Steven Kent - The Clone Redemption

Freeman remained mute. He ran the show during assassinations and invasions, but this was a delicate matter. He left it up to me.

“Maybe the people who built the Wheel built the switch in as a joke,” I said. “You said it yourself, the Wheel generates its own gravity.”

“When did I die?” asked Breeze. “When,” not “if.”

I did not answer.

“How did I die?” he asked. He sounded so reasonable. I heard no panic in his voice. No hysteria.

“You died on New Copenhagen,” I said.

Still absolutely silent, Freeman gave me the slightest nod. He approved. I had risked everything. Hearing that he was dead, the ghost of Arthur Breeze could shut down, and he could very well take Sweetwater with him; but Freeman wanted him to know the truth.

“I died in the mines, didn’t I?”

“Yes,” I said.

“And William? He died, too?”

“He died taking the bomb into the mines.”

Breeze sighed. I imagined him taking off his glasses and smearing the dandruff and grease on the lenses as he tried to wipe them away. Maybe the Unifieds did too good a job programming his emotions. He must have felt hollow at that moment, the moment in which he learned that he was not human. I’d been through that.

“I remember the day I learned that I was synthetic,” I said.

“I never liked that term, ‘synthetic,’” Breeze said. “General, you have a heart beating in your chest. It’s not made out of plastic. You have a brain and hands and lungs that hold air. None of those organs are synthetic. You’re not like a human, you are a human.

“I suppose I am, too,” Breeze said. He sounded dazed. He sounded like a young soldier coming off the battlefield for the first time, alive and questioning his own existence.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

He grunted as if he had just hurt himself.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“I just pricked my finger,” he said.

“What?”

“I pricked my finger with a dissection pin,” he said. “The pain was exactly as I always remembered it.” This was a tall, dried-up old man. He had spent his life in science labs. He did not handle pain well. His real, violent death must have been excruciating while it lasted.

“Why did you do that?” I asked.

“I wanted to see my blood. I bleed like a living creature.

“You’ve seen me, General. Do I look like a real man through human eyes?”

Homely as ever, I thought as I said, “Exactly like you looked the day you went into those caves.”

“They did a better job simulating my blood than they did simulating the space station,” Breeze said. “It’s perfect.”

I answered, “You are a perfect virtual model of the man I knew on New Copenhagen.”

The heads of every major religion could only find one topic on which they all agreed—cloning. They said clones did not have souls and, therefore, were less than humans. They might have been right, too; but as I spoke to the ghost of Arthur Breeze, I realized the computer program that brought him back to life had perfectly captured his soul.

“But I am stuck in this machine,” he said.

“Your universe is as vast as mine,” I said. “You can visit simulations of every known world.”

“How about a world in which I would really exist?” he asked.

I did not answer.

“When Andropov figures out we’re helping you, he’ll unplug us. I suppose that wouldn’t be as bad as dying.”

The real Arthur Breeze had been ripped apart by giant spiders.

I did not say anything.

“Thank you for being honest,” he said. “You and Raymond, you were always truthful with us. You always were.” His voice seemed to shrink as he spoke. “What did you do when you found out you were a clone?”

“I went to a bar with my sergeant. We drank three glasses of Sagittarian Crash and got so drunk we nearly died.”

“Did it help?”

“The next morning, I felt like someone had stabbed a knife into my skull, that wasn’t helpful. I was still a clone, getting drunk didn’t change that. It softened the blow. It got me through that first night.”

“Maybe I need to do that,” he said. “We’ve got an excellent bar on the Wheel.”

“Don’t hit it too hard, we need you sober. They made you so you puke and piss and fall down when you get drunk. The original you didn’t handle liquor so well, and the virtual you won’t handle it any better,” I said.

“I doubt they will allow me to die in an intoxicated stupor.”

Still sounding battle-weary, Breeze said, “There’s enough air to start a colony on Terraneau, but you’re going to need an oxygen generator until you establish a significant plant population. Farming is going to be a problem. The surface soil is ruined. Your colonists are going to need to dig three feet down to find soil that can sustain life.”

“But it can be done?” I asked.

“I am always amazed by the things human beings achieve when their backs are against a wall, General.”

Was he talking about our colonists or the men who programmed him? Was he talking to them or me?

“We ran soil and atmosphere samples on an area near Norristown. Planetwide, the radiation levels are stable and acceptable. The air quality is low but tolerable. I recommend wearing rebreathers until you get oxygen generators in place. I’ve also checked for tachyon residue. There is no trace of Tachyon D on Terraneau.” Breeze was all business as he said this. Then his tone lightened as he added, “Now, if you’ll excuse me, General, I am going to go drink myself into a coma.”

With that he signed off.

Ray Freeman smiled. He even laughed. It wasn’t much of a laugh, just a quick “Huh” that sounded a little like the noise some Marines make when they are doing sit-ups.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have told him,” I mumbled to myself.

Freeman shook his head, and said, “I would have shot you if you’d lied.”

During their stints as commander in chief, Steven Jolly and Curtis Liotta had given orders, but they never really took charge. They were apprehensive leaders, too fainthearted to issue orders and face the consequences. Once Jim Holman ascended to admiral, he took charge.

Watching him conduct this meeting, I realized just how much I liked Holman’s style. There was nothing imperial in his demeanor. He cared about his men, but he also made the tough decisions when he needed to. Seeing him speak, I realized that the empire was finally in capable hands now that its highest-ranking officers were out of the way.

Holman began his command by calling his captains together. He did not use a confabulator for the meeting. This was no remote conference with people popping in from all over the galaxy. Nor was it a lavish summit for fleet commanders only.

The captains of every destroyer, dreadnaught, battleship, and carrier sat in the audience. So did every regiment commander from the Marines. I sat beside the commanders of the thirteen fleets on the dais, watching them try to look comfortable though they had no idea why Holman had called the assembly.

Most of the commanders I had known during my career took charge slowly, giving their officers time to gossip and spread rumors. Given the opportunity, fear will work its way through fleets like a virus, infecting every sailor and Marine. Holman did not wait for that to happen. Now that he ran the show, he took charge.

Before the rumors spread, he called his men together. He did not mince words. Instead of starting with standard-issue apologies and promises, he began the meeting by saying, “Let me explain the situation. We have evacuated the populations of Gobi, Bangalore, and Nebraska Kri to Providence Kri. In all, there are now twenty million people on Providence Kri. We now need to move them off the planet.