“Just shut up and fuck off.” Taggart glared at the floor until the psychiatrist turned his back and headed for the door. “And get Winters back in here. I want to know where that treacherous turd factory Collins has gone.”
* * * *
Samuel Collins made an unimpressive pair. The short men stood before Taggart’s podium, his dense blond hair hanging in dishevelled forelocks over his lopsided spectacles and his hands fidgeting with the fastenings of the identical shirts over his bloated waists.
“Explain yourself, Collins.” Taggart drummed petulant fingers on the polished wooden surface of the console.
“My actions—were in honest attempt—to prevent the loss of the Archer’s ship.”
“Your actions,” Taggart replied, “would have ensured the destruction of that ship, and everything on it, had the missile you fired hit it.”
“But what if the weapon should—fall into enemy hands?—Surely that risk is not worth taking.”
“I the commands give, Collins, not you! If enemies of ours did use the detonator, the result would be the same! We lose nothing if it is kept safe—everything if we destroy it or permit our enemies to destroy it!”
Collins jerked his other head round to face Taggart. “With all due respect, Taggarts—I think you too hasty—in your adamance of the use of this—” Collins switched mouths with a pause of unusual length. “—weapon.”
In Taggart’s peripheral vision, Winters stiffened and turned both heads toward Collins.
“A drastic situation requires drastic measures, think you not?”
“Taggarts, I beseech you!—Billions upon billions will die—if you resort to using this weapon. It cannot be—a rational option!”
“None will die as a direct consequence of its use.” Taggart narrowed his eyes.
“It will be the beginnings—of the Dark Ages!—The undoing of all civilisation.—It will take—a million years—for the human race to regain modern levels of technology. When they do—they’ll be separate species! They’ll—most likely—wage galactic warfare among themselves!”
“Then so let it be,” Taggart growled. “If a Dark Age what takes it to nullify them forever.”
“But perhaps there is—another way. Surely some compromise—could be agreed upon. By all means—threaten the Galactics with the device—but consider what is at stake. Surely the use—of the device—should be consigned to a final resort. For sure in its design—here is a weapon of ransom or desperation—and not a weapon to be deployed.”
“Our grandfathers, and their grandfathers before them, and grandfathers of them as well, spent their lives fruitlessly so that we might have this chance. When hay-day is here, must we take their legacy into our hands own. You have the insolence, the lack of respect, to defile the memory of your ancestors so? The centuries they spent insinuating their subtle defenses, so that the day would come when their unworthy descendants would finally be able to end the Galactics’ tyranny? Destruction rides on their ships, in their machines. They carry it on their clothing. It is in the very air that they breathe. This is no weapon, but the ultimate rite of cleansing. Surely you would not deny our ancestors their due?”
“To hold in one’s hand—the device—is to forsake all civilisation, and I think not that you, Taggarts, honourable and fine men—that you are—have the right to make that judgment. That decision lies in the hands of no people.”
Taggart raised his eyebrows. “You feign ignorance, Collins? ’Tis understandable, is it, that a cripple be treated whole out of pity?” He roared the last word, slamming his fist upon the console where he stood.
In sudden quiet, Taggart was conscious of his own dishevelled presentation. Stains and encrusted food from the morning’s meal covered his clothing, and fastenings on his garments were undone. Taggart himself was aware of the rank odour of urine his motion created. “Look, why not, upon Taggart the Sundered, and laugh in relief that he be not you!”
Taggart raised his hands to the ceiling. The people in the room stood about in a dreading silence, none of them with any apparent solution. They looked at Taggart, he thought, as though he was making an embarrassment of himself. Sheep, the lot of them. The flock of the
Bellwether
.
Taggart sat, slowly. “Collins,” he said at length. “Collins, what you say amounts to treason.”
“It does not!” Collins protested in synchrony. “I merely ask—that you perhaps reconsider—with less haste!”
“Whatever your intentions, for your doubt shall you pay. Take this men to the medical bay and gelded have him.”
Collins’s eyes bulged. “Taggarts, I did not mean—”
Taggart waved a hand. “Take him away.”
Collins resisted the guards who seized him by the elbows. “Taggarts, this is not like you. Please reconsider. I take back—my suggestion. It was ill advised.”
“Indeed it was, and that ill-advisedness would be better not perpetuated, do not you agree? And I thus prevent you from passing on your unfortunate doubtful genetics onto any potential progeny, Messrs. Samuel Collins.”
A fire rose in Collins’s eyes. “Sundered bastard! Crippled fool, venting your hatred—on others!”
“Wait,” said Taggart, a smile of faint malice tainting his lips. “Castrate the right-hand component only. Leave the other half entire.”
Collins stopped struggling in shock, and a faint whimper escaped him. Taggart relished his terror, saw in his eyes the fear of what he was to become—a men factionated by incongruous drive and emotion between his components, forever in an impotent limbo.
Taggart gave a violent one-handed flourish, and the guards spun Collins about and hauled him away. He made a strangulated noise in the corridor.
Winters moved in to flank Taggart. “What now?” he said in a low voice.
“We cannot afford to lose the Archer vessel.”
“It looks as though we already have, and behaving in this way will not help morale.”
“Winters, when I want your opinion, I ask for it will. The Insulars’ governor, he knows something of the vagaries of these freaks. He has studied them, or some such lunacy. Where is he?”
“Incarcerated, as you ordered.”
“Then take me to him.”
* * * *
The Insular sat on an empty bench in the unfurnished cell, his back against the wall and his legs stretched out in front of him. He did not rise when Taggart entered.
“Well,
castellan
,” Taggart said, forcing as much hatred and derision into the word as he could muster.
“Carck-Westmath was destroyed in the attack of the Satigenarian Circumfercirc. Castellan I am no longer.”
