Horrors of the Dancing Gods

by Jack L. Chalker

  She also wondered if it was going to be as easy for the boy as he thought it might be. All that youthful, suppressed sexuality unleashed at once—who couldn't be corrupted, and fast?

  And then there was Joe. Poor Joe. In that nymph's body, tied to the trees to some extent and also to the flesh, how pure could he stay down there?

  It took almost a week to get downriver, and it wasn't wasted time. In addition to getting to know the maps and layout of Yuggoth as much as possible, the three began to get to know each other a bit better. She got the impression that Irving was deliberately cool to her less because she was a woman than because she was a friend and defender of his father. Finally, one evening, she decided to press it a bit and see just how deep that went.

  "Do you really hate your father, Irving?' she asked him, deciding that directness was the only approach that would work with the boy. "I mean it: is `hate' the right word?"

  "Maybe. I'm not sure," the boy admitted. "But I have no love at all for him. In fact, I think I'd rather have been left with Mom on the streets back home."

  "From what I heard and from where you were living, you'd have been dead by your late teens, maybe addicted before that," she noted. "That's what he was scared of. It was partly drugs that split your parents up or at least kept them split, I think. He didn't want you going in that direction. He was really almost obsessed with saving you, Irving. He named his sword after you just so he'd always remember what he had left and what he was fighting for."

  "But then he brought me here and left me! So now I got to go and maybe get killed or worse savin' his neck and hide to boot. And you're tellin' me it's better here than back home? That I'm better off? Mom had problems, sure, but she was gettin' clean. I know she was."

  It was a point she couldn't press even though Poquah had pretty much clued her in that the boy's convictions were less that than they were the hopes and naivete of a young son who loved his mother far more than she loved him. In point of fact, Mom didn't have much use for her son at all; she just wanted him around because that denied the boy to Joe.

  How did you tell a kid that, no matter what age he'd grown to be? And how did you make him believe it when there was nothing else to fill that hole with?

  "When a marriage splits, the two people who loved each other turn that old love to hate as often as not," she told him. "It was because your mom wouldn't let your dad even see you that a lot of this happened. Poor kid, you were just a football in a lot of this, I think, like a lot of kids get to be in these cases."

  "You were human once. You ever have a kid?"

  "No. I don't know if I couldn't or if it just didn't happen, but in the end it seems a good thing I didn't. If I had, I'd probably have stayed and taken it, and my husband would have gotten so drunk sooner or later, he'd have killed me or the kid and I'd have killed him." She sighed. "Kid, that's the one thing about this world. A select group of unhappy people from Earth get to try again here. Some make it, most don't, but they get the chance. You had no chance where you were. I'm not sure what chance you have now, but it's more up to you than it would have been had you stayed."

  "Maybe. But my dad took a kid out of his own comfortable world—a world that might not have been real nice but was one I knew—and plopped him down here in the middle of Fairyland. Then he went off to fight a war and didn't come back. Only he coulda come back. That's what I hold against him. If he'd lost an arm or a leg or been scarred or burned or something, he'd still have come back, and you know it. Come back and been a dad. But oh, no! He got turned into a Greenie, a girl. Can't have that. The boy'll get screwed up if I'm not macho, right? Heap big Injun chief became a squaw. That was something I could have accepted—I didn't know him much, anyway. But it wasn't something he could accept or deal with. It was still Dad inside, though, in the mind, in the head. Like that, well, maybe if he really cared more about me than about himself and his big image, he coulda spent some time raisin' me and teachin' me and givin' me a little love and whatever else I needed in that big, lonely place. But uh uh. The kid might not respect him now as just a nothin', a girl. So he ran away and left me to grow up without anybody. I can forgive all the rest, but I can never forgive him for that. In the end he was more scared of bein' what he was than he cared about me."

