Darkship Renegades (11 page)

Strange.
He wrinkled his forehead.
Perhaps the word was just triggered by my urgency in getting to the fresher, because…let me tell you, it was urgent.
He gave me an apologetic smile.
But if you ran off to come here, and Doc Bartolomeu didn’t come after you, he must know or suspect what happened, and he must be in no hurry to make sure that I’m still compos mentis. I mean, for all he knows, I’ve killed you and am now hiding the body.

He wouldn’t want to interrupt you at that task. He’d wait until you were done cleaning up the cabin and throwing the pieces into the disposal.

Of course. Otherwise, he’d have to help. Seriously, Thena, don’t you find it weird that he didn’t come here at all? I could be having some weird symptom. Brain damage is tricky.

I couldn’t help it. Laughter bubbled up from my throat before I could stop.
It would be odd,
I said.
If the room com weren’t wired for sound and sight so that he could keep track of you while you were unconscious. In case you should suddenly need us.

Kit looked towards the camera pickup in the room—a standard location as Cats and Navs often used the circuits to keep in touch with each other while working around the ship. This one was high up on the wall of the room farthest from the fresher, so that its sweep took in all of the bedroom and the door to the fresher. The fresher too, if the door were left open.
Well, then I assume that Doc is in no hurry to see me,
Kit said.
Would you tell him, since I can’t seem to speak properly, that I’m taking a bath before I go to see him? And that that pickup better be shut in the future, whatever the old perv thinks?

I said it, aloud, without the color commentary even while Kit wrinkled his nose and spoke on in my mind.
Why didn’t you see to it that I got a bath or something? How long has it been? I smell like a chemical plant, and—ew—there’s blood on my neck and my suit. How could you stand to be next to me?

We didn’t want to move you!

Of course not. It would waft the smell farther off,
he said, as he went into the fresher. I heard him clang the doors shut, heard the sound that meant it was functioning on minimal-water setting.

At least he didn’t try to sing. Though he was more likely to hum a version of orchestral pieces, he had a stock of popular songs he’d been known to sing in the fresher, and those would sound very weird given his inability to speak properly.

I stood outside, listening to the hum and splash of water. I wasn’t going to blame him for taking a real water shower, rather than a simple vibration one. Yeah, I know. Scientists have proven that vibrations can bathe us as sparkling clean as water. More. They supposedly even clean our teeth and, for all I know, condition and rinse our lungs. But that is not the point. After vibrating yourself clean, you still felt sticky and dirty. With water and soap, you felt clean.

In the same way, though I knew he didn’t even have the room to fall in the shower compartment of the fresher, I kept imagining him falling, hitting his head, drowning. The human mind is an odd thing.

Kit,
I said, to reassure myself.

Beg your pardon?
A mental answer came back and it didn’t sound like Kit at all.

Kit?
I asked, wondering if I’d somehow got hold of Doc’s mind. No, it shouldn’t be possible even if we were all endowed with the same type of mind-speech and receptors. Normally you can identify the mind you want to communicate to by feel, and it’s not all that hard to keep it contained.

Heck, normally one didn’t communicate accidentally even under great stress. It had never happened to me and my friends back on Earth, though since they were all the clones of their Mule “fathers” they all had to be endowed with a similar mental ability.

Who is this?
The stranger’s mental voice came again, sounding, for all the worlds, like I was the one doing something outrageous.
Irena?

And that was when I screamed.

VOICES

Several things happened, almost instantly. One, the fresher door opened.

It would have taken Cat speed for Kit to open the door to the fresher that quickly, let alone to turn the shower off—it wouldn’t let him open the shower door otherwise—and then open the fresher door and rush out.

But Cat speed or not, Kit forgot he was hurt, and plunged forward towards me, at what would have been a run, except his left leg gave out under him. His knee hit the floor with a sickening thud. A scream escaped him, as he bent over his leg keening in unreasoning pain.

The next thing was a woman’s voice, from the door to the cabin, sounding very cold, very clear. “Stay down. Do not go near her.”

I turned around. Zen stood in the doorway, in the posture taught in every shooting class, feet slightly apart, arms braced, holding the burner pointed at…Kit.

