“Kit is human, normal human,” I said. “Maybe a little better, but human.” I hadn’t meant to say anything. I meant to have Jarl talk himself out, and then hit him repeatedly with the butt of the burner until he came to his senses and gave me what I wanted. Or went out of his senses. Provided I got what I wanted, I didn’t care how at this point. But the words had come out, in my voice. Even if my voice sounded shaky and wet to my own ears.
The hands held in front of his body rose a little, as though to emphasize the fact that he really, really, really had no weapons. “No, he’s not. He can’t be normal human because I’m not normal human. And you aren’t normal human. We’re something else. We’re…biological machines.”
“We are not. We’re people. We grow. We can think. We can love. I can love and Kit can love. Now that I think about it, I’m not at all sure you even know what love is. But we can. We can and we can decide what to do, and use moral sense, so we don’t hurt others or ourselves.”
He snorted. “You don’t do too well at that.”
“No one is perfect. It’s another way we’re standard humans.”
A flicker of something like incomprehension appeared behind his eyes. “We were created to be perfect, and I do my best to be. I think, in fact, until Hampson’s struck, I always was.”
This bald-faced statement, clear and ringing in the otherwise empty room, made me lose track of reality for a few seconds. He really thought he was perfect? That he had ever been perfect?
I don’t know what he said until I tracked again, when he was saying, “So you see, that’s why I can’t let you reverse what the nanocytes did. I doubt I would have initiated the action on my own—not if I’d met Kit as an adult. But what is done is done. And we must make the best of it. I’m not fully myself, of course. I don’t think I’ll ever be, but I think Kit and I are coming to some sort of synthesis where, by virtue of my greater knowledge and experience, I’ll have the upper hand.”
It was what I had feared all along, and now my mouth was dry and my throat hurt and my heart was pounding hard, hard, as though seeking release from my rib cage.
“You can’t do that,” I said. “You have no right to Kit’s body or to Kit’s life.”
He blinked, seeming genuinely surprised and worried. “But it’s not a matter of rights,” he said. “Don’t you understand? It has nothing to do with what I want. It’s what I have to do.”
Okay. So he’d now gone completely insane. Heaven deliver us from broomers on Oblivion, Kath in a mood, and an elderly superman who had never grown beyond the emotional age of twelve. “How is it possible for you to be senile and juvenile at the same time?” I asked.
“What? I’m not.” The tone was entirely twelve years old. “Don’t you understand? I was created and raised to be a perfect ruler for humanity. It is my job to do so. I was made better than normal humans so I could handle the task. Now that I have Kit’s memories too, I think I know how to do what the Earth needs. Oh, not the same sort of freedom Eden had. For one, I don’t think Eden has it anymore. The complete absence of government only allows other entities to take over. Earth needs a government of some sort to protect it from itself, and what I think it needs is one supreme ruler, sort of an emperor.”
“You, I suppose?”
He looked apologetic. “Well, I’m the logical choice, aren’t I? I was created for it, and I was the best—by their measurement—of all the Oligoi they created. And now, in this body, I’m young enough that if we use the anti-agiatics available in Eden, I can live for three or four hundred years.”
“And after that?” I asked. “You clone yourself and have your brain transplanted into your clone’s body?”
“No!” he said, in a voice so horrified that you’d never know he was doing the exact same thing by other means. “Never. I hope…I mean, after that, I’d…I…One has to assume my children will inherit the necessary qualities to be rulers of the Earth.”
“Children!” I said raising my eyebrows. “Good luck convincing Zen.”
“What? But Zen is my clone!”
“The better to increase the chances of your characteristics being inherited.” I said, and went on without giving him time to explain what he meant. “You know you’re crazier than a canned cyborg, right? Why do you think your children, if you figure out how to have any, inherit those characteristics that you think are so necessary to governing poor, benighted humanity? Kit is your clone and he didn’t. He’s nothing like you.”
“He’s exactly like me. Not as creative, perhaps, but only because no one forced him to cram as much knowledge as I had to cram in my first twenty years of life. If he applied himself, I’m sure he’d be able to create on the same level, because his mind works just like mine.”
“Kit,” I said, and by now I was so cold I thought that I’d never be warm again, “is nothing like you. He doesn’t have an insatiable thirst for power.”
“Power?” Jarl said.
And suddenly I saw his whole problem. Or the Earth’s whole problem, if he couldn’t be stopped and did take charge.
Earth, in the collective, across the ages, has been ruled by many people: bureaucrats and generals, businessmen and visionaries, madmen and greedy despots, murderers and sadists. I don’t think it had ever been ruled by a saint. It didn’t deserve to be ruled by a saint. And if there were gods, anywhere, they’d save us from that terrible fate.
Because when Jarl echoed “Power?” and looked shocked, I realized that he didn’t have any desire to rule. Forget insatiable thirst, he didn’t even feel a mild appetite for power.
