The transformer trilogy, p.58
The Transformer Trilogy, page 58
Now he was almost at the summit, and as he passed along a low wall separating sectors, he caught a faint trace of a scent he had been waiting to find. It had a harsh aromatic pungency overlain with a sweetness so intense it was cloying: Carrionflower in predative phase, close enough to be dangerous and cleverly concealed, as was its habit. Demsing knew that whoever was behind him could also pick up this peculiar scent and understand its meaning. And so now the game became deadly.
As far as he knew, no one knew where Carrionflowers had originated, or precisely what they were. They combined attributes of plant, animal, and fungus with a sophisticated ease that spoke of a long evolution somewhere where things were radically different from the way humans usually found them. Essentially, a Carrionflower was a semi-mobile preying plantlike organism which preferred flesh for its main diet and actively sought it out. It captured by luring its prey within reach with psychosexual pheromones and hallucinogens of enormous power, and then tapping into the captured organism with ropy tendrils. The victim would be stung, paralyzed, and kept alive by intravenous feeding of glucose while the plant replenished its store of required chemical compounds, and seeded offspring from a store of previously fertilized gametes. It was said that the plant provided its unwilling hosts with psychedelic hallucinations of unsurpassed detail and clarity. Sometimes distraught souls would seek one out, imagining that the plant would provide a vision of paradise while feeding on it. In fact, it created and amplified chemically whatever might be the leaning of the mood of the victim, and so for one deeply depressed, giving oneself to a Carrionflower was in truth an invitation to hell unplumbed.
Demsing breathed deeply, to take in as much of the scent as he could before subtle trace compounds concealed within its brew shut off his perception of his own sense of smell. For a moment, he felt nothing; then came a heightened sense of clarity, a lift, a confidence. But yet no images, nothing concrete. The concealed plant was, somewhere in its tissues, registering the presence of prey that was not yet close enough to identify so it could attune its chemistry. He knew this one; the Llai Tong kept one near their training halls, and this particular plant was old and wise and very sly.
Contact! Demsing’s sense of smell vanished as if it had been switched off, and simultaneously he felt an unexpected, unexplained sexual desire in his loins—unfocussed and unpersonalized, but very sudden and very strong, like a panicky urge to defecate. He ignored it as much as he could, suppressed it, and continued carefully, extra-consciously, along the way he had previously chosen. He thought he knew where this plant usually kept its main body, and he wanted to come as close as he could.
And now he began to catch hints of flickering images, almost-memories of females he had known, evanescent shifting pictures that vanished as fast as they appeared. Nearer to the heart’s desire, that was the word; Carrionflower found out what your resonance was by chemistry and tuned you up to the point of madness. Even as he made himself remember this, it also occurred to him out of nowhere that he had indeed come to this place at this time to meet Sherith, and so indeed was she here, waiting for him, melting, ardent, in this garden, all he had to do was step into it, she waited in the shadows for him.
The urge was intense and irresistible. But he knew and could not forget that the real Sherith was dead, and so while the powerful chemical illusion haunted him, his own mind generated images to match the chemistry. Sherith is dead, he repeated, opening himself and allowing the response to that death to grasp him, as he never allowed it to in ordinary life. It was enough; the hold of the Carrionflower was broken, and once again his present reality returned to focus. He continued over a low wall, up a short drainpipe, across a roof with a low dome bulging its center. He glanced back across the landscape of the starlit city, spreading to the horizon. A flashback caught him, entangling his mind momentarily with a nonsense verse he totally misconstrued : Oh little town of Bethlehem, followed by an image of a much smaller version of the same city, with groves of peculiar trees with feathery, drooping tops. But the sensation of desire slackened a little, leaving him shaken and weak with the effort of denial. Yes, but that was a lifesaving denial!
He still had no perception of a sense of smell, and was still getting images and flickers of memories or pseudomemories, but the effects were now noticeably weaker. He stopped in a patch of deep shadow, and concealed himself beside an exhalator vent from somewhere deeper inside, which helped dilute the chemical barrage which the damned plant was emitting.
