FREE WILL
"We're going in," Thermeon told Sunfox as he guided the bullet-car along the river of asphalt across Bola's plains toward a distant range of pink mountains.
Sunfox smiled. His legwork had pinpointed the warehouse that was disseminating the virus that had transformed Bola's elite into gibbering, willess nonentities. Of course it was Thermeon who had fixed on Skejax Tlane Gilalo, scientist turned politician, as the culprit. He'd figured it out after seeing the man orate in front of a wonderdome with a group of the victims slumped at his feet, their eyes trembling and their mouths opening and closing like the beaks of baby birds. Gilalo had regarded the victims as an artist does a masterpiece of creation.
"It was your telepathic powers that gave you that insight into Gilalo's thoughts," Sunfox said.
Thermeon brushed the suggestion aside with a wave of his black-gloved hand. His fingers looked unusually long and narrow because the gloves concealed claws hard and sharp enough to disembowel an unarmored man. At least Sunfox thought they could, though he had never seen Thermeon use his claws. The gloves were trimmed with silver and bore a dragon's head logo.
"I can't mind-link with a recorded image," Thermeon said. "I need some real connection to a person before I can merge my mind with his, and I don't know Gilalo. I merely observed his expression and his stance. You could have done it too."
"Yeah, sure," Sunfox grunted. Thermeon knew everything, and had been everything—emperor of the galaxy, lover to a thousand doomed brides, intergalactic trader. Now he was king of a minor planet called Huthfrac and running the Starfire Detective Agency on the side. Sunfox and his boyfriend, Fleomis, took care of all the routine stuff. Fleomis usually stayed in the office as tech support, while Sunfox chased clues around.
Kingship gave Thermeon diplomatic immunity when he chose to break a planet's traffic laws, which he frequently did during their missions. From time to time some petty official would try to take away his Deep-level space-fighter, citing the dangers it posed in the hands of someone as uncontrollable as Thermeon. Operation of the Deep-level fusion field disrupted matter, and he might ignite a planet's atmosphere, or something. But the public wouldn't hear of denying Thermeon his fighter; he was an old war hero as well as everything else.
"You probably don't even need a sidekick like me," Sunfox said. "I'm just here to be wowed by your brilliance, or maybe to do the tedious researches while you're dazzling the upper crust broads in some virtual party zone."
"I was doing investigating at those parties," Thermeon said.
"Yeah? Investigating what?"
"I was learning about the political situation on Bola which led to Gilalo's viral attack. You see, Bola has no native sentients, but life forms have left their records in huge lakes of asphalt. The planet is divided into two political parties; the Progressives, who want to turn all the asphalt into roadways; and the Conservationists, who want to preserve the lakes for scientific study. Right now the Progressives are getting their way. Gilalo is a Conservationist. Unable to prevail legally, he resorted to terrorism. The victims are all top-level Progressives and their families."
Thermeon turned his attention to the bullet-car's command-module, and the vehicle picked up speed to whoosh along the endless straightaway. Sunfox watched piles of black boulders whip past. He saw no signs of civilization beyond the highway's borders, only the plains and distant mountains. Gradually they ascended the foothills, and the plains lay outspread below them in a vast panorama of pink criss-crossed by a black web of roadways, while the mountains hung over them like a glowing crimson wall in the afternoon sun. A sheen of frost appeared on the nearest hills.
It was deep in the night, and the sky mirrored the blackness of the asphalt lot when they pulled up to the warehouse and jumped from the bullet-car. The warehouse sensed their approach and flooded the air around them with light. Thermeon's armor danced with rainbows for a moment, then went dark. His long white hair streamed in the wind, glowing like a comet. They walked up to the wall that towered over them and receded into the distance on either side. It looked shining white from the distance, the pink lettering bold and tall as it blared, "Bola's Past is Your Future," but as they got closer Sunfox saw colonies of mildew. The wall was broken by a series of huge doors.
Thermeon hailed Gilalo, but there was no answer. He tapped a gloved hand against a door, his features going calm and distant as he tried to guess the combination of the lock. He was very good at that. He used his mindpowers. Not that he could read the lock mechanism's mind, exactly. He'd said it had something to do with the Total Configuration Effect, some patternistic skeleton key mindseas like him used for all sorts of things.
Thermeon found the combination, and the door lifted with a faint high-pitched whine. Inside lay what looked like another parking lot. The truck that had delivered the virus sat in front of another warehouse. Thermeon and Sunfox sprinted across the lot, capes and hair billowing. Thermeon used his mind-trick on one of the smaller warehouse's doors. As it began to open, Sunfox heard a distant whine, and whirled. The doorway they'd entered by was closing, blotting out sky and stars. He tapped Thermeon's arm and pointed, but his mentor only smiled.
