“Ah…” said Ruiz, grasping for a diversion. “How have you been?”
“Well might you ask,” shouted Publius in a booming voice. “How long has it been since the last time you came crawling to blackmail me into doing you yet another favor? Thirty years? Forty? Much has happened, my art has flowered, my fortunes have waxed, my power is substantially enhanced, though not enough, never enough.” Publius had discarded his pose of good humor, and his ugly essence shone through his new flesh. “But what’s that to you, eh? What do you want of me now, Ruiz Aw? Old friend.”
“Nothing too elaborate, Publius,” said Ruiz. He strove to show no fear or resentment, though he was terrified.
“No? I’m astonished. So, what is this ‘nothing too elaborate’? And what can you pay for it?”
Ruiz took a deep breath. “I need transport up to the Shard platforms, for myself and three slaves. I can pay a fair price.”
Publius made an airy gesture of dismissal. “Nothing more than that? The simplest thing!” His face writhed into a mask of disbelief. “Are you mad? What makes you think I could do such a thing for you. The pirate lords are currently in the grip of a massive paranoiac hysteria; did you not know this? My customers fume in their hostelries, unable to leave, and their goods stink up the place until the customers are driven to try to return them. I’ve had to kill a baker’s dozen of complainers in the last twomonth alone — can’t have them tarnishing my reputation.”
“I hadn’t realized,” said Ruiz dismally.
“Just got into town, eh? Well, how grand that you thought of me first. Come, come… we’ll tour the labs and talk.” Publius pasted a grotesquely sly look on his face and winked, apparently finished with his brief rant. “Things are never so bad as they might become, eh?”
He put his arm around Ruiz’s shoulders, and tugged him from the foyer, into a world of white tiles, stainless steel, and horror.
Publius’s laboratories were extensive, covering thousands of square meters — and always teeming with activity. The monster-maker’s creative passion was only matched by his lust for wealth; the two drives conspired to push the labs to their maximum output. It always astonished Ruiz that the pangalac worlds’ appetite for monsters could keep pace with Publius’s mania for production — it was another illustration of the ungraspable immensity of the universe and the unknowable diversity of the countless folk who crowded it.
Publius led him past a railed-off pit arena, in the depths of which dozens of stocky ursine warriors hacked and stabbed at each other with long knives — snarling, white fangs gleaming, inhumanly quick. “Elimination trials,” Publius said, by way of explanation. “We started with over two hundred experimental scions. In another day or so, the best will emerge — though we’ll run the trial a few more times, to eliminate the possibility of flukes. But they’ll do well for some berserker prince on a rich Hardworld, won’t they?” He beamed in a parody of fatherly pride. “They’ll have to wear muzzles, perhaps, but nothing’s perfect. On the other hand… you’re good with a pigsticker, aren’t you, Ruiz? You wouldn’t last two seconds against the feeblest of these.”
Against a great support column was a bank of upright vitro tanks, their contents concealed by a screen. Publius paused here and slid the screen up, revealing three adult humans, two men and a woman. These had the puffy formlessness that characterized tank-grown clones, before they were decanted and conditioned, but Ruiz could see that they would be handsome. All of them had Publius’s coloring, and suddenly Ruiz realized what they were.
“Yes,” said Publius. “They’re me. Insurance. If I ever go, they’ll be decanted and set at each other. The strongest one gets my identity.”
Ruiz was horrified. What if they decided to cooperate? Could the universe survive a triad of Publiuses?
Technicians scurried past, shoulders hunched and eyes down, as if they feared their employer as much as Ruiz did.
They passed a series of one-way windowed cubicles, each containing a different variety of joyperson. Some of them seemed to be no more than human men and women, their somatypes modified toward some animal standard. There was a slender languid lizard girl, who groomed her eyescales with a long forked tongue. In the next cell was a young boy with a face like a mastiff, his body muscular and bowlegged. They passed an armless woman with a bald shapeless head, her soft white skin glistening with mucus. An androgynous creature stroked feathery antennae; it had a segmented thorax and a tubular proboscis curled on its chest.
But others were much stranger. They appeared to partake of the characteristics of aliens for which no analogue existed on Old Earth — though Ruiz knew that their genetic material derived primarily from human DNA. Publius was a purist in that way. He averted his gaze from latticed tentacles, stony silicoid carapaces, pulsing masses of stringy yellow fiber. There was even a lumpy creature covered with Gench sensor tufts, gasping through trilateral mouth slits. The symmetry was maintained with three plump breasts, three vaginas.
The Gench-like creature made him shudder, and a wave of disorientation passed over him. He felt the death net stir… and then stabilize. He had avoided thinking about the Gencha since his arrival in SeaStack, apparently for good reason. He wondered how many more near misses he could stand, before either the net decayed or he lost interest in survival.
“Samples. See anything you’d like to try?” Publius slapped him on the back, laughed his strange bubbling laugh. “No, no, I’m teasing you; I know you’re a devoted prude.”
They passed surgeries, in which white-coated technicians operated lamarckers, carving cloned bodies into new shapes. Other spaces held DNA keyboards, where Publius’s employees created new races of monsters, for clients who were willing to pay extra for reproductive functionality. Banks of half-gestated clones floated in clear nutrient baths, autogurneys trundled back and forth, some carrying grotesque corpses, others bearing anesthetized monsters in various stages of completion.
And over all, thick enough to gag Ruiz, was the special stink he associated with Publius and his works, a miasma of organic stenches and chemical wafts, of riotous life and casual death, of creativity and dread.
Finally they reached the apartments Publius used when in residence at his laboratories, and they passed from frenetic activity into silent isolation.
Publius slid the lock shut, and turned to Ruiz, a look of weary contempt blooming on his face.
“So, will you threaten me again? Will you never grow tired of hanging over my head, a ruination waiting to strike me? You cannot live forever; have you no mercy?”
Ruiz adopted a humble tone of voice. “You gave me no choice, Publius. If I failed to take precautions, you would instantly destroy me. I regret as much as you do that you confided your origins to me — had you not, you wouldn’t hate me so virulently, and I wouldn’t be forced to threaten you.”
Long ago, over a campfire on Line, a badly wounded and delirious Publius had told Ruiz his greatest secret — that he had been born in a Dilvermoon Holding Ark and was not, as he had claimed, the bastard of a noble Jahworld family. Ruiz had never completely understood the intensity with which Publius defended his pretentions, but he had realized their importance to Publius when the monster-maker tried to murder him, years later. In self-preservation, he had filed a posthumous memorandum, which would be broadcast over the public datastreams, in the event of his death or disappearance.
In later years, he had begun to worry that Publius had lived with the possibility of exposure for so long that it no longer gave Ruiz any leverage over him. “Truly, I wish you could convince me that my precautions are unnecessary.”