The Sopaths (12 page)

“We do,” Bunty said. “But as I said, we are not entirely rational. We are prepared to take the risk, if you are prepared to behave like a family member. In fact, we can probably use you, because of your ability to identify other sopaths.”

“I’d rather be with you,” Nefer said. “But you don’t owe me that. I’m trying to be fair. It’s not easy for me.”

“It’s not easy for anyone,” Bunty said. “We will guide you. You know the general rules.”

“I do.” Then, relieved, the girl relaxed. They were settling their debt to her the hard way.

It was in the newspaper next day: a house had burned down, the adults had escaped, but their daughter had burned to death. There would be a funeral for her.

Nefer was officially dead.

They kept her out of sight, but did not change her name. It was a nickname anyway, not her legal one. She cooperated perfectly, knowing that discovery was likely to mean her death. She slept in a nook in the cellar, her rat hole as she called it. She donned a blond wig that transformed her appearance, and very innocent childish clothing. She was probably unrecognizable, even to those who had known her reasonably well.

“We need to incorporate Nefer in such a way that no one will ever suspect her nature,” Bunty said.

“You have something in mind?”

“She looks angelic. Maybe we could make her act angelic.”

“I am not following you.”

“We’ll be traveling as a close-knit family. We could be religious. At least to the point of attending local church services. Participating in their events.”

“I’m still not following.”

“Singing in the choir, for example. We can sing average, but Nefer can sing well. She told me she sang in her family’s choir.”

“But sopaths don’t give half a crap for religion.”

“But they can fake it, when they want to.”

Maybe it would help. “Let’s ask her, and hear her sing.”

“Nefer!” Bunty called.

The girl appeared almost immediately. “Whatever it is, I’ll do it.”

“We understand you can sing.”

“Sure, when I have to. I was the best singer they had in the choir.” Modesty was not a sopath trait.

“We’re thinking of singing in local churches as we travel,” Bunty said. “To seem more like a religious family. Will you join us?”

“You want me to?” Nefer asked Abner.

He was unwilling to let his leverage on her be the only reason. “Yes. But this is optional. Let me state my points.”

“That’s okay, Abner. I’ll do it for you.”

“First, it would help the Pariah culture effort, because not everyone can sing, and few can sing well. If you can sing well—well, a good lead singer can help the others stay on track, and make them seem better too.”

“I know. I did it all the time.”

“Second, it would help conceal your nature, because no one would think a sopath could sing a religious song.”

“That’s crazy! I don’t care about religion, but I do like to sing, because it’s a way to soften people up for whatever I want, and some of those hymns are really good for that.”

Bunty smiled. “We soulers have some crazy notions.”

Abner made a mental note: sopaths had no emotional appreciation for the arts, because those stemmed from symbolism and empathy. Nefer cynically used her talent to get things for herself, not for its own sake.

“Okay, let’s see what we have here,” Abner said. “See how we integrate.”

They assembled the family. “We’re about to see how well Nefer can sing,” Abner told the children. “And whether she can help us to sing a hymn better.” He looked at Nefer. “Is there one you prefer?”

“
Oh Holy Night
. It’s got flow and power, and people get all mushy over that.”

“Can you sing it a cappella?”

For answer, Nefer simply started singing. “Oh holy night, the stars are brightly shining. It is the night of our dear Saviour’s birth.” The others listened silently, surprised first that she clearly had no trouble with the tune, words, or religious theme, and second by the quality of her voice. She had not exaggerated; she was an excellent singer. Her tone was like a bell, and she had perfect pitch. It was a pleasure to listen to her. They were indeed getting mushy, as she put it.

Nefer continued through the whole hymn, hitting the high notes seemingly without effort, filling the room and the house with the power of her voice. “...oh night divine!”

Then she looked at Abner.

“You have a really beautiful singing voice,” he said, awed. “It sends shivers down my spine.”

“Okay,” Nefer said. “I’ll do it because I’ll do anything to oblige you, Abner, and because you’re right, it’ll hide me so I won’t get killed as a sopath. But mainly because the thought of sending shivers down your spine maybe all the way to your, your--”

“Manhood,” Bunty supplied with a smile.

