Chaos and Order by Stephen R. Donaldson

Author:Stephen R. Donaldson [Donaldson, Stephen R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780006470229
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 1996-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

chest heaved as if he were trapped in an EVA suit with no air.

Damage glazed his yellow eyes. By degrees pressure blackened

his face. His hands crooked into claws, straining for bloodshed.

Abruptly Angus jerked up his arms and hammered both sides

of his head with the heels of his palms.

Davies flinched involuntarily. Morn's fingers gouged his

shoulder.

As if his life depended on it, Angus struggled to say some-

thing. But he couldn't articulate the words through his hoarse

gasping; couldn't force them out clearly enough.

Davies watched in dismay while Angus hit himself again; and

again.

Then the pressure inside him appeared to burst and fall away.

Grinding his teeth, he rasped like an obscenity, "I'm not your

son."

His voice rose into a rending shout, as if his throat were torn

by clarion triumph or wild despair.

"I am not your fucking SON!"

At once he broke into a fit of coughing that sounded like sobs.

MORN

Angus' cry shocked her like

stun. Charged with fear, her

muscles turned to jelly; the marrow seemed to bleed from her

bones. She wanted to protest, What?

What?

What are you talking about?

But she couldn't find the words. Words were strength—any-

thing she might have said, any response was a kind of strength—

and all the strength had burned out of her. The torn triumph or

pain in Angus' voice had left her helpless.

I'm not your son.

Frantically she glanced at Davies.

He, too, had been hit hard. He remembered Angus as well as

she did. And his ability to distinguish himself from her was frag-

ile: he'd only had a few days in which to try to re-create himself

as a separate human being. Something labored in him, strove to

rise against the blow—some defense or rejection, some instinct

for intransigence or violence. She could see the struggle on his

face. Nevertheless for the moment he was caught the same way

she was; trapped and held by the sheer extremity of Angus' shout.

I am not your fucking SON!

Now he, Angus, broke into coughing as if he'd ripped open

his lungs—

—and stopped. Just like that: between one heartbeat and the

next. Tears of pain smeared his cheeks, but he ignored them.

Maybe he didn't know they were there. He looked as stunned as

Davies, as stunned as Morn herself.

Slowly, as if he, too, had only jelly to support him, he turned

back to the second's station.

Morn recognized that instant transformation. His datacore had

taken control: emissions from his zone implants had stifled his

coughing, forced down his despair, smothered his triumph. He

was a welded cyborg, ruled by decisions made for him days or

weeks ago by men who didn't care what he felt or how he suf-

fered; who cared only how he could be used. Briefly his raw

human distress had burst its bounds. But now the inexorable pres-

sure on the neural centers of his brain had recaptured him.

Whatever he did here, it would be because Warden Dios or

Hashi Lebwohl—or their proxy, Nick Succorso—required it of

him, not because he chose it.

She understood from experience. Oh, she'd never been

welded. But Angus had imposed the same kind of submission on

her. Later, voluntarily, she'd imposed it on herself. Time and

again she'd felt an appalled outbreak of need and pain collapse in

the face of electromagnetic coercion.

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