The Hidden War Page 6

  “A Beat . . .” Prima stared at him, then smiled, then leapt into his arms, and they hugged each other, laughing. “A Beat!” She threw him back in the water, rolled him over and wrestled with him. They came up again, hugging each other. “I thought I was the last one, the only one.”

  “We are,” Krim said. He held her at arm’s length then, reached up and rubbed away a piece of beak still stuck to her upper lip. “We are.”

  Krim and Prima lay side by side on a flat rock. The sun had risen over the ridge to the east, warming the rock and them. He looked down at his body, the slight sheen of the hide visible now that he knew to look for it. Naked, he felt clothed still with the hide, and didn’t feel the need for the covering of his Beat suit. Sam, the slate, lay flat against his stomach, a light flickering occasionally, but he wasn’t picking up a signal from this Electric man, Sam had assured him.

  “So the Jack’s gone?” Prima asked.

  “Far as I know, but I don’t know.” Krim had told her of the attack on the Kirkpatrick and the Jack vanishing into Ur. “We could be the only Beats left.” He thought of what Thom had said, though: There were other Beat pilots fighting for the Alliance.

  Prima rubbed the gold ring on her right hand. “My bond mate—I know she’s gone.” She looked up, her gaze climbing to the edge of the canyon above them. “They got her fighter. I had the attack command on the Ferlinghetti. The next time we went out, I volunteered to lead the assault. That’s when they got me. I didn’t care. I wanted to die.”

  Krim reached out, squeezed her hand. “Yeah, I remember hearing of that. My Corso had been in Ur the whole time. She went with the Jack, I think. I don’t know. If the Jack made it, she made it. I was the last captured, the last one, and the only survivor of my assault.”

  They lay together, his hand holding hers, staring up at the intensely blue sky, and felt the heat roaring down on them from the sun—the only solar body Beats shared in common with the alien planet they now pushed their backs to. Krim felt the sorrow rise up in him, felt hot tears begin to come, but swallowed them back. He had felt that sorrow all too often in his dark cell, had felt it since his release every time he fingered the gold ring, the ring Corso had given him. No tears. If he could not cry for Corso in the cell, he would not cry now. Krim turned to Prima, saw her shut her own eyes and bite her lips.

  “No,” she whispered. “Not yet.”

  Krim sucked in a long breath, and another, then stood up and knelt by the pool. He splashed the hot water on his face and washed the mist from his eyes with the slight sour smell of the hot springs. “Okay,” he said finally, turning to Prima. “What do we do now?”

  “I’m not going to fight for the Alliance.”

  “Me neither. Thom can screw himself.”

  “Might be some brothers and sisters back there.” She jerked her head toward Zoetrope’s camp. “You never know. You found me.”

  “Who is this Electric man?” Krim asked her.

  “Zoetrope.” She turned the ring around on her finger, stared at it. “I remember the Electric man. He lures his victims into his camp—he would have gotten you. He has this wand, and can overpower your slate. Then he seizes your slate, leaving only part of it.” Prima held up her right hand. “The bastard made my bond ring his control device. It’s a receiver. Zoetrope sends out a signal that keeps you in his control. He’ll run a hack on your hide, make you into whatever he wants. Says he’s an artist, and we’re his canvas.” She coughed and tried to spit. “You run into these Electrics—think they’re special, better than others. ‘Purer,’ they say, and that gives them the right to overpower ‘the gray people,’ what they call anyone not like them.”

  “There are others like you?” Krim asked. “Others under the control of these Electrics?”

  “Under Zoetrope’s control, yes—but not like me.” Prima rubbed at her crewcut. “Not willing to escape Zoetrope’s power. I’m free. I figured out how to get away. The signal fades, and if you put some rock between you and Zoetrope, it gets cut off. You can’t alter the transformation he forces on you. If you do, you bleed. Once you get away from the signal, though, the hack stops. That’s how I figured it out. I had gotten out of range once, and snagged a feather. I didn’t bleed.”

  “So that’s when I ran into you—after you figured it out?”

