A grey-skinned woman stooped over him. He recognized her in some fragment of his mind. At the foot of the table he could see the fleshy squid-like tentacles extending from the carapace of an autosurgeon and he felt their wet touch on his leg. As the bioconstruct straightened his ankle, pain briefly laced together the elements of his sentience, and he found enough strength to yell out and jerk upright. A heavy three-fingered hand stilled his protest by the sight of it, even more than the pressure it exerted against his chest to push him back down.
‘You surprise me,’ she said.
He gazed at her disparate arms and couldn’t find any meaning in her words at first. Then something meshed in his mind and he understood.
‘Why?’ he grated. But the question was not directed at her. Why am I? Why is this? Why everything?
‘I see that your shut-off point is graded somewhat above that occasioned by your trauma. Deliberate but cruel augmentation I think.’
That meant nothing to him. He blinked and listened to the sound of a storm outside.
‘I’m Tack,’ he mouthed silently to himself, and wasn’t sure what that meant either.
His mind consisted of disconnected monads, now shaping themselves to each other and searching for connection. On some level he realized he was rebuilding himself, but not quite in the same way as before—like a demolished house rebuilt with the same bricks, a house would result but the individual bricks would not be in exactly the same positions. Foundations did remain, but Tack had memory of things that no longer controlled him, found voids, and sought structure. With all the rage and love of a living man he sought to be, and felt dread, and a terrible yearning.
‘There. The anaesthetic doesn’t work, but this will.’
Blackness interminable, filled with leviathan structures falling against each other and bonding. Then terrible thirst and a massive hand supporting his head to the cool rim of a glass against his lips. He drank cold water.
He’d earlier seen the girl Nandru Jurgens had used, and whom his Director of Operations had subsequently ordered him to kill, but that he discounted as hallucination. This grey-skinned woman, with her strange hands and penetrating golden eyes, he could not deny. He stared at her as she withdrew the glass, and operated some control to raise the backrest of the surgical table further, but then she moved away about her tasks amongst the esoteric machinery that surrounded him.
Now he observed his naked body. Pipes ran from his chest to a wheeled machine nearby, and fluids—dark, clear, bloody and translucent blue—ran through those pipes. He saw that the wounds in his chest were now just sealed lines and that the autosurgeon had withdrawn, leaving an organic-looking surgical boot enclosing his foot and ankle.
‘You’ve been unconscious for three days and I’ve repaired most of your internal injuries. The bone glue is very effective, but I wouldn’t advise any gymnastics just yet,’ the woman warned him, her back turned to him.
The voice was as calm and modulated as that of a professional killer, Tack thought. He wondered if it was this about her that bothered him, but, no, he hadn’t heard her voice before, had he? He realized then what was familiar about her. Though distorted, she had much of the physiognomy of another.
Cowl.
With a lurch of dread Tack instantly realized that Cowl must not see into his thoughts again. Now, Tack’s mind being in such different order, he realized that in his eagerness, Cowl had not delved deeply enough. The being had not heard the one called Thote saying, ‘Like the girl who passed through here fifty years ago, you’re just a piece of temporal detritus. In your case primed and filled with poison, then sent on its way.’ And Cowl had not felt Tack’s later puzzlement at why he had not been provided with weapons capable of a distance hit, nor why he had been so ill-prepared for a fight involving time travel.
The woman turned to him. ‘Can you now speak?’
‘I can.’
‘Good. Cowl’s mind-fuck doesn’t usually leave behind anything human, but it would appear that your mind, being so accustomed to programming and reprogramming, has retained its facility for self-organization. I suspect this is because he reamed you through your interface, thus leaving many natural, unconscious structures intact.’
‘What are you to Cowl?’ he asked.
‘I’m his sister.’
Tack scanned the room for suitable weapons. Though a traitor, she was still Heliothane, so she would be strong and fast. But it seemed imperative he escape, and to do so it would be necessary to kill her. Then suddenly he felt how utterly wrong it would be to try and kill this woman who had tended to him, and his thoughts fell into brief confusion, out of which he re-arose, sick with anger. His immediate reaction had been caused by remaining emotional outfall from his Heliothane programming, but he should not think like that. Now he knew that he had never been an assassin, that from the very moment Saphothere had found him he had been manipulated: his sum purpose that of a sacrificial goat. He owed the Heliothane nothing.
‘Don’t let that worry you.’
For a moment Tack thought she was reading his mind, then he got back on track. ‘Your brother nearly killed me, and tore my mind apart. So I shouldn’t worry?’
‘No, Tack. What he did to you was a response to the assault upon him. I will not define that as your attack, because we both know you had no choice in the matter. And, anyway, the result of Cowl’s violence, whether intended or not, is that you are now alive in a way that you never were before.’
It was true. Tack could now make choices, decisions, and with all that came a concomitant confusion. Perhaps he actually owed Cowl more than he did the Heliothane? But no, what good Cowl had done for him was by default, and to sway in that direction would be like holding out the hand of friendship to a crocodile. From the beginning of his life Tack had never been able to choose sides for himself, to choose anything really. But now he possessed free will, so had to ask himself which side he might choose, and if he should choose any side at all. Just for a second he wished for the easier road of external programming. Just for a second.
‘Does Cowl know about what you have done?’ he asked.
‘No, I don’t share my brother’s views, nor his hatred.’
‘Which side are you on—Heliothane or Umbra?’
‘My own, Tack.’
And there it was, and he made his choice.
Seeing this war from both perspectives, Tack realized, in the perspective now utterly his own, that he did not think anything could justify what Cowl had been doing—his negligent slaughter of the torbearers. And he was utterly aware that the information Cowl now possessed was precisely what the Heliothane wanted him to possess. However, Tack could not forgive the lies and the programming forced upon himself, nor the Heliothane’s ruthless extermination of the Umbrathane.
Asking himself which side he was on, he found his answer the same as Aconite’s: my own.