She opened the door and found herself face to face with a gaunt-featured yet not unattractive young woman with sensitive and troubled eyes. In her right hand she was carrying a plastic shopping bag, clutching the handle tightly as if afraid it might be unexpectedly snatched from her grasp.
Aubretia smiled politely: some quality behind the stranger’s eyes disarmed her. There was a pleasant feeling of psychic resonance, of two minds in tune.
“Are you the woman they call Aubretia?” asked the stranger.
Aubretia nodded.
“May I come in? It is very important.”
Aubretia led the way into the mellow light of the apartment. She switched off the video screen and gestured towards a chair. The dark haired girl set the shopping bag carefully on the table, then sat down, remaining poised on the edge of the chair as if unable to relax.
“Who are you?” Aubretia enquired.
“My name is Koralin. I am a cytologist in the Department of Biophysical Research… or, rather, I was. I had a friend called Deurina, an albino.”
Aubretia shook her head slowly, as if the information were meaningless to her.
“She had an identical twin, also an albino. Her name was Aquilegia.”
Aubretia’s expression became suddenly transfixed and her eyes were, for an instant, remote and far away, but the mood passed almost as quickly as it had begun. The ghost of an albino woman had been hovering in the darker fringes of her mind for a long time now, and at the mention of the name Aquilegia the ghost had become brighter, more clearly etched. Deurina also clicked into place as a very real memory. There had been an albino woman, three years ago, and she had claimed to be the sister of someone called Aquilegia, though she had never given her own name. What had happened to her, Aubretia wondered? Suddenly the past returned in disconcerting detaiclass="underline" the subversive talk, the sombre revelation of secret laboratories, and something that had to do with a man, and later, in the deep night, the quiet phone call to the police. She had never seen Deurina again. “You remember; you must remember,” urged Koralin. Aubretia passed a hand wearily across her brow. “Vaguely, one or two things. Why did you come here?”
“Because Deurina was my friend, just as her sister Aquilegia was yours. That must give us something in common.”
“All right, Koralin, supposing it does, what do you want of me?”
“First a promise that whatever I say will be a secret between us. I must have absolute trust in you.”
“I owe you that trust. I betrayed Deurina. At the time I thought it was the right thing to do. Since then… well, things have been happening to my mind. Now I’m no longer sure of anything.”
Koralin stood up, placing one hand protectively on the plastic bag, and eyed Aubretia uncertainly. “I didn’t know, about Deurina, I mean. I knew she came here after she left the laboratory. She was in trouble with security, and when she disappeared I thought it was just that security had finally caught up with her…”
“Security did — at my invitation. I can’t explain it. I seem to remember that Deurina said they’d been to work on my mind. I never understood what she meant, and I’m not sure that I do even now…”
“You were once the Press Policy Officer for the Department of the Written Word, weren’t you, Aubretia?”
“I can’t remember.”
“But you were. Until you made a mistake. Aquilegia had been talking to you, explaining some of the secrets of our society as it exists, not as we are taught to believe it exists. You made a mistake by trying to release the information over the public press and broadcast services. Your message never got any further than the memory banks in the news offices, where it was promptly cancelled. They took you away and gave you the treatment, a deep hypnotic reorientation of your mind. They arrested Aquilegia, and they closed in on Deurina. She slipped away, for a few days, and, well, you know the rest…”
Aubretia’s eyes were thoughtful and introspective. “I don’t remember, Koralin; honestly I don’t. Only the things that happened after I came to Birm mean anything at all. The rest is just… fragments of some kind of weird dream.”
“It will come back to you, not all at once, but slowly. I’ll try to help you, Aubretia.”
“But why? I’m a secure citizen. Why should I become involved in subversive business?”
“Afraid of your mortic record?”
“My record is good so far as I know,”
Koralin removed the crimson cloak from the plastic carrier, then carefully lifted out the paper wrapped bundle and placed it on the table.
“I came to you for help,” she said. “Not many of us can see through the sham of our way of living, and even fewer know the full truth. Most of the subversive types are already under security surveillance, though they may not realize it.” Aubretia nodded in silence, thinking of Valinia.
“In the ordinary way,” Koralin said, placing one hand on the bundle, “we should never have met, not in a thousand years. I would have spent my life in the Department of Biophysical Research, and you would have remained in the Department of Statistics. But today something important happened, something that might affect the future of the entire world.”
Aubretia’s eyes became questioning.
“Today,” Koralin went on, “a decision was made at a high level. It was a decision with which I disagreed. One of my colleagues also disagreed, but she was foolish enough to say so. Right now she is probably undergoing hypnotic reorientation.”
“What was the decision?”
Koralin began unwrapping the bundle. Her hands moved slowly, methodically. With a touch of melodrama she kept the contents covered by the paper until she was ready to perform the unveiling ceremony. Then she said: “The world brain decided, after many weeks of careful consideration, that this should he destroyed…”
She unveiled the baby in a crackling flourish of paper.
XVI
The Controller of Internal Security switched off the videophone and pressed a green button on the intercom panel.
“Get me the Senior Mistress of Applied Cytology in Zone Four.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Fifteen seconds of silence, then a metallic voice through the intercom grille.
“Applied Cytology. Senior Mistress speaking.”
The Controller faded up the video screen. A flaccid, square-jawed face stared at her from beyond the rectangular panel of glass.
“Code six,” said the Controller curtly.
The image on the screen glanced downwards. Unseen fingers moved an unseen switch. Scrambler circuits clicked into operation to render the conversation indecipherable at all intermediate points between the two terminals.
“I have received an alarming report,” said the Controller. “It concerns you.”
“Indeed?”
“And test four-six-five.”
The Mistress smiled a little. “Test four-six-five has been destroyed.”
“Are you certain?”
“I gave the order myself.”
“And you witnessed the destruction and checked the death of the embryo, pathologically?”
“Not personally. It was unnecessary. The staff of the cytological laboratory can be trusted to obey orders.”
“All of them?”
The Mistress’s face became a little smug. “With one exception, a woman called Cordelia who proved to have certain reversionist ideas. I have arranged for a course of hypno-orientation. She will not return to the laboratory.”
“Supposing I were to tell you that test four-six-five was not destroyed.”