“Germs?”
“Or maybe viruses, or even less important stuff. No use kidding ourselves any more. We’re the byproduct of a series of chance actions in the exhaust of somebody else’s ship. The black stuff’s just more gunk, and the so-called Higher Races are a bunch of smart diseases, cockroaches, and other pests kind of halfway in our bailiwick and halfway in the real, big one, where here they play tin god and there they’re nuisances and insects. It doesn’t matter any more if I believe or not. Nothing much matters any more.”
“Where are the others?”
“Big Joe and the Terran Slut are off on a bunny trip again in the cockpit, since Tobrush is taking the con from the bubble, and the talking Build-a-Slut kit is napping in back.”
“Your opinion of women has certainly changed,” he noted sourly. “Grysta saved you from doing something pretty nasty to yourself. I’d expect some gratitude.”
“Gratitude!” McCray snorted. “Yeah, she saved me from myself all right, but not to do me any favors. She saved it ’cause she wanted it. Deep down that’s all any of ’em want. Drag men down, control ’em, and in exchange allow us to give ’em what they bloody well crave. Hell, look at Modra. She gets raped and now she’s ‘Beat me! Whip me! Screw me!’ like some bad pornography. And, let her. But nobody on this ship gets mine, that I’m swearin’ to you. Throw caution to the winds and get what you want when you want it is the only way that makes sense in this black cosmos we’ve uncovered. We lifted up a rock in the glen and found ourselves livin’ under it. Hell, the one thing good about all this is that I spent my whole life believin’ and teachin’ that sin was something external, the sins of Eve and Adam, and the forces of the devil and his minions. And, what do you know? It is the devil and his minions doin’ it! And sin, real sin, is literally a god-damned computer program!”
“External causes make it easier for you, then? Absolves you of any responsibility for your actions, any conscience, you think. But it’s not the case, McCray. It doesn’t matter where we are in the overall cosmos, this is still the same place and the same people and the same cultures we grew up in, and it’s very real, all of it. The basis of all religious faith is that the gods—God, singular, if you please—is boss. We were always subject to the whims and the will of greater forces and prayed to them the way ancient slaves pleaded with their masters for crumbs. So what if we’ve found out something about how the system really works? All religions postulate that even the supernatural operates by its own set of rules and codes and that the gods use intermediaries. The physical presence of a corruption program or device means nothing, and absolves us of nothing. Unless there’s an intelligence, the Quintara or their boss, behind it, it’s generic.” He tapped his head. “It uses what it finds in here. It’s found the ugly part in all of us and enhanced it, taken the lid off. You know that, deep down, intellectually. You just are willing to let it win.”
“Big talk. You didn’t feel it. You didn’t let it go in and wrench your mind out. Not her, either, in the same way.” Jimmy pointed to Krisha, who was ignoring the whole conversation as if the pair weren’t even there.
“Huh? What do you mean by that?”
“She’s being specifically reprogrammed. I can read it from back in her subconscious mind, although she’s not aware of it. She’s being made over into the exact specifications of that demon prince’s curse on her. It’s not complete yet, but as soon as she steps off this ship and onto a real planet it’ll set up the rest almost instantly and lock it in so tight won’t no power get it out without destroying her mind as well.”
He half rose from his chair. “How do you know this?”
“As I said, I can read it. She’s an open book to most anybody all the way down. It’s a set of instructions. Not in words, but very clear in holograph. Starts with a real compulsion to survive and not go completely off the deep end. Wide open, full-power broadcast to everybody and everything, but the input’s scrambled so she can’t understand a thing anybody says. Won’t accept charity or help from anybody, or use anything anybody else might want. And anybody who tries will get cursed somehow themselves. Don’t ask me how. Not that they’d want to help after a while. The very next thing on the list seems to be a total loss of bowel and bladder control. Glad that one hasn’t kicked in yet! Real ugly picture there of her wallowing in the mud and her own excrement, eatin’ garbage totally cut off from society and totally alone. Had enough?”
“I get the idea. But you’re sure this isn’t from her own nightmares?”
“Oh, who can say where the old devil got the idea from? All I know is, it’s & pattern. Not something in any way like her other fears and terrors and dark regrets. If this crap’s generic, explain that.”
Gun Roh Chin’s eyes widened. “He programmed her! That demon set her up!”
“Set her up? When? In -her dreams? If he could do that, ‘ why didn’t he do worse to us? I’m pretty sure we were protected by that pentagram no matter what that evil bastard claimed. He never stepped over the line.”
“He didn’t do it. Don’t you see? He only planted the vision in her mind, built from a synthesis of her own terrors. It was the other demon, the one who had you both back in the city station—he saw that vision and he made it a program while he had you! It must be!”
“Yeah? So why’d he do that to her and not me? He had me just as low.”
