by Dave Duncan
After a moment’s silence, Brother Andre said, “Your sentiments do you credit, Athena, but you should perhaps refrain from expressing them until you are safely home on Ayne.”
“I call on the rest of you to be my witnesses!” Athena was a long way from being drunk, but she was at least as far from sober. “Even STARS cannot be brash enough to leave the entire commission here. If I do not return, you can make a martyr out of me. Or you can sell your silence to STARS for a lifetime of wealth. Your choice.” She drained her glass. No matter what anyone did, that rock was going to slam home four days from now and burn up the world. And she had been used as a tool to give this ghastly geocide an aura of respectability. “Four days!” she said.
“Three now.” The piping tone came from Solan. “See how the light is failing? Eclipse has begun. End of Toody, start of Thirdensdy. In bright week Javel blots out the sun during eclipses; in dark week, we see Pock’s own shadow crossing Javel! So our days start at the same time all over the world. Yours don’t, do they?” He was looking at Athena.
“No,” she agreed. “On Ayne we take a long time to start a new day. But on Pock’s World enlightenment can come very quickly.”
Across the table, Linn smiled sourly at her metaphor. Solan looked puzzled.
“Totality lasts about two hours,” said the archbishop, who had been feasting heartily during all this. “Time for Compline, Brother.”
* * *
The paths were well lit, flashing silver in the rain. Athena walked back with Linn and Solan. They bade Solan goodnight at his door, and he went in quietly, carrying a plate of food he’d brought in case his father was awake.
“Skerry has terminal pancreatic cancer,” Linn said as they continued. “Oxindole told me. It’s into his lungs and everything else now. His wife died a fortnight ago of a brain tumor. Pock’s is a tough world.”
“Very.”
“That was quite a speech you made. The opening of your presidential campaign, was it?”
“I told you I had decided not to run. I couldn’t run for parking attendant now. I’ll be forever tainted by the destruction of Pock’s World.”
Linn snorted. “Make that speech you made a while back and you’ll ride a landslide. Carabin is in STARS’s pocket, of course. Most politicians in the sector are, whether they know it or not. If you want to muzzle STARS, you will have to run. Your opponents will be extremely well funded. And you will have to win big—big to do any good.”
Where were the brave words now? Had the noble purpose died so soon? She did not reply.
“But Senator Fimble is going to retire to Portolan and make a cute little baby for pretty boy-toy Proser. President Fimble, now—President Fimble would have been something.”
They were almost at her door.
They walked in silence, reached it, stopped.
“Is the offer still open?” she asked.
“Certainly. Lifelong ambition, remember?” He had been waiting for the question, damn him!
“You want to come in, then?” she said. Decision made.
“No, let’s go to mine.”
They walked on. “Do you remember the first summer at college?” he said. “You were getting it off with Joe and Tiny.”
“Joe, yes. Never Tiny; I was never stoned enough to need Tiny.” She wished she were stoned now. This was going to be a cold-blooded commercial transaction.
Linn thumbed the door open and let her enter first. Lights came on.
“Lights brightest,” he ordered. “Secure door, no callers. This way to the bedroom, darling. We went skinny dipping one night, a gang of us. One night in particular, I mean.” He stopped her in the doorway. “Wait here a moment.”
He walked across the room to the bed and turned. He was still wet and shiny from the rain, his curls sparkling. And he was still a hunk, just as he had been at sixteen. The humiliation would not be physical.
“I watched you come walking up out of the sea,” he said. “You went straight to Tiny. Joe wasn’t there, but others were. You were not stoned, and you did go to Tiny. Remember now?”
She nodded, feeling her face burning. This was going to be even worse than she had expected.
“Remember what you did when you got to him?”
She nodded.
“I swore then that one night you would come to me like that. And do what you did then.” He dropped his shorts.
“Slowly,” he said, as she started to undress. “Good. Now walk slowly. And smile. It doesn’t count if you don’t smile.”
