“Drop it,” beamed the lion.
The cop and the auto stepped behind me. The cop had his ray gun out, but he wasn’t sure where to point it.
“Jenny, keep them occupied,” ordered the lion, who I assumed was Shawn.
The rhinoceros smashed a parked gyropod to one side and charged the cop. His heater scorched her thick hide, but it wasn’t made to stop something that big. He dove away at the last moment, though his partner wasn’t so lucky. Jenny crushed the poor auto underfoot.
The lion dove at me, but I got a lucky punch under his chin. While he was staggered, I grabbed him by the mane and smacked him a few more times across the nose. We danced around, but he outweighed me by a good hundred pounds. He nearly snapped my hand off in his jaws, and finally I was forced to push him away rather than be dragged under him, someplace I’d rather not have ended up.
I could feel him digging around in my brain with his telepathic claws. It was only adrenalin and instinct that kept him at bay.
I dredged up those instincts, but lions and apes don’t grapple in the wild, despite what Tarzan pictures might say. Shawn coiled to spring as I went for my raygun, tucked in the holster under my jacket. I might have been faster, but I didn’t need it often. Being a gorilla was usually enough.
Too slow, I was underneath the lion. His claws dug into my shoulders, and his jaws would’ve snapped around my throat if I hadn’t rolled and used his momentum to fling him onward. He twisted and landed on his feet, sprang again. I had my heater out and blasted him point blank. The ray burned a hole in his shoulder, and he yowled, tumbling on the weakened leg. He limped forward, but with a wound, he wasn’t quite so eager to test his speed again.
I scooped up the monkey doll off the street.
Jenny had crushed the police auto, but the cop she’d mesmerized stood there, staring blankly. She snorted and stomped the street with her foot.
The chimp in a bowtie emerged from the crowd. “No. You might hurt the monkey.”
“I’ll be careful,” she said.
“No. Your help has only made this situation worse.” The chimp held out his hand. “Mr. Jung, we need that monkey. It is rightfully ours. I know you’re not in your right mind now. Your head is clouded. If you’ll permit me to help you to see things correctly . . . .”
“Fat chance, Cheetah. If you think I’m going to let you muck about in my head, you’re daffier than you look.”
The sounds of sirens were closing in fast. I had to get out of here. Before these Jungle Jim rejects had another chance to mess with my mind. Before the cops showed.
I walked to my skimmer, never turning my back on the animals, avoiding looking them in the eyes, fearing they might pop something loose in my head that I might not be able to tie back down. They didn’t make any move to stop me. They poked at my subconscious, but I was able to keep them locked out. At one point my vision blurred and I lost sight of the chimp before spotting him having taken up a safer position behind the lion.
I jumped into my skimmer and pulled out of there just as the police hovercraft started lighting up the sky. I got away with some luck, and with a little more luck, the animal gang would be too busy with the cops to follow.
***
I had a headache by the time I got back to the office. The kind that could only be fixed with a stiff drink and a bag of leaves to munch on. Maybe after I gave Faye the monkey, she’d care to join me.
I kept my hand on the monkey the whole ride over there, not willing to even put the damned thing in the seat beside me. It was too precious to let go of. Even for a moment. The gashes and scrapes I’d gotten from the lion hurt, but it’d all be worth it in the end when I dropped this monkey in Faye Darrow’s beautiful gray paws.
None of this was over, I figured. The telepathic animals knew who I was, and they’d definitely come looking for me. One problem at a time, and I knew what mattered most to me.
I pushed open the office door. Faye Darrow sat on the couch in the waiting area, sipping a tea.
“Oh, hello, Joe.”
Eve sat behind her desk. She wasn’t on. I could tell because she hadn’t given me any sass yet.
“What happened to her?” I asked.
“I thought it best to switch her off.” Faye nodded to a small device on the coffee table. “A wonderful little tool for shutting down robots. Very handy.”
Things weren’t adding up. They hadn’t been since Faye Darrow had first walked into my office. I’d told myself I didn’t care, but now, I was beginning to think maybe I did.
