(eng) Nancy Kress - Crossfire 01 by Crossfire

Author:Crossfire [Crossfire]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

18

Shipley came back from his walk with Franz Mueller more troubled than when he’d left. The soldier had insisted on carrying a weapon and on staying within sight of the group by the shuttle at all times. As a result, the walk had comprised a large semicircle, with Franz paying more attention to the aliens than to the conversation.

The only time Shipley felt he’d had Franz’s attention was when he said quietly, “You didn’t want to have the cloned organs put in, did you?”

“Yes, I did want!” Franz almost shouted. A moment later he turned stony. “Captain Scherer make the clone for me, when I am still nineteen, twenty years old. My father and Captain Scherer. My father commands the unit Captain Scherer serves. Captain Scherer saves my father’s life, in the fighting at Rio de Janeiro … you remember the fighting at Rio?”

“I’ve read about it,” Shipley said. Food riots, about as brutal as urban uprisings could get. It made painful reading; what had it been like to live it?

Mueller continued, “They swear the Blutpakt. All of them alive after the fighting swear the Blutpakt.”

Shipley nodded. These were—had been—increasingly common on the Earth the Ariel had left behind. The word might be German or Italian or Bantu or Chinese, and the details differed, but the intent was the same. In a fragmented and lonely century, with globalization bringing neither strong kinship ties nor strong religion, a blood pact meant completely reliable loyalty. The members could count on each other for help, protection, companionship, continuity, no matter what else happened in their life. They lived near each other, took care of each other. They were what a community should be, had perhaps once been.

Was a New Quaker meeting only a milder version of a Blutpakt, cemented by different means?

No. A meeting did not create, nurture, and murder innocent cloned human beings for a chance at extended life.

“Franz, you could have had a Blutpakt without becoming rebuilts.”

He didn’t answer, staring fixedly at the shuttle.

Shipley said, “You feel terrible about shooting Captain Scherer. Don’t you also feel terrible about killing your clone?”

“No. The clone is not a human, it is the clone. Doctor, Entschuldigen Sie, but you are not a priest. I am Catholic when I am a boy, but I am not Catholic now. And you are not a priest.”

True enough. Shipley had started this walk to see if he could make Franz feel better, ease some of his guilt. Somewhere Shipley had gone off track. But the image in his mind, of a teenage Franz Mueller drooling and smiling, then strapped down and butchered for his heart, his liver … Shipley shuddered. The image didn’t seem to horrify Franz the way it did him.

“Franz, I must, as a doctor, ask you some questions.”

“Ask.”

Shipley ran through an artful list, designed to elicit not only information on Franz’s physical state but his emotional one as well. When he was finished, Shipley knew no more than when he began. Franz was not sleeping

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