by Julian May
PD32:C2 could be purchased on the open market, of course—cautiously, so Rampart would not know that the stuff was being resold at an enormous markup—or it could be stolen. Gala agents and Haluk pirates pursued both courses of action, while Alistair Drummond tried to engineer a hostile takeover of Rampart in order to regain control of the Spur planets—especially Cravat—that Galapharma had so imprudently let slip out of its hands.
At the same time, the wily CEO encouraged other large Concerns—Sheltok, Carnelian, Bodascon, and Homerun—to join the illicit Haluk trading partnership. There was safety in numbers, and plenty of profits to go around. The Haluk were hungry for all kinds of advanced human technology and willing to pay through the nose.
Emily and Alistair were no longer romantically involved. Her idealistic pursuit of a “greater good” allowed her to turn a blind eye to the commercial shenanigans orchestrated by her ex-lover while she expanded the therapy program, training Haluk scientists to build and operate dynamic stasis units. The aliens were very quick learners.
Too damn quick—but none of the human conspirators had any inkling of the awful truth.
One day the Servant of Servants of Luk proposed a new genetic enterprise to Emily. He had conceived a plan that would open a great new era in Haluk-human relations. Its fulfillment required “a small number” of demiclones. These Haluk in human guise were to become special cultural envoys to the populous planets of the Haluk Cluster, supposedly soothing the intense xenophobia that had poisoned any hope of rapprochement between the two races from the time of their first encounter over a hundred years earlier.
Emily Konigsberg was dubious about this bizarre notion. Demicloning, like other extreme forms of genetic engineering, had long been outlawed in the Commonwealth of Human Worlds. But eventually she gave in to the Servant’s pressure and even contributed her own DNA to the project.
When Alistair Drummond found out about the demiclones, he was furious. He believed the Servant actually intended to use fake humans to spy on the Concerns and gain trade advantages. Drummond’s first inclination was to shut down the demiclone project, but he relented after the Servant hinted that serious consequences would ensue. By then, illegal trade with the Haluk had generated immense profits that Galapharma and its Concern collaborators were reluctant to forfeit.
Drummond hatched a ploy to minimize the danger of industrial espionage. He ordered Konigsberg to incorporate a genetic marker into the demiclone procedure without Haluk knowledge. In addition, the sole genen facility producing the clones was placed under strict human supervision, on a remote human world. Galapharma itself undertook to supply the luckless donors of human DNA.
Alistair Drummond’s precautions worked well enough … until the aliens learned how to perform the complex demiclone procedure without the help of human scientists, built secret labs of their own, and discovered how easy it was to defeat the sporadic DNA testing of employees that was supposed to prevent Haluk ringers from infiltrating the human race.
As I reached this point in my narrative, my pocket phone trilled. It was Cosmo Riendeau. I excused myself from the table and went to answer the call in the cottage’s living room, urging Karl to continue the story while I was gone.
Cosmo’s report was disturbing. “Only one outsider took an interest in your starship, Helly—a very pretty young woman from the accounting department in Rampart Tower. She showed up here in Oshawa yesterday, around noon, and apparently had the proper pass and personal ID. This cutie told Ole Wiren, the day-shift supervisor, that she was at the port to reconfigure a billing procedure for our number crunchers. She said she was on lunch break and ever so curious about the big starships, and she begged Ole for a quick tour. He admits he came down with instant beaver fever and showed her around.”
“She saw Makebate.”
“I’m afraid so. Your boat was obviously something special—not just another freighter or ExSec cruiser. Ole told her your starship was almost ready to leave the barn—even let slip that we’d done a fuel-cell augmentation. Sorry, Helly. The whole team knew your refit was supposed to be hush-hush, but that chick played poor Ole like a Stradivarius.”
“Probably no harm done,” I lied. “Did the woman give her name?”
“Dolores da Gama. I pulled her image and voice-signature off the shop entry security monitor for you. Hold on while I feed a dime.”
He inserted a data disklet into his phone and a talking image popped onto my screen. Da Gama was stacked like a brick shithouse and had wide-set dark eyes, pouty lips, and long black hair with a white blaze at the left temple. She talked her way past the laxly guarded entrance to Rampart Fleet Maintenance using a voice as sweet and seductive as fireweed honey. If Dolores was a demiclone, her original must have been a real hottie.
