Gorgon Child

by Steven Barnes

  "Now you, lady."

  Promise bent, and laid it down. As she did, she heard Jenna whisper, "Whatever happens, don't say a word."

  Numbly, Promise answered, "Yes."

  Three Gorgons emerged from the shadows, weapons at the ready.

  They peered into the shadows, and were satisfied. One of them spoke briefly into his microphone, and then they moved forward.

  "All right. Against the wall. More bargaining chips. You were fools to come here."

  "I'm not moving," Jenna said.

  One of their barrels flickered toward Leslie, and Promise screamed to herself. "The child dies."

  "I'm not saying that you can't bind me. I'm saying that I won't stand still for it. If you want me, come and get me.

  "We have our orders."

  "Three NewMen. Two unarmed women. Is this Gorgon?" Jenna's voice was sharp with scorn. "If this is the best that Gorgon has to offer, you really are a pitiful flock of faggots."

  One of them, the Oriental, took a step and Promise realized she had seen him before. He was Sawa, and had fought Aubry. His right knee was damaged. She wanted to call out to Jenna!

  But he stepped back, and said, "This is not the time for honor. Bind her."

  The first man stepped forward, and Jenna extended her wrist. He reached for it, and she slid back a step, her eyes holding his insolently.

  Puzzled, he took another step, and her hand was still just out of reach. Angry now, he leapt forward, and this time caught her wrist.

  But at the instant that his hands made contact, Jenna was moving, a whiplash of relaxed torque flowing through her entire body. She wore an expression of such ethereal concentration that Promise barely recognized her.

  The off-balance Gorgon's own grip and the sudden drop of her body to the kneeling position put him in a precarious balance. She was a mouse guiding the movements of an elephant.

  She was beneath him, and his feet ran into her body and she reared up, exhaling harshly. He went over her head, rolling in a breakfall, except that her own hand had gripped his wrist, and she sprang upright with astonishing fluidity. She dug in her heel and jerked hard: his breakfall went bad, and he landed on his shoulder. Jenna was on him as he landed, her thumbs digging up under his ears, into the nerve plexus between the base of the ear and the hinge of the jaw, burrowing with all of her strength. His entire body splayed out in shock, heaved once, and collapsed.

  But the second Gorgon was on her, and she barely ducked as the butt of his rifle grazed her head. She dove forward, palms flat against the ground, then forearms folded to take the shock, and she drove her heels back into his body. The butt of the rifle slammed down into her leg. Promise heard the crack as the tibia shattered.

  But the kick had been deliberately wide, drawing his stroke, as Jenna had made her move. The other leg slammed home into a perfect heel-thrust to the groin, drove the Gorgon's feet a half inch from the ground with the shock. A perfectly placed blow, perfectly delivered, without an ounce of wasted strength, every erg of energy centered on the most vulnerable portion of his body.

  He stood for a moment, aiming his rifle at her, then his face went gray with shock, and he collapsed.

  The Oriental's eyes were hooded, staring at Jenna as she lay on the ground, her hands at last moving to her shattered leg.

  "Fools," he spat. His eyes were hot. "It is too bad that you are injured. I could have taken you without a hesitation."

  Jenna was fighting shock, and the compound fracture of her lower leg was oozing blood. But still she managed to spit her words out through a smile. "Then . . . fight my . . . sister. She is better than me."

  He looked at Promise with interest. "Is that true?"

  Promise met Jenna's eyes. Are you insane?

  Jenna spoke quickly. "Durga is related to our dance art. Promise is the greatest dancer our culture has ever produced. She is our greatest fighter."

  Utter panic flooded Promise. But Jenna's eyes held her, commanding, then flickered over to the other corner of the room.

  Urgently. Meaningfully. And Promise, overcome with terror, looked at the child hanging in the center of the room, and her heart melted. Leslie was unconscious, and utterly helpless. Not the deadly war child, the monster trained and conditioned to kill the President of the United States, but merely a helpless creature who needed her, needed her as no human being had ever needed her before, or would again. The child she had never nursed, the infant she had never cradled in her arms.

