Into the Slave Nebula (10 page)

“P
LEASE!
” said the old woman in supplication. “Please! I am very old, but I am not mad!”

Horn approached slowly and sat down on the edge of the bed facing her as she lowered her aged bones once more into the chair, closing her eyes as she did so. “I didn’t say anything, granny,” he murmured. “Please explain.”

Rapidly, confusedly, with many repetitions but obvious overwhelming sincerity, she told him the story of the Talibrands.

Barg Talibrand, father of Jan and Lars, had been a
simpler
man than either of his sons; that was her actual term, but Horn glossed it as meaning less intelligent. When his wife had become too ill to endure his violent love-making after bearing him the elder son, Jan, he had gone down to the spaceport one day and picked out a female android to satisfy him instead—one who, as well as being buxom and comely, was relatively well educated, could cook, make clothes, sing and speak passable Anglic: all in all, not unfit to be a concubine in one of the noblest families on Creew ’n Dith.

Horn had never heard of a female android before. As the tale progressed, a possible reason why they were no longer shipped onward via here to Earth emerged.

When this female android—allegedly as sterile as the males, an obvious advantage in a society where rights of succession were jealously guarded—conceived a child, Barg Talibrand had at first boasted of his unprecedented virility; he joked about fathering a baby on a
woman who couldn’t have one. Then the strangeness of the event began to prey on his mind, and some member of a cadet branch of the family, seeing a chance to get the thick-witted Barg under his thumb, fed him a superstitious explanation and preached impending doom.

Raging, Barg banned the transit of female androids through his spaceport. Bit by bit, he came to accept that instead of being blessed with incredible powers of generation he was cursed, and at last he died in a haze of insanity.

The whole affair was hushed up, and as soon as he was old enough to run the estate, Jan cleared out the parasites who had sponged on his father during the years of decline. He would have liked to remove the last vestige of the tragedy by doing away with the android woman. By then, though, Lars had developed into the kind of forceful personality Horn had imagined, capable of outfacing anyone else in the family, and defiantly accepting his improbable ancestry had sworn to have the life of anyone who harmed his mother.

Of course, directly he learned the truth about the kidnapped children who were being disguised as androids, he realized his mother too must have been human and stolen away in similar fashion. And there lay the motive which had driven him from world to world, hounding the android traders who had grown fat on the profit from such crimes.

No wonder Jan was jealous! To be surpassed by a brother who was not only younger, but a bastard to boot
…!

The door of the room slammed open, and Horn leapt up in alarm. Jan Talibrand stood before him, panting, with blood trickling out of his left sleeve. There was more blood on the naked sword he held. He barked in Creewndithian at the ancient crone, who covered her face
and rocked back and forth in rhythm with an outburst of sobs.

He shouted at her again, and she made a tearful answer. Talibrand spat on the floor and rounded on Horn.

“So, you lickspittle Earthling! You abuse my hospitality by eavesdropping, skulking in corners, bribing my retinue to unearth scandalous lies—is that how it is?”

The old woman cried that she had not been bribed, that she had come voluntarily to Horn, and his face distorted with animal rage.

“In that case I’m finished with you!” he snarled. “You’ve been a mark of my father’s shame for far too long. And now Lars can’t protect you any more—!”

He choked and strode forward. His sword crashed down with lunatic violence, and it split the old woman’s skull from crown to nape.

Appalled by the futile savagery of the deed, Horn was for a moment too overcome to react. At last he forced out, “Your father’s shame
is
nothing to the shame of that, Jan Talibrand!”

“Shame? How dare you?” Talibrand roared. “There’s no shame in disposing of an old and worn-out android—only common sense.”

“But she wasn’t an android!” Fury drove Horn plunging on. “She can’t have been—not if she bore a child!”

“I say she was,” Talibrand gritted, and raised his sword to the level of Horn’s heart. “And it is not seemly for a guest to insult his host by calling him a liar.”

“I don’t believe I care to enjoy the hospitality of one who kills old defenseless women and threatens unarmed men, made brave only by possession of a sword!” Horn made each successive word crack like a whip, and Talibrand’s face went perfectly white.

“Come then!” he said softly. “They tell me you’re clever with a blade—that lately you killed your challenger
in a duel. But Coolin was a decadent Earthling like yourself. Let’s find out how you compare with a man of Creew’n Dith!”

