I remembered to stop the mail and papers and
get the bills paid up before we had to leave. We had three days if
we needed them, since all of this plan was based on the time them
girls was to go from that bastard in Virginia—that other
Virginia—up to Pennsylvania. Sam managed to tie up two cases,
one of which was gonna send up that little accountant for a long
stretch, and pass the others off to other agencies he trusted.
Considerin’ this was two and a half million bucks no matter
what, he didn’t mind much if he pissed off a couple of
clients.
The morning of the third day we met Bill and went down to the
airport and caught a flight west. First class, too, first time I
ever rode that, and it was real nice. The seats are real wide, the
drinks are free, and the service is great, but the food’s
just the same—they only make it look a little fancier.
At San Francisco, we changed to a private Learjet for the ride
up to Oregon, which was even fancier and more luxurious, but we
wasn’t on it long enough to really enjoy it. Then, at Bend,
the final switch to a standard four-seat helicopter for the ride up
to McInerney, the little town in the middle of nowheres high up in
the mountains that was the main station at least for our
North America.
Considerin’ how crazy this all was, and how, odds were, I
was takin’ my last ride, I really just relaxed and enjoyed
things and didn’t think too much ’bout the end of all
this. Not that I was puttin’ it outta my mind, it just
wasn’t nothin’ to think about. I done all that when I
made the decision to take the case.
I mean, in a way, it weren’t no different than
dressin’ up like some whore and goin’ undercover in the
bad dude’s hangouts, and I done that more than once. Either
way, they catch on or somethin’ don’t go right and
you’re just as dead whether it’s some Nazi nut on some
crazy other world or some small-time hood in Philadelphia or
Camden. It was true that I had more to lose this time, but I also
had more to gain. Sniffin’ out some missin’ girl to see
if she was on some pimp’s string or findin’ some
runaway daddy who was hidin’ out in the worst places, the
kind the cops don’t go in, for twenty to fifty bucks was
crazier than doin’ this for millions. No risk, no gain. I
just made sure high risk was high gain, that’s all.
Sam was a lot more worried, mostly ’cause in this case he
had no control. He was strictly backup, but he was still important
to me and both he and I knew it. If it did go bad, and I could get
that word out, it was his job to pull me outa there no matter
what.
McInerney was still the little town on the little road along a
pass where the railroad came through with the one lousy diner and
the one small motel and the Company’s station just outside,
lookin’ like a cross between a railroad yard, which it was,
and lots of warehouses, which it also was. ’cept, of course,
one of them warehouses was the station and not for trains.
And that’s what the place looked like, even inside. One
big, empty warehouse with a concrete floor and lots of dirt and
stains and lots of see-through walkways and stairs of steel
criss-crossin’ overhead. Bill had decided not to waste no
time once we got in; he wanted to get us where we—or me,
anyways—could start work. That took a lot of high-tech prep,
and the best and most secret place to do it was at the Company
headquarters—the home world. Few folks who worked for the
Company or even rode the Labyrinth all the time ever went there; it
was strictly controlled and mostly off limits. I got to admit I was
always curious about what the place looked like and what its people
were like, but I never expected to find out. Bill had been there
twice before, so he at least knew his way around a bit, but this
time he wasn’t bein’ ordered there by the bosses but by
us. He didn’t really seem to mind, which helped the nerves a
little, I guess. ’Course, he didn’t have to get his
mind fucked and go undercover in that slime pit.
Bill was a nice guy, but you always got the idea that if he
could get somethin’ done a little quicker by killin’
you it just wouldn’t enter his head to do nothin’ else
but shoot you right then and there.
It’s always kinda impressive to watch the Labyrinth come
on, partly ’cause you still can’t figure out what
it’s doin’ or how and it’s kinda pretty. You
stand over in the safe zone of this big warehouse floor and some
folks up in a control room high and to one side throw the switches
and it starts with a rumblin’ under your feet that sorta
shakes the whole building, like a vibrator. Then this line is
drawn, straight up and down, just a little above the floor, in a
kind of blue-white light. It just starts from nowhere, then draws
itself to maybe fifteen or twenty feet high. When they’re
happy with it, they throw more switches and more lines start kinda
branchin’ off from the other line. Like half the line just
falls away and then you have an L, then another from it to make a
squared-off U and finally a top, so you got this big square of
light.
Then the whole square slips off and you got two sides, then it
splits again, and again, till you got a cube of light just
sittin’ there. Then it really starts goin’ fast,
foldin’ and twistin’ in and out of itself until you got
a whole mess of cubes connected together. All of it looks like just
lights; there ain’t nothin’ to be seen, but it’s
kinda neat to look at.
Then you walk right into the mess, even as it twists and turns,
goin’ to the middle of the thing, until everybody’s in
the same cube.
From inside, it looks different. You’re in this cube of
light, all right, but it seems kinda hard and solid somehow. You
can see a cube or two ahead or behind, but you can’t hear
nothin’ at all. It’s like all the sounds just go
away.
When we first fell into this thing by accident a coupla years
ago, we only went forward or back, but you can go other ways, too.
If you look at the top of the cube, then keep lookin’ at it
as you walk, the cube kinda, well, rotates, if you can
imagine it, and you walk through the top; same with the bottom or
sides. Wherever you look when you start walkin’, that’s
where you go.
Startin’ almost with the next cube, though, not all them
cube faces are blank. You get, well, flashes of places, or
things. Sunsets, green hills, you name it. They ain’t exactly
real when you look at ’em, more like reflections in a mirror,
but you know they are real and that if you go to that cube
you’ll come out there. Some—a lot—are dark.
Sometimes where you’re lookin’ is the inside of a hill,
or maybe up in the air with nothin’ below, dependin’ on
what happened to the spot you’re standin’ on.
That’s really the hard part—you don’t move all
that much for all the walkin’ you do through the thing. You
can come out just where you went in, but a hundred or a thousand
worlds away.
And you can come out some other place, but not without
goin’ through a switchin’ cube. You can always tell a
switchin’ cube. All the faces but one are dark, and that one
has somebody in a room, just a room, sittin’ in a chair,
lookin’ at a whole mess of switches, dials, and screens. If
they talk, you can hear ’em, and if you talk, you can be
heard, ’cept you sound more’n a little dead and
flat.
Lots of them switchers ain’t human, neither. At least,
they ain’t our kind of human. First one we got to
was a guy with hair all over his face and a real animallike look;
sorta the Wolfman in some fancy uniform. Bill says most of the
switchers are from the Type One worlds ’cause many of
’em got better hearin’ and can see more stuff than we
can and for some reason that’s important. They don’t
speak English, neither, or any other language we know, but thanks
to some little gizmo when we talk it’s translated to their
language and when they talk it’s translated to ours.
Keeps things simpler. When I think of the number of languages
they talk just on our world, then you got to figure how many there
must be goin’ through here.
“Amitash fridlap!” said the hairy guy. It
don’t translate till it knows both languages to use, of
course.
“Headquarters, please,” Bill responded, just like he
understood that crap. “Special Agent Markham, world thirteen
twenty-nine two stroke seven, with authorized encoded personnel
from the same coordinates.”
“English, huh?” the switcher grunted. “Okay,
I’ve got you identified on my screen. You’re authorized
to the next switch module. Go through.”
He turned some funny dial and one of the black faces opened up
and we walked back into the quiet cubes with the many mirrors
again.
The flashin’ pictures on the walls, though, were different
now. We sure wouldn’t come out in no Oregon no more if we
walked through one. The skies looked different, somehow, and the
land was flatter, the green stuff a darker green. The trees looked
big but all twisted ’round, and their leaves, when they had
them, were real dark.
Now, some of them paths was just to different exits, but some of
the places now already didn’t look much like what I knew back
home, even if they was Africa or Siberia. It was kinda wild to look
at them and know that on most of ’em there was billions of
folks all goin’ about whatever normal folks did there,
livin’ and lovin’ and dyin’ and havin’
babies and all the rest, all thinkin’ they was the center of
creation.
We went through three more switchin’ stations, each one
with a man or woman or something like that at the controls, but
only one was what we’d call normal, and that’s only
from what I could see. She was kinda plain but with bright orange
spiked hair that matched her eyes, so you can see what I mean.
This time, though, she was more of a boss lady than just a
worker. “You are authorized onto the headquarters siding.
When you get there, follow all instructions. No exits other than
headquarters entry will be permitted from this point.”
“I understand,” Bill told her, and we went on. The
Labyrinth took on a real odd look from this point, though; suddenly
the walls of the cubes didn’t just look like mirrors
reflectin’ strange places, they was mirrors, and
they reflected back just us, then us again from the other sides,
and so on, so there was thousands of smaller and smaller
“us’s” just goin’ back until we got so
small we disappeared, and that was on all the walls ’cept
only the one ahead, which was black. Suddenly, though, we stepped
out and into a really big cube that was all
mirrors—even the way we came in was a mirror.
“This place gives me the creeps,” Sam muttered, and
sounded normal.
“It’s designed to unnerve people,” Bill
replied. “It gets more unnerving as you go along. This
isn’t the Labyrinth anymore—it’s a special
security entry room. We’re here.”
“Identification and purpose, please,” came a real
boomin’ man’s voice from all ’round us, kinda
like the Voice of God. I jumped.
“Bill Markham, Brandy Horowitz, Sam Horowitz, on Security
Committee business. We are expected.”
“Remove and drop all clothing and anything else brought
with you to the floor and stand at least arm’s length from
one another,” the Voice commanded.
“I wondered why we didn’t even bring a
suitcase,” Sam muttered.
“He means everything?” I asked,
seein’ Bill already droppin’ his pants in public.
“Everything,” Markham replied. “Except for
special communications channels and the area for cargo quarantine
and inspection, nothing is allowed in or out. Don’t
worry—we’ll get new clothes when this is
done.”
“But what ’bout my glasses?” I protested.
“I’m damned near blind without ’em.”
“Those, too, I’m afraid. They’ll fix you up
when we get through.”
Well, I never was all that shy, so in a little while there the
three of us were, stark naked, and spread out in a room that
reflected us in all directions into forever. I couldn’t see
none too good—even Sam was a little blurry and he was
closest—but I could see what happened next.
Suddenly the place was filled with a whole series of colored
lights. They didn’t feel like nothin’, but one or two
tickled some, and they seemed to come like see-through globs of
color from all the mirrors. The first one was kinda lavender, then
pink, then purple, and there was reds and blues, too. Then they
switched off, and the mirrors did, too. Now it was a creamy white
all ’round us, and I looked and our clothes and stuff was
gone. I didn’t know how they did that and I wasn’t sure
I wanted to know.
A part of one wall went back with a little whine, and we
followed Bill through into a second room. This one was kinda warm
and had real plush furry brown carpeting on it and a gizmo that
looked like a cross between a doctor’s scale and an eye
doctor’s gadget. Bill stepped up on it, stood straight, and
looked through the two lenses of the thing. I really couldn’t
see the thing much till I was led up to it by Sam. I looked through
it, then got a sudden little flash in my eyes, and that was it.
“Well, that done it,” I muttered. “Now
they’ve gone and made me completely blind.”
“It’ll wear off,” Bill promised.
“It’s not as much as a flashbulb. This thing is a final
check of our identity. They know who we are, and they can take a
basic code reading even at the switch points, but this is detailed
to the last billionth of a millimeter. This thing makes absolutely
sure that you’re not only Brandy but the Brandy they expect
to see and no other. Nobody has ever fooled it. The encoder
implanted in you long ago is almost like a tiny, microscopic
computer, and it even monitors and records changes in your body as
they happen. Never mind the rest,” he said, seein’ my
blank look. “Just believe that the best and brightest of
security, computers, and electronics have tried to fool this system
and never have.”
When Sam got his okay, he took my hand and another one of them
doors appeared. This one actually had some people there, two men
and a woman. They was kinda blurry to me, but they looked both
human and not real human, dressed in some kind of satiny clothing.
They had one for me, a kind of sari that went on real neat and
fastened without no buttons or snaps or anything. Funny thing was,
though, it kept me up, big tits and all, even though it seemed
kinda soft and, well, breakable. It was cream colored and
felt a lot like silk. They also had sandals that were so light you
hardly knew they was there, but held with only one small strap that
also seemed to know its place all by itself.
They also handed me a pair of real thin, light plastic glasses
that also looked kinda shiny, and I put ’em on and at first
couldn’t see no change ’cept everything was tinted a
little bit rosy. The longer I wore ’em, though, the clearer I
could see, till in a little bit I was seein’ better than I
ever did with my regular glasses.
I could see the people of headquarters real clear. The best way
I can describe their complexion is golden, deep but real
goldlike, not just yellow or light brown. They had thick lips and
them Japanese kind of eyes, and looked kinda Oriental, but not
really. Their eyes all seemed to be jet black and kinda shiny, and
their hair was all thick, dark brown. None of ’em seemed to
have any face or body hair ’cept, of course, on their heads,
and I guessed that none of the men ever needed to shave, nor the
women, neither.
They wasn’t small like the Chinese and Japanese usually
are, but about average height. The girl was maybe a little taller
than me, the men both about six two or three. What really hit me
when lookin’ at ’em was that none of ’em seemed
to have a single mark or zit or nothin’, now or in the past.
All three seemed to be teenagers, but their skin was soft and
smooth and unworn as a baby’s. The girl wore a sari
pretty much like mine, but of satiny crimson with golden designs in
it. The two men wore a different kind of getup, kinda like a cross
between what you wear for your judo lessons and what the
politicians wear in all them Roman Empire movies. You know, the
kind where the guys wear skirts and still look real normal.
Both the men and the girl were gorgeous, too. They had
the kind of looks everybody always dreams of but nobody ever
has.
I looked over at Sam and Bill and had to laugh. They was both
bein’ dressed in cream-colored versions of what the golden
boys had on and somehow it just didn’t look the same with
their white skin and hairy legs.
