by David Bowles
His plan had been to do start over in some remote corner of the Southern Continent. Foolish. Impossible.
As the borrowed transport hurtled across barren terrain, a new destination occurred to him, one he had learned of years ago, during those first few days on Jitsu.
They drew up to the house that still echoed Tenshi’s soul. A transmission hummed throughout the shuttle.
“Brando D’Angelo, this is Sergeant Yanuar Hurek of the CPCCAF. Please set down the shuttle away from the house and await more instructions.”
Brando quickly checked the display panel. Two AF shuttles would be on him in six minutes. Without a word, he quickly banged the shuttle down on the tarmac, grabbed the hypo he’d prepared, and shot Samanei full of drugs.
“Oh, great. Another man doing what he wants with me,” she managed to get out before slipping into unconsciousness. Brando used a trucha to quickly free her arms.
“You, chirurgic. Come carry this woman and follow me.”
“Yes, Mr. D’Angelo.”
They hurried into the lift, the robot compressing its near three-meter height in order to clear the arches. As they hit the basement level, D’Angelo hurried out. The change in gravity strength as he approached the office pounded home the damage his last little adventure had wreaked upon his body. By the time he cycled open the door and leaned against the desk, he was drenched in sweat and the pain was affecting his concentration.
“Mr. D’Angelo,” the chirurgic said in its calm, oddly human voice, “I feel very heavy.”
“Yeah, well, get used to it. This is how it’ll be where we’re headed. Now, push this desk out of the way.”
The robot did so while still holding Samanei in two of its four upper limbs. His knees popping agonizingly, the linen robes he still wore spreading in a halo of white, Brando knelt and keyed open the trapdoor. He looked up at the chirurgic: it would probably fit, but not carrying Samanei.
“Ah, shite. Here, put the woman on my back when I’m standing on the ladder.” The robot complied. He gripped her with his remaining hand while his left arm hugged a rung. “Now grab that shirt over there, no, higher—damnit, on the next shelf, you useless—yeah. Okay. Bind her hands around my neck with it. Good. Now, follow me down.”
Samanei wasn’t very heavy, but Brando was exhausted. Still, he made it to the bottom in about forty-five seconds and quickly closed the trapdoor from the access panel in the tunnel. The AF would be inside his house any second, and he didn’t want them following him, at least not yet.
“Are we returning to the jinja?” the chirurgic asked as it reached Brando’s side. It was odd, a docbot’s asking questions.
“No. We’re going to a ship. Now shut up, take the woman, and follow.”
“Yes, Mr. D’Angelo.”
They traveled the southbound tunnel for about a kilometer, heading deeper into the earth. It had taken Brando a year to finish the digging with the help of advanced tunneling tractors. Almost the entire house was filled with the dirt from the excavations, except for the basement. The AF troops wouldn’t have to search far. They’d no doubt found the panel on the floor and were trying to bypass the codes. Not much time.
Soon Brando and his companions had reached the airlock. Opening it, he motioned the robot inside. “Take her all the way to the back of the ship, to the hypostasis chamber.” Then he shut down the far entrance to the tunnel remotely and activated the timer. Ten minutes.
In the physical navigation alcove, Brando initiated the pre-flight sequence. He then dashed to the hypostasis chamber himself. The chirurgic was already inserting Samanei into the suspensor gel of her capsule, even though it hadn’t been instructed to. Brando stripped and eased into his own, finding the gel slightly warmer than room temperature. The life-support devices snaked their way to his body, and the pink light of a faux-connection danced over his head. He linked to the faux bridge: immediately he found himself in a vivid virtual room much larger than the simple alcove that actually existed. He walked to the captain’s station and sat down. The automated systems were all represented by somatoids of Brando’s college friends from Earth, a programming choice that, though whimsical, pleased him every time he thought about it.
“Giuseppe, let me address the passengers on board,” he instructed, meaning the chirurgic. The somatoid nodded and opened the ship-wide channel.