They stepped inside the smaller warehouse and found themselves surrounded by the bubbling vats and instrument panels of a bio-engineering lab. As the second door closed behind them a bronze-skinned man with pale yellow hair appeared in a larger-than-life projection and grinned down at them. "Ah, Thermeon and Sunfox. Ive been expecting you. When I realized that the Progs had called you in to save their butts I took the precaution of laying a false trail, which you conveniently followed. The truck was a decoy. My virus is safely aboard a jet on its way to the capital."
Thermeon cursed and gave Sunfox a malevolent look.
"Can't you mind-link with him now?" Sunfox said, hoping to direct his anger in a more useful direction.
"No. That's just a recorded image."
Fiendish laughter pealed from the projection. Echoes rang back at them from the warehouse walls. "The virus is free in the air about you! You've already breathed it in! You're already undergoing the transformation! You'll be lying on the floor, helpless as jellyfish, when my speech announcing the formation of the new government is broadcast from the capital."
"There must be a cure!" Sunfox shouted. "Use this lab, Thermeon! You know everything! Surely you can concoct a cure in a centisecond or two!"
Thermeon sat down in a comm niche, frowning as he tried to break into Gilalo's system. Sunfox prepared himself to break down the door so that he could race to the capital, then reconsidered. What good would it do? He might bruise himself, and then he would not only be incapacitated, but in pain as well. He started composing a last message to Fleomis.
"We have been tricked, Flea." Why was he calling his friend and lover a bug? He'd never done that before.
"Gilalo has made a very interesting discovery," Thermeon said. "He must have stumbled across it in his study of the Bolan evolution of multicellular life. It's too bad he's chosen to use his talents to hurt people."
Sunfox found himself tittering. "You just talk as if you like people, Thermeon. You really think we're bugs. You've just been using me, and now I'm gonna die! It's not fair!"
"Get hold of yourself!" Thermeon said irritably.
Sunfox went back to his message, but he couldn't get past the salutation. Putting it aside, he tried to decide what to do about the situation. Nothing came to him. Suddenly he felt something warm and wet against the inside of his thigh. He yelped, then giggled. He was wetting himself, but he didn't seem to care. He felt the probe of Thermeon's violet eyes, and realized that he knew too. Even that caused only a tiny ripple of shame that quickly vanished.
"Well hot damn," Thermeon said for no apparent reason. There was an uncharacteristic twang in his voice. The next moment he pitched out of the comm niche and onto his chin.
Sunfox giggled. He found himself sprawled beside Thermeon. Part of him realized that there was no sense in wondering any more about what he should do, because it was all over. He heard his own hysterical laughter echoing from the walls around them.
Hot tears rolled down his cheeks, though he was still laughing. The laughter and the sobbing tried to come out of his throat at the same time, and he choked and writhed, gasping for breath. A million voices screeched inside his skull. They shrilled like crickets, but they were speaking in words and pictures, tugging him this way and that. His awareness, which before had been brilliant and dominating as the sun (though he'd never much thought about it, or thanked it for being there), was now shattered and diffuse as the stars spread across Bola's sky. He tossed about on the floor, laughing, weeping, choking.
A flash of violet light stilled all the little voices. Thermeon's mind-voice roared in his head. Listen, Sunfox! His virus doesn't affect my mindpowers. Things are not so bad for us as he thinks.
"You? We? Cure?" Sunxfox's voices screamed.
We haven't been damaged. Our patternistic integrity has been altered.
"What? What? What?"
Gilalo made a study of the changes that cells undergo when they give up a lifestyle as independent creatures and join to form a single multicellular organism. They lose certain processes that they needed to make life-choices as independent beings. Gilalo found a way to restore those processes, and he engineered his virus to deliver the instructions to his victims' cells. He has, in effect, given each and every one of our cells free will. We no longer have single identities. We have become confederations of trillions of primitive wills.
"Oh! Bad! Reverse?" Sunfox thought.
I'm sure that Gilalo's "enhancement" can be removed from our cells. I've communicated my findings to Fleomis and told him to bring these facts to the attention of Bola's scientific community. He'll also warn them about the jet, of course. The centers of government will be evacuated. Gilalo's plan will fail.
"Ha! Ha! Ha!"
Like many scientists who devote themselves to a single branch of learning Gilalo is relatively ignorant about other fields. He didn't realize that my mindpowers spring from Deep-level components of my being, and would be unaffected by his virus.
"What? Now? Do?" Sunfox squirmed.
Just relax. I can mind-link with my own cells, so I'm going to address them for a while. Don't worry if you don't hear from me.
