Dark Tempest

by Manda Benson

  He walked from his sleeping quarters into the washroom.

  Taggart looked at his sundered reflection in the mirror. With the light behind him in the doorway, his face appeared aged by the torments of stress and insomnia, the eyes sunken beneath heavy brows. His hair hung over his forehead in greasy curls and his remaining face was stubbled and scarred with fumbled attempts at shaving. His shirt hung open, torn at the fastenings where he’d lost his temper with it, and the skin it revealed was sallow and hairy, like that of his dead body, an image now so firmly imprinted upon his memory he knew it would haunt him for the remainder of his life. His imagination mutilated the face in the mirror to that of the corpse.

  Taggart seized the razor from the nail on which it hung. Now he would cut himself with it for the final time. His hands shook as he prised the blade from its mounting, but he felt nothing, only emptiness and cold logic.

  The half of Taggarts which remained, the right-hand component, had always been the weaker side. Some people were ambipartite with equal bias, but most, as he had been, were of two complementary halves of slight difference. Taggart’s left-hand half had been the more wayward, the one inclined to action without thought, and the better speaker. The left-hand half had been he who had to take the device and go after the Archer’s ship, and now the mission had truly failed.

  What use was Taggart now? He was but a shadow, an undead remnant not quite yet departed. He could do no further good for the cause, and his presence as a Sundered would be a source of despair and pessimism for the crew of the Bellwether. From hereon, he could never truly live. He would always be half-dead, incapable of any real feeling or action. He could not lead this mission on now.

  He pressed the flat of the blade to his throat, and its cold, hard edge seemed more real than anything else in the foggy gloom his perception had become. One smooth movement like so, with the blade angled downward, and the blood supply to his brain would be severed and he’d expire as quickly as he had in the phantom half-existence he’d eked out alongside that bizarre Insular Gerald Wolff. Then would come the final, eternal, dream, and release.

  The thought of his own death beyond the scope of his own senses, the circumstances of which he would never know, made him shudder. The blade grated against his skin.

  He could do it. He could.

  But what of the dreams? What of the dream he’d had the night before, in which he’d been incomplete? What if the eternal dream was that?

  This was not the way. This was a coward’s exit.

  A knock on the door. “Taggart?” queried Winters.

  Taggart’s fingers slipped, and the blade fell to the floor. A key grated in the lock. “What have you been doing?” Winters asked, seeing Taggart as he entered. “Dales is worried about you.” He started trying to do up the fastenings on Taggart’s shirt.

  Taggart slapped his hands away. “Stop it, Winters!”

  “You can’t go about—like this anymore.—It doesn’t help their morale!”

  “It’s humiliating!” Taggart shouted.

  “You’re going to have to accept—that you can’t manage independently.” Winters’s right half reached into his pocket and withdrew a paper sachet. “Dales told me to give you this.”

  “What is it?” Taggart demanded. Winters had already set to work, with one half tearing open the sachet and pouring it into a mug while the other filled the kettle and set it to boil.

  “It’s just herbs and vitamins—and that sort of thing.”

  Taggart knew Winters was lying, but he sat on the bed and drank the hot solution Winters presented to him. Soon after he’d finished it, things became indistinct.

  Winters was leaning over his face, gazing at Taggart intently. “What do you think they would all do—if you weren’t here to guide them?—We’d be lost—lost to those Insulars.—There’d be no hope.—Not all is lost.—So stop wallowing in it and start using it to your advantage.”

  The spectre that was Taggart, and Taggart under the influence of a sedative, could not think as quickly as Taggarts had been able to, but it was fathomable that the device still existed, and there remained this hope. The cause was not yet quite lost, and Taggart could not abandon this mission while the possibility still lived in his mind.

  “The fool’s crisis is the maven’s opportunity,” Winters said. “You may think you are now hopelessly disabled—and can no longer inspire those who follow you.—But look at it a different way.—The Insulars did this to you. You’re a martyr.—We’ve been coming apart at the seams of late—and a sympathy vote might be what could pull us back together.”

