Eternity's End

by Jeffrey Carver

  "I understand," said the surgeon, in a tone of sandpaper, probably meant to be soothing. "That's why we're training you—so you will be in control. You're off to a good start. I expected it to take you far longer to pull out of that image just now. My congratulations."

  Legroeder swore under his breath. "You might have given me some warning."

  Her laugh sounded like crinkling cellophane. "Next time. Next time we will give you warning. Now, would you like to rest before we move on to phase two?"

  Legroeder rolled his head on the padded table. "Phase two? Phase two? Yes, I would like to rest! Can I get off this damned table?"

  The surgeon helped Legroeder sit up. "You are feeling well enough to walk? Good! Then my associates will take you to your room and get you something to eat before you sleep. Try to make yourself at home and I'll see you tomorrow."

  Legroeder wobbled as he slipped off the table onto rubbery legs. "Thank you."

  The surgeon acknowledged with a nod, then motioned to one of the medical assistants to come forward. "Now, do not be surprised if you find yourself... interacting... with your new implants as you sleep. It is nothing to worry about."

  "Nothing to worry about?" Legroeder asked suspiciously.

  "You may have dreams."

  * * *

  Sleep proved hard to come by, and when he did drop off, Legroeder found himself on a roller coaster of night visions. His inner world flickered with images and movement; he ran in his dreams, trying to find his way down a maze of corridors, trying to escape from he knew not what, or to catch up with something very much like it. His breath became ragged; his pulse raced.

  He woke up, alone, in a small room. He was lying on a pad on the floor. The Narseil had worried that he might fall off one of their high beds, and his tangled bedclothes suggested that they were right. He sat up, dazed, trying to bring back the confusing welter of dream images that had preceded his awakening. He felt a need to identify them before he could push them aside—to clear his mind of them before he could trust his senses in the waking world.

  A Narseil aide appeared, calling him to breakfast. Already? It felt like the middle of the night. He dressed and followed the aide to a nearby room, where he sat alone and ate cereal with rice milk, and drank something like coffee. Finally he was taken back to the medical center. Com'peer greeted him cheerily, asked how he'd slept, and led him to a console. "Please study," she said.

  On the display were six faces. The first snapped to full screen as he sat down. It was his own face: dark, olive-tinted skin in a narrow, slightly pinched face. All right—he knew what he looked like. He could stand to be a little handsomer, but he'd lived with this face for a long time, and figured he could keep on living with it. The screen flicked to the second face, and it was... his face, but different. It was longer and thinner, almost more like a Narseil. His features were recognizable, but only because he was looking for them. It was a very good disguise. It was also a remake of his entire facial structure. "Just how would you do this—by putting my head in a vice?" he asked, looking up at Com'peer.

  "Nothing so crude," said the surgeon. "But in a sense you are right. We would have to redo the bone structure of your face. It would involve some pulverizing and reconstituting."

  "Jesus," Legroeder said, feeling faint. "What else have you got?"

  The next image was just the opposite effect: it looked as if an anvil had been dropped on his head. The face was recognizably human, but barely. "Oh, that's great," he said. "Christ Almighty."

  "All right, no need to worry," said Com'peer, beginning to sound just a little tense. "We'll keep showing you possibilities."

  "I can just imagine! Christ!"

  Com'peer was quiet for a moment. "Could I ask you a personal favor? Could you not curse in those terms, please?"

  "What?" He looked up at her, startled.

  The Narseil's voice changed in tone. "I am a Christian," she said, "and it troubles me to hear His name used in that manner."

  Legroeder stared, open-mouthed. "You're kidding."

  "No, I am not." The Narseil looked at him oddly. "Why would I kid?"

  "You're a Christian? I thought you Narseil were all Three Ringers."

  Com'peer's neck-sail quivered a little. "The Three Rings is the predominant faith on my world. But not the only one, no. Forgive me for the digression. About these images—"

  "I'll be damn—I mean—"

  "It is all right. Now, if you will look at the images again... I think you worry too much about these changes. If you do not want us to alter your fundamental bone structure, we will not. There is much that we can do, short of that."

