Morah thought a moment, then nodded. “Very well. I will so inform him. It is now—let’s see, 1720. Give me the comcode and I will see to the checks with my people, and also arrange for you not to be disturbed in the meeting room until… shall we say, 1900? We’ll set your dinner date for then. After, or in the early morning, you can meet the Altavar. Shall we set negotiations to begin at, oh, ten hundred tomorrow morning? That will also give the Council plenty of time, and my men can hook up the Altavar and Council visuals. How does that sound?”
He nodded. “Excellent.” He turned to his counterparts. “You three want to come outside with me? I think we have some talking to do. Of course the ladies can come, too, if you wish.”
He stood there looking at them as they studied him. Tremon was still a big, muscular brute of a man, just as he remembered him, and Lacoch still had a somewhat reptilian cast to him, including a tail. Zhang was in the body of a young civilized worlder, and looked much like he did himself, although he was certainly physically older and felt ancient. He found it interesting that neither of the two with their ladies there had included them in on this reunion, although it saved making explanations.
“I assume we’re being totally bugged, so I won’t say anything I don’t want Morah to know,” he began. “I want to start by stating flatly that I was with you all the way on your worlds. I know you very well, and you know me.”
They were fascinated that, after all the different events that had happened to them, they found it difficult not to begin speaking at the same time, and one quite often could complete another’s statements.
Still, he let them get their resentment out, and, perhaps, their pride as well. Zhang pretty much said why he didn’t want Dylan in the room when he stated, “Hell, you were there, sort of, all the time. Every time we made love, you did it, too. That’s not an easy thing to face, or to explain to her.”
“Then don’t,” he suggested. “Let’s get this straight. We are all individuals. I am Mr. Carroll, for reasons only you three probably understand. You’re Tremon, and you’re Lacoch, and you’re Zhang. I think the easiest way to explain it to others is to explain it in more natural terms.”
They all nodded and said, as one, “Quadruplets.”
“Why not? It’s closer to the truth now, anyway. Have you all been briefed on the situation?”
They nodded, but he found they were still a bit sketchy and he filled in the details. It was surprising, once they got down to business, how quickly the anger and hurt and resentment vanished and they worked almost as a team. Finally, though, Lacoch asked the loaded question. “Where’s our man on Medusa?”
He sighed. “Three hits, one miss. Not a bad record.”
“Dead, then?”
He nodded. “Yes, dead. But his information was the clincher. Damn it, though, I’ll always feel guilty about that. After I got the report from you, Lacoch, on Charon, I had it pretty well down. If I had gone directly to Medusa at that time, instead of delaying as I did, he’d still be alive. It was that close.”
Tremon whistled. “You know, I think all of us hated your guts up until today. I know I did.” The others nodded understandingly. “But, with you here, in the middle of this shit, I think we got off lucky. Not the Medusan, of course, but the three of us, anyway. We’re the individuals, and we’re the free ones living our own lives. You got nothing, nobody, not even the Confederacy in a pinch, and you got all the crosses.”
“And yet you’ve really changed,” Lacoch put in, again getting nods. “We all sense it. Sure, we changed, but you were with all three of us and you still got the load. The big load. That’s, what this is all about, isn’t it?”
He grinned. “In a way, yes. If we never had this meeting, never had this talk, none of us would be really free of the others and you know it. Now you—all of you—are free and only I am not. If this all works out, I think the four of us will do very well indeed as … brothers. If not—well, who knows what will happen to any of us?”
They accepted that in silence for a moment. Finally Tremon said, “The Council will never bargain in good faith. You know that.”
He sighed. “Not yet they won’t. Not without the shedding of blood on both sides. I’m going to do my best, though, tomorrow, to put it together. We’ll see. At least you of all people understand my motives and loyalties.”
“I think we do,” they all said softly. The meeting broke up a little after that, and Dumonia was summoned to the conference room. The little man with the needless glasses and nervous ticks didn’t try to conceal his position of strength from him, but he was curious.
“You are really the original of all of them?”
