"But…" It was obvious Dade still wanted to blame someone. "You didn’t have to rip away from the anchor and break it. You didn’t have to hit the guy."
"No?" Festina knelt beside the clear-chest man and patted him down. At his hip, she found a holster holding a standard-issue navy stun-pistol: very bad if the man had been given enough time to start shooting. Even worse, Festina opened a zipped inner pocket of the leather vest and pulled out a palm-sized electrical doodad — a control box of some kind.
She held it for Dade to see. "Command module for those Laughing Larries," she said. "Voice-activated. He didn’t even have to pull it from his pocket; all he had to do was shout. One word, and his three nasty pets would have sliced us to ribbons."
Dade stared, his eyes growing wide. He whispered, "How did you know?"
Festina shook her head in despair. "I didn’t know, Dade — I made a snap judgment, based on inadequate facts. That’s what Explorers do. Sometimes you’re right, sometimes you’re wrong. Sometimes it doesn’t matter, sometimes it’s life and death. You never know till it’s over… and often, not even then."
Slowly she got to her feet. Tobit took the controller from her. "Let me have a look at this," he said. "If I’m lucky, I can hot-wire the voice-recognition circuits, so it obeys one of us instead of sleeping beauty there."
"No need," Festina told him. She took the box back and held it out to me, like a microphone I should speak into. "Edward, say, ‘Rise two meters.’ "
I did. The three Larries that’d just come down the Sperm-tail whirled themselves up a couple meters higher. I swallowed hard, but Festina only shrugged. "Clones. You and this guy look the same, so I figured you’d sound the same too. At least close enough to fool a simple-minded voice-recognition system." She tossed the controller to me. "Congratulations, King Edward. You’ve got three killing machines. I’m curious as hell what you’ll do with them,"
Giving me the controller was a test: I knew that. Festina wanted to see if I’d go crazy or something. I think she still was inclined to trust me, but considering how I’d smashed that anchor, she couldn’t be sure I was on the side of the angels. If I’d tried to talk to the Larries, maybe she would have punched me just like the guy on the ground… or shot me with her stunner. She’d turned a titch away from me, so I couldn’t see either her holster or her gun hand.
But none of that mattered — I had no intention of using the Larries for anything. I came close to throwing the controller off the parapet, so I wouldn’t be tempted… and so the spirit that sometimes possessed me couldn’t use the Larries either. Instead, I just handed the little gizmo back to Festina, "You keep it," I said. "If you need the Larries to do something, I’ll give them your orders; but I don’t want my own army."
"Lousy instincts for a king," she muttered. But she took the controller and tucked it into a pouch on her belt. Glancing down at our new Mr. Clear Chest, she asked, "What do your instincts say about him?"
"Um… maybe shoot him with your stunner, just to make sure?"
She looked like she was considering it, but Dade spoke first. "If you shoot him, he’ll be out for six hours. Suppose we need to interrogate him or something."
Festina looked at the boy. "Interrogate him? What about?"
"I don’t know," Dade answered, not meeting her eyes. "But it’d be nice to have the option. And maybe we could use him as a hostage… if he’s important to York’s sister."
"You think my sister would care?" I asked.
"She might," Festina admitted. She knelt beside the unconscious man. From a pouch in her belt, she pulled a coil of copper wire (probably for making electrical repairs to her suit) and began trussing our prisoner’s hands behind his back. "Dade," she said, "if you’re so interested in this guy, you’re in charge of him. No matter what else happens, don’t take your eyes off him. Shout when he wakes up. Can you do that?"
"Yes," Dade answered, sounding all huffy with indignation. Festina didn’t comment; instead she turned to me.
"This fellow is a clone of your father, right? Or possibly of you yourself."
"Since I’m a clone of my father, there’s no difference."
"There’s a difference, If nothing else, your father’s fully human; you have that pinch of Mandasar. I suspect this fellow has Mandasar genes too — all the better to produce babies with your sister."