Sam gave me a look but Bill just chuckled and said,
“Don’t worry, Sam. Since everybody wears these things
here, you’ll get used to it.”
One of the golden boys said somethin’, and the girl nodded
and also said somethin’, both in a kinda soft, pleasant,
singsong kinda voice. The words didn’t sound like
nothin’ human, and I knew I for one could never make them
notes.
“I think we’re being told to move on,” Markham
told us. “Their language is unique and nearly impossible to
learn or even understand. I think their vocal equipment includes a
few things ours doesn’t, but don’t worry. They do that
for their security, too. The folks we’ll be with will have
been prepped and know English by now, at least as long as they need
to. I can assure you, too, we’ve been observed by security,
both people and machines, since we came in the entry room and
they understand English quite well, or any other
language.”
“Quite right, sir,” said a man’s voice from
another of them doors that just opened. We looked over and saw him
come in, wearin’ the same kind of Roman-karate outfit as the
rest, but he looked a little different. For one thing, he looked
older, though not real old and real good for his age, and
his clothes seemed fancy and tailored even if they was the same
style. He also had two gold-plated thick watches, one on each arm,
or at least they looked like watches. He went up and shook
Bill’s hand.
“Folks,” Markham said, “May I present Executor
Aldrath Prang. My boss. These are the Horowitzes.”
He shook Sam’s hand then took and kissed mine. It was
kinda sensual and neat. He got right to the point, though, in a
neutral American-type accent that coulda been from anywheres. I
guessed he learned it all by machine.
“We must go quickly,” he told us. “We need to
allow others in and I really would like to get you out to Vice
President Mayar’s estate as quickly and quietly as possible
for security reasons. The fewer who know you’re here, the
better. We don’t want any slips.”
I could agree with that tune. “What about them
here?” I asked, suddenly gettin’ a little nervous. I
didn’t bargain for no public sessions here at
headquarters.
“Everybody you’ll meet outside the estate works for
me,” Aldrath Prang assured me. “They get their minds
probed and cleaned so often they don’t think of it as
anything more of a big deal than taking a shower.
Now—come.”
We made it over to an elevatorlike contraption, but you
didn’t have no feelin’ you was goin’ up or down.
One last security precaution, I guessed, and this Executor read my
mind.
“All the weak points are well covered and blocked,”
he told us. “All but this one, which happens to be very deep
inside a mountain of granite and basalt. Even if somebody managed
to infiltrate and blow their way through and capture the station,
it would do no good. They can’t get into the world any way
but one, and we control that from the surface. It’s nothing
personal, but it’s somewhat ironic that we must isolate
ourselves pretty much from any universe but our own even as we
master the others. All our records are here, all the knowledge is
here, all the computer controls and administration are here. Our
culture is also very tight and devoted to our mission, and we dare
not have it polluted lest some culture without our sense of
responsibility come in and take control.”
“You mean you never leave this world?” Sam asked,
amazed.
“I don’t, no. Particularly not me, although I was
out when I was younger and didn’t know too much. Some of our
people go out, of course, particularly when they’re young and
idealistic or ambitious. We have research projects all over the
place, and special needs and interests, and it’s essential
that those who will have the responsibility of running the
Labyrinth and the Corporation get a sense and feel for just what
we’re dealing with—not just its size and complexity,
but its differences. You see, there’s been no disease here of
any kind for generations. That’s why you received a
sterilization treatment among others when you arrived. It kills any
microorganism that might be harmful to us and at the same time
virtually halts mutation, freezing in place those which our bodies
must have to help in digestion, for example. There also
hasn’t been a war here in thousands of years now, nor any
kind of unpredicted natural disaster, nor famine nor in fact even
real crime as you think of it, except for crimes of
passion.”
We saw. A whole world of peace and plenty with none of the dirty
shit. If you just grew up here, and lived here your whole life, how
would you ever be able to understand them other worlds, let alone
make decisions that might cost lives? If you ain’t never felt
no pain or sufferin’ or misery firsthand, if your idea of
bein’ hungry is that you’re stuck in a city after all
the restaurants are closed, if you never had nobody look at you
funny ’cause your skin was black or you talked funny, then
how you gonna understand the problems and see the big picture. Not
that these folks would care in the end if they killed a bunch if it
was for somethin’ they wanted, but at least they had to look
into the faces of some of the folks they’d be doin’
in.
They’d been at this a long, long time.
We got to the surface and saw that the whole place had been
cleared for us. We walked across a kinda lobby area that looked
like some luxury airport waiting lounge, out a side door, and right
into a funny-lookin’ big car with no wheels that just kinda
floated there at the door. A side of it was dropped down so there
was steps leadin’ up and in. The whole thing looked like some
roast beef plate with a half a cigar on top. There was windows all
the way along, although it’d looked solid from the outside.
We could see out, but nobody could see in.
Inside it was kinda like a millionaire’s camper van. Nice
furlike carpets even on the walls, real plush recliner chairs
around a table that looked like polished marble, and compartments
all over the place. I expected the thing to wobble when we got on,
but it was steady as a rock. I couldn’t figure what was
holdin’ it all up.
There wasn’t no driver, neither; not even a driver’s
seat. This fellow Aldrath—we found out quick that they said
their first names last and last names first, like the Orientals
do—he just went up front, took some kind of card out of a
little pocket in his toga, and stuck it in a slot. The door closed,
and off we went, no seatbelts or nothin’. You had to look
outside to see that we was even movin’—and was
we movin’! Up, up, and away real fast.
I could see the place below us clearly now, just a little round
dome of a building in the middle of a bunch of trees in the middle
of a bunch of low mountains kinda like the Poconos, but with no
roads, no power lines, no nothin’.
It was a sunny day with just them cotton candy clouds, but we
stayed just below them, so you had a right good view of the country
below for miles and miles. Here and there you could see round
towers and groups of domes and cubes and other funny shapes, but
none of the places were real big and there was no roads at all.
Aldrath punched something in one of them compartments and
brought out some drinks. I kinda figured they was somethin’
like that. He saw that Sam and me were mostly lookin’ out and
down at the country, which didn’t look the least bit familiar
but really didn’t look all that strange, neither. Sorta like
central Pennsylvania or upstate New York, only before all them
folks stuck all them roads and wires through it. ’Course, if
your cars and buses and trucks all fly like this thing we was in,
you don’t need all that.
“If you are looking for major cities, we have them,”
Aldrath said, “but not in this area. Our cities are mostly in
the subtropical and tropical climates. When you can control or
eliminate all the pests and divert big storms and manipulate the
rainfall, those places are like gardens. This is mostly an area of
wilderness and balance, with a few towns for special purposes or
simply because people like to live here, and a number of broad
estates mingled with forests and game reserves.”
“I’d’ve thought sheer numbers would have populated a
lot of this,” Sam replied. “Or is the population
stable?”
“It’s stable, but reasonably large. We keep it
worldwide at about a billion, which is more than adequate to
preserve what should be preserved. It’s not that we’re
restrictive, but we have many outlets for a population, both in
settling and preserving certain other Earths that are truly
wonderful places to live but which never developed a higher race
and also the planets and to a limited extent the stars.”
Even I was startled at that one. “You mean you don’t
just go next door, you’re also up there?”
He smiled. “Getting to the near planets is no great trick,
nor is colonizing a place like Mars. The stars are trickier, and
we’re still in our infancy regarding them, but who is better
qualified to go than we if there are in fact alien civilizations
out there? It provides us with a limitless and exciting future, you
see. The parallel worlds go from infinity to infinity, and each
universe is in itself so vast and varied it will end before anyone
can explore more than a fraction of it. That’s the secret to
keeping a civilization as successful and prosperous as ours from
rotting and decaying, you see. There is always someplace new to go,
something new to learn, something wonderful waiting to be
discovered. We have never become jaded or yielded to
rot.”
Yeah, it sure sounded like one of them—what’cha call
it?—Utopias, all right, and maybe it was about as close as we
get, but I couldn’t help think that we’d gotten sucked
into all this ’cause some folks with real power, probably
right here on this planet, ran at least one and maybe many rebel
groups that tried to sucker and screw up and take over parts of the
Corporation’s territories and worlds, and we was here at all
’cause there was at least one known traitor and he had some
boss higher up. They was askin’ me to risk my mind and my
neck against them folks, so I figured I had a right to bring that
up, and did.
Aldrath shrugged. “Humanity is by nature imperfect, and so
perfection is not attainable without also costing humankind the
things that are most important to it. Creativity, a measure of
freedom, curiosity, drive, willpower. We can remove these things,
but then we make not perfect humans but perfect automatons. In
spite of the fact that the lowest of the low here have things your
richest and most powerful people would envy, we have classes. It is
a part of our culture and our heritage. Our very language, our
accents, are differentiated by class so that merely by a
person’s speech we know their station. Our very names are
actually descriptives chosen for their poetry, their symmetry, and
their meaning. My name is actually—” He gave one of
them pretty songs. “The names we give you are rough
transliterations of these sounds according to English rules. The
corporate chiefs are the highest class and marry only among their
own families. The professional, or managerial class does the same.
The working, or common class is likewise separated not merely by
name and accent but by family and society. As always, this causes
strains.”
“And I don’t suppose there’s anyone really
anxious to let people move up,” Sam commented.
“Not many. I, for example, am from the professional class
and would not be anything else. The big limits are all on the
corporate class—the people you will be meeting. They have all
the real policy-making power, but they can not abrogate that power
or that responsibility. That’s determined almost from birth.
They have very little choice in their lives and much of it is quite
boring. I, on the other hand, am what I am because that’s
what I wanted to be. I could have chosen any profession I liked,
and if I made the grade I’d have gotten it. If I
didn’t, or found I hated it, I could have chosen another. I
work as hard as I like to work—and I very much like
working—and get tremendous benefits. I don’t have a
private estate here or elsewhere, but I can avail myself of the
desirable parts of any of them.”
“Yeah, that’s all well and good for you,” I
said, “but what about the common folks?”
“Those who greeted you today are so-called common folks.
There’s no heavy labor; it’s mostly a service and
maintenance economy here, and most of what we have that’s
really odious is automated. We automated everything once, but
finally cut back so we automated only what people shouldn’t
ever be required to do. They, too, have a choice of many jobs, no
real stress or pressure they don’t wish to take upon
themselves, and much in the way of benefits and opportunities. For
example, how old would you say that trio who met you
were?”
“No more than eighteen for the oldest,” Sam
answered.
The security chief laughed. “The girl is thirty-seven, and
the two boys are thirty-one and forty. When you do jobs you enjoy
and have conquered all the diseases and defects inherent in our
ancestry, it’s amazing how long a span you can have. I, for
example, am sixty-seven just last month. From your standpoint
I’m probably about half that, which is the way I feel and
act. The average lifespan here is about two hundred and nine years,
and you begin to get gray hairs and a few wrinkles at about ninety,
but you really don’t start looking old until you’re
about a hundred and sixty, and I know several two-hundred-year-olds
who still swim a few kilometers a day and do mountain climbing for
a hobby. That’s true no matter what class you’re
in.”
“Yeah, but what if some commoners think they can run
things better than you, or maybe want to be scientists instead of
lab assistants or something like that? What then?” I asked,
gettin’ an idea of how even this kind of society could get
rebels.
“That’s what I meant by outlets and
expansion,” Aldrath replied. “If there are commoners
who believe they have superior talents and abilities and can
demonstrate them, there are ways for them to be educated every bit
as good as, say, my own son. We just can’t have them here,
since that would upset the system and the balance. They are welcome
to go to a colony where they might find a place, or even found
their own. Only the corporate level is closed absolutely, since
there can be only one set of people controlling the Labyrinth and
they are born, raised, and trained to do that and safeguard both us
and the other worlds from one who might use that power for evil. We
are not dictators to other worlds and cultures, Madam Horowitz. We
are thieves. We steal things we need, and, most of all, ideas, art
forms, even stories from unique and different cultures. In
exchange, we keep the would-be dictators and oppressors of
universes out, and we try as hard as we can to preserve worlds that
have not destroyed themselves from doing so. Other than that, we do
not tip balances.”
“But you’re much of organized crime on many worlds,
including ours,” Sam noted. “That’s sure as hell
interfering.”
“I didn’t say we didn’t interfere. I said we
do not tip balances. Those things were there before we
came and would be there with or without us. We don’t even
increase their efficiency, and we leave it in local hands. Think of
the alternative. We could easily take over any government, even all
of them, and thereby safeguard everything, but we do not. We do not
actually even take over the criminal societies, we just use them to
help us covertly get what we wish. The vast bulk of the criminals
do not know or even suspect us.”
“Yeah, but you still got traitors and rebels,” I
pointed out. “I mean, we only got into this thing
’cause some folks from here got ambitious.”
“That’s true,” he admitted, sippin’ his
drink. “As hard as we try, there are just some people
who’ll never understand the system. You see, we’re
thieves as well as explorers and preservers. We get a lot
out of this. Our medicine, our power systems, this
vehicle—all stolen ideas. To preserve this wilderness, we
import raw materials we need and which we buy at a fair price and
never in quantities that would impoverish a world. There are some
who, nonetheless, see us as inherently superior to everyone else.
Our religion teaches that all the gods of all the universes are
real, and that together they form a powerful overmind, a Supreme
Lord. We were selected by the Supreme Lord to master the Labyrinth
and oversee the universes. Some take that a bit too far, and see us
as the natural and Supreme Lord’s choice as rulers
of all the universes. They simply never grasp the essence of the
system: thieves never steal everything from the last rich man
on Earth. If we came in and took over, destroyed cultures and
replaced them with an autocratic government, they would soon all be
like us, only under us and never able to attain freedom again.
Without that freedom, there is no creativity. If you make them
subjects, they will reflect your own will imperfectly and, as a
result, will never produce anything new or unusual or creative. In
short, nothing worth stealing.”
It was a real crazy way of lookin’ at things, but it made
a kinda lopsided sense. I turned and tried the wine, which was real
sweet and went down good. I always had a thing for sweet
stuff; it’s why I ain’t never been able to keep weight
off.