  Legroeder shifted his gaze from the surgeon to the screen. The next image looked like a face that had stood in the path of a desert sandstorm. The features were scoured and smoothed, the eyebrows almost entirely missing, the angularities of his nose and cheekbones rounded and softened. It seemed almost feminine.

  "Next!" he grunted.

  The next was a lot more like his real face, except that at first he scarcely saw it, because his hair was so drastically altered. It cascaded out in a thick, overhanging umbrella, and was cut sharply inward at the bottom, in a downward angle to his head. The eyes were changed, too—dulled from the dark intensity that he normally saw in the mirror. "Ug-g-ly," he grunted. "But better than any of the others, that's for sure."

  "This would require far less in the way of organic change to your facial bones," Com'peer said. "But we're not sure that the change is sufficient to disguise you." She hesitated. "At the risk of offending... I must confess that most human characteristics look universal to most Narseil. Even after considerable exposure. So we must depend somewhat on your judgment in the matter."

  Legroeder tried to look more offended than he actually felt, then realized that the expression was probably lost on the Narseil, anyway. "It would fool me," he said. "You got any others?"

  There was one more, which looked like his face molded from putty. Legroeder shook his head. "Nope. If it has to be one of these, give me the umbrella-head."

  Com'peer and several other Narseil conferred, then Com'peer said, "Very well. That is what we will do. Do you have any requirements before we begin the procedure?"

  Besides packing my bag and leaving? Legroeder sighed heavily. "I guess not. You mean, now? Let's get it over with, then."

  They put him back on the padded table, and this time put him under a light sleep. He started to protest—did he trust them to do this right without his oversight?—but it was already too late. The sleep-field slipped over his thoughts like a fine, downy comforter and his thoughts drifted away.

  He dreamed of rows of corn growing on the top of his head, and the wind sighing through his hair.

  Chapter 13

  Mission Away

  He awoke feeling clear headed, and asked to see a mirror.

  "Dear God, how long was I asleep?" he gasped, when they led him to a seeing wall. His face was white, and his hair had turned light grey and been shaped into a wide, snub-topped cone, extending about four inches out from the sides of his head. It was at least ten inches longer than it had been when he went to sleep. He touched it hesitantly; it felt synthetic. But it wasn't; it tugged at his scalp roots as he moved his head from side to side.

  "About fourteen hours," said Com'peer, walking into the room. "How do you like it?"

  Legroeder was having trouble breathing. "My skin! I'm bleach white!"

  "Well, it's not quite that—"

  "Fish-belly white! You didn't tell me you were going to do that to me!"

  Com'peer waved her hands. "We felt that it was necessary."

  "For what?"

  "To ensure your anonymity. The other changes seemed insufficient, when we saw them."

  Legroeder patted his skin, scowling at himself and at the surgeon in the reflection. What the hell was wrong with this mirror, anyway? Then he realized that the surgeon, who was standing to his right, was also to his reflection's right. It wasn't a mir
ror; it was a projection of his image, without left and right reversal. Damned disorienting. He shut his eyes for a moment. "What else have you done?"

  Com'peer made a husky sound. "Well... we did change your DNA slightly—just enough to fool a scan."

  Legroeder gulped. "You changed my—"

  "Only in your gonads. According to our reports, that's where the raiders like to do their testing."

  "What?" His hands went instinctively below his belt.

  One of the other Narseil said, "Apparently it is more accurate there."

  "Not more accurate," corrected Com'peer. "Just more humiliating. It is a method of theirs." She lowered her gaze as she studied her human patient. "That is something you needed to be warned about, in any case. You must be ready."

  Legroeder stared at her, appalled.

  Com'peer seemed to relax a little, having delivered the bad news. "We can change you back if—forgive me, when—you return safely. And we only changed genome segments listed as inactive or cosmetic. So it's not really a big thing."

  Speak for yourself.

