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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN,

Messages from the Black House,
where dwell the Dead.

The Eater of Souls belongs to a separate mythic tradition from Achibol and Benadek, but the biocybes have cited it as source material.
Romantics may be disappointed, because the story of Gaddo and Ameling, dear to young females galaxywide, is presented unconventionally. The biocybes have deleted the lovely Ameling entirely and replaced her with . . . but see for yourselves. Just remember the inherent flexibility of myth: one people's god may be another's demon.
Debate rages, exacerbated by the precipitous resignation of Director Saphooth, and his acceptance of a position with SOMA *, a consortium of archconservative one-worlders. SOMA, through various front organizations, controls a significant share of MYTHIC's financing—and the influence that goes with it. The director's position is still unfilled, and SOMA is pressing for a sympathetic replacement.
This must not happen. A research project, no matter how it catches the public interest, must not be influenced by beliefs. Beliefs and convictions inspire the collection of facts that support them, but facts, even in the greatest numbers, are only data. They may inspire confidence, but they prove nothing. Skepticism, on the other hand, is vital to scientific inquiry. In science, there is no proof. Hypotheses (not beliefs) can only be disproved—and one contradictory datum is all it takes.
MYTHIC straddles the border between science and belief. Its data base is myth, its goal neither to prove nor to disprove, but to understand the processes underlying myths' creation.
It is vital that the new director understand the project's philosophy and goals. He should have specific qualifications as well:
1) An extensive background in comparative mythology.
2) Experience applying rigorous scientific methodology in his own field.
3) The capability to set aside personal convictions. He must be a monument to probity and impartiality.
Neither SOMA, the GSHP ** nor any other "interested" party should decide MYTHIC's strategies or edit its publications. That task must remain in the hands of literary scholars.
If you, the reader, have been stimulated by these tales and wish them to continue to unfold in an unbiased manner, exactly as the biocybes have produced them, then make your voices heard. Though SOMA currently provides 40% of MYTHIC's operating expenses, you, subscribers and supporters furnish 55%. The Board of Trustees will listen to you.
(Kaledrin, Senior Editor)



INTERLUDE

The Great School, Midicor IV

 

"Will it make a difference?"

"I hope so, Ab. Our original subscribers aren't fundamentalists."

"They won't vote as a bloc like SOMA. You'll be lucky to get an equal showing."

"If twenty percent write in, the Board will pick me, or someone like me. They weren't appointed by SOMA. They don't want priests, magisters, and medicine men standing behind their desks dictating to them."

"Why didn't you say that? All that `rigorous scientific' stuff leaves me cold."

"You want me to be as bad as SOMA? `If my opponent wins, every geologist will have a priest holding his hammer! Every surgeon will operate beneath the eye of a shaman in grease and feathers!' That sort of thing? No, they'll understand."

"I hope so. I really like working here."

 

The days following Benadek's revelation of dangers unforeseen flew by, free of the stresses that had driven the threesome. Benadek's change relieved sexual tension between him and Teress, though it was far from a perfect solution, as Achibol frequently reminded him with snorts of exasperation and disgust not entirely feigned. Benadek's relationship with the pure-human girl was amicable. His barely adolescent body's innocuous chemical signals neither threatened nor enticed. Apart from an occasional nostalgic look she treated him like a well-loved younger brother.

"Whatever he has in mind," she explained to Achibol, not for the first time, "he'll be in great danger. That kind of bond might distract him."

"He told you that? The boy's tight as a clam, with me."

"He hasn't told me a thing," she reassured him obliquely, patting his hand, which he indignantly snatched away.

"Don't do that! I'm not your old grandpappy, remember?"

"My what?"

"Never mind. Did you find the storerooms?"

"Circe did. Everything we need is here—and lots of things I don't recognize. You'll have to come with me, next time. I took three canvas packs with lots of pockets, and some cook-pots that fit inside each other."

"There should be tents, heaters, ration packs . . ."

"There probably are."

The outfits they put together were as light and compact as late-twenty-first-century science and industry could make them. They gathered throwaway lights, shelters that collapsed to fit Teress's palm, ration-packs that heated themselves and tasted no worse than Circe's fare.

