“So far it was believable,” he said. “Max was my best friend, my closest friend. We’d been close since . . . well, I can’t remember since when. You probably remember us playing together. I remember when he was smaller than I, but once he got bigger, I never caught up.”
I filled the plate and put it on the floor for Goldie, who rushed to it. “Goldie! Manners,” Nat said. “Don’t act like you haven’t eaten in days.”
“I vaguely remember you,” I said. “You’re Max’s age, just about, right?”
“Three years older, though I was always smaller after he hit four or so. Your mother thought you’d been raised too much in isolation, so from the time we could toddle, my father brought me over two or three times a week, to play. My siblings too, of course. We . . . Max and I, well, there’s no guarantee of it, right? We might have grown up to hate each other, but we didn’t. We grew up to be very close. So, when I thought he had ascended, I—” He shrugged. “I thought I could help him, and I came to talk to him.” He frowned. “He treated me exactly as your father did. No. More like, as your father would treat me if he were trying to impersonate Max. I . . . I don’t care to relate that interview, but it was like, you know, of course he knew I was Max’s friend, so he was trying to be friendly. But when you’re . . . When you’re close to someone, there’s things you know. There’s in jokes. There’s references to things that you two have done and lived through. Like . . . like . . .” He seemed to be madly reaching, perhaps goaded by skepticism in my eyes. “Like, you know, we were broomers together, and there were . . . people from our broomers’ lair.” He sat back and twirled his silver ring on his finger. “Eat. You’re not eating. Anyway, we’d kept our broomer stuff secret, and it was clear your . . . father knew nothing of it. Neither did what I’ll call new-Max. New-Max didn’t want his furniture, he wanted your father’s things transferred here. New-Max didn’t know about Goldie, who had spent most of his time at my house, though he was Max’s dog.” He gestured with his head towards the portrait on the wall. “And new-Max didn’t know who had drawn that. He liked it, mind. And he wanted to pay the artist. Pay!”
“Who—”
Nat shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. I thought I was going crazy. Or that Max had gone crazy. I thought he’d fallen and hit his head. I thought he’d had a stroke. I thought—”
“I thought all of that today, when I met with Javier.”
“I figured. So maybe you won’t think I’m completely insane. Though that’s what it felt like to me. I didn’t know what to do, or how to act. My friend was still here, but he was gone, and I didn’t know why or if it was something I’d done, or if he’d ever return.” He paused a long while. The cigarette appeared in his hands and I didn’t dare chide him into putting it away and eating, because he was looking right through me and you’d think his memories were as horrible as mine. “And then there was a series of events I can’t explain, because I don’t think you know the participants, and some of them aren’t mine to confide. But Good Man Sinistra’s daughter disappeared, and when she came back, she had to rescue her husband from Never-Never. That’s when we . . . That’s when you were freed.”
“Good Man Sinistra’s daughter?” I said, shocked. It shouldn’t be shocking, but Good Men had sons with such regularity, and usually no girls, that I’d long suspected some form of gene manipulation.
“Athena Hera Sinistra. About Max’s age, so she was born when you— I don’t suspect you cared much for birth announcements, though.” Nat strained smoke through his teeth “Almost as scary as my sister Martha, but a good woman, all the same. Not that it matters. You’re not likely to ever meet her. She’s—elsewhere. With her husband.” His pauses made me wonder if he resented that Athena Sinistra had married someone else. But that wasn’t any of my business. “What matters is that she broke into her father’s study and got some gems with information. What she discovered . . . What those gems revealed tallied with several other . . . other sources of information, including what we’d got from Uncle Benjamin. And what other people in the lair . . . There is this broomer who was severely disabled who, had that not happened, would probably have met the same fate you did. Or perhaps he would just have been killed.”
He took a deep drag on his cigarette. “You must, you absolutely must believe that I’m sane as I tell you this, because you’ll be tempted to think I’m insane. Because that would make everything so much easier.”
