by S. L. Viehl
“Of course.” He glanced back at the monitors. “There is very little that happens under my dome that escapes my attention.”
“Then why didn’t you stop Mercy before she found us?” I demanded. “You knew how furious she would be.”
“Mercy needs to face her demons,” he said. “As does Tya.”
“This is not a game, Drefan. These females are not simulations. Stop playing with them.” I turned on my heel and walked out.
Reever had been taking his meal intervals elsewhere, so when I arrived at our quarters I prepared a simple dinner for myself and ate while I reviewed the data on Tya that I had not had time to analyze.
“A Hsktskt who would starve rather than eat meat.” I sipped some tea from my glass as I considered my own plate of something Reever called “chicken and rice.” The chicken part was tolerable, but the rice tasted like bits of soggy gauze.
I had little practical knowledge of other species’ food preferences. Jorenians did not eat meat, as they received the protein they needed from the milk of their herd animals, but they were mammalian-based species, not reptilian. Hsktskt needed enormous amounts of protein to help fuel and warm their massive bodies.
I knew the pains of an empty belly. The Toskald had tried to starve us during the rebellion, and many times I had eaten old meat, needle plants, and other things that otherwise I would never have touched. Even if Tya had some unnatural aversion to her dietary requirements, her hunger should have driven her to eat what was available.
I recalled Drefan’s Nekawa bodyguard, and how she had been conditioned in the mines to eat whenever she saw food. Maybe something similar had been done to Tya, to control her behavior. Then there was the implant I had found in her neck; another method of control, to insure she never attempted to escape her enslavement.
Davidov must have hated her beyond reason to treat her with such cruelty. But why? Did he hold Tya responsible for the Faction’s crimes against other enslaved beings? Were the implant and the food conditioning some creative form of torture?
Or was it, as I suspected, something more ominous?
I stayed up for several hours, using the console to access the colonial database and pull up what little information they had on Hsktskt. Most of it covered ways to disable and kill the reptilians, not how to treat them for malnourishment and poisonous implants.
When I couldn’t find any worthwhile data, I pulled up studies of various forms of depression in reptilian species. Some pompous asses claimed that reptilians did not experience any emotions at all, but after my time on Vtaga I knew better. The Hsktskt might be extremely reserved, and had disciplined themselves not to show emotions, which they considered beneath them. Yet when they let their guard down, they revealed that they experienced the same anger, joy, hate, and love as any warm-blooded species.
Tya, on the other hand, displayed her emotions openly, as if her blood were as warm as my own. She had committed the ultimate betrayal of her species by deserting her post during time of war, yet seemed not to care that she had been branded a coward and made a slave.
I knew the Hsktskt, and their rigid, unforgiving culture had strict codes of honor and service. They condemned and harshly punished anyone who violated them. They would rather die than be dishonored or enslaved themselves.
Tya’s lack of interest in her own well-being and her aversion to meat might be symptoms of a suicidal state. Indeed, when I had checked with Keel, the Chakacat told me that Tya had never once asked for the prep unit to be reprogrammed to her preferences. The only problem with that theory was how she fought in the grid. During the demonstration for me and Reever, Tya had defended herself with intelligence and vigor, and had used considerable skill to defeat her opponents. A depressed, suicidal slave should not be capable of such deeds.
After some hours it became apparent that Reever was not coming back to our quarters at a reasonable hour, so I cleansed and went to bed alone. Although I felt weary, I spent another thirty minutes staring at the ceiling and trying to work out the puzzles involved with the Hsktskt female.
Finally I closed my tired eyes and cleared my thoughts. If I were back on Joren, this would be the time I would go to check on Marel. The familiar ache of missing my child twisted its blade of love and motherhood in my heart. I knew Salo and Darea were taking good care of her, but it was not the same. I was her mother. I should be with her, to protect her. To be the one to whom she gave her smiles and hugs. To kiss her brow as she slept. I had missed too much of her life as it was.
