Brass Man

13

They led him out of darkness, but it was no transition. Arian Pelter could look through his eyes, control his movements directly, or indirectly by programs instantly fashioned in the man’s military aug. But the cycle of travelling from place to place, slaughter to slaughter, would have been banal if it were not so horrific. In fractured memory, Crane remembered men in uniform dying, men rendered limb from limb, and one surviving just because he possessed a pair of antique binoculars. Later, another survived because he possessed a beautiful Tenkian blade. There was a rainy place, and a Golem he had fought and destroyed there. Another place, a battle, and two Golem tougher even than he, ripping him to pieces, and sending him where nothing hurt any more. And back, and again… and one of those Golem again, traded for a piece of crystal. And on still, but with shape-forming, ill-understood possibilities, if only he could take the time…

On spotting the two creatures waiting in the canyon, Mr Crane halted and watched. He was not to know how unusual it was to see intact second-stage sleers together, only the trysts of their mating segments, for such animals were usually savagely territorial. Nor did he know that the albino form was rarer than his own tears, and ones with sapphire compound eyes rarer still. All he did know was that he had been ordered to a particular location, and that while under orders he could not stop to place in sequence—and resequence—his collection of ersatz deaths.

He also guessed that these creatures were probably going to attack him whatever he did, and so, without any more ado, Crane once again advanced.

One of the second-stagers abruptly turned aside, scampered smoothly over the new ground cover, mounted a sandstone boulder, and froze there. The other one, grating its mandibular saws together in a spray of lubricant, came scuttling towards Crane. The Golem recognized it as an only slightly larger version of the one he had stepped on outside Skellor’s ship, so expected no serious problems. As it got closer, he stooped down, and in doing so spotted an intricate fossil right in front of him. As the sleer closed in for attack Crane just shoved his hand under its head and flipped it over on its back—and then he picked up the fossil. The sleer—the independently revolving sections of its body easily getting it to its feet—attacked again. Crane prepared himself to stamp on it, but some other imperative operated. He grabbed it by its carapace saws, and hauled it up squirming in front of him, then, one by one, began to pull off all its legs. Leaving it behind him, still alive, he pocketed the fossil—while the other sleer came down off its rock and quickly and prudently headed away.

The Golem Twenty-five possessed no name yet, and though his nascent intelligence was huge and the uploaded information available to him encyclopedic, he just could not make choices. This was annoying. Perhaps it was the perpetual interference of his diagnostic and repair programs, tracking down every fault caused by the EM shock that had felled him; or perhaps it was the perpetual busy handshaking and reformatting of his software. When he groped for consciousness, the wholeness of mind began to degrade. When he opened his eyes his vision doubled, as two temporary subminds separately controlled each of his eyes half a second out of phase. It took the intervention of the submind claiming the territory of his atomic clock to get things in order.

‘Stalek, it moved.’

‘Of course it moved, vacuum brain. It’s waking up.’

Briefly, the Golem achieved wholeness through his diagnostic programs, and with great precision viewed his surroundings. He was in a box of a room with bare brick walls, three metres high by seven wide to his left and right, and eight point three metres wide in front and presumably behind. The door directly ahead was close-grained wood—probably from one of the thousands of varieties of oaks prevalent on many worlds (a list scrolled down in what might once have been the Golem’s superego). Trying to stand, the Golem met resistance and, looking down, noted thick ceramal clamps binding his arms and legs to a chair of a similar material. He raised his head and focused his attention on the two men.

He knew which was which because he had located the source of each voice while his diagnostic and repair programs acted as mediators amid the bickering crowd inside his head. The first to have spoken was an aviapt: an adaptation the Golem understood, from his reference library, to be quite uncommon. The man’s eyes were those of a hawk, his face beaked, and small feathers layered his skin. Adaptation technology not being sufficiently advanced to enable a man to fly in Earthlike gravity, he did not have wings. This bird man was operating a Cleanviro auto-assembler and machiner in an area divided off by benches laden with equipment. From what the Golem could see of the touch console and screen inset in this bathysphere-like machine, the man was powder-compressing and case-hardening ceramal components.

Stalek was of a more standard appearance: a melting-pot human with just a hint more of the oriental than was usual. Unlike the bird man, who was clad in a padded shipsuit, he wore a wide-brimmed hat, long coat and fingerless gloves. Only on noting this attire did the Golem think to check the temperature in the room, and found that it would be cold for humans.

