Black Brillion

by Matthew Hughes

  Baro fired a pulse into the restraint’s control matrix. The device came apart and fell to the ground. Kosmir leaped up, windmilling his arms to stimulate circulation.

  “Quick,” he said, “reset the pistol to maximum! Shoot down that aircar when it tries to land!” When Baro did not do as he said, he tried to grab for the weapon.

  Baro stepped back and pushed the man away. “Now you are the one who has gone mad!” he said. “That is a Bureau vehicle and at the controls is my section chief.”

  Kosmir put his hands together in the ancient gesture of supplication. “I lied!” he said. “I was holding back something to bargain with—that I did hear the man Helvic was speaking to. I did not know his name but I know his voice! It was the man you spoke with minutes ago. Whoever he is, he is Helvic’s controller. And he will kill us all!”

  “No!” Baro raised his voice. “You are trying to trick us!”

  “Baro!” Guth Bandar cried.

  The young man swung to look at the sky, thinking the aircar must be sliding down to land. But Bandar was pointing in the other direction, his mouth open and his face distorted in a rictus of horror.

  Olleg Ebersol had sat up. Corje Sooke was in the act of doing likewise. But something was wrong with the way the man and woman moved. Something much worse was wrong with the way they bent—they did not fold at the waist and hips, but in the middle of their torsos, their lower backs remaining flat upon the rock while their rib cages bent up at right angles.

  Baro thought he ought to be hearing bones cracking, but the only sound was their sighing breath. Ebersol’s head moved from side to side, but much too far for any normal neck. He raised his arms straight before him and the hands flexed in a way that sent a shiver along Baro’s spine. The fingers stretched steadily to an impossible length until the skin at their tips suddenly burst open. Long, spiky things, dark and green, now unrolled themselves and wriggled at the end of the sick man’s arms, the skin falling back like loose sleeves.

  Ebersol brought his hands that were no longer hands to the back of his neck. There was a sound like tearing cloth and Baro saw the man’s face come away, pulled forward like a mask to reveal a blank, shining surface of dark green, hard and polished like an insect’s carapace. Two feathery tendrils uncurled themselves from the top of the rounded, eyeless head that now stood above Ebersol’s shoulders. The claws pulled again and both the gown he wore and the skin beneath it split down the back.

  A glistening thorax now supported the featureless head. The rest of the skin sloughed away to reveal sharp-edged limbs and a long-segmented abdomen. Baro had seen those shapes before.

  “It is a Dree,” he said.

  The head rotated toward him and the fernlike tendrils vibrated. The thing stood up and faced him, and the digits where hands and feet would have been clicked together to form crescent-shaped claws. At the sight of them Baro knew what had caused the wounds on the corpse they had found below the Monument.

  Imbry had watched the transformation openmouthed, still kneeling between what had been Ebersol and Sooke. As the newly made Dree began to tear away the chrysalis that had been the skin of the Fasfallian, the fat man lurched to his feet and stood looking at the emerging creature with horror.

  “Get clear!” Baro shouted and raised the pistol. But his aim was blocked by the Dree that had come out of Olleg Ebersol. At the sound of his voice it flexed its lower limbs and leaped toward him, claws outstretched. Baro discharged the pistol into the Dree, catching it in midleap and burning a hole through its thorax.

  Even as the thing crashed to the rock in front him Baro shifted his aim to the second Dree. It had reached out to catch Luff Imbry as he turned to run but its hooked forelimb had only snagged the loose cloth of his robe. The creature was hampered by being still partly encased in Corje Sooke’s body and Imbry was frantically tearing the clasps that held his garment closed at the front so he could slip it over his head and escape.

  Baro laid the pistol sights on the Dree’s head but as his finger compressed the power stud there came the rasp of chitin on stone followed by a lance of agony stabbing through the muscle of his right calf. The first Dree, the wound in its body still smoldering, had dragged itself forward and sunk one claw into the meat of his leg. The other limb was raised to rip his belly.

