S Stirling - A Taint in the Blood

The slight sting of the needle as Harvey taped it to the inside of his left elbow awakened him from the seductive voice of the trance. He smiled as his arm was arranged.

“Tucking me into bed again, Harv?”

The Texan chuckled. “Hell, you weren’t that young when I pulled you out of the Br?z? stable. Just into your obnoxious teenaged years as I remember. Remember real well.”

The older man held a small tube of liquid to his lips. “Puree of Wilbur Peterson,” he said. “Probably they got the DNA for replication from strands of hair or the bone marrow, considerin’ how old the body was.”

Adrian drank the neutral-tasting liquid. “Thank you for that thought,” he said, and concentrated.

Within him mechanisms that had evolved long before the age of polished stone assimilated the paired helixes of a man who had decided that immortality was too much to bear.

“Since we’re probably going to die in the next thirty-six hours…” he said, when he was ready.

Harvey grinned like a gargoyle. “Shit, you don’t have to pay me back that twenty bucks you borrowed for beer. Forget it.”

“Then just let me say that if we make it, I’m back in the war full-time. After my honeymoon.”

Harvey froze for an instant, a blue-lit troll. “You are? Any particular reason?”

“For one thing, I don’t think Ellen will stay with me if I don’t, or anyway, I find I can’t stand the thought of her bad opinion of me. For another, I have been infected with the delusion called hope. It is more comfortable than sanity, in the long run.”

“Glad to hear you’re back in.”

“On my own terms.”

A chuckle. “I always sorta liked approaching it that way myself. You ready?”

Adrian sighed. “I am reluctant. It is not the danger, you understand…”

“The danger of possibly eternal torment? Hell, that makes me reluctant, ol’ buddy. I do it anyway, but I’m reluctant as shit.”

“It is pretending to be a Shadowspawn predator. The things I must do to avoid suspicion are too hard to forget.”

“Adrian, I don’t wish to do anything much but go back to Pecan Creek, retire, go fishing and watch football and drink beer, and amble down to the crossroads for some BBQ now and then. With an occasional trip to Arles. I certainly never became much attached to blowin’ people’s heads off.”

Softly the older man finished: “I see their faces sometimes.”

“True. Moi aussi. Goodbye, then, old friend. Remember, she will be with Hajime of a certainty at the final ceremony, if there is no opportunity before.”

“You just keep her pinned long enough for the bullet to hit.” A grin. “It’s going to be what you might call a target-rich environment and I’ve got a fair amount of ammo.”

“There is only one target that really matters.”

He leaned back against the softness of the sleeping bag and the air pillow. Dimly he could see Harvey take up the sniper rifle, its outline broken up by a scrim of fabric that turned it shaggy. The other man pulled down a bulbous face-mask with passive image intensifiers built into it, and clicked off the blue light.

Adrian let the Mhabrogast form in his mind, convincing his hindbrain that it did not need his physical form: Amss-aui-ock!

There was an instant of wrenching, ice-and-silver pain along his nerves, and he was standing and looking down at his body.

I am better, this time. Balanced and strong. Win or lose, I will not fail myself. Let’s make sure I don’t fail Ellie, either.

Another, and his body flowed. He felt duller, more constrained; Peterson had not been as purebred as he, nor as intelligent in general. The part of him that was always him struggled, and thought and senses gradually grew more clear. Adjusting a form was much more difficult than simply donning it, but possible, and once done could be locked in for recall. Harvey looked at him critically.

“That’s Peterson at about twenty-one,” he said.

“I don’t have the somatic memories,” Adrian replied. “It’s not unknown for postcorporeals to de-age their aetheric forms, and God knows he had time.”

“It’ll have to do. Good luck, ol’ buddy.”

Adrian nodded and stepped towards the camouflage curtain. He concentrated, and to the aetheric eyes the complex fabric faded to invisibility. The molecules of his stolen form slipped through those of the cloth, and he was naked in the early night. Around him was a web of floating energies; curtains of them crawled across the stars, still a little hurtful in the west where the sun had vanished. He raised his arms to the night, let the syllables he whispered shape what was, and willed.

Form flowed. Perceptions flowed and changed with it; scent dulled, but vision grew far keener than his eyes saw by day, and hearing had an unearthly sensitivity that made the rustle of a field-mouse as loud as boots on gravel and gave direction with swift precision. The sounds of the night were a roar, but after an instant each was as distinct as lines scribed with a diamond. Thought shrank, but took on a savage directness that did not seek to question itself. Broad wings five feet from tip to tip caught at the night, and a great snowy owl ghosted upward as small things skittered in panic or more wisely froze.

Exultation filled him as feathers caressed the air and danced with it, and it took the silent command of the man-mind that lurked at the back of the narrow avian brain to keep it from plunging and sporting in sheer joy. Instead he circled for height, stroking with his wings when he must, riding currents of air he could see as billowing shapes when he caught them. Land unrolled below him, not the map-image you saw with a man’s eyes from an aircraft but a living tapestry as detailed as skin beneath a microscope, down to each clear-cut leaf and grass-blade. Fields, roads, buildings… … and hovering above one a banner of energies, potentials sparkling into and out of existence.

That he saw with the eyes of the Power which never left him. A simple construct, but with the mark of his sister’s savage elegance: here.

Ellen is there, he thought with some part of him that still remembered words. I can feel the base-link. She is miserable, with more than mere fear.

It was close, but he banked widely to make sure that no other night-walker rode the air. None were nearby, though their approach tickled at his senses. He folded his wings then, and dove. Speed built, and the earth swelled; he could hear the murmur of many voices, loud and ugly to the owl’s hearing. Human voices, some carrying the freight of pain and fear. The building swelled, a long rectangular stable or barn of stucco-covered concrete with openings just under the peak of the tile roof at either end. For a form that could stoop on prey by sound alone it was simple to dive through, though the blaze of electric light was hurtful The space within was divided by a fence of wire mesh. The larger part held prisoners, eighty or so men and women.

The others… guards, in the uniform of small-town policemen. His sister, her aura like a blow, a wave of rank salt blood and slinking menace. Another woman in elegant dress, radiating fear and a sick dread and an abject abandonment. And…

Ellen, he thought. Ellen. Why did she bring you here?

“Eeerrk!”

Ellen bit off the small shriek as the slim long-fingered hand fell on her shoulder while she stared at the computer screen.

God, but I hate it when she sneaks up on me like that! “I know you hate it. That’s why I do it. Sadist, remember? What’s this?”

Adrienne’s head followed the hand, looking at the arrangement of the paintings on the screen and the number-coded map of the casa grande.

“This is my plan for the next step in reorganization,” Ellen said. “There’s more than enough display space in the casa, you’re just not using it to best advantage. We’ve done the basic sectional sort-and-move; now we need to get down to fine-tuning the placement of each piece.”