— TAPE III
AFTER the fusion of the insect-like Angae and the growing masses that followed the outcast Messiah Martin, the fate of the Holy State was inevitable. The State had been the ultimate statement of arrogant humanism and sought in its own way to bring about the unique racial fusion that Martin had found naturally in his period of being a part of the Angae family. It seems incredible that such a primitive society should have resisted so long the singleness of purpose that Martin displayed. His motivation, of course, was his knowledge that the Angae had been fleeing the Theos, the force that had already extinguished the life in one galaxy. It was only a matter of time before it entered this galaxy and there seemed only one way that such a force could be defeated. If his methods appear cruel, consider the alternate approaches that the Holy State had. . . .
Die Anelan de Galactea—Vol. II, ca. 3400
I am the Inquisitor Jarvis on the service of His Most Exalted Plurality, the Premier Anointed of this, our Holy State of Earth. It may seem that in preparing this tape, I take an undue burden of pride upon myself in speaking knowledgeably of this, our Time of Troubles, but my insight into the events leading to this great chaos that is upon us is both intimate and complete. Since I have served as Inquisitor throughout the advent of the thing called Martin, I have collected a number of interrogation and subsidiary tapes and will, as my purpose seems suited, interject these into this recorded document.
There is no God but the State and the Earth is its abiding Mother!
When did I first hear that? It seems centuries ago rather than a mere three decades. It was a part of the teachings of the crèche to reinforce the subtle conditioning of the Mettler serum. The general DNA conditioning was implicit in the molecule of the serum, but the specific semantic content had to be inculcated in us. The finely structured logic of the State would have been apparent to any observer, but it was necessary that each learn a particular esthetic in viewing the grandeur of this final creation that had preserved the human race against its own savagery.
It is this Thing called Martin and the creatures he called down from the stars that have returned us to the brutalized existence of the days before the State. (Hard to imagine but there were days before the State realized its ideal.) Granted, we, and I in particular, limited the infection when we killed the other children in the first prelude to Armageddon in the Great Smokies. Still, Martin remains and is alive and the very embodiment of the Chaos Principle against which all the vassals and the anointed ministers of the State have preached. He is, believe me, the ultimate evil, the Anti-State.
For this reason I pursued him long after that terrible day in the Great Smokies when the alien ship came down from the skies to avenge the loss of the lesser ship, the one upon which Martin and his companions were prisoners. Well, not prisoners really, since they were captured in a remote part of Canada where their parents had taken them and were incorporated into the strange insect life of the ship. Imagine aliens whose knowledge of biochemistry was so superb, whose understanding of the manipulation of the most subtle forces of the universe was so complete that they could change human beings into something that could merge with their society. Martin described himself and his fellow children as “cows.” It seems from all that I have learned that the insect-like aliens (I still do not know what they call themselves) changed the human biochemistry so that the children became “kreels,” leading an aphid-like existence to provide sustenance for the aliens. They became a part of that ship’s group mind, drawing from it the aliens’ most prized talents and secrets. This was the chief mistake of the aliens for they did not realize that Martin and his fellows were different from the normal strain of humans, that this was indeed the reason that their parents had fled our Holy State and taken refuge in the most inhospitable part of the north country.
So Martin and his fellows took charge of the ship, a part of the great fleet that was about to depart from our solar system forever, fleeing some indefinable menace that had destroyed their world. They took the ship and threw the creatures into a sleep, crashing the ship near Cherokee in the Great Smokies. When we attacked the ship finally, we destroyed it and the aliens. How were we to know that this was the first strike in what has become Armageddon for our race? Martin said the aliens were peaceful, that They meant us no harm. Only why have They returned to soar over our cities, meet our air fleets in battle, and devastate our lands? I know now that it stems from a great fear, an overriding fear that transcends their fear of that distant thing that destroyed their world.
It is the fear of Martin.
