Chalker, Jack L. – Well of Souls 06

The Grabant System

there had been no dreams. that was the strangest part; there was a sensation of time passing, of an experience ongoing, yet if anything was going on in her mind during that period or if she was in any way aware, it was gone now.

After all the dancing around and threatening talk, the exchange had gone quite normally. The boat from the war­ship had come alongside, a temporary dock established, then the hatches were opened and the Rithians and the Kharkovs went over to the other boat. There was little noise, since the locks were automatically sealed except when ac­cessed in an emergency, and it took about fifteen minutes to affect the transfer. Finally, the Kharkovs had returned, bear­ing a very large case of dark polished wood. An ornate seal was carved on it, in what was almost certainly pure gold, and it was studded with precious gems. The case—about ninety by 106 centimeters, and a good thirty centimeters thick—was a beautiful work of art, but what was inside was far more precious, and Jules Wallinchky could hardly con­tain himself as it was carefully, almost reverentially, handed to him by Ivan Kharkov. The jeweler was wearing surgical gloves, and Wallinchky put on his own pair before going further. Then he sat back, the case on his lap, and looked back up at the master jeweler.

“You’re certain?”

“There is no doubt,” Ivan Kharkov assured him. “I never believed that I or anyone would ever see them, not in this lifetime, and I never dreamed that I would have this oppor­tunity. If those are not the Pleiades, then no creature living or dead would feel any differently toward these than toward the real ones.”

Wallinchky slipped the small manual locks that seemed something out of ancient history and then actually crossed himself and took a deep breath before opening the case. Then the crime king gasped, seeing what Ivan Kharkov had meant. Angel was numb and passing in and out of con­sciousness, but still managed a glimpse of the case as he stared into it.

The seven jewels varied in size from enormous to impos­sible; seven colors, but with one cut and finish, set into a metal that seemed almost liquid and which burned, throbbed like something alive, making the gems themselves seem to beat like seven alien hearts.

“Pass them the codes as soon as we are positioned oppo­site the tow,” Wallinchky said at last, his voice low, almost reverential, as if he were in a grand cathedral and in the presence of God Himself.

Angel was unclear about what happened next. It seemed there was a lower deck composed entirely of coffinlike trans­parent cages stacked one atop the other, and that she was carried down there by one of the Mallegestors. He untied her—there was hardly much risk, as she couldn’t feel her extremities anyway—and ripped off all her clothing, even her religious medals, which she found particularly offen­sive. She was then shoved into one of the transparent cof­fins, hooked up to probes attached within, and then the enclosure was shut with a hissing sound. After that, all she could remember was that it grew incredibly cold, and it be­came harder to think, harder even to breathe. The last thought she could remember having was: This must be what death feels like when it comes slow and steady upon you.

Then there was darkness, a darkness without sound, with­out sight, without thought, but a darkness that somehow existed in time. It went on and on and on, but she didn’t care, didn’t think of it, nor anything, but just lay there in the nothing.

And then there was pain. Horrible, racking pain like she’d never experienced before, had never believed possible to experience. It seemed as if every cell, every point of skin, every organ, was in full rebellion, and even her blood con­sisted of searing white-hot fire.

It did not go on for long; nobody could have stood it for any length of time without passing out. Still, it was longer than she ever wanted to feel that kind of pain again.

There was a horrid ringing in her ears that seemed to mask more ordinary noises, and it took a while to subside, although it never completely went away. Her eyes were open, she had control of them, but everything remained a featureless gray. She attempted to move her arms and legs, to clench her hands and bend her toes, but could feel noth­ing beyond the elbow or knee. There was a smell of disin­fectant and other related substances, and a few lingering odors she wondered if she wanted to find out about.

Angel coughed, at first a little, then violently, uncontrol­lably. There were the sounds of people running to her; some­one grabbed her shoulders, someone else gave her a shot, and then one of them or perhaps a third person gave her a strong, foul-tasting drink that nonetheless relieved her dryness and actually eased a lot of her immediate discomfort. The cough­ing stopped completely after she drank some of it, and after she downed it all, the cough didn’t come back.

They seemed satisfied, whoever they were, and then she heard them walking away, talking softly, although she couldn’t understand a word. She tried to call them back, so they could tell her where she was and what was going on, but only mean­ingless gurgling sounds emerged, which hurt her throat.

After a while the pain subsided further, becoming a dull burning. Angel then became aware of the tubes attached to her, which she guessed was some kind of intravenous feed, and concluded it was why she felt neither hungry nor dehy­drated. She worked her head around in increasing circles, flexing her neck. It was painful at first but soon felt very good. She could control her head, and to some extent her shoulders, and began to concentrate as her teachers had instructed and to try and feel all her body.

