“I can’t believe they thought people wouldn’t be in an uproar over something that inhumane!”
“They were going to try it and see. The idea was to make the Jin Haa deadstock at least look less than human – as I say, they’d probably have been boneless – and to keep their brains simple and inactive.”
“The Jin Haa would have been out for our blood!”
“It wouldn’t have mattered. Once we had what we needed to start up the deadstock farms, we wouldn’t have needed the Jin Haa or Sinan anymore.”
“Jesus,” Stake hissed, wagging his head. He looked away, had a thought, touched some keys on his wrist comp and stared down at it.
“Wait, who are you calling?” Persia said, leaning forward.
“I’m not calling anyone. I have a photo of Brando in my files, and I’m staring at it to keep my lock on his features. I don’t want to slip and start looking like you. Nothing personal.”
She sat back. “Don’t take it personal if I tell you you’re starting to give me the creeps.”
Without looking up, Stake said, “Okay, speaking of the creeps, this fucking unethical plan...it never started up? Because of what happened to your lab, and your husband?”
“Right. Preliminary teleportation of robot probes and test animals had gone very smoothly, so my husband and two others were ready to give our process a go with human subjects.”
“Who were the other two?”
“Kiyoshi Nihei and Johnny Esperanto. Nihei was a Theta agent who’d been on Tomas’s team; the colonies wanted at least one Theta agent with transdimensional experience with us, and he had experience on Sinan. They felt they couldn’t trust Tomas himself to agree to the project.”
“I’ve read about Tomas. I think he’d have too much integrity to be part of that. And Esperanto?”
“A Red War veteran turned mercenary, for muscle if the team needed protection, and to help them navigate the jungle and get down into the tunnels.”
“I can picture them taking the samples from corpses, but how about from live people? Was this muscle going to hold them at gunpoint while your husband took some tissue, then kill them to keep it quiet?”
“My husband had his limits to what he’d agree to, Mr. Stake. The plan was to approach rural people and gather samples in exchange for gold ingots they brought with them. They hoped they’d be back home before the authorities learned of their presence.”
“But the teleportation went bad, the lab exploded, and you Wonky scientists were all but wiped out. The plan was dropped in favor of another – supporting the Jin Haa, and getting to Sinan using established technology.”
“Right. Controversial, but probably still less problematic than the deadstock farm idea. Anyway, we Wonky survivors went our various ways, but Dink kept up his connection with the government. That’s what led, quickly enough, to his creation of Argos.”
“Did he maintain a connection with you?”
“He tried. He asked me out about a dozen times, but I declined. He always had a thing for me. In fact, Timothy – whom I did maintain a connection to – had a theory about that, but I think it may be a little overboard.”
“What was it?”
“Well, knowing how competitive Dink was, and how jealous he was of Lewton being the team leader and being married to me besides, Timothy believed Dink might have sabotaged the teleportation on purpose, to kill Lewton and ruin his project, in favor of Plan B. Basically I think the idea is absurd, but then again, Dink was outside the building getting something from his car at the time of the teleportation and so he was the only one of us who wasn’t killed or injured. I suffered severe burns myself, and Timothy...well, you saw him.”
“Huh,” said Stake. “A funny place for him to be at such an important moment. Maybe Leung wasn’t being absurd.”
“One thing I’m sure of – Dink’s Argos company is well established now, incredibly successful, and the last thing he needs for his public image is to have Wonky Science and our Plan A to come into the spotlight. Not good for business, to be associated with an idea that ghoulish, not if we want the Jin Haa to keep working with us. If they ever learned about the deadstock idea...like you said, they’d hate us even more than the Ha Jiin ever did. So I can see Dink killing Leung and sending those snipes after you and your friends, to keep the story from reaching new ears. I can see him killing me for what I know, too, and that’s why I’m frankly very afraid, Mr. Stake.”
