«If I die?» She shook her head. «Don’t worry. That will never happen, believe me. I mean no offense–probably you’d be a handsome woman–but Cleet has very... specific tastes. Oddly enough.’’
«But he sounded... he really sounded as if he means to kill you.»
She nodded, still inhumanly calm. «Of course he means to kill me. That won’t be a first. He’s owned me for a long long time. But afterward, he’ll put me in the med-unit, and it’ll put me back together, good as new. As I say, he’s really not a murderer; it’s not murder if you don’t stay dead, is it? He’ll never get rid of me; I’m the perfect woman. For Cleet. But you’ll be all right. Believe me.»
Berner was suddenly sure that she spoke the truth. «That’s awful for you,» he said.
«It’s not so bad,» she said, shrugging her lovely shoulders. «I never remember being dead.» But then her composure slipped a little and her eyes darkened. «It’s the dying that hurts.»
Berner went to his bed full of pitying admiration. Sleep eluded him for a long time, but when he finally slept, a terrible dream seized him.
The dream followed no logic; disconnected images floated across the stage of his mind. Nor did Berner himself play any part in the dream. He was an observer, entirely without volition.
Candypop’s strong face watched him, from some inner distance. He seemed to perceive her only out of the corner of his eye, but she was the heart of the dream. After a while he noticed that the beautiful flesh that cloaked her skull had grown translucent, so that white bone glowed through. Murky expressions swirled through the translucence–a river of secret emotion, flowing over pale stone. Behind the lovely eyes black caverns. Behind the lush mouth the long sad teeth of the dead.
In the dream’s foreground Cleet struck a series of awkward poses, in a slow ritual. His eyes at first were dull. His mouth hung open, slack. He seemed possessed by an interior life, as if another creature inhabited his body, one not quite human and unsure how the human body was supposed to move. Now Cleet stood on one foot, the other foot lifted high, his arm twisted behind his back. The arm rose, appeared to dislocate, and became a spine thrusting from the back of Cleet’s neck.
The dream shimmered and Cleet was a poisonous fish, a warty horror with frayed fins, eyes as lifeless as pebbles. And at the same time he was still Cleet, and Berner felt a chilly shock of recognition.
From her distance Candypop watched soberly, her skull lit by an inner fire.
Cleet twisted and became a man again. He dropped to a spraddle-legged crouch and Berner saw a spider. Then a snake. A shark, a hyena, an alien thing with horns like razors, a tenta- cled monster of the deep. With each transformation, Berner felt an acceleration of terror. He needed to scream; his throat ached as though it would burst.
But he couldn’t scream, couldn’t flee, and his helplessness seemed to attract Cleet’s attention. The monster now watched Berner with glittering eyes. The transformations took on a shuddering urgency, the shapes changed faster and faster. Berner could no longer identify the shapes; all he could see were the eyes, which began to draw closer.
He was certain that he was about to die. He tried to shift his attention to Candypop... and then he saw something that saved him.
Up through the skull and its waning film of beautiful flesh, another face rose. A young woman, smiling, full of joyful life. Her eyes were warm and innocent. Trusting.
He struggled to recognize her.
By some miracle he was seeing Candypop as she was before Cleet had possessed her.
His terror faded, replaced by a wrenching sorrow.
He woke with tears on his cheeks and an irresistable urge to see her.
By the time he stood over her bed, his tears were gone, but not the pain. She lay still, and in the artificial composure of her drugged sleep, he could see the young woman of his dream. He glanced at the bed’s timer. In a few seconds the tubes and wires would withdraw from her body.
The bed clicked and hummed. The hardware dropped away. Her eyelids fluttered, and Berner was seized by a dangerous impulse. He felt driven to perform some act of tenderness, however small, so he bent over her bed and touched his lips to hers... feeling an absurd pleasure, feeling a giddy terror.
She woke as he kissed her, but her only reaction was an infinitesimal shake of her head.
He nodded, but he bent over her again and pressed his cheek to hers and whispered, «If I could do anything, I would. I would.»
«Yes,» she said softly. «I believe you. Yes.» Her hand came up to touch his face, a cool, brief contact.
«Yes?» roared Cleet, at Berner’s back. «Yes? Yes, what?»
Berner sprang away from the bed, but Cleet swung his heavy arm and knocked Berner sprawling into the comer. In Cleet’s hand the nerveburn twitched, and Berner readied himself for a descent into hell.
Cleet’s voice dropped into a rumbling register Berner had never heard before. «What did I tell you, hermit? Can you remember?»
Berner couldn’t speak.
«What did you tell him?» asked Candypop in a low, amused tone.
Berner glanced at her. She perched on the edge of her bed, her body arched into an oddly provocative pose. Her face was full of sly triumph.
Cleet turned toward her. «I might think an unpleasant thought,» he said slowly. «I might think you were taunting me. I might believe you seduced the lout just to annoy me.»
«Really?» She laughed, and it was an ugly jeering sound. «You didn’t really think the little coward would ever have defied you. Without a great deal of... help. Did you?»
Cleet fired the nervebum.
Bemer watched her flop and flail, her shrieking face contorted into an inhuman shape. All her beauty lost. He wanted to turn away, but he couldn’t.
When it was finally over, Cleet left without another word.
Berner helped her to the med-unit and lifted her into the tray. Before he slid it in, he took her hand. «Why? Why did you take the blame?»
Her shoulders lifted in an approximation of a shrug. Her voice was a hoarse whisper. «He might have killed you, and what a silly waste that would have been–he’s almost ready to let you go. Besides, I’m used to it.»
«Thank you,» he said, unsteadily.
Again the tiny shrug. «In a thousand years, what will it matter?»
In the library, Cleet lingered over his selection. «Which should I pick, hermit?»
Cleet opened the box labeled HYAENA EXTRO-BRUNNEA, took out the skeins,
weighed them in his hand, watching Berner with opaque eyes. «Shall I use these?»
Silence stretched out, and Berner felt the tug of Cleet’s will, impelling him to answer. «It would be presumptuous of me to offer an opinion,» Berner said, finally.
Cleet smiled. «Very good. Well said; I knew you were trainable. I think I’ll wait one more night for these.» He replaced the skeins, took down another pair. «Tonight, something sweet, I think. Gentle. For contrast.»
When Cleet had gone to her, Bemer tapped the faceplate behind which Cleet had replaced the hyaena skeins. He watched the display, sickened.
Over a scrubby plain, the beast shambled on six stumpy legs, heavy-shouldered, armored with mud-brown fibrous plates. Ttifts of hair grew in sparse patches. Its head was naked, its fangs curved up past its porcine snout, its eyes glowed with some intense excitement.
It stopped, tossed up its head, nostrils opening wide. An instant later, it set off at a windmilling trot, and foam lathered its muzzle.
It caught the female in a grassy swale. The female, whose belly sagged gravidly, was smaller and less agile. She whirled to face the male. But he rolled into her, knocking her sprawling, exposing her belly. His fangs slashed, and an instant later her belly gaped open. A greenish crawling mass moved within her, began to spill out. The male stood over the body, spraddle-legged, and a dozen slender organs extruded from flaps in his chest. Streams of yellow fluid splattered down on the mass.