Last Stand of the DNA Cowboys (6 page)

Richthofen was already shaking his head. Wellblessed looked
down at the shapeless novice's shift that was his only garment. Hell, they didn't even give out drawers in this place.

'I can't go out into the world looking like some cheesehead monk.'

'Then return to your empathy class.'

Wellblessed leaned back against the rail and slowly nodded. Okay, Richthofen, he thought. He knew when he was getting the shaft. 'So I go out looking like this? Don't I even get an SG?'

'You'll be given a stasis generator.'

'Don't do me any favors.'

Master Richthofen was clearly through with him. 'Try to be off the Sanctuary by nightfall.'

Nightfall came quickly, and with it a torrential downpour. By the time he had drawn a stasis generator, charged up, and scrounged a little food from the kitchens, the rain was coming down in straight gray sheets. Wellblessed had a sneaking suspicion that the weather conditions had been arranged for his benefit. Soaked and desolate, he trudged through the dripping ornamental garden. He was making for the Half Bridge. It seemed an appropriate way to go out. He was in the Place of Meaningful Boulders and getting close to the bridge when, for the second time that day, his thoughts were interrupted by a voice from behind.

'Billy Oblivion, wait up!'

It was strange to hear his own name spoken aloud after so long. The imprinted personality of Novice Wellblessed dropped away as though it had never been. For better or worse, he was Billy Oblivion again. Unfortunately, the return of his old personality came with a brand-new problem. The voice was hideously familiar. Billy turned and saw that his duplicate was coming after him.

'What do you want?' Billy demanded.

'I want to come with you.'

Billy halted. 'Don't be ridiculous. Two identical people can't go traveling together. There are places were they'd stone us to death as an abomination in the eyes of Zanthar.'

Oblivion II looked desperate. 'If I stay here, they'll run off another replica and put me in your place.'

Billy wiped the rain from his shaved head. 'I feel for you, but it ain't my problem anymore.'

The duplicate had a dangerous look in his eye. Billy had never thought he was capable of looking so mean. The two of them realized at the same moment that only one of them was going to walk away from that place. It might have been that Oblivion II was a fraction slower. Later Billy would come to believe that it was because the other was the copy. An original had to be just that bit better. In any case, Billy had the edge. He was the one standing next to a harmonic arrangement of fist-size chunks of uncut quartz. He grabbed one and swung. The replica tried to block the blow with his arm. Billy heard the snap of bone. He swung again and again, overcoming the problem of fighting someone who thought exactly as he did by resorting to mindless rage. He wanted to kill; he wanted to completely obliterate the interloper. He was not killing himself. He was killing a thing. He was killing a created thing. Nobody could blame him for that. It was him or it. If he did not kill it, it would usurp his life and his personality. He went on smashing at it. Die, you bastard!

The replica was down, but Billy kept beating it. He knelt beside it, hammering its face with the rock until it was a bloody pulp. Blood was every where. Blood was making the rock slippery and hard to grip. Blood stained his shift. There was blood all over the wet gravel. The rain running down his forearms was bloodred.

Finally he stopped. He was sobbing, totally spent. The body was unrecognizable. It was not him anymore. He found that he could not get up off his knees. He flopped onto his back, and the rain beat down on his face. The water tasted good as it ran into his mouth. He had killed himself and lived through it. After long minutes he found the strength to roll over and push himself up onto all fours. He started coughing and retching. The food that he had brought from the kitchen for the journey was scattered and trampled into the gravel. He forced himself to his feet and stumbled to the bank of the stream. In a daze, he stripped off his garment and tried to wash off the worst of the blood. As he wrung it out, he stared at the nothings on the other side of the water. What did they have in store for him? Shivering with cold and shock, he pulled on the wet shift and started toward the bridge.

At the top of the Half Bridge he stopped and briefly looked back at the rain-drenched Sanctuary. The three huge pods, like monster tulips on squat, thick stalks, and the taller spires of the minarets were all but obscured by a thick mist. Momentarily he had an impulse to run, to beg them to take him back. He knew that was impossible. He turned on his stasis generator and stepped into the nonmatter.

