Mindworlds

by Phyllis Gotlieb

  Cawdor opened his mouth and—Rrengha appeared from among the forest of legs and looked him up and down. “You give your comm to the Bengtvadi woman in your camp that you smoke the ge’inn with after dinner.”

  Cawdor closed his mouth. Blood rose into his rawboned face like wine poured into a pitcher. Without a word he jumped on his tractor and sheared off.

  The beaten O’e, half Cawdor’s size, was bleeding from his bruised mouth, thin pink blood. “I’ll get you first-aid for that, soldier,” Gretorix said, and took him by the shoulder.

  Spartakos seemed about to follow, and Ned said, “Wait.”

  Spartakos turned half of his body by a hundred and eighty degrees. “Yes, Ned?”

  Ned said very carefully, “Please, send your O’e friends back to their own camps tonight, Spartakos. They’re becoming a target, and if they ever do move out of line they’ll be hammered twice as hard.”

  “They need me.”

  “You don’t want them hurt. If they march around with you leading them it looks to those chukkers like they’re being threatened, and it’s just too hard to protect each one. If they need you so much they’ll do what you ask.”

  Azzah cried, “How are we going to live together in this place if we’re treated like that? And you say we mustn’t defend ourselves.”

  “Not yet. Not by marching in straight lines. I don’t like the way things are going here, and I think we will have to defend ourselves, but in the meantime don’t ever forget we’re dependent on the enemy for food and water, they’re armed and they can get out of here whenever they want and we can’t, and even if we could we’d have a damned long way to walk.”

  The O’e muttered among themselves for a few moments until Spartakos waved his hands and they dispersed. Ned broke into a sweat and ran off to get lunch before anybody picked a fight with him.

  The afternoon passed with weapons drills and more brush-cutting, and after dinner the camps were quiet enough with recruits playing zodostix or skambi for not much stakes, telling hard luck stories of seventeen worlds, and boasting of old conquests made only in the imagination.

  But Ned’s mind was running and running around the possibilities: they were a closed perimeter. Spartakos could break through fences, but only in one place at a time; Rrengha could control minds, but only a few at once. The big powerful Dabiri had a cyber hindquarter that did not work very well. The O’e were stronger than they looked, but no stronger than anyone else here.

  “Spartakos,” he whispered, “can you disrupt the electronics in any of those weapons they carry here?”

  “Some. Most of the long-arms you train with are mechanical, except for their sighting mechanisms.” After a moment he added, “I will use weapons to defend you and others but only to disable, not kill.”

  “I’ve never killed anyone yet, except once by accident. But you can’t create an army and then tell the troops not to kill anybody.”

  Spartakos had nothing to answer.

  Montador City: Bait

  Tyloe said, “You want us to go out there in that wilderness and let him catch us. What will you do if we refuse?”

  “Not what I will do, it’s what he will do,” the Lyhhrt said. “Perhaps something like using your body for his workshell.” At this point Lorrice ran for the bathroom to throw up. “That will let him move freely without being noticed. Or he can split and make two of himself quite easily. They will be much younger versions but quite as evil. I could have done that myself when he murdered my Other, but that one would not be other, and though we might like to believe that we are all the same person, your friend here has realized that there are differences, there are identities, and we need them.”

  “And you could do to us what you say he—the non-Other can—”

  “No! He has lost his sense of sin because he is so alone. I have not, yet. That’s one point of difference.”

  “Maybe, but you’re still asking us to let ourselves be killed.”

  “I did not cause you to be in this situation, and I am certain that you could not have escaped for long with the plans you made.”

  “I’m not so sure of that,” Tyloe said sharply. “He’d have had no way to track us.”

  “Whatever he would have done, I have found you now,” the Lyhhrt said. “It is better than being found by the police and the government, and I will do everything in my power to keep you safe. I have only a few days to find that one and only a few more to take care of some others.”

  Lorrice had come back into the room, looking pale and dabbing at her mouth. “What have we got to do?”

