The Ancient Ones, page 11
“Management,” I said.
One word can be more effective than twenty. Lorg considered, blinking rapidly. Then the hairy lycanthrope let his grip slacken.
“Oh. Yeah.” He looked left and right, nervously. “Guess I’m just irritable. Been constipated, lately.” He set me down. “Anyway, watch where you’re stomping, Standard. You could still find yourself on somebody’s menu.”
“Sure thing, Lorg,” I answered, straightening my clothes and nodding for Coalshack to hold back. “Till then, try adding fiber to your diet… and some mints.”
Joining Coalshack, I resumed weaving through the crowd, more carefully. “This way,” he said, eyeing me warily. I had been scanning the throng as we proceeded, and he clearly knew that I was considering all options. So I let him guide me through a shrouded entryway, rimmed with soft neon lights, into a dimly-lit bar.
A small band played onstage. The singer, who looked as if she had been sewn together from scrap parts, crooned a melody whose lyrics seemed to consist of many variations on the word “Uhn!” Still, there was something about her performance that made it alluring, instead of nauseating. Since coming to this planet, I had come to appreciate zombie musical harmonies. Moldy oldies. They kind of grow on you.
The others – Nuts and Dr. Katske – were already seated at a booth some distance from the stage, across from a pair of scruffy types. One of them was clearly a very tall were-creature of some sort. Not a wolfman. Maybe some lanky variety of Yeti. The other was a Standard humanoid, though tough-looking, with a three-day beard and a mean sidearm at his hip. By the time I approached, some kind of deal seemed to have been struck, because Katske pushed forward a bag that clinked with the unmistakable sound of coins, Then, he and the man clasped each others’ thumbs in the local equivalent of a handshake. Everybody stood.
“Montessori, Nomlin, this is Captain Fu Tichi,” said Coal Shack, making brisk introductions. “And his partner, Cuspitui. They’ll be taking us across the desert.”
The rough fellow looked me up and down, taking special interest in my teeth. Nuts displayed hers in a friendly smile that seemed to take him briefly aback. Still, however pointy her demmie dentition, she was clearly no vampire, and that seemed good enough. He answered with a wry, uneven grin of his own.
“Nice to meet you both. Any friends of Cat-ski and Cola Snack are acquaintances of mine.”
“That’s Coalshack,” the policeman growled, stepping closer, as if daring the mercenary to make an issue of it. Holding his ground, the captain seemed willing.
His furry were-companion let out a plaintive yowl, in a voice that seemed surprisingly whiny, for one so large. Somehow, my ear nanos made sense of it.
“Let us be off, before the bookies come to enforce our debts!”
“Bookies? I ain’t afraid of no bookies,” snapped Fu Tichi. But he relented. “Come quickly then, while there’s still daylight. To our ship!”
Ship? I thought, briefly allowing hope to spark. But no. He can’t mean that kind of ship. Something much more primitive, no doubt.
Soon, in the cavernous casino parking garage, I discovered just how primitive.
“It’s a lovercraft!” murmured my demmie colleague, as she hurried forward, running her hand along the streaked and stained hull, stretching about ten meters in length, by six in width. Low-slung, with a single-story cabin, it seemed to levitate, just above the ground. “I’ve never seen one so big,” she crooned. “They don’t even work on most worlds! Captain Tichi, how fast does it go?”
The grizzled pilot tossed our bags up to his hirsute comrade while Katske ascended a narrow boarding ramp, the old man carefully cradling the finder, out of sight beneath his cape.
“How fast? Get aboard, sweetfeet, and let me show you.”
Nuts sighed, suddenly happy, and hurried to comply. Though not before bumping the mercenary with a wide sway of her hip, accompanied by a coy smile.
Oh, boy, I thought. I hope we’re not in for trouble. At least not that kind.
