Coven (25 page)

Liddy’s fingers and toes twitched, and
Stella was blinking. The sister’s neurohemolyticpyrrolizicvenom was
wearing off. Tom pushed the levslats through the next extromitter.
Besser had told him that the slats had an unlimited
load capacity. Theoretically you could push an aircraft
carrier around on one of these things. You could push worlds.

But no worlds today. Just a pair of naked
coeds. Tom could feel the warmth of the sensorpost behind him. They
were everywhere in one way or another—hybridized into the sisters’
eyes, in the sensor rings that Besser and Winnie wore, even in
Tom’s transceptionrod. Through such sensor circuits, the Supremate
saw and heard everything. The sensorpost was merely a black rod
above the keypass. It reminded Tom of the Orwell novel.

He flipped the Erblings off their slats onto
the carbonized floorwall. “If you think Do Horse was hot
stuff,” he joked, “wait’ll you see what’s waiting for you in the
next room. You’ll be the only gals in town with boyfriends from
another planet!” Tom laughed. “I’ll be right back, and in the
meantime, you’ll be trying on some new genes, and I don’t mean
Levi’s.”

He extromitted to the
pointaccess of the xyholotypehold. The exposed unit read
#1003WADEST.JOHN. The hold was empty, but not for long. In
sisterspeak the hold was called a
carbonmassrepulsiondiodedeflectiveenergybarriersecuritynodule. In
Tomspeak, it was called a fuckin’ jail. It reminded him of the brig
on
Star Trek.
Nothing could penetrate its repulsion screen. A TOW missile
wouldn’t dent it. A sixteen inch naval shell would bounce off
its transparent face like a tennis ball.

Tom touched the scrollmode
on the revolutionactivator, thinking of the proper stockcodes
#765NRLDYL and #6500: .::. . Instantly the first
appeared, something reminiscent of a giant gray chicken gizzard,
which rose joint by joint on segmented legs. “Come on, Valentino,”
Tom said. “Time to make some bacon.” Nrldyl had haired antennae in
place of eyes and ears, and at the end of its single arm was not a
hand but a rubberish shovel like thing. Tom understood that
this particular genus had intercourse by means of manual seminal
congestion: It took its semen out of itself with the scoop and
stuffed it into its mate.
True
passion,
Tom thought.

#6500: .::. . appeared next. “Ah,
Blob Man,” Tom commented, noticing the bucket. It was nice to
know that earth was not the only sphere in the universe that used
buckets. He carried it down the pass, as Nrldyl dumbly followed.
Tom didn’t have to worry about the holotypes getting rowdy; the
ganglionstaticreflexpulsemodificationdischargenodes implanted into
their nervous systems would zap them a nutcracker at the faintest
negative thought. That way they couldn’t rough up the female
surrogates.

Tom decayed the radiophaseshifttriionizer,
which paved the way for successful antirejectorybifertilization. He
took the two holotypes into the warren. “Girls!” he announced. “I’m
back! With your new dream dates!”

Stella began to visibly jerk. Liddy managed
a muffled whine from deep in her chest.

“
Go to it, fellas.” Tom set
the bucket between Liddy’s feet and nudged Nrldyl toward Stella.
“If you guys need a godfather, let me know. I could be
available.”

Nrldyl was hopping up and
down in pure alien excitement. Clumps of its semen were already
visible within the slit of its spermonic duct. The grotesque thing
then knelt between Stella’s legs and began to tenderly transfer the
globs of its off-blue semen, via the scoop hand, into Stella’s
vaginal vault. The scoop packed it in nice and tight, leaving poor
Stella bloated like a blueberry turnover with too much
filling.
What a way to fuck,
Tom thought. Nrldyl chortled. Stella vomited a
yard into the air while at the same time convulsing in multiple
orgasms.

Meanwhile the thing in the bucket had
already dumped itself out. The brown blob spurtled, groaning,
surging upward as if against tremendous gravity. After several
strenuous attempts, it managed to stand upright, sporting a
dripping, long erection that looked sort of like a giant chewed
Tootsie Roll. Liddy screamed through her paralysis when the thing
climbed between her legs.

