C. S.Friedman - The Madness Season

The Madness Season

By C. S. Friedman

Scanned and proofed by BW-SciFi

Release Date: July, 22nd, 2002

Cover art by Michael R. Whelan.

For color prints of Michael Whelan paintings, please contact:

Glass Onion Graphics

P.O. Box 88

Brookfield, CT 06804

DAW Book Collectors No. 829.

First Printing, October 1990

123456789

PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

To the memory of Herbert Friedman

1931-1988

Writer, Editor, Teacher, Square Dancer Extraordinaire,

and beloved father.

PART ONE: EXILE

EARTH

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When the series of images ended I reached out and flicked the projector switch off, sending the last holo

spiraling down into darkness. That was when the years suddenly seemed to bleed one into another; past,

pres-ent, and future so lacking in definition that for a mo-ment I couldn't tell them apart. I couldn't

remember how many names I had worn, or where in my life each one belonged. It was the darkness that

triggered it, the absolute darkness of a moonless night, on a campus that had long since let its street lights

fall into disre-pair. Total blackness, within the classroom and with-out. And in that utter darkness,

silence. Not the relative quiet of a handful of students who had other things to do, other places to be

—that would have been reassuringly familiar, a restless silence filled with guarded whispers, the rustling of

papers and tapes and clothing, and the barely audible shifting of flesh as one student stretched, another

yawned, a third dared to turn off his recorder. But instead, nothing. An abso-lute silence, the sound of a

dozen people who felt more comfortable with stillness than with life. An inhuman silence that had existed

on Earth for so long that I could no longer count its years, or separate them in my mind.

A touch to the control plate brought up the lights, an unhealthy green to illuminate empty, purposeless

faces. For a moment I was angry, and dared to hate the creatures that had brought us to this pass. But

an-ger of any kind is a dangerous emotion, it eats at the nerves and eventually makes you careless. And

carelessness was a luxury my kind couldn't afford. I took a deep breath to steady myself, and recited

once more the litany of my post-Conquest existence:You swore you would accept this. You have no

other choice.

"That's all for now," I announced. Bodies stirred, moving from lethargy to life without obvious

reluc-tance. Why did they come here? What did they want? A comfortable ritual, perhaps, or a taste of

the past. It didn't really matter. They came, and I taught them; the ritual exchange permitted us some

illusion of pur-pose, so I encouraged it. At heart it was just another lie, another emptiness . . . but we

must hold on to some illusions, and so they learned—or played at learning—and the ancient ritual held

sway.Education. Without free thought, it had no meaning; without cre-ativity, it had no purpose. Why

did they bother? Why did I?

They filed out in silence, leaving me alone in the classroom, with only the projector for company. After a

moment I turned its motor off. The pockets were in need of repair—had been, for some time now—and

one of them jammed when I tried to open it to retrieve my holodisks. Just my luck. I pried back the lip to

get the disk out, careful not to do any permanent damage. There were fewer and fewer people to repair

such things, in the world that the Tyr had left us, and I hadn't worked in holography for ... well, for long

enough. I couldn't have repaired it.

At last I had them all, three matched disks in their labeled cases. ART OF THE SUBJUGATION,

PARTS I, II, AND III. Holding them brought to mind images from our most recent lesson: an

earthenware vase sup-ported by ten identical figures, a sculpture of steel and plastic which was tedious in

its symmetry, a computer generated light-sculpture too balanced to be dynamic. Disk after disk, holo

after holo, the message of the Tyr was driven home:In unity there is strength. Diversity breeds chaos.

We've learned our lesson well,I thought grimly.

My image, seen in the shimmer of a plastic window, against the backdrop of the Georgian night: A

middle-aged man, well-schooled, retiring, an instructor of night courses in post-Conquest art in one of

North-america's few remaining colleges. My age had always been difficult to judge (thirty-five? forty?

perhaps a well-preserved fifty?) and now a touch of gray at my temples, artificial, added to the

uncertainty. Hair a sandy color, not unappealing, body neither fat nor scrawny, but comfortably lean.