At the top of the ramp, I took one last look around the garage. Nearby, a row of oversized transports ranged all the way from grungy barges to highly-polished land yachts. Then came rows of smaller coupes, sedans and hearses, leading finally to the underground back entrance of the Golden Palace, where imp-like valets in burgundy uniforms hopped about, parking vehicles or retrieving them, greedily accepting gratuities in the form of red disks that they popped into their mouths. One more thing about this world that I found curious, but probably would rather not learn about up-close.
Then I spotted a more familiar figure, standing to one side of the doorway. Someone tall and wide and hairy.
Lorg?
The werewolf was looking at me, making some kind of gesture – reaching into his ragged vest, repeatedly, as if urging me to do the same.
I did so—
—and my hand encountered a folded piece of paper.
Oh. I realized. Then our encounter was no accident. He must have slipped this in while lifting me… and I was too distracted to notice.
Cursing my stupidity, I made my way aft, making sure none of the others noticed. The captain and his assistant were casting off and revving engines. Katske and Coalshack shook thumbs with two other passengers – a young man armed with a shiny sword and a small creature who looked like a cross between a frog and some kind of lawn gnome.
I turned to open the letter. Some flecks of skin-colored substance fell out of the unfolded page. But the handwriting was fluid and quite pretty.
Sorry we had to run, leaving you in that alley.
CS was nosing about. He’s dangerous!
Took a while to find you with help from Lorg.
We have news! Located some of your friends.
Also, Ping awaits! Anxious to discuss matters.
It finished in a sweeping signature.
—Sully and Moulder.
When I next looked up, the ship was already in motion, heading toward a broad exit from the parking garage into fading daylight. Beyond lay a vast landscape of ravaged urban ruins, where the once-prosperous city formerly extended – now a wasteland extending to the horizon.
Glancing back at Lorg, I saw him joined by a svelte figure dressed in a bellboy uniform, and even at a distance I recognized one of the only friends I had made on this world – author of the note I clutched in my hand. But, as I got ready to leap over the rail – a risky drop, at this height and speed – I felt a familiar poke.
“You’re not thinkin’ of leaving us, are you doc?”
I whirled to face Coalshack. “You don’t need me anymore. You have Nuts and her finder. Let me go and good luck with your quest.”
The cop answered with a headshake, then a curt motion with his weapon. I could only glance back to give Sully and Lorg a resigned shrug, as the lovercraft cruised ahead, exiting between wide gates.
There was a tense moment as some ogre-like security guards gave us a once-over. Cuspitui yowled something about how Fu Tichi “should have let the bookies win…”
But the guards attention mostly aimed at a nearby picket line, where the casino’s regular zombie service staff marched – or shambled – back and forth, waving signs, pelting vehicles with garbage and stray bits of themselves. While I could not understand their moaning chants, my nanos translated placards, waved by weathered, crumbling hands.
CORPAMBULISTS DEMAND BETTER CONDITIONS!
FULL EMBALMING & DENTAL!
RESIDUALS ON RE-RUNS!
MORE BRAINS!
Jeers, taunts, scabs and small body parts rained upon the land barge while it rumbled by the demonstrators. We all had to duck—
—till the captain finally reached street-level and turned his ship onto a once-grand boulevard, now dusty and wind-blown. The noisy, shimmering pyramid of the Golden Palace fell behind us as we sped away from the still-lively – if not living – parts of Cal’mari, heading into long-abandoned precincts, beneath broken, eyeless towers left over from better days. Soon we raced toward the margins of the old metropolis, hurrying to make the safety of open desert before night fully fell.
11.
Our lovercraft flew low over white sands making soft smooching sounds, arousing sighs of electrified dust that climaxed with languid lightning discharges in our wake. A unique mode of travel that I might otherwise have found diverting. Alas though, the vessel was taking me ever-farther from where duty called – the city where my captain and crewmates had vanished.
Pondering the possibility of being stranded forever on a world where “civilization” had become a deathless-but-deadly cycle of predator and prey, I pulled out my canteen and took a swallow, then cursed. Back at the casino, I had meant to dump the water and fill it with local brew, intent on numbing my depression the old-fashioned way.
I walked to a railing and took a deep sigh.
