Shockball

by S. L. Viehl

  I’d been backing down on his sedation, gradually weaning him off the heavy dosage. Now he was able to respond physically to reflex and verbal stimulation, although the few times he’d opened his eyes, he hadn’t acted very lucid.

  Today he was looking better, and his vitals had inched up another few digits out of borderline red range. The Jarvik was thumping along without a hitch. He responded to my voice by opening his eyes and trying to focus on me.

  “Hello, Patril.” I checked his infuser lines and catheters before giving him his daily sponge bath. The surgical site was also healing nicely. “Miss me while I was gone?”

  His eyelids fluttered. A sound came from his lips. Something that distinctly resembled “no.”

  “Don’t spare my feelings now.” I finished the bath and carefully changed his berth linens. The liquid nutrient diet I’d put him on had eliminated twenty-five percent of excess body fat, so it was getting easier to handle him. “Your extra heart is working fine, and you’re making me very happy by not getting any unnecessary infections. Now if I can get you to a League medical facility, and someone can convince you to stop lining your vessels with enough plaque to choke an elephant, you’ll be able to start chasing me again in a few months.”

  He groaned something in his native language, too low or too obscene for my wristcom to translate.

  “Tell you what. When Reever gets here, I’ll ask him what that means.”

  Reever came back that night, a study in surrealistic contrasts. He carried a bouquet of exotic-looking orchids, a plaque with his Indian nickname on it, and a black eye that spilled over into a huge bruise on his left cheek.

  I looked up from the chart I was studying and jumped to my feet. “What happened? God, you look like you went ten rounds with the front end of a glidetruck.”

  “Rico does not like having champagne spilled down the front of his suit.” He handed me the flowers and plaque, and sat down on the exam table. “Especially in front of the media.”

  I set his stuff aside and pushed open his swollen eyelid to check his eye. Other than the surrounding bruising and some broken capillaries beneath the cornea, the eye wasn’t injured. The orbital bone and cheekbone had narrowly escaped being fractured, though.

  “Bet this hurts like nobody’s business. He hit you this hard in front of the reporters?”

  “No.” He winced as I applied a cold pack and put his hand over it to hold it in place. “He waited until they left.” He extended his other arm. “You’ll have to check the scanner, but I believe I was successful.”

  “You must have been, if you got flowers and a plaque. Your face first.” I finished examining him and only then did I pull up the sleeve of his jersey and unwrap his forearm. “Did you have enough time to run a full series?”

  “Yes. It was a large bottle of champagne.”

  “Sit back and relax. I’ll put your flowers in some water.” I couldn’t help chuckling as I took the scanner over to the console to download the data. “While you were out carousing with the boys, I found another way to the surface.”

  I inserted the leads into the console input panel and transferred the information Reever had gathered. As it downloaded, I told him about the storeroom and the vertical air shaft.

  “Even if it is too narrow for me to traverse, you can use it.” He changed out of his uniform.

  “Keep that pack on your face, and I’m not going anywhere without you.” I sat back and ran an analysis on the downloaded scans. The scrolling results made my smile fade. “Oh, boy. This isn’t what I thought. At all.”

  He came over to study the screen while I grabbed the ancient printed book on STDs and started flipping through it.

  “Does it indicate that he is the carrier?”

  “Looks that way. Hang on, I need to find something.”

  I waited until the final cerebral series appeared, then cross-referenced the results with information from the old text. Then I put the book aside and rubbed my eyes.

  “Okay. Rico is crazy, but not for the reasons I thought. He’s in the final stages of paretic neurosyphilis.”

  “That is a different disease from what infects the others?”

  “No. It just means he’s had this disease for so long it’s worked its way into his brain tissue. It’s started destroying it.” That’s why he hadn’t shown any latent symptoms. He’d probably stopped showing them a long time ago.

  Reever perched on a storage container beside me while I ran the secondary scans, and created a patient data file on the chief. Transferring the data kept my hands busy, while I tried to figure out the next move.

