Mythmaster, page 3
How…? The girl who had greeted him earlier when he arrived appeared beside him to answer his unspoken question. ‘You were photographed when you arrived. The camera is linked to our computer, where your probable actions were selected from among numerous possibilities, and the holographic display was then programmed for your entertainment. We decided to show you what awaits you with Reba Charlo.’
‘Reba Charlo. How much does she cost?’
The girl named a figure that was at least four times as much as Shannon had expected but which he was more than willing to pay. Reba Charlo, he thought, would be worth every Token.
On the screen, he watched himself remove the tiny golden clasps that fastened Reba’s gown at her shoulders. The gown slipped free and slid down, to hang in folds about her waist.
Shannon stared at himself staring at Reba. The screen Shannon unbound the buckles resting on her hips, and the gown puddled to the floor. She stepped out of it, brushed her hair back from her shoulders with a gesture that was vibrant and faintly bestial. She moved towards him. He took her in his arms, took all the majestic beauty of Reba Charlo, and, watching himself, felt himself enter a roaring volcano that seared his mind and inflamed his senses.
‘I want Level Seven,’ he told the girl firmly.
‘You want Reba Charlo,’ the girl said. ‘Reba is Level Seven. She has taken booty from many pirates before you. She is our choicest offering at the present time to those of our clients who prefer women — one at a time.’
Shannon handed the girl his cashcard. She quickly verified his balance in the bank on Marstation via her computer credit terminal, unaware that the name he had given her was false. He used the name Ackerman to maintain the Marstation account.
‘The lift is to your left,’ the girl said. ‘Through that door, and then to the left. Enjoy yourself, pirate.’
Shannon followed the girl’s directions and found himself in front of the pneumatic lift, which carried him soundlessly, a moment later, upwards to Level Seven and Reba Charlo.
As he entered the apartment designated as Level Seven, he felt like a pirate come to plunder, and the treasure that was the object of his search reclined across the room from him on a low couch covered with purple brocade. She was more beautiful in person than she had appeared on the screen in the reception area. She was wearing a one-piece suit of some veloured fabric that clung to her body.
‘Your name is Shannon,’ she said. Her voice was faintly husky but totally feminine. ‘First name or last?’
‘John Shannon.’ Her greeting unnerved him. Hadn’t he given the girl in the reception room the false name of Ackerman? He had. ‘Then how did Reba Charlo know his name was Shannon?’
‘I know your name is Shannon,’ she told him, ‘and I know other things about you as well. I know they call you the Mythmaster and that you are the prize fly that the spider Oxon Kaedler covets.’
Shannon stood rigidly in front of her, unsure of himself suddenly and hating his uncertainty when he should be confident and commanding.
‘Starson,’ Reba said and smiled. ‘He is here too.’
Shannon looked around the room.
‘Oh, no! Not here.’
She got up and went to the decanter on the table near her couch. She poured a glistening green liqueur into two small glasses and held one out to Shannon, who stepped forward and took it from her. ‘Starson,’ she said, ‘is here in Seventh Heaven, as are the other members of your crew. I know Starson well and have known him for a long time. As you might expect, if you know him at all, he is on Level One. I am told they have imported a number of very handsome and very agreeable young men from Earth to staff that level. Starson is with them.’
‘I’m not surprised.’
‘Nor should you be. Not everyone is born with blue eyes. Not everyone likes caviar. Not everyone dreams the same dreams. He is in love with you, you know.’
‘I know.’
Shannon sipped the liqueur. A tang brought his tongue to vivid life. He drained the glass. ‘I hired him as my astrogator. I don”t hate him.’
‘But you don’t love him, either.’
‘No, I don’t.’ Shannon hesitated and then said, ‘I’m here. I’ve chosen you.’
Reba’s eyes grew wide with pretended ingenuousness. ‘Why, Shannon? Why me and not Starson?’
‘I don’t want to talk about Starson. His appetites are not mine and never have been.’
‘But you are so tolerant of him and his appetites. So very kind.’
