Thousandstar (Cluster 4)

Prologue
* * * *

She was lank and lithe and startlingly fair of feature for her kind, and as she ran her hair flung out in a blue splay. Her skin was blue, too, but light and almost translucently delicate. By Capellan standards she was a beauty.

"Jess!" she called, as she intercepted the blue man. "What are you doing home?"

He grinned, his teeth bright against the blue lips. He was beardless and small, as like her in size and feature as it was possible for a male to be. "I thought you'd never ask! It's a saw, of course."

She kissed him with the barely platonic passion typical of this Solarian subculture, her teeth nipping warningly into his lip. "Did you flip out from the training exercise? If they catch you--?" She paused, her features hardening prettily. "What saw?"

He stepped back, ran one thumbnail along the translucent wrapping, and allowed it to fall open, exposing the machine. "A genuine top-of-the-mill heavy-duty self-powered laser," he announced proudly. "Now we can hew our own timbers for the summer house. Bet we can carve the first ones this afternoon."

"Jess," she said, alarmed. "You didn't--" But she knew from his aura that he suffered no abnormal guilt.

"Of course I didn't steal it," he said, flashing a mock glare at her. "I bought it outright. It's more legal that way. It's ours, Jess, all ours! Isn't it a beauty?"

"But Jess--we can't afford--"

"Girl, the trouble with you is you have no confidence," he said with jubilant sternness. But there was something in his aura, an excitement that communicated itself to her via their interaction of auras. "Would I waste money?"

"Jess--you didn't remortgage the castle? You know we're on the verge of broke already. We can hardly pay our retainer, Flowers, or finesse the taxes! Besides, you need my countersignature to--"

"Remortgage, heavenhell!" he exclaimed. "I paid off the old mortgage, O ye of little wit." Even his aura was teasing her with its strange excitement.

"Come on. I can only chew so much joke in one swallow. What's the real story, Jess? Are the creditors on your tail?"

He settled into a serious expression, but still his aura belied it. "Well, Jess, you have to void the safety latch, like this, so the thing will operate. Then you set it for the type of cutting you require, which we can skip because it's already set at the standard setting. Then you switch it on and--"

"Jess!" she exclaimed peremptorily. This time her aura gave his a sharp nudge.

"Jess," he replied equably.

"Jess, pay attention to me!"

"Jessica, don't I always? What little I have to spare?" His eyes were blue mirrors of malicious innocence.

"The money, Jess--the money."

"Now isn't that almost just like a woman," he chided her. "Here I have this superlative expensive laser saw, quite fit for royalty, and all she cares about is the morbid mundane detail of--"

"Jess, do you want me to start being difficult?"

He shied away with a look of horror he could not maintain, dissolving into laughter. "Oh, no! Anything but that, Jess-ca! Anything you can do, I can do better, except that! Oh, I can't stand you when you're difficult. That's what the X chromosome does, all right; it is jam-packed with diffi--"

"That's not true!"

"Oh, it's true! Too too true! You are the most difficult creature in System Capella! You--"

"I was referring to the other thing, Jess. That I can do better than you."

He glanced at her, seeing her vibrant in her petulance. "That doesn't count, Jess. That's inherent in the gender. To be fair we'd have to survey my liaisons against yours, and compare partner-ratings. I'd bet I--"

"I was talking about the artistry," she said, fending off the baiting. "You can't make a decent holograph freehand."

He held up his hands in the millennia-old Solarian gesture of surrender. "Acquiescence, sis. Two things. Holograph and difficult. If I'd been the female aspect of the clone, I'd have them too, though."

"If you'd been the female aspect, Jess, you wouldn't have squandered credit we don't have on a saw we can't afford, to build a summer house we'll never use because we'll be evicted for debt from the estate. Now out with it, and don't try to lie, because you know I can feel it in your aura."

"That's the one thing about a cloned aura," he complained. "No decent secrets. Not until one clone abdicates his heritage and deviates too far to--"

"The money, Jess," she prodded.

"Well, if you must pry, in your female fashion--it's the advance on the mission."

"What mission? You're still in training!"

"Not any more. They needed an anonymous Solarian with intrigue expertise, and I needed a quick infusion of credit, so--"

"Who needed? For what? Where?"

"Thousandstar."

She stared mutely at him.

"Segment Thousandstar," he repeated, enjoying her amazement. "You've heard of it? Farthest Segment of the Milky Way Galaxy, twenty thousand parsecs from here, give or take a few light seconds? All those non-human sapients crowded into--"

"I took the same geography courses you did. We have just as many sapient species here in Segment Etamin. What about Thousandstar?"