“Yeah. That sends shivers through
me
. Maybe I can evoke your passion with my voice.” She was learning not to say “Get you to fuck me.” Abner appreciated that.

“Maybe you can,” he agreed, not insincerely.

That night he confessed his concern to Bunty. “That girl is too pretty, too clever, too talented. She is gaining on me. I fear where this is leading. I am revolted, but it’s there.”

“Don’t be concerned.”

“But Bunty, sometimes I even think I would
like
having sex with her. You mean everything to me, but she’s so ardent, so persistent. I am no longer seeing her quite as a sopath, or a child. She’s a cynical young woman.”

“Get real, Abner,” she said firmly. “We don’t live in the ‘nice’ culture we once did. We have to do things that would have been unthinkable before. We lie, we use people like her, we kill children, we kill grown criminals with souls. The old morality is dead. If I thought your having sex with a more-than-willing rational child would enable us to solve the problem of sopaths, I’d put you in bed with her and not let you out until you satisfied her. I know the children would agree.”

“You can’t be serious!”

“I
am
serious. But I don’t believe it would do the job, so it’s academic. If she had sex with you once, she’d expect it again, and there would be no end to it. It remains her best expression of the love she feels for you.” She smiled briefly. “I know exactly how that is. You have that magnetism springing from your soul, bending women to your will.”

“That’s really no credit on me.”

“The credit is your discipline and conscience. You are not allowing your power to corrupt you.”

“Thank you,” he said, bemused.

“We can use her, we need her, and she’s settling for little enough, considering her passion. Let’s let it rest there.”

“You frighten me almost as much as she does.”

“We’re women.” Then she set about seducing him, which required very little effort. He might feel some temptation for touching the girl, but he had a full-blown passion for the woman, and she knew it and shared it.

There was a problem with the motor home they found on sale: it slept four, two adults and two children. They could not afford more, and more would have been suspicious. Space was tight; there simply was not room for another person.

It was Nefer who came up with the answer. “We hope this puts off the criminals, and that they’re not after any of us anymore. But we can’t be sure. Someone needs to be on watch all the time. We can take turns around the clock, and when it’s my turn I swear I’ll be as good a watch as you can find. When I sleep, it will be in whichever bed isn’t being used by the one who is on watch. Or I’ll sleep in the daytime, hiding.”

“Something like that should work,” Abner agreed. Her intelligence also attracted him, but he couldn’t say that.

It took another two weeks to finally get things cleared and start moving. During that time they also practiced family singing, and Nefer continued to cooperate fully, enchanting them all with her beautiful voice. “She’s trying to be a full member of the family,” Bunty murmured during a tryst. “As she was with her original family. She’s eerily good at it. I confess I’m coming to like her.”

“She’s a sopath,” he reminded her.

“That’s what makes it eerie. It’s like having a tame rattlesnake in the house, uncaged.”

It was, indeed.

They departed without ceremony, the Pariahs knowing only that Abner had become a traveling organizer who didn’t want publicity because of the general prejudice against Pariahs.

The first night they parked in a park without connections, so it was little used despite being cheap. They were prepared with plenty of food and water. Bunty cooked a respectable dinner, they practiced singing a hymn, and they settled down for the night.

“I’ll take first watch,” Nefer said. “I’ll prowl the neighborhood to make sure no one is sneaking up on us.”

“Not just yet,” Abner said. “First we’ll have a family mission meeting. You can move around and peer out the windows, but you need to hear this.”

“There’s something we don’t know?” Clark asked.

“There is,” Bunty said. She knew the details, but had kept silent.

Then in darkness Abner informed the children of the rest of his mission. “The organization mission is a cover,” he said. “I will do it, going to a list of towns across the country, meeting with local Pariah groups and showing them how to organize and establish relations with the national organization. It will do them good, because they will have information and support. But the real mission is to investigate two mysterious towns, Sweetpea and Sauerkraut.”