And like an echo, in my mind, came Kit’s voice, He hates ruling. He always did. After the war with the Seacities, at the end of the twenty-first century, he was more or less by default, the supreme ruler of half the world. He either controlled territories directly, or he controlled them through his proxies. And he hated it. He really is a lot like me. He doesn’t even like social occasions, unless music is involved. He detested having power. But he feels he has to do this. He feels it’s his duty. You see, he thinks of himself as a machine. A machine humans created to rule them. So he has to do it. It was pounded into him when he was too young to think. He was raised to believe that ruling was his justification for living. He was told he needed a justification for living.
Kit sounded sad, and I felt horrified. Humanity had never met the likes of Jarl, as I said. Not for apparently more than a brief period at the end of the twenty-first century. But we’d had several regional and near-global rulers who felt it was their duty to bring humanity to some sort of paradise.
Even the rule of the Good Men, corrupt autocrats who never wanted anything more substantial than to despoil the Earth, could not compare to the ravages of well-intentioned people who thought they were altruistically doing something for the good of humanity. Because humanity can’t be made perfect, people trying to achieve perfection usually managed only blood baths and massacres on an epic scale. “It didn’t work so well last time, did it?” I said, and my voice was full of malice. “You didn’t become the perfect ruler you think humanity wants, did you?”
“No, but—”
“No, but, nothing. I seem to remember neverending wars, mass famines because you misallocated resources, populations moved willy-nilly from wherever you chose them to vacate and…”
He shrugged. “It was close on four hundred years ago,” he said, in the tone of someone talking about errors made when they were under ten. “I didn’t know enough, yet. I didn’t know about the Earth as I should have. All the cultures and all…And besides, I had to fight with all the other Alphas. They didn’t like me, you know?” A glimmer of paranoia in his eyes. “None of them liked me, except Bartolomeu. They resented the fact that I was taken ahead, on an accelerated learning course, that I knew more than they did, that I—”
“Spare me. You might not have to deal with your fellow Mules, but I assure you humanity will still be the same it ever was, and you’ll still not understand them.”
“I thought you said—”
“I said there were other Oligoi, other Alphas, but we weren’t really a species. There weren’t any females of our kind. I couldn’t experience what most humans experience: mating with a female of my kind and having children and seeing my children grow and knowing they’ll live after me.”
Ooh boy. Yeah, I liked the way this was drifting. And I supposed our children, if I were crazy enough to have any with him, would marry their siblings and so forth. By the time we had great-grandchildren, we’d probably be into extra limbs or perhaps additional pairs of eyes. On stalks.
“I don’t think,” I said slowly and measuredly, “you get what I’m saying. Someone might have made you with the idea you’d rule over the Earth, but I don’t think anyone now wants you to rule. There’s a whole war against the current rulers going on, and I think if you persist in this nonsense, you won’t live long enough to rule over much of anything.”
He crossed his arms on his chest. “You underestimate me. We’ll give Zen and Bartolomeu the data on the powertrees, and then we’ll set about acquiring power. It won’t take very long before we rule over the world, my love.”
I knew it was coming. I’d caught the drift of what he was saying. I knew what he meant.
Why then, did his words send me absolutely insane?
I think the only reason I didn’t shoot him was that I really, really, really, didn’t want to damage Kit’s body. Instead, I realized I’d pocketed one of the burners, and I was flying at him, hand open. I landed a slap full on his face, hard enough to imprint my fingers on it in glaring red.
I never landed a second, because he’d gripped my wrists, hard, and was making quite sure that the burner was pointed the other way, and he was pulling me, hard, against his body, his heartbeat echoing against mine, as he lowered his mouth to mine.
Should I have expected it? Of course I should. Did I expect it? No, no, I didn’t. His lips were sealed over mine, his tongue teasingly venturing into my mouth before I realized what he meant to do, much less what he was doing.
Part of my mind commented in a completely irrelevant way that he kissed better than Kit. He damn well should have. He had three hundred years of experience. But it didn’t make it right. In fact, it made it very, very wrong. It was Kit’s mouth, but not Kit.
I reacted again, or my body did. Honestly, sometimes it was like I, myself, was only a passenger in this body. I realized I’d closed my teeth on his tongue, at the same time my knee went up and hit him squarely between the legs.
He screamed and let go of me. It was only after he did that I realized I tasted blood.
I took off toward the dark interior of the building, running, with only the vague idea that I was going to barricade myself somewhere until I could talk sense into the lunatic megalomaniac.
As I ran into a dank, dark corridor, I heard Jarl’s voice calling “Thena, no.” It was echoed by Kit’s mind-voice. Don’t go in there!
THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE
ARACHNOPHOBIA
I ran a long while, into a dark hallway. Somewhere, at the back of the hallway, through a high-placed window a sort of cold green light filtered, probably having come through various branches, or maybe mildew on the window. It threw shadows on that space that gave the impression of the whole area being underground.
At the back of my mind was the idea that I must find a defensible place, or perhaps a place from which I could leave the compound. But the first couple of doors I tried were solidly locked, and it slowly dawned on me I couldn’t leave.
First, I needed to get the information on how to grow powertrees, because if I didn’t we wouldn’t be allowed back into Eden, or, if we were, we couldn’t save them from Castaneda’s clutches, and then Eden would be a tyranny worse than Earth ever was. And second, I was not going anywhere without Kit’s body and the means to bring Kit’s mind back. Because I wasn’t going anywhere without him, but the freedom of Eden depended on us going back.
