Just a little sting, and it will all be over.
Marian, naked on the table, the robot arm digging into her flesh as tears leaked from her eyes. The genetic combination had been so hard to get right. Ten, twenty, thirty years. And each year the same empty promise.
Rape. Yes, it had been something like that.
How fortunate, the Sleep Master’s First Brother had written nearly three hundred years before, to have found a species our ancestors ignored. With the decline in our own population, it may be that we can lift genetic material from them to strengthen our race.
But Reen had taken that dream a step further than the Sleep Master’s First Brother ever intended. Reen had created not stronger Cousins but Cousinly humans. Humans who would live four hundred years and breed like animals for the sheer exhilarating pleasure of it. Angela would probably live long enough to see her progeny cover the galaxy like a blanket.
By then, surely, the new species would find some way to defeat distance, and it would spread to the Magellanic Clouds, Andromeda.
Yes. If the purpose of his rape was Angela, Reen would choose Marian’s suffering again even though he knew she still needed pills to sleep.
By the time she reached fifteen, he understood why she kept the lamp burning at her bedside, why she was afraid to be alone. And yet he went on capturing her, a fox mouthing a speechless, terrified rabbit.
He couldn’t help himself. From the moment he first saw her he knew that he wanted his child to have her courage. And once he had lost his heart, once the decision had been made, he kept to it through Marian’s tears, through her pleas, through her bad marriage and attempted suicide.
There was no good reason why Marian should ever trust him, Reen thought as the ship now passed over the high fence of Camp David and flew over a group of humans gathered under a sparse forest of floodlights. Absolutely no reason.
Thural landed in a darkened, deserted part of the complex.
“You really want to do this?” Oomal asked, leaning over and laying a claw on Reen’s arm.
Reen nodded.
“You sure? It’s one thing seeing what humans did to Womack, Brother. It will be another to see what human has done to Cousin. As long as I’ve lived among them, as much as I like them, there are still some things about humans that I–”
Angrily shrugging off Oomal’s claw, Reen stood and walked out of the ship. The air was calm, prickly with frost and the smell of pine. Above his head, clouds made a banded halo around the moon.
The Taskmaster herded the trio of Helpers out of the lounge and down the ramp. Oomal glanced around as though counting heads. “Okay. Let’s go,” he said quietly.
They made their way through the trees.
In the glare of the halogens Marian and Rushing were watching a pair of workmen dig a rectangular hole. At Rushing’s feet a naked man lay, his right arm twisted under his body, one cheek pressed into the dirt. As Reen approached, he noticed the hounds tooth pattern of burn marks, the ruined feet. And he recognized the bleached blue of the slain man’s dumbfounded eyes.
Kapavik.
Rushing saw the Cousins. He tapped Marian’s arm and nodded toward them.
Marian, seeing the direction of Reen’s gaze, said, “We had to do it this way. There wasn’t time for anything else.”
So Marian had ordered the tortures. Did Le Doux and Kapavik scream? Did they beg for mercy? Marian always got what she wanted.
Reen peered into the open grave at his feet and saw what he first took to be the glint of dark water. Only water, he thought in relief. Nothing to be afraid of. And in a minute all of this will be over.
The workmen bent to lift the water, which turned out to be black plastic sheeting.
“Not yours,” Marian told him, reading Reen’s expression. “Ours. We’re taking her home.”
Rushing knelt and flipped back the plastic. Dirt tumbled down the gleaming sides. A gaseous stench escaped, spoiling the night air.
Natalie lay curled in her comfortless shroud, legs slightly bent, hands at her chest. The fingers were broken and bent backward. There were needle marks along her arms, some torn and jagged. The bullet that killed her had entered the back of her cranium and, leaving, took her forehead with it.
Reen looked down at Natalie’s body, at which both worms and humans had plucked. Natalie of the bright clothes, all her color gone to a dull blue-gray. His throat closed. His voice emerged in a rasp. “Why?”
“Natalie died protecting you, Reen,” Marian said. “Everything I’ve done was meant to protect you.”
