Beast Of The Heartland And Other Stories Part 14

Mornings, Kiri told me once, were lies. It was only the nights that were true. She meant a sad, desolate thing by this, she meant that the brightness of things is illusion, and the blackness of them is where the truth would fit if we had courage enough to admit it. Yet when I thought of those words now, they meant something completely opposite, because the virtues she applied to night and morning had been all switched around for me.

At any rate, in the gray, bl.u.s.tery morning following that brilliant night, with big flakes falling from the sky, Wall sent his second-in-command, a man named Coley, to fill us in. Coley was a tense sort, a little yappy dog to Wall's big placid one, scrawny and worried-looking, with a grizzled beard and sunken cheeks and a startling bit of color to his outfit, a bright red ribbon for a hat band. Though his anxious manner unnerved me -- he was always fidgeting, glancing around as if concerned he might be caught at something -- I related to him a d.a.m.n sight better than I did Wall, mostly because Coley did not seem so all-fired sure of himself.

He told us they'd been planning this raid for years, and that the purpose of it was to steal a flying machine. A few years back one of the machines had crashed out on the flats; they had captured the sole survivor, whom they called Junior, and forced him to supply information about all manner of things; hewas to be the pilot of the stolen machine once Wall's people succeeded in breaking into it. Problem was, the minute they started messing with it, there was a chance that an alarm would be sounded, and we might have to fight off the Captains for as long as it took to finish the job. Maybe an hour, maybe more.

There were, according to Coley, nearly five hundred men and women scattered about in the rocks, laying low, and he wasn't sure that many would be enough to keep the Captains off, though Wall was of the opinion that our casualties would be light. Coley did not agree.

"It ain't the Captains worry me," he said. "It's who they got doin' their fightin' for 'em. Chances are there'll be apes. Might even be some of our own people. They got ways of makin' a man do things against his will."

"What I don't get," Brad said, "is how you make this here Captain do what you want. Every time I talk to 'em, I get the feelin' things don't go how they like 'em, they're liable to keel over and die."

"That ain't quite the way of it," Coley told him. "They just don't think they can die is all. 'Cordin' to Junior, they make copies of themselves. Clones, he calls 'em. One dies, there's another waitin' to take his place who's got the same memories, same everything." He shook his head in wonderment.

"d.a.m.nedest thing I ever heard of. Anyhow, they got these collars. Metal collars that fit back of the neck and the head. I don't know how it works. But slap one on somebody, and they get downright suggestible. We picked some up from the crash, and we used one on Junior."

We all three nodded and said, "Huh," or something similar, as if we understood, but I doubt Brad or Callie understood Coley any better than I did.

A shout came from a man downslope, and Coley turned to it; but the shout must have been directed at someone else. The crater walls looked ashen, and the whole thing seemed more fearsome now than it had with light streaming up from it. Under the clouded sky the hardpan was a dirty yellow, like old bones.

"What is this place?" I asked. "What the h.e.l.l are they doin' down there?"

"The Captains call it the Garden," Coley said. "Sometimes they use it for fightin'. Junior says they're all divided into clans up on the stations, and this here's where they settle clan disputes. Other times they use it for parties, and that's probably what's goin' on now. If it was a fight there'd be more ships. They like to watch fightin'." He worked up a good spit and let it fly. "That's how come they treasure us so much. They enjoy the way we fight."

I let that sink in for a few seconds, thinking about Kiri fitted with a collar. A break appeared in the clouds, and Coley peered up into the sky, looking more worried than ever. When I asked him what was wrong, he said, "I'm just hopin' the weather holds. We usually don't put so many people at risk. Then if the Captains drop a net, we don't get hurt so bad." He let out a long unsteady breath. "'Course even if the weather does clear, chances are they ain't lookin' this way. They're pretty careless as regards security, and they ain't very well armed. Not like you might expect, anyway. They didn't have many personal weapons up in the orbitals, and we don't believe they've collected any weapons from the shelters. Why would they bother? They don't think we can hurt them. All they've got are their ships, which are armed with mining lasers. And even if they did collect weapons from the shelters, they probably wouldn't know how to use 'em. They used to be technical, but they've forgotten most of what they know. Eventually I figger their ships'll break down, and they'll be stranded up there."

