Farah busied herself with peeling a few sweaty blond locks of hair off her forehead. They’d had their heads inside those helmets for hours while Dag took them on a guided tour of Commander Lenon Donali’s treacherous mind.
It wasn’t Donali’s fault that he was a traitor; he’d been made into a Sythian agent against his will, but now that Bretton knew the whole story, he couldn’t help feeling like Donali’s capture had been a stroke of fate.
“So we’re all Sythians,” Farah said.
“Not exactly. They’re still millions of years down the evolutionary chain from us. That makes them alien enough,” Bretton said.
“But they used to be humans,” Farah replied.
Bretton nodded.
“I’m more surprised that there have been two Great Wars,” Farah said. “One in this galaxy, and one in theirs. History repeated itself even after we should have known better.”
“Maybe we forgot.”
“Omnius is right to make us choose,” Dag mused. “Immortals and mortals can’t live together without slaughterin’ each other over their beliefs.”
“Do you think Omnius knows all this?” Farah asked.
“If someone out there with a working Lifelink knows about it, then so does he,” Bretton replied.
“So why is this the first we’re hearing about it?”
“Simple, Omnius lied,” Bretton said.
Dag shook his head. “Lyin’ ain’t the same as omission. When you know everythin’ there is to know, ain’t possible to share it all.”
Bretton smiled thinly. “We’re not talking about demystifying quantum indeterminacy to predict the future. We’re talking about the origins of our race. Omnius doesn’t share everything he knows because if he did, he wouldn’t have the upper hand anymore.”
Dag shrugged. “What’s it matter if he hid that from us?”
Bretton gave an incredulous snort. “If he’s hiding where we came from, maybe that’s not all he’s hiding. We need something to open peoples’ eyes, to make them see what Omnius really is, and why they should shut him down. This could be it.”
“Even if you get it right, they’ll never all see that at once,” Dag replied. “And I’m not sure we can shut him down. You’re wastin’ your life with bitterness, Bret, and it’s goin’ to get you killed.”
“Just because it’s personal doesn’t mean I’m wrong. You can hide down here and pretend we’re not oppressed because Omnius more or less keeps his nose out of our affairs, but we’re stuck. Children are the future, and we aren’t having any. When was the last time anyone down here got a breeding license? Never. They’re too expensive.”
“Lots of unlisted Nulls get illegally fertilized and have kids without a breeding license,” Farah said. “They can afford to feed and clothe their kids, but that’s it. No money for education or health care. That’s why the government makes us pay before we have any children. I’m no fan of Omnius, but we can’t blame him for all of our problems.”
Dag nodded along with Farah’s arguments. “I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, you should listen to your partner, Bret. She’s a smart one, and she’ll keep you out of trouble.”
Bretton ignored him. “So why don’t you go back?” he asked Farah. “You don’t need an education in Etheria. Omnius just downloads whatever you need to know, straight to your Lifelink.”
She shook her head and looked away. “I’d get bored. A little chaos is what makes life interesting.”
Bretton made no secret of why he’d come down here after Omnius had resurrected him, but Farah’s reasons were less clear. He suspected an unusual fondness and concern for her uncle was at fault, but maybe she really had just gotten bored.
“From what I hear the Etherians ain’t havin’ any children either. They’re buyin’ their breedin’ licenses years in advance.”
“And from what I hear Omnius is already working on that. He’s busy preparing a whole new world just so that his children can have children of their own. New Avilon they’re calling it. How much do you want to bet they won’t be selling any tickets to Nulls when it’s done?”
Dag frowned. “Where did you hear that?”
“Information is the only weapon we have, and the Resistance is far from defenseless. Believe me, fifty levels above our heads, the Etherians are all lining up to buy their breeding licenses for the price of a loaf of bread. Just because they can’t use them yet doesn’t mean they won’t. As for us? Forget about it. Not in this lifetime, and we only get one.”
