The Orpheus Machine

Chapter 7

Gejas shivered in the chill of The Yellowleaf’s displeasure.

“At once, at once,” he said, the words forced from his mouth by the pressure of his fear. He switched off the neurostim and watched the man on the platform slowly subside into a boneless heap.

“You’re right, of course,” he said. “But the specimen is essentially undamaged, despite appearances, Master.”

The Yellowleaf touched her dataslate, called up the specimen’s indices. Each string of numbers glowed red at the last entry. A flashing warning bar read: PERSONALITY TERMINATION IMMINENT.

“I’m sorry, Master,” Gejas said faintly. “I underestimated his attachment to the primitive woman. Who could have known? He’s such a secretive creature; he hides from himself almost as well as he hides from us.”

He watched her face; it remained cold and distant. He felt a bubble of desperation form in his chest. “But I can repair the situation, I’m sure,” he said. “I’ll place him back in the group he arrived in, intact. A sort of family, to heal his hurts and allow him to regain hope. Perhaps his bonds to the others of his group are stronger than we had assumed; perhaps we can use his loyalties to control him.

“I know; this is less satisfactory. If only we had more time…. We’d have no trouble breaking him to the leash, I’m certain. But time grows short. SeaStack burns. The pirates decimate each other, each day more passionately. We must learn what we can, Master.”

She finally turned her head and looked at him with a terrifying degree of appraisal.

“Oh, it will surely work, Master,” he babbled, believing it with all his might.

Nisa stood against the wall, arms wrapped around her chest as if she were cold, though the air still held the moist animal heat of the stockyard. In fact, she had grown used to the warmth, and now in the rough coveralls provided by the guards, she was too warm.

The others, except for Einduix the cook, stood looking about the three rooms they had been brought to. Their faces revealed varying degrees of relief and apprehension. The guards had deposited Einduix on one of the cots in the second room, where he still lay in his deathlike sleep.

Gunderd touched her shoulder, and she jumped.

He held up his hands in a disarming gesture. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you. What can you tell me about the change in our accommodations?”

She shrugged. “How would I know anything?”

“Well, the guards come for you, take you away, and a few hours later we’re escorted from the stockyard and installed in what for Roderigo must be termed palatial quarters. What happened to you? Perhaps it has a bearing on our new circumstances.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

He frowned. “Listen, Nisa-the-princess. We have very little chance of survival, and even if we do survive… on Roderigo our lives will torment us until we die.” He looked about the rooms, as if searching for something. “Our hosts listen, but I speak an obvious truth, so they will probably not punish me for stating it. At any rate… you must overcome your petulance and risk your dignity, if you have any hopes involving the future. Our only tools are what knowledge we can share. Tell me what you can, please.”

She wanted to reply that she had discarded hope, but in his thin rough face she saw a great terror, held barely in check. She felt a pang of unwilling admiration for him, that in his more certain knowledge of their plight, he could still keep his wits.

“All right,” she said. “The guards took me to a small room and strapped me to a wheeled table. They sent me along a track, through a hole and into a dark place. After a while I saw a dim red light and a naked man dancing on a platform in the middle of the darkness… though I could hear no music. I was drugged, I’m sure — nothing seemed to matter very much and I felt little fear. Then my table stopped by the platform and I saw the man more clearly. I thought it was Ruiz Aw, though I couldn’t be sure. He was covered with black blood. He held a knife high. He took me by the throat, and I thought he would kill me then. I called to him and he stopped…. “She shook herself. “But I don’t believe it was Ruiz, now. The man’s face was very strange. Then he fell down; perhaps he was dying. My table took me away after a while, and the guards brought me here.”

Gunderd looked no less puzzled when she had finished. “I wonder what it means?” he said, his eyes unfocused. “I wonder—”

The doors opened with a clang, and two guards carried Ruiz in, unconscious. Old blood crusted on his body. He stank of the abattoir. She looked into his face and saw a frightening absence there, worse than just a common senselessness.

It disturbed Nisa more than the mania she had seen in the slaughterhouse.

They dumped him on a cot next to Einduix and went away.

The others looked at Nisa, as if asking her what they should do. She went in the other sleeping room and lay down. Let them deal with whatever Ruiz had become.

