The Orpheus Machine

Chapter 21

Ruiz Aw was lost. He and Junior had wandered through the endless maze for an hour, meeting no one. Occasionally they’d heard the sounds of rapidly retreating feet, but always distant and distorted by the twisting tunnels. Sometimes the sounds seemed closer — the clank of machinery or high-pitched voices. The floors of the tunnel were slippery, the walls gave off the same dim red light. Uninteresting rubbish lined most of the tunnels.

Apart from those mysterious sounds, there was an air of long disuse about the areas they had passed through.

Ruiz paused at a wheel-spoke nexus, where there were seven possible choices of route. He looked at the dataslate and could find no correspondence with the map Somnire had given him. “I have the feeling that we really haven’t gotten into the main enclave. I’d swear we were in an abandoned network.”

“You’re lost,” said Junior sourly.

“Maybe so,” said Ruiz. “How’s your oxygen?”

“Down to sixty percent. You?”

“Worse than that.” Ruiz felt a twinge of resentment, that his clone excelled him even in so minor a thing as breathing — but then he reminded himself that breathing, after all, was not so insignificant an accomplishment.

“What should we do?” The clone leaned against the side wall.

“Let’s rest and think,” said Ruiz, and sat down on the nearest dry spot. He laid his ruptor across his knees and closed his eyes.

“You rest,” said Junior. “I’ll think. While I’m at it, I’ll wander around a bit. Don’t worry, I won’t go so far I can’t get back.”

Junior went away down the corridor, his armored head twitching from side to side — a beast scenting its prey. Ruiz opened his mouth to protest, then closed it. Let his younger self try.

When they arrived at the bottom of the pit, Nisa was almost afraid to look, for fear that she would see Ruiz’s body lying on the platform… or in the sump.

But if he were one of the huddled forms half-sunk in the pink slime, she couldn’t tell. Corean seemed confident that Ruiz had survived. She unloaded her prisoners briskly and attached throat leads to each, linking them into a coffle. Nisa found herself staring at the thin dirty neck of Flomel; behind her was Dolmaero.

Molnekh held Flomel’s lead in one bony hand and gave the conjuror his most cheerful smile. Muscles jumped in Flomel’s shoulders; Nisa almost felt sorry for him, treacherous fool though he had been.

Corean finished conferring with her Deltan commander, a man called Kroone.

She came toward the prisoners, bouncing lightly on her feet, a look of ferocious happiness on her perfect mouth.

“Let’s go, let’s go,” she said. “We have fish to fry, slayers to skin.”

So they moved off, the coffle in the center of a formation of armored men. Nisa would have pinched her nose shut, had her hands been free. The stink at the bottom of the pit was so intense that she felt a bit dizzy. In fact she was beginning to get a strange wavery head-swimming sensation, as if the unpleasant reality about her had begun some subtle shift toward a new configuration. It reminded her a bit of the way she’d felt on the few occasions she had smoked snake oil.

She glanced back at Dolmaero. The usually stolid Guildmaster wore a faint nostalgic smile, and Nisa remembered that he had been an oil addict, back on Pharaoh.

She noticed that Corean and her escorts had all closed the faceplates of their armor.

Already the pirate Lords had brought force to bear on Gejas. The Roderigan destroyer had taken significant damage defending the Yubere lagoon, though it sank two pirate vessels in the lagoon’s entrance. The pirates could easily have disabled the destroyer had they coordinated their attacks — but they were fighting each other at the same time they were trying to fight their way into the fortress. At the moment the pirates were busy outside. Gejas’s forces had used the respite to improve the lagoon’s defenses.

Gejas began to think that he might indeed be able to hold the fortress until reinforcements arrived. And then he would be free to follow Ruiz Aw, down to the place where he would begin the slayer’s punishment.

He discounted the possibility that Ruiz Aw would actually carry out his threat and destroy the treasure; the man would have to be stupid as well as mad.

