QE3-QW-Ch3-未校对

April, 2515 

Puppet endocrinologists stood on tip-toes, tugging at Del Casal’s lab coat, craning her neck. He yanked the coat from small fingers and turned away from the screen. The histological sections there were an artscape of tiny cells rendered in soft mauves and purples, revealing not only the microstructure of an apocrine sweat gland, but the many types of bacteria colonizing it. 

“That’s the right microbiome pattern?” Doctor Rockfort-8 said dubiously. She was a pretty Puppet with brown hair and a doubtful expression. 

“It’s not the right pattern,” Del Casal said. “It’s one of many patterns that will work, and may be more stable.”

Doctor Teller-5 leaned close, squinting, pushing Rockfort-8 aside. The other Puppet woman shoved back. Neither were real doctors. The Federation of Puppet Theocracies didn’t have universities or medical schools, only automated teaching modules that barely supported their genetic research. Grassie-6, the green-robed Puppet bishop, inclined his mitred head to Del Casal. 

“One of many patterns, rather than the pattern,” he said musingly in his antique Anglo-Spanish patois. A young priest wrote that down on a pad of paper with the stub of a tooth-marked pencil. “Your work asserts the existence of multiple routes to divinity. That has fascinating, hopeful ontological implications.”

Del Casal did not enjoy the theological puzzling of the Puppets. 

He could have been living luxuriously at the Lanoix Casino designing biological art, or at his lab complex at Shackleton City on Earth’s moon, or he might have taken another board position with a corporation. But those were mountains already conquered, accolades already earned. Instead he was in the rogue state, mastering a genetic problem no one else could defeat. 

The Puppet divinities, the genetically-engineered Numen, were going extinct. Every generation, fewer and fewer Numen children expressed the unique pheromonal traits the Puppets perceived as divine. The Puppets had been trying to slow the decline for eighty years, but they hadn’t the skill. The secrets to making the Numen had died with their engineers. But he could recreate and surpass their accomplishments. 

He found the Puppets religious nonsense slightly nauseating, but in one respect, they shared a need for immortality. They found an imminence and permanence in the world. Accomplishments could last forever. Writing. Vast feats of engineering. Leaving the Earth. Creating new life. Del Casal was on his way to a kind of immortality as well, through feats of intellect. 

“We’d considered the creation of the Numen to be a singular cosmic event,” Grassie-6 said, “but you’ve proven that multiple creation events are possible. We’d thought that a singular biochemical state defined the Numen, but now, if you’re right, we have to explore and comprehend multiple states of divinity.”

Johns-10, the young priest, wrote as quickly as possible, flipping the tiny page and transcribing the bishop’s words. Grassie-6 caught Del Casal’s eye and smiled with a kind of knowing self-deprecation. The Puppets were accustomed to all of civilization looking down on them, considering them insane slavers. Del Casal had been with the Puppets for two months, beneath the ice of Oler, in a medical complex adjacent to the Forbidden City where most of the Numen were held in captivity. He’d asked for nine million Congregate francs to teach them how to make more Numen.

It was delivishly complex. The original creators of the Puppets had wanted an unhackable control over their slaves. They’d succeeded in building that system in a language of pheromones produced by hundreds of species of bacteria in the sweat glands. The genetic changes in the Numen chromosomes were relatively well understood, but no one had succeeded in replicating the exact mix of microbiome populations in their glands. Those bacteria had been engineered by those immoral geniuses, and until now, no one had cracked that code.

Speakers near the ceiling funnelled sounds of confused terror into the lab. “Get away! Get down!” Beyond a transparent wall, Gonzalo Cornell, one of Del Casal’s first Numen creations, an ex-Anglo-Spanish shareholder, faced Puppet doctors and priests. A hundred days ago Cornell had been in a debtor’s prison on Nueva Granada, with no practical skills with which to earn oxygen and food for the rest of his life sentence. The Puppets had bought out some of Cornell’s debt sentence, as well as three dozen other similarly destitute lifers. The subcontracting agreements only stipulated that the Puppets had to keep the debtors alive.