Once I was considered tall, as the standards of men were measured, then av-erage in height as man's

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fortune increased, now tall again by comparison. But not excessively so.Average-ness was important, it

was my only armor against dis-covery, and so I was carefully, studiously,average. What nature had not

provided, cosmetics and tailoring did; my appearance should inspire no curiosity in ei-ther human or Tyr.

But when I looked at my reflection for more than a moment, when I allowed myself tosee . . . ah, then

the ghosts were visible. Visions arose from the past, images displaced from their natural timeframe,

wrapped around my current visage like a mask. What I had been. The things I had failed to do. What I

had chosen to accept. If it was true that the coward died a thousand deaths, then I died each time I

looked at my reflection. And so I chose the easiest course: to look quickly and then turn away, lest I

render myself inca-pable of maintaining that lie which was now a neces-sity of my life.

Mine was the last of the late-night classes, so I locked the building when I left. Coarse steel bars had

been placed on the windows, ironic in light of the fact that theft was almost nonexistent. What was the

point of accumulating wealth in a world that no longer had purpose? But what little thievery there was,

was fo-cused upon the few items of real value—such as so-phisticated electronic equipment in working

order—so I took the time to check the double doors when I was done, pulling hard at the two of them

until I was sure that the ancient locks had caught.

Don't dwell on the past,I cautioned myself, but the ghosts of memory were legion tonight. The spirit of

Earth had been destroyed, but what right did I have to complain? The current world was no threat to me

or my kind; how often had I dreamed of that coming to pass? What price would I not have paid, in my

youth, to purchase a lifetime of peace?

Not this,a voice whispered, couched in the cadence of recall.Never this . . .

Memories: I felt them rising within me, tried not to let them overwhelm me. Of all my unique weaknesses,

this was the worst—and the only one which I had not, to some degree, mastered. My brain seemed loath

to distinguish between sleeping and waking, and plagued my conscious hours with images that rightly

belonged in dreams. Pre-Conquest science had verified the problem—electromagnetic patterns occurred

in my waking brain which should only appear during sleep— but had offered no salvation; my own

experiments, so successful in every other regard, had failed to provide a solution. All I could do was

concentrate on the pres-ent, observe my surroundings—

And stop suddenly, alert. Something was wrong; I knew it, but couldn't say how. I listened: no sound

existed that was any more or less than ordinary. I looked, deep into the shadows of night, my vision

ad-equate even in the relative darkness: I saw no shapes or movement which any such night might not

contain. The air? I tested it: warm Georgian moisture, rich with the smells of autumn.

And then the breeze shifted direction and suddenly there was something else—horrible, stifling—that

awakened memories so intense that they struck like a fist straight into my gullet, driving the breath from

my body in a sudden eruption of fear.

I ran.Tried to run. The past overlapped the present, raining images down upon me as I dodged that

hated smell. But a hand shot out of darkness and grabbed me by the lapel of my coat as I passed the

corner of the building. I was swung back, into the brickwork, and there was blinding pain—but that

wasn't what ter-rified me most. It was that smell: a thick, acrid odor, the stink of Earth's defeat.

Honn-Tyr.

There were six of them—at least, six that I could see—and they were all heavily armed. Taller than I.

was by a handswidth, with black and mottled green and a dozen other shades of almost-black covering

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their bodies in random splotches. Identical, all of them, with an absoluteness that bore chilling witness to

the unity of their nature. Six armed extensions of a single will, gathered about me like the fingers of a

hand, poised to crush. And willing to crush, should I dare to defy them. But there was nothing to be

gained by fighting them, I knew that from past experience. No hope of escape, on any terms. I knew that

all too well.

The dark claws reached for me and I held myself still, despite my revulsion—submitted to the odor of

their presence as they searched my person, tearing my clothing, discarding their finds—and tried to forget

that once, in the distant past, I had dared to fight them. My current identity was passive, nonthreatening; I

couldn't afford to lose control of that.

At last they finished. My disks were scattered, and I saw a clawed foot crush one of them as my

assailant shifted his weight. My other possessions were scattered as well, lost in the thick summer grass.

And the pills on which I depended—my God, ifthose were lost—

"Daetrin Ungashak To-Alym Haal."

