As the alarms throbbed through the intercom, the Enforcer whirled and fumbled at his armor. Behind the black visor he tried to grasp the situation and choose the proper weapon for combat.
In a daze Danal turned away and stumbled toward the transplastic door. It was too late now. He saw no way out, and he still had no answers.
“Servant! Halt!” the Enforcer shouted, finally sliding a wide-barreled pocket bazooka from its holster.
Danal hesitated a moment. The Enforcer, in his alarm, had not used the Command phrase. Danal knew he would be terminated if he stopped. He had murdered Francois Nathans and Rodney Quick.
He did not want to die a second time.
Danal had no other decision to make. Without a thought he burst toward the door, pumping his legs faster than any normal human could. The Enforcer blinked in amazement. The receptionist screamed again.
The Enforcer pointed his weapon and launched a projectile.
Danal plowed through the revolving doors as a blast shattered the transplastic and blew shrapnel outward. He let out a cry of pain as something ripped through his shoulder, but he swallowed his fear and rushed into the milling streets.
“Rebel!” the Enforcer cried. He fired again, blasting away the debris of the door, and climbed rapidly through the jagged opening.
Danal floundered among the gawking pedestrians, trying to swim through the crowd, but he could not cloak himself in anonymity. The crowd hated him, hated all Servants. They stared at him with mocking expressions. But they would not help anybody; they hated Enforcers, too.
The Enforcer danced through the churning bodies and fired a third time.
A woman beside Danal screamed and fell to the pavement with blood dribbling out the back of her head. Ice began to form in his stomach as he ran, waiting for a projectile to pierce his body and detonate, which would leave nothing for anyone to resurrect. He dodged, running much faster than his pursuer but much slower than any exploding bullet that might be launched after him.
The Enforcer stopped, looking down helplessly at his weapon in horror or confusion, but the visor hid all expressions.
Danal’s chest ached where his original heart had once been, but that heart had been torn from him by a murderer’s hand, replaced with a biomechanical pump. Danal clutched his torn shoulder and saw clear synBlood oozing between his fingers.
The Enforcer moved again, shoving a man out of his way. Someone else screamed next to the fallen woman. The Enforcer took out his riot club, swinging it but hitting no one.
“You can’t treat citizens like that!” someone shouted. The crowd’s anger began to ignite like a match.
In the wake of Danal’s flight, a man fell into an old woman; he regained his balance and angrily swung at her. The Enforcer fired twice, but into the air this time. Several screams echoed in the crowd as Danal continued to flee. A man struck the Enforcer from behind, but he turned and convulsively struck the man full in the face with the riot club. Some of the people were hitting each other in a senseless release of their anger.
And Danal ran to escape from the mob that was drawing in like a noose around the hapless Enforcer. The black monster of his imprisoned memory battered his Servant identity, and Danal fought against releasing it.
He was a murderer. Unprovoked, he had slaughtered two men. He had resisted direct orders from an Enforcer, and he had fled from justice.
Danal was terrified by his own capabilities, by what was locked in the mausoleum of his dead memory. He did not want to know what his flashbacks signified. He wanted only to forget.
He looked ahead of himself with tunnel vision, seeing only the path of least resistance, the confused route that let him avoid as many people as possible yet left enough of them in the way to baffle the Enforcer’s line of fire.
Just ahead of him, Danal fixed his gaze on a thin man with square-cut salt-and-pepper hair, grinning and strutting proudly down the street with a female Servant. Details flooded into his mind—he saw the insignia of a Guildsman on the man’s lapel; he saw indigo lines tattooed into the wrinkles around his eyes; he saw one of the Guildsman’s knobby hands massaging the female Servant’s buttocks. She seemed not to notice at all.
The other Servant wore the usual gray jumpsuit, but the old man had placed a long blond wig on her head and flowers in the artificial hair. He had draped jewelry on her neck and wrists. She walked like a piece of livestock.
