The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde Page 14

  Well I must’ve just wandered around for hours before I felt… How can I describe it? A kind of scratchy shiver in my head, like running a broken fingernail down a piece of slate. An awful feeling, but it just came and went in a moment, and all of a sudden, things got kind of dreamy-like.

  The moss seemed to get thicker, the light richer, heavier. And all of a sudden, the air was full of tiny, neon-colored birds, no bigger than beetles, like a whole aquarium full of flying tropical fish, and they almost seemed to be whistling in harmony.

  I went on in a kind of daze, and that scratchy feeling came and went again, and a very funny thing happened. I found myself remembering all kinds of things: women I had known, the taste of Blandi wine and fried prawns, the smell of Shondor aphrofume, the sun flashing on the Ruby Beach, the carnival feel of Riallo… Good things, a whole lifefull of good things, all whipping through my mind like someone had recorded the best moments of my life on tape and was playing the whole tape back, a hundred times normal speed.

  It was like being high on mescal and bhang and duprish all at once, and I got flashes of that too, I mean memories of what being high was really like, mixed in with the rest of it.

  I forgot everything—the reason I was in the Swamp, the fact that I had to be back on the ship in two days, even my depression at my impending Mustering Out. I just wandered around reliving the best moments of my life at breakneck speed.

  And then I felt that awful, nerve-tingling feeling again, stronger this time. It seemed to last for hours, and then it was gone again, and…

  I was standing on top of a little hill. And there below me, where it just couldn’t possibly be, was a city. The city. The city the Mindallan spacer had raved about. And he had been dead right. It was the most beautiful place in the Galaxy.

  I’ve seen a thousand cities on hundreds of planets. I’ve seen Riallo on Topaz which makes Greater New York look like a dirty little milltown. Fred, this place made Riallo look like a cluster of mud huts.

  Translucent towers of emerald a mile high, piercing the clouds like artificial mountains, hundreds of them, and the streets of the city wound around their feet, streets jammed with buildings from a hundred planets and cultures—Argolian force-pavilions, mosques, Boharaanan fhars, skyscrapers, stadia, ziggurats—all shimmering and flickering in the ever-changing light that seemed to come from the towers, that made the sky above the city a great rainbow aurora.

  A river separated the foot of my hill from the city. A bridge crossed the river, and a road crossed the bridge. The road was a ribbon of burnished silver. The bridge was a single, arching, dazzling living crystal that might’ve been diamond. The river was a flow of liquid gold.

  The Capital city of the Universe. Utterly stupifying, utterly impossible… and yet, I had that, what do you call it, deja vu feeling that I had somehow seen it before.

  What can I say, Fred? I must’ve been out of my head. It couldn’t be there, but it was, and I couldn’t even think of all the impossibilities of the situation, the sheer insanity of it all. I ran down that hill like a sex-starved hermit towards a Mexican border town, down the silver road, across the diamond bridge, and I was there, totally there.

  Ever been in Rio at the height of Carnival? Ever spent Mardi Gras in Old New Orleans? Ever heard of how Riallo becomes one great citywide party on Settling Day Eve? Well triple that. Raise it to its own power, take a big drag of opium, and man, you won’t even come close.

  It just sucked me in—whoosh! The streets were simply boiling with people and beings. Golden Women from Topaz, tall green Jungle Masters from Mizzan, Steppenvolke from Siegfried dressed in clinging mirror-suits, lemur-faced Cheeringbodas, women with their hair piled into nests for shimmering Grellan Glass Butterflies… Beings from a thousand planets, all babbling, laughing… Carnival sounds; laughter, singing, music. Carnival smells; perfume, frying food, hashish smoke, wine, women.

  I felt as if I had stepped into the Arabian Nights. Any minute, a flying carpet might float by. I felt as if I had been searching for this place, this huge Carnival, this moment in time, all my life. I wanted to laugh and scream and cry.

  And then I felt that itching in my mind again, and I saw her coming towards me, straight towards me through that packed throng.

