by Steve Perry
Walls done in a complementary color, no pictures.
The library door opened, revealing an impressive room. Most of the walls were shelves, floor to ceiling, and stacked with antique tape cases, disk cartridges, and even bound hardcopy books. A wood fire or close approximation of one was burning cheerily in the gray stone fireplace to their left, and Reason himself sat in an overstuffed wingback chair— the thing had to be eight or nine hundred years old, if Dirisha was any judge of such things. He had a book on his lap, and he smiled at the four of them as they entered the room.
Jersey Reason was notso impressive as the room. He was a short, almost tiny man, with thick, white hair and a very short beard, also white. His face was wrinkled, especially with smile lines at the corners of his pale blue eyes, and his skin was sun-damaged and tanned. He wore a black-and-white patterned kimono belted at the waist, and slippers.
"Ah, my night-child Dirisha.How long has it been?A decade or more, eh?" He smiled, showing perfect teeth.
The size of the man belied the deep voice. Dirisha had thought that Reason talked a lot bigger than he was when she'd met him before, and the ten years had shrunk him even more, but the voice still boomed with power.
Sleel leaned over to whisper to Dirisha.
"Something's wrong here," he said. "If this geep is so good, why'd he let us just stroll in?"
"For all you know we're standing in a zap field or under a dozen gunsights."
"Maybe.But something's wrong with him, too."
"So, Dirisha, what brings you to Earth?You and your three friends?"
"Excuse my manners," Dirisha said. "This is Sleel, Bork and Geneva ."
"I've heard of them," Reason said."Nice to meet you."
"We need some help," Dirisha said. "We've run into something strange."
Reason raised one thick, white eyebrow."Yeah?"
At that point, Sleel raised his left hand, slowly and casually—and fired his spetsdod, aiming directly at Reason's forehead.
Dirisha snapped her gaze away from Reason."Sleel!"
"Told you something was wrong," Sleel said. "Look."
Dirisha glanced back at the old man. He smiled at them.
"What—?" she began.
"That dart should have hit him right between the eyes," Sleel said. "It didn't miss and it didn't bounce off; I was watching. Where is it?"
Reason stood, and while he did it slowly, all four of his visitors pointed at least one weapon each at him as he moved. The old man's grin increased. He turned and put one finger against the back of the overstuffed chair. "There's your dart, Sleel.Right where you aimed it."
There was a tiny hole in the fabric of the chair.
Dirisha understood almost immediately. Bork said it first: "He's a holoproj."
Reason walked toward them, until he was no more than two meters away.
"Incredible," Geneva said. "Even this close I can't see the scan lines."
Bork stepped forward and waved his hand back and forth. As his arm entered the image of Reason, it disappeared as if it had plunged into a solid.
"That's the best holographic projection I've ever seen," Dirisha said.
"It's the best anybody has ever seen," said the image of Jersey Reason. "And the chair is rigged with a pheromone and scent pump. At five meters, it can fool a dog because itsmells like me, too. How did you figure it out, Sleel?"
Sleel shrugged. "It didn't feel right."
"I'm in the blockhouse," Reason said. "Come on over and let's talk."
Dirisha looked at Sleel, who grinned and waggled his eyebrows. She shook her head.Gods. There'd be no living with him for at least a month.
Chapter Fifteen
IF WALL HAD tended toward believing in the metaphysical, he would have probably gone mad when first he had awakened to find himself reincarnated as a computer. Even though he had known the theory, the practice was another thing. The idea of transferring a portion of his self into the radically altered brain of a mastodon would have seemed equally crazed only a few short years past. And yet, here he was.
It began with a flow, an electronic flux that might be likened to white-water rapids, though it was altogether different. Some of him stayed on the shore, in the shelter of his computer trees, watching as another part of him floated away on the surging electron currents to a place no man had ever been before.
The rapids vanished. There came a sensation of falling, that flutter-in-the-gut tightness that happened in space vessels too small to bother installing in them ersatz-gravity generators.
