by James Kahn
Josh found himself silently agreeing with the Centaur. Isis hissed softly. Lon puffed meditatively on his pipe. Jasmine waited a moment, until she was certain Beauty had nothing further to say, then answered him. “You’re letting Venge-right cloud your judgment, both of you. Three times over. First, you have no idea how many creatures will be escorting the hostages—it may be an army. I suspect you’ll need as many allies as you can find. Second, I’m your equal or better in a fight any day of the week, and Lon can vouch for that. What’s more, I’ll bet that little Cat there can hold her own or more.” Isis growled approval. Josh liked the Neuroman’s spunk, at least. Lon smiled. Jasmine stood up. “Third, I’m the only one among you who knows Dundee’s Terrarium well enough to track and second-guess Bal, if he gets that far.” She pointed at Beauty, scolding. “That’s why you should want me to go,” she repeated, “but by Neptune’s Middle Fin, that’s not why I’m going. I’m going because this boy saved my life, and I always repay my debts, and I always define the terms.” She picked a glass of wine off the table and downed it hard.
“Her words have merit,” said Josh.
“Words,” scowled Beauty. Then, resigned, to the Neuroman woman: “I cannot stop you. Still, I do not like it.”
“You mistrust words?” Jasmine asked him, her manner softer now.
“Words are a sorry attempt to describe what is.”
“Words can approximate the truth,” she replied. “You cannot convince me with words of something I know to be false by experience or feeling.”
“Words are their own truth,” asserted Joshua. Normally this was a topic he and Beauty avoided discussing; but they were all a little heady from the liquor and the moment: sentiments were bubbling up like steam in a simmering kettle.
“Words just reflect the truths of their times and their places,” said Jasmine, warming to the subject. “For example …” She paced before the fireplace, a bright burgundy wine in her hand. “For example. When I was still young, in the late years of the twentieth century, people rarely used verbs anymore, except in the present tense. The past was so depressing, and the future so frightening, that only the Now had any power to instruct or inspire. Not that it was all that instructive or inspirational, frankly, but you see, we had no truck with pasts or futures, so it became chic to discard all grammars but the present indicative. So we said, ‘I eat,’ and that had to do, since nobody cared if you had eaten, or were going to eat. The words were just reflections, though. Of the way things were. Does that make sense?”
Beauty’s expression looked as much like a wall as an expression could. “I hope you do not talk so much when you hunt,” he said.
Jasmine paused, smiled. “That reminds me of a story,” she began. “I was walking with a Captain of Clones, some hundred and fifty years ago, stalking a renegade Hedon in the jungle south of the Line. Well, I just talked and talked about this and that, and after a while, the Hedon jumped out of the trees at us, swinging his machete. I got him, though, dropped him at the Captain’s feet.
“Well, the Clone Captain was a little peeved, just like you. ‘You always talk so much when you hunt?’ he said. I just smiled, though. If I hadn’t been making so much noise, that Hedon never would have found us, and we might not have caught him. So you see, it’s all a question of definition—whether you think of yourself as hunter or hunted, and how you make use of that. And that gets us back to words again, doesn’t it?”
Beauty stared at her as if she’d come from another planet. He had never wanted a hunting partner less. She’d been kind and helpful, true—but so much chatter turned his stomach. It made him positively disharmonious, tilted his equanimity. Once more, he measured his words: “I hope you do not talk so much when you hunt.”
There was a second of silence, punctuated by an eruption of laughter so loud that the Flutterby woke up. Lon raised his glass. “To the hunt,” he said.
“To the hunt!” they all toasted, and a cheer went up. Soon, everyone was talking at once, and even Beauty relented to the mood. Toasts were answered with vows, the music resumed, the dancers whirled in every corner. Humbelly fluttered until she fell asleep again. Even Isis got up on her hind legs to do a rowdy jig-Josh was so sated, he was moved to sing a song, which he seldom did in the company of strangers. So he bade the musicians follow him as he sang out, in a lovely, clear voice:
“The hunter, he did cross the plain, and then he ventured home again, the merry merry feast will soon begin, among the leaves so green-o.”
