Morgan's Choice (10 page)

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.

****

The images beamed up from Andreena’s
surface were just like those from Dilmar. Strafe the ground, send
in ground troops and if the whole place catches fire, so what? At
least this time the inhabitants had had a little warning and a few
families had managed to survive. But they couldn’t tell him
anything he didn’t already know. A pity he couldn’t have reached
here in time after
Ajagara
called
for help. He still had no evidence, no real idea of what he was up
against. And where would they strike next?

“Well, Prasad? Do you have any suggestions?”
Ravindra said.

“
The same pattern we saw on Dilmar,
Srimana
. They
certainly made a mess of
Ajagara
.” The blackened remains of the frigate drifted, a larger
piece of flotsam. “She must have been hit in the power
units.”