Hero!

by Dave Duncan

  THE BOAT IS long and narrow, with a high prow and a canopy amidships, just large enough for three boys to sleep sprawled out in comfort. In the heat of the following afternoon it smells faintly of varnish and old cooking. The design was invented centuries ago by water spider catchers over in the bayou country, Raj says airily, but this is a recreational replica for rich folk. With its diminutive motor humming softly, it lazes along, finding its own way through the mud flats without troubling its crew for guidance. The sun is a white glare in a muggy, white sky, and Angel a fierce blue smudge in the west.

  Wide and mostly deserted, the distributary curves endlessly back and forth amid pozee grass. The three brothers wear broad-brimmed hats and scanty clothes of contrasting colors. As long as the boat shuns villages and gives a wide berth to other craft, no one is going to notice that its three occupants are virtually identical.

  Raj sprawls on his belly in the shade under the canopy—mostly reading a book, idly joining in the talk when he wants to. Vaun sits aft, cross-legged on the deck in front of Dice, who is trimming his hair for him. Vaun’s cheeks are shiny-shaven and feel odd.

  Everything feels odd. Being clean. Reading books. Friends! Want to talk? Sure, what do you want to talk about? Why Q ships have fireballs at both ends? Why eels come upriver at this time of year? Why small Q ships accelerate faster than big Q ships but the big ones can go faster than little ones? And why do boys have nipples anyway? Anything at all.

  All three of them are still hoarse from talking most of the night away, comparing their experiences, laughing, commiserating, joking; reaching almost to hysteria at times with the sheer joy of being united. Vaun has discovered within himself a great well of happiness that he has never known existed. He keeps wanting to weep, which is crazy.

  Dice is a fraction larger than Raj, and Vaun is undeniably the baby of the three. He’ll grow this much this year, and about this much next year, Dice says, and no, he’ll not get much hairier at all. He mustn’t judge what’s normal by the mudslugs of the Putra Delta, who are unusually shaggy. Notoriously hairy people.

  “We’ve got hair where everyone has hair,” Dice explained at some point in the night. “And that’s enough. Like other boys, we get our faces depilated once in a while. Our chests don’t grow hair. What would you want chest hair for? That would just be—”

  “—an unnecessary frill!” Raj completed the thought without a pause, and all three started howling with laughter yet again.

  No hurry. They talk and doze and talk again under the hot sun. They will meet up with Prior in Cashalix in three weeks, and hopefully Tong also. Tong is another brother, presently hunting down yet another lost lamb over in the Stravakian Republic somewhere. Prior is the leader. Vaun notices that Prior is not referred to as “Brother” Prior. Just Prior.

  Vaun’s queries about Prior are politely and regretfully averted: Let Prior explain himself, Vaun.

  It is all incredibly wonderful. They eat well and talk and right now they do nothing. Relax and be happy, Dice says dreamily; what else is life for? And Vaun thinks of the grinding toil in the village and says nothing.

  Raj cooked the last meal, and Dice the one before, and Vaun is eager to be useful. “How about fish for supper? I can catch ’em. I know how to cook ’em.”

  “Mm,” Dice says behind him. “I’m not too partial to fish.”

  “I like fish,” Raj tells his book. “’Slong as they’re not eels.”

  “Hey!” Vaun protests. “I thought you said you were…we are…Ouch!…identical?”

  “Sorry!” Dice says. “Well, you’re certainly not identical now, Brother Vaun, missing half an ear like that.”

  “It’s only a nick!” Vaun inspects the blood on his fingertips.

  “Major artery,” Dice mutters, angry with himself. “Terminal exsanguination. Hang on, I’ll lick it.”

  “We’re not perfectly identical, ever,” Raj remarks sleepily. “You have a delta accent, and Tong’s is Stravakian. Upbringing is important, too. I suppose Dice didn’t get fed fish as a child. That must be why he now prefers to eat ears. Environment.”

  Dice finishes slobbering on Vaun’s ear. “There, it’s stopped bleeding. Almost. There’s more, Raj. You want to tell him? See if you’ve got it right, now?”

