“Why are you afraid of me?” He had not felt so sore and weak since his forced rehabilitation.
Ridgeback stammered, “You—you are like the Us in the cage, stranger. They do nothing but fight.”
Dahlgren became aware of the screaming and chattering behind him, and turned. The Pit had the rank smell of the more unpleasant places on the planet, and the clone cage was likely the most unpleasant place in the Pit. Its occupants were rolling on the floor, tugging each other’s hair, biting each other’s faces in an ecstasy of some sort. “They are not always fighting,” Dahlgren observed. He turned away.
“It is time to eat,” said Grayhead.
“I’m not hungry,” said Dahlgren. He sat on a rock, which emitted a sharp exclamation point, and he got up hastily.
“That is Thinks,” the serpent said.
“What?”
“Stranger does not read you,” Ridgeback said. “Thinks is one of Us.”
Dahlgren knelt to examine it. The creature called Thinks did not look as much like a rock as a brain coral half a meter across; very deep brown, the color of polished wood, and actually composed of closely packed layers of frilled and fluted bone. He touched it gently. It repeated, “!”, and then “?”
Dahlgren murmured, “Lower grade ESP than even tKlaa.”
“tKlaa is my mother,” said Ridgeback suddenly, “but I am not a Thinks.” Dahlgren nodded. Mutated clone or artificially conceived child of tKlaa, and her people had racial memory. No biovine on this one either. Well, tKlaa would never know she had had—whatever it was. And Dahlgren’s wife would never know—his heart wrenched—to what use her flesh had been put, either.
He spent an hour exploring the Pit. He avoided the cage; those savage faces of his chilled him. There were other reptiles and mammals, mildly or severely warped variants of species he knew. Perhaps some had come from his own labs, but he thought most had been created by the ergs, because there was only one of each, and no signs of offspring. They were apathetic from long confinement; there was nothing to fight over: each took a different kind of food, one slept on rock, one half in water, one in a tree. They let him examine them, when he asked. They seemed to enjoy his touch, for they had been so long without stimulation. He noted with sadness that their sexual organs were either atrophied or absent. Nothing here reproduced except insects and small scavenging lizards. The erg-created animals had no particular grace, or beauty, but they were alive, and they were the first and last of their kind.
The one of Us they called Thinks he left for the last, because he felt it might be the most interesting. “Will it let me look at it?” he asked Ridgeback.
“It does not care.”
Dahlgren sighed. He did not know why he should care. Death was upon them all. He knelt before the brain coral and peered at it in the dull light. Its bone-flutes were pale in the depths of their creases, and it seemed to glow from within. He turned it over. In the large round opening of its underside there was a pursed mouth and a protruding foot. The mouth contained silt deep in its creases, and threads of glittering slime; likely it fed on soil organisms and rejected the grit. The muscular foot, like a snail’s, would allow it to move and to push soil into its mouth at the same time. Dahlgren approved of this economy, and was about to turn over the heavy casing again when he noticed on the other side of the foot, between it and the bone, a protruding membrane. He slid three fingers into the fold gently and felt a sac of hard round things, like walnuts. His heart thumped. “Are these more of Us?” he asked Ridgeback.
“Yes.”
Dahlgren felt a surge of joy, at this time and in this place, as a lily will spring in a field of thorns. “Parthenogenetic female,” he whispered. “Has she had them before?”
“No.” Thinks was objecting silently but strongly, and he withdrew his hand carefully, not to break the membrane, and turned her over.
So it had taken years for her to grow and hatch these, for true fertility to be born in the Pit.
He realized that the cage was silent and looked up. The male had found a strong heavy stick somewhere and was wrenching at one of the rusty bars, which was beginning to give a little. It stopped when it felt his eyes on it, shoved its face at the bars and began to scream at him; the female joined in. They had borne no children; they were sterile, like some clones, or had become sterile out of rage and frustration, like some captive animals.
A door scraped; a servo appeared, dropped a lump of this and a gob of that before each creature. The Dahlgren male quickly hid the stick under a heap of rubble in the corner of its cage and went on howling, reaching clawing hands at Dahlgren. The servo threw a few moldy and misshapen fruits at it and dumped a heap of them in a trough before the cage, then paused to let fall a few more at Dahlgren’s feet.
Feeling thoroughly demoted, Dahlgren settled his stiff joints on a genuine rock and began sorting through the garbage for something to eat. Every once in a while he raised his eyes to glance at that bending bar.
THE ROAD menders had finished their work and gone; the yellow brick road wound in darkness, buckling over ridges of broken granite, and dipping in sloughs of crumbled sandstone edged with salt crystals. There was no life except in the occasional vein of lightning that crossed the sky. It was an hour to midnight; in erg-Queen’s terms it was twenty-seven and counting.
In the main chamber of the Argus its crew were sitting on lumpy sacks of dead moss and wilted cabbage leaves. Esther was crouching on Sven’s shoulder with her arm around his neck; everyone looked frightened and sickly.
Shirvanian ran a finger around the remains of his black eye. His voice quavered. “I had to hide him; there was nothing else I could do. She’s planning to kill us and Dahlgren once she gets him up in orbit.”
