Hero!

by Dave Duncan

  Three weeks ago he would have been ashamed of his excitement, but now he can sense that same thrill in Raj and even in Dice, who has visited big cities many times.

  Not only are the three brethren virtually indistinguishable, but they are becoming more so. Vaun knows he is picking up Dice’s way of speaking, although he is not conscious of trying to. It is fun to notice Raj doing the same. As the oldest, Dice tends to set the standard and sometimes he will quote Prior as an authority, but he will often conform to the others if he finds himself in a minority—he enjoys eating fish now. Better food and better booster are relieving Vaun of his extreme skinniness, and that means he must look even more like Raj than he did before. None of them has mentioned this convergence, but Vaun knows that if he has noticed, then the others must have done so also.

  “There it is!” Raj is on the other side from Vaun, keeping down and peering out in the same uncomfortable crouch.

  “Got it.” Dice sits on the bench by the motor, at the stern, looking very calm and competent. He speaks a command to the controls.

  Their destination is the marina where the boat was hired four weeks ago. Vaun glances at the sun, estimating time. At noon, Prior’s torch will be sitting in the parking lot, waiting.

  Soon Vaun will see himself or at least his double, in the uniform of a spacer commodore. That will be a memorable experience. Prior is much older, of course, but he looks exactly like Dice, Raj says. They both seem to worship Prior. He is the leader, the pioneer. Prior is not his real name, but a sort of title that he adopted as his name when he arrived on Ult.

  “Even brethren have to have leaders,” Dice has explained. “Sometimes a decision isn’t obvious, and you can’t have half jumping one way and half the other…So Prior says.”

  Only Prior really knows, of course. Only Prior knows how it feels to be not just one of a half dozen identical brethren, but one of hundreds. Vaun feels giddy when he tries to imagine it. Prior was born…conceived…on Avalon, and he embarked on the Q ship Green Pastures when he was about the age Vaun is now.

  Soon, very soon, he will meet Prior. Then he will learn some more of his own future. Either Raj and Dice do not know what is planned, or they have been ordered not to say. Whatever it is, Vaun knows he will accept it. These are his people. He belongs, and after a lifetime of alienation, this is ecstasy. If Prior tells him to lie down on the street and be run over, he will probably do it.

  Well, he might argue a little first.

  And, of course, he can be certain that Prior will never betray him like that. He can trust his brothers, as he has never been able to trust anyone, except maybe Nivel, long ago.

  The boat glides very slowly through a maze of floating jetties and small pleasure craft in a bewildering spangle of colors and shapes. And the people—clean, well-fed, well-dressed rich folk! Peeking under his hat brim, Vaun sees that most of them do indeed have black hair. Their skin color and their shapes vary a lot, but light hair is not common at all. He sees a few boys of delta type, with sandy hair and shaggy chests. Already their oddly squashed faces look ugly to him, although he would never have thought so three weeks ago.

  Randoms. Wild stock. He practices the brethren’s terms and they sound good in his mind. He may be alien to the randoms, but they are alien to him. Perhaps the city of Cashalix is as alien to Vaun as Ult was to Prior, twenty years ago.

  Bump.

  Raj leaps ashore with a rope. Vaun eases in under the canopy so as not to be noticed, keeping his head down.

  “Five minutes early,” Dice says, stepping swiftly in beside him. “Not bad. Remember your orders?”

  “Of course.” For some reason Vaun feels a little nettled by the tone.

  Dice raises his thin, dark eyebrows. “I’m Prior for this trip, Brother.”

  “Of course.” Maybe Dice is not as cool as he looks.

  Raj bounces back into the boat, and it rocks.

  Vaun squares his shoulders, and Dice claps a hard hand on one of them.

  “Good luck, Brother!”

  Vaun stares into those wonderful black eyes and sees concern, and he wants to fall on his knees and sing hymns of gratitude—he won’t, of course, because the other two look oddly at him if he mentions religion at all, and that is something else he must come to terms with. But Dice cares! So does Raj, of course. Two boys who care what happens to Vaun? That’s a miracle. That’s enough to make him weep. But he manages to flash his brother a cheerful smile of thanks and turn away casually, as if he knows Cashalix as well as he knows the village, as if his pulse isn’t racing like he has a summer fever and his eyelids prickling.