“I don’t think anything easy can explain what happened to me today. Or, in fact, what happened to me since I was twenty-two. So I’m prepared for the unbelievable.”
He nodded. “First,” he said. “Pardon me, it’s none of my business, but it will help me understand some details. You said you and my uncle were . . . involved. This was . . . physical?”
I looked at my plate. Attitudes towards homosexuality have changed through the centuries. If those learning gems were right, in Greece it had been almost obligatory. Then, at various times it had been condoned or accepted. But even in eras when it was accepted, some people were violently repulsed by it, and not only for religious reasons. There seemed to be something built into the species that made some people loathe the very idea. Perhaps this was necessary for keeping the species alive.
I’d never talked about my love life. It didn’t matter to anyone else, except Ben, really. My persona as the heir to the Good Man didn’t have an official sex life. Oh, I had young women I took out to official occasions. I’d never had an interest in them, and most of them had never had an interest in me, though some would have thought it was grand for me to set them up and keep them as a fling on the side—but that would have been for the setting up, not for me.
It had never mattered. Ben and I had—I supposed it would be called fallen in love?—very young. And after that, it just hadn’t mattered. He was safe and secure, in a world where anyone else might run screaming to the news holos. I didn’t care to risk it, and he seemed fine with it. And besides, he was my main companion in everything else. He was mine.
I’d never told anyone else. Not even my mother. Never spoke of it. By the time I could have, I knew our particular society disapproved very strongly of it, at least for males. Oh, maybe not in some parts of the world. Since I didn’t discuss it with anyone, I didn’t know for sure. But in the places I knew, homosexuality was as disapproved of as any other unusual and possibly odd behavior. In many places, perhaps most, it was subjected to the death penalty. In Olympus it was at a minimum a matter for a jail sentence, though rarely enforced in the higher classes. “We were lovers,” I said drily.
Nat Remy didn’t seem shocked. He nodded. “None of my business, but . . . exclusive, or . . .”
I frowned at him.
“What I mean,” he said, “is whether you also had an interest in women, or—”
“What? Some women make fine friends, but . . . not that way, no.”
“May I ask if anyone knew about it?” he said. “And when it started?”
“I don’t see why—”
“Because I think I need to, to explain things to you.”
I bit my tongue, got up and went blindly to the buffet, where I slammed things around, pretending to look for something. I just didn’t want to be looking at him. “I think we must have been around seventeen though we might have been sixteen when we started fooling around physically,” I said. “And we were discovered shortly after. Someone—I don’t remember who, one of the maids—opened the door on us, and screamed and . . .” I remembered the scene and part of me wanted to laugh at how ridiculous we must have looked. It had never occurred to us we were doing anything wrong. More importantly, it never occurred to us anyone would care. We’d been punctilious about hiding our escapades out of the compound, our souping up of stolen flyer-safety brooms, the first ones we’d tried out. But no one had ever talked to us about sex, and it never occurred to us what we did together was on the list of forbidden things. “There was a horrible scene. I think my father fired the maid or whatever,
but everyone in the house knew, though most of them pretended not to. For about a year, I could only see Ben in secret. Then Max was born, and my parents got very involved with him and seemed to forget. And Ben and I took care to lock the door.”
Nat nodded. He leaned back in his chair. Goldie, having finished his food, came over and put his head on Nat’s knees. Nat lit another cigarette. “You say you’ve been studying history. What do you know about the Mules?”
“Eh? The Mules or the Mule Lords?” I asked, disoriented by the shift.
“Both.”
