It was also true that she was now more helpless and more dependent than a captive songbird with clipped wings. She could waddle, first one side forward, then the other, like a penguin, but not very far or very fast. Climbing or getting her own food was out of the question. She might manage a little something with her head and mouth— beak—but not a lot. She was totally defenseless. She couldn’t run, fly, or grab or use a weapon or tool, and even her bright colors were a problem, making concealment difficult. That was if the enemy came within two meters so she could see it.
Even her hearing seemed off. True, they’d recessed the ears into the head and covered them with feathers so it appeared she had none, but even so, she thought it odd that all she heard from the corridor outside were what sounded like snorts, clicks, and silly noises.
She suddenly felt foolish. That drug did make one stupider, she thought. Of course they would have removed the translator. Did they do more? She opened her mouth and called “Hey, out there! Shut up!” but the only thing that came out was a series of awful-sounding squawks. They’d altered her vocal chords or replaced them. And she couldn’t even form words with her lips. Not with this rigid beak.
Helpless, dependent, no ability to talk or understand, no way to form words silently or use sign language . . . they’d really cut her off. To literally everyone else, even those she knew and who knew her—save only the ones who had done this with masterful skill and a technology far beyond expectation, and Campos, of course—she’d be seen as—she was—the world’s first exotic animal junkie.
Well, she’d kept Campos around, a captive, drugged and hauled about through the jungle, and had wound up making him into the world’s sexiest duck creature. Now Campos had in her own twisted mind attained the perfect revenge.
What was odd was how she was taking it. She herself noticed this, but only as a curiosity, not because it really bothered her. She just accepted it fatalistically as something that was. She knew it was the drug, placing a soft, pleasant haze between herself and reality, but she did not want that haze to disappear. So long as it was there, she could accept almost anything. It was her only friend, her only protector.
Still, there was the practical, pragmatic need to get used to it. She waddled over in the direction of the door, blurry though it was, and the usual food cakes and drink were there. Although a little nervous about it, she discovered that they’d set the balance and center of gravity exactly right. These doctors were geniuses with the souls of monsters. She could bend completely forward on those knee joints, and the bill, serrated a bit, was perfect to break into the loaves and get pieces she could mush and break up inside her mouth proper and swallow without difficulty by raising her head a bit while keeping bent over. Drinking was harder to master and amounted to using the tongue or a back part of her mouth to get some suction through the tiny bill if it was immersed, but it, too, was manageable.
The only real problem was with the breasts, which amounted to dead weight tumbling down when she bent over and which, with no arms and true shoulder muscles to stabilize them, went every which way, pulling on her neck and throwing her slightly off balance. She’d never had large breasts as a human, and they could well have dispensed with them as they did with other parts of her, but instead they’d enlarged them and created a problem. More of Campos’s revenge, she understood. She would learn to live with them with practice, she decided.
A technician or guard or whatever who looked like an underdressed turtle gave her the drug regularly, in the form of a solid soft cube. It was far slower to take effect when eaten, but the creature was never late with it. Campos, she worried, might not be so punctual.
And finally the Cloptan came for her. Campos seemed absolutely enthralled by the redesign, and Mavra was again taken aback to discover that thanks to the legs, she was now even shorter, no more than a meter or so tall. She had always been small and mostly looked up to see other faces, but this meant craning her neck.
“Oh, but this is so excellent!” Campos gushed. “Revenge is seldom so perfect! Can you understand me?”
To her surprise, Mavra could. “Yes, I can.”
“Wonderful! You see, the little device inside you is tuned only to me. It even blocks out other people’s translators from your mind. And what it transmits, only I have been given the ability to translate and understand. And all I have to do is think about it and I can turn it off, or on, at will. So you will communicate, and understand, only to me and when I wish. What you send is a computer code that sounds to all others like the noise of a bird. You will truly be my pet, and you will act like it. You will guard me and protect me at all costs if you can, and the rest of the time you will be a nice little trained birdie and do everything I say, because I and I alone have those nice little red cubes. You will exist to please me and never to displease me, now, won’t you?”
“Yes,” she replied resignedly.
“Oh, no! We begin right here. It will from now on be ‘Yes, master.’ Not even ‘mistress,’ not ‘madame.’ Master. Understand?”
