WARDEN.

He was at his best when he was ashamed.

He could not have explained that: he was hardly aware of it. Yet it was true. The tension between his unyielding pa.s.sion for standards of integrity, commitment, and efficacy so untrammeled that they could never be attained and his sense of mortal chagrin when he fell below those standards was fruitful for him. It taught him strengths he might never have known he possessed.

Shame and idealism were the means by which Holt Fasner had manipulated him into becoming what he was: the director of the UMCP, guilty as charged; the man most directly responsible for the corruption of the cops. Holt had focused his idealism-his essential belief that it was the honorable and necessary function of the police to serve and protect to serve and protect humanity-to position him where he would be vulnerable; then had exercised his shame to push him farther and farther from those ideals. humanity-to position him where he would be vulnerable; then had exercised his shame to push him farther and farther from those ideals.

In a sense Warden had accepted this. Presumably he could have refused at any time-could have preserved the man he wished to be by letting Holt fire him. At the worst Holt might have had him killed. So what? Warden knew to his cost that there were many worse fates than death.

Yet he hadn't refused. At every crisis he'd resisted the Dragon's cunning up to a certain point; then he'd let it carry him along.

In a sense, the reason he did this was simple.

All his life, he'd considered himself inadequate to his dreams; unequal to the task of making them live. Certainly he'd been too flawed to see Holt Fasner accurately when the Dragon had first hired him to work for SMI Security. Stupid with naivete, he'd believed that he was being given a chance to do good, valuable work for a good, valuable man. And Holt had encouraged that illusion with every trick at his command. Hungry with dreams and shame, Warden had learned to define himself in terms of law enforcement at its n.o.blest: service and protection for those who needed it most-and could afford it least.

By the time he'd realized that Holt used the cops for no purposes but his own, and that those purposes had nothing to do with idealism, Warden had already acquired a taste for the nourishment his sore heart craved: the food of lawful power.

So who could hope to stop the Dragon, if not an officer of the law? Whose job was it? And to whom did that job properly belong, if not to the man who had helped make the Dragon powerful by allowing his own hopes to blind him?

Precisely because he considered himself culpable, Warden Dios had sworn to take any risk and pay any price which might help him undo the harm he'd caused by supporting Holt Fasner's ambitions.

Of course he couldn't undo that harm if he weren't a cop. The authority of his position as director of the UMCP was all that enabled him to act. He couldn't afford to sacrifice that authority in the name of personal honor.

Therefore he swallowed the compromises and betrayals necessary to keep his job, earn the Dragon's trust. When he wasn't engaged in some dirty business of Holt's, he developed and ran the UMCP as if his organization were indeed as incorruptible as it should be. And in the dark corners of his mind, through the gaps between his other commitments, he set about the complex, secret task of arranging Holt's downfall.

Inevitably the Dragon caught glimpses of this. He knew better than to trust his UMCP director too much. So he strove to bind Warden closer to him with new acts of complicity and shame. But there he erred. He misunderstood the true nature of Warden's dreams. Each new piece of extorted cynicism drove Warden farther away; drove him to imagine more, dare more, suffer more in the name of his real pa.s.sion. Shame pushed pushed him. him.

He was no longer the man he'd once been: he'd transcended himself long ago. By will and mortification he'd become more than he or Holt Fasner or anyone else realized.

When Holt outplayed him, demanded that he sacrifice Morn and Angus as well as everything they represented, Warden was left stripped of his hopes; naked with chagrin at all the harm he'd done-and done for nothing.

Intertech's antimutagen had been denied to humankind-but not to the Amnion. Vector Shaheed, the one free man with the knowledge to replicate Intertech's work, was about to be killed. Morn Hyland had endured Angus Thermopyle and Nick Succorso, rape and zone implants, for months. months. Now she would be discarded like a piece of sc.r.a.p. Angus himself, who carried the core of Warden's desperation in his welded resources and secret programming, would become Nick's plaything and tool; the perfect illegal, violent and dehumanized. Now she would be discarded like a piece of sc.r.a.p. Angus himself, who carried the core of Warden's desperation in his welded resources and secret programming, would become Nick's plaything and tool; the perfect illegal, violent and dehumanized.

