Pariah

by W. Michael Gear

  Two Spot swallowed hard, shot a look of supplication at Allison. All he got was a slight shrug and her soft suggestion: “I’d tell him. He’ll kill you otherwise.”

  Two Spot, as Tam had known he would, began to talk.

  Ten minutes later, Two Spot was secured to a chair in the conference room and Port Authority was in total blackout.

  All Tam had to do was collect his hostages and the real struggle would begin.

  66

  The hot cup of cacao seasoned with finely ground ancho chili reminded Talina of how special her childhood as an archaeologist’s daughter had been. She sat in her mother’s kitchen, the smell of warm sopapillas smeared in honey filling the air.

  The cup she held was ceramic, not sialon or duraplast. Like all of their dishes, her mother had made the cup by hand. Formed it from local clay. She’d decorated the sides in traditional Mayan designs and fired the piece in a historically accurate kiln.

  Mother’s dedication to experimentally recreating the past had extended to food, too. Homegrown corn, beans, squash, peppers, chia, teosinte, several species of potatoes, yams, and amaranth had grown in the garden, and cacao and coffee trees crowded the surrounding walls. Monthly trips to the field resulted in bags filled with annatto, various wild fruits, medicinal plants, roots, and vegetables like tomatillos.

  Not that they didn’t eat more Corporate-distributed synthetic rations than either cared for. Mother didn’t always have time to cook, and rejecting rations would have brought the dietary monitors knocking at the door to determine why Mother wasn’t ensuring her daughter received the exact amount of nutrition and calories prescribed by Corporate nutritional tables for a child her age.

  Even the house they lived in—what Mother called la casita—was special. Consisting of a whitewashed twenty-first century adobe with a solar tile roof, the historic structure had originally been the groundskeeper’s house just outside the Yaxchilan Maya ruins. As head archaeologist at the site, Mother had received a special permit to occupy the house and maintain its historic integrity.

  Now safe in Mother’s kitchen, Talina savored the warmth of the cacao radiating through the ceramic and into her fingers.

  To her right, Rocket perched on one of the old wooden chairs, while Demon crouched across the table from her—the beast’s three hard eyes like internally lit obsidian as they gazed at her.

  How perfectly Maya that they should be here. Way. Transformation. Spiritual animal companions. Co-essences. Part of her soul, yet different. Implicit elements of her dream. Rocket, her friend and ally, diametrically opposed from Demon, who always sought to destroy her on his own terms.

  And there, on the table between them, stood the reconstructed pot. Each potsherd had been perfectly placed right down to the tiny gray chips.

  But what did it mean now?

  The fragmented ceramics might have gone together in just the right order, but to Talina’s unease, it was no longer the same pot. Or—more to the point—it might have been the original pot, but the designs painted on the slipped surface were now different. The Way glyph was twice as large as it had been before she broke the thing. And when she’d reassembled the pieces that depicted the Lords of Death, they’d come together in the images of quetzals: brightly colored, collars flared. Originally the image of the resurrected One-Hunahpu was shown rising from the cracked turtle shell as the reborn Maize God; the depiction now was that of a dark-eyed, bare-breasted young woman with raven-black hair, wearing a black security uniform with a pistol at her hip. A small quetzal headdress rose above her head. Where originally the twin heroes, Hun Ajaw and Xbalanque, had been drawn, now Rocket stood on the right side of the cracked turtle shell in Hun Ajaw’s place. Demon made threatening gestures on the left where Xblanque had been.

  The Way glyph, once black on orange, now glowed in phosphorescent yellow-green light, as if it were illuminated from the inside.

  “What did I do wrong?”

  “Nothing,” Rocket replied. “The pot could never have been put back together as it was. Look closely. Where you fit the pieces back in place, not even a line remains to signify the repair.”

  She stared at the seamless surface, the burnish unmarred by so much as a hairline crack.

  Transformation.

  But into what?

  She shook her head slowly.

  “You hesitate?” Rocket asked.

