Return - Book III of the Five Worlds Trilogy

by Al Sarrantonio

  “Care to see something really interesting, sonny?” a voice said close beside Trel Clan’s ear, as he watched a man and woman in flaming costumes shot into Ike??? air from what looked like a plasma cannon.

  Trel Clan turned to give his interlocutor a blank stare.

  The man, who had bent down to accost Trel Clan from a remarkable height, was dressed in clown’s clothing, yellow and red polka dots on billowing satin over a thin frame; his face was bloodless white with a bulbous red nose and frighteningly crimson mouth; his eyes, outlined in black, widened as he poked a long, white-gloved finger into Trel Clan’s chest and smiled.

  “Sure, sonny? Biggest wonder of all the worlds!”

  The clown stood up, put his hands on his sides, threw back his head, and laughed. “Hoo-heee! Ladies and gentlemen! Children of all worlds! Step right this way to the greeeeeeatest attraction ever! The most stupeeeeeeeendous thing your mortal eyes will ever see!”

  They had gathered a crowd, and Trel Clan was jostled by a passersby who had stopped to hear the clown’s spiel. Trel Clan saw now that the man was mounted on stilts, so that he could easily tower over those around him. He spread his hands and smiled.

  “Riiiiiiight this way! First show of the day! Riiiiiiiight this way!”

  The clown was pointing to a vivid tall sign behind him; but Trel Clan’s own shortness, and the size of the crowd around him, prevented Trel Clan from seeing more than the very top of it: TITAN’S in huge letters, with something nebulous below it. There was a surge of the crowd forward.

  “Just tweeenty credits! Tweeenty credits! For the most stupeeeeeeendous sight of your lifetime! Just arrived two weeks ago! Be one of the first to see this close enough to touch!”

  The crowd surged again, moving toward the clown, who had stepped aside to register their credits and to let them pass through the center of the sign, which was hollowed into the door.

  “Step riiiiiight this way! Always room for one more! Single file pleeeeease!”

  Soon the last of the customers were gone, leaving the clown once again towering over Trel Clan.

  The clown bent close, smiling his horrid smile. “What’s the matter, sonny? Scared of a little Titanian king?”

  Trel Clan, stifling the rush of excitement that flowed through him, looked around the clown’s stilted body and studied the sign that straddled the doorway.

  TITAN’S KING! THE ONE AND ONLY JAMAL CLAN! the sign said; these words wrapped around a luridly rendered painting of a man’s head and one arm reaching upward; the man’s torso, limbless save for the arm, was cut off by the opening of the entry.

  Pushing credits into the clown’s hand, Trel Clan was drawn to the doorway like a nail to a magnet.

  “Hey!” the clown called after him. “You gave me too much!”

  The doorway led into near darkness, muffled by thick straw on the ground. Trel Clan found himself in a tunnel with turns, which, it became evident, were part of the attraction. Far ahead he could hear the sounds of amazed voices.

  He hit a wall, made a turn to the right, and there was a sudden brilliant light in the wall. There was a diorama within, a three-dimensional depiction of the Half-Day War, with the High Leader himself, the insect-bodied Prime Cornelian, striding over the lifeless bodies of Titanian soldiers. Above, the dark sky burned with the rays of Cornelian’s light soldiers, who spread out in a fan around him, bringing destruction. Magnificently ringed Saturn, half risen, loomed at the horizon, which was on fire.

  Stifling rage, Trel Clan moved on, hitting another wall that again turned to the right, revealing another diorama in the wall. This piece of propaganda, a fictitious scene of Queen Kamath Clan kneeling before the High Leader in the ruins of her planet and baring her throat to Cornelian’s metallic fingers, Trel Clan merely glanced at before turning away. Ahead, things had become quiet, and he stumbled on, hitting another wall and a final diorama depicting the explosion that had destroyed Titan, before pushing himself through a dark curtain and suddenly finding himself blinded by light.

  The last of the other patrons were pushing their way through another curtain at the far end of the room; there was a railing a`nd behind it a brightly lit cage, barred on all sides, its floor littered with popcorn, fruit peels, and other detritus.

