I had learned how to create fake identities with convincing histories during my training: my latest incarnation easily passed the security check. For eight and a half years, Roy Bruce, guard third class, cricket breeder, amateur freestyle climber, lived a quiet, anonymous life out on the fringe of the solar system. And then two guards stumbled across the body of Goether Lyle, who had been the leader of the Senate of Athens, Tethys when, along with a dozen other city states in the Outer System, it had declared independence from Earth.
I’d known Goether slightly: an intense, serious man who’d been writing some kind of philosophical thesis in his spare time. His body was found in the middle of the main highway between the facility and the farms, spread-eagled and naked, spikes hammered through hands and feet. His genitals had been cut off and stuffed in his mouth; his tongue had been pulled through the slit in his throat. He was also frozen solid—the temperature out on the floor of the graben is around minus one hundred and fifty degrees celsius, balmy compared to the surface of Ariel, but still a lot colder than the inside of any domestic freezer, so cold that the carbon dioxide given off by certain strains of vacuum organisms precipitates out of the atmosphere like hoar frost. It took six hours to thaw out his body for the autopsy, which determined that the mutilations were post mortem. He’d been strangled, and then all the other stuff had been done to him.
I was more than thirty klicks away when Goether Lyle’s body was discovered, supervising a work party of ten prisoners, what we call a stick, that was harvesting a field of vacuum organisms. It’s important to keep the prisoners occupied, and stoop labour out in the fields or in the processing plants leaves them too tired to plan any serious mischief. Also, export of the high-grade biochemicals which the vacuum organisms cook from methane in the thin atmosphere helps to defray the enormous cost of running the facility. So I didn’t hear about the murder until I’d driven my stick back to its block at the end of the shift, and I didn’t learn all the gruesome details until later that evening, at the sweat lodge.
In the vestigial gravity of worldlets like Ariel, where you can drown in a shower and water tends to slosh about uncontrollably, sweat lodges, saunas, or Turkish-style hamams are ideal ways to keep clean. You bake in steam heat, sweat the dirt out of your pores, scrape it off your skin, and exchange gossip with your neighbours and friends. Even in a little company town like Herschel City, there are lodges catering for just about every sexual orientation and religious belief. My lodge, #23, is for unattached, agnostic heterosexual males. That evening, as usual, I was sitting with a dozen or so naked men of various ages and body types in eucalyptus-scented steam. We scraped at our skin with abrasive mitts or plastered green depilatory mud on ourselves, squirted the baking stones of the hearth with water to make more steam, and talked about the murder of Goether Lyle. Mustafa Sesler, who worked in the hospital, gave us all the grisly details. There was speculation about whether it was caused by a personal beef or a turf war between gangs. Someone made the inevitable joke about it being the most thorough suicide in the history of the prison. Someone else, my friend Willy Gup, asked me if I had any idea about it.
“You had the guy in your stick last year, Roy. He have any enemies you know of?”
I gave a noncommittal answer. The mutilations described by Mustafa Sesler were straight out of my training in assassination, guerrilla tactics, and black propaganda. I was processing the awful possibility that Goether Lyle had been murdered by someone like me.
You must know by now what I am. That I am not really human. That I am a doppelganger designed by gene wizards, grown in a vat, decanted fully grown with a headful of hardwired talents and traits, trained up, and sent out to kill the person whose exact double I was, and replace him. I do not know how many doppelgangers, berserkers, suicide artists and other cloned subversives were deployed during the Quiet War, but I believe that our contribution was significant. My target was Sharwal Jah Sharja, a minor gene wizard who lived alone in the jungle in one of the tented crevasses of East of Eden, Ganymede, where he orchestrated the unceasing symphony of the city state’s closed loop ecosystem. After I took his place, I began a programme of ecotage, significantly reducing the circulation of water vapour and increasing the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide and toxic trace gases. By the time the Quiet War kicked off, some four weeks later, the population of East of Eden was wearing breathing masks, the forests and parks were beginning to die, and most food animals and crops had died or were badly stricken, forcing the city to use biomass from vacuum organism farms to feed its citizens. A commando force of the Three Powers Alliance annexed East of Eden’s farms in the first few hours of the war, and after two weeks its starving citizens agreed terms of surrender.
I was supposed to turn myself in as soon as the city had been secured, but in the middle of the formal surrender, dead-ender fanatics assassinated half the Senate and attacked the occupying force. In the subsequent confusion, the tented crevasse where I had been living was blown open to vacuum, Sharwal Jah Sharja was posted as one of the casualties, and I took the opportunity to slip away. I have successfully hidden my true identity and lived incognito amongst ordinary human beings ever since.
Why did I disobey my orders? How did I slip the bonds of my hardwired drives and instincts? It’s quite simple. While I had been pretending to be Sharwal Jah Sharja, I had come to love life. I wanted to learn as much about it as I could in the brief span I’d been allotted by my designers. And so I adopted the identity of another casualty, and after the war was over and the Three Powers Alliance allowed trade and travel to resume, I left East of Eden and went out into the solar system to see what I could see.
In all my wanderings I never met any others like me, but I did find a hint that at least one of my brothers and sisters of the vat had survived the war. All of us had been imprinted with a variety of coded messages covering a vast range of possibilities, and a year after going on the run I came across one of them in a little-used passageway between two chambers of the city of Xamba, Rhea.
To anyone else it was a meaningless scrawl; to me, it was like a flash of black lightning that branded an enciphered phone number itself on my brain. The walls of the passageway were thickly scribbled with graffiti, much of it pre-war. The message could have been left there last year or last week; it could have been a trap, left by agents hunting renegades like me. I didn’t have the nerve to find out. I went straight to the spaceport and bought a seat on a shuttle to Phoebe, the gateway port to the other moons of Saturn and the rest of the Outer System. Six months later, wearing the new identity of Roy Bruce, I became a guard at TPA Facility 898.
That’s why, almost nine years later, I couldn’t be certain that any of my brothers and sisters had survived, and I was able to convince myself that Goether Lyle had been the victim of the vicious internal politics of the prison, killed and mutilated by someone who knew about the black propaganda techniques in which we’d been trained. But that comforting fiction was blown apart the very next day, when another mutilated body was found.
The victim was a former senator of Baghdad, Enceladus, and a member of the prison gang that was intermittently at war with the gang to which Goether Lyle had belonged. A message written in blood on the ground next to the senator’s body implied that he’d been murdered by Goether Lyle’s cronies, but whoever had killed him must have done the deed in his cell some time between the evening count and the end of the night’s lockdown, spirited his body out of the facility without being detected, and left it within the field of view of a security camera which had been hacked to show a recorded loop instead of a live feed. Members of the rival gangs lived in different blocks, had chips implanted in their skulls which constantly monitored their movements, and were under lock-down all night. If the killer was a prisoner, he would have had to bribe more than a dozen guards; it was far more likely that the senator had been killed by one of the facility’s staff. And when I heard what had been done to the body, I was certain that it was the handiwork of one of my brothers or sisters. The senator had been blinded before he’d been strangled, and his lungs had been pulled through incisions in his back. It was a mutilation called the Blood Eagle, invented by the Vikings some two thousand years ago. I remembered the cold, patient voice of the instructor who had demonstrated it to us on a corpse.