The Cestus Deception

by Steven Barnes

  "The medicine?"

  "Yes. And the meatless meals."

  "How can these be dashtas? According to my reseach, they are

  much too large. They... these creatures are intelligent..." How did

  he know that? So far they had done nothing but float. But something

  about those blind eyes. They made gentle sounds, cooing, calling,

  comforting . . .

  "Yes," Sheeka agreed.

  He shook his head. "I've read the reports. Dashtas are nonsentient."

  "Not nonsentient. Call it a form of sleep. A gift from the Guides—

  a lifetime of dreams. Even unconscious, their nervous systems supply

  the Force sensitivity. I don't understand all of it. I'm just grateful it

  works."

  He paused for a moment, digesting information. "What are you

  saying?"

  "Female dashtas lay millions of eggs," Sheeka said to him. "The

  males fertilize only a few thousand. Unfertilized eggs produce young

  who never mature."

  "The eels gave you their children?"

  She nodded. "Those who would have died in competition with

  their fertilized brothers and sisters. They lived on, and in living gave

  life to we who befriended them."

  "Why would they do such a thing?"

  "Long ago," Sheeka said, "this planet was more fertile, and there

  were more sentient species. They died out in competition with each

  other as the sand ate the forest. The struggle for survival was distasteful

  to the dashtas, who retreated deep into the planet's core.

  We've been their first new friends in millennia."

  "You."

  "Yes. The eels offered us their unfertile eggs, knowing that the JKs

  would bring Cestus more fully into the community of worlds."

  "There is conflict in that world, as well."

  "Yes. As long as there are eaters and eaten, there will be conflict.

  But the dashtas hold the potential for sentient creatures to meet their

  needs without slaughtering one another. This is our potential, not

  our present."

  Need rarely triggers war, Jangotat thought. Desire is far more deadly.

  The X'Ting had driven the spiders into the mountains. If the

  plagues had been no accident, then Cestus Cybernetics had all but

  destroyed the hive. The Separatists and the Republic might well destroy

  Cestus Cybernetics . . .

  An endless chain of domination and destruction. And he was one

  of its strongest links.

  Jangotat kept his thoughts to himself. There was something more

  important here than philosophical discourse. He desired understanding

  more than he yearned for his next two minutes of air. "They have

  no eyes. Why do they glow?"

  "For us," she said, and sat on the rock to gaze more closely at the

  eels. "For you, and me. I come here sometimes. Not too often, but occasionally,

  when I need to renew myself."

  Her words were true. He could feel it, and had for some minutes

  now. It was a sensation not of warmth, nor of cold . . . but of something

  else. Something that was an . . . aliveness. He felt a compressed

  lifetime of murderous lessons dissolve, as if he was not any of the

  things he had been trained to be. But if he was not those things, then

  what was he? "I'm a soldier," he whispered.

  "No," she said. "That is your programming."

  His spine straightened. "I am a mighty warrior's clone brother."

  "No," Sheeka said. And there was no mocking in her voice. There

  was, instead, some other emotion he could not name. "That is your

  body, your genetics. We're more than that. You are not your 'brothers'

  and they are not you."

  Jangotat's sight began to blur, and he wiped at his eyes with his

  hand. Looked at the moisture collected there on his fingers, dumbfounded.

  He could not remember ever shedding tears before. He

  knew what they were, but had never seen them from his own eyes.

  And if he could do one thing that he had never done . . . perhaps

  there were others as well?

  What was this place? One part of him wanted to flee as swiftly as

  possible. And another wanted to lie down here and be bathed in eellight

  for the rest of his days.

  "What do you feel?"

  He closed his eyes again. A marrow-numbing tingle flowed through

  him, lifting him up, seemingly above himself. He heard himself speak

  without recognizing the words, and realized it was possible he had

  never really known himself at all. "What do I feel?" he asked. His

  voice shook with emotion. "What have you done to me? I feel everything.

  Everything I never knew I lacked." She had taken his hand.

  Her fingers were small and warm and cool. " I . . . see myself, back to

  infancy, out to old age." It was true.

  Child.

  Infant floating in a decanter, the spawn of endless night.

  His body torn and war-ravaged, dying, the light of combat still glowing

  in his eyes.

  Then other flesh, aged Jangotats, ravaged and worn not by war but by

  time, time he would never have. A wrinkled Jangotat, sight dimming, but

  smiling, surrounded by...

  "Yes?"

  For an instant he saw children he would never sire, grandchildren

  he would never hold, and the sudden, wrenching sense of the path

  denied was so devastating that he felt himself implode. It was as if all

  he had experienced on Cestus had awakened some deep and irresistible

  genetic memory within him. The memory of what his life

  should have been. Could have been, had he been a child of love and

  not war. He saw those children, but then, in their eyes he gained the

  strength to go backward, back to his own infancy, back to . . .

