Mythmaster, page 5
He was a fisherman, and money was the gaudy lure that had netted him his crewmen. Rawley, for example, could have been a respected member of any university staff, but he had chosen instead to loose his feet and unfetter his mind, throw conventional value systems to the winds of all the worlds, and sail with Shannon. Devlin, now dead, had been the classical misfit. Unable to hold a job, unable to stay put in any one place for more than a few months at a time, he had signed on with Shannon and soon found himself no stranger to the stars. Maxevitch was a man of many weaknesses, and he had found in Shannon the one man who would draw lines which he dare not cross. Shannon’s gift to Maxevitch had been barriers which Maxevitch only dimly sensed he needed, or else he would find himself established in a hell more horrible than any manufactured by the pellets of Mythmadness.
It was true of all of them. Shannon had walked into their lives in strange places and at odd moments, and they had been caught. Trapped? It didn’t matter. The hunter, Shannon suspected, was as much trapped by his prey as was his prey trapped by him. Accommodation and compromise — these were the names by which Shannon knew life. Life, for him, was a market in which countless bargains were constantly being made. There was only one trick to it all, one he had learned early in his life, and well. You never got something for nothing. You had to decide what you wanted and be willing to pay the price for it. You had to convince the man or woman with whom you bargained that you were not clever, that you were not shrewd, and that you were not nearly as sly as you very well knew yourself to be.
Shannon knew himself for a buccaneer and an entrepreneur par excellence in the bright bazaar of space. He was also the master of worlds that never were nor ever would be except within the curious electrical circuitry of human brains — he was the Mythmaster. An interest in control and cash had enabled him to buy the formula for the pellets that created the Mythmadness from a crazed chemist he had met a year ago. The old man had talked much and often of his discovery, but his stubbled face and stained clothes had discouraged belief in his hearers. He had earlier, he said, been expelled from several corporations because of his penchant for a slow and devious suicide which took the obtuse forms of a love for alcohol and a consuming lust for females under the age of fifteen.
But he had perfected his formula and its antidote amid regular bouts with the bottle and frequent orgies which were expensive and lasted only as long as did his little money.
And then he met Shannon in the bar of a spaceport hostel. He said he was not a beggar but had something valuable to sell. So Shannon had bought a bottle for him, knowing that profitable songs could be sung by the most unlikely-looking birds. He listened, not minding the man’s sour fragrance or his petulant complaints concerning mistreatment by a world he only wanted to remake in a glorious and glowing image with the help of his formula. When the man finished speaking, Shannon bought a second bottle and bargained as the man earnestly and repeatedly wheezed out his alcoholic story, coughing and spluttering as he did so.
Shannon hired him to train unskilled labourers to manufacture the pellets and their antidote. Each of the men that had been hired performed but a piece of the overall process, and none of them knew what it was that they were manufacturing.
A week passed during which Shannon procured flesh for the man and generously poured alcohol. At the beginning of the second week, the man, unsated still, died while straddling a blunt-eyed girl who continued placidly eating her orange because she thought the old man’s dying shriek meant that he was enjoying himself.
Cardiac arrest. Shannon had calculated correctly once again — this time concerning the survival potential of the chemist who had been, at the end, something much less than a human being. Shannon had not killed him. Perhaps he had provided weapons. But he had not wielded them. He paid for the cremation of the man’s remains and the service that preceded his fiery passage from the scene.
Shannon stretched again and leaned forward to pull off his boots. He undressed and lay down wearily on his bunk. He switched on the tapetext and began listening at the point he had left off the day before.
ANTIGONE: I’ll neither urge thee, nor, if now thou’dst help
My doing, should I thank thee for thine aid.
Do thou after thy kind: thy choice is made:
I’ll bury him; doing this so let me die.
So with my loved one loved shall I abide,
My crime a deed most holy: for the dead
Longer have I to please than these on earth.
There I shall dwell for ever: be it thine
To have scorned what gods have hallowed, if thou wilt.
ISMENE: Nay, nothing do I scorn: but, how to break
My country’s law — I am witless of the way.
The tapetext continued to whisper its words, but Shannon distracted, put his hands over his eyes.
His distraction bore the name of memory. There had been no one, no loved one, to demand any single sacrifice of him. His mother surrogate had been competent; he had had no quarrel with it. It had lifted the fat basket of flesh that had been his newborn self every half-hour as programmed, and it had fondled him automatically and whispered words he couldn’t understand and had plopped its huge plastic breast with its sterilised nipple out and into his mouth, and he had sucked contentedly, feeling himself safe. Then, as the years passed and he was allowed to choose his name and join the other children in the communal nursery, he knew he was not safe because the bloodline that was his would remain forever unknown.
He had chosen his name, John Shannon, from a list they gave him. He chose it by putting a pencil mark at random on one of the pages labelled ‘Male’. His name did not matter to him. It would not identify him. Only he would be able to do that in the flow of time in which he would learn to swim with no lifebelt and without hearing the guiding sound of bell buoys.
His life at times seemed as unreal to him as anything released from the pellets out of which the Mythmadness sprang.
