In our editorial enthusiasm we have too often strayed from our primary concern, the myths of Achibol and Benadek. It is time to get back to them.
The origin of Chapter Twenty-two in myths of the Salist'efen Cycle is clear. Many of you are familiar with the story of Wandag. But there are others equally strongly represented, like Alnra'kof, Eater of Souls, who herein (and only herein) gets his just desserts.
(Kaledrin, Senior Editor)
He stretched massive, well-proportioned limbs, and absently scratched his naked, blond-furred buttocks. It was good to be alive, to be in control, and not to have to share his body and mind. It was good, too, to think clearly without his thoughts being blurred by others'. This is an astronaut's body, he thought, fine-tuned and reflex-fast, the perfect tool for the difficult task ahead of me.
This is an astronaut's brain, too, he thought further. Computer-perfect. Astronaut, philosopher, soldier . . . and these are fine hands, strong precision tools. He turned his hands palms-up and flexed his fingers. He smiled.
"Watcha doing, Gorb?" asked the honch in the next bunk, observing his odd behavior.
"Nothing," Gorb replied. He thought of himself as Gorb, right now, so the answer had come automatically. He could, if he wished, think of himself as Benadek or any of the others. It made no difference. He was himself, and he was one.
Dressing rapidly, he jogged to the mess hall. He was not on duty for six hours, and there was much to be done. It would be easy, he realized as his fine body adapted unprotestingly to his smooth, jogging pace, to forget all the details of this body, to let the cells and nerves and enzymes follow their ordinary programs and not think about them. We all do that, most of our lives. Someday, if I survive what's ahead, I'll allow myself just to exist like that again. But first . . .
He ate rapidly, tray on his knees, and rose as soon as he had finished. His next stop was a repair shop he had observed incuriously on many occasions. . . .
Boffins bent over well-lit workbenches, engaged in the intricacies of portable com units, lasers, and less familiar equipment. Gorb stood in the doorway holding a list. He had written it himself. The sources of the electronic expertise he had drawn upon were identifiable, but he did not bother putting a name to the memories. He was all one, now.
A boffin snatched the list. "Who wants this?" he snapped. "What's it for?" Gorb shrugged wordlessly. Honches never explained their orders. "Never mind! Wait here. I'll get it."
There were many empty rooms in the underground complex, gathering dust through doors hanging open on rusted hinges, accumulating black mold and white mildew from decades and centuries of unchecked seepage and poor ventilation. Gorb hunted until he found one with a functional ceiling light and a door that still shut, and set to work. He unpacked circuit boards, microchips, pinout sockets, a spool of hair-fine wire, a soldering pen, a clip-on heat sink, and a pair of locking needle-nose pliers. Arraying tools and components on his spread-out jacket, his big hands began their delicate task.
With his completed product hidden inside his jacket, he sought an abandoned barrack with a functional call bell. Removing its cover, he wedged his small creation inside with neatly cut blocks of foam, and connected it with tiny copper alligator clips at the ends of fine leads. He replaced the bell cover. That was all, right then. His bunk-mates would be returning to the barracks to prepare for platoon assembly, where they would be given their duties for the next shift.
Gorb's platoon drew hall-dutymopping and cleaning. A part of his mind long enured to monotonous tasks performed them no differently than the other honches. What was different was the level of bright, active thought that went on in other parts of his brain and body. Later, when the platoon returned to its bunks, only Gorb had trouble sleeping. He woke up for every call bell, no matter whose.
The next day was a repetition of the one before. The rumble of his impatient curiosity and low-level anxiety, like unheard subsonic vibrations, made it hard to keep his mind on cleaning. No wonder he had had those constant headaches before he had merged with . . . with himself.
Finally, with eight unplanned hours ahead, Gorb returned to the barrack whose bell he had modified. He removed a thumbnail-sized data-chip and wrote a brief note. The heat-pencil and flimsy paper looked incongruously delicate between his big, blond-haired fingers.
Once their annoyance at being distracted from one job and set upon another ran its course, the boffins at Data-Processing took up the new task with myopic enthusiasm, and Gorb was shortly presented with a sheaf of printouts. "I wonder who wants this stuff?" a boffin asked as he handed it to Gorb. "Never mind!" he spat, before Gorb could shrug.
Gorb took his printouts back to the empty storeroom and read page after page of cryptic data. Then he got out tools and components, and built another device. Hiding it in his jacket, he returned to his barracks.
