Darkship Renegades (25 page)

SHALL WE PLAY A GAME?

I tried it just for the sake of completeness.
Kit?

I can’t help,
he said, his voice sounding distant and muffled, as it did when he was under sedation.
He’s not letting me see, and he’s not letting me know what he’s doing. I gather he’s enjoying himself at your expense, though.

I gritted my teeth.
I bet.
And if he weren’t occupying Kit’s body, right now, I’d be visualizing really hard which parts of his own anatomy I could make him eat. As it was, I’d have to be careful, and I’d have to be cunning, and I’d have to beat him at his own game, and make him reveal where he’d put the data on the powertrees. And make him explain how to make the nanocytes to restore Kit, which would be harder.

There had to be a way to do that, or he wouldn’t be working so hard not to cooperate. As for the first, it really didn’t take much thought to know that a paranoid and isolated genius would keep his notes and knowledge in the one place that no one could penetrate, the one place where even his friends weren’t allowed to go. That, and of course in his own head. But his head wasn’t functioning too well, so it would have to be whatever data gems or papers he had hidden here. He had said there were notes. He’d said it to Doc Bartolomeu when both thought they’d never see Earth again, and when they had no reason to lie.

I knew, though, knowing Kit—and by inference, Jarl—the only way to get those would be to play Jarl’s little game and to find him. But I’d be damned if I gave him the advantage of following me on his spying apparatus. At least I’d try to cut out that source of his amusement.

I ran sideways and on an erratic path towards the creek then, from the bank, threw myself in. It wasn’t a full dive, because diving in to a shallow, rocky creek is a great way to break one’s neck. More of a sideways roll and fling, landing on my hands and toes on the river bottom, under the water, and swimming, still under water, upriver, before surfacing just the minimum to draw breath, then diving in again and swimming.

Thena!

What?

He’s lost you. He’s scared for you. He thinks something might happen to you.

He should be scared for himself,
I said, then added,
If he weren’t in your body…

You have my permission to kick him in your favorite spot.

I refused to analyze “favorite spot.” Instead, I mind-disconnected, afraid Jarl could somehow trace it, and swam some more upriver. The river was very cold, which meant I’d probably get hypothermia if I stayed in too long. Maybe that was what Jarl worried about. Let him worry. More likely, he worried that I would find him. And he should.

Fish swam around me, tickling me, and I was sure a couple had got into my boots. If I had a bug in there, I hoped they ate it.

In my mind, I figured out where the building was. He might not be there—he probably wasn’t—but I’d bet sooner or later he would go there. He might be following our little so-called game on a remote device, but I’d bet for programming new fun, he’d have to have access to the equipment in the building.

So, I’d go there now.

I got out of the water and ran in the direction I knew the building was. I felt even colder, with the air rushing around me, but that was good. It meant I wasn’t radiating at normal temperature.

He says no, don’t go there. Not that way.

Right. Well, poor Jarl Ingemar was about to get the surprise of his long and confused lifetime. No matter if he’d been created to rule, no matter how much people had revered him and feared him, his words were not law to me, and he could take his orders and fold them all in corners preparatory to inserting them where—

The ground went out from under me, and I was lifted, up and upside down, to hang from a tree. I’d been captured by a fiendish machine!

But looking up, I realized the fiendish machine was one of those tricks that hunters have been playing on animals since humans first learned they could get easy lunch by setting snares. There had been a bent tree, a carefully positioned rope lasso…and I was now hanging from a pine tree by a rope tied of rope binding my feet.

The thing about rabbits and foxes and other creatures who got snared in these traps is that they rarely carried pocket knives. Even more rarely had they been forced by a less-than-sane parent to go through various sorts of bootcamps. That meant they were at a disadvantage, because I had both.

Touching my ankles while standing on my feet had never been difficult. I’ll confess more effort was needed to do it against gravity, but it wasn’t impossible, and I could sort of grab at my legs and pull myself up that way. With a pocket knife carefully held so I didn’t cut myself.

Meanwhile, my mind spun upon itself in disbelief. He’d snared me. What was he? Twelve years old?

This was the sort of ridiculous prank, I thought, as I managed to hold on to the rope above the knot with my free hand and reach up with the knife to saw the loop fastening my calves together, that reminded me of the things boys did to get girls’ attention at the various camps I’d attended as a pre-teen.

