I lifted an eyelid and flashed a light against her pupil. It contracted normally. Her pulse was even and tidy.
I set her hand down where I had found it and slowly left the room. The syster had not looked up from their work. You don’t find many people that devoted on a sleep shift, but maybe they were studying for advancement. Or maybe they were playing solitaire.
There was a little more corridor beyond this room, and at the end of it, another door.
I squared my shoulders. I was ready to jimmy this lock, too.
I wondered what I would find there.
* * *
At first, I thought the space beyond—too large to call it a room: a hold, maybe, labyrinthine—was full of cryo tanks. Much more modern ones than those that had lined the vast hold on Big Rock Candy Mountain, naturally—but it still left me with a shiver of recognition.
Then I looked at them again, and realized they were not cryo tanks, but the exact opposite. The cryo tanks were there, but they were in ranks behind the objects I’d first noticed, and there were a lot more of them.
The ones in the front… were artificial wombs and incubator tanks full of suspensory medium. Incubator tanks of various shapes and sizes. Incubator tanks optimized for a dozen, two dozen different species of systers.
And they, and the cryo units behind them also, were full of clones.
* * *
It was not the first clone farm in my experience. This was a hugely resource-intensive operation, but there was no good reason for it not to be here. The whole private unit was a resource-intensive operation, after all. But something about this place and the young/old woman I’d seen outside bothered me.
I picked my away along the rows of tanks. Call me ethnocentric, but I concentrated on the human ones. A few dozen, ranging in age from fetal to the prime of youth. Suspended in their nutrient liquid, doing nothing at all. Medical clones don’t have fully developed brains; enough to keep the autonomous functions functioning and the normal growth growing. Brains don’t develop in a vacuum; they need stimulation and experience to learn how to do even such basic things as balance, pick up a fruit. Interpret language. See.
I supposed there was a possibility that Mx. Denarian out there had had her brain transplanted into a clone body. It would be an egregious waste of resources; sure, you could use a stem-cell suspension to graft the old brain onto the new neural tissue, but old brains are old. We don’t die, these diar, because our bodies wear out; we die because our brains stop functioning effectively and we run out of the ability to prop them up with spot repairs.
Besides, the incision on the patient’s skull had been small, tidy. The sort of thing you did to efficiently implant a fox, for example.
One of the clones near me twitched, and I almost jumped right out of my exo. I turned toward it, but it was only a long, myoclonic tremble. A contraction through the muscles of the shapely, muscular thigh and calf and ankle. A REM-sleep shiver.
Clones didn’t dream.
Clones weren’t usually… buff. They didn’t have exquisitely trained, athletic bodies.
They didn’t generally have deep brain stimulation wires running into their skulls. They didn’t wear virtual reality goggles over their eyes, waterproof earphones in their ear canals.
My hands trembling despite the exo, I called up records on the pad attached to the incubation tank. Daily exercise sequences, isometrics, general health of the body—
Brain development.
I looked at the magnetic scans. I craned my head back and looked up at the clone, hovering over me in hairless, godlike nudity. Looming pale inside its tank of translucent dark liquid.
I looked back at the magnetic scans.
Brain development normal for a seventeen-year-old person.
But this wasn’t a person. This was an object.
Objects were not supposed to have brains.
CHAPTER 25
TSOSIE WAITED FOR ME OUTSIDE my quarters. He was sitting on a bench in an alcove, looking uncomfortable: those multispecies perches aren’t really suited to most of the species they serve. I looked at him, and he looked at me.
He stood.
I said, “You appear to know where I’ve been. How much do you know about what I found there?”
“Can I come in?”
I didn’t feel like having this fight in the hallway, so I opened my door and led him inside. My quarters are rated for a family, it’s true, but that doesn’t make them large. It does mean that what would have been Rache’s room is my own private bedroom, so I can use the main room off the little entry as a sitting room.
It’s selfish of me, but I never bothered to clarify to admin that my daughter would probably never be visiting me. Maybe I didn’t want to clarify it to myself, to be honest.
I offered him the couch. He took the floor. I printed myself a cold beer and asked if he wanted one, too.
“Caffeine,” he replied, looking uncomfortable.
I gave him a mug of coffee substitute. If he wasn’t using the couch, I was. I settled into it.
He sipped his drink, probably framing an opening gambit, and I exploded in his face. “Am I the only person in this entire fucking hospital that didn’t know what was going on in there?”
Tsosie swallowed. “You’re not the only one who doesn’t want to know. Am I right in saying you never bothered to find out until somebody made you?”
He looked more compassionate than I had expected, given his words. As is completely predictable, I immediately tried to pick a fight.
“I need,” I said, “a certain amount of professional detachment to do my job.”
“You’re not detached,” he told me. “You’re dissociated. It’s treatable and you know it.”
“If Sally thought I was ill—”
“If Sally thought you were too ill to do your job, she’d say something,” Tsosie interrupted. “You’re not too ill to do your job. You’re just too ill to be good for yourself.”
“Oh,” I said, “and you’re absolutely perfect.”
