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Page 3.

He felt her soft, dry hand firmly in his as she stood shimmering over him. “I am so pleased to meet you,” she said in a faintly accented, softly lilting voice that was almost as exotic as the Sea Tea, almost a Samba of old Earth. He and Stella had joked that they might stay here, run away from Lyxa, who had given him this pet as a gift. Stella was a diaphane, just like Edzar—diaphanous, like a fly’s wing, meaning see-through. They were constructs from 3/di holos of their human source’s nervous system, rather drifting seaweeds of genes and minimal construct organs including every detail from skin to eyes to fingernails, but still just moving projections of could be, would be, should be. They were demi-humans and, by law, had souls meaning, for practical purposes, they had human rights except that freedom had been bred out of them.

Pets did not reproduce and were not sexual creatures. They had no physical organs for sex, and no instinct for how to perform something so alien to them. They did have powerful emotions since they were grown from human stem cells and holocopied nerve tissues including everything from the cranium and spine to the remotest finger cells. Jared sometimes, lying in bed at night and watching Stella walk nakedly (still mostly invisible) about the room before settling to sleep, would imagine she drifted about like a creature of finest ocean kelp. The finest djia were essentially creatures built of nerve fibers, like humans stripped of muscles, skin, veins, arteries, and the like. Her nerve trail had the softest greenish underwater glow in that hotel room light residue. It was actually somewhat horrifying to some people, and impossible to get used to, but once you came to see your djia as a demi-person it was like having a combination cat, butler, and best friend. A good djia could be the closest, most loyal friend you’d ever have. You got used to a face that resembled a slightly glowing (at night) ink sketch or a pencil sketch by day. It was far more suggestion than minutiae but the human brain was wired to fill in those details on the fly.

“Hello, my dear,” said Hordibay as Stella stood modestly before them, with her hands demurely clasped before the Y of her dress, covering the area where a full human’s thighs and frontal bottom met.

“Oh Stella, you are beautiful,” Iada gushed, overcome even more by her than by Jared.

Edzar rose, or floated upright in rapt attention. Djia were either going to be instant friends or enemies for life, depending on their programming. In this case, it looked as if Edzar and Stella would get along just fine. Stella went to sit beside Edzar at Hordibay’s feet, where they held hands, looked at each other, and communicated emotively (a step down from telepathic, but heartwarming to see when it wasn’t an instant cat fight with pixels floating in all directions).

“Where did you get her?”

“From the royal family,” Jared said obliquely, thinking privately: From my lover Lyxa, whose pet I am. Unlike Stella, he was fully human, of natural gene stock, but he might as well be a djia these days.

“After that run on the Victory Arch, you deserved the best,” Iada said admiringly.

If Hordibay knew anything, he wasn’t saying. Jared’s fate had become a news item for a while, but so much scandal surrounded everyone in the city that the daily gossip media had already long since moved on to a million other stories.

Iada changed the subject. “Are you at all afraid to travel these days, lieutenant?”

Hordibay injected a slight explosion at his wife’s question. “We came here to relax, dear.”

“I know, Franjek, but we’re in the company of an expert.”

Jared had to laugh. “If you rely on my expertise, you’re in a losing game.”

Hordibay held his drink before him as if steadying it would steady his nerves. “There is talk of war everywhere. The aliens are moving in on a thousand fronts, and all our government does is bicker.”

Iada made a face. “The UGO is worse than useless.”

“What do you think?” Hordibay asked sharply.

Jared reluctantly told them the truth. “I am actually assigned to our delegation as a military liaison, and I don’t know any more than you do right now.”

Iada raised her fingers to her lips in a gesture that she knew she’d made a faux pas.

Hordibay declared sensibly, with an air of resignation, “You have all sorts of secret info going on, and I know you couldn’t say anything if you wanted to.”

“It’s all right,” Iada said, sitting back with her drink. “Let’s just relax and enjoy ourselves.”

“That’s right,” Hordibay said, “in a few days we have to get back to our lives in Mercury FPC. We are a house divided, and a house divided always falls.”

“A dreadful thought,” Jared said.

Iada added, “The way it is now, with rioting in the streets, and the Raskians and others undermining everyone, I’m not looking forward to going home.”

“People who can are already fleeing from the capital,” Hordibay said. “Anything to get away from what is coming. Anarchy, destruction, invasion.”

Iada waved her glass in a wide arc. “To look at people here sunbathing, drinking, partying, you’d never know it may be the end of the world as we’ve known it.”

Jared had seen certain intelligence briefings. What he could not tell these people was that things were far worse than anything they could imagine. He raised his glass. “Let’s drink to peace and enjoying every moment we can.”

All three raised their glasses in a cheer. Stella and Edzar each raised one hand in a silent hallelujah. They’d make a cute couple if djia could be couples, Jared thought.

In his few years with Stella, Jared and she had become fond of each other as much as a full human and a demi-human could ever be. In some ways, he loved her as if she were a sister or a daughter. He suspected that she had feelings for him also, in the complex way that djias’ emotional lives were like humans in some areas and unlike humans in others.

He’d been gifted her by Lyxa, who was at the time deeply infatuated with her Olympian prize. By now, Lyxa kept him at arms’ length, calling him to her when she needed him. He suspected there was a connection between Lyxa and Stella. After all, Stella had been grown from some extracts of Lyxa’s genetic tree, which made the two almost sisters. Jared still had some feelings for Lyxa, and he supposed in a Platonic way that rubbed off on his interaction with the neuroclone. It was like having your cake and eating it too. He was only grateful that Lyxa had never had him neurocloned, or there might be a ghostly copy of himself floating around the palace in the Free Port City like sea kelp glowing on the obsolete castle ramparts at night.