That made me gulp. "Babies? But that’s, umm…"
"Incest?" she suggested. "Absolutely. But it still produces healthier offspring than cloning the clones of a clone. How old was your father when you were produced? Sixty, something like that? So your own genes were sixty years old the moment you were conceived. YouthBoost can compensate to some extent, but sorry, Edward, you don’t have the hundred-and-sixty-year life expectancy of a normal human. A hundred and twenty, tops. And if we cloned you, your progeny might not make it to eighty.
"So," she went on, "since your sister wants to generate a dynasty of superkids, it’s best to avoid more cloning and just use the old-fashioned approach. A mummy and daddy love each other very much… and they mass-produce fertilized ova which are farmed out to surrogate mothers all over the Technocracy." Festina gave a rueful grin. "Your Samantha is the mother, and I’ll bet this fellow is the father."
"Oh." It made me kind of sick, thinking this copy of me might have been with Samantha. For all I knew, they could have produced kids already. But when I thought about it, that wasn’t so likely: Sam had been so busy running the war, she wouldn’t have time to go through pregnancy; and on Troyen, she’d have a hard time finding another human woman who could act as surrogate mom. All the humans had been evacuated twenty years ago.
Still, this clear-chest guy — this version of me or my father — it made me feel horrible, thinking of him and Sam together. Was he smart? It was such a dumb jealous question, but was he smart? Was he witty and charming and all, a real equal who could keep up with her and not some halfwit moron who always needed to be babied? Because if he was stupid, maybe I could stand the thought of him with Sam, her giving him orders, do this, do that… but if he was so smart that sometimes he got the better of her, and sometimes he said, "This is what I want," and she did it…
That would make me truly, truly sick. I don’t know why but it would.
Kneeling beside Festina, I bent over the man and sniffed… as if I could somehow smell whether or not he was clever. I couldn’t tell you what I expected to find, but I do know what actually hit my nose: the odor of buttered toast.
Uh-oh.
The hairs on the back of my neck curled cold and clammy. I was remembering something from back on Celestia, as the glass-chested recruiter stood in the hatchway of his skimmer. There’d been that tiny dot of red shining in his belly, like the tip of a ruby laser… but back then, I hadn’t known enough to be terrified of little glowing specks.
Gingerly, I flipped the man’s vest all the way open. Inside the glass torso, his lungs lifted up and down; his heart thudded behind his ribs; and there in his gut, tucked among the folds of his small intestine, was a glowing pinprick of red.
"Look," I said, pointing. I made sure to keep my finger high above the glass.
Festina squinted, then sat back abruptly. "Jesus Christ. Is that Balrog?"
"Smells like it," I told her.
"In his stomach. How could it get into his stomach? How could you smell it in his stomach?"
That was a real good question. For the first time it occurred to me maybe I wasn’t really smelling stuff at all. Maybe I was just kind of sensing it, the way Kaisho could see things even though her eyes were covered with hair. That could explain why some people smelled like sounds or colors: I wasn’t actually using my nose. Or at least I wasn’t using it for everything. Mandasar queens might secretly have a sixth sense, like ESP or something… and now I had the same thing. Considering how Balrog spores were supposed to be all telepathic, maybe other telepaths could sense them pretty easily — as if they were giving off strong signals on the ESP channel.
"Oh, fuck," Festina whispered. "Fuck, fuck, fuck." She quickly turned to Tobit, and snapped, "Put a Bumbler back together. Fast."
Two minutes later, we were staring at the Bumbler’s vid-screen, looking at a mocked-up anatomical diagram made with X rays and ultrasound. The clear-chest man did indeed have a Balrog in his belly; but it was locked in a thumb-sized containment chamber that must have been surgically implanted. The chamber itself was glass, which was why you could see the spore glowing inside; but it also had a set of black tubes sunk into the intestinal wall, and a bunch of wires leading back to the man’s spinal cord.
"Got to be some kind of life support," Tobit said. "Those tubes into the intestines — they’re probably siphoning nutrients from the guy’s digestive system. Feeding the damned moss."
"And everything is glass," Plebon pointed out. "Balrogs need sun as well as food, correct?"
