“How many… last night?”
“Six,” he said with a very male grin of satisfaction.
“Ozzie!” That’s it, I’m now officially a complete trollop. Can’t wait to see Cressida’s face when I tell her that. Six! She’ll be as jealous as hell.
“What do you want for breakfast?” he asked as she opened the door to the en suite bathroom.
“Orange juice, Bathsamie coffee strong, croissants with strawberry and hijune jam.”
“It’ll be ready when you are.”
***
The regrav capsule sped low over the scrub desert. Dead and desiccated bushes virtually the same colour as the crumbling jaundiced mud from which they’d grown merged to a speckled blur as Aaron looked down through the transparent fuselage. Their jumbled smear confused his visual perspective, making it difficult to tell if their altitude was one metre or a thousand. He often found himself searching for the capsule’s jet-black shadow slithering fast across the low undulations to provide a clue.
A couple of minutes before they reached the ranch, he saw a fence; posts of bleached wood sticking up in a section of desert which appeared no different to the rest of the wretched expanse. Rusty spikewire sagged between them. More fences flashed past underneath as they drew closer. The fields they marked out were smaller, closer together. Eventually the clutter of buildings which comprised the ranch itself were visible, nestling at the centre of a vast web of spikewire.
“What does he raise out here?” Corrie-Lyn asked.
“Korrimues,” Aaron said.
“I can’t see anything moving.”
“Wrong season, I think.”
She gave the vast desert a disapproving look. “There are seasons out here?”
“Oh yes. It rains every ten years.”
“Gosh, how do the ranchers stand the excitement?”
The capsule began to circle the ranch. He counted eight large outlying barn sheds, all built from an ancient ginger-coloured composite, while the house in the middle was a white stone structure surrounded by a big emerald garden. An outdoor swimming pool shimmered deep turquoise. Terrestrial horses cantered around a broad paddock.
“Okay, that actually looks rather nice,” Corrie-Lyn said grudgingly.
His field functions reported the capsule was being given a broad-spectrum scan. “Not quite paradise,” he muttered. His own passive scan was registering some dense power clumps in the ground. They were arranged in an even circle around the perimeter. A defence ring of some kind.
The capsule settled on a designated zone just outside the garden.
“Can you…” he started to say to Corrie-Lyn, then saw her disinterested expression. “Just leave the talking to me, okay?”
“Of course I will. Shall I just stay in here? Or would you like to gag me? Perhaps you’d prefer me stuffed into a suspension pod?”
“Now there’s true tempting,” he told her cheerfully, ignoring the scowl.
Paul Alkoff was leaning on the five bar gate which led to the paddock, dressed entirely in faded blue denim with a Stetson perched on his head. A tall man who was finally allowing his seven and a half centuries to show. His hair was snow white, worn long at the back but perfectly brushed. His movements were noticeably slow, as if each limb was stiff. With skin that was tanned dark brown his pale blue eyes seemed to shine out of his thin face. A neatly trimmed goatee added to his palpable air of distinction. Even Aaron recognized he was in the presence of a formidable man, he immediately began to wonder just how much living had been crammed into those seven hundred and fifty years. A great deal, if he was any judge.
“Sir, thank you for agreeing to see me.”
Corrie-Lyn shot him a surprised look at the respectful tone.
Paul gave a small smile then lifted his Stetson an inch off his hair and inclined his head to Corrie-Lyn. “Ma’am. Welcome.”
“Um, hello,” a thoroughly confused Corrie-Lyn managed.
“Don’t normally allow your kind in my home,” Paul said directly to Aaron. “So you’ll understand if I don’t ask you in and break bread with you.”
“My biononics are for combat, I’m not Higher.”
“Uh huh. Don’t suppose it makes no difference these days, son. That battle was fought a long time ago.”
“Did you win?”
“Planet’s still human, so I guess we did some good back then.”
“So you are Protectorate?”
