Bruce Sterling - Crystal Express

In the third week they began drugging his food. When things began to trail and pattern about two hours after lunch, the spook realized he was not facing the usual vibratory thrill of subsonics but a powerful dose of psilocybin. Psychedelics were not the spook's drugs of choice, but he rode out the dose without much difficulty. The peyote next day was considerably harder -- he could taste its bitter alkaloids in his tortillas and black beans -- but he ate it all anyway, suspecting that his intake and output were monitored. The day crawled by, with spasms of nausea alternating with elation-states that made him feel his pores were bleeding spines. He peaked sometime after sunset, when the city gathered by torchlight to watch two young women in white robes plummet fearlessly from a stone catafalque into the cold green depths of the sacred well. He could almost taste the chill green limestone water in his own mouth as the drugged girls quietly drowned.

In the fourth and fifth weeks his diet of native psychedelics was cut back. He was acculturated by being escorted around the city by two young priestesses of his own apparent age. They rounded out the subliminal language lessons and began to introduce him to the Resurgence's carefully crafted theology. By now a normal man would have been sufficiently pulverized to cling to them like a child. It had been a severe ordeal even for the spook, and he sometimes had to struggle against the urge to rip both priestesses to pieces like a pair of tangerines.

Halfway through his second month he was put to work on probation in the cornfields, and allowed to sleep in a hammock in a thatched house. Two other recruits shared the hut, where they struggled to reintegrate their shattered psyches along approved cultural lines. The spook didn't like being cooped up with them; they were so broken up that there was nothing left for him to pick up on.

He was tempted to creep out at night, ambush a couple of priests, and break them up, just to get a healthy flow of disintegrative paranoia going, but he bided his time. It was a tough assignment. The power elite's consumption of drugs had accustomed them to psychotomimetic states, and if he used his implanted schizophrenic weaponry prematurely he might actually reinforce the local paradigm. Instead he began to plan an assault on the millionaire's bunker. Presumably, most of the arsenal of the Predator Saint was still intact: cultured plague germs, chemical agents, possibly even a privately owned warhead or two. The more he thought about it, the more tempted he was to simply murder the entire colony. It would save him a lot of grief.

On the night of the next full moon he was allowed to attend a sacrifice. The rainy season was due, and it was necessary to coax the rain gods with the death of four children. The children were drugged with mushrooms and adorned with flint and jade and thickly embroidered robes. Pepper was blown into their eyes to evoke the rain tears of sympathetic magic, and they were escorted to the edge of the catafalque. Drums and flutes and a chanted litany combined with the moonlight and torchlight to throw an intensely hypnotic ambience over the worshipers. The air reeked of copal incense, and to the spook's empathie senses it seemed as thick as cheese. He let himself soak into the crowd, and it felt wonderful. It was the first time he'd had any fun in ages.

A high-ranking priestess weighted down with armlets and a towering feathered headdress paced slowly along the front lines of the crowd, distributing ladles of fermented balche from a jug. The spook shuffled forward for his share.

There was something very odd about the priestess. At first he thought she was just blasted on psychedelics, but her eyes were clear. She held out the ladle for him to sip, and when his fingers touched hers, she looked into his face and screamed.

Suddenly he knew what was wrong. "Eugenia!" he gasped. She was another spook.

She went for him. There was nothing elegant about the hand-to-hand combat techniques of spooks. The martial arts, with their emphasis on calmness and control, didn't work for operatives only partly conscious to begin with. Instead, ingrained conditioning simply stripped them down into screaming, clawing, adrenalin-crazed maniacs, impervious to pain.

The spook felt murderous hysteria rising up within him. To stand and fight was certain death; his only hope was to escape into the crowd. But as he fended off the woman's rush, strong hands were already seizing him. Snarling, he broke free, spinning toward the lip of the broad edge of the sacred well, then turned, looked: torches, ugly fear, a crazed face, the plumes of warriors nearing, the clack of automatic rifles, no time for a rational decision. Pure intuition, then. He turned and threw himself headfirst into the wide, dank, empty gloom of the sacred well.

The water was a hard shock. He floated on his back, rubbing the sting of impact from his face. The water was thready with filaments of algae. A fish nibbled his bare leg beneath his cotton shirt. He knew all too well what it ate. He looked at the cenote walls. No hope there -- they were as smooth as glass, as smooth as if they had been fused with lasers, or fireball-blasted.

Time passed. A white form came plummeting downward, belly-flopping into the water with a lethal smack. They were sacrificing the children.

Something grabbed his foot and pulled him under.

Water filled his nose. He was too busy choking to fight his way free. He was pulled down into the blackness. Water seared his lungs and he passed out.

The spook awoke in a straitjacket and looked up at a ceiling of creamy antiseptic white. He was in a hospital bed. He moved his head on the pillow and realized that his scalp had been shaved.

To his left an antique monitor registered his pulse and breathing. He felt awful. He waited for his computer to whisper something, and realized that it was gone. Rather than feeling its loss, however, he felt, somehow, repulsively whole. His brain ached like an overstuffed stomach.

From his right he heard faint, harsh breathing. He twisted his head to look. Sprawled on a waterbed was a withered, naked old man, cyborged into a medusa complex of life-support machinery. A few locks of colorless hair clung to the old man's age-spotted scalp, and his sunken sharp-nosed face had the look of long-forgotten cruelty.... An EEC registered a few flickers of comatose delta waves from the hindbrain. It was John Augustus Owens.

The sound of sandals on stone. It was the female spook. "Welcome to the Hacienda Maya, Eugene."

He stirred feebly in his straitjacket, trying to pick up her vibrations. It was like trying to swim in air. With growing panic, he realized that his paradigmatic empathy was gone. "What in hell...."

"You're whole again, Eugene. It feels strange, doesn't it? After all those years of being a junkyard of other people's feelings? Can you remember your real name yet? That's an important first step. Try."

"You're a traitor." His head weighed ten tons. He sank back into the pillow, feeling too stupid even to regret his indiscretion. Tattered remnants of his spook training said he ought to flatter her....

"My real name," she said precisely, "was Anatolya Zhukova, and I was sentenced to corrective education by the Brezhnevograd People's Zaibatsery.... You were a dissident or so-called criminal of some kind also, before the Veil robbed you of your personality. Most of our top people here are from orbit, Eugene. We're not the stupid Terran cultists you were led to believe. Who hired you, anyway? Yamato Corporation? Fleisher S.A.?"

"Don't waste your time."

She smiled. "You'll come around. You're human now, and the Resurgence is humanity's brightest hope. Look."

She held up a glass flask. Inside it, something like a threaded cloudy film floated slowly in a yellowish plasma. It seemed to squirm. "We took this out of your head, Eugene."