by Simon Hawke
"Is everything all right?" I said, under my breath.
"I honestly don't know," said Higgins. "Tyla threw Garr a curve by not telling him about it. Did you see how she was watching him? She did it on purpose."
"Why?"
Garr spoke before Higgins could reply. His voice was startlingly deep and sonorous, his words were addressed to Breck, though of course neither Breck nor I could understand them. There was very little known about the Nomads of Purgatory and there were no language programs that Coles could have fed us.
Higgins translated. "He humbly apologizes for hesitating in his greeting," he told Breck. "He says that he perceived at once you were a warrior, but that your ... uh ... your 'carved hand' is an, uh, artifact he had never before seen and he was startled. He apologizes again for his rudeness and expresses his deepest sorrow at your . . . your having been rendered ... uh ... hell, Breck, he doesn't understand . . ."
"What?" said Breck.
"At your having been rendered crippled and useless," Higgins finished awkwardly.
Breck was about to reply, but Tyla spoke first. Her tone was sharp, but it did not seem to be a rebuke. More like a correction. Garr glanced from her to Breck, a slight frown on his features.
He said something and Higgins translated.
"He's speaking to Tyla," Higgins said. "He said, but humans have no claws. How can this one, who has not even a hand, possess claws sharper than mine?"
Tyla said one word to Breck.
"Show him," Higgins translated.
Breck wordlessly held up his hand and rapidly snicked out his blades, one after the other. Garr's eyes grew wide and he sucked in his breath sharply. He stared at Breck with wonder, reached out for his hand, then hesitated, speaking to Breck once again.
"Is it permitted?" Higgins translated.
"Tell him he's welcome, but to be careful," Breck said. "The blades are razor-sharp."
Higgins translated to Garr and slowly, almost reverently, Garr took Breck's artificial hand in both of his, feeling it, lightly touching the incredibly strong nysteel blades. As he examined it, the others all approached, staring with equal fascination. Tyla spoke to them.
"Oh, hell," said Higgins.
"What is it?" Breck said.
"She's telling them the story of how you lost your arm. She's passing on your rather facetious comment about how you used it as a weapon and beat to death the man who took it from you. Only she's embellishing somewhat on the details, I'm afraid."
Breck grinned.
"She's also telling them that you have the true soul of a warrior. That when you lost your arm, you had it replaced with one that was a weapon, so that you could continue to be useful to the tribe. She says that is the true test of a warrior, one who continues to fight for the good of the tribe until there is nothing left of him at all."
"I've heard that somewhere before," said Breck.
"I'm sure you have," I replied wryly. "Probably from Coles."
EIGHT
It was probably a good thing that Purgatory was going to be placed under quarantine, because otherwise I shudder to think what would have happened to the Nomads. Humanity would have descended upon them with a vengeance. Already, we had started dumping our garbage on their world; we'd brought in some of our dirtiest industries, our most toxic wastes, and given time, we would have started exporting our most undesirable product-people.
True, there were already people on Purgatory, but they were there only for the money and they didn't really give a damn about the natives. That made them far less dangerous than the ones who would have really cared about the Nomads. The lure would have been irresistible. Here were savages to civilize, primitives to save. We have always been real big on saving. We'd been saving each other for centuries and considering how seriously we'd been at it, you'd think we'd have gotten the whole job done by now. But we hadn't, partly because the various savers could never get their act together collectively- which was, you'll pardon the expression, a blessing-and partly because some of us didn't feel like being saved. But there were very few of us who seemed at peace simply being the way we were. The sad fact was that most of us required answers to some of life's more complicated questions and it was upsetting to hear that in a complex world, there were no simple answers. Simple answers were infinitely more attractive. You could get more people to listen to a simple answer, because a complex one confused them and their attention span was ludicrously short at best. So keep it simple, set your hook and reel 'em in.
Clearly, the Nomads needed saving. They needed the benefits of our civilizing influence and our spiritual guidance. Their lives were elegantly in harmony with their surroundings. Something was obviously wrong here. What they needed was modern clothing, box warren apartments, mass transit, fast food, and biochips. In time, we would have given it all to them and, in the process, taken away their culture and their land. The am-bimorphs were probably the best thing that ever happened to them.
