Reunion Read Online Free Page B

distraction, he directed the unit to opaque the curtain from within as well as without. Not a sound would escape the confines of the cubicle until he ordered it dropped.
    Thus comfortably cocooned, he settled back in the chair, the induction band resting easily on his head, and started digging.
    He began with a casual search of global news for 533: the year of his birth. Needless to say, his coming into the world had not been front-page news. A narrowing of focus to the Indian subcontinent yielded little except what he already knew from previous inquiries. Most of the headlines for the week when he had been born were full of news about the legendary Joao Acorizal winning the surfing competition on Dis. Having not expected to encounter anything startling, he was not prematurely disappointed. What he was trying to do was back into the information he sought without coming upon it directly, just in case any alarms were attached to specific files. A rambling, semirandom search was much less likely to attract unwanted attention.
    The basic birth records for Allahabad were there, just as they had been when he had accessed them years earlier on Bali. But he was after other data this time, information dealing with a far more sensitive subject. From 533 he skipped unobtrusively backward to 530, spiraling in on his subject like a raven dropping down on road-kill. And there they were: several small articles on the discovery and subsequent exposure of the Meliorare Society and its illegal, outrageous work in eugenics. As he devoured the details of the Society’s unmasking, the arrest of its members, and the removal of their unwitting “experiments” to an assortment of homes, hospitals, and medical laboratories, he felt as if he were sitting in witness to his own creation.
    Some of the information was known to him. Some was new. During his previous visit to Earth he had researched only his birth history, knowing nothing then about the Meliorare Society, its experiments and misshapen aims, and how they related to him. When he came across the uncensored details of the euthanasia that the authorities had been compelled to carry out on the Society’s least successful “procedures,” his spine went cold and Pip stirred uneasily. In addition to the cool, detached prose of the report there were accompanying visuals: disturbing images, of twisted bodies housing tormented minds. Forcing himself, he deliberately enlarged the most grotesque. Out of eyes overflowing with anguished innocence, fear and terror and uncomprehending madness spilled forth in profusion unbounded. He forced himself to look at them, to not turn away. Any one of them, he knew, might be relations; distant genetic cousins hideously deformed through no fault of their own.
    For the most severe cases there was no future save a quick and mercifully painless death. For those deemed sufficiently undamaged, the government provided new identities and lives. These nominally healthy survivors were scattered across the Commonwealth so that any lingering, undetected genetic time bombs implanted in their DNA by the Society would be dispersed among the species as widely as possible. Even those considered normal would be subject to scrutiny by the authorities for the rest of their natural lives.
    Eventually, it was solemnly intoned in one article, all would die out, and the potentially injurious effects of the Meliorares’ nefarious gengineering would pass harmlessly into history.
    Except—at least one participant in the Meliorares’ work had escaped the attention of the pursuing authorities long enough to give birth. Her history and that of her offspring had thus far escaped the notice of the otherwise relentlessly efficient monitors. Somehow evading their attention, raised on the backward colony world of Moth by a kindly old woman with no children of her own, he had matured unobserved by Commonwealth science. Now he stood on the brink of adulthood, gazing back at what little scraps he