02. The Shadow Dancers (4 page)

That was the best way to explain withdrawal to a lay person I ever heard.

"It
does
pass, though, without killing or doing real harm to the body," Sam pointed out. "You only
wish
you'd die."

"True. But a lot of what we do is based on pleasure-pain stimuli. The memory of the rush, just how great you felt, remains, and a fair number are inclined to get hooked again even if they're forced off. Now this stuff is different. It's more like a parasite. It spreads over your body, but doesn't duplicate itself to the extent of harming any part of it. It gets what it needs from the body, and it's pretty stable once it's complete, but it knows you. Don't ask me how that's possible, but it does. If it gets into the brain it sort of takes over. The body abruptly considers it natural and normal. Your body defenses won't fight it. It survives by controlling that chemical balance, the blockers and the enzymes, in your brain. If it needs sugars and starches for some reason, it'll stimulate its host to eat particular things. Ditto for things rich in various minerals and whatever. It can suppress urges, emotions, desires, or heighten them to near compulsion."

I got to admit I was gettin' a real sick feelin' inside. "You mean it takes over, makes the body a slave? It
thinks?"

"No. I doubt if anything like this ever could think as we understand thought. And it just manages the body and stays where it is and gets what it needs and it's happy, leaving the host to still be him or herself, subject to its requirements. There actually are some microscopic life forms like this here on Earth, but all in the lower animals and all known here so far in marine organisms. We think this is a natural organism. We think that on some world, somewhere, it was allowed to evolve so that it reached a very high state and operated on the highest life forms, and on land as well. You can't just catch it, like a disease. A specially organized cluster-still microscopic but definite-must invade the new host. Its remote cousins here reproduce by sex between two hosts-and it can compel its host to have sex, and does. The trouble is, from its point of view, it doesn't work that way in Type Zeros, so we think this is from a world quite different from ours."

I didn't remember much from our lessons on the Company, but I remembered what he meant by Type Zero. That was the type that the home world was-which also happened to be the type
we
were, too. Just plain folks. The further away you got from us, though, on both sides, the more real strong differences came on. Humans developed in different places than here, or with maybe different ancestors. Some of 'em was ugly as sin and looked like folks from a bad horror movie, but they was still basically human anyway. They just went to show how different we could have turned out with just one little thing goin' another way. Those they called Type One, and no matter how weird they looked, they was all close enough to us that we could probably have sex and produce somethin' neither of us would really like to claim. Sorta like you can breed a lion and a tiger, or a cow and a buffalo; like that.

Type Twos came from different ancestors and weren't close enough to breed with us. At best they'd produce sterile offspring-like mules-and mostly nothin' at all. Type Threes and beyond were so far off us that they might as well
be from Jupiter or somewheres for all we had in common. We couldn't even catch their colds.

Trouble was, there was millions of worlds side by side that was only different in smaller things, then millions of Type Ones on both sides of them, and so on. A lot more than the Company could count, let alone know everything about.

"So we can catch it but we can't give it," I said. "That's somethin'."

"Yeah. It means real addiction. We think it's a Type One organism, but we haven't been able to locate where it came from and considering the number and range it might take years, even decades, if all resources were put on doing just that. It's a needle-in-a-haystack proposition. On our own, we'll find this one only by the kind of luck you have hitting the lottery. Now it does a nice, neat job inside of us, but we're not what it evolved in and it runs into problems. Something in our air, or our body chemistry, or whatever gets to it after a while. It begins to slow down, then break down. The only thing that can restore it is a fresh module of itself. What it does inside the body is very complicated; suddenly it can't handle the task. It starts cutting back. It starts to die and it tells you about it by hitting the pain centers. It also becomes a massive infection in the brain, fighting off all comers and struggling to survive one more minute. The withdrawal becomes the ultimate agony-and the host dies before the parasite does."

Sam was kinda disturbingly clinical, but, then, he'd been a vice squad man. "How long before this breakdown?"