Up through a terrible dark dream, Ruiz Aw swam toward the light.

He dreamed he was a great monster, knee deep in the sea, his head above the last icy wisps of atmosphere, thrusting out into the cold brilliance of space. He looked down at the misty surface of the world, so far below, and laughed a wild laugh.

The texture of the dream was a mad hopelessness, compounded by a ferocious amusement — though he couldn’t say what he found so amusing.

He laughed again, a belly-bursting laugh that seemed to go on too long, until he felt the world wavering, until it seemed he had lost a lifetime’s breath. He looked down at himself and noticed the shuddering of his flesh, like the slow-motion chaos of an earthquake — and then he saw his skin begin to tear open under the wrenching of his laughter.

He expected to see the ordinary things to be found inside a body: flesh, bone, blood. But there was nothing inside him but a darkness more absolute than starless space. He stopped laughing, but it was too late. The ruptures spread, and he felt his body begin to collapse, to fall back toward the world, dissolving into shrieking tatters.

He woke flailing and gasping for air.

Dolmaero and Molnekh held him down for a moment, before releasing him and jumping back. “Be calm,” said Dolmaero. “We weren’t attacking you, Ruiz Aw.”

Ruiz realized that he had been striking at them; a welt bloomed on Molnekh’s cheek and Dolmaero had suffered a split lip.

For once, he could recall a few fragments of his dream, though already he felt the details slipping away. What did it mean, that he dreamed and remembered? Were the doors of his mind finally crumbling?

“Sorry,” he muttered.

He was sitting in a hygiene cubicle, where apparently the two Pharaohans had been trying to wash him clean. Rusty water had splashed high on the cubicle’s plastic walls, but he was still stained with the product of his labor.

He held up a trembling hand and examined the matter that caked under his fingernails.

Memory clubbed him, and he bent over, retching.

“Can we help you, Ruiz Aw?” asked Dolmaero uncertainly.

“No,” he gasped, “no. Leave me. Please!”

The two of them went out, closing the cubicle’s door behind them.

How many had he murdered? He hadn’t even kept a count. A hundred? A thousand? How many lives had he ended this time, just to save his worthless self some pain?

And Nisa? An involuntary sob forced its way past his clenched teeth. Had he killed her in a mindless involuntary spasm, or had he left her to Gejas? Surely she must be dead.

Why wasn’t Ruiz dead, too? He surely deserved to be, and the Roderigans weren’t known for capricious mercy.

He took a deep breath and leaned back against the plastic wall. He was still alive, which meant that he had a chance, however small, to make the Roderigans pay for what they had done. Comforting visions rose up in his mind’s eye: Gejas crucified on a neurostim cross, body spasming frenetically. The Yellowleaf throttled with her own slimy guts. Roderigo itself blooming into fiery beautiful destruction, its bunkers and tunnels cleansed of the horror that now inhabited it.

He tried to smile, to take some comfort from those lovely images, but he felt a curious distance from them, as if they were too far removed from any possible reality to satisfy him.

Finally he stood up and turned on the cubicle’s shower. The hot water pounded him, and he stood there, scrubbing until his skin was almost raw, until he was as clean as he would ever be.

Warm air swirled around him, and he closed his eyes, waiting without thought until he was dry.

When he emerged from the cubicle, Gunderd handed him a pair of gray coveralls. As he put them on, he looked about the room. Everyone was there but Nisa. He struggled to control his urge to cry out, to smash something. What had he expected?

“She’s in the other room,” said Gunderd.

He took two long strides and reached the door. She lay on a cot, her back to him, and he could see that she breathed.

That was enough, for the moment. He backed slowly away. If she could find refuge in sleep, he wouldn’t disturb her.

“You’re pleased,” said Gunderd. “Are you sure you should be?”

Ruiz turned to the former second mate. “What does that mean?”

Gunderd glanced uncertainly at the other Pharaohans. “Remember your suspicions?”

Ruiz couldn’t bring himself to care. His former worries seemed remote and unimportant compared to what had just happened to him on Roderigo. So what if one of them had been to the Gencha? If one of his companions had become Corean’s creature? He couldn’t imagine how such a small thing could affect him now.