What was left, except shame and the price of failure?

Warden Dios was at his best when he asked to see Norna Fasner.

He didn't try to explain the request to himself. It was purely intuitive-a small gesture to counterbalance what he'd lost-and he accepted the consequences of acting on it. Yet it seemed to make him stronger with every pa.s.sing moment. As HS guided him into the secure depths of Holt's headquarters, his heart grew steady and his respiration calmed. Neither his stride nor his composure gave his guards any hint that the Dragon had found a way to deprive him of what he loved most.

There was always something left.

Perhaps that was why he wanted to consult an oracle.

So he followed his escort until the two men delivered him to the specialized cave of life-support systems and video screens where Norna Fasner lived. At the door he dismissed them. They had no orders to accompany him in. And surely the Dragon could eavesdrop on his mother whenever he wished.

Warden entered her sickchamber alone and closed the door.

The lights were off in the high, sterile room; but he could see by the phosph.o.r.escent glow of the video screens which filled the wall in front of Norna's bed and equipment. That wall was all she had, her whole world: the bed held her rigid, as if it were a traction frame, so that her equipment could do the delicate and obscene work of keeping life in her immured carca.s.s. Only her eyes and mouth could move-and her fingers, allowing her to control the illumination and screens. In the flat, heartless light, she looked spectral and bereaved. The medical advances which sustained her son had come too late to do anything more than impose existence on her. Mortality stained her shriveled skin so that it seemed filthy against the clean linen of her bed.

Her equipment gave off so many IR emissions that Warden's prosthetic sight was effectively useless. As far as he could see, she had no aura; perhaps no emotions; possibly no mind. Yet Holt had told him over the years that she remained conscious-not only sentient but sharp. On one occasion Holt had said, "I keep her alive, you know. I don't mean my doctors or my orders-I mean me personally. I keep her alive. She would go out like a candle if she didn't hate me too much to die. She lives for the hope that she'll get to see me destroyed. And maybe, just maybe, that she'll be able to see it coming."

The Dragon had laughed as he said this. Apparently he considered it funny.

Warden was of a different opinion.

He kept it to himself, however, now as much as then. He wasn't here to feel sorry for the woman who had taught Holt his hungers. And he had only ten minutes. If Norna couldn't answer him in that time, the risk of visiting her would be wasted.

Nevertheless he stopped just inside the door, momentarily paralyzed. Holt had told him about the video screens; but he hadn't realized how daunting they could be: twenty or more of them, all alive, all projecting their images simultaneously, all gabbling at once; and all dead because they had no human IR emissions and therefore contained no life. As inert as Norna herself, newscasts and s.e.x shows vied with comedies, sports programs, and dramas to dominate his attention; voices conflicted with background music and sound effects up and down the audible spectrum. The effect was at once hypnotic and disturbing, like a white-noise rumble which felt soothing, but which presaged some kind of tectonic cataclysm. It created the strange illusion that all but one of the screens offered gibberish as a way of concealing the sole exception; that the exception displayed instead a soothsayer's version of pure, cold truth; and that it changed places constantly with all the others, so that only the most savage and unremitting concentration could hope to glimpse its wisdom as it pa.s.sed from screen to screen.

Warden stifled an impulse to curse the Dragon. He didn't have time for that.

Steadying himself on urgency, he forced his legs to carry him away from the door toward the screens until he entered Norna's field of view. There he turned; put his back to the video wall and faced her.

"h.e.l.lo, Norna."

In the phosphor gleam her eyes looked empty, transfixed by death. They made no apparent effort to track individual images: perhaps she'd learned how to focus on all the programs at the same time. Or perhaps she'd merely forgotten what she was looking for. Her lips and gums chewed constantly, as if she were trying to remember the taste of food. Saliva she couldn't control drooled into the wrinkles across her chin.

