Julian May - The Rampart Worlds 3 - The Sagittarius Whorl (v1.2) by The Sagittarius Whorl (v1.2)

Author:The Sagittarius Whorl (v1.2) [Whorl, The Sagittarius]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-01-06T20:05:07.500000+00:00

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Chapter 7

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I expected they would take me to their secret base on Amenti—an asteroid station abandoned nearly eighty years ago by Sheltok—or even to a Haluk colony in the Perseus Spur. Instead, as I discovered much later, they brought me back to Toronto, to the commercial and residential tower where they had established their embassy and secure living quarters.

There I was demicloned. Twice. The complicated process took about seven months. When I was finally released from the dystasis tank it was mid-November, although I didn’t learn the date right away.

I had the superficial appearance of a Haluk, a side effect of the preliminary phase of the demiclone process. The disorienting discovery didn’t prevent me from executing the Helly Frost replica who shared my recovery room—the demiclone who had lived most of his life as a Haluk. But another perfect duplicate of me was already at large, committing God knows what sort of crimes in my name. The first impostor was a renegade human being, collaborating with the aliens.

I hadn’t had much time to speculate on the identity of Fake Helly I. When the medical device monitoring Fake Helly II flat-lined, it triggered an alarm. Rather slow on the uptake, four blue-skinned xenos took their own sweet time coming to the recovery room to see what had happened. None wore translators. Two of the Haluk were meditechs, the same ones who had attended me and Fake Helly II while we recuperated from dystasis. The other pair were uniformed embassy guards armed with Ivanov stun-pistols.

The aliens stood in a close group, about ten feet away from me. They had me backed up against the tall windows. I’d opened the drapes earlier to determine my whereabouts, and outside was a nightscape of downtown Toronto, a glittering forest of colored glass towers.

The taller guard barked at me in his own language. “Human! Do not move!”

I understood. With two laser targeting dots shining on my sternum, it was easy. I stood still.

The female medic, Avilik, darted to the bed where the dead demiclone lay and checked out the corpse with a diagnosticon. She uttered a horrified expletive, then came away from the bed and spoke to me in the Haluk tongue. “Wah! What have you done? Ru Balakalak is not only dead, he is blah blah!”

“Yeah. He sure as hell is,” I replied in English. My tongue felt funny and my teeth seemed to be too far apart. The larynx was mine, but it was laboring under some exotic handicap. My voice was gravelly and deeply resonant, almost Louis Armstrongesque. I continued in execrable Halukese. “This one did it! Ru Balakalak will not live again by dystasis. This one thinks that is very, very good!” I switched back to English. “And fuck you all very much.”

The four of them exclaimed, “Wah!”

Then Avilik began to jabber rapidly with her male colleague, whose name was Miruviak. I only understood one word in ten of the agitated conversation, but the general tenor seemed to

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