“Anything,” Archie said.
“You don’t believe I have a soul,” I said. I did not really care about whether or not I actually had a soul. I had made it this far without one. But the prejudice bothered me. I had come to help these people. If they considered me less than human, that bothered me a lot.
Archie Freeman stood silent and still as a tree and stared into my eyes. He had dark brown eyes that had yellowed. His eyes were bloodshot and appeared tired and full of intelligence. Staring into those eyes, I decided that Archie Freeman might give in to prejudice, but he would never knowingly lie.
“No, son, I don’t believe you have a soul.”
“Science can create life, but it cannot create a soul?” I asked. “Is that what you believe?”
“Science cannot create life,” Archie said.
“I’m alive,” I said, “and I’m a work of science.”
“I am not trying to judge you, Mr. Harris. I’m sorry for what I said. It was an awful thing to say. I don’t suppose I can ever take it back. No man can tame the tongue. It is a little member that boasts great things.” I did not know if this last bit was poetry or philosophy or scripture, but Archie sounded sad as he quoted it.
“Don’t judge me, judge science. I crawled out of a tube, not a womb. What does your gospel say about that?” Yes, I was spoiling for a fight with a man who had come to apologize to me. I was mad. I was offended. I knew I was wrong, and I did not care.
“Mr. Harris, I don’t pretend to understand cloning. I am a minister, and I have spent the last fifty years of my life on barren planets cut off from men and the galaxy.”
“But you don’t think science can create life through cloning?” I asked.
“Cloning doesn’t create life, it duplicates it,” Archie said. “If I have a fire, and you hold a stick over the flames until it catches on fire as well, you haven’t created a new fire, you’ve simply borrowed a flame from me.
“They didn’t create life when they made you, Mr. Harris. They borrowed genes from one of God’s creations . . . somebody who had a soul. You got his hair and his skin, and his eyes, but I do not believe you got his soul. I don’t believe his soul was embedded in that DNA.
“Now I think it’s real nice that you and Raymond came to rescue us. And I am grateful that you have been so generous. You appear to be a man of great virtue, though if you are associated with my son, you are probably a professional killer. But unless science has identified the gene that holds the soul, I see no reason to believe that you are anything more or less than a temporal man . . . a body with an Earthly spark of life and no chance for eternity.”
I thought about Shannon quoting Nietzsche to that archbishop, telling him that no man has a soul. I thought about pointing out that there was a time when white men thought that black men had no souls. None of this mattered. I asked Archie what he believed, and he gave me an honest answer.
“I came to apologize for what I said, Mr. Harris. I am extremely sorry about what I said on your ship. I hope you will accept my apology.” Having said this, Archie turned and walked away.
“That’s not exactly what he told everybody else about you,” Marianne said as she came around the corner.
“You were listening?” I asked, feeling ashamed.
She smiled at me; and her dark eyes, so much like her father’s, seemed to stretch wider with her smile. “He is my father.”
“And that makes eavesdropping alright?”
“Yes,” she hesitated and spoke slowly as if trying to make up her mind. Then, with more certainty, “Yes, it does.”
“What did he say to everybody else?”
“The night you landed, we held a town meeting.”
“I know. I was there for some of it. I left and you followed me and we talked.”
“No,” Marianne said, “that was an open meeting. After you and Raymond left, Archie held a closed meeting, just for the men.”
“And you listened in?”
“Do you want to hear what he said or not?”
“What did he say?” I asked.
“People were scared of you. They said that cloning is an abomination. Archie said that incest is an abomination.”
“That makes me feel better,” I said.
“You don’t understand. Do you read the Bible?”
“Do you follow current events on the mediaLink?”
“Wayson, you’re such an ass.”
“Sorry.”
“Have you heard of Lot?” Marianne asked.
“Sodom and Gomorrah,” I said. “His wife looked back and turned into a pillar of salt. You don’t need to read the Bible to know that story.”