Teress found wristwatch-sized communicators that worked fine in the hallways of Biopsych Three, but were useless on the surface. "It's the jamming," Benadek said. "Just as well—we might alert the ones I want to sneak up on. I'm hoping those honches have reported us dead in the swamp, by now."

"Do you think they have?"

"We almost did die, didn't we?"

"Now that you mention it . . ."

To Achibol's and Teress's surprise, Benadek began acting like the boy he purported to be. Preparing to depart, free of the most grueling work, he took time to discover some of the ancients' entertainments, as Teress had been doing for several weeks. She became his enthusiastic guide through the esoterica of "the movies." Benadek watched cube after cube of fictional adventures and documentaries. He soon stabilized on a diet of twentieth-century naval stories and on fantasies about far-future civilizations and the exploration of the galaxy. The slow, protesting murmurs of the other residents in his body did not faze him. Their staid denunciations of instantaneous travel, paranormal powers, time machines, and faster-than-light spaceships flowed through his blood and impinged on his brain with no more lasting effect on his addiction than did Achibol's all-too-frequent diatribes against "filling your narrow head with the accumulated trash of the ages."

He dutifully watched romantic comedies with Teress. Her grasp of the nature of the ancients' ordinary folk, their lives and desires, was more useful, she insisted, than either fantasies or the dark, somber drama Achibol indulged in. But the oldster grew petulant if they did not join him in his viewing. "At least the ones I watch are supposed to be funny," Teress protested, "and though I don't laugh at all the same things those ancient people did, I've probably learned more than you have from that awful Macbeth."

"The Scottish Play is great drama," the mage said pompously.

"So are we," she countered.

Achibol raised his eyes to hers. "You may be right," he said after much deliberation, "but I hope our outcome is less . . . tragic."

* * *

The first few days' journey traversed terrain like that surrounding Sufawlz. Further north, it became rougher and rockier, but the hills remained small, and they had a well-preserved ancient vehicle. The "Tin Mule" ran on stabilized hydrogen. It electrolyzed fresh fuel from spring water, using power from solar collectors on its roof. Its fuel tanks held enough for thirty hours of continuous operation.

The Tin Mule was a hybrid, a ground-effect machine on smooth surfaces and unruffled waters, wheel-driven on steeper terrain. The first days were mostly over the latter, but shortly after crossing the old Canadian border they turned westward, and now slid smoothly over rolling grassy plains that stretched from horizon to horizon, relieved only by deep-cut river valleys. Nothing rose above the endless grass; even the blessed, shade-giving cottonwoods that crowded the riverbanks did not project much higher than the high banks that sheltered them.

For four days, they saw no trace of human activity. On the fifth, a column of smoke rose straight into the pristine blue afternoon sky. Not wildfire, it was concentrated in one narrow shaft and erupted from ground level in puffs and small clouds instead of a steady stream, only blending into a uniform haze where high-altitude winds feathered it south and eastward.

After all their time alone, first in the morass, then in Biopsych Three, now in the wilderness again, the very idea of other living beings seemed eerie. Nonetheless, they steered north of their former course and headed toward the slowly twisting, segmented black pillar.

"How far is it?" Benadek wondered after they'd pursued the column for several hours. Sunset was not far off.

"Still more than twenty miles," the old man estimated when they stopped to stretch and relieve themselves. "I've noted its direction on the auto-compass. We'll be there tomorrow." They traveled another hour before night fell, preceded by a rose and crimson sunset that decorated even the easternmost wisps of cloud with color. They made a simple camp under the open sky.

 

"There's a little black house ahead," Teress reported when she returned from her scouting mission. Seeds of late-blooming grasses clung in her tight-bound hair. "I saw wagon tracks, but no people. They must have moved on before dawn."

"Hmmm," Achibol pondered. "Perhaps we should examine what traces they left. Are they simples, I wonder, or closer kin?"

"How will you tell that from wagon tracks?" Benadek asked skeptically.

"You'd be surprised what can be deduced."

