Anayabi then did perhaps the worst possible thing he could have done at that moment and under those emotionally charged circumstances.
He laughed.
Flinx thought his head was going to explode. Combining a suddenly escalating headache with the clashing emotions that were raging inside him threatened to send him spinning back into unconsciousness. With as great an effort of will as he had ever exerted, he somehow forced himself to remain composed and in control.
“Please.” A universe of multiple meaning underscored that one word. “Explain yourself.”
“Oh, very well.” Anayabi was at ease now. Finally convinced he was not about to be arrested and sent off for mindwiping, he had reverted to his natural authoritarian self. “You might as well know the truth about yourself. Everyone deserves to know the truth about themselves, I suppose. Even experiments that ought not to have survived this long.” Virtually merry, his improving mind-set contrasted starkly with Flinx’s deepening somberness.
“What else did dear departed Theon tell you about your origins, Twelve-A?”
Despondent and confused, Flinx struggled to recall. “Very little. He—wasn’t talking much at the time. No, wait—I do remember something else. He said—he said that I was not the product of a natural union. I already knew that, of course, since I’d previously learned that my mother was impregnated via artificial means.”
“Artificial means.” Anayabi chuckled, shaking his head. “Description without being descriptive. I’m afraid that all these years you’ve spent searching for your ‘father,’ you’ve been wandering aimlessly on a bit of a wild-goose chase, Philip Lynx.”
Something horrible was growing in the pit of Flinx’s stomach. The gathering discomfort threatened to match the throbbing that felt like it was going to blow the top off his skull. On his lap, a suddenly apprehensive Pip twisted around to look up at him. She could not read the expression on his face, but she could perceive his emotions as clearly and sharply as she could detect dead meat at twenty meters.
“Maybe,” Flinx said abruptly, “we should stop for a little while.”
“Stop?” Anayabi eyed him in mock astonishment. “Why would you want to stop now, when you’re so close to obtaining the truth that you say you’ve spent such a long time seeking?” Still holding on to the pistol that was resting on his thigh, he leaned toward his newly uncertain, uneasy guest.
“When I say that I am ‘one’of your fathers, what I am really saying to you is that you have no father. You never did. Not in the traditional patrilineal sense.”
Flinx was barely breathing. Head pounding, he desperately wished for the medicine kit that was part of the service belt he always wore. Kit and belt, hope and past, and maybe a great deal more lay drowned together somewhere in a Gestaltian river far to the south.
“Even, even if the name was lost,” he stammered, “the identity of the man who donated the germane sperm should be traceable through—”
Clutching the pistol, Anayabi stood up abruptly. “You’re not listening to me, Twelve-A. Pay attention. That’s a good little experiment.” He smiled as a desolated Flinx stared starkly back at him. The older man’s widening smile was far from what anyone would have considered jovial. There was, truth be told, just a faint hint of a smirk about it. It was one more indication, however minor and seemingly insignificant, that the outlawing of the Meliorare Society had not been done in an arbitrary manner but for good and sound and well-researched reasons.
“There was no sperm donor, Twelve-A. Your DNA was mixed in the proverbial vat. Your chromosomes were predesigned in shell and sybfile. You were not conceived: you were sculpted. A strand of protein here, a fragment of nucleic acid there.” His voice grew slightly distant, remembering fondly. “We picked and chose and cut and spliced. The most difficult gengineering work ever attempted; the finest ever achieved. You were pasted together, Twelve-A. Like all the others. Some of it worked. Some—did not.” His attention returned fully to the present. “You weren’t born, Philip Lynx. You were made.”
Somehow Flinx choked out a response, instead of on it. “To what purpose? To what end?”
Anayabi gestured meaningfully with his free hand. “Isn’t it obvious? You yourself already used the term improve. Humankind has come a long way since our first ancestors figured out it was more efficacious to throw rocks at their enemies instead of hiding behind them. Time passed, civilization—of a sort—grew. Thousands of years passed. Hundreds of years ago we finally took our first steps out of the nursery and off the mother world. Since then we have accomplished many things, some great, others less admirable. We, along with the thranx, have made the Commonwealth. Yet we still all too often fight and argue among ourselves, act irrationally, neglect our true potential.”
