"My father gave me a great many gifts," he said. "But the greatest was an unwitting donation. Yes, Dekker, I am a dragon. And what no one realized is that we learn about the world before we're born by absorbing information from whatever minds are nearby. Doctor Omicron monitored my development very closely, and he knew so very much information. Gave me quite the edge when I had to escape from you and your friends."
The third voice, the one I didn't have a name for, chuckled. "Is that how you explain those eyes of yours?"
Subject Sixteen looked up and smiled. "They don't seem to change when I transform."
"Wait, you're serious?"
"What does it matter what I am?" Subject Sixteen asked. "You want your social justice, I am helping you achieve it. Or do matters of birth and race actually matter to you?" His remark drew an awkward silence from the others. "Find the gargoyle while Dekker and I hook our friend into the imager." The third speaker headed off. He turned out to be a heavyset man with receding dark hair, round eyes and a jaw like the prow of a steam engine. His beard didn't dispel the image of a cow-catcher any. He walked behind a stack of oscilloscopes and I heard the sounds of a door.
I was wheeled a short distance into a cinderblock vault with yellow walls. The table I was strapped to was locked into place at the foot of a mass of cables, hoses and wires whose purposes I couldn't begin to guess at. Dekker was a fairly ordinary looking young man of college age with a lanky build and a nervous demeanor. He fidgeted every time he paused for a second or more. Subject Sixteen lowered a steel cage over my head and adjusted some screws. Metal plates pressed against my head, holding it in place like a vice.
"What is this thing?" I asked, trying to pretend a nonchalance I didn't feel.
"One of my father's experimental devices. He didn't name it, so I've dubbed it the Omicron Imager in his honor."
"Names are nice, but what does it do?"
"It's an imager, it channels psychic energy to peer through space and time. You see, retrocognitives, or postcognitives, whatever you want to call them, can only pick up the past of an item or location, and then only glimpses limited by their own power. Scryers can look almost anywhere, but only in the now. The imager combines the techniques, and uses technology to filter out the interference, so that you get a clear picture of anywhere and anywhen. Or that's what it's supposed to do. We've had a bit of a snag where it kills the guy in your position and seems to require more psychic energy than our gargoyle can feed it."
"So that's why you took Keyes."
"He's the most powerful mind on record, and better still, he's in a coma, so we can tap into his power without having to subdue him first."
"So what are you going to do with it once it's working."
Subject Sixteen smiled. "Knowledge is power. Even just with the secrets of the past open to us, there's no end to the opportunities. And if we can find a precognitive, things will get very interesting."
"There's never been a proven precognitive."
"That's not really a problem at this stage."
A creature loped into the room, gray-skinned with over large eyes of solid blue. A tiny nose pointed like an arrow at a mouth full of snaggled, tiny teeth from which lolled a bright red tongue that reached down to its navel. Its arms were small, gracile and bore two elbows. Warped vestigial wings hung limply from its back. The only thing it seemed to be wearing was a pair of white pants, and it appeared to be completely hairless. It was obvious that the thing could not speak beyond a gibber. Its eyes glowed briefly, and I heard a voice in my mind, erudite and calm. "Let us get this over with." The gargoyle turned its gaze to Dekker. "That was not very nice."
"I can't help what comes into my head. Please stop eavesdropping!"
"Be polite, Serar," Subject Sixteen said. The gargoyle didn't reply, but climbed up on a shelf and pulled a headpiece out of a nook. Dekker helped strap him into it.
"Main bus A primed," the man with the impressive jaw said, "Main bus B primed, secondary buses A and B on standby." I couldn't see where he was standing, but it sounded like he was near some of the electrical equipment.
"How's our new power source doing?" Subject Sixteen asked.
"Uhh," Dekker said, "Readings are steady. I'm not a doctor, so I don't know if the numbers are good."
"Key numbers Grigor," Subject Sixteen said.
"I don't even know what these mean," the man with the impressive jaw muttered. "Zeta is steady at nine point eight, same as last run. Lambda is down to two. Psi is... Thirty eight."
"Most impressive," Subject Sixteen said in a smug tone, though I'm pretty sure he had nothing to do with it. He leaned close to my ear. "This may hurt a bit."
He threw a switch and the world exploded in pain.
There was a weight on my back. It was Mini-Uth-sk. His orange-gloved gripping hands held on to my shoulders, with his hooves pressed against the small of my back. The delicate fingers of his manipulating hands sat atop my head, and he peered over me. That alone should have been enough to tell me that I was in no real place. He was a figment of my mind, nothing more than a representation of the implant keeping me from getting any sleep. The place I was standing in was also unreal in its scope. The shadows hid most of the details, but there was a door whose knob was at the level of my face and whose upper reaches disappeared into the vague shapes overhead. It wasn't a closet, as there were dusty steps going down.