  Within the cage, staring out at Trel Clan as he suspended his torso above the filth on the floor by grasping the cage’s top bars with his one remaining hand, was Jamal Clan, King of Titan.

  The king’s eyes rolled up into his head and he gibbered, swinging back and forth, drooling. He laughed, letting himself drop into the pile of rotting food on the cage floor; his one arm pulled him around as his mouth opened and closed, pulling in bits of food; the hand and arm, as if possessing a life of their own, shot out to grasp the front bars and then inched up, pulling the torso after it until it was suspended once more, this time with its back to Trel Clan.

  Jamal began to sing and rock; and then abruptly he stopped both, the hand making a lightning-quick switch, pulling the body around so that it faced Trel Clan.

  Jamal Clan, drooling, looked hard into Trel Clan’s face with sudden acknowledgment and sentience. “I know you … .”

  Jamal Clan said nothing.

  “You’re … Trel Clan. Twentieth in line. Very clever, hiding as a child. I used to know all these things. I knew who number nineteen was, and fifteen, and eleven, and—”

  “Yes, I am,” Trel Clan said. “But now—”

  “Now you’re first in line! After me!”

  Trel Clan again said nothing.

  “I know what you want!” The king laughed. For a moment he began to swing again, drooling copiously, humming a tune to himself. Then he abruptly stopped again, concentrating.

  “I won’t die,” he said. “They’ll keep me here, and feed me. That means you’ll always be number two!” Gritting his teeth, Trel Clan was silent.

  Looking from left to right, as if afraid of being heard, the king motioned with his head.

  “Come closer!” he whispered.

  Trel Clan moved as close to the railing as he could. “Come close to the cage!” the king urged.

  Looking from side to side himself, Trel Clan ducked under the railing and came close to the cage; there was a foul odor that repulsed him, but he overcame it.

  Suddenly, a foot in front of the cage, Trel Clan hit a force field, which repulsed him with a burning shock.

  “Ha!” King Clan said. “Ha ha! A little trick! Don’t forget—I’m still king!”

  “Titan is gone,” Trel Clan said spitefully, hauling himself off the floor to stand behind the railing once more. Behind him, at the beginning of the attraction, he could hear a tangle of voices that told him the next group of customers was approaching.

  “Blown to bits! Boom!” King Clan laughed. “But not gone!”

  Trel Clan studied the king closely, waiting for him to break into madness; but Jamal’s gaze was level.

  “Not as mad as they think I am, Trel Clan!” the king said. “Both of us good at disguises, eh? But I tell you, Titan is not dead!”

  “Tell me what you mean.”

  The king began to swing slightly. “Oh, yes. There’s another place we should be, the two of us! And I can get us there! With the help of greed …”

  The voices of the new customers were growing louder; there were guffaws of delight from close by in the tunnel approach.

  “You’re mad, is all,” Trel Clan said.

  Jamal hooted, pulling himself along the top bars of the cage like a monkey moving through a line of trees. In disgust, Trel moved to the curtain at the far end of the room.

  “Wait! Do you want to see Titan again?”

  When Trel Clan turned to look, the king was rolling his eyes again and humming to himself. But in a second Jamal Clan’s features steadied into evident sobriety.

  “Be here after darkness tonight,” the king said. “After the last show. Either that or lose your chance forever.”

  A customer, followed by another, burst
through the curtain at the far end of the room, laughing; immediately, Jamal dropped to the floor of the cage and rolled in the filth there, singing at the top of his lungs, “Kiiiiing am a kiiiing!”

  But when Trel Clan turned to leave, the king’s one index finger was pointing directly at him.

  Trel Clan spent the rest of the day in a fog. He passed attraction after attraction—the Two-Headed Dogs, Mindreader of Mars, the Beardless Man—pushing away the grasps of barkers and showmen trying to get him to sample their wares. There was a midway of games of chance, but he walked past their bursting balloons and hissing raser rifles as if sleepwalking. His feet brought him past the cages of wild beasts, great apes from the last preserve on Earth, lions and ostriches, a Venusian whale in a block-long tank, the last surviving Bengal tiger on any world. He gave none of them the notice they gave him. He skirted the Big lop acts, a hundred clowns leaving a single tiny transport, jugglers and tumblers, trapeze artists working a hundred meters high. He walked from one end of the tent to the other without noticing.

