Mythmaster, page 2
At Shannon’s elbow, a yellow light winked up at He acknowledged its message. He pushed, in intricate sequence, a series of buttons. Outside the viewplate, Seventh Heaven rose and tilted, turned and danced to the left and then to the right as the ship descended and entered the docking site. Shannon watched as, the site doors slid open to receive the ship. The action — the act of docking — brought a rumble of laughter out of his throat. Perhaps they had designed it that way — symbolic and sensuous. Doubtful. He decided, that it was only his overactive glands feeding his brain with the fuel of desire that allowed him to interpret the simple technological act of docking and mooring a spaceships as the sexual thrust and lunge of a man into the symbolically feminine opening of the dock doors.
‘Starson!’ he bellowed, rising and walking back through the passage to the row of cabins where the crew was quartered. ‘We’re here. Where the hell are you?’
He finally found Starson, alone as usual, on the lower cargo deck. He was leaning against the thick glass panel that separated him from the tiny cubicles on the opposite side in which the living cargo scratched and gnawed and sucked the minuscule nipples from which a nutrient solution constantly seeped. The cargo — the slightly more than four hundred mice were the usual white, black, and patchwork mice, plus a few pink ones. They were, Shannon thought, as he watched Starson watching the mice, the ideal animal for his purposes. They were small, and that was their most important qualification. They could be shipped easily anywhere in the galaxy and beyond it with little trouble — hundreds of them, each of their wombs sheltering several fertilised human eggs. Cows wouldn’t do. Too big. Even dogs or cats would reduce the important quantitative factor in Shannon’s business and thereby measurably reduce his net profit. He had tried transportation in artificial wombs, only to find that their instability factor during space flight caused the eggs to atrophy. No, live mice were the obvious answer. They made his business profitable, and that was Shannon’s only concern.
What was Starson doing? He barely breathed. Shannon could not see his face. Starson came down here often when he was off duty. Shannon saw nothing fascinating about the mice. They were just… mice.
‘Starson.’
Starson turned around slowly. ‘Shannon, did you say there were over a thousand this time?’
‘Eggs? Yes. One thousand and sixteen. Why?’
‘One thousand and sixteen,’ Starson repeated. His brown eyes flickered beneath their heavy lashed lids. His hands, his fingers, moved slightly, as if they were counting, in the way of unsure children in the early years of school. He was slender, but his slenderness was deceptive. It did not spell weakness. His body was strong and muscular, his bones not large but decidedly serviceable. His grip was firm, and his fists had met more than one opponent’s face and body with unpleasant results for those opponents. ‘One thousand and sixteen. So many.’
‘We’ve carried more.’
‘I know.’
‘Over two thousand last time out to Aldebaran. Tell me something. Why do you come down here? Why do you watch the mice?’
Starson grinned and ran his hand through the forest of his black hair. Several rings on his fingers flashed in its tangle, and the tan of his hand was mahogany in an ebony nest. He shrugged. ‘I like living things. They fascinate me. I mean… well, I don’t know, really.’
Shannon shrugged. ‘You’re at liberty,’ He said. ‘We’ve docked.’
‘Seventh Heaven?’
‘All seven heavens.’
‘To each his own, Shannon?’
Gruffly, angrily, Shannon said, ‘Secure the ship before you set one wayward foot off her. Forcefield her.’ He stood his ground, aware that he was glaring at Starson, aware that the hard edge of his anger was somewhat blunted by another, gentler feeling that lurked somewhere in the shadowy chambers of his mind and which he would not or could not name.
Starson stepped around Shannon and made his way down the passage, his hand trailing along the clear and shining glass behind which the mice nuzzled and scurried. He went through the door and around the corner.
Coincident with his disappearance, Lee Rawley arrived from the opposite direction and greeted Shannon with a nod. ‘How long are we going to be here, Shannon?’ he asked, as he busied himself adjusting the dials on the feeding apparatus that sustained the mice.
