The Space Opera Novella

by Frank Belknap Long

  At last he noticed a return of the inwardness of pain.

  The pains themselves had not changed: he had.

  He knew all the events which could take place on Shayol. He remembered them well from his happy period. Formerly he had noticed them—now he felt them.

  He tried to ask the Lady Da how long they had had the drug, and how much longer they would have to wait before they had it again. She smiled at him with benign, remote happiness; apparently her many torsos, stretched out along the ground, had a greater capacity for retaining the drug than did his body. She meant him well, but was in no condition for articulate speech.

  The half-man lay on the ground, arteries pulsating prettily behind the half-transparent film which protected his abdominal cavity.

  Mercer squeezed the man’s shoulder.

  The half-man woke, recognized Mercer and gave him a healthily sleepy grin.

  “‘A good morrow to you, my boy.’ That’s out of a play. Did you ever see a play?”

  “You mean a game with cards?”

  “No,” said the half-man, “a sort of eye-machine with real people doing the figures.”

  “I never saw that,” said Mercer, “but I—”

  “But you want to ask me when B’dikkat is going to come back with the needle.”

  “Yes,” said Mercer, a little ashamed of his obviousness.

  “Soon,” said the half-man. “That’s why I think of plays. We all know what is going to happen. We all know when it is going to happen. We all know what the dummies will do—” he gestured at the hummocks in which the decorticated men were cradled—“and we all know what the new people will ask. But we never know how long a scene is going to take.”

  “What’s a ‘scene’?” asked Mercer. “Is that the name for the needle?”

  The half-man laughed with something close to real humor. “No, no, no. You’ve got the lovelies on the brain. A scene is just a part of a play. I mean we know the order in which things happen, but we have no clocks and nobody cares enough to count days or to make calendars and there’s not much climate here, so none of us know how long anything takes. The pain seems short and the pleasure seems long. I’m inclined to think that they are about two Earth-weeks each.”

  Mercer did not know what an “Earth-week” was, since he had not been a well-read man before his conviction, but he got nothing more from the half-man at that time. The half-man received a dromozootic implant, turned red in the face, shouted senselessly at Mercer, “Take it out, you fool! Take it out of me!”

  When Mercer looked on helplessly, the half-man twisted over on his side, his pink dusty back turned to Mercer, and wept hoarsely and quietly to himself.

  * * * *

  Mercer himself could not tell how long it was before B’dikkat came back. It might have been several days. It might have been several months.

  Once again B’dikkat moved among them like a father; once again they clustered like children. This time B’dikkat smiled pleasantly at the little head which had grown out of Mercer’s thigh—a sleeping child’s head, covered with light hair on top and with dainty eyebrows over the resting eyes. Mercer got the blissful needle.

  When B’dikkat cut the head from Mercer’s thigh, he felt the knife grinding against the cartilage which held the head to his own body. He saw the child-face grimace as the head was cut; he felt the far, cool flash of unimportant pain, as B’dikkat dabbed the wound with a corrosive antiseptic which stopped all bleeding immediately.

  The next time it was two legs growing from his chest.

  Then there had been another head beside his own.

  Or was that after the torso and legs, waist to toe-tips, of the little girl which had grown from his side?

  He forgot the order.

  He did not count time.

  Lady Da smiled at him often, but there was no love in this place. She had lost the extra torsos. In between teratologies, she was a pretty and shapely woman; but the nicest thing about their relationship was her whisper to him, repeated some thousands of times, repeated with smiles and hope, “People never live for ever.”

  She found this immensely comforting, even though Mercer did not make much sense out of it.

  Thus events occurred, and victims changed in appearance, and new ones arrived. Sometimes B’dikkat took the new ones, resting in the everlasting sleep of their burned-out brains, in a ground-truck to be added to other herds. The bodies in the truck threshed and bawled without human speech when the dromozoa struck them.

  Finally, Mercer did manage to follow B’dikkat to the door of the cabin. He had to fight the bliss of super-condamine to do it. Only the memory of previous hurt, bewilderment and perplexity made him sure that if he did not ask B’dikkat when he, Mercer, was happy, the answer would no longer be available when he needed it. Fighting pleasure itself, he begged B’dikkat to check the records and to tell him how long he had been there.

  B’dikkat grudgingly agreed, but he did not come out of the doorway. He spoke through the public address box built into the cabin, and his gigantic voice roared out over the empty plain, so that the pink herd of talking people stirred gently in their happiness and wondered what their friend B’dikkat might be wanting to tell them. When he said it, they thought it exceedingly profound, though none of them understood it, since it was simply the amount of time that Mercer had been on Shayol:

  “Standard years—eighty-four years, seven months, three days, two hours, eleven and one half minutes. Good luck, fellow.”

  Mercer turned away.