  She was wearing those now-opaque, now-transparent golden robes from Topaz. She was almost my height, had exotic oriental features but bone-white skin. Luminous emerald hair cascaded onto her shoulders. She had a slim-but-full body, and through a momentary transparency in her robes, I saw that her nipples were an impossible blood-red, matching the color of her small, full lips.

  She was like no woman anyone had ever seen, and yet as she stood before me, I had that uncanny deja vu feeling again. I knew her, but from where? Ridiculous! How could any man forget a woman like this?

  She touched my hand, and a thrill went through me like a jolt from a Pleasurebox. “Hello,” she said, and the sound of her voice turned my knees to jello. “I’ve been waiting for you. We’ve all been waiting, a long, long time. Just for you. Come! Come join the carnival!”

  “What…? Uh…? How…?” I stammered like some poleaxed yokum. Me, Fred, old Supercharged Spence!

  She laughed, reached up, curled her hands around my neck and kissed me. Her mouth was warm and open, and the taste of her breath made me forget everything. I moved my body against her, asking the question, and she answered me with a counter-pressure that was more than a compliance, more certain than an open invitation.

  She snaked her hands down my neck, over my shoulders, across my chest, and took both my hands in hers. She nodded towards the choked, swirling streets. “Come on,” she said. “The best night of your life is waiting for you, and the darkness is just beginning.”

  “How long…? How long does all this go on?” I somehow managed to say.

  She laughed, a long, wild laugh that made me burn and made me shiver. “Forever!” she cried maniacally. “For you, this can be the night that lasts forever!”

  And before I could say a word, before I could tell whether I was eager or afraid, she tugged at my hands, and we were off into the camivaling city together.

  It was dusk—I don’t know what time it was by the revolution of Mindalla, but in that impossible city it was a winey, misty, red dusk, and dusk it remained as long as I stayed there, a heady night that always seemed about to fall.

  She led me through the streets, through the laughing, packed streets, past knots of humans and ’Bodas and Dreers, open stands offering food and wine and drugs from all over the Galaxy, and finally into… a house? a room? a place?

  A great round hall, the “walls” a circle of marble columns, past which I caught glimpses of other halls, and rooms, and passageways beyond, that seemed to go on and on and on, a labyrinth of rooms and hallways packed with people and beings and tables bearing food and drink, an endless, continuous party that wound through the hall, and the rooms beyond, and perhaps the entire city, without limits, without end.

  We ate from tables piled with the delicacies of scores of cultures, dozens of worlds: caviar, mulgish, roast boar, shar-shu-ding, pilaf, cheeses, cakes, breads, majoun… And strangely, my hunger, though never sharp, lasted through it all, through a feast that seemed to go on for hours.

  We drifted from crowded room to packed courtyard. A dark chamber where naked women danced to the pounding beat of African drums… An open court by the golden river where we sat on white sands, inhaling moutar from Topaz, and watched the Golden Ones do their insidious Water Dance… A neon-lit room where weirdly-dressed kids danced to the music of an ancient Terran rock band…

  The amorphous building seemed to be the city itself, and the city was one wild carnival of food and music and dancing, swirling, laughing, and completely carrying me away. It seemed that I had but to think of something—a certain food, a wine I remembered, a music I had heard of, and it was there, anything I ever wanted, ever could want.

  And when the time came when there was only one more thing I wanted,
we turned a corner, stepped through a doorway, and…

  We were suddenly alone. We were floating in a dark chamber, floating in nothing at all. A velvet, buoying nothing, softer, somehow than free-fall itself. She threw aside her robes, and all at once her body seemed to glow with a warm, golden light. She plucked at my clothes, and then I was naked too, and my body was glowing from within like hers.

  When we made love, it seemed as if we were alone in the whole universe, the light of our bodies the only light there was. She was perfect… and I was better. You know me, Fred, so you know what I mean when I say it was the best I had ever had, and the best I had ever been. It made me forget every woman I had ever known.

  And afterward, I wasn’t tired at all—I was full of vitamins and ready for another night of partying. So we laughed and kissed, and it was back to that endless, fantastic party.