“What is he talking about?” asked Dolmaero.

Ruiz sat down on the nearest cot. He didn’t want to answer, but he found the thought of continuing to deceive Dolmaero repellent, even if Dolmaero were the one who belonged to Corean. Deception was part of his old life — along with the violence, the death.

That life was gone, for better or worse. It came to him that his dreams of vengeance were just that: dreams. In his present state of mind, he would be incapable of bringing destruction to Roderigo, should an opportunity miraculously present itself. He sighed. He didn’t even care that the Roderigans were surely listening.

“Publius told me something,” Ruiz said.

Gunderd raised his eyebrows in a quizzical expression, as if he questioned the wisdom of revealing this, but he said nothing.

“What?” demanded Dolmaero.

“He told me that Corean sent one of you to the Gencha minddivers. Which one… he didn’t know, or wouldn’t say.”

A silence followed. Dolmaero seemed to sink into thought, and his broad face closed in on itself.

Finally he spoke again. “Do you believe this?”

“I didn’t,” said Ruiz. “Until someone killed the folk in the lifeboat.”

Dolmaero rubbed his face, an uncharacteristic gesture, and Ruiz saw sweat glisten on his jowls. “You spoke of this once. Long ago, it seems now.”

“Yes.”

“The Gencha take a man’s self, you said. They steal his soul and leave nothing but the urge to please his master.”

“Yes.”

Dolmaero shuddered. “Tell me. Would a man know if he had lost his soul?”

Ruiz shrugged and did not answer.

“Not necessarily,” said Gunderd in a pedantic tone. “Only if his master commanded him to recognize the fact. If his master told him to conceal it, no one could tell, not even the Roderigans… perhaps not even another Gencha practitioner.”

Dolmaero went to his cot and sat heavily. He stared at the floor, apparently empty of questions, for once.

Even Molnekh seemed sobered. He said nothing. After a while he went to the food hopper and got a handful of pellets, which he ate without his customary relish.

“I wonder what our hosts think of your revelations,” said Gunderd, glancing about the room.

Gejas watched the specimens. He touched his slate and linked to The Yellowleaf’s data retrieval locus. “Master,” he said. “We’ve confirmed the connection.”

He watched her beautiful, terrible face. “Yes, as you suspected, Corean is involved. Your plan is vindicated, Master. It only remains to set it in motion.”

She looked at him with eyes full of dreadful promises, and he was very afraid. “Oh yes, Master,” he said. “Ruiz Aw will play his part, however it goes at the virtual. If he returns with the data we need, well and good. If not, we’ll use him to hook the slaver.”

Gejas walked in, his gait as springy as ever, his face full of alien cheer. “Everyone up!” he called. “Time to go on a journey.”

Ruiz got carefully to his feet, still sore from the neurostim, from the straining of his muscles in their attempt to escape the pain. Hatred flooded into him, but it was an odd hatred. He couldn’t imagine any way to ease the emotion, to satisfy his need for retribution. His earlier fantasies now seemed pale and colorless in the light of the tongue’s actual presence.

Crucifixion seemed far too gentle a punishment, for Gejas.

He could barely see the tongue’s grinning face. Other faces — pleading, hopeless, numb — seemed to float in his vision.

“Come, come,” said Gejas. “No time to waste. Let’s go, all!”

Ruiz felt a shudder of rage pass through him. He tried to speak, but his throat seemed full of some burning substance, and he made a foolish croak. Gejas turned to him, crooking his eyebrow up in an inquisitive gesture. “What?”

Ruiz cleared his throat, tried again. “Where do we go?”

Gejas frowned. “Why haven’t you learned the unwisdom of questions? And where is the respect you should show me?”

“Fuck you, Master,” said Ruiz carefully. “If you didn’t need me very badly, I’d be dead. So you must be content with what respect you deserve. Answer my questions, or do without my cooperation.”

Gejas’s face twisted into a predatory mask, but only for an instant. “Ah. Well, yes, we need you. So! We go to Dorn to consult the virtual.”

“All of us?”

“If you wish. The Yellowleaf is merciful, and permits you to enjoy the comfort and company of your friends while you prepare for your mission.” Gejas looked at Einduix, comatose on his cot. “Though why burden yourself with the little turnip? We’ll send him to the composter. No profit in slaughtering such an odd specimen… the cannibals are surprisingly conservative in their tastes.”