Assured by Teress that no one lingered around the odd, small building, the Tin Mule's infrared scope confirmed it. Trampled grass and grown-over ruts mingled around the unadorned stonelike cube. Its walls were five paces in length, unmarred by joints, slightly weather-rounded at the corners. The east wall held a gray metal door, of a kind Benadek had seen before. Achibol's exclamation confirmed his speculation. "A temple! I haven't seen one like this, uncluttered with outbuildings and additions in . . . let me see now . . . it must be twelve, no, fifteen hundred years. How small and strange it looks, here in the midst of this grassy sea! Already I'm learning much about the people who visit it."

"You are?" Benadek considered the barren cube unrevealing. Tracks and trampling told him only that recent visitors used carts or wagons, and had beasts to draw them—oxen, to judge by the cloven hoofprints, though of the four-, six-, or eight-legged types he could not tell.

Achibol noted the boy's tone and manner with well-disguised pleasure. Their return to the world of sunlight, weather, and fresh air was having effects besides sunburn. Away from the computers and frozen memories of Biopsych Three, Benadek was losing the mannerisms of his secondary personalities. Whether merely dormant, as the boy claimed, or fading entirely away, Achibol was happy for the return to their old, comfortable relationship. He could be as condescending and irascible as he wished. Benadek, too, seemed to welcome it, and played the "ignorant apprentice" broadly, a knowing caricature of the boy he had been in their easy, carefree days.

"Observe, apprentice. Absence often says much. The barrenness of the structure declares that there is no priestly caste—people visit here without cultish impedances and tolls. The deep ruts, all the same width apart, state that such visitors are one people, who make their conveyances to a standard. The old sod in the ruts informs me that they are nomadic, passing by only infrequently, perhaps as one of several temples on their annual round. Further, lightly trampled grasses, undisturbed growth roundabout, and the dearth of ruts off the main track assure me that travelers arrive here only one wagon or so at a time, and never linger—or there would be other ruts, where latecomers and early departees could pass by the rest. You see?"

"They're nomads with no love for temples, then," Benadek observed, "simples who dislike the necessity of having to visit them—and there are no honches among them."

"How do you figure that?" Teress asked.

"They travel in small groups. Honches need people to dominate. I think there's some critical number necessary to hold a honch in a particular place."

"An interesting speculation," Achibol commented. "It's not beyond the planners' capabilities to have arranged. It makes sense that police—which honches were, before their natures were perverted—would linger with groups large enough to need policing. That would ensure that the least productive simples didn't impose unduly on the resources of others. Large gatherings of honches, quasi-military organizations, may be aberrant results of the secondary geas placed on them to eliminate pure-humans . . .

"But what now, boy? We could overtake them by noon." Benadek and Teress agreed it made sense to gain information about what lay ahead, and that an innocuous family would be less risky than a settlement or a larger gathering.

Before they departed, Achibol wished to examine the temple, though it might not matter much longer if he repaired it or reprogrammed its computer. Using his "talisman" key, he entered alone, and a scant half hour later emerged with a puzzled frown and a small greenish component board.

"What's that?" Benadek asked.

"I'm not sure," the mage muttered, his frown deepening. "It's not a standard replacement unit. I had trouble reprogramming the system until I found this and pulled it out. It overrode the euthanasia chamber, lowering the microwave intensity and cutting the duration in half. I can't understand that. Who would have wanted anomalies—pure-humans—to be half killed, then expelled? Who, and why?" Neither Benadek nor Teress offered suggestions.

They climbed aboard the Tin Mule. Teress drove. Benadek sat silently, envisioning a big, bearded man emerging, screaming, from a wide-swung temple door, his clothes crackling and smoking, his skin reddened, his hair smoking, and his eyes blistered blind. A pure-human. His father . . . Half killed and then expelled . . . His father's suffering had not been a fluke. Benadek's knuckles whitened. He clutched his knees and stared unseeing at the flat prairie that slowly, all too slowly, moved by.

The sorcerer, meantime, held the microchip card, turning it over and over in his gnarled hands as if it would yield its secrets to the intensity of his gaze.

