Torch of Freedom

  It was the contrast between the barren unhappiness of Simões' current existence and his own family's closeness, he realized yet again. That comforting, always welcoming, nurturing love. Looking at his parents, seeing how after all these years their children were still their children. Adults, yes, and to be treated as such, but still their beloved sons and daughters, to be worried about and treasured. To be (although he suspected his mother would be more comfortable with the verb than his father) celebrated for who and what they were.

  For who and what had been taken away from Simões.

  He'd tried—and failed, he knew—to imagine what that had truly felt like. The pain of that loss . . .

  He shook his head under the pounding water, eyes closed. Just from the purely selfish perspective of what had been stolen from Simões' own life, the anguish must be incredible. But he'd spoken with Simões several times now. He knew that part of the hyper-physicist's anger, his rage, really was the product of his sense that he'd been betrayed. That something unspeakably precious had been ripped away from him.

  Yet those same conversations had made it clear to Jack that far more than his own loss, it was the entire lifetime which had been stolen from his daughter that was truly tearing the man apart. He'd seen the promise in his Francesca which Thomas and Christina McBryde had seen realized in their JoAnne, their Jack and Zachariah and Arianne. He'd known what that child could have grown up to be and become, all of the living and loving and accomplishments which could have been hers in the four or five centuries which the combination of prolong and her genome would have given her. And he knew every one of those loves, every one of those accomplishments, had died stillborn when the Long-Range Planning Board administered the lethal injection to his daughter.

  That's what it really comes down to, isn't it, Jack? he admitted to the shower spray and the privacy of his own mind. To the LRPB, Francesca Simões, ultimately, was just one more project. One more strand in the master plan. And what does a weaver do when he comes across a defective thread? He snips it, that's what he does. He snips it, he discards it, and he goes on with the work.

  But she wasn't a thread. Not to Herlander. She was his daughter. His little girl. The child who learned to walk holding onto his hand. Who learned to read, listening to him read her bedtime stories. Who learned to laugh listening to his jokes. The person he loved more than he could ever have loved himself. And he couldn't even fight for her life, because the Board wouldn't let him. It wasn't his decision—it was the Board's decision, and it made it.

  He drew a deep, shuddering breath, and shook himself.

  You're letting your sympathy take you places you shouldn't go, Jack, he told himself. Of course you feel sorry for him—my God, how could you not feel sorry for him?—but there's a reason the system is set up the way it's set up. Someone has to make the hard decisions, and would it really be kinder to leave them up to someone whose love is going to make them even harder? Who's going to have to live with the consequences of his own actions and decisions—not someone else's—for the rest of his life?

  He grimaced as he recalled the memo from Martina Fabre which had been part of Simões' master file. The one which had denied Simões' offer—his plea—to be allowed to assume responsibility for Francesca. To provide the care needed to keep her alive, to keep private physicians working with her, out of his own pocket. He'd been fully aware of the kinds of expenses he was talking about—the LRPB had made them abundantly clear to him when it enumerated all of the resources which would be "unprofitably invested" in her long-term care and treatment—and he hadn't cared. Not only that, he'd demonstrated, with all the precision he brought to his scientific work, that he could have satisfied those expenses. It wouldn't have been easy, and it would have consumed his life, but he could have done it.

  Except for the fact that the decision wasn't his, and, as Dr. Fabre had put it, the Board was "unwilling to allow Dr. Simões to destroy his own life in the futile pursuit of a chimerical cure for a child who was recognized as a high-risk project from the very beginning. It would be the height of irresponsibility for us to permit him to invest so much of the remainder of his own life in a tragedy the Board created when it asked the Simõeses to assist us in this effort."

  He turned off the shower, stepped out of the stall, and began drying himself with the warm, deep-pile towels, but his brain wouldn't turn off as easily as the water had. He pulled on a pair of pajama bottoms—he hadn't worn the tops since he was fifteen—and found himself drifting in an unaccustomed direction for this late at night.

