Brother Death

by Steve Perry

  Kifo said, “Brother Angst, you may cross first.”

  “I am honored, my Unique!”

  The man was thirty years older than Kifo, had been instrumental in teaching him the ways of the faith, and it seemed only proper to allow him this small favor. Once in Paradise, what did it matter who arrived first or last?

  Brother Angst stepped toward the wall, hesitated not even an eyeblink, and vanished in the steely murk.

  An involuntary gasp escaped from those who had never seen the phenomenon before. Even the Unique still felt a sense of amazement after having witnessed and done it himself a number of times.

  “Sister Weary?”

  The second member of the Very Few squared her shoulders and strode forward, vanished from the world.

  Kifo turned to look at the prisoner. Mkono held the man by the shoulders. He was staring, all right. His mouth hadn’t gaped, but his amazement was plain to see. It made Kifo feel a certain sense of power.

  Perhaps he should not have reacted so hastily in having the two cools who had come snooping killed. It would have increased his pleasure to see their wonder before they died. Ah, well. Even a candidate for godhood could not think of everything. Perhaps he would revive them once he became a god and allow them to see it then. He laughed at the thought. Ah, the power of a god!

  The passage continued, each of the Few in turn stepping up to the wall and vanishing into it. They knew to cross over and wait until he arrived to lead them. The Zonn realm was not a place in which to wander around unguided.

  When all in the chamber had crossed save himself, Kifo turned and waved at Mkono. The big mue nodded, slid his hands up and around the prisoner’s head, twisted sharply, and broke his neck. The man fell in an untidy heap. Mkono waved once, then turned and walked away. He did not look back.

  Kifo nodded. So much for that little problem. He stepped up to the swirling wall and into it. He felt the bone-freezing blast of cold that always came with the crossing. As he took the step that would end in another world, another universe, he heard a small humming behind him. Ah. The vouch. He had forgotten to shut it off. He wondered idly how long it would wait here for him. Given the life of the power system, it could be years.

  Well. No matter. It was only a machine, loyal, but of no importance. Not to one who was going to be crowned a god. He would hardly need it when he returned.

  Taz attacked the weights in her gym, slamming them back and forth, doing too many sets and reps, trying to blunt her anxiety. She tired herself but did not quell the worry.

  If Ruul were here now, she would marry him in a second. All it took was the knowledge that he might not be around to make Taz realize how much she really loved him. She hoped it wasn’t too late.

  She had no patience with the workout machines. She loaded plates onto the bar, squatted with more than she could safely handle, managed to keep from falling and being crushed. The dumbbells she bench pressed were five kilos past her usual maximum and she did too many sets.

  After an hour she couldn’t move any more weight. Her muscles were pumped so full that she could barely bend any joint; it was as if she had balloons under her skin, skin stretched so tight it felt as if she moved suddenly it would tear, spilling her muscles, her guts, her bones onto the gym floor.

  She went to the shower, dialed the spray to its hardest and as hot as she could stand it. Vapor fogged the room, coated the mirrors, condensed and ran down the walls.

  The two POs sent to check out the Zonn Ruins had not reported in. Two more units were sent to find out why. It was dark and they had found the flitter but no sign of the missing officers yet. Taz didn’t doubt that the pair had met resistance of some kind and might be fertilizing plant roots somewhere. She hoped Ruul wasn’t with them.

  When her fingers started to pucker she shut the water off. Stood under the dryer until she was parched.

  Went to her bedroom and sat naked on the bed. Stared at the wall.

  She should try to get some sleep; but no, she knew it would be a wasted effort. Despite the grueling workout, despite the long shower, she was still wired. And she didn’t want to take any chem that might make her dull and stupid if a call came in the middle of the night. Better to find something useful to do, she had to be awake

  The com chimed. She swatted it to life before the first cycle ended. “Yes?”

  “Chief, this is Thumal.”

  The WC for the corpse-stealer’s shift. “Go.”

  “We, ah, found Nestom and Parleel. At the Zonn Ruins. Dead. Broken necks.”

