by Chris Turner
Cold…empty…space.
For how long I floated in that caustic vapor, a dead, spiritless zombie, I do not know. I could have floated there for a million years. What meaning does time have in such bodiless realms? A human thought, some mere idea, or figment of imagination, as insignificant as a grain of sand or a single atom, floating in space and time which might become a thought bubble of tomorrow.
Maybe only a split of a second was I in that realm. The mind can be a funny thing. The conscious reality that we cling to in this waking life is tenuous, that stuff we take for granted in our pitiful drop-in-the-bucket existences. The merry-go-round soup bowl we live in.
I’d never really understood it so clearly until now. I could still not describe it, since it was so abstract and timelessly alien as time itself—and so frightening. The expanse so enormous that it brought to light in chilling clarity how puny the individual awareness truly is.
In a blur, I came back.
“Wha—”
“Easy, Jet Rusco.”
I came back into my body, sucking in a rasping breath. Mong sat before me, grinning at me like a grim reaper. “How did you like your little ride?”
“What the—fuck are you?”
“I am the angel of death.”
“You’re a psycho-demon.”
“I was already well-versed in the forbidden arts before you were sucking on your mamma’s teats.” Mong’s jaw worked in satisfaction. He blew air through his nostrils. “I had hopes for you. But it’s time for you to die. Maybe then you’ll understand the truth of it all.” He nodded to Balt and had him plunk me on my ass and hold me steady.
He stripped off my monk’s robe to the waist. With my hands lashed behind my back, he stepped behind me, brandishing a glinting bowie knife. Without preamble, he cut deep into the muscles of my back.
I howled with pure agony. He took no notice of my squeals. He merely threaded leather cord into my slit flesh and looped the strips round my chest, tossing their ends up over the high beams above. As an afterthought, he wound my ripped robe around my back to contain the flesh and blood before he pulled me up like a stuck calf with his massive strength.
Regrettably I came to know the reason for those ropes now hanging in front of his obscene tanks.
Dangling and twirling like a slaughtered buck, I gasped and gurgled. How my flesh could withstand the pressure, I did not know. Perhaps a testament to Mong’s setting of knot and cord, looping rawhide around my chest to take off some of the pressure.
He stared at me in a mode of abstract curiosity, as an ever inquisitive scientist would who wonders how his lab experiment is faring. Not with eyes of sympathy, but of detached interest. How long could Jet Rusco handle the pain? How long before Jet Rusco wailed, shit his pants, cracked, gibbered like a lunatic, convulsed, cried? Most curious of all was Mong in seeing where my edges lay, the thresholds of reason before the other world of lunacy and death.
“Surrender to pain, Jet Rusco,” he murmured. “’Tis the only way to survive. Fighting will only get you deeper in the mire.”
“F-Fuck you, you shit fucking bastard sadist,” I spat out between my gritted teeth, the pain rising to indescribable levels. I closed my eyes. Utter agony had my eyes rolling backward in their sockets like a crazed yogi, hoping that a split second’s death would release me from this flesh-tearing, mind-numbing pain.
But death would not take me. Mong knew it as he knew his brutish handiwork and he was master of torture.
That figure of doom withdrew from my flickering, darkening vision, but my sense of reason knew a monster was still nearby. Next came Zan’s turn, the recruit who had shriveled to a husk, shrunken to a worm in some crab shell of fear. He thrashed and whimpered but there was no getting away from Mong’s bestial justice that would envelop Zan in seconds. In less than five minutes, we were like two stuck hogs twirling slowly and gently from our fishhook, rawhide lariats in Mong’s special house of horrors.
Through pain-streaked eyes I could make out the clear glass tanks below us. The trapped insects inside looked like black-tarred puppets, much different from this vantage: toy specimens out of a cartoon lab. So did Blest’s blond-matted head appear like a comical jack-o-lantern as he floated in his pale brine a dozen or so yards away.
Mong loosed a moody sigh. “Let me tell you the story of my mentor, Rusco. He was Zastras, a cruel man and practical man, with many innovations. We had a particularly grueling time one fine day in late summer. I remember how he strung five initiates up, one by one, dangling from rawhide straps like yours from the stout branches of certain cypress trees.