  “What about Gerald Wolff?”

  “What about Gerald Wolff?”

  What, indeed, about Gerald Wolff? A moronic oaf. Taggart scowled. Yes, he had been quite sure of Wolff’s ambitions when he decided the risk of bringing him was worth taking. If the man had had any motivation, he might have been considered useful by his own Insular society. He had ability beyond reason, the kind of individual who would break into a high-security bank for a few credits to buy his lunch, and leave the rest, claiming he had no use for it—a braggart filled with arrogant showmanship and folly.

  Taggarts’s right-hand component had seen little of Gerald Wolff in person, since it was to be his left-hand component that eventually was to go on that fated journey with him, and the man would have noticed the discrepancy between the dextrous hands of Taggarts’s two components, and perhaps even the minor differences in confidence and loquacity. The man was devious, sardonic and impious, and had a propensity for making two-faced remarks. Sometimes Taggarts had seen him, plotting and scheming away in silence, his chin cupped in his hand. He could have been very dangerous indeed, had he wanted to be. Taggart’s thoughts were out there in the void, with Wolff, wherever he might be now, and the mystery he would never know, of what had happened aboard the Archer vessel Wolff had no doubt so skilfully run down with his accursed affinity for computers. Could it have been Wolff’s hand on the blade that slit Taggart’s throat?

  One person, one Insular, might know the answer.

  “The Castellan Viprion,” he said, as though thinking aloud might assist a men with only one brain.

  Chapter 12

  Arithmetic

  Speak to me of honour, noble knave,

  And a thousand dishonours I’ll you show,

  Tell me the righteousness of master and slave,

  When nothing is right that I know

  Half of the psychologist sat on a sofa only wide enough to accommodate one backside. His other half was behind a screen toward the back of the room.

  He leant forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “Why don’t we discuss the options you’ve got?”

  “Why not you up shut and fuck off?” Taggart said. He lay on a sofa opposite, his back against the corner formed by the back and seat. His shirt was on inside out and only the third and fourth buttons were fastened, into the fourth and fifth buttonholes. He didn’t have any shoes or socks on and his trousers were undone.

  “Taggart, you cannot move forward until you have put this behind you.”

  “How are you to help? Winters sends you in here, and you sit there with half of you hidden, like I’m talking to some stinking Insular? Is that supposed to make me feel better, is it?”

  “I just want you to listen to what I’m going to say.”

  “Then hurry up and say it!”

  The man sighed and leant back on his seat. “Some limited success has been achieved—”

  “—in the past—” said the psychiatrist’s voice from behind the screen.

  “—by two sundered persons in a cohabiting situation.”

  Taggart sat up. “I’m not having someone else in here, following me around! Having half of someone else, you think, can make up for not having a whole of myself?”

  The man raised his palms toward Taggart in a consoling manner. “Of course not, but it does mean you can manage better—help each other—with the physical side of things.”


  “Two halves do not make a whole,” Taggart said through gritted teeth.

  “Of course they do not, and to treat this situation as though it could be solved by something as crude as simple arithmetic would be naïve. But—as I said—success has been achieved this way in the past. I can give you some—experimental data—and reports on the success rates and the selection criteria, if you wish, but you can’t dismiss the option without—at least—attempting it first.”

  Taggart said nothing. He remained motionless.

  “You are still the same person.”

  “I am not!” Taggart’s answer came out as a roar, and the psychiatrist flinched in his chair. “It will never be right! Whenever I go to a public place, people there will see. They will see a Sundered men, pretending to be whole! Your words nothing give me! I see that you useless are! Get out and leave me in peace!”

  The psychiatrist stood and gathered up the things he’d put on the table. “Taggart, if you are to have any life at all—you must put from your mind all pretensions—of you ever attaining a state of normality again.”

  “Just shut up and fuck off.” Taggart glared at the floor until the psychiatrist turned his back and headed for the door. “And get Winters back in here. I want to know where that treacherous turd factory Collins has gone.”