A sense of coldness gripped him, but intermingled with streaks of heat, alternating patches of fire and ice.
Now there was a feeling of speed, and of high energies swarming like a hive of maddened insects, frantically searching for something indefinable.
Now Infinity yawned like a frozen canyon to the sides of a narrow trail, and one slip would hurl him into a fall that never ended.
It was a journey that seemed to take forever, winding through mental constructs that ran the gamut of travel, floating, walking, flying, crawling, until at last—
Until at last, without any sense of having arrived, he wasthere .
Alive.Blood coursed through his veins and arteries. Air came into his lungs. Muscles shifted under his thick, but somehow tender, skin. He felt strong, massive, he could hear, taste, he could see; he was flesh!
It had worked! He was a mastodon, but with the sensibilities of a man.
He was three meters tall at the shoulder; he had tusks of gleaming ivory that stretched outward almost two meters in a lazy curve. Intellectually he knew these things, but more importantly, hefelt them.
"Program in place?"came a voice.
He heard the speaker with his ears, but also within the chamber of his thoughts, as if hearing two men speaking in two languages at once. It was the doctor, standing next to him—so small!—an insignificant being painted in shades of gray. He knew that he would see in black and white; he had expected it, but even without color, the picture was so vivid that it put to shame his most advanced computer sensing gear. Here was the essential difference in the kinds of life: the flesh was made to be sensual, the circuit could never be anything but electronically cold.
Using the great strength of the thing he had become, Wall nodded. He curled and uncurled his trunk—what a powerful coil of ridged muscles it was!—and reached to the communicator built especially for him. He tapped the fat, square plate marked "Yes."
A billion kilometers away and a billion years past, far back there in the forgotten distance behind him, the machine that he had been, that he stillwas somehow, also acknowledged the same query. He spoke with two voices and the division seemed almost complete.
"Very good," the tiny doctor said. He touched a control on a smaller panel that released the padded shackles holding Wall, a precaution against the possibility of transfer damage. A crazed mastodon could create a lot of grief in such a finely tuned place.
Wall stretched, glorying in the feel of his ability to do so. His tusks flashed in the sterilizing lights.
"Can you walk?"
Again Wall nodded, and proceeded to demonstrate his control. He took three steps forward, then three back. He felt an urge to trumpet his triumph. He restrained himself. No point in scaring the little man next to him.
"Excellent! Now, for the other tests—"
Wall reached out with his trunk and began to tap at the giant keyboard.
"A moment," the doctor said. "This is not scheduled."
Wall ignored him and continued to spell out his message. The flesh would not be denied.
BRING ME A FEMALE, he wrote.
"Not wise," the doctor said. But even with his reduced vision, Wall could see that the man was intrigued.
DO IT.
Jambi shrugged. "It's your money."
Anticipation filled Wall with a delicious ache.
The blockhouse on Jersey Reason's island was not so easy to enter as had been his house. The door that cycled
open was more than a meter thick; the worm-gear hinges were of squashed steel and braced by plates of the same. The locking mechanism was of solid carbonex—it must have cost a fortune—and the center of the door showed at its edge another plate of carbonex sandwiched into the plast-crete.
"Nobody's gonna come in uninvited," Bork said.
Dirisha nodded. "Wonder if the whole place is carbonex shielded?"
"Take a long time to dig through, if it is," Sleel said.
The four of them walked through the open portal and down an arched hallway lined with what looked like stainless steel, floor and walls. "Straight ahead and right at the end," came Reason's voice.
Despite the look of the interior, it felt comfortably warm, Dirisha noted. The lighting was from sconces set into the walls at three-meter intervals, and the design of the fixtures was art deco, sort of like an inverted letter" A ." There were no windows or obvious openings to the outside.
A steel door slid open to admit them at the turning, and the four found themselves in an elevator. There were no controls apparent.
"We sure this guy is our friend?" Geneva asked, as the door slid closed.
