Sindri pressed a button on the remote-control unit with a stabbing motion. The image on the stage froze, and the monotonous lecture stopped. In an intense tone, he said, “You understand now.”
“Understand what?” Brigid demanded. “That you and your people were genetically engineered? We pretty much figured out that much.”
“But the banal perfidy of it all!” Sindri’s voice hit a high note of fury. He pointed to the stage. “The way that presentation is worded, an uninitiated dolt would think the type of bioengineering discussed was far in the future, just a whim to look into when nothing more urgent was pressing. In truth, when the documentary was made, the first generation of transadapts had been born over five years before.”
Grant sighed. “Your point being?”
“My point, Mr. Grant, is that generations of human beings had their birthrights denied, born into government-sanctioned, -funded and -institutionalized slavery. Mr. Kane, remember what I said to you about the Cy-donia Compound’s long tradition of abduction? The raw genetic material used to create the first generation of transadapts was provided by people taken forcibly, against their will, from Earth. Victims, not volunteers! Can’t you grasp the monstrous injustice of it all?”
“Hell, yes,” snapped Kane. “Of course we can. Things haven’t changed all that much on Earth.”
Sindri’s eyebrows quirked. “Yes, so I learned.”
Kane noticed how Brigid’s hands suddenly clenched into fists.
“But what might be very different,” Sindri went on, “is that the transadapts were the majority in this micro-cosmic society. They built most of the compound, mined the ores, tilled the fields, maintained the machines. They were the serfs and vassals to a tiny number of royal humanstheir royalty bestowed upon them simply by dint of the fact that their antecedents weren’t abducted to provide the templates for the trans-adapt program.
“Eventually, over a period of decades, the trans-adapts outnumbered them three to one. By the end of 180 years, their population continued to grow, while that of the humans dwindled.”
“So far,” commented Grant dryly, “this has a familiar ring.”
Sindri ignored him. “The transadapts were bred to be the Cydonia Compound’s manual labor, its dray animals, its mules, living their lives doing nothing more than slouching through the red dust of Mars. They did not question their place in the scheme of things. They obeyed and did what was expected of them.
“But the humans here feared their growing numbers. They already had instituted a form of apartheid, segregating the transadapts into their own habitats. But due to several factors, only a couple of them environmental, the men had become sterile, the women barren. They couldn’t stand the thought of perishing while the subhuman transadapts inherited this planet.
“So, using a medical treatment disguised as necessary vaccinations, they made the transadapts as barren as themselves. It was nothing less than the perpetration of slow-motion genocide. Inasmuch as the transadapts were engineered to have far shorter life spans than human beingsvery few live past thirty years of ageit was conceivable that they could all be dead within a single generation.”
” They ,” Brigid argued testily. “You’ve called the transadapts ‘my people,’ yet you refer to them as they . Which is it?”
The corners of Sindri’s mobile mouth turned down.
“I was supposed to be a transadapt. But I was born a mutation, with far more Earth-human characteristics. It happens occasionally.”
Brigid inspected Sindri silently, glanced over at the trolls sitting behind them, then back to Sindri. “No mere accident of birth can account for the differences between you and them.”
Sindri smiled bleakly. “You’re quite correct, Miss Brigid. My father was a human who took a transadapt woman as a lover. Truly a horrific case of miscegenation, at least as far as my father’s peers were concerned. You can imagine the reactions when I was born.”
“What happened to your mother?” Kane asked.
“She died shortly after giving birth to me. I never knew her.”
“And your father?”
“He was shunned, ostracized, exiled from the Cy-donia Compound. In a twist of irony that cheap fiction loves so much, only the fact of his exile saved him from death when the revolt occurred.”
No one spoke. Sindri looked at them expectantly.