But even that wasnt enough for the Demarchys rulers, Karl had told her, for they saw a way in which they could secure the Demarchys future for as long as the Magi ship remained there by the shores of the Ka.

They took tissue samples from the clones corpse, and from them fashioned a new clone of their own one that they themselves could control. That first Speaker-Elect had grown to adulthood with its own personality and memories and none of Merricks and had undergone surgery to install the machine-head implants that would allow it eventually to communicate directly with the Magi ship.

Once such a clone reached the age of twenty-one, the cerebral circuitry had matured sufficiently that the clone could be transported to Dios, and to the Ship of the Covenant. Each Speaker was forced then to enter the alien starship, after which she would emerge once more carrying within her mind a cornucopia of data offered up by the ship in return for it not being torn apart by the Demarchys engineers and scientists.

The only problem, Karl continued, was that each time a Speaker returned from her encounter with the ship, her own personality and memories had been wiped and replaced with those of the long-dead Dakota Merrick. And, each and every time, she proved just as wildly recalcitrant and unwilling to cooperate as before. The Demarchys interrogators found it necessary, on every such occasion, to torture the clone until she gave them the information they wanted.

At first, Karl explained, the Demarchy considered trying to keep each of the clones alive, or even to produce multiple clones, but the ship refused to divulge data to more than one such clone at a time, perhaps realizing the speed with which it might otherwise be drained of knowledge; it also set a limit on how much data each clone could siphon from its memory banks. In this way the ship ensured its indefinite survival, by giving the Demarchy of Uchida sufficient leverage to rapidly dominate the whole of Redstone. And since it would take a little over two decades for a clones implants to reach maturity, that set a definite limit on the frequency with which the ship could be interrogated.

And what about the clone? Gabrielle had asked, as she lay curled up on top of the bedsheets, her hands clasped around her knees and shivering. Put to death, Karl had informed her, once a clone had outlived her usefulness. The physical remains were disposed of in secret, even as the next Speaker-Elect was being born to a secret birth-mother.

This process had been finessed over the intervening centuries, and embellished with ceremonies as a public demonstration of the Demarchys growing power. The city of Dios meaning literally, the city of God had grown up around that grounded starship, becoming a place of devout pilgrimage for the Demarchys citizens. Few outside a secretive inner circle, however, knew the underlying truth.