Deathsport

by William Hughes

  The ritual was done. They were joined as one for any attempt they might make to free themselves from this terrible place. Now, Kaz Oshay could talk of other things. He whispered:

  “We must take care of our own. The child. I will help you to find her when we are gone from this place.”

  Deneer’s eyes flashed their message of gratitude. They shone as if a burden of worry had been taken from her mind by his reassurance. Such words from one Guide to another were as good as the ancient oaths made to the gods—a vow to the death.

  Once more silence reigned between them as their eyes explored each other before Kaz Oshay asked:

  “Do you have knowledge of why we have been brought here?”

  Deneer began a reply:

  “All Guides—”

  After this time, the chief jailer, inspecting his video machines, had come to the conclusion that the two prisoners were communicating with each other, though he had not been able to hear a word that they had said. Still, he enjoyed being safe rather than sorry and he had sent a bolt of electricity through the door and floors of both cells. Kaz Oshay and Deneer fell to the ground, knocked almost unconscious by the force of the blows. At his console, the jailer chuckled at the results of his little surprise.

  As the two Guides struggled, dazed, to their feet, his voice boomed out over the loudspeakers:

  “If you disobey me and open your mouths again, I will make sure that the pain gets worse. Now stand by your doors in silence as you were ordered.”

  Doctor Karl had left his office and his work at the clinic as soon as the summons came through. A summons to go to the chambers of the Lord Zirpola deserved no lesser response. As a man, the doctor had little time for the ruler of Helix, regarding him as something of a strutting, ridiculous figure, but, as a patient, he would not have dreamt of not treating him at once. In addition, as the ruler’s personal doctor, he knew the man’s wild changes of mood and had a great sense of self-preservation.

  He was still dressed in the white, zip-on one-piece jump suit that he wore to go about his work in the Helix Clinic and he merely snatched up his treatment bag and made for the elevator complex that would take him up to Zirpola’s quarters. The only delay was the moment he spent fumbling for the special pass that he could slip into the slot at the side of the elevator that proved his official status and would allow him to ride up.

  Karl strode out of the elevator on to the thick pile carpet that was on the corridor floor in front of the entrance to the ruler’s quarters. He was a trim, neat man in his early fifties, still retaining a good head of dark hair, though here and there there was a hint of grey streaking it. His face still retained a trace of the youthful good looks that could be seen to better effect in the face of his son, Marcus. A widower for many years, he lived only for two things; the widening of his knowledge in his craft and the future of his son.

  He crossed the short space between the elevator doors and the entrance to the ruler’s apartments and stopped, glancing at the bored-looking Obedience Enforcer who stood on guard outside and who nodded vaguely at him. Doctor Karl was a well-known, even distinguished member of the hierarchy and recently his treatment visits had been becoming more and more frequent. He was never summoned when Ankar Moor was around, but then the guard on duty reported all the Lord Zirpola’s visitors, so there was no chance, as the ruler hoped, that the doctor’s coming and going would be secret.

  The guard turned to the inter-communicator console and announced that the doctor had arrived. A moment later, the main door slid open and Zirpola himself stood in the doorway, leaning against the lintel to support his shaking frame. The sweat was pouring out of his pallid, oily skin and his watery blue eyes flickered with an unbearable pain.

  He took a pace forward, wobbled, then thrust out a talonlike hand to cling to Doctor Karl’s arm:

  “Doctor Karl, you must help me, you must. The pain. It is getting worse and my head may burst.”

  Karl was somewhat taken aback by this public show of weakness. He had seen Zirpola in one of these attacks before but had never seen him give way to one in front of any other witness. He glanced at the guard, but the man was staring with an exaggerated studied boredom at the closed elevator doors as if he was unaware that anyone else was present. He knew that his life was in danger if he gave any indication that he had noticed such weakness in his lord and master.

  Doctor Karl helped the Lord of Helix into his chambers and the door slid shut on them. Many times in the past, the doctor had tried to persuade Zirpola to come to the diagnostic centre at the clinic and each time he had refused the suggestion. Now, bracing himself for the tirade he felt sure would come, he tried again:

  “You must come to the clinic. It is imperative. You must give me the chance to treat the causes of your pain, not just remedy the results.”

  If he had expected another argument, he was pleasantly surprised. Zirpola was in too much pain to argue:

  “Take me. Do what you like. But stop this pain.”

  Doctor Karl took no chance that Zirpola would change his mind. He half dragged him back to the door, opened it, pulled him through to the elevator bank and opened the doors, hustling him inside and pressing the button for the clinic level before another word had been spoken. Only when they were travelling down did Zirpola say:

  “None other must see me.”

  Doctor Karl gave him his professionally reassuring smile:

  “Trust me.”

  Three levels down there was an elevator changing station, from which he could take another elevator that would land them in the hallways of the clinic itself.

  He opened the doors at this level, glanced out and, seeing that no one was in evidence, he half-walked, half-carried the stricken man across and they were moving down again. By the time the elevator doors opened in the hallway of the clinic, the pain had receded enough to allow the Lord of Helix to stride out on his own. Even so, he still made no argument against going into diagnosis, but, as Karl led him to his private office, he said urgently:

  “You must help me, Doctor.”