But unexpectedly, suddenly, the surge of desire came again, rose alarmingly and Demsing began moving, haltingly, exerting all his will to hold himself back, and it was not enough! It was close! And it could move, if it had to, itself. He groped in one of the shallow pockets of his coverall for an ampule of Atropine, but before he could administer it, he hallucinated a powerful image: a young man or perhaps late-adolescent. Demsing, bemused, did not object to that per se, but what puzzled him was that the image was, however clear, of no one he had ever known, that he could remember. The image, however attractive, was of a stranger. But, tantalizingly, he could almost put a name to the boy. He experienced a momentary confusion, because some still-conscious part of his mind knew that this was one of the limitations of the system of perception which the Carrionflower exploited: the mind of the intended victim always keyed the attractant to an image in memory, specifically a memory of a real person, not a projection.
The boy was slim and intensely vital, with clear and well-defined features, and a most peculiar mustache, soft and close to the skin, trimmed out (or not growing) in the center of his lip, drooping lazily at the corners of his mouth. Demsing almost reached for it, but he also insisted, even as he reached with an impossible lust for that face, that he had never known such a person, and for an instant his mind divided into two warring parts, and that conflict broke the hold of the plant. It tried to compensate by making the image even sharper, but the details were becoming blurry and Demsing was able to shake it off. Soon, it faded out entirely, and was replaced by a nearly uncontrollable urge to run as fast as possible from this place, in any direction. The fear was palpable.
Demsing smiled to himself, knowing that the trap he had set had indeed worked. The plant had picked up another prey, shifted to it, locked on, and had accomplished a successful catch. It always put out a warn-off chemical. He put the remembered ampule of Atropine away, and reached for another ampule of somewhat more specific effects, which he used, grimacing at the sting of it where he drove the point in.
Presently his senses returned to him. He waited, unmoving, measuring out the time it would take the Carrionflower to complete its connections with its new host. But while he waited, the image which the plant had caused him to hallucinate came clearly back to him. That, too, was unusual. A boy, or young man, with an odd mustache, distinctive and memorable. In the background, he could sense somehow that a city was burning, and there was an oppressive sense of dread, of onrushing, slowly magnificent doom, which had only been lightened by the sensual encounter he had had with ... him. The name still eluded him. Still the image did not match any conscious memory, and there was now something else he had not seen before: in the image, he was perceiving the unknown nameless young man from a woman’s point of view. He was her lover, not his. Right. It had been difficult seeing this at first, but once one caught on, it was obvious. He shook his head, hard, as if to clear away the cobwebs of a too-vivid nightmare, and thought, cynically, Nice kid, that one, yeah, but I’ve never been a woman. Too bad!
Back in the present, he reflected that, after all, the trap had worked, and about now, it would be time to slip down there and see what had fallen into the Carrionflower’s embrace. Perhaps that might tell him something. But without delay: the Llai Tong certainly possessed chemoreceptors in their compound which would now be telling some unsleeping guard that their pet had caught someone. They would be interested, too. Maybe more than he.
The garden of the Tong appeared to be the typical rooftop garden of this sort of level, appreciably larger than most, but not greatly different from other places this high up on the rise. The predominant vegetation was of the hardy stock which everyone presumed to be native: sturdy, twisted fibrous trunks and small, fleshy leaves. Many of these were sensitive and semi-mobile and followed the rapid path of Primary across the dark sky of the painfully short day of Teragon.
He dropped soundlessly down onto the patio floor and examined each part of the garden closely. After a careful search, he found it in a dark corner, more or less where he had expected it to be. The main body of the plant looked to be an ancient, short tree-trunk, sinuous and twisted as if it had been out in hostile climes for centuries. It appeared rigid, and wooden; neither was true. All parts of the organism were slowly mobile, and it seemed to capture its prey by simply anticipating it, as a human might capture much-swifter flies in its hand by anticipating where the fly would be, not where it was, or had been. Then all one had to do was be there. But it was easy to understand how a human could do that, with a brain thousands of times the size of the fly’s entire body; more difficult to comprehend how a hundred-kilo thing which looked like a cross between a bristlecone pine and a strangler fig, and which seemed to have nothing in its structure resembling either brain or nerves, could anticipate a human, or indeed any animal. There was always the last category: OTHER, he thought. No system ever maps the universe 100 percent. It is a deadly arrogance to imagine that one could.
