by William F.
"Where are we going?"
"Where they take us. Up."
They kept climbing.
Steps and steps and steps.
Logan's wounded back throbbed; his jaw was a full ache. Exhaustion dragged at him. The fitful rest on the bank had done little to strengthen him.
It grew darker as they ascended: the computer glow fading into gray shading into pitch. Logan was grateful for the darkness; he didn't want to see the steps falling steeply away below. Even the great plain of the Thinker far beneath him induced a sense of swimming vertigo. He would not look down again; he would look up. Up.
Logan froze, pulling Jess in beside him.
Someone was coming down the steps.
Was it Ballard?
Logan crouched close to the rock wall, eyes on the beam of light bobbing slowly toward them. The figure moved steadily down the twisting rope of steps. Now he was distinct enough for Logan to identify the tunic of a DS man. And the face. Not Ballard.
Francis.
Logan raised the Gun. Keeping his eyes tight on the advancing figure, he whispered, "All right, Jess. It's up to you. You hate killing. He's a DS man, armed with a homer. Either I use my Gun first or he uses his. Which will it be?"
Silence.
"Jess . . . Jess?" Logan pivoted. The steps were empty.
Jess had vanished.
But how? He was stunned. Had she gone on back to—to where? Surely not to the thing which still waited for them at the bottom?
A soft voice called to him. "Logan . . . here!"
He slid quick fingers along the rock. An opening.
Francis was twenty steps closer; his light flickered the walls.
Logan put away the Gun and slipped into the fissure, groping for Jess.
"Here . . ."
He touched her ankle.
'Go on ahead," he urged. "I'll follow you."
The crawl-space narrowed. Narrowed more. They were flesh corks in a pipe. A muffled sob. Jess could go no further. The weight of Crazy Horse pressed around them. Logan felt the rush of claustrophobia, shut it off.
"I think it's a little wider ahead," whispered Jess.
"Stretch," he told her, speaking harshly. "We can't go back."
Her hips scraped against the rough, sinuous pipe; she inched ahead.
Now they could move on hands and knees. The ceiling had risen. They stood upright in the blind core of the great mountain.
The rough talus of the stone floor cut into Logan's bare feet. The dark was impenetrable.
"Which way?" asked Jess.
Logan took her hand and began a cautious advance. With a bare foot he encountered emptiness, caught his balance, drew back. "Not this way." He tried another direction. The floor was pocked with deep shafts; a moment's carelessness and they would fall. The murmur of subterranean waters echoed up to them.
Logan probed ahead, weaving between the sinkholes in the stone. On all sides, in the living blackness, his ears could detect the shift of distances and depths.
A smooth rock face. Logan cautiously felt his way along it, searching for an opening. The rock face curved. They were in a closed chamber. Abruptly his hands fingered emptiness: the climb and twist of a passage. They heard the slow drip of water. Where did it lead?
They'd lost the sense of sight and now all sense of direction.
"Keep going," he said.
They clambered up flowstone ridges, snaked between stalactites and stalagmites and wet limestone columns. They were in a black mole-land of dolomite and calcite and gypsum. The mineral breath of the caverns blew on them.
Jess suddenly collapsed. Logan knelt, held her against him. "Rest a moment," he told her.
Now, with the cessation of their movement, they heard other sounds in the pitch. Something plopped into a pool. Hard claws clicked on stone. A rustling insect scuttled over Jessica's leg. She screamed, surged to her feet, shuddering, as a second and a third claw-footed creature crawled her flesh. Whipping at her skin, she frantically dislodged them.
"Wait," said Logan. "I think I can give us some light."
He twisted the pearl endplate of the Gun, lifted the plate free. The glow from the Gun's interior power pack dimly illuminated the space around them.
The chamber was acrawl with cavernicolous life: in the shallow pools lived crayfish and salamanders, whose optic ganglia had atrophied. These blind fish had developed tactile papilae on their heads, arranged in ridges. The lava walls supported Harvestmen spiders spinning gray clockcurl webs. Adelops swarmed the floors, preying on mites and myriapods among the dark mold and fungi. Here they had lived and adapted since the Permian and Cretaceous periods. And here, too, were the beetles and wingless insects. By the thousands.
