Darkship Renegades (14 page)

“No,” I said. “We do have to fight to survive. We have to find a way. But…we can’t kill Earth. The price…”

“The price shouldn’t be paid by others?” Kit said. “I think maybe that’s what made Irena Ingemar recoil from Doc’s and Jarl’s plan.” He rubbed the tip of his nose with his free hand. It was very much a Kit gesture. It was a gesture made instead of wiping at his eyes. I had no idea what in what he’d said had triggered tears, but it had. Maybe it was the feeling that he was one of the others paying. Or not. Kit didn’t cry for himself, ever. “I agree with that. I’ve seen Earth, and we’ve been helped, even, on Earth.” A brief smile. “The broomers might be many things, but they’re not worthy of death by starvation. We will not risk it. I will…There is a way.” He swallowed. “We will get to the side of Circum where the boats are stored. We can do that. Then get close enough that we can reach it. And then rope-crawl to it.”

Zen was looking at him, intently, her eyes narrowed, as though trying to decide which of them was talking and what it meant. “We’d still take the bacteria with us to Circum,” she said.

“No.” This was the doctor, frowning. “No. Not if we disinfect carefully, before getting into our suits. We’ll need to be in our suits to go across.” He frowned. “I take it the suits aren’t infected?”

“The suits are, in a way, alive,” Zen said. “And so far it hasn’t touched living material. Besides, I’ve disinfected the suit storage every day, just in case. It can only be done thoroughly in a very small area, but fortunately the suit storage is a very small area. They’re clean.”

“Then we’ll get clean ourselves, before we put them on. And we’ll disinfect the rope, too.”

“But the exterior of the suits,” Zen said. “They’ll pick up bacteria as we go. They will be teeming by the time we get to Circum. If we can get there through these acrobatics. Who is going to be the first one to go out? I can see that the rest of us will be able to hang onto the rope to get there, but if there’s any distance at all, how is the first one to get there?”

“Don’t worry,” Kit’s voice sounded strangely doubled, like he was speaking in unison with himself, one voice reassuring and one supremely confident. He stopped, then resumed with his voice, only. “I’ll let him take over for the time. He has more experience in vacuum than I do. Thena, he helped seed the powertrees. All of them did. He…he’s not…In other circumstances, I’d go some way to save him. Yes, he’s arrogant, and in many ways he’s cold, but…his childhood was—” He stopped so abruptly that his lips made a snapping sound. And the tone if not the voice changed, though he didn’t let go of my hand. “Touching, but I don’t want to be justified. Neither do I wish to die completely, just so some young wastrel can go on with a life he wasn’t doing much with. No, he’s not bad enough to deserve to die, but you have to ask yourself, which of us is more useful to most people?”

I pulled at my hand, recoiling away from him. “Human lives aren’t measured in usefulness.” I had been raised to believe I must be useful to justify myself. I must be the perfect Good Man’s daughter, the perfect little Patrician. My job was to grow up socially adept, to make a good show of the reasons that the Good Men deserved power. And to marry and have children. Never mind. Those had been lies. Not the children part, but the rest. I’d been a body only, grown to be used. And I felt very strongly that humans couldn’t be measured in usefulness, or not that way.

Take my friend Fuse, for instance. He was a poor scrap of humanity. The clone of a Good Man, intended to be used for a transplant, he’d got wind of it and tried to escape. His escape had taken him through an ancient piece of dock machinery, and he’d got caught in it and mangled badly. One of his legs dragged, his whole body was lopsided and twisted. And his mind was, at best, the mind of a six year old.

Poor piece of scrap at best. Our broomers lair looked after him, because they had to have rules to keep the sanity of their members. And one of the rules was that one didn’t abandon one’s own. And Fuse—broken, seemingly useless Fuse—was one of us.

So we cleaned up after him, and saw that he was fed, and when it became obvious that the accident had turned his incipient pyromania into a full-blown obsession, we made sure that he didn’t blow up or set fire to anything too big or too obvious, or which might kill us and him.

But it had been Fuse, late at night, in a despairing time, through a random firing of memories, who had recalled what our fathers were and what they intended to do with all of us. And that moment of lucidity, soon overwhelmed by the wreck that was the rest of Fuse, had made it possible for me to figure out the plot against us and how to circumvent it. It had saved my life and Kit’s and probably half a dozen of our fellow broomers—maybe eventually all of them.