Festina nodded. "They have to get solar energy every day… and some warped fool must have replaced this guy’s chest with glass, so light could get in. Drastic, but it does the job. That’s why he prances around in just a vest — a shirt would get in the way."
"But why would you want a Balrog in your belly?" Dade asked. "If that glass container ever broke…"
"It can’t be real glass," said Festina. "Neither is the man’s chest. They’re both some transparent polymer… probably as tough as armor."
"But why keep a Balrog at all?" Dade insisted. "Dangerous little parasites, who can see the future and read your mind…"
Something went click in my head. "Communication system," I blurted out. "What do you mean?" Plebon asked.
"Festina said some folks believe all the Balrogs are in telepathic contact with each other… instantaneous communication, no matter how far apart individual spores might be. Suppose someone figured out a way to use Balrogs as, um, relays. You lock one up inside you, hook it to your brain — through those wires there, straight to the spinal nerves — then you kind of use it like a broadcast link. This guy’s thoughts go into his Balrog, and get transmitted instantaneously to Mr. Clear Chest on Celestia. Mr. Clear Chest’s thoughts come back the same way. They constantly hear what each other is thinking." I stopped a second. "For all we know, their thoughts may go back and forth so fast they scramble together. Like one joint brain inside two separate heads, light-years apart. A little hive-mind of their own."
"Bloody hell," Festina whispered. "If your father can not only make superhumans, but keep all their brains in synch so they don’t fight among themselves… staying in instantaneous contact even when they’re spread across the galaxy…"
"They’d be worse than the damned Balrogs," Tobit growled. "Speaking of which, imagine how the mossy little bastards feel about this: their fellow spores taken as slaves and used as someone else’s phone line."
"They hate it," Festina said softly. "And they hate the people who built it." She turned to me. "That containment chamber looks like Fasskister technology — Fasskisters are masters of hooking machines to organisms and vice versa. Remember what Kaisho said back on the orbital."
I nodded. The Fasskisters know full well why it’s right and proper to lock them in their precious metal suits, with physical needs taken care of, but their minds slowly going crazy. That’s why the spores had taken over the Fasskister orbital: tit-for-tat vengeance against the folks who’d sealed up spores in little glass cases.
"Makes you wonder," Festina said, "who really got the idea of dumping spores on the Fasskisters. Did Queen Temperance think of it herself? Or did the Balrog plant the notion in her head?"
"Generally," a voice whispered, "we stay out of the heads of lesser creatures. But we do make exceptions."
Kaisho hovered in her chair at the top of the nearby ramp. Behind her, the stairwell blazed as bright as a forest fire.
42
ACCEPTING THE INEVITABLE
Zeeleepull leapt in front of her, his pincers wide and ready. "Back, you," he snarled. He looked more mad at himself than at Kaisho, because he’d let her sneak up on our backs.
"Dearest boy," Kaisho whispered to him from behind her veil of hair, "you might stop me, but not my colleagues." She waved a lazy hand at the spores all around her. They gleamed on the surface of the ramp like a burning red carpet — not advancing but thickening, as if more and more of them were climbing up from below, accumulating layer after layer of alien fuzz.
Zeeleepull didn’t flinch. Mandasar warriors have a crazy fondness for doomed last stands. "Back," he said again, and made a snipping gesture with his claws. "Smelly un-hume."
Kaisho chuckled. "Easy, my dashing innocent. We aren’t here to swallow you up… just for a little justice."
Festina straightened to her full height. "Justice against whom? Mr. Glass Chest here?"
"Amongst others," Kaisho said.
"Because the Balrog doesn’t appreciate being used."
"That’s right."
Festina snorted. "Some aliens can dish it out but they just can’t take it. The damned Balrog had no moral qualms enslaving the woman you once were, Kaish — twisting your mind and body for its own mossy convenience — but heaven forbid a human ever takes advantage of a single fuzzy spore. Not that I’m defending our glass-chested clone here, but don’t you see the irony?"
