Alex stood in the recreation lounge in front of the switched-on wall-size screen. He was watching a live broadcast from the surface of clouds, and above them, the greenish, off-white underside of the lotuses, drifting to follow the sun. The active part of the lotuses’ life cycle took slightly longer than those two months. The rest of the year, they carpeted the surface of the ocean, turning it into a green, scaly plain, lightly rippling on the waves. The lotuses were home to other plants and animals—little symbiotes that had perfectly adjusted to the cycle. They spent the two sunny months in the oceans, awaiting the lotuses’ return, or inside the flying plants’ thick, meaty tissue, replete with hydrogen cavities, or simply on the leaves’ underside.
“There’s a gap!” commented the announcer quietly, without any hint of fear. “Dear guests of the planet! You will now see what to do in case of a break in the lotuses.”
Maybe it had been a gust of wind, maybe something else, but the plants scattered. Amidst the greenish-white field, a blinding flash flared up. As if a fiery spear, thick and heavy, had ripped through the live shield and hit the surface of the planet. The video camera lowered itself, zooming in on a strip of forest that was hit by the flare. A light mist stood above the treetops—water was evaporating from the leaves. Then the camera showed a family—a man, a woman, and several small children—enjoying a picnic by the edge of the woods.
“Even if it looks like the affected zone is passing you by,” said the announcer cheerily, “be on the safe side. Take cover …”
The man and the woman looked sideways at the sky and moved under a tent of mirror-like reflective plastic.
“Be sure to put on personal safety-wear …”
The kids, who had been peacefully making sand-pies, took little crumpled sun-coats made from the same shiny material from their pockets. Slipped them over their shoulders, put the hoods over their little heads—and went on playing.
“If for any reason you are unable to take these safety precautions,” said the announcer amiably, “be sure to assume the following position …”
Out of a brook, which meandered a little ways off, a little girl came running. She wore nothing but a pair of panties. She looked up and then hurriedly lay down, folding her arms and her head underneath her body.
“Help will come!” said the announcer soothingly. The girl’s mother was already running towards the brook, waving a sun-coat.
“And even if it comes too late …”
The scene flooded with blinding light.
“Do not worry. The ‘sun kiss’ lasts no more than ten or twelve seconds. In most cases, the worst you can expect are some superficial burns.”
The barrage of light rushed on. The mother pulled the whimpering little girl to her feet, spanked her a few times, and then, with equal ardor, rubbed the child’s body with ointment. Then the woman sauntered back to the tent. The little girl wailed for a while and then returned to the water.
“The corporal punishment of the child, as shown here, is in no way endorsed by Zodiac’s Health Ministry. It is not a mandatory procedure after being accidentally ‘kissed by the sun,’” quickly added the announcer. “Welcome to our hospitable planet!”
The infomercial was over. Alex couldn’t suppress a crooked grin, thinking of the official statistics. Every white-sun season still claimed from twenty to thirty lives on Zodiac. Mostly tourists’, of course. Locals were more careful, and everyone, even the naturals, had adapted to “sun kisses.” In the same situation from which the little girl had emerged with only a slight redness of the skin, he, a strong and healthy man, would have been howling from the pain of being covered head to toe with blisters.
“I’m not so keen on going down there,” said Generalov. He looked around, as if hoping the others would support him. The whole crew had already gathered in the recreation lounge, but no one shared the navigator’s pessimism.
“Two hundred million people live down there,” said Morrison. “I’ve been there, though not in the hot season. It’s a very beautiful world.”
“I wanna go there,” Kim interjected quickly. And smiled at Alex.
Alex felt he really was looking at Kim differently. The girl hadn’t become more sexually appealing … and he still felt affection for her. But something had changed—something Alex had no words for.
Would it always be like this?
“Our venerable passengers are sure taking their sweet time,” said Janet with a smirk. She was standing right next to the screen, now showing views of Zodiac set to pleasant music. Really beautiful views. Zodiac’s nature was not Earth-like, but strangely enough, it looked very agreeable. There were lakes of dark-blue water, as if tinged with artificial color. Lush crowns of trees—every leaf green on one side and white on the other. Agile, cute little animals, scurrying in the grass like orange fur-balls.