  She turned to the Oriental and nodded her head. "It's the truth."

  "Good. You watched me beaten. I will like killing you." He took the battery cartridge out of his rifle, and set it against the wall.

  He pulled a knife from his belt. "Come. Instruct me."

  Promise moved away from him, fighting not to show her fear, and walked to Jenna. Jenna's face was ashen, and her fingers fumbled as she pulled the ceremonial Durga blade from her belt sheath, and handed it to Promise.

  "Jenna—"

  "Shut up!" she said fiercely. "This isn't a fight, Prom-i ise! It is a dance." Again, her eyes flickered urgently to the corner, where the pulse rifle stood. "All your life, i you've said that you were the strong one, and 1 the weak. You were strong enough to leave the womb! You went out and tasted the world! I never did. I never dared. You are the stronger." Her eyes held Promise, and Promise felt herself lost, drowning in them. "This isn't a fight. It is a dance!" Jenna's face was ashen. She fought to keep pressure on her leg wound. Blood squirted between her fingers.

  Promise nodded, and took the knife. As she turned to face the enormous Oriental she almost fainted. She felt vomit splash against the back of her throat.

  But behind Sawa, hanging limply in a sack, was her child.

  Promise found her calm. She might die now. She would probably die. But she would die dancing. Sawa tested her space carefully, not committing anything. The injured leg!

  Promise clicked her jaw twice, triggering the Plastiskin. It flared like sunlight split through a prism, rippled and coursed with color. She circled, made him put weight on the right leg. He adjusted with surprising ease, but there was no doubt that he was clumsier on that side.

  Then Promise began to move. She wound her body, found the rhythms of Durga, but only the dance movements, the movements that the women taught one another in that ancient time. Movements hidden in the ebb and weave of the dance, taught beneath the very noses of unsuspecting men.

  Sawa grinned, fascinated with the colors, and slid in. Promise, on the balls of her feet, slid away and away, always just out of distance, cutting off the corners, circling and circling, keeping Sawa's weight on the bad leg. Her movement was hypnotic, and Sawa smiled, enjoying the flow.

  He lunged. It wasn't Aubry's quality of speed. It was a frog-jump, a leap forward that penetrated the periphery of her defense. There was no time to move backward or sideways. It was just there, and his blade bit into her arm as she spun away.

  Sawa laughed, and Promise moved. Somewhere, something in the dance . . .

  There was the circular footwork. Sawa lunged, and she let the lunge graze the periphery of the circle, because the circle was moving.

  Spinning, the very emotional energy of his thrust impelling her movement, as a partner's movement caused her to respond in dance. It was there! Jenna had spoken true—it had been there within the dance from the very beginning. ; And the women who had developed it, who had so carefully hidden the truth of their art from their men, had known that the truth could be resurrected. But to learn so late! So late! There was no time to learn now. There was only time to die.

  Sawa, new respect on his face, stood still, inviting her to do the same. Promise continued to move around him, turned circling toward his bad leg, weaving as he made his lunges.

  But the movement was soothing, almost hypnotically so. And because she faded back, and never made a threatening forward movement, Sawa began to enjoy himself, to mock her movements, to dance with her as she became tired.

 
; The tension was killing her. She couldn't relax! The stress was literally burning her up inside, and Sawa knew it. She was heaving for breath, her movements less fluid, more jerky and desperate by the moment.

  Aubry! My darling! I need you—

  Jenna! You are the strong one. Help me!

  Leslie . . .

  For the first time in the engagement, Promise stopped dead. Sawa froze in surprise. Promise lunged forward, screaming, but stopped herself a half step in as Sawa made his defense. Promise flared her Plastiskin up as brightly as she could, a sunflare in a darkened room, and hurled the knife directly into his face.

  Shocked and blinded, Sawa was taken completely unaware. The knife, balanced to make one complete rotation in four and a half feet, turned one and a half times, and hit Sawa between the eyes.

  Hilt first.