  “No. I ran away before, like now, until I became myself again. Then I stupidly went back to free the others. I did, too. Only they didn’t want to be free. I had put Zoetrope out and shut down the amplifier he uses to run his hacks. None of the others wanted to be free. They begged me to change them back. Then Zoetrope came to, and he hacked them again—and me. There aren’t any Beats there. And I gave the others their chance. Screw ’em.”

  “You’re sure there aren’t any Beats there?”

  Prima glared at him. “Screw them, I said.” She stood, stretched. “Holy Jack, I’m famished.” Prima walked over to the edge of the rock, reached down into the ground, and pulled up a handful of dirt. She shoved it into her mouth, then spat it out. “Crap! This tastes like dirt.”

  “It is dirt.” Krim cocked an eyebrow at her. “It’s supposed to taste like dirt.”

  “No, it’s not. The slate . . . Oh.”

  “I can adjust the hide so dirt can taste like anything you want it to,” Sam told him.

  “You don’t have a slate,” Krim pointed out.

  “Just a receiver.” She waved her hand. “Uh, that was part of the other thing Zoetrope did. Bastard.”

  “I can broadcast a tight beam to her receiver,” Sam said. “Provide her basic programming.” Krim told her Sam’s suggestion.

  “No way. I am not going to be hacked by anybody ever again. Nobody.”

  Krim held up his right hand. “I’m a Beat. You wouldn’t trust a brother?”

  “How do I know you’re the real thing?” Prima reached down, held up another handful of dirt. “Zoetrope gave me a Beat one time—hacked a new guy who had come in. He turned out not to be a Beat, and not even a man. A woman.” She raised the handful of dirt to her mouth, grimaced. “My hide will use the dirt, even if it tastes awful.”

  Krim searched through his memories, trying to recall his few encounters with Prima. He’d only known her briefly in all his years on the Jack. What did he know of her, though? It came to him then: running into Prima and her bond mate. They had a special relationship, something unusual—what was it? Right. And he’d seen them.

  “You had a secret bond,” Krim said. “You didn’t want to announce it so you could be together always. If you had a public bond, you could never fly together.”

  Prima stared at him, nodded. “You’re right. I had a secret bond. Lots of us did. So what? Lucky guess.”

  “I know your bond mate’s name.” Krim smiled. “I recognized her. You were on shore leave together. She had to get back to your ship early. I saw you kiss her good-bye.” He traced the two letters in the air. “D-I. Di, Diana Di was her full handle. I remembered that, because it was so unusual, a two-word name.”

  Prima held the dirt up to her mouth, then reached out and handed it to him. “Eat,” she said. “Brother.”

  “Sister,” he said. Krim took the dirt from her, and shoved it into his mouth. For a moment, he smelled the musky richness, and then he felt his senses block, and he thought—for some odd reason—of strawberries, and then tasted and felt strawberries. He wiped the dirt off his mouth, tried not to look at it so he wouldn’t shake the illusion.

  Krim took her right hand and placed it on his slate. Prima nodded, and Krim felt Sam trickle into her, felt a wash of memories flood back into him of her: a blue-haired woman being strapped to a slab by a shimmering man; the woman screaming as hideous creations scraped her scalp clean, her hair bleeding and the blood running down her face; the woman waking up to find herself sheathed in feathers; the woman running, and then returning; and more torture as she went through the transformation again. He felt Sam send messages back to her, felt tastes surge through his bod
y: strawberries, chocolate truffles, salmon, lettuce, chicken, beef and sausage and milk and some sticky peanut taste he’d never felt, taste upon taste singing to her.

  Prima smiled, then raised her hand, gently breaking the connection. “Thank you.” She pointed at the hole she had begun to dig, and spread out the dirt as if setting a table. “Shall we dine now?”

  Chapter 4

  Krim and Prima walked down to Sea City. Sea City! Emerald city! Rain city! A city of drizzle, of green, of volcanic mountains ringing azure seas, of forests rolling up to the edge and into the very heart of the city. The city, the great metropolis of the Northwest, the only city allowed to grace the long worm of ocean that oozed into the continent. Sea City, where rivers met, where young salmon tumbled down into the sea and came back as fat, fleshy fish; where great eagles soared on the updrafts of a million steaming breaths; where bears stared down suspiciously from the hills; where moose and deer and previously uncommon teeming forests and plains of animals fed on the edges of humanity. Sea City.