Just for an instant, however, her gaze flicked toward him. Then it returned to the screens.

"Ward." Her voice barely reached him through the ambient mutter. "Warden Dios. It's about time."

He c.o.c.ked an eyebrow in surprise. "You were expecting me," he remarked because he didn't know what else to say.

"Of course I've been expecting you," she muttered like the voices of her world. "Who else can you talk to?

"Move. You're in my way."

Warden glanced behind him, saw that he was indeed obstructing one edge of her view of the wall. Shrugging an apology, he took a step to the side! "Is that better?"

"'Better'?" Something in the twist of her bloodless lips gave the impression that she was laughing. "If you think anything around here ever gets 'better,' you've wasted a visit. We don't have anything to talk about."

He frowned. He was in no mood for verbal sparring. Nevertheless he kept his response casual. "Forgive my choice of words. I certainly haven't seen anything get better."

Her toothless gums continued chewing. "No. And you won't. Not until you finish him."

Well, Holt had warned him that she was sharp; almost presciently cognizant of the world beyond her screens-the world she couldn't see. Still her bluntness took him aback.

"'Finish him'?"

"Isn't that why you're here?" Although she appeared to focus on nothing, follow nothing, her gaze never left the restless movement of images. "Don't you want me to tell you what you need to know to finish him?"

A frisson of alarm ran down Warden's back, settled in his lower abdomen. How much could Holt hear? Softly, trusting her to pick his voice out of the gabble-trying to warn her-he asked, "Norna, does he listen in when you have visitors?"

He couldn't tell whether she heard him or not. For a moment she was silent. Then her mouth gave another twist that might have been laughter.

"How should I know? I never have visitors."

He made another attempt. "Should you be careful what you say?"

This time she didn't pause or hesitate. "Why? There's nothing left he can do to me. And if you were worried about yourself, you wouldn't be here."

Her blank concentration on her screens was eerie, almost ghoulish. Like a woman inured to death and corruption, she watched them as if they showed maggots feasting on corpses-one scene repeated from different angles on all the screens.

"Of course," she went on, "he doesn't realize how much I know. He has no idea what I might tell you. That could be dangerous. But I think you're safe enough."

Safe? The mere concept startled him. He raised a hand to interrupt her, ask her indulgence.

"Norna, forgive me. I guess I'm slow today-I'm not keeping up with you. What makes you think I'm safe here?"

Her face in the cold light looked so hollow and doomed that he half expected her to intone like a sibyl, Everyone who comes here is safe. This is the cave of death, where no other harm enters. As long as you remain, you are beyond hurt.

Her actual reply was more prosaic, however. "After all the trouble you've caused, he needs you. He can't afford to punish you now."

Baffled as much by the way she spoke as by what she said, he countered, "He's Holt Fasner, CEO of the entire created universe. What can he possibly need me me for?" for?"

Again that twist like laughter. Apparently she liked his sarcasm. Almost soundlessly her lips shaped her answer.

"A scapegoat."

Ah, Warden sighed to himself. Someone to blame. That made sense. He felt suddenly that he'd been freed from the confusion of the screens and the mystification of her manner. Now he knew how to talk to her.

"Thank you," he said more confidently. "I think I understand.

"As I'm sure you can guess, I've just come from talking to him. You mentioned all the 'trouble' I've 'caused.' And he told me you warned him I was getting him in trouble. Does he know what kind of trouble it is?"

"Shame on you, Ward." Through the interference of other voices she sounded like a disappointed schoolmarm. "That's not the right question. You know better."

Before he could absorb this criticism, she asked, "What did you talk to him about?"

He swallowed a rush of impatience. He was running out of time. Yet he had nothing to gain by trying to hurry her. Trusting that she didn't need long explanations, he answered, "I told him that Joshua's mission to Thanatos Minor was a success. But it was also a surprise. Joshua has come back into human s.p.a.ce with some unexpected survivors."

"Such as?" she inquired quickly.

