Dark Tempest

by Manda Benson

  Mathicur was a vicious bully, but she was the only person who could and would protect Jed if a senior Archer of another clan attacked her, and it was she who commanded Jed’s utmost respect. Mathicur would be disappointed if an apprentice of hers did not in turn take an apprentice, and disgusted if she were ever to find out what had happened here on Jed’s own ship—how she’d let herself be literally tied up through not being vigilant enough, and how she’d let Wolff take pleasure from her, and in turn and perhaps more shamefully, she had taken pleasure from him.

  Gerald Wolff was not a contingency the Code made allowances for, but Wolff had touched the original Jed, the part of her she’d thought long stifled beneath her training. He’d opened her mind to compassion, and shown her an empathy too long missed—the Jed who trusted without question, who loved without reason. Now Jed saw.

  She looked wistfully up at the chimaera suspended in the bubbling water. She wrapped her arms around her knees, just as she had crouched in a place very much like this on her first night on the Agrimony. She had felt consumed by her own misery, and Mathicur had found her there and told her that in the real world, people had not the time to be miserable. She wanted so much to unburden all this suffering, to tell Wolff about the pain still haunting her. She felt so sure he would understand, but that would be weak, and Jed wasn’t sure she could distance herself from her pride enough to be able to expose herself to him at that extent. Now she saw why she and Mathicur clung to the Code so tightly. It was reassurance, something to believe in that nobody could disprove or argue against. It was the one standard, stationary reference point in a universe of whirling light and confusing colour, filled with injustice and suffering. It was something to cling to in times of crisis and despondency. The seat of the god, be it Steel and Flame, or the Code, or some other tenet, was in the self-aware mind. It was none other than the essence of consciousness itself, and its manifestation was in the creation and ingenuity of Mankind.

  And Wolff—although he perhaps wasn’t the hedonistic and secretive villain Jed had leapt to conclusions of—still withheld something, she was sure of it. He’d tried to delude her, perhaps because he’d done something else she wouldn’t approve of that hadn’t yet come to light, or maybe because of some knowledge of what Taggart was after, or some closer connection with Taggart than he cared to admit.

  Jed tried to reassure herself that whatever it was Wolff was concealing, it didn’t pose a threat to her, but bacteria had a habit of multiplying and holes had a habit of growing larger, and the insecurity wouldn’t go away.

  The dissection room was full of dead things, things that had never really been alive. She stood and set her foot to the ladder out, her hand already reaching into her pouch for a cube of conurin.

  Chapter 11

  Tweedledee

  What’s freedom, but a state of mind,

  And confinement just the same,

  Sight is not missed by those born blind,

  But blinding drives a man insane.

  “Who did it? Who opened fire upon the Archer’s ship?”

  Taggart stood on the podium in the center of the Bellwether’s bridge, his officers watching him uneasily.

  “It was Collins,” a women ventured in a small voice. She hung her heads.

  “Collins? Where is he? He is not here! Find him, now!”

  Several people hurried toward the exit at the back of the room. They broke into a commotion when someone tried to pass through them.

  Winters had entered, grasping between him a figure by its arms. At first glance, one might have thought him Sundered, as Taggart was, but Taggart could tell he was one of the overlords of the Galactics’ caste system, although it was not from the state of his apparel. His tunic was torn, and his face stained with ash and dried blood. Beaded sweat stood out around his widow’s peak, but he managed to raise his head enough to flash a venomous leer at Taggart. Here was a conceited half-man who thought himself whole.

  “This Insular says—” Winters’ left half said, then his right half immediately completed the sentence, “—he is the Castellan Viprion.”

  Taggart stared at the man. “Downstairs, to the cells, take him!”

  Winters turned the castellan about smartly and dragged him back the way they’d come.

  “And you others, get out!” Taggart shouted at the remaining pairs on the bridge. “I don’t want to see anyone until you Collins bring me!”

