The Shapechanger Scenario

by Simon Hawke

  Breck shrugged. "Well, after all, you are over twenty-one and I didn't really think it was my place to interfere."

  "So help me, Breck, if I had enough energy to make a fist, I'd punch you in the mouth," I said weakly.

  "All right, I'm sorry," Breck said, with a smile. "But you must admit that this situation is not without its comic aspect."

  "Notice I'm not laughing."

  "Duly noted," Breck said. "In fact, I couldn't have stopped what happened any more than you could. I've had a rather busy night myself, if not quite as active." He smirked, then caught himself. "Sorry. Actually your new wife is extremely concerned about you. Tali is young and apparently very energetic. She was afraid she might have killed you. She's with Tyla and Higgins at the moment, being instructed in the proper care and treatment of her fragile human spouse."

  "You really find this amusing, don't you, you miserable bastard?" I said. "Where're my clothes?"

  Wordlessly, he held up what was left of my shirt. It was in tatters. His mouth started to twitch and he struggled to keep it contained, but it was too much for him and he lost it, dissolving into laughter. I wanted to kill him.

  A moment later, he got himself back under control. "I'm sorry, O'Toole," he said, shaking his head. "I truly am. It's just that-" and he started to laugh once more, but this time he managed to fight it down. He looked away, cleared his throat, took several deep breaths, and turned back to me again. "We really do have much to talk about," he said.

  "Damn you," I said. "You should have done something! I simply can't believe it! I remember some of what happened, but it's . . . it's as if I was drugged or something. Breck, I can't be married! You've got to tell Higgins, he's got to explain it to ... what's her name again?"

  "You cad," said Breck.

  "Dammit, Breck-"

  "Her name is Tali," he said. "And you can explain things to her yourself. She can speak English, after a fashion."

  "She ... she what?"

  "Here," said Breck, tossing me some hides. "Put these on while I go get you some breakfast. Though she finds the idea quite appalling, Tali has actually agreed to burn some meat for you. Even Higgins is impressed. In this culture, that's akin to a princess agreeing to debase herself before the coachman. She must really like you. There must be more to you than meets the eye."

  I glared at him as he went out to get me something to eat and then I started dressing in the hides he'd left me. When I was done, I looked absurd, as if I were on my way to a masquerade party. I was in fairly good shape, but in the outsize hides, I looked like some sort of undernourished caveman. Or perhaps a cyberpunk in drag. A few moments later, Breck came back with some food, which he had promised we would eat out of sight of the Nomads. Higgins, it seemed, ever the complete xenobiologist, had learned to eat his meat raw with the other males.

  "I've heard from Mondago," Breck said, as he bit into his roast beast. "He's been absolutely frantic and Coles is in a state, as well. It seems they couldn't get in touch with us. Mondago kept trying repeatedly, but he could not establish contact."

  "I seem to remember Mondago calling to me last night," I said, "during the tribal meeting or ceremony or whatever it was-"

  "Did it sound as if he were calling from a great distance, his voice sort of muffled?"

  "More like a distant echo," I said. "Then it wasn't just my imagination?"

  Breck shook his head. "No, I heard it, too. And after a while, it sort of faded away. They blocked him out, you see."

  I frowned. "What do you mean, they blocked him out?" And then it sank in suddenly and my jaw dropped as I stared at Breck with disbelief. "They blocked him out?"

  Breck nodded. "I don't really understand it, but it seems that what the Nomads did was to telepathically 'insulate' our minds, effectively jamming the tachyon broadcast and reception."

  "But . . . but how?" I said, astonished.

  "That" said Breck, "is what our friend Coles would give his right arm to know."

  "Did Higgins know about this?"

  "How would he know? The Nomads have never been confronted with biochips before. He knew about their being telepathic, though." Breck grimaced. "It seems he neglected to inform us of that little detail."

  I shook my head. "I don't understand."

  "It's simple enough," said Breck. "He's on their side. Not against us, specifically, but against what's being done on Purgatory. And he realized that we could help him."

