Ash Ock

by Christopher Hinz

She motioned him to one of the utilitarian chairs. “If you get out of that clumsy spacesuit, you’ll be more comfortable.”

  He sat down. Undress. Yes, that made sense. They certainly could not make love with Ghandi wearing this armor. And his groin was starting to bother him. Spacesuit crotch plates were not designed for great expansion.

  “I’ll be right back,” she whispered. “I’m going to give your friends some chores to do.”

  Ghandi could only nod.

  * * *

  His spacesuit—a rumpled mass of bendable plastic—lay in a heap beside his chair. He had been sitting in the midcompartment for what seemed a long time, alone, staring at the floor because whenever he tried to look at the walls his headache worsened.

  He was trying desperately to remember something. Something important. A facet of pre-Apocalyptic history. But the idea of making love to the woman kept interfering with his thought processes. He simply could not concentrate.

  I need her.

  That was important.

  I need her. Yes!

  The conscious acknowledgment brought him back.

  He roared to his feet, grabbed the thruster from the belt of his crumpled spacesuit, and ran to the nearest window. He kept his eyes focused directly ahead, away from the pastel walls.

  I need her all right. Son of a bitch! I need her like I need a second asshole.

  She had caught them, drawn them in like bees to honey. She was using an almost mythical device of pre-Apocalyptic origin—a needbreeder—state-of-the-art technology from over two centuries ago, when Earth science had reached undreamed-of heights.

  He recalled what he had read about the device, about the invisible beams that tracked eye movements, insinuating their curious pattern of radiation, skirting the brain’s cerebral judgment centers to overwhelm the less rational safeguards of the emotion-oriented limbic system. The hypnotic effects of the needbreeder enabled the user—in this case the young woman, who was probably using special contact lenses to shield herself—to emotionally manipulate any and all victims. Needbreeder trances could last anywhere from hours to days.

  Ghandi assumed that the midcompartment’s pastel walls housed the needbreeder’s actual hardware—the tiny subliminal televisors, flooding the room with their deadly hypnotic radiation. That made perfect sense, and accounted for the extraordinarily vibrant walls in the corridor. The optic assault of those walls had prepped Ghandi and his mates for entering the needbreeder compartment. Simple psychology. Their eyes had been automatically drawn to the soothing pastel walls, finding relief from the spectral madness outside. Subconsciously, they had been indoctrinated into looking more intensely at the hidden needbreeder.

  “I’m impressed,” said the woman.

  Ghandi whirled. She stood there in the open air-seal, hands on hips, smiling.

  He aimed the thruster at her chest. “Don’t move!”

  “I won’t.” She did not appear upset by his action.

  “I could kill you for what you’ve done.”

  “Yes,” she agreed. “But you won’t.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “You’re not a talker, Corelli-Paul Ghandi. Talkers never resist—let alone escape—my needbreeder. You’re a doer. If you intended to kill me, you would have done it by now.”

  “Pretty sure of yourself.”

  “Yes.”

  Anger surged through him. “Who the fuck are you? How the hell do you know my name?”

  “Don’t be weak,” she chided. “Getting mad can be effective in many situations, but not in this one. Anger’s a tool. Use it well or don’t use it at all.”

  “Answer my question, bitch.”

  The aquamarine eyes seemed to study him for a long moment. Then:

  “My name is Colette. And I know your name because I scanned your shuttle’s computer when it was still a hundred miles away from Denver.”

  Ghandi frowned. “That’s not possible. We have a shielded computer.”

  She looked down at his crotch. “I notice you lost your erection.” She smiled. “That’s too bad.”

  “Don’t change the subject.”

  “I haven’t.”

  Ghandi felt his pulse beginning to quicken. “Where’s my crew?” he demanded.

  “Outside.”

  Keeping his thruster pointed at the woman, he moved to the midcompartment window. The glass bore a light dusting of snow, but Ghandi could see through it well enough to make out their own vessel, resting on the exit ramp beyond the eight-lane highway. The main loading hatch was down. The captain and the pilot were using a portable winch to lift a seven-foot-high, pale-ivory egg into the cargo bay.

