The Pearl Saga - Mistress of the Pearl Part 34

Kirlll Qandda had begun dismantling his equipment, stowing it away in his satchel. He stopped and sighed. "It's true, I killed them. The ones that were dying I put out of their agony."

"And the others?" Thigpen growled. "There were Rappa there, flushed out of the shadows where we were too loyal or too stupid to quit Axis Tyr and take to the deep caves of the Djenn Marre."

Kirlll Qandda pressed his thumbs against his eyelids as if trying to blot out the memory. "The others I killed as well. I slit their throats cleanly, neatly, quickly. You see, by that time I knew what the Gyrgon had ordered. They wanted to instill fear among the Kundalan, but they also wanted information. Those who survived the first slaughter were to be interrogated." He took his thumbs away and looked at them.

"You both know what that means. You know the unbounded torment the Ramahan would have otherwise suffered."

"Even so," Thigpen growled, "it was not your place."

"I wonder about that every day," the Deirus said as he rose, "because when I dream it is their cries I hear."

You should not have brought him here," Nith Immmon said. "This is very bad. Very bad indeed."

"I gave her no choice, Nith Immmon," Sahor said. "Besides, who will recognize me in my new form?"

"She did," Nith Immmon pointed out.

Gul Aluf, her arms and wings folded, gazed at Sahor with her enigmatic half smile.

They were in her lab-orb at Receiving Spirit, where Kurgan had first spied on Nith Immmon and GulAluf. The deep thrumming of her ion engines was a background wash. At intervals, heuristic nets hung from the high ceiling, but they were empty.

"She also suspected that I was alive," Sahor said as he walked around the lab-orb, observing everything in the minutest detail. He peered into each of the biochambers and did not like what he saw.

"Does Nith Na.s.sam?"

"No," Nith Immmon said with absolute a.s.surance. He cleared his throat. Gul Aluf seemed secretly amused by his discomfort with Sahor's new appearance, doubtless recognizing another superiority she held over him.

Sahor said, "The experiments are at an impa.s.se."

"I do not-"

"Let's not get off on the wrong note." He stopped moving and turned to face Nith Immmon. "This is what Gul Aluf told me."

In response to Nith Immmon's glare, Gul Aluf said, "There is nothing to be gained in holding anything back. Not at this point."

"These experiments are heinous," Sahor said in a cold, clear voice. "Wrong in every way you care to look at them."

Gul Aluf said, "We are talking about our survival."

Sahor took a step toward her. This was why he had kept from her the reality of his transformation. If she suspected, she would demand to know by what means he had merged himself with a Kundalan, for he had employed the formula for which she had so long been searching. "And if, through these experiments we survive, then what?"

"Then we have won," she said. "We will have done the unimaginable. We will have defeated the Centophennni."

"No," he said, advancing farther on her. "I mean what will we have become? What will we have sacrificed so that we might survive?"

"Surely our survival is paramount. Nothing else matters."

"Yes," he said. He was very close to her by then, and her face dominated his vision, his thoughts. "

'Nothing else matters.' That is the V'ornn way. Our proud motto, if you will."

"Nith Sahor-"

He rounded on Nith Immmon. "I am no longer Nith!" He grinned fiercely. "You see how it is, what we have already become? We are cripples, moral cripples. We do what we please with whatever species we happen to come across and conquer."

"It is survival of the fittest," Nith Immmon said, "pure and simple."

"There is nothing simple about it," Sahor said. "And surely there is nothing pure about killing, torture, and rape-the misery and suffering we leave in our wake like a slimy trail. No wonder the Centophennni can track us!"

Nith Immmon, taken aback by this extraordinary outburst, said, "I told you this was a mistake."

"I need him," she said.

"He requires a rest," Nith Immmon said with a sigh. "A good, long rest."

"No." Sahor swung around. "What I need is to stop these experiments right here, right now." Thrusting his face into Gul Aluf's, he said, "Did you really think that anything-your s.e.xual blandishments, your clumsy attempt at coercion-would get me to a.s.sist you in this obscenity?"

"We do have your father," Nith Immmon pointed out.

"You have the DNA program I created for him," Sahor said. "You stole it from me."

"You were dead."

"She did not think so."

As if they inhabited a prison cell, a claustrophobic silence wrapped them in its shroudlike embrace.

Sahor wished them plunged into the depths of the ocean; either that, or into a raging inferno, where all the collected sins of the V'ornn could be swept away. But sins, particularly of this magnitude, could not so easily be expunged. Possibly they never could, but that would not stop him from trying.

"You see, my dear"-Gul Aluf touched him gently, tentatively-"this is why I broke it off. It wasbecause of you. I could no longer bear the brunt of your contempt. You despised me for engineering this experiment-"

"Operating on the hybrid offspring of V'ornn and Kundalan. The offspring of callous rape." She had pushed him, pushed him farther than he thought he could go. "Yes, I despised you."

