Quest for the Well of Souls - Jack L. Chalker [91]
Vistaru nodded. "Yes—although I didn't know it until Ortega told me. This bastard's known for over twenty years, but didn't even tell me when we met on that island and joined forces to find her."
Wooley chirped a dry chuckle. The Yaxa couldn't manage to change its cold voice, but there seemed an extra dimension of humanity, of warmth in it somehow. "You want to tell him the story, or should I?" she asked.
The Lata shrugged. "I'll start and you can join in any time you want." She turned to face Renard. "Let's see—where to begin. I suppose we ought to go way back, to the first of our three lives."
Yulin was suddenly awake and interested, too. "Three lives?" he said.
Vistaru nodded. "I was born on a Comworld, one of those where you are made into little plastic ten-year-old neuters and raised and conditioned only for a specific function. The theory's to produce a society much like an insect colony—and it works, after a fashion. I was called Vardia Diplo—I was a courier, a kind of human tape recorder. You understand this was two centuries ago."
"'My background was much the same," Wooley put in. "I was a farm worker who didn't work out on a world that didn't work out, either. It was Com, but syndicate-controlled. I suppose you know about that, Yulin."
Yulin's bull's face could show no human expression, but the minotaur's bearing seemed to grow sheepish and apologetic. Yulin could show sincerity and conviction—whether he felt or not.
"I was never involved with that," the Dasheen responded defensively. "Look, I was born into the syndicate, the son of a major controller. Raised in luxury on a private world a lot more human and humane than Trelig's. Who knew? Educated in the best places as a scientist and engineer. You have to understand—when the big-shot villains of the galaxy are your father, mother, friends, family—everybody you know—then they aren't villains at all. Not to you. Not to me. It's true I had no particular regard for anything but family law, but, then, again, aren't freighter captains like Chang there just variations of the same attitude?"
In Mavra Chang's case it was particularly true; she'd been a rebel and a thief the first half of her life.
"Never mind the alibis, let's get back to the story," Renard snapped impatiently. Yulin shrugged and settled back down.
The Yaxa paused a moment and continued. "I was developed as a woman, put in a Com whorehouse for party bigwigs, and got so screwed up and was so abused by the men who came by that I became unable to relate, sexually or socially, with men at all. That made me wrong for the job, so they gave me to a bastard controller in the sponge syndicate to use as a sample—hook me on sponge, then decrease the dosage very slightly as a living example."
Renard nodded sympathetically. "Remember, I was a spongie, too—and I saw New Pompeii in its heyday."
"Well, the two of us found ourselves on a freighter bound for Coriolanus," Vistaru continued. "The captain was a funny little guy named Nathan Brazil."
Renard's dark eyebrows rose in surprise. "It's been over twenty years since I heard that name. I can hardly remember where. Mavra, I think. He's not for real, if I remember. The Wandering Jew."
"He's for real," Vistaru assured him. "He discovered that Wooley was on sponge and decided to make a run for the sponge world without us knowing. We got detoured by a strange distress signal from a Markovian world, discovered a mass murder, and wound up falling through a Gate and winding up here. Wooley came out a Dillian first, I came out a Czillian—you may have seen some. Intelligent plant creatures."
Renard nodded. "Seems to me I met one—named Vardia, come to think of it."
She nodded. "That was me, too. The Czillians reproduce by budding off. There are probably several of the original me still around, with memories complete to that point."
"Wait a minute!" Yulin objected.