Martin, who was a departure from humanity, who was changed by them to something inhuman, who returned to his people and found for a moment a friendship he had never had with John Talltrees in the hills beyond Cherokee. Martin, who has since gone on, growing in the human image, expanding in nonhuman ways, carrying a corrupting messianic mission to the shattered peoples of my world. Martin, who threatens the final dissolution of our Holy State, the greatest monolithic spiritual and political structure humans have ever built. The structure that was to usher in a thousand years of peace to our troubled species.
I am resolved, implacable. I will seek him, and kill him. Somehow I will kill him for this is necessary to our survival. Perhaps then the aliens will leave us alone.
After the savage attack against our forces at Cherokee and the destruction of my interrogation van beyond the town (They must somehow have detected that residual personality of Martin lodged in John Talltrees, whom I was interrogating), I managed to summon help and. was returned to Washington where my wounds were tended. Even with the vast resources of St. Bethesda, it was weeks before I could again walk freely and without pain. In the meantime Martin had disappeared, after his fellows had been destroyed in Cherokee. (Face it, admit it. It was I who had them killed. Why not? They were a terrible menace and we had Martin. Besides, they were younger and underdeveloped. I doubt if we could have killed him.)
How find an illusion; how trap a wraith? This was the problem I faced. Yet it had to be done. The first of the alien raids have been carried out against Rome and Chicago, tentatively as though They were testing our strength. They did not use their large ships, as though They feared their power. They were probing and even then our defenses, so long fallow, were almost equal to Them. The rocket pursuits (there were five in Chicago) drove the ship away, but not before it had left the Loop a smoldering ruin. The solution was obvious. Driven by the immediate threat of Martin as They were, I knew that They would sense his death and go away. I had to find him and destroy him. I requested the assignment from my consecrated director, and he, in his wisdom, gave me the blessings of the Holy State.
My taped journal of the period after my hospitalization extracts as:
... the land down to Lake Michigan like one slick of rippled glass with no sign of the grand avenues, the delicate soaring buildings that were our pride... nothing but the mottled glassy greens and browns of fused earth where the beams reached from the sky and made the very ground flow like molasses.
But why Chicago?
And why Rome?
The very antipodes of our culture. Yet of all the cities of the earth, they chose to fall on these two great cities and reduce parts of each to mere spatterings of melted glass and metal. The destroyed area in Rome touched the Augustan Forum but saved most of the rest of the city. We ourselves had long ago reduced the Anti-State symbol of the Vatican, but we had preserved some of the stately buildings. Much of the art we had dismantled and stored in deep parts of the catacombs, recognizing that, while these were dangerous reminders of an earlier chaotic period, no State can truly exist in the minds of men without some evidence of historical continuity. The rationale of this eludes me since these are the relics of the foremost religious state against which we warred a particularly long and vicious battle, but the theosophists and theoreticians of the Holy State had decided that this was necessary.
But why Rome?
Then it came to me. Believing as I now do in racial inspiration I can see the source. Then it was baffling but I knew that it was because he was there. Martin, the Anti-State. Yet how could he be in two places at once? I knew enough of Martin by then not to be dismayed by this question. Martin could. I began to. .. .
I was young then. The voice on the tape is crisp and vigorous with no vacillation. It holds a fervor that has only recently left my tired spirit. If only the Beast could be met and destroyed, these things from another galaxy would simply depart. They would recognize that we no longer posed a threat to Them and They would continue Their flight from the unknown menace that had destroyed Their planet.
That wasn’t my motive, of course. My motive was one of sheer impersonal hate. I could not hate as an individual, not then. My service and devotion to our Holy State was too complete, so rigid that I would never allow myself the luxury of hate. I was the implacable force of this great creation of man, determined to destroy the final blasphemy . . . the Anti-State . . . the Anti-Man.