The device he installed in his own barracks bell was simpler than the other one. The first device had recorded all the call-signals that traveled the main bus wires. It recorded time, source, and destination data for every one. The printouts put names and locations to otherwise meaningless numbers. He could have mapped most of the complex's communication system from that data, but only needed to know four codesthe identifiers for his barracks, his personal bell-call, the series of bits representing calls originating from the horrible Processing lab, and the General's personal sequence. He now had those vital codes.
The device would read bus signals traveling through the system, and occasionally modify them before they reached the bell itself. If any call requesting honch labor was routed from Processing or the General's private quarters, the bell would ring Gorb's summons only.
* * *
That night Gorbor Benadekhad second thoughts. He had no plan past the moment he confronted the General. Theoretically, since all knowledge of the change was extant, he should be able to use it. But this body was Gorb's, not Benadek's. If some lost secondary function of an overlooked gene was required, and Gorb's chromosomes lacked it . . . the ability might be gone. There was only one way to find out. He was not going to get much sleep. What if the call came tonight? He should have allowed more time to practice, to get to know "himself."
There were no calls. An hour before reveille, he visited the latrine. By its single, dim light, he examined his left arm's light bronze skin and sparse, white-blond hairs. Only what was missing told him he had succeeded: there were no scars, and Gorb had collected several. He had changed. Reassured, Benadek went back to bed, but did not sleep. If only the bell would ring right now . . .
Hall duty again. Gorb went through the motions. If he had to go through another day like this . . . That night the bell rang. He sprang to his feet, and began pulling on his trousers. "Hey Gorb! What're you getting up for? It's my call." The honch, Effred, looked long and hard at him.
Before Gorb could think of an excuse, the bell rang a second timeGorb's code. "See?" he said. "My call."
Effred became less perturbed. Two bells, two honches. Gorbor Benadekwas less satisfied. What duty was Effred called for? If the two of them were assigned together, why had not his, Gorb's, code been first? In fact, it should have rung the Gorb-code twice.
Perhaps Effred's call was for something else entirely. For that matter, so might his own be. The small, ironic thought that followed could have had its origin with no one but Gorb himself: if all this idle speculation is typical, no wonder we honches are efficient. Effred is dressed already. He'll be at the assignment station before I get my boots buckled.
Effred was there ahead of him, but had found out nothing. "Follow me!" a waiting boffin ordered. Benadek almost blurted "Where?" but Gorb-habit overrode his impulse. It was odd, he thought, to have one personality again, but still to have such inconsistent urges. Or was it? He could not remember.
Their route led toward Benadek's desired destination. When they passed the intersection leading to the poot-pens without changing direction, relief overrode his growing anxiety. There would be no dead-eyed girls to fetch. At the processing lab, they were ordered to take a gurney from storage.
The boffin led them from the lab to a kitchen where elaborate meals had been prepared for the underground base's elite. But the stink that assailed his nose was unlikely to appeal to the most jaded ancients. The carcasses that lay coldly on stainless-steel countertops were neither meat-beasts nor ancient, unmodified cattle. They were human. The stench alone told him they were far beyond any use in the lab.
Benadek's stomach twisted in rebellion. The nearest body was a child's. Its wide-eyed stare and twisted mouth, rigid in death, showed that it had not died wrapped in the unfeeling dullness of the broken ones, the "cured," though there were no marks on the corpse. The honches picked it up and dumped it on the cart.
The second corpse's throat was like scavenged meat mauled by an old, dull-toothed cat. Blood was everywhere. That one had been male, very much alive, and had struggled. Benadek fought the urge to gag.
The third one had been dead longest. The stink was overpowering. Effred grabbed an arm and pulled. Flesh and skin peeled off in his hand. That was too much even for a phlegmatic honch. "Acch!" Effred dropped the arm, shaking rotted meat from his palm. Benadek's head swirled. Effred's effort had rolled the body over, exposing her face. She, at least, had not gone to her death fearful and struggling. She was smiling.
With an agonized cry, Benadek averted his face. Tears blurred his vision, and his stomach revolted. Bile and the remains of his last meal splashed across the corpse. Dimly, he heard a prattling boffin voice, and an answering basso murmur from Effred. When he looked up with tear-filled eyes, the other honch was eyeing him most strangely. He opened his mouth to speak just as something pricked him sharply in the side of his neck. He staggered a step away from the mess he had made before his knees folded under him. The last thing he saw was the boffin's bright, curious stare.
