Rogue clone (40 page)

A torrent of bright daylight flooded in through the gap that the door had once blocked. His expression still as inscrutable as ever, Freeman turned and walked back to the Starliner, pocketing his pistol along the way. He did not rejoin me in the cockpit but took a seat in the cabin. I drove out of the hangar, rolling over the fallen door, and took off. Streaming up into the horizon, I chanced a glance down at Safe Harbor. From here, the city looked no different than it had the first time I came. Five miles up and rising quickly, I could not see the burned buildings and broken highways. The atmosphere thinned and darkened as we entered outer space. I did not have to worry about radar or traffic controllers tracking me. As soon as we left the New Columbian atmosphere, I engaged the broadcast computer and worked out coordinates for Little Man. Lightning danced outside the cockpit, and we emerged in the Scutum-Crux Arm a short thousand miles from the target.

Something in my programming had gone haywire and rendered me sensitive to the loss of human life. I still had the ability to kill, but it bothered me. Now, seeing Little Man, my head filled with memories of the Marines who died in that awful battle. I remembered Captain Gaylan McKay . . . the personable young officer over my platoon on the
Kamehameha
. I remembered the ranks of idealistic Marines and the march that led to their deaths. Strange as it sounds, I felt an involuntary shiver. What I should have felt was anger.

“When was the last time you saw your family?” I asked.

“It’s been five years,” Freeman said.

“This should be some homecoming,” I said.

“They don’t want me here,” he said. He did not elaborate. Freeman never elaborated. We kept flying into the green and blue horizon. Using sensors to search for metal and heat, we located the colony in a plains area. They were building their settlement on the edge of a forest and not far from a clear-water lake. In the distance, a mountain range filled the horizon. It was not on the same continent on which we fought that final battle.

The first thing we saw was acres and acres of plowed land. Beyond the fields was a small and primitive town that consisted of warehouses and unfinished apartment buildings. Even when the apartment buildings were complete, they would only be temporary shelters meant to hold people for days or weeks. Work had already begun on larger, more permanent buildings as well.

Women and children in simple clothing emerged from the temporary shelters as we landed. Men in overalls came from the construction projects and from the fields. If there was one thing that stood out about the people on Little Man, it was their industrious nature.

The people did not approach my ship, but huddled together inside the borders of their town. They did not seem scared. They simply stood in place, curious to see who we were.

“I guess the welcoming committee has arrived,” I said, and turned to see that Freeman had already opened the hatch. I followed him out.

“I should have known it was you,” a man called in a voice drenched with loathing. Freeman did not answer.

When I stepped out of the ship, there was a collective gasp. I guess they were used to a seven-foot-tall black man, but the sight of a clone was strange and new. I turned to look at these people and got a jolt of my own.

I had always taken it for granted that Ray Freeman was unique in the universe. He was, I thought, a one-of-a kind, like me. It never occurred to me that he could have come from a colony of men and women similar to himself. The men and women of Delphi were very much like Freeman. They were tall and dark-skinned. One of the woman later told me that they were pure-blooded African Americans. As far as I knew, they were the last people anywhere who referred to themselves as American at all.

“What are you doing here, son?” an old man asked. The man was tall and solidly built, but he looked underfed. He did not have Ray Freeman’s broad, wrestler’s physique. His shoulders were square, his back was erect and the parts of his arms that extended beyond the short sleeves of his shirt looked strong and well formed. He removed his hat. An even layer of gray berber hair covered his head. His dusty skin was far darker than Ray’s, almost a true black. It looked dry and leathery from decades of toil under a burning hot sun. “What are you doing here, Raymond?” he repeated. Silence hung between Freeman and his father like a curtain. I could almost feel the hostility. The people around the old man stood silent and staring. They stood unflinching and unmoved. Like Freeman’s father, these people were tall, dark, with skin that had dried to leather in the sun. Freeman took nearly one minute before he began to speak; and when he did speak, he spoke so quietly I could barely hear what he said. “The Broadcast Network was destroyed.”

“Destroyed?” the elder Freeman repeated. For the first time since we landed, the people behind him showed concern. They began to speak quietly among themselves.

