Blood and Fire (28 page)

“I—I came to say I'm sorry. And ask if there's anything I can do for you.”

Easton rolled over sideways and looked up at Armstrong. “What's it to you?”

“Paul was my friend too.”

“Paul and I were more than friends.”

“You know what I mean,” said Armstrong. “I'm just—” He spread his hands helplessly. “I just thought, for Paul's sake, I would—oh, damn, I don't even know what I'm doing here.” Armstrong sat down on the edge of the bed. “Paul talked about you a lot and I didn't really understand. I still don't. But he talked about you like you were the only person in the world, and I guess if you felt the same way about him, then you must be feeling so bad right now, you're probably hurting the worst you ever hurt in your life. So I thought I'd share some of that hurt and maybe take some of it away if I could. I know I'm not that smart,” Armstrong admitted. “But you don't have to be smart to care. And I cared too.”

Easton blinked. Several times. His eyes had welled up with tears. He put one arm over them and blotted. He turned his head sideways and wiped. He was trying not to cry again. “It could have been me,” he said. “It
should
have been me. It was my job to go last. It should have been Korie. He was supposed to go last. But it wasn't supposed to be Paul. Paul had a family. Two little brothers—identical to him. Just perfect. Clones, you see. I would look at them, I'd see his childhood. How am I going to face them? Tell them how he died? This isn't fair, Brian. It isn't fair. I promised to take care of him—I promised them, I promised him, I promised myself—and I failed. I broke my promise.”

Easton levered himself up on his elbow. His expression was haunted. “And you want to know the worst of it, Brian?” He looked desperately into Armstrong's face. “I can already see my future. I'm going to spend the rest of my life knowing that the best days of it are over, that I had something special for just the shortest, sweetest moment, and I'll never have it again. Never see him again, never feel his hand on mine, never look into his eyes or hear his laugh or share a meal or simply just wake up next to him again. Never complain about his snoring. Never smell one of his
ghastly farts. Never get jealous of all the time he spends with you. Never ever see him again. I'm going to miss him every day, forever ...”

Armstrong felt a hot tightness in his throat. It was constricted so that he could barely swallow. Tears blurred his vision. He shook his head, so much at a loss for words that he wanted to run sobbing from the room. But he didn't. Instead, he reached over and took Easton's hand in his own and just held it tight, squeezing, as if to say, “I'm here.” Easton squeezed back, and then abruptly sat up and flung himself at Armstrong, sobbing into his shoulder. Armstrong grabbed him and held him in a strong and comforting embrace, a hug against the emptiness all around. And as Easton cried against him, he felt his own tears running down his cheeks, and now his own sobs came too.

They cried—for Berryman, yes—but for themselves as well. For what they had both lost.

And then, after awhile, after they had both cried so much they couldn't cry any more, Easton pulled away, gently chuckling. “Look at us,” he said. “A couple of babies. You know what Paul would say?”

“‘Get over it,'” said Armstrong.

“Yeah,” nodded Easton. He wiped his eyes and patted Armstrong's hand. “You're good, Brian. You are. You have a good soul.”

Armstrong didn't know how to reply to that, so he just shrugged and grinned and looked away—a little routine he did to avoid being embarrassed, the equivalent of digging his big toe in the sand and saying, “Aww, shucks.”

But Easton wasn't buying it. “Let it in, Brian. Don't pretend I didn't say it. Look at me. Look me in the eye and just get it. You're a good person. That's why Paul liked you. He saw something sweet in your heart. He said so. More than once. And he was right. You're the first one to come by. Maybe that's my fault. We kept apart from everybody else. It's hard not to be conscious of your differences.”

“Well,” Brian shrugged. “I never saw any differences. I mean, I never understood what this ‘bonded' thing was all about, so I never worried about it. I didn't even know about Quillas till I came aboard.”

“Yeah,” grinned Easton. “Everybody remembers that.”

Armstrong flushed. “I was a jerk.”

“You were innocent. And if you hadn't been innocent, you wouldn't have discovered how sweet Quillas really are.”

“Do you want me to stay with you for awhile?”

“I'd like that, yes.” Easton inched forward, just a bit—Brian Armstrong understood the desperate need in the gesture and enfolded him into his arms again. Easton stayed there for the longest time, sobbing softly again.

Later, back in the cabin he shared with two other crewmembers, Armstrong asked HARLIE about bonding. Without comment, HARLIE lit up a screen and began a recitation of ancient history.

Seven hundred and eighty years before the Morthan Solidarity attacked the Silk Road Convoy, less than 200 years after the dawn of interstellar travel, the Miller-Hayes Colonial Corporation took on a series of private contracts to establish experimental settlements for the Paradigm Foundation, a quasi-religious cult of social scientists.

