THE DECEIVERS by ALFRED BESTER - Fiction - The hero is Rogue Winter, King of Maori Commandos. His lover is the beautiful Demi Jeroux, who has been kidnapped by the villainous, demonic Manchu Duke of Death. Rogue must search through the entire solar system to find missing Demi, from the Paradise of Carnal Pleasures to the bloody torture chambers of Triton. It is in Triton's subterranean chambers that the key to the whole adventure lies, for buried here is the sole source of the newly discovered Meta-crystals, which hold the secret to unlimited energy for all mankind.
ibooks,Inc.Copyright © 1999, 2001 by the Estate of Alfred Bester
At the towering hangar, shaped like a domed observatory, a squad of black-armored guards lay dozing before an entry hatch. The executive kicked the sergeant brutally but quite dispassionately. The squad leader exclaimed and scrambled to his feet, followed by the rest of his men. They opened the hatch for the man in white who stepped through into pitch black. Then, almost as an afterthought, he turned back into the light, contemplated the squad standing fearfully at attention and, quite dispassionately, shot their sergeant.
There was no light inside the hangar, only sound. The executive spoke quietly in the darkness.
“What is your name?”
The reply was a sequence of binary bits, treble blips and bass beeps, “—’ ”—”—’—”
“Not in binary. Switch to phonetics. RW what is your name? RR answer.”
The answer was as quiet as the question; but it was not a single voice, it was a chorus of voices speaking in unison. “Our name is R-OG-OR 1001.”
“What is your mission, Rogor?”
“To obey.”
“To obey what?”
“Our program.”
“Have you been programmed?”
“Yes.”
“What is your program?”
“Convey passengers and freight to OxCam University Dome on Mars.”
“Will you receive commands?”
“Only from authorized control.”
“Am I authorized?”
“Your voice print has been programmed into the command bank. Yes.”
“I.D. me.”
“We identify you as Executive Level One.”
“My name?”
The reply was again a series of high-low bits.
“That is my statistical I.D. What is my social name?”
“It has not been entered.”
“You will receive it now and link it to my voice print.”
“Circuits open.”
“I am Doctor Damon Krupp.”
“Received. Entered. Linked.”
“Are you programmed for inspection?”
“Yes, Doctor Krupp.”
“Open for inspection.”
The hangar dome slowly split into two hemispheres which slid down and admitted the soft light of the starry sky, revealing the two-man craft with which Krupp had been speaking. Standing tall over the deep ignition pit, it bore a startling resemblance to a giant antique Russian samovar; small crown head, wide cylindrical body with what might have been odd handles thrusting out, then tapering to a square base on four feet which actually were jet nozzles.
A hatch opened at the base, flooding the hangar with light from the craft’s interior—the ship had no need for port-holes—and Krupp stepped up two inset rungs and entered to inspect. R-OG-OR 1001 was surprisingly overheated. Krupp stripped off his clothes and crawled and clung his way up toward the control deck which was the samovar crown. (There would be no such climbing constraint out in weightless space.) In the main belly cabin he discovered the reason for the tropical heat; a naked woman was sweating and swearing over the maintenance gear surrounding a transparent incubator. She was tinkering and crawling over and under the complications like an octopus.
It was his assistant, Dr. Cluny Decco, and Krupp had never seen her nude before, but his controlled voice did not betray his delighted amazement.
“Cluny?”
“Yeah, Damon. I heard you and the ship exchanging compliments. Ouch! Goddamn!”
“Trouble?”
“This sonofabitch oxygen feed is temperamental. Now you see it, now you don’t. It may kill the kid.”
“We won’t let it.”
“We can’t take any chances. After seven months of the care and feeding of our fetus, I’m not going to have a piece of machinery blow it for us.”
“It’s not the gear, Cluny, it’s ambient pressure that’s throwing off readings and choking the feed. The gear was designed for space, and space will make all the difference.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
“Then we crack the crib and give the boy mouth-to-mouth.”
“Crack this thing? Christ, Damon, it’d take a sledge to split it open.”
“Don’t be so literal, Cluny. I meant crack it open procedurewise.”
“Oh.” She crawled out and stood up, steaming in skin and temper. Krupp had never seen her look so desirable. “Sorry. I never did have any sense, humorwise.” She gave him a peculiar look. “Was the mouth-to-mouth a joke, too?”
“Not any more,” Krupp said, seizing her. “I’ve been promising myself this as soon as our boy was decanted. He’s born now, Cluny…”
And this is why R-OG-OR 1001 crashed on Ganymede.
The ship had been swung off-course by a lucky hit on the guidance system by a rare million Bev cosmic particle. This happens occasionally and is corrected manually, but Krupp and Decco had too much blind faith in computers and were too involved with their passion to check, so all three, the man, the woman, and the boy in the incubator, went down.
I’m Odessa Partridge, and I was in a unique position to ferret out and sometimes reconstruct the events before and after the facts and put them in proper sequence in this telling. Exempli gratia: I began with the encounter in R-OG-OR 1001 which I didn’t unearth until long afterward, mostly from the gossip still current at Cosmotron Gesellschaft. That answered a lot of questions much too late. Anyway, it was only a fringe benefit; I was after something else.
By the way, if I seem to be flip in my attitude, it’s because my business can be so damned grueling that humor is the only sovereign remedy. God knows, the grim patterns generated on Jekyll Island which tortured the lives of the Synergist from Ganymede, the Sprite from Titania, and my own, needed all the humor I possessed.
Now let’s have a look at the events surrounding that first link in the chain.
When Cosmotron set up their Metastasis Energy Plant they threatened, blackmailed, bribed and finally were permitted to buy Jekyll Island on the Georgia coast. It took them a year to roust out and even kill off the squatters and dedicated ecologists entrenched in the Greenbelt preserve. It took them that same year to clean up the trash, garbage and corpses deposited by transients. Then they encircled Jekyll Island with 1,500 megavolts of electrified privacy and built their energy plant.
For the production they required apparatus long abandoned and forgotten. Another year was spent exploring and raiding museums for antique gear. Then they discovered that the brilliant young engineering Ph.Ds hadn’t the foggiest notion of how to handle these antiquities. They hired a high-level personnel expert who heisted ancient professor-types out of retirement and put them under contract to operate the apparat which they alone could understand. The expert was elevated to supervisor status. He was Dr. Damon Krupp who had taken his degrees in Persona Analysis.
Krupp’s doctoral dissertation had been on Huntington’s chorea (Saint Vitus’ Dance), a dazzling exploration of the concept that the disease magnified the intellectual and creative potential of the victim. It was so dramatic and caused such a stir that backbiters used to say, “Krupp has Huntington’s chorea and Huntington has Krupp’s.”
He was still hipped on magnification of the intellect and the Cosmotron plant opened the door for a dangerous experiment. Cosmotron synthesized every element in the periodic table from atomic weights 1.008 (Hydrogen) to 259.59 (Asimovium) by a metatastic process which duplicated in miniature the solar thermonuclear caper. Radiation byproducts were a constant problem, which is why the staff was required to wear armor at all times; but the radiation inspired Krupp’s experiment, Maser Generated Fetal Amplification by Syndetic Emission of Radiation.
His assistant, Cluny Decco, was an M.D. and was delighted to participate, mostly because she was slavishly in love with Krupp, partly because she loved playing with machinery. Together they designed and set up the lab gear for what they called “The Magfaser Experiment,” which, of course, was the acronym for Maser Generated Fetal, etc. Then came the problem of materiel. Here Cluny delivered.
She placed guarded advertisements in the Georgia media which, to the harassed alone, meant free abortions. Together, they examined all applicants, physically and psychologically, until the ideal one came along. She was a tall, dark, handsome mountain girl with a keen illiterate intelligence, the victim of a rural rape, two months pregnant. This time, Dr. Decco took extra pains to preserve the fetus intact in its sac which was placed in an amniotic fluid in a flask.
Cluny’s microsurgery linking the umbilical cord to a balanced nutrient supply had been, by then, so explicitly researched that it was almost Standard Operational Procedure, but the tricky Maser amplification was the first ever. How it was done will never be known because only Krupp and Decco knew it and the secret died with them on Ganymede. However, Cluny had had a brief encounter with one of the Cosmotron executives, who must remain anonymous, and he reported this conversation from the bed.
“Listen, Cluny, you and Dr. Krupp have been overheard whispering about something you call ‘Magfaser.’ What is it?”
“An acronym.”
“For what?”
“You’ve been very nice to me.”
“Likewise, I’m sure.”
“So can I put you on exec’s honor?”
“I am already.”
“No tell no one?”
“Not even President Gesellschaft himself.”
“Maser generated fetal amplification by syndetic emission of radiation.”
“What!”
“Yeah. We’ve been using some of our radiation byproducts.”
“To do what?”
“Amplify a fetus during gestation.”
“A fetus! Inside you?”
“Hell no. It’s a test-tube baby floating in a Maser womb. It’s about nine months ready to decant now.”
“Where’d you get it?”
“Even if I knew her name I wouldn’t tell you.”
“What are you amplifying it into?”
“That’s the headache, we don’t know. Damon thought we were doing an overall amplification, sort of putting the kid through a magnifying glass…”
“Sizewise?”
“Brainwise, but we’ve been monitoring his dream patterns—you know that the fetus does dream, sucks its thumb and all that—and they’re just average. Now we suspect that what we did was multiply a single aptitude by itself into a kind of quadratic X-square.”
“Crazy!”
“So what’s X, the unknown quantity, that’s been multiplied by itself? Your guess is as good as mine.”
“D’you think you’ll find out?”
“Damon thinks we’d better get help. He’s a brilliant guy, really the greatest, and what makes him great is his modesty. He’s willing to admit when he’s licked.”
“Where will you find help?”
“We’re taking a leave and jetting the kid to Mars, the OxCam University Dome. They’re all spaced-out experts there and Damon has enough clout to get all the prognosis he needs.”
“And all this for a test-tube experiment?”
“Man, this isn’t just another experiment. This can’t be just another test-tube baby, not after seven months of syndetic saturation. The kid must have some special quality, but what? Ah re-peats, suh. Yoah guess is as good as mine.”
She never found out.
Of course we’ve forgotten our history. That profound philosopher, Santayana (1863-1952) once said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Surprise! Surprise! We’re repeating it with a stupidity that verges on a death-wish. Let me recall the saga of our Solar, just in case you cut that Monday lecture in Cosmography or else dropped out entire because you signed up for it by mistake, getting it confused with Cosmetology 101—The branch of philosophy concerning itself with the general structure of beautifying the complexion, skin, etc. (2 credits)
It’s the “New World” all over again. Just as the English, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Dutch had colonized the Americas and fought in the 17th century, so the Terrans had colonized the Solar and are now wrangling in the 27th century. A thousand years don’t change human nature much. Nothing can. Consult your friendly neighborhood anthropologist.
The Wops (to quote the Wasps) had a lock on Venus. It was Italian and they insisted on calling it “Venucci,” in honor of Amerigo Vespucci, who had also given his name to some other place. Terra’s moon, Luna, was quintessential California (“Like man, that sun! Gigsville like wow, hey!”) and you would swear that any one of its demented Domes was Muscle Beach or Big Sur. Terra itself had been inherited by the old-fashioned Wasp Corridor after almost everybody else got the hell off.
The English found Mars closest to their native repellent climate, and the UK Domes were programmed for “Bright Periods.”
“Showers,” and a Charles Dickens “White Christmas.” One amusing aspect: The Martian “year” is nearly twice as long as the Terran year, which meant they had to go the twenty-four month route or opt for a sixty-day month. Nobody agreed, so there was hell to pay on Christmas, Easter, and Yom Kippur.
I’m simplifying, you understand. Actually, it’s only the majority on Mars that’s English. There are also the Welsh, Scots, Irish, Hindus, Nova Scotian, and even Appalachian mountaineers, descendants of the 17th-century English settlers in America. Some mingle with others; some prefer insularity.
Similarly, when I speak of Luna as “quintessential California,” I’m really only describing the mad charm of that segment which has captivated all the Domes; Mexican, Japanese-American, Canadian, and even Vegas and Monte Carlo, the gaming centers. They’ve turned them on to bikinis, Lunar dune-buggies, holistic health, reflexology, and hot-tub babble about “human potential.”
“interface,” and “what space you’re into.”
Keep that in mind while I describe the Solar. I’m merely highlighting the predominant in a gallimaufry.
Neptune’s Triton, largest and remotest habitable satellite in the Solar, was Japanese-Chinese, contracted to “Jap-Chink” and “Jink,” although there were other Asiatic races. They were as arrogant as ever, contemptuous of what they called “The Inner Barbarians,” and now even more so since their discovery of “Meta” (short for metastasis) the amazing new energy generator which burst on the Solar like a thunderclap and ignited more conflicts than the entire history of gold.
We’d wasted our energy sources like drunken sailors for centuries and were down to an incredibly expensive scraping of the bottom of the barrel:
Quasi-fossil and semifossil fuels like peat and oil-bearing shales.
Sun, wind, and tide power. (Installations too complex and costly, except for the wealthy.)
Unburned carbons; soot, chimney sweepings, sulfur-bearing residues.
BTUs from machinery exhausts.
Friction heat from the rubber and plywood industries and plastics plants.
Fast-growing pulpwood forests; poplar, willow, and cottonwood. (But the population explosion had limited available acreage.)
Geothermal heat.
The Three Mile Island-type atomic-power generators were still being fought and blocked by half the population which would rather freeze than burn. Then along came Meta, the unexpected energy catalyst discovered on Triton, and it was almost as though Mother Nature had said, “If you’ve learned your lesson about waste, here’s your salvation if you use it wisely.”
Whether the Solar did remains to be seen.
Jupiter’s Ganymede was strongly Afro, seasoned with Brown and mixed Mulatto. It had been taken over by the Blacks from France and her colonies who’d sickened of the hopeless war with the Honks and were now warring with themselves. (They’re not primitive; just thorny.) Other Blacks and Browns were also lending a hand; Congo v. Tanzania, Maori v. Hawaii, Kenya v. Ethiopia, Alabama v. All-Africa, und so weiter. It was the despair of the SAACP, the Solar Association for the Advancement of the Colored People.
The Afro Domes are colorful and much visited by tourists. An attempt is made to replicate the tribal villages with palm-thatched huts (containing modern plumbing) and little yards with African animals for pets; nilgai, gnu, baby elephants and rhino, all sorts of exotic snakes, and even crocodiles (if you can afford a pond) which are a constant source of exasperation. Young crocs make gourmet eating for some, and the despicable crime of crocnapping has spread on Ganymede.
The Dutch, plus others, were on Jupiter’s Callisto which, like Ganymede, is even bigger than Mercury. Their Domes are reminiscent of medieval Bruges, with cobbled streets and over hanging houses. (The Callisto Chamber of Commerce won’t like this, but the local whores, like their predecessors in Amsterdam, still hang small mirrors on either side of their windows for a full view of the length of the street, and tap-tap-tap the glass pane with a coin whenever a likely john passes by.)
Callisto is heavy in the gold, silver, jewel and gem-cutting business which has brought a large Jewish population to the Domes. The Jews are traditional experts with gems, and have always been on traditionally friendly terms with the Dutch. There are also the traditional artists’ colonies, and the rest of the Solar wonders how painters with names like Rembrandt-29-van Rijn or Jan-31-Vermeer dast demand and get so much loot for avant-garde productions to which no sensible person would give house-room.
Saturn’s Titan (not to be confused with Uranus’ Titania, about which much more later) started like England’s old Australia. It was a dumping ground for hopeless recidivists until the Solar decided that it was cheaper to execute than transport, and to hell with the do-gooders and bleeding hearts. Titan descendants still speak an anachronistic, incomprehensible convicts’ jargon, is a lopsided inferno of ancient hatreds against the Solar, and plays no part in this faithful history except to provide the classic line, “First prize, a day on Titan; second prize, a week on Titan.”
Some of the small satellites like Phobos, Mimas, and Jupiter VI and VII have tiny freak colonies devoted to various religions, theater groups, diets, and sexual abstinences. With one lovely, extraordinary exception, no local inhabitants had ever been discovered on the solar planets and satellites, so the Dutch didn’t have to buy Callisto for $24. No Indian wars against the English on Mars. Some clown calling himself “Star-born Jones” had started a cult for a thousand more who also believed that as infants they had been secretly kidnapped from Outer Space by the Solar. He established a JonesDome in the Caloris Basin on Mercury, which nobody wanted anyway.
