“Owner of the Bat Rack, sir. I work there.”
“Bat Rack?”
“A moonbrew mansion. Once called the Happy Torus, I’ve been told. In the Old Days, Wine Mess Three, Doc told me.”
“Hmm. Well, what’s all this mean, gramps? And what’s your name?”
Spar stared miserably at the dark-mottled gray square. “I can’t read, sir. Name’s Spar.”
“Hmm. Seen any… er… supernatural beings in the Bat Rack?”
“Only in my dreams, sir.”
“Mmm. Well, we’ll have a look in. If you recognize me, don’t let on. I’m Ensign Drake, by the way. Who’s your passenger, grandpa?”
“Only my cat, Ensign,” Spar breathed in alarm.
“Well, take the black shaft down.” Spar began to move across the monkey jungle in the direction pointed out by the blue arm-blur.
“And next time remember animals aren’t allowed on the Bridge.”
As Spar traveled below, his warm relief that Ensign Drake had seemed quite human and compassionate was mixed with anxiety as to whether he still had time to visit Doc. He almost missed the shift to the gang-line grinding aft in the dark red main drag. The corpse-light brightening into the false dawn of late afternoon bothered him. Once more he passed the tumbling bent figure, this time croaking, “Trinity, Trellis, Wheat Ear…”
He was fighting down the urge to give up his visit to Doc and pull home to the Bat Rack, when he noticed he had passed the second squeeze and was in Hold Four with the passageway to Doc’s coming up. He dove off, checked himself on a shroud and began the hand-drag to Doc’s office, as far larboard as Crown’s Hole was starboard.
He passed two figures clumsy on the line, their breaths malty in anticipation of Playday. Spar worried that Doc might have closed his office. He smelled soil and greenery again, from the Gardens of Diana.
The hatch was shut, but when Spar pressed the bulb, it unzipped after three honks, and the white-haloed gray-eyed face peered out.
“I’d just about give up on you, Spar.”
“I’m sorry, Doc. I had to—”
“No matter. Come in, come in. Hello, Kim—take a look around if you want.”
Kim crawled out, pushed off from Spar’s chest, and soon was engaged in a typical cat’s tour of inspection.
And there was a great deal to inspect, as even Spar could see. Every shroud in Doc’s office seemed to have objects clipped along its entire length. There were blobs large and small, gleaming and dull, light and dark, translucent and solid. They were silhouetted against a wall of the corpse-light Spar feared, but had no time to think of now. At one end was a band of even brighter light.
“Careful Kim!” Spar called to the cat as he landed against a shroud and began to paw his way from blob to blob.
“He’s all right,” Doc said. “Let’s have a look at you, Spar. Keep your eyes open.”
Doc’s hands held Spar’s head. The gray eyes and leathery face came so close they were one blur.
“Keep them open, I said. Yes, I know you have to blink them, that’s all right. Just as I thought. The lenses are dissolved. You’ve suffered the side-effect which one in ten do who are infected with the Lethean rickettsia.”
“Styx ricks, Doc?”
“That’s right, though the mob’s got hold of the wrong river in the Underworld. But we’ve all had it. We’ve all drunk the water of Lethe. Though sometimes when we grow very old we begin to remember the beginning. Don’t squirm.”
“Hey, Doc, is it because I’ve had the Styx ricks I can’t remember anything back before the Bat Rack?”
“It could be. How long have you been at the Rack?”
“I don’t know, Doc. Forever.”
“Before I found the place, anyhow. When the Rumdum closed here in Four. But that’s only a starth ago.”
“But I’m awful old, Doc. Why don’t I start remembering?”
“You’re not old, Spar. You’re just bald and toothless and etched by moonmist and your muscles have shriveled. Yes, and your mind has shriveled too. Now open your mouth.”
One of Doc’s hands went to the back of Spar’s neck. The other probed. “Your gums are tough, anyhow. That’ll make it easier.”
Spar wanted to tell about the salt water, but when Doc finally took his hand out of Spar’s mouth, it was to say, “Now open wide as you can.”
Doc pushed into his mouth something big as a handbag and hot. “Now bite down hard.”
