A Dark and Hungry God Arises

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  And Angus replied, “You aren’t thinking straight. You’re a cop. It’s worse when a cop breaks the law. They’ll find out. They have to find out. And then you’ll be finished.” He may have been crying. “I’ll lose my ship.”

  If there were alarms wailing in Operations, or in the Bill’s strongroom, Davies couldn’t hear them.

  Frantic with haste, Angus and his companion manhandled Davies into the lift. Sweat splashed from Angus’ face as he whirled to the control panel, sent the car upward. A red splotch outlined the impact of Davies’ knuckles high on his cheek.

  “You can’t save it,” Davies shot back, suddenly angry, more than a little desperate. “I can handle station Security. And the UMCP. I’ll think of a way. But nothing can save your ship. It’s too badly broken. We’ll need a miracle just to get back to Com-Mine alive.

  “Please. Give me the control.” Now he was pleading nakedly. “I’m not going to use it against you. I need it to heal.”

  Clamping one hand on the armrest of Davies’ seat, bracing his feet on the deck, Angus struck him a blow like the one which had felled Nick, a blow with the whole weight of his existence behind it. If Davies’ seat hadn’t absorbed some of the impact, he might have been knocked unconscious. Angus might have broken his neck.

  “Bitch. I’ll never give up my ship.”

  Who asked you to, you vile bastard? Davies raged. Who wants you to go on living? Succorso should have slagged you while he had the chance!

  Morn would have been better off if she’d died then.

  But he kept his mouth shut, locked the words and the memories like screams inside his skull. A convulsion was taking place within him, a seismic upheaval, and memory was only one of the tectonic forces Angus had unleashed. Rescue was another: escape from the Bill; from the Amnion; from Nick Succorso. And sound was the only danger he understood. I can hide us visually, but I can’t block sound.

  Despite the collapse of his protective barriers, he clung to what he understood; to the hard clear need for escape.

  Liberated at last, memories yowled and harried through his brain like furies.

  While the lift rose he remembered how Nick had tricked and trapped Angus. He remembered the part he’d played in making that possible.

  He remembered the impossible yearning which had sprung to fire in him when he’d first seen Nick—the mute, ineluctable, sexless, and almost entirely abstract passion, not for Nick Succorso the man, but rather for the capacity to act which Nick embodied.

  He remembered hours of rape, days of humiliation, weeks of the zone implant. He remembered pleading, prostrating himself, offering Angus anything he could think of.

  Does that make you feel like a man? he’d asked before he’d learned what was about to happen to him; how savage Angus’ intentions were. Do you have to destroy me to feel good yourself? Are you that sick?

  It’s because of men like you I became a cop.

  Forbidden space is bad enough. We don’t need any worse threats than that. But men like you are worse. You betray your own kind. You prey on human beings—on human survival—and get rich. I’ll do anything I can to stop you. No price is too high for stopping a man like you.

  And later he’d said, Even if I can’t do it, somebody else will. It doesn’t matter what you think of me. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I’m as bad as a traitor. But there are better cops than me—stronger—They’ll stop you. They’ll make you pay for this.

  But Angus had answered, They’ll never get the chance. I told you. I’m a bastard. The worst bastard you’ll ever meet. And I’m good at what I do. I’ve been dancing circles around the fucking cops all my life. If they ever catch me, it’ll be long after you’re dead.

  In the meantime, I’m going to have some fun with you. You’re my crew now. You’re going to learn to take orders. And I’ve got old scores to settle. A lot of them. I’m going to settle them on you. By the time I’m done, you’re going to want to run away so bad it’ll damn near kill you, but I won’t even let you scream.

  It was too much in too little time. The car was as claustrophobic as a coffin, too small to contain furies. Davies remembered what Angus had done without being able to believe that he’d done them to Morn Hyland, not to her son.

  And he couldn’t remember why.

