Memorymakers by Brian Herbert, Marie Landis Page B

ceiling, this time with cleaning supplies. The arms stretched and moved in precise, methodical circles as they tidied away the mess. One arm sprayed Thomas’s face, and the other wiped it with a towel. Dishes and garbage were removed, tables and benches were lifted into ceiling compartments. Presently the room was entirely barren of furnishings.
    Squick heard a subsonic signal and opened the door. Peenchay stood there, bowing slightly with his tiny ochre-red eyes lowered. Something gray and glistening hung from his lower lip, a piece of Gweenbrain from Peenchay’s last meal. His tongue lashed out, pulled the fragment in and he swallowed.
    Like a damned frog, Squick thought. Or a toad. Indeed, the Inferior reminded him in body structure of such an amphibian. Squick detected an odor of decaying meat.
    “You have an amoeba-cam?” Squick asked. What a curious diet for the penultimate fool, he thought. You’d think some of that Gween gray matter would seep in.
    “Here, sir.” Peenchay extended one open palm containing a blue-green device in the shape of a tiny round pill.
    Squick plucked it from the proffered palm and snapped, “Change your clothes and bathe.”
    “Now?”
    “Immediately, if not sooner!”
    When Peenchay was gone, Squick relocked the door and returned to the boy. Holding up the amoeba-cam, Squick asked, “Can you see this?”
    “Your hand?”
    “I’m holding something.”
    “Another game?”
    Squick detected a modicum of fear in the boy’s eyes, and the fieldman trembled, a familiar sensation. Soon Nebulons would flow from his body into the boy’s . . .
    “No games.” Squick flipped the amoeba-cam in the air, and it buzzed into flight, a pale red glow to him. “You still see nothing?”
    “Am I . . . supposed to imagine? You threw something?”
    “No games, I said.”
    “I hear buzzing, like a fly.”
    “Aha! Just like before, when I was in your house?”
    Thomas nodded. “Invisible insects?”
    “Bugs of a sort” came the response, and Squick felt his mouth shape into a sardonic smile. But it didn’t hold. “Only Ch’Vars can hear their sound.”
    “Only what? Can we get back to the games? Please, Mr. Squick?” More fear than before in the eyes, and in the boy’s tone of voice.
    “You are not Ch’Var. I see that in your eyes.” But Squick wondered if the Nebulon count in this boy might be so low that the red of Nebulons didn’t show in his irises. This fieldman had never heard of or encountered a Ch’Var with such an extreme condition, but he thought it possible. According to stories long told among his people, the irises of ancient Ch’Vars were ruby red. Then over millennia, a fading, a washing away.
    Ruby eyes! What a sight they must have been!
    “What are you talking about? What’s a Ch’Var?”
    Squick glowered at the boy and said, “And your sister claims she hears the grating of my eyeballs. Even Ch’Vars do not hear that, if such a sound exists. Yet in all ways our senses are superior to Gween senses.”
    “I don’t know what you—”
    “Shut up! You don’t need to understand! Strange children. Come here, strange one.”
    The boy’s chin quivered and he didn’t obey. He appeared ready to cry.
    “Here! Now!”
    Thomas shuffled over, made whimpering sounds.
    Squick touched the tear ducts of his own eyes, felt the icy flow of Nebulons, and within moments the ancient, memory-seeking organisms entered the boy’s body through Thomas’s eyes to his brain.
    The boy slumped to the floor, and a scream issued from him, a high trill that sent Squick backward several steps.
    The child was in a prenatal position, not uncommon in extraction cases, but the muscles of his throat convulsed, discharging volleys of shuddering screams into the room. The terrible sounds filled Squick’s body, blocked thought, and he ran back to the door, fumbled with the lock mechanism and thrust the door open.
    When he was in the corridor with the door closed, Squick still heard the