And so, lost among them, I remembered a day at the Academy, long long ago….
“I’m not going.” Aidan stopped in front of the door, throwing his head back so that his auburn hair fell into his eyes. “It’s barbaric, their bringing an energumen in like this….”
John and I looked at each other in surprise. Aidan’s reaction was bizarre, especially in light of Aidan’s mockery of John’s revelations during our last game of Fear. If John could overcome his revulsion at an energumen, surely the fearless Aidan Harrow could do the same.
“It will probably be in a cage, Aidan,” I said reassuringly. “We’ll sit in the back if you’re worried—”
Aidan shot him a furious glance, then shook his head. “I’m not afraid, Sky Pilot,” he said, using the derisive nickname I hated. “It’s just—well, it’s cruel, that’s all, cruel and…”
His voice died, maybe because what part of our studies did not have to do with cruelty? We were in the hallway outside the first-level classroom, where of late we had been studying Luther Burdock, whose devoutly cruel lifework was to make possible all the later horrors of our own age.
Of course, our rectors did not think of Burdock in such terms. To them—and to us their students, still living in the golden haze of youth—Burdock was a hero, the brilliant geneticist who refused to recant his beliefs and so was executed by the fundamentalists of the short-lived Third Ascendancy. For the last few weeks we had been watching old ’files of him in his laboratory, and re-creating some of his more basic experiments in our own classrooms. It was horrifying and fascinating work, even on such a primitive schoolboy level—watching the retroviruses do their work upon a colony of cyclops, exposing amoebas and paramecia and brine shrimp to the metrophages and seeing them change, almost before our eyes. We could not, of course, replicate even the simplest of Dr. Burdock’s efforts at real gene-splicing, but then we didn’t really need to. The evidence was all around us in any case: the aardmen who did the heavy labor at the Academy, lifting hundred-kilo sacks of flour and moving the huge video backdrops of the cycloramas where we held our war games; the hydrapithecenes and sirens that acted as victims in our simulated raids on the Archipelago, imprisoned in their tidal pools; the argalæ that serviced the older male students in the nearby town of Kasco. No, the NASNA Academy was not lacking in geneslaves. What surprises me now is how few of us were ever moved by their plight.
We had all of us since childhood been thrilled and terrified by tales of Dr. Burdock. He had refined the primitive work of the twenty-first century’s genetic engineers and created the first-generation geneslaves for the Ascendants. He was equal measures Louis Pasteur and Victor Frankenstein, his legend as much a part of our lives as his creations. That was why it was odd to see Aidan so disturbed by Burdock’s work with his daughter. It was a terrible thing, perhaps, but it had happened so long ago, and at any rate, we had been hearing about it forever.
John Starving nudged me, whispering, “We’d better go in—there’s Bowra—”
I turned to see our rector plodding down the corridor, his worn crimson leathers burnished by the light spilling from the high recessed windows above him. John and I started in, but Aidan remained in the hall, glaring defiantly in Bowra’s direction.
“Come on —you’ll be sent down!—” I hissed. Aidan had missed so many classes and training sessions that the infirmary had a permanent carrel for him. His wrists were raw where he had been strapped in, and his eyes had dark circles beneath them, from the nightmares induced by the drugs they fed him in a futile effort to make him more pliant. I yanked at his arm, pulling him through the door after me. He swore as John and I dragged him to the back of the chilly room and shoved him into an ancient metal folding chair. We threw ourselves into the seats next to his. A small pulse throbbed at the corner of John’s mouth, showing how angry he was with Aidan; but Aidan only slouched in his chair and glared sullenly at the front of the room. By the window I could see Emma Harrow, staring at us with a frown. She was fascinated, practically enthralled, by Luther Burdock. She and John argued endlessly over the ethical aspects of his work. When she saw me looking at her, she turned away and started talking to another student.
A moment later Bowra entered. His piggish eyes darted suspiciously across the rows of exhausted cadets.
“Good morning,” he croaked brusquely. He turned to crank up the dilapidated old ’file machine, and the morning’s session began.
Flickering ’file images filled the room. “Cassandra, Virginia, United States, 2069,” Bowra recited in a bored voice, and leaned back upon his desk.
The first part was familiar enough: old holofiles showing the everyday life of the great man. Burdock and his daughter Cybele eating dinner in their grand compound, attended by the first generation of aardmen—surprisingly slight and hirsute creatures, resembling dogs more than their descendants do. Burdock strolling the grounds of his mountain compound, pointing out the cages where aardmen howled and scratched, the huge oceanic tank that imprisoned his leviathan folly Zalophus. A carefully staged shot of Burdock leafing through books full of fotos, pretending to search for the individual who would be the perfect subject for his work. Burdock dropping the books and throwing up his hands in exaggerated dismay at the hopelessness of his task.
Then the ’files changed. Now they had a clarity, a documentary quality that the earlier ones had lacked, and which I found chilling. My friends did too—when I glanced at them, their eyes were fixed on the front of the room, and while John frowned, Aidan’s pale face held a look of disgust that bordered on terror.
We saw Cybele alone in her room, curly head bent over a scroll, her face screwed into a frown as she strove to hear whatever it was saying. My heart ached to see her. She was so young, so much prettier than any of the Academy recruits, with their hard darting eyes and nervous hands. The picture shifted to a formal holo portrait of father and daughter, Cybele smiling wistfully, as though she already knew where her future lay.
And finally, ancient ’files from that remarkable operation; images as famous as the archival footage of the First Shining or the twentieth-century lunar ascent. The kindly man’s head bent over the shining elfin face of his trusting adolescent daughter. Her fearless gaze, the little-girl voice asking We won’t die? and his soft reply—
“We will die. But then we will be regenerated, because of that— ”
And the camera scanned the banks of steel and glass crucibles, the metal canisters and frozen vials of DNA. Then came quick flashes of Cybele unconscious, and Luther Burdock’s pale face and fatigue-smudged eyes staring at a gleaming steel vat where something floated, a whitish form like a bloated football, turning over and over as fluids churned into the vat and still Luther Burdock watched, patient and exhausted: waiting, waiting.
And, finally, Burdock staring exultantly as across the clipped green lawns of his compound came the slender figures of two girls. Hand in hand, wearing identical shifts of white linen, their dark curls spilling around heart-shaped faces: Cybele and her cloned sister.