And, as a rule, he was a shy, reserved man, little given to talking in the presence of strangers, or even in the presence of close acquaintances unless it was concerning one of the many subjects of which he had mastery.
A high-level technologist by birth and training, KaphNo had never stopped his education, and could, at the drop of a suitable hat, argue medicine with AkweNema and ThefeRa, microbiology with SkorTho, psychology with GrelLo, or aesthetics with EnDera. And as often as not he would win those arguments.
Why he seemed to like me so well I had no idea— it was certainly not because I was his intellectual peer! —but I found myself flattered that he did. In turn, when I learned to take his frequently taciturn behavior with a grain of salt, I got to like him as well. Of all those in the Underground, he was the only man I really did like without reservation.
And I wasn’t certain whether I really liked EnDera all that well. I felt a strong physical attraction for her, of course, and there were many things I did like about her personality, her mind, and I could understand her problems and even sympathize with them, but I’m not
certain that I sympathized with her revolutionary ardor, though I’m sure her hatred of the system against which she fought was very similar to the hatred of the Kriths and all they stood for that had grown in me.
Yet—and this is the strange part—neither did I sympathize with KaphNo’s even greater revolutionary ardor, and I called him friend.
“All the world’s a bit queer, but for thee and me,” said the old Pennsylvania Dutchman, “and sometimes I wonder about thee.”
You know, there are times when I wonder a little even about myself. . . .
Of a Dream, and of Identities
When I had been in the Underground only a little over a month, my replicates had reached ML-2Y and looked very much as I must have looked as a two-year- old. Their lives differed in that they were never really conscious, and were taken from their encanters every other day for brief periods during which their muscles were exercised—cerebral programming had given them only the vaguest hint of what walking was all about. Then the replicates looked like 342 identical little brothers, normal and happy, if always “asleep.”
In many ways it seemed much longer than a month to me, though I was certain that by now it must be about the first of October, as time was measured by the calendars of a world a long way from this Here and Now.
Two weeks later AkweNema’s “daughter” was decanted for the last time and gradually awakened to the world outside the glass cylinders in which she’d grown from the cells taken from a dying girl's body. Education, in addition to the cerebral data fed to her before decanting, was begun, and every effort was made by the psychology team to re-create in the replicate a personality as similar as possible to that of the real daughter. AkweNema’s reaction to the seeming resurrection was hard to gauge, but I got the impression that it alternated between delight and horror, and filled him with an almost morbid fascination he could not effectively fight. And there were times when KaphNo seemed to regret the growing of the replicate; things might have
been easier for AkweNema had his daughter died once and for all.
At the same time as the replicate girl’s decanting, my own replicates had reached the stage of three-year-olds and looked like a band of miniature HarkosNors—or Eric Matherses, the name to which I was more accustomed—or even Thimbron Pamassoses, as I had been called when I was their age, or rather at their “maturation level.”
Like AkweNema, I didn’t know whether I was fascinated and awed by the replication process or disgusted and frightened by it. Maybe it was a mixture of both, with a touch of narcissism thrown in for flavoring.
And as the time passed in the Underground, the dream I’d had a year before kept coming back to me:
A city of towering buildings and streets and parks illuminated in the night by floating globes of light, a city that I could see in my dreams but dimly and with double vision, poorly and out of focus and half hidden by rain and mist, but what I saw told me that it was no city I had ever seen before, no city ever built by humankind.
Despite the floating light globes, much of the alien city lay in darkness and shadow, and after a while, as my vision cleared, I saw movement in those shadows, furtive movement, stealthy and quiet, a figure here, another there, wrapped in dark clothing, but now and again betrayed by a glint of light from metal. All the moving figures in the quiet city carried weapons.
One of the dark-clad figures stepped briefly into light and for a moment I saw him clearly: a man in his thirties, tall and scarred from many battles, tanned, blond, wearing a short beard; he carried a Paratimer R-4 power pistol in his right hand, a knife in his left. This man, whom I shockingly recognized, turned as if facing me, as if peering into my eyes, and on his lips was a twisted, bitter smile of anger and hatred, of satis
faction and revenge. Then he turned away and vanished into shadows.
In another place another figure revealed itself momentarily. This too was a tall, scarred, blond, bearded man in his thirties, and he carried a large, heavy energy rifle in both hands.
And in still another place, stepping out of the shadows for a moment to make his way forward, was the same man. An army of men in the night, all identical, all perhaps cloned from a single person—so went my dream.
The army of raiders slipped silently through the night, all headed for a single destination wherein lay something they/he wished to destroy. In my dream there was a chill in me such as I’d never known before.
Time had gone by now, how much of it I didn’t know, and they had almost reached their goal when, in the sky above the nonhuman city, a great light burst, white and brilliant, destroying the shadows and revealing those who had hidden in them. For a moment the raiders stopped in their tracks, startled by the light; then, as if guided by a single mind, they darted forward, running through the streets and across the parklike areas toward the largest building of the city.