“So what’s next?” I asked the man. “Why
bring us here?”
“We have some time, and we thought we’d make the
best use of it,” Aldrath told me. “There’s no
place more secure than here, although nothing is absolutely secure.
We are going to Mayar Eldrith’s estate, which is both private
and isolated. He is a senior vice president of the Corporation and
chairman of the Security Committee. His staff were all handpicked
and are constantly checked by me and are as secure as we can get.
We have all the medical-techinical apparatus needed to prep you for
this job, and we’ll do that as well as practice the system as
best we can. When we’re ready, we’ll also be ready over
in Vogel’s pesthole of a world.”
The flyin’ bus turned and started down, and below we could
see a real big house, a bunch of smaller houses that were still
bigger’n most of what we had back home, with gardens and
woods and stuff. It was the kind of country place you might expect
the Queen of England to have, and the kind I always dreamed about.
There weren’t no funny cubes and circles here; this place had
real charm and the outside, at least, looked like real wood, though
it was real modern-lookin’ and had all kinds of crazy
angles.
We was met by a small group of young people all of which looked
just as beautiful and just as perfect as the ones in the station. I
was already feelin’ real self-conscious about my looks, kinda
like bein’ the only black in an all-white town someplace out
west. They wasn’t white folks, but they was all the same and
they was sure different than any of us.
The main house was big—I think it coulda been the
biggest hotel in Philadelphia with room left over, though it was
only four or five floors. It just went on and on forever. They
didn’t take us there, though, but to a smaller place down a
hill and in some woods.
The inside was gorgeous, anyways—all wood
paneling, thick carpeted floors that felt and looked great, real
modern-type furniture, soft lighting that seemed to come from
everywhere and went on when you came in and went down when you
left—all that. The upstairs rooms all looked out on a balcony
onto an enormous livin’ room, kinda like in them
luxury hotels.
“We use this place when we want privacy, even from the
main house, where there are a lot of comings and goings,”
Aldrath told us. “You’ll find clothing and the basics
in the closets and bath upstairs. Your meals will be prepared by my
security staff and served below in the dining alcove. If you wish
to go outside, please limit yourself to the walks out the back of
the house and do not go to any other buildings or speak to anyone
not on the staff without my permission. We have very little time
and much to do. I know you must be tired now, so Bill and I will
leave you for now, but we start bright and early tomorrow morning
and the sessions will be long ones.”
I had thought Bill would stay here, but it looked not. The whole
place was ours. “Now, this is somethin’
else!” I breathed. “The kinda place I always
dreamed of havin’!”
Sam was glum as usual. “Yeah, they treat the condemned
with all the luxuries. I still got a bad feeling about all this.
It’s too complicated.”
“Five million bucks, Sam! We can have our own
place like this.”
“Yeah—if we don’t pay too high a price for
it.”
His name was Jamispur Samoka. He was another of them beautiful
people, fifty-one and lookin’ maybe in his twenties, and
wearin’ a pale pastel blue outfit that seemed to be the same
here as lab whites were back home. He wasn’t no
doctor—they didn’t have doctors here like we
did—but he was the same kind of thing. His workroom looked
like some mad scientist’s shit from old horror movies, but
they was all designed to do different things to and for people. I
was scareder of him than of the mission.
“Much of this equipment was developed because our own
people need some modifications before venturing into other
worlds,” he told me. “Also, it’s often not
possible to get an exact replacement for someone else when we need
to infiltrate a place. This equipment can make a close match seem
an exact match. It can’t work miracles but it can do wonders.
Fortunately, we have had the opportunity to get all the physical
and genetic data from the woman you are to replace, and that makes
it a lot easier.”
That didn’t sit well with me. “How much of a change
will there be? I know I ain’t no beauty queen, but I kinda
like me the way I am.” Five million bucks, I kept
tellin’ myself. Just think of that.
“It’s important to emphasize that there is nothing
we can do here that can’t be undone here,” he replied.
“The trick is doing it in the first place. Whatever we do we
have an exact record of doing and so we know the way to reverse it.
In your case, we do not need to do anything really major or
radical, anyway. The biggest problem here, which we don’t
face all the time, is that you might be subjected to tests
available to someone who knows of and has some access to our
technology. In effect, it must be so perfect that even we
can’t detect what we’ve done. This fellow Vogel is a
paranoid and sadist at best. You must hold up to get close to him,
and even though he doesn’t know we’ve made him as a
traitor, he’s bound to have been even more cautious and
paranoid because of his fear of discovery. Let me show you
something.” He reached down, pushed a button, and
pointed.
The place where he pointed flickered, then took on an outline of
a woman that quickly faded in and became solid and real
three-dimensional. It was a black woman, stark naked, and still as
death.
“That is who you have to be,” Jamispur told me.
I looked hard at the woman, seein’ now that it was just
some kinda 3-D photograph. “Don’t look much like
me,” I said. “That hair’s long and straight. I
never could get mine straight long enough to do much with it.
Complexion’s wrong, too, and she got a damn sight better
figure than me or what you’re gonna get out of me in two
weeks.”
“You underestimate yourself. No one really sees themselves
as others see them. I know you’re not all that modest about
yourself or you wouldn’t have taken this job. Will you
disrobe and go stand next to the image, on that small dot in the
floor, there?”
I did it—hell, he was gonna see more of me than
this—and went over. The woman’s picture didn’t
look so real right up close, kinda faded and with lines like bad
tuning on the TV. There was a click, and he said, “Now come
back over here and we’ll look at what we’ve
got.”
I came back over and turned, and saw two women
standin’ there. The other one was me, but the doc was
right—it really didn’t look right, somehow. I started
thinkin’, is that the way I really look to Sam
and the others? And I started makin’ little critical
notes to myself. Fact was, I was kinda cute, though, and I
didn’t have much different a figure than she did after all. A
little more hip and thigh, that’s all. The face, hair, and
skin tone, though, just weren’t right. I looked taller, but
that might have been the bush hair.
And then he started puttin’ me in his machines. They
didn’t hurt none, but sometimes they used drugs and sprays
that might have hid just about anything. They was fast,
though. I got the feelin’ that if I broke my leg in the
mornin’ I’d walk out whole in the afternoon.
At the end of three days, Sam, who’d been spendin’
his time with planners for the mission, was a little uncomfortable.
I was changin’ more than either of us bargained for. For the
first time in my life, my hair was straight and silky-black like
it’d been born that way, and it was growin’ at one hell
of a rate. By the end of five days my hair was thick and down below
my shoulders and was just as big a pain to comb and wash as I
always figured. It really changed my appearance,
I’ll tell you. My skin was a little lighter and almost a
uniform chocolate brown. A couple of old scars and lots of stretch
marks were gone; so was my vaccination scar, and my skin was a
little oilier, almost shiny. I was also gettin’ thinner, back
in shape. The doc said the machines used my own body to do and lock
in a lot of the changes, and that it took from the too fat parts.
Not that I was skinny—but she wasn’t, neither. Still,
every time I looked in the mirror it was some strange girl
starin’ back.
It got worse, though, when the dental stuff started. I had more
than a few fillin’s, and they was wrong and had to go. They
put me under with somethin’, and when I woke up I was almost
a stranger. The stuff in my teeth, and one or two new teeth, now
felt a little dead in my mouth, like caps might, but there was no
way by lookin’ or even X ray to tell that them teeth
weren’t the way nature intended. My nose looked different,
and so did my smile. My round face seemed a little more oval. I
also always had a deep voice, but they tuned it a bit—it
sounded funny when I talked, a little higher and a lot huskier. The
new face also done somethin’ to the way I could talk, too. I
had real trouble with s and r sounds; it was a
hell of a lisp. Still, in only five days, when he took another
picture of me and put it next to that one of the other girl and I
stepped away and looked, we was close. Damned close. It was more
the way she held herself, and that idiot’s smile on her, than
anything you could measure.
“You thure you can change thith all back?” I asked
him worriedly. “I nevah thought ’bout thith kinda thuff
when I took the job.”
“In the same five days,” he assured me.
“Except for the lost body weight, of course. That you will
have to replace yourself, if you want to.”
“I thure don’ wanna talk like thith the west of my
life.”
Sam couldn’t help but make fun of the lisp till he saw how
self-conscious I was about it; then he stopped. “Remember,
you agreed to do this,” he said. “You don’t like
the price you paid so far—and neither do I—but this is
the easy part.”
“I know, I know,” I grumbled. “I already got
to the point where I just wanna get goin’ and get thith over
with.”
I think what disturbed him most was the last thing they did. It
was on the inside of my left palm, and it was nothin’ more
than a long number tattooed there in purple ink. Sam had an uncle
and a coupla cousins with numbers like that, souvenirs of
Hitler’s camps. And, in the end, that was the bottom line of
what was buggin’ him. This world I was gonna get dropped in
was a Nazi world, a world where the Jews had been wiped out and
we was the new Jews. It was like I was volunteerin’
to be a Jew at Auschwitz. That didn’t set none too well with
me, but none of them had Sam just outside holdin’ a
gun on G.O.D., Inc.
Not that I wasn’t startin’ to get nervous. I was.
The closer the dates came, the more doubts I had, the more second
thoughts, and the scareder I got. I began to really wonder if Sam
was right all along. I wasn’t no Cleopatra Jones, no Jane
Bond. Undercover was always the hardest and riskiest thing any
investigator could do, and this was undercover in a whole
world that considered me no better than a pet monkey and
would treat me the same or worse.
Then we started through the simulation exercises. They had a
room in the big house rigged up kinda like they thought
Vogel’s Safe Room was—but they wasn’t
sure—complete with secret passage, and they took me in there
naked and in light but limiting arm and leg chains to where a big
guy about Vogel’s size and weight played the mark. The first
three days of this, twenty times a day with analysis, I never even
come close to takin’ him, and I got real
discouraged. Still, every time I blew it they took me aside, showed
me a recordin’ of the whole thing, and explained what I done
wrong, what tricks I fell for, what opportunities I missed. I
learned quick—this was my ass on the line, and I wanted to
live to spend that bread. By the fourth day of trainin’, I
took not only the fellow playin’ Vogel but two other guys
even bigger and meaner about half the time. By the time there was
only two days left, I was takin’ all comers in that room
three out of four times.
It wasn’t good enough, but it had to do.
We also had all sorts of briefin’s, goin’ on and on
and makin’ us all memorize everything till we talked it in
our sleep. Timing, other things, and most important the emergency
procedures in case it went down wrong. I knew just what was gonna
happen when and if, and there were only a few things they
didn’t tell me, ’cause if I didn’t know
then I couldn’t be made to tell Vogel.
That night, we got dressed up in fancy-colored silks for the
last real night we’d have until it was over. The way I
talked, the last thing I wanted was guests and a dinner party, but
this weren’t no last meal. The ones comin’ to dinner
were the folks with the five million bucks—the Security
Committee.
“You got to do all the talkin’,” I told Sam.
“I couldn’t open my mouth ’round nobody
now.”
“Yeah, well, I’ll try, but you’re what
they’ve come to see and neither Aldrath nor I like it
much.”
“Huh?”
“Babe, these guys dreamed up this thing and passed the job
of actually doing it down to Aldrath, who passed it on to Bill and
then to us, but until now it’s just an abstract thing to
them. Beyond Bill, Aldrath, Jamispur, and a tight circle of
security personnel who have their brains laundered every morning to
make sure they’re secure, nobody knows who is doing this, or
when, or anything else. Now all of a sudden the whole damned
committee shows up and demands to meet with us. They’re all
corporate class people—untouchable even by Aldrath unless he
catches them with a smoking gun in their hands standing over a
freshly dead body. They’re all ambitious up-and-coming
corporate types, sort of like Congressmen. They’re a
potentially leaky bunch and you can do a lot in forty-eight
hours.”
“But thurely the Thecurity Committee is checked
out!” Trouble was, I was startin’ to get used to
talkin’ like a black Elmer Fudd.
“People leak things for their own advantage. If one of
’em gets concerned with a bigwig he’s trying to impress
and gets pressed on what’s being done about this security
threat, he might blurt it all out just to make an impression, or
leak it if there’s rumors going around that he hasn’t
been very effective. Now, we’re going to block out that whole
time line from the Labyrinth, so nobody and no messages go in or
out until you’re safe, and anybody who leaves here not on our
team will be monitored like a hawk, but these are big shots used to
intelligence work. It’s an extra added pain in the
ass.”
I couldn’t help but notice that the Security Committee was
all male. In fact, I found out when I pressed, just about all the
senior officers were men. It wasn’t that this place was
out-and-out sexist, but women somehow never made it to the top
spots. Some of it was that these guys tonight were mostly in their
seventies and maybe had a hundred years or more before there was
much of an openin’, and the Chairman of the Board, they said,
was a hundred and five and nowhere near retirin’, but I think
there was more. This sorta trickles down, too. If women
aren’t in top spots, they don’t tend to be treated as
good further down. Kinda like Russia, where all women are equal and
work at jobs, but never get high up in the government ’cept
as the head of culture or arts or somethin’ like that, and
are still expected to come home nights and clean house and cook
dinner.
Here, nobody really had to work, and a lot of women
didn’t, stayin’ home with the kids and stuff. Lots of
the artists were women, I found out, and dancers and entertainers,
and lots in the common classes had all sorts of regular jobs, but
almost never on top unless they was the absolute best. Nobody
seemed to care ’bout this, though. They all had one of them
religions that believed in reincarnation, and you was a man one
life, a woman the next, and so on. Me, I was thinkin’ I might
like to be a housewife and full-time mother to some kids,
’specially if I had lots of money, but I sure as hell would
hate to be required to do that.
They trooped in, one at a time, and got greeted like one of them
diplomatic receptions. More of them beautiful golden people, all of
’em, only lookin’ a little older and maybe a little
shiftier, like politicians or salesmen. Mayar Eldrith, our host,
was tall and strong and real slick lookin’; he brought his
wife, Eyai, who looked somethin’ like some Hawaiian goddess.
