The last of the puzzle was comin’ clear
now; the few things that didn’t make no sense was
fallin’ into place. I ain’t too much on subjects like
biology or other sciences, but detective work is puzzle
solvin’, and makin’ sense of what evidence you got is
the way to solve it. Trouble was, we always thought we was
dealin’ with one organization, the competition, as any moves
against the Company was always called. Now we had that, and a band
of fanatic revolutionaries within it even the bad guys didn’t
know about.
I still can’t figure why Addison just come out and told it
to us, or why she bothered to have Carlos fix me up. The only thing
I could figure was that somehow she thought just ’cause we
was bright women stuck by circumstances she thought we’d
understand, maybe even applaud. Yeah, maybe in the end that was it.
All this secrecy and skulking about in disguise, all this
two-timin’ and double-crossin’ was leadin’ up to
the climax for her, and since she didn’t expect to be able to
appreciate it then she just wanted to take a few bows now.
Still, while it was double dangerous to be around her at this
stage, the fact was it was lucky beyond any hopes we had. Maybe Sam
had her figured all along; maybe, somehow, he knew she needed an
audience, and we was the only witnesses around guaranteed not to
talk.
Carlos and this Aeii was a lot less friendly, and clearly
considered us excess baggage, but they indulged her. Why not? At
least instead of tryin’ to figure a way to tag along, we was
bein’ forced to take front row seats.
It was clear that Carlos and Addison had a thing goin’. At
least, he looked at her and treated her like some kinda goddess,
and he was the only man around who we ever saw her drop her act and
guard. He knew he was gonna lose her, but he was willin’.
Like I said, fanatics. I don’t know whose world spawned him,
but he sure as hell wanted it changed.
My twin and me, we had problems with the juice that they had to
handle. Like I said, when the juice says you need somethin’,
you really need it. Food we got, at roadside places, though not the
balance we needed, so we both wound up with some of them funny and
otherwise gruesome combinations of things. They also let us run, at
roadside rest stops, and we was able to use the space and some of
the gear in the truck for other exercises and weights. The sex urge
was a problem, since the driver was this tough-lookin’ woman
in a black outfit and cowboy hat and Carlos was only interested in
Addison. The only way out of it was the way we’d had to go
when the club was closed and weather kept any chance of
gettin’ anybody slim to none. I won’t go into details,
but if you ever wonder what it’d be like to be somebody else
and get laid by yourself, ask me. It wasn’t all that bad,
since we both sure enough knew just what the other liked most. It
was kinda like havin’ a million great appetizers but no main
course, but so long as you got off, the juice didn’t know no
different.
They all watched us with real distaste, and Addison in
particular looked uncomfortable. We was a real example of what she
was thinkin’ of doin’ to herself.
We come into a small private airport somewheres in Ohio, I
think, and there was a plane waitin’ for us. It was a small
job as planes go, but it could take the five of us, with the lady
trucker keepin’ on the road with all that fancy and illegal
gear. It was a straight air charter, called ahead from the road. I
figured from this either we wasn’t goin’ where I
thought we was or they decided not to use anyplace the Company
might now be monitoring.
We finally landed, after two stops, someplace in Mississippi,
which didn’t thrill either of us none on the face of it. I
got to admit, though, that my twin was far less thrilled than me.
In her world Lincoln lost the 1864 election, and President
McClellan made peace with the Confederacy. Oh, they got reunited
again, long ’bout 1900, but on strict terms that included a
state’s rights to make its own laws on segregation and race
and to leave the union again if the Compact of 1900 was broken.
Yeah, the south abolished slavery eventually, but her version of
the place sounded more like South Africa than the U.S.A. I knew.
The north wasn’t so bad—most of the states had their
own civil rights acts—but her Mississippi of today was kinda
like ours of the twenties. I tried to assure her that this
Mississippi even had black mayors and councilmen and sheriffs, but
I had to admit I still didn’t feel comfortable in the place,
neither.
By nightfall, we was in a rented station wagon headin’
south, first on nice road, then on real back road shit. We finally
got to this old deserted shack in the middle of this hot, humid,
swamp in the center of the lousiest land in the state. It was
run-down and didn’t have no phone or electricity or
nothin’, but it had a pump outside that worked, an old-style
outhouse out back that smelled like nothin’ else on this or
any other Earth, a wood-burnin’ old iron stove, a few
supplies in sealed containers, and a bunch of mattresses stacked up
in a corner that would do for all of us. Addison had stopped at a
grocery and picked up a bunch of things, which told us we was gonna
be there for a little while but not too long or there’d be a
hell of a drive for more.
They put us to work beatin’ out the mattresses,
wipin’ down the place, washin’ out the pots and pans,
and even choppin’ some of the chunks of wood there so
they’d fit in the stove for cookin’. We also did the
cookin’, the servin’ on paper plates and with paper
cups we’d bought, and the cleanin’ up. The way they had
us goin’, I got the real impression that the only thing these
folks found wrong with havin’ a low class to do the shitwork
was that they was all in it. They wasn’t so damned superior
as they liked to think they was, but any attempt to point it out
was met mostly with anger and threats, not reason. ’Bout the
only consolation we had was that the millions of mosquitoes there
tried us and dropped dead without no bites of consequence, while
them three was near eaten alive and covered with Carlos’s
salve.
We was there close to two days when that big old truck finally
got to us. By that time they’d gone down into the swamps and
come back with this thing that was like a flat piece of roughed-up
plastic that floated a little bit off the ground. There seemed to
be some kinda touch controls on it, though nothin’ was
marked, so it went up or down to suit. To move, though, you had to
push it, although even if a couple of us stood on it, anybody could
move it as easy as if it was on flat rails.
Now they needed our muscles, and everybody else’s, to move
that shit from the trailer onto the slab. It was a lot of stuff,
and one of them crates had to weigh a ton—took us two hours
just to get it from the back of the trailer to the edge, bit by
bit—but once you had it on the slab it was the same as all
the rest.
I ain’t sure if that lady trucker was in on anything or
not, but she got paid off a huge roll of hundred-dollar bills and
she never asked no questions or made more than businesslike
comments. I got the strong impression that she got not just the
cash but that they bought and gave her the truck as well. I guess
maybe I wouldn’t ask no questions, neither.
Well, once we had it all, they was as anxious as could be to get
out of there. I couldn’t figure why we flew down,
’cept, maybe, none of the others could stand the idea of two
more days and nights in the back of that truck with poor sleep. I
got the idea that if they knowed about Mississippi mosquitoes in
summer they might have saved their money and taken the truck.
A wide path, just wide enough for the sled, as they called it,
had been cut outta the woods, but they had my double and me take an
ax and saw and sickle and clear out what had grown back since the
last time they used the place, which was more than they’d
figured. Still, it only took the two of us to push all that stuff
down to this shallow and foul-smellin’ lake edge. I knowed we
was strong, but we wasn’t that strong. It was easy
to see how small amounts of goods could be easily transported
within the Labyrinth.
At the lake’s edge, though, we all had to get up on the
thing and push off with two long, rough poles, one on each side,
walkin’ front to back at the same time. This was clearly
another one of them Vogel-type entrances, one that the Company
didn’t consider useful, and when we reached the spot and saw
the Labyrinth form, I could see why. All but a tiny little bit of
that set of constantly changin’ cubes of light and force was
under the damned water. We headed into it, and wound up in a cube
that had a fair amount of that water in it, only it wasn’t
actin’ like water should. It was all broke up and
floatin’ around, and we all got sloshin’ wet with
swampy, foul-smellin’ water in no time. Still, we was able to
jump down in a hurry and push into the next cube where it was dry,
but the smell lingered on.
I never been on this track, so I had no idea where the switches
was or anything, but just before a switch point we angled up and
out the top. It was dry land, anyways, and surrounded by one
creepy-lookin’ forest. I almost preferred the swamp after
seein’ these monstrous trees and bushes that seemed all
misshapen and was all sorts of colors and not just green. If you
can imagine a forty-foot-high mushroom that was all ugly
bruise-purple and oozed bloody-lookin’ shit outta its top,
you get the idea of just one of the horrors of that place.
“Anybody live ’round here?” I asked
nervously.
“No,” Carlos replied. “There are some great
apes on other continents that have rudimentary intelligence, but
there are no great apes on this continent. There are dangerous
creatures about, though, so once we reach the camp and throw on the
protection, do not venture beyond it.”
He wasn’t exactly warmin’ to us, but I think he was
gettin’ to like havin’ two strong folks around to do
all the shitwork he and the other two might otherwise have to do.
Aeii was probably the same way, but we couldn’t be sure. She
and Carlos could talk in some language, and she and Addison could
talk in that singsong tongue, but she didn’t know no English,
or at least she acted like she didn’t.
We passed through a bunch of poles about ten feet apart that
looked like fence posts waitin’ for the fence. Once inside,
Addison hit a switch on a pole and there was some kind of light
beams criss-crossin’ between each of the posts.
“Don’t touch the posts or in between,” Addison
cautioned us. “It is sensitive to size and shape to a degree
so it probably wouldn’t kill you, but it might burn all your
hair off and probably leave you blind and partially
paralyzed.” She didn’t have to worry. After that, I
didn’t want to be no closer to them things than I had to
be.
The camp itself looked like some African village, with three big
round huts with thatched roofs and a few smaller ones that looked
the same ’cept for size. The biggest one, right in the
middle, had some kind of hard, very smooth brown floor, and had a
kind of straw door that opened big enough to get the whole sled in.
Once in, though, it was real hairy movin’, since the place
already had a bunch of machines in it. It looked like something out
of the Center, or at least Doc Jamispur’s lab. There was
lights, and even power for all this stuff, though from where I
couldn’t guess. There sure were no wires to the huts.
We got all but the big, heavy one off easy, then managed to tilt
the sled enough to get it to mostly slide off with some real group
pushin’.
It turned out they had a real setup here. One of the huts had a
communal shower with real hot water—it looked like they
collected rainwater, purified, and stored it—and toilets. Not
our kind, but waterless round types that somehow got rid of the
stuff with a chemical spray. Every time you went you had to wash
off in the shower, though; nobody thought to pack toilet paper.
The third contained your basic headquarters roughin’-it
kitchen, which was a bunch of gadgets that stored food in these
funny boxes, then you stuck ’em, box and all, into one of
these compartments or another dependin’ on if they matched
the symbols on the box, waited until a bell rung, and took
’em out. Some was hot, some cold, and others at room
temperature, but while we didn’t recognize much of what we
ate it didn’t taste all that bad and the juice approved.
They stuck us in this little hut that was furthest away from the
bathroom, but that figured. It wasn’t much—a woven
straw mat floor, one bed that was barely a double that seemed to be
just a big air mattress covered in some soft stuff and all blown up
at one end to form a kinda pillow, plus a bowl if you wanted to get
water from the supply and keep it handy, and that was it. We waited
to take our showers after them, and stuck our nice, new clothes in
to soak, although we kinda figured we’d never get that stink
out.
None of the others bothered with no clothes ’cept Carlos,
who put on some kind of flowered ankle-length skirt and belt. We
figured he was both bein’ modest as the only man in the world
and also it looked right on him, like the kind of thing his people
wore wherever they was.
They mostly ignored us and let us do our own thing ’cept
for a few hours after we arrived when Carlos and Addison called us
into the big hut and he gave us each a cup of some dark liquid.
“Drink it—all of it,” he ordered.
It tasted lousy goin’ down, but after a little while it
really revved us up. We went through our needs and routines extra
long and extra hard that day, then just dropped into sleep. It
wasn’t till the next day that Brandy Two said, “We
didn’t get no juice last night.”
