Klyber had said that the book had a passage in it about a friend of mine. I opened the journal to the section marked by the thin strip of ribbon. As I looked at the handwritten entry, I realized that Admiral Klyber had been wrong. The man described in this journal was more of a mentor than a friend. The passage was about Tabor Shannon, whom I had met while serving on the Kamehameha, Klyber’s old flagship.
Shannon was a living paradox. He was a Liberator. He’d killed hundreds of enemies in battle, but he also went to Mass. He was the only clone I ever met with a religious streak. His religious feeling made no sense because, as a Liberator, he knew he was a clone and therefore knew God had nothing to do with his creation. Catholic doctrine held that clones had no souls. Almost every church taught that.
Shannon was intelligent, but he remained blindly loyal to the Republic to his last breath. He died in battle, fighting for the nation that had banned his existence. At the time he died I admired him more than anyone I ever knew, but I grew to despise him. He seemed pathologically determined to devote his life to those who cared least about him—the nation that had outlawed his kind and the God who disavowed his existence.
Since leaving the Marines, I had come to question the line that separated devotion and delusion. Granted, I was still working for the same side as always, risking my life for the same Republic that never shed a tear for Tabor Shannon; but I was different. I had gone freelance. I made money for my services. I was also free to leave. If the Confederate Arms offered me a better deal one day, I wanted to believe that I would take it.
Having seen what I had seen, I did not believe in nations or deities. And as for Shannon, who did believe, I could not decide whether he had been a quixotic hero or just a fool. Either way, I had no intention of following in his footsteps.
CHAPTER SIX
From the Journal of Father David Sanjines, archbishop and chief administrator of Saint Germaine:
Entry: Earth Date June 4, 2483
I received an urgent message from spaceport security this morning. When I called to look into the matter, the captain asked me to watch a feed from his security monitor.
They had detained a marine named Tabor Shannon. I only needed a moment to identify the problem. “Is that a Liberator?” I asked the captain. “Haven’t they been banned?”
“Liberators are not allowed in the Orion Arm,” the captain said. “They can travel Cygnus freely. If you want my opinion, I think they should all be executed.”
The ecumenical council of 2410 held that clones did not have souls and therefore did not fit the Catholic definition of human life, but I did not think that made them machines. Church canon dating back to Saint Francis forbade cruelty to animals. Perhaps this Liberator clone had more in common with a mad dog than a man, but he had blood running through his veins, not oil. He was no machine.
The captain told me that he checked with the U.A. Consulate. “We don’t have to let him on our planet. Should I send him away?”
The captain knew better than to tell me what to do. Saint Germaine being a Catholic mission, I was the one who made the decisions. “Do you know what he is doing here?” I asked.
“He says he is on a pilgrimage.”
“You must be joking,” I said.
“No sh—er, no, Father. I am sorry about that, Father.”
“I understand, my son,” I said. The presence of a murderer on our little planet would put everyone on edge. A religious pilgrimage? I was skeptical to say the least. “He is on a pilgrimage?”
“That’s what he says.”
I asked the captain if he would detain the man in question until I could arrive. I thought that might be soon, but this was Friday and a holy day—the immaculate heart of Mother Mary. I needed to attend to Mass and then I had a full day of meetings. The Liberator would have to wait until tomorrow.
Entry: Earth Date June 5, 2483
I did not know how I would react to meeting a Liberator face-to-face. As a young priest, I served in the Albatross Island penal colony. I was there during the riot of 2472. A force of Liberators came to the planet to stop the rioting. They put down the riot, all right. They also killed the prisoners and the guards and almost everybody on the planet.
Before seeing Liberators in action, I believed that clones were human even if they had no immortal souls. I even questioned the ecumenical convention that decreed clones were created of man and not God. That changed for me on Albatross Island.