I cut off the replay. “Thanks for the information, Cosmo. I’ll look into this, but I’m sure everything’s okay.”
“Anything else I can do for you, Helly?”
“I’d like to lift off sometime early next week. Think you’d have time to rig simple arm and leg restraints on the copilot’s chair—plus an exterior lock on the john door?”
“Prisoner transport, eh?”
“Something like that.”
“I’ll attend to it personally.”
I thanked him and hit the End pad, then used the phone to access Rampart’s roster of accounting personnel.
There was no Dolores da Gama. Why wasn’t I surprised?
I sent a copy of her mug shot to Sean Callahan at InSec and told him to pass it along to his supervisor. I doubted that the lovely lady would press her luck and try another incursion, but Rampart Tower’s doorkeepers had to be put on alert.
And I had to get out of town before a fresh set of demiclone thugs came sniffing after me.
However, there was still unfinished business to be taken care of with Simon, Ef Sontag, and a few other people. I also needed to assemble certain items crucial to a successful Barky Hunt that probably wouldn’t be available off-Earth.
I sat for a few minutes, thinking, then made two brief calls. The first was to Tony Becker, Rampart’s brilliant but testy Vice President for Biotechnology, who grumped and bitched and asked questions that I didn’t intend to answer. He only agreed to put together what I needed when I used both a carrot and a stick: the promise of a hefty bribe, plus a half-joking threat to have him fired if he didn’t come through.
The second call went to Halimeda Opper, a venerable and trustworthy Reversionist party stalwart who was a media production designer by profession. She heard me out, then referred me to a theatrical supply house in Mississauga that would have exactly what I required.
I returned to the kitchen and helped myself to a second piece of German chocolate cake. Next to snickerdoodle cookies and rozkoz flan, it’s my favorite confection. Karl was regaling Charlie with accounts of our more recent adventures with the Haluk—demiclone and au naturel—on Dagasatt and on the journey back to Earth following my capture of Oliver Schneider. I lowered my eyes modestly during the heroic parts, which seemed a lot more fun in retrospect than they’d been at the time.
When Karl wound down, Charlie said, “I’m still not clear on the aliens’ motivation. Trade between humanity and the Haluk is regularized. On the face of it, we’re friends. So why the continuing demiclone espionage?”
“Why indeed,” I murmured. “Perhaps the Haluk have a hidden agenda that involves more than taking care of business. Perhaps they’ve had that agenda from the inception of the demiclone scheme! What if their moles have dug deep into the inner operations of the Hundred Concerns? What if they’re rooting around inside our scientific establishment, our law enforcement agencies, and our government?”
“To what end?” He asked the question, but an intelligent man like Charlie White had to know the answer already. I spelled it out anyhow.
“Maybe the Haluk aren’t willing to wait patiently while the Commonwealth Assembly doles out small numbers of new Milky Way worlds for them to colonize.
I have this theory that population pressure back in the Haluk Cluster is dire—otherwise, why would they have made the desperate and difficult step of jumping to our galaxy in the first place? The only Spur colony of theirs I ever visited seemed conspicuously lacking in elbow room. The school I toured was jam-packed with youngsters. Now that allomorphy can be eradicated in the germ line, parents no longer pass on the allomorph trait to their offspring. Pretty soon everybody’ll be wide awake back there in the Haluk Cluster, as well as in their Spur colonies. If they already have an overpopulation problem, doing away with allomorphy will make that problem worse.”
“You believe the Haluk intend to seize planets in our galaxy by force?” Charlie said.
“I think it’s a strong possibility. So do Karl and Bea and a few other voices crying in the wilderness.”
“The difficulty,” Karl interposed, “has been proving Haluk hostile intent beyond a shadow of a doubt. Placing concrete evidence before the Commonwealth Assembly so the matter must be openly debated—not swept under the rug, the way the Hundred Concerns and corrupt elements in SXA and ICS would prefer. Up until now, we’ve never even been able to prove conclusively that demiclones exist.”