Spar felt as if he had bitten fire. He tried to open his mouth, but hands on his head and jaw held it closed. Involuntarily he kicked and clawed air. His eyes filled with tears.
“Stop writhing! Breathe through your nose. It’s not that hot. Not hot enough to blister, anyhow.”
Spar doubted that, but after a bit decided it wasn’t quite hot enough to bake his brain through the roof of his mouth. Besides, he didn’t want to show Doc his cowardice. He held still. He blinked several times and the general blur became the blurs of Doc’s face and the cluttered room silhouetted by the corpse—glare. He tried to smile, but his lips were already stretched wider than their muscles could ever have done. That hurt too; he realized now that the heat was abating a little.
Doc was grinning for him. “Well, you would ask an old drunkard to use techniques he’d only read about. To make it up to you, I’ll give you teeth sharp enough to sever shrouds. Kim, please get away from that bag.”
The black blur of the cat was pushing off from a black blur twice his length. Spar mumbled disapprovingly at Kim through his nose and made motions. The larger blur was shaped like Doc’s little bag, but bigger than a hundred of them. It must be massive too, for in reaction to Kim’s push it had bent the shroud to which it was attached and—the point—the shroud was very slow in straightening.
“That bag contains my treasure, Spar,” Doc explained, and when Spar lifted his eyebrows twice to signal another question, went on, “No, not coin and gold and jewels, but a second transfinite infinitude—sleep and dreams and nightmares for every soul in a thousand Windrushes.” He glanced at his wrist. “Time enough now. Open your mouth.” Spar obeyed, though it cost him new pain.
Doc withdrew what Spar had bitten on, wrapped it in gleam, and clipped it to the nearest shroud. Then he looked in Spar’s mouth again.
“I guess I did make it a bit too hot,” he said. He found a small pouch, set it to Spar’s lips, and squeezed it. A mist filled Spar’s mouth and all pain vanished.
Doc tucked the pouch in Spar’s pocket. “If the pain returns, use it again.”
But before Spar could thank Doc, the latter had pressed a tube to his eye. “Look, Spar, what do you see?”
Spar cried out, he couldn’t help it, and jerked his eye away.
“What’s wrong, Spar?”
“Doc you gave me a dream,” Spar said hoarsely. “You won’t tell anyone, will you? And it tickled.”
“What was the dream like?” Doc asked eagerly.
“Just a picture, Doc. The picture of a goat with the tail of a fish. Doc, I saw the fish’s…” His mind groped, “… scales! Everything had… edges! Doc, is that what they mean when they talk about seeing sharply?”
“Of course, Spar. This is good. It means there’s no cerebral or retinal damage. I’ll have no trouble making up field glasses—that is, if there’s nothing seriously wrong with my antique pair. So you still see things sharp-edged in dreams—that’s natural enough. But why were you afraid of me telling?”
“Afraid of being accused of witchcraft, Doc. I thought seeing things like that was clairvoyance. The tube tickled my eye a little.”
“Isotopes and insanity! It’s supposed to tickle. That’s the field. Let’s try the other eye.”
Again Spar wanted to cry out, but he restrained himself, and this time he had no impulse to jerk his eye away, although there was again the faint
tickling. The picture was that of a slim girl. He could tell she was female because of her general shape. But he could see her edges. He could see… details. For instances, her eyes weren’t mist-bounded colored ovals. They had points at both ends, which were china-white… triangles. And the pale violet round between the triangles had a tiny black round at its center.
She had silvery hair, yet she looked young, he thought, though it was hard to judge such matters when you could see edges. She made him think of the platinum-haired girl he’d glimpsed in Crown’s Hole.
She wore a long, gleaming white dress, which left her shoulders bare, but either art or some unknown force had drawn her hair and her dress toward her feet. In her dress it made… folds.
“What’s her name, Doc? Almodie?”
“No. Virgo. The Virgin. You can see her edges?”
“Yes, Doc. Sharp. I get it!—like a knife. And the goat-fish?”
“Capricorn,” Doc answered, removing the tube from Spar’s eye.
“Doc, I know Capricorn and Virgo are the names of lunths, terranths, sunths, and starths, but I never knew they had pictures. I never knew they were anything.”
