Lomandra mashed his lips.
Careful, Captain, be very careful.
“But, Srimana, can we trust her? What do we know of this… person?” His lip twisted in distaste.
“More than you might think. Sayvu may have been a traitor but she did an excellent job of finding out about our guests. Particularly in her delightfully frank discussions when she thought no-one could hear. I have taken a most particular interest and studied them both, especially the woman.” Yes, most especially the woman.
Lomandra’s eyes flickered. Not convinced.
“As to trust, I appreciate there is a level of risk. Bear in mind, though, we fitted emotional response monitors which will be functional for a few days yet. In addition Hanestran will keep a close eye on her, as will I. At other times, Senior Commander Prasad has appointed a female officer to share her quarters. If she proves intractable or in any way a danger…” He moved his hand flat in a cutting gesture.
“Yes, Srimana.”
“You disapprove, Captain?” Of course you do but you’d better not say so.
“I… do not question you, Srimana. A number of senior officers have begun to ask me questions. They’re curious.”
“I understand they would be interested. I’ll bring her to the mess regularly. They can see her for themselves. Have my adjutant bring me the order for Sayvu’s execution as you leave.”
“Admiral.” A short bow.
“Captain.” Ravindra turned his attention back to his screen. He heard the door close when Lomandra left. Yes, he’d taken a risk. But then, if the woman could help and he did not take the opportunity, he would have failed in his duty. He wished he knew enough to predict where the Yogina would strike again.
Chapter Ten
Morgan flicked her eyes up at the man opposite her for the hundredth time. Ravindra seemed different tonight, finishing his food automatically. They hadn’t even chatted over the meal.
Over the days she’d begun to actually enjoy his company. To begin with he’d asked many of the questions she had already answered for Sayvu, but recently they’d moved on to other things. They’d talked about ships and space and crews, pirates and hijackers, the sorts of things people in the same business could share, things she would have talked about with other spacers in a bar or restaurant. The last few nights the discussions had widened to sport and music.
“You seem… distracted,” she said.
He pushed away his bowl and smiled. “I have been looking at the recordings from your ship with some interest. I would like you to explain some things to me.”
“Of course, Srimana.”
Much good it would do him. The one she’d seen was Banstock’s kid’s birthday party. She’d shown Hanestran how to play a data cube on Curlew and last time she looked they’d pointed a camera at a screen to record what was on it onto their own media.
He placed a data stick into the reader. The holographic images appeared on the HV in the corner.
“It’s a child’s birthday party.” She pointed at one of the figures, a balding young man, his arm around a simpering woman and two curly-haired kids. “That’s Banstock, who was the navigator on Curlew, with his wife and children. The other people seem to be friends and relations. The older people at the front are grandparents.”
“You know these people?”
“Only him. You can pick up who the others are from the conversation.”
He grunted an acknowledgement.
Banstock’s son unwrapped presents with help from his grandfather. ‘Here, Billy, let grandad help you with the string.’ A little girl, Banstock’s daughter, stood to one side, looking unhappily at her brother getting all the attention until grandma distracted her with food and a hug. The venue looked like a normal suburban park next to a children’s playground. A number of children were playing on slides and swings or simply running around, while adults encouraged a few children who appeared to be younger or less certain. In the background, someone cooked food on a burner, laughing and joking with a group who stood with glasses in their hands.
“This is a normal family situation?” Ravindra asked.
“That’s right.” Morgan nodded absently. “A man and a woman and two children with extended family.”
It was sad, really, looking at this slice of domestic life that was now ended forever. At least Banstock’s family would know for certain that he was dead. Tariq’s family—if he had one—would never know what happened to him. For that matter, she was missing in action too. Nobody would ever know what had happened to Curlew. Disappeared somewhere past Belsun Station was going to be as good as it could get.
Who would miss her? Her parents and her brother and sister? She hadn’t seen them in years. Coreb? They’d had a torrid night not long before she’d left on this trip but he’d taken a ship on an extended delivery circuit. They didn’t even try to keep in regular contact. Romantic entanglements? No, thanks very much.
Ravindra’s voice interrupted her reverie. “Do these people all belong to one class?”
“We don’t have classes. Everybody is built the same.”
“But you have been modified.”
“I’m fitted with implants and they are integrated into my brain. Some of my genes have been manipulated. But apart from that, my DNA is the same as everybody else’s. It’s different with you. Your classes don’t interbreed, so effectively, you have four species or sub species, all calling themselves manesa. But we are one species. I expect you’ve seen where Sayvu explained your classes to us?”
“I have. You seemed astonished.”
That was an understatement.
“What? You’re telling me that you could have sex with a Mirka officer with not even a chance of a pregnancy?”
Sayvu looked as though she’d swallowed something nasty. “I wouldn’t do that. But yes. If I want to be a mother, the father must also be Vesha.”
“Or you can’t conceive?”
“Yes.”
