DarkShip Thieves (26 page)

I didn't like the tone of that last sentence, but even my sleeping brain had to admit that Doctor Bartolomeu seemed to love Kit. That much was obvious, as was the fact that the doctor was deeply concerned for Kit, and had been concerned for our relationship before I had any idea we might, eventually, have a relationship. "I'll come back," I said, stiffly. "But you let me leave the moment I wish to."

He lowered his head, this time in a deliberate movement, half bow half nod. "If you wish to leave after you heard me, I will let you." He looked up and his eyes sparkled with that impish look. "I won't even make you take a packet of sleeping pills."

I came back to the chair, of course, not fully sure I could trust him. But if he blocked my path again, I would forget he was more than a centenary.

I picked up the hot chocolate and sat down looking at him. He took his time sitting down, and took a sip of his drink and a deep breath, before saying something I didn't expect at all, "What do you know about the Mules?"

For a moment I was speechless. The last thing I expected was an history test.

"They were bioengineered," I said, dredging up the paragraph from my history lesson pertaining to it. "Sometime in the mid twenty first century. The . . . governments of Earth had run their course one way or another before then. Monarchies and democracies and all that, and none of it worked. So people, as a whole, decided that government was too important to be left to benighted multitudes or even to inbred aristocrats," I smiled a little, as it occurred to me that inbred aristocrats might damn well apply to the Good Men too. Which was probably why Kit had accused me of being an Earthworm and inbred when we first met. "So they created people who were far smarter, far more healthy and . . . well . . . better at everything than normal people. And they delivered the government to them."

He didn't say anything, and I thought I was supposed to go on, so I said, "They were rational, of course, and very smart, but they didn't seem to understand . . . well . . . they didn't get humans. Quite. Or perhaps they simply didn't work by human values. Which might make sense, since they weren't, quite, human. So they did things . . . well, they viewed people kind of like humans view livestock. But I don't think they ate them."

A flicker of something in the eyes, and a look up, "Not most of them, no."

I didn't even want to pause and think of that. "And they moved entire populations around, and they experimented with bacteria that were supposed to improve the soil, and which killed vast portions of Europe leaving it depopulated. And they started massive wars. And when they were done . . . Well . . . people revolted. There were riots and massacres. They revolted against the Mules and against the bioengineered people that were the Mules' servants. And they killed them all. There is a legend that some of the Mules and some of their servants escaped in a spaceship that they'd been building. There are many versions of the story. I suspect it grew through the centuries. There are those who say it was FTL, built by the same Mule who seeded the powertrees—though most of our historians think it was a team effort, not a single Mule, but . . . I guess legends are like that—and some say that they have a new world outside the solar system, where they're growing their bioed armies to attack Earth some time . . ." He was still silent, looking at me attentively. "I suppose that I thought it was all a dream or a legend, until I met Kit, because they say the Mules and their servants come back in darkships to steal powerpods. But of course, it's just Edenites."

He stirred. "Eden was founded by bioed refugees of Earth," he said. "What you would call the servants of the Mules, I suppose."

"Yes, Kit's history books said that."

He looked at me a while longer, and then took a deep swig of his drink, finishing it. He set the empty glass on the floor beside his chair, and stretched out his legs, so that they were almost at the fireplace. He stared at the flames, as if trying to read the future in them. "History is a funny thing," he said. "Live through enough of it and you start wondering what these people are writing about." He looked up at me, and his eyes looked clear and, for a moment, startlingly young. "You see . . . It wasn't like that. It wasn't the Mules that depopulated Europe. For a soil-improving microbe to attack people would take a massive kind of screw up which would forever put paid to the notion that the Mules had any kind of superior intelligence."

He frowned at the fire. "It wasn't like that at all. By the mid twenty first century it was obvious that Europe was dying. There were other problems too. The last gasps of a religion that refused to integrate into modernity had caused a war . . ." He shrugged. "All very involved and you either read the outlines of it in your history lessons, or it's not worth going into. Suffice it to say that, semantically, in many ways, it was a psychotic period."

