Koontz, Dean R. - Flesh In The Furnace (v1.0)

by Flesh In The Furnace(Lit)

  The Vonopo were each as large as two men, with twelve spindly appendages not quite like arms and not quite legs. Each appendage was tipped with a fleshy tool, each tool with a different purpose and design, like fingers and yet utterly unlike fingers. Their skin was really scales and the color of polished amber. They swallowed their food directly into their stomachs through a mouth on their bellies, and they shivered in disgust at the thought that men fouled their vocal apparatus with food pulp.

  Despite this fierce appearance, the Vonopo were a gentle people who shied from publicity and valued privacy above all else. Each lived separately in a subterranean warren, with all the comforts of a super-technical society. If one Vonopoen met another more than twice in any single week, he felt it necessary to purge himself with rituals no human had ever witnessed. No other race was permitted to live on Shafta,u, for the Vonopoens had discovered that other species tended to curiosity and could not be trusted to obey common rules of courtesy. Humans who wished to conduct business on Shaftau were issued thirty-two-hour passes, one equivalent day on that slowly turning world. Violation of the pass meant a permanent revocation of a human's right to visit Shaftau. And no man wished to lose that privilege, for the Vonopoens made many marvelous and highly marketable items, among them the Furnaces that produced the puppets.

  The Furnace came in nine pieces for easy transport, and very little skill was required to establish the proper connections between the separate components. Also, very little skill was required to pry open the casings of the machine and see what might whir and blink inside. But the moment any piece of the hull was removed, the insides melted to slag that smoked and glowed and presented better protection for the manufacturers than any number of patents might.

  Now, in the darkened room where Pertos had chosen to erect the Furnace, the process of creation was about to

  begin. The Olmescian amoeba, all but invisible when spread over the machine, had now rolled to the back and clung there in one gelatinous lump. The only light in the room came from the capsule-womb faceplate and was a dull green.

  Sebastian sat in the corner on a stool, out of the way. He tried to remain as quiet as he could, for he knew that Pertos would tell him to leave otherwise. Yet he found himself repeating lines from the script of Bitty Belina's story, mumbling them in complete accuracy, though he had never been able to memorize anything in his life before, other than the way his name looked on paper.

  Pertos selected a wafer from the file of puppet identities on the side of the machine, frowned, then let his smile return. He looked toward Sebastian as he replaced that wafer and chose another. He slipped the disc into the memory translator above the Furnace, and the process of creation was begun.

  Sebastian was halfway off his stool before he remembered that silence and stillness were essential. Carefully, he sat back, leaning against the wall, and watched the capsulewomb intently.

  Pertos worked the only two knobs on the machine, and slowly the green color changed to rich crimson, working across the spectrum of colors. The crimson became white, and in that glare the pudding of synthetic flesh jelly that was puddled in the forming tray began to take on a solidity. It began to mold, without the help of a form, and soon was a faceless, womanly body, with pert little breasts and creased vagina.

  Sebastian became excited, though not sexually, for that was beyond him. He strained to see more of what transpired in the capsule-womb.

  The hair came next, on the head and below the belly: golden.

  It crinkled. It grew before his eyes. Like a thousand yellow snakes. And then it stopped and the face came and it was her face with the incredibly blue eyes.

  Sebastian watched until she was fully formed, until her nose popped open with nostrils and her mouth filled with teeth. Pertos removed her from the capsule-womb, a strange god with a businesslike sense about creation, and placed her

  in a nutrient bath which stimulated the nerve clusters in the outer layers of her unnatural flesh. Soon, she was tossing this way and turning that, murmuring softly, fingers twitching as she grasped at dreams of death as if refusing to accept the life so suddenly flooding into her.

  More of the synthetic flesh, in its liquid form, spilled into the capsule-womb, and the cycle was begun again as Pertos chose the next wafer from the identity file and fed the disc to the machine. But Sebastian did not care about the creation of the prince of the demon-possessed stepmother, of the good angel or the three suitors who came before the prince in the story. Bitty Belina, was alive, and that was all that really mattered.