“Robot, wherever you are, check the seals on the d-sleep chambers and get to the dormitory. Lay down on the bunk and strap the net across you. We’ll be experiencing heavy gravity in a moment. Giuseppe, flip to AF frequency number four. Open? Sergeant Hurek, this is Brando D’Angelo.”
“Where are you? We told you to set down outside your house and wait. You’re just causing more problems for everybody. We found your trap door, and we’re about to open it up, so get ready to come out calmly.”
“Listen to me, Sergeant. You’ve got exactly four minutes and ten seconds to get your men out of my home, into yall’s shuttles, and far away. I planted explosives throughout the house. Small transuranic bombs, in fact. I’m surprised your scans didn’t detect them. You did scan the property, right?”
There was just silence.
Brando nodded to himself. “Close channel. Piero, prepare to blow the cliff face.”
The defense subsystem somatoid nodded. The tunnel ended in a hangar that was smack up against a cliff overlooking the desert to the south. Once the wall was blown, the autopilot would take them out and up, and the accel would begin. In about eighteen hours, once the ship reached .6c just beyond the Oort cloud, fenestration would begin, and Brando’s refitted ship would plow through hyperspace to emerge at the edge of explored space, untraceable. Of course, he was counting on the battle above to keep the AF largely off his tail, but he knew he might be pursued all the way to his holing spot. As long as he could keep far enough ahead until then, however, he’d be in the clear.
The chronometer ticked off the seconds to the house’s destruction. Brando felt a pang, but he’d be damned if anyone would ever live in it, or on the land that lay beneath it.
Ten seconds before detonation, he ordered Piero to blow the wall. The ship lurched out into the open air and nosed upward, just as the huge, beautiful home a kilometer or so away exploded in a deafening hail of concrete, steel, sand and rock, ballooning upward and out. Brando called for the max accel the hypostasis tubes could protect him from, and the ship went screaming through the atmosphere and into the swirling blackness of space.
As he regarded the rapidly receding sphere that was Jitsu, his father’s voice unexpectedly rang in his ears: mentre il mondo pian-piano spariva lontano laggiù.
“While the world slowly vanishes into the distance below,” he crooned to the specters of his loved ones, all of them lost to him, even the living, and he a doppelganger of a man, shuffling through and past them, down the Path, into the limbo of the future.
CHAPTER 50
Two months later, orbiting a dead world in an uncharted system, Brando prepared to rid himself of Samanei forever. As the chirurgic had predicted, the gene therapy they’d put her through to eliminate the physical source of her mental illnesses could do nothing to right the trauma that now drove her. She’d nearly caused him to crash into the planet twice, he’d caught her on the verge of tunneling a message to Sopiya-knew-who several times, and it had become obvious that she couldn’t be connected to the faux-life of the ship because she knew how to hack into the virtual bridge. He’d had to keep her strapped down, locked up or drugged while the chirurgic extracted what they needed from her body.
Now here they were, twenty million kilometers from a barely earthlike world, sister of the one they presently orbited, and Kyr—as he’d begun to call the chirurgic—reported the embryos were fine and should develop perfectly.
Brando was relieved. He’d soon be free of his sister-in-law.
He had loaded the escape pod with a couple of weapons, plenty of charge cartridges, knives, a foldable plexisteel domicile, rations, extra clothes,
a small portable library, and a host of other supplies she’d need to survive, including a medpack and a scanner for detecting poisons in native food as well as a small protein recombination unit that would help her subsist if she couldn’t find edible plants and animals.
From time to time as he packed her things, Brando felt a twinge of guilt, but then he reminded himself of all she’d done and all she was capable of doing. She no doubt deserved to die, but he couldn’t bring himself to kill her, couldn’t risk turning her over to the authorities. He himself was a wanted man now. Leaving her here was the best option: let fate decide whether she lived or died.
Their escape from the Eta Cassiopeia 2 system had been relatively anti-climactic: the battle raging in space above the other side of Jitsu had kept him free of pursuers except for the one AF shuttle from the surface that hadn’t been blinded by the explosion, and even it hadn’t been able to keep up with the intense burn Brando’s heavily modified ranfla was capable of. The shuttle had fired on him several times, damaging a few minor systems, but it had eventually turned back, leaving Brando to clear the system and hole his way into oblivion.
