Terribly Twisted Tales

by RABE, JEAN

  He thought he heard whimpering then, in the stifling wilderness. Androye cudgeled his imagination for playing tricks on him. Then he realized he wasn’t imagining it.

  Something was sobbing, off to the right, only meters from him. He pushed forward, determined to ignore it. Freedom was near.

  But he couldn’t ignore it. All his instincts forbade him from going on without investigating the sound of a fellow creature crying not in sorrow but in pain. It could be a child.

  He dithered for a moment. The animals on this planet competed hard for available prey. Who knew whether one of them had figured out that making distress noises might attract a curious scavenger? Why expend the calories to hunt if your quarry came to you? He kept running toward the safety of the control tower.

  The sobbing changed to a low moan. Androye’s feet made the decision for him, turning toward the noise. He couldn’t help himself.

  He pushed underneath a low-hanging vine as thick as his wrist. The sunlight was even more spare here. The only illumination seemed to be coming from a pair of glowing eyes. A strong, sour, musky smell hit him straight in the nostrils.

  Androye pulled up short. The eyes flashed. The keening stopped abruptly, and a low warning growl came from the depths of the shadows. He held up both hands to show they were empty.

  “It’s all right,” he said in Orskian, then reframed it in Dominion Basic. “I am a healer. I will not harm you. Do you see?” He held out his right hand and peeled back the wrist of his jumpsuit with the left. The skin on the back of both was flayed. He cringed at his own touch, but the pattern of red bars and crescents on his skin was intact. The eyes narrowed at him. “You are in pain. I can feel it. Let me help you.”

  “I will kill you.” The voice was weak. Androye knew that if the voice’s owner could have killed him it would have happened the moment he appeared.

  “Don’t. I have medicine. What happened to you?” A hand thrust itself forward into a thin shaft of light. It was strongly made, long, with knobbly knuckles and covered in thin, golden hairs. Rich, purple blood dripped from the wrist. Androye winced when he saw the cluster of thorns that pierced right through the joint. In spite of the possessor’s efforts, the limb trembled.

  “That must hurt,” Androye said. His eyes were becoming accustomed to the dimness. He could see the face now. The glowing green eyes sat to either side of a blunt, bewhiskered muzzle. Round, golden ears sat on the flat-skulled head. “You’re a Corex, aren’t you?”

  “I am the Corex,” the lion-man said. “I am Lraou.”

  “I’m Androye. I come from Orskia. What are you doing here?” The Corex didn’t answer. The healer sat on a heap of rotting leaves and secured the limb between his knees. He felt in the pouches of his shipsuit and brought out what he needed. A general purpose styptic that worked on more than 80% of the species in the Dominion and the surrounding systems halted the bleeding and numbed the area. With an extractor that resembled an electronic technician’s pliers, Androye pushed each of the thorns out through the exit wound. They had barbs that prevented them being drawn the way they had gone in, as the tearing and irritation of the skin attested. The Corex had tried to remove them himself, but they had hurt him too much.

  Battlefield medicine had trained Androye to operate swiftly. In no time he had cleaned and disinfected the wound and added a skinpatch of antiseptic/anesthetic to cover it against infection. He put the tip of one of the thorns into the ancient analyzer he carried in his breast pocket. The indicator turned orange.

  “It’s toxic,” he said, pointing at the light. “Alkali-based. That’s why you feel sick. Give me a minute. I have some antidotes.” He thumbed through his pouches for the correct envelope. He tore off the guard strip and applied the adhesive to the male’s palm, one of the few patches of bare skin he had. “That’ll work within a couple of days.” If not, you’re dead, he thought but did not say. Both of them understood.

  “I thank you, Androye,” the lion-man said. “You have the gratitude of the Corex.” His head went up suddenly.

  Androye felt as though all the bones in his body had disintegrated. Boots threshed down the vegetation outside the copse, and the sound of a hoverbot tore the air overhead. They had been discovered.

