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was a chaplain on a penal planet.”
    “Was it Albatross Island?” he asked.
    “It was,” I said. “You can imagine my feelings when I received a call alerting me that a Liberator had arrived in our spaceport.”
    The Liberator said nothing.
    “You claim that you have come on a pilgrimage. Is that correct?”
    “It is, Father,” the clone said, sounding as determined as a young boy wanting to enter a seminary.
    “You will forgive me if I find that hard to believe, Mr. Shannon, but you see, I watched three hundred of your kind butcher prisoners, both rioting and innocent. Perhaps you were not involved in that . . . that . . .”
    “Action.”
    The Liberator used the word action. I was offended.
    “I was trying to decide whether to call it a slaughter or a massacre,” I told him. “I think a more appropriate word might be extermination. As best as I can remember it, one thousand five hundred inmates rioted and the marines sent a battalion of Liberator clones to restore order. That was five rioting inmates for each Liberator. I should have thought that would have been enough blood to satisfy them.”
    “I wasn’t there,” the Liberator told me.
    “When they finished killing the rioters, they slaughtered prisoners who did not riot. Then they turned on the guards and hostages. By that time, they weren’t even using bullets anymore. They beat men to death with their rifles. I helped reclaim the bodies of the victims, Mr. Shannon. It was the most terrible thing I have ever seen.
    “That was the closest I ever came to renouncing my vows. When I saw what those Liberators had done, I did not believe that a just God would have allowed the creation of such monsters. A few weeks later, the Senate outlawed Liberators. Is that not so?”
    “They outlawed the manufacture of Liberator clones,” Shannon said to me. His gaze still met mine. I did not know if I saw glee or defiance in his expression, but I did not like what I saw.
    “We don’t, as a rule, receive many clones on this planet.” Having said this, I felt a tinge of guilt. This clone had been nothing but pleasant, and I had acted adversarial from the start. “Forgive me,” I said. “I have been too straightforward. Are you sure you will not have a sherry?”
    I climbed from my seat and went to the bar to pour myself a glass.
    “Are you refusing me entry?” the clone asked.
    “We Catholics like to believe that our church runs this planet, but the Unified Authority maintains an embassy just down the street from the Archdiocese. The U.A. runs this spaceport facility, as a matter-of-fact. That is not a symbiotic relationship. We do not welcome government intervention on our planet.”
    I shut my eyes and thought about Liberators as I sipped the sherry. Perhaps I was reliving those last hours of the siege on Albatross Island, those awful moments when our rescuers became predators. I thought about a cell block in which the blood and brains on the walls were so thick that I could no longer see the bricks and mortar.
    We Catholics are anti-synthetic by our very nature. According to our doctrine, only God can create life. The use of clones in the military caused the Vatican to release a statement defining life as a being with an immortal soul. Science can clone sheep, snakes, and soldiers that breathe air and move of their own volition, but science cannot prove that its creations have souls.
    “They were without compassion,” I said. “Ravenous dogs lusting for blood. You will forgive me if I have been impolite, Mr. Shannon, but I see nothing even remotely redeeming about your kind. I once questioned the doctrine that clones have no souls. Having seen the work of Liberators, I determined that the butchers who came to Albatross Island were soulless creatures. I saw nothing redeeming in them.”
    “‘But if there be no virtue to take away, consequently there can be no vice,’” Shannon said. I heard this and smiled and took a long sip of sherry. “You’ve