  He scrambles up on the jetty. He is going first, because first is safest. If any underoccupied busybody is going to notice three identical boys disembarking from that boat, then it will not be the first of the three that raises the alarm. There should not be an alarm, because wild stock breed twins and triplets sometimes. He does not know why any concealment is necessary, but this is how Prior wants it done.

  He strolls. Rarely has he ever wanted to run quite so much as he does now, but he strolls. He tries to look as though he is interested in the myriad craft in the pool, but they are a meaningless blur to him. He reaches the shore and ambles up the stair.

  The street is a madhouse of noise and crowds and confusion. Half the population seem to be giants. He shies back as a huge girl thrusts bare breasts in his face. “Watch me being raped tonight on ‘Wonderworld’,” she says urgently. Then he realizes that it is a sim. He turns away in disgust and is faced with a grotesque wall of rippling brown bulges. “The girls must all be laughing at you, lad!” the giant roars through the din. “Astal Booster will double your muscles in two weeks! No exercise required!” Vaun makes a fast dodge around the figure, walks right through a slimy reptilian biped waving a book at him, and finally reaches the curb.

  And there is the parking lot across the street. Watch out for the traffic, Dice has told him. He attaches himself to a knot of jabbering, chattering girls, and crosses when they do. If anything goes wrong, he must make his way to the base of that silvery spire to the north and wait there. Under no circumstances must he run back to the boat. But nothing should go wrong.

  So why is his heart leaping all around his chest like a sandfly?

  For a long, terrifying moment, he looks blankly over the parking lot, appalled by the number of vehicles and torches, and by their diversity. He has never dreamed that there could be so many machines in the world. The whole of the village would not buy one of these shiny monsters. Female sims cluster around him, fighting for his attention, merging at times into gruesome many-limbed, multiheaded composites, all shouting, touting products and services he has never heard of. He has to peer around and between them. “I have no money!” he shouts, but they pay no attention. More come hurrying over. Then, with inexpressible relief, he sees the ominous black bulk of a Patrol torch, hogging two parking stalls.

  He strolls across to it. He risks a glance around, and no one is watching. Frightened that he may have seemed furtive, he raises his chin and looks around again, defiantly. The torch is a monster, as big as Glora’s cottage. The windows are all smoky-dark, so he can see nothing of what is inside.

  He lays a thumb on the door plate. Astonishingly, the door slides open for him, as Dice had said it would. He thinks he will be very glad to see Raj and Dice again. Raj will be along in a minute; Dice must settle the bill for the boat.

  Vaun steps into the torch and the door hisses quietly shut. He blinks in the cool gloom.

  There are two men there in uniform, and neither of them looks in the least like him, or Raj, or Dice.

  NOW COMES THE Dreamer, silent in the hot night. A shape, undetected…gone again…perhaps just a whisper, a breath of movement among the rushes? Hovering unseen, unheard, unfelt. The Dreamer crosses the black pools without rippling their stillness, and the rank grasses barely wave as he drifts above them. There is no moon. There is never a moon here, and the rank fog hides the stars. Hovering
over the swampland, the hunter who does not kill, the predator that gives life…

  Dark his pursuit, yet bright his purpose. Mean deed may craft great matter, as the teachers say.

  This craft tonight is a mean and decadent means indeed. Such craft are not crafted anymore, for the means are depleted and the craft is lost. Very witty…No matter. No one here to appreciate his wit except the rightful owner, and he neglects his duties as host, for he lies a-snoring on the floor beyond the bed. Hyperdisneural hallucinosis, you say? Commonly known as stungun hangover? Well, fancy! A hefty shot of axilithene also? Poor fellow. But he may be capable of answering simple questions in seven or eight weeks, if he’s lucky.