Logan and Jess fled the chamber.
They hurried onward, along deep winding cuts and narrow cracks in the substrata. Jess stopped at the edge of a wide pool of black water. She was breathing in ragged gasps, her body shaking with exhaustion. "I—I can't go—on."
"If we stay here we die."
"We'll die anyway. We're hopelessly lost. Admit it."
"All right, we're lost."
"And the caverns go on forever. We'll die here. We'll fall and be crushed or starve . . ."
Logan studied the water revealed by the Gun's glow. A wet flash. "We won't starve," he said grimly.
He was soaked to the armpits when he brought up the darting silver fish. It wriggled in his fist. Logan climbed back to the girl and the Gun that lay beside her.
"We won't starve," he said again. "In fact, if we—" He paused, staring.
"What is it?"
Logan triumphantly thrust the creature toward her. "This fish. It's not like all the others. This fish has eyes!"
He quickly reassembled the Gun.
"Let's go," he said. "Into the water."
Up the coursing stream that fed the pool, ducking their heads to avoid the rock ceiling that lowered and raised above them. Around two sharp bends. Swimming. Climbing as they swam.
"Look!"
Sunshine ahead.
They climbed faster as light filled the cave.
They came out beneath a clean, cold waterfall that speared white music into a deep gorge.
They breathed the bright, clear air.
He glides the cave darkness, guided by the glow-flicker of the Follower.
His quarry is ahead, but it is not wise to attempt a chase in these caverns.
He retraces his path, leaves the tunnels and climbs uncounted steps into the head of Crazy Horse.
He peers through the right eye of the great warrior, sees Logan and the girl. They are far away, moving through the scrub toward the high grass.
He smiles.
He has them now.
There is nowhere for them to go.
EARLY AFTERNOON . . .
"Let's pidge!" cried Graygirl.
Deesticker jay,
Lift me a day,
Wanna' me forever,
On a PeeGee way.
A skirl of lung music, recorder and flageolet.
Deesticker lay,
Wild me away.
Me gotta never,
Kinda stickerlift play!
The pleasure gypsies came in jeweled laughter. They fireballed the Black Hills. Their devilsticks flamed.
Deesticker,
Deesticker,
AAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaa . . .
Logan heard the shrill piping as he and Jess cleared the high grass. "Down!" He gestured her back, out of sight.
In a glitter and swoop the gypsies were upon him.
"Footfella, hey!"
A blast of volcano heat behind Logan. The devil-stick chopped the Gun from his hand as it passed. Another struck him at chest level.
He was down, ringed in a circle of jato fire.
"If Sandfella tickles, giva he a fry!"
Logan did not move. He knew of the gypsies. Their first leader had been a full blooded Apache named Jimmy Walks-Like-a-Wolf who went berserk in the aftermath of the Li
ttle War. Gathering a crew of psychotics about him, he had conceived the gypsy death pact, the ritual vow of self-destruction. No pleasure gypsy lived long enough to see his flower go black; each was sworn to die on red as a gesture of ultimate defiance against the system. They feared neither Sleep nor Sandman. They were a law unto themselves.
A sword-slim man in white dismounted from a stick, and walked from the low-hovering vehicle to Logan. "Sandfella up," he said.
Logan stood up. He faced Rutago, king of the devilsticks. Sixteen. Bearded. White silks. Flat-muscled. Golden curls. A beauty. He reached over, turned up Logan's right hand. "Blinker he," said Rutago. He gave the others his smile.
Graygirl joined her man. She regarded Logan with lynx eyes. "Giva he Sandfella Lastday wild!"
The pleasure gypsies were fourteen in number. Seven men, seven women. Youngest: fifteen. Oldest: seventeen.
The females were satins and brocades and goldwire mesh. They were glittermake and richly coifed hair, star-piled; their nails opalescent and striped with lapis lazuli metallics. They were scented and soaped and smelled of peaches. (Graygirl was the exception. She wore no makeup; only her eyes were striped in black. She was starkly beautiful.)
The males were skinsilks and kidleather fringe and cuffed velvet boots. They were filigreed in silverstitch and platinum. They were brushed and oiled and immaculate.
