Star quest

by Dean Koontz

  The woman flashed an evil stare at Tohm as the boy buried his head in her ample breasts, doing more—Tohm thought—than a mere boy should have been doing there.

  "Go," Hunk said for him.

  The driver lifted the brakes, started the cart, and floated away.

  Hunk signed. "It wasn't the same boy you saw before. You can be sure of that."

  "But it was! Who was he."

  Hunk flapped a tentacle in the direction of the fruits. "We had better eat before they get to town and have the police after us."

  Chapter Eight

  IT WAS two o'clock in the morning when they reached the capital. Tohm thought that whatever the Muties had done to the city the attack must not have been too unusual, for everything seemed quite normal and calm. Everyone was asleep. Or nearly everyone, anyway.

  They whistled in from the sea, climbed high above the city, and dropped down on the buildings unseen in the pitch night. The buildings were of every size and shape. There were spheres of all hues, forty story rectangles composed almost completely of windows, square box structures without any windows at all, and even a pyramid temple. Lights lined the main streets, green globes like fruit on the metal trees of the lamp posts. There were few lights inside the buildings, and most of these seemed standard night lights.

  "How do we contact your underground?" Tohm asked, hovering over a giant rectangle, peering down into the flower-planted medial strip.

  "Same way I always did before, I guess. The Old Man would have kept the same headquarters. We operate from caves."

  "But," Tohm said, "I thought you transferred only the city. How far down did you move things?"

  "You wouldn't understand."

  "Try me."

  "Well, the city is, in a strange way, an entity. It is connected, each building to the other, each lamp post to the sewers, and—in the mind of we Muties—the caves are also an integral part. When we pictured the city, we pictured the caves with it just in case we failed— as we did—and needed the caves later."

  "But there was no hole in the ground where you uprooted the city," Tohm said.

  A hovercraft sped by on the boulevard below.

  "Oh, it's not actually uprooted, as you're thinking of it. It just never was in that spot as far as space-time laws are concerned. When we found that we could not push it through the Fringe, we allowed the space-time currents to sway it, moving with them, placing the city in another location that could, by natural laws, accept it

  For all intents and purposes, the city has always been in this spot."

  "Okay, I don't understand. You were right."

  Hunk swiveled his face about on the shoulder that was not his. "East. Slowly. When I see the building, I'll tell you. The longer we stay out in sight, the more dangerous for the Mutie cause as well as our lives."

  Tohm banked himself by extending an arm and tilting it like a wing, leveled off, and coasted slowly across the roofs of the buildings, rising and dropping with the man-made topography.

  "There," Hunk said at last. "That mauve stone without windows."

  "What is it?"

  "Local court house. Drift in to the wall, then hug the shadows to the ground."

  Tohm did as ordered. The Mutie head was beginning to feel like a ton weight on even his massive shoulders. He was in just as much of a hurry as Hunk to get into those caves and relieved of his burden. He eased down, constantly searching the sidewalk below for late night citizens. Every city had its night people. On Earth, the night people parried until all hours of the morning. On Chona, they pulled practical jokes for people to find and stumble onto in the morning. On Frye, they sucked blood (the very, very night people). And here on Basa II, a Romaghin planet, they killed Muties. And men who aided Muties.

  They settled into an alley illuminated only by a faint blue bulb that cast a double set of shadows for everything. If he looked at the ground, his shadow made him an odd creature indeed, two bodies and four heads. Siamese twins, two-headed.

  "That grating at the end of the alley," Hunk said, raising a tentacle and waving it at an area below the Huht.

  Tohm advanced and stood on the grill. A draft of warm, dry air trickled up. "Now what?"

  Hunk seemed to be counting the bricks. Shaking a tentacle out, he lingered over the smooth surface of the stone, tapping it out like a blind man reading Braille. "This one, I believe." Bending the tentacle against it, he pushed. The brick popped in, held an inch deeper than the surrounding blocks, hummed slightly.

  "What—" Tohm began.

  Then the brick snapped back out, the grating fell away, and they were dropping through darkness. Down.