“No,” said Ruiz. The cook was nothing to him, though he had enjoyed the little man’s music. But he wanted to frustrate Gejas in every possible way. “We’ll take him. And what payment will you offer me for this job?”

“We’ve already discussed this,” said Gejas in a soft deadly voice. “Your life. That’s all you may expect to gain.”

Ruiz laughed, a sour hollow sound. “Insignificant — you’ve made me worthless to myself. You must offer something I value more.”

Gejas snapped his fingers at the guards. “Bring out the woman.”

They brought her forth, twisting and struggling, her face full of fear.

The rage and hatred in Ruiz Aw congealed into something much colder and stronger, an emotion he could put no name to. A great distance opened between himself and his feelings; the situation took on an unreal, abstract quality. Without effort, he adopted an expression of sneering condescension.

Gejas gave him a curious glance, as if the tongue’s expertise in reading faces had suddenly deserted him. He frowned and looked at Nisa. “This is the woman you would have died for. I believe I can buy your cooperation with her pain, if necessary.”

Ruiz laughed, a metallic sound.

Nisa looked up at him, and he was strangely pleased to see that she regarded him almost without recognition. “Then you are wrong. What are these creatures to me? Phantasms, no more. Their lives are nothing notable, a blink of tedium between unbeing and the grave. At best they’re symbols of my power over you. I insist on their preservation… but only because I take my only remaining delight in annoying you and your hag.”

Gejas’s face darkened, and Ruiz smiled a smile that hurt his face. He turned to Nisa and struck her across the mouth, so that she sagged and a trickle of blood ran down her chin. Her eyes grew enormous and bewildered.

He felt a sickness that never reached his face. It wasn’t just Nisa’s confusion and hurt — it was the blood. But he thrust the sickness away. “See?” he shouted, his voice trembling on the edge of a happy mania. “Mine to hurt. Not yours.”

He whirled and seized Gejas by the silky material of his shirt. “Do you see?” he screamed into the astonished tongue’s face. “Fuck with me and I’ll sit down and die right here. Do you doubt I can do it?”

Gejas picked ineffectually at Ruiz’s hands. “Be calm, Ruiz. No, I don’t doubt you. We peeled you well enough to see that you have all the skills a famous slayer requires.”

Ruiz pushed his face into Gejas’s until their eyes were no more than a few centimeters apart. In the Roderigan’s gaze Ruiz saw ferocity and uncertainty, contempt and fright. Good enough, for now, he thought, bending down. He jerked Gejas close and lunged.

Cartilage crunched, as his head flattened the tongue’s nose.

He stepped back with a high-spirited giggle and folded his arms. Gejas stumbled back; his eyes went wide and then ignited. He snapped his arm straight and a sonic knife dropped into his fist. With flickering speed, he drove it toward Ruiz’s throat.

Ruiz waited for the blade, still as stone.

A low bone-trembling tone sounded, and Gejas dropped as if dead, the blade grazing down the front of Ruiz’s chest. Ruiz felt a cold stinging pain and looked down to see if his innards were still in his belly. The knife had barely broken the skin.

“Ooh,” said Ruiz. “Synaptic decoupler. The Yellowleaf seems to be keeping an eye on you, shithead — and a finger on your button. Nice for me.”

The two guards finally reacted. They started into movement that seemed painfully slow, pulling out neural whips and starting toward Ruiz.

“No,” croaked Gejas from his sprawl on the floor. “The Yellowleaf permits this activity.” He started to rise, as carefully as if he were made of glass.

Ruiz skipped forward and kicked Gejas in the ribs, so that he rolled across the room and thumped into the far wall.

“What fun,” Ruiz said brightly. He took a small detached pleasure in the tongue’s humiliation, but again the blood sickened him, even though it was his enemy’s blood. What was wrong with him?

“Stuns only,” said Gejas, wheezing and clutching his ribs.

The guards pointed their stun rods at Ruiz.

He faded away to a single point of triumphant futility. And then to nothing.

