The Man-Kzin Wars 07 mw-7

by Hal Colebatch

  “Son,” the old man's face rasped, “your very thoughts betray you. I can read you like a book.” Early's features began to sag and melt, then reform, like hot wax.

  “So can other things, and more closely than any book,” added a new voice from behind him.

  Theosus (Bruno) turned quickly, his own plumed helmet almost falling from his head. Carol Faulk stood there, hair incongruously long and red, a flowing gown covering her Belter-thin body.

  “Carol?” he asked incredulously, his mind in two places at once, thirty centuries and thousands of light-years apart.

  “Less, and yet more,” the figure replied cryptically. Her hair changed color, became black, then shortened to the familiar Belter crest. In an instant it reverted to its earlier state. Her eyes kept changing color, as did her skin.

  “Why am I here?” Theosus' (Bruno's) mind hurt, like the time he had hung upside down in a crashed aircar, with a crushed skull, and… and…

  Even those thoughts and images flew away, leaving a gaping hole in his mind. His thoughts probed gingerly around the ragged holes in his memory, like a tongue exploring the hole left by a missing tooth.

  A tooth ripped from his jaw against his will.

  The figure of Buford Early spoke again. “Your thoughts are no longer your own, son. Protect them, until it is Time. The center cannot hold, boy, unless you make it.”

  Theosus (Bruno) was puzzled. A few verses of Yeats' poetry seemed to leap from his brow like birds, flapping away like his other thoughts. Vanishing into the green clouds and blue humming air.

  Were all of his thoughts going in the same direction? What did it mean? Theosus (Bruno) could not be certain. Was he losing his mind?

  “Nothing is being lost, Tacky,” whispered the Carol figure in his ear, though she was standing some distance away. “Your thoughts are being taken, read, analyzed.”

  “Why?” he managed, confused, looking from one to the other of the two shifting figures. He could no longer remember how Carol smelled, or where they had met.

  His mind was being taken from him, a bit at a time. Theosus (Bruno) would have to stop whatever was doing this to him. Before he lost all of the contents of his mind.

  And there was something more he had to do.

  “Where?” he repeated.

  The image of Buford Early pointed with his blazing pike, which lengthened, stretched long, and seemed to touch a crumbling ruin on the plain before him.

  The sun illuminating Theosus (Bruno) with such hot bright light began to flicker and dim. A cool wind brushed his skin, making him shiver.

  He turned. The Early figure was gone. Theosus (Bruno) could no longer remember the first name of the vanished man; that too had flown away into the growing darkness. The image of Carol, now with skin as red as the sky was dark, returned his gaze sadly.

  Theosus (Bruno) swallowed, his throat dry with the dust of the arena he knew he was to face.

  “Will you come with me?” he asked Carol's image.

  “I cannot.” Tears welled in her eyes, and glittered like jewels in the dimming light. “You must do this alone, Bruno.”

  He turned and walked away, unseeing. Part of Theosus (Bruno) knew that all of this was simply an image inside his head, the most sense his mind could make of what was happening to him in reality.

  He had a job to do. Spacecraft controls or the hilt of his spatha; what was the difference, really?

  Fate waited for him in both places.

  His sense of unreality grew as he walked across the darkening plain toward ruins the color of sun-bleached bone. Toward the figure that he somehow knew waited there, moving unpleasantly, as if with many arms.

  Whatever it was, it awaited him. Theosus (Bruno) left his spatha unsheathed, and began to hurry toward the opening he saw between fallen blocks of stone. The gate was broken, bordered with stones jagged as cruel teeth. He didn't want to be there in the dark.

  Theosus (Bruno) entered the long-abandoned palaestra. The arena was deserted. There were no murals or carvings to adorn the walls.

  The Hydra was waiting for him, as he had expected. Known.

  It stood twice as tall as Theosus (Bruno), like a great black cylinder topped with dozens and dozens of black ropy arms, all squirming toward him. Each arm ended in a mouth, filled with whirling lamprey teeth.

