**Hold tight. Don’t give up now.**
Dark nebulae were invading the field of stars. All around, the heavens dimmed and faded.
I fought to put my hand in my pocket, pull out the bottle of blue pills.
Too late. My fingers were losing their sense of touch, I could not open the glass phial. I raised it to my mouth and gripped the plastic in my teeth, biting at the stopper. Glass broke, ground between my molars. My tongue bled as I spat the broken bottle out onto the sand, swallowed, swallowed again. Two pills, ten pills, what difference did it make?
The last tide was going out, sweeping away from the sandy shore. I was helpless to fight it, drifting into the night. Axons linking, synapses closing, the floodgates wide open.
**Goodbye, Ameera. Goodbye, Rabiyah.** Goodbye, Tess.
The old tall story again. “So what happened to you then, Bill?”
“What happened to me? Why, I died, of course.”
- 18 -
I was awake, flat on my back and staring up at a grey ceiling. Creaks and clattering came from all sides, then a whir of machinery and the sound of running water. Finally, I heard the squeak of leather boots.
Impossible to sleep. I sighed, gave up the fight, and opened my eyes. Sir Westcott Shaw slowly came into focus, frowning down at me. He grunted as he saw my eyes flicker open.
“What’s the point of patchin’ you up, when you go off and get torn to bits again? Open your mouth.”
“Where am I?” It came out as a throaty gurgle.
“Where do you think? Back where you started, in Intensive Care. Wider, an’ keep it open.”
He was shining a light down my throat, and moving my tongue around with a spatula. It hurt like hell.
“How did I get here?” I mumbled, as soon as he stopped poking about. “I thought I was dying.”
“We’re all dying.” He looked across at the bank of meters sitting by the bedside. “But you don’t seem to be goin’ any faster than the rest of us. Move your eyes, an’ follow my finger.” He passed his hand slowly across my face: up, down, left, right.
“I was in the Riyadh Zoo.” The memory blurred back like a bad dream. “Who brought me here?”
“I did, soon as you were stable enough to be moved.” He stopped waving his fingers in front of my eyes. “The doctors out there wanted to slice open your skull — didn’t like the EEG readings, said you had meningitis an’ a brain tumor. They only phoned me because our hospital discharge was in your wallet. I had a lot of trouble with ’em. An’ I had one hell of a job gettin’ the Riyadh Police to let you go, what with a dead man an’ a sick woman in that zoo with you. I told ’em—”
“Sick woman?” It took my fuzzied concentration a few seconds to interpret his words. “You mean a dead woman.”
“Uh-uh.” He shook his head firmly. “I saw her. She’d been bitten a lot, but they were small wounds — not much venom in ’em. They got you both out quick, so there wasn’t much danger she’d die. I’ll bet she’s discharged by now.”
Zan. Alive. The old blend of terror and excitement tingled inside me. Where was she now? On her way here? I started to lever myself toward the side of the bed.
“But you were somethin’ else,” went on Sir Westcott. He pushed me back firmly onto the pillow. “I told ’em you’d die for sure unless we got you over here sharpish. Does this hurt?”
He twisted the lower part of my left calf in a way that brought me upright and cursing, and nodded happily at my reaction. “Good. You’re a madman, Salkind, I hope you know that. You were brought in here missing a quart of blood, with a skin infection, abrasions, a hundred and three temperature, two bullet wounds, and a blood pressure of fifty over twenty. I suppose that’s your idea of takin’ it easy?”
Infections, abrasions, bullet wounds — and all for nothing? I struggled to sit up straighter and grabbed at his arm. “My jacket. What happened to it? In the left hand pocket, a little box—”
“The Belur Package?” He again pushed me back to the pillow. “We got that all right — your friend Chandra told us you might be carrying somethin’ interesting. We found it, an’ it’s being looked at by the right people. But some of the chips have ’em baffled.”
Chandra.
I wanted to ask ten questions at once. Ameera, Zan, the Package, Tess…
“You mean Chandra’s here?”
“Got here yesterday, along with that popsie of yours. Attractive girl, eh?” He sniffed. “We had a good long talk about everything last night, me an’ Chandra an’ Ameera — an’ Tess. Matter of fact, they’ll be poppin’ in later — you weren’t conscious when they stopped by yesterday.” He began to fiddle with the tubes of my I.V., but he wouldn’t look me in the eye as he went on: “Ameera’s eye operation is tomorrow. Should be an easy one, a week or two here and she can go back home — if she wants to.”
Tess and Ameera! There was trouble on the horizon, but I had to get something else out of the way before I could worry about that. I gritted my teeth and sat up again. My left hand was a ball of white bandages, my head was spinning, and I had an ache all the way from my crotch to my ribs.
“Sir Westcott, I have to talk to the police. I know what the Belur Package does — I don’t know who’s looking at it in London , but get them over here.”
He raised his eyebrows at me and rubbed a hand over his bald head. “We’ve already realized they’re implants. They’ve been takin’ data dumps off the chips, an’ tryin’ to work out what the program code means.”
“I can tell you more than that.” Maybe it was some odd combination of fear and medication, but my muddled brain suddenly hit high gear. “I know what they do. Three of the implants are improved versions of Belur’s old prototypes. They allow the person they’re grafted into to ignore pain. But he made new ones, quite different ones, a couple of months before he was killed.”
“An’ you know what the new ones do?”
“Not in detail, but I can tell you enough to get started. I got the main clue in the British Embassy in Riyadh . That, plus the fact that the people peddling Nymphs were so interested in the Belur Package. Each wafer in the box is a different introsomatic chip, designed to be planted inside the body.”
“We know that much. What else?”
“They hold programs that can override fatigue or hunger signals, or induce sleep for exactly the length of time that you want, or jump adrenaline and hormone levels, or increase or decrease blood flow to injured or infected areas — all under programmed control. Belur may not have known it, but he was creating the perfect soldier.”
“But you said Nymphs were a clue, too.” The fleshy jowls puffed out. Sir Westcott had paused in his examination of the monitors. “None of the effects you mentioned has a thing to do with the drug business.”
“Not the drug business — the sex business. Increased blood supply to any part of the body, under conscious control. Can’t you see what that means? Impotence a thing of the past. Some men — especially some old men — would pay fortunes for that implant. ’Specially if they could buy ones that control the female body reactions, too.”
“That’s what Nymphs do.”
“Nymphs can only do so much. Combine the drug with programmed control of a girl’s muscular and glandular system, and you have a dirty old man’s dream. Young girls who respond to him exactly as he wants, with his own implants helping him to take advantage of it.”