Had Jarl been so unformed, so isolated, that this was his idea of courting me? I was very much afraid it was. Afraid, because it made me feel almost maternal sympathy, as well as extreme anger. That overgrown, infantile genius needed a spanking. But I very much suspected he would enjoy one way too much and in entirely the wrong manner.

The rope parted, and I was hanging from one hand. I put the knife between my teeth, in manner of pirates in holos, and held with both hands onto the rope, swinging it in increasing arcs until I could reach the branch of a nearby tree, which I leapt to.

I fell straddling it, which was not—probably—the best thing to do. Women might not have the part that Kit called my favorite, but I was still rather attached to the part I did have. I took deep breaths, trying to control the pain, and then stood and inched along that branch to the tree trunk and from that to the end of the next branch—as far as it would support me.

I supposed Jarl could see me. That seemed obvious, considering he’d had Kit scream a warning just before I’d got caught. So the following bug, whatever it was, must be targeted for mass alone. And I couldn’t change mass. Well, not that quickly. Give me ten months and enough chocolate, and I could probably double it.

There was nothing for it, then. I’d have to work with that handicap. But it wouldn’t stop me from going to the building.

He says you shouldn’t go to the building. Not alone.

How convenient, then. Tell him I don’t need to be alone. He can join me there.

Thena, are you armed?

Kit, were you hit on the head? Wait. Yes you were. Of course I’m armed.

Oh, good.

Dear lonely hearts columnist, my husband is glad I’m armed against the creature that’s occupying his body. What should I do?

Well, I should be about as careful as a sheep at a gathering of wolves, that’s what.

So, instead of going to the building over ground, as I’d planned to, I went over the trees. There were these holos very popular when I was a little girl, though I doubt anyone else, and of course no one in Eden, had ever heard of them. Well, maybe other children my age on Earth. I’d bet Simon remembered them.

They featured a young boy abandoned in the jungle and raised by apes. Somehow—holo writers are not obligated to respect reality, and in fact, they seem to treat it like other men treat hired girls—this gave him special powers to call to animals and to perform the most extraordinary feats.

His normal mode of locomotion through the jungle in which he lived was to swing on climbing vines from branch to branch.

While Jarl’s pet forest didn’t come equipped with those convenient hanging vines, over the three hundred more years it had been left untrimmed, the trees had grown so close that it wasn’t hard to just swing with my whole body from tree to adjacent tree.

I was lucky, no branch broke. Of course, it necessitates a new definition of luck. Before I reached the door to his retreat, my hands were skinned and raw, and my teeth were chattering so hard that Jarl only needed a sound pickup to follow me.

But while he could no doubt hear me, and probably see me, too, it was obvious that he hadn’t prepared any fun traps at tree-branch level.

So far, so good. I dropped from the branch directly in front of the door to the building and glared at the genlock.

Kit? Tell the bastard he can either open the door or I’m going to burn his genlock off. And then I’m probably going to burn other things off, too.

Kit’s response had a curiously hesitant tone.
He says he’d rather you didn’t come in.

Really? Well, then. I’m going to count backward from ten. If this thing doesn’t open by ten, I’m going to burn the genlock.

Thena, don’t be too mad. I don’t think…I don’t think things are as you believe. He was the one who asked me to ask if you were armed, and said it was good you were.

Oh, I’m sure. He likes to have fun, doesn’t he?

I don’t think he was the one who trapped you, Thena. It doesn’t feel that way. Oh, sure, he enjoyed watching you circumvent the traps, but I don’t think they were his. He’s very worried about something. He’s trying to get into the building, but he’s afraid to.

Right. I think he’s merely playing you. He’s crazy enough to lie to the voice in his own head.

I took a deep breath.
Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five—

The door slid open. Jarl was bent over his apparatus, and had taken a panel off it. In the holo screen, a small image of me stood, dripping water and shivering, with a burner in each hand.

Jarl turned around. “Good Gaia,” he said. “You must be frozen. Let me find you clothes.”

“Don’t bother,” I said. Each syllable was punctuated by chattering teeth. “Don’t bother at all. I’ll be in the broomer suit again in moments.” My hands clenched on the burners. “As soon as you give me every gem you have on the creation, planting and growing of powertrees, or even just a way to transplant a cutting to the vicinity of Eden.” The whole concept struck me as funny all of a sudden and I cackled mirthlessly. “Another Eden, another tree.”

