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SIXTY-THREE The Cosmic Collective

She awoke alone, in blackest darkness, without feeling in her hands and feet.

At first Rosalind thought she'd simply fallen asleep on the command deck of one of the shuttles, until she remembered that they were parked, at present, on the outer surface of the canopy. Nevertheless her hips and shoulders ached from lying on a hard floor in an uncomfortable position, and it was very cold.

Trying to move, she found that her arms were bound together behind her back and her legs tied at the ankles.

And she was naked.

With the greatest possible effort of will, she hammered back the terror threatening to overwhelm her and focused on the immediately practical. In the feeble gravity of 5023 Eris, she must have been lying here for a long time to feel this stiff and sore. Bound as she was, there was no gag in her mouth—be grateful for small favors, she told herself—and she was certain from its bone-numbing chill that the floor beneath her was metal. Despite that paralyzing cold, she also felt stifled somehow, as if the air were unusually humid.

It wasn't until a loose strand of her own hair floated past her face that she began to guess the truth: she was breathing poorly oxygenated liquid fluorocarbon.

She must be inside the asteroid!

No wonder she was cold! The drawback of fluorocarbon in general was that it conducted heat away from one's body more efficiently than air or even water did—this stuff she was breathing now had been hanging in the absolute cold of space for a billion years. Even the cold-blooded Mister Thoggosh maintained his office at close to mammalian body temperature. The invention of central heating, he'd once told her, had contributed as much to the rise of nautiloid civilization as the discovery of coffee—to which he credited the Industrial Revolution—had to her own.

Also, she was willing now to wager that her aching muscles had every bit as much to do with a marginal supply of oxygen as it might with gravity or lack of heat.

Something else brushed her face, almost shattering her resolve to remain calm. Whatever it was, it had been slimy, and colder than her own flesh. The sensation lasted only an instant, but she had jerked away, hurting her wrists and ankles.

"Aha, I see that you have awakened!" The voice coming to her out of the darkness was as liquid as the medium conveying it, even colder, and ominously familiar. "You will be interested, I suspect, to learn that you cannot be found by your friends and will soon be presumed dead—or in hiding. No one but you and I will ever know the truth, that you have been . . . what is the term they use? `Appropriated'—to spend the brief remainder of your life serving the most whimsical desires of your captor."

Cautiously, Rosalind tested her own voice. "Is it necessary to gloat about it?"

"But that is one of the principal benefits of doing villainous deeds, is it not?"

Rosalind felt that she trembled at the edge of recognizing the faceless speaker. His English was unaccented, uninflected by any trace of emotion. His elocution was flawless and pleasant to listen to, even when he addressed unpleasant ideas.

"In time, of course, a gullible few will come to blame you for the brutal murder of that waterbug thing—disregarding the utter lack of any credible motivation on your part—and of the vile slug who temporarily commands this asteroid vessel."

She started again. "You killed Mister Thoggosh?"

"He's as dead as dead can be," the voice rose, almost losing itself in an inhuman, hysterical squeal, "with poison in his tea (would that read better, `sea'?)—they'll find it in his pee, adding up to three for me! And now we two will see," the voice sank to an ominous, terrifying whisper, "what I shall do . . . with thee!"

Rosalind shivered violently and it had absolutely nothing to do with the cold. She'd recognized the voice at last, and the one thing that frightened her even more than the presence of Nikola Deshovich—dread master of both the Russian and American KGB, meticulous student of the most draconian methods developed by Joseph Stalin, implacable dictator of the United World Soviet, and infamous as "the Banker" for settling his old political debts "with interest"—was the presence of a Nikola Deshovich apparently gone stark, raving mad.

Involuntarily she spoke his name just as some soft, slimy object brushed her upper arm. Her muscles jumped. Whatever it had been wriggled away across her unprotected flesh.

"Yes," came the voice in a breathy, almost wistful tone. "It is I, Nikola Deshovich."

A terrifying silence ensued, during which Rosalind attempted desperately to concentrate on something other than her fear, to recall, for example, how she'd gotten here.

