The Stardance Trilogy (66 page)

A little corner of my mind, way in the back, understood what was happening. I had forgotten that these people could kill with their kiss.

Chen Po Chang’s voice came from the far side of the universe, metallic and atonal. “The first one was just chemical. Call it truth serum. But the second one was a nanobandit.”

I reached for my lap, and it wasn’t where I had left it. Everything I found seemed to bend in the wrong directions; some of it felt wet and some of it was sticky to my questing fingers.

“Absorbed through the palm,” he was saying, “one heartbeat to the brain, another second to crack the blood-brain barrier, then it starts secreting.”

I had to find my lap—that was where I had left my gum! Gum? That wasn’t right. Gub? I couldn’t read my own goddamn handwriting. Where the hell was my fucking p-suit? Mist was closing in from all sides—

I beat at the mist, fought for control of my mind. I knew what I had to do. It was necessary to yell as loud and as clearly as possible, “Help me! I have been drugged and they’re going to take me out of here and kill me.” My old friend the waiter would then come and slap them both to death. My body was made of taffy, but I summoned all my will, directed all my desperate energy to making my mouth and tongue firm enough to function, obedient to my command.

“Productive marbles. Didn’t to bite wonder-log with it, the palaces. Curt! Curt!”

The waiter was back. There were four of him. “I’m very sorry, sir,” they all said slyly. “She had quite a few of those Irish coffees before you arrived. Maybe you’d better take her home. Can I call you a cab?”

“No, thank you,” Kris Kringle said. “We have a car outside. We’ll get her home.”

“Both of you? My.” Four eyebrows arched.

“Gunders,” I said, smiling to show I was in mortal danger. “S’ab.”

“She’s been under a lot of stress lately,” Robert/Po Chang said. His chest was closed up again now, but his face was melting. Never a dull moment with Chen Po Chang. It ran down his chest and formed an oily pool on the table. I tilted my head to see my reflection in it, and suddenly the local gravity changed. The spaceplane was taking evasive action. “Down” was
that
way. No,
that
way! No—

Lap dissolve.

Horrid dreams, that went on forever. My body was made of putty, which I twisted into the ugliest shapes I could devise. I butchered an infant, grew an enormous steel penis and raped a child, skinned and ate a living cat, burned a city, strangled a bird, poisoned a planet, masturbated with someone’s severed hand, stepped on a galaxy out of sheer malice, gutted God, gathered everything anywhere that had ever been good or beautiful and defecated on it. My laughter killed flowers, my gaze boiled steel, my touch made the Sun grow cold. I tortured my parents to death, brought them back to life and killed them again, and again, and again. I danced on Grandmother’s face with razor feet for days on end. Throughout all this, horrid little things with leathery wings at the edges of my peripheral vision watched and chittered and cheered me on. A snail kept oozing past, leaving a greasy trail, offering arch aphorisms in a language I could almost understand. My old shrink Alma appeared once, in a hockey uniform, and told me that my trouble was I kept everyone at arm’s length; I needed to open up and let someone love me. I vomited acid on her until she went away, and then cried carbonated tears.

Peace came at last, when the last star in the Universe burned out and the blessed darkness fell all around, like warm black snow in summer.

In pride, in reasoning pride, our error lies;

All quit their sphere, and rush into the skies.

Pride still is aiming at the blessed abodes,

Men would be Angels, Angels would be Gods…

—Pope, Essay on Man

A
SWITCH WAS
thrown and I was awake. My mind was clear, and my body was its normal shape and consistency. There was an insistent ringing in my ears, but otherwise reality seemed real again. The leather-winged things were gone. I was very glad of that.

I was sitting in a chair. I was naked. My bearded Chinese uncle was looking at me from half a meter away, clinical curiosity on his face. “Can you hear me all right?” he asked.

Lie.
“Yes,” I said.
Okay, you can’t lie. More of that truth drug shit. Keep trying. Meanwhile, can you move?

“The neuroscrambler should have largely dismantled itself by now. How do you feel?”