  But his mind was on fire.

  He found himself, finally, in the entrance to the freak show as the sun was descending. The crowds had thinned, only to swell again as night came on. Trel Clan knew that at this moment the school transports would be boarding for the trip back to the dormitories.

  “You wanna go in, kid?” a fat barker said, leaning close, his breath smelling of onions. He was impatient and waved his cane in front of Trel Clan’s eyes. “Lots of folks behind you, kid! Make up your mind!”

  Trel Clan paid and entered.

  There was a darkened entranceway, and then accession into a squalid long tent, badly lit, lined with rows of huge old jars on staggered shelves. It smelled vaguely of formaldehyde and death.

  Trel Clan stopped at the first jar. Filled with dark green liquid, there floated within it a flaccid pink blob, vaguely of human head form; from it sprouted a few tired tentacles. One eye in the head was open and empty, the other sealed closed with a flap of tissue. Above it was another jar labeled FISH WOMAN, with something appropriate within.

  Other patrons, testy with Trel Clan’s refusal to move on, pushed past him to guffaw over the other jars and move on. One old man, a thin well-dressed Martian, nearly bowled Trel Clan over and snapped peevishly, “If you won’t move, get out of the way!”

  When there was a lull in the line and Trel Clan was momentarily left alone, he crawled beneath the deep shelf holding the Tentacle-Headed Man, pushing sawdust aside with his hands and knees, and came to rest at the back of the tent, well out of the light and hidden. He sat and put his back to the tent; it smelled musty and gave slightly, then supported his weight.

  Other patrons came, saw, laughed, gasped, and left; Trel Clan watched their feet, the bottoms of their tunics. Eventually he was alone.

  There were sounds in the freak show tent, subtle gurglings, the faint lapping of water against glass, the settling of contents. It was as if the freak show itself gave a collective, timid sigh after the long day. The lights went out, leaving vague glowings behind.

  The lights went back on.

  The attraction’s barker, louder and even more impatient, entered with, from what Trel Clan could see of leggings, some sort of official and a school attendant, the sleek chrome of its lower half evident. They bustled through, the barker complaining all the while, saying, “He may have come through, how the hell do I know, I think he did but they all did, didn’t they? What the hell do you want from me? I’m sure the kid ran off into the desert. Lowell City’s where you’ll find him, if he’s anywhere.” He laughed acerbically. “Whaddaya think—he ran off to join the circus? You think anybody’d work for this dump that didn’t have to?”

  In a few moments they were gone, leaving the lights back out and Trel Clan undiscovered.

  He waited another hour, hearing the circus truly wind down, the diminishing shouts of roustabouts, occasional laughter, hush.

  He crawled out from his hiding place, stood up, briefly regarded the lines of glowing tanks—green, deep red, sickly orange, pulsing violet—then turned and walked out.

  It was truly night. The circus lights, save for a few dim white walkway bulbs, had been switched off. Under starlight, the tents looks less luridly wonderful, more utilitarian, their stripes muted. The near-invisible rails of the roller coaster could be seen against the backdrop of blackness.

  Trel Clan made his way directly to the attraction labeled TITAN’S KING! THE ONE AND ONLY JAMAL CLAN!

  The entranceway gaped open; but inside the tunnel was a heavy steel door that had been slid into place and locked.

  Behind it, Trel Clan heard voices.

  He hesitated, then banged on the door.

  The voices ceased immediately.

  Trel Clan waited, in the darkness, and heard nothing; especially not the sound of whoever appeared behind him and drove him with one savage blow down into unconsciousness.

  He awoke, again hearing voices.

  Only now he was on a ship, off Mars.

  That much became evident when the belly porthole beside the pallet that had served as his bed showed him the tiny dot that was the Red Planet. From this distance it looked pale and ineffectual, not the warmongering beast it had proved itself to be.

  The shuttle transport he rode was a small and cheap one, with no partition between the cabin and hold. The spaceshields in front of the pilot’s and copilot’s couches were wide, giving a view of what appeared to be the beginning of fastspace, stars bending back toward them in colored streaks.

