Pirates of the Thunder (15 page)

“Now you’ve gone and done it,” Reba Koll said in a dry, nasty voice that hardly seemed human. “Now you went and
really
made me mad! Who put you up to this? Clayben? Naw, he’s too damned smart to think something like this would work. Okay,
sonny,
it’s time now. Time for you and me to have a
real
intimate get-together.” And, with that, she advanced toward him.

There was just something about it all that completely unnerved Sabatini. He reached frantically for the bucket and tripped over his own wires, falling to the ground.

Most of the others, attracted by the loud noises and commotion, had drawn up in a semicircle, watching. Too late to help Koll, they were unsure of what to do.

Sabatini, still on his back on the ground, got hold of Koll’s pistol and brought it up. Seeing that, Warlock brought up her own pistol and took aim, but Clayben reached out and pushed it down. “No!
She’s
not the one in trouble! Watch and learn!”

The black woman paused and looked over at Raven, who took the half cigar from his mouth and nodded.

Sabatini fired three times into Koll’s body at point-blank range. The bullets tore into her, knocking her down and forcing her back, but even as the man was getting untangled and rising, so was Reba Roll. She stood there, three big holes in her chest, and though there were signs of bleeding, no blood was flowing now.

She laughed at him. “You’re mine now. You went and spoiled this old rag I had on.”

Manka Warlock stared along with the others. “Those were good shots,” she said in wonder. “It is not possible! See the gaping exit wounds in her back!”

Reba Koll ripped off her skirt and tore off her gunbelt with tremendous strength, and then leaped at Sabatini. This time the man could not move out of the way; he was as stunned and totally confused as Manka Warlock and the rest of them.

Koll clung tightly to Sabatini, and the man’s body suddenly stiffened. He opened his mouth in a cry of pain and surprise but nothing came out.

“Get away, Chow Dai! Get away now!” came a horrible, inhuman voice. The Chinese girl, suddenly animated, got up and ran to the others.

The two stood there a moment, a frozen tableau, the small, frail-looking old woman clutching the chest of the big, muscular Sabatini—and then it began to happen.

“Sweet Jesus!” Nagy swore. “They’re
melting!”
He’d been told about Koll—over and over by Clayben—but until now there always remained some lingering doubt over whether Koll was anything more than she seemed or merely the subject of a Clayben dementia. There was no doubt now in any of their minds that Isaac Clayben, sane or not, had not been kidding.

Raven’s cigar fell out of his mouth.

“Fortunately, it’s very slow,” Clayben remarked, his voice almost casual and clinical, as if discussing a sprained ankle. “That was the only reason we could capture and contain it at all. It’s been a long time since I saw this. I’m glad it’s no different. Gives me
some
odds.”

His detachment was disturbing to most of them, but they could not take their eyes off the slow-motion drama now taking place before them.

The merged bodies had become a single seething mass of amorphous flesh; it writhed and wrinkled like some great monster, and slowly, very slowly, a form began building out of the center, as if something inside the mass was now rising to and then through the top. At first it was a head, humanoid but hardly human, a death’s head with bloated, puffy flesh and no hair, eyes closed, lips and nostrils sealed. It was ugly and gruesome, but none could take his eyes off it even for a moment.

There was a neck now, then the torso started to emerge —a broad, muscular frame lacking in detail—then the waist, and finally thick, sturdy legs. Finally a complete figure stood in a thick pool of protoplasmic goo, but it was still not human, more like a thing of plastic or wax, an artificial man before the artisans had started to work. It was still being fed by the mass in which it was rooted like some strange tree, and it was still changing.

Subtly the skin texture and muscle tone changed, becoming flatter, harder, and more natural. The nipples, the fine detail of the male genitals, even, incredibly, a few minor scars on the torso were formed. Very slowly but steadily, so slowly that it couldn’t really be tracked by the eye—the way the position of the hour hand on a clock keeps changing even though its movement cannot be followed—the rest of the detailing came in, including the hair, the lashes, and the rest. The figure was clearly recognizable now as Sabatini.

Then, quite suddenly, an imperceptible new energy was added to the figure, and it was no longer a statue of Sabatini, but a real human figure.