“What’s the problem?” asked Commander-Artificer Nomlin.
“For starters? I wouldn’t recommend this water to a man dying of thirst.”
Nuts took my canteen and chugged. “Well, it’s wet, anyway,” she commented, wiping her mouth with her sleeve.
A deep breath of desert air made me blink in puzzlement, followed by a snort of sudden realization.
“What now?” asked Commander-Artificer Nomlin.
“You don’t smell that?”
“Smell what?”
“When I was just starting out – before becoming a galaxy-famous warrior and hero – I served time in the mess halls, like any other recruit. My specialty was baking dessert for three hundred men and women.”
“So?”
“That’s what this smells like!”
She frowned. “Like three hundred men and women?”
“No. Sugar.”
“Okay honey, what does it smell like?” Nuts sidled closer.
“No. I mean it smells like sugar!”
“Well, of course it does,” said Fu Tichi, our handsome, sardonic captain, from his station above and behind us, at the boat’s tiller.
Brushing my tunic, I brought some dust to my mouth.
“It’s sweet!”
“I’m sweet,” said Nuts. “That’s sand. And you’ve been too long without a woman.”
I shook my head vigorously.
Cuspitui, tall and shaggy, opened her mouth and emitted a burbling yowl that my ear nanos swiftly translated:
“You mean that you haven’t been too long without a woman? You’re the first man I met who ever said that.”
“I’m talking about the sand, dammit!” I growled.
“Okay, so what about the sand, dammit?” Nuts asked.
“The desert sands are made of sugar!”
“And you’re surprised?” demanded Coalshack. The Cal’mari policeman-vigilante approached us from the stern, where he had been keeping watch. “Then you truly are aliens. Can’t you eat the dessert on your home world?”
Blinking in surprise, I stammered. “Why would we leave twenty thousand square miles of sugar to explore the cold, forbidding stars?”
“So, you aliens want to invade us for our sugar?” Coalshack murmured in dour suspicion.
“That’s silly!” scoffed Fu Tichi. “You could have just taken some sugarworms with you.”
“Sugarworms?”
The captain pointed off to starboard. “Like that one.”
Sure enough, staring in that direction I soon spotted a sinuous shape slithering among the sparkling-frosted dunes, diving into one of them with a jaunty flick of its spoon-like tail. While the landscape offered few perspective clues, I estimated the creature’s length to be in excess of two hundred meters!
Squinting against the glare of granulated sweet-sand, I soon spotted another pair. One of them, just before diving, arched its rear and emitted a cloud of white powder which almost certainly had to be pure, granulated sucrose.
“It comes from their… defecation…?”
I took out a kerchief and wiped hard at my tongue and lips.
“Yes indeed,” Dr. Katske commented professorially, joining us at the rail. “City folk used to send out great big harvesters, back in the days of high population, before the Ultimate Crisis. Of course such a high-fecalorie diet led to obesity. And dental and dietary problems! The first wave of Normort-vampires could scarcely bite a neck without sucking in a carb overload. Which of course caused fang decay.”
“And Lik’ems got tusk cavities?” Envision Lorg and Besh chomping down on syrupy steaks. Oy.
Katske nodded. “Which led to more trouble, when inexperienced dentists used silver fillings. Which almost led to extinction of the profession in the infamous Night of the Novocanines…”
It was hard not to stare as a majestic worm reared out of the sands, not half a kilometer away. “They look awesome,” I admitted.
“They look delicious,” said Nuts, who had been complaining for weeks about missing fresh meat.
“There’s nothing quite like hunting and slaughtering a Sugarworm on a lovely sunny morning,” offered Fu Tichi.
“Why would you want to?” asked Coalshack.
“I take it you’re not into blood sports.”
“Our world is already awash in blood,” mumbled Coalshack. Like most city-swelling Standards, he was vegetarian – a fact I found ironic, since his stake-hurling weapon had at least two dozen notches from successful vampire and werewolf kills. But then again, who am I to judge? Take the inhabitants of Vega IV, who are all – of course – vegans. They consume only fruits and vegetables… much to the irritation of their neighbors, the contemplative Zen Apples of Vega III.
