“That’s ridiculous, a primitive, guilty superstition, based on the primitive belief in Karma, that every joy in life must somehow be paid for. Really, Commander, nonsense like that is more appropriate to a man pounding on the ground with a rock than a man who walks among the stars.”
“What about the people?”
“The Echelon has not decided yet, or at least, has not made their intentions known to us. Like you, we can only communicate one-way with our megaspheres. The population is small enough to be absorbed into the body whole, at least those who willingly join us.”
“So, those that join you become slaves, and those that don’t, I imagine, will not be immortal any more.”
She waved him off. “That should be no concern of yours. Even by your standards, they are a stagnant, degenerate population. Whatever fate they have, they certainly deserve it. I did not bring you here to discuss this planet’s fate, I brought you here to discuss yours.”
“I don’t see any point to it,” he told her. “I think I can guess what choice you’re going to give me. If you are going to ask me join the Aurelians and betray my ship and crew, you can save yourself time and energy by killing me now. I will never join you.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re evil.”
She laughed heartily at this. “Evil… good… words from a dead language, representing the dead moralism of defunct gods.” She sighed and caught her breath. “Only a very few humans at your level can ever learn this truth, but the Echelon believes you are one of those very few.”
“One of the enlightened elite, whose privilege it would be to guide the destinies of all the inferior masses?” Redfire snarled. “No idea in history has caused more human suffering.”
“We offer you riches beyond your imaginings,” she answered. “A chance to fulfill every desire, to create the art you love on the scale of planets, of star systems, a place in the Echelon, where you will rule over armies and planets as a god!”
She ran a finger across his cheek. “We know all about you, Philip John Miller Redfire, of Graceland.
When the Eighth Echelon made contact with your ship, they extracted every piece of data on the officers and crew.”
“From the crew of Hector, and Basil?”
“Yes, among other sources”
“Before you murdered them.”
She sighed and pinched his chin in the cup of her hands. “If you are going to use judgmental terms like
‘murder’, then we are not going to get anywhere. Aurelians do not murder. Sometimes it is necessary for some to have their lives humanely shortened to serve the greater communal good. The needs of the collective are greater than the needs of any individual.”
“How convenient for you.”
“Regardless, you were profiled, as were Prime Commander Keeler and Executive TyroCommander Lear. We developed profiles on over 600 of your crew and the Echelon determined that you were one of the most promising prospects for conversion.”
“Only one of the most, who was more likely to be converted than me?”
“That is of no concern to you?”
“Was it Ex. TyroCommander Lear?”
She laughed. “Oh, no, no, no. Lear is far too limited in her thinking to ever comprehend what it is to be Aurelian. She would make, at best, a four of cups… perhaps a wand. She may be useful, but she is not suitable for the Echelon.”
Redfire wondered for a moment if Lear would flattered or offended by the rejection. “Who then?”
“That is not important.”
“If I am not leaving this chamber alive, why not tell me?”
“I will only tell you now that if I told you, you would be very surprised. I will tell you, should you decide to join us, but until you do, it would only distract you. I have three days, and three days only, to convince you to come over to the Aurelian way, and days are very short on this world.” She gave a slight toss of her head, and gave him a good, hard, look. “The important thing is, when I deliver you and this world to Aurelia, it will assure my ascension to the Echelon. I have worked my whole life to gain a place with the Echelon. You, on the other hand, are being offered the privilege of joining the Echelon outright. You have no idea the magnitude of this gift.”
“And what would this ‘gift’ entail?”
“First, you would return to your ship. When the time was right, you, and others whom you would recruit to join us, would deliver the ship to Aurelia.”
“How could you be sure I would not betray you?”
“You will give yourself completely and voluntarily to us. You will prove your loyalty to us, and you will be monitored. If you ever so much as think of betraying us, you, and everyone on Pegasus will die.” Redfire had figured as much. “What will happen after I turn over Pegasus to Aurelia.” An expression of wonder and joy came across her. “You will become an Aurelian. You are already more Aurelian than human. Your mind needs only to be given a body worthy of your intellect.”
“A new body?”
She approached him, and began stroking the short hairs at the back of his head with her fingertips.
“First, your body would be cloned, not as it is, but improved. You would be larger, of course, with two hearts to sustain your greater size, and maintain the enhanced brain they would provide you. Your own brain would be grafted with it, preserving all of your intellect and memories.”
“Then what?”
“You would assume your place among the Echelon. Aurelia wants you badly, commander, very badly, and our reward would be beyond your imagining. You would command a megasphere, with an army of Swords to protect you, an Army of Cups to serve you. If your body grew boring, you could exchange it for another, perhaps even a female, a comely maiden from among the Cups or Pentangles. You may decide to get inside their skin and see what it feels like.” Redfire twitched in horror. “Don’t judge it until you experience it,” she said. “I’ve worn many bodies.
It’s extraordinary. Every person sees colors differently, they taste differently, they hear differently. You can be anyone. Man, woman, child… and experience the world through a different pair of eyes … one thing you could never achieve on your own… you want that, you want that very, very much.” It was attractive, Redfire admitted to himself, but he said, “It’s immoral.”