His scans of the unexplored area he’d unexpectedly defenestrated into after a bizarre computer malfunction had at first seemed fruitless. But just when he’d been about to leave in search of another, more promising slice of space, Kyr had pointed out vaguely promising readings that had led him to this frightening system that the star charts called Castor 6. As his ranfla had approached, Brando had discovered a sextuple star system made of three binaries, two of the pairs bright visual stars, the other pair dim red flare stars, brighter in X-ray wavelengths than the first four. Around one of the red twins he’d come upon a series of icy and stony worlds, one of which was marginally habitable.
Once the ship was locked into a parking orbit around a dead planet, the chirurgic had begun to help Brando extract ova from Samanei (locked in her claustrophobic cabin, she only allowed the chirurgic to approach her), and they had used recovered DNA from the blood samples of Brando’s wife and daughter to clone the two.
They’d failed on several occasions, despite the advanced tools they had at their disposal. Neither of them, despite their understanding of the cloning process, had ever done this before. It was a highly illegal procedure punishable by death, looked upon since for the past two hundred years ago as evil and immoral. Their job was further complicated by the genome masking that Brando insisted on doing, a process that would keep his loved ones’ true genetic identity from being discovered except through the most rigorous of scans.
The chirurgic had never balked at the job, though it surely had been programmed with the knowledge of the prohibitions against it. Brando found himself talking more and more to the machine in the absence of any sane human company. It was childlike and had a one-track mind, but its unexpected intelligence and, difficult though it was to believe, apparent compassion for Brando filled the ex-professor with gratitude. He’d even given it a name.
Of course, as the robot was now to be his only companion, it was good that they got along so well; otherwise, the strain of so many repeated failures might have warped Brando’s mind. Six weeks ago, they’d succeeded, and the embryos were still maturing and healthy. Samanei was no longer needed, and Brando didn’t want to give her the chance to finish the task she’d started: destroying Tenshi and all that she’d loved.
Palming the intercom on the wall open, he gave the order: “Okay, Kyr, bring her down.”
Soon the robot floated down the ladderway to the lower corridor where Brando waited at the escape pod’s hatch. In his arms, bound and gagged, was Samanei. As Kyr used its other appendages to push down the corridor, Brando hooked himself onto the wall and regarded his sister-in-law. She’d filled out well, and she painfully reminded him of Tenshi more and more every day. He couldn’t get her to do anything about her shock of hair, however. She’d never had to care about her appearance, and he wondered if she ever would.
As he took her from Kyr and eased her into the g-netting, she aimed a viscious kick at him. But her muscles were too weak. Brando was glad that the world they were sending her to had such low gravity, as years in hypostasis and months in space had seriously deteriorated her muscular and skeletal systems.
For a moment, he almost changed his mind about sending her into such terrible exile: he realized there was a very good chance she wouldn’t survive. But then he hardened himself and removed her gag.
“Well, Samanei, this is it. Time to say goodbye.”
“You can’t do this, Brando. Leave me alone on some world light years away from anybody else. That’s evil.”
“No, it’s the one alternative to killing you I’ve got. You’ll be fine. All those resourceful neurons working overtime, you’re going to blossom down there. And just think: a whole planet, all to yourself. No ambitious people trying to use you. I would think you would be thrilled.”
“What about my babies?”
“Those are not your babies.”
“You used my little eggs. They’re mine.” She strained against the mesh.
“Okay, this conversation is over.”
“You know, you’re just as crazy as me, Dr. D’Angelo. I hacked into that little faux-life of yours, saw those avatars of Tenshi and Tana. How much time you spent in there, Koweke? You ever, you know, relive the romantic moments with my sis? Little ‘dock the rocket’ with the old doppelganger?”
Brando shook his head. He couldn’t even feel rage at this thing before him. All he wanted was to be free of it forever. He slipped back out the hatch, prepared to close it.
