Emerald Eyes | Page 7

up at the woman, flushed with strong emotion. Montignet continued, "We have one. It's going to live."
"Fascinating," murmured Amnier. He looked down at the steel stairway he sat on. When he looked up again there was a flat snapping sound, like a whip being cracked. For an instant Amnier stared directly at the flat black cutout of a man, merely the outline of a shape. I doubt he ever again fully believed his own eyes after that; Camber Tremodian was gone before Amnier could be certain of what he had seen.
None of the others appeared to have noticed. "Which one is it?" asked Malko quietly.
"Number fifty-five. Series C, number C; we've been calling it Charlie Chan."
"Do you know its sex yet?"
"Male."
Malko Kalharri had not yet turned away from Darryl Amnier; now he came closer, squatted until his eyes were on a level with Amnier's. "I think we shall name him Carl...Castanaveras, perhaps. Yes."
Amnier blinked. His mind seemed to be elsewhere. "Oh?"
"Yes," said Kalharri, "Castanaveras. I think it an appropriate name."
Three days after my life brushed against his, Jorge Rodriguez died of radiation burns.
Camber and I have kept the costs of the battle down; Jorge Rodriguez was only the fifth human being in sequential Time to die in a battle of the Time Wars.
It might have comforted him to know that.
Or not.

2.
Three decades passed. The SpaceFarers' Collective continued to grow. Early in the 2030s, they established SpaceFarer colonies in the Asteroid Belt.
In the late 2030s, the United Nations began colonies in the Asteroid Belt, in an attempt to forestall the SpaceFarers' Collective's bid to assume control of the Belt. They were successful; the SpaceFarer colonies never flourished. Their success did them no good, however. The U.N. colonies were largely self-sufficient; with the time lags in their supply lines, they had to be. It was a logical result that they should find themselves more sympathetic toward the SpaceFarers than toward a government millions of kilometers away. In 2040, with support from the SpaceFarers, all but a half dozen of the Belt colonies declared their independence from the Unification.
Of necessity the colonies evolved into "CityStates." It was the logical basic economic unit for a society built of flying mountains.
When Carl Castanaveras was still a young boy, before puberty turned him into a Peaceforcer weapon, an officer of the United Nations Peace Keeping Force once asked him what he wished to do with his life.
The question startled the boy. He had been raised by doctors and scientists and Malko Kalharri; the Peaceforcer's question was not the sort of thing anyone had ever asked of him before.
After a moment's consideration he said, "Am I supposed to do something with it?"
There can be good mistakes. Fact and truth and history are rarely related. The facts are these.
Carl Castanaveras was born on the eighteenth of September in the year 2030. He was named after a soldier who, fighting for his country, died during the Unification War; he was raised in a world that still bore the scars of that war. The America in which he was raised was an occupied country, with more Peaceforcers than police. The war was history already by the time he was old enough to understand its causes. In classes he was taught about its great battles; how after the Battle of Yorktown, the young Marine Corps sergeant who was in command of what was left of the United States Marine Corps forced the U.N. forces to withdraw into a neighboring city before he would agree to surrender his forces. In agreeing to surrender, a young Marine named Neil Corona produced the most memorable quote of the War: "We will fry under your goddamn cannon," he said, "before a single Marine will lay down his arms in Yorktown."
After that war's end, the slow task of rebuilding began. France, alone among the industrial nations of the time, emerged unscathed from the Unification War. In the years that followed the war, it attained a position of preeminence among the bodies that constituted the United Nations.
The gene pattern that produced Carl Castanaveras was not successfully reproduced until April the eighteenth, in 2035, when a design that became Jane McConnell was successfully imprinted upon a sterile egg. In creating her, Suzanne Montignet localized three unique genes that Carl Castanaveras possessed and no other living human being did. Jane McConnell was, aside from her gender, his clone. She was the first and last instance in which Suzanne Montignet had to resort to relatively clumsy cloning techniques to ensure that the gene complex took properly. Johann MacArthur was brought to term late in 2036; unlike Jane McConnell he was a true genie, assembled gene by gene until a design was found that Suzanne Montignet approved. Six such others were born between 2036 and 2042.
In 2040 Darryl Amnier was appointed