CHU LI HAD EXPERIENCED ONE BIG SCARE ON THE way
to the spaceship. Just before boarding, they were all required to
clear security by placing both hands on a plate and looking through
a binocularlike eyepiece. He had been sure that the other three
would leave without him once the machine, which was definitely
linked to Master System, identified him not as Chu Li but as Song
Ching.
But the machine had not. Incredibly, it positively matched eye-
and fingerprints with Chu Li and showed a picture of the disguised
Song Ching on the security monitor. The success at the checkpoint
was as startling and disturbing as failure would have been. He knew
that the system was hardly infallible, but nobody could fool Master
System to this degree. It was unthinkable. The only explanation
possible was that the gods themselves had intervened.
Captain Sabatini was correct that the ship was not intended to
take off from the ground except in emergencies; it was impossible
to imagine how it had ever landed there. The passenger cabin was
boarded by going sideways through an open air lock, then into a
room that contained twelve huge, plush chairs with oversized backs
in three rows of four each. The ship was not completely vertical
but at a forty-five-degree angle that was certainly as
unmanageable. A network of planks was laid inside so that people
could enter.
Chu Li was carried in by a very large guard who looked like a
retired wrestler, then placed in one of the far chairs in the front
row. He sank so deeply into the chair that he feared being
smothered, and the network of belts and webbing that strapped him
in made it impossible even to move.
Deng was carried in next, placed in the rear seat farthest from
the door, and similarly fastened in. The two girls were placed in
the front and rear seats nearest the air lock, but so restricting
were the bonds that Chu Li could not turn to see which one was in
his row.
Sabatini entered, managing the entire mess with acrobatic skill
that made it look not only easy but normal. He went
down—back—beyond the last row and vanished; they
didn’t know where and could not look to see.
The captain was in one of the two rooms that were in the rear of
the compartment, seated in a chair that could be maneuvered
electrically by controls at his fingers and was surrounded by
screens and instrumentation. His own webbing would hold his body
tight but allowed his arms total freedom. There were straps through
which he could slip his hands for total security when necessary. He
put on a small, light headset that had a tiny microphone on a rigid
loop in front of his mouth.
“Captain to pilot. Prepare to clear and close all outer
doors. Internal systems on,” he instructed calmly.
Up front there was the distant sound of warning sirens. As the
planks were hastily withdrawn, the air locks—first the outer,
then the inner—were closed and sealed automatically, and the
passengers were left with only the light of the red signal above
those doors and the very dim emergency lighting system to see by.
Not, of course, that there was anything to see.
Then, with a whine, the lights came on full inside, restoring
some sense of normalcy. There was a sound of air blowing in from
all sides, and they felt their ears pop several times.
“Switch to passenger intercom, then prepare for
launch,” the captain ordered. Then he changed his tone, and
his voice blared from the overhead speakers.
“Good evening. I know you’re uncomfortable, but this
will last only a short while. We are now eleven minutes from
launch, and it will take us about forty minutes to reach orbit and
activate the gravity. We’ll then have a little time to get
comfortable for the long haul. There will be a second sustained
engine firing from orbit, but that won’t feel like very much
in here, and all it will really require is that you sit down and
keep a seat belt on. This is the rough part. You’ll feel at
first like some big hand is pushing you completely through the seat
until you can’t bear it anymore, and it’ll sound and
feel like the whole ship’s shaking to pieces, but don’t
worry. That’s normal. After a little bit, you’ll
suddenly find that pressing weight gone, and you’ll feel like
you don’t weigh anything at all, which will be more or less
true. There’s a monitor hanging from the ceiling up front and
center which will show a view from the stern. Enjoy it. This is the
only planetary lift-off you’re ever likely to
experience.”
He switched back to his business channel. The computer took
readings on the prisoners and showed the results on a screen to his
right, but he didn’t pay attention. If their blood pressure
didn’t go through the roof, they’d be all right.
“Chu Li!” called the girl three seats to his
right.
“Here. Is that you, Chow Dai?”
“Yes. Chu Li—I am frightened. I do not like this
kind of flying ship.”
He tried to reassure her. The fact was, he wasn’t the
least bit frightened of the ship or the takeoff. It was what would
come after, on the days out there, that caused real fear.
“It is just a ship, in many ways like the ones that sail
the rivers.”
“I am far more worried by his saying that it was the only
such experience we’ll ever have,” Deng Ho shouted from
the back. “This will be just a lot of shaking and
noise.”
“It is the waiting!” Chow Mai added from her rear
seat. “I wish they would just do whatever it is they will
do!”
Suddenly the ship trembled, and they found themselves being
raised so that their backs were down and their feet were forward.
It was most uncomfortable. Then the lights and power switched
briefly off, then on again, and there was a tremendous whine from
somewhere deep inside the ship that grew in pitch and intensity.
The whole world seemed suddenly to begin shuddering and shaking;
there was vibration but no real sensation of moving. Chu Li’s
eyes went to the monitor, and with a start he saw the entire
spaceport complex framed there, growing smaller by the second,
until it was lost in a view of steppe and desert. Only then did the
great invisible hand Sabatini had warned about really begin to come
down on them.
The weight was crushing and terrible, and the two girls
screamed. It lasted only a few minutes, but it seemed like hours.
All four felt as if all the air was being squeezed out of them.
The pressure ceased so abruptly that the transition made them
dizzy with relief. They experienced no real discomfort except some
popping ears, but when Chu Li again had the wits to look at the
monitor, he saw nothing familiar there, only a vast expanse of blue
and white. Within a few minutes there were browns and grays down
there as well; it was almost as if they were looking at some model,
some relief map of a strange place. Chu Li had expected something
more dramatic, such as the world as a ball growing ever smaller,
but this was just indistinct nothingness.
The ship shuddered a few times as it made small mid-course
corrections, but these were brief and caused no real sensations at
all, just a steady vibration throughout the ship and a low whine
coming from somewhere in the rear.
At least they were sitting upright again, Chu Li thought with
some relief. Still, it had been somewhat of an anticlimax to him;
he had expected lift-off to be longer and far more extreme.
Now there was a gentler sense of acceleration that slowly built
but did not grow very far. A buzzer sounded in the rear, then
Captain Sabatini was walking comfortably forward, still wearing the
headset. He checked each of them in turn, finally reaching Chu
Li.
“All right, we have only a short time to do this, so
listen closely and do just what I tell you,” he said loudly.
“I’m going to release the restraints on you one at a
time and put on more comfortable ones. I don’t want anyone
trying anything. With this headset I can control a good deal of
what it’s like in here, and I do it in a language none of you
know, so don’t think you can grab it and start shouting
orders. It will go very hard with anyone who gives me any trouble
at all.”
He pressed something between Chu Li’s legs, and the
intolerable belts and webbing loosened, then were reeled into the
seat. For a brief moment, Chu Li was free and unrestrained, but he
knew this was not the time to try anything. They didn’t know
enough yet, and there were many aspects of this ship that
didn’t fit the model and schematics in his brain.
“Stand up,” the captain ordered, and Chu Li did,
feeling oddly light and slightly off balance. Sabatini gave a
command in some very strange sounding tongue, and a small
compartment in the wall opened. Removing what looked like a belt
fastened to a thin but tough chain, he attached it around Chu
Li’s waist under his tunic. He repeated the procedure with
each of the others in turn, then passed out some prewet towels to
the two girls, both of whom had thrown up on takeoff.
Chu Li examined the restraint. The chain held him and would not
slip either up or down more than a few centimeters, yet it was not
tight or particularly uncomfortable. At the back was a small box
that was both a lock and a piece of electronics which adjusted for
comfort but also tightened in response to any attempt to move the
chain too far. There was even enough give to pull out some chain
and actually rotate the body loop, bringing the box around to the
front, but it still could not be removed.
“All right, now, here’s the situation,”
Sabatini said. “The restraint you each wear contains a length
of chain sufficient for you to reach all the parts of the cabin you
need to get to. It is smart and will automatically adjust in or out
depending on where you want to go. The one thing you have to
remember is that the chains will not allow themselves to be
crossed. That avoids tangles but will take some getting used to.
Any problems and I can have those chains drag you all the way to
the wall and hold you there. You can’t imagine how fast you
can find yourself slammed against the wall. Right now, just bring
out a little chain and bring the box forward, then sit down. We
can’t get comfortable yet.
“Now, I want to run through a few basics. You have gravity
here, but it is only seventy percent of what you’ve been used
to, so you’re going to find maneuvering difficult at first.
Just remember that if you weighed fifty kilos on Earth, you weigh
only thirty-five here. You also fall at seventy percent the usual
speed if you happen to trip. Questions?”
There were many, but none were asked.
“All right, then. If we all do our part to be nice, then
those chains will be all that is needed. You’ll get so used
to them that in a day or two you won’t even think about them.
You’ll sleep with them, eat with them, go to the bathroom
with them. However, rest assured I have other restraints if you
cause me troubles, many of which are neither smart nor comfortable.
Later I’ll have clean clothes for you, and I’ll show
you how to get rid of your body wastes and where and how showers
are done here. For now, I want you to use the regular lap and
shoulder belts on your seats and remain there. We have another
boost coming up, although nothing like the last one, and then
it’ll be smooth as silk for the rest of the
journey.”
The second burst, when it came, was accompanied by the same
noise and vibration as the takeoff, but the giant’s hand was
a pale shadow of its old self, nor did it seem so long.
Still, Chu Li worried. What sort of new clothing? Would his
secret have to come out right away, before he’d had time to
prepare the others? And, of equal concern, what sort of man would
they send who could nursemaid four condemned prisoners for
forty-one days in close quarters? So far he had been almost too
nice and polite. They were, after all, not paying passengers, and
this was no luxury cruise.
The passenger cabin, as Sabatini called it, was a marvel in
itself. With a few commands in that strange tongue and the
manipulation of some hidden controls, the chairs vanished deep into
the floor and were replaced by large reclining leather seats that
could go all the way down to become quite comfortable beds. These
chairs swiveled a full hundred and eighty degrees and were placed
at equal distances around a polished laminated table. The rear of
the cabin was empty, providing perhaps six by nine meters that
could be used for walking or other exercise, and there were three
doors in the back wall. From watching Sabatini’s comings and
goings, the passengers guessed that the center door led to the next
area back in the ship, the right-hand door led to Sabatini’s
own private cabin, and the left-hand one opened on a room that
seemed to be filled with complex electronic gear. A thick red line
was painted on the floor about a meter in front of the doors, and
past that the chain would not go.
Forward of the table and chairs there were also three doors. The
center one, they were told, led forward to the next area and was
doubly dangerous, since it opened onto an inner air lock and seal,
and no areas forward now contained air. A red circle on the floor
in front of the door again proved to be the chain’s limit.
The door on the left, however, was the toilet, and that they could
enter.
The other door led to a shower, or at least what Sabatini called
a shower. There was a small outer area for putting down clothing,
then what looked like a huge plastic tube with one side cut away.
When one stood in the center of the tube, the open side closed, and
one was almost engulfed by a tremendous stream of liquid. The
shower had three cycles, which left the bather dry and very
clean.
For the first two days out the boredom was broken only by
occasional explanations from Sabatini. The new
clothing—white, loose-fitting cotton pajamas—allowed
Chu Li to maintain his fiction a while longer, although Deng Ho was
beginning to look at him curiously. Chu Li knew that the time was
coming when he could not avoid revealing his secret, but he could
not bring himself to do it—not yet.
Sabatini was generally not in the passenger cabin, occupying
himself elsewhere. This gave them some initial breathing room and
allowed for some expert examinations. Chu Li could find no routine
visual monitoring devices in the cabin, though it appeared that
Sabatini could watch them from either of his rooms through some
special plates. The speakers were certainly two-way, but there were
only two of them, and they were easily avoided. It was possible to
have private conversations by having one pair talk loudly near the
speakers while the other pair spoke in whispers.
“You have seen the place now. What do you think?”
Chow Dai asked Chu Li in such a circumstance.
“This room is customized far beyond what this ship usually
has,” he told her. “It is possible that it is used to
carry important people as well as prisoners. That might also
explain the lack of monitors and recorders. Both of the rooms in
back are also not standard. I particularly do not understand that
room full of gear or that headset he wears. This ship is totally
automatic, with a self-aware computer for a pilot. What could he be
doing from that room? And what is forward? I do not know how far up
we are in the ship, but if that middle door is an air lock, then it
shows no indicators like the ones on the sides and no seals,
either. There is air up there, at least for one more room.
I know there is. Why? And where are the space suits? They should be
in a compartment off this room, yet there seem to be no
compartments except the small ones that manage these chain devices
and the ones that deliver our food and drink on the little trays
and dispose of the waste. Much of this does not make
sense.”
“The food is strange, too,” she noted.
“It is foreign devil food, but it serves. This is not a
Chinese ship. What about these chain things?”
“The box is easy to fool. Chow Mai and I have already
found two ways to make it loosen up enough to slip the whole thing
off. The doors have simple electrical locks. I know the
combinations now from just observing the captain, but they are
almost identical to the locks on the toilet and shower. We could
break them if we had to.”
“I thought you’d need some tools for
that.”
“We have them. He never missed the two we required when
Chow Mai took them from his pack. The problem is his headset. It
really can override—we have watched him—and the tongue
is impossible.”
