Darkship Renegades

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  Kit’s mouth worked, making sounds that couldn’t be understood, and Doc Bartolomeu said, “No, we never grew the clones of me. We could have. It seemed easier to concentrate on Jarl’s first, and then in a year or two…when we knew the pitfalls. The truth is I think I knew, even then, the insanity of it. It would have required us to control those clones, to force them to marry each other. It felt…dirty. It was too much like our upbringing, our…Our controlled lives, our lack of choices.”

  Did you know this? I asked Kit, sharply.

  I knew Zen was my sister. Or at least I was told Zen was my sister when I was so young that I thought I was a normal homo sapiens. Strangely I never questioned it after I found out I wasn’t human. Not…Not till this moment. I knew she was my sister, then I found out I was a Mule, and the two facts didn’t seem related or contradictory at all. I suppose if I had thought about it at all, particularly after knowing what you were, I’d have figured it out. But Zen and I rarely saw each other, and you know, she was married and had her own life, and I never thought…I rarely thought of her. It wasn’t as though we were close. Honestly, I think at the back of my mind, I thought she was my adopted sister, like Kath and Anne, that because her adoptive parents were good friends and unable to have children of their own due to genetic defects Jean or Tania or both had donated genetic material…They were very nice to her, treated her as one of us, when she came to play. And Zen and I were both happy where we were. It didn’t seem important. She Light! What a mess.

  I had to agree on the mess, and I focused again on Doc Bartolomeu, who was saying, “I came to be glad that Jarl had failed. I like Christopher for himself.” Doc looked up at Kit and blinked. “I suppose I should say, Christopher, that I love you like a son, or as what I imagine people with normal lives feel for their sons. I’ve seen you grow, and of course, you have a lot of Jarl’s inclinations and dispositions, but you’re not…Jarl. Not really. You’re more like the new and improved model. What Jarl would have been if he…if we had been raised normally.

  “We always assumed that Mules didn’t act human because they weren’t born of human parents, in the normal way. Because something in how their—our—genes expressed was different and made it impossible for us to ever be really human. But watching the two of you grow up I’ve wondered if that’s true, or if it was simply the way we were brought up. Knowing we weren’t human. Not really.”

  “So that’s why Zen came with us,” I said. “Because you thought she, too, might understand Jarl’s writings?”

  “No. Not because of that. She might understand Jarl’s writings better,” Doc said. “She…rebelled all along the line, including about her bioing as a Navigator. She studied science for a while, before she fell in love with a Cat and returned to the fold, and decided to learn to be a Navigator. She still graduated with her class, but she brought with her a knowledge of science that Christopher lacks. I stand a better chance of figuring out Jarl’s notes than either Christopher or Zenobia. No, they both had to come because Christopher was in danger, and because Zenobia was the one Navigator I could trust implicitly.”

  “Though I did volunteer,” Zen said. “On my own.” She expelled air in something between a sigh and a huff. “I don’t think I can fully explain it, but see, I knew I was Kit’s female clone. With the family who raised me having moved to the Thules, and Len…” She paused. “Len gone…I didn’t want to marry again. Maybe I’ll never marry again. And Kit was the only…he’s my only family. And then he was in danger. I figured even if I died getting him out of this, it would be a life well spent. What else was I doing with it?”

  Kit smiled at her, shook his head. “Thank. You. Stupid. Lots. Of. Things. Can. Do.”

  He took a deep breath and spoke, each word carefully enunciated, though still slurred. “Is…that…why…people…in…Eden…think…I…am…Jarl…in…mind?…They…know…nessies?”

  “Yes,” Doc Bartolomeu said. “I suspect that so did Athena’s fath…Alexander, you know? When you landed on Circum…No, he probably recognized your voice before you landed, over the com. The ELFing has masked your resemblance to Jarl, but your voices are remarkably alike, the same register, the same inflections.”

  “Not mentally,” I said.