  He wanted to get up.

  He dared not; Pertos would send him out.

  He wanted to touch her hair.

  He was afraid to.

  He watched.

  And as the light flickered from green to crimson to white and the making of life from the Vonopoen synthetic flesh continued, as other small bodies, each no smaller than eighteen inches and no taller than twenty-four, were laid in the nutrient bath trays, strange images shot through the idiot's mind, sometimes dark and hideous, sometimes naive and gay, but always without coherence.

  Bitty Belina reminded Sebastian of someone . .. someone long ago and long gone, someone whose phantom visage, resurrected in memory, was teasingly familiar and yet utterly strange. He remembered golden hair most of all. Bitty Belina, had it, and so did the girl in the past, curls and curls of it. Somehow he was certain he had been close to the unremembered yellow-haired girl, very close, painfully close-and abruptly, painfully separated by the sound of a sharp twig cracking underfoot, though it was not a twig but something else. What had it been? What had taken the blonde girl from him? And who had she been? Bitty Belina?

  The prince lay in the nutrient bath alongside Bitty Belina and her three unsuccessful suitors.

  The good angel was being created now.

  Golden wings were forming in the womb.

  Golden hair. The sharp sound, snapping. And blood. Yes, yes, lots of blood, running down his right hand, soaking his shirt sleeve. And the golden girl was looking down at his hand and at herself, and she was still laughing and he was laughing and then she was screaming and he was laughing and then she was gagging and he was getting scared and then she was . . . she was dead.

  But who?

  Sitting here now, he felt guilty, though he could notr understand why. He felt as if he had sneaked some money from Pertos' lockbox to buy candy. He had done that once. And felt awful and sorry when he was caught. But this guilty-it was worse. Much worse. It hurt.

  The winged angel lay in a nutrient bath himself, his lovely appendages draped across the edges of the pan. Behind closed eyelids, his eyeballs moved spasmodically. It was hard to let go of non-being and accept the role of life in all its facets.

  In the capsule-womb, the stepmother formed.

  Sebastian felt a kinship for her, knowing both were guilty. But her guilt, he realized, was much easier to take than his, for she knew what she had done. And he did not.

  He tried to remember the bleeding girl and the blood on his hand and the laughing and the screaming. But it hurt, and his eyes fogged, and his jaw went loose. He couldn't remember. He stopped trying, and he felt so much better that he resolved never to think of that memory again.

  He had made the same resolution hundreds of times before, though he never remembered it.

  At last, all the characters for the story of Bitty Belina were lined up in nutrient baths. Bitty Belina herself had sat up and was looking about at the dark room and the shapes of the puppet master and the idiot. Her eyes were very wide, and she kept brushing herself as if there were dust all over her, though that could not be.

  Pertos closed down the Furnace, deposited all the identity wafers in the file again and touched the Olmesclan amoeba in the proper rhythm, causing it to spread out over the Furnace like a film of water, until it was not visible. He turned around, looked at the puppets. His face was drawn, and his large eyes looked sick, like a man bearing too much of a burden.

  "Sh
ould I watch them?" Sebastian asked.

  "Yes," Pertos said. "I'll be in my room for an hour. Then we must be prepared for the show."

  Sebastian moved his stool closer to the puppets.

  Pertos gazed one last time around the room, then departed that place, the Holistian Pearl already in his hands. He walked the dark corridor to his room, went inside, closed the door and sank upon the couch there, utterly exhausted spiritually as well as physically. It was not that he minded playing God in the creation of the puppets. He thought of himself as nothing more than an operator of the Vonopoen devices. It was when the play was done and the small living creatures must be returned to lifeless, waiting liquid that made him miserable. To be a life-giving god leads only to pleasure. To deal death to those fragile creatures while they watched, aware of what was to be done to them, sapped a man's soul. The depression always set in upon creation, because creation could only lead to death again, later. He rolled the Pearl over and over in his fingers, seeking solace.