But the pirate forces gradually filled the channels outside, and then one of them put sappers to work on an angled tunnel, driving it into the far side of the stack, trying to bypass the fortress.

Gejas cursed violently and dispatched a squad of cyborgs to an upper level of the stack, with instructions to drop satchel charges on the tunnelers.

Most disquieting of all was a report from his observers topside. Two large Shard vessels hovered above the stack, apparently monitoring the battle for infringements of Shard law.

When Corean called a halt, Nisa at first was unable to drag her attention away from her feet, on which she had concentrated all of her attention in an attempt to avoid seeing the frightening changes in the others. In the last few minutes, she had seen Corean and the other armored persons lose their humanity, become dire insectile creatures, stalking along on legs that moved too quickly. The Moc, ranging ahead, had become an even more demonic shape, as dreadful as Bhas the Dry God. Flomel’s narrow back had become the back of a rodentlike creature, and Molnekh a walking corpse, dry bones covered by tatters of dried skin.

When finally she looked up, she saw, coming down the tunnel toward her, a great crowd of grotesquely disfigured humans, surrounding a trio of Gencha. The Gencha appeared to be the only solid objects in a sea of shimmering misperception — as though the drug that filled her head ceased to affect her when she looked at those ugly heaps of alienness. So she kept her eyes on the Gencha.

Corean went to the head of her group of fighters, pushing them out of her way in her eagerness. “Stop! Or I’ll set the Moc on you,” she shouted to the crowd of approaching grotesques, which did in fact stop, though they continued to mill about uneasily.

Eventually a woman came forward, a woman with ears set like feathers along the backs of her thin arms, and a tuft of red hair growing from the tip of her long nose. “What do you want here?” she called in a trembling voice.

“The cooperation you owe me, as Alonzo Yubere’s heir.” Corean took off her helmet and shook back her black hair. “Look at me; memorize my face,” she said. “In every way Yubere protected you, I will protect you. In every way that you aided Yubere, you must aid me. Yubere is dead; only I can stand between you and the universe, which hates you.”

The disfigured woman put her hands to her face; Nisa noticed that on the back of each hand was a large pink nipple. “How can we know the truth of this? Already this dayperiod, two men have come to kill and steal. And now you, with your monster and your shells.”

Corean’s nostrils flared. To Nisa’s drug-dazzled eyes, she seemed some sort of hunting beast. “Yes,” said Corean. “Those men are my enemies. Take me to them, and I will dispose of them for you.”

The woman wailed, a thin sound of confusion, and looked around at the Gencha, as if begging for direction. “No, we must know the reality of this. Too important a decision, this, to risk on the currents of chance.”

Corean shook her head impatiently. “Then listen: Send a Gench to me, that it may confirm my ownership of Yubere’s fief.”

“You would permit this?” asked the woman, eyes wide.

“Yes, yes — but hurry. Those men you describe are here to steal and destroy. Of that reality you should already be certain.”

A Gench shuffled forward on its three short legs. Corean waited for it with her head high. When the Gench opened one of its mouths and extended a sensory filament, Corean stood still, and the only emotion Nisa could see on her perfect face was impatience. The filament sank into her forehead, and the slaver didn’t twitch.

A moment later the Gench withdrew its sensor. “The situation is unclear,” it whispered. “It seems uncertain that you will be able to protect us, as Yubere did for so long. Still, you appear to be telling the truth as you see it. I will recommend that we assist you, as long as you refrain from damaging our properties and servitors.”

Corean nodded and replaced her helmet. “We’ll be careful. But Ruiz Aw won’t, so take us to him.”

The Gench’s eyespots ceased their endless circulation for a moment. “Yes. The men are currently wandering in the same parallel gallery that you have entered, where they can do little harm. But if they are at all clever, they will soon find a way to break into our Inner Spaces. I will give you a servitor to guide you.”

The woman with the ear-covered arms came reluctantly forward. “This is called Soosen,” the Gench whispered. “It will take you to your enemies.”

