Brother Termite (15 page)

“I HAVE LOST
the only two humans I ever loved,” Reen told Oomal as he watched Marian’s car roll through the barricades, past the waiting tanks, and out into the dark rush-hour street.

Oomal gave him a sidelong glance.

“So now there is no reason I cannot out-Cousin Tali,” Reen said.

“If that’s your goal, you’d best forget it.” Oomal seemed amused. “Nobody can out-Cousin Tali.” The BMW disappeared down Pennsylvania Avenue, into the river of red taillights. “Let the Helpers take over her mind, Brother. Let me ask her some questions. There are things she’s lying about.”

“I can’t, Oomal.” Reen spread his hands and looked at them: the chubby fingers, the stubby claw. No wonder guilt-ridden Jonis hadn’t been able to manage a better penned note of apology. “I’ve begged her to let me prolong her life the way I did Jeff Womack’s, but she says she would rather die than have the Helpers touch her. I can’t put her under control again.”

“I’m gentle with them, Cousin Brother,” Oomal replied. “You know I’m gentle.”

Reen nodded. Oomal was the gentlest of Brothers, making the descent into Communal Mind a cushioned fall. Yet during that fall, even with Reen holding her hand, Marian had wept. Communal Mind was deep, much deeper than the shallow graves of Marian’s eyes–its depths without light, its sides without handholds.

“So a karma seller converted Jonis? No shit,” Oomal said in wonder as they started for the ship. “Poor Jonis. There
is
something seductive about the humans, you know. Give us a couple more generations with them, if we had them to give, and Cousins would start wearing three-piece suits and driving Volvos. Maybe Tali knows that. Maybe that’s why he’s playing Super Cousin. And,” Oomal said, giving Reen a knowing glance, “maybe that’s why he thinks you’re dangerous.”

“If he did not think like a human himself,” Reen grumbled, “he wouldn’t have plotted to kill me.”

“Just my point.” His Brother paused at the lighted ramp.

“Another generation. That’s all it would take. Two cultures don’t merge without one coming out the winner. Some of us would be driving Volvos, all right, and some would be driving Chevy pickups with guns under the seat. Now I see why our ancestors acquired the bad habit of genocide.”

Oomal tapped the shocked Reen playfully on the arm.

“Remember when we first landed and it looked as though things were going to go the other way? Remember you were on the
Today Show,
and you said the Old Ones spoke to you? Overnight it seemed as if every human became a damned spiritualist. That’s where this karma seller stuff all came from, you know–that
Today Show
interview fifty years ago. I’ll bet you anything that Womack was trying to call up the Old Ones and turn them against us.”

Reen looked at his Brother with such shock that Oomal laughed.

“Trying to hook up an AT&T long-distance link with the Old Ones. Come on,” he said, snagging his Brother’s sleeve, “what do you expect? We took all Womack’s power away. But screwing around with cardboard ghosts isn’t important. What bothers me is what Marian said about Tali. And how Tali’s been acting lately. As if he has a bug up his ass. It’s only a matter of time before the Community finds out what Second Brother was up to. And if Tali’s panicking, Reen, we have a problem.”

Thural came out and stood in the lighted rectangle of the ship’s doorway. Reen trudged to him, and the three walked to the navigation room.

“How many humans do you figure know about the sterilizations?” Oomal sat down and hooked an arm over the back of his chair.

Reen fell heavily into his seat. Marian. The Secret Service. Certainly Bernard Martinez had known, and anyone else Jonis had confessed to. There could be hundreds.

“And when do you suppose the balloon’s going to go up?” Oomal asked.

Reen looked worriedly toward the tanks surrounding the White House. He didn’t reply.

“Maybe we ought to start making contingency plans, Reen-ja,” Oomal said.

“Why hasn’t someone leaked it already?” Reen wondered aloud. “Why aren’t we seeing stories on the news?”

“They’re too afraid of that doomsday virus. And so am I,” Oomal muttered. “Come on. Let’s get out of here. I want to follow that car and make sure they don’t duck out on us.”

