Darkship Thieves

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  I thought I heard a chuckle, but he might have been clearing his throat. A hand rested gently on my head. It should have been creepy, but it wasn't. It should have felt sexual, but it didn't. More a touch of encouragement or benediction.

  "Thena," he said. "Listen to me. Not all duels lead to death. You can pick the form of the duel and restrict it to first down. I understand what you mean about Christopher wanting the creature kept alive, though I can't say I understand it. What I can't quite make out is why you think that they would make Kit pay blood geld. Surely you understand that if a death occurs in a fair duel there is no blood geld due?"

  I groaned again, deep in my throat, and I looked up at him, above my fingers. "That is the problem," I said. "Fair duel."

  "Uh?" His bushy eyebrows climbed his wrinkled forehead. "I don't understand. Are you planning to cheat?"

  I removed my hands completely. "No. It's one of those things . . . like, like the mind talk. When I'm pushed, or scared, or angry, I go . . . faster than normal humans. I don't know how else to explain it."

  "Hysterical speed?" He asked. "It happens, like hysterical strength, you know, and it doesn't mean you're that much faster than normal, just that your senses give you the impression that other people have slowed down."

  "No. Not that. I can almost match Kit. Not quite, but close enough. Sometimes, you know, I almost catch him . . . though he usually ends up catching my ankle and I usually end up with my ass on the floor, but . . ."

  The doctor grinned as though all of this made a lot of sense, and said, under his breath, "If I were a hundred again . . ." Then cleared his throat. "Uh . . . Are you sure it's not your perception? Or that Christopher isn't pulling punches?"

  I told him about trying to garrotte Kit, about our fights in the Cathouse, when we'd first met, and then about our training fights. I expected him to be horrified, but he looked hugely amused, an almost manic grin pasted on his face. "I see," he said, at last. "Yes, if it's that obvious, you could end up having to pay blood geld. It would be assumed you had been ELFed to an unfair advantage over him." He collected my cup, refilled it and came back, this time with a deep, rounded glass of something amber, for himself. "Well . . . you are going to have to meet him, you know? Now that you've challenged him, you simply have to. And if you don't fight to the death, but only to first down, you have . . . Well . . . They might still accuse you of assault, though everyone knows he's been pursuing Christopher and trying to kill him, so you'd think . . ." He looked at me. "No, that won't do, will it?" He sipped his drink. "They'll find a way to blame it on you and, by extension, on Christopher."

  "They said I attacked him," I said sullenly. "Out of the blue. I'm sleep-deprived, but I don't think I am that sleep-deprived. I would remember."

  "Likely." The doctor sipped again, then brought the drink down, sparkling like a golden jewel between his gnarled hands. The reddish flames or pseudo flames brought out deep tones in the amber liquid. He sighed. "The problem with all this is Christopher's . . . ancestry. He told you?"

  I blinked up at him. "That his biological father killed his mother, then himself? Yeah, he told me," I allowed derision into my voice. "I know Edenites like to think that Earthers are barbarians, but even we aren't stupid enough to think genetic predisposition is destiny."

  He stayed quiet a long time, and pressed his lips together in a way that made me wonder if he was offended at me for saying that about Eden. But I'd be damned if I was going to apologize. Edenites had made Kit's life a living hell all over a stupid thing that he could not have helped.

  At length Doc Bartolomeu said, "Ah." He sighed hugely, as if he'd been keeping from breathing the whole time he was silent, and had now to set the balance. "Is that what he told you?"

  "He . . ." I took a deep breath. "Are you implying he lied?" I had been in Kit's mind. I had the feel of him, if not all the details, and I was sure, if I was sure of anything, that Kit was not casually untruthful.

  "Oh, he's not lying. His biological father—for a given value of father—did kill his mother—for a given value of mother—and then himself. But that's not the worst—or the least of the rumors that people spread about Christopher. And none of it is as bad as the reality."

