“I’ve heard of it,” I said, only barely remembering it from one of my schoolbooks growing up. I’d been much more interested in post-spaceflight history. Old Earth was a dead world and I preferred its fiction to its history. “You may recall I have rather strong opinions on the subject of slavery.”
Zoe chuckled, taking a seat on the side of the table rather than bothering to get a seat. It reminded me of better times when we were still friends. “You and your windmill crusades.”
“Yes, your feelings on the subject were ever an embarrassment,” Cassius the Elder sighed. “Humanity is a race of control and controlled. There will always be slaves and there will always be masters. The problem with so many of the latter is they attempt to justify it with rationales beyond the capacity to do it. They claim God, racial politics, bringing civilization, or ancient wrongs to justify it.”
“I am glad to continue embarrassing you if you want to say slavery is right,” I said.
“Not right, just a fact of life,” Cassius the Elder said. “At least as long as humanity is the way it is. We are a fallen race and it is the cure for my agnosticism that something has crafted us in that way. We are a vicious, murderous, and violent species.”
I tried to hold my tongue and failed. “If that’s the cure for your agnosticism, you’d have been better off remaining an atheist.”
“And your beliefs?” Cassius the Elder asked.
“I believe in beauty,” I said. “Goodness of the spirit and the eye which has nothing to do with practicality or randomness. I also don’t believe Fate or God has any protection against the problem of evil, but leaves it to us.”
“And the source of evil?” Cassius asked.
“Men like you and women like Zoe,” I said, looking between them. “Men like me.”
Zoe looked down at the ground. “Did my doppelganger harm you so much that you hate me?”
I stared at her. “Is she your doppelganger or you in another body? I was tortured, my friends tortured, and nearly killed. Now I find you’re allied to one of the Elder Races who has done God knows what to your followers.”
Cassius the Elder narrowed his eyes. “My, you know a good deal more than you should.”
“Allied is a strong word,” Zoe said, frowning. “Better to say the Kathax Prime and our side have a mutual understanding.”
“The Elder Races are insane and cannot be trusted,” I said, firmly.
“Says the man who, until recently, had one in his head,” Cassius the Elder said. “Of the three people in this room, which do you think is the most likely to be brainwashed?”
He had a point there. “What are you doing here?”
Cassius the Elder paused. “I was getting to that before you so rudely interrupted me. What I was getting at is the American Confederacy was defeated by the Northern Union due to all the typical reasons. Industry, population, and lack of foreign support.”
“They were also a slave-holding state,” Zoe said, pointing out. “Which is economically unfeasible whether through intelligent machines or people.”
“Only for cultures,” Cassius the Elder said. “It’s economically wonderful for the slave holders themselves.”
God, my father disgusted me. “You used to have principles.”
“Yes, where did that get me?” Cassius the Elder replied. “Basically, I’ve studied that war at length and determined it’s possible to achieve victory through defeat.”
I blinked. “What?”
“Defeating the Commonwealth was never an option and defeating the Community is impossible. However, we can lose in a way which guarantees our ascendance,” Cassius the Elder said, snapping his fingers. A snifter of brandy appeared in his hands. I mean that in the literal, as-if-by-magic, sense.
I stared at him. “How did you—”
Cassius the Elder took a sip before laughing, interrupting my statement. “So you can understand how vexing it is for you to come in here carrying a surrender agreement and throw all my plans into disarray.”
I put my hand over my heart. “I bleed for you, Father, who is tested by the possibility of winning a war he’s trying to lose so he can sell out the human race in an unequal treaty. None of that has to do with the fact you’re making a deal with an imprisoned Elder Race.”
“Imprisoned for a while longer,” Cassius the Elder said. “I’m working to try to release it.”
I stared at him. “Perhaps you should explain the whole thing.”
“There’s not much of a story here,” Cassius the Elder said.
“I somehow doubt that,” I said, staring at him. “Being as you’re walking around in a clone of my body.”
“No, a clone of my body,” Cassius the Elder said. “I’m using your name but given you’re named after me, that doesn’t make—”
Zoe cleared her throat. “Perhaps I should be the one to explain.”
I closed my eyes. “I agree.”
Zoe looked at me, her eyes going deep. “You know what it’s like to lose a world, brother. To experience the sudden loss of everyone and everything. To be the child of a dead world.”
“All Crius survivors do,” I said, surprised at how deep my sister’s feelings seemed to run.
“I tried to rebuild my life,” Zoe said, pausing. “The Commonwealthers took me in and told me I could help my people if I offered my mind to science. They only wanted me to build weapons and devices to make sure the worlds they’d conquered remained under foot. They took my research in uploading consciousness and decided to market it as a way to create even better bioroid slaves.”
“I know this story,” I said, remembering how her bioroid copy had played on my sympathies the way the real Zoe was now. “Somehow, you managed to convince them to let you send out bioroid copies of yourself into the universe. To meet up with people like your brother and, apparently, my father.”
