CELESTE
There was a musty smell about this place, and it was deathly still. Beyond that—
I sighed, a sigh that was almost a groan, and shifted. My groping hand slid over something rough, like a coarse fabric. Dust rose and eddied to my nostrils.
It made my head ache even worse. Yet I moved again, and this time caught the faint, half-whispered sounds of friction and of creaking.
Another sigh. Slowly, painfully, uncertainly, I opened my eyes.
Blackness, utter and complete.
The very circumscription of it seemed to freeze me. I lay ever so still, running my tongue-tip along dry lips ... tasting the grittiness of my teeth. Slowly, recollection began to flow back through me. My mind picked up a faster beat.
Where was I? How had I come here? What had happened?
Again, I reached out, groping.
I lay on some sort of narrow couch, it seemed. On either side of me it fell away to a rough, dust-filmed floor.
Warily, I sat up and swung down my feet, then waited till my head had cleared.
Rising, then, I felt my way along the couch.
One end of it joined a wall. Still silent, still feeling my way, I followed the partition.
It brought me to a door—a door securely locked.
I moved on again. Four turns later, I bumped against the bed.
That made it a room—a small, tight-sealed room, windowless and with one door, and furnished only with the couch on which I'd lain.
My own role, apparently, was to wait here, humble and patient, till someone came to call me.
The only trouble was, I didn't feel humble, nor patient either. There were too many questions in me; too much anger.
And somehow, all the questions, all the anger, centered around one lovely face.
Swiftly, I ran my hands over the couch.
Only now, it developed, it wasn't a couch; not really. What I'd taken to be a fabric cover was nothing but a wad of sacking draped over a row of fibrox shipping cases.
Fumbling, I located one of the case's opener tabs and sheared away the fibrox.
Smaller cases spilled out, each about the size of a candybox.
A tremor of excitement ran through me. Hastily, I ripped open one of these smaller cases ... ran my fingers over smooth metal and an array of dials and switches.
A thrill-mill.
For an instant I hesitated. Then, quickly, I ripped away box after box, lining up the mills in a neat row along the wall beside me.
By the time I'd finished, I had no couch to sit on, and the row of mills reached well-nigh half the way around the room.
Now, by feel, starting at the door, I lined up all the dials alike, then threw the activating switches.
All of a sudden, the room was no longer still. Every breath, every shuffle, rose in my ears like peals of thunder. Varicolored sparks flashed through the black. The mustiness grew to a stench that blocked my nostrils. I coughed and choked on every particle of eddying dust.
Beyond the door, there came a rush of feet. A woman's voice cried, "Turn them off, Traynor! Quick, before they burn your brain out!"
"Open up, then! Unlock that door!"
"Yes, yes! But turn them off!"
"Unlock it!"
A bolt flew back with a deafening crash. The door burst open in a dazzling blaze of light.
Blinded, lurching, stumbling, I clawed down switches. My head throbbed till it seemed it must surely split wide open.
But as the mills went off, the tide of experiential wave-shock ebbed. Slowly, the intensity of the stimuli flooding in upon me fell back to normal level. My vision cleared. My head stopped ringing.
Celeste Stelpa stood in the doorway. Her face was pale, her lovely eyes dark-ringed with strain.
I said, "All right. Talk."
"Talk—?" The grey eyes widened visibly. "What do you mean?"
"You know what I mean. Where are we? Why'd you bring me here? What's behind this thrill-mill business?"
The girl's hand came up in a too-quick movement, smoothing blonde hair already perfectly coiffured. A shutter seemed to close behind her eyes, just as it had on the voco scanner. "Really, Agent Traynor—"
"Would you rather I told you, then?" I stepped past her quickly, peering this way and that to be sure we were alone. "We'll start with why you brought me here; and the answer is, because you're scared."
Our eyes locked for an instant as I said it. Then, abruptly, Celeste laughed—a soft laugh, pleasant and unrestrained.
"On the contrary, Mr. Traynor." She took my arm. "However, let's go back to my quarters, where we can be a bit more comfortable. You must be terribly tired, after that insane ordeal with the mills."
Together, we moved down a dark aisle like that of a storage warehouse ... then through a doorway into another room, not too much larger than the one in which I'd been.
There was a difference, though: This place was the strangest I'd ever seen. Even the concept was alien.
There were no furnishings, in the normal sense, save bulky, twisted shapes, all knobs and hollows, that I'd have classed as statuary.