  Baro’s torn leg gave way and he fell backward. As he went down he touched the weapon to the blankness where the Dree’s face should have been and let loose a blast of energy that blew its head apart. He pulled its dead claw from his leg and blood spurted as he sat up and aimed again at the one that had caught Luff Imbry.

  Imbry had not escaped. He had stumbled and fallen facedown, his robe still tangled about his head. The second Dree had sunk both its hooked forelimbs into the wadded cloth and pulled itself onto the fat man. It kicked itself free of the last vestiges of Corje Sooke and prepared to rake the prone and motionless Imbry.

  Baro aimed and fired and did not stop the pistol’s discharge until the creature’s head and thorax were ash. Imbry lay silent.

  When Baro tried to stand his wounded leg would barely support him. He limped his way to Imbry, the hot. pistol still tight in his grasp. He thrust aside the remains of the Dree and tore at the cloth around the fat man’s head. The face beneath was slack and gray. Blood seeped from a deep gash on the forehead, soaking the robe. But his partner still breathed.

  The shapes that had been Ule Gazz and Pollus Ermatage were now beginning to twitch as things moved under the waxy skin. Baro adjusted the pistol’s output to maximum and got to one knee. He aimed.

  A blast of air and the powerful hum of an aircar swept over him. He turned his head quickly, glimpsed the Bureau insignia and Ardmander Arboghast stepping from the aircraft, a Bureau sidearm called a shocker in his hand.

  “I doubt your weapon will affect them,” Baro called over his shoulder to the section chief as he prepared to incinerate the Dree. “They are a dangerous ultraterrene species.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Arboghast and those were the last words Baro heard before the shocker struck between his shoulder blades, shook him like a rat in a dog’s jaws, and threw him down into darkness.

  His first awareness was of sounds: muted voices nearby; somebody moaning a little farther off; the crash of a door slamming across a distance wide enough to create echoing reverberations.

  “He’s waking up,” someone said. It took him a moment to recognize the voice, then he opened his eyes to see the face of Horslan Gebbling peering down at him. “I think he’s all right,” the fraudster said. “They didn’t jellify his brain.”

  “No,” said another familiar voice, and now Baro saw Guth Bandar’s features come into view over Gebbling’s shoulder, “they want us fit for work.”

  Baro realized he was lying on his back. He moved his hands and felt rough sacking over a hard surface that must be a floor. A deep ache stretched across the broad of his back and curved around to his chest, but he ignored the pain to push himself into a sitting position and looked around. Someone had applied first aid to his wounded leg. It was sore but functional.

  He decided that he was in the hold of the Orgulon. Around him were dozens of others—passengers and crew—seated or lying on a utilitarian surface. Raina Haj and Guth Bandar sat nearby.

  “Where is Luff Imbry?” Baro said.

  “Arboghast left him on the Monument,” said the historian. “Said he was too injured to be useful.”

  “He will die.”

  “As will we all, one way or another,” Bandar said.

  “What about Kosmir?”

  “Arboghast told him to stand still but he ran. That excited the Dree. When they are newly made their brains are undeveloped. They remain feral, creatures of instinct. They caught Kosmir and indulged their appetites on him before they could be shocked into immobility.”

  “Much the same as happened to the white-haired woman we found below the Monument, we surmise,” said Haj.

  “I do not understand,” said Baro.
/>   “We are still working it out ourselves,” said Bandar. “Gebbling, bring him up-to-date.”

  “Wait,” said Baro. “Is there any water? My mouth feels as if it has been left out in the sun to dry.”

  “There is a barrel with a dipper over there,” Bandar said. “Walk slowly. The guards will shoot without warning.”

  Baro looked where the small man indicated and saw the barrel sitting alone in the middle of the vast floor, a dipper chained to its rim. Beyond was a wide stretch of emptiness, then two staircases leading up to the top of the hold. Halfway up each staircase stood an armed Rover.

  “Those are pulse rifles,” he said.

  “Some of the ‘mining machinery’ in the Orgulon’s cargo,” said Gebbling. “There were also heavy weapons and armor plating to convert the landship’s gig and the scroot aircar into warcraft.”