His eyes—Kit’s eyes—went wide with alarm. This was possibly because the little image reflected on the holo screen and therefore I looked a few power packs short of a full charge, with wild eyes and madly flashing grin. “Oh, yeah, I also need the formula for the nanocytes to get me my husband back.”

He backed against the apparatus, with its open panel, his hands held on either side of his body, palm out, in the age old appeasing gesture of “Look, Ma, no weapons at all.” He swallowed hard. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. “Thena, look…”

“Patrician Athena Hera Sinistra to you.”

“Athena…Hera? Really?”

“Yeah, your bastard friend had a sense of humor.”

“Uh…Patrician,” he said, in an apologetic tone. “Uh…Patrician. Madam. Uh…”

“Yes?” I asked.

“You don’t understand. I didn’t do anything to you.”

“Oh, really? Then what made me black out when I untied your hands?”

He sighed, but it was with a sound of exasperation. “I might have done that,” he hedged. “But not the rest. You see…there’s something…”

“Don’t care,” I said. Frankly, as confused and scared as he looked, he had to be the world’s best actor. “Don’t want to know. Doesn’t mean a damn thing to me. I just want you to give me the gems and the formula for the nanocytes. And then I’m going to tie you in a way you’ve never been tied.” Oh, no, he hadn’t just wagged his eyebrows at me. That had just earned him extra tight ropes. And not in a way he would like. Oh, no. “And then I’m going to take you back, and we’re going to give you the nanocytes. And then I get my husband back, and you go the hell away from us forever. Or away from us to hell, for all I care.” I was approaching as I spoke, though not so close he could grab my burners. I pointed both burners at a portion of his anatomy that my husband was particularly fond of. He wouldn’t like it, and I wouldn’t like it, but I could just make the hit painful and not completely damaging. And we were within reach of modern medicine.

He was human enough that his hands went in front of his crotch, in a defensive gesture. He looked up at me. “You don’t understand. There are two problems. I can’t get in there,” he pointed within. “There is something there. I think I know what, but it would take too long to explain. And I don’t think it will allow us in. Whatever it is, it’s the same thing that created the traps you fell into.”

“Right. Why weren’t those traps there when we were here before?”

“I think they were, but I think it gen sampled you when you slept in the woods alone before.” He gestured wildly at the holo screen. “I swear I never put a tracer on you, though ’Xander—”

I snorted, in rhythm with my chattering teeth. “I don’t care. I want the data on the powertrees. And I want my husband back.”

“I’ll have to figure out a way to get you the data, but I don’t think I can give you your husband back. Don’t shoot.”

THE KINGDOMS OF THE EARTH

“Well,” I said, purposely relaxing my death grip on the burner, where my finger had almost flexed on the trigger, “then you’d best explain yourself and quickly. My hands are very cold and they might cramp at any moment, and send a ray through…your hands. And the rest.”

He blinked up at me. His mouth said “You wouldn’t,” but his expression said “you might.”

“I don’t think,” he said, and took a deep breath, almost like a sigh, “that I can in perfect conscience give you your husband back.” He lifted his hands, palm out. “Yes, I know you love him, and I think I’ve told you before that I rather like him, myself. Were we normal unenhanced humans, and were I able to…Had I known him as a son, I think I’d have loved him as a son. He seemed…seems like a good kind of young man, even if too noble and silent for his own good. Perhaps because he’s aware of not being…quite normal human, and therefore he tries to be better than he’d otherwise be.”

“Kit is human, normal human,” I said. “Maybe a little better, but human.” I hadn’t meant to say anything. I meant to have Jarl talk himself out, and then hit him repeatedly with the butt of the burner until he came to his senses and gave me what I wanted. Or went out of his senses. Provided I got what I wanted, I didn’t care how at this point. But the words had come out, in my voice. Even if my voice sounded shaky and wet to my own ears.

The hands held in front of his body rose a little, as though to emphasize the fact that he really, really, really had no weapons. “No, he’s not. He can’t be normal human because I’m not normal human. And you aren’t normal human. We’re something else. We’re…biological machines.”

“We are not. We’re people. We grow. We can think. We can love. I can love and Kit can love. Now that I think about it, I’m not at all sure you even know what love is. But we can. We can and we can decide what to do, and use moral sense, so we don’t hurt others or ourselves.”

He snorted. “You don’t do too well at that.”

