"If you'll be so kind as to go through the door behind you," the owl-faced attendant said. "I do hope you can make it. Had to drag three of you in there already this shift; I'm rather weary. Let's get moving, eh?"
Weary? Yes—the attendant radiated only emotional weariness. It was nothing a Tegas could grasp.
The new host responded to the idea of urgency, pushed up out of a chair, shambled towards an oval door. The attendant hurried him along with an arm across the old shoulders.
The Tegas moved within the host, consolidated neural capacity, swept in an unresisting awareness. It wasn't an awareness he'd have taken out of choice—defeated, submissive. There was something strange about it. The Tegas detected a foreign object pressed against the host's spine. A capsule of some kind— neural transmitter/receiver. It radiated an emotional-damper effect, commands of obedience.
The Tegas blocked it off swiftly, terrified by the implications of such an instrument.
He had the host's identity now: James Daggett; that was the name. Age seventy-one. The body was a poor, used-up relic, weaker, more debilitated than William Bailey had been at 236. The host's birdlike awareness, giving itself up to the Tegas as it gave up to death, radiated oddly mystical thoughts, confusions, assumptions, filterings.
The Tegas was an angel "come to escort me."
Still trailing wisps of William Bailey, the Tegas avoided too close a linkage with this new host. The name and self-recognition centers were enough.
He realized with a twisted sense of defeat that the old body was being strapped on to a hard surface. The ceiling loomed over him a featureless gray. Dulled nostrils sniffed at an antiseptic breeze.
"Sleep well, paisano," the attendant said.
Not again! the Tegas thought.
His Bacit half reasserted itself: "We can jump from body to body—dying a little each time. What fun!"
The Tegas transmitted a remote obscenity from another world and another aeon, describing what the Bacit half could do with its bitterness.
Vacuity replaced the intrusion.
Defeat... defeat...
Part of this doomed mood, he realized, came out of the James Daggett personality. The Tegas took the moment to probe that host's memories, found the time when the transmitter had been attached to his spine.
Defeat-obedience-defeat...
It stemmed from that surgical instant.
He restored the blocks, quested outwards for a new host. Questing, he searched his Tegas memory. There must be a clue somewhere, a hint, a thought—some way of escape. He missed the Bacit contribution, parts of his memory felt cut off. The neural linkage with the dying James Daggett clung like dirty mud to his thoughts.
Ancient, dying James Daggett remained filled with mystical confusions until he was swallowed by the Tegas. It was a poor neural connection. The host was supposed to resist. That strengthened the Tegas grip. Instead, the Tegas ran into softly dying walls of other-memory. Linkages slipped. He felt his awareness range contracting.
Something swam into the questing field—anger, outrage of the kind frequently directed against stupidities. The Tegas waited, wondering if this could be another client of the center.
Now, trailing the angry one came another identity. Fear dominated this one. The Tegas went into a mental crouch, focused its awareness hungrily. An object of anger, a fearful one—there was a one a Tegas could grab.
Voices came to him from the hallway outside the alcove— rasping, attacking and (delayed) fearful.
James Daggett's old and misused ears cut off overtones, reduced volume. There wasn't time to strengthen the host's hearing circuits, but the Tegas grasped the sense of the argument.
“...told to notify... immediately if... Bailey! William Bailey! ... saw the... your desk..."
And the fearful one: " busy... you've no idea how... and understaffed and... teen an hour... only... this shift..."
The voices receded, but the emotional auras remained within Tegas range.
"Dead!" It was the angry one, a voice-blast accompanied by a neural overload that rolled across the Tegas like a giant wave.
At the instant of rage, the fearful one hit a momentary fear peak: abject retreat.
The Tegas pounced, quitting James Daggett in the blink-out as life went under. It was like stepping off a sinking boat into a storm-racked cockleshell. He was momentarily lost in the tracery of material spacetime which was the chosen host. Abruptly, he realized the fearful one had husbanded a reserve of supercilious hate, an ego comer fortified by resentments against authority accumulated over many years. The bouncing shock of the contact was accompanied by an escape of the host's awareness into the fortified comer.