  Raj yawns and switches off his book. Then he scrambles upright to sit cross-legged in front of Vaun, like Vaun, right shin in front of left, forearms on knees, left thumb over right…

  “You know about heredity? Genes? Cells? No? Mm. Thank you, Brother Dice! Well, every living thing is made of millions—billions—of cells. A baby starts from one single cell, and that becomes two, and then four…and then billions. And every single one of those cells has an instruction code inside it, like a how-to manual. Every organism is different, because it has its own unique how-to manual. It gets that from its parents, half from each, with the pages shuffled a bit. Then there’s a brutal business called ‘evolution’ to remove the mistakes. Dice, do I have to go through all this?”

  “Yup. Close your eyes, and I’ll do your front.”

  Vaun closes his eyes and lets Dice twist his head around. Raj groans, but he probably likes to show off his knowledge. Vaun would, and already he knows that these uncanny replicas of himself enjoy the things he enjoys, like this teacher-talk. He can’t imagine Olmin or Astos ever wanting to listen to talk like this; they only talk about girls. Dice and Raj haven’t mentioned girls at all yet. Now Vaun has an odd feeling that he has been summed up, and is about to be trusted with something important. Dice suggested it and Raj agreed, all without words. They want to show him he is trusted, maybe?

  They are more easily distinguished by their voices than by their looks. With his eyes closed, Vaun can tell Raj’s husky youthfulness from Dice’s deeper, more adult tones. But it doesn’t really matter which one is speaking. They are interchangeable.

  “The code is organized into forty-six strings called chromosomes,” Raj says. “In people. Other animals may have more or less. In Earth species the codes are groups of four amino acids—”

  “Bases,” Dice growls.

  “Sorry, bases, and I don’t know what those are yet. I left that book back at the hive. Bases for Earth life, but other planets vary that a little…Life always uses much the same system, though. Two sexes for variety, plus trial-and-error sorting, to weed out the mistakes.”

  “You can open your eyes, now,” Dice tells Vaun. “I think you should run through it simpler to start with, Raj.”

  “Who’s doing this, you or me? Does it matter’? Well, trial and error is wasteful. Forty-six aren’t necessary. We have all our genes packed onto twelve chromosomes, and Prior told me that even that many aren’t really needed. And we don’t get ours by random shuffling. You see, some of the instructions…genes…are harmful. Humanity once thought it had left those behind on Earth, but they keep reappearing. Some are good. Some are good sometimes and harmful other times. Or harmful when there are two of them only. Or one of them only. They interact. It’s complicated. It is very, very difficult to work out which are the best genes, the best mixture. But it’s not impossible. Strength, and smarts, and courage design the recipe for what you want to produce, see? Then you’ve got the Brotherhood. The best! The perfect human. No weak eyes or ungovernable tempers. And once you’ve got the design, then it’s possible to make up the gene strings needed to produce that person—twelve are more than enough—and coat them with all the various sorts of goo that an egg…ovum…needs. Layer by layer. Then you put it in a machine that nurtures it, and it starts to grow.”

  He stops. Vaun stares down at his smooth, brown legs and unprecedentedly clean knees, at the fine, soft cloth of his unfamiliar shorts—all littered at the moment with black hair clippings—and no one speaks for a time, while ripples slap softly against the boat and a formation of torches drones across the sky, very high up. The air has a hot smell of river and boat varnish.

  And finally Vaun says quietly, “You’re saying that we came out of a m
achine?” His voice sounds strange to him.

  Dice puts a hand on his shoulder from behind, and squeezes. “We know it’s a shock, Brother. We’ve both been through this. Maybe it’s worse for you. You see, in big cities…rich folk often come out of a machine, too. The girls don’t like the fuss of growing their babies inside themselves, so they have the ovum sucked out and let a machine do that bit. That’s quite common, Vaun.”

  “What’s not common is the making-the-egg in the first place,” Raj explains, staring intently, almost fiercely, at Vaun from the same cross-legged position, like a wrong-way-round reflection. “In fact, anywhere on Ult that’s illegal. It needs a big factory to make such a tiny product, lots of very special equipment, and the knowledge is suppressed.”

  “They do it with animals,” Vaun says uncertainly.

  “Animals is easy. There’s nothing in the galaxy more complex than a human brain.” Raj tries an encouraging smile, but it fades as Vaun stares back at him, not trusting himself not to say something wrong here.

  Body, obviously. Mind, too? Look-alikes and think-alikes? His throat hurts.

