Memorymakers (8 page)

Chapter 8

I wonder what it’s like undergoing an embidium extraction. Has it ever been attempted on a Ch’Var?

From an anonymous letter to the Director

It was a golden train, an engine and five passenger cars, on a golden track in a golden room, and Squick paused momentarily in the doorway to watch the boy roll tile train back and forth.

The boy looked up and smiled quizzically.

“Hello, Tom-Tom,” Squick said.

“It doesn’t have a motor. I looked.”

“That doesn’t mean one isn’t there.” Squick approached, sizing up his prey, this remarkable child. The Harvey boy seemed alert and unchanged despite the extraction, and he had a trusting openness about him. It almost seemed too easy, as if a trap had been set for Squick.

But what sort of trap could this be? From children? Squick recalled his childhood ethics classes and a folktale, “Rescue of the Gweens,” about an evil Ch’Var who preyed upon Gweenchildren and abused them sexually. In the story Lordmother intervened, and the Ch’Var, having lost face, committed ritual shittah.

Squick placed a hand on the boy’s shoulder, felt the delicate child bones beneath the fabric of Thomas’s shirt. Bones fragile enough to snap.

Thomas pulled away and lowered his face to the level of the train’s engine car, peering through openings in the side of the toy. He lifted it from the track, unhitched the coupling that held it to the string of cars and let the cars back down on the track.

“There’s no motor in there!” Thomas insisted.

“I didn’t say where it was.”

“You’re teasing!”

“Do you like this game?”

“Where’s the motor? In one of the other cars?”

“Look in the mirror.”

“What mirror? What do you mean? Oh, you mean ’m . ..?”

Squick nodded. “You’re the motor, whenever you push it. The thing’s made of gold. Every item in this room is, with varying alloys. Maybe a golden engine wasn’t practical.”

Gold, gold,
Squick thought.
Are you the goose with golden eggs? Lay me another embidium, goose!

In one of Squick’s hands appeared an array of nearly flat candy bars in varying fruit and chocolate flavors, held like playing cards. “Pick a candy, any candy,” he said.

Thomas held back, then grabbed a chocolate bar.

“Your reward for winning the engine game.” In a blink the remaining candy bars were gone.

Thomas tore the wrapper from his treat, and with his teeth he pulled away a large hunk of chocolate taffy. He began chewing it. The gooey candy left a pattern of brown around the edge of his lips, a clown design that enlarged his mouth.

“Would you like to play more games?” Squick asked.

The Harvey boy nodded, and Squick saw he was laboring to chew the candy.

“Now we’ll play the breakfast game, and that’s why I gave you candy first. Guest children get to have candy with every meal.”

Thomas swallowed a lump of candy and said, “I don’t know how to play the breakfast game.”

“Oh but you do, only I’m going to show you a different version, one for kids.”

Squick led the way down a corridor lined with emerald green walls. Light glowed from behind the walls and cast patterns of green across the boy’s face and T-shirt. They passed an alcove lined in silver, from which an eyeless face stared. The eyes had been gouged away hideously, and the sockets dripped blood.

The boy suppressed a scream.

“Just a party display,” Squick said. “Some kids like horror fetes, and they get pretty elaborate. Look, there’s another!”

On their left through a large window of glass, a pond became visible, bobbing with floating bloody heads. They were eyeless and gory like the head in the alcove, but the mouths of these heads moved, as though talking to one another. No sounds reached the corridor.

“Yuk!” Thomas said, pausing with Squick to gaze at the display. Thomas finished his candy bar, balled up the wrapper and held onto it.

“You can toss the wrapper. Just sling it. Littering is the law here, young man.”

Thomas looked surprised, but let the wrapper fall.

“No social rules here whatsoever, so litter to your heart’s content. Would you like a can of spray paint to deface something?”

“But the hallway’s clean except for my wrapper. And I don’t see any graffiti.”

“New rules.”

“Oh.”

“Things are always changing. That’s important to understand.”

They reached the lunch room, and once inside with the boy, Squick locked the door surreptitiously. He motioned his unwitting captive toward a long table, and as Thomas took a seat on one of the benches, the tabletop budded open before him, producing a white linen tablecloth and napkin, a bone china cereal bowl and plate, a silver place setting, and a crystal juice glass.

