The Forlorn

by Dave Freer

  The sounds coming from the great bed indicated that there was an occupant in the room. In fact there was little doubt that at least two people were present, perhaps more. On the other hand, by the moaning and panting they were otherwise engrossed right now.

  Shael moved to leave the walk-in cupboard that was the valet's domain and her bracelets tinkled. Instantly she froze. Obviously the bed's occupants were too busy to notice. Hastily taking a beautifully ironed shirt from one of the shelves she wrapped it around and tucked it under her bracelets. Pleased with the result she did the same on the other side with another shirt. She began her crawl. She had to reach the far room while the bed's occupants were still absorbed. The bedchamber was a substantial room, but well lit, with two small chandeliers on either side. If they looked away from each other they would almost certainly see her. Concentrating on her goal she ignored the panting, urging and pleading from the bed. It was only when she'd reached the far chamber that she risked a look at the huge mirror on the ceiling.

  She swallowed a gasp, and quickly moved around the corner. No wonder the tall Count Deshin had hated her power games. They had always included a certain amount of sexual coquetry. It was not the frustration of desire which had angered him, but rather that Deshin really preferred boys. A specific boy, it seemed: a dashing and handsome young captain . . . of her father's secret police. That was the foundation of his successful coup.

  The Grand Dukes of Shapstone had not always been satisfied with their wives. Many of them had married for political reasons. Others had been unable to part with their wild days, before assuming the throne, as mere viscounts free to exercise droit du seigneur. But bringing one's paramours past the Duchess's chambers was sometimes a risky pastime. Therefore it was necessary to have another route to the Duke's chambers. She knew that many a blindfolded girl had walked that passage, and up the hidden stair. One of her instructors had told her about it in some detail. The captain on that bed would know of the passage. But had he been too occupied with arranging his lace suspender belt to seal it?

  It was dim here. It took her a few steps to ascertain that not only had he not sealed it, he'd left the hidden door open. His fallen clothes had plainly been stripped off in haste and on the way. She slipped off into the welcome darkness and felt her way along. In a few minutes she was opening the outer concealed door, and darting away into the gardens, towards the wicket gate so artfully hidden in the rhododendrons.

  She'd won free to the streets. Now, could she get through the city without being caught? It proved easier than she'd thought possible. She'd watched the pattern of patrols from the roof. Their movements were no more difficult to predict than the steps of her favorite dances, and thus easy to evade. But the gates . . .

  . . . were thoroughly locked and barred. With distinctly wakeful Morkth-men guards patrolling them. Could she get over the walls? Unlikely. She knew that fear had helped her to climb before, but she certainly didn't feel up to it now. Still, she'd better try to find a way up onto them. Then she saw her salvation. Outside the city granaries heavy wagons were being loaded in the silent, mechanical fashion of the Morkth-men. Already most of them were piled high with sacks. She sneaked closer, stumbling over an empty sack. She picked it up and ran to the last wagon in the row. The deity who watches over fools and amateurs must have been working overtime for her that night. The guard had just stepped over to an alley to relieve himself, a thing even Morkth-men must do, as she scrabbled and scrambled her way up the cargo net to the top. She burrowed into the sack and lay still, holding onto the net and hoping they'd not notice that the one lumpy sack was outside the net.

  A few minutes later she heard the crack of whips, and then, with a jerk, the steel-cased wheels started to rumble their way over the cobblestones. Never had the movement of one of her feather-sprung carriages felt as lovely as that slow, rough, bouncing progress. She lay dead still as the wagons rolled away under the gate arch, past the flaring torches, and out into the welcome darkness.

  How long could her soft hands survive this? The ropes cut at them, but if she let go on this uneven road she would almost certainly slide and fall. By the paling sky, dawn would be here soon. They'd see her for sure then. Perhaps she should try to get off now? There was a patrol marching behind them. How could she get clear? The train halted abruptly. She risked a peep to see the patrol leader moving past, leaving his men waiting with swords at the ready.