“Huh? ’Course we did, ’cause I feel
fine.”
“We didn’t get it. We should both be well into
withdrawal right now, but we’re fine. I’m even a little
higher than usual. You?”
“The same.” I got puzzled. This wasn’t
possible—was it? Not that we kicked it. We hadn’t. It
was all there, all the same, only we didn’t get no jolt and
we both felt cheated by it, even a little let down. No super high
at all for the first time in almost a year. No mellow comedown.
Nothin’. The juice was still runnin’ our bodies and our
routines okay, but it was kinda on its own.
Later that day, the juice made that same shit in the cup taste
like the world’s most wonderful wine. “This is it, huh?
This is the stuff?”
He nodded. “Not a lab production, though. It is the
product of a plant. A very common plant in certain areas. The
locals in the world where it grows call it something like ogroppa,
or that is as close as we can come to a name that is part word,
part grunt. Literally speaking, the name means ‘rainbow
weed,’ since it is quite colorful. It is their staple, as we
use maize, rice, bread, or potatoes. Its chemical composition is
quite complex and unique to any botany I have known. Even this
world’s strange plants are distant relatives to ones in our
worlds, but this seems to be a crossover between the botany of
basic humanity and the botany of the other sentient peoples who are
out along the boundaries of Type Two. At some point, a common
organism that was parasitic on higher animals in that world moved
into the lifeform that are humans there, and a strange relationship
developed among a viral organism, a plant, and the humans of that
world. The plant will grow most anywhere except in the Arctic and
immediate subarctic regions, deserts, and above roughly two
thousand meters. The natives take it for granted and have never
related it to this parasite inside them, which becomes a symbiont
with the plant. They do not even understand that there is anything
inside them at all.”
“They ain’t real clever, huh?” Brandy Two
asked.
“Oh, they have the same potential as we do, but this
shapes their development. They do not get sick, therefore they have
not developed real medicine and biology as we know it. They are
excellent farmers and herdsmen, but high mountain barriers,
stretches of desert, and wide seas limit them, as the plant will
not travel well or for very long without going bad. They are a
generally happy people; they have a rich art and folklore
tradition, and some remarkable cities similar to those of the
ancient native American empires or those of the early Middle East.
They progress, but they are not very ambitious. As you can guess,
they have a great deal of sex, but they reproduce very slowly.
Females there ovulate only a couple of times a year. The only
reason you have this irrepressible sex urge is that it thinks you
are one of them; it senses potential reproduction almost constantly
in you, and not being smart or clever it acts.”
“But there ain’t no super high with this
shit!” I protested. “That ain’t fair, when you
got to do all the other stuff.”
“You will always want it, but we think you will get used
to this. We will take specimens and samples from you daily, from
now on. Otherwise, you are free to roam about. Later, when we begin
to move, you will gain even more freedom.”
“Hold on,” I said. “You say you knew
’bout this whole thing, this plant, long ago? Then why all
this experimentin’?”
“The biochemical problem is, I think, beyond you. It has
to do with the way in which the plant’s molecules are
constructed. The architecture is very alien to what we understand
now, and we haven’t had the resources of the Corporation or
institutions like the Center. Its own requirements for growth and
development are not understood. It grows in most Type Zero and all
Type One worlds, and looks chemically identical to the original,
yet it will not interact with the symbiont. This is the first one
that tested out in the lab for interaction, only a week ago. You
two are telling me whether it is functionally identical to the
parent.”
So that was it. They couldn’t use Vogel’s world no
more, ’cause we blew it before they made their breakthrough.
And they couldn’t test it on them shadow dancers,
’cause that was their own and needed for the plot. They could
make more addicts, but that’d require them importin’
more juice when the heat was on, and that wouldn’t tell them
nothin’ ’bout long-time addicts. So they had Brandy Two
left over from their idea of switchin’ for me, and they had
me, so we was handy. Guinea pigs, just like Sam said.
It wasn’t a hundred percent, but where it failed it
wasn’t no pain. Some times you just had so much energy you
had to burn it off; other times, you got real droopy and just sorta
lay around lazily and tripped a little on raindrops or clouds or
grass or somethin’, just starin’ for hours. I could see
why they was good artists; probably would blow mean jazz, too.
You really ached for that jolt and high, but we both knew deep
down that Carlos was right. We’d always want it, but we
didn’t need it. We was on our own form of
methadone.
After we’d get into our horny fever pitch and go at it,
Carlos would be there takin’ vaginal samples and
scrapin’s. Took me a couple days to figure out what he was
lookin’ for, and took him about ten days to find it. In the
meantime, Addison left for someplace, come back briefly once, then
left again. She was back about four days after Carlos made his
discovery, and this time there wasn’t no doubt I guessed
right all down the line. She didn’t have no disguise on, and
she was gorgeous.
“I can’t believe that’s the same girl,”
my twin remarked. “Jesus! She even turns me on and
I’m sick of doin’ it with women—nothin’
personal.”
“I know what you mean.” Did I ever!
“They got this, they ain’t never gonna have ta go back
to the origin world, though. We’re dead-ended and it should
be clear by now. I can’t figure why nobody’s
moved.”
“You sure that Sam was your man? I mean,
real sure?”
“Sure as I can be,” I replied without much
hesitation. “You heard him and saw him. They
wouldn’t’a had much prep time to get him ready, and
they didn’t have Sam under a hypnoscan like they did you and
me. I don’t think he could have faked it. Besides, even if
they coulda, I just felt it. I couldn’t explain it,
I just felt it.”
“I thought I did, too. He loves you an awful lot, sister.
An awful lot. And this hurt him real bad.”
“I know,” I whispered. “I know.”
Addison seemed both nervous and excited when she came over to
see us. “Come. Get into the clothing I have brought for you.
After all this time, we are finally beyond the testing and the
skulking.”
She brought two of the sari and sandal combinations common to
the world of headquarters, and they fit just fine. Addision,
Carlos, and Aeii also got new clothes, but with an added touch.
Each had a small, light, but real nasty-lookin’ gun. You
wasn’t real sure how it worked or what it shot, but no matter
how futuristic it was, I could recognize a machine gun when I saw
one. They checked ’em out, but then put them in a
carryin’ bag which Carlos carried for now. Clearly you
didn’t want to be seen with them things when you reached a
switch point.
“You two will stay close to each other at all
times,” she warned us, “and give no warnings or alarms.
Come.”
Carlos killed the protection gizmo and we walked out. I dunno
how that thing guarded when nobody was there; I guess they had some
kind of switch down at the Labyrinth entrance.
Carlos carried with him a gadget I’d heard the Company
dudes call a forcer, a small but impressive-lookin’ little
machine that could force a weak point open, briefly, to gain
entrance to the Labyrinth from a world at that weak point or to
maintain a small signal so that you could do it with the right code
the other way. It made safe worlds like this one possible, and I
bet that the bright boy who invented it spent the rest of his life
wishin’ he hadn’t.
We got cubin’ okay, but the thing looked weak, unsteady,
and not too big. Even so, we stepped into it and everybody made it.
We walked immediately down one to the switch point, which was
bein’ handled by a guy in a red uniform who had a face sorta
like an orangutan. “Headquarters, security
clearance—” and then she gave one of them words or
phrases in the headquarters language. Ape-face checked his board,
then made a kinda circle with his face which I guess was the same
as a nod, and replied through the translator, “Very well. The
male, however, is not cleared. Do you wish me to call in for
special clearance?”
“That will not be necessary,” she replied, real cool
now like she usually was. “Only two of us will enter, the
rest will remain in a holding cube until we take care of our
matter.”
“Very well. Cleared in. Specify the two to go at the final
switch control point.”
We kept goin’, wonderin’ just what was goin’
on. Headquarters? It didn’t make no sense. We couldn’t
take no guns in, and if I guessed right ’bout what this was
all leadin’ up to, neither Brandy Two or me was much good
there. It was a real surprise, then, when we got to the final
security checkpoint and Addison specified herself and me to go
in.
And suddenly I figured what we was doin’, and I got real
scared.
We got cleared all right, but when we got to the entry cube and
she motioned for the others to wait, I refused to move. That got
’em a little mad, but confused ’em, too. Finally Carlos
reached in the gun bag and I thought he was gonna shoot one of us
to get the other in, but instead he brought out a pair of them
little headsets, givin’ one to Addison and one to me, so we
could talk to each other.
“What is your problem?” she asked, nervous and
irritated. “I won’t leave you there.”
“Don’t make no difference. Once we do this, I figure
you don’t need us no more. I might just as well yell
‘security’ once I’m inside as come back out with
you and get dumped in some world where they ain’t got no
juice or no weed or nothin’. If I’m gonna die I’d
rather it be with a gun, here and now, then slow from withdrawal,
and we know too damn much to be stuck someplace with a pile of the
stuff.”
“I thought of that,” she told me. “Look, right
now you are registered in the log as coming in with me, and you
will be registered going out and at every switch point from then
on. They may never make the connection that there’s something
odd about it, but we can’t take that chance. If we could,
there are other ways to force you to do this. After this, we will
take you up to the origin world, the world where the thing is
natural and the rainbow weed runs wild. It’s no paradise, and
the people aren’t quite human, but there are a few other
humans stuck there—men, too—so you will survive. After
we have taken over, we will come to liberate all of you, as you
will be very useful when we begin to reform the other worlds. Now,
come. They will grow suspicious if we wait too long.”
I wasn’t too sure whether to believe her or not, but I
figured I had very little to lose now that the point was made. I
went through with her into the entry chamber. We stripped down, got
sterilization baths and super scans and everything, then got
cleared to come on back, take that little code verification test on
the combination eye and scale gadget, then walked into reception.
The small staff was there with new clothes like before, and we had
no trouble walkin’ from there to the high-speed elevator and
up to the surface station.
“You’re takin’ a real risk with this,
ain’t you?” I whispered to her.
“It had to be done and I had to see it. There was no other
way. Now, I will make my call on mundane business from here and we
will exit and rejoin the others.”
“You mean what you said back there?”
“Why not? Soon you will be joined by many more, from all
the worlds the Company now exploits.” And, with that, she
made her call. I don’t know to who or why, but I figured it
was some routine thing not at all connected to our business, though
I thought it might have been a code call to her high-class lover
that all was goin’ well.
It was over quick enough, and we made our way back down. The way
out was on a different floor from the way in, and not nearly so
complicated. You just had a code check, to make sure nobody was
sneakin’ out who shouldn’t be, and then you stepped
into the Labyrinth that was always on at this end.
Addison smiled and nodded to Carlos and Aeii, who seemed real
pleased, as well they should be. This was one hell of a
plot.
We had a long walk in the Labyrinth after that, the
longest I ever remembered. The switches and tracks had shortcuts to
help long distances, but we was still talkin’ hours and hours
of cubes and more cubes, weird landscapes and more weird
landscapes. After a while, Carlos and Aeii handed off the bag to
Addison after takin’ out their own guns and left us. It was
just us three now, but somehow that made me feel better, not worse.
Addison’s fury at Monroe had been real; she had a temper, but
I think in her own way she had a sense of honor. I wasn’t
none too sure the other pair did.
Finally we turned and entered the damndest tunnel in the whole
thing I ever saw.
All the scenes on all four cube walls for the longest distance
was exactly the same. We was lookin’ out on some broad grassy
range and off in the distance you could see a fellow on horseback.
But each scene was just slightly different as you walked through.
It was fascinatin’. First of all, the man and the horse was
never in the same exact place. Second of all, sometimes the grass
was tall, sometimes short, sometimes green, sometimes yellow, and
sometimes there was other trees and sometimes there wasn’t.
