Rogue clone (42 page)

“Do they want to kill us?” Archie asked.

“We’d already be dead if they did. That was a fighter. The pilot could flame us with a single shot if he wanted.” I glanced at the broadcast gear. It would need another two minutes of charging before I could use it.

The Harrier did not came upon us from behind. It slowed so that we would see it, flashed over the top of the Starliner, and vanished into space. The radar tracked its path.

“They’re not going to shoot us yet,” I said.

“How do you know that?” Archie asked.

“They’re stuck out here and the broadcast station is down, right?” I asked. “They’ll want to know how we got here before they start shooting. If they figure out that we’re self-broadcasting, they’ll want to capture our ship.”

“Unidentified space craft, this is the U.A.N.
Grant
. Identify yourself.”

“The
Grant
,” I whispered to myself. I knew the ship.

“What are we going to do?” Archie asked.

“They want to know how we got here,” I said. “I’m going to show them.” An amber light winked on above the broadcast engine to show that it was ready. I had already programmed in the coordinates for Little Man, and now I initiated the broadcast.

They had no way of knowing where I broadcasted to, but they could certainly make an educated guess. If I had come from within this galactic sector, I could only have come from Little Man—Delphi as Archie called it. That was the only habitable planet in the area.

With that short visit, I set events in motion. I started the countdown. Archie could no longer evacuate his colony. We had time to fly his people to safety, but he would need to leave his buildings and equipment behind. But Archie did not want to leave. He believed that God had deeded him Little Man and that God would protect him. All he needed was faith.

“Raymond was right,” Archie said in a soft voice to his people. He looked dejected. His arms hung at his side as he spoke, his head hung at a slight tilt. “That carrier did not make it through the broadcast disc. It will not arrive at Delphi today, and it may not come back for a week; but sooner or later, it will return.”

The congregation let out a collective gasp. “Deliver us, Lord,” one woman yelled. She stretched her arms above her head, her fingers extended, imploring.

I sat alone in a corner in the back of the town hall ready to leave. Freeman sat with Marianne and her son. They sat one row behind the rest of the congregation. They were with the people but not part of them.

“Raymond believes that we should leave this planet. He believes that the Philistines are at the gate, and we must abandon our promised land.

“God has promised us deliverance. We will not abandon our planet. I have seen the enemy with my own eyes. His fighters are as fast as light. But we must not fear the puny arm of man, for God will protect us.”

As the congregation let out a collective hiss, Freeman looked back at me, and our eyes met. In the silence that passed between us, we communicated disbelief.

If they wanted to call Little Man their “promised land,” well, they had the right to interpret it any way that they wanted. Saying that God would deliver them from the
Grant
, however, that was bullshit. No one could deliver them from the
Grant
, and the only ones who might try were the “goddamned clone” and the colony pariah.

The thing was, I couldn’t leave them. Klyber once told me that military clones were programmed with an altruistic streak. We were made to serve and protect, especially when it meant killing enemies of the Republic. But now my programming was twisting in on itself, I was programmed to fight for the Unified Authority. In the back of my mind, I constantly reminded myself that the Unified Authority no longer existed and that whoever was flying the
Grant
, they were not receiving orders from Washington D.C. I did not know if I could convince myself of this. I would not know until I either performed in battle, or froze because my programming would not let me continue.

I watched these people and I hated them. I regretted coming to Delphi. All of the anger I felt for the Unified Authority now focused itself on this congregation. And yet, none of them had done anything to harm me. Not even Archie.

Archie launched into a prayer. In that prayer he gave thanks for the planet of Delphi. Still praying, Archie said that Ray and I were led to the planet by God so that we could be instruments of deliverance. We were “tools in God’s hand.”

When the meeting ended, I asked Ray how he could ever have lived with these people. He shrugged his shoulders and walked away.

“Wayson,” Marianne said as she watched Ray leave, “this is Caleb. This is my boy.” She rested her hands on the shoulder of a young man who stood just a tad under six feet tall. His head came up to my nose.