He nodded. “I must know more about the ship. When he
sleeps, you must show me how to slip this bond and help me enter
that mystery room with all the electronics. We must know everything
before we move.”
They were all supposed to sleep at the same time, but their
chains were left free in case they needed to use the toilet. No
matter how hard he tried, Chu Li could not manage the simple
maneuver to fool the box, but Chow Dai slipped hers and then freed
him. Chow Mai and Deng Ho remained in their beds, quietly on
watch.
Chu Li would have liked to explore the rest of the ship, but
whenever Sabatini had opened the rear door, a distant bell had
sounded; until they could somehow mask that alarm, they
couldn’t risk it. In any case, the mystery room was their
primary target.
Chow Dai did not want to chance using the combination. Instead,
she skillfully bypassed the combination board and sprang the lock
with two small and nearly silent pilfered electronic tools. When
the door swung back, Chu Li kissed her and entered the room.
The place was an electronic wonderland situated around a single
command chair. Much of the equipment was unfamiliar, though he
recognized some machines and could guess at the functions of
others. There was a small mind-print machine and a large number of
cartridges, which were numbered in the Arabic system rather than
labeled. The machine itself was far too simple for psychosurgery;
more than likely it was there so that Sabatini could instantly
learn other languages he needed or be updated on ship changes and
modifications. Monitors showed schematics of the ship at this level
and probably could display other levels in response to the correct
commands. One thing was certain: The areas of pressurization and
atmosphere, which were outlined in blue, extended far aft as well
as forward of the cabin they were in. The artificial gravity,
however, appeared limited to the passenger compartment and a much
larger compartment immediately behind it—almost certainly the
live animal transport area of which the captain had spoken.
Unfortunately, too much of the information on the monitors and
even the labels was useless, written again in that unknown script.
Chu Li looked longingly at the mindprint machine and cartridges.
Somewhere there was probably the language he needed, but which one?
He certainly didn’t have the time to learn them all.
Still, there was far more equipment here than any human
companion on this ship would require, even more than would be
needed for any conceivable human intervention. It was more like the
kind of compartment required for someone to run the whole
ship—but that was done by computer.
The only logical explanation struck him with the force of a
blow. Song Ching’s father had already known that
there was a human override built into the ships. Suppose Sabatini
really was the captain? Suppose the computer pilot was not
independent but his subordinate, subject to him? He remembered the
complex helmets in the illegal tech cult’s fortress
laboratories. They had built them from scratch and had assumed that
they would have to hardwire the connection. Suppose that was what
the omnipresent headset was really for? Sabatini was running
his own ship!
He turned back toward the door only to see it suddenly shut with
a speed and force he’d never before seen on a door. He tried
to open it but could not. He was stuck in there!
“You just stay right there and don’t touch a
thing!” Sabatini’s voice came over a small speaker in
the console. “I will tend to you as soon as I have tended to
your friends, and I will be far gentler to them if you just sit in
the chair and relax until I come for you.”
There was no malice in his tone, but Chu Li had no doubt that
the captain would not hesitate to carry out his implied threat.
There was nothing to do but sit and try to figure out as much
additional information as he could from what he could see.
After an eternity, the door opened and the full cabin lights
flooded the compartment. Sabatini, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt,
stood there with a small weapon in his hand. He had his small
headset on as well. “All right—time to get out
now,” he said casually. “And I was beginning to wonder
if this would be a boring trip. All right—out!
Now!”
When Chu Li emerged, he found both the girls kneeling on the
floor, their chains reattached, their hands bound behind their
backs, and their ankles secured. Chow Dai gave him an expression
that was filled with both hurt and apology. Deng Ho was still in
his chair, strapped to it by hand and leg cuffs and unable to
move.
Chu Li looked at the weapon in Sabatini’s hand. It was a
very small thing of red plastic with a gauge on its handle, a small
button for a trigger, and a metallic point where the barrel
ended.
“I’ve already demonstrated the stinger to your girl
friends,” the captain warned. “If you’d like one,
I’ll be happy to give it. This little line here shows the
amount of power it’ll put out in a room this size. Right now
it’s set for a debilitating shock. Halfway and it’ll
knock you out for a couple of minutes. All the way up and it might
stop your heart.”
“I believe you,” Chu Li responded hollowly.
“All right, then—over here. Chain on. That’s
it. Now—hands behind your back. Good.” Chu Li felt
pressure and found his hands held by very firm handcuffs that
allowed no real give or play at all. “Now—on your
knees.” He did so, and two stiff leg cuffs were also locked
into place. He faced the two girls on the opposite side of the open
space.
Sabatini relaxed. “Now, I told you I could be mean if
somebody tried to take advantage of me. I figured you might be
pulling something, covering talks with other talks and whispering
campaigns, and I knew from the records that the girls were experts
at locks. When I sleep, I put the alarms on all these doors so they
sound in my cabin. I just decided to see what you were up
to.”
Chu Li understood now how it worked. The captain switched on the
alarm, and when it rang and awakened him, he had merely to grab his
headset to find where the trouble was and who was causing it. He
then simply commanded the door to shut, overriding the lock, then
took the others with his weapon.
“All right—it was one slip,” Sabatini said
almost kindly. “If I was mean and nasty or even smart,
I’d just leave you all like that for the next thirty-nine
days but pull you all to the wall with the box behind your back
like your hands and feed you like animals from trays. Or send you
back to the animal cages, maybe. But that’s only because this
sort of stuff puts me in a real bad mood. Now, if somebody got me
in a better mood, I might actually forgive and
forget.”
He walked back over to his open cabin door, reached in, and
brought out a rather nasty-looking straight knife. Then he muttered
something into his headphone, and abruptly both women were jerked
back to the wall and slammed against it. Since the chain emerged
from a point in the bulkhead above their waists, it had the effect
of suspending them slightly, leaning forward because of their bound
hands, barely touching the floor with their toes.
Sabatini went over to Chow Dai. “You’ve got an ugly
face,” he told her, “but I’m curious about the
rest of you.” Using the knife, he cut away her pullover and
her pants and flung them to one side, leaving her hanging there by
the chain, naked. She did, in fact, have quite a nice body, but
something made the captain stop and command the chain to come out a
bit. He caught her and turned her around to face the wall.
Chu Li gasped, and Sabatini was almost equally appalled. Chow
Dai’s back was a mass of welts and scar tissue almost from
the shoulders to the buttocks. “Holy—somebody really
did a job on you, didn’t they, beautiful?” he
commented. He lifted her up, then put her back on the floor in the
kneeling position. “You stay there. Let’s see if your
sister got the same treatment.”
She had. If anything, Chow Mai’s scars were worse. The
evident brutality was so gross and unexpected that even Sabatini
hadn’t been prepared for it. He put the sister back down in
the kneeling position on the floor as well.
“Well,” the captain muttered. “Nothing about
that in the record. Damn it, you girls wouldn’t be
any fun at all.” He paused a moment. “But then, hope
springs eternal, doesn’t it? There’s lots of
things not in the official record.” He turned and stalked
back across the room. “Isn’t that right,
Mister Chu?”
Now it was Chu Li’s turn to be suspended against the wall
and slowly have the clothing cut away as the others watched.
Everyone except the captain seemed shocked, surprised, and amazed
at what was revealed. Song Ching, after all, had been genetically
designed for perfection. Nor were there any marks on this
body, not so much as a scar or blemish.
“Now, that’s more like it,” Sabatini
proclaimed lustfully as he put Chu Li back down in the kneeling
position.
Chow Dai’s mouth seemed permanently open in amazement, all
embarrassment from her own exposure pushed aside. “Chu
Li—you are a girl! But—how is that
possible?”
“I’d like to know that one myself,” Sabatini
put in. “My manifest says you’re a boy, you’ve
got a voice to match that, and you passed a Master System identity
check as a male.”
So here it was. He knew he could not be mystical; the Chow
sisters would accept it, but Deng Ho—who could only stare in
wonder, not a little lust on his face as well in spite of his
bindings—and the captain would never buy it. He had worked
out a story, though, that explained the facts even if he
didn’t know if it was really possible. He’d been
refining it for days.
“It is none of my doing,” he lied.
“They—changed me. A surgeon and a psychochemist. But
they never completed the job. They changed me from a boy to a girl,
but you can tell from my voice, my ways, that they never changed me
inside.”
“The outside does just fine by me,” Sabatini
noted.
“But why would they do such a thing?” Chow Dai asked
him.
“They were remaking me to replace somebody. Somebody
important who was sent down for work but who had power enough to
fake it. Song Ching, the daughter of the chief administrator. They
had no other use for me, and they decided I was about her size. I
had no choice. But they were fooled near the completion of their
goal. Orders came from somewhere that I was to be sent here. They
could not change the orders, and they could not give someone else
my prints and patterns, so they had to send me.”
“Rat—is that really you?” Deng Ho
asked in wonder.
“Deep inside, my cousin. I am sorry. They fixed me so I
would not know myself what had been done until the day I left, when
it wore off.”
“Oh, I am so sorry, Chu Li!” Chow Dai cried.
“Why did you not tell me when you knew?”
“Sooner or later I was going to tell you,” he
replied honestly. “I—I just cared for you, Chow Dai. I
am a man in a woman’s body. I feel as a man feels, as I felt
before they did this to me. You have your scars, and you were
pleased that I looked past them, but how could a normal woman look
past this?”
Sabatini had let the touching scene go on. He was somewhat
fascinated himself by all this, particularly when the name Song
Ching had been mentioned. The reason they had all been forced
through an extra and complete security check was that Song Ching,
the daughter of the chief administrator of the China District, had
been reported vanished from a maximum security area. He knew the
powers those butchers had. They were perfectly capable of turning a
worthless kid into a duplicate of this girl and maybe turning this
girl into something else, somebody she’d disposed of and then
replaced, or maybe even somebody outside China.
Her story held together. For a moment he thought she might be
the real Song Ching, although why anybody’d pull strings to
be sent to Melchior was beyond understanding, but the fact that
she’d passed the security exit test as a boy named Chu Li
made her story ironclad. Briefly he considered not turning her over
at Melchior but bringing her back and passing her off as the real
one, which would save a lot of asses and earn him some real
powerful friends, but by this time they’d run security checks
up the rear and the plot would be easily exposed—which would
only send him back to Melchior—this time in chains
and one-way.
The captain looked her over. “Well, kid, they did a really
great job. No scars, no nothing. Perfect. I think you got to get
used to being a girl no matter what your head says. They threw away
all the old parts, anyway. I think maybe you ought to learn what
it’s like to be a girl these days Uh uh! Careful!
You can’t do anything but sit.”
Chu Li had attempted to lunge forward in anger at the
captain’s words, but it had been fruitless.
“Now you sit and listen,” he continued.
“You’re property and you got a great body and you are
being sent to hell. They’re going to love you on
Melchior. A slightly incomplete job but an expert one, just up
their fields of interest. They’ll study you, pick your brain
and chemistry apart, then they’ll have what they want. Then
they’ll complete the job and make you somebody’s
present. Since you look like this Song Ching, they won’t want
you anywhere where her father would notice, but they’ll find
a bunch on Melchior in a region where chief administrators never
even look and stick you there, all right, only you won’t be
interested in machines or escape anymore. It won’t hurt
anything to start now, and it might put me in a good enough mood to
forget this little incident.”
“I will never dishonor myself so!” Chu Li spat.
“Perhaps they can make me as you say, but then I will not
know my shame. I will fight you even if I fail!”
“Chu Li! You must not!” both sisters said at once.
“Look at our bodies! And it was to no avail! The price is
great enough without adding more!”
“You do not know what it is like,” Chow Dai
continued alone. “You cannot. But can’t you see, under
that smile of his he is one of them! No different from the
ones who did this to us?”
“Listen to her,” the captain urged.
“She’s right, you know. I can be quite—creative,
within my charter.”
“Never!” Chu Li exclaimed. “To me it would be
a perversion as well as an assault! What does it matter to me if
you do things to this body? It would be better for me if you
did make it less beautiful!”
“You’ve got a point,” the captain admitted. He
thought for a moment, then said something in his language into the
headset. They waited, not knowing what was going to happen, and he
seemed both relaxed and patient. Finally the rear center door
opened, and an emergency medical unit appeared.
“Now, I don’t want all the bother of keeping you
shackled or caged all the time, not if I can help it,” he
told them, again sounding casual and almost friendly. “There
are many ways around it, but I’m still in a bad mood, having
been awakened and all that. It seems to me the heart of
this—incident—are our two locksmiths here. I
can’t see that doing a little more to them here is going to
change anything on Melchior, either. Seems to me that if you
don’t have any thumbs or index fingers, you won’t be
stealing things and picking locks anymore, will you?”
“No!” Deng Ho cried out. “They have suffered
enough, you monster! You cannot do this!”
“He won’t do it,” Chu Li responded. “He
has to deliver his cargo undamaged.”
“Oh, of course I will,” the captain assured them.
“They don’t mind a few things like that. They
understand. See, you of all people should know that those types can
grow back things like missing fingers and the like if they feel the
need. Look at what they grew out of you!”
Chu Li’s spirits sank as he realized the truth of that,
even if they hadn’t really grown anything on him. The two
girls’ faces were masks of terror. “All right, you
serpent. What do you want of me? To ravish my body? Is that the
price?”
