by B. V. Larson
The Investigator tried to slip out of my grasp. He was surprisingly strong for an older, lanky man. Dust Worlders had always been tough in both mind and body. They lived in a deadly environment such as few humans on Earth ever experienced. The civvies back home were like fattened rabbits by comparison.
But he couldn’t break free. I was hazy-minded, and my hands felt a bit rubbery—but still, my grip was like an iron band around his wrist.
Finally, he relaxed.
“All right,” he said. “We’ll talk now, if you’d like.”
“I’d like that very much, sir,” I said in as friendly a tone as I could muster. “The last I remember, I was falling about two kilometers down into a valley.”
“Yes, exactly... We have sensors up on the rim. The illegal vehicle that transported you here tripped our defensive network. After careful inspection of the site, we realized several individuals must have been involved in some kind of altercation. It was a simple matter to retrieve the bodies from the lake below.”
“Right…” I said, letting go of his wrist.
He withdrew his hand and examined the tip of his syringe. “Surprising dexterity and effectiveness so soon after revival. I shall have to make a note.”
“You do that.”
I was able to see him pretty clearly now, and I was looking around the chamber I’d found myself in. The place looked like a medical lab—Dust World style. The tables were slabs of polished stone.
The Investigator reached out a long arm and snapped on a light. This created a yellowy glow rather than the white glare Earth doctors preferred.
“Uh…” I said, gazing this way and that. “Where’s the revival machine?”
The Investigator shrugged. “Already, my decisions bear the fruit of misfortune.”
“Um… what?”
The Investigator was a pretentious man. He absorbed everything you told him in a deep way, thinking constantly about some third ramification that no one else in the room had yet considered. I figured he was having just such a spell of daydreaming right now.
“They warned me not to do it—not to revive you,” he said. “But I did it anyway.”
“Who warned you?”
“The Council,” he said with a shrug. “Those who seek to advise me in my leadership.”
“Hmm…” I said. “My mind is still a little fuzzy, but I’m catching on now. You can revive people without a machine?”
He made a vague gesture toward a series of stinking vats full of thick liquids.
“The process is somewhat similar to the wet-printing the alien machines perform. We have modified the procedure somewhat, as we only bother to recreate human flesh—the system doesn’t have to work for any biotic morphology. That simplifies the design.”
“Huh…” I said, looking around at his tanks and dripping, oily vats. “If you don’t print people… how do you…?”
“It’s more of a seeding process of our own design. We start with a clean strip of DNA, incubating it until it’s the size of a grain of wheat. Then we allow it spin up into a larger mass. Cell differentiation is encouraged, of course, if not exactly guided. The process is therefore slower, but no less effective.”
When he said the word “slower” I snapped my neck around to look at him.
“How long? How long was I gone?”
“Precisely forty-two days—within the margin of error of an hour or two.”
That was a gut-punch—no one likes to learn they’ve been dead and gone for a long time. It makes a man’s mind wonder about existence. But then again, I’d been dead for as long as two years in the past. Six weeks shouldn’t be a mind-blower for me.
“What about my mind?” I asked. “My memories? They seem whole, up to the point of my death. How did you manage that?”
He pointed at my tapper. “Earthmen all bear these integrated devices. They store memory up to the point of death. We retrieved the data from the arm of your corpse.”
“Yeah…” I said, looking down at my tapper. “Makes sense.”
Standing carefully and stretching, I began rolling my neck and flexing my fingers. The Investigator watched and made a few careful notes.
“I’m surprised at your effectiveness,” he said, “and even more so by your calm demeanor. Past test subjects didn’t become fully functional so quickly.”
“They probably haven’t died as many times as I have,” I said. “You get your head wrapped around it eventually, and it doesn’t bother you.”
He stepped close again, peering into my eyes. He was only about five centimeters shorter than I was—a rare thing at my height—which allowed him to study me face to face like few could.
“Death and life don’t intrigue you? How is this possible? Most humans are obsessed with these things.”
“Yup—but not me. Dying is old news for the likes of James McGill. To me, the process is akin to going to sleep and waking up again.”
“An interesting adaptation…” he said, walking around me and squeezing my bare arms now and then, poking at my flesh as if to test its quality.
It was weird, but I let him do it. After all, I did owe him my life. He was fascinated by me—he always had been.
“Do you ever wonder where you mind goes every night?” I asked him. “Are you really yourself then, or are you partially dead—or at least in suspended animation?”
“You’re equating our natural comatose state with non-existence,” he continued as he crept around me. “In a way, the analogy holds up. When we sleep, we’re out of control, unaware, and generally motionless.”
“Right…” I said, but my eyes began to wander. I was becoming bored with the Investigator and his odd ways.
Looking at his various tanks and vats of goop, I frowned. “You know… this entire operation is a Galactic violation. You can’t just build your own revival machine.”
“I’ve explained to you the critical differences in my process. My efforts in no way represent an attempt to duplicate currently patented technology.”
“Um… right. But that’s not how the Galactics will see it. They’ll consider this a clear criminal case.”
