Armageddon (11 page)

There were maybe a half a dozen men sprawled on the bunks. Several of them glanced her way and looked her over with interest. Embarrassed to be caught gawking at them, she moved on.

On the left side of the corridor there seemed to be smaller versions of the captain’s cabin. Most of the doors were closed and she didn’t want to open them, but she caught a glimpse of one through a partially open door.

When she reached the end, she found a ladder leading up through a tube to another level. After hesitating for several moments, she climbed up it until she reached the next level. The smell of food wafted to her and her stomach growled painfully.

Deciding to see if she could find something to eat, she stepped off the ladder and into the corridor, following the aroma.

This level seemed to be a collection of storage rooms, a gym, what looked like it must be a recreation room, and a large dining hall, or mess, and kitchen.

There were people grouped around some of the tables. Apparently, the crew worked and slept in shifts.

Lena stepped into the doorway uncertainly.

A woman that looked vaguely familiar looked up, spied her and immediately got to her feet. “I’m Mel--or Doc,” she said, smiling as she extended her hand.

Lena felt herself relaxing fractionally. “I’m Lena.”

Mel’s smile widened. “I know. Nigel’s sister.”

Lena sent her a startled look. “You know Nigel?”

“Come on. You look like you could use something to eat,” she said, tugging at the hand she held to urge Lena inside before she released it. “Not really,” she answered the question once she’d pointed out to Lena where to get a tray and utensils. “I’ve met him though.”

Lena swallowed a little thickly. “My brother was supposed to meet me at my apartment the night the home guard picked me up. I don’t know what happened to him.”

Mel sent her a look of sympathy. “He’s all right.”

Relief flooded Lena. “You’re sure? They didn’t get him, too? You wouldn’t …

just say that, would you?”

Mel grimaced. “I might. But it just happens to be true.” She thought it over. “At least, he was alright the last I knew. You’ll see him soon. I promise.”

Still not completely convinced, Lena nevertheless relaxed enough to return her attention to the food spread along the buffet.

She was starving. By the time she’d gotten to the end she discovered she’d put a little of everything on her tray. It looked like enough food to feed a small army. She stared at it with a mixture of embarrassment and dismay.

Mel chuckled. “You
do
have an appetite!”

“I think I got more than I need,” Lena responded with a grimace. “I didn’t realize

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I’d put so much on the tray.”

“Don’t worry about it. Come on. Sit with us and I’ll introduce you around.”

They were a rough looking bunch. If Lena had seen them anywhere else she would have turned around and walked the other way, or crossed the street. She discovered they were all very pleasant and polite, however.

It was still one of the most uncomfortable meals she’d ever sat through, mostly because her arrival seemed to have deprived everyone of any ideas for conversation even though they didn’t seem to be having a problem before her arrival. She had always been pretty reserved around people she didn’t know well and couldn’t come up with any ideas that might get a conversation of some kind going.

All in all, she was glad when she’d eaten all she could swallow, which wasn’t nearly as much as she’d taken out on the plate, or even nearly as much as she might have been able to eat if she hadn’t felt that she’d created a strain in the atmosphere.

“Done already?” Mel asked, her voice tinged with disapproval.

“I can put it up for later,” Lena said uncomfortably. Food wasn’t wasted. She doubted even the wealthy wasted food, because it was still pretty damned hard to come by, and it occurred to her that she’d either given them the impression that she was criminally wasteful, or, almost as bad, greedy, grabbing more than she could eat to make sure she got her share even if it deprived others of getting theirs.

“I’ll show you where to store it,” Mel volunteered. “You’re just not used to eating what you used to after being out so long, and then the time in the jail. I’m sure you didn’t get fed much in there.”

Lena smiled at Mel gratefully. “I guess that’s it. I was just so hungry I didn’t realize I’d gotten so much. This will probably hold me for three or four meals.”

She couldn’t tell that the soldiers’ opinions toward her had improved that much, but at least none of them glared at her when she got up and followed Mel into the kitch/galley to wrap the food and store it.

“You’ll be better off eating small amounts at first anyway. Feel like walking down to the med lab with me so I can check you out?”

She didn’t, but she could see Mel wasn’t actually asking. She was just trying to be polite about it. She nodded, following Mel from the mess hall and up another level.

“They think I’m a clone, don’t they?” Lena asked as she stripped and climbed onto the examination table.

Mel frowned over the chart she was studying on her screen. “What makes you think that?”

“I don’t remember things very clearly about what happened when we got on the ship, but I know Dax thinks I’m a clone,” she said, staring at the ceiling. “I’m not,” she added as Mel moved to the head of the examination table and set up the scanner.

“I’m convinced,” Mel retorted a little absently.

Lena studied the woman’s face. “You aren’t.”

Without responding, Mel moved to the computer again and set the scan cycle.

“Actually, I am more inclined to think you’re Lena. I didn’t see anything to convince me you weren’t. But I did see a lot to convince me you were.” She was silent for several moments, studying the read out as the scan began. “You have to understand that, around here, people are pretty jumpy about it. We’ve seen it--enough times to find it really scary--and mostly we’d rather err on the side of caution.”

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A sense of hopelessness invaded Lena and a touch of anger along with it. How was she supposed to prove she was the real Lena? She knew she was. She remembered things from her childhood and the clones didn’t have a childhood, couldn’t.

The thought reminded her of her conversation with Dax. Why hadn’t he accepted, when she’d told him about her memory, that she was who she claimed to be?