  He opened the liquor cabinet, dropped a couple of ice cubes into a glass, poured a hefty shot of blended whiskey over the ice, and swirled it gently for a second. Then he raised the glass and closed his eyes as the thick, rich fire burned down his throat.

  It didn't help. Two faces floated stubbornly before him—a sandy-haired, hazel-eyed man's, and a far smaller one with brown hair, brown eyes, and a huge smile.

  This is stupid, he thought. I can't change any of it, and neither can Herlander. Not only that, I know perfectly well that all that pain is just eating away at him, adding itself to the anger. The man's turning into some kind of time bomb, and there's not a damned thing I can do about it. He's going to snap—it's only a matter of time—and I was wrong when I downplayed his probable reactions to Bardasano. The break is coming, and when it gets here, he's going to be so damned angry—and so unconcerned about whatever else might happen to him—that he's going to do something really, really foolish. I don't know what, but I've come to know him well enough to know that much. And it's my job to keep him from doing that.

  It was bizarre. He was the man charged with keeping Simões together, keeping him working—effectively working—on his critical research projects. And with seeing to it that if the time ever came that Simões self-destructed, he didn't damage those projects. And yet, despite that, what he felt was not the urgent need to protect the Alignment's crucial interests, but to somehow help the man he was supposed to be protecting them from. To find some way to prevent him from destroying himself.

  To find some way to heal at least some of the hurt which had been inflicted upon him.

  Jack McBryde raised his glass to take another sip of whiskey, then froze as that last thought went through his mind.

  Inflicted, he thought. Inflicted on him. That's what you're really thinking, isn't it, Jack? Not that it's just one of those terrible things that sometimes happens, but that it didn't have to happen.

  Something icy seemed to trickle through his veins as he realized what he'd just allowed himself to admit to himself. The trained security professional in him recognized the danger of allowing himself to think anything of the sort, but the human being in him—the part of him that was Christina and Thomas McBryde's son—couldn't stop thinking it.

  It wasn't the first time his thoughts had strayed in that direction, he realized slowly as he recalled past doubts about the wisdom of the Long-Range Planning Board's master plan, its drive to master the intricacies, shape the best instruments for the attainment of humanity's destiny.

  Where did we change course? he wondered. When did we shift from the maximizing of every individual into producing neat little bricks for a carefully designed edifice? What would Leonard Detweiler think if he were here today, looking at the Board's decisions? Would he have thrown away a little girl whose father loved her so desperately? Would he have rejected Herlander's offer to shoulder the full financial burden of caring for her? And, if he would have, what does that say about where we've been from the very beginning?

  He thought about Fabre's memo again, about the thoughts and attitudes behind it. He never doubted that Fabre had been completely sincere, that she'd truly been attempting to protect Simões from the consequences of his own mad, quixotic effort to reverse the irreversible. But hadn't that been Simões' decision? Hadn't he had the right to at least fight for his daughter's life? To choose to destroy himself, if that was what it came to, in an effort to save someon
e he loved that much?

  Is this really what we're all about? About having the Board make those decisions for all of us in its infinite wisdom? What happens if it decides it doesn't need any random variations any more? What happens if the only children it permits are the ones which have been specifically designed for its star genomes?

  He took another, deeper sip of whiskey, and his fingers tightened around the glass.

  Hypocrite, he thought. You're a fucking hypocrite, Jack. You've known—known for forty years—that that's exactly what the Board has in mind for all those "normals" out there. Of course, you didn't think about it that way, did you? No, you thought about how much good it was going to do. How their children, and their grandchildren and their great-grandchildren would thank you for allowing them to share in the benefits of the systematic improvement of the species. Sure, you knew a lot of people would be unhappy, that they wouldn't voluntarily surrender their children's futures to someone else, but that was stupid of them, wasn't it? It was only because they'd been brainwashed by those bastards on Beowulf. Because they were automatically prejudiced against anything carrying the "genie" stigma. Because they were ignorant, unthinking normals, not an alpha line like you.

