Deathstalker Return (19 page)

“What were the nature of her new abilities?” asked Dr. Happy, sounding almost sane for once.

“According to the data crystals, she had become an extraordinarily powerful telepath, capable of forcing other espers into a gestalt consciousness, which she could then dominate. Through the gestalt, all their powers became increased, and she was able to wield them all. She traveled the Empire, collecting other espers and absorbing them into her gestalt. The new Hadenmen followed her progress with fascination, but they were still human enough to be scared of her. When she had enough espers under her control, she returned to Haden and forced them all through the Madness Maze. The Hadenmen . . . kept out of her way. It also seems she used her powerful mind to drive all the other espers crazy, before putting them into the Maze. Perhaps she thought it would protect them. Perhaps she thought it would help her control them afterwards. Either way, most of the espers died, and the few that emerged . . . were monsters.”

“We all have monsters within us,” said Dr. Happy, blinking owlishly.

“How true,” said Finn. “Do carry on, Dr. Ramirez.”

“I think you know who I’m talking about,” said Ramirez. “These monsters were the legendary uber-espers: the Shatter Freak, the Gray Train, Blue Hellfire, Screaming Silence, the Spider Harps. The terrible minds that run the Esper Liberation Front these days. The original uber-esper had intended to use the power of these minds to force all espers into one great esper consciousness, like our oversoul today, but under her control. But for the first time, her ambition exceeded her abilities. The pressure of so many minds fighting to be free destroyed her. The gestalt collapsed, the woman died, and what remained of her mind was sucked into the mass subconscious of the espers; later to emerge as the Mater Mundi. The other uber-espers disappeared, fearful of being controlled again, and developed their own agenda.”

“Fascinating,” said Finn. “Do you have any clues as to the identity of this remarkable woman?”

“Yes,” said the blue steel robot. “We have a name: Alicia VomAcht Deathstalker.”

“Well,” said Finn, after a while. “I didn’t see that one coming. You’ve given me much to think about, Dr. Ramirez, but it’s not why I came here. Where are the twelve survivors?”

“This way,” Ramirez said reluctantly. He led them through more corridors, still talking. He sounded increasingly nervous. “The twelve survivors are kept in a holding area attached to the Maze. It appeared quite literally out of nowhere, an
outgrowth
of the Maze, because it was needed.”

“There are those who have suggested the Madness Maze is alive,” said Dr. Happy. “And quite possibly aware.”

“It’s alien,” Ramirez said shortly. “It could be anything.”

Dr. Happy clapped his bony hands together. “Oh, the possibilities . . .”

“All twelve are imprisoned behind force screens,” said Ramirez, deliberately not looking at Dr. Happy. “The shields allow nothing in or out. We haven’t been able to come up with anything that can affect these screens.”

“Then how do you feed the survivors?” said Finn.

“We don’t. They haven’t eaten or drunk anything in two hundred years. And that’s just the beginning of how . . . altered they are. I should warn you; you’ll find just being this close to the Maze disturbing. You’ll experience a constant feeling of being watched, and studied, or weighed in judgement. And not by the survivors. In this, as in everything else we do here, the Maze watches us all.”

“Yes,” said the Shub robot. “We feel it too. It is disturbing.”

Finn shot a quick glance at the robot, and then decided not to pursue the matter. “Can we communicate with the twelve?”

“We can talk with them, but I don’t know that what we get is actually communication.” Ramirez shuddered suddenly. “We’re almost there, Sir Durandal. Soon you’ll know why we’ve kept these . . . abominations secret for so long. The force shields the Maze provides are a blessing, and a protection for all Humanity. It is my fervent hope that they will never be lowered. Or at least not until the rest of Humanity has evolved to a point where we have some hope of dealing with these creatures.” He gave Finn a hard look. “I have to ask, Sir Durandal; what are your intentions towards the twelve?”

“I haven’t decided yet,” said Finn. “That’s why I came all this way, to see them in person. But, they could be weapons we can use against the Terror. Or other enemies.”

“Like Donal Corcoran,” said Dr. Happy, unexpectedly. “He’d make an excellent weapon.”

“Mouth is open, Doctor, should be shut,” said Finn.