  No, he cannot rightfully be called the rightful owner. Legal owner, maybe. He deserves no sympathy, that weak-faced Sybarite, that fleshy random, for he must surely have inherited this antique wonder, this luxurious drifter with its pseudobrain control and divided-quarkian suspension, and even if he has somehow earned, it honestly, he has conceived no better purpose for it than to fit it out as a floating brothel. Not a rightful deed.

  But a pleasant irony under the circumstances.

  Wonderful old technology. Wonderful for getting around uncivilized country, perhaps of honorable purpose once. A model this size could house a band of six units in comfort—foresters or ecologists, say—and disturb nothing in the environment with its passing.

  And now regard it! A cesspool of expensive bad taste. Thick rugs, crystal chandeliers, silken bed sheets! Walls padded in lace and crimson velvet, pornographic sim equipment ready to depict every depravity imaginable. Pathetic, really. Thus do wild stock squander their lives and resources in the useless pursuit of transient carnal sensation. Sad. Decadent. Overdue for replacement.

  Of course there are no tiresome control panels in sight to spoil the love-nest decor. Diminutive marshes, channels, bayous—all flow silently by within a sim imaged above the central gilt-and-crystal table. The craft itself rises and falls smoothly in a seductive, soothing motion.

  There have been no signs of humankind for the last hour. Time is running out. Before morning the Dreamer must return to claim his torch from the copse by the Transdelta Highway, and this lust boat must be safely sunk in a convenient pond. It has served him poorly. He should have hijacked a more prosaic vehicle and hunted in the orchard country eastward. This delta excursion has been a regrettable folly.

  But wait! Here comes something new—a jetty and a diminutive huddle of shacks. Alter course, change speed…A squalid little hamlet, drawing slowly closer as the drifter approaches. There may be quarry hereabouts—silent bog monster stalks its prey through the night.

  This is the thirteenth mission, and the last. In two days the Dreamer must report to Doggoth, an appointment he will not miss—not after all the effort required to get it! Granted that randoms vary widely in their abilities, a rational boy would expect them to favor their best, and to define those best by merit. But no! Amazing! On Ult, access to the Patrol is restricted to the pampered get of spacers.

  Even so, that same rational boy might assume that a space patrol containing almost no one with deep space experience would welcome a former member of a Q ship crew as an acceptable recruit. Well, barely. Only just. Only after two years’ bribery and flattery and scheming and crawling around webs. Back in Monad, the teachers warned him: Nepotism must always be an intrinsic weakness of random societies.

  The teachers would be proud of him now, he thinks; his brothers would be proud of him. He has done well so far. It will be interesting to see how the Doggoth teachers react to a recruit who can sport spacefarer blazes on his lapels. Badly, probably. But he can hold his own in any company of mere lust-maddened randoms.

  Aha! A solitary figure is making its faltering way along a dirt track on the far side of the hamlet. In the false colors of the infrared, it shimmers as a violet ghost. Dare a boy hope that this lonely pedestrian will be the right age and sex? He demands more magnification.

  Yes! He feels a hunter’s visceral thrill. Luck is on the side of virtue. She is just what he needs.

  It is easy. In a few minutes he has circled around and brought the drifter down astride the track, a dozen paces ahead of the plodding figure. He slips on his vision enhancers and douses the lights. The door opens with a barely audible hiss. He need not even stalk his prey on foot—moments later, she stumbles to a halt in front of him, recognizing the presence of something solid ahead of her in the mist. As she raises her hand uncertainly to feel for the obstacle, he shoots her down.

  He holsters the stungun and stoops to lift her. She is not heavy, but she does stink.

  Door closed…lights on. He glances around and concludes that to use that bed for his purpose would be altogether too ironic, even for him. He spreads her out on the little table, legs dangling over one end, head over the other. He tells the craft to retrace its course until it is above open water, and feels a gentle tremor as it rises from the ground.

  His catch is scraggly, pale, and pocked by insect bites; not promising material at all. The medics back at Monad said that half the implants would take, but they hadn’t counted on recipients like this. She may well be a total waste of time.

