"The little... ?"
"The white stuff. Don't play dumb. You know as well as I do what's happening with these Lords. Your best chance of getting anything done in the Interior Division is to go into Government City. The clerks all run it from there anyway."
The "white stuff": that meant dope. "Well, thank you. You have been of great help."
"I wouldn't give you the time of day if you weren't from the Apparatus." And the officer walked off.
Gloom settled in on Madison. The day he began to transact business through clerks had not arrived. And the top men? In sudden revelation, this deserted city was explained. Any minute he expected to see an I. G. Barben truck. Lombar Hisst had this place on dope! Did this explain the chiefs interest in Rockecenter? Did Rockecenter have a connection to that Earth base in Turkey? No, he doubted Rockecenter even knew about these people. But they knew about Rockecenter.
Madison seldom cursed. He felt a bit like cursing now. You could only deal with top men for the things he had in mind, and with insight he knew that from the Emperor on down, here at Palace City, he would be running into hopheads. Suddenly he understood a bit more about Lombar Hisst: the (bleeped) fool must be on amphetamines himself! A speeder! The signs of persecution were there, delusion was obvious. It wasn't to the point of feeling bugs under the skin or aging or losing one's teeth, but it would get there. And he probably had been crazy to begin with.
A chill hit Madison. He had better get his job done on Heller somehow, some way, and get out of this place before Hisst reached raving paranoia and started to kill everyone in sight!
How long did he have? A few months?
He groaned. He didn't even have any place to start!
"Where now?" said Flick. "It's quitting time. Do I drive to Government City and find a rooming house?"
"I don't have any money."
"Hells of a boss you are," said Flick. "I'm tired of sleeping in an airbus and I bet you have nightmares: killers always do."
"Sleep in a car?" said Madison. This was getting worse and worse. He could see himself becoming an unshaven wreck: not the slightest chance of being believed.
"Well, I ain't going to break into any of these palaces," said Flick. "That would be a fast route to Camp Kill, with all these guards around. Tell you what, we'll fly to Slum City and rob a store. You can shoot the watchman."
Madison wished Flick wouldn't keep building on that image, yet he could see respect for him was dwindling. "I don't have a gun."
"Blowholes! The assignments I get! My last boss lost all his pay in gambling and finally got stabbed in a dice game. Now I'm going to starve to death."
"Don't you have any pay? Any quarters?"
"In the Apparatus? A driver's boss is supposed to provide all that. And I get a murderer who isn't even packing a gun, that's dead broke and has no pay status. Can't you do anything?"
It jarred Madison. Yes, there was something he could do. He could be a knight-errant. He could rescue Teenie; that had been allowed. He would do it even though the thought of sleeping three in an aircar presented new problems.
He mentally donned his plumed helmet. "Drive back to that park in front of the Royal Palace. I've got to rescue a girl."
Chapter 4
They drove back a mile and slid along the curving path where he had first seen her. The light seemed bad: apparently in this place they followed day and night, and this must be dusk.
The garden space around the painted statue was all dug up but no workmen were about. Flick stopped.
Suddenly, from under the sculptured purple cloak of some long-dead monarch, an Apparatus guard moved out, rifle levelled. It was the same guard he had seen before. Madison hastily presented his identoplate through the window. The guard saw "Apparatus" and relaxed.
"There was a girl here earlier," said Madison.
"Oh, yeah," said the guard. "They're gone now. You haven't got a puffstick, have you?"
"Give him one," Madison told Flick.
With a very dirty look, Flick complied. He gave the guard an even dirtier look when he had to light it for him.
"They went over that way," said the guard. "Between those two orange-colored buildings."
Flick headed in that direction. "This is getting worse and worse," he said.
Madison privately agreed with him. If he found her, she would probably be covered with mud and this car, not overly clean already, would really ruin all his clothes then. Anyway, she would be terribly happy to see him and know that, as his assistant, she would be free.
They burst into an area of pools. There was a circular series of waterfalls, each one lower than the next, the water spilling off the lips in shimmering sheets, the underlighting turning them into a cacophony of colors.
They would have passed them by but Madison saw a sudden movement on a rim. It was pretty far away.
TEENIE!
She was running along a lip. She dived through scarlet lights into the next pool. She swam across it. She dived through yellow lights in the next pool and swam toward the next fall.
A sign plainly said:
NO SWIMMING
Oh, Gods, she was going to get into trouble before he even had a chance to rescue her!
Frantically, he directed the airbus to a point where she would come out if she dived into the ground-level pool.
She did! Her body glistened as she shot through a sheet of yellow light. She came swimming boldly across.
Madison got out of the car. He waited at the pool edge.
Teenie came to the rim and with an agile leap, sprang up on it, gleaming in the red lights. She was very lean: her stomach and her thighs were flat. Water cascaded from her shoulders and made sparkling rivulets down her legs. She swept her light brown hair out of her big eyes and looked at him.
"Teenie!" he cried. "I've got great news. I've got a chance to get us back to Earth. And you're my assistant now! You're not a slave anymore!"
She shrugged. She turned and walked over to a bench where she had evidently left her purse. She got out a comb and began to whip the water out of her hair with it.
