War Games (17 page)

“My mother was quite religious—she pledged me as a neophyte to the Temple of the Dead.”

Somehow that was supposed to explain something, but my mind couldn’t grasp it.

“I’m afraid I failed her,” she continued. “The discipline was too much. I wasn’t strong enough to stay. I think perhaps I could now. I’ve been practicing. But it’s too late now, of course.” She smiled apologetically. “Only virgins need apply.”

Endophetamine embers were fanned to flame. I pushed the madness away briefly. I had to ask her one more question. “Your other mindriders, the ones before me. What happened to them?” Angry fists beat at a door in my mind. I put a mental shoulder against it.

Her finger found an orifice and probed. I held it tight with a sphincter. Jain sighed. “They failed me. They weren’t quite strong enough to play games with me.” She kissed my cheek. “You’ll do much better.”

The door in my mind burst. A frenzied mob rushed in, waving torches and brandishing pitchforks. I let myself be swept up into their ranks. My mind caught fire.

Jain Maure looked into my eyes. “It’s time,” she whispered.

* * *

We were on the balcony—both naked.

The sky burned with elf-fire. My mind burned with endophetamine. A thousand flashbulbs winked overhead. Sometimes a beam stabbed down—then a real fire burned. Smoke billowed from scores of smoldering buildings, to hang over Chronus as a gray cloud. Details were obscured by murk. In the park below, ghost dancers cavorted wildly. The smoke made them appear like naked specters arising from the ground.

Jain leaned across the balcony’s railing; her wrists and ankles were bound to it with silver chains. The stroboscopic flashes from above froze her writhings in stop-motion.

I worked an alphalash over her body. Static hummed in the air. As I swung the whip, sparks fanned out as though I twirled a sparkler. Each time the lash touched her skin, it left tattoos of glowing embers. Wisps of smoke rose from lines of fire that swirled over her shoulders, across her back, around her buttocks, and down her thighs. My nostrils were filled with the smell of scorched epidermis. As the lash struck, she turned her body to meet it, letting it brush across her breasts and belly.

My mind was still held by endophetamine; my body was still ruled by synthetic passion. But the initial frenzy had waned. Deep inside was a small zone of reason, like the eye of a flaming hurricane.

I flashed to remembered glimpses of my childhood, when it was I shackled to a wall and peptide madness gleamed from my father’s eyes as he played a lash upon my body. The symbolism did not escape me. I remembered the harmony of hurt sung by alpha particles imbedded in cutaneous nerve endings. How I had howled and shrieked then. Jain only moaned each time the lash struck. And I was fairly certain they weren’t sounds of pain.

A pulsar beam cracked past, not ten meters from the balcony. My skin tingled with ionization. Ozone stung my nostrils. I looked down. The pulsar quantum had struck into the crowd of ghost dancers below. Bodies flew into the air and fell back into a crater in the lawn, there to be burned by white-hot lava. Flames swirled high. The other dancers continued leaping around the rim of the crater, dancing in clouds of smoke and dust.

My arm kept swinging the lash.

Jain’s entire body blazed with its own blue fire. She touched her tongue to her nose. Copper gleamed in her eyes. Then she called to me: “Now! It’s time. Come to me now.”

I dropped the lash and crossed the balcony. She leaned out over the rail, with her back toward me, spreading her legs. I stood close behind her, cupping her breasts with my hands, entering her from behind. Her buttocks settled against my pelvis, rocking to my thrusts. Her skin burned against mine, impressing a reversed pattern of fire into my flesh.

Above, the elven barrage continued. Detonations beat like rhythmic thunder. All of Chronus was illuminated in stark, flickering light. Flame licked up from burning rooftops. Smoke billowed up to hang like luminescent clouds. Ghost dancers cavorted in their death dance. Jain and I stayed coupled, undulating to destructive rhythms. Endophetamine throbbed in my brain.

