THE CAPTAIN CAME FORWARD IN A HURRY. “Transfer command to me and get back there, both of you! Strap in, take sedatives, anything you want! Just move!”
They immediately saw his point, although they didn’t like it, and Josef and Modra immediately moved to the rear. Gun Roh Chin slid into the seat, strapped in, and put on the command helmet, which was so large for his head that it almost rested on his nose. At this point, he didn’t care.
Another series of alarms sounded, and the screens showed at least a dozen fighters now launching from the cruiser, which kept a steady station just barely inside the Exchange border. Clearly, though, the fighters had no such restrictions, not here, in this desolate area of space.
Chin reached up and threw the manual contacts that sent the ship into combat mode. Although he had no intention to fight, this had the effect of putting the entire system on ready alert and at one and the same time dividing the frigate into separate sealed compartments. No matter what happened back there, nobody could get to him now unless he allowed it, or was unable to prevent it.
“Brace yourself,” he said through the intercom. “I’m going in!”
The ship did not respond, and the instruments registered a series of shots hitting very near him. For a moment he was confused, trying to figure out what was wrong, when it hit him. He was too excited, too tense. Think in Mycohl, he told himself. Calm down and think in Mycohl!
The ship surged forward and he felt the slight vertigo and shimmering of the vessel as it went into subspace.
By the gods I’m right in the middle of the stuff! He felt the tingling and slight dizziness and had a sudden feeling of nausea, but he ignored all those and pressed full speed in toward the Mycohl. He couldn’t help imagining what this was putting them all through back there and he just wanted to get them out.
Speed, course, heading, all were correct, but the seconds ticked on. How much of this stuff could there be here? It just couldn’t be this thick!
And, almost immediately, he realized that what he was thinking was correct. They weren’t in that wall any more; one of the damnable things had latched on to the ship!
“Think, Chin! Think!” he said aloud, angry at himself for not foreseeing this despite the small amount of time he’d had to prepare. What was something that would get it off? His eyes scanned the instrumentation, some of which was unfamiliar to him and little of which had any coherent legends in any language. One, however, caught his eye because he understood from the measuring unit what it had to be. Air pressure! But the others wouldn’t be sealed in their suits. Particularly not now. How long had it been? By the gods of his ancestors! Minutes, at least!
The devils with it! If he didn’t get that thing off the ship quickly, it wouldn’t make any difference anyway! “Depressurize at maximum safety curve!” he ordered. “Vent through all parts to ship exterior.”
Even as the ship filled with a hissing sound he pushed the command helmet up and grabbed a breather mask from inside his own suit.
In a way, it was a totally illogical, very risky move. Those poor souls in the rear would find it increasingly difficult to breathe; all of them required oxygen in higher quantities than this for normal use. At least it would really slow them down, probably knock them out, although he wasn’t that sure about Tobrush. Still, the very notion that the thing could move through their energy shell and interact with them with no problems yet might not be able to stand normal air outside seemed ridiculous.
Sudden waves of nausea gripped him, and he tried not to throw up, but they stopped as suddenly as they’d begun. He tried to get hold of himself and keep his stomach calm and take a look at the screens. They showed a vast black amorphous shape rapidly receding in the distance until it was gone from view. For a moment, he was amazed that it had worked. Then he quickly moved to halt the still ongoing operation and set about trying to figure out the commands and controls for rebuilding pressure and proper mixture once again in a slow and steady rate to minimize any ill effects on those in the rear. Thinking carefully in Mycohl, he ordered, “Estimate safe time for full ship repressurization, all compartments.”
The answer flashed. Emergency, about five minutes. To be absolutely safe, twenty minutes. This was coupled with a warning that he had vented close to half the reserve, and that no extended trip should be undertaken without full recharging.
He noted an odd flashing code. “Meaning of code on ship’s support systems?”
“Safety systems override, Compartment Three,” responded the ship’s computer. “Triggered from within compartment.”
Three . . . Let’s see, that was the upper bubble. Tobrush.
“Effect of triggering in this manner?”
“Potential mutiny, insubordination, or enemy agent activity,” the ship’s computer replied. “Effect is to introduce non-toxic nerve agent into closed air system. Will paralyze or render unconscious all but five known carbon-based life forms.”
He relaxed. He had to hand it to Tobrush. He’d knocked himself cold!
“What about the other compartments? Were they knocked out, too?”
“Code can be triggered only by ship commander or in manual at bridge or navigation station,” the computer responded. “Only Three was triggered.”
He sighed. So the other five had been forced to go through it. That would have put Jimmy next to Grysta, Josef with Modra, and poor Krisha alone as usual. Well, maybe that last had been for the best.
He had the computer play back the sequence from going in to expelling the black thing. A little over nine minutes. A lot could happen in nine minutes.
“Reset security code in Compartment Three,” he ordered. “Introduce”—what in blazes was the Mycohl word for antidote!—“agent into air system to revive occupant. Code triggered in error.”
“Counter-code required,” the computer responded.
Gun Roh Chin had never been a cusser in his whole life but he wished he had a few choice words to use right now. The only way to revive Tobrush short of docking at a Mycohl military installation, which wasn’t something he relished, would be Josef—if Josef was in any condition to give it.
“Condition of other personnel?”