Yes, but without precision. So don’t try any more now.
“As if I were in free fall. Or wrapped in cotton.” It was true. I felt light as a feather. I seemed to be sitting in a chair, involuntarily I gripped it to keep from drifting away.

“Do you have any questions?”

“Yes.”

“You may ask them.”

“Is there a bomb in me?”

“No. A single detonation was both necessary and sufficient.”

“Why am I still alive?”

“I must know exactly what you know, and what you have done about it. You’ve already told me of the letter you left for your teacher, and I know your security code. But before I send an erasure command after the letter, I want to know exactly what it says.”

I started to recite the letter verbatim; after a few sentences he cut me off. “This will take forever. I have it: ask me any questions you still have about our activities. The gaps in your knowledge will define what you know. And you will have the comfort of dying with no unanswered questions, a rare blessing. It is safe enough: I know you are not wired in any way. What would you like to know?”

I tried prioritizing my questions, but couldn’t make them hold still. All over my body and brain, switches were hanging open, wires were cut. My mental thumb was mashed down on the panic button, but somewhere between there and my adrenal glands a line was down. In fact, the whole limbic system seemed to be down; my emotions were nothing more than opinions, with no power to command my body. My heart wasn’t even pounding particularly hard. I picked a question at random, sent a yapping dog to cut it out of the herd, and stampeded it toward Uncle Santa.

“Are you Chen Hsi-Feng?”

Why do they say, the corners of his mouth turned up? They don’t, you know; they just get farther apart and grow parentheses. “Ah, excellent: you are not certain. Yes, I am Chen Hsi-Feng.”

“Where are we?” Now there was a stupid, irrelevant question. What the hell difference could it make?
Pick a better one next time.

“In one of my homes. Near Carmel, if it matters to you.”

I had been in Carmel once, on my way somewhere else. Down the coast from San Francisco. Upper-class stronghold; high fences and killer dogs; Clint Eastwood had once been Sheriff there or something. Estates big enough and private enough to hold a massacre without disturbing the neighbors.

“How come you do your own hatchetwork? If I were you, I’d be about eight layers of subordinates away, playing golf in some public place.”

He shook his head. “Your grasp of tactics is thirty years out of date. Multilayer insulation was indeed useful in conspiracy or fraud for centuries: before a fallible lazy human investigator could work his way to the top of the chain he was likely to give up or be reassigned or retire or die. But then they started buying computers, and interconnecting them. Now every layer of intermediaries is merely another weak point, another thread the enemy may stumble across, and pull on to unravel the entire knot in a twinkling. I have many such chains of influence, whose sole purpose is to be found and keep investigators happy and harmlessly employed. Really important work I assign to the only person I know will not betray me. What else puzzles you?”

“Your ultimate aim. Do you plan to keep on blowing up Stardancers until they get annoyed and go away?”

“I plan to annihilate them, root and branch.”

“But that’s silly.” Hunt down and kill more than forty thousand individuals in free space, who had low albedo, no waste heat, and nothing bigger than fillings in their teeth to show up on radar? Fat chance. With those huge variable light-sails attached to insignificant mass, they were more maneuverable than any vessel in space could ever be. What he proposed was not merely impossibly expensive, but impossible. “How could you hope to succeed?”

“By raising up an army against them,” he said blandly. “And for that I need a technological edge, an unbeatable one. I need the Symbiote, tamed.”

In my present state, I was incapable of shock. I was only mildly confused. I tightened my grip on the edges of my chair, so that I would not float away. “‘Tamed’?”

“You did not know. Good.” He sat back and lit up a joint. No, a cigarette. My ex-husband had been a diehard smoker too. “By coincidence, it was a resident of Carmel, Sheldon Silverman, who first proposed the concept of a Symbiotic army—less than ten minutes after the existence and nature of the Symbiote was first revealed. It’s in the Titan Transmission. But Charles Armstead pointed out the flaw in the idea. An immortal, telepathic soldier will mutiny the moment he joins the Starmind. He cannot be coerced anymore. I have tried placing spies in the Starmind; all ceased working at the instant of their Symbiosis. Fortunately I had anticipated this; none of them carried knowledge especially dangerous to me.