It was crazy, all of it. But the rational island in my mind made sense out of the insane pattern of chaotic images. Before the fires died, it had figured out how to play the dreamgame.

There would never be another player quite like me.

THE TERRORIST
scowled
at me, then spat in my face. I hit her across the mouth with the back of my hand, splitting her lip. I wiped the blood off my trouser leg.

I nodded to my assistants, each a schizoid persona of myself. They fastened an interrogation helmet over her head, despite her struggles. A little shot of endolepsin slowed those down.

Then I began playing with her mind by tapping buttons on a console, which caused her brain to receive various chemical, hormonal, and electrical stimulations. The resuIting mental images were picked up and translated by a computer, which had been programmed to look for a particular set of patterns. Her mind didn’t fit into those patterns. My helpers disconnected her from the I-helmet and turned her over to two guards (more personas of me), who hauled her off to her cell.

Next, please.

* * *

I was playing the old game of Search and Destroy. Only this time I’d wised up a little. I was the spook calling the shots. Have you grasped the simple eloquence of my strategy? I wanted to find the mind of a mindrider named Nels, who now inhabited another body. To do that I had to question every other mindrider in each dreamgame. What better way to achieve my goal than play a spook interrogator? I’d found I could establish the pattern of the dreamgame. I could also split my mind into multiple personas. Each time I played I was able to form more. I’d spent six months as a combrid. I was good at it or I wouldn’t have survived half a year. Images of war were too vivid ever to forget. And they were too powerful for civilians to resist. I made the other players play my game, with my rules.

I made them play the Interrogation Game.

The other ten mindriders all became terrorist guerrillas. They were the bad guys. I was the good guys, having split my mind into a multitude of other personas: a company of Ghost Cavalry, gunship pilots, guards and jailers, field chameleons, and the me, me—Chief Spook Detrs, whom other mindriders began calling the Inquisitor. I took vain pleasure in the sobriquet.

The rules of the game were simple: ten terrorists tried to hide, my Ghost Cavalry captured them, they were brought to my spook house where they were interrogated by me and my computer. Sooner or later I’d play against Nels. When I did, my computer would recognize him. Then he would be made to talk.

It was an easy game to play. At least for me. Since I always used the same format and the same cast of characters, I could set it up effortlessly. Each time I played, I could maintain more personas and add more complexity to the background. Since we played my game, using my rules, I always won. The first few times a few players had escaped, but not now. I was quite methodical now. But then I wasn’t playing the dreamgame for fun; I had a reason. Of course I was also winning. That meant Jain Maure was making lots of money.

The only problem was that my dream time began to seem as real as when I was awake. I sometimes confused which was real. The Interrogation Game was pure and simple. The rules stayed the same. Its pattern was constant. There was purpose and meaning to it. The same could not be said of my waking world, where ghost dancers cavorted to the rhythm of the elven barrage, where Chronus burned nightly, where my mind was battered by the synthetic passions of neuropeptides. My dreams were clearer and certainly more pleasant than that reality.

Even Jain Maure’s madness was inconstant.

Some nights she would want to play her usual sex games. On those occasions she would overload my mind with peptides until I shared her madness and would play her way. I could only remember glimpses of those nights: sparks flying from an alphalash, bubbles rising from the nostrils of a face I held underwater, the hum of sonic shackles, the slap of flesh against flesh, the trickle of blood.

Other nights she played a different game. She would at first administer only enough peptide to keep me from withdrawing. The sex afterward was perfunctory and almost tender. She gave me endiazepam to help me sleep. Recurring dreams caused insomnia. Endiazepam chased the demons out of my dreamtime. It was also an amnesiac. I only remembered snatches of the dreams. The fragments were disturbing enough: a disembodied voice kept asking me questions, making me tell it all about the dreamgame, all about what I’d learned from my interrogations. The voice was familiar, but I couldn’t identify it. And there was sex in the dreamtlme. Jain had become an androgynous creature—a woman with a man’s genitalia. I retracted my genitals into their pouch. When we coupled, her penis slid against mine in my pouch, caressing it, until our warm ejaculates mingled within me. I was a little bothered by the symbolism of that dream.