  Baro limped to the barrel and drank. As he dipped a second time a door at the top of one of the staircases opened and two more armed Rovers brought in a man who wore the uniform of a windman. The prisoner seemed dazed and would have stumbled down the steps if he had not been held up by his escorts’ grips on his arms.

  They brought him down and laid him on the floor where the man lay moaning. The Rovers chose another from the crowd—Baro saw it was the plump steward he had questioned about Haj and Kosmir, it seemed a thousands years ago—and led her trembling up the stairs. The door slammed after them.

  Baro walked carefully back to where his companions sat. “What is happening?” he said.

  “They take them for testing,” Gebbling said. “The few who fail are brought back. The many who pass are sent to the creches.”

  “What kind of test? What are these creches?” Baro could feel a dozen more questions bubbling up.

  “Another revelation,” sighed the historian. “Again, we have been privileged to discover something new, something that even our distant ancestors did not know when they fought the Dree and expunged them.

  “The noösphere’s flaw is that it retains only what everybody knows, but sometimes what everybody knows to be true is actually false. Thus it was believed that because the Dree resembled hive insects they must have bred like them, with a hive mother laying eggs and helpers rearing the young. Of course, no one who had ever seen the inside of a Dree hive ever came out to say different.

  “Instead, it turns out that Dree reproduction was unique. They used captured members of other hives, not for breeding but for genetic restructuring. The captor’s hive mind could reach into the captives’ very gene plasm and compel it to become identical to that of the captors. They were aided in this work by a symbiotic plant that when ingested by the victim infiltrated the cells and prepared the genes for change.”

  Baro saw it. “The truffles of the Swept,” he said.

  “Exactly,” said Bandar. “The stuff is harmless on its own. Its gene-altering effects can be triggered only by Dree mental energies.”

  “So those who eat the truffles and come within range of a Dree are remade? They lapse into the lassitude and end by becoming Dree themselves.” Baro said.

  “Not all,” said Gebbling. “Some are more resistant than others, even when force-fed. The Rovers, for example, simply die. On the other hand, the Rover mental defenses are easily overwhelmed. They have all been enslaved.”

  “So some of us will become Dree,” Baro said, “and the rest will be slaves?”

  “Except,” said Bandar, “for a small minority who go mad.”

  “I think I would prefer to die attacking the guards,” said Baro.

  “They refuse to cooperate,” said Gebbling. “They do not shoot to kill.”

  “But the Dree were exterminated eons ago,” Baro said. “How could they still be with us?”

  “Better if I begin at the beginning,” Gebbling said. “A few months ago I took a lease on some played-out tunnels at the far edge of the Fundament brillion mine property. I rented machinery and dug a new length of tunnel which I seeded with certain variants of blue and red brillion, the kind said to be associated with deposits of black brillion.”

  “There is no such thing as black brillion,” Baro said.

  “Of course not,” said Gebbling. “If there were it would surely be nowhere near as beguiling a substance as that which exists only in the imagination of the gullible and greedy. And nowhere near as valuable.”

  He resumed his narrative. “I drove the tunnel down and at an angle from a used-up red brillion gallery and when I thought it deep enough, I began gouging out the niches where my ‘investors’ would find the red and blue variants. I then began installing the subsonic equipment which, when surreptitiously operated, would cause their skins to pebble and their hair to rise—sure signs that they were in the presence of the true black.”

  Gebbling had been lying on the tunnel floor, drilling tiny holes at the base of the wall when he had suddenly lost control of his limbs. It was as if different parts of his body were assuming unusual sizes and weights, the effects constantly shifting and fluctuating. He became dizzy, then nauseated, lost all sense of whether he was upright or prone, and clung to the rock beneath him as if it were the face of a cliff.

  “A gravitational cyst was working its way slowly to the surface. Its rise through the rock had intersected my tunnel. I could not tell its dimensions but I knew I should try to put myself out of its reach lest it suddenly assign some crucial part of me a greater weight than bones and tissues can bear. I might have had my ribs snapped by a backbone that suddenly assumed the weight of a tree.

