He dropped off to sleep.
The gentle peremptorinesses of the Lady Da brought his eyes open again.
“Commander, why are they sounding it here? Why did you come to us?”
“You, Ma’am, and the gentleman with the ears seem to think best of our group. I thought you might have orders.”
Mercer looked around for the gentleman with the ears. It was himself. In that time his face was almost wholly obscured with a crop of fresh little ears, but he paid no attention to them, other than expecting that B’dikkat would cut them all off in due course and that the dromozoa would give him something else.
The noise from the cabin rose to a higher, ear-splitting intensity.
Among the herd, many people stirred.
Some opened their eyes, looked around, murmured. “It’s a noise,” and went back to the happy drowsing with super-condamine.
The cabin door opened.
B’dikkat rushed out, without his suit. They had never seen him on the outside without his protective metal suit.
He rushed up to them, looked wildly around, recognized the Lady Da and Mercer, picked them up, one under each arm, and raced with them back to the cabin. He flung them into the double door. They landed with bone-splitting crashes, and found it amusing to hit the ground so hard. The floor tilted them into the room. Moments later, B’dikkat followed.
He roared at them, “You’re people, or you were. You understand people; I only obey them. But this I will not obey. Look at that!”
Four beautiful human children lay on the floor. The two smallest seemed to be twins, about two years of age. There was a girl of five and a boy of seven or so. All of them had slack eyelids. All of them had thin red lines around their temples and their hair, shaved away, showed how their brains had been removed.
B’dikkat, heedless of danger from dromozoa, stood beside the Lady Da and Mercer, shouting.
“You’re real people. I’m just a cow. I do my duty. My duty does not include this. These are children.”
The wise, surviving recess of Mercer’s mind registered shock and disbelief. It was hard to sustain the emotion, because the super-condamine washed at his consciousness like a great tide, making everything seem lovely. The forefront of his mind, rich with the drug, told him, “Won’t it be nice to have some children with us!” But the undestroyed interior of his mind, keeping the honor he knew before he came to Shayol, whispered, “This is a crime worse than any crime we have committed! And the Empire has done it.”
“What have you done?” said the Lady Da. “What can we do?”
“I tried to call the satellite. When they knew what I was talking about, they cut me off. After all, I’m not people. The head doctor told me to do my work.”
“Was it Doctor Vomact?” Mercer asked.
“Vomact?” said B’dikkat. “He died a hundred years ago, of old age. No, a new doctor cut me off. I don’t have people-feeling, but I am Earth-born, of Earth blood. I have emotions myself. Pure cattle emotions! This I cannot permit.”
“What have you done?”
B’dikkat lifted his eyes to the window. His face was illuminated by a determination which, even beyond the edges of the drug which made them love him, made him seem like the father of this world-responsible, honorable, unselfish.
He smiled. “They will kill me for it, I think. But I have put in the Galactic Alert—all ships here.”
The Lady Da, sitting back on the floor, declared, “But that’s only for new invaders! It is a false alarm.” She pulled herself together and rose to her feet. “Can you cut these things off me, right now, in case people come? And get me a dress. And do you have anything which will counteract the effect of the super-condamine?”
“That’s what I wanted!” cried B’dikkat. “I will not take these children. You give me leadership.”
There and then, on the floor of the cabin, he trimmed her down to the normal proportions of mankind.
The corrosive antiseptic rose like smoke in the air of the cabin. Mercer thought it all very dramatic and pleasant, and dropped off in catnaps part of the time. Then he felt B’dikkat trimming him too. B’dikkat opened a long, long drawer and put the specimens in; from the cold in the room it must have been a refrigerated locker.
He sat them both up against the wall.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said. “There is no antidote for super-condamine. Who would want one? But I can give you the hypos from my rescue boat. They are supposed to bring a person back, no matter what has happened to that person out in space.”
There was a whining over the cabin roof. B’dikkat knocked a window out with his fist, stuck his head out of the window and looked up.
“Come on in,” he shouted.
There was the thud of a landing craft touching ground quickly. Doors whirred. Mercer wondered, mildly, why people dared to land on Shayol. When they came in he saw that they were not people; they were Customs Robots, who could travel at velocities which people could never match. One wore the insigne of an inspector.
“Where are the invaders?”
“There are no—” began B’dikkat.
The Lady Da, imperial in her posture though she was completely nude, said in a voice of complete clarity, “I am a former Empress, the Lady Da. Do you know me?”
“No, Ma’am,” said the robot inspector. He looked as uncomfortable as a robot could look. The drug made Mercer think that it would be nice to have robots for company, out on the surface of Shayol.
“I declare this Top Emergency, in the ancient words. Do you understand? Connect me with the Instrumentality.”