"I broke it off," she said, her voice very low, "because you would not."

Nith Immmon cleared his throat again. "About Nith Einon-"

"My father is dead," Sahor said without taking his eyes off Gul Aluf.

"I know him," Gul Aluf said. She unwound her arms, unfurled her wings. "He does not mean that."

"It is a program," Sahor said, slowly and carefully. "Nothing more."

Her half smile had returned, but its smugness fatally marred her beauty. "I can take that program and build him again, molecule by molecule, into Nith." The smile widened. "You can have him back again, all of him, as he was."

Sahor shook his head. "You simply do not understand, do you?"

She shrugged. "What's to understand? This is a business transaction, nothing more, nothing less."

"Listen to yourself." Sahor gestured. "A business transaction involving the maiming-and murder-of innocent victims."

"They are half-breeds, they mean nothing to us," Nith Immmon said, hammering the last nail into his coffin.

"That is my point," Sahor said. "They mean nothing to you, and they should."

"Why?"

"Because they breathe, they think, they live."

"This is useless," Nith Immmon said impatiently.

Sahor at last rounded on him. "Don't you understand it yet? Don't you see? We are never leaving Kundala. Here is where we will make our stand against the Centophennni. Here is where we will be judged by time, by history. I want us to be a better species than we now are."

"It will not matter if we are all dead," Nith Immmon pointed out.

"It will matter most then."

"Beware of what you wish for."

Nith Immmon held out his hand, and a tiny sphere flew from it, blue and green. Sahor knew what it was. Two meters above their head, it popped open and he saw the star-field, the constellations so familiar to him since the V'ornn arrived on Kundala. Then he saw the debris, floating dead hunks, turned inside out by goron-particle weapons.

"They are coming," Nith Immmon said. "It will not be long before the Centophennni are here."

"If my experiments are terminated," Gul Aluf said, "we will surely be destroyed when they arrive. We have no defense against their goron-particle weapons."

"We ourselves cannot master the goron particle, cannot harness it," Nith Immmon admitted. "We have tried so many times and failed. Even Nith Batox.x.x, who was experimenting with a goron-wave weapon, failed."

"And so your response is to try to genetically engineer the hybrids-"

"The Kundalan have a quality, a resilience," Nith Immmon said. "You were right about that."

"But it's more. Much more." Gul Aluf's gaze did not waver. She had taken his best blow and, for better or worse, had absorbed it. He had, at least, to admire her for that. "Something happens when the species combine, something special. The joining becomes more than the sum of the two parts. Something greater, something possibly invincible."

"The miscegenation does not work," he said. "The two races are physically incompatible."

"But they're not. My experiments have proved that." Gul Aluf looked at him with her penetrating stare.

"Right now the compatibility is ephemeral, like a radioactive substance with a half-life of milliseconds,"

she admitted. "Right now I can't quantify it, I don't understand it at all. I only know it exists." She came up to him, and whispered, "Nith Batox.x.x worked on many experiments. The goron-wave chamber was one. We discovered hard evidence of that in his lab-orb. But there were other experiments, hidden from us while he was off-line from the Comrades.h.i.+p's matrix. What was he doing? These others have no idea,Sahor. But I genetically manipulated him. I gave birth to him. I suspect he was working on a project parallel to mine but with the same purpose: to meld V'ornn and Kundalan."

19

Maggot in the Works

When Kurgan recovered sufficiently to lever himself up, he hobbled over to the bed and sat heavily.

He stared morosely at the dead beast without really seeing it. He could not care less about it, though he guessed the Gyrgon would have a field day with it. A brief flicker of pleasure at not telling them wafted through him, and was almost immediately expunged. Eleana was gone, and the trysting chamber was as dead as ever it had been. The dust lay heavy as molten lead. Its onyx columns seemed to pitch inward, the gloom was suffocating. He could smell death, snickering in the cob-webbed shadows.

His leg felt as if it were on fire, and when he touched the flesh it felt swollen and pulpy, as if his muscles had melted like wax. There was little point in going after Riane, even less in calling his Haaar-kyut. He did consider summoning his personal Genomatekk, but then thought of a better idea.

Scooping the banestone back into its alabaster box, he limped his way through the darkened Kundalan corridors. He stashed the box in a niche he had sometime ago discovered behind his wall of weapons.

The pain in his leg was bad, but not so bad as to impair his keen mind. The stairs were the worst. He held on to the banister for support, but he never broke his stride. He used one of the secret exits the Ra-mahan had made in the palace and left his heavily guarded precincts without his Haaar-kyut being the wiser.

Outside, the glimmerings of night had begun. The city was awash in the bluish glow of fusion lamps.

