Gods of the Greataway (13 page)

Brutus, alarmed, was tapping at the keyboard. The screen showed the number of neotenites delivered from the People Planet, the number of those used as replacements in the Dome, the balance remaining. “Thirty-four,” said Brutus harshly. “It should be thirty-four. There’s a neotenite missing. Oh, Mordecai!” He used the Specialists’ oath.

“Well,
I
don’t know anything about it.”

“And neither do I. But the Cuidadors will think I do, after … after that other business.” He stared wildly at the empty shelves. “How can it happen? Where has it gone?
When
did it go?”

“It could have happened anytime,” said the nurse, rolling the last neotenite onto a trolley. “I don’t suppose anyone makes a regular count of the inventory here. It’s only come to light because we’ve used our entire stock. For all we know, the shortage could have existed for centuries.”

“But how?” Brutus stared at the last neotenite. It lay on the trolley quietly, a slack mountain of flesh, twitching a little. It had never received any stimulation of any kind. It had been kept in a coma since the day of its creation, brain activity maintained at the minimum level consistent with life, body growing until it reached a length of approximately one and a half meters. It was physically male, but it was not aware of the fact. It would only become conscious of its sex when it received a standard brain imprint and its mind entered Dream Earth to continue the wild imaginings of the neotenite it had replaced.

“We’ll have
to report this to the Cuidadors,” said the nurse.

Although Brutus towered over her, he seemed to have shrunk. He crouched in an almost animal posture, making washing motions with his hands. “Must we?”

“If we don’t report it, you can be sure the Rainbow will.”

“Mordecai!” Brutus glanced involuntarily at the monitor in a corner of the ceiling.

“Get it over with, Brutus,” said the nurse kindly. “We’ll all back you up. There’s no reason for them to blame you. Now get along to the Rainbow Room and tell Zozula what’s happened. He’s a good man. He may even know how to ask the Rainbow where the neotenite went.”

“Yes, he may,” agreed Brutus quickly. “He may.” He took a deep breath, inflating his enormous chest, quelling the shivering. He gave her an overbright smile. Murmuring reassurances to himself, he lumbered from the room.

*

Brutus had hardly begun his explanations when Juni arrived. It was almost as though she sensed trouble.

“
Another
irregularity, Brutus?” she said coldly.

“It’s no fault of Brutus’s,” Selena explained. “Just a simple mistake in data entry I expect. I’ll check with the records on the People Planet.”

“It couldn’t have been anything to do with the Girl, could it?” asked Zozula. “Perhaps we forgot to record her release, when we removed her mind from Dream Earth and woke her up.”

“That’s what it is,” said Selena in relieved tones.

“No, it’s not,” said Brutus.

“Speak when you’re spoken to, gorilla-man,” said Juni.

“What do you mean, Brutus?” asked Zozula.

“I checked the Girl out myself.”

Juni was gazing sourly at Brutus. “It’s funny how these things always seem to happen when you’re around.”

“That’s enough, Juni!” Selena rose to her feet. “Come on, Brutus. It’s time we got back to the People Planet. We have a lot of work to do. We can’t afford to waste time arguing about a lost neotenite when we’ve got a whole breeding program to accelerate. We’ll lose more than one body if we don’t hurry up and restock the hibernation room — we’ll start losing the minds in Dream Earth!”

She
hurried from the Rainbow Room, and Brutus trailed disconsolately after her. During the ten-minute trip to the shuttle station she was silent, and Brutus found himself glancing at her often, trying to gauge her mood. Her lips were pressed together and her memory potto seemed ill at ease. It was trying to groom Selena’s hair — a sure sign that it was being affected by disturbing thoughts from its host. Brutus was not sorry when they reached the station and took their seats in the shuttle.

*

The shuttle was a total mystery to the Dome’s inhabitants — all except the two Specialists, Akela and Verna, who operated it. Knowledge of the shuttle’s working had been handed down from one fox-human generation to the next since time immemorial.

“Greetings, travelers,” said Verna, sidling up to them and smiling too brightly, like a member of some Wild Human love cult. Brutus snorted.

“Greetings,” snapped Selena.