  The Lyhhrt held out the gold leaves: “Stay here tonight, then take this money, go out into the city and do as you were doing, but keep the money with you. I will give you some of my own to spend. I’ll stay out of sight but always within five spans of you, you will sense it with your telepathy. Likely he will find us all at the same time, but he will be much more interested in me.”

  “You hope,” she said.

  Tyloe took the folded leaves as if they were poison. “Maybe this money was meant to lead your enemy to you.”

  “If it was, so be it,” the Lyhhrt said.

  With a deep rasping breath, Lorrice said, “Back where we started.” They were in bed, Tyloe keeping his hands to himself, only too tired now. “I feel as if I’m in one of those stories where you’re condemned to live the same day over again forever. Repentance doesn’t do much good either.” She touched his shoulder, a light virginal touch. “I’m sorry I bit your head off. I knew exactly what Andres Brezant was. Loving never improved him, and I was scared of him one half of every minute.”

  “Yeh, now we can be scared shitless the whole time.”

  The Lyhhrt had gone, but was hovering somewhere. Both Lyhhrt were.

  Moving targets, they spent a second day in the same activities, shopped for wilder clothes, bought more colorful drinks, ate at even more pretentious restaurants and left even bigger tips with Lyhhrt money. Always they sensed the light touch of the Lyhhrt’s mind, but they were frozen numb, and hardly spoke.

  Tyloe thought only of what Lorrice was thinking as she scanned the milling crowds of vacationers, beggars marooned as Lorrice had been, diplomats in locked security helmets, other Lyhhrt who could esp anyone but would rather not fight through the press of minds, the clouds of thought like nebulae among bodies, holograms, blinking neons, walls shrieking bulletins.

  For relief they fled into a theater where they took the cheapest back-row seat and thankfully did not hear or see much of the morbid drama of alien incest and revenge or its five-language subtitles.

  It was when they were coming out that Lorrice felt the knuckle-biting hollow-chested dread that approaching Lyhhrt gave her. When they were focussed on her.

  Tyloe felt those chills again. “That’s him?”

  She whispered, “There’s two of them, oh my God.” Then she said, “I know them.” The ambassadors in bronze and silver-scrolled brass who had left Brezant in that Lyhhrt-world restaurant to snarl and smash glass.

  The Lyhhrt, now in his half-visible brushed silver, had been crouching on the curb that night in O’e’s clothing. He came from behind to stand between Lorrice and Tyloe: “So do I.”

  In Deep in Bonzador

  Rrengha kept prowling at night, like her ancestor the leopard on Earth. She made Ned uneasy. “You’re gonna get a big poke with a zap if you keep that up.” Since he’d whacked Hummer she was going around with a plexiplast wristband and an even meaner look on her face. Ned was always on the dodge.

  “She is no match,” Rrengha said. She was not boasting.

  But Ned tossed on his mattress ever more restlessly. He felt enclosed, and his mind beat at its walls.

  Enclosed. A country with no city, no government, only hundreds of villages and each with, at the most, one or two peace officers. Spartakos might reach them by radio but they had no forces. Who would believe us? And if they’re anything like the police in Miramar they’ll join in running the place w
ith the rest of these yobbos.

  A country where people came to lose their identities, become unidentified …

  And Rrengha endangering herself. Spartakos commanding his O’e cohort like some half-mad general. The stupidity of his own choices. Zel and the kids whom he might never see again. The Lyhhrt’s departure/desertion: Will he bring us help?

  :If he does not it is because he is dead.:

  There’s a thought to hold on to.

  :Time to break that cycle,: Rrengha said, and it broke. As he was falling asleep he found himself in her mind:

  Ground under her feet … an ingrown claw to bite off, tail slung along flank, :Nobody can grab that.: Shoulderblades pistons in oil—:Only to Earthers! These are my bones in meat.: Filthy air stinking of rotten leaves, too much water in it … all those strange minds trying to sleep or looking for trouble, There’s a murderer, those two are thieves, and all the snoring lot of them are lost spirits far from no home. Why do they come here? Why am I here?

