I OPENED my eyes. Instead of the underwater blur to which I’d grown accustomed, my vision was clear. Nictitating membranes had finally become complete. But the difference was negligible. There still wasn’t much to see: cratered moonscape, bathed in Earth-light; a kaleidoscope of other hybridization pods, each containing its own human larva, metamorphosing just as I was. I brought my left hand in front of my face. Five stubby fingers grew from the stump. They wriggled at me, of their own volition. But soon both feeling and motor control would return. It would be good to have my hand back.
With my right hand, I scratched my head. The wires in my scalp no longer itched, but there was still the deeper one. That itch was as bad as ever. Yet I marveled at the grim efficiency of hypnotraining. Already I knew the twenty-three ways to kill a man using only bare hands and feet. I also knew how to dispatch a score of other creatures not quite men anymore. I was proficient with both light and heavy photonuclear weapons. I could make a bomb out of common minerals on any of the inhabited moons and planets. On those that supported carbon-based plants, I knew which plants you could eat and which ones would kill you. In a pinch, I could pilot anything from a hoverbus to a gunship to a Nova-class gravship. I could do things I’d never done, and do them well.
I laughed out loud.
I should have figured out how to get all this training years ago. I could have saved myself some trouble. Killing wasn’t nearly as hard as I’d always found it to be. If only I’d had the skills then that I had now. Oh, well. Live and learn. I smiled at my play on words.
I saw movement at the edge of my vision. My peripheral vision had been considerably enhanced, I looked up. A gravtug passed overhead in orbit, towing a long train of silver pods. I searched my new memories. Strange. I had no knowledge of what the tug was towing. It passed out of sight over the horizon. The pods followed, one by one.
Something bothered me.
Unbidden, an image formed in my mind: frost covered the face like close-cropped fur. Red filaments fanned out from the ears. Teeth were broken into shards of ivory ice.
I pushed the face away,
I had more pleasant memories. I was telling you about myself, wasn’t I? You’ve seen the face I was fleeing. Maybe you’ve figured out why I was afraid of it. I probably told you sometime. But you don’t know the complete plan. I left out part of what the sailor told me. You don’t really know what the timestone was. Remember Nels, the mindrider. He can tell you all about timestones. If you can find him. If you can get him to talk. But I’ll tell you what I know about timestones. I paid the piper once. I’m ready to pay again.
Listen.
* * *
I was home for the last time. You figure out what that means.
I’ll spare you the gruesome details of my homecoming—my father worked me over with an alphawhip; my mother got in a few licks herself. What happened after I passed out, I couldn’t say. I’ve got educated guesses, from the various places that hurt, but you’re not interested in guesses. Before I lost consciousness, for some reason I thought of the sailor. I made some sense out of what he had said.
I came to late the next morning. My vision was still a little blurred, but it cleared rapidly. A sonic shackle clasped my ankle, attached to a long chain. I was in my room.
I stumbled into the bathroom, unsteady on my feet. I examined myself in the mirror. Except for a few scrapes and bruises, I looked all right. No scars, this time. I stepped into the shower stall. Ultrasonic fingers massaged my skin. After a few minutes, the soreness left my muscles. I stepped out, walked to the toilet, and sat down. Sonification beams warmed my bottom. Reflex took over. Smooth muscle contracted; sphincter tone relaxed. Then I remembered. I jumped off the toilet and squatted over the floor. I barely made it in time. Stool plopped against smooth marble. I’d often wondered how smugglers did it. Now I knew. They shit on the floor and poked through it with a pencil. It wasn’t as bad as it sounds. Kind of fun, really. Infantile fixations, and all that.
Anyway, I found what I was after. I fished out the ring and washed it in the sink. Then I cleaned up the other mess, I didn’t want the maidmech to blow a fuse. Or be hanging around any longer than necessary.
