bowed over drinks and dinners, shoulders which stayed turned.
Outside air hit him like a wall of cold and light. He drew a breath, tried to
clear his head, while the floor kept developing lattices of shadow, flashes of
here and there, truth and untruth.
Cyteen was a lie. He was. Part of him functioned like the automaton he reckoned
himself bred to be… he acknowledged instincts he had never trusted, not knowing
why he had them—drew another breath, trying to think, while his body navigated
its way across the corridor and sought cover.
Only when he had gotten back to his cold dinner on the back table in Ngo’s, when
he sat in that familiar place with his back to the corner and the reality of
Pell came and went at the bar in front of him, the numbness began to leave him.
He thought of Damon, one life, one life he might have the power to save.
He killed. That was what he was created to do. That was why the like of himself
and Gabriel existed at all. Joshua and Gabriel. He understood the wry humor in
their names, swallowed at a knot in his throat. Labs. That was the white void he
had lived in, the whiteness in his dreams. Carefully insulated from humanity.
Tape-taught… given skills; given lies to tell—about being human.
Only there was a flaw in the lies… that they were fed into human flesh, with
human instincts, and he had loved the lies.
And lived them in his dreams.
He ate the dinner, which kept sticking in his throat, washed it down with cold
coffee, poured another cup from the thermal pitcher.
He might get Damon off. The rest had to die. To get Damon out he had to keep
quiet, and Gabriel had to mislead the others following him, promise them all
life, promise them help which would never come. They would all die, except
himself and Gabriel, and Damon. He wondered how he should persuade Damon to
leave… or if he could. If he must use reason… what reason?
Alicia Lukas-Konstantin. He thought of her, who had helped him in the process of
helping Damon. She could never leave. And the guards who had given him money in
hospital; and the Downer who followed them about and watched over them; and the
people who had survived the hell of the ships and of Q; and the men and the
women and the children…
He wept, leaning against his hands, while somewhere deep inside were instincts
which functioned in cold intelligence, knowing how to kill a place like Pell,
knowing that it was the only reason he existed.
The rest he no longer believed.
He wiped his eyes, drank the coffee, sat and waited.
ii
Union carrier Unity: deep space; 1/8/53
The dice rolled, came up two, and Ayres shrugged morosely, while Dayin Jacoby
marked down another set of points and Azov set up for another round. The two
guards always assigned here in the lower-deck main room sat watching from the
benches against the wall, their young and flawless faces quite passionless. He
and Jacoby, and rarely Azov, played for imaginary points, pledged against real
credits when they reached some civilized point together; and that, Ayres
thought, was an element as chancy as the dice rolls.
Tedium was the only present enemy. Azov grew sociable, sat black-clad and grim
at the table, played with them, for he would not bend and gamble with his crew.
Perhaps the mannequins amused themselves elsewhere. Ayres could not imagine it.
Nothing touched them, nothing illumined those dull, hateful eyes. Only Azov…
joined them from time to time as they sat in the main room, eight and nine hours
a tedious day of sitting, for there was no work to do, no exercise to be had.
Mostly they sat in the one room freely allowed them, and talked… finally talked.
Jacoby had no restraint in his conversation; the man poured out confidences of
his life, his affairs, his attitudes. Ayres resisted Jacoby’s and Azov’s
attempts to draw him out to talk about his homeworld. There was danger in that.
But all the same he talked… about his impressions of the ship, about the present