SHE WAS TIGHTENING the cords around his wrists when the door chime sounded. “Will that hold?” she asked, yanking on the knot. She circled around and stared at his face, with an expression caught somewhere between fascination and terror. He could hardly blame her.
He shrugged. “Maybe you should let him in.”
As they waited for Max to come up from the lobby, he tried to remember what he could of Tamika Jones; but in this area, as in so many others, he could find only shadows of memories. He was adrift in darkness; and he dared not question her, for fear of confirming her worst suspicions. He could only guess at Tamika’s feelings as she’d watched a monster who claimed to love her change, like a human chameleon, into the man she herself had known and loved.
“Willard,” she said, interrupting his thoughts. “If you are Willard—”
He raised his eyes questioningly.
“What the hell did they do to you?” she whispered—and there was more than just fear in her voice.
Before he could answer, the inner door chimed. Tamika checked the monitor before opening the lock. “Ali’Maksam,” she murmured in relief.
Max entered, wearing what looked like a white spacesuit, with a fabric hood enclosing his head and a dark visor across his eyes. The Logothian moved with a sinuous, rippling gait, which was only partially concealed by the suit. He paused and gazed at Ruskin, who was still sitting cross-legged, and now bound, on the floor. Max’s expression was concealed by the hood; but when his voice hissed out, the dismay was plain to hear. “What is the meaning of this?”
Ruskin was silent while Tamika locked the door again. She stood, glancing between the two of them, the weapon still in her hand. “It was necessary,” Ruskin said, tugging instinctively on the cords that bound his wrists. “You tell him,” he said to Tamika.
“Where the hell do I start?”
“At the beginning. Don’t try to make sense of it. Just say what happened, from the beginning.”
She nodded, eyes half closing. When she spoke, it was in a different voice—harsh, angry, afraid. “You tried to—you came to the door, and you tried to kill me. But it wasn’t you. You were different. I don’t—”
“Please,” Max whispered, crossing the room. “I do not understand.”
They looked at one another in silence. “None of us understands,” Ruskin said. “Why don’t you sit, Max? But don’t get too close.” He tugged experimentally on the cords binding his wrists. “I don’t know if this would really hold. I might do something that I can’t control.”
Max nodded and settled into a position on the floor that seemed more coiled than cross-legged. The Logothian, Ruskin knew, could move fast at need. “Tamika, might I ask you to dim the lights, please?” Max asked.
“But leave them bright enough to keep a watch on me,” Ruskin cautioned.
“Yes. That would be satisfactory, for now,” Max said.
Tamika complied and drew up a chair, so that the three of them formed a small circle in the gloom. Ali’Maksam adjusted the visor on his hood to a more nearly transparent setting and blinked at them with eyes that were large and dark, with glittering diamonds at their centers. Tamika cradled the weapon in her hand. She began explaining.
A man had come to her door and identified himself as Willard Ruskin. Having no reason to fear or doubt that it was Willard, she’d not checked the monitor before opening the door. Instead of her friend, however, she’d come face-to-face with a brawny, thick-browed man—with large hands and eyes full of hatred. She’d had no time at all to react before he’d forced his way in, pinned her against a wall, and begun choking her.
Ruskin tensed as he listened. Had he done that?
Max asked, “But you were able to defend yourself?”
Tamika shrugged. “I’m not defenseless. But he took me by surprise. I managed to break free, and when I saw him with this weapon, I was able to knock it out of his hand. But he caught me—and began strangling me again—” Her hand went to her throat, rubbing the spot where Ruskin’s fingers had closed over her windpipe.
“But he didn’t succeed,” Max said.
Tamika shook her head in the near-darkness. “Something distracted him. He began acting crazy—in a different way, I mean, talking to himself or something—and I got free again. I grabbed the gun and I . . . I shot him.” Her voice came near to breaking. “I shot him dead. Do you hear me, Max? Dead. I blew a goddamn hole in his chest—I swear it!”
For a moment, no one spoke, and Ruskin was conscious only of the slow hiss of Max’s breath. The Logothian was peering with interest at Ruskin’s chest—which bore a scar, but no hole, though the front of his shirt was burned open.
Tamika finally regained her voice. “I was about to call the police—wondering what the hell to tell them—when, when he . . . when he woke up. He sat up and talked to me! Just sat right up. And said he was Willard. But he wasn’t Willard. He wasn’t Rus’lem.”
“But,” Max said softly, “he appears to be Willard now.”
Tamika struggled. “His—face changed. From the time I called you, until . . .” She shrugged helplessly, like a tree shaking in the gloom.
“What she says is true,” Ruskin said.
“About your face?” Max asked.
“Yes. And the other—the attack.”
