Hero! (13 page)

It’s a true story, though. Three boys as alike as three clams.

“Never quite identical,” Raj says, perhaps guessing his thoughts—why not? Same brain. “First, there’s lots of spare room on even twelve chromosomes, so they put a file number in there.”

Of course machines have serial numbers. Even a dumb mudslug from the delta knows that. A baby-making machine that puts serial numbers on the product is very logical. Vaun wants to scream.

“And a little variation is a good thing,” Dice says gently. “Sometimes you need a little extra strength at the cost of…well, a quick temper, maybe. Coordination rather than mathematical reasoning? I’m just guessing at the details, but that sort of thing.”

“Not all environments are the same,” Raj adds. “So you can modify the design for climate and stuff like that. And disease resistance—that’s important. Add a small amount of trial and error to keep looking for improvements to the mix. But ninety-five percent is the same, always.”

Dice squeezes Vaun’s shoulder harder. “Remember that machines only do what they’re told, Vaun. It’s people who make people, even us. You follow?”

His lack of response is worrying them. “Roughly.” He sounds hoarse. “It takes a bit of getting used to.”

Back in the village he thought he was a freak because his hair and eyes and skin were too dark. Raj and Dice have told him that it’s the mudslugs who are odd. His coloring is about the commonest there is. Far more people have black hair than any other color, so he isn’t a freak at all.

Now they’ve told him how freakish a freak can be.

“The randoms are half-and-half. Half from father, half from mother. Two brothers share half their genes. But you and Dice and I, Vaun, are at least ninety-five percent the same. The other five percent is deliberately varied.”

Vaun nods, still unable to accept that he is something that came out of a
machine
.

“Cheer up!” Dice says heartily. “Look on the bright side! You’ve got the finest brain in the world. Your muscles, gram for gram, are stronger than anyone’s. Coordination, temperament, intelligence, adaptability…you are the best there is, Vaun! Not big, because size is no advantage in a technical culture. You can do anything better than any random can. The perfection of the human design. Prior…”

He stops, and must be looking to Raj for agreement, because Raj nods.

“Prior,” Dice continues quietly in Vaun’s ear, “arrived on a Q ship as a penniless immigrant twenty years ago, and now he’s a commodore in the Space Patrol.”

W
HEN THE SPACER cops finally swooped down on Forhil, the first one out of the torch was a swarthy, husky boy, who had the suicidal audacity to pull a gun on Admiral Vaun and tell him to put his hands up. His sidekick went ashen-white and made gurgling noises. Vaun dressed down the leader fluently until he was the white one and his companion was smothering a smirk. Then Vaun appropriated their torch, told them he would file a formal report in a day or two, and departed.

He gave the board Vathal’s coordinates, telling it to use maximum speed and all of his priority. He settled back to endure the cramped, smelly discomfort of a standard issue J9, but his mood improved when he discovered the cops’ packed lunches in the locker. He munched greedily as the Forhil landscape dwindled swiftly away below him.

He fantasized over his arrival at Valhal, with that freckled redhead waiting for him, all eager. That would be a worthy hero’s return, just the two of them to share the whole of Valhal. He would show it to her in all its splendor. He would show her how heroes lived. And loved. Which was a reminder that he had hardly slept at all in the night, and had time to kill now. The seats were specifically designed to discourage somnolence, but he made himself as comfortable as he could.

With the sky darkening to the black of near space, with Angel waxing brilliant in the west, his mind returned sleepily to the problem of the Q ship. True, it was still a long way out, about a tenth of an elwy. Also true, a Q ship’s bearings were notoriously hard to establish, but he had been using triangulation data from mining bases and research probes, well spread around the system. If it didn’t start braking soon, it would not be able to do so without being ripped apart by the tidal stress.

Unless it was a metal-skin, a boat. He wondered if even units of the Brotherhood would face a twenty-year journey in a boat. He decided that they might. The brethren were suicidally loyal to their kin, like hive insects.

But why come in on the ecliptic, aimed straight at Ult like that? It was a blatantly hostile move, guaranteed to rouse the Patrol’s fury. If anyone on Ult should be able to think like the brethren, it was Admiral Vaun. Trouble was, he had been behaving like the wild stock for so long that he felt trapped now in their ways of thought.

