Star Quest

by Dean R. Koontz

  He looked up at her.

  “Let's get moving,” she said, not returning the stare.

  Babe came from the shadows. Mayna and Tohm topped the wall first, then reached down and lifted the smaller Mutie. From there, the alley and the grating was a very short step. There were no guards around those streets yet. They ran freely, more anxious for speed than secrecy. They gained the grille and the warm cushion of air without incident.

  When they reached the hutch, Corgi rushed to greet them, his eyes flashing with all shades of yellow in riotous waves. “We leave in three hours. The Romaghins have caught on to our attack date. The pressure is on. They might invade Federation worlds to kill us. The Old Man will be here to move us out in exactly three hours.”

  PART TWO

  “NEW DESTINIES, NEW DESIRES”

  XIII

  They were flushed with the heat of love…

  Lying naked on their grass mat in the cool darkness of the hut…

  He rolled over to kiss the lips that he knew to be sweet and soft and warm…

  And she had no face…

  It had not been torn off, ripped bloodily away in rage, but had simply faded out of existence. “Tarni—” He began to say. But her name was slipping away too, dissolving from his memory…

  He strained to remember the face … As if, by sheer power of the will, he could undo whatever the gods had done to their relationship…

  For a moment, a mouth appeared with a greedy tongue. But that was worse than the blankness — that one, grotesque feature on the barren plain of the face. He stopped trying to remember. He simply ran…

  He ran from the hut, weeping…

  He ran through the coolness of the night with the stars overhead…

  He ran with the booming of the surf in the distance…

  He ran beneath the moons, wishing he could howl…

  He ran through the bushes of amber leaves…

  He ran through orange flowers, stopping suddenly to listen to something. What? What was it? What had he heard?

  A hissing. An animal hissing in the bushes nearby…

  “All right,” someone said, shaking his shoulder. “No more time for naps.”

  He pushed himself off the couch, wobbling as he stood.

  “We meet the Old Man in forty minutes on the edge of town. There is a passageway through the caves that will take us under the city wall.” Corgi's eyes were still flushing with brilliant color. He was excited about the swift culmination of all their years of work, the finish line of their centuries-long race.

  Tohm stretched, blinked the last traces of sleep from his eyes. “I'm anxious to meet this Old Man of yours.”

  “Quite a person, quite a person. Come along now. We mustn't be late.”

  They entered the caves where he had first heard Mayna singing, where her hatred for him had bloomed, mushroomed into sight for a few short moments. She hadn't spoken a word to him since they had entered the hutch after escaping the Romaghin guards. She was perturbed, he was sure, by the fact that it had been her fault that Babe now wore his arm in a sling and had it patched with heavy heal-and-flex bandages. Corgi and Mayna took the lead, Fish guiding the Seer next, and Babe and himself with Hunk on his shoulder bringing up the rear. Moving past the lake, skirting its shores, they snaked downward for a time through phosphorescent corridors, then turned upward and finally struck out in a straight tunnel with no nonsense to it. Tohm estimated ten or twenty feet to the surface, perhaps as much as thirty.

  The weight of Hunk was already burdening him down, sending throbbing pains through his shoulder. There was no flybelt now to support them, and he was taking all of the Mutie's weight himself with no help from the limited de-grav and propeller plates in the magic waistband.

  “Not much farther,” Hunk said, sensing his discomfort.

  “I can't believe it,” Babe said, puffing away on his tobacco cylinder. “I can't believe we're finally ready for the big show.”

  “I wish,” Tohm said, “I understood what this big show is all about.”

  “You will. In time, you will.”

  Tohm tried to remember how long ago it had all begun. Strangely, he could not. Whether it had been a week or a month or a year, he did not know. All he knew was that he had come a long way, from hut to Jumbo to “pervert.” He had crossed millions of miles of space and thousands of years of civilization. Somehow, his destiny had become linked with these semi-people. There had, in the beginning, been few people in his life. Parents, a girl whom he had loved — or thought, in his inexperience, that he had — and a few tribal friends. Now there were many people and semi-people in his life whom he had directly or indirectly affected for better or for worse for as long as all should live. He had killed, it suddenly came to him with a bitterweet shock, as many people in this week-month-year as he had known all together in his previous life.

