The Shapechanger Scenario Read online

  It was a profitable system for the Combine for many years, but the Fire Islands habitats were under quarantine now. Am-bimorphs who had broken the quarantine would have been more likely to wind up on Purgatory than anyplace else. From there, given enough money, they could have gone almost anywhere. However, it seemed that some of them had stayed.

  There had been an explosion at one of the refineries. A huge cracking tower had been demolished and the fire had damaged much of the plant before it was brought under control. It had been no accident. Explosive charges had been strategically placed, and just before the tower had blown, a plant foreman had ordered everyone away from the site. They later found him, bound and gagged in a storage closet. He swore that he had been struck from behind and that he had come to inside the closet, where he had been unsuccessfully struggling to escape his bonds for hours. And despite eyewitness testimony that he was the one who had warned everyone out of the area, the foreman denied having done any such thing, insisting that someone was trying to frame him.

  It looked like it was time to play another "game."

  The playermaster Coles had assigned to run the operation was our old friend Tolliver Mondago. Coles had far too many irons in the fire to personally run field agents on a mission. Mondago would make sure that Coles was kept informed. Personally, I didn't know who was worse, Coles or Mondago. Mondago had a lot to answer for. That crazy old man had almost killed us last time. I often worried about telling the difference between reality and programmed hallucination, but I wasn't sure Mondago knew there was a difference. And Coles would only part with so much information-as usual, the operative term was "need-to-know."

  Personally, I needed to know a lot more than I was being told. I didn't know if Coles was playing it by ear or just close to the vest. Probably both. I didn't know if Mondago knew more than he was willing to tell us or if he, too, was being made to function purely on a need-to-know basis. Again, probably both. For that matter, I didn't even know if this was going to be a real mission or merely another elaborate hallucinact the home audience would share with me. It was a hell of a way to train agents and run a covert operation-with live coverage on mass media entertainment channels.

  The audience would be sitting at home, plugged into their psy-fi sets, vicariously participating in what they thought was an interactive fantasy adventure game. Only it would be for real-appropriately edited, of course. And as they plugged in and watched and heard and smelled and felt, Coles would undoubtedly be plugging in to them at the same time, feeding them subliminal programs and propping them for future use as they enjoyed their entertainment. He'd be learning how to push their buttons. It was the new ecology. Eat or be eaten, beat or be beaten. Use or be useless.

  I came out of downtime as the ship made its approach to Purgatory Station. I didn't remember going down. And I had no idea how long I had been down. The last thing I remembered was sitting in a comfortable black leather chair in Coles's black, dimly lit office. Someone flicked a switch and turned me off and now I was coming out of it trillions of miles away.

  There were no viewports in the supercargo compartments Breck and I were traveling in, tiny individual passenger cubicles not much larger than the inside of a coffin, but I was able to see Purgatory Station by turning on the small monitor screen built into the bulkhead. There wasn't enough room in the compartment to sit up, so I turned over on my side and propped my head up on my elbow, watching the tiny screen as we made our docking approach.

  There wasn't much to see. Purgatory Station was a small island habitat, a sphere about one mile in diameter with external radiators at its poles that removed heat from the interior of the station and solar mirrors that directed sunlight inside through windows near the rotational axis. Like most such stations, it was equipped with tachyon drive. It had functioned as a starship until it reached its destination and then it became a permanent orbital habitat. If necessary, it could become a starship once again, but leaving orbit would mean leaving behind the various smaller work stations and cylinders that had been constructed around it over time and linked to it with skyhooks. There were a lot more of them than when I had been here as a young noncom in the supply corps, berthed aboard a freighter we used to call "The Slop Bucket."

  Our pilot then wasn't much better than our pilot now. Docking was accomplished with all the dexterity of a drunk trying to thread a needle, but we eventually made it and locked on. We left the ship and transferred to a shuttle that would take us to the planet surface. The cargo would follow later, in several shifts, and anyone who had brought a lot of luggage would have a long wait until they could collect it at the ground-base spaceport terminal. Fortunately, Breck and I were traveling light.

