“But the best Arboghast will win from all of this is to be a slave to the Dree,” Baro said.
“He does not see it that way,” Guth Bandar said. “I believe he is a natural, that he has been absorbed by the grim archetype known as the Tyrant. His only desire is to stand atop a heap of humanity. To him the Dree are just another natural force, like a storm or a flood, that can sweep him onto a throne. Why should he care what transpires in the sky above so long as his feet are planted firmly on a thick carpet of his fellow creatures?”
“Now Helvic, like. me, has served his purpose,” said Gebbling. “They have already taken him away. Soon it will be my turn.”
“We are all scheduled to suffer the same fate,” said Haj, “if not a worse one.”
“What are our choices?” Baro said.
“We have none,” said Gebbling. “Some of us will be mind-shackled and put to work. The majority are suitable for transformation and will become Dree. A few go mad and are set aside. Bandar believes they will be tortured for the Dree’s satiation, once the hive mind has come into its own.”
“The hive mind has not yet coalesced?” Baro asked the historian.
“Not judging by the way they went after Kosmir on the Monument,” Bandar said. “I suspect there may need to be a critical mass, a minimum number of living Dree brains that must intermesh before the hive rises above instinctive behavior and becomes conscious.”
“I think that’s right,” Gebbling said. “At the ‘inculcation,’ I could feel the Dree archetype trying to merge with the new-made ones, but they kept reacting instinctively to the screaming and running. Finally it had the Rovers subdue them with shockers.”
He had more to say but at that moment the door at the top of the stairs opened and a pair of Rovers began to descend the steps.
“They have not brought back the woman they took,” Haj said. “She must have passed the testing and is either now toiling in the truffle beds or on her way to a new life as a Dree.”
“How is the testing done?” Baro said.
“They bring you to the gravitational anomaly and into the presence of the Dree,” said Gebbling. “In seconds it ransacks your being and makes its decision.”
“I will fight it,” said Baro.
“You cannot fight what is not there,” said Gebbling.
Baro was framing his next question when the Rovers came for him. Their thick nailed fingers seized his arms and he was hauled to his feet.
“Wait!” he cried, but they did not.
Dusk had fallen on the Swept, coloring the western sky with bands of vermilion, lemon, and magenta and the east with deep indigo. The guards took Baro toward the Fundament mine head, a tall structure of winches and girders above a huddle of rudimentary buildings that housed the mine’s offices and maintenance facilities. Cold air welled up from the main shaft and Baro expected to be taken to an elevator and down into the chill darkness. Instead he was marched toward a small building set on a foundation of used mine timbers. Yellow light spilled from small windows on either side of the door.
One of the guards pulled open the portal and the other thrust Baro inside. He stumbled on the threshold but managed to maintain his balance and therefore his dignity as he came face-to-face again with Ardmander Arboghast. The section chief sat behind a battered desk reading from a sheaf of documents. The fact that he wore his Bureau green and black sparked a surge of outrage in Baro Harkless.
Arboghast continued to examine the papers and did not look up. Baro was reminded of the last time they had met, when he had stood rigid, eyes fixed on a point in the air above his superior’s head, his mind a whirl of mingled fear and hope. That Baro was now long gone, that innocent fool who thought the world was drawn in smooth lines and clean-sawn edges. Now he knew it was all rough and jagged surfaces, a marketplace for half-truths and comforting lies where betrayal was the common currency.
Arboghast looked up and a smile spread across his meaty face. “Well,” he said, “isn’t it pleasant, meeting like this?”
Baro felt contempt for the man, but no fear of what he would do. What he wanted most was to strike back, to puncture his grinning pomposity. The Hero is rising in me again, he thought, a surmise that was confirmed when he heard the words that came out of his mouth. “You won’t get away with it,” he said.
“Yes, I will,” said Arboghast.
“You forget that the Archon himself selected me for this assignment. Questions will be asked.”