Thirdensdy
Ratty wakened unromantically when hot water ran up his nose. He spluttered and choked and wondered where in the world… And which world? He was bathing in wet moss with an entirely gorgeous naked girl who had demonstrated a natural knack for love-making as if she’d been doing it for ten thousand years. He had been deprived of tender caring love for a long time, ever since a one-nighter with Whosit-the-Busty, but Joy had made up for it in spades, doubled and redoubled—greatest lay in the universe already and just started her training! The air was almost chilly on his face and above him spread infinite starry space, not the familiar stars of Ayne, a hundred light years away. And the singing…
Singing? He sat up, which was not as easy as expected in the hot mush. Joy grumbled and made sleepy noises. On the horizon loomed the great dome of Javel in eclipse, black against the stars and yet not black. The Mother glowed with a metallic bluish light, a flickering, ever-changing glow racing hither and thither over the mightiest of worlds. Almost he could see shapes in those lights, faces calling him, writing flashing strange scripts…. How could he hear singing across the vacuum of space? This was a holy place. This was where the Mother spoke to mortals.
He floundered through the moss, staggering and flailing arms to keep his balance in the low gravity, going to see why the voices were calling him, wondering what they were saying. But the singing wasn’t coming from the Mother, but from off to his left, from the tower that Joy had called Quoad, vastly larger than the one in the temple, a gargantuan phallic symbol if ever there was one. Oh Mighty Pillar of Andesite, hear my prayer… Quoad was inhabited, too. Bluish lights ever moving, drifting up the spire, floating down, dancing, writhing, waving, and it was they who were singing to him, calling him. Louder and sweeter soared the songs, odes to the Mother and Quoad. Mighty Quoad. Who was Quoad? Igneous extrusion, phallic symbol, pagan god of virility, did it matter? Dazed and ever-happier, Ratty kept stumbling, ever falling and yet soon moving again, not even remembering getting up, and the lights were brighter, closer, their song soaring to the heavens, to the Mother.
From this new angle, Quoad was crazily tilted out over the edge of the crater. A staircase, a set of crumbling steps, zigzagged up the nearer face. The luminous souls were beckoning him to climb those steps and join them. They would guide him, help him climb, go home to the Mother, and that was Joy’s too-human voice yelling, but raucous, too mortal. Angels’ song was sweeter.
Wham! She cannoned into him and they splashed down together. Water up his nose again. No! No! He struggled. She wrestled and clung, still shouting in his ear.
“What? Let me go, love. They want me. They’re calling… let me go.” He must go, yet he mustn’t hurt her. She was slippery and persistent and amazingly strong, a hundred hands and legs, tree octopus. “Can’t you hear?”
“No! There is no song!”
Yes there was. The song was building, growing desperate. He freed himself, struggled to his knees, and there was the Mother, almost sunk below the edge of the world, flickering and gleaming—and suddenly a speck of gold at the edge, brighter than stars, spreading into a line, widening, brightening, and some practical sanity muttered in his ear that this was sunlight refracted in the Javelian atmosphere. Brighter and brighter, curving around the edge of the disk until the sun itself peeked over and stabbed at his eyes.
Perforce he looked away. The angels had gone, the singing had ended.
“Gone!” he said. He was kneeling in a tangle of Joy, exc
ept that Joy was weeping and sobbing; also still digging her fingers into him like tiger claws. “Sorry, love,” he muttered. “You were saying?” Then the two of them collapsed into the sponge, and he got his arms around her and comforted her.
“You’re back? You’re all right now?”
He nuzzled. “I was always… all… right.” He closed their mouths around the kiss and it developed from there, for there was only one thing a naked man could do with a beautiful naked girl in a warm and totally intimate embrace like that.
* * *
This time it was a peal of thunder that shocked him awake. Rain was splattering all around. He could see nothing through the fog. Lightning flashed close with a head-smashing peel of thunder, so close he thought he could smell it.
“Let’s go!” Joy said.
He grabbed and pulled her flat again. “No! We’re safest here, lying down. It’s the trees that get struck, not the moss.” Roar! “That’s why it’s evolved to hold water, I expect. It’s so conductive it can’t build up a local charge.
“But if the flyer gets hit?”
