“Out of the system came the Flagits’ soldiers, in equal legions of white and black, in daily batches of a hundred or so, just as they had ordered. From my private laboratory, I looked in on the business from time to time, but after everything had shaken down to a routine, I left things to run themselves. Meanwhile, I indulged my whims and fancies, creating little bits of human fluff and folly to dance about me and delight my senses. And to flatter my immense self-regard.”
And now a haunted look came over Tharp’s features, a look Conn realized he had seen from time to time across the paduay board though he had never thought to question its provenance. “And then, one day, Ermin called me to his operations room. He said something about the heavy troopers not functioning as he wished them to.
“I said I would go to the workshop and test the contents of the vats. There might have been some creepage in the replicity matrix.
“Ermin said he had already examined the matrix. He believed the flaw was in the design.
“It did no good to argue with a Flagit. I said I would reexamine the specifications and run some extrapolations. But he said no to that. I would not understand the problem if I came at it from that end of the process; instead I must see the outcome.
“He wished me to accompany him down to the playing area to see some heavy infantry in action. I would understand the problem and could begin to consider remedies.
“Naturally, I responded to my employer’s wishes. He summoned his observation platform and we went down to the field.”
Again, the image’s eyes met Conn’s and he saw horror and despair. Though the simulacrum of Hallis Tharp had captured him in his youthful prime, the voice might have been that of the old man he became in Bay City as he whispered, “Here is what I found.”
A new scene appeared. Conn realized it must have been recorded by percepts on Ermin’s observation platform as it flew low across a wide expanse of level ground, the white sun of Forlor tiny and bleak in the afternoon sky. They passed over three parallel bands of trenches, the outer one bristling with sharp stakes angled into the ground, then went out over a sea of treeless mud, pocked with craters and deep scars gouged out of the gray slime.
Ahead he saw what looked to be large ripples in the mud, as if the saturated earth had thrown up waves that had solidified in the air. It was only as they flew closer and passed over the first of these off formations that Conn realized that they were lines of corpses, light and heavy troopers, in places piled up three or four deep on top of one another. The mud had so caked their skin and equipment that they were of the same color as the ground into which they were slowly sinking.
The view continued as the platform passed over another stretch of pockmarked ground, but now that Conn’s eyes were tuned to the elements of the scene he noticed the shapes of limbs, heads, torsos. They were everywhere he looked, sunk a little deeper than the bodies heaped up in ranks. Then they came to another line of sodden dead, this one higher and wider, stretching off to either side as far as the platform’s forward-facing percepts showed.
Conn noted that he was automatically counting the corpses, estimating the number of dead soldiers in the sections of each windrow that he could see then extrapolating by the estimated width of the battlefield. He realized that he had already moved beyond thousands into tens of thousands, and still the platform flew on.
Ahead was a low ridge with a long slope leading up to its skyline. Against the dark blue of the sky, Conn could see the outlines of spiked barriers. From behind them, all along the top of the ridge, came pinprick flashes of light. And now came a crackling sound, like someone snapping small sticks at a distance, an immense number of small sticks so that the noise was continuous. It grew louder as the approached, and Conn realized it was the sound of repeating projectile weapons being fired en masse.
The platform slowed as it reached the bottom of the ridge. Here the mud was not so deep and it looked as if heavy drifts of snow coated the lower slopes. But when the projection’s point of view drew closer and at last stood still, Conn saw that the drifts were the mounded bodies of Ermin’s white soldiers, light and heavy infantry mostly, piled so high that they formed a wall all along the base of the hill. Behind the wall of dead stood and crouched more massed ranks, mud smeared, many of them wounded. Conn could see untended gashes and punctures that bled slowly, broken limbs and some men with parts of their faces shot away.
The projectile fire from the top of the ridge continued unabated. He could hear the rounds thumping into the dead and the impacts caused some of the corpses atop the row to twitch or shift position. But Ermin’s recorded voice was drawing Hallis Tharp’s attention to those behind the wall.
“They just stand there,” the voice was saying. “They do not go forward.”
Conn could see a bannerman striding up and down before a long rank of heavy troopers. The infantry stood with their weapons in their hands, ammunition pouches and ration packs slung about their bodies. Their gross faces were slack, their eyes dull as the mud beneath their boots.
The bannerman gestured forcefully toward the wall of dead and the enemy up the slope. His intent was unmistakable but still the troopers did not move to scale the heaped corpses and advance.
“What is wrong with them?” Ermin’s voice cracked at the question’s place of emphasis. “Blathe sits and laughs at me, and your soldiers do not move!”
A captain, distinguishable by the crest on his helmet, pulled a trooper from the line and gestured toward the front. Conn could see the soldier summon an effort, saw a wash of rage pass across the oversized features. But then the emotion faded and was replaced with something like despair. The man stood inert.
