into the Parched Spikes, entering the section of the range that formed the southern border of the Desolation. Soon he reached the summit of the high passes among the sheer cliffs and precipitous spires of the Parched Spikes. Here, the man he was driving with stopped at what was apparently the sole service-station between the Desolation and New Amazonia to fill the car’s tanks with hydrogen.
The man who had picked him up claimed to be an archaeologist on an extended sabbatical leave from Bauru University. He was an aging man with a sparse growth of gray facial hair that didn’t quite fall into the category of a beard. Frequently during the trip, he drank from a canteen filled with an odorous alcoholic beverage that he kept on a chain that hung around his neck.
Fryx took a moment to feel an overwhelming wave of self-pity. He had thoroughly enjoyed his life as Garth’s silent rider, peeking out from his quiet meditations only occasionally for variety. Physically, his kind consisted of little more than two pounds of grayish ooze and prickly spines. All riders preferred the inner solitude of a chosen skald’s brain and nervous system to the harsh crude world of open elements. The interior of a human’s body was a shrine of purity compared to the external world of oxygen-breathing creatures.
“As an archaeologist, these people intrigue me,” said the driver, indicating the service man with a discrete gesture.
With an effort of concentration on the motor functions, Fryx swiveled Garth’s eyes and focused on the man servicing the car. As gross and unclean as all of the beings that inhabited the open world were, this man stood apart as a figure of unrelenting filth. A tallish man in the loose bags of the desolation peoples, he was broad only around the middle, where he had tied a brown sash smeared with black grease. His pink face was clearly diseased, eroded and scabbed like wood that has been randomly carved by the worm. His eyes were mercifully hidden beneath heavy, dust-coated goggles.
“Oh, but I’m forgetting,” said the driver, tugging at his scraggly beard and taking another swig from his canteen. “You’ve taken a vow of silence, haven’t you? I’m a proper star-fearing man, but I’m afraid I’m just not used to having a fellow like you around. I mean, skalds just don’t make it down into the Parched Spikes that often.”
Fryx ignored the prattling of the driver and scrutinized the service man who moved about the front of the car, poking and prodding at the exposed machinery. Slipping something from his sash that flashed metallically in the brilliant sunlight, the man leaned forward into the power compartment. Fryx directed Garth’s body to hunker forward. Uncaring, he allowed the eyes to stare protrudingly and let the jaw hang slack. A white thread of saliva slipped from his lips and turned instantly cold as it adhered to his chin.
The driver frowned a bit, then returned to his indulgent smile. “Of course, I know I’ve got you at a bit of a disadvantage with you being silent and all, but a man in the desert doesn’t get many chances to talk with anyone but himself, so please don’t be annoyed.”
He took a moment to fiddle with his low-brimmed desert hat, smoothing an imaginary crease while giving the skald a perplexed, sidelong glance. “Now take this fellow here, for instance. You’d think he’d be dying to talk to someone, but no-he’s all business even though there can’t be another customer within fifty miles or more. It’s just his way, I guess.”
Suddenly, the service man stood erect, triumphantly holding aloft a long narrow tube of some kind. He appeared at the window, dangling it in front of them for inspection. “This hose broke in your engine,” he explained simply. A fetid odor tainted the interior of the car. Green liquid dripped lazily from the open end of the hose.
“Oh dear,” said the driver, kneading his hairy chin with dusty fingers. “That’s from the front stabilizers, isn’t it? It wouldn’t be safe to drive any further until we have a new one. You don’t happen to have any hoses in stock, do you?”
The man leered in amusement at the concept and shook his diseased head. Fryx was suddenly alarmed. The dangling end of the hose was clean-edged and showed no sign of fraying. It had been cut, obviously. Then the service man spoke, and the fetid odor grew stronger. “We could send away for one. The next delivery flitter is due tomorrow morning.”