  “Another half mile,” Corgi said, calling back over his shoulder.

  Another half mile to what? What was going to happen when the Muties got together and did their thing? Who was the Old Man? What was the Fringe? Did he want to be a part of it, and would they let him even if he did? The last thought struck hard. He thought they liked him — aside from Mayna — but how could he be certain? Could one judge these people on normal human standards? Mayna herself had told him not to force his mores and values on her. Did they really want a peaceful world, or was that some front for a larger design they had on things? His mind was wrapped in on itself. Whatever was coming, however, and whatever had been left behind, he could not imagine anything but being a pervert. Their cause, at least, seemed just, the first righteous cause or purpose he had seen in civilization. Personally, he was hooked on these people: comical Babe, songwriter Fish, competent Corgi, incomparable Hunk, possibly even Seer now that he understood him… And there had been hissing in the bushes …

  “This is it,” Corgi said, as they all gathered around him.

  A small cavelet yawned upward at an angle.

  A fresh breeze swept down, stirred their hair and tickled their nostrils with freedom.

  “We cleaned out the mouth of this a long time ago, broke through to the surface. A back door for emergencies. It comes up in a clump of rocks just outside the gate. There's no cover for about a thousand feet. Remember, when you're out, run. The walls are very near, and you don't want to draw any attention. Don't stand about making a target of yourself''

  Then he was snaking up through the blackness, moving amazingly fast if one thought of him as eyeless, progressing normally if one remembered he had radar cells. Dirt crashed down in handfuls, but there was no sign of a cave-in. Mayna went next with Seer, passing without notice, blending with the walls. Gone. Fish followed, then Babe, at his insistence. Hunk and he were the last. Heaving mightily, he lurched upward. He was grateful for his new and powerful body, for without it, he could never have done what was expected of him.

  They broke ground in a pile of rocks just as Corgi had said. Straight ahead a clump of brush and trees loomed darkly. He wondered whether they had transferred the trees as well as the caves, then decided they hadn't. There were many other clumps of growth further out, exactly like this one, and they would not have transferred them all. Possibly, in the old city, this clump of brush and trees had been closer to the outlet. A thousand feet was a terribly long way when the guards were so close. He swiveled his head about, taking Hunk's with it, to look at the wall which was not even two hundred feet away. Once he had reached the trees where the others now waited, the growth would conceal their retreat to the meeting place the Old Man had chosen. This was the only dangerous ground, this open space. Heaving again, he cleared the rocks and began running, his ankles twisting slightly in the loose sand. But he would have made it — would have if some citizen had not been leaving the gate then. The huge portals swung open, and floodlights flashed on to show the traveler the road. The light caught him and Hunk. Plainly. Brightly. Less than half a dozen seconds passed before a stronger light snapped on,
found him. The sand began boiling as near-miss laser beams splashed around him. The shrubs seemed an eternity away.

  The searchlights began fanning the bushes, more than a dozen of then now, picking out darker forms that were Corgi, Babe, the others. Beams lanced in, setting the desert weed on fire. The brush erupted quickly, jumping from a tiny tongue of flame to an impenetrable wall of fire. The others were running from it. He saw Mayna fall on her belly, take aim, and laser out a searchlight. Another. Another still.

  He ran, his tongue lolling from the corner of his mouth much like the tongue of a dog. He dropped onto the sand next to the others and drew his own pistol. Hunk had one clutched in his tentacle. They fired. Now and then he saw a guard slump away from the wall where he had been hiding. The majority of the Romaghins, however, were behind portions of the wall that were too well fortified and were too wary of the lasers to let themselves be injured very easily. Mayna pumped steadily at the lights, every shot counting, every shot making their hiding place a little less brilliantly illuminated. But the wall guards were searching out the source of her beam, trying to fix the exact location. Every shot she fired added to their basis for calculations, helped them vector in on her. A block of guards came through the gate, the front line blasting steadily to cover their advance.