"About thirty hours, give or take with the individual. Never less than twenty-four and never more than forty as near as we can tell. Our samples have been very limited, our information mostly second-hand or eavesdrop or observations by people not trained in this sort of thing. Withdrawal takes another six to eight hours of increasing agony before you pass out and the heart stops. Brain tissue disruption or destruction begins shortly after the pain button is pressed, though, and accelerates from there. We think that's what kills, eventually. The autonomic nervous system-heart, breathing, whatever-is disrupted. Let it go too long and a fresh infusion will get the body going again but it won't repair whatever brain damage you get. The effects are wide
ranging and inconsistent from individual to individual. There could be memory loss, or some sensory loss-vision, hearing, taste, smell-or some motor function problems or intelligence, talents, abilities-you name it. But pain's the last to go."

I listened, not understandin' all the biology shit but understandin' the effects on the people good enough. "Bill -how do you know this?" I asked him. "The only way you could know this is if it was done on people."

"It was," he said softly. "But not by us. This isn't something we'd
ever
fool with. It's too scary."

"Can you kill it?" Sam asked. "Without killing the addict, I mean?"

"Sure. You can kill anything. If we had enough cases, we could easily isolate whatever starts breaking it down. Without tipping off the opposition and letting them know we're on to them, we just don't know for sure if we could cure it or not and if so what the price would be. We got hold of some raw samples, strictly by accident, and ran them through every test and every expert and computer the home world has. We have been unable to make it grow in the lab, and it ignores test animals, even chimps. The only way it'll reproduce is inside a human, and since the reproductive clusters humans produce lack something it needs and can't get, they aren't any good, either."

With that kind of setup, Bill Markham then let us have the whole load.

I got to admit I don't understand the Labyrinth, and I ain't sure nobody really does. I sure can't figure out how them early scientists guessed it was there, let alone built this network, this inter-world railroad. I been in it a few times, but I still can't figure what's happenin' in there. It's like a real long tunnel, stretchin' out in all directions, only you're inside a cube with windows. Windows up top, windows beneath, and on all sides 'cept the ones that keep you in the Labyrinth. That means you always got a choice of four worlds to exit to. Every once in a while, there's a switch junction, with a control room and Labyrinth in all directions. That switcher punches his buttons and you go which way he decides, into a whole set of new cubes in all directions until you get to other switch points.

Sam and me we went to a bunch of 'em, and we always
walked, but there's enough room in there to drive a truck through-if you could figure out how to make a truck go up or down instead of just forward, back, left, and right. Of course, it probably ain't left or up in there; none of the usual rules mean much inside there, 'cause you're outside everyplace else. They must have some kinda trucks or flyin' saucers or whatever they use, though, 'cause they move trainloads of shit through that thing.

Three guilds, which I guess are sorta like unions or somethin', run the thing. One controls the switch points, one runs the stations, and a third moves the cargo through from one point to another. Ain't no way the biggest, baddest computer in creation could look at all that stuff all the time, though, so security mostly monitors the switches 'cause just about everybody and everything has to pass at least one of 'em.

The first way they check is that everybody who has any real business in there's got some kind of code thing in your bones. Fact is, there might be a whole hell of a lot of Brandys, even with the same fingerprints and eyes and all that, but they ain't the same person no matter how alike they are. I got a code planted somewhere inside my bones- don't ask me how or where. They stuck me in a thing like an iron lung, punched a bunch of buttons, I didn't feel nothin', and that was it. But now any switchman can look at his or her board as soon as I'm inside that cube and read out not only who I am but
which
I am. The code's big, random, and total nonsense. It's all in computers, of course, but they tell me that even if you got into the computer you couldn't find the numbers.

