Stars & Empire: 10 Galactic Tales

by Jay Allan

  Jeremy strolled over to a rack of swords arrayed against one wall. She recognized his showcase pieces, a collection of fine blades he’d collected from cities all over the world during his trader years. “Immortality you say? As a gol?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  Jeremy ran his fingers along the many hilts. Sometimes he’d pause to pick a sword from the rack and test its weight. “It is enticing, I must admit. Gols can’t get sick. Physically, at least. And gols don’t notice pain like ordinary men and women, or so it’s said. I’d accept your offer, I really would. Except for one thing.”

  Jeremy picked out a sword and sauntered back to her side. “I’m not quite sure I want to be a gol. That whole mind plague business, you know. It quite turns me off to the prospect. And it’s spreading faster than ever. Did you know I have to replace twenty of my pet Direwalkers each day because of it?” He rotated the blade in front of his eyes and light pinpricked the surface. A fine weapon—numerous gems inlaid the hilt, and silver-chased scrollwork etched the blade beneath the cutting edge. “You promise immortality, darling Ari, but your argument is seriously flawed. Because you see, gols can die.”

  He slammed the blade into the Direwalker’s belly. The stunned gol dropped the fire swords, and looked down at the weapon impaling it. When the Direwalker looked up, its expression was all too human. Heartbroken. Filled with one question. Why?

  Jeremy slid the weapon free, and an intestinal loop followed it in a spurt of blood. The Direwalker fell to its knees, vainly trying to hold back its insides, and collapsed, squirming. Blood pooled on the ermineskin, and Ari understood now why Jeremy had dyed the carpet red.

  “Did you like how I gave him the other swords to hold?” Jeremy’s voice was filled with malicious glee. His eyes didn’t lift from the twitching body. “Politics. It’s all about misdirection.” Jeremy swung the blade down and cruelly severed its head. The body gave one final kick and then ceased all motion.

  Jeremy looked up. He seemed to realize for the first time that his guests were fidgeting uncomfortably. “What? It’s just a gol! He had the beginnings of the mind sickness anyway. Had to be replaced.”

  Jeremy raised a hand, and three Direwalkers stepped forward to replace the fallen one. “Take her and her friends to the Black Room. I’ll deal with them shortly. And bring someone to clean up this mess!” Jeremy turned to his house guests, and segued into goodbyes and thanks-for-comings.

  The carpet released Ari and her companions, and the Direwalkers brought her upstairs, disarmed, humiliated, and conquered, into the heart of the enemy’s domain.

  The enemy who had once been her husband.

  CHAPTER 33

  Hands secured behind her back, Ari knelt with her companions in the center of the Black Room, so named for the paint that blackened floor, ceiling, and walls. Only the bronze brazier with its hot coals and the iron desk with its wicked instruments gave the room any color, malevolent though that color might be. The bronze candle lamps completed the disturbing scene.

  Jeremy stood before her, his hands gloved, a long apron tied around his suit. The gloves and apron were, of course, black. Jeremy held a pair of dental forceps, and he smiled like a madman.

  “You’ve never seen this room,” Jeremy said. “I was always careful to hide it from you. It’s my special room, the place I take certain bad people who’ve done certain bad things to me. For example, people who rush into my house and kill my guardsmen. Only I’m allowed to do that. You understand why I’m angry, don’t you?”

  “Oh, I know you’re mad, that’s for certain,” Ari said.

  His grin widened. “At least I’m not afraid to admit it. There’s something to be said about a man elected by the people, a man who embraces his madness, for the people…”

  “Elected?” She glanced at Tanner and Marks. “No one would ever vote for this sorry excuse of a man. He fixed all the elections.”

  Jeremy spread his arms in what Ari supposed was meant to be a gesture of apology, or conciliation. “Call me a perfectionist.”

  “I call you a liar,” she said. “And a dictator.”

  “Come now Ari, why so harsh? After all I’ve done for you?”

  She glanced at the forceps. “I wonder why.”

  “Oh, you need not fear, this isn’t for you.” Jeremy opened and closed the forceps. “At least not yet.”