  The gray surface of the living jewel slowly responded to his caress, absorbing the body heat he offered, sucking up the energy of friction caused by the stone rolling across the microscopically ridged flesh. Its pale color seeped from it as whiteness flowed in. In moments, it was storing the energy to carry on its life functions, and a moment later he had given it more than it could hold. It used the incoming excess of energy to play its own role in this symbiosis. Through the nerves in the tips of his fingers, it flushed a distortion throughout his body, sent him into synathesia where all senses were confused, where sight came as smell and sound as pictures. The Pearl fired alien images in his brain, plunged him through the heart of a star and into even stranger places where it had been in its eternity of existence.

  The Pearl had had a thousand masters in its life to date, and now it drew on all their experiences, all the scenes and events it had shared while in their possession. It touched filaments of power along the surface of Pertos' brain, stepped up the vividness of the dreams and took him across the universe in the bodies of half a dozen races, in half a hundred strange spaceships, through half a thousand points of wonder.

  And he accepted.

  For a while, he forgot that he was a god of sorts and tha doom would follow genesis. There was a large audience for the first night's two performances. Every seat in the auditorium was filled, three thousand paying customers in all. Those seated too far to either side or toward the last half of the hall had raised the folding telescopic windowplates on the backs of the seats before them and were watching the magnified stage and the drawn, emerald curtain with childlike anticipation.

  The robotic orchestra played something of RimskiKorsakov's, cymbals crashing and drums growing ominous, then flutes and piccolos bursting forth with sign that fairness and good still existed in the black scene the music painted.

  Sebastian peeked through the curtains again and again, watching the patrons, carrying an excitement that came only with a performance. If the combination of dress styles from a hundred worlds looked strange out there, Sebastian didn't notice. It was not the clothes, but the people that excited him. So many people, so close, all there for the puppets he helped bring them.

  He closed the gap in the curtain and turned to look over the puppets who stood together, talking, perhaps working over their lines. He had always wondered what the puppets talked about when they were together, alone, but he could ', never fathom what it might be. Pertos said they sometimes I, dreamed of escape, though they could never go farther from the Furnace than a thousand yards without suffering an excruciating, unendurable pain that eventually forced them back where they belonged.

  Bitty Belina was looking very earnest, her little brow wrinkled, her eyes set and sparkling, her lips moving steadily, almost as if in ritual cadence, repeating some charm or magic spell.

  Suddenly she turned and faced Sebastian, and in his mind, there was blood pumping out of her stomach and she was not Bitty Belina any more, but a girl named jenny. And he gurgled and looked away from her, blinking, crying, but no longer remembering what had stirred him so deeply. The flash of memory was gone. Jenny? Just a name.

  "Where is Master Godelhausser?" she asked Sebastian.

  Her voice, though small, was not tinny. It did not screech or whine as she spoke. It was a womanly voice in the sense that some little girls, when breathless, sound very adult and somehow sensuous.

  Sebastian waved his arms, pointing nowhere, and finally managed to say, "With the lights. As always."

  His throat ached, as if each one of the sharp-edged words had torn chunks of flesh loose on their way from his body to Bitty Belina. He coughed, dry and racking, making his eyes water.

  She had her tiny hands on her hips now. Her white, mid-thigh skirt rustled as if made of paper, and it thrust out stiffly over the pert curve of her small buttocks. "Damn him! He promised us we'd have a new ending in the script, like we want, and then he disappears before he comes throughl"

  "New ending?" Sebastian asked. He could not understand what she meant, for the story of Bitty Belina was a permanent cycle with him, and the notion that it could be changed was alien and unfathomable. One might as well say the sun will rise in the north and settle in the east or that cows will now fly and birds will give milk henceforth.

  "We don't want Wissa killed in the end," Belina explained, indicating the wickedly beautiful, dark-haired and sloe-eyed villainess.