The man and the horse and the scene all changed. After a while,
that horse seemed to be a purplish thing and the guy on top began
to look more and more like some kinda horror movie freak and less
and less like a man. Unfortunately, the scene ran out before I
could get a real clear look at them, but I got to tell you it was
unnervin’.
We was now in Type One territory, and it was weird all
’round. Once they set up a region, they blacked out the
worlds they didn’t use or want to look at generally and now
there was only the occasional scene here or there, almost never
with people. You couldn’t see much, anyways; they was careful
that their stations would always be concealed, so what we’d
seen with that horse and rider was some real thin weak point, a
natural thing. Now we was back to just stations, and they was as
blacked out mostly as the unused worlds.
We stopped in stages at certain worlds, mostly Company setups, I
figured, where there was survival shacks, basic Type Zero food and
water, and the like. There was also a separate area we could see
that looked all crazy and had stuff you wouldn’t touch on a
bet—Type One stuff. These was worlds like the one we’d
left, worlds where people of any kind just never got invented, and
they used ’em as rest stops on the inter-world highway. At
the first one, Addison pulled out these little necklaces that
looked sorta like red pearls, one for each of us. “Put these
on,” she ordered us, puttin’ one on herself.
“They contain small broadcast units that contain randomly
shifted identity codes while leaving the security clearance intact.
They will mask your much weaker identity signals and make it
impossible to trace us from this point.”
Another question answered. Anytime somebody tells you a
system’s foolproof, all it means is that you are protected
from fools.
They said that pulpweed juice didn’t travel, but I guess
that’s ’cause the folks where it come from never got
’round to inventin’ vacuum-sealed storage containers or
somethin’, ’cause Addison had it and ’cause we
didn’t get no high, damn it, we didn’t even slow
’em down.
We actually took a sleeping period at one of them rest areas. I
didn’t mind, but I was real surprised that a revolutionary
band this well connected hadn’t been able to con no vehicle.
What the hell—what did we have the right to complain about,
anyways? The last thing I wanted to think anything about was the
future.
We took three days, judgin’ from the sleep periods and the
doses of weed juice, before we got near the place. I lost count of
the cubes, worlds, switch points, and rest areas. Finally, though,
we entered the world at a force point.
It was a right pretty-lookin’ place, but not real homey.
More like the kind of background you see in all them old John Wayne
westerns. Lotsa colors, mesas, rock steeples, and—what do
they call them things?—buttes. Never was clear what a butte
was, but they had ’em.
The temperature was cool but not cold, maybe high sixties. The
sky looked a little bluer than I thought it should be, and I
didn’t remember no John Wayne movies with green rocks, and
blue ones, too, but this place had ’em. It also had little
clumps of growths here and there, of sickly purple grasses and
clumps of this odd-lookin’ plant that had a base like a pale
blue cabbage and thick purple stalks growin’ out of ’em
with round pale pink balls on the ends. The skin and balls looked
sorta metallic, and as you walked all the colors of the
sun seemed to ripple off ’em, like lookin’ sideways at
a pane of glass in summer.
“This is it?” I commented. “Looks
kinda lonely to me.”
“Looks kinda yucky to me,” my twin put in.
“There are better places, but this is the only force point
developed,” Addison told us. “There’s a small
settlement about fifty kilometers—about thirty
miles—that way. An old trail leads down the cliff side here
to the bottom, where there’s a small river. Follow the river
against the stream and you’ll hit it. Most of the vegetation
is that violet color; plants here use a different system of making
food from sunlight than ours do. Don’t let it throw you off.
Most anything the people here eat, you can eat, and I doubt if the
symbiont will let you eat wrongly. The bulk of the Type Zero
colony, perhaps a half dozen people, live near the village. You
won’t have any trouble finding them. The natives are
generally friendly and will mostly ignore you unless you do
something to provoke them. They’re not very pretty to look
at, but we aren’t that pretty to them, either, and it
is their world. Go down to the colony. They’ll fill
you in and get you settled. They’ll understand your problems,
too. They’ve all been hooked on this stuff for
years.”
“That’s it?” my twin asked. “You just
drop us here and that’s the end?”
“That’s about it. When I leave, this forcer will be
set to open only from the Labyrinth side. It might be quite some
time before anyone comes for you. It might well be many years,
depending on how smoothly this goes and how many problems the takeover and restructuring of the Company first and
then my people goes, but eventually someone will come. In a week,
no more, I will be like you, and Addison will be no more, so this
is farewell.”
“Seems to me you’re makin’ the biggest
sacrifice of all,” I noted. “Is it really worth that
much? Do you really believe that your people are gonna be any
better than the ones now?”
She swallowed hard. “I am not eager for this. Who is eager
to die? But I would take a dagger and strike my chest and remove my
own heart and crush it if that is what it would take to topple this
abomination. I don’t know if we will be better rulers than we
have now; no one can fully predict the future. I do know that they
could not be any worse, and that radical change in a society that
has never changed since gaining power will collapse it, force it to
rebuild, and along different lines. I will have the necklaces back,
please, now. You can keep the dresses and sandals, although no one
here cares much if you run nude all the time. The climate here is
mild, and if you get a chill you can make your own. This is enough
time. Farewell.”
We handed her the necklaces, but we wasn’t gonna let her
get away scot-free. “Wait a minute!” Brandy Two called
to her. “You ain’t left no juice or weed or
nothin’! How do we even know this is the right
world?”
She turned. “I would not have brought you all this way
just to fool you. Ask your twin. There are many easier places I
could have dumped you with far less time and trouble.”
“That’s true ’nuff,” I agreed.
“As for the fix, you won’t need it anymore. That
round plant with the stalks is the rainbow weed. It grows like
wildfire. You’ll find it delicious.” She pushed the
forcer, got a crude cube, and stepped into it. It collapsed almost
immediately.
“Can you believe her?” my twin commented.
“Damn! We spend all that damned time prayin’ for the
day when the color of your skin don’t mean a thing, and we
find out that even if everybody was the same color and beautiful,
people would still figure out a way to divide and hate
each other!”
“It do give you some discouragement,” I
agreed. “Damn it, I guess we got a long climb down and a
thirty-mile run ’fore we know if we’re just a
pair of conned turkeys or if we got a future at all.”
“Shouldn’t we hang around awhile, just in
case?”
I shook my head. “Uh uh. We don’t know if them
necklaces didn’t screw up this whole bit, but if they did
we’re better off findin’ folks and seein’ what
this place is like. If not, they’ll find us. Besides, in
order to really wrap this up, I wanna talk to them humans stuck
here. Besides, don’t you remember her sayin’ that some
of ’em was men? They been havin’ to live with rank
amateurs all this time. Maybe us trained professionals can put a little spice in their
lives.”
We was able to find the trail without much lookin’; it was
well worn and well used. Well, I supposed they had to get the
damned juice up to this point somehow and fairly regular.
Thirty miles was more than a marathon run, and sure as hell
impossible in a sari and sandals. The river was fairly wide but
real shallow and there was a flat, worn area all along this shore.
More of the trail, we supposed, since off and on we saw some real
ugly-lookin’ animal shit. Leastwise, we hoped it was
animal turds. Either that or this world’s dudes was
really huge ’nuff to shit bricks. Purple and orange
ones, too.
I don’t know if the juice was feelin’ at home or
not, but it really felt good to run; we paced ourselves but ran for
hours before we stopped, and even then we was just startin’
to work up a real sweat. The rainbow weed was all over the place,
wherever there was sunlight, and we found ourselves just
pullin’ it up and eatin’ the balls and the big round
head. I guess it weren’t enough, ’cause the juice also
had us eatin’ grass like we was some kinda cows or
somethin’, and drinkin’ long and hard from the river.
It filled us up, though, but also made us kinda drowsy, and
’long ’bout sundown we just found a patch of
grass and collapsed. ’Bout the only thing my twin said before
we was both dead to the world was, “I ain’t sure I like
the menu, but we sure as hell won’t starve none
here.”
Which were, of course, my thoughts exactly.
Next day we made real time, and broke outta that badlands and
into broad fields. It took a minute to realize that a lot of the
landscape was just like the stuff we saw where we come in, only now
it was covered in violet and purple and shimmering colors. The path
kept on beside the river, sometimes broken by small streams and
creeks flowin’ in, but we just splashed through ’em.
There was clouds in the sky now, and they looked pretty normal; big
fluffy cotton balls that made shadows on the ground.
The trail also had several junctions, but we kept to the river
path. Hell, that’s what we was told to do. Finally, we come
in sight of civilization, or what passed for it in these parts. A
big clump of what looked like giant mounds or maybe beehives with
pointy tops, only made of clay and mud and rock and havin’
openin’s and ladders and steps. Before we reached it, though,
we met our first inhabitant.
He was big, in every sense of the word. Built like a
wrestler, with big, round eyes, the biggest, flattest nose I ever
seen, and skin that was kinda shiny and glitterin’ like fish
scales. He had big, muscular arms and bigger feet and he needed a
manicure somethin’ awful. He also had a flowin’ mane of
thick, curly, dark purple hair and a beard maybe a foot long. He
was wearin’ a kinda sleeveless dark brown tunic and a
knee-length skirt or kilt, but I doubt if there ever was the
Einstein what could make shoes for them feet. The hair was about
the same color as the grass.
He started talkin’ to us, gesturin’ wildly, making
the damndest gruntin’ and blowin’ and bellowin’
we ever heard, which we took to be the way these dudes talked. It
took a couple minutes for us to realize that he didn’t even
know we was newcomers; he was spoutin’ off to us ’bout
somethin’ like we met every day.
“I guess we all look alike to them, too,” Brandy Two
noted.
We finally got this big bruiser calmed down enough to take a
breath. We tried to show we didn’t understand him, come from
up there, and was lookin’ for our own kind. It was crude, but
he turned put to be a bright fella at that and pointed a long,
pointy-nailed finger further on, then cocked it. We figured that
meant take the next right, so we thanked him and went on.
Any other circumstance I’d’a been scared to death of
that creature, but here it almost seemed normal. At least now we
knew what the people were like who got permanently married to a
virus and a plant.
“I wonder if our hair’s gonna turn purple,” I
muttered. Anything was possible now.
The new trail we took was less used, but still plain enough, and
led pretty quick to a small single one of them beehive type huts
with two even smaller ones behind. There was a small creek
runnin’ right beside the property, and in the field was two
creatures that looked like hairy purple elephants with no trunks
and tails like them old dinosaur pictures.
We slowed down, not sure this was the place, when we saw two
women ’bout as pregnant as you can get sittin’ outside,
naked as we was, sucklin’ a couple of little babies. That
stopped me. I just hadn’t figured on babies.
One was the golden type, the other was darker and built
different, not black but maybe Latino. They saw us, and did a real
take, then the Latin woman called to us in some language that
sounded as bad as old scales and bellow, only more human. “Uh
oh,” I muttered. “We forgot ’bout the language
thing. Bet Addison did, too.”
Well, they all started comin’ ’round to us after
that, and others come out of the houses or in from the field. There
was three women, three men, and seven kids, the oldest of which
looked maybe two and a half. A man and woman was of the golden
people variety, another couple was this Latino-lookin’ type,
and a third couple was deep-tanned white, he with real blond hair
and blue eyes and she with reddish-brown hair and green eyes.
From the looks of the kids, they didn’t seem exactly
married to their own matched partners. Maybe they was, maybe they
wasn’t, when the kids showed up, but not lately.
Language was a problem right off, but one of the men, who looked
older, though they all looked damned good, at least knowed what
English was and knew a language close enough that we could talk
with practice, at least on a simple level. With time we could come
to some kinda compromise, I felt, but that worried me. If we had
that kinda time, we was in deep shit.