“Satisfactory. However, all occupants are unconscious due to oxygen deprivation. Some damage may result in full if repressurization is not ordered within the next three minutes.”
Blazes! He’d forgotten to actually give the order.
“Do it now. Slowly, but sufficient to induce no physical or mental damage.”
“Complying. Monitoring life forms directly.”
He suddenly had a thought. If this culture was paranoid enough to have nerve gas for use on its own crew . . . “Is there a way to see into the compartments?”
“Yes. Do you wish it?”
“Please. Give me Two first.”
The main screen that monitored the aft view in space shifted and he got a skewed but somewhat panoramic view of the compartment. What he saw shocked him.
It looked as if Modra’s e-suit had been almost ripped off her. Untearable, of course, by normal agents, but fasteners, packs, instruments, were smashed or shattered, and she looked bloody and bruised, as if almost yanked from it before it had been fully deactivated. She lay naked on the floor, face up, arms away from her sides, like a limp doll. Josef, whose own suit appeared to have been removed and then thrown against the bulkhead, was on top of her, his own hands near hers. It wasn’t very difficult to get the scenario, as much as the captain didn’t want to know. By the gods, he was still inside her!
He searched for Krisha, suddenly panicked, and it took a little doing to find her. She, too, had removed her suit, but not, apparently, in a forcible manner. She was back there behind the second set of seats, pressed into a corner, naked, wrapped into a ball, almost a fetal position.
She’d probably gone through mental hell, but at least she looked physically all right, and untouched by another.
Josef groaned, gasped and started taking in deep breaths, He rolled over, off of Modra, who was starting the same procedure herself.
In the aft compartment, it was Grysta on top of Jimmy, but there was an odd note. The little man had bled as well, and in his right hand he clutched the utility knife from his suit, and Grysta’s own hand was still against his wrist. That scenario was much more difficult to determine.
“Is the nerve agent still in Three?” he asked the computer.
“Negative. It was vented with the reserve.”
“What’s the pressure now, in altitude?”
“Twenty-eight hundred meters.”
“Secure from combat mode. Equalize and open all compartments.”
In a moment, the door slid back and all screens returned to normal.
“Maintain alert status, automatic defense mode. Maintain current course and speed, avoid any subspace returns,” he ordered, then removed the command headset and got up and walked back into the next compartment.
Josef was sitting up, taking deep breaths, and shaking his head as if to clear it. Still, he was aware enough to look up as the captain entered.
“It’ll be all right in a couple of more minutes,” the captain told him. “It’s taking more time because it has to refilter a lot of the existing air. I had to use one of the two reserve tanks to blow that thing off us.”
Josef coughed, then managed, “Oh, is that what it is? I feel weak as a baby and my head is pounding.”
“Do you remember any of it?”
Another series of coughs., “Yes. It was very strange. Once we joined, I—it was very weird. There wasn’t any telepathic link, but the moment I took control of her we had this other link, like I could feel everything she felt and she could feel everything I felt.”
“You hypnoed her? Then what are all these signs of violence?”
“Captain, there wasn’t any thinking. It was all just raw power, raw lust. She was a natural empath under my influence. She felt what I felt and so she was the same way. It was like two wild animals in heat.”
“You okay now?”
Josef nodded. “I’m getting enough air. You might help me up, though.” He frowned. “Tobrush? He’s calling me, and he sounds pretty strange himself.”
“He triggered the mutiny signal in his compartment. I’m sure he wants you to get him out of it. I don’t know how.”
“Yeah. I thought about doing that for us but then I remembered that you wouldn’t know how to countermand it. Okay, I’ll set the codes, then come back and help you.”
Modra still lay there on the floor, breathing hard, her eyes open, but staring up at the ceiling.
“Modra? Are you all right?”
For a second or two she didn’t reply, then she said, in a hoarse whisper, “I’m not sure. I feel like somebody’s punching bag, and my head feels like it’s going to explode.”
“You know what happened?”
She nodded idly. “I—I was him. And I enjoyed it! Now . . . Now I feel unclean, like some of that black stuff is still lodged inside me. He disgusts me. He is in my mind and I’m in his and he still disgusts me.”
“It was that thing. You must know that.”
“What happened isn’t the point. He’s still enjoying having done it!”
The captain sighed and moved back to Krisha, who had uncurled and now sat, looking puzzled. “Are you all right?” he asked gently.
“It was the same nightmare,” she told him. “Only this time it seemed so real, and it went on and on and on. It’s still there, too. Not fading, like before, to a bad memory or an irrational fear. Like—like this is just a shell, and the vision’s going to shatter it and become real.”
“It’s only a nightmare triggered by that thing from your own mind,” he assured her in as gentle a tone as he could manage. “If you want to find out what real is, go help Modra. She needs somebody.”
He patted her hand, helped her to her feet, then had to steady her as her headache and nausea attacked full tilt. As soon as he felt she was recovering, though, he made his way through the hatch to the aft compartment. Both Jimmy and Grysta were up and seemed all right except for some cuts and bruises, perhaps, but Grysta seemed angry and Jimmy uncharacteristically reserved.
“Jeez, Jimmy! You’re damned lucky it only got to me a little! I still had my brains about me and could stop you!”
“Shut up, Grysta!” Jimmy snapped. “Just shut up, will you?”