“My old partners asked me to let you land. When I enquired, I heard they got leaned on by people high up in the movement, people we haven’t heard from in a long time. You made that happen, son, so I’d appreciate it if you don’t go all coy with me now.”
“Of course not.”
“What do you want?”
“Information.”
“Figured as much.” He turned and rested his elbows on the top of the gate. “You see Georgia out there? She’s the one with the dappled mane.”
Aaron and Corrie-Lyn walked over to the gate. “Yes, sir,” Aaron said.
“Frisky little thing, ain’t she? I can trace her blood-line right back to Arabians on Earth from the mid-nineteenth century. She’s as pure as they come. Not an artificial sequence in her whole genome; conceived naturally and born from her mother’s belly just as every one of her ancestors have been. To me, that is a thing of beauty. Sublime beauty. I do not wish to see that spoiled. No indeed, I don’t want to see her foals improved. She and her kind have the right to exist in this universe just as she was intended to by the planet that created her.”
Aaron watched the horse as she cantered around, tossing her mane. “I can understand that.”
“Can you now? And my hat.”
“Sir?”
Paul took his Stetson off, and examined it before returning it to his head. “This is the real McCoy, I’ll have you know. One of the very last to come out of Texas, over two hundred and fifty years ago in a factory that’s manufactured them for damn near a millennia, before ANA finally shut down what it regarded as an inconsequential irrelevance. The once-humans who live on that poor ole world these days don’t even make them as a hobby any more. I bought a whole batch and keep them in stasis so every time I wear one out I’ll have another a fresh one. I have only two left now. That’s a crying shame. But then I don’t expect to be around long enough to use that last one. It’ll sit right there on top of my coffin.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, sir.”
“So tell me, son, do you see what I am now?”
“Not quite, no.”
Paul fixed Aaron with a perturbingly intense stare. “If I can get all hot under the collar about the purity of a hat, just think what I’m like when human heritage is threatened with extinction.”
“Ah.”
“Yes. I’m Protectorate, and proud of it. I’ve played my part in preventing those obscene perversions from spreading their sanctimonious bullshit supremacy across these glorious stars. Higher isn’t like some old-fashioned religion or ideology. With them, fellas who hold two different beliefs can argue and cuss about such notions all night long over a bottle of whisky and laugh it off in the morning like gentlemen. But not Higher culture. I regard it as a physical virus to be exterminated. It will contaminate us and take away choice. If you are born with biononics infecting your cells, your choice is taken away from you. You will download your thoughts into ANA. That’s it. No option, no alternative. Your essence has been stolen from you before you are born. Humans, true humans, have free will. Highers do not. No indeed.”
“And the life they live between birth and download?” Corrie-Lyn asked.
“Irrelevant. They’re the same as pets, or more likely cattle, cosseted and protected by machines until the moment they’re ready to submit to their metal god in a final sacrifice.”
“So what’s the point in that god creating them?”
“Ultimately, there won’t be one. Despite the years, this is early days yet. ANA believes it is our replacement. If it is allowed free reign it will see us ext
inct.”
“A lot of species continue after their post-physical plateau,” Aaron said. “For most a singularity is a regeneration event, those that don’t go post-physical diversify and spread across new stars.”
“Yes. But no longer what they were.” Paul gazed out at Georgia again. “Unless she is protected, the universe will never see her like again. That is wrong. It cannot be allowed.”
“The radical Higher movement is almost extinct,” Aaron said. “There are no more infiltrations. ANA saw to that.”
Paul smiled thinly. “Yeah, and ain’t that an irony. Maybe the Good Lord is having a joke on his metal pretender over morals.”
“I need to ask you about your time as an active Protectorate member.”
“Go right ahead, son. I don’t know what you are, but I’m pretty sure what you’re not, and that’s the police or some version of them.”
“No, sir, I am not.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“I’m here about Inigo.”
“Ah. That was high up on my list. You two looking for him?”