  If her hair were clean, it would be blond. Her single garment is a disgustingly grubby rag, so rotten it rips apart when he pulls it up…pubic hair darker, breasts flat and hard. Given a better diet and lifestyle, she might have been attractive enough…

  Horror!

  Something has come alive inside his pants. His pulse beats harder. He feels a breathless tremor, a tightness in his chest.

  Just two days from now he must report at Doggoth and begin his impersonation of a random. Career performance will be easy—he can outscore any recruit they have ever seen if he chooses to. Being accepted socially will be something else. Although the normal behavior of a wild stock male is utterly repellent to him, he will contemplate even that if he must. For the Brotherhood. So he has begun dosing himself with stiffener already, and now the sight of this squalid female peasant has set off the required reaction. No matter that he consciously rejects her flea-bitten carcass with revulsion and dismay—knowing that he has years of this abomination to look forward to—at the same time he craves it.

  Business first…except that his pants are squeezing him so painfully that he has to open his fly, and that simple act, that meaningless gesture he has performed innumerable times without a thought, is suddenly erotic and sinful and exciting. His arousal grows. Striving to ignore it, he fetches his equipment and sets to work. Thirteenth time, and last time. Ethics? Is he still bothered by the ethics of it? Not really. He is an agent of destiny, of evolution in progress. The upward struggle of any life-form is a ruthless, savage contest, and he is merely a tool, like the predator that eliminates the unfit.

  So why are his hands shaking? They never have before.

  Insert the speculum…dilate vagina…laparoscope inspection—which finds no sign of a legitimate tenant to be evicted…catheter into the cervix…He fumbles. Damn! Damn! Damn! A slip here could puncture a major artery.

  Then he rises and regards the scrawny patient, still oblivious. “That’s it!” he says aloud. “Well, almost. I wish you safe labor, citizen, so that together we may launch one more unit of the Brotherhood on a promising career of subversion and conquest.”

  He strokes her thigh thoughtfully, and then goes for the syringes.

  “You are the thirteenth, you know,” he says as he inserts the needle in the first bottle, “and the last. There can be no more after you, for I have no more hormone.” He squeezes the dosage into the muscle of her thigh. “I hope you appreciate this, mother-to-be? The months I spent deciphering pharmacopoeias, translated pharmacologies, plundering pharmacies, and concocting pharmaceuticals?” The second shot goes into a vein in her groin. “All just to stimulate you into producing a corpus luteum, you ungrateful wretch?”

  Done. Except that there is more than half a dose left.

  He ponders, regarding the e
maciated limbs and shrunken belly. “Would you care for seconds? Why not! I really have no further use for it. You are most welcome.”

  Aware that the tremor in his hands is showing no signs of fading, he gives her the rest of the drugs and tosses the instruments into the bag under the table. Again he contemplates the disgusting female body before him.

  “That completes our business, citizen. As you would see if you were paying attention, there is also a problem of pleasure to consider.” It doesn’t feel like pleasure. It feels like an irresistible compulsion.

  Trembling, he unbuttons his shirt. “You understand that I do need the practice? I’m sure I can trust your discretion in the matter? More than I can trust anyone else’s, and I will have to start sometime.” He feels nauseated and invigorated at the same time. The worst part is the knowledge that stiffener acts primarily on the mind. It has made him want to couple his flesh with that of this filthy, naked animal.

  There can be no harm in it, for forty-eight chromosomes can never meld with twelve, even if his testes produced viable sperm, which they don’t.

  “I do hope you feel honored,” he says, as he removes his pants. He takes hold of the girl’s knees to spread her legs wider, and feels a sudden reaction. Her head jerks up, chin on sternum, and she stares at him with wide-stretched mud-brown eyes.

  That double dosage may have been an error.

  He is absurdly aware that he is as naked as she is. Never in his life has nudity bothered him before, but it does now. The immediate result is to remove all trace of the burning lust he felt only a moment ago. What in the galaxy ever possessed him? Tongue-tied, he stands and stares back at her, wondering what to do now. The boy snoring beyond the bed never caught a clear view of his assailant, but the theft of the drifter will be discovered eventually, and now there is a witness to describe the thief’s appearance.