Callie asked what he meant by "shelters," and he told us that they were underground places where people had slept away the centuries, waiting for the Captains to wake them once things on the surface were back to something approaching normal. It was in those places that the Bad Men lived. Places fortified now against attack from the sky. But it was clear to me that neither Coley's faith in those fortifications nor in the raid was absolute. Though I didn't know him, I had the impression that his anxiety was abnormal, at least in its intensity, and when I tried to talk with him about Wall, I detected disapproval.

"He's brought people together," he said. "He's done a lot of good things." But I could tell his heart wasn't in the words.

Sleet began coming down, just spits of it, but enough so I could hear it hissing against the rocks. "What's all this about?" I asked Coley; I gestured at the crater. "All this business here. I know you said it was to get a ship. But why bother if..."

"It's about killin'," said Wall's voice behind me; he was leaning up against a boulder, looking down at us in that glum, challenging way of his; his long hair lifted in the wind. "'Bout them killin' us all these years," he went on. "And now us evenin' things up a touch. 'Bout finding some new thing that'll let us kill even more of 'em."

"I realize that," I said. "But why not let well enough alone? Accordin' to what Coley says, we leave 'em be, sooner or later they ain't gonna be a problem."

"Is that what Mister Coley says?" Wall pinned him with a cold glare, but Coley didn't flinch from it; he made a gruff noise in his throat and turned back to me. "Y'see Coley's out here with us, don't ye?

Don't that tell ye somethin'? He may believe what he told ye, but he ain't countin' on it to be true. He'd be crazy to count on it. S'pose they got more weapons than he figgers? Even if they don't, who knows what's in their minds? They might up and decide they're tired of games and kill us all. Nosir! Killin's the only way to deal with 'em."

"Ain't you worried they gonna strike back at you?" Callie asked him.

"Let 'em try! They might pick off a few of us when we're out on the flats, but we're dug in too deep for them to do any real damage."

"That's what you believe," I said. "But then you'd be crazy to count on it bein' true, wouldn't you?"

He tried the same stare on me that he'd tried on Coley, but for some reason I wasn't cowed by either it or his faulty logic. Coley, I noticed, seemed pleased by what I'd said.

"S'pose they got more weapons than what you figger?" I went on. "S'pose they got some'll dig you outta your holes? They might decide to kill us all. Who knows what they got in their minds?"

Wall gave a laugh. "You a clever talker, Bob, I'll hand you that. But ain't no point you goin' on like this. It's all been talked through and decided."

"How 'bout everyone back on the Edge?" Callie asked. "And Windbroken? And everywhere else?

You talked it through with them, have you?"

"They ain't involved with us. Anyhow, the Captains got no reason to go hurtin' them for somethin' we done."

"No reason you know of, maybe," Callie said.

"Well," said Wall after a bit, looking off into the distance, "this is a real nice chat we're havin', but like I told ye, it comes a little late in the game. We'll be going down into the Garden at dusk." He cut his eyes toward me. "You come along with me if you want, Bob, and have a look for Kiri. But keep in mind she's not the main reason you're goin' to be there. Keepin' the Captains back from the ship is. That clear?"

Brad started to speak, but Wall cut him short.

"The boy and the woman can stay with the ship. We can use another coupla rifles case any of 'em break through."

I thought Brad was going to say something, but he just lowered his head; I guess he was wise enough to realize that Wall couldn't be swayed by argument.

"Keep your chin up," Wall told him. "Time'll come soon enough for ye to do some real killin'."

The three of us spent the remainder of the afternoon huddled among the rocks. We talked some, more than we had recently at any rate, but it was for the most part anxious talk designed to stop us from fretting over what lay ahead, and never touched on the things we needed to talk about. Snow fell steadily, capping the boulders in white, and as the sky darkened, golden light began to stream up from the crater once again. Then, as dusk began to acc.u.mulate, I caught sight of Coley and a couple of others leading adiminutive pale figure down the slope. It was a Captain, all right, but like none I'd seen before. Dressed in rags; emaciated; scarred. As they drew near, I got to my feet -- we all did -- fascinated by the proximity of this creature whom I had previously thought of in almost G.o.dlike terms. There was nothing G.o.dlike about him now. His nose was broken, squashed nearly flat, and his scalp was crisscrossed by ridged scars; one of his eyes was covered by a patch, and his other had a listless cast. The only qualities he retained similar to those curious ent.i.ties I had spoken to in Edgeville were his pallor and his size.