“You’re nuts, Brando. What normal man would clone his dead wife and raise her as if she was his daughter? Stark, raving mad. Don’t think you can run from that, or your past either. It’s all going catch up with you, Koweke. It’ll sneak up when least you expect it. And me too. You’ll never be free of me, not if you send me into a black hole, even. Just wait. You’ve got no idea, Brando, who I am or what I see. You think your fleeting vision of some faint blue spark gives your existence meaning? You fool.”
She stretched her face toward him, and he recoiled at what he saw in her eyes.
“I have been down to the deepest depths of Gumun Gereza, to the greyest of cells of this vast prison, and I saw Him, roaring orange in all his glory. Not Dresch, Doctor, but HIM. Domina’s son. Sakra made flesh. He wants to meet you, Brando.”
Shuddering, Brando remembered Sakra’s voice, bleak and spiteful.
You seek shattering? I will break you.
Samanei smiled at his hesitation. “Ah, that’s right. You’ve heard Him speak. He’s not done breaking you, Koweke. He’s waiting there in the growing grey, just for—”
With a grimace of disgust, Brando cycled shut the hatch and cut her off mid-rant. He sighed, then punched the launch button.
The hull reverberated with the thrust of Samanei’s departure for a couple of seconds, and then there was silence.
“She called you Dr. D’Angelo. You want me to call you Dr. D’Angelo?” Kyr floated to Brando’s right, two arms close to his wasp waist, the other two held out for balance.
“No. Call me Nando Miranda. That’s my new name.”
“Okay, Nando Miranda. I like your new name.”
Brando had to laugh. “Let’s go check on the girls, Kyr.”
Up in the medical alcove, Brando and Kyr verified the embryos’ progress. Already in their sixth week, the lumps of cells were starting to take form. Beside them in the lab floated Brando’s nearly grown replacement hand, which they’d cloned several weeks ago and forced to age more rapidly in a specially charged nutrient bath. After the surgery the following week, it would be time to prepare the injections that D’Angelo would be taking over the next eight months. Gene therapy, designed to return his body to its previous adaptive state, one that could handle a thicker, Earth-like atmosphere and gravity, came first, and then the genome masking. His physical appearance would also have to be changed, permanently.
It would be a grueling, painful time, but nothing compared to the past eight years. He had a new language to learn, as well, and a new religion to adapt to. His choice seemed to fly in the face of the Path, but he could continue to create a soul for himself in any environment. Nando Miranda was just a extension of his self into the physical world, a construct like Tenshi’s house or Samaneino Teyopan. A tool for enlightenment.
“Take one away,” Tenshi had said to him in the vision. “Bring two back. Prepare them.”
Brando had sworn to obey. He had taken Samanei from Jitsu. He was bringing back Tenshi and Tana. He would prepare them. If he didn’t, she had warned him in that first dream in the hospital, the end would come.
But she had also made a promise.
“I will come back to you.”
And he believed. Just as he believed in the Path, in the Ogdoad, in his own nascent soul, he believed that somehow, somehow, Tenshi would return.
Hope. Love. Faith. Gifts that Jitsu had given him.
He thought of his father’s guitar, sealed in a case in the cargo compartment. He hadn’t touched it in eight years, and he couldn’t bring himself to yet. Perhaps, with time, he’d be able to play those old songs again.
After all, it no longer hurt to think of his father. There was no anger left in Brando’s heart for him.
Once he found a new Way, perhaps all those old pains would fade.
As Kyr clicked and clattered away, performing some maintenance task or another, Brando strapped himself onto a stool and sipped some coffee from a flask. Eight months to get ready, then the babies would be removed from the tank and placed in the hypostasis tube. They’d accel to .6c and fenestrate to their new home. This time he’d do it right. This time he wouldn’t leave their side. This time they would survive, because he’d teach them what they needed to survive. It was his penance; it was his joy.
He stared for the longest time at the tiny embryos suspended in blue-green fluid within the tank. His hand went to his and Tenshi’s wedding rings, hanging from a chain around his thick neck, and he wondered.