“We can’t—” said the inspector.
“You can ask,” said the Lady Da.
The inspector complied.
The Lady Da turned to B’dikkat. “Give Mercer and me those shots now. Then put us outside the door so the dromozoa can repair these scars. Bring us in as soon as a connection is made. Wrap us in cloth if you do not have clothes for us. Mercer can stand the pain.”
“Yes,” said B’dikkat, keeping his eyes away from the four soft children and their collapsed eyes.
The injection burned like no fire ever had. It must have been capable of fighting the super-condamine, because B’dikkat put them through the open window, so as to save time going through the door. The dromozoa, sensing that they needed repair, flashed upon them. This time the super-condamine had something else fighting it
Mercer did not scream but he lay against the wall and wept for ten thousand years; in objective time, it must have been several hours.
The Customs robots were taking pictures. The dromozoa were flashing against them too, sometimes in whole swarms, but nothing happened.
Mercer heard the voice of the communicator inside the cabin calling loudly for B’dikkat. “Surgery Satellite calling Shayol. B’dikkat, get on the line!”
He obviously was not replying.
There were soft cries coming from the other communicator, the one which the customs officials had brought into the room. Mercer was sure that the eye-machine was on and that people in other worlds were looking at Shayol for the first time.
B’dikkat came through the door. He had torn navigation charts out of his lifeboat. With these he cloaked them.
Mercer noted that the Lady Da changed the arrangement of the cloak in a few minor ways and suddenly looked like a person of great importance.
They re-entered the cabin door.
B’dikkat whispered, as if filled with awe, “The Instrumentality has been reached, and a lord of the Instrumentality is about to talk to you.”
There was nothing for Mercer to do, so he sat back in a corner of the room and watched. The Lady Da, her skin healed, stood pale and nervous in the middle of the floor.
The room filled with an odorless intangible smoke. The smoke clouded. The full communicator was on.
A human figure appeared.
A woman, dressed in a uniform of radically conservative cut, faced the Lady Da.
“This is Sh
ayol. You are the Lady Da. You called me.”
The Lady Da pointed to the children on the floor. “This must not happen,” she said. This is a place of punishments, agreed upon between the Instrumentality and the Empire. No one said anything about children.”
The woman on the screen looked down at the children.
“This is the work of insane people!” she cried.
She looked accusingly at the Lady Da, “Are you imperial?”
“I was an Empress, madam,” said the Lady Da.
“And you permit this!”
“Permit it?” cried the Lady Da. “I had nothing to do with it.” Her eyes widened. “I am a prisoner here myself. Don’t you understand?”
The image-woman snapped, “No, I don’t.”
“I,” said the Lady Da, “am a specimen. Look at the herd out there. I came from them a few hours ago.”
“Adjust me,” said the image-woman to B’dikkat. “Let me see that herd.”
Her body, standing upright, soared through the wall in a flashing arc and was placed in the very center of the herd.
The Lady Da and Mercer watched her. They saw even the image lose its stiffness and dignity. The image-woman waved an arm to show that she should he brought back into the cabin. B’dikkat tuned her back into the room.
“I owe you an apology,” said the image. “I am the Lady Johanna Gnade, one of the lords of the Instrumentality.”
Mercer bowed, lost his balance and had to scramble up from the floor. The Lady Da acknowledged the introduction with a royal nod.
The two women looked at each other.
“You will investigate,” said the Lady Da, “and when you have investigated, please put us all to death. You know about the drug?”
“Don’t mention it,” said B’dikkat, “don’t even say the name into a communicator. It is a secret of the Instrumentality!”
“I am the Instrumentality,” said the Lady Johanna. “Are you in pain? I did not think that any of you were alive. I had heard of the surgery banks on your off-limits planet, but I thought that robots tended parts of people and sent up the new grafts by rocket. Are there any people with you? Who is in charge? Who did this to the children?”
B’dikkat stepped in front of the image. He did not bow. “I’m in charge.”
“You’re underpeople!” cried the Lady Johanna. “You’re a cow!”
“A bull, Ma’am. My family is frozen back on Earth itself, and with a thousand years’ service I am earning their freedom and my own. Your other questions, Ma’am. I do all the work. The dromozoa do not affect me much, though I have to cut a part off myself now and then. I throw those away. They don’t go into the bank. Do you know the secret rules of this place?”
The Lady Johanna talked to someone behind her on another world. Then she looked at B’dikkat and commanded, “Just don’t name the drug or talk too much about it. Tell me the rest.”