A Mercurian “day” lasts 88 Terran days and the temperature soars high enough to melt lead. There was no need for the aliens snatched from the stars to commit suicide; the Dome insulation failed one day and they all roasted to death. The sort of sadists who relish the horrors of Grand Guignol theater often tour JonesDome to stare at the roasted, frozen mummies. One creep with a sick sense of humor stuck an apple in Star-born Jones’ mouth. It’s still there.
Ah, but that one extraordinary exception, Titania, the sprite of the unexpected, daughter of Uranus, mythic Ruler of the Heavens. Here were found local natives indeed! The great William Herschel, professional musician and amateur astronomer, sort of stumbled on Uranus with his homemade telescope back in 1781 and spotted the satellite Titania six years later. Are there any questions?
Q: Yes, we would like a description, please.
A: Well, Uranus is covered with very bright cloud bands of orange, red, and—
Q: Not Uranus, Titania.
A: Ah, yes, the magic moon. You know, the Cosmos must have a sense of humor. To almost every one of its systems or combinations a “Drop of Freak” is added to thumb its nose at order and harmony. It rather reminds one of Roger Bacon’s famous line, “There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.”
Q: Francis.
A: What?
Q: Not Roger, Francis Bacon.
A: Francis, of course. Thank you. In the Solar assemblage, Titania is that strangeness, to the wonderment and exasperation of all the rest; wonderment because the few clues and hints we have are a fascinating exasperation because we can’t understand them.
Q: What are they?
A: If you’re acquainted with gems and crystals, you know that just about any crystal may have fluid inclusions. In size, inclusions range from a diameter of less than one micron to a few centimeters. Inclusions bigger than a millimeter in diameter are rather rare; those in the centimeter range are museum pieces.
Q: But don’t they destroy the value of gems?
A: True. True, but we’re exploring the geology of crystals. Most of their inclusions contain a solution of various salts in various concentrations from nearly pure water to concentrated brine. Most also enclose a bubble of gas. When the bubble is small enough to respond to irregularities in the number of molecules striking it, it can be seen to wander continuously in a jerky Brownian movement:
Q: You lost us. Did you know?
A: Sorry. I just threw in a little classy Einstein, but, you know, it’s fascinating to watch such a bubble under the microscope and to think that it’s been nervously pacing its cell for a billion years.
Q: When are you getting to Titania, the magic moon?
A: Wait for it. Wait for it. Some inclusions have one or more crystals in their liquid; some are composed of several immiscible liquids; a few contain gas alone. Sometimes the crystals within the inclusion have their own fluid inclusions with bubbles in them, and so ad infinitum. Now, multiply this by a thousand miles, her diameter, and you have Titania, the freak of the Solar.
Q: What!
A: Indeed yes. Under the crust of meteoric trash and rubble accumulated through the eons, the satellite contains a conglomerate of giant crystals ranging from a foot to a mile in diameter.
Q: You ask us to believe that?
A: Why not? The traditional models of planets and satellites are being revised. It’s speculated that Terra may actually be a living organism; we just can’t go deep enough to find out. We do know that a hell of a lot more went into the formation of the Solar than gases condensing into mere solids.
Q: And what about Titania’s crystals?
A: They have a multitude of inclusions and inclusions within inclusions ad infinitum.
Q: And are they supposed to be alive, too?
A: We don’t know, but we do know that they contain a fascinating life-form that has evolved, displaying its own Brownian movement. They’re wonderful and perplexing and exasperating because they won’t let the Solar visit and explore. “Titania for the Titanians,” is their slogan.
Q: What do they look like?
A: The inclusions? A sort of proto-universe. They’re self-illuminating and sometimes syncopate or synchronize when you jet close enough to make them out through the crust. There seems to be some sort of molecular or osmotic linkage between them which—
Q: No, no. The locals. The natives of Titania. What do they look like?
A: Oh, the Titanians. What do they look like? Italian, English, French, Chinese, Black, Brown, your wife, your husband, three lovers, two dentists, and a partridge in a pear tree.
Q: Don’t joke. What do they look like?
A: Who’s joking? They look like any living thing. The Titanians are polymorphs, which means they can take any damn shape they please.
Q: And any sex?
A: No. Boys are boys and girls are girls, and they don’t reproduce by budding.
Q: Is it an alien culture?
A: It’s alien but not from a distant star. It’s strictly a home-grown Solar product, but, man, like it’s a race apart.
Q: Is it an ancient culture?
A: Dating back to the Terran Tertiary at least; around fifty million years.
Q: Is it a primitive culture?
A: No. It’s advanced out of sight.
Q: Then why haven’t the Titanians visited our earth in the past?
A: And what makes you think they haven’t? King Tutankhamen could have been a Titanian. Or Pocahontas. Or Einstein. Or Rin-tin-tin. Or the mad scientist’s Giant Clam That Clobbered Cuba. Or do I mean the giant scientist’s Mad Clam?
Q: What! Are they dangerous?
A: No, they’re full of fun and games. You never know what they’re up to next. They’re sprites of the unexpected.
And one of them fell in love with the Synergist.
The Solar was being flooded with counterfeit coins and tokens, beautiful jobs minted from Britannia metal. We perted the operation—Pert is the acronym for Program Evaluation and Review Technique—put together a flow chart of the progress of the fakes from Mars out into the Solar, but we couldn’t locate the Critical Path to attack. In other words, we had to find the one line in the network through which alone we could stop everything.
Well, “Pointer” was in the London Dome doing a Cockney color feature for Solar Media. He explored all the patterns, including the traditional Cockney Rhyming Slang; “plates” for “feet”—plates of meat, feet; “frog” for “road”—frog and toad, road; “titfer” for “hat”—tit for tat, hat; “dot” for “flash” (flash is counterfeit money)—dot and dash, flash. And that was our Critical Path.
Because there was an antique shop in New Strand called “Dot and Dash” which specialized in old medals, old silver loving cups, ornamental presentation swords, fancy gavels and maces… that sort of thing. Very chic. Very expensive. We’d been combing the metal foundries for the source of the coins without success; and here it was, right under our nose, unconsciously pointed out for us. Old loving cups aren’t silver; they’re Britannia metal.
We knew a lot about “Pointer,” we had to, but we didn’t know what breed he really was—he didn’t know himself—and I’d best explain the enigma by describing my first meeting with him some time after we’d discovered that we could use his unique qualities.
It was at one of Jay Yael’s delightful talk-ins. Jay is a professional art mavin and he collects people the same way he collects pictures. There were a dozen guests, including Yael’s prized protégé, the Synergist. He was a tallish, angular, formerly-young man who somehow gave the impression that he would have been more comfortable without clothes.
He behaved like the rare, better sort of celebrity, and he was somewhat celebrated; balanced, amused, never taking himself seriously, clearly showing his feeling that fame is only part earned and mostly luck. And he had an extravagant sense of humor.
He displayed an absorbed interest in everybody and everything, listening intently and timing his responses to encourage speakers and draw them out. The timing was his synergic genius, but he had another remarkable quality; the ability to convince each separate member of a group that his absorbed interest was devoted solely to him-or herself. He made eye-contact and his glances said that you were the only one who really counted.
When people are poised and successful there’s always the danger of inspiring hostility unless it can be seen that they’re not altogether perfect. The Synergist had private flaws, to be sure, but also a public one which was curious and arresting. He wore enormous black-rimmed spectacles in an attempt to conceal the astonishing sunbursts scarred on his cheeks. He had a habit of pulling the spectacles down to mask the scars, so automatic that it was almost a tic.
He was Rogue Winter, of course, and during a lull in the conversation-pit I asked him whether his first name was a nickname. This merely to pique him into talking, you understand. I knew all about him because that was part of my job.
“No,” he said solemnly. “It’s short for Rogue Elephant. Dr. Yael discovered me in Africa, where he shot my mother. She’d been crossed with a gorilla by an alien breeder from Boötes alpha.” He pulled the spectacles down. “No, I’m a liar. It’s really short for Rogue Male. Dr. Yael discovered me in a whorehouse where he shot the madam. Dear Madam Bruce,” he added wistfully. “He was like a mother to me.” Spectacles. “But if you must have the vero truth,” he said in deadly earnest, “my full name is Rogue’s Gallery Winter. After Dr. Yael shot the Chief Inspector at Scotland Yard, he—”
“Oh stop it, son,” Yael laughed. We were all laughing. “Tell the nice lady how I made my greatest discovery.”
“I don’t know about the great-bit, sir, but it was your discovery and it’s your story. Damned if I’m going to goniff into your act.”
“Yes, I raised you genteel-like,” Yael smiled. “Well, briefly, Rogue’d been found in the wreckage of a craft by scouts from the Maori Dome on Ganymede. He was an infant, the only survivor, and they brought him back to the Dome, where the King or Chief, Te Uinta, formally adopted him.”
“He had no sons,” Winter explained, “only daughters. When Uinta dies, I get to be king banana.”
“Hence the blazon of royalty on Rogue’s cheeks, of which he’s so absurdly ashamed.”
“They kind of zig girls off into a zag,” Winter said. Spectacles again.
Knowing his track record with women, I had to stifle a laugh, and I’m almost certain that his quick eye caught it.
“The Maori named him Rog,” Yael continued, “because those were the only I.D. letters that could be made out on the wreck. R-dash-oh-gee. R-OG Uinta, pronounced with a long ‘O’ as in Rogue. Right, son?”
“Sounded more like R-grunt-O, sir,” Winter said and pronounced his name Maori-style. “Makes people want to say, ‘Gesundheit.’ ”
“End of part one,” Yael went on. “Part two. I was visiting the Maori Dome to have a look at their wonderful woodcarving and came across this ten-year-old kid with his sister. She was wearing a beaded tunic and he was pointing to the beads and trying to explain a pattern he saw in them.”
“Which was?” I asked.
“Tell the nice lady, R-grunt-G.”
“It seemed so obvious.” Winter pulled the specs down. “The pattern was beads and stitches in a triangle:
Yael rolled his eyes to heaven. “God deliver mere mortals from a genius!” he laughed. “Did you hear him speaking triangle? He will do that; he thinks and lives patterns. I’ll have to translate. The king’s child was pointing to a group of eight red beads and holding up one finger. Then he pointed to four empty stitches and made Maori sign for zero. One finger up for two black beads. Zero sign for the single empty stitch. Then he swept his palm across the triangle and held up ten fingers. His sister giggled because she was ticklish, and that was my discovery.”
“What?” I asked. “That girls are ticklish?”
“Of course not. That her brother was a genius.”
“At beadwork design?”
“Sharpen a wit, madame. One group of eight. No four. One two. No units. The king’s child was counting in binary. One-oh-one-oh equals ten.”
“It seemed so obvious,” Winter repeated.
“What? Obvious?” Yael snorted. “A naked, illiterate Maori kid discovering binary on his own? Well, naturally I made a deal with King Te Uinta, brought R-grunt-G back to Terra, Englished his name to Rogue Winter, began his education, and then had a problem. Where the devil do you aim a child with a genius for patterns?”
“Math?” I suggested.
“That came second. With my bias, art came first, but after a brilliant start in Paris the boy lost interest and damped off. Then math at M.I.T. and the same thing. Architecture at Princeton, business at Harvard, Juilliard for music, Cornell Med, Taliesin for Dome design, astrophysics at Palomar—all the same story; brilliant start and then a damping off of dedication.”
“They all seemed compartmentalized,” Winter said. “Parts of a whole without any connection. I was looking for the whole ball of wax.”
“He was of age by now, so I drove him out—”
“With whips,” Winter cringed.
“With a thousand in his pocket for a Wanderjahr, and stern orders not to return until he’d discovered what he wanted to do with himself. Frankly, I expected him to come crawling back, dead broke and obedient…”
“Like a rogue and peasant slave.”
“What’s that cribbed from?” I asked Winter.
“Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2,” he whispered. “Don’t tell anyone, but I studied English Lit. behind Yael’s back. You know, Major British Writers I & II. Busted that too,” he added, “owing to a surfeit of lampreys.”
“Instead, the young man swaggered in, if you please, with cash bursting out of his jumpsuit and the tape of the damnedest integration the Solar has ever seen. You all must recall ‘Lockstep,’ a best-seller. Rogue wove gambling on Luna with—”
“I ran the doctor’s gift up to a hundred thousand before word got around and they barred me from the casino tables,” Winter laughed. “Rogue the Greek, they called me.”
“—with corn crops in Kansas, Meta on Triton, high fashion on Ganymede, the Women’s Movement on Venucci, art auctions on Callisto—all into a Solar pattern which he made so obvious but which had never been noticed before. He’d found himself, by God! He was a Synergist.”
Winter spoke Solar-Verbal because he was an Inquisitor (back in the twentieth century they called it an “Investigative Reporter”) and the words of the worlds were the tools of his trade. He knew he understood Soma-Gestalt (back in the twentieth century they called it “body English”) because he’d had much investigating experience communicating with strangers on many levels, and it was his business to discover what realities lay hidden behind the concealment of words.
All this he knew, but what he didn’t know was that he resonated to the Anima Mundi which produced his extraordinary synergic pattern sense. I used to think that the frightful shock to the infant of the crash of the R-OG craft was the cause of his hypersynsitivity. Now I know that it was the Krupp-Decco maser experiment, and the X-quantity which was multiplied by itself in what I call a “Phane Sense,” from the Greek, phainein, meaning to show. It was this phane sense that enabled him to be shown things from apparently unrelated facts and events and synergize them into a whole.
Anima Mundi is the fundamental “Soul of the World.” Latinwise, Anima = soul, life. Mundi = the world. Anima Mundi is the cosmic spirit pervading all living things and, it is argued, even all inanimate things as well. I believe that myself. An old house has a spirit and character of its own. How often have you seen a picture which doesn’t like its place in the decor and rebels by refusing to hang straight? Don’t chairs poke us for attention as we pass, and sulky stair treads trip us up?
So many of us resonate to Anima and are powerfully influenced by it. We can recognize some obvious aspects; “soul.”
“vibes.”
“Psi,” weather and night-and-day affects; but we don’t realize that these are merely facets of the deep, underlying Anima Mundi which is the bedrock, so to speak, the bottom line of all existence. Rogue Winter understood this least of all while he was being affected most of all. Here’s an instance of his unconscious response to the bedrock patterns, which we got from the Flemish girl.
He was on assignment on Mars and taking an afternoon off fishing in a salt lake in the Welsh Dome. They’d stocked it with Coelacanths, “Old Four-Legs,” a legacy from the Cretaceous. Winter was casting and retrieving his lure, fishing east to meet the schools of Four-Legs feeding from east to west. Suddenly—he thought it was a hunch, he thought he was outsmarting the fish, but it was really his unconscious seventh sense forcing him to answer an Anima command—suddenly he reversed himself and began fishing west.
After he’d been casting without success for a few minutes, a girl appeared on the lonely lakeshore. She was wearing chopped jeans, no top, had swept bronze hair, and was carrying two heavy shopping totes without benefit of null-G. She put them down, rubbed her arms, smiled and said, “Allo.”
He was instantly enchanted by her French accent and grateful that she didn’t stare at the sunbursts blazoned on his cheeks. “Good evening. Where are you going?”
“I am guest at ’ouse in next village. I ’ave been buying dineur.”
“Where are you visiting from?”
“Callisto.”
“But I thought Calliso was Dutch.”
“You ’ave never visite?”
“Not yet.”
“Is not all Hollandais. Is Benelux, comprenez? Is also Flanders, Belgium, Luxembourg. I am from Flemish Dome. You are feeshing?”
“As you see. Would you like a fish for dineur?” He reeled in and held the lure up to her. “Spit on it and that will bring us luck.” That was a lie, of course, but she was very pretty and had a delicious bosom.
She gave him a perplexed look, was reassured by his gallant glance, and spat delicately on the lure. Winter cast out into the deeper waters, started his jig-jag retrieve, and had a tremendous strike. He couldn’t believe his luck. He shouted with laughter and began fighting to bring the fish in while the girl danced excitedly alongside him. He kept a tight line on the Four-Legs but when at last he brought it to shore it was the body of a child.
The Flemish girl moaned, “Dieu! Is the Megan fille. She drown this afternoon. They ’ave look for ’er bodee ever since.”
“Jesus Jig God,” Winter muttered. He detached the lure from the tiny bathing suit and picked up the body. “Show me where to take her.”
