THE DECEIVERS

by Alfred Bester

  “And I’m only an adopted orphan. Yes, Kuiti, but you’ve always known that.”

  “And hated it,” Tapanu said.

  “I don’t blame you. I know I’m an outsider, an intruder; but it was never my wish, it was your father’s.”

  “He had no right.”

  “He had every right, Patea. No woman can ever sit on the throne.”

  “We have husbands.”

  “Ah, so that’s it. And sons?”

  Their silence was the answer.

  “I see. I’m sorry. The direct Uinta line is ended. Too bad, but it’s happened to many royal lines in the past. So you’ll elevate one of your husbands and be the power behind the throne. What if he won’t listen? What then?”

  “He’ll listen. We are three, the true children of Te Uinta.”

  “Of course, but whose husband will it be? Yours, Kuiti? You’re the oldest.”

  “You murdered him,” she snapped.

  “Murdered? Nonsense!”

  “On Venucci.”

  “On Yen—? You mean… what was his name? Kea Ora? I thought he was just a soldier.”

  “He was the next king.”

  Winter was stunned. “My God! My God! What a disaster! My sister’s husband…”

  “Never your sister.”

  “And now never a king. What about those men who were here with you? Husbands, too?”

  “No.”

  “Soldiers?”

  “Yes.”

  “They looked it. How many have you in your group?”

  “You’ll find out when we’re ready.”

  “No, Kuiti,” he answered slowly. “No, you’ll never be ready, now that I know and can have you called to account no matter what happens to me. Dear sisters, loving sisters, Kuiti, Tapanu, Patea, you’re finished.”

  “Never!”

  “Finished,” he repeated. He drew the Slice Knife. They never flinched. “If anything happens to me or mine, you’ll be held accountable. My sacred blood oath on it.” He slashed his forearm and before they could avoid it, smeared his blood on their faces.

  “My sworn blood on your heads,” he said. “This is the end of your vendetta. We’ll never meet again.”

  He turned and left them, but as he disappeared in the dark he called back, “You never once spoke my name.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Lovelorn

  ‘Tis said that absence conquers love,

  But oh! Believe it not;

  I’ve tried, alas! its power to prove,

  But thou art not forgot.

  —Frederick William Thomas

  This is Odessa Partridge again, on Terra, in the Northeast Corridor, reminding you that I’m putting all this together in sequence from what the principals confided in me much later. It makes me feel like a Yiddisha Mama, and I love it.

  While R-grunt-OG was working out his destiny on Ganymede, une crise se prépare (a “things coming to a head”) clobbered Demi Jeroux in the New York jungle. I’d explained the urgency of Rogue’s abrupt departure, and she’d accepted it without complaint like the good child that she was. Now, while she was waiting for his return, she was trying to go through the motions of her life as it had been before the trapper became the trappee.

  But she woke up this morning, upchucking in all directions for the second time, and again passed it off as a lovelorn stomach. She examined her fresh-woke basic Titanian reality in the mirror and was again amazed to see Winter’s ideal; slender, virginal, with a big befront and a high inhind. Limpid skin and auburn hair, she might have been Botticelli’s model for “The Birth of Venus” if Sandro hadn’t desexed his vision.

  “So this is what Rogue’s done to me,” she murmured. “They never talk about the Frog Princess.” She turned to the psycat. “I’ve made a profound discovery; a woman needs a man to make her real.”

  Titanian constraints imposed a dress style on her which career women around the Solar will understand. She had to wear clothes which would not clash with any guise she might be obliged to transform into during her work; competent, helpless, shrewd, maneuvering, ego-trip, team-player, etc. She selected a dark unobtrusive suit, quiet buttoned blouse, sensible shoes, no ornaments, but in her tote she carried jewelry and an evening purse and evening sandals just in case. She switched on the kaleidoscope projector for the entertainment of the psycat spot-chaser and left for the Media office.