Kurgan entered the bustling stream of pedestrian traffic on Momentum Boulevard without causing so much as a raised eyebrow. He walked with only the slightest limp, though it cost him in effort and pain, and he wondered idly whether he was bleeding. He felt weak, his entire body throbbed. Pausing at a stall on Aquasius Street across from the forbidding facade of warehouses, he drank a cup of cheap ludd-wine in one swallow. He almost choked on the rawness of it, but felt somewhat fortified by the fermentation.

The standing, however, did him no good at all because an odd stiffness had set in.

He headed south again, but by the time he reached Harborside the pain in his leg had reached his thigh, and every so often he would suffer a pinp.r.i.c.k of agony in his hip. The crowds had thickened, and the smell of roasting meats and vegetables perfumed the air. Down along the Promenade, tavern doors were thrown open, and the shouting and songs of the Sarakkon spewed forth like heat from a bonfire.

Kurgan felt abruptly parched, and he pulled himself out of the mainstream crawl, looking around for another drink stall. Heading for one, he lost a couple of seconds, everything went dark, and he momentarily lost his bearings. Holding himself erect, he felt as if he were in the middle of a dream where he did not know where he was, where he was going, or why. He blinked and swallowed hard. The pain in his leg was like a drumbeat of agony. Then he remembered, and he reentered the loud swirl of Sarakkon, Kundalan, and V'ornn, making his way down the Promenade to the slip where Courion's boat was docked.

Long before he got there, he could see that the slip was empty. He gave out a little groan, his one concession to the pain that racked him, but he kept going, step by step, meter by meter. He stared bleakly out across the Sea of Blood. Where was the Omaline? Why wasn't it there?

Bleary-eyed, hanging on the rail, he stared out to sea, but what he saw was not the darkling water, not the smear of orange at the horizon, not the black silhouettes of sails like bird wings. He was trapped again in the hateful vision from his last salamuuun flight, his father bent over the sweaty back of another Kundalan female, her long hair twined in his white-knuckled fists, pounding away with great animal grunts, talking about him, about Kurgan. The anger in his voice, in his thrusts, the anger at not getting what he had wanted in his son (he never spoke of Terrettt). Nothing Kurgan ever did pleased him. Butwhy should Kurgan try? His father looked right through him, spoke to a nonexistent place over his left shoulder when occasionally addressing him. Except when he dressed him down, then he looked him in the eye, which drove Kurgan to do whatever it took to anger his father even more, to be noticed rather than ignored by this hateful figure from whom, it seemed now, he would never be severed, even though he was quite dead. But death had many meanings. In the mind memories refused to die, rather grew like weeds in a tangle, a suffocating ma.s.s, for in every nucleus of every cell in his body his father lived, bred, colonized, his tendencies trapping him at every turn.

He slammed fist against thigh. Each time he did so, the pain spiked up to dizzying levels. He hung upon the sea rail, panting, sick to his stomachs, willing the pain to excise his memories. But finally it got the best of him and he pitched sideways, rolling beneath the sea rail, down onto the gently rocking slip where once he and Courion had spoken of many things the night he had saved the Sarakkon from the immense jaws of the black Chimaera.

What it all boils down to," the Teyj said, "is that they are right." It spread its four multicolored wings, its beady eyes on Sahor. It was very happy to see him. "I know you despise her, I know you love her. And as for Nith Immmon, the only thing to say about him is he has the best interests of the Modality in mind."

The Teyj watched Sahor out of beady black eyes as he walked around the circular turret that crowned one of the minarets of the Temple of Mnemonics. From this eyrie, he could look out over the Great Phosphorus Marsh, to the north of which were the raked-out hills being systematically strip-mined of lortan, the mineral-rich substance the V'ornn refined into veradium. At the moment, however, his mind was elsewhere. He was checking every square centimeter.

"They cannot see or hear," the Teyj said. "I made certain of that."

Sahor turned to his father. "I will not help Gul Aluf with her experiments," he said flatly.

Nith Einon c.o.c.ked his little Teyj head. "From the look of you, it wouldn't take much."

"What does that mean?"

The Teyj flew onto his shoulder and said, "You know what it means. You have broken the genetic code. You have engineered the merger of V'ornn and Kundalan into one being. Our experiments in hybridization are crude compared to what you have done, so crude they always end in failure. What did you think you were doing?"

"Isn't this what you had been looking toward?"

"With someone-anyone-else. Not you. Nith have no business muddying the gene pool."

"You haven't gone over." Sahor took great pains not to show his alarm. "You haven't become one of them, have you, Father?"

"It is no longer a matter of them versus us, Sahor. The Centophennni are almost here. You have seen the evidence with your own eyes. The need of the V'ornn Modality is great. You can no longer afford to stay on the sidelines."