Horrors of the Dancing Gods

uncomfortable doing it. It wasn't as if he were actually doing anything, but watching all those female heads turn and follow him with their eyes and expressions as he walked self-consciously by, making him feel like a piece of meat or maybe an ice cream cone they all wanted to lick, was a bit unnerving. One thing about Irving — he was never going to be inconspicuous.

It was much easier to see where the boat had left from than to find it; clearly a tour was on, as the slip was empty. There was, however, a kiosk where you could buy tickets just in front of the slip, and as they approached, there came the sudden sounds of an unseen ghostly chorus.

'Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale,

A tale of a fateful trip.

That started from this tropic port

Aboard this tiny ship. '

'How's he doing that?' Marge asked, conscious that the last thing you would find in Husaquahr was electricity.

'Some sort of spell,' Poquah responded with a weary sigh. 'I believe the Master procured it for him, but he still had to pay a good deal for it. Not as much as he has to pay to ensure that his batteries keep being charged on those infernal Earth devices, but those at least are for him alone.'

'I'm surprised the Council let him keep them,' Marge commented, knowing that Poquah was referring to Macore's battery-powered television and videotape recorder, which he used so that he could view his complete collection of Gilligan's Island tapes. 'They are a dangerous anachronism here.'

'So long as they remain private, it is all right,' Poquah assured her. 'Also, Macore appears to have convinced a majority of the Council that maintaining them is the only certain defense against zombies.'

'There is definitely a grain of truth in that,' Marge acknowledged. 'I always did wonder who the true audience for that show was until I saw its effect on the Army of the Dead.'

'There's the boat coming now!' Irving shouted, and they looked where he was pointing.

The boat was a medium-sized sailing vessel, rather sleek and trim and nicely kept up and in some ways a bit too elaborate for the kind of work it was being asked to do.

'Oh, Uncle Macore lives aboard,' Irving told them. 'The tourists pretty much stay above, and his own pretty nice place is below.'

There were a half dozen or so tourist types aboard, clearly from wealthier merchant families in the City- States from their look and dress. The rest were crew members, with a greater number required for this boat than for the original television Minnow, and they were very, very different.

'Good grief! His whole crew is water nymphs!' Marge exclaimed.

At that moment a smaller boat crossed right in front of the Minnow and one exotic-looking crewwoman let out an unnaturally loud series of whoop! whoop! whoop! sounds that scared not only the small boat but half the harbor as well.

'Well, nymphs and sirens,' Poquah noted dryly.

A few moments later gray shapes rose on one side of the boat and began bumping and nudging it toward its berth as all sails were taken in. That close in, all boats of any size allowed the pilot whales to bring them safely to a halt in the right spot.

Two buxom water nymphs threw out lines, and then one jumped to the dock and began tying off the boat. Water nymphs generally looked like all the other kinds of nymphs but tended to come in a variety of sizes and colors and seemed somewhat translucent. The nearest two were an azure blue nymph and a creamy white one, the first with green hair and the second with silver locks. The siren, another type of nymph, was a fiery red color and much larger than the average nymph, and it seemed as if there were at least one more somewhere in the back.

At the wheel aft of the mainsail was a small, wiry figure dressed only in a pair of shorts but wearing an oversized sailor's cap. His skin was tanned so dark that it seemed as if he were of some other, more tropical race, and his long, unkempt hair and equally messy full beard were gray going fast toward white.

Marge felt shock at the appearance of the captain. She remembered Macore as an eternally young little man with coal black hair and catlike movements. Somehow, sometime since she'd last seen him, the little retired master thief had grown old.

The tourists were no sooner off the ship than Macore spotted his visitors standing there on the dock and bounded toward them with some semblance of his old energy. 'Irv! Poquah! Good to see you!' he called out cheerily, coming down to greet them. He stopped, frowned, and looked at the colorful winged faerie between them. 'Marge? That you?'

'Hi, Macore. I hadn't realized it, but it seems to have been a long time,' she said with a smile.

He grinned. 'Well, I'm fifty-seven now, and that's really all right with me. I mean, ninety-five percent of all the people in my old profession would be either in jail or executed by now!'

The idea of a fifty-seven-year-old Macore, let alone the sight in front of her, brought home the different world in which she now existed as even the sight of a grown-up Irving couldn't have done. It was a graphic example of why faerie were always taught that interacting with humans was fine but they should never form attachments or get to know them all that well. There was a phrase for it, universal among the fairy folk of all sorts but one she'd never really thought much about until this moment

They pass… We endure.

She laughed at his still-flippant attitude, though, and his apparent high spirits. 'I'm glad you seem pleased to see us, but you don't seem all that surprised,' she noted.

His expression grew a bit more serious. 'I kind of expected something of this sort. Not sure who all would be in the Company, but it was kind of inevitable. Come on aboard and I'll have the girls find us some nice, cool drinks and comfortable seats.'

'I see you have an all-female faerie crew,' Marge noted.

He grinned in mock-evil fashion. 'Hey, if I'm ever cracked up during one of these tours, I sure as hell don't want to be stuck on some deserted island for years with some dork professor who can invent anything except a way off, a mate too dumb to make fire, and a bunch of people who refuse to accept their fate. Uh uh. You pick who you want to crash with, and I'll pick who and what I want to crash with.'

Marge was startled as they came aboard and all the faerie crew turned as one, sighed, and said, 'Hi, Irving!'

'Hello, girls,' he responded, a bit resigned but clearly impatient with the attitude they expressed.

Still, Macore was as good as his word, and soon they were all sitting on comfortable deck furniture or pads, relaxing, and the drinks were actually chilled. With a cold drink and a warm breeze near sunset, things were just about perfect.

'The cold drinks are a little secret shared by a few regulars here,' he explained. 'There's a cold current out there, and you can drag through it, and whatever bottles you have get cold and stay that way in the coolers here. Most folks here don't have a real taste for cold drinks, but I figured you still did.'

'It's been a long time, but yeah,' Marge agreed. As a Kauri she did not eat, at least in the way humans and animals did, but virtually all faerie still had to drink and had a real appreciation for flavored waters and good wines and beers.

'You said you were not surprised to see us,' Poquah prodded after a while.

Macore nodded. 'I figured it out when Joe and that weird halfling girl came through a few weeks back. Talk about somebody nearly impossible to recognize!'

'Who? The halfling girl? You knew her?'

'No, no! I mean Joe, of course. Frankly, unless you talk for a while, you'd be hard pressed to tell her — er, him — er whatever—from any old garden variety wood nymph except maybe a lot spunkier. Um, sorry, Irv.'

'No problem,' Irving responded. 'We aren't exactly close, remember, in the usual ways, and we aren't close by blood, either, at this point, considering that she runs tree sap in her veins.'

'Yeah, well, anyway, we at least got to talkin' a little bit of old times,' the ex-thief continued, 'and suddenly it's questions about Yuggoth, of all places. I don't even like to say the word, let alone