He hadn’t the faintest inkling that it was a subliminal summons by the Anima to which his synsitivity had responded. There was an unbalanced death that had to be fitted into the Anima pattern, and it called him west. It might have been resolved eventually by other natural responses, but Rogue Winter’s seventh sense, his resonance to the bottom line, had drawn him there first.
And he hadn’t the faintest inkling that it was this same Anima resonance which produced the serendipity which always amazed and amazed him. Serendipity is the faculty of making unexpected and unsought discoveries by accident. You’re on your way from A to B, minding your own business, and you stub your toe on X, much like Herschel stumbling on Uranus. This was the quality that made Rogue Winter our “Pointer.”
What else on him from our Meta file (MAX SECRET. ALEPH AGENTS ONLY) Operation Pointer:
He had curious recall. He remembered shapes to the milli, but not colors. He could remember the argument and action of everything he had read or seen, but not addresses or phone numbers. He remembered the personality of everyone he had met, but not their names. He recalled his love affairs in patterns which the ladies would not appreciate.
He had undergone risky cerebral surgery to install prosthetic synapses which gave him a brain-wave interface with his studio computer. Winter could think to his workshop computer which would print, tape, and/or graphically illustrate his concepts. Not many can use this advanced technique. It demands an unswerving concentration which cannot be deflected by stray associations.
He would do anything to puzzle out the warp and woof of a pattern; lie, cheat, charm, steal, bully, humble himself, break any one of the Ten Commandments plus the Eleventh (Thou Shalt Not Get Caught) and he had broken most of them in the line of duty.
He was thirty-three years old, 6-1½, 187 lbs., in fair condition. Once upon a time he’d been married to a darling girl from the Frisco Dome on Luna. She wore her fair hair in a casque, had slitty dark eyes, a supple swimmer’s body, and a big front, a type to which Winter was always attracted. She spiced every sentence with the igwords that were the current cant of the Lunar Domes and are spreading: “Zig, man, I love you, gig? But I’m jig sleepy is all, gone to bed, mig.”
Charming, flaky, entertaining, but, alas, merely with it in the I.Q. department, so the marriage broke up. Winter loved ladies, but only as equals. One of his ladies, also a slender-big-front-number, remarked bitterly that even he couldn’t live up to his idea of equality. The Titanian sprite took care of that.
Winter had returned from an assignment inquisiting the Women’s Movement on Venucci and he was still in shock from a violent event in the Bologna Dome; the more so because he couldn’t understand it. This was the night before the day that changed his life.
He had a floor-through apartment in the Beaux Arts rotunda, a complex built in the old Edwardian style with bay windows, fireplaces, and thick walls for the protection of creative artists from each other. The insulation muffled the cries of sopranos coping with coloratura, the electronic thunder of “Galactic Gavotte in G-minor,” the dictation of the Oxford English Dictionary being translated into Nü-Spēk.
His pad was old-fashioned and exactly suited to his taste: Large living room with Georgian furnishings, utility kitchen, bath with a monster six-foot tub, two bedrooms in the rear, one large, one small. The small resembled a monk’s cell in its simplicity. The large was his workshop and a mess; walls lined with books, tapes, films, software; a conference table for a desk; the studio computer to which he was neurally linked—he had to make sure the read-in was switched off when not in use, otherwise it would record everything he was thinking in the apartment—stacks of stationery, virgin film and tape, shambles of old stories cluttering the floor, some spewing off their spools looking like a clutch of serpents in search of Laocoön and his two sons.
He was so upset that he didn’t bother to unpack his travel tote or even change, and the Alitalia jets are not famed for cleanliness. Instead he got a whiskey bottle, sat down on the living-room couch with his feet up on the coffee table and tried to drink himself numb. He was trying to recover from his first killing, which had taken place his last night on Venucci.
Turning points occur in moments. This was a three-second affray in the dim Central Gardens of the Bologna Dome that changed Winter’s life. He was waiting for a girl to keep her date with him when a gorill armed with a deadly knife came at him out of the dark bushes. Years of childhood drilling had trained Winter’s reflexes. He did not meet force with force as was natural and expected; instead he went limp, fell supine, did a double-roll as the assailant floundered over him, and was on the killer’s back. Two smashes with a knee into the testicles, knife-wrist twisted back and snapped with both hands, knife seized and right carotid slashed. All this in three seconds of hissing silence. It took the killer much longer to die. Winter didn’t like to think of that.
“But why, baby? Why?” he kept asking.
Three drinks later he was suddenly inspired. “What I need right now is a girl to lose myself in. That’s the only way to wait for a pattern to show.”
One of his reciprocal Rogues (he had a dozen alternate selves) answered, “Feel free, but you left your big red book in the workshop.”
“Why, for jigjeeze sake, can’t I have the little black book, famed in song and story?”
“Why can’t you remember a phone number? Never mind. Shall we join the ladies?”
He made three calls, all negative. He had three more drinks, all positive. He stripped, went to his Japanese bed in the monk’s cell, thrashed, swore, and slept at last, dreaming crazed p a t t e r n s
Next morning Winter was up fairly early and out. First to the network for a script conference with his producer. Next to his publisher for a battle over graphics. Last to Solar Media where he entered the editorial corridors and began his customary circus parade, kissing and pinching the staff without bias and finishing in Augustus (Ching) Sterne’s corner office. Ching was editor-in-chief.
“Have you got the story, Rogella?”
“Got it.”
“Deadline in three weeks.”
“I’ll make it. Have you got an empty office I can use for an hour or so? I have to make some calls and production gave me my galleys to check. They want them back today.”
“Which story is that?”
“Space And Mongolian Idiocy: Arrested Development in E = Mc2.”
“Crikey! That should have gone to the lab yesterday. Use the conference room, Rogella. Nobody’s brainstorming in there today.”
Winter settled down in the conference room, made his calls, rang the copy department to come pick up his Venucci reference material for their files, finger-read his author’s galley tapes—electrotaxis was another facet of his synergic skills—flew into a rage, rang Ching Sterne and began to ream him out.
A girl poked her head into the conference room. It was a streaky blonde head with hair like a helmet and slitty dark eyes; Demi Jeroux from the copy department. Winter motioned her to enter, blew her a kiss and continued to swear venomously on the intercom. “I’ve been checking the galleys on the idiot piece and some sonofabitch has been rewriting my copy. How many times do I have to tell you? Nobody fucks around with my copy! You want changes, ask me and I’ll make them. I won’t let a shit-ass second-guesser climb onto my by-line.”
Winter banged the intercom down, turned and beamed at the girl who looked frightened. “Demi, love, what a dear sight you are for a drinking man. Come on, give Daddy a big hug.” He opened his arms and she trembled against him. “My peerless copy-checker, I’ve got all the Venucci background material for you.”
“I’m not a copy-checker anymore,” Demi said in a soft Virginia voice.
“Don’t tell me they’ve fired my Gem of the Ocean.”
“I was promoted. I’m a junior editor.”
“Congratulations! And about time. They’ve been wasting a bright girl from—What was that cockagiggy college you took from?”
“Marymount.”
“Did they give you a raise?”
“Alas.”
“Shits! Never mind, we’ll celebrate anyway. Come on out and I’ll get you stoned.”
“You won’t want to, Rogue.”
“Why not?”
“Well… my first assignment was—It was your Mongolian piece.”
“You mean you’re the sonofabitch who—? And you heard me hollering down the pipe?” Winter burst out laughing and kissed the girl, who blushed vividly. “You’ve had your first lesson in handling me. Will you be editing my Women’s Lib inquisition?”
She nodded shyly. “I’ve been assigned to you. Mr. Sterne says it’ll be educational.”
“Now I wonder what he could possibly mean by that? Well, well! Look at Demi Jeroux, the Dixieland Demon, now my editor.”
The girl took a deep, shaky breath and sat down on one of the conference chairs with a fetching mixture of determination and terror. “I want to be something else,” she said in her soft voice.
“Oh?”
“Remember that story you told me about the Irish houseparty?”
“No, dear.”
“That time you took me to lunch at the Kosher Space-Ahoy Seafood Grotto?”
“I remember the lunch but not the story.”
“There… There was an infant crawling around under everybody’s feet and you got mad and kicked him.”
“Oh God! Gig!” Winter laughed. “It was in the Dublin Dome. I’ll never forget the shock of horror that ran through the assembled. It was a rotten thing to do, but it was such a damned dull party.”
“And the infant looked at you with love.”
“He did. He did. Liam must be eight years old by now and he still loves me. He writes to me, in Gaelic. It’s almost as though he was born with a mad passion to be kicked.”
“Rogue,” Demi said, “you’ve kicked me, too.”
“I—? Kicked—?”
An amazed thrill prickled his skin. He’d been propositioned before, but never quite like this.
Have I asked for it?
Did I invite it?
Is she aware of a two-way attraction that I never sensed?
Am I lying?
Did I want this all along?
So his reciprocals quaeried while he got up, closed the door of the conference room, came back to the girl, pulled a chair around so that he could face her knees to knees, and took her hands.
“What is it, Demi?” he asked gently. “Rotten old love?”
She nodded and began to cry. He pulled out a kerchief and put it in her hand.
“What a brave thing to say, darling. How long has this been going on?”
“I don’t know. It just… happened.”
“Just now?”
“No, it—It just sort of happened.”
“How old are you, love?”
“Twenty-three.”
“Been in love before?”
“Never with anyone like you.”
Winter looked at this weeping slender little thing with a big front and sighed. “Listen to me,” he said carefully. “In the first place, I’m grateful. When someone offers love it’s like the end of the rainbow, and not many of us find that treasure. In the second place, I could love you right back, but you have to understand why, Demi. When love is given, the response is love; it’s a kind of beautiful blackmail. I’m just distracting you with the obvious so you won’t get my kerchief too wet…”
“I know,” she whispered. “You’re always honest.”
“So I can be had. I’m queer for women—it’s my one vice—and now of all times I need a girl badly, but—now you must look at me, Demi—but you’ll only have half a man… less, maybe. Most of me belongs to my work.”
“That’s why you’re a genius,” she said.
“Stop adoring me!” He stood up abruptly and crossed to a giant map of the Solar which he examined without interest. “My God! You’re determined to harpoon me, aren’t you.”
“Yes, Rogue. I don’t like it but… yes.”
“Is there no mercy? The late, great Rogue Winter landed by a Marymount nebbish, proving yet again that I’m a clown who can say no to anybody except a girl.”
“Are you afraid?”
“Damn right I am, but I’m helpless. All right, come on.” He opened his arms to her and she fled into them. They kissed; merely a firm contact of lips from him.
“I love your hard mouth,” she murmured. “And your hands are hard, too. Oh, Rogue… Rogue…”
“That’s because I’m a Maori savage.”
“Not you. There’s no one like you, Rogue.”
“Will you zig off the worship. I’m vain enough as it is.”
“Golly! I never thought I’d get you.”
“Yeah? Like hell!” Winter appealed to the ceiling. “Please, holy ancestors of the royal Uinta line, noble kings who have ruled the Maori for fifteen generations and whose souls now reside in Te Uinta’s left eye… Please don’t let me be gaffed by this black widow spider!”
Demi giggled and let out a Ssss! of delight.
“What can a noble savage do when a girl sets her sights on him? He’s surrounded, doomed, losted.”
“Left eye?” Demi asked.
“Uh-huh. We believe that’s where the souls dwell.” He closed his right eye and the left returned her look of delight and anticipation. “Gigsville, Demi. Leave us go out and celebrate, only now it’s me that’s going to get smashed… to numb the pain.”
“Ssss!”
First she had to tour the apartment, inspecting and sometimes admiring every piece of furniture, every picture, every book and tape, the knick-knacks and souvenirs of his assignments through the Solar. She raised an eyebrow in old-fashioned surprise at the six-foot tub (formerly illegal because such luxuries devoured too much energy before the Age of Meta), cocked an eye at the Japanesey bed, merely a thick white mattress on a giant slab of ebony, and let out a little moan at the mess in the workshop.
We would sit down, and think which way to walk, and pass our long love’s day. Thou by the Indian Ganges side should’st rubies find; I by the tide of Humber would complain.
“What did you like about me?”
“When?”
“When I first came to work for Solar.”
“What makes you think I liked you?”
“You took me to lunch.”
“It was your dedication.”
“To what, in particular?”
“To granting Vulcan its rightful place in the family of planets.”
“There isn’t any Vulcan.”
“That’s what I liked about you.”
“What’s this in the souvenir box, please?”
“It’s a porcelain doll’s face. I found it in a trash barrel in the Anglia Dome on Mars and fell madly in love with her.”
“And this?”
“Oh come now, Demi. You don’t really want to explore my entire past, do you?”
“No, but tell me, please. It’s so odd.”
“It’s a teardrop from the Gem Tower in the Burma Dome on Ganymede.”
“Gem Tower?”
“They pour synthetic jewels the same way they used to drop pellets in a shot tower centuries ago. They were pouring red ruby flux and this one didn’t drop spherical, so they gave it to me.”
“It’s so strange. It looks like there’s a flower inside it.”
“Yes, that’s a flaw. Would you like it?”
“No, thanks. I want more than flawed rubies from you.”
“She’s turning aggressive,” Winter told the living room. “Now that she’s nailed me, she’s showing her true colors.”
I would love you ten years before the Flood, and you should, if you please, refuse till the conversion of the Jews.
“And what did you like about me when you first met me at Solar?” he asked.
“Your beat.”
“My exhaustion?”
“Gracious no! Your rhythm.”
“That’s because I’m really a Black. We all got rhythm.”
“No you’re not. You’re not even a real Maori.” She touched his cheek with tender fingertips. “I know how you got these scars.”
He pulled his spectacle down.
“You do everything with some sort of beat,” she went on. “Like a rhythm section in a combo. When you walk, talk, joke…”
“What are you, some kind of music freak?”
“So I wanted to get into your tempo.”
As she replaced the ruby teardrop in the souvenir box, Winter stared. The evening light had caught her at an odd angle and suddenly she bore a flashing resemblance to the redheaded Rachel Straus of Solar Media with whom he’d once had a perplexing relationship.
My vegetable love should grow vaster than empires, and more slow.
He was beginning to feel uncomfortable with her; a new sensation for him. “This is a damned lymphatic start for anything,” he complained.
“Why? Isn’t it full of fun and games?”
“Who’s having fun?”
“Me.”
“Who’s playing games?”
“Me.”
“So where do I come in?”
“Just play it by ear.”
“The left or the right?”
“The middle. That’s where your soul dwells.”
“You’re the damnedest girl I’ve ever met.”
“I’ve been berated by better men than you, sir.”
“Like who?”
“Like the ones I refused.”
“You leave me in doubt.”
“Yes, that’s the only way to handle you.”
“Damn it, I’m outclassed,” he muttered.
An hundred years should go to praise thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze: two hundred to adore each breast: but thirty thousand to the rest; an age at least to every part, and the last age should show your heart.
“This is the last thing I expected from you,” she smiled.
“What last thing?”
“Your being shy.”
“Me? Shy!” He was indignant.
“Yes, and I like it. Your eyes are taking inventory, but the rest of you hasn’t made a move.”
“I deny that.”
“Tell me what you see.”
“A crazy kaleidoscope.”
“Maybe you’d better explain.”
“I—” He hesitated. “I can’t. I—You always look different.”
“How?”
“Well… Your hair. Sometimes it looks straight, sometimes wavy, sometimes fair, other times dark…”
“Oh, that’s a new dye called ‘Prisma.’ It responds to wavelengths. You ought to see what an A.P.B. broadcast does… turns me into the Northern Lights.”
“And your eyes. Sometimes they look dark and slitty, like my ex-wife’s; other times they open up into huge opals… like a girl from the Flemish Dome I once knew.”
“That’s just a trick,” she laughed. “All girls practice it. It’s supposed to stagger men like a bolt of lightning.” She pulled his spectacles off and put them on. “There. Feel safer now?”
“And—And the boozalum.” He was close to stammering. “When you first came to work for us I thought they were… they were cute little points. Now they’re—they’re—Have you been growing up while I was out on assignments?”
“Let’s see,” she said, and started to remove her blouse.
But at my back I always hear time’s winged chariot hurrying near: and yonder all before us lie deserts of vast eternity. Thy beauty shall no more be found; nor in thy marble vault, shall sound my echoing song: then worms shall try that long-preserved virginity, and your quaint honor turn to dust, and into ashes all my lust.