“At the start, yes. Now I want more. I want cooperation.
Enthusiasm. It will be a long trip yet. I want a servant. Someone
who will do exactly what I say without needing restraints. If I
don’t cut their fingers, I must leave their hands
where they are. Makes it inconvenient for them to eat, so they must
be fed. I want a mistress who will do my bidding without even
thinking about it.” He drew the little pistol.
“Hesitate, argue, or fail to please me in any way for the
next month and you’ll feel this.” He fired at the
torso.
Chu Li had never felt such pain, and he cried out.
“Betray me, fail to do my will, or act or even speak
with them about acting in any way against me and it will cost
your girl friend’s sister her thumbs. Twice and your girl
friend loses hers. As for the fat boy on the chair, if he gets out
of line in any way or is involved in anything at all I don’t
like, I’ll bring this little thing out, and then I’ll
be the only whole male on this ship. Understand?”
The Chow sisters looked pleadingly at Chu Li. “All
right,” he said. “I will do whatever you
say.”
There was a nearly immediate jolt from the little gun that again
produced agony. “From now on, your name, the only name you
will answer to, even to your friends here, is Slave. And you will
call me Master or Honorable Captain. My slave here will refer to
herself as a she at all times, and so will you all—only the
feminine will be used when referring to or speaking to her. I want
her to get a basic truth through her head once and for all.
“Additionally, all of you will bow in my presence, and
you, Slave, will kneel to me, head bowed, anticipating my desires.
To prevent more thefts, all of you will go naked until we arrive at
Melchior, and as extra insurance our two sisters will continue to
have their hands bound behind their backs—unless the slave,
here, fouls up and they lose sufficient fingers to be a threat no
longer. What do you think of that, Slave?”
“Whatever you command, Honorable Master,” Chu Li
responded, teeth clenched but head bowed.
Sabatini went over to him. “I know what you’re
thinking, but I plan to change that. You see, you’ve lost
everything. Everything but your honor and your dignity. I will
strip those from you. You’re the only one of this bunch who
really has any. That’s why you are the leader. Before the end
of this voyage, you will break.”
He sighed and dismissed the medical robot, then went back to his
cabin for a moment. He emerged soon with a set of U-shaped devices,
then unlocked all chains from Chu Li and commanded her to lie flat
on the floor in a particularly embarrassing position. The four
restraints descended to hold down her arms and legs. Then he began
removing his own clothing and weapons.
He made the rest watch in anguished silence as he first
performed the ultimate indignities upon their companion. He was
deliberately brutal about it, but he clearly was enjoying
himself.
Sabatini kept his slave apart from the others in a small, dark
closet barely four meters square and only a meter and a half high.
The only light came from a small grill right at the top of her box.
She could not see out, and the vibrating compartments at the rear
of the cage masked any noise or movement outside. She would be
there for long, horrible periods, then suddenly taken out and
checked over to see how she reacted. Sometimes he didn’t like
the slightest thing and shoved her back. She was allowed to see her
friends only in his presence, and then she had to speak to them
servilely and in a very loud voice. Infractions were met with
deprivation of food, water, and bathroom stops.
Clearly he wasn’t neglecting the other three. Deng Ho
seemed lost most of the time in a world of his own, while the two
girls were vacant, listless, and resigned.
He no longer restrained her when mounting sexual attacks, but he
was even rougher and more brutal and demanding. Early on,
he’d left his shock pistol on a table near his bed in the
cabin where he had her, and she had gotten it and fired it at him,
over and over. He had just laughed. He had removed the little
charger and deliberately left it there. He then actually handed her
his knife and invited attack, but she lost the knife and her
footing before she made the fist real move. Then he had worked her
over with just his hands, leaving painful bruises that did not show
on her skin, and raped her, before tossing her back in her hole to
be wakened every hour or so for an extremely long period but denied
food, water, and bathroom.
His treatment so brutalized her that when he finally let her
out, she was so sincerely servile, so letter perfect, he let her
sleep. Her behavior after that remained so perfect that he began
easing up, slowly but progressively. He cleaned the closet and
disinfected it. He let her shower. He gave her good food. A few
more very minor slips brought renewed punishment, but they were the
last gasps of resistance. She found it increasingly difficult to
think of anything but the ship, her duties, her behavior, pleasing
him. After a bit longer, the only thing that mattered to her was
pleasing him. He continued to leave weapons and other things of
interest to the old Chu Li around, and if she saw them at all, she
did not even think of picking them up or using them.
She began to hope that she would be so useful, so obedient, so
perfect that he would not think of turning her over at Melchior but
would retain her on the ship. He obliquely encouraged this idea,
then released her forever from her closet and allowed her to rejoin
the others. She was not, however, to have any private conversations
with any of them.
The other three had been faring only a little better, with
routine deprivation and punishments by Sabatini’s pistol. It
was what he had done with, and to, the one they’d known as
Chu Li that was the telling blow. If the strong, educated one could
be broken so completely without even any technological aids, then
there was no hope.
When they were twenty-three days out, although they’d lost
all track of time, Deng Ho committed suicide.
It had not been easy, but it had certainly been well planned. He
did it in the bathroom by wrapping his waist chain excess around
his neck and then somehow getting it caught up in the
toilet-flushing mechanism. It must have been an agonizingly slow
strangulation, yet he had resisted all impulses to stop it and had
not cried out, even at the last.
The act shocked all three of the remaining prisoners, and it
really irritated Sabatini. He had spent so much time on Chu Li that
he’d really neglected to keep close watch on the others, and
particularly on the quiet chubby boy who had never really given him
any trouble. He actually felt a little sorry for the kid, but he
was more upset that perhaps this was only the first. He doubted
that Chu Li would try it; she was too anxious to keep in good with
him in the pathetic hope that he’d keep her aboard—if
he could, he would, but they’d never allow it. Instead, he
now had a black mark, and he needed a good line to get out of
it.
He decided that a burial would be a nice gesture. He had no
desire to build up any more resentment. And so, after speaking some
words, he’d taken the body to the port center air lock, where
the other three could watch, and placed it respectfully inside. He
was even indulgent to their reactions. “You may say farewell
and whatever prayers you wish for him,” he told them.
“If you please, Honorable Captain,” Chow Mai said,
somewhat more animated than she’d been in a long time.
“Where will he go now?”
“Normally, you would enter the air lock in a pressure suit
and then pump all the air out before going into space. I’m
keeping the air inside, and I’ll pump the pressure way up.
Then, when the outer door opens, he will be launched into space by
the escaping air. He will drift in space forever.”
Chow Mai, who had always liked the boy, had a few tears for him.
“That is good,” she responded, almost to herself.
“He will become one with the stars, a constellation in the
heavens.”
The two girls both said prayers and farewells, but Chu Li stood
back, silent. She had found the body of the boy and had seen the
grotesque face and distorted, popped eyes. It was a haunting
grotesquerie worse than anything yet experienced in this horror
odyssey.
The two sisters stepped back, and Sabatini made certain that the
body was arranged in the air lock.
Something snapped in Chu Li’s brain. The compassion of
the innocent Chu Li who had been killed; the haughty pride of Song
Ching, reduced and violated; the relative innocence of the two
sisters, punished all out of proportion to their crimes; the cruel,
calculating Sabatini who personified the system’s least
common denominator; the quiet innocence and inner despair of Deng
Ho, who chose to die a slow, agonizing death rather than see or
accept any more . . .
“No,” she whispered under her breath. Sabatini
didn’t hear it, but the two sisters did, and they looked at
each other, then at her, not quite knowing what was about to happen
but ready to assist. Chu Li moved up behind the captain silently.
He was a good fifteen centimeters taller than she and far stronger,
but she knew that this was the moment. Risk it now, and perhaps
lose, or be a slave forever and deservedly so.
With one motion she jumped, grabbing the headphones from the
captain’s head and striking his face with the little
microphone. As he was still turning in shock and surprise, she gave
him a push forward with all her adrenaline-pumped might. He
staggered, but a hand caught the side of the air lock door.
The two sisters, hands still tied behind their backs, ran at him
and butted him in the midsection with their heads. He grunted and
fell backward into the air lock, almost on top of Deng Ho’s
body. He recovered quickly. “Why you little bitches!
I’ll—” he bellowed, but Chu Li had already
begun to swing the door shut on him. When he saw what was
happening, he rushed against the door, and all three girls lent
their bodies to pushing it closed. It was fury versus desperation,
and desperation won. The door shut with a hiss, and Chu Li, while
still pressing against it, managed to turn the wheel that locked
it.
“I don’t care what you do—put your feet in it
if you have to—but don’t let him turn it back from that
side!” she shouted to the sisters, then ran to the panel.
Sabatini was lazy; she knew he would have preprogrammed the
sequence, but she had to find the right control and throw it. The
sisters were having a hard time holding the wheel by backing
against it and gripping it with their hands as best they could, but
the safety lights kept flashing yellow, green, yellow, green.
There were only five buttons, and she pressed each of them in
turn, but nothing happened. She knew the sisters were weakening and
that he would soon get that door open. She kept pushing the buttons
in desperation, one after the other, hoping to catch the right
button at the right point. It had to work. It just
had to.
The red light suddenly came on, and a bell sounded. Sabatini
stopped for a moment, and through the small glass window they could
see his expression of desperation. He pounded, swore, then renewed
his attack on the lock, but now Chu Li was on the wheel. The whole
procedure took perhaps forty seconds, yet it seemed like years.
Since it was a pressurized burial, the outer door opened pretty
quickly.
Deng Ho’s body moved right out, but Sabatini grabbed hold
of the wheel. His body was horizontal, his hands gripped the wheel,
his face was pressed in fear against the viewing port, but the air
was exhausted in an instant, and the artificial gravity plunged him
back down.
Chow Dai, exhausted, slumped to the floor, followed quickly by
her sister. “Do you think—you can close—that
outside door?” she managed to ask.
“Not yet. Not for many minutes,” Chu Li responded.
“I do not know if someone can live in space with no air, but
I do know that no one can hold his breath for more than five
minutes. We will give it ten.” She sank down, also exhausted.
Her arms and shoulder muscles ached, and she felt as if she’d
sprained both wrists. Still, it had been worth it. That one moment
of stark terror on Sabatini’s face was payment for much
inflicted misery, brutality, and indignity. Deng Ho’s gesture
had not been in vain.
Chow Dai crawled over and gave Chu Li a kiss. “Welcome
back,” she said.
“Not for long, but I do not regret it. We have killed him,
and the ship will know it. The gas should come at any
moment.”
Chow Dai looked disappointed. “I had forgotten about that.
I suppose that was why he was so confident. Foreign devils have no
idea of what honor is. Still, it would have been nice to have won
completely.”
Chow Mai listened, thinking. “It would seem to me that if
this gas was coming, it would have come by now. Either it is not
going to come or he is not dead.”
Chu Li felt a new shot of energy and stood up. “You are
right.” She looked through the air lock window and saw the
interior, still lighted. She could not see the area right by the
door, but there was no sign of anyone or anything in the air lock,
and the outer door was definitely open, the alarm bell still
ringing. There was certainly no air in there, and she knew that
space had to be very cold, yet there was something nagging at her
brain, troubling her.
Gravity. They had weight here, even if they felt lighter than
back home. The whole section had gravity, including the air lock.
Sabatini clearly had not been sucked out with the air, although it
had been close. Why was there now no body slumped down, hands
frozen to the wheel in a death grip?
The ship had been elaborately and illegally modified, and there
were all sorts of compartments and gadgets built into the walls.
Might there not also be some sort of emergency compartment in the
air lock? She couldn’t see how a body could stand a vacuum,
even for a few moments, but what if it could? There was better than
two meters of air lock. Something had to be inside those thick
walls.
“We must find something to jam this door. Before we close
the outer door, which will automatically flood the compartment with
air, we must jam the wheel so it cannot be opened from the outside.
He might be alive in some rescue compartment there. We must examine
as much of the ship as we can to make sure such a one cannot
otherwise reenter the ship.”
If he was in there someplace, he’d be in a small,
probably dark compartment much like a closet, with some sort of
breathing device but little in the way of food and water for more
than a day and certainly no bathroom. The only way to make certain,
though, was to risk keeping the outer door open, jam the inner, and
somehow make contact with the ship’s pilot.
She reached down and picked up his headset. She had not brought
honor, glory, or dignity to herself by serving him, but she had
always been observant. Now she thought she could imitate his odd,
animal-like growls that commanded some of the locks. The headset
had been bent out of shape, but it did not appear damaged. She put
it on, although it was too large for her head, and spoke one of the
commands in his language that she knew overrode the electronics
room lock.
The door opened, and to her surprise she heard a growling,
unintelligible response in the earphones. For a moment it startled
her, and she wondered if there were others aboard in areas they had
never seen, but then she realized that it was the computer
pilot.
She had spotted something in the electronics room long ago that
was the first priority, and that was a complete electronics and
mechanical tool set. It was almost too heavy for her, but she got
it out and open, and the Chow sisters were able to tell her which
tool to use. Shortly the girls’ hands were free, although the
cuffs themselves remained as oversized bracelets. One of the waist
chains they wrapped through the spokes of the air lock wheel, then
secured it with a small hand-held welder to the base of the nearest
chair.