  From the copilot’s seat appeared the head of Jamal Clan; his torso had been strapped tightly into the couch and his one arm was raised in salute as he grinned widely.

  “Our friend is awake! Welcome!”

  Trel Clan, sitting on his haunches, rubbed at the back of his neck. “Where are we going?”

  Jamal laughed, with a tinge of madness still evident. “To our destination, of course!”

  Trel Clan waited for elaboration, and wasn’t surprised to get none.

  In the pilot’s chair sat a tall, thick figure. Taking his eyes from the front view, he turned a single dour eye on Trel Clan. He appeared Martian, but his face was crinkled and discolored, white and pink, as if it had been burned. His hair was thin and then thicker in back, pulled into a knot.

  “Shut your mouth and do as we say,” the pilot said.

  Jamal hooted. “Be civil to your guest, Jerzy! After all, he’s first in line to my throne!”

  Again Jamal hooted, as the pilot snorted and turned back to the view before him.

  Seeing nothing to be gained in conversation, and feeling the beginnings of a terrible headache, Trel Clan lay down and soon was asleep.

  He was awakened by the grip of a strong hand on his throat.

  “Wake up!” Jamal Clan hissed, and Trel Clan, ever self-protective, came out of sleep immediately and put his hands on the king’s grip at his throat.

  To his great surprise, he could not loosen the tight grip. He began to choke, and witnessed Jamal Clan’s face inches from his own. The king’s arm had little leverage from the rest of his body and yet his grasp was incredibly powerful.

  The grip loosened, letting Trel Clan breathe; but there was the threat of tightening in the iron hold.

  “Listen to me, and say nothing,” Jamal Clan said. His eyes stared into Trel Clan’s own with either madness or purpose. “You must do precisely what I say or everything is lost for us.” The grip loosened ever so slightly. Nearly spitting the words, the king whispered, “Jerzy is in the airlock, checking for a pinhole leak I manufactured near the bottom of the outer door. He will only be in there a short while. You must seal the inner door and expel him into space.”

  Jamal’s eyes studied Trel Clan fiercely. “If you do not agree, I will choke you to death now. Do you agree?”

  Trel pulled in breath but said nothing.

  The hold tightened again and Jamal began to tremble with anger. “You will not get a second chance. I sp
oke of greed to you regarding this venture. Jerzy was promised great wealth, which exists but will never be his. It belongs to Titan. It belongs to you and I. If he lives, he will reveal our secret after getting paid. Do you agree?”

  Again the grip loosened, and this time Trel Clan nodded slightly.

  “I will let you go now,” the king hissed. “Do it!”

  Trel Clan gulped in a long breath of air as the king’s fingers released his throat.

  “Stand up and do it!” Jamal Clan whispered hysterically.

  Trel Clan pushed himself to his feet, still fighting for air, and stumbled to the inner airlock door. Through the port he could see Jerzy bent over a task at the outer door, near its bottom corner. The inner door seal was a meter above the floor, just to Trel Clan’s left.

  “Pull the lever, damn you!”

  Still studying the man in the airlock, Trel Clan pulled the red lever, which sealed the inner door with a tight thud.

  “Now activate the lock!” Jamal Clan screeched loudly.

  The big man in the lock had heard the sound behind him and turned to throw himself, bellowing, at the inner door. His creped face flushed bright red and pale white as he pounded on the door, screaming for release.

  “Activate the lock or he can override it!” Jamal screamed.

  Trel Clan looked at the raving king on the floor; Jamal was pulling himself frantically toward Trel, his fingers clawing against the deck of the shuttle transport; giving up on this tactic, he howled and drew his arm to his side, trying to roll forward into Trel.

  Trel turned back to see Jerzy desperately working at something just out of sight.

  Trel slid the safety shield from the activation button aside and pushed it.

  In the airlock Jerzy looked out at Trel Clan for a moment, the word No forming, before turning with the beginnings of true horror on his face to confront the outer door, which suddenly flew open. The man’s scream was lost in a hiss of expelled air, and Jerzy was pulled out of the door with his hands before him and legs kicking; as he went out, finding no purchases he covered his face with his arms.