.

  If he could give her time to get used to her new life. Then, later, they could see what this Love thing might or might not be. There was no hurry. She had all the time in the world, now.

  ‘Tell her what is happening for you, and what your fears are. She is a mature young woman. Let her decide,’ Maggie suggested, as she returned to her artwork.

  He tried to think of what he might say to her. Jane, I am fond of you, and I don’t seem to be able to keep my hands off you. But you are dealing with a lot right now, and as I can’t promise where this might go, it might be better if we just kept this, whatever it is, as friends for now.

  That might work. Then, if they both agreed, they might have a better chance of keeping dangerous emotions in check.

  But not this day. His overwrought senses couldn’t take much more. And Jane had enough on her plate just getting her body on-line. He would talk to her tomorrow.

  ‘I think I will leave such a heart to heart until tomorrow. Can I leave her in your capable hands until then?’

  ‘Certainly. That is why I agreed to have her stay. I like her. She is a strong, sensible young woman. And if there is a medical problem, I will get straight onto the MediVac team.’

  Julio nodded. ‘Until tomorrow.’

  Chapter Eight

  Over the next few weeks, Jane became orientated to her new world and her new body. It wasn’t easy; the new world challenged her sense of reality, the new body challenged her sense of self. And everything required so much mental energy that she was constantly exhausted.

  If her exhaustion was partly fuelled by depression over Julio’s neglect, she wouldn’t acknowledge it. If he was keeping his distance, doing his duty and remaining politely aloof, it was probably for the best. There was already far too much for her to have to chew on, without the complexity of a relationship. And what Maggie had told her, helped to keep her hopes alive.

  Julio had gone against the rules to bring her here. He had taken the time to get to know her, find her worthwhile, before making the decision to Retrieve her. And it was her, not this clone body, who had gained that level of respect and admiration from him. She wouldn’t let her greed for more diminish the importance of that.

  He had taken her for a tour of the city, and introduced her to people from her own time who were making lives for themselves there. Although it was comforting to get their perspective, as it was with Maggie, she still felt different from them. For one thing, they were all much older than she was when they came here, and they had all recognised themselves in the clone body they now inhabited.

  Julio showed her all the important sites around New Atlantis, including the cavern where the Start Point for Time Travel was located. She’d even watched a Jumper leave and return from the curtain of falling lights. It had reminded her of Star Trek’s ‘beam’. She half expected someone to say ‘Beam me up, Scotty,’ when they turned on the curtain.

  But though the cavern was fascinating, as was the Research Centre, it was the Knowledge Centre, a kind of library, that she loved the most. Left to her own devices, she would have spent hours exploring the library. It was unlike anything she’d ever seen.

  It held no books. This world had no books. No one cut down trees anymore for such things. Everything that had ever been stored in a library, in her own time, was now stored electronically in this amazing place.

  Of course, you didn’t need to go to the library to access its information. The strange devices they called computer terminals allowed access to all of the resources. And the little hand-held TV screens they called Tablets, provided the same information, but at a slower speed. But the library, which they jokingly called ‘Google’, for some unknown reason, had attractions that the consoles and the tablets didn’t have.

  On wall size invisible screens, information could be portrayed and moved around by touch. So people could put up multiple fields of information, and with a stroke of the hand, link them to each other, looking for similarities, or differences, trends, or whatever. And the data retrieval was done via the mind. People just thought the information they required, and it was there.

  They also had whole rooms set aside for what they called Virtual Reality Replications of the past. By selecting her own time and place, she could walk down George Street, right through The Rocks area, as if she were really there. Even the corner shop was there. Julio had shown her it all, taken from his memories. He’d even walked her right up to the shop window so she could see herself, standing behind the counter, looking sad.

  Looking at herself like that was like looking at home movies from years gone by. You knew intellectually what you saw was how it had been, but it lacked the ‘feel’ of reality. The Old Jane, as she now called her Original, was recognisable. The feelings she was experiencing were familiar. But they had become distanced, as if she was looking at them from millions of miles away – recognisable, but not real anymore.

  Julio had told her that using these VRR rooms was one of the ways Retrievers and the Researchers prepped for Jumps. They became as familiar as they could with the details of the world they would visit, right down to the name of the coffee shop on the main street, or the way the traffic lights worked.