Her skin seemed to have been mildly burned, apparently from the cryo units in the lifeboat. Well, that might be ex­pected; those units were intended for emergency only, and not for use in deep space. It was likely that only the Malle­gestors and maybe Tann Nakitt hadn’t been burned, the for­mer because nothing could penetrate that hide, the latter because of his fat and fur layering. If that was all that this was, she knew it would pass.

The same severe conditions might also have caused her blindness, she reflected, if she’d been in shock from her tightly tied arms and legs and her suspension, and then gone under with her eyes not completely shut. Could be; they’d never gotten their emergency lecture! If that were the case, though, would she remain blind unless given new eyes or lenses or whatever, or would vision slowly return? It fright­ened her, but she fell back on her faith and her prayers and calmed down.

She was definitely sitting up, not lying down, but she had no idea what the support might be. She was on something, some kind of device or prosthetic, since she could feel a rubbery form and seal that covered her crotch area and went back to near the top of her buttocks. It wasn’t the only sup­port because it wasn’t wide enough, but it certainly had a utilitarian purpose. It caught, washed off, and flushed waste.

Angel began to chant softly, attempting to hum, and after some false tries she managed it. She was so pleased to get a steady tone, she tried shaping some words while still keep­ing the monotone hum, in effect singing or chanting them. “Hmmmm . . . Is anybody else here?” she managed, her voice sounding unnaturally low but giving a fair Gregorian chant sound.

Someone else was there! She was right! The other tried to respond, but had the same kind of gargling noise she’d tried. Slowly, Angel attempted to teach the other to hum from the diaphragm, then up and out, form the words, keep singing. She had no idea why this worked, but felt her voice growing stronger and her command of it returning the more she did it.

The other used a different sort of tonal scale but managed eventually to raise a steady tone, then a series of tones. The other’s voice, too, sounded unnaturally low, but was defi­nitely another woman.

“Just answer me simply,” Angel chanted. “I am Angel. Who are you?”

“Ming,” the other managed to sing back, keeping the tone going, except for breathing in to help retrain the larynx.

Ming! “Can you see at all?” Angel sang to her.

“Light and dark. No shapes,” Ming came back, increas­ingly getting the hang of it.

“Better than I am,” Angel told her. “All is gray to me. Can you move at all?”

“No, I cannot,” the other sang back. “I cannot feel my arms and legs.”

There was the sound of a door opening at the other end of the room and of footsteps approaching. The person walked very close to them, then stopped.

“Well, I see you are both awake.” It was Ari’s voice. He sounded pleasant, even friendly, his old self. Ming hated him most for that, and Angel tried hard not to. To her, God had for some reason delivered her to the devil and was testing her. She did not know why, but it was still God’s will.

“I heard what sounded like singing. That’s actually a fair method of getting vocal chords working again after cryo pa­ralysis, which is itself very common. The Kharkovs also had problems with it. Feel free to keep doing it as long as it is com­fortable. I don’t mind. It’s actually kind of pleasant.”

“I cannot sing the words I have for you,” Ming responded, doing just enough of a chant as she could.

“Umph. I know how you must feel. I didn’t want this, Ming. You weren’t supposed to be here. You were supposed to be on the first lifeboat.”

“I did not know your depths,” Ming managed.

“Hey, I didn’t know you were a cop, either! All this time, and we find out we have our nasty secrets. You were more undercover than I was. All my standard work was for com­panies owned or controlled by Wallinchky, most of them legit. There is just this occasional job that requires me to get on the unpleasant side of his works. It’s not like I have much of a choice. I’m the third generation to work for him, and he’s been my patron, sponsor, and employer for all my life.”

“Where are we and what has happened to us?” Angel asked him, attempting a sentence without singing it and pleased to get it basically out.

He turned. “Well, hello! Bad luck for you, too, but you were born and raised to do what you do, too, right? By the way—the one or sometimes two octave drop in voices gen­erally goes away over time.”

“Can you answer her question?” Ming managed.

“Okay. You’re in the Grabant System, on the fourth planet from the sun, a chilly ball of rock with an atmosphere so thin you’d asphyxiate before you’d freeze if you ran outside, but outside’s a real interesting place. It’s one of those an­cient worlds with those weird remains of the Ancient Ones all over. You’re in the infirmary in Wallinchky’s getaway and museum here, which doesn’t impact the ruins. The infirmary is entirely computer run, including surgery, but it’s first rate. Right now you’ve both been—well, operated on and placed in recuperative mounts, but once things heal 1 think you’ll find that the intent is to regenerate.”