In that instant Horn was finally certain of something he had barely dared to suspect before. Since his arrival on Creew ’n Dith, he had told no one but Braithwin the full story of his departure from home. Certainly, in the bald account he had given Jan Talibrand of the circumstances surrounding Lars’s death, he had never spoken Coolin’s name.

So while Lars Talibrand hunted evil men from world to world, his brother was hand-in-glove with his mortal enemies.

But there was no time for thought now. At sword-point he was being chivvied along the passages that led to the great hall. There had indeed been fighting here, more than he would have imagined: there a door showed splinters of bright white wood, here someone had had to spill sand on a patch of blood. From outside came the occasional snap of a projectile weapon, and there were no servants in sight. Horn guessed that the last of the guests were having to be driven forcibly off the premises.

“There’s a sword!” Talibrand halted opposite the door to the vestibule which connected the great hall and the outside air. The hall itself was a chaos of overset chairs and smashed crockery, which no one had yet started to clear away. Not a little nervous, for the walk from his room had given him a chance to overcome his first uncontrollable rage at Talibrand’s murder of the old woman, Horn hesitated. It would be better to stand his ground in the vestibule, he decided; it was adequately large, perhaps twenty feet square, and he could avoid the risk of losing his footing on the debris with which the hall was littered.

As unhurriedly as he could, he advanced to pick up the weapon Talibrand had indicated, and went still a
pace or two further before turning. He needed a moment to get the feel of the sword. Dismayed, he discovered it was heavy and cumbersome compared with the ones he was accustomed to on Earth, but here there were no such niceties as the chance to balance a strange blade with a convenient grindstone.

“Your last chance, stranger from Earth,” Talibrand said, planting his feet apart and scowling. “Confess you’re a booby devoid of decent manners and I’ll let you depart with your life.”

“I don’t believe you,” Horn grunted. “You’d be afraid to have anyone tell the truth about you—granny-killer!”

One heartbeat later he was half an inch from death.

Here was no mannerly fencer like Coolin, rendered vulnerable by his eagerness for blood. Despite his foppish appearance, Talibrand was a genuine fighter, and though he must have been tired by his previous encounters, to which the slash on his left arm testified, his movements were fast, economical and controlled. Also, Horn judged, he did not lack stamina.
This
was not a match that would end quickly on a sophisticated trick.

For a while he contented himself wholly with defense, his sword always arriving—though he himself once or twice expected it not to—in time to turn Talibrand’s edge. They closed, parted, closed again, locked hilts in a brief trial of strength during which he thought he could read in his opponent’s eyes grudging respect for his competence, and broke by unspoken agreement into a series of conventional thrusts and parries. But during it he knew Talibrand was maneuvering him, and dared not look behind to see why, only realizing the truth when his foot slipped in a wet patch on the floor—blood, perhaps, shed by one of the reluctantly departing guests—and he came within an ace of overbalancing.

With a gasp, he jumped back, touching the wall with one elbow, and used the instant Talibrand needed for
recovery to dart aside. Was Talibrand tiring, was his recovery slow? Horn could not tell; he was too busy fending off the next attack.

Talibrand tried to lock hilts again, and he avoided the clash. He was pounds the lighter, and even though he had hardened up considerably since he looked with distaste at his own soft body in the hotel suite on Earth, he was probably not as strong.

And that was what was going to tell in the end.

Over Talibrand’s shoulder he saw that they were no longer alone. Both doors to the vestibule were crowded with watchers: retainers with long guns on their shoulders, back from clearing the grounds of the visitors, servants interrupted on the way to clear the great hall of the mess on its floor … and Moda Talibrand.

She was gazing open-lipped and tense, hands clasped as though in prayer. That was all Horn saw in the instant he was distracted, and it was almost too much—Talibrand was on him, blade raised high for a killing blow!

Moda cried out; he dodged desperately, and as he did so his sword—almost undirected by his will—touched Talibrand’s already wounded left arm and he felt it grate as it rubbed on living bone.

Talibrand’s mouth opened in what began to be a scream, and changed without the drawing of another breath into a shouted order as he saw that Horn’s sword could reach his exposed belly before his own could rise to meet it. Something struck Horn across the back of the neck, and he went sprawling, his sword lost. Two of Talibrand’s retainers dragged him to his feet again and held his arms in an iron grasp.

What now? Does he have me spitted like a pig? But was it rational to expect a man like Jan Talibrand to fight to the finish?