  “Why are you creating an army of Direwalkers?” she said.

  Jeremy slitted his dark eyes. “Maybe I like Direwalkers.”

  “What’s next? Zombies? Werewolves?”

  He shrugged. “This world is mine to do with as I please. It’s been promised me.”

  “Promised? By who?”

  Jeremy glanced at his Direwalker assistants, and nodded toward Tanner and Marks. “Hold them.”

  The Direwalkers restrained her and her friends, though all three of them had their hands tied behind their backs already.

  “I’ve grown quite proficient in dentistry, did you know?” Jeremy studied the forceps. “Having a tooth pulled is one of the most excruciating experiences of the human condition. It’s almost beyond the mind’s pain threshold. When you pass that threshold, the brain turns on its defenses, and the person faints. But what happens when you turn off that preservation mechanism? When the mind can’t faint to save itself from the pain?” He smiled. There was a twinkle in his eye. “Madness. Pure and utter.”

  He went to the desk, and retrieved a small vial. He approached Tanner and one of the Direwalkers forced her friend’s mouth open.

  “A little something to prevent you from fainting.” Jeremy casually poured a third of the vial’s contents into Tanner’s mouth. He repeated the procedure with Marks. And her.

  When it was done, she felt incredibly alert, and awake.

  “Have you heard of the Schmidt pain index?” Jeremy said. “It’s a rating of the agony inflicted by different hymenopteran stings. Kind of a grading scale for pain, as it were.”

  He strode to the iron desk, and opened a jar. “On the scale, which increases exponentially, zero rates as a pain that barely registers, like a kiss with a bit of a bite. At two, we have a familiar pain, such as a quick, rude pinprick. Having a tooth pulled rates a three, though for obvious reasons it’s not included on the scale. The index maxes-out at four, the most painful level. Unfortunately, most of the insects included on the scale are now extinct. But I’ve managed to get my hands on a particularly resilient species that has survived in the homes of the south.”

  He inserted the forceps into the jar and removed a squirming insect about the size of Ari’s little finger. “Paraponera clavata. Also known as the bullet ant. The Schmidt pain index rates this little creature a four-plus. Yes. It’s beyond the scale. The sting induces pure excruciation, concentrated on an area the size of a pencil-point. The affected body part exhibits a totally uncontrollable urge to shake, and throbs with pain for an entire day afterward. It’s like walking over a firepit with a rusty nail grinding into your heel with each step. And that’s from one sting. Imagine what twenty stings would do.”

  Jeremy approached Tanner, and the Direwalker assistant forced his mouth open.

  The insect wriggled at the tip of the forceps. Its legs opened and closed, its mandibles snapped at the air, its stinger flexed and unflexed.

  Tanner’s eyes were focused, unbroken, on that insect, his face a mask of fear. Ari had seen raw terror on only a few people in her life, and seeing it now on her friend made a small part of her die inside. The innocent part.

  Jeremy lifted the ant toward Tanner’s open mouth—

  CHAPTER 34

  “Stop it!” Ari said. “Stop!”

  Jeremy lowered the ant. He looked at her blandly, as though she had ruined his fun. “Tell me how you became a gol, sweet Ari.”

  “I—” She shook her head. “You wouldn’t believe it anyway.”

  Jeremy raised the ant once more—

  “We crossed the Forever Gate,” Ari said.

  Tanner shook
his head free of the Direwalker’s grip. “Don’t tell him a thing Ari!”

  The Direwalker punched Tanner in the jaw, and forced his mouth open again.

  Jeremy was facing Ari fully now. “Crossed the Gate, you say? And then what?”

  “No, you don’t understand,” she said. “The Outside is a completely different world. We’re actually on a moon, around Jupiter. On a crashed ship of some kind. And we’re being attacked. We’re trying to help the gols. We need the Control Room. The Box.”

  “We’re on a moon,” Jeremy said flatly. “Around Jupiter. Now I see why you came in here with swords swinging. A story like that … it’s more than ridiculous. It’s preposterous.” Jeremy shook his head. “I’m disappointed in you, Ari. You can do better than this.”

