“Segregate the cripples they are,” said Taggart, then cried out in frustration at his inability to even construct a simple sentence.
She put her rightmost hand on his left. “This will get easier with time,” she said.
“What do you know?” Taggart snarled, but he knew she did know. The
Bellwether
was not Dales’s first post. She’d worked previously as a medic back on Reeshevern, and she must have dealt with the victims of the invaders’ torture. This women had no doubt seen horrors, persons Sundered completely as Taggarts had been, and probably even worse.
Taggart’s left component had been the negotiator and the conversational initiator, and now when it came to relaying his feelings to a female, there was just frustration and irresolution. He looked at Dales, and craved sensation of genuine physical substance, and riddance of this disembodied feeling of the world being made of textureless static, and moreover, he had to know he was still physically capable of sex.
As Dales was reaching across him for the medical kit, Taggart let out a bestial snarl and pulled her down by the wrist. Dales pulled back, and consternation broke out on her faces as she saw the rising lump in his trousers. “Now—is not the time!”
“Yes is it,” Taggart growled. He pulled her back down and butted himself against her thigh. Dales shuddered.
“Taggart, this isn’t right.”
“What would be right? Should I were to be buried still half undead? Would you deny a dead men his final wish?” Taggart grimaced, gripping her wrist and thrusting with his loins. He struggled to undo his trousers with his free hand. He didn’t have enough hands. If he couldn’t do this, he was something beneath a men. He had to know!
Dales watched him swearing and fighting with his clothing, and her resolve seemed to soften. Crossing over her lefter-right and righter-left hands, she assisted him. Taggart moved desperately, encumbered by his lack of hands and Dales’s immobility about the waists. He didn’t know where to put himself.
Dales moved closer, connecting most with her right side. Penetration was a struggle, and he couldn’t get into any sort of rhythm. He grated against Dales like a boat run aground in the shallows. Why did she have to be so damned unresponsive? Taggart grunted and lurched in frustration, but it was all horribly stiff and uncoordinated, and when he looked to Dales’s faces her right-hand side was contorted into a rictus of revulsion, eyes squeezed shut and teeth bared, while her other face stared wide-eyed and expressionless at the ceiling, as though in some sort of shocked trance. Taggart stopped struggling.
“I can’t do this, Taggart,” said Dales, and a tear rolled down one of her cheeks and fell on his shoulder. “It’s not natural.—It’s obscene.”
Dales tore herself away, staggering on the floor as she came off the bed and trying to rearrange her uniforms.
“I’m sorry,” she said again. “It’s not right.”
She turned and stomped to the door, the irregular thump of her footfall dying away down the corridor.
Taggart lay where she had left him, in a pathetic sprawl. Did his level of disability prohibit even this, the most natural act?
He had never seen anyone make two so disparate expressions at once, and it chilled him. There was something disturbing in it.
It was his fault. He felt disgusted at himself—he was disgusting, and he must have made Dales feel disgusting as well, forcing her to let him do that to her. He’d thought he was disgusting when he’d done it with her before, harbouring a secret guilt that it was somehow perverse. That was nothing compared to this. More so, he felt self-hatred and frustration. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t physically perform the act of mating. It had to be done in tandem, with his left-hand component to provide a rhythmic stimulus, otherwise it just would not work at all.
Taggart sat up and tried to put his trousers back on. He couldn’t do the fastenings, and finished by throwing the trousers at the wall and yelling. His emotions died away quickly, leaving a gulf like the one he’d encountered on being informed of his death—this gulf was final. It was an emptiness marking the end of the line, from which there could only be one escape. He couldn’t even
masturbate
in his crippled isolation. There was nothing else he could do to save himself from here.
He walked from his sleeping quarters into the washroom.
Taggart looked at his sundered reflection in the mirror. With the light behind him in the doorway, his face appeared aged by the torments of stress and insomnia, the eyes sunken beneath heavy brows. His hair hung over his forehead in greasy curls and his remaining face was stubbled and scarred with fumbled attempts at shaving. His shirt hung open, torn at the fastenings where he’d lost his temper with it, and the skin it revealed was sallow and hairy, like that of his dead body, an image now so firmly imprinted upon his memory he knew it would haunt him for the remainder of his life. His imagination mutilated the face in the mirror to that of the corpse.
Taggart seized the razor from the nail on which it hung. Now he would cut himself with it for the final time. His hands shook as he prised the blade from its mounting, but he felt nothing, only emptiness and cold logic.
The half of Taggarts which remained, the right-hand component, had always been the weaker side. Some people were ambipartite with equal bias, but most, as he had been, were of two complementary halves of slight difference. Taggart’s left-hand half had been the more wayward, the one inclined to action without thought, and the better speaker. The left-hand half had been he who had to take the device and go after the Archer’s ship, and now the mission had truly failed.
What use was Taggart now? He was but a shadow, an undead remnant not quite yet departed. He could do no further good for the cause, and his presence as a Sundered would be a source of despair and pessimism for the crew of the
Bellwether
. From hereon, he could never truly live. He would always be half-dead, incapable of any real feeling or action. He could not lead this mission on now.
He pressed the flat of the blade to his throat, and its cold, hard edge seemed more real than anything else in the foggy gloom his perception had become. One smooth movement like so, with the blade angled downward, and the blood supply to his brain would be severed and he’d expire as quickly as he had in the phantom half-existence he’d eked out alongside that bizarre Insular Gerald Wolff. Then would come the final, eternal, dream, and release.
The thought of his own death beyond the scope of his own senses, the circumstances of which he would never know, made him shudder. The blade grated against his skin.
He could do it. He could.