My body became heavy, and sank into the sleeping platform, dragging me into its moving softness. I had slept on the floor for the first months after leaving Akkabarr. This bed was too soft. It rose up around me, thick and formless and smothering. . . .
Snow light touched my face, and I reached for it, clawing my way out of the suffocating bed linens. It drew me up, high into itself, where the kvinka, the storm winds, roared and the world became mountains of ice, blue and white and unforgiving.
I stood on a cliff above a methane field, with ice crystals scouring my naked face. I squinted, bracing myself against the freezing gusts, and spotted two figures facing each other on the ice. I walked toward them, stumbling now and then as my thin-soled boots slid on the crusted snow. The rapid approach of gigantic, black-purple clouds from the south alarmed me. Such killer storms had been known to sweep entire hunting parties off the ice.
“Do you have a shelter?” I shouted over the wind to them, pointing toward the impending blizzard.
Neither one seemed to hear me, intent on each other as they were. The storm ripped their loose robes away, revealing the forms beneath.
The female stood twice as tall as me, and her body shimmered as if she wore the dimsilk I had once donned to disguise myself on the battlefield. Her long hair was silver, or white, or perhaps purple; it kept changing color, as did the dimsilk. I could not make out her face, and then I saw why. She had no features, only a smooth oval of gray flesh.
Vral.
I had never seen her before, but I knew her. I knew her as I knew myself, as if everything that had happened to me on Akkabarr had happened to her as well. She had been with me, somehow. But why would the vral come to me now? Why in a dream?
The ghostly-looking female raised her long arm and brandished a sword at her opponent, a drednoc as tall and broad as she.
The icy atmosphere of my homeworld had already left its mark on the battle drone. Frost whitened its armor, and blue icicles dripped from its halo. Yet it did not seem affected as it lifted an extensor arm with a sword attached to the end, also ready to attack.
I felt the unpleasant twang of recognition again. Not as strong as I had with the vral, but I knew this creature. It looked like a drone, but it was something else. Someone else . . .
“Put down your weapons.” I had to shout to make myself heard over the kvinka. “The war is over.”
A shower of bright orange sparks exploded as their blades met, and the female turned, whirling with the storm, coming up behind the drone and driving her sword into the back of its chassis. It cried out, enraged, and staggered forward, turning just in time to meet her third thrust. It locked blades with her and backhanded her across her blank face with the gauntlet on the end of its other arm.
The female went down, and silver-blue blood splashed the snow, freezing instantly. I ran toward her, calling for the drone to halt its attack. The drednoc dropped its sword and assumed a waiting position.
“Are you hurt?” I dropped down on my knees and reached to turn her over onto her back.
Silver-blue blood had frozen over the blank mask of her face. Before I could touch her, she buried her fingers in the center, clawing at the sheet of flesh and tearing it away from her head.
A face appeared, one raw and horrifying to behold. Tears of blood ran from her slanted, orange eyes, and the unprotected muscle tissue began to blacken and fall away in shriveled strips, revealing orange-red skull bones that bulged and shrank as if alive.
Her mouth smiled as the tissue around it shrank back. “You cannot save my skin, Healer.”
I lurched to my feet and staggered backward, colliding with an immovable object. Grapplers took hold of me and turned me around.
“Let go of me,” I said, struggling in its grasp. “I have to help her.”
The shield on the drednoc’s sensor case rose, displayingthe lower part of a humanoid face. “Save yourself, Cherijo.” It bent toward me, its mouth open, its jagged teeth gnashing together.
I screamed, pushing at the armor with frantic hands, and then the alloy became cloth, and the grapplers strong, five-fingered hands.
“Jarn, wake up,” my husband’s voice called to me.
The snowy winds snatched at me, but I held on, and then I was back in the bed, in my husband’s arms, sobbing against his chest.
“Duncan.” I groped at him, blinded by tears. I felt as if my heart would break. “Duncan.”
“I am here, beloved,” he said, his hand stroking my back in a soothing motion.