 

The large-wheeled wagon rested hub-deep in yellow grass, its two oxen grazing on coarse stems. The Tin Mule drew abreast, thirty paces distant. Achibol aimed the IR scanner toward the wagon. "They're hiding under it," he concluded from the screen display.

Teress lowered herself to the ground. "What do you think you're doing?" Benadek demanded.

"They'll be less threatened by me."

Achibol stilled Benadek's protest. "I'll have my staff close at hand," he said, "and this too." He held out the talisman. "If you sense trouble, fall to the ground, and I'll activate the unconsciousness field."

Benadek reached for a laser pistol to plug it into the dashboard. Achibol restrained him with a casually outstretched arm. "Unnecessary," he murmured. "If they've seen such weapons in the hands of honches, they'll be cowed, but we'll never gain their trust. Teress is in no danger."

So it proved. Too far away to hear speech over wind-rattled grasses, they saw a man emerge, then a female—a poot of the red-hair-and-freckles variety—and three smaller figures. The poot looked too young to be mother to the children, one of whom was only a head shorter than she.

Teress motioned Benadek and the mage to come forward. She introduced Gaddo, a short, muscular man—pure-human?—clad in soft-tanned hides, and Jilleth, his companion, whose smoke-stained full-length skirt and blouse reminded Benadek of "Western" garments from Biopsych Three's drama collections. The children were shy waifs who nodded silently as their names were spoken. "They lost a sister an' their ma to honches last winter," Gaddo confided in soft, slurred tones. "They've never seen many strangers."

"What business do honches have with women and children?" Achibol asked.

Gaddo snorted derision. "You mock me, old man. How could you live to grow that beard, an' not know honches? Or don't you or yours need the damned temples, where honches lurk?"

"I don't mock you, Gaddo," Achibol replied mildly. "In our far home, honches behave differently. Answer me truthfully, that we may prepare ourselves." Gaddo replied that he would explain all he could, but over hot brew by a fire, not standing exposed to hostile eyes. He gestured to a low copse where dry wood and concealment would be at hand. He expressed a desire to ride the Tin Mule there. "I've seen the hulks of such things on the prairie, but never alive and moving," he explained. He was unable to say who might have driven the abandoned vehicles, or how long ago. Achibol motioned him aboard.

While the four adults waited for weed tea to boil, Jilleth and the children kept watch from the tallest tree in the copse. They watched less for distant enemies or friends, Gaddo explained, than for the puffs of smoke that served as distant early warning of honch raiders, a kind of prairie radio network. The very smoke that had led them to the temple had been Gaddo's contribution to the net, when he had determined that no honches lay in ambush. Though one might ride for days without seeing another family or band, he told them, scarcely a day went by without at least one such signal being seen, oftener several.

Benadek, the dutiful apprentice, carefully noted the smoke-codes as Gaddo enumerated them. It was a simple system, albeit slow, but honches had yet to demonstrate that they'd deciphered it. Meanings of phrases changed with the seasons and the time of day. Even Circe would have been hard put to decrypt them.

Gaddo filled out their knowledge of the prairie folk. Nomads traveled in search of bounteous but seasonal resources; they fished, hunted, and gathered roots in season, never overburdening the fragile balance with large groups or too-consistent patterns in their roving. In Gaddo's mother's mother's time there had been gatherings at the weirs on the river called Center of the World, but the coming of the honches had changed that. "Ma's ma was young when the first honches came," he explained, "an' she saw whole families killed at the weirs. They took only the untempled, then, but killed others who fought them."

"The untempled?" Benadek and his master blurted simultaneously.

"Ones who never feel the craving. They're who the black ones seek."

"Pure-humans!" Benadek exclaimed.

"So it must be, boy. Let Gaddo continue without further outbursts."

Plainly disapproving of impertinent boys, the plainsman did so. Honch strategy emerged, clearer for the outsider's knowledge. They hid near temples, and watched the comings and goings of nomad families, observing who went within and who did not. (As a rule, Gaddo explained, regular temple-goers entered the shrines as opportunity presented, rather than risking debilitation later should such opportunity be denied them.) When honches took note of people who remained outside, they attacked. They did not kill untempled ones outright; they forced them to enter the temples. When the victims were ejected kicking and screaming in blind agony, the honches dragged them away. None were ever seen again, not alive.

