Beloved Son by George Turner

Author:George Turner [TURNER, GEORGE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orion Publishing Group
Published: 2025-12-31T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

Idealists at Work

As dynastic Chinese worshipped their ancestors, so the present dynasties of the West are inclining towards descendant-worship … Rightly, we begin to fear about the sort of world we are bequeathing our grandsons.

Brian W. Aldiss: The Shape of Further Things

1

Raft insisted on going alone into Town Centre. He preferred not to be professionally told what he looked at, but to observe and enjoy and casually stop the passer-by for information.

Since Campion had confirmed, over protest, that the man must not feel himself observed, this created perplexities for his guardians, requiring far too many men in civilian dress for a simple surveillance behind and before, carefully unnoticeable, passing him from hand to hand.

Still in black overalls he stepped into summer sunlight out of an enamel sky; summer at least had not changed. He needed a gesture, a raising of hands to smooth the light over face and shoulders; if others had not been coming and going he might have done it. But in St Kilda Road, with its island lawns and quadruple avenue of trees, excitement took him. He walked in a state close to hallucination, breathing air remembered from paradise, wondering at grass and flowers grown from dreamstuff, tempted to return the laughter when a kookaburra derided the world from overhead.

When had anyone last heard a kookaburra laugh in the city? Chalk it up to the new men that they had brought back something of the real world.

Like a boy he had energy begging release. He broke into a run, regardless of stares, until sweat and breathlessness and the drag of Earth slowed and halted him. He sat on the grass verge, feet in the gutter, red-faced, panting and full of life.

Some kids in early teens galloped over the grass strip in the middle of the road, playing a game involving the passing, on the run, of red and white balls in a rapid cross-fire pattern he would have thought too complex for spontaneous sport. Their faces were intent and calculating; perhaps it was not so spontaneous.

They stopped when they saw him. He supposed that an insane Security Tech snorting like a grampus in the gutter made a break in a routine day, but he was not prepared for one boy to cross the traffic lane and approach him with grave courtesy to ask, ‘Are you all right, sir?’

Sir, indeed! The archaic courtesy made him uncomfortable, but though the boy might have been thirteen his expression was formidably adult, with nothing soap-opera cute about the grownupness. Jackson had said that the kids still had a childhood, and that energetic game had seemed some sort of evidence; but they had a forced life as well and the sign of it peered from this cool face. He felt constricted, unable to be outgoing, to smile; he was too conscious of appraising stares and of the pre-packaged adulthood in all of them.

He said as amiably as he could that he was all right and the boy replied with his intolerably

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