Dazed, he looked about him and discovered that one
person at least among the company shared his view of Talibrand. For Moda was advancing on her brother-in-law, her gown swishing at every step. She halted before him and deliberately spat upwards into his face.

“Coward!” she said—in Anglic. A glance at Horn left no room for doubt as to why she had selected the language.

His eyes burning, Talibrand wiped the spittle from his cheek.

“Coward!” she repeated. “Losing in a fair fight, and you get your dirty hirelings to save your worthless life!” She stamped her small foot, blazing with rage. “Oh, if I were only a man!”

“You’re not even a natural woman,” said Talibrand coldly. “To wed and bed with the child of an android—
faugh!
You disgust me, and I’m not surprised that you take the side of a stranger against your own family! So how do you enjoy being told that he has killed your husband’s mother? I found her in his room with her skull split!”

The incredible lie galvanized Horn. “Why, you—!” he began, but one of the men who held him clapped a broad palm over his mouth, and though he tried by biting into the flesh to drive the hand away, he failed.

Offering his new wound to be looked at by attendants, Talibrand was continuing, “I shan’t simply have him killed, if that’s what you’re thinking. A clean quick death would be better than he deserves. For him there is only one logical, beautiful fate. …”

He chuckled suddenly, and the sound chilled Horn’s blood.

“Oh yes! You’re going to
hate
your life before it snuffs out!”

W
HEN
H
ORN HAD
exhausted himself in struggling, he was dragged through the house to a dark, stinking room; here an old man as shriveled as the mummy of a bat trembled up to him and broke a capsule of something pungent under his nose, and his consciousness shattered into fragments.

He woke once to jolting darkness and the sound of men yelling orders, but could not make sense of what he heard; then a second time to find himself floating under nil gravity, bouncing very slowly from side to side of a cuboid cage of thongs. They were smeared with something sticky and unpleasant, and a fetid animal stench assailed him; he was glad to flee into oblivion again.

But that was the last time he managed to do so. His third waking was on a patch of gravely soil under a blank white sky, and he was shocked conscious by the impact of a bucket of icy water.

“On your feet, you!” grunted the man who had thrown it–a total stranger with a bald head and a straggly fair beard. Too dazed to think of not obeying, Horn tried to rise, and found he was too weak to lift his own weight. He gave a groan.

“Idiots, starving him like that,” the stranger muttered. He reached out and hoisted Horn upright so easily he was astonished. He caught a glimpse of his own arm, on which stringy muscles knotted with effort stood out under pallid skin, and then the stranger was hustling him down a slope and he could barely keep his balance.

Summoning enough energy for delay, if not for resistance, Horn tried to take in his surroundings. The sky
was pale with high driven clouds; the ground too was whitish, and here and there it sparkled. Salt-pans? That fitted. A trickle of the water that had been poured over him ran into his mouth, and that was salty. Distantly he heard the soughing of ocean against a beach.

Over to his right, four battered and rusty ships pointed their blunt noses at the sky. Men and women dressed in coarse badly cut garments of a fabric like tweed, guns and daggers belted at their waists, were going to and fro among them.

“Where—where have you brought me?” Horn croaked.

“Don’t waste energy trying to talk!” his escort rapped. “Just keep moving along!”

Horn stumbled on. Salty gravel got into his shoes and cut his feet. Soon, as he was compelled to scramble up a dune, though grass-like plants slashed at his shins. And over the crest of the dune …

Camps. Compounds. Stretching for miles. Glittering huts built from blocks of crude rock-salt, patched here and there with brown. Among them huge vats steaming towards the sky, a smear of blueness staining the ground nearby. As Horn managed to focus his eyes, the blur separated into a horde of naked children.

By each of the vats a brawny human was ladling out portions of steaming mush into bowls. More docile than animals, the children waited in dutiful lines to receive their share. Horn had a chance to see them closely as his companion hurried him along a well-beaten path bordering the compounds but separated from them by a pit and a high barbed fence. He raged impotently within himself at the sluggishness of both mind and body; he knew, tinglingly, that what he was seeing was crucially important, but he could only register it with passive eyes that now and then blurred as a last drop of the water he had been drenched with drained out of his hair. His body ached everywhere, his throat was sore, he was bruised
and feeble and all his joints were swollen. He must have been tossed around during his trip here like a sack of rubbish.

At the intersection of this path with another a sharp female voice hailed them, and a woman with an air of authority strode up to them. Desperate, Horn tried to memorize her face, but a fit of dizziness overcame him and all he could cope with was the words she uttered. At least she was speaking Anglic, not some outworld tongue he was ignorant of.