You cannot understand a lion until you have seen one devour its prey. I thought that all people were created in God’s own image until I saw the Liberators, demons who looked like men but who rejected all goodness. I saw them kill thousands of innocent, helpless men. Just thinking about that massacre is painful. Once I witnessed the way the Liberators fought and killed, I saw the wisdom of the ecumenical counsel’s judgment. These monsters could not have had souls.
I arrived at the spaceport before lunch and found an office in which I could interview this Liberator. His name was Tabor Shannon. I arranged for us to be alone. I was an old man now, and I had no time to fear devils, not even cloned ones.
Three soldiers walked the prisoner into the room. I dismissed them at the door. The leader of the soldiers did not want to leave. He said I would not be safe alone with a Liberator. I told him I would take my chances, and I dismissed him a second time. All the while the Liberator sat in one of the seats I had arranged in the middle of the room, watching us.
If I ever felt scared during my interview with the Liberator, it was when I turned and saw the way he watched us. I believed his expression was implacable. Now, as I think about it, I have changed my mind. I think that his expression was merely one of curiosity.
“I am Father Sanjines,” I said as I came to sit across from him. We were nearly knee-to-knee, just a foot or two separated us. I knew this man could easily spring from his chair and strangle me, but I sensed that he did not come to do violence. “You are Corporal Tabor Shannon?” I asked.
“That is correct, Father.”
I looked around the room. Maybe I was unconsciously looking for a door through which to escape. What I saw instead was a small wet bar with a crystal decanter. “I am an old man, Corporal Shannon. I took my vows nearly fifty years ago.”
He said nothing.
“Would you like some sherry? We don’t have many fine things on Saint Germaine, but we do have a superb distillery. I personally oversaw the building of it. I’ve been in this mission from its start.”
The clone did not accept my offer. Perhaps he was not much of a drinker or perhaps he wanted to leave a good impression, I could not tell.
“You’ll want to try it before you leave,” I told him.
“What is this about?” the Liberator asked, still trying to sound civil. “Why have you detained me?”
“Mr. Shannon, this mission is nearly twenty years old, and I have been the chief administrator and archbishop here for all of that time. Before coming here, I was a chaplain on a penal planet.”
“Was it Albatross Island?” he asked.
“It was,” I said. “You can imagine my feelings when I received a call alerting me that a Liberator had arrived in our spaceport.”
The Liberator said nothing.
“You claim that you have come on a pilgrimage. Is that correct?”
“It is, Father,” the clone said, sounding as determined as a young boy wanting to enter a seminary.
“You will forgive me if I find that hard to believe, Mr. Shannon, but you see, I watched three hundred of your kind butcher prisoners, both rioting and innocent. Perhaps you were not involved in that . . . that . . .”
“Action.”
The Liberator used the word action. I was offended.
“I was trying to decide whether to call it a slaughter or a massacre,” I told him. “I think a more appropriate word might be extermination. As best as I can remember it, one thousand five hundred inmates rioted and the marines sent a battalion of Liberator clones to resto
re order. That was five rioting inmates for each Liberator. I should have thought that would have been enough blood to satisfy them.”
“I wasn’t there,” the Liberator told me.
“When they finished killing the rioters, they slaughtered prisoners who did not riot. Then they turned on the guards and hostages. By that time, they weren’t even using bullets anymore. They beat men to death with their rifles. I helped reclaim the bodies of the victims, Mr. Shannon. It was the most terrible thing I have ever seen.
“That was the closest I ever came to renouncing my vows. When I saw what those Liberators had done, I did not believe that a just God would have allowed the creation of such monsters. A few weeks later, the Senate outlawed Liberators. Is that not so?”
“They outlawed the manufacture of Liberator clones,” Shannon said to me. His gaze still met mine. I did not know if I saw glee or defiance in his expression, but I did not like what I saw.
“We don’t, as a rule, receive many clones on this planet.” Having said this, I felt a tinge of guilt. This clone had been nothing but pleasant, and I had acted adversarial from the start. “Forgive me,” I said. “I have been too straightforward. Are you sure you will not have a sherry?”
