The Paratwa (#3 in the Parawta Saga)

by Christopher Hinz

  But according to the medcom, even ETll should have become unbreathable at somewhere around seventy-five hundred feet. Not to mention that the pressure certainly should have crushed the relatively thin hull well before this incredible depth was attained.

  I'm over two miles below the Atlantic Ocean. And I should be at least two ways dead.

  Obviously, there were scientific operations here that he did not understand.

  Jalka/Aristotle, whispered his monarch, echoing Gillian's logical assumption. But still ... how could Jalka/Aristotle have developed such incredible technologies?

  Empedocles did not answer.

  "PRESSURE EQUALIZED,” announced the airlock.

  Gillian drew a deep breath and opened the seal.

  The lock had been butted against a roughly tubular tunnel. The tunnel was about eight feet in diameter and curved away to the left, dimly lit by what appeared to be erratically spaced patches of luminescent blue ... ceiling?

  No, not ceiling. More as if the walls had simply merged together in spots: in some places, in a very smooth linear fashion, at other locations, more randomly, forming a composite of organic strands, like woven muscle.

  He crossed the threshold and made his way around the bend in the tunnel. Helmet sensors, constantly analyzing external conditions, printed their findings on the main status panel above his inner visor. The air mix was a bit high in oxygen but well within breathability parameters; the average outside temperature was sixty-eight degrees. It seemed to be a thoroughly hospitable environment.

  No matter. Gillian was not about to sacrifice the security of his spacesuit. Despite the apparent cordiality of this place, deviance abounded.

  He walked around the bend, came to a place where the tunnel merged into a much wider area. It was a brightly illuminated room with a glowing ceiling, roughly rectangular in shape, but with its uneven walls in constant motion, like starched sailcloth endlessly wafted by stiff breezes.

  He took one step into the new area and froze. The right side wall began to glow with a fierce orange light, so intense that his faceplate automatically polarized as internal sensors adjusted to the onslaught of high-intensity illumination. And then, just as abruptly, the wall returned to its previous nonluminescent state. His visor followed suit.

  The wall stopped moving, assuming a brittle translucent quality, becoming a vast curving sheet of frosted glass. Soft reddish afterglows appeared in a few areas, like warm spots within the boundaries of a recently quelled campfire, fading embers fighting darkness.

  The warm uneven patches went through yet another metamorphosis, becoming fully transparent. On the other side—or within the wall itself—a series of odd formations were revealed. Gillian was not even certain that what he was seeing was physically real. Could the entire partition be merely the projection of some incredibly complex holo?

  He approached carefully, extended his hand, pushed his gloved fingertip into something that felt like hardened jelly. The wall shuddered. Instinctively, he jerked his hand away.

  Definitely not a holo. The partition had reacted as if it were alive.

  On the other side of the transparent wall, within a small round chamber, a quintet of large murky gray stalagmites appeared to be growing from the faintly misted floor. If his eyes could still be trusted to gauge size and perspective accurately, the wobbly formations varied in height from eight to fifteen feet, with base diameters anywhere from thirty to sixty inches.

  Even as he watched, the five stalagmites started to...

  crystallize? Hollow cavities were revealed within.

  Each stalagmite contained a life-form. Gillian stared intently, caught up in the sheer strangeness of the uncloaked organisms. And from the nether regions of consciousness, perhaps given greater impetus by the singularity of his concentration, came the voice of Empedocles.

  Each stalagmite is a mere cylinder, housing that which is ultimately important. You do understand: outside is merely the shell. Inside those sculptured forms exists authenticity: that which is truly vital.

  "Go away,” he ordered.

  His monarch laughed—a sensation transfigured immediately into a quivering rush of feeling ascending their common spine.

  Three of the stalagmites contained densely coiled snakes, or creatures that resembled snakes. The heads were the wrong size and shape: too boxlike and easily twice the girth of the snakes’ bodies. Scaled skins varied in hue over the twenty-foot length of each creature: muted sea greens melted discordantly into stunning streaks of deep violet, outlined in amber. Most disturbing of all were the eyes—frozen in wide-open gazes that looked more human than reptilian.