“No one is perfect. It’s another way we’re standard humans.”

A flicker of something like incomprehension appeared behind his eyes. “We were created to be perfect, and I do my best to be. I think, in fact, until Hampson’s struck, I always was.”

This bald-faced statement, clear and ringing in the otherwise empty room, made me lose track of reality for a few seconds. He really thought he was perfect? That he had ever been perfect?

I don’t know what he said until I tracked again, when he was saying, “So you see, that’s why I can’t let you reverse what the nanocytes did. I doubt I would have initiated the action on my own—not if I’d met Kit as an adult. But what is done is done. And we must make the best of it. I’m not fully myself, of course. I don’t think I’ll ever be, but I think Kit and I are coming to some sort of synthesis where, by virtue of my greater knowledge and experience, I’ll have the upper hand.”

It was what I had feared all along, and now my mouth was dry and my throat hurt and my heart was pounding hard, hard, as though seeking release from my rib cage.

“You can’t do that,” I said. “You have no right to Kit’s body or to Kit’s life.”

He blinked, seeming genuinely surprised and worried. “But it’s not a matter of rights,” he said. “Don’t you understand? It has nothing to do with what I want. It’s what I have to do.”

Okay. So he’d now gone completely insane. Heaven deliver us from broomers on Oblivion, Kath in a mood, and an elderly superman who had never grown beyond the emotional age of twelve. “How is it possible for you to be senile and juvenile at the same time?” I asked.

“What? I’m not.” The tone was entirely twelve years old. “Don’t you understand? I was created and raised to be a perfect ruler for humanity. It is my job to do so. I was made better than normal humans so I could handle the task. Now that I have Kit’s memories too, I think I know how to do what the Earth needs. Oh, not the same sort of freedom Eden had. For one, I don’t think Eden has it anymore. The complete absence of government only allows other entities to take over. Earth needs a government of some sort to protect it from itself, and what I think it needs is one supreme ruler, sort of an emperor.”

“You, I suppose?”

He looked apologetic. “Well, I’m the logical choice, aren’t I? I was created for it, and I was the best—by their measurement—of all the Oligoi they created. And now, in this body, I’m young enough that if we use the anti-agiatics available in Eden, I can live for three or four hundred years.”

“And after that?” I asked. “You clone yourself and have your brain transplanted into your clone’s body?”

“No!” he said, in a voice so horrified that you’d never know he was doing the exact same thing by other means. “Never. I hope…I mean, after that, I’d…I…One has to assume my children will inherit the necessary qualities to be rulers of the Earth.”

“Children!” I said raising my eyebrows. “Good luck convincing Zen.”

“What? But Zen is my clone!”

“The better to increase the chances of your characteristics being inherited.” I said, and went on without giving him time to explain what he meant. “You know you’re crazier than a canned cyborg, right? Why do you think your children, if you figure out how to have any, inherit those characteristics that you think are so necessary to governing poor, benighted humanity? Kit is your clone and he didn’t. He’s nothing like you.”

“He’s exactly like me. Not as creative, perhaps, but only because no one forced him to cram as much knowledge as I had to cram in my first twenty years of life. If he applied himself, I’m sure he’d be able to create on the same level, because his mind works just like mine.”

“Kit,” I said, and by now I was so cold I thought that I’d never be warm again, “is nothing like you. He doesn’t have an insatiable thirst for power.”

“Power?” Jarl said.

And suddenly I saw his whole problem. Or the Earth’s whole problem, if he couldn’t be stopped and did take charge.

Earth, in the collective, across the ages, has been ruled by many people: bureaucrats and generals, businessmen and visionaries, madmen and greedy despots, murderers and sadists. I don’t think it had ever been ruled by a saint. It didn’t deserve to be ruled by a saint. And if there were gods, anywhere, they’d save us from that terrible fate.

Because when Jarl echoed “Power?” and looked shocked, I realized that he didn’t have any desire to rule. Forget insatiable thirst, he didn’t even feel a mild appetite for power.

And like an echo, in my mind, came Kit’s voice,
He hates ruling. He always did. After the war with the Seacities, at the end of the twenty-first century, he was more or less by default, the supreme ruler of half the world. He either controlled territories directly, or he controlled them through his proxies. And he hated it. He really is a lot like me. He doesn’t even like social occasions, unless music is involved. He detested having power. But he feels he has to do this. He feels it’s his duty. You see, he thinks of himself as a machine. A machine humans created to rule them. So he has to do it. It was pounded into him when he was too young to think. He was raised to believe that ruling was his justification for living. He was told he needed a justification for living.

