Darkship Renegades (3 page)

MORE THAN ONE WAY
TO SQUEEZE A BUG

Serious talk waited until we finished dinner. I didn’t notice what we ate. We sat in the living room, on the biocarpet, and the little turtle robots were going around picking up our plates and silverware. The chit-chat that had accompanied dinner fell silent.

Jennie, Waldron’s wife, took all the children to the back and left them there.

Then everyone scooted closer, until we were all drawn up in a circle. In the year I’d known Kit’s family, I’d never seen them do this. Of course, it was completely possible they had done this behind my back and away from me while I was still a relative stranger.

They seemed to be waiting for me to speak, so I did. I told them about landing and what had happened. Eyebrows went up here and there through the narrative and when I finished with, “I have no idea what Kit meant by saying he would be safer if I left him there. We could be on our way to Earth right now. We could—”

“No.” It was Jean and he was final. Not loud. Just definite. “You couldn’t have taken off again after landing. They would have shot you out of the sky. In fact, I suspect the docking operator must have had your best interests in mind when he called those hushers.”

“Uh?” Clear as mud. Of course, anyone who calls a group of armed men to subdue you clearly has your best interests at heart!

Jean smiled. “No, Kit was right; the safest thing for him is for us to get a lot of people in Eden to demand a public examination of the facts.” He frowned. “That shouldn’t be difficult if all of us talk to our friends, who will talk to their friends. And then, if we can get him examined by Doc Bartolomeu, I mean under hypnotics—”

“We can’t,” I said. “Then the truth will come out. I mean…who Kit really
is.
” I looked around the room and hesitated because I wasn’t sure how many of them knew the secret of Kit’s true origins. His parents knew. His sisters almost certainly. But his in-laws? His nephew? Did they know?

They knew Kit had tainted origins, of course. Everyone on Eden did. When I’d come to Eden I’d been told he was a child of tragedy, that the reason he’d needed to be adopted in utero was that his father had killed his mother and then himself. But the truth was far more complex and damning than that and not something he wished widely known.

The truth was that Kit’s biological “father” and Doctor Bartolomeu, one of the family’s oldest friends, and the man who’d decanted Kit from the biowomb, had both been Mules, two of the bioengineered rulers whose ruthless despotism over Earth was said to have turned a lot of it into a wasteland and oppressed the natural-born population into revolt. The same rulers who weren’t supposed to be able to reproduce themselves.

Doctor Bartolomeu and Kit’s “father” had been part of the planners of the exodus from Earth just ahead of the riots that supposedly killed most of their kind and anyone with even a suspicion of bioengineering. And in planning it, they had chosen to leave behind those Mules who had been created for and grown to enjoy less savory avocations: assassins and murderers, rapists and arsonists.

Created as weapons of terror, some of those Mules left behind had been very powerful under the Mule regimen on Earth, but their past and their bioengineering tainted them, so that Doc Bartolomeu and Jarl, Kit’s biological “father,” had thought them not fit for the confined society of an interstellar ship, certainly not while humans were on board. Among those left behind had been my…
ancestor
. Not that he was that. I was his female clone—but that is a very long story.

Their decision had probably saved many lives. One shouldn’t pen together wolves and sheep. But it had created great resentment, not just among those left behind, but among the Mules who had made it onto the ship with their bioengineered servants.

Jarl and Doc Bartolomeu had chosen humanity over their own kind, and they found that they had to do it yet again. Driven by the resentment of their own kind towards them, they had chosen to stay in Eden with the bioimproved, non Mule humans. Where Jarl never quite fit in.

As far as the public knew, Kit was a human, created to be as much as possible like the Mule, Jarl, the husband of Kit’s supposed mother without sharing any genetics. This was not true, and Kit knew it, had known it for years. He was Jarl’s clone.

That two Mules isolated on Eden had even managed to clone one of them was a miracle. Mules had been designed by humans who wanted them to be superior, capable of doing things that humans didn’t do well,
and
incapable of reproducing either the normal way or by cloning. Doc Bartolomeu, himself, was a Mule. But few, if any, remembered it. Jarl could not hide it. In his time, on Earth, he’d been a genius as famous as Einstein had been before him. He’d been a genius even among Mules, and his face had been plastered on everything from posters to clothing.