  “As I crept along the tunnel I looked up and there was Ardmander Arboghast coming toward me. I knew he had been pursuing me, but I thought I had eluded him. I experienced both disappointment and relief: the former that he had finally caught me, and the latter that I was saved. He was aiming a pistol and gesturing for me to rise. I could do no such thing and tried to tell him so, but my jaw was too heavy to lift.”

  It was then that a further strangeness began, Gebbling said. One moment he was looking at Arboghast in fear that the scroot would shoot, the next he was looking at both himself and the scroot with outrageous alterations in his organs of perception. His vision did not encompass shapes, but ripples and splashes of colored light, shifting and brightening and dimming, with occasional sparks of intense illumination that he soon realized were associated with motion.

  Arboghast took a step toward him and came into the field of the gravitational cysts. He overbalanced and tumbled to the tunnel floor.

  Meanwhile Gebbling had been coming to grips with the new modes of perception. “I deduced that my consciousness had been penetrated by some other entity. I must be in the ambit of a telepathic ultraterrene, a strong one, though why it would be down in a brillion mine or where it could hide in this narrow tunnel I could not guess.”

  Bandar took over and said, “Of course it was not a Dree. They were all long dead. It was the Dree equivalent of a noösphere, whose elements can apparently cohere to form a unified persona. Or perhaps the Dree Commons never had more than a single archetype. In either case, it had been captured within a gravitational cyst that had slowly journeyed to the core of the planet and now was finding its way after eons to the surface again.”

  “Is that possible?” Baro asked.

  “It must be, because it happened,” said Bandar.

  Gebbling took up his tale again. “No sooner did I become aware of the Dree than I felt the force of its will. I was commanded to continue crawling out of the range of the bubble and so, clearly, was Arboghast. Fortunately, the anomaly, though powerful, was small in size. A few moments and we were clear of the effects.”

  But they were not clear of the ultraterrene’s mental grip. Gebbling suffered the deeply unsettling experience of feeling a coldly powerful intelligence rummage through the contents of his mind. He made an effort to oppose the interference, but his resistance was brushed aside.

  “Somewhere during this, I became linked to Arboghast,” he said, “a more unpleasant sensat
ion in some regard than having the Dree ransack my passageways and storerooms. I saw that he fought the pressure as I had, but with better results. The thing could not clamp hold of him; it was as if some essential part of Arboghast was polished too hard and smooth to allow the Dree a steady grip. His core was too self-contained, too selfish, for the entity to hook and hold him.

  “I felt it withdraw—from him, that is, not from me. My mind made a picture of the two of them, Arboghast sitting with his arms crossed, staring down this darkness that wanted to envelop him. It withdrew from him then, and I felt its fierce, cold thoughts as it weighed him up.

  “And then it used my voice to bargain with him.”

  Only days before, if a criminal had told Baro that a senior officer of the Bureau would haggle with an inimical alien intelligence the young man would have sneered in disbelief. Now he asked only, “What did Arboghast want?”

  “What those like him always want,” said Gebbling. “Power. The chance to rule over a multitude.”

  “And the Dree granted him his wish?”

  “It did. And now they work hand in claw to bring the world into their grasp. The Dree entity had been instinctively reaching out and seeking those who might be suitable for transformation. But without the truffles the change could not happen.”

  “The first lassitude victims,” Baro said. “They all died.”

  “Yes, but then came Arboghast,” said Gebbling. “He linked his mind with the Dree’s. They reached out together, mentally trolling for ‘candidates’ who lived near enough to the Swept that they could be introduced to the truffles.”

  Baro remembered Kosmir saying, They don’t travel well.

  One of the candidates was Erisme Helvic. Once she was afflicted, Arboghast arrested her father and brought him within range of the Dree entity.

  “I know what happened to him,” Gebbling said. “I was forced to endure the same treatment. Like me, Helvic believed all that Arboghast wanted him to believe, even while a part of him beat on the sealed door of his memory and cried out horrid truths he could not hear.”