“But just suppose one could genetically modify the Symbiote, to produce a strain which does
not
convey telepathy, and has a limited life-span without regular reinfection.”

He had not phrased it as a question, so I could not answer. I did as I was told, just supposed. The drug kept me physically calm, relaxed and at ease—but inside my head a tiny part of me was screaming, beating at the walls of my skull.

The toughest part of having an army is keeping it fed and supplied and in motion. If you had a Symbiotic army, all you’d have to do was issue them lasers and turn them loose. So long as they needed regular fresh doses of false Symbiote to keep breathing vacuum, they would follow orders.

“It would be useful,” he went on, “to further modify the altered Symbiote so that it could survive terrestrial conditions. But I am told that is fundamentally impossible. No matter: who controls space controls the planet, in the final analysis. And the only military force in space that cannot be defended against is naked human beings who never hunger and thirst, an infantry who cannot be seen until it is too late. Do you see a flaw in the plan?”

“How can you genetically modify Symbiote? You can’t get a
sample
, without giving yourself away.”

Again his mouth grew tiny parentheses. “I have done so. That is precisely why your friends died.”

The Symbiote Mass! Its mass and vector to several decimal places had been public information. Place an explosive of known force near it, trigger it by radio at a predetermined instant, apply a little chaos theory, and when the mass blows to smithereens…you’ll know the projected new vector of the largest smithereens. There’s no way anyone else can track shards of organic matter in open space—but you can happen to have a ship in the right place to intercept some.

I lacked the capacity to be horrified. I appraised the idea dispassionately, like the emotionless Vulcan Jerald in
Star Trek: the Third Generation
on 3V. The scheme was brilliant, without flaw that I could see. Not only did he have sample Symbiote for his geneticists to experiment on, no one even suspected that. His biggest problem would be making sure no human accidentally touched any of the Symbiote while working with it—but that’s why they make remote-operated waldos; it was nowhere near as complex a problem as coping with dangerous nanoreplicators.

I’d been asked if I saw any flaws in the plan. “Stardancers would still have tactical advantage in combat. Instant, perfect communications.”

He shrugged. “Telepathy is not
that
much more effective than good radio, at close quarters. I will match my generalship against any component of the Starmind. And they are utterly unarmed.”

“There are a lot of them.”

“Do you have any idea how many men I can put in space in a hurry, if I do not mind heavy losses in transit? At most, the Stardancer population is one ten thousandth of that of the People’s Republic. The outcome is foreordained.” He blew a puff of smoke toward the ceiling. “Well, what do you think?”

“I think you are the biggest monster I ever heard of.”

He nodded. “Thank you,” he said.

A phone chimed beside him. He answered at once. “Yes?”

Maybe the drug enhanced my hearing. I could make out Robert’s voice. “Is she all right?”

Chen Hsi-Feng frowned slightly. “Did I not promise?”

“Let me speak to her.”

“No.”

“Then I’m coming in. I have to see her once more, before you take her mind.”

His frown deepened…then disappeared. “Of course. Come.”

He put down the phone, and took an object from an inner pocket. My own Gyrojet, it looked like, or one like it. “There is time for one last question,” he said distractedly.

I nodded. “You’re not going to let me live, are you? You lied to him.”

“Yes. I dare not simply wipe your memory. Organic memory differs from electronic in that any erasure can be undone, with enough time and effort. A pity: it will cost me a son.”

So I was going to die. And so was Robert, or Po Chang, or whoever he was today. Interesting. Regrettable. At least I would be forever safe from the things with the leather wings. Or perhaps not; perhaps they came from the land beyond life. No matter. An old traditional blues song went through my head.

“Sit there and be silent,” he commanded me. He swiveled his chair away, faced the door with his back to me. The door opened and Robert came in. Not Chen Po Chang—my Robert Chen. The door closed behind him, and locked. He registered that at the same instant he saw the gun. His face did not change, but his shoulders hunched the least little bit, then relaxed again. “I have been stupid,” he said.

His father nodded. “When you called
her
a romantic in the restaurant, I nearly laughed aloud. Do you remember what I told you on your thirteenth birthday?”