“I was one of them. A time like no other—brimstone and fire stretched across a limitless fire plain; pain and pleasure mixed as one in a long silent continuum. Suspended over the fire one minute, then dunked in ice-cold water the next. Some of us he dunked in pools of fire weed; others, he incited flesh-nibbling fish to bite at our toes.
“You can see I am much less imaginative than Zastras. I saw men with ankles bared to the bone. Zastras was a dark humorist of his time, assuring that his victim would live, that the skin would grow back. Strung up there like beasts, we would believe anything.
“Oh, Zastras was a funny man! One of the old guard. There will never be another like him, rest his cursed, black-hearted soul. Lucky I have not so macabre an imagination, Jet Rusco. Still, you will beg me to stop, you too, Zan. Both of you will beg, and I will smile and watch you squirm like maggots.”
Mong burned loathsome incenses, clouds of sickly sweet vapors, rank as mushrooms from some jungle hell, and his doped up drummer beat those skins with ever fiercer force and wilder intent while the Star Lord stood by, nodding with much toe-tapping and finger-snapping as the fumes of myrrh and absinthe, cinnamon and sage struck my nostrils in a vague fury of madness during my time of torture.
Cold water dripped on my brow now from a tap he had installed high above. He lit a crackling fire underneath my toes. Both sensations were eerily approaching the threshold of pleasure now. One counterpoint to the edges of sensory overload of the other. Reaching such places, he tapped new regions that the pain-pleasure sensors could not reach. All the while his mellifluous voice swirled in my hazed brain, spewing out dime-store philosophies, cheap, preachy aphorisms, endless lessons, patronizing, hackneyed teachings, moralizations, sermons, which hovered on the edge of my consciousness.
Every sin I’d committed roared back to me in full technicolor during those moments of pain. I screamed them aloud in a hoarse voice, as did Zan, who was half dead while Mong nodded, explaining in quiet tones that this was perfectly normal.
He gave a snorting sigh and rubbed his temples in thought. “I will leave you two for some time. But I will return to record your progress. My interest waxes high in this affair. I want you to reflect on a basic point. What drives you? What is your purpose in this universe? To what end will you go to fulfill your lives? Men and women have pondered these basic questions since the beginning of time, when we rose from the lower species and became masters of the planets. Still, we have no more clue of an answer to these questions than when we rutted in primitive caves as common beasts. Questions perhaps much too abstract, Jet Rusco, considering the direness of your current situation. At a base level, you’d be thinking, when do I get cut down from here? When do I take some regen or narcotic to dull the heart-ripping pain? But life is pain, Jet Rusco and Zan Vulder. When do we ever take time to contemplate these grand questions? Maybe in our darkest dreams and most intimate moments of pain. I leave you with these questions.”
Mong’s words echoed in my beleaguered brain. The pain had gone far beyond any sane man’s threshold and yet we hung there like freshly slaughtered deer, our bodies numb. I saw a giant man-insect in the form of Mong leave us in that godless torture chamber, a place of windless darkness that had no windows showing vistas to skies or stars. My vision blurred and before I lost consciousness, I cursed Mong and all his breed of meslars and monkey-guards to eternity, cursed them to
suffer the worst hell that this universe could offer.
Chapter 23
Light years later I remember strong hands prodding my body and testing me to see if I were still alive. Those hands stopped my slow twirl around magnetic north. A fatherly figure with compassion in his eyes peered into mine while capable hands lifted me from my swinging perch and unlashed the hated leather from my pierced back. Those same hands cradled me as if I were a baby, popped off the top of the nearby empty tank and let me fall into the chill green water with a plunk. Struck dumb, I floated there for some time, unable to move my arms hardly an inch, and my body a wall of stiff rubber while an unfathomable pain racked the mutilated flesh of my back. Those hands pushed my head gently under the pale green water while I choked, struggling weakly, like some limp shrimp beached on a lonely shore. My lungs filled with water. Muscles spasmed as all muscles do when faced with perilous conditions, or in my case, death. My legs and weakened arms thrashed, struggling to raise my head above water and gulp life-giving air. But the arms of that impossibly tall figure held me firm and with his fatherly strength and ever compassionate sense, drowned his deformed child with no future.