When he glanced up, she was giving him a speculative look.
“Jonis is over here, Reen,” Marian said.
Jonis was wrapped in a soiled white sheet, and he lay, a cocoon without prospects, on the brown winter grass.
“I don’t know if you should look,” Rushing said gently. Reen kept his eyes lowered until the sheet was peeled from the body.
Ants had visited Jonis. Disagreeable houseguests, they were crawling in and out of his punctured, wrinkled eyes.
“Where are his fingers?” Reen asked, his voice nearly failing him. “Where are his feet?”
Rushing went to the ambulance and returned with a small box. A clumsy Pandora, he unfastened it, and from the opening came a thick puff of corruption.
“They buried the feet and fingers separately,” Rushing said, closing the box, “Kapavik said they were planning to dismember the rest of him, to conceal what they had done. Jonis died before they pulled the third finger out of its socket.”
Reen turned to Marian. “Where were you going to bury Jonis?”
“At the Virginia farm.”
“Take him there. Take him there and bury him again.”
Marian seemed surprised. “You don’t want–”
“Take him!” Reen shouted. “Bury him, damn you! Don’t you understand that the Community can’t comprehend torture? That they believe the Cousins who were kidnapped died in peace, without a human raising a hand against them?”
She blanched. “We didn’t have a thing to do with Jonis. We don’t kill Cousins, Reen. That’s not what we’re after.”
“You murdered Sidam, didn’t you? You planted the bomb on the commuter ship. Tali was talking with Hopkins. Despite all we have learned from you, no Cousin could have murdered as coldly as that. And no other human could have got that close.”
She drew back, as if fearing Reen would strike her. “I knew Tali and Hopkins were planning your kidnapping. I thought I could stop it.”
He looked across the lawn to the two rectangular holes. The opening into Communal Mind was softer, its depths free from importunate insects and decay. “How did you get the explosives on board?” he asked. “Tell me on your own or I will bring the Helpers over and you won’t have any choice but to tell me.”
“I caught Sidam by the ship,” Marian said, “and gave him a teddy bear for Angela. I told him you’d be going to West Virginia the next morning and that you’d give it to her then. There was an altitude-triggering device inside it. I never thought I’d kill Sidam, Reen. When Natalie called, I left for Langley. I thought it was Tali who died.”
In a day and a night, Reen’s entire life had soured. Marian turning against him. Jeff’s laughter gushing onto a yellow carpet. Hopkins and Tali conferring in the basement of the White House, planning Reen’s destruction. And at his feet the shell of Jonis in its filthy shroud.
Abruptly Reen turned and walked away.
“Reen,” Marian called. “Where are you going? What are you going to do?”
Reen didn’t answer. Hopkins was the problem. Hopkins, who had ripped out Jonis’s fingers by the roots to learn Cousin secrets; Hopkins, who had murdered Jeff and had led Tali down the twisted path of treason. As Reen stalked past the other Cousins and the three Loving Helpers, they swiveled and followed him to the ship.
Oh, yes. Reen was going to see Hopkins.
LIKE COUSINS, humans sent out signals when they slept, signals so resonant that if a Cousin listened carefully, he could hear the mutters of their slumber.
Below the darkened ship Reen could hear that murmuring. He felt a woman in a neighboring house toss in a restless dream; sensed beneath him Hopkins’s mind drifting like a boat across a dark sea.
When they landed and walked to the door, Oomal slid an opener into the key slot Reen could hear its metal fingers probing the lock’s tumblers. Beside him, the Taskmaster was fumbling a trace into an outside plug where it would send a command through the network of electrical nerves in the house telling the security system to slumber, too.
There was a soft click. Oomal turned the knob and opened the door to black, warm silence.
The floor was marble, and the hall smelled not of death but of peach potpourri. In the living room to the right, the glow from the VCR’s clock cast an eerie deep-ocean green on the carpet.
Reen turned left and found the stairs that led to where Hopkins was riding the slow breakers of his slumber. Behind him, quiet as thieves, soft as cats, the Loving Helpers followed.
