Unlike anybody else he had ever known, Woulf loved the noise that Velcro made.
Beside him flowed a meandering stream of some sweet, sticky, carbonated fluid he knew was fed by a bubbly spring somewhere upon the other side of the stadium-sized chamber. He had no idea what it was and—for obvious reasons—had never felt any urge to taste it. The original formula for this sort of beverage had been lost almost a millennium ago, and was precisely as dead as ancient Earth. He thought he might have recognized the smell even so, except that the air in here, as always, was laden with the harsh odor of disinfectant chemicals.
He shrugged.
Extracting a pair of brown, gritty-surfaced silica rods, each of them triangular in cross section with a groove down one face, he inserted them at the proper angle to each other in the black plastic base with which they had been provided all those centuries ago, and then added a slenderer section of brass, set in its own position, to protect his left hand from a slip of the blade.
He drew his big fighting knife from the scabbard upon his hip and admired it a moment, as he invariably did at times like this. Its blade was broad, perhaps five and a half siemmes at the widest (it had been manufactured to a different standard of measurement) and some twenty-three siemmes in length. When new, it had been a uniform matted dull gray, but ninety decades of contact with the sheath had polished its high spots, bestowing upon it the appearance of a beautiful patina.
All round the open clearing where Woulf sat and waited, stood a forest of orchard-sized trees. He knew that just beyond them the place was circled by a grim cadre of Oplytes at no greater than an arm’s length from one another. They were one reason for the disinfectant. At close quarters like this they tended to reek, the older ones in particular, of two or three years’ age, that had begun deteriorating. The peppermint trees that concealed them tastefully were remarkable, if only for the red-and-white stripes spiraling round their trunks, as well as for the brittle green leaves covered with fine sugary crystals, interspersed with clumps of soft, white, powder-covered marshmallow “fruit.”
One of the obese, softball-sized mice that had developed in this place—“devolved” was a better word, he thought disgustedly—pushed itself past his feet, sliding upon a distended belly in lieu of front legs that had long since atrophied and vanished in this grotesquely overfed species. Woulf considered flipping his knife at the thing to kill it for practice, but relented. Blood being among the most corrosive of common substances, he was always careful to clean his knife and touch the edge up, whenever it had completed its gruesome work.
Today, the sharpening process served him only as a form of meditation, helping him to focus his thoughts and concentrate upon the next stage of his plans.
It might be vital: there was a feeling of change in the evil-smelling air down here, and given the way this mission had gone so far, nine hundred years of loyal and efficient service or not, he was one of the things most likely to be changed.
The knife, then. Its knurled cylindrical grip and minimal guard were of a piece with the razor-sharp swordlike blade, integral to it and of the same material, an alloy of steel which had once been thought of as technologically sophisticated, and was still superior to many another material put to the same purpose. The handle was hollow, capped with a fine-threaded O-ringed aluminum pommel piece, intended to contain a small assortment of survival items. Woulf had long since filled the cavity in with a small electric torch, bringing the balance point to the rear of the guard, making even the big blade quick and maneuverable in a fight, a feature that had saved his life upon more than one occasion.
Overhead, blind, genetically impoverished hummingbirds—the last in the universe since the destruction of their homeworld—plucked at cotton-candy clouds, spun freshly every day by spreighformers concealed within the arched ceiling.
Holding the blade straight and level, edge down, he drew it past the left stone first, and then past the right, backward toward himself and downward, as if removing the thinnest possible layer from the surface of the stone, bending his wrist at the final moment of each stroke so as to properly sharpen the upwardly curved edge.
One and, two, and, three and . . .
He gave each side of the blade ten strappings against the corners of the stones, wiped the blade, then replaced the brown rods with a pair of harder, smooth-surfaced white ones. These he gave a full twenty strokes apiece, as lightly as he could, and when he was finished, the wire edge of his knife gleamed like a filament of fire in the subdued skylight of the chamber of the Uebermutti.
As a fly buzzed past his face, he wondered, as he always did, why there were no spiders in this place. As always, he concluded that they had died of diabetes.
Woulf preferred this simple weapon above all others, for it never ran out of energy or ammunition, it operated silently, and it was virtually impossible for an unskilled enemy—that amounted to practically everyone, these days—to seize and turn against its owner. He had long since ceased to keep a count—perhaps as long as five hundred years ago—how many individuals he had killed with it.
He yawned. It was important to have something like privacy and quiet in which to consider the possibilities open to him. The moments were rare, in this place, when he could achieve that. He contemplated having callously used the Islay girl. That had been rather enjoyable. Sex without violence, he had discovered early in life, was hardly sex at all. And sex without death was scarcely worth the effort. Even so, look at the disappointing way his moment with her mother had turned out. These damned things never lasted nearly long enough.
Or their artificiality palled. He had slept in stasis most of the past nine hundred years. From time to time, whenever there was a perceived need for his services, he would be revived by his keepers and begin to live again. The tasks he performed for them were hardly unique in a perpetually bloodthirsty universe, but he strove to carry them out with what he pridefully trusted was a competence and determination absolutely unique in this slatternly, slovenly era.