But what of the dreams? What of the dream he’d had the night before, in which he’d been incomplete? What if the eternal dream was that?
This was not the way. This was a coward’s exit.
A knock on the door. “Taggart?” queried Winters.
Taggart’s fingers slipped, and the blade fell to the floor. A key grated in the lock. “What have you been doing?” Winters asked, seeing Taggart as he entered. “Dales is worried about you.” He started trying to do up the fastenings on Taggart’s shirt.
Taggart slapped his hands away. “Stop it, Winters!”
“You can’t go about—like this anymore.—It doesn’t help their morale!”
“It’s humiliating!” Taggart shouted.
“You’re going to have to accept—that you can’t manage independently.” Winters’s right half reached into his pocket and withdrew a paper sachet. “Dales told me to give you this.”
“What is it?” Taggart demanded. Winters had already set to work, with one half tearing open the sachet and pouring it into a mug while the other filled the kettle and set it to boil.
“It’s just herbs and vitamins—and that sort of thing.”
Taggart knew Winters was lying, but he sat on the bed and drank the hot solution Winters presented to him. Soon after he’d finished it, things became indistinct.
Winters was leaning over his face, gazing at Taggart intently. “What do you think they would all do—if you weren’t here to guide them?—We’d be lost—lost to those Insulars.—There’d be no hope.—Not all is lost.—So stop wallowing in it and start using it to your advantage.”
The spectre that was Taggart, and Taggart under the influence of a sedative, could not think as quickly as Taggarts had been able to, but it was fathomable that the device still existed, and there remained this hope. The cause was not yet quite lost, and Taggart could not abandon this mission while the possibility still lived in his mind.
“The fool’s crisis is the maven’s opportunity,” Winters said. “You may think you are now hopelessly disabled—and can no longer inspire those who follow you.—But look at it a different way.—The Insulars did this to you. You’re a martyr.—We’ve been coming apart at the seams of late—and a sympathy vote might be what could pull us back together.”
“What about Gerald Wolff?”
“What
about
Gerald Wolff?”
What, indeed, about Gerald Wolff? A moronic oaf. Taggart scowled. Yes, he had been quite sure of Wolff’s ambitions when he decided the risk of bringing him was worth taking. If the man had had any motivation, he might have been considered useful by his own Insular society. He had ability beyond reason, the kind of individual who would break into a high-security bank for a few credits to buy his lunch, and leave the rest, claiming he had no use for it—a braggart filled with arrogant showmanship and folly.
Taggarts’s right-hand component had seen little of Gerald Wolff in person, since it was to be his left-hand component that eventually was to go on that fated journey with him, and the man would have noticed the discrepancy between the dextrous hands of Taggarts’s two components, and perhaps even the minor differences in confidence and loquacity. The man was devious, sardonic and impious, and had a propensity for making two-faced remarks. Sometimes Taggarts had seen him, plotting and scheming away in silence, his chin cupped in his hand. He could have been very dangerous indeed, had he wanted to be. Taggart’s thoughts were out there in the void, with Wolff, wherever he might be now, and the mystery he would never know, of what had happened aboard the Archer vessel Wolff had no doubt so skilfully run down with his accursed affinity for computers. Could it have been Wolff’s hand on the blade that slit Taggart’s throat?
One person, one Insular, might know the answer.
“The Castellan Viprion,” he said, as though thinking aloud might assist a men with only one brain.
Chapter 12
Arithmetic
Speak to me of honour, noble knave,
And a thousand dishonours I’ll you show,
Tell me the righteousness of master and slave,
When nothing is right that I know
Half of the psychologist sat on a sofa only wide enough to accommodate one backside. His other half was behind a screen toward the back of the room.
He leant forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “Why don’t we discuss the options you’ve got?”
“Why not you up shut and fuck off?” Taggart said. He lay on a sofa opposite, his back against the corner formed by the back and seat. His shirt was on inside out and only the third and fourth buttons were fastened, into the fourth and fifth buttonholes. He didn’t have any shoes or socks on and his trousers were undone.
“Taggart, you cannot move forward until you have put this behind you.”
“How are you to help? Winters sends you in here, and you sit there with half of you hidden, like I’m talking to some stinking Insular? Is that supposed to make me feel better, is it?”
“I just want you to listen to what I’m going to say.”
“Then hurry up and say it!”
The man sighed and leant back on his seat. “Some limited success has been achieved—”
“—in the past—” said the psychiatrist’s voice from behind the screen.
“—by two sundered persons in a cohabiting situation.”
Taggart sat up. “I’m not having someone else in here, following me around! Having half of someone else, you think, can make up for not having a whole of myself?”
The man raised his palms toward Taggart in a consoling manner. “Of course not, but it does mean you can manage better—help each other—with the physical side of things.”
“Two halves do not make a whole,” Taggart said through gritted teeth.
“Of course they do not, and to treat this situation as though it could be solved by something as crude as simple arithmetic would be naïve. But—as I said—success has been achieved this way in the past. I can give you some—experimental data—and reports on the success rates and the selection criteria, if you wish, but you can’t dismiss the option without—at least—attempting it first.”
Taggart said nothing. He remained motionless.
“You are still the same person.”
“I am not!” Taggart’s answer came out as a roar, and the psychiatrist flinched in his chair. “It will never be right! Whenever I go to a public place, people there will see. They will see a Sundered men, pretending to be whole! Your words nothing give me! I see that you useless are! Get out and leave me in peace!”
The psychiatrist stood and gathered up the things he’d put on the table. “Taggart, if you are to have any life at all—you must put from your mind all pretensions—of you ever attaining a state of normality again.”