She had that special smile and way of talkin’ that all
politicians’ wives seem to have, and Mayar talked like he was
some big shot Senator runnin’ for office. Real smooth voice
and delivery.
He was followed by Hanrin Sabuuk, who looked and sounded enough
like Mayar to be his brother, then Dringa Lakuka, who looked older
and wiser and was a real quiet type but with real bright eyes. You
got the feelin’ he was some god slummin’ and
havin’ a ball doin’ it. Then there was Basuti Alimati,
the youngest and newest member—only fifty-seven and
lookin’ a good thirty—who seemed real stuffy and
businesslike. They told us he was the only one of them who never
married and never seemed to fool around, neither. They wasn’t
very hung up on sex here—you could have as many wives, or
even husbands, as you could talk into it, swing with either or both
sexes, and have unlimited lovers on the side. This guy, though, was
never even known to swing with himself.
The last one and just slightly older than “young”
Basuti, was Mukasa Lamdukur. He looked much like the others and was
maybe the most human of the bunch, and he was the only one who
brought along others, much to Sam’s and Aldrath’s
distress. They looked so young I figured it was his kids, but they
weren’t. Mukasa’s job was keepin’ the records
straight and generally runnin’ the committee on a day-to-day
basis, and Dakani Grista, a real young hunk of a boy, and Ioyeo,
who was a little small as the women went here and looked maybe
sixteen or so, were the administrative assistants, or so we were
told. Only Dakani was of the manager class, though; Ioyeo (their
women never seemed to have but one name, all vowels—I guess
it was the way things was translated) was actually a commoner class
person whose big talent was that she was oversexed and not real
bright. She had one hell of a figure, though, and that
sari looked painted on, and I guess that’s one of the things
they wanted around the office. Even on a world of beautiful women,
she was a real stunner, and she even had one of them dumb blond
voices—you know, high-pitched as all get-out and whispery to
boot—and all the right moves. I had to poke Sam more than
once that night to get his mind back where it should be.
They all treated her kinda like some servant, though, but she
fetched and smiled and giggled and didn’t seem to mind. I
couldn’t help thinkin’ that if there was a leak or a
traitor at the top, that’s the one I’d look first at.
Nobody was like that in real life.
The talk was mostly small talk, and I did almost none of it.
“So, tell me, what’s your world like?” Mayar
Eldrith asked Bill Markham.
“A stroke seven world, sir,” Bill replied
pleasantly.
“Oh, yes—atomic weapons, superpowers, big and little
wars,” Mukasa put in. “An interesting world. Not at all
boring.”
Bill choked down what he might really wanna say. “Yes,
sir, it is definitely interesting. You’ve been to a stroke
seven?”
Mukasa chuckled. “Long ago, when I was very young. They
were fighting a big conventional war then, and there were lots of
diseases and abysmal ignorance about them. I remember that. I
suppose it must have been your world, since that’s the only
stroke seven we’ve developed for many years so far. Who won
that war, anyway?”
“Depends on which one it was. If it was a world war, then
it was probably the U.S., England, and Russia against Germany,
Italy, and Japan. The U.S. side won. Now they and the Germans,
Italians, and Japanese are on the same side and the Russians on the
other.”
“Fascinating,” Hanrin put in. “I should like
to see a full-blown war one day—from a safe distance, of
course.”
“They’re very destructive and not very pretty or
glamorous,” Sam couldn’t help but put in. “In
fact, they’re the ugliest side of human nature.”
“Perhaps, but they are incredibly valuable. Progress and
inventiveness accelerate a hundredfold during a war. Most great
inventions and ideas come out of them, you know. I fear it is the
nature of the human beast and just as necessary to him as
love.”
“I notice there haven’t been any wars here,”
Sam noted, a little ticked off at this.
Mayar Eldrith sensed Sam’s irritation. “Come, come!
Yes, you’re right, we don’t have wars here, but
we’re a pretty static culture because of it. Our progress
comes from what we learn from others. Still, we are not ignorant of
the horrors and cost of wars. The Labyrinth came out of a war, in
fact—the last war fought on this Earth between our people. In
point of fact, it was terribly ugly. It destroyed in the end all
human life on this planet. Only a small band of brave pioneers
managed to escape through the Labyrinth, a very primitive thing
then, and wait it out. When they were at last able to return, they
found a wasteland. All that you see—the animals, trees,
flowers, everything—they imported from other worlds. They
redesigned the entire planet into a garden, and they swore that
never again would violence sear us. Out of that came the
Corporation and the system we now have.”
That sorta explained a lot, like why most everybody looked like
everybody else. Ten to one that class thing was really who was
related to who when they came back. That was more’n a
thousand years ago, but if they lived a couple hundred years plus
each it was to them like maybe the World Wars were to us.
“Ancient history,” muttered Basuti, the cold fish
and also youngest at fifty-seven. “We’re too damned fat
and lazy for our own good, I say. No discipline, no motivation.
We’ve become a bunch of whores, that’s what.”
“Now, Alim, don’t start that again,” Dringa
Lakuka put in. He turned to us. “Basuti, there, was a priest
and holy man until his older brother was killed in an accident,
forcing him to assume obligations in the real world. I think
he’d only be happy if we turned the entire world into a
monastery.”
“Many of us here would be far better off if we were closer
to the gods than the flesh,” Basuti muttered, giving the eye
to Mukasa and his girlfriend.
“We strive for balance on committees as vital as this
one,” said Mayar Eldrith, clearing his throat nervously.
“I humbly suggest that we confine ourselves to pleasantries
for now. Our disagreements are none of these people’s affair,
nor their concern. What concerns us is whether or not we are
vulnerable to evil. Someone very powerful has gone to a great deal
of trouble to import this alien organism and test it. We must know
why. It surely isn’t to take over a mere Earth or two. Anyone
with enough power to do that is hatching something aimed clearly at
us.”
Sam and I exchanged a look, and I knew we was both
thinkin’ along the same lines. All of a sudden, with two days
to go, I felt like one big, fat, brown worm on the end of a hook.
Somebody real powerful set this up. Somebody like one or more of
the folks in this room. Somebody—Aldrath or maybe
Mayar—already figured that one out. To keep that shit
comin’ down without tippin’ off security as to where,
it had to be somebody with a lot of knowledge and power in
security. One of these guys. So they was trottin’ out their
sacrificial lamb and lettin’ whoever have a good look, then
they would all be watched like nobody ever been watched before,
hopin’ somebody would try and tip off Vogel.
I mean, guys who thought other folks’ wars were neat and
ran criminal syndicates on a bunch of worlds sure as hell
didn’t give a shit about me. I started feelin’ a little
sick and forgot all about eatin’ or my talkin’ or
anything else.
“You have to excuth me wadieth and gentamen,” I said
softly. “Unweth theah’s thomething vewy impowtant foa
uth to tawk about, I have much to do and thith ith my wath night
with my huthband foah a wong time.” Damn! It was
gettin’ so bad I couldn’t say no I’s,
neither. Mix that with my usual accent and I must sound like an
idiot!
“Oooh! That’s a cute way of
talking,” Ioyeo whispered loud enough for me to hear.
“What did she say?”
That did it. I kinda rushed away and nearly ran upstairs to the
room. I felt so damned miserable I was cryin’ before I hit
the bed, and still cryin’ when Sam came into the room.
He closed the door, came over, and just started gently rubbing
my back. He always knew what I needed, and I could feel his own
hurt and shame. Damn it! I’d asked for this! I
really wished now that I’d listened to him and not spent all
my time feelin’ sorry for myself. I never wanted dear old
Philadelphia and that mink-lined apartment more than now, and
I’d’ve even given it all up and moved back to roach
heaven in Camden right then.
“I’m sowwy,” I sniffled. “I
juth—it ain’t what I thought it would be.”
He sighed and kept on rubbin’. “I know, babe, I
know. But it is just like putting on the hooker outfit and
staking out the hourly motels. It’s just a higher league.
They can make the disguise so perfect it’s scary. When you
figure they can make themselves pass for us, and learn English in
their spare time with a gadget, they just don’t think of what
it can do to us poor primitive mortals.”
“I’m thcared, Tham,” I told him.
“Weal thcared. I want to caw it off.”
He sighed again. “You saw them down there. You saw how
they regarded us, how they talked about the other worlds.
We’re their toys, their playthings. They want this Vogel
because he’s a threat to them, not us. Their only
opening is in two days. Not enough time to recruit and train
somebody new.”
“They can’t make me do it!”
“You want to walk down and quit? Come on, babe, get hold
of yourself. There’s nothing I’d like more than for you
to cancel out. They’d send us back, but they’d be
damned angry at being inconvenienced. They’d have to come up
with a different, even trickier, plan and maybe risk the necks of
some of their own. They’d send you back just like you are
now, and then they’d cut us off completely. You’d be
stuck looking as you are now, speech impediments and all, and
we’d be out on the streets with nothing.”
I turned around and looked at him with this strange face.
“And what if I did that anyway and they did that? Would we
thtill be togetha?”
He kissed me. “You’re still a pretty woman, babe,
just different looking than I’m used to. But you’re
still you, inside, and that’s who I married anyway. As for
the money—how many Brandys can I buy for two million plus
bucks? None. I started out with nothing, and I’ll probably
end up with nothing no matter what. If money mattered to me
I’d be top salesman at my uncle’s car showroom in
Harrisburg, or maybe starting my own dealership by now. Or
I’d be a comfortable cop with a heavy pad.”
I hugged him and kissed him and never have I been more in love
than right then and there. I just wanted to give myself to him, to
fuck his brains out, and I planned to, but first I said, softly,
“Tham—do you think it can be done? Do you think I can
do it? Sthrait anthwa, now. No jive.”
“It’s possible,” he answered, and I knew he
was tellin’ the truth. “And if anybody can pull it off,
you can.”
“Then, I’w’l do it, juth to thee them have to
fork ova that money.”
And then we made love for a long, long time.
I didn’t get much sleep, and neither did Sam, even after
we got done, but I was somehow real wide awake that mornin’.
We did get to talkin’, though.
“You think one of them’th the big twaita?”
He
nodded. “And so does Aldrath. I think you’re safe,
though. Whoever’s behind this is a big risk taker but
he’s no fool. He’ll know he’s been set up and sit
it out. They’ve been on the hot seat, whoever they are, since
the word came that Vogel was exposed, and they haven’t dared
try to reach him with any messages. They’re stuck. They
have to let this go down and work around it.”
“But if Vogel knowth who, then they hav’ta
act.”
“You’d think so. But I just can’t see any
opening now that wouldn’t just relieve us of the job of
making the snatch. Aldrath is good at his job and I think
he’s a basically honest man, or as honest as you can get in
that line of work. He wants this higher-up so bad he can taste it.
It’s almost like something personal with him.”
“Which one do you think it ith?”
“Hard to say. Ioyeo and Dakani are the obvious choices,
but Aldrath can haul them in and pick their brains without their
even knowing it. He says Dakani’s ambitious but hardly
treasonous, and that Ioyeo really doesn’t have anything in
there except animal passions. She’s not as dumb as she plays,
but she’s no heavyweight. No, it’s one of the five. I
keep thinking I should already know which one, even from our brief
meeting, but I don’t know why.”
“Funny. Me, too. But I juth can’t get a hand on
it.”
“Well, one job at a time,” he sighed.
“I’ll work on that angle while you follow yours. If we
can hand them Vogel and his master, now
that’s an IOU!”
I wasn’t goin’ nowhere right off; it was Sam who was
leavin’, for the team was already pretty much in place. They
had to be all set up and ready to go before I even got there, which
was fine with me, ’cept it was gonna be a real lonely, scary
couple of days.
That day they introduced me to the hypnoscan, and I was real
glad Sam wasn’t around. Not that it was much of anything
bein’ in it—you sat down in this real comfortable
reclinin’ chair and they put sensors and stuff all over you
and then packed your head in somethin’ soft, so you could
breathe but you couldn’t see, hear, or know much of anything.
It was all done by computers, of course; they load what they want
in, then you just sorta drift off, and in what seems like a couple
minutes it’s over—even though it takes hours.
It was a little weird, too, ’cause even when you woke up
you didn’t have no idea that anything was changed. The doc,
he brought me over and made me walk this way and that, and I
thought his voice sounded real fancy and cultured. Then he brought
me over and handed me a sheet with words on it and asked me to read
it.
“Hey, Doc, ev’body know we can’t read,”
I responded. I felt nothing odd at the idea I couldn’t read;
I did feel some relief that my speech had improved some. In fact, I
had changed radically.
The thing was, they’d wiped out any way I had of
gettin’ to a lot of my knowledge and skills. My ignorance was
appalling, and I just took it for granted. I was also childlike and
eager to please or do whatever I was asked to do without question,
but I walked and moved like a two-bit whore. Any deep thoughts were
just gone; so was any real sense of self-identity. I didn’t
know where I was or who I was or anything, but the worst thing was
that it didn’t matter to me. I had no questions.
Later on, lookin’ at myself in a mirror, I saw only me
reflected back with this idiotic smile. They left me in a room for
a while with the doors wide open and it never even entered my head
to leave or go anyplace I wasn’t told to go.
The Nazis had forty-plus years to experiment on us in that hell
world, and that was plenty of time to take and raise children in
cultural isolation and experiment with mind-dulling drugs that left
permanent marks and methods of trainin’ and all the rest.
These wasn’t slaves who was born in chains and wanted
freedom; these were the ends of experiments on humans that nobody
on our world would ever allow, born and bred as less than
human and in their master’s image.
And that was just stage one. Stage two put me out till I woke up
in hell as somebody else, somebody completely different, somebody
with a past and memories only of bein’ property on that evil
world. Somebody so ignorant they didn’t even know it was hell
they was in.
Preparation and trainin’ was over. The mission was
underway.