I lay in bed and examined the ring. The setting was plain platinum; quite cheap-looking, in fact. The stone was nothing to rave about, either. It was deep blue, almost black, like an amalgam of tourmaline and obsidian. The exposed face was crudely cut on an oblique angle to the other facets, which were much finer. But then it was a chip from a larger gem, wasn’t it? That’s what the sailor had said. And he’d told me more.
I looked deep into the stone, letting my mind relax. A shiver ran up my back. I smiled.
I got up and rummaged through my closet. I found a children’s game board with a set of dice. The next hour I spent rolling naturals. Or any other number I wanted. It was easy. You just thought about it real hard, until you could see an image of the dice inside the stone. Then you made them show the number you wanted. When you threw the real dice, they came up that way. Simple. Took the gamble out of gambling. No wonder the sailor had wiped out all those casinos. But his brashness had gotten him killed. I’d be more careful.
Someone coughed behind me.
I turned around, already knowing who stood there. I mean, I knew! I’d known several minutes before she had come into my room.
“Practicing for the sporting life?” Grychn asked.
“Just fooling around. Killing time.” I smiled. Dogs, I was clever. “What number do you want to see? A seven?” I threw the dice. A natural rolled up in the air. “How about eight the hard way?’ I roIled again. Two fours. Before the dice stopped flashing, I picked them up and flipped them again. A six and a two. Naturally. “How about snake eyes?” I rolled. Two single red spots glowed in midair.
“Trick dice?” She laughed. “You can buy them in any novelty store.” She picked them out of the air and examined them closely. Her eyes widened. She’d seen the National Quasiconductor seal on each. You couldn’t fake that. Not in a novelty store. “How?” she asked.
“Child’s play.”
I pulled Grychn close and let her stare into the ring. I told her about the sailor. I shouldn’t have. I could have saved myself a lot of trouble later if I hadn’t. But I was young and foolish then.
* * *
“I don’t like it,” she said later.
“What?”
“The ring. The timestone. It feels wrong. Get rid of it. Toss it down a dispoz.”
I laughed. My hand lay on her chest, between her breasts. The timestone glittered on my finger. My timestone. She touched my lips. I took her finger between my teeth.
“I mean it,” she said. “Something bad is going to happen.”
“Don’t be silly. I’ve got plans, big plans.”
“You’re leaving again?” She knew I was.
I said nothing. I kissed her, pressing my body against hers. We spent the rest of the day making long, slow love. Grychn was nice. I would almost miss her when I left again. Almost. But there would be others. Just as nice.
Later, in the dark, she snuggled comfortably against me.
I heard someone moving up the stairs. I didn’t need a timestone to know who. “You better leave now,” I whispered to Grychn.
“He’s coming?”
I nodded. “Time for you to go.” Ions buzzed in the air. The nocturnal ritual was about to resume.
“I want to stay.”
“No you don’t. Not if you value your hide. I’ll be OK. I’m used to it. Get going.”
“I’m staying with vou.”
“Suit yourself. It won’t be pleasant.”
The door opened. My father stood in the doorway, surrounded by blue smoke. He was naked. Thermite embers glowed in red tattoos on his skin. His eyes burned brighter with endocaine. “Your mother wants you now,” he said. He held an alphalash in his hand. Sparks dripped from the whip and bounced from the floor. Again, I didn’t need the timestone to know it was going to be bad.
He unlocked the, far end of my chain and dragged me down the stairs to where Mother waited. Grychn came by herself. It must have been a treat for my parents, to have someone as nice as her. If they even noticed.
* * *
Grychn kissed me in the night. Her lips sought the places that hurt; her tongue’s wetness extinguished glowing dermatographies. Lines of flame burned in her skin also, like cruel corposant, swirling over her breasts, across her belly, between her legs. Beneath each line of fire, ions beat on pain receptors. Nerve endings sang a harmony of hurt. White sparks danced in ocher eyes. Ermine hair with retained static stood out as straight as dandelion fuzz. Darker streaks marked where tears had washed away the alpha tattooing. I licked the others out, one by one, tasting the salt-sweet taste of burned epidermis. Alpha particles could burn no deeper. They didn’t leave scars in skin, just temporary pain. Her tongue worked the same magic on my skin.