“Does the desert beg for mercy?” Fu Tichi asked Coalshack. “Does it tell you it’s got a wife and three kids and a mortgage?”
“No. What does that have to do with—”
“What about the Lik’ems that you hunt… sometimes they do, right?”
Coalshack ignored the dig. After considering for a long moment, he asked: “Does a Sugarworm?”
“Does a Sugarworm what?”
“Does a Sugarworm beg for mercy?”
“I guess you won’t know until you hunt one,” Fu Tichi teased, and I could tell the tension between them was climbing toward danger levels. Time to change the subject.
“I wonder if this world’s got a chocolate desert, hidden over on the dark side. That’d be a real export commodity.”
“What is… chocolate?” Cuspitui asked in a yowl that sounded eager.
“Of course, you’ve never tasted Earth’s greatest delicacy and trade commodity. Well, that will be just one of the great advances and life improvements from relations with the Federated Alliance of Worlds.”
It was all I had left – talking this band of revenge-obsessed Standards into looking at the bigger picture. If they could be persuaded to seek First Contact and membership in the FAW, then Commander Nomlin and I might get access to materials to build a subspace transmitter.
Nuts eagerly took up her end of the sales pitch. “Great idea! Only it gets better. Perhaps with some advanced bio-engineering, we could get sugarworms to poop a wide variety of delicacies! Chocolate for starters. But then strawberry, vanilla, flan, starfruit, tapioca…”
From just her wistful tone – and the line of drool forming at the corner of her demmie mouth – she was winning over Katske and Cuspitui better than I could. Even Coalshack, clearly despite himself, leaned in, listening eagerly. But at length Nuts finished her long list of delightful flavors and conversation eventually lapsed. Hours slowly passed as we thrummed across endless stretches of what Katske insisted should be called the Great Sugarfrosted Dessert.
Finally, with the sun past zenith, Captain Fu Tichi announced:
“We have arrived.”
Looking around, at first I saw nothing but treeless emptiness.
“Arrived… where?”
“At our rendezvous – the Big Rock Candy Boulder. Engines off!”
Kissing the terrain ever-more slowly, our lovercraft came to nibbling rest next to a gleaming hillock that – unlike the surrounding dunes – seemed to be made of one massive, diamondlike crystal. A cluster of figures stood there, shrouded in hooded black robes.
“Femen,” Coalshack said, disapprovingly, fingering his weapon as if expecting trouble from the dark-clad, desert dwellers, below.
“We’re at the appointed place and the greeting party is here,” Fu Tichi finished. “Passengers disembark!”
At first I worried he meant to dump me and Nuts and Katske in the middle of this desert waste, with those ominous beings. But then a pair approached us from the bow of the ship – the two I briefly met, upon coming aboard – a blonde young man in an off-white karate robe, whose shimmering sword hung from one hip, giving off a faint humming sound and whiffs of ozone. He was accompanied by a tiny, shriveled, gnomelike being, who rode upon the boy’s back, steering him by clutching both ears.
“Will you turn that damned thing off?” Fu Tichi demanded, as the sword accidentally burned through several ropes and guy wires, threatening to topple the main mast.
“Oops, sorry sir,” the lad apologized and flicked a switch, causing the blade to vanish into the sword’s handle. The little gnome tossed a small bag to Fu Tichi – it jingled payment for their passage – and urged his steed toward the gangway.
“Aw, do I haveta go down there?” The teen whined.
“To train for your destiny!” The rider insisted, digging in with teensy spurs. “To become a great unwitting tool… I mean master of the Puissance! To learn infinitive eloquence. To learn yodeling, also. To learn how to nag someone unhelpfully, even after-death. To boldly go—”
“Yeah yeah,” Fu Tichi interrupted. “Watch your step, kid. You might trip and… oops.”
With a shriek, the boy toppled over the side. We all hurried to look down.
