"And all this for a few mutations?"
"More than a few, Senator. The population of a whole planet is a vast palette to draw from. The dirty work has to be done; let the Rix be blamed for it, we thought."
Senator Oxham dropped into a large chair, letting the plagueman stand alone. She covered her eyes and felt a twinge from the city. The incessant human throng that always threatened to consume her seemed terribly fragile now. With the right weapon, all those voices could be silenced in an instant. That ancient specter of mass destruction--more than the diaspora, or the Time Thief, or even the gray powers of the symbiant--was the appalling price of technology.
Death had hardly been beaten. The Old Enemy had simply changed its scale of interest.
"I am sorry that you were disappointed by the Lynx's victory," she finally said.
"No, we were glad, Senator."
She looked up at him.
The biosuit shuffled from side to side.
"Try to understand. We of the Axis are all hopeful monsters. Mutations who hope one day to contribute to the germ line." "Monsters," she agreed.
"As are you, Nara Oxham."
"What do you mean?"
"In your ability, your madness, you are one of us. If synesthesia implants had been invented a few hundred years earlier, before apathy treatments existed to cure you, all those with unexpected reactions to the process--brainbugs, photism, verbochromia, even your empathy--would have been cast aside as mad, as were my ancestors. The descendants of these unfortunates, people like you, would be in the Plague Axis now."
For a moment, Nara was revolted at the thought. Her condition was not genetic, but the result of untried technology. A small percentage had unexpected reactions to any new technique.
"I'm not a mutation."
"You are. The last hundred years have shown that reactions to synesthesia implants are often inherited. Your kind are a genetic anomaly, one that was hidden until the environment changed. Synesthesia revealed you."
The plagueman fell silent, letting her digest his words. She could almost grasp his viewpoint, unfamiliar though it was. So much lay 203 hidden in the human code, revealed only by events. It was like the rain forests of Vasthold, whose vast reservoirs of protein structures routinely delivered up new drugs and bioware, but only when the need for them became apparent. Irrational design, it was called: plumbing diversity for random answers.
Events could make a monster--or a savior--of anyone.
But Nara had never thought of herself that way.
"Possibly," she said.
"But you shamed us, Nara Oxham. You faced down the Emperor, as we did not."
She laughed bitterly. "Now you decide you don't want a new race of mutants? After the point is moot?"
"We realized even before Laurent Zai's victory that we had gone too far. Our thinking had been changed by cowardice. We were afraid to oppose the sovereign."
She shrugged. "So you say."
"Allow us to prove it, Nara Oxham." "How?"
He shuffled toward her, held out his hand. Oxham no longer felt compelled to hide her disgust, and she stood and pulled away.
"Any vote you wish, Senator, we will side with you."
Nara raised her eyebrows. The War Council was structured around a natural four-to-four split, the three opposition parties and Ax Milnk against Loyalty and the three dead. The Plague Axis held the deciding vote. She realized now that the Emperor had planned it that way. When they had confirmed the War Council, the Senate had thought the Plague Axis a natural ally to the living, not knowing of the pressures that the Axis suffered from the Rix blockade, not realizing how the Emperor could bend them to his will. But the sovereign had overplayed his hand; his attempted genocide had turned them into guilty, regretful accomplices.
"You'll vote the way I say?"
The biosuit nodded. "We will, once, when you ask it."
"I'll let you know. But however many votes it takes, there must be no more genocides."
"None," the plagueman agreed.
That was something, Senator Oxham thought. She had an ally. Perhaps this war didn't have to be a bloodbath. If the man were genuine, perhaps it was time for a gesture.
Swallowing, Nara crossed to where the representative stood, and put her hand on the shoulder of the suit. It was as cold as a dead man's arm.
"What do you want from me in return? Surely not just absolution," she said softly.
The biosuited man turned away from her, faced the darkness of the Martyrs' Park, and cleared his throat, a very recognizable sound.
"If you would favor us, Nara Oxham, we do have a request. Perhaps your particular ability is merely happenstance, a slip of a few angstroms in the implant procedure. But if not, then maybe your empathy can be added to the germ line."
He turned to her.
"So one day, in your own time, we would like you to have a child. Or give us what we need to make one." A child, she thought. More madness in this universe, another Oxham addicted to the passions of the crowd, addicted to drugs to maintain sanity, given to loving broken men light-years distant. This was like some fairy tale, a firstborn promised to demons. She shuddered.
"Give me your vote when I ask it," she said, "and I'll consider it."
Another hopeful monster for the cauldron.
Laurent Zai watched the object in the bridge airscreen, his mind fighting against the mesmerizing undulations of its surface.
Now that the Lynx was closing with the thing, simple telescopy revealed a level of detail that had been invisible to active sensors. The 205 wild dunes that played across its visage had grown far more active since Marx's probes had imaged them. The object was definitely alive now, clearly possessed of some inner, animating presence.
Zai could sense the compound mind in its movements. Somehow, the Rix had found a way to mirror the data of an entire world, to compress and transmit it, and house it in this strange arrangement of matter. The planet had merely served as an incubator, virgin soil in which to culture the first of a new species of the compound mind, one able to move across the stars. The Rix takeover of Legis was not an invasion.
It was a breeding program.
And the Apparatus was afraid of a few transmissions escaping Legis? Here was the data of the entire planet, wrapped up and ready for shipping back into Rix space. Every aspect of Imperial technology and culture would be open for other Rix minds to probe and pick apart, a living model of the enemy brought back as spoils of war.