The Children of Anthi

by Deborah Chester

  That knowledge had lain within Blaise for a long time now, but the finality of those quiet words knotted his stomach even tighter. No! he wanted to scream. But he held off the urge as he had held off fear, driving it away, refusing to think of anything except the way out Picyt offered.

  He said, “Draw your knife, Picyt.”

  The priest dropped his hand in startlement. “I…do not understand. To spread your own blood is forbidden.”

  Saunders came up to stand nearby, the Bban close beside her. But she said nothing.

  Blaise glanced at her, then back at Picyt. “I’m not going to kill myself,” he said impatiently. “Please. Just do as I ask.”

  Slowly Picyt drew the jen-knife from his belt and held it forth so that the soft clear light shone along the green blade.

  Blaise made no move to take it. “Saunders,” he said, struggling to keep his voice steady, “is that corybdium?”

  She gasped and snatched the weapon from Picyt’s hand. The soldier beside her growled and moved to interfere, but Picyt swept out his hand palm down.

  “No, Tuult!” he said sharply. “Leave her untouched.”

  For a moment it seemed as though Tuult would protest. Then with a salute he stepped away to stand with legs braced apart, his arms crossed over his chest in disapproving silence.

  “Well?” demanded Blaise, fighting off the growing desire to lie down and let things slip away for a while. Now was not the time to rest. There might not be any more time. “Saunders!”

  She looked up with the blade cradled in her hands. “It’s very like,” she said excitedly, her voice muffled by her mask. “Of course I would have to make an exact test, but…” Her voice trailed off. Abruptly she squared her broad shoulders, her gloved hand closing on the hilt, which was wrapped in gold wire.

  He tensed, knowing her intention as surely as though she had spoken it, but to conceal his alarm he returned his attention to Picyt.

  “The metal of this blade,” he said sharply, conscious of a growing sense of urgency around him. “Is it plentiful?”

  “Yes,” answered Picyt in puzzlement. “Do you value it? Many metals are found on Ruantl, with lead the most…useful.” He swept out his hands. “You delay the matter to no purpose, n’ka. We must—”

  “I agree to your terms,” said Blaise quickly, raising his head, his heart thundering. “The original ones. Everything.”

  Picyt took a half step forward. “That is known,” he said impatiently, unable to keep sharp triumph from his voice. “But why? Because you fear death?”

  “I have found other reasons for changing my mind,” Blaise replied.

  “Corybdium!” cried Saunders, jerking up the knife. Swiftly Tuult snatched it from her, and she swung her fist at him, cursing as he dodged with twice her quickness. “Damn you, Omari!” she said, whirling to throw herself against the coffin separating them. “You’re after the wealth in minerals here, with no thought of—”

  “Chi’ka nun dl!” snapped Picyt with sudden, unexpected fierceness. “You have not leave, n’dl, to interrupt this!”

  With a growl Tuult seized her arms and shook her into momentary submissiveness.

  “Now,” continued the priest, with a ragged edge to his voice as though he, like Blaise, stood at the limits of his physical endurance. “Reasons no longer matter. The moment we raise the Jewels and reactivate the purpose, Hihuan will know of it and send forth an attack to stop us. There will be no opportunity for doubts.”

  “I’m ready,” said Blaise, swallowing.

  “No!” cried Saunders, despite Tuult’s attempts to silence her. “You lied to me! Noble Picyt, I had your word that I could return him as a prisoner—”

  Picyt gently placed his fingertips on her mask. “A second oath does not bind the first,” he said with a harshness that belied his quiet gestures. “I serve Anthi and her will above my own and above yours. Now be silent and look upon the wonders that are here.”

  Turning away from her, he pressed his fingertips together for a moment, gathering himself, then stripped off his gloves and lay his left palm upon the top of the nearest crystal box, holding it there as a faint hum slowly filled the air.

  “Anthi,” he chanted, his deep voice swelling with volume. “M’thra en t’blis al ty i rantaun. We seek our fathers. We beg you for their return.”

