“An alien race?” I asked.
“No. No aliens, just a crazy bastard politician. It turned out that Morgan Atkins was behind the whole thing. He wanted to build a new republic, with no allegiance to Earth. He was the ultimate expansionist, pushing the idea that Earth was just another planet and not the seat of man. It sounded good. It sounded poetic and freedom-loving, but anyone with an ounce of intelligence could see that his views would lead to chaos.
“Even back then, Atkins had fanatical followers. We later found out that Atkins planted men on every ship in the Galactic Central Fleet. They put poison gas in the air vents and commandeered the fleet as soon as it arrived in the inner curve. Of course we didn’t know that back on Earth. All we knew was that Atkins and his fleet were gone. We found out the truth after the Liberators arrived; but by that time, Atkins had a base, a hierarchy, and the strongest fleet in the galaxy. He didn’t know about my clones, so he wasn’t prepared.
“We sent a hundred thousand Liberators in explorer ships. Atkins’s land forces never stood a chance. Atkins and most of his men got away in their self-broadcasting fleet. That was the last anybody saw of those ships. At least it was until now.”
“I never heard any of this in school.”
“Of course not,” Klyber snapped. “This was the most classified secret in U.A. history. It was so damned classified that we backed ourselves into a corner. When communes of Atkins followers began springing up around the frontier, we couldn’t arrest them. There would have been too many questions.”
My head still spinning, I tried to understand where Admiral Klyber was taking me. That war ended forty years ago. An image came to my mind. “The sergeant over my platoon . . . Is he a Liberator?”
“Master Sergeant Tabor Shannon was in that invasion,” Klyber said. “It wasn’t really a war, not even much of a battle. Atkins’s men had no idea what they were fighting.”
Admiral Klyber took a deep breath, stood up from behind his desk, and turned to look out that viewport wall. “Do you have any other questions, Corporal?” he asked. Then, without waiting for me to respond, he turned, and added, “You’re not an orphan, Harris, you are a Liberator. A freshly minted Liberator.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Learning about my creation did not kill me. Identity-programming and the death reflex were components of modern cloning. I was a throwback, an early-production model that somehow found its way back on to the assembly line for a limited run.
“Do you understand what I am telling you?” Admiral Klyber asked me.
A few moments before, I had been wrestling to gain control of my thoughts. Suddenly I could think with absolute clarity. I felt neither sad nor confused. I nodded.
“You are a Liberator, and knowing it will not kill you.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Perhaps we should stop for the evening.” From behind his desk, Klyber stared at me suspiciously, the way I would expect a parent to examine a child who should be hurt but claims to be fine.
“I’m okay, sir,” I said.
“All the same, Corporal, we have accomplished enough for one evening.” Klyber stood up from his desk, and the meeting was over.
“It never occurred to us that we were anything but clones,” Sergeant Shannon said as he choked back his first sip of Sagittarian Crash, easily the worst-tasting drink you could find in any civilized—or uncivilized—bar. They called the stuff “Crash,” but it was really vodka made from potatoes grown in toxic soil. Congress once outlawed the stuff; but as it was the only export from an otherwise worthless colony, the lobbyists won out.
Shannon and I picked Crash for one reason—we wanted to get drunk. Crash left you numb after a few thick sips. “Damn, I hate this stuff,” Shannon said, frowning at his glass.
“You ever wonder about . . .”
Shannon stopped me. “Knowing you are a clone means never having to wonder. You don’t wonder about God—he’s your commanding officer. Good and evil are automatic. Orders are good because they come from God. I even know where I’m going after I die.” He smiled a somewhat bitter smile. “The great test tube in the sky.”
“Isn’t that blasphemous?” I asked.
“Blasphemous?” Shannon’s revelry evaporated upon my using that word. “I’ll be specked! I suppose it is.”
“I thought you were the churchgoer?” I said. “You’re the only one in the platoon who goes to services, and you’re the one Marine I would think was the least likely to attend religious services.”