“He didn’t do anything!” I said.

“No?” she said, but didn’t stop pointing that burner. Kit glanced up, pale, with tears of pain shining in his eyes. He was naked and wet. Blood covered his thigh. His running must have ripped whatever bandage the doctor had glued on.

“What in all the hells is going on here?” the doctor’s voice asked.

“No-nothing,” I said. “That is…Kit has hurt his leg. You need to help him.”

“You screamed like that because he hurt his leg?” the doctor said, and gave Zen one of his patented annoyed glances. “Oh, Zen, for the love of little children, put that damn thing away. Even if Christopher— Just put that thing away. And go get me my bag.”

I had the impression of something bitten off hastily after “Christopher” and I also had the impression that Zen knew what it had been. Something I didn’t know about Kit? Why? And how?

But she looked reluctant, as she slipped the burner into her pocket and turned to leave.

And while Zen might be reserved, and she might be cold, the one thing she wasn’t was completely crazy. She wouldn’t have pulled that burner on Kit, while he was fallen over one knee on the floor, unless she had reason to suspect he was dangerous. Dangerous how? Dangerous to me? And why would Zen know that when I didn’t? What had Doc told her?

And whose had been that voice in my mind? Who was aboard ship besides us?

Doc had approached Kit, who tried to stand, but was shaking too much and, from the expression on his face in obvious pain. “Idiot boy,” Doc Bartolomeu said. I’d found out long ago that the Doctor tended to scold one and disparage one’s mental abilities in proportion to his fondness for the person being addressed. And he was very fond of Kit indeed, probably holding him in as much affection as though Kit had been his son, instead of merely the clone of his childhood friend. “What did you think you were doing, trying to run?”

Kit’s mouth worked and sounds emerged, then he took a deep and frustrated breath and managed, slowly, what might have, with some good will, have been interpreted as “Thena. Scream.”

“Yes, she screamed,” the doctor said. “For no good reason I can imagine. Ah. Thank you.” The last was as he turned to receive his familiar black bag from Zen’s hands.

“I heard someone,” I said, defensively.

“Of course you heard someone,” Doc said. “Yourself. You screamed. Let me tell you, girl, they probably heard you on Earth.”

“No,” I said. I had a feeling he was being purposely obtuse. He didn’t want to know. He feared that there was something going on he didn’t wish to face, and therefore he would stall me and treat me like an idiot, if I let him. But he had told Zen what he suspected. It was the only thing that explained her overreaction. “No. I heard someone in my mind. Like…like mind-talk.”

Doc was slathering Kit’s wound in something sticky that smelled repulsively sweet. “Kit, were you mind-talking her?”

“No.”
I think I fell asleep in the shower,
he said, in my mind.
I only woke up with your scream. Thena, what do you mean you heard someone in your mind?

“A stranger’s voice,” I said firmly. “Please don’t treat me like an idiot or a child. I know I’m younger than you, but I’m not an infant. There was a stranger’s voice in my mind.”

This made the doctor frown in my direction. “Are you sure?” he asked. Then he looked at Zen. “I haven’t done a sweep of the ship. You have. Could we have a stranger on board?”

Zen shook her head. “You’re welcome to double check me,” she said. “But no.”

Doc was fastening a skin-colored patch across the jagged rent on Kit’s thigh. I hadn’t seen it clearly or for very long, but I had an impression that cut was almost bone-deep. No wonder Kit couldn’t stand fully on that leg, much less run. “If you don’t try to run marathons, this should stay in place now, and stimulate your body to heal itself, so that you will be fully able to stand and walk on it in a month or so.”

Kit nodded.
I should finish my shower,
he said, in my mind, and I relayed.

“Not…” The doctor looked reluctant, but like he knew he had to do something no matter how unpleasant. “Not yet.” He stood, grabbed Kit’s forearm. “What were you thinking about in the shower?”

“He says he was asleep,” I said.

Or at least not aware of being awake.

“Why did you say
run
earlier?” the Doc asked, and his asking it caused both Kit and I to stare at him openmouthed.

