The Outpost

by Mike Resnick

  (I should probably have asked some questions when I saw that all the other patients were animals—but at least the veterinarian was open for business in the middle of the night, which is more than I can say for all them rich, stuck-up doctors.)

  When I got back to the hotel, I asked the desk clerk where I could find the Star of Bethlehem. He called up some Tri-D star maps on his computer and began looking, so I grabbed him by the collar and shook him a couple of times to make sure I had his attention, and politely suggested that while the Star of Bethlehem might be a lot of things, including a celestial object, the particular stellar body I was looking for was wearing a skin-tight dress and was staying in the hotel.

  He apologized and told a servo-mech to mop up the small puddle he’d made on the floor, and then checked the hotel’s register, and suddenly turned as white as a sheet.

  “You look like you seen a ghost,” I said.

  “I’m just anticipating,” he answered.

  Well, I didn’t know what he meant, and it wasn’t none of my concern anyway, so I said, “What room is she in?”

  “She checked out half an hour ago,” said the clerk, cringing as if he expected the ceiling to fall on his head.

  “Where did she go?” I asked.

  “Let me see,” he said, messing with the computer.

  “You know,” I opined, staring at his hands, “you really ought to see a doctor before that palsy gets any worse.”

  “I plan to see a whole barrage of them the second I’m off duty,” he replied. “Ah, here it is. She caught the starliner to Dante II.”

  “You got any other info on her?” I asked, wondering for instance if she was married, and if she was, was she a fanatic about it?

  “Just that her companion listed his profession as assistant to the Mage of the Swirling Mists.”

  “The Mage of the Swirling Mists?” I repeated, rolling the name around on my tongue and wondering if anyone involved in this situation except me had just a first name and a last one.

  “Yes,” said the clerk. “I’ve never seen him, of course, but I’ve heard that he can foresee the future, explain all the eternal verities, and even predict the roll of the dice.”

  “Sounds like a handy guy to know,” I allowed. “I hope he ain’t too good-looking.”

  “He is the Master of the Mystic Arts,” said the clerk. “What matters appearance to a being like that?”

  I was more concerned with what they mattered to a being like the Star of Bethlehem, but I kept my thoughts to myself and went to the spaceport, where I climbed into my ship and took off for Dante II, which for the uninitiated was just past the Virgil system, way out on the Spiral Arm.

  Took the better part of two weeks to get there, during which time my love for the Star of Bethlehem had blossomed and grown and matured into a beautiful thing of gossamer fragility. I’d been doing a lot of thinking about the pair of us, and I had only one question left, which was would she let me call her Star, since calling her Star of Bethlehem every time I spoke to her could get to be a little tedious.

  Once I landed, I made my way through customs—they’d never heard of me, so it didn’t take as long as usual—and walked out of the spaceport. I figured I might as well get right to business, so I stopped the first pedestrian I saw with the intention of asking him where I could find the Mage of the Swirling Mists, but he just lay peaceful-like where he’d fallen, and after eight or nine minutes my patience began wearing thin, so I just wandered into the city on my own.

  Before long I came upon another man walking the streets by himself, and I kind of signaled for him to stop and talk to me.

  “Okay,” he said, stretching his hands way above his head. “And you can stop pointing the blaster at me. I ain’t armed and I ain’t dumb enough to run away from a man that’s carrying as much firepower as you seem to be.”

  “That’s right reasonable of you, friend,” I said. “I got just one thing to ask of you and then you can be on your way.”

  “Is this some kind of trick question?” he asked nervously. “What’ll you do to me if I get it wrong?”

  “It ain’t no trick,” I assured him. “And it’s vitally important to my sex life and my emotional well-being.” I tried to figure out how to word it without sounding like too much of a country bumpkin, and finally I blurted out, “Where can I find the Swirling Mists?”

  I was all prepared for him to laugh at me, but instead he looked kind of relieved and pointed up the road a way.

  “Go to Fourth Street and turn left,” he said.

  “That’s all there is to it?”

  “That’s it.”