  A few moments later he came back. "Sheath swords. One of the wagons has broken a wheel. Come. We must move it from the road."

  As soon as they'd filed past, Shael slid out of her sack, scrambled down the netting and ran into the dark shadows among the trees of a small dell. Her protective deity must have gone to answer a call of nature himself just then, because there was a shout behind her.

  She ran.

  Tripping and falling, tearing through brambles, stumbling down a steep bank and into the stream, up the muddy bank opposite and out into the heather and broken heathlands.

  In the woods she'd heard them behind her. Now, although her heart was hammering like a drum in her ears, the sounds seemed further away. It didn't matter any more. They might as well catch her. She simply couldn't run another step. She collapsed into the bushes, and waited, panting.

  No sane fugitive would leave the shelter of the woods for open ground. Thus it was that the Morkth-men were peering up every vast-boled tree and sapling instead of following the simple, straight course to their quarry. After a short while Shael realized they were still searching amongst the trees. She got onto hands and knees and crawled away, towards the lip of the dell and over, onto the hillside. Once she was beyond the line of sight she got up and began to walk, painfully. Her feet were unused to such punishment, but she forced herself to go on. She was heading for no specific place, just away.

  Her lack of decision was probably just as well. She had no real idea where she was. She had always been escorted and taken to places. She had no real notion of distance or direction, for someone else had always taken care of this. She only knew that she was tired and sore, her feet and legs bleeding from a myriad of small cuts and scratches. On top of this she was also hungry, thirsty and cold. The sky was pale now, but the dawn breeze still sliced at her dew-wet legs. If only she'd kept the sack, she thought, she could at least have wrapped it around herself. Then it occurred to her that she did have two large shirts and, once unwrapped from her arms, they made reasonable short dresses on her small frame.

  The comfort of the garments, and the first rays of sunlight lifted her spirits considerably. She raised her arms and shook her small fists, jangling her bracelets defiantly. She looked at them and smiled to herself, for the first time since her life had abruptly begun to unravel. On her arms was a small fortune. Perhaps, perhaps she had the means to some power. In Shael's mind power and security were automatically equivalent.

  She was still trying to work out the best approach, considering each of her father's generals in turn, when she stumbled upon the stream. She was unsure how one did this rough drinking: usually a servant brought drinks on a silver tray in a container of some kind. She settled for kneeling and scooping water up rather ineffectually with her hands. The water was cold and peat-stained. A day before she would have looked at it, raised an eyebrow and rejected it disdainfully. Now she drank until her side had a stitch in it.

  Her vanity was still intact however. Shael was still kneeling, looking at her reflection in the pool when a coldness began creeping down her spine. Small, almost hidden sounds told her there was someone behind her. Slowly she turned. She steeled her face for calmness, but the muscles in her neck were jumping with tension, betraying fear which was mounting towards panic.

  Well, he was no Morkth-man. Those were always clean-shaven, both on the head and face, and clad in black. The heavy stubble on his cheeks was the only thing that was black about this man. He was long-haired and his clothes had once been a Tyn States uniform, a lancer's at a guess. He attempted a disarming grin.
The blackened stumps of several rotting teeth made it less of a success than it could have been. He touched the hank of limp, greasy hair on his brow, his shifty eyes darting about. "Morning, missy. You alone?"

  Her first inclination was to run. Her second, on realizing that this was totally impractical, was to claim a score of companions.

  "My . . . my servants are just back there. Lots of them. If you touch me, I'll scream and they'll come." Despite her training her voice belied her.

  He was certainly not fooled. He snorted derisively. "Likely bloody story, missy. They're hiding in the grass, belike? Calm down, I'm not gonna hurt you."

  She relaxed slightly, even if it was not a credible performance on his part either. This slightly run-to-fat goliath might be physically stronger than she was, but she had other skills. Words . . . and certain other talents. She was unaccustomed to being alone. She felt sure she could manipulate him easily. Then he would provide her with company, protection and—most important right now—food.