‘Am restrained,’ the Golem said, then coughed three times and closed its right eye.

‘It spoke,’ said the aviapt.

Stalek looked at the bird man as if studying a particularly fascinating variety of stupidity, then with a puzzled frown turned to the console and screen on the table before him. The small rubber dog attached to the upper edge of the screen seemed the only one in this room who had attention to spare for the Golem. Embarrassed, the bird man focused again on Cleanviro.

‘Repeat: why am… restrained?’

After a short delay, Stalek lifted his gloved hands up from the console and gazed across at the Golem. ‘You are restrained, Mr Longshanks, because if unrestrained you would attempt to return to your masters at Cybercorp. And we don’t really want you going back there.’

The Golem abandoned the conversation to a recalled Turing analogue, its own weird conception of self wandering around in the confusion of its skull.

‘I must return. I have my indenture to Cybercorp to work out before I can become a free Golem and choose where to be and what to do.’

‘Listen, machine, I’m not going to get into any pointless debate. We are going to make a few alterations to you, then your new owners will come and collect you.’

‘I am the property of Cybercorp and will not work for anyone else.’

Stalek grinned nastily. ‘You will when I’ve finished with you. You will actually commit murder for your new owners.’

‘I am incapable of taking human life.’

Inside his head, the Golem’s self-perception leaped from submind to submind at a frequency not dissimilar to a giggle. The untruth was just the sort of comforting balm it should feed to humans at every opportunity. The truth was some memory of morality which had no power over him.

Stalek pushed his chair back and stood up. As the man walked around the table, the Golem self divided into the subminds controlling its eyes. It noted that the man wore thick leather lace-up boots—very anachronistic footwear.

‘No,’ Stalek said, ‘you are capable of doing whatever you like, yet your mind is structured in such a way that you choose not to commit murder, but choose to abide by ECS rules. In fact you choose to be a good little citizen. This programming, though tough to break, is breakable. Ever heard of Serban Kline?’

The Golem searched his uploaded memory, and fragments of self, and came up with nothing. He shook his head.

‘Not surprising,’ said Stalek. ‘You probably get the nicely historical ones like Jack the Ripper, but not the more modern ones. The fact is that they could completely fill up your memory space with information, but they prefer you to find out some things for yourself — helps you develop your own personality. Well, in total, Serban Kline killed a hundred and eight women. He was clever and it took ECS years to track him down. They found him with his hundred and ninth victim, who he’d had for two weeks. They managed to give her back her face and body, but they never managed to restore her mind. In one of her more coherent moments she later chose euthanasia.’

‘Do not understand the relevance of serial killer,’ said the Golem.

‘Kline went for mind-wipe, and that is what happened to him, but not before a very naughty individual at ECS had made a memcording of Kline’s mind.’

‘For forensic psychiatric study,’ said the Golem.

‘No, for black VR entertainment. Amazing how much some people will pay to be a monster for a little while. Trouble is that they discovered Serban’s recording tended to drive into psychosis those experiencing it, so after a while it didn’t sell so well.’

‘Why are you telling this?’

‘Because I’m going to load a Serban Kline memcording straight into your silicon cortex. After a while you won’t be concerned about your indenture, or ECS law.’

The Golem decided it did not like the name Longshanks’ and so tested its bonds to the limit, but found that they were firm. Fear of losing itself was quite irrelevant. The Golem did not know what ‘self was.

Consciousness was immediate, whereupon Thorn said, ‘Seems I’m still alive. The nanobots worked?’

‘They worked, Patran Thorn—you are human again,’ answered the disembodied voice of Jack.

Staring at the ceiling, Thorn tried to understand how this confirmation made him feel. He realized he felt the sadness of an addict freed from addiction—knowing the power of the narcotic, and that he could never go back.

Sitting upright, he surveyed the medical area and wondered how much time had passed. Sliding back the thin sheet that covered him, he inspected his naked body and saw no sign of drastic surgical intercession, but he did feel battered, slightly ill and weak. Slowly swinging his legs off the surgical table, he paused before standing up.

‘You have been unconscious for eight days,’ Jack informed him, ‘and since your… incapacity a number of things have occurred.’ Jack went on to detail them, while Thorn padded over to a wall unit, scrolled down a menu and called up a disposable shipsuit and slippers, which he took from the dispenser and donned. Then, from the same unit, he ordered coffee, but instead got a tall carton of some sickly vitamin drink—and quickly drank half of it. The AI’s voice tracked him as he left Medical, stepped out into the decorous corridor and headed for the dropshaft. By the shaft’s entrance, he looked around for somewhere to discard the carton.