  As soon as the last of them had gone, Taggart held onto the edge of the console podium and lowered himself onto the floor. He sat on the step and took deep breaths. That fool Collins had nearly destroyed everything they’d fought for. He would pay for it. And the castellan, he had failed, and he would die for his failure, the loathsome Insular aristocrat. Taggart fought back a paroxysm of temper. Yet the sight of the half-man, the enemy of his race, had brought ideas to his mind he dared not consider. Viprion's people were born Sundered.

  They had been staring at him again.

  Whenever Taggart walked among the others, he felt their eyes upon him. Winters said he was being paranoid, but Taggart was no fool. He knew how cripples were looked upon. He knew how he would have looked at a cripple, a half-man, before. One pitied a cripple, compelled to stare, and at the same time thanked fortune one was not in the same position.

  Last night Taggart had a dream, and in it he had been incomplete. It troubled him greatly.

  These days Taggart could not stand company and the weight of others’ attention, but solitude was maddening, driving him inevitably into circles of guilty anger. How much longer would he be in this state? How much longer could he cope? That awful feeling of rising panic he used to get when he tried to reason with himself or work something out, the very essence of insanity, strained him to his limits every day. Taggarts had been an inspiring and voluble orator when he’d been whole, but now he could hardly express himself at all. The frustration of not being able to convey information and ideas was bad enough, but the small things caused Taggart the most despair and exasperation. Not being able to lift certain things, not being able to wash his back in the shower. The anger he felt at his own unsatisfying inadequacy, the pathos of being unable to do things mere children were capable of.

  A loud crash sounded from outside, and Winters burst onto the bridge.

  Taggart leapt to his feet. “What?” he roared.

  Winters’s faces were flustered, and when he spoke he opened his mouths in synchrony, with identical expression as though a mirror plane separated the two of him. “A ship.” The voice was a chorus of despondency. “There’s a ship—caught up. They’ve found something.”

  Taggart held that gaze that told all for a moment then the spirit that had carried him through the past few weeks collapsed. He searched frantically for something within himself, perhaps some instinct or long-forgotten knowledge, that might provide an answer. There was nothing, not even emotion. A numb absence suffused his being. His eyes moved in a desultory manner, scanning the real, solid objects on the bridge that took on false dimension in their ridiculous mediocrity. When he looked up, Winters still waited there. “There can be no mistake?”

  The men paused before resuming speech in the usual manner, staccato bursts, one speaking while the other assembled the next sentence fragment. “You must come—”

  “—To identify—”

  “—The remains.”

  Taggart stuttered out a long expletive, and flung a drinking vessel at the wall. Water splattered the floor. He threw himself back down where he’d been sitting.

  “Taggarts, this must—be done.” Winters approached and pulled him up by the elbows. “You have your public image—to think of now.”

  The taller men frog-marched him into the corridor. Taggart didn’t lash out or resist—he was beyond that now.

  Those in the corridors stared, and Taggart thought he could sense a subtle change in their demeanour. Already rumours of their leader’s dismemberment must have leaked and spread. All the time Taggart was somnambu
lating between Winters, lost in a hazy bewilderment, staring ahead—a men half-dead.

  Winters snapped his card down the access panel of the morgue door. A click announced its unlocking, and the men set his free hands to it. The door opened vertically across the middle to a shaft of stark artificial light. As Winters pulled him in, it was as though he saw the mortuary through a dream, hazed-over in places but lucid in others in the glaring light and clinically spartan fixtures and fittings.

  A tall women in labcoats awaited them, and she turned both faces upon Taggart with that same pitiful expression. Taggart scowled at her, and at the somehow inhuman shape lying on the table, draped with a sheet as colourless white as death itself.

  Taggart’s head swam a little. An unwholesome miasma hung about the room, one that he couldn’t assign to a particular element or odour, but that seemed to present itself as a gestalt of numerous ineffable unpleasantries.