Corean and her group followed Soosen through the crowd of grotesques, and Nisa returned her gaze to her feet, so that she wouldn’t have to look at the terrible things these people had done to themselves.

But when they reached the turn of the tunnel, Nisa looked back, to see the three Gencha, facing each other and hooting softly but insistently. And then two of them disappeared into nothingness, along with their semi-human entourage. The remaining Gench turned toward her, though she couldn’t tell if it was watching her.

It was almost as if they had been arguing, she thought, before she returned to her walking dream.

Ruiz sat motionlessly taking slow shallow breaths, willing his metabolism to gear down. He glanced again at his armor’s readout slate — his oxygen was almost half-depleted. He manually retarded the rate of release. Surely he could do with a little less now.

He tried to think, to come up with a way to find the Gencha habitations and the Orpheus Machine. It was a maddening situation; the tunnels they had traversed bore a resemblance to the topography Somnire had described. But he had seen none of Somnire’s landmarks, nor had they come across any other dwellers. What was going on?

His breathing slowed a bit more, and his eyelids grew heavy. He found himself nodding. His neck grew too supple and his head fell forward.

He dreamed. At first it was a dream of such stark simplicity that he was almost impatient with it. He was tending his flowers on the terrace. Behind him: the facade of his home. Before him: the great rift canyon with its jagged black cliffs, the airless black sky of his empty planet.

The sun beat through the protective field, warming his back as he bent over the beds. He loosened the black soil around each precious plant, dusted the soil with a handful of mineral supplements. Time passed, and impatience gave way to a sweet regretful nostalgia — though with the unruly time-slipped logic of dreams, he couldn’t understand where that sense of loss and longing came from. When had he ever been happier than he was here, alone and safe?

He saw a clump of asters past its prime; the blossoms had gone brown and ragged. He reached out to pull off the dead flower heads, but when his hand closed around the soft flower, it hardened and twisted in his hand, like a small muscular animal.

It bit him with tiny sharp teeth and he jerked his hand away. The dead aster seemed unchanged. He looked at his hand, holding it palm up at his waist. The hand ached, as if the flower had injected some painful venom. Slowly blood collected in the cup of his hand, and he gazed down at it, unable to look away.

He saw his reflection in the shining pool of blood — the face of a terribly sad man, who cried silently, his mouth twisted with the effort of holding in the sobs.

His eyes snapped open; his heart hammered. His vision blurred, and he pressed the chin switch that sent an emergency draft of oxygen into his lungs. How could he have fallen asleep, here in this place of death and deadly illusion? Was he completely mad? Had he lost all of the edge that had helped him to survive for so long?

He looked wildly from side to side, expecting to see Corean, or her Moc, or an army of monsters standing there, fingers on triggers, ready to laugh and kill.

He was still alone. How long had he slept? He selected the channel to Nisa’s clone. “What’s been happening? Why did you allow me to sleep?”

“I would have spoken if anyone had come. But you needed the rest, didn’t you?” Her voice held a strong echo of that warmth that had captured his affection, back when he was still a slayer and she still a princess.

He was shaking. “Maybe, maybe. But it was an extremely foolish thing to do. I’ll get plenty of rest when I’m dead. Meanwhile, keep me awake.”

“If you say so,” she answered. She sounded a little hurt.

He glanced at his chronometer. He had slept for only a few minutes. But still, he had dreamed. It suddenly occurred to him how strange this was, that he had dreamed. And he found that he could remember the details of the dream. He endured another shudder. Somehow he had always thought that if he ever began to dream again, his dreams would be more endurable. What did it mean?

He shook his head violently. “Have you seen Junior? My clone?”

“No,” she whispered.

He got up, adjusting the oxygen flow to support moderate exertion. An idea had come to him along with the dream. Somnire’s map had seemed to resemble the empty maze in several places. Suppose they were moving along the course of the occupied levels, separated from their goal only by a layer of meltstone and fused alloy? That surmise might explain the sounds they had heard at various points along the path they had taken.