Two of the pleasure girls came forward, holding Jessica between them. "Gotta more than Sandfella," said one. "Gotta we a runnergirl."
Logan took a step toward Jess, but the jato fire still hemmed him. He looked sourly at the circle of devil-sticks, their jet-flamed pods ready to sear him if he made an improper move.
These were not the devilsticks he'd ridden as a boy; these were fast and deadly, and the thrust from their rear-mounted chromaly jato housings could char a man down in the snap of a finger. If I could break this circle maybe I could handle them, thought Logan. Just maybe.
Rutago seemed pleased with the situation. He waved a graceful, jewel-encrusted hand. "Tie fella, runnergirl. Takeum on a stickerlift."
Three of the male gypsies stepped into the circle to bind Logan's wrists with tapewire.
They led him to Rutago's machine. The devilstick gleamed richly, from its hand-scrolled leather saddle studded with diamonds, emeralds, sapphires and fire rubies, to the inlay of pearls set into the long stick-body of the swift pleasure craft.
Logan settled himself behind the stitched saddle, and his legs were tapewired under him. Jess was similarly mounted and tied on Graygirl's stick.
"Deestickers go!"
The pleasure gypsies jetted.
Logan's Gun lay in the grass, abandoned.
The fiery wheel of the noon sun blistered its slow way across the Dakota sky, crowding the thin dry air with waves of shimmering heat. Deadwood was dust and ghost town stillness. The squat, windworked buildings along the main street had long since been scouted of paint, and their weathered boards reared up crookedly from the red earth.
A man lounged back into the porch shadow of the Big Dog Saloon, boots propped lazily on the spurscarred rail. His lizard-lidded eyes raised to a distant shout: "Stickereeeeeeeeee." The man stood up, peered down the dust-hazed street.
The gypsy riders passed the lookout posted at the edge of Deadwood and arrived at the Big Dog in a bright, chattering cluster.
They dismounted, led their prisoners inside.
The saloon was lavishly furnished. Velvet couches. Ivory chairs. Green baize tables. Ornate lamps of shell pearl. Tapestries and bead hangings. The long mahogany bar was polished to a high gloss. Behind the bar hung a garish oil painting of a coyly smiling nude.
Logan and Jess were herded into the room, wrists, still secured.
Rutago made his entrance, a heavy saddlebag across one silked shoulder. He dropped the bag carelessly at his feet. From it spilled gypsy riches taken on the raid: sprays, pendants, seed pearls, ribbons of garnet and topaz and amethyst. In the heaped mound were cabochon stones, onyx and agate. With a connoisseur's care, Rutago plucked out one tiny pigeon blood ruby. He breathed on it, rubbed it along his silk thigh until static electricity crackled from the faceted surface. "Like me a rubyrock. Took it from a merchantman," he said.
Rutago walked forward to stand in front of Logan. He slowly unscrewed the jewel face from a Borgia ring and held it to Logan's nose. Logan sniffed cautiously and choked.
Hemodrone! The bitter smell of the ritual gypsy poison lingered in his nostrils. One swallow and a man would begin to die. Unless the victim received an antidote he would continue to die slowly as the hemoglobin of his blood absorbed the virulent poison. It would take hours and bring great pain. Logan instinctively clamped his teeth together.
Rutago smiled, blinked sleepily, turned away. He crossed to Jess. Two of the females gripped her elbows as Rutago deftly pried open her lips and poured the Hemodrone down her throat. She coughed and strangled.
Logan thrust himself at Rutago, but was driven to his knees by a numbing blow.
"Sandfella must behave or runnergirl die," said Rutago. "Gotta earn the antidote."
One of the females approached Logan with a first-aid kit. "Sandfella turnabout," she ordered. He obeyed.
The girl severed the tapewire binding his wrists. Then she gentled away his torn shirt, exposing the crusted wounds along his back. She adjusted the kit, placed it at the top of one of the deep cuts and drew it slowly downward. A trail of fresh pink synthaskin formed behind it as the wound healed. She tended his other cuts and abrasions, while a second female treated Jess.
Logan was given a clean white shirt and boots for his bruised feet.
