Роджер Желязны - Warriors of Blood and Dream

"Mom? I'm scared. I don't know what's going on here."

He came closer. There was something wrong with her face, that beautiful dark face that he knew so well.

"Mom?"

She whipped her head up. She had no eyes, only empty pits within which flashed a cathode display, an endless blankness with numbers and letters flashing across over and over, on and on, and as he watched, she smiled to him sweetly, and said:

"I have to work, David. It's for both of us. I need it for both of us."

"We have enough money," his lips fumbled over the words. "From Dad's insurance. You said so. I don't need money. I need you ."

She smiled, as if there were so much more to life than his poor little brain could conceive of.

"David, there's work. And when the work is done, there will be time for us."

"There's never time. Dad had to die for you to make time, and then it took you a year —"

"Now go out and play—"

David turned, and almost died. He teetered on the raised and fractured brink of a volcanic pit. Far beneath him, hazed by heat, a river of lava crackled and boiled. Things moved in it.

" Mommy—"

She was gone. The computers, the printers, the entire room itself was gone. Flame lashed up around him. " Mommieee!" He screamed, nothing alive in him now except fear. "I needed you dammit, and you needed your work more than you loved me or Dad. I hate you. I hate you. You left me here and I wish you were dead !"

Brenda stumbled back, and one small hand went to her chest. She sucked air through her pursed, pinked lips, and shook her head.

Trias watched her carefully. "Mrs. Chase?" she asked. "Are you all right?"

Brenda stared, momentarily sightless, and shook her head an emphatic no .

The flesh around David's chest wrinkled, and something climbed out. It looked like a warped and twisted human infant, crimsoned by placental tissue. It grinned up at him, its head webbed with red threads, blood glistening on its white, white teeth, and dripping from the corners of its wide, white eyes.

"David," it said. "I'm here."

It crawled the rest of the way out of him, and fell heavily to the ground, heaving. With every breath it became just a little larger. It balanced on stumpy, wobbly stumpy, legs, growing still. It was a five-year-old David, naked save for the slick of gore. Then it was a twelve-year-old David, his twin except for a tighter, fuller sheath of muscle and outsize genitalia. Then it was him as a teenager, animalistically muscled and fully aroused. And then—

His father.

"David," the glistening father-thing craned its head. "You have cried for me, and I came. I have been within you the whole time."

Lava splashed sparks against the peak. Shrieks of the damned wafted from below, loud at first, then more distant.

"Father?"

"Your mother can't protect you," the thing said. "She doesn't really want to. Don't be afraid of me."

David was numb, and silent.

"I am you. I am what you want. What you feel inside is the child being devoured by the man. Your mother will try to keep you a child. Her dyke shrink will try to keep you a child. Lightning Elk knows he can't stop me. All his life he has played in the shadows of reality. I am the sun. Bow before me, David. Bow, and I will give you what you want."

"What is that?" David asked.

"Power," it said.

The room lights flickered. Trias stood over Brenda, a Dixie cup filled with water in her hand. She straightened and looked back over at the couch, the flickering lights alternately shading and exposing the suddenly deep lines in his face.

"Shit," she said quietly. Twin brain scan lines wavered on the monitor. One was a jarring forest of angry spikes. The other was David's normal boyish arcs.

Brenda felt as if someone had hit her in the center of the chest with a sledgehammer made of raw rage and grief. She felt as if she were imploding.

She barely noticed the alarms ringing in the halls outside. Running feet slapped the tile. Men were yelling.

Trias murmured, almost babbled, as if there were no one in the room with her. "If the leads had slipped, I would think he was suffering an epileptic seizure. Or that there was damage to the corpus callosum, and the halves of his brain were no longer communicating with each other. Or ..."

Trias's voice was a squeak. Her eyes were wide and fixed on David's body. The groaning, churning vibration had increased. "There is something going on ... that I hadn't anticipated."

The monitor screen burst, sparks and shards of steel and glass fountaining into, and through, the ceiling.

Through the pain in her chest, Brenda managed to gasp: "Wake him up! Wake him up, damn you!"

One halting step at a time, Trias stumbled toward David.

"What do you want?" David stammered.

"What do you want?" his father asked in return. "Do you want things to go back to the way they were? Your mother has no time for you. It is time to be a man. To be a human being is one thing. To be a man is another."

"What are you talking about?"

"Men and women are not human beings," his father said, and licked its lips with a red, slimy tongue. "To be a man is to crush, to destroy, to raze. In balance with the woman-force, it makes a human being. Either by itself is partial. Your mother seeks more of the male. Obsessed with the male. That is why she divorced your father. That is why he died alone. There is no room for a man in her life. Any man. Not even you."

It stretched out a bloody hand to him. "Take it," Father said. "I could have chosen a thousand others. I chose you . Within you lies the seed of a great warrior. I will make you a man. A real man, unlike the milkwater whining things that think they are men because penises dangle between their scrawny thighs. I will show you the truth!"

And it dug its fingers into its own chest, and pulled it open, exposing the beating heart. And that heart was alive with light.

Trias had opened the door to the sleep chamber, and was almost to her patient when the impossible happened. From within his chest appeared a shaft of silver flame. It danced at first, then gushed forth in an unending flow.

It slammed her back against the wall, and she crumpled. She managed to say: "I—" and then the words froze, her mind froze, and in that instant Annelle Trias, Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology and masters in Neuroanatomy, author of two best-selling books on lucid dreaming, went quietly insane.

Still clutching her chest, Brenda fought her way to her feet, screaming silently into the light.

And out of that light flowed ...

David, and his father.

David rose up, piercing his own shadow. He looked down at the husk of his body, and felt a great calm. The figure beside him, one arm around his shoulder, was magnificent. He saw how the black woman quaked, and the white one crawled against the wall like a crab, babbling. The black one was ... mother . Yes, he remembered now. Mother. For the first time, her air of superiority was completely gone. Completely. She stretched out her arm to him, beseechingly.

"She wants to hold you, David. She wants to stop you."

David looked up at his father, all-wise and

Am

knowing, and felt his heart surging with

I Dreaming

love like he had never known

Now ?

The thing with its arm around his shoulder was dead, long dead, the remnants of flesh twisted about its chipped and blackened bones like blood-slimed beef jerky.

Brenda teetering on the edge of insanity, her entire world turned inside out and upside down. The unconscious David had opened up like a melon, spewing ... David. A waking David and a thing , a rotted, maggoty abomination. For a moment her boy was transfixed. Then he fought back, lashed out with one small foot. It stuck to the thing's cavernous belly. He kicked with the other foot. It stuck as well. Screaming, David punched it, and then again, and then he struck it with his head, and it laughed.