Planet Origins

by Lucia Ashta

  Dolpheus must have been thinking some of my same thoughts because he didn’t ask the question she was waiting for us to ask of her either. He waited, and I waited. Neither one of us were particularly patient men, although Dolpheus was more measured than I. But I knew how to play this game, now that she insisted on playing it.

  She waited too. Finally, she tucked her chin toward her chest a bit, arched her eyebrows slightly, and smiled in a maneuver that she must have meant to be seductive, and under different circumstances, might have been. “So, aren’t you going to ask me whether I’ll give you this information or not?”

  I waited for Dolpheus. I wasn’t in the mood for diplomacy, and gruffness probably wouldn’t get us nearly as far as its opposite.

  “I figured you’d tell us,” he said.

  She swirled her hips a bit in a flirtatious move that would have been more effective had she been wearing a dress and not a lab suit. “And do you want me to tell you?”

  I looked at her, my face impassive, willing what I really thought of these childish games to remain concealed.

  “I’m sure I speak for Tan in saying that yes, we’d very much like that. He’s been longing for his beloved for a long time. It’s important to him to return her to safety.”

  “Perhaps she’s safer where she is than she would be here.” She said this with a lightness that had the same effect on me as metal scraping against stone. I wouldn’t be able to do this much longer. I’d been on edge since Ilara’s disappearance. I hadn’t snapped yet, and I hoped that I wouldn’t, but she was pushing the wrong buttons right now, and it looked as if she had every intention of continuing without realizing what a dangerous prospect it was.

  “Whether she’s safer on or off of O depends greatly on where she is, which we don’t know. However, it’s clear that our planet would be safer with her back on it. The safety and well-being of all the citizens of Origins may depend upon her return.”

  “Hmmm,” was all she said. She’d already shown herself intelligent enough to work out the reasons on her own. It was impossible to predict how rule under my father would be, but he was unlikely to put the needs of Oers over his own. Ilara, however, felt the need to protect Planet Origins coursing within her blood. If someone was to replace King Oderon on the throne, I’d want it to be Ilara, even if she weren’t my lover. And if neither my father nor Ilara took the throne, Ilara’s survival would reinforce King Oderon’s rule. We’d all experienced his rule for centuries. Even though he wasn’t as generous as I knew Ilara to be, he was more generous than my father. His rule had been mostly fair.

  “So my helping you would be a matter of state?” She chuckled lightly and began to step back and forth.

  “It would,” Dolpheus said.

  “What would I get in return if I decided to help you?”

  I glared at her and didn’t care if she noticed, which she didn’t seem to. Why did people always need something in return? Why did they always think of themselves before the good of others? This seemed to be the prevalent attitude of Oers, beginning with the courtiers all the way down to the workers, although it was worse with the courtiers, those that had more than they needed. Greed and selfishness was as prevalent across O as any infectious disease. It repulsed me. There were times for looking out for oneself, and there were just as many times when that shouldn’t be the priority.

  I was grateful Dolpheus had insisted on joining me on this journey. I probably would have throttled the selfish, flirtatious look right off of Lila’s pretty face by now.

  “Your freedom,” Dolpheus said, and by how he said it, I knew he was sharing some of my resentment.

  Lila didn’t like Dolpheus’ answer. “What you’ve done here is wrong,” she said. “You taking me by force was wrong. You should free me just because it’s the right thing to do.”

  Where had her sense of absolutes been just seconds before, when she was willing to leave a princess, a woman, alone and abandoned on a planet that could be much more dangerous than our own?

  “We didn’t want to take you against your will. We really didn’t. Our actions were forced. We’ve apologized for how things worked out.”

  Her look was suddenly petulant. I’d known enough women to understand that their moods could change quickly and unpredictably. But this woman changed faster than the weather on O.

  “No, you haven’t apologized.”

  “Oh? I thought we had,” Dolpheus said. “I’m sorry, truly.”

  “As am I,” I said. “We had no desire to hurt you in any way.” I meant it, even though I didn’t think apologies counted for much when we were still threatening her life. It seemed that she’d really forgotten this part. Just because our swords and knives were sheathed made us no less dangerous. I once watched Dolpheus kill a moab, the most ferocious of beasts, with his bare hands when they were the only weapon available to him.

  She appeared convinced by the earnestness of our apologies and allowed them to appease her. “I will help you,” she said a little too soon. She circled us in a languid walk. Her theatrics would have fooled only an amateur. Perhaps she was younger than I’d originally thought. The years of life on Planet O beat upon most people’s sense of naïveté until they killed it.

  She returned from her jaunt to face us. “But you will have to allow me to return to the lab right now.”

  “We can’t do that,” Dolpheus said.

  We couldn’t. There was no chance that we would.

  “They’ll have noticed me missing by now. They’ll wonder where I am and raise the alarm.”

  “Were you supposed to get off at the setting of the Suxle Sun?” Dolpheus asked.

  Most work shifts were tailored around the Suxle Sun and the Auxle Sun. The Suxle shift was eighteen hours long, three longer than the Auxle shift. Yet the Auxle shift was the less desirable one. It was shorter to make up for its lack of appeal; if not, no employees would want to work the shift that had most others sleeping.