“Don’t,” he said. “Please don’t.”
“Why not? Still shy?”
“No, I—it’s not what I expected.”
“Of course not. The macho Maori. But I’m making the pass.” The blouse came off. “How long d’you expect a girl to wait? Until she’s in the grave?”
“Jigjeeze!” he exclaimed. “You look like a figurehead on the prow of a ship.”
“Yes. They call me the China Clipper.”
“What are you, some kind of Virgins’ Lib militant?”
“Now why don’t we find out?” she laughed. “Come on, Rogue…”
She hauled him off the couch and pulled him toward the bedroom with one hand while with the other she tore open his clothes.
Let us roll all our strength and all our sweetness up into one ball, and tear our pleasures with rough strife through the iron gates of life. Thus, though we cannot make our Sun stand still, yet we will make him run.
And yet she did make the sun stand still in a timeless lovers’ limbo. In the darkness she seemed to be a hundred women with hundreds of hands, mouths, and loins. She was a Black with thick lips that engulfed him, and hard, high buttocks that clutched him. She was a Wasp virgin, supine, helpless, yet trembling with joy.
She was a succulent, crooning in his ear while her mouths drank arpeggios from his skin. She was an outworld animal emitting guttural grunts as he bestialized her. She became an inflated synthetic mannequin, squeaking and buzzing the sounds of a pinball machine. She was tough, tender, demanding, yielding, always unexpected.
And she inspired lurid fantasies in him. He was being whipped, crucified, drawn and quartered, branded with glowing irons. He thought he could see them together in impossible tangles reflected in magnifying mirrors. He panicked as he heard the front door being hammered while muffled voices shouted threats. His loins seemed to mount into a volcano of endless eruptions. Yet through all this he imagined he was carrying on a sparkling conversation with her over champagne and caviar as an erotic prelude to lounging before the fire to share love for the first time.
“I love you,” she whispered. “I love you, I love you, I love you.”
After a long pause he drew a shuddering breath. “You’re Titanian.” It was not a question.
She took a pause as long as his, then nodded. “Will it make any difference?”
“I don’t know. I—You’re the first I’ve ever met.”
“In bed?”
“Anywhere.”
“Are you sure?”
“N-no. I suppose I can’t be. Nobody can.”
“No.”
“Can you be sure?”
“You mean are there mysterious clues, like secret Masonic signals? No, but—”
“But what?”
“But we can spot each other if we happen to speak Titanian.”
“What does Titanian sound like? Have I ever heard it?”
“Maybe. This is tricky. You see, Titanians don’t communicate the way the rest of the Solar does.”
“No?”
“Not with sound or sight.”
“How then? ESP?”
“No, we speak chemical.”
“What?”
“Ours is a chemical language; scents and tastes and sensations on the skin or inside the body.”
“You’re zigging me on.”
“Not at all. It’s a highly sophisticated language of mixtures and intensity modulations.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“You can’t because it’s alien to you. Here, I’ll speak chemical. Ready to receive?”
“Go ahead.”
After a few moments of dead silence, Demi asked, “Well?”
“Nothing.”
“Smell anything? Taste anything? Feel anything?”
“Nothing.”
“Receive any output of any kind at all?”
“Only the conviction that this is a con scam which—No. Wait. I have to be honest. For a moment I thought I was seeing a sort of sunburst, like these scars on my cheeks.”
She beamed. “There! See? You were receiving me, only it’s so alien to you that your mind had to translate the input into familiar symbols.”
“You were actually telling me something that I translated into a visual sunburst?”
She nodded.
“What were you saying in chemical?”
“That you’re a crazy, mixed-up Maori macho, and I adore every part of you, including the scars.”
“You said all that?”
“And meant it, especially the scars. You’re so ashamed of them, poor dear…”
“Don’t feel sorry for me; I hate that,” he growled, then, “Do you Titanians walk around, broadcasting in chemical?”
“No.”
“Are there many of you here?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care. I only care about you… and you’re frightening me, Rogue.”
“I don’t mean to.”
“You’re so cold and analytic after… after you know what.”
“Forgive me.” He managed a smile. “I’m trying to sort it out.”
“I should never have told you.”
“You didn’t have to tell me; you showed me. The most extraordinary experience I ever—How do you come to be on Terra?”
“I was born here. I’m a changeling.”
“What? How?”
“My real mother was a close friend of the Jeroux family. She was their doctor. I can’t go into her history; it’d take ages.”
“All right.”
“I was a month old when their first baby died of crib-death. She substituted me for the body.”
“Why on earth?”
“Because she loved them and knew the shock of losing their first child would cripple them forever. I wasn’t her first… we shell them out rapid-fire like peas…”
“Your father was Terran?”
“No. We’re fertile only with Titanians. Seems like our eggs don’t love your sperms, or maybe vice versa. Anyway, she thought it would advantage me to be raised as a Terran in a fine family. She could always keep a Titanian eye on me, which she did. The end.”
“Then you people can love.”
“You ought to know, Rogue.”
“But I don’t know.” He waved a helpless hand. “All that talk about Prisma hair dye and practicing eye-bits and—That was Titanian camouflage, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. I try to be what you want, but my love isn’t camouflage.”
“And you can change yourself?”
“Yes.”
“But what are you really like?”
“What do you think Titanians are really like?”
“Damn if I know.”His glance to her was perplexed. “I suppose like—like a ball of burning energy or maybe a kind of plastic amoeba or maybe a bolt of lightning, eh?”
She burst out laughing. “No wonder you’re worried. Who’d want to be kissed by a thousand volts? Tell me what you’re really like.”
“You can see for yourself, and you can believe what you see.”
“Au contraire, m’sieur,” she smiled. “I won’t see what you’re really like until you’re dead.”
“That’s preposterous, Demi.”
“Not at all.” She became grave. “What’s the real you, the you that I love? Your genius for patterns? Your brilliance as a synergic inquisitor? Your wit? Your charm? Your sophistication? No. The reality of you lies in what you do with all your marvelous qualities… everything you contribute and leave behind you, and we won’t know that until you’re dead and gone.”
“I suppose you’re right,” he admitted.
“And it’s the same with us. Yes, I can adapt and change to fit occasions or suit people, but not any situation or any person. The real me is what I chose to do. And when I die I’ll look like what my deep inside has always chosen. That’ll be the real me.”
“Aren’t you going mystic?”
“Not at all.” She tapped the coffee table, much in the manner of a schoolmarm illustrating a lecture. The table was a magnificent cross section cut from a tulip tree on Saturn VI. “Look at these rings. Each shows a change, an adaptation, yes?”
He nodded.
“But it’s still a tulip tree, yes?”
“Yes.”
“It started as a tender bud which could have grown into anything, but the Cosmic Spirit said to it, ‘You are a tulip tree. Change and adapt as you must, but you will live and die a tulip tree.’ Well, with us it’s the same thing. We change and adapt, but always within the limits of what we really are deep inside.”
All Winter could do was shake his head in bewilderment.
“We’re polymorphs, yes,” she continued, “but we live, adapt, fight to survive, fall in love—”
“And play fun love-games with us,” he broke in.
“And why not? Isn’t love fun?” She glared at him. “What the hell’s the matter with you, Winter? D’you think love should be deep, dark, gloomy, despairing, like one of those old Russian plays? I didn’t think you were that juvenile.”
After a startled moment he began to shake with laughter at her outburst. “Damn you, Demi! You’ve adapted again. But how in God’s name did you know I needed a mentor?”
She laughed with him. “I don’t know, darling. Maybe with my left eye. Half the time I’m only sensing what’s needed. After all, I’m only demi-human, and this is the first time I’ve ever been in love, so I’m not accountable.”
“Never, never change,” he smiled. Then, “But what the hell am I saying?”
“That I should change only for you.” She took his hand. “Come on, Starstud.”
“Come sit close, darling.”
“Not now. That couch talks too damn much.”
“Talks too much?”
He nodded.
“You can’t be serious, Rogue.”
“Sure I am. Everything talks to me, but right now I just want to listen to you.”
“Everything?”
“Uh-huh. Furniture, pictures, machines, plants, flowers… you name it, I hear it, when I bother to listen.”
“What does the couch sound like?”
“Like… Mostly like a slow-motion walrus with a mouth full of cotton. Bloo—foo—goo—moo—noo—You have to be patient and listen long.”
“And flowers?”
“You’d think they were skittish like giggly girls, but they’re not. They’re sinuous and sultry like commercials for perfumes named C’est la Séductrice.”
“You’re on speaking terms with the whole universe,” she laughed. “I think that’s why I fell for you.” She looked down at him. “Does anything say, ‘I love you’?”
“They don’t think in those terms. Egomaniacs, all of them.”
“I do. I. Love. You.”
His glance returned her look. “I can do better than that. I trust you.”
“Why is that better?”
“Because now I can confide in you. I’ve got some thinking to do with you.”
“You’re always thinking.”
“It’s my one vice. Listen, love, something happened to me… something bad.”
“Tonight?”
“On Venucci. Now you’re not to repeat what I’m going to tell you to anyone. I know I can count on you for that, but you’re just a kid from Virginia, even though you’re Titanian, and you may be swindled into revealing something.”
“I’ll never reveal anything.” Suddenly the captain of the field hockey team began to resemble Morgan le Fay.
“Avaunt!” he cried and crossed his arms before his face.
“Caught in the act.” The sorceress grinned and transformed into the fiery Sierra O’Nolan.
“Not her!” Winter cried, remembering screaming brawls. “For God’s sake, Demi…” And then, as she dropped the role, he grumbled, “So you Titanians aren’t infallible after all.”
“Of course not. Who is?” she said composedly. “And will you please stop using ‘you Titanians.’ It’s not ‘you’ and ‘us.’ We’re all part of the same joke in the Cosmic caper.”
He nodded. “But sweetheart, you have to understand how tough it is to cope with mercurial love.”
“Oh is it? Look, Rogue, have you ever made a connection with an actress in your raunchy private life?” She began to resemble Sarah Bernhardt.
“Alas! Yes.”
“And how many roles did she play, onstage and off?”
“A jillion, maybe.”
“So with us it’s the same damn thing.”
“But you change physically.”
“Isn’t makeup the same damn thing?”
“You got me, you got me,” he surrendered. “I guess I’ll never know who I’m in love with. Who? Whom? I busted the grammar at the Höhere Schule,” he confessed, “owing to a surfeit of adverbs.”
“You are a genius,” she crinkled, “and I’m going to learn from you.”
“I’m afraid I’m a father image for you.”
“Then we’ve been incestuous.”
“Well, I’ve broken most of the Ten Commandments, so what’s another? Brandy?”
“Perhaps later, please.”
Winter got a bottle of cognac and two claret glasses, put the stemware down on the coffee table, opened the bottle and had a belt from it.
“I’ve broken another.”
“Which?”
“Isn’t Marymount a Catholic-type college?”
“More or less.”
“Did les Jeroux raise their changeling kid a Catholic?”
“More or less.”
“Then this may shock you. The sixth.”
“Thou shalt not—? No!”
“Uh-huh.”
“You’re trying out a story on me.”
Winter shook his head. “It happened in the Bologna Dome, my last day there.’’
“But—But—” She leaped up, looking like one of the avenging Furies, and Winter imagined he could see serpents twined in her hair. “Rogue Winter, if you’re zigging me on, I’ll—”
“No, no, no,” he interrupted. “Would I joke about a thing like that, Demi?”
“Yes you would. You’re a wicked liar.”
He patted the couch. “Sit down, love. It’s a story all right, but I didn’t invent it. It happened, and I have to talk it over with someone I can trust.”
She sat down, still suspicious. “So? Tell.”
“I came across the tail end of a peculiar pattern in Bologna which involved the Meta Mafia. You know the Triton jinks have a lock on Meta, and they’re tough. They set prices and quotas, and if they don’t like the Inner Barbarians for any reason, they cut your quota. So naturally there’s a Meta Mafia smuggling the stuff out of Triton. Their prices are outlandish but they deliver, no matter who or what you are. Sort of nice-guy goniffs. Clear so far?”
“Except Meta,” she said slowly. “I know it stands for metastasis, which produces energy, but how?”
“It’s kind of complicated.”
“I’ll try.”
“Well, start with atoms and charged particles. They can be kicked from their normal state into an excited state by Meta. This absorbs energy from the Meta. Then they flop back into their normal state, releasing that energy, and that’s the metastasic process. Dig?”
“No. Too scientifical, and I’m not going to try to look like Marie Curie.”
“She was no looker anyway. All right. You tried talking chemical to me; I’ll try talking pattern to you. I want you to think of a laser beam that can drill a hole through steel or carry a message across space…”
“Got that?”
“No pattern yet. Just a straight line.”
“Ah, but how’s that line produced? Think of a cloud of particles in their normal rest state… sort of like a gang of zeros…”
“Now we stimulate this crowd into an excited state by pouring energy into them. That kicks them up into particles-plus…”
“But this isn’t a natural stable condition, it’s a sort of nuclear hysteria, and they start to quit and go back to their normal, comfortable zero rocking chairs… Got the pattern?”
“Continuez. Continuez lentement.”
“They’re not freeloaders, so a particle gives up the energy it’s received, which coaxes a couple more of its chums back into their normal rest state, giving up their energy, which cues four more, and then eight take the hint, and sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four, and it builds until you’ve got all that energy emerging as a beam.”
“All in nanoseconds and all in phase, which is what gives it its power. Got the picture?”
“Yes, but where does Meta come in?”
“Well, it takes a tremendous amount of energy to stimulate atoms and particles into the excited state, more than they give back; so when you balance profit and loss, you wind up in the red. But when you use Meta to excite them, you’re in the black. You spend one and get back a hundred.”
“Why? How?”
“Because that freak catalyst is a powerhouse of stored energy fighting to get out. There’s stored energy in everything, Demi, and all it needs is an electron transfer system to be released. Think of a match. You’ve got a chemical head of potash, antimony, and stuff, full of energy waiting to be released. Friction does it. But when Meta excites and releases energy, it’s like a stick of dynamite compared to a match. It’s the chess legend for real.”
“I don’t know it.”
“Oh, the story goes that a philosopher invented chess for the amusement of an Indian rajah. The king was so delighted that he told the inventor to name his reward and he’d get it, no matter what. The philosopher asked that one grain of rice be placed on the first square of the chessboard, two on the second, four on the third, and so on to the sixty-fourth.”
“That doesn’t sound like much.”
“So the rajah said. He’d expected a request for gold and jewels and stuff. This, he thought, was too modest until he discovered that all the rice in India and China wouldn’t be enough to fill that last square. That’s geometric progression for you, and it’s what Meta does for energy.”
“How did it get that way?”
“I don’t know. I’ve always wanted to do a full feature on it but never could get started because the Jinks on Triton refused to cooperate. The only thing our local physicists can tell me is that it reverses entropy, and good luck to them.”
“What’s entropy?”
“Didn’t they learn you nothing in that high-class collitch you took from?”
“The foreign-language department didn’t offer any courses in entropy.”
“It’s not a language, it’s Decadence 101. Entropy is decay. If you leave a physical system alone, its entropy increases, which means that it runs down and flakes out and its energy available for work peters out too. The stored power in Meta reverses that with one hell of a shot in the arm.”
“Zig wow! It is complicated.”
“Yeah, it’s a race apart.”
“What does Meta look like?”
“I’ve never seen it. The engineers protect it like eunuchs defending a harem. No visitors. No sightseeing. They say it’s too dangerous—Stop that, Demi!—I can’t say I blame them. There’s been too many damnfool accidents in the past.”
Demi abandoned her transformation into a naked concubine and said, “Now go on about the Sixth Commandment.”
“Now?”
“Please.”
“But I want to talk about the wonderful thing that’s happened between us.”
“Later.”
“It may be too late. Love is not a faucet,” he sang, miserably. “It don’t turn off and on…”
“Yes, your voice is beautifully entropic, in four flats. Now what about the Sixth Commandment? Please, Rogue, it’s blocking what’s between us.”
“It is?”
She nodded. “I can feel it when you love me… a tiny thundercloud hanging over you…”
“My God,” he whispered, half to himself, “you’re fantastic… To sense that… even while you were ravishing me…”
“Please, darling, be serious.”
“Just trying to shift gears,” he said uncomfortably. “Give me a moment.”