  “Hold your hands out where we can see them, or we will level this area,” a man’s harsh voice boomed, amplified by a uniform speaker. Androye realized that his vow to heal all creatures had just put him back into the hands of the enemy, and his new patient, too. All hope gone, Androye put his arms outside the enclosure. Voices exclaimed in surprise, and muttered among themselves. Androye wondered whether it was he they were not expecting to find out there. A whole troop of guards in spaceport uniform burst into the clearing with guns and blankers.

  The female guard from the transport pushed through the others. She grabbed him by the hair and tossed him to the ground.

  “Tell me why I shouldn’t kill you!” she demanded. Androye lay still. Once she had controlled her temper, she hauled him to his feet. “We have lost our launch window. Now we must wait until tomorrow, and it is your fault! You will have no rations today.” Androye nodded miserably.

  The lion-man didn’t want to be captured. He leaped at the guards, claws out, and succeeded in taking the face off one man and the throat out of another before a dozen moved in to club him to the ground and blast him unconscious with blankers. The charge wouldn’t keep him out long, but it was long enough to fasten a yoke around his neck and bind his wrists behind him. The Corex hissed in pain. Androye leaped forward to help him and was clubbed back.

  “This critter’s been gone a couple of weeks,” the lead guard told Androye’s escort. “I don’t know why he came back this way. He coulda been clean gone, if it wasn’t for your guy’s tracer implant.”

  He needed medical help, Androye thought miserably. And I supplied it. Unluckily for both of us.

  The uniformed Dominion troops dragged the lion-man upright. One of his eyes was swollen half shut. He winked the other one at Androye.

  “I don’t blame you,” he said. “And I won’t forget it.” Before any of the uniformed guards could stop him, he leaned over and shoved his cheek hard against Androye’s. “There.”

  “Come on!” Androye’s guard said, taking him by the back of the neck.

  “Good luck,” he told the lion-man before he was pushed back out into the blinding sunlight.

  “It’s a good deed you’re doing,” whispered Tomping, huddled next to him on a bench in the anteroom. He was a field laborer who had once been an artist on Melaysi. “We all appreciate it.”

  “You know what they say about good deeds,” Androye said, with a calm smile for the guards.

  “We care that you try,” Tomping murmured.

  “Clesborn! On your feet. The governor will see you.”

  Androye stood and carefully smoothed down his patched shipsuit. With an air of unhurried professionalism, he followed the secretary. The sergeant-at-arms stayed close to his side, a blanker held in Androye’s ribs.

  The next day’s ship out of Danton had taken Androye and his fellows to the plague- and injury-ridden host of prisoners and low-level workers they expected him to cure with promises and a pocketful of bandages. The guards kept a closer watch on him than before. Instead of just an implant, they lock-sealed a heavy ID shackle around one ankle. Now there was no mistaking his status as a prisoner no matter where they took him. No longer could he pass unnoticed in a crowd, even if he could get away. The first new planet’s atmosphere stank of simmering metal from the smelting plants. It gave him and his fellow prisoners a rash. The next was a morass of swamp gas thoroughly mixed with the exhaust from outdated engines that hauled precious timber in from the waterlogged forests. This third system, Imsan, was a center for agriculture and industrial assembly. Androye thought he would soon die if he couldn’t get away from the reek and pollution and the endless work that sent him exhausted to an unpadded cot at night. He repaired flesh wounds and reattached limbs as be
st he could. So many of his patients died for want of better care. Androye worried about them, but he worried about his wife back on Orskia. As soon as he could, he would make another break for freedom, but in the meanwhile he tried to negotiate for better equipment and better conditions for himself and his patients. Even an air filtration system would go a long way.