木偶内分泌专家踮起脚尖，拽着德尔-卡萨尔的白大褂，仰着脖子。他从小手指上扯下外套，转身离开了屏幕。屏幕上的组织学切片是由微小细胞组成的艺术景观，以柔和的淡紫色和紫色呈现，不仅揭示了无分泌汗腺的微观结构，还揭示了其中定植的多种细菌。

“这就是正确的微生物群模式？洛克福特-8 博士疑惑地说。她是一个漂亮的傀儡，有着棕色的头发和疑惑的表情。

“这不是正确的模式，"德尔卡萨尔说。“它是许多模式中的一种，可以起作用，而且可能更稳定。”

泄密者-5 号博士凑近一看，眯起眼睛，把洛克福特-8 号推到一边。另一个女傀儡也推了回去。两人都不是真正的医生。傀儡神权联邦没有大学和医学院，只有自动教学模块，只能勉强支持他们的基因研究。绿袍傀儡主教格拉西-6 向德尔-卡萨尔歪了歪他的头。

“他用古老的盎格鲁-西班牙土语喃喃自语地说："众多模式中的一种，而不是模式。一位年轻的牧师用带牙印的铅笔在纸上写下了这句话。“您的作品主张存在通往神性的多种途径。这在本体论上有着引人入胜、充满希望的意义"。

德尔-卡萨尔并不喜欢傀儡们的神学困惑。

他本可以在设计生物艺术的拉诺瓦赌场过着奢华的生活，或者在地球月球上的沙克尔顿城的综合实验室里，也可能在一家公司里担任另一个董事职位。但这些都是已经征服的高山，已经赢得的荣誉。相反，他在 “流氓国度 ”里掌握着别人无法破解的基因难题。

傀儡神族，基因改造的努曼人，即将灭绝。每隔一代，表现出傀儡神所认为的独特信息素特征的努曼人子女就会越来越少。八十年来，傀儡们一直在努力减缓衰退，但他们没有技术。制造 Numen 的秘密已经随着他们的工程师一起消亡了。但他可以重现并超越他们的成就。

他觉得傀儡们的宗教废话有点令人作呕，但有一点，他们都需要永生。他们在这个世界上找到了临界点和永恒。成就可以永恒 写作 伟大的工程 离开地球 创造新的生命 德尔-卡萨尔也在通过智慧的壮举实现一种永生。

格拉西六世说：“我们认为努曼人的诞生是一个单一的宇宙事件，”"但你证明了多重创造事件是可能的。我们曾认为单一的生化状态定义了努曼人，但现在，如果你是对的，我们必须探索和理解多种神性状态。”

约翰斯-10，这位年轻的牧师，以最快的速度写着，翻动着小小的书页，誊写着主教的话。格拉西-6号捕捉到了德尔-卡萨尔的目光，带着一种心领神会的自嘲笑了笑。傀儡人习惯了所有文明都看不起他们，认为他们是疯狂的奴隶主。德尔-卡萨尔已经和傀儡们在奥勒冰层下呆了两个月，那里是紫禁城旁边的一个医疗中心，大部分努曼人都被囚禁在这里。他要了九百万刚果法郎，教他们如何制造更多的努曼人。

这个项目非常复杂。傀儡的最初创造者想要对他们的奴隶进行不可破解的控制。他们成功地用汗腺中数百种细菌产生的信息素语言构建了这一系统。努曼人染色体上的基因变化相对来说比较清楚，但没有人成功地复制出他们汗腺中微生物群的确切组合。这些细菌是那些不道德的天才设计出来的，直到现在，还没有人破解过这个密码。