  The secret little corner of his mind, which stayed sane through happiness and pain, made him wonder about B’dikkat. What persuaded the cow-man to remain on Shayol? What kept him happy without super-condamine? Was B’dikkat a crazy slave to his own duty or was he a man who had hopes of going back to his own planet some day, surrounded by a family of little cow-people resembling himself? Mercer, despite his happiness, wept a little at the strange fate of B’dikkat. His own fate he accepted.

  He remembered the last time he had eaten—actual eggs from an actual pan. The dromozoa kept him alive, but he did not know how they did it.

  He staggered back to the group. The Lady Da, naked in the dusty plain, waved a hospitable hand and showed that there was a place for him to sit beside her. There were unclaimed square miles of seating space around them, but he appreciated the kindliness of her gesture none the less.

  CHAPTER IV

  The years, if they were years, went by. The land of Shayol did not change.

  Sometimes the bubbling sound of geysers came faintly across the plain to the herd of men; those who could talk declared it to be the breathing of Captain Alvarez. There was night and day, but no setting of crops, no change of season, no generations of men. Time stood still for these people, and their load of pleasure was so commingled with the shocks and pains of the dromozoa that the words of the Lady Da took on very remote meaning.

  “People never live for ever.”

  Her statement was a hope, not a truth in which they could believe. They did not have the wit to follow the stars in their courses, to exchange names with each other, to harvest the experience of each for the wisdom of all. There was no dream of escape for these people. Though they saw the old-style chemical rockets lift up from the field beyond B’dikkat’s cabin, they did not make plans to hide among the frozen crop of transmuted flesh.

  Far long ago, some other prisoner than one of these had tried to write a letter. His handwriting was on a rock. Mercer read it, and so had a few of the others, but they could not tell which man had done it. Nor did they care.

  The letter, scraped on stone, had been a message home. They could still read the opening: “Once, I was like you, stepping out of my window at the end of day, and letting the winds blow me gently towards the place I live in. Once, like you, I had one head, two hands, ten fingers on my hands. The front part o
f my head was called a face, and I could talk with it. Now I can only write, and that only when I get out of pain. Once, like you, I ate foods, drank liquid, had a name. I cannot remember the name I had. You can stand up, you who get this letter. I cannot even stand up. I just wait for the lights to put my food in me molecule by molecule, and to take it out again. Don’t think that I am punished any more. This place is not a punishment. It is something else.”

  Among the pink herd, none of them ever decided what was “something else”.

  Curiosity had died among them long ago.

  * * * *

  Then came the day of the little people.

  It was a time—not an hour, not a year: a duration somewhere between them—when the Lady Da and Mercer sat wordless with happiness and filled with the joy of super-condamine. They had nothing to say to one another; the drug said all things for them.

  A disagreeable roar from B’dikkat’s cabin made them stir mildly.

  Those two, and one or two others, looked towards the speaker of the public address system.

  The Lady Da brought herself to speak, though the matter was unimportant beyond words. “I do believe,” said she, “that we used to call that the War Alarm.”

  They drowsed back into their happiness.

  A man with two rudimentary heads growing beside his own crawled over to them. All three heads looked very happy, and Mercer thought it delightful of him to appear in such a whimsical shape. Under the pulsing glow of super-condamine, Mercer regretted that he had not used times when his mind was clear to ask him who he had once been. He answered it for them. Forcing his eyelids open by sheer will power, he gave the Lady Da and Mercer the lazy ghost of a military salute and said, “Suzdal, ma’am and sir, former cruiser commander. They are sounding the alert. Wish to report that I am… I am… I am not quite ready for battle.”

  He dropped off to sleep.

  The gentle peremptories of the Lady Da brought his eyes open again.

  “Commander, why are they sounding it here? Why did you come to us?”

  “You, ma’am, and the gentleman with the ears seem to think best of our group. I thought you might have orders.”

  Mercer looked around for the gentleman with the ears. It was himself. In that time his face was almost wholly obscured with a crop of fresh little ears, but he paid no attention to them, other than expecting that B’dikkat would cut them all off in due course and that the dromozoa would give him something else.

  The noise from the cabin rose to a higher, ear-splitting intensity.

  Among the herd, many people stirred.

  Some opened their eyes, looked around, murmured, “It’s a noise,” and went back to the happy drowsing with super-condamine.

  The cabin door opened.

  B’dikkat rushed out, without his suit. They had never seen him on the outside without his protective metal suit.

  He rushed up to them, looked wildly around, recognised the Lady Da and Mercer, picked them up, one under each arm, and raced with them back to the cabin. He flung them into the double door. They landed with bone-splitting crashes, and found it amusing to hit the ground so hard. The floor tilted them into the room. Moments later, B’dikkat followed.

  He roared at them, “You’re people, or you were. You understand people; I only obey them. But this I will not obey. Look at that!”

  Four beautiful human children lay on the floor. The two smallest seemed to be twins, about two years of age. There was a girl of five and a boy of seven or so. All of them had slack eyelids. All of them had thin red lines around their temples, and their hair, shaved away, showed how their brains had been removed.

