“This is where you get off,” she told them.
She dumped their equipment from the hold and then opened the human quarters to the vacuum. The air made a thick whistling noise as it blew out. Soon the K-ship had a little cloud of its own, comprised of frozen gases, luggage, and bits of clothing. Among this floated five bodies, blue, decompressed. Two of them had been fucking and were still joined together. The clone was the hardest to get rid of. She clung on to the furniture, screaming, then clamped her mouth shut. The air roared past her, but she wouldn’t give up and be evacuated. After a minute, Seria Mau felt sorry for her. She closed the hatches. She brought the human quarters back up to pressure.
“There are five bodies out there,” she told the mathematics. “One of the men must have been a clone, too.”
No answer.
The shadow operators hung in corners with their hands over their mouths. They turned their heads away.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Seria Mau told them. “Those people brought some kind of transponder on board here. How else could we have been followed?”
“There was no transponder,” said the mathematics.
The shadow operators shifted and streamed like weed under water, whispering, “What has she done, what has she done?” in soft, fey, papery voices. “She has killed them all,” they said. “Killed them all.”
Seria Mau ignored them.
“There must have been something,” she said.
“Nothing,” the mathematics promised her. “Those people were just people.”
“But—”
“They were just people,” the mathematics said.
“Come on,” said Seria Mau after a moment. “No one’s innocent.”
The clone was crouched in a corner. The drop in air pressure had ripped most of her clothes off, and she was squatting with her arms wrapped round her upper body. Her skin had a hectic, wealed look where the evacuating air had scraped it. Here and there along her thin, ribby sides, blackish bruises showed where things had bounced off her on their way out into space. Her eyes were glazed and puzzled, full of a hysteria she was holding in place out of shock, puzzlement, failure to quite appreciate how much had happened. The cabin smelled of lemons and vomit. Its walls were scarred where fixtures and fittings had ripped loose. When Seria Mau spoke, the clone stared round in a panicky way and tried to force herself further into the corner.
“Leave me alone,” she said.
“Well they’re dead now,” Seria Mau said.
“What?”
“Why did you let them treat you like that? I watched. I watched the things they did to you.”
“Fuck you,” said the clone. “I can’t believe this. I can’t believe some fucked-up machine is giving me a lecture, that just killed everyone I know.”
“You let them use you.”
The clone hugged herself tighter. Tears rolled down either side of her nose. “How can you say that? You’re just some fucking machine.”
She said: “I loved them.”
“I’m not a machine,” Seria Mau said.
The clone laughed.
“What are you then?” she said.
“I’m a K-captain.”
The clone got a disgusted, tired expression on her face. “I’d do anything not to end up like you,” she said.
“So would I,” said Seria Mau.
“Are you going to kill me now?”
“Would you like me to?”
“No!”
The clone touched her bruised lip. She looked bleakly around the cabin. “I don’t suppose any of my clothes survived,” she said. Suddenly, she began to shiver and weep silently. “They’re all out there, aren’t they? With my friends? All my good clothes!”
Seria Mau turned the cabin temperature up.
“The shadow operators can fix that,” she said offhandedly. “Is there anything else I can do for you?”
The clone considered this.
“You can take me somewhere where there are real people,” she said.
The occupied planet of the system was called Perkins IV, though its inhabitants referred to it as New Midland. It had been terraformed, after a fashion. It had an agriculture based on traditional principles, some FTZ-style assembly plants in closed compounds, and two or three towns of fifty or sixty thousand people, all on one peneplained continent in the northern hemisphere. The agriculture ran to beet and potatoes, plus a local variety of squash which had been marketed successfully further up the Beach until some cutter worked out how to do it cheaper; which had been the fate of traditionally based agricultures for three and a half centuries. The biggest town ran to cinemas, municipal buildings, churches. They thought of themselves as ordinary people. They didn’t do much tailoring, out of a vague sense of its unnaturalness. They had a religion less bleak than matter-of-fact. At the school they taught about the ghost train and how to mine it.
The first Monday of an early, squally spring, some of the younger children were playing a game of “I went to the particle market and I bought . . .”
They had got as far as “. . . a Higgs boson, some neutral K mesons, and a long-lived neutral kaon which decayed into two pions by CP-violating processes,” when a single flat concussion rattled the windows and a matte-grey wedge-shaped object, covered all over in intakes, dive brakes and power bulges, shot across the town a hundred feet up and stopped inside its own length. It was the White Cat. The children rushed to the schoolhouse windows, shouting and cheering.
Seria Mau put the clone out of a cargo port.
“Goodbye,” she said.
The clone ignored her. “I loved them,” she said to herself. “And I know they loved me.”
She had been saying that to herself for five hours. She looked round at the municipal buildings, the tractor park and the schoolyard, where waste paper blew about in the dust.
What a dump, she thought. Perkins’ Rent! She laughed. She walked a little way away from the K-ship, lit a cigarette, and stood in the street waiting for someone to give her a ride. “It looks like that,” she told herself. “It looks like somewhere that would be called Perkins’ Rent.”
She started crying again, but you couldn’t see that from across the schoolyard, where the children were still glued to the windows, the girls eyeing enviously her pink satin tube skirt, patent leather high heels and crimson nail polish, while the boys regarded her shyly from the corners of their eyes. When they grew up, the boys thought, they would rescue her from some bad situation she found herself in, down in the Core among the gene doctors and rogue cultivars. She would be grateful and reward them by showing them her tits. Let them touch, even. How good and warm those tits would feel, resting in your hands.
Perhaps sensing some of this, the clone turned round and banged on the hull of the White Cat.
“Let me back in,” she called.
The cargo port opened.
“You should make up your mind,” said Seria Mau.
Local interceptor squadrons, scrambled as the K-ship hit the outer atmosphere, showed up a minute or two later. They got good locks and began to make an attack run. “Look at these idiots,” said Seria Mau. Then, on an open channeclass="underline" “I told you I wasn’t staying.” She torched up and quit the gravity well vertically at a little under Mach 40, on a faint but visible plume of ionised gas. The kids cheered again. Thunder rolled round Perkins IV and met itself coming the other way.