The last thing she could remember was being on her way to the house of Eichra Oren. She and the Antarctican were on the verge of some sort of personal understanding again, now that the ugly business with Toya was over—and who was she kidding, with this "verge" bullshit? She and Eichra Oren had been powerfully attracted to one another, almost since the first time they'd laid eyes on one another. No matter what had happened with Pulaski, or even with Estrellita, "some sort of understanding" between them had always been as inevitable and unavoidable as the sun rising in the morning.

All right, then, honesty taken care of, she'd been walking through the woods, almost within sight of the moral debt assessor's house, when she'd felt something brush past her face, a mist or perhaps cobwebs, she'd thought, and then—

Then nothing.

Then this.

Suddenly there was noise in the darkness again, an eerie and unrhythmic wheezing that disturbed all of her instincts as a healer. "In my present unenviable condition, I sometimes lose self-control to my . . . enthusiasms," Deshovich informed her. "Say rather that they sometimes gain control of me. You must forgive me. I assure you that it's only momentary and that I'm practically harmless."

Rosalind knew this last was a horrible lie. "Your present condition?" she asked, trying to keep her voice even, which was very difficult. "Tell me about your present condition, Nikola Deshovich. Perhaps I can help. I am a doctor, you know."

"You don't say." Again the wheezing noise. "I had no idea. I simply wanted someone, preferably a young boy or a woman, from the human camp. As you can see, I've settled for a woman. It was a worthy attempt, Doctor, but I'm afraid that even if I were to trust you, which obviously I cannot, there's precious little you could do for me, medically speaking, that hasn't already been done."

"What happened to you?"

"Quite an embarrassing series of events, really. My flagship, the Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria, was unceremoniously shot out from under me, practically the moment I arrived. I believe I have your famous General Gutierrez to thank for this, although I rather doubt that he had the satisfaction of knowing it at the time. Nevertheless, I intend to see that he goes down in history as did Benedict Arnold, Erwin Rommel, or Georgi Zhukov—posthumously, of course. I barely escaped with my life."

In the stifling darkness, the unseen speaker paused again for a moment, apparently to catch his breath, which continued to sound labored to Rosalind when he resumed.

"And that was only to begin with. We managed to limp away. I was superficially wounded, when the flagship began breaking up, by an ungrateful protégée of mine, a young woman who seized the tragic moment to exact her petty revenge."

Rosalind controlled her tone. "I see."

"Being a young woman yourself, you probably do. You're really all alike, you know. `All pink on the inside,' as the saying goes. Then my escape capsule struck the outer covering of this asteroid, sticking fast and killing my perfidious little companion who, I regret to say, was crushed beneath me. I was a man of considerable substance at the time. This lifepod was equipped with an emergency spacesuit of sorts, really nothing more than airtight insulation, without supplemental oxygen or environmental control. I was farsighted enough to have obtained a supply of the solvent which our scientists had produced in order to get our Spetznaz forces through the canopy."

"Tell it to the Marines," Rosalind replied. "I saw how it worked: flies stuck in amber. Not a pretty sight."

"Knowing Russian quality control, I had taken the precaution to acquire a sample of the PRC formula. I emerged from the pod, which I suppose would have killed my young lady even if the fall had not. I sprayed the area around my feet with the solvent. The canopy quickly sealed again over my head and I climbed down one of those astonishing trees. It's simply marvelous what even a man of my former girth can accomplish without gravity to hinder him. Dodging troops of every stripe and occasional withering gunfire, as I once did escaping from Siberia to India, I eventually found my way to the excavation site."

"So I was right," declared Rosalind, perversely proud of her deductive ability. "We're inside the asteroid."

"Where else could we be?" the Banker acknowledged. "Although I must say getting down here all in one piece the first time wasn't quite as easy as I may have implied. You see, I hadn't survived the landing entirely without injury. The humiliating fact is that I'd broken an arm and a leg—which slowed me appreciably when someone threw a fragmentation grenade at me just outside the entrance. I fell into the air lock—and with an agonizing slowness, let me tell you as a former sitting duck—pierced through with a dozen rifle bullets, believing that for all practical purposes I was a dead man."

"It's too bad wishing can't make it so," Rosalind observed wryly. She was tired of this conversation in the dark, tired of being frightened, and beginning to get angry.

