Betrayer of Worlds (5 page)

With which disc would he experiment? Not the one that kept him breathing, even if he could manage to detach it. He’d have to try the disc on which he stood.

How could he upend it?

That disc in the jungle had been a bomb. Blind experimentation might explode this one. He would try it anyway. It wasn’t as though he had a lot of choices.

He’d have to get above the disc.

He set one foot against the wall, set his back against the other, and raised
his other foot. Slowly he climbed. The creep upward, pressing hard against the walls, made back and leg muscles scream. Like rock climbing, he told himself. Never mind that this cylinder is as slippery as glass; the fall couldn’t really hurt him.

From maybe twenty-five centimeters above the floor, he reached around his hips, toward the floor. He jammed all four fingers into the gap at the edge of the disc—and one foot slipped. He cracked his head as he splashed into the filth.

He tried again with the same result.

Nessus didn’t hear or didn’t care.

With feet spaced a bit farther apart, Louis managed on his third try to stay suspended as he forced the fingertips of his right hand into the gap. The disc lifted, breaking suction with a disgusting slurp. Then it slipped from his grasp and he fell.

The shakes got him again. Louis lost track of how many times he made the attempt. Finally he had the disc angled upward at about twenty degrees. With his back and leg muscles trembling from strain, he crept higher, wondering if he could possibly climb high enough to set the disc on its edge.

He couldn’t.

The disc slipped and fell. Wham! He slammed onto the disc, the breath knocked out of him. But not before he had glimpsed the disc’s underside in the mirror. The disc’s bottom was dark, like the circle outside the cylinder.

That circle, presuming it was a stepping disc, was upside down. If it operated at all, transferring there would teleport him
into
the deck. Doubtless Puppeteers built fail-safes to prevent that.

Surrendering to the shakes, Louis let depression wash over him.

Another bout of seizures and hopelessness passed. Nessus had yet to stir.

The Puppeteer did not respond to Louis’s shouts. Not to “Help!” (disinterested in helping another?) or “Fire!” (what harm was there in trying again?) or the more general “Danger!”

Danger,
if anything, curled up the Puppeteer even tighter. Too vague, Louis decided. By this stage in his terror, Nessus must be beyond anything but hiding from an undefined danger.

There was a germ of an idea here. Louis chewed his lower lip, trying to
coax out the thought. Suppose some peril loomed against which Nessus
could
take action? The hull was indestructible, but
Nessus
wasn’t. What about a big explosion alongside the hull?

An emergency restraint field had saved Louis during
Clementine
’s crash, but only because he had been in the pilot couch. Would even Puppeteers equip cargo bays with emergency restraints?

“Submarine approaching!” Louis shouted. “Nessus! Torpedoes in the water! Nuclear warheads.”

Shuddering seismically, Nessus unfolded. His necks writhed like serpents. His heads swiveled, searching everywhere for danger. “Torpedoes?” he bleated, leaping to his hooves.

“My mistake. Just some fish,” Louis said.

Seeming not to hear, Nessus galloped for the hatch. The cargo hold echoed with the clops of his hooves.

“No torpedoes!” Louis screamed.

Nessus skidded to a halt partway out the hatch. One head plucked at his mane. “No submarine?”

“No,” Louis answered, as firmly as his shakes allowed. “Now get me the tanj
out
of this cell!”

An alert lamp pulsed. A timer began counting down the final hour. The moment Nessus had anticipated—and dreaded—was at hand. Louis Wu would emerge soon from the autodoc.

And then Nessus must judge whether the man was up to the challenge.

Beowulf Shaeffer was the one Nessus sought. Needed. Shaeffer was special. A neutron star, the galactic core explosion, a black hole, an entire solar system of antimatter: he had survived encounters with them all—only to be undone by some mundane accident.

Unless, of course, Louis lied.

As often as Nessus had found it expedient to lie, he did not doubt that someone else might. Especially when a simple lie might extract Louis from a dire predicament.