I climbed from my seat and went to the bar to pour myself a glass.
“Are you refusing me entry?” the clone asked.
“We Catholics like to believe that our church runs this planet, but the Unified Authority maintains an embassy just down the street from the Archdiocese. The U.A. runs this spaceport facility, as a matter-of-fact. That is not a symbiotic relationship. We do not welcome government intervention on our planet.”
I shut my eyes and thought about Liberators as I sipped the sherry. Perhaps I was reliving those last hours of the siege on Albatross Island, those awful moments when our rescuers became predators. I thought about a cell block in which the blood and brains on the walls were so thick that I could no longer see the bricks and mortar.
We Catholics are anti-synthetic by our very nature. According to our doctrine, only God can create life. The use of clones in the military caused the Vatican to release a statement defining life as a being with an immortal soul. Science can clone sheep, snakes, and soldiers that breathe air and move of their own volition, but science cannot prove that its creations have souls.
“They were without compassion,” I said. “Ravenous dogs lusting for blood. You will forgive me if I have been impolite, Mr. Shannon, but I see nothing even remotely redeeming about your kind. I once questioned the doctrine that clones have no souls. Having seen the work of Liberators, I determined that the butchers who came to Albatross Island were soulless creatures. I saw nothing redeeming in them.”
“‘But if there be no virtue to take away, consequently there can be no vice,’” Shannon said.
I heard this and smiled and took a long sip of sherry. “You’ve read Saint Augustine. Impressive. But you’ve misquoted him. Augustine said, ‘If there be no good to take away.’ He also said, ‘It is impossible that there should be a harmless vice.’”
“He did say that, didn’t he?” the Liberator said cheerfully.
“The Liberators who invaded Albatross Island did a lot of harm. I believe that their existence is a vice,” I said. “It is a vice of the Unified Authority government.”
“I never cared much for Saint Augustine, anyway,” Shannon said. “What about the secular philosophers? Friedrich Nietzsche said that no man has an eternal soul. If he was correct, that would put us all on equal ground. None of us would be alive by the Vatican’s definition.”
“Quoting a philosopher who referred to himself as ‘the anti-Christ’ does not generally lead to a favorable impression in a Catholic colony,” I said. “I suggest you restrict yourself to Saint Augustine while you are on Saint Germaine, Mr. Shannon. Better yet, I suggest you avoid discussion of philosophy entirely. The people on this planet have strong opinions.”
“While I’m on Saint Germaine?” Shannon asked, “Are you allowing me to stay?”
“What is the object of your pilgrimage?” I asked.
“The same as any pilgrim,” the Liberator said. “I seek truth. I want to know who I am and how I fit into the universe.”
“And you believe you can find those answers on our little planet?” I asked.
“I’m curious about Catholicism,” the Liberator said.
“I can tell you where the Catholic Church stands when it comes to you and your place in the universe. The Catholic Church holds that you have no soul and that you are an abomination.”
“And yet I am created in God’s own image.”
“Man was created in God’s image,” I told him.
“And I was created in man’s image,” he said.
I said, “I will allow you to visit our planet, and I hope that the answers you find here will not leave you discomfited.”
I did not let him stay because of his amateurish attempts to grasp philosophy. I let him stay because I believed he was sincere, and that intrigued me. If this man was a Liberator, then he was by nature a killer and a creation without a soul. I knew this to be true, though in his case, I am not certain that I believed it was true.
CHAPTER SEVEN
March 13, 2512 A.D.
Location: Golan Dry Docks; Galactic Position:
Norma Arm
The Golan Dry Docks were considered one of the “seven man-made wonders of the galaxy.” Other wonders included the Capitol Building in Washington D.C., the outer-galactic scientific observatory on the outer edge of the Orion Arm, the planetary food storage and production facility on Nebraska Kri, the all-faiths military burial facility near the center of the Norma Arm, the Sol science station on the surface of the sun, and, of course, the Broadcast Network.