"Honches put the devices there, then," Benadek blurted, earning a further disapproving glare from Gaddo.

"I suspect you're right, boy," Achibol agreed, ignoring the plainsman's displeasure. "Making the cremation-cycle merely disabling, they identify pure-humans without destroying them, and satisfy their innate cruelty at the same time. But why save them at all? That seems in conflict with the planners' intent."

Gaddo had listened silently to the old man's talk of devices and purposes. Now he silenced the mage with a slashing motion of his hand. Like a bear awakening in midwinter, he stretched and swelled as he spoke, his face a mask of bright, bitter anger. "Such questions form too readily on your well-spoken tongue. You've asked nothing of the fate of the untempled. You ask, `what winds will blow tomorrow' when you don't know the time of the day, the season, or even where on the face of the world you stand."

Achibol was taken aback by his intensity and the salience of his speech. What, indeed, did they know of the captives' fate? The mage reprimanded himself for his blindness: the uneducated nomad understood more than appearances suggested.

Teress took the opportunity at hand. "What follows their capture, Gaddo? What do you know of their fates?"

The plainsman acknowledged her with a nod, less upset that a female should ask than that a boy should interrupt the speech of men. "They're taken into the Great Lodge of He-Who-Eats-Souls, fodder for the Nameless One. Their husks are sucked like spiders' prey and cast out again." Nomads, they were to discover, often employed the odd, staccato inflection of "speaking in capital letters" when referring to things Spiritual, Mysterious, or of great emotional impact.

"You've seen them?" Teress asked.

"I've carried away the empty shells of my Rosalie and my child. I made the Long Journey to the Vale of the Dead. In the second moon of Winter, I found Rosalie, and in the third, the girl, Shabeth."

Silence followed, broken only by the harsh rale of Gaddo's breathing. He hid his eyes behind lank hair that hung from his bowed head. When his breathing evened, he again took up his tale. "I knew the husk had been Rosalie by her red hair and the scars of childhood pox. Otherwise all I'd loved was gone. There was no moisture in it, no weight but bones."

He paused, defiant, as if expecting them to contest his tale or mock him with casual words. Teress's hand crept out to cover his where it rested on his knee. None spoke, but questions still lingered in their eyes. Gaddo nodded. "There's little more to tell. In the days after Rosalie was Made Ashes and Returned to Wind, madness consumed me. I found Shabeth later, the worse for having lain untended while my mind was fled. Rain had filled her husk with moisture and it wouldn't burn, so I took her and another of my tribe to the hills beyond sight of the Vale, where I cut wood for a great pyre, and sent them On." Spreading his hands wide, he shrugged. "That's the end of my tale. It's little different than what any man might tell—the path to the Vale of the Dead is well-worn by the wain-wheels and feet of my people."

While they'd talked, the sun had sunk low and the fire seemed to burn the more brightly for it. Now Gaddo removed stick after stick, smothering each one, allowing no smoke to rise. Teress helped him cover the fire-pit with earth. Gaddo strode to the side of the clearing nearest his wagon, then turned back as if a further thought had struck him. "I know nothing of your customs, men from beyond the Edge of the World. I would not offend you, but . . ."

"Say what you will," Achibol urged him. "No offense will be taken where none is intended."

Gaddo looked toward Teress. "It's been two seasons since I returned from the Vale, fifteen moons since Rosalie was lost. Jilleth is but a child, and for long, I wanted no woman over my wheels, but now . . ."

Achibol shook his head slowly, not even glancing at Teress. "It is not our custom to . . ."

"Not custom, but still my right to choose," Teress interrupted him. "I'll visit your wain, plainsman—for a single night only, and you'll not ask me to linger when my companions are ready to depart. Is that agreeable?"

