02. The Shadow Dancers (11 page)

That sorta explained a lot, like why most everybody looked like everybody else. Ten to one that class thing was really who was related to who when they came back. That was more'n a thousand years ago, but if they lived a couple hundred years plus each it was to them like maybe the World Wars were to us.

"Ancient history," muttered Basuti, the cold fish and also youngest at fifty-seven. "We're too damned fat and lazy for our own good, I say. No discipline, no motivation. We've become a bunch of whores, that's what."

"Now, Alim, don't start that again," Dringa Lakuka put in. He turned to us. "Basuti, there, was a priest and holy man until his older brother was killed in an accident, forcing him to assume obligations in the real world. I think he'd only be happy if we turned the entire world into a monastery."

"Many of us here would be far better off if we were closer to the gods than the flesh," Basuti muttered, giving the eye to Mukasa and his girlfriend.

"We strive for balance on committees as vital as this one," said Mayar Eldrith, clearing his throat nervously. "1 humbly suggest that we confine ourselves to pleasantries for now. Our disagreements are none of these people's affair, nor their concern. What concerns us is whether or not we are vulnerable to evil. Someone very powerful has gone to a great deal of trouble to import this alien organism and test it. We must know why. It surely isn't to take over a mere Earth or two. Anyone with enough power to do that is hatching something aimed clearly at us."

Sam and I exchanged a look, and I knew we was both thinkin' along the same lines. All of a sudden, with two days to go, I felt like one big, fat, brown worm on the end of a hook. Somebody real powerful set this up. Somebody like one or more of the folks in this room. Somebody-Aldrath or maybe Mayar-already figured that one out. To keep that shit comin' down without tippin' off security as to where, it had to be somebody with a lot of knowledge and power in security. One of these guys. So they was trottin' out their
sacrificial lamb and lettin' whoever have a good look, then they would all be watched like nobody ever been watched before, hopin' somebody would try and tip off Vogel.

1 mean, guys who thought other folks' wars were neat and ran criminal syndicates on a bunch of worlds sure as hell didn't give a shit about me. I started feelin' a little sick and forgot all about eatin' or my talkin' or anything else.

"You have to excuth me wadieth and gentamen," I said softly. "Unweth theah's thomething vewy impowtant foa uth to tawk about, I have much to do and thith ith my wath night with my huthband foah a wong time."
Damn!
It was gettin' so bad I couldn't say no
I's
, neither. Mix that with my usual accent and I must sound like an idiot!

"Oooh!
That's a
cute
way of talking," Ioyeo whispered loud enough for me to hear. "What did she say?"

That did it. I kinda rushed away and nearly ran upstairs to the room. I felt so damned miserable I was cryin' before I hit the bed, and still cryin' when Sam came into the room.

He closed the door, came over, and just started gently rubbing my back. He always knew what I needed, and I could feel his own hurt and shame. Damn it! I'd
asked
for this! I really wished now that I'd listened to him and not spent all my time feelin' sorry for myself. I never wanted dear old Philadelphia and that mink-lined apartment more than now, and I'd've even given it all up and moved back to roach heaven in Camden right then.

"I'm sowwy," I sniffled. "I juth-it ain't what I thought it would be."

He sighed and kept on rubbin'. "I know, babe, I know. But it
is
just like putting on the hooker outfit and staking out the hourly motels. It's just a higher league. They can make the disguise so perfect it's scary. When you figure they can make themselves pass for us, and learn English in their spare time with a gadget, they just don't think of what it can do to us poor primitive mortals."

"I'm thcared, Tham," I told him. "
Weal
thcared. I want to caw it off."

He sighed again. "You saw them down there. You saw how they regarded us, how they talked about the other worlds. We're their toys, their playthings. They want this Vogel because he's a threat to
them,
not us. Their only
opening is in two days. Not enough time to recruit and train somebody new."

"They can't
make
me do it!"

"You want to walk down and quit? Come on, babe, get hold of yourself. There's nothing I'd like more than for you to cancel out. They'd send us back, but they'd be damned angry at being inconvenienced. They'd have to come up with a different, even trickier, plan and maybe risk the necks of some of their own. They'd send you back just like you are now, and then they'd cut us off completely. You'd be stuck looking as you are now, speech impediments and all, and we'd be out on the streets with nothing."

