Darkship Renegades

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  He didn’t try to kiss me again, which was good, and I have no idea what I told him after a certain point. I pushed the robot arm up, trying to make him let go without hurting him permanently.

  And I called him names, and pointed out he didn’t belong here, and I wanted Kit back. My mouth tasted of sweat and blood, mine or his, I didn’t know.

  I’d just told him to let go for what seemed like the thousandth time, and sank my teeth into his arm, where I could reach, when he went very still, and seemed to lose force.

  For a moment I was afraid I had done enough damage to really hurt him, that he was bleeding out, about to lose consciousness. And then his eyes shifted.

  I can’t explain it. They just shifted. Like a holo screen, changing between programs. And a voice, sounding hoarse as if from screaming, said, “Thena?” It was Kit’s voice, and his next words were odd and yet infinitely reassuring. “Let go of her, Jarl. Let go. We’ll take care of you. We’ll arrange for you to go…wherever you need to go.”

  Jarl said something long and complex in the ancient language I thought was Swedish, and then Kit chuckled, unmistakably Kit’s chuckle. And Kit’s voice was speaking. “But it wasn’t your fault. It was never your fault. They created you to fulfill an impossible mission. No one else could have done it. No one can save all of humanity, not anyone who is human.”

  This time, Jarl’s voice broke through in Glaish, surprised, sounding very young. “But I’m not really human. I was designed to be better at governing.”

  “What? Because of a few different chromosomes? You’re still human, and you were raised by humans. You’re still mortal and fallible. Let go, Jarl.”

  And then Jarl let go of me. Tears fell from Kit’s eyes, mingling with sweat and blood. Kit straightened. He took a deep breath. “I’m going to get down this pile,” he said. “It’s easier for you to climb down on your own. You wouldn’t want this body reaching for you now.”

  And I said, “I always want you reaching for me.” And I seemed to be crying too, sobs cutting through my words.

  He gave me a weird lopsided smile, and offered me his hand, to help me get up. I took it. Together, we picked our way down the pile, and then Kit seemed to lose all ability to stand, and collapsed to his knees.

  “Kit,” I said. “Did I wound you beyond—”

  But he shook his head and took deep breaths, kneeling there on the floor, as his hands slowly went up to cover his face.

  Kit was talking softly through the tears, his voice eerily calm given the emotional storm wracking his body. “You are not responsible for those who don’t want you to be responsible for them. Ultimately, each man’s ability to save himself or destroy himself is his own. You can’t take that away from them. Going to hell in your own way is the ultimate right of every human. It is your right, too, Jarl. In this you can be totally human. You can die.”

  PICKING UP THE PIECES

  A voice in my mind, a familiar and well-beloved voice, Thena? Thena, love? Kit lowered his hands. There was no doubt that it was Kit behind the eyes.

  He looked like hell, naked, bruised, scratched. I probably was doing justice to my image as warrior princess, dressed in wire and weapons, with my hair on end and dirt caked on my tear-streaked face. We looked at each other and I started to cry again.

  “Don’t cry.” It was his voice. Yes. His voice sounded a lot like Jarl’s, but his had different inflections.

  “Jarl…did we get rid…?”

  Kit shook his head. “No. He’s still in control of most of the body. He’s just…for now at least, he’s accepted…The components were…” Kit’s eyes widened. “I think the computer was trying to change the nanocytes. Reprogram them. Make them into it. He’s scared, Thena. And he’s shocked. But he accepts that he wants to go. He wants to die. Or at least, he wants to die more than he wants to kill me.” He gave me a pitiful, lopsided smile. “It might be the best we can hope for.”

  I told Kit what I’d seen in the computer room and for a moment I thought Kit was going to throw up, but then his eyes softened. “For what it’s worth,” he said, “I don’t think he did it with ill intent.”

  “How can you do something like that with good intentions?” I asked.