At which point Beauty joined in with his gravelly baritone, in various harmony:
“Well it’s hey down down, ho down down, hey down ho down derry derry down, among the leaves so green-o.”
Followed by more cheers, more music. More drink, talk, play. Stories, gloriously told, of battles heroically fought, of journeys unconditionally traveled, of mortal trials tried.
Until finally, some time later, Lon stood and said he would be going to sleep. He showed the guests to their sleeping quarters—a lush, private room for each—telling them it would be his honor if each of them would take to bed a chosen favorite from the harem. Josh and Beauty politely refused; Lon intimated that he understood, though Josh suspected the Vampire felt hurt, if not insulted by the rebuff. Jasmine selected the beautiful young servant boy with all the jewelry, picked him up easily in her arms; carried him off into her bedroom.
Lon had a special surprise for Isis: a champion Persian with long violet fur. The two cats eyed each other, sidled up next to each other. “Mnnnnnn,” said Isis, as the Persian followed her hotly up a dark corridor into a seldom-used section of the cave.
Humbelly woke up long enough to flutter a bit nearer the glowing coals; and finally, the whole household was asleep.
At sunrise they convened in the library: walls engorged with books, ceiling to floor; Josh had never seen such. He stared in profound wonder at the stacks of antique volumes, folio editions, gold-leaf bindings. “You can read,” he whispered to Lon as if it were a shared secret. Lon only laughed.
Josh considered carefully, then with great ceremony asked Lon if it would be possible for him to leave his scriptures—including those he’d written the previous night, before falling asleep—leave them with Lon, for safekeeping, here in the company of all these other books. “They could share thoughts with each other when no one else was reading them,” Josh added.
Lon was touched. He accepted Joshua’s treasure with high moment, saying he would be honored to harbor the writings with his own coveted texts. Gently, he placed Joshua’s records on the shelf; when the manuscripts were finally nestled, he took Josh by the arm and said, “There is something I would show you.” He led Josh to a hidden door, then through it to a hidden room. Once inside, Joshua momentarily had to hold his breath: all manner of surpassing things were here.
“My museum,” said Lon.
Josh walked from shelf to shelf, intuitively and completely silent. Strange artifacts sat in delicate display, mysterious machines from another time. Colored glass beakers, some connected by elaborate coils, filled one whole wall. A small collection of crumbling, ancient books was propped on the end cubicle. Josh read the titles: all contained the word Alchemy.
Another section of the room was devoted to various dried herbs, animal parts, and raw gemstones. Timidly Josh walked up and down aisles of curious devices. All were labeled: Slide Projector, Television, Film Projector, Audio Cassettes, Video Cassettes, Holographic Laser Projector, Tape Recorder, Lava-Lite, Cloud Chamber, Van de Graaf Generator, Jacob’s Ladder, Crystal Ball, Alpha Wave Stimulator, Cardiac Pacemaker, Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus, Electroencephalograph, Radio, Microwave Oven, Nutty Putty, Operator-Gene Ligase Control-Pak, Refractive Index Distortion Panel, Hyperbaric Gestation Modulator, Magic Wand, Geiger Counter, Bubble Gum, Magic Eight Ball, Hypno-Lite; the shelves were endless, the articles on them potent with silence.
“The magic of times past lives here; antiques of sorcery from every age,” Lon spoke from
the doorway. “And though museum it is, every item here is in working order—oh, the moving parts must be hand-turned, now; electricity is such a rare luxury—but the magic contained in these potions and contraptions is still strong. You can feel it when you walk in the room.”
Indeed, Josh had been aware of this power from the moment he’d stepped in. He felt as if he were still holding his breath.
“I’ve never shown this room to anyone before,” Lon went on. “It is my special gift to you. In this way we share the magic, as our books share thoughts with each other.”
Josh was overwhelmed with the magnanimity of the gift, the magnificence of the room. He said, simply, “I’d like to see it again, someday.”
Lon smiled. “So you shall,” he said, and led Josh back into the library.
When all at last assembled, fond adieus were bid, along with stern admonitions.
