Cauldron of Ghosts Page 16

  “And the reason the war in Europe started turning against them,” Benton-Ramirez y Chou said, nodding in agreement, “was because their mods had turned them into predators, not herd animals. Among other things, they were so full of contempt for their ‘obsolescent’ pure strain opponents that they tended to downplay the need to unite against their outside foes while they engaged in internal warfare with one another for control of the Confederacy.”

  “And while all that was going on,” Catherine Montaigne put in sourly, “the idiots in Western Europe had pulled the stopper out of their own bottle of lunacy.” Montaigne had spent longer on Old Earth than anyone else gathered around the table. She’d spent quite a bit of that time learning about the womb in which Mesa and genetic slavery had been conceived, and her expression was bitter. “The Ukrainian Supremacists had taken all of them by surprise by the timing of their attack, but everyone on the planet—hell, everyone in the entire star system—had seen it coming for a long, long time. The Western Europeans weren’t interested in genetically modifying human beings. Instead, they decided to genetically modify diseases like anthrax, botulism, bubonic plague, meningitis, typhus, cholera, and something called Ebola.”

  “I’ve never even heard of most of those,” Yana said plaintively.

  “That’s because most of them have been effectively stamped out.” Montaigne’s expression was grim, “and thank God for it! In fact, most of them had been stamped out on Old Earth before the Final War, too. Until the idiots dusted them off and sent them off to war, at least.”

  “How could they have expected that to work?” Elaine Mayhew demanded, eyes dark with the horror the mere thought of such a weapon evoked in someone who’d been raised in Grayson’s hermetically sealed environments.

  “They thought they’d designed firewalls into their pet monstrosities.” Benton-Ramirez y Chou’s voice was even grimmer than Montaigne’s. “They’d integrated ‘kill switches’ and stockpiled disease-specific vaccines. But once they were out into a real-world environment, their firewalls evolved right out from under them a hell of a lot faster than they’d expected. Oh, initially, their weapons had almost exactly the desired effect when they deployed them. That lasted as long as three years, and the Confederacy’s super soldiers’ hyper-active metabolisms seem to have made them even more vulnerable than pure-strain humans. But once the pathogens got loose in the civilian population of Asia, the law of unintended consequences came into play with a vengeance. By the time the same diseases started bleeding back across the frontier into Europe, they’d developed effective immunity to the vaccines which were supposed to protect Europeans against them.”

  Katherine and Elaine looked at their husband, as if they hoped he’d tell them Benton-Ramirez y Chou was exaggerating, but Benjamin shook his head.

  “There’s a reason they managed to kill off damned near the entire Old Earth branch of the human race,” he told his wives. “And don’t think it was all Europe and Asia, either. The western hemisphere made its own contribution to the holocaust.”

  “True,” Honor agreed. “On the other hand, at least they weren’t crazy enough to turn genetically engineered diseases loose on their opposition.”

  “Oh, no!” Benton-Ramirez y Chou showed his teeth in something which approximated a smile in much the same way a hexapuma’s bared teeth approximated a pleasant greeting. “They were lots smarter than that. They decided to deploy weaponized nanotech!”

  “Sweet Tester,” Katherine Mayhew murmured.

  “Rather than further disturb the digestion of Mac’s meal,” Honor said after a moment, “I propose we not go a lot deeper into the specifics of the Final War, Uncle Jacques. I don’t think we really need to in order to answer Cat’s original question about the . . . ill feeling between you noble Beowulfers and those despicable Mesans.”

  “No. No, we don’t,” Benton-Ramirez y Chou agreed. “But that ‘ill feeling’ owes a lot to how Beowulf and the rest of the colony systems which responded to Old Earth’s attempted suicide viewed what had happened there.”

  He sipped from his own wineglass, then set it down very precisely.