Five rooms, all open, the cobalt of night gathered in the doorways. Downstairs the furnace came on with a low rumble and an exhalation of heated air. Somewhere in the darkness a mechanical clock ticked. Reen chose the second of the right-hand doors, the one from which Hopkins’s sleep licked at the edges of his mind.
Hopkins lay, a graveyard hump, under moonlit covers. Reen, whose ancestors had crawled in twilight tunnels and had eyes that pierced all shadows, saw Hopkins’s hand curled innocently under his jaw.
Two bruises on the jaw, Marian had told him, where strong unexpected fingers had clutched Jeff’s face. Reen could almost hear the sudden, frightened squeak of the rocking chair, the clink of teeth against metal, the felling explosion.
The Loving Helpers, dainty and elfin, were drawn by body warmth, by curiosity, to Hopkins. One grasped the man’s hand. In a milky spill of moonlight from the blinds Reen saw Hopkins’s eyes fly open.
“Who am I?” Reen asked, stepping to the bed.
“Reen,” Hopkins whispered, not needing to read the nameplate, for now Hopkins could see as a Cousin saw. He could look past the unremarkable face straight into Reen where the soul itself murmured identity.
“Get up,” Reen said.
With a thin moan Hopkins sat up in bed, the Helpers clustered around, touching him like street children in some strange Third World country.
“You murdered Jeff,” Reen told him. “You murdered Jonis.”
Humans responded in different ways to a Helper’s touch. Marian quietly, steadily wept. Hopkins was the speechless type, his terror so profound that it couldn’t be given tongue. He shuddered. His face poured sweat. His eyes were tender, moist, globular, like peeled plums.
“Tell me,” Reen said.
“Yes.”
“Do you have a gun in the house?”
Hopkins’s reply came in a reedy squeal, the sound of a saxophonist hitting a bad note. “Yes.”
“Get it.”
The man’s mind fought to escape; his body ignored it. When his feet hit the floor, he looked down at them in surprise.
“Get it now,” Reen told him.
With trembling hands Hopkins slid open the night stand drawer. In it lay a nickel-plated pistol.
Hopkins looked up at Reen in mute, apprehensive hope, as though praying the exercise was over.
“Pick it up.”
When the hand obeyed, Hopkins’s jaw dropped in slapstick surprise.
Against a wall of the darkened room sat a rolltop desk. Reen walked over and pulled out the chair. “Sit here,” he said. “Bring the gun.”
Hopkins’s mind was obviously screaming for him to stop, He walked stiff-legged. The Helpers led him to the chair, and Hopkins collapsed into it.
“Put the muzzle in your mouth,” Reen said.
A twitch ran through the muscles in Hopkins’s cheeks. His breathing was shallow and rapid. Reen heard a drip-drip on the carpet. The man was urinating. His maroon pajamas were soaked.
Hopkins’s face twisted grotesquely. His jaw worked. He was struggling to talk. “Tali. Tali.”
“I know all about Tali. Put the muzzle in your mouth.”
“The others ... not me. Marian Cole. Yes. Yes. Jonis. But didn’t mean–”
“Do what I said.”
Hopkins’s mouth twitched closed. His eyes bulged as he watched his hand turn on the pivot of its wrist. His lips parted in a rictus of a smile. His teeth stayed clenched, the only mutiny he could muster.
“Pull the trigger,” Reen said.
Hopkins moaned. On his teeth the muzzle was playing frantic castanets.
The Taskmaster leaped forward. “No!”
Reen looked into the white-rimmed blank pennies that were Hopkins’s eyes.
“Pull the–”
An explosion. The head snapped backward. The back of it blossomed open like an autumn-blown rose, strewing red petals of skull to the floor.
Hopkins’s right foot kicked the desk once, hard. His arm jerked out away from him, flinging the pistol in an arc to smash the dressing-table mirror. His body heaved, then flopped wearily back into the chair.
After the boom of the gun, the silence of the room was so complete that it seemed to Reen he had been struck deaf. A sliver of mirror fell from the frame and tinkled on the dresser.
