Steven Kent - Rogue Clone

“ You’ll want to try it before you leave,” I told him.

“ What is this about?” the Liberator asked, still trying to sound civil. “Why have you detained me?”

“ Mr. Shannon, this mission is nearly twenty years old, and I have been the chief administrator and archbishop here for all of that time. Before coming here, I was a chaplain on a penal planet.”

“ Was it Albatross Island?” he asked.

“ It was,” I said. “You can imagine my feelings when I received a call alerting me that a Liberator had arrived in our spaceport.”

The Liberator said nothing.

“ You claim that you have come on a pilgrimage. Is that correct?”

“ It is, Father,” the clone said, sounding as determined as a young boy wanting to enter a seminary.

“ You will forgive me if I find that hard to believe, Mr. Shannon, but you see, I watched three hundred of your kind butcher prisoners, both rioting and innocent. Perhaps you were not involved in that …that …”

“ Action.”

The Liberator used the word action. I was offended.

“ I was trying to decide whether to call it a slaughter or a massacre,” I told him. “I think a more appropriate word might be extermination. As best as I can remember it, one thousand five hundred inmates rioted and the marines sent a battalion of Liberator clones to restore order. That was five rioting inmates for each Liberator. I should have thought that would have been enough blood to satisfy them.”

“ I wasn’t there,” the Liberator told me.

“ When they finished killing the rioters, they slaughtered prisoners who did not riot. Then they turned on the guards and hostages. By that time, they weren’t even using bullets anymore. They beat men to death with their rifles. I helped reclaim the bodies of the victims, Mr. Shannon. It was the most terrible thing I have ever seen.

“ That was the closest I ever came to renouncing my vows. When I saw what those Liberators had done, I did not believe that a just God would have allowed the creation of such monsters. A few weeks later, the Senate outlawed Liberators. Is that not so?”

“ They outlawed the manufacture of Liberator clones,” Shannon said to me. His gaze still met mine. I did not know if I saw glee or defiance in his expression, but I did not like what I saw.

“ We don’t, as a rule, receive many clones on this planet.” Having said this, I felt a tinge of guilt. This clone had been nothing but pleasant, and I had acted adversarial from the start. “Forgive me,” I said. “I have been too straightforward. Are you sure you will not have a sherry?”

I climbed from my seat and went to the bar to pour myself a glass.

“ Are you refusing me entry?” the clone asked.

“ We Catholics like to believe that our church runs this planet, but the Unified Authority maintains an embassy just down the street from the Archdiocese. The U.A. runs this spaceport facility, as a matter-of-fact. That is not a symbiotic relationship. We do not welcome government intervention on our planet.”

I shut my eyes and thought about Liberators as I sipped the sherry. Perhaps I was reliving those last hours of the siege on Albatross Island, those awful moments when our rescuers became predators. I thought about a cell block in which the blood and brains on the walls were so thick that I could no longer see the bricks and mortar.

We Catholics are anti-synthetic by our very nature. According to our doctrine, only God can create life. The use of clones in the military caused the Vatican to release a statement defining life as a being with an immortal soul. Science can clone sheep, snakes, and soldiers that breathe air and move of their own volition, but science cannot prove that its creations have souls.

“ They were without compassion,” I said. “Ravenous dogs lusting for blood. You will forgive me if I have been impolite, Mr. Shannon, but I see nothing even remotely redeeming about your kind. I once questioned the doctrine that clones have no souls. Having seen the work of Liberators, I determined that the butchers who came to Albatross Island were soulless creatures. I saw nothing redeeming in them.”

“‘ But if there be no virtue to take away, consequently there can be no vice,’” Shannon said.

I heard this and smiled and took a long sip of sherry. “You’ve read Saint Augustine. Impressive. But you’ve misquoted him. Augustine said, ‘If there be no good to take away.’ He also said, ‘It is impossible that there should be a harmless vice.’”

“ He did say that, didn’t he?” the Liberator said cheerfully.

“ The Liberators who invaded Albatross Island did a lot of harm. I believe that their existence is a vice,” I said. “It is a vice of the Unified Authority government.”

“ I never cared much for Saint Augustine, anyway,” Shannon said. “What about the secular philosophers? Friedrich Nietzsche said that no man has an eternal soul. If he was correct, that would put us all on equal ground. None of us would be alive by the Vatican’s definition.”

“ Quoting a philosopher who referred to himself as ‘the anti-Christ’ does not generally lead to a favorable impression in a Catholic colony,” I said. “I suggest you restrict yourself to Saint Augustine while you are on Saint Germaine, Mr. Shannon. Better yet, I suggest you avoid discussion of philosophy entirely. The people on this planet have strong opinions.”

“ While I’m on Saint Germaine?” Shannon asked, “Are you allowing me to stay?”

“ What is the object of your pilgrimage?” I asked.

“ The same as any pilgrim,” the Liberator said. “I seek truth. I want to know who I am and how I fit into the universe.”

“ And you believe you can find those answers on our little planet?” I asked.

“ I’m curious about Catholicism,” the Liberator said.

“ I can tell you where the Catholic Church stands when it comes to you and your place in the universe. The Catholic Church holds that you have no soul and that you are an abomination.”

“ And yet I am created in God’s own image.”

“ Man was created in God’s image,” I told him.

“ And I was created in man’s image,” he said.

I said, “I will allow you to visit our planet, and I hope that the answers you find here will not leave you discomfited.”

I did not let him stay because of his amateurish attempts to grasp philosophy. I let him stay because I believed he was sincere, and that intrigued me. If this man was a Liberator, then he was by nature a killer and a creation without a soul. I knew this to be true, though in his case, I am not certain that I believed it was true.

The Golan Dry Docks were considered one of the “seven man-made wonders of the galaxy.” Other wonders included the Capitol Building in Washington D.C., the outer-galactic scientific observatory on the outer edge of the Orion Arm, the planetary food storage and production facility on Nebraska Kri, the all-faiths military burial facility near the center of the Norma Arm, the Sol science station on the surface of the sun, and, of course, the Broadcast Network.

Funny how the mundane wonders get overlooked. I considered the spaceport on Mars far more wondrous than the Sol science station or the Nebraska Kri food-packing plant. That place was so big that it needed a resort-sized dormitory to house clerks and waiters. Mars Spaceport even had a smaller secondary dormitory that housed the people who ran special stores, theaters, and restaurants for the employees living in the primary dormatory.