The floor, in turn, was weirdly geometric, a thing of slopes and planes, angles and undulations. Pyramids jutted up, adjacent to cubes and octagons and wedges. Color ran riot—here tinting and blending, there contrasting.
Celeste said, "Find a spot that fits you. That's the best way."
Gingerly, I tested the footing, and discovered that the whole room was surfaced with a substance like a superior, foam-based carpet. Following the girl, I found a hollow at the base of a slab and slumped down.
"Comfortable?"
"Comfortable." I leaned back, studying my companion. "Are you?"
"Am I comfortable, you mean?"
"Yes."
"Of course. Why wouldn't I be?"
"I don't know." I shrugged. "I just thought it might be a little difficult for a human—adapting to the Kel."
"And I think you're trying to fish for information." The girl smiled at me. "You know, you're really a rather remarkable man, Agent Traynor."
"Oh?"
"You asked me why I brought you here—and that's the reason. You caught my curiosity when you talked to me on the voco. So much so I decided to come see you. And when I saw those others chasing you—well...."
It was my turn to smile. "You're very convincing, Celeste. I might even believe you, if I hadn't known you back on Bejak."
"Oh, yes. Bejak." For the fraction of a second, the clear eyes shadowed. "It would have been nice if you'd been on Bejak, Mr. Traynor. It really would. But you weren't. Those details—the things you said to me on the voco—they came out of FedGov Security files, of course. You wanted to upset me, to frighten me...."
Her voice trailed off, and it was as if she herself, somehow, had left the room. I felt a strange sense of helplessness and guilt. Words wouldn't come.
And it was a time when I needed words, the right words; needed them desperately; needed them now, this instant, if mankind were to survive.
Yet still we sat there, looking past each other in aching silence.
Then, quite suddenly, Celeste asked in a small voice, "Would you trade, Mark? Would you?"
"Would I trade—?"
"Yes. The things you want to know for ones I'd like to ask."
Tension crept across my forehead, stretching the skin tight. "What kind of things?"
"About—about you, mostly, Mark."
It was the second time she'd used my given name. Her voice held a vibrance that was strangely taut and urgent.
I said, "It's a bad bargain, Celeste. There's nothing to tell about me. Not that anyone would want to know."
"There is, Mark! For me, there is!" She moved swiftly, sliding across the space between us on her knees. Her hand pressed my arm. "Who is it you hate, Mark? What are you fighting, really?"
"Who do I hate—?" I stared. "Who do you think? Who do any of us hate, except the Kel?"
"But why, Mark? Why?"
I groped; pulled back a little. "You come from Bejak II, and you ask that? Give those monsters half a chance, and there'll be no human race!"
"That's your answer, then? You hate the Kel because of this fight, this war between the races?"
"Of course that's why. Isn't that enough?"
"I don't know, Mark. I really don't." Celeste buried her face in her hands. Her shoulders shook with sudden tremors.
A strange uneasiness stirred in me. Shifting, I slid my arm about her; pulled her to me. "Celeste, Celeste...."
"Mark...." Her words came muffled. "Mark, why is it that you hate them more than any other man does?"
"I don't. All of us are fighting—"
"No! That's not true!" Celeste's face came up, the grey eyes feverish. "The rest aren't fighting like you are. They haven't gone against Controller Kruze's orders. They haven't violated warping regulations. They haven't thrown a planet into chaos with a deportation edict!"
I rocked back. "Celeste—! What is this?"
"Don't you see, Mark? Everything you've done is different from the others! All the rest—they fight out of discipline, or fear, or maybe even desperation. But you—there's hate in the way you go about it. You don't rest, you don't slow down, you don't stop to think of consequences. To watch you, anyone would swear your children's blood was on Kel hands."
The uneasiness inside me grew. I looked away, not speaking.
"What is it, Mark? Tell me! What's happened to you that makes you hate them?"
"Nothing, rack you! Nothing at all!" The words came out in a rush, almost before I knew that I was speaking. "I'm just like any other agent, except that Psychogenetics picked me to be de-conditioned."
"You were—de-conditioned?—I mean, before you came in contact with the thrill-mills?"
"Yes, of course. Psychogenetics thought a free mind might work better in a fight like this than one pinned down to pattern."
"And what do you think?"
"You've seen what I've done, haven't you?"
"Yes, yes." A pause. "But no one else has acted like you, have they?—Not any of the thrill-mill people?"
"No."
"Then what is it, Mark? Why don't the others behave like you?"
My head was beginning to ache. I gripped it between my hands, trying to fight back the undercurrent of rage that somehow kept trying to well up in me. "Let me alone, will you? I've had nothing but trouble ever since the first time that Psychogen bunch pulled me in."