  Down through the sable-hued tunnel, they dropped. Darkness covered by neatly painted layers of blackness, lacquered over with Stygian pigment and laminated in jet, pitch, crow, ebony. The blackest place Tohm had ever been in. It brought ancient fears boiling into his mind, his heart, roiling over one another with bared fangs. His people had not long been from the cave. The memory of fanged things and clawed things, of man-eaters and child stealers was still strong in his mind, in his racial memory. He wanted to scream and flail, but he saw that Hunk was not perturbed, and he managed to divine that this was supposed to happen. He held his natural rage in.

  Abruptly, the winds stiffened, still warm, and grew strong enough to slow their fall. Giant air hands eased them down, holding them as if they were fragile children. It was nothingness with a sense of touch, drawing them into the bowels of the earth. Again, Tohm suppressed his urge to scream. Far, far away, a small red dot glimmered like a monster's tongue, the devil's waiting mouth. They were settled before it gently, gently. A door slid open beneath the red dot, blinding them suddenly with the harsh yellow light of the next room.

  "Go in," Hunk said.

  Trembling in his stomach, he walked in, shielding his eyes from the glare.

  "Stay right where you are," a voice boomed from the walls which he was just now beginning to see.

  "Don't move an inch," Hunk advised.

  He was wondering what sort of trap he had fallen or been led into. If he moved, would they kill him? Was Hunk involved? Then the primitive fear called paranoia surged through his mind. He could suddenly picture a situation wherein the entire galaxy was set up just to lure him into this room, that his whole life had been for the purpose of falling into these people's hands.

  "State your names," the walls said demandingly.

  "My name is Tohm," he said, his voice quavering.

  "I'm Hunk," Hunk said.

  Tohm could now see the blunt snouts of laser guns zeroed in on them, peeking out from the seam where the walls met the ceiling. Twenty. Twenty little mouths ready to vomit out death.

  "What's the password?"

  "In the old city, it was Soulbrother."

  "It still is," the walls croaked.

  The lights dimmed. Another door opened into a third room, and its opening brought the voice again, only softer, "Welcome home, Hunk."

  "Go on," Hunk urged him.

  He moved through the door, watched it close behind him. The room was an ultra-modern, comfortable-looking place. There were a number of couches, three desks heaped with papers, a "living" map of the capital, a map of great and surprising detail, showing all buildings and streets, and a number of gray areas which seemed to represent underground pockets of Muties. The lighting was indirect, the ceiling blue, the walls a tasteful bone-white, and the floor smooth concrete. That last brought him out of his contemplative reverie. For all its apparent luxury, the room was still a rebel stronghold, a place where the business of overthrowing a world—several worlds—was carried on.

  And there were people. Or, rather, Muties. A fellow about Tohm's age moved forward. He was thin, his face creased with heavy lines of worry—and he had no eyes. In place of orbs, two splotches of gray tissue lay in the sockets, pulsing now and then with various shades of yellow. "Welcome, Hunk. We thought you were dead."

  "As good as. Tohm here saved my life."

&nb
sp; The eyeless man turned to "stare" at Tohm. "Tohm, I'm Corgi Senyo. Those are two words which mean "bat 'yes' in my native tongue. I'm the… well, manager of this link in the underground. I thank you for all of us. Hunk is a valuable man as well as a friend."

  Tohm flushed. "He said you would help me."

  "He comes from a primitive world," Hunk explained. "He was kidnapped by the Romaghins for use in their jumbos. He knows nothing of our plight. He wants to help to find his woman, who was also kidnapped, and probably brought here to be sold. I said that we would help him find her."

  "Of course," Corgi said. "Certainly."

  "Her name was Tamilee," Tohm managed to say. He was not quite able to believe that he had found an entire block of friends. After all that he had been through, he thought all men were out to drink the blood of all other men. But, of course, these were not exactly men. These were Muties.

  "A very beautiful name."

  "A beautiful girl," he answered.

  "I'm sure. And now, maybe you'd like to know the names of those here."

  Tohm nodded politely, although his mind was on a dark girl and the finding of her.