  Narrowing his eyes, Blaise watched as the milky gas within the crystal container stirred and blazed with a sudden blinding white light. Blaise covered his face, cringing back. The pressure on his leg caused it to throb viciously. He gasped, clutching his thigh with both hands in an unsuccessful effort to ease the torture. When he looked up again, the brilliant light was gone and the inside of the container clear.

  Blaise’s heart seemed to stop as he stared at the woman lying inside, covered only by the thick wealth of her coppery bronze hair. She looked as though she were sleeping, her mouth curved in a faint smile. No garment concealed the golden, clean-limbed perfection of her beauty. Not even Giaa could begin to match her in sheer loveliness. To gaze upon her like this seemed almost a sacrilege.

  Saunders wrenched free of Tuult’s slackened grip and drew nearer the container, ripping off her mask so that she might have a better view. A look of awe and wonder grew on her broad, scarred face. Then she frowned and turned away, one fist clenching on the crystal surface.

  “Who is she?” Saunders whispered.

  Picyt lifted his head, and as he did Blaise glimpsed a queer blue glow shining through the mesh eye guards of the priest’s mask.

  “Aural,” said Picyt, his deep voice reverberating through the cavern with a power and resonance not his own. “Leiis.”

  It was enough to break the spell holding Blaise. “I’ll not take a woman’s form!” he snapped, his voice nearly failing him as the pain grew worse, robbing him of strength. Limply he sagged onto the bier. “Picyt, no! I—”

  But the priest removed his palm from the top of the woman’s container and with a solemn step moved to the next, placing his hand upon it and repeating the same incantation. The white light blazed forth more quickly this time.

  “Vauzier,” said Picyt, his voice rumbling like thunder.

  Relief flooded Blaise, and he lay still, keeping back the lapping waves of unconsciousness but making no further attempts to move or to watch as Picyt moved to the third and activated it.

  “Rim,” he announced, and swayed before moving to the fourth. Tuult hastened to his side as Picyt hesitated, and put out a hand to steady the priest’s elbow, but he did not touch Picyt. After a second the priest placed his palm upon the last box. He was directly behind Blaise now and out of sight.

  For a moment there was only silence. Puzzled by the delay, Blaise lifted his head slightly but still could not see the priest. The crowd, which had ranged itself in the shadows along the cave walls, now drifted forward, moving close together in a tight huddle.

  Blaise’s head fell back with a thud. He blinked, fighting off the heaviness clouding him. He had not yet heard the name Picyt had once said he could become. This had to be it. Why was Picyt so slow? Blaise knew he couldn’t hold out much longer, not with the fever crawling through him again. His vision blurred as shivers wracked him, and as he opened his mouth to call for Giaa he heard, as though from a long distance, Picyt’s voice, ragged now with exhaustion, calling forth the final incantation. The light flashed brightly enough to make Saunders and Tuult flinch.

  “Asan,” said Picyt, his voice like the rushing waters of the ocean. “Father of our fathers. First of the great. In death we serve him as in life.”

  Hypnotic in their intensity, the words swelled through Blaise. They forced back the fever and left him suspended between two forces. Has it begun? he wondered dully.

  A hand, the fingers so icy they shocked him, gently touched his brow, brushing his eyelids closed. “Sleep,” whispered Picyt’s normal voice, hollow with exhaustion. “In an hour you shall be beyond pain.”

  He thought he shut his eyes for only
a few minutes, but when he next awakened—disturbed by urgent, almost angry voices and the muffled sounds of machinery being set up—it was to find that he was lying strapped on his back, a glass dome fitted over him. The air, what there was of it, smelled stuffy and old. Alarmed, he tried to move and found he could not. He had been stripped. Even his bandages were gone, leaving the black corrupted mess of his leg exposed. The stench of it, freed from Giaa’s salves, overwhelmed him. He twitched, testing the bonds again, and panted under the bright cube of light focused over him, feeling exposed and trapped like a specimen fixed to a microscope slide. His lungs heaved for air, and the fever throbbed through his brain, blurring his vision as he strained to see what was going on around him. What was Picyt doing?