  "You're probably right on all that," she admitted, "but the fact is that being incredibly dumb in this area doesn't make him a bad guy, or girl, or whatever. He was raised in a very different way than either of us. I just don't think he could accept it. Maybe the other way, but the way it was, it was a kind of honor thing with him. I'm a little pissed off myself that he considered it a step down, but I wasn't raised his way. As dumb as it sounds or maybe is, I think he decided that you'd have no respect for him at all if he just showed up and told the truth. Somehow he really believed that if you could just be convinced he died a hero in that last battle, you'd somehow turn out better than if he showed up as a wood nymph. I don't know. Neither of your family ethnic cultures held women on a high plane. I think the real tragedy is that everybody just assumes. Nobody ever asks the kid what he thinks would be best."

  Irving shrugged. "Well, I know one thing from reading this stuff. Either he's as brave as or braver than he ever was or he's even stupider than you say he is. I mean, Dad and one other girl went into Yuggoth cold turkey, without even the knowledge or powers we got, and that's not all that great."

  She nodded. "Still, if you feel this way, why risk yourself to maybe try and save a perfect stranger, anyway?"

  He gave a wan smile and said, "Because I'm not about to do to him what he did to me. If I don't at least make the attempt to save him, am I any better than he was by not coming back and being a parent to me? Besides, I got to know a little about myself. I want to know if I've got the guts I think he should have had or if cowardice and stupidity run in the family."

  "I think you might be very surprised," she told him. She was. Deep down, if she could keep him in that kind of mood, there almost seemed somebody she could actually like down there.

  "Um, Irv, are you also aware of the effect you have on women?"

  He gave a dry chuckle. "Yeah. What a waste, huh?"

  "You don't find them attractive? At all?"

  "Oh, I guess, sort of. I don't understand women much. I've talked to you as an equal longer and more seriously than I think I've talked to any other woman since I left Earth. I understand on an academic level, I guess, but not personally. I know it's partly a spell—I have the knack for that myself, remember—but it's still not something I know firsthand. I'm not even sure I want to."

  "Huh? Oh, I can tell you, there's a lot of fun in it."

  "Fun? Yeah, maybe. Feel-good stuff, too. I know. But at what cost in self-control? You asked me if I hated my father. I'm trying very hard not to. I'm trying not to let any emotions overcome me other than maybe a sense of humor and a sense of tragedy. The spell itself isn't difficult, you know. It's a common spell used by adepts to keep themselves from being tempted during magical training. I see no profit in lifting it, particularly not now."

  "Scared you couldn't control it?"

  "Perhaps. Maybe I'm scared because I see how those girls react to me and how my mom and others reacted to their men. I don't think I want that. Not now. It's too much of a diversion. Better for now I stay where I am until I can control all of my mind and body."

  Marge stared at him and sighed. "You're right, kid. What a waste."

  Macore was still a few days away.

  Quinom was an old and somewhat seedy but still very popular ocean resort on the southern coast of Leander. Although the town itself had obviously seen better days and the upkeep on a tropical tourist trap was a bit higher than the locals had been willing to pay, it still had a harbor crowded with small pleasure boats, fishing vessels, and all sorts of recreational craft.

  Just beyond the pier was what Marge would accept as an obvious boardwalk area, a long line of shops, stalls, games, and whatnot that stretched in back of a wooden walkway tha
t divided town from beach.

  "The last I heard, Macore was talking about a nice, quiet, peaceful retirement," she noted. "This looks like a circus."

  "It is suited to his temperament," Poquah responded dryly. "One suspects that the phrase 'quiet, peaceful retirement' means in Macore's world view a place where he is not wanted by the authorities."

  "It's kind of a neat place," Irving put in. "I always loved it when the old man sent me down here for a while each year."

  Marge looked at the crowded harbor and town area and shook her head in wonder. "Just where is he in all this? And what's he doing?"

  "Up the boardwalk a bit, down at the end of that far pier there," Irving said, pointing well off to their left as they came in toward the dock. "This is the jumping-off point for the Mystic Islands, remember. Folks like to go out and see them and all the strange stuff without actually risking landing. With a good, fast vessel like Macore's you can get out there in about an hour, sail down the strip of islands for an hour and point out the main sights, then get on back. The tourists pay big money for that kind of thing."