  "Good," said Com'peer. "Now, if we're through with the inspection and everyone's happy, let's get started with your training. Shall we?"

  Shaking his head, Legroeder followed the others out of the room.

  * * *

  If he thought they were going to give him time to acclimate to the changes, he was wrong. Before he could blink, he was being subjected to lectures on combat and undercover operations, interspersed with physical training in everything from hand-to-hand combat to deep-cyber penetration of shielded intelligence systems.

  The basic plan of action was simple enough. Their ship, posing as a passenger liner, would put itself in harm's way, in a region of space known to be patrolled by ships of a certain raider tribe. Upon contact with a raider ship, the Narseil would be prepared for a diplomatic encounter if it occurred—but if attacked, they would attempt to capture the pirate ship, and then use it as a cover to make their way to its home base. Once at the raider outpost, their goal was to gather intelligence through the local networks, contact the underground, and get out as quickly as possible.

  It was a risky plan, obviously. They were counting on a combination of Narseil fighting skill and potential assistance from their contacts in the raider organization. Indirect messages received from this outpost had suggested a possible interest in opening lines of communication with the outside. The problem was, the messages were of uncertain reliability; however, it seemed possible that they represented a genuine underground movement within the Free Kyber organization.

  To the Narseil Command, it had seemed a risk worth taking—especially if, in the long run, it might lead to a reduction of hostilities.

  "Academic El'ken is more hopeful about that than I am," Mission Commander Fre'geel said during one discussion. "I doubt we'll find this particular leopard changing its spots, as you might say. If someone is looking for us and wants to talk, we'll talk. But I am operating on the assumption that this will be an undercover intelligence mission, from beginning to end. We can hope that any underground element that wants to find us, will. But we have no way of looking for them; we must assume that we are on our own. If we're in a fight, we intend to win it. And not just win, but take captives and a flyable raider ship. That could be the hardest thing of all."

  "Except, perhaps, getting out again afterward," Legroeder pointed out.

  "Well, yes—there is that. And that is why everyone, including you, Rigger Legroeder, must be trained in all phases of combat. We might have to fight our way out."

  It was hard to argue with that line of reasoning, and Legroeder threw himself wholeheartedly into the training. After two days of lectures, rigger-sims, and hands-on training with Narseil weaponry, he was brought to a large cavern the size of a sports arena. From a balcony, he looked down on Narseil commandos in training—in one corner storming an office complex, in another working their way through a jungle setting (a jungle?), and in still another making their way deck by deck through a mockup of a ship, opposed by holographic adversaries. At one end of the balcony, he peered through a window into an enormous zero-gee chamber, where spacesuited teams were rehearsing a ship-to-ship assault.

  "This way, please!" his trainer called. Legroeder turned from the window and dutifully followed to the suit-up room. Having gear fitted to him took two hours—and for the next two, he ran and climbed and shot—and tried not to be shot—all with a heavy pack on his back, and holo-enemies popping up like targets on an arcade game. At the end of a long obstacle course, he found himself being urged into a pool for water-borne hand-to-hand combat training.

  That was where he reached his limit.

  "Swim yourself!" he gasped, and threw himself down, wheezing for air.

  "What's the matter?" asked his trainer, a Narseil weapons specialist named Agamem.

  "I'm not an amphibian, and I don't want to drown, that's what's the matter!" Legroeder snarled. He had never been a strong swimmer. He had nearly drowned once as a boy, when he'd lost his footing in the shallows of a river beach, and gotten caught in an undertow. The memory still haunted him, twenty years later. "Why the hell should I train in water combat, anyway?"

  "We want you prepared in all environments," said Agamem.

  "Yeah, well, we're trying to penetrate a pirate outpost. Unless I wind up falling into the local pirate Y pool, I don't think I'll have to fight anyone in the water. Comprendo?"

  Agamem looked puzzled, but perhaps recognized that an alien species might have different training requirements. "Very well, then. How about another round of corridor fighting?"

