“You can’t stop me,” Kincaid told her, not threateningly, but as a statement of fact. “And Tann Nakitt is not a party to this. I say the three of us go, and Beta and Martinez remain.”
“Very well. Time is of the essence, then. Let us go.”
Ari started to follow them, but Beta moved and blocked him. Although she was much smaller, the reinforced limbs the two women had been given after they were properly programmed were more than his match, and he couldn’t easily reason with or argue with them. He sighed, watching the figures vanish from sight. It didn’t take long before he decided that even talking to a slave was better than nothing.
“Beta, do you remember who and what you used to be?”
“The question is meaningless,” she responded. “Beta has never been anything but Beta. I have the memories of the one who was and is no more except as data, but I am not her.”
“So you have all of Ming’s memories, but you don’t see any connection between her and yourself?”
“The name you speak is not in my data field. I have no name for the other.”
“Well, it was probably erased, but it was Ming Dawn Palavri. Alpha was Angel Kobe.”
“No, Alpha is Alpha. She simply has the data of another, as I do.”
This was tough. “So it’s just data? But what good is that data if you cannot assume the identity of the one who lived those memories? Every memory in the brain is subjective. How can you interpret it if you weren’t ever her?”
“I have the module to do this, but I can integrate it only on command of the Master.”
“And what if he dies? If your sole purpose is to serve him, and he dies, then you have no purpose? No Master? Do you die or what?”
“In the absence of the Master, and death is an absence condition, then we would both serve the Oneness.”
“The Oneness? Who or what is that?” He was sure his uncle hadn’t come up with anything like a Oneness.
“We are both part of the One. We are detached from it, but still part of it. We would then become self-programming autonomous units but in its service.”
He finally got it. “The One—you mean the house computer? The server core?”
“Yes.”
He sighed and leaned back against the wall. All his life he’d thought of himself as basically a moral guy, that what he did was basically honest work, and that what his uncle did was between his uncle and the cops. Now he’d been dragged into it, not just a little larceny but big-time, with deaths and worse, and he’d managed to some degree to rationalize even that. But what his uncle had done to Ming, particularly Ming, hit home with him. It made him feel… well, dirty. In an age when machines could do anything and if you had the money, you were at least a minor version of what they thought these Ancient Ones were, only somebody who could have everything would decide he wanted human slaves. Even an honest death would be preferable. Hell, he’d known this woman. Jeez! He’d even had a good time in bed with her on a couple of occasions, the last time on the City of Modar itself. To see her reduced to this just to feed a rich old man’s fantasies and ego—it was wrong.
Merely feeling this was a revelation to him. Somewhere along the line he seemed to have grown a conscience, and while it didn’t make him feel any better, it made him feel… well, superior to that old bastard down there. All his life he’d wanted to be his uncle, envied him everything. He didn’t want to be Jules Wallinchky anymore. He wanted a warm shower, a change of clothes, and a chance to walk away and see if he could do something decent with his life without being reinfected by his uncle’s cesspool.
But he was stuck here with two bodies, one dying and one quite possibly dead.
And the worst part was, he’d been the instrument of the latter. He had fired the gun that knocked Angel and Ming cold. He’d delivered them to his uncle. This was his punishment, his circle of Hell, for doing that.
Beta’s head snapped up, a happy expression on her face. “They have made contact with someone! Help is being dispatched!”
That got him out of his reverie. “Made contact? With who?”
“Someone. Someone from—here.” She stood up, walked over and faced him. It made him uncomfortable, but he wasn’t sure what she was doing now. Who could figure out a creature like this, created by a man of evil?
“You must understand the Oneness,” she said. “We may need you.”
Her hands suddenly shot out and grasped both sides of his head, bringing him down. To keep his neck from being broken, he had to kneel. He tried to resist with his own hands, but the grip was absolute.
He felt helpless, and then, worse, dizzy and disoriented, almost as he had when the transport had kicked in, but different. She was looking into his mind! Not like a telepath would, but as if their two brains were a single physical unit. Information flowed back and forth, but at a speed he couldn’t follow and with a commanding force he couldn’t resist. He also felt physical sensations—cold and hot, pain and pleasure, a whole range of things sweeping over him like a beam switching on and off. He started to laugh for no apparent reason, then felt incredibly sad, tears welling up, only to have that cut off and then feel sexual desire, then none, then hunger, thirst—Our minds link one to another, so that there is only Oneness. He felt and understood the command rather than hearing it.
She let him go, and he sank down and tried to steady himself as the place seemed to fly around him. He understood now that his uncle left nothing to chance, that most likely everyone who stayed in one of his houses for more than a few days got implanted with the same neuroreceivers and transmitters as the two women had in themselves.
Unlike Ming, he still knew just who and what he was, and with the same feelings as before. But now, and possibly till death, his mind, every thought, even his innermost feelings, was an open book to her and to Alpha/Angel as well. He could feel the permanence of the connection but could not reach out to her mind in the same way she could to his.
Stand up! They come! Again his mind filed it as words, but it was on a level way beyond that. She was not speaking to him telepathically; rather, having cataloged his entire electrochemical set of stimuli and responses, she was operating him. He found himself standing up and looking in the direction where the others had disappeared, with no conscious act of will on his part.
The worst part was, when they came, he couldn’t even tell them what had happened.
Giant Emperor butterflies, two meters tall with wing spans four times that and heads that seemed like death masks, as grotesque and skull-like as Jeremiah Kincaid.
There were three of them, one on the walkway, another flying past and landing beyond them on the walkway behind, and one more hovering over the huge transport area, its wings creating a wind sufficient to whip Ari’s hair into a frenzy.
But they weren’t giant butterflies; that was obvious from the start. Butterflies didn’t wear some sort of belt around their midsection, and butterflies didn’t carry what were most definitely alien-looking but still quite identifiable heavy duty rifles. And butterflies didn’t stand on their hind legs and hold such rifles comfortably in soft but clawlike hands.
Ari felt panic; these babies looked mean. Just as suddenly, he found his panic evaporating, and a calm coolness come over him. In concert with Beta, he and she were protecting Jules Wallinchky’s body.
“You will remove your spacesuits and all mechanicals from yourselves and from the one who is dying,” an eerie, almost nasal voice said in a language they both easily understood. It had the kind of threat in its tone that would have been there even if it had simply said “Good evening.”