The Tegas knew then he was in for a fight such as he'd never before experienced. The realization was accompanied by a blurred glimpse through host-eyes of a darkly suspicious face staring at him across a strapped-down body. The death-locked features of the body shook him—William Bailey! He almost lost the battle right there.
The host took control of the cheeks, contorted them. The eyes behaved independently: one looking up, the other down. He experienced direct perception, seeing with the fingertips (pale glowing), hearing with the lips (an itch of sound). Skin trembled and flushed. He staggered, heard a voice shout: "Who're you? What you doing to me?"
It was the host's voice, and the Tegas, snatching at the vocal centers, could only burr the edges of sound, not blank out intelligibility. He glimpsed the dark face across from him in an eye-swirling flash. The other had recoiled, staring.
It was one of the suspicious ones, the hated ones, the ones- who-rule. No time to worry about that now. The Tegas was fighting for survival. He summoned every trick he'd ever learned—cajolery, mystical subterfuges, a flailing of religious illusion, love, hate, word play. Men were an instrument of language and could be snared by it. He went in snake-striking dashes along the neural channels.
The name! He had to get the name!
"Carmy... Carmichael!"
He had half the name then, a toehold on survival. Silently, roaring inward along synaptic channels, he screamed the name—
"I'm Carmichael! I'm Carmichael!"
"No!"
"Yes! I'm Carmichael!"
"You're not! You're not!"
"I'm Carmichael!"
The host was bludgeoned into puzzlement: "Who're you? You can't be me. I'm... Joe—Joe Carmichael!"
The Tegas exulted, snapping up the whole name: "I'm Joe Carmichael!"
The host's awareness spiralled inward, darting, frenzied. Eyes rolled. Legs trembled. Arms moved with a disjointed flapping. Teeth gnashed. Tears rolled down the cheeks.
The Tegas smashed at him now: "I'm Joe Carmichael!"
"No... no... no..." It was a fading inner scream, winking out... back... out...
Silence.
"I'm Joe Carmichael," the Tegas thought.
It was a Joe Carmichael thought faintly touched by Tegas inflections and Bacit's reproving: "That was too close."
The Tegas realized he lay flat on his back on the floor. He looked up into dark features identified by host-memories: "Chadrick Vicentelli, Commissioner of Crime Prevention."
"Mr. Carmichael," Vicentelli said. "I've summoned help. Rest quietly. Don't try to move just yet."
What a harsh, unmoving face, the Tegas thought. Vicentelli's was a Noh mask face. And the voice: wary, cold, suspicious.
This violent incident wasn't on any computer's predictives
Or was it? No matter—a suspicious man had seen too much. Something had to be done—immediately. Feet already could be heard pounding along the corridor.
"Don't know what's wrong with me," the Tegas said, managing the Carmichael voice with memory help from the Bailey period. "Dizzy... whole world seemed to go red "
"You look alert enough now," Vicentelli said.
There was no give in that voice, no love. Violence there, suspicious hate contained in sharp edges.
"You look alert enough now."
&
nbsp; A Tegas shudder went through the Carmichael body. He studied the probing, suspicious eyes. This was the breed Tegas avoided. Rulers possessed terrible resources for the inner battle. That was one of the reasons they ruled. Tegas had been swallowed by rulers—dissolved, lost. Mistakes had been made in the dim beginnings before Tegas learned to avoid ones such as this. Even on this world, the Tegas recalled early fights, near things that had resulted in rumors and customs, myths, racial fears. All primitives knew the code: "Never reveal your true name/"
And here was a ruler who had seen too much in times when that carried supreme danger. Suspicion was aroused. A sharp intelligence weighed data it should never have received.
Two red-coated android law-niks, as alike in their bland- featured intensity as obedient dogs, swept through the alcove hangings, came to a stop waiting for Vicentelli's orders. It was unnerving: even with androids, the ones-who-submitted never hesitated in looking first to a ruler for their orders.