“Good to meet you,” I said, trying to sound like I was comfortable around kids. I did not know what to say to the boy.

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Harris,” said Caleb.

And then we had an awkward moment when none of us knew what to say next. Archie came and tapped me on the shoulder. “May I speak with you?” he asked.

I nodded, grateful for the escape.

Archie led me to a quiet corner of the building. We could see people filing out the door. No one came to speak with us. I think they could read in Archie’s posture that he had serious business to discuss.

“Mr. Harris, I owe you an apology,” he said. Speaking in that baritone voice, he sounded truly humbled. He looked down at the ground as he spoke and rocked back and forth on the soles of his feet. “I don’t know what came over me.”

As I heard this, I could not help but remember the journal entry that the Catholic priest wrote about Sergeant Shannon. “I should not have laughed,” I said.

Archie looked up at me and smiled. “It must have looked awfully funny . . . me farting with that stunned look on my face.”

I returned the smile. “It did.”

“Mr. Harris, you and Raymond did not need to come here. No one asked you to help us, but you came. And now, once again, we are asking you to extend your generosity.”

I put up my hand. “It’s okay. Coming here was Ray’s idea. You should thank him.”

“He says it’s your ship.”

I nodded.

“Well, I wanted to thank you.” Archie turned and started to walk away.

“Can I ask you a question?” I said.

“Anything,” Archie said.

“You don’t believe I have a soul,” I said. I did not really care about whether or not I actually had a soul. I had made it this far without one. But the prejudice bothered me. I had come to help these people. If they considered me less than human, that bothered me a lot.

Archie Freeman stood silent and still as a tree and stared into my eyes. He had dark brown eyes that had yellowed. His eyes were bloodshot and appeared tired and full of intelligence. Staring into those eyes, I decided that Archie Freeman might give in to prejudice, but he would never knowingly lie.

“No, son, I don’t believe you have a soul.”

“Science can create life, but it cannot create a soul?” I asked. “Is that what you believe?”

“Science cannot create life,” Archie said.

“I’m alive,” I said, “and I’m a work of science.”

“I am not trying to judge you, Mr. Harris. I’m sorry for what I said. It was an awful thing to say. I don’t suppose I can ever take it back. No man can tame the tongue. It is a little member that boasts great things.” I did not know if this last bit was poetry or philosophy or scripture, but Archie sounded sad as he quoted it.

“Don’t judge me, judge science. I crawled out of a tube, not a womb. What does your gospel say about that?” Yes, I was spoiling for a fight with a man who had come to apologize to me. I was mad. I was offended. I knew I was wrong, and I did not care.

“Mr. Harris, I don’t pretend to understand cloning. I am a minister, and I have spent the last fifty years of my life on barren planets cut off from men and the galaxy.”

“But you don’t think science can create life through cloning?” I asked.

“Cloning doesn’t create life, it duplicates it,” Archie said. “If I have a fire, and you hold a stick over the flames until it catches on fire as well, you haven’t created a new fire, you’ve simply borrowed a flame from me.

“They didn’t create life when they made you, Mr. Harris. They borrowed genes from one of God’s creations . . . somebody who had a soul. You got his hair and his skin, and his eyes, but I do not believe you got his soul. I don’t believe his soul was embedded in that DNA.

“Now I think it’s real nice that you and Raymond came to rescue us. And I am grateful that you have been so generous. You appear to be a man of great virtue, though if you are associated with my son, you are probably a professional killer. But unless science has identified the gene that holds the soul, I see no reason to believe that you are anything more or less than a temporal man . . . a body with an Earthly spark of life and no chance for eternity.”

I thought about Shannon quoting Nietzsche to that archbishop, telling him that no man has a soul. I thought about pointing out that there was a time when white men thought that black men had no souls. None of this mattered. I asked Archie what he believed, and he gave me an honest answer.

“I came to apologize for what I said, Mr. Harris. I am extremely sorry about what I said on your ship. I hope you will accept my apology.” Having said this, Archie turned and walked away.