  “I’ve been…” Kit hesitated, “in his mind more than I wanted to. He was so lonely, Thena. Yes, there were the usual cruelties visited on his kind by the institution that brought them up. Yes, there was separation and being convinced he wasn’t human. But most of all, Thena, he was so lonely. There was really nothing but responsibility and duty in his life. I think he created that machine, and I think, in a way, he created Zen and me, not just because he wanted to reproduce himself, or because he wanted to live forever.” He paused. “I’m not even sure he wanted to live at all; more that he doesn’t know how to die. But…more than that, I think he wanted company. He just wanted company, Thena, and his horrible upbringing had left him with no ability to connect to anyone outside himself.”

  “Not true. He had Doc and my…and Sinistra. You, yourself, said that they loved each other like brothers.”

  “Oh, yes. I think Jarl did love them like an older brother. Like an older brother left in charge of younger siblings. Yes, he loved them, and yes, they mitigated his solitude somewhat. But Thena, they were—they were yet more responsibility. That computer and, I believe, probably making me, too, was his attempt to create a friend he wouldn’t have to protect. An equal. Thena, he was like a lonely child with imaginary friends.”

  Men are much softer and more sentimental than women. Don’t let anyone tell you differently. This fact is masked by the female ability to cry easily and by our approved emotional displays. But it doesn’t mean men are less emotional for being more controlled. On the contrary.

  In every couple I know, if presented with a hard case where death and life hang on a decision, she’ll vote for death and he for life. He will see some redeeming quality in the most unreformed bastard. She will see the bastard and want him dead.

  I think this is because women, evolutionarily, were in charge of protecting the young. We have less room to allow dangerous people to live.

  In this case, I think Kit understood Jarl a little better too. I didn’t really care. I just wanted Jarl gone. Whatever had happened with the nanocytes had given Kit a chance to look out through the eyes on his body and to talk to me, but Jarl was still there, and his body had curled in a tight fetal position.

  Right. I touched his shoulder, gently. One thing Kit was right on, at least; if Jarl was catatonic, I didn’t think that being harsh with him would help.

  “Jarl,” I said, “you must stand. We must get you somewhere where you can bathe, and we must talk. We have to talk. This can’t go on…”

  Kit shook his head and it was Jarl who spoke. “You killed it?”

  “Yes,” I said, and braced.

  He let out a breath, with every impression of having held it too long. “Thank you. It was…” He shook his head.

  Kit’s voice came again, “We got…all its memories. It was…it had gone quite insane.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I suspected as much. Solitary confinement for three hundred years and not being able to die, and having to defend itself as its main imperative.”

  “Yes.” The voice was harsh and raspy and I didn’t know if it was Kit or Jarl, and I realized that whoever it was would be severely dehydrated and half-dead of starvation.

  “You said there were provisions here,” I said. “You need food and water. I’ll get you some.”

  He looked at me, momentarily unfocused, and I got the impression he was talking to himself inside his head, then Kit spoke, “Down the corridor, first door on the right. Should be filled with those ready-made meals that heat themselves. They’re warranted for half a millennium. This is where we learn if they’re right…”

  Thank all the gods they were. The dinners, picked up blindly in the growing darkness and self-heated, turned out to be steak and chicken stewed with vegetables and some undefined
starch. I’m sure they were as nasty and tasteless as that sort of cookery normally is, but to me it tasted like ambrosia, whatever that is. This was very good.

  Jarl managed to use his hands enough to eat and drink. But it had to be one of the weirdest things I’d ever seen. Or heard. It was obvious from the way he was eating that Jarl might control everything from the neck down, but Kit controlled everything from the neck up.

  The hand would reach up, and the mouth would intercept the food on the fork, and somehow you knew two different people were involved. He drank more than he ate, a lot of water from convenient dispensers with straws you could suck through.

  The strangest thing was that between bites and sips Kit was talking. It was clear he was arguing with Jarl, but Jarl’s voice must have been in his head only, because I couldn’t hear it. It was like listening to one end of a conversation.

  I fell asleep. In the night, I half woke, with Kit next to me. I listened to his breathing. I put out a hand and touched him between his shoulder blades, and he mind-touched me, with an impression of warmth, but he wasn’t awake enough for there to be words in the feeling.