She still couldn’t get her head around it. They had sort of classes on some Coalition planets but if some upper-class fellow decided to have sex with a servant, she could end up just as pregnant as the upper-class wife.
“You have so many variations,” Ravindra said. “Skin, eyes, hair, nose.”
“That’s right.”
“But they can all interbreed?”
“Yes.”
He changed the data stick. New images appeared on the screen. Porn.
Morgan refrained from rolling her eyes and scratched her ear instead. She looked at him through her eyelashes. What was this? Some sort of come-on? But he hadn’t moved.
“People having sex. You have similar programs on your databanks. Most ships do.”
His eyebrows quirked and he almost smiled. “That is so. But there are some things here I do not understand.”
She’d seen their porn channel. What was to understand? The normal sort of cut and thrust as far as she could see. She hadn’t seen anything that would have been out of place in the Coalition. She tensed, wary.
He changed to a different channel on the same data stick. “This behavior, Suri. Is this normal?”
Homosexual sex between two women. She shot a glance at Ravindra out of the corner of her eye. His face betrayed curiosity, maybe distaste, nothing more. It seemed a genuine question. “It’s common enough. Most people don’t, though. We’re happy enough with the opposite sex. This is a genetic thing. A bit like hair color. Only different.”
He selected a new channel. Male homosexual sex. “And this?”
She couldn’t resist a long look at his face. Full-on, unmistakable, testosterone-fuelled, heterosexual revulsion. The Coalition fleet was full of homosexuals. Not that anybody cared. “You don’t have this sort of thing in your fleet?”
That head-back no.
She pinched the bridge of her nose, suddenly a little too warm. “Not anywhere? Never?”
“No.”
“On most of our planets, no-one takes any notice of who
people share their beds with. As I said, it’s a genetic pre-disposition.”
“I find it very, very strange. What pleasure could there be in this?”
“Don’t ask me. I don’t have that genetic pre-disposition.” Good grief. Who cared? The situation was strangely embarrassing, as if she had some responsibility for how the manesa viewed humans.
Ravindra offered her the faintest smile. “The first recording is refreshingly normal—and as you say, mating between a man and a woman is,” he grinned, “recognizable. But sex between two women, or two men…” He shook his head. “What else can you tell me about these matters?”
What could she say? How could she explain things she frankly didn’t understand herself?
“Look, same sex couples are tolerated in our society—where I come from, at least. It’s common in the Fleet. Boys locked together in an airtight cylinder, you know? Sure, there are women in the Fleet, but the men outnumber them, just as in your fleet, and some of the women prefer each other’s company, too. I had a friend at the Fleet Academy who was like that. When I first met her she carefully checked to see if I’d be interested in… her way of doing things. I wasn’t and after we got past that, we became friends. I was curious, though, because like you I find it all a bit odd. I looked up what information I could.
“A few centuries ago, there was a debate going on about what changes could be made to the human…” she wondered what the manesa equivalent of ‘genome’ would be and gave up. “…to improve the species.”
“You could do that?” interrupted Ravindra, eyebrows arched. But the look in his eyes signaled skepticism.
“Yes, we could—can. I take it you can’t?”
He frowned, stared at her as if he was trying to see into her soul. “Not that I know of.” He waved his hand in a circular motion. “Continue.”
“They started by making changes to the human genome to eliminate disease. The scientists isolated the genes they thought were responsible for certain conditions and modified them. They did a lot of that. That’s a good thing, sure. But, hey, it doesn’t always work quite so easily. You eliminate one thing and it affects something else where there was no obvious relationship. That was a problem for the same sex thing. The people who are that way don’t see it as an issue, and they weren’t happy at seeing their preferences called a disease. Eventually, after a lot of discussion it was agreed that the human structure would not be altered any further but that children could be tested in the womb so that potential diseases could be eliminated in vitro. They say that humanity has adapted and changed and survived over the millennia and that if we play with our structure, we’ll jeopardize that resilience. Having said that, there are lots of Coalition planets where testing isn’t done at all.”
“And yet you have been heavily modified, have you not?”
Oh, yes. Heavily modified. Even before she was born. “That’s because of the Cyber Wars.”
“Which you will, of course, explain.”
“The Cyber Wars ended about two thousand years ago. Humanity was on the verge of extinction. A problem with smart machines, you see.”
“Like you?”
She bristled. “I am not a machine.” Although he wouldn’t be the first person who thought so. “I… people like me… are a result of the Cyber Wars. Before the war, machines were being used to do all sorts of work that people used to do. It was cheap, you know? Machines don’t need food, they don’t go on strike, make demands, want holidays. They took over in more and more jobs; working the fields, tending children, making goods for sale, designing things, building them and so on and so on. Running spaceships, controlling transit systems, buildings, you name it. The machines became smarter and smarter. Eventually, so the story goes, on the more advanced planets, they took over and flesh and blood people became inferior beings.”
“And people like you took over.”
“No. Shut up and listen.”
One eyebrow lifted but he said nothing.
