He had been born there—if you thought of one day waking inside a laboratory, surrounded by a dozen forms identical to your own, as being born. That was in Sulawaya, in Jawa. He lived there only a few days, long enough to have another kind of tattoo drawn on his face, this one a string of numerals written on the soft circle of flesh beneath his chin. The men and women who watched over the vesicles wherein the clones were generated did not call him Kalaman. Or rather, they called all energumens Kalaman, or Kalamat if, like their long-dead progenitrix, the clones were females. But it was seldom that their Ascendant masters spoke to them. Within three days all members of the cluster—Cluster 579, the Asterine Cluster as it later came to be known—had been dispatched, sold or bartered into slavery, most of them within the Archipelago’s thousand islands. They were herded into plasteel crates, or else had monitors attached to their temples or necks or legs; a few even had an eye removed and a keek, a more sophisticated monitor, inserted in its place. Those not destined for elsewhere in the Archipelago were sedated in preparation for their journey to HORUS. Their masters never looked back as these few crates were hauled onto the elÿon freighters that would take them to the space colonies, or as the rest were shoved into the holds of Ascendant freighters bound for Mindanao and Palembang and Singapore. As often as they could, their masters avoided looking at the energumens at all.
Kalaman hated his masters, a hatred so pure and focused, it seemed like a form of worship. Such intensity of emotion was an anomaly in a geneslave—they were bred for servitude, after all—but Kalaman was nearly halfway through his brief life before he knew that. A week after his birth he shrieked and fought when the plastic monitor with its nearly weightless load of explosive was clipped around his neck—an extreme reaction, but not unheard of. The energumens were strange creatures, and centuries of genetic manipulation had made them highly unpredictable. If one could subject their minds—as opposed to their brains, the usual organ of study—to the sort of scrutiny produced by instruments such as the neuroelectrical transmitter, or NET, you might see nesting within the overlapping circles of fear, hunger, curiosity, pride, cunning, a sort of radiant core that pulsed violet (it had been her favorite color); and this would be the emotional heart of the energumens, that aspect that was passed down through the centuries nearly untouched from its donor, the fifteen-year-old Cybele Burdock. It was a truly childlike and innocent heart, its keenest legacy the gentle image of Luther Burdock, which the energumens from inception all carried within them, like an atavistic vision of a middle-aged and all-loving god; but this heart was hardly ever glimpsed or understood by the Ascendants. They saw only the dark outer layers: the guile, the restless intellects that lived only a few years, the joy of debate and the physical hunger that imperiled unwary masters.
The one thing the Ascendants rarely saw was hatred.
Kalaman hated. So did the others from Cluster 579, though they were not as driven as he was. Afterward—too late for anything but the unsatisfying execution of the culpable technician—it was learned that the entire cluster had been manipulated in vitro—the first successful sabotage by one of the human rebels who would later spearhead the Asterine Alliance in the Archipelago. The unauthorized shuffling of a few chains of telomeres on the right chromosomes, like tugging beads from a string; and instead of another cluster, identical to thousands before it, there were Kalaman and his sibs.
Physically he resembled all the others, eight feet tall and big-boned, his features incongruously delicate for that face, the size of a horse’s but with Cybele’s narrow nose and Cybele’s pert mouth and Cybele’s broad cheekbones. His skin was red, almost a brickish color—they tried to vary skin color, to make it easier to identify those destined for places other than the Archipelagian hydrofarms or Urisa mining colonies—and he had the same eerie eyes, the colors of pupil and iris reversed so that they had a truly demonic appearance. Not Cybele’s eyes; an energumen’s. A monster’s.
Kalaman opened those eyes now, where he lay beneath the wispy tendrils of the oneiric canopy. It was as though a pinpricked beam of light sliced through a black hole. The shining pupil grew larger, adapting to the bright room, until the iris disappeared and there were only those two staring orbs, dead white and fixed on the canopy overhead. He had come here to rest, to recover from the exertions of sending his thoughts and will across the Ether, to try to speak to those of his kind who lived in the other HORUS colonies. It was a skill the energumens had developed over the last few hundred years, and one which their masters did not clearly understand. A sort of telepathy, like that which exists between twins; but stronger, since when they employed this subtle telepathy, the cloned siblings were, in essence, only talking to themselves.
But now Kalaman was too exhausted to send his thoughts any farther than his own head. He raised one hand, shading his eyes from the glow of the canopy, and turned slightly until he could see across the room.
“Ratnayaka,” he whispered.
On the other side of the chamber Ratnayaka stirred. He had not heard Kalaman, precisely; instead he felt him, like the breath of a moth’s wing across his consciousness. He was identical to his sibling, except for the color of his skin, which was an ivory yellow, the color of a jaundiced eye; that and the fact that he really did possess a single jaundiced eye, the other having been replaced by a keek. After the successful rebellion on Helena Aulis he had pried the prosthetic orb from its socket. It still had not healed completely: the nearly atrophied eyelid hung in a limp fold of flesh, giving him a queasy look. And so Ratnayaka, who was vain (another anomaly; he too had been a member of Cluster 579) wore a patch over that eye, a neatly woven circle of red-and-gold silk tied about his sleek long head with a cord of braided hemp. Like Kalaman he had filed his upper front teeth into dull white V’s and stained his lower teeth red with madder-root, so that they disappeared when he opened his mouth. A line of thin gold rings hung from a series of tiny piercings in his brow. As he crossed the chamber to Kalaman, the rings made a nearly imperceptible tinkling.
“O, my brother,” Ratnayaka said softly. In a room full of energumens speaking, one would hear the same voice over and over—louder, softer, angry, laughing—an effect that had driven their masters to distraction, and which Kalaman had exploited when planning the revolt on Helena Aulis. “O Kalaman, I am here—”