by V. B. Larson
Mai Lee appeared to be enjoying herself. “Ah, how strange are these coincidences of fate that change the faces of power.”
Feeling the first pang of real worry, Zimmerman leaned toward the phone, pressing his flabby side against the cool lip of his tub. “What’s happened?”
Mai Lee’s eyes ceased wandering and focused back on his face, her black-eyed gaze hardening. “The new Governor has just arrived on the Gladius. He will be claiming your title shortly, I suggest you prepare a reception for him.”
“What!” cried the Governor, horror-struck. He sunk back into the warm waters, eyes bulging like a heart-attack victim. “But it’s only been eight years! How could this happen? What will I do?”
“It was bound to, sooner or later. The Cluster people aren’t total idiots, you know,” said Mai Lee with an off-handed gesture.
“What are we going to do?”
“I’ll do what I can, and you do what you can. That means get your heavily-invested crowd of uncles and aunts to back you and slow down any kind of action in the Senate, in case he announces before we can move.”
“But what will you do?”
Here Mai Lee grinned and showed all her ancient teeth-unnaturally preserved enamel that should have rotted out of her head one hundred and eighty years ago. Somehow that grin shined through all the make-up and the operations, showing her true, fantastic age. She leered at him, a skeleton clothed in flesh that hung on her bones like limp putty. “I’ll do what I do best. I’ll kill him.”
After the connection cut off, Zimmerman was left to stew in his warm gurgling bath. He swam to the far side of his bath and looked out over the edge of the Stardrop Cliffs. Fluffy clouds scudded along far below him, brushing up against the great rock walls. Ten thousand feet down, air-swimmers wheeled over an endless stretch of white sand and black rocks. The sea pounded against the cliffs with huge waves churned up by the powerful gravity of Gopus overhead. It was a scene unchanged for millennia.
But it would change for Hans Zimmerman. If this new usurper were allowed to take his place, he would no longer be allowed to enjoy his villa, nor the jungle house, nor his saber-reed plantation on Gopus. He wouldn’t be able to afford them without the tens of thousands of credits in graft he received weekly for his lax police services and general rubber-stamping of the Senate’s every bill. Roasted air-swimmers and even green hork-leaf wine, his favorite, would be things of the past.
With a knot of cold fear in his belly that he had not known for almost a decade, Hans Zimmerman gulped down the last of his wine and swam back to his phone. He began tapping wet fingers on his contacts-list like a man possessed.
Two
It was midnight in the depths of the Equatorial Desolation. Garth huddled close to a tiny campfire that sputtered and popped, greedily eating the sparse fuel of spiny weeds he fed it. The weeds were all that grew on the sifting red sands.
An unknown figure approached along the highway. As he drew near, Garth recognized that the man was a fellow skald.
“Your rider is the great Fryx?” asked the man coming into the firelight.
“Yes,” said Garth. “Come and sit with me.”
Zeke, a small skald with large ears and long fingers, sat beside him. “You are indeed blessed to carry one so exalted as Fryx.”
Garth smiled slightly, trying to quell his pride. He added another twig to the campfire and in so doing moved slightly so that the scarred, red, horizontal stain that slashed across his face was more visible in the firelight. “The dictates tell us that it’s not proper for a skald to feel prideful.”
“Ah! I see now the mark of a great rider. The way it encompasses your eyes with livid red is truly striking,” Zeke said, beaming. He leaned forward so that he could better examine the red stain in the flickering light of the campfire. “Only the oldest and the largest of the riders leave such a blaze of glory upon mounting their skalds. Now I understand why my rider has driven me to find you. Surely, I have much to learn from the skald who bears Fryx.”
“It was more good fortune than anything else that brought Fryx to me,” said Garth, trying to sound humble.
“But tell me, communication must be easier for you than I, how does it go with Fryx?”
“True telepathy with one’s rider always takes time. Today I started playing at sunset, and still I continue to play and listen, hours later in the depths of night.”
Zeke nodded. “It goes much the same with my rider. Tell me, brother Garth, why did you come out here to this forgotten corner of the planet?”