  I thanked him and hurried off, anxious to clutch the Star of Bethlehem to my manly bosom.

  When I got to Fourth Street, I took a left, and walked half a block past a number of theaters and clubs and restaurants, mingling with a bunch of folks who were dressed to the nines, and then suddenly I found myself in front of a blinking holographic sign that proclaimed that I had reached the Swirling Mists Nightclub.

  “Welcome, wayfarer,” said the doorman, who was dressed exactly like the guy I’d kind of disassembled back on Futzi Minoulli. “Enter the Swirling Mists and let the fabulous Mage astound you with his feats of prestidigitation and legerdemain!”

  Well, Prestidigitation and Legerdemain sounded like a couple of Altairean bodyguards, but I didn’t want to show my ignorance, so I thanked him and walked on in.

  The show was just finishing, and a bunch of chorus girls were on stage, dressed—or maybe a better word is undressed—like witches, and doing really interesting things with their broomsticks, but I wasn’t here for the high culture the place afforded, but for my Star of Bethlehem, and once I determined that she wasn’t anywhere to be seen I moseyed backstage and began looking for her.

  I tried five or six dressing rooms, and raised a couple of female screams, which struck me as odd since I wasn’t seeing nothing they weren’t proud to show off onstage, and then I came to the biggest dressing room of all, and there, sitting at a table and staring into a mirror, was this guy with a cone-shaped magician’s hat and a long white beard, and a robe that kept changing colors the whole time I looked at it.

  “You ain’t the Star,” I said, making no attempt to hide my disappointment.

  “I most certainly am,” he replied with dignity. “Don’t take my word for it—go out and look at the marquee. The Mage of the Swirling Mists is the star this and every night.”

  “And you’re the Mage?” I asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “Good!” I said. “Where can I find the Star of Bethlehem?”

  He looked puzzled. “Second star on the right and straight on ’til morning?”

  “She’s a woman,” I explained.

  “I didn’t know they came in sexes,” he said. “Fascinating!”

  “I thought you knew everything,” I said.

  “Me?” he replied with a laugh. “I just do card tricks.” He reached into the air and produced a deck, then fanned it out. “Here, take a card, any card.”

  “I don’t care about card tricks!” I yelled.

  “Okay, don’t lose your temper,” he said. He reached behind my ear and suddenly there was an egg in his hand. “There!” he said proudly. “What do you think of that?”

  “It’s an egg,” I said. “Big deal.”

  “But where did it come from?” he said with a twinkle in his eye.

  “That’s the kind of stuff everyone says you know,” I answered him. “Did it come before the chicken or after? And while we’re on the subject, where’s the woman I love?”

  “How the hell should I know?” said the Mage.

  “They told me you knew everything,” I said.

  “Ah!”!” he said, his eyes lighting up. “Now I understand. You want the Mage of the Purple Mists! He knows everything. He answers all the questions about life and death and such, and he’s never been known to be wrong. Me, I just do sleight of hand.”

  “You�
��re sure?” I asked, staring at him and trying to decide if he was joking.

  “Absolutely,” said the Mage. “He works about half a block down the street. And I hear that he’s got the most beautiful blue-skinned assistant …”

  I didn’t wait to hear the rest. I was out the back door before he could finish his sentence, and a minute later I was pounding at the locked door of the Purple Mists.

  Finally the door inched open and a skinny old guy stuck his head out.

  “Stop pounding!” he said. “I heard you.”

  “Let me in!” I said.

  “We’re closed for the season.”

  “What season?” I said. “What’s going on, and when do you open again?”

  He shrugged. “How should I know? Maybe never.”

  “What are you talking about?” I demanded. “Where’s the Mage of the Purple Mists?”

  “He left the planet this afternoon with that beautiful assistant of his,” said the old guy.

  “When’s he coming back?”

  “Beats me,” was the answer. “Didn’t leave no forwarding address neither.”

