Darkship Renegades (19 page)

Simon looked so genuinely startled that even Jarl must have seen it and recognized it. “Ah. No. It’s just that I greatly dislike being shot to pieces while flying over rebel-held territory, see, and I need to know how that has changed overnight, and if needed, get safe conduct.” He gave me a direct look. “Fear not, Thena. You’re still one of the lair. I’ll come get you, and then we’ll try to figure out where your…what’s his name? Jarl has hidden his notes. I will call on this and leave a message when to expect me.” His gaze flickered to Jarl, and then he reached forward, and the screen went blank.

“We have a day,” Jarl said. “Let me show you my domains.”

I thought it sounded odd. There was some story, in some holy book—not being raised with them, I had trouble remembering which one precisely—about the devil taking a demi-god to a pinnacle and offering him the kingdoms of the Earth. The way Jarl said this, sounded like that.

And then I realized he meant it like that, too. Oh, not that he was offering us the kingdoms of the Earth in return for our subjection, though I suspected he would, if it got him our subjection. But more like he thought what he was showing us were the kingdoms of the Earth…or the better part of Earth.

He took us walking up winding paths, to pick only slightly dusty fruit from huge, gnarled, venerable trees. He ate apples with the relish of a child, grinning between bites. “Damn vat-grown in Eden. Or even tree-grown. Might be very healthful and full of vitamins and minerals, but they don’t taste the same.”

Then he led us to a huge rock, atop a small hill, from which we could contemplate the canopy of trees, with the birds fleeting among them. The air felt like a summer afternoon, and I’d never spent so much time just walking around amid trees. If my husband weren’t being held captive, I’d have enjoyed myself greatly.

Kit?

Here, Thena, still here. Don’t worry. Just…let him enjoy himself.

You like him!

And Kit’s voice, slow and thoughtful,
I think…it’s hard not to like him from inside. I could…be him. If I’d had a truly awful life and then been treated like both an object and a threat and a demi-god, all at the same time. Even his achievements weren’t his own. They were a reason for his creators to be proud, instead.

I didn’t know what to say. It seemed like a betrayal, like Kit had gone over to Jarl’s side, but Kit laughed in my head.
Not on your life. We’re going to figure out how to beat this, Thena. We’re going to figure out how to defeat it. We’ll survive. But he won’t. Let him have his fun.

I realized Jarl was offering me a handful of berries on his palm. “They’re very sweet,” he said. “I’ve tasted one.”

I looked up into his eyes, and realized he’d been paying more attention to me than to the rest of them. Was it just because he felt guilty over Daddy Dearest? Or was it something else? Had Kit’s feelings for me leaked? Behind him, Doc was looking studiously up at the tree canopy or at the ceiling of the cavern up there.

I took the berries and thanked him, with as much reserve as I could put into it, and ate the berries. They were sweeter, and juicier than in Eden, and I conceded this when he asked me. He was enjoying them so enthusiastically his hands were stained with the juice. “The fish tastes better too.” He looked over at Doc. “What do you say, Bartolomeu? Should we have a fish dinner by the creek? I have rations stored somewhere…but I’d prefer not to go into the deeper levels here. Also, rations will be good after three hundred years, but they’re rations.”

Doc made a noncommittal sound, and Jarl turned, giving the impression of sudden, vital energy. He headed for the creek. Zen followed behind me and got beside me. “Do you still hear Kit?” she asked in a whisper.

I told her what Kit had said and she shook her head. “See, that’s the difference between us. Kit was always softer. Let’s hope he’s not too soft.” She looked at Jarl’s back. “I don’t trust him.”

“Uh…he’s your elder clone, just like Kit is—”

“Did you trust your father?”

“Well, no, but the stories of Jarl in Eden…”

Zen sighed. “He killed his wife to continue with a mad scheme, Thena. I’m not saying he wasn’t a wonderful man…before. Doc seems to think so, and I respect him. But, Thena, when my husband’s father started—”

She was interrupted by Jarl turning around from the bank of the creek that ran through the compound and saying, “Oh. My. We won’t need fishing rods.”

The creek boiled with fish. You could see them through the very clear water, and you could see the pebbled bottom. The creek wasn’t at all deep, perhaps waist high.