I read the newscripts that were issued during my months of recuperation and slowly, though the day-to-day news was carefully edited to avoid needless spiritual troubling of the citizens, I saw the pattern emerge. At first there were signs of selective affluence in several of the lower economic areas where rationing was particularly rigid. L’Observatore, the east City tape news, mentioned that the San Togliatti area had met its final tax bill completely and had followed this by three days of unseemly feasting and rejoicing. The tape wondered at the masses of food and drink when there had been no discernible drain on the strained peripheral transportation system. (In those days, in spite of the Great Confrontation, Rome had rebuilt to the limits of its valley and had burst forth to sprawl all along the southern coastline to the very edge of the deadly areas. The problem of maintaining food supplies to the interior of the city was astronomical. The State Chambers of the Blessed Fields were even turning aside applicants, who perforce went to their homes and lay quietly expiring from lack of food.
Yet here was a celebration—no, a bacchanal in the very center of the city, with food and drink abounding in such disgusting plenty that the very inner spirit of a man rose in disgust at such gluttony. The people of the district must have consumed millions of kilos of food and drink in one night and yet there was no sign of unusual drains upon the transportation facilities. Indeed, the tape remarked, enough food had been diverted from the district because of this to supplement the rations of two badly deprived but politically and spiritually less desirable districts.
I considered a similar event in Chicago, but this district had been wiped out in the alien raid while the San Togliatti district was on the edge of the attack, as though the aliens had somehow failed to pinpoint Their target properly. Of course, the Mediterranean forces of Anointed Plurality were based near at hand along the edges of the Belgradian Lake (which peculiar natives still insist was once a thriving capital), and they responded within minutes of the appearance of the ship. They managed to drive it off, seriously damaged, and the San Togliatti district survived.
The decision was, of course, obvious. I prayed for the blessings of food and comfort from my superiors and set out for Rome. Had I been allowed military transport, I would have been there in three hours but the trip required an unhappy four days and when I arrived there was little evidence left of the visitation. Only the scattered baffled words of the people of the district until. . . .
It is true, Señor. I saw him. The others saw him but they will not tell.
Don’t be a fool, Casaletto. They are part of the Holy State. They must tell. They cannot help but tell.
As He said, if all is obedience and all must tell, then why the existence of the Inquisitors ?
He? Who is this man you call He?
He was the one who spoke of the great destiny of our human race and the thing it was to become. He spoke of power, power that was to be apart of all of us and was to be our ultimate proud stance among the stars. He spoke of our greatness to wage war against the ultimate evil.
An unconditioned one, an Anti-State?
No, a man of goodness and strength and terrible vengeance against those that would destroy him.
Let me tell you, Casaletto, what he looked like. He was tall and lean, scarcely more than eighteen with deep burning eyes with odd pupils that looked into your very inner mind. . . .
No, he was not that way at all. He was well above the middle years with fierce yellow-white hair and a look that seemed to hold you close to him and dare you to breathe in his presence. We feared him and thought he was mad.
No, that’s not possible. The creature I want is still only a boy in appearance.
I know nothing of this. He had the appearance of our ancient Moses even to the horn upon his head. As to his features, they seemed to change from day to day as he assimilated followers.
Assimilated?
They became a part of his substance though they still lived. It was his way, but, even though they did not die, their children and their parents spoke to them through him, testing him, and he did not fail a single test.
He taught you to disobey the State, to deny us our terrible need for children?
No, he taught us to be fecund for there are personalities beyond life, crying to be born, and no man is ever lost. He proved that.
He spoke of the Holy State’s failure to feed you?
He spoke of the Holy State as a desperate need of the human race and not lightly to be discarded.
Liar! He is the Anti-State.
No, he is the ultimate consummation of the Holy State.
He is our enemy.
He is our friend and our ally against the ultimate evil that will in too short a time come from the heavens to destroy us and all the spirits that might otherwise be forever immortal.
The aliens? They are strong but we can defeat Them.
No, not Them. Something vastly greater, vastly more deadly, something that is anti-life.
Disgusting. This is an intolerable mons. . . .
