by Neal Aher
“I will leave you here,” said Bsectil, as the door parted.
“I’d rather you didn’t.”
“You will be safe, so my father says,” said the first-child, turning away and moving off.
I took him at his word and entered, the door closing behind me. I immediately smelled smoke and saw a pillar of it rising from the encampment ahead. As I walked towards this, I saw a shellman lying on the ground, prador limbs torn away and his human throat opened. There were also figures milling aimlessly around the burning building from which the smoke was rising. A radically altered human shambled over to me—a shellwoman who had retained her human form but was armoured head to foot. And she just stopped, facing me. She looked dull and confused.
“Father?” she said, then emitted a strange grating sound from her throat.
I gazed across at the others. They all seemed just as disoriented but, while I watched, two shellmen squared off and started snapping at each other with their claws.
“Give it,” said the shellwoman.
I wasn’t sure how to respond.
“Over here,” called a voice.
I glanced across to see a catadapt leaning out from behind another building.
“Just ignore her and walk over here,” she added. “Nice and calm.”
I turned and did as bid, noting the two fighting shellmen losing interest in each other mid-fight and just wandering off. Now focusing back on the catadapt, I paused, glanced down at my nascuff. I realized I hadn’t reset it since my rather torrid encounter with Gloria Markham on Masada. I looked at the catadapt again. She was gorgeous. My inner reptile brain was laughing and pointing out how I didn’t see that one coming.
“What the hell is going on here?” I asked the catadapt as I reached her.
“Wait a minute.” She raised one hand—one strong, tanned and quite beautiful hand, cat claws protruding. In the other hand, she held a pepper-pot stunner, which she aimed over my shoulder.
I turned. The shellwoman was close, staring at me intently as if trying to figure something out. After a moment, she winced in pain and then thumped the palm of her armoured hand against her head. When she lowered her hand she looked dull again, distracted. Then she turned and ambled off.
“Come on,” said the catadapt. “I’ll leave the explanations to Trent.”
“Sure,” I said, admiring the shape of her back and then her arse as she turned and led off. Then I sighed, followed, and tried to think like an adult rather than a hormonal teenager. However, the woman ahead was a problem. In the Polity, even in my years before and during the war, it was possible to make yourself into any shape you chose. Most people, of course, chose to be beautiful. It was something one enjoyed over the passing decades and eventually became inured to. The basis of physical attraction then slid into another more complicated realm, based on experiences and minutiae difficult to define. Was my reaction to this woman somehow connected to my experience with Sheil Glasser, soon after I awoke from my memplant? She had been a catadapt, after all. No, it wasn’t that—I just didn’t know what it was. This woman was beautiful—who wasn’t?—but something about her just grabbed me by the throat.
She led me through the encampment, where similar scenes to the ones I’d just witnessed were playing out. Forcing a retreat to a colder portion of my mind, I studied all those around me and remembered Sverl’s words. I saw the shell people suffering under ill-made transformations that would eventually kill them, just like Vrit—the shellman from whom I had bought Flute. I saw also that there had been fighting because scattered around there lay dismembered corpses. One of these was the body of a normal man, his severed head lying a few yards away.
The catadapt gestured at it. “He thought he would do better alone.”
“That didn’t work out, I take it,” I commented.
“It didn’t work out for two others either, who stayed in the cage where we’d all been kept. Though Rider Cole survived.” She looked at me, then, really looked at me. “I suspect Trent knocking him out saved his life.”
It always annoyed me when someone made an assumption about what I might know, especially when I really didn’t have the facts. Was she trying to establish a connection with me? In irritation, I dismissed the thought and decided not to make any more enquiries.
The catadapt finally brought me to a larger central building and rapped on a door.
“Sepia,” she said. It sounded like a password, but obviously wasn’t.
A frightened-looking woman with cropped blonde hair opened the door, then quickly closed it behind us as the catadapt led me through. I found Trent Sobel sitting at a console in some ersatz captain’s sanctum, looking tired and utterly defeated. Glancing round, I watched the cata-dapt heading off with the other woman. So the catadapt’s name was Sepia.
“Thorvald Spear,” said Trent, standing as I approached. “I should kill you.” He shrugged, shook his head, then reached up to finger that earring of his.
“Trent Sobel,” I said, “I find you in an odd situation, and I was told that you might need my help.”
He glanced to what I had first taken to be some piece of wrecked equipment, beside the dais at the centre of the sanctum. I realized I was seeing a large skeletal Golem, with some kind of organic-looking tech wrapped around it. It was sitting on the floor with its head bent down between its knees. I took a steady breath. Time to really focus . . .
“Taiken took control of the shell people in the same way a father-captain controls his children,” Trent explained. “I had that—” he pointed at the Golem “—kill Taiken because it was our only option. The man wanted us to either become shellmen or face thralling. Taiken’s death released the shell people from hormonal control, but now they’re behaving like prador adolescents after the death of their father and beginning to kill each other.”
“And why do you care?” I asked, cold now.
“It seems my path to redemption is here,” he said.
“Redemption?”