  Promise turned and ran. Sawa cursed, slapped his palm to the bruise, then darted after her.

  Her back burned. Would he throw the knife? Would he? His every movement seemed to be designed to weaken or tire. He wanted her alive!

  She heard the first, cat-quick step coming after her. Promise dropped to the ground, and rolled herself into a ball. Sawa, coming too quickly to stop, hit her body and hurtled over her.

  The breath was slammed from her lungs by the impact, and she knew her ribs were bruised. She wanted to die, the pain racing up her body, but she sprang to her feet and ran to the opposite corner of the room.

  For her rifle.

  Sawa realized it the instant before her hands made contact, and jumped at her, screaming.

  She pivoted, rifle in hand, bringing the barrel up—

  Sawa's body loomed up like a balloon. So swiftly and directly did he come at her, his eyes chillingly black, and—

  Her finger pressed the trigger. Sawa spun, his side torn away. His knife flew from his hands but momentum carried him onto her. His hands went to her face, and throat, squeezing with killing strength. She couldn't breathe, couldn't move, found herself falling into a red-rimmed void—

  Then his hands relaxed, and released. Sawa tumbled to the ground, dead.

  She was too weak to move. Promise pulled herself out from under Sawa's body, staggering toward Leslie, holding the knife that had smashed against her spine.

  One more step. Just one.

  And then another.

  The room was spinning. She sawed through the cords. Leslie fell into her arms. He was curled onto his side, and quite unconscious, and she put her ear to his chest, trying to hear a heartbeat. There it was. There it was. . . .

  She held her child, kissed her child, and then plunged facefirst into the ground.

  For a few moments there was no movement in the chamber.

  And then . . .

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  And Death Smiled ...

  The room stretched out in all directions, dark and empty and soundless, save for the distant thrumming of explosions.

  Aubry could barely breathe.

  He had difficulty catching his emotional balance. He was cut off, sealed off, and trapped back in the bowels of his very worst nightmares.

  He squatted back on his heels and tried to breathe deeply.

  Suddenly the room wasn't empty anymore. It was filled with the limping, sore-ridden bodies of the damned, and Aubry was just another convict, everything that he had been and done in the past years gone, gone instantly, the only truth the fact that he was back, where he had sworn he would never return.

  The thrumming becoming distant, and then silence, save for his own breathing.

  And he was drawn deeper and deeper into trance. He had walked these halls how many times?

  There were Sugar and Jo Jo. And there was Mother, pushing his book cart, slight, slender, pretty Mother, who had befriended Aubry Knight. It had only cost him his life.

  And Aubry his soul.

  And he was back in the last place on God's earth that Aubry ever wanted to visit again.

  In his mind, the wallscreen was still in place. That was still there, still clearly displayed where they had shown him films of Nullboxing—

  Remember that, Aubry? Remember your dreams, dead dreams of escaping from Earth, from care, and sharing something of yourself with one of those few men in the world who can understand, who can feel what you feel. Who see the world as a grid of movement options, who look at another human being as a glass object with target points stenciled into place?

  God, you FREAK!—)

  There was no movement of air in the room, and it was muggy. There was only the glare of his flash lamp, and the ancient play of images behind his closed eyes.

  How long does pain last? How long does hatred endure?

  But here, in this room, they had stolen his anger, taken the best part of him. The strongest part.

  Here, they had played their damned films, and they had pumped him full of drugs, until every time he thought of anger, every time the adrenaline boiled within his body, his stomach spasmed, and the sour fluid would rise to his lips and arc out, and he . . . and he . . .

  He bent over, and pounded on the ground.

  It was all so wrong, so wrong! If he was wicked, then let him die. If good, then let him live! Or even kill him! But to go on like this, endlessly lost in the caverns of his own regret, tumbling through the well of years . . .

  He stretched out phantasmal hands, reaching for the shattered pieces of his identity, slipping away from him too quickly now, just too quickly for him to catch.