"More than I would have hoped for," Gaddo replied with quiet intensity. He glanced cautiously toward the mage and the apprentice, whose expressions were uniformly unreadable. Then, with a curt nod, he spun on his heel. Teress remained long enough to fix her companions with a stern gaze that brooked no protest, and followed Gaddo.

Benadek turned to his master, his mouth ajar, words he had been too stunned to voice moments earlier now ready to spill forth. Achibol forestalled him. "Serves you right, boy," he said with a malicious snigger. "Had we not been an old man and a hairless boy, that wagoner would never have considered asking. Had you been a virile warrior, Teress would never have followed him. Have I reminded you lately of your cowardly choice? Need I do so tonight?"

As the sense of Achibol's comments penetrated his hurt and surprise, Benadek realized the truth. Having abdicated adult sexuality, he had no valid claim on Teress's. Only on one count was the old man in error—Benadek knew full well that Teress's decision was based less in attraction to the plainsman than in compassion.

Had Benadek been fully adult, she might still have risked his hormone-driven rage out of that gentle concern. As it was, the most Benadek was capable of feeling was petulant frustration. That, he reminded himself, was one reason he had assumed his current state; he had been afraid to take on hormones and intellect at once, when the fate of his world hung in the balance.

That situation had not changed: the plainsman's story confirmed what he had suspected. The denizens of the command center beneath the ice were diabolical; they had lost all claim to humanity, but they still controlled mankind's fate. The boy was more anxious than ever to move on in the morning.

Teress had been specific. Her cool bargaining with the nomad had at first bothered him as much as her acquiescence: she had been as matter-of-fact as a whore. But was that wrong? Gaddo had not been offended. Teress could not replace his Rosalie, but could for one brief night give him happiness without fear of importunements and demands on the morrow. She had protected her own interests, Gaddo's, Benadek's, and Achibol's as well.

"Incredible!" he reflected, considering the tenor of his thoughts. "Is this really me? Is jealousy no more than chemistry?" He wanted to explore that avenue, to poll the other minds dormant within but, as from a great distance, he heard Achibol address him.

"Well, boy? Put your jealousies aside, for we must talk."

"I'm not jealous, Master. What Teress did was right—and kind."

"You're not . . . it is? I mean . . . well then, fine." Achibol recovered quickly. "Let's discuss what the plainsman's told us. A remarkable adaptation to difficult conditions, wouldn't you say?"

"Truly, Master. And not only to the ordinary hardships of the prairie, but to being a mixed society of simples and pure-humans, and to honch predation as well. A less kind people might have driven the pure-humans from their midst."

"Just so. But why do these honches want pure-humans alive, when elsewhere they kill them outright? That's the meaning of the added circuit board, of course—to identify, disable, and take them alive."

"Gaddo gave us the answer."

"His talk of `dried husks,' you mean? I've hardly speculated as to why the bodies of the dead are returned in that manner, or why returned at all."

"Immortality, Master. The ancients maintain themselves at the expense of pure-human lives. The `husks,' drained of blood and fluids, are what's left after they're `processed.' I came across the technique in Circe's files. It was considered impractical, because every eight or ten weeks of extended life required sacrificing the life of another. Even the ancients hadn't stooped that low."

"Hmmph. They hadn't stooped that low, or they couldn't cover the disappearances, in their well-regulated society? They developed the technique. They're using it now, when no one can stop them. But how is it done?"

"A recombinant virus infects the `immortal,' cleansing his body fluids of mutagens. His cellular reproductive codes are thus less prone to replication errors and degeneration. But there's a problem."

"Obviously. What?"

"When the virus runs out of consumables to attach to its surface receptors, it begins collecting similar-shaped neurotransmitters. Those it modifies, if only so slightly. Their function is changed: the host is killed by the disruption of his own synaptic transmissions—his brain malfunctions. In fact, it can blow up."

"Oh? How can a brain, a soggy mass of fluids held together by flimsy membranes, burst?"

"Perhaps I misspoke myself. Do you happen to know the electrical potential across a neuron's membrane?"

"The sodium and potassium ion-charge differential? About seventy millivolts, I believe."