  It was a stasis capsule—a genetically manufactured living cocoon, surrounding and protecting someone being held in suspended animation.

  Son-of-a-bitch!

  And in the middle of the highway, Ghandi spotted a second stasis capsule, fastened to a small power sled, being guided toward their shuttle by his other two crewmates.

  “Do you know why you escaped the needbreeder?” the woman asked calmly.

  “Shut up! Who the hell are you? Where did you come from? Who’s in those stasis capsules? And why the fuck are they being transferred onto my ship?”

  “You escaped,” she continued effortlessly, “because you’re smarter than your mates. You should be the captain, Corelli-Paul Ghandi. Why do you waste your time serving lesser men?”

  Anger surged. “Don’t push your luck, bitch!”

  She sighed. “Stop being dense, stupidity doesn’t become you. You escaped from the needbreeder because you have a certain inner control, a quality that few humans possess. And I need someone with such an attribute. I have plans . . . and you are the man who may be able to help me carry them out.

  “I could have killed you, Ghandi, as you sat here helplessly for the past hour, fighting the needbreeder. But you overcame—you’ve proven your worth.

  “I need your help. I wish to . . . emigrate . . . to the Colonies. I wish to learn about colonial life—you could become my teacher, my guide. I need someone with intelligence to function as my business partner—someone who understands the dynamics of intercolonial commerce, someone who understands the value of marketing certain products . . . shall we say, technological items that are presently officially prohibited.” She grinned. “The needbreeder is merely a sample of what I have to offer.

  “And so, Corelli-Paul Ghandi, I hereby offer this proposition: assist me—and I will make you wealthy and powerful beyond your dreams.” She peeled open the blue vest and let it fall to the floor. She wore nothing underneath.

  Her breasts were perfect. Ghandi felt his heartbeat accelerating. His palm grew sweaty. The gun wavered.

  Laughing, she unsnapped her white pants and let them fall to the deck. “I don’t like underwear.”

  His erection returned. His throat went dry again. “Who are you?” he whispered.

  Dancing eyes, speckled with joy . . . amusement. “I told you—my name is Colette. But I have a secret name. Come closer, and I will whisper it to you . . .”

  Ghandi heard a sharp noise. He looked down. He had dropped the thruster.

  Either she moved to him or he moved to her—Ghandi was not sure which. But abruptly they were together. Arms encircled him. Hot breath tickled his ear.

  “I am a human needbreeder,” she whispered. “And my secret name is . . .

  “Sappho.”

  Sappho. A name out of history. There were two of them: one a poetess of ancient Greece, and the other . . .

  The other was the name of a Paratwa of the Royal Caste. An Ash Ock.

  Two of them.

  Ghandi understood. For one timeless moment, he considered trying to tear himself away from her embrace.

  “I want you, Ghandi.”

  And then it was too late.

  O}o{O

  To Susan Quint, there was nothing at all remarkable about the four-mile-wide, eighteen-mile-long space community of Honshu. Like the other two
hundred and seventeen floating cylinders that comprised the Irryan Colonies, Honshu orbited the devastated Earth at a perigee of over one hundred thousand miles. Like that of most of the other colonies, the cylinder’s inner surface was divided into six lengthwise strips—alternating land and sun sectors—the latter three arcs composed of thick slabs of cosmishield glass. Honshu’s citizens lived on the inside of the vast cylinder, on the three land sectors, under a gravitational pull of 1G induced by the cylinder’s slow and carefully regulated rotation rate. For a medium-sized colony with a service economy, Honshu’s population fit the normal curve; slightly more than five million people breathed the air of its self-contained ecosystem. Most of those citizens lived in this capital city of Yamaguchi.

  In almost every respect, Honshu was an ordinary colony. In almost every respect, Susan Quint was glad to be leaving it.

  She took one last look at the triple image of the noonday sun, reflected through the three cosmishield glass strips by rows of mirrors, and then entered a glittering red archway between two office buildings. The archway, typical of shuttle terminal entrances in Yamaguchi, was shaped like an ancient pagoda. Inside the portal, the pagoda arch collapsed into a luminescent tunnel: a glowing ramp descending into the bowels of the city.