In the corner, huddled in a fetal position, was Irvin Keyes. He was wearing a pair of round glasses and filth stained clothes, looking very small indeed. I walked over to him, though distances seemed to be elastic, adding to my doubt that this was a real place. After the first few steps made no progress, I crossed the remaining distance in a single bound. I knelt beside him as he shrank even further. "Irvin?" I asked.
"Shh," he whispered, "She'll hear you." I was going to ask who he was talking about, but a light appeared behind me. I turned. The figure emitting the light was not the 'she' Irvin had mentioned. The winged man looked to be made of ivory light, save for his golden wings and solid blue eyes. Proportionally perfect, the luminous avatar floated a few inches above the floor. The steady beat of his wings was too slow to actually bear his weight at a hover. That is, if anything in this place had weight. It seemed that my representative here was analytical me, the second most obnoxious component of my personality. And he recognized the solid blue eyes of the winged man.
"Serar," I whispered.
"Come now, is it a surprise?" Serar asked, his lips still unmoving. I didn't answer. "You don't actually have to wear your self image in a mindscape," he said. "But, that's rather irrelevant information." I raised an eyebrow. "I have to kill you for the sake of the greater good."
"That doesn't make a lot of sense."
"I've seen what plans lie in Victor's mind for this Imager," Serar said. "I cannot let him go forward with any of them. And the only way he will give up is if he believes the Imager cannot be made to work."
"So the machine didn't kill the others."
"The first was an accident, but a fortuitous one. The rest were by necessity. Fortunately, that dragon cannot tell the difference." Serar looked around. "You have a very dark and untidy mind."
"It's not my mind," I said, taking a step to the left. Irvin looked up, his eyeglasses catching Serar's glow and turning into disks of ivory light.
"She heard you," he said. A booming footstep punctuated his remark, followed by another. The door behind Serar was wrenched open and a towering woman stood in the blazing light from outside. Her immense girth almost filled the doorway. Miles of cloth formed a yellow sun dress that fluttered down to ankles like tree trunks. Beady eyes over a squashed nose stabbed through Serar, transfixing him. A solitary cigarette was pasted to frog-like lips with days old lipstick, shedding ash and embers with each word she screeched.
"I told you
to be quiet! Who said you could speak! You're ruining my evening!" A massive, meaty hand wrapped about Serar and dragged him towards the ceiling. "I want silence!" She shook him, rattling the winged figure in her grip. With an incoherent cry, she hurled Serar at the floor. He crashed into the wooden planks with a splintering crack. She bellowed once more and slammed the door closed, bringing back the gloom.
Serar blinked, the blue light of his eyes vanishing briefly. "What..?"
Irvin raised a finger to his lips.
A new voice reached us, distant, like the echo of an echo. "The Gargoyle's readings are going haywire," Dekker said. "It looks a lot like what we get just before one of the focusing minds goes. I think we should shut down."
"It's not your job to make decisions," Subject Sixteen said, his voice equally indistinct.
"If we get Serar killed, the whole project is scuppered," Dekker said, an edge of fear creeping into his words. It didn't sound like fear for Serar, and I could only imagine the look Subject Sixteen had shot him.
"Give them a few minutes, see if he stabilizes. The other two are stable. This is still the best try we've had."
Serar rose, slowly knitting his broken avatar back into shape. His eyes focused on Irvin, narrowing to mere slivers. "The element of surprise only works once. I suppose one more sacrifice for th-" Before he could finish speaking, figures of polished obsidian seized Serar and pinned him to the floor. Piling on top of him, they muffled his words.
"Shh," Irvin said. For a moment or two, Serar struggled against the pile of undefined obsidian figures. He fell slack, but from the way he clenched and unclenched his fist, it was pretty clear he was still alive.
"What now?" I whispered. Irvin looked up at me in confusion.
"See," Subject sixteen said, "Stable." A feeling of dread came over me as the next words echoed into the mindscape. "Now let's get started."
Berthold narrowed his pale eyes and pushed the overlong bangs of his light brown hair out of them. Focusing on a distant patch of well trimmed grass, he steadied himself and adjusted his stance. He tapped the head of the worn club against the toe of his shoe. Positioning it behind the little white ball, he returned his gaze to the distant green. The flag whipped into view, fluttering on an unsteady breeze. Giving a brief nod, Berthold muttered to himself. "Don't cheat, the wind is part of the challenge." Dressed in a checked sweater vest, a button down shirt and khaki slacks, Berthold didn't stand out that much from the other golfers on the Doolittle Club course.
Drawing back the club, Berthold was thrown off his stroke when it became stuck in mid-air. He turned to look over his shoulder. It had stopped because someone with an iron grip had taken hold of the head. Athletic in build and clad in black, a large white N graced the center of his chest. His hair was black, save for the sides, which were stark white. A large domino mask graced his face, its eyes a blank white. His feet floated inches above the grass, and he wore a rather impressive scowl.
"Neutrino. What brings you to the front nine?" Berthold asked, trying to hide his unease. Wordlessly, Neutrino shoved a newspaper at him. Cautiously, Berthold let go of the golf club and took the paper. He skimmed the stories looking for anything that might have raised Neutrino's ire. "Oh. You're upset over that?"