There is more to the tape, of course, but only the ravings of a madman. I sent him to the Fields. In those days I could make quick and effective decisions. I don’t know why it is so hard for me to do this now. Has his influence infiltrated my brain in this latter year of my life? No matter. I sent him to the Fields, and after him almost a thousand others who raved in a similar manner. The details were all different. All saw him in some dissimilar manner, although no one ever saw him as an eighteen-year-old boy. They spoke of his powers of persuasion, of the same message of unspeakable menace coming to the human race. They spoke of his powers to create light above them in the darkness, his ability to summon food and drink from nowhere, his ability to strike a peace deacon in his tracks with a gesture, his ability to move great masses by the merest flicker of an eyebrow, of the energies of hell itself that seemed to crawl around his person as he spoke. It was like rabid hysterical mouthings out of some medieval witchcraft trials. In their contact with this creature, they had all become insane and it became necessary that they leave this society of sane men. I had no qualms about it. After all, was this not the total of my conditioning from childhood and that of my father before me?
I left that blighted city and returned painfully to the Americas, crossing the inland ocean and arriving finally in Chicago where the other attack had followed rumors of a similar appearance. Although the descriptions in Rome and in Chicago were different, there was no doubt that it was the same creature. And that it was the creature named Martin who had escaped me in the Carolina mountains after I had brought the State’s Peace to the other children of his group.
I was troubled by what I had read in the distorted ramblings of the lambs of the State in the San Togliatti district. Was his constantly changing appearance mere hysteria or perhaps some kind of mind control that he exerted on the people? Or was it more? The thought that he could indeed incorporate other personalities into him nagged me and I wondered if this was the source of this phenomenon. The method whereby the aliens did this . . . the method he must have learned from their minds disgusted me . . . but I would not discount it. After all, insects eat their dead. . . .
But humans?
But Martin is not human.
(And the thought persisted that this had not happened to John Talltrees but he still harbored a residual personality that seemed to be Martin’s. I dismissed this finally as a particularly subtle form of hypnosis. Like the summoning of the two personalities in the brain of the first Interrogator who met him. Induced schizophrenia, nothing more. Whether or not the personality of his victims persisted, I knew what he and the children I had killed did in the village of Cherokee and the thought brought my dinner boiling up in my mouth.)
The Loop showed the same signs of attack as had the melted area south of the San Togliatti district. (I wonder at the old names. There is nothing in the geography of the area that resembles a “loop,” yet the name for this district persists.) The new buildings in which the State had so gloried were gone, mere dimples of slag against the broader melted swath that the aliens’ beams had cut through the city. Here, the defense had not been so quick and the ship had found a full ten minutes to do its damage. Surprisingly, it had not attacked any other part of the city. Only this section was damaged, and witnesses told me that the great sphere of the ship had hovered above this area, raking it with high-energy beams again and again until the ground boiled and for days thereafter the air was foul with the vapors from the area.
They know. Somehow They know. They can detect him and They are determined to destroy him. I have tried to convey this to my anointed superiors, but they are convinced that the aliens mean the complete destruction of our cities. It is obvious to me that THEY DO NOT. They want to destroy only one thing, the thing that I want most to destroy...this demon in human flesh that I have called Martin.
There were only a few witnesses to interrogate. Most of the people had been trapped in the area and their ashes were mingled with the melted rock and the brackish seawater that had poured in from the lake afterwards. These few I gathered together. Amazingly, they were terrified, but they were more terrified of him than they were of me. I set about to change that.
Citizen, doctrine teaches us that the most exquisite agonies are to be endured for the Holy State, not just endured but gloried in.
Please, Inquisitor, don’t hurt me.
What is pain, dear woman? A transitory thing that exalts the spirit when it serves the greater goals. It is nothing that I joy in giving but I joy in your ability to give this to the Holy State even as much as I joy in your pleasure in giving her something more valuable, the information I need.
About him? I don’t know anything about him.
Perhaps if you commune with your inner senses.
Oh, God, God.
There is no God. Only the ideal State that is the expression of centuries of human God-making.
Please, no more, no more.
You are exalted. I can see it in your expression. Extend your spirit and embrace the State’s anointed servants. Tell us about him.
I will tell you. I’ll tell you. Only . . .
Is he truly dead?
