"The Balrog can supposedly determine whether a being is sentient. Don’t ask me how it works — maybe a killer gives off non-sentient psychic vibrations. The damned moss isn’t perfectly telepathic, thank God, but it can sometimes do an uncanny job of peeking into someone’s mind."
No kidding, I thought. Out loud, I said, "You really think the Mandasars are dangerous non-sentients?"
"No." Festina gave me an apologetic look. "But we have to make sure, Edward. Otherwise, we could end up like Willow — killed for not being careful enough. The League expects us to make our best efforts not to violate the law."
"So you don’t trust the kids, but you trust the Balrog?"
"In this particular instance, I trust the Balrog’s judgment. It doesn’t mean I trust the Balrog in general — that fuzzy-assed bastard scares the piss out of me. But on our upcoming trip, the Balrog’s life is at stake too."
"Why?"
"Kaisho’s coming with us to Troyen," Festina replied. "If one of your Mandasars is non-sentient and the Balrog lies to us about that, it’s the Balrog who’ll die when our ship crosses the line. We mere humans will be blameless; the League won’t fault us for being deceived by a superior species."
As she spoke, Festina had a grim little smile on her face… and for a second, I thought she might be hoping the Balrog would get executed by the League. If there was no other way to get rid of the creature — if you couldn’t scrape it off its host — then maybe you’d look for situations that’d kill the Balrog without hurting the human underneath.
A few seconds before, I was going to ask Festina why she wanted Kaisho to come with us to Troyen… but I decided I didn’t want to know.
The wheelchair drifted around each Mandasar in turn — Counselor trying to look composed, Zeeleepull trying to look tough, the workers trying to look so meekly unimportant they wouldn’t be worth eating — while Kaisho barely turned her head to give the kids a glance. Why would she? She couldn’t see for all the hair in front of her face, so why pretend to stare at anyone?
"Why does she wear her hair like that?" I asked Festina. "Does she have moss on her face? Is she really really…" I stopped. Considering the blotch on the admiral’s own cheek, there was no polite way to finish my question.
But Festina guessed what I was going to say. "Is she really really ugly?" Festina suggested. "Is she disfigured?" "Um. Sorry."
"No," the admiral said, "it’s a valid question. Especially since Kaisho used to be an Explorer. You know she must have had something wrong with her."
I felt myself blush. I couldn’t even look in the admiral’s direction.
"Kaisho did have… a facial condition," Festina said. "You don’t need to know the details. But when she got infected with the Balrog, the condition cleared up. The Balrog actually tinkered with Kaisho’s genes and hormones to cure the problem. I suppose the Balrog was trying to be nice; it could read Kaisho’s surface thoughts well enough to know how she hated the… blemishes. In a way, clearing up Kaisho’s face was like a wedding gift — a demonstration that being bonded to a Balrog wasn’t all bad.
"But from Kaisho’s point of view," Festina continued, "her face and its flaws were key parts of her life. Her identity. To have that identity casually erased by an alien parasite… well, imagine being subjected to cosmetic surgery till you didn’t look like yourself. It wouldn’t matter if you ended up more beautiful than you’d ever dared hope; you’d feel violated. Especially if your hideous old face was what made you feel like an Explorer, and that was the one thing in your life you felt proud of."
Festina suddenly sucked in a sharp breath and turned away from me. "Anyway," she muttered, "I’m sure that’s what Kaisho feels. Her mind gets more and more integrated with the Balrog every day, but still there’s a part of her, outraged and bitter over what the damned moss did to her face. Making her look ‘normal’ instead of like herself. So she hides behind her hair in shame — she doesn’t want to be seen as she is now."
Odd. Someone hiding and ashamed for being made better than she was to start with. Of course, "better" is always in the eye of the beholder… but if I were Kaisho, I’d cover my legs, not my face.
The Balrog’s inspection didn’t take long. One circuit around each Mandasar, then Kaisho announced, "They’re acceptable. No more homicidal than the rest of you."
Festina grimaced. "Not what I’d call an effusive recommendation."