"So the advance is twenty thousand units of Galactic credit, and a similar amount upon successful completion of the mission. This saw was only five thousand, and our old mortgage twelve thousand, so we have three thousand left--"

"I can handle the basic math," she said faintly. "But that fee--"

"Well, I admit it's small, but--"

"Small!" she exploded. "Will you get serious? It's a fortune! How could a nit like you, Jess-man--?"

"But it's firm, Jess-girl. All I have to do is show. So I don't even need to complete the mission successfully, though of course I'll do that too. You won't have to go out selling your favors anymore."

"I don't sell my--" She broke off, retrenching. "Don't try to divert me with your spurious slights! Why would Segment Thousandstar advance twenty thousand Galactic units to an anonymous Solarian clone?"

"Hey!" he cried with mock affront. "Don't you think I'm worth it, Jess?"

"You're worth a million, if you marry the right aristocratic clone girl and preserve the estate," she said coldly. "That's why I don't want your head on the royal execution block. You're no wild giant like Morrow who can get away with--"

"Ah, Morrow," he said. "What I wouldn't give for his muscle, money, and moxie, not to mention his cute wife--"

"Now stop fooling around and cough it out!"

He coughed it out: "Jessica, I don't know. The mission's secret. But it's legal. It came through Etamin and Sol."

"Through the Imperial System and the mother world," she said softly. "It has to be legitimate. Unless Andromeda's started hostaging again."

"Impossible. Melody of Mintaka fixed that, remember? For the past century there's been no hostaging; the host controls the body, no matter what the aura of the transferee may be, unless the host lets the visiting aura take over. Anyway, Andromeda's no threat; the Milky Way controls all Andromeda's Spheres."

"True," she said uncertainly. "But it must be a dangerous mission. Really grotesque, to warrant such a fee." She turned to him, and he felt the unrest in her aura. "Jesse, you and I are closer than any two other people can be, except the same-sex clones, and sometimes I think we're actually closer than that, because we have been forced to concentrate on our similarity so constantly. If I lost you--"

He tamed his enjoyment momentarily, meeting her with equivalent candor. "That's why I bought the saw, Jessica. I knew you'd go along. It's not a waste of credit; it will pay itself back within a year, slicing out all the boards and timbers we need. This is the break we've needed to put our family back into its aristocratic mode. The seed of Good Queen Bess will flourish again."

"But the mission! All that credit for a secret job! Why is it secret, Jess? Because they know you'll die?"

"I asked about that. I have a cunning mind, remember; that's part of my training. Mortality expectation is five percent. That's not bad, Jess. One out of twenty. So when I go on that mission, I have a ninety-five percent chance of survival--probably ninety-eight percent for someone as smart as me--and a hundred percent chance of keeping the advance credit. So maybe the chance of successful completion is small--I don't know--but at least I'll be home again, and we don't need that matching payment. The advance alone will solve our economic problem. I'm willing to take that minuscule risk for the sake of our castle, our estate, our family line. Without that advance, we stand a thirty percent chance of a foreclosure on the property. You know that. Royalty is no longer divine. We may derive from Queen Bess, but our family power has been fading a thousand years, because we've become effete. System, Sphere, and Segment have waxed while we have waned. The universe does not need aristocracy anymore. Now at a single stroke I can restore our status--or at least give us a fair chance to halt the erosion. Isn't it worth the gamble?"

"I don't know," she said, biting her lip so that it turned a darker blue. "There's something funny about this deal. You didn't get this assignment through merit, did you?"

He did not bother to inflate his wounded pride. "No, there are lots of qualified candidates. But two thirds of them wouldn't take a blind mission at any price, and of the remainder I was the only one with royal blood. Royalty has pride, more pride than money or sense; they know that. We won't let them down when the mission gets hard, because we are allergic to failure. It's bad for the image. So I was their best bet: a qualified, foolhardy royalist."

"Foolhardy--there's the operative term. Jess, I don't like this at all!"

He laughed, but his aura belied him. "Come on, let's make the first beam while we consider."

She smiled agreement, troubled.

They took the saw to their mountain stand of purple pine. The old royal estate possessed some of the finest standing timber on the planet. Some of the pines dated from the time of Queen Bess, who as legend had it had taken jolly green Flint of Outworld as a lover, conceived by him, and settled this estate on the produce of that union. Regardless of the validity of this dubious historical claim, it was a fine estate. The castle still had the old dragon stalls and the equally impressive giant bed, where the green man was reputed to have performed so successfully. Unfortunately, that phenomenal two-hundred-intensity aura had never manifested in Flint's successors, and with the passing of the formal monarchy the proprietors had become virtual caretakers of the estate.