He stood up. “Come with me.”
He led me into a small room provided with a bed, a table, some chairs and jury-rigged computing. It looked recently outfitted—clearly Trent’s little hideaway. He found a bottle of whisky and two glasses and brought them over.
“Taiken’s stock,” he explained, “though I wonder how many years it has been since he enjoyed it.” He sat and poured. I joined him, and remembered sharing whisky with him and his partner aboard the Moray Firth—the glasses tainted with the prions I had later used to shut down their nervous systems.
He explained how Penny Royal had saved him aboard the wreck of that vessel and the AI’s subsequent instruction. He then related the rest of his story, and I began to understand Sverl’s attitude to the black AI’s manipulations. We were just pieces in some complex puzzle. But to what purpose? I had no idea of the overall shape, but felt a strong intimation that this jigsaw of human lives and deaths was the only kind of game that would keep the AI sufficiently interested, engaged. My own part in it remained unclear. On Masada, Penny Royal had provided me with intimate evidence of its own guilt, so my role seemed to be that of executioner. However, on my route to some final encounter with the AI, it seemed I must remain engaged in the game.
“So you want to help the shell people,” I suggested.
“I do now.”
“Because now you are no longer a villain?”
“Because empathy is a painful gift.”
“A conscience is too.”
“I guess.” He sipped his whisky.
“Sverl,” I said, communicating through my aug, “I’m going to need equipment and access to some heavy processing.”
“If you could elaborate . . .” Sverl replied.
I put together a shopping list in my aug and transmitted it. Some of the items were very new and it seemed unlikely Sverl would have them, but it was worth a try. Just half a second later, the list came back, most of the items crossed out.
“I can provide some of the equip
ment, but I am sending Riss,” said Sverl. “As for the processing, that has been available to you since you acquired your destroyer, with additional functionality since I allowed you to connect into my system.”
“And you’re sending Riss?” I questioned, not inspecting too closely what he meant by that “available processing.”
“Perhaps it is because I have been changed by Penny Royal itself, that I now see the patterns it follows,” said Sverl. “You could not possibly get all the equipment you require up and running in time to be effectual. The shell people are beginning to kill each other even now. And in a short time, because they are not having the medical treatment they constantly require just to stay alive, they will all begin dying.”
“But why Riss?”
“The drone is part of the answer, and the other is one easily within your reach.”
“Why can’t you just tell me?”
“Because I don’t need to.”
Sverl stated the words with finality and when I tried getting in contact with him again, he blocked me. Instead, I concentrated on fully exploring my connection into the father-captain’s system. To Trent I said, “I can probably return many of these people to their base human format. Free them from prador pheromone control and thereby free you from that responsibility.”
“What?” he said, gaping at me.
“Physical damage can be reversed or repaired. We are, after all, dealing with some relatively primitive adaptations, grafts and alterations of body chemistry.”
Trent stared at me for a moment, then said, “Like you could reverse or repair what was happening to Isobel?”
“These are not one of Penny Royal’s transformations.”
He nodded, but he looked a bit less beaten now. I continued, “However, as Sverl just pointed out to me, that’s not our main problem. They are fighting even now and not keeping up with the constant interventions they need to keep themselves alive. So we have little time.” I paused. “We need something now.”
“What?”
“I’m thinking about it.”
By now, with the larger part of my mind and my augmentation, I was deep in Sverl’s computer system. I had made a place for myself and was there uploading stencil programs for the design of nano-machines, complex enzymes, adaptogens and the whole human toolbox of physical transformation at the microscopic and sub-microscopic levels. I had also discovered another body of work in there: Bsectil and Bsorol’s combined research. This looked into reversing the damage to them and the second-children caused by being chemically maintained in adolescence for so long. This work wasn’t barred to me, and I soon found stuff in there I could use.
“So how do we get started?” Trent asked.
“Taiken must have equipment here,” I said. “I’ll need to make some initial examinations and assessments.”
“I’ll show you.” Trent stood up, suddenly energized. I followed him as he moved from his sanctum to an annex containing a surgical theatre. As we entered, I caught myself looking round for any sign of Sepia.
“Will this do?” Trent asked.
It would do for examinations and surgery, and equipment was available for assembling bio-molecules and other organic items. It wasn’t the best, but then, according to Sverl, I didn’t need the best right now. I just wished I knew what the hell I was going to do.
“It’ll do until other equipment arrives,” I said, turning away and walking back out into the sanctum.
Just then, the frightened-looking woman came in through one of the doors, dragging a child behind her. After her came Sepia, armed with a stunner and looking like a warrior maid out of some VR fantasy to me.
“Trent,” said Sepia. “We might have a problem.” She backed away from the door, pointing her stunner towards it.
“I’m never a problem,” said a familiar voice.
Riss came through the door, squirming like a snake but a couple of feet above the floor. I noted that she now wore a collar about her neck, heavy ceramic with inset controls. Next, she lowered her ovipositor to the floor and seemed to balance on it while opening her black eye.
“We’re going to Station 101,” said the drone, with a hint of craziness in her voice that I didn’t like. “And you know what that means?”
