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engineered? We pretty much figured out that much."
"But the banal perfidy of it all!" Sindri's voice hit a high note of fury. He
pointed to the stage. "The way that presentation is worded, an uninitiated
dolt would think the type of
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James Axler - Parallax Red bioengineering discussed was far in the future,
just a whim to look into when nothing more urgent was pressing. In truth, when
the documentary was made, the first generation of transadapts had been born
over five years before."
Grant sighed. "Your point being?"
"My point, Mr. Grant, is that generations of human beings had their
birthrights denied, born into govern-ment-sanctioned, -funded and
-institutionalized slavery. Mr. Kane, remember what I said to you about the
Cy-donia Compound's long tradition of abduction? The raw genetic material used
to create the first generation of transadapts was provided by people taken
forcibly, against their will, from Earth. Victims, not volunteers! Can't you
grasp the monstrous injustice of it all?"
"Hell, yes," snapped Kane. "Of course we can. Things haven't changed all that
much on
Earth."
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Sindri's eyebrows quirked. "Yes, so I learned."
Kane noticed how Brigid's hands suddenly clenched into fists.
"But what might be very different," Sindri went on, "is that the transadapts
were the majority in this micro-cosmic society. They built most of the
compound, mined the ores, tilled the fields, maintained the ma-chines. They
were the serfs and vassals to a tiny num-ber of royal humans their royalty
bestowed upon them simply by dint of the fact that their antecedents weren't
abducted to provide the templates for the trans-adapt program.
"Eventually, over a period of decades, the trans-adapts outnumbered them three
to one.
By the end of 180 years, their population continued to grow, while that of the
humans dwindled."
"So far," commented Grant dryly, "this has a fa-miliar ring."
Sindri ignored him. "The transadapts were bred to be the Cydonia Compound's
manual labor, its dray an-imals, its mules, living their lives doing nothing
more than slouching through the red dust of Mars. They did not question their
place in the scheme of things.
They obeyed and did what was expected of them.
"But the humans here feared their growing numbers. They already had instituted
a form of apartheid, seg-regating the transadapts into their own habitats. But
due to several factors, only a couple of them environmental, the men had
become sterile, the women barren. They couldn't stand the thought of perishing
while the sub-human transadapts inherited this planet.
"So, using a medical treatment disguised as neces-sary vaccinations, they made
the transadapts as barren as themselves. It was nothing less than the
perpetration of slow-
motion genocide. Inasmuch as the transadapts were engineered to have far
shorter life
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James Axler - Parallax Red spans than hu-man beings very few live past thirty
years of age it was conceivable that they could all be dead within a single
generation."
"
They
," Brigid argued testily. "You've called the transadapts 'my people,' yet you
refer to them as they
. Which is it?"
The corners of Sindri's mobile mouth turned down.
"I was supposed to be a transadapt. But I was born a mutation, with far more
Earth-
human characteristics. It happens occasionally."
Brigid inspected Sindri silently, glanced over at the trolls sitting behind
them, then back to Sindri. "No mere accident of birth can account for the
differences between you and them."
Sindri smiled bleakly. "You're quite correct, Miss Brigid. My father was a
human who took a transadapt woman as a lover. Truly a horrific case of
miscege-nation, at least as far as my father's peers were con-cerned. You can
imagine the reactions when I was born."
"What happened to your mother?" Kane asked.
"She died shortly after giving birth to me. I never knew her."
"And your father?"
"He was shunned, ostracized, exiled from the Cy-donia Compound. In a twist of
irony that cheap fiction loves so much, only the fact of his exile saved him
from death when the revolt occurred."
No one spoke. Sindri looked at them expectantly.
"Do tell us all about it, won't you?" Grant requested with unmistakable
sarcasm.
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Sindri nodded gravely. "In due time. But first, a bit about myself. I
obviously could not live in the trans-adapts' habitats, so I was tolerated
among the humans. I made myself indispensable to them with my mechan-ical
acumen and affinity for electronics. I was very clever with my hands.
"A little over a year ago, I was allowed into the computer database to correct
a minor problem. I cor-rected it, but I stumbled across things of far greater
magnitude that had very little do with machines or elec-tronics."
"And they were?" asked Kane.
Sindri stared directly into his eyes. "The Tuatha De Danaan and a group with
whom you have had prior dealings...the Archon Directorate."
Chapter 23
Kane said grimly, "I don't recall mentioning the Ar-chon Directorate."
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James Axler - Parallax Red
"You may not recall it," Sindri replied diffidently, "but you did. All three
of you, in fact. Different per-spectives on similar experiences."
A fleeting memory of Sindri's words came back to him: "I will walk in all your
minds, looking at your memories, strolling here and there among the ruins of
your broken dreams. Make no mistake about it I will find what I need."
Kane lunged to his feet in an angry rush. The trolls rose just as quickly, but
Sindri's reaction was to wag his walking stick like a chiding finger.
"An outbreak of violence will accomplish nothing, Mr. Kane. It will not bring
our business to a satisfac-tory conclusion, nor will it get you back home."
Kane scowled around the theater. "Maybe not. But I'm tempted to give it a try
just to see what will hap-pen."
Brigid tugged at his sleeve. "He's right, Kane. We've gone this far, let's
hear the rest."
Sindri nodded to her gallantly. "Ever the orderly mind."
Kane dropped back heavily in his seat. "What do the Danaan and the Archons
have to do with your re-volt?"
"In a direct, one-on-one way, almost nothing. But the war they fought here,
long ago, still echoes. Evi-dently the war was more of a skirmish, the
continuance of hostilities that began aeons before between the Da-naan and the
Archons' root race. What did you call them again?"
"The Annunaki," interjected Grant tonelessly.
Sindri nodded. "Just so. They weren't given a name in the data I found within
the computer. According to it, a Danaan colony from Earth had settled here,
ob-serving the terms of truce wherein both races agreed to leave the planet."
r
Kane recalled what Brigid had learned in Ireland of the hostilities between
the reptilian
Annunaki and the humanoid Tuatha De Danaan, which had broken out millennia
before. Mankind became embroiled in the conflict, and the conflagration
extended even to the outer planets of the solar system, immortalized and much
disguised as a war in heaven.
Finally, when it appeared that Earth was threatened with devastation, the war
abated under terms. The Da-naan and the Annunaki agreed to end it for the sake
of all their intertwined futures.
A pact was struck, whereby the two races intermin-gled to create a new one, to
serve as a bridge. Extrap-olating from information imparted to her, Brigid had
speculated that the Archons might be the spawn of Da-naan, Annunaki and even
human genes.
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James Axler - Parallax Red
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