About his neck and cupping the back of his skull was a metal apparatus worked with intricate designs resembling those I'd seen on antique silver; its richness was incongruous in contrast to his sorry state. I had expected I might feel hatred on seeing him, or something allied, but I felt nothing apart from a dry curiosity; yet after he had pa.s.sed I realized that my hands were shaking and my legs weak, as if strong emotion had occupied me without my knowing and left only these symptoms, and I stood there, as did Brad and Callie, watching until the Captain -- Junior -- had been reduced by distance to a tiny shadow crossing the hardpan toward the crater.

It was not long afterward that Wall came to collect me. Callie and Brad went off with a big, broad-beamed woman who reminded me some of Hazel Aldred, and Wall led me over to a group of men and women who were sitting and squatting at the edge of the hardpan, and gave me over to the care of a woman named Maddy, who fitted me out with a hunting knife and a pistol and an ammunition belt.

She was on the stringy side, was Maddy, with dirty blond hair tied back in a ponytail; but she had a pretty face made interesting and more than a little s.e.xy by the lines left by hard weather and hard living, and she had a directness and good humor that put me somewhat at ease.

"I know a red-blooded sort like you's all bucked up and rarin' to go," she said, flashing a quick grin, "but you keep it holstered till I give you the word, y'hear?"

"I'll do my level best," I told her.

"We'll be goin' down soon," she said. "If there's an attack and things get confused, stick with me and chances are you'll be fine. We believe there's gonna be some of our own people down there. They'll be collared, and like as not they'll be comin' after us. If you gotta kill 'em, n.o.body's goin' to blame you for it. But if you can, aim at their legs. Maybe we can save one or two."

I nodded, looked out between boulders across the hardpan. A handful of Bad Men were visible as silhouettes at the rim of the crater, black stick figures blurred against the pour of golden light; I couldn't make out what they were doing. The thought of descending into that infernal light turned my nerves a notch higher; I couldn't have worked up a spit even if the price of spit had suddenly gone sky-high.

"Ain't no point my tellin' you not to be afraid," Maddy said. "I 'spect we're all afraid. But once we get down to business, you'll be all right."

"You sure 'bout that?" I said, trying to make it sound light; but I heard a quaver in my voice.

"You come all this way from the Edge, I guess I ain't worried 'bout you seizin' up on me."

"How bout Wall? You reckon he's afraid?"

She made a noncommittal noise and glanced down at her hands; with her head lowered, a wisp of hair dangling down over her forehead, her expression contemplative, the crater light glowing on her face, eroding some of the lines there, I could see the girl she once had been.

"Probably not," she said. "He likes this kind of thing."

There was disapproval in her voice. This was the second time I'd detected a less than favorable feeling toward Wall, and I was about to see if I could learn where it came from, when Clay Fornoff hunkered down beside us.

"He all set?" he asked Maddy.

She said, "Yes." Then, following a pause, she asked how much longer before we started.

"Any minute now," Fornoff said.

I didn't really have anything to say, but I thought talking might ease my anxiety, and I asked him what sort of opposition we'd be facing aside from people wearing collars.

"What's the matter, Bob?" He made a sneering noise of my name. "'Fraid you gonna wet yourself?"

"I was just makin' conversation." "You wanna be friends, is that it?"

"I don't much care about that one way or another," I said.

His face tightened. "Just shut the h.e.l.l up! I don't wanna hear another d.a.m.n word from ya."

"Sure thing. I understand. I s'pose you don't want to hear nothin' 'bout your folks either, do ya?"

He let a a few beats go by then said, "How they doin'?" But he kept his eyes trained on the crater.

I told him about his folks, his father's rheumatism, about the store and some of his old friends. When I had done he gave no sign that he had been in any way affected by the news from home. Maddy rolled her eyes and shot me an afflicted smile, as if to suggest that I wasn't the only one who considered Fornoff a pain in the a.s.s. I'd been coming around 180 degrees in my att.i.tude towards Bad Men, thinking of them more as heroes, rebels, and so forth; but now I told myself that some Bad Men were likely every bit as rotten as what I'd once supposed. Or maybe it was just that I was part of a time with which Fornoff would never be able to reach an accommodation; he would never be able to see me without recalling the night when he had gone Bad, and thus he would always react to me with loathing that might have better been directed at himself.

