Cauldron of Ghosts: Chapter Sixteen

    “I think you’re all insane, of course,” Honor Alexander-Harrington said with one of her crooked smiles as she sat back in her chair with her wineglass and looked at her mostly rather-less-than-reputable dinner guests. Neither of her spouses had been able to join them, and the nature of those guests — and their plans — had restricted her potential invitation list in rather draconian fashion. The table before them bore the remnants of a generous meal, and James MacGuiness made the circuit refreshing coffee cups for the coffee drinkers who had not yet transitioned to something stronger. Those coffee drinkers included Victor Cachat (not surprisingly for those who knew him) and Yana Tretiakovna, who claimed to prefer a caffeine buzz to alcohol.

    “If you thought it was a bad idea, you should’ve said so at the time,” her Uncle Jacques replied. “And if we’re going to talk about insane ideas, I could think of a few of yours over the years which were even better qualified for that particular adjective.”

    “Well, of course you can! You don’t think I’d venture an opinion like that without having a meterstick of my own to base it on, did you? Besides, I do come by my genome honestly, you know, and if memory serves there’s been a . . . less than fully rational action plan from both sides of the family tree upon occasion. I remember stories Daddy told me about one of my uncles, for example. Back when he was a captain in the BSC, I believe.”

    “If you’ll pardon my saying so, Your Grace,” Thandi Palane said a bit dryly, “I doubt most of your uncle’s follies could outshine the one you pulled at a place called Cerberus.”

    “Or the one at a dinner party I can call to mind,” Benjamin Mayhew said even more dryly. The Protector of Grayson and his wives were the only members of the dinner party which kept her guest list from being totally disreputable, in Honor’s opinion.

    “Details. Details!” Honor waved her wineglass dismissively. “Besides, I already admitted I needed a meterstick of my own. And I never said it was a bad idea, either. I just said that the whole lot of our fearless agents” — the wineglass gestured at Thandi, Victor Cachat, Anton Zilwicki, and Yana Tretiakovna — “have fairly tangential contact with rationality.” Her smile faded. “And probably a little more in the way of guts than is good for them.”

    “While I hate to disabuse you of your obviously inflated notion of my bravery quotient, Your Grace,” Zilwicki said, “I intend to emulate an Old Earth mouse to the very best of my ability once we’re on-planet.”

    “Of course you do,” Catherine Montaigne said sarcastically. “I’ve noticed what a shy and retiring type you are.”

    “Actually,” Jacques Benton-Ramirez y Chou said rather more seriously, “he’s not that far wrong.” Montaigne looked at her old friend incredulously, and the Beowulfer shrugged. “There are lots of different ways to be as unobtrusive as possible, Catherine. One of the most effective is to be something else entirely as obtrusively as you possibly can. Which is exactly what our friends here are proposing to be, when you come down to it.”

    “Doesn’t mean we won’t have to be careful when we go about our nefarious activities,” Zilwicki agreed. “But the principle’s one every stage magician understands perfectly. We’ll be so busy waving our public personas under everyone’s noses that no one’s going to be wondering what we might have hidden behind the curtain.”

    “That’s all well and good,” Honor said in a much more serious tone. “And, for what it’s worth, I agree with you. But something nobody’s been talking about very much is that for this Alignment to have operated so long without anyone’s spotting it, even on Beowulf, it has to be very, very good at covert operations of its own . . . including penetration of other people’s security. That ‘sleeper agent’ your people found on Torch is one example of how far they’re prepared to go, and if McBryde was right about their having buried genetic ‘sleepers’ all over the galaxy, how confident can we really be that they haven’t penetrated the BSC itself?”

    “Much as it pains me to admit it, we can’t be,” Benton-Ramirez y Chou replied, more than a bit sourly. “Obviously, we’ve had to rethink everything we thought we knew about Mesa in light of the information Victor and Anton — and Yana — brought home. I have a few ideas about how we might look for those ‘genetic sleepers’ of yours using gene scans, but nobody’s worried much about that particular form of security screening in the past. On the other hand, we’ve always been pretty fanatical about compartmentalizing information and operating on a ‘need to know’ basis. To be honest, that’s one reason I was so uncomfortable bringing this new genetic sheathing technology into the light of day even under these circumstances. It’s certainly not impossible that the Alignment’s caught a hint of the R&D on it, or even — although I think it’s very unlikely — infiltrated some of its ‘sleepers’ into the R&D program itself. But I guarantee you that anyone who’s involved with it is going to find himself under the most intense scrutiny of his entire life as soon as we get home. And I don’t see how they could have prepared a cover that’s going to stand up to our newest counterintelligence types.”

