The Dreaming Dragons Part 12

Riona had been gone five 'days'. Anokersh could still scarcely grasp that she was safe. It was the first time any of them had returned from the tumorous Ancillary Core, ever, ever, ever.

A young medic was already bent over her, smearing the lacerated flesh beneath her feathers with an enzyme salve. Behind him, a slavey nervously attended the diagnostic float. He stood up shakily.

'Well?' Muscles stretched taut across the bones of his muzzle. 'Sir, just shock I think.'

Sedation baffled the female's fright. Her sobbing caught and choked. Anokersh lifted her in his own arms and carried her to the sentry bubble.

Stiffly formal, mastering his own shock with evident difficulty, the officer of the watch preceded them into the bubble. He helped the medic fold out a foam stretcher float and lowered Riona on to it. Gently, he removed the hands that clutched his upper arms. And with abrupt distress, and aversion, saw the mutilation that had been done to her: the finger of her right hand was absent, surgically excised. The thumbs remained, pressed together over the stump with bloodless, unconscious intensity.

'Status?' Anokersh demanded without turning his head.

'We have this quarter of the perimeter fully covered, sir,' stated the officer. 'I've ordered up reinforcements from Gamma and Delta. Nothing can get through now.' His thin dark lips drew back over incisors in a snarl.

'Any signs of pursuit, Sentry?'

'None, sir. The board's clear.'

The medic reached across with another ampoule of sedative. As the fine jet hissed against the pulsing artery at Riona's neck her breathing slowed, relaxed. Lifting the exhausted female, the Director let her lean against his chest.

'It's all right, technician,' he murmured. 'You're fine now, it's all over.' The sentry's shadow put bruises about her dark eyes. 'That's all for the moment, officer,' Anokersh told him. 'Send in T'kosh huj Nesh as soon as he arrives. Oh -- and allow Diitchar rhal Lers through if she comes up.' The guard gestured his understanding and stepped out into the tense, arc-bright crystal coruscations of the Perimeter.

'Kersh?' The thin, injured face looked up at him. 'Am I really home, Anokersh?'

He ruffled the soft, tawny down at her neck. 'You're home,' he said. 'I'll be surprised if the whole mission doesn't know it, the racket you raised getting here.'

'Tech temperament.' Her wan smile was ghastly. He felt his abdomen tighten again. Despite every precaution, the Core and the ferals it harboured were slowly squeezing the life out of them all.

Distantly, the express capsule sighed, and a voice demanded peremptorily: 'Where is she?' A slavey muttered. T'kosh came into the sentry bubble, the plumage at his limbs and torso quivering erect. His pupils were dilated. 'My love!' He went down on his knees beside the float and took Riona to him, ignoring the Director. Anokersh moved aside, conscious of the revived rage within himself. He left the couple to themselves, sealing the bubble behind him. Etched rainbows of light splintered from the crystal ma.s.s.

The Sentry officer interrupted his brooding with a curt status-report. Glare splashed the deck. With some hesitation the youthful medic joined them. 'Director, it would be best if the female were taken immediately to sickbay.'

'All right,' Anokersh agreed. They went back to the bubble. T'kosh sat on the rocking stretcher beside his spouse, arm tight around her. His atavistic aggression display had subsided somewhat, but his plumage continued to ripple in barely controlled spasms.

'Kersh,' he said at once, 'we have to act. We've been too patient.' The sharp-boned planes of the artist's face were rigid. 'We must go into the Core in force.'

As always, nausea burnt Anokersh's throat. Riona gave a sharp little cry, and her lips twisted with the same reflex.

'Brother,' Anokersh said, 'you know that's not feasible.'

T'kosh rose. 'We must _make_ it possible.'

'Hush, my love,' whispered Riona faintly, through the blurring clouds of her medication. 'The Director is doing all he can to contain the crystal ma.s.s. You can't expect -- '

'Expect? I _demand!_' The medic glanced sideways at T'kosh, aghast. 'The situation is intolerable. I demand safety for the mission, for the children in the still-cells, for the females.' His eyes bored into Anokersh, pale fire.

And the cool voice at the entrance: 'Ah, Riona, dear.'

The exhausted female smiled from her float. Fury left T'kosh's blood-filled face for a moment. The Director turned, took his spouse's hand.

In the doorway, against the stark glare of the perimeter arcs, Mistress Diitchar rhal Lers was sublime. Her eyes were shadow-masked in her perfect face; flame lit them. And though she had missed the outburst from T'kosh, her thumbs closed on Anokersh in that same struggle to express the unthinkable.