  Krim and Prima wandered up the hard rock path out of the forest and into a network of greenbelts making the transition between wilderness and civilization. Trees lined the path, a greenway, not hard, black roads, but rock roads, cobblestone roads, roads lovingly built by the labor of millions.

  And great skyscrapers soared, high buildings of steel and concrete and shimmering glass, the only real structures left standing: a building here, a building there, vertical plazas open to the sky and sometimes covered from the wind and rain, some even shielded and locked for only a few to enter. Privacy! Off in the distance, silhouetted against the white flanks of a conical mountain, a thin spire thrust up at the sky, the elevator to LaGrange space, the Space Needle, Sam told him it was called.

  Gray-haired men and women swept the road before them as Krim and Prima walked into the town. The street sweepers had smooth hides and bodies, their skin soft and unblemished and tan or dark black or chocolate-colored, but their hair shiny and gray. “Old,” Sam replied to Krim’s query, but these workers didn’t look old. They swept with vigor, with dedication, some even washing individual rocks with small brushes.

  The sweepers glanced up as the two strangers passed, nodding their heads, and sweeping the path behind the Beats as they entered. Krim turned and looked up the path, to where it ended at the tubeway station and the forest. He could see other paths leading down from similar forests, and beyond that, more green, more mountains.

  Steam rose from the ground as the morning sun burned off the damp. He saw more of the gray-haired people, some with white hair, and some of the men with bare patches on their scalps, but “old” as he understood it seemed not to actually apply to them. Only their hair looked old, their beards and patches of pubic hair gray, with the faintest of wrinkles around their eyes. Krim glanced at Prima and back at himself and saw that except for their coloring, and their brooms, they could be like the gray-haired people: naked bodies, save for the slate Krim wore roped around his neck, and his Beat suit he had rolled up and tied around his shoulders. He’d tried to wear the skin-tight suit again, but it felt uncomfortable over the hide. His hide and Prima’s hide had adjusted to their natural skin color, like the old people’s skin colors, not Kabuki white but olive or ebony or tan.

  “Welcome,” a white-haired man said to them as they entered. “You have come to assist us?”

  Krim shrugged. “To visit.”

  The white-haired man waved to a stack of brooms laid against a low wall. “You are Naturals, yes?” He pointed at their bodies.

  “Naturals,” Sam said. “A cult or order who do not adorn their bodies, and who allow certain characteristics, such as preliminary signs of aging, to be manifest.”

  “We are Beats,” Krim said.

  The white-haired man shrugged. “All grow tired. Still, if you take a broom . . . ?” He waved at the city. “You will find a broom a helpful scepter, particularly against those who think themselves superior and wish to deny that we are all equals.” He pulled forth two brooms, the handles planed smooth but slightly crooked, and the straw crisp and uneven, wrapped with green and purple twine. He held out a broom to Krim, who took it, noting that its length fit him exactly.

  “Thank you,” Krim said.

  When Prima took the broom from the old-looking man, he paused, then touched her. “You have no slate, daughter.”

  Prima looked down at her feet. “An Electric man took my slate. I had to run away from him, and I did not dare go back to get it.”

  “Those Electrics . . .” The old man frowned. “They think that because they overpower you they have become your superiors. I can remedy that injustice.” He searched in a box by the stack of brooms, then pulled out a floppy piece of some thin silver metal. “Here,” he said. “Your ring, your remaining piece of slate, should reprogram this.” He twirled the silver substance around and around, forming it into a long rope, and then laid it across Prima’s wrist. Her new slate shimmered, became gold, and then wrapped itself around her arm.

  “I—” Prima stopped, her eyes staring in the distance. She turned to Krim. “Help—I cannot . . .”

  Krim stepped to her, reached out his hand to her wrist. His slate moved down from his neck to his wrist, and he could feel Sam coil around, one end to his own ring, the other end reaching out to Prima’s new slate. Her slate repeated the process, one end to Krim’s slate, one end to her own ring. Again Krim felt the connection, felt the flood of memories wash from her to him, the memories of whatever Zoetrope had done to her, of what he had made her, and what she really was. As quickly as he had made the connection, he broke it. Prima stepped back, rubbing the slate.