"I hope so," Dirisha answered.
"Very funny," Sleel said.
"Feel a little better about the old geep's security?" Dirisha said.
"Maybe."
After dropping for fifteen seconds at a slow speed, the elevator stopped and the door opened. Jersey Reason stood there, waiting.
He looked the same as he had in the holoproj, and the room in which the four visitors found themselves was a match for the library in the house above the ground.
Bork said, "Man. The whole room was a projection.Furniture, books, everything."
"Except the chair," Sleel said. "Which didn't have to be there.Why was it?"
"I like to play fair," Reason said. "To see who is paying attention." He smiled. "Good to see you again, Dirisha, How can I help you?"
"We had somebody come back from the grave on us," she said. "We'd like to know who raised him from the dead."
"Solov manages a surfing resort on theGreat Barrier Reef these days and is lucky to be alive to do it. I'll be happy to see what I can do."
Sleel, who had been looking at a leatherbound book he'd taken from a shelf, turn around. "Solov is your son?"
Reason inclined his head slightly.
"You named your son 'Solov Reason'? No wonder he got into trouble."
Reason laughed. "I'd like to talk to you, Sleel, about how you saw through my illusion. No one ever has before, you know."
Sleel shrugged. "I know real when I see it."
"We must discuss this at length. Meanwhile, let us see if we can solve your problem."
There was a rec room in the hotel at which Khadaji and Veate registered, and she told him she was going to work out the kinks in her muscles. Khadaji nodded absently.
"I'll join you there in a few minutes."
After she had gone, he lay on the bed in his room. Were they any closer to Juete? He felt as if hewere somehow moving in the right direction, doing all the right things, but there was no way to be sure.
Whatever all this represented, it was an intricate web. He had the feeling that if he could only catch a single strand, he could unravel it all.
He spent another five minutes trying to meditate, hoping to empty his mind of thoughts and allow the monkey brain to rest. The monkey was active, however. It didn't want to rest, it wanted to dance and caper and throw rotten fruit at him. Get up, fool! Your albino mistress is captured and your daughter by her hates you. Somebody out there wants you and all who know you dead. You don't have time to rest!
The skies are going to fall and crush you!
Khadaji arose.So much for quiet meditation.
He took the lift to the recreation area, sixteen floors above their rooms. The lift doors opened to reveal a fair-sized gym, smallball court, and a long and narrow swimming pool. Six people, all naked, stood on the banks of the pool, watching a solitary swimmer.
Veate churned the water, her pale arms rising and falling evenly, her legs scissoring and creating foam in her wake. As he watched, she reached the far end of the pool, dug into the water and did a flip turn; her nude buttocks flashed under the lights. She twisted and pushed off powerfully, gliding under the water like an alabaster fish for a moment before surfacing to resume her mechanically perfect facedown crawl.
She rolled every fourth stroke to breathe.
Normally his entrance into a small area would have drawn stares, dressed as he was in his orthoskins and spetsdods, but the six people—four men and two women— were all held captive by Veate's magic.
One of the men had an erection he was trying in vain to cover with his hands, and one of the women was flushed red and breathing heavily.
Khadaji found a plastic chair against the wall and sat, noting automatically the entrances and exits to the big room. The echo of Veate's feet and legs as she slapped the water during her turns bounced hollowly from the walls, and the air held an acid tang of some bacteriostatic agent in the clear water.
After about fifteen minutes of flashing whitely back and forth, Veate came to a halt. She hung on the lip of the pool for a moment, allowing her breathing to slow,then pulled herself from the water in a single motion, to stand on the rounded edge. She was naked, and she squeezed water from her hair before padding toward a towel and robe draped over one of the plastic chairs.
Khadaji sighed. She was lovely, every bit as beautiful as her mother had been when first he had seen her naked. Perfect in every way, not a gram of surplus fat, each muscle in harmony with all the others. Her shoulders were a bit wider than her hips, her torso sleek, her breasts small but shaped well, her buttocks and legs without flaw, the wispy white pubic hair downy, even while wet.Beautiful? Here walked Beauty incarnate.
