Ursala frowned in thought.
They was attacked, I said. That’s why everything is half-melted and fallen down. After the attack, they found all their seeds was gone bad.
“Calibrate the sampler, Cup,” Ursala said. “Here, look. Right here.” She moved Cup from where she was, a little to the left. I think she seen Lorraine’s eyes on us, and put Cup in a better position to hide our hands from her as we talked.
So, she said, something depends on the living boy being a perfect copy of the dead man.
There’s something else besides. We went into the bottom of the boat and found tech there. Weapons of old times, more than we could count. And the boat has turned around. It’s going back to land.
It’s hard to see what that’s got to do with the boy.
I think it does though. Can you stop it? Pretend to change him and not do it?
Ursala turned her hands up in a kind of a shrug. It wasn’t a Franker sign, but I knowed what she meant. No. Yes. Maybe. They’re very clear about what they want. If I do the work badly, or leave it unfinished, I imagine they’ll have a way of knowing.
Ursala frowned, leaning down to check that some one thing was joined up to some other thing. When she come up again, she had a look on her face I wasn’t used to see there – a look like fright and puzzlement mixed together.
I suppose one way to stop it would be to kill the boy, she signed.
You can’t do that, I told her quickly. He’s been trying to help us. He’s got the dead man inside of him and can’t shake him out. We got to think of some other way.
Cup touched my sleeve.
I’m not sure I could have done it in any case, Ursala signed.
Cup punched my arm.
We got to do something though. Maybe if we run at Paul real quick, we can…
“Koli,” Cup said. I seen where she was looking, and turned. The drone had come down off the ceiling and now was hanging just off to one side of us, on a level with our eyes. We had our backs turned to Paul and Lorraine, but the drone’s red eye was looking straight at us.
Paul’s left hand fell on my neck. His right went to Ursala’s shoulder. From the gasp she give, he gripped her as tight as he did me. He bowed his head down in between us and give a kind of a growl like a dog that’s on watch and has smelled someone it doesn’t know. “It appears you can’t be trusted even when you’re directly under our eye,” he said. “Playing at codes and conspiracies, is it? Are you spies after all? Should we abandon this pretence and simply hang you?”
“We were talking with our hands,” Ursala said. “It’s a habit we fall into naturally when we’re working.”
Paul squeezed us a little tighter. “Is it now? That seems a little perverse, when your hands are actually required for the work. That’s why human beings learned to vocalise in the first place, isn’t it? But perhaps you people are de-evolving. Rolling back down the slope that took our species so long to climb.”
He pushed us down until our heads was laying on the table. Knowing how strong he was, I didn’t struggle or push back against him. I think I just would of hurt myself in trying. He only pressed lightly at first, but then harder and harder yet until I was scared he meant to put our heads through the table or break our skulls open against it.
“No more time-wasting,” he said. “Start the procedure now. If any problems arise, explain what they are and talk us through them as you address them. With real words, I mean. Not animal gesturing and capering. Do you understand me?”
“Yes,” Ursala said. “Perfectly.” I marvelled at how steady her voice was. My heart was hammering inside me. I thought the time must of come at last for me to die. And if it wasn’t now then it could not be long. Paul and Lorraine wouldn’t have no use for us once we was done. Whatever they said, I believed they would kill us like Stanley said in his message.
You might expect such thoughts would cast me down and make me weak, but it was not that way at all. Monono was already gone, and it felt like more than half of me had gone along with her. If I was going to die, then that was that. But I decided I would find some way before I was done to pay Paul and Lorraine out for what they done to her. They might be as strong as giants, with drones that come and went at their command, but they didn’t know everything. And they was so sure in their strength. Maybe thinking they didn’t have no weakness was a weakness in its own self. I didn’t have no plan to speak of, but a chance might yet come.
You might wonder how much of this thinking was me, and how much was Stannabanna. I can’t tell you. I seen the little shells called barnicles when I was at Many Fishes, clinging tight to the wooden piles of a jetty so there wasn’t no way to break them off. Stannabanna was clinging to my mind in just that way, and my anger drawed him more than anything else. It was like that recursion, when I remembered him remembering his own rememberings. He swallowed down my rage and spit it back stronger.
“And you,” Paul said, squeezing my neck a little tighter. “Do you understand?”
“I do, Paul,” I said, real quiet.
“I do too,” Cup said. “In case you was going to ask.”
Paul took his hands off us at last, letting us stand up straight again – as far as our aching muscles would take us. He looked at Cup as if she was something that had been flushed out of a gutter pipe. “As far as I could tell, you weren’t a party to this conspiracy.”
“No,” Cup said. “I can talk with my hands though.” She made a sign that wasn’t in Franker, and that everyone knows the meaning of.
Paul’s mouth went into a thin line. “You assume you won’t be punished for that,” he said.
“I assume it won’t make no dead-god-damned difference.”
“Let’s waste no more time,” Lorraine said loudly, coming in between us all. She looked sidelong at the drone. Without her even telling it to, it went back up to the corner where it had been floating before. “Do the work,” she said to Ursala. “There won’t be any further warnings. If you try to trick us or disobey us, the boy will die first. Then the other one, whatever name it chooses to give itself. And the end result will still be the same.”
Ursala rubbed her shoulder. Paul’s hand had left bruises there that was already showing blue and black against her brown skin. “Very well. You should know though that gene-splicing on this scale is a complicated procedure. It carries risks.”
“The risks don’t concern us,” Paul said. “We have back-ups if Stanley dies. Just do what you’re told.”
Ursala kept on talking to Lorraine. “In most cases, you’d only edit an adult’s DNA to remove the risk of passing on an inherited condition. So you’d be swapping out a single allele. The transmembrane conductance regulator, say, for cystic fibrosis, or the FMR1 gene for fragile X syndrome. You’re asking me to edit more than seven hundred gene loci at once. And you’re asking me to do it on his whole body, not just on his gametes.”
“So?”
“So the interference with normal cellular function will be more extreme. It might be painful. It might be very painful.”
Lorraine lifted up one eyebrow but not the other. “We bear what we’re given to bear. A pain endured for Albion is no pain at all, but a joy. Stanley knows what this is for, and why it’s not merely necessary but welcome.”