Chapter 10: The Descent
Part 3: Hallucination
As they came out of the elevator, Anaconda abruptly grabbed Piranha's collar and, jerking him forward, set off in long rapid strides down the lengthy doorless hall, moving with an eagerness very unlike his usual restrained, languid manner. Piranha trotted quickly alongside, having to run to keep up, alarmed and perplexed and infuriated. The Boss's hand kept an insultingly tight grip on his coat as they hurried through that grey metal corridor, swept around a corner, and sped down the next hall. What, did Anaconda think he was going to run away?
Then through his haze of irritation, it struck him with a shock: They were on one of the lowest levels of the ship, just above the intake level where the prisoners and booty was brought in. He'd been on this level before, but at the other end, the bow of the ship; this time he was approaching from an unfamiliar direction, from the stern. This was the lower of the two levels of the ship where the slave quarters were. And this was the level where the room upon room, row upon row of grey punishment boxes lurked. They were rapidly approaching. Involuntarily, his body stiffened a little, he hesitated. The hand on his collar almost yanked him off his feet as the Boss continued his swift pace. Piranha stumbled and had to bound forward to catch up. He began to pant.
The long corridor ended at last in a metal door. Several guards posted there straightened up hastily as the Boss came into sight. One of them hurriedly unlocked and opened the door, and jumped aside barely in time to avoid a collision with Anaconda, who didn't slow his pace even fractionally. Piranha heard the door being locked again behind them as they entered the next section.
The first thing that struck Piranha, even before his eyes took in the scene, was the smell, and then the harsh glare of the lighting, reflected even more harshly by the metallic floor and walls. Then the noise of several thousand moving bodies and voices, much amplified and chaotically re-echoed by the smooth shape and hard surfaces of the place. It was a huge, bare, open room, supported here and there by thick metal pillars. There were some openings into corridors along the walls, patrolled by robot guards; other than that, the space was simply a slightly curved rectangle, no divisions, no furnishings. Anaconda plunged straight down the center of the room without slowing.
The room itself was crowded with ragged, dirty, mostly humanoid slaves, sitting on the floor in small groups or sleeping in heaps, often clustering around the pillars. The noise and long-unwashed smell of the place and its inhabitants was heavily oppressive. It was late evening by ship time, and some of the slaves were carrying handfuls of food they apparently had brought in from somewhere for themselves, or to give to others. There were men, women, and children of all ages, though probably three or four times as many women as men, and more old men than young ones.
Piranha had never been in the slave quarters before. As he was hauled rapidly along, he stared around the place, looking at the subdued, apathetic faces around him, almost unconsciously drawn to see if he recognized any, if there were any forgotten remnants here of beings from his own planet, or any of the tanned, blond-haired people from the villages they had just invaded. But in fact, although these people evidently represented a large sampling of sizes, colours, and shapes of humanoid species from many different planets, there was something about them, the weariness, dirt, and discouragement, that seemed to melt them all down into an indistinguishable, anonymous mass.
Yet Piranha also caught glimpses of something beyond that, of individual actions and touches of emotion. A female slave handing out food to a cluster of children of many different species, who crowded eagerly around her clamoring like baby birds. A group of young female slaves sitting together combing and plaiting each others' black, brown, white, golden, red, or dark blue hair. A male slave coming in and putting his arms around a female who hurried to meet him, both of them smiling as though they belonged to each other and not to that robot yanking a small limbless alien through the room.
Piranha couldn't help noticing a number of intimate acts and functions being performed that in most places would not have been seen in public, though they occurred here without attracting the slightest notice from either the many guards patrolling the room or from the other slaves. Irrepressibly, images of familiar faces superimposed onto those unknown slave bodies, pictures of his old friends and companions reaching such a brutalized state that nothing mattered to them any more ... He winced and averted his face.
It was a long walk through the huge room, despite their fast pace. After some fifteen minutes, the activity around them began to change. They were approaching the bulkhead forming the front end of the room, and there was a stream of newly captured natives being brought in through the large double door in the center of it.
The front door was heavily guarded, and there were many more guards, mostly robots, stationed along the walls and scattered through the area. But the captives being brought in, dirty, some bloody, some needing help to stand, were bowed, subdued, looking terrified and exhausted, few of them showing any spark of rebellion. Most clung to each other in twos and threes and fours, friends or family groups. As they advanced under the watchful eyes of the guards, ship's slaves converged on them and began to check them for weapons or goods, sometimes confiscating items. They separated the groups and sent the members in different directions, passing them on to other ship's slaves who escorted them out into the corridors at the sides of the room, for what purpose Piranha could only guess at. Some of the captives became unruly as they were separated, and guards with stun devices or clubs stepped in immediately, efficiently quashing any attempt at rebellion before it got started.
