To the Galactic Rim: The John Grimes Saga (26 page)

Marlene said, “I like a man who likes
real
food.”

Grimes said, “I like a woman who likes
real
food.”

The robot Karl filled their coffee cups, offered a box of Panatellas to the Princess, who selected one carefully, and then to Grimes, who took the first one to hand. And then—it was a delightfully outré touch —a jet of intense white flame appeared at the end of Karl’s right index finger. He carefully lit the Princess’s cigar, and then the spaceman’s.

“The brandy, Karl,” said Marlene, through a cloud of fragrant smoke.

“The Napoleon, Your Highness? “

“You know as well as I do that it has no more connection with the Emperor of the French than . . . than Lieutenant Grimes has. But . . . Oh, very well, then. The Napoleon.”

To Grimes it was just brandy, but he had no cause for complaint.

“And what would you like to do now?” asked the Princess.

Grimes did know but could not muster up the courage to state his desire.

“Oh, yes,” said the girl after an uncomfortable pause. “I told you, I think, that I am a member of the Committee of Management. Would you be interested in finding out what that entails? “

“Yes . . .” answered Grimes dubiously.

Chapter 18

Before
its fantastically costly dismantling and transportation Schloss Stolzberg had been well equipped with what, in the Middle Ages, were regarded as finest modern conveniences. Now not even a hole in the ground somewhere in Germany marked the site of these dungeons and torture chambers; where the Castle had once brooded stood a towering block of apartments. But still there were subterranean galleries and spaces: wine cellars, storerooms, and the Monitor Vault.

“It is our obligation as members of the Committee of Management,” explained the Princess, “to watch. And we, even during our tenure of office, know that we can be watched . . .”

“You mean that there’s no privacy?” asked Grimes, shocked.

“I suppose that you could put it that way.”

“But . . . But I thought that this was a society, of . . . aristocratic anarchists.”

“That’s a good way of putting it, John. And a true way.” She lay back in the chair set before the huge screen, relaxed, but with her fine features thoughtful. “But, can’t you see?, neither the aristocrat nor the anarchist suffers from false shame. I can conceive of situations in which a petty bourgeois such as yourself would be agonizingly embarrassed if he knew that he was being watched. During copulation, for example or defecation. But
we . . .”
In spite of her almost supine position she managed a delicate shrug. “But
we . . .
We
know
that it doesn’t matter.”

“But why this body of elected, I suppose that you are elected, Big Brothers? And Big Sisters.”

“El Dorado,” she told him, “could be a Paradise. But there are snakes in every Eden. When such a snake is found, he is placed aboard a small, one-man spacecraft, with whatever personal possessions he can pack into two suitcases, and a Universal Letter of Credit that will allow him sufficient funds to make a fresh start elsewhere. He is then sent into exile.”

“Have there been many such cases?”

“Since the foundation of the colony, several. About a dozen.”

“I’m surprised that none of these deportees has talked. Their stories, sold to newspapers and magazines throughout the Galaxy, would bring in enough to maintain them in luxury for the rest of their lives.”

She smiled. “Somebody must
know
what happens, but quite a few of us suspect. After all, not much engineering skill would be required to convert a perfectly functioning ship into a perfectly functioning time bomb.”

“I suppose not. But tell me, Marlene, just what does anybody have to do to get slung off this, insofar as you all are concerned, perfect world?”

“There was one man who still lusted for power, direct, personal power. Working in secret he tried to form a Party, with himself as Leader, of course, on the same lines as the old Fascist and Communist Parties. . . .” She almost whispered, “I was lucky not to have been involved. Anyhow,
he
went. And there was another man . . . We still have the record. I’ll show you.”

She made a slight gesture with her right hand. There was the slightest of humming noises, a hesitant click, and then misty forms and colors swirled in the depths of the big screen, slowly coalesced. And there was sound, too, a woman’s voice screaming,
“No! Please! No!”

Horrified, yet obsessed by a fascination of which he was afterwards bitterly ashamed, Grimes stared at the picture. It showed the interior of a cellar, and there was a naked girl, her body dreadfully elongated, stretched out on a rack, and a pale, fat slug of a man, stripped to the waist, in the act of taking a white-hot iron from a glowing brazier.

