“When was the last time you saw your family?” I asked.
“It’s been five years,” Freeman said.
“This should be some homecoming,” I said.
“They don’t want me here,” he said. He did not elaborate. Freeman never elaborated.
We kept flying into the green and blue horizon. Using sensors to search for metal and heat, we located the colony in a plains area. They were building their settlement on the edge of a forest and not far from a clear-water lake. In the distance, a mountain range filled the horizon. It was not on the same continent on which we fought that final battle.
The first thing we saw was acres and acres of plowed land. Beyond the fields was a small and primitive town that consisted of warehouses and unfinished apartment buildings. Even when the apartment buildings were complete, they would only be temporary shelters meant to hold people for days or weeks. Work had already begun on larger, more permanent buildings as well.
Women and children in simple clothing emerged from the temporary shelters as we landed. Men in overalls came from the construction projects and from the fields. If there was one thing that stood out about the people on Little Man, it was their industrious nature.
The people did not approach my ship, but huddled together inside the borders of their town. They did not seem scared. They simply stood in place, curious to see who we were.
“I guess the welcoming committee has arrived,” I said, and turned to see that Freeman had already opened the hatch. I followed him out.
“I should have known it was you,” a man called in a voice drenched with loathing. Freeman did not answer.
When I stepped out of the ship, there was a collective gasp. I guess they were used to a seven-foot-tall black man, but the sight of a clone was strange and new. I turned to look at these people and got a jolt of my own.
I had always taken it for granted that Ray Freeman was unique in the universe. He was, I thought, a one-of-a kind, like me. It never occurred to me that he could have come from a colony of men and women similar to himself. The men and women of Delphi were very much like Freeman. They were tall and dark-skinned. One of the woman later told me that they were pure-blooded African Americans. As far as I knew, they were the last people anywhere who referred to themselves as American at all.
“What are you doing here, son?” an old man asked. The man was tall and solidly built, but he looked underfed. He did not have Ray Freeman’s broad, wrestler’s physique. His shoulders were square, his back was erect and the parts of his arms that extended beyond the short sleeves of his shirt looked strong and well formed. He removed his hat. An even layer of gray berber hair covered his head. His dusty skin was far darker than Ray’s, almost a true black. It looked dry and leathery from decades of toil under a burning hot sun. “What are you doing here, Raymond?” he repeated.
Silence hung between Freeman and his father like a curtain. I could almost feel the hostility. The people around the old man stood silent and staring. They stood unflinching and unmoved. Like Freeman’s father, these people were tall, dark, with skin that had dried to leather in the sun.
Freeman took nearly one minute before he began to speak; and when he did speak, he spoke so quietly I could barely hear what he said. “The Broadcast Network was destroyed.”
“Destroyed?” the elder Freeman repeated. For the first time since we landed, the people behind him showed concern. They began to speak quietly among themselves.
“I wanted to make sure you were okay,” Freeman said.
By this time, however, the elder Freeman’s attention was no longer on his son. He had turned to me. “You are a friend of Raymond’s?”
I nodded, wondering if Ray Freeman had ever really had a friend.
The old man turned back to Freeman. “How could anybody destroy the Broadcast Network?” It was a fair question. In U.A. society, the Broadcast Network was a given as constant as sunlight and water. No one, with the exception of Rear Admiral Thomas Halverson, had ever stopped to consider its fragile nature.
“There was a war. Some of the arms declared independence,” Freeman said. His father should have known this. Of course his father would have known this. It was the biggest news in history. And yet, looking at the old man’s surprised expression, it became clear that he had not known about the war.
“A civil war?” the old man asked.
“It’s a civil war if you lose,” Freeman said. “It’s a revolution when you win.”
“They won?” A younger man stepped forward. This man was far shorter than Freeman and not as broad along the chest and shoulders. He had a wiry build, but he looked athletic.
“They destroyed the Mars broadcast station,” I said. “Without the Mars discs, the entire system shut down.”
“For how long?” the old man asked, turning back to Ray. “How long before they fix the broadcast station?”
“They won’t fix it,” Freeman said.
“Of course they’ll fix it,” the younger man said. “They’ll send over the fleet …”
“Earth doesn’t have a fleet,” Ray said. “The Earth Fleet was defeated, and they can’t send ships from other fleets without the discs.”
The older Freeman stood still as a statue, his gaze boring into his son’s eyes and then mine. “Man has finally turned his back on us,” he mumbled. Then louder, he added, “God has cleared the way for us to stay in this promised land.”
There were 113 people living on Delphi. I know the exact number because the entire population, or perhaps I should say congregation , assembled in their meetinghouse—a building meant to be used as a sleeping and eating facility during large evacuations. The people sat on plastic benches. Archie Freeman, Ray Freeman’s father, looked down on the congregation from behind a very plain pulpit, over which hung a fiberglass cross.
There were two women with infants in the congregation. One woman threw a blanket over her shoulder and nursed her child. You could hear it sucking when the conversations lulled. The other woman cradled a sleeping baby in her arms, rocking it softly as she stood in the back of the meetinghouse. I noted the tenderness with which she treated the child and envied it. Having grown up in U.A. Orphanage #553 with other clones, I had never seen tenderness of this kind.
The people of Delphi attended this meeting as families. Husbands and wives sat together with their children. Near as I could figure, there were eighteen extended families. The whole of them only filled the first four rows of the meetinghouse. For the most part, the next twenty rows sat empty—an ambition unfulfilled.
“My son says that we are in danger,” Archie Freeman began the meeting with those words. He stood at his pulpit as austere and grave as any man I had ever seen. He had washed and changed his clothes. He wore a black suit, white shirt and black necktie. He dressed like a businessman.
Now that he had washed up, the color of Archie Freeman’s face was almost onyx. His skin had the texture of parched leather, his reward for fifty years of trying to start colonies on uninhabitable planets. Having finally landed on a productive planet with plenty of water and healthy soil, he did not want to leave.
Archie was bald at the top, with a very short layer of gray-white hair that looked like a macramé cowl. His eyes were bloodshot from his day out in the sun.
“Raymond, come up and speak your piece,” the elder Freeman said.
Ray, who had been sitting with a woman near the back, stood and walked to the front of the chapel. No one reached out to shake his hand or pat his back. Seeing the reception these people gave him, you might have thought he had never lived among these people. But he must have lived with the people before they moved to Little Man. He was their 114 th citizen. He probably knew every one of them by name.