“I seek what all skalds seek: truth through communion with my rider. I have wandered over much of this planetary system.”
“You are young yet.”
“Yes, I’m still serving my pilgrimage. I’ve visited many of the works of man and nature, and recently entered the Desolation seeking solitude. The Desolation at night allows the closest intimacy and communication with one’s rider.”
“I beg your forgiveness for disturbing you,” said Zeke seriously.
Garth waved his hand in a dismissive gesture.
“So you follow the great crossing highway northward, and I follow it southward. I came here for no reason of pilgrimage, however. My rider drove me here with the express purpose of finding you and Fryx.”
Garth stared into his fire for a moment, watching the tiny yellow tongues of light. He produced his skire. “Perhaps it’s time we let our riders have free rein with us.”
Zeke nodded and solemnly produced his skire as well. Together, they began to play.
Soon Garth was in complete harmony with his rider. His fingers danced over the reed instrument with fluttering bird-like motions. He heard only the warbling music and felt only the cold night air. The desert climate gave his skire an excellent clarity of tone. Each thin note seemed to last for an eternity.
After a time there came a welcome scratching in his brain, indicating that Fryx was active and willing to commune. Garth opened his eyes long enough to glance over at Zeke. The man played his skire fervently; his fingers danced madly over the tiny holes and his cheeks puffed out. Sweat bathed them both despite the cool night breezes.
Zeke stopped playing his skire and made a croaking sound, as if trying to speak.
Garth looked at him in surprise.
“We must. We must perform the dance. Our riders must communicate. Micyn wishes to commune with the great Fryx.”
Garth felt a stab of pain in his skull. His jaw locked up, then loosened slowly. He groaned and whispered, “Fryx agrees to the communion.”
Setting aside their skires, the two men rose up and clasped hands. Together they let go the reins of their minds and their riders took over. Their sandaled feet shuffled in the red sands.
An unknowable time passed. Garth was so deep in communion that he didn’t notice the roadtrain until it was almost too late. In their trance state the two men had danced right out onto the highway. What finally impinged on Garth’s consciousness wasn’t the thunder of the roadtrain’s man-sized tires, or the glaring brilliance of its headlamps, or the vibrating ground that tingled his legs. What awakened him was the sense of it. The roadtrain had a presence, a malevolent spirit of its own. A spirit of combustion, rubber, steel and glass. A spirit of noise, speed, heat and grinding metal. It was a legendary behemoth with burning hydrogen in its belly and hot machine oil for blood.
The roadtrain was making its run from Space City on the east coast of New Amazonia to the Slipape Counties on the northern tip of the continent. It had crested the mountains early this afternoon and the driver had spent all evening making good time on the endless stretch of flat desert.
The headlights searched for Garth. Clear plastic lenses focused brilliant halogen suns and burnt purple stains into the back of his eyeballs. They stabbed through the crisp Desolation night like lasers cutting paper.
Garth threw his arm up to defend his gaping pupils and drew in a ragged breath. The roadtrain wasn’t on him yet, but it was close, less than a kilomete
r off and coming very fast. Out here the only speed limits were in the guts of the driver and the number of squeeze-bottles of beer he had set between his legs along the way. He stepped back from Zeke, who was still lurching and shambling in an odd, inhuman fashion. He scrambled away and ran until he felt the reddish sand splash over his feet. He had taken to camping near the arrow-straight rolling carpet of tarmac because it retained heat better than the sand did. Traffic was a rare event this deep in the Desolation, and usually didn’t pose a problem.
His intimacy with his rider broken, he suddenly felt the discomforts of his weary body. The desert night had stolen the heat from his bones. The void between the big shimmering stars overhead had leeched through the insulation of his heavy cloak and sucked the warmth from his thin sunburned body underneath. The nights in the Desolation were as cold and dark as the days were broiling hot and bright.
His eyes could focus a bit now in the glare the gargantuan truck was putting out from its six headlights. He realized that Zeke was about to be pulverized by a stampede of thundering black tires. Snaking out his tongue to slide over cracked lips he took a step back toward him.
NO! His rider shouted in their shared mind, a command that physically stopped the skald in his tracks. His leg muscles spasmed and went rigid.