  "So this whole thing about ambimorphs playing gods among the Nomads was a setup?"

  Breck shook his head. "No, he claims that's real enough and Dyla backs him up. I spent most of last night talking with them. It was absolutely fascinating, I wish you could have been there, but you were . . . otherwise engaged."

  "Don't start," I said, pointing at him.

  He grinned. "Have some meat, you need to keep your strength up."

  "Very funny. I'm still waiting for you to explain what this is all about. What does Higgins think we can do for him? Where do the ambimorphs fit in? And why the hell was it necessary for me to marry ..."

  'Tali," Breck prompted.

  "Yeah," I said, feeling my face flush. "It couldn't have just been my boyish charm. Compared to the males around here, I'm downright anemic. So why?"

  "At the risk of wounding your tender ego," Breck said, "it was not love at first sight. It has to do with their customs and traditions, which require sexual bonding in order to ... well, it's rather complicated. I'll explain it to you later. For the moment, let's simply say that the reasons for your marriage were primarily political, although Tali does seem to have taken to you. But you need not concern yourself. It's a serious matter, to be sure, but it isn't quite the same as marriage in our society, as Higgins has already pointed out. In fact. Tali has something like fifteen husbands already."

  "Fifteen?"

  "I understand that's a conservative number for a female in her position. She's being groomed to take her place in the matriarchy, along with Tyla," Breck explained. "And to accept responsibilities far greater than any matriarch has ever had to undertake before. Which is why she's been learning English telepathically from Higgins. Sort of on the principle of know your enemy."

  "Meaning us," I said.

  "Meaning us. It seems we never learn from our mistakes. We underestimated the creatures we found on Draconis 9 and now we've done the same thing with the Nomads. We wrote them off as primitive nomadic tribes, semisentient savages at best, of no great interest to us because we had nothing to learn from them and all they had that we wanted was their real estate."

  "Instead, it turns out that they're the biggest threat to Psychodrome's mind-control monopoly," I said. "Looks like Coles has finally met his match. He can't push their buttons. Nor can he push ours, if they don't want him to. They decided to cut him off and that was that. They simply pulled the plug."

  And then it hit me. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "My God, Breck, they really did pull the plug. On themselves. They're already in the way of the greedy bastards who want to come in and rape this planet. And Higgins thought that he was helping them by bringing us here? Hell, we've just hammered the last nail into their coffin! Any reason Coles could possibly have had for helping out the Nomads disappeared the moment he found out that they could beat the biochip with just a thought. That makes them almost as great a threat as the ambimorphs."

  "Perhaps it would, except for one thing," Breck said. "Well, two things, actually. The first is that the Nomads are not hostile and they're not interested in threatening Coles or anybody else. They'd really much rather we went away and left them the hell alone. However, they wouldn't have much to bargain with if it wasn't for the second thing."

  "And that is?"

  "They can detect ambimorphs," said Breck.

  NINE

  I wondered which moron had decided that the Nomads were not as intelligent as we were. Breck was right; we never learn. Whoever had contacted the tribes of Purgatory first had probably taken one look a
t the way they lived, at the simple animal hides they wore, at the fact that they were nomadic hunter-gatherers, not interested in agriculture or technology, and based on that, they judged them simple savages. And the Nomads politely gave the fools back exactly what they expected, no more, no less. And no one ever suspected how sophisticated these "savages" really were.

  No one except a xenobiologist named Graver Higgins, maintained on the consortium staff as an exercise in public relations-a man who was expected to do no more than collect his salary, keep his mouth shut, and look the other way while they did to Purgatory what they once tried to do to Earth. Only Higgins took his duties seriously. Unlike all the bought and paid for corporate scientists and researchers who, throughout the years, had defended everything from cigarettes to strip mining, Higgins cared about the truth. And because of that, he had discovered the truth about the Nomads.