Could he trust Stella? He wasn’t sure, and so he never told her of his on again, off again plans to run away. That would mean abandoning her, along with his name, family, career, and education. He’d become a cipher on the galactic spaceways, a thought that always made him change his mind. She was totally sexless, but sometimes if they were cold she would wrap herself in a blanket and spoon with him, so they’d keep each other warm for the night. If his hand strayed to the blanket, her curvature and hip felt much like that of a fully human woman.

Jared did go out, did date attractive young women, did sleep with them, but he always returned to his bachelor life with Stella. He’d once loved Lyxa, and he had not truly loved another woman since. That was the major missing part of his life right now. He was not ready to settle down, and so he felt he must wait it out. This situation, being on call for Lyxa, while serving as a military attaché to UGO President Cyrus Mbe, could not go on forever. It was an artificial job, threatening to become a real job as the political situation worsened. And Jared had always seen himself as a line officer, leading men and women in space combat as a fleet commander. Being stuck with a bunch of aging or aged civilians and all their bickering and intrigue was just not his taste in theater.

The Hordibays stayed for another drink, along with their djia Edzar.

Jared gestured to Stella, who rose in compliance. He excused himself, saying they must get some rest because they were to travel home to Mercury FPC the next day. After cheery goodbyes and well wishes, Jared and Stella sauntered through park-like surroundings, holding hands at times in an absent sort of sibling sign of affection, until they reached their decorative, turreted building overlooking beaches and ocean. There they slept the night away, full of uneasy dreams and portents while the planet’s two large moons were full and gyrated glacially in the night sky. In the morning, their journey home would begin. He wasn’t looking forward to it. And once again, he had not run away. He wondered if Stella understood that. And if she might be reporting or beaming the information to Lyxa back in the city.

Many of the scantily clad beach goers were on the so-called Summer Planet for early celebrations of the upcoming new year and new millennium. These were the last days of 4999 OC. More than just a calendar would make its millennial turn. An entire civilization teetered on the balance, and with it the survival of the human empire that sprawled across the galaxy.

Millions of partiers, surfers, swimmers, drunks, and orgiasts wanted desperately to ignore the chaos beginning to gnaw at the fringes of the human domain, now starting to cut uncomfortably toward the heart of the empire itself in its nearby capital city Cosmopolis and planet, Mercury FPC, orbiting the Aldeb sun.

Here, a just a few orbits away from the capital world, Jared could briefly escape the crowding, intrigues, and struggles of the City of the Universe. The republic was, as historians liked to say, another empire in all but name. Jared lived and worked in the center of the whirlpool, and saw it all first hand. A pretense of democracy continued, but all power was now in truth (a dark but blatantly obvious reality) in the hands of ruthless oligarchs who looted, who pillaged, who sold to foreigners whatever they did not want to acquire for themselves, who cared nothing about the civic religion of the holy ancestors. If the oligarchs had souls, they would sell their souls for more profits. The Assemblies (Interior and Exterior) were entirely under corporate control. It was a yard sale, and anything could be bought or stolen. Nothing was sacred anymore. The pretense of normalcy continued from day to day (what else could ordinary citizens do?) but time was running out for the republic and for humankind. Not only was the republic or empire (take your pick) being torn apart from inside, but vast hordes of formerly oppressed alien races had formed confederations whose fleets already approached human dromespace.

Here, briefly on vacation, Jared could escape from the tendrils of Lyxa’s spy organization that poked into every aspect of Mercurian politics including the city’s enemies (which were many). Lyxa was a survivor, the last princess of an extinct Vegan royal house that should have vanished a thousand years ago when Mercury became a republic. As Jared saw it from the inside, those people never went away. You could declare a republic and pretend to have a democracy, but the tyrants simply went underground. It was an eternal defect of the human race.

Jared’s ideal, his youthful dream while finishing the Star Academy and becoming the world’s champion torch runner on the Victory Arch, had been to earn for himself—by his own blood sweat and tears—a posting to some remote outpost. He dreamed of a place where he could lead troops in battle and build a career of adventure and glory for himself. At the moment of his triumph, Lyxa had seen him running the Arch with that torch, to the cheers of billions on a thousand worlds, and she’d claimed him for her own. She’d used her connections, her wiles, and raw desire to get him in her bed and assigned to her personal body staff. Only in the past year had she begun to move on to other pets, but she was not one to let go. So she had thwarted his dreams again, and gotten him assigned to a diplomatic post with the Starmeer in Mercury City. He hated it. It was better than being stuck in her palace with the eunuchs and other unfortunates, but it wasn’t the remote posting either. He was on the staff of Exterior President Cyrus Mbe, as a military attaché, working for Colonel Jesse Bowman, and working with more senior military officers who all had the line and frontier experience he had so desperately wanted. Worse yet, some thought he had evaded duty or curried favor, so they despised him, which hurt all the more.

So Jared was always looking for that way out of Lyxa’s clutches, away from his own beloved capital city, and out to the frontiers. He had no idea how he would achieve that without sacrificing everything. But he kept looking for that middle way—a way out, far out, to freedom.

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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.