Twice I died on that day. Jet Rusco, twice deceased.
I hung there suspended like a jellyfish, or some unlucky crustacean in the sinister water. It was eerie, but magical. The numbing pain that had once burned my body like a firebrand subsided to a dull ache, then to a warm tingle, some soothing balm of long-lost techno-science. A background elixir of warmth and massage. I was on a blessed Myscol trip!—to the far stars!
My eyes flickered open. I looked out upon a dim panorama of opaque filminess, blurred shapes, distorted distances, much different from when I came in. Through eyes not my own, it appeared a grainy world out there. The Star Lord stood idly by as he watched me with detached interest, as a father does his child caught with his hand in the cookie jar, as if nothing could be more natural than watching a child drowning in alien brine.
The water on my lips tasted terrible, salty and fermented, a peculiar rancidity, impossible to quantify. I saw my arms float up. My hands looked as if they had starfish-like fingers. That’s because they were broken. The splint had come off, the wrappings peeled off long ago. My fingers were not as crooked as they’d been on entering the tank. Knob-knuckled, yes, like some old codger with severe arthritis. But remarkably whole. I could move them, barely. The water seemed to act as a paralysis agent, making my nerves sluggish and unresponsive. But I could think, and the mind of old JR was as active as before.
What to think? Well, a million things. Dwell on the past. Be stuck in a cage of the mind forever. Remember those medicine teachers of Mong’s somewhere back in the pagoda babbling on about the endless chatter of mind when one first sits down to meditate? I was a drowned man floating, but alive. A punishment worse than death.
All sorts of random items flitted across the landscape of my mind as I stared out from behind the glass.
What were these plant tendrils wrapped so tenaciously about Blest’s leg? What was that bulb that hatched the flying cricket? The thing that killed the Skugs and Mong’s mercs.
The alien plants must have given birth to the flying things—the dragonfly and the eel-lizard, then the flying cricket. How? A poignant mystery. I shuddered at the implication, thinking again of the gross leaf twined about Blest’s leg. The poor sod must be going out of his mind.
I closed my eyes. Shielded whatever remained of JR from the demons that would eventually take him. I let my mind travel inward, like those insistent monks had instructed me back in the prayer meetings. I flashed back on old memories, truths, lies, to past lives. Or were they past lives? Or just tricks of the imagination? The images, compelling enough, entailed fighting enemies with swords and gunpowder and electric wands then R4s, enemies so cruel and detestable that they threatened to bring down the empire. One minute I was a hero, then a broken-legged soldier, next a traitor, then some nameless beggar wandering the ghettos, slumming for scraps in back alleys. Was that this life, or a previous one? All a blur. My lingering dream morphed into the boy wanting to be a rocket scientist and save the world, then it flickered out like a candle flame to something else. The bombs of the warmongers fell ravaging my home planet, leaving thousands dead, and the camps and the flight of madness occurring afterward, a nightmare like any aftermath of war, but it all started to make sense. I saw the dance and drama of my life multiplied a million times over in the lives of countless others. Just little puffballs of existence flashing in and out of time, with little significance to speak of in the overall picture.
The quintessence of me was but a tiny drop of water dribbling down on the vast leaf of time. Dripping down into an immeasurable pool of life, to be drawn out, consumed, reborn, recycled into some new matter and new phenomenon. Humbling to see this, and yet disturbing to catch a glimpse of what could be reality.
And I thought and I dreamed and brooded in the green liquid as the days and the weeks drifted by.
Out of my suspended animation I sprang up in a groggy rush. The sounds of murmuring voices and the sensation of touch drifted nearby. I flexed my hand. The fingers moved with full power. No more did my knitted flesh or my bent fingers throb. As the water had the power to nourish the occupants in the tanks, so could it heal flesh and broken bones. As long as the individual wasn’t dead, the liquid could perform the miraculous.