Dag’s lip twitched and he looked away. “Well, I never liked kids, anyway. Can’t afford no wife neither.”
Farah placed a hand on Bretton’s arm. “We need to de-link this guy and go. I electrified the car, but I don’t think that will stop determined thieves.”
Bretton nodded absently. “Dag, we could use someone like you. You believe in an after life, but you’re keeping it all for yourself. Why don’t you share the good news?”
“Not my business what others believe or don’t. I got my life, they got theirs.”
“All right, then do it because Omnius has to be stopped before he decides to turn us all into drones.”
“Aren’t you a drone?” Dag asked simply. Drone was one of the Nulls’ pejoratives for immortal Avilonians. It was their way of saying that something about Ascendants, with their perfect bodies and their carefully-controlled behavior wasn’t entirely human. Bretton hadn’t been given a choice about becoming a drone. He’d died in the war and Omnius had resurrected him here to find his pregnant wife waiting for him in paradise. Now she was in Etheria and he was down here. She’d long since stopped making conjugal visits, or any other kind of visits for that matter. He didn’t blame her after everything that had happened.
Bretton gave a bitter smirk. “So take it from someone who knows. The only difference between me and an Omni is that I’m programmed with a personality and Omnies aren’t.”
“Bret, drop it. Dag’s comfy. He’s got his shop. He doesn’t need to waste his life chasing conspiracy theories.”
Dag gave a tight smile and nodded once. “At least someone understands me. If I were a younger man, you’d be in trouble—pretty girl like you, charmer like me, we’d be liquid dymium.”
“If you were a younger man, I’d punch that dirty grin off your face.”
Dag turned to Bret. “Ain’t she somethin’?”
“She’s somethin’ alright,” Bretton replied. He nodded to the Sythian agent, still lying unconscious on Dag’s table. “Copy his link data to a holo card and de-link him.”
Dag turned to him, his glowing orange eyes narrowed to slits. “Backups cost extra.”
“We can’t afford to lose this information, Dag.”
“So pay for it.”
“I’ll get the Resistance to pay me and then I’ll pay you later, how’s that?”
Dag seemed to consider that. “Fine, but after this we’re even. Your favor’s been called. You come back here, you better be willing to pay full price.”
Bretton nodded. “Sure thing.”
* * *
“How long before we get to wherever it is we’re going?” Atton asked.
“Not long,” Peacekeeper Delon Tarn replied, leaning forward in his seat, as if even he were in suspense.
The city raced by beneath their feet. The gray, green, and blue blur of buildings, parks, and shields grew larger and more distinct, seeming to race by faster and faster as they descended.
They came to within a few hundred feet of the rooftops, and suddenly the variegated blur underfoot became a solid color—a sea of blue shields. Just one building dominated the horizon, floating in that sea.
The tower was like Omnius’s Zenith Tower in that it rose more than a kilometer above the Celestial Wall, but it was not a delicate-looking tower of light and architectural beauty, it was a gleaming black fortress of bristling armor and weapons.
The Sightseer raced onward, seemingly on a collision course with the massive structure.
The morning sun disappeared behind the tower’s bulk, and the building became limned in a bold red light, as if dipped in blood.
In the distance, a tiny blue-white square of light appeared. They raced toward it until it became the gaping maw of a hangar.
The Sightseer plunged inside and came to a sudden stop just before they would have slammed into the far wall. At the top of the wall was a bank of viewports, tinted a glossy black, and lit from within. The hangar’s control tower. Dark shadows roved within.
A giant door slid aside below the control tower, and the Sightseer slipped into an empty berth.
Peacekeeper Delon Tarn unbuckled his flight restraints and stood up. He turned to them with a smile. “Welcome to Tree of Life 1177,” he said.
“Tree of what?” Ceyla asked, sounding like she was about to burst out laughing. The brittle edge in her voice made Atton think otherwise.
“Tree of Life,” Delon repeated.
“What is it?” Atton asked, unbuckling and rising to his feet with the other refugees.