  Part of the Debrief every Jumper undertook on their return, involved downloading these detailed experiences of the world. But the Jumper had control over what was accessed, so the more personal details of their visit could be excluded.

  No one, he said, wanted to see a bathroom visit, unless it was an important aspect of that world. Like in some cultures toilets were communal. He’d told her that with a laugh. Oddly
enough, that wasn’t something she really wanted to see!

  There were also niches around the Knowledge Centre where you could download huge amounts of data – like whole languages – directly into your brain. It was how Jumpers could move seamlessly through cultures with different languages.

  The data was stored in short term memory, and easily forgotten when no longer required. If the data was going to become part of a way of life, such as when Julio, who wasn’t a native speaker of English, had to acquire that language as part of his life in the Gaian Confederacy, then such information would go into long term memory. ‘Hardwired into the system’ was the strange phrase Julio had used.

  There were a lot of strange terms and stranger gadgets and gizmo she was having to get her head around. It made Doctor Who, Star Trek and Lost in Space look stupid. But what there wasn’t, and she had expected to be part of this world, were man-like machines, as she had first supposed herself to be.

  ‘Robotization’, Julio informed her, had remained the domain of industry. As a backlash against technology and waste that led to the Dark Ages, humanity undertook most tasks themselves, with a little help from small scale labour saving devices like the Kitchen Chef. There were no robot servants to be at their master’s beck and call.

  What was the greatest strength of this new world, she had determined, was how ‘technology’ blended so seamlessly into the framework of the society, while the general populous remained largely unaffected by it.

  Each day of exploration was kept short, and was followed by an extensive Rehab session, where gadgets measured her reflexes, speed, dexterity and a million other human actions Jane had never thought about in her old body. Her program of physical rehab involved mental as well as physical exercise.

  Jane had to think a series of choreographed movements, and then carry them out. She did this slowly at first. But, over time she sped them up, until she did them naturally. This was how she learned basic martial arts and ballet. The theory was uploaded into her brain. Then she thought the movements as her body practised them.

  The focus required for these programmed activities was unlike anything she’d ever experienced, and her new body adjusted to the requirements with a speed that stunned her.

  In her third week in her new life, Julio arranged for her to visit the school so she could at last meet Tommy, the boy she had tried to save. Jane had completed her Rehab, and was waiting in the centre for Julio to pick her up.

  While she waited, she decided to practice her movements a little more. She programmed the new Tablet, which she kept attached to the belt at her waist, to play an accompaniment. As the gentle, melodic notes of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake supported her, she began to move through the intricate ballet steps she was mastering. There came a point during the practise, she had found, where she could forget to think and just started to Be. Her body then moved automatically, so she could just enjoy the ride.

  Flowing from one movement to the next, she danced through the practise; sinuous hand movements of port de bras, the whirl of a pirouette, a graceful Fouette en tournant ending with a pas assemble, in fifth position. Her skill, and the speed with which she turned downloaded theory into physical mastery, entranced her.

  She had to wonder whether genetics played a part in the process. The body she now inhabited was built like a ballet dancer’s; long, lean and elegant. It seemed to have a grace all of its own.

  The Old Jane would never have been able to dance like this, even if she’d been given a perfect cloned version of her Original. Even with muscles toned, and maximised physical potential, she would only ever have been as good as her genes made her.

  It was a fallacy to see all clones as beautiful, she’d discovered. If a person’s genetic makeup made them heavy boned, solid and mousey haired, that was what the clone would look like – just the best version of that.

  So New Jane had ballet dancer genes, where Old Jane would always have been as graceful as a baby elephant. She wished she didn’t resent the reality of that. She wished she could accept the bonus of the upgraded body, instead of constantly feeling belittle by it. The more aptitude her clone seemed to have, the less she valued Old Jane. She wondered if there would come a time when she would be embarrassed to admit to ever being Old Jane, and would lie and tell everyone she had always looked like this.

  As she remained poised in fifth position, breathing heavily from the exertion, she heard applause over the music. She turned to see Julio watching her from the doorway, clapping his appreciation. Embarrassed and a little annoyed to be observed by him, she frowned as she walked slowly over to where he stood.

  ‘You have the grace of a gazelle, Jane.’ His hand made a graceful flourish.

  ‘Yeah, well, it helps to have Anna Pavlova’s DNA.’ She pulled a depreciating face.