  I have no excuse, except that I hadn't slept in almost a week, or not more than an hour or so a night. I found I'd got up and set the cup on the chair—of all places—somehow managing not to spill any of the rich liquid within.

  I stood beside the chair, my hand on the arm, swaying slightly, because I was that tired. "I thank you," I said, politely, in my best Patrician manner. "I thank you for the hot chocolate, I know it's expensive, and I want to thank you for the explanation you meant to give me, I know you mean well, but I truly don't think you can help me, and I don't see what can be served by my sitting here and listening to . . . calumnies."

  He didn't move. For a moment, he just looked at me, his face as close to blank as he could get it, but then the wrinkles rearranged into an ironical smile, and the dark eyes sparkled. "Indeed," he said. "If I were standing would you be trying to kick me in the testicles?"

  I clenched my hands together, tightly, till the nails bit into the palm. I bit my lip but I couldn't bite it hard enough to keep the words in. "You are old," I said, carefully. "I don't fight with elderly people."

  "Oh, honey, don't let that disturb you," he said, and cackled, a short, immensely amused cackle. "I will probably outlive you by a hundred years." But then his face went grave and he wrinkled his eyebrow and looked attentively up at my face. "Or perhaps not. You do look an awful lot like my old friend. Though if they managed that . . ." He lapsed into silence.

  He was old. He was wandering in his mind. I would not throw a fit because an elderly man was confused. But I was also not in the mood to sit here and listen to him tell me that Kit was . . . what? Something terrible, he'd implied. "I'll be going to the Denovo compound," I said. "I'm sure I'll figure out a way . . . I'll just have a non-killing duel with—"

  "Sit down!"

  No one spoke to me like that. No one. I started towards the door.

  Behind me I heard an annoyed huff, like the not-quite sneeze a cat does when tempted beyond endurance out of the depths of its dignity. I ignored it. He was old. I was not going to fight with him. I was not.

  I reached for the doorknob. And he was there. Somehow, he was there, in front of the door. "You put something in the hot chocolate!" I said, because that was the only way he could have got there before me. "Only Kit—"

  "I put milk, chocolate and a touch of cinnamon in your hot chocolate," he said, grinning. "When you leave I'd like to give you sleeping tablets to take, because you're running on nerves and spit. But I don't give patients anything without their consent. Not unless they're total idiots, and you don't strike me as such."

  "Please, let me out," I said. So I was so tired, he'd gotten to the door ahead of me. But that only meant nothing could be gained by continuing this conversation with him.

  He cleared his throat and tried to look dignified, which somehow only made him look like an impish gnome. "Patrician Athena Hera Sinistra, would you do me the great honor of returning to your seat, removing the cup of hot chocolate from it, sitting down, and letting me speak to you? I will attempt not to offend your sensibilities—though I can't promise I won't since I'm not sure I fully understand your upbringing." He lowered his eyes, and I was sure it was just to prevent me from seeing the amusement in them, though I had to admit he was trying. "Some of what I have to tell you—and I do believe I have to, since Christopher balked at it and you have been dragged into the midst of this unholy mess—will probably shock you and offend you. However, I beg you to believe that I don't mean any form of disparagement to Christopher, whom I consider as an adopted son of sorts. He is, in many ways, admirable, even if he tends to go weak-kneed around women."

  I didn't like the tone of that last sentence, but even my sleeping brain had to admit that Doctor Bartolomeu seemed to love Kit. That much was obvious, as was
the fact that the doctor was deeply concerned for Kit, and had been concerned for our relationship before I had any idea we might, eventually, have a relationship. "I'll come back," I said, stiffly. "But you let me leave the moment I wish to."

  He lowered his head, this time in a deliberate movement, half bow, half nod. "If you wish to leave after you hear me, I will let you." He looked up and his eyes sparkled with that impish look. "I won't even make you take a packet of sleeping pills."

  I came back to the chair, of course, not fully sure I could trust him. But if he blocked my path again, I would forget he was more than a centenarian.

