"But they do not live."
"Not--" Not yet, she had started to say; Suzanne Montignet clamped down upon her anger. It was almost as though Malko were there in the room with her, whispering in her ear. Amnier delighted in argument; directness was the way to handle him. "Did you," she asked slowly, "come here to shut us down?"
"I have come," said the small man, "to decide."
They were still staring at each other when the alarms went off.
It was strange, looking down upon the bundle of amino acids that was my ancestor.
They had assembled him with lasers and viruses, in a process that the histories said would be obsolete within a decade. It was a primitive process, far likelier to fail than otherwise; the histories were unclear as to how many times the technique had ever functioned properly in the decade it was employed.
There are moments when Destiny reaches out to trace a finger down my cheek, with the touch of a lover. I do not know if it is the same for Camber Tremodian; he is an immensely practical man in some ways. The tiny bit of matter before me was the great-grandfather of the first of my line; and it was right that it was with the Gift of the House of November that I reached out, and took the broken long chains of dead matter, and brought them together in the pattern that would let Carl Castanaveras live.
Robin Macintyre finished reading off status reports in a dull monotone. "We hustled the decon unit downstairs, and--"
"Radiation?"
"All over the place. Low levels most places, but--Jorge's badge was black." For the first time Suzanne understood Robin's grief stricken expression; Robin's closest friend on the staff was a dead man. "They're taking Jorge to the hospital; I'm going to log out and go with him."
"No." It was Amnier, standing on the other side of the Information Network terminal. He could not see either Robin or the status reports that filled the other half of the screen. "You can't take him out of here."
Suzanne was not sure Robin had heard Amnier; she'd slapped down on the silence point as soon as he'd begun speaking. "Why the hell not?"
"If his badge is black," said Amnier patiently, "he's dead regardless. I saw enough of that during the war; so did Malko. Check with him if you must; medical technology hasn't advanced as much as all that in the last decade. Taking him to the hospital will be of use to nobody except this Robin person, and it will, by releasing knowledge of this radiation contamination into the general populace, place a potent weapon into the hands of those who do wish to close you down."
Robin was gesturing on the terminal's screen. Suzanne lifted her thumb from the pressure point. "One moment, Robin." She pressed down again. "How so?"
"It will mean that you are either incompetent enough to have allowed radioactives to escape from confinement--"
"We don't even use radioactives."
"Irrelevant. Or it will mean that you have been targeted by ideologs." Amnier shook his head. "The Unification Council would find that an excellent excuse to shut you down. We haven't the resources to guard an installation of questionable worth against a group of determined ideologs."
An override suddenly flashed on Suzanne's terminal. "Malko here. I'll meet you at the showers. Bring Amnier." The override ended, and Robin's form appeared again in the terminal.
"This is," said Suzanne, the instant the thought struck her, "a fascinating coincidence, that this should happen while you are visiting."
Darryl Amnier smiled at her, the first true smile she had seen from him. He spoke with chilling precision. "I have thought that myself."
Terence Kniessen, a tall fat man with a shock of red hair, met them at the showers. He was wearing his head bubble--barely visible refraction ran five centimeters around the perimeter of his skull--but his gloves had been removed. Malko was already there, undressing to enter the chemical showers; Amnier flinched visibly at the sight of the long laser scars that crisscrossed Kalharri's body. Almost hidden among the marks of the lasers were the small round puckered bullet scars. Kalharri did not look at Amnier; he entered the first shower in the row as they began undressing.
Sweat dripped off Kniessen. He took Amnier's coat, babbling instructions at the man. "--and then gargle with the mouthwash, you'll have to swallow the second mouthful. I'll meet you on the other side and show you how to--"
Suzanne interrupted him. "Terence."
He stopped speaking instantly and glanced at her sideways--he was more of a prude than most. "Yes ma'am?"
"You took your gloves off."
Terence let out a low moan. "Oh, damn," he swore and began stripping off his clothes.