“You— Of course, you’ve never seen watches, or stars, let alone the constellations of the zodiac.”
Spar was about to ask what all those were, but then he saw that the corpse-light was all gone, although the ribbon of brighter light had grown very wide.
“At least in this stretch of your memory,” Doc added. “I should have your new eyes and teeth ready next Loafday. Come earlier if you can manage. I may see you before that at the Bat Rack, Playday night or earlier.”
“Great, Doc, but now I’ve got to haul. Come on, Kim! Sometimes business heavies up Loafday night, Doc, like it was Playday night come at the wrong end. Jump in, Kim.”
“Sure you can make it back to the Bat Rack all right, Spar? It’ll be dark before you get there.”
“Course I can, Doc.”
But when night fell, like a heavy hood jerked down over his head, halfway down the first passageway, he would have gone back to ask Doc to guide him, except he feared Kim’s contempt, even though the cat still wasn’t talking. He pulled ahead rapidly, though the few running lights hardly let him see the centerline.
The fore gangway was even worse—completely empty and its lights dim and flickering. Seeing by blurs bothered him now that he knew what seeing sharp was like. He was beginning to sweat and shake and cramp from his withdrawal from alcohol and his thoughts were a tumult. He wondered if any of the weird things that had happened since meeting Kim were real or dream. Kim’s refusal—or inability?—to talk any more was disquieting. He began seeing the misty rims of blurs that vanished when he looked straight toward them. He remembered Keeper and the brewos talking about vamps and witches.
Then instead of waiting for the Bat Rack’s green hatch, he dove off into the passageway leading to the aft one. This passageway had no lights at all. Out of it he thought he could hear Hellhound growling, but couldn’t be sure because the big chewer was grinding. He was scrabbling with panic when he entered the Bat Rack through the dark red hatch, remembering barely in time to avoid the new glue.
The place was jumping with light and excitement and dancing figures, and Keeper at once began to shout abuse at him. He dove into the torus and began taking orders and serving automatically, working entirely by touch and voice, because withdrawal now had his vision swimming—a spinning blur of blurs.
After a while that got better, but his nerves got worse. Only the unceasing work kept him going—and shut out Keeper’s abuse—but he was getting too tired to work at all. As Playday dawned, with the crowd around the torus getting thicker all the while, he snatched a pouch of moonmist and set it to his lips.
Claws dug his chest. “Isssiot! Sssot! Ssslave of fffear!”
Spar almost went into convulsions, but put back the moonmist. Kim came out of the slopsuit and pushed off contemptuously, circled the bar and talked to various of the drinkers, soon became a conversation piece. Keeper started to boast about him and quit serving. Spar worked on and on and on through sobriety more nightmarish than any drunk he could recall. And far, far longer.
Suzy came in with a mark and touched Spar’s hand when he served her dark to her. It helped.
He thought he recognized a voice from below. It came from a kinky-haired, slopsuited brewo he didn’t know. But then he heard the man again and thought he was Ensign Drake. There were several brewos he didn’t recognize.
The place started really jumping. Keeper upped the music. Singly or in pairs, somersaulting dancers bounded back and forth between shrouds. Others toed a shroud and shimmied. A girl in black did splits on one. A girl in white dove through the torus. Keeper put it on her boyfriend’s check. Brewos tried to sing.
Spar heard Kim recite:
“Izz a cat.
Killzz a rat.
Greetss each guy.
Thin or ffat.
Saay dolls, hi!”
Playday night fell. The place got hotter. Doc didn’t come. But Crown did. Dancers parted and a whole section of drinkers made way aloft for him and his girls and Hellhound, so that they had a third of the torus to themselves, with no one below in that third either. To Spar’s surprise they all took coffee except the dog, who when asked by Crown, responded, “Bloody Mary,” drawing out the words in such deep tones that they were little more than a low “Bluh—Muh” growl.
“Iss that sspeech, I assk you?” Kim commented from the other side of the torus. Drunks around him choked down chuckles.