We had the time. Weeks, in fact, to kinda settle in and get the
feel of the place. There wasn’t much work to do ’cept
cleanin’ up a bit, and gettin’ used to the idea of a
pit toilet and a creek for runnin’ water, but we managed. The
women, all pregnant, seemed almost relieved at our arrival. They
didn’t get the urge as bad, but the men did, and we kinda
took some of the pressure off.
And, real hard but real dedicated-like, we got to the point
where we could get complicated ideas across to each other, at least
the guy who spoke that sorta English, who said his name was Avong
Simran, one of the golden people. A real scientist—he showed
us his old field expedition gear, much of it still powered and
workin’ but not much used these days and not much useful day
to day here.
They was an exploiter team, the six of them, sent out by the
Company like so many to scout out a bunch of worlds in an area
where the Company thought there was somethin’ possibly worth
its while. They was only scouts, the early explorers, but they did
a lot of the original work. Each had a specialty—geology,
anthropology, two different biology people, one for plants and one
for animals, general physics, and general chemistry. They was on
the track of some rare trace element, whatever that is, that was
valuable to the Company in runnin’ its portable gear and
which didn’t seem all that common among the worlds, and they
was like them dudes who go out searchin’ for oil,
diggin’ here, then there, till they hit a gusher. This was
maybe the twentieth world they’d looked at in a row, and all
the signs said that in the next few worlds this stuff they was
lookin’ for, which was made in some natural process not real
common and takin’ millions of years, was there in goodly
amounts.
They was kinda surprised to find the folks here so primitive;
their near identical twins in some of the other worlds were pretty
well advanced. They set up a base camp near this town, adjusted
their gear so they had some language ability with these big
dudes—they could understand it, but no Type Zero human had
all the guts needed to talk it right—and settled in to make
their search. In ’bout a month and a half they found some of
it in the hills nearby and was all ready to call in more experts
with better equipment and move on when all of a sudden the real
peaceful folk of this world just went nuts.
For nine days and nights, there was a near orgy of rape and
constant sex and not much else, day in and day out. They were not
immune. Each of the women got it at least once from one of them big
suckers before it was over. Even the men weren’t immune; they
got raped by these Type One women just the same, drippin’
stuff. You don’t get much of a hard-on like that, but they
had theirs shoved up holes anyways and got covered with wet.
Then, just as suddenly, it was all over and everybody was
peaceful and lovin’ and kind as before. None of the Type
Zeros was in any condition to walk or ride all the way to the force
point for weeks, and a couple had broken bones and all was
wall-to-wall bruises, but by the time things started to heal they
began to see the changes in themselves. We knew the routine real
well. They was hooked. They was also smart enough to figure out
that they’d caught somethin’, and
somethin’ real dangerous to others, from the local folks.
They got up to the force point and sent a
“trouble—dangerous infection” message up the line
to the Exploration and Exploitation Division, then set out to study
the thing even as it changed and held them.
Trouble was, they was an advance party and not a medical man
among ’em. Their lab gear was set up for explorin’ and
survival, not complicated medical studies. The Company—at
least they thought it was—sent some stuff that helped, but
there was a limit to what they could do. Finally, they decided that
two of ’em would set off toward a quarantine area down toward
headquarters to be studied. You can guess what happened. They
barely made it back in time to save their own lives and sanity, and
even now that couple was showin’ some lingerin’ effects
of damage.
They sent all sorts of samples back—blood, urine, even
semen—and eventually they got their answer. Some kinda virus
of unknown design and construction, they was told. Probably
incurable at this stage without damagin’ the host. However,
it had real possibilities for somethin’. No, they
didn’t know for what, or why the Company seemed so
interested, but that wasn’t their job or place. Could the
native males be induced by trade goods and ideas to give semen?
Well, it turned out they could. Even though they was only real
interested in sex once a year durin’ that mad orgy time, they
could get it up if they had to. It was a hell of a business, but it
kept the stranded team in touch with the Company and civilization,
gave ’em a feelin’ it weren’t no total tragedy,
and gave ’em a real chance to study this civilization and
people.
It took ’em a long time to get the link to the rainbow
weed, even though it was right under their noses. You just
don’t think of a disease that lives off humans needin’
somethin’ from a plant. The biologists finally figured it
after ’bout a year or more when they started seein’
other connections between the lower animals and plants of the
world. They sent samples and loads of seeds up as part of their
studies.
They also studied the people here and compared it to themselves.
You’d think that after that orgy time every female would get
pregnant, but only a fraction of them did in any given year. The
birth rate was low, but the life expectancy was very long. Still
and all, in some ways it was a culture without a lot of the shit
that tore us apart. Men and women did all the same jobs equally.
They didn’t have no marriages or stuff, since what was the
point of even developin’ it, all things considered, but they
had a real sense of tribe and community. Weren’t no social
classes, neither, ’cause when you had a period of time every
year when everybody was screwin’ everybody else there just
was no way to keep no royal families pure. No races, either. Since
everybody bred with everybody any real differences got averaged out
maybe thousands of years ago. No wars, neither. They had no real
idea of private property.
But there was a price. There wasn’t much in the way of
development, invention, real progress. They got to a point the
scientists called Bronze Age culture, and stopped. Guess they just
didn’t need to go no further. In the same time our ancestors
went from Bible times to television and space travel and computers,
and the golden people developed all that fancy futuristic shit and
the Labyrinth, they maybe invented a better saddle and a better
plow.
It didn’t seem fair, but it seems like all our warfare and
jealousy and hatreds and divisions was the thing that caused real
progress, too. If you got rid of all the bad things ’bout
human bein’s, you didn’t go nowheres. Nasty, divisive,
warring civilizations with territories and jealousies and kings and
all did best, if they didn’t destroy each other, which was
the odds ’bout half the time. On that scale, them golden
people who founded the Company must have been real sweethearts. And
I thought we was bad!
I tried to explain what was goin’ on with what they was
sendin’ back down the Labyrinth. They didn’t really
want to believe it, and they didn’t like the idea of
bein’ used that much, but they seemed to care a lot more that
somebody’d found a way to live with it back there than with
the idea that it was gonna be used to destroy the Company. I guess
if you work for a Company that treats you like shit, you
don’t give a damn what happens to it. They worked for the
Company ’cause it had the Labyrinth and the only ticket to
what they’d all wanted to do. They sure didn’t have no
love for it, though.
Since the demands for semen had stopped and most business with
the Company stopped, they figured the high-tech boys had figured a
way not to need ’em anymore. That was fine with them, so long
as they was stuck, but they was still havin’ a real tough
time convincin’ the locals that they didn’t need it no
more and that they had nothin’ to trade for it. I guess
that’s what the old blowhard we met was complainin’ to
us about.
They hadn’t figured on kids, neither, but it was kinda
inevitable when you had to do it every day, sometimes more than
once, and the chemicals they used to prevent it was long gone.
Unless that juice done more to us than we knew, though, there
wouldn’t be no black babies around. Still, it was kinda nice
to see them little kids, hold ’em, play with ’em. Even
Brandy Two, who never let down her hard shell, really took to
’em.
Still, the little colony was just markin’ time here. This
wasn’t their world no more than it was ours, and they
didn’t really have much place in it. They was just
doin’ what they could, livin’ day by day, and not
lookin’ much beyond the moment.
Five weeks or so after we got there, we had visitors.
They came in white suits with space helmet type gear and air
packs and all the rest. We told ’em they wouldn’t have
no trouble if they just all kept their pants on all the time and
didn’t stick around another month and a half until the locals
went after everything alive. One of ’em was Bill Markham, and
I was never so happy to see nobody in my whole life ’cept
Sam.
“I look pretty healthy for a dead man,” he admitted
to me. “After all, Sam killed me in a pretty fancy car
accident about two weeks ago. Made all the papers. I’m
getting a little tired of rescuing you from these worlds, though.
We have to stop meeting like this.”
“You got ’em, then?”
“No. Not yet. Until we were able to analyze that plant we
got samples of from that safe world where you two were held there
wasn’t any way. Now, however, we’re ready to act.
Don’t worry, though. We’re pretty well alerted to what
they’re trying to do and in a very short time, with all the
knowledge and technology of the Center, we’ve learned a lot
about this bug. We’re setting up the climax now. I thought
you’d want in on it.”
“Would I! But—where’s Sam?”
Markham cleared his throat. “You want the truth?”
The way he said it I was afraid somethin’ happened to
Sam.
“Yeah, Bill. Straight.”
“Brandy—Sam’s real broken up about all this,
no matter what act he put on for you. I’m not sure he can
take seeing you much more. You wanted the truth, you got it. To be
perfectly frank, the only reason I think he’s kept on living
was to wrap up this case. I wouldn’t give fifty cents for his
future once it’s closed.”
“Not Sam,” I responded. “I can’t believe
that.”
“You think he’s so much stronger than you? That he
rescued you from the depths? You rescued each other. You never
believed that, but it’s true. In his own way, he needs you as
much as you needed him. Just remember what you were like when you
thought he was good as dead. Listless, aimless, nothing to live
for—you finally decided that it didn’t matter if you
got hooked, even killed. Like him, you had only the case and you
didn’t give a damn about yourself or what happened during or
after. I have never seen two people so absolutely unlike in all the
superficial ways who were so identical underneath. He’s not
so tough deep down. Maybe, somehow, he could cope with your death,
although I’m not too sure of that, but he could never stand
to live knowing that you were alive, too. It would tear him to
pieces.”
“But—I still love him! I’d go back to
him!”
“Sure. You’d go back to him, but like this.
It’d be like having a wild, promiscuous, totally uninhibited
daughter in the house beyond control, not a wife, partner, and
lover. I don’t know how much ideas of right and wrong, good
and evil, wild and limited, you retain, but there’s no room
the way you are for compromises, self-sacrifice, or selflessness. I
think he could take you crippled, or paralyzed, better than
this.” He sighed. “Well, we better get things and
people all packed up and ready to move here. We’re on a tight
schedule.”
“Bill, I—”
“Save it. It can wait. It’s between you and Sam,
nobody else. You are all under technical arrest, since you’re
part of the substantial case we’re building here.”
“Damn it, you shoulda come sooner!”
“We did. You forget that time runs at different rates in
many of these worlds. You been here—what? Five, six weeks?
But it’s only been four days of my time, subjectively, and
two of those were spent with computer experts sorting out the
garbage from the signals and tracing you here. They have a pretty
powerful and clever jammer there. I’d love to get a look at
one. If we hadn’t had two of you giving off the same
identical signal to reinforce it, we’d never have found
you.”
“Bill—what happens now? To me, I mean?”
“We have essence du rainbow weed in a shot capsule. With a
team working here, I think we can probably get enough to last a
very long time, until we can isolate and duplicate what it is in
these plants here that makes them different from their twins and
siblings on other worlds. We’ll be taking transports back,
and then you’ll be extensively debriefed. Then we’ll
spring our own little trap and try to wrap this up.”
“No—that ain’t what I meant. After
that.”
“We’ll take you—and your twin—to any
home world you want. Yours, hers, it doesn’t matter.
There’s still over four million in the bank. You get half,
and you can split it with her if you want. We’ll supply you
with whatever amount of this junk you need as long as you need it.
You’ll have money and a supply, you’ll have at least
fifty years before you even start to look or feel middle-aged, or
so they’re theorizing now, and nobody pulling your strings
unless you want it. You’ll have a ball.”
“Yeah,” I sighed. “We’ll have a
ball.” At the cost of losing Sam.