  Intent Bban’n, maskless and brown-robed, moved in and out among the four glass cases surrounding his. He shrank now from calling them coffins, as his eyes focused desperately on the arc of glass only inches above his face. Fear, nameless and cold, crawled through him, refusing to be beaten back any longer by the promise of wealth or new life. Precious metals meant nothing. He knew instinctively that this was a mistake. Even if Picyt, with his odd mixing of superstition and knowledge, could do what he attempted here, something was still wrong. An error had been built in and was compounding as time trickled out. Sweat beaded along Blaise’s spine, sticking his flesh to the surface of the bier beneath him.

  A man with the elongated head and plated skin of a Bban, yet with Tlar eyes and jaw, paused, his vivid green eyes intent on the square metal pole he was erecting near Blaise’s head. Panting with the sensation of being cooked alive under the bright lights, Blaise spread his fingers, curling them as he strained to break the cuff of mesh-woven metal binding his wrists. If he could just get a hand free to pound on the glass…Why wouldn’t the man look at him?

  “You!” he shouted, knowing that if he could hear them they could hear him. “Hey! I want to talk to Picyt! Let me—” He broke off, exasperated as the worker hurried away.

  “…but you told me this machine would heal his leg!” said a strident, familiar voice over the din of the workers. “Not transfer him into another body. You can’t—”

  “The process works,” said Picyt’s deep voice, still strained with weariness. “You have done well in assisting Teecht with his tasks, Saunders. But do not seek to interfere now.”

  Blaise twisted his head to the side and saw Picyt’s blue-cloaked back. Above the collar the priest’s thick dark hair waved sleekly in the brilliant lights. He lifted his golden, tapering fingers in a gesture. But Saunders, whom Blaise could not see, did not back down.

  “We made a deal, noble,” she snapped, and Blaise could imagine her broad face reddening. “You gave me your word that we could go, that he would be returned to me as my prisoner. And now you’re trying to use him as a symbol in some insane kind of holy war. You lied!”

  Again Picyt lifted his hand, but this time it was to quell the black-masked Bban who stepped forward to intervene. Tuult, Blaise guessed, seeing the narrow band of scarlet at the soldier’s throat. The glass wavered over him. Cursing, Blaise forced himself to regain a hold on consciousness and heard Picyt’s low, impassioned answer: “You know nothing of the purpose, n’dl, nothing!” he said in a tone as glacial as the snow-covered slopes outside. “Every lie spoken in the cause of the purpose is justified. Do not interfere. We must make this transfer!”

  “But you cannot!” Now at last she stepped into Blaise’s line of vision, unmasked like Picyt and flushed with anger. The new scar on her cheek stood out white and drawn as she stared unflinchingly at the priest. “Don’t you understand? He’s not…he wasn’t…” She waved her hand in exasperation, searching for words, as the tendons in her neck spread and corded. “He was vat made! Grown in a laboratory for a cheap labor drone. He wasn’t born…he wasn’t created naturally.”

  Picyt turned to signal at someone. “Raise power levels. It is time to activate direct linkage with Anthi.”

  “Why won’t you listen to me?” she shouted, while a sudden hum of vibration started up around Blaise, setting his teeth on edge. He smelled a peculiar pungent odor, not unpleasant, and a milky-white gas, as cold as death itself, began to fog over the glass covering him. “This is all so futile—”

  “If you comprehended what we are doing—” began Picyt impatiently.

  “I do!” she retorted as the fog obscured her. But he went on straining to listen, as if their voices were his last link with life. “Picyt, listen to me. You will destroy him, and possibly your king as well. Blaise Omari’s psyche is artificial. He was built in a lab. There is nothing in him that can be put into another body, no matter how advanced your equipment…”

  The fog wrapped icy tendrils around Blaise’s body, searing him with cold. He could no longer hear Saunders’s voice, nor Picyt’s answer, if any was given. Anger spread through him. How did she know he had no soul? Had she created the universe? Damn her!

  But anger could not overcome this fresh fear. No soul…The words pounded through him, shredding what scant courage he had left so that all that remained was growing fear, overwhelming and raw.

  No soul! An artificial psyche! No transfer!

  That was the error in Picyt’s calculations, the one factor neither of them had considered. Saunders was right. He did lack what real men possessed. The scientists of the Institute were not God; there were limits to their abilities of creation. That was the real point of shame, being half a man.