“I seeded it with fish, and I guess being untouched this long…” Jarl said. “There are filters on the water at the entrance and there’s a life-barrier at the exit, which I suppose kept them safe. But I never expected this. Almost a kindness to thin the population.” He pulled off his shirt, revealing Kit’s muscular chest with its dusting of red-gold hair. He pulled off his shoes. And then he waded into the creek, with his pants still on, and turned in moments, a fish in each hand, and goofy grin on his face. “It’s devilish cold, but I’ve seen nothing like this in three hundred years. Won’t any of you join me? Bartolomeu? Thena? Zen?”

“I’ll clean the fish,” Zen said, catching them as he flung them.

Doc sat a little way away. “I’m too old to go into cold water, Jarl.” He looked at me, and I understood the unspoken message and sat by him. I expected the query of whether Kit was still there, but instead what I got was an intent whisper, “When Jarl’s brain got imprinted, the pattern already revealed considerable damage from Hampson’s. Impossible for it not to show now. And I’m seeing the symptoms. Jarl’s brain already showed loss of synapses and some neuron damage. He’d forget a name or a skill or become unexpectedly clumsy. I know these symptoms very well, because every time I treated Jarl again, he would forget everything since the last treatment. He left himself notes, but…There are other symptoms, too, harder to pin down. Poor impulse control. Paranoia. Thena, I want you to know that’s not who he was.” He looked towards the river, where Jarl was throwing a couple more fish at Zen, a happy smile on his face. “This is more like it. He was a kind, generous man, and unlike what happened at Circum, he would no more take life casually than Kit would. The Jarl I knew would never have killed Irena. But…he wasn’t himself. We figured in the course of the brain growing…”

“So you want me to know that not only is Kit being taken over, he is being given a horrible degenerative disease?”

“No, just the symptoms,” Doc said. He looked over at me, and chewed his lower lip. “We have to find a solution,” he said. Yet, I felt like Kit, he was too likely to think well of the invader.

“Yes, we do,” I said. “I don’t care how much you miss your old friend, or how worthy Jarl was of living. My husband doesn’t deserve the death penalty so Jarl can live.”

Doc shivered, and paled a little. “No. No, Thena. We’ll find a way. Maybe your friend Simon can give me access to a lab…”

“Jarl knows how to build and program the nanocytes to reverse this, doesn’t he?” I asked. “And you don’t quite.”

Doc sighed. “Jarl designed them, yes. It doesn’t mean he knows how to reverse them.”

“And he wouldn’t tell us if he knew,” I said.

Doc frowned, worried. “We have to persuade him, somehow. Or maybe I can reverse engineer it.”

DANSE MACABRE

It was not the best meal I ever had, because fish will never be my favorite meal. But it came close to it, with the fresh fish cooked on sticks over the fire and various fruits and berries for dessert. Jarl continued in near manic-mode.

He reminded me of a little boy, trying to show off all his toys at the same time and unwilling to pause long enough to explain why the toys were wonderful. I should have been more alarmed, but I couldn’t be.

I could hear Kit’s burble of delighted laughter in my mind, and realized with shock that he was enjoying this almost as much as Jarl. Not being in the water. That kept him quiet for a while and I could feel his near-phobia of free running water, born of never having seen so much of it in one place until our last visit to Earth.

But he did enjoy the fish and informed me,
He’s right. It does taste different and better. It’s more…layered.

After the meal, we lay about on the grass, looking up at the ceiling of the cavern, which was fully dark, now that night had fallen outside and the piped-in sunlight no longer shone. Dark, with a relief of branches waving in the breeze.

Thena,
it was Kit in my mind, even though I was almost sure Jarl was asleep on the ground next to the fire.

Yes?

I wish…I wish there were some way for him to live. Just not in my mind,
he added, hurriedly.

I felt a surge of alarm again, despite his qualifier. I thought of Zen asking me if I trusted Jarl. Was Jarl, somehow, working on Kit, making him think he should allow Jarl to live, allow him to have Kit’s body.
You can’t let him,
I said.
You can’t let him take over. Kit, I won’t let you. I’m in love with you, not him. I have nothing against him, but I will not allow you to sacrifice yourself for him. And he’s not well.

