Hero! (12 page)

Vaun will not believe this. Others like him? He is as mad as his mother. He is seeing things. This can’t be happening. If he takes one step, he’ll be admitting that he thinks this is all real, and then the disappointment when it isn’t will be even worse. His heart is pounding so hard he thinks he must be fevered, but it’s the wrong time of year for fevers, and he doesn’t catch fevers anyway. He pushes back against the wall, and Raj frowns, as if worried.

“Trust me, Brother!”

“Go where?”

“First to Cashalix. Big city! We’re meeting Prior there in three weeks.” Raj s voice throbs with excitement. “He sent us to look for you! Brother Tong’ll be there too. They’ll both be so glad to see you! Very glad! Like I am!” Raj laughs nervously. “Like Dice will be! We’ll all be glad. You’re one of us, Vaun!”

One thing at a time…“Brothers?” Lots of kids in the village have brothers but they don’t look as much alike as Vaun and this Raj do. That’s
himself
he’s looking at. A little taller and wider and thicker, a little tougher around the face, in spite of the lack of beard.

“Brothers of a special sort. Vaun, oh, Vaun! It’s all right!” Suddenly Raj hauls Vaun away from the wall, throws his arms around him, and hugs him; and that feels strangely right, except it reminds him of the time he tried hugging Wanabis to find out why the other boys hugged girls, and Wanabis burst into shrieks of laughter.

“What special sort?” Vaun demands, letting Raj squeeze him and very much afraid that he is about to start weeping. Scared of waking up, maybe.

“A very special sort. Brother Dice’ll explain. Or Prior will. We’re all brothers, Vaun, and you don’t have to be alone ever again…” Raj’s voice breaks off in a sniff.

He backs away, grinning and wiping tears from his cheeks. Vaun does the same, and they snigger ashamedly in unison.

“Vaun? Brother Vaun! Come on, Brother!”

“But the teacher says I must stay—”

“Fornicate the stupid machine!” Raj seems as overcome at meeting Vaun as Vaun feels at seeing him. “The government programs it to produce peons, that’s all.”

Whatever that means…“My…Glora? My mother?”

“She isn’t your real mother! Just a foster mother. Never mind her, whoever she is. She’s not important and
you are
!”

“I am?” Impossible. That’s what Glora says.

“Yes! Very important! Just come! We’ve got food on the boat, and terrific beer, and Dice will explain everything. You’ll love Dice. He’s eighteen and Prior found him, coupla’ years ago. You’re sixteen?”

“Almost.” Vaun wonders how this apparition knows that, and is certain he is mad, meeting his own self like this—being hauled over to the door by his own self, a strong hand gripping his wrist.

Raj is both laughing and weeping with excitement. “You’re the youngest. I’m seventeen. Gotta do something about that chin, Brother! We’ve got a shaver on the boat, and we’ll get you done properly in Cashalix. Hairy faces are for savages. Vaun, Vaun! You belong with us! You’re going to be with real friends, now. Real brothers.”

“But I haven’t got any brothers! Or sisters.” Vaun stumbles as the light vanishes completely, and he is pulled out into the muggy night and the faint purplish glow of the setting Angel. Laughter rolls across from the pubcom beyond the first row of shacks.

“You have now! You can trust me! I’m closer’n any brother you can ever have!” Raj makes a happy, chortling noise in the darkness. He can hardly force out the words. “I know you inside and out, like you know yourself. And you know me. I’ll help you, Vaun, any way I can. I’ll share with you—anything I’ve got. I’ll fight for you. If I have to, I’ll die for you.”

T
HE BOAT IS long and narrow, with a high prow and a canopy amidships, just large enough for three boys to sleep sprawled out in comfort. In the heat of the following afternoon it smells faintly of varnish and old cooking. The design was invented centuries ago by water spider catchers over in the bayou country, Raj says airily, but this is a recreational replica for rich folk. With its diminutive motor humming softly, it lazes along, finding its own way through the mud flats without troubling its crew for guidance. The sun is a white glare in a muggy, white sky, and Angel a fierce blue smudge in the west.

Wide and mostly deserted, the distributary curves endlessly back and forth amid pozee grass. The three brothers wear broad-brimmed hats and scanty clothes of contrasting colors. As long as the boat shuns villages and gives a wide berth to other craft, no one is going to notice that its three occupants are virtually identical.

