Star Quest

can go. And he would starve if he didn't have that. Hell, maybe that would be better. Maybe it would be merciful to let his stomach curl in on itself, shrivel and toss about in agony, trying to gobble him up for nourishment. Hell, maybe we should put a bullet through his head and rip up his brain, let him bleed his soul out on the cement. But I won't. Corgi won't. The Old Man won't, and the Old Man has more guts and brains than all of us. There's something horrible about Seer and something holy too. Something holy that rubs off from that undescribed demon called God, Hero Tohm.”

“I didn't know.”

“Okay,” she spat. “Then you didn't know. You don't know. But don't be so goddamn superior! Don't judge me, Hero Tohm, by what you think I should and should not do. Don't go setting my moral standards and values when you don't have the least understanding of what I am! Don't give me goody-goody nonsense. By now you should know the world is not goody-goody.”

He stood, crossed the space between them in a near leap, clutched her and dragged her from the dresser.

“Get away from me!”

“Mayna, listen—”

She purred as he ran his hand through her great pile of hair.

“Listen, I was confused. Hell, I don't know anything. I didn't ask to be here. I didn't ask to be ripped free from my village and plunged into confusion.”

She laced her arms around his back, cried into his shoulder.

“I came looking for a girl. At first, I wanted only to find her and go home. I don't know any more. I have to find her now because that has been my motivation all along, that has been the thing that has kept me alive. It would be like cheating a dream if I stopped. So if I trampled on anyone, maybe it is worth it, maybe not. But I don't mean to trample.”

She was shivering. He lifted her slight body and carried her to the bed with him.

“The Seer,” he said. “Hell, that's terrible. Terrible, not only for him, but for everyone who understands him.”

Her hands were caressing him. He forsook all conversation, pressed his lips to hers. Her small, pink tongue flicked inside his mouth. He squeezed her breast. And suddenly her claws came up, raked his side. He leaped off her. Blood was oozing thickly out of the long, fine scratches, staining his shirt.

“What did you do that for!”

“I'm still nothing more than an animal to you, Hero Tohm! You want to see what it would be like. You-never say 'I love you'; you just start groping around. You want to see if there is anything good about me.”

“Bitch!” he snapped, massaging his tender side.

“You want to know whether my tummy is furry.”

“Is it?” he wheezed, blood sticky on his fingers, his mind on fire.

“You'll never know,” she said, running for the door. “Never in a million years!” She slammed the door, leaving him alone in the darkness.

For a long moment, he stood, clutching at the fire in his side, trying to diagnose the fire in his mind. But no answers would come. He treated the bodily fire by washing the shallow slashes. They were not deep, and the job required little time. He rinsed them with alcohol, salved them, and applied two hand-sized adhesive bandages.

Washing the blood out of the sink, he felt even less real as the crimson patterns in the water grew fainter and fainter. Everything was beginning to seem like a dream — dozens of dreams and nightmares piled upon one another.

He went to bed then, his eyes fixed to the ceiling, and tried to sleep. But sleep was a long time coming…

XI

Mayna was not around the next morning when Corgi, Babe, Fish and Hunk gathered to send him off. He looked for her constantly and hoped that she would come. But she did not.

“Now remember,” Corgi said, his eyes a misty gamboge-flecked gray, “you only have twenty-four hours. Get back here with Tarnilee, and you can come with us. Otherwise, I'm afraid you'll be stuck here in this universe with the Romaghins and Setessins.”

“I'll try, Corgi,” he said, shaking the preferred hands and tentacles.

“Remember, you can go to the other hutches if you need either help or shelter,” Hunk said.

“Don't hesitate,” Babe urged.

“I won't,” he assured them. He stepped back into the tunnel from where he had first made his entrance seemingly years ago on the cushions of air. They closed the doors to the hutch. Taking the periscope scanner, he checked the alley above as they had taught him. He saw no one and, therefore, activated the blower that reversed the air streams and lifted him gently but firmly up, up, up and through the grating which clanked back into place behind him and served as a landing zone when the winds abruptly ceased.

He could hardly believe it. He was finally in the capital city, near the slave market, perhaps in time to buy back his Tarnilee. He tried to think of what she looked like. He couldn't get a clear picture.

The day was going to be a beautiful one. The thin yellow clouds that would burn off before even the noonday sun appeared were the only things marring the otherwise perfect sky. The sun had just risen and had not yet heated the cool, pleasant air of night.

He began walking, turned from the alley into the streets. The stores were open for business — ultra-modern, clerkless, giant chain stores, and the little, open front shops that always seem to flourish in a desert community no matter what its size and sophistication. At one place, homemade pretzels were for sale, salty and soft. He bought one with his miscellany money and munched on it as he walked. His insides were jumping with excitement and fear, but the most important thing was to seem calm externally, to appear as if he belonged there.

He passed fruit shops where large baskets of berries of every chromatic dispersion lay in heaps. Some were similar to those he and Hunk had stolen from the hovercraft, but others were unlike any he had ever seen. He wished to taste them all, but he knew there were only twenty-four hours. He might need that time and more to find her. He walked on.

In an open-air market where sides of animals lay in bloody pools, and cuts of steaks and roasts lay on chipped ice in unpainted bins, a Romaghin government inspector checked over the flesh, stamping it as the butcher slipped him (not so discreetly) a large coin for every animal approved. Flies were already congregating about the front of the place, and Tohm could well imagine what it would look like when the heat of the day lay like a blanket over all. And what it would smell like.

Next door to the meat market was an automated butchery where meats were kept in refrigerated glass cubes, constantly on display. The prices were about three times those of the cruder merchant, but Tohm felt that he wouldn't mind paying the difference. If he could gag meat down any more. Even looking at all that raw flesh, he realized, was making him ill. The customs, likes and dislikes of the Muties were, he knew, rubbing off on him too.

A man in a fluttering cape like the one the auto-fact had provided him with many days ago came strutting along the walk. A grossly fat man with a pig's face, he picked at his teeth with a sparkling nail. The lower classes stepped into the street to allow him passage, even though it wasn't a physical necessity, the walks being wide enough for seven or eight men abreast. Tohm, however, did the same. He was not out to call attention to himself, to arouse suspicions.

Once, crossing the busy street, he saw the boy with the white eyes go by in a limousine. A very wealthy woman sat beside him. The boy showed no signs of recognition. Tohm wanted to run after him, but he didn't. There was something about the boy he didn't like. He couldn't say more than that. Perhaps it was Hunk's fear of the boy, and Hunk seemed afraid of so little. If the Mutie feared the boy, there was a reason. Something beyond the dreams. He made the other side of the street and struck out for the Market of Concubines, having entered the Street of the Pleasure Sellers.

The Street of the Pleasure Sellers was not really a street at all, but a square. In the center of the square, a