trace of personality, or even humanity, in the furnishings. No personal touches at all. It could have been anybody's room or nobody's. Half A Man was sitting in the only chair, his single-eyed gaze directed at the opposite wall, concentrating on something she probably had no concept of. Shoal tried not to stare at him, but it was hard not to. The seething energy construct that made up his right side was endlessly fascinating. If you looked at it long enough, you started to see things. Disturbing things. But you couldn't help looking anyway. Half A Man looked around at her suddenly, and only her training kept her from jumping.
'I know, Investigator,' said Half A Man in his surprisingly normal voice. 'It's far too early in the morning, and there are certainly other more productive things you could be doing with your time. But I need to talk to you. Sit down. You make the place look untidy standing around like that.'
Shoal automatically looked around for a chair she already knew wasn't there, and then realized he meant the bed. She sat down gingerly on the edge, kept her back straight, and looked at Half A Man attentively. He wasn't exactly known for being talkative, so presumably whatever he had to say was going to be vitally important to their mission here. Half A Man sighed quietly, his half a mouth moving in something that might have been meant as a smile.
'Relax, Shoal, I'm not going to eat you. Despite whatever rumors you may have heard. I just need to talk. There aren't many I can talk to these days. Most people think me cold and inhuman, and it suits my purposes to encourage that impression. And it's mostly true. But I do still have a human side, if you'll pardon the expression, and now and again I need someone to talk with, as one human to another. I knew your grandfather.'
Shoal looked at him uncertainly, not following the change in subject. 'More than I did, sir. Investigators aren't encouraged to have family ties. They might distract us.'
'Probably wouldn't have been allowed to talk to you about me anyway. Your grandfather was a good man. Good starship officer. Would have made a good Captain if he'd only had the right Family connections. When I heard they were detailing you to this mission, your name rang a bell, so I looked you up in the files. You've had a very impressive career, Shoal. Until you came here, but that seems to be true of a lot of people. Anyway, it seemed to me that if I could talk to anyone here, it would be you. And I have to talk to somebody. You do understand that anything you hear in this room cannot be repeated to anyone, on penalty of death?'
'Yes, sir. Of course. What did you want to talk to me about, sir?'
'My past. Who I used to be. When I was still just a man like any other, and my name was Vincent Fast. That used to be a joke; that I was fast enough getting into trouble, but rarely fast enough to get out of it. That turned out to be true in the end, but no one tells the joke anymore. They wouldn't dare. Wasn't much of a joke in the first place. I like to talk to people now and again, in private. It helps me keep track of how human I still am. I'm always afraid that I'm losing what's left of my humanity; that once I reach a certain point I won't notice or care anymore. You won't have noticed, but every day there's just a little less of my human side and that much more of my energy side. Takes a computer to measure the process accurately, but it's there. I'm losing myself, bit by bit. I've still got a fair amount of time ahead of me, unless the process decides to accelerate for some reason. But what's left of me isn't that human anyway.
'I don't eat or drink anymore. Cold and heat don't bother me. I'm a lot older than I have any right to be. The energy construct keeps me alive when I should have died long ago.
And sometimes I wonder what the aliens had in mind, that they needed me to live for so long. I've tried to kill myself more than once, but I can't do it. My energy half won't let me. That's why I'm talking to you now. Investigator. If in your opinion the energy half is taking control of me, overriding my humanity, I want you to kill me. Destroy my human half completely, with sustained disrupter fire. That should do it. I'm asking you because you're one of the few people on this planet capable of doing the job, because I trust your judgment… and because you have your grandfather's eyes. He was a good man. He would have killed me if he'd thought it necessary. How about you?'
'If that's what you need,' Shoal said slowly. 'I can't argue with your logic. You'd make a hell of a threat to the Empire if you got out of control. Lionstone would have me killed for depriving her of your talents, but that's my problem. I'm an Investigator, and I've always taken my oath seriously. My life for humanity. If you're in such a talking mood, sir, can you tell me anything about the aliens who changed you? The official reports aren't very helpful. Even the ones only open to Investigators.'