The last of the puzzle was comin’ clear
now; the few things that didn’t make no sense was
fallin’ into place. I ain’t too much on subjects like
biology or other sciences, but detective work is puzzle
solvin’, and makin’ sense of what evidence you got is
the way to solve it. Trouble was, we always thought we was
dealin’ with one organization, the competition, as any moves
against the Company was always called. Now we had that, and a band
of fanatic revolutionaries within it even the bad guys didn’t
know about.
I still can’t figure why Addison just come out and told it
to us, or why she bothered to have Carlos fix me up. The only thing
I could figure was that somehow she thought just ’cause we
was bright women stuck by circumstances she thought we’d
understand, maybe even applaud. Yeah, maybe in the end that was it.
All this secrecy and skulking about in disguise, all this
two-timin’ and double-crossin’ was leadin’ up to
the climax for her, and since she didn’t expect to be able to
appreciate it then she just wanted to take a few bows now.
Still, while it was double dangerous to be around her at this
stage, the fact was it was lucky beyond any hopes we had. Maybe Sam
had her figured all along; maybe, somehow, he knew she needed an
audience, and we was the only witnesses around guaranteed not to
talk.
Carlos and this Aeii was a lot less friendly, and clearly
considered us excess baggage, but they indulged her. Why not? At
least instead of tryin’ to figure a way to tag along, we was
bein’ forced to take front row seats.
It was clear that Carlos and Addison had a thing goin’. At
least, he looked at her and treated her like some kinda goddess,
and he was the only man around who we ever saw her drop her act and
guard. He knew he was gonna lose her, but he was willin’.
Like I said, fanatics. I don’t know whose world spawned him,
but he sure as hell wanted it changed.
My twin and me, we had problems with the juice that they had to
handle. Like I said, when the juice says you need somethin’,
you really need it. Food we got, at roadside places, though not the
balance we needed, so we both wound up with some of them funny and
otherwise gruesome combinations of things. They also let us run, at
roadside rest stops, and we was able to use the space and some of
the gear in the truck for other exercises and weights. The sex urge
was a problem, since the driver was this tough-lookin’ woman
in a black outfit and cowboy hat and Carlos was only interested in
Addison. The only way out of it was the way we’d had to go
when the club was closed and weather kept any chance of
gettin’ anybody slim to none. I won’t go into details,
but if you ever wonder what it’d be like to be somebody else
and get laid by yourself, ask me. It wasn’t all that bad,
since we both sure enough knew just what the other liked most. It
was kinda like havin’ a million great appetizers but no main
course, but so long as you got off, the juice didn’t know no
different.
They all watched us with real distaste, and Addison in
particular looked uncomfortable. We was a real example of what she
was thinkin’ of doin’ to herself.
We come into a small private airport somewheres in Ohio, I
think, and there was a plane waitin’ for us. It was a small
job as planes go, but it could take the five of us, with the lady
trucker keepin’ on the road with all that fancy and illegal
gear. It was a straight air charter, called ahead from the road. I
figured from this either we wasn’t goin’ where I
thought we was or they decided not to use anyplace the Company
might now be monitoring.
We finally landed, after two stops, someplace in Mississippi,
which didn’t thrill either of us none on the face of it. I
got to admit, though, that my twin was far less thrilled than me.
In her world Lincoln lost the 1864 election, and President
McClellan made peace with the Confederacy. Oh, they got reunited
again, long ’bout 1900, but on strict terms that included a
state’s rights to make its own laws on segregation and race
and to leave the union again if the Compact of 1900 was broken.
Yeah, the south abolished slavery eventually, but her version of
the place sounded more like South Africa than the U.S.A. I knew.
The north wasn’t so bad—most of the states had their
own civil rights acts—but her Mississippi of today was kinda
like ours of the twenties. I tried to assure her that this
Mississippi even had black mayors and councilmen and sheriffs, but
I had to admit I still didn’t feel comfortable in the place,
neither.
By nightfall, we was in a rented station wagon headin’
south, first on nice road, then on real back road shit. We finally
got to this old deserted shack in the middle of this hot, humid,
swamp in the center of the lousiest land in the state. It was
run-down and didn’t have no phone or electricity or
nothin’, but it had a pump outside that worked, an old-style
outhouse out back that smelled like nothin’ else on this or
any other Earth, a wood-burnin’ old iron stove, a few
supplies in sealed containers, and a bunch of mattresses stacked up
in a corner that would do for all of us. Addison had stopped at a
grocery and picked up a bunch of things, which told us we was gonna
be there for a little while but not too long or there’d be a
hell of a drive for more.
They put us to work beatin’ out the mattresses,
wipin’ down the place, washin’ out the pots and pans,
and even choppin’ some of the chunks of wood there so
they’d fit in the stove for cookin’. We also did the
cookin’, the servin’ on paper plates and with paper
cups we’d bought, and the cleanin’ up. The way they had
us goin’, I got the real impression that the only thing these
folks found wrong with havin’ a low class to do the shitwork
was that they was all in it. They wasn’t so damned superior
as they liked to think they was, but any attempt to point it out
was met mostly with anger and threats, not reason. ’Bout the
only consolation we had was that the millions of mosquitoes there
tried us and dropped dead without no bites of consequence, while
them three was near eaten alive and covered with Carlos’s
salve.
We was there close to two days when that big old truck finally
got to us. By that time they’d gone down into the swamps and
come back with this thing that was like a flat piece of roughed-up
plastic that floated a little bit off the ground. There seemed to
be some kinda touch controls on it, though nothin’ was
marked, so it went up or down to suit. To move, though, you had to
push it, although even if a couple of us stood on it, anybody could
move it as easy as if it was on flat rails.
Now they needed our muscles, and everybody else’s, to move
that shit from the trailer onto the slab. It was a lot of stuff,
and one of them crates had to weigh a ton—took us two hours
just to get it from the back of the trailer to the edge, bit by
bit—but once you had it on the slab it was the same as all
the rest.
I ain’t sure if that lady trucker was in on anything or
not, but she got paid off a huge roll of hundred-dollar bills and
she never asked no questions or made more than businesslike
comments. I got the strong impression that she got not just the
cash but that they bought and gave her the truck as well. I guess
maybe I wouldn’t ask no questions, neither.
Well, once we had it all, they was as anxious as could be to get
out of there. I couldn’t figure why we flew down,
’cept, maybe, none of the others could stand the idea of two
more days and nights in the back of that truck with poor sleep. I
got the idea that if they knowed about Mississippi mosquitoes in
summer they might have saved their money and taken the truck.
A wide path, just wide enough for the sled, as they called it,
had been cut outta the woods, but they had my double and me take an
ax and saw and sickle and clear out what had grown back since the
last time they used the place, which was more than they’d
figured. Still, it only took the two of us to push all that stuff
down to this shallow and foul-smellin’ lake edge. I knowed we
was strong, but we wasn’t that strong. It was easy
to see how small amounts of goods could be easily transported
within the Labyrinth.
At the lake’s edge, though, we all had to get up on the
thing and push off with two long, rough poles, one on each side,
walkin’ front to back at the same time. This was clearly
another one of them Vogel-type entrances, one that the Company
didn’t consider useful, and when we reached the spot and saw
the Labyrinth form, I could see why. All but a tiny little bit of
that set of constantly changin’ cubes of light and force was
under the damned water. We headed into it, and wound up in a cube
that had a fair amount of that water in it, only it wasn’t
actin’ like water should. It was all broke up and
floatin’ around, and we all got sloshin’ wet with
swampy, foul-smellin’ water in no time. Still, we was able to
jump down in a hurry and push into the next cube where it was dry,
but the smell lingered on.
I never been on this track, so I had no idea where the switches
was or anything, but just before a switch point we angled up and
out the top. It was dry land, anyways, and surrounded by one
creepy-lookin’ forest. I almost preferred the swamp after
seein’ these monstrous trees and bushes that seemed all
misshapen and was all sorts of colors and not just green. If you
can imagine a forty-foot-high mushroom that was all ugly
bruise-purple and oozed bloody-lookin’ shit outta its top,
you get the idea of just one of the horrors of that place.
“Anybody live ’round here?” I asked
nervously.
“No,” Carlos replied. “There are some great
apes on other continents that have rudimentary intelligence, but
there are no great apes on this continent. There are dangerous
creatures about, though, so once we reach the camp and throw on the
protection, do not venture beyond it.”
He wasn’t exactly warmin’ to us, but I think he was
gettin’ to like havin’ two strong folks around to do
all the shitwork he and the other two might otherwise have to do.
Aeii was probably the same way, but we couldn’t be sure. She
and Carlos could talk in some language, and she and Addison could
talk in that singsong tongue, but she didn’t know no English,
or at least she acted like she didn’t.
We passed through a bunch of poles about ten feet apart that
looked like fence posts waitin’ for the fence. Once inside,
Addison hit a switch on a pole and there was some kind of light
beams criss-crossin’ between each of the posts.
“Don’t touch the posts or in between,” Addison
cautioned us. “It is sensitive to size and shape to a degree
so it probably wouldn’t kill you, but it might burn all your
hair off and probably leave you blind and partially
paralyzed.” She didn’t have to worry. After that, I
didn’t want to be no closer to them things than I had to
be.
The camp itself looked like some African village, with three big
round huts with thatched roofs and a few smaller ones that looked
the same ’cept for size. The biggest one, right in the
middle, had some kind of hard, very smooth brown floor, and had a
kind of straw door that opened big enough to get the whole sled in.
Once in, though, it was real hairy movin’, since the place
already had a bunch of machines in it. It looked like something out
of the Center, or at least Doc Jamispur’s lab. There was
lights, and even power for all this stuff, though from where I
couldn’t guess. There sure were no wires to the huts.
We got all but the big, heavy one off easy, then managed to tilt
the sled enough to get it to mostly slide off with some real group
pushin’.
It turned out they had a real setup here. One of the huts had a
communal shower with real hot water—it looked like they
collected rainwater, purified, and stored it—and toilets. Not
our kind, but waterless round types that somehow got rid of the
stuff with a chemical spray. Every time you went you had to wash
off in the shower, though; nobody thought to pack toilet paper.
The third contained your basic headquarters roughin’-it
kitchen, which was a bunch of gadgets that stored food in these
funny boxes, then you stuck ’em, box and all, into one of
these compartments or another dependin’ on if they matched
the symbols on the box, waited until a bell rung, and took
’em out. Some was hot, some cold, and others at room
temperature, but while we didn’t recognize much of what we
ate it didn’t taste all that bad and the juice approved.
They stuck us in this little hut that was furthest away from the
bathroom, but that figured. It wasn’t much—a woven
straw mat floor, one bed that was barely a double that seemed to be
just a big air mattress covered in some soft stuff and all blown up
at one end to form a kinda pillow, plus a bowl if you wanted to get
water from the supply and keep it handy, and that was it. We waited
to take our showers after them, and stuck our nice, new clothes in
to soak, although we kinda figured we’d never get that stink
out.
None of the others bothered with no clothes ’cept Carlos,
who put on some kind of flowered ankle-length skirt and belt. We
figured he was both bein’ modest as the only man in the world
and also it looked right on him, like the kind of thing his people
wore wherever they was.
They mostly ignored us and let us do our own thing ’cept
for a few hours after we arrived when Carlos and Addison called us
into the big hut and he gave us each a cup of some dark liquid.
“Drink it—all of it,” he ordered.
It tasted lousy goin’ down, but after a little while it
really revved us up. We went through our needs and routines extra
long and extra hard that day, then just dropped into sleep. It
wasn’t till the next day that Brandy Two said, “We
didn’t get no juice last night.”