  But now—now that you see it happening to someone else who's also an alpha line. When you see it happening to Herlander, and you realize it could have happened to your parents, or to your brother, or your sisters . . . or some day to you. Now you suddenly discover you have doubts.

  He dragged in a deep, shuddering breath and wondered how the warmth and love and caring of his family could have crystallized this dark, barren night of the soul for him.

  It's only fatigue—emotional and physical fatigue, he told himself, but he didn't believe it. He knew it went deeper and farther than that. Just as he knew that anyone who found himself suddenly experiencing the doubts he was experiencing, asking the questions he found himself asking, should immediately seek counseling.

  Just as he knew he wasn't going to do anything of the sort.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  In the event, the weeks that Brice Miller and his friends spent fretting over their upcoming encounter with the notorious Jeremy X proved to be pointless. When they were finally introduced to the feared and ferocious terrorist, after they arrived on Torch, it turned out that the reality bore no resemblance to the legends.

  To begin with, he was not two hundred and twenty centimeters tall, nor was his physique that of an ogre. Quite the opposite, to Brice's surprise and relief. The former head of the Audubon Ballroom and current Secretary of War for Torch was no more than a hundred and sixty-five centimeters in height, and his build was wiry and slender rather than massive.

  He seemed quite a cheerful fellow, too. Even puckish, you might say—at least if, like Brice, you had just recently encountered the term and been taken by it, but hadn't yet read enough literature to realize that "puckish" was by no means the same thing as "harmless."

  Jeremy X didn't scowl, either. Not once. Not even after Hugh Arai—far more bluntly and precisely than he needed to, in Brice's opinion—explained the manner in which Brice's clan had stayed alive on Parmley station, for the past half century.

  Unfortunately, while Jeremy X didn't scowl, someone else in Queen Berry's audience chamber—that was what they called it, anyway, although Brice thought it looked more like a big office with no desk and not very many chairs—most certainly did scowl. And she made up for everything Jeremy lacked, and then some.

  Thandi Palane was her name. It turned out she was the commander of Torch's entire military. Brice had been surprised to hear that. If anyone had asked him to guess at the woman's occupation, he would have said either professional wrestler or enforcer for criminal enterprises. Uniform be damned. That woman was just plain scary. Even without the scowl.

  Thankfully, the queen of Torch herself didn't seem to share her military commander's attitude. In fact, she seemed very friendly. And after a few minutes, Brice realized that Palane's scowl wasn't directed at him anyway. She was apparently just scowling at the general state of the universe, moral failings thereof.

  By then, though, Brice had stopped caring what Palane thought or didn't think. In fact, he'd become almost completely oblivious to her existence—and even the existence of Jeremy X. That was because it hadn't taken more than five minutes in the presence of the queen of Torch before Brice had developed an infatuation for the young woman. A really, really powerful infatuation, the sort that drives all other thoughts from a teenage boy's brain like a steam cleaner scours all surfaces.

  Also a really, really, really stupid infatuation, even by the standards of fourteen-year-old adolescent males. Brice wasn't so far gone that he didn't realize that, at least in some part of his brain. Big deal. He was providing neurologists with the most graphic evidence probably ever uncovered that the brains of adolescents—male adolescents, for sure—were not fully developed when it came to those portions that evaluated risks.

  From the slack-jawed look on their faces, he was sure that his cousins Ed Hartman and James Lewis had been struck down by the same infatuation. And, alas—unlike Brice, who still had a few functioning neurons in his cortex—were now completely ruled by their limbic systems. You might as well have called them Amygdalum and Amygdalee. He could only hope they didn't do anything really foolish. Too much too hope, of course, that they wouldn't drool.

  It was odd. Brice was already self-analytical enough to realize that his points of attraction when it came to girls were . . .

  Being honest, not probably all that mature. Good looks came first, put it that way. And, prior to this very moment, he would have sworn that for his cousins Ed and James, good looks came first, last, and everything in between.