“Oh, no — now that won’t do,” said Akela softly. “That won’t do at all, Selena. The shuttle must have harmony. The vibrations must be sympathetic. The secret is serenity and love.”

“Well, that’s not the way I feel right now. Get on with it, you two.”

“I’m afraid we just can’t.” Akela and Verna, male and female fox-humans, stood close together, almost rubbing against each other, smiling and murmuring, flashing each other looks of embarrassingly open adoration. “We wouldn’t like to take the chance. We could find ourselves losing control of the shuttle somewhere out in the cold Greataway, all because of your hate thoughts. And you wouldn’t want that to happen, would you?””

“Look
at the Helix,” said Verna, unclipping the golden object so that it sprang upright, man-height, bouncing slightly. “See how dull it is?”

“And the Chain,” added Akela. “It’s like putty. It has no strength.” He held it up for them to see — long, silver and tinkling. “This would never protect you from the winds of the Greataway.”

“Nonsense,” said Selena. “Mystical claptrap. This is just an ordinary Space shuttle and you’re the pilots. Now get going before I report you to Zozula.”

Brutus, sitting in the back seat of the tiny cylindrical vehicle, groaned. It was terribly unwise for Selena to threaten the pilots. If they chose to withdraw their services, the People Planet would be cut off. And that would be the end of everything for the True Humans.

Akela and Verna had walked away, ignoring Selena, and were now stroking each other near the airlock that led Outside. Brutus spoke quietly to Selena.

“Forgive me. But we really should compose ourselves for the journey.” And because Selena didn’t seem to have heard, he touched her on the shoulder.

She started, staring at him wildly as though he was a stranger, threatening her. For an instant, far behind her eyes, there was a flash of something very like fear. The potto jumped, too, twittering.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” muttered Brutus, snatching his hand away and scratching himself.

Selena closed her eyes and took a deep breath, then let it out shakily. “I’m sorry, too, Brutus,” she said. “It’s been a bad day. I must pull myself together.” And when she opened her eyes, the strange expression was gone. Akela and Verna, sensing that she was under control, walked toward them with dancing steps. Verna took the Chain and began to encircle the small, enclosed vehicle with it …

Fifty thousand years previously, any psycaptain would have recognized the actions of Akela and Verna. They were a longstanding tradition, refined by years of practice and codified by the Psycaptains’ Guild, but they had died out during the Age of Regression, becoming almost extinct with the planting of the Hate Bombs.

They were the
trappings of the Outer Think.

The Song of Earth relates that the Outer Think fell into disuse at the time of the Hate Bombs, and this is substantially true. However, the Song of Earth does not relate that one tiny thread of vulpids carried the knowledge and traditions through fifty thousand years and countless generations, solely for the purpose of operating the shuttle between Earth and the People Planet. The True Humans of the time did not know that the Outer Think was being used. Because the shuttle looked something like an ancient three-dimensional Spaceship, they assumed that was what it was. The fact that it never required fuel did not concern them; they left such details to the ship’s foxy custodians.

Now the vulpids, hand in hand, were repeating the Psycaptains’ Apothegm:

In years to come, the Song of Earth would relate that the Outer Think was rediscovered by Manuel, Zozula and the Girl when they defeated the Bale Wolves and removed the Hate Bombs. Such is the accepted view, and the existence of the vulpids should not be allowed to detract from the Triad’s achievement. So far as the True Humans were concerned, the secret was lost. However, the vulpids were not the only people still to possess some of the old powers, as we shall see. There was, for instance, an Everling known as Loanna, living on the People Planet, who …

But that is in the Ifalong.

S
elena left
Brutus at the fork in the trail. Hunched against the rain, she climbed the hill toward Boss Castle, where she lived. Brutus, big hands thrust deep into the pockets of his rainwear, plodded downhill toward the baby factory.

Selena was a little puzzled. As usual, the shuttle had landed close to the array of monoliths known as Horst’s Stones, and the fox-human pilots had made it clear that they could not — or would not — drop their passengers off any closer to the Castle. So it was going to be a long, cold and wet walk home.