No
, Kit admitted. Then said,
And I don’t want to sacrifice myself for him, or allow him to take over…me. It’s just…You know I love my family.
He paused.
But much as love them, I’ve known since Doc told me what I was, that I was different, that I wasn’t like them. Now I have you, and I suppose Zen, and I always had Doc, but…Jarl is older than I. He’s been…he’s seen things I haven’t, experienced things I haven’t. He…feels like a father to me?

I thought of what a father felt like to me and allowed my exasperation to show, just a little. He laughed in my mind.
Yes, beloved
, he said.
But you didn’t know you were different until just recently. You didn’t live with it every day of your life from adolescence on. You might think that your father was impossible to like or admire.
There was a long silence, and I had a feeling he was scanning whichever memories of Jarl’s he could access for what my father was like.
All right. Maybe your father was impossible to like or admire, he added. But even so he might have seemed more tolerable if you knew that he was the creature closest to you in the world.

I felt a chill up my spine. What I said, in his mind, was,
Don’t go weak. He can use your emotions too, Kit. And he wants to live. You have to want to live just as hard.

I didn’t know if this was true, but I seemed to remember it from the multiple personality cases I had read about.

But inside, I wondered if Kit had any idea how much I feared my similarity to my father, how much I feared I would grow to be just like him.

Suddenly, Jarl was in control again. I could tell from the way he jumped up, full of energy, as though he’d just remembered a toy he’d forgotten to show us.

He came back with the violin. By the light of the fire, Kit’s eyes looked brighter, as if he were feverish. I realized he—Jarl?—had pulled off his light-mitigating lenses. He tuned his violin, carefully, a ritual I was familiar with because Kit always did it before he played anything.

Then he started playing.

I clenched. I recognized the piece, because it was one of Kit’s favorites, the type of thing he would play late at night in his room or in the main room of his parents’ compound. It was
Hungarian Dance #4
by Brahms. But there was something wrong.

I thought it might be just the setting—this old compound, and the night, and the fire reflecting off Kit’s hands and violin and bow while he played, faster then slower again, pleading with the cavern ceiling that obscured the sky and with the unseen stars. But even accounting for those something was wrong. Something was very wrong.

I closed my eyes, and listened, and felt the hair on my head and on my arms rise on end, before I could think what was causing it. And then I realized what it was. Two people were playing that violin. They were handing off, in tiny increments, each perhaps half a minute long. You couldn’t perceive where the handoff was, but you knew—you knew—it was happening.

I’m not a musical expert, but I know a difference in style when I hear it. Kit’s playing was softer and deeper, and Jarl’s more disciplined, curter. And they flowed in and out of each other, seamlessly, like…

Like two hands playing the piano together. Like a person picking up something with two hands, like—

I found myself on my feet and running, running madly in no direction in particular, running stumbling in the darkness, running and not caring if small shrubs caught at my clothes, if I fell, and picked myself up, and fell again.

The music pursued me like a living thing, winding around me, changing, enveloping me, choking me, with its seamless, cloying mix.

Once, when I was young, I’d heard my father talk about my mother. I’ll remember the words to my dying day. You see, I’d thought they’d been happy, or somewhat happy, even though it had been an arranged marriage. I didn’t think it was perfect, clearly, since my mother had left.

But then I overheard Father talking about Mother, and he called her a “stand in” and “disposable” and “the womb.” At the time I hadn’t understood what he meant. I didn’t know she hadn’t really been my mother, or really his wife, in any sense of the word. Just the convenient facade of a marriage with which to hide his acquisition of a daughter.

I knew the words hurt though. My mother, such as she’d been, had been the only person who’d shown me affection—personal affection, not the care of those paid to care for me.

The words had cut me to the quick, and I’d found myself running. Running out of Daddy Dearest’s home, running out of the gardens, running out of the compound, and, aimlessly, towards the industrial levels of Syracuse Seacity.

I hadn’t stopped running till I could no longer move. Father had sent his goons after me, and they found me and carried me home. Because I refused to tell them what had happened, Father thought it was another of my maddening behaviors designed, solely, to drive him insane. The next morning, my governess had found that I had blisters all over my soles.

And I’d found out you couldn’t outrun your troubles. They galloped right along with you, waiting to flood your mind and body as soon as you stopped running.

