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background, and we find it of the sort we need. Your experience in combat is greater than that of any other man your age in all of VarKhohs, perhaps all of NakrehVatee,” AkweNema told me.
    And I thought: The guy who sold me my computer identity said it would be everything I’d ever need. I guess he was right. It had cost enough.
    “We are satisfied with you, HarkosNor,” DessaTyso said. “You are the sort of man we need.”
    “Then will you join us?” AkweNema asked.
    “What exactly do you want of me?” I asked in reply. “You shall be our general in the field. You and your private army”—he smiled as he said these words— “will spearhead the takeover of the central government buildings of VarKhohs.”
    Old KaphNo looked up from under his eyebrows. “You are familiar with the concept of cloning, are you not, Master HarkosNor?”
    “Of course,” I said, wondering why he asked.
    And as if I hadn’t answered, he continued: “Every
    cell of the human body—save only the sex cells designed for diversity in the next generation and a few very specialized cells like those of the blood—holds a complete genetic blueprint of the parent body. That is, every bit of genetic information that existed at the time of your conception, in the combined sperm and egg of your parents that grew to be you in your mother’s womb, is repeated in exact replication in the cells of, say, the skin of your left index finger, or in the cells of your intestinal lining.”
    I nodded, beginning to suspect. Sometimes I may be slow, but I’m not that dense.
    “From any one of those cells,” old KaphNo went on, “under the proper conditions, there can be grown an exact duplicate of you, HarkosNor, down to the last detail.” He paused, then added: “Except, of course, for the effects that environment has had on you. A clone grown from the cells of HarkosNor would have neither the scars you carry on your body nor the memories you carry in your head.”
    I nodded, then said, “I kn ow.”
    “We propose, then,” AkweNema picked up after KaphNo grew silent, “to take sample cells from your body—a simple and painless operation, I assure you— and from them grow an army of your physical duplicates, an army which you will train and which you will command.”
    “There is a phenomenon called ‘resonance,’ ” KaphNo said. “Through it, so it appears, the senior member of a replicated partnership or group—in this case, yourself—is able to exercise a significant degree of, shall we say, telepathic control over the junior members. It is not yet well understood, although the same or a similar phenomenon—‘sympathetic awareness,’ it is often called —was long ago first observed in identical twins, which have many similarities to multiple replicates.
    “Furthermore, resonance is even more pronounced when the senior of a replicated unit is an adult at the
    time of replication. During the later stages of maturation, so it seems, the senior may totally dominate the ‘offspring’ replicates: that is, by moving in before the brains of the replicates have been exposed to any significant number of external stimuli—we’ll go into more detail regarding all this later—and by establishing a resonance pattern before these external stimuli have ‘awakened’ the brain and allowed it to begin to develop a distinct personality of its own, the senior may exercise complete mental, psychological control over the junior replicates, even when separated from them by great distances.”
    “An army of flesh-and-blood robots controlled by telepathy,” the lord DessaTyso said. “Something the fools in power today have feared to create. Fear of the anger of the gods. Ha! More likely fear of creating a power greater than themselves.”
    Ignoring his lordship, AkweNema said, “Such an army we propose to give to you, Master HarkosNor.” I remembered a dream I’d once had—it now seemed like a long, long time ago—a nightmare in which I was