  Demi was working the “Soft Shift” this month, noon to six, but she was dedicated and often put in extra morning hours. She needed them this day because she was required to cope with submissions in Nü-Spēk, Medieval French, Mozambique, Arcane English, and Chromatics, and forward them to Media’s owner and editor-in-chief, Augustus (Ching) Sterne, with crisp descriptions and explicit recommendations. She’d been particularly tickled by the lunacy of “Rabelais Diabolo,” proving that François was Satan in disguise (she knew that the great medieval farceur had been a Titanian) but Ching was not amused.

  By five-thirty she decided that an evening on the town would help her forget Rogue for a few hours, so she dialed GIRLGUARD, waited for the computer to check her credit, and ordered an escort who would be Winter’s exact opposite. That, she imagined, would squelch office gossip. To the crucial specification, Sex? she hammered an emphatic NO which, of course, was noted by the office and only confirmed the tittle-tattle.

  He strutted into Media, small, powerful, aggressive—you could almost see the chip on his shoulder—with an attitude that announced he was God’s gift to the Solar and you’d better believe it. “Miz Jeroux?” he challenged. “Miz Demi Jeroux?”

  “Here,” Demi answered while her heart sank.

  “I’m Samson from GIRLGUARD.” He made it sound like a commercial while his eyes took in the other women on the floor. “Herc Samson.”

  “Herc for Hercules?” a small voice called from a corner.

  “You got it, babe,” Samson threw over his shoulder. He took Demi’s elbow. “Leave us hit the highs, honey.” He grinned. “Your credit’s gonna take one beautiful beating but don’t worry, Here’ll make everything worth it.” He cased her. “Too bad about that negatory, babe. You look like you could use Herc. He’s the greatest. Herc’s the works.”

  Demi wanted something different from the cultivated entertainment to which she was accustomed, so Samson gave her a wild tour of the Northeast underworld. He was intimate with cracksmen and fences, magsmen, goniffs, and shofulmen, the swell mob, the fancy sportsmen and sporting houses, the citadels of the underworld. “I’m the greatest, honey,” he assured her. “You’re guaranteed girlguarded, so don’t worry. Herc’s the works.”

  She quailed at the entertainments of the sporting fancy, first at The Hound Hut.

  Raising a really first-class fighting dog is a serious business. Mastiffs, bulldogs, terriers, hounds, huskies, setters, airedales, and savage crossbreeds are imported from the entire Solar, most of them stolen. Since they’re fought by weight, about forty to fifty pounds is the maximum so that ten in the pit will not exceed five hundred pounds.

  Careful feeding and training is vital. Practice encounters introduce the dog to its profession. “Taste Goons,” poor, indentured laborers, are fed up to give them some strength and spirit (sometimes with the promise of manumission) and used. Before being put into the practice pit the Taste Goon has the most vulnerable parts of his body shaved so that the dog can learn to attack these places.

  Demi stared around with wide eyes as Samson led her into the pit parlor. Center was the round, deep circus with a sand floor, surrounded by crowded bleachers. Sporting prints hung on the walls. There were glassed vitrines containing stuffed dogs, famous in their day. They flanked a large portrait of what seemed to be a nude blackamoor jockey, “Wonder Timmy.”

  “Weighed a hundred pounds,” Samson told Demi. “Always wore a woman’s bracelet around his neck. Timmy once fought three mains in a row. He was the greatest killer of all time, but they got him in the end.”

  At one side of the pit, half a do
zen nude and shaven men were warming up with ferocious calisthenics while shouting and screaming gamblers were laying odds on their favorites. The first main was called and “Bendigo Benny” announced. Benny vaulted heavily into the pit and paraded in a circle while his backers cheered and applauded. He took center and nodded to the M.C. A chute opened, ten snarling, slavering fighting dogs swarmed into the circus and tore at Bendigo Benny as he began kicking and smashing them to death.

  “Can we go, please?” Demi whispered.

  “You sound like a pet freak, honey,” Samson laughed. “That’s okay. Everything’s perk with Herc. Tell you what, we’ll try a Shoot’em’up. No dogs.”