"What? What? What?" Sunfox thought in despair.
There was no answer.
It was very uncomfortable lying there on the floor, but he could never get himself to squirm into a better position. His costume was cold and damp around the crotch. Squirming made it chafe, but he couldn't stop squirming. A war raged in his head.
"Squirm! Don't squirm! Squirm! Don't squirm!"
He began to laugh and weep again. Then his bladder released another stream.
Part of him hoped Thermeon was wetting himself too.
It felt like days had gone by when sounds that weren't his own mental voices penetrated his shards of awareness. Thermeon was humming to himself. Sunfox tried to squirm around to get a look at him, but parts of him still didn't want to squirm. Once he flopped over so that, just by chance, he caught a glimpse of the old man stretched out face-down on the floor. But without wanting to, he squirmed some more, and a view of the swivel-seat Gilalo had vacated presented itself. He heard a distant voice from the comm niche.
"There is panic in the capital as word of a terrorist plot …"
Sunfox squirmed away. Thermeon's humming grew louder, drowning out the newser's voice. Sunfox began to make out words.
"Fight, fight, fight! For the violet and white!" Thermeon sang.
"Ha! Ha! Ha!" Sunfox sneered. "Fight! Sob! Wet pants!" Squirming some more, he found one eye squashed against the floor, the other aimed toward the old man. He was still just lying there.
"One and all, to duty's call band!" Thermeon sang. "Divided we fall, together we stand!"
Then he stood up, and smiled at Sunfox. "You see? I know how to work a crowd."
Sunfox gasped, gurgled, and squirmed so that he was staring at the warehouse roof with both eyes.
"Pull yourself together," Thermeon snapped. "We have things to do!"
Sunfox didn't feel any more together, but when Thermeon reached down and pulled him to his feet he was able to stand. Thermeon opened the warehouse doors from the comm niche, then guided his tottering steps out to the bullet-car.
"The double warehouses served as an airlock for the virus," Thermeon said. "The outer door was programmed to close whenever the inner door was opened. But it doesn't matter any more because the organism has a limited life-span, and the batch that affected us is dead now."
The stars were beginning to fade as they barreled down one of Bola's broad asphalt roadways. Pink light flooded another mountain range on the horizon. It was so beautiful Sunfox sobbed.
"Where? What? We?"
"Things are at a stalemate," Thermeon reported. "Gilalo's confederate is threatening to release the virus over a population center if he picks up a single blip from Bola's air force on his scanner."
"Virus? Old? Die?" Sunfox gurgled.
"Unfortunately, their missiles keep the virus in a state of suspended animation until they're detonated. Their jet may run out of fuel, however."
They drove on, the rising light touching the vast sweep of rocky plains around them.
"Gilalo and his pilot are trying to make their getaway," Thermeon reported. "They're demanding transportation off the planet. If they don't get what they want within the hour they say they'll release one missile, and another one in another hour …"
Thermeon let out a gasp. For a moment Sunfox thought his cells had revolted again. Then he settled back into his seat with a scowl. "That dastardly pair want my space-fighter to escape in! I'll …"
Slowly a smile spread across his face. "I'll fix them!"
Sometime later they pulled into a vast parking lot surrounding yet another vast and bleak warehouse. The letters on its side were almost totally obscured by mildew. One door stood halfway open. Another looked slightly off its track. Thermeon parked the bullet-car beside the crooked door, and they waited.
A gleam grew in the morning sky, then fell like a shooting star. Sunfox recognized the outline of Thermeon's space-fighter. Thermeon bounded from the bullet-car, then remembered Sunfox and returned to pull him out. The space-fighter gleamed like a big purple beetle in the sun, multi-finned and pointy-nosed, on its side the light gray, green, and blue emblem of the planet Huthfrac. It had more fins than a Home-lever fighter; they had something to do with its Deep-level capability. That wasn't an advantage for air duels over a planet, though. The craft was unwieldy compared to standard airforce jets. Its rocket engines were powerful enough to blast it from the surface of any planet in the union, but on a massive world like Bola it would not become airborne as quickly as a Home-level jet, either.
As Thermeon and Sunfox approached the canopy popped, the front fins dropped, and a pilot in the uniform of Bola's airforce stepped out onto one of them, then jumped to the ground. Sunfox writhed a bit when they stood face to face with the pilot. Thermeon was still holding onto his mind and onto his arm, but that only made his awareness focused enough to realize that he must look like an idiot, without being able to do anything about it.
The pilot hardly looked at him, though. He shook Thermeon's free hand, studying the old man with shiny eyes. He smiled and shook his head. "She's all yours!"