His friend, Bartolomeu Dias, less well-known, had hidden it. Eden didn’t know what Doc Bartolomeu was. The few who’d known it had died. Their descendants had forgotten. His freakish longevity was attributed to random good genes, plus I suspected no one knew how old he was—only “very old” and “a fixture of Eden.” Jarl had wanted to give his clone a similar chance to be anonymous, a human among humans.

But Kit knew. And worse than that, Kit knew about Doctor Bartolomeu. The first didn’t worry him. My husband was sufficient in himself, and didn’t care all that much what people thought of him, provided that his family didn’t mind. He regretted that his true origins had blighted his first marriage and led directly to his first wife’s suicide, and yet, he was not ashamed of being what he was.

Still, after his wife died in space, he’d lived under suspicion of murder for two years rather than submit to questioning under hypnotics. Because there were no other witnesses, he had no other way to exonerate himself. And though—as he’d explained to me—he didn’t mind its being known what he really was—he was afraid that his origins, if revealed under hypnotics as the cause of Jane’s suicide, would expose Doc or blight his family’s standing. And so he’d kept quiet. If he submitted to questioning now…

I finished lamely, “It will come out about his past and who he is…”

Jean shook his head. “In this case, Kit’s origins aren’t at the root of events, as they were with his first wife’s death. Doc Bartolomeu will ask the questions and keep them within bounds. Our family can demand it, since he’s our family physician, well acquainted with Kit’s physiology and Kit is dreadfully allergic to most hypnotics.”

“What?”

“Oh, he is,” Jean said. He gave me a tight smile. “It’s not a cover-up, though it would be convenient. No cover-up is as convenient as one that’s true. We know about it, because the drugs are in the same class as drugs used to test reflexes in final Cat tests. Since the Energy Board must risk a rookie, his Nav, and a ship on a run to the powertrees just to test him, they give Cats hypnotics to make the run more difficult, and they put them in virtus. Kit gets respiratory issues and an upset stomach from the hypnotics. He passed, but that was an awfully messy virtus closet, and the test had to be carefully timed to give him the antidote before hypnotics caused serious damage.”

“Oh,” I said. “But if it’s not safe—”

“Perfectly safe, provided it’s ended in time. And it gives us an opportunity to request Doctor Bartolomeu,” Jean said, “who will be careful in administering it.”

“But what will a hypnotics test prove?” I asked. “I mean, you can’t rig it so Kit says he didn’t land on Earth after all. He did. I was there. We figured there was no way to hide it, so we might as well tell the truth, from orbit.”

“You did the right thing,” Kath said. “At any rate, I suspect they would have arrested him on suspicion, considering how late you were. That you confessed it up front establishes that you didn’t have any ill intent towards Eden or its people.”

“But then what can Kit say under hypnotics that will exonerate him?”

“Why,” Tania said, “the only thing he can say. That he has no ill intent towards Eden and her people.”

“But that’s obvious,” I said. “Why would he have any? And what difference does it make?”

“All the difference in the world.”

“I still say,” I said, darkly, “that this is all very confusing. It would be much easier to storm the cursed place, get Kit out and take off to space. I know places on Earth we could land. I know his eyes make him illegal, but my friends didn’t care and I—”

Anne’s hand rested on my arm, a light touch that managed to be both sympathetic and restraining. “Thena, on Earth he’d always be out of place. Here…don’t give up yet. Remember there’s more than one way to juice a bug.” This was a proverb in Eden, relating to the fact that their equivalent of coffee was bug juice, actually made from the droppings of specially engineered bugs.

But I didn’t want to juice bugs. I didn’t even drink the stuff. I wanted my husband back.

“Trust us,” Kath said. “We can get you through this, and get Kit released.”

“Whether we can get Eden back too, that’s something else again,” Bruno said darkly, as his eyebrows came down over his eyes. To my non-comprehending look, he added, “There are some people very invested in keeping powerpods scarce and a state of emergency going on.”

“State of emergency?”