“I wanted to make sure you were okay,” Freeman said.

By this time, however, the elder Freeman’s attention was no longer on his son. He had turned to me.

“You are a friend of Raymond’s?”

I nodded, wondering if Ray Freeman had ever really had a friend.

The old man turned back to Freeman. “How could anybody destroy the Broadcast Network?” It was a fair question. In U.A. society, the Broadcast Network was a given as constant as sunlight and water. No one, with the exception of Rear Admiral Thomas Halverson, had ever stopped to consider its fragile nature.

“There was a war. Some of the arms declared independence,” Freeman said. His father should have known this. Of course his father would have known this. It was the biggest news in history. And yet, looking at the old man’s surprised expression, it became clear that he had not known about the war.

“A civil war?” the old man asked.

“It’s a civil war if you lose,” Freeman said. “It’s a revolution when you win.”

“They won?” A younger man stepped forward. This man was far shorter than Freeman and not as broad along the chest and shoulders. He had a wiry build, but he looked athletic.

“They destroyed the Mars broadcast station,” I said. “Without the Mars discs, the entire system shut down.”

“For how long?” the old man asked, turning back to Ray. “How long before they fix the broadcast station?”

“They won’t fix it,” Freeman said.

“Of course they’ll fix it,” the younger man said. “They’ll send over the fleet . . .”

“Earth doesn’t have a fleet,” Ray said. “The Earth Fleet was defeated, and they can’t send ships from other fleets without the discs.”

The older Freeman stood still as a statue, his gaze boring into his son’s eyes and then mine. “Man has finally turned his back on us,” he mumbled. Then louder, he added, “God has cleared the way for us to stay in this promised land.”

There were 113 people living on Delphi. I know the exact number because the entire population, or perhaps I should say
congregation
, assembled in their meetinghouse—a building meant to be used as a sleeping and eating facility during large evacuations. The people sat on plastic benches. Archie Freeman, Ray Freeman’s father, looked down on the congregation from behind a very plain pulpit, over which hung a fiberglass cross.

There were two women with infants in the congregation. One woman threw a blanket over her shoulder and nursed her child. You could hear it sucking when the conversations lulled. The other woman cradled a sleeping baby in her arms, rocking it softly as she stood in the back of the meetinghouse. I noted the tenderness with which she treated the child and envied it. Having grown up in U.A. Orphanage #553 with other clones, I had never seen tenderness of this kind.

The people of Delphi attended this meeting as families. Husbands and wives sat together with their children. Near as I could figure, there were eighteen extended families. The whole of them only filled the first four rows of the meetinghouse. For the most part, the next twenty rows sat empty—an ambition unfulfilled.

“My son says that we are in danger,” Archie Freeman began the meeting with those words. He stood at his pulpit as austere and grave as any man I had ever seen. He had washed and changed his clothes. He wore a black suit, white shirt and black necktie. He dressed like a businessman. Now that he had washed up, the color of Archie Freeman’s face was almost onyx. His skin had the texture of parched leather, his reward for fifty years of trying to start colonies on uninhabitable planets. Having finally landed on a productive planet with plenty of water and healthy soil, he did not want to leave.

Archie was bald at the top, with a very short layer of gray-white hair that looked like a macramé cowl. His eyes were bloodshot from his day out in the sun.

“Raymond, come up and speak your piece,” the elder Freeman said.

Ray, who had been sitting with a woman near the back, stood and walked to the front of the chapel. No one reached out to shake his hand or pat his back. Seeing the reception these people gave him, you might have thought he had never lived among these people. But he must have lived with the people before they moved to Little Man. He was their 114thcitizen. He probably knew every one of them by name. Archie Freeman did not step away from the pulpit as his son joined him on the stand. The two men stood a few feet from each other. Ray, as I have mentioned before, stood at least seven feet tall. His father appeared to be three or four inches shorter than him, and a lot thinner.

“Tell them what you told me, son,” Archie Freeman said in his handsome baritone.