“Well, let’s order it then,” said the driver resignedly. He turned to the skald, taking another swig from the canteen. “Looks like we could be stuck here for a bit. Perhaps we should go inside with him and take the opportunity to get out of the heat while we wait.”
Behind his sun-goggles the skald’s eyes were even wider now, although this would have seemed an impossibility a minute before. Fryx worked Garth’s muscles, jerkily raising one hand to point at the hose. Was it not obvious that the man was a bandit? His throat made a rumbling croak, but he couldn’t afford to release the vocal cords. If he activated enough of Garth’s mind to permit speech, the human would have to be conscious and aware. If he allowed that, his control over the nervous system would be in jeopardy.
Fryx felt fear wash through him. He was facing the unimaginable indignity of exposure-possibly, and even more unthinkable: death. The stimuli of the outside world after so many years of quiet inner peace were too much. The urgency of his mission regarding the demons that stalked the heavens combined with these filthy thieving creatures of the hellish exterior world, and the final effect was simply overwhelming. His gelatinous mind shivered, causing his spines, planted deeply in the cerebral cortex, to jolt various neurons.
Garth’s body wheeled to the passenger door, fumbling with the levers. He thrashed convulsively, a wild bucking horse with a mad rider. Desperately Fryx tried to get out of the car, but he couldn’t control Garth’s motor responses closely enough to open the door. Lurching back the opposite direction he found that the driver had produced a gun and pointed it at him.
“You’ve got to be the craziest bastard I’ve ever robbed in this godforsaken desert!” He whistled in amazement at Garth’s alien demeanor. “Rolf, open the door for him, will you? Before he does something disgusting in my car.”
Fryx was beyond hearing and interpreting the primitive grunts and warblings of human speech. The world had narrowed to that black-barreled weapon that confronted him and the oblivion it represented. Contemplating his possible exposure to the open air and radiation, sensing the nearness of death, Fryx loosed a terrible scream, a long chilling shriek of mindless fear. The sound was inhuman in nature, and its passage made the skald’s throat rattle eerily, as though he was indeed already dead.
Garth was dreaming. Deep in the ocean of the subconscious, the glowing ember of his personality still glimmered, trapped in twisted memories and imagined fantasies. He dreamed that he was at his confirmation again, the ceremony that had elevated him from the lowly position of a shrine-sweep to the exalted status of a skald.
What he remembered best about the experience was the odd combination of terrible pain mixed with a sense of ultimate fulfillment. The rider had been extracted from the skull of a dying skald and placed into his shortly after completing his manhood rites. Although he was a bit young for the process, his mentors had decided he was the most fit of the current candidates to bear Fryx. He was very fortunate indeed to gain such an aged and wise rider, who was of great size for his kind. Fryx performed expertly, this being his fifth such mounting over nearly three centuries of life. The skalds marveled at the rider’s clean style. There was no hesitation, no shivering in the unfamiliar cold air of the external world, nor did he have to hunt for the appropriate opening.
With startling rapidity, a dollop of spiny gray jelly slid into young Garth’s nostrils. Quickly burrowing through the thin lining of the sinuses, Fryx took up residence in Garth’s cranium in less than a minute. Wrapping itself around the base of the brain, Fryx slipped thread-like nerves into the brainstem and tapped into an artery to feed.
For Garth it was the lancing of his nerves that hurt the most, even more than the bloody rip in his nasal passages. In fact, the pain had driven him into a frenzy, during which the hard, ready hands of his fellow skalds had firmly gripped him, lest he injure himself or the venerable Fryx.
Before the involuntary reactions had lessened and finally subsided all together as Fryx released chemicals through his spines to ease the young skald, Garth had been in a state of total panic. Thrashing wildly, eyes rolling and tongue gripped in bloody teeth, he had wanted nothing but to get away from the horrible pain in his head.
That feeling of mortal terror gripped him again now, reaching down deep into his dream and pulling him up to the distant surface of his mind.
The scream that Fryx had allowed to bubble up through Garth’s dry throat had been half-human.