“That’s not exactly what he told everybody else about you,” Marianne said as she came around the corner.

“You were listening?” I asked, feeling ashamed.

She smiled at me; and her dark eyes, so much like her father’s, seemed to stretch wider with her smile.

“He is my father.”

“And that makes eavesdropping alright?”

“Yes,” she hesitated and spoke slowly as if trying to make up her mind. Then, with more certainty, “Yes, it does.”

“What did he say to everybody else?”

“The night you landed, we held a town meeting.”

“I know. I was there for some of it. I left and you followed me and we talked.”

“No,” Marianne said, “that was an open meeting. After you and Raymond left, Archie held a closed meeting, just for the men.”

“And you listened in?”

“Do you want to hear what he said or not?”

“What did he say?” I asked.

“People were scared of you. They said that cloning is an abomination. Archie said that incest is an abomination.”

“That makes me feel better,” I said.

“You don’t understand. Do you read the Bible?”

“Do you follow current events on the mediaLink?”

“Wayson, you’re such an ass.”

“Sorry.”

“Have you heard of Lot?” Marianne asked.

“Sodom and Gomorrah,” I said. “His wife looked back and turned into a pillar of salt. You don’t need to read the Bible to know that story.”

“Do you know that after his wife died, Lot’s daughters got him drunk and seduced him? They had two sons and both sons created nations.”

“Unless they were cloned, I don’t see what that has to do with me,” I said.

“One of those nations was Moab,” said Marianne. “A woman from Moab married a Jew. Her great-grandson was King David.”

“So?” I asked. I had heard of David and Goliath. I knew he wrote the Psalms. “What does any of that have to do with cloning?”

Jesus was a descendent of David. Had it not been for Lot’s daughters, Jesus would not have been born.

“Don’t you see, Archie justified you? He said that righteous ends can come from evil means.”

The errand was not dangerous. All I was doing was broadcasting out to the middle of nowhere to take some radar readings and locate the
Grant.
I would not broadcast anywhere near its course, and unless they were looking for a broadcast signature, they would not detect me. If they did detect me, I would broadcast out before they reached me. If they reached me, they still wanted my ship intact. They could not risk shooting at me.

Ray came into the cockpit. Marianne loaded some food in the Starliner’s galley as I prepared to take off. The last people on the Starliner were Archie and Caleb, Marianne’s son. Over the last few days, Caleb had become my shadow, my helper, and my unofficial second-in-command. The boy was twelve years old, far too tall for his age, and headed toward another growth spurt. He liked to ask questions and watch his surroundings with great curiosity.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Marianne asked.

“I’m going along for the ride,” he said.

“You’re not going anywhere,” Marianne said.

“That’s what I told him,” Archie said.

“He’s with me,” I said.

She stared at me as if making sure I was serious. Caleb grinned like a child and squeezed around her as he made his way toward the cockpit. Marianne gave me a nasty look and climbed out of the Starliner.

“Go sit back there,” Ray said, pointing back to the cabin. Caleb and Archie sat on the same row. Caleb sat by the wall and stared out the window. Archie sat by the aisle and watched Ray and me.

“He’s adopting you,” Ray said. “You know that, don’t you?”

Taking a break from my instruments, I looked back at Caleb. I could only see the back of his head. I imagined that he was smiling, excited to fly into space.

“I don’t know much about families,” I said. “Is that what they call it?” I flipped a switch and brought the controls on line. I would take off in another minute.

“When a fatherless boy starts following you around, he’s looking for more than a friend,” Ray said. He glanced at Marianne, who was standing in the door of the meetinghouse. “She and Caleb are alone. Unless you want to live here on Little Man, you’d better let Marianne know you’re not here to stay.”

“You lost me,” I said. “Let’s square things with the
Grant,
then we can talk family.”

So Ray sat cramped in his seat and watched me. I stole a peek at Caleb. Had he pressed his face into the window any harder, he might have broken the glass. Seeing the boy made me laugh.

“Harris,” Freeman said, “this colony is a different world from your old clone farm. Nothing goes to waste here.”