  He felt a memory — skin sliding across his legs, a smell of clean sweat and desire in his nostrils, as his lips met Carol's — tear loose from his mind, and take flight.

  An arm snatched it from the air, teeth crunching on a part of Theosus (Bruno). Gone forever.

  Rage filled him as he set upon the Hydra, his spatha screaming challenge in the air as it swung. The flesh of the thing was insubstantial, but sizzled and popped as clean steel sliced into it.

  “You will take no more from me,” Theosus (Bruno) grated as he swung his broadsword again and again, pulpy flesh and dark blood flying. The wind began to pluck at his clothing. A distant thunder rolled in the dark greenish air.

  The Hydra moved with him, sprouting two arms for each Theosus (Bruno) lopped off. It seemed to be laughing at him, an electronic hissing that rivaled the windstorm sweeping the palaestra. Sand from the arena floor blew into his eyes, making him squint.

  And for every swing Theosus (Bruno) made, one of the Hydra's arms, snake-quick, snatched a mouthful of memories from him. He began to swing his spatha two handed as the light began to fail, and heads fell into gory piles on the arena floor. But still more arms and heads sprouted, ever hungry for the experiences that made up Theosus (Bruno). Dodging his weary swings, the sharp teeth took and took, a bit at a time.

  The puppeteers he had met.

  The name the kzin had given him before he had died.

  The name of his university.

  Carol's last name.

  The name of their spacecraft.

  The feeling of Transcendence when he was Linked.

  The names of his father and mother.

  ***

  Everything that he was seemed to vanish into the swelling black shape of the Hydra towering over him, triumphant. Unfeeling, Theosus (Bruno) let his spatha drop from exhausted fingers to the arena floor.

  The arms of the Hydra kept him upright as it fed upon his memories. The pain was excruciating. He wanted to scream out a woman's name, but had forgotten whose.

  Bruno, whispered a man's voice he did not recognize, it's all right to let go now.

  He looked down at himself, past the nest of squirming arms entering his body. His skin was beginning to become transparent. He could see his heart beating within a cage of snakes.

  Oh, Tacky, Theosus (Bruno) heard a woman's voice cry from so far away. I love you so.

  “I love you,” he croaked. Theosus (Bruno) suddenly remembered something old, massive, powerful. Something the Dissonants had buried deep within him, to use here and now. A weapon.

  It was Time.

  His beating heart within his chest changed shape, from muscle to jewel to a cylinder of mining explosive. It was the signal and program the Dissonant Outsiders had planted inside him, before setting him against the Zealot spacecraft.

  “Now!” he shrieked, and released the fast, slick disease. A distant equivalent of a computer virus, that the rebel Outsiders had planted deep within his brain and circuitry.

  A blaze of light seared upward from his chest, burning with a clean, pure fire. The Hydra cried out and tried to withdraw.

  Laughing weakly, Theosus (Bruno) hung on to the burning arms, forcing more of the blazing light into the Hydra's heart. It shrieked again, trying to force him away, but he clung to the Hydra. The pure fire raged in vengeance.

  The Hydra itself burst into flame, every arm a streak of flame slicing the blackness around him. Clots of fire blazed in the distance. More shrieks joined the din.

  The portion of Theosus (Bruno's) mind not trapped within the Dream knew that this was all metaphor and representation; that the computer virus was spreading from Bruno into the group mind
of the Zealot Outsiders. The self-replicating pattern would expand and move within each mobile unit of the Zealot mind, erasing and randomizing data packets.

  He knew that he would die with the Zealots, lost forever in the other dimension that was hyperspace.

  But she would live, even if her name had been torn from him by the Zealots. And perhaps the Dissonants could convince the Radiants… and their Masters… to force other Zealot ship-minds… to leave human space alone.

  Pain. So much.

  The light became still brighter. Began to pulse like a great heart of flame. The arms of the Hydra, nothing but fire now, still tugged and pulled. But he hung on.

  Agony could be so pure.

  The Dream began to die around him.

  Bruno could feel his own brain circuitry begin to fail. His biological components burned with eddying currents as the shielding around the Zealot ship began to fail. The twisted space-time of hyperspace began to enter, leaking into the bubble that had been protected by the Zealot equipment.