“The Zzygou must not need an orientation,” remarked Paul. He yawned. “Captain, do we wait for them or just go in for landing?”
This jolted Alex out of his contemplation of Kim.
“Yes, please. Paul, go call them in to the recreation lounge. But be sure to ask Zey-So first, she is the senior one of the couple… .”
The engineer nodded and was just about to step out of the lounge when there was a sound of hurrying feet.
“Finally!” snorted Kim. “Should we hit replay?”
C-the-Third appeared in the recreation lounge.
The air went still with an oppressive silence. The clone’s face was covered with red blotches, and beads of sweat ran down his forehead. His eyes were glassy.
“What happened?” Alex stepped forward. This could very well be the way a pilot would look after seeing the stern of his own ship in the hyper-channel.
“Captain …” The clone’s voice was barely audible. He swallowed spasmodically, and stretched out his arm, grabbing Alex by the shoulder. “Come with me! N-now!”
Alex turned around, glancing at his crew. They all looked on in bafflement.
“Everyone, stay here,” he said, just in case. “We’ll leave the landing till the next circuit.”
The clone nodded vehemently, as though Alex had given voice to his own thoughts, and then dragged the captain off.
“What’s going on?” said Alex softly, as soon as they were out in the hallway. “C-the-Third?”
“Sh-sh-sh!”
Now that they were alone, C-the-Third’s face expressed such desperation and panic that the grimace that had frightened everyone back in the lounge seemed good-natured and happy by comparison.
“Stop it, C-the-Third!”
“It’s … all over …” the clone forced out. Laughed hoarsely. “No. I lie. It’s all just about to begin …”
Having lost any hope of getting a coherent answer out of him, Alex quickened his pace. Ten seconds later, they were standing at the door of one of the cabins.
“You aren’t faint of heart?” the clone’s voice dropped to a whisper.
“Not really.”
C-the-Third flung open the cabin door.
First, Alex saw one of the Zzygou, maybe Zey-So, maybe Sey-Zo, obeisantly kneeling beside the bed. The cabin, it seemed, had been decorated for a carnival—bright spots of red paint all over the walls. Odd, shapeless garlands hung from the ceiling. The odor, disgusting, almost intolerable to the human sense of smell, made him hold his breath.
And then it was as if a dam burst—his mind made the leap, and Alex realized all that had happened.
“No!” he shouted.
The Zzygou, frozen in a kneeling position near the mutilated, cut-up body of her partner, didn’t even stir.
“Let’s go, Alex. Let’s go. There is nothing we can do to help now.” C-the-Third dragged him out into the hallway, quietly closing the door of the cabin. He swallowed. Then shook his head. “It’s monstrous … monstrous.”
“Why did she do this?” Alex looked closely at the clone, who was, after all, a specialist in the Others. “They aren’t Bronins. They don’t have ritual murder
!”
The clone tittered, quietly, hysterically:
“Alex … No! Zzygou partners are incapable of killing one another!”
“A suicide …” Alex began, and stopped himself. No living creature could smear its own blood all over the walls, festoon the ceiling with its own entrails, and then peacefully lie down on the bed.
“Zey-So has been murdered.” An anxious rattling note appeared in C-the-Third’s voice. “She has been murdered by someone in your crew, Alex! By a human—by one of us!”
He was quiet for a second and then, a little more calmly, although the words’ significance would not in any way dispose anyone to be calm, he added:
“Zey-So is the Crown Princess of the Zzygou Swarm. Her death at the hands of a human is a just cause for war. As a matter of fact … I think the Zzygou warships are already on their way through the hyper-channels. Sey-Zo has a portable transceiver. Before calling me in, she had gotten in touch with her mother world.”
Operon III,
Dominant.
The Naturals.