  He lifted the insect back to Tanner’s mouth—

  “Wait!” she said. “Please. Don’t do this. You’ll kill him.”

  “I know that,” Jeremy said.

  The insect was so close now that it perceived Tanner’s lips, and it started flexing its stinger toward him, anticipating the contact, perhaps believing that by stinging him it would know freedom.

  She closed her eyes. She couldn’t watch. This was her fault. She should’ve followed the plan, and now, because of her rashness, she’d have to watch her friend die. Tanner had grown on her these past three days on the Inside. It was too soon to lose him. She’d just lost her father. Hadn’t she lost enough already?

  “You were right Jeremy,” Ari said, swallowing the last of her pride. “You win. I care about him. Please don’t do this. You win. I’ll do whatever you want.”

  Jeremy paused. The insect was a fingersbreadth from Tanner’s lips. Then he nodded to himself. “Very well. I will grant you this one favor. For what you and I once had.”

  He swung about and in two quicks steps covered the distance to Marks. One of the Direwalkers forced Marks’ mouth wide.

  “Jeremy no!” she said, but inside she was relieved.

  And she hated herself for it.

  Jeremy opened the forceps and dropped the ant inside.

  The Direwalker clamped Marks’ mouth shut with those corded arms, and squeezed tight so that he couldn’t chew.

  Marks struggled a few moments, the pain apparently not registering. And then his eyes widened. He began shaking violently all over. Frantic, muffled yelps emerged from his sealed lips.

  Faint faint please faint, Ari thought.

  But Marks didn’t faint. Froth formed at the corners of his mouth, and the flesh all around the lower part of his face puffed up.

  “Release him,” Jeremy said.

  Marks fell forward and spat the ant on the floor. The insect was crimped, and quivered sickly. Marks lay there for a few moments, shuddering like the insect, eyes closed, his breath coming in deep, painful-sounding wheezes. His swollen tongue puffed from his lips.

  His lids shot open and he let out a bloodcurdling, muffled scream. His eyes were bloodshot and filled with madness. He scrambled to his feet. His body trembled wildly. His head shook from side to side. He hooted deliriously and dashed from the room.

  Two of the Direwalkers made to follow him.

  Jeremy raised a hand. “Leave him.”

  Outside the room, Marks’ hooting changed pitch suddenly, and Ari heard a sickening splat, just as if he’d stumbled over the balcony and fallen headfirst to the marble below.

  “What have I done?” she said.

  Jeremy smiled sadly. “Killed your friend.”

  “He was only eighteen.”

  “Looked older to me.” Jeremy strode to the table and set the forceps among the other instruments of torture. “I have some good news. I’ve decided what I’m going to do with you and your lover.” He smiled lifelessly. “I’m going to be kind. Somehow you’ve become a gol. I’m happy being human, but I very much want to know how you accomplished this neat little trick. Without the lies, mind you. You said you would do whatever I want? You will indeed.”

  He waltzed over to Ari and tightly gripped her chin in his gloved palm, just as if he were examining a goat or cow for the slaughter. She could feel his fingers pressing into the bone. “Gols can be revised just like any human. It doesn’t work on the mentally damaged ones of course. But for the rest, it’s fabulous. I’ve turned gol executioners into seamstresses, gol whores into assassins. The symbol on the chest remains the same. It’s great for hoodwinking people. Anyway, the good news is, I’m going to revise you. Again! Yes, I thought you’d be delighted. I’m going to suck out all your memories so I can view them at my leisure. I’ll learn how you became a gol soon enough.

  “And those empty memories will be replaced with, well, something fun! You and your lover are going to be my personal fellators. Every day when I wake up, you’ll take turns. You’ll follow me around my house all day, naked, begging to fulfill me. But you won’t be allowed until the next morning. You’ll live only to pleasure me, and my pleasure will be your greatest reward. You’ll be so debased, so degenerate, no one will recognize you as anything even remotely resembling a woman. And the sad part is, you’ll be loving every minute of it.” He glanced at the Direwalkers. “Take them to the revision chamber.”