For a time, as he regained his strength, received briefings upon whatever assignment he was to be given, made detailed plans of his own, and perfected his persona, he was free to do as he liked in his off hours. Luxurious rooms, the most sumptuous food, any kind or amount of companionship he desired—the Oplyte conversion process had no other use for female captives—was provided him. For a while afterward, as well, while he was debriefed for the archives and healed from whatever wounds he might have received, he lived in the same luxury.
And then to sleep again.
The next time he was awakened it might be a decade later, or a century. Usually it was more like the latter than the former, since he represented a precious and irreplaceable asset to those who naively believed they were his owners. And besides, they feared him, and dreaded the necessity of waking him up.
Of a sudden, figures could be seen moving along a winding garden pathway paved with high-temperature structural chocolate and bordered by half-buried disks of a brightly colored transparent sweet, standing upon their edges, with holes through their middles. Long ago, he had known the name of the substance represented—something about breaking them in the dark—but had forgotten it.
The ordeal was about to begin.
“How wonderfully appropriate it is, my dear. The Monopolity of Hanover, which gave you birth, happens to be the first civilization to be planted in this Cluster of stars, away from the home galaxy. And now—how perfectly delightful!—you have retraced our historic steps and reached the end of the Great Moonship’s journey, to find the last human colony established in the Cluster!”
There were four of them, Loreanna observed, attempting to remain calm in spite of the circumstances she found herself in. Four unutterably repulsive creatures reclined in some variety of complicated mechanical lounge chairs, wheeled from one point to another wherever they wished by domesticated Oplyte slaves. They had been waiting for her in this bizarre place when she was led in.
Looking from right to
left, she could not determine, at first, which of them was speaking, for none had moved her mouth—in fact, two of them had only tiny, puckered, vestigial orifices, surgically or genetically closed off. Now that she observed carefully, she could also see transparent tubes attached to mechanisms behind their chairs, leading beneath their draperies, where they were no doubt nourished automatically through insertions in their umbilical scars.
Thanks, she was willing to wager, to centuries of dependence upon this sort of technologized slavery, the monsters seated before her had degenerated physically, mentally, and no doubt morally, almost to the point that they were no longer human. She refused to speculate, even to herself, about what else went on beneath the draperies that covered their legs. Despite herself, there arose unbidden in her imagination, horrifying images of formless lower legs and shrunken feet, seamed together like the single lower extremity of a marine mammal.
Loreanna failed to suppress a shudder. Yet, despite the stultifyingly hideous sights that greeted her arrival here—and the countless humiliations already visited upon her before that—she could still thrust her chin up defiantly.
“The Monopolity did not give me birth,” she insisted to them, “my mother did!”
A small amber light appeared at the base of the leftmost entity’s throat. It had probably happened before but Loreanna had failed to notice it at first. The apparent leader simpered, “But have you never heard, that these things take a village?”
The light went out.
Probably the most horrible thing about the four was that they appeared to have no eyes. Like blind cave fish, Loreanna realized, they had somehow lost the ability to see. Instead, devices of some kind had been implanted in their shallow, vestigial eye sockets, with wires trailing into the hidden recesses of their chairs. Apparently they had busied themselves playing with the genes of others over the past ninety decades, but had been a trifle careless with their own.
Loreanna realized the irony of her position. As a prisoner, rather than an invader, she had reached the center of this malignant culture before her husband and his warship the Osprey. She was now at the necrotic heart of Oplyte Slaver civilization, facing its supremely depraved leaders in the kind of ultimate confrontation between good and evil that most cynics believe never really happen—although in many small ways, of course, they happen every day.
“I am Hillik,” the leader informed her, her amber indicator lamp lighting again, “presently foremost of what we’ve come to call, over the centuries, the ‘Overmoms.’ ”
Hillik was a female of broad face and forehead, wide cheekbones, sallow, oily features with just the faintest trace of an incipient moustache, and a single thick black eyebrow traversing the area over what should have been her eyes. Her bleached hair hung down to her shoulders in uneven, greasy-looking strings.
“Upon my right are my dear lifelong colleagues and associates Patteesh, Saraber, and Janareen. As you can see—she can see, can she not, Woulfie?—there is no one at my left, which is what we all wished to discuss with you.”
Standing before them, stripped naked, and in the grip of restraints more onerous than any chains, Loreanna had no desire to discuss anything with these living horrors. All she wanted was to destroy them in some highly satisfying and extremely messy fashion. Perhaps wisely, she forebore to tell them, but stood before them in a silent dignity which had nothing to do with clothing.
Woulf had kept her tied up until he had reached the sixteen-gunner he had sent for. Then he had kept her drugged. She had wakened in an antechamber of this place where minions of Woulf’s keepers had taken her clothing and pierced her body through several personal and tender places with enormous needles, both ends connected to cords they had handed to a little girl as leashes to restrain and guide her movements.
As Loreanna stood now, helpless for the moment and rigid in her outrage, she could feel an occasional droplet of her own blood fall upon the tops of her feet.
