Memorymakers (10 page)

Chapter 11

The Nebulons are becoming nebulous.

—Dark Ch’Var wit, typical of the breed

With all the technology at his disposal, Director Jabu Smith had backups for backups and alternatives for alternatives. So it was with electronic communications, and when the beep went off in Squick’s ear, the fieldman thought at first it must be his sleep alarm.

A hazy image formed in Squick’s brain: Director Jabu, in a long yellow-and-blue-striped insulcoat, with deep circles beneath his eyes and more wildness than usual to his black beard. Irrationality there, and anger.

Squick thought he was dreaming, but became conscious of his eyes being open and charcoal darkness in the room. He closed his eyes, and the image of the Director grew clearer.

“With so many time zones involved,” Jabu began, “some of you are in bed. To those I say this is not a dream, and I assure others this is not a daydream.”

He’s using Amoeba One,
Squick thought.

Amoeba One dispatched long-range transmitting units from Homaal that sought all fieldmen in the world, somewhat in the manner of amoeba-cams. But Amoeba One had unique features, and the characteristic buzzing he heard was lower-pitched, almost gravelly. He saw a bright ruby midair glow to his left.

Squick yawned and sat up, scrunching a pillow between his lower back and the headboard. With his eyes open, he saw Jabu as slightly translucent, and that suited Squick. It seemed like a minor act of defiance, keeping his eyes open to diminish the visual effect of the transmission.

“Stand by,” Director Jabu said.

Squick remembered something—the damned fire department inspection was due in two days, and he hadn’t recalibrated the sensor in the basement yet. Too many distractions, and Peenchay couldn’t be entrusted with the task.

Such inspections, like communications from Jabu, were an irritant to Squick, pesky pressures that forced him along certain courses of action, making him jump through hoops, molding him against his will. He resented anyone with power over him, longed for a situation where he might be in charge. If he were Director he wouldn’t have to put up with such annoyances.

He tried to visualize the world from the Director’s vantage, and suddenly Squick felt very small and very foolish.

The Director cleared his throat. “Some fieldmen have reported a . . . problem, and I want to hear from all of you now. Radio-op me on Channel 162 or speak into the flying transmitters about anything unusual at all. I can take your calls simultaneously.”

Should I tell him about my Nebulons?
Squick wondered.
He can’t be referring to that!

So Squick lied, and as he spoke into the flying transmitter he reported nothing out of the ordinary. All the while he wondered if he could still produce Nebulons, and this was something that could only be determined in the presence of a Gweenchild. For Squick and most Ch’Vars, the viral organisms flowed only if stimulated by an imminent extraction.

The image of Jabu disappeared and the buzzing dissipated, but Squick could not return to sleep. He needed to know about his Nebulons, but something told him he should avoid the troublesome Harvey children. Maybe he needed a normal extraction encounter with children in the field. He’d lay here for a while and then go to work as usual, leaving the Harvey siblings where they were.

“
Shittah comforts you in life,” Squick thought.
“Shittah comforts you in death.”

He shuddered, tried to discard the mantra from his mind.

Maybe I should have Peenchay kill them.

An uneasiness pervaded Squick now when he thought about the Harvey children. The strange extraction of Thomas Harvey’s embidium, and the second attempt, a failure, that left the boy screaming . . . then the failed attempt on the girl . . .

Nebulon production is a delicate holistic balance,
he thought.

Each extraction attempt on the Harvey children had results more unusual than, worse than, the attempt before. Perhaps he had been unnerved by the sequence of events. And those strange comments from the girl. Where did she obtain her information? If a bluff it was a good one, with authentic-sounding fragments.

Her words rang like a curse in his brain:
“Your Nebulon count is zero!”
Squick felt faint.
“Zero. . . zero
. . .
zero . . .”

As Squick lay awake, he planned his day. He would cruise for strays and call on children with impending birthdays, from the lists—familiar routines that would restore his potency. Then, brimming with Nebulons he would laugh in the faces of the Harvey siblings and spray them with icy, spurting Nebulons. Just before turning them over to Peenchay.

A desperate thought occurred to him, that the Harvey children may have been planted by the Director to develop information. If so, it would be a technique different from any known to Squick, but he didn’t rule it out.

Director Jabu was a clever man, unpredictable, and he had that powerful Inventing Corps with its secret workings. Maybe the Harveys weren’t human, Gween or Ch’Var; could they be bionic, transmitting data to headquarters, damaging data about Squick?

