She looked at me strangely. “What in hell is good about it?”
“Consider. We—the two of us—killed that mass of muscle and teeth, and did it pretty easily. We instinctively used all our best biological weapons against him. He outweighs us by a couple of hundred kilos, probably, and he was born a predator. But we’re a more fearsome predator. That maneuver that toppled him probably saved us from serious injury. It’s something you did almost automatically, but it would never occur to such a pea-brain as him. We’re the bosses now. He is king and queen of Charon’s jungles, totally adapted to our element We have nothing whatsoever to fear while we’re in that element.”
“But—the blood. God! It was like a shock, an orgasm. It Was like a supercharge, the ultimate drug stimulant! Even now, repelled as I am, I crave the taste of it”
She was right So did I, and it was something that was going to be hard to ignore.
I sighed. “Well, I’d say well probably keep it under control, but maybe have to give into it every once in a while. We’re killers now, Darva. Natural predators. It’s the bill that goes with this form and we simply have to accept it.”
She looked dubious. “I—I don’t know. Park—what if it had been a man? One of those troopers?”
My training was coming to the fore, my mind sorting and placing the new facts and choosing inevitable courses of action. It would be far harder for Darva, I knew, far harder, but she would have to eventually accept one basic fact and live with it.
“We’re no longer human, Darva,” I told her flatly. “We’re something else entirely. Frankly, as long as the man is an enemy, I can see no difference between spearing him and shooting him.
“But—cannibalism!” She shivered.
“If I ate you, it would be cannibalism,” I said realistically. “But a human is just another smart animal.”
She shook her head. “I—I don’t know.”
“You’ll have to accept it, Darv, or go nuts,” I told her.
“But I wouldn’t worry about it. Back with our own, back in intelligent company with ready food supplies, I doubt if our condition will be any problem at all. Only out here, in the jungle.”
She said nothing for a while, and we more or less slept off the experience. When we awoke it was nearly dark, but we found a stream and washed the caked blood and remains from each other, feeling a little more like rational people and less like predators after we did.
Still, she could ask, “Park—those aliens you spoke of. Aren’t we aliens, too? Particularly now?”
I didn’t really have a ready answer for that one.
Despite the moralizing, we repeated our orgy the next day—deliberately. This time we found a small female uhar with a wounded leg who had been left by her herd to die because she could no longer hunt food. Such a target of opportunity was quite literally irresistible, incredibly easy, and also easy to defend to our consciences since the creature would have died more agonizingly anyway. Still, the ease and quickness of the decision and the high emotion—“anticipation” I guess would be the word—of the kill actually bothered me more than Darva. My whole life and self-image was based on my absolute confidence in my ability to be completely in control at all times, to be able to analyze and evaluate every situation with cold, dispassionate logic. To be able to give in to such base, animal—literally animal—instincts so easily was disturbing. To enjoy the experience so much was even more disturbing.
As for the hunting and killing, humans had been doing that to animals since the dawn of time. Though the civilized worlds knew meat only as a synthetic, those on the frontier certainly knew it in the same way ancient man on ancestral Earth had. Here on Charon people made their livings hunting game and fishing and eating their catch, and those who did this work enjoyed it. The fact that the people of Montlay and Bourget, among others, had their meat ground or cut and cooked and seasoned so they no longer really thought of their meal as an animal that had to be butchered only eased their minds a bit Darva and I were no different—we were simply eliminating the hypocrisy. Looking at it in that way we both found it much easier to move fully into our roles as predators.
The Warden organisms that governed everything inside us also seemed to take a more practical view. After only the third kill and feed I was aware of odd feelings, mostly numbness and a little discomfort in my mouth. I mentioned this to Darva, who had noted the same thing, and a quick examination showed that things were changing. Our teeth were becoming sharper, the front fangs growing longer and thicker. Without an additional magic spell or anything else, we were changing into true carnivores.
Such a modification could not have been in the long-range plans of an apt like Isil; the Wardens inside us, somehow, were sensing the change in our life-style and modifying us to adapt. But what exactly were they reacting to? I wondered. Was it the changed physical circumstances? That seemed unlikely—Darva had been this way for a long time, I a very short time, yet the transformation was taking place only now. It had to be the change in our mental attitude that triggered it, I decided. Korman said we all had the power. Maybe the process was more complex than even he thought.
But that brought up an even more mystifying question. How did the Wardens know! An apt like Isil, even a powerful sore like Korman, hardly had the kind of mind that could literally reprogram every cell, order speeded growth, put every cell and every molecule together in such a pattern as to create a biologically functioning changeling. The Confederacy’s computers could do the job easily, of course, although doing so was illegal. But a man or woman could just wave a magic wand here, mumble some words, and somehow, force the transmutation of a human being into something else—something that functioned.
I had here a lot of pieces of a truly great puzzle but, as yet, nothing with which to put them all together. For the first time in a long while I wondered about my counterpart, my old self, out there, somewhere, off the Warden Diamond. Was he still getting his information even though I’d been transformed? And, if he was getting information from all of us on the four Warden worlds, had he already been able to put those pieces together with the superior computer and Confederacy resources at his command?
I no longer hated him, certainly. Now, here, the way I was, I wasn’t even sure if I envied him.
Slowly, through it all in the final week, we moved cautiously closer to the rendezvous point Darva had selected as the main target for us, the least likely to be betrayed. It was about a kilometer off a main road, in a rock cleft near a waterfall, and we approached it cautiously and in a roundabout manner. Darva was still hesitant about going at all, particularly now.
“We’re happy here,” she argued. “You said it yourself—we were made for the jungle and for this life. If we return, there’ll only be more fighting and trouble.”
“What you say is true,” I admitted, “but I’m thinking of more than just you and me. For one thing, I have to know. I want to find out just what the hell is going on here, and I have a particular responsibility, since I know that all Charon might be destroyed, we and our precious jungle along with it. But there’s more. If we win, and if this Ko-ril’s a man of his word, we can strike a blow for changelings and end this stupid discrimination. Changelings need their own land and they need the Power. Otherwise, somebody will always control and threaten us. With the Power, we could build a new race here, or many races.”
I’m afraid she didn’t really share my vision or my curiosity, but she understood, at least, that I could not be denied—and she wasn’t going to be left out, alone, again.