She was mocking him. He knew it. He had come to make love to her. He was beginning to need to hate her.
‘You are furious with me, John Shannon. Come here. Look at yourself in the mirrors. See how your eyes flash! And look there. Your hands are fists. I shall tease you no more. How very exciting you look in yellow. The sash Starson recommended — very nice. Yellow is your colour. But you would look equally attractive in green or violet. You would look good — remember, I am experienced in these matters — in only the tight, taut skin that hides you from the world. In only that.’
Shannon felt the knot of fury that had been growing within him begin to loosen. He put down his empty glass and took off his shirt. He sat down and pulled off his boots.
Reba poured herself another drink. As he stood up and began to unzip his trousers, she laughed.
Shannon stared at her, his fingers waylaid in then? attempted action.
‘Shannon, you are not like Starson. Nor, I imagine, are you like the rutting spacers in their clumsy search for sex. For your own sake as well as mine, let me recommend that you not ungird yourself for battle so soon or so matter-of-factly. Come and touch the lobes of my ears first. Place your hard hands upon my breasts. I shall turn on some music. I shall pour more liqueur for us. We will move about each other slowly until our orbits join with a sweet inevitability. Do not seek to plough so fertile a field as myself before our sun has had a chance to rise.’
Sheepishly, Shannon slipped his boots back on. This was a mistake, he decided. Reba Charlo was a mistake. There were other levels where the women would not talk so much, where they would not make a man know his own clumsy failures. He made up his mind. If this was not to be the idyll he had imagined, it would he, nevertheless, a few hours to remember. And if the memory must be base, he was not to blame. Reba was.
‘Come here,’ he said in a low tone.
Without hesitation, Reba came to stand in front of him. She was nearly as tall as he was, and seemed as invulnerable. It showed, her invulnerability, in the cold depths of her eyes. The coldness there contradicted without entirely cancelling the warmth her body projected. Shannon wondered what kind of thoughts were going on in her mind. He suspected that they were calculating and perhaps cruel. But he did not ‘really care.
‘I have paid,’ he reminded her, ‘although your price is planet-high. When I pay for merchandise, I expect prompt delivery and complete satisfaction. Begin.’ He felt triumph spread through him as he felt her fingers touch his bare chest as she leaned forward and kissed his throat.
‘There are things I think about in the long times between space stations,’ he said. ‘Wild and barbaric things.’
‘I can be both wild and barbaric.’
‘With only the cold stars for companions, a man begins to imagine things. Warm things. Soft things.‘Women. Women waiting for a man to come and be fulfilled with them. Women offered for sale on auction blocks while the slave dealer winks at potential buyers. I have bought you.’
There was no more music, no more liqueur. Shannon deliberately stripped their meeting of any possible gentility. Something had gone very wrong from the moment he had entered Reba’s apartment. He told himself that it did not matter. They were here, he and his crew, for twelve hours. He had paid for Reba Charlo. He would be back here in the months and even years to come, and there would be other Rebas with different names. She would probably be gone to some dark place where wrinkles did not show and faded flesh was no liability. He too would be old in those years yet to be. But the girls who would take Reba’s place would all be young and pliant, and it he could still pay their price, he would still receive quality performances from any or all of them, despite his age. The thought brought him comfort.
He held himself in abeyance while he let his body respond to Reba’s ministrations as he stood naked some minutes later in the middle of the room. In the mirrored walls and floor and ceiling, a thousand other Shannons were serviced in intricate ways by a thousand other Rebas, while outside Seventh Heaven, stars were born and stars died, all unnoticed.
He led her at last to the bed in the adjoining room. He came down hard upon her and expertly impaled her. He felt her fighting him, not with her body, which responded readily to his own above hers, but with her spirit. Love was not the result of their union. They were wild animals engaging in a deadly battle to the death.
Afterwards, Reba remained totally untouched. Shannon knew that he had failed in an unknown but important way. Somewhere inside herself, she had hidden from him. The woman he had held in his arms possessed no identity and was therefore unpossessable.
As he was about to leave, Reba, smiling, kissed him one last time.