No matter how many times he crossed the nothings, nothing could stop the fear of that first step. It was more than just the flash that the SG might turn out to be malfunctioning. It was the truly primal terror of entering an environment that was so utterly alien that it was almost beyond comprehension. There was also a very practical reason to be afraid. Billy had no way to navigate. No lizardbrain for him: Aledya and the Minstrel Boy had had the transplants. Nobody had ever tampered with him. He was going in blind, hoping that he would stumble across a stable area before he died of hunger or thirst or his SG ran out of power.

The portable stasis generator, even running at full power, could not maintain stable reality much beyond the area immediately around its user. Billy had about ten inches of clear air in front of his face, and a patch of solid ground formed each time he put a foot down. He could breathe and he could move, and the temperature of his strictly limited reality remained constant, neither warm nor cold. There was nothing to do but continue to trudge on. There was no sound but his own breathing and absolutely nothing to look at but the bright swirling fog. Billy knew that one of the first dangers in the nothings was a crushing hypnotic boredom. The only things that punctuated it were the moments when his subjective gravity shifted through ninety degrees and pitched him onto his side us though he had been hit by a sudden pile-driving wind. It was painful and annoying, but at least it was something. There was also a strange, cold comfort in the way the SG was always able to produce enough solid ground for him to fall on.

In the nothings time quickly ceased to exist. Billy had no idea how long he had been walking. It could have been no more than a few minutes, or it could have been a day. He knew that he was hungry and that his mouth was very dry, but the nothings seemed to provide a certain kind of numbness. When everything around him was so dangerously strange, his own minor discomforts
hardly seemed to signify. He simply plodded on. Walking became the core of his being. He helped maximize the numbness by making himself as mindless as he could. He behaved like a prisoner on a treadmill: one foot after the other; don't even think about it. If he thought about anything, it would open the door to the fear that he knew was waiting for him below the surface. Perhaps he was not going anywhere at all. Maybe he was just walking around in circles, if such a thing as a circle existed in the nothings. There were stories about people in his situation, people who had crossed the nothings without a lizard or a lizardbrain to guide them and had never come to stasis again. In the end they just gave up and turned off their SGs. Of course, those stories had to be pure speculation. How could anyone be there to know for sure? Even so, the stories were far from comforting.

In a place where the senses were so completely deprived, a small tactile change in the ground under Billy's feet was a major event. It felt like a small pebble under his big toe. He looked down, scarcely daring to hope. It
was
a pebble. The ground under his feet had taken on an uneven texture. There was dirt and small rocks, not just the flat colorless; basic matter that had been there previously. Had he really reached somewhere solid? He took two more paces — and he was out. The nothings were behind him.

The nature of the place he had reached was something else. The nothings were still all around him, but they were at a distance. He seemed to be in a tunnel of stability that had been driven straight through the nonmatter. The purpose of the tunnel seemed to be to enclose a wide, smooth six-lane highway that ran to distant perspective points in either direction. The rocks and gravel under his feet were the hard shoulder of the highway.

The road through the nonmatter was like nothing Billy had ever seen before. A muted light came from glowing spheres, almost like miniature, featureless moons that hung close to the curved roof formed by the edge of the nothings overhead. Billy's initial reaction was that the road was empty, but he quickly realized that he was wrong. A procession of faint, ghostly shapes moved along it. They were formless and indistinct. He could not make out any real details of their shape, but they were definitely there. It was as if they were something that was leaking through from another dimension, or maybe weird visual echoes of travelers who had gone before. Billy shivered. The shapes gave him the creeps; also, it was much colder in the tunnel than it had been in the nothings. The numbness was going, and his thirst and hunger were much more intrusive. He might have arrived somewhere, but it was an exceedingly minimal somewhere, and it looked as though he still had a long way to go before even his most basic needs could be satisfied. He supposed he should have been grateful, but it was hard as he stood beside the highway, wondering which way to go and without even a coin to flip.

After some pointless pondering, he made an arbitrary choice, turned to the right, and started walking. As far as he could estimate, he had been walking for maybe an hour and was deeply unhappy about it when he heard the noise behind him. It was the hum of a very real engine. He spun around. Was it really a vehicle? A solid, human vehicle? All he saw was a moving dot way off in the distance.