He nodded. “If original is the right word. And I experienced all that they experienced, Doctor, but without any little memory tricks. You might tell me, though, how the hell you managed to erase yourself from Zhang’s mind. I thought any tinkering like that was damned near impossible with my—his—mind.”
Dumonia smiled. “And who do you think created many of those techniques in the first place?”
He sighed. “I wish you’d been on Ypsir’s satellite a couple of days ago. I assume that you’re behind the Opposition projects there?”
He nodded. “But what happened that you wished for me?”
Briefly, he told Dumonia and asked, “What’s your long-term prognosis?”
“Well, Jorgash is among the best I ever taught, if that’s any consolation, and your kind of mind is best for that procedure, but—and it is a big but—he would have to guess on your mental blocks and patterns where I would know. In any event, I would counsel you to think of Bul as dead, for dead he certainly is. I realize your guilt but I also know this Ypsir. He knows that you were Control for Bul, and that’s why you’ve been invited to dinner tonight. You should understand him, too, to an extent, and realize that if you had been in time to intercede, he would have accidentally on purpose done it anyway. The only real human being in Ypsir’s mental universe is himself. Everyone else is either a tool or an enemy authority. To the enemy authority—and to himself—he must continually prove that he is better, stronger, superior. You are the tool of that authority, the Confederacy, and, therefore, you represent it If I were you I would not go to dinner tonight.”
“Why? You think he means me harm?”
“He is not so foolish. But if you cannot accept the fact that this Tarin Bul is dead, as dead as if he had been shot through the heart, and that this new person is exactly that, a new and different person you do not know and have never met, he will torture you horribly. You must put aside your guilt, for it is misplaced. There is nothing you could have done to stop this. Nothing. You would only have hastened it. In the case of Bul, you must abandon hope with that guilt. Otherwise, cancel and eat here with us.”
He nodded. “Til handle it. But what should my reaction be?”
“You are not yourself here!” the psych snapped. “You are not even the Confederacy! You are all of mankind, and all of the Diamond as well! You’ve been elected, without your consent, to a post that makes you more nonhuman than these Altavar things! You must be above all human concerns, all personal concerns, for the duration of this conference! If not, you are lost.”
He nodded and smiled wanly. “Then you know at least as much as I do about this.”
“I know what Laroo knows, and that is quite a lot. I assume that you are here because you know, too. If you don’t, then God help us all.”
He sighed. “Well, I don’t pretend to have all the answers, or, maybe, any answers at all, Doctor, but you’ve convinced me I have to go to dinner tonight.”
“Eh?”
“If I can’t handle Talant Ypsir’s mad egomania, how the hell can I handle tomorrow?”
After the cramped quarters below, he was surprised at the size of Ypsir’s apartment. Surely the man hardly ever visited Boojum, and so this place spoke volumes about the man’s mind. Ypsir must have a place like this on every damned one of these moons, he assumed.
He entered a main hall and turned into a room at the sound of conversation. They were there, all of them, the old and the new, and he recognized the ones on sight that he had not yet met. The tall, distinguished man with the snow white hair was Duke Kobe, new Lord of Lilith. The tall, muscular, handsome man was Laroo, in his robot body totally indistinguishable at this point from a normal human one. Morah was there, too, temporarily representing Charon. He made a mental note to ask him sometime what happened to his pretty little killer. And over there, laughing and joking, a distinguished-looking civilized worlder with incongruous flaming red hair and mustache, his eyes mischievous-looking and flanked by “laugh lines,” dressed in deep black and gold. He just had to be Talant Ypsir.
Scampering around were four scantily clad young women of inordinate beauty and sexual endowments, supplying hors d’oeuvres, replenishing glasses, lighting Kobe’s Lilithian cigars, all with a smile and an adoring expression. Goodtime Girls, happily plying their trade. Idly he wondered if they were always here, waiting for that incredibly rare occasion when their master might show up, or whether they were part of his traveling party.