  And this time around, I felt that the eyes of every woman there were on me. Ever have that feeling? I suppose you never have, Fred. But I felt like the cock of the walk; I somehow knew that any woman there I wanted would be mine, and glad to be of service. But it only made me eager for another go at the chick with the white, white skin and the green hair. I somehow knew that I would have plenty of time to sample the rest of them, all the time in the world…

  So the spirit moved me again, and we were alone again. We swam nude in a pool of golden water heated to blood-heat under a huge silver moon (on moonless Mindalla), and then we stretched out on a lawn of bright green grass while a warm, perfumed breeze swiftly dried our bodies. 1 reached out, touched one perfect breast…

  “Spence…” she moaned.

  It brought me short. I suddenly went cold. I had never told her my name. That one impossibility somehow reminded me that I was in the middle of a swamp, a swamp where there was no city, where… I was afraid, furious and afraid.

  I pulled my hand away. “Who are you?” I snapped. “What is—?”

  She leaned toward me, kissed me, and the question seemed stupid, trivial…

  But something in me was still fighting it. I shoved her away. “What the hell is all this? What’s going on here?”

  She looked at me, a strange, pleading look in her eyes. She laughed a wicked, sensual laugh. “Do you really have to know?” she sighed.

  But I wasn’t buying. Something was being done to me, and I had to know what.

  “Tell me!” I roared. “Tell me or—”

  She began to cry, wilt, whimper. I felt like a heartless monster. “If you insist…” she said, “I’ve got to tell you. But don’t insist—take my word for it, Spence, you won’t like what you hear. What do you care what we are, where you are? Look around you, smell the air, hear the music, touch my body. Do you want to lose all this? Can any place be like this for you again? Will you ever have another night like this, ever, ever?”

  I felt a terrible, aching sadness. I knew she was right, knew that this moment, right now, this night and no other, past or future was the best I could ever know. I was a spacer with less than two years left on my Papers, and suddenly I felt like an old, old man—from this moment, the rest of my life could only be a long, gray downhill slide to nothingness.

  “It doesn’t have to be,” she said, as if reading my mind. “This moment, this night, this place, this carnival, never has to end. Not for you. Forever, Spence. It can last forever, and forever is a long, long time…”

  “Tell me!” I screamed, shaking her shoulders, driven by some savage compulsion, perhaps the knowledge that I was being offered something that in another moment I would be powerless to resist.

  Suddenly, a terrible pain sheered through my head, and the city, the pool, her, flickered for a moment and were gone.

  I was lying on the moist black swamp earth. I was dressed. My clothes were clammy, my stomach ached with hunger. It was night.

  And I was alone.

  Then I heard a voice in my mind, a cold, chitinous voice like a million crabs clicking their claws in my head. “A billion years,” the voice said, and the very sound, the sandpaper feel of it, filled me with dread. “A billion years is a long time to be alone, unused, discarded like a broken toy.”

  “Who… what are you? Her…? The city…?”

  “You…” the voice in my mind rasped. “Mostly you, a little of me. I looked into your mind, read your memories, your desires, things you didn’t even know yourself, and I gave it to you. What you wanted, what you really wanted. It was easy. That’s what I was… made for doing. A billion years ago.”

  “All an illusion?” I stammered. “Just a reflection of my dreams?”

  The voice laughed, a hideous, crawling mental sound that set every nerve in my body screaming. “You underestimate the subtlety of the Masters,” the voice said. “Those you call the Race With No Name. No mere wish-fulfillment for them. Every world in this Galaxy was theirs, but it was not enough for them. They craved new worlds, subjective worlds, worlds that lived and breathed and reflected their private whims, but worlds that were still apart from their minds, worlds that held surprises for their dirty, jaded minds. None of them mere dreams, but none of them real.”

  “But you… you’re real! You’re talking to me now!”