Raj sprawls on his belly in the shade under the canopy—mostly reading a book, idly joining in the talk when he wants to. Vaun sits aft, cross-legged on the deck in front of Dice, who is trimming his hair for him. Vaun’s cheeks are shiny-shaven and feel odd.

Everything feels odd. Being clean. Reading books.
Friends!
Want to talk? Sure, what do you want to talk about? Why Q ships have fireballs at both ends? Why eels come upriver at this time of year? Why small Q ships accelerate faster than big Q ships but the big ones can go faster than little ones? And why do boys have nipples anyway? Anything at all.

All three of them are still hoarse from talking most of the night away, comparing their experiences, laughing, commiserating, joking; reaching almost to hysteria at times with the sheer joy of being united. Vaun has discovered within himself a great well of happiness that he has never known existed. He keeps wanting to weep, which is crazy.

Dice is a fraction larger than Raj, and Vaun is undeniably the baby of the three. He’ll grow
this much
this year, and about
this much
next year, Dice says, and no, he’ll not get much hairier at all. He mustn’t judge what’s normal by the mudslugs of the Putra Delta, who are unusually shaggy. Notoriously hairy people.

“We’ve got hair where everyone has hair,” Dice explained at some point in the night. “And that’s enough. Like other boys, we get our faces depilated once in a while. Our chests don’t grow hair. What would you want chest hair for? That would just be—”

“—an unnecessary frill!” Raj completed the thought without a pause, and all three started howling with laughter yet again.

No hurry. They talk and doze and talk again under the hot sun. They will meet up with Prior in Cashalix in three weeks, and hopefully Tong also. Tong is another brother, presently hunting down yet another lost lamb over in the Stravakian Republic somewhere. Prior is the leader. Vaun notices that Prior is not referred to as “Brother” Prior. Just Prior.

Vaun’s queries about Prior are politely and regretfully averted: Let Prior explain himself, Vaun.

It is all incredibly wonderful. They eat well and talk and right now they do nothing. Relax and be happy, Dice says dreamily; what else is life for? And Vaun thinks of the grinding toil in the village and says nothing.

Raj cooked the last meal, and Dice the one before, and Vaun is eager to be useful. “How about fish for supper? I can catch ’em. I know how to cook ’em.”

“Mm,” Dice says behind him. “I’m not too partial to fish.”

“I like fish,” Raj tells his book. “’Slong as they’re not eels.”

“Hey!” Vaun protests. “I thought you said you were…we are…
Ouch!
…identical?”

“Sorry!” Dice says. “Well, you’re certainly not identical now, Brother Vaun, missing half an ear like that.”

“It’s only a nick!” Vaun inspects the blood on his fingertips.

“Major artery,” Dice mutters, angry with himself. “Terminal exsanguination. Hang on, I’ll lick it.”

“We’re not perfectly identical, ever,” Raj remarks sleepily. “You have a delta accent, and Tong’s is Stravakian. Upbringing is important, too. I suppose Dice didn’t get fed fish as a child. That must be why he now prefers to eat ears. Environment.”

Dice finishes slobbering on Vaun’s ear. “There, it’s stopped bleeding. Almost. There’s more, Raj. You want to tell him? See if you’ve got it right, now?”

Raj yawns and switches off his book. Then he scrambles upright to sit cross-legged in front of Vaun, like Vaun, right shin in front of left, forearms on knees, left thumb over right…

“You know about heredity? Genes? Cells? No? Mm. Thank you, Brother Dice! Well, every living thing is made of millions—billions—of cells. A baby starts from one single cell, and that becomes two, and then four…and then billions. And every single one of those cells has an instruction code inside it, like a how-to manual. Every organism is different, because it has its own unique how-to manual. It gets that from its parents, half from each, with the pages shuffled a bit. Then there’s a brutal business called ‘evolution’ to remove the mistakes. Dice, do I have to go through all this?”

“Yup. Close your eyes, and I’ll do your front.”

Vaun closes his eyes and lets Dice twist his head around. Raj groans, but he probably likes to show off his knowledge. Vaun would, and already he knows that these uncanny replicas of himself enjoy the things he enjoys, like this teacher-talk. He can’t imagine Olmin or Astos ever wanting to listen to talk like this; they only talk about girls. Dice and Raj haven’t mentioned girls at all yet. Now Vaun has an odd feeling that he has been summed up, and is about to be trusted with something important. Dice suggested it and Raj agreed, all without words. They want to show him he is trusted, maybe?