  “I don’t know what I am.”

  “An abomination,” Demon told her, a series of black patterns running along his hide. “A murderer. Call it up in your mind. Remember how it was? Your pistol leveled as you shot Sian Hmong down in the street? That’s who you have become.”

  Talina could see it as if she were there, felt her pistol buck in her hand as her bullet tore a hole between Sian’s breasts, blasted through her lower sternum, and took out the bottom of the woman’s heart.

  “What’s to say that if I go back I’ll ever know reality from the dream?”

  “You would rather live here?” Rocket asked, his colors violet, mauve, and orange.

  “Looking back at my life, it was right here. In this very spot. This was the happiest I ever was. Smell the air? Chocolate and the tang of chili. Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve had chocolate?”

  “This is illusion,” Rocket told her softly. “A lie that you tell yourself. You really think this is your mother’s kitchen? The Lords of Death laugh. Safe as you may wish yourself to be, you are still in Xibalba.”

  “That’s not true.” Talina pointed. “Look. See all of Mama’s pots? The oven? The dent in that big kettle on the stove? She did that when she dropped it in the sink. The handles were too hot to hold, and she was pouring out boiling water.”

  Demon chattered, the white and iridescent red of amusement rolling down his flanks.

  Rocket fixed his three eyes on Talina. “Step to the door. Look out. Blink your eyes three times. Then tell me what you see.”

  “That’s—”

  “Just do it,” Rocket insisted. “Call it a test.”

  Talina put down her cup, stepped to the kitchen door, and looked out. “I see the garden.”

  “Blink three times.”

  “It’s a trick,” Demon called. “Come back. Your chocolate is getting cold.”

  “Blink three times?” She wondered at her sudden reluctance.

  “It’s an old shaman’s trick I found deep in your memory,” Rocket told her. “Humor me.”

  “He’s deceiving you!” Demon insisted. “You’re happy here. Why put it all at risk?”

  Talina blinked once, twice, and on the third blink, the garden vanished. She was staring at the stone pavement. Beyond it stood the Copan ballcourt. She could see her bloodstains on the paving stones.

  When she looked back, expecting to see her mother’s familiar and comforting kitchen, a lonely, dead calabash tree stood there.

  A sense of desolation washed through her—a hollow and draining emptiness. So terrible was the feeling that she raised her hands to her face, half certain she would feel the bony surface of her skull, the hardness of exposed teeth where her cheeks were supposed to be.

  But her fingers encountered firm flesh, the triangle of her nose, and the softness of her lips.

  Xibalba!

  It didn’t make sense. She’d repaired the pot.

  “You need a guide,” Rocket told her, appearing beside her. “In the stories of your people, when Blood Moon escaped Xibalba, she was led out by the messenger owls.”

  Talina studied every aspect of the ballcourt, every dressed-and-set stone, the empty temple above it, the leaden sky overhead.

  “Kind of shy on owls.”

  Rocket turned a shade of black, patterned by angular chevrons in the infrared. A combination of sadness, frustration, and defeat.

  “Yeah,” Talina told him, “I know how you feel.” A beat.
“Pus in a bucket, you think I want to stay here?”

  Rocket made a gargling sound of confusion, questioning why with his patterns of yellow, green, and pink.

  “Because if I go back, what if I can’t determine reality from the dream? I would have shot Sian. You get it? I really don’t know what the hell I am. Human? Quetzal? That Way glyph says I’ve been transformed, but into what?”

  Rocket snapped his jaws in a gesture of confusion.

  “See, you think it’s all well and good. But you were always a hunter, Rocket. Me, I’m a killer. Which is different. Just ask Demon.”

  Her old quetzal appeared from behind the calabash tree, flashing his hide in sky blue and orange patterns. “Yes, a killer.”

  Fixing on Rocket she added, “Which means that even if I find a guide, I may be going back as the worst possible thing: a monster.”

