Darkship Renegades (12 page)

“Damn,” Kit said. He scooted to the end of the bed and reached for the decanter from Doctor Bartolomeu’s hands.

Doctor Bartolomeu extended the liquor, but I intercepted it, my hand around the neck of the decanter. “Is this going to hurt it? To speed up the nessies’ actions or…”

Doctor Bartolomeu made a face. “Hey, it could even help. Suppress synapse formation for a few hours.”

I removed my hold on the decanter, and he passed it to Kit, who took a deep swig from it, swallowed hard as he capped it again and said,
But I’m not Jarl. Or am I?

Doc Bartolomeu shook his head, smiled a little, then looked grave again. “You are not Jarl. You see, things went wrong, and I swear by all that’s holy if I’d known that there was the slightest danger…”

“Never mind that,” I snapped. “Why isn’t he Jarl?”

“I don’t know. I thought it was because Irena found out. I don’t know how. Either the house was bugged, something I’ve started suspecting just lately, or…or she overheard us accidentally. Her reaction shocked Jarl. It surprised me. It had never occurred to us we were doing anything wrong, let alone immoral. I still don’t fully understand it. We grow other body parts via cloning when they break down, or against the possibility of their breaking down. So…why not a brain? The answer had always been because we couldn’t replace the brain and have the same thoughts, personality and memory. But the nessies solved that, so…why not? And if in the process we could pretend that this was not Jarl’s clone, but just another human among humans, why not do it and free him from being known as a Mule throughout Eden? Being known for what he was had made his life odious.

“But Irena went berserk at the thought. She said it was immoral. She said it was wrong. That the child would develop, and then Jarl would just take over and destroy him. Despite being an extremely rational person, smart, really—Jarl wouldn’t have chosen her otherwise—she could never give a coherent reason. She could just express disgust and repulsion.

“Because the emb…Christopher was not supposed to be a genetic relation of Jarl’s, he was not Jarl’s property. Irena had sole proprietorship over the contents of the biowomb, and she could order whatever she wanted done with them. And what she ordered done with them was to have them decanted. Prematurely. Two months of gestation. Killed.”

He took the brandy from Kit and took another swig. “I never knew what happened exactly, because it happened, as these things normally do, in the middle of the night. It was…” He compressed his lips, his eyes suspiciously shiny. “It was impossible to deny, on forensic evidence alone, that Jarl killed Irena, and then he killed himself. Both burner shots through the head. Very thorough. Very final.

“Of course, because there was no doubt he had survived her, and he was her sole heir. He inherited the contents of the womb, and he’d left a note saying Chri—Kit was not to be decanted until term. And because I was his heir, I inherited responsibility for Christopher. I went to the scene as soon as I could, but I couldn’t tell what happened. There was a…womb injector on the floor, but part of the contents had dried around it, so I didn’t know if any made it into the womb. I didn’t know if Christopher had in fact ever been infected with nessies or not. I didn’t know if the embryo growing in the womb was a new person or an exact replica of my old friend…and I’d have to wait at least thirteen years to find out.” He shrugged. “I arranged for the Denovos to adopt him. I was not married and not in a position to raise a child, and they were the happiest family I knew. I wasn’t sure what we’d do if he turned out to be Jarl’s replica, but the Denovos stood as much or more chance of hiding that as anyone else. And they might even accept it, at least when there was nothing else they could do. Of all of Jarl’s servants and dependents, their family had maintained the most loyalty to him.”

“But Kit wasn’t Jarl,” Zen said.

“No. Christopher wasn’t Jarl. By two that was very evident, and it only became more so as he became an adult. So I thought that Jarl hadn’t got the fluid into the womb. I swear if I had known…”

“Were you disappointed?” I asked. It sounded vicious and I couldn’t help it. The idea of two old Mules, plotting to create a new body and brain for one of them, was too much like what my father and his co-conspirators had done. Oh, okay, so perhaps not, not in a rational light.

After all, my father and his friends, because cloning was illegal on Earth, had to keep up the pretense of normal dynastic succession. They had to let an independent person grow and develop to teenage years, and then commit murder to get the younger body.

I suspected even if the same biological industry—including at nano level—were available on Earth as on Eden, they wouldn’t have availed themselves of it. Think about it. If you create a replica of yourself, all you have is an identical twin who shares your memories. It doesn’t mean you, as an individual, get to go on living. No, you’ll still get old and die, beside your younger replica. Dying of old age was not what Daddy Dearest and his cronies wanted. In fact they changed, normally, before old age, when mild degeneration set in.