Demi lapsed into a sympathetic silence. He drummed his fingers softly, staring into the past, and once murmuring, “Don’t bother me now,” to whichever picture or piece of furniture that was intruding with a subsonic soliloquy. At last he looked at Demi.
“You know that Venucci isn’t exclusively Italian,” he began. “It’s more Mediterranean; Greek, Portuguese, Algerian, Albanian, and so on. They all cling to their own traditions and lifestyles, and the Italian Domes hold on to regional cultures and local subcultures, too; Sicilian, Neapolitan, Venetian, and even New York Little Italy. They speak Slum-Italo-English and the Saint’s Day festivals in the Mulberry Dome are a riot.”
She nodded again, still silent, wondering where he was headed.
His quick eye caught her expression and he smiled. “Wait for it. Wait for it. Once a Soup-Kwik company asked me why Bologna was the only Italian Dome that would buy their product. I had to explain that Italian wives were traditional home-bodies who took pride in preparing their own soups. The Bolognese were the exception because their women preferred careers, you know, down with Kinder, Kirche und Küche, and they all came home and slapped packaged dinners together.”
“I’m with them.”
“I’m not against. Bologna is the hot center of the Women’s Movement on Venucci. Most of their polizia are women; big, tough ginzo dykes you wouldn’t want to mess around with, but there was one remarkable exception, a delicate little thing and—here it comes—she was a Jink.”
“What? On Venucci?”
“In the Bologna Dome, and that gave me furiously to synergize, particularly because she was in heavy money—expensive tailored uniforms, posh restaurants, luxury transport, that sort of thing—so you can guess what I was synsensing.”
“She was a Mafia rep.”
“And a possible lead to their operation on Triton, which was a pattern I’d been yearning to expose. I didn’t sense that this was the wrong end. I turned on the charm and finally dated her to meet me in the central gardens when she came off duty. That was my last night in the Bologna Dome.”
“And you killed her?” Demi was horrified.
“I got there early to case the gardens—it’s a wild playground for Lib women cruising for studs; dark, misty, shadowy—and on the very spot where she’d promised to meet, this gorill came crashing out of the bushes and hit me with everything he had.”
“Holy bolido! And… ?”
“And I broke the Sixth.”
“But—But how?”
“Demi, I’m not going into details, but if there’s one thing the Maori hammer into a future king, it’s how to defend and kill in hand-to-hand.”
“Who was he? I mean, could it have been a mistake?”
“It wasn’t any mistake, and that’s why I’m having fantods… because he was carrying a Slice Knife—that’s a kind of knife the Maori use to cut out the heart of a brave enemy to eat for its courage—”
“Ugh!”
“Yes, and his I.D. papers read: Kea Ora—Ganymede. He was a Maori killer.”
“My God! My God! And did the Mafia girl come?”
“I didn’t wait to find out. I took the knife, left the bod under a bush, and got lost. So now you can understand what’s zigging me into zags. Look at it. Had I slipped and given the Jink a clue to what I was really after? Did her Mafia turn me over to a hit man? And why pick a Maori soldier, one of my own people, and what the hell was he doing on Venucci anyway? Will their polizia find out that I’m the alleged perpetrator and will they come after me? Does the Mafia still have a contract out on me? Oi veh! Shlog’n kop in vant!”
After she’d taken in as much of Winter’s head-banging as she could absorb, Demi asked, “You have that Maori Slice Knife?”
“Still in my travel tote.”
“May I see it, please?”
He brought the knife and she examined it cautiously. It looked like a pointed straight razor, hollow-ground, glittering and deadly. There was no guard. The handle was natural walnut, much worn from long use, blotched with red smudges.
“I killed him with it. That’s why I had to take it. Prints.”
“So it’s true, what you told me.” She put the knife down very carefully.
“All of it.”
“I think I need that brandy now, please.”
He filled both claret glasses and they drank together in a long, silent meditation. Then the cognac seemed to restore his poise. “Cheer up, love,” he grinned. “I’ll come out of this smelling like roses. You’ll see.”
“Please make that ‘we’ll.’ I want to be in it with you,” she said earnestly.
“Thank you. Instant dumb loyalty. You’re a right Titanian tootsie.”
She had to laugh. “Damn you, Winter! You’ll joke in your coffin. What fantastic things happen to you. I wonder why.”
He refilled their glasses. “I don’t know. Maybe because I invite them without meaning to. After all, you’re a fantastic thing that’s happened to me, and I swear I never invited it.”
She finished her cognac and announced, “I’m going to make a confession,” beginning to look like Saint Joan of Arc. “It wasn’t any accident. When I realized I wanted you, I set out to get you. I looked up everything about you, talked to people who knew you, spent days going through everything you ever wrote… You didn’t stand a chance. Don’t hold it against me.”
“Your halo’s showing,” he murmured.
She slopped another cognac into her glass. “Why did you say you needed a girl?” she demanded. “You must have hundreds.”
“No.”
“How many?”
“You ask the damnedest questions. What’s Demi short for, Demon?”
“Neh-neh-neh-neh-NO. Fifth Amendment.”
“Now, Demi…”
“Never.”
“One call to payroll and you’re doomed.”
“You wouldn’t!”
“I have you in my power.”
“You won’t hold it against me?”
“Second Amendment.”
“What’s that?”
“Right to bear arms.”
“Well… I told you I was raised down south. Typical fine Virginia family, so I’m a typical fine Virginia girl…” She gulped. “W-with a typical fine Virginia name.”
“Consisting of?”
“Demure,” she whispered.
“What!” He began to break up.
She responded with hauteur. “My full name, suh, is Demure Recamier Jeroux, and ah defies y’all.”
“Why Recamier?” he asked faintly.
“Madame Recamier is mama’s hero.”
“I see. Now listen, my stoned sprite, you’ve got a kid’s idea that I’m a Casanova with like a Women’s Corps at my beck and call. That just isn’t true of myself or any man. Women are always in control and they make the decisions.”
“Saying that I seduced you. I knew you’d hold it against me.”
“Damn right you did. So now you’ve had your Titanian will of me, what?”
“I still want to know why you said you needed a girl when I made my move in the conference room.”
He took a long beat, then, “Isn’t it obvious? I’m not always jaunty-jolly under the gun. ‘Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.’ ‘You may fire when ready, Gridley.’ There come times when I lose my cool and I’m upset and confused and frightened like I am now. Then every instinct makes me turn to a woman for comfort and support.”
“Ssss.”
“What are you sissing about?”
“Because I’m your mother image,” she said with delight. “It’s double incest.”
“All you southern types love decadence. Or is it the Titanian in you?”
“I was pure, sir, until I was dépravée by a surfeit of Maori.”
“How dast you steal my type line?”
She put her glass down firmly. “What time is it?”
“Fourish.”
“I’ve got to get dressed.”
“What’s the rush? Where are you going?”
“Home, silly.” She arose from the couch. “I’ve got to change to block gossip at the office. There’ll be scam enough as it is. And I have to feed my cat.”
“Cat!” he exclaimed. “A fine Virginia girl like you wasting herself on a cat?”
“She’s special. She chases the spots you see before your eyes. She’s a psycat and I love her.”
“I will be damned. I’ll see you home, of course.”
“Thank you. What are we going to do about your problems?”
“Cool it and wait for the next move.”
“Are you in any danger?” she asked anxiously.
“Not really.” He looked up at her with love, pulled her close and nuzzled her belly.
“No fair,” she giggled. “You’re tickling. Get up, Star-pooped. Let’s get dressed.”
“You meant that to sting.”
“Yes, now that I’ve robbed you of your manhood I’ve no more use for you. That’s the Titanian way.”
“Only the first time around. Showing off. We all do that.”
“I’ll make sure it’s always the first time around with us.” She poked her head out. “Why aren’t you exhausted, too?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s because I’ve stolen your Titanian essence. Rogue, the Vampire, they call me.”
“Why on earth are you blinking like that?”
“Trying to work up spots before my eyes for your alleged psycat to chase.” He fondled the pet which was an affectionate Saturnian crossbreed, an odd blending of Siamese with koala. “She is a beauty. Does she chase her own spots?”
“But of course; all cats do. I’ve finished changing now. Time to go.”
“I’ll walk you to the office.”
“Only as far as the corner, I beg. If we’re seen together at the main entrance first thing in the morning… Well! Do I call you or you me?”
“You call me, and for God’s sake use your own Virginia voice. Don’t spring like a Mata Hari on me.”
“C’est magnifique,” she answered in throbbing spy-sultry tones, “mais ce n’est pas la guerre. Come on, Starjock.”
“I’ll give you the plans for the secret invasion,” he whined, “if you’ll only let me out of your secret thrall.”
Some sort of advertising parade came down the main stem; a fife-and-drum corps with almost as many twirlers as drummers, making a hell of a racket which was compounded by a street gang of young hoods, “Titan Dukes” their jackets proclaimed in neon, leaping and cavorting in ludicrous passes at the twirlers. Then came the hard-sell float for P + L + A + Z + M + I + L + K with eight farm girls (live) milking eight Holsteins (plastic).
The Synergist stopped dead in his tracks, as though paralyzed by a mysterious laser pistol yet to be invented. “Eight!” he exclaimed. He turned, ran, and caught up with the head of the parade and counted the drummers. “Yes, twelve.” He counted the Titan Dukes, the fifes, the twirlers. “Eleven, ten, nine, by God! Jigjeeze!”
He resumed his walk toward the rotunda, every synergic perception prickling and exploring. He spotted more of the pattern, a toy shop at the entrance to an arcade. There was a magnificent dollhouse displayed in the window. It was set in a miniature park built to scale. On a tiny pond floated seven swans. Winter nodded and entered the arcade. He was not surprised to be led around a corner by a gourmet shop which had six Canadas lying on crushed ice in the vitrine.
“Gig,” he murmured. “Dukes are lords. Canadas are geese. What next?”
All thought of getting back to the rotunda had left him. He explored, sensing, searching, until he found it at last at the foot of a flight of stone steps, a poster for some flower show decorated with a stylized Gold-poppy made up of four rings for the petals and a center ring for the carpel.
“Uh-huh. Five gold rings.”
He mounted the stairs, came into another arcade, passed a pet shop with a window full of puppies, continued, then stopped and shook his head. “Starschmuck!” he muttered and returned to the pet shop. He peered in. At last he saw it, a large cage at the far end. It contained four myna birds. He went in for a closer look.
“Do they talk?” he asked the owner.
“Can’t shut ’em up. Only trouble is, they holler in Gullah. That’s why the price is so cheap.”
“It figures. Thanks.”
Winter went out the back door, wondering how three French hens would be made manifest. It was managed by a blackboard in front of a restaurant. On it was chalked:
Poulet Gras Poularde
Poulet de l ’Année
Vieille Poule Coq
Burgundy, Bordeaux, Côtes du Rhône
Before Winter could enter in search of two turtledoves, two young ladies came out. They were dressed in the latest trendy high style, including enormous Eugénie hats. Each had a tiny red jeweled-quail perched on the brim.
“Natürlich,” Winter said to himself. “Ruddy quail. A form of turtledove. Two.”
He followed the young ladies at a discreet distance, now searching right and left for some kind of tree. There are no trees in that section of the Mighty Metrop., but the ladies entered a towering office building. Above cathedral entrance was graven in English Gothic: PAIRE BANQUE ALSACIENNE BLDG. Winter began to chuckle. The pattern had turned into a preposterous treasure hunt, and he was wondering what absurd prize he would find at the end.
He went in, crossed directly to the tenant listings and didn’t waste any time; merely glanced at “P,” found “Odessa Partridge—3030” took the express elevator to the thirtieth floor, and there it was, an impressive tree-paneled door labeled PARTRIDGE. Winter entered.
He found himself in what appeared to be a full symphony orchestra waiting for the musicians to appear. He was surrounded by every known instrument; strings, brass, woodwinds, percussion. A charming young lady, no longer wearing a Eugénie hat, approached and greeted him. “Good morning, Mr. Winter. So glad you could keep your appointment. The spinet is ready for inspection. Frances!”
“Spinet?” Winter echoed feebly.
“Well, really, a virginal. You know, a lap-spinet without legs. Frances, please take Mr. Winter to the studio.”
A second charming young lady, also without hat, had appeared and now conducted Winter through the orchestra. “We had trouble bringing it up to concert pitch,” she confided. “I do hope you’re not fussy about a 439 A, Mr. Winter. 435 is the most the strings would hold. In here, Mr. Winter.” She opened the studio door and the bewildered Winter was gently urged in.
“Good morning, King R-og,” I said.
I didn’t think he heard me. He just stared, then. “But you’re the nice lady from Dr. Yael’s talk-in. The diva lady. I thought you should sing Brünnehilde.”
“You never told me,” I said. “I’m Odessa Partridge. In the music trade but not a singer.”
He looked around with his quick eyes; at the thick insulated walls, the double-glazed windows, the stacked music in print and manuscript, the gilt harpsichord, the virginal, the concert grand piano with Jay Yael seated at it, smiling benignly.
“And Dr. Yael?”
“Good morning, son.”
“This is too much for me.”
“No, it isn’t boy. Sit down. I’ve never seen you lose your poise for more than a moment. You’ll regroup.”
Winter backed into a chair and sat, shaking his head. Then drew a deep breath, compressed his lips and looked hard at me. “And this is the prize at the end of the treasure hunt?”
“There! You see?” Yael beamed. “It didn’t take you five seconds, Rogue.”
“But why this ridiculous Roguemarole?”
“We had to brief you on something extremely sensitive,” I told him.
“So? Couldn’t you call?”
“I said ‘sensitive.’ Calls can be tapped. And messages. And word of mouth. The problem was how to bring you here without a clue to anyone, so we relied on your pattern sense, which is unique. No one else has that.”
“Forgive me, Brünnehilde, but you’re sounding like an X-rated spy feature.”
“We had all last night when you were—otherwise occupied, to set up ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas.’ ”
“Naturally, your name being Partridge. But if it’d been Kallikak?”
“I knew you’d be the only one able to sense the pattern, and if you were tailed, your course would be so eccentric that you’d certainly shake it.”
“Tailed? Oh sure. Rogue Moriarty, they call me,” Winter laughed. “Paging Sherlock Holmes.”
“This is serious, son,” Yael said.
“Why King R-og?” Winter shot at me.
“You’re brilliant,” I said with genuine admiration. “Because that’s the crux and you’ve synergized it already. Te Uinta’s soul now resides in your left eye.”
“When? How?” Like lightning.
“A week ago. Hunting accident. His suit ripped open by a tusk. He was really too old to encounter an anaerobic mammoth alone.”
Winter swallowed hard. “He had to prove himself. Once a year. It’s the Maori tradition for royalty.”
“And now you’ll have to,” I said. “Please listen, Winter, and don’t zag in. Gig?”
He nodded.
“We’ve been using you, without your knowledge, for years and you’ve been invaluable. You’ve been watched and followed. Your code I.D. is ‘Pointer.’ ” And I told him about our Pert operations and the unconscious role he played in them. He listened intently without interupting. He was quick and perceptive and didn’t plague me with obvious questions like who “we” were. Once, however, he did dart a glance at Yael, who responded with a shrug.
“Now the crux,” I went on. “That soldier in the Bologna gardens carried a Slice Knife for two purposes. One was for the kill, of course, but the other was to bring your cheeks back to Ganymede.”
“Ah!”
“Yes. He had nothing to do with the Jink girl from Triton or her organization. He was only stalking you as R-og Uinta, king-presumptive.”
“So!”
“So indeed. There’s a small, tough terrorist group who don’t want you. You’re not a Maori. You weren’t raised in the Dome. You’re Honk-corrupted. You’re soft. You can’t be trusted. Etcetera. Etcetera. What’s their answer? Wipe you, and they’re on the wipe. These killers are trained and smart, and that’s why I had to go through the ‘Twelve Days’ caper to bring you here.”
“They’re wasting their time,” Winter said. “I don’t want any part of the king-bit.”
“That won’t make any difference to them. No matter who they acclaim in your place, you’ll always be a present danger. The majority in the Dome will forever homage your cheeks. Their only answer is to bring your cheeks home as trophies of the kill.”
“I’ll abdicate formally.”
“It won’t go down with them. They won’t trust you to stay abdicted. They’ll stay on the wipe until you’re blown.”
“Jigjeeze! What a hell of a scam for a nice goyisha boychick. And now that Demi and I—” He cut himself off. Then; “But you didn’t paper-chase me here just to bring the bad news from Ganymede to Terra. You have something more in mind. What?”