But Roker ought to want him to try. The two of them detested each other, and normally they were careful never to meet, but now the fate of the planet was at stake. It was curious that Roker was still refusing Vaun’s calls.

The com set
pinged
. “Communication for Admiral Vaun,” it announced in a satisfied tone.

Vaun had long ago accepted that the universe enjoyed playing with coincidences. “Who from?”

“Caller’s identity is classified.”

Vaun pondered that nonsense for a moment, but all it meant was that he must accept the call before Roker would admit it was from him. The big bastard probably had not even planned that, it was just a function of the security procedure, which would not switch to deep scramble until the channel was fully open. And it was very convenient at the moment, for Vaun had started to feel sleepy. He perversely decided that he was not in the mood to cross wits with the high admiral just now.

“Call refused,” he said. “Accept no others. Disconnect.”

Surprisingly, that worked. He squirmed himself around to try another position. No wonder the heavies were always so bad-tempered when they were given tubs like this thing to ride in! His left knee was in his armpit and his head kept sliding against the canopy field, which made his scalp tingle. His bruises hurt like hell and he hadn’t had his booster.

There was a lot of unfamiliar geography visible out there now, and a fair amount of history also. The purple haze must be the Zarzar Mountains, whose warlike tribes had swept down over the Viridian Plain a dozen times throughout history, at first on riding beasts and later by kite and hang glider. Beyond the range would lie the Ashwor Desert—a symphony of reds and maroons the last time he’d seen it—where the Tolian Regicides had tried to build a nuclear capability a few centuries back and been blasted off the face of the planet by the Patrol, on the only occasion it had ventured a major interference in Ultian politics. Far away to the south, where blue moor and glinting lakes faded into the amber horizon smudge, would be Firstcome, site of the Holy Joshual Krantz’s landing, ten thousand years ago.

Somewhere on the nearer green flatness, an invisible border divided the Western Commonwealth from Freeland. The former was a benevolent, ineffectual anarchy, and the latter a bloody military dictatorship. Some things never change. The Doggoth instructors had taught that every planet followed the same path: a simple rural settlement by a few dozens or hundreds, a period of rapid growth in wealth and population, leading to warfare and industrialization, and finally overcrowding and retrenchment, and a long decline. Then what? The Silence…but that was rarely mentioned.

Straight below Vaun now lay the mudlands of the delta, and the festering blotch of human pollution that was Cashalix.

Now there was a city he had never returned to.

Once was enough.

T
HE HOLIDAY IS over. The boat eases its way through a snarl of river traffic and floating garbage into the outskirts of fabled Cashalix, holy city of the Farjanis. Staying low, peeking out between the side and his hat brim, Vaun is conscious of a dry tingle in his throat and a madly pounding heart. He is amazed by the number of torches howling through the air, the way they seem to weave in and out of the towers in the distance. He is disgusted by the stench and alarmed at the way larger, faster-moving craft constantly threaten to swamp the boat with the sewage-laden soup of the river. He is so excited that he can hardly keep from giggling like a child. Monstrous trucks roar along the levees and pack the many bridges. Noise!

Three weeks ago he would have been ashamed of his excitement, but now he can sense that same thrill in Raj and even in Dice, who has visited big cities many times.

Not only are the three brethren virtually indistinguishable, but they are becoming more so. Vaun knows he is picking up Dice’s way of speaking, although he is not conscious of trying to. It is fun to notice Raj doing the same. As the oldest, Dice tends to set the standard and sometimes he will quote Prior as an authority, but he will often conform to the others if he finds himself in a minority—he enjoys eating fish now. Better food and better booster are relieving Vaun of his extreme skinniness, and that means he must look even more like Raj than he did before. None of them has mentioned this convergence, but Vaun knows that if he has noticed, then the others must have done so also.

“There it is!” Raj is on the other side from Vaun, keeping down and peering out in the same uncomfortable crouch.

“Got it.” Dice sits on the bench by the motor, at the stern, looking very calm and competent. He speaks a command to the controls.

Their destination is the marina where the boat was hired four weeks ago. Vaun glances at the sun, estimating time. At noon, Prior’s torch will be sitting in the parking lot, waiting.