What Jarl had wanted, what Doc had helped him do, was more akin to creating an afterlife or a legacy—the sort of thing most normal humans can look for in their normally begotten descendants. The sort of thing that is the foundation of every human society.

Only they weren’t considered human, or they had been taught they weren’t. Was it so wrong for Jarl not to want to vanish utterly? Was it so wrong for Doc not to have wanted to lose the only friend he had who remembered him as a boy? Given Jarl’s gifts, his technological work that few could emulate, was it so wrong, even for him, to wish to be around and continue working? Didn’t his work benefit all of humanity?

The two things felt different. One was the killing of a person. The other, simply, the perversion of a new personality forming. And yet, both left a bad taste in the mouth. Both felt wrong in the pit of my stomach.

I understood Irena Alterman Ingemar. The personality would form until age thirteen. Taking it over would be like possession. Corruption of the innocent. Clearly, Doc Bartolomeu hadn’t understood it, and he was the only witness surviving. But I could feel the recoil she had felt.

Were Jarl and Doc evil and wrong?

I didn’t know. I’d never taken advanced metaphysics. I’d never taken any metaphysics at all. The closest I’d come to metaphysics and solving the unsolvable were late night discussions in my broomers’ lair or aboard the
Cathouse
, when all other subjects are exhausted and the mind veered that way. But either with my broomers’ lair, or with Kit, we’d been discussing in the absence of reasoned discourse by previous generations. We’d been trying to figure out these dilemmas armed with nothing but our minds and our life experience, and what felt wrong and what felt right.

In this case all of it felt wrong—anything that Jarl could have done to escape death was wrong. And dying might have been wrong too, considering his knowledge and abilities which Eden desperately needed. Perhaps that’s the definition of a tragedy. That there is nothing one can do to find a way out that won’t be wrong. Sometimes there isn’t even something that is less wrong.

POP GOES THE SHIP

“So you assumed that Jarl had never used the nessies?” I asked. I was only channeling the question that Kit had shot at my mind.

“What else could I assume?” Doc asked. “Christopher developed normally, and even though, eventually, I…well…Eventually I mourned for Jarl. I missed him. Miss him still. He was my only connection to everything that happened, to everything we were in our childhood. No one else on Eden even knew about Earth, except through historical holos. They…had no idea. Even those who thought they did. I didn’t have anyone to talk to, anymore; anyone who would unquestioningly understand my jokes when they referred to things long past. Of course I missed and miss Jarl but I…I found out that Mules too could take interest in a new generation. There was Kit and…” He slid his gaze sideways to Zen.

Zen sighed. She’d been sitting in lotus on the floor, her hands resting on her lap. “I suppose,” she said, “I might as well tell you, Thena.” And, as she said it, I remembered that Doc had said she’d heard the mental shout in the strange voice. And about her sending the alarm, when Kit was wounded, via Mule telepathy. She’d heard it; she’d sent it and so…She continued, “Kit and Doc already know, but you don’t, and it’s been very difficult spending as much time working with you as I have, and trying not to fall into easy conversation because it might all come spilling out. I’ve known since I was five or so because my adoptive parents told me—”

“Your adoptive parents?” I asked. “You’re…” I remembered Jean saying that Doc Bartolomeu had suspected I was my father’s female clone, because—and then cutting off abruptly.

“Jarl’s other clone. Zenobia. Spirit of Zeus. Christopher. Christ bearer.” She flashed me a bright and embarrassed smile. “I sometimes wonder what Doc and Jarl were smoking when they came up with this stuff. It must have been extremely good, and clearly they weren’t sharing. Or did you name us alone, Doc, in homage to your lost friend? Never mind.”

Doctor Bartolomeu blushed, a dusky tone on his wrinkled skin. “It seemed…There is such a thing as folie à deux, and we’d been alone with our own ideas far too long, talking to each other only. I think other people…No. Other people were still real and people, but we weren’t. Or those we could create weren’t. The idea was that each of us would be cloned twice, in male and female form, and that each of them would marry the other’s clone and then we’d build another ship and go to the stars, in search of our kind. With us as sort of avuncular protectors to the young people. Before Hampson’s became manifest, of course.”

I started to open my mouth, but Doctor Bartolomeu waved his hand. “I said it was insane. A shared folly. The two of us talked too much to each other and too little to anyone else, and both of us so badly wanted to escape. Not Eden, as such. We each wanted to escape who we were. We each wanted to have a future and a family and to be…normal. We…” He shrugged. “It was a dream. I don’t think either of us intended to do anything with it, except prove we could do it. Not really. Once we knew the escape hatch was there, we would have no need to take it. But then Jarl became ill and…We started growing Christopher and we thought we might as well grow Zenobia.” The blush intensified. “And yes, I named you both, after Jarl’s death. I was…grieving.”