Max gazed at him with glittering Logothian eyes. “You attacked her without warning?”
“Yes.”
“Without reason? Do you know why you attacked her?”
Ruskin took a slow, deep breath. He shook his head; his mind was spinning. “I don’t know. I have no idea. I can’t conceive of an idea. But everything she said is true, that I can remember.”
“And are you . . . Willard Ruskin?”
Ruskin barked a laugh. “As far as I know.”
“And were you, when you attacked her?”
His laugh died. “That’s what I want you to tell us.”
Max seemed to contemplate that statement. “When did you last speak with me, Willard?” he asked. His head swayed from side to side. “When did you last see me?”
“I called you today—twice—three times—I don’t know how many times. And I—I saw you—last night. Virtual. In my apartment.” He closed his eyes, thinking. “Night before last, I guess it was. I’ve . . . lost track of time, you see.”
Max gazed at him without answering.
“But why? Why, damn it?” Tamika’s voice was a strained whisper. “What’s happened to you? What did they do to you?”
He returned her agonized stare. “They?”
“You went on a trip. With some men.”
“Men. Yes. I don’t know.” As the two stared at him, he began to explain what little he remembered.
* * *
“You wish my help in trying to understand the changes to your psyche?” Ali’Maksam asked at last.
“Yes. Everything. Tell me if I am still Willard Ruskin, if you can. If not, who am I? Or what?”
Max nodded slowly. He turned to Tamika. “If it is satisfactory with you, this will require a deep meditative state—and more complete darkness, so that I might remove my suit. I should like to invite you to join in the meditation, but the difficulty, and the danger—”
“Never mind. Just please find out what’s happened to him.” Tamika rose to dim the lights.
Ruskin’s next words made her pause. “I’m concerned about your safety,” he said slowly. “If it happens again in the dark. If I—” He cleared his throat. “Will you be able to protect yourselves?”
“I still have the gun,” Tamika pointed out.
“If you kill me, I will just rise up again.”
She answered as though she hadn’t heard him. “I don’t want to kill you,” she whispered.
Max studied the two of them. “I might have some warning and be able to do something.” Ruskin knew dimly what Max was going to say, before he said it. “If you threaten to become violent, I might be able to stop you . . . with inward pain. By using a technique I would greatly prefer to avoid.”
Tamika scowled, but Ruskin had no hesitation. “Use it if you need to.”
“It could be fatal.”
“To me? I’ll just come back.”
“I hope so. But you may come back in pain. Severe and lasting pain.”
“What I have now is worse. Do it, if you have to.”
Tamika turned off the lights.
* * *
In darkness, the Logothian’s voice was a dry whisper, the sound of a night wind rustling needles in a bone-dry wood.
—Listen to the whisper, Willard; let your feelings spin free like the winds on the plain—
(Yes.)
It was the voice of wind, sighing across a nighttime prairie, rustling in the chimeweed that clinked softly beneath the cottony darkness of the clouds.
Ali’Maksam’s voice carried him backward; took him deep into realms of solitude and memory, to a place of peacefulness where the voice of the speaker and the voices of memories stirred free and floated up and away from the confusion of feelings.
(He remembered his first sight of the plains of Kantano Aries: plume of smoke curling in the moonlight from the chimney of a solitary dwelling. It made his heart ache with a lonely thrill as he tried to remember . . . who was with him that long-ago night?)
The wind curled its way back into the forest, searching out the secret places of the heart. It became the sound of tiny flames licking and crackling as they grew, leaping up through a kindling of parched needles.
—Listen to the whisper of the flame; unlock the inner worlds, flow deep and through and release them into the night—
(Memories: a night of magic and chances and love, the first time he’d allowed himself to love again, the night he drifted on a breeze of desire, intoxicated . . . and slipped headlong into love with a woman with golden eyes, a mouth that only rarely smiled, and oddly but exquisitely angled breasts. He remembered a smell of hazelwood and incense . . .
There were secret places too many to count; but the wind searched where mere thought could not go. Ali’Maksam’s voice wrapped itself around his thoughts like webbing from a magical spider of Erian, drops of dew melting into the traps at the apexes of the webbing, releasing an aroma of hazelwood.
—Release, Willard; spin backward; share and find truth—
Whirling, rotating, it was not like any invasion he had known; it was a mingling of thought and feeling, and his were not the only secrets to be given up to the night.
(Of course—he had known Max as well: the wonder of discovering the soul of an alien being, the topography of spirit so unlike, and yet so like his own; the fascination and fear of the Kwatroni Rotation, the empathic union; the joy of discovering a friend in the unseen places of the mind and soul. . . .)