  The problem with tertiary-stage syphilis, especially when it affected the nervous system, was treatment. I could destroy the bacteria in his body, but I had no way to repair the destruction it had already caused.

  “Here.” I handed him the book. “Read the section on long-term effects on the neural system.” Then something caught my eye. “What? Can’t be.”

  Reever looked up from the page he was reading. “Those are DNA patterns.”

  “They sure are.” Maybe I was just seeing things. I got up, selected a scanner I’d just used and downloaded a file from it. Then I created a split data screen and ran a side-by-side comparison.

  “You already had a sample of Rico’s DNA?” Reever asked.

  “No. This sample belongs to someone else.” The two samples were, with the exception of gender and a few altered physical characteristics, identical.

  “What’s wrong? You look ill.”

  I was ill. “The name.” I rested my brow against my hand. “Of course. He’s nothing if not consistent and methodical.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  I tapped the screen. “Rico’s not an only child, Reever. These DNA sequences match. He’s a twin.”

  “Who is his brother?”

  You have been touched by the gods. Like our chief.

  “Not a brother.” I shut the display off. “A sister. Me.”

  I got up and checked on Shropana, then wandered around the alcove for a few minutes. Reever left me alone. He probably guessed I wasn’t capable of coherent speech.

  It wasn’t every day I found out I had a brother.

  I didn’t know exactly which one he was, but Joseph had created nine other clones before me. When we’d confronted each other the first time about my origins, my creator had told me that none of the others had developed properly. I’d assumed that meant they’d died.

  Now I had proof at least one of them was alive.

  “When I was a kid, I hated being an only child,” I said as I sterilized the already-clean spare monitor rig. “You were an only child. Didn’t you hate it?”

  Reever eased the sterilizer from my white-knuckled hand and tossed it on my worktable. Then he handed me a single orchid. “I had no basis of comparison.”

  “I did. All my father’s colleagues had at least two kids. I’d have given anything to have a brother or sister. I would have loved it.” My face felt hot and stiff as I touched the pale lavender, waxy petals of the bloom.

  “Now that I know the connection, I see the resemblance.” Reever brushed a piece of hair from my face. “He has the same features, the same cast to his hair.”

  I’d never noticed, but then, I hadn’t been looking. “What did Joseph do to him, Reever? What did he do to all the others?”

  “We will find out.”

  “Not like we can go back to the estate and ask him.” I shook my head. “I wonder if Rico knows what he is. Of course, he has to know something. How else could he have found this place, unless he’d lived in the underground lab? But how did he get away? Did Joseph put him up for adoption? Did he escape? Does he know where the others are?” I glanced at the blank vid screen, still seeing the ghost images of those matching patterns. “Does he know about me?”

  “He must. There are too many concurrences in our present situation for Rico not to have extensive knowledge of you and Joseph.” He turned me around to face hi
m. “What did you mean when you said he was consistent and methodical?”

  “The name Rico. Joseph would have named him the same way he named me—with the experiment designation.” So much for my very original name. “The chief is about thirty-four years old, so it’s safe to assume he’s Comprehensive Human Enhancement Research I.D. ‘C’ Organism.”

  “C.H.E.R.I.C.O.”

  “He had to know about me. Why else would he kidnap us from the lab? Twice?” So many things made sense—and didn’t. My head whirled with the potential avenues of disaster. “Hawk told me Rico won’t be back until just before the World Game. We need to get some answers, Duncan.”

  “Agreed. We should find out what else Hawk knows about your brother.”

  My brother. I looked down, and saw I had crushed the fragile orchid in the tight knot of one fist. Slowly I uncurled my fingers, and let the remains drop to the floor.

  “Hello, Hawk.” I stepped inside the consecrated hogan, with Reever right behind me. “Planning out the next dry painting?”

  He was scratching the surface of the cave floor with a piece of light-colored clay, which left visible lines in complicated patterns. “Yes. I have three more to make.”

