Shockball (39 page)

One of the older women beckoned to me. “Are you hungry? I have bread from the morning meal.”

“No, thank you. I was just wondering, are those potatoes?” I pointed to an open mesh sack next to the flat boulder used for food prep.

“Yes. New potatoes, very fresh.”

Fresh. In an underground cave. With no sunlight. “May I have one?”

She nodded, a little puzzled. “You would eat it raw?”

I smiled and shook my head. “No, I don’t think so.”

I went over and took a potato from the sack. I brushed a little dirt from it before I dug a hole in the hot ash with a stick and buried it. Then I started to walk back to the tunnels.

“Patcher, what about your potato?”

“It has to cook. I’ll be back in a little while.”

When I got to Medical, I made a slide from the dirt concealed in my palm. The analyzer balked a little at my input analysis request, but eventually it identified three different organic compounds, including horse manure.

My conclusion: The potatoes hadn’t been grown this far underground.

Working off the theory that using the subway system to transport food to
Leyaneyaniteh
from the surface village would be impractical, I went back to the central cavern and did some discreet reconnaissance from behind the cover of an unoccupied hogan.

The women working on the stew occasionally got up and wandered back toward a certain tunnel. When I judged the timing was right, I edged along the wall and went into the tunnel.

It was another section I hadn’t been permitted to explore, part of another subway station. I kept listening for footsteps as I cautiously made my way deeper into the network of platforms and recessed storage areas.

I saw the sunlight before I found the storeroom. It streamed into the tunnel from an open doorway, illuminating everything with a faint, golden glow. Holding my breath, I edged into the room.

Sacks and boxes of vegetables were neatly sorted and stored inside. Above my head, sunlight poured in from a narrow square opening lined with some kind of alloy.

Even better, there was a square wooden platform hooked to a pulley-and-chain fall hanging from the shaft. It was simple to see how it worked. Whenever they needed something, all they had to do was pull the chain, which hauled the platform up through the shaft. Food was loaded onto the platform at the surface, then lowered back down. A primitive, but ingenious, method of assuring the tribe got their veggies.

I got under the shaft and looked up. It was longer than I’d expected, maybe as much as five hundred feet straight up. The shaft itself was too narrow to accommodate more than a few boxes or sacks of vegetables.

But perhaps one small, skinny Terran could fit through.

I heard voices coming near and promptly dived behind a stack of crates. A rat squealed as I dropped and ran past my face to cringe in a nearby corner. I held my breath as the storage room door opened.

“We need three more bushels of corn for the ceremonial. And bring some of those new carrots. Burrow Owl wants to mash them for her little one.”

“They were sweet, were they not?”

“Sweet is all that greedy baby wants.”

The women laughed and gossiped as they collected the food, then left. I lifted my head cautiously, then rolled my eyes as the rat stared suspiciously at me from its corner.

“I wouldn’t hang around here, if I were you. Burrow Owl’s kid may decide she wants some stew to go with her mashed carrots.”

I got back to the central cavern without raising an alarm, and retrieved my now-baked potato. It proved to be delicious. I made a mental note to prepare some for Reever when he returned from the arena, and returned to Medical to run the daily cardiac series on Shropana.

I’d been backing down on his sedation, gradually weaning him off the heavy dosage. Now he was able to respond physically to reflex and verbal stimulation, although the few times he’d opened his eyes, he hadn’t acted very lucid.

Today he was looking better, and his vitals had inched up another few digits out of borderline red range. The Jarvik was thumping along without a hitch. He responded to my voice by opening his eyes and trying to focus on me.

“Hello, Patril.” I checked his infuser lines and catheters before giving him his daily sponge bath. The surgical site was also healing nicely. “Miss me while I was gone?”

His eyelids fluttered. A sound came from his lips. Something that distinctly resembled “no.”

“Don’t spare my feelings now.” I finished the bath and carefully changed his berth linens. The liquid nutrient diet I’d put him on had eliminated twenty-five percent of excess body fat, so it was getting easier to handle him. “Your extra heart is working fine, and you’re making me very happy by not getting any unnecessary infections. Now if I can get you to a League medical facility, and someone can convince you to stop lining your vessels with enough plaque to choke an elephant, you’ll be able to start chasing me again in a few months.”