Then the roadtrain was on top of them, and he realized that his rider had been right. He hadn’t judged the speed of the oncoming monster of metal correctly. It moved too fast, and he would have been killed. As it bore down on him, the driver gave a single deafening blast on the horn, then for a moment the behemoth was right there, close enough to touch. Far, far up in the lofty cab sat the dim outline of the driver, and Garth thought he could feel the man’s curious eyes on him for a blurred fraction of a second. Then a powerful wall of air hit him and knocked him flat upon the sands. A hundred huge black tires thundered by, roaring as they greedily pulverized Zeke, grinding him into the tarmac and coating his corpse with black rubber and grease.
Instantly the blinding apparition was gone, shrinking to a set of glowing red trailer lights in seconds.
Garth grieved briefly over the rider Micyn and the skald Zeke. He performed what ceremony he could over the cooling mess on the highway.
Troubled, Garth spent the rest of the night trying to regain communion with his rider, but it was no use. Only the threat of death seen through Garth’s eyes had gotten such an extreme emotion through loud and clear into Garth’s consciousness. The frightening encounter with the roadtrain had caused Fryx to withdraw again. He played his skire for a while anyway, hoping to coax Fryx out of his mood, but to no avail. His rider refused to respond, remaining an inert cool presence hugging the nerves at the base of his skull. After a time he gave up on his music-without his rider’s participation, there was no magic in it.
Sighing, the skald wrapped himself tightly in his cloak and settled down on his bedroll. He wondered about the strangeness of the night and grieved for Micyn and Zeke. What had Micyn come so far to communicate to Fryx? He doubted that he would ever know. He recalled the instant of direct communication he had experienced. Fryx had actually spoken to him, commanding him to halt. Few skalds could boast of such a moment. If the night had not turned into such a horror, he might have felt exalted at the interference of his rider.
Lying with his hands behind his head, Garth gazed at the heavens. Spread out above him were the nearby stars of the Listak Cluster. Gopus was below the horizon, but due to rise in the next hour or so. Hanging over the South Pole were the twin stars Thor and Loki, Thor a red giant that fed an endless stream of super-heated plasma to the vampirical white dwarf Loki. Down low on the eastern horizon, half-blocked by the Parched Spikes, was a liquid waver of stars that formed the constellation Taurus, seen at an oblique angle. Garth knew that Sol and Old Earth lay somewhere beyond, too dim for the naked eye to pick out.
He stared up at the brilliant Desolation stars, seemingly closer and brighter than anywhere else on Garm. As he fell asleep, it occurred to him that the riders had been discussing something about the stars. He recalled the sensation of fear and dread, he had associated it with the roadtrain before, but now he wasn’t so sure. The two riders had been discussing a danger from the beyond Garm, of that much he was certain.
With a lurch, Fryx forced Garth’s body to sit straight up. His legs were wrapped in a dusty bedroll. Everywhere stretched the sands of the Desolation. The rising sun was a lurid red glow on the horizon and the heat of it was already in the moistureless air. Standing in an awkward, stiff-kneed fashion and clumsily fixing sun-goggles on Garth’s face, Fryx scanned the landscape through Garth’s bloodshot eyes.
The nothingness of the Desolation met the optical organs, sending impulses down the optical nerves and into Fryx’s worm-like tangle of interrupting tendrils. A flat stretch of slightly reddish sand reached up to meet the horizon in all directions, fringed with the hazy images of barren mountains. Those mountains were the Parched Spikes, the wardens that kept this vast wasteland a prisoner. Beyond were the steamy jungles and the oceans of Garm.
Gathering up Garth’s meager belongings, Fryx rammed a wad of salty meat into the skald’s mouth and added two mouthfuls of body-warm water from the tube-like waterskin that encircled his hips. Chewing mechanically, he set the body into a lurching march, heading back the way they had come. Fryx was in luck; the nearest settlement was only forty miles away.
Long legs swung forward, striding fast, eating up the ground. Wide eyes stared ahead, almost unblinking in the blinding morning sun and the wind-whipped sand.
