Director Gneiss

Gneiss sat in his chair gazing at a screen display which, divided into four, showed views through the diamond pane end-caps of each Ozark canister. The tangled complexity within appeared ever on the point of movement, like some simple optical illusion, and seemed to offer him answers to questions—but questions he did not know how to pose. He felt as if the images he saw pressed on his eyeballs, and sometimes wondered if that pressure lay within the skull behind them. But Gneiss had always been stubborn, and so resisted something he could not even identify.

The only child of parents who had remained desert nomads despite all pressures to join 'civilisation', he had inherited their pig-headedness and forever been a trial to them. He had in his early years learned all they taught him about desert survival, but then, before he even reached his teens, he decided their lifestyle was not one for him. Informing them of his decision had perhaps not been the brightest idea, because it developed into a contest of wills with them, often culminating in physical violence. They did not win in the end, for at the age of thirteen he packed up his meagre belongings and fled, taking himself off to the nearest city to acquire a 'proper' education. His parents came after him but, having rejected the society they now entered, they did not know how to fight the systems that would keep Gneiss from them. Despite having obtained what he had apparently wanted, Gneiss remained an outsider even within the Sudorian orphanage and schooling system. But ensuing years of conflict opened his eyes to the fact that his stubbornness, candour and uncommon intelligence would have made him an outsider in any society. Those same intransigent qualities finally secured him his promotion to the overall directorship of Corisanthe Main.

The view of the four canister end-caps was one Gneiss called up regularly to remind himself that he was only human and must never again become complacent about his charge. He gazed frequently at the mind-distorting patterns so as to accustom himself to them, to toughen his mind and harden himself against their influence. Leastways, this is what he assured himself when given time to distance himself from the hypnotic experience. For during it he felt himself to be pitting his will against that of the Worm. Sometimes, as on this occasion, he felt himself locked in a conflict he could not resolve but which, oddly, enabled him to remain obstinately himself.

Standing abruptly, Gneiss turned away from the images and walked over to a mirror inset in his apartment wall. He noted the even spokes radiating his irises, like two small wheels inset in his eyes, and remembered a time when they had not been like that—some months before Yishna Strone was born. Upon first noting this change, and suspecting some strange influence from the Worm, he had them medically checked but found that nothing else untoward could be detected. He reached out and palmed the carved head of the snake swallowing its own tail which formed the mirror frame, and stepped back while the mirror itself turned sideways into the wall to reveal the cavity of a small lift, into which he stepped.

As the lift carried him down, he opened a small hatch and took out a visored breather mask to place it over his face. The direction of the lift's acceleration changed, then changed again, and he clasped a handle beside him as he became weightless. Shortly afterwards the lift slowed to a halt, and then revolved partially to open into a gloomy chamber.

None of the sensors here in Ozark One would report his presence, since he had long ago instructed them to ignore him. He pushed himself down in an angled trajectory he was well accustomed to, and after a few moments of weightless flight closed his fists on the hand bar positioned before the transparent end-cap of the Ozark canister. Now, without an imaging system intervening between him and the Worm itself, the effect upon him was distinctly more powerful, as was the effect of that muttering madness called bleed-over. It almost felt as if something was reaching out physically from within the canister, to push the patterns shimmering before him through his eyes and deep into his head. His customary response was instant: a solid mulish stubborn resistance. This was his parents trying to shape him into what they envisaged was a more perfect version of themselves. This was his political teacher trying to impress on him some ideology obviously at variance from reality. This was the constant pressure of Sudorian society showing him the easy path to conformity. And it was Combine society trying to deform his mental shape to fit a particular niche. He resisted with the flat negativity of an iron wall.

Gneiss remained obstinately himself.

Gneiss accepted that this conflict prevented him from being anything else.

McCrooger

While studying my erstwhile captors I remembered how their body chemistry was weirder than their appearance. They could breathe atmosphere such as once killed soldiers in the trenches of ancient Earth battlefields, and could eat bivalve molluscs and worms containing enough sulphuric acid to burn through hull plating. But, as I saw it, their main difference to 'normal humans' was a mental one, stemming from the hive-like set-up of their society and the consequent ways they had of communicating. It seemed as if, when together, their minds partially conjoined.

This sort of thing had happened back in the Polity once or twice, when certain groups using cerebral augmentations tried to set up gestalt societies, which never lasted since each individual had been originally raised an individual. Such societies would inevitably break apart, often with many of their members needing psychiatric help for a long time afterwards. I wondered if here the formation of a gestalt had been a matter of necessity, or just resulted from their severe genetic modifications. It may even have been planned by some or all of the original settlers, but I would probably never find out for sure.

After about an hour the sound of an engine alerted me to another fan-driven boat approaching across the lake. As it drew closer, I saw that it was another four-man vessel like the one waiting by the jetty, but with only three individuals aboard. Turning hard, it slowed by the beach and then drew up to the jetty. I noticed that the two in the front seats were very different from those waiting alongside me, and this difference became even more evident as they climbed out—one quickly securing the mooring rope to a bollard.

These were bigger, heavier, more stooped and apelike. Their heads seemed like boulders and what I at first took to be helmets I shortly realised were chitinous plates. Then I noticed similar growths extending over the rest of their bodies. The new arrivals were armoured, not by artifice but by biology, or rather by the artifice of genetic manipulation. Both of them lacked spur fingers, had eyes sunk into hollows, and were wearing green dungarees. They carried heavy carbines suspended across their stomachs, from which cables extended to packs resting on the near horizontal part of their backs just behind their shoulders. Their mandibles were huge and, upturned like tusks, were obviously intended for more than simply gustation.

Standing up, the four with me in unison announced, "Quofarl." I glimpsed hand signals implying both trepidation and amusement.

Soldiers, I realised, created by a society dependent on genetic manipulation and under the intense pressure of war. I wondered if these two creatures had been fashioned back then, or if the Brumallians still created them.