Chapter 1
“Before we begin …” The man sitting across from Alex had finished filling his pipe and was lifting the flickering little flame of his lighter. “First of all … have you ever worked with a detective-spesh?”
“No, I can’t say that I have, Mr. Holmes,” replied Alex.
Sherlock Holmes puffed on his pipe and leaned back in his armchair, fixing Alex with a tenacious stare. They were sitting in Alex’s own cabin, but now he felt himself a guest … an uninvited and unwanted guest, at that.
“My real name is Peter C-the-Forty-Fourth Valke. My matrix, Peter Valke, has been dead for thirty-six years now, but our line has proved so successful that more of his clones are still being made.”
“A rare case,” Alex ventured. “They say … they say it is very hard for clones to be born posthumously.”
“Yes, Mister Romanov.” The clone nodded. “That’s right. But my whole line of detective-speshes, including me, is incapable of any human emotions, so we aren’t shocked that our matrix happens to be dead. Peter Valke was a great man, one of the first genetically modified detectives. He had personally offered to introduce the production of a line of his own clones and named them in honor of the most popular detective of all time.”
“Do you also like Sherlock Holmes, Mr. C-the-Forty-Fourth?”
“Of course. But I suggest you address me as Mr. Holmes in all our communication from now on.”
Alex nodded. That wouldn’t be hard. The detective-spesh’s entire appearance—from the lean, broad face, high cheekbones, and lanky figure to the formal tweed suit—brought to mind the immortal hero of Arthur Conan Doyle and his mad successor, Professor Hiroshi Moto. Moto had been a Japanese literature specialist who had superimposed the psychological profile of the long-dead British writer onto his own consciousness, completely losing his own personality. In his place appeared the twenty-first century writer named Moto Conan, and children all over the world still were engrossed by his books. The Rebirth of Sherlock Holmes, The Case of the Missing Gel-Crystal, Cyborg at Rest, The Four Contested Gigabytes, The Strange Story of a Dentist-Spesh … Without a doubt, Hiroshi Moto had really become a worthy successor of the ancient writer. Most probably, he had latently possessed a genuine talent—after all, not one of the many other attempts of this kind had ever led to success. Neither Count Lee Tolstoy, nor poet Anna Shelley, nor artist Mikola Rubens had ever managed to create anything decent.
“The image of my prototype, Sherlock Holmes,” continued the clone in the meantime, “is almost completely congruous with a detective-spesh. All remnants of emotions had to be removed, of course. But in general, I am a real Sherlock Holmes, Detective for Cases of Imperial Importance …”
Alex could not resist saying, “Holmes usually demonstrated his abilities to his distrustful clients.”
“You are not a client.” Holmes took the liberty to smile. “You are a witness and also, excuse me for saying this, a suspect in the case of the brutally murdered Zzygou. Although …”
The detective’s gaze became more piercing as he studied Alex closely.
“I have already committed your official and, I beg your pardon … your unofficial personal files to memory. So I will be asking you about things I couldn’t learn the ordinary way. The last alcoholic beverage you perused was dry red wine … em … Edemian Beaujolais … with some chemical stimulant unknown to me. During the last twenty-four hours, you had sexual contact with two women, apparently, first Kim and then Janet … and then there was an unfinished contact in a sex imitation program …”
As absurd as was the very thought of making ironical comments about a detective-spesh, Alex couldn’t help himself—the blocker was probably to blame… .
“Yes, the real Sherlock Holmes would have benefited enormously from acquiring a dog’s sense of smell.”
