Betrayer of Worlds Read Free

are you feeling, Richard?”
    By shift’s end, Nathan’s hands were shaking. Hating himself, he slipped into the dense shrubs not far outside the cave. There was little privacy inany guerrilla camp, he had found. Many used this thicket for a bit of quick sex.
    A tryst wasn’t
his
purpose. He had liberated three painkillers during his last shift; now he popped two into his mouth.
    The night was warm, the outside air untainted by antiseptic and fear. He plunged deeper into the wild, lay down beneath a flowering shrub, and drifted off. . . .
    Nathan’s childhood memories were so deeply repressed he expected never to recover them all. Still, flashes came to him: in dreams, in therapy—
    With drugs.
    Falling asleep one night in his own bed, his own room. His parents had been strange that whole week. Anxious? He hadn’t understood it. Neither did his sister, and she was almost six. She usually understood everything.
    Awakening in—well, he didn’t know where. Not his bed. Not his room. Not his
house
. Getting up, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, and staring out the window. Nothing was familiar.
    Mommy and Daddy, gone. A friend of theirs, looking
so
sad. “I am your father,” he kept saying. And he kept calling them Nathan and Tweena—pleading, insisting, finally
screaming
over their howls of protest. Tears streaming down all their faces. “Those are your names. You must remember them for your own safety.”
    Confinement inside the new house until they could recite much more than their new names without hesitation—and without tears.
    In time, Nathan’s original parents reappearing. And how they had changed! Mother, who had always been so happy and carefree, seeming—Nathan was a long time putting a name to the look—haunted. Mother crying about the strangest things, as though the hue of the sky or the length of the day could be wrong. But First Father had changed the most. He who had once towered over everyone had somehow shrunk to Mother’s height.
    By then Nathan had gotten old enough to notice who had skin like bronze and slanted eyes. He and Tweena did. New Father did. Mother and First Father, the incredible shrinking man, did not.
    Old parents and new, when they thought no one was listening, talking about other times and places. About wondrous adventures. About terribleadversaries. About implacable forces out to get them all. Black holes and space pirates were somehow among their more normal experiences. Nathan working up his courage—he was about ten, then. Asking them, old parents and new: who were they
really
? The only answer was an awkward silence and Mother looking terrified.
    As soon as Nathan could, he had run away.
    The memory storm passed.
    Nathan emerged from the bushes into brutal clarity. He was a druggie, a fugitive, and flat broke. Everything he had saved over a lifetime had gone down in flames. He was trapped on Wunderland. If the aristos caught him, the
best
he could hope for was years of hard labor in a reeducation camp.
    First Father’s adventures—and Nathan, almost despite himself, believed those whispered, overheard allusions—usually ended in triumph.
    Nathan wondered: Would
he
ever measure up?
    The human crouched behind the clear wall. The ceiling, not fear, explained that posture, for Nessus had constructed the isolation booth to Earth norms. He had forgotten how tall Wunderlanders stood.
    “This is outrageous!” the man said, flushed with rage. He turned a full circle in the tiny cylindrical booth, whether seeking an exit or someone to confront. He found neither. He poked at his pocket comp, swore as he found that comm was jammed, and put away the device. The main thing visible beyond his cell wall was a floor-standing mirror. He glowered at that. “Release me immediately.”
    “In good time,” Nessus answered from behind the one-way glass. He spoke fluent Interworld in a throaty contralto. He could as easily have imitated a burly human male—or, for that matter, a string