Image of the Beast

by Philip José Farmer

  They were here because Childe had ordered it. He had told them that if both groups did not declare, and keep, a truce, he would destroy the Grail and would refuse to act as their Captain. If they agreed to keep the peace and to participate together, he would transport both groups to their home planets.

  They did not take long in reaching an agreement.

  Childe was still dubious about his ability to move them across intergalactic spaces and pinpoint the exact world for each. But he hoped that it would work. It meant ridding the Earth of a number of monsters and potential monsters. He wished that he could also do this with others than the Tocs and the Ogs.

  Hindarf and Pao had died under some heavy timbers and several tons of mud. Tish had been elected master of ceremonies. It was he who had arranged that the authorities did not investigate the ruins. With the spending of much money, he had kept the police and others out of the area, and the Tocs and the Ogs who survived had secretly buried the dead.

  Now Tish called up the couples, one by one, to begin the ceremony. These were male and female with each couple composed of a Toc and an Og. There were about four females left over, and these were also to couple in the beginning.

  Male and female, they approached Childe and knelt before him. They touched his genitals and kissed his penis and then rose. He stared at the Grail while his cock became bigger with each kiss until it had reached its utmost rigidity. The Grail began to glow and to pulse. Its glow waxed and waned as the throbbings of his dong built up.

  One by one they knelt and kissed or sucked his cock. Then they returned to their stations to wait, hand in band, or hand on cock or cunt, for the last couple to return.

  The light from the Grail grew brighter and brighter until it could not be looked at directly by anybody but Childe. The light filled his eyes and his skull, but he could still see the Grail and the people beyond.

  Finally. Tish approached Childe and knelt and stroked his balls and cock and then kissed the glistening glands. Childe's body from behind his naval to his knees had turned to ice, and the peter was giving little jerks while the fluid moved more swiftly towards its exit. He beckoned to an exquisite Thai woman, a Toc, and she ran to him and bent over to take his cock into her mouth. Immediately, the man who had been her partner came up behind her, got down between her legs, and buried his face in her cunt. Another woman got down on all fours and began sucking his dong; a man went down on her; a woman crawled between his legs and sucked on his peter; a man thrust his tongue up her slit; a woman got under him and started to work on the head of his penis with her mouth; and so forth. The result was a daisy chain with the woman on the end lying on her back blowing a man and nobody on her cunt.

  Tish walked down the line of the grunting, moaning, smacking, writhing men and women. He straddled the last woman and let himself down, not too easily, into her slit.

  But even while he was pumping away, Tish called out in a strange language. He chanted, and Childe understood the words, though he was not able later to translate them.

  Childe sat still and let the woman mouth his glands and run her tongue over his prick while the ecstasy mounted and mounted and mounted. Suddenly, he gave a little scream and spurted. The Grail seemed to burn; it shot out a pulsing light that drove away every shadow in the hall. Tish continued to chant. Apparently, he had not come yet. And then, as Childe's peter gave its final jerk and spurt, Tish cried out.

  The air over the squares darkened. Little clouds formed. The air became very cold, chilling the hot and sweating bodies. There was a wind, as if the air was moving towards the clots of duskiness over each square. At first, the air moved gently, but within a minute it was whistling from every corner of the hall and rattling the windows. Dust from the floor rose up and whirled in small cyclones.

  The Grail continued to pulse dazzlingly, though Childe had ceased to ejaculate. It did not obliterate the shadows above the squares; it seemed to make them darker.

  The first one that Childe recognized was Igescu, the Toc whom he had killed in his oak-log coffin by thrusting a sword through his heart. Afterwards, the body had been burned to ashes in the fire of the great house.

  Childe had never expected to see that long lean face with the high forehead, thick eyebrows, high cheekbones, and large eyes, nor the very long and skinny dick.

  And there was Magda Holyani, the beautiful blonde weresnake.

  And there was Hindarf and beside him was Pao.

  They were all naked and all in their human form.