  As we made our descent to Purgatory, I saw that nothing had really changed. It was still a wild, desolate world of low mountains and high plains which leveled off toward the equator into vast deserts that seemed to go on forever. There were a couple of oceans on Purgatory, much smaller than those on Earth, and there were a few lakes nestled in mountain valleys. Someday, there would probably be cities, but for the present, there was nothing here except for a number of sprawling refineries and industrial plants that were the sole reason for human presence on the planet.

  You could make a flyover of the barren plains and see miles upon miles of nothing and then, suddenly, you'd see giant islands of metal rising up out of the ground like surreal sculptures, surmounted by dense clouds of pollution. The unmistakable footprints of man. Having almost poisoned our own world beyond recovery, we were now dumping our waste into other people's yards.

  There had been a lot of construction since I had spent three lonely, maddening months here all those years ago. Small developments had grown up around the plants, scatterings of clustered workers' housing all looking absolutely identical, interconnected by plastic tubeways. The shuttle landed and we disembarked. I was immediately struck by a blast of desert heat and the stench of pollution.

  Breck sniffed the air and grimaced. "Travel halfway across the universe," he said, "and you arrive at a place that smells just like New Jersey."

  We hurried across the tarmac and into the air-conditioned coolness of the terminal. We were supposed to meet a man named Grover Higgins. I imagined some corporate type stamped out with a cookie cutter, glib and superficial, a PR man with red eyes and ruptured capillaries in his nose from too much drinking. Someone who had suffered a long fall from the climb up the corporate ladder and was stuck out in the middle of nowhere, desperate to make good and get out. Grover Higgins turned out to be not at all what I expected.

  The man who greeted us as we came into the terminal was in his late forties, about five-ten and a well-built hundred and eighty pounds, with thick, dark brown hair and sleepy, deeply set brown eyes. He was darkly tanned and his hair was streaked from sun bleaching. His skin had the weathered look of a man who had spent a great deal of time outdoors. He had a slow and easy dimpled smile and a relaxed, informal way about him. He was dressed in lightweight khakis and well-worn leather boots.

  "Mr. Beck, Mr. O'Toole? I'm Grover Higgins." His hands were callused and his handshake very firm. The hands of a real working man, not an office button-pusher. "Hope the flight out wasn't too bad," he said. "That all you brought with you?"

  "Yes, just our hand luggage," Breck said.

  "I find it's always best to travel light, myself," he said. "How about a bite to eat and a drink or two or three?"

  "Sounds fine to me," I said.

  He led us to a little cart and beckoned us in. "Hop aboard."

  He sat behind the tiller and the cart whispered off quickly across the terminal, heading toward a tubeway. The tinted plastic cut out the sun's glare and the cool air inside the tube was a marked contrast to the heat outside. The tube ran from the terminal toward the plant, with several branching off points along the way, where the tube corridors radiated out from traffic circles like spokes from a wheel. Other open carts zipped by us, but we didn't see a single pedestrian. Apparently, th
e people on Purgatory didn't walk any more than they had to and they spent most of their time insulated from the outside environment, which made me even more curious about Higgins with his outdoorsy look. He didn't seem to fit in.

  "We'll be eating at my place if it's all right with you," he said. "Not that we don't have any bars or restaurants, but I think I can promise you better food than that. I'm a pretty decent cook."

  "I hope you won't go to any trouble on our account, Mr. Higgins," said Breck.

  "It's no trouble. I like to cook and I thought you might prefer a quiet place to eat and talk a bit. Our bars tend to be a little on the rowdy side and you being celebrities, I thought you might not want to attract a crowd right off."

  "That's very thoughtful of you," Breck said.

  "Like I said, no trouble at all."

  The cart swung around and shot off down another branch of the tubeway, heading toward a cluster of residential buildings nestled in a slight depression. He parked the cart at the end of the tubeway and we went into the village.