Like a huntress, like a mother, she went to the injured female. When she stood back, trembling, the golden feathers of her spine stood out; her tail whipped back and forth. 'What have they done to you?' she keened, holding the maimed hand. The violence of her tone dizzied Anokersh.

He gestured the medic forward. 'We'll talk with Riona later. For the present she must rest, recover her strength. We must learn what she can tell us of the feral pongids. And then,' he growled, holding to that resolve which buckled and slid aside even as he spoke, 'we shall look to action.'

A piercing howl was exclamation mark. It rang in the bones above his auditory openings where the communication circuits were printed. The sound galvanised him.

'Break-in, Break-in!' cried a voice. The carrier whine vanished, replaced by the anxious tones of Control-Watch. 'Director, return immediately to Control. There is a feral within the Civilised area of the craft!'

Anokersh huj Lers was already sprinting across the metal deck.

He hit the inter-deck express tube, slid into the cushioned capsule, activated the field. From the corner of one eye, he saw his spouse following. The capsule kicked, draining blood from his face. Almost instantly it belled and sprang open. He hurled himself across the Control Room, heard the bell of Diitchar's tube arriving, took in the patterned information of the computer displays.

'It's on the third deck,' Diitchar decoded. She stood beside him, snapping the visual display screens from one loc to another.

'Third deck study sector,' confirmed the voice in their ears. On every side, officers sped through an all-systems check. The intruder would most probably aim to sabotage as much vital equipment in the peoples' redoubt of the craft as it could manage. Fortunately it seemed to have no grasp of where those vital services were located.

Even so, the Director told himself, the feral can do a boning lot of damage if it isn't stopped immediately.

The screens before Diitchar flickered and hissed.

'It's using some kind of 'tronics-jamming mech,' explained the voice. 'That's why we didn't pick it up the moment it broke in. No doubt jerryrigged -- it's failing already.'

'No mechanism,' dissented another voice. 'Chances are this feral's employing some neural form of radiation control. What we're getting now isn't component degradation; the creature's under stress, and it's losing fine focus.'

'Still on Level Three. Everything else sealed off now, sir.'

'Good.' Anokersh spun to face the tall, golden female at his side. 'So Riona was a blind to get this one in.'

Diitchar nodded. 'They must consider this feral pretty important.'

'It's important where it is now.' This was the first wild simian to break through since the Core brought them out of their still-cells. He unclipped his formal cloak. Diitchar ran at his heels. With faint incredulity he found himself standing before the Always-Locked weapons room. It opened to his priority command. He grabbed up a power-gun, thrust in the charge cell, checked it.

'Kersh, what are you _doing?_'

'We're not going to -- hurt it, sweetness. I'm going to drag it back here before it retreats to the crystal ma.s.s.' He headed for the tube to Level Three.

People shouted as he ran; he shouted louder. Even on the mission craft, you don't contradict the Director under conditions of emergency.

Capsule field detonating. The tube kicked him out on Deck 3. A rough-and-ready militia, people backed by simian slaveys, crouched at all points behind anaesthetic synaptic distorters, covering corners, guarding critical installations. A bell chimed and Mistress Diitchar was beside him again, a power-gun in her hand. Anokersh grinned at her with a sudden savage glee. They prowled, looking for their impudent feral.

Information streamed into their printed command transceivers. It told them nothing. The simian had vanished again off the screens.

Then: 'Power drain, Children's Orientation Centre.' They started running. A corner came up; corpses huddled in the corridor, feathers charred and rank. Together, they hit the deck and skidded.

Fiery whiteness blossomed. The air was scorched. Cascades of golden sparks opened like murderous flowers.

'Communications,' Anokersh murmured, flat against the deck. 'Give me a private channel to Diitchar rhal Lers.' She lay beside him, breathing deeply without a sound. He could have whispered directly to her now, but he needed to keep in touch when they split up.

'Control, cut the ventilation fans in this section and break all magnetic locks on service inlets.' It was an expedient of desperation but fortunately, he told himself, far from obvious to the wild pongid. For hundreds of millennia its kind had been forbidden any access to the electronically operated inlets. Other than what they had contrived for themselves, of course....

'Fans and locks off, sir.'

'Dii, edge back and go through the shaft,' Anokersh murmured, not looking at her, intently watching the white-hot fountain erupting from the cla.s.sroom.