My current name, a Tyrran number; voiced in the harsh, staccato whisper of the Honn-Tyr, it was a

com-ment as well as a question.

I barely managed to get my voice to work. "What do you—"

"Tiye Kuolqa," my assailant announced.Itis the Will. "You will come with us."

I considered running. Better in some ways to be shot down now, than to face whatever fate the Tyr

might have in store for me. But there was, as always, a shadow of cowardice resident within me—and it

wasthis that won out, whispering,Maybe they don't know the truth yet. Maybe there's some other

reason they want you. Maybe, if you cooperate, you can talk your way out of this. And so, clinging

to that fragile hope, I moved away from the wall—slowly, making no sud-den movements—and allowed

them to drive me south-ward, toward the bulk of the campus.

How had they found me out? Certainly not through any outstanding display of intelligence on my part, or

any hint of a rebellious nature. Those things would have stood out like armor-spikes on a human, and I

had been careful to suppress them. Since the time of the Conquest, the Tyr had devoted itself to

redesigning the human species. From the wholesale slaughter that took place during the Subjugation, to

the current sys-tem of transportation, it had worked at weeding out all seeds of possible insurrection,

removing men of intelligence and spirit from Earth's gene pool in the hope of rendering the human race

more tractable. And it appeared that it had succeeded—not for genetic rea-sons, I suspected, so much

as for psychological ones. When any act of unusual intelligence might cause a man to be taken from his

native planet, geniuses were loath to advertise their talents. As for whether the spirit of revolution was

hereditary, and could thus be erad-icated, or whether it was latent in all human beings, ready to spark to

life in response to the proper stim-ulus ... we hardly understood that ourselves, in the years before the

Tyr came. How could our conqueror have gained any better comprehension?

By those standards, I should never have been dis-covered. With my averageness wrapped around me

like a concealing cloak, I should have slipped through the years unnoticed, unharassed. So what had

gone wrong? Why had they taken me? Where had I miscal-culated?

"There." A captor nudged me with the point of his weapon. We had reached the concrete bridge that

had once spanned a football stadium. They herded me to-ward the bleacher stairs, and flanked me like

hunting dogs, driving me downward. Toward the nightmare vi-sion of a Subjugated landscape.

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Transports had blasted the field clear of grass long ago, fusing the sod and clay beneath into a black,

glasslike expanse. The sur-face was marked with a spiderweb of thin, jagged fissures, some barely

discernible and others, which time and ice had widened, of treacherous proportion. The bleachers

themselves had long since rotted away, leaving metal struts sticking out of the concrete like twisted

knives, red with decay. And in the center of it all—

A skimship. But not the common, suborbital type which the Tyr often used to patrol its conquered

ter-ritory. This was clearly an intership shuttle, capable of maneuvering in the dark, empty spaces which

lay between the planets.

My heart nearly stopped as I realized what that meant. I had always known that I might be taken from

Earth—that was a possibility we all lived with, subject as we were to the whims of our alien

oppressor—but I had stored that knowledge in the dark back rooms of my mind, where such things can

be deliberately for-gotten. The thought that it might happenhere andnow was suddenly more than I could

handle. My body froze in mid-step, and I felt incapable of moving it.

No one who leaves the Earth may ever return.That was the conqueror's law; it had never, to my

knowl-edge, been compromised. To lose Earth now meant losing it forever.

What was the ancient belief, about leaving one's na-tive soil?

They forced me across the cracked-glass surface, using the points of their weapons to drive me

for-ward, and into the skimship. There, in the dimly lit interior, one of them shoved me down into an

aircush-ioned plastichair. Not designed for human comfort. Another strapped me into it. With sharp, alien

ges-tures they made their intentions clear.Say nothing. Be still. We will kill you if you try to defy us.

Trembling, I sank back into the cold plastic seat, wondering where in this conquered universe they were

taking me. In the skimship's claustrophobic confines the smell of Honn-Tyr was nigh on overwhelming,

awakening memories that were better off forgotten. I fought them for a while, hanging on to the present

moment as though it were a lifeline—but then, as the skimship blasted the field yet again, and lifted me

from my native soil for the first and probably the last time, despair possessed me utterly and I slid coldly

down into memory.