“Did you know he was Higher?”
Paul’s reaction startled Aaron. The old man slapped his hand on the gate, and produced a beaming smile. “Son of a bitch! I knew it, I goddamn knew it. Hell, he was a wily one. Do you know how long we watched him?”
“So you suspected?”
“Of course we suspected.”
“That means Erik Horovi was Higher?”
“Erik? Hell no. Poor kid. He was used just like the sisters by that bastard angel.”
“Sisters? Are you talking about Inigo’s aunt?”
“You don’t know so much after all, do you, son?”
“No, sir. But I do need to learn. It is urgent.”
“Ha. Everything is urgent. The whole universe is in a hurry these days. I know it’s that way because I’m older, but damn—”
“Erik,” Aaron prompted gently.
“We’ll start with the angel. You know what they are?”
“I’ve heard of them.”
“The radical Highers wanted to convert entire worlds to their culture. They didn’t want to give people a choice about it. Like I said, if you’re born with biononics you don’t have any options in life, in what you become. So back then these angels would land on a planet and do their dirty work; starting the infection which would spread across the entire population. Now the Protectorate watched the spaceports for anyone with biononics, and kept tabs on them while they were visiting. Still do, so I gather. So the angels would land out in the wilds somewhere. They’d jump offship while it was still in low orbit, and their force fields would protect them through aerobraking.” He gave Aaron a long look. “Could you do that?”
“Yes, I suppose so. It’s just a question of formatting. But back then it would have been cutting edge.”
“Oh the bastards were that, for sure. The force fields were what earned them their name. They were shaped like wings, and brought them down to the world amid a fiery splendour. A lot of them got through unnoticed. This time, though, we got lucky; a sympathizer out fishing saw the thermal trail it left over the ocean and called it in. Me and my team tracked the monster to Kuhmo. But we weren’t quick enough. By the time we got there it had hooked up with Erik Horovi and Imelda Viatak, who were dating just like normal kids. Now the thing with angels is they’re hermaphroditic, and they’re beautiful. I mean really beautiful. This one was exceptional even by their standards, either a pretty boy or a real humdinger of a girl depending on your own gender. It was what you wanted it to be. So it made friends with Erik and Imelda and went to bed with both of them. Erik first. Now that’s important. Its organs injected his sperm with biononics. Then it lay with Imelda and impregnated her with Erik’s altered sperm.”
“Contraception?” Aaron queried.
“No use. Angels can neutralize it faster than any medic. So the kids find they’re having a baby, and the DNA test proves it’s theirs no question. Biononics are hellishly difficult to detect in an embryo even today. Back then it was near impossible. So, bang, you’ve got a challenging in the nest without ever knowing it. Biononics don’t come active until puberty, so by then it’s too late. Plant enough of them in a population, and a few generations later most of the births are Higher. But we intercepted this little love triangle in time.”
“The college art block,” Corrie-Lyn said.
“Yes, ma’am. You might say the angel put up something of a fight. But we got it. All you really need to defeat biononics is a heavier level of firepower. The art block got in the way.”
“What about the baby?”
“We took Erik and Imelda back to our field headquarters. She was pregnant, about two weeks gone as I recall, and it was infected.”
“I thought you couldn’t tell.”
Paul looked straight ahead at the horizon. “There are ways you can find out. You have to test the cells directly.”
“Oh, Ozzie,” Corrie-Lyn breathed, her face had paled.
“We took it out of her and checked. No kind of embryo can survive that kind of test. Fortunately we were right this time, it was one of them.”
“You’re not human, no matter what you claim.”
Aaron gave her a furious look. She started to say something then threw her hands up in disgust and walked away.
“Sorry about that,” Aaron said. “What happened?”
“Standard procedure in cases when the girl knows she’s pregnant, which Imelda did. We can’t wipe weeks from their memories, that would be detectable. So we took another ova from her and fertilized it with Erik’s contribution, and implanted. Then they both got a memory wipe for the evening they spent with us. Next morning they wake up with a bad hangover, and can’t remember what they did. Typical teenage morning after.”
