John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

“As for its deteriorating—the wetware link is only a temporary expedient till we get a hardware system. We’re keeping the tissues alive with a nutritive fluid. It’s fascinating, really, don’t you think? Just being able to access all the right parts of the brain to use… remarkable. Admittedly, it’s an experiment that, ah, interests me…”

Russ suspected that Praeger took some kind of perverse pleasure in using his old adversary’s brain tissue as a convenient spare part. It was like a medieval ruler making the skin of his enemy into a seat covering for his chair, or drinking ale from his skull. It was a celebration of his complete triumph over him.

Praeger, Russ thought , you’re a sick man.

Praeger went on. “And as for its being Rimpler’s brain—this isn’t a Gothic by Mary Shelley, Parker. Do you suppose we sent Igor out for a good brain and he dropped it, came back with Rimpler’s? There’s no shred of Rimpler’s personality left in it. We have a primitive extractor here… not adequate for interrogation, but it will erase. Rimpler’s memories were erased. A great deal of the brain was cut away; we’re only using the tissue that’s interfaceable. Dr. Tate used electrochemical amino-acid breakdowns to translate the computer’s impulses into neurohumoral transmission units which…”

“ Dr. Tate did this?” Russ broke in, startled.

“Yes.” Praeger’s expression was as glassy and flat as the TV screen. “Why?”

“Uh—nothing.” So Praeger was working closely with Tate. How much had Tate told him about Russ’s problems? Did he stick to professional confidentiality? Was Tate SA?

“It could be some of our Security Risks know about Rimpler’s brain,” Praeger said. “There could be a connection.”

“Seems pretty farfetched to me. And interrogating people in this arbitrary kinda way… To be honest, I don’t think excessive security is good security. It makes people angry at authority, makes them hard to deal with—we could end up making rebels. I just don’t see the necessity.”

“You don’t see the necessity.” Praeger’s voice was terribly calm. He reached for something offscreen, punched some buttons. An image appeared on the lower right-hand TV monitor…

It was a telescopic TV image of a spacecraft; something like a standard space shuttle but knobbier, with heavily bolted plates, and generally cruder: a New-Soviet vessel. Their spacecraft always looked directly descended from the Monitor and the Merrimac.

“You see that?” Praeger asked.

“I see it.”

“They’re out there. The New-Soviets. Less than a hundred kilometers from our outer hull. Directly in the way of the approaches to our hangars. They’re armed. They have—you see the dishes?—a great variety of communications gear. They could be communicating with someone on the Colony, for all we know. They could even have had accomplices at the air locks.”

Russ listened with amazement to the rising tone of hysteria in Praeger’s voice. Praeger looked cool, but… he’d begun talking rapidly, and his pitch had risen half an octave.

“I see,” Russ said slowly. Soothingly. (Thinking, This man is making life-and-death decisions about people… about me… he’s capable of having me killed. ) “Well, uh, I surely see your point and, ah, that puts a different light on things.” Adding humbly, “I’ll get right on it, Bill.”

“You do that, Russ.”

Praeger cut the connection.

Russ stared at the blank screen, thinking that he just hadn’t had the courage to bring up his real objection to the brain interfacing. It seemed immoral. Blasphemous somehow.

But Praeger would’ve laughed at that. Praeger was an atheist.

And now he was expected to take part in systematic racial profiling. And he just couldn’t see any way out of it.

Russ turned slowly to his console, to the list of names. Thinking, God forgive me.

The first five people on the list were all waiting in the outer office.

He noted the first name on the list and called his assistant on the intercom. “Sandy, send in Kitty Torrence, please.”

She saw men who were also wild dogs. Wolves, jackals, wild dogs. They went on their hands and feet, running in a crouch; unnaturally long arms, unnaturally short legs. Each lean muscle clearly etched in the moonlight; skin mottled pink and mange-gray. Hairless but for a strip of fur down the back. Wagging, semi-tumesced sexual organs. Their hands and feet black with grime, their faces—

Their faces were the worst part. She saw lust for murder and rape in those faces. But—and this was the horror that kept her from looking twice—they were human expressions. Expressions that, till now, she’d glimpsed in men’s faces for only a microsecond before the veil of civilizing conditioning was drawn again.

There were two packs. One had made a sort of camp around the mouth of a burrow, a small cave in a bank of dirt, under the dark cypresses dripping with Spanish moss. Smaller dogwomen licked and suckled dogman-infants. Others stalked the edges of the feces-littered camp, snuffling the hot swamp breeze, tick-studded ears listening, sorting through the croc grunts and cricket calls. Listening for…

A splashing. Pricked-up ears caught a rustle, a panting. A prescient silence.

And then the second pack lunged from the shadows, attacking the camp.

She saw two of them rending one of the dogwomen; the dogwoman bitch tried to run but was caught with one set of jaws on her rump, the other on her neck, pulling her two different ways, pulling her apart so blood spurted, hotter than the steamy night air. While three more leapt on her husband, rending with toothy jaws and filthy talons.

She saw one of them raping a mother whose breasts swung heavy with milk under her as she tried to claw away from him, as he sodomized her while biting into the back of her neck… biting deep. She saw them maim their victims so they could no longer move and then the victors thrust their human faces into the wounds of the still living—

Claire sat bolt upright in bed, choking, trying not to vomit, but a sound between a gurgle and a scrape was all that escaped her throat.

The room yawed, and a dark, tooth-bared man-face thrust itself into her line of sight.

She screamed and clawed away from it. It was barking at her.

“Claire! Hey, Claire!”

The last membrane of the dream dissolved.

It was Torrence. Danny. It was Danny. She looked around, found she had backpedaled off the bed, had fallen, was sitting on the cold floor, her back against the cool wallpaper. Sweating. Her tailbone bruised.

“I’m sorry,” she said. Her voice sounded funny in her own ears. “I… shit, what a nightmare.”

“Sounded like it was. You okay?” As he bent over her, nude, he helped her to stand. His touch on her arm making her skin crawl (a flash of the filthy talons ripping pink into red).

She pulled away from him. Wearing only panties, she went out the bedroom door and down the dark hallway. It was three in the morning. The house creaked with her footsteps. It felt fragile and porous around her, after the Colony; you could feel all its boards straining in the night wind to burst free of their nails. (Nails! God, the house had been nailed together! One step from mud huts… )

Claire found the bathroom and gratefully turned on the light, looked around at the old ceramic surfaces of the sink, the bathtub—she looked quickly away from the tub. It had brass legs shaped like an animal’s, complete with claws…

She washed her face and smoothed her hair and tried to calm herself. At last she went back to the bedroom.