I wept and held on to him for a long time, and then tried to speak. “Faces. No faces. Killing. Them. Me.” I pressed my hand over my mouth.
“No,” he said, tugging my shaking fingers away. “I am here. You’re safe. Try to tell me what you saw.”
I wanted to tell him of the gray vral, and the drednoc with a humanoid face, but the hysteria had me firmly in its grip. “I never . . . they did not . . . why were they . . . she tore off . . . he tried to . . .” I couldn’t stop weeping long enough to make myself coherent. I seized his hands and brought them to my face. “Link with me.”
His thoughts, cool and steady, joined the chaos inside my mind. I am here. I will not let anything hurt you.
I poured my memories of the dream through the link, where I was finally able to stop babbling and communicate coherently. Do you see them now? Who are they? Where are they? They will kill each other if I do not stop them.
They are not real, Waenara. Reever moved through the terrifying images and swept them out of my thoughts until only he and I remained. They are only a manifestation of your fears.
No, they were real. I felt it. I knew them. I knew them both. I could still smell the female’s blood, and my ears rang with the pitiless sound of her voice. She was vral. She was a real vral.
The vral are a myth, he reminded me. Superstition to house the guilt of the Iisleg for trading with the Toskald in the faces of the dead. Don’t you see, beloved? The killer here on Trellus is taking skins from its victims; naturally it would remind you of that time in your life.
I knew he was right, but part of me resisted his explanation. What of the drednoc? I tried to think of what it could have meant. Could one of Drefan’s or Mercy’s drones be killing the colonists, and putting parts of them inside itself?
Drednocs would have no use for organic body parts; it could not be one of them.
The Hsktskt responsible for the plague of memory had been such a being. What of SrrokVar?
He is dead, Reever thought with flat finality.
I could see his thoughts processing the bizarre images from my dreams. He went through them methodically, comparing them to hundreds of other faces from his own memory. He lingered for the longest time on the vral, and the nightmare visage she had exposed, tearing away the mask of gray flesh.
I did not want to see her like that, so I broke the link between our minds.
“She is not real,” he assured me again. “There were no vral like her on Akkabarr.”
“She felt real.” I knew I sounded ridiculous. “I must wash my face.”
When I returned from the lavatory, Reever had straightened the bed and turned down the bed linens, but remained dressed.
“I suppose you will leave now.” I regarded the platform with no small amount of dread. “You should ask Drefan to assign you other quarters. I do not think I will sleep again tonight, so there will be no chance for you to sneak in and out.”
“I don’t wish to fight with you,” he informed me, “but I am not sleeping anywhere else.”
My temper, which our estrangement had pulled thin, finally snapped.
“Is this what you did with Cherijo?” I threw out my hands. “Stayed away from her until she grew so lonely she could no longer be angry with you?”
“She never grew lonely.” His eyes filled with the faraway look that thoughts of my former self always commanded. “She had medicine. It filled her heart, not me.”
My anger went as quickly as it had come. “Then I pity her, for you cannot love a lascalpel, or a pressure dressing, or a bacterial culture.” My mouth quirked. “I am rather fond of the medical database on the Sunlace. I wonder if it cares for me.”
He regarded me warily. “Does this mean you are calm enough now to discuss Marel and the chameleon cells in a rational manner?”
“No, but you could couple with me,” I suggested, “until I become pregnant again. Chances are that our second child will live long enough to suit you.”
He didn’t say anything for a time, and then told me, “You can’t become pregnant, Jarn.”
I laughed. “Of course I can. It is only a matter of time before . . .” I stopped as I recalled his appalling childhood. “Has no one told you how children are made?”
“I know how to make them,” he said, “but we can never conceive another child.”
“What?” Shocked, I sat down on the edge of the sleeping platform. “You are barren?”
“As far as I know, we are both still fertile.” Reever placed his hand on my left leg and traced a circle around a spot on the inside of my thigh, and then pressed lightly. “Do you feel that?”