Madison couldn't understand it. She didn't seem glad to see him at all! He walked closer. "Don't you understand? I've freed you! And when I saw the horrible way they treat slaves, you ought to be very happy!"
She gathered her wet hair into a ponytail and put a rubber band around it. Then she went over to the pool waterfall and fished up the piece of sackcloth she had been wearing. She wrung it out and, without putting it on, tossed it over her shoulder. She picked up her purse and began to walk off.
She seemed cross.
Madison tried to find a reason for it. Why was she angry with him? He hadn't been the one who had gotten her into this mess. That had been Gris.
He followed her, Flick driving the airbus at a slow pace behind him. The little procession went down a curving promenade, between two other buildings. They were approaching a gold structure that was ornate but seemed very aged. Vines had crept up its several stories and were tangled in its balconies. The wide, curving staircase was so huge that it made the thin Teenie look like a toy in a giant world.
Madison followed up. Flick stopped at the bottom.
She went through a pair of gold doors you could have flown a Boeing jetliner through.
Madison entered after her.
They were in a mammoth hall, all festooned with golden cords woven into patterns through which three-dimensional painted angels flew against a white sky. The floor was in patterns of clouds. Hundreds of jewelled chairs lined the walls: it must be some sort of a salon.
There was a mound of silken-fabricked pillows in the middle of the floor. Teenie sat down on them and they were promptly spotted with water.
Madison walked up to her, his footsteps sounding hollowly in the vast place. "Teenie," he pleaded. "I know a lot of these palaces are deserted now that families have moved out. But you're just riding for an awful fall. First you're swimming in a no-swimming pool
and now you're coming in here just because it's an empty building and you're even ruining those pillows. Please come along and let me get you out of here. Guards may drop by at any time to turn off the lights or something."
She picked up what must have been a priceless silken cover from a low table within her reach and began to swab herself with it, using it for a towel. She was ruining it! Oh, how could he stop her from sure disaster?
"Don't be cross with me," he begged. "I am your friend!"
She gave a short, barking laugh. "You're a fine one to talk. Some friend! On that freighter, you didn't help me a bit. You didn't even volunteer to keep books for me! You could have put up signs, 'The One and Only Too-Too!' You're even a lousy PR."
"Oh, come off of it," said Madison. "I couldn't get involved with a filthy business like that! You were making that poor boy into a prostitute, ruining his life! You even had him smoking pot. You have no conscience! No moral sense of any kind!"
"You're a fine one to talk, sleeping with your mother!"
"That's just the way I was raised!"
"Well, this is just the way I was raised!" snapped Teenie. "Have you got any money?"
"Well, no."
"And I bet you came around here just to borrow some."
Madison received a shock. He had sort of wondered if they had let her keep hers.
"I landed with a thousand credits," said Teenie. "I got it stashed. I'll let you have ten credits and that's the limit. You can then proceed to get lost."
Ten credits? He didn't know what things cost but it wasn't enough to sell his pride for. "I wouldn't touch money made out of the body of that poor boy!"
"That 'poor boy,' as you call him, happens to be a catamite that that (bleep) Gris set onto Lord Endow. Lord Endow is the head of the Exterior Division and the top man over the Apparatus, when he can stop drooling long enough. So I taught that 'poor boy,' as you call him, a few little tricks he could do and when he got back here he pleased Lord Endow no end. The goofy old (bleepard) went absolutely delirious over Too-Too."
"Wait a minute," said Madison, in Voltarian, "you just shifted languages. When you started talking about Endow, you shifted to Voltarian."
"Of course I did. And it's court Voltarian. What you just said, you said in executive Voltarian."
"But how..."
"Well, Lord Endow would do anything Too-Too asked, even jump over one of this assortment of moons they got on this planet. And I right away got sent to page school. They hypnotrained me to talk, read and write court Voltarian in five days. But meantime, Too-Too told all the other catamites about the wonderful trip he had had, and boy, were they envious! (Bleeped) by a whole crew for six weeks! He was the hero of the hour! So he's got me teaching the other catamites and we're including all the pages."
"Wait a minute," said Madison. "You must be lying, Teenie. I saw you doing slave work with my own eyes!"
"Well, jumping Jesus Christ, Maddie, you really are dumb. Is that why you were chattering about me being a slave? Listen, buster, I've only got a limited supply of marijuana seed and those dumb gardeners would have wasted it. Sure they got a growth catalyst that matures it in a week, but the old (bleeps) are 160, would you believe it? And they potter and totter when they ought to be drilling and tilling. We're tearing up all the flower beds in sight and planting the whole place properly with Mary Jane."
"Oh, God," said Madison. "More trouble. They'll kill us. You're my assistant now. Please, get out of this palace before they shoot us."
"(Bleep), Maddie! Nobody's going to shoot us. Too-Too told Lord Endow I was a movie queen on Earth. So the drooling old (bleepard) gave me this palace. Two hundred and thirty rooms! Some queen abandoned it about a hundred or a thousand years ago, poisoned or old age or something. But all her things are still here: Queen Hora, it says on the silver trays. I'm getting cold."
