Brother Termite (16 page)

Oh, yes. Reen was going to see Hopkins.

LIKE COUSINS,
humans sent out signals when they slept, signals so resonant that if a Cousin listened carefully, he could hear the mutters of their slumber.

Below the darkened ship Reen could hear that murmuring. He felt a woman in a neighboring house toss in a restless dream; sensed beneath him Hopkins’s mind drifting like a boat across a dark sea.

When they landed and walked to the door, Oomal slid an opener into the key slot Reen could hear its metal fingers probing the lock’s tumblers. Beside him, the Taskmaster was fumbling a trace into an outside plug where it would send a command through the network of electrical nerves in the house telling the security system to slumber, too.

There was a soft click. Oomal turned the knob and opened the door to black, warm silence.

The floor was marble, and the hall smelled not of death but of peach potpourri. In the living room to the right, the glow from the VCR’s clock cast an eerie deep-ocean green on the carpet.

Reen turned left and found the stairs that led to where Hopkins was riding the slow breakers of his slumber. Behind him, quiet as thieves, soft as cats, the Loving Helpers followed.

Five rooms, all open, the cobalt of night gathered in the doorways. Downstairs the furnace came on with a low rumble and an exhalation of heated air. Somewhere in the darkness a mechanical clock ticked. Reen chose the second of the right-hand doors, the one from which Hopkins’s sleep licked at the edges of his mind.

Hopkins lay, a graveyard hump, under moonlit covers. Reen, whose ancestors had crawled in twilight tunnels and had eyes that pierced all shadows, saw Hopkins’s hand curled innocently under his jaw.

Two bruises on the jaw, Marian had told him, where strong unexpected fingers had clutched Jeff’s face. Reen could almost hear the sudden, frightened squeak of the rocking chair, the clink of teeth against metal, the felling explosion.

The Loving Helpers, dainty and elfin, were drawn by body warmth, by curiosity, to Hopkins. One grasped the man’s hand. In a milky spill of moonlight from the blinds Reen saw Hopkins’s eyes fly open.

“Who am I?” Reen asked, stepping to the bed.

“Reen,” Hopkins whispered, not needing to read the nameplate, for now Hopkins could see as a Cousin saw. He could look past the unremarkable face straight into Reen where the soul itself murmured identity.

“Get up,” Reen said.

With a thin moan Hopkins sat up in bed, the Helpers clustered around, touching him like street children in some strange Third World country.

“You murdered Jeff,” Reen told him. “You murdered Jonis.”

Humans responded in different ways to a Helper’s touch. Marian quietly, steadily wept. Hopkins was the speechless type, his terror so profound that it couldn’t be given tongue. He shuddered. His face poured sweat. His eyes were tender, moist, globular, like peeled plums.

“Tell me,” Reen said.

“Yes.”

“Do you have a gun in the house?”

Hopkins’s reply came in a reedy squeal, the sound of a saxophonist hitting a bad note. “Yes.”

“Get it.”

The man’s mind fought to escape; his body ignored it. When his feet hit the floor, he looked down at them in surprise.

“Get it now,” Reen told him.

With trembling hands Hopkins slid open the night stand drawer. In it lay a nickel-plated pistol.

Hopkins looked up at Reen in mute, apprehensive hope, as though praying the exercise was over.

“Pick it up.”

When the hand obeyed, Hopkins’s jaw dropped in slapstick surprise.

Against a wall of the darkened room sat a rolltop desk. Reen walked over and pulled out the chair. “Sit here,” he said. “Bring the gun.”

Hopkins’s mind was obviously screaming for him to stop, He walked stiff-legged. The Helpers led him to the chair, and Hopkins collapsed into it.

“Put the muzzle in your mouth,” Reen said.

A twitch ran through the muscles in Hopkins’s cheeks. His breathing was shallow and rapid. Reen heard a drip-drip on the carpet. The man was urinating. His maroon pajamas were soaked.

Hopkins’s face twisted grotesquely. His jaw worked. He was struggling to talk. “Tali. Tali.”

“I know all about Tali. Put the muzzle in your mouth.”

“The others ... not me. Marian Cole. Yes. Yes. Jonis. But didn’t mean–”

“Do what I said.”

Hopkins’s mouth twitched closed. His eyes bulged as he watched his hand turn on the pivot of its wrist. His lips parted in a rictus of a smile. His teeth stayed clenched, the only mutiny he could muster.

“Pull the trigger,” Reen said.

Hopkins moaned. On his teeth the muzzle was playing frantic castanets.

The Taskmaster leaped forward. “No!”

Reen looked into the white-rimmed blank pennies that were Hopkins’s eyes.

“Pull the–”

An explosion. The head snapped backward. The back of it blossomed open like an autumn-blown rose, strewing red petals of skull to the floor.

Hopkins’s right foot kicked the desk once, hard. His arm jerked out away from him, flinging the pistol in an arc to smash the dressing-table mirror. His body heaved, then flopped wearily back into the chair.