“What happened was that people were forced into poverty because machines did all the work. Those people rebelled and fought back against the machines and destroyed them. Millions, billions died just on the advanced planets. But that wasn’t the end of it. The smart machines had kept everything going so when they were destroyed there was disease and starvation on top of all the deaths that had happened already. Nobody knew how to keep the ordinary machines going anymore. Then people started killing each other in a struggle to survive. It became a self- perpetuating thing. Somebody got a disease on planet A and moved to planet B to start a new life, bringing the disease along for the ride. Or tribe A killed tribe B for the food they’d grown. Eventually, the survivors stopped fighting and started again. And the survivors, needless to say, were the primitive people on the backward worlds who knew how to farm.”
“But they built new machines. You have a starship.”
“Yes, new machines many centuries later but not like the ones they destroyed. They never built another sentient machine. That knowledge was lost.”
“There were no records kept?”
“Not that anybody could read, no. What records survived were destroyed so the same thing couldn’t happen again.” She shrugged. “After that, humans did things differently. We use machines but not at the expense of people. And the machines are controlled by specially modified people like me.”
“Interesting,” he murmured. “And people like you are equally carefully controlled.” Frowning he drummed his fingers on the arm of the chair, lost in his own thoughts.
Morgan mulled on his words. ‘People like you are carefully controlled’. She hadn’t told him that.
“Could you build a sentient machine?” he said.
“They were called Machine Intelligences. A machine that thinks for itself. No, I can’t. I wouldn’t know how.” It was a law deep in her programs. Any machine had to have a fixed purpose. React to an external stimulus, yes. Store and analyze information, yes. Process rules, yes. But not create new rules for itself. Not perform beyond its purpose.
“You call yourselves humans, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me, Suri, are you really human?”
Here it comes. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
He said nothing.
Was she really human? She’d asked herself that question before today. “You mean because of these?” She pointed at her forehead. “I’m different. But I’m as human as all those people in all those vids.” Just a little bit more than human; a little bit strange, a little bit scary. What the hell. She’d grown up with that. And if he felt that way about her, too… that was fine. She’d become inured to it.
****
After Selwood had gone Ravindra sank back down onto the couch and called Tullamarran for a drink.
This had proved an interesting evening. Oddly unstructured, these people. All those physical variations were remarkable. And… what had she called it... homosexual behavior; so very peculiar. Revolting, really. He couldn’t begin to imagine grappling with another man. His skin prickled with distaste. Best not to dwell on it.
He placed the data stick back into the reader and re-ran the birthday party. The people had different colored skins, some almost black, some like manesa and one almost white. The hair, too. One woman had yellow hair like Jones’; the black man’s hair was also black but tightly curled. The strange eyes, as well, with white around the edges and round pupils.
So reminiscent of the children’s story about the mythical Orionar, who came down from the stars, created the manesa, each class with its own role, and then departed. According to legend, the Orionar were multi-colored. In picture books, each individual was shown as having different colors in stripes or patterns. But if you looked at it from another point of view, maybe multi-colored really meant that each individual varied, as these people did.
Interesting.
He flicked back to the heterosexual channel and searched through for the images of the normal-colored male with the pale,
almost ghostly, woman. Not like Selwood’s golden tones. His nostrils flared, remembering her scent, softer, sweeter than any manesan woman. And not remotely interested in sex as far as he could tell. Perhaps she wasn’t. Perhaps that was something else this bio-engineering had done to her. Now that would be a tragedy. The action on the screen distracted him again and he grinned. He wouldn’t mind doing something like that with Selwood. Foolishness. She’s an alien prisoner.
He turned off the vid and drained his glass.
Chapter Eleven
Another ride in a closed-in vehicle. Jones perched on the bench seat, his stomach churning with sheer, blind terror. Maybe this was it. He had nothing more to tell the military. He’d answered all their questions, the same ones they’d asked him on the warship and now they’d hustled him into this transport. To think he’d actually been relieved when they took him off the battle cruiser to their capital city.
The vehicle slowed down and he swayed, hands clutching the edge of the bench. A brief stop, then onward.
The doors swung open. He blinked in real light.
“Come along, Sur Jones. We are delighted to see you.”
A friendly voice, not the clipped military ‘do this’, ‘do that’. He rose to his feet and climbed out of the vehicle into a closed-in space, but this one had high windows through which he saw sky and drifting cloud. Bare walls, paved floor, full-length doors. A garage?
Two older men smiled at him. One wore a floor-length, red and blue robe, his long hair hanging around his head from a central parting. The other man’s robe was yellow, topped with a white waistcoat. Sure, a couple of guards in light blue uniforms held weapons in their hands but it seemed friendly.
“Where am I?”
“This is Ankhiva University,” said the fellow in red and blue. “I am Professor Chopra, head of exo-biology here, and this is Professor Vinash, who specializes in bio-chemistry.”
Oh, great. Universities and experiments. Maybe his time had come. “Nice to meet you.” Doing his best to hide his trembling hands, he bowed.
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