Rogue clone (41 page)

“So you’d be glad to get off this planet?” I asked.

“Mr. Harris . . .”

“Call me Wayson.”

“Wayson, I don’t think we’ll leave this planet. Our little colony might not look like much, but we’ve worked night and day to build it. Delphi is a lot nicer than the other planets I’ve seen. Frankly, Wayson, starting all over again scares me more than that carrier out there.”

Easy to say when you haven’t seen what one of those ships can do
, I thought. But I did not say this. Darkness spread across one side of the horizon. The air continued to cool. I felt a pleasant chill in the breeze. “You haven’t been here that long. Your crops haven’t even sprouted. How hard could it be to start over again?”

Marianne laughed and smiled. Her teeth were white and even. “That field . . . We worked on that field night and day. We still haven’t cleared it properly. We got out most of the rocks, but there’s a lot more we can do. We’ve planted almost every seed we have in that field, Mr. Harris.”

“Wayson,” I said.

“If we leave that field . . . I can’t speak for everyone, Wayson, but the people I have spoken with would rather die than leave.

“And it’s not just that we are neo-Baptists. We used to do this for the church, but that ended a long time ago. Now we’re colonists first and neo-Baptists second. The church wanted to create colonies just like the Catholics. That was their deal. Us, we wanted to make a home. Now that we finally have a planet that will sustain us, you can’t really expect us to turn it over.”

“Why did your husband leave?” I asked.

“He thought there must be a better life on other worlds, so he flew off on a supply ship, just like Raymond. He asked me to come with him, but I didn’t want to go. I believed God wanted us to build a colony. I had my boy, my Caleb, and I wanted him to grow up in a righteous colony. I believed that God would bring us to our promised land, our Goshen. I believe he has.

“Do you believe in God, Mr. Harris?”

There was a loaded question. She had to have known that I was a clone. I thought about the conversation about clones and souls that Tabor Shannon had with that priest on Saint Germaine. “I don’t know if I believe in God,” I said. “And I don’t know if he believes in me.”

It was not love at first sight. It probably wasn’t even love, but I felt attracted to Marianne. I liked her. I only had one other woman with which to compare her, a girl named Kasara whom I met on leave. Kasara had been beautiful, irresponsible, self-centered, and fun. She was a girl. Marianne was something else. She was raising a boy on her own; she worked hard on a farm; and she kept her head straight in a lethal situation. If Kasara lived to be a thousand years old, I doubted she would ever grow into the woman Marianne had already become.

“It doesn’t seem like anybody here knows about the war,” I said.

“We hear things. Well, truth be told, we all heard things. The missionaries that flew us here told us about it, but it didn’t sound serious. It didn’t sound like more than a little uprising.”

“You never followed the war on the mediaLink?”

“And what would that be?” she asked.

“What would what be?” I asked feeling thoroughly confused.

“You said something about following the war on something or other.”

“The mediaLink,” I said. “That’s the news source.”

“I can’t say I have ever heard of it,” she said.

“It’s too late now,” I said. “It receives communications signals sent through the Broadcast Network. You do know about the Broadcast Network.”

“Yes,” she said, feigning that she was offended. “I know about the Broadcast Network.”

“When they destroyed the Network, they shut down communications as well as travel. Close as I can figure, it would take a laser signal 70,000 years to get from Earth to Delphi. Without the Broadcast Network, they might as well be sending smoke signals.”

“So it’s all true. The entire Republic is shut down,” Marianne said.

“Everyone is on their own,” I said. “It’s just that some planets are better off than others.”

“So why did you come here?” Marianne asked. “You have that self-broadcasting ship. You can go anywhere.”

“I asked Ray where he wanted to go, and he said he wanted to come here.”

“And you went where he asked. ‘Where you go, I will go . . . Where you lodge, I will lodge also . . . Your people shall be my people.’ You’re a modern version of Ruth, Mr. Harris.”

I didn’t know what that meant and I had never heard of Ruth, but Marianne’s smile charmed me.

“Maybe we should look in on the meeting,” I said. “I don’t want to start tongues wagging.”