They were all tired and aching but far too excited to sleep. Chu
Li checked the schematic of the ship’s passenger level on the
monitor. “If I read this correctly, then the whole level is
pressurized—has air, that is, that is fit for us—except
this area all the way in the rear. Those double lines front and
back are air locks, but if this color is air, then they
are not active. Shall we go see?”
She opened the center door with a command in that strange
language, and a bell sounded distantly—but nothing else
happened. She was almost relieved to hear the response coming from
the earpiece; it confirmed her belief that it was the computer
responding and not anyone else.
They went along a narrow corridor, then Chu Li stopped.
“This was my home for those long times,” she told them
gravely, pointing to a lower storage closet. “After just one
week in there, you would sell body, soul, and honor to anyone who
would keep you from going back.”
As Sabatini had warned them, animal cages filled the huge
storage area, all designed for just about anything that could be
imagined and some that were beyond imagining. The cages were empty
this trip and apparently newly cleaned and reinforced. Beyond them
were a large number of sealed containers, all labeled in a language
or code none of them could understand, fitted together into vast
clumps for useful storage. The path between was so narrow, they had
to go single file.
The compartment narrowed until they emerged at an air lock. As
she had expected, the light was green. When they opened it, the
noise of great motors was almost deafening, but Chu Li finally got
the courage to enter and walked the short distance to the far door.
Peering through the window, she gasped, then continued to stare,
fascinated. “Come! Look!” she called. Nervously, the
two sisters joined her.
Before them was a second enormous cargo room. Larger than the
first and filled with containers, it was spinning around at a
dizzying pace.
“Why does the room spin?” Chow Mai asked Chu Li.
She thought for a moment. “I’m not sure. I seem to
remember from very long ago—her
memories—something about this. Ah! I think I know,
but there is only one way to know for sure. Do you notice how light
you feel?”
Only then did they notice how little gravity they felt here.
“I do not think the room spins at all,” she told
them. “I believe that it is we who are spinning. You
must trust me on this, for it is far too complex to explain, but
spinning is how many spaceships make gravity in space.”
“We are not spinning!” the sisters
responded in unison. “That room is!”
“There is only one way to find out, and if I am wrong it
is a dangerous one. It is to go in there. See that net stretched
there? I think you jump and grab on to that and then use the
handholds to go on.”
“No. It is too dangerous,” Chow Dai responded.
“What does it matter who is spinning? There is nothing in
there that we can use.”
Chu Li was disappointed but had to agree. Without her, these two
were lost in the technology of this vessel, which to them was
incomprehensible and magical. Now was not the time to see what
weightlessness was like.
Reluctantly, she turned and led them out through the container
corridor, past the cages and the closet, and back into the
passenger cabin. She was somehow relieved to find it just as they
had left it.
She looked again in the electronics room and at the mindprint
machine and its numbered cartridges. “That machine makes you
learn things you do not know or be things you are not,” she
told them. “It is how the captain learned our language so
well. I fear that we will have to try them and see if one has the
key to speaking to the ship.”
“But would that not be in his true language?” Chow
Dai asked. “Would he have something to teach his own native
tongue in there?”
“I doubt if the pilot computer speaks the captain’s
language. All such computers are produced by Master System in
factories peopled only by machines. They speak their own language,
a language of numbers, on a level humans cannot possibly
comprehend. The way humans talk to them is by a shell, a pretend
environment where what the computer speaks is translated into a
human tongue and where human language is translated into
machine. These ships are built according to standards that existed long
ago, in the times of our ancient ancestors, and those outside of
Earth continue to use those ancient languages.”
“But it could have been changed to any, could it
not?” Chow Dai persisted.
“It could, but I do not think it was. I have heard the
captain curse many times, and it is a truth that one tends to curse
in one’s native tongue. His curses were equally
unintelligible, but they were in a softer, more melodic tongue than
the one used for opening the doors. It is a harsh, nonmelodic,
almost machinelike language, an ugly tongue. It is there. It
must be there. Otherwise we will arrive at Melchior
anyway, just without the captain. I worry about what might be on
some of the others. There are close to forty cartridges here, and
only nine spaceports on all of Earth, so a captain would have need
of only the nine languages of the Administrative Centers for each
spaceport. I know nothing about the other worlds, but even if we
give them nine or ten, it still leaves half the cartridges
unexplained.”
“But if we must, we will try them all and see,” Chow
Mai said pragmatically.
“I fear we must, yet I do not like it. Anything may be
programmed by a master mindprint machine on those cartridges.
Things that change your mind, your memory, everything. Some of
these might be traps for the unwary, just in case ones like us got
to this point. Even if not, these are to be taken sparingly, and
never more than one a day, to avoid confusing and muddying the
mind. We do not have thirty-eight days.”
“There are three of us,” Chow Mai pointed out.
“Each of us could try one and see. Perhaps fortune will
smile. If not, we try again, then wait to see if anyone has
troubles. We have nothing to lose. Just hours ago we had lost all
hope and you were in his power.”
“You are right,” Chu Li responded. “Let us
begin now, for when we sleep this time, it will be long and
deep. Perhaps we can at least find some pattern to their
arrangement. I can read the numbers, although they are in a foreign
system. That type of number is used in all computer work. One of us
will take the number one, which is an odd number and at the start.
Another will take thirty-eight, an even number at the end. The
third will take nineteen, an odd number in the middle. Then ten,
twenty, and thirty. Then we will see if we can find a pattern.
Beware, though. It does more than teach; it changes the mind. I am
a living example of that.”
“I will go first,” Chow Mai said, “because you
will have to show us how it is operated.”
“It is quite simple. Just sit in the chair there and
relax. No! Do not put the headset on as yet! Not until
there is a cartridge in the system. To do so would cause brain
damage. Now—watch. Number one in just so, and only this way.
Wait for the small green light there. So! Now you may put
on the headset, and I will adjust it.”
Chow Mai seemed almost disappointed. “I feel nothing.”
“You will. Now, put your head back on the rest and close
your eyes. When I push this activator, it will begin. Push it again
and it will stop, so if we see something terrible happening it can
be halted by being quick. Otherwise it will run as long as it runs,
and you will be awake yet as if asleep. Ready? Chow Dai—you
should push the activator.”
Chow Dai hesitated a moment, then pushed it. The green light
changed to amber, then to flashing red.
Suddenly Chow Mai said, “It asks a question in my head. A
single word I do not know.”
Chu Li thought a moment. She hadn’t even considered
password protections for a setup like this, “Answer with the
same word as it asks, only give it as a statement,” she
instructed Chow Mai. “No need to say it. Just think
it.”
Chow Mai looked confused but sat back, closed her eyes, and did
as instructed. The program started running, and Chu Li breathed a
sigh of relief. With a computer she was sure she could break any
password, but she needed the password to get to the computer. This
computer’s password, however, was the default:
“password.”
The machine ran for a nervous half hour with Chow Mai showing no
visible reaction, then switched off. Chu Li lifted off the headset.
“Remember never to remove the cartridge until this is first
removed,” she said.
Chow Mai opened her eyes dreamily and saw the worried
expressions of the others. “Do not worry, my sisters, for I
am well,” she assured them, and wasn’t quite certain
why they seemed even more upset.
“Chow Mai—do you understand me, your
twin?”
She did understand, although it took some concentration
to reply. Her first efforts were a hopeless mixture of two
languages that could not be mixed, and it took a while before she
was able even with difficulty to switch comfortably.
“It is Arabic,” Chu Li explained. “One of the
Center spaceport languages. I have heard it spoken, although I do
not know it. It is not the language of the ship, this I know. It
will be difficult for her to sort one from the other for a while,
but she will be able to separate them as time passes. This is good.
One is a language program. If thirty-eight is not, we will try
number two, perhaps. Chow Mai—go. Lie. Down. Yes.”
Still feeling a bit dizzy and confused, Chow Mai went out and
collapsed into one of the chairs. Chu Li removed cartridge one and
replaced it with number thirty-eight, then got into the chair and
put on the headset. She nodded at Chow Dai, then relaxed. The
sister pressed the activator.
Number thirty-eight proved to be a highly technical program
about the ship itself and paid particular attention to the
restraint system, locks, and other protective and safety devices.
It was not designed as language-specific but searched in the mind
of the user for the right words and terms; if such terms were not
present or possible to construct, one simply didn’t
understand all of the program. Song Ching’s technological
center Mandarin, however, was more than adequate for the task.
She awakened feeling elated and recovered quickly, thanks to her
long experience with such devices. She removed the headset and saw
Chow Dai just coming back into the room. The girl was apologetic.
“I am sorry. When I saw you were in no distress, I went to
see how Chow Mai was getting on. I did not think it would be so
short.”
“Long enough,” Chu Li responded. “That was a
technical tape, the last probably made to date. It makes many
references I cannot totally get because they are obviously
referring to past modifications, but I know now how much of this
operates. I know the restraint systems, the alarms, the door and
hatch combinations, and much more. I even know what many of these
instruments here do, and what the numbers mean. I know, for
example, that those two numbers compared mean that we are about
sixty percent of the way to Melchior, but I also know that we have
under a week before we come under traffic control that will be able
to sense if we deviate from our planned course and raise alarms. We
do not have much time if we are to take control of the ship
unnoticed.”
“Shall I take number two now?”
“No. I am used to it, and the technical orientation did
nothing to me. Let us see just how far the languages go.” She
chose cartridge number ten, then inserted it in the machine in
place of number thirty-eight. “I will do this one as well.
There should be one of us around with her wits about her, and you
are it. Your turn will come in due course.” She replaced the
headsets and lay back. “When you are ready.”
Chow Dai pushed the activator, then waited. This time Chu Li was
not quiet but started to breathe hard, then to moan and thrust. Her
hands went to her crotch and seemed to be doing something, but it
was unclear what. What was clear was that this was not a
tape like the others. Fearful, particularly of the sounds from the
chair, Chow Dai pushed the activator off.
Chu Li came down very, very slowly and seemed almost
disappointed when she realized that she was no longer switched in.
She opened her eyes and looked at Chow Dai; her expression, though
foreign to Chu Li’s nature, was one Chow Dai had seen before
in unpleasant circumstances.
Chu Li had been connected only a couple of minutes and so was
able to regain control, although her body trembled slightly.
“It was—” she gasped, breathing hard
“—a sex tape. A very graphic one. I was—a
man—in the body of a man—amidst a horde of foreign,
exotic women. All were naked; all were there for my pleasure. I was
to choose one and do as I pleased. It was such a feeling of power,
of dominance. I am—was—highly aroused.”
Chow Dai did not comprehend the depth of the experience, but she
understood the reason for such a cartridge and why Chu Li had
responded to it. “Now at least we know where our honorable
captain got his urges so readily and what he must have done to
amuse himself when no one else was aboard.”
“Yes, I think so. I had heard that such things existed,
but I had never experienced one before. The images are like
memories, like reality. It is as if the scene actually existed for
me in the past, and whichever girl I chose I would have bedded. To
the mind, there would be no difference between the reality and the
illusion. I feel the desire to go back and complete it, but I dare
not. Even now I feel the urge to grab you and make mad, passionate
love to you.”
Chow Dai felt relieved and smiled. “Is that such a bad
thing?”
“To me, no. I have wanted it from the first. But to you it
would be perverse.”
“No. What the guards did to us was perverse. What Sabatini
did to you and to us is perverse. Nothing done in love that harms
no one can be perverse. You are half man, half woman. That is
enough.”
They used the bed in Sabatini’s cabin, the scene of much
of Chu Li’s violation, but it was different now, and
afterward they fell asleep, exhausted more by the events of the day
than by their own final efforts.
The next day Chu Li, feeling better than she ever had in her
whole brief incarnation, decided to tackle things for real. Chow
Mai hit another of the pornographic male-oriented cartridges but
was not affected in the same way Chu Li had been. Rather, she
seemed to have shifted mentally from the male point of view to that
of the females in it, and although they stopped the program quite
early, she wound up not only very, very turned on but also
nonaggressive to the point of total passivity. She also, for some
reason, pleaded to have her chains put back on, but they decided
that the effects would wear down in a while and ignored her
requests.
There were a number of other languages, including one cartridge
that seemed to have no particular effect on Chow Dai other than to
improve slightly her grammar and vocabulary. They decided that it
must have been Mandarin Chinese.
They also discovered many more programs on shipboard design and
construction, mathematical tables, basic celestial navigation, and
computer module design and operation. One showed the complete
interconnect between Sabatini’s command module in the rear
and the computer pilot, confirming Chu Li’s suspicions that
this was one of those very ships where Master System was not in
charge. And, as suspected, there were some traps.
The machine clicked off, and Chow Dai removed the headset and
waited for Chu Li to come out of it. The cartridge had seemed
uneventful to the observer and had taken the normal amount of time,
so there had been no reason to think anything was wrong. Finally,
Chu Li came around, then sat up and looked around, almost
panicking.
“What’s the matter?” the sisters asked in
unison. “What has happened to you?”
“I have been stung,” she told them. “I have
spent a half hour in a pleasant dreamworld, and now I wake up to
find a nightmare.”
As they watched, concerned, she looked around vacantly, then
tried to get out of the chair and stumbled, holding on to it for
support.
“There is only darkness,” she told them, a pained
tone in her voice. “I am blind.”