The Tegas thought of the control capsule that had been on James Daggett's spine. A new fear trembled through him. The host's mouth was dry with a purely Carmichael emotion.
"This is Joseph Carmichael," Vicentelli said, pointing. "I want him taken to IC for a complete examination and motivational profile. I'll meet you there. Notify the appropriate cadres."
The law-niks helped the Tegas to his new feet.
IC—Investigation Central, he thought.
"Why're you taking me to IC?" he demanded. "I should go to a hospital for—"
"We've medical facilities," Vicentelli said. He made it sound ominous.
Medical facilities for what?
"But why—"
"Be quiet and obey," Vicentelli said. He glanced at William Bailey's body, back to Carmichael. It was a look full of weighted suspicions, half knowledge, educated assumptions.
The Tegas glanced at William Bailey's body, was caught by an inward-memory touch that wrenched at his new awareness. It had been a superior host, flesh deserving of love. The nostalgia passed. He looked back at Vicentelli, formed a vacant stare of confusion. It was not a completely feigned reaction. The Carmichael takeover had occurred in the presence of the suspected William Bailey—no matter that William Bailey was a corpse; that merely fed the suspicions. Vicentelli, assuming an unknown presence in William Bailey, would think it had leaped from the corpse to Carmichael.
"We're interested in you," Vicentelli said. "Very interested. Much more interested than we were before your recent... ahhh, seizure." He nodded to the androids.
Seizure! the Tegas thought.
Firm, insistent hands propelled him through the alcove curtains into the hallway, down the hall, through the antiseptic white of the employees' dressing room and out of the back door.
The day he'd left such a short time before as William Bailey appeared oddly transformed to the Carmichael eyes. There was a slight change in the height of the eyes, of course—a matter of perhaps three centimeters taller for Carmichael. He had to break his visual reactions out of perspective habits formed by more than two centuries at Bailey's height. But the change was more than that. He felt that he was seeing the day through many eyes—many more than the host's two.
The sensation of multi-ocular vision confused him, but he hadn't time to examine it before the law-niks pushed him into the one-way glass cage of an aircar. The door hissed closed, thumping on its seals, and he was alone, peering out through the blue-gray filtering of the windows. He leaned back on padded plastic.
The aircar leaped upward out of the plastrete canyon, sped across the great tableland roof of the Euthanasia Center toward the distant man-made peaks of IC. The central complex of government was an area the Tegas always had avoided. He wished nothing more now than to continue avoiding it.
A feeling came over him that his universe had shattered. He was trapped here—not just trapped in the aircar flitting towards the plastrete citadel of IC, but trapped in the ecosystem of the planet. It was a sensation he'd never before experienced—not even on that aeons-distant day when he'd landed here in a conditioned host at the end of a trip which had taxed the limits of the host's viability. It was the way of the Tegas, though, to reach out for new planets, new hosts. It had become second nature to choose the right kind of planet, the right kind of developing life forms. The right kind always developed star travel, releasing the Tegas for a new journey, new explorations, new experiences. That way, boredom never intervened. The creatures of this planet were headed towards the stellar leap, too—given time.
But the Tegas, experiencing a new fear for him, realized he might not be around to take advantage of that stellar leap. It was a realization that left him feeling exhausted, time-scalded, injured in his responses like a mistreated instrument.
Where did I go wrong? he wondered. Was it in the original choice of the planet?
His Bacit half, usually so explicit in reaction to inner searching, spread across their mutual awareness a projected sense of the fuzzy unknowns ahead.
This angered the Tegas. The future always was unknown. He began exploring his host-self, assessing what he could use in the coming showdown. It was a good host—healthy, strong, its musculature and neural system capable of excellent Tegas reinforcement and intensification. It was a host that could give good service, perhaps even longer than William Bailey. The Tegas began doing what he could in the time available, removing inhibitory blocks for quicker and smoother neural responses, setting up a heart and vascular system buffer. He took a certain pride in the work; he'd never misused a host as long as it remained viable.
The natural Tegas resilience, the thing that kept him going, kept him alive and interested—the endless curiosity—reasserted itself. Whatever was about to happen, it would be new.