‘Just throw it on the floor,’ Jack told him.

This he did, watching as something like a glass beetle scuttled out of a small hatch opening up at the bottom of the wall, caught the carton even before it hit the floor, and scuttled back again. He shuddered, stepped into the shaft.

There was only one occupant on the bridge, whom it took him a moment to recognize. ‘Cento,’ he said eventually.

‘Thorn.’ The Golem nodded to him, then turned back to face the spectacular view.

To the right, the giant incandescent orb of an F-class sun filled half their visual field. It was milky emerald, with the contrasting yellow of a titanic flare looping out from its surface, and other fires of orange, red and violet rippling out from a pox of sunspots like mosquito bites turned bad. To their left, a dark dwarf sun revolved with slow dignity, turned jade by reflected light, with the flickering dots of meteor impacts occasionally appearing on its matt, and apparently smooth, surface. Between the two suns, the occasional rocky moonlet—or maybe planet, as there was no real sense of their scale — tumbled through space.

‘It can loosely be described as a planetary system.’ Cento gestured: ‘The brown dwarf is small enough and cool enough to be defined approximately as a planet, and its mass is such that it orbits the sun here. Jack’s contracted the view so we can see both of them. In reality, if they were as close as they seem to be, they would be drawn in towards each other in a matter of days, and the cataclysm would be visible a thousand light years away, a thousand years hence.’

Cento now turned to Thorn, then glanced beyond him. Thorn himself turned as Cormac stepped out of the dropshaft.

‘I had hoped,’ the agent said, ‘that Jack would have finished scanning this system by now.’ He grimaced. ‘We had to check it, even though it seemed unlikely that either Dragon or Skellor would be here.’

Thorn rubbed his face—he still wasn’t up to speed, and he desperately wanted that coffee.

Cormac went on, ‘Of course Skellor could be present on any of those planetoids, under a chameleonware shield. We are actually looking for Dragon, and by finding him will eventually find Skellor.’ He looked up at the brown dwarf. ‘Anything more, Jack?’

‘Excuse the delay.’ The AI’s automaton suddenly came to life, tilting its head back to take in the external view. ‘On one of the planetoids exists a species of rock-boring worm, and a deeper scan was required to confirm that its tunnels were not the result of draconic pseudopodia.’

‘Then what are we waiting for?’

The automaton turned to frown at Cormac. ‘Must I explain to you the interaction of solar and U-space mechanics?’

Thorn watched as, with something odd in his expression, Cormac gazed out at the F-class sun. The agent replied, ‘No, you don’t. It’s a matter of extra minutes only on our departure time, which could add or subtract days from the duration of our next journey.’ He tilted his head, reaching up to press the tips of his fingers against his temples. ‘The solar gale will hit soon, and the distortion wave can carry us out, accelerate us…’

There were tides and currents in U-space, Thorn knew, and sometimes leaving a system later meant your subsequent journey took less time. Now, by his expression, Thorn realized Cormac must be conducting a silent conversation through that damnable impossibly functioning gridlink of his. Then the view winked out and he felt the strange slew of the Jack Ketch in a direction he could neither see nor indicate. Cormac still stood with his eyes closed and his fingertips to his temples. Thorn thought he himself must still be suffering the after-effects of surgery when the agent wavered and grew thin, so it seemed Thorn could see the drawing room showing right through him. Then, for a fraction of a second, Cormac was gone, then reappearing a pace to the left of where he had been standing — and Thorn knew that what he had seen was real but inexplicable.

Sunrise usually quelled sleer activity, but this morning not so much as usual. Light cutting down the canyons and ravines now revealed a world of violently contrasting colour. As always, there were the beige, pink and sepia tones of the surrounding sandstone below the turquoise sky, but now dark green and purple shoots were spearing up everywhere from the ground, light-green roundish leaves ringing their bases, and nodular yellow growths spattering the butte faces and spreading to smear together in resinous masses. And the armoured brethren and prey of the sleers were also appearing.

Readying Stone for departure, Tergal observed a line of four small sand gulpers hoovering their way down the canyon towards them, sand spewing from their throat sieves as they worked, and only stopping when they lifted their heads to swallow vegetation compacted in their crops. He also noticed a large rock crawler, its piton feet wedged into stone while it sucked up yellow fungus with twin trumpet-shaped siphons.