Perhaps that’s why this time I stopped sooner. Or perhaps it was because the terrain was broken, full of rocks and trees and roots, and I couldn’t run, just run as I’d run as a child, my lungs filling with air, my feet pumping.

Here, I didn’t even have the illusion I could outrun my troubles. Besides, the music stopped, and Jarl’s voice called “Thena!” then Kit echoed it mentally:
Thena!

I stopped and fell to the ground on my knees, trembling, weak, my mind filled only with one overwhelming and horrible thought. I’d been telling Kit he had to survive. I’d been telling him to stand firm and withstand Jarl’s attempts to take over wholly. I was sure that, of the two, Jarl was the most determined to live. He’d walked with death for years before his brain imprinting, the part of him, frozen in time, who was trying to take over Kit. He’d know death for the adversary it was and what it meant, and that would make him even more desperate.

I’d thought Kit could fight it, just barely, but I thought he could. I thought he could fight it for my sake. I’d thought he could hold on until I got Doc to a lab, until Doc could concoct something that would keep Kit alive, that would bring Kit back.

I didn’t think of the reality of it. No matter how it felt to me, I wasn’t dealing with two distinct and separate people, forever apart, or battling it out where one would live and the other die. No. I was dealing with one brain and one creature.

One creature, the love of my life, whose mind was being changed and reshaped by physical means, whose very physical integrity, his body, was being reshaped so that he had the memories and thoughts of another being.

Only there hadn’t been quite enough nanocytes in the solution injected in the bio womb. Not enough to start developing when Kit was forming and from what Doc said, probably fewer now, since these things decayed over time. So there was probably just enough to take it halfway, and there the brain would stay, half-changed. Half-Kit, half-Jarl. Some memories from both. Some personality from both.

And because the brain itself wasn’t diseased, over time, it would consolidate, it would merge.

I’d thought the choices were to have Kit survive or to have Jarl survive. I hadn’t thought of the most likely thing to happen. That they would both survive and merge, till there was only one being in that body, neither Kit nor Jarl, but a hybrid who wasn’t either. A hybrid who was not my husband. A stranger in my husband’s body.

I walked away in the darkness, and sat down on the ground. I felt cold, though Jarl had said the temperature was constant here.

Something ran over my lap, but I didn’t know what it was—a mouse or a rabbit or something else. And I was too tired to even feel my old horror of being outdoors, surrounded by critters.

I leaned against the trunk of a tree.

THENA!
Kit in my mind, panicked, and I could hear footsteps, not near, but near enough. He could see in the dark as well as I could in the light, and I was sure I’d left a path of broken twigs and trampled ground as I ran.

I’m here,
I said.
Don’t come near. No. Don’t come.

Thena?

I’m all right. I just can’t have you near right now. No. Please.

What…what did I do?

Can’t explain. Never mind. I’m fine. Just leave me alone. Everything will be fine in the morning.

I felt his reluctance in leaving me, but heard the steps going away and I closed my eyes and prayed.

I’m not religious. I don’t even know if I believe in gods as such. But I believe in something. There had to be something, either God or fate or justice. There had to be something out there that listened, that dealt with human needs when our courage brought us so far and then broke, leaving us stranded.

To that distant, nameless force, I begged to have my husband back. And then I threatened. And then I must have fallen asleep.

I woke up in the morning with light in my eyes, a squirrel eyeing me speculatively from a near branch, and Kit—I was sure it was Kit—looking at me with concern from the edge of the little clearing where I’d slept against the trunk of a tree.

“Kit!” I said.

And he smiled a little, and looked sad, then said, “He said it should be me, because he thought he had scared you. Did he scare you?”

“Yes. No. Maybe.”

Kit’s eyes widened. “Thena!”

“I haven’t gone insane,” I said. “I know what happened, but I can’t tell you.” Or I could, but I was afraid both of them would embrace it as a perfect solution. “I can’t explain.”

His eyebrows rose, and he said nothing, but I felt him draw upon his reserve, a closed look I had rarely seen since our marriage. “Well, at any rate, I thought you’d want to know your friend, Simon, is down by the creek, talking to Doc. He has a brand spanking new, properly registered flyer all sparkling clean and ready to take us to the seacities and civilization.”