Charlie said, “The body in my morgue—”
“Is a corpus delicti,” I said. “The legal meaning of that term has nothing to do with a cadaver. It means ‘the body of the crime’—the substantial proof that an illegal act has been committed.”
Charlie nodded slowly. His lucent green eyes had a detached thousand-meter stare, looking into a future almost too alarming to contemplate. “If only the Haluk weren’t so intelligent! It’s said that they haven’t simply purchased our high technology—they’ve improved on it.”
“That’s a fact.” Karl looked bleak as he cut himself another hunk of cake. It was almost gone. “Some of their starships are equal to the best we have. Most are inferior. But the technology gap will close as they obtain advanced production machinery from us. There’s still an embargo against selling weapons to the Haluk, but you know how effective that will be. Gunrunning to the Insaps is a fine old human institution, tremendously profitable.”
“They’ll wage war on us,” I said, “unless we expose their hostile intent. Force them to allow human inspection of their worlds on pain of full trade interdiction.”
“Force them?” Charlie White exclaimed. “In heaven’s name, how?”
“I’m working on it,” I said.
“Do the Haluk know that?”
“Probably,” I admitted.
“Maybe that’s why they tried to kidnap you,” Charlie said.
I’d pretty much come to the same conclusion. “Yeah. But I’m damned if I can figure why they didn’t just kill me outright. Why take me alive? I don’t have possession of the crucial evidence against them. Efrem Sontag does, and he’ll back up the data and secure it so immaculately that not even I can touch it. It’s still too early in the game for us to have finalized our anti-Haluk strategy, so I can’t spill any great secrets under psychotronic interrogation. And why would they need to snatch my brother Dan and sister Beth along with me?”
Charlie just shook his head.
Outside, the shades of night had fallen. Patio lights gleamed in the rain and reflected on the smooth sides of Karl’s big hoppercraft. I ate the last piece of chocolate cake. Charlie made fresh coffee and we sat around drinking it and waiting, not saying much.
Finally, about 2100 hours, Bea Mangan’s hopper wafted down and parked beside Karl’s. She came in through the back door, looking tired but pleased with herself, and dropped a magslate on the table in front of me. “Here’s the report, Helly. I’ve already sent a copy of it to Delegate Sontag.”
Charlie helped his wife off with her coat, heated water, and put a couple of peppermint teabags into a big china cup labeled C10H19OH. I pulled out a chair for Bea and apologized for the fact that we’d scoffed up all the cake. She said she’d eaten supper at the cafeteria in Commerce Tower. After she had relaxed for a few minutes and sipped some of the calming brew, I asked the pertinent question.
“What did your genetic assay show? Speak freely. Charlie knows the score now.”
Bea gave me a reproachful look. “Helly, I thought we—”
I said, “Your husband is in this thing up to his neck, just like the rest of us. He deserves to know what’s really going on.”
“It’s for the best,” Charlie said to her. “At least now I know the importance of that bod stashed in my morgue under false pretenses.”
“So—is he a demiclone?” I asked Bea.
“He is,” she said, “provided the data Lorne Buchanan sent to Sontag are correct. The so-called marker incorporated by Emily Konigsberg is actually a unique suite of introns—multiple noncoding sequences of DNA—occurring on four different chromosomes, plus a single mutant exon from the complex controlling telomeric proteins. The genetic profile of the individual you nicknamed Brown Fleece contains both the intron suite and the mutant exon typical of demiclones.”
“What are telomeric proteins?” I asked.
Dr. Charlie said, “Telomeres are ribbonlike appendages on the ends of chromosomes. Each time a cell divides—and those in the normal human body split about seventy times before kicking the bucket—the telomeres diminish a little. Youthful cells have long telos. Old worn-out cells have shorter ones. Tinkering with the genes that influence telo proteins is one of the important ways that dystasis therapy brings about cell rejuvenation and healing. There’s an enormous scientific literature on the subject.”
Bea said, “Brown Fleece’s telomeres seem to be of an appropriate length for a human male of his apparent age. It’s quite possible that the exon mutation’s effect is negligible.”
I frowned. “Then why would Konigsberg bother to include it in the demiclone marker group at all? Wouldn’t the intron suite adequately label fake humans?”