"Well, in a manner of speaking only partly metaphorical, my dear Doctor, that's precisely what I was." The Banker chuckled eerily. "A dead man. And still am, I suppose, despite my dubious good luck in being taken in and `healed' by the benevolent trilobitoid automaton who so modestly refers to herself as Model 17."

"You said something before about three killings." She was reluctant to risk another hysterical reaction, but Deshovich was dangerously unpredictable whatever she did, and there was one question that had to be answered. "Was it you who injured Sam?"

"Sam? I don't believe I know any Sam, here on this—"

"Eichra Oren's dog. Large, white, shaggy?"

"Ah," the Banker wheezed. "An experiment of sorts. I was endeavoring to squash a rather disgustingly large spider at the time, but had only a partial understanding of the mechanisms involved. I don't believe Model 17 completely trusted me at that point. My only consolation was that the dog didn't die instantly."

Rosalind laughed. "He didn't die at all! He transferred his personality to the implant network. They're cloning him a new body right now. You lose, Banker, Sam is alive!"

Silence was followed by another of Deshovich's ominous chuckles. "And do you also believe in the tooth fairy, Doctor? There is no Sam. I killed him. Or I am Sam, if you prefer. His `personality' as you call it, is my cleverest ruse so far, enabling me to communicate on an intimate basis with my enemies, and they're never the wiser. In the end, of course, their trusting nature will destroy them."

Rosalind would have gasped at the enormity of what the Banker had told her if the fluorocarbon had allowed it. Sam irrevocably dead and his cheerful surviving spirit a hoax? As it was, she remained silent, feeling stunned and defeated.

"Not that I haven't made mistakes," Deshovich went on. "I wasted days stalking something called a `leeroo obeelnay' before discovering, quite by accident, that it was no more than a trainable domestic with the brains of a fruit fly. The maddening part of planning and executing these things is that it's so difficult telling who's who among all these damnable animals. Don't you find it so?"

"They're not animals, Nikola Deshovich, they're people!" she shouted, then, remembering her own helplessness, forced herself to calm down. "They only look like animals."

"Whereas," the Banker replied cooly, "animals of my acquaintance happen to look like people. I learned long ago that it scarcely makes any difference, in the end."

"A very convenient philosophy." The man sounded just like Empleado, except that Arthur was all theory on the outside, wrapped around a core of basic gutlessness. "Is that what let you murder a sea-scorpionoid and poison Mister Thoggosh?"

"Dear me, no. For the most part, I do these things because I enjoy them so much. I notice you neglected to mention destroying your shuttlecraft, but since I accomplished that after I took you, you've no way of knowing about it. Nonetheless, you can hardly understand what I'm doing here if you don't know about my setting fire to them. All three are no more by now than ashes and embers. And now that I'm about to work my evil will on you, Doctor, your friends up there will be at each other's throats, probably before the sun rises again."

This time, when something long, cold, flexible, and slimy stroked her legs in the darkness, to her amazement the adrenaline it generated helped her keep her head. "And Model 17," she replied, "unknown to the people on either side, and in violation of the basic instructions her builders programmed into her, is just going to stand by and let you get away with all these atrocities?"

"Model 17, my dear, suffers terribly from a number of internal conflicts." If it was Deshovich touching her this way, his voice gave no indication of it. "True, she's programmed to aid sapient beings of all species. However she was also programmed to an astonishing degree of paranoia regarding certain subjects. I happen to be something of a paranoid, just like any powerful leader. From the beginning, there was a sort of automatic sympathy between her and myself."

"That's right." Rosalind nodded. "The beliefs you share are completely unnatural for any sapient being. Fundamentally, they arise from an extraordinary sense of personal unworthiness, giving rise to an insecurity which in turn produces an exaggerated and unhealthy fear of every known phenomenon. The mildest form was once called `liberalism.' I've often thought that this, rather than any real threat, is what caused the Predecessors to flee the Solar System."

The Banker laughed. "I'm aware how deeply Model 17 fears return of the Eldest, if that's what you mean. That was the first thing she told me of when I regained consciousness. As much as I wished, I could not prevent her telling your people. I only narrowly succeeded in persuading her to conceal my presence. I argued that she and I stand for the same principle, the Cosmic Collective."