Him? Dead? Of course not. He cannot die any more than I can die.
Your spirit lives in the State but you can die. I assure you, I can demonstrate to you that you can die.
This part of me but I cannot die. I have shared blood with him.
And flesh? Oh, I have known about that filthy doctrine, that illusion he preaches.
No, blood. He learned that somewhere in the mountains, he said. It is the blood only that is needed. Now, we are one. I am he and he is I.
So that he is in this room, I suppose. He is watching and savoring your pain?
Silently. Yes. He is here. Oh-h-h-h.
This is a small part of the loving care I have reserved for him. There will be a day. I will find him and, free of all his tricks, I will talk with him as you and I talk now. I promise you.
Is there that much hate in you?
I serve the Holy State. There is no room for hate, only devotion to this highest of ideals. Tell me about him. Did he take you as a lover?
Me? I would have been honored. No, there was another. He is after all still a young man, scarcely eighteen or nineteen, I would say, but tall and lean with a mature man’s figure and a face with eyes that look into you and beyond and seem to be filled with a million souls looking out of a single window.
Tell me about this other, the whore of the Anti-State.
You call her that?
Isn’t that what she was?
No, she was one of the group who first came down to the lake to listen to him. Only it wasn’t a matter of listening, but rather of experiencing, of seeing in a new way by new colors, of feeling with new nerves, of tasting tastes that had never crossed a human palate before. He was that way. He could expand your consciousness until it encompassed the world in dimensions that had been alien to you.
Drugs, surely drugs.
No, this was something completely different. He was trying to make us see, to bring us into greater unity against the day of Armageddon.
Armageddon? Did he use that term? Did he dare call upon that sacred term?
These are my words. I suppose we each used our own terms, found ways to vocalize what was after all a feeling and a sensing more than a message. It was not that he said anything but rather that we walked with him and experienced what he experienced. The small seconds we were with him seemed like an eternity and his taste-smell-sense-sight-thought became our taste-smell-sense-sight-thought. It was like being in a multiple of worlds, like entering into the real three-dimensional world after having been condemned to live a life confined to the life of a single line.
That’s very poetic. You are obviously an educated woman. Has your education been so sadly neglected that you would abandon the sure teachings of the Holy State for this charlatan?
There is no difference, he told us. He is the extension of the principle of the State, the ideal of unity made flesh. He is not your enemy but your successor.
Enough, enough, I cannot tolerate . . .
I was stupid, of course. To let my emotions, no matter what my devotion to the State, override my control and my primary mission. Still, I have been absolved by my anointed superiors who themselves were horrified at the tape. They understood even though they disapproved. I wept as I had her body removed but I was more determined. I would hunt the Beast down and in the end he would go with my hand to the Fields.
There were others, of course. She was not the only one who had vital information and her loss was not a particularly great one. Had it been, I’m sure that my anointed superiors would have been less tolerant of my weakness. As it was, their reaction held a sort of grudging approbation and one of the Sacred College of the Diet even privately praised my devotion to our ideals. It was enough to fill my spirits, but I promised myself that I would not make such a mistake again.
There were others, as I said. Only a few but enough. . . .
He walked among us and he was good. He was the full realization of humanity.
You saw him?
I touched him. I shared blood with him.
Where did he go?
Away. He went away and took many of us with him. He took me with him.
You went with him ? What luck! Where did he go?
I don’t know.
Another:
Yes, I remember her. She had lived in a small lean-to on the edge of the Loop since her mother died, a rickety lean-to of iron and discarded wood against the back wall of one of the great sacred buildings. She had little to eat, of course. No more than any of us who have not yet conceived or who are past the age of childbearing. She was very dark-haired with deep brown-black eyes, very large so that they seemed to fill a good part of her face. Her skin was pale and perfect except for one small black mole set high on her left cheek. I think it was the cheekbones, thin and marvelously molded with smooth hollows underneath that gave her that delicate fine look with its underlying strength.
Very pretty. You speak like a man rather than a citizen.