“Perfection is not required for awareness,” he said, and his deadpan—curse him—made me laugh. Once they get you to laugh the fight is over, because no matter how mad you are, nobody takes you seriously when you’re trying to dress them down while giggling. Anyway, he was sitting a half meter lower than I was, which made it hard to find him threatening.
That man is entirely too good at everything he does. I wondered if he was right about me—whether what I thought of as a professional reserve, professional detachment… was really more like floating a centimeter outside the world, never really engaging with it.
He might be right, I decided. If he was, it was a problem for another dia.
“Nobody holds it against you,” he said. “But you do make yourself hard to get close to, Llyn.”
I wanted to bite his head off, which probably meant that what he was saying was true. I sighed. “Am I good at my job?”
“Very,” he admitted.
“Are you one of the saboteurs?”
“No!” His horror had to be real, didn’t it?
“Then why are you here?”
“Sally sent me. She said you might need emotional support.”
Tsosie was definitely the guy you sent for that, all right. I rolled my eyes.
It occurred to me that he said he knew what was in there, but maybe he only thought he knew. Maybe he didn’t actually know the worst. “So what do you know about what’s in the private unit?”
He put his hot caffeine water under his nose and leaned over the mug, closing his eyes and inhaling exactly as if the contents were palatable. “I know,” he said, “that there are a couple of secret—well, okay, not secret exactly—wards in Core Gen. That one is in ox sector. That it’s reserved for patients who fork over a ridiculous amount of resources for access, and that most of them are suffering from diseases of extreme senescence. I also know that the death rate of these extremely old people is extremely low, even by the standards of care
available at Core General.”
I studied him. He was, as near as I could tell, being honest.
“I don’t imagine they’re coming here to die,” I said. “They could do that far more comfortably in their own habitations, or in a planetary hospital for that matter, though nobody likes gravity when their joints hurt.”
I knew that for a fact.
He sipped the hot caffeine water and rolled it around his mouth before swallowing. “I don’t know exactly what therapies they’re receiving.”
“Clones,” I said. “Not parts grown from stem cells. Whole bodies. Whole clones.”
He stared at me, head turned slightly as if he had almost figured out what was bothering me, but hadn’t quite yet made the intuitive leap.
“Whole clones,” I said. “With fully developed brains.”
He breathed out.
“I met one of the patients. Well, I can’t say I met her, as she was still in an integrative coma. A young woman of a mere hundred and thirty ans or so. With a fresh implant scar.” I touched my head.
His face did a number of interesting things as I talked, and as he considered what I had said. It settled on concentration. He was going to treat it as an intellectual problem, then. “You can’t transplant a fox. The architecture of one brain is too different from another. Even a clone brain—especially a clone brain, that’s grown to adult size without experiences to influence its development. It wouldn’t have—it wouldn’t have developed speech centers, even. And even if you could, you wouldn’t be transplanting the person.”
Beer had been the right choice. Possibly O’Mara’s tequila would have been a better one. “What if you… exercised the developing clone brain? The same way you exercise the body so the muscles and skeleton develop normally? Virtual stimulation? A series of implants, changing as the clone grows? They start them young in some of the clades: the technology exists.”
“That’s not a blank slate,” he said. “That’s a person.”
“A person who has never existed in the world,” I said. “A person with no rights, and no records, and no friends or family. And then, when they are physically adult, you put a final fox in place, integrate it, and… download the entire senso of the original person into the clone body you made. It would cost a fortune. But some people have fortunes to spend.”
“That’s not the same person!” he protested.
“Legally it’s the same person. There’s continuity of experience, of a sort. As much as any of us have, anyway. If you could buy planets, but not another moment of being alive, would the niceties matter to you? Or would you have the ego to believe that you would persist in some meaningful sense?”
“I think I’ll take that beer now,” he said.
I gestured to the printer. “Help yourself.”
I missed real beer, with its irreproducible organic esters and subtle, layered tastes. But this would do in an emergency, and I felt like emergency had arrived.
My breath frosted in the air in front of me, which was unusual. I checked the datapad in its pocket on the couch arm. An unusual power drain on environmental systems, technicians working to correct. So many little things going wrong.
“Wow. It got chilly in here.” Tsosie made himself a pale ale and came around to sit on the other end of the couch. I felt better conversing at eye level.
I handed him the pad, and he grunted, then made eye contact. There was nothing either of us could do about it now. Saboteurs? The digital infestation of the hospital’s physical plant? I hoped the engineers could solve it.
“Is the private unit the target of the sabotage? I suddenly have some sympathy—” He stopped. “Does O’Mara know?”
“O’Mara knows and is under a confidentiality lock. I think they pushed me into finding out on purpose. And yes, it’s what the sabotage is about. I think it’s meant to… draw attention. And that’s why the hospital has been being quiet about it—because they didn’t have any choice, because they couldn’t explain…”
“Why didn’t the saboteurs just tell everybody what was going on?”