Obligingly Thural took the ship up. Extinguishing the outside illumination so they would not be seen, they located Marian’s BMW by its hidden beacon and tagged after the twin cherries of its taillights.

Cottage-cheese clouds sailed across the moon. The road below was a necklace of tarnished silver that some careless hand had tossed on the black, rumpled bedspread of the Maryland hills. Intent on his flying, Thural hunched over the controls. In a gesture copied from the human pantomime book, Oomal pretended to straighten a crease in his skin-tight pants and then crossed his legs.

Humanity was so seductive.

Reen looked down at the faint red dot-dot-dot tracer of the car’s lights as it shot past the trees. Marian had deceived him with her strength, her warmth. But Reen had deceived her first.

Come along,
the Cousins had told her when the Helpers took her hand and dragged her to the ship.

We won’t hurt you.

The murmured assurances of a nurse with a needle to a frightened five-year-old.

Just a little sting, and it will all be over.

Marian, naked on the table, the robot arm digging into her flesh as tears leaked from her eyes. The genetic combination had been so hard to get right. Ten, twenty, thirty years. And each year the same empty promise.

Rape. Yes, it had been something like that.

How fortunate
, the Sleep Master’s First Brother had written nearly three hundred years before,
to have found a species our ancestors ignored. With the decline in our own population, it may be that we can lift genetic material from them to strengthen our race.

But Reen had taken that dream a step further than the Sleep Master’s First Brother ever intended. Reen had created not stronger Cousins but Cousinly humans. Humans who would live four hundred years and breed like animals for the sheer exhilarating pleasure of it. Angela would probably live long enough to see her progeny cover the galaxy like a blanket.

By then, surely, the new species would find some way to defeat distance, and it would spread to the Magellanic Clouds, Andromeda.

Yes. If the purpose of his rape was Angela, Reen would choose Marian’s suffering again even though he knew she still needed pills to sleep.

By the time she reached fifteen, he understood why she kept the lamp burning at her bedside, why she was afraid to be alone. And yet he went on capturing her, a fox mouthing a speechless, terrified rabbit.

He couldn’t help himself. From the moment he first saw her he knew that he wanted his child to have her courage. And once he had lost his heart, once the decision had been made, he kept to it through Marian’s tears, through her pleas, through her bad marriage and attempted suicide.

There was no good reason why Marian should ever trust him, Reen thought as the ship now passed over the high fence of Camp David and flew over a group of humans gathered under a sparse forest of floodlights. Absolutely no reason.

Thural landed in a darkened, deserted part of the complex.

“You really want to do this?” Oomal asked, leaning over and laying a claw on Reen’s arm.

Reen nodded.

“You sure? It’s one thing seeing what humans did to Womack, Brother. It will be another to see what human has done to Cousin. As long as I’ve lived among them, as much as I like them, there are still some things about humans that I–”

Angrily shrugging off Oomal’s claw, Reen stood and walked out of the ship. The air was calm, prickly with frost and the smell of pine. Above his head, clouds made a banded halo around the moon.

The Taskmaster herded the trio of Helpers out of the lounge and down the ramp. Oomal glanced around as though counting heads. “Okay. Let’s go,” he said quietly.

They made their way through the trees.

In the glare of the halogens Marian and Rushing were watching a pair of workmen dig a rectangular hole. At Rushing’s feet a naked man lay, his right arm twisted under his body, one cheek pressed into the dirt. As Reen approached, he noticed the hounds tooth pattern of burn marks, the ruined feet. And he recognized the bleached blue of the slain man’s dumbfounded eyes.

Kapavik.

Rushing saw the Cousins. He tapped Marian’s arm and nodded toward them.

Marian, seeing the direction of Reen’s gaze, said, “We had to do it this way. There wasn’t time for anything else.”

So Marian had ordered the tortures. Did Le Doux and Kapavik scream? Did they beg for mercy? Marian always got what she wanted.