  I picked up the hot chocolate and sat down looking at him. He took his time sitting down, and took a sip of his drink and a deep breath, before saying something I didn't expect at all, "What do you know about the Mules?"

  For a moment I was speechless. The last thing I expected was a history test.

  "They were bioengineered," I said, dredging up the paragraph from my history lesson pertaining to it. "Sometime in the mid-twenty-first century. The . . . governments of Earth had run their course one way or another before then. Monarchies and democracies and all that, and none of it worked. So people, as a whole, decided that government was too important to be left to benighted multitudes or even to inbred aristocrats." I smiled a little, as it occurred to me that inbred aristocrats might damn well apply to the Good Men too. Which was probably why Kit had accused me of being an Earthworm and inbred when we first met. "So they created people who were far smarter, far more healthy and . . . well . . . better at everything than normal people. And they delivered the government to them."

  He didn't say anything, and I thought I was supposed to go on, so I said, "They were rational, of course, and very smart, but they didn't seem to understand . . . well . . . they didn't get humans. Quite. Or perhaps they simply didn't work by human values. Which might make sense, since they weren't, quite, human. So they did things . . . They viewed people kind of like humans view livestock. But I don't think they ate them."

  A flicker of something in the eyes, and a look up, "Not most of them, no."

  I didn't even want to pause and think of that. "And they moved entire populations around, and they experimented with bacteria that were supposed to improve the soil, and which killed vast portions of Europe, leaving it depopulated. And they started massive wars. And when they were done . . . Well . . . people revolted. There were riots and massacres. They revolted against the Mules and against the bioengineered people that were the Mules' servants. And they killed them all. There is a legend that some of the Mules and some of their servants escaped in a spaceship that they'd been building. There are many versions of the story. I suspect it grew through the centuries. There are those who say it was FTL, built by the same Mule who seeded the powertrees—though most of our historians think it was a team effort, not a single Mule, but . . . I guess legends are like that—and some say that they have a new world outside the Solar System, where they're growing their bioed armies to attack Earth some time . . ." He was still silent, looking at me attentively. "I suppose that I thought it was all a dream or a legend, until I met Kit, because they say the Mules and their servants come back in darkships to steal powerpods. But of course, it's just Edenites."

  He stirred. "Eden was founded by bioed refugees of Earth," he said. "What you would call the servants of the Mules, I suppose."

  "Yes, Kit's history books said that."

  He looked at me a while longer, and then took a deep swig of his drink, finishing it. He set the empty glass on the floor beside his chair, and stretched out his legs, so that they were almost at the fireplace. He stared at the flames, as if trying to read the future in them. "History is a funny thing," he said. "Live through enough of it and you start wondering what these people are writing about." He looked up at me, and his eyes looked clear and, for a moment, startlingly young. "You see . . . It wasn't like that. It wasn't the Mules that depopulated Europe. For a soil-improving microbe to attack people would take a massive kind of screw-up which would forever put paid to the notion that the Mules had any kind of superior intelligence."

  He frowned at the fire. "It wasn't like that at all. By the mid-twenty-first century it was obvious that Europe was dying. There were other problems too. The last gasps of a religion that refused to integrate into modernity had caused a war . . ." He shrugged. "All very involved and you either read the outlines of it in your history lessons, or it's not worth going into. Suffice it to say that, semantically, in many ways, it was a psychotic period."

  "Kit says it was a psychotic period in every way."

  "Oh, probably. But the fish rots from the head, they used to say when I was little. And the head, the way we order our thoughts, is language. Somehow they'd got themselves twisted around till they confused culture with race and religion with both. The war with this backward religion brought with it a wave of racist thinking. Particularly in dying Europe, which was very . . . worried . . . about losing its supremacy in the world."

  "But they'd lost it hundreds of years before."