"Kit says it was a psychotic period in every way."

"Oh, probably. But the fish rots from the head, they used to say when I was little. And the head, the way we order our thoughts, is language. Somehow they'd got themselves twisted around till they confused culture with race and religion with both. The war with this backward religion brought with it a wave of racist thinking. Particularly in dying Europe, which was very . . . worried . . . about losing its supremacy in the world."

"But they'd lost it hundreds of years before."

"Ah, but nations are like somnambulists. They wake in their own time. And continents . . ." He shrugged. "Anyway, it started first, in silence, almost in secret, in the frozen steppes of the area that was then called Russia. The idea was to create enough Caucasian babies. Only, you know, like everyone else, they thought they were men of their time. But none of us are. Humans . . . the legends of humanity fester in each of us, like a wound that can't be acknowledged or lanced. The men out of dragon's teeth, and other creations of not-exactly nature haunted the designers of the Mules. They wanted children, lots of them, armies of laborers and inventors. Millions of people who would fill their echoing streets, work for the state and pay their taxes . . ." He made a face. "So they decided to make these people so they couldn't mingle with normal humans—so they couldn't change the tenor of humanity, or, as they put it at the time, change the precious inheritance of humanity.

"They made the Mules all male. They said they also made them sterile, but that seems like taking too much of a precaution, for with whom were they going to reproduce? They locked it so that this time there would be no taking any Eve from Adam's rib." He grinned at my expression, "But I am speaking in riddles, aren't I? They hobbled the genetic code of their creations, so that no female could be made by slightly altering a cloned Mule. So that Mules would not have another generation. And at the same time, of course, they started encouraging their precious, natural, caucasian population to reproduce." He frowned. "Mind you, not just caucasian. It had spread like wild fire and every race was trying to get its citizens to reproduce, as though there were a prize at the end of the competition. Which, of course there was. It was never the meek who inherit ed the Earth, unless the meek were also very fertile.

"But I digress. Of course in making the Mules, they had come to understand how to improve all humans. So the parents who could afford it started picking the characteristics of their children and improving them. Beauty and brains. It could be said that the end of the twenty first century saw the finest specimens of humanity ever to run the Earth. Just not many. People who could spent their entire life savings to make one perfect child. Not for them the brood of natural brats."

"And the Mules governed . . ." I said.

"No, no." He shook his head. "Heavens no, child. Think about it. If you could create someone to do your work for you, would you hand them direction of your life?"

I shook my head.

"No. Neither did your . . . ancestors. They weren't stupid. Or at least they weren't stupid that way. Besides, you're not seeing the full picture. How many Mules do you think there were?"

I blinked. No one had ever asked me this, and I had no idea what it could matter. "Uh . . . fifty or so? The rulers of countries and . . . and the divisions of United Europe? And . . . and maybe some of the seacities?"

He laughed. He got up, and picked up his glass, then looked at the cup in my hands. "Here, let me warm that up for you. He came back with his glass filled and handed me a cup of hot chocolate, and sat down again. "There were millions, child. Millions. All the animals big enough were drafted to carry babies. You see, there was an aging generation that must be taken care of . . ."

I blinked. "Animals?" I'm sure the horror showed in my voice.

"Oh, yes, no one had bio wombs yet. That was much later. Invention of the Mules in fact . . ." He took a sip. "They just poured little Mules into the world and educated them in creches, by the massed multitude."

"But . . ." I swallowed. "The environment in the womb . . . the . . . enzymes . . . it would be different. It wouldn't be . . . right."

"No." He shifted in the chair. "They didn't care. The first generation of Mules were, I suspect near-retarded, probably intentionally, but possibly due to the means of raising them. They filled the factories, they tended the farms. They were not actually more anything than most humans."