  B’dikkat, heedless of danger from dromozoa, stood beside the Lady Da and Mercer, shouting.

  “You’re real people. I’m just a cow. I do my duty. My duty does not include this. These are children.”

  * * * *

  The wise, surviving recess of Mercer’s mind registered shock and disbelief. It was hard to sustain the emotion, because the super-condamine washed at his consciousness like a great tide, making everything seem lovely. The forefront of his mind, rich with the drug, told him, “Won’t it be nice to have some children with us!” But the undestroyed interior of his mind, keeping the honor he knew before he came to Shayol, whispered, “This is a crime worse than any crime we have committed! And the Empire has done it.”

  “What have you done?” said the Lady Da. “What can we do?”

  “I tried to call the satellite. When they knew what I was talking about, they cut me off. After all, I’m not people. The head doctor told me to do my work.”

  “Was it Doctor Vomact?” Mercer asked.

  “Vomact?” said B’dikkat. “He died a hundred years ago, of old age. No, a new doctor cut me off. I don’t have peoplefeeling, but I am Earth-born, of Earth blood. I have emotions myself. Pure cattle emotions! This I cannot permit.”

  “What have you done?”

  B’dikkat lifted his eyes to the window. His face was illuminated by a determination which, even beyond the edges of the drug which made them love him, made him seem like the father of this world—responsible, honorable, unselfish.

  He smiled. “They will kill me for it, I think. But I have put in the Galactic Alert—all ships here.”

  The Lady Da, sitting back on the floor, declared, “But that’s only for new invaders! It is a false alarm.” She pulled herself together and rose to her feet. “Can you cut these things off me, right now, in case people come? And get me a dress. And do you have anything which will counteract the effects of the super-condamine?”

  “That’s what I wanted!” cried B’dikkat. “I will not take these children. You give me leadership.”

  There and then, on the floor of the cabin, he trimmed her down to the normal proportions of mankind.

  The corrosive antiseptic rose like smoke in the air of the cabin. Mercer thought it all very dramatic and pleasant, and dropped off in catnaps part of the time. Then he felt B’dikkat trimming him too. B’dikkat opened a long, long drawer and put the specimens in; from the cold in the room it must have been a refrigerated locker.

  He sat them both up against the wall.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “There is no antidote for super-condamine. Who would want one? But I can give you the hypos from my rescue boat. They are supposed to bring a person back, no matter what has happened to that person out in space.”

  There was a whining over the cabin roof. B’dikkat knocked a window out with his fist, stuck his head out of the window and looked up.

  “Come on in,” he shouted.

  * * * *

  There was the thud of a landing craft touching ground quickly. Doors whirred. Mercer wondered, mildly, why people dared to land on Shayol. When they came in he saw that they were not people; they were Customs robots, who could travel at velocities which people could never match. One wore the insignia of an inspector.

  “Where are the invaders?”

  “There are no—” began B’dikkat.

  The Lady Da, imperial in her posture though she was completely nude, said in a voice of complete clarity, “I am a former Empress, the Lady Da. Do you know me?”

  “No, ma’am,” said the robot inspector. He looked as uncomfortable as a robot could look. The drug made Mercer think that it would be nice to have robots for company, out on the surface of Shayol.

  “I declare this Top Emergency, in the ancient words. Do you understand? Connect me with the Instrumentality.”

  “We can’t—” said the inspector.

  “You can ask,” said the Lady Da.

  The inspector complied.

  The Lady Da turned to B’dikkat. “Give Mercer and me those shots now. Then put us outside the door so the dromozoa can repair these scars. Bring us in as soon as a connection is made. Wrap us in cloth if you do not have clothes for us.
Mercer can stand the pain.”

  “Yes,” said B’dikkat, keeping his eyes away from the four soft children and their collapsed eyes.

  The injection burned like no fire ever had. It must have been capable of fighting the super-condamine, because B’dikkat put them through the open window, so as to save time going through the door. The dromozoa, sensing that they needed repair, flashed upon them. This time the super-condamine had something else fighting it.

  Mercer did not scream but he lay against the wall and wept for ten thousand years; in objective time, it must have been several hours.

  The Customs robots were taking pictures. The dromozoa were flashing against them too, sometimes in whole swarms, but nothing happened.

  Mercer heard the voice of the communicator inside the cabin calling loudly for B’dikkat. “Surgery Satellite calling Shayol. B’dikkat, get on the line!”

  He obviously was not replying.

  There were soft cries coming from the other communicator, the one which the customs officials had brought into the room. Mercer was sure that the eye-machine was on and that people in other worlds were looking at Shayol for the first time.

  B’dikkat came through the door. He had torn navigation charts out of his lifeboat. With these he cloaked them.

  Mercer noted that the Lady Da changed the arrangement of the cloak in a few minor ways and suddenly looked like a person of great importance.

  They re-entered the cabin door.