Betrayer of Worlds Read online

  He had deluded himself, of course.

  A respite from the dull routine yet another career had become? Of course. A way to get beyond Paula Cherenkov dumping him? Running the blockade was that, too.

  Sinking back into hazy oblivion, Nathan confronted a harder truth. He ran—still—from far older demons.

  2

  The trail had gone cold long ago.

  Cold trail: a carnivore’s metaphor. A human’s metaphor. Nessus was neither.

  “Nessus” was a label of convenience, something humans could pronounce. His true name—given enough pairs of vocal cords to enunciate it properly—sounded like an industrial accident set to waltz time. Or so, at least, a human had once described it. A long time ago . . .

  Humans had called Nessus’ kind Puppeteers before, more than a century earlier, they had withdrawn from Human Space. More often than humans realized, a few Puppeteers returned. The galaxy was a dangerous place and humans made excellent cannon fodder.

  Cannon fodder: another human metaphor. Nessus had spent much of his life among humans, when even a day among aliens did not speak well of him. No sane being left Hearth, separated himself from the herd. By setting hoof on Wunderland, Nessus was, by definition, insane.

  He had learned to embrace insanity. The full measure of his madness was that he had even come to like humans.

  Perhaps insanity—and a well-chosen human agent—might once again avert disaster for the trillion and more Nessus had left behind.

  Nathan went up and down the aisles of the hospital ward. He emptied bedpans, took routine med scans, distributed water, and dispensed pills. His duties distracted him from the tightness in his side, where the burn had healed badly, and kept him busy and his conscience clear. The work kept him, without killing anyone, in the good graces of the Resistance.

  “Hey, Big Nate.”

  As the only one vertical, Nathan was taller than these Wunderlander giants. Under the circumstances, you found humor where you could. “Hi, Terry. How are you doing today?”

  A chain of wet coughs: fluid in the lungs. “Just great, Big Nate. You can’t tell?”

  Nathan patted the man on the shoulder and moved on to the next patient. He topped off the water pitcher sitting on the floor beside her cot. “How’s it going, Maeve?”

  “You tell me,” Maeve said. She had a stern face, the kind that seemed locked in to a scowl, but that was only a guess. She had little reason to smile.

  Nathan waved his scanner over her. Indicators lit, mostly green. He paged down and saw more green. “I’m no doctor, but I’m guessing you’ll be out soon.” With only one kidney.

  “Uh-huh,” she said. “I’m ready for a pill.”

  Hadn’t she heard him? But of course she had. The “doctors” here couldn’t properly treat half of what they encountered. Instead, they drugged their patients to the eyeballs. “It’s too early,” he lied. Because you don’t want to end up like me.

  And because the fewer painkillers I dole out, the more I can keep for myself.

  By the time the doctors had released Nathan, he’d been hooked. He could get drugs here. Irony of ironies, lots of these meds had been salvaged from Clementine. He recognized the batch numbers. Drugs flowed from the government to the black market to the Resistance. If the two sides could manage to trade, tanj it, why couldn’t they talk?

  Maeve grabbed for his sleeve. “It’s time, Nathan. I know it is.”

  “Nice try.” He extended his arm. Years and light-years away, when he had had a bit of money, he had indulged in a wrist implant. Clock, calculator, compass, and more . . . the implant was, pitifully, the most valuable thing he still owned. He would have sold it for drugs, but nobody here had the skills to remove it intact.

  Maeve peered dubiously at his wrist, but had no way to know he had set back the time. The pitiful ruse—and more, his reason for it—shamed him. “See you later then,” she said.

  “Right.” He stepped to the next cot. “How are you feeling, Richard?”

  By shift’s end, Nathan’s hands were shaking. Hating himself, he slipped into the dense shrubs not far outside the cave. There was little privacy in any guerrilla camp, he had found. Many used this thicket for a bit of quick sex.

  A tryst wasn’t his purpose. He had liberated three painkillers during his last shift; now he popped two into his mouth.