  It was designed as a residence mall, with all the individual dwellings clustered together into one huge, multileveled structure. The entire village was sealed off from the outside. The climate control systems kept the temperature inside quite cool, as if in overcompensation against the heat outside. The corridor opened out onto large wide, multileveled walkways with tinted skylights overhead. The interior of the mall was generously landscaped and heavily planted with trees, vines, flowers and shrubs, sweet-smelling herbs and mosses, rock gardens and artificial streams and waterfalls.

  "Looks like a damn rain forest, doesn't it?" said Higgins.

  "It's like living in a terrarium. I try not to spend a lot of time here."

  As I wondered where he spent most of his time, he led us up to a door and opened it by placing his palm against the sensor pad. As we entered, he called out to someone in a language I had never heard before.

  The woman who came out to greet us was dressed in a knee-length khaki skirt, a plain white cotton blouse, and knee-high, soft leather boots. Her hair was thick and dark, almost like a horse's mane, naturally streaked with gray and silver highlights. Her skin was the color of coffee with a lot of cream in it, a light caramel shade, and her eyes were golden. She moved with a sinuous grace that made me think of a large predatory cat-a mountain lion.

  "This is my wife, Tyla," Higgins said. "She's tribal."

  ..Which meant, of course, that she wasn't human.

  THREE

  That "God made man in His own image" was a conceit we've had for a long time, despite the imprecision of the statement. Man was a varied species-some of us were black and some were white; some were brown, some were red, and some were yellow; some of us had sharp features, some had flat and broad ones; some eyes were slanted, some were round, some almond-shaped . . . Precisely which of the many images of Man was God's?

  That old debate was complicated further the first time we encountered races that weren't human, but that looked disturbingly familiar. It sure did upset a lot of folks. It disappointed all those people who had clung to the notion that humanity was unique in the universe. And it provided much fuel for theological debate, as well as for some arguments that weren't exactly theological, such as the old chestnut about how we were "planted" on Earth by some extraterrestrial superrace of ancient astronauts who had apparently wandered around the universe, scattering people like cosmic Johnny Appleseeds. Of course, what makes old debates old is that they never really get resolved. The discovery of intelligent races on other worlds didn't change anything as far as that was concerned.

  We did what we usually do when we encounter strangers. We acted like a bunch of busybodies, sending out ambassadors and missionaries, followed by embassies and military bases and settlements and fast-food outlets. Sometimes we were welcome, sometimes we weren't. Either way, the arguments continued. Personally, I've never bothered with the truly weighty questions. I'm a fairly simple guy and I've always tried to stick to issues I could understand.

  When it comes to Truth-with-a-capital-T, I don't really know, you see. However, I do know the difference between faith and knowledge and after where I've been and what I've done, I don't take anything on faith. I figure that since I've got considerable doubt about the issue in my mind, then if there is a God, that must have been the way He made me. I'm neither prejudiced nor insecure. For all I know, maybe God did make us in His own image, but that doesn't necessarily mean the image referred to is physical. Virtually all of the humanoid races we'd encountered had some sort of spiritual mythos, a sensibility beyond the rudely physical. Call it God if it makes you comfortable, call it Nature or call it Being, any way you look at it, we all came from the same ingredients. On Earth alone, there were so many of us who were different in so many ways, yet roughly similar in essence, that perhaps we shouldn't have been surprised to find the same basic design occurring elsewhere under similar conditions.

  There was no question that Tyla wasn't human, but on the other hand, she looked a lot more human than some people I have known-some cyberpunks, for instance. Her fingers had short, catlike claws, though they were retracted when she shook our hands; her canine teeth were long and sharp, bringing to mind the image of a vampire; and her grip was very strong. Her hair was thick and coarse, yet beautiful in a savage way. She looked like some surrealist's impression of an Apache. The most striking things about her were the tawny color of her skin and those incredible golden eyes. There was an otherworldly beauty about her, which seemed a ridiculously obvious observation, since she was otherworldly and we were the aliens here, but no other expression would suffice.