The Guildsman turned, startled, as Danal nearly ran into him, and then gaped as he noticed the long smear of Nathans’s blood on his jumpsuit and the wound on Danal’s shoulder bleeding clear synBlood. In reflex to her Master’s actions, the female Servant turned to look at Danal as well.
Her crystal-blue eyes were empty. The resurrection process had washed the sea spray from her face, and her artificial hair had been combed by someone else. Her elfin, dimpled features were waxy and lifeless.
But it was still the face on the beach, the one he had found in the hologram on Van Ryman’s mantel.
JULIA!
Suddenly his real memory burst open, all of it. Thousands upon thousands of thoughts stumbled hungrily into the light of day. His old self, his true self emerged.
And Danal knew.
He screamed as the agony struck him, making his knees buckle, turning the pain in his torn shoulder into a mere annoyance. The world vanished in the resurgent flood of his flashback as his life and his violent death on the sacrificial altar rose up to stare him in the face.
Van Ryman
Van Ryman!
I AM VINCENT VAN RYMAN!
He saw that the old Guildsman had already hurried Julia away, frightened by the rampaging Servant. Danal watched her in anguish for only a moment, fixing the scene in his mind, then ducked blindly down a crossway, then another, until he had run far enough ahead of the mob to feel relatively safe. But he could no longer hide from his returning memories.
The man I Served is an impostor, usurper!
He tried to sort out his thoughts. And everything fell back into place, just where it had always belonged.
PART II
Flashback
16
Danal kept running by instinct. Enforcer hovercars soared overhead, skimming the tops of the buildings, converging near Resurrection, Inc. If he concentrated, Danal could still hear the sounds of the angry mob even above the background noises of the city.
Danal wondered when the Enforcers would send out special tracker teams to locate him. Or would they even bother? Would they assume he was dead? Had they even discovered that Danal had been the cause of the uprising?
The Servant stumbled into a residential area of towering condominium buildings. The streets—all of which had been named after extinct wildflowers—looped about in a conscious attempt to break the illusion of a geometrically ordered city.
Danal wished he could see through the buildings, look straight down the convoluted streets. Julia remained out there somewhere. He had seen her—a Servant like himself. But was she Julia? Or was the true Julia gone, leaving only a walking body behind? He could remember the last time he had seen her—the real Julia. The memory had returned now, if he could find it, if he was able to dig through the pain….
She had been sitting across from him in the formal dining room of the Van Ryman mansion, resting both elbows on the tablecloth. They were laughing. It had started out as an argument, but they had consciously steered the conversation to more lighthearted things.
They talked and drank cheap pink champagne—Julia liked cheap pink champagne. Their two new Servants, a male and a female, stood attentively outside the door of the formal dining room. Danal—the real Vincent Van Ryman—had purchased the Servants to allow him more time alone with Julia, now that he had given up all his neo-Satanist activities. Danal/Van Ryman hadn’t noticed that the Servants’ eyes looked too attentive, that their thoughts seemed too alert.
Julia giggled, but then stopped laughing abruptly. Van Ryman looked up and saw that the room had gone blurry, and th
e champagne suddenly had an awful aftertaste of chemicals. The world went out of focus, and then faded to black….
He had awakened in the artificially dank stone Sabbat chamber underneath the mansion. Manacled to the walls—it all seemed weirdly Gothic and melodramatic. Francois Nathans was there, and Julia was not.
“Julia? What happened to Julia?”
Nathans made a wry scowl. “Oh how noble of you to think of the poor lady first, Vincent. She’s already dead—dumped on the street and deleted from The Net. But you’re a much bigger PR item. Our first ‘Traitor to the Faith.’ I couldn’t have dreamed up a better unifying force if I’d tried. We’ll have a special Sabbat in your honor, Vincent, and no one will know the difference… because you aren’t you anymore.” Nathans laughed. “Oh boy, we’re going to milk this for all it’s worth!”