Now I did. I stared down at my leg. “What is that?”
“It’s a contraceptive implant,” he said. “Squilyp implanted it while you were recovering in Medical, after the transition that made you comatose. It releases enough hormone into your bloodstream to prevent you from becoming pregnant.”
“How can this be?” Horror made me crawl backward and scramble off the bed. “Why would he do such a perverted thing? Where is my medical case?” I looked around wildly. “Give me a knife.”
Reever took my arm to keep me from hurrying out of the room. “Jarn, after we became sexually active again, I insisted on the Omorr installing the implant. You cannot carry a child to term.”
“You did this to me? You are keeping me from having our children? You dare?“ Fury made me blind, but my hand still found his face as I slapped him. “I had Marel. I will have others. As many as I wish.”
“We agreed not to have any more children,” he said, his voice cold. “You miscarried Marel in your third month, but you had Squilyp harvest the fetus and transplant her to an artificial womb.”
I almost slapped him again. “I did not do any of that,” I shouted. “She did.”
“In this moment, it is impossible not to think of you as you were,” he said, and took a deep breath. “While Cherijo and I were on Terra, the Omorr tended to Marel until she was large enough to live outside the tank.”
Nausea clogged my throat. “He grew her in a machine? Like some experiment? Like Cherijo—like I was?”
“Cherijo and I made her together, with our bodies, in our bed,” he said flatly. “When Cherijo miscarried, she allowed me to believe the baby had died. I did not meet my daughter until she was a year old.”
I felt my outrage fade into disgust. “Did she trust you with nothing? Is that why you have become as secretive as she? That you must prevent me from bearing you children, but never tell me why?”
“I never intended to hurt you.”
“Truly? Do you know how worried I’ve been, each time my cycle begins, and I know there will be no child? And you and I coupling every night?” I felt my stomach clench. “Here, all this time, you have been preventing it.”
“Joseph bioengineered your immune system to prevent a full-term pregnancy. It will attack and spontaneously abort any child we conceive.” He put his hands on
my shoulders. “It does not mean the situation is hopeless. When we return to Joren, we can speak to Squilyp about the possibility of using surrogates, if we choose to have more children.”
The thought of others having children for us reminded me of the Iisleg custom of taking infants from the ahayag, the tribe’s whores, and giving them to barren wives.
“If I cannot carry our babies, then Marel will be enough.” I touched the implant in my thigh, and realized how painful it would have been for me to conceive a child, only to lose it. Reever had prevented that. “If you have put anything else in my body, I would know about it. Now.”
“The contraceptive is all that was implanted,” he promised, stepping closer. “Are you going to be angry with me over this, too?”
“No.” I felt as if I had used up all of my emotions. “I understand why you did it, and I thank you for protecting me. Only tell me these things, Duncan. We cannot have secrets between us.”
He nodded. “Were you really lonely for me, this past week?”
“Yes, although it has been so long since I have seen you, I am not sure I remember why,” I grumbled. “I should be like her and find more patients, perhaps. Fill my heart with them.”
“I would rather have my place back.” Reever bent his head and kissed the corner of my mouth. “I was just growing accustomed to it.”
“If we are going to live forever, we must find better ways to disagree.” I wrapped my arms around his waist. “For I cannot do without you, Husband. Not one week. Not one night.”
I woke to find Reever gone from our bed, but heard him entering data on the console in the next room. I dressed and went out to find him paging through the various screens of data I had saved on reptilian mood disorders. He was comparing them to another text and frowning at the screen.
I went to the prep unit to make our morning tea. “I examined the Hsktskt female yesterday. They have her locked up like a tithe animal. She has been starving herself.”
Reever made a noncommittal sound.
“Mercy also discovered Tya’s presence for the first time yesterday. I had to sedate her to keep her from attacking the Hsktskt. Another one of Drefan’s games, I think.” I brought a steaming server to him and looked at the screen. “Alterforms? What have they to do with a depressed Hsktskt?”
