YOU LEFT THE COLONY. YOUR ACTIONS MUTED SIX VOICES.

Six voices? Dharma, do you understand?

The cephaloped revere each beating heart as a voice from the Holy Spirit. When the Andria clone slaughtered Oscar’s companions, she did so dishonorably, muting their voices.

I’m sorry. Seeing the woman … the voice I was once bonded to … it confused me. Oscar, do you know where Dharma and I come from?

YOU COME FROM BEFORE.

Yes, I suppose that’s correct. Our awakening in your world … it was an accident.

NO ACCIDENT. THE LIGHT THAT BRINGS THE REBIRTH MOON SUMMONED MY VOICE TO AWAKEN THE ONE WHO SLEEPS.

I turned to Dharma.

“From what I’ve been able to learn, the Rebirth Moon is a very rare lunar event—a spiritual happening among the cephaloped that will lead to a thousand years of peace and prosperity. Your awakening was set for the last full moon which precedes the event—an event set to take place tomorrow night.”

“Dharma, how can the moon prevent the machine I programmed twelve million years ago from systematically exterminating Oscar’s people?” I turned to the cephaloped. Oscar, there’s a voice in my head that tells me we may be able to create a weapon that can destroy GOLEM using the equipment aboard Oceanus. If the next full moon really is tomorrow night, then we have to hurry before the tide rises and sweeps the habitat back out to sea. I’m going to need your help.

THE COLONY WILL DECIDE.

Chapter 35

35

Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.

—DENIS DIDEROT

Roused by ABE’s internal alarm, I opened my eyes. I was curled against Dharma’s back, the two of us spooning naked, sandwiched between giant spinach leaves. For a long moment I lay there, warmed by our shared body heat, bound by our place in history—the last two humans on Earth.

Were GOLEM’s clones human? To me, they were animated flesh, programmed to hunt and kill and raise offspring that never cried and could not procreate. That latter chore was performed in a lab by a machine—a computer implanting its designer eggs into incubators, the developing fetuses fed by artificial placenta until they were ready to crawl. They were human hybrids that would never love or be loved, experience the confusion and desires of adolescence, or the challenges and triumphs of adulthood. Theirs was an existence void of the shadow of their own mortality. They were animals bred to follow the commands of their master, their place in this world secured by my own “prime directive” that had salvaged the genetic blueprints of their species at the cost of another.