  * * * *

  Samuel Collins made an unimpressive pair. The short men stood before Taggart’s podium, his dense blond hair hanging in dishevelled forelocks over his lopsided spectacles and his hands fidgeting with the fastenings of the identical shirts over his bloated waists.

  “Explain yourself, Collins.” Taggart drummed petulant fingers on the polished wooden surface of the console.

  “My actions—were in honest attempt—to prevent the loss of the Archer’s ship.”

  “Your actions,” Taggart replied, “would have ensured the destruction of that ship, and everything on it, had the missile you fired hit it.”

  “But what if the weapon should—fall into enemy hands?—Surely that risk is not worth taking.”

  “I the commands give, Collins, not you! If enemies of ours did use the detonator, the result would be the same! We lose nothing if it is kept safe—everything if we destroy it or permit our enemies to destroy it!”

  Collins jerked his other head round to face Taggart. “With all due respect, Taggarts—I think you too hasty—in your adamance of the use of this—” Collins switched mouths with a pause of unusual length. “—weapon.”

  In Taggart’s peripheral vision, Winters stiffened and turned both heads toward Collins.

  “A drastic situation requires drastic measures, think you not?”

  “Taggarts, I beseech you!—Billions upon billions will die—if you resort to using this weapon. It cannot be—a rational option!”

  “None will die as a direct consequence of its use.” Taggart narrowed his eyes.

  “It will be the beginnings—of the Dark Ages!—The undoing of all civilisation.—It will take—a million years—for the human race to regain modern levels of technology. When they do—they’ll be separate species! They’ll—most likely—wage galactic warfare among themselves!”

  “Then so let it be,” Taggart growled. “If a Dark Age what takes it to nullify them forever.”

  “But perhaps there is—another way. Surely some compromise—could be agreed upon. By all means—threaten the Galactics with the device—but consider what is at stake. Surely the use—of the device—should be consigned to a final resort. For sure in its design—here is a weapon of ransom or desperation—and not a weapon to be deployed.”

  “Our grandfathers, and their grandfathers before them, and grandfathers of them as well, spent their lives fruitlessly so that we might have this chance. When hay-day is here, must we take their legacy into our hands own. You have the insolence, the lack of respect, to defile the memory of your ancestors so? The centuries they spent insinuating their subtle defenses, so that the day would come when their unworthy descendants would finally be able to end the Galactics’ tyranny? Destruction rides on their ships, in their machines. They carry it on their clothing. It is in the very air that they breathe. This is no weapon, but the ultimate rite of cleansing. Surely you would not deny our ancestors their due?”

  “To hold in one’s hand—the device—is to forsake all civilisation, and I think not that you, Taggarts, honourable and fine men—that you are—have the right to make that judgment. That decision lies in the hands of no people.”

  Taggart raised his eyebrows. “You feign ignorance, Collins? ’Tis understandable, is it, that a cripple be treated whole out of pity?” He roared the last word, slamming his fist upon the console where he stood.

  In sudden quiet, Taggart was conscious of his own dishevelled presentation. Stains and encrusted food from the morning’s meal covered his clothing, and fastenings on his garments were undone. Taggart himself was aware of the rank odour of urine his motion created. “Look, why not, upon Taggart the Sundered, and laugh in relief that he be not you!”

  Taggart raised his hands to the ceiling. The people in the room stood about in a dreading silence, none of them with any apparent solution. They looked at Taggart, he thought, as though he was making an embarrassment of himself. Sheep, the lot of them. The flock of the Bellwether.

  Taggart sat, slowly. “Collins,” he said at length. “Collins, what you say amounts to treason.”

  “It does not!” Collins protested in synchrony. “I merely ask—that you perhaps reconsider—with less haste!”

  “Whatever your intentions, for your doubt shall you pay. Take this men to the medical bay and gelded have him.”

  Collins’s eyes bulged. “Taggarts, I did not mean—”

  Taggart waved a hand. “Take him away.”