  “Of course not,” Doc said. “That is more like…Both of them are violin virtuosos—though we never pushed Kit to it—but the way they play, the…expression is completely different. But their voices are almost exactly the same, except for the fact that Jarl had a slight accent. Swedish was his native language. He only learned Glaish at three or four when they brought us together for schooling. He’d have lost the accent, I suppose, but his national trust made sure he spoke and read Swedish fluently. Still, an accent is not a thing of the brain. It’s a thing of the ear and the training of throat and mouth. Alexander wouldn’t expect those to survive a transplant to a new body, and of course he thought if Jarl had made a clone of himself, it was to replace the clone’s brain with his own—”

  “Which turns out not to be too far off,” I said, perhaps cruelly.

  “So, it makes sense that Alexander thought Kit was Jarl, in all but name. And you can imagine his fury, too. Jarl had stolen Alexander’s new life, his opportunity to leave the Earth on the Je Reviens, and now he’d stolen Alexander’s female clone, the culmination of centuries of research, most of it fruitless. It’s a wonder he didn’t kill you on sight, Kit. He must really have wanted your help with cloning…

  “It’s harder to imagine how people in Eden can have got the idea. But I think…I think Irena left recordings. Whatever she heard scared her. Perhaps she was afraid we’d use our modified nessies to tamper with her brain; who knows? It made no sense, since it would only work with a cloned body. But I think she left a cache of recordings or writings somewhere. There was something in Jarl’s last note, about people not believing Irena’s lies, which makes me believe she told him; warned him. And I think, whatever that was, Castaneda found it? I think he believes Christopher is Jarl and knows all Jarl knew. Hence his wanting Jarl dead. Perhaps not helped”—he bit his lip—“by the fact that Irena was his cousin and they grew up together.”

  “No, I’d imagine not helped by that at all,” I said.

  “Quite.”

  For a moment silence reigned, then Kit grabbed the decanter and took another swig. “So…How do we stop…” He paused and seemed to regroup and started again, still very, very slow and very, very slurred. “How do we stop my brain from becoming Jarl’s. I know he was…your friend, but…I like me. As I am.”

  Doc closed his eyes, compressing them tight, and then pressed his fingers to his temples, as though trying to contain his thoughts, or perhaps discipline them. “I like you as you are too, Christopher. And besides, the nessies making all these connections, all at once, might very well kill you. The human brain is not made to endure that type of thing. I just hope there isn’t enough of the serum active. The problem is that I don’t have the…necessary computer to create counter-nessies, but an EMP powerful enough to deactivate them all will cripple the ship. We need to create nessies that act like antibodies but only to Jarl nessies. The programming was Jarl’s. If we find his notes…and if we can get to Earth and get…if I can get access to the proper machinery to create them, I think I can stop it. Reverse it, even.”

  “It’s three months!”

  “Yes. Meanwhile I’ll have to find a way to…delay them. Make them slower.”

  He must have read the horror in Kit’s eyes. I did. And I was sure my expression echoed his.

  “I’m sorry. If I’d known there were dormant nessies in you, nothing in the universe could have persuaded me to use other nessies on you. Clearly Jarl managed to introduce the nessies, but something went wrong—or right—and they never activated. They were probably just below critical mass. Then I gave you the nanocytes, specifically to heal a brain injury. I’d given them to you before, but…”

  “Not brain.”

  “No. Not inhaled. Not circumventing th
e blood/brain barrier. And I never thought…when I gave Christopher ‘adult’ nessies—not the modified juvenile ones that Jarl produced—the presence of the adult-pattern nessies ‘matured’ the dormant nessies and activated them and now…” He shook his head. “I don’t know what to tell you. Except I’ll do whatever I can to save you. As much as I miss Jarl, I don’t want him back at your expense.”

  It wasn’t the reassurance either of us wanted. Well, it certainly wasn’t the reassurance I wanted. I wanted to know that my husband would remain my husband. I wanted Kit. I had nothing against Jarl—other than that he’d apparently killed his wife to get his way, though in the heat of the moment, and while mentally ill, I supposed that could happen—but I didn’t want to have him in Kit’s body. I appreciated Kit’s body, but I loved Kit—the combination of his mind and body, and perhaps soul if there’s such a thing.

