Rogue clone (43 page)

“Meaning?” I asked.

“Marianne is looking for a husband,” Freeman said. “Her boy needs a father and you’re available.”

“I’m a clone,” I said.

“You see any other options?” Ray asked.

Stewing over Freeman’s warning, I looked back at Caleb. Archie was glaring at him, but he looked out the window and pretended not to notice. So now Ray wanted to play the role of the protective brother. I did not want to settle down on a cozy little planet with a family. It might have been my military upbringing or the neural program that made Liberators what they were, but I could not imagine life on a farm.

“She could come with us,” I said, thinking I had found a workable alternative. “We could take them to Earth or to . . . some other planet.”

Freeman shook his head. “She doesn’t want to get out. She wants to bring you in.”

“Ray, the boy is just coming along for the ride,” I said.

“Just know what you’re getting into,” Freeman said. “Marianne isn’t just scrub you met on the beach.”

Having delivered his warning, he left the cockpit and climbed out of the ship. His job was to scout the area around the farm. We needed to know where the
Grant
would send its landing party and how we could defend ourselves.

“You want to sit up here?” I asked Caleb.

His smile brightened and he trotted into the cockpit. He sat in the copilot’s seat.

Archie stood hunched in the door of the cockpit. Caleb and he watched every move I made as I pressed buttons and flipped switches. “What is that for?” “How about that one?” Caleb asked questions like a six-year-old, but he stored up the details like an adult. Archie watched in silence. When I powered up the broadcast computer, Caleb’s face lit up. “What is that?” he asked.

“This,” I said, “is the reason we can still travel when the rest of the galaxy is stuck in one place. This is a broadcast computer. It lets us go places without having to fly there.”

“Without having to fly?” he asked.

“I tell this computer where I want to go and it puts us right there.”

“That’s the part that scares me,” Archie said.

I was afraid Caleb would ask for details, but he didn’t. Instead, he hovered over the computer and pieced together how it worked. “How do you tell it where to go?”

I showed him how to translate interactive maps into coordinates. “Going to a planet is easy. The computer has coordinates for every star and planet in the galaxy.” I thought I would impress the boy. I mostly ignored Archie. “The hard part is if you want to fly to a pinpoint location, like a certain spot right above a planet. You don’t always aim at something big like a planet. Sometimes you have to fine tune it.”

“Like into deep space?” Caleb asked. “Like where we are now?”

“There used to be a space station called the Golan Dry Docks,” I said. “It was top secret. If you wanted to broadcast yourself there, you needed to put in the coordinates yourself.”

And then I remembered a story that I thought he would find interesting. “You heard there was a war, right? That was the reason your uncle and I came to Delphi.”

“A war against Earth?” Caleb asked.

“Yes, and Earth had this giant ship called the
Doctrinaire
. It was bigger and stronger than any other ship in the galaxy,” I said. “It was so strong that it could destroy whole fleets of enemy ships. And it had special shields so no other ship could hurt it.”

“So Earth used it to win the war,” Caleb said, his eyes wide with excitement.

“No, Earth lost. The people attacking Earth destroyed that ship with a single shot,” I said. “And they did it with a computer like this.”

We spent two hours on this trip. Caleb and I spent the entire time talking. We could have returned the moment we finished taking the radar readings. Instead, I showed Caleb how the Starliner worked. This fine young man, this kid whose company I so enjoyed, I told him stories from the war. Freeman might have said that I adopted the boy back.

“How can you destroy a ship with a computer?” Archie asked.

“The shields of the
Doctrinaire
were so strong that nothing could get through them, right? And its cannons were so powerful that it could pick off any ship that came within range. But the captain of the
Doctrinaire
kept the ship in one place while the smaller ships in his fleet chased the enemy.”

“Why did he do that?” Caleb asked.

“He was smart. Big ships are not maneuverable. They get into trouble when they move out of position. So Thurston, he used the
Doctrinaire
like a floating fortress. He wanted to trap the enemy with the
Doctrinaire
on one side and his cruisers and battleships on the other.

