A Company of Heroes Book Four: The Scientist

by Ron Miller

  Rykkla and her convoy proceeded directly to the Baudad’s palace, a gleamingly white overornamented affair that looked not un-like a chintzy wedding cake. Guards like spear bearers in an operetta passed them through a great iron gate with a kind of fearful, resentful deference toward the chamberlain. The heavy gate doors swung closed behind the convoy with a bong whose funerality was not lost upon Rykkla.

  They dismounted at the perimeter of the flagstoned courtyard within and near a twinkling fountain that made Rykkla involuntarily lick her cracked lips. While the men led the perspiring and relieved animals away, Rykkla followed the chamberlain into the palace proper. At first she could see nothing in the dark, cavern--like hall, her eyes still accustomed to the brilliant sunlight. As her pupils dilated, she gradually became aware of a vast, cool room, its high, arched ceiling supported by scores of slender, braided columns. Shafts of dusty light slanted diagonally across the murky space from windows high above the sun-dappled floor. Lush draperies hanging in heavy catenaries decorated the walls.

  “If you will be kind enough to wait here for just a few moments, I will make the necessary arrangements for your introduction to the Baudad. You should be comfortable; there are refreshments, please help yourself, and should you want for anything, simply tell this man,” he said, gesturing toward a towering menhir of muscle and cartilage that stood with its arms crossed, as silently and stolidly as a caryatid supporting a mausoleum. Ak-Poom left before she could say a word, his bootheels clattering on the parqueted marble floor. Rykkla glanced at what she assumed was more guard than servant and received little more in return than an unintelligent basilisk--like glare. There were overstuffed sofas and cushions everywhere, so she chose the nearest and began grazing among the trays of delicacies that were waiting on a dozen little ornately-carved tables. There were decanters of wine, fruit juices and spring water, effervescent and still, all freshly chilled and covered with sparkling dew, and these she drained one after the other. She devoured the food without stopping to see what it was, let alone taking time to taste it.

  After what seemed to be only a few minutes, but what was in reality closer to forty-five, the chamberlain returned and summoned her to follow him.

  Wherever she was being led required a meandering odyssey through labyrinthine passages, cavernous halls and colonnades like groves of marble trees and swooping staircases like terraced hillsides before finally arriving at an ornately-decorated door flanked by a pair of the largest men Rykkla had seen, with the exception, of course, of Thud Mollockle. Together, she estimated, they equaled no less than 1.75 Thuds. They blocked the door with steel-shanked battleaxes. They glared with eyes no less glitteringly steely at the chamberlain and his guest.

  Ak-Poom ignored them and, turning to Rykkla, said, “The Baudad will receive you in the morning. He is not feeling himself at the moment and wishes to give you all of the attention that you, as a very special guest, deserve. He asks for your indulgence and in the meantime, offers you the hospitality of the palace. If you will pardon me for mentioning it, perhaps you may not object to an opportunity to remove the dust of the journey, and to rest, eat and drink? There will also be a change of clothing available, if you desire.”

  “That all sounds exceedingly fine,” she replied. “I don’t think that I am particularly presentable at the moment. I believe that if anyone were to throw me at that wall, I’d stick to it.”

  “Then perhaps the Baudad can expect you to join him for breakfast?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Then I shall come and fetch you at ten. In the meantime . . . ”

  He gestured toward the guards who, until then not having shown a sign that they had even perceived his presence, uncrossed their axes as mechanically as a pair of machines. The chamberlain opened the door, using a complex-looking key that hung from a chain at his waist, and bid Rykkla to enter. She stepped ahead of him, then stopped so suddenly that ak-Poom bumped into her, causing them both to stumble forward inelegantly.

  She had been wholly unprepared for what lay beyond the door:

  A huge, sprawling room, certainly not as large as many of the others she had seen earlier by several orders of magnitude, but it was so filled with light that she had thought for a moment she had stepped out of doors, back into the desert. The room’s vaulted ceiling, its walls and floor were covered with a mosaic of porcelain tiles, either a translucent, soapy white or the palest of pastel tints, like nacreous squares of mother-of-pearl. The patterns were subtle and seemingly random, appearing to shift and flow like the diffracted spectra of an oil film, as though every surface were encrusted with enormous opals, which, indeed, they may have been. Silken banners, pennants and drapes of the same indistinctly transparent hues undulated from the walls or fluttered between the slender columns, drifting weightlessly like lazy tendrils of smoke or steam. Everywhere, little fountains tinkled clinquantly, while parakeets, cockatoos and canaries deliriously looped the loop among them.

  She smelled perfume and incense and warm bread.

