Vestiges of Time by Richard C. Meredith Page B

general.” “Don’t overrate me, KaphNo. I’m no superhuman warrior out of some Norse saga. Just a simple soldier.” “No longer that. Not when you have an army that will literally obey your slightest whim.”
    “That does scare me a little.”
    “It shouldn’t. You have the capacity to handle it.”
    “I hope you’re right.”
    “This isn’t something we’ve undertaken lightly. We know what kind of man you are, HarkosNor, otherwise we wouldn’t have chosen you.”
    Do you really? I asked myself. And was hit by a sudden feeling of chill: What if they did know? What if they knew who and what I really was?
    (Maybe they do know, said that cantankerous part .of my mind. Maybe they’ve known all along.)
    And thoughts like that could have led me down the dark paths I’d followed the night before, down into plots within plots within plots, and I wasn’t ready for all that again.
    “Are you feeling well?” KaphNo asked.
    “I’m okay. I think I ate too much for supper. A touch of indigestion.”
    “Should I call EnDera? She could get you something.”
    “No, I’m fine now. Would you like another beer?” We each had another, and then another, and before the evening was over KaphNo was weeping like a baby, telling me about a sweetheart he’d once had, long ago, the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen, and how he’d lost her to another.
    EnDera was already asleep when I groggily crawled into the room that was a bed. I didn’t bother to wake her. We both needed the sleep.
    Of EnDera and KaphNo
    Within the crystalline vessels called encanters, the manipulated and irradiated cells whose DNA carried data identical to that within my body began to grow and divide, and grow and divide again, in a fashion very similar to that which takes place within a mother’s womb. Cells that had originally been unspecialized began to differentiate and develop particular characteristics the parent cells had not had. Still hardly more than microscopic, within the embryos, the rudiments of organs—heart, liver, brain, lungs, digestive tract— began to take shape. In the murky fluid of the encanters the masses of cells curved, fattened, backbones began to grow, and the buds that would later be arms and legs began to sprout. Not yet did they look even vaguely human, but the indications were there if you knew how to look for them. With the passage of days, of weeks, the cells continued to grow, to change, to become. ...
    As the embryos within the replication encartters in the laboratories of the Underground evolved through recapitulation toward “birth,” which for them would consist of no more than being placed in larger encanters where most of the organs and much of the tissue of their bodies would begin to function in more nearly normal fashion, I was going through some processes myself.
    With a voice recorder, a note pad, and a pencil, with the help of psychologist GrelLo—a rather mature woman, attractive, and not unpleasant to work with— I was putting together what they called a mnemonic
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    autobiograph, but which was more nearly a quickly sketched outline of the principal memories of my life and the structure of my life as I saw it in retrospect— which was one hell of a thing to do, since I had to make up a lot of it as I went along.
    As far as possible I used real events from my past, modifying the suitable ones to fit into the patterns of this world as I knew them. Claiming to be a foreigner, bom and raised in the Central European country of SteeMehseeh, helped in covering some of my fabrications—but not much.
    However, GrelLo didn’t seem to be as much interested in my life itself as she was interested in categories of memories, my “epistemological mnemology,” she called it: the taxonomy of my mind. She wanted to know how I classified my thoughts and memories, to determine what categories were relevant to the clones —excuse me, the replicates—and to determine how best to call up those specific memories