Kit’s mouth worked, making sounds that couldn’t be understood, and Doc Bartolomeu said, “No, we never grew the clones of me. We could have. It seemed easier to concentrate on Jarl’s first, and then in a year or two…when we knew the pitfalls. The truth is I think I knew, even then, the insanity of it. It would have required us to control those clones, to force them to marry each other. It felt…dirty. It was too much like our upbringing, our…Our controlled lives, our lack of choices.”

Did you know this?
I asked Kit, sharply.

I knew Zen was my sister. Or at least I was told Zen was my sister when I was so young that I thought I was a normal homo sapiens. Strangely I never questioned it after I found out I wasn’t human. Not…Not till this moment. I knew she was my sister, then I found out I was a Mule, and the two facts didn’t seem related or contradictory at all. I suppose if I had thought about it at all, particularly after knowing what you were, I’d have figured it out. But Zen and I rarely saw each other, and you know, she was married and had her own life, and I never thought…I rarely thought of her. It wasn’t as though we were close. Honestly, I think at the back of my mind, I thought she was my adopted sister, like Kath and Anne, that because her adoptive parents were good friends and unable to have children of their own due to genetic defects Jean or Tania or both had donated genetic material…They were very nice to her, treated her as one of us, when she came to play. And Zen and I were both happy where we were. It didn’t seem important. She Light! What a mess.

I had to agree on the mess, and I focused again on Doc Bartolomeu, who was saying, “I came to be glad that Jarl had failed. I like Christopher for himself.” Doc looked up at Kit and blinked. “I suppose I should say, Christopher, that I love you like a son, or as what I imagine people with normal lives feel for their sons. I’ve seen you grow, and of course, you have a lot of Jarl’s inclinations and dispositions, but you’re not…Jarl. Not really. You’re more like the new and improved model. What Jarl would have been if he…if we had been raised normally.

“We always assumed that Mules didn’t act human because they weren’t born of human parents, in the normal way. Because something in how their—our—genes expressed was different and made it impossible for us to ever be really human. But watching the two of you grow up I’ve wondered if that’s true, or if it was simply the way we were brought up. Knowing we weren’t human. Not really.”

“So that’s why Zen came with us,” I said. “Because you thought she, too, might understand Jarl’s writings?”

“No. Not because of that. She might understand Jarl’s writings better,” Doc said. “She…rebelled all along the line, including about her bioing as a Navigator. She studied science for a while, before she fell in love with a Cat and returned to the fold, and decided to learn to be a Navigator. She still graduated with her class, but she brought with her a knowledge of science that Christopher lacks. I stand a better chance of figuring out Jarl’s notes than either Christopher or Zenobia. No, they both had to come because Christopher was in danger, and because Zenobia was the one Navigator I could trust implicitly.”

“Though I did volunteer,” Zen said. “On my own.” She expelled air in something between a sigh and a huff. “I don’t think I can fully explain it, but see, I knew I was Kit’s female clone. With the family who raised me having moved to the Thules, and Len…” She paused. “Len gone…I didn’t want to marry again. Maybe I’ll never marry again. And Kit was the only…he’s my only family. And then he was in danger. I figured even if I died getting him out of this, it would be a life well spent. What else was I doing with it?”

Kit smiled at her, shook his head. “Thank. You. Stupid. Lots. Of. Things. Can. Do.”

He took a deep breath and spoke, each word carefully enunciated, though still slurred. “Is…that…why…people…in…Eden…think…I…am…Jarl…in…mind?…They…know…nessies?”

“Yes,” Doc Bartolomeu said. “I suspect that so did Athena’s fath…Alexander, you know? When you landed on Circum…No, he probably recognized your voice before you landed, over the com. The ELFing has masked your resemblance to Jarl, but your voices are remarkably alike, the same register, the same inflections.”

“Not mentally,” I said.

“Of course not,” Doc said. “That is more like…Both of them are violin virtuosos—though we never pushed Kit to it—but the way they play, the…expression is completely different. But their voices are almost exactly the same, except for the fact that Jarl had a slight accent. Swedish was his native language. He only learned Glaish at three or four when they brought us together for schooling. He’d have lost the accent, I suppose, but his national trust made sure he spoke and read Swedish fluently. Still, an accent is not a thing of the brain. It’s a thing of the ear and the training of throat and mouth. Alexander wouldn’t expect those to survive a transplant to a new body, and of course he thought if Jarl had made a clone of himself, it was to replace the clone’s brain with his own—”

“Which turns out not to be too far off,” I said, perhaps cruelly.