  Legroeder nodded. That he would do. It was entirely plausible that there would be fighting in corridors. Although he had little interest in or native talent for fighting, he did have a survival instinct. He would take all the training he could get.

  "Let's go, then."

  "Give me a moment to rest, okay?"

  "Will your enemy give you time to rest...?"

  * * *

  The implant training was another matter altogether. The Narseil had embedded what seemed at times a controlled madness in his skull, and he had to learn to master it. The knowledge bases, the processing enhancements, the memory caches... none was impossibly difficult in isolation, but taking them as a group was like trying to herd a group of drunken pirates.

  During commando training, he'd mostly kept them turned off. But in rigger training, his teachers insisted that he practice using the implants. His trainers seemed puzzled by his difficulties; but Legroeder felt as if his head had become a cage full of wild animals, and his confusion and frustration were overlaid with fear that the augments were gaining the upper hand.

  Palagren and Cantha led him to a sim-room filled with rigger-stations that looked like giant clamshells propped open at a forty-five degree angle. Legroeder climbed into the opening of one and lay back on the soft body of the clam—a neural hydrocushion. The clamshell snicked closed, leaving him surrounded by darkness and silence, except for a reassuring whisper of circulating air. He tried to relax, alone with his thoughts... and his implants. A minute later, the com and the net came alive. Cantha was at the control center on the outside. Though not a rigger himself, Cantha was an expert in rigger theory, having done advanced research at the Narseil Rigging Institute. He would be overseeing much of the training.

  "Are you ready?"

  "As ready as I'll ever be." A moment later, Legroeder's head filled with voices: library inputs, head-up data displays, com status reports on everything from the rigger-net interface to his own kidneys. He tried to corral the voices into the background, but the only thing that seemed to work was to turn them down to near inaudibility; and that left him with an annoying and useless low-level buzz. In the end, he simply tried to ignore the voices, droning in the background.

  First Cantha let him fly alone, to regain the feel of being in a net and to acclimate himself to the Narseil equipment. Though he wouldn't have mistaken the sim for the
real Flux, the net responded well as he "flew" virtual currents of wind and sea. After a while, Palagren joined him, and then another rigger, named Voco. For the rest of that day, they flew programmed sim voyages, polishing their skills together along both familiar and unfamiliar star-routes.

  The next day was more of the same.

  Legroeder struggled with the difficulty of rigging with aliens in an alien environment, and of adjusting his flying style to theirs. The Narseil were restless riggers—using a lot of sea imagery, but also changing images frequently in an effort to gain new leverages or insights. When Legroeder invoked his implants for assistance, he found himself quickly overwhelmed by inputs. It didn't take long before he had the whole crew struggling to maintain control of their virtual ship. He was thankful that these were only sims; the Narseil probably thought he was a hopeless incompetent.

  "You must control your augments—be their master," Cantha urged. "You are their master. You are like the conductor of one of your human symphony orchestras, and you must think like one." Legroeder felt more like a musician trying to produce a concert on a synthmixer, but unable to control anything except the master volume while a gaggle of musical voices rippled through his skull.

  The breakthrough came on day three of his training. The night before, he'd tossed and turned in his sleep, dreaming of struggling with the strings of a dancing marionette, and thrashing helplessly in a tangle of threads. He'd woken up trying to remember what had followed that dream; it was something important. Were the dreams part of his training? They certainly felt similar. The first sim of the day gave him a tangle of maneuvers to perform, with full input from his internal nav-libraries. The streams of data nearly overwhelmed him. But he was determined to overcome it.

  He was flying down a cataract—a simulation of a region of the Flux known as the Hurricane Flume. Palagren and Voco were at the keel and stern, with Legroeder in the lead position. He was having trouble keeping the ship centered in the flow. It was a white-water rapids, fast approaching a sheer drop into a waterfall. The dashing water tossed the ship from side to side, threatening to capsize it. Legroeder's head reeled with data from the nav-library, suggestions from the augments' tactical advisor, and warnings from Cantha on the outside. It was too much; he was losing control. If he didn't shut off the implants, he would crash for sure.