Patrimony (24 page)

Visually, Anayabi’s expression did not change. Verbally, he responded straightaway with, “All of that means nothing to me.” Emotionally—emotionally, he convulsed. It was as potent a conflicted upwelling of sentiments as Flinx had ever perceived. Beyond subterfuge now, he challenged the other man’s denial head-on.

“You’re lying.” Having slithered down to his lap, Pip was now wide awake and alert, her attention focused exclusively on the man holding the pistol.

Anayabi let out a snort of disgust. “I save your life, and ten minutes after regaining consciousness you’re calling me a liar.” He made a show of checking a chronometer. “The sooner that transport gets here and you’re gone, the better I’ll like it. And you can be sure I’ll think twice about picking up the next fool I find stumbling around in this country.”

Having confessed, however concisely, his personal history, Flinx saw no reason to hold back now. His whole life had been pointed toward, had been leading up to, this confrontation.

“I know that you’re lying because I can read your emotions. That’s my Talent. Experiment Twelve-A’s Talent. I’m an Adept.”

A moment in time passed during which a great deal was said even though nothing was spoken. After, Anayabi did not so much crack as subside. When his lips finally parted again, the voice that emerged was altered from what had gone before. It was still firm, still resolute, but at the same time subdued. The same held true for his emotions. Voice and feelings and posture pooled to put Flinx in mind of a prizefighter who had taken one too many punches, was barely able to stand within the fighting cube, and could do nothing more except wait for the final blow to land.

“Theon Cocarol.” Anayabi was slowly shaking his head. “Hadn’t thought of him in—years. Many years.” From staring into the distance, he now looked up and across at his guest, seeing him in an entirely new light. “Dead, you say?”

Flinx nodded. There was nothing to be gained and possibly much to be lost by going into detail concerning the means and manner of the other surviving Meliorare’s recent passing. “He told me that he knew where my father was.
Gestalt,
he said. That was all the information on the matter I managed to get out of him before he died. So I came here, did my best to initiate a search based on some preconstructed paradigms, and interviewed a lot of potential candidates. Too many, in retrospect.” He sat a little straighter on the couch. “Then you came to my notice.”

He expected the inquisitive Anayabi to inquire how that singular revelation eventuated. Instead his host eyed him with fresh curiosity. “You really are who you claim to be, aren’t you?” Flinx nodded, just once. “Then you’re not a peaceforcer or other government or Church agent, here to arrest me? You really are just on some kind of insane quest to try to find your paternal parent?”

Flinx replied softly, “Insanity has nothing to do with it. If you could read my emotions the way I can read yours, you wouldn’t be asking that question or couching it in such terms.”

Sitting down in and swinging around on one of the large chairs, Anayabi rested the pistol on his right thigh. For a long time he just sat staring at the tall young man seated across the room from him. Occasionally, he would shake his head and an odd expression would momentarily transform his features. Emotional resonance aside, Flinx was unable to tell if this was a grin or a grimace. Anayabi’s corresponding feelings likewise remained ambiguous.

“Maybe I can’t read your emotions, Twelve-A, but I can see your solemnity and I can sense your desperation. It’s all true, then. You knew Theon. You are familiar with a certain significant amount of your personal history. You know about the Society. And you’re sharp enough and smart enough to have found me.” He shook his head more strongly. “I didn’t think anyone would ever find me here, in the northlands of an unimportant incorporated world like Gestalt.”

“I wouldn’t have either,” Flinx told him, “if not for Cocarol.”

The placidness went out of Anayabi’s voice, to be replaced by the steel Flinx had encountered earlier. His host’s voice dropped to a growl. “Theon always was one to favor the grand gesture. The old bastard could have done me a favor by keeping his dying mouth shut.”

“Maybe he wanted you to see that one of your experiments had survived the Commonwealth crackdown.”

“Maybe, maybe…,” Anayabi muttered. “So you’re an empath—you can read emotions. I can’t recall what the specific objectives were for the Twelve line. It was all so long ago…”

“Not so very long.” Flinx’s voice was taut, barely controlled. “Only twenty-seven years.”