This was seditious thinking for a man in my position, a psychic cog in the machine of the multinational overmind, but then I was a reluctant cog at best and the fact that I was still able to think seditious thoughts was one of the few things that kept me sane. But, unless you had all the sensitivity of a real-estate developer, it was hard not to think such thoughts when confronted with the lifeway of the Nomads.
Their camp was in a high valley ringed by mountains and as we descended the trail that led down to the verdant valley floor, winding along a swiftly flowing river fed by a roaring cataract, it felt as if we were stepping back in time to a period in Earth's prehistory. Their "houses"-low, dome-shaped shelters made of hides and scrub thatch-brought to mind some old Celtic village from the Bronze Age. The dwellings were spaced fairly wide apart, in a rough circle around a larger central structure that was probably used for tribal meetings. A crude sort of earthworks had been thrown up around the camp, which seemed to indicate some competition among the tribes, or perhaps it was only there to keep the beasties out. We went in through the main gate and immediately became the center of attention as the entire tribe turned out to look us over.
All the clichéd expressions sprang to mind as I returned their scrutiny-noble savages, fierce pride, primitive grandeur, and all that-but the truth was that none of those expressions really did the Nomads justice. Imagine a cross between Crazy Horse and Lucifer. The result would be something both magnificent and frightening. The result would be a Purgatory Nomad.
As Higgins had already explained, Nomad was our term for them. They thought of themselves in terms of their tribal identities. Tyla's tribe was Dyla-ken. Higgins explained that this translated roughly as "Dyla's people." They took the name from their tribal matriarch, Tyla's grandmother, and her mother before her and so forth. If Dyla were to die, then Tyla's mother, Noli, was the next in line and at a sort of ceremony of investiture, she would add to her birth name the name of the matriarch, though she would be addressed only as Dyla. Eventually, Tyla would also take on the name, using it as a prefix to her own. In this manner, the name had become a sort of title.
However, names among the Nomads played a more colorful and descriptive role than among humans and apparently things could get a little complicated. Birth names were usually short and simple, chosen from among family names, but from there, it was anything goes. The next set of names a Nomad was saddled with depended on some significant or possibly even an amusing incident in his or her young life. Garr, for example, was actually Kol-Ap-Garr-Hoc-Altani, which Higgins translated as "Kol, Small Killer of Large Stones." There was, of course, a story that went along with this, as there was a story that went with every Nomad name.
It seemed that when he was a child, Garr-then known only by his birth name, Kol-had been playing hunter with some other children and had attacked a fairly good-sized boulder, pretending that it was some local equivalent of a woolly mammoth or something. He had struck it a strong two-handed blow with a stone ax belonging to one of his fathers and the shock traveling up his arms had put him on h
is ass and made his head spin. However, he must have struck the boulder on the exact spot of a flaw, because the damn thing cracked and split apart, enhancing his reputation no end among his playmates. Hence, Kol-Ap-Garr-Hoc-Altani, "Kol, Small Killer of Large Stones," which he had informally shortened to Garr, which meant simply "Killer"-a name with a considerably more ominous interpretation, but given his size, apparently no one felt inclined to nitpick.
I learned all this, and a few other pertinent bits of information, while we waited in the large central structure for the tribal meeting to formally convene. Everyone, or most everyone, it seemed, was already there and we were now waiting on the matriarch, who was being fashionably late. I half expected to hear a skirling of wood flutes or a roll of hide-covered drums announcing her arrival, which I guessed would be in some sort of a sedan chair. I was surprised instead when a Nomad female who didn't appear much older than Tyla walked in without ceremony and sat down cross-legged on the ground, about fifteen feet away from the fire pit dug in the center. At once, the other members of the tribe gathered on either side of her, forming a circle around the fire pit which we were meant to join. We sat down and the fire was lit. I stared across the flames at Dyla, the matriarch of Tyla's tribe.