“You can’t have heard that,” I said. “You can’t. The telepathy only works between a bonded pair of—”

“Forget it,” Doc said. “You’re being irrational. Yeah, Eden telepathy only works between a bonded pair of Cat and Nav. But Eden telepathy is a different animal, in range and kind from what Mules had. And what you and Kit have is Mule telepathy. And even though we worked very hard at conditioning Kit to believe he could only communicate with his spouse, and even though you don’t seem to pick up anyone else, it is possible to. And I heard him clear as day in my head when he woke, saying
run
. So did Zen. Just like I heard Zen before, when she panicked over Kit being hurt and mind-called me back in Eden.” He looked at what must have been our equally outraged expressions. At least, Kit looked outraged and I felt outraged. “Don’t bother. That was the first time I heard Kit, or at least the first time since he was a toddler. But I’d like to know. Why
run
?”

I don’t know,
Kit said.
I don’t remember thinking it, much less projecting it.

Doc didn’t look like he’d picked up any of that, which was good and bad. Good because I’d really hate to have to kill him, but if that were the alternative to his listening in on every one of Kit’s and my private exchanges, then I’d have to face the terrible necessity. And bad because it meant I had to repeat everything in voice to Doctor Bartolomeu.

It didn’t help that it made him frown more. He said “I see.” And I had the terrible impression that he meant it. And that he didn’t like what he saw.

“So?” I said.

“What did he say?” He asked. “That made you scream?”

“He?” I said. “It wasn’t Kit’s voice!”

Doc waved an impatient hand, much in the way he did when we said something startlingly stupid, and said, “What did he say?”

I noted he didn’t have any doubts of the gender of the voice. Curiously, I didn’t either. Don’t ask me how one can perceive such a thing in a mental voice, which by definition is devoid of sound and timbre and intonation, but it was a male voice.

“He said…he asked who I was,” I said. “And he begged my pardon, you know, like people do when they don’t know someone.”

Are you sure you didn’t just dream it?
Kit asked. At the same time, I managed to say, “Who is Irena?”

“What?” the doctor said, and looked at Kit as though he’d grown three heads, all of them snake-shaped. Then he looked back at me. “What did he say? All of it?”

I repeated it, slowly, while Doctor Bartolomeu looked at Kit and frowned. “Are you sure you were asleep in there?”

Kit’s turn to frown, then shook his head. “Thena. Screamed. I…Wakened?” The words were slurred but understandable.

The doctor took a deep breath, then let out with the longest, lowest, string of profanity I’d ever heard issue from human lips. At least the words I understood were low and vicious and nasty. But I only understood about a third of them. From the sound of it, some of it was ancient languages.

“Doc?” said Kit. His voice shook.
Thena, what’s wrong? What is happening? Why does he keep looking at me like that? What have I done wrong?

I don’t know,
I said, and then aloud,
“
Who
is
Irena
?”

Irena Alterman—Ingemar, since she took
his
name against custom—was my moth…the woman who married my fa…Jarl,
Kit replied. And then,
Thena!

The last as I felt as if all blood had drained from me, downward, and as if my heart sank somewhere into the floor of the cabin. I looked at Doc Bartolomeu and he looked back. For a moment, we each knew what the other feared, clearly, without words.

“What have you done?” I said, at the same time he said, “What have I done?”

Jarl’s brain-pattern had been used for the nanocytes that had been injected into Kit to heal his limited head injury. Doctor Bartolomeu had said that they were neither enough, nor programmed to do anything that would make Kit have any of Jarl’s memories or…or Jarl’s personality. He’d
promised.

Even as I thought it, I realized that no, he hadn’t promised. He hadn’t even hinted at promising it. He’d just said it was impossible.

And now he was repeating it, loudly, and in a tone of finality, “Impossible!” And then, snapping, “Christopher, lie down. I need to get some equipment to figure out what’s going on.”

ALL TOO MORTAL FLESH

“It’s impossible,” Doctor Bartolomeu said again. It was the third time in fifteen minutes. He stared at Kit as though he’d not only grown three extra snake heads, but also wings and possibly a pseudopod and some tentacles.

It’s been my experience—limited as it is—that when people say that something is impossible that often, they know it’s not, but they very much wish it were.

He swallowed, hard. “The brain shows nano assembler activity all over, but…” He swallowed and said again, “That’s impossible.”