Approaching this area, Piranha was jerked nearly off his feet, backward this time - Anaconda had unexpectedly slowed. Piranha glanced up at the Boss in confusion.
Anaconda had his eyes on a human guard who was pushing around a newly captured young female, though as far as Piranha could see she hadn't tried to make any trouble. The guard was simply entertaining himself, shoving her back so she almost fell, knocking her small bag of possessions out of her hands, grabbing at her in ways that made her cringe and cover her face or give a small cry of pain and horror. He was grinning, and saying things to her that were lost in the noise of the room. Though she surely didn't understand a word of his language, his meaning was likely as clear to her as it was to Piranha across all that distance. Other new captives were watching too, huddling together with anguished, fearful faces. A few other human guards paused to watch as well, pointing and laughing. The robot guards glanced at the noise, then turned away without interest.
Piranha looked at Anaconda's face. The Boss's yellow eyes seemed almost detached from his dark face, they glowed with such intensity. As he walked he watched the guard avidly, a small, strange smile on his face. In the metal grip that still held onto him, Piranha felt a change, a sudden tension. And involuntarily, without thinking, without even knowing what he was doing, Piranha snarled, writhed like a wild animal to get away, nearly tore himself out of Anaconda's grasp.
The Boss, as if startled out of a trance, glared down at him. He scowled, tightened his grip on the collar, getting a handful of the shirt underneath as well, and yanked Piranha forward, speeding up his pace again. Piranha couldn't see what was happening to the captive any more, but even over the noise in the room for a little while he could still hear the laughter, the shouting and joking, and her gasps. He was shaking now. The cascade of bitter, savagely contradictory thoughts and impulses that swept through him made it hard to keep his footing or even see where he was going.
And then, breaking through the mental chaos that half-blinded him, something caught his attention. A small, slender, golden-brown form in a tattered brown cloak, quite a distance away, intermittently hidden behind other, taller bodies. Elly. Like some of the other ship's slaves she was inspecting incoming captives, coming up to one at a time, quickly going over their clothes and possessions if they had any, checking them for injuries, sending them on to other slaves who led them away. Though there was no roughness in the way she handled the prisoners, even at that distance it was clear that no trace of emotion was visible on her face or in her motions, only a calm, detached purposefulness.
Again Piranha tried to jerk out of Anaconda's grip. A panicked urge to hide took hold of him, he struggled for an irrational moment only to get on Anaconda's other side, further way from Elly. Anaconda gave him an impatient yank that lifted him right off the floor. As he stumbled and recovered, he glanced across the crowd over at Elly again. She was paying no attention, she hadn't even noticed them passing through. She was too far away, and too intent on her work.
Another slave near her pulled a baby out of the arms of a wailing female captive. The mother was yanked away by a guard, the baby was taken to yet another slave who seemed to be collecting a nursery of infants and small children.
As Piranha watched, trying not to lose his footing, Elly finished the task she was doing then quickly walked over to the nursery. The slave in charge was busy taking in another child, Elly slipped behind her, grabbed the infant, and at a run quickly caught up with the mother, who was being consoled by other captives as they moved toward the exit. She shoved the baby into its mother's arms, covering it firmly with the woman's loose outer garment, and hurried away again. The robot guards, if they noticed, didn't seem to care. Elly was back at her work in a moment, as calm and steady as before.
Anaconda gave Piranha another yank to straighten him out - he was running almost backwards by now - and he lost sight of her. He looked ahead. They were nearly up to the exit now, approaching the stream of captives coming through the door. On the other side of that wall, through that door, was the front half of the level. The series of rooms where the coffins, the grey concrete boxes were.
The guards ushered them through the big double door. On the other side of it, Anaconda slowed; for the first time he came to a stop. Piranha, still in his grip, glanced around and then closed his eyes. He couldn't quell the shaking of his body. He could feel that Anaconda perceived it. He could feel Anaconda smiling, he could feel the hot chill of that smile right through the metal hand on his collar and the metal arm that bound him to that metal body and linked him as if by an electrical connection directly into the glowing, overheated coil that was Anaconda himself.
Piranha took in a long breath. He forced his eyes open.
If the slave quarters had been a sprawling disorganized chaos, on the other side of the wall, although that room was also very large, everything was stifling, crushed, rigid and compressed. For an instant, the first time he ever saw the place flashed through his nerves - himself, numb hands clamped to his body and fastened behind his back, reeling with weakness, barely able to stand even being half held up by a guard; slaves hurriedly pushing captive after captive into the boxes; Anaconda striding possessively through the rows of anonymous grey coffins set in orderly lines stretching into the distance, like a military cemetery.
