Daughter of Regals (31 page)

Ushre put a sheaf of
papers down on the counter in front of me and said again, “I understand.” The
way he said things like that was beginning to make my scalp itch. “Once you
have completed these forms, I will ask Dr. Paracels to show you around.”

I said, “Fine,” and
started to fill out the forms. I. didn’t worry too much about what I was
signing. Except for the one that had to do with cremating my body, they were
pretty much standard releases—so that Shares’s Point wouldn’t be liable for
anything that might happen to me. The disposal-of-the-body form I read more
carefully than the others, but it didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already
know. And by the time I was done, Dr. Avid Paracels had come into the office.

I studied him as Ushre
introduced us. I would’ve been interested to meet him any time, but right then
I was particularly keen. I knew more about him than I did about Ushre—which
meant that for me he was the key to Sharon’s Point.

He was tall and
gaunt—next to Ushre he was outright emaciated. Scrawny and stooped, as if the
better part of him had been chipped away by a long series of personal
catastrophes. And he looked a good bit more than thirty years older than I was.
His face was gray. like the face of a man with a terminal disease, and the skin
stretched from his cheekbones to his jaw as if it were too small for his skull.
His eyes were hidden most of the time beneath his thick, ragged eyebrows, but
when I caught a glimpse of them they looked as dead as plastene. I would’ve
thought he was a cadaver if he wasn’t standing up and wearing a white coat. If
he hadn’t licked his lips once when he first saw me. Just the tip of his tongue
circled his lips that once—not like he was hungry, but instead like he was
wondering in an abstract way whether I might turn out to be tasty. Something
about that little pink gesture in that gray face made me feel cold all of a
sudden. For a second I felt like I knew what he was really thinking. He was
wondering how he was going to be able to use me. And how I was going to die. Maybe
not in that order.

“Dr. Paracels,” I said.
I was wondering if he or Ushre knew there was sweat running down the small of
my back.

“I won’t show you where
we do our breeding,” he said in a petulant way that surprised me, “or my animal
hospital.” The whine in his voice sounded almost deliberate, like he was
trying to sound pathetic.

“We never show our
patrons those facilities,” Ushre added smoothly. “There is an element of
surprise in what we offer.” He blinked again. The rareness of that movement
emphasized the cunning and malice of his eyes. “We believe that it improves the
sport. Most of our patrons agree.”

“Rut you can see my
clinic,” Paracels added impatiently. “This way.” He didn’t wait for me. He
turned around and went out the inner door of the office.

Ushre’s eyes never left
my face. “A brilliant surgeon, Dr. Paracels. We are fortunate to have him.”

I shrugged. The way I
was feeling right then, there didn’t seem to be anything else I could do. Then
I went after the good doctor.

That door opened into a
wide corridor running through the complex. I caught a glimpse of Paracels going
through a set of double doors at the end of the corridor, but there were other
doors along the hail, and they were tempting. They might lead me to Ushre’s
records—and Ushre’s records might tell me what I needed to know about Sharon’s
Point. But this was no tame for taking risks. I couldn’t very well tell Ushre
when he caught me that I’d blundered onto his records by mistake-assuming I
even found them. So I went straight to the double doors and pushed my way into
the surgery.

The registration
inspector was right: Sharon’s Point was very well equipped. There were several
examination and treatment rooms (including x-ray, oxygen, and ophthalmological
equipment), a half dozen beds, a pharmacy that looked more than adequate
(maybe a lot more than adequate), and an operating theater that reminded me of
the place where I was made into a cyborg.

That was where I caught
up with Paracels. In his whining voice (was he really that full of self-pity?),
he described the main features of the place. He assumed I’d want to know how he
could do effective surgery alone there, and that was what he told me.

Well, his equipment was
certainly compact and flexible, but what really interested me was that he had a
surgical  laser. (I didn’t ask him if he had a license for it. Is license was
hanging right there on the wall.) That wasn’t common at all, especially in a
small clinic like this. A surgical laser is very specialized equipment. These
days they’re used for things like eye surgery and lobotomies. And making
cyborgs. But a while back (twenty-two years) they were used in genetic
engineering.