From the building gunfire opened, sending shot and flame into the streets and the parks, and from the portals of the building issued an army of men—they, too, all identical, or nearly so—and all of them looked very much like a man—no, a being whom I’d known as Mager, a being who was slender and wiry and had a face made of craggy planes and tiny white lines like scars, who had neural organs complex enough to be called “brains” in addition to the one he had in his head. His type was very hard to kill. . . .
The Mager-force rushed into the streets, automatic slug throwers in their hands, spitting leaden death into the attackers, whose leading element was within range
of the defenders’ weapons. One of the blond men took a bullet in the chest. ...
I staggered backward from the impact of the slug as it ripped through the right side of my chest just below the nipple, shattering ribs, puncturing a lung, exiting through my back, and tearing away great globs of flesh. I staggered backward more shocked than pained, stunned, dazed, knowing as the pain began that the wound was mortal and I was going to die.
I tried to raise my stolen R-4 power pistol, to take at least one of the Magers with me, but I didn’t have the strength; the pistol was too heavy, slipped from my weakened grip, fell to the earth, and in moments I followed it, darkness, pain, and death coming over me as I fell.
The first of me died, but more of me came on, a dozen, two dozen; and here and there, as the collective I rushed forward, the individual I took more wounds. One of me was hit in the head, my skull shattered. I died instantly.
But I’d also taken a gut wound, a me some yards away, and I lay in agony as blood seeped onto the ground.
And I ran forward, a different me, a stream of bullets ripping away my left arm, but somehow I still fired with my right until I collapsed in unbearable pain.
Yet still, dying here and there, others of me terribly wounded, I came on against the Magers and still they killed me, though I wouldn’t stop until they’d killed me all. . . .
And maybe they nev
er would.
There my dream ended; it always ended there every time. And I wondered about it.
Oh, the Tromas in their wisdom had assured me that I had no psionic abilities, none at all, so I couldn’t possibly be precognitive, could I? The dream couldn’t
possibly be some dim vision of the future, seen through a glass darkly, could it? Well, could it?
Religion didn’t play a major role in the lives of the common people of NakrehVatee. It was there and was given lip service. The Bright Lords of Life and, more importantly, the Dark Lords of Death were given their due, but no more than that. Only among those of the higher castes, those who truly believed that through the cycles of reincarnation they had at last reached the point where they could hope to abandon the Wheel and look forward to an eternity in the land of the Blessed beyond the darkling waters of the Mountains of the West, was a great deal of thought given to the preparation and maintenance of the tombs in which their physical bodies would be preserved. Rather than a way of life, to most NakrehVatea religion was a mood, a coloring that seeped down to them from the higher reaches of the social pyramid, and really not much else.
And if most of the people of NakrehVatee had little regard for religion in their day-to-day lives, then the members of the BrathelLanza had even less. The revolutionary movement did not embrace atheism, didn’t exactly reject the idea of godhood itself, but if"'" did at least reject the polytheism tacitly accepted by the bulk of the nation’s population. Monotheism was the order of the day among the avant-garde of the BrathelLanza and, like so many other people who have traveled the long road from pan- to poly- to monotheism, they looked toward the sun as the physical manifestation of their concept of the deity—a la the golden sun disk of Aton introduced to the world by Ikhnaton some thirty-three centuries ago.
For this reason the BrathelLanza, along with the rest of the NakrehVatea on the surface world above, did celebrate at least one religious holiday each year, that of the Return of the Sun King from the Dark Re-
gions of Cold, the Deliverance of Helios from the Lords of Death, the winter solstice.
It was also an opportunity to throw one hell of a party.
So on the evening of the day that would be called December 20 on some calendars, all work in the city of VarKhohs and in the underground chambers of the BrathelLanza came to a halt; shops and offices above, labs and training areas below were all closed, and the membership of the Brotherhood of Life congregated in the Underground’s largest room, that which contained the drill field, a great, brightly lighted cavern cut out of the living stone.
I won’t go into what was eaten and drunk that night, or what followed in the darkened corridors and shadowy rooms. I’ll only say that when the morning came there was many an aching head and many a guilty conscience.
To soothe those consciences, and in an effort to overcome those aching heads, most of those who were able to drag themselves out of bed went to a morning service that was a mixture of religious teachings, astrological mumbo-jumbo, ancestor worship and moral indoctrination.
. Although I was one of those able, if barely, to drag myself out of bed, wondering where EnDera had spent the night, for it certainly hadn’t been with me—those hours for me had gone by in the company of a dark young lady whom I later learned had not been bom from a mother’s womb but from an encanter flask, but she was warm flesh and blood for all that—I wasn’t one of those who went to the services.
Rather, after a breakfast of coffee, raw eggs in milk and a brace of pills I hoped would make me feel halfway human again, I cleaned myself up, dressed in the military-type garments I’d begun to wear and went for a walk through the subterranean chambers.
My wandering footsteps unconsciously but purpose
fully took me through the strangely quiet and empty tunnels and passageways to the laboratories and finally into the large chamber where the 340 surviving replications of myself were still sleeping peacefully, totally unaware of the frenzy and gluttony that had passed through the chambers the night before.