  Collins resisted the guards who seized him by the elbows. “Taggarts, this is not like you. Please reconsider. I take back—my suggestion. It was ill advised.”

  “Indeed it was, and that ill-advisedness would be better not perpetuated, do not you agree? And I thus prevent you from passing on your unfortunate doubtful genetics onto any potential progeny, Messrs. Samuel Collins.”

  A fire rose in Collins’s eyes. “Sundered bastard! Crippled fool, venting your hatred—on others!”

  “Wait,” said Taggart, a smile of faint malice tainting his lips. “Castrate the right-hand component only. Leave the other half entire.”

  Collins stopped struggling in shock, and a faint whimper escaped him. Taggart relished his terror, saw in his eyes the fear of what he was to become—a men factionated by incongruous drive and emotion between his components, forever in an impotent limbo.

  Taggart gave a violent one-handed flourish, and the guards spun Collins about and hauled him away. He made a strangulated noise in the corridor.

  Winters moved in to flank Taggart. “What now?” he said in a low voice.

  “We cannot afford to lose the Archer vessel.”

  “It looks as though we already have, and behaving in this way will not help morale.”

  “Winters, when I want your opinion, I ask for it will. The Insulars’ governor, he knows something of the vagaries of these freaks. He has studied them, or some such lunacy. Where is he?”

  “Incarcerated, as you ordered.”

  “Then take me to him.”

  * * * *

  The Insular sat on an empty bench in the unfurnished cell, his back against the wall and his legs stretched out in front of him. He did not rise when Taggart entered.

  “Well, castellan,” Taggart said, forcing as much hatred and derision into the word as he could muster.

  “Carck-Westmath was destroyed in the attack of the Satigenarian Circumfercirc. Castellan I am no longer.”

  Taggart’s mind wandered. So there existed these strange men, alone from birth, not Sundered for they never had been whole. He shuddered at the thought of him being anything like them, but there was a comfort of sorts, albeit a disgusting one, in knowing they existed in such a way, a reassurance
of solidarity. With a hating irony, Taggart wondered if, Sundered as he was, he could be accepted as one of Viprion’s kind, and could he perhaps even have an Insular relationship with a single Insular woman.

  “What are you thinking, Taggart?” Viprion smiled unpleasantly. “I came aboard this ship not entirely sure what I was dealing with, but now I think I know who you are and where you are from. It would seem you yourself are no longer so different to us. Do you detest us so much now, knowing that you are as one of us?”

  Taggart bared his teeth and did not take his eyes away from Viprion. “Winters, leave us.”

  Winters looked at Taggart then at himself, and turned, leaving the cell.

  When he had gone, Taggart lowered his face to Viprion’s level. “Every minute I spend as a Sundered, my hatred of your people and their wretched lives grows. Dirty and unnatural you are. You cannot love, and because you are incomplete, you destroy everything! Your essence is unbalanced!”

  “Love? It would seem your society is obsessed with fornication.” A mockery of a smile hinted upon Viprion’s lips. “But then again, you do not know computers.”

  “Sex is natural! Bondage—to drugs and machines—is not!”

  “Very well, as you wish. After all, it is too much to expect savages to appreciate finer things.”

  Taggart’s arms went rigid at his sides. “Shut up!”

  “Surely you cannot expect those of the Blood to embrace your barbarism, any more than you and your kind appear to tolerate ourselves.”

  Taggart spat in Viprion’s face. “You people are incorrigible!”

  Viprion did not wipe Taggart’s saliva from his face. He merely blinked and looked at the wall. “The name is on the tip of my tongue, but I cannot remember it.”

  “It is not of any consequence. Not so far as you are concerned.”

  Taggart walked the length to the far wall. He turned and folded his arms, leaning his weight back on his heels and regarding Viprion. “So, the men of the Blood do not love. I suppose, then, that they wank into a syringe, and present it to their women when there arises the need to propagate themselves?”