Shannon didn’t reply at first. Starson — their encounter — had left him feeling uneasy. He felt familiar and darker demons stirring within him somewhere. Damn Starson!
‘Daydreaming —’ Rawley stood facing Shannon, an eyebrow lifted slightly, the corners of his mouth turned up in what was not quite a smile.
‘Nightmaring,’ Shannon replied. ‘What did you say?’
‘I asked how long we would be staying here. Whats our schedule?’
‘Twelve hours. It should be enough. It’ll have to be. How’s the cargo?’
‘Splendid, although we did lose a few mice in the last day or two.’
‘Present egg count?’
‘One thousand and six. We’ve lost four mice — ten eggs in all.’
‘Our contract calls for the delivery of one thousand. Don’t lose anymore.’ Shannon strode down the passage and around the corner.
In his cabin, he stripped off his clothes and stepped into the shower. The steam that swirled up in the enclosure was pleasantly warm and languid. Counterbalancing it was the invigorating cold water he turned on after he had washed himself thoroughly. He dried himself with blasts of hot air and stepped out of the shower and into his far-from-princely cabin.
There was little if anything princely about the ship or its accommodations.
“It was an old ship which he had bought years ago after his first one had been damaged beyond repair. A meteor had exploded in its path and punctured the hull like blasts of bird-shot. This present ship had been retired from service as a long-run freighter and had been up for auction at the Federal Preserve on Marstation when Shannon arrived in port. Its purchase had taken nearly every Token he had had at the time. It wasn’t a bad bargain, really. He needed a cargo carrier for his purposes. He later borrowed enough Tokens — a few here, a few there — to make the necessary adjustments in the cargo hold that he required, and he was back in business. His last trip out when the meteor had struck had been a financial disaster. He had lost his cargo — all of it — thereby voiding his contract. Every mouse on board had perished. The meteor fragments had penetrated the air filtration system, and the mice had all been asphyxiated. They couldn’t protect themselves by switching on auxiliary filtration as Shannon and the crew had done in their quarters after the collision. Shannon blamed himself for what had happened. He had not got to the mice in time. He had shanghaied his astrogator that trip, and the man, Shannon still suspected, had deliberately plotted their course to coincide with the track of the meteor racing towards them. The astrogator had been about to marry before Shannon subjected him to Mythmadness and had him carted aboard. For days afterwards, the man had raved and stormed about the ship, threatening to foul the navigation system with sugar crystals. Shannon fought him finally, fist to fist, and afterwards the man performed his duties in a silence that was a cool pool of hatred.
Shannon, with a grim smile, put aside his memories. He chose a silk shirt and velvet trousers, both yellow. As he slid his long legs into the trousers and then belted them about him, he faced himself in the mirror. He was definitely not handsome, he realised, principally due to the scar on his face, which had been one legacy of that battle to end all battles in which he had engaged in the hold of his first ship when he had been an honest man — an executive officer in the Spacelane Five Fleet, in fact. There had been an attack by freelane pirates. Lasers and long knives had been the weapons they used. A knife had midwifed the scar, opening his face like a piece of bloody, butchered beef. The limp that plagued him was also the result of that encounter. A laser beam had broken both flesh and bone in his left leg during the mêlée, and no surgeon had ever been able to weld the bones together again in a way that would let him walk normally.
He stared at his reflection in the mirror without pity or any real regret. No, he wasn’t handsome. His hair was too thick and too wiry, and it wasn’t black or brown, but something rather nondescript in between. His eyes were a pale blue, not unlike the eyes of an albino. At times he speculated on the genetic message they signalled. What had happened back there in the timestack of days and nights, and between whom, that had left him with the legacy of a pair of ghostly, blue-white eyes? He would never know. He bent down and pulled on a pair of boots, thinking of Starson, forgetting himself.