  “We weren’t made on Ult,” says Dice’s voice.

  Vaun continues to watch Raj. Wanting to trust, to believe, to be trusted, to accept…To be accepted.

  “Avalon,” Raj says, studying him carefully. “The ovums…ova…were put together on Avalon, and frozen. Prior brought them here on a Q ship, years ago. He had them machine-incubated, and then he put the babies out to good families to foster.”

  Virgin birth? Oh, Glora!

  Oh, Heavenly Father!

  “Something must have gone wrong in your case,” Dice says. “From what you told us about your mother.…foster mother. Vaun. I’m sure Prior would have picked a better foster mother than that. Something must have gone wrong. Kidnapping, or something.”

  “My family was all right,” Raj says quickly. “Dumb and dull, but they took good care of me. I’m going to go back and visit them, often.”

  “Me, too,” Dice says.

  No use going back to the village and asking Glora where she found the baby. Get Glora on that topic and she makes no sense at all.

  And Vaun doesn’t think he can suggest anything like that just at the moment. There is one of him, and two of them, both bigger, and he’s just been given some very dangerous information. He suspects that “illegal” means “major crime,” if the whole planet has the same law.

  It’s a true story, though. Three boys as alike as three clams.

  “Never quite identical,” Raj says, perhaps guessing his thoughts—why not? Same brain. “First, there’s lots of spare room on even twelve chromosomes, so they put a file number in there.”

  Of course machines have serial numbers. Even a dumb mudslug from the delta knows that. A baby-making machine that puts serial numbers on the product is very logical. Vaun wants to scream.

  “And a little variation is a good thing,” Dice says gently. “Sometimes you need a little extra strength at the cost of…well, a quick temper, maybe. Coordination rather than mathematical reasoning? I’m just guessing at the details, but that sort of thing.”

  “Not all environments are the same,” Raj adds. “So you can modify the design for climate and stuff like that. And disease resistance—that’s important. Add a small amount of trial and error to keep looking for improvements to the mix. But ninety-five percent is the same, always.”

  Dice squeezes Vaun’s shoulder harder. “Remember that machines only do what they’re told, Vaun. It’s people who make people, even us. You follow?”

  His lack of response is worrying them. “Roughly.” He sounds hoarse. “It takes a bit of getting used to.”

  Back in the village he thought he was a freak because his hair and eyes and skin were too dark. Raj and Dice have told him that it’s the mudslugs who are odd. His coloring is about the commonest there is. Far more people have black hair than any other color, so he isn’t a freak at all.

  Now they’ve told him how freakish a freak can be.

  “The randoms are half-and-half. Half from father, half from mother. Two brothers share half their genes. But you and Dice and I, Vaun, are at least ninety-five percent the same. The other five percent is deliberately varied.”

  Vaun nods, still unable to accept that he is something that came out of a machine.

  “Cheer up!” Dice says heartily. “Look on the bright side! You’ve got the finest brain in the world. Your muscles, gram for gram, are stronger than anyone’s. Coordination, temperament, intelligence, adaptability…you are the best there is, Vaun! Not big, because size is no advantage in a technical culture. You can do anything better than any random can. The perfection of the human design. Prior…”

  He stops, and must be looking to Raj for agreement, because Raj nods.

  “Prior,” Dice continues quietly in Vaun’s ear, “arrived on a Q ship as a penniless immigrant twenty years ago, and now he’s a commodore in the Space Patrol.”

  WHEN THE SPACER cops finally swooped down on Forhil, the first one out of the torch was a swarthy, husky boy, who had the suicidal audacity to pull a gun on Admiral Vaun and tell him to put his hands up. His sidekick went ashen-white and made gurgling noises. Vaun dressed down the leader fluently until he was the white one and his companion was smothering a smirk. Then Vaun appropriated their torch, told them he would file a formal report in a day or two, and departed.

  He gave the board Vathal’s coordinates, telling it to use maximum speed and all of his priority. He settled back to endure the cramped, smelly discomfort of a standard issue J9, but his mood improved when he discovered the cops’ packed lunches in the locker. He munched greedily as the Forhil landscape dwindled swiftly away below him.