"And they only lived about as long as other humans. But . . . of course . . . they were not good at innovation. And Mules . . . well, think about it. All males, barely socialized . . . They required supervision like slaves—which in many ways they were." He narrowed his eyes at the fire, as though the fire had offended him. "I think that's when a lot of the ideas about the Mules formed. When I was a child, we could still see old newsvids—I suppose a lot of them got destroyed in the turmoils? Must have. Either that or no one looks at those—of break outs of Mules from factories and farms, of entire towns where the men were killed and the women raped. I mean . . . They couldn't reproduce, but they still had all the urges of normal men. Normal men who had never learned the niceties of civilization.

"So people thought why not make supervisors for the Mules. Other Mules who would be . . . supervisors. Who would hold the whip over their own kind."

He looked at me, his eyes very intent. "And then they made us."

I thought I'd fallen asleep and dreamed that last sentence. The words
beg your pardon?
formed in my mind and almost came out of my lips. But then I realized he was looking at me with an extraordinarily intent look.

I couldn't breathe. I couldn't speak. I'd heard about the Mules. I'd learned to fear the Mules. They were the enemies of Earth. They were going to come back . . .

But this was Doctor Bartolomeu, who reminded me of nothing so much as what I'd like Father to be. I took a deep breath. "And?" I asked. My voice shook, but it seemed to reassure him. He smiled.

"Who created you?" I asked. "And what happened?"

"In my case? My own group was created by the governing body of United Europe. The European Congress voted on it and some minister without portfolio got the assignment to see the project through."

"Isn't that a fairly high level for slave supervisors?" I asked.

He grinned. "Give the lady a cigar," he said, completely confusing me. "Yes, indeed. But myself and my . . . companions . . . my brothers, were created for other purposes, connected to those who supervised the slaves, or at least that, but up a chain of command several levels high. We were to report on the Mules to the human government. To do the jobs they could not do. We were supposed, too, to be the innovators, the creators. To find a way out of the genetic mess humanity had created for itself and to render our own kind obsolete eventually."

"Scientists?"

He shrugged. "Some of them. Do you know the term
renaissance men?
"

I nodded. "People who are good at everything."

"Kind of like that," he said. "We were truly designed as everything you've heard about the Mules. Created to be smarter, faster, healthier, live longer . . . The latter because were expensive. I don't know how many years of work it took to assemble a viable embryo for one of us. The later experiments . . . Well, even cloning one of us turned out to be very hard, so I imagine designing from scratch was more so, and generated any number of culls.

"At my level there were about two hundred of us, maybe five years apart. In Europe. We were, you see, treated a little better than our sad brethren in the fields and factories." He was quiet a long time. "Young women were paid or conscripted into carrying us. That was one big difference. And though we were still raised in creches like the others, we were raised in a creche where . . . A lot was demanded of us, intellectually. They gave us teachers and demanded we learn. We were culled for intelligence and ability to learn as well as everything else."

He shrugged and smiled at me, a smile that managed to look infinitely sad. "I'm not going to say we were any better adjusted than the rest of the Mules. No. We were smarter, designed to be so. And we were learned. But . . . Well, I suppose it was no grimmer than the average Victorian orphanage of a couple of centuries earlier. But . . . you see, I can't blame them. By then they had twenty five years of Mule riots and Mule crimes. They didn't trust us. They might have suspected it was the way we were gestated, the way we were educated, but most of them thought there was something wrong with us. At a very fundamental level. Dragon's teeth and all that. Their religions told them we were unnatural. Their instincts did too.

"We weren't so much socialized as broken to rules and bound to behavior, till we didn't know who we were, but we knew which set of silverware to use for which meal."

"At first," he said. "We did what we were supposed to. We took our jobs between the upper echelons of the Mules and the lower ranks of government. And we did it well, and we developed other interests. Music, art . . ." He shrugged. "You have to understand . . . we were smart. Designed so. Trained to learn. It didn't stop when they stopped whipping us to make us memorize things. We filled every niche, from secret courier to researcher. Sometimes one person filled several of those. We had no personal lives, after all. The time other people filled with children and parents and . . ." For a moment I'd swear there were tears in his eyes. "All that, didn't exist for us. We were humans but not humans—creatures not related to the past of humanity and with no room in the future."