Her eyes flashed as she tightened a telepathic vice around my instincts. I couldn’t think clearly, but I could think enough to see that she was manipulating me. She had from the beginning. Little pokes and prods to my inner ape. Nothing obvious. Just a subtle push to the animalistic drive to impress females. A drive that had been buried too long and was all-too-eager to come out.
“I see you succeeded,” she said. “I’ll admit to some doubt the others might compromise you. That’s why I wanted the robot on this. Biological minds can be so unpredictable. But then I realized how much easier it would be to convince you, and thought it worth a shot.”
She set down her cup of tea and smiled at me with her burning green eyes. Even as I knew it was stupid, I knew I’d wrestle a thousand lions for her approval.
“Oh, dear, Joe,” she beamed. “You’re a mess. I do hope you know how much I appreciate your help. And your pain will be over soon enough.” She caressed my cheek and took the monkey from me.
Except I wouldn’t let it go.
The smartest thing in the world would’ve been to pull my raygun out and blast her. I couldn’t do that. It wasn’t just her grip on my mind. For better or worse, she was the only mutant gorilla I’d run across, and I couldn’t just let her slip away.
But I didn’t have to give her the damn monkey either.
She tugged harder. “Joe, honey, don’t be stubborn about this.”
“What’s in the doll?” I asked.
“That’s none of your affair, dear.”
She abandoned all telepathic subtlety and stomped around in my head with sudden, overwhelming force. I screamed, fell on my face, drooling. My body felt like jelly held together by my suit, and my vision blurred.
But I didn’t let go of that damn monkey.
“Have it your way. I was going to do this anyway, but I was hoping to make it more pleasant.” She rolled me to one side and reached under my jacket for my gun. I couldn’t make a move to stop her.
Without warning, the pressure in my head lessened, and my body was mine again. I grabbed her wrist and squeezed. The pain disrupted her concentration, and more of my own will struggled against her cage. I pushed her away, drew my heater. I couldn’t bring myself to point it at her.
“What’s in the monkey, Faye?” I asked.
“The future,” beamed the telepathic chimp from behind me. “Our future.”
I realized then that he’d been there all along. I hadn’t left him at the train station. He’d telepathically blurred my perceptions. I’d known he was there, but I hadn’t known too. It was why I hadn’t let go of the monkey in the skimmer. If all the animals could do that, it also explained how a lion and a rhino could walk around without causing a scene though you’d think robots would notice. Then again, this was Empire. If a wild animal walked around with enough nonchalance, nobody much cared.
“Not your future,” said Faye. “You have no future.”
The chimp shook his head. “You have to let it go. We can’t keep fighting this war. It doesn’t’ matter anymore. This is a new world. We can move on.”
She growled and beat the floor with her fists. “Kill him for me, Joe.”
She flipped some switches, letting loose some of my more uncivilized instincts. He threw up a wall around those instincts. My mind was a battleground between these two, and I was only along for the ride.
“The monkey has an element in it, not found on your world,” he said. “My people
, we need it to reproduce.”
“Your people?” I asked. “You’re Pilgrims? There’s a race of space chimps and alien gorillas and nobody bothered to tell me?”
“It’s more complex than that,” he said. “This isn’t my body. It’s only borrowed. Just as hers is. Just as the others. We are, for lack of time for a better explanation, extraterrestrial symbiotes that find hosts with lower creatures.”
He passed a mental snapshot in my mind of a green worm, long and thin, wrapped around a spinal column. Gorilla, lion, chimp, rhino. It all worked the same. It wasn’t a pretty picture, and Faye Darrow went from the gorilla of my dreams to a thing out of a horror picture.
“We only want to live in peace,” said the chimp. “Most of us anyway. But others, they still want to fight the old wars. They want to take our most sacred right and use it as a weapon.”
“He’s lying, Joe,” she said. “He’s manipulating you, trying to trick you. Give the monkey to me, kill him, and we can be together. Does it matter if I borrowed this body? You can still have it. You can still have me.”