  I recalled what he had said about the Nomads being "private about different things." Their refraining from being judgmental was both an indicator of how differently they related to one another than we did and the different levels of their communication. A very formal, nonabstract sort of communication took place on the oral level. Secondary, nonoral communication required an intimate bonding, apparently more from custom and tradition than purely functional considerations. Higgins knew more about the Nomads than any other human, but without sophisticated scanning equipment such as could be found at Game Control, he could do no more than theorize about the way their brains worked.

  His idea was that their minds functioned as if they were two separate organs-and for all he knew, perhaps they were. A sort of primary and secondary brain, as he put it, able to work together, but able to function separately, as well. The primary brain, to follow his analogy, was the main engine. The secondary brain acted as a sort of turbocharger, amplifying the functions of the primary brain when necessary and giving them their telepathic and, in some rare cases, telekinetic abilities. However, not all of them were gifted equally.

  The males, with only few exceptions, had little or no telepathic ability. With most males, it wasn't mind reading so much as it was intuition. The females seemed to have greater development of their secondary brains, but not all of them were equally telepathic. Tyla, for example, had not been able to sense the presence of the ambimorphs back in the Red Zone. There were far too many people there, too much "white noise," as Higgins put it, for her to pick up on the subtle difference.

  "But Tali could've done it," he said. "Her powers are almost as strong as Dyla's, and Dyla says her own abilities increased with her maturity. When she was Tali's age, she says she wasn't nearly half as strong."

  I glanced at Tali, sitting silently next to me, following the conversation. There was a very intent, interested expression on her face, but then I realized that I was judging her by human standards and, for all I knew, the expression on her face might well have been one of amusement or even boredom. How was I to know?

  "In-trest," Tali said in softly accented English, enunciating carefully. "I am in-trest, husband mate."

  "I am interested," Higgins corrected her. "And it's just husband, Tali, not husband mate. Human females call their mates husband, at least when there's been a marriage ceremony. Unlike the tribes, humans do not always have a marriage ceremony before mating."

  She looked surprised, then she glanced curiously at me. "Have you mated with human females without ceremony?"

  Breck choked back a laugh as I tried to figure out how to reply, but my Nomad wife was already way ahead of me.

  "This is . . ." She glanced at Higgins and briefly slipped back into her own language, ending on a question.

  Higgins cleared his throat and replied, saying the word in her language and thinking it in ours.

  "Per-son-al," she said, enunciating carefully and nodding. "I understand. Interested."

  "Interesting," said Higgins.

  "Interest-w#?" she said, looking puzzled. It seemed that proper English grammar even taxed a telepathic mind. She glanced at me. "No offense in-ten-ded."

  "None taken," I said, feeling somewhat flustered. "This, uh, is going to take a little .getting used to. Are you reading my mind right now, Tali?"

  "Do you not desire me?"

  "Do you not want me to," Higgins hastily corrected her.

  "It's a little late to worry about confusion on that score," I told him, wryly. "Uh, Tali . . . can you read my mind only when I'm speaking and not at other times?"

  She nodded. "Yes. I want to have . .. courtesy?" She glanced uncertainly at Higgins.

  "I want to be courteous," he corrected her. He turned to me. "I know it must be pretty confusing for you right now, O'Toole. You see, they regard their secondary communication-the telepathy-as their most intimate level of communication, for obvious reasons. Their telepathy is not involuntary. It's something that takes a deliberate effort. And they don't need to be bonded to read each other's minds, but generally, they don't unless there's a close familial relationship involved. In any case, it doesn't take a mind reader to see that you're in a somewhat difficult position. You might feel as if you've been . . . well, raped, I suppose. There's no delicate way to put it. At the very least, you were seduced. But there really wasn't any other choice."

  "I don't understand," I said.