  Then suddenly, there were words again, Jarl’s voice, “Perhaps it would be better, then, to die?” he said. “Just die? Both of them were a misconceived idea, a lost cause. Perhaps resting—”

  Kit’s voice didn’t answer and I woke fully, in a panic, not even sure who Jarl meant by both—himself and Kit? Or himself and me? I couldn’t let him. I stood up. He stood there, facing me, and had somehow got hold of one of my knives. There was an odd look in his eyes.

  “No,” I said. I could have kicked him, but in this case, I didn’t know whom it would disturb. “No, Jarl. Perhaps it’s your time. I wish it weren’t. I will…mourn you. Kit will mourn you more, I think. But I think you have run your course, and perhaps it would be impossible to make you sane and whole, even if there were a brain and a body you could inhabit. But Kit isn’t you. And I’m not Alexander Milton Sinistra.”

  He looked at me a long moment, as though he didn’t fully understand, then sighed. “Perhaps,” he said, “there is indeed something else, hereafter? Perhaps we can start anew, somehow?…Not, not in this body or in this life.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what to tell you. No one knows. This is the one thing every human must always face alone. Some of us trust prophets and soothsayers and traditions, but in the end, it’s one thing everyone must do alone.”

  Something like the shadow of a smile crossed his lips. “You know,” he said, “I always wanted to be wholly normal in something.” He raised an eyebrow. “I think I can extract enough information from my poor dead cyborg to make the antidote to these nessies. Would you like to come and observe?”

  I would. He might be broken, he might be defeated, but I still wouldn’t trust him. Not with Kit’s life. I stayed awake through the night, while he hooked things and transferred data and, finally, build an ersatz assembler for something. He put them in an inhaler and inhaled. “These nanocytes will stop the others,” Jarl’s voice said, “until we can…restore Christopher.” And of course, I had no way of knowing they were the real thing, but I trusted. He had the look of a man who had run his course. He wouldn’t want to start it all again.

  “Perhaps ’Xander is there somewhere, and we’ll be young again. Perhaps this time we will be brothers and he will be sane?” He looked at me, and must have found no encouragement in my eyes. “No? Well…it’s a lovely dream in any case.”

  He used the com and called Doctor Bartolomeu. I was almost sure it was all Jarl, because Kit didn’t have the knowledge to do this, but Doc called him Christopher. Perhaps it was wishful thinking. He sent back the template he’d done of Kit’s brain after Kit’s injury, and Jarl worked on the parts of the computer he could get to function. “He’s modifying the model,” Kit told me, with a hint of admiration in his voice, “to repair the hole and the damage.”

  “You trust him?”

  “Strangely, yes. Having decided once to…go, though he’s not sure what that means, he’ll deal straight with me. Thena, you said you thought he liked me too, and I know it is so. He feels about me as though I were his son. That’s part of it. You see, he always wanted to have children. Odd, since the very concept should have been alien to him. He grew up knowing he couldn’t do so. But he…liked watching children grow up, the children of his servants and retainers, and he always wanted children of his own. I think it is that desire that has given him the strength to allow me to return my brain to what it was. He can’t convince himself to sacrifice me to his continued life.”

  “That’s not what he sounded like,” I said.

  “Don’t you see? He thought he had to do it. He thought it was his duty. And even so, he was still trying to get your approval for what he was doing, because it still felt wrong to him.”

  And then he did more work, and at long last, he built another inhaler, and inhaled that too. “And this,” he told me, with a sad smile, “will bring your husband back.”

  And then somehow I did fall asleep there, with my back against the wall, in the room littered with dead peripherals. I woke up in the morning, and Kit was standing nearby, smiling at me.

  IN BETWEEN

  “Do you have your lenses in?” I asked, alarmed because there was way too much light in the room.

  “Yes, Mommy,” he said, and made a face. I sat up, in panic. Were we back to that? Had he gone around the twist again, confusing his childhood with Jarl’s and visiting both in turn.