The first thing Amnier noticed as they cycled through the double doors that led into the labs was the faint smell of ozone. The bubble let filtered air through, and it was not supposed to filter anything so small as an ozone molecule; but before he could be certain about the smell, he was led through the inner door and found himself upon a catwalk looking down on chaos.
Kalharri was down there, with a pair of technicians wearing decon badges. Only one of the decon badges bore the radiating triangle insignia that meant its wearer had passed training to deal with radioactive materials. The tech who wore that badge was probably paid twice as much as the tech who did not; even today, over eleven years after the end of the Unification War, there were not enough skilled decon techs to go around.
The lab was huge, easily the largest room in what was not a small building. This, thought Amnier, is where they work. The things that had been missing everywhere else were in abundance here; comic strips had been inscribed in the glowpaint, and decorative calendars were hung in three different places. The dozen or so desks scattered across the place were personalized to various degrees; one that caught his eye held the holograph of a ballerina, turning eternally on point.
The laboratory was the first place Amnier had seen in the building where glowpaint gave an approximation of yellow sunlight.
A huge laser hung nose-down from the ceiling, pointing at a table that bore a ceramic depression nearly a meter in diameter. In the middle of the depression was a small transparent container that had been clamped into position; tubes so small that Amnier could barely see them from where he stood led to the container.
Amnier made his way down from the catwalk slowly. Montignet was already down at floor level. One of the technicians was showing her listings from the devices attached to the transparent container; Montignet rose from the computer, snapped, "Ellie, get me nutrient flow now," and went back to the readouts.
Amnier reached the floor and found Malko Kalharri there, waiting for him. Kalharri stood with his arms crossed, pale blue eyes calm and rather relaxed. "Hello, Darryl."
Amnier sat down abruptly on a step four from the bottom. It put his eyes almost on a level with Kalharri's. "Hello, Malko. How have you been?"
"Well. And yourself?"
Amnier shrugged. "Busy. I work. What is happening?"
"There was a source of radiation." Kalharri eyed Amnier speculatively. "It's gone now. Vanished. We haven't been able to track it down."
"Assuming," said Amnier, "that you yourself have not caused this excitement--and I do not put it past you--please accept my assurance that I am not responsible for whatever has happened here today." He looked directly at Malko. "Did you let them take this Jorge person to the hospital?"
"Of course not."
"It grieves you that you could not."
"It would have made Robin feel better."
"But he would still die."
"Yeah."
Amnier watched the technicians in silence for a moment as they rushed about at errands that he, and he suspected Kalharri also, found incomprehensible. "If a living fetus comes out of this, and what I am hearing leads me to believe it might, I shall find it all most suspect."
Amnier thought a smile might have touched Kalharri's lips for an instant. "You're flattering yourself, Darryl."
"Perhaps. It is a danger in my profession." Amnier paused. "Our profession, I might say. You have not forgotten the way things wo
rk, at any rate. I have not needed to say a startling number of things."
"I've been thinking," Kalharri said, "about what you said to me the last time we talked."
Amnier stared at him. "Malko, that was seventeen years ago."
"I think you may have been right. The United States was in trouble." Kalharri spoke slowly, almost reluctantly. "I mean politically. In other ways it was not. The Unification Council--the entire superstructure your Sarah Almundsen designed--it is, in some ways, more vigorous than what we had; certainly better than what the Russians had, or the Chinese. Perhaps this Unification is better. Perhaps it was worth the deaths that came about in the War."
"It's good of you to say so."
"Darryl."
"Yes?"
"You are--all of you--already losing sight of what you fought for. I did not agree with you, and today I am not certain that I was right--but your government is being overrun by the barbarians. It's already happening." He paused. "I don't know if Americans will tolerate it."
Amnier said gently, "You're too much of a philosopher, Malko. It was charming when we were boys, but it helped you lose the War."