  Massive DNA restructuring, proclaimed Empedocles.

  The fourth stalagmite encapsulated an eight-foot-high ratlike creature, suspended upright, with elongated forepaws dangling in front of the creature's face, giving the overall effect of a canine begging for food. The entity also possessed a weird pair of ragged protuberances emerging from the smooth dark fur of its underbelly. From each of the two lumps, a set of small leathery hands hung limply from short folds of pale skin. Each hand boasted four long digits.

  Notice the fingers, remarked Empedocles. They are configured in opposing sets of two. Designed for gripping.

  Gillian turned to the final stalagmite, largest of the quintet. Inside, standing at least eight feet high, poised on squat hind legs, was the weirdest creature of all: a black-fleshed monstrosity—definitely humanoid—sprouting two heads from the stem of one impossibly long neck. The twin faces, clearly Negroid, stared blindly at Gillian. Both sets of eyes were pinched tightly shut in a way that reminded Gillian of a frightened child trying to make the world go away.

  He shuddered. Even that stream of thoughts which was Empedocles momentarily grew silent and introspective, attempting to interpret precisely what it was they were observing.

  "Failed genetic experiments?” Gillian wondered aloud. “A museum of entombed blunders?"

  These could be the successes, countered his monarch.

  "I don't think so."

  Again, note the ratlike creature with the double set of hands attached to its belly. Phylogenetically, an almost impossible natural mutation and far too complex for an accidental experiment gone awry. No—we are looking upon deliberate specialized adaptations.

  "Specialized for what purpose?"

  Empedocles, having no answer—or not willing to reveal one—again withdrew.

  Gillian moved farther along the wall, stopping at the next transparent section. Within, three more stalagmites angled from the floor. This set had also “crystallized,” revealing their interiors.

  Here, there was no confusion of form and function. Each of the stalagmites contained a naked human being—two males and a female—their common phylogeny clearly discernible. Each had long dark brown hair, high-set cheekbones, and sharply angled chins. Their eyes were wide open but lifeless, trapped in either slumber or death.

  Gillian felt his heart beginning to race as he gazed at the three figures. There was something strangely familiar about those three ashen faces...

  A flood of what seemed to be memory/images was instantly transferred into his body as strokes of pure feeling, cascading along his arms and legs, through his shoulders, up across his chest, and out along the muscles of his neck. He sensed that Empedocles was being overwhelmed by the same interplay of energies.

  So intense was the bombardment of feeling that Gillian believed he might be under attack, possibly from a needbreeder. Instantly, he closed his eyes, trying to prevent what could be an optic assault from reaching the deeper crevices of consciousness. Fingers flashed across the tiny control board to his belt, manually polarizing his visor to full opacity. But the prickling deluge of energies continued to course through him.

  Not an attack, concluded his monarch. We have been speared by a natural process. A massive flow of nondifferentiated feeling, induced by the sudden opening of long-dormant mnemonic channels.

  "Repressed memories,” whi
spered Gillian, knowing it was true. He opened his eyes and restored his suit to primary status.

  Acceptance of what was happening to him parted the floodgates. Long-repressed vistas became visible; consciousness returned to a density of emotion/physicality that had defined the parameters of Gillian's early childhood.

  "The faces,” he heard himself say, knowing that they were what had triggered his reaction. Faces from his own early years; images from an arena of consciousness shuddering with primordial richness.

  The faces ... the same faces.

  Gillian knew who they were.

  The two men were of the so-called Ash Ock scientists. Their names were Yoskol and Eucris.

  They may not be Yoskol and Eucris, cautioned Empedocles. They may be clones. Even holos.

  It did not matter whether they were real persons, genetic copies, or mere apparitions. They were indisputably mirrors into Gillian's past.