They waited on the streaming deck of a Roderigan submarine, looking through a misty darkness at the deeper smudge of land. Gunderd stood by Ruiz; the others gathered in an anxious clump a few steps away. The only illumination came from the glow of green ready-lights on the weapons of the Roderigan guards.

“Dorn,” said Gunderd. On the whole, the former sailor seemed more cheerful than he had since the sinking of the Loracca. Perhaps, Ruiz thought, Gunderd was just happy to be away from Roderigo’s dungeons.

“The devil you know is only preferable when you can tolerate it,” Ruiz muttered.

“Eh?” asked Gunderd.

“Nothing,” said Ruiz. “So, you’re a scholar. What do you know of Dorn?”

“Very little,” said Gunderd. “Ghost stories, mostly. I’ll tell a few when we’re sitting round the campfire. Do you suppose they’ll allow us a campfire?” He pulled his coveralls tight and shivered. “It’s cold.”

“We’ll have a campfire, then,” Ruiz promised.

Gunderd gave him a speculative glance. “I confess to astonishment. How did you come to have such influence with the hetmen? I mean, we’re alive, most of us. More or less.” He glanced at Einduix, strapped to a floater on the deck.

Ruiz shrugged. “They need me, for some reason. They want information from the virtual, and none of their own can get it. For some reason they think I can.”

“Ah,” said Gunderd, but he looked no less confused.

Gejas climbed over the rail. The tongue wore a black shipsuit and a helmet haloed with sensors. “Come,” he said. “The lander is ready.” He pointed at Ruiz. “You first.”

Ruiz laughed. “Me last.”

Gejas tensed and moved toward Ruiz, baring his teeth. A neural whip appeared in his hand.

Ruiz stepped back, seeking better footing on the water-slick deck, but he bumped into one of the dozen mirror-suited guards that waited with them. The guard shoved him with the butt of his graser. Ruiz kept his balance and turned to the guard, planning some satisfyingly destructive act.

A hatch in the conning tower hissed open, and The Yellowleaf stepped forth, clad in light armor of some dead-black composite. An impressive collection of weapons hung from harness points on her torso. She carried her helmet under one arm.

Gejas stopped and looked at his master. Ruiz could see nothing at all in her stony eyes, but apparently Gejas read some dire message there. He dropped his head and said in a voice shaking with fear, “The Yellowleaf states: You may go last, if you wish. The Yellowleaf states: We must board the lander quickly. Persons unfriendly to Roderigo patrol Dorn’s waters. They will attempt to prevent us from landing if they find us.”

Ruiz faced the hetman. “We have not yet negotiated my fee for this job.”

“The Yellowleaf states: We will do so before you enter the virtual.”

Ruiz hesitated. “All right,” he said finally. “Why not?”

He couldn’t avoid an uncomfortable thought: that in agreeing with the hetman in the slightest degree, he was taking another step along the path to oblivion. He still hoped to survive long enough to give Nisa a chance at life — however unreasonable that hope might be.

He glanced at her as the guards took them to the boarding ladder. She looked back at him with a smooth passionless expression, as though his were a passing face in a crowd of strangers. He was suddenly reminded of the look she had given him in Bidderum, on her way to her Expiation… and to her first death.

They landed on a beach of gray cobblestones just as a dim pearly light began to lighten the mist. The half-dozen guards went ashore first, their mirrorsuits detuned a little, so that they looked like wisps of fog. When they were deployed into a perimeter a hundred meters from the lander, The Yellowleaf stepped onto the beach.

She stood without movement for a long minute, then motioned.

“Out,” Gejas whispered urgently.

Ruiz sensed a genuine apprehension in the tongue, and so he decided to save his next defiant gesture for later. He nodded and went down the ramp behind the others. He took a remote pleasure in discovering that the Roderigans had enemies dangerous enough to make such precautions necessary.

With the thought came a lift of irrational optimism… but he put it away. “Not yet,” he muttered.

“What?” The tongue stood at his shoulder, peering into the mist, a small ruptor strapped to his left forearm.

“What are you so afraid of?” asked Ruiz.

“Probably nothing,” said Gejas, his eyes darting from side to side. “Anyway, nothing for you to worry about.”