Ypsir spotted him, grinned a politician’s grin, and made his way over to him, hand out. “Well, well! So you’re the man’s who’s going to save the universe!” His manner was joking, not sarcastic-sounding, and he recognized the man’s public persona in an instant. The eternal baby-kissing hypocritical politician, the crook who knows full well he’s got everything in the bag. He snapped his finger and a Good-time Girl was immediately at hand, eagerly awaiting a command. “Get Mr.—Carroll, I believe?—a homau and a tray of those little sausage things with the cheese inside.”
The girl was quick to obey and was soon back with both. He sipped the sweet drink and took a small sausage on a toothpick and tasted it. The drink was a bit sweet for him—he recognized it as some blend of Charonese fruits and alcohol—but the appetizer was quite good.
Ypsir engaged him in small talk for some tune, and he found it remarkably easy to do. His indignation and outright hatred were still there, of course, but under complete control. He doubted if he’d ever met someone so internally corrupt and evil, but he’d tracked down and caught a bunch of very unpleasant types in the past, and quite often he’d had a meal with them and been forced to endure their bizarre lifestyles and values.
All the men in the room except himself were in that class, he realized. Laroo had been the criminal boss of a dozen worlds; Morah had run the criminal brotherhood’s scientific branch, which included projects that would probably make the Goodtime Girls seem tame. Kobe had in his youth been a master of the robot and computerized alarm systems, personally looting more works of art by great masters from impregnable fortresses—or so they were thought to be—than any other single human being. And yet, oddly, he felt almost a kinship with those three, whose careers were based upon disdain for the very values he now disdained, and who, beyond that, were at least sane enough to live in the real universe.
Of them all, only Talant Ypsir hoped he would fail to stop the impending war. Dumonia had been most specific about that point. Ypsir saw the destruction of the Confederacy, and perhaps the whole non-Warden branch of humanity, as something very much to be desired. He was assured of survival with his harem, and that was all that mattered to him. He did not consider the Altavar any threat, because they did not interfere with him or threaten what he considered important. In fact, to Talant Ypsir the entire alien race was just another tool against his enemies.
Ypsir held up a finger and grinned broadly, ever the jovial, friendly politician, only his incredibly cold eyes betraying anything of his inner self. “Wait herel I want to show you my most precious possession!” And, with that, he ducked from the room.
He heard the others whispering admiringly of what they knew was coming. But when Talant Ypsir re-entered, in spectacular fashion, he was aware that the eyes of the other Lords—Morah’s inhuman, burning orbs in particular—were all upon him and not on the newcomer to the room. To Ypsir, this was fun torture; to the others, it was very much a test of his own self-control and resolve. If he blew it now, there would be no tomorrow morning.
She was almost inhuman in her wild, exotic, sensuous beauty, far beyond the sketches he’d seen in Fallon’s office. Despite all his knowledge and feelings, he was almost overcome by wanton desire, by pure lust, and that, he realized later, was the key.
You must think of her as someone you do not know and have never met.
It was easier to do than he’d believed.
She entered on all fours, playfully tugging at a golden leash held by Ypsir, whose face showed absolute ecstasy and triumph. Ypsir was having a doubly fine tune, not only tweaking this outsider’s nose and, by so doing, the Confederacy’s, but also showing off to the other Lords, his political equals, with an air of I have her and you never can or will.
Ypsir and the girl halted just inside the entrance door, and she rolled over and then partly propped herself up on one arm, legs crossed, and looked up at them with those enormous green eyes, at once sexy and, somehow, wild as well.
She was, he thought lustfully in spite of himself, the ten best pornographic performances ever given all rolled up into one. She was quite literally designed to create instant envy and lust, and he could only stare at her. She looked straight into his face and there was no glimmer of any recognition at all, but there was a vibrancy, a fire in those eyes that was not in any of the Goodtime Girls.
Ypsir looked down at her with pride. “Tell the nice men your name,” he urged softly, as if talking to a trained animal or a child.
“I’m Ass,” she purred. “I’m a baaad Ass.”
“And why are you named Ass?”