  67

  Dortmund didn’t sleep. The words a polluted hybrid kept repeating in his brain as he tossed and turned on the bunk. Adding to his woes, every time he’d start to finally nod off, and the outrage, confusion, and dismay would begin to fade into sleep, he’d roll onto his wounded arm.

  Not only did the pain bring him rudely awake, but with it came the reminder of his infection.

  What the hell am I going to do?

  He had just become his own worst nightmare. The fact filled him with a despair so devastating he wanted to die. His paper entitled “Controlling the Genetic Damage of Hybridization in Re-Wilded Areas” had led to the culling of more than ten thousand zebras, wildebeests, bongos, rhinoceroses, and cheetahs. The action had left the evolutionists howling and enraged, but he’d had the Board behind him. Genetic purity had to be maintained to preserve the species in their original and natural condition.

  And now I’m a hybrid?

  Not that he believed in God—or in any permutation of a conscious universe that would act so capriciously—but it smacked of such a cruel irony it couldn’t be random.

  The mere thought of what his professional colleagues would say if they found out left his face burning. Let alone the joyous abandon of his bitter environmentalist enemies: “See! Weisbacher himself is now a living contradiction of his so-called ‘moral imperative.’” And “Cull yourself, Weisbacher! Come on, put a gun to your head for the betterment of the general population.”

  Dortmund Weisbacher had always believed he could endure anything. That his bitter years battling in academia had prepared him for any kind of conflict. What it had not prepared him for was how to face the future as a living joke.

  He couldn’t countenance the idea of switching sides, becoming an environmentalist. Would not see the glee expressed in his longtime adversaries’ faces.

  Nor could he ever go back and claim, with any moral authority, to espouse the conservationist cause.

  A man could only take so much. Several times during the night, he’d hunched into a ball beneath the blanket and broken into muffled sobs lest any of the others hear.

  Adding to his misery, any twinge, pain, irritation, or itch automatically had to be the insidious result of the quetzal infection. When he wasn’t brooding about his lost virtue and purity, he trembled at the thought of what the alien molecules were doing not only to his body, but to his marvelous brain.

  The mere chance that Dortmund Weisbacher might end up as sullen, vile, and uncouth as Talina Perez or that horrible waif, Kylee, filled him with dread. They’d told him that the TriNA changed the brain. And he need look no further than Talina Perez, lying in a coma as the hideous little molecules ate her neocortex.

  That will be your fate.

  Would he recognize the first invasive tendrils as they began to steal his intellect?

  Alzheimer’s, dementia, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and so many other mental disorders had been vanquished in the last century that it was inconceivable to imagine that he might end up a vegetable. Not that it could get much worse, but in this benighted wilderness, thirty light-years from Solar System, he had no way to download his thoughts into a database for future access. All the wondrous implants in his head might be nothing more than useless metal and ceramic.

  As that knowledge permeated his consciousness, a panic unlike anything he’d ever known possessed him. This was worse than just facing quetzals. Worse than the knowledge of impending death. This was the loss of himself. Of all that he’d accomplished, of all that he understood and had learned.

  Vixen!

  It was a survey and exploration ship. It had been designed to download from implants. That, now more than ever, was the key.

  He blinked his eyes open, seeing the first graying of the windows. Morning was coming. He had to act. He might have been desperate before this, but it was nothing compared to the resolve that now pumped with each beat of his heart.

  This was more than just mere survival.

  Dortmund slipped his legs out from under the blanket. In the bunks across the room, Mosadek and Dushane slept.

  Dressing quietly, so as not to disturb them, he emerged into a dreary and wet morning. Low clouds hung in the sky, and across the distance the drizzling mist seemed to drift down in rippling patterns.

  The wet air carried the alien perfume of distant trees and vines. Was it just his imagination, or did his sense of smell seem better?

  Quetzal molecules? Already at work in his nose? Just the thought of it sent him into a near fugue. He hurried along the side of the dome, headed for the doors.

  Turned his head at a flicker of movement. What was that over behind the aircars? He’d swear he’d seen . . . No, had to be a product of the misty rain. Optical illusion. Nothing broke the pattern of the stone behind the vehicles.

