“It never seems to have any trouble. And it doesn’t talk as much, either.”
“Go away, now,” Nacker said, and Ruiz poured down into his deepest, safest place.
Nacker paused for a moment before transferring in, to look through his own sensors at Ruiz’s motionless body. Ruiz lay on the immo-bed, encased in an amber block of shockgel, his head sprouting a thick crop of silver wires. The scars of Ruiz’s encounter with the wolfheads were fading quickly; if the dive took any length of time, the scars would be invisible before Nacker returned to his bell jar and his own moribund body. In the gel, Ruiz’s dark skin had an almost metallic smoothness and density, as if it would turn a knife, as if it could be polished into a man-shaped mirror. Nacker examined Ruiz’s hands where they floated in the gel, curled into half-fists. Nacker marveled at the hands. To think that such dangerous objects could be so beautiful; the strong fingers tapering, the knuckles curving into perfect scimitars of bone, the whole knitted with wiry muscle and sheathed in lustrous skin.
A moment passed in this pleasurable contemplation. Then Nacker dropped his probe in, delicately, delicately, cleaving Ruiz’s holomnemonic sea, a needle falling point first into the abyss. He sank deeper and deeper, sliding effortlessly around the middepth reefs of Ruiz’s protective self-circuits. He danced nimbly away from the massive, sensitive cables of the Gencha death net, a structure anchored in the abyssal trenches. With equal agility he avoided the fine skein of League mission-imperative that fogged the depths like the tendrils of some great demanding jellyfish.
At last Nacker settled to the floor of Ruiz’s mind and came to rest in the slurry of decayed memories, the dead diatoms of experience that rained down continuously from above. Here he lay quiescent for a long time, extending his perceptions upward, mapping the artifacts of Ruiz’s personality as they wheeled overhead in the slow currents.
When he was satisfied, he detached a bubble of stimulation from his own substance. It rose, twinkling, until it shattered on the stony underside of one of Ruiz’s early memories, a massive thing, so heavily encrusted with protective substance that it was probably no longer accessible to Ruiz.
Ruiz was five years old, helping his demi-father in the barn. It was Ruiz’s special task to gather the warm nodules of orms flesh from the nests when the orms crowded out into their runs for their breakfast. It was a good task, one of Ruiz’s favorites. The freshly budded nodules squirmed in his hands as he collected them into the brood bucket, their tiny palps searching his palms for the feeding pores his human skin lacked, and the sensation was a pleasant harmless tickle. The weight of the brood bucket when he was done was another reward — each nodule represented a small but measurable amount of credit toward his family’s independence. And though in his young mind the concept of independence was a fuzzy one, he knew beyond doubt that independence was a Good, and that the converse quality, bondtotient, was a Bad. This he had learned from the long faces and hushed voices around the dinner table whenever the latter word was spoken. Of late the faces had grown longer and the voices less hushed, a situation that worried Ruiz when he thought of it.
It didn’t seem to help that Ruiz brought in as many nodules as ever. And no matter how much he exhorted the orms, they refused to bud more than their usual number of nodules. They stared at him with their dull, multifaceted eyes, uncomprehending, while Ruiz tried earnestly to explain how important it was that they do better. Sometimes, if the voices around the table had been very loud, Ruiz ended up crying at the orms, frustrated and tempted to throw pebbles at them, to punish them for their stupidity.
But not today. Today he was happy. He was carrying the brood bucket across the compound toward the wombshed when a glittering contraption came rushing into the enclosure and settled to the ground with a puff of blown dust. Ruiz was so startled that he dropped the bucket, spilling several nodules out onto the dirt. Immediately he set the bucket upright and began retrieving the precious lumps. By the time he’d picked them all up, the hovercar’s doors had, with a pneumatic hiss, lifted open. Out stepped the overseer, a thin snake of a man with a long braided beard and tattooed eyebrows. The overseer’s name was Bob Piyule, a name that brought almost as much tension to the family conferences as the mention of bondtotient.
From the meltstone commonhouse came most of the older family members. Ruiz was curious and wanted very much to stay and listen, but the nodules were his responsibility, and if they were not soon taken to the wombshed they would die. So he carried them inside and distributed them as quickly as he could among the empty conveyors.
When he was finished Ruiz rushed back out into the yard. But when he saw that all the family elders were gathered, gazing at Ruiz with varying degrees of sadness, he stopped in his tracks, afraid. The other children watched wide-eyed from the darkness of the cottage windows. He became more fearful when all the elders looked away, except for his bloodmother Lasa, who stood with tears running down her ordinarily serene face.
Ruiz sensed impending tragedy. He ran to Lasa on stubby legs, tears trembling in his own eyes. She lifted him, hugging him so that he could barely breathe. But she said nothing, nor did anyone else.
“What’s it? What’s the matter?” Ruiz asked in a voice that squeaked with fear.
The overseer had a nasal, prim voice. “You’re making far too much fuss over the child; you’ll frighten him needlessly,” said Bob Piyule, taking hold of Ruiz’s shoulder. “Don’t be afraid, Ruiz. You go to a greater family than this huddle of dirt scratchers. You go to the Lord’s School. If you are diligent, one day you’ll wear fine clothing and serve the Lord.”
Ruiz clung more tightly to Lasa. Bob Piyule pulled at him, to no avail. “Come, Lasa,” the overseer said, “is this dignified?”
Ruiz’s demi-father Relito spoke. “What’s dignified about child stealing, Piyule?” Relito’s voice, ordinarily harsh, sounded now as if he spoke through a throat full of stones.
Bob Piyule released Ruiz and whirled to face Relito. “Child stealing, is it? Can Lord Balliste steal what is already his? A less generous master would sunder your family and redistribute the members to more efficient production units, as I have many times advised him to do. Instead, he is merciful.”
“Yes, merciful.” Relito laughed bitterly.
Bob Piyule’s narrow face flushed, and his eyes took on a dangerous gutter. “Enough,” he said. He took Ruiz by the arm and roughly tore him away from Lasa, who fell to her knees, looking as if something inside her had broken.
Here the memory tattered and streamed away into darkness. Nacker still lay quietly in the ooze at the bottom of Ruiz’s mind. A farm boy, a common slave, Nacker marveled. Who would ever have guessed? This incongruity amused Nacker anew each time he entered Ruiz’s mind.
It was a long time before another touchstone memory drifted into position to be stimulated, long enough for Nacker to grow anxious, worried that one of the subtle guard filaments of the League mission-imperative might brush against him and trigger the death net before he could escape. Or that he’d be attacked by one of the great predatorial neuronic patterns, cleverly birthed by Ruiz to protect his mnemonic ocean from clumsy invasion. But nothing touched him, and eventually Nacker released a second stimulating locus. It detonated against another memory: Ruiz grown almost to manhood.
Ruiz wore the fine clothes that the late Bob Piyule had promised him so many years before, and he crouched at the right hand of Lord Balliste. But nothing else was as it should have been. The front of Ruiz’s brocade coat was stiff with drying blood, the blood of the Lord’s last bondguard. A sonic knife burbled in Ruiz’s hand, transmitting its hungry shimmy to his flesh.