“We’ll have to walk down.”
“You’re trembling!”
Trembling? He was shaking like a maraca in a rhumba.
Roar! said the storm again.
He told her how his parents had died. She comforted him, which was nice. But then she asked the embarrassing question he had been dreading.
“What were you doing when I caught you?”
He laughed awkwardly. “I saw the lights on Javel. Thunderstorms, of course. The whole planet must be a seething mass of thunderstorms. Aurora, too? Pretty! I wanted to find a better view.”
“But you were heading for Quoad!” She was not convinced. “There’s ruins all around here you could have climbed on. You had a better view of the Mother where we were.”
“Oh? Didn’t see that. You said there was a cliff on the other side? Downdraft… There’s probably a big regional downdraft when the eclipse shadow arrives, yes? Do the clouds usually clear during eclipses?”
“Often, yes.”
“That explains it. I mean explains it scientifically, no disrespect to your goddess. I’m sure she arranges her appearances that way. And the pillar is some different sort of rock, so it might have different conductivity or capacitance or something, and you have temperature differences and this soggy moss, so there’s all kinds of induced currents, I expect. The lights on Quoad would be what’s called St. Elmo’s fire, a static discharge. And the sounds—”
Roar!
He flinched. She must think him a terrible coward.
“You saw lights on Quoad? What sounds? What lights?”
He pulled her down again. Obviously he had alarmed her. “Joy, I have to confess something. I have a dozen implants in the mess I call a brain. The external contacts won’t work here, but I can still adjust my sleep patterns and tune out distractions when I need to concentrate on something—a few useful tricks like that. Something in there must have been resonating with the electrostatic fields. I heard… I heard a sort of warbling humming, like somebody singing without words.”
“Holy Mother!” she whispered. “And you saw lights on Quoad?”
“You mean you didn’t?”
“No. Darling, the thunder’s stopped. Why don’t we find the flyer and our clothes?”
“No hurry,” he murmured, wondering if he might be good enough for another try.
“No. Let’s go!”
Why was she so insistent all of a sudden? He struggled to his feet and helped her up. Where had they left their clothes?
They found their clothes. He turned his back on her while he dressed, wondering as always why nudity was sexy and undressing could be, but dressing never was. Shorts, sandals, and visor didn’t take long, but Joy had just picked hers up and carried on toward the fliers, mother-naked. He bounded over the moss—running turned out to be easier than walking—and caught up with her just as she arrived.
She opened a locker and pulled out the bundle she had packed. She tossed it Ratty. “Dress me.”
Shaken out, the garment was revealed as a white cotton gown.
“I like you better the way you are,” he said.
“Don’t be impudent! After what we just did, I have to wear that. Always. Except in bed,” she added with a return to her childlike grin.
He slid the garment over her head. It was sleeveless but otherwise covered her to the ankles.
He knelt to her. “You are still the sexiest woman in the galaxy, Priestess.”
She touched his head. “Mother bless you.”
He rose and resisted the temptation to kiss her yet again. “Who was Quoad?”
“Quoad is the pillar.” She straddled the flyer.
“But Quoad was a person, a martyr, you said.”
“Quoad the martyr died on the pillar, so it was named after him. Hurry! Get on! I’m starving.”
Chapter 2
By morning the sun was still low in the east, little changed from the previous night. Athena knew it was morning because of her hangover. It was not a wine hangover. It came from too much Linn, from too little sleep, and—above all—from nightmares about the coming holocaust.
The sky was cloudless and deep indigo, with the valley glowing like a green jewel of vineyards and orchards suspended on a blue ribbon of river. In three days it would be charred black.
The air car that came to fetch the commissioners was a reminder that Pock’s world’s rustic facade did hide some high technology; the fact that it was a military vehicle was a sad comment on human priorities. Their destination, Colonel Cassinoid Veterans Hospital, also belonged to the Hederalian army and was a predictably ugly collection of wooden modules lined up in ragged rows. Its watch towers and shock fences showed why it had been chosen to contain the alleged cuckoo.