  CHAPTER 3

  Humans are the vertebrate equivalent of the cockroach. They can, and will, adapt to nearly anything. The Alpha-Morkth hives pushed this adaptability close to its limits. At this point most humans crack. Some go insane, some try to rebel, and some become catatonic. Still, after more than three hundred years of selection, the Alpha-Morkth had to weed out about seventy percent of each crop of humans they bred. The culls went back into the food supply for the others. The remaining thirty percent were almost all perfect Morkth-men. Almost all . . . but there were always a few exceptions. Adaptation to survive could always be pushed one step further. A few of the humans the Morkth bred had learned not only to survive, but to exploit the system. S'kith 235 was one of those. He was a great danger to the entire hive system. Not only had he learned to exploit it, but also he still had his balls.

  The Alpha-Morkth wanted uniformity, absolute obedience, and antlike industry from the humans they bred to replace workers and, reluctantly, warriors of their own species. The warriors were a problem. A good fighter needs a certain amount of flexibility in their response to an enemy. A degree of tactical adaptability is also needed. A soldier may also have to be deployed at a variety of tasks, given the chaotic nature of war. The sheer stupidity bred for in workers was thus unsuitable, but with too much intelligence and flexibility the warrior Morkth-men could be dangerous to their creators. The cull rate here was over ninety percent, and the resultant warrior-breds were still somewhat less effective than wild-human fighters. The selection bias toward strongly left-brain-dominant warriors failed to adequately deal with the erratic nature of hand-to-hand combat. It was the main reason for the hive cities' lack of speed in their advance against the internecinally squabbling city-states.

  In the lower levels of the hive were the small lightless cells where the Alpha-Morkth kept their brood-sow humans. It was a place where no male Morkth-man should ever be found. Even the cleaners down here were microcephalic hormonally-altered male neuters. S'kith 235 moved calmly along behind one as it mopped the passage. It would almost certainly not turn around, or react, no matter what noise he made, but S'kith never took chances. His curiosity was almost equally matched by a secretive caution. The mopper moved around the corner. Experience told him that it would be at least twenty-five minutes before it came back.

  The grille on the bottom of the cell door was intended to allow any solid matter to be washed out after its daily hosing down. The floor within was curved and sloped towards the door to ensure that the system worked efficiently. Even the food and water dispensers were positioned on the back wall, to assist gravity. S'kith knelt down beside the grille, and spoke, his voice very low. There could be no mistake about the eagerness of the whispered reply.

  Copulation through a six-inch-wide by five-inch-high steel-barred grille is not easy. It can be done, however, if both participants are very determined. The warrior class are bred for physical strength, agility and speed. They are fed on a well-balanced diet—the protein often coming from the most biologically suitable source: their own species—and are renowned for their stamina. Thus it was that the human cuckoo was able to beat the Alpha-Morkth artificial insemination team five times. Then the sound of the mop bucket being pushed forced him to withdraw and retreat hastily up the passage and onto the internal beam structure which he railed along to reach the next level of the hive. He had another fifteen levels to go before he reached the place where he was supposed to be on guard.

  * * *

  Morkth drone males are nonintelligent. In fact, the brain is reduced to pinhead size. The body, too, is a stunted thing with few functional internal organs. Before maturity they could not survive for an hour outside the caring nurture of the hive. Even their food has to be carefully predigested for their growth period. On maturity the mouth parts meld and change, forming a long tube with vicious extrudable hooks on the end. They crawl up the vast body of the Morkth queen, following pheromone tracers till they reach the soft spot in the chitinous armor, where the great vein pulses close to the surface. Then the sharp snout is forced in through the soft tissues, and the hooks extrude. Sometimes up to a dozen drone males may hang like small, bloated ticks just above the egg vent.