CHU LI HAD EXPERIENCED ONE BIG SCARE ON THE way
to the spaceship. Just before boarding, they were all required to
clear security by placing both hands on a plate and looking through
a binocularlike eyepiece. He had been sure that the other three
would leave without him once the machine, which was definitely
linked to Master System, identified him not as Chu Li but as Song
Ching.
But the machine had not. Incredibly, it positively matched eye-
and fingerprints with Chu Li and showed a picture of the disguised
Song Ching on the security monitor. The success at the checkpoint
was as startling and disturbing as failure would have been. He knew
that the system was hardly infallible, but nobody could fool Master
System to this degree. It was unthinkable. The only explanation
possible was that the gods themselves had intervened.
Captain Sabatini was correct that the ship was not intended to
take off from the ground except in emergencies; it was impossible
to imagine how it had ever landed there. The passenger cabin was
boarded by going sideways through an open air lock, then into a
room that contained twelve huge, plush chairs with oversized backs
in three rows of four each. The ship was not completely vertical
but at a forty-five-degree angle that was certainly as
unmanageable. A network of planks was laid inside so that people
could enter.
Chu Li was carried in by a very large guard who looked like a
retired wrestler, then placed in one of the far chairs in the front
row. He sank so deeply into the chair that he feared being
smothered, and the network of belts and webbing that strapped him
in made it impossible even to move.
Deng was carried in next, placed in the rear seat farthest from
the door, and similarly fastened in. The two girls were placed in
the front and rear seats nearest the air lock, but so restricting
were the bonds that Chu Li could not turn to see which one was in
his row.
Sabatini entered, managing the entire mess with acrobatic skill
that made it look not only easy but normal. He went
down—back—beyond the last row and vanished; they
didn’t know where and could not look to see.
The captain was in one of the two rooms that were in the rear of
the compartment, seated in a chair that could be maneuvered
electrically by controls at his fingers and was surrounded by
screens and instrumentation. His own webbing would hold his body
tight but allowed his arms total freedom. There were straps through
which he could slip his hands for total security when necessary. He
put on a small, light headset that had a tiny microphone on a rigid
loop in front of his mouth.
“Captain to pilot. Prepare to clear and close all outer
doors. Internal systems on,” he instructed calmly.
Up front there was the distant sound of warning sirens. As the
planks were hastily withdrawn, the air locks—first the outer,
then the inner—were closed and sealed automatically, and the
passengers were left with only the light of the red signal above
those doors and the very dim emergency lighting system to see by.
Not, of course, that there was anything to see.
Then, with a whine, the lights came on full inside, restoring
some sense of normalcy. There was a sound of air blowing in from
all sides, and they felt their ears pop several times.
“Switch to passenger intercom, then prepare for
launch,” the captain ordered. Then he changed his tone, and
his voice blared from the overhead speakers.
“Good evening. I know you’re uncomfortable, but this
will last only a short while. We are now eleven minutes from
launch, and it will take us about forty minutes to reach orbit and
activate the gravity. We’ll then have a little time to get
comfortable for the long haul. There will be a second sustained
engine firing from orbit, but that won’t feel like very much
in here, and all it will really require is that you sit down and
keep a seat belt on. This is the rough part. You’ll feel at
first like some big hand is pushing you completely through the seat
until you can’t bear it anymore, and it’ll sound and
feel like the whole ship’s shaking to pieces, but don’t
worry. That’s normal. After a little bit, you’ll
suddenly find that pressing weight gone, and you’ll feel like
you don’t weigh anything at all, which will be more or less
true. There’s a monitor hanging from the ceiling up front and
center which will show a view from the stern. Enjoy it. This is the
only planetary lift-off you’re ever likely to
experience.”
He switched back to his business channel. The computer took
readings on the prisoners and showed the results on a screen to his
right, but he didn’t pay attention. If their blood pressure
didn’t go through the roof, they’d be all right.
“Chu Li!” called the girl three seats to his
right.
“Here. Is that you, Chow Dai?”
“Yes. Chu Li—I am frightened. I do not like this
kind of flying ship.”
He tried to reassure her. The fact was, he wasn’t the
least bit frightened of the ship or the takeoff. It was what would
come after, on the days out there, that caused real fear.
“It is just a ship, in many ways like the ones that sail
the rivers.”
“I am far more worried by his saying that it was the only
such experience we’ll ever have,” Deng Ho shouted from
the back. “This will be just a lot of shaking and
noise.”
“It is the waiting!” Chow Mai added from her rear
seat. “I wish they would just do whatever it is they will
do!”
Suddenly the ship trembled, and they found themselves being
raised so that their backs were down and their feet were forward.
It was most uncomfortable. Then the lights and power switched
briefly off, then on again, and there was a tremendous whine from
somewhere deep inside the ship that grew in pitch and intensity.
The whole world seemed suddenly to begin shuddering and shaking;
there was vibration but no real sensation of moving. Chu Li’s
eyes went to the monitor, and with a start he saw the entire
spaceport complex framed there, growing smaller by the second,
until it was lost in a view of steppe and desert. Only then did the
great invisible hand Sabatini had warned about really begin to come
down on them.
The weight was crushing and terrible, and the two girls
screamed. It lasted only a few minutes, but it seemed like hours.
All four felt as if all the air was being squeezed out of them.
The pressure ceased so abruptly that the transition made them
dizzy with relief. They experienced no real discomfort except some
popping ears, but when Chu Li again had the wits to look at the
monitor, he saw nothing familiar there, only a vast expanse of blue
and white. Within a few minutes there were browns and grays down
there as well; it was almost as if they were looking at some model,
some relief map of a strange place. Chu Li had expected something
more dramatic, such as the world as a ball growing ever smaller,
but this was just indistinct nothingness.
The ship shuddered a few times as it made small mid-course
corrections, but these were brief and caused no real sensations at
all, just a steady vibration throughout the ship and a low whine
coming from somewhere in the rear.
At least they were sitting upright again, Chu Li thought with
some relief. Still, it had been somewhat of an anticlimax to him;
he had expected lift-off to be longer and far more extreme.
Now there was a gentler sense of acceleration that slowly built
but did not grow very far. A buzzer sounded in the rear, then
Captain Sabatini was walking comfortably forward, still wearing the
headset. He checked each of them in turn, finally reaching Chu
Li.
“All right, we have only a short time to do this, so
listen closely and do just what I tell you,” he said loudly.
“I’m going to release the restraints on you one at a
time and put on more comfortable ones. I don’t want anyone
trying anything. With this headset I can control a good deal of
what it’s like in here, and I do it in a language none of you
know, so don’t think you can grab it and start shouting
orders. It will go very hard with anyone who gives me any trouble
at all.”
He pressed something between Chu Li’s legs, and the
intolerable belts and webbing loosened, then were reeled into the
seat. For a brief moment, Chu Li was free and unrestrained, but he
knew this was not the time to try anything. They didn’t know
enough yet, and there were many aspects of this ship that
didn’t fit the model and schematics in his brain.
“Stand up,” the captain ordered, and Chu Li did,
feeling oddly light and slightly off balance. Sabatini gave a
command in some very strange sounding tongue, and a small
compartment in the wall opened. Removing what looked like a belt
fastened to a thin but tough chain, he attached it around Chu
Li’s waist under his tunic. He repeated the procedure with
each of the others in turn, then passed out some prewet towels to
the two girls, both of whom had thrown up on takeoff.
Chu Li examined the restraint. The chain held him and would not
slip either up or down more than a few centimeters, yet it was not
tight or particularly uncomfortable. At the back was a small box
that was both a lock and a piece of electronics which adjusted for
comfort but also tightened in response to any attempt to move the
chain too far. There was even enough give to pull out some chain
and actually rotate the body loop, bringing the box around to the
front, but it still could not be removed.
“All right, now, here’s the situation,”
Sabatini said. “The restraint you each wear contains a length
of chain sufficient for you to reach all the parts of the cabin you
need to get to. It is smart and will automatically adjust in or out
depending on where you want to go. The one thing you have to
remember is that the chains will not allow themselves to be
crossed. That avoids tangles but will take some getting used to.
Any problems and I can have those chains drag you all the way to
the wall and hold you there. You can’t imagine how fast you
can find yourself slammed against the wall. Right now, just bring
out a little chain and bring the box forward, then sit down. We
can’t get comfortable yet.
“Now, I want to run through a few basics. You have gravity
here, but it is only seventy percent of what you’ve been used
to, so you’re going to find maneuvering difficult at first.
Just remember that if you weighed fifty kilos on Earth, you weigh
only thirty-five here. You also fall at seventy percent the usual
speed if you happen to trip. Questions?”
There were many, but none were asked.
“All right, then. If we all do our part to be nice, then
those chains will be all that is needed. You’ll get so used
to them that in a day or two you won’t even think about them.
You’ll sleep with them, eat with them, go to the bathroom
with them. However, rest assured I have other restraints if you
cause me troubles, many of which are neither smart nor comfortable.
Later I’ll have clean clothes for you, and I’ll show
you how to get rid of your body wastes and where and how showers
are done here. For now, I want you to use the regular lap and
shoulder belts on your seats and remain there. We have another
boost coming up, although nothing like the last one, and then
it’ll be smooth as silk for the rest of the
journey.”
The second burst, when it came, was accompanied by the same
noise and vibration as the takeoff, but the giant’s hand was
a pale shadow of its old self, nor did it seem so long.
Still, Chu Li worried. What sort of new clothing? Would his
secret have to come out right away, before he’d had time to
prepare the others? And, of equal concern, what sort of man would
they send who could nursemaid four condemned prisoners for
forty-one days in close quarters? So far he had been almost too
nice and polite. They were, after all, not paying passengers, and
this was no luxury cruise.
The passenger cabin, as Sabatini called it, was a marvel in
itself. With a few commands in that strange tongue and the
manipulation of some hidden controls, the chairs vanished deep into
the floor and were replaced by large reclining leather seats that
could go all the way down to become quite comfortable beds. These
chairs swiveled a full hundred and eighty degrees and were placed
at equal distances around a polished laminated table. The rear of
the cabin was empty, providing perhaps six by nine meters that
could be used for walking or other exercise, and there were three
doors in the back wall. From watching Sabatini’s comings and
goings, the passengers guessed that the center door led to the next
area back in the ship, the right-hand door led to Sabatini’s
own private cabin, and the left-hand one opened on a room that
seemed to be filled with complex electronic gear. A thick red line
was painted on the floor about a meter in front of the doors, and
past that the chain would not go.
Forward of the table and chairs there were also three doors. The
center one, they were told, led forward to the next area and was
doubly dangerous, since it opened onto an inner air lock and seal,
and no areas forward now contained air. A red circle on the floor
in front of the door again proved to be the chain’s limit.
The door on the left, however, was the toilet, and that they could
enter.
The other door led to a shower, or at least what Sabatini called
a shower. There was a small outer area for putting down clothing,
then what looked like a huge plastic tube with one side cut away.
When one stood in the center of the tube, the open side closed, and
one was almost engulfed by a tremendous stream of liquid. The
shower had three cycles, which left the bather dry and very
clean.
For the first two days out the boredom was broken only by
occasional explanations from Sabatini. The new
clothing—white, loose-fitting cotton pajamas—allowed
Chu Li to maintain his fiction a while longer, although Deng Ho was
beginning to look at him curiously. Chu Li knew that the time was
coming when he could not avoid revealing his secret, but he could
not bring himself to do it—not yet.
Sabatini was generally not in the passenger cabin, occupying
himself elsewhere. This gave them some initial breathing room and
allowed for some expert examinations. Chu Li could find no routine
visual monitoring devices in the cabin, though it appeared that
Sabatini could watch them from either of his rooms through some
special plates. The speakers were certainly two-way, but there were
only two of them, and they were easily avoided. It was possible to
have private conversations by having one pair talk loudly near the
speakers while the other pair spoke in whispers.
“You have seen the place now. What do you think?”
Chow Dai asked Chu Li in such a circumstance.
“This room is customized far beyond what this ship usually
has,” he told her. “It is possible that it is used to
carry important people as well as prisoners. That might also
explain the lack of monitors and recorders. Both of the rooms in
back are also not standard. I particularly do not understand that
room full of gear or that headset he wears. This ship is totally
automatic, with a self-aware computer for a pilot. What could he be
doing from that room? And what is forward? I do not know how far up
we are in the ship, but if that middle door is an air lock, then it
shows no indicators like the ones on the sides and no seals,
either. There is air up there, at least for one more room.
I know there is. Why? And where are the space suits? They should be
in a compartment off this room, yet there seem to be no
compartments except the small ones that manage these chain devices
and the ones that deliver our food and drink on the little trays
and dispose of the waste. Much of this does not make
sense.”
“The food is strange, too,” she noted.
“It is foreign devil food, but it serves. This is not a
Chinese ship. What about these chain things?”
“The box is easy to fool. Chow Mai and I have already
found two ways to make it loosen up enough to slip the whole thing
off. The doors have simple electrical locks. I know the
combinations now from just observing the captain, but they are
almost identical to the locks on the toilet and shower. We could
break them if we had to.”
“I thought you’d need some tools for
that.”
“We have them. He never missed the two we required when
Chow Mai took them from his pack. The problem is his headset. It
really can override—we have watched him—and the tongue
is impossible.”