No longer the reclusive retiree, Anayabi was now every millimeter the true believer, Flinx saw. The face and voice of the gently inquisitive hermit had been replaced by that of the dedicated fanatic.
“Humankind has always been impatient.” Having fully warmed to his polemic, the older man continued. “Those of us who worked as Meliorares were merely a little more impatient than the rest. Tired of waiting for our species to achieve its full potential, we determined to do our best to bring it about. In so doing we dedicated ourselves not just to reach for the next rung of the evolutionary ladder, but to skip as many rungs as possible. We strove to push human gengineering to the next level.”
“Without the consent of the gengineered.” Flinx’s voice was flat.
Unperturbed, Anayabi shrugged diffidently. “It is difficult to consult with an embryo. Yes, there were some failures along the way. It is ever so with science. With each line we strove to focus on a new ability, a new dimension of human consciousness.”
“I’ve scanned the Society’s history. Some of your ‘failures’ died prematurely. Some of them died horribly. Some were not that lucky.”
“It was not intentional,” Anayabi assured him. “Steps forward are invariably accompanied by steps back. We did everything we could to minimize the discomfort of those lines that did not develop as intended.”
“Verily your kindness knew no bounds,” Flinx replied acidly.
The other man’s expression darkened. “Great leaps in practical, as opposed to theoretical, science are rarely made without sacrifice.”
“A noble proposition on the part of those who never have to make the sacrifices.” Discouraged, disenchanted, and disheartened beyond measure, Flinx had had just about enough of this smug survivor. “At least I had a mother.”
Anayabi eyed the tall young man pityingly. “Twelve-A, Twelve-A—you listen but you do not hear. If you are no more perceptive than this, then despite your claimed Talent you are beyond doubt only one more in an unfortunately long line of failed experiments. I have told you, you were produced. From head to toe, you are a manufacture. The lynx-caste ex-courtesan Anasage whom you persist in referring to as your ‘mother’ was only one of many hired to carry finished product to term. Biological carriers are more reliable than synthetic wombs. Not to mention cheaper.” Leaning forward once more, he all but hissed his next words.
“Listen to me, Twelve-A. Philip Lynx. There was no sperm donor. There was no egg donor. You are a broth, a brew, an infusement and distillation of thousands of different strands of DNA carefully selected by brilliant if misunderstood men and women, vetted by software and machine, melded together in the simulacrum of a fertilized human egg that was then implanted in a suitable vessel and allowed to mature to term.”
Escalating headache ignored, everything else forgotten, a trembling Flinx swallowed hard one more time. His throat was as dry as the time he had been marooned on the deserts of Pyrassis, as dry as when he had gone gem hunting on Moth with an old man by the name of Knigta Yakus.
“Then,” he finally managed to whisper, “I’m not human?”
The older man’s humorless laugh filled the room. Behind him the wood fire, forgotten and unattended, was beginning to subside. “Oh, you�
�re human enough, Twelve-A. If anything, you’re more human than human. That was our intent, remember. To enhance, not to change. To revise and update, not begin anew. We did not wish to break with the human genetic code. Merely, as with any reliable machine, to give it a tune-up. Working without precedent and in the absence of a suitable manual, we were forced to fall back on trial and error.”
He’s not looking at me, Flinx realized. He’s studying me.
“Stop it,” he snapped icily. “Stop it right now.”
“Stop what?” Anayabi’s emotions belied his innocence. “You have no idea how rewarding your unexpected appearance is for an old man. I am gratified merely to see you alive, Twelve-A. Alive and—”
Flinx could not keep himself from finishing the other man’s sentence. “Not warped? Not misshapen? Not some poor, miserable, crawling thing that needs to be put out of its misery?” Now it was his turn, as he stroked and soothed and restrained the increasingly restless Pip, to lean forward. “There are all kinds of distortions, old man.”