She turned to the captain in disgust. “Shit! You’d think I should’a let him cut his balls off!”
Gun Roh Chin felt his jaw drop. “What?”
“Yeah, that’s what he was gonna do. I mean, it all started and all, and like last time I just get all horny, and I undo the straps and go to Jimmy, who’s gettin’ outta his suit, so I do the same, right? And then instead of doin’ what I figured, next thing I know he’s got this knife in one hand and he’s holdin’ his nuts in the other and I grabbed his knife arm and pushed him over and had to fight like hell just to hold him down. And for that he’s mad at me now! Can you believe it?”
Chin looked at Jimmy McCray. “Is that true?”
Jimmy looked down at the floor rather than at the captain, but he slowly nodded. “It was an overpowering urge, but it wasn’t any unthinking action. I was thinking too much, maybe. All of a sudden I knew, I just knew, I had to do it. That if I did it everything would be all right, everything would work out, my soul would be purified. No question. It was like a revelation.”
“And do you still feel like that? Is that why you’re angry?”
“I—I don’t know. I wouldn’t do it, but I still can’t shake the idea that it’s right, somehow. You said it yourself, Cap. Those things can’t know us as individuals. They just let loose what we got in our own minds, what we hide away even from ourselves. Maybe that’s why I’m still a virgin. Maybe I don’t want to be a man. At least not in that way.”
“Most likely it’s guilt,” the captain replied, trying to make the little man feel a bit better. “You were a priest once and you rejected it, your vows, everything your life had stood for and believed in up to that point. You’re afraid you did it because you were selfish, carnal. That is a double-edged way out. You remove the source of your fall and punish yourself at the same time.”
He looked up at the captain. “I know the pop psychology. Probably right, too. The problem’s more basic than that. If I wasn’t a priest we might all be dead or enslaved back in that demon hellhole. Every bit of my knowledge that made me a real asset to the rest of you came from my being a priest. And then I get to the heights and this—this being—knows me, says we talked before, many times. That we, maybe all of us, were picked. That all along I’ve been an instrument of higher powers, which is what a priest is supposed to be. Before, it was easy. I was on non-Terran worlds and around non-Terran types, and then I had Grysta on my back, and then we had much too much to think about to be very carnal. Not now, though. Not this time. When we went in I wanted her, wanted her bad, and she wanted me, and there we were.” His eyes looked haunted. “There wasn’t any other way out, you see. I knew I wasn’t strong enough to resist . . . ”
Gun Roh Chin sighed. “Well, you’ll have to deal with your own problems as best you can, and so will the others. Consider Modra and Josef.”
“Hey, I’m linked to them, too, remember,” Jimmy said. “And he saved her life by what happened and she knows it. Not deliberately, of course, but it’s the first case of rape I ever heard of that was a blessing. She just doesn’t want to face that, because that means facing her own dark little corners.”
“Eh? What? Saved her life?”
Jimmy nodded. “Before the link snapped I got a picture. It was only a second, maybe a fraction of a second, but it was all I need. She’s got enough guilt inside her to make a neutron star. She’d have killed herself in a matter of minutes if he hadn’t taken her over. Not, to be sure, that he knew it or that it had anything to do with what followed, but the knowledge gives him a sense of smug self-righteousness.” He gave a dry, mirthless chuckle. “What a crew of saviors we are!”
Gun Roh Chin gave a wry smile. “Would it surprise you if I said that I think we are a most extraordinary crew of saviors?”
“Huh? What do you mean?”
“Beyond the balance of skills, talents, intelligence, and lack of commitments beyond our immediate mission, we’ve faced the burdens of our upbringing and now the burdens of our own worst selves and we’re all still here. And if you want to believe you’re on some sort of divine mission, fine, but take the entire package because logic says you should.”
“What?”
“Consider that, perhaps, Grysta’s purpose was to save you from yourself. That her actions, too, were meant to be.”
With that, Gun Roh Chin walked back into the middle cabin. As he did, the big, hairy figure of Josef came down from the top bubble.
“How is Tobrush doing?” the captain asked him.
“All right. The gas put the body out but not the real Tobrush inside it. It was just immobile. He says he spent the whole time fighting the stuff off. That it kept trying to enter and bond with him.”
Chin frowned. “Bond? What does he mean by that?”
“Remember we said that stuff couldn’t exist on its own in our universe? Not unless it was encased, protected, anyway. Think about every scary story you ever heard about the supernatural. Demonic possession, the walking dead, the vampires and werewolves that used to scare my ancient ancestors—stuff like that.”
“All cultures have such legends, or their equivalents.”
Josef nodded. “That’s the bottom line, Captain. It doesn’t just happen in any of the stories. Demons come when they’re summoned, intentionally or otherwise; vampires and werewolves and their ilk are created by blood and deliberate acts. The bottom line . . . It doesn’t need idols, it just uses them. It can use bodies, too, and minds.”
Suddenly Gun Roh Chin understood. “That’s what it was trying to do! Take control! Good Lord! Think of the number of ships and people traveling through subspace! Think of the automatic pilots and programmed courses that might not avoid what they’re told cannot be there! They’re doing more than controlling commerce—they’re making converts! Forcible converts! Ones who not only will then sow an evil path, but who will also make the pentagrams and ensnare the unwary and make gateways for the Quintara to enter!”