Finally the fires were out. We lay together, lips touching, breath mingling. A rush went from head to toe. There was no euphoria greater than agony that was past. I touched my hand to her face, resting it gently on her cheek. She opened her eyes and stared into the timestone on my finger. She stopped breathing for a moment. Her pupils narrowed,
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
She covered my hand with hers. “Don’t look,” she said in a strange voice.
Of course I had to look then. I pulled my hand away from hers and stared into the timestone. A compressed image darted into my mind, there to expand: Grychn and I were shackled to a beam in the ceiling, hanging by our hands. We were both naked. My parents each held whips, but not harmless alphalashes. This time they wielded sonic flagella. Their eyes gleamed with peptide madness; their lips smiled wickedly. They began working the whips over our bodies. Carefully. Slowly. So that their pleasure would last a long time. Each place the whip touched, flesh exploded into red slime as tissues were sonificated. I saw Grychn and myself scream with pain as our bodies became pocked with bleeding craters. Slowly, flesh melted. Weakened belly walls burst—entrails dangled out. Eventually we were reduced to limp skeletons—bones with only tatters of muscle left. And still sonic whips sang.
I looked away from the timestone. But the images stayed in my mind. They were there yet. And I knew the vision was true. The timestone had shown me what was to be, what would happen sometime, I was convinced of that.
“You saw?” I asked Grychn.
Her face told me she had.
“Then you know what we’ve got to do.” I looked at my parents. They lay in a peptide stupor across the room.
“Maybe it’s a trick,” Grychn said. “Maybe it’s only a possibility, not an inevitability. Maybe it’s only illusion.”
“We can’t take that chance.” My shackle was off. They’d made that mistake once before. I crawled across the floor. Grychn followed.
“Are you sure?” she asked.
“We have no choice.” I was right. We had no other choice. I shouldn’t have needed the timestone to realize what would happen eventually. They’d get carried away with their game. They were hardly in control of it, anyway. It was just a matter of time before they killed me. I’d known it unconsciously. Why do you think I was running? The timestone just confirmed what I should have suspected earlier. The sailor had told me it would show me my own death. He said there was nothing you could do about it. Well, we’d see about that. I still had one choice, one chance. But no others.
Grychn helped me drag their limp bodies across the room to the pool. We floated them on top of the steaming water. My father wore a jeweled dagger strapped around his thigh. I pulled it from its sheath. Ultrasonic fire flared from the blade, sharper than any metal edge. It took only a few seconds to nick their wrists and send red blood squirting out. I dropped the knife into the pool. A double suicide. Lords and Ladies did it all the time. Very fashionable. I stood beside the pool and watched blood pump into the water. Finally it stopped. They still floated, but now were white as polystyrene statues.
What did I feel? I don’t know. Feelings didn’t matter, I had no other choice.
Grychn was trembling. I took her hand and led her away. In my room I let her hold me for a while. She cried on my shoulder.
Then we made love again.
* * *
As we were dressing, I asked: “Are you coming with me?” Giving her another chance.
“OK.” She looked up with shimmering eyes. “I guess so.” Then she saw the ring. “Marc, get rid of the ring.”
I laughed. “You’ve got to be joking. I’ve got plans. Big plans.”
“Please get rid of it. For me.”
I shook my head.
“I can’t go with you if you won’t destroy that ring. It’s poison. Look at the trouble it’s already caused.” She was trembling,
“Then stay.” I was dressed and ready to leave. I looked back once. Grychn’s eyes were hidden. Cheeky little tart, anyway, She’d had her chance. Two. Frog her. There’d be others just as nice.
And there were.