“Huh? ’Course we did, ’cause I feel
fine.”
“We didn’t get it. We should both be well into
withdrawal right now, but we’re fine. I’m even a little
higher than usual. You?”
“The same.” I got puzzled. This wasn’t
possible—was it? Not that we kicked it. We hadn’t. It
was all there, all the same, only we didn’t get no jolt and
we both felt cheated by it, even a little let down. No super high
at all for the first time in almost a year. No mellow comedown.
Nothin’. The juice was still runnin’ our bodies and our
routines okay, but it was kinda on its own.
Later that day, the juice made that same shit in the cup taste
like the world’s most wonderful wine. “This is it, huh?
This is the stuff?”
He nodded. “Not a lab production, though. It is the
product of a plant. A very common plant in certain areas. The
locals in the world where it grows call it something like ogroppa,
or that is as close as we can come to a name that is part word,
part grunt. Literally speaking, the name means ‘rainbow
weed,’ since it is quite colorful. It is their staple, as we
use maize, rice, bread, or potatoes. Its chemical composition is
quite complex and unique to any botany I have known. Even this
world’s strange plants are distant relatives to ones in our
worlds, but this seems to be a crossover between the botany of
basic humanity and the botany of the other sentient peoples who are
out along the boundaries of Type Two. At some point, a common
organism that was parasitic on higher animals in that world moved
into the lifeform that are humans there, and a strange relationship
developed among a viral organism, a plant, and the humans of that
world. The plant will grow most anywhere except in the Arctic and
immediate subarctic regions, deserts, and above roughly two
thousand meters. The natives take it for granted and have never
related it to this parasite inside them, which becomes a symbiont
with the plant. They do not even understand that there is anything
inside them at all.”
“They ain’t real clever, huh?” Brandy Two
asked.
“Oh, they have the same potential as we do, but this
shapes their development. They do not get sick, therefore they have
not developed real medicine and biology as we know it. They are
excellent farmers and herdsmen, but high mountain barriers,
stretches of desert, and wide seas limit them, as the plant will
not travel well or for very long without going bad. They are a
generally happy people; they have a rich art and folklore
tradition, and some remarkable cities similar to those of the
ancient native American empires or those of the early Middle East.
They progress, but they are not very ambitious. As you can guess,
they have a great deal of sex, but they reproduce very slowly.
Females there ovulate only a couple of times a year. The only
reason you have this irrepressible sex urge is that it thinks you
are one of them; it senses potential reproduction almost constantly
in you, and not being smart or clever it acts.”
“But there ain’t no super high with this
shit!” I protested. “That ain’t fair, when you
got to do all the other stuff.”
“You will always want it, but we think you will get used
to this. We will take specimens and samples from you daily, from
now on. Otherwise, you are free to roam about. Later, when we begin
to move, you will gain even more freedom.”
“Hold on,” I said. “You say you knew
’bout this whole thing, this plant, long ago? Then why all
this experimentin’?”
“The biochemical problem is, I think, beyond you. It has
to do with the way in which the plant’s molecules are
constructed. The architecture is very alien to what we understand
now, and we haven’t had the resources of the Corporation or
institutions like the Center. Its own requirements for growth and
development are not understood. It grows in most Type Zero and all
Type One worlds, and looks chemically identical to the original,
yet it will not interact with the symbiont. This is the first one
that tested out in the lab for interaction, only a week ago. You
two are telling me whether it is functionally identical to the
parent.”
So that was it. They couldn’t use Vogel’s world no
more, ’cause we blew it before they made their breakthrough.
And they couldn’t test it on them shadow dancers,
’cause that was their own and needed for the plot. They could
make more addicts, but that’d require them importin’
more juice when the heat was on, and that wouldn’t tell them
nothin’ ’bout long-time addicts. So they had Brandy Two
left over from their idea of switchin’ for me, and they had
me, so we was handy. Guinea pigs, just like Sam said.
It wasn’t a hundred percent, but where it failed it
wasn’t no pain. Some times you just had so much energy you
had to burn it off; other times, you got real droopy and just sorta
lay around lazily and tripped a little on raindrops or clouds or
grass or somethin’, just starin’ for hours. I could see
why they was good artists; probably would blow mean jazz, too.
You really ached for that jolt and high, but we both knew deep
down that Carlos was right. We’d always want it, but we
didn’t need it. We was on our own form of
methadone.
After we’d get into our horny fever pitch and go at it,
Carlos would be there takin’ vaginal samples and
scrapin’s. Took me a couple days to figure out what he was
lookin’ for, and took him about ten days to find it. In the
meantime, Addison left for someplace, come back briefly once, then
left again. She was back about four days after Carlos made his
discovery, and this time there wasn’t no doubt I guessed
right all down the line. She didn’t have no disguise on, and
she was gorgeous.
“I can’t believe that’s the same girl,”
my twin remarked. “Jesus! She even turns me on and
I’m sick of doin’ it with women—nothin’
personal.”
“I know what you mean.” Did I ever!
“They got this, they ain’t never gonna have ta go back
to the origin world, though. We’re dead-ended and it should
be clear by now. I can’t figure why nobody’s
moved.”
“You sure that Sam was your man? I mean,
real sure?”
“Sure as I can be,” I replied without much
hesitation. “You heard him and saw him. They
wouldn’t’a had much prep time to get him ready, and
they didn’t have Sam under a hypnoscan like they did you and
me. I don’t think he could have faked it. Besides, even if
they coulda, I just felt it. I couldn’t explain it,
I just felt it.”
“I thought I did, too. He loves you an awful lot, sister.
An awful lot. And this hurt him real bad.”
“I know,” I whispered. “I know.”
Addison seemed both nervous and excited when she came over to
see us. “Come. Get into the clothing I have brought for you.
After all this time, we are finally beyond the testing and the
skulking.”
She brought two of the sari and sandal combinations common to
the world of headquarters, and they fit just fine. Addision,
Carlos, and Aeii also got new clothes, but with an added touch.
Each had a small, light, but real nasty-lookin’ gun. You
wasn’t real sure how it worked or what it shot, but no matter
how futuristic it was, I could recognize a machine gun when I saw
one. They checked ’em out, but then put them in a
carryin’ bag which Carlos carried for now. Clearly you
didn’t want to be seen with them things when you reached a
switch point.
“You two will stay close to each other at all
times,” she warned us, “and give no warnings or alarms.
Come.”
Carlos killed the protection gizmo and we walked out. I dunno
how that thing guarded when nobody was there; I guess they had some
kind of switch down at the Labyrinth entrance.
Carlos carried with him a gadget I’d heard the Company
dudes call a forcer, a small but impressive-lookin’ little
machine that could force a weak point open, briefly, to gain
entrance to the Labyrinth from a world at that weak point or to
maintain a small signal so that you could do it with the right code
the other way. It made safe worlds like this one possible, and I
bet that the bright boy who invented it spent the rest of his life
wishin’ he hadn’t.
We got cubin’ okay, but the thing looked weak, unsteady,
and not too big. Even so, we stepped into it and everybody made it.
We walked immediately down one to the switch point, which was
bein’ handled by a guy in a red uniform who had a face sorta
like an orangutan. “Headquarters, security
clearance—” and then she gave one of them words or
phrases in the headquarters language. Ape-face checked his board,
then made a kinda circle with his face which I guess was the same
as a nod, and replied through the translator, “Very well. The
male, however, is not cleared. Do you wish me to call in for
special clearance?”
“That will not be necessary,” she replied, real cool
now like she usually was. “Only two of us will enter, the
rest will remain in a holding cube until we take care of our
matter.”
“Very well. Cleared in. Specify the two to go at the final
switch control point.”
We kept goin’, wonderin’ just what was goin’
on. Headquarters? It didn’t make no sense. We couldn’t
take no guns in, and if I guessed right ’bout what this was
all leadin’ up to, neither Brandy Two or me was much good
there. It was a real surprise, then, when we got to the final
security checkpoint and Addison specified herself and me to go
in.
And suddenly I figured what we was doin’, and I got real
scared.
We got cleared all right, but when we got to the entry cube and
she motioned for the others to wait, I refused to move. That got
’em a little mad, but confused ’em, too. Finally Carlos
reached in the gun bag and I thought he was gonna shoot one of us
to get the other in, but instead he brought out a pair of them
little headsets, givin’ one to Addison and one to me, so we
could talk to each other.
“What is your problem?” she asked, nervous and
irritated. “I won’t leave you there.”
“Don’t make no difference. Once we do this, I figure
you don’t need us no more. I might just as well yell
‘security’ once I’m inside as come back out with
you and get dumped in some world where they ain’t got no
juice or no weed or nothin’. If I’m gonna die I’d
rather it be with a gun, here and now, then slow from withdrawal,
and we know too damn much to be stuck someplace with a pile of the
stuff.”
“I thought of that,” she told me. “Look, right
now you are registered in the log as coming in with me, and you
will be registered going out and at every switch point from then
on. They may never make the connection that there’s something
odd about it, but we can’t take that chance. If we could,
there are other ways to force you to do this. After this, we will
take you up to the origin world, the world where the thing is
natural and the rainbow weed runs wild. It’s no paradise, and
the people aren’t quite human, but there are a few other
humans stuck there—men, too—so you will survive. After
we have taken over, we will come to liberate all of you, as you
will be very useful when we begin to reform the other worlds. Now,
come. They will grow suspicious if we wait too long.”
I wasn’t too sure whether to believe her or not, but I
figured I had very little to lose now that the point was made. I
went through with her into the entry chamber. We stripped down, got
sterilization baths and super scans and everything, then got
cleared to come on back, take that little code verification test on
the combination eye and scale gadget, then walked into reception.
The small staff was there with new clothes like before, and we had
no trouble walkin’ from there to the high-speed elevator and
up to the surface station.
“You’re takin’ a real risk with this,
ain’t you?” I whispered to her.
“It had to be done and I had to see it. There was no other
way. Now, I will make my call on mundane business from here and we
will exit and rejoin the others.”
“You mean what you said back there?”
“Why not? Soon you will be joined by many more, from all
the worlds the Company now exploits.” And, with that, she
made her call. I don’t know to who or why, but I figured it
was some routine thing not at all connected to our business, though
I thought it might have been a code call to her high-class lover
that all was goin’ well.
It was over quick enough, and we made our way back down. The way
out was on a different floor from the way in, and not nearly so
complicated. You just had a code check, to make sure nobody was
sneakin’ out who shouldn’t be, and then you stepped
into the Labyrinth that was always on at this end.
Addison smiled and nodded to Carlos and Aeii, who seemed real
pleased, as well they should be. This was one hell of a
plot.
We had a long walk in the Labyrinth after that, the
longest I ever remembered. The switches and tracks had shortcuts to
help long distances, but we was still talkin’ hours and hours
of cubes and more cubes, weird landscapes and more weird
landscapes. After a while, Carlos and Aeii handed off the bag to
Addison after takin’ out their own guns and left us. It was
just us three now, but somehow that made me feel better, not worse.
Addison’s fury at Monroe had been real; she had a temper, but
I think in her own way she had a sense of honor. I wasn’t
none too sure the other pair did.
Finally we turned and entered the damndest tunnel in the whole
thing I ever saw.
All the scenes on all four cube walls for the longest distance
was exactly the same. We was lookin’ out on some broad grassy
range and off in the distance you could see a fellow on horseback.
But each scene was just slightly different as you walked through.
It was fascinatin’. First of all, the man and the horse was
never in the same exact place. Second of all, sometimes the grass
was tall, sometimes short, sometimes green, sometimes yellow, and
sometimes there was other trees and sometimes there wasn’t.