“What does it mean, Riss?”
“Eggs!” she exclaimed. “I can get eggs!”
After living for a brief time in that snake skin, I now understood perfectly what she meant. And that made me like her crazy tone even less. I felt, just for a moment, as if the madness of Room 101 was already reaching out to us here. Perhaps it was my hormones.
“Oh good,” I said. “And apparently you are part of an answer I require.”
“Just tell me what to do,” said Riss, which was no help at all.
After a brief, embarrassed pause, Trent said, “Perhaps you can start here.”
I turned to see that the frightened woman was standing close to him, one hand possessively on his arm. He was pointing at the child, who could not have made the choice to have his arm removed and replaced by a claw.
“Yes,” I said, “that’s where I’ll start.”
CVORN
Eager to make the most of the new feelings rising within him, Cvorn wanted to reach his females. He watched impatiently as the first door of the water lock revolved into the wall, spilling fluid from the last time it had been used. The door seals in prador ships were never foolproof, because they had no need to be so. Prador could withstand large changes in atmospheric pressure and losses of air or, in this case, water. And they could easily obtain more from ice asteroids or comets. Cvorn peered at the water running into the gratings about his feet in irritation, but considered how the ship systems reclaimed it anyway. Analysing the feeling, in an attempt to divert his mind from other urges surging through his body, he realized he now disliked an inefficiency he had previously ignored. After fitting his aug, his thinking was tighter, more factual, and his awareness of shortfalls like this was growing. When he was done here, he would set his children and the ship’s robots to work to improve this type of thing.
When he was done here . . .
Once inside the water lock, he found the manual environmental controls, then tried to locate them via his aug through the ship’s system. Someone had disconnected them, which was odd—more work for his children and robots. Perhaps the problems with this lock were due to infrequent use—he was only using it because he wanted quick direct access to the pool rather than using the chamber above. Through his aug, he set the door behind him closing. As it grated home, circular hatches opened in the wall by his feet, water immediately gushing in. Cvorn hyperventilated in preparation. As a male prador, he could survive underwater for a long time and probably didn’t need the extra oxygen in his system. But underwater, it was not good if you had to untangle from a female quickly because you were running out of air—that was when the worst injuries occurred.
Next, he tried mentally to locate the automatics for the inner door, but they weren’t in the system either. The water rose quickly and he shivered when it reached his sensitive prongs and coitus clamp. Damn. He glanced at the environmental control, reached out with his claw and tapped the temperature up a little way, feeling further irritated when he noted how high the scale could go. This was not only inefficient but dangerous, because if that control was accidentally shifted up to its top sterilizing setting, the females would end up boiled alive in their pool.
The water rose up over his carapace and finally over his visual turret. But before it reached the ceiling of the water lock, an indicator rattled in the fluid to tell him he could open the inner door. He slammed his prosthetic claw against a large impact control on one wall. Such a large, heavy button here to operate the lock was understandable, because any prador here could be in such a state it might end up wrecking something less durable. However, he was finding he enjoyed the newly extended power offered by his aug to control his surroundings mentally. He decided he must do something about that impact
control too.
The inner door opened at last into the murk of the mating pool and Cvorn propelled himself out, ready to swim over to the far side. On his previous viewing, he had seen that one of the females had separated herself from the others. The three other females had gathered in the middle around the feeding pillar. He hoped to get past them, and get on with his business before they detected him. However, he hadn’t taken his prosthetic legs and claws into account, for they immediately dragged him down.
He hit the bottom with a heavy crump that the other females would have certainly detected through the floor of the pool. He quickly headed to his left, sticking close to the wall in the hope of circumventing them. He could now just see the feeding pillar and the humped shapes gathered around it. They were all rising up on their legs and he could hear the harsh clatter of their powerful far-reaching mandibles through the water. He could also taste their readiness for mating and feel the skittering of their ovipositors against the floor. In fact, if he had just waited a little longer, they would have abandoned the pool for the chamber above, where it would have been much easier to hunt them down.
Soon he saw the isolated female ahead, but she was now moving away from the wall and quickly heading towards her companions. Cvorn swerved to intercept her, coming in from the side, and tried to close a claw on the edge of her carapace. She turned slightly as she fled, and one mandible shot out sideways, clanging against his claw and knocking it away. He’d forgotten that trick. It had, after all, been a long time.
The female now joined her three fellows, who all turned to face him. Cvorn halted and gazed at them, remembering how some of his contemporaries had surgically crippled their females by removing their mandibles. Others had ensured the females had guards affixed over their ovipositors, to prevent them being used as a weapon during mating. Still others had even had their females locked into body cages that prevented any movement at all, making mating a completely risk-free exercise. Cvorn, however, was of the old school. He understood the evolutionary imperative that made females so hostile towards the males that wanted to mate with them. It was because only the strongest, most aggressive and most resilient males should be able to reproduce. But that wasn’t why he preferred his females to be free-ranging. He’d tried confined or crippled females and it just wasn’t the same. Violent sex was much more satisfying.