"--in republics there is greater life, greater hatred, and more desire for vengeance; they do not and cannot cast aside the memory of their ancient liberty."
Amnier looked at him quizzically. "The Prince," he said after a moment. "The Old Man would have been proud of you." He smiled distantly. "In the same work it says, this is a paraphrase, a city used to liberty can be more easily held by means of its citizens than in any other way, if you wish to preserve it."
Malko nodded. "Yes. It says that."
Amnier did not answer. There was a silence that continued until Suzanne left her work station and returned to where they waited. Amnier sat with his eyes unfocused, looking off into a distance that did not exist; Kalharri stood, eyes fixed on Amnier's face. Neither saw what they looked upon.
"Malko?" Amnier looked up at the woman, flushed with strong emotion. Montignet continued, "We have one. It's going to live."
"Fascinating," murmured Amnier. He looked down at the steel stairway he sat on. When he looked up again there was a flat snapping sound, like a whip being cracked. For an instant Amnier stared directly at the flat black cutout of a man, merely the outline of a shape. I doubt he ever again fully believed his own eyes after that; Camber Tremodian was gone before Amnier could be certain of what he had seen.
None of the others appeared to have noticed. "Which one is it?" asked Malko quietly.
"Number fifty-five. Series C, number C; we've been calling it Charlie Chan."
"Do you know its sex yet?"
"Male."
Malko Kalharri had not yet turned away from Darryl Amnier; now he came closer, squatted until his eyes were on a level with Amnier's. "I think we shall name him Carl...Castanaveras, perhaps. Yes."
Amnier blinked. His mind seemed to be elsewhere. "Oh?"
"Yes," said Kalharri, "Castanaveras. I think it an appropriate name."
Three days after my life brushed against his, Jorge Rodriguez died of radiation burns.
Camber and I have kept the costs of the battle down; Jorge Rodriguez was only the fifth human being in sequential Time to die in a battle of the Time Wars.
It might have comforted him to know that.
Or not.
* * *
2.
Three decades passed. The SpaceFarers' Collective continued to grow. Early in the 2030s, they established SpaceFarer colonies in the Asteroid Belt.
In the late 2030s, the United Nations began colonies in the Asteroid Belt, in an attempt to forestall the SpaceFarers' Collective's bid to assume control of the Belt. They were successful; the SpaceFarer colonies never flourished. Their success did them no good, however. The U.N. colonies were largely self-sufficient; with the time lags in their supply lines, they had to be. It was a logical result that they should find themselves more sympathetic toward the SpaceFarers than toward a government millions of kilometers away. In 2040, with support from the SpaceFarers, all but a half dozen of the Belt colonies declared their independence from the Unification.
Of necessity the colonies evolved into "CityStates." It was the logical basic economic unit for a society built of flying mountains.
When Carl Castanaveras was still a young boy, before puberty turned him into a Peaceforcer weapon, an officer of the United Nations Peace Keeping Force once asked him what he wished to do with his life.
The question startled the boy. He had been raised by doctors and scientists and Malko Kalharri; the Peaceforcer's question was not the sort of thing anyone had ever asked of him before.
After a moment's consideration he said, "Am I supposed to do something with it?"
There can be good mistakes. Fact and truth and history are rarely related. The facts are these.
Carl Castanaveras was born on the eighteenth of September in the year 2030. He was named after a soldier who, fighting for his country, died during the Unification War; he was raised in a world that still bore the scars of that war. The America in which he was raised was an occupied country, with more Peaceforcers than police. The war was history already by the time he was old enough to understand its causes. In classes he was taught about its great battles; how after the Battle of Yorktown, the young Marine Corps sergeant who was in command of what was left of the United States Marine Corps forced the U.N. forces to withdraw into a neighboring city before he would agree to surrender his forces. In agreeing to surrender, a young Marine named Neil Corona produced the most memorable quote of the War: "We will fry under your goddamn cannon," he said, "before a single Marine will lay down his arms in Yorktown."