Tom plugged his key into the extromitter.
But before he left, he turned and offered a final commiseration.
“Have no fear, girls. You’ll live forever. You’ll be cosmic mothers
of miracles—forever.”

But where did that
leave
him
? As he
fed the thought “Student Shop” into the extromitter, he wondered.
They said he would live forever too. But how could that be, when
already shreds of his own flesh were beginning to peel
off?

—

CHAPTER 20

“
Museums? No,” Professor
Fredrick said. “None within hundreds of miles, I’m
afraid.”

Lydia had come to Fredrick at 9 A.M. sharp.
Fredrick was Exham’s chairman of the archaeology department. She’d
wanted to know where a three hundred year old
cutting tool could be found near the campus. And he’d told her.
Nowhere.

“
May I see those
photographs?” Professor Fredrick asked. The shots were microphotos
she’d taken of the impactations at the stables.

Fredrick lit a pipe with a face on it.
“There’s no scale here,” he remarked. “How long would you say this
strike mark is?”

“
A little over ten
inches.”

“
That’s a long blade for an
ax. It’s perfectly flat too. But the angle width of the cutting
bezel interests me more.”

“
Sir?”

Fredrick pointed to the grainy shot with his
pipe end. “I mean the angle at which this tool was honed” —he
squinted— “you can see that the left side of the blade is a flat
plane, while the right bears the honing surface.”

Lydia had already noted this.

“
And your police scientist
told you—”

“
It was an estimation,” she
clarified. “There were no exact classifications in the indexes.
This ax is definitely iron, and definitely forged over three
hundred years ago. That’s all we know.”

“
This isn’t an ax,”
Fredrick said.

“
What?”

“
It’s plain to see. It’s
not an ax. It’s not a mattock, an adze, or a froe
either.”

“
Then what is
it?”

Fredrick’s brow rose over his aging face. He
tapped his pipe into a glazed Babylonian
bloodtap turned ashtray. “The tool you’re looking for is
a beam hewer. It’s the only tool within your estimated time
period that had this kind of cutting edge.”

Lydia frowned. “What the hell is a
beam hewer?”

“
A tool used by colonists
to turn round logs into square beams. There were many different
types of hewers, mind you, but only the beam hewer possessed a
planed left blade side, so the scores of the dogged log could be
sliced off evenly.”

Scores of the dogged
log,
Lydia thought. “I’m not exactly an
expert on beam hewers, Professor.”

Fredrick laughed, for the first time
displaying a comprehension of humor. “Beam carpenters were the most
vital tradesmen of the early colonial period. The procedure
involved the following steps. One, a tree was cut down. Two, the
felled tree was held to the ground by a dogging clamp. Three, the
dogged tree was scored with axlike tools called adzes. Four, the
scored tree was hewn—four flat planes were cut along the scores.
The beam hewer had the appearance of an oddly shaped ax. The
cutting edges were commonly a foot long, to clear each score.”

Lydia tried to picture an ax with a
foot long cutting edge. “They were huge, you mean.”

“
Yes, and heavy—twenty to
thirty pounds. The left blade sides were perfectly level, or
‘basilled,’ so as to cut the scores off flat. A good beam carpenter
could turn a thirty foot tree into an evenly sided beam in
about an hour.”

Fredrick rose to take down some books. Lydia
understood that he’d been on digs all over the world. Years of
blazing sun had cragged his face, toughened his skin to leather. He
slid aside a small statue of Chinnamasta, the Bengalian goddess of
decapitation, and presented to Lydia an old book opened to a block
of pictures.

“
That,” he said, pointing
to one, “is a typical beam hewer.”

Lydia nearly shit her police pants.

“
And that,” he paused to
add, “is me.”

The ghostly field photograph was dated March
19, 1938. “New Excavations at Kent Island,” it read, and the text:
“Sophomore F. Fredrick displays one of dozens of newly disinterred
artifacts found at Maryland University’s latest Kent Island dig, a
beam hewer probably forged by William Claiborne’s blacksmiths
in 1632. Note the hewer’s extraordinary size.”