Ruiz shrugged and stepped aside as the first of the landwalkers bumped down the ramp, carrying racks of gear on its low steel back. The next one carried Einduix’s litter, strapped to its underside.

Gunderd stood beside him. “He fears Castle Delt. Delt and Roderigo were the principals in Dorn’s destruction. Both claim the island, and both fear the other will discover how to exploit the virtual.”

“I see,” said Ruiz.

They followed the four landwalkers in a single file, flanked by the unseen guards. Ahead of the landwalkers, Gejas picked a path through tumbled stones and thorny scrub. The mist still lay heavily on the island, but the sun was soon bright enough to make the going fairly easy, though the waist-high scrub eventually soaked Ruiz and the others.

They climbed into an area where the stones were larger and showed the marks of tools — though the stones had long ago weathered into anonymity. Here and there, holes yawned; apparently the ruins had deep roots. Ruiz couldn’t tell a pillar from a paving stone, but the place had a melancholy sense of antiquity, as if sad ghosts watched from beneath every dark heap.

The land rose slowly and the mist grew thinner, until it floated in tattered streamers across the ruins, and Ruiz could see the sea, shining below them. The island’s central massif became visible: once-jagged peaks of black basalt, now worn into gentler contours. Everywhere were the remains of ancient structures, reduced to dimly seen patterns amid the stony wastes.

Ruiz walked almost blindly, trying to think nothing, feel nothing. To a large extent he succeeded. The others said nothing to distract him, although Dolmaero seemed to be having some difficulty maintaining the pace; he breathed in a loud rasp that gradually took on a desperate tone.

Once Ruiz looked up to see Nisa watching him. She looked away instantly, as if her gaze had fallen upon him by accident.

After three hours of steady hiking, they descended into a hollow and Gejas signaled a stop. The landwalkers formed a defensive square. Several of the guards reappeared.

“We wait here for a while,” said Gejas.

Dolmaero sat heavily on a flat rock, gasping for air, his face pale and blotchy. Ruiz seemed to wake suddenly; he saw that Dolmaero was in real difficulty. He knelt beside the Guildmaster and loosened the collar of Dolmaero’s overalls.

Gejas watched incuriously.

Ruiz remembered that several hours had passed since he had last baited the tongue. “Give me a medical limpet,” he said.

Gejas shook his head. “Medical supplies are reserved for essential personnel.”

Ruiz smiled, somehow delighted. “Oh? Give me the limpet. Or do your own dirty work.”

Gejas looked at his master. She nodded, a barely perceptible movement, and Gejas hung his head. Ruiz saw that Gejas had changed profoundly over the last few hours; he no longer seemed the perfectly-at-ease monster. In some way Ruiz had disrupted Gejas’s world. It seemed an insignificant revenge, compared to what Gejas had done to him, but the thought gave Ruiz a brief chilly pleasure.

The tongue consulted the miniature dataslate he wore at his wrist. “The limpet is in the second starboard pannier on the red-legged landwalker.” He turned away and started supervising the guards, who were erecting a canopy of chameleon gauze over the campsite.

Ruiz considered forcing the tongue to fetch the limpet. But then he realized that a tiny traitorous sliver of hope had embedded itself in his heart. He didn’t want to risk driving the man to a violence The Yellowleaf might not be quick enough to stop. He looked at Dolmaero; the Guild-master seemed no worse, but perhaps he should get the limpet without delay.

So he went to the landwalker and dug out the limpet. It was of Dilvermoon manufacture, a model with which he was familiar. He quickly activated it and slapped it on Dolmaero’s chest.

The indicators trembled to life, showing an orange-red on several of the scales. Dolmaero looked down, pop-eyed, as the limpet sent several hair-thin sensor wires into his skin.

“What…?” he gasped. Then the limpet took control of his laboring heart and dulled the pain. He looked more frightened than relieved.

Ruiz watched the indicators fade toward amber, then chartreuse. “You’ll be all right,” he told Dolmaero. “Your heart is strong. Rest for a bit. Don’t touch the limpet.” Dolmaero nodded, eyes still too large.

Ruiz rose and went over to Gejas. “Why are we stopping here?” he asked.

Gejas didn’t look at him. “The virtual won’t open until local midnight,” the tongue said, in a thin colorless voice.