  “I’m real,” the voice said, words dripping sour acid. “You would call me an… Artifact. They created me out of metal and force… and things you could never understand. They gave me the power to read the innermost thoughts and desires of all sentient beings, the power to spin dreams, beautiful dreams without end. A toy, just a toy. But they wanted more, they wanted passion. So they made me sentient, a living, caring thing, a thing with a will and only one motivation—the passion to please a sentient being, any sentient being. And then, a billion years ago, they left for I know not where, and they left me here to rot, flung aside when they no longer were amused by their toy. They left me here to rot and suffer and yearn to please a sentient being. For a billion years, a billion empty years till humans came to this planet.”

  I shivered in the warm night, felt monstrous things staring at me from out of the black, black night, from out of the unthinkable, distant past.

  “But… you’re not a woman?” I said.

  “I can give you every woman you could ever learn to want,” the voice said.

  “I…1 want to see you…” 1 stammered.

  “I cannot disobey the order of a sentient being,” the voice said. “No matter how much I want to…”

  There was a movement in the trees, and I saw a dark shape, a slithering, metallic thing, a lump of darkness blacker than the night… A wet sound… A cold, cold wind across my face, a vortex of… of something my eyes could not focus on. I felt myself falling into a black, black pool, eaten alive by green squamous things…

  I screamed and screamed and screamed.

  And all at once, I was standing in the middle of the diamond bridge, and she was standing before me.

  “I can’t keep you from going,” she said. She kissed me and gestured toward the great emerald spires, the carnival that went on and on and on…

  “All yours, Spence,” she said. “Your own private heaven. A universe all for you, a universe that was made for you. Think of it—being made love to by a whole universe. A night of pleasure that never ends. Forever, Spence, a special kind of forever.”

  “What… what kind of forever?”

  She laughed, touched me lightly on the lips. “What does it matter?” she said. “A second, an hour, a day, a year, a billion years. If it seems like forever, it is forever, isn’t it, Spence? And I can make it seem like forever. You know I can. I can’t keep you from going… but can you keep you from coming back?”

  Then she was gone, and the city was gone, and I was alone in the silence of the Swamp. I stumbled forward a few steps, and my feet clattered against something in the dark, something hard and round. I reached down, touched it, and pulled my hand back.

  It was a skull. A human skull. I remembered the Mindallan spacer, and I felt the gnawing hunger in my guts, and I rememb
ered that in the city I had eaten and eaten and eaten…

  What kind of forever?

  Now you know why I’m writing to you, Fred. Soon my Papers will expire, and I’ll have to pick one lousy planet out of a whole Galaxy on which to spend the rest of my life… thirty, forty, fifty years of… of nothing. Or a whole universe that can be mine for a day or a week or a year that will seem like forever.

  Please Fred, talk me out of it! Say something, anything, that will make it seem wrong. But make it good, brother mine, make it good. Say something, anything, that will keep me from going back to Mindalla.

  Spence

  Deathwatch

  The old man’s breathing was shallow now, dry and brittle, each breath an effort of no little significance. His head rested on the pillow like a dried and shriveled nut on a napkin.

  The man standing at the foot of the bed stared impassively into indefinite space. His strong, unlined face showed no emotion—though there was a strange look, indeed, about his eyes, a deep, ageless resignation that seemed grossly out of place on a face that could be no more than twenty-five.

  The woman leaning her head on his shoulder had long, thick, honey-colored hair framing a young face wet with tears. Now and then a sob would wrack her body, and the man would stroke her hair with near-mechanical tenderness. He would pass his tongue slowly over his lips as if searching for words of comfort.

  But there were no words and there was no comfort. The only sound in the room was the rasping breath of the old man in the bed sighing the dregs of his life away…

  He smiled happily at his wife as she cuddled the newborn baby in her arms. He was, like all babies to all parents, a beautiful baby: weight, nine pounds; skin, ruddy; voice, excellent.

  A son, he thought. My son. Secretly, he was relieved. While the doctors had assured them that there was no reason in the world why they could not have children, he had always had that inane, irrational feeling that he would never really be able to know that it was true until this moment, when he could actually reach out and touch his son.