  “My own ancestors—and Honor’s, of course” he nodded at his niece “—ended up in command of the Rescue Fleet. In a way, since the League grew out of the relief effort and the kick in the pants that gave to interstellar commerce and travel in general, you could say the present day Sollies are at least partly our family’s fault, I suppose. On the other hand, there’s more than enough blame to go around where that minor problem’s concerned, so I don’t intend to dwell on it. But the lesson Beowulf and most of the rest of the human race took away from the Final War was that they never—ever—wanted to face that sort of nightmare again. And the ‘super soldiers’ and, possibly even more, the mindset of the Ukrainian supremacists, was almost worse than the genegineered diseases.”

  Several of the others looked a bit surprised by his last sentence and he snorted.

  “I know. Compared to the Asian Confederacy’s nightmares, the Scrags were actually almost benign, weren’t they?” He gestured at Yana. “I mean, look at her. Then look at Honor. Not a lot to choose between them, is there?”

  Yana and his niece looked at each other for a moment. Then Honor smiled slowly and shook her head.

  “No, not a lot at all,” she murmured.

  “But the idea behind the Ukrainians was even worse,” Benton-Ramirez y Chou said softly. “The Confederacy had seen its super soldiers as weapons systems, tools that wouldn’t be allowed to reproduce and certainly weren’t any sort of pattern for the future of humanity. But the Ukrainians had intended all along to force the evolution of the next step, of Homo superior, and that was what had initiated the entire conflict. All of the carnage, all of the destruction and the billions of lives which had been lost, started in the Ukrainian ideal of designed genetic uplift. The further weaponization of biotechnology, and of nanotechnology, made the devastation immeasurably worse, but the people trying to dig the human race’s homeworld out of what had become a mass grave were determined that it wasn’t going to happen again. The Beowulf Biosciences Code evolved directly out of the Final War. That’s why it unequivocally outlaws any weaponization of biotech in general . . . and why it places such stringent limits on acceptable genetic modification of humans.”

  “And Mesa doesn’t agree with that, obviously,” Victor said.

  “No, it doesn’t.” Benton-Ramirez y Chou agreed. “Leonard Detweiler thought it was a hysterical overreaction to a disaster, an isolated incident which, for all its horror, had after all been limited to a single star system. Mind you, the bio weapons had jumped the fire breaks between Old Earth, Luna, and Mars, but even at their worst, they’d never gotten beyond Sol’s oort cloud, and the human race had lots of star systems by then. And even if that hadn’t been the case, then surely humanity had learned its lesson. Besides, he didn’t have any real objection to outlawing weaponized biotech—or he said he didn’t, at any rate. It was the Code’s decision to turn its back on targeted improvement of the human genotype, to renounce the right to take our genetic destiny into our own hands, that infuriated him. ‘Small minds are always terrified by great opportunities,’ he said. He simply couldn’t believe any rational species would turn its back on the opportunity to become all that it could possibly be.”

  He paused for a long moment, then sighed deeply.

  “And the truth is, in a lot of ways, Detweiler was right,” he admitted. “Again, look at Honor and Yana. Nothing horrible there, is there? Or in any of a dozen—two dozen—specific planetary environment genetic mods I could rattle off. Even you Graysons.” He smiled at the Mayhews and shook his head. “Without the genetic mods your founders put into place so secretly, you wouldn’t have survived. But what Detweiler never understood—or accepted, anyway—was that what the mainstream Beowulfan perspective rejected was the intentional design of a genotype which was intended from the beginning to produce a superior human, a better human . . . what lunatics from
Adolph Hitler to the Ukrainian supremacists to the Malsathan unbeatables have all sought—a master race. For all intents and purposes, a separate species which, by virtue of its obvious and designed superiority to all other varieties of human being must inevitably exercise that superiority.

  “Detweiler never understood that. He never understood that his fellow Beowulfers were repelled by the reemergence of what had once been called racism which was inherent in his proposals.”

  Several members of his audience looked puzzled, and he snorted and looked at Catherine Montaigne.