It gave a shudder, then breathed deeply. Its lips parted, and it flexed its arms and knees and turned on its hips.

The eyes opened, and he looked down at the mass of goo with distaste and stepped from it, strands of plasticlike flesh trailing, then breaking away. He squatted down and removed parts of it that still clung to his feet; behind him, the mass that remained seemed now devoid of purpose. It writhed a moment, then was still, all life and energy draining from it. It began to putrefy almost instantly.

The new Sabatini got up and looked at them. “That’s the trouble with this if you’ve got conscience,” he said in Sabatini’s rich baritone. Even the accent was perfect. “One must either destroy those who are innocent and deserve life or one must make immortal the scum of the race. Don’t worry, Clayben—I’ll never eat you unless you force me to it. This is bad enough—to become you would be desecration.” He looked over at Hawks. “Now you see why I am essential to this thing. No matter what hell hole and no matter what monstrosity might have a ring, he is not safe from me. I can become his confidant, his lifelong friend, his lover. I can even become
him.”

And me as well,
thought Hawks glumly, knowing the others shared the same thought. Never had he thought so furiously and so logically to cover himself. “Can you become five or more of us at once, friend?”

The creature that was now Sabatini frowned. “What? Of course not. As you can see, the rest is rotting flesh.”

“Can you become a Val, then, or a robot? Can you become Star Eagle?”

“You know I cannot. Why are you pressing this way?”

“It will take five different people working in willing concert to use those rings, I warn you, and if any of the five objects, it will be the destruction of them all. Even you could not withstand Master System in full defensive array and you know it. And you are only a bit less at risk than we. The Vals will be after you, as well. In a Val ship, in a machine environment, you will be as helpless as on Melchior and at the mercy of something far darker even than Clayben. Retain our partnership and you will share as I promised you would, but this is the last of our number that you will so consume.”

“I intend to keep our bargain and my word, although I can see why you would fear. How would you know if I violated it?”

“We’d all know,” Isaac Clayben said. “Because there wouldn’t be any Sabatini any more, would there?”

“I, personally, and most of the others, as committed and full of hate as we are for the system, would bring in the Vals if this compact is broken,” Hawks warned. “Your—ability—is incredible, beyond anything I would have believed only minutes ago. It is why you are here, included in this band.”

“I’ll behave,” Sabatini said, sounding quite natural and Sabatini-like. “You trusted Koll, didn’t you? She’s still here—somewhere. I confess even I am unsure how it works. The big problem I have is that I’m compelled to be a nearly
exact
duplicate. Even if you subjected me to full examinations, I would be Sabatini and Sabatini alone. You do not possess the equipment, nor the know-how to create it, to tell me apart. I have his urges, his temperment, and his habits. I simply have more self-control than he did, and more of a conscience. By tomorrow I’ll be Sabatini—a Sabatini who just changed sides, and knows more than he used to. I’m just not as stupid as he was.” He yawned. “I think I’ll get some sleep. It’s been a long time since I did this, and I’d forgotten how tiring it is.”

He walked off, and they let him go.

Raven crept close to Hawks. “Is that really true, Chief?”

he whispered in Lakota. “About needing five willing ones?”

Hawks shrugged and replied in English. “Beats the hell out of me, Crow.”

Raven grinned. “Maybe you
are
the best man for this job, after all.”

It was quite late, but many were not asleep. Hawks sat by the fire, impassive as always, his mind in some plane all his own, while behind him, in the center hut, Cloud Dancer and Silent Woman prepared to aid China in the imminent delivery of her child. It was neither tradition nor paternalism that found those two in there and he and the others away; nobody but the two women in attendance had ever done that sort of thing before.

Isaac Clayben came over and sat down next to Hawks. For a while the Hyiakutt did not move nor in any way show that he was even aware of company, but suddenly he asked, “Is Sabatini still sleeping?”

“Yes. It is fully capable of being on the go within minutes after it consumes, but if it can it sleeps for a long time, which helps it integrate all the new memories and information into its mind. You heard it this afternoon—Sabatini never talked like that. It is an incredible process at that, so much integrated into a single mind. I sometimes amaze myself with my handiwork.”