The whole idea made my
skin crawl. There was something menacing about it As innocently as I could, I
asked Paracels the nastiest question I could think of. “Do you save any lives
here, Doctor?”

That was all it took to
make him stop whining. All at once he was so bitter I half-expected him to
begin foaming at the mouth. “What’re you,” he spat, “some kind of bleeding
heart? The men who come here know they might get killed. I do everything for
them that any doctor could do. You think I have all this stuff just for the
hell of it?”

 I was surprised to find
I believed him. I believed he did everything he could to save every life that
ended up on his operating table. He was a doctor, wasn’t he? If he was killing
people, he was doing it some other way.

4

Well, maybe I was being naive. I didn’t
know yet. But I figured I’d already learned everything Paracels and Ushre were
likely to tell me of their own free will. I told them I’d be back bright and
early the next morning, and then I left.

The rain was easing, so I
didn’t get too wet on the way back to my car, but that didn’t make me feel any
better. There was no doubt about it: I was outclassed. Ushre and Paracels had
given away practically nothing. They’d come up with neat plausible stories to
cover strange things like their vet hospital and their independence from the
usual animal breeders. In fact, they’d explained away everything except their
policy of cremating their dead hunters—and that was something I couldn’t
challenge them on without showing off my ignorance. Maybe they had even
spotted me for what I was. And I’d gotten nothing out of them except a cold
sweat. I had an unfamiliar itch to use my blaster; I wanted to raze that whole
building, clinic and all. When I reactivated my transmitter, I felt like
telling Inspector Morganstark to pull me off the case and send in someone who
knew what he was doing.

But I didn’t. Instead, I
acted just like a good
Special
Agent is supposed to. I spent the drive
back to town talking to the tape decks, telling them the whole story. If
nothing else, I’d accomplished something by finding out Sharon’s Point ran a
security screen. That would tell the Inspector his hunch was right.

I didn’t have any doubt
his hunch was right. Something stank at that preserve. In different ways,
Ushre and Paracels reminded me of maneaters. They had acquired a taste for
blood. Human blood. In the back of my head a loud voice was shouting that Sharon’s
Point used genetically altered people for “game.” No wonder Paracels looked so
sick. The M.D. in him was dying of outrage.

So I didn’t tell
Inspector Morganstark to pull me off the case. I did what I was supposed to do.
I went back to the motel and spent the afternoon acting like a rich man who was
eager to go hunting. I turned in early after supper, to get plenty of rest. I
asked the desk to call me at 6 A.M. With the shower running, I told the tape
decks what I was going to do.

When midnight came, and the sky blew clear for the first time in two days, I climbed out a window and
went back to the preserve on foot.

I wasn’t exactly loaded
down with equipment. I left my .30-06 and all my rich-hunter gear back at the
motel. But I figured I didn’t need it. After all, I was a cyborg. Besides, I
had a needle flash and a small set of electromagnetic lock-picks and jimmies.
I had a good sense of direction. I wasn’t afraid of the dark.

And I had my personal
good-luck piece. It was an old Gerber hunting knife that used to be my father’s.
It was balanced for throwing (which I was better at than using a rifle anyway),
and its edges near the hilt were serrated, so it was good for cutting things
like rope. I’d taken it with me on all my visits to bunting preserves, and once
or twice it had kept me alive. It was what I used when I had to kill some poor
animal crippled by a trap or a bad shot. Now I wore it hidden under my clothes
at the small of my back. Made me feel a little more self-confident.

I was on my way to try
to sneak a look at a few things. Like Paracels’s vet hospital and breeding
pens. And Ushre’s records. I really didn’t want to just walk into the preserve
in the morning and find out what I was up against the hard way. Better to take
my chances in the dark.