  Winters’s grasp loosened on Taggart’s arms, but the men seemed to notice the slackness of his charge’s legs. He supported Taggart while he fetched a chair.

  “With your permission, sir.”

  Taggart slowly took hold of the arms of the chair Winters had fetched and nodded his head once. Before Drs Falcons had but touched the sheet, he knew deep within himself it was over, and he had indeed perished somewhere out there, away from his people and all help.

  Falcons removed the sheet from the body’s head and shoulders. What had looked inhuman covered neither looked particularly human unveiled—the skin discoloured, the flesh bloated. The eyes had sunk into the face and the features had become disfigured by the freezing in the void and rethawing after the body had been found by one of the Bellwether’s followers. When Taggart moved closer, he saw blood upon the lips and around the nostrils, and a deep, uneven groove across the throat, most probably the cause of death. The skin of the face had lost its structure where the blood had frozen in its vessels.

  Despite all the damage and abuse it had suffered, the unnatural object lying on the metal table like so much flabby and expired meat was, undeniably, Taggart. He stood there looking down on the macabre spectacle of his own mutilated physiognomy, and it filled him with the kind of despair of knowing he’d gone too far this time. There could be no undoing of this final catastrophe.

  “The device?” he managed to say.

  “Missing,” said Falcons.

  A dull, glucking noise rose in Taggart’s throat. The air in the room seemed to grow ever more thick and oppressive.

  “Taggarts?” Winters voice sounded distant and distorted.

  “Taggarts—” Taggart’s voice broke off as he struggled to muster speech. “Taggarts am I no longer,” said he, and followed with a long pause. “Hereon I am Taggart the Sundered.”

  “Do you—want to—stay?” Falcons asked.

  “No.” Taggart turned away, his heart palpitating and his head spinning. He felt the change in air as she threw the sheet back over the body. A foul smell wafted up Taggart’s nostrils, and a thick, putrid taste filled his mouth. The starkness of the light blanched the colour from everything. Winters was a spectre of pale foreboding grey, and Falcons a nondescript and glaring white. The room lurched as it came up to meet his knees, and distantly, he felt hands trying to arrest his fall.

  He came around in the peace of his cabin. The dim blue glow of the desk lamp percolated into his senses.

  For a moment he exhorted himself into believing it was otherwise, and that he would look about to find himself whole, and that he lay on his so-familiar bed with his full complement of four arms and four legs, and two heads. He scoured his memory of the past month in search of something to suggest the whole enterprise of the device and its being lost, and the steps taken to recover it had all been some hideous illogical dream. But he found none, and all his memories seemed congruent, and when he cast about his bed he found nothing save a medical device plugged into a wall socket, whose creeper-like tendrils reached down the collar of his unfastened shirt to monitor his life signs.

  Taggart pulled the medical kit away and threw the wires against the wall.

  “Hello, Marcus.” The voice came from close by, soft and consoling.

  Taggart turned his head to see a women, a little overweight and with immaculately pinned-back light brown hair, sitting at his bedside. She wore a medic’s uniforms—dark blue tunics over white shirts and tight-fitting black trousers, a stethoscope draped round one neck. Something about the way she sat so uncomfortably close together made him look again. She was deformed. Sisters Dales, one of the Bellwether’s nurse staff, had been born conjoined at the waist and with only three legs, and the surgeons had never rectified her because some of her internal organs were missing, and the risks outweighed the benefits.

  He scowled. He could see in an instant why she’d been stationed to watch him. However altruistic Winters’s intentions had been, Dales’s presence only compounded Taggart’s misery. Taggarts had liked Dales. Although she was disabled, he was neither particular nor easily disgusted. She was, now, more able-bodied than he would ever be again. When he looked at her now, he did not notice how obstructed two of her arms were by the enforced proximity of her bodies, or recall her awkward three-legged gait that he would have before he had been Sundered. He noticed only the comfortable equanimity to her person, the air of a whole individual at one with the Universe. If anything, her disability only seemed to make her more complete, not a persons who could lose part of herself. A quotation remembered from some distant lecture as a children sprang to his mind. In the valley of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

  “You remember me—don’t you Taggarts?—They asked me to watch you.”