I remembered to stop the mail and papers and
get the bills paid up before we had to leave. We had three days if
we needed them, since all of this plan was based on the time them
girls was to go from that bastard in Virginia—that other
Virginia—up to Pennsylvania. Sam managed to tie up two cases,
one of which was gonna send up that little accountant for a long
stretch, and pass the others off to other agencies he trusted.
Considerin’ this was two and a half million bucks no matter
what, he didn’t mind much if he pissed off a couple of
clients.
The morning of the third day we met Bill and went down to the
airport and caught a flight west. First class, too, first time I
ever rode that, and it was real nice. The seats are real wide, the
drinks are free, and the service is great, but the food’s
just the same—they only make it look a little fancier.
At San Francisco, we changed to a private Learjet for the ride
up to Oregon, which was even fancier and more luxurious, but we
wasn’t on it long enough to really enjoy it. Then, at Bend,
the final switch to a standard four-seat helicopter for the ride up
to McInerney, the little town in the middle of nowheres high up in
the mountains that was the main station at least for our
North America.
Considerin’ how crazy this all was, and how, odds were, I
was takin’ my last ride, I really just relaxed and enjoyed
things and didn’t think too much ’bout the end of all
this. Not that I was puttin’ it outta my mind, it just
wasn’t nothin’ to think about. I done all that when I
made the decision to take the case.
I mean, in a way, it weren’t no different than
dressin’ up like some whore and goin’ undercover in the
bad dude’s hangouts, and I done that more than once. Either
way, they catch on or somethin’ don’t go right and
you’re just as dead whether it’s some Nazi nut on some
crazy other world or some small-time hood in Philadelphia or
Camden. It was true that I had more to lose this time, but I also
had more to gain. Sniffin’ out some missin’ girl to see
if she was on some pimp’s string or findin’ some
runaway daddy who was hidin’ out in the worst places, the
kind the cops don’t go in, for twenty to fifty bucks was
crazier than doin’ this for millions. No risk, no gain. I
just made sure high risk was high gain, that’s all.
Sam was a lot more worried, mostly ’cause in this case he
had no control. He was strictly backup, but he was still important
to me and both he and I knew it. If it did go bad, and I could get
that word out, it was his job to pull me outa there no matter
what.
McInerney was still the little town on the little road along a
pass where the railroad came through with the one lousy diner and
the one small motel and the Company’s station just outside,
lookin’ like a cross between a railroad yard, which it was,
and lots of warehouses, which it also was. ’cept, of course,
one of them warehouses was the station and not for trains.
And that’s what the place looked like, even inside. One
big, empty warehouse with a concrete floor and lots of dirt and
stains and lots of see-through walkways and stairs of steel
criss-crossin’ overhead. Bill had decided not to waste no
time once we got in; he wanted to get us where we—or me,
anyways—could start work. That took a lot of high-tech prep,
and the best and most secret place to do it was at the Company
headquarters—the home world. Few folks who worked for the
Company or even rode the Labyrinth all the time ever went there; it
was strictly controlled and mostly off limits. I got to admit I was
always curious about what the place looked like and what its people
were like, but I never expected to find out. Bill had been there
twice before, so he at least knew his way around a bit, but this
time he wasn’t bein’ ordered there by the bosses but by
us. He didn’t really seem to mind, which helped the nerves a
little, I guess. ’Course, he didn’t have to get his
mind fucked and go undercover in that slime pit.
Bill was a nice guy, but you always got the idea that if he
could get somethin’ done a little quicker by killin’
you it just wouldn’t enter his head to do nothin’ else
but shoot you right then and there.
It’s always kinda impressive to watch the Labyrinth come
on, partly ’cause you still can’t figure out what
it’s doin’ or how and it’s kinda pretty. You
stand over in the safe zone of this big warehouse floor and some
folks up in a control room high and to one side throw the switches
and it starts with a rumblin’ under your feet that sorta
shakes the whole building, like a vibrator. Then this line is
drawn, straight up and down, just a little above the floor, in a
kind of blue-white light. It just starts from nowhere, then draws
itself to maybe fifteen or twenty feet high. When they’re
happy with it, they throw more switches and more lines start kinda
branchin’ off from the other line. Like half the line just
falls away and then you have an L, then another from it to make a
squared-off U and finally a top, so you got this big square of
light.
Then the whole square slips off and you got two sides, then it
splits again, and again, till you got a cube of light just
sittin’ there. Then it really starts goin’ fast,
foldin’ and twistin’ in and out of itself until you got
a whole mess of cubes connected together. All of it looks like just
lights; there ain’t nothin’ to be seen, but it’s
kinda neat to look at.
Then you walk right into the mess, even as it twists and turns,
goin’ to the middle of the thing, until everybody’s in
the same cube.
From inside, it looks different. You’re in this cube of
light, all right, but it seems kinda hard and solid somehow. You
can see a cube or two ahead or behind, but you can’t hear
nothin’ at all. It’s like all the sounds just go
away.
When we first fell into this thing by accident a coupla years
ago, we only went forward or back, but you can go other ways, too.
If you look at the top of the cube, then keep lookin’ at it
as you walk, the cube kinda, well, rotates, if you can
imagine it, and you walk through the top; same with the bottom or
sides. Wherever you look when you start walkin’, that’s
where you go.
Startin’ almost with the next cube, though, not all them
cube faces are blank. You get, well, flashes of places, or
things. Sunsets, green hills, you name it. They ain’t exactly
real when you look at ’em, more like reflections in a mirror,
but you know they are real and that if you go to that cube
you’ll come out there. Some—a lot—are dark.
Sometimes where you’re lookin’ is the inside of a hill,
or maybe up in the air with nothin’ below, dependin’ on
what happened to the spot you’re standin’ on.
That’s really the hard part—you don’t move all
that much for all the walkin’ you do through the thing. You
can come out just where you went in, but a hundred or a thousand
worlds away.
And you can come out some other place, but not without
goin’ through a switchin’ cube. You can always tell a
switchin’ cube. All the faces but one are dark, and that one
has somebody in a room, just a room, sittin’ in a chair,
lookin’ at a whole mess of switches, dials, and screens. If
they talk, you can hear ’em, and if you talk, you can be
heard, ’cept you sound more’n a little dead and
flat.
Lots of them switchers ain’t human, neither. At least,
they ain’t our kind of human. First one we got to
was a guy with hair all over his face and a real animallike look;
sorta the Wolfman in some fancy uniform. Bill says most of the
switchers are from the Type One worlds ’cause many of
’em got better hearin’ and can see more stuff than we
can and for some reason that’s important. They don’t
speak English, neither, or any other language we know, but thanks
to some little gizmo when we talk it’s translated to their
language and when they talk it’s translated to ours.
Keeps things simpler. When I think of the number of languages
they talk just on our world, then you got to figure how many there
must be goin’ through here.
“Amitash fridlap!” said the hairy guy. It
don’t translate till it knows both languages to use, of
course.
“Headquarters, please,” Bill responded, just like he
understood that crap. “Special Agent Markham, world thirteen
twenty-nine two stroke seven, with authorized encoded personnel
from the same coordinates.”
“English, huh?” the switcher grunted. “Okay,
I’ve got you identified on my screen. You’re authorized
to the next switch module. Go through.”
He turned some funny dial and one of the black faces opened up
and we walked back into the quiet cubes with the many mirrors
again.
The flashin’ pictures on the walls, though, were different
now. We sure wouldn’t come out in no Oregon no more if we
walked through one. The skies looked different, somehow, and the
land was flatter, the green stuff a darker green. The trees looked
big but all twisted ’round, and their leaves, when they had
them, were real dark.
Now, some of them paths was just to different exits, but some of
the places now already didn’t look much like what I knew back
home, even if they was Africa or Siberia. It was kinda wild to look
at them and know that on most of ’em there was billions of
folks all goin’ about whatever normal folks did there,
livin’ and lovin’ and dyin’ and havin’
babies and all the rest, all thinkin’ they was the center of
creation.
We went through three more switchin’ stations, each one
with a man or woman or something like that at the controls, but
only one was what we’d call normal, and that’s only
from what I could see. She was kinda plain but with bright orange
spiked hair that matched her eyes, so you can see what I mean.
This time, though, she was more of a boss lady than just a
worker. “You are authorized onto the headquarters siding.
When you get there, follow all instructions. No exits other than
headquarters entry will be permitted from this point.”
“I understand,” Bill told her, and we went on. The
Labyrinth took on a real odd look from this point, though; suddenly
the walls of the cubes didn’t just look like mirrors
reflectin’ strange places, they was mirrors, and
they reflected back just us, then us again from the other sides,
and so on, so there was thousands of smaller and smaller
“us’s” just goin’ back until we got so
small we disappeared, and that was on all the walls ’cept
only the one ahead, which was black. Suddenly, though, we stepped
out and into a really big cube that was all
mirrors—even the way we came in was a mirror.
“This place gives me the creeps,” Sam muttered, and
sounded normal.
“It’s designed to unnerve people,” Bill
replied. “It gets more unnerving as you go along. This
isn’t the Labyrinth anymore—it’s a special
security entry room. We’re here.”
“Identification and purpose, please,” came a real
boomin’ man’s voice from all ’round us, kinda
like the Voice of God. I jumped.
“Bill Markham, Brandy Horowitz, Sam Horowitz, on Security
Committee business. We are expected.”
“Remove and drop all clothing and anything else brought
with you to the floor and stand at least arm’s length from
one another,” the Voice commanded.
“I wondered why we didn’t even bring a
suitcase,” Sam muttered.
“He means everything?” I asked,
seein’ Bill already droppin’ his pants in public.
“Everything,” Markham replied. “Except for
special communications channels and the area for cargo quarantine
and inspection, nothing is allowed in or out. Don’t
worry—we’ll get new clothes when this is
done.”
“But what ’bout my glasses?” I protested.
“I’m damned near blind without ’em.”
“Those, too, I’m afraid. They’ll fix you up
when we get through.”
Well, I never was all that shy, so in a little while there the
three of us were, stark naked, and spread out in a room that
reflected us in all directions into forever. I couldn’t see
none too good—even Sam was a little blurry and he was
closest—but I could see what happened next.
Suddenly the place was filled with a whole series of colored
lights. They didn’t feel like nothin’, but one or two
tickled some, and they seemed to come like see-through globs of
color from all the mirrors. The first one was kinda lavender, then
pink, then purple, and there was reds and blues, too. Then they
switched off, and the mirrors did, too. Now it was a creamy white
all ’round us, and I looked and our clothes and stuff was
gone. I didn’t know how they did that and I wasn’t sure
I wanted to know.
A part of one wall went back with a little whine, and we
followed Bill through into a second room. This one was kinda warm
and had real plush furry brown carpeting on it and a gizmo that
looked like a cross between a doctor’s scale and an eye
doctor’s gadget. Bill stepped up on it, stood straight, and
looked through the two lenses of the thing. I really couldn’t
see the thing much till I was led up to it by Sam. I looked through
it, then got a sudden little flash in my eyes, and that was it.
“Well, that done it,” I muttered. “Now
they’ve gone and made me completely blind.”
“It’ll wear off,” Bill promised.
“It’s not as much as a flashbulb. This thing is a final
check of our identity. They know who we are, and they can take a
basic code reading even at the switch points, but this is detailed
to the last billionth of a millimeter. This thing makes absolutely
sure that you’re not only Brandy but the Brandy they expect
to see and no other. Nobody has ever fooled it. The encoder
implanted in you long ago is almost like a tiny, microscopic
computer, and it even monitors and records changes in your body as
they happen. Never mind the rest,” he said, seein’ my
blank look. “Just believe that the best and brightest of
security, computers, and electronics have tried to fool this system
and never have.”
When Sam got his okay, he took my hand and another one of them
doors appeared. This one actually had some people there, two men
and a woman. They was kinda blurry to me, but they looked both
human and not real human, dressed in some kind of satiny clothing.
They had one for me, a kind of sari that went on real neat and
fastened without no buttons or snaps or anything. Funny thing was,
though, it kept me up, big tits and all, even though it seemed
kinda soft and, well, breakable. It was cream colored and
felt a lot like silk. They also had sandals that were so light you
hardly knew they was there, but held with only one small strap that
also seemed to know its place all by itself.
They also handed me a pair of real thin, light plastic glasses
that also looked kinda shiny, and I put ’em on and at first
couldn’t see no change ’cept everything was tinted a
little bit rosy. The longer I wore ’em, though, the clearer I
could see, till in a little bit I was seein’ better than I
ever did with my regular glasses.
I could see the people of headquarters real clear. The best way
I can describe their complexion is golden, deep but real
goldlike, not just yellow or light brown. They had thick lips and
them Japanese kind of eyes, and looked kinda Oriental, but not
really. Their eyes all seemed to be jet black and kinda shiny, and
their hair was all thick, dark brown. None of ’em seemed to
have any face or body hair ’cept, of course, on their heads,
and I guessed that none of the men ever needed to shave, nor the
women, neither.
They wasn’t small like the Chinese and Japanese usually
are, but about average height. The girl was maybe a little taller
than me, the men both about six two or three. What really hit me
when lookin’ at ’em was that none of ’em seemed
to have a single mark or zit or nothin’, now or in the past.
All three seemed to be teenagers, but their skin was soft and
smooth and unworn as a baby’s. The girl wore a sari
pretty much like mine, but of satiny crimson with golden designs in
it. The two men wore a different kind of getup, kinda like a cross
between what you wear for your judo lessons and what the
politicians wear in all them Roman Empire movies. You know, the
kind where the guys wear skirts and still look real normal.
Both the men and the girl were gorgeous, too. They had
the kind of looks everybody always dreams of but nobody ever
has.
I looked over at Sam and Bill and had to laugh. They was both
bein’ dressed in cream-colored versions of what the golden
boys had on and somehow it just didn’t look the same with
their white skin and hairy legs.