Icy. Mud. Beneath my fingers, nearly frozen. Pain.

I drag myself a few inches farther. And farther. Important to get away. The ship is burning, might

explode when fire hits a fuel line. I dig my few functional fingers down into the frozen soil an inch, two

inches, then hit slick ice beneath; my hands scrape back without finding traction. No farther, then. I lack

the strength. I pray that this is far enough. All about me are greater and lesser bonfires, spurting orange

and blue sparks into ebony blackness. Pyres of the dead, monuments to our last warplanes' final effort. I

lower my head in sorrow and exhaustion; tears, like bits of ice, work their way slowly down my cheek.

We failed, my world, we failed!

I try to draw one arm up under me, to raise myself up a bit more, but sudden darting pain from forearm

to elbow causes me to drop, gasp-ing, to the ground. Broken, then—or worse. That sleeve of my

uniform is still intact, preventing me from assessing the extent of the damage. As for my other arm . . .

that, and the whole left side of my body, is a mess of blood and burns. Am I dy-ing? Is this what dying

is?

Forgive me, my world. I did what I could. For-give me that it wasn't enough.

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Footsteps. I feel them first, through the ground against my face: alien footsteps, a horribly famil-iar

rhythm. Tyr. The sharp odor of burning flesh assails my nostrils, and I hear the sizzle of their weaponry as

it turns our few survivors into so much roasted meat. Killing those remaining few who risked all for

freedom, and lost; cleansing the Earth of its rebellious vermin, once and for all.

Including me.

The footsteps approach. I become aware of the sound of my breathing, the blood welling up from one

lacerated lung. I don't dare cough, though the sticky fluid fills my mouth and throat, and threatens to

choke me. Because then the enemy will know that I live. Death in battle is one thing, and I had been

willing to risk it in order to save my people. But to be fried to a crisp by the Tyr's cleanup crew offers

neither honor nor purpose, and so I lie as still as possible upon the cold, wet earth, and try to minimize

the roar of my breath-ing. My body is cold, my blood pressure minimal, my heartbeat slow under the

best circumstances. Perhaps they will mistake me for one of the dead; if so, it won't be the first time it's

happened.

The footsteps surround me, stop. A scanner purrs—then silence. They have no need to speak, these

alien warriors, but share each thought and purpose in a kind of species unity that we, being individuals,

can't begin to comprehend. But ap-parently they have judged me dead—or dying— for they move on

wordlessly, seeking out another wounded shadow to receive their judgment.

I live.

That thought takes form slowly, almost reluc-tantly. I live. Will live. Want to live, despite all that the

Subjugation will mean. My powers of healing are excellent. I know; if I can survive the next few hours

—and find shelter before daylight—I have no doubt that I can and will recover. Surely I can learn to play

the game that the Subjugation will require, and adapt to the Tyrran will.

To survive. Is there shame in that? I did what I could to save my planet, risked giving up a longer life

than most men even dream of. But that war is over now. And the need to survive is a powerful master. A

jealous god. Is there such defeat, in bowing to his dictates?

I wonder what time of night is passing. How long the battle lasted, after I was struck down. The

darkness of the sky is absolute, shrouded in cloudcover, unblemished by the light of day. Ex-cept ... I

catch sight of a narrow band of gray rising almost lazily from the far horizon, and I feel my body shiver in

pain and fear as I know myself far from any hope of shelter.

I look around, desperately. There is no possible source of shade, not anywhere. And even if there were,

I couldn't get to it. Not like this. I must face this first day unprotected, offer up my blood to that vicious,

hungry star. ...

I did fly into sunlight during battle, I remind my-self, although the heavily tinted glass surround-ing my

cockpit protected me from the worst of the radiation. I seem to remember that the sun can't kill me. Burn

me, yes, in the course of a long day's passage, and evoke a defensive reaction from my

radiation-sensitive body ... but it can-not, in and of itself, kill. I remember that, some-how. And try to

believe it, as the sun rises into the heavens.

I feel it first on my outstretched hand.