  Jangotat sagged to his knees. The tears he'd spent a lifetime repressing

  welled up once again. "It's wrong," he whispered. "All wrong." He

  gazed up at her with haunted, hollow eyes. "I never heard my mother's

  heart. Never felt her emotions while I slept, safe in her womb."

  "No," Sheeka said gently. "You didn't."

  Hands shaking, he sank his face against his palms. On any other

  day of his life the heat and wetness would have shamed him, but Jangotat

  was beyond shame now. "No one ever cradled me," he said. "No

  one will miss me when I'm gone."

  He paused, and into that pause he heard a voice within him whisper,

  Please, Sheeka. Say that you'll miss me when I'm gone. When I've performed

  that single function I have practiced to perfection.

  Die.

  Here on this planet. Or the next. Or the next. Tell me that some

  memory of me will stay with you. That you will dream of me. Remember

  my smile. Praise my courage. My honor. Please. Something. Anything.

  But she said nothing, and he realized that it was best that way, that

  he had come to a place in his life where lived the core conundrums

  that no outside entity could resolve for him. This was his loneliness,

  his grim and inexorable destiny. And in this terrible moment, all the

  fine words about the immortality of the GAR rang as hollow as a

  Sarlacc's belly.

  "Jangotat?"

  Despite his horrific realization, he couldn't stop another clumsily

  disguised plea: "No one ever said they love me." He turned and

  looked up
at her. It was as if tearing his gaze away from the pool required

  a physical effort. "Am I such an ugly thing?"

  "No."

  No. He was not an abomination of nature. He could feel everything

  that she was not saying, knew why she had brought him to this

  place: to experience the fear and loneliness he had hidden away from

  himself. It was mind numbing. And necessary.

  His next words were a whisper. "Why would anyone ever leave this

  place, once they had found it?"

  And now for the first time in minutes, she spoke in complete sentences.

  "Jangotat, it's not one or the other. We don't live either a life

  of action and adventure, or one of spiritual contemplation. True, the

  brothers and sisters come here to meditate. But then they return to

  the world."

  "The world?"

  "The world outside. Farms, mines, the city. The world needs us to

  be active, but to also contemplate the consequences of our actions. To

  obey orders is good, Jangotat. We all live within a society with reciprocal

  obligations. But to obey them without question is to be a machine,

  not a living being. Are you alive, Jangotat?"

  His mouth worked without producing words.

  "I think you are. Wake up before it's too late. You're not just a

  number, you're a man, a living, breathing man. You were born dreaming

  that you're some kind of machine, an expendable programmed

  device. You're not."

  "Then what am I?" He blinked hard, shivering. "What is this feeling?

  I've never known it." He paused, mouth opening in astonishment.

  "Loneliness," he said finally, answering his own question. "I feel

  so alone. I've never felt alone before. How could I? I was always surrounded

  by my brothers."

  "I've felt lonely in a crowd," Sheeka said. "Only one thing really

  cures loneliness."

  "What is that?" Another plea, but this one did not shame him.

  "The sense that the universe knows that we're here."

  Confusion warred with clarity. "But how can it see me among so

  many brothers? We're all the same."

  "No," she said, her voice carrying a new sharpness. "You're not. As

  you told me, no two of you have ever had the same experiences. So

  no two of you can be the same."

  "I lied," he said, the words twisted with anguish. "There's no me inside.

  It's all us. The GAR. My brothers. The Code. But where am I?

  Who am I?"

  "Listen to your heart." Her palm and fingers rested against his

  chest. He felt the warmth, so deeply that for a moment he feared its

  cessation, feared that if she drew her hand away he would become a

  man of ice.

  Again.

  "Your heartbeat says it all. It says we are all completely unique."

  She paused.

  "And that, in that very uniqueness, we are all the same."

  We are all the same... because we are all unique. The words echoed

  through the chamber, but he heard them not merely with his ears. He

  knew now why she had asked him to cease listening to the sounds.

  Cease using his outer ears, so that the inner voices could whisper their

  secrets. "Unique, as every star is unique. As every particle of the universe

  is unique."

  And in that uniqueness, we are all the same. Every being. Every particle.

  Every planet. Every star.

  He was speaking to himself. She spoke to him. The dashta eels

  spoke to him. His wrinkled, bearded, and beloved future self, the

  Jangotat who would never be, spoke to him. The child he had never

  been, who had known a mother's love and a happy home, a mother

  who would nurture him that he might one day make his own choices

  in the world . . .

  All of these spoke to him. Each in its own voice, but together

  they blended into a single chorus, a single blended sentiment, overwhelming

  in its simplicity and abiding love.

  He sagged from his knees onto his side. All false strength, all

  bravado drained from him like water squeezed from a sponge. In its

  place remained a sense of lightness rather than power. He had always

  felt himself to be of a man of iron, if not durasteel. What need had

  durasteel for air or water or love?