“That’s the one Talibrand sent out from Creew ’n Dith, I suppose! Miserable-looking specimen, isn’t he? Didn’t they even pipe any food into him on his way here?”

“Doesn’t look like it,” Horn’s escort grunted. “He’s so weak he can barely stand up. I guess Talibrand must have it in for him in a big way!”

“That’s for sure.” The woman consulted a sheaf of dirty paper she was carrying. “Which way did he come in, anyhow—on Rynalman’s route?”

‘That’s right. The Arthworld way. Why?”

“We have to send him back by a different one. Talibrand insisted. Hmmm—let’s see now. Oh yes, that’s pretty convenient. He can go through Vernier, with the batch Firgal’s processing right now from out Lostworld way. Take him down and get him blued up, and stick him in with the others. Plurivel’s going to Vernier this trip and he can cram in a few more, I guess.”

“How’s about the rest of it?” the man demanded. “Conditioning, and sterilization?”

“Conditioning not,” the woman answered, riffling through her papers. “The way I hear it, Talibrand wants this to hurt as much as possible—says someone’ll take a whip to him right away if he starts claiming to be a human being, or maybe have his brain pithed. I don’t seem to have anything here about sterilization, though. …”

That’s me they’re discussing
. The fact seeped slowly into Horn’s awareness.
That’s the “logical, beautiful” fate Talibrand planned for me!
He glanced around wildly, seeking a way of escape, but when his escort took hold of his arm he lacked even the strength to throw off the grip.

The woman shuffled her papers together with a shrug. “Well, what the hell’s the difference whether he’s sterilized or not? All he’ll be getting from now on is android company, and the kind of human woman who orders an android with the urge intact isn’t the kind likely to risk having children by anybody. Okay, move him along.”

Moaning, trying to struggle but betrayed in every feeble attempt by his own wasted muscles, Horn was forced along until they reached a large low prefabricated building where—as the woman had put it—Firgal was “processing.” The sight drained Horn of all power to act; he could only absorb the terrible truth that Lars Talibrand must have learned, the truth which meant he had to follow the android trade to its terminal on Earth even though he risked his life.

Firgal was processing children. Human children. Scores—perhaps a hundred—were crowded into a wire cage at one end of the building: peaked, mostly naked and revealing skins of every human shade from stark white to deepest brown, aged between six months and six years. Horn’s head rang with their screaming. Women in dirty gowns dragged each in turn from the cage and tossed them on a table, where a man in a full-head mask stabbed them with a hypodermic, rolled them over to sever the nerves governing the sexual reflexes with a fast blast from a self-sterilizing light-scalpel, and waved them onwards to make room for the next.

Horn’s grasp of reality failed under the shocking impact of the spectacle. His eyes rolled upwards in their
sockets and he slumped into a faint. When he woke up, his skin was a brilliant blue.

Detachedly, he was aware that this time he had been better looked after; he had been fed intravenously and his bruises and aches had been attended to. But that was only something he turned his mind to in order to distract himself from the appalling sight of his own hand.

Blue? I can’t believe it! But—but it is my hand!

They had taken his clothes and draped him in one of the standard android ponchos. He swept it off and saw that the blue stretched unbroken from head to foot.

In memory he heard again the harsh voice of the woman who had said, “Someone’ll take a whip to him right away if he starts claiming to be a human being, or maybe have his brain pithed.” Despair that would not lift clamped over his mind as he realized how true that was—how often back on Earth friends of his had complained of having to return a newly bought android under guarantee and train a replacement from scratch.

And who had the right to order his brain pithed, the higher nerve-centers destroyed so that he was fit only for repetitive menial chores—the woman in charge here, Plurivel the captain of the ship he was being sent out on? Yes, of course! Anyone could, any human being! Androids were legally property! And—he had to shut his eyes as he swayed, then instantly to re-open them as the imagined vision of Jan Talibrand’s glee besieged him—wasn’t that the climax Lars’s traitor-brother must be hoping for?

Anyhow, with whom could he share his new and terrible knowledge? He was surrounded by a crowd of young male androids, presumably the load destined for Vernier and eventually Earth, but they still displayed the aftereffects of recent intensive conditioning, glazed eyes,
streels of drool hanging from the corners of their slack mouths, wet stains on the hems of their ponchos. In that state they were barely aware of the most violent pain, and wholly incapable of following a complicated sentence.

