I might not get another chance, she thought. I must tell him.
Bobby. I saw David. Had news. About you.
His signing now was slower, hesitant. Me what me ?
Your family … I can’t do it, she thought. Ask Hiram, she signed back, feeling bitter.
Asking you.
Birth. Your birth.
Asking you. Asking you.
Kate took a deep breath.
Not what you believe. Think it through. Hiram wanted dynasty. David big disappointment, out of control. Mother a big inconvenience. So, have boy without mother.
Don’t understand. I have mother. Heather mother.
She hesitated. No she isn’t. Bobby, you’re a clone.
David settled back and fixed the cold metal Mind’sEye hoop over his head. As he sank into virtual reality the world turned dark and silent, and for a brief moment he had no sense of his own body, couldn’t even feel Mary’s soft, warm hand wrapped around his own.
Then, all around them, the stars came out. Mary gasped and grabbed at his arm.
He was suspended in a three-dimensional diorama of stars, stars spread over a velvet black sky, stars more crowded than the darkest desert night-and yet there was structure, he saw slowly. A great river of light- stars crammed so close they merged into glowing, pale clouds-ran around the equator of the sky. It was the Milky Way, of course: the great disc of stars in which he was still embedded.
He glanced down. Here was his body, familiar and comfortable, clearly visible in the complex, multiply sourced light that fell on him. But he was floating in the starlight without enclosure or support.
Mary drifted beside him, still holding on to his arm. Her touch was comforting. Odd, he thought. We can cast our minds more than two thousand light years from Earth, and yet we must still grasp at each other, our primate heritage never far from the doors of our souls.
This alien sky was populated.
There was a sun, planet and moon here, suspended around him, like the trinity of bodies that had always dominated the human environment. But it was a strange enough sun-in fact, not a single star like Earth’s sun, but a binary.
The principal was an orange giant, dim and cool. Centered on a glowing yellow core, it was a mass of orange gas, growing steadily more tenuous. There was much detail in that sullen disc: a tracery of yellow-white light that danced at the poles, the ugly scars of gray-black spots around the equator.
But the giant star was visibly flattened. It had a companion star, small and bluish, little more than a point of light, orbiting so close to its parent it was almost within the giant’s scattered outer atmosphere. In fact, David saw, a thin streamer of gas, torn from the parent and still glowing, had wrapped itself around the companion and was falling to its surface, a thin, hellish rain of fusing hydrogen.
David looked down to the planet that hovered beneath his feet. It was a sphere the apparent size of a beachball, half-illuminated by the complex red and white light of its parent stars. But it. was obviously airless, its surface a complex mesh of impact craters and mountain chains. Perhaps it had once had an atmosphere, even oceans; or it might have been the rocky or metallic core of a gas giant, an erstwhile Neptune or Uranus. It was even possible, he supposed, that it had harbored life. If so, that life was now destroyed or fled, every trace of its passing scorched from the surface by the dying sun.
But this dead, blasted world still had a moon. Though much smaller than its parent, the moon glowed more brightly, reflecting more of the complex mixed light of the twin stars. And its surface appeared, at first glance, utterly smooth, so that the little worldlet looked like a cue ball, machined in some great lathe. When David looked more closely, however, he could see there was a network of fine cracks and ridges, some of them evidently hundreds of kilometers long, all across the surface. The moon looked rather like a hard-boiled egg, he thought, whose shell had been assiduously if gently cracked with a spoon.
This moon was a ball of water ice. Its smoothed surface was a sign of recent global melting, presumably caused by the grotesque expansion of the parent star, and the ridges were seams between plates of ice. And perhaps, like Jupiter’s moon Europa, there was still a layer of liquid water somewhere beneath this deep-frozen surface, an ancient ocean that might serve as a harbor, even now, for retreating life …
He sighed. Nobody knew. And right now, nobody had the time or resources to find out. There was simply too much to do, too many places to go.
But it wasn’t the rocky world, or its ice moon-not even the strange double star itself-but something much grander, beyond this little stellar system, which had drawn him here.
He turned now, and looked beyond the stars.
The nebula spanned half the sky.
It was a wash of colors, ranging from bright blue-white at its center, through green and orange, to somber purples and reds at its periphery. It was like a giant watercolor painting, he thought, the colors smoothly flowing, one into another. He could see layers in the cloud – the texture, the strata of shadows made it look surprisingly three-dimensional – with finer structure deeper in its heart.
The most striking aspect of the larger structure was a pattern of dark clouds, rich with dust, set out in a startlingly clear V-shape before the glowing mass, like an immense bird raising black wings before a flame. And before the bird shape, like a sprinkling of sparks from that bonfire behind, there was a thin veil of stars, separating him from the cloud. The great river of light that was the Galaxy flowed around the nebula, passing behind it as if encircling it.
Even as he turned his head from side to side, it was impossible to grasp the full scale of the structure- At times it seemed close enough to touch, like a giant dynamic wall-sculpture he might reach into and explore. And then it would recede, apparently to infinity. He knew his imagination, evolved to the thousand-kilometer scale of Earth, was inadequate to the task of grasping the immense distances involved here.
For if the sun was moved to the center of the nebula, humans could build an interstellar empire without reaching the edge of the cloud.
Wonder surged in him, sudden, unexpected. I am privileged, he thought anew, to live in such a time. One day, he supposed, some WormCam explorer would sail beneath the icy crust of the moon and seek out whatever lay at its core; and perhaps teams of investigators would scour the surface of the planet below, seeking out relics of the past.
He envied those future explorers the depth of their knowledge. And yet, he knew, they would surely envy his generation most of all. For, as he sailed outward with the expanding front of WormCam exploration, David was here first, and nobody else in all of history would be able to say that.
Long story. Japanese lab. The place he used to clone tigers for witch doctors. Heather just a surrogate. David WormCammed it all. Then all that mind control. Hiram didn’t want more mistakes …
Heather. I felt no bond. Know why now. How sad. She thought she could feel his pulse in the invisible touch at her palm. Yes sad sad.
And then, without warning, the door crashed open. Mae Wilson walked in holding a pistol. Without hesitation she fired once, twice, to either side of Kate. The gun was silenced, the shots mere pops.
There was a cry, a patch of blood hovering in the air, another like a small explosion where the bullet exited Bobby’s body.
Kate tried to stand. But the nozzle of Wilson’s rifle was at the back of her head. ‘Don’t even think about it.’
Bobby’s ‘Shroud was failing, is great concentric circles of distortion and shadow that spread around his wounds. Kate could see he was trying to get to the door.
But there were more of Hiram’s goons there; he would have no way through. Now Hiram himself arrived at the door. His face twisted with unrecognizable emotion as he looked al
Kate, at Bobby’s body. ‘I knew you couldn’t resist it. Gotcha, you little shit’
Kate hadn’t been out of her boxy cell for-how long? Thirty, forty days? Now, out in the cavernous dimly lit spaces of the Wormworks, she felt exposed, ill at ease.
The shot turned out to have passed straight through Bobby’s upper shoulder, ripping muscle and shattering bone, but-through pure chance-his life was not in danger. Hiram’s medics had wanted to give Bobby a general anaesthetic as they treated him, but, staring at Hiram, he refused, and suffered the pain of the treatment in full awareness Hiram led the way across a floor empty of people past quiescent, hulking machinery. Wilson and the other goons circled Bobby and Kate, some of them walking backward so they could watch their captives making it obvious there was no way to escape.