She was that way. She could make you feel very much a man. Not that she was conscious of it. It was simply that she responded to you and you to her and there was something like an undercurrent of empathy, of liking . . . no, loving . . . that flowed from her. I can understand why in his youth he would find her so desirable. I envy him.
Envy the Anti-State ? Never mind. Where did they go?
South, I have heard.
Don’t you know? You said you went with them, just as a dozen before you have said the same thing.
A part of me will always be with him, will always live.
The Holy State has forbidden mysticism.
I am a product of the State and its serum. I could not be a mystic if I wished, but this is not mysticism...
And another:
South, that’s all I know. He said it was imperative that he go south.
And another:
He could see a distance into the future, I know. Not as much as he would like but enough. I heard him tell her that he had to go south and that she would come with him. Something about a ship.
And still another:
Yes, he said that there would be a ship. On that last night as they lay together and made love.
You heard this? He allowed you to hear this.
I shared blood with him. He could not have changed it even had he wished. When he made love with her, we all made love with her . . . and with him. . . .
What about the ship?
One of the alien ships. He knew it would crash or be forced down. I don’t know which, but he had to be there.
He hated Them. He plans to destroy Them?
There was a hate, of course, but there was a love too, strange warring emotions. No, he will not kill any of Them. He will become a part of Them and They of him, for that is his ultimate plan.
Part of those . . . things ? Those insects that breed humans for food? They keep men like cows to be milked of their sustenance ?
I cannot find this as disgusting as you, Inquisitor. It is all a part of an order that invests life. Even you, for all of your lack of humanity, are a part of it.. .
That is enough. That is enough. ENOUGH!
South. South. South. That was all I heard. I had to know where south, but I could find nothing more than this vague direction. There were nearly thirty that I questioned, using all of the subtleties of the art I had learned as an apprentice but the artifices of the Inquisitor were not enough. One cannot elicit information where there is no information to be had. I sent them to the Fields, each and every one of them, save a single girl that I kept for my own devices for several days but eventually she too went the way of the others. I might have kept her, but she insisted on sharing blood, that disgusting ritual these beings have developed . . . and I led her personally into her blessedness ... or cursedness. After that I spent over an hour in the bath, ridding myself of her smell and the memory of her touch on my body.
I waited for a week, hoping to find another who could tell me but to no avail. In the latter part of the last week the news came to me. There had been another incursion of the aliens. A ship had come in rapidly (our radar net was now complete and the pursuits were increasingly effective so that the aliens were finding Their match in us, at least in a planetary atmosphere). It attacked a small village in the island between the Mississippi and the Missouri rivers and the pursuits were upon it. It had little chance to escape. They shot it down and it crashed in the overgrowth along the Mississippi, spilling its fragments out over a limestone bluff. There was little doubt in the observer’s mind that all were lost.
I knew better.
You can’t imagine the excitement I felt. They would not have attacked in this way if he were not there. That was obvious, and more obvious, from my interrogations, he expected one or more of Them to survive. That was why he was there. The Thing I called Martin was reestablishing his contact with these creatures, perhaps forming an alliance with Them. Between his powers and Theirs, they would grind humanity and the State into the most abject slavery.
But I knew, I knew, and I moved with as much speed as I could command. I claimed priorities that not even my anointed superiors had thought to give me and I commandeered one of the five rocket pursuits vital to the Chicago area. I knew that I would not be dangerously weakening the city because he was south and They would not attack here while he was there.
The flight took minutes and we landed near an old hamlet called Collinsville that had somehow survived the great disasters and was still much as it had been in the eighties. The pursuit hovered over the field, landed roughly, and before I climbed from the copilot compartment, a lorry was racing across the field to meet me. They had complete instructions and they had brought an interrogation van north from New Cairo literally minutes before I arrived.