“Sure,” Bruno said. “When the Earthwo—” He stopped, midway through the derogatory term. “Earthers started hunting darkships—”

“That was my fault,” I said. “My father was trying to recover me. He…”

“So? It hasn’t stopped since you were caught. At least not to our knowledge. Going to the energy trees remains a huge risk, and the Energy Board maintains it’s too risky to take more than one trip per couple, per year, because we’re losing so many of our pilots before new ones are trained, and besides they need to take time to repair ships. They’ve convinced everyone—well, almost everyone—that it is somehow your fault. And Kit’s fault for bringing you here.” He made a face as though he’d like to spit. “So, we’re all on rationed power, which means the Energy Board gets to pick who gets power and who doesn’t. They can dictate that someone gets their power shut down, for
using too much
. And if you ask questions, you’re suddenly using too much, and find yourself cut off. No one has died yet, but people have had to hide out with relatives and friends. It’s only a matter of time, though.”

“But…” I tried to reconcile this with the Edenites I knew, who were always ready to fight for the freedom to do as they pleased. Kit had once told me that if they had traffic-tower access controls installed in their ships, Edenites would just rip them out. That sounded right. This didn’t. Letting people tell them when they could—or couldn’t—have power didn’t seem like them. “Won’t people rebel against…”

“How can they rebel against scarcity? Scarcity so terrible that of course supply has to be controlled. And not just by how much you’re willing to pay,” Bruno said. “Because no one wants their less well-off neighbors to freeze in the dark. At least that’s how it is being sold. The truth is they have switches and they can control who gets what.” He looked vaguely ill. “It’s the problem of a centralized supply system.”

“But why is it centralized?” I asked. “Is the Energy Board elected?”

“No,” Kath said. “They’re not a government. We don’t have elections. Jean, how did the people in the boards come to the boards?”

He frowned. “Don’t remember reading about it. I think…Well, I assume they owned the ships? Somehow? It was long ago, and it worked, so it didn’t seem important.”

“They never tried to control Eden with energy rationing before,” Anne said. “But of course, they never had an excuse before.”

“And of course no one complains,” Eber said. “Not even us. Because if we do, then we’ll come home one day and find our home has been without energy, which drives air and heating as well, and Jean and the kiddies are all dead. No. We don’t complain. Mind you, they haven’t cut energy to anyone to that extent, but there have been instances of people left in the dark and without heating, with only enough power for air recycling for hours.”

“And I think,” Jean said, “that this is why they wanted to get rid of Kit. It’s a minor miracle they didn’t blast you out of orbit, and I say our family owes that docking controller a debt of gratitude.”

He shook his head at what must have been my utterly blank look. “Don’t you see, Thena? They’ve somehow figured out what Kit is. They’re afraid Kit will be able to understand what we have of Jarl’s writing, and be able to complete Jarl’s last project—the creation of a new cluster of energy trees, and our own powerpods. That would put an end to Castaneda’s power. Not immediately, but inevitably.” He made a face. “Though why they think Kit can understand it…We’re not primitive, surely they know that clones do not have the memories of the original?”

The word “clones” dropped unremarked and no surprise showed in any of the faces around me. I know. I looked. Which meant they knew what Kit was. But his family would never talk. Certainly not to Castaneda and his ilk. They had accepted Kit as their own, as if he were their genetic relative. I felt at once vaguely envious and so moved I had to swallow so as not to cry. Kit’s kind—and mine—didn’t have families. Having one even at a remove was more of a miracle than I ever expected.

“I think perhaps his late wife told someone,” Jean said in the disconcerting way the Denovos had of answering questions I didn’t ask. Of course, they were mind-readers, but their ability was supposedly restricted to their partners. I decided either I was glass-fronted or our minds worked remarkably alike. “Because a lot of people seem to know what he really is. People who shouldn’t. Mind you, it’s not as…certain as his confessing it under hypnotics would make it, and most people will refrain from acting on it unless they can be really sure. Because, it’s such a shocking idea. Of course, as your…when you two don’t have children, it will be seen as a confirmation of rumors, but it will be slow and over years, and by then there is no reason you two can’t immigrate to one of the Thules before it’s noticeable.”

“There is no reason our marriage won’t have children,” I said. This time confusion showed in their faces.