  “Run!” Corgi shouted, following his own advice.

  They leaped from the sand and rounded the wall of flame, momentarily putting a barrier between themselves and the troops. But the Romaghins would soon clear it too. And suddenly they had cleared it. There was a scream. Tohm turned to his right and saw Fish grabbing at the air, his arms stroking as if he were swimming through very thick water. Then he fell, burning, rolled several times, and was still.

  Tohm looked at his watch.

  At first, nothing seemed to focus. Then his vision cleared through sheer willpower. There were still ten minutes until the Old Man arrived. Ten minutes, he realized, as Seer lost his head in a blaze of purple light and crashed to his knees, would be much too late. Much.

  XIV

  They were behind a ridge of sand, firing at the mass of Romaghin guards that had collected in the windblown dunes ahead. It was only a matter of minutes, Tohm knew, until the officers would direct their flanks to spread out and surround the Muties. And worst of all, they were too outnumbered to do anything about it. Far away, the roar of a desert tanker droned steadily forward, closer, louder. When the tanker moved in between the Romaghins and Muties and began lobbing shells, they would be dead to the last. He realized that the guards would not risk their own lives when a deadly and efficient machine like the tanker could kill for them.

  Mayna was crying about Seer and Fish. It was the first time he had seen her cry real tears.

  Corgi was cursing the oncoming artillery.

  Just that suddenly, the thought of artillery reminded him of Jumbo Ten. Somewhere in his brain, a memory was dug out of storage and dusted off. The small communications bulb in his ear! He lifted a finger to the fleshy lobe. The bulb was still there, a little lump in the fat. He pressed it between two fingers, smashed it, activating the chemical broadcasters. Instantly, J-10 would be firing loose of the sands, homing in on the beam. Eight hundred miles at 24,000 miles an hour top speed. That meant it would be there in — he began doing some swift calculations…

  But before he could even decide on a relative arrival time, he heard the roar of the mighty engines, the whine of the air being squeezed out of the way, rent in two like an old, rotten curtain. The retro-rockets fired a hundred miles off, lighting the sky. Then, abruptly, the giant machine was crashing down a hundred yards ahead, blocking his view of most of the Romaghins.

  The tiny, sonic scope twiddled about, hunting his voice which it had recorded on its memory bank tapes.

  “Behind and to the right,” he said. “Kill those soldiers.”

  The Jumbo readjusted its position. The Romaghins, thinking at first that it was their own machine sent somehow, miraculously, to aid them, stood and began running toward it, laughing. Most ceased chuckling and guffawing when their first ranks were gunned down with laser cannon. They turned to run. But cannon beams and gas shells tore up the sand and the men indiscriminately. The armored tanker, seeing the gargantuan robot, wheeled about, tried to retreat. It made a dozen yards before the laser cannon melted it into slag.

  The Muties were cheering. Babe had hold of Tohm's neck and was nearly strangling him with one arm while clubbing him with the cast of the other.

  “Yours?” Corgi shouted.

  “Mine!” He turned to Jumbo Ten which sat with all weapons ready. “At ease.”

  The humming softened.

  “We'll walk before it to where we meet the Old Man. We keep that Jumbo,” Corgi said excitedly. “We may need it before this is all over.”

  “Hey!” Mayna shouted, pointing toward a sled that had drifted in low from the gate. There was a single figure on it. Small. As it came closer, Tohm could see that it was the boy with the white eyes, the albino who wan't an albino.

  “Tohm!” Hunk shouted. “Order the Jumbo to—”

  But then there was no Jumbo.

  There was nothing for Tohm for one split second, then:

  A lightningbolt smashed!

  Another blasted down!

  And yet another!