“Did it go wrong, then?”
“No, son, everything worked perfectly. Nine months later they had a lovely little girl. A normal one.”
“So how was Inigo conceived?”
“Imelda had a sister.”
“Sabine.”
“Yes. They were twins. Identical twins.”
“Ah. I think this is starting to make sense.”
“I should have realized. It’s every teenage boy’s ultimate fantasy; plenty of men, too.”
“He slept with both of them.”
“Yes. Him and the angel. You just confirmed that for me. Finally. Part of the Protectorate’s whole clean-up procedure is to review the angel’s memories, to find out who it has contaminated. Hacking into its brain is a terrible, terrible thing, one of the greatest abuses of medical technology possible. It takes days to break the protection which biononics provide for the neurones. I used to do it for the team, may God forgive me, but it was necessary. There’s no other way of discovering what those devil-spawned monsters have been up to. It’s not an exact science, now or then. Minds are not tidy little repositories like a memory kube. I had to merge my mind with its and endure its vile slippery thoughts inside my own skull. When I reviewed its recent memories I actually experienced coupling with Imelda.” He closed his eyes, clearly pained by the fraudulent memory. “Her face was inches from me. She tasted so… sweet. But, now, I don’t suppose it was all her. Rather, the memories weren’t just of her. I couldn’t tell the difference between the girls. Damnit, at the time I didn’t know there was a difference I should be searching for.”
“So Inigo was born as part of a radical Higher infiltration plan.”
“Yes. We were shocked when we found out Sabine was pregnant, but that was just before she was due. There were a lot of arguments within my team about what we should do.”
“Snatch the baby and test it.”
“That was one option. The mild one.” Paul looked over at Corrie-Lyn who was sitting on a low concrete wall outside one of the barns. “But intervention becomes progressively difficult as time winds away, especially once the child is born. We’re not… There’s a difference between abortion and infanticide—to
me, anyway. And once it was born it has a legal right of residency. Even if we took it away from the mother and shipped it back to the Central Worlds, they’d just send it right back. Legally, it’s a mess. Which is why the Protectorate was formed, to stop the whole nightmare scenario before it gets politically complicated.”
“So what did you do?”
“I never really believed the girls having a kid two weeks apart was coincidence. In the event, we settled for observation. If Inigo was infected he’d give himself away eventually, they all do.”
“But he didn’t.”
“No. We monitored him off and on for over twenty-five years. He never put a foot wrong. He was a straight down the line normal human. School. University. Girlfriends. Not exceptionally sporting. Got injured when he played football. Had to get a job. Kept out of local politics. Signed up with a rejuve finance company. When he took aerosols he got high. Took a boring academic position in the state university cosmology department. There was nothing to indicate he had biononics. Right up until you arrived today I’d still have said he most probably didn’t. I had come to accept that his birth maybe was coincidence after all. Believe me, son, if we’d confirmed it when he reached legal age we would have made a quiet ultimatum.”
“Leave or die.”
“Yes. There’s no other way you can treat them?”
“Then he did leave, didn’t he? All the way to Centurion Station.”
“Yes. And what a goddamned pitiful mess that’s turned into. Half the aliens in the galaxy want to shoot us out of space. Who can blame them.”
“It’s only the Ocisen Empire.”
“You mean they’re the only ones who have declared themselves. Don’t tell me you think the others are just going to sit back and let us wreck the very stars themselves.”
“Who knows? If I can find him maybe we can put a stop to the whole Pilgrimage.”
“I should have killed him in the womb when I had the chance.”
“Whatever he is, he’s not Higher.”
“He might not be polluted with their culture, yet, but it will come to him eventually.”
“Apparently not. He found an alternative to a route you believed was set in stone. His destiny is inside the Void, not with ANA.”