She pushed harder, and I pointed the raygun at the chimp.
He said, “You’re stronger than this, Joseph Jung.”
He shored up my mind, and while I wasn’t thinking clearly, I got the big picture. Faye Darrow was pushing me to kill. The chimp was leaving the choice up to me.
I blasted someone. In the moment, I wasn’t at all certain who it was, but someone was going to get shot, and at the time, I wasn’t sure if I cared who it was just so long as the pressure in my head eased up.
My hand was shaking, and my vision was blurry, but I had managed to burn a hole in Darrow’s side and her pretty blue dress.
Her concentration slipped, and I felt like myself again. Maybe for the first time since meeting her.
Those eyes, they pleaded with me. They were beautiful, all right, but behind them, I could see the hints of a fresh telepathic push.
“Joe, please.”
I decked her. Not my proudest moment, but there was nothing else I could do short of shooting her. She fell flat with a groan.
“Joe, you idiot.” Her choppy telepathic words were like distant static as the chimp locked down her telepathic mojo. “You could’ve had it all.”
“Sorry, beautiful,” I said. “Even if I believed you, some things just aren’t worth the price.”
***
Faye’s borrowed body, a greyback named Grapefruit, didn’t die. They patched her up, put her in the zoo. I only went to see her once.
I hated the zoo.
Grapefruit sat among the other gorillas in the enclosure, and I pondered what I’d lost when I’d mutated. Zoo life wasn’t the bee’s knees, but there were times when it didn’t look so bad from this side of the enclosure.
Denham the chimp walked up beside me. “She’s adjusting well. She should make a full recovery.”
“Something positive,” I said. I didn’t know if I could’ve lived with myself if I’d killed her, but in a way, I had. Faye Darrow had been two entities, and divided, neither of them had much use for me.
“You did the right thing, Mr. Jung,” said Denham
“What about Faye?” I asked.
“Extraction from the host is never without damage to us, but she is recovering and we are hoping to rehabilitate her.” He shrugged. “But I fear some can never move beyond old wounds.”
“We’ve all got our scars.” I ran my hand across the fresh ones I sported from this affair. “You don’t happen to have any other gorilla alien hybrids among you, do you?”
Denham chuckled. “Sorry. But when we do, you’ll be the first to know.”
I smiled. In a city where superscience ran amok, tomorrow was a place of infinite possibilities. Most of those possibilities were dangerous misfires, but even among the worst Empire had to offer, there was always hope.
“Let’s get out of here.” I cast one last look at Grapefruit. “I hate this place.”
“Can I buy you a beer, Mr. Jung? It’s the least I can do for you, all things considered.”
“You’re right.” I slapped Denham on his shoulder. “It is the least you could do.”
He might not have been the primate I’d planned on sharing a drink with at the end of the week, but all things considered, he wasn’t such a bad guy. Sometimes, you took what you could get and were grateful to get it.
###
DEATH, DUST, AND OTHER INCONVENIENCES
Too Many Curses
Too Many Curses is easily my most fairy tale like story and probably my most neglected. It’s not as flashy as most of my other stories, and the premise doesn’t jump out at you. Maybe that’s why I like it as much as I do. Telling stories about tough-as-nails werewolves and super genius space squids is relatively easy. Those types of characters are made to be heroes, but Nessy and the denizens of Margle’s cursed castle are exactly everything we wouldn’t expect heroes to be. Somehow, despite that, they get by. Here’s a story where they do just that.
A shadow of death stalked the halls of Margle’s castle.
Nessy found out about this from Humbert the hummingbird, who heard it from Richard the staircases ghost, who was told of the shadow’s presence by Bethany the banshee, who had met the shadow in that place between life and death where ghosts spent a lot of their time.
It wasn’t the first time one of death’s shadows had visited the castle. Death often came calling on wizards, and any wizard of any accomplishment had ways of dealing with such shadows. But Margle was dead, and his castle was without any defense against the grim specter that now roamed, invisibly, waiting to strike.