I turned around and looked at him with this strange face. "And what if I did that anyway and they did that? Would we thtill be togetha?"

He kissed me. "You're still a pretty woman, babe, just different looking than I'm used to. But you're still you, inside, and that's who I married anyway. As for the money -how many Brandys can I buy for two million plus bucks? None. I started out with nothing, and I'll probably end up with nothing no matter what. If money mattered to me I'd be top salesman at my uncle's car showroom in Harrisburg, or maybe starting my own dealership by now. Or I'd be a comfortable cop with a heavy pad."

I hugged him and kissed him and never have I been more in love than right then and there. I just wanted to give myself to him, to fuck his brains out, and I planned to, but first I said, softly, "Tham-do you think it can be done? Do you think / can do it? Sthrait anthwa, now. No jive."

"It's possible," he answered, and I knew he was tellin' the truth. "And if anybody can pull it off, you can."

"Then, I'w'l do it, juth to thee them have to fork ova that money."

And
then
we made love for a long, long time.

I didn't get much sleep, and neither did Sam, even after we got done, but I was somehow real wide awake that mornin'. We
did
get to talkin', though.

"You think one of them'th the big twaita?" He nodded. "And so does Aldrath. I think you're safe, though. Whoever's behind this is a big risk taker but he's no
fool. He'll know he's been set up and sit it out. They've been on the hot seat, whoever they are, since the word came that Vogel was exposed, and they haven't dared try to reach him with any messages. They're stuck. They
have
to let this go down and work around it."

"But if Vogel knowth who, then they
hav'ta
act."

"You'd think so. But I just can't see any opening now that wouldn't just relieve us of the job of making the snatch. Aldrath is good at his job and I htink he's a basically honest man, or as honest as you can get in that line of work. He wants this higher-up so bad he can taste it. It's almost like something personal with him."

"Which one do you think it ith?"

"Hard to say. Ioyeo and Dakani are the obvious choices, but Aldrath can haul them in and pick their brains without their even knowing it. He says Dakani's ambitious but hardly treasonous, and that Ioyeo really doesn't have anything in there except animal passions. She's not as dumb as she plays, but she's no heavyweight. No, it's one of the five. I keep thinking I should already know which one, even from our brief meeting, but I don't know why."

"Funny. Me, too. But I juth can't get a hand on it."

"Well, one job at a time," he sighed. "I'll work on that angle while you follow yours. If we can hand them Vogel
and
his master, now
that's
an IOU!"

I wasn't goin' nowhere right off; it was Sam who was leavin', for the team was already pretty much in place. They had to be all set up and ready to go before I even got there, which was fine with me, 'cept it was gonna be a real lonely, scary couple of days.

That day they introduced me to the hypnoscan, and I was real glad Sam wasn't around. Not that it was much of anything bein' in it-you sat down in this real comfortable reclinin' chair and they put sensors and stuff all over you and then packed your head in somethin' soft, so you could breathe but you couldn't see, hear, or know much of anything. It was all done by computers, of course; they load what they want in, then you just sorta drift off, and in what seems like a couple minutes it's over-even though it takes hours.

It was a little weird, too, 'cause even when you woke up
you didn't have no idea that anything was changed. The doc, he brought me over and made me walk this way and that, and I thought his voice sounded real fancy and cultured. Then he brought me over and handed me a sheet with words on it and asked me to read it.

"Hey, Doc, ev'body know we can't read," I responded. I felt nothing odd at the idea I couldn't read; I did feel some relief that my speech had improved some. In fact, I had changed radically.

The thing was, they'd wiped out any way I had of gettin' to a lot of my knowledge and skills. My ignorance was appalling, and I just took it for granted. I was also childlike and eager to please or do whatever I was asked to dp without question, but I walked and moved like a two-bit whore. Any deep thoughts were just gone; so was any real sense of self-identity. I didn't know where I was or who I was or anything, but the worst thing was that it
didn't matter
to me. I had no questions. Later on, lookin' at myself in a mirror, I saw only me reflected back with this idiotic smile. They left me in a room for a while with the doors wide open and it never even entered my head to leave or go anyplace I wasn't told to go.