  The BBOH (Bitches & Bastards of Outlaw History) stages its entertainments in a replica of a Western saloon. The members re-create the legendary 20th-century Western stars; Gary Cooper, Jimmy Stewart, “Duke” Wayne, Marlene Dietrich, Mae West, etc. Great pains are taken with the costumes, and the men practice quick-draw with six-guns while the women rehearse tough seduction and the barroom cancan. The gambling types wear shiny top hats, frock coats, and practice various forms of card manipulation and cheating in the style of John Carradine, Henry Hull, Brian Donlevy, et al.

  This night they were staging a barroom brawl, featuring broken furniture, shattered glass, bloody fistfights, thrown bottles, and finally a gun-walk and quickdraw encounter which ended with the shooting of Henry Fonda wearing a star and Jane Russell wearing nothing.

  “They make it seem so real!” Demi exclaimed, applauding enthusiastically.

  “It is real, baby.”

  “What? Those people… really hurt and… and killed?”

  “Uh-huh, they’re really clobbered. All the fighting’s for real. They love to maul each other. That’s why the BBOH is a sellout.”

  “And… and the killing?”

  “No, they don’t go that far. It’s faked with high-power props that look realer than the real thing and cost a mint. That’s why tickets are priced out of sight. You’re going to scream when you see what we’ve been charged. Herc’s no jerk. He always delivers.”

  “Can we go, please?”

  “But baby, a lynching comes next.”

  “Please?”

  “Okay. How about a classy courtroom trial? No dogs, no assault and battery. Just good clean fun.”

  It was a sporting house decorated in the plush Victorian style; red velvet, cut glass, fumed oak, flickering gaslight. The brothel bullies wore tailcoats and starched white bibs studded with diamonds. There was even a Victorian governess chaperoning the child prostitutes.

  They were holding one of their featured mock trials for an enthusiastic paying audience. A courtroom had been set up in the LSD lounge. There was a Victorian judge in black robes and white wig on the bench, wielding a circumcised dildo gavel. Up in the musicians gallery the band was playing gems from “Trial by Jury.” Twelve sequinned whores sat in the jury box, powdered and rouged, and enticingly décolleté. The accused before the judge was another grotesquely painted whore and was singing, screaming and rhyming on a mad trip.

  “Prisoner,” the judge shouted over the uproar, “you have been charged. What have you to say in your offense?”

  “How did you get to be my judge?” she demanded and sang, “Oh judge not, pussy, lest ye be judged, coozy, lest ye be bugged, riff, fugged, riff, hugged, riff, mugged—”

  The dildo pounded. “Don’t you know, prisoner?”

  “Oh I know, I know, with a bribe. On the path.”

  “What path?”

  “The Bridal Path. How many legs does a horse have?”

  “Four.”

  “If you take three legs from the Four Whoresmen of the Apocalypse how many are left?”

  “Nine.”

  “Subtract prix your goner and what’s left?”

  “Three.”

  “I have three legs which makes me a horse.”

  “Whose horse, prisoner?”

  “Everybody’s. Take two from me and what’s left?”

  “One.”

  “The one and only, the be all and end all, riff, the sweet end, raff, the beat end, ruff, sentence me, sentence me to fart labor.”

  “Prisoner at the bar, I sentence you to rape.”

  “Oh goody, goody bum drops. A rape is a wake is a cake is a jape is a gape which is mine for one and all, come one, come all, come, come, come until you’re squeezed dry.”

  She stripped, revealing that she was a fag in drag and the jury, leaping upon him while the audience cheered and jeered, revealed the same thing.

  “And that’s why the ambassador blew his brains out,” Samson told the horrified Demi.

  “Wh-what?”

  “Tröyj Caliph, the Turkish ambassador. The embassy claimed it was a heart attack, but he really suzysided. Got trapped in the badger game by the swell mob. You know, babe. Pick up a hustler. Go to her place for jollies. Get caught flagrant plus tapes which you buy off. But the mob wasn’t selling, they set him up for blackmail. Can you guess how?”

  “I… I d-don’t want to.”

  “They pulled a fancy switch on the ambassador. The hustler wasn’t a real doll, it was that one down there, the prisoner getting banged. Fagsville. Panic city for Tröyj…”

  “Please,” Demi begged. “I want to go home now.”

  She was girlguarded back to her apartment, signed Samson’s careful bills, safed the door and collapsed.