However, just before the shuttle had touched down, there had been a rare break in the clouds, and the sun had illuminated the landscape so that Horst’s Stones glittered like diamonds. And the perspective had been wrong. Instead of seeming to be
down there
, on the surface of the planet, the Stones had somehow appeared all around the shuttle, as though they were a vast three-dimensional complex of which she, Selena, was a part. She had a sense of
belonging
to something so huge that her mind was incapable of grasping it.

She decided to talk to Mentor about it. Mentor was the most understanding person she had ever met and the only other True Human resident on the People Planet.

The door slid open and, gratefully, she entered the warm, bright interior of Boss Castle. Allowing a caracal-girl to take her clothes off, she passed through the sonic shower and into her private room. As she entered, the old guilt returned, and with it the old breath-catching excitement.

Mentor took her in his arms.

He had no real name; somehow
she’d never dared to give him one. To her he was simply Mentor, and had been for the past eighty years: her mentor, her companion, and her lover. She had taken him as a child and raised him — mothered him and taught him — and as time went by their relationship had undergone a slow reversal, so that now he was the counselor and advisor and she the uncertain one, eager for advice. After all, he was several hundred years younger than she, and he had no need of pottos. He had grasped the workings of her Rainbow terminal as a child. He was strong, healthy and skilled in the practice of the Inner Think. As he held her, the guilt faded. And as he carried her to their bed, guilt became meaningless, an instrument of self-torture that she could lay aside at any time. So, for a while, she immersed herself in the joy of reunion.

Afterward, one of the many facets of guilt returned.

“Mentor,” she said. “Don’t you get lonely while I’m away?”

He smiled at her. “I have the Rainbow and the caracal-girls. Why should I be lonely?”

“You’re a True Human. You should be with other True Humans. But you’ve never even seen one, apart from me.”

“Humans are humans,” he said with naive wisdom.

“The caracal-girls are just … Specialists. Not that there’s anything wrong with Specialists, but … Mentor, you’re a real person and you have a mind of your own. Don’t you ever feel you need some real, challenging True Human company? Don’t you ever wonder what it’s like on Earth?”
Say you don’t want to know
, she thought.
Say I’m all you need
.

“The Rainbow provides more challenge than True Humans ever could. And the caracal-girls provide more fun.”

What about me?
“What about me?”

He kissed her gently. “You are all the True Human I need.”

“You’re only saying that. You probably think the caracal-girls are better. All I can say is, you’d better watch out for those caracal-men. They may be small, but they’re vicious brutes.”

“Selena, Selena. You’ve only just got back.”

Just a touch
of the Inner Think, and she laughed. “Sorry, Mentor. I’m just a silly old Cuidador who can’t believe she’s so lucky. If they ever took you away from me, I don’t know what I’d do.”

“They’ll never find me, so they’ll never take me.”

Selena bit her lip. “Brutus discovered a shortage among the standby neotenites today. It’s just possible he could follow it through, if he felt like it. There could be some awkward questions.”

“You’ve always told me what a good man Brutus is. Surely he wouldn’t cause trouble?”

“At one time I’d have said he wouldn’t, but now he resents me. I’m frightened that if he ever found out about you, he might do anything!”

“Calm down, my love. How could he possibly resent you?”

So she told him the terrible story of how Brutus, full of love, had been unable to recycle the neotenite babies; how for generations he and his ancestors had been setting the babies free to drift down the river Outside in little boats, hoping some kindly Wild Humans would find them and care for them; how, in the gorilla-peoples’ minds, anything was better than feeding living, crying little babies into a recycling machine.

“Mordecai!” murmured Mentor. “The poor man.”

“I felt so sorry for him. But I had to reprimand him in front of the Cuidadors. What else could I do? Juni wanted to recycle
him.”

“I’m glad I’ve never met Juni,” said Mentor.

She hugged him. Then, as often happened, she found herself gazing over his shoulder at a picture on the opposite wall. It was a portrait of a young girl with an intelligent, lively face; a small plate attached to the frame bore the simple caption SHE. Four other paintings hung on the walls of Selena’s quarters, all of the same girl, but all completely different in execution, as though the artist had been experimenting with styles, using the same model.