“All right,” Sven said, “but what will she do when she can’t find him?”
“I—I think she’ll pick us up.”
Sven said, “It’s better than being burnt down. Why do you think she’ll pick us up?”
“Because the only way I could get hold of a machine she doesn’t control was to knock out the one that gives it orders, and the one I chose was in the same class as the one I scrambled before. I left a trail to give her a hint that I’d done it, and make her more curious about me. Maybe I did more than I should have.” He rubbed the sweat off his forehead with his sleeve. “I’d have had to come out to check with you, and I couldn’t have made myself go back in there again.”
“Maybe you should have stayed,” said Mitzi.
“I don’t think she’s ready to take orders from me yet.”
Joshua said, “She may decide to burn us anyway.”
“I don’t think so. I’m sure she’ll have to find out where he is and I did my best to make her realize I’d hid him. She was threatening to send out Dahlgren under drugs and hypnosis, but that was just a bluff. Even if she could make him go under it wouldn’t last, or else his heart would give out.”
“Nine years,” Sven whispered, “and he may die first.”
Joshua kept on, “But why’d she move the time up?”
“She was afraid of the erg’s loyalty. She made him too well; they both agreed on that. The more he stayed near Dahlgren the more like him he got, and naturally the more he liked him.”
“It doesn’t sound natural to me,” Mitzi said.
Ardagh asked dryly, “When did you last like anybody?”
Shirvanian scrubbed his forehead again. “When I was in her brain I found out a lot—I found out a lot more than I wanted to.” His eyes were on Sven.
“You mean you found out more than I’d want to know. It always turns out that way.”
Shirvanian was silent.
“Go ahead. I’d better learn while I’m still alive.”
“Your four arms ... she didn’t do that, but the ergs that made her did.”
Sven’s stomach tightened. “Why?”
“The
y wanted to—to weaken, to demoralize Dahlgren. They did something just after the ovum got fertilized, when the cells start dividing and you get something called a—um—”
“Blastula,” said Ardagh.
“Yeah ... and they knew how much he’d wanted to—to have a kid ... with his wife ...”
“I see.” For a few moments Sven thought his thoracic muscles would tighten till they broke his ribs. Suddenly they relaxed. Esther’s fingers drummed his shoulder.
“Yes, Esther ... you were right ... I admit it. It fits with his being a prisoner, anyway.”
“We haven’t got much time,” said Shirvanian,
Esther said, “Suppose—if they do decide to pick us up—they send a crew to pry us open right here, where it’s about seventy-five rads per hour in the shade—”
“That’s inefficient,” said Joshua. “I’m sure the skimmers have strong enough grapples.”
Sven asked Shirvanian, “Where’d you put the erg?”
“Are you sure you want to know that?”
“We’re going to tell her before we let her pull any of us apart trying to find out. The idea is to stay alive.”
“He’s on a shelf in Clothier’s storeroom wrapped up in twenty-five meters first-quality midnight blue takIon from Sirius Two.”
“What?”
“I can’t help it. That crazy machine thinks like that and it gets to you!”
* * *
One of Argus’s tool kits was open, rattling on the floor, and Joshua and Shirvanian were staring moodily into it.
“What an arsenal.” Mitzi hugged herself with white-knuckled hands.
Joshua lifted out one of the coils of explosive. “What’d they use the plastic for?”
“To blow out rockfalls on the road,” Sven said.
Joshua picked out a rivet gun, a clip of rivets, two lighters ... his hand hesitated over the blowtorches.
“Don’t take the heavy one,” Sven said. “You’ll fall all over it, and you won’t have time for big jobs.”
“How much time do you think we have now?” Joshua asked.
Shirvanian shrugged. “Maybe an hour. She’ll have to make plans too.”
“Ardagh, would you have a book with a blank page we could draw a map on?”
“How’d you guess?” Ardagh picked herself up.
“I can’t draw,” Shirvanian said.
“It’s the right time to tell us. How did you design?”
“On a computer, with a light pen, and then the computer rectified it. It’s in my head all right, I got it out of erg-Queen.”
“As long as you’ve got it in your head I’ll get it on the paper. Come on, we can’t use more than fifteen minutes for that.”
Sven went into the control room, Esther riding on his shoulder. There was nothing more to do. Flyover had stopped, and there were no signals from Surveyor.
“I said terrible things to you, once,” said Esther.
“I thought terrible things. At least what you said was true.”
“Are you upset?”
“I’d have liked to be able to tell him ...”
“Oh yes, I know that one,” said Esther. After a moment, she added, “I did the best I could with my life, but it would have been nothing without you. And Yigal.”
Sven took her hand and kissed it.
“I’ll just go and stay by myself for a bit,” Esther said, and slipped away.
Sven picked up the mike. “Well, Argus, have you found any pirates in the forest lately?”
THERE IS NO FOREST HERE ANY MORE, SVEN. THINGS HAVE CHANGED.
“Yes, they certainly have.”
Ardagh came in and leaned against the wall, face lifted to the screen where the yellow brick road wound in the strange light of the infra-red.
“We might as well drop our brick load,” Sven said. “At least leave a block for anything coming up behind us.” He gave the order and the bricks went out with a clatter.