“That was my doing,” Cassius the Elder said, smiling. It was the practiced look of a politician rather than a father. “I was on Earth when Crius was destroyed. I was campaigning to allow me to negotiate a surrender agreement with the high lords. It might have worked if we’d successfully assassinated Prince Germanicus but my conspirators blundered the job and got themselves killed by State Security. As a result, the Commonwealth ended up going for a scorched-world solution to the Crius problem.”
“So while millions of your fellow countrymen were fighting and dying in a desperate attempt to stop the end of their world, you were sipping it up with the rich on Albion?” I asked, wondering if I could strangle him right now.
“Yes, because it was a stupid war you helped start,” Cassius the Elder said, snorting. “Perhaps you should study more of the Earth North American Continent’s Civil War. They, too, were a bunch of self-styled nobles who built their empire on slavery before picking a fight they couldn’t win out of hubris. I, at least, knew it was hopeless from the start and see no reason why I should sympathize with the dead who died for a stupid cause. Also, Cassius, it’s in poor taste to claim the moral high ground after murdering tens of thousands of people who promised to liberate slaves.”
I stepped forward to strangle my father with my bare hands. I’d learned a lot since his days of humiliating me in duels. “You bastard.”
Zoe stepped between us and put her hand on my chest. “Once freed of my prison, I sought out help from the Elder Races. I’d devoted my life to trying to figure out how to elevate humankind above the miserable warmongering race we were—”
“You say it like it’s a bad thing,” Cassius the Elder said, finishing his brandy.
Zoe briefly looked at our father like she was regretting standing in our way. “I sought out the markers of the Elder Races to study them and they led me here. It was here I discovered the Kathax Prime. A being who took upon the form of Prophet Allenway to show me the mysteries of the world.”
“You’re an atheist,” I pointed out.
“Not anymore,” Zoe said, her voice low. “What is a god but a sufficiently advanced alien? I learned m
any things from him which would make your blood run cold and then blind with their glories. Even then, they are but a fraction of the knowledge the Elder Races possess.”
“The Elder Races destroy any race they view as a threat to them,” I said, shaking my head. “Hundreds, millions of species have been eradicated by them.”
“Which is why we need weapons against them and for them to cease to be an issue,” Cassius the Elder said. “If we can free this Kathax Prime from his prison and unleash him back among his people, it might result in a civil war if what he’s telling us is true. That should hopefully give us the chance to evolve into something a bit more formidable.”
I tried to wrap my head around what these two were contemplating. “So not only are you planning to get the human race conquered by the Community, but you’re also planning to pick a fight with beings you identify as gods.”
“All to build the new human race,” my father said dryly. “What? Did the destruction of your planet wipe all stomach for battle from you?”
“The hypocrisy about you lecturing me on that strikes me as so obvious it must be deliberate but you seem to be serious,” I said. “At least the Community was made of flesh and blood enemies. The Elder Races are made of light and code.”
“Think about it, Cassius—” Zoe started to speak.
“Yes?” my father asked.
“Not you,” Zoe said, shaking her head. “The one that matters.”
“You wound me,” Cassius the Elder said. “You and Cassius both.”
“I do not wound, only kill,” I said.
“Imagine the future of the human race,” Zoe said, her voice full of the conviction only the very religious or deranged possessed. I’d used to speak of the archduchy with that kind of fervor. “We can all be immortal. Not in another generation or a millennium from now but in our lifetime. The advance of human technology can be forwarded to the Singularity and beyond.”
The Singularity was a concept which my sister had always been obsessed with. It was when humanity’s technology got to the point where it became self-creating with A.I. and other concepts merging with humanity to the point we ceased to be “human” and became something far greater. Most races disdained the concept and refused to create intelligent computers or modify themselves save superficially. Crius, itself, had pushed the envelope of such research but had never crossed it lest it turn the entirety of humanity’s other surviving colonies turn against it. Indeed, that was one of the ways the Commonwealth justified its war against us.
Zoe believed humanity had guaranteed its extinction by abandoning research into Cognition A.I. The fact it had been sabotage by the Elder Races was something I would have gladly informed her of, if not for the fact I could no longer be sure of her sanity. I wanted to believe the Zoe bioroid was fundamentally “different” from my sister, a deranged caricature, but too much was merely an exaggeration of what had always been there inside her.
My own opinion on the subject was mixed. Transforming ourselves into something infinitely greater was a concept found in both religion as well as science. However, either way required the death of what made us human. If you cast aside the body and kept only the mind then made it something able to see the whole of creation, you couldn’t really call yourself human anymore. Zoe would think of it as a caterpillar becoming a butterfly but one might easily argue it was killing all of a race and making simulations of it instead.
“Rather than argue with you, I shall just point out that if someone is promising you something too good to be true then it probably is,” I said.
“I have faith in the Kathax Prime,” Zoe said before frowning. “Well, in our ability to control him, at least. He is imprisoned and powerless in his temple but we’ve managed to convince him to teach us vast amounts of information regarding everything from physics to self-evolving technology.”
“Did the fate of the Kolahn teach you nothing?” I asked.
“We are not the Kolahn,” Zoe said. “If necessary, I have ways of dealing with even the Elder Races.”