  And Kit looked bleak and scared. How do I know, Thena? He asked. How do I even know if it’s me? This is what split personality must feel like.

  I’ll know if it’s you, I said. I’ll tell you. And even as I said it, I wondered if that was true, if I would tell him. If we couldn’t do anything about it, wouldn’t it be better to let him slip into oblivion without burdening him with the knowledge of what he was inexorably losing?

  At the thought of his slipping into oblivion, leaving behind his body, still acting as though it were him, and as though he were alive, I felt the hair trying to rise on my head. I don’t know what I would have said or done, if at that moment the ship alarms hadn’t sounded, loudly, in a range that made all thought stop.

  Zen and I were on our feet and running before we had time to reason. And both of us ran, instinctively, straight at the source of trouble. Those alarms could mean only one thing. The steering system of the ship had just failed.

  PATCHES AND RAGS

  It turned out we were right, unfortunately. The steering system had just failed. Oh, no, not just failed. That would be too easy and much too clean. The steering system had disintegrated into powder. As though it had never existed.

  “It has to be one of the material-eating bacteria,” Zen said, as we were both hip-deep in the bowels of the ship, reconstructing the steering and navigation systems from scavenged parts and bits, and some of the spare parts we’d thought to bring along. Yes, we’d brought spare parts, but we never thought we’d need to rebuild an entire system.

  “Bacteria that eat dimatough, ceramite, metal and biolinks?” I asked. “They’d eat us too.”

  She made a face. “No. A complex of bacteria, I think. But how could anyone have given the infection to anything that came aboard this ship? We had everything that came in scanned, to make sure it was clean.”

  I gave a bitter laugh before I realized what was so funny, and faced with Zen’s glare—not improved by the fact she had a dark grease smear on her nose—I had to explain. “Everything we brought in,” I said. “What didn’t we bring in?”

  “Damn,” she said, and sounded so much like Kit when he cursed, that I wondered I’d never seen the resemblance before. Only, of course, they were different enough to throw anyone off, between male and female and one bioengineered as a Cat and one as a Nav. The changes to their basic genetics were wide enough. They probably only had as much in common as any brother and sister. “The Hull. The hull of the Hopper. It would be almost impenetrable even with bacterial infections because it’s made resistant. It’s not something a ship can afford to lose so it’s well designed. While bacteria would eat through it, it would be so slow they’d eat everything in the ship first.” She shook her head. “Of course, I’d never check. It was my ship. They infected my ship to trap me! And the technologies for designing materials-eating bacteria are all forbidden. I mean…”

  “You mean Eden has no laws, but it’s a small enclosed space, and attempting to create these would be something that should set off alarms amid the entire population and make its creator very dead?”

  She nodded fiercely, and then disappeared into the engine compartment with an armful of pieces. From the depths came clangings and bangings as she assembled things. We had, of course, sterilized the space and the pieces, first, as well as it was possible to do so aboard.

  “I don’t think Castaneda is afraid of retribution. I think he has arranged for layers of protection around himself.”

  “Yeah,” Zen said. “I suspect so too. But all that protection won’t be enough when I get back to Eden. I intend to see him die screaming.”

  “You can kill him after I kill him,” I said magnanimously.

  “There’s something wrong with that reasoning,” Zen said, from the depths of the compartment. “But I’m too tired to examine it. I’ll arm-wrestle you for first shot at him.” There was a long period of silence. “I think I have this on the way to being assembled. Let’s hope at least that we got all the infection. Can you figure out how to replace the stabilizer?”

  “Sure,” I said, as I went in search of a part that would do and hoped this was the end of the infection.

  “What burns me,” Zen said. “What purely burns me is that Castaneda wants to control the entire world—what we do and what we become.”

  This seemed like an exaggerated claim and I muttered something about the Energy Board and the riches.

  “No. Riches would be easy enough to embezzle from his current position, if that was what he wanted. But he wants to have some lever to make us obey.”