What he felt, however, was not lust, but a kind of pride. True, she got her looks from her mother. But he was her father. Some of her genes were his.
The naked watchers hung on her every motion, staring as Veate toweled herself dry. One man turned his head and pressed his hand over his mouth as Veate slipped into her robe, white on white. Was it because he could not stand to see such beauty covered?Or merely to keep himself from drooling?
Veate wrapped the towel around her head, enshrouding her hair, and turned and walked toward Khadaji. She wore a half smile, and he knew that she was only too aware of the effect she had on those fortunate enough to be allowed to see her form in all its glory.
"I feel better," she said. "All that flying had me stiff."
"It must be catching." He nodded at the half dozen observers.
She laughed, a sound full of pleasure, and once again he knew her for her mother's daughter without any doubt. Her laugh could have been a recording of Juete's. "None of those will come within ten meters of me," she said. "Were I to approach the one whose penis longs for me, he would stammer andretreat. I can always tell."
"Of course," he said.
"So, do we have time to eat before these friends of yours arrive?"
"I think so."
"Well, Father, would you have me starve?"
There was a sting to the word "Father," but it seemed less venomous than before. Or maybe that was only his imagination.
The being that was Wall/Hizta felt a tremor in his rear legs as the female elephant was led into the room by the mahout. With them was the zoo's director, a thin woman with a worried look. She moved toward the doctor.
"This is Gretl, the only elephant we have in heat. What do you want with her?"
Jambi smiled. "What does one ordinarily want with an elephant in heat, madam?"
The director shook her head. "Hizta can't fertilize her; his strain is not close enough. And he's too old."
Wall's musth glands throbbed. The thick, oily secretion ran from his temples down and into the corners of his mouth, and the taste and smell of it was exquisite, adding to the urge to rush to the female and mount her. His heart thudded f
aster, until he could feel it throbbing all over his body, synchronized with the throbbing glands in his head. His penis grew hot within its sheath.Old?
Jambi said, "I don't think our client is interested in whether any offspring result from the mating.Just in the act itself."
"I protest—" she began.
"And I have carte blanche, madam, as you well know. If our client wishes to experience the fucking of an elephant, it is up to him."
Wall could stand it no longer. He was a man, but his body now sang to him a most basic song, older than language and more compelling than any words. He flung his trunk up into the sterile air and screamed his mating cry.
The young female elephant—Gretl—might have doubts about whether a mastodon was suitable for a mate, but there was within her some racial memory that recognized Hizta's desire and his call. She twisted her head around far enough to see him as he began to run toward her.
Gretl saw a male and that male knewshe knewexactly what he wanted. She bolted.
The mahout dug his hook into the tender spot, but he was wasting his time. Gretl slapped the man aside with a sharp sweep of her trunk and fled. The mahout was slammed into a table, flipped over it, and landed in a broken sprawl.
She was, Wall knew, only being coy. The females did that sometimes, they ran from what they wanted.
Hizta knew,if Wall did not. She was in heat. She would receive him.
Wall could not separate his desires from that of his host; he was pulled deeper into the mating urge every second. He did not think he could stop even if he wanted, and most certainly, he did not want to stop.
Even a large room such as this one had little space for an elephant and a mastodon to run before reaching a wall. While some small part of Wall's senses noticed Jambi tending to his instruments and the director moving to the fallen mahout, it was the female who called to him. Her smell overpowered all else, beckoning.
He caught her gaze as she turned to lurch away from the wall, shook his head and let his ears, smaller than her own, nap.
She understood the signal well enough, he could see that. She cocked her head at an angle.
Wall danced with Hizta to her side. He touched her back with his trunk, urging her to turn, to present to him. He was prepared to be firm and insistent, as insistent as need be, because he was not prepared to be denied.