After that war's end, the slow task of rebuilding began. France, alone among the industrial nations of the time, emerged unscathed from the Unification War. In the years that followed the war, it attained a position of preeminence among the bodies that constituted the United Nations.
The gene pattern that produced Carl Castanaveras was not successfully reproduced until April the eighteenth, in 2035, when a design that became Jane McConnell was successfully imprinted upon a sterile egg. In creating her, Suzanne Montignet localized three unique genes that Carl Castanaveras possessed and no other living human being did. Jane McConnell was, aside from her gender, his clone. She was the first and last instance in which Suzanne Montignet had to resort to relatively clumsy cloning techniques to ensure that the gene complex took properly. Johann MacArthur was brought to term late in 2036; unlike Jane McConnell he was a true genie, assembled gene by gene until a design was found that Suzanne Montignet approved. Six such others were born between 2036 and 2042.
In 2040 Darryl Amnier was appointed to the position of Prosecutor General to the Unification Council.
For over a decade the Bureau of Biotechnology Research, and the Peaceforcers who controlled them, thought Carl Castanaveras a failure.
An interesting failure. He seemed slightly stronger than his muscle mass should have warranted, with greater endurance; but his muscle mass, even with conditioning, was not exceptional. He moved with abnormal speed, and was emotionally unstable.
At the age of twelve, when puberty struck him with full force, Carl Castanaveras awoke one day and found that he could read minds.
He let others know, among them a Unification Councilor named Jerril Carson, who was at that time the Chairman of the Unification Council to supervise the Bureau of Biotechnology Research. That was the first mistake. By the time the other abilities began to manifest, he had learned enough to know that in knowledge there is power. As he grew older, what would be known, more than a thousand years later, as the Gift of the House of November, grew also. Carl Castanaveras learned to hide that which he did not wish revealed: throughout history, slaves have always found this a useful skill.
They were slaves, no less so than the indentured hunters of twenty-third Century Tin Woodman, or the blacks of the early American South. After the first shakeout, the Peaceforcers had three facilities
where their experiments in genetic engineering were conducted; following the death of pioneer genegineer Jean Louis de Nostri, the facilities were consolidated under the control of Suzanne Montignet. The slaves--the "genies"--were relocated along with the research teams; and the telepaths met the de Nostri.
There were times when Shana de Nostri did not mind the fact that she was not human, but now was not one of those times.
She sat brooding on the mat at the side of the gym as a group of five Peaceforcers put Carl through his paces. Her girlfriend Lorette was with her, and the two of them were striking enough that the four Peaceforcers who were not engaged with Carl kept sneaking glances, mostly at Shana. She was no better looking than Lorette, only less modestly dressed. In gross physiological detail they resembled human women closely enough that human men often found them attractive. The differences were minor enough that a good cosmetic biosculptor might have made them look human, had they desired to look human. At one point, while he lived, Doctor de Nostri had, in a fit of conscience, offered that option to the de Nostri. Their tails would have had to be amputated, and their fur removed permanently; the claws would have been replaced with fingernails. Facial reconstruction would have lowered the very high cheekbones, replaced their flat, wide noses with noses that protruded properly. Sexually they were more like humans than the leopards from whom the balance of their genetic makeup was derived; male and female genitalia closely resembled those of normal humans. The females had breasts that would produce milk when one of the maturing seventy-three de Nostri females finally bore children.
The de Nostri had rejected the offer: the de Nostri were proud of their appearance.
Lorette had, like most of the female de Nostri, made concessions to the morals of the--mostly American--humans among whom they now found themselves. Her breasts were covered by a loose blouse, and her genitals were covered by a pair of baggy pants that had been altered to accommodate her tail.
Shana was nude except for her fur. Her nipples were clearly visible, and a human who stared--and some had, though not more than once--could have made out the outline of her genitalia through her fur.
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