  “But make us obey to do what?” I said. This was something that hadn’t been really clear to me. “I mean, my father got a mansion out of it, and he got, you know…He was safe,” I said with sudden insight. “I think they never felt fully safe, not, you know, after the riots.”

  Zen shrugged. She gave me a darkling look from under russet eyelashes. “I don’t think so, Thena. I mean, I don’t think that’s all it is, when people want this sort of control. Perhaps, perhaps it is insecurity, but that’s too easy. I think they just want the power to tell everyone else what to do. There’s something broken and they see other people as things…as play toys. I don’t think he ever thought killing us was murder.” She slammed a piece home. “Just that, you know, we needed to be out of the way for his grand plan to go on.” I realized she was going to tighten the circuit wrong, because she was using her gestures as counterpoint to her speech. I nudged it aside, and gently pulled two bio circuits together, linking the new ceramite pieces. She nodded at what I’d done, as though approving it, then sighed. “It’s like Doc, you know, still not sure why Irena was revolted by his and Jarl’s plan. Honestly. They were doing the same thing, treating people as things.” Her features softened. “Though, to be honest, in their case it is perhaps more understandable, if not excusable. They were treated as things themselves, weren’t they.” She checked my work as I linked circuits ahead of her. I wasn’t sore. When your life depends on a machine, being checked is good. But I thought of Zen’s relationship with her adoptive family, out of nowhere. She never talked about them. She hadn’t immigrated with them. And, unlike Kit, I couldn’t see she had holos of them anywhere around. “There,” she said. “I hope we fixed it.”

  Only we hadn’t. By a week later, when we had assembled the entire steering and navigation systems, it became clear we hadn’t, because the air-recycling systems disintegrated suddenly.

  This was, of course, a far more urgent job. Without those systems we’d die quickly. We got them patched in time. Just. And then something else broke. Zen and I worked, shift on shift, sleeping maybe four hours before going back to fix and reassemble a neverending succession of systems. Doc worked with Kit, both calculating and correcting courses and trying to stop the infection in Kit’s mind.

  I wasn’t sure how much progress he was making, or what was happening, because I rarely saw Kit, certainly not often enough to be sure of what was going on in his mind.

  You see, I only went back to quarters when I was absolutely dead on my feet. And because Kit and Doc were doing not only the piloting, but als
o the navigation calculations—since Zen and I were busy elsewhere with repairs—plus doing whatever it was that Doc was doing to try to arrest the process by which Jarl was slowly taking over my husband’s mind, there was very little time for Kit and I to talk. We usually met only in bed, and only to sleep.

  Sometimes Kit would clutch at me in the night, with the despair of a drowning child looking for reassurance. And sometimes…sometimes in the middle of the night I woke up with a stranger’s voice in my head asking, Who are you?

  THE MINOTAUR IN THE LABYRINTH

  “We never intended to take the Hopper to Earth,” Zen said, for the third time. She looked very tired. She’d been the last one on repair duty. I’d just awakened and let the vibro shake me to awareness, then dragged on my coveralls.

  While looking for Zen, who could have been repairing anything anywhere in the ship, I’d found her looking for me. She’d called a council.

  This meant pulling the men away from piloting, which was a chancy thing, now that we were so near Earth. We were—in fact—within striking distance of Circum and the powertrees. But it was important, because we’d reached a point we couldn’t go on as we’d been.

  We sat around the little table in the kitchen, all four of us in the places we’d chosen at the beginning of the trip. Zen and Doc sat across from Kit and me, or at least what I hoped was Kit and me. I didn’t know how far gone Kit was. Just before he’d sat down, I’d seen his eyes, and there was a look in them, an odd…not-quite-Kit look.

  Kit was no shrinking violet. I think part of what had attracted me to him when we first met, back when I registered my attraction to him as extreme annoyance, was that he was fully confident, as sure of himself and his abilities as I was of mine. I’d never met anyone like that before, and I think that cemented my interest in him.

  But what was in his gaze just then was more than that. It was almost a swagger. The confidence of someone not only in what he knows and knows he can do, but in what he is. It looked like how I imagined the eyes of Alexander the Great might have looked when he contemplated invading India.