Not long afterward I heard a shout, and before I could prepare myself, I was jogging alongside Maddy and Fornoff toward the crater, watching the chute of golden light jolt sideways with every step; a couple of minutes later I found myself in the company of several hundred others descending the crater wall on ropes. The three ships rested at the bottom of the crater on a smooth plastic floor, from beneath which arose the golden light. We paused beside one of them as Wall, with the help of two other men, worked feverishly at the smallest of the mining lasers that protruded from the prow. I saw that it was a modular unit that could be snapped into place. Once they had removed it, Wall shrugged out of his coat and lashed the unit to his right arm with a complex arrangement of leather straps; the way it fitted, his fingers could reach a panel of studs set into the bottom, and I realized it must have been designed to be portable. Wall pressed a stud and a beam of ruby light scored a deep gouge in the rock face. On seeing this he laughed uproariously, and swung the thing, which must have weighed seventy or eighty pounds, in a celebratory circle above his head.

Beyond the ships, at the bottom of a gently declining ramp, lay the entrance to a vast circular chamber -- I guessed it to be about a half-mile across -- floored with exotic vegetation, some of the plants having striped stalks and huge rubbery leaves, unlike anything I'd ever seen; the domed ceiling was aglow with ultraviolet panels, the same sort of light I used to grow my peas and beans and tomatoes back in Edgeville, and the foliage was so dense that the four narrow paths leading away into it were entirely overgrown. Mists curled above the treetops, rising in wraithlike coils to the top of the ceiling, lending the s.p.a.ce a primitive aspect like some long-ago jungle, daunting in its silence and strangeness.

And yet the place was familiar.

I couldn't quite figure why at first; then I recalled that Wall had said the Captains called the crater the Garden, and I thought of the book I'd read and reread back in the hydroponics building, The Black Garden, and the ill.u.s.trations it contained -- this chamber was either the model for one of those ill.u.s.trations or the exact copy of the model. Confused and frightened already, I can't begin to tell you the alarm this caused me. Added to everything that I previously had not understood but had managed to arrange in a makeshift frame of reference, this last incomprehensible thing, with its disturbing echoes of decadence, now succeeded in toppling that shaky structure, and I felt as unsteady in my knowledge of what was as I had during our ride from Edgeville. I had an urge to tell someone about my sudden recognition, but then I realized that thanks to Junior, they must know far more than I did about the Garden, and of course d.a.m.n near everybody knew about the book. But none of these rationalizations served to calm me, and I got to thinking what it meant that the Captains would give us these clues about their existence, what it said about their natures.

Approximately a hundred of us headed down each of the avenues, moving quietly, but at a good pace. Maddy, Clay Fornoff, and I were attached to a party led by Wall. Once beneath the canopy we were immersed in a green twilight; sweetish scents reminiscent of decay, but spicier, issued from the foliage and a humming sound rose from the polished stones beneath our feet -- that sound, apart from thesoft fall of our footsteps -- was the only break in the silence. No rustlings or slitherings, no leaves sliding together. Every now and then we came to a section of the path where the stones had been replaced by a sheet of transparent paneling through which we could see down into a black s.p.a.ce picked out here and there by golden lights, and once again I was reminded of The Black Garden, of what the book had related about a region of black foliage and secret rooms. Once we walked beneath a crystalline bubble the size of a small room suspended in the branches, furnished with cushions, and with a broad smear of what appeared to be dried blood marring its interior surface. Far too much blood to be the sign of anything other than a death. The sight harrowed me, and Maddy, after a quick glance at the bubble, fixed her eyes on the path and did not lift them again until it was well behind us.