  “Be patient,” soothed Karl. “It will take only a little time and then we will know what must be done.”

  They entered Doctor Karl’s private consulting rooms and Zirpola sank down in a chair. But he was not going to get away as easily as that. The doctor crossed the room and opened the door that led to his examination and diagnosis room:

  “Come in here.”

  Zirpola, feeling a new wave of pain, tried to rise, fell back and the doctor was forced to support him into the other room, propping him up on the side of the examination table. He went back for his bag, opening it as he re-entered the room. The first essential, before making his diagnostic tests, was to stop the pain for the moment and soothe down his patient.

  In recent weeks he had always kept a syringe of painkiller ready in his bag and he took one out now and turned to set about his work. Zirpola held up a shaky hand. His voice was thin and reedy with pain:

  “What is that? I will not be made helpless.”

  Karl had been through the same question before and he answered with his usual formula:

  “It is just a drug that will soothe the pain, that is all.”

  Zirpola lowered his head. In the last few years, the ruler of Helix had trusted fewer and fewer of the men around him, knowing that they all secretly hated him, knowing that they were just waiting for some sign of weakness in him so that they could depose him and seize his power, for he had no natural heir, no issue to follow him. Many of them he had had destroyed, others had been imprisoned before they had died in the Death Sport. Now there was a mere handful of men he trusted. The most powerful of these was Ankar Moor, but the closest was Doctor Karl.

  An added argument for trust came with a further wave of blinding pain that almost made him fall. He nodded feebly:

  “Help me, Doctor, please.”

  Karl reached up with his free hand and undid the throat clasp that held up the great emerald cloak whic
h was Zirpola’s clothing of office, so that it slipped off his thin, rounded shoulders, on to the floor. The Ruler of Helix stood revealed as a rail-thin, shaky old man. He knew the routine and rolled up the sleeve of the blouse he wore, after which Doctor Karl found a spot on the oily skin where the needle had not entered before and, after rubbing it with his special disinfectant, he rammed the needle home and gave the injection.

  Zirpola gave no sign of pain at this pin-prick. It was nothing compared with what was happening in his head. Karl withdrew the needle, then:

  “You will feel relief in just a moment. Now lie on this table and I will prepare you for your tests.

  Slowly, the Lord Zirpola obeyed Doctor Karl’s instructions and swung his legs up on the examination table, lying back, resting his head on the pillow at the end. Karl could see that the injection was beginning to take effect, beating back the waves of pain inside his patient, so that he subsided from his rigid shaking tension into a sort of relaxation, his eyes wide open, the lines smoothing out of his face.

  Now that his patient was more relaxed, the doctor turned his attention to his diagnostic machines, wheeling them forward along the far side of the couch, ready to make a thorough examination. He checked out the screens, making sure that everything was in working order.

  It was only after he had made checks that the doctor turned his attention back to Zirpola:

  “I am going to fit these electrodes on you. The machines will be able to diagnose what is wrong with you better than any human examination could. That way, we will be able to treat the cause of the pain.”

  Zirpola sighed. He was relaxing now, his nervousness disappearing with the racking pain which had been threatening to explode his head:

  “Very well, Doctor. Do what you have to do. I must know what is wrong. I must be cured before it is too late.”

  Something in the stricken man’s tone told Doctor Karl that he was referring to something more than just stopping a disease in time. Outside, he maintained his neutral, placid manner, inside, he was asking himself the question: “Too late for what?” Later there would be time enough to follow the train of speculation that had been opened up. Lord Zirpola was a sick, perhaps even a dying man; his unhealthy pallor, the sweating, the constant bouts of pain, all these things were indications of a deep-laid malady. Diagnosis might be the only way of saving him, so that should come before curiosity. As he started to fit on the electrodes, Doctor Karl speculated on the irony of the fact that death came to great and humble alike, not sparing one at the expense of the other. Whatever progress man had made, either before or after the great devastation, he had never been able to change that.

  Carefully, the doctor taped the electrodes to the man’s forehead and temples, then, as the first machine started to function and absorb the transmitted information and commence its read-out of the results of sensory measurement of the patient’s brain waves, he taped similar electrodes from a second machine to the man’s chest and arms. A few more such attachments and all the machines were humming away at their task, correlating their information for the read-outs that would give him his answers—if he was lucky.

  Slowly, Doctor Karl had been reaching out towards the moment of his greatest danger in the examination. In order to let the machines do their work with the best efficiency, the patient would have to be put to sleep for a short time, a state that would put him entirely under Karl’s control. Karl knew, even had Zirpola not stated it, that the man on the table would not normally allow this to happen, so he had to make the actions that led up to it look casual, in order that Zirpola would not realise what had been done to him.

  He readied a syringe and laid it out on the little table by his bag. Next, he got a length of surgical rubber hose and only then did he say to his patient:

  “Now give me your arm. There’s still one test I have to do by hand. We don’t have a machine for it.”