The man and the horse and the scene all changed. After a while,
that horse seemed to be a purplish thing and the guy on top began
to look more and more like some kinda horror movie freak and less
and less like a man. Unfortunately, the scene ran out before I
could get a real clear look at them, but I got to tell you it was
unnervin’.
We was now in Type One territory, and it was weird all
’round. Once they set up a region, they blacked out the
worlds they didn’t use or want to look at generally and now
there was only the occasional scene here or there, almost never
with people. You couldn’t see much, anyways; they was careful
that their stations would always be concealed, so what we’d
seen with that horse and rider was some real thin weak point, a
natural thing. Now we was back to just stations, and they was as
blacked out mostly as the unused worlds.
We stopped in stages at certain worlds, mostly Company setups, I
figured, where there was survival shacks, basic Type Zero food and
water, and the like. There was also a separate area we could see
that looked all crazy and had stuff you wouldn’t touch on a
bet—Type One stuff. These was worlds like the one we’d
left, worlds where people of any kind just never got invented, and
they used ’em as rest stops on the inter-world highway. At
the first one, Addison pulled out these little necklaces that
looked sorta like red pearls, one for each of us. “Put these
on,” she ordered us, puttin’ one on herself.
“They contain small broadcast units that contain randomly
shifted identity codes while leaving the security clearance intact.
They will mask your much weaker identity signals and make it
impossible to trace us from this point.”
Another question answered. Anytime somebody tells you a
system’s foolproof, all it means is that you are protected
from fools.
They said that pulpweed juice didn’t travel, but I guess
that’s ’cause the folks where it come from never got
’round to inventin’ vacuum-sealed storage containers or
somethin’, ’cause Addison had it and ’cause we
didn’t get no high, damn it, we didn’t even slow
’em down.
We actually took a sleeping period at one of them rest areas. I
didn’t mind, but I was real surprised that a revolutionary
band this well connected hadn’t been able to con no vehicle.
What the hell—what did we have the right to complain about,
anyways? The last thing I wanted to think anything about was the
future.
We took three days, judgin’ from the sleep periods and the
doses of weed juice, before we got near the place. I lost count of
the cubes, worlds, switch points, and rest areas. Finally, though,
we entered the world at a force point.
It was a right pretty-lookin’ place, but not real homey.
More like the kind of background you see in all them old John Wayne
westerns. Lotsa colors, mesas, rock steeples, and—what do
they call them things?—buttes. Never was clear what a butte
was, but they had ’em.
The temperature was cool but not cold, maybe high sixties. The
sky looked a little bluer than I thought it should be, and I
didn’t remember no John Wayne movies with green rocks, and
blue ones, too, but this place had ’em. It also had little
clumps of growths here and there, of sickly purple grasses and
clumps of this odd-lookin’ plant that had a base like a pale
blue cabbage and thick purple stalks growin’ out of ’em
with round pale pink balls on the ends. The skin and balls looked
sorta metallic, and as you walked all the colors of the
sun seemed to ripple off ’em, like lookin’ sideways at
a pane of glass in summer.
“This is it?” I commented. “Looks
kinda lonely to me.”
“Looks kinda yucky to me,” my twin put in.
“There are better places, but this is the only force point
developed,” Addison told us. “There’s a small
settlement about fifty kilometers—about thirty
miles—that way. An old trail leads down the cliff side here
to the bottom, where there’s a small river. Follow the river
against the stream and you’ll hit it. Most of the vegetation
is that violet color; plants here use a different system of making
food from sunlight than ours do. Don’t let it throw you off.
Most anything the people here eat, you can eat, and I doubt if the
symbiont will let you eat wrongly. The bulk of the Type Zero
colony, perhaps a half dozen people, live near the village. You
won’t have any trouble finding them. The natives are
generally friendly and will mostly ignore you unless you do
something to provoke them. They’re not very pretty to look
at, but we aren’t that pretty to them, either, and it
is their world. Go down to the colony. They’ll fill
you in and get you settled. They’ll understand your problems,
too. They’ve all been hooked on this stuff for
years.”
“That’s it?” my twin asked. “You just
drop us here and that’s the end?”
“That’s about it. When I leave, this forcer will be
set to open only from the Labyrinth side. It might be quite some
time before anyone comes for you. It might well be many years,
depending on how smoothly this goes and how many problems the takeover and restructuring of the Company first and
then my people goes, but eventually someone will come. In a week,
no more, I will be like you, and Addison will be no more, so this
is farewell.”
“Seems to me you’re makin’ the biggest
sacrifice of all,” I noted. “Is it really worth that
much? Do you really believe that your people are gonna be any
better than the ones now?”
She swallowed hard. “I am not eager for this. Who is eager
to die? But I would take a dagger and strike my chest and remove my
own heart and crush it if that is what it would take to topple this
abomination. I don’t know if we will be better rulers than we
have now; no one can fully predict the future. I do know that they
could not be any worse, and that radical change in a society that
has never changed since gaining power will collapse it, force it to
rebuild, and along different lines. I will have the necklaces back,
please, now. You can keep the dresses and sandals, although no one
here cares much if you run nude all the time. The climate here is
mild, and if you get a chill you can make your own. This is enough
time. Farewell.”
We handed her the necklaces, but we wasn’t gonna let her
get away scot-free. “Wait a minute!” Brandy Two called
to her. “You ain’t left no juice or weed or
nothin’! How do we even know this is the right
world?”
She turned. “I would not have brought you all this way
just to fool you. Ask your twin. There are many easier places I
could have dumped you with far less time and trouble.”
“That’s true ’nuff,” I agreed.
“As for the fix, you won’t need it anymore. That
round plant with the stalks is the rainbow weed. It grows like
wildfire. You’ll find it delicious.” She pushed the
forcer, got a crude cube, and stepped into it. It collapsed almost
immediately.
“Can you believe her?” my twin commented.
“Damn! We spend all that damned time prayin’ for the
day when the color of your skin don’t mean a thing, and we
find out that even if everybody was the same color and beautiful,
people would still figure out a way to divide and hate
each other!”
“It do give you some discouragement,” I
agreed. “Damn it, I guess we got a long climb down and a
thirty-mile run ’fore we know if we’re just a
pair of conned turkeys or if we got a future at all.”
“Shouldn’t we hang around awhile, just in
case?”
I shook my head. “Uh uh. We don’t know if them
necklaces didn’t screw up this whole bit, but if they did
we’re better off findin’ folks and seein’ what
this place is like. If not, they’ll find us. Besides, in
order to really wrap this up, I wanna talk to them humans stuck
here. Besides, don’t you remember her sayin’ that some
of ’em was men? They been havin’ to live with rank
amateurs all this time. Maybe us trained professionals can put a little spice in their
lives.”
We was able to find the trail without much lookin’; it was
well worn and well used. Well, I supposed they had to get the
damned juice up to this point somehow and fairly regular.
Thirty miles was more than a marathon run, and sure as hell
impossible in a sari and sandals. The river was fairly wide but
real shallow and there was a flat, worn area all along this shore.
More of the trail, we supposed, since off and on we saw some real
ugly-lookin’ animal shit. Leastwise, we hoped it was
animal turds. Either that or this world’s dudes was
really huge ’nuff to shit bricks. Purple and orange
ones, too.
I don’t know if the juice was feelin’ at home or
not, but it really felt good to run; we paced ourselves but ran for
hours before we stopped, and even then we was just startin’
to work up a real sweat. The rainbow weed was all over the place,
wherever there was sunlight, and we found ourselves just
pullin’ it up and eatin’ the balls and the big round
head. I guess it weren’t enough, ’cause the juice also
had us eatin’ grass like we was some kinda cows or
somethin’, and drinkin’ long and hard from the river.
It filled us up, though, but also made us kinda drowsy, and
’long ’bout sundown we just found a patch of
grass and collapsed. ’Bout the only thing my twin said before
we was both dead to the world was, “I ain’t sure I like
the menu, but we sure as hell won’t starve none
here.”
Which were, of course, my thoughts exactly.
Next day we made real time, and broke outta that badlands and
into broad fields. It took a minute to realize that a lot of the
landscape was just like the stuff we saw where we come in, only now
it was covered in violet and purple and shimmering colors. The path
kept on beside the river, sometimes broken by small streams and
creeks flowin’ in, but we just splashed through ’em.
There was clouds in the sky now, and they looked pretty normal; big
fluffy cotton balls that made shadows on the ground.
The trail also had several junctions, but we kept to the river
path. Hell, that’s what we was told to do. Finally, we come
in sight of civilization, or what passed for it in these parts. A
big clump of what looked like giant mounds or maybe beehives with
pointy tops, only made of clay and mud and rock and havin’
openin’s and ladders and steps. Before we reached it, though,
we met our first inhabitant.
He was big, in every sense of the word. Built like a
wrestler, with big, round eyes, the biggest, flattest nose I ever
seen, and skin that was kinda shiny and glitterin’ like fish
scales. He had big, muscular arms and bigger feet and he needed a
manicure somethin’ awful. He also had a flowin’ mane of
thick, curly, dark purple hair and a beard maybe a foot long. He
was wearin’ a kinda sleeveless dark brown tunic and a
knee-length skirt or kilt, but I doubt if there ever was the
Einstein what could make shoes for them feet. The hair was about
the same color as the grass.
He started talkin’ to us, gesturin’ wildly, making
the damndest gruntin’ and blowin’ and bellowin’
we ever heard, which we took to be the way these dudes talked. It
took a couple minutes for us to realize that he didn’t even
know we was newcomers; he was spoutin’ off to us ’bout
somethin’ like we met every day.
“I guess we all look alike to them, too,” Brandy Two
noted.
We finally got this big bruiser calmed down enough to take a
breath. We tried to show we didn’t understand him, come from
up there, and was lookin’ for our own kind. It was crude, but
he turned put to be a bright fella at that and pointed a long,
pointy-nailed finger further on, then cocked it. We figured that
meant take the next right, so we thanked him and went on.
Any other circumstance I’d’a been scared to death of
that creature, but here it almost seemed normal. At least now we
knew what the people were like who got permanently married to a
virus and a plant.
“I wonder if our hair’s gonna turn purple,” I
muttered. Anything was possible now.
The new trail we took was less used, but still plain enough, and
led pretty quick to a small single one of them beehive type huts
with two even smaller ones behind. There was a small creek
runnin’ right beside the property, and in the field was two
creatures that looked like hairy purple elephants with no trunks
and tails like them old dinosaur pictures.
We slowed down, not sure this was the place, when we saw two
women ’bout as pregnant as you can get sittin’ outside,
naked as we was, sucklin’ a couple of little babies. That
stopped me. I just hadn’t figured on babies.
One was the golden type, the other was darker and built
different, not black but maybe Latino. They saw us, and did a real
take, then the Latin woman called to us in some language that
sounded as bad as old scales and bellow, only more human. “Uh
oh,” I muttered. “We forgot ’bout the language
thing. Bet Addison did, too.”
Well, they all started comin’ ’round to us after
that, and others come out of the houses or in from the field. There
was three women, three men, and seven kids, the oldest of which
looked maybe two and a half. A man and woman was of the golden
people variety, another couple was this Latino-lookin’ type,
and a third couple was deep-tanned white, he with real blond hair
and blue eyes and she with reddish-brown hair and green eyes.
From the looks of the kids, they didn’t seem exactly
married to their own matched partners. Maybe they was, maybe they
wasn’t, when the kids showed up, but not lately.
Language was a problem right off, but one of the men, who looked
older, though they all looked damned good, at least knowed what
English was and knew a language close enough that we could talk
with practice, at least on a simple level. With time we could come
to some kinda compromise, I felt, but that worried me. If we had
that kinda time, we was in deep shit.