  Corgi turned and waved a hand at a man sitting at one of the massive desks. The Mutie had a pen in his— claw, working carefully over sheets of graph paper. There were red, raw-looking gill slits under his jaws, ringing the top of his neck. Under the hair and on the backs of his hands, the skin, for patches, seemed to become scales, gray and shiny, then faded back into skin once again. His fingers were narrow and long, ending in a thin prong of nail. "This is Fish," Corgi said. "His real name is something very long and foreign sounding. Most of us do not go by our real names. Our parents forsook us as did the rest of society; in fact, like the others, they would shoot us on sight. We have no great fondness for family history. We're making our own history."

  Fish nodded, his eyes bleary and wet-looking.

  "Glad to meet you, Fish," Tohm said, feeling slightly inane.

  "And this is Babe," Corgi said, pointing to another, smaller man.

  Babe stood about four feet high.' He was chubby, a virtual ball of flesh. It hung in pink rolls under his chin, circled his middle like an inner tube. His fingers were tiny, puffy, pink like the rest of him. His eyes were blue as the day sky. And he was smoking a cigar.

  "Hiya, Tohm!" Babe said around the tobacco tube.

  "Babe never grows up," Corgi said. "At least, externally. Hell always look like a pre-schooler and that is, finally, that. He used to use it to our advantage. He could move in the outside world because everyone thought he was a boy. Then they caught on. Today, Babe is one of the ten most wanted Muties by both the

  Romaghins and Setessins. He doesn't dare show his face."

  "The fortunes of war," Babe said, waving his cigar. It was larger, by far, than the fingers that held it

  "We also think he's immortal."

  "Bah!" Babe snapped.

  Corgi grinned. "But how old are you?"

  "Two hundred and twenty-three. But there's an end somewhere. I'm just another Methuselah. He died eventually, you know."

  Corgi smiled again. "Then—"

  He was interrupted at that moment by the woman he meant to call. The door opened from the interior rooms of the shelter and the most stunning creature Tohm had ever seen entered the room. She was feline. Positively cat-like. She wore a black leotard suit which helped to give the impression, but even without it, Tohm knew, she would be a sleek, sensuous cat

  This is Mayna," Corgi said, eyeing Tohm, expecting the reaction the woman was getting. "Mayna, this is Tohm."

  She was about five and a half feet tall. And lithe. She glided rather than walked. Slid rather than stepped. Her body was a sensuous mass of rippling muscles and soft flesh. Her legs were full but streamlined, her feet tiny. Tiny paws. The toes, as she stood in bare feet, were stubbier than normal and joined abruptly with the main part of the foot, topped by tiny claws. The bottom and edges of her feet were covered with a tough pad. Her belly, he noticed as he reversed the direction of his perusal, was flat. Her breasts were as large as his fist, upturned. Her neck was a graceful architectural wonder as it arched up to support her head. Her lips were full, sealed and bursting with honey when closed, stung open by a bee when she spoke. Her teeth were fine and white, sharply pointed behind those lips. He could see that when she smiled the most disarming smile he had ever seen. Her nose was slightly pug. Her eyes were green as the sea is green. And they were quick. They took him in, in a moment, relaxed on his own and watched him survey her. Her dark, smooth face was framed by oceans of black, silken hair that made her look all the more animal.

  "I'm pleased to meet you, Tohm," she said, walking, rippling, flowing toward him, extending her hand. He didn't know whether to kiss it or shake it. He shook it. It was a warm, very warm, and dry hand.

  "He saved Hunk's life," Corgi contributed. Mayna turned, seemed to see Hunk for the first time. She ran to him, weeping, and engulfed him where he slouched in a leather chair after freeing himself of Tohm's shoulder.

  "Are you hungry, Tohm?" Corgi asked. "Not really. I was wondering—about Tamilee."

  "Yes. Yes, in the morning. Tomorrow."

  "Then, perhaps there is some place where I could lie down and sleep."

  "Certainly. Babe, how about showing Tohm to a room?"

  "This way," Babe said, uncrossing his fat, fatigue-covered legs. He toddled through the door from which Mayna had made her grand entrance. Tohm cast one look back at the girl where she sat conversing excitedly with Hunk, then followed the immortal man-child.