He had brought these children into his field office. Banned conduct. Against the edicts of Lordmother.

I
haven’t touched them improperly,
he thought.
Not so awful what I’ve done. Peenchay’s actions are infinitely worse. But I’ve known of his deeds, have looked the other way. I’m an accomplice.

Peenchay seemed to enjoy killing children for his bizarre diet, and took advantage of every opportunity he could. But Peenchay, despite his gruesome misdeeds, had never directly disobeyed a command from Squick. Not yet.

Squick loathed the code of silence he and the Inferior had developed, for it imprisoned Squick within an ancient stream of criminally insane Ch’Vars. He deserved a different, more exalted lineage.

And Squick suspected he wasn’t the only fieldman tormented by questions about his mental health, for it seemed too remote a possibility to consider. Lordmother’s Way would keep him on the right track, keep him from becoming another Peenchay. He was proud of himself each time he followed Ch’Var Law to the letter.

He became aware of a feint burr of flying sound, and soon the sound dominated his consciousness and became a buzzing that roared in his ears.

“Fieldman Squick!” It was Director Jabu’s voice, and now the image of the Ch’Var leader appeared in Squick’s mind as before. “Tell me about the Nebulons!”

Squick gave a vague excuse to his superior, asked for a little time, a few minutes. Then without waiting for an answer, Squick stormed down the corridor to the game room in which he’d left Emily.

The magic that Emily had absorbed simmered within her, and she realized that if she reached for it too quickly or too soon, its power might overwhelm her senses. Slowly, ever so slowly, seemed the proper way of approaching the memories that stretched back tens of thousands of years. She entered the place within her brain that stored this gift, and she walked on a plain of ice—a small figure bundled in furs pushing against the bitter cold that swept across a barren landscape. She heard the voices of hunters ahead of her, from somewhere beyond her vision . . .

The hunters chanted an ancient song, a vaguely familiar, strident tune that ricocheted through Emily and frightened her.

The enemy approaches!
she thought.

The words of the hunters’ song filled her, and she went with the words, unable to oppose them:
“We are Ch’Vars, and for us the lit-tle Gween-child. Come, in the na-ame of Lordmo-ther!”

“
No!” screamed Emily to the wind that tossed her words back upon her.
“No!”

And Emily understood the depths of the hunters’ transgressions, the sanctioned and unsanctioned acts they committed. Even the sanctioned seemed terrible and outrageous, for what right did this Ch’Var Lordmother have to declare open season on the brains of Gweenchildren? By what right did they plunder?

“
The flesh of Gween-child, so sweet but forbidden, “ the hunters sang.

“
It’s all forbidden!” Emily shouted.
“From now on, all your acts against my people are forbidden!”

My people
. . .
Gweens?

Something seemed awry to Emily, and as her words of protest to the hunters were carried off by an icy wind she realized the futility of resistance.

Ch’Var and Gween,
she thought.
I
am like both but unlike both. How can this be?

In a terrible vision of searing, white-hot pain, Emily died under a hunter’s jagged knife.

Beads of perspiration covered Emily’s face. She tried to understand the vision but feared it, feared uncovering information that lay hidden, information she should not know.

The door to her room grated open, and Squick loomed over her. Emily saw another face behind the handsome, angry one he presented to her. The second face was a dim image, a narrow, mean little child countenance with bristly hair and sharp, poorly spaced teeth. Subhuman, it seemed. Emily concentrated on the image, and it solidified and pushed itself closer to her, held out its arms and hissed obscenities.

Startled, her mind withdrew. This child within Squick was not Squick, and she knew this with certainty.

“I want an explanation now,” Squick said. “What’s all the drivel you were bellowing about Nebulons, about killing them?”

“Exactly as I said, child thief. I’ve finished them off, finished you off. I’ve liquidated you, erased you. You’re impotent. Why don’t you go off in a corner and die, bastard?”

“Don’t mess with me,” Squick said in a low, threatening voice. “You’re teasing, and I don’t like that in a child, especially a female child, especially a Gween female child. I might have to punish you.”

“You shouldn’t have tried to extract from me. Big mistake, and now you’re in big trouble.”

“You’re crazy!”

“So some say. But the Ch’Var Nebulons are one creature, rooted in the same mother weed. I’ve poisoned the mother dandelion, crippled its tentacles.”

