The Emperor of Everything

Publius led him past a railed-off pit arena, in the depths of which dozens of stocky ursine warriors hacked and stabbed at each other with long knives — snarling, white fangs gleaming, inhumanly quick. “Elimination trials,” Publius said, by way of explanation. “We started with over two hundred experimental scions. In another day or so, the best will emerge — though we’ll run the trial a few more times, to eliminate the possibility of flukes. But they’ll do well for some berserker prince on a rich Hardworld, won’t they?” He beamed in a parody of fatherly pride. “They’ll have to wear muzzles, perhaps, but nothing’s perfect. On the other hand… you’re good with a pigsticker, aren’t you, Ruiz? You wouldn’t last two seconds against the feeblest of these.”

Against a great support column was a bank of upright vitro tanks, their contents concealed by a screen. Publius paused here and slid the screen up, revealing three adult humans, two men and a woman. These had the puffy formlessness that characterized tank-grown clones, before they were decanted and conditioned, but Ruiz could see that they would be handsome. All of them had Publius’s coloring, and suddenly Ruiz realized what they were.

“Yes,” said Publius. “They’re me. Insurance. If I ever go, they’ll be decanted and set at each other. The strongest one gets my identity.”

Ruiz was horrified. What if they decided to cooperate? Could the universe survive a triad of Publiuses?

Technicians scurried past, shoulders hunched and eyes down, as if they feared their employer as much as Ruiz did.

They passed a series of one-way windowed cubicles, each containing a different variety of joyperson. Some of them seemed to be no more than human men and women, their somatypes modified toward some animal standard. There was a slender languid lizard girl, who groomed her eyescales with a long forked tongue. In the next cell was a young boy with a face like a mastiff, his body muscular and bowlegged. They passed an armless woman with a bald shapeless head, her soft white skin glistening with mucus. An androgynous creature stroked feathery antennae; it had a segmented thorax and a tubular proboscis curled on its chest.

But others were much stranger. They appeared to partake of the characteristics of aliens for which no analogue existed on Old Earth — though Ruiz knew that their genetic material derived primarily from human DNA. Publius was a purist in that way. He averted his gaze from latticed tentacles, stony silicoid carapaces, pulsing masses of stringy yellow fiber. There was even a lumpy creature covered with Gench sensor tufts, gasping through trilateral mouth slits. The symmetry was maintained with three plump breasts, three vaginas.

The Gench-like creature made him shudder, and a wave of disorientation passed over him. He felt the death net stir… and then stabilize. He had avoided thinking about the Gencha since his arrival in SeaStack, apparently for good reason. He wondered how many more near misses he could stand, before either the net decayed or he lost interest in survival.

“Samples. See anything you’d like to try?” Publius slapped him on the back, laughed his strange bubbling laugh. “No, no, I’m teasing you; I know you’re a devoted prude.”

They passed surgeries, in which white-coated technicians operated lamarckers, carving cloned bodies into new shapes. Other spaces held DNA keyboards, where Publius’s employees created new races of monsters, for clients who were willing to pay extra for reproductive functionality. Banks of half-gestated clones floated in clear nutrient baths, autogurneys trundled back and forth, some carrying grotesque corpses, others bearing anesthetized monsters in various stages of completion.

And over all, thick enough to gag Ruiz, was the special stink he associated with Publius and his works, a miasma of organic stenches and chemical wafts, of riotous life and casual death, of creativity and dread.

Finally they reached the apartments Publius used when in residence at his laboratories, and they passed from frenetic activity into silent isolation.

Publius slid the lock shut, and turned to Ruiz, a look of weary contempt blooming on his face.

“So, will you threaten me again? Will you never grow tired of hanging over my head, a ruination waiting to strike me? You cannot live forever; have you no mercy?”

Ruiz adopted a humble tone of voice. “You gave me no choice, Publius. If I failed to take precautions, you would instantly destroy me. I regret as much as you do that you confided your origins to me — had you not, you wouldn’t hate me so virulently, and I wouldn’t be forced to threaten you.”