The Paratwa (#3 in the Parawta Saga)

by Christopher Hinz

  The skier straightened to his full height, and suddenly there was a three-tubed thruster in his left hand and a Cohe wand in his right. Comprehension came to Ghandi. He knew who the invader was.

  Cold air whistled through the shattered window. The heavens erupted with new fury as a pack of screeching skysticks dove toward the chalet. From somewhere downstairs, Ghandi heard the unmistakable machine-gun roar of Jy's spray thruster coming to life. Explosions shook the house, and he knew that the skystick riders were blasting through the chalet's lower windows.

  And then a skystick hurtled right through the veranda's disintegrated glass wall, touched down beside the wrecked uniski. With unnatural speed, a woman leaped from her saddle to land beside Gillian. Ghandi, on the floor, overwhelmed by astonishment, heard himself utter her name.

  "Susan Quint!"

  She smiled at him. They both smiled at him. And Ghandi knew. Somehow, against all reason, Sappho's traitorous breedcousin had been restored.

  The Ash Ock did not kill him. Instead, its tways leaped through the open doorway and vanished down the staircase.

  More skystick riders poured through the shattered window, and then there were guns being aimed in Ghandi's face and he was being ordered not to move a muscle. He tried to comply. But from deep inside, the hated microbes—remarkably absent for these past few hours—began their feverish dance anew. His arms and shoulders started to twitch violently.

  There was absolutely nothing humorous about his situation. But he could not help himself, and he began to giggle. Mild chuckling quickly expanded into full-blown shrieks. By the time the Security troops had gotten him to his feet, Ghandi was awash in hysterical laughter.

  * * *

  Get ready, warned Gillian. There's great turmoil. We're in the middle of a battle. It's almost time.

  I can feel it! projected Susan, excited by the sharp images of movement, the heightened perceptions, penetrating the amalgam of her consciousness with newfound clarity. She sensed herself leaping down steps, sensed the body of Gillian racing in front of her.

  We're going to make it! promised Gillian. We're going to escape the monarchy—

  —and take back what was stolen from us! Susan yelled. But deep within, at the periphery of consciousness, shadows of doubt appeared, bleak forms cascading upward from the river of her being, jagged sirens of mortal dread.

  I'm afraid, she whispered.

  The shadows grew more ominous, coalesced into nightmarish proportions. An icy whorl of terror seemed to vault the length of what she imagined to be her spine.

  Trust me, soothed Gillian. It's the only way.

  The only way, she told herself.

  Empedocles bounded down the stairway, Gillian/tway first, taking steps six at a time. He hit the second-floor landing, leaped through an open doorway, entered the chalet's large rectangular day room. His tways, back-to-back—crescent webs humming—danced into the unoccupied chamber. Gestalt awareness registered the arena in true 360-outline form, his interlaced monarchy creating a perfect internal icon of the room's dimensions and furnishings.

  Chairs, sofas, ceiling-mounted kitchenette, pseudosheepskin hassocks. No windows. Walls covered in twenty-first century holo art, mostly naked male and female figures cast in erotic poses, with breasts, buttocks, penises, and vaginas prominently displayed within the multidimensional forms.

  Empedocles knew with certainty that he was standing in a sanctum once used by Sappho.

  In addition to the entrance he had just come through, the day room boasted three other doors—two along the opposite wall, and a third leading toward the rear of the chalet. All three doors were closed.

  The monarch whirled toward the center of the room, keeping his tways in constant motion, bodies pirouetting, like two rotating planets revolving around each other in a perfect closed system.

  A tremendous din erupted beneath his feet; he felt the vibrations coming up through the floorboards. Down below, on the first floor, the main group of skystick troops were attempting to penetrate the chalet. From the plethora of noises, the monarch quickly distinguished individual sounds. He heard the muted bursts of small weapons fire—mainly E-Tech Security thrusters—intermixed with desperate cries of rage and agony.

  Death was being created down there, and the monarch knew its architect. High above the din, dominating the lesser sounds, came the relentless howl of the spray thruster. The first wave of attackers had run into the tway called Shooter.