'Yes.' It was eerie, hearing her at his shoulder as well as on the closed band. A slither, and she was away. Up ahead, metal from the ancient corridor wall glowed red, runnelled sluggishly into a pool of molten slag. Once, when it was new and bright, that metal would have withstood the a.s.sault of a industrial laser. But millennia of slow, inexorable quantal changes had weakened its formidable metallic gla.s.s molecular structure. Abruptly, the defensive wall of hot sparks died.

'Power source traced and cut, sir,' said the Control monitor. Good, Anokersh thought, easing to his feet. That'll throw the pongid back onto its own resources. Carefully, he made for the corner, grimaced as the heat of barely cooling metal singed his plumage.

'I'm at the ventilator inlet over the cla.s.sroom, Kersh.' Diitchar's voice held horror. 'He -- it's searching for another power cable.'

'Drop through,' Anokersh said, peering into darkness for the entrance. He hadn't been up here for years. Light had gone when Control cut out the main regional power supply. 'Distract it, I'm nearly there.'

A thud, ahead and to his right. He saw the frame of a door, hurled himself through with the power-gun dialed to quarter strength. There's no question, he told his clamouring inhibitions, of killing the feral.

Glo-strips marking the light-switches gave the vaguest possible general light. Anokersh heard a cry, strained his eyes to peer into the gloom. Diitchar's power-gun blazed at the far end of the room. The dim-red energy beam snaked raggedly across the ceiling, went out again. In that brief moment his adjusting pupils caught his spouse struggling with a dark shape.

The Director raised his own weapon, fired over their heads. The red glow burned an image into his retinas, a momentary picture of Diitchar toppling across a Teaching Machine as the pongid struck her with a huge, five-fingered fist. There was a crash as she fell, and then silence.

Anokersh used the distraction, for all that his heart faltered in anguished rage. He slid in away from the door, hunched himself against a wall. No telling how sensitive the feral's vision was, and he had no wish to be silhouetted against the dull illumination of the molten wall outside. He ran his tongue over the roof of his mouth, found the switch for his printed transceiver, pressed it off. No telling how sensitive its radiation perception was, either.

Across the room, in the murky blackness, flesh sc.r.a.ped metal. It's found Diitchar's weapon, Anokersh surmised. He circled silently toward the sound's source, avoiding the glo-panels, wondering frantically if he could force himself to dial full power. Cool and heavy in his hand, the gun's upper stud pressed his central finger. The thought of death was unutterably repugnant. He left the setting at quarter -- paralysis strength.

'TODAY, CHILDREN,' a hearty voice boomed, 'LET'S TALK ABOUT THE CRAFT WE LIVE IN!' The Director's heart contracted; his feathers stiffened in reflex dread. Then he placed the recorded voice, and his pulse thudded back to stability. In groping for Diitchar's gun, the pongid had accidentally activated one of the Teaching Machines. Evidently the machines were serviced by an alternate power circuit.

Useful, Anokersh decided, eyes aching with the futile effort of trying to pierce the darkness. The noise will mask my movements, he told himself. I can move faster with less worry. The same held for the feral but the creature was not familiar with this area of _The Soul_. Anokersh huj Lers had been brought up in it.

'WE LIVE IN A LARGE METAL EGG MADE BY GROWN-UPS MANY, MANY YEARS AGO,' roared the recorded voice, 'IT ISN'T A REAL EGG, OF COURSE, BUT IT'S SHAPED LIKE ONE. AND IN SOME WAYS OUR HOME IS LIKE A REAL EGG. IT PROTECTS US FROM TIME JUST AS A REPTILE'S EGG PROTECTS THE TINY CHICK INSIDE IT.'

The room stank with a curious unpleasant odour, the stench of a foreign biochemistry. It was an appalling reminder of how far these ferals had deviated from the slavey simian stock. Half a million years at least, Anokersh thought. The figure was beyond intuitive appreciation; it meant nothing and everything. I wonder if my sweat smells as bad, he thought, to the feral?

'THE EGG IS CALLED _THE SOUL_,' the Teacher informed him at the top of its voice. 'CAN ANYONE TELL ME WHY?'

There was a moment of silence, while the idiot circuits listened for a response in the vocal frequency range appropriate to its usual charges. Anokersh listened as well, nerves trembling, for some clue to the pongid's position.

