I rolled to my feet, clutching it tight. I’d worked for this moment all my life—millions would be watching on vid, tens of thousands awaited me just beyond that curtain at the end of the monitor-lined corridor, beyond that broken-down dancebot half-blocking the way. The pounding of the music surged louder in my ears. Time for my entrance—why was the curtain still down?
But then it opened, and I saw another dancebot between me and the stage. Exultantly I dashed forward, leaped over the broken ‘bot and reached for the second, but it turned and spun away from me, out into the bright stage lights.
The crowd roared, but I was furious. A malfunctioning ‘bot, tonight of all nights—Marcel would hear about this! I dashed after it, stringsynth loose in my hand, singing, but the ‘bot kept moving away from me, staggering, programming obviously bugging out. The roar of the crowd turned to boos, and then to laughter—and in a rage I flung the stringsynth at the dancebot.
It struck the machine squarely in the head in a shower of sparks and smoke. The ‘bot froze, then toppled with a grinding, ear-splitting shriek of tortured metal.
The music still pounded around me, and so I raced forward and snatched up the stringsynth again. Another dancebot appeared in front of me, as obstructive as the previous one. Had they all crashed at once? My anger swelled again, and I reared back to throw the stringsynth, but something grabbed my arm from behind and shrieked in my ear.
The sound rang my head like a bell, the echoes resolving slowly into words, “Kit, no!”
For an instant, just an instant, the stage, the dancebots and the music faded away, and I saw, as dimly as if it were a bad holoprojection, the corridor outside the cargo module. The big Hydra stood in front of me like the Dealer had before, inert, collapsed. Behind him cowered Rain. Meta had seized my arm, and in my hand I held, not a stringsynth, but, wriggling and hissing, the horrible creature that had bitten me.
Rain! She didn’t know—he was in league with the Dealer—I struggled to pull free of her grasp, to throw the monster at Rain as I’d started to, but it shifted in my hand and lunged instead at Meta and in horror I broke loose and threw it against the wall with all my strength. It hit with a solid crunching sound and slid to the floor, leaving behind a green, glistening streak.
But I couldn’t hold on to reality against the strength of the venom racing through my veins. The corridor blew away like smoke in a hurricane, returning me to the dark stage and the pounding music. I dashed forward, shouldering past the dancebot that I no longer remembered as Rain, and burst onto a huge stage. Light exploded around me and I screamed as flaming daggers lanced into my head through my eyes, through my ears, through my mouth. My body seemed bathed in acid, eating away my skin, stripping me down to the bone. Still screaming, I staggered back to my feet and ran, trying to outrun the agony.
I left the stage behind and ran through darkness. Nightmare figures loomed before me: Paris Paradise, half his head blown away by a police bullet, babbling, “I told you so, I told you so,” through the bloody ruin of his mouth; Meta, lunging at me, hands curled to tear out my eyes. I dodged them both and ran on.
Marcel dropped from the ceiling in front of me, his chest covered with blood from the knife wounds that had killed him, his eyes blank and dead. I pushed him aside, sobbing with horror and pain, but he grabbed my ankle and almost pulled me down. I screamed and kicked him and he let go, and again I ran on.
But my pain waxed, growing worse, far worse, and then suddenly I saw movement ahead—tentacles, thousands of disembodied red-orange tentacles, filling the corridor, dropping from the ceiling, slithering toward me. I turned to run the other way and saw more tentacles, an army of them, some of them ending in the purple, slit-pupilled Hydran eyes, glittering and cold. They moved slowly, but there were so many—I couldn’t escape them all!
Or maybe I could have, if not for the pain. But when I tried to dash to freedom, agony hit me like a riot club thudding into my gut. I doubled over, gasping, and the tentacles had me, coiling around my arms and legs and neck and body, dragging me down, though I thrashed and screamed till my throat bled.
From nowhere another of the monsters from the cages appeared, and opened its horrible mouth, and once more I felt fangs sink into my arm. Numbness seized me. I couldn’t move. The creature vanished, and the tentacles uncoiled and assembled themselves into a complete Hydra—Rain, standing over me with a hypodermic.
Meta appeared beside him, looking down. Betrayed! She’d joined forces with Rain, she’d sold me out...I wanted to howl curses at her, but I couldn’t open my mouth.
“What else can we do?” Meta boomed in an incongruous bass.
“I can think of only one thing,” said Rain, his voice even deeper and slower. “The time pocket.”
No! Paul Jerez, frozen forever—Paris Paradise, crazed and ancient at nineteen—how could I have thought Meta was my friend? Streetsense had been right. Don’t make friends. Don’t trust people. Look after yourself. I’d trusted her, and she...she...
The numbness gripped me tighter, and vision faded. I wandered through a barren land of flat gray rock and flat gray skies and cold, skin-drenching rain, a land where nothing changed...until, hours or days or even years later, it began to grow dark.