  Susan squinted. Shuttle entrances were notoriously overilluminated, and this tunnel had to be at least twice as bright as the filtered sunlight out on the street. A monumental waste of electricity, she thought, but then everybody wasted electricity. Few colonies ever had to worry about the cost of energy; community power needs were adequately satisfied by keeping the northern ends of the cylinders aimed at the sun. Solar power was cheap and abundant, and Honshu, like many other midsized colonies, flaunted its electrical wealth.

  But no matter how well Honshu lit itself, no matter how exotic its shuttle-port entrances appeared, this colony, like all others, faded into the shadows when contrasted against the light and decor of Irrya.

  Susan could hardly wait to get back home. She certainly enjoyed her job and the fantastic travel privileges it afforded her. But on this trip, she had been away from Irrya for almost a week, and to be out of touch with the Capitol for that length of time did nothing to help her career, to say nothing of her social life. Maintaining status was not an easy task in Irrya; the crown jewel of the Colonies demanded constant attention, and the competition for that attention was intense.

  Susan allowed herself a smile. Of course, she did have a rather unfair advantage. Not everyone could boast that their great-aunt was an Irryan councilor—one of five human beings whose decisions determined the political course of the Colonies.

  Aunt Inez was the chief executive of La Gloria de la Ciencia—the science and technology advocacy group—and it was in that capacity that she had gotten Susan this job, as a progress inspector for the organization.

  The brightly lit entrance tunnel continued curving downward. A few hundred feet later, it opened into the equally well illuminated underground concourse. Five other inlet ramps poured into the terminal from ground level, depositing multitudes from Yamaguchi’s various street entrances. In addition, there were six ramps to handle outbound traffic as well as a plethora of escalators and elevators leading to the actual shuttle docks a hundred feet below. Susan sighed. Honshu did share one unfortunate characteristic with Irrya. Like shuttle terminals everywhere, it was overcrowded.

  At least she would not have to wait in line at any of the automated ticket machines that rimmed the concourse. Susan’s shuttle pass, issued by La Gloria de la Ciencia, enabled her to move from Colony to Colony with minimal delay. La Gloria de la Ciencia took care of all travel arrangements and Susan consciously thanked them for that little perk each time her duties necessitated plunging into a corpulent terminal like this one.

  Gripping her transit bag tightly, and with a glance upward at the color-coded ceiling grid, she began squirming her way through the mass of people, heading for the departure gates. She walked briskly, eyes straight ahead, ignoring the usual profusion of social fatix and outcasts who seemed to gravitate to shuttle terminals throughout the Colonies.

  There were beggars and barterers. There were hordes of silkies, male and female, wearing every imaginable style of enticing garment, their eyes alert for bored travelers with enough time—and money—to afford a sexual romp at one of the nearby hotels. Missionaries garbed in flowing blue-green robes solemnly handed out invocation disks, seeking converts for their Reformed Church of the Trust. Even today, the Church remained a powerful institution, albeit a pale shadow of its progenitor, the original C of the T, which had splintered following the debacle of fifty-six years ago, when its bishop had been exposed as the tway of an Ash Ock Paratwa.

  Dealers and traders drifted through the crowd, offering every sort of merchandise, from rare Earth coins and hologames to scrap antiques, aural encyclopedias, and authentic Costeau odorant bags—the fumigated variety. Phony C-ray ignors stumbled back and forth, eyes vacant, message plates strapped to bare and dirty chests, neon words begging for enough cash cards to provide them with a meal. A few years ago, Susan might have been taken in by these helpless-looking creatures, but these days she was too much the experienced traveler to be fooled. Authentic, genetically retarded individuals, whose ancestors had suffered overexposure to cosmic rays, were a rarity in 2363. Susan found it amazing that people continually stooped to such depths to make money.

