Hero! (27 page)

“The raping wasn’t.” Vaun feels a strange rage; his blood pounds in his ears.

“You want revenge?” Prior whispers. “Take it! Take this abomination off my head and push a finger in.”

“In what?”

“Pink jelly.” He seems to find Vaun’s shock amusing. “They took the top off. Then they gave me a mirror.” He forces a thin smile. “Not many people get a chance to see themselves so clearly.” A trail of spittle runs from the corner of his mouth.

“Tell us the password, then, and maybe they’ll let me do that. It’ll be a pleasure.” Could he really push a finger into a living brain?

“Password? Is that what they told you—password? There’s no password, Brother.”

“We’ll see.” Vaun is annoyed to find that his anger is becoming contaminated by a sort of pity. He remembers
rape
, but it doesn’t help as much as he would like.

“No password,” Prior insists. “Language.”

“Oh.” Well, that makes sense. A whole new language? This is to be a bigger job than Vaun expected, and the thought is chilling.

Prior’s eyes have closed, but he continues to whisper. “A world. A life. So you can pass as me. I know.”

“You deserve this, and more!” At least Vaun can speak louder than he can.

“I don’t mind. They’re good memories, and you’re welcome to them, Brother. Enjoy them.”

Vaun is at a loss. He can’t find his anger now, only fear. And pity, damn it. His brother, helpless. The machinery hums. Fluids sob in the tubes.

“I’ll try,” Vaun says. “I’ll certainly try. And I’ll use anything interesting I find in there. Your forgiving attitude is very touching. I’m just sorry I can’t share it.”

Prior opens his eyes again and smiles weakly. “You were reared as a random; you’re a little confused still. But don’t worry—in the end you’ll never betray the Brotherhood.”

“Oh, won’t I? I would say ‘Watch me!’ but you won’t have that pleasure.”

“No, Brother Vaun. When the chips are down, you’ll side with your kin.” There is a chilling deathbed certainty in that quiet statement. Remembering the hidden listeners, Vaun almost panics.

“This is war!” he shouts. “And you started it.”

Prior’s eyelids lift partway. “Did I? Is it? Do cats and dogs wage war? Wait until you know more, Vaun. Xanacor Hive…they burned it. Burned down our brothers like vermin. Little kids…And Monad. I suppose they showed you that clip? I wept when they showed me. I was raised at Monad. You were conceived at Monad.”

“I don’t care!”

“You will. When you remember. The woods…”

“You started this.”

“No. Cats and dogs. It’s evolution.”

Vaun makes a scornful noise, because he isn’t sure what words may come if he tries to speak.

The dark eyes open wide, staring, intense. “You know about evolution? Go read up on it. Survival of the fittest. We’re the next stage, Brother. The perfection of mankind, a whole new species,
Homo factus
. Whatever happens to me, or you, doesn’t matter. Maybe it’ll take centuries. Doesn’t matter. The end is inevitable. The wild stock have had their day.”

“And you’ll wipe us out, I suppose? Bury us?”

Again Prior tries a smile. “‘Us’? Them!”

“You think I’m one of you? Well, I never asked—”

“No, you didn’t. But you’re still our brother.”

Vaun wishes he could feel as confident and self-assured as the prisoner looks. How can he stay calm when he knows the awful things that are about to be done to him?

Prior sighs. “No hard feelings, Vaun. I’m only sorry you’re on the losing side at the moment. But I understand.”

“Oh, now that takes confidence! You sit there with no top to your head and tell me you’re doing fine, you’ve got them on the run?”

Prior manages a faint echo of Raj’s chuckle. “Not me. I’m only one unit. I’m no more important to the Brotherhood than a single cell in your epidermis is to you, and you shed those by the million all the time. Perhaps the Brotherhood won’t win on Ult. I hope it does. But whether we win here or not, though, the wild stock will lose.”

“We all die in the end, you mean.”

“But a whole species doesn’t have to kill itself, Brother. I wish I had time to explain. Maybe you’ll pick up my memories on this. You know the random population on Ult?”

“About ten billion.”

“And it used to be over twenty. You think they’ve reduced it by choice?”

“Certainly.”

