FREE STORIES 2012(100)

Jarl and his . . . kind, back at Hoffnungshaus, were not mentally deficient. Rather the opposite. They hadn’t been haphazardly brought to life from stored genetic materials. They had been carefully assembled, DNA strand by DNA strand, and characteristic by characteristic, designed to be the best of their kind, the best of their sub-race, the best of their nationality. Their designers had proudly given them their own names.

They were supposed to help manage the increasingly more complex state. Since it had been realized that the planned economy, the planned society couldn’t work unless something better than humans could be found to lead it, something better than humans had been created. They were supposed to shepherd humanity into a new age.

Because each nation feared that the other’s creation would have no sympathy for them, it had been decided, by treaty, that they’d be brought up at Hoffnungshaus, all together, no matter where they came from in the world. Most of them had only ever known Hoffnungshaus. Jarl, because he was one of the older ones, remembered his first three years, hazily. There had been a family and a woman he called “mother”—he remembered being hugged and kissed.

In Hoffnungshaus he was never kissed or hugged, or touched, at least not by the caretakers and not unless he was being punished. He wasn’t stupid enough, he thought, pressing his cheek harder against the floorboard, to think that he had it as bad as the mules, and he was sure most mules would think Hoffnungshaus was a resort, as nice as this one. But he also wasn’t stupid enough not to see the resemblances. They were all male, kept isolated. They were brought up by males only, probably because mule riots always involved rapes of nearby females, and the caretakers saw the resemblance between the people in Hoffnungshaus and mules. And they were disciplined somewhere in a way resembling historical prisons and reform houses—possibly because while they were needed, as the mules were needed, if for different things, they were also feared. The mules were feared for their strength. Jarl and his kind were feared for their intelligence. There always hung around their caretakers the faint suspicion that their charges could outwit them without effort, and that the only protection was to keep the young bio-improved boys terrified.

All that Jarl could understand—had understood for a long time, without much thinking—that he was both more and less than normal humans. His mind was more powerful than theirs, but there were things he’d never know: what it was like having a family or growing up in the midst of his equals, freely. He watched enough holos—because Xander was really good at hacking link units—to know how other people lived and how odd and stilted his life would appear to them.

He also knew that most normal humans would be just as horrified at having one of Jarl’s kind in their midst as at having a mule.

And yet there were normal humans, free humans—Mr. Alterman and this woman, Jane, whom he’d heard but never yet seen clearly—who would risk everything including arrest and possibly summary justice to free mules.

Jarl never made a decision. Not consciously. But his body knew what to do. Once he was sure the men had really left and weren’t trying to trick him into showing himself, he crawled out from under the bed.

He was going through the Alterman’s bags before he was sure what he meant to do. But by the time he found a small bag and started throwing into it gems, ID gems, anything even vaguely identifiable, plus two bottles of odd serum and a row of empty injectors, he knew. He was going to get out of here, find them, and take them the things they might need to execute their mission and leave. They’d risked everything for others, and he’d risk everything for them.

At the bottom of Jane’s bag—he presumed hers, because it contained both a small flask of perfume and what looked like a hairstyling brush—there was a small black book embossed with the words “Holy Bible.” It was an old-style book, made of paper and probably expensive, and though it had nothing written on it that might identify her, it looked well thumbed through, and he thought she might very well be upset if it went missing. So he put it in his bag, too.

Finding the burner was harder. It took his almost taking apart their big suitcase. But he thought that they wouldn’t be able to come back here anyway. The burner—burners, actually, as there were two besides his own—were in a false bottom which took him quite a while to work out how to open, even though it was obvious from the dimensions it must be there.

He took the belt and holsters there, and put all three burners around his waist.

Things were barely packed, when he heard the murmur of voices outside the room. Time to go. He’d heard the sound of birds outside the window, so there must be an outside to the resort. However, he remembered he was supposed to be exploring, and that resort employees were supposed to be on the lookout for him.