The captain drew a hand weapon, placed it at the trooper’s temple, just beneath the rim of the helmet. The officer fired, his weapon’s discharge sounding sharp and loud above the continuing crackle from upslope. The trooper’s head snapped sideways then his knees folded. He seemed to sit down slowly then he fell backwards. The captain called another infantryman forward. The man stolidly advanced two paces and stood, wearing the same look of dull anguish as his dead comrade had before extinction relieved him of all emotion.
But it was not the heavy trooper’s face that Conn was looking at. It was the captain’s. And now he focused on the bannerman. Their skins, like their uniforms and equipment, were all flat white. But their features were identical, as if cast from the same plaster mold. Conn knew that nose, that chin, the shape of those lips: they were his own.
He looked at the heavy trooper’s face as the captain put the muzzle of his weapon to the soldier’s head. Pull the cheekbones a little wider, broaden the forehead, deepen the eye sockets, and that was Conn Labro’s face enlarged and coarsened. The captain’s weapon barked and the soldier collapsed.
“Stop!” Conn heard Hallis Tharp’s voice. “Stop this! What have you done?”
“They must go forward,” Ermin Flagit said, his voice rising to a nasal whine. “You were supposed to give us troops that went forward. We were months preparing our dispositions, now the game is only half over and I’m stopped. Fix it!”
“I made troops that would advance, energized by fury, eager for victory,” Tharp’s voice said. “But not day after day without cease. You have worn them out, as if they were machines and you had run them beyond their maximum ratings until they overheated and their parts seized.”
Another shot sounded as the captain dispatched another ruined trooper.
“Call off the attack,” Tharp said. “Let them rest and recover, purge the toxins from their systems, and they will be renewed to fight again.”
“No!” Ermin Flagit made the single syllable an elongated whine. “Blathe sneers at me! Fix them now! Or make me some new ones, better ones!”
“You were supposed to use them for what they are made for,” Tharp said, “battle and glory and the dignity of arms. Instead you have used them up, wasted them.”
“They are mine. I will do with them as I wish. Now make more and make
them better.”
Tharp spoke but not to answer Ermin. It was as if he addressed himself, or perhaps the creatures he had made and handed over to the Flagits. “I didn’t know,” he said. “I didn’t know they would do this.”
The scene faded and the simulacrum of Tharp reappeared on the dais. “Of course,” he said, “I should have known. But the knowledge would have been... inconvenient. Thus, I never asked. I never looked.”
He sighed. “But now that I had seen it, now that I had smelled it, I could not let it continue. I turned the platform around and returned to the production facility. I assured Ermin I would fix everything and he slunk back to where his brother gloated. The moment he was gone, I went into the facility and stopped it all. I gently terminated the attendants, emptied the generative vats and let the half formed contents expire on the floor. Then I smashed the equipment, destroyed the records and purged the process files.
“Soon after my arrival on Forlor I had gained control of the house integrator’s command complex. It was not difficult. The Flagits knew only how to give orders; they relied on underlings like me to work the levers that delivered their wishes to them, fully formed. I had thought it a wise precaution in case the brothers reneged on our agreement, leaving me their prisoner in a place where they were the only authorities.
“Now I have instructed the integrator to detain them for several days, then allow them to leave in Blathe’s yacht. Ermin’s I will take for my own escape and abandon somewhere.
“I have overflown the battlefield and applied a general mortifacient that is even now gently relieving my creations of their suffering. I have seized and will take with me the encrypted bearer deed to this world and I will instruct the integrator to discourage anyone who chances upon this planet. It will allow only one person to land and enter this terrible house.”
The simulacrum sighed. It was a sound Conn had often heard when he and Hallis Tharp had sat across the paduay board from each other. “I will go now to my laboratory and terminate my poor ephemerals. They would grow despondent if I left them, and I cannot take them to the Ten Thousand Worlds without risking prosecution.
“Then I will go back to the production facility and retrieve the one piece of equipment I did not demolish: the cradle that contains the template for all of the poor creatures I made and allowed to be fed to the Flagits’ cruel appetites.
“I will bring the template to full gestation then take it to a world where it – no, I must say he – can have some reasonable hope of a true and satisfying life. It will not be easy to find a place for such a singular person, but I have an odd little planet in mind that may serve.
“Then I will stay to guide his growth and development as best I can, for as long as I can. Thus will I seek to make one good life come out of the great evil that I did here, and perhaps that will be my atonement. And if he grows into a being who could live at large among other people, and not be a danger to them or to himself, then perhaps in his maturity I will reveal to him his secret and my great shame.”
Again the image’s gaze came to meet Conn’s eyes. “I hope, Conn Labro – for that is what I mean to name you – that you have arrived here as a mature and well founded man, able to face where you have come from and to go on to whatever may be your fulfillment. I hope that I have been able to train you in the discipline of suppressing the rage that is intrinsic to your matrix, the same rage that burned out the legions I supplied to the Flagits.”
Tharp’s image performed a solemn gesture and said, “I swear that I will do all that I can to give you a decent life, and I hope that it will be enough.”