Though he tried to sustain his anger, he could no more do so than he could continue to deny to himself the truth of the relentless Anayabi’s statements. He was too stunned to marshal an appropriate response. What more could he say, what else could he do? The sense of loss, the emotional hollow that had materialized inside him, was overwhelming and threatened to drown him with its import.
After all these years, after more than a decade of desperate, hopeful searching, not only had he not found his father—he had lost a mother.
I am nothing, he thought.
No, that wasn’t quite true. He was certainly something. Some thing. A human thing, Anayabi had insisted. Had insisted with a hint of an emotional as well as visual smirk. What kind of human-thing not even the last of the Meliorares was able to say. Anayabi’s next words indicated that he very much wanted to know, however.
“When the representatives of the sanctimonious United Church combined with ignorant Commonwealth authorities to smash and scatter the Society, a number of incomplete experiments were dispersed throughout the Arm. Preoccupied with saving ourselves from mindwipe, those of us who survived the initial storm and its subsequent outrages quickly lost touch with our test subjects. In nearly every instance we never learned which of these were successes or failures. Tell me, Twelve-A—which are you? Without access to long-destroyed records, I cannot correlate generalized hopes with specific manipulations. Besides reading emotions what else, if anything, can you do?”
So earnest was the query, so genuine the request, that for a moment Flinx almost answered honestly. He caught himself in time. The last thing this cavalier toymaker deserved was any kind of insight into the life and nature of one of his unhappy, unwilling subjects. A new kind of calm settled over Flinx.
“Nothing,” he replied evenly. “Other than perceiving the emotions of others, I can’t do anything. Except, apparently, track down sinister dead ends like yourself.”
“Nothing at all? I have already decided from talking with you that your intelligence level is nothing remarkable.” Anayabi delivered this observation as coolly as if the subject of the slight were not sitting directly across from him. “No unusual abilities, no great physical strength, no exceptional enhancement of the other senses?”
“No,” Flinx told him categorically. “Nothing. Except for being cursed by the need to track down the truth about my origins, I’m—ordinary.”
“I see. Ordinary. An ordinary empathetic telepath.” Anayabi nodded at some private thought. “I am afraid, Twelve-A, that in the lexicon of the Society ordinary, when measured against the expectations of the Society and even if combined with what is after all not such a useful ability—a talent for reading emotions—must be placed in the same category as failure. Besides which, you now know not only where I live but also who I am.” The muzzle of the pistol started to rise slightly. “This has been fascinating and enlightening. Meeting you, reminiscing—but on balance and despite the brief burst of pleasure it has given me, it would appear that I should have left you in the snow.”
Preternaturally sensitive to such things, Pip perceived the stark shift in the other man’s emotional balance an instant before Flinx did. Unfurling her wings, slitted eyes focused unblinkingly on the other man, she rose from her master’s lap.
Possibly she was getting old. Despite his long association with her, Flinx had no idea how old she was and therefore had no idea how long she had to live. For self-evident reasons, records on lethally venomous Alaspinian minidrags were notoriously incomplete. Possibly Anayabi was just lucky. The reason was immaterial.
His pistol blew a hole in her left wing. He could not possibly have focused so quickly on and aimed so accurately at the pink-and-blue blur. One lucky shot in a lifetime of close association with Flinx finally brought her down. Spiraling awkwardly downward, she crashed to the floor and lay there, writhing and coiling in pain. A stunned Flinx found he could only stare.
“It was going to attack me,” a defensive Anayabi stated with confidence. “I have this feeling it will try to do so again. As always, first things first…” Training the pistol on the helpless flying snake, he took careful aim.
“No!” Rising from the couch, Flinx unhesitatingly threw himself between the weapon and the animal with whom he had shared an unbreakable empathetic bond since childhood. It was not the first time in such a dire situation that he had acted without thinking.