  She passed by a quartet of Costeaus—the mainstreamed variety—two men and two women, sans odorant bags. They were dressed in stunning purple leisure suits of a style that Susan recognized as being designed by the high-fashion house of A-la Pa-pa-la in Irrya’s North Epsilon District. But Costeaus remained Costeaus, and this bunch was not about to let anyone forget the fact. One of the women wore a miniature thruster housed in a silver-and-pink belt strap. Legal, but extremely unorthodox. And the taller of the two men had his shaved skull implanted with staggered rows of detoxified beryllium spikes. Susan flinched. That was positively grotesque. No matter how well mainstreamed into colonial society they might appear to be, and no matter how much everyone seemed to brag about the Grand Infusion, pirates remained pirates.

  “That’s a fine ass, silky,” uttered a male voice from directly behind her.

  Susan did not turn. She instinctively knew that the man was talking to her and she also knew that it would be a mistake to even acknowledge his existence.

  “Let’s trade, silky. Fresh bread for fresh white meat.”

  She sighed. He wasn’t going to let it go, either—one stupid remark would not be enough.

  “Hey, silky—today’s payday, if you’ll only take a chance.”

  Not just an ordinary hustler, she thought, but a dumb one as well. Silk-trading was technically illegal in many colonies, although authorities everywhere tried to ignore the cylinders’ oldest profession. Still, a little subtlety was called for when propositioning in public places. Local patrollers did police shuttle terminals, and if Susan was bold enough to formally complain, the patrollers would at least have to give the bastard a citation.

  But her tormentor doubtlessly realized that Susan—along with most other sexual quarries—would be in too much of a hurry to make an issue out of a few noxious remarks.

  Having been mistaken for a prostitute enough times in the past, she had gotten used to it. Still, the lewd remarks were annoying. She sighed. Nothing to be done about it. She was twenty-six years old and naturally attractive, and those advantages were too important to disguise by dressing herself like some sort of pre-Apocalyptic nun. And it certainly wasn’t Susan’s fault that many of the high-priced silkies also seemed to have adopted the latest fashion in Irryan bunhuggy slacks.

  The voice tried again. “Hey, silky! With an ass like that you should . . .”

  The words degenerated into a loud, obscene gurgle. Susan twisted her lips in disgust. Enough was enough. Just because she would not involve patrollers in the matter did not mean that she had to put up with this sort of blatant hara
ssment. She spun around, fully prepared to throw the bastard a few choice words.

  He stood three yards behind her—an older man with a pudgy face and deep-set brown eyes. He looked astonished. A full-circle white cape flowed outward to cover an obvious potbelly and the front of the cape bore an odd design of large red splotches. For just an instant, Susan thought that his startled expression had to do with her turning around. But then he opened his mouth and gurgled again, and huge globs of blood poured out and splattered onto the front of his cape, creating a fresh arrangement of gross red stains.

  Susan retreated in horror.

  The man shuddered and collapsed facedown onto the terminal floor. The back of his cape was torn and shredded; he had been stabbed from behind.

  A woman shouted. Off to Susan’s left, a rapid series of thruster blasts thundered above the din of the terminal, and then the entire crowd seemed to erupt into a screaming mob.

  Someone shoved her from behind and she stumbled forward, almost tripping over the body of the caped man. Pivoting at the last moment, she avoided touching the bloody corpse. But she was thrown off-balance, and she had to run several feet forward to regain equilibrium, and then suddenly there was no crowd, but there were bodies littering the floor—everywhere—and she was tripping over arms and legs and some of them were no longer attached to anything, and then her toe smacked into the back of a woman’s head, and the head went rolling across the deck—an attractive young face with smiling eyes . . .

  Susan froze. A scream erupted from deep down inside her chest, but it just seemed to blend into the other screams, as if Susan were just one miniscule fragment of some total entity, one huge creature, overwhelmed by terror.

  But the force that maintained Susan Quint as a discrete being erupted to life, and that inner spirit whispered into consciousness.

  Run! Get away from here!

  And then she was leaping over bodies, head twisting wildly from side to side, simultaneously looking for the killer and scanning the leading edge of the retreating crowd, knowing that she would be infinitely safer as a part of a group, rather than out in the open like this . . .