The big man nodded. “We’ve decided not to make for any frontier posts. In less than three days we’ll be at a position only Tobrush knows. One from which he can contact the highest levels of his own people—and I don’t mean the Julki. So far, the further in we go, the fewer blips I’m getting on the monitors. At least you’re right about that part, it seems. They’ve got less of that stuff to go around than they need.”
Gun Roh Chin sat perched casually on the edge of a storage locker, Tobrush nearby at his console in the upper bubble.
“I know you have the power to seal the others out,” the captain said softly. “I’d like a private conversation.”
“You may speak freely,” the Mycohl master responded. “The Julki brain is linked to theirs, but I am rerouting the input-output to my true self and operating manually. None will overhear if you do not wish it.”
“It’s about the others that I’ve come to speak.”
“Yes, I thought as much. We are only two hours from egress.”
“You’re monitoring them, linked to them. Surely you’ve noticed the changes.”
“Changes in Terran behavior and attitudes are not always so obvious to an outsider.”
The captain smiled, wondering if he was being put on. “I’m talking about slow, steady behavioral changes over the past three days from the episode. Krisha has withdrawn almost into a shell. She speaks little, refuses to put on the e-suit, and half the time doesn’t seem to understand what’s said to her, even by me.”
“Yes, that is noted. Her thoughts are very dark and very confused and frightened. The memory of her ordeal is strong and she is having trouble at times distinguishing it from reality. She has been very strong up to now. I had hoped some time and rest would allow her to sort things out.”
“Those were my own thoughts,” Chin agreed. “But it is not isolated. There’s Modra, too. Rape is one of the things a Terran woman fears most. It is an ugly invasion of her most private area, and is used in some cultures as a violent cultural act to keep women from leading roles through fear. Just after the encounter, she reacted just that way, just the way I would have expected. Now suddenly it was no big deal, and she’s all over Josef and she’s made love to him twice of her own accord in the past two days.”
“Four times. You sleep more than they do. It might have been more if they had been less bruised and battered.”
“Four! Even worse!”
“I found a great deal of the ritual and physical addenda quite fascinating. The oral parts in particular are quite unusual in that they have no direct relationship to the primary functions. I could not, however, know out of hand that this follow-up behavior was unusual. There are many races . . . ”
“Yes, I know. But it is. Highly unusual. And McCray—he’s become cruel, even violent to Grysta, and cool and distant to the other two women, while he eggs Josef on and even tried to get me to force myself on Krisha. When you try and put him down he flies into rages and either approaches violence or stalks off. Josef—I haven’t seen as much of a change in him. It’s more one of degree, I suppose, but I have less comparison there.”
“Josef has gone the last step to what you would call a megalomaniac. He no longer sees people as individuals, only as toys for his own amusement. Before, he would kill to survive; now he would kill if it pleased him to do so. He is utterly without conscience and is incapable of remorse. Only by subtly stimulating and directing his impulses have I managed to keep him under control. What you sense is true. They are all corrupted.”
Gun Roh Chin sighed. “That—stuff, that evil, programmable plasma, got in, then.”
“Yes. I was too weak and disoriented for the first few hours afterwards to really recognize it. I knew from the assault it waged upon my own person how it could work, but it did not occur to me at the time that I was not the only one under attack. By the time it did occur to me, it had integrated itself into their systems so as to be beyond any known means of detection. What one cannot detect, one cannot excise.”
“But don’t they recognize it?”
“Yes, but it is in the very fundamentals of evil that one always condemns it when they see it but rationalizes it when they do it. They are not going over to the enemy—they are much too strong for that. But they are undergoing a corrupting metamorphosis that makes them more like their enemy. I can control the three through the mind-link, even moderate them if need be. You and the syn seem to have escaped its grasp due to your physiological makeup. About Krisha I can do little, since she is using it to create her own self-enforcing hell. We can hypno her to a degree for our immediate purposes, but only for short and, I suspect, decreasing periods of time. The Quintara energy, for want of a better term, is there to resist counter-moves and, although a raw program as amorphous in many ways as its true shape, it is programmed to survive and is capable of learning how.”
“You mean there’s no hope for her—them—then?”
“I didn’t say that. What I need is a way to get the material to manifest itself. If I can detect it, I can isolate and remove it. It will not reverse things to do so, but it will free them to reverse things as they will. We must get it out. We dare not go up against the Quintara without doing so. I believe that the Quintara can program the material by sheer force of will if they are in close proximity to it. With that stuff inside them, the Quintara would be able to remake them into their own image. It is my hope that when we egress for the first time, the material inside them, which has never had that experience before, will be briefly shocked and undergo a self-protective reaction. Using the mind-link, I might well be able to excise the material in the three to which I am metaphysically attached.”
“Yes, but even if it works, you said it learns. Krisha—”
“I will do what I can, but I am unsure of success even with my own. If not, then we shall have to find some other way. I do not have it all yet, nor do you, but without the Mizlaplan there is no success. Of that I am convinced. And you are not the one to bring us the Mizlaplan, Captain. You know that. That leaves but one candidate.”
The captain sighed. “All right. We are in your hands right now. There seems nothing more we can do.”