I reached the preserve
in about an hour and hunched down in the brush beside the road to plan what I
was going to do. All the lights in the barracks and office complex were out,
but there was a bright pink freon bulb burning next to the landing area and the
hovercraft. I was tempted to put it out, just to make myself feel safer. But I
figured that would be like announcing to Sharon’s Point I was there, so I left
it alone.

The barracks I decided
to leave alone, too. Maybe that wasn’t where the handlers lived—maybe that was
where Paracels kept his animals. But if it was living quarters, I was going to
look pretty silly when I got caught breaking in there. Better not to take that
chance.

So I concentrated on the
office building. Using the shadow of the barracks for cover, I crept around
until I was in back of the complex, between it and the fence. There, about
where I figured the vet facilities ought to be, I found a door that suited me.
I wanted to look at that clinic. No matter what Ushre said, it sounded to  like
a grand place to engineer “game.” I tongued off my transmitter so I wouldn’t
run into that jammer again and set about trying to open the door without
setting off any alarms.

One of my picks opened
the lock easily enough. But I didn’t crack the door more than a few cm. In the
light of my needle flash, the corridor beyond looked harmless enough, but I
didn’t trust it. I took a lock-pick and retuned it to react to magnetic-field
scanners (the most common security system these days). Then I slipped it
through the crack of the door. If it met a scanner field, I’d feel resistance
in the air—before I tripped the alarm (in theory, anyway).

Isn’t technology
wonderful (said the cyborg)? My pick didn’t meet any resistance. After a minute
or two of deep breathing. I opened the door enough to step into the complex.
Then I closed it behind me and leaned against it.

I checked the corridor
with my flash, but didn’t learn anything except that I had several doors to
choose from. Holding the pick in front of me like some kind of magic wand, I
started to move, half expecting the pick to start bucking in my hand and all
hell to break loose.

But it didn’t. I got to
the first door and opened it. And found floor-cleaning equipment—electrostatic
sweepers and whatnot. The night was cool—the building was cool—but I was
sweating.

The next door was a
linen closet. The next was a bathroom.

I gritted my teeth,
trying to keep from talking out loud. Telling the decks what I was doing was already
an old habit.

The next door was the
one I wanted. It put me in a large room that smelled like a lab.

I shut that door behind
me, too, and spent a long time just standing there, making sure I wasn’t making
any noise. Then I broadened the beam of my flash and spread it around the room.

Definitely a laboratory.
At this end there were four large worktables covered with equipment: burners,
microscopes, glassine apparatus of all kinds—I couldn’t identify half that
stuff. I couldn’t identify the chemicals ranked along the shelves on this wall
or figure out what was in the specimen bottles on the opposite side of the
room. (What the hell did Paracels need all this for?) But there was one thing I
could identify.

A surgical laser.

It was so fancy it made
the one in the surgery look like a toy.

When I saw it, something
deep down in my chest started to shiver.

And that was only halt
the room. The other half was something else. When I was done checking over the
lab equipment, I scanned the far end and spotted the cremator.

It was set into the wall
like a giant surgical sterilizer, but I knew what it was. I’d seen cremators
before. This was just the largest one I’d ever come across. It looked big
enough to hold a grizzly. Which was strange, because hunting preserves didn’t
usually have animals that size. Too expensive to replace.

But almost immediately I
saw something stranger. In front of the cremator stood a gurney that looked
like a hospital cart. On it was a body, covered with a sheet. From what I could
see, it looked like the body of a man.

I didn’t run over to it.
Instead, I forced myself to locate all the doors into the lab. There were
four—two opposite each other at each end of the room. So no matter what I did I
was going to have to turn my back on at least one of them.

But there was nothing I
could do about that. I went to the door across from me and put my ear to it for
a long minute, listening as hard as I knew how, trying to tell if anything was
happening on the other side. Then I went to the other two doors and did the
same thing. But all I heard was the thudding of my heart. If Sharon’s Point was
using sound-sensor alarms instead of field scanners, I was in big trouble.