He heard the gabble and screech of angry scratchbirds and the jagged, off-key clatter of an overheated bearing grinding itself apart. The annoying sounds threatened to resolve into words, but he could not quite wake up. Something foreign roiled through his blood and interfered with his awakening. He wanted to concentrate, to force his blood to cleanse itself, but it was hard to think straight. He slipped back into unconsciousness.
"Not a honch?" the cackling voice squalled. "Of course he's a honch. I'm not blind. Be careful, boffin. Don't overreach yourself." Not a honch, indeed. What's the boffin up to? A trick? Are they becoming capable of manipulating me?
The General was afraid. More afraid than ever in his two thousand years. Everything was falling apart. Once, a single deviant "pure-human" wench would have given him a month of rigorous life. Once boffins obeyed without sidelong looks, and plumbing worked properly. Once, he had been tall, commanding, and strong. His voice had boomed, and menreal men, not simpleshad jumped to obey him. Now even these slavish half-men dragged their feet and told him lies.
"Explain yourself," he said, forcing his voice to remain low so he did not cackle. "What is this creature on the transfer-table? Why does he look like a honch?"
"We don't know, General." The boffin quivered with unconcealed terror. "He came in through the sally-port M.T. several months ago. Outwardly, he is Gorb, but his genes are anomalous."
The General's sagging face reddened, and he sucked air into his shrunken lungs. To forestall another outburst, the boffin pressed on quickly. "He has a full complement of old-human genesand some odd ones we can't identify. His blood is as clean as a youth'sa perfect donor, far superior to the ones the troops drag in."
"A perfect donor?" A feral gleam lit the raddled, ancient face. Suspicion faded in the bright light of that wonderful news. "But if this failsif he's not what you say . . ."
If the composite being who was Gorb, Benadek, and old memories had been awake, he would have understood. Changing was not just a variation in gene expression, but in the molecular codes themselves. The incorporation of ancient memories wrought no such changes, nor did the willy-nilly invasion of Gorb's body. Old memories and Benadek had existed in Gorb as entities apart. But they were all information, and information could be coded in many ways, remaining essentially the same. When those scattered souls all joined to become one being in Gorb's massive body, information merged, and the new "document" contained all the original "pages," in one integrated format.
The totality was too complex to fit within Gorb's fourfold-redundant genetic structure. Simples, unlike the fully human, had no introns, no "waste space" in their coding. The new Gorb genome, the synthesis, contained only a single copy patterned most strongly on that of the dominant one in the gestalt, Benadek. Now there was only one being, with one genetic code, optimized to partake of the best of every one of them. There was much of the original Gorb, not just Benadek and the memories of ancient genes. The final melange was closer to the old human norm than to honches or latter-day pure-humans. But as the boffin had remarked, there were anomalies . . .
"Why wait? Open the valves now! Give him to me."
"But General, the sedative. There are still traces in his blood. They'll dissipate soon."
"You probably gave him too much," the old horror grumbled, but did not complain further.
It had almost been too much. The proper dosage for a honch would pacify any simple mind's coarse channels, but for the complex being Gorb had become, it was immeasurably more disruptive. Benadek/Gorb did not regain consciousness until long after the drug had dissipated to what the boffins considered safe for the General.
The first thing Benadek realized as consciousness returned was that he was dying. He was being poisoned with the breakdown products of the General's aged blood. He was growing old, cluttered with free radicals and dangerous clumps of foamy cholesterol and lipid precursors, inert leukocytes, bits and pieces of uningested dead cells.
He did not recognize what was wrong immediately. Sovoda-memory did, but there were more pressing things on Benadek's mind. He could not see. His optic nerves and brain centers seemed to be functioning, but he could not open his eyes. He could not move either. His wrists, arms, and ankles were restrained. It was hard to think with all the junk accumulating in his bloodstream.
"It's working," a voice crowed. "I can feel it! You were right, boffin. This is a good one." It was a familiar voice, evoking uneasy feelings, but Benadek, in his enervated state, did not dig deeper. It was too hard just remaining conscious.
Headache, he thought, as Gorb. Sick. The others, those bright voices in his mind that had opened doors onto endless vistas of understanding, were silent. Gorb the honch resented the dullness that clung like a stinking, sweaty blanket, like a dirty fog between him and the brilliant sun. Part of him was dying, and Gorb did not want to die. Honch breeding dictated survival: death was not glory, but failure. And Gorb did not want to fail.
Like an antique battle-computer coming on-line after long downtime, the memory of his specialized honch-brain performed its hardwired tasks.
SELF CHECK: DATA PHASE.
* MUSCULAR DYSFUNCTION.