The antidote. Logan knew he could not take Jess away without it. Even if they broke free he couldn't take her to a populated area, where the antidote might be found, because of her palm flower. As a runner she'd be doomed. But did they really have the antidote here? The gypsy might be lying. Yet he'd have to trust them. He had no other choice.
"How do I earn the antidote?" Logan asked Rutago.
The gypsy smiled, nodded toward the pleasure girls. They crowded close to Logan. Blue eyes, brown eyes, hazel eyes, green eyes, golden eyes, gray eyes, radiated heat.
"And what happens to Jess?"
Rutago scooped the jewelry back into the saddlebag. He then regally offered Jessica his hand and escorted her up the stairs.
One of the males said sweetly, "Rutago he a Ribbonrider, but also he a loverman. After he, the rest of we. Runnergirl a lucky one."
The seven pleasure girls guided Logan out of the main room, along a hallway, into a chamber at the rear of the saloon, a boudoir, dominated by an Emperor bed over which was spread a pale snow coverlet of imported satin.
Led by Graygirl, the females removed Logan's clothing. They led him to the cleansing room, adjusted the temperature to blood heat, and pushed him under the needle suds. He was dried by warm air currents, scented and powdered. Then he was given an injection of Everlove.
In the boudoir the girls awaited him. They were all golden nude and reclined at the foot of the bed on which lay Graygirl. She was somber and colorless and lovely. She took Logan's hand as he walked over to her, gazed up into his eyes, and smiled a sleek cat's smile. "Wild me, Sandfella," she said to him in a husky voice. She ran her fingers along his thigh. "Bedabye me."
And the others smiled with her. The green-eyed females said, "Wild she, Sandlover. Then wild we!"
The first orgasm was good.
The second was all right.
The third orgasm was bad.
The fourth orgasm was painful.
The fifth orgasm was agony.
The sixth orgasm was damnation.
And where was Jess, and what were they doing to her? And where was the antidote?
In the upstairs room Rutago lay waiting. The floor was spread with his jewels and glittered: a lake of gemfire. The cleansing room door opened.
Rutago nodded. "Come you runnergirl me."
Jessica moved toward him over
the jeweled floor, her face emotionless. She wore a flowrobe of silver mesh.
The gypsy peeled away her robe, pulled Jess down upon him.
She was wood.
He stroked and petted her.
She was wood.
He kissed her deeply, fondled her with desperate hands.
She was wood.
Jessica stood at the long bar while Rutago paced. His face was flushed and angry.
"Keep your promise," said Logan. "Give her the—"
"Antidote, no!"
Logan tensed his fists. "We both did what you wanted."
Rutago smiled savagely at Jess. "Cheated by a runnergirl. Didn't try hard enough. Now we use another lift."
"Pull a tooth of runnergirl," said one of the males brightly. "Maybe pull a fingernail."
"Gotta me another lift," said Rutago, waving aside the suggestion. He eyed Logan jealously. "Sandfella's gonna do it."
Logan read the effects of the poison in Jess. Her face was ashen, her breathing shallow. The Hemodrone was running her blood. And, for the moment, there was nothing he could do. Nothing.
Four of the gypsies lifted Jess onto the polished bartop. They held her wrists and ankles. The others waited expectantly. The play was Rutago's.
The gypsy leader savored his power; he advanced and placed his hands on Logan's shoulders in comradely fashion. "Runnergirl she soon a sick one. Wanta you the antidote?"
Logan nodded tightly.
"Then"—Rutago handed a short bone-handled dirk to Logan—"gotta take an ounce of flesh— anywhere on runnergirl."
Logan paled. No, he couldn't do this: The act was inhuman. And was a homer human? They were asking him to torture the girl who'd saved his life.
But she'd die if he didn't.
"Anywhere?"
Rutago nodded. His smile was angelic.
Graygirl placed a delicate set of spring balance scales on the bar. One tiny pan held a gold ounce.
Logan bent over Jess. She had her eyes closed, which was fortunate, because if she watched him . . . He slit the clothing along her hip to expose a patch of white skin. He placed his hand high on her upper leg. Shielded by his body, his thumb searched for the nerve plexus on her inner thigh. Shifting his weight to cover the action, he dug his thumb powerfully into the pressure point. Jess winced.