“Twenty-seven years,” Anayabi echoed more calmly. “An empathic Adept. What do you know.” His emotions shifted in a way Flinx did not like. “There should be more. Or at least something else. Tell me, of what else are you capable?”

“Nothing, insofar as I know,” Flinx lied. He lied without hesitation and without thinking. It was easy. He’d been doing it ever since he was old enough to realize that he was different. “Answer my question.
I have to know. Are
you my father, Anayabi of the Meliorares?”

The man who years ago had fled to out-of-the-way Gestalt in order to avoid the relentless hounding of Commonwealth justice sat pondering silently. When he finally deigned to reply, his words were accompanied by a slight nod.

“Yes, Philip Lynx. Twelve-A. I am your father.”

Flinx’s heart missed a beat, his thoughts going momentarily and uncharacteristically blank. Before he could respond, Anayabi continued.

“One of them, that is. In a manner of speaking. After a fashion of science.”

From unguarded elation, Flinx was plunged into a vortex of bewilderment. “I—what are you trying to say?”

Anayabi then did perhaps the worst possible thing he could have done at that moment and under those emotionally charged circumstances.

He laughed.

Flinx thought his head was going to explode. Combining a suddenly escalating headache with the clashing emotions that were raging inside him threatened to send him spinning back into unconsciousness. With as great an effort of will as he had ever exerted, he somehow forced himself to remain composed and in control.

“Please.” A universe of multiple meaning underscored that one word. “Explain yourself.”

“Oh, very well.” Anayabi was at ease now. Finally convinced he was not about to be arrested and sent off for mindwiping, he had reverted to his natural authoritarian self. “You might as well know the truth about yourself. Everyone deserves to know the truth about themselves, I suppose. Even experiments that ought not to have survived this long.” Virtually merry, his improving mind-set contrasted starkly with Flinx’s deepening somberness.

“What else did dear departed Theon tell you about your origins, Twelve-A?”

Despondent and confused, Flinx struggled to recall. “Very little. He—wasn’t talking much at the time. No, wait—I do remember something else. He said—he said that I was
not the product of a natural union.
I already knew that, of course, since I’d previously learned that my mother was impregnated via artificial means.”

“Artificial means.”
Anayabi chuckled, shaking his head. “Description without being descriptive. I’m afraid that all these years you’ve spent searching for your ‘father,’ you’ve been wandering aimlessly on a bit of a wild-goose chase, Philip Lynx.”

Something horrible was growing in the pit of Flinx’s stomach. The gathering discomfort threatened to match the throbbing that felt like it was going to blow the top off his skull. On his lap, a suddenly apprehensive Pip twisted around to look up at him. She could not read the expression on his face, but she could perceive his emotions as clearly and sharply as she could detect dead meat at twenty meters.

“Maybe,” Flinx said abruptly, “we should stop for a little while.”

“Stop?” Anayabi eyed him in mock astonishment. “Why would you want to stop now, when you’re so close to obtaining the truth that you say you’ve spent such a long time seeking?” Still holding on to the pistol that was resting on his thigh, he leaned toward his newly uncertain, uneasy guest.

“When I say that I am ‘one’of your fathers, what I am really saying to you is that you
have
no father. You never did. Not in the traditional patrilineal sense.”

Flinx was barely breathing. Head pounding, he desperately wished for the medicine kit that was part of the service belt he always wore. Kit and belt, hope and past, and maybe a great deal more lay drowned together somewhere in a Gestaltian river far to the south.

“Even, even if the name was lost,” he stammered, “the identity of the man who donated the germane sperm should be traceable through—”

Clutching the pistol, Anayabi stood up abruptly. “You’re not
listening
to me, Twelve-A.
Pay attention.
That’s a good little experiment.” He smiled as a desolated Flinx stared starkly back at him. The older man’s widening smile was far from what anyone would have considered jovial. There was, truth be told, just a faint hint of a smirk about it. It was one more indication, however minor and seemingly insignificant, that the outlawing of the Meliorare Society had not been done in an arbitrary manner but for good and sound and well-researched reasons.