“Did you create it—or order it created?”

“A bit of both. I did much of the theory, but others, more skilled than I, actually created it. The final single integrated program for it was the longest I had ever known. At computer speeds it took more than three days just to load that thing.”

“It seems inconceivable that human beings could have created such a thing.”

“Human beings created Master System. Just five of them, in fact, wrote all the code and debugged it and established it. Of course, it probably took an army of technicians to build even the initial primitive version and get it running right, but it was at its heart just five people. We don’t know a lot about them except that they were not even typical of the polyglot culture in which they worked. Only two were native to the nation that employed them, for example. A Chinese Buddhist from Singapore; a Jewish lady from Israel; a black Moslem man from someplace in Africa, I believe; a part-Japanese girl from Hawaii; and an old Jewish professor from someplace in eastern North America. Funny—we know their names, their origins, and, of all things, their religions, but little else.”

“I know. Much of it was suppressed. I suppose it was Master System’s own choice to keep some details of them alive in the records. After all, they were, in a sense, its parents and creators. The Fellowship of the Rings, they called themselves. I understand it was from some popular work of the time. A joke. One masking a serious purpose. They knew their creation could turn on us all, Doctor. You should have learned something from that.”

“I thought I had it all figured out. All contained. We were extra careful. We simply did not foresee how good an organism we had created. It is less an organism than a colony. Memory, control, you name it, is distributed in a unique and ever-changing pattern throughout the cells. You could blow Sabatini’s brains out and it would only slow it down. Sabatini’s memories and personality would be gone, but the rest—that’s stored and accessed differently. Unfortunately, what allows it to survive also makes it eventually unstable. Cells die or wear, new ones replace them. We hardly notice, but it does. Its cells have to do so much more than ours that it can’t replace them at our rate by normal means. You saw how it can do the job all at once.”

“I saw. It was a person once? A real human?”

“Yes. Frankly, I don’t even remember who. Someone from the penal area whom we took and cleaned with the mindprinter of all memory and all personality. A spiritual blank, as it were. It was the only merciful way to do it. After all, it—the mechanism—needed to know how we work, the quadrillions of intricate interrelationships we all possess. The original was a physical template, nothing more. A dedicated army of those could be anyone anywhere, walk through any security except the highest machine-only accesses, be invulnerable to most threats. Sent out as information collectors, they could get all the bits and pieces of knowledge we cannot and put it together. I had no knowledge of the rings. It seemed a fragile hope, but the only one, of breaking the system.”

“Why, Doctor?”

“Huh? Why what?”

“Why bother breaking the system? You and it seem so well made for each other, and I cannot see you as wanting to be god. Too much detail work. You were as free as any human can be in your own little playground. Certainly not on moral grounds, nor out of revenge. Why break the system?”

“Forbidden Knowledge. We were always on the edge of discovery, of being wiped out or worse. I have no idea why Master System ever tolerated Melchior. Even there, we had so many dead ends, and we were not free to pursue any leads we might develop. Humanity was born to quest for knowledge, Hawks. It is the only activity that really matters. The system places great limits on that, and I do not believe in limits.”

“That,” Hawks said dryly, “is obvious.”

“I could ask the same of you, you know. I think we are more alike than you want to admit. The system wasn’t exactly bad to you, either. You knew when you opened and read that pouch, even before you had actually divined a single word, that it would be dangerous, probably fatal. You just couldn’t resist it. Forbidden Knowledge.”

There was a sudden series of loud shrieks from behind them, then sudden silence, then the cry of a newborn baby. Neither man turned to the source of the sound, but both heard and understood.

“Just another digit in the mass of humanity to you, Doctor,” Hawks remarked. “Another subject, another plaything, nothing more. Not a new soul damned to strangulation, its future one of chains. That is the difference between us. That new one in there, who is getting such a rude awakening, is just as important, if not more important, to me than you are. You will not understand that. You will quantify it or dismiss it, but that is because there is a part of you that is missing. That is your curse, Doctor—the ultimate irony. Even without Master System there is Forbidden Knowledge for you; Forbidden Knowledge you can never have because you can never comprehend it. The quest is not the end, it is the means.”