  He was neither by training nor nature much of a negotiator, though he did his best to express the desperate need exacerbated by the primitive conditions. In the healing halls on Orskia, he had access to all the most modern advances in medicine. With increasing frustration, he took his complaint from his guards to their supervisor. It was a risk. As the supervisor was unable to answer his demands, she passed him up the chain of command, to the next tier, where an officer heard him out. He couldn’t make decisions of that level and sent Androye upward, and so on until he had reached the limits of the echelon. He felt heartened, knowing he was making progress toward getting what he wanted.

  He had rehearsed what he would say to the governor. Providing better conditions would restore the Dominion’s conscript workforce to full strength, enabling them to carry out tasks as ordered. He would offer himself as a consultant. If he could work his way up to a position of trust and authority, perhaps he might be able to secure communications with his family on Orskia, even leave time.

  The governor, a stout, beetle-browed man barely glanced up from the glowing array of screens beneath the transparent surface of his desk.

  “Well?”

  “I am Androye Clesborn, Lord Governor.”

  The piggy eyes beneath the brows glared up at him. “I know who you are! What do you want?”

  Androye smiled. Here was the opportunity he had been hoping for. “Lord Governor, I don’t know how well acquainted you are with the medical facilities to hand for your, er, foreign workforce.” He began to outline conditions in the fields and the mines, the injuries and illnesses that were being sustained by the workers, and the bare measures he felt were needed to ameliorate them. He outlined point after point of the deficiencies in the infirmary and in the field units at each work station. “Now, I have made a study of the nutritional requirements of the various races that you have in your . . . employment. . . .”

  He looked at the governor for a response, and his voice ran down to a stop. The fleshy face wore an expression of exasperated boredom. The beady eyes had gone stony. Androye peered at him hopefully.

  “Sir, may I have your feedback on my suggestions?”

  The teeth bared like an animal’s. “Certainly not. Such things are not in my interest.”

  Androye felt his face grow hot. “Then why did you listen to me?”

  “I heard you out only to see how long you would go on. You make demands as if you have some measure of importance on this outpost. You are nothing. Less than nothing. Slaves die. We replace them when they do. They will work as long as they can. You’re here to use until I have no use for you and discard you once I do. I don’t care about the conditions. My workforce, as you call it, is lucky to get what it has.”

  “Then why let me go on and tell you all the plans I . . . that I offer?”

  He did not understand until that moment the stories of how dangerous the governor was, nor that he had earned the fear in which his underlings held him. The beady eyes burned like coals. “To see if you would ever become amusing. You did not.” He moved a finger toward the sergeant at arms. “Take this fool to the arena! At least he’ll have entertainment value for a moment or two. Inform me when he is on the schedule. I’d like to see him die.” He gestured through the door at the workers huddled on the benches near the entry door. “And take that scum with you! All of them! I may as well enjoy my afternoon.”

  “Yes, Lord Governor,” the sergeant said, tugging Androye out of the room. The healer tried to pull away.

  “But Lord Governor!”

  The sergeant poked him in the chest with the blanker. “Don’t speak again, or I’ll kill you here.”

  “I tried,” he told Tomping, as they were hustled into the gray corridor toward the steel lifts.

  “I know. We’re going to die here.”

  Tomping’s prediction came true within an hour. They hauled his body, dead, from the sands to the cheering of the live audience, a thousand or so locals, Dominion citizens only, who crowded the stands. Androye clung to the grate of a cage full of remote cameras, one of a cluster containing the day’s victims to be.

  A young man with an earpiece poked a skinny sword through the wires. Androye took it, knowing he would never be able to use it. “Here you go, friend. Now, remember, the crowd gets bored if the bouts last more than ten minutes. Try and cringe a little as we lower you. The governor likes to see cringing.”

  “Will it spare my life?” Androye asked desperately.

  The attendant gave him a sympathetic look. “No. But it might keep us out of trouble. Be good. We’ve got families.”

  “So have I!” Androye shouted as the crane hauled his cage out into the air over the gleaming sands.