. . .my outstretched hand . . .

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Burning away the timefugue

. . .sunlight? ...

Into a fever that is even more painful: reality.

I looked down at my hand, at the beam of light that had fallen across it, and moved it out of harm's way.

It took me a moment to remember where I was, and then a moment longer to realize what was

happening.

We were flying through a sunlit sky. Which meant that we hadn't left Earth yet. I felt a lurch of wild hope

within me; was it possible we weren't going to leave Earth after all? I leaned toward the window, and

dared to look outside. A calculated risk. I saw a field of brilliant white, seething with deadly radiation; it

was too painful to look at for more than a moment, and as I fell back into my seat, shielding my eyes

against the glare, I could feel the fever starting.My own fault, I thought.Ishould have stayed in shadow.

"Be still," a captor warned. A little late.

"Where are we going?" I didn't expect to be an-swered. But to my surprise, the Honn-Tyr seated

op-posite me spoke. "Ustralya. The Kuolqa-Angdatwa."

Through the thickness of his accent I made out the remnants of a familiar label: Australia. A land bathed

in sunlight, when much of Northamerica was clothed in darkness. That prompted a new, and much more

immediate fear: did they know the advantage it gave them, to bring me here?

No, I told myself. They couldn't possibly. The Tyr's ruling palace—the Kuolqa-Angdatwa—had been

erected amidst the ruins of Sydney as a gesture of con-tempt for the soldiers Down Under, who had

persisted in fighting long after the rest of us had accepted defeat. That's all. That it was daylight there so

soon after I was taken prisoner was . . . well, bad luck. Damned rotten luck, to be blunt about it. But that

was the ex-tent of it. Surely.

We dove through the cloudcover with a suddenness that left my stomach in midair. Damned Tyrran

pilots! I was only just recovering from that when we pulled into a tight circling pattern. I glanced out the

window again, squinting against the glare. There: the Kuolqa-Angdatwa. Like a fat, stone spider it

sprawled amidst the ruins, embracing fragments of buildings and pave-ment as though it had itself

wreaked the destruction. A few bits of buildings remained intact, impressive in their decay. Like the

Romans, who left the last wall of the Temple standing as a witness to the magnitude of what they had

destroyed, the angdatwa squatted amidst the ruins of free Earth smugly, contentedly, its very position

saying:Here. See what I have con-quered. See what I chose to destroy.

I closed my eyes, but it was long before the vision faded.

We landed.

There was a jerk as the skimship was secured—to what, I couldn't say—and then the portal split open,

and sunlight poured in. They unstrapped me and made me stand, and instinctively I reached into my

pock-ets—for my sunshades, my cap, my thin cotton gloves, the dozen and one bits of clothing that

would protect me from the worst of the radiation—but those things had been left on the ground in

Northamerica, where my captors had strewn them. Along with my pills.

"Move!" I was struck in the back, forced to march forward. It was a choice between the sunlight and

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their wrath, and of the two, Tyr anger was infinitely more lethal.Daylight can't kill me, I told myself,

reassured by my memories. I stepped into the puddle of light— like walking into fire, but I managed

it—and then, re-luctantly, stepped outside.

—And I had remembered the particulars, what it would do to me and why, but Christ, I had forgotten

thepain! It hit me in the face like a panful of burning coals, and air like molten glass seared my throat and

lungs with every breath I took. I could feel the fever rising as my body fought to adapt, and I was glad

that my temperature had begun to rise on board the skim-ship; I could never have faced this, cold.

Had it hurt this much on that terrible day when I lay cold and bleeding on an exposed plain of mud? Or

had I simply lived such a sheltered life since then that what little tolerance I'd once possessed had faded

away? I could hardly move, couldn't see at all, just staggered forward when the point of a Tyrran

weapon forced me to go: one step, two, then countless numbers—an end-less march through the center

of Hell, with my body racing to adapt. Blood pressure up, heartbeat pound-ing, all my vital signals

readjusting themselves ac-cording to those terrible, alien instructions. Eyes readjusting as I walked. I

could almost see my surroundings by the time the thrust of a Tyrran handgun sent me through a doorway,

and into shadow.