Starson was twenty-seven years old, only three years younger than Shannon himself. But he was like a twelve-year-old with his clear and unlined skin. The aura of youth was a bright corona about him. Only Starson’s eyes betrayed him. They were the eyes of a centenarian. They had seen too much too often, and it showed.
Shannon shoved his hands in his pockets. He glanced at himself in the mirror again, not wishing he were handsome or that he walked as steadily as any other man, but wishing that he… The thought wouldn’t come clear. He couldn’t even think the wish. But it was there. A yearning. Someday he would surprise it in the shadows within his brain and know exactly what it was he wished.
There was something in his pocket. A piece of paper. He withdrew it and unfolded it.
‘I knew you’d choose the yellow outfit. But I bet you put on your old garrison belt. Take it off. In the second drawer of your clothes cabinet is a scarlet sash. Put it on.’
Shannon crumpled the note and threw it in the waste-disposal unit. It had no signature. It needed none. Shannon knew that Starson had written it. The leather garrison belt he had indeed put on suddenly felt too tight. Studying himself in the mirror, he decided that the belt really wasn’t right. It was old and scarred and stained. Like myself, he thought. He wore it because it was familiar, and he liked such familiar, friendly things as old clothes and worn tools. He slipped the belt through the loops of his trousers and tossed it on his bunk. He found the sash, neatly laid out as if waiting for him. It was a narrow piece of silk, brightly red. He threaded it through the loops of his trousers and tied it in a knot at his side, letting the ends hang down unevenly. Looking at himself again in the mirror, he decided that Starson had been right. He looked quite dashing. It was the sash that did it. He grinned faintly before going out and up the ladder to the airlock, on his way to one or more of the seven heavens that waited just outside the walls of his tired old hell of a ship.
CHAPTER THREE
Mirrors.
Quaint instruments.
Scented pools with bright blossoms floating on their surfaces.
Incense and thongs and costumes.
Seventh Heaven was Wonderland, and Alice was everywhere. On one level, she wore high, high heels and carried a riding crop. Another Alice on another level sat. astride a throne, and on her head, instead of a crown, was a filmy mourning veil. Countless Alices, seven levels, a boutique of bizarre entertainment, a haven where the dark calls of flesh to flesh — whatever their nature might be — never went unanswered. Seventh Heaven. Refuge and zoo. It was its own world in which penance and pain and love and desire and hate and guilt and fear and trembling blended and fused, lurking one within the other, ever altering, ever deceiving.
As Shannon entered the gilded reception hall, odd music filtered softly through the air to his ears. The wordless song suggested to him the desperate cry of the stricken antelope when the claws of the lion are in its flanks.
He saw the girl coming towards him, and his eyes narrowed appraisingly. Short she was, with up-tilted breasts like ripe apples, and an unmistakable gaudiness in her glance. She looked as if she would be able to endure anything and all things. She reached out, and he let her take his hands in her own.
‘Home is the sailor,’ she said. ‘Home from the seas of space. Was it a long trip?’
Shannon nodded. ‘Out from Earth twenty days ago with a good crew, poor provisions, and only our dream of dollars at the end to console us. What’s your name?’
The girl, instead of answering, asked a question. ‘Are you a pirate?’
Shannon’s laughter was without joy. When it had subsided, he thought about the girl’s question briefly, and then answered it not in the negative as he had been intending to do, but with an affirmative nod of his head. Well, it was true. He was a pirate of a strange sort, although he had never thought of himself or his occupation quite that way before.
‘What do you steal, pirate?’
‘I asked your name.’
With no coyness, but with a practised lure in her voice, the girl replied, ‘Eve.’
‘Let every man be Adam, then,’ Shannon said, bowing slightly.
The girl evidently had not expected the compliment, nor to hear it put so gracefully. She seemed surprised that this mountain of a man with the broad shoulders and heavy hands hanging at his sides could turn his tongue to work such graceful subtleties. It obviously pleased her. ‘What pleasures can we provide for you? Oh, forgive me. I have not been employed here very long, and I am still learning how to… Come, Adam. Come with me.’