Funny how the mundane wonders get overlooked. I considered the spaceport on Mars far more wondrous than the Sol science station or the Nebraska Kri food-packing plant. That place was so big that it needed a resort-sized dormitory to house clerks and waiters. Mars Spaceport even had a smaller secondary dormitory that housed the people who ran special stores, theaters, and restaurants for the employees living in the primary dormatory.
My mind wandered when I traveled through space. The light flashing on my radio brought me back to reality. “Starliner A-ten-twenty-thirty-four, this is Dry Docks traffic control, please come in.”
“Traffic control, this is Starliner A-ten-twenty-thirty-four.”
Ahead of me, the Golan Dry Docks looked like a cross between bleached bones and a giant spider web. Eight-mile pillars described the outside of the platform in lilting arches like the ribs of a gigantic skeleton. Between these pillars was a haphazard warren of walls that divided the structure into mooring slips and construction zones. Scaffolding lined the insides of those slips. From out in space, the scaffolds looked like threads instead of twenty-foot-wide metal platforms. The dry docks housed over eight hundred cubic miles of space for building ships.
Golan did not orbit a planet. It was a free-floating space station.
“Starliner pilot, please identify yourself and prepare for security scan.”
This request did not worry me. The Golan Dry Docks were one of the most security-intensive facilities in the galaxy. Knowing that Admiral Klyber had picked me for this assignment, the head of Doctrinaire security crafted my new identity and logged my clearance and flight plans while I was still on New Columbia. He knew where I was headed before I knew, it seemed. Rather than enter the Dry Docks as Corporal Arlind Marsten or Lieutenant Wayson Harris, both of whom had damning skeletons in their closets, I now traveled as Lieutenant Commander Jeff Brocius of the U.A. Navy assigned to the Central Cygnus Fleet.
I flew a Johnston R-56 Starliner, a 20-seat luxury craft on loan to me from the Doctrinaire fleet. The R-56 was generally flown by corporate pilots. Like every other pair of wings on the Doctrinaire, this R-56 had been outfitted with its own broadcast engine.
“Please state your identity.”
“Lieut
enant Commander Jeff Brocius, U.A. Navy.”
“Lieutenant Commander Brocius, copy. Are there passengers aboard your flight?”
“No, sir.”
“Thank you, Starliner.”
Traffic Control was acting unusually polite and I had a pretty good idea why. Security gave me the name Brocius because Admiral Alden Brocius, the officer-in-command of the Central Cygnus Fleet, was headed to the Golan Dry Docks for the summit. For all the men in the traffic tower knew, I was the admiral’s son or nephew.
“Starliner R-fifty-six, we are under heightened security at this time. Please switch off all onboard controls. Our traffic computers will guide your ship into port.”
“Aye,” I said.
The traffic tower took control of my ship the moment my hands left the panel. Lights turned on and off as traffic control accessed all of my instrumentation. They might discover that I had unusual equipment on board, but they would not know it was a broadcast engine unless they tracked me from millions of miles away. I had disconnected the power after broadcasting in. Without a generator pouring tera-volts into it, the broadcast engine would look like nothing more than spare parts to their security computers.
My ship slowed to a near standstill as it joined the queue waiting to enter the Phase 2 landing bays. Unlike the rest of the platform, Phase 2 of the Golan platform was totally enclosed.
Seen from this side, the Dry Docks had a sleek teardrop shape. The outer skin of the station had a pattern of shining black squares against a flat white base. As I flew closer, I realized that those black squares were enormous solar energy cells.
This side of the Dry Docks facility had three landing bays, each marked by two half-mile wide circular entrances called “apertures.” All ships entering or exiting the docks would have to pass through those doors. As traffic control led me toward one of those openings, I saw the distinctive silver-red of a security laser and knew someone in the dry docks had X-rayed my ship.
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