  “No. I was scheduled to work though to the setting of Auxle.”

  She was lying. It was reassuring to see that she wasn’t all that good at it.

  “So you were scheduled to work a double shift? Since we ran into you when the Suxle Sun was still up,” Dolpheus said. A double shift would be nearly thirty-three hours long. For obvious reasons, they were rare and mostly reserved for emergency situations.

  “I was.” She didn’t meet our eyes, pretending to be interested in our surroundings.

  “I see,” Dolpheus said. “What will they do once they discover you gone when you’re scheduled to work?”

  She looked straight at him. “They’ll review the security footage to see what happened to me.”

  She was lying again. I’d checked for the telltale signs that security recordings were underway. When a recorder was present, light reflected off its surface a bit differently than its surroundings. If you knew where and how to look, a recorder would be shinier than the surrounding wall, even if the wall itself was reflective. The surface of the recorder was made of a different material, and I could locate it, even if the differences that made it stand out were minute.

  There were no recorders in the lab or the hallways. I’d made sure to check. I wasn’t surprised by their absence even though most high-security places incorporated them into their basic construction. Father didn’t like to leave a trail of his actions. He was more secretive than anyone in the royal family could ever possibly be. He didn’t risk the discovery of his many secrets. I knew little of them other than to know that he had them, and I was his son. There were no recorders in the splicing facility, just as there were no recorders in our house, not because he trusted others, but precisely because he didn’t. He wanted no one watching him. He was assured enough in the security of his buildings to assume that no one could ever break into them. He didn’t need recorders. He didn’t want them.

  Dolpheus knew all this as well as I did, but he didn’t call her out. “Then I guess that’s a risk we’ll have to take. We can’t s
end you back in there now.”

  “And why not?” Her tone was defensive as if she were a dear friend and we were betraying the trust essential to all good friendships.

  This time, I chuckled. “Because we don’t know that we can trust you.” I said the obvious.

  “But you can trust me!”

  “How do we know that?” Dolpheus asked.

  “Because I’m telling you that you can.” Now she was angry.

  What emotion would come next? I wondered.

  “And why can we trust you? Why do you want to help us?” Dolpheus said.

  “Because I want to see the splicing facility destroyed.” She said this with convincing spite.

  Finally, we were getting somewhere.

  Twenty-Seven

  Women could be some of the most dangerous of creatures—if they were the vengeful type, the kind that remembered a wrong as long as they lived. If you wronged this kind of woman, you needed to be on guard as much as if an enemy dispatched its assassins to kill you. The right type of woman—or the wrong type—would hunt you down to set right whatever she viewed as wrong. She was unrelenting in her fury.

  No one told me this. I learned it on my own, from observing the dealings of angered women with others, before I’d made the mistake of offending one of these dragons myself. I could see from the fire burning behind Lila’s otherwise ordinary eyes that she was one of these women. The kind with which you needed to be careful. The kind that it was easier not to befriend to avoid the risk of any misstep.

  Lila hid it well. Nothing about her appeared to be extraordinary. Her face and body were modestly attractive, but I wouldn’t have given her a second look if she weren’t our reluctant captive. Still, even though nothing stood out about her at first glance, I was surprised my father hadn’t recognized her potential for betrayal. He too was wary of women like her. Only a fool of a man wouldn’t be. My father was many things, but a fool he wasn’t. Perhaps he didn’t know her well, an employee too far down the ladder to cross his path often. But even so, it was strange. My father didn’t take unnecessary risks. It made more sense for him to screen every one of the employees that worked in his lab personally. Personality was as important a condition for employment as skill in science and technological advancement.

  Something about Lila wasn’t adding up, apart from her obvious lies. I just didn’t know what. I didn’t know enough about my father’s splicing facility to understand what within it could cause her to erupt like this. What about it all was so terrible that she would want to see my father’s splicing empire crumble? We’d have to unearth what this was about, and we’d have to do so carefully now that we realized we were dealing with a dragon that would burn us as readily as she wanted to destroy my father.

  “Why do you want to destroy the splicing facility?” Dolpheus asked the obvious question with admirable composure. He was cool as if he didn’t care one way or the other whether she did or not.

  Lila crossed her arms across her chest and pouted. It seemed that her grand statement of intent hadn’t received the response from us that she wanted. “Because it’s evil.” She looked straight us, defiance blazing in her eyes.

  Neither Dolpheus nor I were about to contradict her, at least not outwardly. Evil seemed like a strong word to describe my father’s splicing empire. My father was a different man than he’d been when I was a child, before my mother left us in the middle of the night when I was eight, soon after my father made breakthroughs in splicing and foresaw the potential of fortune and ease for our family, something we hadn’t yet had.

  Even though I have few memories of the time with my mother, some of them are tinged with sorrow. I remember my mother crying, begging my father to do something which he wouldn’t do. I never learned what. Still, even though things hadn’t been perfect between my parents, they’d been good enough from what I could see. I was shocked—and heartbroken—when she left us. I’d done my best to recover. But I didn’t think my father ever did. After she left, he changed in a way that even I, as a boy, noticed. The change was slow and gradual at first, but then, at a point I can’t define, he ceased to be the father I’d known to become the man he was now.