The horror permeating the place, the weight of suffering - he felt it even more now than he had then, he felt it with a hundred times the intensity. It was part of him now. He knew now everything those boxes meant.
Anaconda, still clutching Piranha's collar, stood for a few moments and surveyed the room. He glanced down at the small figure beside him.
"Look familiar, First Mate?"
Piranha didn't answer, didn't look at him.
"I expect you'll be pleased. We didn't have many war prisoners today. As you said, these people are too inept to defend themselves; so, not many enemies requiring, ah, retribution."
Piranha glanced around the room. Hundreds of boxes filled it, and at the far wall an open doorway showed another identical room beyond, another of the many rooms full of boxes taking up more than half the level of the enormous ship.
He looked them over intently, his lips drawn back in a slight grimace. He didn't know, couldn't tell, could not remember, had no idea where his had been. Which of those identical coffins had held, for that brief but eternal time, his own paralyzed, suffocating frame? Which one of these things had wrenched apart his body and his soul? Which of these rooms was it in? Was someone else in it now? He glanced up at Anaconda. Anaconda knew.
It didn't matter which one, of course, it made no difference. It made no difference at all. But still Piranha couldn't stop staring at the boxes, couldn't stop groping through the frayed memories, through the terrible weakness and confusion of that time; struggling to lay hold of a moment lost in a dying blur. Which one of these thousands of boxes all alike had it been? Why couldn't he recognize it? Why didn't it stand out to him like a beacon?
He looked up again at the Boss, and Anaconda turned his angular face down to look back at him, smiling slightly, his yellow eyes gleaming as they had when they were turned on that small suffering thing held tight in its coffin.
Piranha lowered his head. He said nothing.
Anaconda smiled a little more.
A guard on the far side of the room near the door motioned to Anaconda, and the Boss, still with Piranha in his grip, strode forward. They passed into the next room full of boxes. Several empty coffins close to the door had their lids removed, and five or six slaves were working frantically about each one. Anaconda felt Piranha's instinctive jerk backwards and yanked him forward so hard the cloth of his coat partly gave way with an audible rip. Anaconda grabbed at him again, those metal fingers digging into his flesh as well as his clothes. Piranha gasped.
"Come along," the Boss hissed. "Scared you're going back into one of those boxes? Calm down, that wasn't my plan."
Piranha's jerk away hadn't been based on anything so coherent as fear of going back into the box. He went where he was led. His struggle now was to keep from fighting, to force himself not to resist. As he had done all day, as he would have to do for the rest of his life...
And he saw the half-naked, exhausted prisoners slumped against the wall. Five blond, tanned men, their hands tied behind them, looking considerably more bruised and beaten than he recalled seeing them on the planet. One of them in particular he recognized, the tall, long-haired, handsome young warrior he himself had captured.
His body went cold, he stumbled, he almost blacked out. It had never crossed his mind, he'd thought he was capturing a slave, it had just not occurred to him, he thought he'd been - he'd imagined he was committing an act of mercy by taking the boy alive.
Never, he would never make that mistake again, he -
Anaconda dragged him over to peer into the open coffins, with their complex internal machinery, all the things he had never gotten much of a look at before. He did his best not to look now. The slaves were just finishing their work of preparing the boxes for use. Now, while Anaconda and Piranha stood a little way off, two guards took hold of the long-haired young man and brought him over towards the coffin closest to the Boss.
The prisoner seemed weak, only half-conscious, he certainly had no clear idea of what was about to be done to him. All the same, the situation was alarming, and he struggled with the robots as they marched him implacably up to stand beside the box. His blue eyes glanced around the room, they caught sight of Anaconda, and then Piranha. He fastened his gaze on Piranha, something at least he recognized.
Piranha couldn't look at him. He turned his head. He heard the prisoner give a slight gasp as the paralyzing shot was given to him just before he was lifted into the box.
And Anaconda let go of his trunk, took hold of the back of his head, and with smooth, gently vicious forcefulness turned it so that he had no choice but to watch, unless he closed his eyes.
Piranha watched as the slaves fastened the prisoner in, hooked him up, started the silent machinery underneath the box, checked the external indicators showing the prisoner's physical condition, made adjustments... He watched. In truth, he had no right to shut his eyes to any of it.
All the same, after a moment, he whispered, "Why - why in the box? Why not keep him as a - a slave, such a good - specimen?"
