Through Fire (Darkship Book 4)

by Sarah A. Hoyt

My turn to cough, to disguise a laugh. “You’re just afraid of what I might do if I don’t know and run off my own.”

  “Do you blame me?”

  “Perhaps not, but answer me this first: you gave the Patrician some type of knockout injector?”

  “Yes.”

  “What if we do spot hostiles, and it’s someone we must run from in haste?”

  He made a sound like a hiss. “Madame, I am not stupid. It is unlikely we’ll have to run in a hurry, or at least in that much of a hurry, but if we have to run, then I give the Patrician an antidote.”

  “You’re carrying an awful lot of those around?”

  He chuckled. “Half a dozen. Mostly with a view to disabling guards, if needed, but also, I’ve known the Patrician for a long time.”

  “How long?”

  “In a manner of speaking, his entire life,” he said.

  “But he didn’t know about you,” I protested.

  “Well, he did and he didn’t. I’m sure he’d seen me a few times. You see, I was raised in a crèche controlled by Doctor Dufort. And the Patrician was attended by the doctor as his physician, so I’m sure our paths crossed now and then, but—”

  “But I doubt he paid me much attention. Or knew who lived in the crèche, or what he had in common with us. You see, for the rest of the world, and for us too, for most of our childhood we were just orphans, abandoned or surviving parents who had died, and being raised by the doctor out of charity. We called him father—”

  “Did he know?” I asked.

  “What that we were created in a lab? Yes, I believe so. Since he oversaw the process, how could he avoid knowing?”

  “I’m not wholly stupid, you know. That was not what I was asking. I was asking if he knew about what the Good Men did, creating children clones of themselves and then having their brain transplanted into their putative son’s body, as a way to immortality.”

  Brisbois hissed again, but this time it seemed like a sharp intake of breath between the teeth. “The doctor is not a monster,” he said.

  “I didn’t think he was. Not in your opinion, at least, since you made a special trip to save him, and you still call him father, but I wondered if he knew. People—” I said, partly sincerely and partly trying to ease his qualms and get him to talk. I felt like I only had a partial picture of this strange place and the relationship between people, and if I was going to survive this very dangerous time, I needed to know more. “People do strange things when under restricted circumstances. Even good people can do…things under pressure of the circumstances, and if I understand the Good Man regime, no one was quite free.”

  “Only those who chose not to play along with society or established norms,” he said. “Difficult for a medical man. But no, I don’t think he knew. I think he found out after the Good Man found out. Simon, I mean.”

  “Why? I mean, why do you think that?” I looked up and again everything was deserted, though it seemed to me I heard steps some streets off.

  “Because I was there when Simon told him, and Father’s face…” He sighed. “He thought, you see, that since the Good Man was a Mule—yes, he knew that—and he couldn’t reproduce with a normal woman because of the stops built into his kind, he had to create a clone of the Good Man, and implant it under the guise of a routine exam, in the Good Man’s wife, and that way he’d assure succession and stability. He never knew…He had been Simon’s physician since Simon was very small, and he had looked after him. He considered Simon, like us, almost one of his children. I’ve never seen anyone so shocked as when he found out what the plans for Simon were. When Simon told him, I mean.”

  “How did Simon find out? Or did he only find out when his father was incapacitated.”

  Brisbois snorted. “I found out what I was at eleven. Father—Doctor Dufort, I mean, told me. He told us when he thought we were ready for it.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “Ask? No, but it’s the only way I know to answer what you did ask. Listen. He told me when I was eleven. He told Rose a little before that. What was explained to me, and probably to her, too, was that since the Patrician was enhanced, he needed servants who were enhanced too. Also, that other Good Men had enhanced servants, and so our Good Man needed to have them too, to defend himself from attempted takeovers. True as far as that goes, you know? Even if it were possible to completely ban bioimproving technology, no Good Man could ever trust any other Good Man to keep his word and not to create his own improved army to take the others out. There have been fewer wars recently, but in the early days many of the Good Men got taken out as others conquered their domains. I think about seventy of the Mules got left behind on Earth when the Je Reviens took off. This is not an accurate count, but the best guess we can make. They then took over the power structure, half of which was already…dictatorships by someone called a Good Man, which ironically was supposed to have the connotation of not genetically modified. But then they consolidated by killing each other and invading.

