“I’ll call him.”
“He left his phone. Don’t worry, he’ll calm down...he just needs to get away from all the screaming.”
“So do I,” said Sophi. Now one of the two police detectives approached, having slipped away from the blast furnace of Mrs. Horowitz’s anguish to find out what the latest developments were, and why Mitch had stormed out.
“Remind me never to marry a Jew,” he said confidentially, smirking around the cigarette he was lighting. “She isn’t gonna lose her daughter without some kind of reimbursement in money to make it worth something.”
Del Kahn sighed irritably. He was primarily Jewish himself. Why shouldn’t a bereaved parent want to lash out at something tangible? He would have wanted to own the carnival too. But then, only so he could burn it down.
Sophi called into town. It took twenty minutes to get hold of someone in authority. Her request to shut down the annual Paxton Fair early was denied.
At the edge of the grounds was a large building especially constructed for the fair, two stories high, which museum-like exhibited most of the entries in the various agricultural, craft, and art contests which had taken place throughout the season. There was a stage outside where some of the exposition and judging had taken place, and a few days ago a mind-reader/hypnotist (a telepath somewhat more gifted than Sneezy Tightrope) had entertained there, calling up members of a large audience seated on benches. At present the stage was a barren wharf, a few teenagers sitting on its edge or far under it, smoking and drinking quietly.
Inside, the mood was similar, if brighter. On the second floor Hector Tomas found much to engage his interest, but there were only two couples with him in this single, immense, barn-like room. Near the stairs where he had first come up were the framed, hanging prize-winners in the various art and photography contests. A fraction of it was impressive, most was pedestrian, several deserved ribbons but the prize-winning status of some of the artwork was incomprehensible to him. It wasn’t a matter of style–he had very eclectic taste in art–but of talent, skill. All the people in Punktown and this was the best they could offer? Either not many people were to be bothered creating art these days, or else the deep Punktowners kept to their own galleries and had left this contest, less sophisticated, less chic, to the outer dwellers.
Much of the photography was so good as to be professional, but aside from composition and subject the technology took care of that. What most compelled him were the quaint displays of knitted sweaters, wood projects, floral arrangements, other crafts spread on nearby tables. A lot of the wood pieces were lovely and he would have liked to purchase them. There were tables spread with plastic-covered prize-winning pies and pastries, bread and various dishes. A tall bookshelf-like rack held a great many canned and pickled goods in pretty colors; red, pink, purple, amber, green, luminous with the gelatinous translucency of whatever it was inside them. This floor made him feel peaceful, gratified, as had the floor below with its agricultural displays: flowers, vegetables, fruits, plants. The care, the dedication. Who were the people who took the time to do these things? He didn’t know them. Even the poor art was done with pride and love. Was it where they lived–on the periphery of the vast city–that inspired this patient dedication, or simply that in the deep of town there were too many stressful, loud distractions for him to notice this kind of thing? Both, probably. But he thought, seriously, that maybe the best thing for him now would be to move out this way. What must it have been like once, when these items were more commonplace, more utilized, than novel or decorative as they chiefly were now? He would have liked to have lived amongst the pre-colonial Chooms, he fantasized. That was a nearer daydream than Earth’s ancient, similarly quaint and homey times.
Did the woman who made this prize-winning pie cheat on her husband, or snort gold-dust, or dress in leather and whip her nameless lovers? Did the man who made this bench molest his own daughter? Were these real expressions? Could he dare trust the hope they seemed to symbolize to him…of passions which didn’t involve greed and lust and avarice?
By the time he decided to descend back to the room below, the second floor was empty but for him and a seated woman reading a magazine who was no doubt meant as a guardian lest someone steal a prize-winning cookie.
Previously below he had marveled at sunflowers from Earth, never having seen them before–taller than he was, with maned heads like lions. Children had painted or carved jack-o-lanterns out of pumpkins and native gourds, displayed on one table. Another held hideously warped and deformed gourds, like cancerous organs ripped out of giants for exhibition, in an ugly gourd contest. Fortunately, he reflected, this fair hadn’t tolerated a contest to create the most hideous, mutated version of a rabbit, pig, cow or other such domestic animal as he had seen as a teenager at several other fairs. The person who could create the most absurdly grotesque creature which could remain alive without artificial life support would win, so long as the “artist” worked within certain nonprofessional technological limits.