    He took a stalk of celery from the plate in front of him and offered it to the cream and gray treecat in the high chair beside him. Bark Chewer’s Bane accepted it with a pleased “Bleek!” and began chewing happily. The Blue Mountain Dancing Clan scout was Benton-Ramirez y Chou’s newly assigned bodyguard, and he and Honor’s uncle were settling into a comfortable working relationship. It wasn’t the same as an adoption bond, as Bark Chewer’s Bane’s retention of his treecat name indicated, but it was the sort of relationship which was going to become increasingly common as the ‘cats integrated themselves more and more thoroughly into human society.

    “As soon as BCB and I get home,” Benton-Ramirez y Chou went on, his expression amused as Honor rolled her eyes at the acronym he’d adopted for his new partner, “he and some of his friends and I will be personally interviewing every member of the team working on this project. Between us, I’m pretty sure we’ll be able to uncover anyone with divided loyalties. After that, we’ll be working our way through as much of our entire security structure as we can.” He grimaced. “Obviously, we’re going to be limited by time constraints and the number of ‘cats available to us, so we’re not going to get very far beyond the ‘management’ echelons for quite some time, but we’ll pay special attention to plugging any leaks in our more sensitive programs. Especially this one. And if we find one” — the last amusement faded from his expression and his eyes were grim — “we’ll plug it very, very thoroughly indeed.”

    “That sounds like a good idea to me,” Cachat observed.

    “And to me,” Yana agreed even more firmly. The ex-scrag had hit it off surprisingly well with their hostess. Personally, Benton-Ramirez y Chou thought that was at least partly because of how much she had in common with Nimitz. However “reformed” she and her fellow Amazons might have become since falling under Thandi Palane’s influence, there was still a lot of predator in them, and especially in Yana.

    “I hope this won’t seem too dreadfully ignorant of me,” Catherine Mayhew said, “and I know that the . . . enmity between Beowulf and Mesa’s been around a long, long time, but it seems even deeper and more, well, personal than I’d thought it was. I haven’t had the opportunity to sit in on all the intelligence briefings Benjamin has, and unlike him, no one was sending any mere women off to Old Earth for their college educations when it would’ve done me any good. But why in Tester’s name could anyone be so filled with determination or hatred or whatever it is as to spend six hundred years planning something like this?” She shook her head. “I’m not questioning any of the information Mister Zilwicki and Mister Cachat brought back from Mesa. I’m just trying to wrap my mind around it and understand.”

    “That’s going to be a big part of the problem when we start trying to prove any of this to the Sollies, Cat,” Honor said soberly. “The League would be prepared enough to see this as more anti-Mesan panic mongering on the part of Manticore and Haven, based on our obvious, corrupt imperialism — now that we’ve taken our masks off, that’s clearly the only reason we’ve been so fanatical about enforcing the Cherwell Conventions for so long! — but including Beowulf’s going to make it even easier for their propagandists to attack the entire idea. Everybody knows Beowulfers’ve been lunatics on anything to do with Mesa for centuries, after all. And on the face of it, it does sound pretty absurd.”

    “I didn’t mean to say that,” Catherine began, but Benton-Ramirez y Chou interrupted her.

    “Honor didn’t mean to suggest that you had,” he said. “But she’s right, and so are you. It does sound absurd. For that matter, there are people back home on Beowulf who’re going to find it hard to accept all of this. Of course, in their case it’s not going to be because they won’t believe Mesans are despicable enough for something like this; it’s going to be that they can’t believe we could have missed it for so long. And, much as I hate to admit it, one of the reasons they’re going to think that way is that we’ve become so accustomed to thinking of all Mesans in terms of Manpower and their transstellar partners.”

    “Personally,” Catherine Montaigne said, “I’ve come to the conclusion that one reason the bastards have been so busy propping Manpower up has a lot to do with setting up an obvious stalking horse. Web DuHavel and I have argued for years over why Mesa‘s stood so foursquare behind genetic slavery for so long given the economics of the institution and the potential social powder keg all those seccies and slaves create on Mesa itself. Now that we know about this Alignment, it makes a lot more sense. Just thinking about the hooks it can get into people by involving them in the filth of the slave trade puts an entirely new perspective on it, but when you add in the façade it sets up — the way it colors all of our thinking where Mesa as a whole is concerned — it makes even more sense.”

    “Exactly.” Benton-Ramirez y Chou nodded. “The idea that someone might set themselves up as proponents of the galaxy’s vilest form of commerce so that we’d concentrate on that view of their villainy and not notice an even deeper one is going to take a little getting used to. And the truth is that Beowulfers have become so set in their ways of hating and despising everything about Mesa and Manpower that it’s going to take time for a lot of us to start taking this threat as seriously as we ought to.”