“Not, at least, until I have reported to my own kind. Leave me now; I must prepare for the brief moment of possible opportunity. Watch them carefully, though, at the moment of egress. If I am successful, who knows what will result?”
“I will do what I can, as you will.”
“It is all that can be done right now. Oh—Captain?”
“Yes?”
“Have you any more thoughts on how we are expected to win this thing, even if the unlikely event comes to pass that all the pieces fit into place? I begin to fear that we may have the weapon but not the instruction manual.”
“I know. And yet, I can’t help feeling that the answer is right in front of our faces, if only we could recognize it. It is a puzzle requiring more pieces, I fear, but the pieces only assemble a lock. The key is still required.”
Gun Roh Chin sat staring at Krisha trying to think of something he could do. She just sat there, naked, on the floor, her arms wrapped around her pulled-up legs, and stared vacantly at some point only she could see.
“Want to know what she’s thinking, Captain?” Jimmy McCray asked in a casual, almost amused tone.
“I know you’re a telepath, McCray, but until now I hadn’t thought you were a voyeur.”
McCray shrugged. “We’re all voyeurs. We just don’t like to admit it to anybody, that’s all. But I don’t have to make any effort with her. She’s become the worst kind of talent to be, a broadcast telepath. Even ordinary folks, the kind with no talents at all, can know pretty well what she’s thinking just by staring at her. Not as clear as a telepath, or as deep, but pretty well. I’ve known a couple in my life. Live well away from just about anybody, doing the kind of shit jobs loners do. It’d drive me nuts to be like that; you can never lie, never have even the most private secrets. Most of ’em wind up insane or suicidal, but she’s not the suicide type. Deep down she still believes all that guff she was raised on.”
“I was raised on that ‘guff,’ as you call it, too,” he reminded the little man. “And you were raised in and believed a different but equally solid system. Just out of curiosity—what do you believe in now?”
“Me. That’s what I believe in. What I can see, feel, hear, touch, and use. That’s more than most germs believe in, I think.”
“Germs?”
“Or maybe viruses, or even less important stuff. No use kidding ourselves any more. We’re the byproduct of a series of chance actions in the exhaust of somebody else’s ship. The black stuff’s just more gunk, and the so-called Higher Races are a bunch of smart diseases, cockroaches, and other pests kind of halfway in our bailiwick and halfway in the real, big one, where here they play tin god and there they’re nuisances and insects. It doesn’t matter any more if I believe or not. Nothing much matters any more.”
“Where are the others?”
“Big Joe and the Terran Slut are off on a bunny trip again in the cockpit, since Tobrush is taking the con from the bubble, and the talking Build-a-Slut kit is napping in back.”
“Your opinion of women has certainly changed,” he noted sourly. “Grysta saved you from doing something pretty nasty to yourself. I’d expect some gratitude.”
“Gratitude!” McCray snorted. “Yeah, she saved me from myself all right, but not to do me any favors. She saved it ’cause she wanted it. Deep down that’s all any of ’em want. Drag men down, control ’em, and in exchange allow us to give ’em what they bloody well crave. Hell, look at Modra. She gets raped and now she’s ‘Beat me! Whip me! Screw me!’ like some bad pornography. And, let her. But nobody on this ship gets mine, that I’m swearin’ to you. Throw caution to the winds and get what you want when you want it is the only way that makes sense in this black cosmos we’ve uncovered. We lifted up a rock in the glen and found ourselves livin’ under it. Hell, the one thing good about all this is that I spent my whole life believin’ and teachin’ that sin was something external, the sins of Eve and Adam, and the forces of the devil and his minions. And, what do you know? It is the devil and his minions doin’ it! And sin, real sin, is literally a god-damned computer program!”
“External causes make it easier for you, then? Absolves you of any responsibility for your actions, any conscience, you think. But it’s not the case, McCray. It doesn’t matter where we are in the overall cosmos, this is still the same place and the same people and the same cultures we grew up in, and it’s very real, all of it. The basis of all religious faith is that the gods—God, singular, if you please—is boss. We were always subject to the whims and the will of greater forces and prayed to them the way ancient slaves pleaded with their masters for crumbs. So what if we’ve found out something about how the system really works? All religions postulate that even the supernatural operates by its own set of rules and codes and that the gods use intermediaries. The physical presence of a corruption program or device means nothing, and absolves us of nothing. Unless there’s an intelligence, the Quintara or their boss, behind it, it’s generic.” He tapped his head. “It uses what it finds in here. It’s found the ugly part in all of us and enhanced it, taken the lid off. You know that, deep down, intellectually. You just are willing to let it win.”
“Big talk. You didn’t feel it. You didn’t let it go in and wrench your mind out. Not her, either, in the same way.” Jimmy pointed to Krisha, who was ignoring the whole conversation as if the pair weren’t even there.
“Huh? What do you mean by that?”
“She’s being specifically reprogrammed. I can read it from back in her subconscious mind, although she’s not aware of it. She’s being made over into the exact specifications of that demon prince’s curse on her. It’s not complete yet, but as soon as she steps off this ship and onto a real planet it’ll set up the rest almost instantly and lock it in so tight won’t no power get it out without destroying her mind as well.”
He half rose from his chair. “How do you know this?”