When the Second War of Energy burst upon the Cluster, a thousand Solarian years after the first, there had been no high-aura hero from this Capellan realm to save the Milky Way Galaxy. Instead Melody of Mintaka had come, an alien, unhuman creature transferred to a Solarian host. She had done the job, and she was indeed another distant descendant of Flint of Outworld via non-human line, but the luster of Sphere Sol had dimmed, and System Capella had become a virtual backdust region.

That was part of what passed through the minds of the unique male-female clones Jess as they approached the stand of purple pine. To be an anonymous remnant of a once-proud System of a once-great Sphere--there was a certain dissatisfaction gnawing through the generations. The male wanted to achieve some sort of return to notoriety, if not to greatness, and the female, though more cautious about the means, desired a similar achievement.

Jess started the saw. The laser blade leaped out, a searing white rod terminating at a preset distance. "Stand clear," he said, but his sister-self needed no warning. She was afraid of that short, deadly beam.

He approached a tree. Not one of the millennia trunks, for those were monuments, but a fine century individual. Its bark was as blue as his skin, its needles deep purple. "Where's the lean?" he inquired.

She surveyed it, walking around the trunk, her breasts accentuating as she craned her head back. She was highly conscious of her female attributes, because only here in the seclusion of the estate could she ever allow them to manifest. No one outside knew her for what she was. "No lean," she decided. "It's a balanced tree."

"I don't want a balanced tree! I want one that will fall exactly where I know it will fall!"

"Take another tree, then. One that suits your temperament."

"Unbalanced... temperament," he murmured. Then he lifted the saw. "I believe I'll trim off an excrescence or two here," he said, making a playful feint at her bosom with the laser.

She scooted backward. "You do, and I'll trim off a protuberance there," she said, indicating his crotch. "Your bovine girl friend wouldn't like that."

He cocked his head. "Which bovine?"

"That cow Bessy, of course."

"Oh, that bovine." He shrugged. "How about your lecherous commoner buck, who thinks you're a chambermaid? Now there's a protuberance that needs trimming!"

"Don't be jealous. Nature grants to commoners' bodies--"

"What they lack in intellect," he finished for her.

"You have a tree to fell."

"Um." He set his saw against the trunk just where the tree began to broaden into the root, and angled the laser blade slowly across the wood.

"It's not working," the girl said, concerned.

"That's what you think, you dumb female," he said with satisfaction. He angled his cut back without removing the beam from the tree. The bit of white visible between the saw and the tree turned red. "Oops, I'm going too fast; the blade's dulling. Slowing, rather. It's molecule-thin; the visible bar is only to mark the place. Still, there's work in burning through solid wood; you have to cut slowly, give it time. There." The beam had converted back to white.

"But there isn't any cut," she said.

He ignored her, angling up. In a moment the beam emerged. The tree stood untouched. "Now take out the wedge," he told her.

"Sure." Playing the game, she put her hands on the trunk where the imaginary wedge of wood had been sliced out, heaved with exaggerated effort--and fell over backward as the wedge came loose.

Her brother-self chuckled. "Now get your fat posterior off the grass and straighten your skirt; I'm not your protuberant commoner-friend. I'm going to drop the tree there."

She looked at the wedge in her hands, then at the gap in the trunk. The edge of the cut wavered somewhat because of his unsteady control, and one section was ragged where he had pushed it too fast. That was why the wedge had not fallen out of its own accord. There was no doubt the laser had done it. She hoisted her slender derriere up. "That's some machine!" she remarked with involuntary respect.

"That's what this mission means to us," he said smugly. "I've got three days leave before I report; I want to get that summer house built."

"In three days?" she asked incredulously. "We can't even set the foundations in that time."

"True, the saw can't do it all," he said, reconsidering as he started to cut from the opposite side of the tree. "You may have to put the finishing touches on it while I'm away. Give you something to do when you're not polishing your claws. The mission only lasts ten days or so. It's good payment for that time."

"It certainly is," she agreed, involuntarily glancing at her neat, short, unpolished nails. Her suspicion was reasserting itself. "There has to be a catch."

"So maybe it's an unpleasant mission," he said, his eye on the progress of the cut. "An obnoxious transfer host. A giant slug made of vomit or something. I can put up with it for ten days. And if the mission is successful, and I get the completion payment--" He glanced at her and the beam jerked, messing up his cut. "We could afford a marriage and reproduction permit for one of us, nonclone. No more fooling around with sterile partners."

"Yes..." she breathed. "To be free of this ruse at last. To have meaningful sex, a family, security--"

"Recognition, status," he added. "Timber."

"Timber?"

