“They’re not the same!” Gundhalinu turned back, stung by his f own guilty knowledge.

Herne smiled, believing the answer his eyes gave away. “That’s

I what I figured. She’s the Queen’s clone, it’s the only thing she could

I be’”

“Are you sure?” He asked the question compulsively, not wanting to, not even meaning to.

f Herne shrugged. “Arienrhod’s the only one who’s sure. But I’m I sure enough. It’s not her daughter — she never misses taking the water of life. And shed never let a man get that hold on her.”

“It makes you — sterile?” Gundhalinu blinked, taken by surprise.

“While you use it… maybe forever, after a hundred and fifty years. Who knows? That’s a joke, isn’t it? It makes you slow to heal, too. It’s even killed a few people.” Herne chuckled, pleased at the idea. “Makes some people go a little crazy too, “personality distortion’ or some crap like that. That’s what the whiners claim, anyhow — the have-nots. It’s the power that warps you, not the drug. How’s it feel to be a have-not, Gundhalinues/z rod?”

Gundhalinu ignored him, an image of Sparks Dawntreader in a helmet of spines suddenly blotting out his sight. He started forward. “Give me the control box, Herne. You aren’t sending Moon into that snake pit

Herne moved slightly, and there was a stunner in his hand. “Hold it, Blue. Suppose you just stand up against the wall, unless you really want what you’re asking for.”

Gundhalinu backed away again, his own forgotten stunner weighing like lead on his hip, under his coat. He leaned against the wall, coughed with grueling helplessness until his head swam. “Do you mind… if I sit?” He slid down the wall without waiting for an answer, sat on the floor.

“You ought to see a medic,” Herne said unsympathetically. “When a Tech sits on the floor he’s as good as dead.”

“I can’t.” Gundhalinu pulled open his coat again, abruptly too hot. Not until this is finished.

“You mean they’re hunting you too.” A statement, not a question. “All your old true-Blue buddies. You’re on the run with a proscribed Mother lover, you don’t have a friend in the world; you’ve thrown away your job and your position and dragged your highborn honor in the gutters. And all for love.”

Gundhalinu looked up, his face burning, opened his mouth.

“I can two and two add.” Herne grinned, dripping vitriol. “I’m a Kharemoughi.” He shook his head, leaning back on an elbow. “She’s really sticking it to you, boy… What did she promise you? Her body?”

“Nothing, mekru!”

“Nothing?” Herne leered. “You’re a bigger ass than I thought.”

“Anything that’s happened to me I’ve done to myself.” Gundhalinu sat up straighter, struggling against his fury, against the galling truth that roused it. “It was my decision; I accept the consequences of a rational act.”

Heme burst out laughing. “Sure, she can make you believe that! That’s her power. She could make you believe you can breathe vacuum. It makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it, you rational brain wipe-You want her so much nothing else matters; you could have her under your thumb, a deportee. But instead you’re helping her find another lover! Gods, that’s Arienrhod down to the ground. And they want the same man; the only one she’ll ever want enough to make her hate herself. The ultimate incest. If that isn’t enough proof they’re the same… if that isn’t the hell of it.” He sat forward, his fingers lacing in the mesh of his caged legs, his head down.

Gundhalinu felt disgust rise in his throat. “That’s what I’d expect of you — that you’d drag everything down to your own level, and smear it with filth. You’re incapable of anything better; of even understanding what it is you degrade and destroy.”

“How would you know?” Herne raised his head.

Gundhalinu frowned. “Because you can’t see why I want to help Moon more than I want to help myself. Because you can’t feel what it is about her—” He closed his eyes, looking back. “Yes, she made me love her. But she didn’t mean to. She took by giving… and that makes all the difference.”

Herne held up the control box, a challenge. “Why do you think I’m giving her this?”

“Revenge.”

Herne looked down again, without an answer.

“No clone ever made is a perfect image of the original. Even identical twins aren’t the same, and they’re not created by a middleman. The control in cloning isn’t nearly that precise, all you ever have is an imperfect recreation.”

“A flawed copy,” Herne said harshly.

“Yes.” Gundhalinu pressed his mouth together. “But why couldn’t it be better for the things that were changed — lost, or gained, inadvertently?”

Herne seemed to consider the possibility. “Maybe…” He scratched his jaw. “If you’re so sure Moon’s not the same, why don’t you tell her the truth?”

Gundhalinu shook his head. “I tried to.” He looked down at his wrists, traced the scarring with unresponsive fingers. “How can I tell her a thing like that?”

“Failed-suicide,” Herne whispered.

Gundhalinu stiffened, pushed up onto his knees. But then he saw that Herne was not trying to bait him.

“Did she drive you to that?” with bald curiosity, without rancor. Herne plucked at his braces like a harpist.

“No.” Gundhalinu shook his head, sinking back again. “She made me see that there might be some reason to go on living.” It struck him as strange that it did not seem stranger to be telling this to an Unclassified, sitting on the floor in a brothel. “All my life I never imagined it was possible to survive without the armor of one’s honor intact. And yet, here I am—” not quite a laugh, “—naked to the universe. And it hurts like hell… but maybe that’s only because now I feel everything more clearly.” And I don’t know yet whether I want it like this or not.

“You’ll get used to it,” Herne said sourly. “You know, I never used to be able to figure that at all — how you Techs swallowed poison any time life gave you a kick in the butt. You’d be dead a hundred times over if you’d been through my life — a thousand tunes!”

“You’re right.” Gundhalinu cringed at the idea of being trapped inside Herne’s mind. “Gods, that would be a fate worse than death.”

Herne looked at him with bleak disgust, with the unrelenting hatred of half his world’s people, until he felt his brittle arrogance crumble, and his gaze broke. “Yes. “Death before dishonor’ is a rich man’s privilege. Just like the water of life…” But nobody really owns Life, or Death.

“I used to think there was nothing more important to me than my life, there was nothing that could ever make me understand weaklings like you who’d throw it away. Survival was all that was important, it didn’t matter how you survived—”

“Was?” Gundhalinu rested his head against the wall, catching the past tense. His tongue absently explored the place where a tooth had been. He followed Herne’s glance down the exoskeleton that encased his lower body, realizing all that it implied the loss of — all that had made Herne a man in his own eyes, in the eyes of the world he belonged to. “You don’t have to stay here, you know. You could get that fixed on Kharemough.”

“After five years?” Herne’s voice rose, ready with all the arguments, all the answers he must have gone over and over endlessly in his own mind. “Nobody has that kind of money. I sure as hell don’t I don’t even have enough to get off this goddamn spitball!”

“Go to the authorities. They aren’t going to leave any off worlder behind who doesn’t want to stay.”

“Yeah, sure.” Herne pulled a bottle out from under his bed, un stoppered it and drank without offering to share it. “You have any idea, Blue, of how many outstanding charges I got against me back home? And a lot of other places. If you think I’m going to sweat blood in some penal colony for the rest of my life, you’re crazy.” He drank again, deeply.

“Then it doesn’t look like you’ve got much in the way of open options.” And you probably don’t deserve any. But he felt an unexpected prick of empathy. Sainted ancestors — what if I had been born in his body, and he in mine… “I’m — sorry.”