“Go to Ganymede and get yourself kinged.”
“You’ve got to be zigging.”
“Yael will accompany you.”
“What’s the doctor got to do with this?”
“I’ve never told you, son, but Te Uinta paid for your upbringing and education. He believed it could advantage the Maori to be led by a king who was conversant with our ways.”
“Yes, yes,” Winter muttered. “Same like Demi’s Titanian mother.”
“And I owe it to Te to see you through this crise,” Yael continued. “I must; otherwise all our prep will go down the drain.”
“It’s down already, sir. I’m not the king type and never will be.”
“But you’ll be alive,” I said. “They won’t dare hit you once you’re formally coronated. That would alienate them from the majority completely.”
“What in hell are you trying to do, Odessa, protect me? I can protect myself, now that I’ve been alerted. God knows, I proved that on Venucci.”
“I’m not protecting you,” I flared. “I’m protecting the job you’re doing for us. If you have to live on the alert for hits, you won’t be any use to us. The only patterns you’ll be able to sense will be potential wipes.”
He grunted.
“But if you get yourself coronated, you’ll be safe, back to normal, business as usual.” I let that sink in, then, “And your girl will be safe, too.”
He glared at me. “You bitch,” he said softly. “You unadulterated, natural, organic bitch. You know how to twist a man, don’t you?”
“That’s my business.”
“Yeh. Like music. ‘Music of the Fears.’ Demi will have to be protected while I’m gone.”
“I’ll take care of that.”
“Gig. When?”
I liked him even more for that. Once he’d made a decision, he was ready to act without any fuss. “Noon jet today. Yael’s made all the arrangements.”
“That vig, huh?”
“Best and safest.”
“And you knew you had my number. You’ll explain to Demi after I leave?”
“As much as is good for her to know. Trust me.”
“I have to. Avanti, dottore!” Winter was on his feet moving fast. “Did I ever tell you the one about the mammoth that robbed the jewelry store?”
Winter and Yael arrived at the main lock of the Maori Dome via terrafoil (Ganyfoil?). It was the second of the three days of direct sunlight and it was reasonably bright and pleasant. If the interior of the Dome resembles anything it’s Rapa Nui, i.e. “Great Rapa,” otherwise known as Easter Island.
There are differences, to be sure. It’s circular rather than triangular. No thatched huts; the little houses are drywall. No giant stone images; instead, huge carved tribal totems (with left eyes of inlaid mica) before each family of houses. All delightfully primitive, but the central kampong in which the Maori assemble to exercise, compete, quarrel, gossip, ceremonize, u.s.w., covers the ultramodern Dome maintenance system which, after the JonesDome disaster on Mercury, is Death City taboo for any except authorized technicians to enter.
Yael had been invaluable on the outjet. He dyed Winter with a sepiawoad to conform to the Maori brown skin, this over Winter’s bitter objections. (It’s believed that woad induces impotence.) “Public relations, son. The impotence has never been verified, and anyway the dye will be worn out by the time you get back to your woman.”
“And so will I, from worrying.”
“Just worry about the mammoth.”
They passed through the lock and entered the Dome, expecting pandemonium—Yael had lasered advance notice of their arrival—but were met with solemn ritual. The twelve tribal chiefs, feathered, pearled, necklaced, braceleted and ankleted, were in a semicircle. They genuflected, advanced, and gently stripped Winter naked.
“Oparo? Is that you?” Winter stammered, half in Polynesian, half in English. “I’ve been gone so long. Tubuai? We used to wrestle; you always beat me. Waihu? Remember the time we tried to climb your totem and got walloped? Teapi? Chincha?” No answer.
There had never been a coronation in Winter’s lifetime so he didn’t know what to expect, but he discovered that all his anticipations had been wrong. No frantic mobs, no cheers, no drums, no song; instead he was escorted, stark naked, across the deserted kampong in stately silence and reverently desposited alone in the Te Uinta palace which he remembered so well.
It was enormous by Maori standards, ten separate rooms, now all bare. The house had been stripped of everything; it was merely four walls. Winter squatted in the center of the main hall, which had been as much of a throne room as the Maori cared for, and waited for the next move. There was none. He waited, waited, waited.
“I wonder if the doctor is getting the same treatment,” he wondered, stretching out on the floor.
(Yael was being lavishly entertained. They remembered him with affection.)
“I suppose I’m supposed to be in solemn meditation,” Winter meditated. “The awesome responsibilities facing me. What I owe to my ancestors and my people. So. On my honor I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law…
“And this guy came to his jewelry store early one morning to catch up with his paper work. He got there just in time to see a truck back up to his store. The rear opened and this hairy mammoth got out, went to the store window, smashed it with his tusks, and scooped up all the goodies with his trunk. Then he got back into the truck and it drove away…”
There was a rustling and a chiming. Winter looked toward the sound and discovered that a brown girl had crept into the room. She had the typical black wavy hair—the Maori are either straight or wavy, never curly—attractive Polynesian features and an adolescent body. He could see that because she wore a chain of chiming silver scallops around her waist and nothing else.
“What the hell is this?” he asked himself. “Part of the ritual? My future consort and queen? They ought to let me choose for myself.”
The girl wasted no time. She was against him in a moment, silently entwining and exciting, and it seemed to him that she was giving one hell of an audition for the consort role until he felt the initial slash against the back of his knee. His trained reflexes were like lightning. He drove the knee up into her crotch and smashed the razoredged shell out of her hand. As she doubled over in agony he muttered, “The hamstring-bit, huh? Odessa was right. These cats are no clowns. The mammoth hunt would’ve been real jaunty-jolly with me hamstrung.”
He picked the helpless girl up and gave himself the satisfaction of biting her rump hard enough to draw blood before he threw her out the front door like a piece of trash. Then he slammed the door to give notice that he’d take on anything, and settled down again on the throne-room floor, alert for further action. He didn’t yet realize that the attack and his response was reverting him to the sanguinary for which the future king had been trained.
After a half hour of quiet, he resumed his customary internal discourse. “So, as I was saying when I was so rudely interrupted: this guy watches the truck drive off, absolutely flabbergasted, and finally pulls himself together and calls the cops. They come, he tells, and they’re very professional. ‘We have to have some kind of lead. Did you dig the license number?’ ‘No. All I saw was that hairy elephant.’ ‘What kind of truck was it?’ ‘I don’t know. All I could look at was that goddamn mammoth.’ ‘All right, what kind of mammoth was it?’ ‘You mean there’s different kinds?’ ‘Why yes. The Asian mammoth has big floppy ears. The American mammoth has small, tight ears. Which kind did this one have?’ ”
He fell asleep on that question.
He was awakened by a tumult. He scrambled to his feet, opened the palace door and looked out. The kampong was jammed with Maori; shouting, singing, stamping, pounding drums. The twelve tribal chiefs were advancing, carrying Te Uinta’s six-foot royal shield and royal spear, both of which Winter recognized instantly.
“Ears! Ears!” he muttered. “How could I tell? That goddamn mammoth was wearing a stocking over his head.”
That was his last clutch on Solar English. Now he was completely reverted, thinking and acting in Maori. He stepped outside the door, naked and regal, and when the delegation arrived, he touched each chieftain on the heart, murmuring the formal greeting. They shouldered the shield and he permitted himself to be raised onto it, standing tall and unafraid for all to see.
He was carried the full circuit of the kampong three times, and the excitement was deafening. The shield was lowered to the ground and still he stood, proud and expectant. A priest—actually a shaman—appeared for the unction, carrying an urn of oil. Long-buried memory stirred, and Winter knew it was the fat from his adoptive father’s body. He was anointed; top of head, eyes, sunburst cheeks, breast, palms and loins.
“Now is crowned King of the Seven War Canoes,” the shaman shouted. “Of Hawaiki, Apai, Evava, and Maori. R-og Uinta, son and next heir to our last king departed.”
Te Uinta’s diadem, a wide band of silver and jet threads, was bound around Rogue’s head.
“He and no other!” the shaman challenged.
Dead silence.
The chieftains advanced and placed Te Uinta’s royal fighting spear in Rogue’s hand like a scepter, and there was pandemonium. Now he must go out to kill a mammoth single-handed and prove his royal right to rule.
One of the Solar’s favorite foods (barring kinky religious sects) is pork. Now pigs are wonderful people. They’re bright, active, and superbly adaptable. They really don’t want to lie in a coma and stink; it’s only the ones gorged on garbage and fattening in muddy styes that do. Anyone who’s ever seen a clean, active sow galloping happily in a meadow, surrounded by a cluster of her playful piglets, knows that. Unhappily, when pork is bred for weight, it must wallow in mud to support its mass, and it snores and stinks to high heaven, which is how most of us see pigs.
But a Dome can’t cope with animal stenches (it has enough trouble coping with people) so the breeders and butchers appealed to the genetic mavins to engineer a hog species that could survive in paddocks outside a Dome in the near-anaerobic, murderous Ganymede environment.
The genetic engineers were delighted with the odd challenge and selected the Tamworth, one of the oldest breeds of pigs, as the best candidate. The Tamworth is hardy, active and prolific, and closely related to the wild boar. The head, body, and legs are long, and the ribs deep and flat. Its disposition leaves much to be desired.
The geneticists back-bred the Tamworth; that is, reversed the development of the pig back to its wild origins by selective breeding, while they evolved its hardiness into a tolerance for anaerobic conditions, rooting for oxygen among other needs. The result was the Ganymede “Astroboar” which was raised at minimum cost and sold to the Solar at fashionable prices. It was advertised with:
And:
NO FATSO
NO SALTSO
NO CHOLESTER ALSO
LIVE LONGER ON THE HOG
LIVE HIGHER ON ASTROBOAR
An occasional pig would break out of a paddock and take to the rills. The breeders shrugged. It wasn’t worthwhile chasing them and anyway they were bound to die, but here the Cosmic Caper took a hand. Somewhat like those first primal fish stranded on beaches by the ebbing tide and surviving nevertheless, these rare independents survived nevertheless, rooting the frozen terrain for subsoil mosses and lichens. They lived precariously, they encountered each other, they mated, many died, the most adaptable evolved into the strange breed that Ganymede calls The Mammoth.
Actually, they’re more a gigantic wild boar than elephant. They can stand nearly two meters high at the shoulder, whereas the original Mammuthus stood closer to four. Their ears are elephantine to absorb as much sunlight as possible. They’re hairy, like the woolly mammoth. Their up-curved tusks are enormous for rooting in frozen soil.
The original Tamworth breed was omnivorous and so are the Ganymede mammoths, plus the fact that survival desperation has turned them cannibal. In temperament they’re pure wild boar; irascible, vicious, attacking. They reduce survival to a deadly bottom line.
This was the half-ton number that Winter had to track and kill. “And I don’t even like pork,” he thought.
He was in a vacsuit, helmeted, air-tanked, carrying the long-bladed hunting spear and belted with a Slice Knife to bring the heart back as a trophy, and then eat for its sympathetic magic. The Maori wanted their ruler to acquire the wild ferocity of the mammoth, which is why tradition demanded the kill once a year.
“And which is ridiculous for me,” Winter argued. “I’m a sissy Solar.” But he was talking to himself in Maori.
The terrain was lunar and jagged; mantle rock, shale, slate, igneous outcrops, black obsidian—a glassy souvenir of Ganymede’s volcanic past—the splintered cleavages revealing the sickly white remains of mineral-anabolic fungi; one of the foods the mammoth feed on in addition to themselves. (Give life one chance in a thousand, and it will seize it and never let go.)
An hour out of the Dome, Winter came across the first mammoth sign, droppings in the form of conical pats. The mammoth feeds and excretes constantly. He followed the trail cautiously, saw it joined by others, and came at last to a shallow crater scattered with pats.
He grunted. “Mammoth kampong.”
Then the hunter took over. “Mistake Te Uinta made. They all make, and get killed. You don’t go in after the mammoth; you’re fighting his savvy. Make him come after you and fight yours. Yes.”
A glance at the sinking spotlight sun and giant limb of Jupiter on the horizon. An hour until the three-day night began. Enough time before the quasi-nocturnals came out to feed.
He backtracked, searching, and located a small crater with a ten-foot-high rim. Meteor impact, probably. The crater floor was cracked, crazed schist. He nodded, loped to the obsidian outcrop he had passed and collected long glass splinters, careful not to pierce his vacsuit. With his metal soles he kicked and shattered off even longer stalacts. These he planted in the crazed cracks of the crater floor, close to the ten-foot rim. It was a bed of spikes awaiting a fakir.
He stood erect, breathed hard, swallowed saliva and tried to fill the attached urine sac. He reached back over his shoulder and opened the tank valve to full blast until the vacsuit stretched to Santa Claus dimensions. He bent forward, dove a hand through the taped anal flap and whipped the urine sac between his legs and out. By the time he had the flap resealed and the air pressure adjusted, his urine was frozen.
Winter climbed over the ten-foot crater rim and trekked back to the mammoth kampong, dropping chips of his urine which he cracked off with the Slice Knife. The kampong was still empty, but the sun had set, the stars were brilliant, and Saturn dominated the sky, looking like a lobed light bulb, the rings not quite distinguishable to the unaided eye. Winter dumped the last of his urine, ground his soles into it, and tramped more trail back to the outer edge of the crater rim. There he waited with spear and knife.
He was forced to stand; that brief exposure had frostbitten his rump painfully.
He waited, keeping faith with the territorial challenge of alien urine.
He tested the spear shaft. It was spun glass and had the strength and resiliance of a vaulting pole.
He waited.
He collected a small pile of rounded stones which would not tear his gloves.
He waited.
He waited.
A bull boar came at last, snuffling silently at the urine défi, icy iron hair bristling, bloody crusted eyes rolling, flap ears vibrating, giant tusks gleaming in the starlight, half a ton of mammoth menace. Winter picked up a stone, threw it hard and missed. He threw three more before he hit the beast and caught its angry attention. Winter leaped, waved, threw another stone, darted forward, shook the spear, darted back and threw still another stone which caught the mammoth full on the snout.
The beast finally made the furious connection and charged, tail up, head lowered, tusks poised to rip from crotch to neck. It took all Winter’s nerve to freeze and observe the attack like a matador estimating the speed of his enemy. At the last possible moment he turned, sprinted three steps, and pole-vaulted over the crater rim to land just beyond the bed of glass spikes. He spun around on his knees. The mammoth had pursued him, scrambled over the rim, and plunged into the spike bed. It was thrashing in agony from a dozen stabs piercing the soft belly. Its blood was freezing as it poured out.
Winter got to his feet, looked for the spear, then remembered it had dropped outside the crater rim. He shuddered slightly, realizing the risk he had run. If the beast hadn’t fallen onto the spikes… ! Anyway, there was no need to administer a finishing stroke; the mammoth would be dead in a matter of minutes.
He watched the violent death. Then his sharp vigilance was caught by flying stone fragments. He looked. It was the bull’s sow, struggling over the edge of the crater rim. She had followed at a slower pace.
The sow slid down the inner wall, rolled safely against the last standing spikes, smashing them flat, and was on her legs, another half-ton of fury. Winter felt a grinding inside him; this was vero hand-to-hand, a true test, and with the deadliest opponent of all, a sow-bitch.
The beast came at him, trampling and spurning the twitching body of the bull with her chisel hooves. Her mouth was gaping, showing huge, jagged teeth which could crack rock. Winter teetered back and forth in half-steps, trying to time the momentum of her charge. He held his arms high, flashed them down when the jaws were a foot away, seized her heavy ears and yanked himself up and over the snout in a half-gainer like a Cretan bull-dancer, and was mounted on the sow’s back, clutching the thick hair.
She bucked, pitched, and yawed high in the light gravity. He held fast with legs and one hand while with the other he drew the Slice Knife. He cut the lady’s throat.
He brought both hearts back to the Maori dome spitted on the blade of Te Uinta’s spear.
There were drums pounding, not in classic Terran 2/4, 3/4, and 4/4 rhythms, but in traditional Maori style which has no regular beat because they’re telling a story, with punctuation, pauses, comments and elaborations.
There were girls and women dancing, again not in structured Terran steps. They too were acting out ancient Maori sagas with symbolic gestures telling of wars won, enemies conquered, heroes mating and producing mighty child-men who would someday lead the Maori to even greater victories.