  I set off to hunt them down and pledge my love to the Star of Bethlehem, and I spent the next year searching for them without any luck, but then I ran into a couple of Pirate Queens and a High Priestess who looked exactly like she had an extra pair of lungs, and after a while I couldn’t quite remember what the Star actually looked like except for being blue and kind of pretty.

  As for the Mage of the Purple Mists, I guess he was everything they said he was. But he couldn’t do card tricks, and people who knew him said he wasn’t much with a blaster or a burner, and he was too old to cut the mustard with the Star of Bethlehem, so when I think of him at all, I wonder what knowing all the secrets of the universe was really worth.

  “Let me take him to High Stakes Eddie’s for a night and I’ll put a cash value on it,” said Bet-a-World O’Grady.

  “You know,” said Sinderella, “there’s more to this secrets of the universe business than meets the eye. Or rather, there’s a lot less.”

  “What do you mean?” asked O’Grady.

  “You were listening. The brightest machine in the galaxy couldn’t give poor Argyle even as good an answer as some drunken jerk in a bar could, and the Mage of the Swirling Mists does card tricks.”

  “True,” said Baker. “But the Mage of the Purple Mists now…”

  “You don’t know anything about him,” said Sinderella.

  “Except that he’s got your Star of Bethlehem,” added Max with a smirk.

  “She was too perfect,” answered Baker.

  “How can someone be too perfect?” asked Sinderella.

  “She was purity itself,” said Baker. “How can you enjoy a roll in the hay if it don’t feel dirty?”

  “A telling point,” agreed Nicodemus Mayflower. “If you don’t rut like a couple of farm animals gone wild, and then feel so guilty that you’ve just got to unload in church, and then change your mind because what you did was so filthy that your minister would never speak to you again—”

  “I ain’t never seen, heard, smelled, or even experienced a sex act that could shock my tender sensitivities,” interrupted the Reverend Billy Karma. “You’ve just been going to the wrong church, my son.”

  “Well, if it doesn’t shock you, it should at least shock the pants off God,” continued Mayflower.

  “God is a mighty understanding critter,” said Billy Karma. “And it’s been my experience that He likes a spicy story as well as the next man.”

  “That’s some religion you preach,” said Max sardonically.

  “The best,” agreed the Reverend. “I mean, what the hell good’s a religion that doesn’t attract sinners? That’s what keeps God in business—fresh blood.”

  “I never looked at it that way,” admitted Baker.

  “Not many people do,” answered Billy Karma. “Or else you’d all get into the preaching biz.”

  “And God don’t shock easy?” continued Baker.

  “It’s almost as hard to shock God as it is to shock me,” said Billy Karma. “Take this little lady here,” he added, pointing to Sinderella. “She felt a need to confess her sins this morning, or maybe to brag about ’em a little, and even though we ain’t from the same branch of God’s family, I sat down and listened to her for three hours.” He paused and looked around the Outpost. “Well, brethren, I panted, and I drooled, and my hands started shaking, and once or twice I even went outside to bay at the sun (the moon not being in the sky at the time). I stuttered and I stammered and I howled like a dog—but the one thing I wasn’t was shocked. Excited, yes. Inflamed, sure. Aroused, damned right. But shocked? Never!” Then he winked at Sinderella. “We got to have another heart-to-heart real soon now, you hear?”

  “I think I been going to the wrong church all my life,” said Baker.

  “I don’t know about that,” responded Max. “I mean, to listen to you tell it, the only thing you ever got out of a church service was a vestal virgin or two, and they didn’t stay vestal for long.”

  “You mean virgin,” said Sinderella.

  “That, too.”

  “Well, you sure have an interesting way of looking at things, Reverend,” said Nicodemus Mayflower.

  “I got to,” answered Billy Karma. “After all, I’m God’s eyes and ears on this here temporal plane of existence.”

  “He spent most of last night trying to convince me he was God’s hands, too,” said Silicon Carny

  “You never heard of the laying on of hands?” said the Reverend in mock surprise.

  “Not where you were trying to lay them,” replied Silicon Carny.

  “How about talking in tongues?” asked Max.