'n.o.bODY KNOWS?' the robot tutor chided buoyantly. Another terror had placed clammy hands on the Director. If the feral took time to draw off power from the Machine's source, he'd be faced by a more terrible weapon than his gun. On the evidence, the wild pongid itself const.i.tuted an irrevocably lethal arms-system. 'WELL, CHILDREN, OUR GREAT CRAFT IS CALLED _THE SOUL_ TO REMIND US OF OUR SACRED MISSION. FOR WE ARE ALL ON A TREMENDOUS JOURNEY, LITTLE ONES, A MOST HOLY VOYAGE TO CARRY THE LIGHT AND JOY OF KNOWLEDGE TO OUR REVERED ANCESTORS. ONE DAY YOU WILL UNDERSTAND MORE FULLY -- '

Anokersh hardly heard the old familiar words, strained against them, through them, for sounds of the feral. He moved cautiously across the large room, made for Diitchar's unconscious body. She, at least, would not be hurt further if he could help it.

Reaching out, his hand encountered something soft. He jabbed the snout of the power-gun into it. No movement. He realised that he'd found his spouse, and sagged.

Faded ember lightning split the darkness. It missed them, burned a scar across the console of the Teaching Machine. Parents of all, Anokersh screamed within his skull. It's found the burn-setting on her gun!

'...SEVERAL DISCRETE GENERATIONS OF PEOPLE.' The programmed voice jumped crazily. Anokersh was cold, cold. He could not bring himself to alter the setting on his own gun.

's.p.a.cETIME IS AWASH IN TERRIBLE ENERGIES,' the tutor was roaring. Its tone had changed; now it was more measured, academic, directing its deafening ba.n.a.lities at an imaginary audience of adolescents. 'THE GENETIC HELIX CANNOT WITHSTAND THE TUMULTUOUS SIDEREAL BOMBARDMENT TO WHICH WE ARE SUBJECTED, ON OUR ACCELERATING PARAREAL-TO-REAL TEMPORAL RATIO, WITHOUT THE MOST STRINGENT PROTECTION OF PHASED UNIFIED FIELDS. THIS IS WHY YOU, AND YOUR TRAINED PONGID a.s.sISTANTS, HAVE BEEN QUICKENED FROM EMBRYOS STORED IN STILL-CELLS. DUE TO THE DELETERIOUS EFFECTS OF SUCH FIELDS ON FULLY DIFFERENTIATED ORGANISMS, SUCH PROTECTION CANNOT BE AFFORDED TO THE ENTIRE CRAFT. I REFER YOU TO THE M.H.D. TAPES IN -- '

The voice bawled on, its dry detachment mocked and made absurd by its shocking din. How did the hideous creature hear me, Anokersh thought, through all that? His hand moved across Diitchar's muzzle, felt breath against his skin. He exhaled in relief. Gently, gently.

Turning, he moved away from her, waited for another bolt of lethal heat. He sensed that the feral was tearing at the side panels of another Teaching Machine, desperately seeking external power.

At that moment, sound cut off. His ears roared in the silence. Someone in Control had remembered the alternate cable to the tutors. Anokersh thumbed the power-gun to its widest possible beam and pointed it in the air. A broad red shaft swathed the roof.

Shadows danced. One of them was the feral. A sizzling bolt snapped in his direction, over his head as he dropped. He had its location. Throwing himself forward, he triggered the weapon to paralysis intensity and blasted at the hulking figure.

Incredibly, his aim was precisely accurate. The pongid loomed toward him, beam still blazing, and crashed on to the deck in catatonic seizure. He leapt at it, s.n.a.t.c.hed Diitchar's stolen gun and cut the beam.

Shuddering with reaction, he crouched on his haunches and tripped the circuit in his palate. Behind him Diitchar moaned and he heard her struggle awake. 'Okay, Control,' he said. 'I have it. Put the lights back on.'

The pongid was hairy, flat-faced, stupefied from shock. At every synapse of its central nervous system, neurotransmitter vesicles had been numbed into inaction. A pair of slaveys put their heads cautiously around the cooling, jagged edge of the entrance to the pa.s.sageway. The Director recognised them: Lazy-legs, an elderly grey-hair male, and Apple, a bright female who helped Stezna do Nen in the medical bay. He ushered them in, and they lugged the unconscious creature on to a float. The young medic who'd treated Riona -- was his name Jik huj Lod? Anokersh wondered confusedly -- went straight to Diitchar and gave her an a.n.a.lgesic shot. She disdained a helping hand. Anokersh regarded the scarred corridor. Damage to the craft appeared moderately serious, but not critical. Together, they followed the slaveys to the utility tube leading to medical bay.

'Do you think there's any chance we'll be able to communicate with it, Kersh?'