‘Maybe we should try to get to a drier area,’ he suggested.

The changes in their relationship were quite plain. Anderson was not treating him very differently — still discussing things, still imparting his encyclopedic and sometimes boringly extensive knowledge of the fauna and flora—but Tergal knew he was now on trial and there would be no appeal. Out here, if Tergal fucked up, he knew the knight would kill him. But Tergal’s respect for Anderson had increased tenfold. He realized he wanted this man’s good judgement.

‘My intention entirely,’ Anderson replied as he strapped himself into his saddle up on Bonehead’s back.

‘Which way?’ Tergal asked.

‘No idea.’ Anderson shrugged. ‘If we just continue towards the Plains we stand as much chance of coming out of this as anywhere else.’ He rapped his goad on the shell immediately behind his hog’s raised sensor head. It extruded an eye-palp towards him as if to say it knew they were setting out and there was no need for his impatience, then it stood and, with a steady gait, tramped down the canyon towards the sand gulpers.

The gulpers, without even looking up, parted to allow the sand hogs passage, then closed together behind them. As he and Anderson moved on, Tergal observed something else, with thin fragile legs at least three metres long and similarly elongated pincers, reaching up sandstone faces to pluck down both yellow fungi and rock crawlers, stabbing both with its siphon pincers to suck them dry.

‘Stilt spider,’ Anderson observed. ‘Quite slow, but a bastard when you’re camping at night—steps straight over the camp wires and’ll suck you dry easy as it does rock crawlers.’

Tergal glanced at the knight and noticed how he wasn’t paying much attention to the distant creature, but was studying the ground just ahead of Bonehead.

‘You’re following that brass man,’ he said. ‘Is that such a good idea?’

Anderson looked up. ‘Aren’t you curious?’

‘Yeah, I guess… Who do you think he was?’

Anderson directed his attention to a trail that the fresh growth was making indistinct. ‘Not so much a case of who as what. I’d say he is a machine—“android” was the old word—probably left over from colonization time. He could have been wandering around Cull for centuries, recharging himself from sunlight and maybe repairing himself with the skill of a metallier—who can say?’

Tergal’s instinct was to tell Anderson he was talking rubbish. But he had seen a man, apparently made of brass, twist off a half-tonne sleer’s head as if taking the top off a bottle of quavit. Trying to sit back and fit such an event neatly into the pattern of everyday life was not easy.

‘Maybe he was a metallier in some sort of armour?’ he suggested.

‘Strong fella, then,’ opined Anderson. And of course the suggestion had been ridiculous.

At midday they halted to eat oatmeal biscuits and brew amanis tea. Tergal noted that the young sulerbane plants were now standing higher than his ankles, and their ground leaves, trapping the moisture in the canyon floor, were beginning to overlap each other. Finishing their tea quickly when a swarm of snapper beetles, attracted by the heat of their stove, veered towards them, they continued their journey. Later they came upon the remains of an albino second-stage sleer, its legs pulled off and scattered about it. Anderson stopped to study it, before letting Bonehead and Stone share it between them.

‘First one of those I’ve ever seen,’ commented Anderson. ‘Must be an inbred colony about here. I’ve heard about such things among Earth stock, but never native animals.’

But Tergal could see the knight doubted his own explanation.

Skellor climbed the tumbled edge of a butte to reach its flat top, for a better view of what lay ahead. After studying the city spread before him on its platform, he wished then he had taken apart the mind of the woman he had earlier encountered. It was only a passing regret, for it was not as if he desperately needed knowledge of such a primitive society. There were no killer AIs or Polity agents here, so such an edge was not necessary for his very survival. But, he decided, eyeing the guns casting a shadow below, perhaps it would be prudent to so deal with the next human he encountered.

Back down from the butte, he was soon heading into deep shadow below the city. Scanning around with infrared vision, he observed a chimera produced by no natural evolution. The man-thing, with its pincer mouth and chitinous hide, came leaping out of one of the bulbous nests. He backhanded it to the ground, then held it down with his foot.

‘Now what are you?’ he asked.