  There was soft music on the piccolo.

  This catalog of wonders has not yet mentioned the most amazing thing Rykkla saw. What had stopped her dead in her tracks were the hundred and sixty nude women who had lazily turned to look at her when she came through the door.

  There were all shapes, colors and sizes of nude women, though they were all of an age, more or less. That is, there were none who were very, very young, nor any who were very, very old. There were yellow women who had complexions like ancient ivory or sweet cream rich with butterfat; white women with skins like parchment or vellum, milk or rose quartz, with skin so much like white silk that the blue veins beneath looked like the complex chart of a continental watershed; black women in every imaginable shade from a honey-on-toast not much different than Rykkla’s own caramel skin, to milk chocolate and mahoghany and bitter chocolate, to ebony or the shimmering purple-black of the eggplant; red women who glowed like warm copper or terra cotta fresh from the kiln. Three hundred and twenty eyes turned toward her, eyes round and slit, wide-awake and sleepy, innocent and hooded; grey, green, blue, hazel, brown, violet, even yellow and black. Around and behind these were faces round and thin, square and triangular, high-cheekboned and pudgily baby-like; full-lipped and thin, aquiline-nosed and pugged, haughty and servile, intelligent and stupid, strong and weak. Supporting this variety of heads, which were topped with every imaginable permutation of hirsuity: from wooly bushes to glossy baldness, was a veritable catalog of the bodies available to the human female. There were bodies taller and leaner and lankier than Rykkla’s, bodies shorter and fatter, bodies as muscled as a Peigambar warrior, bodies as small and sleek and rounded as an infant, bodies all bone and bodies sinuously boneless, bodies with breasts like teacups and bodies with breasts as large as grainsacks. Every change that could be rung upon these belles seemed to have been made.

  Rykkla turned to the chamberlain, mouth agape. She started to speak, not at all certain what she was going to say, but ak-Poom forestalled her.

  “Should there be anything you want, just ask.”

  “What is this place? A spa?”

  “Spa? Oh ha ha ha.” Musrum! He laughs like he’s reading a word that he’s never seen before. “No. No. Not a spa. For Musrum’s sake! Ha ha ha ha. This is the Baudad’s personal harem.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  BRONWYN DEPARTS THIS WORLD

  The day set for the launch of the big rocket had arrived and, faced with the reality, Bronwyn wondered, and not for the first time in her life, what in the world she was doing. It was, she realized, perhaps a little late to be considering the doubtfulness of her wisdom, which, the present situation considered, was doubtful indeed.

  She was strapped onto a reclining couch in the nose of the rocket, in what she hoped had been well-named the “life compartment”. To her left was Professor Wittenoom, his long legs causing his feet to dangle beyond the end of his couch; to her right was the third passenger, whom she considered with an icy an
d disapproving eye. Unaware of, or disregarding, this arctic scrutiny was a small, lean, dark-visaged man. Although the princess had only just been briefly introduced to him, she had already decided that she dis-liked him. His name was Sandor Hughenden, one of Dr. Tudela’s most trusted assistants and a distinguished doctor of science in his own right. At their first meeting he had clicked his heels together, murmured “Princess” in a sibilant voice and kissed the back of her hand. His complexion was oily, his thin nose speckled with blackheads, but his dry lips, she remembered, felt reptilian.

  Hughenden had been supervising Tudela’s electrical laboratory since the doctor’s unexplained and sudden leave of absence more than six months earlier. He oversaw its operation with precision; one would hardly have noticed Tudela’s absence, except that Tudela’s presence had filled the room with energy in exactly the way that his glass and bakelite and amber machines charged the atmosphere with power. Without that presence, the vast loft seemed somehow rarified, as though a vacuum pump had sucked away its vitality. Hughenden was efficient and certainly brilliant, but he was not the human spark coil that his master was. Bronwyn had never liked Doctor Tudela very much, since he had much the same personality as a rheostat, and did not particularly miss him; frankly, he had always frightened her not a little. But if he did, it was the sort of supernatural fear that an electrical storm generates, perhaps it was his frightfulness that was part of the inexorable fascination Bronwyn felt. His aloof superiority kept him distant from her (and everyone else, for that matter), but she could never find it in her to resent that aloofness because it was so clear to her that the man was indeed superior. His assistant, on the other hand, was equally aloof and superior, though these manifested themselves only as a kind of sneering superciliousness, and only slightly less frightening, but of these three qualities he only truly deserved to be accused of the latter. The man frightened Bronwyn for much more earthly reasons than the ethereal awe Tudela inspired. Hughenden simply reminded her too much of a snake, rat or cockroach.