“It would,” she said. “Emily was forced to include the exon—for a very odd reason that I’m going to tell you about.”
“What does this mutant thing do?” Karl asked.
“Apparently nothing,” Bea said, “if we’re to judge by Brown Fleece. In the biosample I briefly studied, the telomeric proteins seem completely normal.”
“Isn’t there any way to check it out more intensively?” I asked.
“One would have to do some rather time-consuming research,” she said, “in vitro tissue culture of cells from different parts of the demiclone body—artificial acceleration of cell division to determine whether the overall aging process or specific bodily functions were being significantly affected. Perhaps the exon is a protogene—one that’s effectively dormant until it’s switched on by some external factor. In that case, a researcher might not uncover the mutation’s effect unless she found the relevant trigger. Perhaps Haluk scientists have already noticed this rogue exon and researched it. However, given their relative backwardness in molecular biology, I’d be inclined to doubt it.”
“Me, too,” I said. All this was more genetics than I really wanted to hear about right now, even though I suspected it might be important.
Bea took a long drink of the mint tea and sighed. “Let’s move on to the other interesting—and very puzzling—thing I discovered. Do you remember the Haluk cadaver that was sent to Tokyo University by Rampart? This happened several years ago, just before Eve was abducted.”
Karl and I nodded. I explained to Charlie: “The body was a gracile. It looked like a normal allomorph, but it wasn’t. It had human DNA mixed with the Haluk. During the long period of hostility, human researchers had very little opportunity to study the Haluk genome. So when Rampart captured a Qastt pirate vessel that had a Haluk suicide aboard, it sold the body to Tokyo University for a nice price. That particular corpse unexpectedly provided the first proof that Haluk allomorphism was being erased by unauthorized genen therapy. Bea had it briefly but was unable to do much research.”
“That’s right,” she said. “The body was returned to the
Haluk as a provision of the new trade treaty, supposedly for religious interment. The Secretariat for Xenoaffairs confiscated and sealed the Japanese researchers’ data and mine for policy reasons that weren’t made clear to the scientific community … Perhaps you don’t know that officially the Haluk genome remains pegged at its pre-allomorph-trait eradication status. Fresh research by human scientists into Haluk biology is now allowed only with SXA permission. And no permits have been issued.”
I gave a cynical smile. “Right. The Haluk—and our goddamn government—don’t want to publicize the fact that human genes were used illegally to wipe out allomorphism. That’s why the Tokyo study was never published. My father obtained a précis of it by twisting academic arms, but the full report was quashed.”
“Nevertheless,” Bea said demurely, “I managed to obtain a copy of it two years ago, as did a number of other people in my line of work. Today, when I finished assaying Brown Fleece, I compared his genetic profile to that of the Tokyo Haluk. I did this for technical reasons, to see how much of the redundant human DNA in the Tokyo body might have survived in a demiclone. Of course, the Toyko Haluk didn’t contain the intron marker suite typical of demiclones … but the body did have the mutant telomere exon.”
“What the hell does that mean?” I demanded. I was beginning to feel very confused. All this science was giving me a headache—or perhaps it was too much German chocolate cake.
Bea said, “I think we can presume that every nonallomorphic Haluk possesses this small exon mutation. Older studies of Haluk genetics confirm that the altered gene is not present in Haluk possessing the allomorph trait. Nor has the mutation ever been noted in human beings. I have to conclude that the exon is an artifact. Emily Konigsberg created it.”
Karl’s bushy brows rose quizzically. “She added a little something extra to both the trait eradication and the demiclone genen procedures?”
“Apparently so,” Bea said, “but there’s no documentation for it in her research materials. I haven’t been able to read everything in the secret Galapharma files yet, of course. But there was an extensive section dealing with allo-trait eradication that I did study carefully. I found no reference to insertion of the mutant exon. Konigsberg must have concealed it within another gene-resequencing procedure, keeping it secret from both Haluk authorities and the Galapharma technicians. Later, when the demiclone project was established, she was forced to describe the mutant exon in the marker group. It would be detectable, you see, when Gala checked its employees’ DNA to be sure they weren’t Haluk spies.”