Dark Benediction

“Clicker, please! Eighty people will die if they aren’t warned. Clicker, part of you is human! If you were born a human, then—”

“Shut up!” I heard a vicious slap.

She cried, and it was a Pain sound. My anger increased. “I will be bad and illogical!” I said. “I will be disobedient and—”

“You threaten me?” he bawled. “Why you crazy piece of junk, I’ll—” He darted toward the panel and spun the dial to tel dolls, my saturation-point. If I let him jab the button I would become unconscious. Angrily I spurted the jets—a brief jolt at six gravities. He lurched away from the panel and crashed against the wall. He sagged in a daze, shaking his head.

“If you try to hurt me I shall do it again!” I told him.

“Go down!” he ordered. “I’ll have you dismantled. I’ll—”

“Let Clicker alone!” the girl raged.

“You!” he hissed. “I’ll turn you in with the others!”

“Go ahead.”

“Go down, Clicker. Land at Port Gamma.”

“I will be disobedient. I will not go down.”

He glared at one of my eyes for a long time. Then he stalked out of the cabin and went back to the reactor room. He donned a lead suit and bent over the main reactor. I saw what be was going to do. He was going to take my rockets away from me; he was going to control them himself.

“No, Secon Teacher! Please!”

He laughed. He removed one of the plates and reached inside. I was afraid. I started a slight reaction. The room flared with brilliance. He screamed and lurched back. His hands were gone to the elbows.

“You wanted to disconnect the control circuit,” I said. “You shouldn’t have tried to do that.”

But he didn’t hear me. He was lying on the floor. Now I know they have Pain Buttons. They must have little Pain Buttons all over them.

Janna staggered back to the reactor room. She wrinkled her nose. She saw Teacher and gurgled. She gurgled all over the deck. Then she went back to the cabin and sat with her face in her hands for a long time. I did nothing. I was ashamed.

“You killed him,” she said.

“Was that bad?”

“Very bad.”

“Will you hurt me for it?”

She looked up and her eyes were leaking. She shook her head. “I won’t hurt you, Clicker—hut they will.”

“Who are they?”

She paused. “Secon Samesh, I guess.”

“You won’t hurt me, though?”

“No, Clicker. You might be my own child. They took a lot of babies. They took mine. You might be Frankie.” She laughed crazily. “You might be my son, Clicker—you might be.”

“I do not understand, Secon Janna.”

She laughed again. “Why don’t you call me ‘Mommie’?”

“If that is what you wish, Mommie.”

“Nooo!” She screamed it. “Don’t! I didn’t mean—”

“I am sorry. I still do not understand.”

She stood up, and her eyes were glittering. “I’ll show you then!” She darted to the special panel—the one of which I am ashamed—and she ripped the seal from the door.

“Please, Secon Janna, I do not wish to see that—”

But the door fell open, and I was silent. I stared at the part of myself: a pink-gray thing in a bottle. It was roughly an obloid, wrinkled and creased, with only a bilateral symmetry. It was smaller than Janna’s head—but something about it suggested a head. It had wires and tubes running to it. The wires ran on to my computer and analyzer sections.

“See!” she screamed. “You’re twelve years old, Clicker. Just a normal, healthy little boy! A little deformed perhaps, but just a prankish little boy. Frankie maybe.” She made a choking sound. She fell down on her knees before the thing. She sobbed wildly.

“I do not understand. I am a machine. Secon Samesh made me.”

She said nothing. She only sobbed.

“I am sad.”

After a long time she was through sobbing. She turned around. “What are you going to do now, Clicker?”

“Teacher told me to go down. Perhaps I should go down now.”

“They’ll kill you—for killing him! And maybe they’ll kill me too.”

“I would not like that.”

She shrugged helplessly. She wandered to and fro in the cabin for a time.

“Do you have fuel for your high C drive?” she asked.

“No, Secon Janna.”

She went to a port and looked out at the stars. She shook her head slowly. “It’s no use. We’ve no place else to go. Secon Samesh rules the Epsilon Eridani system and we can’t get out of it. It’s no use. We’ll have to go down or stay in space until they come for us.”

I thought. My thoughts were confused and my eyes kept focusing on the thing in the bottle. I think it was a part of a TwoLegs. But it is only part of me and so I am not a TwoLegs. It is hard to understand.

“Secon Janna?”

“Yes, Clicker?”

“I—I wish I had hands.”

“Why?”

“I would touch you. Would you be avoidant to me?”

She whirled and her arms were open. But there was nothing to hold with them. She dropped them to her sides, then covered her face with her hands.

“My baby! It’s been so long!”

“You were adient to your—your baby?”

She nodded. “Don’t you know the word love?”

I thought I did. “Secon Samesh took your baby?”

“Yes.”

“I would like to be disobedient and illogical to Secon Samesh. I wish he would put his hands in my reactor. I would—”

“Clicker! Are your weapons activated? Are they ready to be used?”

“I have none yet.”

“The reactors. Can they explode?”

“If I make them. But—then I would he dead.”

She laughed. “What do you know about death?”

“Teacher says it is exactly like Pain.”

“It is like sleep.”

“I like sleep. Then I dream. I dream I am a TwoLegs. If I were a TwoLegs, Secon Janna—I would hold you.”

“Clicker—would you like to be a TwoLegs in a dream forever?”

“Yes, Secon Janna.”

“Would you like to kill Secon Samesh?”

“I think that I would like it. I think—”

Her eyes went wild. “Go down! Go down fast, Clicker! I’ll show you his palace. Go down like a meteor and