He had no business discussing such things with her. On the other hand, why had he bothered to come here, if he weren't willing to face the hazards involved?

Shrugging to himself, he let her have her way.

"Nick Succorso. Some of his crew-including a man named Vector Shaheed who used to work for Intertech back in the days when Intertech was doing antimutagen research. Morn Hyland." He did his best to mention Morn as if she had no special significance. "And somehow she has a son-a full-grown kid, apparently. She calls him Davies Hyland."

Norna considered this information for a moment.

"What does he want you to do about it?"

Warden felt that he was exposing his heart as he replied stiffly, "Deliver Davies to him." Like Norna he didn't need to refer to the Dragon by name. "Give Nick control over Joshua. Kill everybody else aboard."

Her empty gaze didn't shift. Chewing incessantly, her jaws leaked a small sheen of saliva into the smear on her chin. Only her lips reacted, twisting from side to side like a grimace.

Now he couldn't tell whether she was laughing or crying.

He waited until her grimace eased and her cheeks fell slack. Then in a low whisper he repeated his question.

"Norna, does he know?"

"I told him," she answered, invoked by mirth or grief. "But he doesn't understand. He fears death too much. It distorts his thinking."

"Most of us fear death," Warden countered, still whispering. "Most of the time we're able to ignore it."

She let out a hiss of impatience or vexation. "This is no ordinary fear of death. Have you suffered under him so long without figuring that out? If I called it 'mortal terror,' that would be an understatement.

"He wants to live forever." Bitterly she nodded to herself. "Yes, forever. Haven't I seen it? Why do you think he keeps me d.a.m.ned here? I've spent fifty years paying for what I see.

"He thinks the Amnion are the answer. Genetic magic. He thinks they know how to rescue his body before it fails. Or maybe they can grow him a new one.

"He can't make peace with them. Humankind wouldn't let him get away with it. Human beings are stupid"-she referred to her screens-"but n.o.body is that stupid. But if he lets you go to war, he'll lose everything he wants from the Amnion. So he needs this hostile truce."

As if she were still on the same subject, she demanded, "What makes Davies Hyland so precious?"

Warden had asked himself that question half a dozen times already. Now under the pressure of Norna's insight and his own needs, he forced himself to consider it again.

Thinking aloud, he murmured, "The Amnion used a technique called 'force-growing.' I've been hearing for years that they have the means to mature bodies rapidly. And it must work. Otherwise Mom would still be pregnant. She wouldn't have a son yet, never mind a full-grown kid.

"But how can he have a mind?" That was the crucial question, the fatal unknown. "How did the Amnion compensate for all the years of learning and experience he didn't get?"

Norna's stare never left her wall of images, yet it forced Warden to go on.

"They must have some way to create minds artificially." The human organism was inherently functionless without acquired training and information. "Or copy them.

"Copying sounds more plausible. But what did they use for an original?

"Did they impose one of their own on him? Then he would be an Amnioni-and Joshua would kill him, if Morn didn't." Panic and possibilities ran through him, riding a burst of intuition like high-brisance thrust. "They must have copied some human mind into his head."

He didn't need to finish the thought; didn't need to say, If they could do that for Davies, they could do it for Holt. Norna was already nodding. Her mummified lips chewed saliva and silence as if that were her oracular secret; the meaning of life.

Is that really it? it? He manipulates the GCES, suppresses the immunity drug, handcuffs my people and me, keeps this undeclared war alive, betrays humanity, just so he can f.u.c.king live He manipulates the GCES, suppresses the immunity drug, handcuffs my people and me, keeps this undeclared war alive, betrays humanity, just so he can f.u.c.king live forever? forever?

Dear G.o.d, he's got to be stopped!

Fine. How?

Whose mind did Davies have? "Director Dios?" mind did Davies have? "Director Dios?"

Warden had been concentrating on Norna so hard that he hadn't heard the door open, or seen the guard stick his head into the room.

"Time's up, sir," the man announced carefully. "Your shuttle's waiting."

Full of alarm, Warden turned his attention on the guard.