“Do you know that after his wife died, Lot’s daughters got him drunk and seduced him? They had two sons and both sons created nations.”
“Unless they were cloned, I don’t see what that has to do with me,” I said.
“One of those nations was Moab,” said Marianne. “A woman from Moab married a Jew. Her great-grandson was King David.”
“So?” I asked. I had heard of David and Goliath. I knew he wrote the Psalms. “What does any of that have to do with cloning?”
Jesus was a descendent of David. Had it not been for Lot’s daughters, Jesus would not have been born.
“Don’t you see, Archie justified you? He said that righteous ends can come from evil means.”
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
The errand was not dangerous. All I was doing was broadcasting out to the middle of nowhere to take some radar readings and locate the Grant. I would not broadcast anywhere near its course, and unless they were looking for a broadcast signature, they would not detect me. If they did detect me, I would broadcast out before they reached me. If they reached me, they still wanted my ship intact. They could not risk shooting at me.
Ray came into the cockpit. Marianne loaded some food in the Starliner’s galley as I prepared to take off. The last people on the Starliner were Archie and Caleb, Marianne’s son. Over the last few days, Caleb had become my shadow, my helper, and my unofficial second-in-command. The boy was twelve years old, far too tall for his age, and headed toward another growth spurt. He liked to ask questions and watch his surroundings with great curiosity.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Marianne asked.
“I’m going along for the ride,” he said.
“You’re not going anywhere,” Marianne said.
“That’s what I told him,” Archie said.
“He’s with me,” I said.
She stared at me as if making sure I was serious. Caleb grinned like a child and squeezed around her as he made his way toward the cockpit. Marianne gave me a nasty look and climbed out of the Starliner.
“Go sit back there,” Ray said, pointing back to the cabin. Caleb and Archie sat on the same row. Caleb sat by the wall and stared out the window. Archie sat by the aisle and watched Ray and me.
“He’s adopting you,” Ray said. “You know that, don’t you?”
Taking a break from my instruments, I looked back at Caleb. I could only see the back of his head. I imagined that he was smiling, excited to fly into space.
“I don’t know much about families,” I said. “Is that what they call it?” I flipped a switch and brought the controls on line. I would take off in another minute.
“When a fatherless boy starts following you around, he’s looking for more than a friend,” Ray said. He glanced at Marianne, who was standing in the door of the meetinghouse. “She and Caleb are alone. Unless you want to live here on Little Man, you’d better let Marianne know you’re not here to stay.”
“You lost me,” I said. “Let’s square things with the Grant, then we can talk family.”
So Ray sat cramped in his seat and watched me. I stole a peek at Caleb. Had he pressed his face into the window any harder, he might have broken the glass. Seeing the boy made me laugh.
“Harris,” Freeman said, “this colony is a different world from your old clone farm. Nothing
goes to waste here.”
“Meaning?” I asked.
“Marianne is looking for a husband,” Freeman said. “Her boy needs a father and you’re available.”
“I’m a clone,” I said.
“You see any other options?” Ray asked.
Stewing over Freeman’s warning, I looked back at Caleb. Archie was glaring at him, but he looked out the window and pretended not to notice. So now Ray wanted to play the role of the protective brother.
I did not want to settle down on a cozy little planet with a family. It might have been my military upbringing or the neural program that made Liberators what they were, but I could not imagine life on a farm.
“She could come with us,” I said, thinking I had found a workable alternative. “We could take them to Earth or to . . . some other planet.”
Freeman shook his head. “She doesn’t want to get out. She wants to bring you in.”
“Ray, the boy is just coming along for the ride,” I said.
“Just know what you’re getting into,” Freeman said. “Marianne isn’t just scrub you met on the beach.” Having delivered his warning, he left the cockpit and climbed out of the ship. His job was to scout the area around the farm. We needed to know where the Grant would send its landing party and how we could defend ourselves.
“You want to sit up here?” I asked Caleb.