The fieldman’s mouth took a dangerous twist, a grimace indicating he was near explosion. Emily was tempted to withdraw, to say nothing further, but the ugly memories would not release her and she was powerless to halt her words. “I speak only truth.”

“You’ve played with the Artful Looper too long,” he scoffed. “You’re only a kid, no more. Your bag of tricks won’t work.” He turned toward the door. “I’ll be back to deal with you.”

With Emily locked in the room again, Squick thought,
Lordmother, what’ll I tell Jabu? All the Nebulons gone? From my solitary extraction attempt, she poisoned them all? Impossible!

A ruby-red flying transmitter awaited him in the corridor.

Chapter 12

The flesh of the Gweenchild is sweet and delicate. How are we to resist it?

—Lament of the Inferiors

Squick paced the corridor nervously in front of his office, rehearsing what he would say to Jabu when he arrived. There wasn’t much time. He heard the click-shuffle of his shoes on the linoleum and the spinning scuff at each end of his route as he pivoted and retraced his steps.

This time the fieldman had an approximate arrival time for his superior, which should have improved the situation, eliminating the nerve-racking element of surprise brought on by Jabu’s unannounced spot checks. But Squick didn’t feel better for the information.

There’d been a brief, awkward radio-op conversation between Squick and Jabu, in which Squick spewed forth some of the startling things Emily had said. In mid-sentence the Director cut him short and ordered him to remain where he was.

“I’m on my way,” Jabu said.

The Director’s tone had been decidedly harsh and agitated, so Squick wondered if Ch’Var security troopers would appear to make an arrest. What the Director already knew was bad enough—the Nebulon snafu and the Harvey children—but the full account would be worse for Squick, much worse.

During one pass of his office Squick glanced through the partially open door and did a double-take. He halted in his tracks. Director Jabu stood inside, by the desk! The Director wore a cardinal red insulcoat, open at the front, and carried a sheath of papers under one arm.

Squick nearly tripped getting his feet redirected, and made an inglorious entrance. “My Lord! I didn’t see you . . . I didn’t know! Have you waited long? I’ve been right outside.”

“You’re late, you bumbling banana head.
In
your office, I said, not outside, not down the hall.
In!”

“My Lord, I’m sor-”

“Shut up and listen. Unlike your time, mine is valuable.”

Squick’s mind raced as he wondered how the Director had gotten there. Fieldmen weren’t taught such things, and this one had never dared to ask.

I’ve had it,
Squick thought.
What does this s.o.b. know? Should I tell all?

At the thought of revealing everything, the fieldman felt a curious, awakening sense of relief, that finally he might clear the burden of both his transgressions and those of Peenchay. The Director couldn’t know all, even with the most sophisticated surveillance.

“Now we begin,” the Director said. But long moments passed without explanation. Jabu’s gaze held firm, and Squick felt very uncomfortable, very guilty.

He told me to shut up and listen,
Squick thought,
but he’s pausing and staring at me, as if I should say something.
“Uh, I’m afraid Peenchay will kill me. I need protection, My Lord.”

“Why would he want to kill you?”

“Because I . . . because he . . . you don’t know?”

“Maybe I do.”

He doesn’t know!
Squick thought.
His eyes
. . .
Uncertainty!
“Uh, I haven’t been under surveillance?”

Jabu frowned, perhaps because his wondrous technology hadn’t provided important intelligence on internal operations, and neither had his renowned ability to sense things, to smell out trouble. Or His Eminence might be faking it, to see if Squick would tell all, to see if . . .

But why fake it?
Squick wondered.
If he knows, I’m dead, so he doesn’t need . . . is it something more I might know, some minute detail he feels could be useful?

“Why didn’t you volunteer information about your Nebulon problem?” Jabu asked. “You should have notified me immediately.”

“My Nebulons are lost!” Squick lamented. Gaze lowered, he shut the door behind him and slipped into the room.

“They aren’t merely your Nebulons. Never were. Selfishly you’ve placed yourself first.”

Squick felt the penetrating gaze of his superior without looking at it, and slowly, ever so slowly, he raised his eyes to meet the Director’s gaze.

In those eyes above the wild black beard Squick saw the layered disappointment of the entire Ch’Var race, going back to Lordmother herself. The beard faded, and hazy female features seemed to take shape around the eyes. A thin face, frail and sensitive . . .