Sam gave me a look but Bill just chuckled and said,
“Don’t worry, Sam. Since everybody wears these things
here, you’ll get used to it.”
One of the golden boys said somethin’, and the girl nodded
and also said somethin’, both in a kinda soft, pleasant,
singsong kinda voice. The words didn’t sound like
nothin’ human, and I knew I for one could never make them
notes.
“I think we’re being told to move on,” Markham
told us. “Their language is unique and nearly impossible to
learn or even understand. I think their vocal equipment includes a
few things ours doesn’t, but don’t worry. They do that
for their security, too. The folks we’ll be with will have
been prepped and know English by now, at least as long as they need
to. I can assure you, too, we’ve been observed by security,
both people and machines, since we came in the entry room and
they understand English quite well, or any other
language.”
“Quite right, sir,” said a man’s voice from
another of them doors that just opened. We looked over and saw him
come in, wearin’ the same kind of Roman-karate outfit as the
rest, but he looked a little different. For one thing, he looked
older, though not real old and real good for his age, and
his clothes seemed fancy and tailored even if they was the same
style. He also had two gold-plated thick watches, one on each arm,
or at least they looked like watches. He went up and shook
Bill’s hand.
“Folks,” Markham said, “May I present Executor
Aldrath Prang. My boss. These are the Horowitzes.”
He shook Sam’s hand then took and kissed mine. It was
kinda sensual and neat. He got right to the point, though, in a
neutral American-type accent that coulda been from anywheres. I
guessed he learned it all by machine.
“We must go quickly,” he told us. “We need to
allow others in and I really would like to get you out to Vice
President Mayar’s estate as quickly and quietly as possible
for security reasons. The fewer who know you’re here, the
better. We don’t want any slips.”
I could agree with that tune. “What about them
here?” I asked, suddenly gettin’ a little nervous. I
didn’t bargain for no public sessions here at
headquarters.
“Everybody you’ll meet outside the estate works for
me,” Aldrath Prang assured me. “They get their minds
probed and cleaned so often they don’t think of it as
anything more of a big deal than taking a shower.
Now—come.”
We made it over to an elevatorlike contraption, but you
didn’t have no feelin’ you was goin’ up or down.
One last security precaution, I guessed, and this Executor read my
mind.
“All the weak points are well covered and blocked,”
he told us. “All but this one, which happens to be very deep
inside a mountain of granite and basalt. Even if somebody managed
to infiltrate and blow their way through and capture the station,
it would do no good. They can’t get into the world any way
but one, and we control that from the surface. It’s nothing
personal, but it’s somewhat ironic that we must isolate
ourselves pretty much from any universe but our own even as we
master the others. All our records are here, all the knowledge is
here, all the computer controls and administration are here. Our
culture is also very tight and devoted to our mission, and we dare
not have it polluted lest some culture without our sense of
responsibility come in and take control.”
“You mean you never leave this world?” Sam asked,
amazed.
“I don’t, no. Particularly not me, although I was
out when I was younger and didn’t know too much. Some of our
people go out, of course, particularly when they’re young and
idealistic or ambitious. We have research projects all over the
place, and special needs and interests, and it’s essential
that those who will have the responsibility of running the
Labyrinth and the Corporation get a sense and feel for just what
we’re dealing with—not just its size and complexity,
but its differences. You see, there’s been no disease here of
any kind for generations. That’s why you received a
sterilization treatment among others when you arrived. It kills any
microorganism that might be harmful to us and at the same time
virtually halts mutation, freezing in place those which our bodies
must have to help in digestion, for example. There also
hasn’t been a war here in thousands of years now, nor any
kind of unpredicted natural disaster, nor famine nor in fact even
real crime as you think of it, except for crimes of
passion.”
We saw. A whole world of peace and plenty with none of the dirty
shit. If you just grew up here, and lived here your whole life, how
would you ever be able to understand them other worlds, let alone
make decisions that might cost lives? If you ain’t never felt
no pain or sufferin’ or misery firsthand, if your idea of
bein’ hungry is that you’re stuck in a city after all
the restaurants are closed, if you never had nobody look at you
funny ’cause your skin was black or you talked funny, then
how you gonna understand the problems and see the big picture. Not
that these folks would care in the end if they killed a bunch if it
was for somethin’ they wanted, but at least they had to look
into the faces of some of the folks they’d be doin’
in.
They’d been at this a long, long time.
We got to the surface and saw that the whole place had been
cleared for us. We walked across a kinda lobby area that looked
like some luxury airport waiting lounge, out a side door, and right
into a funny-lookin’ big car with no wheels that just kinda
floated there at the door. A side of it was dropped down so there
was steps leadin’ up and in. The whole thing looked like some
roast beef plate with a half a cigar on top. There was windows all
the way along, although it’d looked solid from the outside.
We could see out, but nobody could see in.
Inside it was kinda like a millionaire’s camper van. Nice
furlike carpets even on the walls, real plush recliner chairs
around a table that looked like polished marble, and compartments
all over the place. I expected the thing to wobble when we got on,
but it was steady as a rock. I couldn’t figure what was
holdin’ it all up.
There wasn’t no driver, neither; not even a driver’s
seat. This fellow Aldrath—we found out quick that they said
their first names last and last names first, like the Orientals
do—he just went up front, took some kind of card out of a
little pocket in his toga, and stuck it in a slot. The door closed,
and off we went, no seatbelts or nothin’. You had to look
outside to see that we was even movin’—and was
we movin’! Up, up, and away real fast.
I could see the place below us clearly now, just a little round
dome of a building in the middle of a bunch of trees in the middle
of a bunch of low mountains kinda like the Poconos, but with no
roads, no power lines, no nothin’.
It was a sunny day with just them cotton candy clouds, but we
stayed just below them, so you had a right good view of the country
below for miles and miles. Here and there you could see round
towers and groups of domes and cubes and other funny shapes, but
none of the places were real big and there was no roads at all.
Aldrath punched something in one of them compartments and
brought out some drinks. I kinda figured they was somethin’
like that. He saw that Sam and me were mostly lookin’ out and
down at the country, which didn’t look the least bit familiar
but really didn’t look all that strange, neither. Sorta like
central Pennsylvania or upstate New York, only before all them
folks stuck all them roads and wires through it. ’Course, if
your cars and buses and trucks all fly like this thing we was in,
you don’t need all that.
“If you are looking for major cities, we have them,”
Aldrath said, “but not in this area. Our cities are mostly in
the subtropical and tropical climates. When you can control or
eliminate all the pests and divert big storms and manipulate the
rainfall, those places are like gardens. This is mostly an area of
wilderness and balance, with a few towns for special purposes or
simply because people like to live here, and a number of broad
estates mingled with forests and game reserves.”
“I’d’ve thought sheer numbers would have populated a
lot of this,” Sam replied. “Or is the population
stable?”
“It’s stable, but reasonably large. We keep it
worldwide at about a billion, which is more than adequate to
preserve what should be preserved. It’s not that we’re
restrictive, but we have many outlets for a population, both in
settling and preserving certain other Earths that are truly
wonderful places to live but which never developed a higher race
and also the planets and to a limited extent the stars.”
Even I was startled at that one. “You mean you don’t
just go next door, you’re also up there?”
He smiled. “Getting to the near planets is no great trick,
nor is colonizing a place like Mars. The stars are trickier, and
we’re still in our infancy regarding them, but who is better
qualified to go than we if there are in fact alien civilizations
out there? It provides us with a limitless and exciting future, you
see. The parallel worlds go from infinity to infinity, and each
universe is in itself so vast and varied it will end before anyone
can explore more than a fraction of it. That’s the secret to
keeping a civilization as successful and prosperous as ours from
rotting and decaying, you see. There is always someplace new to go,
something new to learn, something wonderful waiting to be
discovered. We have never become jaded or yielded to
rot.”
Yeah, it sure sounded like one of them—what’cha call
it?—Utopias, all right, and maybe it was about as close as we
get, but I couldn’t help think that we’d gotten sucked
into all this ’cause some folks with real power, probably
right here on this planet, ran at least one and maybe many rebel
groups that tried to sucker and screw up and take over parts of the
Corporation’s territories and worlds, and we was here at all
’cause there was at least one known traitor and he had some
boss higher up. They was askin’ me to risk my mind and my
neck against them folks, so I figured I had a right to bring that
up, and did.
Aldrath shrugged. “Humanity is by nature imperfect, and so
perfection is not attainable without also costing humankind the
things that are most important to it. Creativity, a measure of
freedom, curiosity, drive, willpower. We can remove these things,
but then we make not perfect humans but perfect automatons. In
spite of the fact that the lowest of the low here have things your
richest and most powerful people would envy, we have classes. It is
a part of our culture and our heritage. Our very language, our
accents, are differentiated by class so that merely by a
person’s speech we know their station. Our very names are
actually descriptives chosen for their poetry, their symmetry, and
their meaning. My name is actually—” He gave one of
them pretty songs. “The names we give you are rough
transliterations of these sounds according to English rules. The
corporate chiefs are the highest class and marry only among their
own families. The professional, or managerial class does the same.
The working, or common class is likewise separated not merely by
name and accent but by family and society. As always, this causes
strains.”
“And I don’t suppose there’s anyone really
anxious to let people move up,” Sam commented.
“Not many. I, for example, am from the professional class
and would not be anything else. The big limits are all on the
corporate class—the people you will be meeting. They have all
the real policy-making power, but they can not abrogate that power
or that responsibility. That’s determined almost from birth.
They have very little choice in their lives and much of it is quite
boring. I, on the other hand, am what I am because that’s
what I wanted to be. I could have chosen any profession I liked,
and if I made the grade I’d have gotten it. If I
didn’t, or found I hated it, I could have chosen another. I
work as hard as I like to work—and I very much like
working—and get tremendous benefits. I don’t have a
private estate here or elsewhere, but I can avail myself of the
desirable parts of any of them.”
“Yeah, that’s all well and good for you,” I
said, “but what about the common folks?”
“Those who greeted you today are so-called common folks.
There’s no heavy labor; it’s mostly a service and
maintenance economy here, and most of what we have that’s
really odious is automated. We automated everything once, but
finally cut back so we automated only what people shouldn’t
ever be required to do. They, too, have a choice of many jobs, no
real stress or pressure they don’t wish to take upon
themselves, and much in the way of benefits and opportunities. For
example, how old would you say that trio who met you
were?”
“No more than eighteen for the oldest,” Sam
answered.
The security chief laughed. “The girl is thirty-seven, and
the two boys are thirty-one and forty. When you do jobs you enjoy
and have conquered all the diseases and defects inherent in our
ancestry, it’s amazing how long a span you can have. I, for
example, am sixty-seven just last month. From your standpoint
I’m probably about half that, which is the way I feel and
act. The average lifespan here is about two hundred and nine years,
and you begin to get gray hairs and a few wrinkles at about ninety,
but you really don’t start looking old until you’re
about a hundred and sixty, and I know several two-hundred-year-olds
who still swim a few kilometers a day and do mountain climbing for
a hobby. That’s true no matter what class you’re
in.”
“Yeah, but what if some commoners think they can run
things better than you, or maybe want to be scientists instead of
lab assistants or something like that? What then?” I asked,
gettin’ an idea of how even this kind of society could get
rebels.
“That’s what I meant by outlets and
expansion,” Aldrath replied. “If there are commoners
who believe they have superior talents and abilities and can
demonstrate them, there are ways for them to be educated every bit
as good as, say, my own son. We just can’t have them here,
since that would upset the system and the balance. They are welcome
to go to a colony where they might find a place, or even found
their own. Only the corporate level is closed absolutely, since
there can be only one set of people controlling the Labyrinth and
they are born, raised, and trained to do that and safeguard both us
and the other worlds from one who might use that power for evil. We
are not dictators to other worlds and cultures, Madam Horowitz. We
are thieves. We steal things we need, and, most of all, ideas, art
forms, even stories from unique and different cultures. In
exchange, we keep the would-be dictators and oppressors of
universes out, and we try as hard as we can to preserve worlds that
have not destroyed themselves from doing so. Other than that, we do
not tip balances.”
“But you’re much of organized crime on many worlds,
including ours,” Sam noted. “That’s sure as hell
interfering.”
“I didn’t say we didn’t interfere. I said we
do not tip balances. Those things were there before we
came and would be there with or without us. We don’t even
increase their efficiency, and we leave it in local hands. Think of
the alternative. We could easily take over any government, even all
of them, and thereby safeguard everything, but we do not. We do not
actually even take over the criminal societies, we just use them to
help us covertly get what we wish. The vast bulk of the criminals
do not know or even suspect us.”
“Yeah, but you still got traitors and rebels,” I
pointed out. “I mean, we only got into this thing
’cause some folks from here got ambitious.”
“That’s true,” he admitted, sippin’ his
drink. “As hard as we try, there are just some people
who’ll never understand the system. You see, we’re
thieves as well as explorers and preservers. We get a lot
out of this. Our medicine, our power systems, this
vehicle—all stolen ideas. To preserve this wilderness, we
import raw materials we need and which we buy at a fair price and
never in quantities that would impoverish a world. There are some
who, nonetheless, see us as inherently superior to everyone else.
Our religion teaches that all the gods of all the universes are
real, and that together they form a powerful overmind, a Supreme
Lord. We were selected by the Supreme Lord to master the Labyrinth
and oversee the universes. Some take that a bit too far, and see us
as the natural and Supreme Lord’s choice as rulers
of all the universes. They simply never grasp the essence of the
system: thieves never steal everything from the last rich man
on Earth. If we came in and took over, destroyed cultures and
replaced them with an autocratic government, they would soon all be
like us, only under us and never able to attain freedom again.
Without that freedom, there is no creativity. If you make them
subjects, they will reflect your own will imperfectly and, as a
result, will never produce anything new or unusual or creative. In
short, nothing worth stealing.”
It was a real crazy way of lookin’ at things, but it made
a kinda lopsided sense. I turned and tried the wine, which was real
sweet and went down good. I always had a thing for sweet
stuff; it’s why I ain’t never been able to keep weight
off.