  (Postscript to Demi’s adventures: We’d been plagued by the Turkish Domes on Ganymede for years, demanding an explanation of that bewildering suicide. When Demi finally told me about her night on the town, it solved the mystery. Since Rogue was responsible, in a way, for her sordid evening out, he’d more or less played “Pointer” for us again.)

  Demi awoke next morning, sick again with additional complications. There was no doubt that she had to see a doctor. She reported in sick to the Media office, called her real mother in Virginia, and took off for a consultation.

  Now, you’re a Titanian polymorph. You’re a voluntary expatriate because you prefer life on Terra, as many Titanians have down through the ages, and you enjoy your role as a respected physician. What is the permanent persona you adopt? What do you think a lady doctor should look like? Demi’s mother, Dr. Althea Lenox, had taken the great queen, Elizabeth of England, as her model.

  The consultation was in Titanian, of course. Since it’s impossible to depict a chemical conversation on paper, I’ll leave it blank and you can fill in with three of your senses; taste, touch, and smell. It won’t be easy; Titanian grammar is tricky. For example, the feel of wool cannot be used as the verb for the smell of wood smoke unless the object of the sentence has a pleasant flavor.

  There was only one Terran word spoken during those three days:

  “Rabbit.”

  Demi returned to New York, terrified.

  In Demi’s apartment, Winter finished the excited account of his adventures on Ganymede and disengaged the psycat’s embrace around his neck. She’d been captivated, either by him, the vibes of his voice, or the promise of eye spots in the future. Rogue cosseted her on his lap and examined Demi perplexedly, somewhat surprised by her appearance or, more specifically, her lack of appearance.

  After a three-week separation he’d expected her to greet him transformed into the role of the vivacious hostess, perhaps even her namesake, Madame Jeanne Françoise Julie Adélaide Récamier (1777-1840), entertaining literary and political society in her fashionable salon. Instead, Demi looked washed-out. She asked a few indifferent questions.

  “And Dr. Yael?”

  “I left him behind as my regent.”

  “Will you have to go back?”

  “I’m not sure. Certainly next year, for another kill.”

  “Did you—have to eat the heart?”

  “Both. My people nearly went out of their minds. I’m a double-king and, by God, I’m proud of it. I certainly earned it.”

  (He was and had indeed and, most significant of all, had abandoned the
masking spectacles.)

  “And that girl?” Demi asked. “The one you— Did you see her again?”

  “Ah-ha!” he exclaimed. “So that’s it.”

  “That’s what?”

  “Why you’re so cold tonight. No, I never saw her again. Odessa Partridge was right; the hit-crowd got lost after the coronation.” He didn’t think it wise to worry her with an account of the confrontation with his stepsisters. “And please believe me, love, absolutely nothing happened between me and their zapette; no bang, just a bite on her ass to teach her a lesson. So no jealousy, please. Warm up and look me one of your looks that I’ve been missing for weeks.”

  “I’m not cold, Rogue, just tired and depressed, and you’re on a high roll, so please to go home, dear, and leave me alone.”

  “You never called me ‘dear’ before, it was always ‘darling.’ Why now?”

  “Please stop nagging me.”

  “What’s wrong? You’re so nervous.”

  “No I’m not.”

  “And you’ve got that same expression you had when you propositioned me in the conference room, scared but determined.”

  “No I don’t.”

  “Come on, tell Daddy what it’s all about. Give me three guesses. You’ve been fired.”

  “No.”

  “You’re in love with another guy and don’t know how to hand me my congé.”

  “Don’t joke.”

  “You owe money. You’re being dunned.”

  “Nothing like that.”

  “I give up. You’ll have to tell Daddy.”

  “You won’t let it alone?”

  “No. Stand and deliver.”

  She took a deep breath and firmed her lips. “All right, Daddy. You’re a Daddy.”

  “What!”

  “I’m pregnant.” She began to cry.

  He was incredulous. “But you said it’s never happened between Terrans and Titanians.”

  “N-never, b-but I suppose there always has to be a first.”

  “You said our eggs and sperms don’t love each other.”