Two robot arms with giant hands descended from the ceiling. One hand held a yellow metal basket, and the hand of the other arm dipped into the basket, producing sweet rolls, doughnuts, an array of little cereal boxes, cans of juice, and plates with steaming eggs sunny-side up, pancakes, sausages, and assorted melons. Crystal pitchers of sugar, maple and fruit syrups, cream, and milk completed the fare. A pleasant mixture of odors filled the air.

“Neat-o,” Thomas exclaimed, his eyes wide. “I’m hungry.”

The mechanical arm and basket disappeared into the ceiling.

“No social rules?” Thomas asked while he held a doughnut and gazed impishly at Squick.

“None whatsoever.”

Thomas hurled the doughnut across the room, grabbed another and stuffed it in his mouth and smashed his fist down upon the sweet rolls. He filled his bowl with cereal and cream and too much sugar, slurped several spoonfuls, burped gigantically, and wiped his face on the tablecloth.

“That’s all?” Squick asked.

“Not quite.” Thomas stood up and yanked the tablecloth, pulling everything to the floor. China, crystal and food crashed in a great, inundating noise.

“Goodness!” Squick exclaimed, stepping quickly to avoid a stream of berry syrup that drooled across the floor. “You are a bad little boy!”

Thomas burped again, followed by a rumble of flatulence. “What’s next?”

“I see you’re getting warmed up.”

The robot arms reemerged from the ceiling, this time with cleaning supplies. The arms stretched and moved in precise, methodical circles as they tidied away the mess. One arm sprayed Thomas’s face, and the other wiped it with a towel. Dishes and garbage were removed, tables and benches were lifted into ceiling compartments. Presently the room was entirely barren of furnishings.

Squick heard a subsonic signal and opened the door. Peenchay stood there, bowing slightly with his tiny ochre-red eyes lowered. Something gray and glistening hung from his lower lip, a piece of Gweenbrain from Peenchay’s last meal. His tongue lashed out, pulled the fragment in and he swallowed.

Like a damned frog,
Squick thought.
Or a toad.
Indeed, the Inferior reminded him in body structure of such an amphibian. Squick detected an odor of decaying meat.

“You have an amoeba-cam?” Squick asked.
What a curious diet for the penultimate fool,
he thought.
You’d think some of that Gween gray matter would seep in.

“Here, sir.” Peenchay extended one open palm containing a blue-green device in the shape of a tiny round pill.

Squick plucked it from the proffered palm and snapped, “Change your clothes and bathe.”

“Now?”

“Immediately, if not sooner!”

When Peenchay was gone, Squick relocked the door and returned to the boy. Holding up the amoeba-cam, Squick asked, “Can you see this?”

“Your hand?”

“I’m holding something.”

“Another game?”

Squick detected a modicum of fear in the boy’s eyes, and the fieldman trembled, a familiar sensation. Soon Nebulons would flow from his body into the boy’s . . .

“No games.” Squick flipped the amoeba-cam in the air, and it buzzed into flight, a pale red glow to him. “You still see nothing?”

“Am I . . . supposed to imagine? You threw something?”

“No games, I said.”

“I hear buzzing, like a fly.”

“Aha! Just like before, when I was in your house?”

Thomas nodded. “Invisible insects?”

“Bugs of a sort” came the response, and Squick felt his mouth shape into a sardonic smile. But it didn’t hold. “Only Ch’Vars can hear their sound.”

“Only what? Can we get back to the games? Please, Mr. Squick?” More fear than before in the eyes, and in the boy’s tone of voice.

“You are not Ch’Var. I see that in your eyes.” But Squick wondered if the Nebulon count in this boy might be so low that the red of Nebulons didn’t show in his irises. This fieldman had never heard of or encountered a Ch’Var with such an extreme condition, but he thought it possible. According to stories long told among his people, the irises of ancient Ch’Vars were ruby red. Then over millennia, a fading, a washing away.

Ruby eyes! What a sight they must have been!

“What are you talking about? What’s a Ch’Var?”

Squick glowered at the boy and said, “And your sister claims she hears the grating of my eyeballs. Even Ch’Vars do not hear that, if such a sound exists. Yet in all ways our senses are superior to Gween senses.”

“I don’t know what you—”

“Shut up! You don’t need to understand! Strange children. Come here, strange one.”

The boy’s chin quivered and he didn’t obey. He appeared ready to cry.

“Here! Now!”

Thomas shuffled over, made whimpering sounds.

