Star Quest

“One of the songs Fish wrote.”

“Fish?”

“It has the currents of the waters in it, don't you think? The noises of the ocean. The words are nonsense words written merely to evoke a feeling of the sea.”

And as she sang more of it, he realized it did exactly that. He could nearly feel the eddies in the water, the waves. There was that quality of sea-talk he had often heard.

“You certainly are a talented group,” he said at length.

“You gain something when you lose normality, Tohm. Nature mutilates your fetus, smashes you about in drunken folly, then repents and, at the last moment, presents you with many talents, some even superhuman. Every Mutie I know has, besides the ability to sense and affect the Fringe, some talent, some beautiful ability.”

“I see.”

“I doubt it,” she said, standing.

They began walking the rim of the Lake.

“No,” he said. “Really, I do. I can understand what it must be like. This is not my original body. I went through something similar.”

He explained his history, the chemical tanks, the brain transplant, the machine buried eighty-three miles under the sands back near the City That Used To Be.

“That's fine,” she said, wrinkling her tiny, perfect face into an expression of distaste, “but it shows you don't really understand.”

He looked at her, felt his tongue tying itself in knots. From the glint of her eyes, he could see that something was about to happen. But he didn't know what, and he was powerless to stop it. He didn't even know if he wanted to stop it.

“You never thought that with that machine of yours, one of the rare Romaghin Jumbos, you could give Hunk a real body! You could take Babe out of that farcical shell of his and put him inside a big, strong, hulk like your own.”

He swallowed his heart. Twice. “Of course! How stupid of me! We'll go back now. I can do that for every Mutie you bring me.”

“No.”

He stopped tugging at her. “What do you mean — no.”

“Are you even more stupid than I thought? No means no! No, we don't tell Corgi. No, we don't tell Babe. No, we don't put any of them in he-man bodies!”

“Come on. Let's find Corgi—”

“No!”

“But you said—”

“I baited you. I wanted to see if you have even the slightest glimmer of understanding about us, Tohm, wonderful Tohm, Hero Tohm.”

“Now wait,” he said desperately, clutching her hand. He could feel the final rumbles as the volcano began to surge with lava. He didn't think he wanted to see the eruption.

She jerked her hand from his. “You wait! What makes you think Babe could adjust to being normal, huh? Two hundred and twenty-three years he's been a Mutie. Two hundred and twenty-three years he's been a child. Just overnight he takes a he-man body of a normal and thinks nothing of it? And Hunk. Precious goddamn Hunk. Hunk spits out his bodily wastes, a green liquid that smells damned unpleasant. Hunk, you think, could just up and be normal without any trauma involved, no mess up in his mind.”

“The machine surgeons are good. They won't make a mistake in—”

For a moment, she seemed to snarl. “I'm not talking about the physical end of it. Psychologically, man. Way down there in his id and his ego and his superego, even, all these years he has been suppressing the desires that were human and fostering the ones that were Mutie because the Mutie desires were the only ones he could satisfy. All those years, his ego has been building him up, telling him that he is more than a normal, better, happier, less prejudiced, more liberal, more talented. You want to change his id, turn it upside down, smash the old and slip in the new. Oh, boy! You want to tell him that all those human desires that were unsatisfiable are suddenly his again. You want to smash his ego by telling him that he was lying to himself, that being normal is better. You want to crush, mash, burn, and blow away the ashes of his life. And you can't see where it would mess him up.”

“I never thought—”

She spun about, facing him with something akin to hatred in her eyes — but not quite. Nothing seemed to be quite anything anymore. “You never thought! You never added it up. And, Mr. Tohm, what makes you think we even want to be like you? What makes you think being normal is such a lack? We want equality, man, not conformity. We want a world where we don't have to hide in cellars like rats. We don't want to be humans, normals. We're different. We aren't the same but, God, we aren't all ugly. Most, almost all of us are intriguing, not hideous. We're the new mythology for this world, Hero Tohm, but we aren't a mythology on paper. We live, breathe, walk about — fantasies in flesh. You should see some of those in the other hutches on this world and all the others — some of those who died under old Hazabob's hand. Beautiful. A phantasmagoria of wonderful creatures, beings hidden in the folds of creative imaginations for a million years — now stepping through the womb and popping up alive. They are better than normals.”

He grabbed her by the arm, swung her around. “All right. I grant all this. But why take it out on me?”

“You wouldn't understand!” she hissed.

“Everyone, goddamn it, says that I don't understand. But no one will explain it.”

“You couldn't understand it.”

“Shut up!”

“You couldn't!”

He slapped his hand across her face, stared at the red imprint it left. The smell of her was strong, sweet and somehow musky. When he plunged his lips against hers, he was not thinking so very much of what he was doing. Not very much at all. Frustration and confusion had mounted within him and found its form in this. She kissed back for a moment, then tore herself from him and ran back toward the hutch. From the main cavern, she called to him, “Supper will be almost ready. The men cooked it tonight. It might not be good, but you had better hurry.”

And she was gone.

X

“The market of concubines,” Corgi said, staring at him with eyes that perceived only fuzz patches and blips.

“On the Street of the Pleasure Sellers.”

“Mapwise, what quadrant is that?” Babe asked.

“Second.”

“Name the different merchant's platforms in the marketplace in the order in which they appear.”

Tohm strained back through the hypno-lessons, the drills of the afternoon. “Raddish, Fulmono, Kinger, Fadsteon, Frin, Rashinghi, Talaman, and Froste.”

“Very good,” Corgi said. “Very good indeed.”

“All the platforms are owned by the same people— the Romaghin board of governors. There is no free trade in the slave market, though the board of governors wishes to convey that impression.”

“Where'd you get that?” Babe asked, puffing on his odorless cigar.

“Reading on my own — some history books I pored through once.”

Corgi ran through his mental list of questions, which seemed to be endless. “How do you find the hutch in that quadrant if you need help or shelter?”

“I go to the comfort station near the prison, take the third stall from the end, and depress a brick ten up from the floor and five in from the left partition.”

“Okay. I deem you prepared. Now, you will leave at dawn when the markets are preparing for the day. You