  Demos, he thought as panic throttled him beneath the white fog’s groping touch. He drew a hasty breath and it was like inhaling cotton. Choking, he strained to free a hand, to scream, to do anything to make Picyt stop.

  But there was no stopping. The vibrations ran straight into his veins, and he felt a rhythm of incantations spoken over him in slow cadence as the fog froze him. Something infinitely colder began to suck the very essence from him.

  “No!” he screamed, struggling.

  But there was no way to fight or to hold back. He was slipping away, faster and faster as the greed of the other intensified. It was as though something fed upon him, and what had been Blaise shrank smaller and smaller, becoming a speck of quivering terrified flesh in vast darkness. His brain seemed to explode, and then for a split second of stability everything stopped. Shaken, he dared try to comprehend, only to cringe as he suddenly confronted his own mind. Every compartment was flung open, spilling out all that had always been carefully held. Memories, thoughts, fears, and hopes jumbled around him in myriad forms and colors, overwhelming, incomprehensible…terrifying. The pull resumed, dragging him screaming through his own mind as though he were being inverted through a thousand nightmares of knowledge. No one was meant to encounter himself in this way! He sensed, with a fresh spurt of panic, that he was being pulled down to the very center of his being…to the soul, the thing he did not have. He wondered how many creatures had faced their own souls and lived, and he knew he could not survive facing the emptiness that awaited him.

  Something snapped, and suddenly he was warm, resting thankfully in a soft, dark, fluid place, protected and safe and surrounded by…

  Her.

  Only for an instant was he given that sensation, but it locked itself vise-hard about him and would not let go. No vat boy had fetal memories of womb and…and of mother! He had not been created out of chemicals and bacteria. He was not a drone inexplicably more intelligent and rebellious than the average product. What he had valued as independence was life. He was real! He had been born. Damn the Institute! Whether they had stolen him to put him in the lab as an “improved” model or punished a nonsanctioned pregnancy by raising him as a drone—the lowest, most degraded form of life among the upper species—did not matter. What was important was the reality.

  Triumphant, he forgot to fear the pull and threw himself at its source, wanting to be free. The void rushed upon him, black and endless and horrible, but he hurtled onward through its spinning cortex, stretching farther and farther. There must
come an end to how far he could go.

  He reached it with an unexpected, excruciating wrench of pain. For a moment he remained poised, suspended motionless. Then, just at the instant of rebound, a blue beam of light, as incisive as a laser-scalpel, sliced behind him, and he flew onward, faster and yet faster, bridging a place that had not even a void to fill it. Then blackness—alien and unreceptive—engulfed him again. And with a shock he encountered another where there was space for only one.

  For a moment they faced each other, he having no choice but to go forward, the other blocking him.

  Go back.

  Fear struck Blaise, dimming his confidence. He could not. The way had been severed. Picyt had said there was no return, and Picyt had made sure of it.

  Go back. You are not the one.

  The darkness faced him. Blue force raged behind him. Blaise felt himself part, and in sudden fury fought the division, knowing now that Picyt had deceived him too. He was not meant to take on Asan’s body but instead Asan was to take him. Well, he was not a tool—not of the Institute’s and not of Picyt’s. With all the stubbornness lying at his core, Blaise hurled himself at the other, who held firm for a terrifying moment before crumbling away as though brittle with age.

  Now the pull was gone, replaced by a push from behind, as everything rushed forward to fill the vacuum. Again Blaise knew a swift, incredibly harsh lance of pain. Then light flooded the darkness, driving it out with a vengeance, and its brilliance was so great he blinked against the pain in his eyes.

  That physical movement, slight as it was, roused him to consciousness. Once again he was lying in the midst of the white cold fog, half frozen, aching, and weak. He groaned, turning his head to one side in the bitterness of disappointment. After all that pain, terror, and struggle, it had not worked.

  The fog thinned. Blaise lay motionless, too tired to react or even think as he heard muffled unintelligible voices and dimly saw shapes hover over him as the fog dissipated. The shapes were blurred and wavering. He blinked, frowning, but they did not clear. What was wrong? The blurring increased; their shouting voices faded. His lungs caught, strove for another breath, and caught again.