Soon Vaun will see himself or at least his double, in the uniform of a spacer commodore. That will be a memorable experience. Prior is much older, of course, but he looks exactly like Dice, Raj says. They both seem to worship Prior. He is the leader, the pioneer. Prior is not his real name, but a sort of title that he adopted as his name when he arrived on Ult.

“Even brethren have to have leaders,” Dice has explained. “Sometimes a decision isn’t obvious, and you can’t have half jumping one way and half the other…So Prior says.”

Only Prior really knows, of course. Only Prior knows how it feels to be not just one of a half dozen identical brethren, but one of hundreds. Vaun feels giddy when he tries to imagine it. Prior was born…conceived…on Avalon, and he embarked on the Q ship
Green Pastures
when he was about the age Vaun is now.

Soon, very soon, he will meet Prior. Then he will learn some more of his own future. Either Raj and Dice do not know what is planned, or they have been ordered not to say. Whatever it is, Vaun knows he will accept it. These are his people. He belongs, and after a lifetime of alienation, this is ecstasy. If Prior tells him to lie down on the street and be run over, he will probably do it.

Well, he might argue a little first.

And, of course, he can be certain that Prior will never betray him like that. He can trust his brothers, as he has never been able to trust anyone, except maybe Nivel, long ago.

The boat glides very slowly through a maze of floating jetties and small pleasure craft in a bewildering spangle of colors and shapes. And the people—clean, well-fed, well-dressed
rich
folk! Peeking under his hat brim, Vaun sees that most of them do indeed have black hair. Their skin color and their shapes vary a lot, but light hair is not common at all. He sees a few boys of delta type, with sandy hair and shaggy chests. Already their oddly squashed faces look ugly to him, although he would never have thought so three weeks ago.

Randoms. Wild stock. He practices the brethren’s terms and they sound good in his mind. He may be alien to the randoms, but they are alien to him. Perhaps the city of Cashalix is as alien to Vaun as Ult was to Prior, twenty years ago.

Bump
.

Raj leaps ashore with a rope. Vaun eases in under the canopy so as not to be noticed, keeping his head down.

“Five minutes early,” Dice says, stepping swiftly in beside him. “Not bad. Remember your orders?”

“Of course.” For some reason Vaun feels a little nettled by the tone.

Dice raises his thin, dark eyebrows. “I’m Prior for this trip, Brother.”

“Of course.” Maybe Dice is not as cool as he looks.

Raj bounces back into the boat, and it rocks.

Vaun squares his shoulders, and Dice claps a hard hand on one of them.

“Good luck, Brother!”

Vaun stares into those wonderful black eyes and sees
concern
, and he wants to fall on his knees and sing hymns of gratitude—he won’t, of course, because the other two look oddly at him if he mentions religion at all, and that is something else he must come to terms with. But Dice
cares
! So does Raj, of course. Two boys who care what happens to Vaun? That’s a miracle. That’s enough to make him weep. But he manages to flash his brother a cheerful smile of thanks and turn away casually, as if he knows Cashalix as well as he knows the village, as if his pulse isn’t racing like he has a summer fever and his eyelids prickling.

He scrambles up on the jetty. He is going first, because first is safest. If any underoccupied busybody is going to notice three identical boys disembarking from that boat, then it will not be the first of the three that raises the alarm. There should not be an alarm, because wild stock breed twins and triplets sometimes. He does not know why any concealment is necessary, but this is how Prior wants it done.

He strolls. Rarely has he ever wanted to run quite so much as he does now, but he strolls. He tries to look as though he is interested in the myriad craft in the pool, but they are a meaningless blur to him. He reaches the shore and ambles up the stair.

The street is a madhouse of noise and crowds and confusion. Half the population seem to be giants. He shies back as a huge girl thrusts bare breasts in his face. “Watch me being raped tonight on ‘Wonderworld’,” she says urgently. Then he realizes that it is a sim. He turns away in disgust and is faced with a grotesque wall of rippling brown bulges. “The girls must all be laughing at you, lad!” the giant roars through the din. “Astal Booster will double your muscles in two weeks! No exercise required!” Vaun makes a fast dodge around the figure, walks right through a slimy reptilian biped waving a book at him, and finally reaches the curb.