She was dressed simply, in the same short animal hide shift worn by the other females, and her hair was more silver than dark. For a grandmother, she wore her years extremely well. But then, what was old for a Nomad? I had no idea. I'd have to remember to ask Higgins. At the moment, instinct told me to keep my mouth shut, because everyone else was being quiet and you could cut the silence with a knife.
Ever sit in the same room with about a hundred people and have absolutely no one make a sound? Well, perhaps in church, but even in church people tend to cough and shift around and rustle hymn books and there's always at least one anarchist who breaks wind loudly enough to shake the rafters. This was serious silence. Nobody moved. Nobody breathed. Then Dyla started speaking.
Her voice wasn't very loud, but it was firm and full of confident authority. She exchanged a few words of greeting with her granddaughter, then she spoke briefly to Higgins, who replied in her own language. I didn't know what was said, but she seemed to regard him with the patient approval of a teacher toward a pupil who was making progress. Then she turned to look at us, and even from a distance of about twenty feet, that golden stare was difficult to deal with. I felt as if fuzzy caterpillars were crawling around inside the back of my head, tickling the gray matter as they slithered across my mind.
I didn't know if I was really feeling that or if I was just imagining I felt that. Was the feeling self-induced by an attack of paranoia or was it something she was doing to me? Or was it something that evil bastard, Mondago, was doing to me back at Game Control? I couldn't tell and that was scaring me. These little anxiety attacks were coming more and more frequently lately and the fact that I'd managed to keep it all together so far wasn't all that reassuring.
I knew only too well that the breakdown rate among psychos was phenomenally high. My morbid curiosity had led me to investigate a number of those cases. In each of them anxiety attacks and a growing sense of paranoia had increased exponentially until the mind went boom . . . and it seemed no one was really certain what happened after that, where those poor bastards disappeared to or what was done with them.
In fact, the idea of the mind "going boom" raised a very nasty question-could that happen literally? Could Coles have slipped a microscopic bomb into my brain that would explode upon reception of a certain coded tachyon signal? Or would he ever need to do that? Could he get into my driver's seat and make me shoot myself or dive headlong off a cliff or beat my head against the ground until it turned to jelly?
I suddenly realized that I had drifted off into another paranoid fantasy, a sort of mini-fugue, a real doozy this time. I blinked and shook my head to clear it. Dyla was still staring at me without expression. Jesus, how long had I been sitting there, glassy-eyed and slack-jawed, thinking those nightmarish thoughts? I shot a sidelong glance at Breck and saw that he was staring straight ahead, sitting perfectly still, completely motionless except for a slight tic at the corner of his mouth. I opened my mouth to say his name, but I couldn't seem to do much more than part my lips slightly and make very faint croaking sounds.
I felt sweat trickling down my back. What the hell was happening here? A horrifying idea occurred to me, a terrible suspicion that Dyla was not a Nomad at all, but an ambimorph, that they were all ambimorphs, that Higgins had led us into a trap, that he was one of them, and in a moment they were going to start turning into giant snakes and slithering toward us, their jaws unhinged, fangs gleaming, dripping poison ...
And suddenly the fear was gone-Bam-'- just like that, vanished in an instant, and I was staring into the flames of the crackling fire in the pit, seeing forms moving in the background through a veil of heat shimmers. My time sense was confused again. My vision was a little blurry. It seemed very, very warm. The flames were dancing and the heat shimmers above them were dancing and the figures beyond them were dancing and there were strange sounds filling the air-the ethereal, high-pitched, whistling whine of bone flutes, like the cries of sea gulls on the wind. For a moment, I thought I heard Mondago calling me, but it was only a distant echo in my mind that dissipated in that haunting birdlike music.
A young Nomad female stood before me, looking down at me, legs spread apart, hips rolling gently, arms hanging straight down at her sides, fingers spread rigidly apart. Her head was inclined toward me and her jet-black hair hung long and loose down to her waist, only partially covering her naked breasts. She was wearing nothing except a sort of brief animal-hide loincloth and her golden skin gleamed with a sheen of perspiration. Her lips were slightly parted and I could see the tips of her two large pointed canine teeth. Her eyes were like yellow gold in firelight.