Speed itself was of no ultimate advantage to the anticipated fly: neither in some cases did the maneuvering of a human avail against the uncanny powers of the Carrionflower. This one had clasped its prey to itself near the base of the trunk by rootlike branches which looked as if they had grown that way. It was already attached, and so that was that. Nothing, or very little, one could do about it, once it was attached and feeding. At any event, nothing absolute you could do in haste. It would kill the victim and defend itself Once in a great while, an inexperienced Carrionflower might be persuaded to release a catch, but the process required a surrogate catch, and an excessively long time. They were tree-like in their patience. At this moment, Demsing had little time, no prey, and very little patience. He stepped closer to examine the catch, repressing a crawling sensation of horror which was not completely caused by emanations from the plant.
This one had been a girl. Branches clasped her limbs and body in a parody of an embrace, and vine-like tendrils touched her at several places he could see. Her clothing was disarrayed, but not removed: the plant never removed clothing, but simply grew through it. Her face was distorted, her head thrown back, and her mouth was opened in a grimace of mingled ecstasy and horror. While he watched, he could see her breathing shallowly and rapidly, and he could also see her abdomen contracting as if in the throes of the sexual act. A pale trumpetlike flower hovered directly above her uplifted face, a tiny bladder in its base working insistently, like a pulse, drenching her nervous system in hallucinogens which it synthesized on the spot, tuned by chemical feedback to the exact requirements of control of her body.
Demsing saw enough to identify the girl as a Kobith of the Wa’an13 School of Assassins, an organization of impressive and admirable techniques, composed primarily but not exclusively of women. This girl was the nearest available example, in this universe and time, to a ninja, one of the legendary assassins from the far side of the past. She wore a loose, pajamalike garment of dull black. Her face had been carefully blackened out.
Demsing started to draw away, motivated by the waves of fear-substance the thing was emitting at him. All the data he could get from this event, directly, had registered. There was no more to be done. It was a shame, he thought; the girl was slender and childlike, with a face which under other circumstances might be described as elfin and lovely. The lines of her face betrayed the soft blurred features of youth.
Her training at the School would have involved, as a matter of course, not only the mastery of martial arts, dance, and gymnastics, but techniques of seduction and sexual performances. Taken at birth, selectees were taught to swim while still suckling babes. She would be skilled in the use of internal muscles, and now that skill and control would, under the stresses induced by the plant, start tearing her internal organs loose within a matter of hours. It was doubtful she would live more than a standard day, even with the plant helping to keep her alive.
He also knew he would have to leave this place quickly, before he could be discovered by the flunkies of the Tong. Demsing stepped back, leaving, when he heard an almost inaudible sound from the girl, an inhuman sound that made the back of his neck prickle and his bladder weak. He turned back to the girl, moved close to her.
She had, with incredible effort, brought her head forward; her mouth was still open, slack, and saliva ran from one corner. Sweat stained her clothing and ran down her forehead into her eyes. Her eyes were still glassy, focused upon some internal hellish panorama only she could imagine, a she’ol of unendurable pleasure indefinitely prolonged. But somehow she had called on all of her resources and was using them now. It seemed that she could see him, dimly, part of the time. She seemed to flicker in and out of consciousness.
The lovely, blurred mouth worked, tried to shape words, and at last forced out, in a faint hoarse whisper broken by involuntary whimpers and catches, “... can’t stand it. Give me ...”
Demsing drew his knife. “Who are you? Why follow me?”
“... ah! Can’t die....” Her head fell back and her body moved in the throes of some deep inner convulsion. Her eyes focused on him again. “... years ... inside here. Torn inside ... die ... can’t ... you won ... kill me ...”
