Wind rocked the truck.
Outside, snow began to fall again, after several days of clear skies. The sound it made when the wind whisked it across the roof of the cargo hold made Belina's flesh goosebump into thousands of little hills.
When the lights were turned out, Sebastian fell asleep almost instantly, but Billy Belina lay awake for a long time, trying to think of some way to kill the idiot.
It must be carefully done. He must have no chance for revenge. If she only wounded him, it was quite possible that he would catch her and feed her to the Furnace and never call her forth again.
But she was still out when she killed him, because she would be alone and there would be no puppet master to resurrect the prince and Wissa and the others. She might as well be liquid flesh herself, unfeeling and unthinking, rather than be the only puppet alive.
She fell asleep pondering murder, her pretty face a dream of soft lines and golden hair and eyes as bright as seawater.
He was happier now than he had ever been in his life. He no longer had nightmares about a blond girl with a knife in her belly. Nor did he dream about his father stabbing his mother every night. He was never plagued with an indefinable guilt, and he seemed even to have forgotten Pertos Godelhausser and the five years they had spent together on the road, drifting from city to city in their strange symbiosis.
They made only thirty or forty miles a day, driving slowly so as not to miss anything. With Belina, it was as if he had four eyes, and every inch of the land dazzled him as it never had before. They camped for two and three days at a time, playing games in the snow and reciting lines at night. Now and then, Bitty Belina would read to him from one of Pertos' old books, and he would fall asleep listening to the lilting music of her sensuously childlike voice as she recounted the exploits of knights and sorcerers, of magicians and barbarian heroes.
He could even hear her in his dreams, it seemed: pleasant dreams where the sun and the water spoke like Bitty Belina and comforted him with heat and with coolness.
When the idiot finally dozed, his slack face averted, chin on his chest, Bitty Belina quietly closed the book she had been reading from and laid it on the floor. Rising, she hurried to the front wall of the cargo hold where they lived. She climbed the rungs of a stool, stepped from the seat of that to the control console of the Furnace beside it. She looked into the empty capsule-womb, then went to the pair of knobs and worked them back and forth, getting the feel of things. She took a wafer from the identity file and slid it into the proper slot.
The Furnace lighted.
It was bright green.
Liquid spilled into the forming tray beyond the thick viewplate above the womb.
She punched the left knob straight down, rejecting the project. The liquid flesh was withdrawn from the forming tray and restored to the tank to await future creations. The identity wafer popped out of the slot and was replaced in the file.
It had occurred to Belina that she might be able to resurrect the others on her own hook. The idiot had left the Olmescian amoeba curled toward the back of the machine, and everything was ready for use. If she had remembered anything from all those times she had set in a nutrient bath, watching Pertos create her comrades, now was the time to find out. And it appeared that she had learned and remembered well.
At first, she had rejected the thought, for she could not see how a puppet could ever expect to become a puppet master. She was not as bound by rules and patterns of life as Sebastian was, though the concept was too large for her to absorb very quickly. Even Pertos would have balked at the suggestion that he might one day ascend into heaven and become a genuine god rather than a demi-god, guiding the fates of real men rather than the fates of puppets. The Furnace occupied a place of reverence in a puppet's view of things, and no simulacrum regarded the womb with less than a fear of the supernatural. For them, it was both heaven and hell. It was the void. It was the end, yet without an end, the beginning without a beginning. To take command of it seemed no more than egotistical folly that would terminate in some awful disaster.
But when several days had passed without any other plan to take the place of this insane scheme, the insanity looked more pleasing, less ridiculous. She gradually lost her superstitious awe and embraced practicality in its stead. In that way, she was much like the Rogue Saint Eclesian, though she could not know about that.
She had begun to read to the idiot, for she found that put him to sleep faster and deeper than anything but wine-and the wine was all gone. Tonight she had finally dared to go to the Furnace and test her skills. She knew the use of the controls and she knew the procedure for creation. And now she was more than a puppet, though she was not certain what or how much more.
She stepped to the stool, clambered down it and crossed the floor to the snoring idiot. He looked immense, head
nearly as huge as all of her. And in a few moments, little Belina would kill him, no matter how big he was. The thought exhilarated her.
She found the scissors he had used to cut bandages for his hand, and she carried them across the cold metal floor to where he lay. They were terribly heavy, but though her arms ached with the burden she someow found the strength to carry them.
The points of both blades were very sharp. Other nights, while he slept, she had made them sharp with a piece of sandstone Pertos kept for honing his prop-making tools.
Sebastian smiled in his sleep.
He had slumped down against the wall, so that his neck was within easy reach.
She could see the vein pulsing there. Or was it an artery? Never mind. Either way, he was dead and finished, taken care of with the same cruel efficiency he had used to kill her when she had been trying to summon help from the lorry driver.
It did not occur to her that he had snapped her spine with great reluctance and with more than a little guilt and sorrow, while she was going to drive the blades through his neck in what approached pure glee.
Too, she did not consider that she could be re-created and that he could not be.
