Звезда Пандоры

Looking at their contented, normal, extra daughter on her sixteenth birthday, Marcus and Rebecca knew they had succeeded. They’d brought up a Hive child in a loving natural environment, and produced a perfectly happy, healthy human being. What could be done with one could be done to all. The Foundation’s hold over its oppressed population could be broken; their method of control was flawed. Decency and human dignity had triumphed in the end.

Two days later, on a splendid late-summer afternoon, they took Paula out into the garden and told her of her true heritage. They even sheepishly showed her the old news media recordings of the snatch and subsequent manhunt.

What the Foundation had never revealed was the nature of the psychoneural profiling given to the snatched babies. The others were all reasonably standard for Huxley’s Haven: public service workers, engineers, accountants, even an archivist. But Paula, as luck or fate would have it, was an exception even among her own kind. Crime on Huxley’s Haven was extremely rare, naturally so given its citizens were all designed to be content in their jobs and lives. But not even the Foundation claimed to make life perfect. All human civilizations needed a police force. On Huxley’s Haven it was a source of national pride that there was one law enforcement officer for every ten thousand people. Paula was destined to be one of them.

Two hours after their joyful confession, Marcus and Rebecca were in custody. It was Paula who turned them in. She had no choice; knowing what was right and what was wrong was the core of her identity, her very soul.

The last missing Hive child was the greatest media story to hit the unisphere for a decade, making Paula an instant celebrity. Young, beautiful, and frighteningly incorruptible, she was everything a sixteen-year-old should never be.

Thanks to Paula’s relentless testimony, Marcus and Rebecca were sentenced to thirty-two years’ life suspension each, losing double the time over which their crime was perpetrated. It was the kind of punishment normally reserved for murderers. Unisphere coverage of the trial allowed a quarter of the human race to watch in silent fascination as Coya broke down and screamed hysterically at the judge before begging her step-twin to withdraw the sentencing application. Paula’s only answer, a silent pitying glance at the sobbing girl, made that whole quarter of the human race shiver.

After the trial, Paula went back to Huxley’s Haven, the home she’d never known, to discover her real name and suffer embarrassing introductions to the other stolen children with whom she had nothing in common. She belonged there even less than on Marindra; a modern Commonwealth education put her completely outside the norm as far as Huxley’s Haven was concerned. They didn’t have advanced technology on the Hive; the new conformist society was structured so that people did all the work, not machines. With her exposure to domestic bots and the ultimate data access of the unisphere, Paula considered such rejection to be stupid and provincial. It was the one success Marcus and Rebecca had with shaping her thoughts, though by then their bodies were beyond knowing, safely comatose in the Justice Directorate’s hibernation wombs.

Away from the public eye, Paula left Huxley’s Haven for Earth, where she enrolled at the Intersolar Serious Crimes Directorate. At the time, she had no idea how high up the political food chain her application was bounced before it was finally approved. But approved it was, and inevitably she became the best operative they ever had—despite the one notorious case of 2243 that she still hadn’t solved.

Morton lived in the penthouse of a fifty-story skyscraper standing behind Darklake City’s Labuk Marina. Not at all far, in fact, from Caroline Turner’s last lunch with Tara. Paula noted the coincidence as the car drove them along the waterfront. They parked in the skyscraper’s underground garage and took the express lift up to the top floor. Morton was waiting for them in the vestibule as the doors opened. Three years out of rejuvenation, he was a tall, handsome young man whose thick chestnut hair was tied back in a long ponytail. Dressed in a fashionably cut amber and peacock-blue tropical shirt and expensive hand-tailored linen slacks, he looked good and obviously knew it. His youthful face put on a broad courteous smile as he shook their hands in welcome.

“Good of you to see us,” Paula said. It was early evening local time, which was only a few hours ahead of Paris time.