“Give me a good reason.”
“We’re in control now. It’s shifted to us. You know us. Will we permit it to go on making war?”
It had to be a quick decision and it was a tough one. I pulled Hic back from the Extro (he’d probably forgotten his mission anyway) and let him keep company with Twink again. The cryos knelt around the Chief and examined him with hands and ears.
“Dead, all right.”
“Everything’s stopped.”
“No, the heart is still spasming.”
“That’s like the case with electrocution.”
“We’ll have to regulate it again. That’s the least we can try.”
I wondered whether they were speaking from their own knowledge or the Extro’s; probably the latter, which was all right provided the hateful thing was properly humbled. They began an extraordinary cycle of operations. The Chief was pummeled, bent, flexed, stretched, lofted, dangled, prone-pressured, and mouth-to-mouthed; again and again, always in the identical tempo, 78 to the minute. My own pulse was running much faster. At last they stopped and put ears to the Chief’s chest.
“Nominal,” they said. “We’ve got him back from the edge.” They looked around with their blind eyes.
“I’m here,” I said. “He’s going to live?”
“For a long time. Do you trust us, Curzon?”
“I have to, don’t I?”
“No. You can kill us easily. If that’s the way you want it, get it over with now.”
“After that, I trust you.”
“Ta. We won’t let you down. We’ll make the Extro behave. Why lose it?”
“Why indeed.”
“We’re going to repay your trust. Give us all available data on Lepcer. Maybe the Extro can suggest a line of research leading to a remedy. Don’t count on it.”
“Thank you.”
“Try to get some viable tissue from the remains of that girl to us. It may not be too late for cloning. Don’t count on it.”
“Would you lovable freaks care for a few bars of ‘Hail to the Chief’?”
They burst out laughing. “Take Guess, Curzon. He’s all yours. Keep in touch.”
I knelt alongside Guess. “Cherokee,” I said, “it’s me, your brother. Everything’s going to be gung.”
“Ha-ja-ja,” he burbled.
“You’re rid of the Extro. The cryos have taken it over and I believe they can be trusted to do right.”
“Ha-ja-ja.”
I looked at the cryos, who were busy restoring the damage Hic and the Chief had begun. “Hey, bods, he sounds like a baby.”
“Oh, he is, Curzon. When the Extro pulled out it left nothing behind. He’ll have to grow up all over again. Not to worry. He has plenty of time.”
15
Hic had to help me carry Sequoya out. The Chief couldn’t walk. He couldn’t talk. He was helpless. And he peed and shat in his tutta; he’d have to be diapered. I was relieved to get out of the complex before the cryos asked me to get rid of the Rajah. I flagged a pogo, we hauled Tecumseh in and made the tepee in one jump. The Group was waiting there, worried and tense. When they saw us lug the infant in they were flabbergasted.
“It’s all over now,” I said wearily. “We can talk and think out loud. We can take transport. We can do any damn thing we please. No more war.”
“But what happened to Guess?”
“He’ll be his old self in about twenty years. Just now all he needs is cleaning up. Give me a stiff belt and I’ll tell you the whole story.”
I tell and they listen, taking turns looking over the six-foot baby. Natoma was so fascinated by the events and so relieved that our brother had come out of the crisis alive that she forgot to be upset by his regression. All of them were delighted by the end of the Rajah threat, particularly Hilly, and no wonder. I could see he wanted to thank Hic-Haec-Hoc, but he knew better. There was no doubt that the Neanderthaler had forgotten all about it by now.
I said, “I know you all want to leave and go about your business, but please stay a little longer. I have one more mission and I may need your help afterward.”
“What is it?” Ozymandias asked in an asthmatic voice as thick as his body.
I told them about the cryo offer.
“Too late,” Hilly said. “I’m sorry. She’s been in too long.”
“I’ve got to try anyway. There’s always hope.”
“Not much.”
“It’s too dark, Guig. Dangerous. Wait until morning.”
“The longer I delay, the less hope.”
“Don’t go, Edward. You’ll never find her.”
“I’ve got to try, Nat.”
“Please listen to me. I—”
“Damn it, don’t you think I know it’s a ghoulish search?” I shouted. “I know it’s a rotten job, but I’ve got to try and get a part of the body for DNA-Cloning. If you can’t support me in my try because you’re jealous or whatever, at least don’t dissupport me, or whatever I mean.”
“You’ve made yourself v. clear, Edward.”
“R. Forgive my manners. I’ve had a hell of a day and the worst is yet to come.”
“We’ll go with you,” M’bantu offered.
“Thank you, no. More than one would only make it easier for a patrol chopper to spot us. I’ll go it alone. Sit tight, all. I’ll probably need you for messenger service. Back in an hour.”
I took a pogo to the edge of the burial ground and as I got out a chopper thrummed overhead playing its brilliant beam down and around. The light held on me for a moment and then moved on. I had no idea when the patrol would be back. It depended on how many private ops it had to police.
It was night. It was nightugly, not because of the fear of death but from the revulsion of the living for rot and decay. You could smell the decomposition choking you as you approached; ammonia, nitrates, potash, phosphates, carrion putrefaction. Death couldn’t be wasted these days; every end product of life went into compost.
El Arrivederci filled about five acres — the public composts occupied ten times that space — and used the concrete foundations of the old Waldorf West Hotel which had been torn down forty years ago to make room for an office complex never built. The two thousand evictees had blocked the entire undertaking with a squatters’ rights lawsuit. The case had not yet come to trial and most of the parties concerned were rotting in composts themselves. Progress.
The foundations looked like a squared-off labyrinth; odd-sized boxes, squares, rectangles, even a few diamonds and pentagons, depending on what stress supports the original architects had designed. They were concrete walls, six feet high, three feet wide, and flat on top providing a walkway for workmen and funeral corteges. There weren’t many of the latter. You go to a compost once and never again, and the word gets around. The corpses are layered in with other organic refuse and chemicals, and the piles are kept flat on top to collect rain. After a long wet spell bones thrust up out of the decay.
Bones are always a nuisance when it comes time to empty a pit and ship the matured compost out. There’s a gaint steel mesh mounted on pillars in the loading area. It’s used to screen out the coarse rubbish, and the heaped bones and skulls make it look like a danse macabre. I’d seen all that the day I followed Fee-5’s body to the pit to make sure she was treated respectfully.
This was night. The night was dry… the whole week had been dry… and I was startled by the “fire-fang,” as it’s called, shuddering in some of the pits. It’s generated by the intense heat of fermentation and the flames were parti-colored from the chemicals. I could see by the light of the fire-fang and didn’t need the lampland torch I’d brought to find my way.
I threaded across the compost on the walkways to the small pit where I remembered Fee being placed. The miasma was strangling me. The pit was dark, no flames, so I switched on the torch. Just a flat surface of straw some three feet below. I steadied my nerve and dropped down. The straw was spongy. The heat was burning, and I knew I’d have to work fast or I’d be roasted unconscious. I clawed the straw aside, reached a layer of crushed limestone, shoveled that back with my hands, and there was a bloated body, peeling, shredding, rotting. Not Fee. A man. I vomited.