The greeting party waiting at the edge of the pad comprised about a dozen civilians, several Hederalian army officers, and three armed patrolmen in STARS black. Back on Ayne such STARS anthropoids were a sore point. They ostensibly guarded shuttle landings, but twice in the last year some trigger-happy goons had burned people severely. The resulting uproar had sparked the Mongo Bill—and so, perhaps, started all of Pock’s trouble.
The man who stepped forward to greet the visitors wore STARS black, too, but his visor carried only the company logo, not military insignia, and he was unarmed. He was big even for a Pocosin, a man of middle years with a massive belly, shaven scalp, and a head like a red granite boulder perched on a stack of pancakes. There was something atavistic about him, as if he ought to be wearing skins and carrying a club, or covered with body hair like the men of Saumur or Strigate. Perhaps he had been chosen for his ability to project sheer menace.
“My name is Glaum. I am Chairman of Pock’s World STARS.”
Millie had pushed herself forward as usual. “A pleasure, Friend Glaum, although it would have been more of a pleasure if you had made yourself available to us sooner. We have many questions to put to—”
“You’re Backet,” Glaum growled. “Senator Fimble, Brother Andre, Friend Lazuline, Gownsmen Oxindole and Skerry. Also Young Friend Solan, whom I congratulate on what he did yesterday, even if his courage was misplaced in aiding an escaped criminal. Friend Ratty, I understand, is liaising with the youth wing of the Mother’s Church at Abietin, and the turncoat Braata is on his way there.”
Having thus demonstrated a complete grasp of all the secrets, Glaum indicated a woman with a gesture that seemed to dismiss the rest of the company out of hand. “Doctor Eryngo, who heads up the investigation.”
Eryngo was thin and graying, wrapped in a white lab coat. She looked as if she had not slept in several days and owed the universe an apology for her existence. Athena’s cynical eye summed her up as a good choice for an outside expert, one who would cause STARS no trouble.
She bobbed her head to the group.
“STARS has provided us with some very old records on other cuckoo infestations—Soldier Ants,
Ghouls, Zombies. Our team has not finished analyzing them, but we have established a close enough match to leave no doubt that the present specimen includes material from previous species. We have tentatively named this new variety a Changeling. Shall we now proceed inside and view the specimen?”
Millie had been silenced by Glaum’s snub, and Athena found herself in the lead as the assembly proceeded to a nearby building.
“Doctor, when you say an updated variety…?”
“The match is not exact. The present specimen displays some unique features.”
“It is not human?”
“Absolutely not!”
Two more STARS guards flanked the door. “Admit the visitors, Sergeant,” Glaum said, “and the gownsmen. Keep the locals out.”
In her present mood, Athena had suffered more than enough of this oversized ape. In Doctor Eryngo’s place she would long since have exploded and ordered the boor out of her sight, but apparently he had managed to cow the entire Hederal army also, because she heard no whisper of objection from the military at her back.
“No, Friend Chairman!” She threw her full senatorial authority into that bark. “The prisoner is suspected of being synthetic, but STARS is not a disinterested party. The gownsmen may attend, but the rest of you will wait outside, please. We shall examine the prisoner with only Doctor Eryngo present, advising us on her conclusions.”
Glaum smirked down at her as if she were a comical kitten. “Examine all you want, but the sergeant and I will watch. STARS is responsible for your safety, and this thing is dangerous.”
There were more doors inside, more guards. The precautions seemed absurd by the time they reached the prisoner. His windowless room was half cell, half laboratory, and smelled unpleasantly of both. A waste bin held bloody swabs; machines buzzed and flickered; syringes and sample bottles lay scattered in disorder over a big white workbench. Two guards sat by the entrance, three men in white coats were clustered around a hologram. All were dismissed to make room for the newcomers.
The specimen lay spread out on an examination table in the center, clamped at wrists and ankles, wearing only cotton briefs. As if that were not enough restraint, the table was surrounded by the bluish glow of a shock fence. At first glance the figure was a pubescent Pocosin, a year or two older than Solan. It was scowling, making a brave effort to look brave while being utterly vulnerable to its enemies.