Thermeon returned the smile. "There's your transportation." He pointed at the bullet-car. "Better make tracks."
"Thank you," the pilot said. (What was he thanking Thermeon for—putting his life in danger? He could've sent the space-fighter on auto, but obviously he'd needed to get a look at the great hero.) He ran for the bullet-car.
Thermeon leaped onto the fighter's fin and pulled Sunfox up after him. He dumped him into the cockpit and climbed in beside him. He sat in contemplative silence for a moment, then, heaving a sigh, ordered the canopy to close. Sunfox squirmed at his own reek in the confined space.
"Don't worry about it," Thermeon said. "So I'll have to clean up after you. That's nothing new. You puke just about every time we downlevel."
"I! It! Down!" Sunfox gasped. The mere memories of downleveling made his gorge rise. Most people were blessedly oblivious to all Deep-level sensations, and could make interplanetary flights in comfort. Sunfox sensed things, but he would never be able to pilot a ship through the Deep because what he sensed made him violently ill. Thermeon found the Deep a beautiful, wondrous place. He would always lecture Sunfox not to fight the sensations but flow with them, to let his Deep-level self awaken.
"Flow!" Sunfox babbled. "Heave! Throw!" His stomach always seemed to get the message.
Thermeon looked askance at him.
"Gilalo has demanded that the space-fighter be unattended," Thermeon said. "But I figure that by the time his sensors pick up on us it will be too late, and we'll have him."
"What? Oh! No!" Sunfox gasped.
But even had he been his usual eloquent self, he knew it would have been useless to try to talk Thermeon out of taking on a faster, more-maneuverable enemy. The old man still loved a fight.
They waited, the fighter's controls dead. Thermeon was in mind-link with someone.
"They're on their way," he said. Then later, "They're almost here!" Snake-belts snugged him and Sunfox into their seats.
Thermeon swore. "They're onto us! Here we go!"
The dashboard sprang to life and the fighter vibrated about them, throwing them back in their seats as the belly-fins extended to point the nose skyward. With a rumble, the engines ignited, hurling them forward into the sky.
"They're trying to make it back to a more populated area," Thermeon said. "So they can use their missile threat again. But they won't make it. They're almost out of fuel.
"Ah, they're circling back! They think they can take me on." He grinned.
Sunfox writhed. Thermeon had released his mind to concentrate on the battle, and even though he was strapped into his seat he couldn't keep his eyes fixed on the fighter's visual display. He had no idea where the enemy was.
Something starlike flashed in the expanse of blue beyond the canopy.
"There they are!" Thermeon chortled. "Damn! They've fired a missile!"
"Virus! Not! Us!" Sunfox bleated.
"The virus won't hurt us, but the explosion will take us down." Thermeon wrestled the fighter's controls. They banked and swooped.
"Argh! It's locked onto us! Well, I'll just have to …" The fighter leaped forward with thundering engines. Sunfox's eyeballs stopped swiveling as G-forces pressed them back into their sockets. Again he saw that starlike gleam. They were heading straight for the enemy.
But the missile would hit them first.
Thermeon made another maneuver, and the fighter leaped away from the pull of gravity. Yet they were neither diving nor climbing nor banking. Sunfox let out a howl—they were going Deep. It felt like a slimy, alien tentacle was being forced down his throat at the same time that his eyeballs were being plucked out and spun rapidly by their nerve bundles and his stomach was being dropped overboard. A black fountain erupted in the center of his visual field and engulfed all the swirling bits of sky and fighter and Thermeon that his tortured eyes had still been managing to interpret. The black fountain had purple edges that rippled and pulsed like the membranes of a sea slug. But even more repulsive than that was the way it sounded. The grating and chomping was rubbing right across his nerve endings. He heaved.
Sunfox gripped his mouth as they returned to Home-level. Sky beyond the canopy stretched blue and empty. Then Thermeon took them through a back roll and when they leveled off the starlike gleam was ahead of them again.
"We passed over them," Sunfox said. "Or under. Or … the missile!" he suddenly remembered.
"It hit when we were Deep. Harmless."
The star swelled into a silvery shape ahead of them. Plumes of fire were shooting from it at odd angles. Suddenly it rolled like a dying fish and fell away beneath a column of black smoke.
"Hit our fusion field," Thermeon said. "Ha!"
Sunfox leaned from his seat to follow the smoke trail down. There was a brief flash where the jet collided with pink hills. He sat back and looked at Thermeon.
The old man grinned, reveling in victory. No matter how many times he had seen it before, Sunfox was always unnerved by the sight of those long sharp canines erupting from a nearly human face. Maybe it was something burned into his ancestral memories. On the other hand, he was very grateful that Thermeon was on his side. "Well," he sighed. "Another case closed, I guess."