“Are you worried about my reputation?” Marianne asked. “Don’t worry about me. Those tongues are already wagging. That’s how life goes on a small planet.”

“How did it go?” I asked Freeman as we settled down to sleep in the Starliner. Archie could not find beds for us. He could not find sheets for us, but he did have pillows.

“They don’t want to leave,” Freeman said. He stripped off his chest armor and stepped out of his coveralls. Stripped down to his boxers, he stretched out as best he could. “They think they can talk their way out of this.”

“They want to reason it out with a fighter carrier?” I asked.

I had never seen Freeman stripped down. The massive muscles in his chest and arms looked powerful, but not defined. He did not look like a bodybuilder. He had the build of a blacksmith or a construction worker. “They think God delivered them here.”

Marianne had said as much when we were talking. Images of Marianne ran through my head. Was I infatuated, I asked myself, or just lonely? So many new emotions clouded my thinking since the fall of the government that I no longer trusted myself. I wanted to ask Freeman about his sister, but I was afraid of tipping him off to my thoughts.

We slept on reclining seats that only reclined to a forty-five-degree angle. The weight of our heads never left our necks.

“You landed on an engineered planet once, didn’t you?” Freeman asked.

“Ezer Kri,” I said. “That’s where we caught Kline. You were there, remember?”

“No, an unpopulated one,” Freeman said.

“Ronan Minor,” I said, remembering the mission.

“It wasn’t called something Kri?” The term
kri
denoted a planet with an engineered atmosphere.

“It was a shitty place.” I rolled over in my seat and hit the panel to turn out the lights. “What do you think is happening on Earth?”

Freeman thought about this. “Depends who comes out on top. If the Confederate Arms win, they’ll fly in armies. The outer arms always had good ground forces, they just couldn’t protect them.

“If the Mogats made out, it will be worse. The Mogats, they don’t care about colonizing. They don’t want to occupy Earth. All they want is to erase every vestige of the Unified Authority.

“It’s only been a few days . . . The Mogats and the Confederates may not be through killing each other yet,” I said.

“Harris, you think we could relocate these folks on Ronan Minor?”

“They wouldn’t like it,” I said. “It was a jungle and the only life on it is cockroaches and rats.”

Freeman understood what I meant immediately. Ships are not allowed to land on engineered planets until they are declared stable. When squatters trespass on these planets, vermin escape from their ships. On a planet like Ronan Minor, where the vegetation is profuse and there are no natural predators, rat and cockroach populations proliferate.

Talk about your flat-world society . . . Archie Freeman did not believe that there could still be a fighter carrier floating out somewhere around his planet. It took some arm-twisting, but Ray talked him and three of the elders into a trip to the broadcast discs. We would show them that the discs were dead, do a radar sweep to see if we could find any trace of the fighter carrier, and maybe look around. Ray Freeman did not come for the ride.

Archie and his brethren were novices at space travel. They had never been in a self-broadcsting ship, and the idea of it scared the hell out of them. The old man had to brace himself just to climb into the copilot’s seat of the Starliner. He did not complain or ask me to be careful. He looked around the cabin nervously and tried to sound comfortable.

“You know,” he said in a confidential tone that suggested this was a big confession, “I always wondered what it would be like to go up in one of these.” He laughed. Now that he was in true confession mode, he went on. “Self-broadcasters remind me of the early days of airplanes and daredevils flying through barns. Ho, ho, ho.” He laughed a beautiful baritone laugh.

The elders, men in their thirties if I had to guess, sat in the first row of the cabin. They strapped themselves in and did not speak. They seemed to share Archie’s outer fear of self-broadcasting ships not his inner enthusiasm.

“Do you understand how self-broadcasting works?” I asked Archie as we strapped ourselves into our seats. I, of course, only had the shallowest grasp, but a farmer/colonist like Archie would not care about the specifics. All he cared about would be the base fundamentals.

“It will be just like flying into a broadcast disc,” I said.

“The broadcast discs were destroyed,” Archie said.

“Not destroyed . . . just unplugged,” I said, for lack of finding a better way to explain myself.