Again, questions stirred in Hector’s mind as he once more scanned the spread fruits and vegetables, potted plants and flowers, relishing the near empty quiet of this place. The work. The dedication. So important to these people, so meaningless to others. But then, even the greatest art, the greatest books, might be burned by some just to have something to toast wieners over to go with their beers. People would never agree on what was of value. And wasn’t the growing of vegetables just as primal and mindless an instinct as the desire to do drugs, copulate and spin in a loud colorful machine? It was just a matter of quiet animals and wild playful animals, Hector thought. Animals. We are just that. He thought of the Bedbugs...and of their huge, horrifying stockyard...
Turning, he gasped out loud against his will. A bizarre coincidence, or had that thought been a weird premonition? Through the dangling vegetation of hanging potted plants, luckily shielding him, he saw them. There were three of them. One had the strange device he had decided was a camera, and was no doubt the same being he had watched photographing the mysterious insectoid leg. They were standing around a row of cages on a low table, each containing several birds of a kind that Hector had never seen before. Apparently they laid small but delectable eggs, yet that hadn’t stirred his memory either. The birds had just flown into a crazed uproar, fluttering in their cages like moths in a spider web, honking frantically. Hector remembered them as being a little smaller than chickens, gray with iridescent wings, pigeon-like in that regard, but with tapir-like snouts rather than hard beaks. As he watched, the Bedbugs began to buzz and chatter in an odd clicking code to each other.
Hector had come here aimlessly, but wondered now vaguely if maybe some other instinct had guided him. Some submerged, half-formed knowledge...or linkage.
The three black, beetle-like entities moved on, briefly examined the display of mutant gourds, luxuriantly ghastly. The odd birds, however, showed no sign of calming down yet. One of the Bedbugs turned to look back at them, causing Hector to flinch and attempt to appear inconspicuous as its gaze swept across him. After some more clicks and buzzing the three beings made their way toward the exit. It was obvious to Hector that they didn’t care to draw attention to themselves.
Why did he feel this strange need to follow after them–almost a desperate tugging? He started out from his shelter of leaves, but his eyes were drawn to a man he had barely acknowledged before–small, pot-bellied, dressed in a tropical shirt and white shorts, with a high balding sunburnt forehead. The man had also started a few steps after the Bedbugs as they left the building, coming out from where he had been standing previously behind the towering sunflowers, his shirt like camouflage...but now he stopped in his tracks dazedly, open-mouthed. Staring out of the building. Hector was oddly perplexed by him, but would have moved swiftly past him out of the exhibition hall (and where then?) had the man not suddenly collapsed limply. Hector found himself surging to him, crouching by him. An old Choom woman nearby glanced over sourly and clucked her to
ngue. The tapir-nosed birds still honked and fluttered behind Hector.
He saw thick, almost blackish blood running out of the man’s nostrils, into his mouth. His temples throbbed visibly–alarmingly. The man’s eyes rolled up to meet Hector’s eyes, and a hand grasped Hector’s wrist. Hector glanced longingly after the Bedbugs but they were already gone. Had they glimpsed him, had that been it after all, not the noisy birds? Had they seen his Theta researcher’s black jacket and recognized it as such?
The man was mumbling, squeezing more urgently for Hector’s attention. Hector said to the old woman, “Could you call for an ambulance, please? There’s a medical trailer here...”
“I know that, I work here.” The old woman waddled toward the open door, clucking her cow-sized Choom tongue again.
“What is it? Louder,” Hector urged the fallen man.
“Gatherers...the Gatherers...they’re coming,” the man croaked, trembling violently, feverish. His eyes blazed, insane.
