Rogue clone (7 page)

“I’m meeting with Huang and the Joint Chiefs next week at the Golan Dry Docks for a top secret briefing,” Klyber said, interrupting my thoughts. “I would very much like to return from that conclave alive.”

I spent the night on the
Doctrinaire
, sleeping in one of the state rooms that Admiral Klyber reserved for visiting dignitaries. My bunk was hard, my room was sparse, and the bathroom was entirely made of stainless steel. I felt at home.

Stripping to my general-issue briefs and top, I took the book Klyber gave me and climbed into my rack. The sheets were coarse and stiff, stretched so tight that you could bounce a coin on them. It felt good to lie down.

Klyber had said that the book had a passage in it about a friend of mine. I opened the journal to the section marked by the thin strip of ribbon. As I looked at the handwritten entry, I realized that Admiral Klyber had been wrong. The man described in this journal was more of a mentor than a friend. The passage was about Tabor Shannon, whom I had met while serving on the Kamehameha, Klyber’s old flagship.

Shannon was a living paradox. He was a Liberator. He’d killed hundreds of enemies in battle, but he also went to Mass. He was the only clone I ever met with a religious streak. His religious feeling made no sense because, as a Liberator, he knew he was a clone and therefore knew God had nothing to do with his creation. Catholic doctrine held that clones had no souls. Almost every church taught that. Shannon was intelligent, but he remained blindly loyal to the Republic to his last breath. He died in battle, fighting for the nation that had banned his existence. At the time he died I admired him more than anyone I ever knew, but I grew to despise him. He seemed pathologically determined to devote his life to those who cared least about him—the nation that had outlawed his kind and the God who disavowed his existence.

Since leaving the Marines, I had come to question the line that separated devotion and delusion. Granted, I was still working for the same side as always, risking my life for the same Republic that never shed a tear for Tabor Shannon; but I was different. I had gone freelance. I made money for my services. I was also free to leave. If the Confederate Arms offered me a better deal one day, I wanted to believe that I would take it.

Having seen what I had seen, I did not believe in nations or deities. And as for Shannon, who did believe, I could not decide whether he had been a quixotic hero or just a fool. Either way, I had no intention of following in his footsteps.

From the Journal of Father David Sanjines, archbishop and chief administrator of Saint Germaine:

Entry: Earth Date June 4, 2483

I received an urgent message from spaceport security this morning. When I called to look into the
matter, the captain asked me to watch a feed from his security monitor.
They had detained a marine named Tabor Shannon. I only needed a moment to identify the
problem. “Is that a Liberator?” I asked the captain. “Haven’t they been banned?”

“Liberators are not allowed in the Orion Arm,” the captain said. “They can travel Cygnus freely.
If you want my opinion, I think they should all be executed.”

The ecumenical council of 2410 held that clones did not have souls and therefore did not fit the
Catholic definition of human life, but I did not think that made them machines. Church canon
dating back to Saint Francis forbade cruelty to animals. Perhaps this Liberator clone had more in
common with a mad dog than a man, but he had blood running through his veins, not oil. He was
no machine.

The captain told me that he checked with the U.A. Consulate. “We don’t have to let him on our
planet. Should I send him away?”

The captain knew better than to tell me what to do. Saint Germaine being a Catholic mission, I
was the one who made the decisions. “Do you know what he is doing here?” I asked.

“He says he is on a pilgrimage.”

“You must be joking,” I said.

“No sh—er, no, Father. I am sorry about that, Father.”

“I understand, my son,” I said. The presence of a murderer on our little planet would put
everyone on edge. A religious pilgrimage? I was skeptical to say the least. “He is on a
pilgrimage?”

“That’s what he says.”

I asked the captain if he would detain the man in question until I could arrive. I thought that
might be soon, but this was Friday and a holy day—the immaculate heart of Mother Mary. I
needed to attend to Mass and then I had a full day of meetings. The Liberator would have to wait
until tomorrow.

Entry: Earth Date June 5, 2483

I did not know how I would react to meeting a Liberator face-to-face. As a young priest, I served
in the Albatross Island penal colony. I was there during the riot of 2472. A force of Liberators
came to the planet to stop the rioting. They put down the riot, all right. They also killed the
prisoners and the guards and almost everybody on the planet.

Before seeing Liberators in action, I believed that clones were human even if they had no
immortal souls. I even questioned the ecumenical convention that decreed clones were created of
man and not God. That changed for me on Albatross Island.

You cannot understand a lion until you have seen one devour its prey. I thought that all people
were created in God’s own image until I saw the Liberators, demons who looked like men but who
rejected all goodness. I saw them kill thousands of innocent, helpless men. Just thinking about
that massacre is painful. Once I witnessed the way the Liberators fought and killed, I saw the
wisdom of the ecumenical counsel’s judgment. These monsters could not have had souls.
I arrived at the spaceport before lunch and found an office in which I could interview this
Liberator. His name was Tabor Shannon. I arranged for us to be alone. I was an old man now,
and I had no time to fear devils, not even cloned ones.

Three soldiers walked the prisoner into the room. I dismissed them at the door. The leader of the
soldiers did not want to leave. He said I would not be safe alone with a Liberator. I told him I
would take my chances, and I dismissed him a second time. All the while the Liberator sat in one
of the seats I had arranged in the middle of the room, watching us.
If I ever felt scared during my interview with the Liberator, it was when I turned and saw the way
he watched us. I believed his expression was implacable. Now, as I think about it, I have changed
my mind. I think that his expression was merely one of curiosity.

“I am Father Sanjines,” I said as I came to sit across from him. We were nearly knee-to-knee, just
a foot or two separated us. I knew this man could easily spring from his chair and strangle me,
but I sensed that he did not come to do violence. “You are Corporal Tabor Shannon?” I asked.