“Go east first,” said Lon. “That is safest. Don’t turn south until Mirror Lake. From there you must rely on your hunter’s sense only.”
“We’ll be fine, Lon,” answered Jasmine. “You also take care.”
The noble Vampire took a burnished brass-handled épée off the wall and handed it to his old friend. “This blade has tasted the blood of many foes. May it never hunger in your hands.”
She took the épée from its scabbard, lovingly examined it, replaced it in its sheath, strapped it to her waist. “I’ll use it well on this hunt, dear friend.” They hugged long and silently.
To the others, each, he gave a tiny gold locket, shaped like a blood-drop. Josh strapped his to his belt; Beauty tied his in his mane; Isis wore hers tightly at the neck. “These you must keep with you always,” said Lon solemnly. “If ever you need my help, send this locket back, and I will come. Or show it to my friends wherever they be, and they will aid you.” He hugged them all briefly. “Enough,” he said. His eyes were moist.
Finally he escorted them to another hidden entrance, deep in the golden morning of the forest, where they emerged through a bark-peeling door in the trunk of a massive eucalyptus tree. The Vampire watched them disappear quietly among the green shadows. “Go in good blood,” he said, and returned to his cave.
CHAPTER 6: In Which The Hunt Heats Up
THEY walked in silence as the wood thinned and then thickened again, while morning doves sang of love in the leaves. Every degree the sun rose through the trees, it burned off another minute, another dewdrop. Squirrels chattered, frogs belched. The forest was manifest.
The travelers walked single file along a narrow game path that meandered east toward Mirror Lake. Beauty led the way, Jasmine behind him. Josh brought up the rear. Isis darted back and forth between Josh and Jasmine, stopping suddenly, getting tangled in one’s legs, then running slyly back to the other. Hum-belly, who found six thousand distractions in the spring-born flowers, was rarely seen—though not rarely enough for Isis, who took a flamboyant swing at the Flutterby whenever the opportunity presented itself.
Joshua had time to study Jasmine’s backside at length. Smooth, perfectly formed muscles contoured her legs, from her feet—which were bare—up to her mid-thighs. Across her back was thrown a mid-length cape, mottled green and brown, over which her orange-red hair streaked like lava from her head.
She piqued Joshua’s curiosity. She implied a great deal merely with her body—the way she carried herself, with a cool physical presence that intimated there were things about her which could not be seen, or perhaps even known. Then, of course, there were the myths about Neuromans; the legends: they were immortal, some said; devils, others would swear; they had powers, secrets, resources.
Josh had never, to his knowledge, met one before. He certainly hadn’t expected anything like Jasmine.
After an hour walking in her footsteps, after much internal debate, after titillation finally outstretched intimidation, Josh walked up closer to her and said, “Are you really two hundred fifty years old?”
She turned her head briefly over her shoulder, smiled, then kept walking, maintaining Beauty’s steady pace. “Nearer three hundred,” she said. “Born in nineteen hundred and eighty-six A.D., a year of great changes, great change. Know what happened that year?”
Josh shook his head. “Don’t know much but tall tales and campfire stories about anything before the Coming of the Ice.”
“The Coming of Ice, now wasn’t that a time. Right after the Great Quake, summer of 2191,” she reminisced. “Some people predicted that, you know, but then people were predicting lots of things that never happened, so who knows. Anyway, 1986 was the big nuclear power plant disaster back east, killed over a million people. I don’t remember it personally, of course, I was just born then, but people talked about it with tears in their eyes long into the next generation. Some antinuclear terrorists just took control of the facility at Oceanspring and threatened to blow it up. So the government sent in its antiterrorist force, and the place blew up anyway. Million people died. Neptune’s Middle Fin, if that wasn’t the end of nuclear plants, no doubt about it.”
Beauty threw half a glance behind him: he thought he’d made it perfectly clear he did not approve of conversation while hunting. In addition, his sense of propriety was at least mildly upset by the epithet Jasmine had used—a vaguely derogatory, crudely sexual allusion to a mythical part of Neptune’s anatomy. Not that he believed in Neptune; but neither did he believe in impropriety. The others didn’t notice his glare, though, so he simply picked up his stride. The path was becoming overgrown with vines and mulch, as if it were less frequently trod in this area; but the Centaur forged on.