And yet: maybe the luck of Beowulf Shaeffer
had
finally run out.

Nessus had thought a great deal in recent years about luck and unintended consequences. He continued to fret, worrying and plucking at his mane, as the autodoc countdown reached ten minutes. Five. Two.

Nessus sidled onto a stepping disc he had set onto the deck. This autodoc was monstrously large, too bulky for anywhere but
Aegis
’ main cargo hold. Big as befit the autodoc’s unique capabilities.

Shaeffer had hidden himself well. Too well. Nessus had surreptitiously hired private investigators and criminals across the worlds of Human Space. None of his minions had found any trace of Shaeffer, either under his own name or any alias Shaeffer was ever known to have used. Not for decades.

Dead? Concealed beyond hope of discovery? Nessus could live with either. Better those than the final possibility: that Nessus was too late. That another had already found Shaeffer.

For Nessus was not the only Puppeteer familiar with Shaeffer’s extraordinary talents. . . .

.   .   .

Brimming with energy, bursting with life, Louis woke.

Scores of readouts, all in the green, shimmered in the clear dome that hung scant centimeters over his face. A ’doc, of course. He had been too weak to get in unaided. Nessus had had to help.

“Ship’s gravity is higher than Wunderland’s,” Nessus had offered while guiding and pushing from behind.

A fact, perhaps, but not the essential truth. Exhaustion and the shakes had defeated Louis’s solo attempts to climb into the intensive care cavity. That, alas, he remembered clearly. Of the dreams that followed, he recalled only bits and fragments. Only enough to be certain that there
had
been dreams, that the autodoc had been exercising his engrams, maintaining memories for a brain otherwise too inactive, or too drug-addled, to do it for itself.

Nessus’ polite fiction made the Puppeteer seem less alien.

None of the controls were where Louis expected them. Was this a Puppeteer ’doc? He found a panic button and slapped it. The dome began to retract.

“Ah, you are back,” Nessus said. The Puppeteer stood far across the room. “Do you feel better?”

Better? The burn scars had vanished from Louis’s left side. He raised a hand for study and it was rock-steady. His fingers, splayed, showed no hint of tremor. He didn’t sweat and he wasn’t nauseous or dizzy. There was none of the anxiety and depression that had all but crushed him between pills, no crawling-of-the-skin portent of seizures waiting to strike him down.

Feel better? Finagle, Louis felt
terrific.

Sitting up, he grabbed the unfamiliar jumpsuit that lay draped across the bottom of the ’doc. He didn’t want to think about the disgusting state of the clothes he had worn aboard.

“I feel much better, Nessus. Thank you.”

“There is much to talk about.”

Time now to reveal the fine print? Louis tried and failed to care. Even the air, spicy and exotic, rich with some Puppeteer scent, shouted that he was on an adventure. Stepping out of the ’doc, he felt agile and light on his feet. He dressed quickly, while Nessus studied his hooves. “Where are we going, Nessus?”

“To begin, a world called Hearth.”

“I never heard of it.”

“Nor have you heard its true name.” Nessus sang something evocative of oboes and French horns, of cellos and harps.

A few bars, no more, but the music sent shivers down Louis’s spine. The chords spoke somehow of home and belonging. And he realized—

He had no idea of the way home! To
any
home, to
any
world on which he had ever set foot. Earth, Home, Fafnir, Wunderland: he could remember neither their positions nor the pulsar landmarks by which to locate them. More than exercised, his engrams had been . . . examined. Pilfered.

“You’ve tampered with my brain!” Louis roared. The Puppeteer seemed alien again. No, more than alien. Worse than alien. Monstrous. “You wanted to
use
my mind. Are you crazy?”

Even as Louis protested, a calmer part of him chided. He was at Nessus’ mercy. He had
put
himself at Nessus’ mercy. So never mind the immaturity of losing his temper—and where had
that
come from?—this behavior was dangerous.