"Ah, Piranha, you know better. This one distinctly belongs in the box. Specimens like him make worthless slaves, they just can't learn. The box, however, might open them to new ideas. Surely you see my point; you of all people should be familiar with his type."
After a moment, as the slaves were sliding the heavy concrete cover of the coffin into place, and Piranha remained silent, Anaconda went on.
"It was a rather clever thing you did, weaseling your way out of that torture. You know you're the only one? You should have taken the chance to give that specimen of yours a few pointers on bargaining. Though, factually, his bargaining position isn't too similar to yours. After all... let's be blunt, your world wasn't good for much. Some pretty architecture and scenery, what the hell use are those to a pirate? While admiring the view, we could grub around for a week and scarcely come up with a decent sackful of gold and jewels. Your planet frankly wasn't going to repay the outrageous effort it was costing to defeat it.
"If it hadn't been for seeing a remarkable thing like you - Demagnetization! we might have just cut our losses, packed up and left. But, well! A couple of handfuls of your dismembered type would have made my fortune for the next galactic cycle. Talk about a rarity, my dear Rayman. But they turned out to be rare indeed; however much we scoured the planet for more, we never found one. All we came up with was that plague of ridiculous frog things, and those skinny bluish cigar-faced monstrosities, more and more ridiculous creatures, each more bizarre than the last - curiosities, perhaps, but short me out, I'm not in the zoo supply business! Hardly a worthwhile slave to be found except for a few annoying magical creatures - cat fairies and suchlike nonsense - which are far too much trouble to handle.
"Incidentally, I must say I find it peculiar that you fought so hard and so long for beings that weren't even of your own kind. Creatures I'm sure even you can recognize as inferior to yourself in intelligence, abilities, even physical durability. All you really needed to do was disappear and become as elusive as the rest of your species. An odd mentality you have.
"In any case, you see this poor fellow's situation is quite different. His people are plentiful, easy to handle, and conventionally handsome - exactly what the market wants, they're going to bring fabulous prices. And even the children's toys on this planet can be worth thousands. After a run of remarkably bad fortune, at last we've hit the jackpot. I consider it only poetic justice that you've played an admirable part in changing our luck."
For several long minutes, as the Boss stood beside him gripping his collar again, Piranha didn't stir. He was struggling, suffocating. As if he had not already nearly drowned under relentless waves of memory all that day, now a new tide, one horrified thought after another, crashed over him. He'd been defeated far more thoroughly than he'd known. If they'd never seen him - his species - and to think he'd thought he'd at least - they might have - all that fighting, all that suffering - Was the bastard even telling the truth?
Unbearable thoughts, he thrust them away at last, and instead seized on one that had been stabbing at him ever since he'd caught sight of that sleeping village.
"Luck?
You hit the jackpot? What are you talking about? None of this, nothing this ship does makes sense! You could have bought all the trinkets you wanted from these people for practically nothing. All the gold and jewels you could carry! You only needed to ask them. You could have made an easy fortune without fighting, killing, destroying, and without losing your own men. What would you need with slaves? How can it possibly be more profitable to-"
Anaconda's glowing eyes widened with cold joy. Again he took hard, painful hold of the back of Piranha's head and forced those dark fierce eyes to look up into his own.
"Money isn't everything, little freak. No, there are some greater pleasures in life even than money. And you're good enough to provide me with a few." He grinned, and his metal fingers squeezed Piranha's head so hard he thought for a moment his skull would crack; the strength went out of him, his eyesight darkened. Then the hand let go. Momentarily, Piranha halfway collapsed. Breathing hard as he straightened up again, he looked away from the Boss. The burning hatred that had been growing and growing all through that day was a roaring furnace now, hotter than he could endure, it filled his brain, it blinded his vision, it almost stopped his breath.
But though it nearly cracked him in half to hold his fists back, to attack Anaconda was out of the question. Quite aside from the large number of heavily armed guards prowling the area, quite aside from the little he'd be able to accomplish without energy shots in the time he'd have to do it; quite aside from his own deep-seated, nearly physical revulsion against going back on a promise, any promise... Rayman had made a deal. Piranha was the price being paid. Nothing Anaconda had just said changed that. If Piranha deviated in the slightest from Rayman's agreement, Anaconda would be delighted to take revenge on that distant little glowing green jewel, lost somewhere out in black space. As he had said, money wasn't everything.
For all his many years of fighting enemies, Rayman had never known true, poisonous, soul-curdling hate. But it looked like Piranha was not going to know very much else.
They watched the other prisoners go one by one into their boxes. Then Anaconda turned to his First Mate once more.