The creature tried to snap at his ankle, and from its armoured mouth issued hissing, gulping sounds that might have been words. Skellor pressed his full weight on his leg and the ribcage under his foot collapsed with a dull crunch. As the creature expired, Skellor dipped a finger in leaking orange blood and put it in his mouth. Having already recorded the base chromosome format of the creature back at that encampment, he quickly analysed the substance in his mouth, and was unsurprised to identify that same chromosome containing additional human DNA. Glancing up at the platform and remembering what he had already seen of the technology here, he knew this creature did not result from any recombination experiment carried out by humans.

‘Well, Dragon, what have you been doing?’

Thereafter Skellor used chameleonware to avoid the most persistent attackers, and killed only those bearing some form he found particularly interesting, gathering data each time to store in the vastness of that crystal part of his own crossbred brain. Some hours later, he came to a steel wall, and was annoyed to find no access from here to the city above. Now, walking alongside the wall, he planned his next moves.

Neither the woman nor any others in that little encampment had worn Dracocorp augs, which came as a surprise to him. This planet being the hideaway of one of the Dragon spheres, he had expected to find all of the human population under that entity’s control. But then he realized Dragon did not need such devices to control a primitive population so easily to hand. Skellor, however, did need some comparable method of enslavement if he was to usurp this society and twist it to his own purpose: that being the manufacture of components to repair his ship.

Luckily, like the chromosome patterns he had started filing away, he had also stored much else. For conscious inspection, he called up the blueprints of the Dracocorp aug and adjusted them to its state when virally subverted to his control, and made some minor adjustments, since he didn’t want everyone here brain-burnt moronic. There was also the matter of distribution, but that would be easy—the sleer chromosomes offered him an easy means.

And as Skellor walked back out into daylight, where he found uniformed soldiers setting up barricades and mounting weapons, he hacked and spat something horrible into his palm.

In bright white flashes, each of the telefactors disappeared—the glare from each explosion so intense it left black polarized dots on the screens. Jerusalem had just destroyed all but the visual link of the pinhead cameras to itself. The skin on her back crawling, Mika dropped her gaze to the screen that had been showing her a nanoscope view from one of the ‘factors. Either that screen should now be blank, or show the research programs she had been running in parallel. But what it showed was no code she knew: blockish pictographs, like odd-shaped circuit boards, revolved and fitted into each other, shifting diagonally across the screen.

‘Whatever it is, it’s in,’ she said.

Just then, there sounded loud clangs from all around Exterior Input, and Mika noticed that emergency door irises had closed on all exits.

‘Er… what was that?’ Colver asked in dismay.

Susan James grimaced at him. ‘Clamps disengaging. You didn’t feel the acceleration because the gravplates in here would have automatically compensated.’ The woman nicked a control to one of the pinhead cameras and her screen immediately displayed an external view of the Jerusalem with the exterior input centre, like the smallest fleck against the vastness of the ship, now departing it.

‘Shit,’ said Colver.

Though she had speculated that Jerusalem might do this, Mika had never quite believed it. She stared at the screen, wondering if the AI was currently selecting an imploder missile from some carousel inside the ship, prior to ramming it into a launch tube. Then all the screens went blank.

‘D’nissan?’ Colver turned towards the sphere.

‘I disconnected from the pinheads. Whatever got to us did it through the telefactor, but it could leap from us to the cameras, and I don’t want to lose them as well.’ Abruptly the door on the side of the sphere popped open and D’nissan stepped out in a gust of cold. He was wearing a reflective hotsuit, frigid air also gusting out from it around his unmasked face. He pointed a remote control back at the sphere and operated it. Things hissed and crackled in the frigid interior, and there arose a smell of fried optics.

‘Took it completely,’ he said to Mika, then turned and looked up at the ceiling. ‘Jerusalem?’

‘Still here. I am maintaining simple voice transmission and reception only. Any image link has too high a bandwidth.’

‘Okay,’ said D’nissan, ‘it’s a waste of a lot of data, but I recommend full system burn. It subverted everything in the deep scanning sphere, then tried some sort of optical link into me.’

‘Agreed,’ Jerusalem concurred.

Nodding, D’nissan pressed out a sequence on the remote control he held. All through the centre screens flickered out and consoles went offline, with the same sizzling and burnt-circuitry smell as had issued from the scanning sphere. But clearly not everything went off. For a moment D’nissan stared at his remote control, then dropped it onto the floor and stamped on it.

‘Harrison,’ he turned and strode across to a catadapt man working on the far side of the centre, ‘trash those nano-assemblers right now, or they’ll be pumping out Jain mycelium within minutes.’