Squick touched the tear ducts of his own eyes, felt the icy flow of Nebulons, and within moments the ancient, memory-seeking organisms entered the boy’s body through Thomas’s eyes to his brain.

The boy slumped to the floor, and a scream issued from him, a high trill that sent Squick backward several steps.

The child was in a prenatal position, not uncommon in extraction cases, but the muscles of his throat convulsed, discharging volleys of shuddering screams into the room. The terrible sounds filled Squick’s body, blocked thought, and he ran back to the door, fumbled with the lock mechanism and thrust the door open.

When he was in the corridor with the door closed, Squick still heard the screams, and still his body was invaded with sound, unabated in intensity.

He touched a signal button on the underside of his belt, and Peenchay came, wearing a vapid expression.

“Sir?”

“Shut him up,” Squick yelled.

A horrible smile consumed the Inferior’s features.

“Not that way,” Squick snapped. “Drug this one. Keep him alive, but get him away from me! The noise is unbearable! Put him in a basement room where I won’t hear him. Don’t just stand there, idiot. Do as I say. And don’t harm the boy. Hear me?”

Peenchay’s eyes flashed in momentary anger, and Squick wondered:
Would you eat my brains given the opportunity? I think you might, idiot Inferior.

Frozen fear permeated Squick’s bones. He shuddered, envisioning Peenchay in a murderous frenzy, tearing into the brains of Gweenchildren, ripping out the gray, pink, bloody matter within their skulls and stuffing it into his mouth.

And one of Peenchay’s ghoulish descriptions came back, the way he said he tasted sweetness just before he filled his mouth in his abhorrent way—sweetness in his saliva before the taste of Gweenmeat—gushing saliva. Gushing, stinking saliva. And the flavor of the meat, he said, matched the saliva.

Now Peenchay took on the bowed expression of a subordinate sorry for an infraction. Squick reminded himself once again of the assistant’s great loyalty to him, and the feelings of uneasiness began to subside.

Peenchay carried the boy away, and a semblance of peace returned to Squick’s body. It wasn’t the same as before, however. He doubted he could ever forget the screaming of Thomas Harvey. Gweenchildren had screamed occasionally during extractions, and especially when Peenchay got to them, but never anything like this.

I’ll let the boy rest and try again later. An extraction only.

He thought of the Harvey girl, of her embidium.
Perhaps I’ll extract from her first
. . .

Squick went to his private apartment two levels up, intending to rest and clear his thoughts for determination of the best course of action. In the quiet of his room, in a caressing darkness that sank around and upon him, Squick felt frigid, flowing Nebulons in his eyes and just behind the eyes, Nebulons that danced against and through the implanted Gweenboy embidium he carried in his brain.

He’d been happy with the implant at first—the melding of Gween and Ch’Var had been exceptionally smooth—and life had been better then. But lately, more and more over the years, he realized he felt fragmented and confused. His body and mind were unclear battlegrounds, with warring parties pulling at him . . . and a suggestion of programming, of something he didn’t wish to do. And the warring parties, the forces on these hazy, blended fields of combat, were as fuzzy as the battlegrounds themselves. Mental, physical and spiritual powers washed together with ancient tradition, tumbling and flowing in a wet glue of Nebulons.

The face of the boy within flashed: wild hair and jagged, uneven teeth. He was ferocious, riding a long, lean Ch’Var hound.

It wasn’t merely a matter of Ch’Var against Gween, of his Ch’Var body rejecting the embidium implant, though he was beginning to surmise that this may have been part of it. Implant rejections were rare, and if they occurred they usually occurred soon after the procedure, within months. But some rejections took longer, many years.

Gradually the frigid flow of Nebulons coursing through Squick’s body became warm, a soothing temperature, and he felt anesthetized.

Thomas lay in moisture, warm like the fluid of his mother’s womb. Eyeless heads floated in that fluid, and the boy was one. His mouth moved but made no sound, and he tasted blood from his gouged-away eyes.

It was reddish dark in the womb, the redness of blood, and his body formed into a red-irised eye, a single eye about to be born. The taste of blood intensified, and in a torrent he drank of his own fluids, to his fill and beyond. He emerged from the womb, and the eye that was Thomas fled across a desert expanse, into the teeth of poisonous sands borne on a storm wind, sands that were lethal pellets penetrating the cells and tissues of his existence.