Her arrogance astounded me. It was because of her I’d ended up being fooled by the False Judith. It was her Cognition A.I. the Elder Race agent had infected. I turned to my father. “I take it there is no chance of you actually accepting the surrender agreement?”
“I will consider it,” Cassius the Elder said, putting his brandy snifter down. “This may surprise you, but I’m not so quick to throw away one in the hand when there’s two in the bush. Also, I am not so easily swayed by the promises of gods. If you remember your Greek mythology or even Hebrew then you’ll know humans rarely come out of that looking good.”
“Perhaps because we don’t deserve to,” Zoe said.
Cassius the Elder gestured to the door. “Allow me to make a counteroffer, my son. Stay and join my side.”
“I promised you I would,” I said, crossing my arms.
“Yes, but you lied,” Cassius the Elder said. “You might stay if you could keep your sex doll and that stunning marine out there, but you would never stay for me or your siblings.”
I didn’t answer him.
“But you might be willing to it for your daughter,” Cassius the Elder said.
I stopped cold. “What?”
Chapter Twenty-Three
I stared at my father, my mouth open.
“It’s kind of funny,” Cassius the Elder said. “We’re discussing the conquest of the Spiral and ancient space gods, but you being a father is what reduces you to speechlessness.”
“I have no children,” I said. “I will never have children.”
Judith and I had wanted to violate taboo and have a large family. It was another way of resisting the culture I’d grown up in. They would be morganatic children, unable to inherit House Mass’s resources due to her being a commoner, and that was another reason I’d wanted to do it. Death had removed that option. Since that time, I’d completely abandoned the prospect of having a family. I could barely take care of myself.
“You are a father,” Cassius the Elder said, shrugging. “Well, technically we’re fathers or perhaps I’m the child’s uncle since you’re my clone.”
“I’m not Zoe or Thomas’s father,” I said.
“Biologically, you are,” Cassius the Elder said, testing me.
“Semantics,” I said. “So unless you—”
“Do you remember when you were captain of the Kronos?” Cassius the Elder said, smiling wistfully.
I rubbed the bridge of my nose. “Yes, Father, I do remember an entire tour of my career. You may have arranged it to get me out of the Starfighter Corps but I recall it with great affection even if it was nothing but pirate hunting and fighting Union of Faith knights looking for plunder.”
“That’s a distinction without difference,” Zoe said, sneering. “Damn Catholic Space Vikings.”
“What does any of this have to do with my daughter?” I asked, more than a little annoyed at the digression.
“Do you remember the battle with Lord Guldan?” Cassius the Elder said. “You ended up with a head injury and—”
“Of course I remember,” I said, my voice hissing. “I died for a few hours. I’m still stunned they revived me.”
“I always wondered if that was what caused you to gain your embarrassing faith or if it reinforced it,” Cassius the Elder said. “Whatever the case, it was during this time I met with members of Parliament who decided the House of Dumas needed to be genetically corrected.”
I stared at him. “I assume, since you tried to kill Prince Germanicus, you mean a coup.”
“No,” Cassius the Elder said. “I mean to say we wanted to build a better heir to take over after they were dead. Princess Germania was determined to be a better candidate and I persuaded her to have your child.”
If I’d had a gun, I would have drawn it and shot him there. “You…what?”
“Princess Servilia is your daughter,” Cassius the Elder said. “You always wondered whom she’d gotten the genetic mate
rial from and the answer is, simply, you. We took plenty of samples while you were asleep and used them to create her.”
“You’re lying,” I hissed. “This is a gross violation and a monstrous tale.”
Princess Germania had been the head of the chief of staff for her brother’s military and was effectively head of all ground operations. Many individuals had preferred her as a candidate for archduke and only the fact Germanicus controlled both State Security as well as the Navy’s admirals prevented her from taking power.
They’d also loved each other despite their rivalry and preferred to rule jointly instead of separately. Germanicus’s lack of care to sire an heir had also allowed him to name Germania’s child by an unknown father as the third in line for the throne. Speculation had run rampant as to who the father was with the official story being she was a “chimera” or a product of numerous fathers.
Cassius the Elder gave a half-laugh. “Maybe I am. Maybe Princess Servilia died with the rest of her family when asteroids were dropped on Crius. That wouldn’t prevent me from taking samples of your blood or your genetic code, which is mine anyway so it’s really academic, to mix with samples of hers to make a new Princess Servilia.”
“I like the first story better,” Zoe said. “Though the latter is just as easily made up. You’re more likely to believe it, though, because you’re cynical. Germania wanted you as a lover but you never took her hints.”
I’d actively ignored them. “What is wrong with you? Is there nothing sacred to you?”
“No,” Cassius the Elder said without shame. “Not when it stands between me and the legacy I am forging for the human race.”
“Not even your family,” I said.
Cassius the Elder sighed. “You are my legacy, my child. Zoe too. Sometimes Thomas.”
“You know, I’m starting to see why you hate him so much,” Zoe said to me.
“It took you this long?” Cassius the Elder said. Say what you will about my father, but he was self-aware.
“Would you like to meet her?” Cassius the Elder asked.
“Excuse me?” I asked.
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