How to find a way into these hypothetical parallel tunnels? Ruiz wondered where Junior had gone. The clone’s sensors might make short work of the problem. Ruiz opened the short-range channel. “Junior?” he said tentatively.

There was no answer; his clone was out of range, at the least. Maybe Junior was thinking. Maybe he was dead. Maybe he had fallen asleep, too. No… he couldn’t believe that of his younger self.

Ruiz sighed and tapped at the wall with the butt of his ruptor. It made a dull clunk. He moved a few meters down the corridor and tapped again. Was there a difference in the clunk?

He shook his head ruefully. The flaw in this approach was that if these tunnels did indeed parallel the inhabited tunnels, he would be constantly announcing his position to everyone on the other side. Though perhaps they already knew where he was.

He tried another spot and this time he heard a definite clink.

“Might as well be hung for a goat,” he said to himself. He set one of his limpet mines against the wall and set it for a penetrating explosion. As he trotted off around the curve of the tunnel, he heard Nisa’s clone ask, “What’s a goat?”

The mine detonated, and an instant later Ruiz heard the shrieks of the wounded.

The world had grown very strange for Nisa by the time they reached the entrance to the enclave’s habitations — a deep narrow shaft, down which a ladder descended into red darkness. She edged forward to look, but an armored man pushed her roughly back, as if fearing that she might fling herself down the hole, dragging the rest of the prisoners with her. She laughed; what a foolish idea. She had long ago passed that point. Now her overriding emotion was curiosity. What new weirdness would her life next serve up to her?

Another disfigured person scrambled from the pit and went up to their guide. The man, who wore intricate herringbone patterns of eyebrows on his otherwise hairless chest, spoke in an excited whisper to the guide. Nisa watched, repulsed and fascinated. The patterns seemed to move over the man’s skin, as active as a swarm of hairy insects.

Corean took the guide by the arm. “Soosen,” she said. “What’s going on?”

The guide put her nippled hands to her face. “Uncomfortable events. The invaders have separated. We’ve lost contact with one of them, and the other has just broken into the Inner Spaces.”

Corean gave the woman a little shake. “How close to the Machine is he?”

“Why? He would not really hurt the Machine, surely?”

Corean jerked her close, and spoke in a low intense voice. “Never ask me questions, Gencha garbage. Why else would he be down here? Of course he would hurt the Machine. How close is he?”

Soosen opened her mouth, as if to argue, but apparently her loss of humanity had not made her stupid. “He is relatively close to the Machine. If he knows the way, he can be there in a thousand heartbeats or less.”

Corean cursed ripely. “How far are we from the Machine?”

“Much farther.”

Corean turned away, shaking her head. To Nisa’s drugged perceptions, she seemed as dangerous as a dustbear, as unpredictable, as horrifyingly strong. The slaver’s armor shimmered with hallucinatory color, imaginary light sweeping over the polished metal.

Corean called Kroone to her. The squad leader trotted to her, holding his weapon high; his movements reminded Nisa of a dog’s.

“We must travel fast now, Kroone; the coffle will slow us down and make us vulnerable. But I want to keep the Pharaohans in reserve… I’ll never underestimate Ruiz Aw again. So. I’ll leave you here with five of your men to guard the prisoners. The Moc and your two best men will go on with me. Pick them for me.”

Kroone bobbed his helmeted head and gestured two of his men forward.

“Wait until I send for you, Kroone,” said Corean. She turned to look toward Nisa, the red light shining on her armor. “I’ll see him first, it seems. But I’ll save a piece to show you, slut.”

Then she turned to the pit and nodded at Soosen the guide. The woman with the ears on her arms made a sorrowful face and started down the ladder. The Moc followed, its insectile body moving with a flickering grace.

“Good-bye,” Corean said to Nisa, and was gone.