"What do you expect?" Kaisho asked. "Humans and Mandasars are borderline at best. With luck in the gene lottery, and no crisis that stresses you past the breaking point, you can stay sentient all your life. If luck goes the other way… you flunk the sentience test. Nothing to be embarrassed about — both your species are still evolving in the right direction. You just have farther to go before you reach the exalted level of… oh, a certain mossy race that modesty forbids me to mention."
Zeeleepull muttered, "Evolve, evolve, evolve, and end up as moss? Stupid universe."
"Now you know how the dinosaurs felt," Festina told him.
"All right," the admiral announced, raising her voice to the assembled Mandasars, "as you probably know, my name is Festina Ramos and I… I’m heading for Troyen, where I hope I’ll find information to solve your recruiter problem." The kids gave a cheer, but short and polite… like they wanted to hear more before they got really enthusiastic.
"In the meantime," Festina said, "the recruiters should be lying low. Last night, they murdered one of your people as he bravely protected Consort Edward and me; as a result of Wiftim’s sacrifice, the police can’t ignore your problems the way they’ve done in the past. With luck, Mandasars all over Celestia will be able to demand better protection… and the cops will have to take them seriously."
That got a slightly bigger cheer. I could imagine how frustrated these kids must be, getting dismissed every time they complained to the Civilian Protection Office. Now, as Festina said, the police had no choice but to put the squeeze on recruiters.
"So I hope," the admiral continued, "you won’t have trouble while we’re gone. Just in case though, I’m leaving this skimmer which I rigged last night with a Mandasar-shaped control seat. You can fly patrols over the valley and keep watch for anyone suspicious — this baby has the navy’s best sensor equipment, able to pick up human heat signatures ten kilometers away. Nobody will be able to sneak up on you."
Everyone in the crowd was beaming now — especially the gentles, who’d probably get into a big fight about who should drive the skimmer. All gentles love to operate expensive machinery… and each one is absolutely convinced she’s the best driver in the universe.
Maybe it wasn’t such a bad thing I was heading off to Troyen; for the next little while, Celestia might get pretty dangerous.
Particularly Celestian airspace.
"That’s settled then," Festina said. "I hope we won’t be gone more than three weeks, but you never know. Whatever happens, we’ll be back as soon as we can." She smiled. "In the meantime, cooperate with the police but don’t let down your guard. The recruiters hurt themselves badly last night when they resorted to murder; they’ve suddenly lost a lot of friends. Even companies that buy employees from slavers will think twice about dealing with killers. So there’s a chance the recruiters will grow stupid and desperate in the coming days."
"If that’s true," said a gentle in the crowd, "why are you taking Teelu away from us?"
Festina glanced at me. "You want to answer, or shall I?"
"Um," I said. Then I found words coming out of my mouth, with no direction from my brain — taken over again by whatever had grabbed me before. That worried me; I’d hoped that getting possessed was just some weirdness from being poisoned. Why was it happening now, when I felt okay and healthy?
"Children of Troyen," my mouth said, "the next few weeks may be hard for everybody; but if we succeed, you’ll never need to fear recruiters again. Just as important, good people have been abandoned on the homeworld and they deserve to be rescued… if they’re still
alive. They’ve been forced to fend for themselves a long long while. It’s time we did something to help them."
"Teelu" Kaisho whispered, "are you speaking of our poor lost Explorers… or someone else?"
Festina looked at her curiously. Kaisho just chuckled. Her legs flickered, as if the Balrog were laughing too.
The crowd let themselves be shooed back, clearing a patch of ground beside the skimmer. Festina walked to the center of the area and set down a small black box covered with horseshoe-shaped inlays of gold. I’d seen such a box before; it was a Sperm-field anchor, designed to attract and snag the tail from a starship. Festina flicked a switch on the box’s lid and immediately skipped back a pace.
For three seconds nothing happened; then, fluttering out of the sky like the funnel of a tornado, a milky white tube swept down and slapped silently against one of the anchor’s gold horseshoes. The tube was filmy and unsolid, with sparkles of blue and green twinkling deep in its creamy body — like a glittery sleeve of smoke rippling up and up into the blue. It was transparent enough that I could look straight through the tail and see boggled Mandasar faces on the other side.
