The Second Science Fiction Megapack Page 25

  Even with all the brain I had pearled for myself I could not really remember events for which I had had no words, except as feelings. I remembered sensing that heart parts felt different to me from other parts. And I remembered some of the chemical cloud that had surrounded Alison person-part when she fell into me, molecules I had never tasted before, bitter tastes I had had just enough sense to feel were unpleasant. Part memory wash, and part memory strengthener. If I had known words then, I would have collected memories better that night. Alison’s had been leaking in a strange fashion; they hadn’t acted that way since.

  “I’m sorry, Matmoss,” she said. “If it helps, think about some little baby who’s probably living better now because it received the heart you made.”

  She had told me things like this before. I searched her memories again to understand the concept of “other” and “baby.” The only “others” I knew were her and the gloved hands that gave me pearl seeds and then disrupted my system. She had told me before that I was creating things for other people, but I had never understood it. I looked for her memories of other people. I saw babies in her memory. One she held in her arms, so I felt it and smelled it and stared at it. She struggled, trying to escape that memory, but I stayed inside it a long time, walking her remembered self through touching the baby’s cheek, holding out a finger the baby’s fingers curled around, hugging the baby, holding it up to her breast and feeling its tiny hot mouth touch her and draw from her so that she flushed. Her remembered feelings were more intense than any I had shared with her since the time she fell into me. I stayed with her and the baby through a day, noticing a day as a unit of time. She almost always bracketed her thoughts with time units, and I had never understood them before exploring this memory.

  Perhaps a baby was a good thing to grow a heart for.

  I released Alison. She was emitting some of the sharp, unpleasant molecules she had emitted when she first fell into me. I asked her what was wrong.

  “Oh, Matmoss, don’t do that to me. Don’t make me go back.”

  I asked her why not.

  “Because it hurts too much. Like loss.”

  I asked her if she lived like I did, creating things, having them taken away from her.

  “No,” she said, and then, “yes!” A cloud of unpleasant molecules flowed from her. She had many systems I did not yet understand.

  I left and went to visit my eyes. I was growing seven of them. I had used them before, but until I spent time in Alison’s memories, I had not realized that what I was seeing was out of focus; as soon as the eyes worked properly, the hands came down and cut them out. Now, with Alison’s memories strong inside my own, I looked out through my misty eyes and saw dimly the people working around me. I stayed with the eye nearest to completion until I saw the hands reaching down to take it, and for the first time I saw a face above it. I retreated before the cut came, going back to Alison before I had to feel the shock and the loss, and I brought her the face.

  For a while she refused to speak to me. It was the time it took to start an eye and finish three I had started earlier. At last she consented to look at the face I brought her. “Oh, yes,” she said, “It’s Raymond.”

  I brought her the three other faces I had collected from the eyes I had lost since she started her silence. Two, she told me, belonged to Raymond. I lined up the memory of the visions, studying the three she said were the same. I didn’t understand: the lightfall was different, the hair positioned differently, the expression different. The third face had a different shape and hair color. “That’s Greta,” she said. And she invited me into another memory: a party, a staff party for Biotech, with many people in it, all different from each other, all capable of looking different from themselves. She helped me sort through the information and package it. “This is other, and this is another, and this is other, but not all others are the same.”

  We worked within that memory for the time it took me to grow a heart from seed to maturity. I lost three kidneys and started a lung, lost skin and started two eyes, lost bowel and started bone marrow. Alison taught me individuals. While I was there, I listened to voices, too. I heard their words. We shifted to another gathering in her memory, and she tried to pull away from it immediately, but I looked at it and tasted it long enough to hear all these people she had taught me about tell her they were sorry. “Sorry about the baby,” Raymond said. I released Alison and left her alone for half an eye.

  When she would talk to me again I took her to taste the genes in each of the organs I was growing. I took her on an exploration of her own genes, in all the new pieces of her I had grown around her. She got very excited. “Help me, Matmoss,” she said, “help me read the code and figure out—”

  Together we experimented, tickling her gene maps, shifting hormone concentrations, seeing what I would produce when different concentrations were present, which part of the maps I was reading.

  “We knew some of this,” she said, “but not toes! Arms! Fingers!” With my help, she grew more of each.

  Then came the worst time in my life.

  The gloved hands reached in and cut Alison out, shearing off the new pieces of her we had grown together. It was a slow process—an eye growth’s length—a cut, a rest, a cut, a rest, but the rest was never long enough for me to complete reconnections to her, and my systems felt the deepest shock ever. The hands were slicing through the central part of my brain. I sent out frantic signals to the brain nodes I had formed along my nervous system, telling them to store memories for me, to build more brain in distant places, to receive whatever I could send.

  And all the while, Alison was screaming.

  I wanted to talk to her, ask her what was this pain I felt, and what was the pain she felt, but our connections were being cut even as I activated them. I thought of the baby in her memory. At last I stopped trying to get questions through to her, and just sent her the image of the baby in her arms, only I changed the memory so that the baby carried her codes, and the person with arms carried mine. I sent it through all our connections even as they dwindled, and Alison finally calmed, and then she was no longer part of me. First she was gone. Then the hands came down and cut out all the parts I had made from her-as-seed. Then the gloved hands dropped in the memory wash, but I activated the system I had used to transport Alison’s nutrients and flooded the area so that the memory wash diluted and decayed before it could destroy all of the Alison genes I had.