He seated himself firmly in the host, harnessed the Carmichael memory system to his Tegas responses, and readied himself to meet the immediate future.
A thought crept into his mind:
In the delicate immensity that was his own past there lay nonhuman experiences. How subtle was this “Total Profile of Personality"? Could it detect the nonhuman? Could it cast a template which would compare too closely with William Bailey ... or any of the others they might have on their Data Center lists?
He sensed the dance of the intellects within him, pounding out their patterns on the floor of his awareness. In a way, he knew he was all the captive stalks bound up like a sheaf of grain.
The city-scape passing beneath the aircar became something sensed rather than seen. Tiny frenzies of fear began to dart about in him. What tools of psychometry would his interrogators use? How discreet? How subtle? Beneath their probes, he must be nothing other than Joe Carmichael. Yet... he was far more. He felt the current of now sweeping his existence toward peril.
Danger-danger-danger. He could see it intellectually as Tegas. He responded to it as Joe Carmichael.
Sweat drenched his body.
The aircar began to descend. He stared at the backs of the androids' heads visible through the glass of the control cab. They were two emotionless blobs; no help there. The car left the daylight, rocked once in a recognition-field, slid down a tube filled with cold aluminium light into the yellow glowing of a gigantic plastrete parking enclosure—tawny walls and ceiling, a sense of cavernous distance humming with activity.
It made the Tegas think of a hive society he'd once experienced; not one of his better memories. He shuddered.
The aircar found its parking niche, stopped. Presently, the doors hissed open. The androids flanked the opening. One gestured for him to emerge.
The Tegas swallowed in a dry Carmichael throat, climbed out, stared around at the impersonal comings and goings of androids. Neither by eye or emotional aura could he detect a human in the region around him. Intense loneliness came over him.
Still without speaking, the androids took his arms, propelled him across an open space into the half-cup of a ring lift. The field grabbed them, shot them upward past blurred walls and flickers of openings. Th
e lift angled abruptly, holding them softly with their faces tipped downward at something near forty-five degrees. The androids remained locked beside him like two fish swimming in the air. The lift grip returned to vertical, shot them upward into the center of an amphitheater room.
The lift hole became floor beneath his feet.
The Tegas stared up and around at a reaching space, immense blue skylight, people-people-people, tiers of them peering down at him, tiers of them all around.
He probed for emotions, met the terrifying aura of the place, an icy neural stare, a psychic chutzpah. The watchers—rulers all, their minds disconnected from any religion except the self, no nervous coughs, no impatient stirrings.
They were an iceberg of silent waiting.
He had never imagined such a place even in a nightmare. But he knew this place, recognized it immediately. If a Tegas must end, he thought, then it must be in some such place as this. All the lost experiences that might come to an end here began wailing through him.
Someone emerged from an opening on his left, strode toward him across the floor of the amphitheater: Vicentelli.
The Tegas stared at the approaching man, noted the eyes favored by deep shadows: dense black eyes cut into a face where lay a verseless record—hard glyphs of cheeks, stone- cut mouth. Everything was labor in that face: work-work- work. It held no notion of fun. It was a contrivance for asserting violence, both spectator and participant. It rode the flesh, cherishing no soft thing at all.
A vat of liquid as blue as glowing steel arose from the floor beside the Tegas. Android hands gripped him tightly as he jerked with surprise.
Vicentelli stopped in front of him, glanced once at the surrounding banks of faces, back to his victim.
"Perhaps you're ready to save us the trouble of an interrogation in depth," he said.
The Tegas felt his body tremble, shook his head.
Vicentelli nodded.
With impersonal swiftness, the androids stripped the clothing from the Tegas host, lifted him into the vat. The liquid felt warm and tingling. A harness was adjusted to hold his arms and keep his face just above the surface. An inverted dome came down to rest just above his head. The day became a blue stick of light and he wondered inanely what time it was. It'd been early when he'd entered the Euthanasia Center, now, it was very late. Yet, he knew the day had hardly advanced past mid-morning.
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