  "I know," Higgins said. "It's difficult to explain. You see, a Nomad male is not normally sexually responsive unless he's specifically triggered or, to put it another way, 'activated' by a female desiring to mate. That's part of what you felt last night. It's an incredibly powerful stimulus the females put out, part olfactory, part telepathic. Part visual, too," he added, smiling. "And as you discovered, it works very well on humans. Sort of an aphrodisiac that hits you on several levels at once. If you'll forgive the pun, a Nomad female quite literally turns you on."

  "Tell me about it," I said, still feeling weak and sore all over. I glanced at Tali awkwardly. There was a feral beauty about her that was absolutely riveting and I couldn't get over how I could have forgotten most of what had happened last night. She must have tripped some secret switch deep within me and driven me into a raving sexual frenzy. I now understood what Higgins meant when he said that mating with Tyla had almost crippled him. No question about it. I simply wasn't man enough for my new wife. Another night like that and my heart would burst. I sure hoped she'd understand and not hold it against me if I told her that I had a headache.

  "Among the Nomads," Higgins went on, "choice naturally falls to the females. They can take as husband any male they wish, subject to their ranking in the tribe. For example, if Tyla wanted the same male that Tali wanted, Tyla's choice would take precedence and Tali would not begrudge her. Jealousy wouldn't enter into it."

  "But, purely for the sake of argument," said Breck, "what if Tali decided she wanted one of Tyla's husbands?"

  Tali glanced at Breck with a puzzled expression. "There are many males with no mate," she said, speaking precisely and choosing her words carefully, her English improving rapidly as she picked up the conversational rhythms. "With so many males in need, why would I-wish to take a male from my sister?"

  "And if it was that important to her," Higgins said, "I think Tyla probably wouldn't hesitate to give one of her males to Tali."

  "Wait a minute," I said. "Don't the males have anything to say about it?"

  "Why?" said Tali, looking at me earnestly. At least, it seemed like an earnest expression.

  "Why?" I said. "Suppose a male doesn't agree with a female's choice?"

  She stared at me. "Males do not question females," she said, as if speaking an obvious truth.

  "Well, this one does," I said.

  "O'Toole, give it a rest a minute," Higgins said. "You're not at home, okay? You know, when in Rome, do as the Romans do?"

  "What are Romans?" Tali said. "Different from humans?"

  "I think I'm losing control of this discussion," Higgins said, with a sigh. "They're sort of a human tribe, Tali. Anyway, the point I'm trying to make her
e, O'Toole, is that for Tali to have the . . . uh, the depth or intensity of contact with you that was necessary to forestall the telepathic attack upon your mind, it was necessary for her to mate with you and-"

  "Whoa! Back up a minute!" I said, staring at him. "What do you mean, 'to forestall the telepathic attack upon my mind'? What telepathic attack?"

  Higgins glanced at Breck. "You didn't tell him?"

  "I thought perhaps you'd best explain about his getting married first," Breck said. "He's had a rough night and it's not the first time he woke up on the morning after and found himself a newlywed, you see. He's a bit touchy on the subject."

  "What the hell are you two talking about?" I said.

  'That time compression sensation you experienced," said Breck. "You remember when I told you that I felt a mental tug, as well? A sort of probing?"

  I nodded.

  "We thought it was Tyla," he said. "Turns out it wasn't. It was Chameleon."

  For a moment, I simply stared at him stupidly, and then it dawned on me. Mondago said that Chameleon had learned to use his biochip to tap into the playermaster satellite network and bypass Game Control. But I hadn't realized that meant the shapechanger could tune directly into any one of us!

  "Tyla sensed it," Breck said, "but she didn't quite understand what was happening to you at first. It threw her. She thought humans were incapable of telepathic communication."

  "She didn't know about biochips," Higgins explained. "I don't have one, you see."

  "You will," said Breck.

  "Like hell I will."

  "I'm afraid you won't have any choice," said Breck. "You're about to be drafted, Higgins."

  "Listen, if your people think they can simply-"

  "Wait a minute!" I interrupted them. "Can we settle this later? For God's sake, Breck, some alien creature just attacked my mind from light-years away and you're arguing about whether or not Higgins is coming back with us?"