  “Jesu Damn.”

  “Yeah. And we found Oro, too. Also a broken neck.”

  Taz’s heart froze, her body turned to steel. “Oh, God.” Time stopped, the universe burned, she with it.

  The final deathrattle of her words grated from her as stone slammed into diamond: “Oh, God!”

  Ruul was dead. All was bleak beyond words.

  “He’s lucky,” the WC said.

  For a beat it didn’t make sense. She blinked. Found she had one final word in her: “Lucky?”

  “It’s a fucking miracle, that’s what it is.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Him surviving like that.”

  Taz was born again; Atlas returned, took the weight of the planet from her shoulders. Allowed her to go free.

  Ruul was alive?

  Alive!

  “He’s in pretty bad shape,” the WC said. “Gonna be in spinal rehab for a couple months. He’d have been as dead as the others, except when the boys found him, there was a goddamn vouch plugged into him, pumping myelostat and antiplaz and Buddha knows what-all into him. Weirdest fucking thing, a vouch out in the middle of nowhere like that.”

  Taz was already up and moving, jerking clothes on, heedless of her hair, her face. He was alive! She had to get to him.

  “He’s at the Southside Mediplex. I thought you might have some questions for him so they’re keeping him awake until you get there-”

  That was the last she heard of that particular call. She was out the bedroom door and yelling.

  “Saval! He’s alive, goddammit, he’s alive! Saval! Get dressed!”

  She’d never been so happy in all her life. Never.

  Chapter TWENTY-FIVE

  RUUL DIDN’T LOOK so hot but he was more than a little lucky to be alive. Bork watched his sister beam at the injured man where he stretched out inside his Healy unit, and if love were sunshine the room would look like the heart of a nova. Ruul wasn’t going to be feeling much from the neck down for a couple of months, until his spinal cord underwent reversion and repair, but he could still smile.

  “You stupid bastard,” Taz said. “Why didn’t you yell or something?”

  His voice was weak when he spoke but didn’t quaver. “The two buffoons had a gun jammed into my ribs. Noise would have gotten me pierced. I decided I’d rather put that off as long as I could. Besides, if you and the gray giant had come rumbling back into the bar, they might have gotten you, too.”

  “I’m a trained cool,” she said. “I’d have shot the guns out of their hands.”

  “Right.”

  The medic standing next to the Healy adjusting the monitor panel shook his head. “You must have a patron god concerned about you, M. Oro. Not everybody who gets his neck broken has a top-of-the-line vouch idling nearby looking for somebody to latch on to.”

  Bork raised an eyebrow at the medic. “Just how did that happen?”

  “The EEG and MEG pattern locked into the unit’s primary care mode belongs to this fellow you’re looking for, according to the printout. Apparently something fairly major must have happened to him.”

  “How you figure?” Bork asked. Taz, focused on Ruul, didn’t seem to be paying much attention here.

  “Well, the PC mode is what runs these things. Once you are entered into the machine’s operating system, you are who it takes care of. It won’t leave to help somebody two meters away if they slip and break a leg or something; it is yo
urs. If you die, then the basic first aid mode kicks in and the thing is available to offer whatever it can to anybody who is ill or injured within its range. System default, built into all the top models. The manufacturer makes a big deal out of it but it’s basically to cover lawsuits. Wouldn’t look too good to have a life-saving vouch idling its motors while people were dropping like flies all around it; that doesn’t generate a lot of sympathy for medcoes on the planets where they still use human juries. According to the records, your priest or whoever stopped transmitting his EEG and MEG patterns all of a sudden. With its primary program cancelled, the vouch zeroed in on the nearest human, in this case M. Oro, and when it turned out he was in need of help, as evidenced from his disturbed vital functions, it rolled over and plugged itself into him. The newer models can do that without being specifically instructed to do so; they have some leeway.”

  “Lucky for Ruul,” Bork observed.

  “A miracle. The vouch must have gotten to him within sixty seconds of his injury. Another thirty or forty seconds and it would have probably been too late.”

