Bayley, Barrington J - Novel 10 (12 page)

 
          
Pout
was only partly human. Sexually his libido was vague. A woman, various female
apes, were all capable of arousing him, but to what end was blurry in his mind.
His sense of the erotic had, however, found its object.

 
          
He
brought out the
zen
gun from where he kept it in his bib,
chuckling inanely in his throat. He cradled it to his cheek, crooning.

 
          
' I
can maim and I can
kill With my zen gun."

 
          
So
ran the refrain that passed through his mind whenever he took the gun in his
hand. He had learned many tricks with it by now. It did not have to kill every
time it fired. Its power was variable. It could just cripple—or simply hurt.

 
          
Pout
liked it when it hurt.

 
          
He
had set the studs for pain. He pointed the gun. He squeezed the trigger stud.
He did not have to aim with any accuracy. His thoughts did the targeting; he
had learned that long ago.

 
          
The
pink stitching wavered leisurely through the air. It entered the window,
sparked on the girl's breasts.
First the left breast, then
the right breast, then the left breast . . . prodding at the nipples.

 
          
The
girl doubled up, her mouth agape in a soundless grimace of agony, clutching at
herself, hitting at her breasts as if she could strike off the pain. But she
could not strike it off. Pout kept pointing the gun, directing the stitches
with his mind. Left breast, right breast . . .

 
          
His
sparse pelt became damp. Unlike other primates, Nascimento's chimera had both
sweat glands and fur.

 
          
At
last she managed to get her breath long enough to scream, and in a minute other
people rushed into the room. Pout slid back down the bank, put away his gun,
and began to lope towards the horizon, keeping low and hiding
himself
behind the tall tufts of coarse grass.

 
          
Once
he paused. He thought he saw the glimmerings of a falling star in the sky
overhead, but then it turned into a white dot which drifted down and finally
disappeared.

 
          
When
he was out of sight of the village he slowed his pace. It was an hour before he
returned to his group of followers. Apart from the
kosho,
who as usual sat cross-legged off by himself, they were
gathered round a wood fire.

 
          
It
was not yet dark, and Pout saw straight away that a stranger sat among his half
dozen slaves. He bared his teeth briefly, a reflex of uncertainty, and put his
hand to his bib to feel the comforting stock of his gun.

 
          
At
his approach, they rose. The stranger was staring at him. It was a female, a
young woman with a pale, blunt face and black cropped hair. She had a restless,
energetic way of moving, a way of looking at one directly, that disconcerted
him a little. She wore a form-hugging body garment of sheened black and silver,
calf-high black boots, and a wide waist belt that held, among other things,
what looked like a scangun. Although bare-headed, she carried a transparent
globe helmet in one hand.

 
          
"You're
Pout," she said at once, not waiting for him to speak.

 
          
Lacey,
the prairie bum who, after the
kosho
and
the boy had been Pout's first convert, sidled close to Pout and spoke softly in
his humble, apologetic way. "She just came in," he mumbled.
"Some kinda shipwreck . . . dropped outa the sky in an escape capsule. She
gave us some grub." He held out his hand, offering a stick of emergency
rations. Pout took it, sniffed,
then
bit. It was
chewy, if not too appetising. He gulped it down,
then
licked his fingers.

 
          
The
girl, Hesper Positana, gazed at him with distaste. Her survival egg had come
down a couple of miles away. She had been trying to make for what looked like
some inhabited structures on a plain to the west, but hadn't quite made it—the
rotors had no power of their own but came down sycamore-seed style, using the
early part of the drop to store energy in a flywheel. You were supposed to use
this for a few miles of powered flight at a few thousand feet high.

 
          
In
the end, when she started to lose height, she had spotted the smoke from the
campfire. She was almost beginning to wish she hadn't, because she had landed
among a bunch of very odd people. First there was Lacey, some sort of
psychological inadequate who she gathered was in the habit of wandering the
grasslands that dominated this part of the planet, living off any small animals
he could trap. Of the others, four seemed to be brothers who had been thrown
out of their community for unspecified crimes, and were now looking for
somewhere else to live. Only the boy, Sinbiane, appeared to be normal.

 
          
Most
peculiar of all was the one who sat by himself in the gathering dark. He was a
kosho.
Very vaguely, she had heard
something about
koshos,
but had never
expected to see one.

 
          
Lacey
had told her their leader was a chimeric ape called Pout. They had spoken of
him with a sort of grumbling admiration, all except Sinbiane, who had said
openly to her: "Pout is a bad creature, lady. You should go away. He holds
these people under subjection with his gun."

           
"I have a gun," Hesper had
said, patting her holster.

 
          
"The
kosho'
s got lots of guns,
though," one of the brothers had said. "Throw tubes, too."

 
          
Just
then Pout himself had turned up, and she couldn't understand how even these
people—like Lacey, the brothers didn't strike her as being any too bright—could
allow themselves to be dominated by him. The chimera stared at her, large eyes
blinking.