  “I give up,” said Billy Karma. “How about talking in tongues?”

  “Can you do it?”

  “Usually not until my fifth drink.”

  “The more I hear about this man’s religion, the more I like it,” announced Baker.

  “The more I hear about it,” said Max, “the more it sounds like I’ve been practicing it for the last twenty years without even knowing it.”

  “Tell me some more,” said Baker. “You got any saints in your religion?”

  “Not so’s you’d notice it,” answered the Reverend Billy Karma. “I thought I was pretty saintly this morning, just sitting there listening to Sinderella without pouncing on her.”

  “Uh …” began Sinderella meaningfully.

  “Without pouncing on her in earnest,” he amended.

  “Hey, I was there!” she said.

  “Okay, without pouncing on her in deadly earnest,” said Billy Karma. He turned back to Baker. “All right—no saints.”

  “How about prophets?” asked O’Grady, who only seemed to get interested in the conversation when he could bring it around to odds and betting.

  “We make more than our fair share, and we’re completely tax free,” replied the Reverend. “You thinking about taking to the cloth?”

  “I meant prophets, not profits,” said O’Grady, enunciating carefully. “You know—the kind of men who make pronouncements and predict the future.”

  “Men who make pronouncements and predict the future are hanging out in every brokerage house and bookie joint in the galaxy,” said Max. “And every last one of ’em dies broke.”

  “We’ve had our share of prophets,” replied the Reverend. “Including maybe the two most interesting in the history of organized religion.”

  “Organized religion’s been around eight or nine millennia,” noted Max dryly.

  “Nonsense,” said Billy Karma. “Religion didn’t get really organized until I writ down all the rules for it maybe fifteen years ago. And since then there have been 53 amendments, as well as two evenings worth of apocrypha experienced at one of the sleazier whorehouses on Talarba VII, and a rejected canon courtesy of an alien lady who had three of everything worthwhile.” He winked at Silicon Carny. “There’s still time to become the 54th a
mendment.”

  “There’s still time to be nailed to a cross,” she replied.

  “What’s the matter with you, woman?” he demanded. “Religion’s supposed to be enjoyable, or why practice it at all?”

  “I’d enjoy it,” said Silicon Carny.

  “She’s got you there, Reverend,” said Max. “Fair is fair.”

  “So what about these two prophets you were mentioning?” asked Baker.

  “Don’t encourage him,” said Max. “He talks enough as it is.”

  “But think of all the things he can’t do while he’s busy talking,” said Sinderella.

  “He wouldn’t be doing ’em to me anyway,” said Max. He turned to Billy Karma. “Would you?”

  “I got to be a lot more desperate than I am right now to work all the way up to that amendment,” said the Reverend devoutly. “Now, do you want to hear about these prophets or don’t you?”

  “I don’t know,” said Max. “Maybe we ought to take a vote.”

  “You didn’t vote for anyone else’s stories,” said Billy Karma.

  “They didn’t waste three million words building up to ’em,” said Max. “All in favor of hearing the Reverend Billy Karma drone on about these here prophets say Aye.”

  “Aye,” said Catastrophe Baker.

  “All opposed?”

  Everyone else in the Outpost hollered “Nay!”

  Max looked at Baker, and saw a little something in his eyes that made him think twice.

  “The ayes have it,” said Max.

  The Prophet Who Was Never Wrong

  When I was a young man (began the Reverend Billy Karma), and just starting out on the preaching trail, I came across a true quirk of Nature—a pair of brothers who were Siamese twins, joined at the hip. I did my best to uplift their spirits, but they felt abandoned by God, and one day they walked out during a thunderstorm and begged Him to strike them down with a bolt of lightning and end their misery.

  And damned if the Good Lord didn’t do just that. His aim was a little off though, probably due to the poor visibility, and instead of killing them the lightning actually split them apart. The shock sent ’em both into a coma, and they lost a lot of blood, but somehow or other they were found and taken to a hospital before they could expire, and there they lay, day in and day out, tied in to dozens of tubes and wires.