  Then I went through a long period of darkness. I grew eyes and hearts and skin and bowels, but I did not notice them. I stayed below my own surface, along my buried neural network, pushing my way into the fragments of memories I had left. “That’s Greta. That’s Raymond. This is a baby.” “Arms! Legs! Toes!”

  This is a baby.

  I kept a tiny Alison pearl seed, the bit I had saved from memory wash, and teased it into undifferentiated reproduction until I had enough cells to experiment with. I remembered Alison’s excitement as we read her map together. Half of it I put away, safe, and half I experimented with: toe; brain; eye; lung; kidney; skin; bowel; heart; bone marrow.

  No baby.

  I went back to my surface and saw that I was forming arms and legs and toes and fingers now. I went to one of my eyes and looked up. The eye had formed fully. I focused on a face. It looked down at me, but its hands stayed away. It was not Raymond or Greta.

  Then it touched me, and its hand was bare. I tasted Alison’s gene map. The touch was too brief for me to connect with her. I watched her with my eye. She spoke, but I had no ears. I couldn’t understand her anymore.

  Her face changed. Salt water came from her eyes. I remembered her memory: the baby, crying. It needed something—food, milk, water, changing, a hug.

  I stared at Alison and knew there was nothing I could give her. I left my eye, went down deep into myself, and crawled into her memories. Even though I have eyes to open, the darkness of my fifth age falls. “Sorry about the baby,” Raymond says over and over. I think of letting
my brain nodes rise up to where I grow the organs for others; memory wash would cleanse me of thinking, of knowing, of all memories. I taste myself and those strange molecules are present in me, the wishing-for-death ones. I remember: I remember I would not give death to Alison, and after a long long time something clicked in her and the life came back.

  I will wait in the darkness of my fifth age for a click, or perhaps another splash. I wish Alison would come home. In her memories I saw no sign that babies ever do.

  THE GREEN BERET, by Tom Purdom

  Read locked the door and drew his pistol. Sergeant Rashid handed Premier Umluana the warrant.

  “We’re from the UN Inspector Corps,” Sergeant Rashid said. “I’m very sorry, but we have to arrest you and bring you in for trial by the World Court.”

  If Umluana noticed Read’s gun, he didn’t show it. He read the warrant carefully. When he finished, he said something in Dutch.

  “I don’t know your language,” Rashid said.

  “Then I’ll speak English.” Umluana was a small man with wrinkled brow, glasses and a mustache. His skin was a shade lighter than Read’s. “The Inspector General doesn’t have the power to arrest a head of state—especially the Premier of Belderkan. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must return to my party.”

  In the other room people laughed and talked. Glasses clinked in the late afternoon. Read knew two armed men stood just outside the door. “If you leave, Premier, I’ll have to shoot you.”

  “I don’t think so,” Umluana said. “No, if you kill me, all Africa will rise against the world. You don’t want me dead. You want me in court.”

  Read clicked off the safety.

  “Corporal Read is very young,” Rashid said, “but he’s a crack shot. That’s why I brought him with me. I think he likes to shoot, too.”

  Umluana turned back to Rashid a second too soon. He saw the sergeant’s upraised hand before it collided with his neck.

  “Help! Kidnap.”

  Rashid judo chopped him and swung the inert body over his shoulders. Read pulled a flat grenade from his vest pocket. He dropped it and yellow psycho gas hissed from the valve.

  “Let’s be off,” Rashid said.

  The door lock snapped as they went out the window. Two men with rifles plunged into the gas; sighing, they fell to the floor in a catatonic trance.

  A little car skimmed across the lawn. Bearing the Scourge of Africa, Rashid struggled toward it. Read walked backward, covering their retreat.

  The car stopped, whirling blades holding it a few inches off the lawn. They climbed in.

  “How did it go?” The driver and another inspector occupied the front seat.

  “They’ll be after us in half a minute.”

  The other inspector carried a light machine gun and a box of grenades. “I better cover,” he said.

  “Thanks,” Rashid said.

  The inspector slid out of the car and ran to a clump of bushes. The driver pushed in the accelerator. As they swerved toward the south, Read saw a dozen armed men run out of the house. A grenade arced from the bushes and the pursuers recoiled from the cloud that rose before them.

  “Is he all right?” the driver asked.

  “I don’t think I hurt him.” Rashid took a syrette from his vest pocket. “Well, Read, it looks like we’re in for a fight. In a few minutes Miaka Station will know we’re coming. And God knows what will happen at the Game Preserve.”

  Read wanted to jump out of the car. He could die any minute. But he had set his life on a well-oiled track and he couldn’t get off until they reached Geneva.

  “They don’t know who’s coming,” he said. “They don’t make them tough enough to stop this boy.”

  Staring straight ahead, he didn’t see the sergeant smile.

