“I was never a gunfighter,” Billy replied. “I was a fighter, though, when I had to be. Occasionally a man must defend himself.”
“And you,” Fu Manchu pointed at Pat, “you would be Sheriff Pat Garrett. You lied when you said you killed Mr. Kid.”
“It’s Bonney,” Billy said. “William H. Bonney. To the world I’m dead.”
“But why?” Fu Manchu said. He clapped his hands together and laughed. “What a story this will make when my servants tell the press. I can see the headlines now: ‘BILLY THE KID CAPTURED AS A SPY’ or ‘BILLY THE KID ALIVE AND WELL IN BRITISH SPY PRISON WITH PAT GARRETT.’ I suppose you, Mr. Garrett, would have to turn in your badge. No one would want a disingenuous man—a lying man—enforcing the law. Such a precedent that would make!”
“I don’t like this fellow,” Pat said to Billy.
“Why are we here?” Billy asked the Chinaman.
“For now, you are my guests. Tomorrow, you are going back to Earth. In chains, I might add.”
“I have a few more questions.”
The Chinaman waved an arm as if deigning to grant Billy’s wish with magnanimity.
“Who are those orange-headed guys?”
“Ah. The corts.”
“Yes. That’s what said their names were.”
“They are all corts. Mr. Cort Whatley is the Executor of the Estate of the late Dr. Jonathan Conklin—”
“This is beginning to make sense. Go on, please.”
“Mr. Whatley is not entirely...human.”
“How come there are so many of him?”
“Dr. Conklin is the reason for that. Through hi
s work.”
“Cutting up people, you mean?” Ekka asked.
“No. His medical research.”
“The Cell and Regeneration,” Billy said. “Published by Blund and Hanson, London, 1888. I have a copy.”
“Yes, but have you read it?”
“Of course. It’s all bad science, supposition, and hog slop.”
“Hog slop,” Fu Manchu said, and laughed. “And yet with it, Whatley was able to re-create Dr. Conklin from a single syringe of abdominal fluid kept on ice in Whitechapel. The experiment was so successful that I proposed to replicate it with Mr. Whatley’s own cells. Thus, the corts were born.”
“I don’t know,” Billy said. “With all that orange hair and that white skin, something must have gone...south.”
“You are ever the colloquial fellow, Mr. Gostman. You are wrong about that. It’s what Mr. Whatley looks like when he has not dyed his hair and added actor’s makeup.”
“I’m dying to meet him,” Pat Garrett said.
“But you won’t. Mr. Whatley is on Mars, but you’re going back to Earth, and to prison. I thank you, however, for delivering the secret of Merkam’s transmogrifier to me. Your role now, essentially, is at an end.”
Billy said, “Why would you possibly need the transmogrifier, with this big space station and all those clones and singleships? Don’t you already have it?”
“Until today, I did not. All you see around you is based upon ancient chinese fireworks and engineering. Rockets, my cowboy friend. Simple heavier-than-air rocketry. For instance, had you passed us on by and gone straight to Mars, my singleships would have eventually caught up with you anyway, although they would have burned all their fuel during the trip. While your transmogrifier likely runs on some form of antigravitation technology, we do have some preliminary data regarding it. You do not accelerate, per se, but instead your velocity is a factor of a square of the distance from either your destination or your target.”