"Business concluded for today," he smiled. "Time to celebrate!"
Piranha failing to respond, Anaconda went on. "I don't get down here nearly as often as I'd like; I save it for special occasions. Now come with me."
Though Anaconda had finally released his grip, Piranha turned with him as though on a leash. He trudged after the Boss silently, eyes lowered. They went into the next of the rooms full of coffins. Again, there was a large number of slaves working frantically around the boxes, apparently maintaining ones that were already occupied. There was no doubt that they were occupied; Piranha could feel the palpable oppression around him.
Anaconda was springing quickly along with the uncharacteristic liveliness that had begun at the banquet. He paused at last beside one of the boxes.
"I haven't been here in quite some time. These were from... ah, yes, that mountainous, volcanic planet. Very rich in diamonds. The natives weren't good for much but physical labor though. Uppity, too."
There were two tall human slaves, a male and a female, busy with machinery a few boxes away. "You two, get over here and lift this cover," Anaconda barked at them. Stopping what they were doing, they approached. The female went to the end near Anaconda, the male to the opposite end, closer to Piranha. Together they unsealed the clamps securing the heavy lid and then carefully began to lift it out of the groove that held it in place and shift it to the side.
And simultaneously, as the lid slid back a fraction they both dropped it, and Piranha staggered back. As Anaconda looked around in confusion, more human slaves and guards nearby cried out.
"Oh my god, close it! Close it!"
"Close it!" cried Piranha, gagging, hands to his mouth. "Close it, for god's sake, whatever's in there is dead!"
"What?"
roared Anaconda. Dropping his baton, he easily lifted the lid himself and looked inside, over the protests of all the humans in the room. His eyes blazed red, and he slammed the lid shut.
In the same motion, without a pause, he swung his metal fist furiously at the slave a few feet away from him. Almost before she saw it coming, before she could even gasp, it caught her on the side of the head with a loud crack, her head snapped back, and her body crumpled instantly to the floor.
And as the tall, muscular male slave surged past him towards Anaconda's back, Piranha seized him by the arm and around the waist, planted his feet, and with teeth clenched froze him in place. There was a silent, strenuous but brief struggle. Then, his body quivering with fury but unable to move, the man subsided.
As Anaconda, his eyes still red, turned back towards them, Piranha tightened his grip on the male slave even more, clenching him so hard he gasped with pain. Then pushed him firmly, with a fierce warning look, back towards the end of the box away from Anaconda. The slave, rubbing his bruised skin and glowering, rage still visible in the bulging muscles of his neck and jaw, nevertheless did back reluctantly away; at least he didn't try again to make the useless, self-destructive gesture of attacking the Boss.
Piranha gave him one last glare and turned towards Anaconda, subtly interposing his body between the robot and the human.
Anaconda, however, showed no sign of going after the other slave, and even seemed a little flustered, picking up his baton from the floor, shrugging his red cape behind him, stretching out his metal hands. His eyes, yellow again, avoided Piranha's gaze. "These savages," he muttered. "No matter how often you make an example of one, they still can't learn their jobs." He turned abruptly and walked rapidly to the next row of coffins, stepping unheedingly over the body of the female slave as though it was a broken piece of equipment.
"This looks like a better place to start," he said gruffly, stopping at another coffin. Carefully, however, he checked the life support indicators on the end of the box. Apparently reassured, he unclamped the lid himself and lifted it, peering inside. And his body seemed to relax, as though he'd given a sigh of relief.
Piranha was watching him, eyebrows raised. He glanced briefly back at the male slave. He'd gone over to the female's body now, along with several others who clustered around and tenderly began to straighten it preparatory to carrying it away, whispering among themselves. Piranha looked back at Anaconda. He was giving peremptory orders to other nearby slaves; as though the incident had never happened.
All the same, he still didn't look at Piranha. The joy, even the joy of needling his first mate, seemed to have gone out of the occasion for him.
Piranha eyed him closely. Was it possible that Anaconda was ashamed? Embarrassed?
Perhaps. Not at having committed a pointless murder on an innocent person, no, but perhaps at having lost his self-control. Didn't he carry that baton precisely so his blows wouldn't kill?
That perception must have been visible in Piranha's cold eyes, for Anaconda dismissed him not very long afterwards.
"All right, little First Mate, you've done your work for today. I can see you don't fully appreciate what's going on here. Not used to being on the winning side of the transaction, eh? After spending a hard year losing to us. But don't worry. Being a pirate is by far the easier way. It soon becomes completely automatic, no effort at all. You'll get to like it. You'll see."
[End of Chapter 10, Part 3]