“Never. The wilds breed like bugs, all the time. And they exist by competition, so if one group does restrict its procreation, then another grows faster and takes its place. Didn’t Dice tell you any of this? If their numbers are down, it just means that the die-off has started. Vaun, planets
wear out
if they’re not looked after properly. The wild stock have just about finished this one.”

“That’s not true! Yes, there was a lot of waste in the early days, a lot of unnecessary pollution and bad development, but the international resource councils…” Vaun stops, sensing that he is running along a predictable pipe.

Prior sighs. “Too many people. Far too many. You know what the indefinitely sustainable population is for a planet this size?”

“No.”

“Nor I. But the Brotherhood would be content with a couple of hundred thousand. Cooperation, not competition…We have no insane compulsion to multiply, you see.”

“So you’re going to rescue the globe from its inhabitants, are you? Who’s going to thank you?”

“They’ll all die soon anyway, and take their world with them. If you can’t see your way to supporting us yet, then think of your duty to the biosphere.” Prior closes his eyes wearily, and at that moment a couple of medics come in and the conversation is over. It will have been recorded, of course.

Vaun makes his way to the other chair and sits down. The fabric of it feels cold through his flimsy gown, and he shivers. A random would come up in goose pimples, but his skin has no vestigial hair follicles.

Two more orderlies arrive and start fussing with the equipment around him, muttering to each other and ignoring him, treating him like just another item on the manifest. They attach things to the buttons on his scalp. But he hears someone speaking to Prior.

“We’re going to start in on the left lateral cortex. So if you have anything else to say, you’d better say it now.”

Prior does not answer.

T
HE DREAMER IS racked by monsters, pursued by terror. He thrashes and fights, helpless in the coils of horror, and there is no escape.

The hippocampus…now they’re going for the hippocampus. They brought him in on a cart today.

Brought me in on a cart today.

Two red suns and the trees are lime below a purple sky. I am Blue. I am Yellow. I am Red. I am all colors and my brothers are with me. We laugh and run and play. I am loved. I love. I am one with my brothers.

They take me around on a cart. No need for shackles now; too much damage to the motor cortex. Poor Vaun was shouting at them. They hadn’t warned him. Typical. He really can’t have known what to expect. He cares, though, whatever he says. The expression on his face…

Who am I?

They’re going to dig for the amygdala today, and process another piece of the hippocampus, and the nucleus basalis in the forebrain. That’ll fix the bastard.

No pain; it’s only jelly.

Brown is a full grown unit. He is talking about the female gender persons that the wild stock have. I’ve seen them around Monad, of course, but I didn’t know about their special organs. This is very important to the mission. Only one of us will get to go on the Ultian mission—Tan or Rose or me. We spend so much time together that I am learning to distinguish the other two, although of course I would never be so unkind as to tell them so. Yesterday we were Green, Violet, and White, and the teacher was a Black, but the same unit, I am sure.

There isn’t much left of him now. Not a brain in his head, one of the lab gnomes said. And laughed. I wanted to kill her, choke her slowly, but I laughed, too, because Roker is suspicious of me, shooting questions. Even Maeve asks me who I am at times.

This unit has been very bad. I tried to poke a stick in my brother’s eye. I have to go without pants all afternoon so everyone can see the number on my butt and know that this unit may have a design fault.

We’re going to have to go faster. The Q ship will enter parking orbit in three weeks. Not much of Prior left now. Good riddance! I can speak Galactic with Avalonian-Command pronunciation now, and jabber in his native tongue, whatever it was called…Andilian?

Some of the memories are fading already…

North of Monad Hive, about an hour’s flight from Zindir…

If I can win this bout…but I think this is the unit who threw me yesterday…just a hunch, of course, but if it is, then he favors his left hand a little…and he can’t know that I was crop champion last year…

Vaun! Vaun! It’s a nightmare, Vaun. Wake up, Vaun! Maeve’s here, love. Wake up, Vaun! It’s all over, Vaun. Prior died, Vaun. It’s all over, Vaun
.

Warm arms around him…his face buried between her breasts…

“No name!” he sobs. “I was happy, but I had no name. How could I be happy when I had no name?”