He groaned something in his native language, too low or too obscene for my wristcom to translate.

“Tell you what. When Reever gets here, I’ll ask him what that means.”

Reever came back that night, a study in surrealistic contrasts. He carried a bouquet of exotic-looking orchids, a plaque with his Indian nickname on it, and a black eye that spilled over into a huge bruise on his left cheek.

I looked up from the chart I was studying and jumped to my feet. “What happened? God, you look like you went ten rounds with the front end of a glidetruck.”

“Rico does not like having champagne spilled down the front of his suit.” He handed me the flowers and plaque, and sat down on the exam table. “Especially in front of the media.”

I set his stuff aside and pushed open his swollen eyelid to check his eye. Other than the surrounding bruising and some broken capillaries beneath the cornea, the eye wasn’t injured. The orbital bone and cheekbone had narrowly escaped being fractured, though.

“Bet this hurts like nobody’s business. He hit you this hard in front of the reporters?”

“No.” He winced as I applied a cold pack and put his hand over it to hold it in place. “He waited until they left.” He extended his other arm. “You’ll have to check the scanner, but I believe I was successful.”

“You must have been, if you got flowers and a plaque. Your face first.” I finished examining him and only then did I pull up the sleeve of his jersey and unwrap his forearm. “Did you have enough time to run a full series?”

“Yes. It was a large bottle of champagne.”

“Sit back and relax. I’ll put your flowers in some water.” I couldn’t help chuckling as I took the scanner over to the console to download the data. “While you were out carousing with the boys, I found another way to the surface.”

I inserted the leads into the console input panel and transferred the information Reever had gathered. As it downloaded, I told him about the storeroom and the vertical air shaft.

“Even if it is too narrow for me to traverse, you can use it.” He changed out of his uniform.

“Keep that pack on your face, and I’m not going anywhere without you.” I sat back and ran an analysis on the downloaded scans. The scrolling results made my smile fade. “Oh, boy. This isn’t what I thought. At all.”

He came over to study the screen while I grabbed the ancient printed book on STDs and started flipping through it.

“Does it indicate that he is the carrier?”

“Looks that way. Hang on, I need to find something.”

I waited until the final cerebral series appeared, then cross-referenced the results with information from the old text. Then I put the book aside and rubbed my eyes.

“Okay. Rico is crazy, but not for the reasons I thought. He’s in the final stages of paretic neuro-syphilis.”

“That is a different disease from what infects the others?”

“No. It just means he’s had this disease for so long it’s worked its way into his brain tissue. It’s started destroying it.” That’s why he hadn’t shown any latent symptoms. He’d probably stopped showing them a long time ago.

Reever perched on a storage container beside me while I ran the secondary scans, and created a patient data file on the chief. Transferring the data kept my hands busy, while I tried to figure out the next move.

The problem with tertiary-stage syphilis, especially when it affected the nervous system, was treatment. I could destroy the bacteria in his body, but I had no way to repair the destruction it had already caused.

“Here.” I handed him the book. “Read the section on long-term effects on the neural system.” Then something caught my eye. “What? Can’t be.”

Reever looked up from the page he was reading. “Those are DNA patterns.”

“They sure are.” Maybe I was just seeing things. I got up, selected a scanner I’d just used and downloaded a file from it. Then I created a split data screen and ran a side-by-side comparison.

“You already had a sample of Rico’s DNA?” Reever asked.

“No. This sample belongs to someone else.” The two samples were, with the exception of gender and a few altered physical characteristics, identical.

“What’s wrong? You look ill.”

I was ill. “The name.” I rested my brow against my hand. “Of course. He’s nothing if not consistent and methodical.”

“What are you talking about?”

I tapped the screen. “Rico’s not an only child, Reever. These DNA sequences match. He’s a twin.”

“Who is his brother?”

You have been touched by the gods. Like our chief.

“Not a brother.” I shut the display off. “A sister. Me.”