  Zirpola feebly raised his emaciated right arm, Karl took if and tightly wrapped the surgical hose just above the elbow, so that the veins bulged out. He reached behind him, caught up the syringe and made his injection in a smooth neat movement, watching as the fluid passed into the man’s bloodstream, his face wincing momentarily at the prick of the needle:

  “Now, my Lord, if you will count from ten to one very slowly, please.”

  Zirpola might not have liked the injection but he had no inkling that he was being put under. His brow contracted and he began:

  “Ten . . . Nine . . . Eight . . . Seven . . . Six . . .”

  He got no further, his voice drifting away into silence as his senses fled from him and he was carried to a lower level of consciousness; asleep within himself, but still able to respond to the stimuli around him.

  Karl breathed a sigh of relief that it had been so easy. He removed the syringe, destroying it and mixing it with other debris in the trash can in the corner of his consulting-room. He could only pray that, should Zirpola realise what had happened to him when he came round, he would believe that he had fainted away and would not be able to find any evidence that he had been doctored. To be safer still, he pressed a button by the trash can and the whole contents slid away down into the great disintegrators that dealt with the City’s rubbish. Now he was able to turn his full attention to his patient. On the level of dream-filled consciousness where his mind was balanced, Zirpola groaned and licked his lips in a repellent reflexive action, like some great lizard basking in the sun.

  Doctor Karl checked the dials on his machines and the pulsing scan graph that hummed quietly away in one corner. Then he was ready to begin the questioning that was so vital to the diagnostic process:

  “My Lord, how long have you suffered from this pain?”

  He had guessed that it had been many months before Zirpola had succumbed to the pain and had first come to him for help. There was a momentary pause as some final defence mechanism in his patient’s brain fought against the free answering of any question asked by another, then the fight was over and he began to respond, his voice floating softly out of him as if he had no control over it:

  “Some months . . .”

  “How many months?”

  “I do not remember; many months. Since I learnt of the Death Machines and their power.”

  Karl had been preparing to write sensible answers on a little pad. Now he stopped, frozen by the answer. No one in the City of Helix had yet been told about the existence of the Death Machines, though there had been rumours circulating:

  “I’m sorry. Would you repeat? Since when?”

  “The machines. Since the Death Machines came to light.”

  He was on to something that frightened him. Just to be sure that Zirpola was not at a level of consciousness where he was hallucinating, he leant forward and checked the screens. The read-out on the man’s brainwaves and general metabolism seemed level enough:

  “The Death Machines? Explain to me about the Death Machines.”

  The drugged man immediately became agitated. His brow wrinkled, smoothed and wrinkled again. He groaned, his head moving from side to side, and the tongue flickered out to lick his lips over and over again. The machine that measured brainwaves now began to show a marked agitation, and an intensification of brain activity. Karl decided that his only choice was to press his questioning, to capitalise on this:

  “The Death Machines. You must explain what they are. It is important to my understanding.”

  The patient sucked in his breath:

  “They are very powerful, invincible.”

  “But what are they?”

  Zirpola hardly seemed to hear the repeated question but pressed on down his own track of thought:

  “Now that we have them, there is no one who will be able to stand in our way.”

  Karl frowned:

  “Stand in our way? Why would they want to? What would they want to block us for?”

  The voice of the man on the table got louder, rising almost to a screech that made Doctor Karl step back a pace:

>   “From war.”

  The use of the word and the intensity with which his patient had spoken it gave the doctor an almost physical pain. He was suddenly as frightened by the sight of the man before him as that man had been by his pain. War was to all intents and purposes a forbidden word, as it had become an impossible concept, diametrically opposed to the survival of what remained of humanity on the face of the earth. It had led to the degree of destruction that humanity now faced and, in effect, it had been unthinkable for nine hundred years, though it had only been formally banned by the members of the City Federation from a much later date. Ever since the Statemen had found it possible to journey beyond the confines of their own City, they had never conceived of renewing rivalry with the citizens of other Cities in this old-fashioned and outmoded way. War had been forgotten and forbidden, never to enter the range of human understanding again. And now this man, this sick, enraged, twisted mind, was pronouncing the word with a force and conviction that seemed to give it new life.

  Karl thought for a minute, looking down on his patient with disgust. It would be so easy to end it all now—an accident with the machines—a reversed power surge and Zirpola would be dead. But Karl was above all things a doctor, and a doctor never takes human life:

  “War? What makes you talk of war? We are not at war. There is no one who would fight us.”

  The man on the table shook his head and chuckled evilly:

  “War will come, for I have need of it. We must take it from them if we are to triumph.”

  “Take what?”

  “Their fuel. We need their fuel. They have it in plenty and we must take it from them.”

  That answered one question, now Doctor Karl pressed the other:

  “And from whom is the fuel to come?”

  Zirpola became even more excited than previously. It was as if these questions, triggering off, as they were, his secret plans, gave him access to an internal power that was not always available to him. To Karl, it was a frightening sight to witness.

  “From Triton. Triton has all the fuel we need.”

  “But have we not asked Triton? Surely Triton would help us, would give us what we need?”