"Don’t worry," I whispered to Counselor. Which meant I was back in control of my body again — I’d been so busy gawking at the tail, I hadn’t noticed getting unpossessed. "Don’t worry," I repeated, "it’s just a sort of elevator up to a starship."
"A starship in orbit?" she asked.
"Yes."
"But the starship must be hundreds of kilometers above us!"
I nodded. "Sperm-tails are really elastic. You can pull them out thousands of kilometers long."
Counselor swallowed hard. "What do we do?"
"Um. If you stick your hand into the tube’s open end, you get… drawn up. All the way through the tail and into the spaceship overhead."
"Teelu," Counselor said, "if someone dragged me by my arm for several hundred kilometers…"
"It won’t hurt you," I promised her. "As soon as you put a single finger into the tube, the outside universe kind of shoves you in the rest of the way. You don’t get pulled, you get pushed. And once you’re inside the tube… well, it feels very strange, but it doesn’t do actual damage."
Counselor winced. "You’re not filling me with confidence, Teelu."
"Then watch."
I walked over to the Sperm-tail. Before reaching down to the mouth, I asked Festina, "Shall I go first?"
"Be my guest," she replied. "I’ll go last to make sure everyone else is all right."
I nodded and knelt. If you want the honest truth, I’d never gone through a Sperm-tail before either. Real Explorers shot the chute all the time, but me, I’d always traveled in the company of diplomats. "Diplomats," Sam once told me, "do not subject themselves to indignities. It’s called a Sperm-tail, for heaven’s sake. The name alone is enough to demolish your credibility. And I understand that riding one is appallingly visceral. Diplomats hate that; we like to remain detached from physical reality at all times."
Maybe part of that was joking, but Sam still meant it. She and the rest of the diplomats took shuttles from ship to surface, not the slippery white way.
At the last second, just as I was sticking my hand into the Sperm’s mouth, I wondered what my sister meant by "appallingly visceral." Then I found out.
22
SQUIRTING THROUGH THE TUBE
Gulp.
That was the Sperm-tube swallowing me. Out of the real universe, into an artificial one that fluttered and fish-tailed, taking me with it. My whole body turned to water, pumping through a pipe that twisted, turned, narrowed, expanded, did loop-the-loops. I had no bones; I had no solid parts at all, just liquid and steam, spurting up the Sperm-tail at high pressure.
One other thing: I wasn’t alone.
I could feel another presence squirting along with me, a blaze of intelligence burning right next to my skin, as if it was only separated from me by a tissue-thin membrane. It had to be the thing that’d been possessing me: a spirit, a ghost, an alien parasite, some entity that hitchhiked in my body and occasionally shoved me aside so it could drive.
What are you? I thought. What do you want? Why me?
The answer was a blast of fiery emotions — angers and sorrows, regrets and resolutions, all knotted up in a package of memories.
My own memories.
Samantha’s body, her clothes sodden with the blood that kept gushing from her punctured chest. A red pool spreading over the floor. Smears of red on my fingers.
Queen Verity’s head plunked on a platter and placed on the royal dinner table… while the rest of her corpse lay ten paces away, both venom sacs sliced open and spilling dribbles of green.
Me running through the night with a heavy black sack over my shoulder, while shooting echoed in the palace behind me. Racing to a garden shed, lifting up a floorboard, seeing the little black box with the gold horseshoe inlays, and the narrow mouth of a Sperm-tail threading off through an underground conduit. Feeding one end of the sack into that mouth and holding my breath as the bulky load disappeared through the impossibly tiny opening, zipping off heaven knows where. Smashing my heel down on the anchor box, breaking it, releasing the Sperm-tail to slither off on its own so no one could follow… Could follow…
Innocence. My daughter.
Whom I hadn’t seen in twenty years.
Whom I’d abandoned on a planet at war.
And I was supposed to be "The Little Father Without Blame"? If I hadn’t been riding the Sperm-tail at that second — if I’d had a solid body — I would have thrown up everything in my stomach.