  ‘I doubt the DNA accounts for the mastery you have acquired in such a short time. You are barely into your third week and, from what I can see, you have integrated perfectly. Jac took about a week longer than the requisite three weeks to integrate with Hakon’s body, and he’d had practise doing it before. You are quite remarkable.’

  She felt her heart lift at the praise. He wasn’t praising her for the clone’s skills or abilities, but for what was intrinsically her. She was the one who was gaining control over her new body faster than people expected. That had to be a good thing, didn’t it? Julio always seemed to praise her for her, not her clone, as if he understood her automatic response to undeserved admiration.

  As they walked toward the school that had been set up in the research precinct, they talked about Julio’s preparation for his next Jump. He seemed edgy and distracted. Every time she asked for more information about the Jump he frowned and shifted his shoulders restlessly, as if something was sitting on his back that he didn’t like. After several minutes of this odd behaviour Jane stepped off the moving pathway, forcing Julio to follow suit. Then she turned to him and met his eye.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing!’ He tried to step back onto the pathway, but Jane placed a restraining hand on his arm.

  ‘Julio, I’ve come to know you as well as I know anyone. You’re upset about this next Jump. What’s going on?’

  He met her gaze intently, as if he was trying to decide whether to trust her or not. In the end, he nodded and shrugged his shoulders in defeat.

  ‘You were always the one who could see beneath the surface. I don’t know why it should surprise me that you picked up on this.’ He ran his hand through his lock of raven hair, and looked off into the distance before starting to speak again.

  He fell back into formal English, as he often did when upset. ‘In theory, rescuing missing children seems laudable. It was what brought me to the program. But, from the start, we were told that there were some children we would not be able to save. There would be some children that we would have to leave to their fate because they were not missing, they were kidnapped or murdered. And to interfere with that event would be to effect change in the time-line, which we are not permitted to do.’

  Jane nodded, having considered this issue when they told her about the Retrieval program. Just because John Smith disappeared didn’t mean that he’d died. He could have popped up somewhere else as John Jones, and continued on to have an influential life. There was no way of knowing. And it was a tightrope walking exercise to make the kind of choices they did, without impacting the time-line.

  ‘In theory, I accept that there will be some children we will not be able to rescue. In practise, I am becoming less accepting. I broke Protocol for you, Jane, and I do not regret that decision. But they will not let me do it again. That means that I have to stand back and watch terrible crimes taking place. And I do not know if I can do that. I have been lucky, so far. Or maybe they have selected my Retrievals carefully. But Tommy, and Melinda, the little girl before him, were both able to be rescued. This next one may not be.’ He turned to look at her, gauging her response.

  ‘Tell me.’ She reached o
ut and took his hands in hers to lend her support.

  ‘Four year old Jeremy Barnet went missing from his bedroom in his parent’s house in the outer suburbs of London in 1991. The police investigation found no sign of forced entry, no sign of a struggle, and nothing definitive to indicate how the boy had left the house. Although the bedroom window was unlocked. Suspicion fell on the parents and on the older brother, who was a trouble-maker at school – a bully. But no conclusive evidence pointed to any of them. The brother grew up to live a normal, productive life. The parents separated a year after the disappearance, and, although the father drank himself to death, no one can say if that was out of guilt or grief. No remains were ever found.’

  ‘So he’s a good candidate for Retrieval?’ She squeezed his hands, trying to infuse hope into him.

  ‘So the computer indicates. He was old enough to have climbed out his window. It was a single story dwelling in a semi-rural environment. If he wandered off, who knows what might have become of him. He may have fallen down a drain… That is our problem. All we know is when the incident will happen. We have to observe the family dynamics, the environment, strangers or neighbours who seem too interested. Then we have to see what happens to Jeremy on that night, and take him if it becomes apparent that a crime was not committed. But I do not like the feel of this one, Jane, and I am not sure if I am going to be able to… just stand back… if…’

  She understood what he meant. It was an impossible choice to make. And yet, what was the alternative? Retrieve a child targeted by a serial killer, only to find that killer chose a replacement? A child, who history recorded, should have lived a long and useful life?

  Was it better not to Retrieve children at all? No. Even with the complexity of the issue, after only three weeks in this new world, she was coming to see how wrong it had been to refuse to Retrieve children. Yes, they were an unknown. And yes, there would be difficulties for the children being removed from loving parents. But if the alternative was death, surely the few they saved were worth the effort? Like Tommy.