He thought of Reba Charlo and wondered if she knew the person who inhabited the lovely castle of her body. And what of Starson and his dark hunger? Did he know who or why he was? Did he know who Shannon was, or did he seek in Shannon the lost shadow of someone else once needed but now gone?
Shannon turned his attention once more to the tapetext.
SENTINEL: Do I afflict thy hearing or thy heart?
CREON: ‘Where I am pained, it skills not to define.
He reached up and switched off the tapetext and lay back in the darkness, feeling the ship around him like a pod in which his life, for the moment, was seeded.
CHAPTER SIX
On the third morning out from Seventh Heaven. Shannon visited the dispensary. ‘Who is on sick call?’
The meditech consulted his chart and answered, ‘No one.’ He added ‘I was expecting some action after our Seventh Heaven stopover a few days ago, but…nothing. No urethral complaints. No requests for antibiotics. I did dispense some soporifics.’
‘Maxevitch hasn’t reported to you?’
The meditech shook his head.
‘You logged my order concerning him and the dispensation of Mythmakers?’
Another glance at the chart, and the meditech replied, ‘Yes, sir. Right here. He’s been off the stuff for over two days now.’
‘And he hasn’t reported to you — hasn’t manifested withdrawal symptoms?’
‘No, to the first-question, sir. I haven’t seen him, so I can’t answer the second.’
Shannon left the dispensary and made his way to Maxevitch’s cabin. He knocked and received no answer. He tried the door and found it locked, which wasn’t abnormal — maybe. ‘Maxevitch!’ He had checked before visiting the dispensary and learned that Maxevitch had not reported for duty during the last two days. Well, if the man wanted to play the fox, he should have considered every chicken coop. Not reporting for duty was consistent with the problems he would be experiencing under withdrawal from the Mythmakers, but a failure to visit the dispensary made no sense at all under the circumstances.
Shannon used the intercom to summon an assistant engineer. The man came and unlocked the cabin door, after which Shannon dismissed him.
Inside the cabin, Shannon found Maxevitch lying naked on his bunk, a puddle of relaxed flesh on which a thin film of sweat glistened. He shook him. Maxevitch didn’t respond. He wasn’t sleeping. He was Mythmaking.
Shannon summoned the meditech from the dispensary and gave him instructions. Within minutes the meditech had administered the antidote, and within hours after that, Maxevitch, locked alone in his cabin, could be heard groaning and crying out to anyone and everyone that his eyes were jellied and his ears echo chambers in which he heard all the hideous sins of the world being confessed and would someone please, please pluck the needles from his nose — now!
He grovelled on the floor, which he found covered with a crust of imaginary insects seeking to eat the jelly of his eyes. He heard wicked winds blow, and their insane touch froze his flesh, while his nose, which he imagined was a cluttered nest of needles, scented rotting animal matter and other olfactory agonies.
Shannon, later that day, sat alone in his cabin. He dialled the telepanel and watched Maxevitch. On the audiation system, he heard the sound of a tapetext playing Berlioz in the next cabin. The sound was obviously contributing to Maxevitch’s pain. At every crescendo, Maxevitch screamed, and at every swell of the music, he cringed.
Shannon turned off the telepanel and switched on the intercom. ‘Attention, all crewmen. Conservation of power is required due to a faulty generator coil. Power is being reduced immediately by four per cent. All tapetexts, unnecessary lights, and appliances are to be turned off at once and will remain off until further notice.’
A few minutes later, the voice of the chief engineer barked through the intercom into Shannon’s cabin. ‘Sir, there’s no faulty generator coil as far as I can tell. Why did you order the power reduction?’
‘I was about to call you. Don’t worry about the coil. If anyone asks you, tell them you’ve reduced power by four per cent. But there is no need to actually do so. Understood?’
‘Understood.’
Shannon switched on the telepanel again and stared at Maxevitch who was lying huddled on the floor of his cabin. Occasionally he shuddered or clawed weakly at his face. With the tapetext in the next cabin now silent, Maxevitch had only the echoes of his own aberrant organism to contend with until his symptomatology disappeared entirely. Satisfied, Shannon switched off the telepanel.
* * *
A week later, Shannon stood beside Bernie Lennett on the planet Ra and watched the unloading of the mice, which were packed safely in thermal containers. The two men were silent, having discovered that the wind on the open tundra tore the words from their lips and whirled them away unheard. In the distance, they heard the ominous growl of the icebergs as they shifted their stiff positions and inched southward.
Bernie slammed his arms, which were bound in thick wads of rags against his wiry body. ‘One thousand?’ he screeched, trying to outshout the wind.
Shannon nodded. He held up the fingers of one hand plus one finger on the other.
Bernie puzzled for a moment, and then his flat face, which was normally as dead as the ice that was everywhere, broke into a jubilant grin. ‘One thousand and six?’ he yelled.
Shannon nodded again.
‘How much extra for the six?’
Shannon turned his head, cupped his ear in one hand.
‘How much more do I have to pay for the extras?’
Bernie screamed.
Shannon held up his hands, his palms turned towards Bernie. He shook his head.