‘You are scarred,’ she whispered, running her fingers down the welt that reached from his cheek to his chin.
He understood what she was really saying. He was indeed scarred. She had defeated him by refusing to give anything at all of herself, although she had faultlessly obeyed his every order.
‘Say it,’ he said. ‘Only you and I will hear the words. Say it. You’ll fell better for it.’
She said nothing for a long moment, looking into his eyes, appraising him. Then she spoke the three evenly spaced words that had lain between them throughout the long hours like sharp daggers. ‘I hate you.’
‘I know. Good-bye.’
He was in the lift when the red light flashed, to declare that Seventh Heaven was being invaded by members of the Space Patrol. He willed the lift downwards. He knew the Patrollers were not looking for a vice arrest. Seventh Heaven paid them too well and often for that. He thought he knew what they were looking for.
Him.
And his mice.
CHAPTER FOUR
Shannon came warily through the doors of the lift as they whispered open in front of him. He saw that the corridor leading to the reception area was guarded by several members of the Space Patrol. He adjusted his trousers ostentatiously; brushed back his hair, and sauntered down the corridor.
The reception area was crowded. He noticed Lee Rawley being questioned by a Patroller on one side of the large room. Others of his crew were also present — Maxevitch, Devlin; one or two more, some looking sheepish, some looking sly. Maxevitch, when he spotted Shannon, gave a barely perceptible nod. The motion declared that things could be better.
Shannon headed for the exit. A uniformed Patroller snarled a single curt command, backed up by a very visible and very dangerous laserlight that he held firmly in his right hand. Shannon halted, turned, smiled.
The Patroller did not return the smile. He beckoned to Shannon, who came limping forward, the scar on his face whiter than usual.
‘Name?’ asked the Patroller.
‘Ackerman,’ Shannon lied pleasantly. ‘I was delayed up above. Seventh Level.’ He jerked a thumb at the ceiling and winked at the ramrodded man whose laserlight remained unholstered in his hand. ‘Listen, I’m in a helluva hurry. I don’t want to miss the shuttle back to Marstation.’
‘There is no shuttle docked here,’ the Patroller commented coolly.
‘God damn!’ Shannon exclaimed. ‘I must have missed it! When’s the next one due in?’
Before the Patroller had time to answer, another one entered the room from the direction of the dock site. He saluted the officer who had been interrogating Shannon and said, ‘The old freighter moored out there may be the one we’re looking for. It’s got no fleet designation, and it’s force-fielded. It may belong to the Mythmaster.’
‘No designation,’ mused the Patroller. ‘Then it’s an illegal vessel by definition, according to Code.’ He paused, not quite looking at Shannon. ‘Disintegrate the ship.’
Shannon sprang at the man and gave a wild yell that included a few words and Starson’s name. Starson, who was at that moment being led into the area by another Patroller, found Shannon’s yell to be signal enough. He needed no further cue nor encouragement. He whirled around, freed himself from the Patroller’s grip on his tunic, and felled the man with a single jarring jolt from his right fist, followed by an ignoble knee to the man’s groin. The Patroller cried out and toppled to the floor, clutching himself and groaning. Starson, his face afire and his white teeth flashing in a grin that displayed the emerald set in one front tooth, leaped over the fallen man and ran towards Shannon. He seized the surprised Patroller beside Shannon and pressed adroitly with strategically placed thumbs, and unconsciousness came down upon the Patroller with the speed of a tropical night.
Shannon sent a third Patroller spinning away from him, to fall heavily against the screen console. ‘Rawley!’ he yelled. ‘Maxevitch! Now!’
The room became a zoo in which the animals, uncaged, roared and fled, stampeded and attacked one another. A laserlight flashed in the midst of the tumbling bodies. With an eerie whine, a section of the screen console split apart and melted. Starson howled and brawled his way past one fallen Patroller, bounced off another, and sent a third into temporary oblivion by locking his head and arms among the lower rungs of the airlock ladder.