“So what’s next?” I asked the man. “Why
bring us here?”
“We have some time, and we thought we’d make the
best use of it,” Aldrath told me. “There’s no
place more secure than here, although nothing is absolutely secure.
We are going to Mayar Eldrith’s estate, which is both private
and isolated. He is a senior vice president of the Corporation and
chairman of the Security Committee. His staff were all handpicked
and are constantly checked by me and are as secure as we can get.
We have all the medical-techinical apparatus needed to prep you for
this job, and we’ll do that as well as practice the system as
best we can. When we’re ready, we’ll also be ready over
in Vogel’s pesthole of a world.”
The flyin’ bus turned and started down, and below we could
see a real big house, a bunch of smaller houses that were still
bigger’n most of what we had back home, with gardens and
woods and stuff. It was the kind of country place you might expect
the Queen of England to have, and the kind I always dreamed about.
There weren’t no funny cubes and circles here; this place had
real charm and the outside, at least, looked like real wood, though
it was real modern-lookin’ and had all kinds of crazy
angles.
We was met by a small group of young people all of which looked
just as beautiful and just as perfect as the ones in the station. I
was already feelin’ real self-conscious about my looks, kinda
like bein’ the only black in an all-white town someplace out
west. They wasn’t white folks, but they was all the same and
they was sure different than any of us.
The main house was big—I think it coulda been the
biggest hotel in Philadelphia with room left over, though it was
only four or five floors. It just went on and on forever. They
didn’t take us there, though, but to a smaller place down a
hill and in some woods.
The inside was gorgeous, anyways—all wood
paneling, thick carpeted floors that felt and looked great, real
modern-type furniture, soft lighting that seemed to come from
everywhere and went on when you came in and went down when you
left—all that. The upstairs rooms all looked out on a balcony
onto an enormous livin’ room, kinda like in them
luxury hotels.
“We use this place when we want privacy, even from the
main house, where there are a lot of comings and goings,”
Aldrath told us. “You’ll find clothing and the basics
in the closets and bath upstairs. Your meals will be prepared by my
security staff and served below in the dining alcove. If you wish
to go outside, please limit yourself to the walks out the back of
the house and do not go to any other buildings or speak to anyone
not on the staff without my permission. We have very little time
and much to do. I know you must be tired now, so Bill and I will
leave you for now, but we start bright and early tomorrow morning
and the sessions will be long ones.”
I had thought Bill would stay here, but it looked not. The whole
place was ours. “Now, this is somethin’
else!” I breathed. “The kinda place I always
dreamed of havin’!”
Sam was glum as usual. “Yeah, they treat the condemned
with all the luxuries. I still got a bad feeling about all this.
It’s too complicated.”
“Five million bucks, Sam! We can have our own
place like this.”
“Yeah—if we don’t pay too high a price for
it.”
His name was Jamispur Samoka. He was another of them beautiful
people, fifty-one and lookin’ maybe in his twenties, and
wearin’ a pale pastel blue outfit that seemed to be the same
here as lab whites were back home. He wasn’t no
doctor—they didn’t have doctors here like we
did—but he was the same kind of thing. His workroom looked
like some mad scientist’s shit from old horror movies, but
they was all designed to do different things to and for people. I
was scareder of him than of the mission.
“Much of this equipment was developed because our own
people need some modifications before venturing into other
worlds,” he told me. “Also, it’s often not
possible to get an exact replacement for someone else when we need
to infiltrate a place. This equipment can make a close match seem
an exact match. It can’t work miracles but it can do wonders.
Fortunately, we have had the opportunity to get all the physical
and genetic data from the woman you are to replace, and that makes
it a lot easier.”
That didn’t sit well with me. “How much of a change
will there be? I know I ain’t no beauty queen, but I kinda
like me the way I am.” Five million bucks, I kept
tellin’ myself. Just think of that.
“It’s important to emphasize that there is nothing
we can do here that can’t be undone here,” he replied.
“The trick is doing it in the first place. Whatever we do we
have an exact record of doing and so we know the way to reverse it.
In your case, we do not need to do anything really major or
radical, anyway. The biggest problem here, which we don’t
face all the time, is that you might be subjected to tests
available to someone who knows of and has some access to our
technology. In effect, it must be so perfect that even we
can’t detect what we’ve done. This fellow Vogel is a
paranoid and sadist at best. You must hold up to get close to him,
and even though he doesn’t know we’ve made him as a
traitor, he’s bound to have been even more cautious and
paranoid because of his fear of discovery. Let me show you
something.” He reached down, pushed a button, and
pointed.
The place where he pointed flickered, then took on an outline of
a woman that quickly faded in and became solid and real
three-dimensional. It was a black woman, stark naked, and still as
death.
“That is who you have to be,” Jamispur told me.
I looked hard at the woman, seein’ now that it was just
some kinda 3-D photograph. “Don’t look much like
me,” I said. “That hair’s long and straight. I
never could get mine straight long enough to do much with it.
Complexion’s wrong, too, and she got a damn sight better
figure than me or what you’re gonna get out of me in two
weeks.”
“You underestimate yourself. No one really sees themselves
as others see them. I know you’re not all that modest about
yourself or you wouldn’t have taken this job. Will you
disrobe and go stand next to the image, on that small dot in the
floor, there?”
I did it—hell, he was gonna see more of me than
this—and went over. The woman’s picture didn’t
look so real right up close, kinda faded and with lines like bad
tuning on the TV. There was a click, and he said, “Now come
back over here and we’ll look at what we’ve
got.”
I came back over and turned, and saw two women
standin’ there. The other one was me, but the doc was
right—it really didn’t look right, somehow. I started
thinkin’, is that the way I really look to Sam
and the others? And I started makin’ little critical
notes to myself. Fact was, I was kinda cute, though, and I
didn’t have much different a figure than she did after all. A
little more hip and thigh, that’s all. The face, hair, and
skin tone, though, just weren’t right. I looked taller, but
that might have been the bush hair.
And then he started puttin’ me in his machines. They
didn’t hurt none, but sometimes they used drugs and sprays
that might have hid just about anything. They was fast,
though. I got the feelin’ that if I broke my leg in the
mornin’ I’d walk out whole in the afternoon.
At the end of three days, Sam, who’d been spendin’
his time with planners for the mission, was a little uncomfortable.
I was changin’ more than either of us bargained for. For the
first time in my life, my hair was straight and silky-black like
it’d been born that way, and it was growin’ at one hell
of a rate. By the end of five days my hair was thick and down below
my shoulders and was just as big a pain to comb and wash as I
always figured. It really changed my appearance,
I’ll tell you. My skin was a little lighter and almost a
uniform chocolate brown. A couple of old scars and lots of stretch
marks were gone; so was my vaccination scar, and my skin was a
little oilier, almost shiny. I was also gettin’ thinner, back
in shape. The doc said the machines used my own body to do and lock
in a lot of the changes, and that it took from the too fat parts.
Not that I was skinny—but she wasn’t, neither. Still,
every time I looked in the mirror it was some strange girl
starin’ back.
It got worse, though, when the dental stuff started. I had more
than a few fillin’s, and they was wrong and had to go. They
put me under with somethin’, and when I woke up I was almost
a stranger. The stuff in my teeth, and one or two new teeth, now
felt a little dead in my mouth, like caps might, but there was no
way by lookin’ or even X ray to tell that them teeth
weren’t the way nature intended. My nose looked different,
and so did my smile. My round face seemed a little more oval. I
also always had a deep voice, but they tuned it a bit—it
sounded funny when I talked, a little higher and a lot huskier. The
new face also done somethin’ to the way I could talk, too. I
had real trouble with s and r sounds; it was a
hell of a lisp. Still, in only five days, when he took another
picture of me and put it next to that one of the other girl and I
stepped away and looked, we was close. Damned close. It was more
the way she held herself, and that idiot’s smile on her, than
anything you could measure.
“You thure you can change thith all back?” I asked
him worriedly. “I nevah thought ’bout thith kinda thuff
when I took the job.”
“In the same five days,” he assured me.
“Except for the lost body weight, of course. That you will
have to replace yourself, if you want to.”
“I thure don’ wanna talk like thith the west of my
life.”
Sam couldn’t help but make fun of the lisp till he saw how
self-conscious I was about it; then he stopped. “Remember,
you agreed to do this,” he said. “You don’t like
the price you paid so far—and neither do I—but this is
the easy part.”
“I know, I know,” I grumbled. “I already got
to the point where I just wanna get goin’ and get thith over
with.”
I think what disturbed him most was the last thing they did. It
was on the inside of my left palm, and it was nothin’ more
than a long number tattooed there in purple ink. Sam had an uncle
and a coupla cousins with numbers like that, souvenirs of
Hitler’s camps. And, in the end, that was the bottom line of
what was buggin’ him. This world I was gonna get dropped in
was a Nazi world, a world where the Jews had been wiped out and
we was the new Jews. It was like I was volunteerin’
to be a Jew at Auschwitz. That didn’t set none too well with
me, but none of them had Sam just outside holdin’ a
gun on G.O.D., Inc.
Not that I wasn’t startin’ to get nervous. I was.
The closer the dates came, the more doubts I had, the more second
thoughts, and the scareder I got. I began to really wonder if Sam
was right all along. I wasn’t no Cleopatra Jones, no Jane
Bond. Undercover was always the hardest and riskiest thing any
investigator could do, and this was undercover in a whole
world that considered me no better than a pet monkey and
would treat me the same or worse.
Then we started through the simulation exercises. They had a
room in the big house rigged up kinda like they thought
Vogel’s Safe Room was—but they wasn’t
sure—complete with secret passage, and they took me in there
naked and in light but limiting arm and leg chains to where a big
guy about Vogel’s size and weight played the mark. The first
three days of this, twenty times a day with analysis, I never even
come close to takin’ him, and I got real
discouraged. Still, every time I blew it they took me aside, showed
me a recordin’ of the whole thing, and explained what I done
wrong, what tricks I fell for, what opportunities I missed. I
learned quick—this was my ass on the line, and I wanted to
live to spend that bread. By the fourth day of trainin’, I
took not only the fellow playin’ Vogel but two other guys
even bigger and meaner about half the time. By the time there was
only two days left, I was takin’ all comers in that room
three out of four times.
It wasn’t good enough, but it had to do.
We also had all sorts of briefin’s, goin’ on and on
and makin’ us all memorize everything till we talked it in
our sleep. Timing, other things, and most important the emergency
procedures in case it went down wrong. I knew just what was gonna
happen when and if, and there were only a few things they
didn’t tell me, ’cause if I didn’t know
then I couldn’t be made to tell Vogel.
That night, we got dressed up in fancy-colored silks for the
last real night we’d have until it was over. The way I
talked, the last thing I wanted was guests and a dinner party, but
this weren’t no last meal. The ones comin’ to dinner
were the folks with the five million bucks—the Security
Committee.
“You got to do all the talkin’,” I told Sam.
“I couldn’t open my mouth ’round nobody
now.”
“Yeah, well, I’ll try, but you’re what
they’ve come to see and neither Aldrath nor I like it
much.”
“Huh?”
“Babe, these guys dreamed up this thing and passed the job
of actually doing it down to Aldrath, who passed it on to Bill and
then to us, but until now it’s just an abstract thing to
them. Beyond Bill, Aldrath, Jamispur, and a tight circle of
security personnel who have their brains laundered every morning to
make sure they’re secure, nobody knows who is doing this, or
when, or anything else. Now all of a sudden the whole damned
committee shows up and demands to meet with us. They’re all
corporate class people—untouchable even by Aldrath unless he
catches them with a smoking gun in their hands standing over a
freshly dead body. They’re all ambitious up-and-coming
corporate types, sort of like Congressmen. They’re a
potentially leaky bunch and you can do a lot in forty-eight
hours.”
“But thurely the Thecurity Committee is checked
out!” Trouble was, I was startin’ to get used to
talkin’ like a black Elmer Fudd.
“People leak things for their own advantage. If one of
’em gets concerned with a bigwig he’s trying to impress
and gets pressed on what’s being done about this security
threat, he might blurt it all out just to make an impression, or
leak it if there’s rumors going around that he hasn’t
been very effective. Now, we’re going to block out that whole
time line from the Labyrinth, so nobody and no messages go in or
out until you’re safe, and anybody who leaves here not on our
team will be monitored like a hawk, but these are big shots used to
intelligence work. It’s an extra added pain in the
ass.”
I couldn’t help but notice that the Security Committee was
all male. In fact, I found out when I pressed, just about all the
senior officers were men. It wasn’t that this place was
out-and-out sexist, but women somehow never made it to the top
spots. Some of it was that these guys tonight were mostly in their
seventies and maybe had a hundred years or more before there was
much of an openin’, and the Chairman of the Board, they said,
was a hundred and five and nowhere near retirin’, but I think
there was more. This sorta trickles down, too. If women
aren’t in top spots, they don’t tend to be treated as
good further down. Kinda like Russia, where all women are equal and
work at jobs, but never get high up in the government ’cept
as the head of culture or arts or somethin’ like that, and
are still expected to come home nights and clean house and cook
dinner.
Here, nobody really had to work, and a lot of women
didn’t, stayin’ home with the kids and stuff. Lots of
the artists were women, I found out, and dancers and entertainers,
and lots in the common classes had all sorts of regular jobs, but
almost never on top unless they was the absolute best. Nobody
seemed to care ’bout this, though. They all had one of them
religions that believed in reincarnation, and you was a man one
life, a woman the next, and so on. Me, I was thinkin’ I might
like to be a housewife and full-time mother to some kids,
’specially if I had lots of money, but I sure as hell would
hate to be required to do that.
They trooped in, one at a time, and got greeted like one of them
diplomatic receptions. More of them beautiful golden people, all of
’em, only lookin’ a little older and maybe a little
shiftier, like politicians or salesmen. Mayar Eldrith, our host,
was tall and strong and real slick lookin’; he brought his
wife, Eyai, who looked somethin’ like some Hawaiian goddess.