After the boom of the gun, the silence of the room was so complete that it seemed to Reen he had been struck deaf. A sliver of mirror fell from the frame and tinkled on the dresser.

A Loving Helper shrieked, rubbing its hands as though Hopkins’s death had left gummy acid on its palms.

“How could you do this?” the Taskmaster cried. “How dare you do this thing?”

The Helpers were screaming, screaming until the house echoed with their high-pitched cries.

In the Green Room, Reen knew, Jeff was laughing again, laughing to beat the band.

“Get them under control, damn it,” Oomal said.

The Taskmaster glared, “I can’t. They absorbed the death agony. No one can control them now.”

Thural retreated. Oomal did, too. The noise the Helpers were making was the noise of forged steel as it bends.

“Someone will hear,” Oomal said, glancing nervously out a window.

“They’ll make every Helper we have go mad.” The Taskmaster slipped a rod from his belt and touched one and then another of them. The small Helpers crumpled to the ground soundlessly, like crusts of charcoal that, unnoticed, had burned to ash. Somewhere in the darkness of the house a clock chimed the hour.

“You killed them,” the Taskmaster said as he contemplated the outcome of his sad, final chore.

At their feet the three Loving Helpers lay in a tumble, the obsessive light of Communal Mind extinguished in their eyes, their gray skin dim as smoke.

The furnace clicked off. The clock gave one last peal and then fell silent.

Reen thought he heard Hopkins’s never-voiced pleas echo from room to empty room. And somewhere in the silent house he thought he heard a Helper scream, its cry like tearing metal.

REEN PICKED UP
one of the child-sized Loving Helpers and made his way down the steps, cradling his burden as snugly as he might have held Angela. Behind him he could hear Oomal, Thural, and the Taskmaster following, none of them speaking.

There was nothing to say. Reen walked across William Hopkins’s dead lawn, the small head of the Helper nestled lifelessly against his shoulder.

They’re not as intelligent as dogs,
he had once admitted to Marian. But, oh, how much more loyal was this flesh of his flesh, Reen’s skewed mirror. He pressed his cheek against the smooth cool cranium of the Helper, the bulbous case where no thought but duty had ever sparked.

Reen had never touched one, and now he marveled at the feel of that thick skin which was a copy of his own; he wondered at the solidity of its body and the twig-fragility of its limbs.

Halfway across the grass he stopped. Thural tried to take the body from him, but Reen pulled away. The others were now waiting with their own limp burdens at the ship’s door.

“Come, Reen-ja. Come,” Thural urged softly.

Reen twisted away. “No.”

Reen wanted to weep for the Helper but couldn’t. Cousins were made from emotionless clay. Only when they reached sapience did they discover there were things to weep for, but by then it was too late. They hadn’t the genetic tools for mourning.

He heard Oomal’s gentle voice, Brother to Brother. “Let me have the Helper, Reen-ja. It’s time to go.”

After a hesitation Reen put the corpse into his Brother’s arms. The Helper’s head lolled back, sharp chin pointed to the sky, eyes huge, opaque, and sightless. As Oomal turned, the Helper’s arm swung like a heavy rope.

In the ship the others went to the lounge, but Reen sat alone in a small blue meditation room near the door. He fingered the lightning bolt at his chest, the symbol of his intelligence: a brilliant spark from earth to sky.

Fully ninety-three percent of his Brothers had been culled from the nest, raised separately from those who would have individual temperaments and individual names. Reen didn’t know what his Helper Brothers looked like. He doubted he could pick them out from the others. Loving Helpers were interchangeable. They were the faceless night that surrounded the lightning.

Reen sat until Oomal came to tell him the ship had landed.

“Reen-ja, you’re in no shape to go into the Cousin Place,” he said after the door had closed behind him. “So let’s talk for a minute. I have something I need to tell you.”

Oomal sat beside his Brother, not slouching in the chair, as was his new style, but ramrod straight, his old.

“You’re the First and I’m no Cousin Conscience, but I have to tell you that you fucked up.”

Reen didn’t bother to nod.

“Tali’s going to crucify you with this. For a while tonight you had the upper hand. I mean, here Tali knows about Jonis, lies to the Community, and you kill your only goddamned witness.”

“I have proof!” Reen said heatedly. “I have pictures: Tali bringing Loving Helpers into the West Wing. I have names and dates. Everything, Oomal! Jeff had everything!”

“So you have pictures. So you have documentation. Photos don’t tell the whole story. And the Community thinks all humans lie. We had to have Hopkins, Cousin Brother. They’d believe what Hopkins said if he was in the hands of the Loving Helpers. I thought you were just going to put a little scare into the man. Drag him back with us to the Cousin place, make him spill his guts. God, Reen, what a mistake.”

“Do I disgust you?” Reen whispered.