“So, it makes sense that Alexander thought Kit was Jarl, in all but name. And you can imagine his fury, too. Jarl had stolen Alexander’s new life, his opportunity to leave the Earth on the
Je Reviens
, and now he’d stolen Alexander’s female clone, the culmination of centuries of research, most of it fruitless. It’s a wonder he didn’t kill you on sight, Kit. He must really have wanted your help with cloning…

“It’s harder to imagine how people in Eden can have got the idea. But I think…I think Irena left recordings. Whatever she heard scared her. Perhaps she was afraid we’d use our modified nessies to tamper with her brain; who knows? It made no sense, since it would only work with a cloned body. But I think she left a cache of recordings or writings somewhere. There was something in Jarl’s last note, about people not believing Irena’s lies, which makes me believe she told him; warned him. And I think, whatever that was, Castaneda found it? I think he believes Christopher is Jarl and knows all Jarl knew. Hence his wanting Jarl dead. Perhaps not helped”—he bit his lip—“by the fact that Irena was his cousin and they grew up together.”

“No, I’d imagine not helped by that at all,” I said.

“Quite.”

For a moment silence reigned, then Kit grabbed the decanter and took another swig. “So…How do we stop…” He paused and seemed to regroup and started again, still very, very slow and very, very slurred. “How do we stop my brain from becoming Jarl’s. I know he was…your friend, but…I like me. As I am.”

Doc closed his eyes, compressing them tight, and then pressed his fingers to his temples, as though trying to contain his thoughts, or perhaps discipline them. “I like you as you are too, Christopher. And besides, the nessies making all these connections, all at once, might very well kill you. The human brain is not made to endure that type of thing. I just hope there isn’t enough of the serum active. The problem is that I don’t have the…necessary computer to create counter-nessies, but an EMP powerful enough to deactivate them all will cripple the ship. We need to create nessies that act like antibodies but only to Jarl nessies. The programming was Jarl’s. If we find his notes…and if we can get to Earth and get…if I can get access to the proper machinery to create them, I think I can stop it. Reverse it, even.”

“It’s three months!”

“Yes. Meanwhile I’ll have to find a way to…delay them. Make them slower.”

He must have read the horror in Kit’s eyes. I did. And I was sure my expression echoed his.

“I’m sorry. If I’d known there were dormant nessies in you, nothing in the universe could have persuaded me to use other nessies on you. Clearly Jarl managed to introduce the nessies, but something went wrong—or right—and they never activated. They were probably just below critical mass. Then I gave you the nanocytes, specifically to heal a brain injury. I’d given them to you before, but…”

“Not brain.”

“No. Not inhaled. Not circumventing the blood/brain barrier. And I never thought…when I gave Christopher ‘adult’ nessies—not the modified juvenile ones that Jarl produced—the presence of the adult-pattern nessies ‘matured’ the dormant nessies and activated them and now…” He shook his head. “I don’t know what to tell you. Except I’ll do whatever I can to save you. As much as I miss Jarl, I don’t want him back at your expense.”

It wasn’t the reassurance either of us wanted. Well, it certainly wasn’t the reassurance I wanted. I wanted to know that my husband would remain my husband. I wanted Kit. I had nothing against Jarl—other than that he’d apparently killed his wife to get his way, though in the heat of the moment, and while mentally ill, I supposed that could happen—but I didn’t want to have him in Kit’s body. I appreciated Kit’s body, but I loved Kit—the combination of his mind and body, and perhaps soul if there’s such a thing.

And Kit looked bleak and scared.
How do I know, Thena?
He asked.
How do I even know if it’s me? This is what split personality must feel like.

I’ll know if it’s you,
I said.
I’ll tell you.
And even as I said it, I wondered if that was true, if I would tell him. If we couldn’t do anything about it, wouldn’t it be better to let him slip into oblivion without burdening him with the knowledge of what he was inexorably losing?

At the thought of his slipping into oblivion, leaving behind his body, still acting as though it were him, and as though he were alive, I felt the hair trying to rise on my head. I don’t know what I would have said or done, if at that moment the ship alarms hadn’t sounded, loudly, in a range that made all thought stop.

Zen and I were on our feet and running before we had time to reason. And both of us ran, instinctively, straight at the source of trouble. Those alarms could mean only one thing. The steering system of the ship had just failed.