"Except that with you, it's an ideology, whereas with her it's an unintentional programming bug."

"How uncharitable—but I see that you grow restless. Perhaps you're bored. Or perhaps you're looking forward to what I'm about to do with you. I'm certainly looking forward to it, myself. To finish, I warned Model 17 that the intruders here included not only enemies and traitors to our common principle, but spies for the one power she fears beyond reason—the Eldest."

"But that's a lie!"

"My dear doctor—you know, I don't believe I caught your name—Model 17 took me in," he was beginning to sound hysterical again, "and I simply returned the favor!" His breath came to her again in a wheeze as he calmed himself. "But I've been an inconsiderate host. I forgot that you lack certain of my new-found sensory capacities, among them the ability to see in what you think of as the dark. Please allow me to correct my little mistake."

Light gradually began to fill the room, emanating evenly from the walls. Rosalind saw that she'd been bound with some sort of heavy, plastic-coated wire, now cutting into her flesh painfully. She blinked and looked up. Standing over her was something straight out of the worst nightmares of a madman.

The principal element seemed to be the humped, segmented carapace of a giant trilobite, like the hollow corpse—only hundreds of times larger—of a dead sow bug. Flattened and spread across its inner surface, protected by the curve of the shell, were the internal organs of a human being, sealed in transparent plastic.

It was like a high-school exercise in dissection. A bewildering array of wires, and tubes filled with bubbling fluid, led from each organ to those of some other species, probably a trilobite, seemingly mixed at random among them, or to various electronic devices. Rosalind thought she recognized a pacemaker for the heart.

The spiked edge of the carapace was fringed with an indeterminate number of hairy, armor-jointed legs, each ending in a powerful claw. Two of these legs had been removed and the shell notched to make room for Deshovich's remaining unbroken limbs. His injured arm and leg lay buried among his internal organs, drawing sustenance from the gurgling plumbing. Perhaps they were in the process of healing. Perhaps they were there for good and would eventually atrophy away.

The sexual organ—Rosalind averted her eyes and gulped back vomit—cruelly barbed and armored, had a hundred tiny legs of its own. It seemed to be a living thing in itself, perhaps the nonsapient male component of a species otherwise consisting entirely of females. Tubes and wiring had made it a part of Deshovich. She had never imagined anything could be so vile, brutal, and obscene.

The head was almost as bad. Its back was shielded by a skull and face like Model 17's, worn something like a hat. What was left of the human face lay exposed on the underside, but was only partly flesh. The rest was a flexible substance like the leather between a lobster's joints. One eye was intact. The other was artificial, wired into what remained of Deshovich's brain. Even that had been added to with electronics, and with a bloody, pulpy mass, sealed in plastic, that might have been neurological matter from a trilobite.

"I was in a sorry state by the time Model 17 found me. She wasn't properly equipped to administer first aid to a human being, let alone major reconstructive surgery, so she used what she had: knowledge of her builders' physiology, certain medical supplies laid in for their benefit, equipment and parts provided for her own maintenance. The result is not exactly what you'd call pretty, but it works after its fashion. Modest creature that she is—and a billion years old on top of that—poor Model 17 is highly dissatisfied with her work. This is a stopgap, as she calls it, only good for a thousand years."

Rosalind's overloaded mind reeled. She hadn't regained control of it before the Banker spoke again.

"But I think before we begin, we should enjoy a light lunch. I'm sure you must be famished." One of his claws slashed out abruptly and plucked some living, squirming object from the "air." It was a squid, mottled black and green, eight or nine inches long. She couldn't believe that she hadn't noticed until now that the room was full of the creatures, swarming around like moths in the sudden light.

That had been what she'd felt touching her.

Deshovich stuffed the hapless wriggling creature into the ruins of his mouth and swallowed, making ugly noises. She'd heard that sound before and realized that the man had been catching and eating live squid all the time he'd been talking. She would have vomited there and then if her stomach had contained anything.

When he snatched another, crushed it to death, and pushed it at her face, that didn't stop her.

"Imagine," Deshovich continued, ignoring her as she doubled over in agony, "I need only spend a dozen lifetimes in this state until I am released to death!"

 

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