Jabu’s voice intruded, and the beard came back into focus. The Director’s lips moved slowly, framing words with utmost care. Ch’Var words, the ancient tongue, rolled smoothly and understandably across the tongue, the lips—pure vowels from the depths of the throat, from the depths of the collective brain.

“I have their medical reports in hand,” Jabu said, holding up the sheath of papers.

Squick replied in the ancient tongue. “The Harvey boy’s too? I was just about to tell you about him. He’s in the basement, second room from the sensor.” Squick’s words seemed too rapid to him, too nervous, and they didn’t fill the time adequately. The drop-off at the end of his last sentence left too much time for the plethora of additional information he should reveal. Medical reports? Where did Jabu get those?

Director Jabu shoved the sheath of papers under Squick’s nose and said, “Thought you could play Director, eh? Thought you could perform extractions on unusual cases? And don’t think I can’t figure out why! Nice little deal you’d have, with an unlimited supply of embidiums from one boy, eh?”

He knows! Or is he guessing?
Jabu’s expression was cold and intense, with certainty framing the eyes and mouth.

“The minute that boy remained conscious after an extraction you should have contacted me.”

Somewhere, imperceptibly, Jabu’s words had shifted to the modern tongue—a smooth, compressed transition.

“W-when did you find out?” Squick stammered in the new tongue.

“Never mind that! Any thoughts I’ve ever had about you as my successor are dashed. Directors have common sense. Uncommon common sense. They place the interests of our people before personal ambitions.”

He was considering me. Damn, I’ve blown it!

“A true Director would have known what to do, shit-for-brains! Immediate medical reports on both children, checking for abnormalities before proceeding.”

“You’re right.”

“Read!”

With trembling fingers Squick took the sheath, opened it and scanned the reports. Printed letters jumped around, defied his attempts to tame them. “Nothing unusual here,” he said presently. “Two healthy Gweenchildren. All s-seems normal, My Lord.”

“Oh, it does, does it? Look at the dates of conception!”

“What? Oh.” Squick looked through the pages, compared dates, and before he could say anything Director Jabu swung a big open hand angrily, knocking the papers away. They scattered over the floor.

“The identical date, the identical hour, the identical minute, the identical second!” Jabu roared.

“What’s that information doing in a—?”

“Directors need more than the usual, as you might have learned if you’d been patient enough to follow the proper channels toward advancement.”

“They can’t have the same date of conception. The boy is nearly three years younger. It’s a mistake.”

“I double-checked. No mistake.”

“But that’s impossible, My Lord. The gestation variance in Gween mothers doesn’t—”

“Delayed egg! Think, man!”

Squick flushed, and searching his memory he couldn’t quite recall.

“They’re fraternal twins,” Jabu snapped. “Girl and boy, girl born first.”

“You mean Mother Ch’Var? She and her brother were born like that, she first? Wasn’t her brother born three years later?”

“Two years, eleven months, three days, twelve hours, twenty-eight seconds later. Brother Epan.”

Squick grimaced. “Same as the Harvey children?”

“To the nanosecond.”

“But what. . . how . . . ?”

“Emily Harvey is the alpha-mother of a new race, a new mitochondrial Lordmother opposing our race by definition, competing with us for limited resources. And you, with the intellect of an Inferior, try to extract her embidium! When she blocked your Nebulons, she set loose a chain reaction of slippage throughout our people, and all Nebulons in existence flowed into her body, the body of another race! It was such a delicate balance we were trying to hold! Fool!”

“I didn’t realize . . . I’m-”

“So you not only loused up your own Nebulons, but everyone else’s. It must have been her racial defense mechanism, and you strolled right into it.”

“But, Director, our Nebulons were weak, on the verge of failing anyway.”

“Idiot! My Inventing Corps was working feverishly to develop substitute viruses. I ordered research because of diminishing Nebulon counts. I could throttle you!”

Squick took a shaky step backward.

“We’ve been working on artificial embidiums too,” Jabu lamented. “Just a little more time. That’s all we needed.”

“Pardon me for saying so if my opinion is of no use,” Squick ventured, “but I think Emily Harvey should be eliminated. She is a frail girl, and I’ve been able to keep her locked up easily. We could do it in a . . . humane way.”

The Director squinted.