  Jangotat heard a wet slippery sound, then another and yet another.

  He looked up. The legless eels wriggled cooing from the pool, surrounding

  him. Very tentatively, he bent and reached out, touched the

  nearest. Its blind, eyeless face observed him with a vast and aching

  intelligence. Its touch was Love itself.

  "What did you see?" Sheeka asked from behind him.

  "Another life," he said.

  "Another life?"

  He nodded. "I might have been born to a mother and father. Had

  brothers and sisters. Played with my pets."

  That last seemed to surprise her. "Pets?"

  Absurdly gentle emotions flooded him. "I saw a Corosian phoenix

  once. The most beautiful thing I ever saw. I wanted one. As a pet."

  He laughed at himself. "Not at that station. Not at any post I know

  of. A burden to the army, you see?"

  "Strange," she said, voice troubled. "Strange. Usually the Guides

  are a healing influence."

  "They are." His bruised lips turned up in a smile. "For given that

  other option, I choose my life. However and for whatever purpose I

  was given life, still I choose everything that led me to this moment."

  He paused again, the world spinning around him. Within him. "I

  choose everything that led me to this place, and to you."

  She sank down beside him, the eels parting to make room. Although

  they could not see, they saw all.

  She pressed her full warm lips against his, setting her hands against

  his cheeks to draw him even closer. Although he had shared kisses

  with other women, this was different, an unfolding in his heart.

  Sheeka Tull placed her cheek against his, and whispered something

  that he could not quite hear.

  "What?" he asked, afraid to know. "What did you say?"

  "That thing you've never heard," she answered. Then paused again

  before speaking the words he had waited a full, brief lifetime to hear.

  "I love you."

  Sheeka Tull's beautiful dark face rippled with reflected light. Jangotat

  knew that his existence had contained no greater peace and fulfillment

  than this. They kissed again, her lips warm against his.

  68

  1next days seemed a sort of dream, a phantasmal passage from

  which he would inevitably awaken. The village accepted the fact that

  he had moved into Sheeka's house, her children that he had moved

  into her guest room.

  As Jangotat sat sunning himself, Sheeka's son Tarl came to sit with

  him on the porch. They talked for a time, and then Jangotat began to

  use his knife to carve the yellow-haired lad a toy.

  He knew that they were welcoming him to become one of them.

  That while such a choice was impossible, Sheeka was inviting him to

  stay. These were peaceful folk who prayed Cestus would not be

  pulled into a conflict beyond their understanding. He now comprehended

  so much more. The eels had given their beloved friends permission

  to use the sterile young, but for defensive purposes only.


  Only to give the humans a means of income, to save the economy of

  the planet that gave them life. Modifying security droids for the

  battlefield was an abomination that might destroy them all. Just another

  level of confusion.

  But despite the problems, without really saying a specific word, the

  Zantay Hills fungus farmers were offering Jangotat something he

  had never really had: not merely a bunk, but a home. Sheeka's stepdaughter

  Tonote came to sit at his other side, her red hair ruffled by

  the noon breeze blowing in off the desert.

  "Where will you go after?" Tonote asked in her disarmingly fragile

  voice.

  "After what?"

  "After you stop being a soldier. Where will you go? Where is your

  home?"

  "The GAR is my home."

  She leaned her small head against his shoulder. "But when you

  stop fighting. Where will you go?" Strangely, those words seemed to

  resonate in his mind. Where will you go... ?

  You're not intended to "go" anywhere. You will die where you are told.

  "I don't know what you mean." Why had he lied? The greatest wish

  of a trooper is to die in service.

  Isn't it? The possibility of another fate had never really occurred to

  him. The clones hadn't existed long enough for any of them to wither

  in their premature fashion, or retire . . . whatever that might mean to

  a being with such a truncated life span.

  There was simply no precedent.

  Tarl looked up at him adoringly, and Tonote bent her long graceful

  neck to lean her little head against Jangotat's shoulder. Sheeka

  watched from the window, smiled secretively, then closed the shutters

  again.

  69

  sandstorms raged the next day, followed by one of Cestus s brief,

  violent rains. It tamped down the dust but also created a canopy of

  dark, heavy clouds. Time seemed to stretch endlessly, and through

  much of the morning Jangotat wandered the muddy streets alone,

  seeking he knew not what. Something. Some understanding of these

  people that continued to elude him. They watched him as they

  flowed among the stone houses, and were friendly enough, but treated

  him as what he was: someone who was just passing through. Just on

  his way to somewhere else. The deepest smiles and sweetest laughter

  were confined to those who would stay, or might return.

  He was neither.

  Late that evening, news reached Sheeka that contact had been

  made with Desert Wind. Jangotat made his tearful good-byes with