Kaisho lowered her head. "I’m not enslaved," she whispered. "Not quite. But I’m bound close enough to the Balrog to feel the suffering of the spore in that man’s stomach. Can you imagine the humiliation — the degradation — of being imprisoned like an animal, forced to transmit bestial human thoughts every second of the day? Barely kept alive by glimpses of sunshine and the cast-off waste of a human’s gut? Used as a debased go-between, a conduit for sordid schemes of violence and domination…"
Her voice broke into a sob. A real sob, out loud. When she spoke again, it was a normal human voice — no whispering, no taunting, just a genuine person talking. "Festina… all of you… I know you think the Balrog is evil. You see it as a threat because you imagine some terrible parasite eating you, stealing your soul. But it’s not like that. It’s… beautiful. Just beautiful. It’s wise, and honest, and gentle, and caring; I love it with all my heart. Of course I’m scared how I’m changing, and I have my moments of doubt… but I love this creature inside of me. I do. Because it’s so much more holy than anything I ever dreamed possible."
She tossed her head defiantly, flicking the hair away from her face. Her mouth was a fierce line, and her eyes blazed with reflected red light from the moss as she stared at each one of us — daring us to argue. "Think how this bastard is using the spores he’s captured. There are three of them linked together: Admiral York on New Earth; this clone here; and that recruiter on Celestia… who’s another York clone, an earlier model without the fancy DNA. He had his features changed with plastic surgery so he wouldn’t be immediately recognized by people using the recruiters’ services, but it’s still the same old Alexander York, Three versions of the same man, touching mind-to-mind, thoughts kept perfectly in synch so they’re effectively the same person."
Kaisho gestured to the man at my feet. "This is your father, Edward — body and brain. The cloned zygote was planted in a surrogate mother right here on Troyen, and born a few weeks before the war started; that glass thing was installed in the baby’s stomach a little while later. From that day on, the child’s brain was so dominated by transmitted thoughts, the infant had no chance of developing a separate identity. He is Alexander York: helping Samantha on Troyen, leading the recruiters on Celestia, playing Admiralty politics back on New Earth. A man with blood on his hands in three separate star systems, and the League can’t touch him because he never physically crosses the line.
"Now," Kaisho went on, her voice still chokin
g on tears, "can you imagine how it pains the Balrog to be caught up in this? Every day, Admiral York commits murder and war, using sentient creatures like disposable means to repugnant ends. Can you imagine how the Balrog feels, melded to such a putrescent mind? The entire Balrog race is in agony. I’m in agony, and I’m not holy, I’m just a lower animal out of my depth."
"Kaisho." Festina’s voice was soft, more tender than I’d ever heard it before. "Please don’t cry. Please. What does the Balrog want?"
"To free itself, of course. To detach itself from that awful man."
"And to punish him?"
Kaisho met Festina’s gaze for a moment, eye to eye. Then she reached up and fluffed her hair back over her face, hiding once more behind her natural veil. Her voice dropped down to the old familiar whisper: back to speaking for the Balrog instead of herself. "If someone doesn’t do something, he’ll keep playing the same tricks. He has more spores — commandeered from the navy hospital that examined me."
Festina contemplated the unconscious man at her feet. "Suppose we take him to Gashwan for surgery. Have the gadget removed from his gut."
"We get the gadget," Kaisho said immediately.
"Of course," Festina agreed. "As for the man himself… if he’s committed crimes, and I don’t doubt that he has, we’ll turn him over for a proper trial. Considering that the Balrog has heard York’s every thought for the past few decades, it won’t be hard getting a conviction."
"Yes it will," Kaisho said. "Where is he going to get a proper trial? Even if Jacaranda rescued us this very moment, you couldn’t take this man back to the Technocracy. He’s a dangerous non-sentient creature; if you try to move him out of this system, the League will kill you as well as him. And if he stays on Troyen, he’ll be acquitted by the new High Queen Samantha." Kaisho shook her head. "Sorry, Festina dear, but you can’t arrange any ‘proper trial’ — you’ll never find a suitable legal authority."
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