Jarl, who couldn’t hear my thoughts, laughed at my pronouncement and shrugged. “At any rate, my host in this body and myself are in perfect agreement on one thing. We must get out of this death-trap of a ship and onto a place where our life can sustain itself. And then everything else can be decided. But not if we’re dead. Yeah, I can vacuum-swim, and this body is more agile, more…precise than mine ever was. The ELFing, I suppose. I can get your damn rope to Circum.”

“We will not infect Circum with bacteria,” Zen said, forcefully.

“No. We won’t need to. What’s the easiest way to sterilize something?” Jarl asked.

“Vacuum,” I said, getting it.

“Give the pretty lady a star. Vacuum it is.”

I got up. “How long do we have, Zen, and what can we take with us that’s not infected?”

She took a breath. “Clothes. We can sterilize them in advance. Anything medical that we’re sure is not infected. Kit’s”—this with a glare at the direction of the person she, and I, was fairly sure was Jarl—“lenses, because without them he can’t take normal light. Other than that, I’d say the suits and the air tanks, and that’s it.”

“My violin,” Jarl said, though it might have been Kit. That violin was after all both of theirs. It had been made by Jarl using the old techniques, the ones that had been lost for centuries and which he had reconstructed by studying violins at a molecular level. And it had been Kit’s love. And as he continued, I was sure, suddenly, this was Kit, not Jarl. “Please. I put it in one of the airlocks, vacuum side, as soon as I realized what we were up against. I’ve been playing it ever since I can remember. It feels like a part of my anatomy. I can’t abandon it to space.”

I could see Zen relenting before she did. Her eyes softened and she said, “No. Of course not.”

I wondered suddenly and irrelevantly if she were the least bit musical, or if it was a coincidence that both Kit and Jarl were violinists.

FORTUNE FAVORS THE BOLD

So he could swim in vacuum.

“It’s not as hard as it seems,” Doc said, via helmet communication circuit, as we stood at the edge of the airlock and watched Kit, or Jarl, or at least Kit’s body, with just the right amount of push on the skin of our ship, sail away through space, holding a rope.

Circum was maybe fifty feet away. We didn’t dare get closer, for fear the bacteria would survive the trip. As it was, we’d cycled the airlock and stood there in the vacuum a long while.

Those parts of the
Hopper
that hadn’t fallen apart yet, had been set—on a newly repaired autopilot circuit, which Zen and I had worked on till the last minute when we had to leave—to fly off and into space as soon as we were gone. If it held.

It was almost painfully beautiful to watch Kit fly-swim away, trailing the rope. He’d strapped his violin to his back. From certain angles, it looked as though the violin itself were flying away towards the brilliant circle of metal and lights that was Circum. It looked like something out of a surreal painting from the time just before the turmoils. Yes, I know that art—as well as everything else—is supposed to have been decadent and practically worthless then. But I liked some of those paintings and, in fact, had tracked down a good number of them—going for a song, because current art theory despised them—and taken them home, to my rooms in my father’s mansion in Syracuse Seacity.

I watched my husband, or at least his body, grapple for purchase on a thin lip on the other side, then take something out of the toolbelt we’d decided we should all wear, after making sure the tools were clean of course, and use it on the locked airlock in front of him.

The door swung open and he trudged inside, still tugging the rope. For just a moment I wondered what we’d do if Jarl took over and decided he was better off without us; if he let the rope go and left us to our fate. Oh, we’d have time, probably, to find another rope—perhaps even one that was still solid enough—and try again, but it would make life suddenly and painfully interesting.

But Kit had said Jarl was not the enemy. He hadn’t set the process of taking over Kit’s brain in motion. It wasn’t as though he’d done what my father had done: look at a clone with his own personality and his own life, and say, “I can kill him and take it over.” No. The process had been started long ago and had been far more ambiguous. It had been a matter of creating a replacement for himself. If it had all worked the way Jarl had planned it, then Kit would never have developed. He’d never have been Kit.

It would just have been Jarl developing, Jarl on his own, a transplant neither of body nor of brain, but of…personality? Soul? Essence? It had been wrong only in the sense that Kit had existed somewhere in potentia, and that Jarl taking over would destroy that potential. But Jarl couldn’t be blamed for not thinking of that remote potential. After all, Kit was his clone, created by him, like Jarl had been created for a purpose by the people who had made him. He and Kit, perhaps both—it was hard to tell from Jarl’s appearances, because he was not given to telling us anything even remotely introspective—were, to his mind, tools to a purpose. That whole idea of serving humanity. I didn’t think Jarl had ever stopped thinking of himself as a thing.

