The Ancient Ones, page 12
“Well that’s a retief… I mean relief,” Nuts murmured. And we all sighed with gladness to see that he was all right, having broken his fall by landing atop his rider.
“Master!” the lad cried, prying the flattened gnome off the gleaming candy monolith.
One of the hooded ones threw off its heavy robe and cowl, revealing a costume that consisted of breathing tubes, pouches and other plumbing, obviously well-suited to this waterless, sugary terrain – a dessert-suit, I realized. Moreover, it clung to a well-proportioned, womanly form. Others down there followed her lead, likewise tossing aside their outerwear and clustering around the boy, consoling him for his loss… while using hands and eyes to get the measure of his muscular form. And yes, emphatically, all of them were of the same gender.
“You said femen?” I enquired of Coalshack.
“Yes. Long ago their ancestors came out here to dwell with the worms, in desert purity, far from the dangers and distractions of city life.”
“To escape zombies and vampires?”
“To escape men,” Commander Nomlin interjected, with sudden demmie insight. “And I have to admit it sounds tempting,” she added, casting me an arch look. And I felt sure that the mercurial demmie meant it. At that specific moment.
“Only then I have to ask,” she added, “if there are no men, how do they—”
“Reproduce?” Professor Katske was only too glad to explain. “Oh they do keep a few carefully-selected males around, accepting qualified volunteers from time to time. Give them special hero-training, in exchange for services. This young fellow is due for some interesting revelations.”
Under our gaze, the gathered femen stripped the youth of his profane and un-dessertly former garb, doing it with apparent relish, while their leader intoned:
“And we shall call him My’dibs, for he who crushes parasites by accident!” And the others nodded, chanting his new name three times.
Fu Tichi shook his head and restarted the engines. But as Cuspitui cast off, I overheard one of the femen warriors say to our erstwhile companion: “So, you wanna join us hitching a ride on a sugar worm?”
“You bet!” The kid answered, dropping the flattened gnome and fumbling hurriedly to don his own, broad-shouldered version of local attire.
I would soon come to wish that I had a dessert-suit of my own.
An hour later, while we plunged ever-deeper into the sparkling sand waste, a mini-tornado whipped past us, leaving behind clots of cottony, pink fibers, a sweet-sticky mess that Cuspitui had to clean off the masts and then her own fur, yowling curses that even my demmie-made ear nanos were too embarrassed to translate.
The backwash from that sugary dust-devil filled the air with so much choking powder that I felt dizzy.
“Are you all right?” asked Coalshack as I clutched a railing.
“The wind… a gust of dust…” I answered groggily. “I breathed in… a whole bunch.”
Stumbling over to the cargo hatch cover, I sat down and covered my lower face with a bandana, but it could only filter so much. The dizziness lingered – a sugar high that contained its own wild lows.
“So where are we going now?” I asked, gripping cogency with both hands.
“Same as before,” said Fu Tichi. “Obtainia.”
“Wherever that may be,” added Cuspitui with a querulous yowl. And I looked at her shaggy form, which now seemed more blurry… and much more feminine… than before.
“My machine – my finder – still needs more information,” Nuts pointed out. “It insists we must stop somewhere along the way.”
“Yes, from our heading I know where it’s guiding us,” said Fu Tichi. “To the Nameless Oasis and the city of the icons, near the far edge of the desert. We just find the structure bearing the right icon and we’re in business.”
“Right icon?” I asked, blinking, barely keeping it together. “Which icon is that?”
“The Necronom icon, of course,” he replied.
Part of me wanted to climb the rigging and howl at this crazy world. But things only got worse, as cogency seemed to unravel amid the ever-worsening sugar high.
I will do my best to relate what followed, as it flows from memory, though my recollection of this next stretch is as murky and dreamy as Coleridge rousing from an opium binge. I know some of what follows did not happen – it couldn’t have!
At least, I hope not.