  Something else: sudden air currents, winds. Gates opening. An air carrier with a silent engine, whose only sign is in the movement of air, landing in a small field cleared in the brush beyond the fences … . It trundles through the gateway, no pilot, it is a drone … Hummer and Oxman waiting there, the bay doors open, the ramp slides out like a tongue, containers on noiseless casters roll down and settle on the ground.

  Weapons. The vision of thermoplastics and blued steel is in Hummer’s mind. She thumbs her comm, the ramp pulls in, doors shut on it, the car rises in silence. The electric gates close with a crackle. She aims a hypnoform gun at the containers, and they blend with the shadows. Double the watch.

  Oxman reads the manifests. None of them Quadzulls.

  Plenty on Khagodis.

  Yeh. Oxman licks his lips: Now we’re in business.

  Ned twisted on his mattress, fighting the dream. Rrengha touched his mind and his sleep deepened.

  When he woke, stretching and yawning, it was another thick moist day. The dream … when he raised the tent flap she was there.

  :That is no dream,: Rrengha said.

  “I was afraid not. I don’t think all of those guns were meant for us to use … .”

  :I don’t believe so either.:

  There was a low rustle of ill feeling along with the daily struggles against the brush. Rrengha was sleeping off her night’s efforts and none of the caretakers was likely to give her a poke. She had pulled in and shielded her thoughts and dreams as the Lyhhrt had done, and Ned became even more uneasy.

  He knew now who the thieves were and the murderer, but somehow wished that Rrengha had not shown him. At times he had put on the Lyhhrt helmet, pulled its knobs and pushed its buttons, but it was built to let him communicate with Spartakos, who was right within arm’s reach; arrogant Lyhhrt were not to be contacted at will. He was afraid to use his wrist comm: he had no other contacts than the Lyhhrt who would not communicate, and he did not dare to try reaching Zella. If the call was intercepted he would be putting her in danger.

  Now he put on the helmet to keep his mind to himself and went on doing whatever was asked, busy work that could have been done cheaper and easier with machines or chemicals, beating his brains against the problems.

  “Spartakos, could you call down an aircar for us to board?”

  “We are killed before it lands.”

  “Yeh, I thought so—”

  “—and we cannot load all those fourteen hundred and seventy no matter how much you like to save them.”

  The grand old Duke of York, he had ten thousand men … try getting all of them out of here. “We—hey, wha—”

  The cyborg woman had whacked him full length with an armful of scratchy branches. “Watch it, Grushka!” The armful was obviously too big to keep hold of, but there were other places to drop it.

  She put a hand to her mouth, not the metal one. “Sorry, Ned, sorry!” Then, in a low voice, “It’s so hot and dirty and bloody boring here I’m off my crock. I come to fight but it’s more like a prison with hard labor.”

  Ned picked leaves off his face. “You want a fight you won’t get it from me.”

  “Maybe I’ll go look up your friend Metallo Man, we can fight cyber to cyber.”

  “He’d probably like a fight, but I don’t think he’d want to play at it.” He wondered if she’d been doing ge’inn, she had that smoky look in her eyes.

  “Well, I’ll just ask him—” Spartakos was somewhere nearby working his corner of the forest.

  “No!” He found himself growling and forced cold urgency into his voice. “You don’t want one of those yobbos coming down on you like yesterday for chrissake!”

  “Yaah! Did I hear somebody wants a fight?”

  Ned recognized one of the thieves in the stubbled face grinning over Grushka’s shoulder. Grushka turned. “I want a friendly fight, and you aren’t one of my friends.”

  “Well, you can pretend I’m one.” He grabbed her shoulder. “Come on.”

  “No!” She gave his nose a couple of taps with a metal forefinger, and he backed off.

  The thief turned to Ned. “Can’t I find a fight with anybody here? You’re supposed to be a pug.”

  Ned kicked a stack of branches. “I’m fighting this stuff here and you can help.”

  “You’re scared!”

  “You’re damned right! If I fight for no money and get my head cracked, I can’t fight for money, can I?”