“Ah.” I had no idea what he wanted. But I ate a little of my chicken, reveling in the symphony of spices and seasonings, after fourteen years of eating salty mush and sweet mush and trying not to think of what Nathaniel was getting at. “Well, the Mules were first made to make up European populations that were falling precipitously. The first few . . . ah . . . batches were mental defectives, gestated by animals. But after a while, they perfected the process, had them carried by surrogates and started creating smart ones. Very smart indeed. They created them extraordinarily healthy too, and gave them various other enhancements for longevity, and they were used for everything from super-clerks to corporate couriers, to assassins. And then someone had the bright idea that if only we were governed by angels we wouldn’t need to be wary of government. And government would be better than ever. They must have read, what was his name? James Madison. The man said government would be fine if we were administered by angels. I suppose it never occurred to him someone would try to create the equivalent. Anyway, they made the Mule Lords.” I shook my head. “They were good as far as consolidating their power went. They took over territories that had initially been self-governing, like the seacities. And those who were made to be only sort of the masters of bureaucracy took over total control, anyway. And . . . things went very badly. In the beginning of the twenty-second century there was a revolution. And then there were turmoils. Most Mule Lords and their servants were killed. Perhaps all of them, though a legend persists that a number of them went off world in an interstellar ship they’d secretly built and which they ominously called the Je Reviens.”
Nat leaned back further and absently patted at Goldie’s head. Goldie must have been dissatisfied with the pets, because he walked over to me and put his head on my knees. I petted him, glad for his warmth. I had no idea where Nat was going with this, nor why he was giving me a history exam. “You’re almost right,” he said. “Almost. As far as we can tell, from documentary evidence, the Je Reviens was no myth. And a good number of Mule Lords went off on it. Most of the ones, in fact, who were designed to be rulers. The ones they left behind were, with one or two exceptions, the ones that they didn’t want to trust in close confines. A few of them had been rulers, but most of them had been seconds in command, or . . . or assassins. Or spies. Or,” he smiled a little. “I have no evidence of this, but I suspect a few of them were created as honeypots.”
“Mule honeypots?” The idea of bioimproved people being used to subvert by seduction was odd. What would the improvements have been?
“Never mind. There were twenty-five years of turmoil, when every civilized region burned, every archive was emptied, looted, destroyed, every building of note razed. The people who wrote at the time, whose writings we can still find, thought it was like the fall of Rome, or the fall of the USA all over again. They thought they were in for a period of barbarism, or at least privation. This time they thought it would last as long as the Middle Ages, and be everywhere, not just in North America. They thought things would be lost—” He took a pull of his cigarette. “This is when, of course, the Usaian religion was founded, when Bob Haute . . . Never mind. Time enough for that later. But most people just huddled in place. And those with any hint of bioing or even who might be suspected of having such, because they were exceptionally bright or exceptionally beautiful or agile, hid and hoped no one noticed. Some of them were caught. Some of them were even really bioed, but most weren’t. Envy had full rein. They were crucified and stoned and killed in inventive ways, in public, in major cities and rural byways. Until the storm passed.” Another deep pull, and blue smoke twirled in the yellow candle light. “But some people were doing more than that. The Mules who had stayed behind were planning and . . . arranging things. And making sure crucial, targeted knowledge was lost. A lot of them, after all, were created as spies, assassins and agents provocateur. It was their job.”
“So you’re saying some Mules survived,” I said. Goldie was snoring with his head on my knees.
He nodded. “And then, when the turmoils passed, they took control. Slowly, they established themselves as genetically pure. The best humanity had spun off naturally. They gathered around them their bioengineered servants who had survived. Or other bioengineered people who had survived. People who were normal, except for having been genetically enhanced, usually for intelligence, and sometimes for looks—though most of those were killed off—and sometimes for other characteristics like vision, or hearing or . . . You get the point.”
My mind has this very bad habit of getting ahead of me—of racing through, insanely—and adding ten plus ten while I’m back there, painstakingly counting two on my fingers. I looked at Nat. I remembered his fighting on broomback. I remembered the way Ben could move. “Were your ancestors bioed for speed?”
He gave me a tight smile. “Speed and coordination on one side of Dad’s ancestry. Intelligence and memory on the other. Intelligence and organizational skills on Mom’s. It doesn’t always breed true, but mostly it does.” He shook the ash of his cigarette into the ashtray. “The Mules reestablished themselves as rulers . . . as . . . Patricians.”