Several other couples were dancing slowly around the fire, moving in a sort of surreal minuet to the intertwining, whistling melodies of the bone flutes, a cacophony of sounds like a bird chorus coming from a distance, as if heard from across a lake. The couples didn't touch. They stood close to one another, undulating gently, swaying like trees bending in the wind, almost touching, and then rolling back, and moving in and circling slightly, then almost touching once again . . .
The Nomad girl reached out and pulled me to my feet. I stood and started imitating her movements, a little awkwardly at first, then falling into the rhythm of the bone flutes, their rising and falling whistles having a sort of ebb and flow, like surf crashing on a distant shore. Her gaze was locked with mine and I couldn't look away. Nor did I want to. The smoke from the fire filled the interior of the lodge, making my eyes smart. The temperature kept rising. In moments, it seemed, I was soaked with sweat. The wood they were burning had some sort of pungent, musky scent-or was that her scent?-that somehow made me think of the frankincense burned by the Russian Orthodox archbishops of my ancestors during their somber, melancholy services. I almost seemed to hear them chanting in their ancient Church Slavonic, the basso profundo voices of the deacons rising up from deep in my subconscious, memories rising not from me, but through me, from all those who had gone before me, from the long-suffering peasants on my mother's side to the pagan Celts on my father's. The Byzantine intonations of the bishops seemed to segue into the stentorian, guttural chanting of white-robed Druid priests, marching slowly in torchlit procession to an altar set in the center of a circle of high stones. A pale-limbed girl with hair as red as fire was held down on the slab, her green eyes wide with terror as the crude stone knife was raised-
-and her sharp claws raked across my chest, leaving thin red trails that wept blood. I was naked, on my back, with the Nomad girl straddling me, her long, coarse hair, like a horse's mane, whipping me as she rolled her head with each savage thrust of her hips. Her hands gripped my shoulders and I felt her claws breaking my skin, digging deep, and I screamed, though not only with pain, a scream that seemed to catch somewhere in my th
roat and sound only in my mind, echoing inside my head and bouncing off a cacophony of images from a past that was completely alien to me, and yet, at the same time, hauntingly familiar.
"Good morning," Breck said. "How's the newlywed?"
I opened my eyes and saw him sitting cross-legged beside the pile of furs I lay on, a mocking smile on his face.
"What?" I croaked, my voice sounding hideous.
I tried to push myself up, but I collapsed almost immediately. My entire body was sore. I felt as if I'd run a marathon and then been forced to turn around and do it all again because I hadn't done it fast enough. I felt as if I'd gone eight rounds with the heavyweight champion of the world with my hands tied behind my back. I felt as if I'd been-
Jesus! I sat bolt upright and the entire room started spinning. Breck caught me and steadied me with his arm around my shoulders.
"Easy there, son," he said. "You'd best take things a little slowly for a while."
I looked down at myself and immediately squeezed my eyes shut. I was stark naked and my chest and thighs were covered with claw marks. My hips were bruised and there were thin trails of dried blood caked on my stomach. I looked as if I'd been mauled by a leopard. Actually, not exactly mauled, but ...
"Oh, God," I groaned. "Don't tell me . . ."
"One of these days, O'Toole, you'll have to explain to me about this attraction you seem to have for savage, predatory females." Breck pursed his lips thoughtfully. "Perhaps you appeal to their maternal instincts."
"What the hell happened?" I managed to croak.
"You mean you really don't remember?"
"Goddammit, Breck, this isn't funny!" I looked around at the inside of the tiny lodge. "Where the hell are we?"
"Your honeymoon suite, it seems," said Breck. "Tyla's family was gracious enough to loan it to you, seeing as how you married her little sister when you did the mating dance with her last night."
I groaned again and fell back on the furs, pulling them up over me. "Jesus. I can't believe it. Where were you while all this was happening? Why the hell didn't you stop me?"