Ruiz, pressed to the wall beside the hole he had made, readied himself and then peeked into the jagged opening. Instantly he jerked his head back, but no fire came through the hole. He risked another look.

A half-dozen bodies lay on the other side of the wall. They had been monstrously grotesque before the explosion, but now they were only dead or dying people, returned to humanity by their blood and pain.

He darted through the opening, ready to defend himself, but nothing moved, except for the slow writhing of two of his victims. A line of dark spatters led away up the tunnel, as if the least badly hurt member of the group had run away.

Scattered among the bodies were the fragments of crude megaphonelike devices. It came to Ruiz that they had been following him, listening at the thin spots in the wall.

He ran along the trail of blood, hoping that human instinct would make the survivor flee toward home.

Somnire had said that the Orpheus Machine was kept at the core of the enclave, where the tunnels were most thickly inhabited — by the Gencha and their servants.

Nisa sat with the other prisoners on a bench cut from the wall. It reminded Nisa uncomfortably of the niches in the catacombs beneath her father’s palace, where royal corpses were laid to rest. She shifted from one uncomfortable vision to another — each seen from the corner of her eye, tenuous and incomplete. She saw the faces of lost friends, the suffering victims of Expiations she had attended with her father, the gruesome illustrations in a book of dark fairy tales she had owned as a child. Once Flomel turned to her and she saw the mask he had worn for her Expiation — the dreadful countenance of Bhas. She jerked back; at the same moment he shrank away from her. She wondered what awful thing he had seen in her face.

She glanced at Dolmaero, whose broad face glistened with sweat, but who seemed remarkably unafraid. His features seemed somehow less distorted. He patted her hand and spoke in a voice of comfort. “This is only a new way of riding the snake, Noble Person. The visions can’t hurt you. Give heed to their lessons. Try to learn from them — if nothing else, the attempt is calming.”

“Thank you,” she whispered. She looked at Molnekh, who retained his grinning-skull face. She squinted and thumped the side of her head with the heel of her hand. Just for an instant she saw his real features beneath the illusory bone. He seemed unmoved by the visions.

“Are you not at all frightened, Molnekh?” she asked.

His smile widened to show his long yellow teeth. “You forget. I’ve been here before.”

Oh, yes, she thought. So you have. His reply reminded her of what in all likelihood awaited her. She wondered if it hurt to have one’s soul removed.

She heard a low hiss — and somehow the sound conveyed some quality of mortality. One of Kroone’s men staggered and fell.

The others dropped behind the various bits of cover Kroone had posted them by, but not before another hiss sounded and another man had gone down.

The cavern grew still. After a minute Kroone spoke in a strained voice. “Who’s there? What do you want? We’re here on the authority of Corean Heiclaro, proprietor of this place — and also with the permission of the Gencha.”

No one replied.

“Don’t trifle with us,” Kroone shouted in a voice that cracked with fear.

One of his men crawled over to one of the fallen men. “Dead, Kroone,” he reported in a low voice. “Pinbeamed through the bellows of his neck joint. Fancy shooting.”

“I know the Deltan armor,” someone said, though the source of the voice seemed oddly general, as though it issued from several speakers scattered around the perimeter of the cavern. “SeedCorp is so cheap. Besides, I have an acquaintance who occasionally wears the stuff.”

Nisa felt hope begin to warm her heart. She recognized that voice. Ruiz Aw had apparently arrived to rescue her, with the same miraculous timing he had always displayed in the past. Nightmares still chased each other through the edges of her vision, but she felt a great deal better, suddenly.

“What do you want?” Kroone shouted again.

Ruiz allowed the silence to stretch out a bit. “I’ve a deal for you. I can kill all of you — but I’d rather get some use out of you.”

“Really?” Kroone’s voice had gone skeptical. “Who are you that you think you can best four of Castle Delt’s finest, now that we’re ready for you?”

“My name is Ruiz Aw. Have you heard the name?” Ruiz spoke gently, his voice falling low.