It was because Dax didn’t believe, she realized, that everyone else doubted her.

They respected him. She knew that from just the little she’d seen him with his crew.

“I remember my childhood,” she said tentatively. “A clone wouldn’t have had one.”

Mel sent her a sympathetic look. “They didn’t, but they don’t know that.”

Lena sent her a startled glance. “How can they not know? They can’t--give these creatures memories. They certainly wouldn’t be able to give them the memories of the person they were cloning.”

Mel looked uncomfortable. “The human mind is so programmable it’s downright scary,” she said finally. “It’s done all day, every day, without people even being aware of it.”

Lena smiled with a mixture of disbelief and sadness. “That sounds like something Morris would’ve said.”

“But you didn’t believe it?”

Lena shrugged. “I guess I could see he was right in a way. I just never believed it was … like a conspiracy against people.”

“Most of that isn’t a secret conspiracy. It never was. It’s right out in the open.

People just don’t see it. It’s the determination of different factions to control people, not a covert operation designed to take over the world. In old days, before half the population of the planet died and most of the food supplies were destroyed, everybody with money and power was fighting over the little people. All day long they were subjected to vids, sound waves, signs--buy this, buy that, you need this. Even the pharmaceutical and medical professions were in on the free-for-all to gobble up the biggest share of the money. Headache? Take this, or this, or this. Stomach ache?

Sleepless? Need to stay awake? And on and on until probably three quarters of the population were obsessing about their health, or stoned out of their minds because they were told hundreds of times a day that it was all right to take any drug for any problem, because the drugs were going to cure it. And the medical profession invented a catchy phrase--preventive medicine--to get their share of the money. Convincing people that they had to dash to the hospital or doctor’s office all the time, whether there was anything wrong with them or not.”

Lena stared at her frowningly. “That isn’t programming. It’s marketing. It’s good for the economy.”

“Some of it is. Some of it isn’t. Any time people are convinced to buy something they don’t need, don’t really want, can’t use, shouldn’t have, or just to spend money they can’t afford to spend, it isn’t good for them and it isn’t good for the economy. The government just didn’t try to control it like they did everything else because as long as people were spending like maniacs the economy was ‘healthy’.”

“So you’re saying influence is programming?”

“Isn’t it?”

Lena frowned. She didn’t agree with the doctor, but she decided not to argue

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about it. “I still don’t see what this has to do with clones.”

“Nothing and everything. The same principles I was just talking about can be applied to programming people, and have been for centuries. The technique was first developed during the twentieth century--one of the world wars. Basically, if you’re told something enough times you believe it.”

“So--you’re saying they tell the clones about their childhood?”

“As far as we’ve been able to discover, yes.”

Lena frowned. “They couldn’t know everything.”

“They don’t have to. Every day, every where you go, throughout your entire life, you’re being watched and recorded. All they have to do is track down the records, and they have the basics to program with. You graduated here, at this time, these people were with you, etc. They feed all of the information they’ve gathered on a specific subject to the clone while the brain is developing, project images they collect into the mind. By the time the thing comes out of the cooker,
it
thinks it actually experienced all of those things. They’re memories. And, yes, it’s got glitches, but nobody’s memory is perfect either so most of the time people just think ‘faulty memory’.”

It was scary how believable that sounded, how possible. There were things that had happened when she was a child, incidents, that she’d heard about over and over until even she wasn’t sure whether she remembered the incident, or just remembered being told about it.

She knew she was Lena, not a clone. She wasn’t so certain anymore, though, if things had happened differently that she would have known.

“Morris was different. I mean, his personality was all wrong. I knew the moment I saw him it wasn’t really Morris.”

“That’s because they didn’t know enough about Morris. He’d spent most of his life underground, off the grid. And the things that happen to people change them. It affects their personality, so if they don’t experience them, they turn out differently. I don’t think they really intended to clone Morris. He wouldn’t go near a clinic, and I can’t figure out how they could’ve gotten his DNA to develop the clone. I think they took him in to question him and....” She broke off when she saw the look on Lena’s face. “Sorry.”

Lena shook her head, fighting back the urge to burst into tears. “I think it would’ve been easier to take if I hadn’t had to look at that
thing
that looked like him, and sounded like him, but wasn’t. And the worst of it was that I wasn’t there when he needed me. I didn’t get to tell him bye. One day, he was just gone.”

Mel said nothing, focusing on fiddling with the scanner, which had completed its cycle, to give Lena time to get her emotions under control.

“I know,” she finally said quietly. “It’s like that for all of us. That’s why most of us are here, because someone we loved was replaced.”

Lena lifted her head, staring at Mel as that slowly sank into her mind. “Why would they do that? What could they possibly have to gain replacing people that were just … ordinary people? Politicians, I could understand. Maybe even executives of powerful corporations, but just plain ordinary citizens who have no power?”

“Truthfully? I don’t know. But I’m guessing, control. They need the ordinary people. The whole country rests on the shoulders of the ordinary people. They provide the labor that makes the money, and they spend money to support the economy. You weren’t around during the food riots or the riots that came before that. I wasn’t either, for

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that matter. But when the gov lost control of the people, they lost the whole country.

Everything went down the tubes.

“I think they are replacing politicians--and anybody else in key positions of power, but they’re also replacing anybody that presents any kind of threat at all. Even if the only influence they have is on the people around them. All they have to do is make a little wave, and whoever is behind this makes them disappear.