"Exactly. And the strength of the electric field created?" Achibol shrugged, obviously neither knowing nor caring, wishing the boy would stop playing his role and get on with it. Benadek continued: "Almost two hundred kilovolts per square centimeter. And that, across all the synaptic surfaces of all the neurons in the entire brain . . . ? All released at once, or near enough so as to make no difference? In the close confines of the cranium, the brain itself becomes a steam bomb."

"Horribly impressive, I should think," Achibol responded laconically, "but what of the pure-humans, boy? Where do they fit in?"

"I already told you. But you want to know the process, I suppose. Periodically, the host's blood is pumped through a tank of modified kidney tissue, whose cellular membranes permit the flow of virus, with its cargo of undesirable elements, in one direction only. The other side of the kidney tissue is connected to the victim, who must be genetically similar to the host—and to the kidney tissue itself—to be made compatible with simple MHC *-suppressor drugs. The pure-human is given a drug which stimulates the production of 2AIII Pentaphosphorylase, an enzyme. Under the stimulus of ever-increasing quantities of it, the virus, now in the victim's blood, enters its shedding phase—it reproduces. The victim dies. His body fluids are filtered of the virus, now free of aging products and enzymes. It is reintroduced into the host."

Achibol was as much impressed by Benadek's delivery of the information as he was by the hideous nature of the facts. "Whoo-eee, boy! Is that you talking, or one of your companions? I think I understand it, but do you?"

"Completely, Master—just as well as I've come to understand the workings of my own cells. I'm less clear about the external facets of the ice-dwellers' activities. I can't answer your other question."

"Oh? What other question? With all this talk of enzymes and viruses, it's slipped my mind."

"You wondered why the `husks' are returned to their relatives in the vale of the dead, didn't you?"

"Ah, so I did. So I did. That's all quite clear now."

"It is? Then will you enlighten me, Master?" Even now, Benadek felt a faint twinge at the remembrance of past "enlightenments."

"Of course! Have I ever failed to fulfill my obligations? Are you not more sage—or at least more erudite—than any apprentice sorcerer before you? I'll enlighten you."

"Please do, Master."

"What? Oh, yes, the `husks.' It's been seventy years or so since the raid on the fish weirs. That marked the collapse of the ancients' breeding pool; until then, victims came from their own lower-class population—but that population could never have been large, and as only the best and healthiest were chosen to be living filters, the gene pool must have degenerated rapidly, especially at the last. The resulting defectives may not have been compatible. So there you have it."

"Master?"

"What?"

"The husks, Master. You were about to explain . . ."

"Weren't you paying attention, boy? Must I belabor every nuance? The surviving ancients needed a source of fully human bodies, and the widespread plains cultures, having integrated pure-humans and simples, were the obvious source. But they abandoned the weirs and other gathering-places. Ask Gaddo tomorrow—he'll tell you there used to be trade fairs, communal hunts, and other excuses for getting together to mingle and mate. The ancients are modifying plains culture to their own ends. The husks could be incinerated, but instead, the `Vale of the Dead' has become tradition, a reinforcement of the power of `He-Who-Eats-Souls.' Just you wait—the stage is set for the next phase, when the plains folk will select their own sacrifices from among their pure-human numbers, and truck them to the Vale personally. They'll bargain with the `gods' in the traditional manner—with the living flesh of their best and most beautiful."

"A repellent idea, Master. Surely these folk are above such things."

"Right now, perhaps, but such sacrifices are as old as humankind—and for the first time, perhaps, there really will be a `god' to bargain with. It will happen. Unless, of course, the remaining ancients can be stopped. Have you given thought to that?"

"We must go to the Vale of the Dead. There must be an entrance to the redoubt."

"And then?"

"Let's see what develops." Benadek knew what he intended, but it would not be easy for Achibol or Teress to accept. He would reveal his plan only when it was too late for argument.

Achibol rose. He mumbled something about lonely beds and stupid apprentices who deserved them. Benadek lingered by the dead fire, wistfully wondering whether Gaddo and Teress were yet asleep.