"Hm," Thermeon said, banking the fighter. "We'll head back to the agency. It's a good thing this happened in an unpopulated zone. I guess they'll want to monitor the atmosphere for strange particles for a while."
"Oh, because you went Deep so close to the planet's surface."
"They can't take my license away, anyhow."
"Because you don't have one!" Sunfox laughed and slapped his thighs. His hands came away wet.
He was soaked in vomit and urine.
For a few heartbeats he stared unhappily at himself while Thermeon flew the fighter and no doubt conversed with people in mind-link. Slowly the memory of all they had just been through resurfaced. Sunfox willed his hands to rise and stared at them as they rose. He wiggled one finger at a time. They all worked.
"Hey!" he cried, turning to Thermeon. "I can move again! I can talk again! The virus must have worn off!"
"Not at all," Thermeon said. "Its effect was canceled when we returned to Home-level from the Deep."
"You're sure?"
"It should have been obvious to Gilalo that an alteration that actually enhanced the cells' functioning would be easy to reverse. It's the second law of thermodynamics. He had to produce a very specific change in the molecules within the cells to initiate the processes he sought. Any change from this specific pattern would end the processes. That's why the ability was naturally lost through evolution when cells no longer needed it to survive. When an object downlevels—"
"I know," Sunfox said. "It becomes fused together with all of its alternate selves."
"And when it returns to Home-level the alternate states of its components peel away again. But what's left may not be exactly what you started out with. And because Gilalo's enhancement was so sensitive, if even one out of thousands of your cells' alternate states had lacked the enhancement, the pattern would be destroyed."
"So that little jaunt through the Deep cured you and me, and all the other victims can be cured in the same way."
"Correct. Only I'm not cured."
Sunfox gaped at him.
A beneficent smile shone from Thermeon's silvery face. "My mindpowers give me a little more choice than most people about what state I'll uplevel in, and I wanted my cells to be free."
"But! But!" Sunfox sputtered. "Doesn't that mean you'll always have to use your mindpowers to control your own body?"
"No. My cells were very moved by the song I sang to them. They're very enthusiastic about maintaining our union."
"Are you kidding me?"
"Being creatures of limited memory, they may have to be reminded every now and then. So I'll sing to them again. But just think of the things they'll be able to do now that they're free!"
Sunfox groped for a dry section of his cape and wiped his hands. "What things?" he said with as much venom as someone in his bedraggled state could muster.
"They could think up wonderful new mutations never seen before."
"Cells don't think. You're kidding me, aren't you?"
"Some of them may decide to set out on their own, and start little colonies of me on some rocky shore somewhere."
"Thermeon! I've been through enough today. I don't want to hear any more of this nonsense!"
"And if some deranged villain decides to put me through a sieve and dissociate every cell from every other, then they'll just migrate back together again, and there I'll be!"
"I'm going to put my slimy, puke-soaked hands around your throat and choke you if you don't stop!" Sunfox threatened.
"What and damage some of my beautiful cells?" Thermeon threw his head against the seat and howled with laughter. Suddenly he was wiping tears from his eyes. "I just realized that there's a downside to this too. But I think it's all for the best. You see, back in olden times, back in the days when I was emperor, I believed in tyranny. I thought that democracy was a silly dream. But the free people of Huthfrac elected me king, and they are prosperous and energetic and creative. So why not free will for cells?"
With a strangled roar Sunfox lunged from his seat, his hands reaching out for Thermeon's neck. Thermeon smiled at him, and the violet beams that came from his eyes reached into Sunfox's brain, touching the weariness that lurked just below his frenetic consciousness, making it erupt and wash all other sensations away. Sunfox gave in.
When he next opened his eyes, he lay in the foam nook of a wonderdome recovery cell, clean and warm. Fleomis was bending over him, smiling, his hazel eyes full of tenderness and good humor. "Hey. How was the mission?"
"Oh, like it always is. He gets the glory, and I get the crap."
"But you have me." Fleomis brushed Sunfox's hair back from his face and kissed his lips.
Sunfox smiled. It was true. Thermeon had his free cells, his space-fighter, his kingship and his idolators, but he didn't have love. He had stopped crisping brides trying to transform them into a goddess-star with his personal fusion field, because he thought he knew for sure who the goddess-star was now—a lieutnenant in the notorious Snooze Gang. But even if she was his goddess-star, that space-pirate didn't return his love, or passion, or obsession, or whatever it was. Thermeon had no one to take him home to share jokes and pick over the universe's problems with him, so Sunfox probably was the lucky one, after all.