ALTERNATE POSSIBILITIES:
* FATIGUE: (NO CONFIRMATION.
DISCARD.)
* AGING: (NO CONFIRMATION.
DISCARD.)
* DAMAGE: (PINPRICK/PUNCTURE;
NO IMPAIRMENT. DISCARD.)
SELF-CHECK: DISFUNCTION ANALYSIS.
* IMMOBILITY; (9 DISTRIBUTED
POINTS PHYSICAL RESTRAINT.)
Of course, Gorb was not a computer. His was a very specialized organic mind, designed not for analysis, but for . . .
ACTION: SELF-PRESERVATION.
For the milliseconds the analysis required, Gorb did absolutely nothing. In the seconds that followed, he did everything possible to correct the dysfunctional situation. He flexed powerful arm and back muscles, and his left wrist sprung free. A restraint strap and buckle clattered to the floor.
"Hey, what's going on?"
DATUM: UNIDENTIFIED VOICE.
ACTION: DISREGARD; CONTINUE
SELF-PRESERVATION.
Another clatter, another restraint released. Slipping the head strap loose, Gorb sat up. His eyes were taped shut. He ripped the tape away.
DATUM: PAIN; NO DAMAGE.
DISREGARD.
Gorb's eyes scanned everything in range, absorbing, recognizing, cataloguing. The straps holding him were designed to restrain a sedated victimor once, too long in the past to matter, a surgical patientnot a hyperdeveloped, fully conscious honch. Perhaps, too, they had deteriorated. Gorb freed himself with little effort. He studied the clear plastic tubes that connected him to the massive circulatory equipment. He studied other tubes that ran from those paraphernalia to . . . a wizened old man, whose smug, petulant demeanor was only now giving way to fear.
Still addled with gerontogenate toxins, Gorb wanted to jerk free of the deadly bonds, but a small voice inside told him to leave them in place. He must control their output. He needed only a respite. Gorb reached toward the device that hummed and burbled, and toggled a single switch.
Silence ensued. Only the whisper of his breathing, and the harsher rale of his counterpart's, could be heard. Gorb relaxed. He visualized processes within, cleansing, purifying. Hardwired function gave way gradually to the brighter glow of rational thought.
Gorb/Benadek pondered with increasing clarity what he should do next. He observed the General peripherally. Aged, dissipated eyes continued to stare at him. Unsure that Gorb's actions were more than undocumented honch reflex, the General was afraid to stimulate him to further action.
Benadek/Gorb smiled. With a shrug, he reached back to the medical machinery and again toggled the lever. The machine resumed its hum and babble, not unlike a rock-bound mountain rivulet, the murmur of bees in warm afternoon air, and to Benadek no more threatening than those sounds. He turned at last to meet the General's eyes.
"What are you doing?" the old man croaked. "What's happening here?"
"I'm going to give you a taste of real immortality," Benadek said. "You'll feel it happening soon. Be patient. You've waited two thousand years for this." His quiet monotone, the icy intelligence in his blue, honch eyes, belied the benevolence of his utterance. "But first, I will judge you."
"Judge me? Who . . . no, what . . . are you?"
"You should know me," Benadek breathed. "I'm your creator and your victims. I'm simple, pure-human, old-human, and the next step beyond all of those. I'm uniquely fit to judge what you've done with your two thousand years of life. But first, I must know you."
While he spoke, blood-borne essences filled the machine's selective membranes, plugging here, dissolving there, changing flows and functions almost as if he, Benadek, were inside the apparatus. Where gerontic poisons had flowed, other substances circulated. Benadek passed through the barriers that had isolated victim and oppressor, and entered the General himself. The flow was in two directions. This was no invasion, only a raid, and the booty Benadek sought was information: the memories of two thousand years. Even as microscopic soldiers blitzed through the seat of the General's identity, others carried back what they'd found. Benadek absorbed it, pondered, and eventually wept.
The General had no way of understanding what was happening, but biologically, or through some higher sense, he felt the rape of his essence. Errant memories rose to consciousness one after another, some tainted with a horror that may have been Benadek's or his own, others carrying traces of sweetness, wistful memories from a past he had long forgotten or suppressed. All, he sensed, were being weighed by the anomalous being who watched him in silence from the other side of the machine.
Benadek was less placid than he seemed. The memories he reviewedand the reviewing was hardly different than living themfilled him with bleak horror, heartsickness, and agony that threatened to drive him into total withdrawal. Nimbuk had been right. Age did not diminish evil, but concentrated it. What had begun as petty human greed for life, natural and healthy, had transformed with time and excess into a nightmare of slaughter and debauchery.