I leaned, gasping, against the nearest wall. A big risk, not to keep moving; angering the Honn-Tyr meant

courting death. But my body was in shock from adapt-ing so quickly; I needed a minute to pull myself

to-gether.

To my surprise, no one disturbed me. I waited for the fever to peak—it did so quickly—and then tested

my vision. A little blurry, but functional. The fever would make terrible demands later, exacting a high

price for its alteration of my metabolism, but for now it accomplished what it had to. My senses were

al-tered, my muscles stiff with pain, my heartbeat pound-ing within my ears so loudly that it took effort to

concentrate on anything outside my body—but there was a purpose in all of that, and I knew it would be

futile to fight it.

Honn-Tyr surrounded me: a dozen in all, waiting with the stillness that was the hallmark of their spe-cies.

And another creature, far more imposing. A Tyr, I guessed, but not a Honn; taller and more deadly, with

sharp spikes jutting out of its bony plates at stra-tegic points, and gleaming scales on its torso that made

its belly resemble that of a snake. Where the Honn had two small arms, nearly vestigial, tucked beneath

their major pair, this creature had four taut, sinewy limbs wrapped in serviceable muscle; where the Honn

had a minimal tail that served them merely for bal-ance, this creature had a length of chiton and muscle

that culminated in a spear point of sharpened bone. All of it guarded by bone plates, and bits of bone

plates, that slid over each other as it shifted its weight in much the same way that medieval armor had

done, steel glistening on steel as it moved.

Raayat-Tyr, I guessed. One of the Unstable Ones. I had heard rumors of them—all violent—but what

un-nerved me more than anything else was the extent of its natural armory. The Honn were the Tyr's bred

war-rior caste, and they weren't nearly so well protected.

What role had nature cast this creature in, that it made its martial cousins look so vulnerable by

comparison?

"You are ready?" it asked me. Its voice was more fluid than that of its shorter companions, its palate

kinder to English phonemes. Surprised by that ques-tion, I nodded and pushed myself away from the

wall, into the pooling of sunlight. There was no pain this time, aside from that of the fever itself. I had

adapted, at last.

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It indicated a somewhat circular tunnel, then en-tered. I followed. Six of the Honn-Tyr accompanied us.

The interior of the angdatwa was dimly lit, and formed more like a rabbit warren than anything else.

Twisting tunnels cut their way through miles of mor-tared stone, floors and walls varying in height, width,

and texture as we progressed. Halls twisted chaoti-cally, turned back on themselves, and merged by the

dozens in intersections that were no more than rough-ceilinged caverns. There was no regular pattern that

I could discern, nor any doors or other openings that might lead to adjoining chambers. Small patches of

something green—perhaps some alien life-form, or maybe a synthetic substance—glowed dully, stuck to

the ceiling at random intervals to serve as a minimal light source. The resulting semidarkness was

sooth-ing, but powerless to blunt the edge of my fever. It was too late for that, now; I was fully adapted,

and must wait for the proper biochemical triggers before the process could begin to reverse itself.

Just when I began to think that we were going to walk this labyrinth forever, my guide halted. The

Un-stable One touched the wall to one side of him, just so and in a certain spot. I saw no markings.

Barely a moment after he had touched the wall it split open, and a doorway the width of a Honn-Tyr was

revealed.

He gestured toward the opening and I passed through, expecting him to follow. But the door closed

behind me, so quickly that I felt it brush my clothes as I entered the chamber it guarded. I found myself in

a dark room, almost but not entirely without light.

While I waited nervously for my eyes to adjust, I strained my other senses to the utmost, anxious to gain

some clue as to where I was, or what was going to happen to me. My capacity for smell had been

dam-aged by the sunlight, but it was still acute enough to tell me that I was not alone. One, maybe two

different kinds of creatures were with me; as for just how many of them there were, I couldn't tell. The

first smell was somewhat familiar, and might be Tyr; mercifully, the fever had made me much less

sensitive to its fetid power. As for the second . . .