“Yes—master.”
“And you can spend your time thinking of ways to sing my praises. How beautiful I am, how intelligent, how simply wonderful I am. You will spend your time thinking of new ways to praise, flatter, worship me as your one and only god, and you will do it with conviction, with enthusiasm; you will convince me that you believe it. And in the same breaths you will do the opposite to yourself. Remind me and yourself how low you are, how dependent, how miserable and undeserving a creature you are and how lucky you are to be my property, and you will say those things, too, with the same fervor. And any time I find either part unconvincing, I might just forget your little cube for a while. Maybe a very long while, until you are totally believable. Understand?”
One pang of true abject fear pierced the insulating haze. “Yes, my most wonderful master, from whose great kindness all blessings flow. Please forgive this most miserable of helpless wretches who is nothing without you!”
Campos smiled. “It is a start. We shall have many, many long conversations together, and all of them, even the ones that matter, will be partially tests. Practice it in your mind. You will come to believe that what you say is true so that it becomes second nature to use it. Now, come. I have a travel cage for you, and we must catch the return steamer for Buckgrud, the city where I live in Clopta. There, in my flat, I have a nice little place provided for you.”
“As you command, most powerful and magnificent master.”
The worst part of it was, the words weren’t even sticking in her throat.
Still, now would begin the trial, until one day Campos would decide for whatever reason that she’d had enough or wanted more. Then Mavra would be the only means by which Campos could have her revenge on just about everything and everybody she hated, and that was almost the entire universe now. The Cloptan had already thought ahead on this; that was why they could still speak to one another, and she was conditioning her “pet” to think like an obedient slave to ensure complete control. Otherwise, when Juan Campos had the burning desire to get her hands on the Well World controls, how could she make Mavra let her do it? The worst part was, as she was, Mavra didn’t even care.
Lilblod
“YOU SEPARATED ME FROM MY HUSBAND! I WILL KILL YOU FOR that!”
“Now, calm down, I tell you,” Zitz soothed. “There was nothing I could do. They’d have killed you anyway if you made a fuss.”
“They might as well have killed us both!” Alowi cried. “My husband cannot survive without me!”
“Nothing to do with love, I’m afraid,” Tony explained. “She produces something inside her that heals his injuries. We’ve seen it in action.”
“Well, it’s done, and that’s that. I can’t even give you a clue as to where they took ’em. I don’t know nothin’ about the land part of this, and I don’t wanna know. I’ll tell you. though, that either we did what they said or they’d have took ’em anyways and blown all of us out of the water the moment we dropped the load. Blown all three of you away as it was. Think we liked it? We’re gonna lose a fortune because we gotta give back them stolen jewels! And it’d have been easier for us to just knock all three of you off and dump you in the ocean. We’re droppin’ you here instead. That over there’s Lilblod. It’s not a real nice place, but you take care and keep to the trails and keep your nose out of where it don’t belong and you’ll make it. About fifty kilometers north is Clopta, a high-tech coastal hex where you can get a ride into a Zone Gate and a quick pass back home. South maybe sixty, seventy kilometers is Agon, same deal. Don’t think you can go down there and stir up stuff and find them. They probably never made shore there. Got picked up by some other ship and are maybe anywhere or heading anywheres else by now. Go home. It’s over.”
“Come, come dear!” Anne Marie said sympathetically. “Let’s get off this terrible ship first and be on our own. Then we can decide what to do next.”
With neither the Dillians nor Alowi having a translator, it was up to Zitz to interject.
There was no purpose now to further protests, and Alowi nodded and tried to calm down. “All right,” But I will feed the name of this accursed ship and all of its crew to my people back in Erdom. Such an assault on our honor cannot go unavenged.
“This is going to be a problem, though,” Tony commented. “We really can’t speak to or understand her, nor she us.”
“Sister, if she’s nuts enough to go off tramping in that crazy forest by herself, let her,” Zitz responded. “You won’t find much with a translator in there, but it’s easy in either Clopta or Agon. Just get everybody out, huh?” He turned to Alowi.