  “I’m sure your friend Du Havel could explain the concept,” he said.

  “And he’s done it often enough,” Montagne agreed just a bit sourly, and glanced around at the other table guests. “What Jacques is talking about is the belief that certain genetic characteristics—silly things like skin color, hair color, eye color—denoted inherent superiority or inferiority. As Web is fond of pointing out, once upon a time Empress Elizabeth would have been considered naturally inferior because of her complexion and relegated by her inferiority to slave status.”

  “That’s ridiculous!” Elaine Mayhew said sharply, and Benton-Ramirez y Chou chuckled with very little humor.

  “Of course it is. It’s the sort of concept that belongs to primitive history. But the problem, Elaine, is that what Detweiler was proposing would have reanimated the concept of inherent inferiority because it would have been true. It would have been something which could have been demonstrated, measured, placed on a sliding scale. Of course, exactly what constituted ‘superiority’ might have been open to competing interpretations, which could only have made the situation even worse. We Beowulfers are fiercely meritocratic, but we’re also fanatically devoted to the concepts of social and legal equality, and what Detweiler and his clique wanted struck at the very heart of those concepts.

  “So we told him no. Rather emphatically, in fact. So emphatically that if he had attempted to put his theories into practice on Beowulf, he would have been stripped of his license to practice medicine and imprisoned.”

  Benton-Ramirez y Chou shrugged. “I suppose it’s possible our ancestors overreacted, although I’d argue they had good reason to. On the other hand, Detweiler was damned arrogant about his own position. He was deeply and profoundly pissed off by how . . . firmly his arguments were rejected, and it would appear the present-day members of this ‘Mesan Alignment’ have taken his own overreaction to truly awesome heights. When he shook the dust of Beowulf from his sandals and emigrated to Mesa, he took with him a sizable chunk of the Beowulfan medical establishment. A larger one, really, than the rest of Beowulf ever anticipated would follow him into exile, although it was still only a tiny minority of the total planetary population. And that, Katherine,” he smiled wryly at Katherine Mayhew, “is exactly why the enmity between Mesa and Beowulf has been so intense for so long. You could say that Mesa is Beowulf’s equivalent of Masada’s Faithful, and you wouldn’t be far wrong. In fact, you’d be even closer to correct than most of us have imagined over the last five or six centuries.”

  “That’s . . . a bit of an understatement, if you don’t mind my saying so,” Zilwicki observed, and Benton-Ramirez y Chou nodded.

  “Absolutely. I’ve been thinking about it a lot since you dropped McBryde’s bombshell on us, and I’ve come to the conclusion that what’s really behind this entire master plan of theirs—assuming McBryde got it right, of course—is more than simply finally accomplishing Leonard Detweiler’s dream of creating a genetically superior species. That’s obviously part of it, but looking at what we did already know about Mesa and Mesans, I’d say an equally big part of it is proving they were right all along. It’s been a long, long time since the Final War. The feelings of revulsion and horror it generated have largely faded, and the prejudice against ‘genies’ is far weaker than it used to be. In fact, I would argue that if it weren’t for the existence of genetic slavery, that prejudice probably would have completely ceased to exist by now. If this Alignment had been willing to take even a fraction of the resources it must have invested in its conspiracies and its infiltration and the development of the technology that made the Yawata Strike possible and spend it on propaganda—on education, for God’s sake—it almost certainly could have convinced a large minority, possibly even a majority, of the rest of the human race to go along with it. To embark, even if more gradually and more cautiously than the Alignment might prefer, on the deliberate improvement of the human genome. For that matter, in the existence of people like Honor and Yana we’ve already deliberately improved on that genome! But I don’t think it ever really occurred to them to take that approach. I think they locked themselves into the idea that their vision had to be imposed on the rest of us and that as the people whose ancestors had seen that division so clearly so much sooner than anyone else, it’s their destiny to do just that. Which is one reason I compared them to the Faithful, Katherine. Their whole purpose—or the way they’ve chosen to go about achieving it, at least—is fundamentally irrational, and only someone as fanatical as the people who built ‘doomsday bombs’ to destroy their entire planet in order to ‘save it’ from Benjamin the Great and the rest of the moderates could possibly have invested so much in that irrationality.”