It might have been an hour later – or a day or a year – that Nuts held up the finder and announced, as her voice seemed to warble in both tone and volume—
“It’s wriggling.”
Dunes glimmered in all directions, sugar facets reflecting dazzling glints of the setting sun, but soon some kind of watery, tree-lined lagoon appeared. And clumped along one shoreline of the oasis, buildings. Soon they surrounded us, many of them ruins, but a few evidently well-maintained. Each structure was shaped in its own unique, twisted fashion that hurt my already-burning eyes.
Icons, I recalled, wondering how much of what I saw was real, and which parts were the product of sucrose-delirium.
“It’s pointing to the Necronom icon,” said Nuts, holding up her demmie device.
“Well, then we’ve arrived,” said Coalshack. “Set this thing down.”
We settled amid what seemed a pair of agonized screams. I vaguely recall Captain Fu Tichi announce: “Serves ’em right for not getting out of the way. I’ll bet your ship does that all the time.”
“The Clever Gamble does not land on innocent bystanders,” I answered sternly, surprised that I could still make lucid speech.
“Well, not often, anyway,” added Commander Nomlin.
“Clever Gamble?” he repeated. “Sounds like a Cal’mari Casino.”
“So what is the name of this town?” asked Nuts.
“It’s the damnedest thing. I used to know.”
“Couldn’t you ask somebody?”
“I did,” he replied. “Everybody forgot. We all just call it the Nameless City.”
“So we’re going to the Necronom icon in the Nameless City where we will hopefully find a means of reaching Obtainia, which is not on any known map and populated by who knows what,” she summed-up. “Sounds harmless enough.”
A crowd started forming. I recall commenting that they didn’t much resemble humans or demmies or any of the phases of undead life I had met on this world.
“Look behind them,” noted Nuts. “They’ve all got odd tails.”
Coalshack shook his head. “Weird tails.”
“Okay, let’s disembark,” said Dr. Katske.
“Welcome to the Nameless City,” said one of the Necronoms.
“Captain Fu Tichi at your service.”
“Are you really?”
“Absolutely,” Fu Tichi assured him.
“Then scratch between my shoulder blades.”
“Sorry, that’s below my pay grade.”
“If you do, we’ll let you into the city.”
“And if I don’t?”
“We’ll always cherish the memory of your brief and tragic visit.”
Fu Tichi turned to me. “Montessori, don’t just stand there, wheezing like you’re about to faint. Scratch my dear friend’s back.”
“Between the shoulder blades,” added the Necronom.
Shuffling on wobbly legs, I began scratching while idly wondering if this creature represented a new race deserving all the proper protocols of First Contact… or if it was another form of undead afterlife on this strange world… or if I was simply imagining…
A wind off the desert kicked up again, filling the air with powdery white fog. Things got even more blurry at that point and I lost any grasp of time.
“To the left,” said a familiar voice that definitely didn’t belong to a native with a weird tail. “Now higher… higher. Ah, now you got it. That’s the spot.”
“Where I am?” I said groggily, blinking in the dimness. Time had passed in a blur. I could not tell how much.
“In your cabin. Aboard the ship.”
I could hear engines running. The faint smoochy-sound of the lovercraft in motion. We were under way again.
“And whose back am I scratching?”
“Go ahead, insult me,” and I now recognized the voice as belonging to Commander-Artificer Nomlin.
“What… happened?”
She patted the pillows and held up one end of the sheet. “Three guesses. You breathed in a pound or two of sugar and collapsed, so they carried you here.”
“But… What are you doing here?” I asked, growing gradually aware, with rising worry, that we both were… un-clothed.
“You want a blow-by-blow account?” she asked.
“I don’t think I could handle… that… in my current condition.”
“OK, I came by to check on you, you told me you were having nightmares about being attacked by Sugarworms and begged me to stay with you… you announced that Sugarworms loved ladies’ clothing and took mine off me to save me from their attentions… then insisted on showing me a trick you could do that you felt certain Sugarworms couldn’t do.” She paused in her demmie run-on to take a much needed breath. “I guess you must think they reproduce by budding. Anyway, then you—”
“I don’t want to hear any more.”