The simulacrum faded. Conn stared at air above the empty dais. The old questions posed by Hallis Tharp replayed themselves in his head: What are you, where do you come from, where do you go?
He had the answers now. I am a template, he told himself. I come from a vat. I have nowhere in particular to go.
He heard Erkatchian stirring beside him. He looked over and found the spacer regarding him with an unsettled expression. “I knew someone,” Conn said, “who said that all societies are built around one of the seven fundamental sins. I did not believe there could be a world founded on anger. Yet here is that world. And I am its sole remaining citizen.”
“That is one way to look at it,” Erkatchian said.
“Do you still want to travel the spaceways with me?”
“Why not? You are still the same Conn Labro I have come to know and respect. Now you’re just a more knowledgeable version.”
“I am not a real human being.”
Erkatchian waved a hand. “You’re more real than many I’ve known, and that certainly includes my current employer. People are what they do, not where they come from. If more of us knew the actual circumstances of our conceptions, I am sure it would reduce our self-regard.”
Conn rose from the seat. “I do not believe I was designed for philosophical debate.”
“All right,” said the spacer, getting up as well. “What will you do?”
“I do not know. Perhaps it would be best if just stay here.”
“My lord Vullamir will not welcome your company.”
“Nor I his. But he will not be here. This world has been used enough for immoral purposes. I will not sell it.”
“What about that girl who is waiting for you on Old Earth?”
“She would be better off with a real human being. What could I give her?”
“A chance to make her own decision.”
Conn waved the issue away. A curious stillness had come over him. His resentment of Hallis Tharp had faded. The man had meant him no harm, had taken him to a world where his peculiarities would be least noticeable and where his innate abilities could win him at least the seeming of a meaningful life. Then Tharp had done his best to expiate the sin of pride that had led him to commit the evil of handing his children over to a pair of monsters who would ill use them.
A thought struck him: He was my father. Tharp had said he had used his own plasm to make the template. And my mother, too, I suppose.
Erkatchian was watching him. Conn said, “Go and tell Vullamir that the transaction is null.”
“You are truly no Thraisian, if you can say that without a tremor in your voice,” Erkatchian said.
“No, I am not, after all, a Transactualist. I am not a Hauserian, nor a Divorgian, nor an Old Earther. I am unique but I am without purpose. No tasks remain for me to perform.”
“On the contrary,” the spacer said, “you are free to be whatever you wish, to set your own tasks and perform them to whatever degree satisfies you.”
“All of it equally meaningless,” said Conn. “I might as well sit here and regard the walls.”
Erkatchian wished to offer more arguments, but Conn waved him away. “Go, please, and inform Vullamir,” he said.
“He will not take it well. On the other hand, after seeing the result of Hallis Tharp’s refusal to ask the questions he should have asked, I find myself less concerned than usual about the degree of my lord’s happiness.”
Conn said, “If Vullamir’s vanity is so grievously offended that he requires satisfaction, I will accommodate him. That is something I do quite well.”
Left to himself in the viewing room, Conn discovered an inclination to explore the rest of the house. He wondered whether Hallis Tharp had instilled in him a predisposition to explore his environment and decided after a moment’s reflection that of course he had done so. An urge to know what was around him would be useful in a soldier.
Is this how it is to be from now on? he asked himself. Will I scrutinize my every impulse to seek the finger marks of Hallis Tharp? Still, he saw no reason not to give in to the impulse. “Integrator,” he said.
“What do you require?”
“A map of the house, with explanatory labels.”
A color coded chart appeared, superimposed on the air. Conn studied it for a few minims then said, “Have it follow me.” He set off.
He glanced through
an archway that led into the Flagits’ sprawling quarters, but declined to enter; their garish, sybaritic extravagance repelled him. He went down the hall and up an ascender to the top of the house. He paused before a simple door then opened it and stepped through. He found himself in a well apportioned workroom, although all the apparatuses had been smashed. Against one wall was a tiny heap of fragile bones. Conn could make out the outlines of a pair of diaphanous wings. He indicated the remains to the integrator and said, “How did that look in life?”
An second screen appeared beside the floating map and displayed an image of a delicate androgynous creature with two pairs of veined and fast beating wings, fluttering about this very room. Conn could see Hallis Tharp in the background, bent over a workbench, his hands busy with something.
“Enough,” Conn said and the image disappeared. Then he said, “Is this where I was created?”
“It is. Do you wish to see that process?”
“No.”
He realized that he had been half hoping that the place would evoke some reaction, perhaps an epiphany that would... do what? he asked himself. Provide the rest of my life with the moral equivalent of a full bladder? But nothing came.
He crossed to the workbench and ran his hand over the tools and instruments scattered there. The cadaver of a partially constructed homunculus sat in a concave armature; by the look of its proportions, it would have been a comical gnome with outsized hands and feet and a face like a mournful tuber. Tharp must have left off tinkering with it to accompany Ermin Flagit to view the battlefield. On the floor beyond the bench were two more oddly formed skeletons, one with a skull that seemed fashioned after a flower’s petals.
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