No more than fifty yards after we had pa.s.sed beneath the bubble, we encountered the first of two side paths -- the second lay barely another twenty-five yards farther along -- and at each of these junctions we left a quarter of our number, who hid among the ferns that lined the way. I expected to be left with them, but I imagine Wall wanted to give me the best possible chance of locating Kiri, and though uneasy with the fact that I was moving deeper and deeper into this oppressive place, I was at the same time grateful for the opportunity. After about fifteen minutes we reached the far side of the chamber, a place where the path planed away into a well-lit tunnel that led downward at a precipitous angle. We proceeded along it until we came to another chamber, smaller than the first yet still quite large, perhaps a hundred yards in diameter, its walls covered with white shiny tiles, each bearing a red hieroglyph, and dominated by a grotesque fountain ringed by benches and banks of tree ferns, whose centerpiece, the life-sized statue of a naked crouching woman with her mouth stretched open in anguish, bled red water from a dozen gashes carved in the grayish-white stone of her flesh. The statue was so real-looking, I could have sworn it was an actual person who had been magicked into stone. Vines with serrated leaves climbed the walls and intertwined across the white tray of ultraviolet light that occupied the ceiling, casting spindly shadows.

On first glance I'd a.s.sumed the chamber to be untouched by age, but then I began to notice worn edges on the benches, corners missing from tiles, a chipped knuckle on the statue, and other such imperfections. The idea that the place was old made it seem even more horrid, speaking to a tradition of the perverse, and the longer I looked at the statue, the more certain I became that it had been rendered from life; there was too much detail to the face and the body, details such as scars and lines and the like, to make me think otherwise. I imagined the woman posing for some pallid little monster, growing weaker and weaker from her wounds, yet forced by some terrifying presence, some binding torment, to maintain her pose, and the anger that I had not been able to feel on seeing Junior now surfaced in me and swept away my fear. I grew cold and resolved, and I imagined myself joyfully blowing holes in the pulpy bodies of the Captains.

We crossed the chamber, progressing with more caution than before. Judging by the way Wall turned this way and that, searching for a means of egress -- none was apparent -- I had the notion that the existence of the chamber came as a surprise to him, that Junior must not have informed him of it.

Unnerved by what this might mean, whether it was that the collars were not totally controlling and Junior had lied, or else that he had been so stupefied he had forgotten to mention the place, I put my hand on my pistol and turned to Maddy to see what her reaction might be to this turn of events; but as I did, a section of the wall opposite us slid back to reveal a wedge of darkness beyond, a void that the next moment was choked with emaciated men and women wearing metal collars like the one Junior had worn, dozens of them, all armed with knives and clubs, driven forward by white-furred apes that differed from the Edgeville apes by virtue of their barbaric clothing -- leather harnesses and genital pouches. The most horrifying thing about their approach was that they -- the men and women, not the apes -- made no sound as they came; they might have been corpses reanimated by a spell.

I glanced back to the tunnel and saw that it was blocked with in equally savage-looking force; then the attackers were on us, chopping and slashing. There was no hope of aiming discriminately as Maddy had suggested. Everything became a chaos of gunshots and screams and snarling mouths, and we would have all died if it hadn't been for Wall. He swung his laser in sweeping arcs, cutting a swath in the ranksof our adversaries, and headed straight for the opening on the far side of the chamber and the darkness beyond it.

It was a matter of sheer luck that I was standing close to Wall when he made his charge. During the first thirty seconds of the attack I had emptied my pistol; I'm sure I hit something with every shot -- it would have been nearly impossible not to do so -- yet I have no clear memory of what I hit. Faces, ape and human, reeled into view, visible for split seconds between other faces, between bodies, and blood was everywhere, streaking flesh, matting fur, spraying into the air. I simply poked the barrel of my pistol forward and fired until the hammer clicked. Then as I went to reload, a club glanced off the point of my left shoulder, momentarily numbing my hand, and I dropped the pistol. Even with the ape stink thickening the air, I could smell my own fear, a yellow, sour reek, and while I didn't have the time to indulge that fear, I felt it weakening me, felt it urging me to flee. And I might have if I had seen a safe harbor. I drew my knife and slashed at an ape's hand that was grabbing for me, going off-balance and falling backward into Wall. He shoved me away, and inadvertently I went in a staggering run toward the opening from which the apes and their collared army had emerged, so that in effect I wound up guarding his flank, though it was Maddy, beside me, who did the lion's share of the guarding. She had managed to reload, and in the brief time it took to cross the remaining distance she shot four apes and two collared men, while Wall burned down countless others, the laser severing limbs and torsos.

When we reached the darkness beyond the doorway, Wall turned back, continuing to fire into the melee, and shouted to us to search for a switch, a b.u.t.ton, something that would close off the chamber.