  A soundless explosion filled his sensorium, colors beyond spectrum, sounds beyond pitch, sensations beyond feeling. He could feel his back arch as a soundless keening filled his head.

  Pain. Everywhere.

  Bruno finally became One with the All.

  1100101000111100101010101101111110101011101101001110001011101110101111010010111010010011010101100110011110

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Carol and the two-headed puppeteer stood close to one another. They watched the swirling colors and strange shapes of hyperspace through the view hemisphere above them. None of what she saw made sense, even with the Dissonant Outsider enhancements for their benefit.

  “I can't see a damned thing,” she whispered. Carol thinned her lips in fatalism. She had seen friends die before, even lovers.

  But Bruno?

  “They have taken the human ship inside the Zealot main craft,” observed Diplomat, necks weaving as he observed the view portal. His left head dipped into a pouch and emerged, chewing slowly.

  “How do you know?” she asked. The alien grass beneath her bare feet was cool and remote. The Zealot spacecraft above her was a blurry, shifting collection of warped geometrical shapes, now close, now far away.

  “I will improve the image resolution for your benefit,” replied Diplomat.

  If Bruno has been taken aboard the Outsider ship, he must be dead, she thought. Carol's face became hot, and the beginnings of tears stung her eyes. She fought the tide of emotions.

  In the back of her mind, Carol saw Bruno's wry smile, his look of surprising innocence in his old, old eyes. Oh, my love, she thought. You were no soldier, Linked or un-Linked. How could you have done this wasteful thing?

  She could feel one of Diplomat's heads looking at her curiously, but ignored it.

  Through the view portal, she saw the kaleidoscopic image of the Zealot warship shift and smear, colors and shapes distorted by the bizarre topology of hyperspace around them. It was difficult to clearly see the hostile Outsider ship, but Carol's instincts jangled her nerves like an alarm.

  A tiny, glittering speck seemed to merge with the collection of shapes and forms that was the Zealot spacecraft.

  “Will it all be for nothing?” she asked.

  “I think not,” the puppeteer sang in its sultry woman's voice. “The Dissonants have placed a… trap… within Mr. Takagama.”

  “A trap?”

  “Yes. A self-replicating pattern that will wreak havoc on the Zealot group mind. It will make more copies of itself, increasing confusion and destruction.”

  “But what will happen to Bruno?” Carol asked, knowing the answer.

  As if in answer, the Zealot ship seemed to shimmer. Waves of darkness passed over it.

  “I think,” sang the puppeteer, “that Mr. Takagama has been successful.”

  Carol could not look away.

  The Zealot spacecraft suddenly seemed to have a hexagonal hole in its center. Triangular segments began to vanish along the hexagon, increasing in size.

  As if the Outsider ship were being eaten.

  “What…?”

  “When the force-shields are lost,” sang Diplomat softly, “the matter from our space-time continuum can no longer exist in hyperspace.”

  “Where does it go?”

  The little puppeteer shook his head at Carol. “Anywhere. Everywhere. Nowhere.”

  The Zealot ship was a bizarre patchwork of holes and cavities. The rate of the absorption of the spacecraft by hyperspace was increasing. A thin silvery filigree of brightness shone against the blurred opalescence. Then—

  Nothing. The Zealot ship was gone. And Bruno Takagama with it.

  She turned to Diplomat. “Is it — ” she began.

  “It is over.”

  Carol did not know how to mourn the man, to remember him. Her eyes burned, yet no tears filled them.

  She had always been a practical woman, strong and capable. Carol knew that in her bones. But Bruno had seemed oblivious to it. He had opened her up, defused her cynicism. Carol's mind dredged up bits and pieces, fragments of the brave little man's life with her, inside the dingy corridors of the Sun-Tzu.

  It all had to mean something.

  Even stranded far from human space, in a spacecraft of alien manufacture moving in another dimension, Carol knew that humanity was worth something. It was more than weapons or technology or sex or fighting.

  Bruno had taught her that.