She snapped her fingers in a peculiar way and two old men in ornate silver livery, who must have been hovering in one of the several hallways, rushed in. They threw a gauzy silken robe on her that left her twice as naked as before. They snapped up the table cover she had used for a towel and vanished back into the hall.
Teenie snapped her fingers again, in a different way, and two old women trotted out. They were dressed in silver gowns. One bore a crystal jug of sparklewater on a crystal tray with crystal glasses. The other expertly balanced a silver tray which must have had ten pounds of colored sweetbuns on it, topped, each one, with a design which said Queen Teenie.
Madison suddenly got the picture.
Teenie had INFLUENCE!
Hope boomed in him like a struck drum. He could almost hear the trumpets blare. Influence could be USED!
The two old women had made their offerings to Teenie, bent to one knee. She had a goblet of sparklewater now in one hand and was cramming an oversized sweet-bun into her oversized mouth with the other.
The two old women cast their eyes sideways in a question to Teenie, waiting then for a signal to offer something to Madison.
Teenie shook her head. "Forget him," she said. "He's no friend of mine."
The two old women backed away, bowed and left.
It was more than hunger which made Madison stare after them. He knew just where he stood now. Nowhere.
His hopes of finishing Heller fell crumbling about him.
Chapter 5
A small obituary ran through Madison's head:
Earthman Found Dead
An emaciated body was discovered last night in Slum City. The identoplate had the name J. Walter Madison. No known relatives or friends on Voltar.
Teenie sat there stuffing herself with sweetbuns and guzzling down nutritious sparklewater. Maybe, thought Madison, when the beast in her is fed, she will be more kind.
He waited until her face looked relaxed and then he said, "Teenie, common humanity says that you should help me."
She shrugged. "Why should I? Did you help me on the yacht? No. You didn't even attempt to persuade that (bleeped) Gris to stay aboard! You ran right off with him!"
Ah, so that was what was biting her. No reason to stir it up further: he would try another tack, earnest and sincere. Even frank! "Teenie, I've got to succeed as a PR here. Otherwise I'll never be accepted back on Earth. Did you ever hear of Wister?"
"The Whiz Kid? Yeah, I read something. And that (bleeping) (bleep) (bleep) Gris was snarling about him one day."
"Well, Teenie, the Whiz Kid was really Jettero Heller, a Royal officer of Voltar. And I'm in trouble. I never completed my job on him."
"That's your (bleep), baby. Not mine."
Madison was beginning to feel desperate. That obituary was drifting to the last page, below the classifieds. "Teenie, I've got to make motions of putting Hisst on the throne."
"So what's that to me? He doesn't and won't give a (bleep) what's happening in Palace City. He never even talks to the Lords here and they sure won't talk to him, no matter what he calls himself. He's just a rat from Slum City: he'd still have to rule through the Grand Council. He's got them all drugged up, but even so he can only push them so far. They privately laugh at him behind his back. Even if he gets put on the throne he won't last any time at all. I know what I'm talking about, because I been through page school now and I know all the pages and they know everything! So all I've got to do is keep in good with the catamites, raise lots of Mary Jane and sit here in my queen's palace having fun. I've got it made."
Madison's obituary even lost its subtitle. Desperation boiled over. He got down on his knees. "Please, Teenie. Oh, please, help me!"
She laughed at him. She snapped her fingers in yet a different way and two young boys, about twelve, ran out of a hall, stopped before her and bowed.
"You've got to excuse me, Madison," said Teenie. "I have a class starting shortly."
All sorts of arguments were racing through Madison's head. He was hastily examining her own assessment of her situation to see if he could punch any holes in it. Having worked for Rockec
enter, he knew that madmen could not be dismissed so lightly. But all he could come up with was that she had INFLUENCE and he needed it desperately.
Then suddenly he registered what she was doing. He was horrified for more reasons than one. Good Heavens, she was going to disgrace herself and not even be able to help him if she would. She had gone insane!
She had signalled to the two boys before her and they were grinning in a knowing way and taking off their clothes!
"No, no!" cried Madison. "Not here! This is a public audience hall!"
Teenie smiled. She said, "I know. And the audience will be here soon. Bye-bye, Madison. If you ever get back to Earth, say hello to Broadway."
Madison knelt there, suffering. He ignored the dismissal. Somehow, some way, he would make her listen to his plea, but right now she seemed to be well on the way to destroying her public image. The huge entrance doors weren't even closed!
The first little boy was looking down, grinning.
Teenie reached her hand out.
Madison stared. He was horrified. "Teenie! What are you doing? Don't make that boy into a queer! Take that out of your mouth!"
Teenie leaned back and looked in disdain at Madison. "They're not being made into queers, idiot. They'll be top-grade catamites when I'm done. It's still early and
I'm just playing around waiting for the audience. You should see what happens then!"
He could see liveried people watching for her bidding in the halls. She was really going to destroy herself before she could be of any possible use to him! He said hastily in English, "Teenie, don't perform sexual acts in public! The thing you did there is not socially acceptable! Not even in front of the help! What will the servants think?"
Mission Earth 09 - Villainy Victorious Page 6