The clone’s lean, wrinkled face remained unperturbed. He took a few puffs on his pipe and then gruffly said:
“The real Holmes is the offspring of a writer’s genius. I am the offspring of the genius of geneticists. That is why I am just as real and have the same right to this name. Well, Alex, since you’ve asked for it …”
He leaned forward across the little table separating them. And started to talk quickly, bluntly, as if hammering in every word:
“Your parents, Alex, were miserable losers. Your mother a natural, your father an accountant-spesh. He strained himself to the breaking point to pay for your elite specialization. He always worked overtime, and you got used to seeing him in his chair, with bundles of wires sticking out of his cheap neuro-port … so you grew to hate the very sight of it. The hostility you harbored since those days, you later transferred to everyone who used the old neuro-shunts, wrongly assuming that these people were cold, cruel, and indifferent toward others. Three years ago, this very attitude became the cause of problems on the space-liner Horizon because you cooked up a far-fetched excuse to relieve from duty a pilot-spesh with an older-model neuro-port. Your metamorphosis had been extremely painful, due to the peculiarities of your organism, and since then your mind has fixed upon the opinion of all naturals as a lower caste of humanity.”
“That’s not true!” cried Alex harshly.
“Yes, it is. You are convinced that the suffering you’ve endured gives you the right to consider yourself special, while in reality you simply have a weak reaction to analgesics. Ever since your metamorphosis, you’ve been feeling offended and tormented by the insignificant reduction of your emotions, although that is unavoidable for a pilot-spesh. I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve been using some kind of emotional scanner to keep track of your own feelings. But this is all the result of common, ordinary shortcomings in the work of your parents and your child psychologist—they allowed you to experience too close an emotional contact during your pre-metamorphosis period …”
“I don’t know what personal files you’re using, Mr. Holmes …” Alex hissed. “I don’t know how you’ve found out about my poor parents! But it’s probably not worth digging through my past in order to solve a problem in the present!”
Holmes said nothing. He let out a cloud of heavy smoke, set aside his pipe, and continued in a softer tone of voice:
“All this isn’t in your personal files, Mr. Romanov. Trust me. This is a manifestation of the very capacity for induction and deduction characteristic of my literary prototype. In addition, I have unlimited access to information systems, enhanced sense organs, and modified morals. I am a servant of the law, Mr. Romanov. If the law says that a starving child who has stolen a piece of bread deserves to be hanged, I will send him to the gallows. And if the law says that a rapist and a murderer should be acquitted, I will let him go in peace. That is the foundation of my strength. The literary Holmes could allow himself to let a guilty person go, and leave justice to the Lord, if he felt the person truly deserved it. I cannot do that. My heart is only an organ for pumping blood, and I have no other god but
the law. I will find the person who has killed Lady Zey-So and turn the criminal over to the punishing hands of justice. No one is capable of deceiving a detector-spesh, Alex. If you are innocent, however, if your hands aren’t stained with blood—I will become your defense and support.”
Alex was silent, looking at Sherlock Holmes, a person created by the talent of writers, by the work of geneticists, and by the wild imagination of detective Peter Valke. Valke was in some ways akin to Hiroshi Moto—the writer turned himself into a reincarnation of Conan Doyle, and the detective became the embodiment of the literary character.
“I am not guilty of Zey-So’s murder,” said Alex with a sigh.
Holmes nodded and began speaking again. His voice changed now, becoming soft and benevolent, which was surprising in a person completely devoid of emotions. Alex recalled that Sherlock Holmes had remarkable acting abilities.
“Tell me everything that happened following your first visit to the deceased Zzygou’s quarters, Mr. Romanov.”
“I went back to the recreation lounge,” began Alex. “All the crewmembers were waiting for me. They were all a bit alarmed because the appearance of C-the-Third Shustov had made … em … quite an impression. But I didn’t notice anyone behaving differently from everyone else. Just ordinary tension among people who sensed that something unpleasant had happened.”
Holmes nodded approvingly.
“Having told the crew what had happened, as prescribed by the rules, I asked if anyone wished to clarify the situation. Everyone said that they had not the faintest idea about the causes or the circumstances of Zey-So’s demise. After that, using the captain’s exclusive access, I took Mirror into a stable emergency orbit and blocked all the control systems of the ship. Then I reported the situation to the Imperial Security Services, adding to the report the special opinion of C-the-Third Shustov about the consequences of the Zzygou’s death. Having gotten the confirmation that the message had been received, I turned off all communication systems, and we waited for you.”
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