My hands were clenched so tightly that if I pressed just a little harder, they’d form into twin black holes and suck all the contents of the universe into them. My palms hurt where my very close-cut nails bit. “Don’t say that,” I said. “Word magic doesn’t work. Just saying something is impossible doesn’t make it so.” My voice didn’t sound like my own. It sounded low and hard. “I know what you told me before we left. I know what you explained. What could have gone wrong?”

“Nothing,” he said. And he sounded defensive, but not so much as though he were trying to convince me. More as if he were trying to convince himself. “Nothing could have gone wrong. Christopher, I swear the nanocytes I gave you had no power to colonize beyond the very limited area to which they were targeted to go. And the only thing they were programmed to do was repair. Not…not…”

Doctor Bartolomeu stepped back and fell into a chair at the foot of the bed. He lowered his head to his hands, and sat like that, for a moment. When he lifted his head, he looked tired, sick, aged and despairing.

Is maternal instinct programmed into the female of the species? Mules too? As far as I knew I was the only female Mule, ever, so there had never been a Mule mother. And yet, I felt like going to Doc, soothing him.

But I wasn’t going to. Maternal behavior is part of the expected response from women. No, it didn’t mean that Doc was acting helpless on purpose. But it meant if I acted maternal, he might never fully explain himself. Instead, I stayed rooted to the spot, waiting.

He looked at Zen. “Zen, child, would you go to my room and get the bottle of brandy from the cabinet by the bed? Thank you. Medicinal,” he said to us, as Zen left, wordlessly. “I am…I will explain, but…”

Zen came back carrying a glass decanter filled with amber liquid, and then I knew that Doctor Bartolomeu was really feeling unlike himself. I’d long ago realized that his behavior was carefully orchestrated and managed, that he kept himself in hand and made himself look human and act human because at the heart of it he was afraid he wasn’t.

Genetically, we were close enough to homo sapiens, even if—by design—not cross-fertile. We were human enough, I think. But Doc had not been raised as a human, if what I’d been able to glean about Mules and their childhood was true. And he was still trying to compensate. His entire construct of a house, trying to appear like something out of the Middle Ages, his fondness for adventure books and sugary drinks were ways to reassure himself that he was a human like others, and rooted in a common history; a common fund of legends.

Now he didn’t bother with a glass, or any of the other ceremonies that he would normally demand of himself, because it was filed somewhere in his mind under “how humans drink and appreciate liquor.”

Instead, he took a swig, directly from the bottle, shook his head, took a deep breath, took another swig and then capped the bottle.

Kit had sat up on the bed. He’d put on the same ratty, violent-green robe he often wore around the
Cathouse
. He hadn’t bothered to put clothes on underneath, but, for reasons known only to him, had put on a pair of dress socks, the type he wore with his uniform. They were dark blue, and not at all like something he would normally wear. He was now staring at them as though wondering where they’d come from, but I could tell from the tense set of his shoulders, his almost too impassive expression that his thoughts were occupied with far more than socks. “Doc?” he said.

“Yes,” Doctor Bartolomeu said. “Let me tell you about your parents’ death.”

Kit looked up, frowning.
Thena, tell him this: You’ve told me. When I was fourteen. At any rate, I think half of Eden knows the story. It was in all the holo recordings. I’ve seen the recordings.
I repeated.

“No,” Doctor Bartolomeu’s voice sounded harsh and scratchy, as though he’d been eating gravel for a while. “Oh, no. What the casts say, what everyone knows, what I told you, sensational as it is…is only half the story. If that.”

“Why?” Kit said.

The doctor made a gesture with his hand, as though dismissing the whole question as irrelevant. “Jarl…I’ve told Thena, but I don’t think I’ve ever told you, Christopher—I only told Thena when we were faced with…that is…I only told her because we had to use nanocytes, and I had a bad feeling. Though, I might say, the bad feeling I had wasn’t…this.” Again, a sweeping hand gesture that took in Kit and the small machine clicking on our bedside table, the machine that apparently told him that nano assemblers were active all over Kit’s brain.

“Is it possible the readers are malfunctioning?” I asked.