  Movement to the Gillian/tway's left. The side door directly across from the stairwell slid open.

  He pirouetted sideways, fired his triple-tubed thruster at the figure in the center of the portal, squeezing off two quick blasts before realizing that he had been tricked, that he was firing on a full-sized target dummy emerging from the bathroom.

  The back door melted in a roar of white-hot flame and Slasher came cartwheeling into the day room, a blur of violent motion, hurtling end over end, twin cartoon daggers lashing the air, defensive web glimmering as strands of flame clung to its front crescent.

  Simultaneously—from overhead—a panel in the suspended kitchenette split open and a fierce orange light, as bright as an unfiltered sun, spilled down over Empedocles's tways.

  His eye sets squinted. The intense liquid light seemed to whistle and crackle as it splashed across the monarch's crescent webs. Puffs of brown smoke filled the air. And Empedocles knew that his defensive screens had just been nullified.

  But he had planned for this particular contingency, for the Czar had known about the tripartite's web-neutralizing weapon.

  But wait for the right moment, he urged himself. Wait until you can surprise him. Wait for an advantage.

  The monarch jerked both tways sideways, felt subtle tremors pass through his bodies as both halves slipped from the smoldering remains of his decomposing energy screens.

  Slasher completed his final cartwheel, landed on a hassock within striking distance of the Susan/tway's back. Flash daggers blossomed in length, whipped outward, seeking her flakjak collar. But through the eyes of his Gillian/tway, Empedocles saw the blow coming. The monarch dove his female half toward the floor, felt the withering heat of the incinerating blade pass inches from her left shoulder.

  He rolled forward with his Susan/tway, compressed her legs, then leaped up into a full-tilt attack posture, striding forward in great leaps, flash daggers held in front of her body like fiery lances.

  Empedocles bit down hard with both mouths. And his second set of crescent webs ignited.

  For a fraction of a second, Slasher seemed to pause, perhaps surprised by the appearance of backup defensive screens. But the tway's hesitation passed too quickly for Empedocles to take advantage of it.

  Slasher lunged forward, wielding one blade high and the other low. The monarch countered.

  Four flash daggers came together with a violent hiss. The surrounding air burst into a rainbow of flames as each weapon's intricately modulated energy pattern was disrupted by an opposing field.

  For a stark moment, the four daggers hung there, locked in a garish turmoil of heat and light. Empedocles's Gillian/tway lashed his Cohe toward the side of Slasher's web, but the assassin twisted his lower body, easily blocking the beam's entry.

  Slasher grinned. Abruptly, the tway yanked his daggers away, breaking the stalemate. As he withdrew the weapons, he brought the heel of his boot upward, angling toward the Susan/tway's open side portal.

  Empedocles saw the blow coming. But he could do nothing to prevent it. When Slasher withdrew his blades, a counterpoint recoil of energy sent his Susan/tway stumbling to the left.

  Slasher's boot caught her in the side of the head, directly below the left ear. Stunned, the monarch's female half reeled. And then—like a gyroscope torn from its axis—the Susan/tway's feet buckled out from under her and she slammed into the floor.

  Slasher, still grinning, changed targets, lunged at the monarch's Gillian/tway. Empedocles fought back with his Cohe—another sideswipe, aimed at S
lasher's right portal. But the tway again anticipated the beam's strike point, and he merely pivoted a few inches in that direction. The monarch's Cohe energy splayed harmlessly against the Ash Nar's web.

  Slasher laughed. “You are weak, Ash Ock! The Gillian creature—it did better without you!” Suddenly, the tway dropped to his knees.

  Standing directly behind Slasher, in the melted doorway leading to the small balcony overlooking the gym, was Calvin.

  In one coordinated blur of motion, the Ash Nar's namesake tway fired his thruster and whipped his Cohe beam in a long arc across the length of the room.

  Empedocles twisted sideways—black light splatter harmlessly against the Gillian/tway's front crescent. But that sudden turning put his tway slightly off balance. And then multiple blasts from Calvin's thruster were compressing his web, and he was careening backward, arms flailing at the air in a desperate attempt to maintain equilibrium.