Several of these stations were specifically formulated to test certain biotechnical theories relating to sex and gender issues. Three all-male groups and four all-female establishments were commissioned. Two hermaphroditic societies and several other variants on monosexuality were also planted on various worlds. There was no shortage of qualified volunteers, and emigration to these stations continued for over a century. The location of each of the outpost worlds was kept secret, so as to prevent contamination by curiosity seekers, tourists and opportunists. Only starships commissioned by the Paradigm Foundation were given the coordinates and the clearance codes. All the planets were well beyond the frontiers of known space at the time, so accidental discovery remained unlikely.

Despite the ebb and flow of history, tenuous contact was maintained with most of the engineered societies. Reports filtering back to the Paradigm Foundation suggested that most of the monosexual groups had stabilized themselves and adjusted well to single-gendered existence. One of the all-female stations had dabbled with multi-sexuality but had then returned to monosexual existence.

The point of the original experiment had been to test the question, “Are two sexes necessary?” Humans on most worlds would have answered yes automatically and without much thought to the matter. Some theorists surmised that this was an environmental conviction; the culture in which a person is raised and educated colors his perceptions of the way things
ought
to be. The best way to test this thesis was to create alternate environments.

As it happened, after several generations the inhabitants of various
monosexual worlds—having a much different experience of human sexuality—generally felt that two discordant sexes would complicate the problems of mating enormously, so much so as to make successful relationships practically impossible. The inheritors of the Paradigm Foundation were both disturbed and delighted by the results of the original experiment. Whatever else they had demonstrated, the success of the single-gendered worlds proved that humanity was far more mutable than previously believed.

Given this information, the Paradigm engineers were now ready to proceed with the next phase of their program to bioengineer improvements in human evolution: a “more-than” human. As the attention of the Foundation shifted, the experimental societies were left to fend for themselves.

As the frontiers of human exploration moved outward, several of these worlds were rediscovered. After the initial shock wore off, the societies were accepted into the Covenant of Humanity, the forerunner body to the Allied Worlds—despite some opposition from certain dogmatics whose personal paradigms were shattered by the discovery of stable monosexual civilizations.

For a while, there were political movements urging the reformation of the monosexual communities back to the norm, including the mandatory rechanneling of the inhabitants; but this would have represented a massive violation of the independence treaties and the discussions were short-lived. The Covenant of Humanity was unwilling to establish such a dangerous precedent. Besides, the social scientists were having too much fun.

Security Officer Daniel Easton and Senior Medical Technician Paul Berryman were from Rando, one of the oldest monosexual societies. Although the governing authority of Rando had long since allowed women to visit and even immigrate, the population remained more than three-quarters male and almost seventy percent homosexual in its relationships. The Paradigm Foundation had once believed this division to be a cultural phenomenon, and that, given enough time, the population of Rando would return to a “normal” division: equal numbers of males and females, most with a significant preference toward heterosexuality. But after several hundred years, that still hadn't occurred and the behavioral theorists were reformulating their theories to include “planetary reputations” as well as “cultural inertia” and “historical expectations”—not to mention bonding, a target-specific channeling of affection and sexual orientation, undertaken by two or more individuals, with the expressed intention of creating a legal family group.

The bonding process had been developed over several centuries. The intention was to provide a mechanism for stabilizing family units by altering the sense of identity of the members of the group—expanding the individual's sense of self to include all the other bonded individuals, so that a person regarded oneself not only as an individual, but as an integral part of something larger. The intended effect was not only to provide a strong emotional ground-of-being for individuals, but also increased stability for the family contract.

Over time, it became apparent that the bonding process produced a significantly higher degree of success in marriages and families. The downside was that the breakup of a bonded marriage or family was often much more traumatic because of the intensity of the relationships. Yet overall, bonding was regarded as a valuable part of family-building—especially where marriages were arranged by family or state. Although many cultures still believed that marriage was a choice of individuals and that people should be able to build relationships without formal bonding, the process eventually became common on many worlds.

Over time, other kinds of bonding became possible. The Quillas, for example, were the result of an advanced form of real-time bonding, functioning as a “unison-identity” or a “massmind.” The individual's sense of identity was so submerged in the larger self that it effectively ceased to be; the personality existed only as an element within the cluster. Those who had participated in such family-groups reported back that it was the most intense experience of their lives. Most who joined Quilla clusters on an experimental basis eventually made their membership permanent.

Armstrong finished the material on bonding and then asked HARLIE for more information about Quillas. He couldn't imagine what it must be like, but he couldn't stop thinking about it either. There was something here that he didn't know—and he didn't like the
not knowing
...

By the time Captain Parsons returned to the Bridge, the
Norway
had already been reacquired and her engines slaved to the control of the
Star Wolf
. Had they both not already been pointed toward galactic south, reorienting the two ships would have been a tricky matter, because they now shared a common center of gravity.

Unfortunately, the
Norway
's singularity possessed a significantly greater mass than that of the
Star Wolf
—by several orders of magnitude—so the center of gravity for the two ships remained within the event horizon of the
Norway'
s singularity. Despite their similar size and construction, reorienting the
Norway
would have been harder than a flea trying to turn a dog. Fortunately, they would not have to.