Suddenly there was an ingress of men and women, all of them armed, one of them carrying a bell-mouthed pistol like the ones Grimes had seen in Marlene’s room. The report, when it was fired, was no more than a soft
chuff.
At once the torturer was trapped, enmeshed in a net of metal strands that seemed to be alive, that working with a sort of mechanical intelligence bound his hands and arms and legs and feet, swiftly immobilizing him. He fell against his own brazier, and the others left him there while they attended to his victim. Grimes could see the smoke and the steam that rose from his burning body, could hear his wordless screams (until the net somehow gagged him), thought (although this could have been imagination) that he could smell charred flesh.

The screen went blank.

“And who was that?” asked Grimes, with feeble, cheap humor. “The Marquis de Sade?”

“No. Oddly enough, a Mr. Jones from New Detroit.”

“And did he . . . die?”

“Probably. But not on El Dorado.”

“And how did you suspect?”

“Oh, we
knew.
But his first victims were collaborators more than martyrs, and he did them no permanent damage. And that girl, for example, was experiencing nothing worse (or better?) than a mild, sexually stimulating whipping. However, the Monitor sees all, knows all, and gave the alarm, but on the rare occasions that arrests are necessary we prefer that they be made by ourselves, not by robots.”

“But if your Monitor is so highly efficient, why the human Big Brothers?”

“We monitor the Monitor. That first man I told you about, the would-be dictator, almost succeeded in subverting it.”

“I’m not sure that I’d like to live here, Marlene.”

“I’m not sure that we’d have you, John, at least not until you’ve made your first billion or produced cast-iron documentary evidence of a family tree going back to Adam. Or both.” But the words were spoken without malice. “And now, John, would you like to see how your lords and masters are behaving themselves?”

“No,” he should have said.

“They are guests at the Duchess of Leckhampton’s masked ball—the Captain and Surgeon Commander Passifern.”

“That sounds innocuous enough,” he said, disappointed.

Again there was the languid wave of her slim hand, again there was the coalescing swirl of light and form and color. Again there was sound, distorted at first, that reminded Grimes of Ravel’s
Waltz Dream.
But it was not Ravel that poured from the concealed speakers when the picture clarified; it was Strauss, rich, creamy, sensual, unbearably sweet, and to it the dancers swayed and glided over the wide, wide expanse of mirror floor, and in the background there was red plush and gilt, and overhead blazed and sparkled the crystalline electroliers.

Grimes stared, shocked, incredulous.

Crinolines and hussars’ uniforms would have added the final touch but not, relieved (accentuated) only by masks and sandals and jewellery, nudity.

And yet . . .

He shifted uneasily in his seat, acutely conscious of his telltale ears. He muttered, “Surely not the Old Man and the Chief Quack . . .”

And then, as though the Monitor had heard his words (perhaps it had), he was looking directly at Captain Daintree and Commander Passifern. The two officers were not among the naked dancers. They were seated at a table against the wall, stiff and incongruous in their dress uniforms. With them was a lady, elderly, elaborately clothed, one of the few people on this world of perpetual youth and near immortality showing her age and not ashamed of it. There was a silver ice bucket, bedewed with condensation; there were three goblets in which the wine sparkled.

Fascinated, Grimes stared at the faces of his superiors. Daintree—he would—was playing the part of the disapproving puritan, his mouth set in a grim line. But his eyes betrayed him, flickering avidly, almost in time to the music, as the nude men and women swirled past. Passifern was more honest, was making no pretence. A shiny film of perspiration covered his plump features. There was more than a suggestion of slobber about his thick lips.

“Your Grace,” he muttered, “I . . . I almost wish that I could join them.”

The old lady smiled, tapped the Doctor on the arm with her fan. “Naughty, naughty, Commander. You may look but you mustn’t touch.”

“I wish that I could . . .” sighed Passifern, while Daintree glared at him.

The scene shifted again to an overall view of the ballroom. The scene shifted and, once more, the music seemed to Grimes to carry the subtle discordancies of Ravel’s distortion of the traditional Viennese waltz.

