"No thanks." I gave a sideways glance at the vidscreen on my desk, but it’d gone blank. Sam’s message must have automatically purged itself from the databanks after playing.

"Well," Tobit said, "if you aren’t busy, Festina wants you down in sick bay. Since you’ve done the do-si-do with hive-queen venom, she wants to make sure you’re all right." Tobit rolled his eyes. "I’m supposed to be your escort. In case the poison drops you into a writhing heap and you need to be dragged the rest of the way."

"I’m not going to drop into a writhing heap," I said.

"Glad to hear it," Tobit replied. "I’ve got a bum arm, and I hate heavy lifting."

He motioned me toward the door. It slid open in front of us… and I was just about to step out when Tobit grabbed me by the back of my shirt. With a yank that almost ripped the fabric, he jerked me back into the room and spun me around.

My fists came up of their own accord. Wild ideas dashed through my head — like the whole ship had been spying on me while I listened to Sam’s message, and now Festina and Prope and everyone intended to get me. I came a millisecond away from punching Tobit straight in his purple-veined nose… but he backed up fast and pointed at the floor outside my door.

The deck was covered with carpet — this part of the ship was all prettied up for visiting VIPs — and the carpet had a pattern of red jacaranda trees surrounded by multicolored swirls. For a second I couldn’t see anything where Tobit was pointing; but then, on one of the jacarandas closest to my door, I saw a little fleck of glowing crimson.

"Ship-soul," Tobit said in a strained voice, "turn off the lights in this corridor."

The passageway went dark-except for five patches of crimson spores twinkling up from the broadloom. They’d been planted right on five red jacarandas in the carpet’s pattern, where they’d be hard to spot and easy to step on.

"Um," I said, swallowing hard.

"Kaisho seems to be exfoliating," Tobit muttered. "I just caught sight of a flicker before you stepped down."

He flumped on the edge of my bed and lifted his feet to check the soles of his boots. No glowing red dots. "Either I was lucky where I walked," he said, "or the Balrog knew better than to bite into me. My bloodstream has enough liquor left over from my drinking days to pickle any damned fungus that tries to take root."

I just kept staring at the glowing specks: one straight in front of my room and two on either side, likely to get stepped on whichever way I turned. "Do you think Kaisho deliberately wanted… I mean, it’s my door…"

"York, buddy," Tobit said, "the fucking moss has a bone on for you. Or Kaisho does. Or both. If you try to buttonhole her, I’m sure she’ll swear it was only a ‘darling wee joke.’ Only teasing, the spores wouldn’t really eat you. Just lick you a bit, then let go… the Balrog’s way of flirting." He scowled. "Better watch your step, pal — you’ve got all kinds of conquests drooling over you."

He said that last with a grumbly sort of snappishness: like maybe there was a woman he was interested in, except she liked me better. But the only women on Jacaranda who’d even seen me were Prope and Kaisho and Festina…

Oh.

"Christ," Tobit muttered disgustedly, wiping his boots on my floor, even though the soles were already clean. "Let’s call a vacuum cleaner and get the hell out of here. People are waiting for us in sick bay."

I nodded quietly.

"We aren’t supposed to do this," the doctor said. Yet another navy kid — in his thirties, but that’s pretty young for an M.D. His name was Veresian and he’d just accessed my medical history. "There’s a note on York’s chart, NO MEDICAL EXAMINATIONS EXCEPT IN EMERGENCIES. Certified by the Admiralty. Certified."

Festina frowned. "That’s ridiculous. Everyone in the fleet gets regular checkups."

"Not quite true, ah, Admiral, sorry," Veresian said. "The navy will make exceptions. Usually on religious grounds — Opters, for instance."

He turned to look at me. The doctor couldn’t straight-out ask who or what I worshiped — not with the navy’s strict policies on religious tolerance — but Opters are never shy about stating their beliefs. Their god disapproves of all medical treatments; you’re supposed to let heaven decide whether or not you recover. (Don’t ask me why a god would create a universe full of medicines, then tell you not to use them. Gods have a real fondness for making great stuff and putting it right under your nose, but saying, "If you love me, leave this alone." Kind of like my sister hiding her diary in my room so Dad wouldn’t find it.)

By now, everyone in sick bay was looking at me — Veresian, Festina, and Tobit. "I’m not an Opter," I said. "I’m… um… different."

"You’re an Explorer, pal," Tobit replied. "We’re all different."

But I was illegally different. I didn’t say that out loud, of course — if there was one thing hammered into my head, it was keeping quiet about how I came to be. Not just because I’d been engineered. If you want the honest truth, I was also a sort of a kind of a clone of my father.

Pretty awful, right? Being him.

Of course, I wasn’t him exactly — the doctor who designed me started with Dad’s DNA, then fiddled with it to make me better. Samantha was exactly the same as me: the same person exactly, our dad’s clone, except she got an X chromosome where I got a Y.

Which meant she wasn’t the same person at all. Do you know about sex-linked gene deficiencies? Where if you’re a girl you’re all right, but if you’re a boy you don’t get built properly? Sam tried to explain it once with big blowup pictures of actual X and Y chromosomes, but I didn’t feel much like listening. It couldn’t be changed, could it? That was all I needed to know.

Even if Sam couldn’t make me understand how my brain went stupid, she sure made it clear I had to keep everything secret. Cloning had been banned for centuries in the Technocracy, and gene manipulation was strictly limited to fixing "catastrophic disorders" — if you just wanted your kids prettier or smarter, you got thrown in jail.

Worse than that, the children were classified "potentially non-sentient" since no one could predict how a DNA tweak would affect "moral character." There were just too many variables to calculate… and too many awful examples over the years, people trying to make perfect offspring and ending up with monsters: psychopaths, killers, people whose brains were messed up worse than mine. If the navy knew the truth about Sam and me, we’d never be allowed on a starship again — on the off chance we might suddenly turn crazy and inhuman and non-sentient.

The more I mulled it over, the more I wished I hadn’t let Tobit bring me down to the doctor. But I hadn’t thought things through fast enough.

Sometimes you just get so tired of being slow.

"Um," I said. I knew better than to make up some story of why I shouldn’t be examined. Lies get complicated real fast. It would have been nice if Dad had told me about the NO CHECKUPS order so I wasn’t taken completely by surprise; but of course he hadn’t. All I could do was mumble, "My father didn’t like doctors looking at me too much. It bothered him."

Festina gave me a sympathetic look. She probably thought my dad was an Opter, and I was all embarrassed about it. "Don’t worry," she told me, "if you’re allowed to have medical exams in an emergency, I’d say this counts. You’ve had two doses of hive-queen venom, Edward, and that’s serious business. Only a few humans have ever suffered venom poisoning, but several ended up with chronic metabolic imbalances. Isn’t that right, Doctor?"

Veresian looked flustered by the question. It’s tough being a doctor in the Outward Fleet — every new planet that humans visit has a thousand diseases nobody’s seen before. The medical databanks have write-ups on millions of ways to get sick, and for many there’ve only been three or four cases ever. Veresian couldn’t possibly hold all that information in his head. If he was like other doctors, he looked up what he needed when he needed it… and at this moment, he knew absolutely zero about Mandasar venom.