  How had his plight become possible? Why had he let Angus have that kind of power over him? He’d always been able to remember the moment when Starmaster saw Bright Beauty destroy that mining camp, slaughter the miners. Why hadn’t Starmaster killed or arrested Angus? Why hadn’t Davies killed Angus himself?

  Nick had told him the answer, but he couldn’t remember it. The orogenic forces cracking and shifting through him confused it, confused all recent knowledge: only the past was real.

  Blood dripped into his mouth. He bit his lower lip until it hurt like his head.

  As the car eased up to the level Angus had chosen, the other man opened his mouth fearfully: he wanted to say something, ask something. Questions and dread haunted his eyes.

  As fierce as the pain in Davies’ forehead, Angus formed the words, Shut up! As if he were threatening his companion in some way, he shoved his hand into a pocket of the other man’s shipsuit, pulled out a packet of nic. Brandishing it in his companion’s face, he dared the other man to take it back.

  The man winced; his eyes rolled. Nevertheless he didn’t reach for the packet—or pull away.

  When the doors slid aside, Davies and the other man automatically tried to lurch into motion. Incomprehensibly strong, Angus held them still—

  —until he saw that no one was waiting to use the lift; that the corridor in front of him was empty.

  Then, with a flick of his hand, he tossed the packet in a spinning arc out the upper left corner of the open door.

  Davies didn’t realize that the lift was being watched until he saw a guard turn to focus on the object sailing unexpectedly over his head.

  Instantly Angus drove Davies and his companion forward. Before the guard could turn back, Angus touched his fist to the man’s spine.

  The guard fell on his face. After a twitch or two, he stopped moving. A little curl of smoke rose from his clothing and was gone.

  Sweat gleamed on Angus’ cheeks. Grinning savagely, he impelled Davies and the other man into the corridor.

  Twenty meters later, they passed a corner. The lifts which accessed the Bill’s private domain were out of sight.

  Why? Davies shouted in silence and anguish. Why did I let you do that to me?

  What had Nick told him? He gave her a zone implant to keep her under control. Talking about Morn as if she and Davies weren’t the same person. That’s how he got her pregnant.

  It’s a pathetic story. He turned her on until she would have been willing to suck her insides out with a vacuum hose, and then he fucked her senseless. For weeks, he made her do everything he’d ever dreamed a woman could do.

  That’s your father, Davies. That’s the kind of man you are.

  And Nick had said, She’d learned to like it. He’d degraded her so much that she fell in love with it. Eventually she wanted it so much that he could trust her with her zone implant control. It wasn’t found on him because he’d already given it to her. She loved using it on herself.

  But that wasn’t it, wasn’t what Davies needed to remember. The torrent of memories crashing through him had no central why.

  He needed that absolutely.

  At the same time it terrified him so much that he couldn’t dislodge it from the blind core of his mind; couldn’t break it free to dominate and define the furies.

  Struggling for sanity, he took hold of the present long enough to realize that this whole situation should have been impossible. Billingate was thick with monitors. Why didn’t the Bill react? Hide us visually—How?

  And if they were hidden, why did Angus kill the guard?

  Impossible or not, Angus’ concealment appeared to work. Locked together and nearly stumbling like drunks supporting each other after
a binge, the three of them entered an area called Reception. A few men and women were there; but their attention was fixed on the data terminals. And there were guards—Davies couldn’t tell how many. But they all had the poleaxed look of men kept awake by inadequate doses of stim. Because of the way Angus and his companion held Davies, with their heads down and their faces toward each other, the guards might not be able to see them well enough to identify them.

  Once they passed Reception and entered the corridor leading to the visitors’ docks, they were alone again.

  Access passages branched off at intervals, serving individual berths. Outside the passages, ship id displays indicated that some of the berths were occupied; others weren’t. Davies saw Captain’s Fancy’s name and had to grind his teeth to keep from howling. Morn wasn’t there, she was already lost, already Amnion—but Succorso might be, the man who’d destroyed her.

  There was only one evil worse than what Angus had done to her. The ultimate crime had been left for Nick to commit.