The child—doubtless an otherwise useless leftover from a slave raid—could have been no more than days older than her own five-year-old Glynna. Her mouth had been crudely sewn shut with coarse black suture. (Loreanna wondered how she ate and drank—then decided not to ask.) She sat upon a brightly striped artificial toadstool, leaving Loreanna no choice but to stand beside her.
“You see, my dear, there are supposed to be five of us.” Judging by the red light at the wrinkled base of her throat, it was Patteesh who had spoken, a hideous apparition with a sharp-pointed face like a rodent, long, protruding chisel-teeth to go with it, a permanent molelike squint, and a simpering leer Loreanna somehow realized was the result of spending her life being “cute,” in order to conceal the underlying poisonous nature of her personality. “There have always been five, but Elnerose passed away last year, which left four of us. We sorely need a fifth Overmom, do you not see, and we have chosen you for the honor.”
Loreanna threw her head back, laughed aloud, and then ordered them to do something with themselves that she had never even thought before, let alone uttered. She suddenly understood, despite her dire circumstances, how a life of adventure (if that was what she was living, now) tended to enrich one’s vocabulary.
“Well I am greatly afraid it is much too late for that,” Saraber replied evenly, and, looking at her skeletally gaunt, hatchetlike profile, dominated by a permanently power-drunk grimace, Loreanna believed her. “Nor have you a choice in the matter, my dear. In fact, however inadvertently, you are the reason we have distracted ourselves from our Thousand Years’ War against the Coordinated Arm. So in that sense, if no other, you are one of us, already taking your own part in our decisions, and the rest will be the merest of formalities.”
The remainder of the Overmoms, Hillik, Patteesh, and Janareen—a thick-featured ox of a woman with a keglike head topped in dirty thatching, who blinked stupidly and swiveled her head as if two steps behind everybody else—nodded agreement. Somehow the sight was so disgusting, altogether in its repulsive enormity, that Loreanna’s knees grew shaky and she was nearly ill upon the spot.
“ ‘Formalities’?” she replied, striving to regain her aplomb. “What you mean is, doing to me whatever you have done to yourselves! I do not know what it is—I do not care to know—but it is almost as terrible as what you have always done to your victims.” Mercilessly, she added, “In my girlhood science studies I have seen species of slave-keeping ants in exactly the same fix!”
It was Hillik who answered her. “What you may perceive, my dear, in your temporarily unenlightened state, as our various deformities, represent nothing more than a motherly sacrifice, made, in part, as a symbol of our renunciation of the physical world and its many temptations to selfishness. We have made our sacrifice purely for the sake of others, whose lives we have immeasurably improved simply by giving them a purpose. To refer to the beneficiaries of our sacrifice as ‘victims’ is therefore unsophisticated, unappreciative, and impolite.”
The creature lifted a feeble hand to the wires extending from her face. Even her fingers were short, useless stubs. “These bobshaws we have adopted enable us to see whatever is actually seen by certain of our servants. They are, upon that account, greatly superior—both pragmatically and in a higher moral sense—to your merely organic eyes, which offer to you only your own, self-centered point of view. Two of our number are similarly and unselfishly equipped for hearing only what is heard and feeling only what is felt by others.”
“As we communicate through our vulnavias.” It was Janareen who had finally spoken, in a voice Loreanna could not help thinking of as hulking and brutish.
Loreanna looked at the wires plugged into the sides of their wattled necks. “Tell me, do you disgusting slavemongers no longer even breathe for yourselves?
“I’ll have you burned for that!” The hideous female whitened, and her atrophied arms began to jitter with rage. “I’ll have you gassed, thrusted, and then burned!”
“Ah, Janareen,” sighed Hillik, “do not be angry with
the girl. She fails to comprehend why we have selflessly given away so many of our own senses and other faculties, simply because she is not yet one of us. As you know, all of that is about to be changed.” The leader abruptly redirected her attention to Loreanna. “It is simply so that we may see with the eyes of others, hear with the ears of others, and, well, ‘walk a mile in their shoes,’ as the old saying goes.”
“These others,” Pateesh went on, smiling so sweetly at Loreanna that she felt the urge to vomit once again, “we send out into the endless Deep in order to survey our vast interstellar empire—for everything we touch belongs to us—and to discover new worlds to conquer. Woulf, here, for example, never told you—because he never knew until this moment—that he is one of our observers.
“What?”
“Although we stay here, deep in our cavern, we see the universe through him.”
Loreanna had tried to turn at the sound of his voice, but was forced to stop as the needles impaling her threatened to rip themselves from her flesh. She had not realized he was here. At Pateesh’s humiliating revelation, he had leapt from the object he was sitting upon—another mushroom, it appeared to be—and now stood, knife in one hand, sharpener in the other, trembling with fury.
“He is our . . . instrument,” Janareen began adding tentatively. “He is our—”
“He is our dick,” Saraber substituted a franker term. “When Woulf took your drugged and helpless body, we four took it with him. How very enjoyable it was, too. I am surprised you aren’t aching and bruised all over. By our reckoning, this means you now belong to us.” The creature’s tone changed as she added, tauntingly, “Just as when he took your daughter, we took your daughter!”
Coordinated Arm 02: Bretta Martyn Page 38