“What’s a nuclear plant?” asked Joshua. He’d heard the word, he thought, but wasn’t sure. Somehow, he had the impression a nuclear plant had no leaves and no roots and was shaped like a poison mushroom.
“Ever hear of uranium?” Jasmine asked as they stumbled over a clatter of dead branches.
“Geranium?” answered Josh. A wild flower, then; not at all like a mushroom.
“Never mind,” laughed Jasmine. “It’s just as well. If no one ever finds out about nuclear energy again, it’s probably just as well. Kind of sad, though, to think of all the history that’s been lost.” Jasmine had spent the last fifty years of her life alone, more or less—in endless exploration of this adventurous new world—consciously alone, wonderfully alone. She’d had enough of people during her first two hundred fifty years to last her many lifetimes.
But lately, just lately, she’d begun to get lonely. So it was with considerable zest and feeling that she’d decided to string along with Josh and Beauty. She liked them, she felt she could talk to them of all the things that mattered—felt, in fact, now that she’d begun, absolutely compelled to talk, for whatever cathartic reasons.
But now as she started to ramble, she was overcome with a certain melancholy. It was a sense of loss, more than anything—of all the things she’d known in her life that would never again be; things no one would ever again know, that she could never fully explain, however much she wanted to, however much they wanted to hear.
She went on to Josh, “There’s so much you can’t understand—how different it was … before. You have this muddy notion. From fragments of old books that still exist; from legends made of half-truths that squeezed through all the apocalyptic changes of the twenty-second century; from the fantasies and lies of wandering storytellers who heard it from others who never lived through it, who never even knew anyone who lived through it. Fragments is all you have. Very few of us are left anymore who knew it then as it really was.”
Josh heard the remorse in her voice. What an odd creature she was—all clever and sad and mysterious.
And how much she seemed to know. He could learn from her, he was certain. He felt about her almost the way he felt when coming across an old book—expectant, ravenous for the knowledge he would gain, wonderfully scared at the naiveté he would lose. And here she was before him, a living book. He wondered if all books shared the sadness he felt in Jasmine.
Yes, she liked these people. She could see even Beauty was listening intently to her, though he of course maintained his silence, to set a good example. “Nuclear plants,” she continued, “were a way to make energy using a powerful poison. And it was a good way to make energy, but the poison was too strong for us to contain. It exploded all over us, it leaked out of the waste cans it was stored in, it made everyone paranoid and power-mad.” She paused a moment. “In fact, I thought I wanted to talk about it, but now I’ve started, I’d rather talk about something else.”
She talked about her hometown in 1986: the boy she loved when she was eleven; the way the air felt just before a tornado; the way the jasmine smelled in her bedroom as it bloomed on summer evenings. That was why she’d taken the name she’d kept all these years, because of that perfumed memory. She talked herself out just short of a burbling swamp directly in their path. Beauty veered right to avoid the decay. Jasmine held back a breath—she sensed left was a better direction.
Before she could voice her hesitation, though, three creatures leapt out of the brush, smelling of death. Accidents. One had horrible rows of teeth; one had an insect sort of tube for a mouth; one had no face at all, just a thick fleshy head, blind and neckless. Foul, angry creatures.
Jasmine had her sword out in an instant, and before Beauty even turned, the Neuroman had decapitated the first grizzly Accident with a single sweep of her blade.
Isis sprang high at the second attacker, sinking her claws deep into the thing’s eyes. It screamed and reeled backward, bringing its huge hands up to its face. The little Cat clung to the Accident’s shoulder, though, gashing at its neck with tooth and claw, until she struck jugular; and jumped to the ground.
Josh was caught a mighty blow on the back by the Faceless One, and fell forward into the heavy brush. The creature quickly closed for the kill, but Josh turned and thrust his knife into the eyeless meaty head: the Accident fell hard and still beside him.