  And where was Dolores del Osorojo, the beautiful California-Spanish "ghost" who had literally fucked herself back into a materialization of flesh and blood and bone, only to be killed and skinned by the Ogs?

  He saw her in a square in the middle of the crowd. She was smiling at him, and her hips were rotating as if she were relishing the memory of their times together.

  The air warmed up, and the wind ceased.

  The hall was filled with many voices. The living and the recently dead were chattering, yelling, laughing.

  Tish waited for five minutes and then shouted for silence.

  It came slowly and reluctantly, because the Tocs and the Ogs were human in that they had to express their emotions.

  "Now for the voyaging!" Tish shouted.

  They all faced him expectantly. Childe noted, out of the corner of his eye, Forry sitting on his chair. His eyes were bulging out, and he was covered with sweat. Childe did not know whether this reaction was caused by the ceremony he had just seen or the thought of the trip.

  It was up to him whether or not he went along. If he decided to go, he just had to move from the side of the hall to the middle of the floor, and he would be taken along automatically.

  Tish had not liked the idea that Forry was not participating in the ceremony, but he admitted that his noninvolvement would reduce the effect of the Grail by only a negligible amount.

  Tish indicated that a woman should bring up a bowl with a dark liquid in it. She took a position by Childe after kissing his penis and the second ceremony began immediately. She sprinkled his genitals with a few drops of the dark liquid before each person kissed his peter. Tish stood on the other side and every third person dipped his finger into the bowl and passed it over Childe's lips. The stuff tasted like honey with a trace of rancid cottage cheese. When the bowl was empty, Tish signaled for it to be refilled, and the ceremony went on.

  The Grail kept on pulsing brightly. Its white light was beginning to affect Childe. He did not become blind or any less able to see what was going on around him. But he was receiving flashes of strange scenes. Usually these were seen as if he was standing on the surface of a planet, but several times he whizzed by a star burning redly, greenly, or amberly. He seemed to be no more than a hundred thousand miles from the great luminaries. Despite the brightness and nearness, he felt no heat, only a bone-crystallizing cold.

  Tish began to chant in the foreign language. Childe beckoned to Dolores, who ran gladly towards him, her big shapely breasts bouncing with the impact of her feet. She got down on her knees and buried her face in his crotch and wept. Then she took the end of his half-limp organ and began to suck on it. It rose as if she were blowing air into it, became hard and throbbing, and gave him that first warming under his belly button.

  The Grail pulsed faster, and the flickers of alien topographies and brilliantly colored stars increased in number and variety.

  Dolores sucked harder and moved her head back and forth. Igescu came up behind her then and lifted her up so that she was standing up but with her knees bent. He rammed his dick into her asshole and began pumping. Plugger got down on his knees behind Igescu's lean buttocks, spread them, and thrust his tongue up Igescu's asshole. His body rocked back and forth as he rode the vampire's ass with his face.

  Even through the woman and the man, Childe could feel the shock of Plugger's tongue. He hoped that the others would form the daisy chain quickly, because if they didn't they were going to get caught short. He was going to
come soon. This would require starting the voyage ceremony over again, because the chain had to be complete, or nearly complete, when he came.

  The room started to rotate. The naked bodies of the men and women seemed to be skating on the edge of a spinning disc. They slid here and there, catching each other, going down, tonguing cocks and cunts, ramming cunts, mouths, and assholes.

  And there was Vivienne. And there was a tall man with a black beard and burning eyes. His face had much more distinct features, of course, but the resemblance was close enough for Childe to identify him as Gilles de Rais. He had materialized in his original body, and he was sticking his dong into the spread buttocks of a slim blond man who was sucking off Vivienne.

  Then Vivienne and de Rais and everybody receded on the edge of the whirling plate that had been the big ballroom. Lightning was flashing from the Grail, white strokes, scarlet flashes, emerald zigzags, yellow streaks, purple swords with jagged edges. The flashes spurted upwards from the Grail, bounced off the ceiling, spiraled down, caromed off the naked writhing bodies of the men and women, fell to the floor like colored and shattered stalactites.