  Yet the truth was that Queen Berry wasn't actually pretty. She certainly wasn't ugly, either, but about the best you could say for her thin face was that everything was in the right place, nothing was deformed, and her complexion was good in pale sort of way. She had nicely colored eyes, for sure. They were her best facial feature. A vivid blue that contrasted well with her long, straight dark hair.

  True, also, that her slender figure—quite evident, in the casual clothing she chose to wear, even sitting on her throne (which was really just a big, comfortable-looking chair)—was unmistakably female. Still. Various secondary sexual characteristics that normally loomed large in Brice's assessment of female attractiveness and from what he could tell completely dominated that of his friends—big breasts, to name one—were markedly absent here.

  So why was he smitten? What was it about the young queen's open and friendly countenance that seemed somehow dazzling? What was it about her certainly-healthy-but-that's-about-it figure that was producing hormonal reactions way more powerful than any he'd ever experienced gazing upon the voluptuous figure of Cousin Jennifer?

  Part of the explanation was simply that Berry Zilwicki was the first unknown young woman that Brice Miller had ever encountered, aside from brief views of slaves being transported or the slavers overseeing the process, some of whom were also female. One of the many drawbacks of being raised as he had, part of a small clan of people very isolated from the rest of the human race, was that by the time boys reached puberty, they already knew every girl around. And vice versa, for the girls. There were no mysteries, no unknowns. True, the fact that some girls—for Brice, it has been Jennifer Foley—had suddenly developed in such a way as to stimulate new and primitive reactions from the opposite sex (or, sometimes, the same sex—Ganny's clan wasn't at all prudish or narrow-minded about such things) helped a bit. Still, while Cousin Jennifer's ability to stir up fantasies in Brice's mind was new, the cousin herself most certainly was not. He still carried a small scar on his elbow from the time she'd struck him there with a handy tool, in retaliation for his theft of one of her toys. And she was still holding something of a grudge for the theft itself.

  They'd been seven years old, at the time.

  The queen of Torch, on the other hand, was really
new. Brice didn't know anything at all about her, except for the bare facts that she was several years older than he was—irrelevant, at the moment—and commanded legions of armed and dangerous soldiers. Also irrelevant, at the moment. Everything else was unknown. That, combined with her friendly demeanor, opened the floodgates of fourteen-year-old sexual fantasies in a way that Brice had never encountered and against which he had few defenses.

  But there was more involved. Dimly, Brice Miller was beginning to grasp that sex was a lot more complicated than it looked. He was even verging on the Great Truth that most men were quite happy even when the Significant Other in their life was not especially good-looking. So perhaps Brice was not destined for a life of chastity after all. Given that his heretofore stratospheric standards seemed to be crumbling by the minute.

  "—the matter with you, Brice? And the two of you also, Ed and James. It's a simple enough question."

  The genuine irritation in Ganny El's tone of voice finally penetrated the hormonal fog.

  Brice jerked. What question?

  Thankfully, James played the fool, so Brice didn't have to. "Uh . . . what question, Ganny? I didn't hear it."

  "Have you suddenly gone deaf?" Butry pointed at one of the men standing not far from the queen. He was on the short side, and so wide-bodied he looked a little deformed. "Mr. Zilwicki wants to know if you'd be willing to spend a few months—"

  Zilwicki cleared his throat. "Might be as long as a year, Ms. Butry."

  "Twelve counts as a 'few,' when you're my age, young man. To get back to the point, James—and you too, Ed and Brice—Mr. Zilwicki has a job for you." She gave Zilwicki a beady stare. " 'Somewhat' dangerous, he says. A word to the wise, youngsters. This is one of those situations where the phrase 'somewhat dangerous' is a lot closer to 'a little bit pregnant' than it is to . . . oh, let's say the version of 'somewhat dangerous' that a conscientious playground attendant says to a mother when her child is heading for the seesaw."