  “I want it,” Ruul said. “The vouch. I’m going to give it an electrical plug of its own and let it graze for the rest of its life. Maybe bring it a mate and breed little vouches.”

  Taz smiled, something she’d been doing a lot of in the last few minutes. She glanced up at Bork. He knew what she wanted.

  “What say we step out into the corridor for a few minutes?” Bork said to the medic.

  “Huh? Why?”

  “I think Chief Bork there has something she wants to say to M. Oro in private.”

  “Oh. Oh, sure.”

  Taz pressed her hand against the thick clear plastic as if the gesture might be able to transfer some of what she felt to the injured man.

  “Listen,” she said, “I need to tell you something.”

  “I’m not going anywhere. Fire away.”

  “You still want to marry me? Exclusive contract?”

  “Well, I don’t know. I’m not really up for it at the moment.”

  “Ru…”

  “Don’t get all weepy on me, Tazzi. It’s a stupid question; we Oros don’t change our minds about such things. I’d marry you in a San Yubi second and you know it.”

  “Okay.”

  ” ‘Okay’? Just like that? ‘Okay’? “

  “Soon as you get well.”

  He grinned, tried to move, she could see it on his face.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Trying to get up and out of this thing. Open the lid. Get me an exoframe.”

  “I can’t. You know better than that.”

  “Then I am going to get well faster than anybody in history ever has. Why, parts of me are healing even as we speak. I can’t feel them but I’m sure they are.”

  She laughed. “I love you,” she said.

  “I know. Me, too, you.”

  Taz laughed again. Why, it hadn’t hurt a bit to say that. In fact, it felt quite wonderful.

  “Those people are going to be sorry they hurt you.”

  “Whoa, hold up. You aren’t going after them? Not after what I told you? They walked into the fucking wall and fucking disappeared.”

  “We know. Missel is working on a device that will let us follow them.”

  “Tazzi …”

  “Hey, I’m a cool, remember? You said I could work after we were married; it wouldn’t bother you any.”

  “Yeah, well, if I weren’t lying here like a sack of soypro maybe it wouldn’t bother me.”

  “Are you going to give me trouble about this?”

  He managed a dry chuckle. “Not much. If I were up and myself, I would.”

  “If you were up and yourself, we’d be destroying the room with our naked bodies and chasing bad guys would be the last thing on my mind. That make you feel better?”

  “Well. Maybe a little. Tazzi, be careful. These are sick people, they’re dangerous.”

  “I know. And what they don’t know is who they are fooling with. We Borks take care of our families.

  Always. Saval and I both have scores to settle. The fanatics are the ones you should be worried about.”

  He essayed a nod. “I think maybe you’re right. But now that I’ve got you where I want you, more or less, I don’t want to risk losing you.”

  “Lighten up, crip. Guys like these we eat for breakfast.”

  “The man who broke my neck was a giant, Tazzi, bigger than Saval. And he tossed your brother around like a ball, didn’t he?”

  “He caught him from behind. There isn’t a man or mue alive who can come straight at Saval and walk away.” It was brave talk. She hoped it were true. But even if it wasn’t, she was going after this Kifo Unique. The man had caused a shitload of trouble for a whole lot of people, her included, and one way or another, he was going down. She was going to bring him back and it didn’t much matter to her if he were alive or in little pieces when that happened.

  Missel shook his head. “Listen, to be sure about this I need a couple of days to run tests.”

  “No,” Taz said. “We can’t afford the time. We don’t know where the other side of the Zonn trail leads. A couple of days might put them out of reach.”

  Deep in the bowels of the police electronic lab, Missel shook his head yet again. The device lay on the table, hooked into a test grid. It was no bigger than a package of flicksticks, an innocuous rectangle with a rounded bulge on one end, flat gray spunplast with a couple of buttons and diode-analogs on it.

  “You’re the ones who pointed out it was dangerous.”

  “Is it dangerous?” Bork asked.