A siren whooped to life outside, and Stake saw Persia flinch. He looked out the window to see five members of a street gang go running past, but couldn’t tell their race or even species because of the conical red hoods with eye holes they wore as part of their gang attire. Cars being prohibited on Salem Street, it was two hoverbikes bearing black-garbed, helmeted policemen that moments later went by in pursuit. No sector of Punktown, however moneyed, was immune to its infestation of crime and violence. Stake found himself missing the eerie serenity of Bluetown.
“So you’d been following the news about Bluetown, the clones, but were afraid to come forward.”
“I figured they already knew about it themselves, but weren’t letting the public know. I can see them wanting to keep you in the dark, but your friend Rick being one of them, it’s odd that they’ve kept things from him, too.”
“You should know from your own dealings with them, that when it comes to the government and military, one hand doesn’t always see what the other hand is scratching. Getting back to Brian, Lewton, whatever we want to call him; you didn’t want to have a say in the fate of the living clone once you realized who he was?”
“I’ve been concerned for him, no matter what you think, Mr. Stake, but can’t you at least understand my reluctance? Yes, I’m worried about the lengths they might go to in order to hide the truth. Kill him and say he died of that plague that’s rampant on Sinan. Kill him and replace him with a clone made from the remains of some MIA.”
“You were his wife. You have a strong case for claiming him, giving him a home.”
“You think they’d just turn him over to me like a stray kitten, a clone created under such mysterious circumstances? But besides that, Mr. Stake, a lot of time has gone by. For eight years now I’ve lived with my boyfriend, Joel, a very dear man. And frankly, Lewton wasn’t always the best of husbands. He was greedy. He could be cruel.”
“I don’t know about any of that, but I do know a little boy we call Brian, who’s very sweet, and he liked my friend Ami and called her ‘Mee.’ He’s innocent, and he could grow up to be anything, Mrs. Barbour. Anybody. If someone doesn’t kill him first. With Ami dead, Rick out of commission and me banned from the base, he’s short on protection right now.”
“Look, I didn’t say I don’t want to help him, but I had another idea in mind. Lew’s parents are still alive. They’re good people, and they have money so they have influence. His mother is a professor at Paxton University and his dad’s a surgeon. Let me contact them. I know them – they’ll want that child. I do want what’s best for him, Mr. Stake, and I’ll do all I can but I have to protect myself. It was a risk even meeting you. For all I knew, you could have been hired by Dink himself, to flush me out.”
“Henderson will back me up, if you want.”
“As if I could trust a Colonial Forces officer, at this point? But I’ve looked into your various faces, Mr. Stake, and I haven’t seen any lies in them yet, so I’ll take my chances. I couldn’t do anything alone before, so I’m grateful for your involvement. In fact, I’ll even pay you.”
“I’m already getting paid.”
“Your friend is paying you to identify the clones. I’m paying you to steal the child. You need to get him off that base and into hiding until I can involve Lewton’s parents and have them go public, so we can have him safely brought back here to Punktown.”
“Kidnap him, from the Colonial Forces base? Christ, Mrs. Barbour.”
“I know; it’s dangerous. But you’re already involved in this to a dangerous degr
ee, or Dink wouldn’t have set those dogs after you.”
Stake sighed, glanced out the window again. “Well, maybe it’s time I get out of this city, anyway. Off Oasis altogether. Start fresh somewhere new, maybe under another identity. But man, to think not too long ago I was worried about a couple of Stems trying to kill me. Now I’ll have the government after my hide.”
“You have lots of hides.”
“All right, I’ll take your money, because I’ll need it. But I’ll admit to you, I’d do this just for the sake of vengeance. What they did to Ami, and those two young CF troopers, and for almost killing Rick. I’ll sneak Brian out of there one way or another, and find a place to stash him. I can’t get him teleported off Sinan – that’s too tough – so we’ll have to do it legitimately once you’ve got his parents behind us like you say. Funny, huh? Before, the trick was to teleport your husband to Sinan. Now the trick is to teleport him back.”