Within the hour they brought me reports on the alien ship. The flamedozers cut through the rank vegetation to the south, the vegetation that had sprung up after the St. Louis miss and still carried a dangerous activity. It must have been a hellish mission and several of the men had to be hospitalized but they cut through in an hour and found the ship. It was completely destroyed, its crew dead, Their bodies badly charred. One of the dozer crews spotted the tracks on the sand before the bluff. Somehow one of Them had escaped or been thrown free and the three-clawed tracks led off into the underbrush and disappeared. Another member of the same crew found the human footsteps nearby. These were fresher steps with the moisture not yet evaporated from them and I knew.
He was there. He had come and he was tracking the thing, seeking to contact it. Somewhere out in that jungle growth he stalked the insect creature from the ship, not to kill it but to enlist its aid in the final destruction of humanity and the Holy State.
But I knew that she had come with him, that she must still be with him. She could not be on this stalk but she must be close at hand. I became fairly rabid at the thought, the chance to capture her and through her finally to confront him again, but to confront him this time with the power and the might of the Holy State arrayed against him. To bring him to his knees and watch him wither before my eyes. To kill him and dissolve his body and consign his liquids to the Fields.
I sent out interrogation teams. The reports came back. Yes, they had been in the area for nearly a week. They had walked through the villages and they had done as they did in the larger cities, spread corruption among the citizens. They had talked of a universal melding of all mankind, of the implacable menace that human and alien life of the galaxy must meet. They had done this sickening thing they called sharing blood.
She was always with him, silent and waiting. They knew of her, knew her role as his whore, watched them make love at night (or at least experienced it) and they were neither ashamed nor even silent in the memory. God, how they loved to talk about it. I reviewed tape after tape, feeling the disgust rise in me. Only the sure knowledge that the voices no longer existed, that their authors had joined so many others in the Fields comforted me.
Still, I had to have her and now I knew that there was a strong possibility that I might, since his physical protection was for the moment withdrawn. It was only a matter of finding her in what after all was a fairly small geographical area. I ordered spycells to be set out in all the villages, since we could not depend on the citizens to report her presence. We literally carpeted the river valley in sensors, over four thousand from the invoices. We flew them in from Chicago and New Cairo and the delta area, and in twenty-four hours a mayfly could not spread its wings in any village along the river without my ears hearing the rustle of its transparent wings.
Within twelve hours we had located her. They spoke knowingly of her in the homes of this small town called Grafton. That was the first time I knew her name to be Vera. She was there, of that I was sure. I sent two companions to Deacons of the Faithful West and they surrounded the town, entered it and went from house to house. By midafternoon I had the news. They had her. There was no doubt that it was she. She freely confessed it, showing no shame or fear. By nightfall they had brought her to the edge of Collinsville to my van where I waited.
I was surprised when they brought her in and bound her to the interrogation table. I had not expected her to be a Black. They spoke of her high cheekbones, which was true, and the delicacy of her beauty, which was true, and they had spoken of her pale skin. I had assumed they meant that pale waxy kind of complexion that many women develop from undernutrition or long absence from the sun. She was pale for a Black but it was a paleness that was still like burnt ginger with a fine textured skin that showed the’ flush of blood underneath. She was for all of her youth remarkably beautiful.
I am told that you are Vera who is with the creature called Martin.
Yes, I am.
The whore of the Anti-State.
If you wish. Words have little meaning.
It’s not you I want. I promise you a quick peace if you will tell me where he is.
I don’t know. It doesn’t matter, however. He will come to you before too long. He told me of this.
Just, I’m sure, as he told you of your capture and what we would say and do here.
Yes, that too.
If that were so, you would have fled. You would have done anything to avoid confronting me.
No, not if that is what he wanted.
And it went this way for several hours. It was not that she withheld information. I applied all of my techniques and I was sure that she withheld nothing. It was just that she had nothing to offer. He had freely abandoned her to pursue the thing from the ship, knowing that I would take her, knowing what I would do to her. She was carrying his child, I found, but this seemed not at all to matter.
She parroted all of the nonsense that I had heard from those in Rome and Chicago. She spoke frighteningly of some menace descending upon us and his intention of forging humanity and the insect race and others . . . for the first time I heard of others . . . into a galaxy-spanning organism that would meet this menace. She spoke of sharing blood but did not seem to understand its full import. She built a fantasy structure for me that rivaled the elaborate hells of the hopelessly insane. In the end she collapsed, exhausted, and I waited for her revival.