Arboghast’s smile grew wider though his eyes showed a cold glint. “You’re as vain as your father was,” he said and his chuckle sounded to Baro like the satisfied grunt a fand might make biting into the warm flesh of living prey.
“The Archon has never heard of you. I chose you for this assignment, just as I pulled levers to get you assigned to Investigations for your probationary period when old Hamel would have sent you straight to the Research Branch, where you so clearly belonged.”
The news came as a shock to Baro. “Why?” he said. “What am I to you?”
“The next best thing to your father,” said Arboghast, “though a poor second, it must be admitted.” He sighed. “How I would enjoy having him here today, to rub that proud nose in his complete failure, to tuck him into his niche and watch him first be torn down to a mindless husk, then rebuilt as a Dree.”
Arboghast’s eyes unfocused as he gazed into memories. “Unfortunately, he became aware that I had been acquiring certain knickknacks in the course of my duties.”
“Bribes?” said Baro
“You have his voice exactly,” Arboghast said. “He told me if I did not report myself to the Provost he would do so.”
He smiled again. “But the high and mighty Captain Harkless didn’t reckon on the third alternative—a few adjustments to the controls of his aircar and the melody of Ardmander Arboghast’s life resumed its tranquil lilt.”
“You killed my father,” Baro said. A voice in the back of his head—a child’s voice—added, He did it, not me.
“Yes, I did,” said Arboghast. He rubbed the groove beneath his nose with an index finger and looked up at Baro. “And now I’m going to kill you. At least, I think so. It’s a debatable point, is it not: where does the essential part of a human being go when the body that houses it is converted cell by cell into a Dree?”
Baro let the Hero take him. He launched himself across the desk, hands positioned as the Academy trainers had instructed, aiming for the trigger points in Arboghast’s neck that would render the traitor helpless. But the older man had had the same training and was expecting the attack. He threw himself backward, simultaneously chopping down on Baro’s wrists, sending bolts of pain up Baro’s arms. Then he struck with a heavy fist at the spot where Baro’s jaw was hinged, snapping the young man’s head around and leaving him sprawled on the desk, half dazed.
The next thing Baro knew, his wrists were restrained and the Rovers had him by the arms. He was frogmarched out of the mine office and toward the pitch-black of the mine shaft. Arboghast strode jauntily ahead to lead the way.
The elevator’s cage carried them down into darkness and cold. They dropped so fast that the chill upwell of air became a steady wind and the glaring lumens at the mine head were soon pinpoints of brightness as distant as the stars. As they sank the only light in the elevator was a dim glow from the control panel. It turned the creases in Arboghast’s face into a mask of self-indulgent cruelty. The two Rovers stood impassively, but their grips on Baro’s arms never weakened.
He looked down and saw through the mesh floor a small, illuminated square that gradually grew larger. It took a few moments for Baro to realize that he was looking at the base of the shaft, so far down beneath the surface that even their rapid descent still ate up minute after minute. Finally, the glow reached up to envelop them and the cage slowed and thudded against cushioning bumpers.
Three tunnels led away from the shaft, each higher than a man and illuminated at long intervals by lumens attached to the rock wa
lls. A stubby vehicle with small tires was parked near one tunnel’s mouth and Arboghast climbed into the seat behind its controls while the Rovers manhandled Baro into the cargo hopper. The engine hummed to life and they set off down the passageway. Behind them the elevator rose back into the darkness.
“Thinking about an escape?” Arboghast said after a moment. “You’d have a long walk and an even longer climb.”
In fact, Baro had not been thinking of anything. His mind had become an empty echo chamber, surrounded by the red rage of the Hero. He was still slightly dazed from Arboghast’s heavy punch, but more powerful was the traitor’s casually delivered revelation that he had killed Captain Baro Harkless.
It ought to have been a relief to young Baro, final proof that his father’s death was none of his doing. Instead the news had thrust him back into the helplessness of childhood. A part of his mind worked it out for him: his father had been the strongest force in his life, the irresistible force in the circumscribed universe of his boyhood; Ardmander Arboghast had overthrown and destroyed that power; therefore Arboghast must be invincible. Inside his head, Baro was a child sitting in a lonely room. No one would ever come for him and he would always lack the strength to set himself free.