Vincent Van Ryman pulled against his chains, and felt cold as he slowly reached forward to touch his face—
Then Danal slammed the door on the clamoring memories, holding them at bay for later, making them wait. Until it was safe.
The Servant found himself careening down one of the winding streets where the backs of the condominium buildings butted up against each other. He could see the worn fences of the lucky first-level dwellers who had their own yardlets fenced into little honeycombs. The denizens of the upper stories had to remain content with small terraces above, looking down at the ground.
Unseen behind one open patio window came the shouts of two men and one woman arguing in a language Danal could not identify. On another patio an older couple lay on stained chaise lounges, stretched out, motionless next to each other.
Danal felt exhausted, with the world pounding around him, too much happening all at once. His head buzzed with the reality that had just struck him, from the events that in such a short time had changed him from a normal, obedient Servant to a renegade.
He leaned against the fence, sheltered by a large garbage receptacle and the shadow of the twin condominium buildings. Resting for a moment…
Danal took a deep breath and let the nightmares come to him. He was afraid at first, but he opened the door quickly and snapped it shut again, allowing only the first memory—the last memory—to come out.
“Rah hyuun!”
“Rah hyuun!”
The ritual chanting filled the air with a drone like a locomotive, augmented by the chain of speakers around the grotto ceiling.
Vincent Van Ryman was drugged, and he stumbled. The inside of his head felt fuzzy and his vision had narrowed to the width of a pencil shaft. Around him he saw robes—white, red, black—signifying the ranks of Acolyte, Acolyte Supervisor, and Coven Manager, with various markings to indicate the sublevels of authority and mastery of neo-Satanism.
The grotto was lit by candles and red strobelights that provided a hypnotic atmosphere for the ritual, enhanced by odorless hallucinogenic drugs wafting through the enclosed air.
Danal/Van Ryman knew he was doomed, about to be sacrificed. He was not bound or restrained in any way, but he had no will to make his arms or legs move. It took all his concentration merely to remain standing or to stumble forward when someone directed him.
Nathans wasn’t there; Nathans never took part in the actual rituals. He kept his hands clean. He remained out of sight. But with Vincent Van Ryman—the former High Priest of the neo-Satanists—turned against him, Francois Nathans had yanked invisible strings, setting wheels in motion, proving to be a formidable enemy.
The ritual moved forward, but Vincent’s brain had slipped a gear, plodding ahead at a greatly reduced pace. He had conducted the chant himself a dozen times before, but now he could not remember the words, the details of the High Sabbat. Except he knew that at the culmination of the High Sabbat, someone always died.
And as he recalled this, he felt hands grasping the numb skin of his arms, roughly yet gently. Red-robed men urged him toward the poured-stone altar into which had been molded various signs and symbols. In a corner of his mind he remembered designing many of those symbols himself.
Van Ryman could not resist. His arms slowly moved up to fend them off, but he felt a stinging in his neck. One of the Coven Managers herding him toward the altar withdrew his finger; he saw a glint from the silver thimble needle that had been dipped in curare. Vincent knew it would take only a moment, and he felt the vestiges of his muscle control dissolving into mist.
He lay back, barely able to feel the roughness of the altar against his naked back. He stared up at the ceiling, originally hewn from the end of a deep subway tunnel but now embellished with papier mache stalactites.
“Rah hyuun!”
“Rah hyuun!”
Vertigo engulfed him as the chanting reached its climax. He could not move or even turn his head now. It was a major effort simply to blink his eyes.
Then the chanting stopped abruptly. The tape-recorded choir cut off, and the neo-Satanist attendees stopped their own voices a moment afterward. The hushed silence pounded at him.
Into his field of view he saw, like a mirror moving up in front of him, his own face, his stolen face, fixed with a fanatical, confident expression, looking triumphant. The real Van Ryman could see a line of faint red pinpricks along the imposter’s jaw. Then he caught the glint of orange candlelight on the edge of the wide, rune-marked sacrificial dagger, the arthame.