Nightfall, I thought. I can sleep. I can escape the pain—distant, muffled, but still there, tormenting me. I can rest...
But some spark within me, the spark that had driven me out of the orphanage to begin with, maybe, blazed up against the darkness. A ragged scarecrow figure appeared, carrying a battered stringsynth. The face, blurred at first, came into focus.
I stared at myself, at Kit, as I had been before Sensation Singles’ computers gave birth to Andy Nebula. “Not rest, Nebula,” he snarled at me. “Death. That’s what’s down this road.”
“Rest,” I insisted. I tried to push past, but he pushed back, hard, and unslung the stringsynth, holding it like a club.
“Death!” Kit swung the stringsynth at me, forcing me to stagger back. “That’s the easy way out, Nebula, and I won’t let you take it. You do, and The Dealer wins. Qualls wins. Meta and Rain win. And I don’t owe them any favors.”
“The Dealer’s dead.”
“So why are you in such a hurry to join him?” He jabbed me in the chest with the stringsynth, then pushed, hard, sending me sprawling back on my butt. I scrambled up, feeling anger, feeling, in fact, the first emotion I had felt since I came to this gray land. The sky grew a little bit lighter.
Kit came at me again, shoved me down, flat on my back, and planted a foot on my chest. “Coward,” he said contemptuously. “No guts.” He leaned over and glared down at me. “Go on, then. Die. It’s what you deserve, streetslime.” He spat in my face. “You’re nothing. You’ve always been a nothing!”
“I’m a musician! That’s not a nothing.”
“You? Caterwauling, shrieking—you call that music? People paid you just so you’d shut up, you useless piece of—”
My smoldering anger exploded into blood-boiling rage. I lunged upward. My fingers closed on his throat. I could feel his pulse pounding under my thumbs—and then he melted away, along with the mist and the darkness and the flat gray plain, and I found myself upright in a bed, reaching out with my hands, wires trailing from my head and chest, alarms going off all around me, and half a dozen people staring at me.
Somebody was screaming. I closed my mouth, and the sound stopped. The room spun around me, I felt weak as a naked baby rat, and I hurt—all over, I hurt—but I lived. I lived!
I lay back and took deep breaths of air, and people suddenly surrounded me. Real people. Two men, two women. Not Hydras. All in white. And this antiseptic white room—a hospital. “Where—” I began, and had to swallow and begin again. “Where am I?”
A very tall woman with white hair leaned down. “Carstair’s Folly.”
“Carstair’s...” But that was impossible—unless—maybe the old flashman had attacked me, hit me on the head, and everything else had been a dream—
Meta pushed her way between two doctors, an enormous grin splitting her face. “You’re alive! You’re all right!”
Carstair’s Folly—and Meta. She hadn’t betrayed me. She’d saved me again. She really was a friend! I felt ashamed of my doubts—and fiercely, fiercely happy that I’d been wrong. “I’ve been better,” I croaked. “But, yeah...I think I am all right.”
“No, you’re not,” said the tall woman severely. “You’ve been in a coma for two weeks, you’re dehydrated, you’re still suffering from withdrawal symptoms, and I don’t like the looks of your heartbeat. You’ve got a lot of recovering to do yet, young man.” Meta gave her such a concerned look that her face softened. “But you’re going to be all right. And you can think your friends for being smart enough to put you in stasis until they could get you to a human hospital. Otherwise...” She raised her voice. “Everyone out! He needs rest and a little food that doesn’t come through a tube in his arm. Nurse Coles, will you...”
Friends? Plural? “What does she mean, friends?” I asked Meta over the excited babble of the medicos’ voices.
One voice carried back to me. “Strangest thing I ever saw! His vital signs were dropping off, I’d have sworn he was dying, then all of a sudden he lunges up and...” The door cut him off.
“I couldn’t have gotten you here by myself,” Meta said. “It was Rain who thought of putting you in stasis.”
“Rain?” I remembered that. But I’d thought...but if I was here...”I don’t understand. Rain was in league with The Dealer. He tried to trap me at Fat Sloan’s—he—I saw him take flash, and watch Paul Jerez dance. I thought...” My voice trailed off. I thought she’d betrayed me to him, but I couldn’t tell her that.
Meta laughed. “We had it all wrong, Kit. He wasn’t trying to trap you. He wanted to warn you. He knew what was going on.”
“But I—”
“Look, he’ll have to explain it himself. He’ll be here any minute. And you shouldn’t get so worked up. I’m sure it’s not good for you.” Her voice softened. “Don’t you dare do anything to mess yourself up like that again.”
“All right.” But in fact, far from feeling worse, I felt more buoyant than ever. Meta hadn’t sold me out—and neither had Rain. I didn’t just have one friend, I had two! Orbital! “Well, can you at least tell me what happened after you and Rain sedated me?”