"The first time—!"
"What—?"
"There was—more than once—?"
"Yes, of course. There were experiments. I was de-conditioned and then conditioned again four times. Each time, they'd send me out for a few weeks' service, see how I reacted. This is my fifth round. I've gotten to where I hate the very thought of being pushed back down to pattern level. It's flat, all of it—flat and grey and ugly—"
I stopped short, rigid.
Only now Celeste clutched at me, shaking. "Mark, Mark! Don't you see—?"
My hands began to tremble. Then my shoulders. Then my whole body.
And Celeste: "Mark, there's a thing they call—displacement. A way people have of switching headaches. Maybe a man hates his wife. But he's always been taught that he should love her, and the teaching runs so deep he can't hit her.
"Then, by accident, he runs into some other trouble—a little thing, maybe; someone's poor work, or a joke, or bad manners.
"Do you know what he does then, Mark? Can you guess?"
I said thickly, "Nothing. Not if he's been properly conditioned."
"That's right, Mark. Nothing. Not if he's been properly conditioned. He can't even hate his wife in the first place. That's one of the reasons compulsory conditioning came in.
"But back before that, he did something: He struck out; he over-reacted; he kicked the dog instead of his wife."
I didn't say anything. I was shaking too hard.
Celeste said softly, "Could that be you in that picture, Mark? Could you be hating one thing and striking another?"
Spasmodically, I drew up my knees and hugged my arms round them—burying my face, squeezing my eyes tight shut in a vain, desperate effort to blot out the room, and Celeste, and the things she said.
Only they wouldn't blot out, because they were inside of me, too, churning and roiling and spinning round in my brain. I had a queer, detached feeling, as if I were two rather than one, and one of those two was a great, yawning, black pit, and the other hung on the brink, ready to cast himself in.
That was how close I came to madness in that moment.
Then, abruptly, the moment passed. With a curse, I sat up straight, my mood gone suddenly savage.
Celeste's eyes distended. She started to draw away.
I caught her wrist fast; jerked her back. "Where do you think you're going?"
"Mark, please—!"
"Forget it. It's my turn for questions." And then, tightening my grip: "Who's supplying those thrill-mills?"
A thin white line of pain had formed round her lips. But she spoke coolly, levelly: "The Kel, of course."
In spite of myself, I breathed in sharply. "And you—?"
"I survived Bejak II. The price was to help them."
"The thrill-mills—"
"They're part of a plan. Man's conditioned consistency was a bit difficult for the Kel to handle. They felt the simplest solution was to upset the conditioning." A pause. "Thanks to you, they'll probably succeed."
"Thanks to me—!"
"Yes. You see"—a smile, without mirth—"the Kel are shape-shifters. They can take any form. Tonight, an infiltration party will move into Rizal's defenses and take over the posts of the men you had seized. No one will know them from the originals. By morning, there'll be a Kel ship dropping down in the port without interference. After which, we'll all be utilized as laboratory animals for various experiments. The Kel feel we're ideal for that role."
"You know, and you didn't warn us? Your own race; your own people?" I stared at the girl in numb horror, her beauty turning to ashes before my eyes.
Only there was no time for numbness, nor for recrimination. I had too many things to do; too large a role to play.
I came up fast, dragging the woman bodily with me. "Get me out of here. Now, before I kill you."
She tottered, wincing and cringing as I twisted her arm slowly round. But as before, her voice stayed strangely level. "I'm sorry, Mark. I can't do that."
"You're going to!"
"I can't."
I said, "Half a turn more, and something snaps. You won't like it."
"I—can't."
"Why can't you?"
"Because—the Kel—won't let me."
"They won't let you?" I paused in my twisting to make a slow, elaborate survey of the distorted room. "You know, for a second I almost thought you said the Kel wouldn't let you take me out."
"They—won't. Try—to leave. You'll—see—"
There was something in her voice that rasped my nerve-ends. Cat-footed, I spun about, looking this way and that.
Still nothing. Nothing but a strange, misshapen room and twisted, nonrepresentational statuary.
Wordless, I shoved Celeste Stelpa towards the door.
Like an echo, something seized me by the ankle.
It was a tentacle—a tentacle attached to a weird, pseudopodic body that hadn't been there brief moments before.
Frantically, I tried to jerk free.
Lightning-fast, off to one side, a distorted lump of sculpture changed shape ... hurtled at me.
Floundering and flailing, I went down....