The Clone Redemption

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

On the surface, Freeman appeared to take the news about leaving Solomon with cold indifference. I told him about the Unified Authority ships and the battle, and he listened in silence. His expression remained impassive, as slack as a death mask. His eyes, though. His eyes bored through me.

If you could see into a man’s soul through his eyes, I thought I glimpsed the fires of Hell deep within Freeman. His skin was dark as wet stone. His head was bald and scarred. He’d abandoned a religious home for a life of battlefields and gunfights; now death followed him like a shadow as he returned to his roots.

“I asked Holman about warning them,” I said.

“The Unifieds would track the signal,” Freeman answered, speaking mechanically. “Even if they got the message, we wouldn’t save many people,” he said, parroting Curtis Liotta’s words. He paused, stared straight ahead the way blind men stare straight ahead, then he said, “Dust to dust.”

We stood together in the kettle of the transport, a large metal cavern with steel-girder ribs along its iron walls. Freeman wore his custom-made battle armor with his helmet off. I had come in my Charlie service uniform.

At six-foot-three, I was the tallest clone in the Enlisted Man’s Empire. Freeman stood nine inches taller than I and might well have packed twice my weight. He was big and strong and deadly, a fierce man who’d spent most of his life caring about no one but himself. He’d become a murderous messiah, a man on a quest.

I did not know the Bible from front to back, but I remembered a few words here and there. Six of those words came back to me. I said, “Let the dead bury the dead.”

The words woke Freeman from his stupor. He glared at me, and growled, “What is that supposed to mean?” That was the first time I’d ever heard rage in his voice.

“It means that we can kill ourselves trying to warn people who cannot be saved, but we cannot save them. It means that I would rather get caught by a sniper’s bullet than be stood in front of a firing squad. They will spend their last hours humping girlfriends, fishing, reading, going to the specking ballet …doing whatever it is they like to do. I’d rather go that way than spend my last hours panicking about death.”

As I said this, I thought about mothers holding their children. What does a mother do when she learns that all of her children will die at the end of the day? Does she tuck them into bed and tell them a story? Does she give them candy for their final meal? Does she think about her own death? Having never had a mother, I imagined each of them as superhuman, a cross between a saint, a martyr, and a drill sergeant.

I had no concept of what it meant to lose family. Freeman did. His father, a Neo-Baptist minister, died defending his colony. The Avatari had burned Freeman’s last relations when they attacked New Copenhagen. I was haunted by my imagination. He was haunted by his memories.

Sounding like Admiral Liotta and hating myself for it, I said, “Solomon was a lost cause.”

Freeman, big as he was, standing there so still and silent, reminded me of a spider on a web in some abandoned archway. I was a weakling, and he was a spider, and we lived in a universe that was crumbling around us. He spun webs, and I made plans, but we were feeble. Neither his webs nor my plans mattered in the end.

There is nothing I hate more than the feeling of helplessness, I told myself; but it was not the truth. I hated the Unified Authority more than I hated feeling helpless; and I hated the Avatari more than anything else.