“You recognized us?” She looked surprised. “You kept babbling on about tentacles and—”
“I recognized you. For a moment. But what happened next?”
With frequent interruptions on my part, she told me. Afraid I might die, they’d put me in stasis with Paul, then, once we reached Hydra, loaded me immediately onto a high-speed human luxury liner heading to the Pleasure Planets. I’d been kept in their medical bay during the five-day trip, but their doctors and medical computers had had no more idea of how to treat me than the Hydras had. No human had ever been bitten by the flashdevil (Meta’s word, which seemed likely to stick) before. Meta had contacted her parents, who had understandably been very glad to hear from her, and told them in no uncertain terms to have the best doctors waiting when I arrived. Her father hadn’t been anxious to roll out the red carpet—or at least the red hospital bed—for me, I gathered, and I guess I couldn’t blame him, but Meta had insisted—which apparently shocked him. “First time I ever stood up to him,” she said thoughtfully. “I’ve always been scared of him. But this time, I didn’t care. And you know, he really was worried about me. I was kind of surprised.”
“You’re lucky to have someone to worry about you,” I said. “I never did.”
“You do now,” Meta said.
The doctors on Carstair’s Folly had found me a fascinating case, apparently. Lots of brain activity, but never waking up—as though I were in a permanent dream state. But today... “They told me you were dying,” Meta said soberly. “They said they didn’t expect you to last more than a few hours. I came right away.” She touched my hand. “I cried,” she said softly.
I had a lump in my own throat. “I’m sorry.”
“Well, it’s not your fault. It was The Dealer’s.”
“What happened to him? And the other Hydra? Are they dead?”
“No, gladeye! Dead they’re not!” chortled a new voice.
“Rain?” I raised up a little and saw my Hydran friend in the doorway.
“Orbital that you are awake, gladeye.” Rain placed a tentacle on my bare shoulder. “I have sworn to retain memory of you. I am glad I may still be able to add some new ones.”
“I’m glad you’ll be able to, too,” I said fervently, “but right now I’m more interested in answers than memories. How did you know about Qualls and the Dealer? What were you doing on The Dealer’s ship? Who are you?”
“I am an enforcement agent for the legislative council of Hydra,” Rain said.
“What?”
“He’s a ‘forcer,” Meta translated helpfully.
“A ‘forcer?”
“A ‘forcer, gladeye! Flash is illegal on our planet, as on yours, and the Dealer was the source of much of it. I had been trailing him for some time when I met you on Murdoch IV. I knew about his deals with Qualls, and my sources with Qualls told me he had you in mind as the next Sensation Single. So I flopped at Fat Sloan’s and paid him to ensure that you would share my room the next time you came by. When you came back to Fistfight City, I knew a deal between The Dealer and Qualls was coming soon. I tried to contact you before they sealed it, hoping you could get me onto The Bullet so I could be there when that happened. But you didn’t show up, and The Dealer booked passage on a commercial ship, and I had to act fast. I decided you must have realized something was wrong and gotten out on your own, and I had to stay with The Dealer. So I booked onto the same ship as him, and set about convincing him I would be a valuable customer.”
“But I saw you take the flash!”
“An illusion. What you would call sleight-of-hand.” He held up a tentacle and studied it with all four eyes.
I laughed, though it hurt. “And Paul?”
“He’s out now—undergoing withdrawal treatment,” Meta put in.
“You said The Dealer and that other Hydra aren’t dead?” I said to Rain. “Then what happened to them?”
Rain’s tentacles squirmed. “You know how flash affects us—”
“It makes you forget what you have just experienced. Yes, Qualls explained it.”
“Not to me!” Meta complained.
I hushed her. “I’ll tell you later.”
“That is a single small dose,” said Rain. “The bite of the—what did you call it, Meta?”
“The flashdevil!”
“—the flashdevil—is far, far worse, as you have reason to know. The Dealer, his employee—they lost all memories. Forever. They are no longer the people they were. They are no longer people at all.”
“Can’t say I’m sorry,” I muttered. I closed my eyes, feeling very tired. “I’m glad that’s over.”
“Don’t you want to hear about Qualls?” said Meta.
“Meta, we should—” Rain began, but I opened my eyes.
“What about him?”
“Arrested for fraud, murder, kidnapping, and half a dozen other crimes,” Meta said. “And your credit has been unfrozen. And you’ve attracted so much media attention that there are half a dozen promoters here on Carstair’s Folly just waiting to sponsor your first non-Single concert once you’re recovered. You’re going to be a star again, Andy Nebula!”
I sighed and closed my eyes again, this time in final, complete satisfaction. “Never heard of him. My name’s Kit.”
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Interstellar Rock Star Page 13