“ ’Cause Ass was ’sassin. Ass try to kill Master.”
He was under control now, perfectly so, and glanced out of the corner of his eye at the others. They were still looking only at him.
“And what happened when you tried?”
“Master too smart. Master too wise for Ass. Master so generous. Master no kill Ass. Master no hurt Ass. Master make Ass love him. Master take ugly, evil ’sassin, make into Ass, to love Master.”
Despite the depravity of the scene, this was becoming interesting, he thought. If they retold her that much, how much did she know of her former self? Not enough to recognize him, certainly. This was different from what he expected, yet it was consistent. Ypsir wanted her to know.
“Do you remember who. you were?”
She looked slightly confused by that one. “Ass not ’member old self. Ass no want to ’member.”
“Are you happy now, Ass?”
“Oh,, yes!”
“Would you want to be anybody else—anybody or anything in the whole wide universe?”
“No, no, no, no, no. Ass loves being Ass. Feels so good.”
Ypsir looked up straight at him. “Your former agent.”
“Very creative,” he responded dryly, sipping at his drink. “And very lovely. Maybe we missed a bet, Lord Ypsir. Maybe we should have made you into a gorgeous beauty like that instead of sending you to Medusa. That’s what you would have done with you.”
Ypsir’s face clouded, and he literally shook with emotion, his inner self coming out in the twisting of his face, in his expression, in his every mannerism. It was a frightening, totally evil visage, a demonic creature that could no longer hide behind the mask of the cheery politician for very long.
He was about to add more, but felt Morah’s arm touch his and thought better of it. He’d done his job, and that was all that mattered, but he took a strong pleasure in twisting Talant Ypsir’s vision of beauty back upon him by applying the Medusan’s standards to himself.
Ypsir took a minute or-so to regain control, and slowly that terrible demon faded and the cheery politician was back with only a nasty leer remaining. He knew now, though, that he was in complete control, and his self-confidence, which had been badly wavering, flowed back into him in a grand surge. He also now knew tha
t, while he still couldn’t believe in a god, he would always afterward believe in the existence of pure evil.
The rest of the evening was strained, but he found the right balance that not only Morah but the other Lords could approve. Not that Ypsir didn’t try, parading Ass, making her do pretty disgusting and degrading things, and pushing him as far as the Medusan could push using her, but to no avail. Ypsir fought his war with grand and ugly gestures; he fought back with sarcasm and flip comments, and totally frustrated the great Lord of Medusa. It was a very rare evening, really, he told himself, equally unpleasant, and rewarding.
Morah got him out of there as soon as dessert was finished, though. Ypsir would be boiling, horrible mad for hours after. Still, the Charonese was more than impressed by his behavior, and seemed to regard him even more as an equal now than before.
“He will kill you if and when he can,” Morah warned him. “Ypsir is not used to losing face so badly. Only the presence of the other Lords restrained him tonight, for his object is not ours.”
He nodded. “Shall we meet the Altavar now? I don’t care how foul they smell—they almost have to be a breath of fresh air compared to the company we’ve been keeping this night.”
“Come with me,” Yatek Morah said.
The smell was pervasive and pretty much as Morah had warned. On a full stomach it almost made him gag, and he restrained the impulse to do so only with the greatest difficulty and discomfort.
The Altavar were not quite what he expected. They bore a general kinship to the demons of the ice, but only a kinship, in the same sense that Ass was generically related to Commander Krega.
The first thing that struck him was the sheer alienness of the special quarters for the three Altavar. The lighting Was subdued, the furniture odd and blocky and totally unfamiliar in form or function, and there was an odd, figure-eight shaped pool of water to one side. He knew the creatures were watching him with interest, but he couldn’t really tell how. The retractable tentacles and odd, heart-shaped pads on their “heads” were familiar, but their bodies trailed into a large, nearly formless mass that seemed constantly in motion. They did not walk, but oozed as they moved, leaving a slender trail of slime behind them. Obviously none of these creatures could fly, or move very fast at all.
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