Fain laughed aloud.
He stood frozen in the hall on Alvea but he saw much farther.
—the hollow roar of a flame gun had filled the house, impacted sound, swallowing everything as the man covered his face with twisting hands and rocked backwards, the scream shrill and high as the flames washed him, cleansing him a last time, preparing him for—and then the tortured look, the riveting call that lanced between them as his father screamed, trying to form a last word, an unnecessary word now as Fain understood, the crushed insect writhing and feeling its burning insect acids spill out, and Fain felt sure the core of him split, surface, the two final blackening moments converging so that Fain saw, beyond all facts, that what was real and mattered was the streaming through the swelling series of events, the eternal sway and rhythm of the seconds moments days, that mattered, that Fain should do as was his nature, as his life had made him to do, act as the true dark spirit of Fain dictated, pit himself against the shapeshifter, end it here, the knowledge of what he must do suddenly both horrible and comforting, for it was in the flowing moment that all joy and pain came laughing liquid—
He dropped a hand to his waist. He must have cried out, he saw, because the assembled Alveans turned, startled. He drew the gun. His hand shook and he had to steady it, use the two-handed hold, legs braced, arms straight but supple. He blinked, his eyes wet, and clicked over to automatic fire. Someone cried out. A man came forward, running. The Changeling? Perhaps. A yawning moment—
Fain fired. An orange stabbing, bright as a star.
He cut a man in half. And swung the gun smoothly. Screams, horrible screams.
Slicing and scorching. Billowing, acrid smoke. Shrieks. And whimpering, silenced by the roaring, carving flame.
Men died. Thirty Alveans burned alive. Thirty of them—and one Changeling. Fain swung the gun around the hall once, then again; he wanted to be sure no one lived in unnecessary agony.
Fain, the merciful.
Fain, the preserver.
Fain, the destroyer.
Was there any difference?
Licking, snapping flames.
Fain dropped the gun. The reek of charred flesh sickened him.
He leaned over and vomited between his feet. Scorpio, he thought seneslessly, you are avenged.
At the core of him a cold vacuum spread outward, numbing his toes and fingers.
Fain turned and stumbled out the door.
Insect and father and shapechanger, all equal now.
Part Five
1
Skallon ran through the streets of Kalic as fast as he dared. The soft air, heavy with moisture and the drifting, spiced smoke of cooking, rasped at his throat. Cowled figures turned to watch him, people looked at each other and murmured, but he pressed on, knowing that anything faster than a walk would excite interest, so he might as well run and perhaps outdistance anyone who was suspicious.
He had to find Fain. With Scorpio dead, things were desperate. Together they might still find the Changeling in time, but separated they would surely die. The Changeling had shown his hand; the thing was far smarter than Skallon had thought possible. How could belief in chaos give a being such power?
Sweat filmed his eyes. Ahead he caught sight of fretted stonework, elaborate red draperies. The Hall of the Tagras. A crowd sat in its cool shadow, awaiting possible aid or dispensations. Boys hawked fresh berries from the countryside. A woman sobbed against a ruined stone wall. Then he noticed something else.
The roaring came rolling out of the Hall windows. It sounded like the hollow voice of a furnace. There was a long moment when it seemed to go on forever and Skallon, jogging to a halt in the foreyard of the Hall, suddenly realized that he was hearing a flame-gun on full bore.
Blinking, gasping, he stopped. The great ceremonial door edged open and Fain came out, tucking a handgun into his waist.
“What…what have you…” Skallon began.
“I got him,” Fain said thickly. He tried to brush past Skallon.
“Got him? The Changeling? How?”
“Go see.”
Fain stood panting while Skallon walked to the huge door and shouldered it open. Figures clustered at the edges of the foreyard, jabbering to each other but not daring to approach.
Skallon stood looking for a long moment at the Hall, now awash in blood and scorched deeply in the walls. Quite calmly and clearly he thought about the riot, about what he had done under the drugs. That was bad. A destabilizing event, to be sure; he needed no sociometric study of Kalic to know what the presence of Earthers, concealed Earthers, had done.
The effects could have been damped. With delicate tuning, with care, he could have healed the disunion he had caused.
But this …
There was no solution now. Alvea would tip over into a new sociometric phase. The castes might survive, the crude outlines of what Alvean culture had meant…but all would be altered by this destruction of an entire caste leadership. Alvea was beyond Earth’s tinkering now.
Somewhere in that mess of disembowled bodies was the Changeling. Fain had done it, yes. But the Changeling had won. There would be a mad rage in Kalic now, a chaos that would spread throughout the countryside. Nothing he or Fain could do would stop that.
“Come on,” Fain said at Skallon’s shoulder. “Let’s go back to the hotel.”
“No,” Skallon said. He turned, shrugging off the man’s hand, and walked away into the milling, cowled crowd, into the yawning streets of Kalic.
Skallon found he was walking aimlessly, adrift in the scattered outskirts of Kalic. He grunted up a hill, slipping on gravel, banging a knee painfully. The hill, looked down steeply on a flank of the city. Images slipped randomly through his mind. Joane, Fain, the blurred and flickering faces of so many Alveans, the riot, a hot brittle breath of incense and oil, a wan ruby light. His mind spun in its vacuum.