  “Segregate the cripples they are,” said Taggart, then cried out in frustration at his inability to even construct a simple sentence.

  She put her rightmost hand on his left. “This will get easier with time,” she said.

  “What do you know?” Taggart snarled, but he knew she did know. The Bellwether was not Dales’s first post. She’d worked previously as a medic back on Reeshevern, and she must have dealt with the victims of the invaders’ torture. This women had no doubt seen horrors, persons Sundered completely as Taggarts had been, and probably even worse.

  Taggart’s left component had been the negotiator and the conversational initiator, and now when it came to relaying his feelings to a female, there was just frustration and irresolution. He looked at Dales, and craved sensation of genuine physical substance, and riddance of this disembodied feeling of the world being made of textureless static, and moreover, he had to know he was still physically capable of sex.

  As Dales was reaching across him for the medical kit, Taggart let out a bestial snarl and pulled her down by the wrist. Dales pulled back, and consternation broke out on her faces as she saw the rising lump in his trousers. “Now—is not the time!”

  “Yes is it,” Taggart growled. He pulled her back down and butted himself against her thigh. Dales shuddered.

  “Taggart, this isn’t right.”

  “What would be right? Should I were to be buried still half undead? Would you deny a dead men his final wish?” Taggart grimaced, gripping her wrist and thrusting with his loins. He struggled to undo his trousers with his free hand. He didn’t have enough hands. If he couldn’t do this, he was something beneath a men. He had to know!

  Dales watched him swearing and fighting with his clothing, and her resolve seemed to soften. Crossing over her lefter-right and righter-left hands, she assisted him. Taggart moved desperately, encumbered by his lack of hands and Dales’s immobility about the waists. He didn’t know where to put himself.

  Dales moved closer, connecting most with her right side. Penetration was a struggle, and he couldn’t get into any sort of rhythm. He grated against Dales like a boat run aground in the shallows. Why did she have to be so damned unresponsive? Taggart grunted and lurched in frustration, but it was all horribly stiff and uncoordinated, and when he looked to Dales’s faces her right-ha
nd side was contorted into a rictus of revulsion, eyes squeezed shut and teeth bared, while her other face stared wide-eyed and expressionless at the ceiling, as though in some sort of shocked trance. Taggart stopped struggling.

  “I can’t do this, Taggart,” said Dales, and a tear rolled down one of her cheeks and fell on his shoulder. “It’s not natural.—It’s obscene.”

  Dales tore herself away, staggering on the floor as she came off the bed and trying to rearrange her uniforms.

  “I’m sorry,” she said again. “It’s not right.”

  She turned and stomped to the door, the irregular thump of her footfall dying away down the corridor.

  Taggart lay where she had left him, in a pathetic sprawl. Did his level of disability prohibit even this, the most natural act?

  He had never seen anyone make two so disparate expressions at once, and it chilled him. There was something disturbing in it.

  It was his fault. He felt disgusted at himself—he was disgusting, and he must have made Dales feel disgusting as well, forcing her to let him do that to her. He’d thought he was disgusting when he’d done it with her before, harbouring a secret guilt that it was somehow perverse. That was nothing compared to this. More so, he felt self-hatred and frustration. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t physically perform the act of mating. It had to be done in tandem, with his left-hand component to provide a rhythmic stimulus, otherwise it just would not work at all.

  Taggart sat up and tried to put his trousers back on. He couldn’t do the fastenings, and finished by throwing the trousers at the wall and yelling. His emotions died away quickly, leaving a gulf like the one he’d encountered on being informed of his death—this gulf was final. It was an emptiness marking the end of the line, from which there could only be one escape. He couldn’t even masturbate in his crippled isolation. There was nothing else he could do to save himself from here.