I realized, with a shudder, that was what growing up in a society that cared nothing for the individual and where the individual’s duty was supposed to be to exist for the good of society. It wasn’t just Jarl. I’d read in the history texts in Eden about such time periods. They all resulted in people that didn’t view themselves as human, and therefore didn’t view anyone else as human. In fact, in the last stages of such societies, only the leader as the top is supposed to be the human, the individual, the person who embodies that nebulous society for whose benefit everyone lives. In Eden I’d learned of those times with fascination: the Sun King, the mad Red Emperors of the various communist empires. It had been in that light that I’d come to understand the familiar and safe regime of the Good Men was one such. It was just that most Good Men didn’t—at this late stage of their control of Earth—bother to convince the peasants that they didn’t count, so long as the peasants behaved. Without the constant propaganda, most people on Earth, I thought from the ones I’d met, grumbled about the Good Men. They wouldn’t do anything about it, but at least they didn’t think of themselves as worthless.

However, Doc had been raised under a much tighter control and under a regime that, being afraid of him, and of the other Mules,
needed
to convince them they were worthless.

I thought of Castaneda. Right now he held Eden hostage with his finger on the energy controls. But, if he succeeded in maintaining control, he’d realize he couldn’t do that forever. And the propaganda would start. The children would grow up thinking of themselves and others like themselves as things that could be used for a purpose. And they’d think they should work for the good of the man at the top.

I bit my lip, feeling slightly sick. I returned my mind from that horrific vision to Kit here and now. I had to somehow save Kit and somehow go back, with the secret to replanting the powertrees. But we had Jarl. And we’d never counted on Jarl.

The process had gone wrong, and now Jarl and Kit both were prisoners of the nessies. Neither of them could stop it, even should he wish to, Jarl no more than Kit. At least not till we were near a lab. Worse, stopping it amounted to committing suicide for Jarl. And yes, I was aware that Jarl, or at least the other version of him, had committed suicide. But he had done so while in the grip of an invincible, indestructible disease, which would have killed him, anyway, or perhaps worse than killed him.

Other than that, I expected, sharing the same basic personality, Jarl was no more likely to embrace suicide than Kit was. And Kit was not likely to do so at all.

These thoughts came and went, seemingly disappearing into the vacuum. I heard my breathing confined in my own helmet, and it seemed to me the air inside it felt stale. It didn’t. What was in the tanks was a perfect mix, designed for our breathing. And I didn’t think that Eden suits could retain smells. They were made of some biological fabric that felt and stored like a light knit. You could fold them, vibro them, throw them in a small compartment, carry one in your pocket. Even the transparent visor seemed to be no more than part of a head hood, with a transparent front.

But when exposed to vacuum, it solidified and became an impenetrable barrier. Which it was now, sealing me inside its elastic yet airtight confines and making me…claustrophobic. Which was where the sense of staleness came from.

The rope went taut, the end attached to a component part of the ship—a still-solid part—being pulled so that the whole length of rope stayed taut, like a straight line through the intervening space.

Kit, or Jarl, appeared at the airlock door to Circum and moved his hands and arms fast, causing me to blink. The movements were the same thing I knew as broomer language.

Brooms, on Earth—well, beyond the ones used to clean the house, of course—were small antigrav wands. Near untraceable to radar and other detection systems and therefore forbidden in every country—except for limited, short-range use as life-saving devices, in case of a failing flyer—they were nonetheless near-ubiquitous. Lairs of broomers—people who used brooms as their main and decidedly non-registered, much less traced, form of transportation—flourished in most seacities of any size and in many of the large cities on the land masses, as well.

Many broomer lairs engaged in crime, ranging from drug trafficking to the smuggling of illegal communication between proscribed groups. The exception was, perhaps, my own lair, which was, by default, almost a joke. No. Not a joke. We were illegal broomers because we were all the sons and daughters of the upper class—Good Men and their most trusted circle. The broomers lair was our escape from lives of stifling protocol and maddening restrictions. Mostly we used it as a place to spend time drinking and having indiscriminate sex. We rarely committed any crimes, beyond riding a broom.

In any case, atop brooms, one wore a padded suit, insulated to keep out the cold—inevitable when flying at high levels and high speeds—plus an oxygen mask and goggles. With these in place, it was impossible to talk coherently, even if it were possible to scream at each other above the noise of the air rushing past your face.

But communication had to happen when a broomers lair was flying together. It ranged from the simple “Up, down, this way” to the complex “Here comes trouble” or “Not that way, it’s dangerous” or “All clear, come.” For that we’d developed hand signals, which over time—I knew there had been broomers for a good two hundred years, perhaps longer—became as complex as any language.

The gestures Kit was making were the ones for “All Clear. Come. Now.”