  Every day, falling, falling, and the weeks, and now the months, and the years, and he was younger, and younger, all of the things that had grasped at him, and pulled at him, all of the illusions, all of the hurts, flowing from him, and flowing. He sat, raw emotion flowing from him in a torrent. His stomach spasmed and vented, and he didn't realize it. Tears flowed from burning eyes, and he didn't think of it. Aubry Knight curled over onto his side, lost in the years. It was more than he could take, more than he could handle, and he was just gone.

  A child again, in a cold city.

  There was once someone who loved him, wasn't there? Or was everything truly the blur it seemed. Once, wasn't there anyone who accepted him, who just loved him for who he was, and not for what he did, or didn't do.

  And he searched back, and back through his mind, and he found, at last, an image. An image of a man, dying in the back alley where he lived, and the child who would one day become a man running to him, and the hands smeared with blood.

  Aubry . . . Aubry . . .

  And even through the pain, the twisted grimace that fought to become a smile. Even through the final weakness that flooded the man's limbs, the strength of a last hug, a last embrace, and the whispered words, Be strong . . . for me. Be .. . shhhh ... no tears. No more tears . . . ever.

  And then the hand had relaxed its grip, and the body had been suddenly totally still.

  And Aubry remembered the child who would become a man, and the child held the body of its father, and kissed it, tried to kiss it into wakefulness, to motion. And when nothing, no action or prayer, had had any effect, how that child had cried.

  And had gone from there to the home of a sister ... or had it been an aunt? . . . and been an unwelcome burden. And after that other homes, and finally finding the only home where he really fit. The streets.

  And oh, the streets. There, he had found that the rules didn't exist. All that mattered was the quality of fluid violence that came so easily to him as his body began to mature, and finally exploded in an orgy of revenge against a world that had done nothing save turn its head to the death of his father.

  Those streets, those sidewalks, were a battleground, and to survive, young Aubry became a child of war, with the skills and attitudes of one who knows death on the most intimate terms.

  And Aubry cried.

  Light. Sudden, blinding, piercing into this most private of places, the place where Aubry had not been for so many years. Decades. The place sealed up with the rest of his regrets, with the pain that w
as too much for a child to bear, too much for a man to admit.

  "What do we have here?"

  Ibumi. And Quint.

  The two giants stood in the doorway, their arms lightly around each other's waists. Quint wore a bare touch of rouge on his cheeks. There was nothing feminine about the way he moved, nothing in the least bit humorous about the 20-40 pulse rifle he carried at his side, its bore pointed directly at Aubry.

  Aubry looked up. "Where's Leslie?"

  "Leslie?"

  "My kid, damn you. Where is he?"

  "Leslie. Clever. He's safe, unless that fool Bloodeagle has killed him by accident."

  "We should really have killed him before we left Arizona."

  Ibumi grinned. "A pleasure to rectify that mistake."

  They moved in closer to Aubry. "We don't have any wish to kill you, Aubry, but we can't take any chances, either. For a nonenhanced human being, you're the greatest fighter that I have ever seen."

  Aubry glared up at them. "I'm tired of this. I'm tired of all of it. What fucking difference does it make if I can kill you? If I can kill you both? Or if you kill me? I don't think any of us really cares. But Leslie deserves a chance at life. And if my skills can save my child's life, then they exist for a reason. You idiots. You let McMartin and his stooge use you. You almost helped DeLacourte steal the entire nation. You've doomed the NewMan Nation unless Bloodeagle can bring you back, or bring in your bodies. You bought my child, had him stolen from his mother's womb. You betrayed everything that you're supposed to believe in, and you broke the sanctity of your own goddamned sacred ritual."

  Aubry rose, ignoring the rifle that Quint leveled at him.

  "The two of you, for your own vengeance, helped support an operation that killed hundreds of people. That left a trail of death up and down California. You destroyed hundreds of acres of timberland, hundreds of unborn children.

  "And the ones you got! What did you do to them? What did you care about, except making your goddamned supersoldiers. Would you like to turn them into me? Would you like a thousand of them like you? Creatures who have no purpose in life except to destroy? Really?

  "Then you're not only evil, you're stupid."