  She shook hands with me first, very formally and correctly, as if it were something she had learned recently, and she was puzzled for a moment when Breck offered her his gloved right hand. She took it and frowned, glancing at him uncertainly as she felt the hard, smooth nysteel inside the glove instead of flesh. Confused, she glanced at Higgins.

  "I'm sorry," Breck said, removing his glove.

  Tyla gasped and took his metal hand in both of hers, looking at it with wonder.

  "You'll have to excuse her," Higgins said, a little awkwardly. "She's never seen a prosthesis before." He spoke to her briefly in her native tongue, a rolling, lilting, musical-sounding series of quick, short syllables. She glanced up at Breck and reluctantly released his artificial hand.

  "Please tell her it's all right," Breck said. "I'm not sensitive about it. I don't mind if she examines it."

  Higgins spoke to her again and she glanced from him to Breck, then back to Breck's artificial hand.

  "It's all right," Breck said, holding it out for her to inspect.

  She touched it and gently ran her fingers over it, fascinated by its cool, polished smoothness. She felt his wrist and then his forearm, glancing up at him with alarm as she realized that the entire arm was made of nysteel. Then she turned his hand over and stared raptly at the articulated metal, the complex apertures built into the palm, the strange slits in the tips of the fingers ... she frowned and looked up at him questioningly.

  "Watch," said Breck, taking his hand away and holding it up in front of him, fingers extended stiffly. In rapid succession, the six-inch gleaming nysteel blades shot out of his fingertips with sharp pneumatic sounds and locked into place.

  Her eyes grew very wide. She looked down at her own hand, exposed her own claws, then looked back up at Breck's considerably more lethal ones. With a smile, Breck retracted his blades in quick succession. They vanished up into his forearm, allowing him to flex his fingers once again. She turned to Higgins and launched into a brief torrent of her native speech, reminiscent of the lilting, singsong cadence of Mandarin mixed with the quickness of Japanese and the sibilant and hard consonants of a Semitic dialect. Higgins answered her in kind and she turned back to Breck, staring at him intently, searching his face as if seeking some sort of explanation there.

  "Uh, I told her you were from a tribe of great warriors," Higgins said, "
and that you were injured in a battle and had your flesh and blood hand replaced with one that was a weapon, so that you could continue being a warrior." He added, somewhat apologetically, "I couldn't really explain about hybreed commandos. I had to put it in terms she could relate to. It was the best I could do."

  "And perfectly appropriate," said Breck, with a smile.

  Tyla spoke briefly to Breck and Higgins stiffened slightly and was about to say something to her, but Breck caught it and quickly asked him what she said before Higgins could speak.

  "She asked a question we would normally consider in poor taste," said Higgins. Breck gave him a prompting look. Higgins looked slightly ill at ease. I suddenly had the insight that she wasn't the reason he was uncomfortable, we were. "She doesn't mean to be rude," he said. "It's just that her people tend to be very direct. She, uh, wanted to know what happened to the other great warrior, the one who took your arm."

  Breck suppressed a smile. "Tell her I took my arm back from him and beat him to death with it. It isn't literally true, of course, but it's true enough in the metaphorical sense. I exacted my pound of flesh, if you'll forgive the pun."

  Higgins stared at Breck for a moment, then turned to his wife and translated. Tyla's eyes grew wide again and she looked at Breck with new respect.

  Dinner was excellent, made from Earth vegetables grown in hydroponic greenhouses. There was some meat, as well, which Higgins served with a disclaimer, saying he didn't know if we ate meat or not, but if we did, we might be curious to try some local game.

  It certainly smelled gamey. I tried a small piece; as did Breck. It was tough and slightly salty, of a consistency not unlike beef jerky. The flavor wasn't all that bad, despite the smell. It wasn't venison or beefsteak, but it was passable fare if you didn't mind chewing relentlessly.