  And out of the mists of their ozone clouds she came, faceless, moving easily, graceful, slinking…

  But no face…

  And no name…

  He concentrated on her face, on what it should be, on what he knew it must look like…

  Green eyes…

  Green, green, greengreengreen…

  Lips bursting with sweetness: a tiny, pink tongue licking little teeth in show of passion…

  Hissing…

  There was a scream that was not part of it. For a moment the dream cleared and he felt himself gaining control of his body again. Then the dream clamped down tighter than ever:

  A lightningbolt smashed!

  Another blasted down!

  And yet another!

  Hissing…

  He placed his hands upon her breasts, looked into her faceless face…

  Another scream. It was very close this time. In his ear, really. For a moment the world opened up again. The white-eyed boy was kneeling on the ground, the sled upset beside him. Hunk's tentacles were throbbing, wiggling. Hunk was screaming!

  A lightningbolt smashed!

  And another!

  Out of the mists she came…

  He wanted to violate—

  Hunk's screams had been but a prelude to the latest from the boy. It covered all ranges of a scream. It vibrated on every decibel. It was a million-billion screams careening out of the void, smashing upon the rocks of his ears…

  A lightningbolt smashed!

  Naked, she—

  But the dreams were not holding. They receded like the tide, weaker each time, coming in less and less. He wished Hunk would stop screaming.

  A lightning—

  And out of the mist—

  Naked, she turned and—

  And yet anoth—

  The scream of all voices ceased and with it ceased every scrap of nightmare, every vestige of dream. Groggily, he looked about. The others were just coming to their senses too. Half a dozen tanks were rumbling across the sand, moving in under the screen they thought the boy was still putting up.

  “Shell them!” he cried at the Jumbo.

  Raising its barrels and launch tubes, the robot rapid-fired grenades and gas shells into the tankers, puffing them to ashes, smashing down the wall of the city and driving the other guards back into the heart of the capital, away from the walls.

  He felt Hunk's tentacles begin to loosen. For the first time since the boy had attacked, he twisted his head to look at the Mutie. There was blood dribbling from his lips. Tohm dropped to his knees and lifted Hunk off, laid him gently on the ground. The others were gathering around. Hunk's lids were heavy, blotting out half of his eyes. Blood seeped
from his mouth, out both ears. He was pale. He was dying.

  Tohm felt the tears coming now. Fish had been nothing to him. Fish was withdrawn, a loner. It had been a blessing for Seer — this thing called death. But Hunk… He wanted to wade through the rubble of the city and slit the throat of every guard he saw. Rage boiled within him, fired his basest fires. And still he cried; with all the rage at hatred, the tenderness still surged to the surface.

  Blood gurgled in a steadier stream from the lips.

  “Hunk, my God, who was he?”

  “He wasn't the same boy,” Hunk said thickly.

  “Who?”

  “A… Mutie.”

  “But he was working against us!”

  Hunk coughed clots of red, wheezed. “Tohm, can you imagine a Mutie born without a body? No, I'm not delirous. The others will back me up. Born without a body, as a mind, as a pure entity with no flesh shell.”

  “I don't understand.”

  “The White Eyes always look like one another, always the same. He is a living dream maker, a psychedelic drug. He creates his pseudo-flesh, the body that we see, from the raw force of men's desires. Lust is the strongest of man's basic emotions, it seems. So strong in some men that the White Eyes can spin it into a body, take the energy of those thoughts and create a shell of substance. Men once had a drive for food that was their strongest thought pattern, but now no one is hungry. Once it was self-preservation, but that is not so strong anymore. A dead man can often be rebuilt. Death is not always permanent. Once it was family love. But that died long ago in most people as our modern world encouraged love of self. So now it is lust. The White Eyes are tangible lust creatures. When one is born, the men flock to the womb to give him flesh in return for his realistic dreams.”

  He coughed more blood. He closed his eyes and breathed easily for a while. The Jumbo was still shelling the walls. “The boy clothes itself in their desires. But the form is always — always the same.”