“We have,” said B’dikkat very formally, “thirteen hundred and twenty-one people here who can still be counted on to supply parts when the dromozoa implant them. There are about seven hundred more, including Go-Captain Alvarez, who have been so thoroughly absorbed by the planet that it is no use trimming them. The Empire set up this place as a point of uttermost punishment. But the Instrumentality gave secret orders for medicine—” he accented the word strangely, meaning super-condamine—”to be issued so that the punishment would be counteracted. The Empire supplies our convicts. The Instrumentality distributes the surgical material.”
The Lady Johanna lifted her right hand in a gesture of silence and compassion. She looked around the room. Her eyes came back to the Lady Da. Perhaps she guessed what effort the Lady Da had made in order to remain standing erect while the two drugs, the super-condamine and the lifeboat drug, fought within her veins.
“You people can rest. I will tell you now that all things possible will be done for you. The Empire is finished. The Fundamental Agreement, by which the Instrumentality surrendered the Empire a thousand years ago, has been set aside. We did not know that you people existed. We would have found out in time, but I am sorry we did not find out sooner. Is there anything we can do for you right away?”
“Time is what we all have,” said the Lady Da. “Perhaps we cannot ever leave Shayol, because of the dromozoa and the medicine. The one could be dangerous. The other must never be permitted to be known.”
The Lady Johanna Gnade looked around the room. When her glance reached him, B’dikkat fell to his knees and lifted his enormous hands in complete supplication.
“What do you want?” said she.
“These,” said B’dikkat, pointing to the mutilated children. “Order a stop on children. Stop it now!” He commanded her with the last cry, and she accepted his command. “And Lady—” he stopped as if shy.
“Yes? Go on.”
“Lady, I am unable to kill. It is not in my nature. To work, to help, but not to kill. What do I do with these?” He gestured at the four motionless children on the floor.
“Keep them,” she said. “Just keep them.”
“I can’t,” he said. “There’s no way to get off this planet alive. I do not have food for them in the cabin. They will die in a few hours. And governments,” he added wisely, “take a long, long time to do things.”
“Can you give them the medicine?”
“No, it would kill them if I give them that stuff first before the dromozoa have fortified their bodily processes.”
The Lady Johanna Gnade filled the room with tinkling laughter that was very close to weeping. “Fools, poor fools, and the more fool I! If super-condamine works only after the dromozoa, what is the purpose of the secret?”
B’dikkat rose to his feet, offended. He frowned, but he could not get the words with which to defend himself.
The Lady Da, ex-empress of a fallen empire, addressed the other lady with ceremony and force: “Put them outside, so they will be touched. They will hurt. Have B’dikkat give them the drug as soon as he thinks it safe. I beg your leave, my Lady ... “
Mercer had to catch her before she fell.
“You’ve all had enough,” said the Lady Johanna. “A storm ship with heavily armed troops is on its way to your ferry satellite. They will seize the medical personnel and find out who committed this crime against children.”
Mercer dared to speak. “Will you punish the guilty doctor?”
“You speak of punishment,” she cried. “You!”
“It’s fair. I was punished for doing wrong. Why shouldn’t he be?”
“Punish—punish!” she said to him. “We will cure that doctor. And we will cure you too, if we can.”
Mercer began to weep. He thought of the oceans of happiness which super-condamine had brought him, forgetting the hideous pain and the deformities on Shayol. Would there be no next needle? He could not guess what life would be like off Shayol. Was there to be no more tender, fatherly B’dikkat coming with his knives?
He lifted his tear-stained face to the Lady Johanna Gnade and choked out the words, “Lady, we are all insane in this place. I do not think we want to leave.”
She turned her face away, moved by enormous compassion. Her next words were to B’dikkat. “You are wise and good, even if you are not a human being. Give them all of the drug they can take. The Instrumentality will decide what to do with all of you. I will survey your planet with robot soldiers. Will the robots be safe, cow-man?”
B’dikkat did not like the thoughtless name she called him, but he held no offense. “The robots will be all right, Ma’am, but the dromozoa will be excited if they cannot feed them and heal them. Send as few as you can. We do not know how the dromozoa live or die.”
“As few as I can,” she murmured. She lifted her hand in command to some technician unimaginable distances away. The odorless smoke rose about her and the image was gone.
A shrill cheerful voice spoke up. “I fixed your window,” said the customs robot. B’dikkat thanked him absentmindedly. He helped Mercer an
d the Lady Da into the doorway. When they had gotten outside, they were promptly stung by the dromozoa. It did not matter.
B’dikkat himself emerged, carrying the four children in his two gigantic, tender hands. He lay the slack bodies on the ground near the cabin. He watched as the bodies went into spasm with the onset of the dromozoa. Mercer and the Lady Da saw that his brown cow eyes were rimmed with red and that his huge cheeks were dampened by tears.
The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 7 - [Anthology] Page 41