The Peacekeeper didn’t answer Atton’s question, but once everyone had disembarked and was standing on the deck beside the shuttle, Master Rovik explained.
“This is where you will all be re-born if at the end of this week you choose life. In just a moment we will be taken on a tour of the tower’s main facilities.”
Master Rovik turned to a pair of broad doors behind him. They slid open, parting down the middle to admit a group of soldiers wearing strange, silvery armor, and round helmets with circular, glowing red visors. Their footsteps echoed in unison with a loud, metallic clanking. As they drew near, Atton saw that the soldiers’ limbs were too thin to be human. Their glowing red visors were optics, and the rounded helmets were heads. These were the bots they’d seen guarding the mansion the night before.
“Here, Omnius doesn’t even permit his chosen ones to come and go as they please. The entire facility is run by drones, to prevent accidental contamination of the clone labs or data centers.” Galan turned to them with a smile, his blue eyes glowing bright in the relatively dim light of the hangar.
The drones came to a halt before the assembled group of refugees, and their clanking footsteps stopped with one final echo. The drones’ ball-shaped heads rolled this way and that, red cyclopean optics scanning the group. Then the drones fanned out, surrounding them. Even the Peacekeepers were surrounded, but as soon as Master Rovik started forward, their drone escort began walking, too, forcing the refugees in the center to keep pace.
As they drew near to the broad doors where the drones had come from, Atton noticed that the corridor beyond was transparent. It crossed out over a vast field of hexagonally-shaped lights. Here and there drones could be seen walking across the field.
The group reached the corridor and exclamations filled the air as everyone noticed what that field of lights was. Inside of each hexagonally-shaped cell was a drifting mop of human hair.
Atton flinched. His skin began to crawl, and he shivered.
This was a clone lab.
They came to the end of the corridor and entered a lift tube with transparent walls and floor. The doors swished shut behind them, and the lift started down. As it dropped, their top-down view of the clone lab was replaced by a cross-section. There were fully grown men and women inside each of the hexagonal cells, all of them naked and floating peacefully in shining blue tanks. Their eyes were closed, their legs drawn up to their bodies in a fetal position, and nutrient tubes trailed from their belly buttons.
The clones were all stunning—noses the right length and shape; eyes not set too wide or too close together; brows not jutting, too sloped or too high; chins and jaws the right size and shape for their respective sexes. A few of the clones were smiling in their sleep, revealing coveted dimples in their cheeks. There were skin tones of every shade and color, proving that at least Omnius was not racist. Black didn’t become White, but fat became skinny, old became young, and weak became strong.
“This is perverse,” Ceyla whispered.
Atton shook his head. His own stomach was churning, but he hadn’t decided yet if that was from revulsion or excitement.
They dropped past a dozen identical floors of clone tanks, the lift picking up speed.
“How big is this place?” Atton heard his father ask.
Galan Rovik’s voice resonated in the confined space of the lift tube, “The capacity of a Tree of Life’s clone rooms is just over five hundred million. There are more than a thousand towers like this one, spread out all over Avilon.”
Atton frowned, curiosity tickling through the back of his mind. As the lift tube continued to drop past layer after layer of sleeping clones, he realized what it was that had sparked his curiosity. “Five hundred million people, times one thousand towers like this one . . . that’s only half a trillion people. . . . The Imperium had a population just less than sixty trillion. That doesn’t seem like enough.”
“Not to resurrect everyone all at once, no. Clones are grown to maturity in a month or less, but even so, it had to be done in stages. People were resurrected in the order that they died, with immediate family members being resurrected as soon after their loved ones as possible.”
“How did you do it?” Atton asked. He imagined five hundred million people suddenly waking up to find that they weren’t actually dead, all of them disoriented and confused . . . Multiply that by a thousand times, and repeat it once a month. That’s a lot of processing.
“The drones did most of the work,” Master Rovik explained. “There are many more of them than there are of us. They were the ones who expanded Etheria to make room for your kind.”