The Nazis had forty-plus years to experiment on us in that hell world, and that was plenty of time to take and raise children in cultural isolation and experiment with mind-dulling drugs that left permanent marks and methods of trainin' and all the rest. These wasn't slaves who was born in chains and wanted freedom; these were the ends of experiments on humans that nobody on our world would
ever
allow, born and bred as less than human and in their master's image.

And that was just stage one. Stage two put me out till I woke up in hell as somebody else, somebody completely different, somebody with a past and memories only of bein' property on that evil world. Somebody so ignorant they didn't even know it was hell they was in.

Preparation and trainin' was over. The mission was underway.

4.

You Can't Think of Everything

I ain't too clear on what came next. Oh, sure, I remember it, but not like it was real. More like a dream, you know? That's 'cause I was
her,
and she didn't think about much. It's only when I think back on it with what I know as myself that I can put it into any kinda picture that makes sense.

I woke up in a kinda dingy, smelly dormitory. It didn't have much in the way of lights and none in the way of privacy, but it had like twenty naked girls sleepin' on cots. Down at the end there was a long basin and a row of open toilets. It looked and felt perfectly normal. This was my tribe and these were my sisters. The hard part for even me to get into now is that I had no sense of personal identity, of self, at all. I had a name all right-Beth it was-but there was no sense of bein' a particular person named Beth.

We got up, took our shits in turn, walked under these open showers and wiped each other with lard soap, dried each other off with towels, and combed each other's hair with carved wood combs. The showers were cold and while there was a lot of noise there wasn't much said. We could talk, all right, in a kind of strict pidgin southern that made a lot of uses out of few words, but there wasn't no need.

Then we went out, naked, on a cool gray day, and we did exercises and ran around this dirt track like schoolgirls at play. Some white folks watched us from off a ways but we didn't pay 'em no mind. Then we all went into this other building where there was tables and benches on which were dishes and let the sisters who'd gotten up early serve us. I can't tell you what the food was; you drank this thick, real sweet drink and you ate these different kinds of cakes. Lookin' back I figure it was some kinda cheap health food, full of vitamins and minerals and

Then we all pitched in to clean up, makin' that place not just clean but
spotless.
Then it was back to the exercises and the track again, only this time it was more playful and less organized. All this with no boss, no supervisor, not even any orders.

This day would be different, though. In late morning, a black truck pulled up at the big farmhouse off in the distance and after a while two black-clad storm troopers armed with pistols came over to us and we stopped and waited, curious but not afraid. White folks were afraid of these kind of men; to us they were just more white folks. With them was Jenner, one of the supervisors at the farm. He pointed, then drawled out, "All right, you girls! Listen up, now! I'm gonna call out three names. If you hear your name, then you go in and you shower and then you come back out to us. The rest of you just keep on with whatever you was doing."

I was just as shocked and scared when they called Beth as if I were really Beth-which I thought I was. Still, I went with Daisy and Lavinia and took the shower and then reported back. We didn't say nothin' to each other-we was all too scared and confused for that. The black-clad men looked us over like we was horses or somethin', then Jenner said, "You all been sold to a man up north. You go with these men and follow their orders."

That was it; no good-byes, no nothin'-just go on, get in the back of the truck, and off. Well-not quite. When we got to the truck the men put chains on us. They didn't feel heavy, so I guess they were some kind of strong new metal-they felt like aluminum but were hard as steel. They cuffed us hands in front, with about a foot's worth of chain between, and they cuffed our legs with maybe two feet of chain between. I don't know why they chained us-where was we gonna go?-but they did, then loaded us into the truck, which was a kinda pickup truck with one of them caps on the back. It wasn't no camper, though; it was heated but you just sorta sat on the floor and that was it. There was a coupla boxes in there, too, but we didn't dare open 'em. Crazy thing was, I got a little thrill, even got a little turned on, by wearin' the chains.