"That's what you say when the tree's falling."

"Oh." She skipped out of the way as the pine tilted grandly.

The crash was horrendous. Purple needles showered down, and a large branch shook loose and bounced nearby. The sound echoed and reechoed from the near hills. The base of the trunk bucked off the stump and kicked back, as though trying to take one of them with it to destruction.

Brother and sister selves stood for a moment, half in awe of what they had wrought. Even a comparatively small tree like this had a lot of mass! A large one would shake the very mountain.

Jesse hefted the laser. "Now for the beams," he said, his voice calm but his aura animated.

"Beams? How many does that saw have?"

"Idiot! I meant the beams of wood. Measure off a ten-meter length, and I'll hew it now."

"Doesn't it need to season?" she asked. "Suppose it warps?"

"Don't you know anything, cell of my cell? Purple pine doesn't warp. It hardly even woofs. Or tweets. It merely hardens in place. That's why it's such valuable wood, that has to be protected by being included on grand old estates like ours. So that only selective cutting is done, to thin the groves, no commercial strip-cutting. We want to hew it now, while it's soft."

"Oh." She was of exactly the same intelligence as he, and had had the same education, but that particular fact had slipped by her. Sometimes they had substituted for each other during boring classes, so one could pick up sundry facts the other missed. She was beginning to diverge more obviously from her brother, and the mask of identical garb in public would not be effective much longer.

She brought out her measure, touched the little disk to the base of the trunk, walked along the tree until the readout indicated ten meters, then touched the trunk again. A red dot now marked the spot.

He trimmed the base smooth, then severed the trunk at the ten-meter mark. The log shifted and settled more comfortably into the spongy ground. Now he fiddled with a special control, adjusting the saw. "Actually, I'm doing this for you. I'll have to marry another aristocratic clone; you'll get to pick a real person to family with."

"Want to bet? There are more males of our generation than females. That's why they operated on me to turn me female, hedging the bet. I'll probably have to marry the clone, while you get to graze among the common herd."

"There is that," he agreed. "I must admit, there are some commoners I wouldn't mind hitching to. Clonedom is seeming more sterile these days; so few of our kind have any real fire or ambition. They're mostly all socialites, forcing us to play that game too. Stand back, doll. This can be tricky."

The laser beam shot out way beyond its prior length. He aligned it with the length of the log, then levered it slowly so that it made a burn in the bark from end to end. He moved the beam over and made a similar burn, a quarter of the way around. Then he readjusted the saw and used the short cutting beam to trim an edge lengthwise along one line. A meter on the saw showed him precisely what orientation to maintain to keep the cut correctly angled.

"You know, someday the other clones will have to find out about you," he remarked as he worked. Jesse was never silent for very long. "We can't keep it secret forever."

She knew it. She had nightmares about premature, involuntary exposure. Yet she responded bravely enough: "If you find an aristocratic spouse soon, we can. It would be nice to save this hedge for another generation, protecting our line. Once the other clones catch on, they'll all be doing it, and our line will have no advantage."

He nodded soberly. With four cuts, he had a beam roughly square in cross section, ten meters long. The irregularities of his trimming only made it seem authentically hand-hewn. "Where could we get a finer ridge-beam than that?" he asked rhetorically.

"Nowhere," she answered, impressed.

"Still mad at me for buying the saw?"

"No, of course not."

"Five thousand credits--you could buy a lot of silly perfume for that, to make commoners think you're sexy."

"I'll take the saw."

He grinned, pleased. "Make that literal. You hew the next beam. Why should I do all the work?"

"And the castle mortgage paid off," she said, liking the notion better. "That's the first time our family's been solvent in a generation."

"Still, considering the danger of the mission--" he teased.

"Oh, shut up!"

"Now you know how to turn it on and off, Jess. The saw, I mean. It's not heavy, just keep your arm steady and your dugs out of the way; don't let them dangle in the beam."

"I don't dangle, you do!" But she accepted the saw, eager to try her skill. She had, of course, been raised in the male tradition, and there were aspects of it she rather enjoyed, such as hewing beams.

"I don't dangle when I'm with someone interesting." He took the measuring disk and marked off another ten-meter section. "Sever it here."

She started toward him. "The trunk, not me!" he protested, stepping back with his hands protectively in front of him.

She shrugged as if disappointed and set the saw at the mark. The laser moved into the woods. "I can't even feel it!"

"Right. There's no recoil, no snag with laser. Just watch the beam, make sure it stays white. With this tool we can saw boards, shape columns, polish panels, drill holes--anything! I plan to cut wooden pegs to hold it together, along with notching. This saw has settings for carving out pegs, notches, and assorted bevels and curlicues; you just have to program it. We can build our whole house with this one saw!"