  “Thank you . . . ?” she said, waving a hand at the old man.

  “Ezra,” he said. “Call me Ezra. I am the Broommaker.”

  “Thank you, Ezra.” She turned to the old man, passed the broom from her left hand to her right hand. “Thank you for these. Where did you get a slate? I thought you could only get one when you got a hide.” Prima scratched her scalp, tugged at the short hairs, and they seemed to pull longer at her tugging.

  The Broommaker grinned. “We have ways. If you need any help adjusting, ask any Natural. It’s a special slate.”

  “Thank you again,” Krim said. “Can we—?”

  Ezra shook his head. “No. You don’t need to do anything except sweep. Much needs to be swept in the city,” he said. “When you see anything that needs to be swept, sweep it.” He showed them, and they mimed his actions. “Keep Sea City clean,” Ezra said. “Keep Sea City free.” The old man started to turn away.

  “Wait,” Krim said. He untied his Beat suit and shook it out. “This . . . this is sort of like a slate. Can you use it?”

  Ezra took the suit, held it up to the light. The sheer fabric shimmered in a moiré of chaotic rainbows. He ran the back of a hand along the fabric, stopped, then looked up at Krim. “It has a power of its own.”

  “Once,” Krim said, “it had much power—it connected me to my ship. Now . . .” He shrugged. “I have no ship, and so the suit is useless to me.”

  “I can use it,” Ezra said. “We use many such things. Perhaps the strands can be used to make bindings for brooms.” The old man smiled at Krim, revealing perfect white teeth, with faint traces of wrinkles at the corners of his mouth. A peaceful smile, Krim thought, a relaxed and content grin.

  “Good.” Krim twisted the ring on his hand. “The fewer reminders of what was . . . Thank you.” He raised up the broom.

  Holding their brooms like staffs, Krim and Prima continued on, into the heart of the city, into pocket plazas that led into more alleys and paths and parks and fed into larger and larger plazas. For a while they saw nobody else, no sweepers, no life except for innumerable birds that fluttered among the trees or swept down in great black flocks onto parapets and gates. Black birds, Krim saw. Ravens, Sam told him. Bold, they would hop up to him and squawk, and a shoo of the broom would scare them out of his way.

  Surely a c
ity like this must have people, Krim thought. At first he did not understand. The path they walked down came through a winding row of potted trees and low walls. As they rounded one corner, the path opened up into an immense plaza, irregularly shaped with wooden or brick walls shielding pockets of the corners of the plaza. Steps rose up into the hills above, with winding staircases zigging through the steps, some stairways meeting and others ending at a series of smaller plazas above. The grand plaza seemed to be a great pit, with broad platforms ringing it, some only large enough to sit upon, others large enough for sleeping. And throughout every nook and cranny of the pit potted trees and bushes, or hanging baskets of flowers, decorated the immense structures. More walls cut off pockets of the plaza or terraces around it, partially shielding some from view.

  Then the city woke up.

  In the great plaza overlooking the sea, they found the people. From the terraces, from behind the walls, the people awoke, and came forth.

  In what seemed an instant, where Krim and Prima had stood alone, out poured hundreds, then thousands of people, incredible people far more bizarre than any he had seen, even in the flashes of memory Prima had given him of Zoetrope’s camp. They crawled out from behind the walls, rose up out of hidden trenches, climbed down from the trees and out of the bushes. Some seemed natural like Prima and him, or like the old people, and then he noticed that every slight wrinkle or groove in their hides had been etched with some fine ink, so that their bodies seemed a map of movement. They were the least bizarre, though, for they at least seemed human. The others . . .

  Where Zoetrope had only played with feathers and fur and hair, these, these had been played upon down to very muscle and bone. Griffins, sphinxes, centaurs, angels with immense silver wings, dragons and fairies and gnomes, trolls, midgets, obese lumbering beasts, thin skeletons and double-headed men, men with women’s heads and men’s genitals, bodies twinned with men’s and women’s heads, blue-skinned and green-skinned and skins colored impossible colors and patterns, strange beasts that arose not even out of ancient myth, but out of some impossible dementia of twisted souls . . . those were the least of it.