His smile brightened and he trotted into the cockpit. He sat in the copilot’s seat.
Archie stood hunched in the door of the cockpit. Caleb and he watched every move I made as I pressed buttons and flipped switches. “What is that for?” “How about that one?” Caleb asked questions like a six-year-old, but he stored up the details like an adult. Archie watched in silence.
When I powered up the broadcast computer, Caleb’s face lit up. “What is that?” he asked.
“This,” I said, “is the reason we can still travel when the rest of the galaxy is stuck in one place. This is a broadcast computer. It lets us go places without having to fly there.”
“Without having to fly?” he asked.
“I tell this computer where I want to go and it puts us right there.”
“That’s the part that scares me,” Archie said.
I was afraid Caleb would ask for details, but he didn’t. Instead, he hovered over the computer and pieced together how it worked. “How do you tell it where to go?”
I showed him how to translate interactive maps into coordinates. “Going to a planet is easy. The computer has coordinates for every star and planet in the galaxy.” I thought I would impress the boy. I mostly ignored Archie. “The hard part is if you want to fly to a pinpoint location, like a certain spot right above a planet. You don’t always aim at something big like a planet. Sometimes you have to fine tune it.”
“Like into deep space?” Caleb asked. “Like where we are now?”
“There used to be a space station called the Golan Dry Docks,” I said. “It was top secret. If you wanted to broadcast yourself there, you needed to put in the coordinates yourself.”
And then I remembered a story that I thought he would find interesting. “You heard there was a war, right? That was the reason your uncle and I came to Delphi.”
“A war against Earth?” Caleb asked.
“Yes, and Earth had this giant ship called the Doctrinaire . It was bigger and stronger than any other ship in the galaxy,” I said. “It was so strong that it could destroy whole fleets of enemy ships. And it had special shields so no other ship could hurt it.”
“So Earth used it to win the war,” Caleb said, his eyes wide with excitement.
“No, Earth lost. The people attacking Earth destroyed that ship with a single shot,” I said. “And they did it with a computer like this.”
We spent two hours on this trip. Caleb and I spent the entire time talking. We could have returned the moment we finished taking the radar readings. Instead, I showed Caleb how the Starliner worked. This fine young man, this kid whose company I so enjoyed, I told him stories from the war. Freeman might have said that I adopted the boy back.
“How can you destroy a ship with a computer?” Archie asked.
“The shields of the Doctrinaire were so strong that nothing could get through them, right? And its cannons were so powerful that it could pick off any ship that came within range. But the captain of the Doctrinaire kept the ship in one place while the smaller ships in his fleet chased the enemy.”
“Why did he do that?” Caleb asked.
“He was smart. Big ships are not maneuverable. They get into trouble when they move out of position. So Thurston, he used the Doctrinaire like a floating fortress. He wanted to trap the enemy with the Doctrinaire on one side and his cruisers and battleships on the other.
“You never saw anything like it. It looked like the Doctrinaire was falling . . . falling asleep. The ship slid out of formation.” I held my right hand flat to imitate the ship, then let it list the way that the Doctrinaire had done.
“And all of a sudden it just blows up. See, the Mogats, they knew Thurston liked to leave his ship in one place.”
“You’re not saying that they broadcasted another ship into it?” Archie asked. “They killed themselves?”
“And they took the whole damned Unified Authority with them,” I said. “They had a nuclear bomb onboard, but that was just overkill. The anomaly from the broadcast engine probably killed everyone aboard all on its own.”
“Wow,” said Caleb. “And ships can pass through shields when you broadcast them?”
“I don’t understand how it works,” I admitted. “I guess they kind of just appear. I don’t think that cruiser passed through the shields. I think it just appeared inside the other ship.”
Caleb, his eyes still wide, could not think of anything more to ask. He thought about this for several seconds. “So it’s like you’re dead when you’re broadcasting. It’s like you don’t exist for a moment and then you come back to life.” He sounded a little scared.