I knew my mind was getting close to a permanent psychosis. Eventually it would refuse to leave the structure of synthebrain, where order and purpose could be imposed on the chaos of the time matrix. It would refuse to go back to an organic brain buffeted by insane images, I would lose my body. I would never find my way back.

But until I located Nels, I had to keep playing the game. More than once, I wondered if his mind was still around to find. Perhaps he too had fled to a more rational microcosm. Maybe I should abandon the search while I could still escape with my sanity.

But I couldn’t.

Besides, something happened to keep me looking.

* * *

I was conducting my usual interrogation.

Ghost Cavalry rounded up guerrillas. Guards brought them to my chamber. My computer extracted mental images from their minds. The usual routine.

Then an alarm gong sounded.

A prisoner had escaped. That hadn’t happened to me for a while. Either my control was slipping, or the escapee had an unusually strong psyche.

No matter. I would regain control of the situation. It
might be Nels trying to escape.

I loosed the dogs. I sent guards searching my spook house. I surrounded it with a moat of murky water, filled with toothsome swimmers. Then I began checking intruder sensors.

I had become quite proficient at changing the reality of the game matrix. That kept the other mindriders off balance.

In a few minutes I had found my fugitive. I smiled to myself. I mean, they could run, but where could they hide? I decided to play a game of Cat and Mouse. I began rerouting corridors and locking doors. I sent guards and dogs to the chase, to keep the prisoner moving. The escapee frantically ran down hallways, trying various doors. The ones that were open were the ones I chose to leave unlocked. The only way out of the maze I’d created led into my chamber. I waited. Cat and Mouse? More like Spider and Fly. I considered changing myself into a giant spider, then thought it might be a little too theatrical.

One door remained untried. My dogs closed, teeth snapping. The escapee had no choice, and opened the door to the chamber where I waited.

She entered.

I managed to lock the door behind her, before my mind went numb.

She was Grychn.

Or at least my mind had made her appear like Grychn: amber eyes, haughty lips, eyebrows white as ermine, a body proud of its youth. No such body had been one of the ten other players. I’d looked before the game had started. There was only one reason why my mind would put a psyche in that body.

“Who are you, Inquisitor?” It was Grychn’s voice. “Another spook sent to trick me? I’ve already told you all I know.”

She didn’t recognize me. She couldn’t. In the role of Inquisitor, I’d made myself a combrid again. I wore the red beret and silver skull of Corps Intelligence.

I let my body change back to human form.

“Who are you now?” Her forehead wrinkled. “You look familiar... .”

She still didn’t recognize me. The last time she’d seen my human face, I’d been twelve years old. I let myself become younger, until I was the boy she remembered.

Grychn gasped. “Marc! Is it really you? Tell me it’s not another trick.”

I became my current self again. “No tricks. It’s me. I’m the Inquisitor.”

She was still suspicious. Who could blame her? “Prove to me you’re Marc,” she said.

I thought for a moment. “Do you remember a ring I once wore? Do you remember seeing the two of us being cut to pieces by a sonic whip? Do you remember what we had to do to keep that from happening?”

She was in my arms, kissing my lips. The ten years missing made no difference.

I changed the interrogation chamber into a bedchamber. An open fireplace blazed, casting both warmth and light on us. We lay on warm wombskin, soothed by its pulsations. Our bodies were naked and wet with sweat. They seemed to blend into each other, becoming one. We made love to ourselves: touching secret places, feeling again the joy of new love, discovering shared pleasure, basking in a melding of male and female orgasm.

A long time later, we separated.

Our bodies lay side by side, touching enough for comfort. We started talking, filling in ten years of gaps.