The imposter spoke the last words, the benediction of the High Sabbat, as he brought the arthame down. “Ashes to ashes, blood to blood; fly to Hell for all our good!”
Van Ryman was not able to blink; the curare denied him even an instinctive flinch. Blackness and pain exploded outward from the center of his chest as the blade drove in….
Now, Danal came up out of the memory gasping, sucking cold air into his lungs like a drowning man clawing his way to the surface. Servants did not sweat—their body temperature was too closely regulated to make perspiration necessary—but he felt drenched with an emotional backwash.
The memory of the High Sabbat scorched the backs of his eyes, yet the pain grew more endurable. The mental ache did not fade, but he learned how to tolerate it, how to face his own past. He stepped into the middle of the winding street, leaving behind the fixation with his memories. Danal had more practical considerations for the moment.
What was he going to do now?
He couldn’t go back. He couldn’t ask for help. The imposter remained living inside Danal’s own home, playing the part of Vincent Van Ryman. Danal had no place there. The imposter had planned something, led Danal through the motions of a careful script, and he had unwittingly performed like a pre-programmed machine.
But Francois Nathans was dead at the Servant’s hands. Some of the self-directed horror faded as Danal remembered what Nathans had done to him in life, but Nathans had never been stupid. The killing had been too carefully set up, as if Nathans had specifically planned to trigger Danal’s murderous rage. As if he had a death wish, or something else in mind. Had he been trying to commit suicide? Not Nathans. Was there something more, something that Danal still could not see even with the restoration of his memories?
The Servant finally began to heed the pain in his shoulder. He cocked his head and looked down at the torn gray material of his jumpsuit, at the cut-meat remains of his shoulder where the shrapnel had struck him. Clear, saplike synBlood oozed from the wound.
Doctor. Medical attention. He would have to be repaired. Servants had difficulty healing themselves. The synthetic blood did carry micro-platelets to dissolve and coagulate, sealing leaks upon exposure to air, much like some antifreeze solutions sealed mechanical leaks. But the wound sealants in synBlood were not very efficient, good mostly for minor injuries. After all, if a Servant was too badly damaged, an owner could just get a new one.
The slow healing might be Danal’s greatest danger, letting him bleed to death before he could adequately seal off the injury. Even in that case, the synHeart would dutifully keep beating, and the microprocessor would continue to drive his brain w
hile the bloodless body burned itself out.
Danal searched his mind, accessing all the general information stored in the microprocessor until he found the implanted map of the Metroplex. Inside his head Danal located the nearest medical center.
The red swath of Nathans’s blood stood out like a banner on his jumpsuit. Danal would have to explain the blood and his own injury. He wasn’t certain if the center would treat him at all. He set off, trudging down the street, mentally slowing his synHeart to retard the bleeding. He would worry about explanations later.
17
By the time Danal arrived at the medical center, he had reached the middle stages of dizzy euphoria, feeling light as air and drained of blood. The world moved slower around him.
The transplastic doors glided open in front of him, smooth and silent on their chrome tracks. He plodded into the room, peripheral vision suddenly gone fuzzy. Black spots danced in front of his eyes, like holes in the universe that winked in and out of existence.
Several Servants worked behind the expansive front counter, keying information, moving boxes, delivering papers and supplies. Other patients waited in separate privacy cubicles surrounded by bright plastic plant-things, but the reception area itself seemed relatively empty. The casualties from the street riot had apparently not yet overflowed the medical centers closer to Resurrection, Inc.
Danal shuffled up to the counter, trying to speak, but his throat was too dry. A female Servant stood with her back to him, paying no attention to his arrival. One of the fluorescent light panels overhead flickered spasmodically, as if struggling to throw out just a few more photons before the repair-rats replaced it.
An overweight nurse/tech strolled out from another corridor to meet the wounded Servant. Her hair had been dyed black and looked like plastic; her face was weighted down with so much makeup that Danal doubted he could see a square centimeter of her real skin. Thin surgical gloves covered her hands.
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