  The night was warm, the outside air untainted by antiseptic and fear. He plunged deeper into the wild, lay down beneath a flowering shrub, and drifted off. . . .

  Nathan’s childhood memories were so deeply repressed he expected never to recover them all. Still, flashes came to him: in dreams, in therapy—

  With drugs.

  Falling asleep one night in his own bed, his own room. His parents had been strange that whole week. Anxious? He hadn’t understood it. Neither did his sister, and she was almost six. She usually understood everything.

  Awakening in—well, he didn’t know where. Not his bed. Not his room. Not his house. Getting up, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, and staring out the window. Nothing was familiar.

  Mommy and Daddy, gone. A friend of theirs, looking so sad. “I am your father,” he kept saying. And he kept calling them Nathan and Tweena—pleading, insisting, finally screaming over their howls of protest. Tears streaming down all their faces. “Those are your names. You must remember them for your own safety.”

  Confinement inside the new house until they could recite much more than their new names without hesitation—and without tears.

  In time, Nathan’s original parents reappearing. And how they had changed! Mother, who had always been so happy and carefree, seeming—Nathan was a long time putting a name to the look—haunted. Mother crying about the strangest things, as though the hue of the sky or the length of the day could be wrong. But First Father had changed the most. He who had once towered over everyone had somehow shrunk to Mother’s height.

  By then Nathan had gotten old enough to notice who had skin like bronze and slanted eyes. He and Tweena did. New Father did. Mother and First Father, the incredible shrinking man, did not.

  Old parents and new, when they thought no one was listening, talking about other times and places. About wondrous adventures. About terrible adversaries. About implacable forces out to get them all. Black holes and space pirates were somehow among their more normal experiences. Nathan working up his courage—he was about ten, then. Asking them, old parents and new: who were they really? The only answer was an awkward silence and Mother looking terrified.

  As soon as Nathan could, he had run away.

  The memory storm passed.

  Nathan emerged from the bushes into brutal clarity. He was a druggie, a fugitive, and flat broke. Everything he had saved over a lifetime had gone down in flames. He was trapped on Wunderland. If the aristos caught him, the best he could hope for was years of hard labor in a reeducation camp.

  First Father’s adventures—and Nathan, almost despite himself, believed those whispered, overheard allusions—usually ended in triumph.

  Nathan wondered: Would he ever measure up?

  The human crouched behind the clear wall. The ceiling, not fear, explained that posture, for Nessus had constructed the isolation booth to Earth norms. He had forgotten how tall Wunderlanders stood.

  “This is outrageous!” the man said, flushed with rage. He turned a full circle in the tiny cylindrical booth, whether seeking an exit or someone to confront. He found neither. He poked at his pocket comp, swore as he found that comm was jammed, and put away the device. The main thing visible beyond his cell wall was a floor-standing mirror. He glowered at that. “Release me immediately.”

  “In good time,” Nessus answered from behind the one-way glass. He spoke fluent Interworld in a throaty contralto. He could as easily have imitated a burly human male—or, for that matter, a string quartet. That he chose this voice was no accident. Women trusted it and men as reflexively lusted after it. Either way, it gave him an edge. “I apologize for the low ceil
ing. Feel free to sit.”

  The Wunderlander remained standing, haughty despite his stoop. His uniform, gauche with buttons and piping, epaulets and insignia, could have graced a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. His chin jutted out, and the spike of his aristocratic beard left a waxy streak on the clear material of the tube. “I demand that you release me.”

  “Major Buchanan, you are in no position to demand anything.” Nessus let that sink in. “I will, however, release you. After we finish, of course.”

  “Swine,” Buchanan growled. “I’ll tell you nothing.”

  Yes, you will, Nessus thought. This was hardly his first abduction. “You must realize that I intercepted you between transfer booths, and yet you did not comment.” It meant human authorities here had learned to do the same. The insurgents would avoid the system, and that might explain why Nessus had not spotted his true quarry yet.