  "But she . , wants you dead I" Sebastian blurted, amazed at the blonde puppet's concern for an evil woman lie this.

  "Only in the script," Belina said.

  "It hurts so," Wissa explained. "It hurts with the sword in my neck, because I don't die very fast. And every time I'm created, it's all just waiting until I die:"

  "We are people," Belina said. Her pretty face was not as pretty as it usually was, he noticed. "We're made on a pattern designed according to human gene structure. We're complete, with brains and emotions-'

  "Oh, hell, he's retarded," the prince said. "What are you all standing around talking to an idiot for?"

  Sebastian wanted to squash the prince. He could have, too. One swift kick against the wall, a heel brought down hard

  Belina stamped her feet, spat on the floorboards, leaving

  a little spot of glistening saliva there, a dew drop. "We'll put it to Godelhausser tonight. Wissa, it will be the last time. That old bastard isn't going to keep sacrificing you for showmanshipl"

  "He'll refuse to change it," Wissa Said. "Some patrons like the blood in the end. He's said so before."

  "Then we won't perform!" Belina snapped.

  "Yeah?" the prince asked. "And how do you plan to refuse him when he is four times taller than you, when you can't run more than a thousand yards, and when he can refuse you food or water and let you dehydrate until you're too weak to resist?"

  "Or," one of the three suitors offered, "if we push him too hard on it, perhaps he'll just stow us back in the Furnace, return us to plasm, and never use our story again. And that's as good as a permanent death. At least Wissa is always reborn."

  Listening, Sebastian was horror-stricken at such a possibility, and he felt his bladder weakening as he anticipated never seeing Bitty Belina again, never hearing that whispered voice in another show.

  "We could kill the old bastard 1" Belina growled, her face furiously red now, her hands fisted on her hips.

  The prince slid his hands around her, from the back, cupping her pert little breasts, chewing on her neck. "Calm, Belina. Don't louse up all we have and give us nothing in return."

  "I suppose," she said, pouting her lips.

  One of his hands slid between the buttons of her blouse, and the rounded mound of one breast was partially visible.

  Sebastian wanted to squash him, though he felt terribly guilty about harboring such desires. And, too, while he hated the prince and the way the prince touched Belina (and hated, even more, the way she reacted, cooing, giggling, enjoying it), chiefly because he could not understand w
hat they were doing, he was not of a mind to take any action because of the bigger fear: that Pertos would deposit them in the Furnace and never bring them out again.

  They would be dead. Forever. Liquid flesh without feature.

  Dead and forever and no more blond hair and bright eyes.

  Because all this upset him so much, he had had an "accident" and he felt miserable. He wanted to change clothes, but he knew he shouldn't leave the stage until the curtain went up and he knew that there were no last-minute hitches.

  By now the puppets had seen what had happened, were pointing and laughing at the dark wet streaks down his pantleg. He saw that even Bitty Belina was laughing, and he was even more upset at this until he decided that, after all, it was funny, his standing there like that, all wet and embarrassed. So he laughed too.

  He didn't want to laugh, really. It was just that not laughing would have made things so much worse. Not laughing would have made him different and made him outside their fun. And he wanted to be inside more than anything else in the world. He always had, but he had never often succeeded in acting right.

  Now he was. They all laughed together.

  Fortunately, the curtain went up as Pertos operated the controls from the lightman's perch, and the play began. He could stop laughing when he didn't want to, and there was no longer any need for him to remain in the wings. Pertos said he should stay there as a communications link before a curtain rose, but Pertos had never called him in five years. He went to his room and changed trousers, which made him feel better. He came back to watch the puppets kissing and fighting, drinking and singing and dancing. Then there was the final shriek of the evil stepmother as the prince drove his sword through Wissa's neck.

  The audience gasped.

  Belina stepped from her pedestal and took the prince away, to make love to him, and the curtain fell with a whispering hiss that signaled the time for applause.

  It was a good performance and Sebastian felt good.