“There was a war,” Freeman said. “Four of the arms wanted to leave the Unified Authority. They had a fleet of self-broadcasting battleships. They attacked Earth and defeated the Earth Fleet.” Here he paused for just a moment. “And they destroyed the Mars broadcast station. Without the Broadcast Network, Navy ships cannot travel between systems. The ship that came here a few days ago is stuck out here, too. It will be back.”

Until that last sentence, the room remained silent. When Freeman told them that the fighter carrier would be back, the people started talking among themselves.

“How can you know that?” an old man on the first row yelled. It sounded like a challenge.

“It takes four to five days for a carrier to fly here from the discs,” Freeman said. “The one that came here didn’t have enough time to reach them before they went dark.”

I heard shouting and crying. I saw men yelling at each other, then turning and yelling at the women beside them, and I realized that these people had just been told that their world was doomed. Archie Freeman put up his hand to calm the crowd, but the commotion continued. “Raymond and his friend have offered to move us to another planet.”

That last sentence quieted the crowd.

I had this strange feeling, like I was intruding on a family matter. I was an outsider. Hell, Ray was an outsider, and he was born and raised among these people. They had something special, something I could never have. Looking around the congregation, I knew that even if I moved in among these people, I would never be one of them. They were family . . . and I was a clone. I took one last look at Ray standing tall, mute and confused, and maybe even intimidated, on that stand. Then I quietly got up and left the meeting.

It was early evening. The sun had set but the sky was bright. All the blue had faded from the sky. The horizon showed orange and red, and the sky above me was white. The temperature had dropped to a comfortable seventy degrees. Little Man was always a hospitable planet. It was the inhabitants that worried me.

A soft breeze blew in from the fields, carrying the scent of freshly turned soil and fertilizer. I stood and stared at the ground with its rows and furrows. Beyond the fields, a red and green forest stretched out as far as a man could see.

“It looks so pretty at night,” a woman said. “I almost forget all the sweat and hard work that goes into it.”

“It’s beautiful,” I said, turning back. The woman walked in my direction. She had brown skin. It was the same color as Ray Freeman’s skin, but more tanned. Her skin was parched, but not as badly as Archie’s.

“You’re not going to stay for the meeting?” I asked.

“They don’t care what I have to say any more than they care what Ray has to say. We’re pariahs, and decision-making is a job for God’s elect.” She wore a long-sleeved white blouse and her plain gray skirt went all the way to her feet. These must have been her church clothes. They looked clean and pressed.

“I’m Ray’s sister, Marianne.” With this, she put out her had for me to shake.

“Wayson Harris,” I said, shaking her hand.

Her palm and fingers were hard and rough, far rougher than mine. I had climbed ropes and dug trenches in school, but the life of a Marine is mostly spent in combat armor. This woman had spent her days plowing and digging with tools, not equipment. Her palms were calluses. She had broad, manly shoulders, and her wrists were as thick as mine. She stood only an inch shorter than me. Her lips and skin were almost the exact same color. Her hair was black and long. It hung down to her waist. She was elegant and strong, and I thought that in the proper setting, dressed in soft clothes with her hair done up, she might be beautiful. In another world, where she was perfumed and pampered, she might be exquisite.

“Why are you and Ray outcasts?” I asked.

“Raymond couldn’t stand living in a religious colony. He never believed in Jesus, and he and Archie hated each other. When Raymond was old enough, he caught a ride on a supply ship and got as far away as he could. I think Archie was glad when he left.” I noted that she called her father Archie, as if he were a friend or an acquaintance. “He wanted someone to follow in his footsteps and lead the armies of God. That wasn’t Raymond.”

I tried to imagine Ray Freeman as a minister and found that I could not picture him without his armor and his guns. “Does Archie know what Ray does for a living?” I asked.

“We don’t talk about that,” she said.

“But you stayed,” I said. “What makes you a pariah?”

“I stayed, but my husband didn’t. I have a little boy named Caleb. He’s in the meeting, sitting with his grand-mother. I don’t know how Jesus feels about divorced women, but I can tell you how the women on this planet feel about them. If I so much as talk to any of their men, tongues start wagging.”