  Slasher, screaming in triumph, made another lunge with his daggers.

  The stairwell door exploded inward. Two E-Tech troopers charged into the room.

  With a hiss of anger, Slasher turned away from Gillian to face the new threat.

  Calvin came forward, thruster wailing. Empedocles, still off balance, got hit by one too many packets of condensed energy. Shoved backward by the concentrated blasts, his rear crescent nailed the edge of a hassock. He tripped, fell to the floor.

  And then Calvin's Cohe was all over him, the black beam slashing across the width of his front crescent, the flickering spear of projected energy seeking a way through his side portals.

  In complete desperation, Empedocles dragged his still-groggy Susan/tway to her feet. He threw her forward, directly into the path of the black light.

  Her web blocked Calvin's first two slashes. But her equilibrium was still off. Calvin flicked his wrist a third time, and the black beam came in low, along the Susan/tway's left side. It slipped through the gap between her front and rear crescents.

  Empedocles screamed through both mouths as the energy stream entered the side of her left knee, burning straight through the bone.

  The black light exited cleanly, barely missing her other leg. His Susan/tway collapsed to the floor, her destroyed leg sweeping wildly back and forth, its sheared muscles caught in a furious spasm.

  Intense pain rocked Empedocles to his core. A blast of emotions, rooted in bitterness, soared through him, the feelings swelling in power as the excruciating agony rose up to poison the interlace. And borne upon that pain and bitterness was a dense icon of pure logic—a rationality linking his multiplex turmoil into patterns of defeat...

  Patterns of death.

  The Susan/tway was too much the novice, her untrained body no match for an assassin boasting an uninterrupted lifetime of combat experience. The Gillian/tway was beyond my control for too long. I did not truly possess the power of monarchy that I imagined I did.

  In that instant of clarifying candor, Empedocles realized that he had never really stood a chance.

  A tremendous explosion rocked the chalet. From the corner of his Gillian/tway's eyes, Empedocles saw the front wall of the day room coming apart, disintegrating into huge threaded slabs of plastic and wire. Pocono's icy winds whipped in, lashed his faces with an almost comforting spray of fresh snow crystals.

  And borne upon those winds, hurtling down out of the swirling white tempest of an unprompted storm, came a wave of skystick riders.

  Now! shouted Gillian. Now—before it's too late!

  Susan opened up to him.

  She imagined her body, imagined its wholeness—the conglomeration of bone, tissue, and flesh, the entirety of balanced tensions, which defined the creature Susan Quint.

  She remembered Timmy's lessons, down on the Ontario beach, so long ago. She remembered the purity of her first awakening, remembered how it had felt when that buried spirit of her life had swollen beyond the artificial boundaries imposed by a lifetime of repressed pain. She remembered that majestic freedom, being able to soar into synchronicity with her very soul as physical/emotional/intellectual states melded into a unified perfection.

  I am my body-thought.

  And then Gillian was approaching, like an apparition of energies, a ghostly invader from some other space and time. She felt him touch her, drift into her—through her—penetrating the very amalgam of her consciousness as if she were not even there. She opened herself to him, felt his psyche slipping into her mind, into the iconic representation of her body-image. It was a feeling of intimacy far more profound than their lovemaking had been, beneath the waters of the Atlantic, in the cell of the Os/Ka/Loq.

  But Gillian brought a host of brooding shadows with him. And those shadows brought terror.

  Fear what is, she commanded herself sternly, not what might be.

  She gazed into the depths of those shadows. And at last, she perceived their true nature.

  I know what terrifies me! I know what it is!

  Gillian knew too. He shaped her fear into his own words. You're afraid that I'll become like the monarch. You're afraid that once I have you, once I'm controlling you, I won't ever surrender you.

  Yes, she whispered, feeling his calming spirit permeate the river of her life, his waters begin to merge with her own. And she felt the truth of him. And she knew that there was nothing more to fear.

  They were together, two amalgamated consciousnesses, superimposed, and Gillian was taking her toward the place that she no longer possessed the power to enter alone, the realm of her own physical self.