Squick: “I understand that lordmothers are deceptively frail when young, but maybe our opportunity is now, before she gets even stronger.” Squick chewed on his lip. “Isn’t she really only an alpha-child now, before she becomes a woman and selects an inseminator? Isn’t that when her strength accelerates?”

A faint smile formed on Jabu’s mouth. “So you remember something from your lessons, after all.”

“The first challenge of all new races,” Squick blurted. “A perishable seed with hostile forces raging all around.”

“Bring the girl to me,” Jabu ordered.

Director Jabu waited impatiently while Squick ordered Peenchay to bring Emily Harvey forth, and Jabu noticed the exchange of glances between Squick and Peenchay. Something more than simple nervousness there—something rotten, Jabu sensed. He was irritated with himself that he hadn’t noticed before, but he’d been busy, extremely so with all the problems of his race. And his Inventing Corps had directed its attention to the crisis, neglecting other matters, neglecting internal security.

Important details have slipped by,
Jabu thought.

A short while later the Inferior returned, shaking his jowly head. “She will not come,” he reported.

“I didn’t tell you to ask her!” Squick thundered.

Jabu detected terror in Peenchay’s features, and the assistant continued shaking his head.

“It’s all right,” Jabu said, pushing by the others to the doorway. “We’ll go to her.”

The Director led the way down a corridor, then grew confused in the maze of side exits and doors and twists and turns. He motioned to Squick.

“You lead,” Jabu said, and realized he’d just revealed the inadequacy of surveillance, or of his memory. There were only a limited number of designs for these facilities, and at one time Jabu had been very familiar with all of them. That seemed long ago, in the irretrievable past.

I’m not handling this well,
he thought.

The weakening of the Nebulons was a crisis no Director in Ch’Var history had faced before. It was a peculiar imbalance of events and forces that seemed to have toppled the racial life-support system into an abyss.

I
tried, dammit. I wanted a backup system, safeguards, and we only had so many resources to apply. How was I to foresee this, the emergence of a new alpha-mother?

The Harvey girl resembled a deadly virus, he thought, opportunistically attacking the weakened immune system of the Ch’Var race. He agreed the girl should be killed for what she had done, but it must not be done rashly.

Peenchay shambled along behind Jabu while Squick led the way. Jabu didn’t like the stench of this assistant. Something foul on his clothing, saturating his pores.

I
don’t like him behind me!
Jabu thought, remembering Squick’s fear of the assistant. Information to develop there, when time permitted.

What a curse that intelligent, clear-thinking Ch’Vars have to depend on idiot Inferiors,
Jabu thought.
But without them, who would take care of disagreeable tasks? The
Director sighed.
It prevents labor problems, I suppose, the sort Gweens have all the time.

Squick stopped at a closed door, released its lock and thrust the door open. Motioning Peenchay to one side, he ordered the assistant to remain in the corridor.

Jabu noticed Squick’s inquisitive gaze, then nodded approval. The Director stepped first through the door.

A brown-haired girl sat on the floor by one wall beneath a miniature theater, and on her lap she worked to untangle the strings of a puppet. She glanced only briefly at her visitors.

Jabu heard the door close behind him and the click of a lock. Foot-shuffling from that direction, inside the room, affirmed to him that Squick hadn’t tried anything funny.

Not that a lock could stop me,
Jabu thought.
Not the way I travel.

“I’ve been expecting you, Director Jabu,” the girl said in a voice that trailed away. She finished untangling the puppet, held the control bar high and made it dance—a lacking step, kicking toward Jabu.

Strength there,
Jabu thought.
And weakness, in the voice.
He had the odd sensation that he knew this child, this alternate version of his own alpha-mother, and a conviction came over him that he could no more kill Emily Harvey than he could his own Mother Ch’Var. They were the same in a sense, these race mothers.

And he felt something else, something even more troublesome, a feeling that premonition had forewarned him he would know but once in his lifetime. In his position he had no time to pursue this budding, sensuous woman. He had no right either, for she was not of his own race.

I want you, Emily Harvey,
he thought, and with a great, righteous push he fought this untoward, unbidden thought, screamed at it within the mouthless entanglement of his mind.

“Ch’Vars with Ch’Vars; Gweens with Gweens!”

There could be no child from such a union. Then Jabu’s train of thought came to a grinding, screeching, skidding halt and nearly derailed. His mind rolled, and presently he was thundering down a different track. Emily Harvey was not a Gween! She was the first mother of a new race! What would happen from such a union?