H
OW COULD YOU tell one pepod from another? There was one good thing about the wind—it excused shivering. Quild did not seem to feel the cold at all, but then he was twice as thick as Vaun, and thatched all over. More important, he wasn’t scared spitless.

“This is close enough for you,” he said suddenly.

No argument there. Vaun had been forcing every reluctant step with brute willpower. The nearest pepod loomed directly ahead, seeming almost within touching distance, although that was his imagination making it seem closer man it really was. Even over the surf, he could hear its rustling complaint and the chittering noise it made on the shingle. Something out to sea was shrieking plaintively.

His knee still ached, and the bruises on his face were throbbing. Not, likely, for long.

Quild went on another dozen paces, and stopped, watching that big mother of a pepod flickering and writhing like a dead bush possessed.

Vaun hugged himself, hunched against the wind, and watched also. The pepod was a big sucker, full gown, taller than he, and that meant a large privacy radius. He could never work out how they moved, whether they rolled or walked. Antennae, limbs, poison spines, all seemed to flail around simultaneously—they blurred, when the brutes moved fast. Eyestalks and mandibles…nothing seemed to be attached to anything else. Pepods had no centers. Ordinary weapons were useless against them, and he was unarmed except for fingernails. Unarmed, unlegged, untorsoed, undressed, bareass.
Krantz!
it was cold.

The summit of Bandor glimmered in starlight; lights danced in the woods by the parking lot. Once in a while a torch would purr overhead, as Roker’s goons brought in more unwanted guests, anyone who had been present at Arkady the previous night. There must be hundreds of them here by now, but doubtless most would enjoy a visit to the famed Valhal, provided it did not go on too long. Had the traitor herself arrived yet?

Vaun’s teeth wanted to chatter, but who knew what that sound might convey to a pepod? A hundred meters or so back along the beach, Roker was watching with his band of bootlickers, faces indistinguishable in the faded light. Along the edge of the woods, the armed guards stood in a row like fenceposts. Vaun wondered what sort of armament they had been issued—eight of them, and at least three times that many pepods in this thicket alone. He didn’t like their chances, but he wouldn’t be around to laugh.

“Admiral Vaun?” a girl’s voice said in his ear.

He jumped and looked around, but there was no one there. “Yes?” he said cautiously.

“My name is Elan; I am one of Professor Quild’s graduate students.”

“Pleased to meet you.” No point in saying he was pleased to
see
her; she was invisible, elsewhere.

“I will keep you posted on what is happening this evening, Admiral.”

He choked down a fatuous comment about coming to join her in the control room…frivolity would just reveal how scared he was.
Krantz!
but he wished they would get it over with. “I’ll appreciate that.”

“At the moment, we’re still trying to distinguish the specimen closest to you. They toss frequencies back and forth so often…” She fell silent.

“Why does it matter which is which?” Vaun asked, mostly for the comfort of hearing his own voice, or hers.

“It lets us set up a reference point. They orientate on each other and the planetary magnetic field.”

Quild said something that was lost in the sound of the waves, but he was probably speaking to the control room. He edged back a few steps, and Vaun was grateful of the excuse to do the same, keeping the distance between them the same. The pepod was coming slowly in their direction.

A few moments crawled by. “Still trying to calibrate here. They have a different pulse ratio from what we’ve met in Caruva.” Elan’s voice sounded apologetic.

Apologetic, hell! She sounded worried.

The news, whatever it meant in detail, merely strengthened his opinion that Quild was a conceited blowhard, rollicking recklessly far beyond his safe boundaries.

Again Quild backed up. Again Vaun copied him. He thought the pepod was gaining on them, though.

“Ah!” said the youthful voice in his ear. “We’re starting.”

Quild raised both arms, bowed, and began to dance.

“You don’t have to do that, Admiral.”

“I am delighted to hear it.”

“We call it Attention Getting. There is no significance to any of the gestures, but the pseudosentients seem to react faster when there is a…When they can relate to someone, er…”

“Making a fool of himself,” Vaun suggested. Quild continued to cavort and leap, but at least the exercise would warn him. The pepod had changed direction ominously, coming to investigate.

The girl sniggered slightly. “Well put! We are transmitting a standard prerecorded greeting. Some of the symbol groups have been identified—cool temperatures and melodious harmony are two well-established wave package symbols.”