  “You can’t do this,” Ari said as the Direwalkers hauled her to her feet. “You can’t destroy us like this. You wouldn’t.”

  “I can. I would. And I will.” Jeremy walked to the door. “I look forward to many mornings of mulled wine, my dearest Ari, the daily crier in my hands, your head between my legs, your mouth right where it belongs. Ta-ta.”

  CHAPTER 35

  Memories.

  Was Ari truly just the sum of her memories? Or was she something more? Something that experience couldn’t change. Something that amnesia, or circumstance, could never wipe away. And if she were wiped and rewritten, her memories replaced by a lifetime in a whorehouse, would she still retain the dauntless spirit that had kept her going all these long years? The love of humanity that she’d held in her heart through it all? Sure, she’d grown crabby, and maybe a bit cynical in her later years, but she still loved the world and its people. That love was sorely tested at times, especially recently, but it was a love she’d retained despite everything, a love that allowed her to fight for humanity. Would she lose that love? Or would it remain deep inside her, hidden away by revision, out of reach but still present, like vitra beneath the collar?

  The collar. The bronze bitch was a hiccup in the program, according to Tanner. A rule inherited from the days when the world was based on what he called an immersive video game.

  “We will have a world uncollared,” Tanner had told her. “A world where every man can freely use the spark inside him without aging.” She had once thought him a pessimist, but she was wrong. He was more a romantic. Much like she’d been when the Users had first inducted her. Maybe that’s why she’d grown to like Tanner so much.

  “But it will be a false world,” she said, taking over the role of pessimist. “A fake one.”

  “But isn’t the world that the eyes see, the ears hear, and the senses feel, the only reality there is? Isn’t what we taste and smell, real? Bits of light called photons shine from the sun and reflect from surfaces onto our eyes, and our mind puts them back together to form an image. Would the world be any less real if we didn’t have eyes and sent out waves of sound instead, and those waves returned to us and were interpreted the same way our minds interpreted photons? Or if we had some device plugged into our bellies that tapped into the wires implanted in our spinal cords, and fed images and sounds and data for all five senses to our heads? Aren’t all three cases the same? Isn’t what feeds our minds real?”

  “You really buy into this reality-is-what-feeds-the-mind crap, don’t you?”

  “I buy into the truth, Ari,” Tanner said. “And the truth is, what feeds the mind is reality. No matter who or what is doing the feeding. The eyes. A wire. The mind itself.”

  As the grim-faced revisor strapped Ari into the revision chair, she understood the t
ruth of Tanner’s words more than ever. She would be rewritten again, her greatest fear. She’d forget all she knew of the Outside. Her reality would become a living hell.

  She’d failed in her mission. She’d failed Hoodwink. She’d failed herself.

  It was a small consolation, knowing her air would run out in the real world two days from now. Only three weeks on the Inside, living this hell, then she’d die without warning. Just another victim of The Drop.

  Her wrists were clamped in an iron vise. There was a handhold beneath her palms, so that she had something to grip “when the pain comes,” as the revisor told her. She was strapped to an iron chair, and two prongs had been folded down from above to touch her temples. Was it the prongs that would reshape her?

  Though she’d been revised before, she remembered none of this.

  For the first time since she left the house in this new body, she felt cold.

  Tanner was strapped into a revision chair opposite her. Behind him, the headrest contained radial bars of light, each a different shade of purple, the hues changing in sequential intensity so that the bars appeared to rotate. Similar light bars lay behind her own head. She knew because she could see the different tones of purple reflecting on her arms.

  Who would be first, she wondered. Tanner or her? Who would have to sit and watch as the mind of the other was rewritten? Would the last image she’d have of this life, this personality, be of Tanner howling and writhing and vomiting through the pain of revision? Or would she go first and be spared the anguish of seeing him destroyed?

  Maybe the machines would revise them at the same time. But why did it matter? Neither of them would remember when it was done. Everything they knew would be wiped away in an instant. All to massage the ego of the man who once named her wife.

  She gave Tanner her bravest smile, but he didn’t return it. His eyes seemed full of regret for the future that could have been. At least his eyes weren’t accusing. She didn’t think she could handle that.