I heard Doc cackle delightedly, then say, his voice happier than I’d heard it in a long time, “He says to come. It’s all clear.”

I didn’t say anything but wondered how far back the language, and the illegal broomers, went.

About four hundred years,
Kit said in my mind.
Since the—

Kit!

What?
he said, seeming puzzled.
Why do you sound so surprised?

I thought,
I said.
He was in control.

Uh…no. That was mostly me. Oh, him too, but only…after we kicked away from the ship he became caught up in the beauty of Circum and surprise at how big it is. I gather it was much smaller when he last saw it. He also says it looks much cleaner than it was.
He paused.
This is really strange, because at the same time he feels like…well, like a part of me. I remember things he remembers and I…
I got the impression of a mental shrug.
On the other hand, it’s like a really old man in my mind. In a way older than Doc, though I know they’re about the same age. I think Jarl was more isolated and aged more, somehow. It’s all “in my day, Sonny…”

But if you can mind-talk, why the signals? And you don’t know the signals!

No, but Jarl does. And the reason to use them is that…well…I needed Doc to see them too, didn’t want them to have to come across just on your say-so. I don’t know how to use mind-talk to talk to all of you. Only he does.

It made sense, but the impression it gave me, of the two of them squeezed together in the control room of the body, becoming almost chummy, trading reminiscences, made me feel uncomfortable.

I watched Doc make it across, slowly, slowly, hand over hand.

Then Kit’s voice in my head.
Now you, Thena.

I can go last.

You cannot. Your space acrophobia is about to kick in. If you think about it too long you’ll go into a panic, and I’ll have to come back across and carry you.

I inclined my head, knowing it was true, and told Zen, “Maybe I should go next, before panic sets in. Acrophobia. Space only.”

She nodded. “Doc told me you should go second, yes. He said…Alexander had acrophobia when working in space and he was worried about you. If I were more sure of the cables around here, I’d tether you.”

“No,” I said. “I’ll be fine. I’ll just hurry.”

But hurrying wasn’t enough. Turns out moving hand over hand on a rope across the vastness of space is a hardship in more ways than one. For one, even though you weigh next to nothing, every movement causes a disproportionate reaction, which you then have to counter, just as carefully. For another, every time you detach your hand, you’re aware that the only thing holding you on course and onto your world is this other hand on a rope, and that should you let go, you’ll float away into the universe, falling forever, unable—ever—to find your way back.

I’m not afraid of falling off a broom. There’s a—rather solid—limit to that. I’m just afraid of falling off into space and never stopping.

Halfway—exactly halfway—between the ship and Circum, it looked and felt as though I was floating in nothingness, with stars above and below, and nothing, nothing to hold me in place. My hands felt numb and as though they didn’t quite belong to me. If I let go—If my hands opened of their own accord—

Damn!
The voice in my head was almost certainly Jarl’s and it jarred me so I might very well have let go of the rope, except that it was followed immediately by Kit, in full, peremptory voice of command,
Thena. Grab that rope. Close your eyes. Do not move. DO NOT move.

When Kit yelled like that in my mind, it was as though he took direct control of my body. I grasped the rope tight and closed my eyes. With my eyes closed, I could imagine I was only a few inches above a solid ground, in one of the endless and pointless exercises cherished by the boot camps for juvenile delinquents, upon which Daddy had frequently wished me. Like that, I was not afraid of moving my hand over. There was only one problem. The minute my hand lifted, it would have to find the rope again without aid of my eyes. Easy, you say, for a navigator with an inborn sense of direction.

Not this navigator. Not that day, while a part of my mind knew very well where I was and what was happening.

Of all the stupid things for the cloning not to eliminate, even with the sex change,
Jarl’s voice said in my mind.
Stupid not to have been eliminated with
Alexander
to begin with. What kind of idiots design a superassassin with acrophobia?

Shut up.
Kit’s voice.
It’s only space acrophobia. Not one more word. Hold on, darling. We’re coming.

He only called me darling when he was afraid I would die. The rope vibrated, and I realized that Kit or Jarl, or perhaps both, were coming towards me. I risked opening the eye on that side, and saw Kit over-handing it towards me much faster than anyone should be able to. Before I could react, he was on me, and snapping a belt around my mid section, then his. He flashed me a smile, bright and brittle, through his face plate and said
There, I’ve got you. You can’t fall now if you try to. I have you.

The voice was Jarl’s and filled with an odd, echoing tenderness. I tried to hold fast, but he was pulling me, and my hands moved over each other, hand on hand, fast, fast, following the rhythm of his hands, as though they too had been fastened together by invisible wire.