“As I said, I can read it. She’s an open book to most anybody all the way down. It’s a set of instructions. Not in words, but very clear in holograph. Starts with a real compulsion to survive and not go completely off the deep end. Wide open, full-power broadcast to everybody and everything, but the input’s scrambled so she can’t understand a thing anybody says. Won’t accept charity or help from anybody, or use anything anybody else might want. And anybody who tries will get cursed somehow themselves. Don’t ask me how. Not that they’d want to help after a while. The very next thing on the list seems to be a total loss of bowel and bladder control. Glad that one hasn’t kicked in yet! Real ugly picture there of her wallowing in the mud and her own excrement, eatin’ garbage totally cut off from society and totally alone. Had enough?”
“I get the idea. But you’re sure this isn’t from her own nightmares?”
“Oh, who can say where the old devil got the idea from? All I know is, it’s a pattern. Not something in any way like her other fears and terrors and dark regrets. If this crap’s generic, explain that.”
Gun Roh Chin’s eyes widened. “He programmed her! That demon set her up!”
“Set her up? When? In her dreams? If he could do that, why didn’t he do worse to us? I’m pretty sure we were protected by that pentagram no matter what that evil bastard claimed. He never stepped over the line.”
“He didn’t do it. Don’t you see? He only planted the vision in her mind, built from a synthesis of her own terrors. It was the other demon, the one who had you both back in the city station—he saw that vision and he made it a program while he had you! It must be!”
“Yeah? So why’d he do that to her and not me? He had me just as low.”
“Who’s to say he didn’t, McCray? Who’s to say that the knife you almost used wasn’t the first command in a series? It would be different for you, a different set of nightmares, but who’s to say that stuff isn’t just sitting there, waiting until the next time the mind-link is broken, to activate?”
The little man was really rattled by that. “You—you really think so?”
“I have no idea. But I also have no way to find out, do I? I would say that the chances are good that you will find out for yourself in due time. In the meantime, I’m more interested in the fact that she is, as you call her, a broadcast telepath. It’s a variation I hadn’t heard of, although I would assume that the Church would co-opt such ones and hide them away, perhaps as the direct servants of the Holy Angels, since they could never be disloyal. But it’s still simply a variation of a strong talent.”
“Yeah? So?”
“Tobrush said he thought he might have burned the sensitivity out of her, but there was also the chance that it was psychosomatic. Now a variation of her old talent has reappeared. Tell me, McCray—as a strong telepath yourself, could you create a situation where you’d be a broadcast telepath? Send wide open at full strength while not receiving?”
“Yeah, I suppose. I doubt if I could ever do it willingly, though. Not only is all my training, defenses, and intellect directed the other way, but I’d never want to.”
“Wanting or being psychologically capable is not the point. You could create the situation yourself if your life depended on it.”
“Well, it’s theoretically possible, sure.”
“Then her loss was psychosomatic after all. Possibly even induced, the first level of this program. Even a hypno could make her believe she had no more talent for a while. Someone with the Quintara’s power, or Tobrush’s, could do it much better and even make it a permanent command. That’s all the binding ordination of the Church is—a Higher Race using its far stronger hypno talent to create a permanent condition. Long ago, on the way to the city, a still imprisoned Quintara was able to negate her Angel’s hypnotic compulsion. She said as much.”
“Yeah? So it’s a compulsion. That’s a curse anyway, isn’t it? What’s the difference? She couldn’t break her old one on her own, and after seven minutes in the black to reinforce it even Tobrush or her Angels couldn’t undo it. Only a Quintara who knows how it all works could probably do it, and maybe that was the idea. Spend some time like she’s gonna, and you’d cheerfully sell your soul to the devil. Any devil. And then they’d have their own in the priesthood of her all-controlling church. A Kalia for the Mizlaplan.”
Gun Roh Chin thought about it, and the more he thought, the more he knew that McCray had hit it. Not precisely, of course—that demon wasn’t interested in the larger war, only in getting its own following of worshipers—but clearly that was in its mind. Breaking them wasn’t enough; later on, removed from the mental horror, they might still be less than fully committed. Body but not soul. Put them in such horrible situations and, after a while, they’d pray to the damned thing for release!
“If your action with the knife were coupled with an overwhelming sexual desire, you might do anything to get back what you threw away,” Chin noted.
McCray laughed derisively. “A lot easier to get her back than that.”
“Someone in the Exchange is making synthetic people to design. Are they all females?”
Jimmy was startled. “Come to think of it, no! Oh—I see what you mean. Point taken. Which means, as usual, I’m still up the creek and at the end of another’s strings. If I keep the mind-link, I’m in for the duration on this mess. If I lose it, I’m in my own private hell. You’ve really made my day, Captain!”
But Gun Roh Chin looked over at Krisha. It also meant that they could do horrible things to mind and body, but they needed your consent to get your soul. She’d never give them that, no matter how horrible an existence she had. It would be the one thing that would keep her going, give her strength.
He pictured her as McCray said, if the man wasn’t just twisting the knife for the fun of it. Alone, miserable, mud-caked, going through garbage . . .
“No,” he said softly.
“Huh? ‘No’ what, Captain?”
Gun Roh Chin looked at the chronograph. “Go back into the aft compartment and strap in, McCray. We’re going to punch out in just a few minutes.”
“I don’t need to do all that. I’m perfectly fine right here.”
