“Explain it to me again,” Dabry demanded. “How is he awake?”
“It was time,” the ship said. “So I did it. If you leave a clone in the sac too long, it can die.”
“Too long meaning days, not minutes. You should have asked before doing it,” Dabry said testily. He was looking at Rebbe, who stood dropping sac fluid that plastered his fur to his skin, making him look thin and frail. He wobbled like a baby bird.
“Sit down,” Dabry said. As the clone continued to stand, he said, “How much does he understand?”
“He has been instructed with multiple languages,” the ship said. “I gave him the basic educational package. But it is still in the process of self-installing and unfolding. He will remain disoriented until that process is complete.”
“You had no soul chip,” Dabry said to Talon. “You understand that without that, he is not your brother, doesn’t have the memories and soul fire that makes him what he is?”
“He remembers,” Talon said. “Ask him! He knows I’m his brother.”
Everyone looked to the clone. Rebbe blinked at their expectant faces and said, “I don’t know who any of you are.”
“But I feel familiar, don’t I?” Talon demanded. “Doesn’t it seem like you know me even though this is the first time you’ve seen me? My voice, surely you recognize my voice. I spent all that time talking to you while you were in the sac.”
“I don’t remember any of that,” the clone said with polite chilliness, and Talon sagged as though he had been punched in the gut.
“No putting him back,” Gio signed. He shrugged. “Let’s make coffee and talk.”
“I do not want coffee, whatever that is,” Rebbe said. “I am tired. I am new and tired, and you are all looking at me.” The rawness in his voice made them all wince.
“Take him to your room for now, then,” Dabry said to Talon. “Let him sleep. He will want to sleep every few hours for his first few days. It is to be expected.”
“Thank you,” Talon said fervently. “Thank you, thank you.”
He tugged at Rebbe’s hand. “Come on,” he said in urgent tones, as though fearing that Dabry might change his mind and order the other pitched out of the airlock at any moment.
Rebbe followed the stranger along the hallway. The stranger was a stranger, no matter how much he might pretend otherwise, and the frustrating thing about him was the way he pretended, which made Rebbe (he centered that name, I am Rebbe, Rebbe am I) feel as though he were summoned to act in a play whose lines he did not know.
He hated this other person more than a little as he followed him, this other person that looked like him and claimed to know who he was. This other person who was, he gathered, somehow responsible for this whole situation.
And it was a situation, no matter how much Talon might act otherwise. Rebbe (I am Rebbe, I am Rebbe) had read the tension in the other bodies in the room. Dabry had not approved of his presence, and the others had not looked him in the eye, had spent all their time watching Talon.
“What happened to him?” he asked.
Talon kept moving along the hallway. “Who?”
“Your brother. The one you thought I would replace.”
He saw that statement hit home in the way the shoulders in front of him slumped. “He died,” Talon said.
“I understood that already. How?”
“Someone killed him.”
“Murdered him, you mean?” The thought shocked him. It made him realize, for the first time, how orderly his thoughts on such things were, how they came in the same pattern every time, it is wrong and against society to murder. It was the result of his preprogramming, but he did not understand that yet, just felt, somewhere in the depths of his gut, the wrongfulness, the artificiality of it, the constraints imposed on him by it.
“Yes.”
He pushed harder. “But what happened?”
Talon came to a door and shoved it open. He gestured Rebbe inside without answering.
Rebbe stepped in. The room smelled like Talon and someone else, not quite himself but close, so close. It was a relaxing smell above all, and that and the dusk-lighting of the room, easier on his keen eyes, did drain a little tension from him. Just enough that he realized how much he held, how his shoulders ached from keeping himself at high alert without realizing it.
He went to the cot closest to him, tested the surface and found it welcoming, sank into it, starting at first to sit, then giving up and swinging his legs up to lie back. He closed his eyes. “How was he murdered?”
“Ask Atlanta,” Talon said. “She’s the only one who was there.”
“So she killed him?”
“What? No.” Rebbe had succeeded in startling the other into more words. “A man named Tubal Last did it. But she was there. The only one of us that was.”
Talon still hated her for that, even now that he had someone who might be—oh, how desperately he wanted that—his brother.
Rebbe read nothing of this in the silence. He gave up on pushing for more information. He would come back to it later. There would be time, apparently. “Where are we? Where is the ship, I mean. I know we’re on one.”
“My name,” the ship interjected, “is You Sexy Thing.”
“Stop listening!” Talon roared.
There was abrupt silence in the room.
They waited in that silence for three breaths. Then Talon went on, in a conversational tone. “The others are exploring, and they’re going to come out with what they find. It’s a way to kill Tubal Last.”
Rebbe lay there quietly, absorbing it.
Talon gave him another three breaths before he said, “I know everything is scary for you right now, but I’m glad the ship woke you. I’m glad.”
But Rebbe was fast asleep and heard nothing.