Later, there were straps on the bed.
Tied down, helpless without his chair, Drew lay cursing his own tears while Eric loomed above him and the bodyguard took a walk.
“I don’t know why she wants to bother with you, Arlen. I do know why I’m here. First, because otherwise she would have to be, and second, because otherwise you would be on your feet and I could knock you down the way you deserve. You’ve been given every opportunity, every consideration, and you burned them all. You’re stupid and you’re undisciplined and at nineteen years old you don’t have even the minimum ethics that would let you ask what happened to your friend back there who got set on fire by your pointless destruction. You’re a disaster as a human being, even a Liver human being, but I’m giving you one more chance. Note this welclass="underline" None of what’s going to happen to you is Leisha’s idea. She doesn’t even know about it. This is my present to you.”
Drew spat at him. The spittle fell short, landing on the foamstone floor. Eric didn’t even grimace before he turned away.
They left him there, tied, all night.
The next morning the bodyguard fed Drew from a spoon, like a baby. Drew spat the food back in his face. The bodyguard, expressionless, slugged him in the jaw, to the right of where Eric had hit him, and threw the rest of the breakfast in the disposal chute. He threw Drew a clean set of jacks, the cheapest possible Dole clothing, drawstring pants and loose shirt in undyed, biodegradable gray. Drew struggled to pull on the pants only because he suspected they would otherwise throw him into the car naked. He couldn’t manage the shirt over his manacles. He clutched it to his chest as the bodyguard carried him, barefoot, outside.
They drove for four or five hours, stopping once. Just before they stopped, the guard blindfolded Drew. He listened intently as Eric got out of the car, but all he heard was soft murmuring in what might or might not have been Spanish. The car started again. Eventually the guard removed the blindfold; the flat desert countryside hadn’t changed. Drew’s bladder ached, until he finally just let go in the car. Neither of the others commented. The plastic pants held the piss against his skin.
They stopped again in front of a low, large, windowless building like a sealed airport hangar. Drew didn’t know what town they were in, what state. Eric had said nothing the entire morning.
“I’m not going in there!”
“Strip off those wet pants first, Pat,” Eric said, with disgust. The bodyguard grabbed the hem of his pants and yanked. Drew struggled, but his ineffective thrashing stopped when a roadrunner walked casually across his line of vision. A snake dangled from the roadrunner’s beak, half eaten. The snake’s skin was green, with orange letters spelling out “puta.”
They were someplace where illegal genetic engineering didn’t even have to be hidden from the cops.
Inside were endless gray corridors, each blocked with a Y-field. At each checkpoint Eric stepped up to the retina scanner and was cleared without saying a word. This, whatever it was, had all been arranged.
The fear in Drew was a gray spreading ooze, shapeless, and its lack of shape was what made it fearsome.
A small room, finally, with a clean white stretcher. Pat dumped him onto it. Drew rolled off, hitting the floor with an unprotected splat. He tried to drag himself, naked, toward the door. Pat scooped him up effortlessly—augmented muscles—threw him back on the gurney, and strapped him down. Someone he couldn’t see touched his head with an electrode.
Drew screamed. The room turned orange, then red with bright hot dots, each a burn on flesh. But that was in his mind, nothing had touched him yet but cold metal. But they were going to, they were going to bum out his mind—
“Drew,” Eric said softly, very close to his ear, “listen to me. This is not an electronic lobotomy. This is a new genemod technique. They’re going to infect your brain with an altered virus that will make it impossible for you to block the flow of images to the cortex from the limbic. That’s the older, more primitive part of the brain. Then biofeedback adjusts your brainwaves until the cortex learns the pathways for processing the images into theta activity. Do you understand?”
He understood nothing. The fear engulfed the rest of his mind, gray bubbling ooze shot through with hot red burns, and when someone screamed he was flooded with shame that it was himself. Then the machine turned on, and the room was gone.
He lay on the stretcher for six days. An IV dripped nutrients into his arm; a catheter removed urine. Drew was aware of neither. For six days subtle electrochemical pathways in his brain were reinforced, widened as a highway is widened by a road crew that builds sturdily but doesn’t know what will march over the road. Images flowed freely, without chemical inhibitors, from Drew’s subconscious mind, from his racial memory, from the older reptilian parts of the brain to the newer, society-conditioned cortex, which usually received them unfiltered through dreams and symbols and would have broken down in shrieking confusion without the strong scaffolding of genemod drugs holding it together.
He crouched on a rock in the sunlight and he had claws, teeth, fur, feathers, scales. His jaws tore and rendered the thing wailing helplessly, and the blood flew in his face, snout, crown. The blood-smell excited him, and the wordless rushing in his ears said, “Mine, mine, mine, mine…”
He reared up on his hind legs, powerful as pistons, and brought the rock down again on the other’s head. His father, writhing in the vomit of his last drunk, held up clasped hands and pleaded for mercy. Drew brought the rock down hard, and in the corner of the den his mother crouched, her fur glistening with brainies, waiting for the penis that was already engorged with killing…
They were chasing him, all of them, Leisha and his father and the howling things that wanted to cut his throat, and he was running running through a landscape that kept shifting: trees that would not hold still, bushes that opened jaws and snapped at him, rivers that tried to suck him under into blackness…then the landscape became the desert compound and Leisha was there; too, screaming at him that he was a failure and he deserved to die because he could never do anything right, could not even stay awake the way real people could. He grabbed Leisha and threw her down and with the action came such astonishing freedom, such an exultant state of potency that he laughed out loud and then both he and Leisha were naked and she was tied up and he looked around her study and said gloatingly “All of this is mine, mine, mine…”
“He isn’t in pain,” the doctor said. “The writhing is no more than stepped-up muscular reflexes in response to cortical bombardment. Not unlike dreaming.”
“Dreaming,” Eric repeated, staring at Drew’s writhing body. “Dreaming…”
The doctor shrugged, a gesture not of indifference but of tremendous tension. This was only the fourth time the experimental psychiatric technique had been used. The other three people had had no powerful relatives, or whatever this Mr. Smithson was to Bevington-Watrous. The doctor didn’t care what he was. They were outside United States borders, and in Mexico the genemod laws functioned by expensive permits. The doctor had a permit. Not to do what he was doing, of course, but then who ever had that sort of permit? He shrugged again.
“It’s been three days,” Eric said. “When does this phase…stop?”
“We start the artificial reinforcement this afternoon. We—yes, nurse, what is it?”
“Comlink for Mr. Bevington-Watrous.” The young Mexican nurse sounded scared. “It’s Ms. Leisha Camden.”
Eric turned slowly. “How did she find us?”