Driving Garth’s body like an ailing power-walker until it all but collapsed, Fryx managed to hitch a ride up into the Parched Spikes, entering the section of the range that formed the southern border of the Desolation. Soon he reached the summit of the high passes among the sheer cliffs and precipitous spires of the Parched Spikes. Here, the man he was driving with stopped at what was apparently the sole service-station between the Desolation and New Amazonia to fill the car’s tanks with hydrogen.
The man who had picked him up claimed to be an archaeologist on an extended sabbatical leave from Bauru University. He was an aging man with a sparse growth of gray facial hair that didn’t quite fall into the category of a beard. Frequently during the trip, he drank from a canteen filled with an odorous alcoholic beverage that he kept on a chain that hung around his neck.
Fryx took a moment to feel an overwhelming wave of self-pity. He had thoroughly enjoyed his life as Garth’s silent rider, peeking out from his quiet meditations only occasionally for variety. Physically, his kind consisted of little more than two pounds of grayish ooze and prickly spines. All riders preferred the inner solitude of a chosen skald’s brain and nervous system to the harsh crude world of open elements. The interior of a human’s body was a shrine of purity compared to the external world of oxygen-breathing creatures.
“As an archaeologist, these people intrigue me,” said the driver, indicating the service man with a discrete gesture.
With an effort of concentration on the motor functions, Fryx swiveled Garth’s eyes and focused on the man servicing the car. As gross and unclean as all of the beings that inhabited the open world were, this man stood apart as a figure of unrelenting filth. A tallish man in the loose bags of the desolation peoples, he was broad only around the middle, where he had tied a brown sash smeared with black grease. His pink face was clearly diseased, eroded and scabbed like wood that has been randomly carved by the worm. His eyes were mercifully hidden beneath heavy, dust-coated goggles.
“Oh, but I’m forgetting,” said the driver, tugging at his scraggly beard and taking another swig from his canteen. “You’ve taken a vow of silence, haven’t you? I’m a proper star-fearing man, but I’m afraid I’m just not used to having a fellow like you around. I mean, skalds just don’t make it down into the Parched Spikes that often.”
Fryx ignored the prattling of the driver and scrutinized the service man who moved about the front of the car, poking and proddin
g at the exposed machinery. Slipping something from his sash that flashed metallically in the brilliant sunlight, the man leaned forward into the power compartment. Fryx directed Garth’s body to hunker forward. Uncaring, he allowed the eyes to stare protrudingly and let the jaw hang slack. A white thread of saliva slipped from his lips and turned instantly cold as it adhered to his chin.
The driver frowned a bit, then returned to his indulgent smile. “Of course, I know I’ve got you at a bit of a disadvantage with you being silent and all, but a man in the desert doesn’t get many chances to talk with anyone but himself, so please don’t be annoyed.”
He took a moment to fiddle with his low-brimmed desert hat, smoothing an imaginary crease while giving the skald a perplexed, sidelong glance. “Now take this fellow here, for instance. You’d think he’d be dying to talk to someone, but no-he’s all business even though there can’t be another customer within fifty miles or more. It’s just his way, I guess.”
Suddenly, the service man stood erect, triumphantly holding aloft a long narrow tube of some kind. He appeared at the window, dangling it in front of them for inspection. “This hose broke in your engine,” he explained simply. A fetid odor tainted the interior of the car. Green liquid dripped lazily from the open end of the hose.
“Oh dear,” said the driver, kneading his hairy chin with dusty fingers. “That’s from the front stabilizers, isn’t it? It wouldn’t be safe to drive any further until we have a new one. You don’t happen to have any hoses in stock, do you?”
The man leered in amusement at the concept and shook his diseased head. Fryx was suddenly alarmed. The dangling end of the hose was clean-edged and showed no sign of fraying. It had been cut, obviously. Then the service man spoke, and the fetid odor grew stronger. “We could send away for one. The next delivery flitter is due tomorrow morning.”
“Well, let’s order it then,” said the driver resignedly. He turned to the skald, taking another swig from the canteen. “Looks like we could be stuck here for a bit. Perhaps we should go inside with him and take the opportunity to get out of the heat while we wait.”