“Too bad,” she said with an eye-catching shrug. “Would’ve made great reading in your diary on cold nights when you’re all alone.”
“Just tell me that we’re not looking for the Necronom icon anymore and that we haven’t spoken to any trees in the past hour.”
Trees? Yes, there had been talking trees. Some time between when I blanked out and came-to. Talking. Trees. Though I hope it was a dream.
“Not at all! At least not in the past hour. You mean you remember none of it?”
“I wasn’t myself.”
“Hm, yes, that’s what I liked most. A different you.”
I frowned. We’re on a mission, you know.”
“And you suppose I forget that? You don’t suppose we got what we came for? Now I know I’m insulted.”
“Then we acquired—”
“The help we need to find our destination. And yes, you owe me an apology.”
“I sincerely regret any offense I might have caused,” I murmured, reaching out to shake her hand as a show of good will…
…and I wound up shaking my pillow.
In my cabin.
My blissfully empty cabin.
Another hallucination, then? I looked around to make sure I was alone, then shook my head vigorously, making a mental note that inhaling sugar did even stranger things to the system than drinking booze or snorting solar-bat manure. (Actually, I have never snorted solar-bat manure – at least that I can remember. But Assistant Vice Co-Associate Minister for Exploratory Science Suzie Gonzales, one of the sexiest (and smartest) human women I ever met, once fell face first into the stuff, and for the next three days she insisted she was a wild west stagecoach and that I was Billy the Kid. And I promised I would forget all about that. So never mind.)
Okay, so that last hallucination had been a bad one. Nuts, naked, in bed, with me. Not that she lacks charms, but. But the price to be paid, at some point in the future?… Agh.
As if grabbing after shreds of a fast-dissipating dream, I fought to make sense of our time in the Nameless City. There had been the creatures with weird tails. Probably. Then… talking trees? Followed by the vague, warped recollection of meeting a strange being who sat on a dazzling golden throne, whom others referred to as the ancient god… Thulu? And some kind of test that I passed – barely – using a toilet and an eight iron… culminating in some talking doors and a deranged little elf named… Karakal.
Wondering how much of it actually happened, I knew that it was less than all. Alas, with dire certainty, I also knew it was more than none.
Still woozy, I got to my feet and left the cabin to get some fresh air, making it maybe five meters before Cuspitui let out an amused yowl, pointing at me, causing me to look down. Whereupon I went back and got dressed, then re-emerged.
Stumbling to the rail, I saw with some relief that we had crossed onto higher ground featuring… well… ground. Actual dirt and trees and shrubs. I half wanted to leap down and taste them all! Behind us still glinted the painful dessert brightness. But as the dunes and sugarworms receded into distance, I made a vow never to go there again; no matter what happened up ahead, I was not coming back this way, even if it meant finding a long, long route around!
12.
Farther toward the bow, I saw that Nuts was using the finder while deep in conversation with a compact-looking Standard who held some weird-looking contraption of his own. He looked familiar, and a name floated upward.
Karakal.
“So… you’re real,” I commented, restraining myself from pinching the fellow, to be sure. When you live with demmies, you learn to constrain many impulses. “I hoped… I thought I dreamed all that.”
“Hmph,” replied Karakal, “You don’t seem bright enough to imagine half of what you saw in our town.”
“Um… huh?” I knew I had been insulted, but could not actually parse the diss.
“Anyway, you look much better with your pants on.”
“The hell he does,” said Nuts, giving me a friendly pinch. “You just have the wrong perspective.”
I felt a surge of dizziness. “You mean… that part… actually happened?”
Nuts grinned at me and licked her lips. “Need a reminder?” She gave me a much more intimate pinch. And I admit at that point I moaned in despair.