The dot was getting noticeably bigger, and the hum was growing louder. Whatever it was, it seemed to be moving at quite a speed, and in a short space of time he was able to make out some details. It was definitely a ground car, either red or orange, squatly streamlined and with some sort of greenhouse canopy in the front. Even though he did not have a clue as to what he might expect from whoever might be riding in the car, Billy stepped out into the road and started waving his arm. The car sped along the highway surface on a slickfield that was probably only millimeters thick. The thing was larger than he had first assumed — from base to roof, it was eight or nine feet high. Although built for minimum wind resistance, it was chunky and bulbous, like an egg lying on one flattened side. Gaudy, stylized flames were painted on its bodywork, and there was indeed a greenhouse canopy at the front for the driver and/or passenger. The whole thing ended in a set of stubby fins.

At first it looked as though the car was not going to stop. In fact, for a few moments Billy had the impression that it was deliberately going to run him down. Then there was the hiss of retrojets, and the garish machine slewed to a halt right beside him. A section of canopy opened, and a face peered out.

'You look a mess.'

A story came effortlessly to Billy. 'I was attacked and robbed. I've been wandering around in the nothings.'

'Where are you headed?'

'That's hard to say. I don't even know where I am.'

'You want a ride?'

'I'd be real grateful.'

The face, which had narrow blue eyes, sandy hair, and a spiky beard, grinned. The grin was not particularly pleasant. 'How could you be grateful if you was robbed? Strikes me you wouldn't have too much to be grateful with.'

Billy did his best to look honest, harmless, and pathetic at the same time. He had no trouble with the last part. 'If you could give me a ride to civilization, I'd owe you a big one.'

'In my experience, being owed a big one and getting a big one are two very different things.'

Billy made a helpless gesture. 'What can I tell you? I'm stranded.'

The face appeared to be thinking; then it made up its mind. 'Ah, what the hell. I can always toss you out again if you bug me.' A hatch to the rear of the canopy popped open. 'Climb aboard.'

Entering the vehicle was like crawling into a mobile womb. The walls were covered with quilted pink, tuck-and-roll leather. The floor was as soft as a mattress and was covered in a thick pile of shaggy pink fur. A hologram projection panel on the ceiling filled the rear of the vehicle with undulating abstract erotics. Billy was scarcely inside when the hatch sighed closed, the driver banged it into drive, and the machine accelerated away. Billy lost his balance and sprawled into the fur.

The driver glanced back. 'Come and sit up here.'

The driver occupied a contoured command chair in the nose of the ground craft. With a fast gesture he indicated the smaller contour berth beside him. Billy crawled forward and eased himself into the berth.

'Nice machine.'

'It'll do.'

The driver was short and thickset, with pale, almost transparent skin. He was dressed in a mylar jumpsuit with red and blue slogans on it written in a chunky script Billy could neither read nor recognize. He turned his head and grinned at Billy. He had a mouthful of bad crooked teeth.

'You know something? I almost ran you down.'

'I'm glad you didn't.'

'Thought you were a stinking priest. Can't stand priests. Always try to run them down if I find them in the road.'

'I'm no priest.'

'You look like one in that there dress.'

'It's all the robbers left me.'

'They left you your SG.'

Billy nodded.

The driver glanced at him suspiciously. 'Most of the boys I know would have taken the SG double fast. A guy who's one with the non can't come after you.'

'Maybe they had pity on me.'

The driver shook his head. 'Thieves with pity? What's the world coming to?'

He suddenly stuck out a hand. 'The name's Schook Jetstream.'

Billy briefly clasped the hand. 'Please to meet you. I'm Billy.'

Jetstream took another look at Billy. The suspicion was back. 'I knew a Billy once.'

'There are a lot of Billys in this world.'

Schook Jetstream nodded thoughtfuxxly. 'I guess there are.'

For the moment, at least, his worries seemed to be allayed. He fumbled in one of the many patch pockets of his reflective jumpsuit. 'You want a rubyjewel?'

He was holding out one of the clear, red, very powerful stimulant beads. If he lived on those things, Billy thought, it would account for the transparency of his skin.

'Sure, I don't mind if I do.' The rubyjewel would certainly stop the pangs of hunger.

Schook Jetstream seemed pleased by the response. 'Least you can't be no priest. No priest would take one of those.'

Billy put the bead in his mouth, but his throat was too dry to swallow. 'Do you have any water?'

Jetstream shook his head. 'I got a beer, though.'