“Go back aft and strap yourself in, McCray!” said the captain in a tone so menacing and so icy cold that there was no mistaking the danger in him.
Jimmy McCray threw up his hands. “All right! All right! Man! I think some of that stuff made it into you, too, after all.” He got up and started aft, then stopped and turned. “What are you going to do, Captain?”
“You’re the one with the talents. Go back there and divine it.”
Jimmy grinned. “Oh, no! You’re the prognosticator, not me!” He paused a moment, then added, “Let her go, Cap, for your own good. When a woman loves a man, then comes the man’s destruction if he puts her ahead of all else. That’s been the way since Eve got Adam to crunch the apple and share her misery.”
He left before Chin could respond.
The captain sighed. He wished he were a prognosticator, able to predict the outcome of things, but that was the last thing he was. What he had was no talent; it was simply an ability to see things, both little and big, and put them together into a coherent picture. It was why he was a Grand Master at Go before the age of twelve. They’d told him early on that he was a prodigy, with an I.Q. off the scale, but he’d never fully accepted that simply because he didn’t feel any different than those around him. He had far more in common with a random group of people than he did with these talents or some big-brained master scientists. He’d often wondered, though, if smarter and dumber had more to do with processing speed than with really being different. He took it for granted that he could do these deductions because they were simple, obvious; it was always amazing to him that others could not, even ones who seemed on a conversational level to be as smart or smarter than he. He’d always put it down mostly to the luxury he had of absolute privacy of thoughts and feelings from his earliest childhood.
He looked at Krisha sitting so forlornly in the corner and then at the chronometer and wished that he had a clue as to what to do. He’d kill her before he’d allow them to turn her into some kind of animal!
But the more he looked at her, suddenly so small and pitiful, the more he knew he could never bring himself to do it.
There had to be a way out! Think! Think! He glanced up at the countdown chronograph. Two minutes and counting. Precious little time left to think!
No matter if she’d been set up by that demon or not, the fact was that the curse was based upon her own darkest nightmares. The Quintara didn’t have to build levels of Hell; they let you construct it yourself and then made it possible to happen.
McCray had lost his faith, but once he’d had it firm and strong and had become a priest in a celibate order, yet he’d remained too painfully human. Love for an unattainable woman had cost him his profession, cut his faith not only in his God but in himself to ribbons. Another female, although a very different sort of creature, had held him in thrall. That one and another woman had loosed the Quintara. The blackness had no trouble turning his inward self-loathing into an outward hatred of all women from which, if his nature was violent enough, could spring a vicious rapist and possible serial killer of women. That was his darkest corner, the part he never even allowed himself to see. Now he still couldn’t see it, but he could become it as surely as Krisha could become her own nightmare and perhaps even add to it herself.
Josef had already been an arrogant hypno raised in a violent society with little care for individual life, but he’d still operated on civilized codes which had kept his impulses in check and allowed him to function with at least some measure of right and wrong, as different as his definitions might have been from the others’. The darkness had stripped away all inhibitions, redefined “right” as anything he wanted to do and “wrong” anyone or anything that interfered with that, and in so doing he’d become the male counterpart of Kalia with one exception: Josef would do no bidding of a Quintara, prince or otherwise, willingly.
And Modra, proud, independent, tough Modra, who’d seen enough of her decisions create tragedies for others and who therefore carried such enormous guilt within her, had let the darkness seduce her, make her compliant, passive, masochistic, and totally submissive, so that she wouldn’t have to think and decide things any more.
What was it McCray had said? Ninety trillion Fausts. Ninety trillion sentient creatures, each with their own dark corners, inhibitions, repressions, just waiting to be let out and destroy three mighty civilizations, ready to be let out by the Engineer and his minions for their own infinite amusement.
You will win if you deserve to, that distant, godlike being had told the four who’d reached that lofty duty station. What did he mean by that? Morally? Ethically? What were those against the blackness that invaded and corrupted even the best? Intellectually, perhaps, if they could solve the great puzzle before it was too late. But why hadn’t they been given the answer? If those of the Bridge of the Great Ship were of such high moral and ethical character that they opposed all this, why hadn’t they given precise directions to the four of them when they could? Why did the mortals always have to prove themselves to their gods?
Was it, perhaps, to convince the gods that the mortals were worth the trouble and worthy of morals and ethics? In many faiths, including McCray’s if he remembered correctly, evil was less an opponent of the gods than a tool of them for weeding out the worst and perfecting the best. Was there, perhaps, even now some higher state, some ultimate reward, that even we lowly viruses of engine combustion might attain? Something that, even so, would be an enormous bother to the gods of The Ship, a lot of time and trouble? Is that it? he wondered. Are we supposed to show them whether or not we’re worth the trouble?
One minute!
He got up and shed his suit. No barriers. Then he went over to her and squatted in front of her. She looked up at him with those enormous brown eyes filled only with resignation and despair.
“Get up!” he shouted at her. “Don’t let them do it to you!”
When she didn’t immediately react he stood, reached down, grabbed her arms, and forcibly pulled her to a standing position. They were almost the same height and that helped; he looked straight into her eyes.
Thirty seconds.
“You are not alone!” he shouted to her, unsure if she could even understand him.
Twenty seconds.