The scene faded.

“Decadent,” whispered Grimes to himself. “Decadent.
”

“Do you think so, John?” asked the Princess. She answered herself, “Yes, I suppose that it is. But erotic stimulation carried to extremes is one of the ways that we have tried to deal with our . . . problem. And there are other ways . . .”

Although the screen was still dark, from the speakers drifted a throb and grumble of little drums. Gradually there was light, faint at first then flaring to brilliant reds and oranges. It came from a fire and from torches held aloft by white-robed men and women. It grew steadily brighter, illuminating the clearing in the forest, in the jungle, rather. It shone on the altar, on the squatting, naked drummers, on the rough-hewn wooden cross that stood behind the altar, its arms thrust through the sleeves of a ragged black coat, a band of white cloth, like a clerical collar, where a human neck would have been, the whole surmounted by a battered black hat.

Grimes was an agnostic, but this apparent blasphemy shocked him. He turned to look at the girl. “John!” she whispered, “if you could only see your face! That cross is the symbol of a religion at least as valid as any of the others. It represents Baron Samedi, the Lord of Graveyards. But watch!”

A huge man, black and glistening, was bowing before the altar, before the . . . the idol? He was bowing low before the altar and the frightening effigy of Baron Samedi. He straightened, and Grimes saw that he carried a long, gleaming knife in his right hand. He turned to face the celebrants. His eyes and his teeth were very white in his ebony face. Grimes recognized him, saw that it was the Hereditary Chief Lobenga. Lobenga, the exile from New Katanga, the dabbler in black magic, in voodoo.

The enormous Negro called, his voice a resonant baritone, “De woman! Bring out de woman! Prepare de sacrifice!”

“The woman!” a chorus of voices echoed him. “The woman!”

And while the drums throbbed and muttered, a figure, wrapped in an all-enveloping black cloak and hood, was led to the altar by four of the white-robed worshippers. Their clothing made it impossible for Grimes to determine their sex, but he thought that two of them were men, two of them women. Lobenga faced the victim, towering over her. She seemed to cringe. His left hand went out to her throat, did something, and as the stuttering of the drums rose to a staccato roar, her cloak fell away from her. Beneath it she was naked, her flesh gleaming golden in the fire-lit darkness, her hair reflecting the ruddy flames.

She did not resist. As Lobenga moved to a position directly behind the altar, between it and the cross, she allowed herself to be led forward and then, quite willingly it seemed, lay down upon the dark, gold-embroidered altar cloth. She was beautiful of face, her body perfectly formed. Even in this supine posture her breasts did not sag. She was young, or was she? On this world, thought Grimes, she could be any age at all.

Lobenga had raised his knife. Above the now-muted drums rose the voices of the communicants. “The sacrifice! The sacrifice!”

Grimes was half out of his seat. “Marlene! What’s your bloody Monitor doing about it? What are
you
doing?”

“Be quiet, damn you!” she snarled.

“The sacrifice!” cried the people on the screen.

And those about the altar laid hands upon the girl, one to each ankle, one to each-wrist, spread-eagling her.

“The sacrifice!”

“De white goat!” shouted Lobenga, knife upraised.

The white goat . . . the goat without horns . . .

“Marlene!” Grimes’ hand was on her arm. “Marlene, we must
do
something. Now. Before it’s too late.”

She shook him off. “Be quiet!”

And suddenly there
was
a white goat, bleating, struggling. Two men threw the animal on its side to the ground, grasping its feet, lifting it. They set it down on the girl’s naked body, its back to her breasts and belly, its head between her legs. The drums throbbed softly, insistently. The priest’s knife swept down; the animal’s cries ceased in mid-bleat, although its now released limbs kicked spasmodically. The girl, free herself from restraining hands, held the dying body to her.

The drums were clamorous now, ecstatic, yet maintaining a compelling rhythm. All over the clearing men and women were throwing aside their white robes, had begun to dance, to prance, rather, and there was no doubt as to what the outcome would be. Lobenga had lifted the blood-spattered woman off the altar, was carrying her into the darkness. The way that her arms were twined about his neck was proof of her willingness.