 

 

 

INTERLUDE

The Great School, Midicor IV

 

Abrovid peered over the clutter that surrounded Kaledrin. "When will the Board decide?"

The overworked editor did not look up. "Soon, I hope. I'm doing my job and Saphooth's, too. I can't keep on like this." Kaledrin's chitin was once again dull, edged with rough, fibrous delaminations that should have been polished away. His eyestalks were scaly, the orbs atop them clouded.

"Speaking of Saphooth," the programmer asked, "what's he been up to?"

"He's having his own troubles. SOMA's split."

"Split? You mean gone? Pffft?"

"A fine thought! But no, they've divided into two groups. Saphooth is now the leader of the smaller, extreme faction. Financial power lies with the majority, leaving Saphooth without influence. But he still has the public's attention, if only because he's controversial.

"That's good news. What did they split over?"

Kaledrin's laugh sounded to Abrovid like scrap-metal being thrown on a pile. "SOMA was begun by fundamentalists and know-nothings of a dozen beliefs. All they had in common was the one-world conviction and a hatred of universities and `freethinkers.' " Kaledrin raised two eyestalks and swivelled them so their orbs stared at each other. "What wasn't obvious was that there was a strong subgroup in SOMA that cut right across sect lines. A group that was a natural for old Saphooth to discover . . ."

"Go on," Abrovid urged impatiently.

"The fixed-forms! There are more of them than you can imagine, Ab! We don't notice them because they don't advertise their infirmities, and they stay on the worlds they're born to. They have to, of course—most couldn't live anywhere else. Their attitudes are shaped by their restrictions; they gravitate toward provincial and conservative sects, that insist their origin-world and ancestral form are `original.' But since none of them can agree on which one . . ." He made the same mocking eye-to-eye gesture again. "Saphooth found something they could all agree on—he teaches that they're all `original' species, and that only one race ever evolved becoming."

"Which one? Boneyforms like him, I suppose?"

"Only because MYTHIC's output seems to support it. But that's not the point. Would you say that being a fixed-form makes someone a minority?"

"Huh? Is that the point?"

"No, no! Not yet. But would you say that?"

"If there are less of them than us normal people, I would. QED."

"I mean a persecuted minority—an underclass."

"I don't know about that. They're just . . . challenged, that's all. Nothing to make a fuss about."

"Well, Saphooth thinks there is. He's telling them they're the true inheritors of their homeworlds, and that every normal . . . every mutable human . . . is of an entirely different race, a race of imitators and conquerors that has stolen not only their worlds, but their very forms. Our race, and . . . Benadek's. And worse, he's calling for a war of liberation against mutables everywhere."

"War?" Abrovid was aghast, though skeptical. "War? Nobody fights wars. Not since they got interstellar travel, and can go somewhere else and become . . . Oh." He stopped, trapped by his own words. "But wars are unnatural," he essayed again. "They're subhuman . . ." Again, he stopped. Kaledrin let him ponder, his posture conveying expectant neutrality. "War?" Abrovid finally asked, as if pleading for Kaledrin to contradict him.

"Riots, at least," Kaledrin replied. "Political action groups, pressure tactics, lawsuits—and guilt. I doubt they even know what they really want. But we know what Saphooth wants, don't we."

"We do?"

"To be like us! To become, like we do. But he can't. Not if his hypothesis represents reality—and I must admit, it seems to satisfy the facts, and I'm so agitated I can't even imagine a disproof."

"What should we do?"

"I don't know. We can hope the biocybes don't make things worse, that MYTHIC's output doesn't add more fuel to their fire—but that's a forlorn hope. I try to keep up the pretense that it's just a literary production, but . . . have you seen Chapter Nineteen? No? I suppose not. I've been sitting on it." Reaching beneath himself, Kaledrin drew forth a data-cube and proffered it to Abrovid. In truth, Kaledrin had been sitting on Chapter Nineteen.

Abrovid knew he would get no more explanations now. He had to read the output, fail to understand its significance, and then stroke Kaledrin's ego by asking enlightenment. It was, he reflected, not that much different—or better—than dealing with Saphooth.

 

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