He looked with disquiet at the dormant form on the bobbing float. Heavy tufts of bristle, a brown deeper than bronze, sprouted from its leathery hide. The relaxed, open palms were naked; like the slaveys, the creature possessed five manual digits, only one of them opposable. Its visage, in narcoticized repose, was horrifyingly akin to its tame cousins but the skull bulged threateningly above beetling brows, and the wide nostrils twitched above a slack mouth crammed with spittle-shiny grinders. Anokersh shuddered slightly. The feral's cranial capacity might well be greater than his own -- but did it, too, resonate to some element of the damaged Ancillary Core? His mind veered from the blasphemous possibility. The thing was an isolate, like all its family. And it had not been trained by scrupulous schedules of reinforcers, as the slaveys had been, from birth.

'Communicate, Diitchar?' They stepped aside as Apple and Lazy-legs eased the float into a surgery module. Within the confines of the med bay, the creature's musky stink was more a throat-choking affront than before. 'I can't believe that it's more than an animal, Mistress. It's governed by instinctual reflex nets.' The slaveys were strapping it down securely; Anokersh glanced up and nodded as the medical chief came in, extending his depilated arms. 'Well, Stezna, it seems all the hullaballoo was worth it. I know you've always been anxious to get a close look at one of these fellows.'

'Director, Mistress.' Bowing in perfunctory deference, Stezna do Nen looked worried. 'Permit me to congratulate you both. But I trust you appreciate the difficulties this raises,' he said acutely. 'In a sense, this is a moment we've all been avoiding and delaying as long as we could.' His eyes flickered over the metabolic outputs, and his bare arms shuttled automatically over the hardware, preparing a suitable pharmaceutical c.o.c.ktail.

Anokersh said nothing. Stezna shrugged, laid the jet injector against the creature's short, thick neck, and unsnarled its synapses.

Its eyes snapped open, startlingly blue, and flicked around the module.

For an instant it caught Anokersh's gaze and bored into him with raging intelligence. It can't be, the Director thought, quailing. It must not be. With a scream the feral surged against its bonds.

Fantastically, one of the foam-covered steel bands appeared to give slightly, creaking. The pongid swelled its powerful chest again and tensed for another a.s.sault. With mild reproof, unperturbed, the chief medic sequenced an anaesthesia field on his panel. The pongid slumped again, filleted, and its eyes dulled. The great mouth parted.

'You fools,' the feral said, in a barbaric accent. 'Don't you understand yet that you have no future?'

Anokersh stood utterly frozen, and watched the creature sink once more into unconsciousness.

*12. Deep Time*

Amid the woe of the Going-Hence, the genuine grief of the dead ones' clan-kin and the conventional wails of the rest, Anokersh huj Lers stood somehow apart from his central role, deeply troubled by images of the unconscious feral. In the purple gloom of the Great Concourse of the Dead, his eyes moved automatically from the keening mourners to the huge slabs of pack ice adrift in the cold black waters beyond the weather shield, the vast furled streamers of pastel aurora painted on the darkness by Winter's hidden sun. Illusion, he thought, all of it. But it was a kind deceit, even a necessary one. To know entirely, in this moment of Translation, that the infinite sky was an arch of ancient metal, that the slapping frozen sea was a metal deck, would be a recognition close to insupportable.

Yet it was not the holographic illusion that disturbed the Director, but some deep stirring of anguish he could not name. The pent feral was its occasion, that much he knew. Beyond that, he was aware only of the general terror that the cancerous crystal ma.s.s provoked in him, the Ancillary Core that now stood, for all the people, a symbol as much of dread as of peace and hope. Anokersh shivered, drew his priestly robes about him in the season's dusk.

A new note entered the lamentation. The floating catafalque appeared, solemn and splendid, flanked by four clan-kindred males. Under the illusory purple sky, the dead males were hardly distinguishable from the living, except for their awful stillness. The bier came forward, through the sobbing crowd, and settled in the apparent ice at Anokersh's feet. Diitchar, silent at his side, touched his arm; he turned and took from her the long ceremonial knife. Light stropped its grooved, chased blade.

Again, some indefinable premonition of the feral stole over Anokersh. He hefted the knife angrily, lifted it in the sight of the gathering. I am Sacerdote before Director, he told himself. Or was that a meaningless distinction? As commander of _The Soul_, were not his sacred and his mundane roles conjoined? He could not dismiss the feral's mad, absurd words: _Fools, you have no future_.

'People,' he said aloud, and was surprised at the ringing steadiness of his voice, 'we are come to the Place of Birth and Re-birth.'