Aztechs by Lucius Shepard

Author:Lucius Shepard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Science Fiction, General, Military, Space Opera
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2013-08-29T04:01:31+00:00

Childers kneeled beside me as I jabbed the syrette into my arm and stared into my face. “The first time,” he said. “It’s a beautiful thing.”

What he saw, I have no idea. What I saw was everything brand new. Take sand, for instance. It previously had seemed unvarying, uninteresting, but now it had been transformed into a tactical topography, areas of minimal exposure and good footing and so forth. People? I glanced at Lupe and instantly dismissed her as a threat—her face was a mask of weakness and fear. But Zee, though dying, was possessed of a supreme confidence that put me on the alert. I gauged everything in terms of its potential danger to me. Despite what had happened to Dennard, those things I saw that were truly dangerous—black riders, living sand—only supplied my amplified senses with fresh reasons for arrogance. My skin was hot, my heart rate accelerated, yet I felt indestructible. All my senses had been drastically enhanced. Sammy could see a sand-colored spider sitting on rock of the same color thirty feet away, a creature that would have been invisible to that cakeboy Eddie Poe had he been standing next to it. The fragments of Sammy philosophy I’d heard over the years suddenly seemed deep and seasoned ideas, and not the globs of reconstituted Bushido they had once seemed. Whereas before Childers had been somehow pitiable in his strength, when I looked at him now I saw an elder brother who was more adept and powerful than I, not of my blood but a pure relation, one who knew what I knew, who drank from the same reservoir of anger that I drank from, who heard, as did I, the singing of his blood, the whine of the circulatory system orchestrated into a music of red wires. In the back of my mind a voice was squealing that I had lost it, but after a minute or so I didn’t hear it anymore.

“How’s it feel to be human, Eddie?” Childers grinned, and I could not help grinning in return. “The stuff they used to hand out to our brothers back when the war started,” he went on, “it was hardly more than juiced-up amphetamines. But this”—he held up a pack of syrettes, then tossed it to me—“this is the shit. Gets you there quick and keeps you there.” His grin broadened. “You’re going to love it.”

I had to admit the drug was a perfect complement to our moonlit walk. Carrying Zee proved a snap. I was tireless so long as I shot up every couple of hours. Childers kept up a stream of chatter as we went, some of it designed as taunts, reminding me that I was a subordinate, an inferior, and some intended to help me adapt to the wonderful world of Sammy. Tips on how to focus, how to interpret certain sensory information that I’d previously been unable to perceive. I found I was able to compartmentalize his bullshit, store what was helpful, and at the same time to generate and consider my own thoughts, which were conflicted.

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