“Seven.”
“Spell the word ‘Rhinoceros.’”
“R-H-I-N-O-C-E-R-O-S.”
Supervisor tested him with the standard questions, assessing the baggage of knowledge he had managed to carry over from his first life.
“He tests out quite high,” she commented after she had finished. Rodney grinned broadly, as if barely able to control himself from giggling now that the terror and uncertainty had passed.
Danal said nothing. He waited, wishing he had some tool to dig deeper into his memories and bring them into the light—or cauterize them and seal the images below his consciousness forever.
Danal stared out the narrow window of the Enforcer’s hovercar as the Metroplex rushed by below. He sat back in the detention/cargo compartment, saying nothing. The Enforcer escort seemed to ignore him.
The elevator had taken Danal up from the lower levels of Resurrection, Inc., leading him to the lobby. Most of the reception area had been decorated with deeply grained clonewood, giving it the rich, somber appearance of an old-time funeral parlor. Danal had stepped out of the lift and, without moving, stared at the carpet, the ornaments, the light-fountain, the receptionist. Only a moment later, one of the Enforcers came and took him to a waiting hovercar, commanding him to wait in back.
They rose over the crowded streets. The monotonous buzzing of the pedestrians seemed to interfere with itself and left an eerie type of silence in the air. Barely heard, smog scrubbers mounted on the sides of taller buildings added their background drone, filtering the air to recover valuable chemical particulates. Apartments and business complexes stretched into the sky, and endless blind eyes of windows gaped at the world.
As they flew, the Metroplex seemed to stretch out, clean and repetitive, like a vast computer chip from the air: street after street, section after section, all arranged in geometric order. The larger industrial centers could be seen in the distance, but all around them lay the spreading shopping zones intermixed with residential areas.
As the hovercar approached its destination, Danal spotted the vast Victorian mansion looming in front of them, an anomaly among the crowded condominium complexes. The gabled house seemed to command the entire area, standing alone at the end of the block, surrounded by a small lawn of carefully groomed green vinyl sod.
Van Ryman’s bizarre home bristled with odd angles, sharp gables, and black and peeling shutters. One of the gutters hung carefully askew, as if it had been mounted purposely off balance to provide a calculated effect, dramatically decrepit. A weathervane driven by a random motor sent the silhouette of a capering demon in drunken pirouettes. Leering gargoyles squatted on the gables, somewhat brighter and more polished than the rest of the structure, as if they were new.
But the gargoyles were removed.
Stricken from the home in disgust.
Why are they back?
Danal stumbled slightly from the throbbing flashback as he tried to keep a placid expression on his face, a Servant’s expression. He grasped at the fleeing thought that had soared outward from his mind’s core, slipping through his mental fingers. Ripples in his memory died away, leaving a blank hole and no more of an answer.
Another bubble had popped deep in his subconscious—the spark of a buried memory from beyond the wall of death, like an outstretched hand from the grave. The first such explosion of unbridled memory still burned bright in his mind from when he had stood, still dripping, newly awakened from the resurrection vat. A name, a concern—Julia—but no face, no other details arose to fill in the gaps. …
So many sights, sounds, smells, experiences had poured into his starved sensory organs, and everything fell neatly into the empty pockets of his memory, stocking the shelves, filling in the gaps. Danal felt ready to burst after a scant few minutes, and he rapidly learned how to filter what he experienced, to weed out some of the extraneous detail no matter how much it saddened him to have to ignore any part of his new life.
He wondered if all Servants felt this way.
The Enforcer unsealed the detention/cargo compartment, allowing Danal to step methodically out of the hovercar. The Servant stood next to the Enforcer in front of Vincent Van Ryman’s mansion, waiting. The Enforcer seemed uneasy, jittery. Danal felt himself churning with doubts, curiosity, perhaps even rebellion. Part of him knew what Servants were like and what they were supposed to be like. But something was wrong. And that frightened him.
The Enforcer finally stepped on the walkway to the porch, in front of a faintly shimmering wall of air: the deadly force field of Van Ryman’s Intruder Defense Systems.
“Vincent Van Ryman!” the Enforcer called, afraid to go any nearer to the house. “I have escorted your Servant Danal.” The Enforcer fidgeted. Danal stood perfectly still, expressionless.
The spangles in the air faded, and Danal sensed that the field had been switched off. But the Enforcer did not seem eager to proceed. He cleared his throat. “You go first, Servant. Command: Walk.”
The Enforcer motioned him ahead, and Danal strode calmly down the walkway to the porch. The sidewalk was poured from black textured concrete and clean, without weeds. Danal kept walking, his legs mechanically moving him forward as the Servant programming forced him to follow the Enforcer’s Command. Uneasiness grew in him, but he didn’t try to smother any new visions rising to the surface, where the microprocessor could grasp them and hold them up for inspection.
Déjà vu. The phrase suddenly clicked into his head, and somehow it felt right.
He mounted the creaking steps of the porch, where the rail appeared splintered and weathered, but when he focused his attention on it for an instant, he realized that it had been painted and textured to appear so. Everything here had the tinge of familiarity to it, and the part of him that wasn’t frightened wanted to see what lay hidden inside Vincent Van Ryman’s home.
Apparently relieved at seeing his charge delivered safely, the Enforcer saluted the unseen monitors in Van Ryman’s house, then turned and walked quickly back to the hovercar. Danal watched him for an instant, puzzled, and then faced the door.
“Your Servant Danal reporting for duty, Master Van Ryman.” He remained on the porch, drinking in the details of the wood, seeing an artificial hornets’ nest carefully mounted under one of the eaves. He stared at the ornate door knob, at the hideous brass gorgon’s head that gripped a door knocker in its fangs.
A voice struck at him from a speaker hidden in the gorgon’s jagged mouth. “Open the door and come in, Danal.”
The interior hall was dimly lit by a hanging chandelier that left the corners in a deep murk. Plush purple carpeting cushioned Danal’s feet as he took another step forward, and stopped. His Master Van Ryman stood in shadows at the end of the hall.
“Welcome, Danal.” His attitude seemed to show an irregular mix of excitement and terror, masked by an effort to seem calm.
Danal voluntarily used the microprocessor to think and examine with greater speed, filing the details in his growing mental database. Van Ryman was almost exactly the same size and build as Danal, but he had dark, lanky hair grown long and square about his shoulders; his face was wide and somewhat rough, but receptive. A rich green robe loosely covered his tight-fitting black clothing. Van Ryman’s forehead was damp and glistening clean, reddened as if he had just scrubbed it vigorously.
They stood frozen, staring at each other, and Danal felt oddly like an animal squared off at a territorial boundary. Van Ryman’s face sparked a strange reaction in the Servant. He seemed familiar, oddly so. Danal wanted to ask a question, but he felt queasy inside, uneasy, even though his synHeart carefully regulated