  "Three-hour tours of the islands," Marge muttered. "And I suppose his boat's called the Minnow?"

  "Yeah, it is! How'd you know that?"

  She sighed. "I'm afraid Macore's become too predictable. That's probably why he had to retire."

  Making their way from the main dock over to the tourist boat pier wasn't very difficult, although Irving felt uncomfortable doing it. It wasn't as if he were actually doing anything, but watching all those female heads turn and follow him with their eyes and expressions as he walked self-consciously by, making him feel like a piece of meat or maybe an ice cream cone they all wanted to lick, was a bit unnerving. One thing about Irving—he was never going to be inconspicuous.

  It was much easier to see where the boat had left from than to find it; clearly a tour was on, as the slip was empty. There was, however, a kiosk where you could buy tickets just in front of the slip, and as they approached, there came the sudden sounds of an unseen ghostly chorus.

  "Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale,

  A tale of a fateful trip.

  That started from this tropic port

  Aboard this tiny ship . ."

  "How's he doing that?" Marge asked, conscious that the last thing you would find in Husaquahr was electricity.

  "Some sort of spell," Poquah responded with a weary sigh. "I believe the Master procured it for him, but he still had to pay a good deal for it. Not as much as he has to pay to ensure that his batteries keep being charged on those infernal Earth devices, but those at least are for him alone."

  "I'm surprised the Council let him keep them," Marge commented, knowing that Poquah was referring to Macore's battery-powered television and videotape recorder, which he used so that he could view his complete collection of Gilligan's Island tapes. "They are a dangerous anachronism here."

  "So long as they remain private, it is all right," Poquah assured her. "Also, Macore appears to have convinced a majority of the Council that maintaining them is the only certain defense against zombies."

  "There is definitely a grain of truth in that," Marge acknowledged. "I always did wonder who the true audience for that show was until I saw its effect on the Army of the Dead."

  "There's the boat coming now!" Irving shouted, and they looked where he was pointing.

  The boat was a medium-sized sailing vessel, rather sleek and trim and nicely kept up and in some ways a bit too elaborate for the kind of work it was being asked to do.

  "Oh, Uncle Macore lives aboard," Irving told them. "The tourists pretty much stay above, and his own pretty nice place is below."

  There were a half dozen or so tourist types aboard, clearly from wealthier merchant families in the City-States from their look and dress. The rest were crew members, with a greater number required for this boat than for the original television Minnow, and they were very, very different.

  "Good grief! His whole crew is water nymphs!" Marge exclaimed.

  At that moment a smaller boat crossed right in front of the Minnow and one exotic-looking crewwoman let out an unnaturally loud series of whoop! whoop! whoop! sounds that scared not only the small boat but half the harbor as well.

  "Well, nymphs and sirens," Poquah noted dryly.

  A few moments later gray shapes rose on one side of the boat and began bumping and nudging it toward its berth as all sails were taken in. That close in, all boats of any size allowed the pilot whales to bring them safely to a halt in the right spot.

  Two buxom water nymphs threw out lines, and then one jumped to the dock and began tying off the boat. Water nymphs generally looked like all the other kinds of nymphs but tended to come in a variety of sizes and colors and seemed somewhat translucent. The nearest two were an azure blue nymph and a creamy white one, the first with green hair and the second with silver locks. The siren, another type of nymph, was a fiery red color and much larger than the average nymph, and it seemed as if there were at least one more somewhere in the back.

  At the wheel aft of the mainsail was a small, wiry figure dressed only in a pair of shorts but wearing an oversized sailor's cap. His skin was tanned so dark that it seemed as if he were of some other, more tropical race, and his long, unkempt hair and equally messy full beard were gray going fast toward white.

  Marge felt shock at the appearance of the captain. She remembered Macore as an eternally young little man with coal black hair and catlike movements. Somehow, sometime since she'd last seen him, the little retired master thief had grown old.