For a long while I stood there looking at them, the replicates, the clones, the miniatures of me.
About two weeks before they had been transferred from the first of the maturation encanters to the second, where they would remain until they reached a maturation level of twelve years, which was still some two and a half months away. Now they were at ML-7Y, looking for all the world Uke sleeping Uttle boys of seven years of age who would soon wake up and want to go outside and play ball or something.
And that mixture of awe and revulsion passed through me again, and once more I wondered about the wisdom—and the moraUty!—of this thing I’d gotten myself involved in.
So deep was I in these thoughts and feelings that I didn’t hear the footsteps behind me until they had nearly reached me. When I did hear them I turned.
“Good morning, General,” said OrDjina, the lovely mistress of the lord DessaTyso, with perhaps a slightly mocking tone in her voice as she spoke the last word, my title.
“Oh, good morning,” I replied, wondering what had brought her here. To view her own replicate? I wondered, but remembered that the more mature clone of the cells of this woman was in another chamber, having some weeks before been encantered in a cylinder large enough for the final stages of her growth to maturity. So ... ?
“You are not a religious man, I take it, General,” she said, again with a mocking sound to the final word.
I shook my head and I looked her up and down in a fashion that I was sure was obvious to her, though
she made no attempt to shrink from my gaze, to show a modesty I knew she didn’t possess. More an exhibitionist than a shrinking violet, she.
Her clothing this morning was a tan outfit consisting of a thin, loose-fitting blouse with lace sleeves that ended at her elbows, the neckline of which plunged almost to her waist and under which she wore nothing, her full breasts straining to escape the capturing fabric. She wore equally loose-fitting trousers, which were cut with checkerboard squares down the outsides of her hips and legs and through which her dark skin showed from thigh to ankle, warm skin, inviting skin. The color of the clothing was slightly lighter than that skin, a shade that looked well with it.
Her black hair, brushed and gleaming, sparkling with a cluster of jewels above each temple, swept loosely across her shoulders and down her back. In her eyes was a sparkle that might have been mischievous had she had a greater air of innocence about her. But then, like modesty, innocence was a quality Lady OrDjina lacked. And she did not seem to regret that lack.
“And what about yourself?” I asked. “You, don’t feel a need for the sacred services?”
She laughed, flashing bright teeth. “I rather doubt it would do me any good. I am far beyond that point. Like yourself.”
She turned to look into one of the glass cylinders that contained what appeared to be a naked seven- year-old boy. “You were a handsome child, General.” “I like to think so myself.”
“And one who showed great promise for the man he would become,” she said, and almost leered as she gestured toward the child’s genitals. “And I rather imagine you were a nasty little boy as well.”
“What do you mean by that?” I wasn’t offended by either comment, only curious about the second.
“All little boys are nasty, you know. Some are just a bit more wicked than others.”
“Do you really think so?”
“Of course.”
“Well, maybe I was. At least my parents seemed to think so. I got more spankings than any other boy I knew.”
She laughed. “You must have been a terror to the little girls when you grew a bit older.”
I shrugged again.
Then she asked, something flintlike coming to her dark eyes, “And who were those parents you just spoke of, General?”
I turned to look her fully in the face. “Why do you ask that?”
“Curiosity. I would like to know a number of things about you.”
; “Such as?” What was she getting at?
“Oh, such as, where did you really grow up and what was your name then? Such as, what kind of a city or town did you live in and what was the language you spoke then?”
“You want to know a lot, don’t you. Why?” “Curiosity, as I told you.” There was a pause, and the wicked gleam in her eyes sparkled brightly. “Because, General HarkosNor, I don’t think there’s a single word of truth in all those things you told psychologist GrelLo.”
“Everything I told her was supposed to be kept confidential.”
“Oh, General, it is being kept confidential, I can assure you. I haven’t told a soul a thing I know about you—which, in truth, is absolutely nothing.”
“But GrelLo let you go through my tapes and notes, is that it?” I should have been angry, but at the moment I was only worried. What was it that OrDjina suspected about me? The truth? Hardly that, I thought. I hoped.
“Honestly, General, do you think GrelLo could have prevented me even if she’d wanted to and tried?
I am the lady of his lordship, you know, and with his permission I can do just about anything I want.”
“Just about?”
She sighed, placed a hand between her breasts, fingers touching the column of her neck. “I must admit that even his lordship finds it wise to defer to AkweNema at times. For now,” she added with an ominous weight.
“I see.”
“Are you certain even of that, General?”
“Right now I’m not certain of much of anything.”
“ ‘A wise man is one who admits his ignorance.’ That’s an old saying of my people. My people have a great number of old sayings.” She paused long enough to look me up and down as I had looked her up and down a short while before. Then she spoke again: “I have been around a bit, General. NakrehVatee is not my home, as I’m certain you’ve surmised. My experiences have been, shall we say, a bit more cosmopolitan than those of most of the others here. And I know that you are not what you claim to be. General, your accent isn’t even that of a SteeMehseeha, you know.”
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