“Regenerate! Then—” Ming gasped.

“That’s right. Don’t panic, though. There’s nothing here that can’t be restored. Still, at the moment, you both are basically just heads and torsos. Really great-looking torsos, I might add, but that’s about it. Wallinchky will be in to see you sometime today or tomorrow. When he does, he’ll— well, outline the options. Believe me, though—I’ve seen worse than you in here, and they looked fine when all was said and done.”

“You mean like Wallinchky’s two lethal airheads?” Ming asked.

“No, only some here-and-there stuff had to be done to them. Hell, I’ve had an arm replaced here, and another time a toe.”

There was a buzzing sound from Ari’s direction. Then they heard a clicking, and a moment later he said, “Yes, sir?”

The muffled rush of conversation was too scrambled to be overheard, obviously through a communicator, and Ari re­sponded, “Yes, sir. Right away. Yes, they’re both awake. Yes, I’ll be right there.”

A moment later he was speaking to them again: “I’ll have the medlab give you whatever functions you may feel better having, but I have to go.”

“Yes, don’t forget to wag your tail when you lick your master’s ass,” Ming responded acidly. “As to what we want, how about a nice, big bomb?”

Ari sighed, and they could hear him walking out.

Almost immediately robotics within the infirmary started to click and whir into action. Angel felt something come over her head, a helmet, it seemed, with clicking and whir­ring sounds inside. A membrane that came across her face briefly, let up before it caused any real discomfort, then rose back up again, freeing her.

“What was that?” Ming wanted to know, but in a short while the same thing happened to her. After it was over, they could only compare notes and some feelings about Citizen Martinez. Ming was far less charitable; she’d never been all that religious.

It didn’t take long to discover what was happening. The machinery snapped back into action again, and Angel felt something being placed over her eyes and held by a band on her head. They were more like goggles than glasses, and extended out a bit, but after a bit of disorientation they snapped on, and for the first time since coming to she could more or less see. Her vision was limited to straight ahead, and it had little color, but the detail was quite sharp. She was able to look over and see Ming for the first time, and watch a similar but not identical procedure, employing artificial hands and thin prehensile tendrils from above. Ming’s eyewear re­sembled a rectangular dark piece of plastic or glass in a welder’s frame, with an elastic strap to hold it to her head.

Ming was set in a metallic box about a meter square, and appeared to emerge from it about at the navel. Her naked form was apparent the rest of the way, but her arms had been cleanly amputated just below the shoulders and even tapered in. Her face was fine, but as hairless as Angel’s, and she didn’t seem to have eyebrows.

Angel realized that she must look essentially the same, and in the same kind of outfit. She had a long enough neck to be able to get at least some sense of herself.

“So, we’re talking heads,” Angel said.

Ming gave a dry chuckle. “Well, at least we can feel as­sured that nobody is going to rape us, although I wouldn’t be surprised if Mister Big didn’t try and ensure that we felt entirely helpless and victimized. He gets off on that.” She sighed. “I’m sorry you got sucked into this. I’m sorry I didn’t get on that boat myself. I don’t know what I thought I was going to do, but I just never expected Ari to blow me away like that. I’ve known him since university, for Heaven’s sake! Of all the people I might have thought would be my enemy, he would be just a bit higher than my own family.”

“I know how it must hurt,” Angel told her. “Still, I sense the conflict in him. Who knows how he might be if he were ever outside of that evil man’s influence?”

“Fat lot of good that’s going to do us,” Ming noted. “He didn’t need to do this to us. We weren’t going anywhere. He did it deliberately, not only to leave us helpless, but also because he knows how people like me are trained, and he saw the video of you outmaneuvering Tann Nakitt—who, I must tell you, is in trouble himself here someplace because he decided to cast his lot with you, although I think he might have in any event. I wonder what happened to him?”

“Probably being defanged and declawed,” Angel guessed.

“Do not underestimate him. Still, what can any of us do here? Where would we go?”

Angel thought about that. “What do you think they will do with us?”

“Play with us. Terrorize and victimize us if we give them any satisfaction. And then they’ll try and break you. Me, I think, they’ll just go directly for a mindscrub.”

“You mean like the Rehabilitation Centers?” Angel was aghast.