“Your morality is based on second-hand accounts of imaginary encounters with long dead gods. The Echelon are living gods… gods make their own morality.”
“From what I have seen, Aurelian morality is centered around drinking and screwing all day, killing people at a whim, and occasionally destroying planets.”
“Not destroying, liberating.”
“Like you liberated half a billion Bodicéans from their lives, and this was after they had agreed to an alliance with you.”
“Surely you, of all people understand why that was necessary?”
“Destroying their world eliminated the possibility of resistance. You destroyed the planet, then arrived as saviors, restoring order and civilization. If you had left the planet intact, its inhabitants would have had the will to resist you.”
She smiled. “Partly true. You can not simply graft a fundamentally different social order on top of an existing one. The most benevolent approach, sparing the largest number of people the largest amount of dislocation and distress, was to wipe the planet clean and start over. Those who survive are being given a great and wonderful gift. They will be part of Aurelia, the greatest civilization the galaxy will ever know, the pinnacle of evolution. They will know perfect equality, perfect unity, perfect security, and perfect fulfillment of all their physical desires.”
“Which must be of great comfort to the millions who died.”
She wiped his forehead with her hand. “The dead are gone. They are dust. They do not matter. They would have died anyway. It is the living who deserve our compassion.”
“I think you enjoyed laying waste to that planet,” Redfire told her.
“As much as you e
njoyed destroying those buildings on your home planet.”
“I usually moved the people out first.” Except for volunteers, he remembered. Some people liked being inside buildings as they were destroyed, but they were protected by force-fields.
“Your art is what showed us that deep inside, you have the potential to become part of Aurelia.
Before you came along, buildings were routinely destroyed when they were no longer safe, or needed. It was a utilitarian function, but you turned it into an art form. You saw the beauty of creation in the violence of destruction.” She smiled and whispered, as though sharing a confidence. “And that ultimately is why you will join us, because Aurelia calls to the destroyer-creator inside you.” Redfire tried to stare hard at her. He wanted to expose this for the lie he knew it war, but could not bring himself to say it.
Besides which, he was beginning to feel the strain of being hung from his arms and tied by his legs, a kind of tight pain passing as his muscles became taut cables of suspension.
He took a breath, made hard from the weight of his chest pressing on his lungs. “What I did was informed by … my aesthetic. I made turned something thanatic into something … that I thought was wonderful and beautiful.”
“The same thing we do. We take worlds that are ugly, and make them beautiful.”
“You force your will on them. I didn’t force my art on anyone.”
“The same as an adult forces his will on a child by taking a sharpened knife out of his hand.” She waved her hand and suddenly a knife appeared in it. It was half again as long as her hand, with a slim and sharp-looking blade that glinted wetly in the light.
“I never harmed anyone. Not like you. You are evil.”
As with everything, this seemed to amuse her. “Once you free your mind from those primitive concepts of Good and Evil, vast new expanses of possibility open up.”
“Like sucking out kid’s brains.”
Mercuria rolled her eyes. “Now you see, that is a perfect example of letting yourself be limited by rules you have never even thought to question. Just because your morality considers a certain act to be abhorrent, you will not even consider the possibility that it serves a higher purpose.”
“What higher purpose could possibly be served by sticking a stiletto in the neck of a child and sucking his brains out.”
“Firstly,” she said, waving her knife generally toward his neck, “that is a very barbaric and inaccurate description of what happens. The child is anaesthetized, and feels no pain during the extraction. Second, the brain is not sucked out, just secretions from the pituitary and pineal glands.”
“The child still dies.”
“And in your morality, killing a child is always wrong, even if it serves a higher purpose. Suppose you could save a thousand humans by killing a single child. What would your morality say to that?”
“Morality doesn’t speak to mathematics. It would still be wrong.” She rolled her eyes again, and twiddled with the knife. “You really are impossible. So, the child dies.
So what? The Echelon uses those secretions to extend life expectancies to more than six hundred of your years, sometimes longer. Certainly giving one enlightened being five hundred years of life is worth shortening the life of a mere drone by a few decades.”
“You don’t have to kill anyone.” Redfire couldn’t believe he was about to suggest this. “With our technology, we can easily synthesize pineal and pituitary secretions. We would be willing to share this technology with you.”
Mercuria sniffed. “Please, we are perfectly capable of biogenetic synthesis. However, synthetic hormones are not adequate to sustain the Echelon. We don’t know why, they just aren’t. To receive the full effect, the hormones must come from a human host, ideally in earliest adolescence when the hormones are strongest. Besides, the procedure is quite rare, perhaps two or three extractions per year.”
“For everyone in the Echelon. How many millions of children… “
She grabbed his face, pinched his cheeks between her thumb and fingers. “Would you shut up and stop whining about the damned children.” With her other hand, she gently scratched the back of his neck with the knife. “The Echelon only harvests from those who have the least to contribute to the gene pool.” He tried to turn away, but only made the knife cut him more deeply. He winced. “I will never join you.”