“Least likely?” Shannon said, looking confused.
“You’re the only Marine on this ship who specking well knows he’s a clone. Clones don’t have souls . . . Remember, man may be able to create synthetic men, but only God can give them souls. Isn’t that what the peace-and-joy crowd is preaching these days?”
“If you are anything like me, and you are exactly like me, you don’t really give two shits about what peace and joyers are preaching.”
“I still don’t feel like going to church,” I said. “Do you believe that stuff?”
“Yeah,” Shannon said, “I just don’t know where I fit into it.”
It was only seven o’clock. Most of the men were at the mess hall eating dinner. When Shannon saw me returning to the barracks, he had suggested that we drink our meal instead.
Except for the laugh lines around his eyes and his old man’s hair, Shannon looked like a man in his midtwenties in the dim light of the bar. “How old are you?” I asked.
Shannon grinned. “There’s old and then there’s old. After the GC Fleet, the boys on Capitol Hill decided that they wanted kinder, gentler clones, so they opened up orphanages and raised them like pups. Now they have eighteen years to teach you good manners.
“Back in my day, you came out of the tube as a twenty-year-old. I got my first gray hairs as a ten-year-old or a thirty-year-old, depending on how you look at it. Nothing else has changed. I’ve seen my physical charts—nothing’s changed.”
“Are you the last Liberator?” I asked.
“I’d say you are,” Shannon said. “I’ve heard rumors about Liberators in the Inner SC Fleet, but you’re the first one I’ve seen. Klyber is partial to us. If there were other Liberators around, I think he’d be the one to have them.
“What I don’t understand is where you came from. Why make another Liberator after forty years? They didn’t make you by accident.”
“An experiment?” I suggested.
“Maybe Klyber ordered you up special,” Shannon said. “If it was him, he did it without telling the politicos. They hate Liberators on Capitol Hill. Whoever started you on Gobi was trying to protect you. Somebody wanted to keep you a secret as long as possible, but that went down the shitter the moment you were at a card game with Amos Crowley.”
Shannon held up his drink and stared through the glass. He swished it around. “Watch this.”
Shannon took a deep breath, then drained his glass. He shivered, and for a moment he slumped in his chair. Then he looked at the bartender, gave him an evil smile, and turned his glass upside down.
“Goddamn!” the bartender said.
“Another one,” Shannon said.
“Another one will kill you,” the bartender said.
“You try it,” Shannon said to me. “One good thing about Liberators, we don’t get shit-faced.”
I looked at my glass. In the dim light, Crash looked like murky seawater. “Drink it in one shot?” I asked.
“Kid, he’s trying to kill you,” the bartender warned.
Closing my fingers around the glass, I brought it up to my lips and paused.
“Don’t do it, kid,” the bartender warned. “You’ll pickle your brain.”
Sergeant Shannon watched me, his eyes never leaving mine. Heaving a sigh, I put the glass in front of my mouth and tipped it. The syrupy drink spilled over my bottom lip and onto my tongue, leaving a numbing tingle everywhere it touched. I swallowed quickly.
“Whoa!” I sai
d. First my throat felt painfully frozen, then my lungs burned, and finally I felt a flash of nausea; but all of those sensations went away quickly. I looked at the bartender, smiled, and turned my glass over.
“You want another one, too?” the barkeep asked.
“No,” I said. “I really don’t.”
“Give him another,” Shannon said. Sergeant Shannon fixed the bartender with a most chilling smile. He did not glare, did not snarl, did not do anything overtly menacing, but the bartender understood the unspoken message. He looked at both of us, shook his head, then took our glasses.
When he returned, he handed us our drinks. “I’ll tell the infirmary to send a doctor.”
I took my drink. “To the great test tube in the sky?”
“You kidding? They’ll melt us down and reuse us just like any other equipment.” Shannon picked up his glass. “You think you can handle it?”
I laughed. “I’m drinking it, aren’t I?” I said, and I emptied the glass in one slug. Fighting the chill and nausea, I tried to sit straight on my seat and lost my balance. I almost fell but somehow managed to catch myself.