He nodded. “I must know more about the ship. When he
sleeps, you must show me how to slip this bond and help me enter
that mystery room with all the electronics. We must know everything
before we move.”
They were all supposed to sleep at the same time, but their
chains were left free in case they needed to use the toilet. No
matter how hard he tried, Chu Li could not manage the simple
maneuver to fool the box, but Chow Dai slipped hers and then freed
him. Chow Mai and Deng Ho remained in their beds, quietly on
watch.
Chu Li would have liked to explore the rest of the ship, but
whenever Sabatini had opened the rear door, a distant bell had
sounded; until they could somehow mask that alarm, they
couldn’t risk it. In any case, the mystery room was their
primary target.
Chow Dai did not want to chance using the combination. Instead,
she skillfully bypassed the combination board and sprang the lock
with two small and nearly silent pilfered electronic tools. When
the door swung back, Chu Li kissed her and entered the room.
The place was an electronic wonderland situated around a single
command chair. Much of the equipment was unfamiliar, though he
recognized some machines and could guess at the functions of
others. There was a small mind-print machine and a large number of
cartridges, which were numbered in the Arabic system rather than
labeled. The machine itself was far too simple for psychosurgery;
more than likely it was there so that Sabatini could instantly
learn other languages he needed or be updated on ship changes and
modifications. Monitors showed schematics of the ship at this level
and probably could display other levels in response to the correct
commands. One thing was certain: The areas of pressurization and
atmosphere, which were outlined in blue, extended far aft as well
as forward of the cabin they were in. The artificial gravity,
however, appeared limited to the passenger compartment and a much
larger compartment immediately behind it—almost certainly the
live animal transport area of which the captain had spoken.
Unfortunately, too much of the information on the monitors and
even the labels was useless, written again in that unknown script.
Chu Li looked longingly at the mindprint machine and cartridges.
Somewhere there was probably the language he needed, but which one?
He certainly didn’t have the time to learn them all.
Still, there was far more equipment here than any human
companion on this ship would require, even more than would be
needed for any conceivable human intervention. It was more like the
kind of compartment required for someone to run the whole
ship—but that was done by computer.
The only logical explanation struck him with the force of a
blow. Song Ching’s father had already known that
there was a human override built into the ships. Suppose Sabatini
really was the captain? Suppose the computer pilot was not
independent but his subordinate, subject to him? He remembered the
complex helmets in the illegal tech cult’s fortress
laboratories. They had built them from scratch and had assumed that
they would have to hardwire the connection. Suppose that was what
the omnipresent headset was really for? Sabatini was running
his own ship!
He turned back toward the door only to see it suddenly shut with
a speed and force he’d never before seen on a door. He tried
to open it but could not. He was stuck in there!
“You just stay right there and don’t touch a
thing!” Sabatini’s voice came over a small speaker in
the console. “I will tend to you as soon as I have tended to
your friends, and I will be far gentler to them if you just sit in
the chair and relax until I come for you.”
There was no malice in his tone, but Chu Li had no doubt that
the captain would not hesitate to carry out his implied threat.
There was nothing to do but sit and try to figure out as much
additional information as he could from what he could see.
After an eternity, the door opened and the full cabin lights
flooded the compartment. Sabatini, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt,
stood there with a small weapon in his hand. He had his small
headset on as well. “All right—time to get out
now,” he said casually. “And I was beginning to wonder
if this would be a boring trip. All right—out!
Now!”
When Chu Li emerged, he found both the girls kneeling on the
floor, their chains reattached, their hands bound behind their
backs, and their ankles secured. Chow Dai gave him an expression
that was filled with both hurt and apology. Deng Ho was still in
his chair, strapped to it by hand and leg cuffs and unable to
move.
Chu Li looked at the weapon in Sabatini’s hand. It was a
very small thing of red plastic with a gauge on its handle, a small
button for a trigger, and a metallic point where the barrel
ended.
“I’ve already demonstrated the stinger to your girl
friends,” the captain warned. “If you’d like one,
I’ll be happy to give it. This little line here shows the
amount of power it’ll put out in a room this size. Right now
it’s set for a debilitating shock. Halfway and it’ll
knock you out for a couple of minutes. All the way up and it might
stop your heart.”
“I believe you,” Chu Li responded hollowly.
“All right, then—over here. Chain on. That’s
it. Now—hands behind your back. Good.” Chu Li felt
pressure and found his hands held by very firm handcuffs that
allowed no real give or play at all. “Now—on your
knees.” He did so, and two stiff leg cuffs were also locked
into place. He faced the two girls on the opposite side of the open
space.
Sabatini relaxed. “Now, I told you I could be mean if
somebody tried to take advantage of me. I figured you might be
pulling something, covering talks with other talks and whispering
campaigns, and I knew from the records that the girls were experts
at locks. When I sleep, I put the alarms on all these doors so they
sound in my cabin. I just decided to see what you were up
to.”
Chu Li understood now how it worked. The captain switched on the
alarm, and when it rang and awakened him, he had merely to grab his
headset to find where the trouble was and who was causing it. He
then simply commanded the door to shut, overriding the lock, then
took the others with his weapon.
“All right—it was one slip,” Sabatini said
almost kindly. “If I was mean and nasty or even smart,
I’d just leave you all like that for the next thirty-nine
days but pull you all to the wall with the box behind your back
like your hands and feed you like animals from trays. Or send you
back to the animal cages, maybe. But that’s only because this
sort of stuff puts me in a real bad mood. Now, if somebody got me
in a better mood, I might actually forgive and
forget.”
He walked back over to his open cabin door, reached in, and
brought out a rather nasty-looking straight knife. Then he muttered
something into his headphone, and abruptly both women were jerked
back to the wall and slammed against it. Since the chain emerged
from a point in the bulkhead above their waists, it had the effect
of suspending them slightly, leaning forward because of their bound
hands, barely touching the floor with their toes.
Sabatini went over to Chow Dai. “You’ve got an ugly
face,” he told her, “but I’m curious about the
rest of you.” Using the knife, he cut away her pullover and
her pants and flung them to one side, leaving her hanging there by
the chain, naked. She did, in fact, have quite a nice body, but
something made the captain stop and command the chain to come out a
bit. He caught her and turned her around to face the wall.
Chu Li gasped, and Sabatini was almost equally appalled. Chow
Dai’s back was a mass of welts and scar tissue almost from
the shoulders to the buttocks. “Holy—somebody really
did a job on you, didn’t they, beautiful?” he
commented. He lifted her up, then put her back on the floor in the
kneeling position. “You stay there. Let’s see if your
sister got the same treatment.”
She had. If anything, Chow Mai’s scars were worse. The
evident brutality was so gross and unexpected that even Sabatini
hadn’t been prepared for it. He put the sister back down in
the kneeling position on the floor as well.
“Well,” the captain muttered. “Nothing about
that in the record. Damn it, you girls wouldn’t be
any fun at all.” He paused a moment. “But then, hope
springs eternal, doesn’t it? There’s lots of
things not in the official record.” He turned and stalked
back across the room. “Isn’t that right,
Mister Chu?”
Now it was Chu Li’s turn to be suspended against the wall
and slowly have the clothing cut away as the others watched.
Everyone except the captain seemed shocked, surprised, and amazed
at what was revealed. Song Ching, after all, had been genetically
designed for perfection. Nor were there any marks on this
body, not so much as a scar or blemish.
“Now, that’s more like it,” Sabatini
proclaimed lustfully as he put Chu Li back down in the kneeling
position.
Chow Dai’s mouth seemed permanently open in amazement, all
embarrassment from her own exposure pushed aside. “Chu
Li—you are a girl! But—how is that
possible?”
“I’d like to know that one myself,” Sabatini
put in. “My manifest says you’re a boy, you’ve
got a voice to match that, and you passed a Master System identity
check as a male.”
So here it was. He knew he could not be mystical; the Chow
sisters would accept it, but Deng Ho—who could only stare in
wonder, not a little lust on his face as well in spite of his
bindings—and the captain would never buy it. He had worked
out a story, though, that explained the facts even if he
didn’t know if it was really possible. He’d been
refining it for days.
“It is none of my doing,” he lied.
“They—changed me. A surgeon and a psychochemist. But
they never completed the job. They changed me from a boy to a girl,
but you can tell from my voice, my ways, that they never changed me
inside.”
“The outside does just fine by me,” Sabatini
noted.
“But why would they do such a thing?” Chow Dai asked
him.
“They were remaking me to replace somebody. Somebody
important who was sent down for work but who had power enough to
fake it. Song Ching, the daughter of the chief administrator. They
had no other use for me, and they decided I was about her size. I
had no choice. But they were fooled near the completion of their
goal. Orders came from somewhere that I was to be sent here. They
could not change the orders, and they could not give someone else
my prints and patterns, so they had to send me.”
“Rat—is that really you?” Deng Ho
asked in wonder.
“Deep inside, my cousin. I am sorry. They fixed me so I
would not know myself what had been done until the day I left, when
it wore off.”
“Oh, I am so sorry, Chu Li!” Chow Dai cried.
“Why did you not tell me when you knew?”
“Sooner or later I was going to tell you,” he
replied honestly. “I—I just cared for you, Chow Dai. I
am a man in a woman’s body. I feel as a man feels, as I felt
before they did this to me. You have your scars, and you were
pleased that I looked past them, but how could a normal woman look
past this?”
Sabatini had let the touching scene go on. He was somewhat
fascinated himself by all this, particularly when the name Song
Ching had been mentioned. The reason they had all been forced
through an extra and complete security check was that Song Ching,
the daughter of the chief administrator of the China District, had
been reported vanished from a maximum security area. He knew the
powers those butchers had. They were perfectly capable of turning a
worthless kid into a duplicate of this girl and maybe turning this
girl into something else, somebody she’d disposed of and then
replaced, or maybe even somebody outside China.
Her story held together. For a moment he thought she might be
the real Song Ching, although why anybody’d pull strings to
be sent to Melchior was beyond understanding, but the fact that
she’d passed the security exit test as a boy named Chu Li
made her story ironclad. Briefly he considered not turning her over
at Melchior but bringing her back and passing her off as the real
one, which would save a lot of asses and earn him some real
powerful friends, but by this time they’d run security checks
up the rear and the plot would be easily exposed—which would
only send him back to Melchior—this time in chains
and one-way.
The captain looked her over. “Well, kid, they did a really
great job. No scars, no nothing. Perfect. I think you got to get
used to being a girl no matter what your head says. They threw away
all the old parts, anyway. I think maybe you ought to learn what
it’s like to be a girl these days Uh uh! Careful!
You can’t do anything but sit.”
Chu Li had attempted to lunge forward in anger at the
captain’s words, but it had been fruitless.
“Now you sit and listen,” he continued.
“You’re property and you got a great body and you are
being sent to hell. They’re going to love you on
Melchior. A slightly incomplete job but an expert one, just up
their fields of interest. They’ll study you, pick your brain
and chemistry apart, then they’ll have what they want. Then
they’ll complete the job and make you somebody’s
present. Since you look like this Song Ching, they won’t want
you anywhere where her father would notice, but they’ll find
a bunch on Melchior in a region where chief administrators never
even look and stick you there, all right, only you won’t be
interested in machines or escape anymore. It won’t hurt
anything to start now, and it might put me in a good enough mood to
forget this little incident.”
“I will never dishonor myself so!” Chu Li spat.
“Perhaps they can make me as you say, but then I will not
know my shame. I will fight you even if I fail!”
“Chu Li! You must not!” both sisters said at once.
“Look at our bodies! And it was to no avail! The price is
great enough without adding more!”
“You do not know what it is like,” Chow Dai
continued alone. “You cannot. But can’t you see, under
that smile of his he is one of them! No different from the
ones who did this to us?”
“Listen to her,” the captain urged.
“She’s right, you know. I can be quite—creative,
within my charter.”
“Never!” Chu Li exclaimed. “To me it would be
a perversion as well as an assault! What does it matter to me if
you do things to this body? It would be better for me if you
did make it less beautiful!”
“You’ve got a point,” the captain admitted. He
thought for a moment, then said something in his language into the
headset. They waited, not knowing what was going to happen, and he
seemed both relaxed and patient. Finally the rear center door
opened, and an emergency medical unit appeared.
“Now, I don’t want all the bother of keeping you
shackled or caged all the time, not if I can help it,” he
told them, again sounding casual and almost friendly. “There
are many ways around it, but I’m still in a bad mood, having
been awakened and all that. It seems to me the heart of
this—incident—are our two locksmiths here. I
can’t see that doing a little more to them here is going to
change anything on Melchior, either. Seems to me that if you
don’t have any thumbs or index fingers, you won’t be
stealing things and picking locks anymore, will you?”
“No!” Deng Ho cried out. “They have suffered
enough, you monster! You cannot do this!”
“He won’t do it,” Chu Li responded. “He
has to deliver his cargo undamaged.”
“Oh, of course I will,” the captain assured them.
“They don’t mind a few things like that. They
understand. See, you of all people should know that those types can
grow back things like missing fingers and the like if they feel the
need. Look at what they grew out of you!”
Chu Li’s spirits sank as he realized the truth of that,
even if they hadn’t really grown anything on him. The two
girls’ faces were masks of terror. “All right, you
serpent. What do you want of me? To ravish my body? Is that the
price?”