The girl, her sleek gown swirling about her sandalled feet, took his arm and led him to the console of little lights and buttons that covered a major portion of one wall of the reception hall. ‘The screens are numbered, as you can see,’ she told Shannon. ‘Press the buttons, and you will see what you can expect on each level. The sights you will see typify the level’s orientation, but, I should add, you will not be invading anyone’s privacy. We are very conscientious about that here. The scenes were filmed by us earlier, using adroit members of our staff. Let me bring you a drink.’
Shannon felt her release his arm, and he almost regretted her going. It had been nice to feel briefly bound by another human being, however tentatively. The thought disturbed him, and he promptly put it out of his mind. He pressed the button labelled ‘Level Four’. Although he had visited Seventh Heaven several times before, he knew that the delights accessible on any given level at any given time were likely to have changed since his previous visit. Variety, the owners of this pleasure palace had long ago learned, was more than just the spice of life. It was also the quality that brought customers back a second and a tenth and a hundredth time and put money in many pockets and a thin joy in as many hearts.
The screen labelled ‘Level Four’ flickered and glowed into life.
There were two women in the huge bed. Their bodies were carnivals of movement around and about the object of their attentions — the naked man lying indolently on his back, his hands folded behind his head. Hair flying and fingers skilfully touching him now here, now there, the women whirled and writhed above him like dervishes.
Shannon pressed the audio button.
A deep male groan erupted into a higher register and emerged as a great wail. They were turning the man over now. Now he was on his stomach, his arms flung out, his buttocks two white hills above the girl sliding beneath him the other one bent down towards him and…
The girl who had greeted Shannon appeared at his side. ‘Here’s your drink, pirate.’
He did not hear her. She glanced at the screen. Her face showed no emotion as she placed the drink on the circular table beside the console and quietly withdrew.
Shannon darkened the screen of Level Four a few minutes later. As he did so, he noticed the drink the girl had brought. He drank it all in one long gulp and lighted Level One after a moment of obvious hesitation. He had been about to pass it by.
The walls of the room were granite and slate. Embedded in them were iron chains from which manacles hung and above which torches burned in evenly spaced niches. The floor of the room was wet and glistening. Into the empty room came three men, naked except for the hip-high boots and leather vests they wore. In the hands of two of the men were slick whips ending in tightly braided thongs. The whip carriers embraced eagerly kissed and then turned to their companion, who seemed to acquiesce to their unheard demand, dropping to his knees as he did so. The two men dragged him to the wall and fastened the manacles about his wrists raised their whips, and brought them singing down upon him.
Shannon brought his fist down hard upon the button, and the screen went dark.
Level Seven.
She was asleep, or seemed to be, on a pile of furs in the middle of a mirrored room. Beside her a fountain tossed a watery mist mixed with tiny flowers into the still air. Her long hair sprayed out over the hides on which she lay. It was the colour of old, old gold and looked as soft as the rushes of a marsh on Earth. Her nose was straight, with small nostrils above her slightly parted lips that were full and had been touched with a delicate pastel lip pomade. Her long eyelashes feathered her pale cheeks.
Shannon felt lust awaken in his loins. The girl wore a gown of white that was more translucent than transparent. Had she been nude, he would not have felt such desire for her, he was certain. But the gown that flowed over her body like a cascade of sea froth hinted at the marvel of her beneath it without revealing her every secret too soon or too completely.
He heard the faint hum that came from something striking something else — perhaps a ball of chamois against thin brass — a gong.
Her eyes were amber, he saw, as she opened them. She stretched, running impossibly long and slender fingers through the fur on which she was lying. In a movement like rippling water, she rose and went behind an Oriental screen. Impatiently, Shannon waited for her to return.
When she did, a man was with her. Before he recognised the man, hidden as he was in total familiarity, he recognised the yellow velvet trousers belted with a scarlet sash that the man was wearing. Himself!