“I will not permit you to be alone! I will not permit this to happen to you!”
Ten seconds.
In desperation and his own despair he pulled her to him, and she clung to him and he to her, and, on impulse, a lifetime of conditioning and behavior went out the hatch. He held her tight, as if trying to bring her body within his own, and she had her own arms around him so tightly her nails dug into the flesh of his back, and he kissed her and held her and passion and compassion mixed as she responded.
Five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . .
They never noticed the slight vertigo and disorientation of the emergence into normal space, but at the moment it happened something dark and crackling with energy flared within her, reached out for him, and they were both enveloped in an energy pattern that seemed almost a living creature, tentacles of black flame reaching out directed by three tiny red eyes, and throughout the ship all the talents heard terrible mental screams of pure hatred from creatures of a type they could not imagine . . .
And then, suddenly, there was silence, with just the normal sounds of the ship around them, and the telltale whine and vibration from the subspace engines kicking in and regulating normal flight.
It was Krisha who loosened her grip first, relaxing and pulling a bit away from his lips. Sensing that she wanted to break, he let her go, and she stepped back a half step and almost fell. He moved to steady her but she waved him off and remained on her feet, breathing very hard.
“Krisha . . . ?”
“I—I am all right, Captain,” she responded, coughing, but speaking in the classical Mizlaplanian dialect she’d had problems with before. She went over and sank into a chair, and he just watched her, excited, heartened, but puzzled.
“The darkness?”
“That which is within me is back where it belonged,” she told him, eyes tearing. “That which was added is gone. Dead, I think, if such things can truly die. The others, too, although, like me, it will depend on their own wills to control and push that inside them back down. At least—it is our choice once again.”
“You know about the others?”
She nodded. “It is back. I am not a part of their group, but I can read their surface thoughts and feel the absence of that horrible darkness.”
“Then . . . what is wrong?” He was troubled by her strange tone and seeming sadness at what could only be called wonderful news.
“I—I will treasure that moment forever, Captain, when your love saved me. It is the greatest moment in my life, and I mean that. Still, I understand now. That poor little wretch of an animal I was turning into was me, Captain. Not the fantasy I always had, which was based on fanciful ideas about what I might have become in some other culture, some other nation, some other time, but the real me, stripped of all that I was, as I am now.”
He frowned, puzzled. “What do you mean?”
“My fantasies were false, Captain, as most fantasies are. In intelligence, in relative appearances, even in social class, I’m not really all that different than, say, Modra of the Exchange, or the wretched Kalia of the Mycohl. In a sense, they are both alternative versions of me, no matter how different we might seem. No matter my childish fairy tales of a different life, they are, in a great sense, alternate truths had I been born into either of their societies instead of my own. It’s quite a choice. A self-centered, driven work-obsessed woman too busy to even see the feelings of others and causing much pain as a result for an empty, hollow end, or an ignorant, abused girl hating her own beauty and herself for it instead of the society that made her that way, consumed with loathing for life itself. That—or a priestess of the Mizlaplan, helping maintain a state of peace and relative plenty, serving people and solving their problems rather than causing them or being victimized by them.”
“You are not like those other two,” he told her gently.
“No, Captain, I’m like McCray. My identity, all that I have, is wrapped up in one personality, one existence. Remove it now, at this point, and there is nothing upon which to stand. When he lost his faith he became nothing. In his search for something else, he got a replacement control on his back. On our descent to the city, he lost that control but regained his faith for a time and was a great man. When the demon and the ascent to The Ship took it away once more, only ugliness remained. I’m sorry, I’m trying to explain what may not be explainable. I know what you want, and a part of me wants that, too. But, over time, it would be as hollow as Modra’s future, and as selfish. I could never be what we both imagine; in the end, it would eat me from the inside as sure as that darkness. If I am not a priestess, I am nothing at all.”
He shook his head, more confused than ever. “I am trying to understand, but it is difficult. You can’t truly believe the Cosmology. Not after what you know now.”
“It’s beyond that. For twenty years I have been defined by, and defined myself by, a single identity. That’s the very person you love and wanted to save, and you did. It is the only way I can contribute, be a human being. Without that bedrock of truth within a much confused faith, I am too cold and dark and alone, no matter what I am doing or who I am with. It’s no compulsions talking, no powerful hypnotic talent, just me. I almost wonder about that priestess or what ever she was that broke McCray. I wonder how much conditioning and mind control they actually did on her, or whether she, too, came to this point, a point as incomprehensible to him as mine is to you. It hurts—it’s supposed to hurt—but I know now, knew from the moment that thing left me, that I can be one or the other but not something new. You have never truly believed in the Cosmology, even from the start. I’ve known that. I think we all did. But you believed in it over all the alternatives.”
He sighed and gave her a sad sort of smile. “In a sense, I think I do understand.” And he did, although his heart ached. He went over to her, took her hand, and kissed it. “As you say, I, too, am of Mizlaplan.”
He could see her tears, and fought with all his self-control to hold back his own. Of all the losses of this great adventure, though, this one was the most difficult to accept.
Worse, what he’d already determined made it the best result, for now there was hope again for any future at all.
Josef’s voice suddenly came on the intercom speakers. “What the hell happened?” he growled. “There’s nothing on the scanners! Nothing on the screens! We’re dead and flying blind!”