  “When a Good Man takes over the domain of another, the normal procedure is to kill all the upper servants, precisely because they are assumed to be enhanced, or made stronger or smarter. Either that, or they are descended from people who were enhanced and stayed behind to serve the Good Man. In any case, they will be the most capable of the people on the seacity. To take them out is to decapitate the structure, which means it can then be replaced with the invader’s people.

  “Only Good Man St. Cyr didn’t have many hereditary servitors. I think…” He was quiet a little while, then sighed, like a man reluctantly facing a necessity. “Do you know what—I mean, do you know what the job was that the man who would become Good Man St. Cyr was created for?”

  “Yes. Spying, I think.”

  Another long hesitation. “Sort of. Yes, spying was part of the job, but it was, mostly, general intelligence, assassination, covert warfare. Spying, yes, surely, but also targeted killing and…” He hissed air out between his teeth again, a disconcerting sound. “You see, I never knew the former Good Man. Not…closely. I knew him as a ruler, and I heard some things about him from Doctor Dufort. Doctor Dufort’s family, of course, had served the Good Man, but they weren’t exactly the same as palace servitors. Also, someone grossly enhanced and deviated from normal human genetics, if he’s at all smart, tries to keep alive the man who comes from the family which knows his makeup and how to treat any peculiar problems.”

  “He didn’t keep other servitors alive? No hereditary servants?”

  “I—No. I don’t know precise details, except when I became head of the secret police I discovered that the former Good Man was paranoid. More paranoid than is normal for a Good Man, that is,” he said. “He would trust someone or some family for a while and then decide they had abused his trust and confidence, and banish them and have them assassinated or executed. He was always afraid, I think, that anyone beyond Doctor Dufort might figure out what he was. I don’t know what the man saw during the Turmoils. Simon doesn’t seem to be…that way. And I wonder if it was acquired and if—” a sigh.

  I took the opportunity to take another look around over the lip of the building. There was a couple walking down a street two streets away. I could see their heads, though nothing more. They were walking away from us.

  “It can’t be helped,” Brisbois said. “If he’s going to crack with this, then he’s going to crack. And if he cracks, then…I don’t know what I’ll have to do. This is part of the reason I agreed with his plan to join the Sans Culottes and foment the revolution, so he could leave his post and go off and be a colonist in the newly recovered territories.” He chuckled. “Mind you, I can’t imagine Simon being a colonist anywhere even semi-wild, but that was his idea. Which, coming from a man who spent a substantial portion of yesterday trying to find his cat—”

  “Mephistopheles?” I asked. Mephy was Simon’s cat, and sometimes I thought the only creature he really loved. A big black tom with an evil disposition, he shared Simon’s bed most nig
hts, and always worried Simon when he disappeared. I felt guilty that I had totally forgotten Mephy’s existence in the middle of worry for his master.

  “Yes. We haven’t found him, but at least there is no indication he died. He might not even have been near the palace. He’s a tomcat and he roams. But the Patrician worries for him. In the…in the original revolution there were episodes of cat killing, and the Patrician fears this might come to pass here as well. He fears it’s baked into the format. It’s not rational, but—

  “No. But leaving aside the possibility that Simon will become paranoid due to the present difficulties, you meant to—that is, I asked how Simon found out what his father’s plan was. You said it was before his father died.”

  “He’s never explicitly told me, but I think his stepmother must have told him. How she found out, I don’t know. Good Man St. Cyr had her killed. She was not the woman who had borne Simon, who St. Cyr had had killed earlier. The same thing that affected all his close relationships affected the women he married, too. He’d start suspecting them, and…Well, Simon’s stepmother gave birth to a little girl. In the ensuing…drama, I think she found out what the setup was and told Simon what his fate was to be, before she was killed with her daughter. Simon—” He stopped again, for a while.