天花板附近的扬声器将混乱恐怖的声音传入实验室。“走开！趴下！” 透明墙外，贡萨洛-康奈尔，德尔-卡萨尔最早的努门创造者之一，前西班牙盎格鲁股东，面对着傀儡医生和牧师。一百天前，康奈尔还被关在新格拉纳达的债务人监狱里，他没有任何实用技能，无法在余下的刑期里赚取氧气和食物。傀儡 "买断了康奈尔的部分债务，以及其他三打同样贫困的无期徒刑犯。分包协议只规定傀儡公司必须让债务人活下去。

Beyond the transparent wall, Puppets with television cameras and boom microphones filmed Cornell, recording every word he might say for their ongoing and forever-growing Puppet Bible. The doctors and theologians tested Cornell and the other newly-made Numen, trying to detect any difference between him and their naturally born Numen. They trotted in Puppet workers, Puppets with medical conditions, Puppets who’d donated organs to Numen, Puppet ascetics and dazed, sated Puppets who’d just seen true, traditional Numen. None of them reacted to Cornell any differently from the Numen in captivity. Del Casal’s genius had done this.

It didn’t surprise him that they’d failed to make any Numen of their own. The Puppets had learned to faultlessly follow the instructions of the first genetic engineers, fastidiously constructing the Numen microbiomes of their early Edenic period. But they’d not realized that the Puppets and the Numen had been drifting genetically. The lock and key had drifted in synchrony because the Puppets applied a strong selective force on it, executing anyone who couldn’t produce the pheromones or smell them. Del Casal had succeeded in building Numen because he hadn’t tried replicating the key for the lock of the Edenic period, which didn’t exist anymore. The microbiomes in the pheromonal sensors of the Puppets were far different now and he’d built a key for today’s lock on Puppet behavior.

Del Casal’s bodyguards pushed a few staring priests out of the way. The Puppet attention on him was tedious; he couldn’t imagine what it would be like for those debtors who’d become divinities. He supposed here was still better for them than gradually suffocating in a debtor’s prison during one of the periodic cost-saving, ‘accidental’ pressure leaks.

“Did you know that Rosalie Johns-10 here is highly intelligent?” the bishop said. The young priest blushed and looked away. “Belisarius Arjona used to debate theology with her. That’s how smart she is.”

“That doesn’t sound like Arjona,” Del Casal mused.

“Johns-10 is one of our leading thinkers. She’s pursuing a new theory about you.”

“How interesting,” Del Casal said without interest.

Grassie-6 nudged the young priest. She looked at Del Casal, averted her eyes and made a kind of curtsy with her green vestments, a symbol of Puppet submissiveness designed to lift the hem of robe and sleeves to show manacles at wrist and ankle. 

“I’m exploring the possibility that you represent a new theological domain, sir,” she said in her old Anglo patois.

Del Casal began walking away.

Grassie-6 hustled Johns-10 along behind Del Casal.

“We’ve always understood there to be three domains to the cosmos,” Grassie-6 said. “The divine Numen, the Puppets who can perceive their divinity, and the non-divine, who can have no real effect on divinity.”

Del Casal and his little bodyguards had squeezed through to a wide hallway, relatively warm for the icy crust of Oler from which they’d carved the Free City. Small trees grew here among cold, pathetic gardens that fronted decaying mansions from before the Puppet Rebellion. Del Casal had chosen one of the finest villas, about a kilometer away.

“You’re not divine, but you have profound effects on divinity,” Johns-10 said, her short legs flapping her sacral robes as she puffed to keep up with him. “You may be a kind of generative force that we could never directly study. The humans who made the first Numen and Puppets must have had some spark of divinity, but they were long dead before Puppet theologians could study their ontological truths.”

“Imagine the feelings when humanity discovered the archaea,” Grassie-6 said. “For decades they thought these things in their microscopes and samples were bacteria, and then poof! They found a whole domain of life right in front of them.”

“You may be a discovery like that,” Johns-10 said, her enthusiasm rising as Del Casal lengthened his paces. “Through you, we might be able to study the vital impetus, the spontaneous mor