"You're right," she said, no longer even attempting to be flip. "We need this machine. It is worth the credit. You just be sure you report for that mission on time."

"Precious little short of death itself could keep me away," he assured her. "And the Society of Hosts insurance would cover the advance, if I died before reporting, so even then you'd keep the money. But it's not just the money I'm doing it for; I'm tired of this dreary aristocratic life. I want real adventure for a change. I want to go out among the stars, travel to the farthest places, experience alien existence, see the universe!"

"Yes..." she breathed, envying him his coming adventure.

"You just make sure I wake up in time to report for transfer when--"

The log severed before she was aware of it. It dropped suddenly and rolled toward them. It was massive, half a meter thick at the cut: weight enough to crush a leg. Jessica screamed in temporary panic and swung the valuable saw out of the way, her finger locked on the trigger. Jesse grabbed for her, trying to draw her bodily out of harm's way.

The wildly shifting laser beam passed across his spine. His shirt fell open, cleanly cut, but for a moment there was no blood. He fell, his arms looped about her thighs.

The rolling log stopped short of his body, balked by the chance irregularity of the ground. Jessica, acting with numb relief, drew her finger from the trigger, turned off the saw, set it down carefully, and caught her brother under the arms as he slid slowly facefirst toward the turf. "Oh, Jesse, are you hurt?"

But even as she spoke, she knew he was. His aura, which really merged with hers, was fluctuating wildly. The beam, set to cut wood, had touched him only briefly--not enough to cut his body in half or even to cut his backbone, but sufficient to penetrate a centimeter or so. Elsewhere it would have made a nasty gash in the flesh; across his spine it was critical.

His body was paralyzed, but he retained consciousness and speech. "Jess--" he gasped as she rolled him over and tenderly brushed the dirt from his face. "My aura--is it--?"

"Jess, the beam cut into your spinal cord," she said, horrified. "Your aura is irregular." She knew the extent if not the precise nature of the injury because the sympathetic response in her own aura touched her spine, lending a superficial numbness to her legs. His aura irregular? It was an understatement. "I'll call an ambulance." She fumbled for her communicator. The health wing would arrive in minutes.

"No, Jess!" he rasped. "I may live--but hospital'd take weeks! I have only two days."

"To hell with two days!" she cried, the tears overflowing. "You can't go on that mission now! Even if you weren't badly injured, your aura would never pass. It reflects your physical condition. It has to be fully healthy to pass, you know that! I'll take care of you, I promise!"

"Kill me," he said. "Say it was part of the accident Just pass the laser across my chest, slowly, so as to intersect the heart--"

"No!" she screamed. "Jess, what are you saying?"

"The insurance--death benefit--only if I die, it covers--"

"Jess!"

"Jess, I can't renege on that mission. The advance would be forfeited, the insurance invalid, and we'd lose the whole estate and the family reputation. Have Flowers pick up the body; he'll cover for you. He's been in this business a long time, he's doctored family skeletons before, you can bet on it, and he's completely loyal to us. He'll do it. I'd rather die than--"

"Jess, I won't do it!" she cried. "I know Flowers would cover for us. I don't care. I love you, clone-brother! I don't care what--"

But he was unconscious; she knew by the change in his aura. He had fought for consciousness until his message was out, then let go.

She brought the communicator to her mouth--and paused, comprehending the position they were in. The first flush of emotion was phasing into the broader reality of their situation. She could save her brother's life--for what? For a remaining life of poverty and shame? He had spoken truly! He was a joker, but never a coward. He would prefer to die. Now, cleanly, painlessly, with a certain private honor, leaving her to carry on the reputation of the family and maintain the millennium-old estate. She knew this--for his aura was hers, his mind was hers, and she shared this preference. They were aristocrats! If she had been injured in such a way as to forfeit honor and fortune together, death would seem a welcome alternative.

She could do it. She had the nerve, bred into the royal line, and because she was royal, she would not be interrogated. Her word and the visible evidence would suffice. Flowers would employ his professional touch to make the case tight. She could kill her brother-self, and save the family honor and fortune. It was feasible.

Yet she did love him, as she loved herself. How could she face a world without him? Though he might later marry, and she also, with one being royal and the other becoming a commoner, they would always be closest to each other, clone-siblings.

She had to decide--now. Before his metabolism adapted to the injury, making a biochemical/aural analysis possible that would show the separate nature of her act. Now, this minute--or never.

Jessica picked up the saw and held it over Jesse's body. She knew the expedient course--yet her love opposed it with almost equal force. Was there no way out?