“Who’s to say he didn’t, McCray? Who’s to say that the knife you almost used wasn’t the first command in a series? It would be different for you, a different set of nightmares, but who’s to say that stuff isn’t just sitting there, waiting until the next time the mind-link is broken, to activate?”
The little man was really rattled by that. “You—you really think so?”
“I have no idea. But I also have no way to find out, do I? I would say that the chances are good that you will find out for yourself in due time. In the meantime, I’m more interested in the fact that she is, as you call her, a broadcast telepath. It’s a variation I hadn’t heard of, although I would assume that the Church would co-opt such ones and hide them away, perhaps as the direct servants of the Holy Angels, since they could never be disloyal. But it’s still simply a variation of a strong talent.”
“Yeah? So?”
“Tobrush said he thought he might have burned the sensitivity out of her, but there was also the chance that it was psychosomatic. Now a variation of her old talent has reappeared. Tell me, McCray—as a strong telepath yourself, could you create a situation where you’d be a broadcast telepath? Send wide open at full strength while not receiving?”
“Yeah, I suppose. I doubt if I could ever do it willingly, though. Not only is all my training, defenses, and intellect directed the other way, but I’d never want to.”
“Wanting or being psychologically capable is not the point. You could create the situation yourself if your life depended on it.”
“Well, it’s theoretically possible, sure.”
“Then her loss was psychosomatic after all. Possibly even induced, the first level of this program. Even a hypno could make her believe she had no more talent for a while. Someone with the Quintara’s power, or Tobrush’s, could do it much better and even make it a permanent command. That’s all the binding ordination of the Church is—a Higher Race using its far stronger hypno talent to create a permanent condition. Long ago, on the way to the city, a still imprisoned Quintara was able to negate her Angel’s hypnotic compulsion. She said as much.”
“Yeah? So it’s a compulsion. That’s a curse anyway, isn’t it? What’s the difference? She couldn’t break her old one on her own, and after seven minutes in the black to reinforce it even Tobrush or her Angels couldn’t undo it. Only a Quintara who knows how it all works could probably do it, and maybe that was the idea. Spend some time like she’s gonna, and you’d cheerfully sell your soul to the devil. Any devil. And then they’d have their own in the priesthood of her all-controlling church. A Kalia for the Mizlaplan.”
Gun Roh Chin thought about it, and the more he thought, the more he knew that McCray had hit it. Not precisely, of course—that demon wasn’t interested in the larger war, only in getting its own following of worshipers—but clearly that was in its mind. Breaking them wasn’t enough; later on, removed from the mental horror, they might still be less than fully committed. Body but not soul. Put them in such horrible situations and, after a while, they’d pray to the damned thing for release!
“If your action with the knife were coupled with an overwhelming sexual desire, you might do anything to get back what you threw away,” Chin noted.
McCray laughed derisively. “A lot easier to get her back than that.”
“Someone in the Exchange is making synthetic people to design. Are they all females?”
Jimmy was startled. “Come to think of it, no! Oh—I see what you mean. Point taken. Which means, as usual, I’m still up the creek and at the end of another’s strings. If I keep the mind-link, I’m in for the duration on this mess. If I lose it, I’m in my own private hell. You’ve really made my day, Captain!”
But Gun Roh Chin looked over at Krisha. It also meant that they could do horrible things to mind and body, but they needed your consent to get your soul. She’d never give them that, no matter how horrible an existence she had. It would be the one thing that would keep her going, give her strength.
He pictured her as McCray said, if the man wasn’t just twisting the knife for the fun of it. Alone, miserable, mud-caked, going through garbage. . . .
“No,” he said softly.
“Huh? ‘No’ what, Captain?”
Gun Roh Chin looked at the chronograph. “Go back into the aft compartment and strap in, McCray. We’re going to punch out in just a few minutes.”
“I don’t need to do all that. I’m perfectly fine right here.”
“Go back aft and strap yourself in, McCray!” said the captain in a tone so menacing and so icy cold that there was no mistaking the danger in him.
Jimmy McCray threw up his hands. “All right! All right! , Man! I think some of that stuff made it into you, too, after all.” He got up and started aft, then stopped and turned. “What are you going to do, Captain?”
“You’re the one with the talents. Go back there and divine it.”
Jimmy grinned. “Oh, no! You’re the prognosticator, not me!” He paused a moment, then added, “Let her go, Cap, for your own good. When a woman loves a man, then comes the man’s destruction if he puts her ahead of all else. That’s been the way since Eve got Adam to crunch the apple and share her misery.”
He left before Chin could respond.