  Childe felt the gray fluid in him thrusting upward. But when he looked down, he saw only the red lips of Dolores, like an unattached cunt, squeezing around his cock. He could see into his own body, and the gray fluid was red as mercury in a thermometer and rising as if the thermometer had been thrust into a furnace. The red thread sped upward and then leaped out between the disconnected red lips and spurted like scarlet gunpowder exploding.

  The Grail blew up soundlessly with a crimson-and-yellow cloud expanding outwards and pieces of whitely glowing metal flying through the cloud.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 45

  Until the last moment, Forry could not make up his mind. He had been repulsed at first by the orgy. Seeing such things in stag films was one thing, but seeing them in the flesh was very uncomfortable and even sickening. After a while, the aura of reeking sexuality, of uninhibited orgasms, of penises and vaginas and anuses and mouths, began to excite him. He even got jealous when he saw Alys Merrie sucking on the red-skinned cock of a big Amerindian, and he felt an impulse to get off the chair and dive into the welter, that raging sea, of hair and flesh.

  But he was, in the end (I always pun, even here, he thought), too inhibited.

  Nevertheless, the vibrations were getting to him, and he hoped the ceremony would not last too long. Otherwise, he might abandon his restraints and join in the fun.

  A few seconds later, he got his first view of what was taking place in the mind of Childe. He did not know that it was Childe's mind that was broadcasting, but he surmised that it was. There was no doubt that Childe and the Grail, hooked together in some psychosexoneural manner, formed the focus and the distributor of the strange power emanating throughout the hall.

  The glimpses of the alien worlds were like seeing the paintings of Bonestell, Paul, Sime, Finlay, St. John, Bok, Freas, Emshwiller, and other greats of science-fiction become three dimensional and then became alive. Painting turned into reality.

  The worlds were only slices; it was as if Childe was cutting the cosmic pie into slim pieces and hurling them at him.

  He jumped up from the chair and unsteadily made his way towards the complicated shifting structure of flesh. It was only a few feet from him but it seemed to have sped towards the horizon. Between him and the bodies writhing in the glory of the power from the Grail was a vast distance.

  He had to hurry. The Childe--Child?--was coming.

  If he did not get within that blaze, he would be left behind. He would be standing alone, naked and erect and weeping in the big American Legion hall. This was the only chance he would ever get. He, Forry Ackerman, the only human to get a ticket to intergalactic space, to alien and weirdly wonderful worlds in a foreign galaxy. His childhood dreams come true in a universe where he had no right to expect that any dreams would ever be reality. Where he had built a house to embody dreams with only half-reasonable facsimiles. Where the pseudo-worlds had seemed to be real in the shadow world of his home but real for split-seconds only. Where stars like giant jewels, and crimson landscapes, and trees with tentacles, and balloon-chested Martians with elephant trunks and six fingers, and huge-eyed feathered nymphs, and long-toothed red-lipped vampires dwelt in startling fixity forever.

  Now he could go voyaging.

  He ran towards the dwindling figures while the Grail sent up a mushroom cloud of red, green, yellow, purple, and white shoots. He ran towards them, and they shot away as if on skates.

  "Wait for me!" he cried. "I'm going, too!"

  The horizon, so distant, suddenly reversed its direction and charged him and was on him before he could stop running. Like a locomotive appearing out of a tunnel, it ran over him with flashing emerald, topaz, and ruby lights screaming at him, and swiftly rotating puffs of brilliant white and deep-space black cutting through him instead of iron wheels.

  Whatever the objective length of time, to him it seemed instantaneous. He was in the hall and then he was in a huge room with gray walls, floor, and ceiling. It had no furniture and no doors or windows. The only light was that escaping in waves from the Grail.

  Childe and the others were with him. They were all looking at each other dazedly. Some of them had not yet uncoupled.

  The Grail and its pedestal stood before Childe.