Shannon, watching me with some amusement, said, “Rookie,” and drank his shot.
“You going for thirds?” the bartender asked.
“No!” Shannon and I answered in unison.
That night, before going to sleep, I slipped on my mediaLink shades and found an eight-thousand-word philosophical essay about the Platonic justifications for building the death reflex into clones. I barely finished the first page before I realized that the booby-trapping of clone brains meant nothing to me. Klyber’s engineers had placed different glands in my head, and I no longer cared about what might or might not have been placed in other clones’ brains. Closing the article, I noticed that there was a two-hundred-word synopsis.
Plato understood that the warrior class would envy the ruling class and that the ruling class would fear the warrior class. He sought to keep the classes in place with the most childish of lies:
Well then, I will speak, although I really know not how to look you in the face, or in what words to utter the audacious fiction, which I propose to communicate gradually, first to the rulers, then to the soldiers, and lastly to the people. They are to be told that their youth was a dream, and the education and training which they received from us, an appearance only; in reality, during all that time they were being formed and fed in the womb of the earth, where they themselves and their arms and appurtenances were manufactured; when they were completed, the earth, their mother, sent them up; and so, their country being their mother and also their nurse, they are bound to advise for her good, and to defend her against attacks, and her citizens they are to regard as children of the earth and their own brothers.
— The Republic
Book 3, Page 16
According to this article, Plato’s deceit is made true in that the modern-day warrior class is of synthetic origin. Further, the death reflex is shown as analogous to erasing an individual’s belief in his personal history and therefore his identity.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Captain McKay appointed me to a seven-member color guard, and I spent the next few days holding a Marine Corps flag as Bryce Klyber and Absalom Barry welcomed an endless stream of diplomats and politicians. The Senate sent a legal team to overhaul the Ezer Kri court system, and we lined up to meet them. The Federal Bureau of Investigation sent a team of detectives to hunt down any remaining Mogat sympathizers, and we lined up to meet them. Two members of the Linear Committee flew out with an army of reporters, and we lined up to meet them, too.
Every few hours, a group of VIPs arrived, and McKay sent us to hold up our colors. After five days of round-the-clock flag holding, I began to sleepwalk through the arrivals. I no longer cared who stepped down the ramp. At least, I thought I stopped caring.
The night we left Ezer Kri, McKay summoned the color guard to his office. I got the message late and was the last to arrive. When I pressed the intercom button by his door, he squawked, “Harris?”
“Sir?”
The door opened. “As I was saying, this is the big one. You have a problem, sailor?”
One of the sailors in the guard looked nervously to the other men for support. “We just received two members from the Linear Committee.”
“Speck me with a hose!” McKay yowled. “Committee members aren’t brass. They can’t send your ass to the brig, boy. They don’t even notice you. Hell, I could show up with my pants off and a flag dangling from my dick, and the only thing those committee members would notice was that the goddamned flagpole looks awfully long. If you so much as fart on this one, you’re specked for life.”
With that he dismissed the others and kept me behind. “Do you have any idea who our guest is this time?” he asked.
“No, sir,” I said.
“Admiral Che Huang from the Joint Chiefs. Are you familiar with him?”
I nodded, feeling a new knot in the pit of my gut.
“I’m going to be straight with you, Harris. I tried to get you pulled from this duty, but Admiral Klyber wants you on it. You had a conversation with Admiral Klyber a few nights ago?” McKay’s nearly clean-shaven scalp gleamed in the bright lights, but his brow formed a shadow over his eyes giving his face a skull-like appearance.
“Huang does not like clones, any clones.”
I had heard that Huang was antisynthetic. “Especially Liberators?” I guessed.
“As far as he knows, you’re extinct.” McKay stood up and put on his hat.
“Thanks for the warning,” I said.