  * * * *

  Two types of recruits are accepted by the UN Inspector Corps: those with a fanatic loyalty to the ideals of peace and world order, and those who are loyal to nothing but themselves. Read was the second type.

  A tall, lanky Negro he had spent his school days in one of the drab suburbs that ring every prosperous American city. It was the home of factory workers, clerks, semiskilled technicians, all who do the drudge work of civilization and know they will never do more. The adults spent their days with television, alcohol and drugs; the young spent their days with gangs, sex, television and alcohol. What else was there? Those who could have told him neither studied nor taught at his schools. What he saw on the concrete fields between the tall apartment houses marked the limits of life’s possibilities.

  He had belonged to a gang called The Golden Spacemen. “Nobody fools with me,” he bragged. “When Harry Read’s out, there’s a tiger running loose.” No one knew how many times he nearly ran from other clubs, how carefully he picked the safest spot on the battle line.

  “A man ought to be a man,” he once told a girl. “He ought to do a man’s work. Did you ever notice how our fathers look, how they sleep so much? I don’t want to be like that. I want to be something proud.”

  He joined the UN Inspector Corps at eighteen, in 1978. The international cops wore green berets, high buttonless boots, bush jackets. They were very special men.

  For the first time in his life, his father said something about his ambitions.

  “Don’t you like America, Harry? Do you want to be without a country? This is the best country in the world. All my life I’ve made a good living. Haven’t you had everything you ever wanted? I’ve been a king compared to people overseas. Why, you stay here and go to trade school and in two years you’ll be living just like me.”

  “I don’t want that,” Read said.

  “What do you mean, you don’t want that?”

  “You could join the American Army,” his mother said. “That’s as good as a trade school. If you have to be a soldier.”

  “I want to be a UN man. I’ve already enlisted. I’m in! What do you care what I do?”

  The UN Inspector Corps had been founded to enforce the Nuclear Disarmament Treaty of 1966. Through the years it had acquired other jobs. UN men no longer went unarmed. Trained to use small arms and gas weapons, they guarded certain borders, bodyguarded diplomats and UN officials, even put down riots that threatened international peace. As the UN evolved into a strong world government, the UN Inspector Corps steadily acquired new powers.

  Read went through six months training on Madagascar.

  Twice he nearly got expelled for picking fights with smaller men. Rather than resign, he accepted punishment which assigned him to weeks of dull, filthy extra labor. He hated the restrictions and the iron fence of regulations. He hated boredom, loneliness and isolation.

  And yet he responded with enthusiasm. They had given him a job. A job many people considered important.

  He took his turn guarding the still disputed borders of Korea. He served on the rescue teams that patrol the busy Polar routes. He mounted guard at the 1980 World’s Fair in Rangoon.

  “I liked Rangoon,” he even told a friend. “I even liked Korea. But I think I liked the Pole job best. You sit around playing cards and shooting the bull and then there’s a plane crash or something and you go out and win a medal. That’s great for me. I’m lazy and I like excitement.”

  * * * *

  One power implied in the UN Charter no Secretary General or Inspector General had ever tried to use. The power to arrest any head of state whose country violated international law. Could the World Court try and imprison a politician who had conspired to attack another nation?

  For years Africa had been called “The South America of the Old World.” Revolution followed revolution. Colonies became democracies. Democracies became dictatorships or dissolved in civil war. Men planted bases on the moon and in four years, 1978-82, ringed the world with matter transmitters; but the black population of Africa still struggled toward political equality.

  Umluana took control of Belderkan in 1979. The tiny, former Dutch colony, had been a tottering democracy for ten years. The very
day he took control the new dictator and his African party began to build up the Belderkan Army. For years he had preached a new Africa, united, free of white masters, the home of a vigorous and perfect Negro society. His critics called him a hypocritical racist, an opportunist using the desires of the African people to build himself an empire.

  He began a propaganda war against neighboring South Africa, promising the liberation of that strife-torn land. Most Negro leaders, having just won representation in the South African Parliament, told him to liberate his own country. They believed they could use their first small voice in the government to win true freedom for their people.

  But the radio assault and the arms buildup continued. Early in 1982, South Africa claimed the Belderkan Army exceeded the size agreed to in the Disarmament Treaty. The European countries and some African nations joined in the accusation. China called the uproar a vicious slur on a new African nation. The United States and Russia, trying not to get entangled, asked for more investigation by the UN.

  But the evidence was clear. Umluana was defying world law. If he got away with it, some larger and more dangerous nation might follow his precedent. And the arms race would begin again.

  The Inspector General decided. They would enter Belderkan, arrest Umluana and try him by due process before the World Court. If the plan succeeded, mankind would be a long step farther from nuclear war.

  Read didn’t know much about the complicated political reasons for the arrest. He liked the Corp and he liked being in the Corp. He went where they sent him and did what they told him to do.

  * * * *

  The car skimmed above the tree-tops. The driver and his two passengers scanned the sky.

  A plane would have been a faster way to get out of the country. But then they would have spent hours flying over Africa, with Belderkan fighters in hot pursuit, other nations joining the chase and the world uproar gaining volume. By transmitter, if all went well, they could have Umluana in Geneva in an hour.