  “Well …

  “Come on, Missel

  “Not that we can tell. It’s got an overload kickout and a short relay and pin-it. It’ll draw power, there’s an inducer that will pull more than enough from any place in ‘cast radius, plus I’ve installed a battery that should give you plenty of spare juice, you need it, but …”

  ” ‘But’ what?” Taz said.

  “Look, you have to have a team of scientists on this! I know I’m just a second grade cool-tech, I’m not a theoretical type, but this is big! You are talking about a whole new branch of physics here!

  Interdimensional stuff! There are some guys at the University who would come all over themselves to get their hands on this! We’re talking about Helsinki Prize-class stuff here. Listen, I have to pass this on, I can’t sit on it. I can’t believe nobody ever thought of it before.”

  “Somebody did,” Bork said. He nodded at the device.

  “Yeah,” Missel said. “That’s right, but it got lost. We can’t lose it again. I’m sorry, I have to insist on this, this is too valuable-”

  “Tell you what,” Taz said. “After we collect these geeps, the toy and all the specs are yours, Missel. You can do whatever you want with it. Hell, somebody is gonna win the Helsinki Prize, why shouldn’t it be you? You’re good enough to work backward and figure out the theory, right?”

  The skinny man blinked. Bork almost laughed, held it in but barely. Scientists were a strange breed. It had never occurred to him to try and take credit for this; his face said so as plain as a large-print reader.

  “Huh?” he said.

  Taz did laugh. “Missel, you don’t want to be a labbo all your life. This is your ticket to respectability.

  Only we get to use it first.”

  The light of intellectual dawn shined from the man’s eyes. The possibilities flooded from him like dance-floor laser beams.

  “Oh. Oh, wow.”

  “Show us how it works,” Taz said. “And when we are done, it’s all yours. Missel? You there?”

  “Huh? Oh, yeah. What?”

  This time Bork laughed with his sister.

  The slab of material looked as solid as anything Taz ‘had ever seen. She touched it and it sucked heat from her bandit felt like a chunk of frozen steel. She pushed against the door-sized block and it was heavy enough so it didn’t budge.

  Missel bl
inked like someone with dry-eye disease, the device he had produced gripped in a sweaty hand.

  He had explained the controls to them. They were in a section of the lab that could be closed off, and the three of them were alone. Saval said, “Here, lemme do it.”

  “Your butt,” Taz said. “Me.”

  He looked at her. “We both go.”

  She nodded.

  Saval took the device. Pointed it at the slab of material. Looked at Taz again, at the tech, then pressed the button.

  The gunmetal blue-gray turned to smoke, flowing in wild patterns, but contained by the bounds of the material as a solid.

  “It did that before,” Missel said. “I tossed a light pen into it and it vanished.”

  “Well,” Bork said, “if we see your pen, we’ll get it for you.”

  Together he and Taz stepped into the wall.

  Chapter TWENTY-SIX

  WHEN KIFO STEPPED into the realm of the Zonn, his flock stood bunched and waiting. They were not all afraid, but fear rose from some of them as heat waves do from hot plastcrete.

  Kifo smiled. The wall behind them towered to infinity, or at least past the height that the eyes of men could see. The ground crawled with a blue fog nearly the color of the wall itself, a sinuous and thick blanket that curled and flowed around the ankles of the few as if it were alive and lapping at their flesh with gaseous tongues. In the distance blue-white lights danced like giant fireflies in the skies above fat hillocks that appeared to move in some kind of repeating S-pattern, each hill moving at a slightly different speed and cycling back to where it began.

  Visibility was limited to a few kilometers; beyond that a purplish murk occluded the air, giving the already strange scene an even more sinister look. It was slightly cool, though not uncomfortably so. The air had an acrid smell and it tingled against mucous membranes, drying them, making them just a little raw.

  Something cried out in the distance, the rattle of a great bird, perhaps, or that which easily mimicked one. A low hum, a drone answered the cry, a sound that resonated deep in the pit of Kifo’s belly, as if attuning itself to humans, or perhaps tuning them to it.