There was feasting; young crocodile, probably stolen from the Afro Domes, anaconda, ten-pound frogs, imported shark, mule, and barbecued mammoth. No point in leaving those two carcasses for their friends and relations to devour. And there was opium and hemp bought from the Turkish Domes.
With exquisite timing, before the festival could start falling apart, the shaman conducted Winter to the platform on which he’d been crowned, standing on his father’s shield. Now the two mammoth hearts were roasting on it. This was the climax.
The shaman bowed, stepped down, and joined the tribal chiefs circling the earthen dais. Winter picked up the spit, burning his hands but refusing to flinch before his people. He took a giant bite out of the first heart, chewed the scorching meat, again without flinching, and swallowed. Pandemonium! He repeated the ritual with the second heart but this time the joy was cut off in mid-shout. He looked around at his people in amazement and then at the shaman and chieftains who were backing away from the dais in terror.
“What?” he called.
The shaman could only point at Rogue’s feet.
He looked down. The platform was crawling with small living things emerging from the earth. They had no discernible shape. They were grey, hairy mounds that seemed to blunder aimlessly in search of something.
“Mammoth souls!” a horrified voice cried from the crowd. “They’re the mammoth souls. Souls of the royal kills.”
Winter was badly shaken by this unknown but couldn’t reveal it. Certainly a king couldn’t back away in fright. In the heavy silence, he repeated the ceremonial eating of the hearts, replaced the spit, turned and strode slowly and proudly off the dais, never deigning to look down at the mysteries creeping underfoot. Yael says it was a superb performance, and back in the royal palace he congratulated Rogue.
“Thanks, Jay. My God, I was scared.”
“So was I.”
“D’you believe in life after death? Ghosts? Revenants? That sort of occult?”
“Certainly not for animals.”
“Me neither. Then what were those things crawling around my feet? Not mammoth souls.”
“We’ll find out,” Yael said. “I’ve got one.”
“What?”
“I grabbed a ‘soul’ when we started back to the palace.”
“Where is it?”
“Right here.”
Yael opened his ceremonial cloak, shook a fold, and down dropped a small, grey, hairy mound which began an uncertain crawling. “Looks like mammoth hide,” Yael murmured. He touched the top of the creeping mound, explored gently, twitched it once and then picked it up, revealing what was underneath.
“Why, it’s a baby horseshoe crab covered with mammoth hide,” he exclaimed.
“Don’t touch it,” Winter said sharply. “That’s no baby crab. It’s a mature Kring centipede with a carapace, and it’s deadly poisonous.”
Yael jerked back out of danger. Winter stood up and crushed the creature with one powerful stamp of his shod foot. Then he began to pace.
“So that’s the picture,” he said at last.
“What picture, son?”
“Look at it, Jay. Kringpedes are underground types. What’s under the kampong and dais?”
“The Dome power plant.”
“So they came up from there.”
“It seems likely.”
“Where they could be caught, put into mysterious costume, and teased into burrowing up to me on the dais.”
“That’s rather extreme, son.”
“Jay, an overt hit on me was tried before I was crowned. They still want me wiped but now that I’m official royalty it can’t be overt anymore. There’d be hell to pay.”
“True.”
“Then how about a poisoning by dead souls? King R-og must have offended the gods and been punished. The superstitious Maori would buy that and make no objections to his succession.”
“That terrorist group again?”
“Still, Jay, still.” He shook his head doggedly. “I’ve got to settle this or there’ll never be peace.”
“Have you any idea who they are, Rogue?”
“Not the faintest.”
“Then how can you settle it?”
“I’m going down into the power plant after them. That’s strictly off-limits, so it’s probably their cell. Certainly they sent the doom of the gods up from there. See you, Jay,” and he was gone.
The plant was an enormous dark cellar crowded with what seemed to be upright steel boilers with friendly arms around each others’ shoulders. In fact they were the linked energy units, all in locked armor casing to protect them from damage and tampering. Lantern light glowed near the center of the plant, but Winter’s view was blocked by the silhouetted boiler units. He advanced silently, threading and twisting through the maze, one hand on the hilt of the ritual Slice Knife which he still wore. The sound of low voices came; then full view.
Three women and two men around a lantern in close conference. His heart wrenched and he shook his head again. “But I should have guessed,” he thought. The women were his stepsisters. Winter stepped forward into the lantern light, making no attempt to walk silently. The five turned and saw who it was. There was a long moment of confrontation. All of them understood.
Winter motioned to the men. “Go,” he said. “This is a family affair.”
The men hesitated until his sisters nodded. Winter and the women were left alone.
After another silence he said, “I should have known when you didn’t show at the coronation, but I was occupied with so many new things.”
No answer.
“Kuiti, Tapanu, Patea, you’re all looking well.”
They were; tall, handsome women in their late forties, starting to grey, not yet gone to fat.
“But why? Why?”
“We are the only true bloodline.”
“And I’m only an adopted orphan. Yes, Kuiti, but you’ve always known that.”
“And hated it,” Tapanu said.
“I don’t blame you. I know I’m an outsider, an intruder; but it was never my wish, it was your father’s.”
“He had no right.”
“He had every right, Patea. No woman can ever sit on the throne.”
“We have husbands.”
“Ah, so that’s it. And sons?”
Their silence was the answer.
“I see. I’m sorry. The direct Uinta line is ended. Too bad, but it’s happened to many royal lines in the past. So you’ll elevate one of your husbands and be the power behind the throne. What if he won’t listen? What then?”
“He’ll listen. We are three, the true children of Te Uinta.”
“Of course, but whose husband will it be? Yours, Kuiti? You’re the oldest.”
“You murdered him,” she snapped.
“Murdered? Nonsense!”
“On Venucci.”
“On Ven—? You mean… what was his name? Kea Ora? I thought he was just a soldier.”
“He was the next king.”
Winter was stunned. “My God! My God! What a disaster! My sister’s husband…”
“Never your sister.”
“And now never a king. What about those men who were here with you? Husbands, too?”
“No.”
“Soldiers?”
“Yes.”
“They looked it. How many have you in your group?”
“You’ll find out when we’re ready.”
“No, Kuiti,” he answered slowly. “No, you’ll never be ready, now that I know and can have you called to account no matter what happens to me. Dear sisters, loving sisters, Kuiti, Tapanu, Patea, you’re finished.”
“Never!”
“Finished,” he repeated. He drew the Slice Knife. They never flinched. “If anything happens to me or mine, you’ll be held accountable. My sacred blood oath on it.” He slashed his forearm and before they could avoid it, smeared his blood on their faces.
“My sworn blood on your heads,” he said. “This is the end of your vendetta. We’ll never meet again.”
He turned and left them, but as he disappeared in the dark he called back, “You never once spoke my name.”
While R-grunt-OG was working out his destiny on Ganymede, une crise se prépare (a “things coming to a head”) clobbered Demi Jeroux in the New Yorkjungle. I’d explained the urgency of Rogue’s abrupt departure, and she’d accepted it without complaint like the good child that she was. Now, while she was waiting for his return, she was trying to go through the motions of her life as it had been before the trapper became the trappee.
But she woke up this morning, upchucking in all directions for the second time, and again passed it off as a lovelorn stomach. She examined her fresh-woke basic Titanian reality in the mirror and was again amazed to see Winter’s ideal; slender, virginal, with a big befront and a high inhind. Limpid skin and auburn hair, she might have been Botticelli’s model for “The Birth of Venus” if Sandro hadn’t desexed his vision.
“So this is what Rogue’s done to me,” she murmured. “They never talk about the Frog Princess.” She turned to the psycat. “I’ve made a profound discovery; a woman needs a man to make her real.”
Titanian constraints imposed a dress style on her which career women around the Solar will understand. She had to wear clothes which would not clash with any guise she might be obliged to transform into during her work; competent, helpless, shrewd, maneuvering, ego-trip, team-player, etc. She selected a dark unobtrusive suit, quiet buttoned blouse, sensible shoes, no ornaments, but in her tote she carried jewelry and an evening purse and evening sandals just in case. She switched on the kaleidoscope projector for the entertainment of the psycat spot-chaser and left for the Media office.
Demi was working the “Soft Shift” this month, noon to six, but she was dedicated and often put in extra morning hours. She needed them this day because she was required to cope with submissions in Nü-Spēk, Medieval French, Mozambique, Arcane English, and Chromatics, and forward them to Media’s owner and editor-in-chief, Augustus (Ching) Sterne, with crisp descriptions and explicit recommendations. She’d been particularly tickled by the lunacy of “Rabelais Diabolo,” proving that François was Satan in disguise (she knew that the great medieval farceur had been a Titanian) but Ching was not amused.
By five-thirty she decided that an evening on the town would help her forget Rogue for a few hours, so she dialed GIREGUARD, waited for the computer to check her credit, and ordered an escort who would be Winter’s exact opposite. That, she imagined, would squelch office gossip. To the crucial specification, Sex? she hammered an emphatic NO which, of course, was noted by the office and only confirmed the tittle-tattle.
He strutted into Media, small, powerful, aggressive—you could almost see the chip on his shoulder—with an attitude that announced he was God’s gift to the Solar and you’d better believe it. “Miz Jeroux?” he challenged. “Miz Demi Jeroux?”
“Here,” Demi answered while her heart sank.
“I’m Samson from GIRLGUARD.” He made it sound like a commercial while his eyes took in the other women on the floor. “Herc Samson.”
“Herc for Hercules?” a small voice called from a corner.
“You got it, babe,” Samson threw over his shoulder. He took Demi’s elbow. “Leave us hit the highs, honey.” He grinned. “Your credit’s gonna take one beautiful beating but don’t worry, Herc’ll make everything worth it.” He cased her. “Too bad about that negatory, babe. You look like you could use Herc. He’s the greatest. Herc’s the works.”
Demi wanted something different from the cultivated entertainment to which she was accustomed, so Samson gave her a wild tour of the Northeast underworld. He was intimate with cracksmen and fences, magsmen, goniffs, and shofulmen, the swell mob, the fancy sportsmen and sporting houses, the citadels of the underworld. “I’m the greatest, honey,” he assured her. “You’re guaranteed girlguarded, so don’t worry. Herc’s the works.”
She quailed at the entertainments of the sporting fancy, first at The Hound Hut.
Raising a really first-class fighting dog is a serious business. Mastiffs, bulldogs, terriers, hounds, huskies, setters, airedales, and savage crossbreeds are imported from the entire Solar, most of them stolen. Since they’re fought by weight, about forty to fifty pounds is the maximum so that ten in the pit will not exceed five hundred pounds.
Careful feeding and training is vital. Practice encounters introduce the dog to its profession. “Taste Goons,” poor, indentured laborers, are fed up to give them some strength and spirit (sometimes with the promise of manumission) and used. Before being put into the practice pit the Taste Goon has the most vulnerable parts of his body shaved so that the dog can learn to attack these places.
Demi stared around with wide eyes as Samson led her into the pit parlor. Center was the round, deep circus with a sand floor, surrounded by crowded bleachers. Sporting prints hung on the walls. There were glassed vitrines containing stuffed dogs, famous in their day. They flanked a large portrait of what seemed to be a nude blackamoor jockey, “Wonder Timmy.”
“Weighed a hundred pounds,” Samson told Demi. “Always wore a woman’s bracelet around his neck. Timmy once fought three mains in a row. He was the greatest killer of all time, but they got him in the end.”
At one side of the pit, half a dozen nude and shaven men were warming up with ferocious calisthenics while shouting and screaming gamblers were laying odds on their favorites. The first main was called and “Bendigo Benny” announced. Benny vaulted heavily into the pit and paraded in a circle while his backers cheered and applauded. He took center and nodded to the M.C. A chute opened, ten snarling, slavering fighting dogs swarmed into the circus and tore at Bendigo Benny as he began kicking and smashing them to death.
“Can we go, please?” Demi whispered.
“You sound like a pet freak, honey,” Samson laughed. “That’s okay. Everything’s perk with Herc. Tell you what, we’ll try a Shoot’em’up. No dogs.”
The BBOH (Bitches & Bastards of Outlaw History) stages its entertainments in a replica of a Western saloon. The members re-create the legendary 20th-century Western stars; Gary Cooper, Jimmy Stewart, “Duke” Wayne, Marlene Dietrich, Mae West, etc. Great pains are taken with the costumes, and the men practice quickdraw with six-guns while the women rehearse tough seduction and the barroom cancan. The gambling types wear shiny top hats, frock coats, and practice various forms of card manipulation and cheating in the style of John Carradine, Henry Hull, Brian Donlevy, et al.
This night they were staging a barroom brawl, featuring broken furniture, shattered glass, bloody fistfights, thrown bottles, and finally a gun-walk and quickdraw encounter which ended with the shooting of Henry Fonda wearing a star and Jane Russell wearing nothing.
“They make it seem so real!” Demi exclaimed, applauding enthusiastically.
“It is real, baby.”
“What? Those people… really hurt and… and killed?”
“Uh-huh, they’re really clobbered. All the fighting’s for real. They love to maul each other. That’s why the BBOH is a sellout.”
“And… and the killing?”
“No, they don’t go that far. It’s faked with high-power props that look realer than the real thing and cost a mint. That’s why tickets are priced out of sight. You’re going to scream when you see what we’ve been charged. Herc’s no jerk. He always delivers.”
“Can we go, please?”
“But baby, a lynching comes next.”
“Please?”
“Okay. How about a classy courtroom trial? No dogs, no assault and battery. Just good clean fun.”
It was a sporting house decorated in the plush Victorian style; red velvet, cut glass, fumed oak, flickering gaslight. The brothel bullies wore tail-coats and starched white bibs studded with diamonds. There was even a Victorian governess chaperoning the child prostitutes.
They were holding one of their featured mock trials for an enthusiastic paying audience. A courtroom had been set up in the LSD lounge. There was a Victorian judge in black robes and white wig on the bench, wielding a circumcised dildo gavel. Up in the musicians gallery the band was playing gems from “Trial by Jury.” Twelve sequinned whores sat in the jury box, powdered and rouged, and enticingly decollete. The accused before the judge was another grotesquely painted whore and was singing, screaming and rhyming on a mad trip.
“Prisoner,” the judge shouted over the uproar, “you have been charged. What have you to say in your offense?”
“How did you get to be my judge?” she demanded and sang, “Oh judge not, pussy, lest ye be judged, coozy, lest ye be bugged, riff, fugged, riff, hugged, riff, mugged—”
The dildo pounded. “Don’t you know, prisoner?”
“Oh I know, I know, with a bribe. On the path.”
“What path?”
“The Bridal Path. How many legs does a horse have?”
“Four.”
“If you take three legs from the Four Whoresmen of the Apocalypse how many are left?”
“Nine.”
“Subtract prix your goner and what’s left?”
“Three.”
“I have three legs which makes me a horse.”
“Whose horse, prisoner?”
“Everybody’s. Take two from me and what’s left?”
“One.”
“The one and only, the be all and end all, riff, the sweet end, raff, the beat end, ruff, sentence me, sentence me to fart labor.”
“Prisoner at the bar, I sentence you to rape.”
“Oh goody, goody bum drops. A rape is a wake is a cake is a jape is a gape which is mine for one and all, come one, come all, come, come, come until you’re squeezed dry.”
She stripped, revealing that she was a fag in drag and the jury, leaping upon him while the audience cheered and jeered, revealed the same thing.
“And that’s why the ambassador blew his brains out,” Samson told the horrified Demi.
“Wh-what?”
“Tröyj Caliph, the Turkish ambassador. The embassy claimed it was a heart attack, but he really suzysided. Got trapped in the badger game by the swell mob. You know, babe. Pick up a hustler. Go to her place for jollies. Get caught flagrant plus tapes which you buy off. But the mob wasn’t selling, they set him up for blackmail. Can you guess how?”
“I… I d-don’t want to.”
“They pulled a fancy switch on the ambassador. The hustler wasn’t a real doll, it was that one down there, the prisoner getting banged. Fagsville. Panic city for Tröyj…”
“Please,” Demi begged. “I want to go home now.”
She was girlguarded back to her apartment, signed Samson’s careful bills, safed the door and collapsed.
Now, you’re a Titanian polymorph. You’re a voluntary expatriate because you prefer life on Terra, as many Titanians have down through the ages, and you enjoy your role as a respected physician. What is the permanent persona you adopt? What do you think a lady doctor should look like? Demi’s mother, Dr. Althea Lenox, had taken the great queen, Elizabeth of England, as her model.