I got up and checked on Shropana, then wandered around the alcove for a few minutes. Reever left me alone. He probably guessed I wasn’t capable of coherent speech.

It wasn’t every day I found out I had a brother.

I didn’t know exactly which one he was, but Joseph had created nine other clones before me. When we’d confronted each other the first time about my origins, my creator had told me that none of the others had developed properly. I’d assumed that meant they’d died.

Now I had proof at least one of them was alive.

“When I was a kid, I hated being an only child,” I said as I sterilized the already-clean spare monitor rig. “You were an only child. Didn’t you hate it?”

Reever eased the sterilizer from my white-knuckled hand and tossed it on my worktable. Then he handed me a single orchid. “I had no basis of comparison.”

“I did. All my father’s colleagues had at least two kids. I’d have given anything to have a brother or sister. I would have loved it.” My face felt hot and stiff as I touched the pale lavender, waxy petals of the bloom.

“Now that I know the connection, I see the resemblance.” Reever brushed a piece of hair from my face. “He has the same features, the same cast to his hair.”

I’d never noticed, but then, I hadn’t been looking. “What did Joseph do to him, Reever? What did he do to all the others?”

“We will find out.”

“Not like we can go back to the estate and ask him.” I shook my head. “I wonder if Rico knows what he is. Of course, he has to know something. How else could he have found this place, unless he’d lived in the underground lab? But how did he get away? Did Joseph put him up for adoption? Did he escape? Does he know where the others are?” I glanced at the blank vid screen, still seeing the ghost images of those matching patterns. “Does he know about me?”

“He must. There are too many concurrences in our present situation for Rico not to have extensive knowledge of you and Joseph.” He turned me around to face him. “What did you mean when you said he was consistent and methodical?”

“The name Rico. Joseph would have named him the same way he named me—with the experiment designation.” So much for my very original name. “The chief is about thirty-four years old, so it’s safe to assume he’s Comprehensive Human Enhancement Research I.D. ‘C’ Organism.”

“C.H.E.R.I.C.O.”

“He had to know about me. Why else would he kidnap us from the lab? Twice?” So many things made sense—and didn’t. My head whirled with the potential avenues of disaster. “Hawk told me Rico won’t be back until just before the World Game. We need to get some answers, Duncan.”

“Agreed. We should find out what else Hawk knows about your brother.”

My brother. I looked down, and saw I had crushed the fragile orchid in the tight knot of one fist. Slowly I uncurled my fingers, and let the remains drop to the floor.

“Hello, Hawk.” I stepped inside the consecrated hogan, with Reever right behind me. “Planning out the next dry painting?”

He was scratching the surface of the cave floor with a piece of light-colored clay, which left visible lines in complicated patterns. “Yes. I have three more to make.”

“They tell stories, don’t they? Why don’t you make this one about Rico being Joseph Grey Veil’s genetically engineered human construct, and consequently, my brother?”

I expected the
hataali
to show some emotion— shock, dismay, even disbelief—but he didn’t. Hawk only played the silent, inscrutable Indian and kept drawing. As far as he was concerned, Reever and I could have been invisible.

I was tired of the lies, the Night Horse, and being invisible. I spotted a wicker jug of water, picked it up, and tossed the contents over Hawk’s drawing. The huge splash erased all the spirals and patterns and stick figures, and drenched Hawk. This time he reacted.

“What are you doing?”

“Getting your attention. Now that I have it, tell me about my brother, the chief.”

He glanced at the entrance to the hogan, then shook his head. “Do not say that aloud.”

“Why the big secret? There some kind of taboo against cloning? I mean, other than our dastardly whiteskin laws prohibiting it. Or doesn’t he want anyone to know he’s forgotten to send me Christmas signals for the last thirty years?”

“He has only spoken of it to me once, when we first came here.” Hawk used a piece of worn cloth to wipe up the floor of the hogan. “He told Kegide and Milass and I about the Shaman and how he had been brought into this world from the great beyond.”

Sounded like a legend Rico would invent. “Sorry, there’s no great beyond. He came from an embryonic chamber, where he was cloned from Joseph’s cells. Just like me.” And what else had the chief invented?