As I followed his order, my hands trembling, fumbling, groping at the wall, I saw that seven or eight of our group were pinned against the fountain, and before the wall slid shut to obscure my view, sealing us into the dark, I saw three fall, each killed by collared men and women. Many lay dead already, and many others, wounded, were trying to crawl away; but the apes were on them before they could get far, slicing with long-bladed knives at their necks. It appeared that the red water from the fountain had been splashed and puddled everywhere, and that the open-mouthed woman at the center of the fountain was screaming in a dozen voices, lamenting the carnage taking place around her.

The instant the chamber vanished from sight, isolating us in the dark, Wall demanded to know who had found the control, and when a woman's voice answered, he had her lead him to it and burned it with the laser so that the door could not be opened again. He then asked us to speak our names so that he could determine how many had survived. Sixteen names were sounded. Clay Fornoff's was not among them. I tried to remember if I had seen him fall, but could not. The darkness seemed to deepen with this recognition. I could see nothing; even though I knew that the door to the chamber was within arm's reach, I felt as if I were standing at the center of a limitless void. It seemed strange that only now, now that I could not see it, did I have a powerful apprehension of the size of the place.

"All right," Wall said. "We're in the s.h.i.t, and we can't just stand around. Only way we're going to get home is to find one of the little b.a.s.t.a.r.ds and make him show us a safe pa.s.sage. We know they're in here somewhere. So let's go find 'em."

He said this with such relish, such apparent delight, as if what had occurred was exactly what he'd been hoping for, that -- dismayed and frightened as I was -- I found it kind of off-putting. Maybe his words affected others the same, because he didn't get much of a response.

"Do you wanna die?" he asked us. "Or is it just you're scared of the dark? Well, I can fix that!"

I felt him push past me, saw the ruby stalk of the laser swing out into the blackness. In an instant several fires sprouted in the dark. Bushes turned to torches by the laser, their light revealing an uneven terrain of moss or fungus or maybe even some sort of black gra.s.s, like a rug thrown over a roomful of lumpy furniture. Bushes and hollows and low rises. Here and there, barely visible in the flickering light, thin seams of gold were laid in against the black ground, and once again recalling The Black Garden, I realized that these likely signaled the location of doorways into secret rooms. There were no signs of walls or a ceiling. Even with the light, we had no way to judge the actual size of the place; but the fires gave us heart, and without further discussion, we headed for the nearest of those gold seams. When we reached it Wall burned down the door and we poured inside. By chance more than by dint of courage, Iwas beside him as we entered, and I had a clear view of the opulent interior. A cavelike s.p.a.ce of irregular dimensions, considerably higher than it was long or wide, with a terraced floor and slanted ceiling, a golden grotto draped in crimson silks, stalks of crystal sprouting from the floor, and a miniature waterfall splashing down upon boulders that looked to be pure gold. Silk cushions were strewn everywhere. An aquarium was set into the wall, teeming with brightly colored fish as different from the drab brown trout and bottom feeders with which I was familiar as gems from common rocks; the ornament of the aquarium through which the fish swam was a human spine and rib cage.

But what held my attention was the presence of three Captains lying on the cushions: two men and a woman, their pale, naked, hairless bodies almost childlike in appearance. There were also three collared women, who had apparently been s.e.xually engaged with the Captains, and showed bruises and other marks of ill use, and a collared man who was obviously dead; his chest and limbs were deeply gashed, and he was lying arms akimbo by a wall, as if he had been tossed aside. When we entered, one of the Captains, the larger of the two men, put a knife to the throat of a collared woman; the other two reached for what I a.s.sumed to be weapons -- short metal tubes resting on the floor at arm's reach; yet their movements were languid, casual, as if they were not really afraid of us. Or perhaps they were drugged.

Whatever the case, they were overwhelmed before they could pick up the tubes and dragged from the room. The Captain holding the knife looked at me -- directly at me, I'm sure of it -- and smiling, slashed the woman's throat. She began to thrash about, clutching at the wound, and the Captain pushed her off to the side. He was still smiling. At me. The daft little s.h.i.t was amused by my reaction. His androgynous features twisted with amus.e.m.e.nt. Something gave way inside me, some elemental restraint -- I felt it as tangibly as I might have felt the parting of my tissues from a knife stroke -- and I rushed at him, ignoring Wall's order to hold back. The Captain kind of waved the knife at me, but again he did not seem overly concerned with any threat I might pose. Even after I kicked the knife aside and yanked him to his feet, even after I grabbed him by the throat and shoved him back against the wall, he continued to regard me with that mild, dissipated smile and those wet purplish eyes that gave no hint of what might lie behind, as empty as the eyes of a fish. I had the notion that I was doing exactly as he expected, and that my predictable behavior was something that reinforced his feelings of superiority.

