The Course of Empire(46)

The by now familiar shock convulsed his body. He curled around it, as though he could contain it somehow, so maybe it wouldn't be as bad as the last time.



"Tully, goddamit, get up!" Someone pounded back up the steps, then a hand grasped his arm, yanked him to his feet.



He blinked hard and thought he could make out Aguilera's lined dark face somewhere in the middle of all that static. Fingers bit into his flesh. "Do you want your brain fried? Move it!"



His feet didn't seem to be working though, as lightning ricocheted through bone and marrow, neuron and skull. He seemed to become part of it, as though the lightning could transform him so that he might finally understand some essential truth which had always eluded him before.



"Turn it off!" Aguilera called down over the railing, then hastily threw Tully over a sweaty shoulder and thundered down the metal steps. Each step made the pain worse, as though nails were being driven into his skull. He could feel how his would-be rescuer shared the shocks, wherever their damp flesh met, could feel him stagger with each new bolt of pain. "Turn it off before you fry his goddamned brain!"



Time fritzed out so that he was aware of nothing but the white agony throbbing along every nerve. Then somehow he was on his back, the sun beating down on his face. He tried to pull an arm up to shield his eyes and couldn't. "He's no good to you dead!"



"It is not your concern," Yaut's stiff voice answered. "The man is in Pluthrak service, and must accept proper training."



"Damn your training," Tully heard Aguilera say. He was vaguely surprised to hear the collaborator speak so sharply to the fraghta. "This is wrong, treating a man like a caged beast. Kill him, if you must, but don't torture him. The Jao are better than that."



"Are we?" Yaut said, and Tully thought he heard something deadly in those words, like an adder about to strike, unexpected, out of innocent looking shade.



"Shut—up," he said weakly and flailed at Aguilera without finding a target. "When I want someone to—to plead for me, I'll—" His vision grayed out again and he was alone with the pain. "I'll damn well do it myself. Which I won't. Not to these bastards."



The lightning ebbed, though he could feel echoes of it all through his body, as though it had blazed a trail that remained after it had gone. His arms and legs trembled and jerked and his mouth tasted of blood. He'd bitten his tongue at some point.



"It never learns," Yaut said in Jao. "Indeed, I believe it is not capable of learning. It is mired in its early experiences and cannot be retrained to any other purpose."



"I am not interested so much in training," Aille answered, "as in why it makes the choices it does. If I can learn to understand it, then I may understand them all."



Tully laughed weakly, rolling his head in the dirt.



"Why is he doing that?" demanded Yaut.



"He doesn't know what he's doing," Aguilera said. "He's only half-conscious."



I know exactly what I'm doing, Tully wanted to say. I'm laughing because it's all so damned funny, you, a collaborator, of all people, trying to stand between me and these furballs.



But his mouth wouldn't work and his bitten tongue, swollen now, was no better. His eyelids fluttered and then he was falling into somewhere else, dark and cool and quiet.

* * *



"I had no idea they could get ill so quickly," Aille told Yaut later, when they had returned to their quarters with the unconscious Tully.



"Neither did I. But they're sturdier than they look, in other ways—or, at least, this one is. A Jao who had been jolted that thoroughly by a locator would barely be alive."



Aguilera had come with them. Aille and Yaut watched him tending the injured man with a devotion neither Jao could understand.



"Is he of your kochan?" Aille asked, as Aguilera bathed Tully's face with cool water. "Is that why you are caring for him?"



"Kochan—that means clan, doesn't it?" Aguilera rinsed the cloth in a basin of water he had filled and looked up. The centers of his eyes were a shade of brown so dark that, in the room's dimness, they seemed almost as black as a Jao's.



"Something like your word 'clan,' " Aille said, "as I understand the concept."



"Most humans in this country aren't part of a clan," Aguilera said. "Americans did have what we called 'extended families' who often lived far apart, but after the conquest, when our infrastructure was destroyed and transport systems were mostly down, contact between separated family members mostly fell apart." He put the cloth down and rose. "I have no idea what happened to any of my cousins or aunts and uncles after the fall of Chicago."