  “When I was fifteen, Doctor Dufort told me what I was and that my purpose was to serve Good Man St. Cyr. This was around the time when Simon was born, so I always had a great interest in the news of the heir and what he might be doing, because he was to be my future…boss is an inadequate word and lord not quite right. Because the Good Man is fully autocratic, if you are one of his dedicated servants, either created on purpose or descended from the Mules’ servants, you can’t really change allegiance, and you are somewhere between an employee and a slave. The Good Man has full power of life and death over you. Anyway, the doctor told me so skillfully that I never thought that there was anything wrong with what I was and what I was meant to be. Not at least until I was nineteen and I fell in love.”

  “With Madame Parr?”

  “Yes. Rose…Back then her views on enhanced people and normal people were different. She thought we should rule them just by virtue of being enhanced. She thought it was disgusting that people were allowed to just be born naturally. She was supposed to be a secretary of the Good Man. No, that’s not exactly right. She was supposed to supervise the Good Man’s offices, his clerks, his archivists. Anyway, she saw just enough to think the Good Man was a fool, and the regime full of waste. She started a small revolutionary group. We called ourselves ‘The Just.’”

  “We?”

  “I was…I’d fallen in love with her, and I would do whatever she wanted. When we came of age, we got married secretly, because our position was complicated. We were technically just orphans rescued by the state, and as such free to marry like anyone else. On the other hand, we were what we knew ourselves to be, and our whole lives had been controlled from birth, so the idea that we were free to marry seemed like a joke. We weren’t free to do much of anything. So we got married, and I visited her in her rooms in the palace, as she visited me in mine. For ten years, we had this revolutionary group, but we never did much more than distribute pamphlets, and try to divulge some of the worst things the Good Man was doing. Like when he arrested someone secretly.

  “Honestly, I don’t know how we weren’t caught. Then again, I should say I’m not sure that’s all we did. That’s all I did and all I knew about. I have no idea, though, if Rose’s activities were as restricted as my own.”

  I looked over and surveyed the street. It was very quiet. From somewhere far off came the sound of raucous singing.

  “I learned a lot of what I would call everyday deception and agitation,” he said. “Had to, since even distributing pamphlets or meeting with other malcontents was illegal and we needed to evade arrest. I know how to disguise myself, and how to pass unnoticed in a crowd.”

  There was a sound of an explosion in the distance and I looked over to verify, but the street was still deserted.

  “The thing is,” Brisbois said, like a man speaking out of a dream, “that when Simon found out about the…about what his father meant to do with him, he got in touch with Rose. And Rose took the specifications for what we were to do to the Good Man. There was a bomb planted in his flyer, but that was a ruse. A diversion. He wasn’t in his flyer at the time. The flyer was remote-controlled.

  “You see, we needed an explanation for his having suffered brain damage, but the damage needed to be very specific, the sort of thing that would damage his brain, but not so that he would die, and which would give hope that he might be able to come back to full functioning. Simon figured that this was the one way that the other Good Men would not take over. St. Cyr had friends and allies among them, who would not encourage an attack on Simon and Liberte as long as there was a chance St. Cyr would come back. I’m not quite sure why, to be fair, but I think there were secrets held over people’s heads, and things that would come out one way or another. So, while I was instructed to put a bomb in the Good Man’s flyer, and I was told that it was meant to kill him, Jean Dechausse and Madame—I think by then he was already her lover and this was part of an elaborate plan to rid herself of me—applied the damage very carefully. He was then transported to the site of the crash and it was all staged.

  “But I was traced as the planter of the bomb, and Simon had to, of course, throw me in jail.” There was a long silence. “Simon St. Cyr is not his father. It bothered him that the hit he’d ordered resulted in what was objectively an innocent man being condemned to death. As soon as he’d gotten full control of the reins of power in the seacity, he made it his business to seek me out in my jail cell. He refused to sign my warrant. He brought me out. He gave me a new identity.