Persia nodded thoughtfully, lowering her eyes to Stake’s hands on the table. “Cloning private citizens is illegal, of course; otherwise, even without his physical DNA, his parents could have a new clone made of him from undifferentiated cells programmed with the molecular blueprint in his ID bracelet.” She tapped Stake’s wrist band with a nail. “But the child is already here, already made, and something has to be done with him. The public has already been following his story and shown concern. With a name and identity put to him, they’ll want to see him returned to his parents as much as we do.”
Stake held up a hand to make her pause. “You say his molecular blueprint is in this bracelet?”
“In one of them; I don’t know if it’s the one you have, precisely. But yes, a full molecular scan of each individual was programmed into his bracelet, for us back at Wonky to use in recognizing, recalling and reassembling them on our end. I ought to know – that was my contribution to the project. I’m the one who encrypted the data and input it into them.”
Stake wagged his head. “Oh my God,” he breathed. “Well that’s it, then. When the smart matter encountered the remains of the team, its own cellular activity prompted their cells to reproduce, but it was influenced to do this by the transmissions from the bracelets – and used their molecular blueprints to guide it.”
“I suspect there’s even more to it than that, Mr. Stake. The bracelets were our link between dimensions. They were transdimensional positioning devices, so that we could track the team members and collect them when the time came. So they also contain teleportation coordinates for their point of origin, in Punktown.”
“Oh no,” Stake said. “You’re saying – they contain a map?”
“Yes. If Bluetown is Punktown, then I’m sure that’s how the smart matter became infected, and went from a blueprint for a village complex to a blueprint for a whole city. The transmissions from the bracelets were powerful. They conveyed their data to the smart matter, and corrupted its original programming. From there, it’s snowballed as a self-perpetuating process.”
Stake steepled his fingers in front of his face and tapped them below his nose, as he felt things fall into place with an almost audible click inside him. “So this is why it began growing Punktown two blocks over from this location, instead of from the city’s center. Where it started duplicating Punktown is relative to the location of Wonky Science. Though it didn’t get replicated until later, for all intents Wonky Science was the true center of the blueprint.” He dropped his hands. “This makes for another reason you should have come forward, then – you could have helped to stop the city from advancing!”
“Don’t lay all this on me, Mr. Stake!” she hissed. “Timothy didn’t even have to come forward, only talk to you, and look where it got him! I’m sorry I’m not as brave as you’d like me to be, but I’m here now, aren’t I? Anyway, don’t you think they already know that? Don’t you think they already found the Punktown coordinates in the bracelets?”
“You encrypted them, so maybe they have and maybe they haven’t; Ami didn’t mention anything like that. But tell me this, Mrs. Barbour. If transmissions from the bracelets could tell the smart matter to create Punktown, could the transmissions be altered and tell the smart matter to stop creating Punktown?”
“I’m sure they’ve tried to transmit new orders to the smart matter through the computers they ignited the process with.”
“You’re right, they have, but not in the language the smart matter got its initial instructions from – the encrypted language you devised. If it received new orders in that language, maybe the smart matter would understand...and listen.”
Persia Barbour removed her dark glasses at last, her eyes wide and naked. She looked like she either wished she had never agreed to meet with him, or wished she had come forward much earlier than this. Probably it was both. She said, “Then I think you’d better buy me another coffee. And if we’re going to do this, I’m going to need to revise all three transmissions, not just one.” She tapped his wrist band again. “You’re going to have to bring me the other two.”
TWENTY-TWO: ILLUSIONS
The little hotel room reminded him of those he had stayed in during the war, when he’d spent time in Di Noon on rest and recreation between assignments in the bush. It afforded just enough room to navigate around a sizable bed intended for prostitutes and their clients, a tiny bathroom, and an aquarium containing one lonely looking fish, set into the wall near the door. He made sure this was always bolted. Modest, to say the least, but the VT featured Earth Colonies programming and thus offered a wide array of channels, including a station for Ha Jiin news.