  But Davies couldn’t think about that. He was Morn Hyland: the woman who’d been given to the Amnion no longer existed. Rape and ruin ripped through him; furies clawed at his mind. They were going to tear him apart.

  Abruptly Angus and the other man swung him into an access passage. He caught a glimpse of the id display: Trumpet.

  No more guards. He didn’t understand that. Angus Thermopyle was a notorious illegal; he’d just escaped from lockup. He should have had guns trained on him every time he took a step. The Bill should have ordered that for his own protection.

  But of course the Bill was an illegal as well. Davies was thinking like a cop; like Morn before—

  At its end the passage led through a scan field toward an airlock, a ship. Now the Bill would know where they were: that was inescapable. The scan field would register three bodies moving through it. It would show that Angus and his companion had taken someone aboard Trumpet with them.

  But Angus didn’t hesitate. As he compelled Davies and the other man ahead, his face wore a peculiar expression, a look of concentration elsewhere, as if he could hear the voices of the dead.

  Together they reached the ship. The other man panted urgently, eager for safety, while Angus keyed codes into the airlock’s exterior control panel.

  In seconds the lock cycled open.

  They blundered aboard.

  As soon as the lock sealed behind them, Angus shoved Davies and the other man away from him. Malign triumph and rage burned in his eyes; his features twisted savagely. Slashing his fists at the ceiling, he yelled, “I did it! I got you, you bastard!”

  He may have been shouting at the Bill.

  Davies thudded against the interior doors, stood still with his arms wrapped around his chest to contain the furies.

  Gulping for air, the other man gasped, “I don’t understand. How did you do that? What did you do? Shit, Angus! The Bill will be here in five minutes. He’s going to want blood for those guards you killed.”

  “No, he won’t!” Angus needed to shout; needed an outlet for his tension and exultation. Pointing his index finger like a gun at his temple, he barked, “I can emit jamming fields! I blinded his bugeyes—he never saw us! His scan”—he flung his arm in the direction of the access passage—“never saw us! As far as he knows, we aren’t here. We’ve lost ourselves somewhere on the cruise! He’ll spend hours looking for us.”

  Gradually he lowered his voice. “We’ll leave communications on automatic. If he calls, the ship’ll tell him we aren’t here.”

  “Shit, Angus,” the other man sighed again weakly. He inhaled Trumpet’s atmosphere as if he’d never tasted anything so sweet. “You scared me. What would it have cost you to tell me what you were doing?”

  Angus flashed a predatory grin. “What would it have cost you to force me to tell you?”

  Davies couldn’t contain so much pressure. The more he confined it, the stronger it became. He wanted to hit Angus, pulverize him, reduce his triumph to powder. His mother’s legacy urged him to destroy himself by attacking Angus.

  So that he could avoid the central why.

  Angus and this other man were his allies only to the extent that they opposed the Bill. For all he knew, they were working with Nick Succorso, even though Succorso had betrayed Angus to Com-Mine Security. Or they might be working for the Amnion. Nothing he remembered gave him any reason to think Angus’ malice had limits.

  But he’d reached his own limits, his breaking point. If he snapped now, he would snap permanently.

  Like his father, he needed an outlet.

  Tight with suppressed violence, he left the airlock as soon as it opened, strode into the waiting lift to put some distance between himself and Angus. But that was as far as he could go.

  Whirling, he cried from the depths of his inherited anguish, “Damn you, you RAPED me!”

  Angus and his companion froze, staring at Davies as if he’d threatened to immolate himself.

  “He said that before,” the pudgy man muttered anxiously. “What’s he talking about?”

  “How the fuck should I know?” Angus retorted. Facing Davies, he demanded, “What the hell are you talking about, I raped you? You must be my kid. I don’t know how else she could have dropped a brat who looks like me. I’m going to make Captain Sheepfucker pay for not telling me that. But I’ve never seen you before in my life.”

  Unconsciously aping Angus’ exultation, Davies brandished his fists, he flailed the air because he had nothing else to hit.

