Woman on the Edge of Time - Marge Piercy [147]
“But who are Assassins?”
“Sha! You don’t talk about them.” Gildina looked around. “Of course we’re monitored like everybody else, so SG knows I’m talking to you. So like if I’m doing anything wrong, they’ll stop us.”
“Monitored?”
“From the Securcenter here, what else? For versive acts and talks. They pull you in and put a scanner on you so they can tell what you’re thinking to the questions, even if you don’t talk. From the electrical impulses in your brain. You can’t lie to them, unless you’re a trained SD man or an Assassin. Assassins work for the richies. That’s how they deal with each other when they’re at odds. Every richie clan and all the multies have armies of genetically engineered fighters. Instead of sex drive, they have a basic killer drive and obey center. You can’t tell exactly what they are—some are woolies genetically specialized. Some are real Cybos. No animal issue. Entirely improved.”
The door opened suddenly with a swoosh, and a man barged in. He was close to seven feet tall, completely hairless as far as she could see. He wore a shiny gray-blue uniform and his voice as he barked at her was extremely deep, beyond the ordinary human range, with strange overtones in it that made her stomach clutch. Fear gripped her through the belly. She had to do the easercises Luciente had taught her, she had to become conscious of her breathing and relax. “Who are you? Remain still. Answer correctly.”
“My name is Connie and I’m time traveling. I guess you were listening to us?”
“There is no such thing as time travel. You will be scanned. And you will be sealed in here again,” the man said to Gildina. “We’ll deal with you later. She’s a dud, but you talked with her for one hour.”
Gildina began to blubber. “Well, how could she get in here if you didn’t let her? I thought it was a special project. Everybody before the great split, they were all duds and woolies. Everybody knows that! How could she get in if you didn’t let her in?”
“That’s not your problem. You’re for the organ bank now,” he said with savage glee in his strange, artificially deep voice. “You, come.” His hand bruised Connie’s arm, biting in.
“I can only stay here through her. Gildina has a special mental power, even if she doesn’t know it.”
“Incorrect. She was born a dud. She’s just a built-up contracty. All duds have brain deficiencies from protein scarcity in fetus and early childhood. Their IRP’s are negative forty to negative fifteen. Her psych scan tests show negative twenty-five. She has no more mental capacity than a genetically improved ape.”
“She’s still receptive. I guess you don’t measure that! I homed in on her. Break my contact with her and I disappear.” It was wonderful to feel so confident facing a sort of cop. That’s what he was, supercop, with a weapons belt on his waist and one hand modified into a weapon-tool itself.
“When we get done playing with you, you will wish you could disappear. And then you will.” A grin of bright enamel teeth, whiter than scrubbed bathroom tiles. “She’s just a chica, exactly like you look to be. Cosmetically fixed for sex use. Like you find in any knockshop.”
“How would you know?” Gildina drew herself up in fussy, impotent fury. “What would you do in a knockshop? You don’t even have the equipment.”
“No appendix either.” The guard grinned his mirthless flashing white smile. “That’s why we don’t need many of you useless cunts now-on. Nothing inessential. Pure, functional, reliable. We embody the ideal. We can be destroyed—not by you duds—but never verted, never deflected, never distracted. None of us has ever been disloyal to the multi that owns us.”
Connie asked, “What’s a multi?”
He looked shocked now, serious. “The multi is everything.”
“What does ‘multi’ stand for?”
“For what is,” he said hollowly.
“Like states, countries?”
“That was before,” Gildina said. “Multis own everybody—”
“Was irrational,” the guard said. “Overlapping jurisdictions. Now we all belong to a corporate body. Multis. Like that contracty soon to be dismantled into the organ bank, I belong to Chase-World-TT.