  The tourists were no sooner off the ship than Macore spotted his visitors standing there on the dock and bounded toward them with some semblance of his old energy. "Irv! Poquah! Good to see you!" he called out cheerily, coming down to greet them. He stopped, frowned, and looked at the colorful winged faerie between them. "Marge? That you?'

  "Hi, Macore. I hadn't realized it, but it seems to have been a long time," she said with a smile.

  He grinned. "Well, I'm fifty-seven now, and that's really all right with me. I mean, ninety-five percent of all the people in my old profession would be either in jail or executed by now!"

  The idea of a fifty-seven-year-old Macore, let alone the sight in front of her, brought home the different world in which she now existed as even the sight of a grown-up Irving couldn't have done. It was a graphic example of why faerie were always taught that interacting with humans was fine but they should never form attachments or get to know them all that well. There was a phrase for it, universal among the fairy folk of all sorts but one she'd never really thought much about until this moment

  They pass . . . We endure.

  She laughed at his still-flippant attitude, though, and his apparent high spirits. "I'm glad you seem pleased to see us, but you don't seem all that surprised," she noted.

  His expression grew a bit more serious. "I kind of expected something of this sort. Not sure who all would be in the Company, but it was kind of inevitable. Come on aboard and I'll have the girls find us some nice, cool drinks and comfortable seats."

  "I see you have an all-female faerie crew," Marge noted.

  He grinned in mock-evil fashion. "Hey, if I'm ever cracked up during one of these tours, I sure as hell don't want to be stuck on some deserted island for years with some dork professor who can invent anything except a way off, a mate too dumb to make fire, and a bunch of people who refuse to accept their fate. Uh uh. You pick who you want to crash with, and I'll pick who and what I want to crash with."

  Marge was startled as they came aboard and all the faerie crew turned as one, sighed, and said, "Hi, Irving!"

  "Hello, girls," he responded, a bit resigned but clearly impatient with the attitude they expressed.

  Still, Macore was as good as his word, and soon they were all sitting on comfortable deck furniture or pads, relaxing, and the drinks were actually chilled. With a cold drink and a warm breeze near sunset, things were just about perfect.

&
nbsp; "The cold drinks are a little secret shared by a few regulars here," he explained. "There's a cold current out there, and you can drag through it, and whatever bottles you have get cold and stay that way in the coolers here. Most folks here don't have a real taste for cold drinks, but I figured you still did."

  "It's been a long time, but yeah," Marge agreed. As a Kauri she did not eat, at least in the way humans and animals did, but virtually all faerie still had to drink and had a real appreciation for flavored waters and good wines and beers.

  "You said you were not surprised to see us," Poquah prodded after a while.

  Macore nodded. "I figured it out when Joe and that weird halfling girl came through a few weeks back. Talk about somebody nearly impossible to recognize!"

  "Who? The halfling girl? You knew her?'

  "No, no! I mean Joe, of course. Frankly, unless you talk for a while, you'd be hard pressed to tell her—er, him—er whatever—from any old garden variety wood nymph except maybe a lot spunkier. Um, sorry, Irv."

  "No problem," Irving responded. "We aren't exactly close, remember, in the usual ways, and we aren't close by blood, either, at this point, considering that she runs tree sap in her veins."

  "Yeah, well, anyway, we at least got to talkin' a little bit of old times," the ex-thief continued, "and suddenly it's questions about Yuggoth, of all places. I don't even like to say the word, let alone think about actually going there! And a wood nymph and a baffling girl by themselves? It was nuts. I wouldn't send the old Joe there with a legion of troops, let alone those two!"

  "Have you been there yourself?" Marge asked him.

  He shivered. "Once. Briefly. And I've been close to it now and again. I don't have any great ambitions to go farther, let alone get shipwrecked on or near the place. Unless you use one of the ships specially made for the passage, there's nothing around that whole damned continent except things to snare you and enchant or kill you: sirens, harpies, witches, sea hags, Circes, and all sorts of things, not to mention sea monsters and all the rest. It's nearly impossible to get there on your own safely except through blind luck. The place breeds those things!"