I blinked at him. “It won’t pass, Nat. Mules were sterile. And they were all male.”
“Ah,” he said. “There are other ways of reproducing.”
“They were also keyed against cloning, and besides cloning is illegal.”
“Um . . . Yes. But they were keyed against cloning in the twenty-first century, when it was practically in its infancy. And as for its being illegal . . . when did that ever stop those with power? Remember, you can open your father’s genlocks. All Good Men of Olympus could.”
“So . . .” I said, adding slowly, “You’re saying my . . . ancestors were Mules. And yours were bioengineered, but still capable of reproducing normally.”
“You’re not running into the night,” he said, vaguely complimentary.
I shrugged. “Hans said we were all Mules. It seemed insane, but . . .”
“But Scrubbers don’t bother with the insane?” he asked, sharply, stubbing his cigarette, and starting another. He’d eaten less than half of his plate, and I got up, gently removing Goldie’s head from my lap. The dog padded over to Nat and put his head on Nat’s knees. I grabbed a platter full of fruit and cheese, and set it between us on the table, where both of us could reach it.
“I guess,” I said. “I’ve had time to think about it.”
“But you’re still not quite correct,” Nat said. “Oh, yes, of course, they reproduced by cloning.” He plucked a grape from the platter and ate it. “That was why most of them had only sons. The wives were merely carriers, though I suspect none of them knew it.”
“You mean, I was no relation to my mother?”
Nat looked at me. I sighed. “Never mind, go on.”
“The few daughters recorded to Good Men were either . . . well . . . not all wives were faithful. Or they were the result of a long-term project to create a modified clone, a female Mule.”
“Was—”
“We’ve reason to think Athena is one. There were others, but they were either severely handicapped or genetically flawed, or sterile. Or all of the above. Anyway . . . so, you see . . .”
“I don’t feel as if I’m just like my father. We never agreed on most things. And he—” And he had been one of the most outraged at my relationship with Ben. “He thought Ben and I—”
“The human genome is a wondrous thi
ng. They tried to build the Mules as cleanly as they could,” he said. “Wysiwyg.”
“Weezwhat?”
“Ancient Usaian word for ‘what you see is what you get,’” he said. “But it’s not like that. Some genes can’t be separated. You can’t take the good without the bad. And some of them seem to flip on or off randomly, in response to environmental pressures, both in gestation and after. You are not your father. But you are as close as an identical twin. Over the centuries, though, variations crept in.”
“But that doesn’t explain why Max changed when he—”
“No.” He had picked up a piece of cheese, and now put it on the side of the plate and looked at me. “The thing is, the clones never inherited. You see, they . . . the Mules and their bioengineered servants, had access to all the biological science before the turmoils, and . . . and they developed a method for brain transplant. Yes, I know it’s still risky in most cases, but not with their techniques, not to a clone.”
Silence fell, except for Goldie’s light snoring. I wanted to tell Nat he was wrong. But I was thinking of Javier asking me how I’d managed it in only a few days. I was thinking of a stranger looking out of his eyes. I was thinking of Josia. I heard something between a choked sob and a yell. And Nat’s sympathy made me realize I’d made the sound. Goldie lifted his head and looked at me. “You mean they’re all dead? All of them? All my friends? And do you mean Max . . .”
“Max was killed aboard that space cruiser, probably a few days out of Circum, and your father’s brain inserted into his cranium,” Nat said. “Max . . .” He shrugged. “I hope he didn’t know what was happening. I hope he went to sleep and just never woke up. Sometimes I wake in the night. I hear him talking to me. Sometimes I pray he never knew. Pray!” He looked through me. “I think, you know, that I’ve gone quite insane, this last week, since I found out for sure. One thing is to suspect and the other to know. I think I went unhinged. Worry and pain turned to anger and . . . I’ve done things that I . . .” He looked at his hands, as if they were alien and strange.
A Few Good Men Page 11