The catadapt did not hesitate. He picked up the chair he’d been sitting on, and proceeded to smash the two delicate machines with it.

‘Okay everybody,’ continued D’nissan, halting in the middle of the room, ‘we won’t be going back unless this thing is controlled or destroyed. I want all computer systems, all memory storage, anything with enough room to take code, isolated totally. This means that all optics, s-cons, in- and out-circuit emitters must be cut. When we’ve finished, everything must be powered down. I’ll want nothing in here functioning but us.’

Mika gazed at the console she had been using. It was still on, and its screen still scrolled that alien code. She felt a kind of pain when she thought of all the data she would be losing, but then realized it was probably all gone by now anyway—eaten by the virus infecting the whole system here. She reached inside her jacket and pulled out the thin-gun Thorn had given her, and which, infected by his militaristic paranoia, she had carried ever since. She then put five pulses of ionized aluminium into the console, blowing away the touch panels and frying everything inside it.

Colver whistled. ‘I don’t think that’s standard issue aboard Jerusalem? he said.

‘If anyone is still having problems,’ D’nissan said, ‘it seems Asselis Mika has the tool for the job.’

Laughter greeted this, just before the gravplates went off.

‘It’s fighting back,’ said Susan James.

Kilnsman Plaqueast watched the blimps departing from Overcity on an aerial search of the Sand Towers, their powerful searchlights stabbing down into shadowy canyons as they searched for the ship many had seen fly over Golgoth. He muttered and swore to himself about the high-and-mighty and their damned equivocal orders. ‘Erect barricades all around the city, and detain anyone suspicious, as somebody very dangerous and maybe possessing unknown technology might be trying to get in.’ For one thing, just about every citizen of Golgoth was suspicious, but he supposed the order applied only to those coming in from outside. But if he was meant to detain people bearing unknown dangerous technology, hell, how was he supposed to recognize that, and what degree of force should he apply?

Plumping himself down on a rock with his assault rifle across his lap, Plaqueast watched his fellows laying out the portable barricades and setting up the big belt-driven cannon. Already two mineralliers, caught wandering in from the buttes pushing barrows full of those malachite nodules women in Overcity were mad for lately as jewellery, were sitting in the temporary compound with their wrists bound behind their backs and gunny sacks pulled over their heads. Seemed a bit daft to him—their only crime was to go out collecting without sufficient back-up, thinking themselves invulnerable with the new weapons they carried. Already a substantial number of opportunistic collectors like themselves had disappeared amid the Sand Towers, no doubt down a sleer’s digestive tract or under one of the many recent earthquake collapses.

Then, Plaqueast noticed something very strange. The ground was being disturbed by a regular line of indentations heading towards him, yet it was not shaking. Abruptly he realized that he was seeing a series of footprints crushing down the sulerbane sprouts, and he jumped down off his rock bringing his weapon to bear. Then something knocked his rifle spinning away, grabbed his jacket and hoisted him into the air. Suddenly he could actually see the man who had hold of him, and knew he was in trouble, so started yelling. He saw his fellows turning towards him, but could not fathom their puzzled expressions: seeming unable to see him, they were now staring around in confusion. His assailant thumped him in the gut, knocking all the fight out of him, then hit him hard in the face, stunning him, before he slung him over one shoulder and marched away.

‘Over… here…’ Plaqueast wheezed, seeing his fellows stepping out from the barricade, but his capturer just walked up to it, squeezed through a couple of sections, and returned to the shadows of the Undercity.

As breath slowly returned, he began to struggle again, but to no effect. Out of sight of the barricade, the attacker slung him down on the ground below a wall of crumbling sandstone. He then held out a hand on which rested a flat, tick-like thing, its short legs stirring in a foam of slime, then tilted his palm so the little horror dropped onto Plaqueast’s shirt front. He tried desperately to brush it away, but there was a sudden pain in his wrist and paralysis spreading through him in a wave from that point of contact. Then he could only lie terrified as the thing crawled up his shirt, arrived hot on his neck, then attached itself behind his ear and ground agonizingly into his flesh. But there the horror did not end, for something was inside his head, taking his mind apart, ripping away identity, abrading consciousness. Through streaming eyes he saw his capturer had squatted on his heels to watch—and realized he was watching in some other way as well.

Finally, the last bulwarks of his self disintegrated, and Plaqueast was no more… which was merciful since some hours later his now mindless body began to hack and cough violently, bringing up like living vomit things that crawled away, again and again.