    “That’s just it,” Catherine Mayhew admitted. “I’ve always wondered exactly why the hatred between your people and the Mesans cuts so deep. I don’t have any problem understanding that it could, you understand. After all, we have our own relationship with Masada as an example. I just don’t understand the . . . the mechanism for it, I guess you’d say.”

    “I think that’s because — like the original Manticoran colonists — your ancestors missed the Final War, Cat,” Honor said. “By the time the first Manties debarked from Jason, that war had been over for a long time, but it’s even further removed for you Graysons. Or us Graysons, I suppose I should say.” She smiled again, briefly. “You didn’t find out about it until you reestablished contact with the rest of the galaxy, and to be honest, you had a lot more pressing worries at the time, given Grayson’s planetary environment and the Masadans, when you did find out.”

    “Honor’s right,” Benton-Ramirez y Chou agreed. “And I have to admit that as terrible as the Final War was, it has a lot more ongoing immediacy for Beowulf and Mesa than for anybody else in the League. More even than for people living in the Sol System today, for that matter. I know our Final War Museum in Grendel is the best and biggest in the entire League, but it only gets a single wing in the Solarian Military Museum in Old Chicago.”

    “I don’t know as much about the Final War — stupid damned name, when I think about it — as I wish I did,” Cachat said. He smiled faintly. “Like the Graysons, I’ve had more pressing worries until very recently.”

    “It probably wouldn’t hurt for you to spend a little time in the Museum while you’re on Beowulf,” Benton-Ramirez y Chou said thoughtfully. “Assuming you’ve got the time for it, anyway. There are some really good VR programs covering it in the System Database, though, and you’re going to be spending at least a while recuperating from the mods.”

    “Oh, goody!” Yana snorted. “Educational VRs to distract us from all the things you’re going to be doing to us. I can hardly wait.”

    A general chuckle ran around the table, but then Benton-Ramirez y Chou sobered and returned his attention to Catherine Mayhew.

    “Despite Victor’s well taken observation on the stupidity of calling any war the ‘final’ one, Old Earth’s version of it came entirely too close to being just that, at least where the Sol System was concerned,” he said much more somberly. “The Ukrainian Supremacists may have started it when they turned the super soldiers loose,” he glanced semi-apologetically at Yana, who snorted in amusement at his expression, “but they weren’t the only lunatics running asylums. And let’s be honest, the super soldiers weren’t really all that much more heavily genetically modified than Honor here is. Enhanced strength, better reflexes, they heal faster, and enhanced intelligence — although that one’s still a rather . . . nebulous concept — but that was small beer compared to the other crap that got turned loose. For example, there were the Asian Confederacy’s version of super soldiers. Now, those were scary. Implanted and natural weaponry, a metabolism that was so enhanced they ‘burned out’ in less than twenty years and their combat gear had to include intravenous concentrated nourishment just to keep them running that long, and enough other genetic tinkering to make them all sterile — thank God! In terms of effectiveness in sustained combat, the mods didn’t do a lot for them, given the sophistication of the weaponry available even to us poor old ‘pure strain’ models. Doesn’t really matter all that much how strong someone is or how good his reflexes are when he’s up against a main battle tank. But it turned them into god-awful special operations troops, and the ‘intelligence’ mods on them pushed them over the edge into the outright megalomania that proved Old Earth’s undoing. It was when they turned on the Confederacy’s political leadership in the Beijing Coup that the Final War really turned into the ultimate nightmare.”

    “Why did they stage the coup?” Cachat asked. Benton-Ramirez y Chou arched an eyebrow at him, and the Havenite shrugged. “The Confederacy was winning against the Ukrainians, from what little I know about the history involved, but that all turned around shortly after the coup. So why did they do it? And why did it turn around?”

    “They staged the coup because they were sterile,” Honor said before her uncle could reply. “They’d decided their obvious superiority to the pure strain humans who were giving them orders proved they should be in charge, and they’d decided they were clearly the next step in human evolution. But the Confederacy’s leadership controlled the cloning farms where they were created, and the Confederacy refused to allow them unlimited reproduction.” She shrugged. “So they staged their own revolt in order to take over the cloning facilities and produce more of their own kind.”

    “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 was supposed to protect Europeans against them.”

    Catherine 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,” Catherine 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 gene-engineered 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 DuHavel 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, Catherine,” he smiled wryly at Catherine 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 Oyster Bay 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, Catherine. 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.”