  Rounding the curve of the dome, he undid the lock and stepped inside. Ordering the lights on low, he crossed the main room, eased down the hallway, and into the sleeping quarters in the back.

  In the faint glow from the hallway he could see Talina, no more aware of reality than a log. The urchin, Kylee, slept next to her under the blanket.

  Gaze upon Perez, you wretch, for there lies your future.

  His beautiful brain, turned into comatose mush. The thought sickened him.

  Instead he turned to the bed where Trish Monagan curled on her side, breath purling between her lips. The spill of auburn hair made a swirl on the pillow.

  You can do this.

  Dortmund stepped over, made a face, and reached for Trish’s belt. Lifting it from the end table where it had been carefully laid, he settled his fingers on the pistol where it rested in its holster. At the mere touch of the weapon, he jerked his hand back. As if the deadly thing were electric.

  It’s the only way. You do this, or all that you are, the endless years of study and struggle, everything you have been, is gone.

  Taking a deep breath, he forced his fingers around the cold grip and tugged the weapon free. “Lights,” he ordered, filling the room with brilliance.

  Trish and Kylee jerked awake, both sitting up in bed. Talina Perez remained dead to the world.

  Trish fixed immediately on the pistol that Dortmund pointed at her. She asked, “Have you lost your mind?”

  “Not yet. Though I have come to the conclusion that it’s inevitable. Get up. Get dressed. We’re leaving. You are flying me to Port Authority.”

  Trish chuckled; the last thing he expected her to do. What the hell was humorous about the circumstances?

  Trish climbed out of bed. Dortmund tried not to notice her young body as she dressed. Glancing out the window, she said, “Um, Doc? You noticed it’s raining outside?”

  “Of course. I came from the dormitory.”

  “Well, we’re not flying anywhere.” She turned to Talina, asking, “Hey, Tal? You with us this morning?”

  Then Trish tried the woman’s eyes, lifting a lid to find a vacant gaze. Something about Talina’s eye seemed different, darker, lar
ger.

  Trish muttered, “Shit. But she’s breathing okay. Maybe if we get enough soup into her.”

  “Officer Monagan, do you remember I’m holding a pistol on you?”

  “You gonna shoot her?” Kylee asked. She’d slipped off the far side of Talina’s bed.

  “If she doesn’t immediately move herself out to the aircar and head back for Port Authority, I will.”

  “Why Port Authority?”

  “So I can get to Vixen where I can download my brain, save my thoughts and notes while I still can. Before the quetzal molecules turn me into a mindless wreck like Talina.”

  “Download your brain?” The woman seemed completely stumped and not at all concerned about the gun he held.

  “From the implants. I need to place all of my thoughts on record before the quetzal molecules begin to destroy them. Vixen has the equipment that can read and store my intellect for future reference and study.”

  Trish lifted a skeptical eyebrow. “And what makes your brain so fricking important?”

  “Because of a lifetime of training and research. I have unique insights. This is the first Earth-like planet. Everything we’re doing here is historic. Especially meeting with the first sentient extraterrestrial intelligences. As the leading planetologist in Solar System, my work here will become a benchmark. Generations of scholars will pore over every nuance of our interaction and failure on Capella III.”

  “See, that’s the part I don’t get.” Trish straightened from Talina’s bed. “You’ve only been here for days. Kylee tells me you don’t know a bem from skewer, and that you’d probably walk under a mundo tree just to look at the bones.”

  “Enough talk. Now walk.” He liked it. It sounded tough and witty. “Let’s go. Or, damn it, I will shoot.”

  “Shoot me, and who flies?”

  “How about I shoot Talina instead? Save her the misery of her infected body rotting away?”

  Dear God, maybe he should. Though, eventually, her fate would be his. Would anyone have the mercy to end it for him? Or would they just keep his mindless corpse? A scientific specimen to be documented as it slowly deteriorated?