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crucial she'd seen fit to encode it into her son's most
basic building blocks: his DNA, the strands of life that made what he was.
Idly, while the mind array did its work, he put a portion ghosts to work
examining the structure of Jim's DNA itself. yes, Jim was definitely his
mother's son. He knew Kate's pattern as well as he knew his own, and the
inheritance was obvious. Just as it was obvious that
Carl Endicott had He stopped.
No, it wasn't obvious. He looked again. He didn't have a analysis of
Carl's genetic code at hand--why should he? The had been an employee, and
then a traitor. But he could access basic screening, and He gasped. No, the
other inheritance was not from Endicott. It was from... His mind reeled. He
drew back from the inescapable shaken to his core. A truth he'd held
unexamined for sixteen trembled, then shattered in the spectral, humming
darkness.
The unmistakable patterns he knew best of all, blended mixed with
Kate's. Mother and father together, their genetic tory living on forever in
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their offspring's cells. So utterly So devastating.
His world, the world he'd built over a decade and a half of bitterness and
betrayal, teetered wildly. And as he considered that--his mind open, naked,
shocked with discovery--the ghosts finished their work and delivered their
conclusions to him in one gigantic, rolling epiphany:
Kate's secret.
Delta screamed.
e alarms had been shrieking in her ears for several minutes, but Steele had
been busy. Encased in her armor, buoyed up with the strength of ten, she had
given herself over to the slaughter, and now blood dripped from her mailed
fists. Her battle maser was almost too hot to touch.
But now, for a moment, standing in a smoky corridor crossroads, she lifted her
head and paused. Across the heads-up screen of her helmet, an ultimate alarm
tripped in crimson letters, and a spot on a sketchy map blazed with a
throbbing red dot.
"The inner blast doors," she muttered to herself.
The invaders had broken through the final defenses, How had it come to this?
Delta himself was in danger!
She glanced down at the fallen Pleb who writhed beneath her left foot.
Dallm, her back hurtl
"Sorry, buddy, you lose," she told him, and pressed harder. Heard a sharp,
bony crack, and the man went llmp, his acnescalTed face suddenly smooth and
peaceful.
A hand-lettered ID tag pinned to his shirt said only, "Joey."
"Sorry... Joey," she said again, not knowing why she said it. Then she turned
and headed for Delta, and whatJthough she wasn't a superstitious woman at
all--a premonition deep in her bones told her would be her final stand.
Well, she'd lived by it all her life, and had no qualms now about dying with
it... why should she? She was a warrior woman. Her ancient decision, her
fate... Her sword.
He hung in darkness, surrounded by the glimmering light of his ghosts, his
unknowing human slaves, as they chattered their irresistible messages
endlessly, directly into his controlling mind.
His slaves. Some measurable percentage of them disintegrating even as he
watched, their human minds burned out by the pressure of the flawed linkage,
by the mind arrays he'd torn his whole life apart to save"
years ago. The glorious creation upon whose altar he had sacrificed
everything: love, family, hope, dreams. Upon which he'd placed everything of
value, in order to preserve the larger good.
The altar whose iron name was the enclsjustify the means. \020And every bit
of that sacrifice now in stinking ruins, the awful sludge of that psychic
burning defiling his nostrils. The remains of Kate, of the relationships he
could have had, future that might have been his, and--worst of all! He'd been
wrong.
The entire stinking sacrifice unnecessary and, most all, perverse. '
He should have waited, given her more time, listened to no, he didn't do that,
did he? He had his damnable ends to i sider, to justify his equally damnable
means, and so he had his filthy sacrifice, and now he stared at that vile,
plain.
It was more than he could bear. And when her final not the revelation of
science she'd achieved after he'd thrust away--when those few simple words
came drifting up, her remembered caresses--he wept.
After everything, even as the bloody end he'd made for nigh, she'd found a way
to leave her fatal benediction, the cells of her son. Had she known he would
fred it? would?
"I still love you..."
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"NoI"
"... still love..."
"NO!"
"Love."
Delta changed. He had to. Once he had been something some one else, but he'd
thought that man gone forever. as utterly as any smoking calf on the dark
altar of Choices made, a life lived, the past unchanged and
And now, whispering down the winds of years forgotten, a messag unlooked for,
unhoped for. A message of love....... She had loved him, even as he'd
destroyed her.
Could he be forgiven?
Things broke apart. His carefully constructed center did no till hold.
Instead, the heart he'd believed hardened to everything fear and duty
shattered before the ultimate balm:
Love.
He'd murdered her for his means, and buried her beneath his ends, and even
when he was done, she'd still loved him.
And so she resurrected a man who had once lived, but thought himself dead.
Now that man strode forth, out of the Jim halls of the past, once again
understanding the joy of high purpose. He'd
had his ends and means, but those ends no longer justified anything human.
Love is the resurrection.
And his sins were legion.
Tabitha raised her head. The monstrous, disintegrating thing on its throne
tower was screaming. Bits of moist skin flew as it clawed at its sightless
eyes.
She shuddered. What did it mean? Was Delta dying?
Jim moaned softly. He was drifting in and out of consciousness, alternating
moments of clarity with longer stretches of delirium. The fevers were eating
him up, and whatever devil things were hidden inside him were still doing
their work. Even as she held him tighter his body convulsed into a long
series of racking coughs.
She wiped away the pink drool, staring at Delta, Her only hope---J/m's only
hope.
"Don't die, damn you," she whispered. "Save my boy."
Jim began to cough again.
Delta fleshy body was falling apart--he still hadn't unleashed the genetic
therapies that would halt the molecular machines ripping him to pieces, he'd
been too busy with the rest of it--but his mind was clear.
And in its own way, that dry, familiar
clarity was worse than madness, for he couldn't turn the truth. In the end,
his greatest failure had been one of had not been able to see the
possibilities. He had been the brilliance of their original discovery,
seduced by the of the mind arrays, willing in his desperation to ignore their
Kate had not been, but he'd ignored her. Brushed her though the heart of the
discovery was hers. And so he had and his first sin was pride.
Followed shortly by vanity, and by murder on a personal, then a vast, scale.
He checked her results a third time, but nothing had
He could Fred no flaw in her work. She had broken through, trusted her own
imagination, her own brilliance, and... beyond.
So while he clutched the fruit of her first, broken him, defending it against
her doubts, she had kept on.
ceeded.
It was all tied together, the linkage, the Pleb power of the arrays [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]