Festina frowned. "That’s ridiculous. Everyone in the fleet gets regular checkups."
"Not quite true, ah, Admiral, sorry," Veresian said. "The navy will make exceptions. Usually on religious grounds — Opters, for instance."
He turned to look at me. The doctor couldn’t straight-out ask who or what I worshiped — not with the navy’s strict policies on religious tolerance — but Opters are never shy about stating their beliefs. Their god disapproves of all medical treatments; you’re supposed to let heaven decide whether or not you recover. (Don’t ask me why a god would create a universe full of medicines, then tell you not to use them. Gods have a real fondness for making great stuff and putting it right under your nose, but saying, "If you love me, leave this alone." Kind of like my sister hiding her diary in my room so Dad wouldn’t find it.)
By now, everyone in sick bay was looking at me — Veresian, Festina, and Tobit. "I’m not an Opter," I said. "I’m… um… different."
"You’re an Explorer, pal," Tobit replied. "We’re all different."
But I was illegally different. I didn’t say that out loud, of course — if there was one thing hammered into my head, it was keeping quiet about how I came to be. Not just because I’d been engineered. If you want the honest truth, I was also a sort of a kind of a clone of my father.
Pretty awful, right? Being him.
Of course, I wasn’t him exactly — the doctor who designed me started with Dad’s DNA, then fiddled with it to make me better. Samantha was exactly the same as me: the same person exactly, our dad’s clone, except she got an X chromosome where I got a Y.
Which meant she wasn’t the same person at all. Do you know about sex-linked gene deficiencies? Where if you’re a girl you’re all right, but if you’re a boy you don’t get built properly? Sam tried to explain it once with big blowup pictures of actual X and Y chromosomes, but I didn’t feel much like listening. It couldn’t be changed, could it? That was all I needed to know.
Even if Sam couldn’t make me understand how my brain went stupid, she sure made it clear I had to keep everything secret. Cloning had been banned for centuries in the Technocracy, and gene manipulation was strictly limited to fixing "catastrophic disorders" — if you just wanted your kids prettier or smarter, you got thrown in jail.
Worse than that, the children were classified "potentially non-sentient" since no one could predict how a DNA tweak would affect "moral character." There were just too many variables to calculate… and too many awful examples over the years, people trying to make perfect offspring and ending up with monsters: psychopaths, killers, people whose brains were messed up worse than mine. If the navy knew the truth about Sam and me, we’d never be allowed on a starship again — on the off chance we might suddenly turn crazy and inhuman and non-sentient.
The more I mulled it over, the more I wished I hadn’t let Tobit bring me down to the doctor. But I hadn’t thought things through fast enough.
Sometimes you just get so tired of being slow.
"Um," I said. I knew better than to make up some story of why I shouldn’t be examined. Lies get complicated real fast. It would have been nice if Dad had told me about the NO CHECKUPS order so I wasn’t taken completely by surprise; but of course he hadn’t. All I could do was mumble, "My father didn’t like doctors looking at me too much. It bothered him."
Festina gave me a sympathetic look. She probably thought my dad was an Opter, and I was all embarrassed about it. "Don’t worry," she told me, "if you’re allowed to have medical exams in an emergency, I’d say this counts. You’ve had two doses of hive-queen venom, Edward, and that’s serious business. Only a few humans have ever suffered venom poisoning, but several ended up with chronic metabolic imbalances. Isn’t that right, Doctor?"
Veresian looked flustered by the question. It’s tough being a doctor in the Outward Fleet — every new planet that humans visit has a thousand diseases nobody’s seen before. The medical databanks have write-ups on millions of ways to get sick, and for many there’ve only been three or four cases ever. Veresian couldn’t possibly hold all that information in his head. If he was like other doctors, he looked up what he needed when he needed it… and at this moment, he knew absolutely zero about Mandasar venom.
Too bad. Festina was an Explorer, and Explorers did their homework.
Veresian mumbled, "Yes, yes, dirty stuff, that venom." He looked at Festina once more, then decided you seldom went wrong agreeing with an admiral. "Definitely, we can say this qualifies as an emergency. Definitely." He turned to me. "Could you take off your shirt, please, Explorer?"
"Do I have to?"
"Come on," Tobit growled, "forget about your dad hating doctors. No matter how loony he is, your old man wouldn’t want you to Go Oh Shit."
Going Oh Shit was a term Explorers used for dying. My father wouldn’t care if I went Oh Shit, I thought, as long as I just went. On the other hand, Dad had let me see a doctor now and then. And it wasn’t like a sign would flash BIO-ENGINEERED CLONE the moment I hopped onto the examination table. Veresian wouldn’t find anything suspicious unless he went to the trouble of sequencing my entire genome… and why would he do that?
"Okay," I grumbled, and began unbuttoning.
Festina and Tobit watched as the doctor listened to my heart and looked down my throat. Veresian was just passing the time — while he mucked about with a stethoscope, sensors around the room were taking far more detailed readings and checking them against every possible index in the databanks — but Sam always said people were suckers for personal attention. "Medicine is nine-tenths showmanship," she once told me, "just like diplomacy."
The doctor wasn’t the only one providing a show. After all, I was the one with my shirt off; and neither Festina nor Tobit made a move to leave when the examination started. They weren’t gawking or anything, but… well, actually, yes, they were gawking, particularly when Veresian got me to take deep breaths. I told myself they must come from parts of the Technocracy where people weren’t all self-conscious about their bodies. Even so, if the examination headed below the waist, I didn’t want a bunch of spectators.
Especially not Festina.
Veresian finished with the simple stuff and went to his terminal to see what the mechanical sensors had found out While he scanned the readout, I tried not to scratch an itch that all of a sudden flared up on the soft inside of my elbow. I assumed nanites were at work there, sneaking under the skin and sipping blood from my veins — not so different from the eyeball nano that had burrowed into the queen’s venom sacs.
All navy sick bays had nanotech squads floating in the air, like little labs for doing blood analysis, taking tissue samples, and that kind of stuff. The medical computers had probably sent microscopic sensors scrambling toward my internal organs, swimming down my throat to lungs or stomach, in search of more data. I wasn’t sure how much time they needed to do their jobs — it must take a fair while to find the spleen, let alone do a bunch of tests on it — but bit by bit they’d send reports to the main computers, telling how my innards measured up.
"Well," said Veresian after only a few seconds, "well, well, well."
"Well what?" Festina asked.
The doctor glanced at her a moment, then back at the readouts. "There’s just… ahh… maybe it’s time to recalibrate." He thumbed a few dials on the control panel, then gave us a false smile. "Time to run diagnostics on the diagnostics. That happens sometimes."