Your kind, that description rattled around in Atton’s head, making noise.
A new voice asked, “There are more drones on Avilon than people?” It was Captain Caldin.
“There were. They’re mostly gone now, off to build New Avilon.”
“There’s another planet like this?”
“We can’t stay on Avilon forever with a population as large as ours—not if we want to keep having children.”
Atton noticed Alara rubbing her belly at the mention of children. “Will we be able to travel to New Avilon and see it?” he asked.
“No,” Master Rovik replied.
Atton’s eyes narrowed swiftly at that. “Why not?”
“It’s not ready.”
“I’m not talking about living there. I just want to see it.”
“Not even I have had that honor, so you surely will not.”
“Has anyone been there?” Atton heard his father ask.
“It is a surprise.”
“You mean a secret,” Ceyla said.
Master Rovik turned in a slow circle, his expression incredulous as he took in the small group of refugees. “Where I come from, we don’t judge things that we know nothing about. We study them and learn until we understand. Only then do we form our opinions. It has been many years since I have encountered such resistance to the truth. If all of the citizens in Dark Space are like you, I fear for the future of your people.”
Your people. Again, Atton was made to feel like an outsider, and he realized that Master Rovik considered them all second-class citizens, just because they hadn’t been born on Avilon. He wondered if Omnius felt the same way.
Atton frowned and turned back to watch the lift tube dropping past an endless series of honeycomb-shaped clone tanks. His eyes drifted out of focus and it all became one big, bright blur of sleeping humanity.
One thought kept turning over and over in his head as he watched. There are more drones than people. Even if all of Avilon rebelled against Omnius, somewhere out there in the galaxy, now busy building another world just like this one, was the army Omnius could use to stop them.
But Master Rovik was right. They were all suspicious without cause. So they had to give up some of their freedom in order to achieve a real utopia. Was that such a bad thing?
The sheer scale of development on Avilon gave him
hope. No matter how numerous the Sythians were, the Avilonians with their superior technology were more than a match for them. He imagined a future where some day there would be hundreds of worlds like Avilon in the galaxy, and thousands more supporting them. It would be an Imperium on the scale of the Sythian Coalition, spanning from one side of the galaxy to the other.
Ceyla caught him smiling. “What are you so happy about?” she asked.
His smile faded when he saw the guarded look on her face. “Nothing.”
She didn’t look convinced. Ceyla would be harder to win over, given her beliefs. With that realization, he felt a stab of fear for her that took him by surprise. What if she decided to become a Null? Would he ever see her again?
The real price of paradise wasn’t that they were unable to make mistakes. It was that not everyone wanted to be there.
A whispering voice rippled through his thoughts, startling him: Yes, Atton, that is the price, but it is only paid by Nulls. Etherians can visit their loved ones in the Null Zone whenever they like. And most Nulls do eventually ascend to Etheria.
Ceyla shot him another wary look. “You seem to be taking all of this in your stride,” she said.
Atton frowned. “No, Omnius just spoke to me, he was explaining something about—”
Ceyla raised a palm in front of his face. “Don’t tell me. I don’t want to hear anything that serpent has to say.”
“Ceyla, he wasn’t trying to convince me of anything, he was just explaining how things work here.”
She raised her eyebrows and shook her head, gesturing to their surroundings. “The way things work here is determined by Omnius,” she whispered. “Everything on Avilon is designed to convince you to live the way he wants you to. To believe what he tells you. The whole planet is one big arrow pointing up—straight to him. Why do you think they call themselves the Ascendancy?”
The lift tube stopped, and the Omnies preceded them out onto another identical field of clones. As they walked, half a dozen tanks began rising, revealing shining blue pillars of water that served as the clones’ amniotic fluid. They came to the first cell and the Omnies stopped. Within it was a beautiful young woman, long blond hair floating in a silken mane around her head. Master Rovik gestured to her, and Ceyla gasped.
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