"Let him go," said Wall from behind me.

"In a minute," I said, tightening my grip on the Captain's throat. I was still full of loathing, but it was a colder emotion now, albeit no less manageable. I fixed my gaze on those inhuman eyes, wanting to learn if anything would surface in them at the end, and I plunged my knife hilt-deep into the top of his skull. His mouth popped open, the eyes bulged, and thick blood flowed down over his head like syrup over a scoop of vanilla. Spasms shook him, and a stream of his p.i.s.s wetted my legs. Then it was over, and I let him fall. It looked for all the world as though his head had grown a bone handle. In some part of me that had been obscured by anger, I could feel a trivial current of revulsion, but most of what I felt at first was satisfaction, though not long afterward I began to shake with the aftershocks of my violent act.

I turned to Wall, who stood regarding me with a thoughtful expression. "You got two of 'em," I said.

"Two's enough."

Behind him, they were trying to remove the collars from the surviving women. Neither was doing well; blood was leaking from their ears.

"There's more," Wall said. "You gonna kill 'em all?"

The question did not seem in the least rhetorical, and I did not take it as such.

"Long as we're here," I said.

But I did no further killing that night. The vengeful, outraged spirit that had moved me gradually eroded as we pa.s.sed through the Black Garden, led by the two collared Captains, our path lit by burning shrubs and doorways into golden light left open to reveal scenes of luxury and carnage, like a score of tiny stages mounted on the dark upon whose boards the same terrible play had been performed, and I only watched the others do the b.l.o.o.d.y work. The violence I'd committed had worked a change in me, or else had exposed some central weakness, and I grew disinterested in the outcome of our expedition.

Maddy had to urge me along, or else I might have just stood there and waited for my end, displaying nomore concern for my fate than the Captain that I'd killed; and I wondered if the fact that they had done so much violence was at the heart of their dismissive att.i.tude toward life and death -- but I don't believe that. To imbue them with human qualities would be a.s.suming too much. They were no more human than the apes, and the apes, despite what I'd said long before to the man in the bubble car, which had been something I'd said mostly to impress him, were in no way human.

Apes came at us now and again as we went, singly sometimes and sometimes in small groups, flying at us from dark crannies, their knives flashing with reflected fire, and they succeeded in killing three of our people; but they were disorganized, without slaves to support them, and this gave us hope that the other three parties had done well, that the battle, if not yet finished, was on the verge of being won. We killed them all, and we also killed every Captain whom we came across.

Wall was in his element. He burned and burned, and when the laser gave out or broke or whatever it is that lasers do when they go wrong, he killed with his hands, in several instances literally tearing the heads off scrawny white necks. There was a joyful flair in the way he went about it, and I was not the only one who noticed this; I saw others staring at him with a confused mixture of awe and distaste as he carried out the business of slaughter. It was not that the Captains deserved any less, nor was it that vengeance was inappropriate to the moment. No, it was instead that Wall did not appear to be carrying out a vengeful process. Watching him was like watching a farmer scything wheat -- here was a man engaged in his proper work and enjoying it immensely. The minor wounds he acc.u.mulated, the red stains that flowered on his rough shirt, his arms and face, gave him the look of an embattled hero, but the sort of hero, perhaps, whom we -- who were ourselves the pitiful result of laws that heroes had written thousands of years before -- no longer cared to exalt; and we moved ever more slowly in his wake, letting him run ahead of us, separating ourselves from him, as if this would lessen our complicity and devalue our support.

Still, we made no move to keep him from his pleasure. The things we found inside those golden rooms, the flayed bodies, bits of men and women used for ornament or more perverted purposes yet, the collared dead, the few that survived, shaking and delirious, all this legislated against our reining Wall in, and we might have let him go on forever had there been a sufficient number of Captains and if there had been nothing else to capture our attention. But then there came two explosions, distant, the one following hard upon the other, and a ragged cheer went up.