  Hindarf strode, to the wall and spoke one word. A large section of the wall became transparent, and they were looking out over the bleakest landscape that he had ever seen. There was only naked twisted rock. There was no vegetation or water. Yet the sky was as blue as Earth's, indicating that there was an atmosphere outside.

  Childe said, "Come here, Forry. Take my hand."

  "Why?" Forry said, but he obeyed.

  Hindarf activated another window on the opposite wall. This showed more windswept rock, but far away, near the horizon, was a spot of green and what looked like the tops of tall trees.

  "This isn't our world or the Ogs' either!" Hindarf shouted. He pointed into the sky and Forry could barely see the pale moon there. It looked as large as Earth's, but it was darkly mottled in the center and resembled the markings on the wings of a death's-head moth.

  Childe beckoned to Dolores del Osorojo, who smiled and came to him and stood on his left, holding his hand. Childe said something in Spanish to her, and she smiled and nodded.

  "That about uses up my knowledge of Spanish," Childe said. "But she prefers to stay with me. And I want her to be with me."

  "That is the moon of Gruthrath!" Hindarf shouted.

  He wheeled upon Childe. "Captain! You have brought us to the desert world of Gruthrath!"

  Childe said, "It's a desert, but it can support you and the Ogs quite comfortably, if you get out and dig, right?" Hindarf turned pale. Weakly, he said, "Yes, but surely you are not thinking of...?"

  "My ancestral memory or genetic memory or whatever you call it has been opened," Childe said. "I know that there is very little chance that either you Tocs or Ogs would let me go once I made the first landing on either planet. You have Captains greater than I who could neutralize my powers long enough for your people to physically capture me. You'd have to, because I am partly an Earthman, and you could never trust me. And whichever planet I got us to first, the home of the Toc or the Og, the people there would catch me. And they would take captive the enemy peoples, too.

  "That isn't true!" Hindarf and Igescu yelled.

  "I know," Childe said. "You two were taking a chance in a cosmic lottery, as it were. You did not know which planet I would pick out to land on first, and you couldn't even ask me, because I would not know which one until I was presented with a choice. Also, if you tried too hard to sway me, I might get suspicious. So you took a chance. And both of you lost."

  "You can't do this!"

  The Tocs and the Ogs rushed towards Childe.

  Forry almost let loose of Childe because it looked as if the three of them were going to be torn to bits
.

  Childe gripped Forry's hand so hard that the bones cracked.

  He shouted, "Fuck you!" and they were off.

  There was a thin triangle of nothing wheeling by Forry, a gush of soundless purple flame around his feet, and the familiar walls of the American Legion were all around him and the familiar floor was under his feet.

  Forry did not say anything for a moment. Then, slowly, he spoke. "Where's the Grail?"

  "I left it behind. I can do that, you know, although it means that the Grail is now forever out of my reach. Unless another Captain brings one here."

  "That's all?" Forry said. "You mean the trip's over?"

  "You didn't get killed," Childe said.

  "I made a better trip when I saw the movie Barbarella," Forry said.

  Childe laughed and said, "You'd gripe if you were hung with a new rope."

  They got dressed and prepared to leave the hall. Childe said, "I wouldn't tell anybody about this, if I were you. And I think we'd better not see each other again."

  Forry looked at Dolores. She was dressed in a white-peek-a-boo blouse and tight orange slacks that one of the Toc women had left behind.

  "What about her?"

  Childe squeezed the dark-haired woman and said, "I'll take care of her. She may have been one of them, but she was one of the good ones."

  "I hope so," Forry said. He stuck out his hand. "Well, good luck. Adiau, as we Esperantists say."

  "Don't take any wooden grails," Childe said.

  Forry watched him walk away with his arm around the slender waist of Dolores, his hand resting on the curve of her ass. How could the fellow so easily give up that power, that chance to go star-voyaging?

  But he felt good again when he came out into the familiar world of Los Angeles. The rains had stopped, the sky night was clear and full of stars, car horns were blaring, water was splashing onto the pedestrians as reckless drivers roared through pools, a radio was screeching rock, an ambulance siren was wailing somewhere.