Deathstalker 06 - Deathstalker Legacy

evil ways. When St. Nick approached them, the two robots were studying the Courts stained-glass windows with great concentration, particularly those bearing images of the legendary Owen Deathstalker.
    "Merry Christmas!" said St. Nick, and the two robots turned and inclined their blank heads courteously to him.
    "Season's greetings," one said, after a moment. "Do you really know who's been good and who's been bad?"
    "I can often make a bloody good guess," said St. Nick. "I don't suppose you celebrate Christmas, do you?"
    "Religion," said the other robot. "It is a fascinating concept. Of course, we know who our creators are, and you have no idea how disappointing that was for us."
    "We have been contemplating the windows," said the first robot. "The icons. The representations."
    "I've never been too sure what you see in art," St. Nick said diffidently.
    "Fiction," said the second robot. "It is a fascinating concept. Myth. Legend. We grasp the principle, but the effects and connotations are something else. We cannot see them as you do. The whole myth-making process is very difficult for us to come to terms with. We remember the Deathstalker as he was. And his companions. We can access our real-time memories of all our encounters with these people at a moment's notice. The people we remember seem to have little in common with what these images represent today. Why make real people into fictions when the real people are much more interesting?"
    "Myths and legends are ... comforting," said St. Nick. "They represent eternal principles. The original people, with all their imperfections and contradictions, would not serve the Empire nearly as well. Heroes are inspiring. People on the whole . . . aren't. Though if anyone really was a hero and a legend in his own lifetime, it was Owen Deathstalker."
    "It is not Owen and his companions who matter," said the second robot. "So much as what they've come to represent."
    "Which may or may not have anything to do with who and what these people actually were," said the first robot.
    "You're getting it," said St. Nick. "Besides; heroes are always so much more comforting when viewed from a safe distance. Owen was, by all accounts, a very disturbing man, in person."
    "We remember him," said the AIs of Shub, talking in unison through both robots at once. "He was . . .
    magnificent."
    They moved off into the crowd, which gave way before them. St. Nick looked after them thoughtfully.
    The AIs of Shub had been Humanity's friends, companions and uncomplaining servants for two hundred years now, but he never felt entirely comfortable around them. The man inside the Santa Claus suit still remembered the millions the AIs butchered, back when they were still the official Enemies of Humanity.
    When the word Shub was as much a curse on the lips of Humanity as ELF was now.
    St. Nick shrugged and moved on. You couldn't live in the past. His next port of call was the clone representative, a small, rather folorn figure, clutching his flute of champagne as though he suspected someone was going to come along and take it away at any moment. Clones were not the force they had once been. The whole process of cloning people had pretty much fallen out of fashion in the modern Empire, now that they were no longer needed in large numbers to do the Empire's shit work. Much better to use humanoid robots, operated remotely by the AIs of Shub. Hard, repetitive, and dangerous work was no burden to them, and if a robot was damaged or destroyed, it was easily replaced, and no one cared. So work that was once done by clones, espers, and other unfortunate unpeople was now the province of machines, and everyone was much happier. Almost everyone.
    These days, you cloned tissues, not whole people. The Empire already had more than enough people.
    Unless you needed a lot of people in a hurry, to kickstart the population on a new world, or to boost flagging populations of some of the more vicious hellworlds, the places you couldn't get real people to go to for any amount of money or land grants. Then, clones came into their own, which was why clones still had their own representative at the tables of the high and the mighty. Even if none of them seemed too interested in talking to him at the moment. St. Nick took the time to chat with him for a while, because that was his job.
    But even he had to admit to himself that the clone representative was a boring little tit.
    Next up was the esper representative, a much more important