“No,” I said. “I really don’t.”
“Give him another,” Shannon said. Sergeant Shannon fixed the bartender with a most chilling smile. He did not glare, did not snarl, did not do anything overtly menacing, but the bartender understood the unspoken message. He looked at both of us, shook his head, then took our glasses.
When he returned, he handed us our drinks. “I’ll tell the infirmary to send a doctor.”
I took my drink. “To the great test tube in the sky?”
“You kidding? They’ll melt us down and reuse us just like any other equipment.” Shannon picked up his glass. “You think you can handle it?”
I laughed. “I’m drinking it, aren’t I?” I said, and I emptied the glass in one slug. Fighting the chill and nausea, I tried to sit straight on my seat and lost my balance. I almost fell but somehow managed to catch myself.
Shannon, watching me with some amusement, said, “Rookie,” and drank his shot.
“You going for thirds?” the bartender asked.
“No!” Shannon and I answered in unison.
***
That night, before going to sleep, I slipped on my mediaLink shades and found an eight-thousand-word philosophical essay about the Platonic justifications for building the death reflex into clones. I barely finished the first page before I realized that the booby-trapping of clone brains meant nothing to me. Klyber’s engineers had placed different glands in my head, and I no longer cared about what might or might not have been placed in other clones’ brains. Closing the article, I noticed that there was a two-hundred-word synopsis.
Plato understood that the warrior class would envy the ruling class and that the ruling class would fear the warrior class. He sought to keep the classes in place with the most childish of lies:
Well then, I will speak, although I really know not how to look you in the face, or in what words to utter the audacious fiction, which I propose to communicate gradually, first to the rulers, then to the soldiers, and lastly to the people. They are to be told that their youth was a dream, and the education and training which they received from us, an appearance only; in reality, during all that time they were being formed and fed in the womb of the earth, where they themselves and their arms and appurtenances were manufactured; when they were completed, the earth, their mother, sent them up; and so, their country being their mother and also their nurse, they are bound to advise for her good, and to defend her against attacks, and her citizens they are to regard as children of the earth and their own brothers.
—The Republic Book 3, Page 16
According to this article, Plato’s deceit is made true in that the modern-day warrior class is of synthetic origin. Further, the death reflex is shown as analogous to erasing an individual’s belief in his personal history and therefore his identity.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Captain McKay appointed me to a seven-member color guard, and I spent the next few days holding a Marine Corps flag as Bryce Klyber and Absalom Barry welcomed an endless stream of diplomats and politicians. The Senate sent a legal team to overhaul the Ezer Kri court system, and we lined up to meet them. The Federal Bureau of Investigation sent a team of detectives to hunt down any remaining Mogat sympathizers, and we lined up to meet them. Two members of the Linear Committee flew out with an army of reporters, and we lined up to meet them, too.
Every few hours, a group of VIPs arrived, and McKay sent us to hold up our colors. After five days of round-theclock flag holding, I began to sleepwalk through the arrivals. I no longer cared who stepped down the ramp. At least, I thought I stopped caring.
The night we left Ezer Kri, McKay summoned the color guard to his office. I got the message late and was the last to arrive. When I pressed the intercom button by his door, he squawked, “Harris?”
“Sir?”
The door opened. “As I was saying, this is the big one. You have a problem, sailor?”
One of the sailors in the guard looked nervously to the other men for support. “We just received two members from the Linear Committee.”
“Speck me with a hose!” McKay yowled. “Committee members aren’t brass. They can’t send your ass to the brig, boy. They don’t even notice you. Hell, I could show up with my pants off and a flag dangling from my dick, and the only thing those committee members would notice was that the goddamned flagpole looks awfully long. If you so much as fart on this one, you’re specked for life.”
With that he dismissed the others and kept me behind. “Do you have any idea who our guest is this time?” he asked.
“No, sir,” I said.
“Admiral Che Huang from the Joint Chiefs. Are you familiar with him?”
I nodded, feeling a new knot in the pit of my gut.
“I’m going to be straight with you, Harris. I tried to get you pulled from this duty, but Admiral Klyber wants you on it. You had a conversation with Admiral Klyber a few nights ago?” McKay’s nearly clean-shaven scalp gleamed in the bright lights, but his brow formed a shadow over his eyes giving his face a skull-like appearance.
“Huang does not like clones, any clones.”
I had heard that Huang was antisynthetic. “Especially Liberators?” I guessed.
“As far as he knows, you’re extinct.” McKay stood up and put on his hat.
“Thanks for the warning,” I said.
“Don’t mention it, Harris,” McKay said as he started for the door. He turned back. “Klyber likes you. He’s a powerful man, and he knows what he’s doing; but just the same, don’t draw any attention to yourself.”
Klyber, Barry, and Olivera waited by the landing bay for Admiral Huang’s arrival. I noticed nothing unusual about Admiral Klyber or Captain Olivera, but Admiral Barry looked like a man headed for a firing squad. His face was pale, and beads of sweat shone on his forehead and scalp. He mopped that sweat with darting dabs, then crammed his handkerchief back in his blouse. Klyber looked at him and said something that I could not hear.
A red carpet ran the length of the floor, ending at the hatch through which Admiral Huang would arrive. My color guard stood at the other end of the carpet, holding flags representing the Army, the Marines, the Navy, the Air Force, the Unified Authority, the Scutum-Crux Arm, and the Central SC Fleet. We stood as still and intent as our human legs would allow us. The officer of the deck did not need to signal us to attention, we were already there.
A light over the hatch turned green, and the door slid open. Nearly one full minute passed before Admiral Che Huang of the Joint Chiefs of Staff stepped into sight.
Huang appeared to be in his midfifties. He stood around six feet tall, with square shoulders and a narrow waist. He had his cap tucked under his left arm. I could see white streaks through Huang’s thinning, brown hair. There was something about his neatly tailored uniform, or the tilt of his head, or the way he narrowed his eyes as he looked around the landing area, that suggested both breeding and contempt.
“Admiral Huang,” Admiral Klyber said as he led Barry and Olivera to the hatch. “I trust you had a pleasant trip.”
Huang stopped and stared down at the group of officers who had come to greet him. A thin smile played across his lips. “Admiral Klyber,” he said in a stiff voice. The two men shook hands. “Have you read my messages?”
“Admiral Barry and I have discussed them at length,” Klyber said. “I think you will be pleased with the plans we have made.”
“Splendid. I wish to get under way as soon as possible,” Huang said as he stepped away from the hatch. He looked around the hangar and his gaze seemed to lock on the color guard.
“We can start straightaway,” Klyber said with an easy air. Beside him, Vice Admiral Barry managed a tight smile, but the stiffness in his shoulders was unmistakable. All of the blood left his face. As the officers turned to leave the bay, Absalom Barry drifted back and walked several paces behind everybody else.