  “They tell stories, don’t they? Why don’t you make this one about Rico being Joseph Grey Veil’s genetically engineered human construct, and consequently, my brother?”

  I expected the hataali to show some emotion—shock, dismay, even disbelief—but he didn’t. Hawk only played the silent, inscrutable Indian and kept drawing. As far as he was concerned, Reever and I could have been invisible.

  I was tired of the lies, the Night Horse, and being invisible. I spotted a wicker jug of water, picked it up, and tossed the contents over Hawk’s drawing. The huge splash erased all the spirals and patterns and stick figures, and drenched Hawk. This time he reacted.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Getting your attention. Now that I have it, tell me about my brother, the chief.”

  He glanced at the entrance to the hogan, then shook his head. “Do not say that aloud.”

  “Why the big secret? There some kind of taboo against cloning? I mean, other than our dastardly whiteskin laws prohibiting it. Or doesn’t he want anyone to know he’s forgotten to send me Christmas signals for the last thirty years?”

  “He has only spoken of it to me once, when we first came here.” Hawk used a piece of worn cloth to wipe up the floor of the hogan. “He told Kegide and Milass and I about the Shaman and how he had been brought into this world from the great beyond.”

  Sounded like a legend Rico would invent. “Sorry, there’s no great beyond. He came from an embryonic chamber, where he was cloned from Joseph’s cells. Just like me.” And what else had the chief invented?

  “No one may understand how the gods work their magic.”

  “Joseph Grey Veil is not a god. Neither is Cherico.”

  “Jericho. That is what he called himself when he came to Four Mountains.”

  “How old was he? How did he get there?”

  “I’m not sure. Fourteen, fifteen years old, perhaps. He was found on reservation land, injured and near death. He ran away from the hospital the next morning. Milass found him hiding in the pinyon groves. We concealed him, cared for him.”

  Hawk went on to describe the younger Jericho, later adopted by Milass’s family, gradually gaining influence among the young men of the Navajo. He gathered enough followers to make the tribal council concerned, then opposed them on the issue of deporting illegal Indian hybrids. In a bold move, he led the men and women who would become the Night Horse off the reservation in one night. Hawk and Milass were already his lieutenants by then.

  “He kept his promises to us. He created Leyaneyaniteh so the hybrids would be safe. He mended the broken ties with the Four Mountain clans. He purchased the Gliders and ensured the entire tribe would never want for anything.”

  “What about freedom, to come and go as you please? What about proper health care? What about not asking men to risk electrocution in order to donate to the tribal fund?”

  “You do not understand what he did for us. The whiteskins were going to send every half-Indian off-planet, and our own families would do nothing to stop them. Rico stood up for us, spoke for us, protected us. We had nowhere to go; he made a place for everyone.”

  “Giving everything he had,” Reever said. “The Navajo have great regard for someone who sacrifices himself for the good of the less fortunate.”

  Hawk gestured toward the door. “And so it was.”

  “That’s only the beginning of the story. What about when things started to go wrong?” He didn’t want to vilify his beloved chief, so I did it for him. “My best guess is the syphilis progressed to his brain after you established your underground here. You’d remember, he would have been a little irritable at first. Quick to anger. Irrational now and then.

  “As the brain tissue deteriorated, he would have gone from cranky right into scary. The temper tantrums. The rampages. Memory loss and delusions. How many years has he been abusing the men and women of the tribe? Three? Five?”

  “There has been no abuse.”

  “You mean, everyone just let him have whatever he wanted? Out of respect? Or terror? I’ve seen Rico slit a man’s throat and walk away whistling. He nearly beat Ilona to death. I think those were mild incidents. Come on, Hawk, tell me, what’s he do on his bad days?”

  Hawk wouldn’t look at me. “There has been no abuse.”

  “He won’t condemn him, Cherijo.” Reever took my hand. “Put aside your anger and ask him what we need to know.”