  As they soared upward, Gillian acknowledged a pang of loss, perceiving his own body from the outside, untouchable, the mnemonic cursors poised like ramparts, blocking all possible entry. But Susan's form boasted no such defenses.

  He led them back. Together, the joined power of their superimposed psyches soared upward from the quarantine of amalgamation, wrenched Susan's body loose from the monarchial interlace, and reentered the world of sight, smell, and sound.

  And pain.

  Shards of white-hot agony lanced across Susan's left knee. But there was no time for pain. Not now.

  With iron will, Gillian ignored the burning flames that seemed to be racing up and down Susan's leg. He swept his head to the side, looked out from this new vantage point into a scene of incredible violence.

  Slasher, at the stairwell, killed a pair of troopers with his daggers, then whirled to face the new threat flying in upon the winds of the sudden blizzard.

  They soared down from the snowy heavens—skystick riders, half a dozen strong, white phantoms diving into the chalet through the rubble of the exploded wall.

  Slasher vaulted over a sofa, somersaulted feet first up onto the day room ceiling. Twistik grabbed.

  Upside down, maintaining one boot in contact at all times, the tway attacked. Cartoon daggers leaped left and right, slashing across the paths of the first two riders, decapitating one man and slicing straight through the engine housing of the other rider's stick. That second rider leaped from his crippled propulsion tube, hit the floor directly in front of tway Calvin. A quick thrust of the Cohe and the luckless trooper went down. His directionless skystick smashed through the back wall, disappeared over the balcony, and plunged down into the gym.

  Slasher killed a third rider, but the fourth aimed his skystick directly at the tway and stayed on course, handlebar thrusters wailing away.

  In a blur of motion, Slasher pivoted. The skystick missed the tway by inches. From the floor, Calvin unleashed his own thruster, blasting the underside of the fourth rider until the trooper's machine gave out. The skystick swerved to the right, slammed hard into the suspended kitchenette, impaling its rider on the spoke of a thermal tube.

  Gillian glanced away from the carnage, locked gazes with his own body—the Gillian/tway, still occupied by Empedocles.

  The monarch's face overflowed with emotions—surprise, regret, pain ... and something Gillian took to be an acknowledgement of defeat.

  And Gillian knew�
��impossible as it was to believe—that his monarch had lost hope. Empedocles was giving up.

  "No, you bastard! Fight for that body!” Gillian, gritting his teeth, ignoring the pain lancing through his knee, picked Susan up off the floor and balanced himself on her one good leg. He scanned the immediate debris for the flash daggers that had been knocked from her hands. But the weapons were nowhere to be seen.

  On the ceiling, Slasher caught his movement, pivoted. Gillian saw the tway wrench a twistik-coated boot sideways, ready to break its bond, ready to leap down at him—at Susan—from above.

  The fifth skystick trooper nailed Slasher head-on.

  Both of Calvin's tways screamed as the flying rider tore Slasher from his perch. The tway spun through the air like a rag doll, crash-landed in the corner of the room.

  The skystick rider—out of control—plowed into the floor, somersaulted over his saddle, and slammed down onto the cushions of a sofa.

  The final skystick rider missed all the action on her first pass. She raced to the far end of the day room, banked hard, performed a sharp one-eighty, and then headed back out toward the front of the chalet, targeting tway Calvin.

  Thrusters wailed, but Calvin leaned forward, took the hits across his front crescent, and waited calmly for the rider to get within range.

  The Ash Nar lashed out with his Cohe.

  But this rider was quick. The trooper turned sideways at the last instant, deflecting the black beam with her front crescent.

  Calvin adapted. The tway leaped forward, reached through the rider's side portal, caught her arm, yanked her from the skystick threw her halfway across the room. The saddled tube upended itself, dropped lightly to the floor, less than a yard away from Empedocles.

  The monarch did not move.

  Never before had Empedocles imagined such a state for himself. Never before had he even considered the possibility that an Ash Ock could be brought down, defeated.

  With bitter contemplation, he realized that his unshakeable belief in the invulnerability of the Royal Caste had always been at odds with the simple truth.