“No.” The doctor took another swig of brandy and sighed. “Let me tell it, from the beginning. Jarl had Hampson’s disease. We had suspected it for ten years or so, before I was able to diagnose it as Hampson’s disease. At first we thought it was Alzheimer’s. Alzheimer’s poisons brain cells, but if you can detoxify the cells they can function again. So we had tried to treat with nano assemblers, and got some results, but not a complete cure.”

What in Hades is Hampson’s disease?
Kit asked.
And do I have it?

“You have the genetic markers for it,” Doctor Bartolomeu said. “Of course. Whether you’ll develop it or not depends on a number of things. We couldn’t remove it, because the gene is coupled with others that you need to be…you. But it is also not a gene that is active or activated, necessarily until some…exterior stimulus brings it about.”

“But I thought…” I said. “I mean, the Mules were created in a laboratory. Pardon me for speaking frankly.” This was one of the things never mentioned openly, in front of Doc. That Doc Bartolomeu, and Jarl Ingemar and my own, unlamented progenitor had been created in a lab, assembled almost DNA strand by DNA strand. It seemed to upset Doctor Bartolomeu, so we didn’t mention it. “I thought Mules were designed to the last detail.”

“Various labs. National labs. National teams,” Doc Bartolomeu said. “Each of us is the culmination of some country’s bio expertise and, in their opinion at least, the best their breed had to offer. But they shared knowledge. And if what you mean is that we were created out of clean DNA and that everything that went into us was supposed to have been combed through and got rid of bad genes before our various enhancements were applied, that is true. But this was also the twenty-first century. The dark ages. Genes are coupled, and a lot of them express as junk DNA or were supposed to be junk DNA. They didn’t know…” He shrugged. “No one could have known. Though Hampson’s disease was discovered in the mid-twenty-first century by R. Edward Hampson, from the University of Aberdeen, they weren’t sure what caused it. Some people thought it was a form of Alzheimer’s, because of how it presents. Jarl and I thought so ourselves when the symptoms started.

“Wishful thinking, because it was curable. We should have known better. We should have known much better. Alzheimer’s genetics were well known by the time we were made, and that would never have been allowed to slip into our makeup.” He shrugged and looked at the bottle of brandy as though contemplating drinking more. He must have decided against it, because instead of uncapping it, he sat there, playing with the top, making a sound of glass-on-glass that set my teeth on end. “Hampson’s destroys the connectivity between the neurons. Not the cells, but the synapses that store information—all of the memories, skills and experiences. Little by little, it severs them. It doesn’t actually liquify the brain, because the brain cells are still there, it just starts breaking down the proteins that form the synapse connections between neurons. It destroys personality and knowledge and mind. It is a disease of extreme old age, though in homo sapiens that can be around a hundred or so. Which is why it wasn’t discovered till the mid-twenty-first.”

He pulled the decanter’s top off, then slammed it back in, and held his palm across the top as though preventing it from jumping out on its own. “It is irreversible. Or at least it is irreversible by any methods that…that we could think of. Jarl modified the nanoscale emitter/nanoscale assembler prophylactic treatments we had, in an attempt to stop the illness. They are nanocytes that, once inhaled, can go to work on the brain and modify it to resemble what it once was. It means you lose memories since, since they work according to pattern, but it’s better than the alternative. They are programmed to activate stem cells and…recreate the brain as it once was. The NSEs—that’s the nanoscale emitters—map all of the connections. They were invented as a substitute for medical diagnostic imaging—sort of like a super MRI. The NSAs—the assemblers—read the map and can rebuild it when damaged. It’s not…it’s not as obvious as this, but if you think of the brain as a datagem in which knowledge is stored, where part of it has been erased due to magnetic activity, the NSEs…nessies, we call them, can restore the shape that was in the gem before, which restores the memories that were there—anything from the history of Earth memorized in primary instruction, to how to tap dance, learned at eighty.”