She was still concerned that she might not be able to do more than fatally wound him and that he might live long enough to work some revenge on her. She hesitated with the scissors upraised, then gently put them down and went to the rear door of the truck. She pushed it open just a crack to give her somewhere to run if the murder should be flawed, then went back to him and lifted the weapon again.
He snorted, startling her, but remained asleep.
For all the times Wissa died, she thought.
His neck pulsed.
For killing the prince that night you found me with Alvon Rudi, she said to herself.
The scissors felt so good in her hands, the anticipation so sweet, that she did not understand why she hesitated. Why not jam the thing down, tear flesh and watch the blood gush?
Caution, she thought. I've got to have more caution than he does. It was perfectly normal for a retarded man to live by his emotions rather than his intellect, to strangle the merchant when his body cried for blood. But she must not make the same mistake. Hasty action led to things done that had better been left undone.
For instance, what if she found that she could run the Furnace perfectly, but could not get the puppets from the forming tray to the nutrient bath pods? Without the stimulation of the dark nutrient solution, none of them would break the coma they were born in.
She took the scissors back and put them away, returned to the Furnace. This time, when she fed Wissa's identity disc into the machine, she did not reject the process once the liquid had settled in the forming tray. Instead, she worked with the two controls, balancing them against each other, running the colors just as they were supposed to be run until, at last, Wissa lay whole beneath the viewplate.
She looked back at Sebastian. He was asleep.
If I can get Wissa awake, just manage to get her into the nutrients, you're dead, she thought. Together, we'll manage with the others-and before that we'll put the scissors to you.
She lifted the viewplate, which swung up and back, then looked down at the lovely, dark-complexioned seductress that played her stepmother on stage. "I'll get you out of there," she whispered, though she knew that Wissa could not hear.
It was impossible to stand outside the womb and lift Wissa free, for then she was struggling with both their weights, attempting to raise Wissa and keep herself from tumbling inside. At last, perspiring and determined, Belina swung over the lip of the capsule-womb and dropped inside, landed on the forming tray beside her unconscious stepmother.
She felt ill at ease being here. It was like a human child waking and finding itself returned to its mother's womb even though it was grown and could understand where it was. This was a region restricted to spirits, and she was surely looking upon sanctified ground where no eyes were ever meant to spy. To either side, there were thousands of wires and tubes, pumps that swished rhythmically, tubes that carried unknown lubricants from place to place, icy with their burden. She could see the guts of the Furnace to either side, back under the housing that shielded things from an externally prying eye.
This was no place to remain for long.
She lifted Wissa without a great deal of trouble and attempted to shove her over the sill of the womb's exit by shoving first on the other puppet's buttocks, then grasping her thighs, then her knees . ... Once she fell and she required several minutes to free herself from Wissa's weight and regain her breath.
Outside, Sebastian still slept.
She muscled Wissa over the rim without regard to bruising or cutting the small woman. Finally the stepmother was balanced there precariously, her belly creased by the metal edge, free from the waist up. Had she been awake, her breasts would have pained her terribly for the way she had been handled. But she was not awake, Bitty Belina reminded herself, and there was no time for gentleness. Drawing renewed strength from a thirty-second rest period, Belina grabbed one of Wissa's feet in each hand and strained to force her away. The stepmother was pushed another few inches into the open. Only her legs remained suspended over the womb recession, and these were not heavy enough to cause her to fall back inside.
Belina leaped, caught the edges of the escape hatch with her fingers, curled them over and held on tight.
She muscled herself, but found that she was too exhausted to get out. She let go and fell onto the forming tray, breathing so harshly that she was certain she would wake the idiot.
Time passed.
Around her, things hummed and thumped.
She tried it again, managed to force herself to waist level with the rim, looked out on the fiat field of the machine's surface, at the only two prominences which were the control knobs.
Her face was red, and she could feel the blood pounding in her temples. Every muscle in her face ached.
She caught the edge with her belly, tried to get a better hold with her hands and slipped back inside, striking the forming tray with her forehead and slipping mercifully into unconsciousness.
She woke up with Sebastian's face hanging over her like a moon, his fat fingers jabbing at her. She sat up, pushing his fingers away, and cursed him. Against her will, he took her out of the womb.
She watched while he fed Wissa's unawakened body back into the machine. Her identity wafer popped out and was jammed into the file.
Now she wished she had killed him when she had the scissors at his throat. Even if she had failed to get Wissa from the womb and wakened, she would not, at least, have been forced to look at the long, pallid face and those deep-set, hollow eyes that always looked so damned melancholy.
He placed her on the floor and this time allowed the Olmescian amoeba to shield the machine. He did not know if it would keep her out of trouble, but he seemed to remember that the alien organism only responded to either Pertos or himself.
"Hurt yourself," he warned.
But she was already curled up, asleep. He watched her for a while, wondering why she had tried such a foolish thing as crawling into the womb. He wondered, too, where Wissa had come from. It did not occur to him that Belina could be responsible for that. She was a puppet, after all, and not a puppet master.