“Okay, lady, here’s the way it is. They’re gonna head for one or another of these places where you can get home and they’ll take you. Maybe you can’t talk to each other, but you’ll make do. You ain’t cut out to be an avenger. You just ain’t built for it. Relax. Take it easy. Tell the authorities if you want to once you get there. It’s no big deal to us. But one way or another you’re gettin’ off this ship as soon as we get in a little more. Either you get off with all your gear or we shoot you and shove you off and keep it. Your choice.”
“We’ll go, curse your black heart,” Anne Marie responded acidly.
“Oh, yeah, one more thing,” the Zhonzhorpian said. “You can report this and this ship, but remember that all three of you are wanted in Gekir for jewel theft. And even though they’ll still check it out, we’ll show that this ship, under an alternative name and registry, was thousands of kilometers away at the time. You’re out of your league here. Forget it. You won’t find them—hell, the authorities couldn’t anyway, could they, or you wouldn’ta been aboard in the first place. All you’ll do by stirring up trouble is to make sure you all get sent back to Gekir, where you’ll be blinded and sent out for life to work in the salt mines until you die. Nobody wins on this one. Sometimes it happens.”
It wasn’t much of an answer, but it was a collection of hard truths that was impossible to ignore.
The Star Runner came close enough to the shore to scrape bottom, and that was as far as it dared. Anne Marie picked up the sobbing Alowi and put her on Tony’s back, where she clung as hard as she could, and Anne Marie hefted the saddlebags and packs, and they jumped the short distance from the rails down into the water and quickly struck mud. It was a little tough to get some footing, but finally both of them managed to force their way up and onto the shore, Alowi still clinging to Tony’s back, looking wet and disheveled but otherwise none the worse for the wear.
It was very dark and very quiet on the shore; there were no lights to be seen anywhere.
“Now what?” Anne Marie asked, trying to see something other than forbidding swampy forest in the thick gloom of the night.
“We camp as soon as we can find a dry place, of course,” Tony responded. “We still have some matches in a waterproof container, and we might try a fire, if only to scare away anything unwelcome. When we get some light, we’ll see about finding a road.”
“Which way?”
“It really doesn’t matter, does it? I should think, though, if we have any real chance of tracing them, it should be south. At least they’ll have communications, possibly enough to get word to the embassy in Zone. Then we might be able to arrange to get this poor girl home and maybe be out of this and home ourselves. I’ve had quite enough of discomfort and double crosses. We did our duty as best we could. Now we deserve a chance to live our own lives.”
“Duty! Bah!” Anne Marie almost spit. ‘This poor dear won’t go home willingly. She’ll try to find her husband, even if that’s impossible, because it’s her duty and because she’s in love. You heard what they said about that dreadful culture. She’d be married off to some old bum she didn’t know and die of a broken heart!”
“Anne Marie, this is not a romance novel.”
“Tony Guzman! What in the world has gotten into you? It’s not like we are innocent bystanders in all this! Nor entirely without some responsibility, too, simply because we weren’t all that honest with them, either.”
“We didn’t ask to go along on this adventure!” Tony argued. “We were drafted!”
“Nonsense! That nice young man from the Zone embassy came along and asked us to do it. To go and link up with this Mavra Chang and find out as much as we could. And we found out a great deal, I think! We were also to get off a report to the ambassador if they lost track of the party. Thank goodness we didn’t have to do that. I would have felt just dreadful about it!”
“But it’s over, Anne Marie! We’re the party now. The only satisfaction we might have is rubbing it in that smug drug runner’s face after he discovers we were not fugitives but shadows.”
“Spies, you mean. Spies for our government.”
Tony sighed. “Anne Marie, spies are professionals. Espionage is a highly regarded art. We were rank amateurs dropped into a situation where we might have been hurt or killed by a government that wouldn’t have really cared, and now we got out with our lives and whole skins. I don’t want to be blinded or crippled. Not again. Now we have a second chance. I want to go home before something does happen. We were very nearly killed back there, you know. Anne Marie, we’re sixteen years old again, only this time we’re sexy blond bombshells that had the men of Dillia already making fools of themselves around us. I’ve been on that side. I want to find out if it’s any more fun on this side.”
