Offspring Read Free Page B

something of the woman in Ben’s face as well. Ben made mental comparisons. Same eye shape, same mouth, same nose.
    Ben set the mirror down and drew his knees up to his chest. The base of the woman’s hologram was inscribed with the words Irfan Qasad. The base of the man’s hologram said Daniel Vik. They had died almost a thousand years ago, and they were his parents.
    He sat on the hardwood floor for a long time, trying to wrap his mind around this impossible concept. Irfan Qasad. Captain of the colony ship that brought humans to the planet Bellerophon. First human to speak to the alien Ched-Balaar. First human to accept the Ched-Balaar’s gift of Silence and enter the Dream. Founder of the Blessed and Most Beautiful Monastery of the Children of Irfan.
    Daniel Vik. Yeoman to Captain Qasad and eventually her husband. Second human to enter the Dream. Father of Irfan’s children. Genocidal maniac who had tried to murder every Silent on Bellerophon.
    Ben got up and went to the kitchen, poured himself a tall, tart glass of juice and took it out onto the balcony that ringed the house. The early spring sun had finally chased away the heavy winter clouds. Voices, both human and Ched-Balaar, chattered, clattered, and hooted in the distance. Beyond the balcony stretched the talltree forest, with its hundred-meter trees above and giant lizards below. Neighboring houses peeked out from the branches one tree over. The original colonists of Bellerophon had taken to the trees to escape the local lizards—inevitably dubbed “dinosaurs”—and their Treetown descendants had never gone back to the ground. Some of the structures, built of iron-hard talltree wood, were reputed to date back to the time of Irfan Qasad herself.
    Irfan Qasad. Ben set the juice glass on the balcony rail. The news felt unreal, as if it had come to someone else, as if—
    “You are brooding,” said a voice behind him. Ben spun, upset the glass, and caught it just before it fell over the rail. Juice spattered the leaves below.
    “Harenn,” he yelped. “You scared the life out of me.”
    “Perhaps I should scare some life into you,” said Harenn Mashib. She was leaning against the door jamb, her dark eyes half-closed, her arms folded. At her feet lay a star-shaped piece of computer equipment. “I knocked, but no one answered.”
    “I didn’t hear.”
    “You hear very little lately,” she observed. “Kendi has noticed, you know. He asks about you, wants to know if I have any idea what bothers you, and then I have to lie and tell him I know nothing. I dislike lying to him, Ben, especially about something so important.”
    “Straight to the point,” Ben grimaced. “And pulling no punches.”
    “You have to tell him.”
    “I will,” Ben protested. “I just...it hasn’t been the right time.”
    “This begs the question of when the right time will come.”
    Ben sighed and boosted himself up to sit on the balcony rail. Harenn remained in the doorway. She was a shortish, pretty woman whose choice of clothing ran to voluminous, and she covered her hair with a blue head scarf.
    “I don’t know,” he said finally. “How do you say something like this? ‘Hey, love, I just thought you ought to know that Harenn found out who my biological mother is. Can you believe it’s Irfan Qasad?’ Sure.”
    Harenn picked up the bit of equipment and brought it over to the balcony. “That information will not change Kendi’s feelings for you. And it does not change who you are.”
    A crisp spring breeze ruffled Ben’s hair. He took the cryo-unit from Harenn’s hands and stared down at it. The information didn’t change who he was. The problem was, he didn’t know who he was. Or maybe it was that he did know.
    System lights blinked in a familiar pattern across the readout. Ben knew the cryo-unit itself wasn’t a thousand years old, unlike the embryos frozen inside. Those embryos were mere clumps of tiny cells, yet they managed to raise countless questions.