  He shook his head. “No, no, Thena. I was being a brat. Yes, I have my lenses in. They were in Jarl’s room, on the bed. Everything that was taken from us, including our clothes, all the burners. I suppose you have your broomer suit somewhere outside?”

  “I left it in a tree. I emptied and rinsed the compartment, so it’s ready to wear.”

  That he didn’t ask me which compartment, when he knew about as much about brooming as I knew about water mining, probably meant he was preoccupied. He was also, I realized, clean, shaved and wearing a dark blue suit that appeared to be made of natural silk.

  He grinned at me. He had bandaged himself, and done something to the wounds on his face so they were not as obvious. “If you get yourself upstairs and wash, I’ll vibro your suit.”

  “Jarl?”

  “What?” he asked surprised. “He’s still here, but—”

  “Joking. Kit would never offer to vibro anything.”

  He gave me a little smile and extended his hand to help me up. “Well,” he said, “extraordinary circumstances. I’ll explain to you what I’ve been doing, while you bathe.” Then he looked fully at me, as I stood up. “What a picture,” he said. “I wish I could record it, to scare the people at home.”

  I made a face at him, but it wasn’t until I was in Jarl’s bathroom, while Kit set the bathtub to fill itself, and sprinkled in bath bubbles, that I took a look at myself on a full-length mirror and realized what he meant: my hair, never the most ruly mane of curls in the universe, was now a tangled mess, which had somehow gotten smeared with what I hoped was blood. I didn’t know whose blood, though I had a cut in my scalp—I suspected from Jarl’s cold-cocking me—and scalp wounds bleed a lot. I was wearing sheaths on wire bands around my arms, my middle and my legs, and most of them contained either a knife or a hammer, save for the fancy holster attached to my waist and sporting two beautiful burners.

  Am I paranoid? I don’t know. Daddy Dearest was, and apparently some of it is genetic. Kit might be drawing my bath and setting towels at the ready, and he was clearly in control of at least some of him. But he, himself, had told me that he was not in control of the whole body, or at least that Jarl was still there. Yes, Kit and I might have defeated the angel in night-long combat, but angels are stubborn and ancient creatures and, in this case, loopier than a spiral orbit. Also, Jarl had all the emotional maturity of a twelve year old.

  As I divested myself of weapons, I hid them at a corner, behind a p
otted plant, and made damn sure that Kit couldn’t see me, either directly or through the mirrors.

  Kit knew I was paranoid, too. Probably because he, himself, had inherited a little bit of the tendencies, despite his much better upbringing. He didn’t try to stand by the bathtub, where I’d be forever ready to react to his attempt to pull me under. Not that he made any such attempt, of course, but that’s the problem with paranoia. You anticipate both likely threats and unlikely ones.

  There was a long stretch of counter and vanities running around under more mirrors, facing the tub. He sat on top of the counter, while I scrubbed and rinsed and scrubbed again, until most of my curls were clean, and my skin was its natural somewhat olive color, and the water in the tub was a dingy grey. Then, while I refilled the tub, he said, “Jarl has agreed that…that it’s my body and I should have it. I have gems with…well…with everything he knew about how to reseed the powertrees. He had done the work on nanocytes then, you know. It’s what he used on the computer brain, while it was growing. I think that’s what he meant when he talked to Doc about the alpha pattern.”

  I shuddered. “Did he grow the brain in an infant?”

  “No, he grew it independently. I think he would have done just that in Eden, when he found out he was ill and got the brain to transplant into his body, if he’d been fully himself, but he wasn’t, and then…well…I think the lure of being young again and being able to hide the fact that he was a Mule…”

  He was quiet a long time, his face grave. “Don’t judge him too harshly. He was so…lonely and…he still is…”

  I nodded. “I know,” I said. “I caught a glimpse of it yesterday. He tried to lift a burden that was too heavy for any human being, a burden that was too heavy for a supernatural being even, had there ever been one. And he refused to bend under it.” I took a deep breath, plunged into the now-clean water, emerged perfectly rinsed, and said, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but he was…is so much like you. Neither of you knows your limits. And both of you feel responsible for things you can’t control.”