“No proof?” I said. “Add that question to the pile with ‘Where the hell did they get a generation ship?’ ” I finished my beer. “I think Calliope is one of the clones. Remember how Dr. Zhiruo said her DNA looked… very orderly? But hadn’t managed to decode the painfully bad archaic bragging poetry we assumed was encoded in it?”
He looked aghast. “I… that’s awful. I don’t know. I don’t even want to think about that.”
“I don’t want to think about any of it.” Having no more drink to occupy myself, I returned the glass to the recycler. Since I was up, I started to pace. “But I think we have to. You started to say that you might have sympathy for the saboteurs and… you’re probably right. Empathy, anyway. But my god, Tsosie, they have fucked things up. Maybe less through cold malevolence and more through bad planning, or lack of considering the consequences. I…”
“Why is everyone such an asshole?” he asked, sympathetically.
“Yes.”
He sighed. “Helps us fit in better.”
His comment reminded me to apologize. “I’m sorry, by the way. I suspected you might be behind the sabotage for a while.”
“That’s okay,” he said. “I suspected you.”
“I thought you trusted me!”
“I thought you trusted me.”
“With my life. But then I couldn’t trust anything anymore.”
He finished his beer. “That’s smart.”
“It’s lonely.”
“So what made you decide to trust me now?”
I blew out. “I figured out who it had to be, and it wasn’t you.”
* * *
In three-vee thrillers the amateur detective goes off and confronts the suspect without leaving a note, but that’s a little too risk-unaverse even for me. Tsosie didn’t want to leave me alone, after I explained to him. But I explained that I was telling him as a security measure, and that if he came with me that security measure was useless, because we would both be in the same place with the person I suspected was a saboteur.
“Why not tell Starlight?” he asked, pretty reasonably. He was now on his second beer.
“Because I’m not one hundred percent sure, and I want to be sure before I accuse anybody of attempted murder and negligent homicide. And also because I agree with their goals, though not their methods. This needs to be exposed.”
“What if you don’t come back?”
I got up. “Finish your beer.”
He finished his beer. “What if you don’t come back?”
“Then you have proof.” I grinned at his stricken expression. “Come on, Tsosie. Let’s go to work. It’s way too late to start pretending you like me.”
“I do like you, you enormous pain in the ass.” He stood, also. “Don’t get killed.”
* * *
Loese wasn’t in her quarters. I should have checked before I dropped by, but I didn’t want her to get the location ping and figure out that I was onto her. She wasn’t on-shift; there was literally nothing for a pilot to be doing right now, and wouldn’t be until ships could leave the hospital again.
So that meant that unless she was socializing, exercising, or eating, she was likely to be on Sally.
I sighed. I had wanted to have this conversation in private. Not in front of Hhayazh and Camphvis and Rhym. Or Sally.
I was more or less in luck. Rhym and Hhayazh were on-shift, doctoring away somewhere in the ox sections of Core General. Camphvis was sleeping, privacy shield pulled closed. Loese was in her bunk, reading from a handheld. She sat up and swung her legs down when I walked over.
“You haven’t been around much.” She stood. Her voice sounded hurt. The emotion might even be real. People are complicated.
“I got seconded to some administrative work, and then a lot of people needed emergency surgery.” I cleared my throat. “Why are you telling people that Helen caused the disaster?”
She look
ed at me. She looked around. She said, “Let’s go for a walk.”
We went for a walk. Around the outside of the ring, in one of the habitrails that loop its surface. The stars were under our feet; Starlight’s mutating leaves glittered beyond the transparent ceiling. I wondered if the Administree would be able to hear us, through the layers of atmosphere, structural material, and more atmosphere.
“Turn on privacy,” I told Loese.
Her eyes flicked up. “I see.”
Together, we temporarily withdrew translator permissions. I set myself a reminder to turn them back on again, or I was going to wind up shouting to somebody for suction and all they would be able to hear would be gargling noises.
Then she said, “I haven’t been telling anyone anything.”
“That’s not what I heard.”
“I’m not saying I haven’t discussed a possibility.”
That self-justifying—
Well, she would have to be.
I sighed. “If Starlight found out—”
“You wouldn’t do that.”
I was tired and in pain, and I wasn’t thinking too clearly. That’s the only excuse I have for what I said next. “Why would you assume that I would keep a secret like that?”
Oh. You would assume that, if you were secretly combatting something nefarious, and you weren’t afraid of being found out.
“I don’t expect you to keep a secret.” She kept pacing along, strong calf muscles giving her a rolling gait.
“Loese, I know about the sabotage.”
She nodded, and didn’t glance at me. “I figured.”
“You—” All the things I could have accused her of, and the one that burst out of me was, “You hurt Sally.”
Now she looked at me: pityingly. “Did you think Sally didn’t know? She’s one of us, Llyn. Several AIs are.”
I put a hand on the transparent wall to steady myself. These trails didn’t see a lot of use. They were beautiful, but many people found them unsettling. Now I leaned my weight on apparent emptiness that was nevertheless a rigid bulkhead, and struggled to catch my breath.
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