Shannon, beside him, led the way to the alternate exit. The rest of the crew was not far behind. Shannon turned to look back, to shout encouragement to them. He saw Devlin running towards him. He saw, behind Devlin, a Patroller raise himself groggily on a wavering elbow and aim his laserlight.
‘Devlin!’ Shannon shouted, dropping to his knees in a defensive crouch. ‘Down, man. Down!’
The beam flashed out from the laserlight and touched Devlin’s back. It passed through him, melting flesh and bone, bursting organs and draining life. Devlin jerked and swayed, and the commingled pain and surprise on his face masked the coming of death only momentarily.
Shannon swore. Dead, his best technician. The Patrollers were entering behind him. He ran back to the ladder and saw booted feet descending. He scurried up the ladder and seized the first foot that had appeared and jerked it, leaping to the floor as he did so. The Patroller came tumbling down, and Shannon grabbed the man’s helmeted head and banged it once, twice against the steel floor, until the man no longer moved or moaned.
Starson, still grinning, yelled to Shannon from his precarious perch on the opposite side of the ladder down which more Patrollers were now scurrying. One word he cried: ‘Mythmadness!’ He took from his tunic a tiny black globule that glistened in the bright light of the room.
Shannon shouted, ‘Now!’
The globule flew forcefully from Starson’s hand and shattered on the floor. In a moment, the mist of Mythmadness filled the room.
‘Rawley!’ Shannon bellowed. ‘Maxevitch! Mythmadness!’
Rawley, who had been dancing lithely out of the path of several pursuing Patrollers, reached in his pocket and thrust his hand against his mouth. Maxevitch did the same. Shannon and Starson swallowed their own antidote capsules, which would make them immune to the effects of the Mythmadness that was about to begin.
It began with the delicacy of spring in the interiors of the Earth. As subtly and as remarkably. A Patroller who had been lunging forward like an enraged bull towards the lock ladder suddenly slowed in his tracks, and a quizzical expression replaced the fury that had, only moments before, twisted his features. He moved slightly to the left, taking a dainty step, an incongruous one, considering his size. He moved then to the right, first a short step and then a longer one. He turned. He bent, bowed, straightened, and went on with the intricate steps of the dance he was performing to music that only he could hear.
It was working. Mythmadness had invaded Seventh Heaven, and the results were more curious than anything that took place on any level of the pleasure palace.
In the distance, at the end of the corridor, two of the girls from one of the levels crouched as if over an invisible campfire and crooned a wordless song to each other while making motions in the air that were both mystical and beyond any understanding but their own. They rose and stretched towards the ceiling and then dropped to all fours, shaking their heads and growling harshly. They circled each other, their teeth bared, their eyes measuring each other, opponents now in an unknown battle born in the fumes of the chemical hallucinogen that Starson had released.
A Patroller stood against the wall of the corridor. Over and over he muttered, ‘Bird thou never wert… bird thou never wert…’ while water streamed down his cheeks from his emptying eyes, and water also streamed down his thighs, staining and darkening his trousers. He grew rigid, while his mind wobbled, enslaved as it were by the fears and deadly dreams he had never before allowed to escape from the secure cellular dungeon of his brain.’
‘Shannon?’
Shannon, leaning against the ladder, looked up. Starson, standing on the other side of the ladder several feet above him, had stuck his head through the rungs and was grinning down at Shannon like a disembodied creature of the Mythmadness he had created.
‘You okay, Shannon?’
‘Okay, yes. You?’ Starson’s lips parted, and the emerald glittered in his tooth. ‘I’m just fine. What a damned shame that we had to turn Seventh Heaven into hell.’
Shannon swivelled around, looking for Maxevitch, Rawley, and the rest of the crew. Maxevitch was leading a Patroller like a dog on a leash which he had made from a tasselled drapery cord. The Patroller was hopping along, salivating and barking. Rawley staggered towards Shannon, holding his arm, out of breath. Blood leaked through his fingers from the wound in his arm. As he came abreast of Shannon, he said, ‘They didn’t get their pound of flesh. But they did get an ounce or two of mine.’