The wind caught him up and carried him away from that memory. This was a time for another kind of discovering, a search for the feelings that had twisted and distorted and carried him to a place he’d never wanted to go.
—Spin free—
—spin and let it free—
—spin back—
—Willard—
—release it to the flame—
Now it hurt, the wind did; but it was a kind of hurt that made him want to find its center, to find the focus of the pain and let it out. The flame, the fire.
But it was an elemental fire in the cold and dark of space.
(He felt its heat, a terrible conflagration that would consume everything. But out of destruction, a promise of something new, something wondrous that would take his breath away . . .)
(But something was wrong. There was anger, anger that was a jet of fire—erupting from a facade of civility, making him want to strike out and destroy . . .)
The wind was trying to tell him something, but its whispering was so soft he could hear almost nothing but the pulse of blood in his ears.
(Stirring in his blood—something stirring in his blood, something he couldn’t control . . .)
The whispering came now from his own blood, from the power of the thoughts that rippled up and down inside him. But were they driven by his own mind, or by Ali’Maksam, or by . . .
—Spin free—
—spin free—
—spin free—
. . . by something else altogether?
Memory had slipped away, but behind it was a vacuum in which emotions could expand and take on structure.
(...............frustration............................
............anger........(against what?)........
..............................................................
........bewilderment................................
........................................terror.............
.................longing.................................
..............................................................
.......a desperate need to know..............)
(He’d been pierced; and flowing in his lifestream was a power he did not understand, did not know how to name, a power that stole his memories and desires and left behind a changeling body that could climb back from the abyss of death and assume shape at will. . . .)
(But where had it come from . . . ?)
Thundering now, the sound of the blood in his ears, in his thoughts; and whispering at the center of it, Ali’Maksam’s voice, calling him deeper still into his memories; but there was only emptiness there, an echoing maze that wound forever inward.
(And enemies: dark, tall figures that brought death; but he too could kill, if the enemies persisted . . .)
No!
There was a voice at the center of the thunder, a voice controlling him. If only he could kill that voice . . .
No!
(It was the source of the evil.)
Willard!
(He could not be stopped.)
No!
(Yes!)
And pain shot through him like a needle, driving straight to the center of his brain, pain such as he’d never felt before. . . .
* * *
His eyes jerked open at the sound of a hoarse, rasping cry in the darkness. It was his own voice. And in front of him, scarcely visible in the light of a single red-glowing diode from the console, was the weaving form of his friend Max, gasping for breath.
The incredible hot-poker pain . . . he remembered it now. And before it, the bubbling desire—the urge to kill. God, no! Had he been about to try again . . . ?
“Max!” he shouted.
The Logothian’s head jerked back, hissing. “Willard?” The voice was agonized.
A small white light blinked on, and there was a sudden movement, and then Tamika was crouched nearby, holding the gun near Ruskin’s head in a wavering grip. “What’s going on?” she demanded in a shrill voice.
“It’s . . . all right,” Max hissed. He had drawn back away from the light, covering his reptilian face with his hands. “It was not his doing. He stopped in time.”
Tamika lowered the gun cautiously. “Is it safe, then? Is he . . . is this man Willard, damn it?”
“Yes,” Max whispered. “The light—off, please!” Tamika looked from one to the other, before reluctantly dimming the lamp. Ali’Maksam quickly readjusted his garb, then said, “You may turn it on again.” The light came back on. Max was in his suit again, head and body enclosed. Ruskin could just make out the diamonds of Max’s eyes through the visor.
He realized now the source of the Logothian’s pain. Max had stopped his incipient attack with a blast of pain, had jolted him free of the change that was coming over him. But Max had borne the pain, too, felt it as keenly as Ruskin. The empathic connection. Ruskin blinked, gazing at his friend. “Max—are you all right? What did you find?” He was rubbing the bridge of his nose—then realized what he was doing. He stared at the broken cords dangling from his wrists.
Ali’Maksam peered at him before answering. “You are indeed still my friend Willard. But there is a change in you.”
“I know that.” Ruskin tossed off the broken cords, which brought a gasp from Tamika.
Max nodded. “But why? That is the question.”
“Yes.”
“I suspect the answer. But I cannot be sure.”
Tamika swore. “What does that mean, Max?”
Ruskin waited patiently. When Max spoke this way, answers were usually forthcoming. Eventually. He remembered that now.
“I know people who might be able to help us find out,” Max answered. He looked at Ruskin, at Tamika, at Ruskin. “Do you trust me to try?”
Ruskin answered slowly, but without hesitation. “Is there anyone else we can trust?”
Tamika looked in dismay from one to the other, but Max’s only answer was a chuckling whisper, a serpentine hiss.