by Peter David
“No sir, but—”
“You say ‘but’ to an instruction issued you by the vice president of the Colonies?”
There was a dare in Baltar’s tone, and Venner wisely didn’t challenge it. Automatically snapping to attention, Venner said briskly, “I’ll be just on the other side of the door if you need anything, sir.”
“That’s very comforting.”
Venner exited the room. Baltar turned to Boxey, pointed at a stool, and said, “Sit there.” Boxey did as he was told and watched as Baltar prepared a syringe to draw blood. “So what were you doing speaking to the Cylon?” asked Baltar.
“She saved my life. Yours too,” Boxey replied. “I just wanted to see her.”
“Technically, she didn’t save your life. Another Sharon Valerii did that.”
“Yeah, I kind of have trouble understanding that part.”
“It’s very simple,” said Baltar, gesturing for Boxey to roll up his sleeve. Boxey did so. “One model of Cylon dies, and her memories are transferred into the next one, like a computer downloading information one to the next.” He tapped Boxey’s exposed forearm, found a vein he liked, and proceeded to draw blood from it. Boxey made a slight sound of pain at first, but then he decided to remain stiff-lipped and did not cry out.
“But . . . when you’re talking about computers, you know that one’s different from the other,” said Boxey. “Are the Sharons the same person?”
“For all intents and purposes, yes,” said Baltar as he drew the blood.
“Is that the same as a regular yes?”
Baltar was beginning to lose his patience. “Yes,” he said as he withdrew the syringe from Boxey’s arm and set the vial of blood in a stand. “Why is this all so important to you?”
“Because I don’t know why she saved us,” said Boxey. “If she’s evil, why did she do something that helped us? That helped anybody?”
“It wasn’t time for her to act on her programming,” said Baltar. “There was a certain point when it kicked in, and that was when she shot Admiral Adama.”
“And that’s what made her evil?”
“I’m not entirely certain that label applies, but for the sake of argument, yes.”
“So what if she never had done that? Would she have been good?”
“I . . . suppose so, yes. She would have been ‘good,’ to use your phrasing, but with the potential for evildoing. Which, on further reflection,” he admitted, “more or less describes just about anyone.”
“But not ‘just about anyone’ is that way. Just her.”
Letting his impatience rattle him, Baltar snapped, “Are you going somewhere with this? I mean, let’s get to it, shall we? Is there some particularly cogent observation that you want to make about the entire subject? Some dazzling insight you wish to offer that you and only you have discerned?”
Boxey looked taken aback by the outburst. “I just . . .”
“You just what?”
“I just didn’t think she looked evil, is all.”
Baltar was about to fire off a reply, but instead he sat there a moment with his mouth open. Then he closed it and looked askance at the boy. “You didn’t think she looked evil.”
“Yeah.” Boxey shrugged. “That’s all.”
“And what, pray, does evil look like?”
Boxey considered it a moment, and then said, “You.”
“Me?”
“Yeah. I’m not saying you are,” Boxey hurriedly added. “You’re probably not . . .”
“Probably. Well, I like that!”
“It’s just that . . . well . . . you’re not a beautiful woman, first of all. It’s hard to think a beautiful woman like Sharon is evil . . .”
“Trust me: Some of the most evil people I’ve known are beautiful women,” said Baltar. In his mind’s eye, he could envision Number Six taking a deep bow.
“And also, you’re . . .”
“I’m what?”
“You’re all twitchy.”
That drew an even more confused reaction from Baltar. “Twitchy?”
“Jumpy. Your eyes keep moving from side to side. Even back when we left Caprica, I first noticed it. You act like . . . like you’re afraid that someone’s watching you, all the time. Like you’re up to something and you’re concerned that you’re going to get caught at it. Someone who looks worried all the time that he’s going to be caught at something . . . it makes it seem like you’re evil, because only someone evil would have that much to be nervous about.”
“Well, I appreciate that dazzling bit of character analysis,” Baltar said sarcastically. “But I’ll have you know I’m not evil.”
“How do you know?”
“Because,” said Baltar, “I’ve done nothing wrong.” This time Number Six was doubled over in laughter. He forced himself to ignore it.
“Neither has Sharon. At least, the Sharon who’s locked up. I just wanted to—”
“You know what?” Baltar snapped. “You’ll understand when you’re grown up.” He knew it wasn’t true, of course. The only thing growing up guaranteed was that parts of you were going to start hurting that had never hurt before. Other than that, nothing else was assured.
“Grown up.” Boxey laughed bitterly.
“What’s so funny?”
He fixed Baltar with a gaze and said, “Doctor . . . almost everybody is dead. Dead. And we’re being chased by killer robots, and some of them can look so much like us that we can’t tell them apart without blood tests.” And he indicated the vial. “Grow up? You really, really think I’m going to get to grow up? Part of me thinks I won’t even live to see my next birthday.”
Baltar was about to make a sarcastic reply, but then he saw the quiet certainty in the boy’s face. At first he didn’t know what to say. Then he heard himself replying, “That’s no way for someone your age to be thinking. You should be thinking about meeting girls and going to parties and your first kiss and the curve of a girl’s neck and what your profession is going to be and all sorts of things, none of which have a damned thing to do with dying. Youth is always the hope for the future. Always. If young people believe that they have no future, then what’s the point of any of this?”