“Well, then, you go home,” she told the other centauress. “I suppose I should have seen it coming long before this, but I didn’t want to. You’ve had a good life. You were handsome, from a well-to-do and well-connected family, skilled, educated, a pilot and world traveler. I never did any of those things. I couldn’t. I was homely and plain and stuck mostly in a broken body. I made the best of it, but it wasn’t fun, let me tell you! Your coming along, your love, was the one truly wonderful thing that happened to me. I shall always cherish it, and I shall always love that inner part of you, but surely you must have known from the moment we woke up like this that it could never be again. In a sense, this is our afterlife, mortal though we remain, goodness knows. I faced it more and more as we went on this trip. I shall always love that memory of you, and I shall continue to love you, but as a sister. This is after the ‘death do us part’ as surely as if we’d done away with ourselves, and you know it if you’d just face it.”
Tony laughed.
“What’s so amusing? I’m deadly serious.”
“Anne Marie, I’ve rehearsed almost that identical speech a thousand times in my mind, and up to now I never had the nerve to give it. I was afraid of hurting you. And I thought we shared one another’s thoughts to a degree!”
Anne Marie laughed in return, then finally said, “I guess not. I suppose it’s what we thought we would think if the situations were reversed or some such. Or, since we actually were thinking the same, maybe it’s true. Maybe we just didn’t believe we were.” She sighed. “Well, then, I guess this is what we’d call a divorce by mutual consent. Who would have dreamed we two would ever say those words?”
“We’ll always be closer than any other two women of our race,” Tony noted, taking her hand and squeezing it. “But no matter that we see each other in a living mirror, we are two different people who will lead at least slightly different lives.”
“Agreed. And if you want to go back and have all those silly fools swoon over you, be my guest. I suppose, if all else comes out in the end, I’ll wind up doing it, too, but I’m not so eager to start as you.”
“Anne Marie! What can you do? It is like the man said—it is over for us!”
“For you. Go on, I understand completely. But I know how skin-deep those lusting fools are, and they certainly weren’t there when I needed them, going off chasing some—some dumb blond like you. I’m having fun, dear! For the first time in my life I’m living it instead of watching life go by! I very much hope that I’ll come through in one piece, but, in the end it really doesn’t matter to me. Perhaps it was because I was so devoted, to charities, to the unfortunate, to you. Perhaps it’s just divine grace. But God gave me, at the end of my half life, a chance to live a full one, at least for a little bit. I shall probably give up in disgust and go home after a few days, but if there is anything perhaps I can do, if there’s just one little thing I can add, I’ll stick it out.” She looked around at Alowi. “Oh my! The poor dear’s cried herself to sleep!”
“Exhausted, probably. She’s been throwing a tantrum for three days now.”
“We should stop chattering and build that fire, then.”
The next day proved tough going through the thick and ancient trees of Lilblod, but with no sign of who or what was the dominant race there or why they were feared.
Still, before midday they reached a road that, while direct, seemed very well traveled by the depth of the wheel grooves and the marks of all sorts of feet in the clay.
“Runs pretty much straight, northwest to southeast,” Tony noted. “I guess this is the main highway to civilization. He said that place—Clopta or some such—was closest, which would mean we might well make it at a trot before dark.”
Anne Marie raised an eyebrow. “But Agon is where they took the pair of them. If nothing ate us last night except the bugs—goodness! I itch all over!—then I doubt if anything will eat me if I spend one more night by this road. Give me the poor little darling and we’ll head south.”
Tony stared at her. “So this is it? Already?”
“I suppose so. It had to come sometime. It might jolly well be now.” She gestured with her arms to Alowi to get off Tony and climb up somewhere on her back.
After a few moments’ confusion Alowi figured it out enough to act, slid off, and managed, with a little help from Anne Marie, to get up on the other twin.
“Good-bye, Tony,” said Anne Marie. “I’ll see you in a few weeks, I suppose, unless we have a lot more luck than we have had in this matter so far.” And without another word she started off southwest, toward Agon, at a brisk trot.
Tony stood there and watched her go until she was almost out of sight, then muttered, “Oh, hell,” and trotted off southwest after them.
Just Off the Crab Nebula
the kraang was not at all pleased. what had looked from the start to be a fairly straightforward affair had now turned into a series of Gordian knots that threatened all its plans.