Counselor winced. "You’re not filling me with confidence, Teelu."
"Then watch."
I walked over to the Sperm-tail. Before reaching down to the mouth, I asked Festina, "Shall I go first?"
"Be my guest," she replied. "I’ll go last to make sure everyone else is all right."
I nodded and knelt. If you want the honest truth, I’d never gone through a Sperm-tail before either. Real Explorers shot the chute all the time, but me, I’d always traveled in the company of diplomats. "Diplomats," Sam once told me, "do not subject themselves to indignities. It’s called a Sperm-tail, for heaven’s sake. The name alone is enough to demolish your credibility. And I understand that riding one is appallingly visceral. Diplomats hate that; we like to remain detached from physical reality at all times."
Maybe part of that was joking, but Sam still meant it. She and the rest of the diplomats took shuttles from ship to surface, not the slippery white way.
At the last second, just as I was sticking my hand into the Sperm’s mouth, I wondered what my sister meant by "appallingly visceral." Then I found out.
22
SQUIRTING THROUGH THE TUBE
Gulp.
That was the Sperm-tube swallowing me. Out of the real universe, into an artificial one that fluttered and fish-tailed, taking me with it. My whole body turned to water, pumping through a pipe that twisted, turned, narrowed, expanded, did loop-the-loops. I had no bones; I had no solid parts at all, just liquid and steam, spurting up the Sperm-tail at high pressure.
One other thing: I wasn’t alone.
I could feel another presence squirting along with me, a blaze of intelligence burning right next to my skin, as if it was only separated from me by a tissue-thin membrane. It had to be the thing that’d been possessing me: a spirit, a ghost, an alien parasite, some entity that hitchhiked in my body and occasionally shoved me aside so it could drive.
What are you? I thought. What do you want? Why me?
The answer was a blast of fiery emotions — angers and sorrows, regrets and resolutions, all knotted up in a package of memories.
My own memories.
Samantha’s body, her clothes sodden with the blood that kept gushing from her punctured chest. A red pool spreading over the floor. Smears of red on my fingers.
Queen Verity’s head plunked on a platter and placed on the royal dinner table… while the rest of her corpse lay ten paces away, both venom sacs sliced open and spilling dribbles of green.
Me running through the night with a heavy black sack over my shoulder, while shooting echoed in the palace behind me. Racing to a garden shed, lifting up a floorboard, seeing the little black box with the gold horseshoe inlays, and the narrow mouth of a Sperm-tail threading off through an underground conduit. Feeding one end of the sack into that mouth and holding my breath as the bulky load disappeared through the impossibly tiny opening, zipping off heaven knows where. Smashing my heel down on the anchor box, breaking it, releasing the Sperm-tail to slither off on its own so no one could follow… Could follow…
Innocence. My daughter.
Whom I hadn’t seen in twenty years.
Whom I’d abandoned on a planet at war.
And I was supposed to be "The Little Father Without Blame"? If I hadn’t been riding the Sperm-tail at that second — if I’d had a solid body — I would have thrown up everything in my stomach.
Second after second, my own memories pounded into my mind like a repeating loop. Sam soaked with blood; Verity dead; carrying young Innocence in that bag; Sam and her blood again. As if the thing riding with me up the Sperm-tail was trying to make me see something, but I wasn’t smart enough to understand.
Sam’s blood. Me, reaching down to touch the red stick-mess. Lifting my fingers to my nose…
A voice screamed No! inside my head: fighting the memory, fighting the thing that was trying to make me remember. The screaming voice didn’t seem part of me, any more than the force pummeling me with my own memories; but I was eager to shout No! myself. Anything to escape ugly replays of the most awful night of my life.
So I yelled, No, go away, stop it, stop it, stop it! I could feel the memory-thing howl in despair, burning with frustration at my refusal to watch. It pounded away on the thready thin barrier that separated its consciousness from mine; but before it could bash through, I hurtled back into normal space and collided with a mound of soft padding.
I don’t know how long I lay there, trying to clear my head. Not long — the padding was jelly bagged up in rubbery plastic, nice and yielding on impact but cold and wobbly the longer you stayed on top of it. They must have made it that way on purpose, so you wouldn’t sprawl there forever… especially when other people were coming through the Sperm-tube right behind you.
Other people. Kaisho.
With a surge of adrenaline, I tried to heave myself off the landing pad. The jelly beneath me gurgled and sloshed, absorbing my motion; when I pushed harder, my hand just sank into the folds of the bag. Like trying to fight a tar baby, I thought. Forcing myself to be calm, I pulled my hands tight to my chest and simply rolled sideways… off the bag just as Kaisho barreled out of the tube behind me.
Her mossy legs missed me by a whisker. I was sure that’s why she’d come right after me — in hopes of an accidental collision. The Balrog would slam into me, then a splurge of hungry red spores would ooze across my skin…
No, I told myself. Don’t be stupid. The Balrog couldn’t want to possess a person with screwed-up chemicals in his brain. Especially not when I was already half-possessed by something else. "Help me up," Kaisho whispered as she sprawled on the jelly pad. "Please."
On her trip through the Sperm-tail, Kaisho’s hair had got all mussed… which means it’d fallen off her face enough to show what she really looked like. I found her striking in an elegant, weathered way — what people usually call "handsome," because they won’t call women beautiful after the first wrinkle appears. Kaisho had her share of wrinkles around her soft brown eyes… but the wrinkles had such a well-aged grace, maybe they deserved to be called crinkles instead. Serene and amused, both at once. Strong cheekbones, wide half-smiling lips…
She saw me staring. The half smile froze on her face — not a sudden jolt, but a clamp-down of control, keeping her expression exactly as it was till she could cover up. I could tell she was forcing herself not to hurry; oh so slowly, she shook her hair down over her eyes, then brushed her fingers through a few times to make sure there were no gaps in the veil.
"Maybe someday you should stop hiding," I said.
"Maybe someday I will," she answered in her usual whisper. "When the Balrog has ‘elevated’ my consciousness to such heights I can’t feel childish emotions." For a moment, the fingers she was combing through her hair clenched into fists — gripped by some sudden emotion, rage, shame, I don’t know. She trembled with the power of it; I could imagine her face scrunched in on itself under that hair, her eyes squeezed shut, the serenely crinkled skin bunched up into ridges and hollows.
A long ten seconds passed before she relaxed. Then she shook her head and flung her arms wide toward me, crying, "Help me, Teelu." Not a whisper — a desperate plea.
But in the next instant, a shudder went through her; and though her position scarcely changed, all the pleading passion vanished. Got squashed down. "Help me, Teelu," she said, back to her old staid whisper. "Help me up, if you please. Festina promised me time to get clear, but soon that Sperm-tube will spit out a three-hundred-kilo lobster with big sharp claws."