Nisa could almost feel the shock that the name produced. “Ruiz Aw? Yes, the name is familiar. You’re the one the Lady Corean hunts. The slayer who has thwarted her for so long. A dangerous man, she calls you.”

“Such is the rumor,” said Ruiz Aw, very softly. “Tell me, how did you hope to survive this expedition?”

“Why shouldn’t we survive?”

Ruiz laughed, a low pitying sound. “I take it Corean hasn’t informed you of the situation topside? No? The fortress is in the hands of Roderigan cyborgs. But that’s not the worst of it. All the pirates in SeaStack are gathering outside the fortress, and when they’ve finished killing each other and fought their way through the Roderigan maniples, they’ll be coming down the shaft. Down here.”

“Why should I believe you?” said Kroone, but his voice shook.

“Can your armor’s transceivers access the SeaStack general datastream? Tune in. See what they’re saying.” Ruiz spoke in a voice of calm patient reason.

A minute passed. Then Kroone spoke in a weak frightened voice. “We’re as good as dead.”

“Not so!” Ruiz now sounded quite cheerful. “Not so at all. If we can come to an agreement, I’ll take you to a secret egress from the stack, where a sub awaits to take us away from this unpleasant place. But time escapes us on swift feet, and you must decide. How intense are your loyalties to the slaver?”

Another short silence ensued. Finally Kroone spoke. “They do not extend past the line between life and death.”

“A reasonable attitude! Let me make you aware of one more fact. In my helmet is a charge of explosive; wired to the charge is a neural deadman switch. Betray me and we all die, because you will not find the egress without me.”

“Understood,” said Kroone heavily. “But why do you need us? If you can kill us and get away, why not just do so?”

“Several good reasons,” said Ruiz Aw. “One, I value these prisoners and would not wish them to be injured in the skirmish. Two, a crowd of monsters has recently assembled to cut me off from the pit; we must fight our way through them. Three, maybe I couldn’t kill all of you. Who knows? Castle Delt manufactures efficient killers.”

“At least you acknowledge this truth,” said Kroone. “All right. We’ll agree to your bargain. Come out; we’ll arrange the details.”

An armored man stepped cautiously from behind a curtain wall at the back of the cavern. To Nisa’s drugged eyes, Ruiz Aw seemed no different from any of the other armored men who rose from their hiding places. No different at all — and this perception darkened, just a little, the hope that had taken root in her heart.

Abruptly Molnekh stood up. He stared hotly at Ruiz Aw, then at Kroone, who were slowly approaching each other in the center of the cavern.

In the next instant, the conjuror was running for the ladder shaft, his long legs moving much faster than Nisa would have thought possible. Ruiz Aw seemed oddly slow to react, as if he didn’t remember that Molnekh was a traitor.

Nisa didn’t have time to think it through. “Molnekh is Genched,” she shouted. “He’s going to warn Corean.”

Ruiz raised his weapon, and a line of green sparkling light struck through Molnekh’s narrow back. He tumbled along the ground, tried to crawl to the edge of the shaft, but his strength failed him and he died scrabbling toward his goal.

“I’d forgotten,” Kroone said in a shaken voice.

“Once again I thank you, Noble Lady,” said Ruiz. But his voice was oddly detached… and had a sadly formal undertone. “Treachery is no business for the bemused.” He turned from Molnekh’s corpse and began to confer in low tones with Kroone, and Nisa felt a great puzzlement. What was wrong with Ruiz Aw? What was he talking about?

She soon forgot to wonder, as the illusions clouded her mind again.

Before they left, Ruiz made Kroone unleash them from the coffle.

He even freed Flomel, to Nisa’s astonishment — almost as if he had forgotten all the dreadful things Flomel had done.

Flomel rubbed his neck and looked innocently grateful, and oddly enough, Nisa believed that he was showing his true face.

“Then anyone can change,” she said to herself.