Boxey considered that a moment and then said, “Survival?”
“There’s more to life than survival. There has to be. There’s the quality of the life you’re surviving for.”
“I . . . I guess . . .”
“Don’t guess,” Baltar told him firmly. “Guessing is an appalling habit. It shows laziness of mind. One either knows or doesn’t know. If you know, speak of a certainty. If you don’t know, be man enough to say you don’t know, and then research the question until you do know. Anything else is unacceptable. Understand?”
“I gue—” He caught himself and then nodded. “Yes. I understand.”
“Good. Now go out to the nice Colonial marine and tell him I’ll have the results to him in a day or so.”
“A day . . . ?”
“It’s a very complicated test and takes a good long while to administer. Plus it’s not as if guaranteeing the fleet’s safety from you is the only thing I have on my docket. It will be finished when it’s finished.”
“Okay.” Boxey started to head for the door, then paused and said, “Doctor . . . ?”
“Yes?” Baltar said, trying to keep the impatience from his voice and not entirely succeeding.
“Sorry about the whole thing about saying you’re twitchy and jumpy. I know you’re not evil.”
“Thank you for the vote of confidence,” Baltar said with a graciousness he didn’t feel.
Boxey left the lab, and Baltar sat there and stared at the blood sample. When Number Six rested her hands on his shoulders and her chin atop his head, he didn’t react. “Pity your test doesn’t really work. That you’ve told everyone you can distinguish human from Cylon when you, in fact, cannot.”
“Yes. A terrible pity.”
“You know what you should do . . .”
/> There was a mischief in her voice that he really didn’t like. Nevertheless he asked out of morbid curiosity, “What should I do?”
“You should tell them that his test came back positive. That he’s a Cylon.”
The very notion was appalling to him. “Why in the name of the gods would I want to do that?”
“Do you know what they’d do to him if you said that?”
“I honestly don’t, no.”
“Well then,” she said challengingly, “isn’t that all the reason you need to do it? You said it yourself: If you don’t know something, you find out. It would be an interesting test of just how much veracity you have, and how willing they are to believe what you say. Oh, come on, Gaius,” she prompted when he still seemed reluctant. “Don’t you want to watch them eat their young?”
“Why did you laugh before?”
“Before?” She was walking around the lab, her long legs in a sure, measured stride. “When did I laugh before?”
“When I said that he was no more a Cylon than I was. What are you hiding?”
“Nothing, Gaius, I swear. I was just amused by the—”
“By the what? By the suggestion of my not being a Cylon? Is there . . .” He gulped. He was having trouble catching his breath, as if it had become far too hot in there. “Is there something I should know?”
“I just find it interesting that you’ve dismissed the idea out of hand,” she said. “After all, back on Caprica you crouched behind me and thus survived a nuclear explosion. That doesn’t strike you as odd? Your house blew apart around you. I was destroyed right in front of you. Yet you survived? Isn’t it far more likely that we were both destroyed, and your memories were simply transferred to a new body?”
Baltar felt as if he’d been hit in the face by a crossbeam. The fact that her casual explanation of his survival . . . or perhaps nonsurvival . . . made perfect sense wasn’t what horrified him. Or, more correctly, it wasn’t what horrified him the most. What horrified him the most was that it hadn’t occurred to him before. He was a man of science, and as such it was part of his very nature to question, to probe, to seek answers not only for questions that already existed, but questions that others hadn’t thought to ask. For someone of that mindset never to consider something as possible as that . . . it was such a shocking omission that it almost made him wonder if . . .
What?
He’d been designed never to wonder about it? Preprogrammed?
Baltar shook his head, his mouth moving but no words emerging.
Number Six walked over to him and, extending a finger, ran it along the line of his jaw. “Poor Gaius,” she sighed. “You know so much about so many things. The resident expert on Cylons. And yet you don’t even know yourself.”
“It . . . makes no sense,” he said sharply, rallying against the unthinkable. “If I were a . . . what you say . . . you wouldn’t have had to seduce me and trick me into betraying humanity. I would have just done it.”
She kissed his cheek. “Tell them the test has come back positive. Tell them the boy is one of us. For that matter, how do you know he’s not? Maybe I’m trying to help you out.”
“Why . . .” He paused, trying to gather his scattered thoughts. “Why would you do that? What possible reason would you have for turning over one of your own?”
“Perhaps I’m feeling generous. Or perhaps—since our god made us in his own image—perhaps we, like He does, move in mysterious ways.”
“You weren’t made by any deities. You were made by humans. Humans are not gods by any stretch of the imagination.”
“And perhaps, ultimately, that’s the difference between us. You can never be any more than you already are. Our possibilities are unlimited.”
“Is that why you try to destroy us?” he asked grimly. “Because in the event of your ‘ascent’ to divinity, you want to make certain that no one exists who remembers you when you were nothing but pretentious vacuum cleaners?”
