Mother Death

7

The offer was delivered by Alice herself.

Sitting alone in her cell, propped on the foot of her narrow bed, she read the words projected on her normally blank window with a steady, colorless voice. “To anyone with my brother Ord,” she read, “we will grant you a total amnesty. Leave the Chamberlain property before dawn, and every crime will be forgotten. Your past will be forgiven. And we will grant you every freedom and responsibility deserved by citizens of your mother world.”

She paused, then said, “Sincerely, the Earth’s Council.”

Then Alice became puzzled, staring up at the omniscient window, and after a long moment, whispering, “Ord?”

Then, “Why did you come back here? Why—?”

The feed evaporated into blackness.

The others wanted to speak, almost shouting, claiming that the image wasn’t real and the offer was just as bogus. But Ord admitted, “She was authentic. And so is their offer.” He had analyzed every communication and every careless word uttered by ten thousand high-placed souls, and though he had doubts, not one of them had a backbone.

Seeing his resignation, the others began to adjust their opinions, repeating the word, “Amnesty,” with a mixture of gentle horror and tentative hope.

Buteo was first to ask, “So what happens at dawn?”

“They assault our position,” Ord replied.

There was a long silence.

In the faces, particularly in the wide thoughtful eyes, he could see the others replaying Xo’s arguments. Pride, they thought. And sacrifice. Ord had saved their lives, but their Families and a sense of duty had given them life in the first place, and delivered their purpose. They said as much with glances, with half-sighs, and with a persistent, embarrassed quiet that was finally shattered when Ord smiled wistfully, reminding them, “You’re not prisoners. If you wish, leave. That’s absolutely what I expect from you.”

Through the night, one by one, people made their apologies and slipped outside, out into the grasp of the Nuyens.

Only Buteo and Avram remained at sunrise.

Ord never asked for their reasons, but both offered them.

“Nuyens are winning too much, and too easily,” was the Papago’s excuse, offering a flirtatious little smile.

His older brother simply shrugged his shoulders, asking, “What can I do? Chamberlains have to help each other.”

Then he smiled, and when Ord smiled back at him, he added:

“Eons of habit. They can’t vanish in one dangerous little night.”

The bear-dogs were neither bears or dogs, but instead had been built from an assortment of popular species, ancient as well as recent. Into that rich genetic stew mutations were gathered from over a thousand centuries of living in the wild. Possessing a modest, pragmatic intelligence, each pack had its oral history reaching back to the times of the Chamberlains. They weren’t fools. They realized something had gone horribly wrong in their world. The hot night air had crackled with strange energies, and phantoms had drifted through them without offering explanations or apologies. The disruptions only grew worse at daybreak.

The morning chants were interrupted twice by sharp, inexplicable sounds that came from everywhere. The enchanted moon was suddenly close, almost filling the brilliant blue sky. Then a spirit army began its charge up through the mountain, rising toward the summit and the holy mansion. At least one old bitch priestess sensed their bloody purpose, the bear-dogs’ world about to change.

Quietly but firmly, she offered thanks to the mountain for giving them this beautiful home and ample food—every priestess made the same morning prayer—and then she stumbled over her own tongue, trying to find the suitable words for the inevitable.

Today, they would die.

She felt certain.

But before she could warn the others, a Chamberlain materialized beside each of them. They had never seen a Chamberlain before, but they knew him immediately. He scratched behind their ears, knowing exactly what every bear-dog liked, and he smiled at them, telling them, “If you come with me, I’ll keep you safe.”

The priestess had her little doubts.

But she grunted her compliance just the same, and the Chamberlain touched them in a different way… and an instant later, the forest dissolved into plasmas, and the ancient mountain turned to magma and ash and a scalding white pillar of dirty light…

The barrage of shaped plasmas lasted four seconds.

In its wake, the mansion was left blackened but intact, held together by Ord’s own hands. And with the mountain collapsed into a cherry-red lake, its deepest foundations lay exposed, making the structure taller, and if possible, even more imposing.

The army attacked with a wild fury, accomplishing nothing.

But a tiny unit masquerading as the butt end of a kinetic charge managed to slip through Ord’s defenses. Then with a Nuyen general at the lead, the invaders rose swiftly along fissures and a forgotten conduit, materializing inside the central staircase not ten meters below the penthouse.

The murals were gone, replaced with an infinite grayness and a powerful, unnerving cold.

Extinction, perfectly rendered.