  Easier said. “Your chief is a very brilliant, sick, dangerous man. I need to know why he kidnapped us, and what that has to do with Joseph Grey Veil. I need to know why Rico is sending so many men back to the Four Mountains reservation. Why this World Game is so important to him.”

  Hawk’s head sagged against the wall. “I don’t know. He hates the Shaman, but has never told us why. He needs both of you, but he will not say for what. He sends our men back to the Navajo to spread the Night Horse way. Having the Gliders play in the World Game has always been one of his greatest obsessions.”

  “Would he confide in anyone? Milass? One of the other men?”

  Hawk shook his head. “He keeps his own counsel.”

  “Do you know if he ever lived at The Grey Veils?”

  “He once spoke of it. He called it his prison for thirteen years. I knew then the Shaman was his father.”

  Knowing Joseph, I’d bet Rico had been subjected to some of the same testing and training that I’d been. “It doesn’t make sense. Even if he was a total failure, Joseph would have kept him as a baseline, a yardstick to measure the success of future constructs. And why didn’t he do anything about the syphilis he’s carrying? Joseph would have made him take some kind of rudimentary medical courses. I had my first anatomy and physiology courses before I began primary school.”

  “I must complete the ceremonial, but the Night Way will not help our chief.” Hawk looked hopeful. “Can your way save him?”

  “I can get rid of the syphilis, but given the advanced stage of his disease, that won’t do much. He’s teetering on the edge of full-blown psychosis, and the brain damage he has is irreversible.”

  “He would never take medicines or allow doctors to touch him. That has not changed since he came to the Four Mountains. Even now, he has his food tasted before he eats it.”

  “I’ll find a way.”

  Before I could do anything about my long-lost brother or the venereal disease that was driving him insane, disaster struck on two fronts.

  The sound woke up me and Reever close to dawn after the last day of the Night Way ceremonial. We had stayed up most of the night, and Reever was permitted to observe the Dance of the Atsálei and the Dance of the Naakhaí, and join in on a beautiful sing called “The Song of the House Made of Dawn.” While I already knew I had no singing voice whatsoever, I discovered my husband had a
rather startling, mellow tenor.

  “You could be an opera singer, with that voice of yours,” I said as we made our way to our hogan. “No kidding, this could be a real career option for you.”

  “I doubt it.” He gave me a pointed look. “You, however, should not sing.”

  “So I’ve been told, many times.” I ducked inside and knelt to bank the fire. I felt exhausted, wrung out from all the revelations of the day and the endless turning wheel of my thoughts. I smothered a yawn. “What other hidden talents have you been keeping from me?”

  He pulled off his tunic. “You will have to discover them for yourself.”

  The last of the firelight danced over his skin, and suddenly I wasn’t so tired anymore. “Sounds like a challenge.”

  Understandably I was very groggy when, several hours later, things started to rumble and shake. Reever, who was already up and dressed, tossed me my clothes before he disappeared out the door. I had to scramble to catch up.

  The entire tribe assembled in the center of the cavern, while the noises got louder and closer.

  “What’s happening?” I asked Hawk when he limped by us.

  “The Shaman has returned with more men, and has blown a passage through to the east subway station. We think he’s using more explosives to try to create an entrance to the inner tunnels.” A sound from the other side of the cavern made us both turn. “The League forces have also been concentrating their efforts, working their way in from the west.”

  Attacked from two sides with enemies all around us. Would I ever stop getting in these ridiculous predicaments? Then I remembered Ilona and the outcasts. Their new sanctuary was out where the League was currently blowing things up.

  I grabbed Reever’s arm. “We’ve got to get to the hybrids before Shropana’s forces do.”

  Dhreen appeared beside me, his face still bruised and pale from the beating Rico had given him. “Doc, we’ve got to get Ilona and the others out of those pipelines.”

  I saw all the entrances were being guarded. “That may be more difficult than you think.” I spotted Mi-lass, who was ordering everyone in different directions. Little twerp looked like he was having the time of his life. “Stay here. It’s time for me to collect on a favor.”