  He fantasized over his arrival at Valhal, with that freckled redhead waiting for him, all eager. That would be a worthy hero’s return, just the two of them to share the whole of Valhal. He would show it to her in all its splendor. He would show her how heroes lived. And loved. Which was a reminder that he had hardly slept at all in the night, and had time to kill now. The seats were specifically designed to discourage somnolence, but he made himself as comfortable as he could.

  With the sky darkening to the black of near space, with Angel waxing brilliant in the west, his mind returned sleepily to the problem of the Q ship. True, it was still a long way out, about a tenth of an elwy. Also true, a Q ship’s bearings were notoriously hard to establish, but he had been using triangulation data from mining bases and research probes, well spread around the system. If it didn’t start braking soon, it would not be able to do so without being ripped apart by the tidal stress.

  Unless it was a metal-skin, a boat. He wondered if even units of the Brotherhood would face a twenty-year journey in a boat. He decided that they might. The brethren were suicidally loyal to their kin, like hive insects.

  But why come in on the ecliptic, aimed straight at Ult like that? It was a blatantly hostile move, guaranteed to rouse the Patrol’s fury. If anyone on Ult should be able to think like the brethren, it was Admiral Vaun. Trouble was, he had been behaving like the wild stock for so long that he felt trapped now in their ways of thought.

  But Roker ought to want him to try. The two of them detested each other, and normally they were careful never to meet, but now the fate of the planet was at stake. It was curious that Roker was still refusing Vaun’s calls.

  The com set pinged. “Communication for Admiral Vaun,” it announced in a satisfied tone.

  Vaun had long ago accepted that the universe enjoyed playing with coincidences. “Who from?”

  “Caller’s identity is classified.”

  Vaun pondered that nonsense for a moment, but all it meant was that he must accept the call before Roker would admit it was from him. The big bastard probably had not even planned that, it was just a function of the security procedure, which would not switch to deep scramble until the channel was fully open. And it was very convenient at the moment, for Vaun had started to feel sleepy.
He perversely decided that he was not in the mood to cross wits with the high admiral just now.

  “Call refused,” he said. “Accept no others. Disconnect.”

  Surprisingly, that worked. He squirmed himself around to try another position. No wonder the heavies were always so bad-tempered when they were given tubs like this thing to ride in! His left knee was in his armpit and his head kept sliding against the canopy field, which made his scalp tingle. His bruises hurt like hell and he hadn’t had his booster.

  There was a lot of unfamiliar geography visible out there now, and a fair amount of history also. The purple haze must be the Zarzar Mountains, whose warlike tribes had swept down over the Viridian Plain a dozen times throughout history, at first on riding beasts and later by kite and hang glider. Beyond the range would lie the Ashwor Desert—a symphony of reds and maroons the last time he’d seen it—where the Tolian Regicides had tried to build a nuclear capability a few centuries back and been blasted off the face of the planet by the Patrol, on the only occasion it had ventured a major interference in Ultian politics. Far away to the south, where blue moor and glinting lakes faded into the amber horizon smudge, would be Firstcome, site of the Holy Joshual Krantz’s landing, ten thousand years ago.

  Somewhere on the nearer green flatness, an invisible border divided the Western Commonwealth from Freeland. The former was a benevolent, ineffectual anarchy, and the latter a bloody military dictatorship. Some things never change. The Doggoth instructors had taught that every planet followed the same path: a simple rural settlement by a few dozens or hundreds, a period of rapid growth in wealth and population, leading to warfare and industrialization, and finally overcrowding and retrenchment, and a long decline. Then what? The Silence…but that was rarely mentioned.

  Straight below Vaun now lay the mudlands of the delta, and the festering blotch of human pollution that was Cashalix.

  Now there was a city he had never returned to.

  Once was enough.

  THE HOLIDAY IS over. The boat eases its way through a snarl of river traffic and floating garbage into the outskirts of fabled Cashalix, holy city of the Farjanis. Staying low, peeking out between the side and his hat brim, Vaun is conscious of a dry tingle in his throat and a madly pounding heart. He is amazed by the number of torches howling through the air, the way they seem to weave in and out of the towers in the distance. He is disgusted by the stench and alarmed at the way larger, faster-moving craft constantly threaten to swamp the boat with the sewage-laden soup of the river. He is so excited that he can hardly keep from giggling like a child. Monstrous trucks roar along the levees and pack the many bridges. Noise!