Or perhaps Father, knowing I would face someone—something—like Vadesh, trained me precisely to be able to learn from and overcome a monster like this.
If only Vadesh didn’t look exactly like Father.
“But Rigg is too important to listen,” said Vadesh.
“I’m listening,” said Rigg.
Vadesh said nothing.
Rigg repeated back to him what he had just said. “This city was designed by human engineers. All these achievements were human.”
“You did not seem to pay attention,” said Vadesh.
“I was thinking that it seems very important to you that we understand that everything here was done by humans. At first I thought you meant ‘human as opposed to you.’ But now I see that by ‘humans’ you meant ‘humans possessed by facemasks.’ ”
“Not possessed!” cried Vadesh. “Augmented! It was what we hoped for at the beginning, what the great Ram Odin told us our work should be—to combine the life of this world with the life that humans brought with them.”
“So this is really the great city of the facemasks,” said Olivenko.
“Of humans whose senses were sharpened and intensified by facemasks,” insisted Vadesh.
“I thought you said that facemasks returned humans to a primitive state, all war and reproduction,” said Olivenko.
“At first. And in the weaker humans, yes, that was a permanent condition. But some humans were strong enough to overmaster the facemasks. And some facemasks were able to learn the civilized virtues. Self-restraint. Discipline. Forethought. Guilt.”
“Guilt!” said Loaf. “What were they guilty of? They were owned by animals. Ridden by them.”
“Guilt is a civilizing virtue,” said Vadesh patiently.
Father had taught Rigg the same thing. “Guilt is how a person punishes himself in advance,” said Rigg. “Before he commits the act, and afterward, even though no one else detected his crime.”
“It makes people self-policing,” said Vadesh. “The more people feel guilt, the more easily they live together in large numbers.”
“So the facemasks learned guilt,” said Loaf. “They still killed all the uninfected humans.”
“They didn’t!” said Vadesh. “Why do you think they did? They defended themselves.”
“Until the last normal human was dead,” said Loaf.
“No and no and no,” said Vadesh. “It was the uninfected, as you call them—I think of them as invaders from Earth—”
“Like you?” suggested Umbo.
“Invaders from Earth,” repeated Vadesh, “who returned to the city again and again until they murdered every man, woman, and child of the native people.”
“They were not native,” said Umbo. “They were captives.”
“They were a new native life form, half human, half facemask,” said Vadesh. “It was a beautiful blending—painful and frightening at first, for both, but then a fruition of both. As if they were trees that could not bear until they pollinated each other.”
“You’re a poet of parasitism,” said Rigg. “Are these the stories you told the possessed people, to convince them they were even better than humans or facemasks alone?”
“It’s the simple truth,” said Vadesh.
“And yet the people without facemasks were not persuaded,” said Rigg.
“Here’s a thought,” said Umbo. “What if the facemasks let go of the people they possessed, so the people could see how much better it was when they had the parasite? Then they could take them back by their own free choice. Or not.”
“Impossible,” said Vadesh.
“So you admit they would never choose to take the facemasks back,” said Loaf.
“Impossible to detach them. Both would die.”
“I don’t believe you,” said Rigg. “I think the facemask would die, but the human would return to health.”
“Both would die,” repeated Vadesh. “The bond cannot be undone. It was fatal to both. Always. Do you think we didn’t try, at first?”
“I’d think that the ability to detach would be the first civilizing virtue you’d get the facemasks to acquire.”
“They tried,” said Vadesh. “As they incorporated the genes they harvested from their human hosts, each new generation was more compatible. They needed humans more, preserved more of human nature. But the one thing they could not do was make themselves less effective as parasites.”
Rigg looked at Loaf, Umbo, Olivenko. “Finally, an honest sentence—Vadesh admits that the facemasks are parasites.”
“Of course they’re parasites,” said Vadesh. “I was the one who warned you not to drink from the stream, wasn’t I? I didn’t want you infected.”
“Where is all this leading?” asked Loaf. “What do you want from us?”
“I want you to bring humans back to my wallfold,” said Vadesh.
“So you can infect them again?”
“No,” said Vadesh. “Do you think I failed to learn the lesson of the past? Humans do not respond well to seeing other humans parasitized. They think of them as monsters, they destroy them to the last man, and then die out themselves, for fear of becoming infected.”
“They died out?” asked Loaf.
“They killed each other,” said Rigg bitterly. “When they were sure they had killed the last facemask-controlled person, they killed themselves—”
“Each other,” said Vadesh.
“Collectively killed themselves,” said Rigg, “so there was no chance that their keeper here could breed them with more facemasks.”
“They didn’t understand that I would never do that,” said Vadesh. “I am incapable of harming human beings.”
“But you can let them come to harm. Goad them to it, trap them. Aid their enemies.”
“Humans must be free,” said Vadesh. “It is deeply ingrained in my programming. I cannot defy that. All choices are to be made by humans. I merely help them carry out their plans.”
Rigg could not let that stand. “You are such a liar,” he said. “I was raised by one of you, and he was certainly not carrying out anybody’s plan.”
“He wasn’t carrying out your plan, you mean,” said Vadesh.
“Nor mine,” said Umbo.
“Nor the plans of General Citizen and Hagia Sessamin,” said Olivenko. “So whose plan was he carrying out?”
“Neither of us controls the other,” said Vadesh. “But we started out with the same directives—given to us by humans. Our original programmers, and then Ram Odin. He gave us a great work to do. The expendable Ram pursued it his way in your natal wallfold, and I pursued it as best I could here in this wallfold. I made mistakes. I misunderstood the depth of the human fear of the strange and new. They could not be reasoned with.”
“Meaning you couldn’t find them all and kill them,” said Rigg.
“I killed no one,” said Vadesh.
“But you found them,” said Umbo. “And told the facemask people where they were, so they could kill them.”
“I wanted them reconciled!”
“But ‘killed’ was almost as good,” said Rigg. “They were waging a war of extermination, and you weighed in on the side of those who were only half human.”
“There are safeguards now,” said Vadesh. “I’ve worked hard. Ten thousand years I’ve been breeding facemasks until all the obnoxious traits are gone. Humans would remain fully human, in charge of themselves.”
“We are never going to put on your facemasks,” said Rigg.