  “It’s because of men like you I became a cop. I’ll do anything I can to stop you.”

  Angus’ yellow eyes widened. “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. I’ve heard that before. It’s a quote. A direct quote.”

  “Angus—” the other man put in.

  “Shut up, Milos,” Angus snapped. “Let me think.”

  Without warning, all the anger ran out of Davies. Anger was essential: it was his last defense. But now the central why was too close to the surface; he couldn’t fight it down any longer. Involuntary shudders ran through him as his rage turned to panic and helplessness.

  “What did Succorso tell us?” Angus asked rhetorically. “The Amnion used some kind of force-growing technique.” Mimicking Nick’s voice, he drawled, “They say force-growing is supposed to make vegetables out of the mother, but that didn’t happen to her. They think they know why. So they aren’t particularly interested in her. But they want her brat. They want to study the consequences of having a mother who didn’t lose her mind.’”

  Angus’ eyes glittered with intuitions. “I don’t know anything about force-growing. They didn’t supply me with a database on it. But maybe she was supposed to lose her mind because they gave it to him. They imprinted it on him. Because he isn’t old enough to have a mind of his own.”

  He let out a guttural laugh. “He thinks he’s her. He thinks he’s the one I raped.

  “He thinks he’s the one who killed her whole family.”

  There.

  Why.

  Nick had given him a hint, but he hadn’t understood it. After she demolished Starmaster, he rescued her from the wreckage.

  Killed her whole family.

  Hugging himself like a child, Davies Hyland sank to the floor of the lift and curled into a ball.

  ANGUS

  trangely dismayed by the extremity of Davies’ reaction, Angus stared down at his son and chewed his lower lip.

  He needed a database on force-growing; needed to know what he was up against. Apparently he’d guessed right. The Amnion had copied Morn’s mind onto Davies’, presumably because knowledge, training, and experience couldn’t be force-grown the way bodies could. And apparently some facet of the process—maybe her zone implant, maybe something else—had protected her from going crazy when her mind was ripped away; probably by blocking the memories which had afflicted her with so much revulsion and horror. Now those memories were returning to her son.

  His son. The kid was unquestionably his.r />
  Right or not, however, guesses didn’t help. They explained Davies’ collapse, but they didn’t answer the larger questions.

  The Amnion want him back. They want to study the consequences of having a mother who didn’t lose her mind.

  Curled tightly around himself, he lay on the floor of the midship lift. His forehead was crusted with blood. Except for the stertorous rasp of his breathing, he made no sound. But in another minute he was probably going to start whimpering. After that it might be only a matter of time before he began to suck his thumb.

  How good were the chances that the Amnion wanted him back now, in this condition? Wasn’t it more likely that he’d just become worthless to them?

  If that was true, Angus had suddenly lost his leverage. Nick had no reason to exchange Morn for damaged merchandise.

  And the memories which caused Davies so much harm were his, Angus’, doing.

  As he considered the implications, he growled to no one in particular, “Motherfucking sonofabitch.”

  “Who, him?” Milos asked. His safe return to Trumpet left him in a state of brittle relief. Trying to recover his self-confidence, he protested, “Come on, Angus. Give him a break. He’s just a kid. It’s not his fault he looks like you.”

  Full of chagrin and bitterness, Angus rounded on Milos. Past his blistered tongue, he rasped, “Not him. Succorso. Captain Sheepfucker. You aren’t thinking, Milos. That’s dangerous. It’s how shits like you get killed.

  “Help me pick him up.” He moved to Davies’ side. “We’ll take him to the bridge until I decide what to do with him.”

  Riding his relief, Milos stayed where he was. Absent-mindedly he reached for his packet of nic. When he realized it was gone, he gave a fleshy grimace.

  “Tell me,” he said softly. “What aren’t I thinking about?”

  “We’re being cheated.” The pain in Angus’ mouth made him want to rage. “What kind of game do you think Succorso is playing?” He took a step closer to his second. “Or do you already know? Is that what you were talking to him about before we docked? Setting this up?”