Starblood

by Dean Koontz

  "I'm afraid you'll get yourself in trouble," she said as he was closing the door of the car behind her. "They're tough men."

  "And I'm god," he said.

  She started the car then, as she realized he did not want to talk any more and that he would not be swayed by any arguments she could give. "Be careful," she said.

  "I don't have to."

  When the car was out of sight, he walked back to the house on his invisible legs, no longer using the grav-plate mobility mechanism in his silver trunk cap. At the house, he called his servos to his side and smashed them repeatedly against the wall until they were shattered and useless. He no longer needed those, either.

  He reached out with his psi and opened the door.

  It swung inward.

  He went inside and drifted up the steps toward the second floor where the four drugged members of the Brethren awaited him . . .

  CHAPTER 11

  The four Brothers were exactly as Timothy had left them, slumped on the floor in almost comic disarray, like tired children who had flung themselves down in exhaustion and had swiftly fallen asleep. Margle had slid down in his tulip chair until he was precariously close to faffing out of it, into the cavity under his desk. The sound of their breathing was even and deep, indicating that they would require quite a few more hours of unconsciousness before they would fully weather the effects of the darts and could move without grogginess.

  Which suited Ti's purposes perfectly.

  He drifted to Jon Margle and extended prying fingers of thought into his mind without totally occupying the body as he had done earlier. The analogue of the house was the continued manner in which Timothy's own mind chose to present Margle's thoughts to him. In the main ballroom, the dancing had stopped and colorful figures had disappeared. The place was empty, desolate, like the littered morning-after of a party. This, of course, was the conscious mind that had been stilled by the narcotics in the darts. In the cellar, the demons teemed as fully as before. And though there were many things that were not in the cellar of his mind, in the subconscious, that had been in his conscious, there were a number of things Ti could discover.

  It had come as a surprise when he had discovered earlier that Jon Margle, and his brother Klaus before him, were nothing more than figureheads, puppets painted to look like authority, but with all the strings carefully hidden. The Inner Council made all the decisions, a group consisting of Leopold and six other men Margle could not even name. But surpassing this revelation was what Timothy learned as he probed the Brother's subconscious now. Besides Margle's ignorance about his superiors, the man had no knowledge whatsoever concerning the source of PBT!

  Refusing to believe such could be the case, he rampaged through the cellars of Margle's subconscious mind, prodding the hideous denizens of these lairs (beings which were concretizations of Margle's id longings, the festering fantasies of his ego), searching for some clue he might have overlooked. But there was nothing in his mind, in the vast catalogue of the man's data storage cells, that pointed to any solution of the mystery.

  At last, perplexed, he left the mind. He turned to Leopold next, and probed lightly into his quieted mind. Surely a man of the Inner Council would know where the stuff came from, where the home lab was, and what might compose the unidentifiable substance.

  In dealing with the totally different mind of Leopold, Timothy's psionic system established another type of analogue of the Brother's thoughts. Instead of a house that had represented Jon Margle's mental landscape, there was a towering, thousand-storied block building whose walls glittered dark emerald, a sinister color that seemed shot through with pulsing veins and clotted, dark lumps of indefinable material. Inside the structure, the walls were ringed with data banks, billions upon billions of memory units storing nearly every minute detail of Leopold's life; he was, apparently, the sort of man who forgot nothing—which would help to explain his position of importance in such a rugged and competitive arena.

  Timothy went up through the floors of the place, calling forth data, disregarding it when it proved of no importance. On the eighty-first floor, seconds after his entry into the mental construct, he found a bit of relevant information.

  The source of PBT was a farmhouse owned by the Brethren near a small town in Iowa called Charter Oak. He sought further details and learned that Charter Oak was in the west of the state, near Sioux City. After that, Leopold's memory bank offered no more. Timothy searched through all nine hundred and nineteen floors, but whenever he got close to the subject again, Leopold's mind—even though he was unconscious—radiated fear and loathing so heavily that Timothy could not make any sense of the data. But what could the man have to fear in the synthesis of a drug?

  He picked one of the data points concerned with the farmhouse and obtained a perfect picture of the place: a large, white, rambling structure that had been built of moderate size and thereafter added to every generation as the clan grew larger and larger still. There were three large trees, perhaps willows, on the flat and rolling lawn—then nothing but yawning stretches of tabletop land in all directions, the vague phantoms of other houses at distant points. There was a swing on the front porch. The inside had been renovated, supermodern and expensively furnished. The house was occupied by a couple in their early thirties, Richard and Thelma Boggs. They seemed, judging from the mental picture which Leopold had of them, the stereotype of the average Middle American farm couple. He was lanky, wiry, well-muscled, with short curly hair, a rich, leathery tan. She tended toward plumpness, with heavy breasts, a milky complexion, and large blue saucer eyes. Her mouth was drawn in a petulant pout, and she looked as if she might be just a bit difficult to get along with.

  With this much in the open, Ti probed deeper, seeking the source of PBT . . .