Oomal stared at the wall. “You offend the hell out of me, First Brother. You and I and maybe Thural–we don’t see the humans as strangers anymore. Christ. However much Hopkins conspired against you, how could you do it? How could you stand there and tell him to pull that trigger? Wasn’t seeing Womack’s body enough, and Kapavik’s, and Jonis’s? And you made me stand there and watch. It’s something I’ll never be able to forget. I don’t know if I can forgive you for that.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Sorry doesn’t cut it, First Brother. Nothing can make up for what you’ve done to me. And to yourself. Tali’s been using Hopkins against you, and he probably thinks you’ve been using Marian Cole against him, like one of those old Third World wars by proxy the United States and the Soviet Union used to have. Now you murdered Hopkins. You upped the ante. Tali’s not going to let you get away with it. So what did they do during the Cold War to keep it from heating up? They negotiated. You’re going to have to negotiate with Tali, First Brother. As much as you hate it, you’ll have to.”

“Tali tried to kill me,” Reen said.

“No, Reen. Tali didn’t try to kill you. Cousins don’t kill Cousins. He hired a human instead. Tali knows more about Communal law than you ever will. That’s his job, and he’s damned good at it. He knows that Cousins never dirty their hands, and they don’t use Loving Helpers as weapons.”

Reen looked away.

“Listen to me, Firstborn. Thural won’t talk, but you can bet that the Taskmaster will. As far as he’s concerned, you’re
Tulmade,
you’re egg-eater. He thinks you’re crazy. That’s all he talked about on the flight home. Now you’re going to have to walk in there and give Tali something to make him happy. What does he want?”

“To breed the female.”

Oomal was quiet. The lighting in the room was cool, blue, and lulling: nest color. Reen wanted to put his head down and go to sleep.

“That’s stupid,” Oomal said after a while. “You sure?”

“He can’t accept what is happening to us.”

“Yeah, well, Tali will quiet down once the first eggs are hatched and he has another thousand or so Loving Helpers to feed and house.”

Reen turned to his Brother. “I can’t allow the breeding of the female. Who would I choose? You? Thural? Any of the others? And as First, I would have to stand witness. I couldn’t, Oomal. I couldn’t watch that. I won’t order a Cousin to die simply because our Brother can’t accept reality.”

Oomal spread his hands in defeat. “So what do you plan to do?”

“I will go in there,” Reen said firmly, “and apologize for my actions.”

“Oh,
that
should work.
That
should make everything all right.”

“I’m not finished! Then I will tell the Community that Tali knew about Jonis. That he tried to have me murdered. I will ask Tali to step down as Conscience and put another in his place. You, perhaps, since you seem to like the job.”

Oomal ignored the barb. “You’re skirting the edge of disaster, Reen-ja. Brother bonding goes only so far. Tali may have your chains around him, but he chafes under their weight. If you don’t play it very, very cautiously, you’ll end up in rebuke, and Tali will be designated to make all your decisions for you.”

Reen got to his feet. “The Community won’t do that. At least not after a hearing. And I have you and Thural as witnesses to Hopkins’s confession.”

“Reen-ja, sit down. You can’t–”

“Are you coming with me, Third Brother? Or are you afraid of Tali, too? When I call on you to speak up for me, will you lie?”

Oomal jumped to his feet, and Reen found himself slammed against the wall. He nearly fell. Oomal jerked him upright. “Listen, Cousin First Brother,” he said in a low, deadly tone. “Get hold of yourself. You always had a bad temper, even when we were children, and time hasn’t taught you shit. I’d jump off a cliff if you told me to, if you had a good reason, so don’t take your rage at Tali out on me.”

Reen felt as though he were under rebuke already, that every shred of authority had been taken from him. He was suddenly afraid of Oomal, afraid that his Brother would strike him as the Sleep Master had.

But Oomal let him go and stood back. Reen slid to the floor.

“Are you all right?” Oomal asked.

“No, I’m not. I’m sorry for everything. For trusting Marian Cole, for not suspecting Hopkins. I’m sorry for Jonis, for the Loving Helpers, for my anger.”

“Quit saying you’re sorry.”

Reen looked up at his Brother. “What else can I do, Oomal?”

“Breed the female. Close your eyes and point. Choose somebody. Please point away from me.”

Reen looked at the lozenges of blue light set along the tops of the walls. “Then I will have murdered five times tonight: Hopkins, the Helpers, and my own blood.”

“Too bad that by law you can’t choose Tali,” Oomal mused. “That would be a sound executive decision. Come on. We’d better get inside and get it over with.” He bent and helped his Brother to his feet.

It was late. The moon had set, leaving the sky adorned with a meager sprinkling of city stars. Oomal at his side, Reen walked into the chamber, stopping dead when he saw that a crowd of Cousins had gathered there.

Reen’s arrival was met with silence. The Sleep Master, his face grim, was standing next to the Taskmaster. Thural was frozen, one hand still out to Tali in entreaty.

The Taskmaster broke the spell. “Egg-eater,” he spat.

Reen searched the crowd, found nothing but hatred or caution. Prudently Oomal stepped away from Reen’s side.

“I ...” Reen began.

The Sleep Master brought him up short. “We cannot identify your voice. We do not recognize your face.”

Reen saw Thural’s hand fall uselessly, wearily, to his side, all appeals abandoned.

“You are in that place where the eye does not see.”