“You never saw anything like it. It looked like the
Doctrinaire
was falling . . . falling asleep. The ship slid out of formation.” I held my right hand flat to imitate the ship, then let it list the way that the
Doctrinaire
had done.

“And all of a sudden it just blows up. See, the Mogats, they knew Thurston liked to leave his ship in one place.”

“You’re not saying that they broadcasted another ship into it?” Archie asked. “They killed themselves?”

“And they took the whole damned Unified Authority with them,” I said. “They had a nuclear bomb onboard, but that was just overkill. The anomaly from the broadcast engine probably killed everyone aboard all on its own.”

“Wow,” said Caleb. “And ships can pass through shields when you broadcast them?”

“I don’t understand how it works,” I admitted. “I guess they kind of just appear. I don’t think that cruiser passed through the shields. I think it just appeared inside the other ship.”

Caleb, his eyes still wide, could not think of anything more to ask. He thought about this for several seconds. “So it’s like you’re dead when you’re broadcasting. It’s like you don’t exist for a moment and then you come back to life.” He sounded a little scared.

“It’s safe enough,” I said. “Billions and billions of people have done it. I must have done it a hundred times.”

“But you couldn’t just point to a spot and aim using the computer. How did they know they would hit that ship?” Caleb asked.

I told him about triangulation and how you can calculate an exact target using X, Y, and Z coordinates. Caleb was twelve years old, and he understood the math far better than me. Archie didn’t seem interested. He went back to the passenger cabin.

Caleb asked me if we could manually select a spot near Delphi for our broadcast home. I let him pound out the calculations, enter the coordinates and initiate the broadcast home. If Archie knew who flew us home, he might have prayed for salvation.

Clones are sterile. The military class was never meant to have children. This idea was old when Christ was born. Plato, upon whose writings the Unified Authority’s social structure was based, believed that warriors should live in communes and that their children should be shared. In modern days, military clones were raised in orphanages and they were incapable of having children of their own. Marianne provided me an escape clause from Plato’s society. She came with a ready-made family, and best of all, I liked the boy.

Five days had passed since the day Archie and I had flown out and seen the
Grant
. Marianne and I began taking late night walks every evening. We would sit and I would stare into the sky and tell her stories about planets and battles. I told her about Ezer Kri and the Japanese. I told her about Bryce Klyber and how he died so needlessly.

Sometimes I searched space for signs of battles between the Mogats and Confederate Arms. They were out there somewhere, killing each other. More than once, she asked me if I cared who won that war, and I told her that I did not. I lied. I wanted both sides to destroy each other; but if one side had to survive, I preferred a universe with the Confederate Arms rather than Morgan Atkins and his fanatics. But on this particular night, she said something that sent a warm thrill through me. She said, “Caleb talks about you all the time. He loves you, Wayson.” And she took my hand in her calloused and leathery hand and said, “And I love you.”

I turned toward her, and we kissed. It was an innocent kiss, the kind of kiss that I would imagine grade-school boys give grade-school girls when they decide to be a boyfriend and girlfriend. My lips were closed and my eyes were open, but I felt her warmth and tasted her breath. I had not had tender contact with another human being in years. It made me weak inside.

Had this been Kasara, the girl I met in Hawaii, we would have made love. She would have led me back to her apartment and I would have removed her clothes. Kasara was young and beautiful and had no cares. I felt no longing for Kasara, though I sometimes fantasized about her. With Marianne, things happened more slowly. We remained outside, sitting on a bench overlooking the farm, exchanging childish kisses and holding hands. She may or may not have known that I wanted more, but she did not offer it to me.

“I love you, Wayson,” she said again.

The sky was dark and the stars showed clear, like pin-prick diamonds laid out on a black velvet sheet. A cooling breeze traveled across the field. I wanted to tell Marianne that I loved her, but I was not sure I knew how to love.

“How do you feel about me and Caleb?” she asked. There was a note of desperation in her voice. It was as if she had given me her best offer and would give up if it wasn’t enough.

“I’ve never had a family,” I said. “I don’t know about love or father-son relations. I like spending time with Caleb. It’s funny. I like to teach him things. I like it when he asks me questions.”