“We have to do something,” said Sir Thedeus, the former knight, now small fruit bat, sitting on Nessy’s shoulder.
She petted the nurgax, her purple pet. It didn’t do much, but it had saved her life at least once, and it was devoted to a fault. “What would you have me do? It’s death. Best to ignore it.”
“Ye canna ignore death, lass,” he replied.
“Weren’t you a warrior once?” she asked.
“Aye.”
“Wasn’t it your job to ignore death then? Or did you rush onto the battlefield assuming she wasn’t there?”
“It’s an excellent point,” said Echo, the bodiless voice.
“Death is different for a warrior,” said Thedeus. “We have no recourse against it, but surely Margle has a trick or two at his disposal.”
“I suppose it couldn’t hurt to talk to the shadow,” said Nessy. “See what it wants.”
“Ye can do that?” asked Thedeus.
Since inheriting the castle from her not-quite-dead-but-close-enough master, Nessy had been learning the art of magic from Margle’s brother, who unlived as a pair of eyeballs, some teeth, and a bit of brain in a jar. Yazbip thought she had some talent for it, but her studies had been hampered by the physical limitations of her teacher as well as all her daily duties. She understood now why wizards kept people around to tidy things up. Not that she was interested in giving up her job. She found more satisfaction in a dusted hallway than in learning to levitate.
“It’s a smidge beyond my talents,” she said. “But I’m sure we can find something in Margle’s collection to enable it.”
“Is that a good idea?” asked Echo. “Maybe we should just leave it alone.”
Nessy’s pragmatic nature agreed. She had enough to worry about without adding a personification of death to that list. But she was also not the kind to allow a problem to fester when it might be solved easily. In the end, it was Yazbip who convinced her, assuring her that while it was unlikely to accomplish much, it wasn’t likely to make things worse.
Nessy, Echo, Sir Thedeus, Yazbip the Magnificent, and the nurgax gathered in the garden room and prepared to summon the shadow to have a chat. Margle’s garden was filled with all manner of exotic, deadly plant life, but as long as one was cautious enough to avoid the carnivorous chrysanthemums and ignored the whispered promises of the wishing tree (whose cu
rsed wishes acted as its means of reproduction, always ending with the wisher becoming a wishing tree themselves), the garden was a lovely place and one of Nessy’s favorite rooms.
“This should do nicely,” said Yazbip as Nessy levitated him behind her.
“Should’nah we do this in a tomb?” asked Thedeus.
Yazbip chuckled, sending bubbles to the surface of the yellow fluid he floated in. “Hardly. You’re unlikely to find death anywhere near a tomb. Everyone there is already dead. Death’s business is among the living.”
A tendril of vines dragged a mouse out of a crack in the wall and pulled it into the dirt. Nessy was certain it was a normal mouse. All the castle residents cursed into mouse shape knew enough to avoid this room.
“See?” Yazbip’s teeth floated in a smug grin. “Death and life go side by side.”
A nearby purple and red flower of generous size waved its hungry petals in Sir Thedeus’s direction. He clung tighter to Nessy’s shoulder.
With Yazbip’s guidance, Nessy drew a circle with several runes. It wasn’t all that difficult because it was relatively simple magic. It wasn’t an attempt to compel the shadow, but to merely coax him into appearing. The choice was entirely his, and appear, he did.
The shadow of death was a tall, handsome figure with a dark face, black eyes, wrapped in a billowing pale cloak. He stood there quietly surveying the gathering. There was knowledge in his eyes. The knowledge most mortals spent a lifetime ignoring.
“Should we say something?” asked Echo.
“Hello,” said Nessy.
The shadow turned his gaze upon her and smiled. “Hello, Nessy.”
“You know me?” she asked.
“We are acquainted, are we not?” he replied. “I remember all the souls that were once mine, however briefly. A kobold soul is all the more unique among that number.”
Sir Thedeus flew down to land before Nessy. “If ye’ve come for the lass, ye’ll have to get through me first.”
The nurgax joined his side. It growled at the shadow.
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