Dade stared, his eyes growing wide. He whispered, "How did you know?"
Festina shook her head in despair. "I didn’t know, Dade — I made a snap judgment, based on inadequate facts. That’s what Explorers do. Sometimes you’re right, sometimes you’re wrong. Sometimes it doesn’t matter, sometimes it’s life and death. You never know till it’s over… and often, not even then."
Slowly she got to her feet. Tobit took the controller from her. "Let me have a look at this," he said. "If I’m lucky, I can hot-wire the voice-recognition circuits, so it obeys one of us instead of sleeping beauty there."
"No need," Festina told him. She took the box back and held it out to me, like a microphone I should speak into. "Edward, say, ‘Rise two meters.’ "
I did. The three Larries that’d just come down the Sperm-tail whirled themselves up a couple meters higher. I swallowed hard, but Festina only shrugged. "Clones. You and this guy look the same, so I figured you’d sound the same too. At least close enough to fool a simple-minded voice-recognition system." She tossed the controller to me. "Congratulations, King Edward. You’ve got three killing machines. I’m curious as hell what you’ll do with them,"
Giving me the controller was a test: I knew that. Festina wanted to see if I’d go crazy or something. I think she still was inclined to trust me, but considering how I’d smashed that anchor, she couldn’t be sure I was on the side of the angels. If I’d tried to talk to the Larries, maybe she would have punched me just like the guy on the ground… or shot me with her stunner. She’d turned a titch away from me, so I couldn’t see either her holster or her gun hand.
But none of that mattered — I had no intention of using the Larries for anything. I came close to throwing the controller off the parapet, so I wouldn’t be tempted… and so the spirit that sometimes possessed me couldn’t use the Larries either. Instead, I just handed the little gizmo back to Festina, "You keep it," I said. "If you need the Larries to do something, I’ll give them your orders; but I don’t want my own army."
"Lousy instincts for a king," she muttered. But she took the controller and tucked it into a pouch on her belt. Glancing down at our new Mr. Clear Chest, she asked, "What do your instincts say about him?"
"Um… maybe shoot him with your stunner, just to make sure?"
She looked like she was considering it, but Dade spoke first. "If you shoot him, he’ll be out for six hours. Suppose we need to interrogate him or something."
Festina looked at the boy. "Interrogate him? What about?"
"I don’t know," Dade answered, not meeting her eyes. "But it’d be nice to have the option. And maybe we could use him as a hostage… if he’s important to York’s sister."
"You think my sister would care?" I asked.
"She might," Festina admitted. She knelt beside the unconscious man. From a pouch in her belt, she pulled a coil of copper wire (probably for making electrical repairs to her suit) and began trussing our prisoner’s hands behind his back. "Dade," she said, "if you’re so interested in this guy, you’re in charge of him. No matter what else happens, don’t take your eyes off him. Shout when he wakes up. Can you do that?"
"Yes," Dade answered, sounding all huffy with indignation. Festina didn’t comment; instead she turned to me.
"This fellow is a clone of your father, right? Or possibly of you yourself."
"Since I’m a clone of my father, there’s no difference."
"There’s a difference, If nothing else, your father’s fully human; you have that pinch of Mandasar. I suspect this fellow has Mandasar genes too — all the better to produce babies with your sister."
That made me gulp. "Babies? But that’s, umm…"
"Incest?" she suggested. "Absolutely. But it still produces healthier offspring than cloning the clones of a clone. How old was your father when you were produced? Sixty, something like that? So your own genes were sixty years old the moment you were conceived. YouthBoost can compensate to some extent, but sorry, Edward, you don’t have the hundred-and-sixty-year life expectancy of a normal human. A hundred and twenty, tops. And if we cloned you, your progeny might not make it to eighty.
"So," she went on, "since your sister wants to generate a dynasty of superkids, it’s best to avoid more cloning and just use the old-fashioned approach. A mummy and daddy love each other very much… and they mass-produce fertilized ova which are farmed out to surrogate mothers all over the Technocracy." Festina gave a rueful grin. "Your Samantha is the mother, and I’ll bet this fellow is the father."
"Oh." It made me kind of sick, thinking this copy of me might have been with Samantha. For all I knew, they could have produced kids already. But when I thought about it, that wasn’t so likely: Sam had been so busy running the war, she wouldn’t have time to go through pregnancy; and on Troyen, she’d have a hard time finding another human woman who could act as surrogate mom. All the humans had been evacuated twenty years ago.
Still, this clear-chest guy — this version of me or my father — it made me feel horrible, thinking of him and Sam together. Was he smart? It was such a dumb jealous question, but was he smart? Was he witty and charming and all, a real equal who could keep up with her and not some halfwit moron who always needed to be babied? Because if he was stupid, maybe I could stand the thought of him with Sam, her giving him orders, do this, do that… but if he was so smart that sometimes he got the better of her, and sometimes he said, "This is what I want," and she did it…
That would make me truly, truly sick. I don’t know why but it would.
Kneeling beside Festina, I bent over the man and sniffed… as if I could somehow smell whether or not he was clever. I couldn’t tell you what I expected to find, but I do know what actually hit my nose: the odor of buttered toast.
Uh-oh.
The hairs on the back of my neck curled cold and clammy. I was remembering something from back on Celestia, as the glass-chested recruiter stood in the hatchway of his skimmer. There’d been that tiny dot of red shining in his belly, like the tip of a ruby laser… but back then, I hadn’t known enough to be terrified of little glowing specks.
Gingerly, I flipped the man’s vest all the way open. Inside the glass torso, his lungs lifted up and down; his heart thudded behind his ribs; and there in his gut, tucked among the folds of his small intestine, was a glowing pinprick of red.
"Look," I said, pointing. I made sure to keep my finger high above the glass.
Festina squinted, then sat back abruptly. "Jesus Christ. Is that Balrog?"
"Smells like it," I told her.
"In his stomach. How could it get into his stomach? How could you smell it in his stomach?"
That was a real good question. For the first time it occurred to me maybe I wasn’t really smelling stuff at all. Maybe I was just kind of sensing it, the way Kaisho could see things even though her eyes were covered with hair. That could explain why some people smelled like sounds or colors: I wasn’t actually using my nose. Or at least I wasn’t using it for everything. Mandasar queens might secretly have a sixth sense, like ESP or something… and now I had the same thing. Considering how Balrog spores were supposed to be all telepathic, maybe other telepaths could sense them pretty easily — as if they were giving off strong signals on the ESP channel.
But I could think about such things later. I told Festina, "I don’t know how I smelled it, I just did." I took a deep breath. "That other guy had a Balrog too. The recruiter on Celestia. I noticed a little red speck glowing in his stomach, but didn’t know what it was."