  The thief’s friend, a skinny long-face with a scraggy chin beard, came along to join the argument. “Fight going on?”

  “You two can fight, but leave me out,” Ned said, but he knew there was no way out.

  “I like that helmet,” the thief said.

  “I’m sure you do. It’s not for sale.”

  “Give you mine for it.”

  “This one won’t work for you.” :If you want to join a militia you will need this,: says Lyhhrt.

  “Yer puttin’ me on.”

  “Unless you’re my twin and I doubt it.”

  The thief and his friend laughed in unison. “How do you know I ain’t your twin? At least let me try it on.”

  “It might hurt you.”

  More laughter. They began slapping Ned back and forth between them in a semi-friendly manner. Ned kicked one in the shin and elbowed the other in the windpipe, and was immediately sorry. They fell back, recovered fast and came at him harder.

  He slid away out of their grip and let them bang their heads together, then Grushka caught one in the shoulder with her cyber hand, but the other kicked her out of combat, and pushed Ned face down on the ground. He was slow about trying to get up because he’d already had this done to him within the last half-tenday.

  Gretorix came running to break up the fight and the thief punched him hard in the chest, snarling, “Get outa this, you old bastard!” then rolled Ned over, straddled him and pulled out a knife.

  Hummer came then. “Hey! Whatsis!”

  Hummer was the one that scared him. Ned grabbed a mouthful of air and gasped, “Awright, awright, you can have it!” He fumbled to unclasp the helmet, and the attacker moved away to let him.

  Hummer stared at them and Ned. “What is this?”

  “Just a friendly argument, ma’am.” The thief’s friend was fading into the distance.

  There was a look in Hummer’s eyes when they rested on Ned.

  “Go ahead, take it!” Ned thought his time was up.

  The thief said, “How d’you close this thing?”

  “That dirty face looks familiar,” Hummer muttered, and her eyes opened wider.

  “Push that lever,” Ned said breathlessly; his heart was beating enough for two.

  Hummer said, “You—”

  The thief pushed the lever.

  He screamed, then choked and fell to the ground.

  Everything went still.

  Rrengha padded up and looked at the fallen man. “Dead.” :I sleep too long.:

  “What’s going on?” Hummer yelled a
nd dropped to her knees beside the body. She seemed to have forgotten Ned, and Ned did not wonder why. Rrengha could not make people do what she wanted but, like the Lyhhrt, she was a master at making them forget what they wanted.

  He realized that Grushka was crying, and as he slowly picked himself up saw that she was kneeling beside Gretorix, who had not been able to pick himself up, nor was he moving at all. She pointed at the thief: “That sonofabitch punched him good.”

  Hummer yelled, “But why is he dead?”

  “He pushed the wrong button,” Ned muttered.

  Grushka said, sobbing, “He wanted to try on that helmet and said if he couldn’t he’d kill my friend here, he had a knife, and when Gretorix tried to stop the fight he gave him a punch and Gretorix fell down and then he put on the helmet and something went wrong in it and killed him.”

  Hummer’s eyes were rolling in her head. “Don’t move,” she said, and dinged her comm. Nobody came, and finally she ran off.

  She did not hear Grushka whisper, “And I started it all.”

  Ned knelt to retrieve the helmet. “He said it wouldn’t work for anybody else, but I didn’t know it was a weapon.” He gave it a nervous touch …

  “Yes,” Rrengha said, “Likely you are the one person in the universe that helmet doesn’t hurt.” Answering Ned’s unasked question, “I doubt he knows that either. Lyhhrt always make better than they know.”

  “And sometimes worse.” Ned folded it and clamped it on his arm under the sleeve. “I’m not wearing this for a while.” He looked down at Gretorix, curled up in his death spasm. “What happened here, Rrengha?”

  “Something in heart or veins, we don’t need to know. Stop crying, woman! These things must happen in a place like this.”

  Spartakos, Azzah, and all the O’e in the field were gathering around the tableau, and Ned put a hand on Grushka’s shoulder. She was wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. “He was too damned old for this.”