He heard a distant thudding. As he lurched upward he saw a woman lying on a bed. A brass bed, sheet and cover and blanket scrupulously in place, tucked in, neat. The woman lay looking at the sky. He saw beside her a tiny girl, her eyes mirroring the pale blue above. Neither moved or noticed his crunching footsteps. They had a look of waiting, of being at rest. He saw them breathing, long shallow breaths.
Suddenly, at the rim of the hill, a boy rose out of the ground.
“Where did you come from?” Skallon’s voice rasped. “Out of the earth,” the boy said, beaming with his secret. I saw.
“My mother and sister are waiting for us to hollow out the first room.”
The boy stepped back, scattering stones, and showed him the brow of a hole. A cave. From inside came the thumping Skallon had heard.
A man crawled out. He pulled behind him a pail of dirt and rocks. The man looked at Skallon and said nothing. “Our home,” the boy said proudly.
“But…why dig a cave? The plague…there are plenty of abandoned houses in the city. You could…
“They are diseased places.”
“It makes no difference. Few of the diseases can be communicated.”
“Ah,” the man said disparagingly.
“No, really.”
“Can anyone be sure?” the man said with his grating voice. He glowered at Skallon fiercely. Embarrassed, Skallon stepped back a pace.
“Not, not totally, no. But most are surely genetic deficiencies …”
“We live here. Stay away from the houses of the dead.”
The boy nodded gravely. ‘The way the old ones did. Before all this,” he said in a piping voice. “Beneath the earth. In shelter.”
Skallon watched numbly. The man fetched the pail out with knotted arms and pitched the rock down the hill, making a brown slash on the land.
“One room. Then another.”
Skallon saw that the man had no legs, only stumps. A successful amputation, to stop a disease.
The man and then the boy crawled back in the lip of the hole. Skallon watched the woman and the slim, still girl. A silent, exhausted patience,
older than centuries.
Rain began to fall, the first Skallon had seen on Alvea. The figures on the bed lay still, letting it fall on them in soft, persistent sheets. The thumping began again under the earth.
* * *
Now that the Changeling was gone, Skallon allowed his mind to summon up the images of it again. The rustling, creaking way it moved. The groans as its flesh shifted and arranged itself. The awful knowing smile. Skallon’s own smile.
The creature was deadly and frightening, far more frightening than he had ever feared. But it was fascinating, too. For a moment Skallon had gotten a glimmer of what the thing felt, how it saw the world.
Walking, Skallon frowned, trying to recall the subtle impressions. He had gotten from the Changeling not ideas, but rather feelings, senses, emotions. Something about dancing, living lightly, moving through time like a ship on a still sea, gliding. And immortality. That Gommerset made some sort of sense, after all. There was some distant affinity of the Changeling for Alvea, he was certain.
But all the same, the creature—so like a man in so many ways, yet so fundamentally different—had tried to destroy the ancient culture of Alvea. Had destroyed Alvea now. It was a vile and yet fascinating thing, the Changeling. Skallon shivered. Perhaps he couldn’t truly blame Fain for killing it. All the time, Danon had been the Changeling. The thing had been beside him, mocking. In. the square, in the long meetings, during the chase through the Kalic streets. It was always laughing. Always there. And in the end, even when dead, it had won.
The Changeling was not dead.
Joseph Fain sat on the bed in his room in the hotel, sounds of chaos welling up from the street below, and stared at the dark stain ‘on the floor beside his feet. He had just squashed a bug with his boot and now, for the second time in his life, he understood everything.
The Changeling had not been among those who died in the hall. He was as certain of that fact as he had ever been of anything.
To kill a thing, one must know it. The Changeling knew Fain. And with that knowledge, it would never have allowed him to catch it unaware.
Fain understood what the Changeling had intended. Sensing the presence of Fain’s cool center, instinctively comprehending the source of his strength, it had set out to destroy that core.
This was meant to be the end: the realization that he had murdered a roomful of innocents should have pushed him over the brink.
Fain smiled tightly. A dead bug had saved him. He felt nothing—only a sheer, total, overwhelming peace. Not remorse. Not shame. Not guilt.
The Changeling had been far too successful. By obliterating the cool core within him, it had unloosened the knowledge to set Fain free, to make all concerns of life and death absurd and pointless.
At long last Fain truly understood the Changeling.
And he could kill it.
When he found it.
And that, he knew, would be soon.
Skallon drifted, light-headed and vague, through the clogged streets of Kalic. The discord he had envisioned now rose, in response to some unheard pulse. Gangs of small boys fought each other with sticks and dirt clods. Men ran breathless on frantic errands. Carts nudged their way through dusty streets, loaded with skimpy household provisions, their owners leaving the city before nightfall. The city gave off a soft, growling sound of doubt and bewilderment.
He reached the hotel by staying in the back streets, avoiding inquiring eyes. He had things to say to Fain but that could wait. He wanted rest, time to think. He slipped in the rear entrance and made his way through the dim hallway to his room.
Joane was lying on the bed. “You are safe!”