“They don’t have power?” Archie clarified.

“Right. This ship can broadcast itself. There will be an electrical field around the ship right before we broadcast. It’s supposed to be there. There will be a bright flash, and when we come out, we’ll be near the broadcast discs.”

“What if we run into that carrier?” Archie asked as I powered up my console.

“We could,” I said, “but I’m betting that they went to the discs, found them dead, and have already turned back toward Little Man.”

“Delphi,” Archie said.

“Excuse me?” I asked.

“We call the planet
Delphi.
”

“Right. Sorry.”

“What happens if we run into that carrier? I don’t see any guns on your ship.”

“I don’t have any.”

“Can you outrun a carrier?”

I hit the button to start charging the broadcast engine. “Not a chance. Those ships hit thirty million per hour. I might be able to do six million miles at best.”

“So what will we do?” Archie asked.

“Look, Archie, it’s a big galaxy. You don’t run into ships out here by accident. You can go out looking for other ships and never see them. If you and I were the only people on Delphi, what do you think the chances would be of our accidentally running into each other? The galaxy is a billion times bigger than Delphi.”

We took off at a steep angle and left the atmosphere quickly. Now that we had left the ground, Archie gripped the sides of his chair, his bony knuckles curved in like cats’ claws. He seemed unable to look away from the window. The sight of the planet below us seemed to hypnotize him. I looked back in the cabin and saw that the three elders had the same reaction. They leaned into the nearest windows and stared.

“Okay, I am going to broadcast us now,” I said as I brought up the tint shield.

“What’s that?” Archie asked. “The window went black.”

“It’s a tint shield. It protects your eyes,” I said. “Things get bright out there when we broadcast. Unless you tint the windows, the brightness will blind you.”

“Oh, okay,” he said, sounding somewhat reassured.

Strings of electricity showed through the blackened windscreen, then the flash showed through. Archie was startled. He looked around the cockpit nervously. His legs, which did not fit behind that seat much better than his son’s, went stiff, and he lifted himself part way out of his chair. In that moment of fear, he lost partial control of his body. He did not wet himself or drop a load, but he farted something loud and smelly.

I had started to say, “We’re here,” but seeing the shocked look on Archie’s face, I could not stop from laughing.

“Oh, you think that’s funny?” Archie asked. “You goddamned clone.”

Some things you regret saying even before you finish saying them. I saw embarrassment and anger on Archie’s face. He settled back in his seat and stared straight ahead.

Out of habit, I started up the generator to charge the broadcast engine the moment we arrived. That habit saved our lives.

We arrived just a few miles from the broadcast discs and drifted over to see them. Coming to an almost dead stop, I took the Starliner around the defunct discs.

“Those are the discs?” Archie asked.

He probably did not see the discs when he came to Delphi. He and his fellow settlers had most likely traveled in a cargo ship. Even if they flew in a commercial craft, the tint shields would have been up long before they came this close to the discs.

“That is the broadcast station,” I said.

“You fly into it?” Archie asked.

I remembered that he lived on a planet without modern conveniences. “You fly toward it. It sends out an energy field to transport your ship.”

“I see.”

“If the discs were live, they would have a white glow. There would be traffic lights and warning lights along the top. There’s not so much as a volt of electricity in this station.” My broadcast gear included an enhanced radar display. As I reached to turn on the display, the Harrier buzzed us. It was a gray-white blur that streaked past the cockpit and totally vanished.

“Good God! What was that?” Archie yelled.

Red lights flashed in the canopy and on my heads-up display. A warning sign flashed on my instruments. Alarms buzzed. I switched on the radar with one hand and pulled the wheel sharp to the right with the other. “Hold on,” I yelled.

“What’s going on?” Archie yelled. It was not a scream. He had control of himself. “What was that?”

“You asked me what would happen if we ran into that carrier,” I said. “We just did.”

He pressed his face against the cockpit and stared out the window. “I don’t see anything.”

“Archie,” I said, as I stared into the radar, “that ship travels thirty million miles per hour. They could come right up our nose and ram us before you see them if they wanted.”