Stake sat up in bed watching this, still feeling queasy from teleporting back to Sinan – or had the bender poison been stirred up in his blood, like a sediment that settled only to be swirled into motion again? On the screen was footage of the leader of the Ha Jiin, Director Zee, participating in a parade through the capital city of Coo Lon, organized to honor those whose lives had been claimed by the mysterious sexually-transmitted epidemic. Zee marched like everyone else, holding aloft a stick with a gauzy blue pennant flapping from it, representing the soul of one of the dead. Hundreds of these pennants, like a school of ghostly fish. Walking alongside Zee was his chief religious advisor, whom Stake knew was called Abbot Vonh. With his spiraling hole instead of a face, he would have been indistinguishable from any other Ha Jiin or even Jin Haa monk had his blue robes not borne gold designs of flying birds. Not only did the monks sacrifice their faces, their identities, in the strength of their beliefs, but they pinched embers of the cancerous incense between their fingers, and rubbed it into the center of their chests. After years of this, their fingers decayed until their hands were all but useless fleshy mitts, and a smaller version of the facial vortex was echoed on their chests, bared by the open V of their robes.
Abbot Vonh did not carry a pennant, his disfigured hands resting by his sides. Instead, a large bird with metallic blue feathers and a predator’s keen eyes and curved black beak rode on his shoulder like a pirate’s parrot, its black talons gripping his shoulder, but Stake supposed that with the discipline of these clerics the pain was of little distraction. As Stake watched him, the monk turned his faceless face toward the camera, as if staring right back at him. The bird had swivelled it head in unison. The combined effect caused the detective to shudder.
The program offered English translation, and Stake listened as the commentator reiterated the theory that was prevalent throughout both the Ha Jiin and Jin Haa lands – that the nameless plague had been brought by the Earthers. But increasingly, the consensus seemed to be that the contamination was not the result of sex tourism, as previously theorized, but very much by design. The gas reserves were being depleted. Without an increase in dead bodies, sinon gas would not be replenished in sufficient amounts for harvesting.
Until yesterday, when he’d sat over coffee with Persia Barbour, Stake might have dismissed such a claim as ignorant paranoia. Now, he wasn’t willing to dismiss any possibility.
While taking i
n the commentary, Stake realized he’d been massaging the bridge of his nose. A moment after he became conscious of doing this, he was no longer looking at a VT screen in his cheap Di Noon hotel room.
He was in a monastery, secreted away in the heart of a jungle where every frond and blade and leaf and vine was a vivid shade of blue. He had led his men here because he was now in command of their outfit, after his two superior officers – a lieutenant and sergeant – had been eliminated by a Ha Jiin sniper. Now, they had captured the young female sniper and her wounded companion, and brought them along as prisoners to the monastery, where they planned to take shelter until another unit could rendezvous with them in a matter of days.
He was always wary of the monks, because he had heard rumors of their abilities, some almost too fanciful to take as anything but exaggeration. He had encountered them in the burial tunnels a number of times, but found that since he never made a move toward them, they did nothing but blindly gape at him with their empty faces. Still, he was cautious as he moved ahead of the rest of his squad, approaching a group of ten monks standing in a row with their backs to him.
They were running their blunted, flipper-like hands over a colorful mosaic with raised contours that they read like Braille. In a succession of panels, the mosaic told of the life of the great prophet Ben Bhi Ben, from childhood to old age. In the final panel on this wall, a flock of golden birds gripped Ben Bhi Ben’s blue robes in their claws as they bore his departed spirit into the sky, toward twin suns like the staring eyes of a god, rendered on the monastery wall with glittering bits of blue crystal.
Stake narrowed his eyes, confused. Even in the midst of delusion, he understood that this was not the way it had happened. Not quite. There was one monk toward the center of the group whose blue robes were covered with a pattern of golden birds. No, Stake didn’t remember that being the case on this long ago day.
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