Skallon nodded. “Fain … he came back … he said the thing is dead.”
“Revenge for the creature, the dog. And for Danon,” she said simply.
“Yes, I suppose.”
They sat for a while on the bed, not touching. Skallon wondered how grief came out, with Alveans. Joane’s face was not streaked with tears, as nearly as he could tell in the faint light. She sat idly folding and unfolding her hands. A silence hung between them.
“Fain … he said he had to kill many…” Joane seemed to be searching for something to say. Small talk. Fain would have hated it.
Skallon nodded. “What did he tell you? Did he say it was his job? He didn’t like to do it, but he had to?”
“He…something like that.”
Skallon felt an overwhelming weariness. “Right Right.”
“You…will be going now?”
“Fain has probably called the orbiter already.”
“Tomorrow, then?”
“No. Not tomorrow, not ever. I’m not going.” Her eyes widened. “Why?”
“If I went back I’d get stuck in a dorm somewhere, training for another planet, sopping up its culture. I don’t want to. I know Alvea. Hell, I probably know it better than I know Earth. Nobody gets to see much of Earth anymore. It’s all preserves and farmland. No room to move anymore.”
“But to stay here…what you told me before…”
“Did I tell you that? Yeah, I guess I did. Earthmen can’t live out a normal lifespan here. That’s why you’re different from me. You’ve had your genes pruned.”
“You will die?”
“Not right away. I just won’t recover fully, if I get sick. Some damned nonadaptation will eat away at me.”
“How…terrible.”
Skallon made a thin smile. “Somebody’s got to try to fix up what we’ve done here. And there’s the Gommerset business. I’d like to get to the bottom of that.”
Joane frowned. “You were not responsible for the…for killing so many.”
“I was a fool. The Changeling played us like puppets. We never knew what was happening. I should have seen …”
“But the deaths came out of the…disorder.”
“No, it was my fault. And Fain’s,” he added sharply.
“When evil occurs, it expresses the whole of the universe. It is the same when good occurs. They both come out of the random workings of … of the Summation.”
“How can you believe in Gommerset if you …well, maybe there’s more to Alvea than I thought.”
“What you think of as good and evil are not your ideas. They are what they are.”
“So?” said Skallon, musing.
“You should yield to them. Do not try to change them.”
“Everything you say just makes me more sure I’m doing the right thing. I want to know Alvea. To truly understand what you’re saying. Do you understand that, Joane?”
He could not read her expression. Dusk was gathering outside and the room had become dim. Skallon was tired, his joints ached, and his throat felt tight and dry.
“I do not know…Do you want to…?” She lay back and lifted her hips, pulling the hem of her long dress up. “I will receive you.”
“Why … no, no, I…am tired.” Skallon was taken aback at this directness. Even as he said the words he watched her shadowed, fleshy thighs part and thought of finding some relief there. But no, he really wasn’t in the mood. “I think I’ll rest. Perhaps later.”
She nodded and got up, her movements jerky. “I will return.”
As Skallon lay back and tugged off his boots he thought of her, trying to read her mood in these last few minutes. She was different, changed, a woman capable of deep and shifting currents, a woman as complex as Alvea was complex, in a way Earth would never be for him. Earth, where everything was planned and controlled, had been known for centuries, would be forever. Earth, a lattice with people as the nodal points, all arrayed and known and living in a box that limited what they could do and know and love. Nobody bled on Earth, nobody died. One day they were there and then next day they weren’t, zip, that was it. Nobody dug into the ground for shelter-hell, they were already living underground, leaving the surface for crops and preserves—nobody faced plagues and slow crawling death, nobody really lived, not the way the Alveans did. Those people on the hill, they were the ones S
kallon wanted to help, wanted to know. They would be cast adrift by the chaos to follow, without the guides the castes had provided, dropping like small birds before the gale that was coming. He had to help them.
He fell into a troubled sleep, his face pressed into a rumpled pillow.
* * *
He awoke with sandy eyes and a parched throat. But more than water or rest, he wanted Joane. He had to talk about what came next. He would have to tell Fain. They would probably have to leave Kalic, he and Joane—certainly she couldn’t stay with Kish now, they had nothing together—and take shelter in the countryside. There was a whole new life to begin.
He lumbered down to the kitchen, his Doubluth robes snagging in the halls. Joane was not there. Kish looked up from peeling vegetables, nodded, and went back to work, clearly not wanting conversation.
Skallon walked through the lower hotel rooms, looking for Joane. The hotel was deserted. Outside, Maraban Lane stirred and clattered with traffic. People moved aimlessly, carrying packages and bags, their faces drawn and hostile. Some passing knot of women began a hopeful chant, but soon it lost cadence and dribbled away. Feet stirred dust in the heavy air.
Skallon turned away from the filmy windows. Very well, he would see Fain. The moment had to be faced.
When he knocked on Fain’s door there was a pause, a silence from inside. Suddenly the door jerked open. Fain stood to the side, back pressed against the wall, his heatgun covering the door.
Skallon frowned. “What’re you—”
Then he saw the figure on the bed.
Joane.
A spreading brownness down her thighs, seeping through the cloth.
Find the Changeling Page 19