“Yes, the ones for the worst offenders and those who cannot be let back into civilized company. They wire up your brain, send in their signals and probes, download what they find in your thinking parts, and then they erase. Then you get reprogrammed by uploading a very simple routine, after which you’ll be happy and smiling and totally obedient and do and think and believe everything your trainer tells you. You’ll have no memory of who or what you were, and no curiosity about it, either. If you have anything valuable and unique, or might be useful as your old self, they might take the download and create a virtual mind in the computer, then catalog, categorize, rearrange, pick and choose. It is tricky to do, but it’s done all the time. It’s known as a ‘turn­around’ in the psychiatric trade. I doubt if they’ll try it with me, though. We’re regularly tested each time the passwords and authorities are changed, which is often, and it has never been undetectable.”

“It sounds like killing the soul but leaving the body in­tact. It is the most immoral thing I have ever heard,” Angel told her. “How can we stop this?”

“Honey,” Ming said sadly, “look at the two of us, look around, and remember what that son of a dung dealer Ari said about where we are. There is no way to avoid what will happen. None. The only hope I have is that, somehow, I can either kill myself or at least take some of them with me before I disappear.”

It was impossible to tell the passage of time in the infirmary, with just the two of them there. They spoke almost nonstop, until it seemed to Angel that she’d told Ming everything about herself, and that Ming had told her much the same. The closeness they felt at the end of it belied their radically different backgrounds, traditions, and experiences; they felt a bond closer than sisters.

The medical cubes, or whatever they were, provided all they required; neither felt hungry, nor, after being awake for a while, was there any sense of thirst, let alone dehydration.

There were long gaps, though. When the medical com­puter wanted them to sleep, it simply injected something and they went to sleep, often in mid-sentence. Awakening later, there was clear evidence that work was being done on both of them, although it was difficult to tell what, save in the eyes. Ming’s vision was clearing, so that enhancement was no longer needed, but she found it impossible to focus. In fact, her vision was excellent, but she seemed locked in to a fixed focal length of infinity. Things far away to about two meters were fairly clear; closer was a blur.

Angel had a different treatment. Although damaged eyes could be replaced or regenerated easily, one of the things they took for granted, hers were replaced with artificial eyes that appeared normal, but retained the fish-eye vision and poor peripheral vision. She could focus, but it was like focusing a telephoto lens by willing it, rather than the natural sort of focus she’d had.

“They probably are cameras,” Ming guessed. “Transmit­ting type as well. Somebody will be able to see anything you do. They’re common in dangerous undercover work, but I don’t think that’s the purpose here. It shows he has different plans for you than for me, that’s for sure.”

Ari showed up now and again, but didn’t speak to them much and got out as quickly as possible. Ming’s bile was far too nasty to be taken for long, but Angel could see that his reaction did prove he was something of a wimp, as Ming had said. A Jules Wallinchky would have slapped the hell out of her for what she was saying, as she was held there helplessly.

Finally, the big man himself appeared. He’d trimmed his hair and beard and looked distinguished, even dapper, al­though, like most little men who’d risen higher than they dreamed, he was overfestooned with expensive rings and jewelry. He wore pure satin lounging pajamas, not the syn­thetic kind.

“So, my living statues, I am so pleased we’ve been able to get you back up to strength so quickly,” he greeted them, sounding like a genuine humanitarian.

“Yeah, we’re so pretty you should plate us and put us in your study,” Ming responded acidly.

He smiled. “You know, I know people who did things like that. Among the drug lords there’s almost a mania for it. They trim down and freeze up their enemies, captives they’ve got­ten the best of, and sometimes people they hold for black­mail purposes, and they actually make living statuary out of them. The idea is mostly a reminder to would-be competitors and their own ambitious underlings, of course. I consider the practice rather tacky and low-class myself. If you need a lamp, buy a good one, I say.” He sighed. “Well, I heard you’re both well enough for us to get you out of there, and that the unfortunate eye damage is repaired. Putting you in regenera­tion tanks for long periods, while eventually the goal, would keep you out of circulation too long, and I have other business elsewhere. So, first we’ll rig you as temporaries, and then per­haps we’ll be able to give you some semblance of humanity again. It won’t take much practice, they tell me. I’ll see you in a couple of days.”

And then he left, leaving Ming amazed at how little he’d lorded it over them.

“He almost sounded human,” Angel commented.

“Don’t worry. He won’t disappoint us. I know him too well,” Ming promised her.

What the “temporaries” were was revealed the next day, when both of them awoke for the first time not inside cubes but on real hospital beds.

Angel was astonished to wake up in a reclining position, and it was a few seconds before she realized that she had stretched her arms. Arms!

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