I felt rough sandpaper hands slapping at my moist cheeks. Words struggled to come to my nerveless lips.
“Steady does it,” said the figure who pushed finger to my lip. “Well, Jet Rusco, how do you feel after your first rebirth?”
I stammered.
“It will take some minutes to readjust. It won’t do to talk. Look at Zan over there. Comatose. Afraid the poor lad couldn’t cope with his suspension. Alas,” Mong sighed. “I will have to throw the wretch back in the tank for a while to regain his wits.”
“Wha—” I sputtered, my lungs heaving with the effort of taking breaths of life-giving air.
“You have questions, I know. We will repeat this exercise, until you are cured of your insatiable desire to defy me. Blest is up next on the ropes. Each of you will take turns in the Mentera bathtub. The liquid heals all wounds, no matter how grievous. We will start the process all over again, then the pain will run deeper. Much deeper. Treat it as my gift to bring you to a level of awareness higher than what you have already attained. It is written in the Budo scriptures that enlightenment can come through pain.”
“F-Fuck you, Mong,” I croaked. “You rude fucking sadist. I s-shit down your throat and piss on your scriptures.”
The Star Lord sighed. “Blasphemy. Disrespect for the wise ones. Very bad. Behavior as this demands cleansing.” He signaled to Balt.
The fucker lieutenant grabbed me up like a sack of potatoes and tossed me back in the tank, making sure my head was sufficiently underwater for enough time. I struggled, screaming bubbles from my lips. No use. They drowned me, again.
Whole days passed in snail-crawling increments. The prolonged immersion had me fading in and out into weird and grotesque, infathomable worlds.
Again I contemplated the truth of the universe in an alien tank, an irony that did not escape me. For all purposes, I should be dead, physically and spiritually. Then it hit me...as that voice from deep within the psyche broke through the filmy layers of encroaching darkness and spoke in an echoing blur:
The Star Lord will destroy this universe. Such is the duty of an angel of death. He is a cancer that must be excised, hit in the most vulnerable place—through his adulation of the crickets. Your life’s purpose is not to sit encaged in brine, Jet Rusco. Do you not see it? Do you wish to suffer torture indefinitely like a chained beast? You must kill him. You must kill deftly. By striking at the core, the weakest link...
I’d come to believe Mong was invincible, but the monster had a weak chink in his armor, as did anyone else. It was those damn bugs. Mong worshiped them. They had no love for him. Why should th
ey? I’d seen the evil glint in their eyes when he came sidling into the room and their brooding red glares trained on him. If I could escape, loose those creatures upon the compound, maybe there’d be a chance…But how, Rusco? You’re in a tank with half your back ripped open.
All those ruined worlds out there, all the people crying for emancipation from slavery, death—can you help them?
So the devil sat on my shoulder, whispered in my ear. You have to take a stand. So drenched in cynicism I’d been for so many years, shooting my mouth off and myself in the foot with all my breezy sarcasm and my clowning around, I hadn’t seen it. I thought being a rocket engineer was my role of roles. A hustler not long after? Scammer? Gangster? Big man with the big ship?
Your purpose lies before you, Jet Rusco.
Even if it kills me?
You’re already dead. Twice remember?
But I’m in a tank.
So, get out of a tank.
And there was a flash, a glimpse, of some reckoning between me and Mong, a final showdown, just me and him on a distant planet. The details were crystal clear. My mind, lucid as a ten megawatt bulb saw the rocks, boulders, the fields and the peasants hoeing their onions and yams in the fields, eking out a meager existence off the impossibly arid land. These past lives, these future lives, whatever they were, they were a hell of a trip. I’d stick to Myscol if I could.
So, floated to the surface, one of those crazy visions and conversations one has with his alter self, which make a lot of sense in a storybook fantasy but not in real life.
The tanks, the failures, the fuckups, the slits in my back—all these were the universe’s way of forcing me to see reason, to do my duty, and fulfill my life’s purpose. The voice spoke again. What are you, a crazy bastard? Yes. But the path burned clear as a lighthouse’s beacon before me.