'For a long time I didn't remember anything,' said Half A Man. His voice was very quiet, and he didn't look at her. 'Perhaps because I didn't want to. Then I started to remember things in my dreams. Of late the dreams have come more often, and I remember more of them. I don't know if that means anything. I hope not. All I do know for sure is that they're still out there, somewhere. Waiting.
'Forget the official, tidied-up story. This is what really happened. Their ship appeared out of nowhere. Huge and vast, dwarfing us like an ant next to a mountain. Its shape made no sense. We tried to talk to it, and it opened up with weapons of a kind we'd never encountered before. Blew our shields away like they were nothing and blew the ship apart. Only took a few seconds. The lucky ones died in the explosions. The rest of my crew died trying to breathe vacuum. And I woke up in the belly of the alien ship, strapped to an operating table. There was no sign of any aliens. Machines reached down, with long slender blades and other tools, for cutting and lifting and breaking. They opened me up to see how I worked, digging through my guts as the blood spurted. I screamed, but no one listened. I wanted to die, but the machines wouldn't let me.
'I don't know how long it went on. Seemed like forever. I went crazy more than once, but the machines brought me back. Until finally I was allowed to pass out, and when I woke up only half of me was left. My left side was intact, not even a scar, but my right side was an energy construct in human form. It obeyed my every thought, but I couldn't feel it. It wasn't mine. Not really. The restraining straps disappeared, and I got up off the table. With no trace anywhere of all the blood I'd spilled, I left the room and walked out into the ship itself.
'It was huge, none of it on a human scale. There were shapes and structures, but none of them made any sense. There was technology, machines everywhere, but I couldn't understand what they did, or what they'd been designed for. Somewhere something was screaming, shrill and awful, and it never stopped. It might have been pain, or triumph, or horror. And though it never once paused for breath, I had no doubt its source was organic. Something alive. Forever screaming. Just hearing it would have been enough to drive a normal man insane, but I'd been through so much already I wouldn't let myself be broken this time. I had to be strong. I had to survive. The Empire had to be warned.
'I found the aliens, or they found me. Even now, all I remember of them is hints, details, impressions. As though to comprehend them completely, whole, would be more than any human mind could stand. Even now. They were vast and inhuman, draped over impossible machinery with which they were intimately connected. I'm still not sure whether the ship itself might have been alive in some way.
'It took a while before the aliens became aware of me. We communicated, though I couldn't tell you how. They're advanced far beyond us. Their minds work in more than three dimensions. I think they see the future as clearly as the past, as though there was no difference between them. In the depths of their ship, lesser creatures died constantly, their life energies powering the huge ship. They died and were brought back to life and were killed, over and over again, their torment never-ending. But it wasn't their scream I heard. The aliens showed me other things, most of which I didn't understand. All of it was vile and terrifying, evil beyond anything humanity has ever done or could do.'
He stopped speaking, his single eye squeezed shut. For a long time there was only silence in the small room. Shoal stirred uneasily.
'Did they tell you why they did… what they did to you?'
'No. Or if they did, I didn't understand it. There was a lot I didn't understand. Eventually, they'd told me all they wanted to, or they grew tired of me. I woke up curled into a ball in one of my ship's escape pods, in orbit over one of the Rim worlds. A ship picked me up, and I came home to an Empire three years older than I remembered, and endured an endless series of attempted debriefings. You know the rest of the story. The Emperor's espers picked up the gist of the story, confirmed that I wasn't lying or crazy, and I became the Empire's spokesman on alien affairs. Who knew better than I what they were capable of? I set policy for alien contacts and controls throughout the known worlds. I've kept the Empire strong. We have to be strong and ready, because someday the aliens who took and altered me will be back. We weren't ready to fight them then, and we might not be now, but we have to be prepared. They were vast and powerful and utterly evil, and they must never be allowed to do to humanity what they did to me.
'In the meantime I do what I can. Of course, there's always the danger that I'm doing what the aliens