  They passed down a long corridor with rooms to either side, some with doors, some without. Those without doors seemed to be lounges, small offices, and file areas. Those with doors, he imagined, were sleeping rooms. Once, before this cell had been destroyed by Captain Hazabob, all sorts of fantastic creatures must have scuttled and thumped and slid about. Now most rooms would be empty. They turned a corner and bumped into a very old man with white hair curling under and over his shriveled ears. He had a slit for a mouth, only the nostrils and none of the cartilage of a nose, and two overlarge eyes. His face was a mass of wrinkles. Rag face. He was weeping. Silently, though, without sobs and moans: a simple flow of lacrimal fluid, the trembling of the body as he stumbled along. He passed by them without a glance.

  "Seer," Babe said.

  Tohm looked back to the man-child. "What?"

  "That's his name. Seer."

  "But why is he crying?"

  "Suffice to say that he sees"

  "Sees what?"

  "Not now. In time you'll come to understand. You won't like it."

  He shrugged and followed the little man. These people could keep him waiting in the dark if they wanted tons he had found out with Hunk and the white-eyed boy. Best to follow and wait for the answers. And hope there were a few.

  "This is quite an elaborate setup," he said as Babe showed him his room and bath. "The entrances and the offices, these rooms. How could you build them if you are not able to venture out in public? I mean, there would be the procuring of materials and all."

  "The Old Man," Babe said. "He has access to robots. We programmed them to dig out the caves wherever silt had collected and to use the all form plasti-jell in making the walls and ceilings—and most of the furniture. The Old Man has a credit card. He can get anything with his unlimited funds through the black market und have the bill list the purchase as something entirely different. No one knew what he was really buying."

  "Then the Old Man isn't really a Mutie?"

  "Not strictly speaking," Babe said, exhaling a thin stream of odorless smoke between his teeth.

  "Who is he?" Tohm asked, plopping down on an extremely comfortable bed.

  "Oops! Secret Mustn't spill the major fruits of the tree."

  "Sorry."

  "Get some sleep. Can you find your way back to the control room in the morning?"

  "I think so."

  "Good night then." And he was gone, closing
the door behind.

  Tohm stretched out on the bunk, palmed off the lights. His head was swimming with things, hundreds of things, each more confusing than the other. He had come to hunt Tamilee, but he was finding himself reacting to the catgirl Mayna. He believed in fidelity. Strongly. But the juices that poured through him when he thought of the sleek form, the paw-feet, the lips…

  The door opened suddenly. He sat up just as quickly. Seer looked in at him, eyes vacant, watery. "What do you want?" Tohm asked.

  The old man looked at him, nothing more…

  Somewhere in the distance, there was weeping, weeping somewhere far, far down in the guts of Seer, far, far down in his soul…

  Just as suddenly as he had come, the Mutie left, closing the door with a solid thud. His footsteps scraped over the concrete, fading down the hall.

  Tohm was sure he could not sleep now. In only days he had been plucked from a horizontal society of one plane and plunged down into a vertical, horizontal cross-hatch of meanings and purposes, drives and goals, currents and undercurrents. His own purpose was even be-ginning to cloud. He had to think to remember what Tarnilee looked like. At first, he pictured her with green eyes. Was that what the modem world did? Did it squash all love and memories of love? Or was this himself, changed? Ignoring all these doubts, still he would not be able to sleep. The place was crawling with eerie things, eerie people, an illegal operation as it was. He was sure of it. He was certain. But he fell into slumber almost instantly.

  Chapter Nine

  HE WOKE and smelled himself.

  It wasn't pleasant. He got up and undressed, went into the bathroom and showered for half an hour, washing away all the things he had covered himself with in the past days, all the things other than dirt and sweat, the things that couldn't be seen or smelled but were nonetheless there.

  The water gurgled, babbled, talked as the sea talked.

  Water, he thought, was like a womb. Water was an aperture in the earth's belly from which Me crawled forth to be spanked by the hands of the Fates and the Furies. And water cleansed Me, washed away the dirt, leaving only the pure things which Nature first brought forth as her own. In the spring, it fell out of the heavens and splashed lightly onto the ground, dribbled away, cleansing the earth of the stain of evils endured. And in the winter, it drifted gentle and white, a virgin mantle to restore the hymen of the land, to make things once again pure and sweet and innocent.