But a violent tremor went through Hector as well, almost a thrill of recognition...though a nightmarish thrill. A thrill of unreality. The Gatherers. They in the dimension that was nothing more than a stockyard had spoken–wailed, in terror–about something called Gatherers. They couldn’t explain what the Gatherers were...and it had simply been assumed by the researchers that this referred to those particular Bedbugs who were assigned the task of stocking the astral pen, though to Hector’s knowledge no one knew how they accomplished it.
“They bring us here!” the man on the floor rasped in a deeper tone. Then, his voice altering again:
“They reach into our world!”
“They’re coming...Gatherers...the one on the moon is just a nymph!”
Hector was filled with loathing and horror now–he wanted to tear free of this man and run. Run for his sanity. It seemed that several different minds were alternating in voicing themselves through this unwilling medium. Voices so familiar in their fear and desperation.
But he remained, and asked the man, “What are the Gatherers?”
“The Bugs call them…” The voice seemed to be the man’s own now, but no less frantic. “…they call them. They were on the moon before, to call them. Three are coming through tonight. The nymph on the moon–it’s through. The bank…the bank…”
“My God,” Hector said, lifting his head.
“The Gatherers collect the harvest. They reach into our world and take what they can, but tonight three are coming through to take more. They want more. The Bugs…worship them. They pay them tribute. Then the Gatherers collect the harvest for them…”
“The leg,” Hector said.
“We have to stop them! We have to stop…they’re taking away the dead…”
“Listen to me…listen…”
“Vortex! Oh my God, don’t you see now? I see it now! Oh…my God…and I’ve snorted it! I never knew! I don’t think Karny even knows…”
“What do you mean?” Hector recognized the man at last. His aspect had been different before, but he’d seen him with the group from whom he had purchased his drugs. Purple vortex. It had entered his mind upon seeing a Martian inside the van.
“We don’t get vortex from the Bugs…we get it from the Lobu. Everyone thinks the Lobu make it, but Karny found out. Karny found out. The Lobu get one of the main ingredients from the Bedbugs. No one knows. It’s their farts.” Now the man laughed crazily, tears streaming out of his eyes, blood running down both sides of his face into his ears. “They fart purple gas. The Bugs. That’s what the Lobu buy and put in the vortex. That’s what it is…”
“Jesus,” hissed Hector. Not laughing. He looked out of the building again, as if to locate them out there somewhere. The leg. The smoking, camera-like device. The one on The Head. Just a nymph…
“They fart out the gas. The gas is from them…their harvest...after they eat it. And we sell it.” The man blubbered, hysterical. “We’ve snorted it. And we never knew what they were eating…”
At least that much Hector had already known.
The hand crushed his arm in a convulsive return of strength. The man sat up a little as if jolted. “Don’t let me die! Don’t let me die–please! They’ll take me…they’ll take me! We gotta stop them! Hurry–hurry! Go tell somebody! Don’t let me die–please! Pleeeease!”
He screamed, arched his back as if a greater voltage now jolted him, and shook. Hector fell onto his back in wrenching his arm free. The shriek rose to an inhuman pitch. The birds smashed in their cells, down puffing up into the air, straw kicked out by their electrified feet. Hector stood up in time to see Sneezy Tightrope die. His skull did its best to resist the inner explosion but his head cracked open a little in a few places nonetheless. The shriek gurgled away, the shaking took a little longer as the body gradually relaxed from its rigid arched position, sinking down like a parachute to settle. The thick blood pouring from the fissures was almost a peaceful thing–like a release.
A release?
A cage toppled off of the bench-like table, and as Hector scrambled to his feet he glanced over. The sight inside the cage transfixed him. He had to go and look closer, and at the other cages…even as his flesh crawled.
In various states of progression, each bird was painfully splitting, dividing, amoeba-like, into a new bird. Tangled wings and legs, agonized heads thrashing, honking.
Hector fled the building.