Sick, he drew his poncho around him again, for he was shivering, and sat down. So this was how his foolhardy venture was doomed to end! He had done as he hoped and made the same discovery as Lars Talibrand, and he was not even going to be accorded a quick clean death.

For everything pointed to a single conclusion. There were no android factories anywhere off Earth. There were no “imported androids.” There were only human children stolen from their homes.

He remembered the fringe of uncertainty on the map Dize had loaned him, where the cartographers had had to mark some of the names of inhabited planets against more than one star. That was the zone where so-called android traders gathered their human harvest, among worlds too poor and struggling to afford their own starships and interstellar communicators, around which the frontier of colonial expansion ebbed and flowed so that it was seldom certain whether their inhabitants had survived or not, far away on uncaring Earth.

He gained insight into the manner of that harvest from seeing a ship on the port when he and the rest of Plurivel’s load were being herded into dank echoing holds for their trip to Vernier. That other ship had been attacked and defended; its plates were splattered with shot, and an explosion had distorted two of the drive-tubes. Horn pictured the traders dropping from the sky above some crude village, where people cut off from the mainstream of galactic commerce were trying to recreate some semblance of civilization, seizing their prey, being vainly challenged and making good their escape
under cover of advanced weaponry bought with their evil profits.

Once caught, the children—selected because they were too young to understand what was happening—would be brought here or to some similar encampment for “processing.” If it chanced that some captive was precocious, and might later recall details that would give away the raiders, then he (or she, but the demand for female androids had greatly diminished) was ruthlessly brainwashed into amnesia. Losses in transit were highest among this group, and most of them were sold off before they reached Earth, for the treatment left them dull-witted and surly.

All this Horn picked up in dribs and drabs, some by building on what the androids he was shipped with could tell him, some from hints dropped by trained androids with whom he came into contact during transshipment on Vernier. At first he was amazed that not one of them questioned what they had been told about their origin in a factory; then he realized that the truth about human birth is incredible to many children, and anyhow neither manufacture nor birth was accessible to conscious memory. They might intellectually, much later, learn to wonder about what they had been told, but the story had been so effectively hammered home that at present they clung to it like a religious dogma.

They knew what caused their blueness, and talked freely about it—a semiliving suspension of protein which on reaching the epidermis reacted with one of the normal skin secretions. It would go on renewing itself until death.

Sizing up his chance companions, he realized after a while that he had not yet run across any who might later make a Dordy. He could see many who might develop like Berl into a skilled manual worker, but where were the seeds of the intelligence, the inquiring attitude,
the insight into character Dordy had displayed?

That too he figured out. He was among a batch of averagely intelligent androids with good mechanical skills and a generally calm temperament. Those who rated above this level received special treatment, advanced education on some planet whose name he could not establish, and double the normal conditioning to restrain their nervy, unreliable personalities.

That too was something Lars Talibrand must have discovered. Perhaps he had received the all-important clues from one of those exceptional androids? He had trusted Dordy on sight; something must have persuaded him that he could confide in a blue-skinned stranger. …

It was bitter consolation to Horn to realize that in fact even though Talibrand had followed the trail clear to Earth where the armor of his galactic citizenship was useless, he had never learned so much about the android trade as his successor. He had never, after all, seen it from the inside. But there seemed to be no use to put that knowledge to!

Growing desperate, he tried to arouse the interest of his companions, but for them human beings were simply the bosses who tossed them around from planet to planet and beat them when they refused to obey. Why should they feel attracted to the idea that they were themselves human? Hopeless! Hopeless! Trapped in his blue disguise, Horn more than once wondered how long he could resist the temptation of suicide.

On Vernier the original group was split up, Horn being put in with the higher grades, and together with several strangers from another ship they were carried somewhere else. Horn couldn’t identify the world; all he saw of it was the edge of a spaceport, and the hard-faced dealers who came to look the new arrivals over declined to answer any questions, merely studied their prospective purchases. At an auction he was bought by a ship’s
captain who treated androids more harshly than either Larrow or Shembo, for he transported them without artificial gravity in the holds, to economize on power. That was the most terrifying experience yet for Horn: to float, as he must have done on the journey out from Creew ’n Dith when most of the time he was mercifully unconscious, in a springy cage of leather thongs while all around his companions moaned and cried out and sometimes vomited foul liquids that drifted weightlessly until they struck the thongs.