He waved his hand again, and met Kit’s eyes. “We made an imprint of Jarl’s brain using nessies.” He stopped. “At any rate, it wasn’t perfect; by then, he’d suffered some degeneration due to Hampson’s. He said he wished he still had the copy of his alpha pattern, but I have no idea what he meant. It was still close enough. Little memories might vanish, like names and faces—in other words, retrograde amnesia. But the means to make new memories and recall what remained was still intact. Enough that if his brain could be made healthy, he could have gone on living without much problem. He might suffer such indignities common to the rest of mankind as having to, occasionally, read over a book that he’d read once, or perhaps lose his codes to some of his locks. But he would be normal otherwise.

“Only we could not make his brain healthy. Just replacing cells was not enough, the
synapses
are where the real memories and skills are stored. The thousands of synapses each neuron makes are why we could never build a computer comparable to the human brain. It’s not just the billions of processors that are needed, it’s the quadrillions of connections that those processors require. His synapses kept failing, and his brain kept degenerating, faster than we could restore it with the nessies. He kept resetting his memories and losing days, weeks, months, years. And fresh inhalations didn’t help, because there is a saturation point. Because the NSAs require a healthy brain map, and the NSEs were working on an already damaged brain. Which is why we came up with another plan.”

“Oh,
Light
!” Kit said. It was said with feeling and emphasis, even though a little slurred, and I didn’t ask him what he meant, because I thought I knew. Although I couldn’t quite see what Doctor meant, I was starting to get the shape of it—the contours, as it were. And I didn’t like it any better than Kit did.

The doctor didn’t ask what Kit meant, either. He just said, “Quite,” and continued. “See, we had figured out, ten or twenty years before, I don’t remember, in our research, which we did mostly because his social life was rather limited in Eden, and what there was of it was with people who tended to fawn over him…Anyway, in our research, we’d figured out the way to clone ourselves, and had in fact created a couple of clone embryos—”

“What?” from Kit.

“We had created a couple of clone embryos of Jarl’s. Just to prove we could. They were deep frozen and carefully stored, though I don’t think either of us intended on their being used. Not then.” He frowned. “The way we were brought up, or perhaps…perhaps something about us…We weren’t, then, particularly interested in offspring, or in raising children or…” He shook his head. “It never occurred to us we would eventually die, I think, until Jarl…until Hampson’s. And then it seemed too late to start, except…except that Jarl thought he could marry. A pretense marriage. Mostly. He was very fond of Irena, but…She knew who he was, and of course, it would never be a relationship of equals. But he thought he would marry her, and tell her that he wanted to raise his clone, that this would give him a new lease on life. Because everyone in Eden had noticed he wasn’t exactly himself those days.”

“That’s what you told me,” I said. “That he did it for a new lease on life. You mean it wasn’t the truth?”

“Not…exactly. You see, he planned to introduce the nessies to the womb at a critical point in the development. A modified set of nessies with no mapping capability, only the ‘repair’ nanocytes. That was part of the reason that we decided Christopher would be a Cat, because that gave us an excuse to introduce a virus to the womb and…and other things could be sneaked in along with it.”

“Modified how?” Kit managed to say, in a voice that was all rasp, seeming to issue from his throat without modulation.

“Modified so that as you…as the embryo grew, it would replicate Jarl’s brain.”

“But it would be the same brain, anyway,” I said. “Kit is his clone.”

“Don’t be puerile, child,” Doctor Bartolomeu snapped. “I don’t mean his…blank brain, the structure of his brain as an infant. I mean Jarl’s brain, with all the connections, all the…all the data that was in it when we took the impression.”

“How? How?” Zen sank to sitting on the carpet, and looked up at Doc. She was taking this much harder than I expected from an uninvolved participant. “The infant brain doesn’t have the same structures, the same connections…”

“No, that’s why the nessies were modified,” Doctor Bartolomeu said. “They would lie dormant until the infant brain started to form its own synapses. Jarl had a program to time the actions of the nessies not to make too many changes at once. As Chri—as the child grew, it would slowly change his brain, so that by the time he was thirteen or so, he would effectively be Jarl. During childhood, the nessies would start to work on the prefrontal and parietal cortex, laying down the connections that created the personality, so that the eventual emergence of Jarl’s personality would not be sudden. The onset of puberty would trigger the rest of the nessies to start forming the connections that underlay Jarl’s memories. Puberty would also provide a perfect mask for the personality change as the child, as…Chris—as he turned into Jarl.”