“You’re the closest thing he has ever had to a father,” Marianne said.

“How about me, Wayson? How do you feel about me?” She punctuated that question with a longer, more passionate kiss than the childish kisses she had been giving me. I put my hand upon her waist, but fought the urge to let it travel. Our eyes met and we kissed again.

“Will you stay?” she whispered, and we kissed again.

I wanted to tell her yes. I believed that if I said I would stay, she would have let me make love to her. But at that moment I did not know whether or not I would be able to stay. There was a war going on in the galaxy. There were many wars. The Mogats and Confederate Arms were fighting. Unified Authority fleets still patrolled every arm. The Unified Authority still had the most ships and the most troops, even if the government itself no longer existed. What would have happened if Rome had sunk into the sea and left its legions in Gaul and Carthage?

“Will you stay, Wayson?” she repeated, and her hand brushed against my thigh. Her breasts rolled across my arms as she leaned over and kissed me again.

A life of farming . . . She might as well have asked me to spend the rest of my life in prison. Her lips were dry but soft. Her breath was sweet. Her touch was warm. Marianne was thirty-two years old. I was only twenty-two, but I considered myself much older. All I had to do was promise to stay and she would give herself to me. I suddenly understood that life held more experiences than killing. In her way, Marianne knew far more about life than me.

But the velvety night and the sparkling stars still called to me. “Stay with us,” she whispered. “Stay with me.” And she kissed me. Her hands stroked my chest and stomach. The night was warm and her hands were hot. It should have been uncomfortable, but her touch felt good. My mind raced. I flashed through memories of making love to Kasara, but willed myself to imagine Marianne in her place. And I realized that, yes, maybe I did love Marianne. And as I thought this, I realized that I could not lie to her. “I don’t know,” I said.

“Oh, Wayson,” she said, and her voice was not angry but sad.

“I was made for war. I don’t know if there is anything else in me. I can’t become a neo-Baptist farmer. I simply don’t know how.”

She pulled her face away from mine, but she did not pull away. I saw tears running down her cheeks. In the faint light that came from the compound, her skin looked dark gray and smooth. Her eyes remained on mine and I could not look away from her. Yes, I thought to myself, I do love her.

“I’ll take you and Caleb with me wherever I go,” I said. “It can be just like Ruth. ‘Where thou goest, I goest.’ Something like that.”

She sighed and placed her face on my shoulder. “Oh, Wayson,” she sighed again. “You don’t understand.”

I did understand. I just could not do anything about it.

They might have attacked earlier except they could not risk hurting my Starliner. For the last week, Caleb and I had broadcasted out and located the
Grant
every day. It was coming closer. Sometimes it traveled at a mere ten million miles per hour, one-third of its best speed. A few times it stopped all together. The crew was taking its time.

The congregation slept as families in dome-shaped temporary dwellings that looked like blisters on the ground. I would have liked to have slept with Marianne, but no one offered. Ray and I continued to sleep on the reclining passenger seats inside the Starliner. Caleb slept with us. Caleb was fast asleep. Ray and I did not sleep so soundly. We had our seats back and our feet up. Perhaps I unconsciously noticed the movements through the window beside my seat. Something woke me from my sleep, and I turned to look.

Outside, the moon lit the clearing with pale gray light. We were on the edge of a forest, and I saw the silhouettes of trees swaying in the background. I saw rows of dome-shaped temporary housing shelters—sophisticated tents—rising out of the ground like snowy moguls. Lights burned in a few of those tents.

It was not the tents or the trees that I focused on when I woke up. It was the phantoms that caught my attention. They looked like phantoms. Men dressed in U.A. Marine combat armor sifted their way through the tents. To me, they looked like the ghosts of the battle of Little Man, risen from the valley and come to collect us.

When I woke, there might have been fifteen of these spectral Marines moving forward slowly, carrying M27s with the rifle stocks attached. As I watched, more of these men emerged from the woods behind the camp. Apparently they had hiked in from a landing site on the other side of the trees.