He stopped pacing around me and checking me over like some kind of prized pig. Instead, his eyes came up to meet mine again.
“Are you thinking of reporting this incident?”
I jutted out my chin and thought it over. “No,” I said at last. “No, I would never do that. Not for several reasons.”
“One being the fact that you’re now an illegal grow? A deviation which the Empire would deal with harshly?”
“Yeah… that would be reason number one,” I admitted. “But there’s also the fact that I don’t want Dust World to be erased. My own daughter is staying here now. On a larger scale, and perhaps most important, humanity as a whole may be held liable and condemned for your shenanigans.”
I’d meant to slip in the bit about my wayward child casually, but the Investigator took immediate notice. Like I said, he wasn’t born yesterday.
He drew back a step. “Etta? You are here to run her down, then? She told me she suspected as much the moment she learned of your arrival. I’d thought that might be a delusion of hers.”
“Nope… she’s right,” I said, deciding to come clean. “I came here to see Etta.”
The Investigator studied me closely, and at last, he seemed satisfied. He was a walking, breathing lie-detector. That’s why I’d gone with the truth in all my dealings with him so far.
Nodding, he went back to poking at me.
“Say, Doc?” I said. “You got any clothes I can put on?”
“Is it too cold in here?”
“Nope. But on Earth, most of us don’t wander around naked all the time. I’m not used to it.”
He waved toward a dusty row of lockers, and I helped myself. After pulling on some stained coveralls, I felt better.
“Does Etta know I’m alive again?” I asked.
“She’s known for weeks. She’s come here, now and then, t
o study your form as it floated and slowly expanded in the tanks.”
For some reason, that made my lip curl. I didn’t like the idea of my little girl seeing me in such a sorry state. But, what was done was done.
“Can I go see her, then?”
He looked at me in surprise and spread his long-fingered hands wide.
“It’s nothing to me. You’ve got the right to walk among us.”
“And this place—this process you’ve developed—that will all stay secret. I won’t tell anyone about it.”
He nodded, and I turned to go. I felt his strange eyes on my back. They crawled there while his mind filled with unfathomable thoughts.
“One more thing, McGill,” he called after me.
Reluctantly, I turned back to face him from the doorway.
His glowing blue eyes captured my gaze. He aimed a long arm at the vats, and he extended a single index finger.
“What about the next man in the vats? Have you no curiosity about him?”
Alarmed, I turned back. Six fast strides took me to the tanks again, where I gazed down into the murky liquid.
There he was, sleeping in a tank of oily amber gels.
That face—I’d know it anywhere.
The Investigator was reviving Claver.
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The new Claver looked fully-formed. He couldn’t be far behind me in the process.
“He looks like he’s fully cooked,” I said. “How long until he wakes up?”
The Investigator made a vague gesture. “This isn’t yet a precise science for us. We planted a seed, and we fed it. The fruition should come soon—he was planted the same day you were. In fact, most of my staff thought he would quicken before you as his total biomass is considerably less.
I stared down at Claver, frowning.
“This isn’t the man I fought up on the rim,” I said. “He’s not a Class Three.”
“A what?”
“Claver creates many clones of himself. Some of them operate with reduced mental capacities—most of them, in fact. The men you found flying that flitter up there on the rim were Class Threes. This man… I think he’s a Prime.”
The Investigator came near and stood with me, gazing down at the thing in his tanks. Now and then, a puff of bubbles rolled out of the nostrils. They were feeding him oxygen somehow.
“I don’t understand your accusations. We took a DNA sample from the man who fell. There were no others.”
“No second man? No one up there, wounded?”
“No.”
My eyes searched the chamber, but I didn’t notice anything that clarified the situation.
“I don’t understand…” I said. “Claver clones himself illegally all the time. He has a base on a planet full of variations of himself. But how could one of those dumb, muscle-bound Class Threes be carrying the DNA of the original?”
“Ah… it’s very possible,” the Investigator said. His strangely lit eyes were wide, excited. My words seemed to have filled him with curiosity. “He must be manipulating the DNA during processing—as opposed to before setting the original seed. I want to meet this man and study his science.”
I shook my head. “No, I don’t think you do. If he has any cool tech gadgetry, rest assured he didn’t develop it himself. He either bought it or stole it. He’s no scientist. He’s more like an interstellar pirate.”
“Hmm…” the Investigator said, looking a bit disappointed, “I suppose I only have to wait for a time and ask this clone more about it.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“So you said… Didn’t you have a visitation to perform?”
“You mean with Etta? Where’s she living now?”
“In the Grand Cave, most likely. Earth has softened her somewhat. She doesn’t like the heat and dust as she once did. She haunts the shores of our lake and the coolest depths of our caverns, avoiding the blazing eye of our sun.”
“Yeah…” I said, thinking about it. “I guess I’ll be going. I’m looking forward to catching up with her.”
Before leaving, I considered asking the Investigator to stay quiet about my presence on Dust World, but I passed on the idea. He would do whatever he wanted anyway, and he wasn’t a man who was prone to lying. It probably didn’t even occur to him to speak anything other than what he saw as the truth. He was brutally honest, but he wasn’t always right about his take on things.