  Still, he wasn’t evil. Unsympathetic, unmerciful, and unyielding, yes. He was all of these things and more. But these qualities weren’t evil. I didn’t trust in my father’s ability to make good judgments, but I didn’t think he would create something evil. I didn’t want to believe that he could. If he could do something evil, didn’t that somehow taint me in a way that ran so deep that I couldn’t run from it? Or maybe it had nothing to do with me. He morphed after he began to experiment with splicing, not before, when I was already a person of my own. Did that spare me from the infectious spread of evil or any of its lesser alternatives?

  Saying the splicing facility was evil was an accusation leveled at my father. Lila could have been considered either stupid or trusting for making this statement in front of us. My father would see her punished for it if he ever found out. Yet Lila had revealed enough of her true self already to know that she was neither stupid nor trusting. So what was she up to?

  “Why do you think the splicing facility is evil?” Dolpheus asked. Yeah, tell us, I thought.

  Lila hesitated, and I could see the reasons why scroll across her face. She wanted to tell us. A dragon woman always wanted to vent what she saw as her righteous anger; a willing ear fueled the fire within. But Dolpheus and I outmatched Lila. If she told us what she knew, she gave up whatever leverage she had over us.

  When she opened her mouth to speak, I wondered which of the two had won out: anger or prudence.

  “Because of what it does to people.”

  Ah. So she was trying to compromise and walk the line between both.

  “And what does it do to people?”

  “It changes them.” She looked away. She uncrossed her arms. Her shoulders relaxed. She might have chosen truth or at least some version of it.

  “How does it change them?” Dolpheus asked. Was she going to make us draw it out of her question by question?

  “Their personalities change.”

  “How?”

  She looked at Dolpheus. “Lots of little changes happen, but it distills down to the person becoming meaner, less pleasant to be around, more prone to anger, more close-minded and less understanding.” She shifted her eyes toward me. “I’ve noticed these changes in your father over the years. Haven’t you?”

  I nodded, slowly, hesitantly. “I have.” She worked with him closely then.

  “Didn’t you ever wonder why he was changing?”

  I wasn’t prepared to talk about my father in this way. I hadn’t expected the conversation to turn in a personal direction. I didn’t spend too much time thinking about it though; I allowed myself to speak the truth. I wasn’t embarrassed about revealing anything that showed weakness in front of Dolpheus. But I normally wouldn’t in front of someone like Lila. I did anyway, and I didn’t know why. Maybe it was because I knew we still might have to kill her.

  “I thought it was because my mother left him.”

  “I wasn’t working for him then. But I’m certain that his woman leaving isn’t the reason for the person he’s become. I work in statistics and record keeping. I work in the department that monitors all clients of the splicing lab—and your father, when he allows it. We monitor clients every three months. We check them out and probe from top to bottom. And I can tell you without a doubt that each time a person is spliced, a change takes place.”

  “A change in personality?” Dolpheus asked.

  “Something like that.” Lila’s attitude had shifted. She now seemed earnest.

  I allowed myself to believe what she was saying—for now, at least. I knew next to nothing of splicing. The information she possessed was worth sand, lots and lots of sand, if any of what she said was true. It would be enough to trade for Ilara.

  “Their biorhythms are altered, although your father would deny this. Their bodily function
s appear normal, but there’s something different about them after they’ve been spliced. Nothing in the lab results will support this conclusion, but I know it. Each time we do a splice, we have to slow down the body’s normal functions enough so that we can remove the eternality. We have to remove the eternality from the body to affect the splice, which is a tricky thing to do. We can’t do the splice with the eternality within the body. It doesn’t work. If we split the eternality with it still in the body, the body dies. The body senses that the eternality has been damaged, and it shuts down because a body can’t survive without it. But if we remove the eternality, then we can split a piece of it off. Then, when we reinsert the eternality back into the body, the body doesn’t react as if a piece of it were missing. It reintegrates the eternality.”

  “Did my father experiment on people to figure this out?” I asked.

  “Oh yeah. Lots of people died until he figured out that the eternality had to be removed for the splicing to be effective.” Lila didn’t seem bothered by this fact. “We experimented on rebels, so no one missed them when they died.”

  This didn’t seem to be the part Lila considered evil. A pit of dread began to fester deep within my stomach. If experimenting on unwilling rebels and killing them didn’t bother Lila at all, I didn’t want to imagine how awful something would have to be for her to consider it evil. My stomach churned.

  “To do a proper splice, we have to slow the body down so much that it enters a state of stasis. We lower the heart rate. We slow down the brain waves so that they’re only active in maintaining the body’s basic functions, those needed to keep it alive. There are no actual thoughts. We lower the respiration so that the person breathes only the minimum to maintain life. We fully express the intestinal system so it’s free of any residue so that the body doesn’t direct any energy toward digestion. You get the idea. We do everything necessary to slow down the body.”