“Don’t mention it, Harris,” McKay said as he started for the door. He turned back. “Klyber likes you. He’s a powerful man, and he knows what he’s doing; but just the same, don’t draw any attention to yourself.”
Klyber, Barry, and Olivera waited by the landing bay for Admiral Huang’s arrival. I noticed nothing unusual about Admiral Klyber or Captain Olivera, but Admiral Barry looked like a man headed for a firing squad. His face was pale, and beads of sweat shone on his forehead and scalp. He mopped that sweat with darting dabs, then crammed his handkerchief back in his blouse. Klyber looked at him and said something that I could not hear.
A red carpet ran the length of the floor, ending at the hatch through which Admiral Huang would arrive. My color guard stood at the other end of the carpet, holding flags representing the Army, the Marines, the Navy, the Air Force, the Unified Authority, the Scutum-Crux Arm, and the Central SC Fleet. We stood as still and intent as our human legs would allow us. The officer of the deck did not need to signal us to attention, we were already there.
A light over the hatch turned green, and the door slid open. Nearly one full minute passed before Admiral Che Huang of the Joint Chiefs of Staff stepped into sight.
Huang appeared to be in his midfifties. He stood around six feet tall, with square shoulders and a narrow waist. He had his cap tucked under his left arm. I could see white streaks through Huang’s thinning, brown hair. There was something about his neatly tailored uniform, or the tilt of his head, or the way he narrowed his eyes as he looked around the landing area, that suggested both breeding and contempt.
“Admiral Huang,” Admiral Klyber said as he led Barry and Olivera to the hatch. “I trust you had a pleasant trip.”
Huang stopped and stared down at the group of officers who had come to greet him. A thin smile played across his lips. “Admiral Klyber,” he said in a stiff voice. The two men shook hands. “Have you read my messages?”
“Admiral Barry and I have discussed them at length,” Klyber said. “I think you will be pleased with the plans we have made.”
“Splendid. I wish to get under way as soon as possible,” Huang said as he stepped away from the hatch. He looked around the hangar and his gaze seemed to lock on the color guard.
“We can start straightaway,” Klyber said with an easy air. Beside him, Vice Admiral Barry managed a tight smile, but the stiffness in his shoulders was unm
istakable. All of the blood left his face. As the officers turned to leave the bay, Absalom Barry drifted back and walked several paces behind everybody else.
“At ease,” Captain McKay said, after the brass disappeared.
I was surprised to find Sergeant Shannon and Vince Lee talking when I returned to the barracks. They got on together professionally; but on a social basis, they did not have much use for each other.
I had come to realize that Vince, possibly the first real friend I had ever had, was an antisynthetic clone. I never stopped to think about why he befriended me so quickly after we transferred to the Kamehameha . Now that I did think about it, I decided he liked me because I did not look like every other enlisted man, no matter how subtle the difference. Later, however, I suspected that he had a special dislike for Liberators. That was why he had turned quiet around me when Shannon first landed. First he had thought I was natural-born, then, when he saw Shannon, he realized that I was not just a clone, I was a Liberator. The reason Vince and I were friends was because of a grandfather clause. He and I had already struck up a friendship when Shannon arrived. I suppose that having already struck up a friendship with me and not having any natural-borns to turn to, Lee decided I was okay.
For his part, Shannon simply considered Lee an “asshole of the highest order.” Shannon called him a “synth-hating clone” and said that his quirks were bad for morale . . . pretty idealistic talk from the platoon sergeant who swept into the Kamehameha with all of the tact of a typhoon.
In this I think he was wrong about Lee. I think it was the reverse. For all of his bluster about bootstrapping his way into a commission and going into politics, I think Vince suspected the truth. I think he wanted to convince himself that he was not a clone and adopted an antisynthetic attitude as a shield because he believed it would protect him. As he well knew, confirmation about his clone origins would trigger the death reflex.
“I hear Admiral Huang is on board,” Sergeant Shannon called out to me as I entered his office. “Was that who arrived on your last color detail?”
The Clone Republic (Clone 1) Page 16