Kit sounded sad, and I felt horrified. Humanity had never met the likes of Jarl, as I said. Not for apparently more than a brief period at the end of the twenty-first century. But we’d had several regional and near-global rulers who felt it was their duty to bring humanity to some sort of paradise.

Even the rule of the Good Men, corrupt autocrats who never wanted anything more substantial than to despoil the Earth, could not compare to the ravages of well-intentioned people who thought they were altruistically doing something for the good of humanity. Because humanity can’t be made perfect, people trying to achieve perfection usually managed only blood baths and massacres on an epic scale. “It didn’t work so well last time, did it?” I said, and my voice was full of malice. “You didn’t become the perfect ruler you think humanity wants, did you?”

“No, but—”

“No, but, nothing. I seem to remember neverending wars, mass famines because you misallocated resources, populations moved willy-nilly from wherever you chose them to vacate and…”

He shrugged. “It was close on four hundred years ago,” he said, in the tone of someone talking about errors made when they were under ten. “I didn’t know enough, yet. I didn’t know about the Earth as I should have. All the cultures and all…And besides, I had to fight with all the other Alphas. They didn’t like me, you know?” A glimmer of paranoia in his eyes. “None of them liked me, except Bartolomeu. They resented the fact that I was taken ahead, on an accelerated learning course, that I knew more than they did, that I—”

“Spare me. You might not have to deal with your fellow Mules, but I assure you humanity will still be the same it ever was, and you’ll still not understand them.”

He gave me an odd smile, that looked far too forced and wooden. “I didn’t understand humans because I was alone of my kind.”

“I thought you said—”

“I said there were other Oligoi, other Alphas, but we weren’t really a species. There weren’t any females of our kind. I couldn’t experience what most humans experience: mating with a female of my kind and having children and seeing my children grow and knowing they’ll live after me.”

Ooh boy. Yeah, I liked the way this was drifting. And I supposed our children, if I were crazy enough to have any with him, would marry their siblings and so forth. By the time we had great-grandchildren, we’d probably be into extra limbs or perhaps additional pairs of eyes. On stalks.

“I don’t think,” I said slowly and measuredly, “you get what I’m saying. Someone might have made you with the idea you’d rule over the Earth, but I don’t think anyone now wants you to rule. There’s a whole war against the current rulers going on, and I think if you persist in this nonsense, you won’t live long enough to rule over much of anything.”

He crossed his arms on his chest. “You underestimate me. We’ll give Zen and Bartolomeu the data on the powertrees, and then we’ll set about acquiring power. It won’t take very long before we rule over the world, my love.”

I knew it was coming. I’d caught the drift of what he was saying. I knew what he meant.

Why then, did his words send me absolutely insane?

I think the only reason I didn’t shoot him was that I really, really, really, didn’t want to damage Kit’s body. Instead, I realized I’d pocketed one of the burners, and I was flying at him, hand open. I landed a slap full on his face, hard enough to imprint my fingers on it in glaring red.

I never landed a second, because he’d gripped my wrists, hard, and was making quite sure that the burner was pointed the other way, and he was pulling me, hard, against his body, his heartbeat echoing against mine, as he lowered his mouth to mine.

Should I have expected it? Of course I should. Did I expect it? No, no, I didn’t. His lips were sealed over mine, his tongue teasingly venturing into my mouth before I realized what he meant to do, much less what he
was
doing.

Part of my mind commented in a completely irrelevant way that he kissed better than Kit. He damn well should have. He had three hundred years of experience. But it didn’t make it right. In fact, it made it very, very wrong. It was Kit’s mouth, but not Kit.

I reacted again, or my body did. Honestly, sometimes it was like I, myself, was only a passenger in this body. I realized I’d closed my teeth on his tongue, at the same time my knee went up and hit him squarely between the legs.

He screamed and let go of me. It was only after he did that I realized I tasted blood.

I took off toward the dark interior of the building, running, with only the vague idea that I was going to barricade myself somewhere until I could talk sense into the lunatic megalomaniac.

As I ran into a dank, dark corridor, I heard Jarl’s voice calling “Thena, no.” It was echoed by Kit’s mind-voice.
Don’t go in there!