I left him there, poking at the Claver he was growing in his vats. If Claver was about to wake up, I didn’t want to be around when he did.
Moving through the tunnels, I found the denizens of Dust World inclined to stare at an Earthman in their midst. I would have thought it was rude if I hadn’t been familiar with their habits. They didn’t know it was rude to stare.
After checking out the Grand Cave and making a few inquiries, I found Etta wasn’t there. Moving up through the passages and galleries, I made my way to the surface.
There, along the lakeshore, I saw swampy ground. Bulbous growths, most of them bearing large fleshy-flowers, flourished everywhere. These plants stood over three meters tall.
Avoiding the relatively quiet beaches, I made my way to the overgrown spots. I sought land that was overgrown, mushy.
It wasn’t long before I found Etta. She wasn’t trying to hide, fortunately. If she had been squatting out here in these alien reeds, I’d never have found her.
Instead, I found her crouching over a pile of bones—very large bones.
I approached her quietly from behind, but she heard me before I reached her. It’s hard to sneak up on someone when you’ve got huge feet and squelching mud to contend with.
Her head jerked to the side, and a blade appeared in her hand. But then she saw me, and she relaxed and put the knife down again. She went back to arranging her bones.
“Come see what I found, Father,” she said.
Wading in up to my knees in the mud, I sloshed closer and stood over her, dripping.
Her form reminded me of Della’s, but Etta was at least ten centimeters taller. Together, we examined the bulky skeleton she was assembling. The bones didn’t look human. They were too big. They were as thick as a horse’s bones.
But the skull gave it all away. It was clearly humanoid, but twice the size of any man’s. It looked like the skull of some long-extinct great ape.
“Is that…?” I began. “Is that a heavy trooper? A Blood-Worlder?”
“Yes. That’s right.”
“Where’d you find him?”
She stood up and faced me for the first time. She swept the valley with her arm. “Don’t you recognize this place? Something like thirty years back, you fought right here. Maybe you killed this littermate yourself. There’s no sign of the usual nanite-etching Dust Worlder weapons leave behind on a victim’s bones. Just a few broken ribs over the heart. I think he was shot to death.”
“That does sound like the work of the legions,” I agreed.
For a few moments, we didn’t speak. We just stood side by side and gazed at the bizarre specimen that was splayed on the big flat rock at our feet. Back on Earth, Etta had exhibited a strange fascination with digging up bones out in the marsh. I’d always hoped she’d get over it—but I guess she hadn’t.
I didn’t say anything because part of me was enjoying the moment. I’d felt for months like I’d lost my daughter. This activity, as morbid as it was, felt homey to me. I didn’t want the feeling to end.
“I wondered if you would come out here after me—and you did,” she said in a quiet voice.
“There was never any doubt of it,” I lied firmly. When you lie to family, you have to go whole-hog. You can’t have any reservations, no hemming or hawing. They know you too well for that.
“How’d you get out here?” she asked. “Did you die knowing my grandfather could be convinced to revive you?”
I blinked. In a way, that was exactly what I’d done. That hadn’t been my intention of course, but things had turned out that way.<
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Shrugging, I nodded. “That’s right. I arranged for the Investigator to get my DNA, knowing he could revive me. Then I offed myself and zap, after a regrow I’m on Dust World.”
Etta leaned close, suddenly, and she wrapped her arms around me. My privates were doing a dance of fear, I don’t mind telling you. The girl was mean with a blade.
But I let her hug me, and I patted her awkwardly.
Was she crying? I thought she was, just a little.
“I’m sorry Daddy,” she said. “I shouldn’t have run out on you. I guess I was in a bad mood.”
“I’ll say.”
“But Claver told me about the book. About the poison—and about Earth’s plans to use it.”
My mouth opened up to say something, but then it clamped shut.
The book in question was called The Eaters of Lotus, and it hid inside its pages the chemical code for a deadly genetic poison. Floramel had figured all that out while I was off running around on Dark World last year.
I’d known all about that—but I hadn’t known about any plans by Earth to use this bio-weapon.
“Uh…” I said. “What did Claver tell you, exactly? About Earth’s plans?”
“Just that Central wanted to weaponize some kind of spore. That the weapon would be released and allowed to hollow out the populations of the Core Worlds.”
I peered down at Etta, wondering if it could be true. Claver knew things, secret things—but he was also frequently full of shit.
“Is all that stuff true, Dad?” she asked me.
“I think it might be,” I said. “The book and the poison definitely exist.”
She nodded, and she knelt again over her bones. She had dug out a plastic-wrapped package.
“This is it,” she said, handing it up to me. “The real book. There’s no cover—but the contents are still there. I took it because… because I didn’t want to let anyone have such terrible power.”
“But didn’t you sell it to Claver? And give him a fake one?”
She looked a little shy. “I needed the money.”
“Right… to come out here. Are you happy on Dust World? There’s some pretty good swamp-land.”