“At the start, yes. Now I want more. I want cooperation.
Enthusiasm. It will be a long trip yet. I want a servant. Someone
who will do exactly what I say without needing restraints. If I
don’t cut their fingers, I must leave their hands
where they are. Makes it inconvenient for them to eat, so they must
be fed. I want a mistress who will do my bidding without even
thinking about it.” He drew the little pistol.
“Hesitate, argue, or fail to please me in any way for the
next month and you’ll feel this.” He fired at the
torso.
Chu Li had never felt such pain, and he cried out.
“Betray me, fail to do my will, or act or even speak
with them about acting in any way against me and it will cost
your girl friend’s sister her thumbs. Twice and your girl
friend loses hers. As for the fat boy on the chair, if he gets out
of line in any way or is involved in anything at all I don’t
like, I’ll bring this little thing out, and then I’ll
be the only whole male on this ship. Understand?”
The Chow sisters looked pleadingly at Chu Li. “All
right,” he said. “I will do whatever you
say.”
There was a nearly immediate jolt from the little gun that again
produced agony. “From now on, your name, the only name you
will answer to, even to your friends here, is Slave. And you will
call me Master or Honorable Captain. My slave here will refer to
herself as a she at all times, and so will you all—only the
feminine will be used when referring to or speaking to her. I want
her to get a basic truth through her head once and for all.
“Additionally, all of you will bow in my presence, and
you, Slave, will kneel to me, head bowed, anticipating my desires.
To prevent more thefts, all of you will go naked until we arrive at
Melchior, and as extra insurance our two sisters will continue to
have their hands bound behind their backs—unless the slave,
here, fouls up and they lose sufficient fingers to be a threat no
longer. What do you think of that, Slave?”
“Whatever you command, Honorable Master,” Chu Li
responded, teeth clenched but head bowed.
Sabatini went over to him. “I know what you’re
thinking, but I plan to change that. You see, you’ve lost
everything. Everything but your honor and your dignity. I will
strip those from you. You’re the only one of this bunch who
really has any. That’s why you are the leader. Before the end
of this voyage, you will break.”
He sighed and dismissed the medical robot, then went back to his
cabin for a moment. He emerged soon with a set of U-shaped devices,
then unlocked all chains from Chu Li and commanded her to lie flat
on the floor in a particularly embarrassing position. The four
restraints descended to hold down her arms and legs. Then he began
removing his own clothing and weapons.
He made the rest watch in anguished silence as he first
performed the ultimate indignities upon their companion. He was
deliberately brutal about it, but he clearly was enjoying
himself.
Sabatini kept his slave apart from the others in a small, dark
closet barely four meters square and only a meter and a half high.
The only light came from a small grill right at the top of her box.
She could not see out, and the vibrating compartments at the rear
of the cage masked any noise or movement outside. She would be
there for long, horrible periods, then suddenly taken out and
checked over to see how she reacted. Sometimes he didn’t like
the slightest thing and shoved her back. She was allowed to see her
friends only in his presence, and then she had to speak to them
servilely and in a very loud voice. Infractions were met with
deprivation of food, water, and bathroom stops.
Clearly he wasn’t neglecting the other three. Deng Ho
seemed lost most of the time in a world of his own, while the two
girls were vacant, listless, and resigned.
He no longer restrained her when mounting sexual attacks, but he
was even rougher and more brutal and demanding. Early on,
he’d left his shock pistol on a table near his bed in the
cabin where he had her, and she had gotten it and fired it at him,
over and over. He had just laughed. He had removed the little
charger and deliberately left it there. He then actually handed her
his knife and invited attack, but she lost the knife and her
footing before she made the fist real move. Then he had worked her
over with just his hands, leaving painful bruises that did not show
on her skin, and raped her, before tossing her back in her hole to
be wakened every hour or so for an extremely long period but denied
food, water, and bathroom.
His treatment so brutalized her that when he finally let her
out, she was so sincerely servile, so letter perfect, he let her
sleep. Her behavior after that remained so perfect that he began
easing up, slowly but progressively. He cleaned the closet and
disinfected it. He let her shower. He gave her good food. A few
more very minor slips brought renewed punishment, but they were the
last gasps of resistance. She found it increasingly difficult to
think of anything but the ship, her duties, her behavior, pleasing
him. After a bit longer, the only thing that mattered to her was
pleasing him. He continued to leave weapons and other things of
interest to the old Chu Li around, and if she saw them at all, she
did not even think of picking them up or using them.
She began to hope that she would be so useful, so obedient, so
perfect that he would not think of turning her over at Melchior but
would retain her on the ship. He obliquely encouraged this idea,
then released her forever from her closet and allowed her to rejoin
the others. She was not, however, to have any private conversations
with any of them.
The other three had been faring only a little better, with
routine deprivation and punishments by Sabatini’s pistol. It
was what he had done with, and to, the one they’d known as
Chu Li that was the telling blow. If the strong, educated one could
be broken so completely without even any technological aids, then
there was no hope.
When they were twenty-three days out, although they’d lost
all track of time, Deng Ho committed suicide.
It had not been easy, but it had certainly been well planned. He
did it in the bathroom by wrapping his waist chain excess around
his neck and then somehow getting it caught up in the
toilet-flushing mechanism. It must have been an agonizingly slow
strangulation, yet he had resisted all impulses to stop it and had
not cried out, even at the last.
The act shocked all three of the remaining prisoners, and it
really irritated Sabatini. He had spent so much time on Chu Li that
he’d really neglected to keep close watch on the others, and
particularly on the quiet chubby boy who had never really given him
any trouble. He actually felt a little sorry for the kid, but he
was more upset that perhaps this was only the first. He doubted
that Chu Li would try it; she was too anxious to keep in good with
him in the pathetic hope that he’d keep her aboard—if
he could, he would, but they’d never allow it. Instead, he
now had a black mark, and he needed a good line to get out of
it.
He decided that a burial would be a nice gesture. He had no
desire to build up any more resentment. And so, after speaking some
words, he’d taken the body to the port center air lock, where
the other three could watch, and placed it respectfully inside. He
was even indulgent to their reactions. “You may say farewell
and whatever prayers you wish for him,” he told them.
“If you please, Honorable Captain,” Chow Mai said,
somewhat more animated than she’d been in a long time.
“Where will he go now?”
“Normally, you would enter the air lock in a pressure suit
and then pump all the air out before going into space. I’m
keeping the air inside, and I’ll pump the pressure way up.
Then, when the outer door opens, he will be launched into space by
the escaping air. He will drift in space forever.”
Chow Mai, who had always liked the boy, had a few tears for him.
“That is good,” she responded, almost to herself.
“He will become one with the stars, a constellation in the
heavens.”
The two girls both said prayers and farewells, but Chu Li stood
back, silent. She had found the body of the boy and had seen the
grotesque face and distorted, popped eyes. It was a haunting
grotesquerie worse than anything yet experienced in this horror
odyssey.
The two sisters stepped back, and Sabatini made certain that the
body was arranged in the air lock.
Something snapped in Chu Li’s brain. The compassion of
the innocent Chu Li who had been killed; the haughty pride of Song
Ching, reduced and violated; the relative innocence of the two
sisters, punished all out of proportion to their crimes; the cruel,
calculating Sabatini who personified the system’s least
common denominator; the quiet innocence and inner despair of Deng
Ho, who chose to die a slow, agonizing death rather than see or
accept any more . . .
“No,” she whispered under her breath. Sabatini
didn’t hear it, but the two sisters did, and they looked at
each other, then at her, not quite knowing what was about to happen
but ready to assist. Chu Li moved up behind the captain silently.
He was a good fifteen centimeters taller than she and far stronger,
but she knew that this was the moment. Risk it now, and perhaps
lose, or be a slave forever and deservedly so.
With one motion she jumped, grabbing the headphones from the
captain’s head and striking his face with the little
microphone. As he was still turning in shock and surprise, she gave
him a push forward with all her adrenaline-pumped might. He
staggered, but a hand caught the side of the air lock door.
The two sisters, hands still tied behind their backs, ran at him
and butted him in the midsection with their heads. He grunted and
fell backward into the air lock, almost on top of Deng Ho’s
body. He recovered quickly. “Why you little bitches!
I’ll—” he bellowed, but Chu Li had already
begun to swing the door shut on him. When he saw what was
happening, he rushed against the door, and all three girls lent
their bodies to pushing it closed. It was fury versus desperation,
and desperation won. The door shut with a hiss, and Chu Li, while
still pressing against it, managed to turn the wheel that locked
it.
“I don’t care what you do—put your feet in it
if you have to—but don’t let him turn it back from that
side!” she shouted to the sisters, then ran to the panel.
Sabatini was lazy; she knew he would have preprogrammed the
sequence, but she had to find the right control and throw it. The
sisters were having a hard time holding the wheel by backing
against it and gripping it with their hands as best they could, but
the safety lights kept flashing yellow, green, yellow, green.
There were only five buttons, and she pressed each of them in
turn, but nothing happened. She knew the sisters were weakening and
that he would soon get that door open. She kept pushing the buttons
in desperation, one after the other, hoping to catch the right
button at the right point. It had to work. It just
had to.
The red light suddenly came on, and a bell sounded. Sabatini
stopped for a moment, and through the small glass window they could
see his expression of desperation. He pounded, swore, then renewed
his attack on the lock, but now Chu Li was on the wheel. The whole
procedure took perhaps forty seconds, yet it seemed like years.
Since it was a pressurized burial, the outer door opened pretty
quickly.
Deng Ho’s body moved right out, but Sabatini grabbed hold
of the wheel. His body was horizontal, his hands gripped the wheel,
his face was pressed in fear against the viewing port, but the air
was exhausted in an instant, and the artificial gravity plunged him
back down.
Chow Dai, exhausted, slumped to the floor, followed quickly by
her sister. “Do you think—you can close—that
outside door?” she managed to ask.
“Not yet. Not for many minutes,” Chu Li responded.
“I do not know if someone can live in space with no air, but
I do know that no one can hold his breath for more than five
minutes. We will give it ten.” She sank down, also exhausted.
Her arms and shoulder muscles ached, and she felt as if she’d
sprained both wrists. Still, it had been worth it. That one moment
of stark terror on Sabatini’s face was payment for much
inflicted misery, brutality, and indignity. Deng Ho’s gesture
had not been in vain.
Chow Dai crawled over and gave Chu Li a kiss. “Welcome
back,” she said.
“Not for long, but I do not regret it. We have killed him,
and the ship will know it. The gas should come at any
moment.”
Chow Dai looked disappointed. “I had forgotten about that.
I suppose that was why he was so confident. Foreign devils have no
idea of what honor is. Still, it would have been nice to have won
completely.”
Chow Mai listened, thinking. “It would seem to me that if
this gas was coming, it would have come by now. Either it is not
going to come or he is not dead.”
Chu Li felt a new shot of energy and stood up. “You are
right.” She looked through the air lock window and saw the
interior, still lighted. She could not see the area right by the
door, but there was no sign of anyone or anything in the air lock,
and the outer door was definitely open, the alarm bell still
ringing. There was certainly no air in there, and she knew that
space had to be very cold, yet there was something nagging at her
brain, troubling her.
Gravity. They had weight here, even if they felt lighter than
back home. The whole section had gravity, including the air lock.
Sabatini clearly had not been sucked out with the air, although it
had been close. Why was there now no body slumped down, hands
frozen to the wheel in a death grip?
The ship had been elaborately and illegally modified, and there
were all sorts of compartments and gadgets built into the walls.
Might there not also be some sort of emergency compartment in the
air lock? She couldn’t see how a body could stand a vacuum,
even for a few moments, but what if it could? There was better than
two meters of air lock. Something had to be inside those thick
walls.
“We must find something to jam this door. Before we close
the outer door, which will automatically flood the compartment with
air, we must jam the wheel so it cannot be opened from the outside.
He might be alive in some rescue compartment there. We must examine
as much of the ship as we can to make sure such a one cannot
otherwise reenter the ship.”
If he was in there someplace, he’d be in a small,
probably dark compartment much like a closet, with some sort of
breathing device but little in the way of food and water for more
than a day and certainly no bathroom. The only way to make certain,
though, was to risk keeping the outer door open, jam the inner, and
somehow make contact with the ship’s pilot.
She reached down and picked up his headset. She had not brought
honor, glory, or dignity to herself by serving him, but she had
always been observant. Now she thought she could imitate his odd,
animal-like growls that commanded some of the locks. The headset
had been bent out of shape, but it did not appear damaged. She put
it on, although it was too large for her head, and spoke one of the
commands in his language that she knew overrode the electronics
room lock.
The door opened, and to her surprise she heard a growling,
unintelligible response in the earphones. For a moment it startled
her, and she wondered if there were others aboard in areas they had
never seen, but then she realized that it was the computer
pilot.
She had spotted something in the electronics room long ago that
was the first priority, and that was a complete electronics and
mechanical tool set. It was almost too heavy for her, but she got
it out and open, and the Chow sisters were able to tell her which
tool to use. Shortly the girls’ hands were free, although the
cuffs themselves remained as oversized bracelets. One of the waist
chains they wrapped through the spokes of the air lock wheel, then
secured it with a small hand-held welder to the base of the nearest
chair.