Bernie’s jubilation increased. Extra men — or women! And free! There had to be a catch. The Mythmaster didn’t give something for nothing, He would wait and make no further reference to the bonus in the hope that Shannon would forget about it.
Shannon withdrew and took shelter in the opening that led to the crumbling space station which served as home, hospital, and gathering place for the people who inhabited Ra. The wind found him, and he shivered. He made up his mind to stay only long enough to collect his fee. There was nothing on Ra to hold him. The cold riveted his bones together and made a bellows of his chest as he struggled to steal a breath from the clutches of the wind and the talons of the ice that were almost visible in the chilling air.
Bernie flapped his arms like an ungainly bird and hopped about on the tundra. As the crewmen carried the thermal packs full of mice past him, he followed Shannon inside. He sat down at one of the long tables that sliced through the long room where meals were eaten communally and where the sun never shone. In place of the sun for which the planet had been named in a futile denial of reality, someone had painted great yellow globes on the black ceiling and on the grimy walls. Looking at them as he sat down beside Bernie, Shannon decided that this was the way religions began — with symbols to protect against known or sensed dangers, with rituals later attached to the symbols so that life would seem more secure.
Bernie leaped to his feet and cried out to the men carrying the packs to take care and to take it easy and to watch out and to mind their steps so that…
But no single mouse was damaged. All of them basked comfortably in the controlled heat of their packs.
Bernie hopped, jerked, and skipped, his rags flying from the scarecrow that he seemed to be, down to the far end of the long hall and to the door through which steam was flowing and eddying.
Shannon got up as Bernie beckoned to him, and walked down to the door.
‘Look,’ Bernie said, pointing with no small amount of pride. ‘The vats.’
Shannon peered into the huge room beyond the door, in which he could make out figures moving through swirling clouds of steam. As his eyes became accustomed to the grey murk, he saw that they were hauling huge craggy pieces of ice at the end of rusted iron tongs. They dragged the ice up one of several inclines, and when they reached the top, they pushed them over and down into one of the gigantic metal vats that were suspended by chains from the ceiling and beneath which fires burned in deep pits hollowed out of the ground.
’Up there,’ Bernie said, pointing. ‘Look.’
Shannon glanced towards the ceiling of the room and saw the catwalk that girdled it. On the walk, sweating women scooped up the thick soupy substance, using long-handled ladles, and poured it into sagging membranes stretched over other, smaller vats.
‘The ice contains plankton and algae,’ Bernie said. ‘We find quite a few edible fossils in it, too. Later, after the transplants are finished, we’ll add the mice to it. All in all, it makes a pretty nourishing stew.’
‘How do you keep the fires burning?’ Shannon asked.
‘They’re volcanic in origin. They’re the main reason we settled here. This is the warmest part of the whole damned planet. We’ve got a good system worked out, using the natural resources of Ra — the volcanic fires and the ice mines we’ve established up on the bergs. We’re working on a way to pipe the steam farther and farther away from this point so that we can expand our settlement.’
‘It’s hardly the Garden of Eden.’
‘But it’s ours, and it’s all we’ve got.’
Shannon smiled. ‘The Space Patrol doesn’t harass you anymore?’
‘Not since the early days. They think we’re harmless. Instead of prosecuting us for our mutiny, they seem to have written us off. Do you worry about anthills back on Earth?’
Shannon got the point.
‘And this anthill of ours isn’t even on Earth, so why should the Patrol bother about us? But they will again in time. Only, by then it will be too late. Thanks in part to you.’
Bernie led the way out of the vat room and back through the long hall to his private compound. He poured a drink and offered it to Shannon.
Shannon sipped it, snorted, and wiped his lips.
‘It’s made from fermented algae with a bit of volcanic ash added,’ Bernie commented. ‘It’ll put fire in your eyes.’
They toured the remainder of the facilities Bernie and his band had built on Ra. Shannon watched Lee Rawley and several of Lennett’s men transplant the fertilised eggs taken from the mice into the artificial wombs. Since the mutiny aboard the colony ship that Bernie had led years earlier, he and his fellow mutineers who had been abandoned on Ra had barely eked out an existence. The scientific knowledge that individual members among them had possessed had not been channelled into the creation of creature comforts, as it well might have been, but into the construction of the wombs and the establishment of the technology for the accelerated growth process that reduced by more than half the time it took a human organism to grow to maturity. The barrenness and spartan-like existence shared by the residents of Ra contrasted sharply with the gleaming metal laboratories they had built.
‘I have plans,’ Bernie mused, not looking at Shannon but at some inner horizon that brought lights to glitter in the dark pupils of his eyes.
A woman bearing two huge bowls of steaming stew entered the room, set them in front of Shannon and Bernie, and then withdrew.
Shannon stared at the broth and the lumps of matter floating in it. The faintly acrid odour of the stew sickened him.
Across the table, Bernie lifted his bowl in both hands, swallowed hungrily, and put it down. ‘I’ll soon have enough workers to man the ice mines, workers to filter the stew, workers to turn Ra into something near the Eden you mentioned, Shannon. And then…’