They all laughed, thinking it a joke. Which made Abner think again. Nefer had laughed too, which meant that sopaths could appreciate humor. Which meant in turn that humor was not connected to the soul. He hadn’t thought about it before. Thinking it was funny when a fat man slipped on a banana peel and fell on his bottom required no empathy, no real feeling for the man, who might be hurt. Humor could be cruel, as when bullies joked at a victims’ expense. Most humor was innocent, as this was, an oddity of names.

“No joke,” Abner said. “Those really are the names. Sweetpea formed around a large diabetes treatment complex.”

There was silence, so Bunty explained. “Diabetes is an illness affecting the metabolism of sugar. The body uses insulin to metabolize sugars, and diabetics either lack insulin or are unable to use it effectively. So sugar accumulates in the blood. To reduce it, the body gets extremely thirsty and produces a lot of urine, which can be quite sweet because of the sugar. The larger picture is more complicated than that, but that explains the name.”

There was a pause as the children figured it out. “Pee!” Clark said. “They pee a lot!”

“And it’s sweet from the sugar,” Dreda said.

“Sweetpea,” Nefer concluded. “It
is
a joke.”

“In origin, yes,” Abner agreed. “But diabetes can be lethally serious. Today, with more effective treatments, most sufferers get by tolerably well. Some take daily or hourly insulin shots, while some can get by on diet and exercise.”

“Type One and Type Two,” Clark said. “Now I remember. I had an uncle with it. He took shots.”

“Most Type Ones need shots,” Abner agreed. “Most Type Twos don’t. The complex was for type ones. At any rate, that’s in the past. In due course the complex moved elsewhere, and the town foundered economically but kept the name. Later a madman with a machine-gun mowed down half the remaining population before someone shot him to death. It was the worst tragedy to strike that part of the country. We don’t know whether that history is relevant to the current phenomenon.”

“Something’s going on,” Dreda said wisely. “A mystery.”

“A mystery that relates to Pariah,” Clark agreed.

“Yes,” Abner agreed. “It is this: there are no sopaths there. None are born.”

Now Nefer took note. “How can they be sure? Some sopaths are pretty good at hiding their nature. I’m one. I can always spot another sopath, but most soulers can’t.”

“Pariah has investigated,” Abner said. “Quietly, of course. But they’re sure. They think it was a sopath who gunned them down—he was just a child—but that’s the last one reported. Pariah wants to know why. Did the massacre shock the survivors into taking action to stop it from ever happening again? If there’s a secret to eliminating sopath births despite the shortage of souls, we really want to know it. That’s part of my mission: to ascertain the reason, if I can. Without alerting others to my investigation.”

“That’s going to be tricky,” Nefer said. “For one thing, how can you organize Pariahs if there are no sopaths? No sopaths means no sopath survivors. You have no connections.”

“Exactly,” Abner agreed, impressed again by her insight. “It’s likely to be difficult. But I understand there are survivors there, who have moved in from elsewhere. I may have to pose as an amateur researcher writing a book, a history of odd towns, gathering all the obscure information I can. Hoping that somewhere in there is the answer.”

“What about Sauerkraut?” Clark asked. “What’s
its
history?”

“It was settled by a semi-religious outfit as a commune. They believed in being fruitful and multiplying, trying for ten or more children per mother. It was really a fertility cult, and the suspicion is that many of the children were fathered by the cult leader. Its population expanded rapidly and it was a thriving community. They evidently had plenty of money to support their population. Then the commune abruptly moved to a distant location, leaving their facilities to be sold off relatively cheaply. It was a mystery why. There were rumors of a curse on the premises. But bargain hunters soon moved in, obtaining nice residences at dirt-cheap prices. It became a viable town again.”

“Where’s the catch?” Dreda asked.

“It was that curse. There were a number of bad accidents, and some whole families got wiped out. Nothing they could pinpoint, just extremely bad luck. More folk moved in, but they too were soon dogged by mischief as the curse caught up with them. Before long there was a mass exodus. A number of families moved to neighboring Sweetpea. But others moved in, because of the bargain houses. So Sauerkraut is a violent place, in contrast to Sweetpea, with especially violent children.”