“Why did you want to become a renegade terrorist?” I asked in our fused minds. “What made you forsake your own kind?”

“You did.”

“I did?”

“After you left me, I needed something to fill the emptiness you had left. I’m afraid I fell in with unsavory companions. Causes can be made to be more important than people. Besides, I was young and impressionable. It was fun to go to secret meetings with passwords and codes and safe houses. But sooner or later, it stops being a game. People get killed. I had to leave Earth. A bomb went off prematurely. The elves took me in; I was well trained in terrorist techniques.”

“But why on Titan?”

“No particular reason. One place is as good as another. There’s only one enemy, after all.”

“The Terran Empire?”

“Certainly. We Terrans are old and decadent. The human race as a species is declining toward extinction. Hybrids will rule the future. Old Earth has to use hybrids such as yourself to fight her battles. That should tell it all. Unaltered humans are obsolete, fit only to be kept in zoos as curiosities. The species is old and tired.”

“Then why are you unaltered? You are not a hybrid.”

“I don’t know. Maybe I have a sense of nostalgia. Maybe I haven’t yet decided which kind of creature I should become. What creature would you like me to be?”

“I like you fine the way you are.”

“Then you don’t yet know what I am. No matter.” She paused, thinking.

“Whatever happened to the timestone?” She licked my ear.

“I lost it.”

“I’m glad of that.” My silence caused her to guess the truth. “There’s another one, isn’t there?” She paused for a moment. “So that’s why the Inquisitor bit? You’re trying to find the other timestone.” She thought for a bit longer, remembering. I’d told her too much once. Way too much. “Someone knows where the other timestone is. A mindrider knows, who used to be a miner named Nels.” She smiled. “Nels is still here, still mindriding.”

“You know him?” That sparked my interest.

“I didn’t say that. I met Nels once, in a dreamgame. Not long ago, I think. But it’s hard to get much out of Nels, with all the mumbling and fumbled thoughts. Of course, it could all be an act. Nels is awfully scared of something.”

“He told you where the stone was hidden?”

“No. Nels’s ramblings aren’t that coherent.”

“You’re not telling me something.”

“No, I’m not. But it’s nothing important. Just a little joke to amuse myself. Let me have my fun. There’s not much left. Ask Nels about it.”

“Too bad,” I said. “Now I’ll still have to find him.” It was a shame Grychn couldn’t tell me what I had to know to find the timestone. But at least I knew Nels was still mindriding. I would find him eventually.

“You want the other timestone, don’t you?”

“Of course. I had big plans when you knew me in my youth. I still have big plans. Bigger. A squandered youth does have the advantage of broadening one’s horizons.”

Grychn smiled, then kissed my cheek tenderly. Almost regretfully. “Even if you find Nels and the timestone’s location is revealed to you, you’ll not be able to get it.”

“Why not?”

“Mindriders are trapped by peptide. They never leave. Peptide withdrawal always brings them back. I found that out. So shall you.”

I knew all about that problem. But I’d figured out how to beat it. I changed the subject. “How did you manage to escape from the spooks?”
How much did you tell them?
was what I wanted to ask.

She laughed, apologetically. “They were careless. An elf pulsar beam hit the detention area, knocking out a wall. There weren’t enough guards to contain all the prisoners who tried to escape. I got away in the confusion.”

Spooks were never careless. “Then what happened?” I should have guessed the truth then. But I didn’t.

“I went Underground to hide. After a week or so I met a man named Jry who said he could show me an old escape tunnel to the surface that exited beyond the force-field. He wasn’t giving away the information. He made me play a dreamgame before he would tell. And then another and another. What could I do? I was desperate. Before long, I was addicted to peptide. Then it was too late to run. I live here in the Underground now.” She smiled ruefully. “I eventually found the tunnel on my own. I even tried to leave then. Withdrawal forced me to come back. More than once. There is no peptide to be obtained in the bush.”