  And immediately the horror and disgust rose in Leopold's mind, blocking the existence of those memories. There was a hint of some subterranean room—or at least of a very dark and dank sort of chamber. There was a smell that was at the same time sweet and bitter, that cloyed in the nostrils and teased a man to sickness. And that was all. Whenever Ti tried to probe more deeply, Leopold's mind grew agitated, frightened, and set up a terrified wailing that was impossible to still.

  Timothy thought of searching through Leopold's subconscious mind to discover if there might be anything there that could tell him more about the farmhouse. But he could not discover how to reach the subconscious from the regions of the man's conscious mind; it was nowhere near as simple as it had been with Jon Margle. He grew more curious as he searched, unable to envision what the subconscious mind of such an orderly man would be like. At last, he was drawn to the walls of the data storage structure in which the conscious mind's analogue took form. Inside those walls there was a humming, buzzing, frantic noise, as if another level of labor were being performed. He ran his psionic fingers along the walls, felt the tremor of that labor without being able to identify it. He thrust ESP fingers out and breached the partition . . .

  . . . And through the crack in the ethereal plaster rushed hundreds of thousands of hideous, bloated, roachlike insects. They had tiny, razor-edged mandibles, wicked enough to inflict a painful wound. They chittered and hummed, swarming over one another, devouring one another as they advanced, a wave of madness. In a conscious mind where nearly everything that had ever happened or been learned was stored methodically, nothing much was left to relegate to the subconscious mind except id desires of the most grotesque form. Leopold's subconscious was the exact opposite of the conscious mind: disordered, filthy, shot through with a living, mobile rot that would devour Timothy's own sanity in seconds if he did not retreat—and that would surely plunge Leopold into madness some day in the not too distant future.

  Ti vacated those chambers, shivering and slightly ill. He backed off from the man, as if the roaches would swarm from his skull and into this room—when he was perfectly aware that the insects were not real, but analogues of the insubstantial qualities of Leopold's mind.


  He decided it was not necessary to bind these men or shoot them with more narcodarts. He would be at the farm before they were awake and able to send a warning. And even if the people at the farmhouse were waiting for him, what could they do to stop him? Nothing, of course. It was difficult to get accustomed to thinking in terms like "all-powerful" and "invulnerable." But they aptly described him now, and he was going to have to grasp them if he was going to use his abilities to their fullest extent.

  Which meant there was no need to use a grav-car to get to Charter Oak when he had within himself a more perfected and faster method of travel than anything man could devise —despite the species' proven cunning with machines. He could teleport . . .

  For a while he stood there, feeling cold in the pit of his stomach. The idea of being a disarranged string of molecules, even if only for an instant, was not appealing. Yet the longer he hesitated, the more time he was giving himself to think of other things, of the future and the lonely role he would play after this Brethren thing was done with. And he did not want to think of that yet. If ever. He concentrated, recalling the picture of the farmhouse he had drawn from Leopold's mind, burning it into his cortex. He tensed . . . and was gone . . .

  He tracked along spidery filaments of blackness, a burning string of molecules cutting the pitch like a wire drawn through butter . . .

  There was a singing which he heard without ears, having no ears with which to hear. It was a lonely, hollow echo, the voice of a young girl tossed into the air from the peak of some unearthly alps . . .

  There was heat which he sensed without skin, having no skin.

  And the same with cold.

  If there was any odor at all, it was pepper and lemon, but he suspected that was only an olfactory interpretation of the same energy releases he heard in the form of a girl's scream . . .

  Eons passed. But it was only less than a microsecond . . .

  Ti materialized beneath the drooping, whiplike branches of one of the gnarled willow trees that punctuated the well-mowed lawn of the Boggs's farmhouse, facing the building that was to be the end of his quest. It was early evening, and the dark, ironed earth of the Midwest had only recently been shrouded in that impenetrable shadow that lies only on the plains. It was broken in but a few places by harsh, cold yellow-white light which came through the windows of the farmhouse and leaked like the blood of ghosts across the quiet carpet of the night world. The front porch was patterned with patches of intense pitch and brilliant light, with very little bleed-in space between them. Behind the somewhat dusty windows of the Brethren house, a shadow moved back and forth across the living room on some task Timothy could not quite discover.

  He left the shelter of the tree's canopy and crossed to the porch, drifting up the stairs. Clinging to the wall of the house, he came to rest in a darkened area from which he could examine the scene in the living room. There were three men sitting in a conversation corner of well-padded black chairs. The moving shadow was a woman—Thelma Boggs— delivering drinks from the bar where her husband, looking out of place in a lounging robe instead of coveralls, made them to order.

  Ti was about to reach into the minds of one of those three men in search of some information when he heard the slight but deadly click of someone removing the safety latch from a dart pistol. Without moving even the slightest degree, thereby maintaining the illusion that he had heard nothing, he flushed his psionic power outward and felt it contact the mind of a man much like Baker or Siccoli. The brute was sitting on the swing, had been there from the time darkness had begun to settle over the land. It was amazing he had not shot already.