We had the time. Weeks, in fact, to kinda settle in and get the
feel of the place. There wasn’t much work to do ’cept
cleanin’ up a bit, and gettin’ used to the idea of a
pit toilet and a creek for runnin’ water, but we managed. The
women, all pregnant, seemed almost relieved at our arrival. They
didn’t get the urge as bad, but the men did, and we kinda
took some of the pressure off.
And, real hard but real dedicated-like, we got to the point
where we could get complicated ideas across to each other, at least
the guy who spoke that sorta English, who said his name was Avong
Simran, one of the golden people. A real scientist—he showed
us his old field expedition gear, much of it still powered and
workin’ but not much used these days and not much useful day
to day here.
They was an exploiter team, the six of them, sent out by the
Company like so many to scout out a bunch of worlds in an area
where the Company thought there was somethin’ possibly worth
its while. They was only scouts, the early explorers, but they did
a lot of the original work. Each had a specialty—geology,
anthropology, two different biology people, one for plants and one
for animals, general physics, and general chemistry. They was on
the track of some rare trace element, whatever that is, that was
valuable to the Company in runnin’ its portable gear and
which didn’t seem all that common among the worlds, and they
was like them dudes who go out searchin’ for oil,
diggin’ here, then there, till they hit a gusher. This was
maybe the twentieth world they’d looked at in a row, and all
the signs said that in the next few worlds this stuff they was
lookin’ for, which was made in some natural process not real
common and takin’ millions of years, was there in goodly
amounts.
They was kinda surprised to find the folks here so primitive;
their near identical twins in some of the other worlds were pretty
well advanced. They set up a base camp near this town, adjusted
their gear so they had some language ability with these big
dudes—they could understand it, but no Type Zero human had
all the guts needed to talk it right—and settled in to make
their search. In ’bout a month and a half they found some of
it in the hills nearby and was all ready to call in more experts
with better equipment and move on when all of a sudden the real
peaceful folk of this world just went nuts.
For nine days and nights, there was a near orgy of rape and
constant sex and not much else, day in and day out. They were not
immune. Each of the women got it at least once from one of them big
suckers before it was over. Even the men weren’t immune; they
got raped by these Type One women just the same, drippin’
stuff. You don’t get much of a hard-on like that, but they
had theirs shoved up holes anyways and got covered with wet.
Then, just as suddenly, it was all over and everybody was
peaceful and lovin’ and kind as before. None of the Type
Zeros was in any condition to walk or ride all the way to the force
point for weeks, and a couple had broken bones and all was
wall-to-wall bruises, but by the time things started to heal they
began to see the changes in themselves. We knew the routine real
well. They was hooked. They was also smart enough to figure out
that they’d caught somethin’, and
somethin’ real dangerous to others, from the local folks.
They got up to the force point and sent a
“trouble—dangerous infection” message up the line
to the Exploration and Exploitation Division, then set out to study
the thing even as it changed and held them.
Trouble was, they was an advance party and not a medical man
among ’em. Their lab gear was set up for explorin’ and
survival, not complicated medical studies. The Company—at
least they thought it was—sent some stuff that helped, but
there was a limit to what they could do. Finally, they decided that
two of ’em would set off toward a quarantine area down toward
headquarters to be studied. You can guess what happened. They
barely made it back in time to save their own lives and sanity, and
even now that couple was showin’ some lingerin’ effects
of damage.
They sent all sorts of samples back—blood, urine, even
semen—and eventually they got their answer. Some kinda virus
of unknown design and construction, they was told. Probably
incurable at this stage without damagin’ the host. However,
it had real possibilities for somethin’. No, they
didn’t know for what, or why the Company seemed so
interested, but that wasn’t their job or place. Could the
native males be induced by trade goods and ideas to give semen?
Well, it turned out they could. Even though they was only real
interested in sex once a year durin’ that mad orgy time, they
could get it up if they had to. It was a hell of a business, but it
kept the stranded team in touch with the Company and civilization,
gave ’em a feelin’ it weren’t no total tragedy,
and gave ’em a real chance to study this civilization and
people.
It took ’em a long time to get the link to the rainbow
weed, even though it was right under their noses. You just
don’t think of a disease that lives off humans needin’
somethin’ from a plant. The biologists finally figured it
after ’bout a year or more when they started seein’
other connections between the lower animals and plants of the
world. They sent samples and loads of seeds up as part of their
studies.
They also studied the people here and compared it to themselves.
You’d think that after that orgy time every female would get
pregnant, but only a fraction of them did in any given year. The
birth rate was low, but the life expectancy was very long. Still
and all, in some ways it was a culture without a lot of the shit
that tore us apart. Men and women did all the same jobs equally.
They didn’t have no marriages or stuff, since what was the
point of even developin’ it, all things considered, but they
had a real sense of tribe and community. Weren’t no social
classes, neither, ’cause when you had a period of time every
year when everybody was screwin’ everybody else there just
was no way to keep no royal families pure. No races, either. Since
everybody bred with everybody any real differences got averaged out
maybe thousands of years ago. No wars, neither. They had no real
idea of private property.
But there was a price. There wasn’t much in the way of
development, invention, real progress. They got to a point the
scientists called Bronze Age culture, and stopped. Guess they just
didn’t need to go no further. In the same time our ancestors
went from Bible times to television and space travel and computers,
and the golden people developed all that fancy futuristic shit and
the Labyrinth, they maybe invented a better saddle and a better
plow.
It didn’t seem fair, but it seems like all our warfare and
jealousy and hatreds and divisions was the thing that caused real
progress, too. If you got rid of all the bad things ’bout
human bein’s, you didn’t go nowheres. Nasty, divisive,
warring civilizations with territories and jealousies and kings and
all did best, if they didn’t destroy each other, which was
the odds ’bout half the time. On that scale, them golden
people who founded the Company must have been real sweethearts. And
I thought we was bad!
I tried to explain what was goin’ on with what they was
sendin’ back down the Labyrinth. They didn’t really
want to believe it, and they didn’t like the idea of
bein’ used that much, but they seemed to care a lot more that
somebody’d found a way to live with it back there than with
the idea that it was gonna be used to destroy the Company. I guess
if you work for a Company that treats you like shit, you
don’t give a damn what happens to it. They worked for the
Company ’cause it had the Labyrinth and the only ticket to
what they’d all wanted to do. They sure didn’t have no
love for it, though.
Since the demands for semen had stopped and most business with
the Company stopped, they figured the high-tech boys had figured a
way not to need ’em anymore. That was fine with them, so long
as they was stuck, but they was still havin’ a real tough
time convincin’ the locals that they didn’t need it no
more and that they had nothin’ to trade for it. I guess
that’s what the old blowhard we met was complainin’ to
us about.
They hadn’t figured on kids, neither, but it was kinda
inevitable when you had to do it every day, sometimes more than
once, and the chemicals they used to prevent it was long gone.
Unless that juice done more to us than we knew, though, there
wouldn’t be no black babies around. Still, it was kinda nice
to see them little kids, hold ’em, play with ’em. Even
Brandy Two, who never let down her hard shell, really took to
’em.
Still, the little colony was just markin’ time here. This
wasn’t their world no more than it was ours, and they
didn’t really have much place in it. They was just
doin’ what they could, livin’ day by day, and not
lookin’ much beyond the moment.
Five weeks or so after we got there, we had visitors.
They came in white suits with space helmet type gear and air
packs and all the rest. We told ’em they wouldn’t have
no trouble if they just all kept their pants on all the time and
didn’t stick around another month and a half until the locals
went after everything alive. One of ’em was Bill Markham, and
I was never so happy to see nobody in my whole life ’cept
Sam.
“I look pretty healthy for a dead man,” he admitted
to me. “After all, Sam killed me in a pretty fancy car
accident about two weeks ago. Made all the papers. I’m
getting a little tired of rescuing you from these worlds, though.
We have to stop meeting like this.”
“You got ’em, then?”
“No. Not yet. Until we were able to analyze that plant we
got samples of from that safe world where you two were held there
wasn’t any way. Now, however, we’re ready to act.
Don’t worry, though. We’re pretty well alerted to what
they’re trying to do and in a very short time, with all the
knowledge and technology of the Center, we’ve learned a lot
about this bug. We’re setting up the climax now. I thought
you’d want in on it.”
“Would I! But—where’s Sam?”
Markham cleared his throat. “You want the truth?”
The way he said it I was afraid somethin’ happened to
Sam.
“Yeah, Bill. Straight.”
“Brandy—Sam’s real broken up about all this,
no matter what act he put on for you. I’m not sure he can
take seeing you much more. You wanted the truth, you got it. To be
perfectly frank, the only reason I think he’s kept on living
was to wrap up this case. I wouldn’t give fifty cents for his
future once it’s closed.”
“Not Sam,” I responded. “I can’t believe
that.”
“You think he’s so much stronger than you? That he
rescued you from the depths? You rescued each other. You never
believed that, but it’s true. In his own way, he needs you as
much as you needed him. Just remember what you were like when you
thought he was good as dead. Listless, aimless, nothing to live
for—you finally decided that it didn’t matter if you
got hooked, even killed. Like him, you had only the case and you
didn’t give a damn about yourself or what happened during or
after. I have never seen two people so absolutely unlike in all the
superficial ways who were so identical underneath. He’s not
so tough deep down. Maybe, somehow, he could cope with your death,
although I’m not too sure of that, but he could never stand
to live knowing that you were alive, too. It would tear him to
pieces.”
“But—I still love him! I’d go back to
him!”
“Sure. You’d go back to him, but like this.
It’d be like having a wild, promiscuous, totally uninhibited
daughter in the house beyond control, not a wife, partner, and
lover. I don’t know how much ideas of right and wrong, good
and evil, wild and limited, you retain, but there’s no room
the way you are for compromises, self-sacrifice, or selflessness. I
think he could take you crippled, or paralyzed, better than
this.” He sighed. “Well, we better get things and
people all packed up and ready to move here. We’re on a tight
schedule.”
“Bill, I—”
“Save it. It can wait. It’s between you and Sam,
nobody else. You are all under technical arrest, since you’re
part of the substantial case we’re building here.”
“Damn it, you shoulda come sooner!”
“We did. You forget that time runs at different rates in
many of these worlds. You been here—what? Five, six weeks?
But it’s only been four days of my time, subjectively, and
two of those were spent with computer experts sorting out the
garbage from the signals and tracing you here. They have a pretty
powerful and clever jammer there. I’d love to get a look at
one. If we hadn’t had two of you giving off the same
identical signal to reinforce it, we’d never have found
you.”
“Bill—what happens now? To me, I mean?”
“We have essence du rainbow weed in a shot capsule. With a
team working here, I think we can probably get enough to last a
very long time, until we can isolate and duplicate what it is in
these plants here that makes them different from their twins and
siblings on other worlds. We’ll be taking transports back,
and then you’ll be extensively debriefed. Then we’ll
spring our own little trap and try to wrap this up.”
“No—that ain’t what I meant. After
that.”
“We’ll take you—and your twin—to any
home world you want. Yours, hers, it doesn’t matter.
There’s still over four million in the bank. You get half,
and you can split it with her if you want. We’ll supply you
with whatever amount of this junk you need as long as you need it.
You’ll have money and a supply, you’ll have at least
fifty years before you even start to look or feel middle-aged, or
so they’re theorizing now, and nobody pulling your strings
unless you want it. You’ll have a ball.”
“Yeah,” I sighed. “We’ll have a
ball.” At the cost of losing Sam.