The tunnel ended in a wide, low-ceilinged space held up by thick pillars of native rock left in place when the chamber had been hollowed out. Around its perimeter scores of round holes had been bored into the wet stone of the outer wall, each cavity wide and deep enough to hold a recumbent human being.
Directly across from the tunnel that brought Baro into the open space he saw a crew of human workers, miners by the look of their clothing, lifting something wrapped in a glistening shroud into a niche that was waist high from the floor. The bundle twitched and tried to bend, but the workers shoved it into the dark space. As the vehicle carried Baro toward the scene he saw one of the miners produce a long, flexible tube and lean down to the mouth of the cavity. The shrouded figure in the niche again tried to resist but the worker proceeded with practiced efficiency and by the time Baro’s vehicle arrived the hose was in place and its other end was being attached to a pipe that ran along the ceiling.
“Dinnertime,” said Arboghast. He turned and gave Baro a leering wink. “Don’t worry, there’s plenty for you.”
The workers had lifted another wrapped form from a line of them laid at the base of the wall. Baro saw that they were passengers and crew from the landship, wrapped in a translucent material that bound their limbs to their bodies.
“Insulation,” said Arboghast. “They need to be kept warm while the transformation proceeds. And it’s best to restrain the young Dree until they are inculcated into the hive mind. Of course, the untransformed feedstock also requires a little constraint.”
He approached the workers and spoke to them. “Wrap this one and situate him next.”
The workers dropped their next victim and turned their dull eyes toward Baro. With skilled efficiency they swathed him in the insulating fabric until he was tightly cocooned from his feet to the top of his head. When the stuff covered his nose and mouth, Baro felt the panic of imminent suffocation until one of the workers slashed holes to let him breathe. But his eyes remained covered and he could see nothing but a filmy blur of light as they upended him and slid him on his back into a niche at floor level.
“Well, that wraps things up nicely,” he heard Arboghast say with a chuckle that became almost a giggle.
Hard fingers dug into Baro’s cheeks and his mouth was forced open. An acrid taste accompanied the scrape of a tube across his tongue. He gagged when it touched the back of his throat but in a moment the reflex was past and he felt the chill of the pipe sliding down his esophagus. Moments later the tube pulsed and more coldness passed into him.
“Liquefied truffles,” came Arboghast’s voice from above. “It won’t be long before you meet your new self. I’ll have them keep an eye on you. I want to be here for your unwrapping. I may keep your skin for a souvenir.”
Baro heard his footsteps moving off, then the sound of the vehicle rolling, away. The tube gave another pulse and pushed more of the liquid alien nutrients into him. The diffuse light visible through his wrappings darkened as the workers placed another swaddled form in the niche above him and connected the victim’s feeding tube, then the light came back as the crew moved along the wall. He heard the rustle and crackle of the next victim’s wrappings and a strangled moan of protest that was cut off as the tube went in.
Soon the workers had placed all of the wrapped prisoners who had been lined against the wall when Baro was brought down to the crèche. He heard a vehicle start up and move away and guessed that they had gone for another batch. The hum of the engine faded in the distance. The chamber became silent. Baro heard nothing but the sound of his own blood pounding in his ears and the suffle of his own breathing.
His detachment lingered. The Hero urged him to struggle against the tightness that bound him, scream around the blockage in his mouth, make an effort—any effort—to free himself. But Baro was now ruled by a coolly analytical facet of his composite self that heard the advice yet felt no inclination to follow it. The Wise Man, he thought, and understood that that archetype had always been strong in him. Well, I hope you’ve got more ideas than I do.
I may, said a voice within him.
Well? said Baro, but nothing more came.
