Cold water dripped on my brow now from a tap he had installed high above. He lit a crackling fire underneath my toes. Both sensations were eerily approaching the threshold of pleasure now. One counterpoint to the edges of sensory overload of the other. Reaching such places, he tapped new regions that the pain-pleasure sensors could not reach. All the while his mellifluous voice swirled in my hazed brain, spewing out dime-store philosophies, cheap, preachy aphorisms, endless lessons, patronizing, hackneyed teachings, moralizations, sermons, which hovered on the edge of my consciousness.
Every sin I’d committed roared back to me in full technicolor during those moments of pain. I screamed them aloud in a hoarse voice, as did Zan, who was half dead while Mong nodded, explaining in quiet tones that this was perfectly normal.
He gave a snorting sigh and rubbed his temples in thought. “I will leave you two for some time. But I will return to record your progress. My interest waxes high in this affair. I want you to reflect on a basic point. What drives you? What is your purpose in this universe? To what end will you go to fulfill your lives? Men and women have pondered these basic questions since the beginning of time, when we rose from the lower species and became masters of the planets. Still, we have no more clue of an answer to these questions than when we rutted in primitive caves as common beasts. Questions perhaps much too abstract, Jet Rusco, considering the direness of your current situation. At a base level, you’d be thinking, when do I get cut down from here? When do I take some regen or narcotic to dull the heart-ripping pain? But life is pain, Jet Rusco and Zan Vulder. When do we ever take time to contemplate these grand questions? Maybe in our darkest dreams and most intimate moments of pain. I leave you with these questions.”
Mong’s words echoed in my beleaguered brain. The pain had gone far beyond any sane man’s threshold and yet we hung there like freshly slaughtered deer, our bodies numb. I saw a giant man-insect in the form of Mong leave us in that godless torture chamber, a place of windless darkness that had no windows showing vistas to skies or stars. My vision blurred and before I lost consciousness, I cursed Mong and all his breed of meslars and monkey-guards to eternity, cursed them to suffer the worst hell that this universe could offer.
Chapter 23
Light years later I remember strong hands prodding my body and testing me to see if I were still alive. Those hands stopped my slow twirl around magnetic north. A fatherly figure with compassion in his eyes peered into mine while capable hands lifted me from my swinging perch and unlashed the hated leather from my pierced back. Those same hands cradled me as if I were a baby, popped off the top of the nearby empty tank and let me fall into the chill green water with a plunk. Struck dumb, I floated there for some time, unable to move my arms hardly an inch, and my body a wall of stiff rubber while an unfathomable pain racked the mutilated flesh of my back. Those hands pushed my head gently under the pale green water while I choked, struggling weakly, like some limp shrimp beached on a lonely shore. My lungs filled with water. Muscles spasmed as all muscles do when faced with perilous conditions, or in my case, death. My legs and weakened arms thrashed, struggling to raise my head above water and gulp life-giving air. But the arms of that impossibly tall figure held me firm and with his fatherly strength and ever compassionate sense, drowned his deformed child with no future.
Twice I died on that day. Jet Rusco, twice deceased.
I hung there suspended like a jellyfish, or some unlucky crustacean in the sinister water. It was eerie, but magical. The numbing pain that had once burned my body like a firebrand subsided to a dull ache, then to a warm tingle, some soothing balm of long-lost techno-science. A background elixir of warmth and massage. I was on a blessed Myscol trip!—to the far stars!
My eyes flickered open. I looked out upon a dim panorama of opaque filminess, blurred shapes, distorted distances, much different from when I came in. Through eyes not my own, it appeared a grainy world out there. The Star Lord stood idly by as he watched me with detached interest, as a father does his child caught with his hand in the cookie jar, as if nothing could be more natural than watching a child drowning in alien brine.
The water on my lips tasted terrible, salty and fermented, a peculiar rancidity, impossible to quantify. I saw my arms float up. My hands looked as if they had starfish-like fingers. That’s because they were broken. The splint had come off, the wrappings peeled off long ago. My fingers were not as crooked as they’d been on entering the tank. Knob-knuckled, yes, like some old codger with severe arthritis. But remarkably whole. I could move them, barely. The water seemed to act as a paralysis agent, making my nerves sluggish and unresponsive. But I could think, and the mind of old JR was as active as before.
What to think? Well, a million things. Dwell on the past. Be stuck in a cage of the mind forever. Remember those medicine teachers of Mong’s somewhere back in the pagoda babbling on about the endless chatter of mind when one first sits down to meditate? I was a drowned man floating, but alive. A punishment worse than death.
All sorts of