Yeah, I was fully aware I was up against a superman. That was very sad for the superman, who was against me. I was sure he had absolutely no idea how to surrender gracefully and therefore, he would have to be defeated inch by inch, kicking and screaming the whole way.
I was going to enjoy kicking him and making him scream.
As I realized this, I calmed down enough that I stopped running.
“Thena, come back.” It came from the entrance of the hallway, but Ms. Reasonable was not at home for this. Not now. Not today. Not after Jarl had told me how he intended to rule the world and impregnate me. Or something. My skin crawled so much at the idea that I couldn’t think straight.
So instead of going back, I thought I’d hide from his sight. He couldn’t be without the lenses, because the front room had been fully lit. That meant that if I hid in the shadowy part of the hallway, away from the light coming in through the window, he’d never see me.
I pressed myself against the wall, just as my heartbeat started to slow down and I was thinking over what Jarl had said. His absolute determination that he should serve and rule humanity because he’d been created to do it made me ill, but his clumsy idea of romance with me made me want to cry or laugh. I wasn’t sure which, though I was sure I’d eventually figure it out. His kiss itself hadn’t been clumsy, but what kind of a genius thought that he could seduce a reluctant woman by kissing her against her will?
Caught between repulsion and pity, between tears and laughter, my heart slowed down and seemed less deafening in my ears.
Which allowed to hear the skittering of…something along the wall on which I was leaning. And then I realized I could hear the same skittering along the floor and the other walls.
I jumped away from the wall, pointing my burner at it, and realized the wall seemed to be moving.
Spiders. Thousands and thousands of little spiders covered the wall in every direction. Here and there were bigger spiders, about the size of mice, and then bigger ones, say the size of a housecat. The entire wall was boiling with them, and as I stepped back in the hallway, my feet crunched on something, and I looked down. Forget the wall. The entire floor, the other wall, the ceiling, all were boiling with spiders.
Only the crunch under my foot had not been bone and shell, or any kind of keratin. It had the distinct metallic-ceramite sound of breaking a piece of electronics.
I blinked, realizing that all the spiders were not creatures, but mechanical constructs—little…machines. But it didn’t make it any better that they were all converging on me. All of them. I looked down and saw some climbing my boots.
I had no idea what they’d do, but I knew I didn’t want them to do it on me.
I swept them off my boots by stomping, crunching more of them in the effort, then aimed the burner and burned a broad clear swath of floor. I jumped in the middle of it, and, as the mechanical spider things changed course and started towards me again, I burned behind and around till the wall was clear. Then I burned a swath of the corridor.
But as fast as I burned, more the things came, crawling, creeping towards me. What would they do if they got me? Perhaps they would just walk over me? Or perhaps…
The mind recoiled, and I couldn’t entertain a thought of being covered in these creatures without feeling like I’d never be clean enough again.
I couldn’t breathe and my finger hurt from being jammed so hard on the trigger.
As I was burning the wall clean, once more, I heard steps and turned, burning a wide swath and just missing Jarl, who’d come to stand by my side, burner in hand.
For a moment, in the heat of battle, I wanted to turn and burn Jarl. But not all the battle-madness in the world could make me forget that this was Kit’s body and that if the body were dead Kit could not come back. I burned close to his feet, but not so close I could hurt him.
“You should be glad I didn’
t burn you,” I said, as I clobbered at the bugs with my spent burner, while I reached for another one from within my suit.
“Why would you burn me?” he asked in confusion, as he stood with his back against mine. I could hear his burner zapping, presumably clearing a space on the other side of me.
“Never mind,” I said through gritted teeth.
“I’m going to start burning, as we retreat out of the hallway,” Jarl said. “Follow me. They can’t go into the entrance room.”
“No,” I said. “What are these things? your pets?”
There was a long silence, while his burner zapped and the smell of charred electronic components filled the room. Then he said, his voice sounding odd, “I suppose. In a way.”
“What?” I’d come to think that Jarl was a twelve-year-old emotionally, but that was not an answer I expected, nor one that made any sense. “Then why are you burning them?”
“I’ll…explain, but…not now. Right now, we must get out of here. Now, Thena. When I step this way, you step too. We clear the way and we walk to the door.”
He cleared. He stepped. I didn’t. “It’s Athena Hera Sinistra, Patrician Sinistra to you, you utter bastard, and I’m going nowhere till you explain what these are and why they’re attacking me.”
There was another long silence. The flashes from both our burners reflected off the walls and made the hallway look like a little piece of some mythical hell. What worried me more is that though we were burning vast quantities of the bugs, there were always more.
Thena, go. Let him explain this in the front room. Just go.
Whose side are you on?
Kit sounded just slightly exasperated as he answered, Yours. Ours. Trust me, there is no time to explain what these are. He has some sort of barrier which prevents them from going to the front room. Other things can get past, but not these.
I assessed the situation. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Kit. Of course I trusted Kit. The problem was rather that I trusted Kit himself. But Kit wasn’t in his right mind. In fact, he was barely in his mind at all.
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