And then they rounded a final corner, and there the twelve were, imprisoned behind shimmering fields of energy. Ramirez started to say something, but Finn gestured imperiously for him to be silent. He walked slowly forwards, alone. He had no intention of sharing this moment with anyone. He walked slowly down the aisle, peering into each cell, drinking in the terrible miracles the Maze had wrought in their merely mortal flesh. They were everything he had hoped for, and worse.

Twelve men and women, kept alive and suffering and crazy for two hundred years. Not eating or drinking, because they had risen above such human needs. He looked at them, and some of them looked back. They were glorious and awful, magnificent and appalling; sick dreams given shape and form and thrust unwillingly into the waking world. Finn decided he didn’t feel disturbed. He felt . . . invigorated. He slowly retraced his steps, stopped in front of the first cell, and gestured for the others to come forward and join him.

“I have to thank you, Dr. Ramirez,” he said calmly. “In all my years, I have never seen anything like this. A truly unique experience. I could watch them for hours, and never grow tired. Tell me, have they always been like this? Have they changed at all, in two hundred years?”

“Not according to the files left by my predecessors,” said Ramirez. He preferred to look at Finn rather than what was in the cell. “This is how they emerged from the Madness Maze. Each one entirely singular, and horribly self-sufficient. Apart from one, they haven’t slept at all in two centuries. No normal mind could survive under such conditions. But then, these creatures aren’t in any way normal.”

He turned and looked, almost unwillingly, into the first cell, and the others followed his gaze.

The cell contained two survivors. A man and a woman, joined together into one body. A large horribly white creature, with four arms and four legs, and one oversized head with too many eyes, it crawled slowly round its featureless enclosure like a giant insect. The single mouth spoke a language that made no sense, and all the eyes moved in different directions.

“Not much of a weapon, is it?” said Ramirez. “Sometimes it walks on the walls and the ceiling, and sometimes it sings a song that makes any listener’s ears bleed, but that’s about it.”

“Ah, well,” said Finn. “Early days yet.”

In the next cell, the occupant had been turned inside out, all down one side. It sat very still in the middle of its cell, and didn’t respond to any movements outside the force screen. The exposed organs were crimson and purple, pulsing with blood, wet and shiny. The single lung expanded and contracted smoothly. Sharp bone horns stuck out of the exposed gray matters of the brain. Where the genitals should have been there was only a twitching red mass. Tears ran steadily down the normal half of the face.

“Is it in pain?” asked Finn.

Ramirez shrugged. “It doesn’t respond to questions. Either way, we have no way of reaching past the force screen to help. According to my files, it hasn’t moved an inch in two hundred years. God alone knows what it’s thinking.”

“Why would the Maze do something like that?” said Finn. “What purpose could it serve?”

“I told you,” said Ramirez. “The Maze is alien.”

In the next cell, a man ran back and forth impossibly quickly, his movements almost a blur. He pounded on the walls with his fists, which continually broke and bled and constantly healed. His mouth was stretched in an endless silent scream, his eyes utterly mad.

“He can hear the whole Empire thinking,” said Ramirez.

“But he can’t shut any of it out, even for a moment. He doesn’t even know who he is anymore, his identity crushed under the weight of so many others.”

Finn looked at Dr. Happy. “Could you help him?”

“I could have a lot of fun trying,” said the good doctor.

The next cell held a man who’d torn his own eyes out. Blood streamed endlessly down his jerking cheeks from the empty red sockets. But his wounded head turned unerringly to follow Finn as he approached the cell’s force screen. When Finn stopped and looked in, the blind man came forwards to face him.

“I have to keep tearing them out,” he said hoarsely. “Because they keep growing back. I see things. Terrible things. I see other planes, other dimensions, and other realities. I see the awful things that live there, twisting and turning, and the awful things they want to do, if they could only find their way here. I have seen the answers to Humanity’s oldest questions, and secrets we were never meant to know . . . and I can’t stop seeing! I tear my eyes out, and
I can still see!
”

Finn backed away despite himself, and the man in the cell laughed hysterically. The laughter followed them down the aisle to the next cell.