Nessus dipped one head into a pocket of his sash. (Preparing to vanish again, trapping Louis in this cargo hold to reconsider his behavior?) “It was necessary,” Nessus said with his other head. “But consider, Louis. You knew your memories would be altered before your return. This is before your return.”

Fine print.

Louis tamped down his rage, trying to think with his mind instead of his hormones.

After the confusion that was his childhood, memory was a fixation. An obsession. Memory was the sole, gossamer link to all that had been taken from him. He clung to the bits he
did
remember. Throughout his adult life he had studied countless tricks and ploys, learning to learn.

And so he recalled verbatim what Nessus had warned.
Things that you will see cannot be revealed. Your memories will be edited before I return you to Known Space.

The imprecision of
before
was the least of Louis’s problems. Nothing in Nessus’ words limited memory editing to what Louis saw while on this trip! Louis could be returned to Known Space as a vegetable, and Nessus would have kept his bargain.

And Louis had been too addled even to notice. Compared to that failure, the physical weakness from which he had been delivered paled to nothing.

If he survived this adventure, Louis vowed, he would never take drugs again. He would think before he acted. He would be more deliberate in everything he did. If he survived—

No.

He would be more deliberate beginning
now.
Without Nessus’ help, Louis would never get home. “Explain what I am to do,” he said.

Nessus led the way to
Aegis
’ tiny relax room. Fresh-from-the-autodoc euphoria would fade soon enough; when it did, Louis would realize he was ravenous. And Nessus wanted a drink bulb of warm carrot juice. No matter that his biochemistry could extract little nourishment from any terrestrial food. He found the beverage soothing.

His spirits
needed
soothing.

Louis looked all around as they walked, peering down cross corridors and peeking into the occasional open hatch. He bounded more than walked, scarcely able to contain himself—until he skidded to a halt.

Louis gaped at a darkened hatch window. He touched a cheek, still staring, as though convincing himself the reflected image was truly him. Hard living and a recent lack of boosterspice had started him down the path to looking his true age. “I . . . I look
young.
Maybe twenty.”

Nessus had hoped Louis would not make that discovery so soon. It only added to the necessary explanations. “This particular autodoc also rejuvenates.”

“A Puppeteer ’doc, then.”

“We prefer Citizen.” Nessus extended a neck briefly, pointing down the corridor, and resumed walking in that direction. Warm carrot juice sounded better and better. He said, “But this is not a Citizen autodoc; in fact, Carlos Wu built it. Yes, Louis, your father. It is the most advanced autodoc ever built by your people or mine.”

Most advanced
failed to do the unit justice. Carlos had accomplished something truly revolutionary. Nessus knew for a fact this autodoc had rebuilt Sigmund Ausfaller after the man had had half his chest blasted away. It rebuilt Ausfaller a second time from a heavily irradiated, all-but-carbonized husk. And Ausfaller claimed this autodoc had once rebuilt Beowulf Shaeffer from a severed head.

That was why Nessus had custody of the precious device, why the Hindmost had agreed to allow it off Hearth.
Aegis
carried copies of Hearth’s
largest medical libraries. Had he located Carlos, Nessus would have pressed the human to reprogram its nanites to also heal Citizens. Alas, that effort must be undertaken without benefit of Carlos’s genius. Just as far more pressing concerns must be addressed without benefit of Beowulf.

“How did you come to have the ’doc?” Louis asked. “Citizens, I mean.”

“For complicated reasons, Carlos and Beowulf had to abandon it.” Yet another incomplete truth. “It was later acquired, at great expense, from criminals.” A huge lie.

They came to the relax room and Nessus motioned Louis inside. As Louis piled a tray with foods from the synthesizer, Nessus brooded about the many falsehoods this autodoc had evoked.

He had once spent most of a year searching Fafnir for the autodoc. To complete the search Nessus had had to ignore an urgent recall to Hearth and then lie about why he had been detained. The wonder was that he had ever found the device. Shaeffer had hidden it underwater, off the coast of a tiny, nameless, and unpopulated coral island.