They are more easily distinguished by their voices than by their looks. With his eyes closed, Vaun can tell Raj’s husky youthfulness from Dice’s deeper, more adult tones. But it doesn’t really matter which one is speaking. They are interchangeable.

“The code is organized into forty-six strings called chromosomes,” Raj says. “In people. Other animals may have more or less. In Earth species the codes are groups of four amino acids—”

“Bases,” Dice growls.

“Sorry, bases, and I don’t know what those are yet. I left that book back at the hive. Bases for Earth life, but other planets vary that a little…Life always uses much the same system, though. Two sexes for variety, plus trial-and-error sorting, to weed out the mistakes.”

“You can open your eyes, now,” Dice tells Vaun. “I think you should run through it simpler to start with, Raj.”

“Who’s doing this, you or me? Does it matter’? Well, trial and error is wasteful. Forty-six aren’t necessary. We have all our genes packed onto twelve chromosomes, and Prior told me that even that many aren’t really needed. And we don’t get ours by random shuffling. You see, some of the instructions…genes…are harmful. Humanity once thought it had left those behind on Earth, but they keep reappearing. Some are good. Some are good sometimes and harmful other times. Or harmful when there are two of them only. Or one of them only. They interact. It’s complicated. It is very, very difficult to work out which are the best genes, the best mixture. But it’s not impossible. Strength, and smarts, and courage design the recipe for what you want to produce, see? Then you’ve got the Brotherhood. The best! The perfect human. No weak eyes or ungovernable tempers. And once you’ve got the design, then it’s possible to make up the gene strings needed to produce that person—twelve are more than enough—and coat them with all the various sorts of goo that an egg…ovum…needs. Layer by layer. Then you put it in a machine that nurtures it, and it starts to grow.”

He stops. Vaun stares down at his smooth, brown legs and unprecedentedly clean knees, at the fine, soft cloth of his unfamiliar shorts—all littered at the moment with black hair clippings—and no one speaks for a time, while ripples slap softly against the boat and a formation of torches drones across the sky, very high up. The air has a hot smell of river and boat varnish.

And finally Vaun says quietly, “You’re saying that we came out of a machine?” His voice sounds strange to him.

Dice puts a hand on his shoulder from behind, and squeezes. “We know it’s a shock, Brother. We’ve both been through this. Maybe it’s worse for you. You see, in big cities…rich folk often come out of a machine, too. The girls don’t like the fuss of growing their babies inside themselves, so they have the ovum sucked out and let a machine do that bit. That’s quite common, Vaun.”

“What’s not common is the making-the-egg in the first place,” Raj explains, staring intently, almost fiercely, at Vaun from the same cross-legged position, like a wrong-way-round reflection. “In fact, anywhere on Ult that’s illegal. It needs a big factory to make such a tiny product, lots of very special equipment, and the knowledge is suppressed.”

“They do it with animals,” Vaun says uncertainly.

“Animals is easy. There’s nothing in the galaxy more complex than a human brain.” Raj tries an encouraging smile, but it fades as Vaun stares back at him, not trusting himself not to say something wrong here.

Body, obviously. Mind, too? Look-alikes and think-alikes? His throat hurts.

“We weren’t made on Ult,” says Dice’s voice.

Vaun continues to watch Raj. Wanting to trust, to believe, to be trusted, to accept…To be accepted.

“Avalon,” Raj says, studying him carefully. “The ovums…ova…were put together on Avalon, and frozen. Prior brought them here on a Q ship, years ago. He had them machine-incubated, and then he put the babies out to good families to foster.”

Virgin birth? Oh, Glora!

Oh,
Heavenly Father
!

“Something must have gone wrong in your case,” Dice says. “From what you told us about your mother.…foster mother. Vaun. I’m sure Prior would have picked a better foster mother than that. Something must have gone wrong. Kidnapping, or something.”

“My family was all right,” Raj says quickly. “Dumb and dull, but they took good care of me. I’m going to go back and visit them, often.”

“Me, too,” Dice says.

No use going back to the village and asking Glora where she found the baby. Get Glora on that topic and she makes no sense at all.

And Vaun doesn’t think he can suggest anything like that just at the moment. There is one of him, and two of them, both bigger, and he’s just been given some very dangerous information. He suspects that “illegal” means “major crime,” if the whole planet has the same law.