  Carefully, Ti pushed his ESP fingers into the pudding of the killer's brain, stirred through the dark mess of hideous images that ringed the plain of pure white he had experienced in Baker's mind earlier in the day. He found what he was looking for, a small nerve leading up through the back of the brute's neck. He pinched it. The man sagged, passed out, slumped on the lattice of the swing seat. The gun dropped out of his hand and clattered on the floor with a noise that seemed to strike the glass darkness with a hammer, although no one inside the house seemed to notice.

  To make certain his position had been secured, he directed his questing ESP throughout the grounds of the farmhouse, searching for other killers who might be on patrol. He found a man at the back of the house whose duty it was to remain at that spot come hell or hurricane. Since Ti did not plan on using the rear door, he let the man be. A third of the zombies was also behind the house, patrolling a small, white fence that corralled most of the lawn. Ti waited until he was out of sight of the rear door guard, then sent him spiraling into darkness. The Brother doubled over and fell on his head, sprawled on the dew damp grass.

  There was no one else.

  The night was cool, and he felt refreshed, better than he had ever felt in his life. For once, there was no question that he was any man's equal—superior, in fact. But power angle didn't interest. He was not the type to develop a desire to rule. But the knowledge of being equal, being unafraid, was magnificent!

  He turned his attention back to the living room. He delved into the mind of the tall, gray-haired man who sat in the first of the three leather chairs, a drink held in his hand tight against his chest as if it were a magic stone to protect him from witches.

  The analogue for his conscious mind was a well-cared for but ancient private library room where books stretched from floor to ceiling, wall after wall. There were comfortable reading chairs, a smoking stand, a desk, several floor lamps. In moments, Ti flipped through the pages of that store of knowledge, searching for the source of PBT. When he found the volume that was marked as containing this information, he found all the words had been carefully erased from the pages in a painstakingly long letter-by-letter manner. It was a hideously plain attempt to forget something unpleasant He closed the book, put it back on its shelf, and left that mind . . .

  The next man was short, a good bit too heavy, and was nursing a gin and tonic like a small child with a particularly flavorful popsicle. Ti slipped into him, probing . . .

  Ti's own psionic powers chose the house analogue again, though this man's mind was not so much of a mansion as Jon Margle's had been. It was instead a peeling, rotting, creak-filled gothic horror whose every shadow seemed filled with disaster and terror. There were very few thoughts to be found in it in comparison with other minds Ti had investigated, and what thoughts there were were less factual and more of a paranoid nature. Here was a man who fought the universe every day of his life. When Ti began looking for data about the source of the FBT, where he should look for it in the house, the gothic manor was soon filled with bloodcurdling screams, the sounds of a mind teetering on the brink of madness.

  It was much the same in the third man's mental landscape. Though he was not a borderline schizophrenic like his Brethren, he reacted in terror to the gentle probing for the production center of the drug. This was the fourth man Ti had ransacked for the knowledge, and all of them had cringed in fear at the probing, had fought valiantly and successfully to shove that piece of the world down into their subconscious minds. What the hell, he wondered, could be so terrifying about the source of an hallucinogenic drug?

  He was about to go to either Richard Boggs or his wife when he was struck with the idea of trying something in the gray-haired gentleman's mind that had eluded him the first time he had been there. He slipped back into the ancient library and moved along the shelves of books that made up the analogue of the old man's mind. In moments he found what he wanted: a switch set in the edge of a strip of shelving. He threw it and stepped back as the wall slid away and a smaller room became visible.

  This portion of the analogue was a musty cubbyhole which contained a mere fifty volumes on warped, dirty shelves. There were volumes concerned with sexual perversions, with death-wishes and with the inflicting of pain on others, all the paraphernalia of the subconscious mind. But there was also a volume on PBT. He pulled it down, opened it, and read enough
of the crumbling yellow pages to ascertain that the labs, the places where the drug was produced, were in the cellars. But even so, the information was skimpy, broken, and nearly hysterical in tone. Once again he retreated from the old man's mind.

  Outside the analogue, back in reality, he breathed in deeply, smelling the newly turned earth from a nearby field, letting the cool night breeze purge the perspiration from his body and set his nerves at ease.

  The next step would be to black out each of those inside so that he could have unchallenged access to the house and the labs beneath it. He looked back to the bar where Richard Boggs had been mixing drinks, prepared to put the man and his wife out first, since they were nearest an exit from the room. Thelma Boggs was mixing what looked like a marvelously horrendous drink with five or six different kinds of liquor—but her husband was nowhere in sight.

  And then he knew where the man was. There was a sharp intake of breath to Timothy's left. He whirled in time to see Boggs standing at the half-opened door, only partway onto the porch.

  He had a gun, and he was fast

  The .22 slug tore through Timothy's chest and out his back, spattering blood against the white walls of the farmhouse . . .

  CHAPTER 12

  For the shortest of moments, Timothy felt as if he were dropping helplessly down a narrow well toward a pool of brackish water while the light dimmed with every foot of his descent; darkness stretched around him, obscuring the moss-covered stone walls and reaching fingers out to grasp and hold him. Then his senses overcame the stifling shock of having been wounded, and his psionically gifted mind shifted into high gear where—he angrily admonished himself—it should have been from the moment he had teleported onto this farm.