“It’s safe enough,” I said. “Billions and billions of people have done it. I must have done it a hundred times.”
“But you couldn’t just point to a spot and aim using the computer. How did they know they would hit that ship?” Caleb asked.
I told him about triangulation and how you can calculate an exact target using X, Y, and Z coordinates. Caleb was twelve years old, and he understood the math far better than me. Archie didn’t seem interested. He went back to the passenger cabin.
Caleb asked me if we could manually select a spot near Delphi for our broadcast home. I let him pound out the calculations, enter the coordinates and initiate the broadcast home. If Archie knew who flew us home, he might have prayed for salvation.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Clones are sterile. The military class was never meant to have children. This idea was old when Christ was born. Plato, upon whose writings the Unified Authority’s social structure was based, believed that warriors should live in communes and that their children should be shared. In modern days, military clones were raised in orphanages and they were incapable of having children of their own.
Marianne provided me an escape clause from Plato’s society. She came with a ready-made family, and best of all, I liked the boy.
Five days had passed since the day Archie and I had flown out and seen the Grant. Marianne and I began taking late night walks every evening. We would sit and I would stare into the sky and tell her stories about planets and battles. I told her about Ezer Kri and the Japanese. I told her about Bryce Klyber and how he died so needlessly.
Sometimes I searched space for signs of battles between the Mogats and Confederate Arms. They were out there somewhere, killing each other. More than once, she asked me if I cared who won that war, and I told her that I did not. I lied. I wanted both sides to destroy each other; but if one side had to survive, I preferred a universe with the Confederate Arms rather than Morgan Atkins and his fanatics.
But on this particular n
ight, she said something that sent a warm thrill through me. She said, “Caleb talks about you all the time. He loves you, Wayson.” And she took my hand in her calloused and leathery hand and said, “And I love you.”
I turned toward her, and we kissed. It was an innocent kiss, the kind of kiss that I would imagine grade-school boys give grade-school girls when they decide to be a boyfriend and girlfriend. My lips were closed and my eyes were open, but I felt her warmth and tasted her breath. I had not had tender contact with another human being in years. It made me weak inside.
Had this been Kasara, the girl I met in Hawaii, we would have made love. She would have led me back to her apartment and I would have removed her clothes. Kasara was young and beautiful and had no cares. I felt no longing for Kasara, though I sometimes fantasized about her.
With Marianne, things happened more slowly. We remained outside, sitting on a bench overlooking the farm, exchanging childish kisses and holding hands. She may or may not have known that I wanted more, but she did not offer it to me.
“I love you, Wayson,” she said again.
The sky was dark and the stars showed clear, like pin-prick diamonds laid out on a black velvet sheet. A cooling breeze traveled across the field. I wanted to tell Marianne that I loved her, but I was not sure I knew how to love.
“How do you feel about me and Caleb?” she asked. There was a note of desperation in her voice. It was as if she had given me her best offer and would give up if it wasn’t enough.
“I’ve never had a family,” I said. “I don’t know about love or father-son relations. I like spending time with Caleb. It’s funny. I like to teach him things. I like it when he asks me questions.”
“You’re the closest thing he has ever had to a father,” Marianne said.
“How about me, Wayson? How do you feel about me?” She punctuated that question with a longer, more passionate kiss than the childish kisses she had been giving me. I put my hand upon her waist, but fought the urge to let it travel. Our eyes met and we kissed again.
“Will you stay?” she whispered, and we kissed again.
I wanted to tell her yes. I believed that if I said I would stay, she would have let me make love to her. But at that moment I did not know whether or not I would be able to stay. There was a war going on in the galaxy. There were many wars. The Mogats and Confederate Arms were fighting. Unified Authority fleets still patrolled every arm. The Unified Authority still had the most ships and the most troops, even if the government itself no longer existed. What would have happened if Rome had sunk into the sea and left its legions in Gaul and Carthage?
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