She had that special smile and way of talkin’ that all
politicians’ wives seem to have, and Mayar talked like he was
some big shot Senator runnin’ for office. Real smooth voice
and delivery.
He was followed by Hanrin Sabuuk, who looked and sounded enough
like Mayar to be his brother, then Dringa Lakuka, who looked older
and wiser and was a real quiet type but with real bright eyes. You
got the feelin’ he was some god slummin’ and
havin’ a ball doin’ it. Then there was Basuti Alimati,
the youngest and newest member—only fifty-seven and
lookin’ a good thirty—who seemed real stuffy and
businesslike. They told us he was the only one of them who never
married and never seemed to fool around, neither. They wasn’t
very hung up on sex here—you could have as many wives, or
even husbands, as you could talk into it, swing with either or both
sexes, and have unlimited lovers on the side. This guy, though, was
never even known to swing with himself.
The last one and just slightly older than “young”
Basuti, was Mukasa Lamdukur. He looked much like the others and was
maybe the most human of the bunch, and he was the only one who
brought along others, much to Sam’s and Aldrath’s
distress. They looked so young I figured it was his kids, but they
weren’t. Mukasa’s job was keepin’ the records
straight and generally runnin’ the committee on a day-to-day
basis, and Dakani Grista, a real young hunk of a boy, and Ioyeo,
who was a little small as the women went here and looked maybe
sixteen or so, were the administrative assistants, or so we were
told. Only Dakani was of the manager class, though; Ioyeo (their
women never seemed to have but one name, all vowels—I guess
it was the way things was translated) was actually a commoner class
person whose big talent was that she was oversexed and not real
bright. She had one hell of a figure, though, and that
sari looked painted on, and I guess that’s one of the things
they wanted around the office. Even on a world of beautiful women,
she was a real stunner, and she even had one of them dumb blond
voices—you know, high-pitched as all get-out and whispery to
boot—and all the right moves. I had to poke Sam more than
once that night to get his mind back where it should be.
They all treated her kinda like some servant, though, but she
fetched and smiled and giggled and didn’t seem to mind. I
couldn’t help thinkin’ that if there was a leak or a
traitor at the top, that’s the one I’d look first at.
Nobody was like that in real life.
The talk was mostly small talk, and I did almost none of it.
“So, tell me, what’s your world like?” Mayar
Eldrith asked Bill Markham.
“A stroke seven world, sir,” Bill replied
pleasantly.
“Oh, yes—atomic weapons, superpowers, big and little
wars,” Mukasa put in. “An interesting world. Not at all
boring.”
Bill choked down what he might really wanna say. “Yes,
sir, it is definitely interesting. You’ve been to a stroke
seven?”
Mukasa chuckled. “Long ago, when I was very young. They
were fighting a big conventional war then, and there were lots of
diseases and abysmal ignorance about them. I remember that. I
suppose it must have been your world, since that’s the only
stroke seven we’ve developed for many years so far. Who won
that war, anyway?”
“Depends on which one it was. If it was a world war, then
it was probably the U.S., England, and Russia against Germany,
Italy, and Japan. The U.S. side won. Now they and the Germans,
Italians, and Japanese are on the same side and the Russians on the
other.”
“Fascinating,” Hanrin put in. “I should like
to see a full-blown war one day—from a safe distance, of
course.”
“They’re very destructive and not very pretty or
glamorous,” Sam couldn’t help but put in. “In
fact, they’re the ugliest side of human nature.”
“Perhaps, but they are incredibly valuable. Progress and
inventiveness accelerate a hundredfold during a war. Most great
inventions and ideas come out of them, you know. I fear it is the
nature of the human beast and just as necessary to him as
love.”
“I notice there haven’t been any wars here,”
Sam noted, a little ticked off at this.
Mayar Eldrith sensed Sam’s irritation. “Come, come!
Yes, you’re right, we don’t have wars here, but
we’re a pretty static culture because of it. Our progress
comes from what we learn from others. Still, we are not ignorant of
the horrors and cost of wars. The Labyrinth came out of a war, in
fact—the last war fought on this Earth between our people. In
point of fact, it was terribly ugly. It destroyed in the end all
human life on this planet. Only a small band of brave pioneers
managed to escape through the Labyrinth, a very primitive thing
then, and wait it out. When they were at last able to return, they
found a wasteland. All that you see—the animals, trees,
flowers, everything—they imported from other worlds. They
redesigned the entire planet into a garden, and they swore that
never again would violence sear us. Out of that came the
Corporation and the system we now have.”
That sorta explained a lot, like why most everybody looked like
everybody else. Ten to one that class thing was really who was
related to who when they came back. That was more’n a
thousand years ago, but if they lived a couple hundred years plus
each it was to them like maybe the World Wars were to us.
“Ancient history,” muttered Basuti, the cold fish
and also youngest at fifty-seven. “We’re too damned fat
and lazy for our own good, I say. No discipline, no motivation.
We’ve become a bunch of whores, that’s what.”
“Now, Alim, don’t start that again,” Dringa
Lakuka put in. He turned to us. “Basuti, there, was a priest
and holy man until his older brother was killed in an accident,
forcing him to assume obligations in the real world. I think
he’d only be happy if we turned the entire world into a
monastery.”
“Many of us here would be far better off if we were closer
to the gods than the flesh,” Basuti muttered, giving the eye
to Mukasa and his girlfriend.
“We strive for balance on committees as vital as this
one,” said Mayar Eldrith, clearing his throat nervously.
“I humbly suggest that we confine ourselves to pleasantries
for now. Our disagreements are none of these people’s affair,
nor their concern. What concerns us is whether or not we are
vulnerable to evil. Someone very powerful has gone to a great deal
of trouble to import this alien organism and test it. We must know
why. It surely isn’t to take over a mere Earth or two. Anyone
with enough power to do that is hatching something aimed clearly at
us.”
Sam and I exchanged a look, and I knew we was both
thinkin’ along the same lines. All of a sudden, with two days
to go, I felt like one big, fat, brown worm on the end of a hook.
Somebody real powerful set this up. Somebody like one or more of
the folks in this room. Somebody—Aldrath or maybe
Mayar—already figured that one out. To keep that shit
comin’ down without tippin’ off security as to where,
it had to be somebody with a lot of knowledge and power in
security. One of these guys. So they was trottin’ out their
sacrificial lamb and lettin’ whoever have a good look, then
they would all be watched like nobody ever been watched before,
hopin’ somebody would try and tip off Vogel.
I mean, guys who thought other folks’ wars were neat and
ran criminal syndicates on a bunch of worlds sure as hell
didn’t give a shit about me. I started feelin’ a little
sick and forgot all about eatin’ or my talkin’ or
anything else.
“You have to excuth me wadieth and gentamen,” I said
softly. “Unweth theah’s thomething vewy impowtant foa
uth to tawk about, I have much to do and thith ith my wath night
with my huthband foah a wong time.” Damn! It was
gettin’ so bad I couldn’t say no I’s,
neither. Mix that with my usual accent and I must sound like an
idiot!
“Oooh! That’s a cute way of
talking,” Ioyeo whispered loud enough for me to hear.
“What did she say?”
That did it. I kinda rushed away and nearly ran upstairs to the
room. I felt so damned miserable I was cryin’ before I hit
the bed, and still cryin’ when Sam came into the room.
He closed the door, came over, and just started gently rubbing
my back. He always knew what I needed, and I could feel his own
hurt and shame. Damn it! I’d asked for this! I
really wished now that I’d listened to him and not spent all
my time feelin’ sorry for myself. I never wanted dear old
Philadelphia and that mink-lined apartment more than now, and
I’d’ve even given it all up and moved back to roach
heaven in Camden right then.
“I’m sowwy,” I sniffled. “I
juth—it ain’t what I thought it would be.”
He sighed and kept on rubbin’. “I know, babe, I
know. But it is just like putting on the hooker outfit and
staking out the hourly motels. It’s just a higher league.
They can make the disguise so perfect it’s scary. When you
figure they can make themselves pass for us, and learn English in
their spare time with a gadget, they just don’t think of what
it can do to us poor primitive mortals.”
“I’m thcared, Tham,” I told him.
“Weal thcared. I want to caw it off.”
He sighed again. “You saw them down there. You saw how
they regarded us, how they talked about the other worlds.
We’re their toys, their playthings. They want this Vogel
because he’s a threat to them, not us. Their only
opening is in two days. Not enough time to recruit and train
somebody new.”
“They can’t make me do it!”
“You want to walk down and quit? Come on, babe, get hold
of yourself. There’s nothing I’d like more than for you
to cancel out. They’d send us back, but they’d be
damned angry at being inconvenienced. They’d have to come up
with a different, even trickier, plan and maybe risk the necks of
some of their own. They’d send you back just like you are
now, and then they’d cut us off completely. You’d be
stuck looking as you are now, speech impediments and all, and
we’d be out on the streets with nothing.”
I turned around and looked at him with this strange face.
“And what if I did that anyway and they did that? Would we
thtill be togetha?”
He kissed me. “You’re still a pretty woman, babe,
just different looking than I’m used to. But you’re
still you, inside, and that’s who I married anyway. As for
the money—how many Brandys can I buy for two million plus
bucks? None. I started out with nothing, and I’ll probably
end up with nothing no matter what. If money mattered to me
I’d be top salesman at my uncle’s car showroom in
Harrisburg, or maybe starting my own dealership by now. Or
I’d be a comfortable cop with a heavy pad.”
I hugged him and kissed him and never have I been more in love
than right then and there. I just wanted to give myself to him, to
fuck his brains out, and I planned to, but first I said, softly,
“Tham—do you think it can be done? Do you think I can
do it? Sthrait anthwa, now. No jive.”
“It’s possible,” he answered, and I knew he
was tellin’ the truth. “And if anybody can pull it off,
you can.”
“Then, I’w’l do it, juth to thee them have to
fork ova that money.”
And then we made love for a long, long time.
I didn’t get much sleep, and neither did Sam, even after
we got done, but I was somehow real wide awake that mornin’.
We did get to talkin’, though.
“You think one of them’th the big twaita?”
He
nodded. “And so does Aldrath. I think you’re safe,
though. Whoever’s behind this is a big risk taker but
he’s no fool. He’ll know he’s been set up and sit
it out. They’ve been on the hot seat, whoever they are, since
the word came that Vogel was exposed, and they haven’t dared
try to reach him with any messages. They’re stuck. They
have to let this go down and work around it.”
“But if Vogel knowth who, then they hav’ta
act.”
“You’d think so. But I just can’t see any
opening now that wouldn’t just relieve us of the job of
making the snatch. Aldrath is good at his job and I think
he’s a basically honest man, or as honest as you can get in
that line of work. He wants this higher-up so bad he can taste it.
It’s almost like something personal with him.”
“Which one do you think it ith?”
“Hard to say. Ioyeo and Dakani are the obvious choices,
but Aldrath can haul them in and pick their brains without their
even knowing it. He says Dakani’s ambitious but hardly
treasonous, and that Ioyeo really doesn’t have anything in
there except animal passions. She’s not as dumb as she plays,
but she’s no heavyweight. No, it’s one of the five. I
keep thinking I should already know which one, even from our brief
meeting, but I don’t know why.”
“Funny. Me, too. But I juth can’t get a hand on
it.”
“Well, one job at a time,” he sighed.
“I’ll work on that angle while you follow yours. If we
can hand them Vogel and his master, now
that’s an IOU!”
I wasn’t goin’ nowhere right off; it was Sam who was
leavin’, for the team was already pretty much in place. They
had to be all set up and ready to go before I even got there, which
was fine with me, ’cept it was gonna be a real lonely, scary
couple of days.
That day they introduced me to the hypnoscan, and I was real
glad Sam wasn’t around. Not that it was much of anything
bein’ in it—you sat down in this real comfortable
reclinin’ chair and they put sensors and stuff all over you
and then packed your head in somethin’ soft, so you could
breathe but you couldn’t see, hear, or know much of anything.
It was all done by computers, of course; they load what they want
in, then you just sorta drift off, and in what seems like a couple
minutes it’s over—even though it takes hours.
It was a little weird, too, ’cause even when you woke up
you didn’t have no idea that anything was changed. The doc,
he brought me over and made me walk this way and that, and I
thought his voice sounded real fancy and cultured. Then he brought
me over and handed me a sheet with words on it and asked me to read
it.
“Hey, Doc, ev’body know we can’t read,”
I responded. I felt nothing odd at the idea I couldn’t read;
I did feel some relief that my speech had improved some. In fact, I
had changed radically.
The thing was, they’d wiped out any way I had of
gettin’ to a lot of my knowledge and skills. My ignorance was
appalling, and I just took it for granted. I was also childlike and
eager to please or do whatever I was asked to do without question,
but I walked and moved like a two-bit whore. Any deep thoughts were
just gone; so was any real sense of self-identity. I didn’t
know where I was or who I was or anything, but the worst thing was
that it didn’t matter to me. I had no questions.
Later on, lookin’ at myself in a mirror, I saw only me
reflected back with this idiotic smile. They left me in a room for
a while with the doors wide open and it never even entered my head
to leave or go anyplace I wasn’t told to go.
The Nazis had forty-plus years to experiment on us in that hell
world, and that was plenty of time to take and raise children in
cultural isolation and experiment with mind-dulling drugs that left
permanent marks and methods of trainin’ and all the rest.
These wasn’t slaves who was born in chains and wanted
freedom; these were the ends of experiments on humans that nobody
on our world would ever allow, born and bred as less than
human and in their master’s image.
And that was just stage one. Stage two put me out till I woke up
in hell as somebody else, somebody completely different, somebody
with a past and memories only of bein’ property on that evil
world. Somebody so ignorant they didn’t even know it was hell
they was in.
Preparation and trainin’ was over. The mission was
underway.