  Bronwyn knew nothing of the machinations or politics that had been involved in the scientist’s selection over all the other candidates. Tudela, she knew, was, for all of his misanthropy, perhaps the only one of the Institute’s scientists who was well-known to the general public. The people of Londeac might easily tolerate the presence of the princess, as a kind of self-indulgence, but they were a little more critical about the scientists whom they were treating to such an expensive excursion. They might not have ever heard of Wittenoom, but his title as director of the institute was at least comprehensible and impressive-sounding. Tudela, however, was something of a household word, if for no other reason than that there was scarcely a home that had not benefitted from at least one of his inventions or some derivative. If Tudela were involved in the moon expedition, then there must certainly be something to it. And if Tudela himself were not available, than his designated agent would do as well.

  At Wittenoom’s fingertips were the controls that would set in motion the automatic firing mechanism, which was a kind of electrical clock encased in the central column. This would take care of firing the hundreds of individual rockets in their proper sequence. Hughenden was in charge of the equipment that maintained the oxygen, temperature and other environmental necessities. Once beyond the atmosphere, the two of them in concert would undertake the mathematics of translunar navigation as well as make whatever scientific observations that seemed necessary.

  This left very little for Bronwyn to do, except do what she often did so well, which was to brood.

  Did she consider what was about to happen to her as some sort of unconscious attempt at suicide? While of a morbid turn of mind, it is certainly doubtful that this extremity would ever have occurred to her. Bronwyn had a too well-developed sense of self worth for any such hasty, irrevocable and irreversible action as suicide. Nor would there be any point in causing people to weep and wail over her if she would not be there to appreciate it. Of itself, the knowledge that there were those who might so dramatically mourn her passing was not sufficiently compelling. Was she hoping that Gyven would wrench open the hatch at the last moment, to snatch her from her imminent and foolish peril? Perhaps. In fact, she was considering that very scenario and was wondering if it was because of such a far-fetched possibility that she was where she was: to be rescued. Or, put more bluntly: to give Gyven a jolt he couldn’t ignore.

  Bronwyn considered the letter she had left propped against the lamp on the desk in her room at the Academy. On the outside of the sealed envelope she had written in her positive, barbed-wire--like handwriting: To Gyven. On the crisply folded sheet inside was:

  Dear gyven,,

  I have alwasys felt that my life has been as relent;lessly timcking like as a clock’s the scond hand of a clock. while I see,med to be going somewhere from moMent to moment, on the big circle I was going nowhere at all. like the second hannd, I not only kneow whre I’d bveen but where i”d ever bee. I thought that renouncung my throne and coming to Londeac wipould break the rythm of that remorseless pendulum byt I find that i have just swithched sides on the seesaw.

  I wish that you’d beenhere. If you’d been , perhaps someonw else woud be in the third couch on the spaceship. If it is me, I’m not sure what I’m doing there, perhaps committing suicide in very uniquely: shooting my self in the most lteratel way posssible.

  Love, bBronwyn.

  She had written the letter on one of the Academy’s writing machines and hoped that Gyven would make an allowance for her lack of practice while reading it. What will I do if he doesn’t come in time?, she thought, just a moment too late.

  Wittenoom said, “Ready?”

  Hughenden replied, “Ready.”

  Bronwyn said, “What?” and the professor’s hand fell on the great switch.

  Instantly there was a roar that was more physical sensation than sound. She felt as though she were being shaken into a jelly at the same time that she was being pressed into her couch by a weary elephant which, mistaking her for a footstool or cushion, had just then decided to snuggle its great haunches onto her for a rest. She gasped for the breath that was squeezed from her lungs, but she couldn’t expand her chest against the great weight, which was, horrible thought!, increasing steadily. She wanted to turn her head and see what was happening to the two men, but she was afraid that if she moved it her eyes would fall out. She felt as though her pupils were being pressed through the back of her head and the two or three freckles she possessed were drilling into her face like panicked gophers. Even her hair was beginning to feel like thousands of individual iron cables. She tried to raise an arm and found that it had turned into a lead pipe.

  The roar increased to a thundering shriek, then stopped, suddenly, sharply, as though cut off by a knife. Her abused eardrums seemed to bulge at the unexpected release of pressure; at the same time the intolerable weight lifted from her body. For less than a second she believed that it was all over and was about to voice her relief when the sound began all over again and once more she was pressed into her couch, whose thick padding now felt like a sheet of iron. It was worse than before; she could feel her ribs creaking; she was certain that her skeleton was going to give way suddenly and that she would be spread in a thin layer of Bronwyn jam over couch and floor.