The captain sighed. He wished he were a prognosticator, able to predict the outcome of things, but that was the last thing he was. What he had was no talent; it was simply an ability to see things, both little and big, and put them together into a coherent picture. It was why he was a Grand Master at Go before the age of twelve. They’d told him early on that he was a prodigy, with an I.Q. off the scale,
but he’d never fully accepted that simply because he didn’t feel any different than those around him. He had far more in common with a random group of people than he did with these talents or some big-brained master scientists. He’d often wondered, though, if smarter and dumber had most to do with processing speed than with really being different. He took it for granted that he could do these deductions because they were simple, obvious; it was always amazing to him that others could not, even ones who seemed on a conversational level to be as smart or smarter than he. He’d always put it down mostly to the luxury he had of absolute privacy of thoughts and feelings from his earliest childhood.
He looked at Krisha sitting so forlornly in the corner and then at the chronometer and wished that he had a clue as to what to do. He’d kill her before he’d allow them to turn her into some kind of animal!
But the more he looked at her, suddenly so small and pitiful, the more he knew he could never bring himself to do it.
There had to be a way out! Think! Think! He glanced up at the countdown chronograph. Two minutes and counting. Precious little time left to think!
No matter if she’d been set up by that demon or not, the fact was that the curse was based upon her own darkest nightmares. The Quintara didn’t have to build levels of Hell; they let you construct it yourself and then made it possible to happen.
McCray had lost his faith, but once he’d had it firm and strong and had become a priest in a celibate order, yet he’d remained too painfully human. Love for an unattainable woman had cost him his profession, cut his faith not only in his God but in himself to ribbons. Another female, although a very different sort of creature, had held him in thrall. That one and another woman had loosed the Quintara. The blackness had no trouble turning his inward self-loathing into an outward hatred of all women from which, if his nature was violent enough, could spring a vicious rapist and possible serial killer of women. That was his darkest comer, the part he never even allowed himself to see. Now he still couldn’t see it, but he could become it as surely as Krisha
could become her own nightmare and perhaps even add to it herself.
Josef had already been an arrogant hypno raised in a violent society with little care for individual life, but he’d still operated on civilized codes which had kept his impulses in check and allowed him to function with at least some measure of right and wrong, as different as his definitions might have been from the others’. The darkness had stripped away all inhibitions, redefined “right” as anything he wanted to do and “wrong” anyone or anything that interfered with that, and in so doing he’d become the male counterpart of Kalia with one exception: Josef would do no bidding of a Quintara, prince or otherwise, willingly.
And Modra, proud, independent, tough Modra, who’d seen enough of her decisions create tragedies for others and who therefore carried such enormous guilt within her, had let the darkness seduce her, make her compliant, passive, masochistic, and totally submissive, so that she wouldn’t have to think and decide things any more.
What was k McCray had said? Ninety trillion Fausts. Ninety trillion sentient creatures, each with their own dark corners, inhibitions, repressions, just waiting to be let out and destroy three mighty civilizations, ready to be let out by the Engineer and his minions for their own infinite amusement.
You will win if you deserve to, that distant, godlike being had told the four who’d reached that lofty duty station. What did he mean by that? Morally? Ethically? What were those against the blackness that invaded and corrupted even the best? Intellectually, perhaps, if they could solve the great puzzle before it was too late. But why hadn’t they been given the answer? If those of the Bridge of the Great Ship were of such high moral and ethical character that they opposed all this, why hadn’t they given precise directions to the four of them when they could? Why did the mortals always have to prove themselves to their gods?
Was it, perhaps, to convince the gods that the mortals were worth the trouble and worthy of morals and ethics? In many faiths, including McCray’s if he remembered correctly, evil was less an opponent of the gods than a tool of
them for weeding out the worst and perfecting the best. Was there, perhaps, even now some higher state, some ultimate reward, that even we lowly viruses of engine combustion might attain? Something that, even so, would be an enormous bother to the gods of The Ship, a lot of time and trouble? Is that it? he wondered. Are we supposed to show them whether or not we’re worth the trouble?
One minute!
He got up and shed his suit. No barriers. Then he went over to her and squatted in front of her. She looked up at him with those enormous brown eyes filled only with resignation and despair.
“Get up!” he shouted at her. “Don’t let them do it to you!”
When she didn’t immediately react he stood, reached down, grabbed her arms, and forcibly pulled her to a standing position. They were almost the same height and that helped; he looked straight into her eyes.
Thirty seconds.
“You are not alone!” he shouted to her, unsure if she could even understand him.
Twenty seconds.
“/ will not permit you to be alone! I will not permit this to happen to you!”
Ten seconds.
In desperation and his own despair he pulled her to him, and she clung to him and he to her, and, on impulse, a lifetime of conditioning and behavior went out the hatch. He held her tight, as if trying to bring her body within his own, and she had her own arms around him so tightly her nails dug into the flesh of his back, and he kissed her and held her and passion and compassion mixed as she responded.