He found that he was surprised that Arboghast had gone off and left him. In the stories he had read as a youth, villains always loved to gloat over captured heroes, teasing them with detailed descriptions of their cunning plans. Often, these interludes afforded the paladin an opportunity to catch the malefactor out and effect a last-minute turn of the tables, or at least to make a daring escape.
But Arboghast had not bothered to explain himself. He had simply taken time out of his activities to see that Baro was tucked securely away and left to be transmogrified into a Dree.
Perhaps he did not confide in me because he does not consider me a worthy opponent, his analytical function commented. Perhaps I am just a loose end to be tucked in.
It was not a cheering thought. He did not welcome death, but to go out as a hero was preferable to dying as an afterthought.
The tube sent another pulse of alienness into his body and as the sensation faded Baro felt a tickle in his mind—No, not a tickle, he thought, more like a twitch of something hard and dry, like a sharp seed stuck in then soft tissues at the back of the mouth.
It moved again, a little stronger, and he felt a tingling in his lips and fingertips, the onset of the lassitude. But now he knew what the sensations portended. It is the Dree, he thought. It is quieting me, stilling me, before it begins the change.
With the thought came understanding, bursting into his consciousness in a detailed image. He didn’t need Arboghast to explain it to him. The answers were all there, slipped into his mind by the Wise Man.
The Dree had indeed been expunged, crushed into slime by the gravitational aggregator that had collapsed their tunnels and burrows. But there had been a side effect. Bandar was right: the gravity weapon had somehow captured the Dree’s version of a Commons and thrust it down into the core of the planet, from which it had eventually begun a eons-long return to the surface, trapped in a slow-rising cyst.
As the Dree archetypical entity neared the surface it reflexively reached out for compatible minds. First it sought for those it could enslave. The Rovers with their pack instincts were easiest; once they were mentally seized and harnessed they carried on as if programmed. Armed with weapons shipped in on the Orgulon, they overthrew the mayor and police of Victor and herded the inhabitants into the mines where they were brought to the entity for testing.
As a posthumous dishonoring of his old enemy, Arboghast had arranged for the son of Captain Baro Harkless to be one of the first to be converted or destroyed. He would have chuckled as he worked his schemes, picturing the young fool prancing toward his undoing while dreaming of medals and honors from the A
rchon.
Now the first generation of new Dree were already walking Old Earth, or at least the tunnels beneath its surface. As more and more Dree were created, the entity would have actual Dree brains in which to install itself, ultimately tying together enough feral Dree to create a hive consciousness. When that happened, the reborn Dree would have the benefit of knowing what had happened in the first invasion, a knowledge that was forgotten by all but a few eccentrics like Guth Bandar. The Dree would organize and spread surreptitiously, establishing nests beneath major cities, enslaving some and converting others, while making hideous bargains with the likes of Ardmander Arboghast.
At some point, the Dree would emerge in overwhelming numbers to cow and rule a defenseless populace whose police force would have already been infiltrated and disarmed. There were very few military establishments in Old Earth’s penultimate age, and no stores of heavy weaponry such as had contained and crushed the first Dree incursion.
They will use us for their cruel pleasures, Baro thought. The Arboghasts will be the overseers, delivering fresh victims to the crèches and the torture arenas.
Again, Baro felt his consciousness to be divided. One piece of him was horrified by the vision that the cool intellectual facet had splashed across the inner screen of his awareness. He remembered Imbry, left to die on the Monument, and felt a pang of guilt.
Why are you doing this to me? he said, to himself and to the other that he sensed had come into his mind. There was no response.
I know you are there, he said. All of this thinking, this analyzing of the Dree and the Rovers and the plans, that is yours, not mine. Why do you throw it at me now, when I am bound and helpless, waiting to be devoured?
What must be done must be done, came the answer in the dry, cool tone of the Wise Man.
What can I do? said Baro. He attempted to wriggle against his wrappings and found that his limbs would not respond, though he did not know whether that was the work of the Dree entity, disconnecting his brain from his body, or just the effect on nerve and muscle of being tightly bound.
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