  Yoskol and Eucris had been among the few humans responsible for attending to the basic needs of the young Empedocles. Deep in the Amazon basin, more than one hundred miles east of Capoeiras Falls, in the Brazilian rain forest facility known as Thi Maloca, lay the closest thing to a home that Gillian had ever known. Thi Maloca—all seven hundred and fifty square acres of it—ostensibly existed as a pharmaceutical implant research and manufacturing center, a near-perfect operational cover for its deeper function as the breeding and training labs for the Ash Ock.

  Gillian and Catharine had spent most of their early years within the boundaries of Thi Maloca. Yoskol and Eucris, as well as serving as their teachers and guardians, had also been the ones who had first brought the puerile Empedocles into the presence of the facility's true overseer, Aristotle. And Gillian now recalled that it had been Yoskol who, on many occasions, had escorted him and Catharine to their combat training sessions with Meridian.

  Yoskol and Eucris had disappeared from Thi Maloca when Gillian and Catharine were very young. Those two men had been the last of the human scientists—the genetic engineers who were supposedly the creators of the Ash Ock breed—to depart. Afterward, Gillian and Catharine had come under the day-to-day guardianship of Brazilian locals, loyal to Meridian, who lived in the favelas surrounding the pharmaceutical company.

  And by the late years of the twenty-first century, when Gillian and Catharine had reached adult status, they too had come to accept the widespread belief that their elder brethren—Codrus, Aristotle, Sappho, and Theophrastus—had murdered the Ash Ock scientists.

  They disappeared from our lives, mused Empedocles, with uncharacteristic flatness.

  And from our memories as well, added Gillian.

  He stared at the woman in the third stalagmite and immediately found himself buffeted by a wave of even deeper precognizant impressions. Ripples of heat coursed up and down his chest; he acknowledged a throbbing hunger, a need, a purely nonsexual lust. With a flash of insight, he recognized that this feeling corresponded with other recent sensations: Full-body flush. Full-body hard-on.

  But this time, Gillian did not feel the urge to engage in combat. It was almost as if he had descended some linear chain of emotions, dropping to a deeper level, a place where fighting was no longer his only option. Here he could simply feel the feeling; he did not have to utilize the catharsis of violence to redirect the emotional onslaught. He did not have to lash out in order to maintain equilibrium.

  "Who is she?” he heard himself whisper. Despite the perplexing physical effects, Gillian could not recall ever having met the woman.

  His monarch explained. Her name is Sasalla. When we were in our infancy, she was there with us in Thi Maloca. I remember the shape of her nipples and the smell of her bosom and the roving stroke of her palm. She is Sasalla. She was our wet nurse.

  "How can you be sure?"

  You can recall her only through vague physical memories. But I remember much more. While the infants Gillian and Catharine were helpless bundles of nonlinear awarenesses, I was, at a very basic level, intellectually alert. As a monarch, I began to conceptualize even before birth.

  Gillian frowned. “Prenatal intellectualization is not possible."

  Yes, it is. Iconic awareness: as valid and as powerful as the later symbolic representations of words and images. I was intellectually conscious within the wombs. I knew that I was to be born. All of the Ash Ock were prenatally sentient. It was part of our heritage.

  Gillian stared at Sasalla's face. Abruptly, his eyes started to mist over, and he realized that he was momentarily in touch with very early rhythms of pure emotion. He whispered, “She was the closest thing we had to a mother."

  Empedocles pulled Gillian back from an abyss of deep feeling. She was not our mother. We had no mother. She was a wet nurse, nothing more: a female chosen to provide base gratification and bonding. Such things were necessary to ensure later developmental coherence.

  Gillian suddenly understood something else. “You guided me away from my emotions. You created a tension between us."

  Yes.

  "Flexing,” he whispered, awed by his discovery, knowing that he was seeing the outlines of a prototypical pattern that would later become that very syndrome which, to varying degrees, forced all Paratwa to lose control periodically.