Bern had no idea how old the Lobu female was–they could naturally live to be a thousand or more on their home world, and even on polluted, violent Oasis they could easily reach five hundred. He didn’t know much about them; their politics, their religions, their art or architecture. He did know, however, from a friend at school, that their kind had three distinct sexes, two being “male,” so that accidental pregnancy was less likely to occur, since the female must copulate with both males, one sort always before the other, within a few hours in order to become fertilized. Thus, they had been free for many generations to enjoy their sexuality without fear or restraint or inhibition. Only generally known to the Earth colonies for a decade, they had already become highly desirable sex partners. They were well known, also, for their use of drugs. Their long life spans made it less pressing to raise children, and these were taken care of in boarding schools, largely segregated from the adult world, until they reached sexual maturity at the surprisingly early age of five. Theirs was a hedonistic, almost utopian life-style, without sexual repression, discrimination or fear, and thus they had few wars, their religions non-patriarchal despite the two-to-one ratio of “males.” But they did, sometimes, become bored and discontented in their later years. Some branched to other worlds to combat this now that space travel had been introduced to them–not invented by them, due to a certain stagnation in technology. Others committed suicide…not uncommonly.
Bern didn’t know much of all this, though he did draw comparisons with the Wedling Way, a similar belief system–religion?–practiced by certain humanoids and even Earth humans in which each member, or wedling, could have ten wedlings for mates, and each of them ten wedlings, and so on. Many wedlings were bisexual. Again, in the Wedling Way the members lived extra-long lives, though through artificial means, which in the Earth colonies was illegal to such an extent, as was cloning, but it was allowed here as an essential of a specific belief system. At a thousand, though, the wedlings by their own laws were required to halt all artificial means of prolongation and live out the remainder of their lives naturally. Bern did idly wonder if many, many years ago the Lobu had passed a variation of their belief system on to a humanoid group who came into contact with some of them, perhaps captured as sex slaves.
It was a highly desirable thing to be accepted into the web of the Wedling Way–Bern knew of a few famous actresses and singers who had been allowed into this lucky following. He had fantasized about it. Tales of wedlings committing suicide or breaking off from the order hadn’t reached him and wouldn’t have altered his fantasy. He had also fantasized about the Lobu females.
One thing he did know, the one thing he had seized upon, was that they had two equally inviting vaginal openings, with a strange set of four mandible-like digits outside which they could insert into corresponding vents in the groins of their males so as to stimulate them. His friend had told of the expert use of these digits in the fondling and manipulation of the human scrotum and anus.
The Lobu female seated a few tables over from him was alone, delicately spooning herself ice cream, and casting glances at him, suppressing a smile (a stiff expression adopted from humans). She was taller than he, slender and hairless, her polished flesh a softly mottled green and orange, looking like pliable agate. Her very humanoid face was lovely and large-eyed, without a nose, the only unpleasant feature for Bern being the two large ear holes. She wore only a diaper-like piece to hide her middle area, her chest flat and without nipples but with two pink gill-like openings on either side which resourceful humanoid males had also discovered to be gratifying areas for penetration.
Funny she should be alone, but judging from that and from her subtle yet still obvious flirtation Bern decided she must be a prostitute.
She was nearly finished eating, and he was concerned that she would leave if he didn’t act soon. He couldn’t expect her to take the role of aggressor–a much sought after Lobu wouldn’t have to, so wouldn’t be likely to. And the longer he hesitated the greater the chances of someone else seizing the opportunity. But could he afford her? His friend had said that they didn’t come cheap. He had his gold-dust now, though, he reasoned…if she had one of those tube-things his friend had said they inserted in their chest gills to inhale it.
Why be intimidated by this gem? He wasn’t shy, and his beers also made him bold. She wouldn’t be making eyes at him with those glossy pink-irised orbs if she thought him beneath her. He rushed down the last of his beer, mostly foamy backwash. His friend had said their skins were cool like forest-shaded stone, and that they had no offensive body odors–rather, a pleasant natural exhalation from their gills reminiscent of the warm cozy smell of hot apple cider. Bern was smiling as he rose from his table and started around it toward hers. The beer went to his head as he stood, so he kept one hand to the table for support. Her eyes were on him with a look of sweet, mild surprise…feigned innocence. Yes, he was going to get lucky tonight after all. Very lucky. From an extremely negative alien encounter to this…it had been worth it, and Pox’s lateness…
Everybody Scream! Page 27