I must have dozed myself. When I awoke he was in the room. Suddenly and as simply as that, with no warning from the pickets, he was in the room. The tape was still running and. . . .
Wake up, Jarvis.
I...I... What are you doing here?
I came as you expected me to.
I did not expect you to. . . .
But you did. Although you will not admit it, you know me too well by now. We have met and a part of you has analyzed me completely to the point that you can almost predict my actions. You don’t dare admit this consciously, for to do so would be to admit the validity of my motives, but you do.
Another example of your infectious madness. Will you now fragment my personality as you did to the poor interrogator when we first met ?
No, you have a much fuller destiny. Even I can’t change that. We are bound together by bonds of time that I cannot dissolve.
You seem to have remarkable powers. Yet you can’t handle a thing as simple as this?
Yes, yes, I suppose I could, but at what cost? Remember my conversation long ago with John Talltrees, the time when we went badger hunting in the mountains and found the willow trap with the ragged leg of the poor beast ? He had gnawed his leg free of the trap and crawled into the underbrush to die.
I remember that. Disgusting.
You and I are like that. We are bound together and we may free ourselves from each other only at peril to our own lives and our own race. If it weren’t for that, I would never spare an animal like you after what you’ve done tonight.
I needed the information.
She gave you everything she knew. I made sure of that.
How could I be sure?
No matter, she will heal and we have a great deal to do with each other yet. Only I am as human as you and I cannot let you go free after this, not without some satisfaction that you will suffer as she did.
Revenge? The self-styled savior of the race stoops to revenge?
We will leave you now but before we go...
We?
Here, my companion. Don’t ask for his name for it’s quite unpronounceable, just call him... I’m sure you’ll appreciate my jest eventually . . .just call him Peter.
The thing came out of the shadows in the rear of the van and I realized that I had been smelling its rank smell for minutes. It was tall and lean and gleamed like burnished gold in the lights above the couch. I had seen pictures of their corpses but to see one alive.... It made my stomach churn.
The thing came forward and passed Martin to the couch where it freed the girl, gathered her up in chitinous arms that were remarkably gentle.
“We’ll go now,” Martin said, “but there is one thing left. I will not share with you but I will take from you.”
With that he leaned forward and I saw the gleam of the knife in his hand. I realized that it had been all talk. He would kill me now and I would die in the service of the State, which was as it should be. I tried to move but I could not. My muscles would not respond. I waited for the end.
Instead, he took my right hand and the knife made a sudden motion, opening the flesh on the wrist. Bright blood spurted forward and I knew that he would watch me bleed out my life. Instead he raised my wrist and I watched with sick disgust as he drank my blood. My stomach heaved at the sight but he continued for moments.
Then he lowered my arm to my side and stared at it for moments. I watched as the blood slackened, stopped, and the raw wound closed and in a second healed.
“It is not the end, you see,” he said tiredly. “There will be other times and eventually you will understand our special trap. You and me, two savage badgers in a single trap.”
And they left while I lay, waiting for the paralysis to leave. That was a year ago and I find that I weary easily as I write this. It’s the kind of fatigue you would not expect a man of thirty-three to have, but it is common to me these days.
To have his throat in my hands, to squeeze the life from him for what he has done!
I can remember the horror, the agony as I rose from the couch, feeling the first stirrings of what was happening to me. Was it a venom from this creature that used to be human or something more subtle?
I stood before the mirror and watched my body sag, watched the skin coarsen and flow about my face, felt the heavy weight of softening muscles upon my bones. I looked in the mirror and saw in minutes my face take on the cast of a man of seventy, the very face I wear now. I stood and felt my youth dissolve about me and vanish.
But I am not too old to run him down, to have my final revenge. I will find him and kill him, slowly and painfully.
The monster. The State preaches there are no such things but I know.
The monster has stolen my soul.