In this cell, the occupant was constantly changing. It stood very still, a blur of movement from one moment to the next as it became a woman became a man became a child became someone else. Short and tall, fat and thin, every race and color of Humanity, everyone and everything, forever changing.

“We don’t know whether any of those are real people,” said Ramirez. “Whether they’re copies of people from other worlds, or alternate time track versions of the original person, such as the blessed Hazel d’Ark is supposed to have produced, or whether these people are just generated from the original’s imagination. None of them have ever stayed around long enough to be questioned. And before you ask, recording devices don’t operate through the force screen. None of our instruments will. We have no way of running tests on any of the survivors. I’m not sure whether that’s for their protection or ours.”

“Don’t be defeatist, Doctor,” said Finn. “One idea has already occurred to me. But let us press on, press on.”

The occupant of the next cell was fast asleep, curled up into a fetal ball, floating some two feet above the floor. Behind his closed eyelids, his eyes moved constantly.

“He’s been sleeping and dreaming for two hundred years,” said Ramirez. “What can his dreams be like, after so long away from reality? We don’t know if he’ll ever wake up, or what he might be able to do when he does. Perhaps he’s dreaming himself sane.”

The next cell contained a homicidal psychopath of such relentless ferocity that even Finn was impressed. The Maze survivor raged back and forth across his cell, murdering an endless number of people who seemed to appear out of nowhere just to die, and then vanish again. The killer’s face was purple with rage as he battered people to death with his bare hands, or strangled them, or tore them limb from limb.

“Again, we don’t know whether the other people are real or not,” said Ramirez. “But he’s been killing them nonstop, in increasingly nasty and inventive ways, for two hundred years. If the cell force screens ever do go down, the very first thing we’re going to do is shoot that bloodthirsty bastard with every gun we’ve got.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Finn. “He has possibilities.”

“Going to throw him at the Terror, are you?” said Ramirez. “Oh, yes, he’ll be a lot of use against something that eats planets!”

Finn looked at Ramirez. “Now, now, Doctor,” he murmured. “Who knows what other . . . abilities any of these people might have, outside their cells? Even the blessed Owen didn’t become a living god immediately; he had to grow into his powers over time.”

In the next cell, a woman sat cross-legged, smiling at nothing. Her eyes were fixed on something far away.

“She’s been smiling nonstop for two centuries,” said Ramirez heavily. “Never been known to speak or move, but one thing every scientist who’s seen her agrees on, is that . . . that’s a really disturbing smile. Like she knows something nobody else knows.”

“Oh, I’ve seen a lot of that,” said Dr. Happy. “Trust me, it doesn’t mean anything.”

The next occupant all but filled his cell; a huge dark fleshy mass that pressed against the walls and floor and ceiling, but held back from touching the force screen. It had no discernable human details, just a great mass, slowly moving.

“Apparently he looked perfectly normal when he went into the cell,” said Ramirez. “But he’s been growing steadily for two hundred years. Hopefully he’ll stop once he’s completely filled all the space available.”

“And if he doesn’t?” said Finn.

Ramirez shrugged. “That’s up to the Maze.”

In the next cell, a woman slowly faded in and out of reality, disappearing and returning, silently screaming for help. She reached out her hands to the people outside her cell, begging for them to do something.

“She can see us, but she can’t hear us,” said Ramirez. “We don’t know where she goes to, or how she comes back. Or how to keep her here. Whatever powers she hoped to find in the Maze, I can’t believe this was it.”

Finn found the occupant of the final cell the most disturbing, mostly because the occupant looked exactly like Finn Durandal. The two Finns stared at each other in silence for a while. The double was exact, down to the tiniest details of face, stance, and clothing. He smiled amiably back at Finn.

“Takes a bit of getting used to, doesn’t it?” he said calmly. “I become anyone who looks at me. Anyone at all. And not just the exterior; I am you, inside and out. I know everything you know, including all the things no one else is supposed to know.”

The original Finn raised an elegant eyebrow. “A telepath, I take it?”

“Perhaps,” said his double. “Or perhaps nothing so crude. I am you, in every way that matters. If you were to die, I could step into your life and take it over, and no one would be able to tell the difference.”