If you don't have no number, and you look suspicious, they shoot you off to some siding, someplace on a world where people just never came about, and you sit there till they're ready for you, if they ever are. We had that happen. If you don't have no coding but you sound like you know what you're doin', you can sometimes bluff 'em with a convincin' destination, but they can send messages at about the same speed as they can send you, and they call security on both ends. At least, you could, 'cause we did it, but I'm told they tightened that up now. No code, and you get dumped no matter what.

They tightened up a lot of other shit when we breezed through their system. Now before you go in you got to file a destination and any stops with the stationmaster who sends it to the security computer, and you're checked as you go along. Guess they were kinda sloppy and cocksure of themselves till we screwed 'em.

Still, somebody first found the world with this drug disease thingie, whatever it was, then figured out how to bottle or can it or whatever and brought it down the line to the Type Zero-our type-area. There ain't a lot of switches up in Type One and Two territory, and lots of unexplored worlds in between them, so it was possible that somebody could be goin' from one legit point to another and stop off just long enough to pick up the goods.

That meant there had to be somebody who knew just what they was doin' in the world where this shit came from, then somebody who could get messages back and forth without security knowin' to set up the deal and the pickups, then somebody in the transport guild to actually pick up and carry the stuff, disguised as part of legitimate cargo, and drop
it
off at its destination, where other big plotters would make use of it. Pretty complicated stuff.

The Company didn't know who discovered it, or how, and how they managed to both figure out what they had and keep it quiet, even settin' up this scheme. They didn't know how long it had taken to set up. They
did
know that it was well organized and involved some real bigwigs someplace and lots of corruption, but that was it. They just bumped into it, when they had an accident or something in one of the cargo haulers or whatever that they use and found it strictly by luck. They didn't let on they knew, and it seemed like the transport guild worker was innocent. They'd already switched it and he was now on a legit run. They put a tracer on it to see who'd pick it up, and somebody did.

"Rupert Conrad Vogel," Bill said, showin' us a photo of a guy who looked like a fugitive from a cheap World War II movie. "He's a stationmaster, which means administration and a Company man, or so we thought. He got the shipment, took a lot of it, then sent some back disguised as something else, again looking very routine. The pickup courier was legitimate, but he encountered another courier
along his route and somehow that second courier got the package and dropped it clandestinely at a world where we didn't have a station but did know. We picked this courier up, stuck him in a hypnoscan, then erased any memories he had of being picked up and discovered and let him continue. He didn't know much. He just got some nice little extras all in things he and his family could enjoy but we wouldn't particularly notice, and for that he got a message slip passed into his pocket now and then that a shipment-he didn't even know what it was, nor cared-would be with so-and-so as unlisted or misaddressed cargo. He'd meet the other courier, either get the parcel or note that it was wrong and offer to take it back to headquarters for resorting, then drop it when his route took him near this other world. That was it."

"You dead sure this ain't just the tip of the iceberg?" I asked him.

"Pretty sure. Their supply is limited. There's no clear routine as to when the shipments come, but that's probably just to disguise their origins. Vogel's their dispatcher. He gets it, he holds on to it, and then he sends it out in measured amounts. As far as we can tell, he's handling the real experimentation himself, and very effectively and ruthlessly. He's well placed to be able to do so, as you'll see in a minute."

"And the other place?" Sam asked.

"A world not too far from this one and very similar in a lot of ways. They're getting only about three thousand doses every twenty to thirty days, so there's only enough to sustain maybe a hundred people. They appear to be going to a local organized crime underboss who's never had any known connection with us and shouldn't even know about the Labyrinth. He, in turn, has one man supervising it and they seem to be using it in a very low-level way, to maintain a group of young women as prostitutes. This thing's ready-made for that on a petty level-I mean, this thing
compels
you to have sex a lot. We don't know what connection they have to Vogel, or why they were picked, or why they're being allowed to use something like this for such a petty and ordinary thing. Company people don't go there, except our wayward courier, of course, and we've had a monitor on that gate ever since and nobody but that courier ever approached. We sent in a small team of agents, and they couldn't find anything odd, either. There's a connection there, but we can't find it."