  "Ah, but nations are like somnambulists. They wake in their own time. And continents . . ." He shrugged. "Anyway, it started first, in silence, almost in secret, in the frozen steppes of the area that was then called Russia. The idea was to create enough Caucasian babies. Only, you know, like everyone else, they thought they were men of their time. But none of us are. Humans . . . the legends of humanity fester in each of us, like a wound that can't be acknowledged or lanced. The men out of dragon's teeth, and other creations of not-exactly nature haunted the designers of the Mules. They wanted children, lots of them, armies of laborers and inventors. Millions of people who would fill their echoing streets, work for the state and pay their taxes . . ." He made a face. "So they decided to make these people so they couldn't mingle with normal humans—so they couldn't change the tenor of humanity, or, as they put it at the time, change the precious inheritance of humanity.

  "They made the Mules all male. They said they also made them sterile, but that seems like taking too much of a precaution, for with whom were they going to reproduce? They locked it so that this time there would be no taking any Eve from Adam's rib." He grinned at my expression. "But I am speaking in riddles, aren't I? They hobbled the genetic code of their creations, so that no female could be made by slightly altering a cloned Mule. So that Mules would not have another generation. And at the same time, of course, they started encouraging their precious, natural, Caucasian population to reproduce." He frowned. "Mind you, not just Caucasian. Every race was trying to get its citizens to reproduce, as though there were a prize at the end of the competition. Which, of course, there was. It was never the meek who inherited the Earth, unless the meek were also very fertile.

  "But I digress. Of course in making the Mules, they had come to understand how to improve all humans. So the parents who could afford it started picking the characteristics of their children and improving them. Beauty and brains. It could be said that the end of the twenty-first century saw the finest specimens of humanity ever to run the Earth. Just not many. People who could spent their entire life savings to make one perfect child. Not for them the brood of natural brats."

  "And the Mules governed . . ." I said.

  "No, no." He shook his head. "Heavens no, child. Think about it. If you could create someone to do your work for you, would you hand them direction of your life?"

  I shook my head.

  "No. Neither did your . . . ancestors. They weren't stupid. Or at least they weren't stupid that way. Besides, you're not seeing the full picture. How many Mules do you think there were?"

  I blinked. No one had ever asked me this, and I had no idea what it could matter. "Uh . . . fifty or so? The rulers of countries and . . . and the divisions of United Europe? And . . . and maybe some of the seacities?"

  He laughed. He got up, and picked up his glass, then looked at the cup in my hands. "Here, let me warm that up for you." He came back with his glass fille
d and handed me a cup of hot chocolate, and sat down again. "There were millions, child. Millions. All the animals big enough were drafted to carry babies. You see, there was an aging generation that must be taken care of . . ."

  I blinked. "Animals?" I'm sure the horror showed in my voice.

  "Oh, yes, no one had bio-wombs yet. That was much later. Invention of the Mules in fact . . ." He took a sip. "They just poured little Mules into the world and educated them in creches, by the massed multitude."

  "But . . ." I swallowed. "The environment in the womb . . . the . . . enzymes . . . it would be different. It wouldn't be . . . right."

  "No." He shifted in the chair. "They didn't care. The first generation of Mules were, I suspect, near retarded, probably intentionally, but possibly due to the means of raising them. They filled the factories, they tended the farms. They were not actually more anything than most humans."

  "And they only lived about as long as other humans. But . . . of course . . . they were not good at innovation. And Mules . . . well, think about it. All males, barely socialized . . . They required supervision like slaves—which in many ways they were." He narrowed his eyes at the fire, as though the fire had offended him. "I think that's when a lot of the ideas about the Mules formed. When I was a child, we could still see old newsvids—I suppose a lot of them got destroyed in the turmoils? Must have. Either that or no one looks at those—of breakouts of Mules from factories and farms, of entire towns where the men were killed and the women raped. I mean . . . They couldn't reproduce, but they still had all the urges of normal men. Normal men who had never learned the niceties of civilization.

  "So people thought, why not make supervisors for the Mules. Other Mules who would be . . . supervisors. Who would hold the whip over their own kind."

  He looked at me, his eyes very intent. "And then they made us."

  Twenty-Nine