In time, he went to sleep.
When he began to snore, Belina's eyes opened, fresh and observant. For a long time, she watched him, loathing him. But there was nothing she could do about him. Yet. Move cautiously, she told herself, and soon you'll be able to jam those shears clear through the bastard's windpipe.
She slept unsoundly.
They drove farther the following day than they had gone in any single stretch in quite some time. The winds had grown fierce, but the idiot still managed to keep the truck near the roadbed where, when the air cushion blasted the snow aside, it could find a good beater surface to keep itself aloft. The snow had given up the form of flakes in favor of gritty, rock-hard granules. The minuscule pellets rang off the metal hide of the vehicle, hissed on the windscreen as they drove into the storm.
When Earth had set out to beautify and modernize the world, there had been no need to conserve money. The old economic system was dead. There were so few left behind after the Emigration that anyone could have anything that he wanted. For some, this was not enough. They were the workers and the visionaries who were only satisfied when they saw their dreams taking form before them. It was these several thousand who reshaped a world, and the waste of putting a superhighway through hundreds of miles of barren land did not occur to them. It was the completed project itself, not what it would accomplish, that made the effort worth their time and lives. And when they were feeling defensive, they would say, yes, well, perhaps it is, not a necessary highway today, but in the future, when the millions return from the stars, we'll all be thankful for it. Then it will be a highway of need and not just a work of magnificence.
Of course, the millions never returned. But the magnificence remained, and that would have pleased everyone who had a hand in laying the smooth stretch of road.
Late in the afternoon they pulled into one of the widely scattered fueling stops, identical to the one where they had encountered the stranger in the long cargo van. If Sebastian remembered how he had broken Belina's neck with one quick twist of his hands, he did not show it. He seemed happy and pleased with himself at his continuing skill behind the wheel of the truck.
"Eat," he told Belina.
She came with him, walking in the path he broke to the front door of the automat. She thought of running, sure that the snow would hide her from him. But that was death, and it was Sebastian who was slated for death, not Belina, not her.
It was in the automat, then, that she found something that she could use to force the idiot to do her bidding. It was something she should have known about before, because he had mentioned it. But so much that he said struck her as meaningless that she had not attached any importance to the things. Spiders.
Spiders.
Although the fueling station automat was warm and tolerably clean, portions of its robotic maintenance system
seemed to have gone dead. There was one corner where dust had gathered and where some mold had sprouted on the plastic wall paneling. Some of the automat doors delivered food while others were empty. And when the idiot pulled open a panel that was supposed to conceal apple pie, he withdrew half a spider's web that had been woven in the cubbyhole beyond.
A huge, brown spider fell onto his tray, directly in the center of a sandwich he had taken farther up the line.
It was inconceivable that such an enormous spider, fully as large as Sebastian's thumb, could be indigenous to this place where snow was common nine months of the year and where spring hardly came before it went. More than likely it had been brought up with the construction materials or with supplies for the automat doors. It might have been the hundredth-generation descendant of another brown spider transplanted from warmer regions many years before. Its origin hardly mattered, as far as Bitty Belina was concerned. What mattered was its effect upon Sebastian, whether
it was a foreign spider or a domestic one.
He swiped at it, knocking his food to the floor, making the tray clatter on the cafeteria rail. The spider, however, escaped and darted along the innermost of the rails. He watched it go, whimpering and calling Pertos' name over and over again.
"There's another one," Bitty Belina said.
He looked where she pointed, at the dangling shreds of web, and he screamed, turned, fell across a chair. Frantically, he crawled free, made it to his feet and through the door, into the snow.
She watched him, unable to understand. "It's only a spider!" she called. But he did not come back.
For a moment, she was afraid he was going to leave without her, but he only slammed the door of the truck cab and sat there, shaking, hiding his face in his hands.
Spiders?
She stood there a moment, watching the spider in the web, thinking. She had been walking on the rails where the trays were slid along so that she could see the automat doors to know what she wanted to eat. The thing was within easy reach.
Sebastian was blowing the truck's horn.
Belina jumped down, ran to one of the tables and picked up a large clear plastic saltshaker. She poured the salt out and went back to the cafeteria line. It took a minute or so to gain the rails, but once that was done it was easy to reach out, pluck the spider from the web and drop it into the bottle. It was half as large as her dainty hand, but not dangerous.
Sebastian was impatient to be gone, laying on the horn until she was cursing him at the top of her voice.
She found the second spider clinging to the silver rail and put it in with the first. They bristled, stalked each other, then decided they were friends.
Quickly she got some sandwiches and hurried out into the growing darkness. The saltshaker was tucked under the band of her skirt, and she had pulled her blouse out to conceal the spiders. There was still a bulge, but she thought he might not notice.
And she was right.
As they drove into the storm again, eating their sandwiches, she knew that she had him in the palm of her hand, anytime she wanted him there. And tonight, when they stopped, she would teach him who was boss. Again, their roles had changed.
Koontz, Dean R. - Flesh In The Furnace (v1.0) Page 9