Ardagh found a sack in the corner and sat on it. “You look like a Brobdingnag from here.”
“I feel small enough.”
“Do you feel very different about your father now?”
“Different, but not as much as I thought I would. After all, how did I get through those years? I tried to make myself believe he had a reason—not only for making me, but for keeping me alive.”
“Because he loved your mother ... and you ... and—and now you’ve found it’s worth living you’ve given your whole life to a—a bunch of petty criminals.”
“That’s dramatizing, Ardagh. I didn’t think you were all that criminal.”
“We weren’t that successful at it ... tried to steal a ship, couldn’t even make a go of that ... just failures.”
“Koz didn’t fail.”
“Yes, but he’s dead ... did you think the rest of us were like that?”
“Oh, no.”
“What did you think, Sven?”
He was thinking of her face as she caught sight of him with Mitzi. “That’s very hard to answer.”
“I didn’t mean to embarrass you. You did so much for us ... I wondered if you thought we were worthless.”
Do you hate me, Esther? “I thought you were unhappy ...” What did she want from him? “Why do you ask?”
“Because we were all Triskelians ... you might have felt ...”
“Many ranks and orders ... well, I felt that Koz was sick in some way. Mitzi too, I guess. Hates and hurts herself. Shirvanian!” He laughed. “You and Joshua puzzled me ... and then I decided that Joshua probably deserted the Space Academy and had been sent, or was being sent to the Order to duck the disgrace, or the law, or maybe both ...”
“And me?”
“Why should I ask, Ardagh? I’m not the law.”
“I didn’t want you to think—”
“Whatever it is, I don’t.” It hit like a crack on the head, finally. I would have liked to be able to tell ... He said gently, “If you want so much to tell me, I’ll listen. And I won’t think any differently.”
After a silence she said, “No. I don’t believe you will. Now I don’t know why I want to tell you ... or where to start. Where the beginning is ...
“The colony. That damned colony. Rotten place, all tundra ... and we took the blame. We! My great-grandparents. And the shape. Servos. School kids used to laugh. Ox, lummox, everything. And the whole bunch insisted on marrying among themselves, even though the geneticists told them they’d better not. Oh no, kids might have faulty bone structure. I think it was because they hated the Terraform Branch and wanted the government to keep remembering what it’d done. Stupid. It’s stupid, people don’t remember that. At the same time they’ve got some kind of inside-out pride, they work harder to show they’re just as good or better. And they’re right, as far as brains and money go. My parents actually are Solthree diplomats. I guess I love them, but they really are a goddam sour lot.”
Sven laughed. “How did you escape?”
“What?”
“Being sour.”
Her face gave in to a smile. “The same reason they work harder. I’m a lot like them, that way. But ...
“I had these two great scholarships to off-world med-schools, where the competition runs in the millions. The first one I interviewed got nervous about my background, mild physical flaw, dissenters in the family; it was like religious prejudice. And they don’t care, the line-ups chew your heels for a thousand worlds. Maybe a lawyer could have made a case out of it, but my family was scared of getting into court for that, into the news media ... they said, try the other one, and if it doesn’t work, forget it, go into something else. I couldn’t do that. So I bought a background.
“Sol Three is a sector capital, pole-to-pole bureaucracy. You can buy any document you want, and I had plenty of spending money. Not too man
y lies, a few shifts here and there, phony X rays with the medical ... those people are very clever. I got in, I was happy for a while, everything was—I thought everything was going well ... until they started asking for more money or they’d spill it all. After a while I ran out of money, the family caught me trying to sell one of my microscopes, and that was the end of it ... Mitzi says I wanted to be caught, I wanted to disgrace them. Maybe that’s what she wanted. I don’t know.”
“You can’t get back into school? I mean, medical school?”
“Not with my record, plus whatever would be thrown at me if I got out of this alive.”
“Biology? Pathology?”
“I don’t know. I wanted to be a surgeon. I suppose I was lucky to get into the Order instead of one of those really great Juvenile Homes. Maybe I should have left it at that.”
“And the others?”
“You got them down about right. And it’s true, their parents were going to the Conference: it’s a big thing, thousands. Our Center’s on Barrazan Two and we met them on Four because it has a big port facility. They hadn’t seen us for a while and it was on the way.”
“The Order didn’t send anybody out with you.”
“A robot cruiser on a two-day trip, custody of our parents, we stayed in port the whole time ... the Triskelians just didn’t know what they got when they took on Shirvanian—and neither did we.”
“Joshua hated that uniform so much ... and he wore it.”
“I think he wanted to make things easier for his parents ... that takes a kind of pride too. You’ve got the whole story now. And it’s true.” Her voice thickened. “It doesn’t matter much at this point, does it?”
He knelt before her, took her hands in one pair of his own and framed her face with the others. “I’m sorry—”
Her face twisted. “For God’s sake, don’t give me any—”
“Ardagh! I’m sorry you were so unlucky—and so foolish too. I’m sorry I didn’t have more resources to help you with, or the brains to plan more wisely so we wouldn’t be in such a mess. I’m not giving you any pity, and I don’t want any either.”
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