 
          
"You
come off a spaceship?"

 
          
"Yes
. '

 
          
"From another world?"

 
          
"That's
right."

 
          
The
thought excited Pout. She prompted the same feelings in him the girl in the
village had. He allowed his eyes to rove over her, and then to fix on her
breasts. He imagined the stitches of the
zen
gun
playing with them, her body writhing. His jaw became slack.

 
          
Hesper
put a hand on her hip, and nodded westward. "There are some big towers or
buildings or something in that direction. I'm making for them."

 
          
"Cities.
We are going there. You want to join us? First
you give me that." He pointed to the scangun on her belt.

 
          
She
took a step back.
"Oh no you don't.
That's
mine."

 
          
"All right."
Pout gestured to the horizon.
"Off you go, then.
On your own."

 
          
"Okay,
I will." Hesper turned and pushed her way through the group to stalk away
from the camp. She kept a wary eye on the chimera, but did not see him give a
signal to one of the brothers. Before she had got very far she stopped, gasped,
and whirled round, her hand on her empty gun holster.

 
          
"How
did you
do
that?" she screeched
frustratedly to the brother as he tossed the scangun to a delighted Pout. She
hadn't felt anything.
Only when she put her hand on the
holster out of concern for what the chimera might do had she discovered the
flap was unfastened and the weapon gone.

 
          
"It's
our skill, lady. It's what we do."
The brother, a youth
in his early twenties, smiled broadly.

 
          
"Pickpockets,"
she murmured. She stood nonplussed, while Pout crooned and chuckled over his
new acquisition. Though it was but a toy compared with the
zen
gun, he had always wanted one.

 
          
He
knew something about how to make it work. A modern scangun fired a needle-beam
of coherent light which was refracted through an oscillating prism to scan a
six foot by two foot rectangle—or whatever size of target it was set for. With
a scanning density of a thousand lines per inch, the effect was more or less
total disintegration. Pout raised the gun and peered at the little screen that
displayed whatever the muzzle was pointed at. His thumb moved a grooved wheel
by the side of the screen. That was the focusing ring: when the target became
unblurred and just filled the screen, you were ready to fire.

 
          
He
pointed it at a twisted tree that stood on a knoll a little further off. Under
his thumb, the tree shrank until its branches just brushed the edges of the
screen and the picture became sharp. Pout pressed the firing stud. The brief
blue ray was an odd sight: not parallel, like ordinary coherent light, but
divergent because of the way it scanned.

 
          
The
tree erupted momentarily and disappeared in a crackle of smoke and drifting
ash.

 
          
Pout
whooped for joy.

 
          
Hesper
walked slowly back into the light of the campfire and stood boldly before him.
"Are you going to give me my gun back?" she asked wearily.

 
          
He
eyed her. "Why don't you stay with us, lady? Travel to the plain cities
with us. We'll be good to you. Lacey knows how to catch animals for food. Do
you know how to catch animals? You haven't got enough eating sticks to last
long. Better not to be alone."

 
          
She
hesitated, confused. She couldn't fathom this set-up. But, apart from the
half-animal, they seemed harmless—and even Pout hadn't threatened her.

 
          
She
needed to reach a town of some kind before she could get proper bearings and
find out what to do next. The ape was right: it was probably better to have
company, especially now she was unarmed.

 
          
"All
right," she sighed, "I'll stay. But don't get any ideas, ape."

 
          
She
helped gather more firewood for the night,
then
settled down, taking care to put a piece of ground between herself and the
others—especially Pout. The repulsiveness of the creature was coming home to
her, as she watched him prowl around the camp, and saw how the others cringed
in his presence; all apart from the boy, that was.

 
          
Before
falling asleep, she spent some while staring at the sky. This planet's sky was
clear, and the stars shone fairly brightly. She thought of the battle that had
taken place there, in space's vastness, and in which she had taken part. It all
seemed so remote from here.

 
          
She
didn't even know this planet's name, she reminded herself. What did it matter?
There were so many planets. Suddenly she felt very, very tired (she had been
awake about forty hours), and her eyes closed.

 
          
For
Pout, too, sleep was preluded by daydreams. He thought about the girl not far
away. He would like to be able to fondle such a girl, to prod with his fingers
where the
zen
stitches prodded. And so he would, he
promised himself.

 
          
His
little band was growing, he told himself warmly. All thanks to the
zen
gun. It wasn't just what it could do to maim and kill,
he realized. It was its mental ability. While he had the gun it seemed to
magnify his presence; people, respected him.

 
          
His
chief hold over his followers, however, was still fear. He had deliberately
refrained from instilling that fear in the girl—for tonight. Pout had an
instinctive understanding of the skill of dominance: first the girl had to grow
used to him, to develop her own feelings for him, for or against. That way the
relationship, when it came, would be binding.