  The lights on the field were blinding. Androye winced at the hot beams that lanced through his cage. An armored figure waited below. By the thick legs and wide, webbed feet, he could tell it was a Nourin. It was unsteady on its feet, giddy from the heat. An intelligent amphibian, it should have been back on its waterlogged world among the gigantic black roots of varol trees.

  His cage thumped down, and the door creaked open. The Nourin leaped for him. Androye backpedaled. His heel hit the threshold of the cage and he sat down hard. The crowd laughed. He threw up the sword, just deflecting a blow. His arm went numb from elbow to fingers. He couldn’t kill. All he could do was die.

  But the Nourin had done all he was able. Through the eyeholes of the helmet, Androye watched the big, round eyes roll up toward the ceiling. The Nourin collapsed in a heap. The crowd booed. Androye ran to its side to see if he could help it. The creature was too far gone. When he pinched up its skin to test for dehydration, the pinch stayed high. It was dying. Men in black leather masks kicked Androye away. They took one big floppy foot each and hauled the Nourin away.

  “Fight!” one of them growled over his shoulder. “Make it look good, curse you!”

  Androye’s next opponent was already in the ring, a tall figure in a half-mask standing on the toes of huge, gold-furred feet. He knew the scent immediately, not to mention the shape. It was a Corex. He scrambled to his feet. It would tear him apart in seconds. He held out the electronic sword, trying to look threatening.

  “I am a prince of my people,” the Corex declared. “I will not yield to you, no matter how skilled you may be.”

  “I don’t want to hurt you,” Androye said.

  “Lie! Die like the Orskian slug you are.”

  They circled one another for an eternity. He knew about swordplay in theory, though his medical training prevented him from making any attacks. The lion-man feinted and drove in. Androye dropped to the ground. The sword passed over his head.

  Androye had a perfect view of the furry hand and arm as it extended through where he had been standing. A small cluster of round scars still showed purple on the wrist. He knew this male!

  “Lraou!” he exclaimed. The lion-man jumped back surprised, ruining the recovery from his lunge. He stared down at the prone man.

  “I know no Orskians,” the Corex snarled. He drew back his hand and spread his claws to strike.

  “It’s me,” Androye said desperately, eyes flicking to the glinting crescent-moons. “I’m the healer who patched you up on Danton.”

  The eyes in the half-mask widened. Lraou leaned down and smelled Androye’s cheek.

  “Ah,” he said. He pulled Androye to his feet and slapped him on the back. Androye staggered at the lion-man’s casual strength. “Yes, I remember you! You’re mine! I won’t kill you.”

  “You’d better make it look like you will if you want to live,” Androye warned him, backing away. He looked over his shoulder. The hovering cameras we
re invisible behind the brilliant white lights. “We don’t have long. They told me ten minutes.”

  “My people know where I am. I await rescue. This is the day. If I had not been in the arena they would have freed me from my cell.” Lraou’s brilliant eyes widened. “I owe you life, healer. You shall come with me.”

  Such a hope seemed unlikely, but it was enough to lift Androye’s heart a little.

  “They want blood within ten minutes, or they will send in the professional fighters,” he said.

  “Then we will give them a little blood. We must prolong this encounter as much as possible. Let us give them a fine show until my ship arrives!” Lraou beckoned him with one claw and brandished the sword. “Engage!”

  Androye swallowed hard. “I can’t fight you, Lraou. My oath as a healer prevents me harming you or anyone else. Only one of us can live. It must be you.”

  The furry lip curled under the edge of the half mask. “Intolerable. I cannot poke holes in a being who won’t fight. Very well, you shall be as a cub who is learning the skill. Will you pretend? Can you?”

  The crowd was already growing restless. Androye heard boos and jeers coming from the stands. He had no choice. He held up the sword as if preparing to fight. Lraou went on guard. Androye imitated his movement.

  “That is very good. They circled one another, making passes. It half-killed Androye to be making threatening gestures with the thin sword, going deeply against his training, but if they could live . . .