Reen peered into the open grave at his feet and saw what he first took to be the glint of dark water.
Only water,
he thought in relief.
Nothing to be afraid of. And in a minute all of this will be over.

The workmen bent to lift the water, which turned out to be black plastic sheeting.

“Not yours,” Marian told him, reading Reen’s expression. “Ours. We’re taking her home.”

Rushing knelt and flipped back the plastic. Dirt tumbled down the gleaming sides. A gaseous stench escaped, spoiling the night air.

Natalie lay curled in her comfortless shroud, legs slightly bent, hands at her chest. The fingers were broken and bent backward. There were needle marks along her arms, some torn and jagged. The bullet that killed her had entered the back of her cranium and, leaving, took her forehead with it.

Reen looked down at Natalie’s body, at which both worms and humans had plucked. Natalie of the bright clothes, all her color gone to a dull blue-gray. His throat closed. His voice emerged in a rasp. “Why?”

“Natalie died protecting you, Reen,” Marian said. “Everything I’ve done was meant to protect you.”

When he glanced up, she was giving him a speculative look.

“Jonis is over here, Reen,” Marian said.

Jonis was wrapped in a soiled white sheet, and he lay, a cocoon without prospects, on the brown winter grass.

“I don’t know if you should look,” Rushing said gently. Reen kept his eyes lowered until the sheet was peeled from the body.

Ants had visited Jonis. Disagreeable houseguests, they were crawling in and out of his punctured, wrinkled eyes.

“Where are his fingers?” Reen asked, his voice nearly failing him. “Where are his feet?”

Rushing went to the ambulance and returned with a small box. A clumsy Pandora, he unfastened it, and from the opening came a thick puff of corruption.

“They buried the feet and fingers separately,” Rushing said, closing the box, “Kapavik said they were planning to dismember the rest of him, to conceal what they had done. Jonis died before they pulled the third finger out of its socket.”

Reen turned to Marian. “Where were you going to bury Jonis?”

“At the Virginia farm.”

“Take him there. Take him there and bury him again.”

Marian seemed surprised. “You don’t want–”

“Take him!” Reen shouted. “Bury him, damn you! Don’t you understand that the Community can’t comprehend torture? That they believe the Cousins who were kidnapped died in peace, without a human raising a hand against them?”

She blanched. “We didn’t have a thing to do with Jonis. We don’t kill Cousins, Reen. That’s not what we’re after.”

“You murdered Sidam, didn’t you? You planted the bomb on the commuter ship. Tali was talking with Hopkins. Despite all we have learned from you, no Cousin could have murdered as coldly as that. And no other human could have got that close.”

She drew back, as if fearing Reen would strike her. “I knew Tali and Hopkins were planning your kidnapping. I thought I could stop it.”

He looked across the lawn to the two rectangular holes. The opening into Communal Mind was softer, its depths free from importunate insects and decay. “How did you get the explosives on board?” he asked. “Tell me on your own or I will bring the Helpers over and you won’t have any choice but to tell me.”

“I caught Sidam by the ship,” Marian said, “and gave him a teddy bear for Angela. I told him you’d be going to West Virginia the next morning and that you’d give it to her then. There was an altitude-triggering device inside it. I never thought I’d kill Sidam, Reen. When Natalie called, I left for Langley. I thought it was Tali who died.”

In a day and a night, Reen’s entire life had soured. Marian turning against him. Jeff’s laughter gushing onto a yellow carpet. Hopkins and Tali conferring in the basement of the White House, planning Reen’s destruction. And at his feet the shell of Jonis in its filthy shroud.

Abruptly Reen turned and walked away.

“Reen,” Marian called. “Where are you going? What are you going to do?”

Reen didn’t answer. Hopkins was the problem. Hopkins, who had ripped out Jonis’s fingers by the roots to learn Cousin secrets; Hopkins, who had murdered Jeff and had led Tali down the twisted path of treason. As Reen stalked past the other Cousins and the three Loving Helpers, they swiveled and followed him to the ship.