They were all tired and aching but far too excited to sleep. Chu
Li checked the schematic of the ship’s passenger level on the
monitor. “If I read this correctly, then the whole level is
pressurized—has air, that is, that is fit for us—except
this area all the way in the rear. Those double lines front and
back are air locks, but if this color is air, then they
are not active. Shall we go see?”
She opened the center door with a command in that strange
language, and a bell sounded distantly—but nothing else
happened. She was almost relieved to hear the response coming from
the earpiece; it confirmed her belief that it was the computer
responding and not anyone else.
They went along a narrow corridor, then Chu Li stopped.
“This was my home for those long times,” she told them
gravely, pointing to a lower storage closet. “After just one
week in there, you would sell body, soul, and honor to anyone who
would keep you from going back.”
As Sabatini had warned them, animal cages filled the huge
storage area, all designed for just about anything that could be
imagined and some that were beyond imagining. The cages were empty
this trip and apparently newly cleaned and reinforced. Beyond them
were a large number of sealed containers, all labeled in a language
or code none of them could understand, fitted together into vast
clumps for useful storage. The path between was so narrow, they had
to go single file.
The compartment narrowed until they emerged at an air lock. As
she had expected, the light was green. When they opened it, the
noise of great motors was almost deafening, but Chu Li finally got
the courage to enter and walked the short distance to the far door.
Peering through the window, she gasped, then continued to stare,
fascinated. “Come! Look!” she called. Nervously, the
two sisters joined her.
Before them was a second enormous cargo room. Larger than the
first and filled with containers, it was spinning around at a
dizzying pace.
“Why does the room spin?” Chow Mai asked Chu Li.
She thought for a moment. “I’m not sure. I seem to
remember from very long ago—her
memories—something about this. Ah! I think I know,
but there is only one way to know for sure. Do you notice how light
you feel?”
Only then did they notice how little gravity they felt here.
“I do not think the room spins at all,” she told
them. “I believe that it is we who are spinning. You
must trust me on this, for it is far too complex to explain, but
spinning is how many spaceships make gravity in space.”
“We are not spinning!” the sisters
responded in unison. “That room is!”
“There is only one way to find out, and if I am wrong it
is a dangerous one. It is to go in there. See that net stretched
there? I think you jump and grab on to that and then use the
handholds to go on.”
“No. It is too dangerous,” Chow Dai responded.
“What does it matter who is spinning? There is nothing in
there that we can use.”
Chu Li was disappointed but had to agree. Without her, these two
were lost in the technology of this vessel, which to them was
incomprehensible and magical. Now was not the time to see what
weightlessness was like.
Reluctantly, she turned and led them out through the container
corridor, past the cages and the closet, and back into the
passenger cabin. She was somehow relieved to find it just as they
had left it.
She looked again in the electronics room and at the mindprint
machine and its numbered cartridges. “That machine makes you
learn things you do not know or be things you are not,” she
told them. “It is how the captain learned our language so
well. I fear that we will have to try them and see if one has the
key to speaking to the ship.”
“But would that not be in his true language?” Chow
Dai asked. “Would he have something to teach his own native
tongue in there?”
“I doubt if the pilot computer speaks the captain’s
language. All such computers are produced by Master System in
factories peopled only by machines. They speak their own language,
a language of numbers, on a level humans cannot possibly
comprehend. The way humans talk to them is by a shell, a pretend
environment where what the computer speaks is translated into a
human tongue and where human language is translated into
machine. These ships are built according to standards that existed long
ago, in the times of our ancient ancestors, and those outside of
Earth continue to use those ancient languages.”
“But it could have been changed to any, could it
not?” Chow Dai persisted.
“It could, but I do not think it was. I have heard the
captain curse many times, and it is a truth that one tends to curse
in one’s native tongue. His curses were equally
unintelligible, but they were in a softer, more melodic tongue than
the one used for opening the doors. It is a harsh, nonmelodic,
almost machinelike language, an ugly tongue. It is there. It
must be there. Otherwise we will arrive at Melchior
anyway, just without the captain. I worry about what might be on
some of the others. There are close to forty cartridges here, and
only nine spaceports on all of Earth, so a captain would have need
of only the nine languages of the Administrative Centers for each
spaceport. I know nothing about the other worlds, but even if we
give them nine or ten, it still leaves half the cartridges
unexplained.”
“But if we must, we will try them all and see,” Chow
Mai said pragmatically.
“I fear we must, yet I do not like it. Anything may be
programmed by a master mindprint machine on those cartridges.
Things that change your mind, your memory, everything. Some of
these might be traps for the unwary, just in case ones like us got
to this point. Even if not, these are to be taken sparingly, and
never more than one a day, to avoid confusing and muddying the
mind. We do not have thirty-eight days.”
“There are three of us,” Chow Mai pointed out.
“Each of us could try one and see. Perhaps fortune will
smile. If not, we try again, then wait to see if anyone has
troubles. We have nothing to lose. Just hours ago we had lost all
hope and you were in his power.”
“You are right,” Chu Li responded. “Let us
begin now, for when we sleep this time, it will be long and
deep. Perhaps we can at least find some pattern to their
arrangement. I can read the numbers, although they are in a foreign
system. That type of number is used in all computer work. One of us
will take the number one, which is an odd number and at the start.
Another will take thirty-eight, an even number at the end. The
third will take nineteen, an odd number in the middle. Then ten,
twenty, and thirty. Then we will see if we can find a pattern.
Beware, though. It does more than teach; it changes the mind. I am
a living example of that.”
“I will go first,” Chow Mai said, “because you
will have to show us how it is operated.”
“It is quite simple. Just sit in the chair there and
relax. No! Do not put the headset on as yet! Not until
there is a cartridge in the system. To do so would cause brain
damage. Now—watch. Number one in just so, and only this way.
Wait for the small green light there. So! Now you may put
on the headset, and I will adjust it.”
Chow Mai seemed almost disappointed. “I feel nothing.”
“You will. Now, put your head back on the rest and close
your eyes. When I push this activator, it will begin. Push it again
and it will stop, so if we see something terrible happening it can
be halted by being quick. Otherwise it will run as long as it runs,
and you will be awake yet as if asleep. Ready? Chow Dai—you
should push the activator.”
Chow Dai hesitated a moment, then pushed it. The green light
changed to amber, then to flashing red.
Suddenly Chow Mai said, “It asks a question in my head. A
single word I do not know.”
Chu Li thought a moment. She hadn’t even considered
password protections for a setup like this, “Answer with the
same word as it asks, only give it as a statement,” she
instructed Chow Mai. “No need to say it. Just think
it.”
Chow Mai looked confused but sat back, closed her eyes, and did
as instructed. The program started running, and Chu Li breathed a
sigh of relief. With a computer she was sure she could break any
password, but she needed the password to get to the computer. This
computer’s password, however, was the default:
“password.”
The machine ran for a nervous half hour with Chow Mai showing no
visible reaction, then switched off. Chu Li lifted off the headset.
“Remember never to remove the cartridge until this is first
removed,” she said.
Chow Mai opened her eyes dreamily and saw the worried
expressions of the others. “Do not worry, my sisters, for I
am well,” she assured them, and wasn’t quite certain
why they seemed even more upset.
“Chow Mai—do you understand me, your
twin?”
She did understand, although it took some concentration
to reply. Her first efforts were a hopeless mixture of two
languages that could not be mixed, and it took a while before she
was able even with difficulty to switch comfortably.
“It is Arabic,” Chu Li explained. “One of the
Center spaceport languages. I have heard it spoken, although I do
not know it. It is not the language of the ship, this I know. It
will be difficult for her to sort one from the other for a while,
but she will be able to separate them as time passes. This is good.
One is a language program. If thirty-eight is not, we will try
number two, perhaps. Chow Mai—go. Lie. Down. Yes.”
Still feeling a bit dizzy and confused, Chow Mai went out and
collapsed into one of the chairs. Chu Li removed cartridge one and
replaced it with number thirty-eight, then got into the chair and
put on the headset. She nodded at Chow Dai, then relaxed. The
sister pressed the activator.
Number thirty-eight proved to be a highly technical program
about the ship itself and paid particular attention to the
restraint system, locks, and other protective and safety devices.
It was not designed as language-specific but searched in the mind
of the user for the right words and terms; if such terms were not
present or possible to construct, one simply didn’t
understand all of the program. Song Ching’s technological
center Mandarin, however, was more than adequate for the task.
She awakened feeling elated and recovered quickly, thanks to her
long experience with such devices. She removed the headset and saw
Chow Dai just coming back into the room. The girl was apologetic.
“I am sorry. When I saw you were in no distress, I went to
see how Chow Mai was getting on. I did not think it would be so
short.”
“Long enough,” Chu Li responded. “That was a
technical tape, the last probably made to date. It makes many
references I cannot totally get because they are obviously
referring to past modifications, but I know now how much of this
operates. I know the restraint systems, the alarms, the door and
hatch combinations, and much more. I even know what many of these
instruments here do, and what the numbers mean. I know, for
example, that those two numbers compared mean that we are about
sixty percent of the way to Melchior, but I also know that we have
under a week before we come under traffic control that will be able
to sense if we deviate from our planned course and raise alarms. We
do not have much time if we are to take control of the ship
unnoticed.”
“Shall I take number two now?”
“No. I am used to it, and the technical orientation did
nothing to me. Let us see just how far the languages go.” She
chose cartridge number ten, then inserted it in the machine in
place of number thirty-eight. “I will do this one as well.
There should be one of us around with her wits about her, and you
are it. Your turn will come in due course.” She replaced the
headsets and lay back. “When you are ready.”
Chow Dai pushed the activator, then waited. This time Chu Li was
not quiet but started to breathe hard, then to moan and thrust. Her
hands went to her crotch and seemed to be doing something, but it
was unclear what. What was clear was that this was not a
tape like the others. Fearful, particularly of the sounds from the
chair, Chow Dai pushed the activator off.
Chu Li came down very, very slowly and seemed almost
disappointed when she realized that she was no longer switched in.
She opened her eyes and looked at Chow Dai; her expression, though
foreign to Chu Li’s nature, was one Chow Dai had seen before
in unpleasant circumstances.
Chu Li had been connected only a couple of minutes and so was
able to regain control, although her body trembled slightly.
“It was—” she gasped, breathing hard
“—a sex tape. A very graphic one. I was—a
man—in the body of a man—amidst a horde of foreign,
exotic women. All were naked; all were there for my pleasure. I was
to choose one and do as I pleased. It was such a feeling of power,
of dominance. I am—was—highly aroused.”
Chow Dai did not comprehend the depth of the experience, but she
understood the reason for such a cartridge and why Chu Li had
responded to it. “Now at least we know where our honorable
captain got his urges so readily and what he must have done to
amuse himself when no one else was aboard.”
“Yes, I think so. I had heard that such things existed,
but I had never experienced one before. The images are like
memories, like reality. It is as if the scene actually existed for
me in the past, and whichever girl I chose I would have bedded. To
the mind, there would be no difference between the reality and the
illusion. I feel the desire to go back and complete it, but I dare
not. Even now I feel the urge to grab you and make mad, passionate
love to you.”
Chow Dai felt relieved and smiled. “Is that such a bad
thing?”
“To me, no. I have wanted it from the first. But to you it
would be perverse.”
“No. What the guards did to us was perverse. What Sabatini
did to you and to us is perverse. Nothing done in love that harms
no one can be perverse. You are half man, half woman. That is
enough.”
They used the bed in Sabatini’s cabin, the scene of much
of Chu Li’s violation, but it was different now, and
afterward they fell asleep, exhausted more by the events of the day
than by their own final efforts.
The next day Chu Li, feeling better than she ever had in her
whole brief incarnation, decided to tackle things for real. Chow
Mai hit another of the pornographic male-oriented cartridges but
was not affected in the same way Chu Li had been. Rather, she
seemed to have shifted mentally from the male point of view to that
of the females in it, and although they stopped the program quite
early, she wound up not only very, very turned on but also
nonaggressive to the point of total passivity. She also, for some
reason, pleaded to have her chains put back on, but they decided
that the effects would wear down in a while and ignored her
requests.
There were a number of other languages, including one cartridge
that seemed to have no particular effect on Chow Dai other than to
improve slightly her grammar and vocabulary. They decided that it
must have been Mandarin Chinese.
They also discovered many more programs on shipboard design and
construction, mathematical tables, basic celestial navigation, and
computer module design and operation. One showed the complete
interconnect between Sabatini’s command module in the rear
and the computer pilot, confirming Chu Li’s suspicions that
this was one of those very ships where Master System was not in
charge. And, as suspected, there were some traps.
The machine clicked off, and Chow Dai removed the headset and
waited for Chu Li to come out of it. The cartridge had seemed
uneventful to the observer and had taken the normal amount of time,
so there had been no reason to think anything was wrong. Finally,
Chu Li came around, then sat up and looked around, almost
panicking.
“What’s the matter?” the sisters asked in
unison. “What has happened to you?”
“I have been stung,” she told them. “I have
spent a half hour in a pleasant dreamworld, and now I wake up to
find a nightmare.”
As they watched, concerned, she looked around vacantly, then
tried to get out of the chair and stumbled, holding on to it for
support.
“There is only darkness,” she told them, a pained
tone in her voice. “I am blind.”