“That is correct, Father.”

I looked around the room. Maybe I was unconsciously looking for a door through which to
escape. What I saw instead was a small wet bar with a crystal decanter. “I am an old man,
Corporal Shannon. I took my vows nearly fifty years ago.”

He said nothing.

“Would you like some sherry? We don’t have many fine things on Saint Germaine, but we do have
a superb distillery. I personally oversaw the building of it. I’ve been in this mission from its start.”

The clone did not accept my offer. Perhaps he was not much of a drinker or perhaps he wanted to
leave a good impression, I could not tell.

“You’ll want to try it before you leave,” I told him.

“What is this about?” the Liberator asked, still trying to sound civil. “Why have you detained
me?”

“Mr. Shannon, this mission is nearly twenty years old, and I have been the chief administrator and
archbishop here for all of that time. Before coming here, I was a chaplain on a penal planet.”

“Was it Albatross Island?” he asked.

“It was,” I said. “You can imagine my feelings when I received a call alerting me that a Liberator
had arrived in our spaceport.”

The Liberator said nothing.

“You claim that you have come on a pilgrimage. Is that correct?”

“It is, Father,” the clone said, sounding as determined as a young boy wanting to enter a
seminary.

“You will forgive me if I find that hard to believe, Mr. Shannon, but you see, I watched three
hundred of your kind butcher prisoners, both rioting and innocent. Perhaps you were not involved
in that . . . that . . .”

“Action.”

The Liberator used the word action. I was offended.

“I was trying to decide whether to call it a slaughter or a massacre,” I told him. “I think a more
appropriate word might be
extermination.
As best as I can remember it, one thousand five hundred
inmates rioted and the marines sent a battalion of Liberator clones to restore order. That was five
rioting inmates for each Liberator. I should have thought that would have been enough blood to
satisfy them.”

“I wasn’t there,” the Liberator told me.

“When they finished killing the rioters, they slaughtered prisoners who did not riot. Then they
turned on the guards and hostages. By that time, they weren’t even using bullets anymore. They
beat men to death with their rifles. I helped reclaim the bodies of the victims, Mr. Shannon. It was
the most terrible thing I have ever seen.

“That was the closest I ever came to renouncing my vows. When I saw what those Liberators had
done, I did not believe that a just God would have allowed the creation of such monsters. A few
weeks later, the Senate outlawed Liberators. Is that not so?”

“They outlawed the manufacture of Liberator clones,” Shannon said to me. His gaze still met
mine. I did not know if I saw glee or defiance in his expression, but I did not like what I saw.

“We don’t, as a rule, receive many clones on this planet.” Having said this, I felt a tinge of guilt.
This clone had been nothing but pleasant, and I had acted adversarial from the start. “Forgive
me,” I said. “I have been too straightforward. Are you sure you will not have a sherry?”

I climbed from my seat and went to the bar to pour myself a glass.

“Are you refusing me entry?” the clone asked.

“We Catholics like to believe that our church runs this planet, but the Unified Authority maintains
an embassy just down the street from the Archdiocese. The U.A. runs this spaceport facility, as a
matter-of-fact. That is not a symbiotic relationship. We do not welcome government intervention
on our planet.”

I shut my eyes and thought about Liberators as I sipped the sherry. Perhaps I was reliving those
last hours of the siege on Albatross Island, those awful moments when our rescuers became
predators. I thought about a cell block in which the blood and brains on the walls were so thick
that I could no longer see the bricks and mortar.

We Catholics are anti-synthetic by our very nature. According to our doctrine, only God can
create life. The use of clones in the military caused the Vatican to release a statement defining life
as a being with an immortal soul. Science can clone sheep, snakes, and soldiers that breathe air
and move of their own volition, but science cannot prove that its creations have souls.

“They were without compassion,” I said. “Ravenous dogs lusting for blood. You will forgive me if
I have been impolite, Mr. Shannon, but I see nothing even remotely redeeming about your kind. I
once questioned the doctrine that clones have no souls. Having seen the work of Liberators, I
determined that the butchers who came to Albatross Island were soulless creatures. I saw nothing
redeeming in them.”

“‘But if there be no virtue to take away, consequently there can be no vice,’” Shannon said.
I heard this and smiled and took a long sip of sherry. “You’ve read Saint Augustine. Impressive.
But you’ve misquoted him. Augustine said, ‘If there be no good to take away.’ He also said, ‘It is
impossible that there should be a harmless vice.’”

“He did say that, didn’t he?” the Liberator said cheerfully.

“The Liberators who invaded Albatross Island did a lot of harm. I believe that their existence is a
vice,” I said. “It is a vice of the Unified Authority government.”

“I never cared much for Saint Augustine, anyway,” Shannon said. “What about the secular
philosophers? Friedrich Nietzsche said that no man has an eternal soul. If he was correct, that
would put us all on equal ground. None of us would be alive by the Vatican’s definition.”

“Quoting a philosopher who referred to himself as ‘the anti-Christ’ does not generally lead to a
favorable impression in a Catholic colony,” I said. “I suggest you restrict yourself to Saint
Augustine while you are on Saint Germaine, Mr. Shannon. Better yet, I suggest you avoid
discussion of philosophy entirely. The people on this planet have strong opinions.”

“While I’m on Saint Germaine?” Shannon asked, “Are you allowing me to stay?”

“What is the object of your pilgrimage?” I asked.

“The same as any pilgrim,” the Liberator said. “I seek truth. I want to know who I am and how I
fit into the universe.”

“And you believe you can find those answers on our little planet?” I asked.

“I’m curious about Catholicism,” the Liberator said.