It was not the first time in such a dire situation that something powerful and inexplicable overwhelmed him and consciousness fled.
CHAPTER 14
When light and awareness began to return in equal measure, Flinx found that he was not entirely mystified at what had happened. Because the same thing had happened to him several times before. Most recently on Visaria when an alien assassin had tried to kill him, and again on a previous occasion when the offending party had been comprised of human executioners. While he had confessed to Anayabi his abilities as an empathetic telepath, he had neglected to mention the singular and still-unknown attribute that had sporadically stepped in to defend him whenever he was on the verge of being killed. His impulsive and instinctive attempt to protect Pip had placed him in that position yet again, and had once more caused the mysterious mechanism to engage.
He wondered if Anayabi had survived long enough to be enlightened.
Pip was injured, but alive. She lay coiled on the floor, licking her perforated wing. Picking her up carefully, Flinx cradled her in his left arm while stroking her gently with his other hand and whispering soothing words. While comforting her, he studied the damage that had been done to the room. Though he had a good idea what had happened, he still had no clearer idea how he managed to wreak such havoc. As it had on all previous such occasions, the unidentified, innate mechanism that involuntarily engaged to protect his life had concurrently rendered him unconscious.
A perfectly round hole some two meters in diameter had appeared in the rear wall, about a meter above the floor and halfway between the still-smoldering fireplace and another doorway. Approaching the gap, he saw that another chamber lay beyond the one in which he was standing. Conspicuous in the next room’s far wall was a second hole. It was a perfect match to the one through which he was staring. Beyond it, another room and still another corresponding hole. Seen through this third consecutive circular gap, rocky landscape was visible. The faint rush of distant wind could be heard over the crackle of the fireplace. If his shadowy defensive ability had punched a hole in the weather, that was not visible.
Neither was Anayabi. There was no sign of the ex-Meliorare. That is, there was not if one discounted the revealing discolorations that stained the edges of the first hole. These sprayed outward from the still-crumbling periphery in a faint ray-like pattern, like a mottled sunburst. Some of the stains were pale white; others, a very faint red in hue. The explosive medium was comprised of bone and blood that had been powdered and vaporized.
Unaccountably, Flinx felt sick to his stomac
h. Having in his relatively short life already encountered far too much untidy death, he was no stranger to the ghastly fascia of gore. He had unavoidably been responsible for a portion of it himself. Then why should this one particular incident affect him so?
After all, Anayabi was not his biological father. In detailing Flinx’s origins, the Meliorare gengineer had callously admitted as much. He was no more Flinx’s father than Theon al-bar Cocarol had been. Their “relationship” to him had been that of manufacturers to a product, of scientists to an experiment. So what if they were the closest things Flinx would ever know to a paternal parent?
How many men, he mused mordantly, got to kill their father twice over?
The two Meliorares were not all that his visit to Visaria and now Gestalt had dispatched. Following Anayabi’s harsh and uncompromising explication, something else inside Flinx had died. Whereas previously he had only felt terribly, dreadfully alienated, there was now a vast emptiness within him, as if he had gone all hollow inside. You were made, the late, unlamented Anayabi had told him. You are a manufacture.
A manufacture. A human manufacture. Wasn’t that a contradiction in terms? But then, he told himself, what was Homo sapiens stripped of pretension and self-importance if not an organic machine? In the end, was it the process of manufacture that was important, or the product? Certainly the Meliorares had subscribed to the latter belief. If he believed similarly, was he the same as they? Was there in the final analysis anything to differentiate him from his cold, calculating progenitors?
Ethics, perhaps. Morals. A sense of purpose. The last, he knew, was in imminent danger of slipping away. Concern for others, certainly. He was sure that still held true because he spent the next hour searching the house for medical supplies with which to treat Pip’s injured wing. Careful scrutiny with the handheld scanner he found indicated that the damage was confined mostly to membrane. Given time and care, it should heal good as new. Pip would soar again. Would he?
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