"You chose your words poorly," Neutrino said.
"I was asked a question, I gave my opinion," Berthold said. "It's not as if there's a rule against real political activism. I mean, look at Mortis' crusade across the south."
"The Fund is a politically neutral entity, and Baron Mortis makes it quite clear that his activism is a personal matter and not an official policy. You made an unvetted and unqualified statement to the press on a controversial issue in a manner that implied an official position by the Community Fund."
"Dude, take a breath. How did you say that all without-"
"Dude?" Neutrino asked. "What would your parents think if they knew you'd taken to using slang?"
"Seriously? Leave the dead out of this."
"I suppose it's a symptom of the same disease - an inability to think before you speak."
Berthold glared at Neutrino. "You're just upset because I came down against the war," he said.
"The content of your opinion is not what's at issue here. It's the manner in which you express yourself."
"It's not as if I ran off to join a commune to sit in the mud with filth-stained druggies all day."
"No, you just made it sound like an organization stacked full of war heroes supported the communist conquest of South Vietnam."
"That is not what I said," Berthold said. "I just said we shouldn't be telling the Vietnamese how to run their country."
"Do you think the communists will give the people a choice in the matter?" The two glared at each other.
"If you feel so strongly about it, why don't you go over there and sort it out?"
"If called upon to do so, I will."
The image grew garbled and indistinct. As it faded from my mind, the words, "I will," echoed though my head.
"It worked!" Subject Sixteen said, laughing. "Father was right, he just didn't have the right brains to make it work."
"What are you talking about?" Dekker asked. "That was... useless."
"It was an image from another time and place," Subject Sixteen said. "The content is irrelevant, it proved we can do it."
"That would be great," Grigor said, "But there's something wrong with the gargoyle."
As I forced my eyes open, I heard the scent of ozone and tasted the color blue. Apparently, ozone smelled like a sibilant hissing, and blue tasted of a cross between mint and iron. The synesthesia faded as my scrambled brain got itself back into order. Both the ozone and the light were coming from an electric arc somewhere within the imager body. It crackled in a manner that reminded me of bacon fat. Pain still marched up and down my body, stomping on my limbs with iron-shod boots. My left eye was blinded by the tears that had accumulated in it. My right eye blinked 'Rebooting' several times before resolving into an image of the ceiling. The dancing mosaic of light had taken on a more ominous cast. I still couldn't turn my head for the vice-like device clamped about it.
"What's wrong with him?" Dekker asked.
"I don't know," Subject Sixteen hissed. "His vitals say he should be awake. It's almost as if his mind has locked up."
"What happened in there?" Grigor asked.
"He met me," Irvin said, his voice soft, almost inaudible over the electric arc. The pain vanished as the device clamped to my head was severed from its moorings. Though the weight strapped to my cranium made it uncomfortable, I'd regained a measure of freedom of movement. The first thing I saw was Grigor hurled bodily across the room by a massive obsidian hand. He smashed into a stack of electronic equipment, raising a shower of sparks and small, sputtering flames. I turned to look at Irvin in time to see him be enveloped in a faceless, genderless construct of polished obsidian. His fist wiped the smug expression from Subject Sixteen's face.
The punch floored Subject Sixteen, knocking him first into Dekker, then into the cinderblock wall. Dekker crashed into the brass stacks, rupturing phials and shattering crystals as it toppled into the imager proper. The electric arc shorted through the ensorcelled brass and spilled fluids. Dekker let loose an almost inhuman scream as the energy coursed through his body. Sixteen ignored the howling young man as he lunged for Irvin, fingers warping into black talons as his hands sprouted red scales. Irvin swatted him aside, smashing the last undamaged rack of jerry-rigged equipment.
Sixteen's clothes split as he sprouted wings and twisted himself into the horned, squamous form of a dragon. He'd easily gained twice his body weight in moments. He'd grown substantially in the last year, his torso alone was now as long as I was tall. His sinuous neck and long snout easily doubled that length, and his tail made him nearly the length of an omn
ibus. Irvin ripped the imager from its mooring, still sparking and sputtering. He smashed the delicate clockwork instrument down on Sixteen's head, driving it against the dragon's collarbone. Sixteen slumped against the wall and slid to the floor. Irvin punched a hole through the cinderblock and walked out of the building.
Dekker hauled himself slowly up the bent remnants of one of the shelves. At least two types of energy still arced through his body as he staggered away. He moved in a daze, passing the devastation without reaction. All of those were usually bad signs. Strapped to the table, there wasn't a lot I could do to help him. The shattered remnants of the imager shifted, cascading to the floor in an almost musical clatter. Sixteen rose. His snout was speared clean through and pinned to his collar by one of the posts of the imager's frame. Seizing the offending bar of silver-green metal, he pulled it free. Soaked in blood, the runes and sigils etched on its surface hissed as they were exposed to air.
Gruefield 18 (Tarnished Sterling Omnibus) Page 71