The Nuyen attacked the crystal door, then pulled back as it dissolved, becoming a pocket of stale air with Ord standing at its center.

His face was miserable, his eyes pale and tired, and with a voice that matched the face, he said, “I want to talk to Alice. Just that. Then I’ll repair all the damage, and I’ll leave. I promise you.”

The Nuyen shook what passed for a head, then drifted aside.

Ravleen stood waiting, grinning in a cheerless, expectant fashion. A few of her hands had been freed for the occasion. She reached with them, engulfing her enemy, ripping away his talents and senses and strange dark-matter meats, aiming for what lay at the center.

Ord winced and shut his eyes.

Standing on a long green lawn, he found himself wearing nothing but a boy’s half-grown and very naked body. The grass was short and soft and overly perfumed, and the mansion was white again, rooted into the old mountaintop. A pack of tame bear-dogs were lying nearby, drinking in the blue skies and the sun. Ord stood still exactly long enough to believe in the place. Then a hand grabbed his shoulder and spun him, and a second hand—hard as basalt—drove itself into his astonished face.

Ord lay on his back, his face bloodied.

The Sanchex towered over him, naked and unexpectedly alluring. With a practiced, almost surgical precision, she placed a long bare foot to his neck, then pressed hard enough to make the mountain’s bones groan beneath them.

On another day, Ord would have already lost the fight.

Ravleen would have given him a thorough, expert beating, and he would have endured it, knowing that she could never inflict permanent harm.

But this Ord grabbed an ankle and yanked her off her feet.

Then he jumped up and set his foot against her neck, letting her curse and lash at him, then in her rage biting through her own tongue and spitting it at him.

The air gave a supersonic crack as the tongue passed.

New hands were unmanacled. But instead of throwing him off, she grabbed Ord and pulled him close, an irresistible strength leaving him lying on top of her, chest to chest, his left ear pressed against her tongue-less mouth.

This wasn’t Ravleen. This was a monster, nothing but a scorching rage and a shred of embittered, poisoned intellect that gave the rage its direction.

“More talents,” she begged with other mouths. “Let me kill him, please. Please.”

“No,” said a Nuyen’s calculating voice. “No.”

Xo was kneeling on the sweet grass, and with a genuine pain, he told Ord, “You know, you really can’t win this thing.”

Part of Ord wanted to believe him. Defeat meant peace and a kind of freedom, all of his massive responsibilities taken from him.

“You’re simply too weak,” Xo informed him.

Ord said nothing.

The Nuyen’s talents were at work. Oily and cold, they slipped inside him and spoke with a pure confidence, telling his soul, “If you surrender, at this moment, nobody needs to die. Including you.”

“Shut up!” Ravleen screamed. She laid beneath Ord as if he was her lover, and her face colored and twisted, the eyes throwing fire at Xo. “Just please give me another fucking hand, and shut up!”

For an instant, her grip was stronger.

Slightly.

Then weakened again; Ord barely noticed.

Unnoticed, the bear-dogs had made a circle around them. Then one of the beasts became Avram, and he grabbed Xo and pulled him away. Another was Buteo, and she calmly and expertly took hold of the Sanchex monster, peeling back hands until Ord could find his way to his feet again. Then the other bear-dogs—much modified in the last moments— put their cavernous mouths around various body parts, and waited. And the humans watched Ord, waiting for whatever he said or did next.

The artificial moon filled the sky, and the mountain turned to magma again.

Then came a rumbling thunder, vast and vaguely musical, and Ord smiled as if embarrassed. He hid his genitals with his hands, and quietly, in a near-whisper, told Xo, “You were right. I wasn’t strong enough to win.”

No one spoke.

“But I am now,” he admitted.

The Nuyen’s face lost its color, its life. “You can’t be. The defense grid is on full alert. Talent requires mass, and nothing has moved into the system since—”

He hesitated, and winced.

Quietly, to himself, he said, “Shit.”

Ravleen chewed off her lower lip, then spat it at her captors.

Wide-eyed, Xo gazed up at the sky. “You’ve always been here,” he muttered. “That refugee boy was the last of you, not the first.”

Ord nodded, distracted now.

The moon’s framework was dissolving, its mysterious guts obeying gravity, pouring out of it like a great, invisible river.

Xo tried to pull his arms free, and the bear-dogs snipped them off at the shoulders and left them flexing and twitching in a neat pile, the hands instinctively clinging to one another.

Then Ord opened a ten-kilometer mouth, finally slaking his fantastic thirst.