I sought its source, as my eyes adjusted to the dark-ness, and slowly a crouching form became distinct

from the shadows surrounding it. Like a panther it was, but an alien version—more graceful in line than its

Earth-brethren, more upright in posture, with tal-oned claws resting where a panther's shoulders would

be; vestigial wings, which nature had redesigned for combat. Even if I had not known what it was, I

would have recognized it as a hunting animal; its form, its poise, its aura of tense alertness, everything

about it identified it as a predator of formidable capacity. A potentially deadly adversary, whose

dark-colored fur was marked with random daggers of black, whose muscles rippled purposefully

beneath the sheen of its alien coat. Its eyes fixed upon mine and held me, en-tranced, until I forced myself

to look away.

A hraas. I had never seen one before, and hoped never to again. The sight of it awakened fear within me

on a level so deep within, so primitive, that I could do nothing to control it. I could read its purpose—its

only purpose—in the set of its body. It wanted to hunt. It wanted, more than anything, to huntme. I

wondered what contract the Tyr might have made with its blood-thirsty intelligence that managed to keep

it under con-trol; it did not strike me as a creature that would tame easily.

As if sensing my fear, it rose slightly from where it sat; delicately curved talons flexed beneath the smooth

fur of its paws as those gleaming eyes fixed on me, colorless jewels set in a bed of ebony velvet; its

hunger was palpable. Only when the figure beside it rasped a command did it settle, with a growl, into its

former stance. Tensely. Waiting.

Seated beside it, behind a human-style desk, was a Tyr. But neither Raayat nor Honn, in size or in

struc-ture. If the Raayat's body had expressed the promise of power, this Tyr was its culmination. Fully

armored, it appeared more insectoid than mammalian, and its spikes and crests were strongly, powerfully

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built. I re-alized, with a sinking sensation, just what it was—andwho.

"Kuol-Tyr," I said, bowing. The Governor of Earth—or its Tyrran equivalent. Progenitor of Earth's

conquerors, and the focus of the planet's alien con-sciousness. Too important a personage to be

bothered with unimportant business; that it had seen fit to meet with me personally boded ill for my

eventual fate.

Its two forward eyes, surrounded by rings of sharp-ened bone, were fixed upon me. When it spoke its

voice was steady, not the hesitant whisper of the Honn-Tyr, but the full-bodied, rasping voice of Earth's

ruler.

"You have come willingly."

"Tiye Kuolqa," I answered, and bowed my head submissively.

"I have questions. You will answer."

A tightness was growing inside me. I managed to nod.

"You will answer completely, and without decep-tion. Your alternative is death. There is no other. Do

you understand?"

"Yes," I whispered. Aware that if the Kuol were to permit it, the hraas could have me rendered down to

a pile of tasty tidbits before I could move to defend myself. My eyes were adjusted to the darkness now,

and as the Kuol-Tyr stood I could see just how tall it truly was. And how well armed. If the hraas didn't

do me in, the Kuol-Tyr certainly could.

"How long have you lived on this planet?" it de-manded.

The abruptness of the question threw me. Not that I was surprised to hear it. I had dreamed those very

words in a thousand nightmares, said in every place and by every being that the Conquest might make

pos-sible. But in each of those dreams, no matter what my response, I failed to save myself. I died.

Because there was no magic number that the Tyr would find accept-able; if it knew to ask the question, it

knew too much already for any answer to be safe.

What could I say? To be caught in a lie would mean certain execution; to tell them the whole truth, if

they didn't already know it, might be even more damning. I dared not speak.

"How old are you?" it asked me—and then, coldly, "How many Earth-years have you seen? Answer

me, if you value your life!"

Silence was not the most intelligent refuge. But it was, I discovered, the best that I could manage.

It snorted; whether in disgust or anger, I couldn't tell. At last it drew a flat, printed sheet from out of its

baldric and held it out to me. After a moment I stepped forward and took it. A list was inscribed on it, in

bold black print. Seventeen items. I squinted, trying to read in the darkness.

They were names. My names. Identities I had de-signed, entering them into the census net in order to

disguise my longevity.All of them. If there had been even a single one missing, or one here that was not

mine . . . but there wasn't. I'd been found out.

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

C. S.Friedman - The Madness Season

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