  Or else the one Nessus sought had moved on to another world entirely, the trail grown colder still. . . .

  Nessus denied his raging pessimism. “You presume that my intervention must have triggered some alarm. You are sure that system diagnostics must be running even now, that Internal Security”—for which Buchanan was a midlevel cog—“will locate this booth and come bursting through my door. None of that will happen.”

  Buchanan scowled but said nothing.

  “In fact,” Nessus continued with a self-assurance he did not feel, “the last notice the transfer-booth system took of you was when you teleported home this evening. When someone does look for you—tomorrow, perhaps?—they will believe you walked out your front door.”

  Sweat had begun to bead on Buchanan’s forehead. He glanced around, seeming to notice for the first time that his cell was no ordinary transfer booth. “Why am I here?” he asked.

  Concession enough: Buchanan would cooperate.

  Many times, on many worlds, Nessus had pried the information he needed from those loath to offer it. This foray into Human Space was no different. His need was as great as ever—and the methods he used as distasteful as ever. But as always, they worked. They had led him across Human Space, from Home to Fafnir to Earth and now to Wunderland.

  And with each day away from Hearth and herd, the pressure on Nessus grew.

  Something would motivate Buchanan’s cooperation. Coercion? Bribery? Trickery? One of them, although Nessus did not know which. Yet. He did know that he could not continue for much longer in this manic state. Mind-healing catatonia would crash down on him, sooner rather than later.

  He needed answers now.

  Bribery worked. Before whisking Buchanan, by now sweating profusely, back to his home, Nessus had the identities of mob leaders across Wunderland. He had suggestions how to contact them.

  If Nathan Graynor had indeed come to Wunderland, someone in the criminal underground should know.

  3

  Nathan shuffled from the cave mouth, nodding to the sentries. The wounded never stopped coming and he was exhausted. Before he could sleep, though, he needed a pill. Pills.

  He passed the quickie thicket (a couple noisily occupied within) to plunge deeper into the jungle. He retained just enough dignity not to want to be seen at his worst: feeding rumors to Silverman, the camp’s black-market supplier, in trade for a few more pills.

  Nathan followed his customary route, wondering if tonight was the night the perimeter patrols shot him anyway. Both suns had set and the jungle was dark. Walking slowly until his eyes adapted, he made his way downhill to the rendezvous: a massive granite boulder in a clearing unequally bisected by a weed-choked stream. “It’s Big Nate,” he whispered. The patients’ nickname for him had stuck. “I got off shift a bit late.”

  That wasn’t Silverman beside the boulder. Nathan froze.

  “Come no closer,” the thing said in an incongruously sexy feminine voice.

  A shiver ran down Nathan’s spine. He knew what that thing was . . . didn’t he?

  The creature was about Nathan’s height, but there any resemblance to a human ended. The alien stood on three legs, its single hind leg complexly jointed. It wore only a broad sash from which pockets dangled. Its two tiny heads capped long, sinuous necks. Each head, flat and triangular, had a mouth, one ear, and one eye. Its torso (pale, but by starlight Nathan could not guess at a color) was vaguely reminiscent of a wingless, featherless ostrich. A broad dome, covered by a dark mane indifferently braided, perched between the alien’s broad shoulders. At least Nathan decided to call shoulders those muscular bulges where the necks joined the torso, for mouths and necks apparently did double duty as hands and arms. Those head-and-neck assemblies reminded him, inanely, of sock puppets—

  And suddenly Nathan knew what a wondrous manifestation this was. He almost forgot his craving for drugs. “You . . . you’re a Puppeteer.”

  Heads swiveled, and for a moment the alien looked itself in the eyes. “We were often called that. I am Nessus.”

  Puppeteers! Nathan had studied them in college. Their presence in Known Space had always been limited, the locations of their worlds a secret. They had controlled an interstellar trading empire. Then, only a few years before Nathan’s birth, the Puppeteers had all disappeared from Known Space.

  And yet here one stood. . . .