  Most of the eggs would be neuter, unmaturing females, the workers and the warriors. The Queen selected which drone male fertilized which egg, depending on the purpose of the egg. She secreted the hormones into her bloodstream which altered the eggs to produce new drones, or new queens. The same hormones in her blood affected the male, altering the fertility and type of gamete he produced. If a drone gene line proved less than viable, the Queen's giant chela would pluck it off, and leave it discarded, to die and be cleared away and eaten by the workers. It was scant wonder that the Morkth found human sex and the emotions associated with it totally incomprehensible. One sex must, logic insisted, be just a source of gametes, nothing more. To the Morkth this was the province of males, but their first human male captive had shown some sign of intelligence by escaping. Therefore females in this species must be the gamete source. It was strange, but then the entire species was strange. Decision was reached. Thereafter the subject was closed. The noises the human sows made were not speech, just instinctive speech imitations. They were fed, watered, washed . . . and bred.

  Most of the Morkth-men gene lines were bred stupid. With pain as a punishment, and food as a reward, workers could be trained to perform their tasks regardless of thinking ability. With intelligence-poor gene lines, deprived of almost all sensory stimuli in the dark, small rearing cages, many females producing dim-witted workers had become a pitiful once-human equivalent of the Morkth drones. Brood sows that produced intelligent offspring went to the flesh renderers . . . or, if these offspring had good physical characteristics, the females were used for warrior breeding. The genes for good warrior broodstock also carried other linked characteristics, characteristics that had little to do with the traits the Morkth sought. The harsh selection process had refined and reinforced both the desired and unrequired, carried-along traits. Good warriors of the clockwork type the Morkth liked were powerfully left-brain dominant. This made, purely incidentally, for a natural predilection toward math. . . . They were also good at logic. . . .

  Since the Morkth denied that female humans were capable of speech, communication could be easy enough, so long as one did not make too much noise. Noise caused punishment. And punishment meant pain. The Morkth were expert in the administration of pain . . . to other Morkth. Unfortunately, the frail humans died quite easily. The less intelligent and less logical worker brood sows, kept separately from the warrior broodstock, had never realized that they could talk, so long as one kept speech quiet and away from high-pitched sounds. Their section of the hive was virtually silent, apart from quiet, purely animal sounds.

  It was different, vastly different, in the layer of hive where the warrior brood were kept. Here there was always a susurration of low-pitched cage-to-cage talk. The human mind needs stimulus of some kind. Without stimu
lus it atrophies. But speech, even only speech, can be enough to keep sanity and, if the selection pressures favor intelligence, can produce far more . . .

  The oral tradition had generated a strange and distorted picture of the outside world, passed down from the first captives, but the women had a very real idea of the function and structure of the hive. They had time, endless time, to talk, to theorize, to plot and to scheme, until they became reproductively dysfunctional and were taken away to the rendering rooms. The only other distraction in the tiny cells was one's own body, and the products thereof. The Morkth were unaware that in the eternal semidarkness of their warrior breeders' bare cells they had been fomenting a rebellion for generations now.

  This ultimate form of hell had not produced dehumanization, as it had in worker brood sows. Instead it produced a terrible richness, a flowering of poetry, philosophy and mathematics, all directed toward one end: the ultimate destruction of the Morkth. Now they'd found their tool—S'kith 235. And it was even more pleasant than masturbation. It provided a basic human need they'd all been long denied: simple physical contact with another person. For some seven years now the Alpha-Morkth warrior breeding program had been quietly sabotaged. At least eleven thousand new Morkth-men were growing up through the indoctrination classes. Passing unnoticed, yet with a terrifying gene cocktail of high intelligence, intense curiosity and instinctive secretive cunning, virtually from their first reasoning thought. This latter feature was S'kith 235's unique mutation, but he bred true, in more than eighty percent of cases. His male offspring were passing undetected up the layers of the Alpha-Morkth warrior training. All around them other lines were culled. But S'kith 235's children were tailored to survive and flourish in the hive.