The slaughter had come firstthe sacrifice of one life after another as the General and his companions strove to maintain themselves. Depravity came later, a natural follower: having committed murder upon murder not in the heat of battle but by sucking the living essences from other bodies, the General was obligated to prove that his depravity was total, and that he thus bore no guilt for what he had done, or what he would do in the future. It was his last reasoned thought.
From that time on, a dozen centuries past, the Generaland those other survivors he would later kill in the competition for scarce bodies to victimizebecame self-preserving organic machines. The underground stronghold became a battleground in which the weapons of war were bodies, and coup was counted in debasement, degradation, and shame. It was a war which the General finally won, and thus lost.
With the other ancients gone, the war turned inward, its battleground the mind of the last depraved warrior, and the carnage within was as extreme as the desolation without. The General, for centuries not sane by any human standard, had gone entirely mad.
By the time Benadek revived those memories little was left of the man who had once been, little even of the twisted beast he had become. Benadek found a shell, a collection of petulant, rote responses triggered by bodily functions and feelings, by boffin words and honch actions; a hollow shell with no more function than the ancient, useless fortress beneath the ice.
"I have judged you," Benadek said, eventually. "There is nothing good that you haven't polluted beyond redemption." He did not explain. There could be no explanation.
"You can't judge me!" the hollow shell echoed.
"I can. I have."
"You'll kill me?" The General's voice was flat.
"I can't. You can dieor take the immortality I promised you."
"I don't understand. Immortality is a myth. There are only more and more years, until they're all gone."
"Your way. Mine is different. Be silent, and you'll understand." Within Benadek, strands of RNA long in the building broke loose from their ribosomal attachments and floated away. Through veins and arteries they made their uncontrolled way to the tubes in his arms and thighs, and thus to the machine. They crossed over to the shrivelled body of his pitiful archenemy. . . .
Minutes passed slowly. Boffins returned to check on their responsibilities. Strangely, their ancient master remained silent, his eyes locked with Benadek's. The broken restraint straps remained unnoticed, and when instruments showed nothing amiss, the boffins retired.
"Do you understand, now?" Benadek said at last.
"You'll take my memories, and this body will die." Curiously, the aged, dilapidated face seemed less twisted, the rheumy eyes brighter not with the light of madness but with a nuance of forgotten brilliance. "I'll be diluted by you. But in a sense, I'll be as immortal as you may choose to be. So be it. It's more than my failure warrantsor less."
Benadek then understood: this General had been no ordinary man, but the pick of his generation, his long-gone world. Memories of Arnie's surfaced, highlighting the training the General had received, the rigors of the Academy, the demands of staff and general office. Where the very best, the most highly trained, had failed so utterly, he wondered, what might have been the fate of a lesser man?
The General, the once-rational man whose traces now surfaced as Benadek manipulated and prodded, understood both his salvation and his penalty: his memorieshis soul?would live on. Immortality, (if Benadek chose it, through the change), was his too, but his every atrocitycannibalism, necrophilia, and the more personal outrages of rape, murder, and degradationwould survive, testaments to the nadir of human behavior. Standing beside the cool rationality of James Wold Bostwick and the disciplined flexibility of Arnold Sonnenfield, the hard, honest passion of Jack Van Duinen and the bright spark of creativity and élan of Jean-Francois Ailloud, the debasement of General Allan Robert Kauffman would remain always, an example and an admonition.
"I acceptthe opportunity and the penalty." In that moment, even before Benadek's answering nod, the General began the final step in his long dying and the first of his new life.
Benadek got up. The door to the General's quarters opened to his touch. For a quarter hour he explored, and found what he suspected he might: a closet. Uniforms.
When next the boffins inspected their patient and his intended victim, they found only a dried-out husk where Benadek had lain. Benadek stood beside it. Boffin querulousness died before his imposing figure. His antique military uniform, resplendent with ribbons and untarnished braid, was no conceit, for the man who had once earned the right to wear it resided within him. Only a slight change had been necessary to fit Gorb's body to the General's clothing, for the latter had once been large and impressive.
Where the General had been dusky and black-haired, his successor was fairbut boffins who might have remembered his original appearance were hundreds of generations dead. These boffins merely saw and, though without understanding, accepted his miraculous rejuvenation.
Allan Robert Kauffman had maintained his fine military figure through his dynamic years. After taking his first surrogate life, before becoming enured to such taking, he had put his uniforms away. Later, when shame ceased to have meaning, the clothes no longer fit what he had become, and he no longer cared about them. Thus the Gorb/Benadek body fit them easily.