  Nathan said, “I thought the Puppeteers ran from the explosion”—a chain reaction of supernovae—“at the galactic core.” The radiation would sterilize this part of the galaxy. In twenty thousand years or so. A Puppeteer couldn’t be too cautious.

  “And so most of us have. Some of us still have business to complete.”

  As do I. For want of a pill Nathan’s skin crawled. “I was expecting to meet . . . a man.”

  Heads bobbed—up/down, down/up—in alternation. “The criminal element has been most helpful in my investigation. They indicated where I could find you.”

  Nathan trembled. These tremors had nothing to do with his craving for a pill. “You’ve mistaken me for someone else.”

  Again, Nessus looked himself in the eyes. “No mistake, Nathan Graynor. Your stepfather’s exploits are famous. I find myself in need of his talents. As I could not find him, I have come to you.”

  Nathan’s hands began shaking uncontrollably and he jammed them into jumpsuit pockets. He couldn’t have been older than eight the time he overheard his fathers discussing Puppeteers. They could not have known he was behind the sofa. Still, everything was very circumspect and cryptic. No story or context, just hints and insinuations.

  Only the moral was clear. Puppeteers keep their word, but you don’t always get to see the fine print in time.

  Kind of like a deal with the Devil.

  “We do not have much time,” Nessus said. He trembled, too. “Help me to find your stepfather and I will remove you from this place, this misnamed Wunderland.”

  And if Nathan declined?

  Whether or not Nessus so intended, he had given the “criminal element” reason to suspect Nathan might be important—and they would be correct.

  A live blockade runner to make an example of? The aristos would love nothing better. Even now Silverman must be digging up information about how Nathan came to this camp. How long before Silverman sold out Nathan for an Internal Security reward?

  It was too awful to think about. “How did you get past the patrols, Nessus?”

  A neck bent briefly downward and straightened, pointing. Nathan noticed a thin disc resting on the packed dirt of the path. The Puppeteer stood on the disc, not on the path itself.

  Nessus said, “This device and another like it transported me directly here. Think of them as open transfer booths. Untraceable, of course.”

  “One of your . . . minions brought it?” Who better than the black market to smuggle something into a Resistance camp?

  “For a princely fee.”

  History said Puppeteers were cowards. Nathan believed it. Who but cowards fled perils twenty thousand years removed? But cowardice was a way of life for Puppeteers, not an insult. What of the opposite l
abel?

  Nathan said, “Trusting the criminal element, sneaking into an armed camp. Forgive me, Nessus, but those actions seem insanely brave.”

  “If I were not insane, I would never leave home.” With one head, Nessus plucked at his braids. “But even the craziest among us cannot handle an alien world for long. So, decide. Will you assist me?”

  The aristos would hunt Nathan forever and he had no way off this planet. Of course he wanted in! The catch was, he had no clue where his father was. Either father. He had had no contact with his family for decades.

  And if he had known? As much as he resented—had sometimes hated—his parents, they hid for a reason. He would not sell them out. Certainly not to an insane alien.

  “I guess you don’t know,” Nathan said. “There was an accident a few years after I left Home. Everyone died.”

  Nessus plunged a head deep into his mane, twisting and tugging convulsively.

  The Puppeteer was terrified! That fear might come only of standing here, exposed and alone among aliens, his manic bravery at low ebb. Nathan sensed more was involved.

  Who the Finagle were his parents? What had they done? What drove them to abduct their own children? From whom did they hide? And what service could any of them possibly provide to draw a Puppeteer out of hiding?

  With a shudder, Nessus lifted the head from his mane. With both heads held high, he fixed his gaze on Nathan. “Take his place.”

  Nathan blinked. “Doing what?”

  “It may be dangerous,” Nessus said, scraping at the disc with a forehoof. “You will be compensated well. I can reveal no more than that.”

  More dangerous than the middle of a civil war? “How well?”

  “Extraction from this place. Wealth, commensurate with your success. And excuse my indelicacy . . . a cure for your addiction.”