Taggart’s mind wandered. So there existed these strange men, alone from birth, not Sundered for they never had been whole. He shuddered at the thought of him being anything like them, but there was a comfort of sorts, albeit a disgusting one, in knowing they existed in such a way, a reassurance of solidarity. With a hating irony, Taggart wondered if, Sundered as he was, he could be accepted as one of Viprion’s kind, and could he perhaps even have an Insular relationship with a single Insular woman.
“What are you thinking, Taggart?” Viprion smiled unpleasantly. “I came aboard this ship not entirely sure what I was dealing with, but now I think I know who you are and where you are from. It would seem you yourself are no longer so different to us. Do you detest us so much now, knowing that you are as one of us?”
Taggart bared his teeth and did not take his eyes away from Viprion. “Winters, leave us.”
Winters looked at Taggart then at himself, and turned, leaving the cell.
When he had gone, Taggart lowered his face to Viprion’s level. “Every minute I spend as a Sundered, my hatred of your people and their wretched lives grows. Dirty and unnatural you are. You cannot love, and because you are incomplete, you destroy everything! Your essence is unbalanced!”
“
Love
? It would seem your society is obsessed with fornication.” A mockery of a smile hinted upon Viprion’s lips. “But then again, you do not know computers.”
“Sex is natural! Bondage—to drugs and machines—is not!”
“Very well, as you wish. After all, it is too much to expect savages to appreciate finer things.”
Taggart’s arms went rigid at his sides. “Shut up!”
“Surely you cannot expect those of the Blood to embrace your barbarism, any more than you and your kind appear to tolerate ourselves.”
Taggart spat in Viprion’s face. “You people are incorrigible!”
Viprion did not wipe Taggart’s saliva from his face. He merely blinked and looked at the wall. “The name is on the tip of my tongue, but I cannot remember it.”
“It is not of any consequence. Not so far as you are concerned.”
Taggart walked the length to the far wall. He turned and folded his arms, leaning his weight back on his heels and regarding Viprion. “So, the men of the Blood do not love. I suppose, then, that they wank into a syringe, and present it to their women when there arises the need to propagate themselves?”
“If, by
wo
men, you mean females, I have heard such terms used afore, either by peasants or men from populations long isolated and forced into atavistic ways by limited means. It implies that females are in some way lesser men, and I find it abhorrent.”
“It is our custom, and you will not denigrate it on our ship!”
“You are all twins,” Viprion mused. “Mating, for you, must be a peculiar procedure.”
“And twins never occur in your society?”
“When they do, they separate and go among the population as normal men. They don’t remain together, as they were in the womb, as your kind do.” Viprion paused for several moments, and then he smiled—an alarming expression somehow devoid of any emotion. “Reeshevern.”
“What?”
“The name I could not remember—the system of origin of your kind.”
Taggart lowered his face toward Viprion’s. “Yes, Reeshevern. The world your kind pillaged and raped while you could exploit it, and afterward the world they burnt and left desolate because it could provide them no further service.”
Viprion picked at his fingernails in a nonchalant way. “I heard there was a mutiny there.”
“Mutiny! What mutiny? If another steals what is yours, and you take it back, is that again theft?”
“The men of Reeshevern were tribes of savages. The Galactics tried to enlighten and civilise them, but they rejected it, and therefore they had to be suppressed.”
“The people of Reeshevern curiosities to your people were at best, and at worst were they jokes and slaves! Reeshevern was colonised by accident, almost two millennia ago, when a prototype ship was stranded there. The crew put out a mayday call, but it was ignored by the primitive civilisation of that time, as to rescue them would cost too much effort and money. So contact was severed, and the geminal civilisation developed in isolation. When, a few centuries ago, the Galactics discovered Reeshevern again, they found a civilisation already there, and because the two had evolved along different lines, the Galactics ridiculed and persecuted the Geminals. They had none of this cursed Blood your people hold in such high regard, and to the Galactics they appeared as the stupid, the inferior, the genetic undercaste, of their own society. And so they experimented upon them—tortures into the workings of the geminal mind, and raped them, and used them for slaves and for sport! Until one day...” Taggart’s voice trailed off, and for a moment he breathed hard and struggled to regain control. Putting his fist in Viprion’s face would solve nothing.
“One day, the Galactics found in a weed on Reeshevern some chemical, some substance, used to make the filthy drug they depended on.”
“A synthetic intermediate for conurin,” Viprion said.
“And they realised that they could manufacture their poison cheaply from this plant, and they laid to waste all of Reeshevern, and enslaved the entire population in the growing of this worthless weed, and millions starved or were put to death because the Insulars considered the ground that supported them to be of greater worth. The bodies of the people of Reeshevern were just fertiliser, the weeds for, in the minds of the Galactics, and our whole civilisation and way of life was destroyed!”
“You rebelled against them.”
“A group of Geminals broke away. They took the findings of their last, protected scientists, and they stole one of the Galactics’ warships.”
“The
Bellwether
?”
“Yes, and the Galactics found out how it had been done, and they murdered the scientists with a poison that prevents dreams.”
Viprion raised his eyebrows. “Of course. Your people are REMainderists. It is customary to punish the most heinous crimes with a suffering most feared.”
“Unless the mind can enter REM sleep on death, there will be no final, eternal dream! The Galactics denied the Geminal scientists their afterlife, all for their valiant wish for freedom! And by this time, they had genetically engineered strains of their Reeshevern weed that could be grown elsewhere, and they had no need of Reeshevern any more, and they razed the planet with nuclear warheads and killed everyone there. The only Geminals who survived were the ones aboard the
Bellwether
. Now we return, to avenge our forefathers!”
Viprion was quiet for a moment more. Then he said, “So what is it, the mode of your revenge?”