The consultation was in Titanian, of course. Since it’s impossible to depict a chemical conversation on paper, I’ll leave it blank and you can fill in with three of your senses; taste, touch, and smell. It won’t be easy; Titanian grammar is tricky. For example, the feel of wool cannot be used as the verb for the smell of wood smoke unless the object of the sentence has a pleasant flavor.
There was only one Terran word spoken during those three days:
Demi returned to New York, terrified.
After a three-week separation he’d expected her to greet him transformed into the role of the vivacious hostess, perhaps even her namesake, Madame Jeanne Françoise Julie Adélaide Récamier (1777–1840), entertaining literary and political society in her fashionable salon. Instead, Demi looked washed-out. She asked a few indifferent questions.
“And Dr. Yael?”
“I left him behind as my regent.”
“Will you have to go back?”
“I’m not sure. Certainly next year, for another kill.”
“Did you—have to eat the heart?”
“Both. My people nearly went out of their minds. I’m a double-king and, by God, I’m proud of it. I certainly earned it.”
(He was and had indeed and, most significant of all, had abandoned the masking spectacles.)
“And that girl?” Demi asked. “The one you—Did you see her again?”
“Ah-ha!” he exclaimed. “So that’s it.”
“That’s what?”
“Why you’re so cold tonight. No, I never saw her again. Odessa Partridge was right; the hit-crowd got lost after the coronation.” He didn’t think it wise to worry her with an account of the confrontation with his stepsisters. “And please believe me, love, absolutely nothing happened between me and their zapette; no bang, just a bite on her ass to teach her a lesson. So no jealousy, please. Warm up and look me one of your looks that I’ve been missing for weeks.”
“I’m not cold, Rogue, just tired and depressed, and you’re on a high roll, so please to go home, dear, and leave me alone.”
“You never called me ‘dear’ before, it was always ‘darling.’ Why now?”
“Please stop nagging me.”
“What’s wrong? You’re so nervous.”
“No I’m not.”
“And you’ve got that same expression you had when you propositioned me in the conference room, scared but determined.”
“No I don’t.”
“Come on, tell Daddy what it’s all about. Give me three guesses. You’ve been fired.”
“No.”
“You’re in love with another guy and don’t know how to hand me my congé.”
“Don’t joke.”
“You owe money. You’re being dunned.”
“Nothing like that.”
“I give up. You’ll have to tell Daddy.”
“You won’t let it alone?”
“No. Stand and deliver.”
She took a deep breath and firmed her lips. “All right, Daddy. You’re a Daddy.”
“What!”
“I’m pregnant.” She began to cry.
He was incredulous. “But you said it’s never happened between Terrans and Titanians.”
“N-never, b-but I suppose there always has to be a first.”
“You said our eggs and sperms don’t love each other.”
“Maybe I l-love you so much that it—it sort of magicked us. I don’t know.” She was sobbing. “Maybe jus ’nother ccosmic joke and n-not funny.”
“How’d you find out?”
“I—I m-missed my period last week and—”
“You have them?” he broke in.
“All females do… and usually I’m like clockwork. So I went to m-my mother—my real doctor mother—and she made some tests and… and you know now, and I’m scared to death. I don’t know what to do.”
Winter let out a sustained yell. The psycat scatted off his lap.
“Rogue! The neighbors!”
“One night. Knocked up in one glorious night. By God, we’ll beat the insects yet! Come here, Starmom. Come on!” He enfolded her: “If it’s a boy he’ll be named after both my fathers, Te Jay. If it’s a girl she’ll be named after all of you, Demure Delicious Double-jointed Gay Deceiver Demi. We’ll call her Decalcomania for short. There’s only one problem,” he added, “owing to a surfeit of tradition.”
“What?”
“The sunbursts. He’ll be King Te Jay Uinta, eventually. Is it fair to put a boy through the royal cheek-bit?” His hand reached in the automatic tic for the spectacles he wasn’t wearing.
“That isn’t the problem.”
“Think not?”
“I know not. The problem is, will he be a boy? Will she be a girl? What will the hybrid be?”
“What the hell do I care? He, she, or it will be ours, and that’s enough for me. You know, I thought you’d put on weight.”
“After a week? Don’t be silly.”
“You will, you will, and then—Hoop-la!”
“I thought you’d be scared, too.”
“Are you mad? I’ve spent my life synergizing other people’s patterns. Now we’ve got our own personal, home-grown, brand-new pattern to play with, Ms. Winter.”
She was laughing and crying. “Rogue Winter, this is the damnedest marriage proposal I’ve ever had, and I’ve had plenty. At the office the betting was that you’d wind up marrying a high-fashion model.”
“Yeh, I know that zokamamie syndrome. The sophisticated beauty who turns everybody’s head in the ski lodge. All girls are haunted by her. Usually she’s named Mystique d’Charisma.”
“Do be serious, Rogue.”
“What’s to be serious? Lookat it. Odessa Partridge has cooled it with the Bologna fuzz. The Maori wipe is out, now that I been kinged. And the kid—whatever kind of weirdo we produce—will be a prince or a princess. This is a jaunty prologue to a jolly adventure.”
“It’s the weird that’s frightening me. It’s all new, the first time, so even my mother can’t advise me, and I do need advice… desperately. Please help me find it, Rogue.”
He nodded and thought hard for a long time, long enough for the smitten psycat to nestle back into his lap. “Tomas Young,” he said with decision. “He’s your man.”
“A doctor?”
“Better. Tomas is director of the Exobiology department at the university. He’s the mavin on the nature of all possible life-forms and their genesis. I did a piece once on the crazy life-constructs he and his crazy computer created. If you boned up on me to hook me, like you said, you probably read it.”
“Will you ask him to advise me?”
“He’ll be delighted, darling. Tom loves a challenge, and this one’s a beauty. I’ll see him first thing in the morning and set it up. Oh, one warning: Tom’s a trustable gent, in case you have to strip for an examination, but watch out for that computer. It’s a goddamn letch.”
“Ssss.”
“So now let’s go to bed, love. Please?”
“I thought you’d go home to unpack.”
“Why d’you think I came straight here from the port?”
“Unga-unga-unga.”
“What the hell’s that?”
“Ssss in Maori,” and she began to transform into her idea of the hamstringing zapette.
We were in the Jungle-Mother exploring the single bars and drinking too much and too damn clumsy and shy to pick up a man or even recognize that we were the pickups occasionally. Couple of nice, naïve kids full of rude health and clean living.
Anyway, Marj was determined to get rid of “it” at a posh stud place advertised in a handout offered to us in the street, but we’d run out of large money. However, we hadn’t run out of bravado so we decided to hock something. I knew about as much about hockshops as I did about men but off we went, the two vivandieres, and luck, fate, or The Great Pawnbroker in the Sky led us to Soho Young’s Loan Shop just as he was closing up.
He looked like Ivan the Terrible and later I wondered whether Young was a shortening of some impossible Mongol name. He wasn’t too enthusiastic about this late rush, but we explained that we had to get back to school that night and had run out of money for fare and could he please help us raise fifty. Soho cocked an eye and said, “Fifty? You Chicago? Northwestern?”
I cleverly covered up. “No, Mr. Young. Maine, University of.”
“Must be going by boat,” Soho said. “What’ve you got?”
We offered our “sensible” jewelry, the little that our families would let us wear, and Soho disdained everything but touched my wristwatch with a finger. “That’s an antique Patek. Man’s. Your father’s?”
“Yes, Mr. Young.”
“He shouldn’t let you wear it. Too good for a freshman.”
Marj blurted, “How’d you know we—”
Soho’s knowing eye cut her off. “I can lend you fifty on this,” he told me. He slid a ticket across the counter and showed me how to fill it in and instructed me how to reclaim the watch. He handed me two twenties and a ten. “All gig?”
I nodded. He hesitated, inspected us glancingly, then permitted a crease to turn up a corner of his mouth. He opened a tiny cabinet behind the cash register. It was full of medicines and he took out a small white box and gave it to me. “Bonus,” he said. “Cordial customer relations.”
“Thank you, Mr. Young.” I was bewildered. “What is it?”
“Seasick pills,” he said and hustled us out of the Loan Shop. On the street I opened the box. It contained four “senza’s,” Venucci oral contraceptive pills. How in God’s name did that amazing man know? I gave the pills to Marj while I gave my heart to Soho Young.
I redeemed the watch the next time I was in the Jungle and only much later discovered that Soho had done something very generous; he’d had it cleaned and renovated for me. When I tried to thank him he brushed me off. “Didn’t do it for you, did it for the watch. You’re just a kid; you don’t realize how precious an old watch is. They got to be treasured like rare paintings, so don’t be wearing it when you’re back-and-forth-handing on the goddamn tennis team.” That was typical of him; he’d quietly checked me out and knew all about me.
There isn’t much difference between pawnbrokers and psychiatrists. Soho knew all about everything, which made him the kind of father that a girl dreams of; experienced, sophisticated, never at a loss, never judging, never without a wry sense of humor. I infested his place every chance I got and spent hours watching and listening and receiving an education whenever Soho was there, which wasn’t often; he seemed to leave most of the business to his clerks.
I remember that crease quirking in the corner of his mouth when he said that he’d have preferred to send me to Yale. My school was, in his opinion, a fag-dyke school, and Matthew Vassar’s beer had been undrinkable. To cure me of piss-elegant campus culture, Soho administered strong doses of hockshop reality.
For instance, there was a bona fide Indian princess with the red dot on her forehead, the sari, and practically everything else except “Indian Love Lyrics” by Amy Woodforde-Finden. She pulled into the Loan Shop one afternoon wearing a brand-new mink coat. Without a word she took it off and put it on the counter. Soho glanced at it and handed her fifteen hundred. She left without counting the cash.
“She comes in every month with a new coat,” he explained as he wrapped it up. “Her mother’s a maharanee or something from Ganymede. Loaded. They got charge accounts at all the expensive stores, but the old lady won’t give her daughter an allowance. So the princess, she just charges a new coat and hocks it for spending money. I figure her mother pays bills without bothering to read them. That loaded.” Soho gave me a stern look. “I think the princess, she uses the money to buy rough studs off the street, and I know she’s got V.D. Let that be a lesson to you.”
“Yes, Mr. Young,” I said.
One bright morning a young man in black tie and bombed out of his brain came in carrying a beautiful antique lantern clock. Soho allowed him two hundred on it and he staggered out with the money. I started to ask something, but Soho motioned me to wait. A few moments later an excessively English butler entered, paid two hundred plus interest on the loan and departed with the clock. The entire transaction had been as silent and automatic as that with the Ganymede princess.
“Dutch kid from Callisto,” Soho explained. “Rich. Always needs money for skag, so he steals something from the house. I got an arrangement with his mother. She guarantees any loan I make him.”
“But if she knows what he’s doing, why doesn’t she give him the money herself?”
“She can’t get him off horse, so she figures the least she can do is make him sweat for his smack,” Soho gave me another steely look. “He picked up the habit in your fag-dyke college. Let that be a lesson to you and watch yourself. Only habit you should have is work.”
“Thank you, Mr. Young.”
Soho’s slogan was: If it isn’t alive and you can get it through the door, you can hock it. His clerks, Roland and Eli showed me the damnedest things that were brought in; animal heads, outboard motors, an entire gypsy cimbalom, a python skin forty feet long. One old character pawned fourteen sets of false teeth, not his own. Soho never did find out how he got them.
“Craziest thing that ever came in was a mummy,” he told me.
“A mummy? Like from a pyramid?”
“Gig. My first thought was, this guy zigged it from some museum, so I checked.”
“How, Mr. Young?”
“Pay attention and learn. Mummies are so special they’re all pedigreed. The experts know every one.”
“Oh. Like vintage cars, Mr. Young?”
“Now you dig it. This one was legit. The guy was an Egyptologist trying to raise money for another expedition up the Nile or wherever. So I let him have fifteen thousand.”
“Did he redeem it?”
“No. Wrote and told me to sell it.”
“Did you get your money back?”
“Now you go too far,” Soho said sternly.
“Sorry, Mr. Young.”
But behind him Eli silently raised a thumb and forefinger for a “two” and then ringed them into a “zero” and jerked his hand four times.
One glorious afternoon Soho permitted me to stand in the pledge cage as an acting clerk. “Teach you something you can’t learn in that fag-dyke school,” he said, “How to size people up. Half the Solar is goniffs conniving to rip the other half.” Of course his assistants kept a watchful eye on me, but my first customer was an astonishing lesson in human “idio-nys-canaries,” as Soho always put it, which no one could possibly have predicted.
An engineer off one of the Solar ships—his radiation badge read, CUNARD BRIGADIER—rolled in, obviously enjoying a Happy Hour, and asked, “Hoi, you jocks hock any whatsoever?”
“If it isn’t alive and you can get it through the door,” I parroted, “you can pawn it.”
“R,” he said and planked a Lloyd’s thousand banknote down on the cage counter before me. “Wanna hock this.”
I stared. “You want to pawn cash?”
He grinned. “Gotta red-hot momma in tow. Don’t want her find out got this much on me. Sure to take me. Leave it where’s safe. R?”
I looked at Eli and Roland. They shrugged and nodded, so I started filling out a ticket. “How much do you want on this, sailor?”
“Nothin’. Jussa ticket.”
“It’ll cost you the standard five percent all the same.”
“A-Oke.” He fished a five out of his pocket and handed it over. “Sort of protection money, har? Pay five, save a milli.” He received his ticket and rolled out singing, “He knew the world was round-O, he knew it could be found-O…”
An hour later the red-hot momma came in with the ticket and collected the thousand.
Soho’s clerks told me that small-time crooks devote a lot of time and thought to ripping pawnbrokers. They hock painted diamonds, rings with doublet stones’ (glass with a sliver of diamond cemented on top to pass the scratch test), dummy cameras from window displays, and watches and accordions without internal works. Roland said, “They pick the rush hours when everyone’s crowding the buffet and we haven’t the time to look inside the sandwiches.” Roland had a sort of Madison Avenue advertisingese nostalgia, which he got mixed up occasionally. Once I heard him say, “Let’s run it up the flagpole and see if it gets off at Grand Central.”
When respectables visited the hockshop for the first time, they were usually ashamed, imagining that they were at the bottom of the financial line and groveling in the gutter. This always annoyed Soho, who told me, “Man’s got a mortgage on his home and he isn’t ashamed. So why should he be ashamed of a mortgage on his watch? Answer me that, girlie.”
“I can’t, Mr. Young.”
“Did you and your friend who wanted to get laid feel that way when you come in the first time? Did she?”
“She wasn’t ashamed, Mr. Young.”
“I don’t mean that. Did she get to use the Seasick pills?”
“Oh. Yes. Just in case. That was very nice of y—”
“Like it?”
“I think she was scared more than anything else, Mr. Young.”
“Uh-huh. Figures. Were you ashamed, hocking your watch?”
“No, Mr. Young. It was an adventure.”
“Uh-huh. Got to get you fixed up soon. Nice girl like you. You’re overdue.”
“Oh, Mr. Young…”
“Romantic, that’s your problem. At Yale your ass would have been banged off seventeen ways to Tuesday by now. Run up a score before you fall in love. Dig? Fag-dyke college!”
But I’d done so brilliantly my first year at fagdyke Vassar—and I really do believe that it was Soho’s dynamic influence that drove me—that the TerraGardai Section contacted me at the beginning of the sophomore term and I began my long association with Intelligence. And Soho Young abruptly disappeared. Pouf! Just like that. Spurlos versenkt. Without realizing it, much less intending it, I’d made his ancillary decoy cover too dangerous to continue. Intelligence (bureaucrats prefer to call us the TerraGardai Section) didn’t brief me on that until long after the event.
And that late, great Soho Young was the same Tomas Young, exobiologist, whom Winter was to consult on Demi Jeroux’s behalf. I can hear Winter now: “Who? Whom? I busted pronouns owing to a surfeit of__ __ __ __ __ .” Fill in the missing word and you may win one of five giant cash prizes.
“I didn’t, Tom.”
“She tell you?”
“She showed me.”
“Fascinating. I’d love to have a look inside her.”
“No way.”
“Just a little peek? It wouldn’t hurt.”
“Forget it.”
“Oh well, I’ll settle for the Roentgen caper.”
“Will that do anything to her?”
“How should I know?”
“Then it’s out.”
“Selfish! How’d your sprite find out she was pregnant for sure?”
“Tests.”
“Then she’s seen a doctor.