  “At first I trusted him no more than his father trusted anyone. How could I? After all, I’d just been set up to die by my wife, the person I trusted most in the world, the person I’d have followed into the jaws of hell. And I knew what his father had been. But we talked, and I realized that Simon was not his father. I realized that he truly had not meant for anyone to die, not even to save himself from death. He thought he was hiring a hit from experienced revolutionaries that would keep everyone safe from harm. He couldn’t understand how I’d got captured, and he didn’t want me to die for it. So, new position, new face, new name.”

  “New face?”

  He snorted. “Actually, most of it was done while in jail. There were…interrogation sessions, before I was convicted. This was before Simon had taken over. Before they gave up hope of bringing his father back. My features were permanently rearranged which, with a very little work from a skilled surgeon, became just a rather unremarkable face.”

  “Ah,” I said. I’d wondered why someone enhanced would look like he did. It wasn’t that all enhanced people were beautiful, but most weren’t actually homely. He was. Something had been bothering me, in the back of my mind. “The double…Am I right to understand that the man to be executed in Simon’s place was a clone double? Or was he just some person whose features had been rearranged by plastic surgeons?”

  “No. It was what we call a blank double. Yes, a clone. Not really acephalous but with no more brain development than it takes to keep it alive and in more or less decent health. There is no thinking, no personality there. Not even walking. We spread the word that he’d had a stroke, in fear at the invasion of the palace. They believed it.”

  The idea made me squirm. Even without a brain, it seemed evil to create persons who…weren’t. And then to dispose of them.

  “They were created as backups for Simon’s father,” he said. “As doubles of Simon, the same age he is. In case something happened to Simon that prevented the transplant, so his father didn’t have to die, if his transplant had to happen as an emergency.” An odd snort, hiccup, chuckle. “I understand most Good Men create these backups. Well, maybe not Good Man Sinistra. Creating a female once, and having her not die or be ste
rile, was enough of a miracle.”

  “But,” I said. “I’d thought of that, but it makes no sense.”

  “How not?” he asked.

  “If they can have these blanks, why take the risk of creating a fake son, with his own independent life, one who might, you know, find out as Simon did? Why the whole elaborate charade?”

  “Because they aren’t doing this in the open. They’re doing it in secret and behind everyone’s back. People aren’t supposed to know the Good Men are the Mules or, as they called themselves, the biolords, climbed to the top of the pile again. They have to pretend to be normal people with a normal family and have a normal, visible heir who will take over after them when they die. I mean, Mules can live twice or three times the normal span. They wouldn’t need cloning if both Mules and cloning weren’t illegal. As it is, they need fake sons, and an entire architecture of normal succession. There are other reasons—I understand—there are failings to these all but acephalous clones. They don’t have the right muscle mass, and there are problems with the attachment sites for the nerve endings. In fact, if anyone were forced to use one—and there’s rumors one or two of the Good Men have done so over the centuries, though I can’t, of course, verify anything—it would be the same as recovering from a near-fatal stroke or a brain injury. It would be neither easy nor simple. Certainly not guaranteed. So, a “real son” with a real history is vastly preferable. And this is why the doubles were Simon’s age. Were, because most of them were in Doctor Dufort’s lab, which had been blown up.”

  I was about to ask him if that was indeed so, and if a son couldn’t be faked with public appearances by these clones, when he suddenly said something in that tongue I didn’t understand. Another voice answered with an incomprehensible word, and Brisbois said, “Merde.” He was moving, turning around, on his belly. I did too, to face him, just as he opened the trapdoor in the ceiling of the bathroom, and said, “We’re still safe, but they are on their way. Our moles in the Sans Culottes have passed word to Jonny. Madame knows the Patrician is here. She knows they beheaded a fake. She couldn’t care less about us, or where we are, but she cares about him, and she wants to eliminate him. We must clear out.”