He felt beside her left breast for the heart, which was now beating rapidly. He readied himself for the thrust. “Why?”
She groaned out, infinitely slowly, “... Vollbrecht ... do it now....”
Her eyes rolled back into her head alarmingly until only the whites showed, and her voice made a low throbbing sound, an animal noise Demsing could not interpret. When her head came back to near-normal, and her eyes returned, the eyes faced in different directions and moved independently. She repeated, “... Vollbrecht ... please ... now ...”
Demsing began to hear sounds from the far side of the Garden: he had just enough time. He thrust in the knife, and felt her heart jump violently on it. Her body made one last powerful contraction, releasing her bladder and bowels in the reaction of death.
The Carrionflower seemed hardly to notice. After the initial relaxation, the contractions began again, although at a much-reduced strength and rate. The plant was now maintaining her body systems independently, and could prolong her as a chemical factory for its needs for several more hours. Left alone, it would eventually consume the entire body.
Demsing did not wait, but faded to the wall and slid up it like a shadow, only seconds ahead of the Tong flunkies.
On Teragon, as everywhere else, whether its inhabitants knew it or not, information did not merely represent power, it was power. Therefore after leaving the neighborhood of the Tong, Demsing carefully thought over what he had just seen, because in this there was the unmistakable flow of the powerful currents of real and hard information. So who knew it, and how soon? And information was even more perishable than food.
To be followed, briefly, occasionally, or even habitually, was neither unusual nor alarming for most of the inhabitants of Teragon. But in this case, because of who had been following, and because of the unusual persistence she had displayed, even to the point of becoming captured by a Carrionflower, the act was exceptional and definitely worth examination. The surveillance had been paid for, and it had not been cheap, which implied the attention of real powers on Teragon which Demsing did not wish aroused or alerted.
His mission this night had been in his view of negligible importance, or at least so he had calculated it: a minor arrangement of negotiation between an obscure neighborhood sovyet and the Metallists’ Syndic. The matter had been so routine that he had considered it worthy of lesser diplos, and had almost not taken it. So now he reconsidered the task in the new light.
And arrived at no new conclusions. The job had been minor-league, and remained so on second and third examinations. Therefore the shadow had been on him, and not on the job. And so who had paid, and for what purpose? The neighborhood sovyet couldn’t afford a kobith, and the Metallists were too tight to pay.
Then he considered the girl. For a moment, Demsing felt regrets at having killed her. But she had begged for it. And besides, victims of Carrionflowers needed considerable care; her own people wouldn’t have provided it, because kobith were sent out absolutely on their own. That was their code. And he had no place to keep such a girl. And of course the beauty was a carefully selected illusion. No more dangerous or independent an adversary could be found. It would be equivalent to attempting to heal a wild animal. And that, too, was part of Teragon: no one took in strays, and need was the most bottomless pit of all.
She had walked into a Carrionflower trap. Obviously, she could be expected to know about such things, and to be thoroughly trained to resist them, so why she did so required some thinking out. He had not recognized her for what she was until after she was caught; before that, the only impression he had had of her was that she was good at her work, definitely in the upper orders. He thought wryly that had he known she was a Kobith, he would not have tried the Carrionflower stunt; he would have expected her to walk right past it. This was a piece with a loose end he couldn’t tie down. She should not have failed.
A long shot was the possibility that she had intended to fail, which fit in with himself being the target. But that, in turn, suggested an accuracy of assessment of his own capabilities which he seriously doubted anyone competent to make: Demsing had learned early to keep his mouth shut and had not survived as a free agent into his middle thirties standard by opening it—or, equally important, allowing any assessments of his ability to be revealed. Still, that was a possibility and it needed evaluating in its turn. And if she had been the target, then there was a reason for that, too. But that didn’t concern him. It could have been a thousand things—one of their arcane and ironic punishments for some imaginary transgression. Still, it made him uncomfortable, and for that, he needed to make some tests over the next few days.