The boffins did as he bade them. His stature, his visual and chemical signals, and his voice of command precluded their doubting his orders.
Those orders were extensive. Though boffins seldom forgot anything, they soon found it necessary to use their hand-held terminals to record the stream of directives Benadek issued. With General Kauffman's knowledge at his command, Benadek charged the boffins with the shutdown of Continental Defense Treaty Command Post Alpha. Even as his dictates were issued, boffins throughout the underground facility dithered and scooted to carry them out. Benadek gave only superficial attention to the process. Much of his mind was elsewhere, on matters he had had little opportunity to consider since the long, trapped days while the Gorb-persona had governed. Even then, helpless and impotent, he had abstained from tormenting himself with speculation and worry.
Did Achibol still live? Had his faltering heart held out through the long months above, without a word of hope or a hint that all had not been lost? Benadek instructed a boffin to search for anything that might help the old manor rather the old machine: his human parts were not failing. He told the boffin to search the fragmented remains of the world computer net for "Gibraltar," and for records of the cyborg experiments that had been performed there. There had to be a way to save Achibol.
Was Teress there, or had she buried the old charlatan and given up on the skinny boy in his honch-body, thinking him dead or reverted entirely to what he had seemed to be?
Had Achibol's medicines kept Ameling's raddled body from expiring? Was mad Yasha still with them, or had he run off with his rusty treasures?
What would they all think when the first tattered pure-humans emerged alive from the pit of horrors? Would they hear only tales of depravity and despair? Would they welcome any change in the deadly sameness of husks appearing again and again in the bleak valley, to be carted away and burned? Would they recognize that any change was reason for hope?
Benadek considered sending boffins to find his companions, to reassure them, but there were too few boffins, too many honches to be commanded, and far too many miles of corridors and wires and fiber-optic channels to be decommissioned and prepared for a discontinuation that might be forever. There was no need to destroy the facility, even though it was within his power to do it. Instead, let it remain a hidden monument to the glory and folly of the race that had created the world he had known.
Benadek questioned honches and boffins one by one and in groups. Not surprisingly, the honches sought orders. Benadek knew that they would be more fulfilled outside in the real world than marking time on barracks-duty below. But all could not go. He intended that Command Post Alpha remain minimally functional, not succumb to the continuous onslaught of groundwater, mold, and corrosion. It might someday have a higher purpose to serve, and maintaining it required a skeleton staff.
The boffins presented no problems. Given the alternatives of continued service below, with new, challenging tasks, or emerging in the world above to struggle with the vagaries of weather, climate, animals, undisciplined, uneducated simples, and irregular pure-humans, their preference was clear: they would stay where they belonged. Benadek assigned honches to them, for they would need manpower to maintain their small world, and arranged that departing honches would periodically send young members of their ilk to the sally port in the cave, to relieve, serve, and learn.
The problem of the temples had to be solved. Boffins supplied with replacement circuitry and tools could continue the chore he and Achibol had struggled with. Perhaps the boffins, using land-lines and satellites restored to service, could reconstitute the network and begin the long-postponed rejuvenation of the human race. But Benadek had set himself another task entirely.
The braid and medals of the General's uniform had no metallic content; they passed the matter-transmitter gate without difficulty. The emtee had been reprogrammed to accept what Benadek had become. He steeled himself for the single step that would convey him forever beyond this maze under the ice. What would he find? Would there be nothing but a long-decayed Benadek-body huddled on a blanket long gone to mold? Would a gathering of dear friends greet him? Would Teress's eyes light up, knowing him even in this magnificent body? Would the grand, crotchety old sorcerer smile proudly upon his young apprentice, now grown tall?
Taking a deep breath, Benadek stepped through the door into the world.
Saphooth backed away from the consoleand from Kaledrin, whom he eyed with revulsion and horror. "He did it! The little bastard really did it! Just as I suspected! Benadek the body snatcher. And you . . . you want to . . . " He backed up another stepor rather he tried to, but his feet would not move. Something tough and rubbery held his bony ankles.
"No!" Saphooth shrieked. "Let go of me!" He struggled then, but it was too late. Kaledrin had many tentacles, far more than he needed to immobilize the rickety simian-form Saphooth, and to stifle his cries.
For several minutes, anyone up or down the hall could have heard the moans and grunts of the two men struggling, molluscoid tentacles against simian-form muscle and bonebut no others heard. There were only the two of themand then only one.