Second after second, my own memories pounded into my mind like a repeating loop. Sam soaked with blood; Verity dead; carrying young Innocence in that bag; Sam and her blood again. As if the thing riding with me up the Sperm-tail was trying to make me see something, but I wasn’t smart enough to understand.
Sam’s blood. Me, reaching down to touch the red stick-mess. Lifting my fingers to my nose…
A voice screamed No! inside my head: fighting the memory, fighting the thing that was trying to make me remember. The screaming voice didn’t seem part of me, any more than the force pummeling me with my own memories; but I was eager to shout No! myself. Anything to escape ugly replays of the most awful night of my life.
So I yelled, No, go away, stop it, stop it, stop it! I could feel the memory-thing howl in despair, burning with frustration at my refusal to watch. It pounded away on the thready thin barrier that separated its consciousness from mine; but before it could bash through, I hurtled back into normal space and collided with a mound of soft padding.
I don’t know how long I lay there, trying to clear my head. Not long — the padding was jelly bagged up in rubbery plastic, nice and yielding on impact but cold and wobbly the longer you stayed on top of it. They must have made it that way on purpose, so you wouldn’t sprawl there forever… especially when other people were coming through the Sperm-tube right behind you.
Other people. Kaisho.
With a surge of adrenaline, I tried to heave myself off the landing pad. The jelly beneath me gurgled and sloshed, absorbing my motion; when I pushed harder, my hand just sank into the folds of the bag. Like trying to fight a tar baby, I thought. Forcing myself to be calm, I pulled my hands tight to my chest and simply rolled sideways… off the bag just as Kaisho barreled out of the tube behind me.
Her mossy legs missed me by a whisker. I was sure that’s why she’d come right after me — in hopes of an accidental collision. The Balrog would slam into me, then a splurge of hungry red spores would ooze across my skin…
No, I told myself. Don’t be stupid. The Balrog couldn’t want to possess a person with screwed-up chemicals in his brain. Especially not when I was already half-possessed by something else. "Help me up," Kaisho whispered as she sprawled on the jelly pad. "Please."
On her trip through the Sperm-tail, Kaisho’s hair had got all mussed… which means it’d fallen off her face enough to show what she real
ly looked like. I found her striking in an elegant, weathered way — what people usually call "handsome," because they won’t call women beautiful after the first wrinkle appears. Kaisho had her share of wrinkles around her soft brown eyes… but the wrinkles had such a well-aged grace, maybe they deserved to be called crinkles instead. Serene and amused, both at once. Strong cheekbones, wide half-smiling lips…
She saw me staring. The half smile froze on her face — not a sudden jolt, but a clamp-down of control, keeping her expression exactly as it was till she could cover up. I could tell she was forcing herself not to hurry; oh so slowly, she shook her hair down over her eyes, then brushed her fingers through a few times to make sure there were no gaps in the veil.
"Maybe someday you should stop hiding," I said.
"Maybe someday I will," she answered in her usual whisper. "When the Balrog has ‘elevated’ my consciousness to such heights I can’t feel childish emotions." For a moment, the fingers she was combing through her hair clenched into fists — gripped by some sudden emotion, rage, shame, I don’t know. She trembled with the power of it; I could imagine her face scrunched in on itself under that hair, her eyes squeezed shut, the serenely crinkled skin bunched up into ridges and hollows.
A long ten seconds passed before she relaxed. Then she shook her head and flung her arms wide toward me, crying, "Help me, Teelu." Not a whisper — a desperate plea.
But in the next instant, a shudder went through her; and though her position scarcely changed, all the pleading passion vanished. Got squashed down. "Help me, Teelu," she said, back to her old staid whisper. "Help me up, if you please. Festina promised me time to get clear, but soon that Sperm-tube will spit out a three-hundred-kilo lobster with big sharp claws."
I stared at her a moment. What had just happened? The woman herself speaking, "Help me," then the Balrog choking her off? Or was it all playacting: the Balrog amusing itself by making me worry, or trying to trick me into something I’d regret?
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