  “I agree,” Honor said softly, her eyes dark. “I agree entirely. And that’s what truly scares me when I think about this. Because if they really are religious fanatics in some sort of Church of Genetic Superiority, then God only knows how far they are truly prepared to go to drag us all kicking and screaming into their version of Zion.”

  Chapter 17

  The first thing Thandi Palane noticed when she came into the suite was that the central salon’s furniture had been rearranged so that all the couches and chairs had a good view of the HD wallscreen. The paintings which normally filled the screen had been replaced by a talk program.

  “—know anything about this man,” said one of the people sitting around the table that was pictured in the center of the screen. She was a red-haired woman with sharp features that matched her sharp tone of voice.

  “I wouldn’t go so far as that,” said the man sitting at one end of the table. The table had an odd sort of L-shape, which led Thandi to think the man in question was the talk show’s host or moderator.

  The man glanced at a small screen recessed into the table. “We know, for instance, that he was the governor of La Martine province for a short time.”

  “Short time!” That came from the same red-haired woman. The barked laugh that followed had the same edge to it that Thandi was already coming to associate with the woman—for whom she was also already developing a dislike.

  “That’s what I believe is called a ‘euphemism,’ ” the woman continued. “He was relieved from his post almost as soon as he got it—and I can’t help but notice that that came after he spent time under arrest. You can’t help but wonder—”

  “Cut it out, Charlene,” said a woman sitting at the other end of the table from the man Thandi presumed to be the moderator. “None of this even qualifies as ‘established fact’ in the first place, much less any interpretation of it. The events both you and Yael are referring to took place during the revolution that overthrew Saint-Just—and in a Havenite province that’s far distant from our own borders and about which we know precious little to begin with. Everything about that revolution is still murky, especially at the edges. So I think it behooves us—”

  Thandi turned to Ruth Winton, who was sitting on one of the couches next to Victor. “What’s this?”

  “It’s a show called The Star Empire Today,” said Ruth. “The moderator is Yael Underwood.”

  “He’s the slimeball with the long blond hair and weaselly expression sitting on the far right,” said Anton Zilwicki, who was seated on another couch in between Jacques Benton-Ramirez y Chou and Catherine Montaigne.

  Cathy laughed. “God, I swear! Nobody can hold a grudge like a Gryphon highlander.”

  “What grudge
?” asked Thandi.

  Berry had come in right behind her and provided the answer—after laughing herself. “Underwood’s the one who outed Daddy. That happened before we met you at the funeral ceremony for Hieronymus Stein on Erewhon.”

  “—do you refuse to admit that everything about him—”

  “—why am I the only one here who seems to remember, Florence, that this man was our sworn enemy until yesterday—”

  “—go so far as Charlene, but what does seem fairly well established is that his role in the Manpower Incident was hardly—”

  Thandi tuned out the yabber-jabber. “What do you mean by ‘outed’?”

  “Underwood did a whole show devoted to Anton,” explained Cathy. “He let the Talking Heads blather for a while before he trotted out somebody who actually knew something and that guy—Mr. Wright they called him, didn’t they, Anton?—really spilled the beans.”

  “I found out later his real name’s Guillermo Thatcher,” said Anton. “He’d recently retired from SIS—that stands for Special Intelligence Service, if you didn’t know already, which is the Manticoran civilian spook agency—and someday I hope to catch him in a dark alley with no witnesses around.”

  Thandi smiled. The smile widened when she saw the gloomy expression on Victor’s face.

  “—Special Officer Cachat,” the Charlene woman was saying, “and you really have to wonder exactly what the ‘Special’ part of that entails, don’t you? If you ask me—”