  Empedocles explained. You now see the origins of the flex, as they are specific to the Ash Ock. The lesser breeds come upon the process in a slightly different way. But for us of the Royal Caste, the roots of our flexing urges emanate from the sheer dissimilitude between the level of consciousness inherent in the monarch compared to the level inherent in the tways. His monarch hesitated. I'm not sure that the other Ash Ock ever understood this.

  Gillian was glad that Empedocles had prevented his surrender to ancient feelings. There was too much danger here; it was obvious that they were being shown these particular images from their past for a reason.

  His monarch agreed. We are, in a very real sense, being bombarded by graphic icons nearly as powerful as mnemonic cursors. We are being emotionally manipulated. I am now certain that it is Jalka/Aristotle.

  Gillian, with an effort of will, forced himself to turn away from Sasalla and the others. There was one more clear patch at the end of the wall. He moved toward it.

  Behind this third transparent section stood a solitary stalagmite, ten feet high, with a slightly thicker base than the others. But for whatever reason, the “crystallization” process had not occurred here. There was definitely something within the murky translucence of this stalagmite but it remained a dark blur, barely fathomable.

  Gillian could feel Empedocles studying it, probing for interpretation. It looks too big to be another human—

  A noise—like a bucket of water splashing across pavement. Gillian whirled, fingers ready on the trigger of the rifle.

  An opening was taking shape in the wall behind him; the partition began to cross-split, as if invisible perpendicular lasers were slicing through the gently swaying material. Four skinlike flaps peeled back to reveal another large chamber.

  We are being asked to continue our explorations, explained Empedocles.

  "I would never have guessed."

  His monarch chuckled; Gillian felt the sensation as wet leaves being rubbed across the inside of his skin. Have you noticed that you have been speaking aloud to me of late? Can I take this as a public acknowledgement of my existence? Are you one step closer to accepting the inevitability of what we must become?

  Gillian proceeded quickly through the opening.

  The new room was even more massive than the previous chamber—at least a hundred feet long and seventy wide at this end, narrowing into what appeared to be another tunnel, similar in nature to the tube that had butted against the shuttle's airlock. Here, more than a hundred stalagmites erupted from the floor, but these were skinnier and more colorful than the ones serving as stasis capsules or tombs. Each spindly base seemed to be composed of interwoven strands, deep sky-blues laced with semitransparent bands of emerald. Some of the stalagmites widened
into irregularly shaped tabletops; some reached all the way to the ceiling to connect with kindred stalactites. Still others terminated in bizarre mélanges of electronic equipment, as if pieces of high-tech gear were growing directly out of their upthrust surfaces.

  But the weirdest sight rested atop a stalagmite located near the center of the room. A small naked girl lay on her back. She had no arms or legs. Her eyes were closed; the cherubic face seemed at peace despite the fact that a set of thin cables emerged from her vagina. The cables led to an adjacent stalagmite, where they attached to the back of what appeared to be a standard computer terminal.

  "Now what the hell is that?” muttered Gillian.

  Empedocles did not answer.

  The armless, legless child looked to be about five years old. Gillian was reminded of another mutant child—the one from fifty-six years ago, the one molested by Reemul. He had the uneasy feeling that there was a relationship between the two.

  Empedocles prodded. This whole chamber ... you've seen something like it once before. I can sense the periphery of a pattern within your mind ... a recent experience, the vague boundaries of a mnemonic connection.

  Gillian frowned, knowing that his monarch was correct but unable to make the link. “I don't know—"

  It came to him in a flash.

  "The FTL! The guts of the transmitter that we discovered in Codrus's secret communications facility beneath the Shan Plateau.” It was obvious. All the patterns were there, waiting to be properly configured. “This chamber—in fact, everything we've seen so far—comes from the same line of development as the FTL transmitter."

  Gillian could feel Empedocles agreeing with his conceptualization. But his monarch expressed other doubts: The assumption that Theophrastus was the creator of the FTL must now be reexamined. Unless he designed this chamber before the starships left the solar system.