A Loving Helper shrieked, rubbing its hands as though Hopkins’s death had left gummy acid on its palms.
“How could you do this?” the Taskmaster cried. “How dare you do this thing?”
The Helpers were screaming, screaming until the house echoed with their high-pitched cries.
In the Green Room, Reen knew, Jeff was laughing again, laughing to beat the band.
“Get them under control, damn it,” Oomal said.
The Taskmaster glared, “I can’t. They absorbed the death agony. No one can control them now.”
Thural retreated. Oomal did, too. The noise the Helpers were making was the noise of forged steel as it bends.
“Someone will hear,” Oomal said, glancing nervously out a window.
“They’ll make every Helper we have go mad.” The Taskmaster slipped a rod from his belt and touched one and then another of them. The small Helpers crumpled to the ground soundlessly, like crusts of charcoal that, unnoticed, had burned to ash. Somewhere in the darkness of the house a clock chimed the hour.
“You killed them,” the Taskmaster said as he contemplated the outcome of his sad, final chore.
At their feet the three Loving Helpers lay in a tumble, the obsessive light of Communal Mind extinguished in their eyes, their gray skin dim as smoke.
The furnace clicked off. The clock gave one last peal and then fell silent.
Reen thought he heard Hopkins’s never-voiced pleas echo from room to empty room. And somewhere in the silent house he thought he heard a Helper scream, its cry like tearing metal.
REEN PICKED UP one of the child-sized Loving Helpers and made his way down the steps, cradling his burden as snugly as he might have held Angela. Behind him he could hear Oomal, Thural, and the Taskmaster following, none of them speaking.
There was nothing to say. Reen walked across William Hopkins’s dead lawn, the small head of the Helper nestled lifelessly against his shoulder.
They’re not as intelligent as dogs, he had once admitted to Marian. But, oh, how much more loyal was this flesh of his flesh, Reen’s skewed mirror. He pressed his cheek against the smooth cool cranium of the Helper, the bulbous case where no thought but duty had ever sparked.
Reen had never touched one, and now he marveled at the feel of that thick skin which was a copy of his own; he wondered at the solidity of i
ts body and the twig-fragility of its limbs.
Halfway across the grass he stopped. Thural tried to take the body from him, but Reen pulled away. The others were now waiting with their own limp burdens at the ship’s door.
“Come, Reen-ja. Come,” Thural urged softly.
Reen twisted away. “No.”
Reen wanted to weep for the Helper but couldn’t. Cousins were made from emotionless clay. Only when they reached sapience did they discover there were things to weep for, but by then it was too late. They hadn’t the genetic tools for mourning.
He heard Oomal’s gentle voice, Brother to Brother. “Let me have the Helper, Reen-ja. It’s time to go.”
After a hesitation Reen put the corpse into his Brother’s arms. The Helper’s head lolled back, sharp chin pointed to the sky, eyes huge, opaque, and sightless. As Oomal turned, the Helper’s arm swung like a heavy rope.
In the ship the others went to the lounge, but Reen sat alone in a small blue meditation room near the door. He fingered the lightning bolt at his chest, the symbol of his intelligence: a brilliant spark from earth to sky.
Fully ninety-three percent of his Brothers had been culled from the nest, raised separately from those who would have individual temperaments and individual names. Reen didn’t know what his Helper Brothers looked like. He doubted he could pick them out from the others. Loving Helpers were interchangeable. They were the faceless night that surrounded the lightning.
Reen sat until Oomal came to tell him the ship had landed.
“Reen-ja, you’re in no shape to go into the Cousin Place,” he said after the door had closed behind him. “So let’s talk for a minute. I have something I need to tell you.”
Oomal sat beside his Brother, not slouching in the chair, as was his new style, but ramrod straight, his old.
“You’re the First and I’m no Cousin Conscience, but I have to tell you that you fucked up.”
Reen didn’t bother to nod.
“Tali’s going to crucify you with this. For a while tonight you had the upper hand. I mean, here Tali knows about Jonis, lies to the Community, and you kill your only goddamned witness.”
Brother Termite Page 15