In the picture, a young and dusty Professor
Fredrick smiled as he held up the hewer for the camera. Its handle
was nearly as long as Fredrick was tall, and its cutting edge
easily cleared a foot. The bizarre blade was configured like an
upside down, L. Lydia had never imagined a cutting tool so
large.

“
The hewer’s impractical
size was necessary. Too small and they would not be able to cut
each score in a single swipe. Needless to say, next to flintlocks,
the beam hewer was the weapon of choice during Indian
attacks.”

“
I can see why,” Lydia
commented. The look of the thing was terrifying enough, but worse
was the rest. This was the same sort of instrument that had been
used on Sladder.

Fredrick puffed smoke. “May I ask the nature
of your inquiry?”

“
Sure,” Lydia said. “The
weapon that made these strike-marks murdered a man.”

“
Oh, dear,” Fredrick
said.

“
But knowing what it is
isn’t good enough, not with something this old. I need to know
where a person could get one.”

“
Well, I’ve told you, there
aren’t any museums in the vicinity. Exham is a remote town; who
needs museums here?”

No museums,
Lydia thought.
No
beam hewers.

“
Except, of course,”
Fredrick continued, “the artifacts owned by the
college.”

Lydia stared. “You mean there’s a museum
here? On campus?”

“
No, but there are
exhibits. The archaeology department sponsors several digs per
year. Several battles of the Revolution were fought nearby, and
early colony settlements were scattered all over Exham. We’ve got
more musket barrels, bent bayonets, and crushed powder horns than
you can shake a stick at.”

“
Fine,” Lydia said. “But do
you have any beam hewers?”

“
Why, of course,” Fredrick
answered.

Lydia wanted to shout the next question into
his face, but she managed to calm herself. “Why didn’t you tell me
that before?”

“
You specifically asked me
about independent museums, not college archaeological
properties.”

Lydia’s heart quickened. “Professor
Fredrick, are you telling me that there are beam hewers on
this campus right now?”

“
Yes,” he said. “Several,
as a matter of fact.”

“
Where?”

“
The main administration
lobby. My department maintains a fine display of local artifacts
there. It’s an impressive exhibit; I’m sure you’ve seen it. There
are three or four hewers on display.”

Lydia’s scalp seemed to be tingling. Tensely
she stood up and said, “Professor Fredrick, thank you very, very
much.”

««—»»

Wade scrubbed toilets and mopped floors,
oblivious. He smiled, whistling, and thought of his night with
Lydia Prentiss.

It had been wonderful,
which sounded corny, but it was true. He’d driven her home at 7
A.M. He could tell by the way she kissed him that this was more
than a one night stand. The look in her eyes had finished
him.
This girl loves me,
he thought in a crash of incredulity. She hadn’t
said it, of course. But Wade
knew,
and that shock of knowledge was all it took to
show him how significantly his life had changed literally
overnight. His past’s romantic demons had fled like blown leaves;
Lydia had exorcized them. No more macho rich kid in a Corvette. No
more beaver patrol. No more reducing the society of women to
physical tidbits for his indulgence. The burden of his sins was
gone. Wade the Conqueror had been conquered. By Lydia.

I’m in love,
he thought giddily.
How
do you like that?

What a stark, blazing realization. He felt
glittering in the rush of love. Nothing could spoil the moment of
this beautiful truth.

Or at least
almost
nothing—

Plunk.

He looked down and saw that he’d stepped in
the mop bucket. It tipped over when he lifted his foot out. Then he
slipped.

Splap!

Now he lay belly down in the puddle.
His temper struggled. When he tried to rise, he slipped again and
fell on his back. He got up, swore, and kicked the bucket. The
bucket bounced off the wall, hit him in the head, and knocked him
in the water again.

Splat!

Laughter cracked down the hall. Wade, wet
and red faced, looked up. Chief White was standing in the
doorway.

“
I seen a lotta
dumb ass hobnobbin’ in my day, but I ain’t never seen a grown
man get his ass whupped by a bucket.”

“
What do you want!” Wade
yelled.