“You would sacrifice your entire ship, for the sake of your morality? Your wife? Her sons?” She dug the knife into the top of his jumpsuit near his collar and cut outward. The knife dug and sawed and tore at the fabric, until it was shredded and much of his chest and shoulders were exposed to the chilly, damp air.
She stood in front of his, holding the knife against his crotch, pressing just hard enough that he could feel the sharp metal point against his testicles.
“To an objective observer, this would be an easy choice to make. Join us, and not only do you save your ship, and your family, you also begin a long, possibly everlasting life in a body built for pleasure, for fulfillment of every desire.”
She twisted the knife and cut into the jumpsuit. “All these would be enough to sway most humans…
and you are tempted by what I am offering, but not for those reasons.” She continued cutting, making shreds and tatters of the material that covered his private parts. “If those things were enough to tempt you, we would not be interested in recruiting you. The Echelon has no interest in ordinary humans.”
“Stop,” he told her, knowing it would do no good.
“You are curious about us… obsessed with us. All you could think about while you were sitting in that cell was our little ship, and how you wanted to tear it apart and learn our secrets. Sure, you hate us, but the more you are repulsed, the more you are intrigued, because that is who you are. You crave depravity, you are never so alive as when the harshest offenses exquisitely sting your sensibilities.”
“You want to destroy human civilization,” he whispered.
“Yes,” she answered with husky passion. “Humanity’s time has come and gone. We are at the advent of the Age of Aurelia. We will cleanse the galaxy of human filth, world by world. We will return every planet infected with the human virus to its natural, pristine state of nature.”
“Neg…”
“Oh, yes. Humans had no business going into space. Humans are nothing more than a species of predatory apes, barbarians! But we are our own gods. We make our own worlds. We make our own morality. And you want it, too. In your heart, you have always rebelled against the constraints of your world, its stifling morality. Now, embrace it. Embrace what you think of as darkness, and free yourself.
Free your mind. Free your body.”
She cut away the last of the material and Redfire immediately felt one soft warm hand fondling him.
She slipped the cold hard knife under his genitalia and held it there, cutting edge against his ballsac. Her eyes flashed up at him importantly. “Coercion is not our way and seduction is much more fun.” Redfire breathed a sigh of relief as she released his penis and stepped back away, as though to admire her work. She released the knife and it clattered to the floor. Metallic echoes rang in faded off into the depths of wherever they were. She opened the front of her tunic, allowing first the left, then the right breast to pop into view. Nice breasts they were, too, supple and round like apples. She languorously peeled her tunic off, gently sliding it off her shoulders slowly enough to let him imagine the material gliding over her soft skin.
She dropped the tunic on the floor, and paused to cup her breasts in her hands. “Very nice,” she sighed. Then, began working her way out of the bottom half of her uniform. “You come from a planet where sexuality is repressed to an extreme degree, even by the standards of most of the worlds we have encountered. Someone like you, though, is brave enough to test those inhibitions… those taboos.” Redfire laughed at her. “If threatening my family and my ship doesn’t turn me over, why do you expect that sex will?”
She stepped aw
ay from her clothes and stood before him completely naked. He beheld her, or rather the body she had taken, her skin taut and supple, her womanly curves like ripe fruit. She bent over, providing a sublime view of her succulent buttocks, and removed a small brown bottle from her pocket, uncapped it, and approached him, pouring out a golden brown oil onto her finger tips.
“Sex is just a key to the prison of inhibition you’re locked inside.” She came close to him and raised a hand to smear the stinging, pungent oil on his lips. He flinched and turned away from her, but it was no use. He was locked up tight.
“Here, baby, here,” she cooed, and smeared the oil across his upper lip. It heated his skin wherever he touched. The vapor seemed to rush into his nose without his having to breathe, traveled into his sinuses, stinging his soft tissues, and spreading a warm rush into his brain, penetrating like millions of tiny, electric needles.
“How does it feel?” she whispered.
“What is it?”
“A narcotic, an aphrodisiac, a muscle relaxant, a mild hallucinogenic.”
“Øpra?”
“Oh, nothing so banal. This is called Aalai. Much more intense… with just a little drop of that pineal fluid you find so abhorrent.”
He could feel it working its way into him, a great, warm, electric cloud blanketing his mind and senses.
She moved in and wrapped herself around him, her bare breasts against his chest, her loins against his. She whispered. “How old were you when you lost your virginity?”
“Fifteen,” he answered helplessly.
“Would you believe,” she whispered, “that by the age of eight of your years, I had had four hundred lovers?”
He should have been disgusted by the revelation, but his brain was clouding over as though some primal pleasure center had been awakened. Fighting it was like holding off a pack of hungry wolves.”
“This particular body has hardly been used at all,” she reassured him, nuzzling into his neck. “I wonder what it would feel like to make love to you with it.”
Redfire could not move, but his arms were straining against the bonds, wanting to wrap himself around her, wanting to take her wantonly, to ravish her body, suckle at her breasts like an infant, devour her, bang her like a drum.
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