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go-
ing to slit your throat, here. And at the same time that I do it
134 Dove Wolverton here, I have paid the security guard Marinda Chase to slit
your throat outside the virtual reality, and you will die."
"Oh," Warren said.
"You aren't frightened? You didn't even guess that I
wanted vengeance?"
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"I guessed," Warren admitted. "I don't remember what I
might have done to you. I guess ... I came here to find out.
I've been raped, in prison back on Earth. I know what it's like. As for death,
I've never been afraid of it. I've died six times. And I've spent a long time
in hell, on a planet called
Darius IV. I guess, maybe, I came here because I wanted to see your heaven, if
only for a moment. Forgive me if I en-
joyed the taste of it, even for a moment, when you didn't want me to."
"You think this is heaven?" Rebecca said. "Can you under-
stand the tedium of having everything you want, when you want it? I would
trade a day of life for an eternity here, and you stole my life!"
Warren looked up, sweat running from his face. "I know you hate me, but the
man you hated died three hundred and fifty years ago. If you want, you can go
ahead and kill me now." Warren waited, humbled, naked. For a moment Rebec-
ca's scowl faltered. He almost dared hope for mercy.
Then Rebecca shrieked, and the sound of her wrath filled the skies. For one
endless moment the flames of the bonfires leaped up around him, like a wall,
like a huge crown, and
Warren took their full fury, felt them crisping his flesh, bum-
ing the skin from his bones, boiling his eyes in their sockets.
He tried to scream, but only steam shot from his mouth. He twitched to flames
more caustic than any acid. In that mo-
ment, he wanted death more purely than ever before, but it would not come. His
sanity felt as if it would boil and bubble away as cruelly as his flesh, but
still death would not come.
The flames were snuffed more suddenly than they had arisen. Warren found
himself in the slate gray visiting room, gasping, burning. The cyborg Marinda
Chase stood over him, the plug from the neural jack in one hand, a long bare
knife
in the other. Warren saw that a second core was plugged into the neural net,
running up to the socket at the base of
To CARESS THE FACE OF GOD 135
Marinda's skull. She too had been plugged into the illusion, awaiting the
goddess's orders.
"You can go," Marinda said. "Rebecca's had her fun.
You'll never suffer enough to satisfy her. I suspect that your other victims
would feel the same, if they were around to talk.
I can understand their hate, but I won't kill you for them."
"But you thought about killing me," Warren said, unable to imagine what he had
done to her. The cyborg looked into his eyes, and Warren saw danger there, and
the end of his hope.
Marinda might not kill him, but she was the kind who would never forgive him.
She would just keep exacting a toll, day after day, minute after unceasing
minute.
She said in a deadly tone, "Get out, before I change my mind."
The shining shuttle pod returned to Darius IV only two days before I was
scheduled to leave. Warren Garceau got out along with two servant droids and
began offloading seeds and young fruit trees, various desert reptiles, and
other forms of animal life from Earth. I thought it a great waste of his
wealth him, someone who could live almost anywhere, do almost anything.
Still, he was free to do as he liked, and I no longer needed the guardhouse.
Earth had stopped imprisoning men ages ago, having found more advanced and
profitable ways to reprogram criminals. Still, I had managed to keep Warren
imprisoned until his sentence was completed, as was my job. I bore him no
grudge, so I gave him the guardhouse as his own, along with the surrounding
mountains and the orchards.
I asked Warren before I left what he had found at Hotel
Andromeda that made him want to flee civilization so soon.
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"A world too much like the one I left," he answered.
"What of the things you wanted?" I asked. "What of sex and death?"
Warren grunted, looked away. "I've lived without love for a long time. I guess
I can keep on living without it- As for death, I figure I have the rest of
eternity to explore it." I
looked into Warren's eyes, and I saw his dishonesty. Sex and death. I knew, I
knew that he had somehow gotten his fill of both. Suddenly I became afraid,
wondering who he may have raped, who he had killed.
136 Dave Wolverton
I did not wave good-bye to Warren as I left. The cockatoos rose betow the
shuttle in a cloud, and beyond the green of trees in the mountain vale and the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]