“I’m beginning to get the idea you don’t want to be in charge anymore,” said Loaf.
Rigg nodded wearily. “Communication is finally being achieved.”
“All right,” said Loaf. “Then I’ll be in charge. I say we follow this self-powered puppet to the water and drink up while we hear what he has to say. Everybody agree with that?”
“Yes,” said Olivenko. He shot a look at Rigg, as if to say, See? I can agree with Loaf.
“Fine,” said Umbo. “I’m thirsty.”
“No,” said Rigg.
They all looked at him in consternation.
“Oh, it’s the right plan,” said Rigg, “and Loaf’s in charge. It just felt good to be wrong and have it not matter. Param can follow or not, as she chooses.”
Vadesh, who was still standing close by, seemed a little perplexed. “So you’re going to do what I asked?”
“Yes,” said Loaf.
“Then what was all the discussion about?”
Loaf just shook his head. “It’s a human thing.”
“You’re not really very smart,” said Umbo to Vadesh.
“He’s just pretending not to understand us,” said Rigg.
“I think he never understood humans at all,” said Olivenko.
“Oh, you’re right about that,” said Vadesh. “But I know that if you don’t get water you’ll die, and I have water for you, as much as you want, so let’s go.”
He sounded so cheerful. He sounded just like Father. I cannot let myself trust him, Rigg reminded himself. He isn’t Father. Father wasn’t even Father. They’re all liars.
But following this face, this man, answering his questions, doing what he said—that was how Rigg had spent his entire childhood, his whole life until a year ago. To follow him again felt right; it was the feeling Rigg imagined other people referred to when they spoke of “coming home.”
Back in the same room in the factory, they drank their fill, recharged their canteens and water bags, said little as Vadesh said much. He talked about the days when the city had been productive.
“We kept the technology of the starships, as best we could. Not that we flew anywhere—air travel was too dangerous, what with the Wall. You couldn’t see it, so if a pilot strayed too near, he could go mad and crash the plane.”
Rigg tried to make sense of humans flying and decided that “plane” was a sort of flying carriage. Or boat, since it had a pilot. A flying boat. Would it have to fight the winds the way boats had to struggle upstream on a great river?
But he said nothing, for his project at the moment was trying to learn the way Vadesh thought, since it might help them get out of Vadeshfold safely. And it wasn’t just Vadesh. He was only the second expendable that Rigg had known, and there were things Rigg needed to learn about them. Every wallfold had an expendable, so he would be facing the equivalent of Vadesh or Ram in every one.
The expendables can make us rely on them, need them, love them, thought Rigg. Yet they can also lead us to our own destruction, as Vadesh did with the uninfected humans of the city. Had Father been manipulating humans the same ruthless way? Am I his son, or merely a particularly talented human with royal blood who could be manipulated to cause destruction? Maybe Ram was as careless with human life in his wallfold as Vadesh was in this one. In which case perhaps I should untrain myself, and refuse to see the world as Father trained me to see it.
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?”