She blew softly in his ear and, despite himself, he shuddered. “You keep right on doing that, Gaius. Keep right on asking questions. You do it so well. It’s the main reason that I love you so much.”
He closed his eyes, giving in to the pleasure of her touch. He moaned softly, and then he looked around. There was no sign of Number Six. She had vanished back into the recesses of his lust, or his guilt, or his programming, or wherever it was she came from.
Baltar turned and stared at the tube of blood that he had just drawn, and wondered what to do.
CHAPTER
6
Laura Roslin never would have imagined that she would be able to handle press conferences. One would have thought that, given her history as a teacher, she would have had no trepidation about getting up in front of crowds and fielding questions. To a degree, that was true . . . when it was a roomful of students who, more often than not, were perfectly happy to accept whatever she said as a given. That was a far cry from dealing with a roomful of hard-nosed reporters who challenged her on everything she said, and would come back with question upon question upon question. The way in which they regarded her shifted so frequently that she often found it difficult to get herself on any sort of firm footing with them . . . which, for all Laura knew, was exactly the way they preferred it.
When she had first been thrust into the position of president . . . an eventuality that someone as low in the pecking order as Secretary of Education could not have considered a possibility . . . the press had been all over her. She was an unproven commodity, thrust to the forefront of leadership in a time of war. How in the gods’ name could someone who was often dismissed out of hand as “the schoolteacher” (a nickname she suspected had originated with Adama, not her biggest fan at the time) be expected to enable the remnants of mankind to survive? Some of the reporters had adopted a wait-and-see attitude, and a few supported her out of a sense of obligation: If people didn’t rally around their president, whoever that might be, then surely all was lost. But others had been merciless: She had been described as Laura the Lame, Laura the Borer, President Laura the Last. Contempt practically oozed from the screens and write-ups.
But then came the military coup that had thrown her out of office, and as one the press rallied behind her. It was self-serving, to be sure. The thinking was simple: If Commander Adama could sweep in and oust the representative of the people, certainly there was nothing to stop him from annihilating freedom of the press for all time. He had the military might: He could round up every single journalist, stick them on a freighter and shoot them off in the opposite direction from whichever way the fleet was going. It wasn’t widely believed that he would, but it wasn’t widely believed that he would not. Laura Roslin was transformed overnight into a martyr, a political prisoner in the hands of an out-of-control military.
Then came her escape, her quest to the Temple of Athena . . . a quest that had been predicted in ancient writings, which she fulfilled, giving them a guide toward Earth . . . and just like that, she was a religious symbol. A savior. Gods above, they were actually worshipping her. (And the wag who had dubbed her “Laura the Borer” had now renamed her, after her determined expedition to the Temple of Athena, “Laura the Explorer.”)
And then she almost succumbed to breast cancer, a disease so pernicious and so far gone that it would have claimed anyone else. Except an amazing discovery had been handed her in the form of fetal blood from the unborn child of Sharon Valerii . . . or the creature passing for human that called itself Sharon Valerii . . . a discovery that had cured her. But the press and general public hadn’t known about Sharon. So instead, the attitude was behold, she was risen: Laura Roslin, the walking miracle.
As she prepared for her morning press conference, finishing up in the bathroom and checking her makeup before going out to face the cameras and reporters, Laura wondered when in hell she was going to be regarded simply as Laura Roslin, the woman. That was all. A woman, no more and no less than any other woman, trying to overcome odds that more generous
gods would never have thought to heap upon her. No matter her outward appearance, no matter what the façade she displayed for the world and what the world chose to call her in turn, inwardly she was still simply Laura Roslin. Laura Roslin, with all the fears and uncertainties and frailties that the human condition was heir to. Yet she gamely soldiered forward, trying to be all things to all people, and often felt as if she were being torn in a dozen directions at once.
Her people needed her. They needed her to be whatever it was they were describing her as this week. There were times when she absolutely detested them for it, and wanted to go off into a corner, clap her hands over her ears, and make them all vanish. And when those times arose, she would just sit down somewhere, preferably in a darkened room, lower her head and take a series of long, cleansing breaths until it all went away.
She straightened her back, forced a smile onto her face, and walked into the press room.
They were waiting for her, just as she knew they would be. The moment she set foot in the room, she sensed that something was wrong, but she couldn’t tell for certain what it was. She saw that Admiral William Adama was standing nearby the podium. He’d been speaking to the press, but the moment she entered the room, he immediately fell silent. He appeared to toss a conspiratorial glance toward the press, and even more strangely, they nodded almost as one. It was as if there had been some sort of mutual decision made between Adama and the reporters, and Laura didn’t have any idea what that decision might be.
She chose not to press the matter. Instead she moved to the podium, nodded quickly to acknowledge the reporters, and said, “Very briefly: Admiral Adama has been investigating the circumstances under which the Cylons apparently knew exactly where we were going to Jump to, and were lying in wait to ambush us. Admiral Adama, would you care to . . . ?” She gestured to the podium and the assorted microphones that were poised on the edge of it, like metal flowers.
Adama smiled, stepped forward, and said into the microphone, “I’ve got nothing.” He turned, bobbed his head to her as if this were a wholly satisfactory way of handling the matter, and stepped back.