  She was standing in front of an alien that no human had ever seen, inside an impossible spacecraft built by aliens still stranger. She was too good a soldier to think that she would be allowed to go home. Would they dissect her, like some laboratory animal? Or break her very mind down into pieces, as they had done with poor Bruno, when first taken aboard?

  Her life — all of it — had to be worth something, more than an impotent challenge to the night sky. Black entropy could not always win, not here and now.

  She had fought for things she had believed in, made a difference. Had been true to the things in which she had believed. So had Bruno. Bruno Takagama would not want her to give up, no. He never had, not even when fighting against himself.

  Carol remembered Bruno's love of old poetry, from the bad old days when humans had walked alone across a single world. Poetry scribbled with pigments on sheets of flattened vegetable matter. Long-dead words that had resonance after centuries.

  One of them came to mind, by someone named Hunt, written before the atom had yielded up its energies to mankind, and the gene her potent secrets. It had been stored on one of Bruno's recreation datachips, and had pleased her. Light and silly, but with a sting of truth to it.

  Carol whispered the words aloud, ignoring the nonhumans listening to her.

  “Say I'm weary, say I'm sad,

  Say that health and wealth have miss'd me,

  Say I'm growing old, but add,

  Jenny kissed me.”

  Carol turned to the alien, and drew herself UN Space Navy straight. She wanted to do the memory of Bruno proud. He had faced his fate well; so should she. Carol prepared to speak.

  “Well,” a voice said into her ear from the air around her, “I must admit I have never kissed anyone named Jenny. But kissing Carol Faulk is something to remember.”

  Bruno's voice.

  Carol's jaw dropped — then she closed it. Anger quickly formed in the pit of her stomach. “This is some kind of trick,” she grated, moving without thinking toward the little two-headed alien, her fists raised like bludgeons.

  Her nose banged painfully into the invisible barrier. The alien was prepared; Carol had to give him that.

  Even with the protective shield between them, Diplomat had turned to run. It looked over its shoulder with one head.

  “Captain Faulk,” the two-headed alien sang quietly, “I can assure you that I have no intention of tricking you.” The single eye in the head facing her glittered. “Can I trust you to eschew violent action?”

  She lowered he
r shaking fists and nodded.

  “I wish to offer you what you humans would call… a deal. Is that the correct idiom?” The little head that had been speaking paused, cocking to one side.

  Carol said nothing, still seething. Would they make a dead man pawn to their plans, too?

  “No matter,” Diplomat continued. “A demonstration is in order.” The alien raised its voice. “Mr. Takagama?”

  “Yes?” replied Bruno's voice from nothing, again.

  “Since Captain Faulk is… underwhelmed?… by my approach, would you please explain your presence.”

  Carol's head whirled.

  “It is me, Carol. Before the Dissonants sent us against the Zealot ship with the databomb in my circuitry, they uploaded my mind into their processing core.”

  “But that's…”

  “Impossible?” A tone of humor entered the familiar voice. “You have always forgotten how much of me is electronic.”

  Still suspicious, she thought about it for a moment. There was some truth in the words, but it could be a trick; a souped-up version of the Buford Early hologram when she and Bruno had first been taken aboard the Dissonant spacecraft.

  “Do you want me to quote the rest of that poem?” Bruno's voice asked. “I can, you know. Leigh Hunt was one of my favorite poets. Or would you prefer Yeats? Dylan Thomas? Or how about Gulati?”

  “No,” she answered quickly, not wanting to believe. “Information is information. Bruno's datachip collection was in Dolittle, and could have been downloaded.”

  For once, the little Puppeteer kept quiet while Carol said nothing. Waiting, half hoping.

  “I remember walking out of the Black Vault with Colonel Early and Smithly Greene, while you were walking into the building.” Was there a smile in the voice? “You looked good under lunar gravity. We were just back from a roundtable on antimatter containment. Colonel Early introduced us, but you looked at me like I was a bug.”

  Carol smiled. The first time she had met Bruno Takagama she had thought he was a bug. “I suppose I did. But — for the sake of argument — how is this possible?”