Read an Excerpt
Chapter one
Sigmund Ausfaller woke up shivering, prone on a cold floor. His head pounded. Tape bound his wrists and ankles to plasteel chains.
He had always known it would end horribly. Only the when, where, how, why, and by whom of it all had eluded him.
That fog was beginning to lift.
How had he gotten here, wherever here was? As though from a great distance, Sigmund watched himself quest for recent memories. Why was it such a struggle?
He remembered the pedestrian concourse of an open-air mall, shoppers streaming. They wore every color of the rainbow, clothing and hair and skin, in every conceivable combination and pattern. Overhead, fluffy clouds scudded across a clear blue sky. The sun was warm on his face. Work, for once, had been laid aside. He'd been content.
Happiness is the sworn enemy of vigilance. How could he have been so careless?
Sigmund forced open his eyes. He was in a nearly featureless room. Its walls, floor, and ceiling were resilient plastic. Light came from one wall. I could be anywhere, Sigmund thought-and then two details grabbed his attention.
The room wasn't quite a box. The glowing wall had a bit of a curve to it.
There were recessed handholds in walls, floor, and ceiling.
Panic struck. He was on a spaceship! Was gravity a hair higher than usual? Lower? He couldn't tell.
Plasteel chains clattered dully as Sigmund sat up. He had watched enough old movies to expect chains to clink. Even as the room spun around him and everything faded to black, he found the energy to feel cheated.
COLD PLASTIC PRESSED AGAINST Sigmund's cheek. He opened his eyes a crack to see the same spartan room. Cell.
This time henoticed that one link of his chains had been fused to a handhold in the deck.
Had he passed out from a panic attack? Where was he?
Sigmund forced himself to breathe slowly and deeply until the new episode receded. Fear could only muddy his thoughts. More deep breaths.
He had never before blacked out from panic. He could not believe that his blackout stemmed from panic. Yes, his faint had closely followed the thought he might be aboard a spaceship. It also had occurred just after he had sat up. Sigmund remembered his thoughts having been fuzzy. They seemed sharper now.
He'd been drugged! Doped up and barely awake, he'd sat up too fast. That was why he had passed out.
More cautiously this time, Sigmund got into a sitting position. His head throbbed. He considered the pain dispassionately. Less disabling than the last time, he decided. Perhaps the drugs were wearing off.
Some odd corner of his mind felt shamed by his panic attacks. Most Earthborn had flatland phobia worse than he, and so what? True, he'd been born on Earth, but his parents had been all over Known Space. Somehow they took pleasure in strange scents, unfamiliar night skies, and wrong gravity.
On principle, Sigmund had been to the moon twice. He had had to know: Could he leave Earth should the need ever arise? The second time, it was to make sure the success of that first trip wasn't a fluke.
He listened carefully. The soft whir of a ventilation fan. Hints of conversation, unintelligible. His own heartbeat. None of the background powerplant hum that permeated the spaceships he'd been on. Gravity felt as normal as his senses could judge.
Recognizing facts, spotting patterns, drawing inferences . . . he managed, but slowly, as though his thoughts swam through syrup. Traces of drugs remained in his system. He forced himself to concentrate.
If this was a ship, it was still on Earth. Someone meant to panic him, Sigmund decided. Someone wanted something from him. Until they got it, he'd probably remain alive.
They.
For as long as Sigmund could remember, there had always been some they to worry about.
But even as Sigmund formed that thought, he knew "always" wasn't quite correct. . . .
IN THE BEGINNING, they were unambiguous enough: the Kzinti.
The Third Man-Kzin War broke out in 2490, the year Sigmund was born. He was five before he knew what a Kzin was-something like an upright orange cat, taller and much bulkier than a man, with a naked, rat-like tail. By then, the aliens had been defeated. The Kzinti Patriarchy ceded two colony worlds to the humans as reparations. In Sigmund's lifetime, they had attacked human worlds three more times. They'd lost those wars, too.
Fafnir was one of the worlds that changed hands after the third war. His parents had wanderlust and not a trace of flatland phobia. They left him in the care of an aunt, and went to Fafnir in 2500 for an adventure.
And found one.
Conflict erupted that year between humans on Fafnir and the Kzinti settlers who had remained behind. His parents vanished, in hostilities that failed to rise to the level of a numeral in the official reckoning of Man- Kzin Wars. It was a mere "border incident."
Everyone knew the Kzinti ate their prey.
So they, for a long time, were Kzinti. Sigmund hated the ratcats, and everyone understood. And he hated his parents for abandoning him. The grief counselors told his aunt that that was normal. And he hated his aunt, as much as she reminded him of Mom-or perhaps because she did-for allowing Mom and Dad to leave him with her.
The same year his parents disappeared, the Puppeteers emerged from beyond the rim of Human Space. A species more unlike the Kzinti could not be imagined. Puppeteers looked like two-headed, three-legged, wingless ostriches. The heads on their sinuous necks reminded him of sock puppets. The brain, Aunt Susan told him, hid under the thick mop of mane between the massive shoulders.
So they came to include these other aliens, these harmless-seeming newcomers, because Sigmund didn't believe in coincidence. And then they came to include all aliens-because, really, how could anyone truly know otherwise?
That was when Aunt Susan took him to a psychotherapist. Sigmund remembered the stunned look on her face after his first session. After she spoke alone with the therapist. Sigmund remembered her sobbing all that night in her bedroom.
He had a sickness, or sicknesses, he couldn't spell, much less understand: a paranoid personality disorder. Monothematic delusion with delusional misidentication syndrome. He didn't know if he believed the supposed silver lining: that it was treatable.
What Sigmund did believe was the other consolation Dr. Swenson offered Aunt Susan-that paranoia is an affliction of the brightest.
In time, Sigmund understood. Trauma can cause stress can cause biochemical imbalances can cause mental illness. A day and a night asleep in an autodoc corrected the biochemical imbalance in his brain. But a single chemical tweak wasn't enough: Knowing the world is out to get you is its own stress. Three months of therapy with Dr . Swenson addressed the paranoid behaviors Sigmund had already learned.
Dr. Swenson was right: Sigmund was very smart. Smart enough to figure out what the therapist wanted to hear. Smart enough to learn what thoughts to keep to himself.
TREMBLING, SIGMUND TRIED AGAIN to shake off the drugs. Reliving old horrors served no useful purpose-especially now. He needed to focus.
Start with them. They weren't Kzinti: The room was too small. Kzinti would have gone crazy.
They wanted something from him; how he responded might be the only control he had in this situation. Who might they be?
Others might see in him only a middle-aged, midlevel financial analyst. A United Nations bureaucrat. A misanthrope dressed always in black, in a world where everyone else wore vibrant colors.
Sigmund saw more. All those year
