“Stanley,” I said. “Don’t do it. You got to fight this, and stay yourself.”
The pain in my head was worse now. I reached up and felt wetness there. When I looked at my fingers’ tips, they was red. I guess that drone had not missed me after all, but touched me with its hot light as it went past. Cup was looking at me, and her face was pale. I guess the blood was running down my face somewhat.
Stanley sighed, like answering me was a wearisome thing. “He is myself, you idiot.”
Cup moved towards the drone. She didn’t shift her feet but only leaned forward, bringing her knife hand very slowly around. The drone turned fast to track her and its light flashed quick, settling on the top of her leg like Stanley bid it.
“I really wouldn’t,” Stanley said with a nasty laugh.
I tried one more time. “What are the things you love?” I asked him, and I felt my chest almost squeeze shut as I thought of Monono. “On the ship, here. The things you done in this life that you love, and remember.”
He didn’t say nothing to that, but a look of deep thought come over his face. I would of said more, trying to bring him back to himself – or rather to the part of himself that wasn’t wicked and old – but just then we heard heavy footsteps coming.
Lorraine Banner walked down the row of glass coffins until she got to where we was. Her arms was swinging at her sides and her scowling face was still as a mask. She changed when she got to Stanley though. She hugged him tight, kissing his face and the top of his head, and told him how proud she was that he was the one to catch us after we got out of our cupboard. She didn’t ask how we got out in the first place.
Then she turned to us, and her face was cold. “Ursala swears she needs you to help with the operation,” she said. “She claims you’ve helped her before. I think that’s a lie, but it’s a clever lie. We can’t afford for this work to fail – and therefore you all get the benefit of the doubt. For now. As soon as the job is done, we’ll speed you on your way.”
“We know where you’re going to speed us,” Cup said. “We’re not stupid.”
Lorraine didn’t bother to answer.
37
Ursala was hard at work and barely looked round as we come into the lab. Paul’s drone was there, and so was Paul his own self, watching her with arms folded and a stern look on his face. The other drone, from down in the room of the glass coffins, come in right behind us and took up a place next to the door.
“Ah,” Ursala said. “Good.” She give my bloody face one hard look, but didn’t say nothing about it. She pointed at the bench. “There’s some disinfectant gel there. Get yourselves ready and we’ll make a start.”
It had been four days since I was in the lab. A lot of the loose bits of tech that used to be on the bench was gone. The dagnostic was sitting there by itself now.
“Do you need Stanley to undress?” Lorraine asked as Cup and me rubbed the cold jelly on our hands. We had done it before at Many Fishes, this scrubbing up, and we remembered how it was supposed to go.
“Not yet,” Ursala said. “Now that my assistants are here, I’d like to carry out some test procedures, ideally without you breathing down our necks.”
Lorraine looked to Paul, who didn’t do nothing but shrug. Then she went right up to Ursala and put a hand on her arm. Ursala went stiff. It seemed to me like Lorraine knowed full well that Ursala misliked being touched, and only done it on that account. “You told us you’d installed the gene splicer and checked it,” she said. “You assured us it was functional. Were you lying to us?”
“No.” Ursala stood her ground and didn’t try to pull free from Lorraine. Her voice was tight, but nothing showed on her face. “It ought to work. I checked every component separately before I installed it. Then I checked the data-flow of the finished unit at every transfer point. Twice. Now I need to do a non-invasive dry run, with Cup and Koli’s help, and then I need to make sure the logical interface is running at a hundred per cent efficiency. Obviously we’ll also run a full battery of tests on the splicer itself and the data buffers. Your equipment hasn’t been used in decades. And it’s never been used as a component in this particular assembly.”
Lorraine said nothing, but there was fierce anger in her look. Ursala give her back the same stare, and didn’t blink. “Do you seriously want me to use the splicer on your son without making absolutely certain it will do what it’s meant to? We’re talking about Stanley’s DNA, which is encoded in every single cell of his body. If the unit’s badly calibrated, or there’s a sequencing malfunction, it’s quite likely he’d be dead before we hit the off-switch.”
“That sounds like obfuscation,” Lorraine said. “My understanding is that the loom would issue a warning before carrying out a dangerous edit.”
“That’s true, and completely irrelevant. The human body has about forty trillion cells. So we’re contemplating forty trillion separate acts of molecular breaking and entering. And after each one, we need to make good the damage and get out clean. One atomic valence more or less and you won’t have a son when I’ve finished. Just eighty kilos of random chemicals.”
There was some silence while Lorraine thought about this. “All right,” she said at last. “Do what you need to. But don’t draw this out indefinitely. Our patience has a limit, and you’re already very close to exhausting it. After that, things will take their course. That’s likely to be unpleasant for all of us.”
I hand-talked with Ursala in Franker as we worked, and Cup set herself to be our shield, blocking Paul and Lorraine’s line of sight ever and again. Meanwhile, Ursala did the best job she could of making it look like all three of us was working together. She’d tell us to activate such-and-such, or check on this-and-that, and we would touch an edge or a corner of the dagnostic and say “It looks good” or “Nothing wrong here”. The sole and single point of all of this was to give us time to talk.
You’re hurt, Ursala said.
A little, I told her. Not much. Are all these tests needful?
Not in the slightest. But something has got these two very agitated. I thought you might be able to tell me what it was.
The boy’s a copy, like we said he was, I said – not having a sign for Stanley, or for clone. They made him to be like that dead man we talked about. And they give him that dead man’s memories. They want him to be like the dead man on the inside as well as out. And they done it before. There’s a room down at the bottom of the ship that’s full of dead… I flicked my thumb, with my hand down by my side, in Stanley’s direction. He was sitting on a chair that Paul had brung into the room, all folded in on himself and quiet. Paul stood on one side of him and Lorraine on the other, each of them with a hand on his shoulder like they didn’t want him to forget who it was he belonged to.
Dead what? Ursala said.
Boys. Like him. Just exactly like him. He said they was tested and they failed. He didn’t say what the test was, but I was thinking maybe it’s his… I didn’t have a word for genes either. Or any real idea what they was, except that they was inside you and made you be you and not something else. I made the sign for seeds, then the sign for inside.