“There was no sperm donor, Twelve-A. Your DNA was mixed in the proverbial vat. Your chromosomes were predesigned in shell and sybfile. You were not conceived: you were sculpted. A strand of protein here, a fragment of nucleic acid there.” His voice grew slightly distant, remembering fondly. “We picked and chose and cut and spliced. The most difficult gengineering work ever attempted; the finest ever achieved. You were pasted together, Twelve-A. Like all the others. Some of it worked. Some—did not.” His attention returned fully to the present. “You weren’t
born,
Philip Lynx. You were
made
.”

Somehow Flinx choked out a response, instead of on it. “To what purpose? To what end?”

Anayabi gestured meaningfully with his free hand. “Isn’t it obvious? You yourself already used the term
improve.
Humankind has come a long way since our first ancestors figured out it was more efficacious to throw rocks at their enemies instead of hiding behind them. Time passed, civilization—of a sort—grew. Thousands of years passed. Hundreds of years ago we finally took our first steps out of the nursery and off the mother world. Since then we have accomplished many things, some great, others less admirable. We, along with the thranx, have made the Commonwealth. Yet we still all too often fight and argue among ourselves, act irrationally, neglect our true potential.”

No longer the reclusive retiree, Anayabi was now every millimeter the true believer, Flinx saw. The face and voice of the gently inquisitive hermit had been replaced by that of the dedicated fanatic.

“Humankind has always been impatient.” Having fully warmed to his polemic, the older man continued. “Those of us who worked as Meliorares were merely a little more impatient than the rest. Tired of waiting for our species to achieve its full potential, we determined to do our best to bring it about. In so doing we dedicated ourselves not just to reach for the next rung of the evolutionary ladder, but to skip as many rungs as possible. We strove to push human gengineering to the next level.”

“Without the consent of the gengineered.” Flinx’s voice was flat.

Unperturbed, Anayabi shrugged diffidently. “It is difficult to consult with an embryo. Yes, there were some failures along the way. It is ever so with science. With each line we strove to focus on a new ability, a new dimension of human consciousness.”

“I’ve scanned the Society’s history. Some of your ‘failures’ died prematurely. Some of them died horribly. Some were not that lucky.”

“It was not intentional,” Anayabi assured him. “Steps forward are invariably accompanied by steps back. We did everything we could to minimize the discomfort of those lines that did not develop as intended.”

“Verily your kindness knew no bounds,” Flinx replied acidly.

The other man’s expression darkened. “Great leaps in practical, as opposed to theoretical, science are rarely made without sacrifice.”

“A noble proposition on the part of those who never have to make the sacrifices.” Discouraged, disenchanted, and disheartened beyond measure, Flinx had had just about enough of this smug survivor. “At least I had a mother.”

Anayabi eyed the tall young man pityingly. “Twelve-A, Twelve-A—you listen but you do not hear. If you are no more perceptive than this, then despite your claimed Talent you are beyond doubt only one more in an unfortunately long line of failed experiments. I have told you, you were produced. From head to toe, you are a
manufacture
. The lynx-caste ex-courtesan Anasage whom you persist in referring to as your ‘mother’ was only one of many hired to carry finished product to term. Biological carriers are more reliable than synthetic wombs. Not to mention cheaper.” Leaning forward once more, he all but hissed his next words.

“
Listen to me,
Twelve-A. Philip Lynx. There was no sperm donor. There was no egg donor. You are a broth, a brew, an infusement and distillation of thousands of different strands of DNA carefully selected by brilliant if misunderstood men and women, vetted by software and machine, melded together in the simulacrum of a fertilized human egg that was then implanted in a suitable vessel and allowed to mature to term.”

Escalating headache ignored, everything else forgotten, a trembling Flinx swallowed hard one more time. His throat was as dry as the time he had been marooned on the deserts of Pyrassis, as dry as when he had gone gem hunting on Moth with an old man by the name of Knigta Yakus.

“Then,” he finally managed to whisper, “I’m not human?”

The older man’s humorless laugh filled the room. Behind him the wood fire, forgotten and unattended, was beginning to subside. “Oh, you’re human enough, Twelve-A. If anything, you’re more human than human. That was our intent, remember. To enhance, not to change. To revise and update, not begin anew. We did not wish to break with the human genetic code. Merely, as with any reliable machine, to give it a tune-up. Working without precedent and in the absence of a suitable manual, we were forced to fall back on trial and error.”