Spar served the pouched coffee piping hot with felt holders and mixed Hellhound’s drink in a self-squeezing syringe with sipping tube. He was very groggy and for the moment more afraid for Kim than himself. The face blurs tended to swim, but he could distinguish Rixende by her black hair, Phanette and Doucette by their matching red-blonde hair and oddly red-mottled fair skins, while Almodie was the platinum-haired pale one, yet she looked horribly right between the dark brown, purple-vested blur to one side of her and the blacked, narrower, prick-eared silhouette to the other.
Spar heard Crown whisper to her, “Ask Keeper to show you the talking cat.” The whisper was very low and Spar wouldn’t have heard it except that Crown’s voice had a strange excited vibrancy Spar had never known in it before.
“But won’t they fight then?—I mean Hellhound,” she answered in a voice that sent silvery tendrils around Spar’s heart. He yearned to see her face through Doc’s tube. She would look like Virgo, only more beautiful. Yet, Crown’s girl, she could be no virgin. It was a strange and horrible world. Her eyes were violet. But he was sick of blurs. Almodie sounded very frightened, yet she continued, “Please don’t, Crown.” Spar’s heart was captured.
“But that’s the whole idea, baby. And nobody don’ts us. We thought we’d schooled you to that. We’d teach you another lesson here, except tonight we smell high fuzz—lots of it, Keeper!—our new lady wishes to hear your cat talk. Bring it over.”
“I really don’t…” Almodie began and went no further.
Kim came floating across the torus while Keeper was shouting in the opposite direction. The cat checked himself against a slender shroud and looked straight at Crown. “Yesss?”
“Keeper, shut that junk off.” The music died abruptly. Voices rose, then died abruptly too. “Well, cat, talk.”
“Shshall ssing insstead,” Kim announced and began an eerie caterwauling that had a pattern but was not Spar’s idea of music.
“It’s an abstraction,” Almodie breathed delightedly. “Listen, Crown, that was a diminished seventh.”
“A demented third, I’d say,” Phanette commented from the other side.
Crown signed them to be quiet.
Kim finished with a high trill. He slowly looked around at his baffled audience and then began to groom his shoulder.
Crown
gripped a ridge of the torus with his left hand and said evenly, “Since you will not talk to us, will you talk to our dog?”
Kim stared at Hellhound sucking his Bloody Mary. His eyes widened, their pupils slitted, his lips writhed back from needle-like fangs.
He hissed, “Schschweinhund!”
Hellhound launched himself, hind paws against the palm of Crown’s left hand, which threw him forward toward the left, where Kim was dodging. But the cat switched directions, rebounding hindwards from the next shroud. The dog’s white-jagged jaws snapped sideways a foot from their mark as his great-chested black body hurtled past.
Hellhound landed with four paws in the middle of a fat drunk, who puffed out his wind barely before his swallow, but the dog took off instantly on reverse course. Kim bounced back and forth between shrouds. This time hair flew when jaws snapped, but also a rigidly spread paw slashed.
Crown grabbed Hellhound by his studded collar, restraining him from another dive. He touched the dog below the eye and smelled his fingers. “That’ll be enough, boy,” he said. “Can’t go around killing musical geniuses.” His hand dropped from his nose to below the torus and came up loosely fisted. “Well, cat, you’ve talked with our dog. Have you a word for us?”
“Yesss!” Kim drifted to the shroud nearest Crown’s face. Spar pushed off to grab him back, while Almodie gazed at Crown’s fist and edged a hand toward it.
Kim loudly hissed, “Hellzzz ssspawn! Fffiend!”
Both Spar and Almodie were too late. From between two of Crown’s fisted fingers a needle-stream jetted and struck Kim in the open mouth.
After what seemed to Spar a long time, his hand interrupted the stream. Its back burned acutely.
Kim seemed to collapse into himself, then launched himself away from Crown, toward the dark, open-jawed.
Crown said, “That’s mace, an antique weapon like Greek fire, but well-known to our folk. The perfect answer to a witch cat.”
Spar sprang at Crown, grappled his chest, tried to butt his jaw. They moved away from the torus at half the speed with which Spar had sprung.
Crown got his head aside. Spar closed his gums on Crown’s throat. There was a snick. Spar felt wind on his bare back. Then a cold triangle pressed his flesh over his kidneys. Spar opened his jaws and floated limp. Crown chuckled.
Ill Met in Lankhmar and Ship of Shadows Page 11