“What’s going on here?” demanded Coalshack. “Are you interfering again?”
“Again?” I blinked. “Interfering with what?”
“Navigation.”
“Then they know how to get to—”
“Obtainia. Yes. So let these two go back to work.”
Wanting no confrontation with the irritable cop, I drifted a few meters to one side, watching Nuts and Karakal consult their mysterious devices and compare notes, shouting directions to Fu Tichi and Cuspitui each time the finder executed another turn and click.
For some time we gained altitude as the lovercraft proved its worth at cross-country travel, hugging the ground as we rolled on over rocks and shrubberies, soon climbing at an angle no other vessel could have attempted, ascending toward a cleft barely visible between two mountains. I commented that this seemed the least likely course to anywhere.
Coalshack nervously cleaned and tightened the tensioning cords on his multi-function weapon. “That may be the point. Wherever we’re going and whatever we’re seeking, it was carefully hidden.”
Soon we entered a narrow pass. Though twisty, it had clearly once been chiseled through the folds between twin peaks. Cuspitui eyed the ridgelines, yowling unhappily:
“A perfect place for an ambush…”
Canyon echoes reverberated as we neared the top of the pass, our craft barely squeezing through in spots, and I shared Cuspitui’s worry. A single boulder, toppled either accidentally or on purpose from on high, could finish us.
“Hey, there’s something down there,” cried Fu Tichi from his elevated position at the tiller. He gestured ahead, so we all hurried to the forward railing. Sure enough, as our faithful craft crested the highest point and started to descend, a green valley came into view, completely enclosed by mountains. And there at the center, surrounded at ground level by a circle of tall trees, stood an enormous, glistening glass cube.
“Stop engines!” Fu Tichi shouted abruptly – as a monster stepped into the path, blocking a narrow point in the pass.
An impressive beast, its fur glistened rainbow highlights under the sun. A lion-like body and gaudy but useless-looking wings all led to a face much like that of a Standard or a human, though with fangs that would have made any Nomort or Lik’em proud. Commander Nomlin sighed in admiration… and I gave myself a skull slap for forgetting – even briefly – what kind of world this was.
“You know,” remarked Dr. Katske, “recalling legends from our revered past, I’d swear that thing is a sphinx.”
“That’s what I am!” thundered the monster.
“What, you had them here, too?” Nuts asked with a touch of awe in her voice. Before humanity contacted demmies and taught them science, they had a richly colorful mythology system that made our Greek or Chinese demonologies look like a soccer team lineup.
“Would you kindly step aside?” asked Fu Tichi. “Our passengers hired us to convey them to that glistening cube.”
“Nothing is ever that easy,” came the creature’s answer. “As you say, I am Sphinx. I demand riddles for passage. Answer correctly, and you may you pass.”
“Okay,” said Fu Tichi. “But no math.”
“And nothing about me,” added Nuts. She jerked a thumb in my direction. “I’m his weak spot.”
“Fair enough,” agreed Sphinx.
“Okay, shoot,” said Fu Tichi.
“Don’t you want a chance to live?”
“Poor choice of words,” I snapped, getting fed up. Sometimes you must assert yourself, to stay sane. “Ask your damn question!”
“Okay. No need to be tetchy.” The creature harrumphed, clearing its throat and milking the moment, almost like a demmie. Finally, the fearsome monster intoned:
“What has no feet…”
“No feet, gotcha,” Nuts murmured, taking notes.
“…or legs…”
“Or legs. Righto.”
“…just one arm and hand…”
“Okay. But are they connected, as a unit? Or are they separately—” Yelping slightly, she clammed up when my elbow connected sharply with a rib.
“…very little torso… and not much of a head?”
We all looked at each other, deciding by mute consensus to give Professor Katske the honor of re-stating the riddle.
“What has no feet… or legs…” he repeated, in a classroom voice. “…just one arm and hand… very little torso… and not much of a head? Is that correct?”
