03. The Maze in the Mirror (33 page)

I did notice, however, that while the men were towering musclebound hulks, they seemed to be at the women's beck and call, with nary a peep of protest. One woman came up to a guy and fondled his genitals, and he just sort of giggled and smiled inanely. Another couple seemed to be strutting and showing off for two women who were ogling them but clearly not interested.

It wasn't hard to figure out the system here, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out how it was maintained. The male bimbos and jocks I'd known had generally been pretty tough, commanding types.

The long climb was no fun at all, but at least by this point I was in a little better condition. It didn't stop me from having to pause and catch my breath several times, enduring the less than kind commentary of my escort each time, but it wasn't just the exercise but the tremendous heat and humidity as well. I was sweating like a stuck pig.

It was possibly only because of their offer to carry me to the top that I made it on my own. They let me sit on a lounge chair under the shade of a beach umbrella and try and keep from passing out while one went inside and the other security officer turned to one of the musclebound hulks who'd come out to greet us and said, "Jerry, be a
dear and get the poor boy some of the special fruit punch."

He looked over at me and I got the idea that he was trying to keep from cracking up. Maybe my eyes shot daggers, though, because he straightened up and said, "Yes, Ma'am. At once. He sure looks like he needs it," then turned and went back inside.

He returned maybe two minutes later with a tray, pitcher, and large glass filled with ice. He poured the drink and I took it and took a sip. It tasted like the best drink I'd ever tasted in the whole world. I needed it-I needed most of that pitcher. When I had two and a half glasses, though, I felt much, much better.

Jerry was fascinating in and of himself. I don't think I ever had seen a guy just like him, in fact. Oh, he looked like the Mister Universe type, but there was something odd about his mannerism, his voice, the whole thing. He somehow managed the trick of seeming to be a very gentle giant without once really seeming effeminate. You got the idea that the guy could bend steel with his bare hands and lick any ten men in the bar-but that there was almost no circumstance where he would want to.

And, just as he turned to leave, Valintina Mendelez came out of the house, dressed in a tight halter top and wearing a pair of designer jeans and sandals. She was really the Latino bombshell her picture had suggested; thin, wasp-waisted, but with a pair of jugs that would do Dolly Parton proud. She was wearing dark sunglasses and smoking a cigarette through a long holder, which made for the image I think she wanted.

I started to get up, but she stopped me. "No, no! Just sit! You are hot and tired." She slid into a beach chair opposite me, then asked, "Well, I would be surprised if you approved of my little pleasure spot." She had a fairly thick accent, probably Spanish or some derivative of it, but it was because she was proud of it and never felt any need to get rid of it. She could clearly think in English.

"It is a beautiful place, Senora Mendelez," I responded, trying to remember the rules and even give the name a bit of the proper inflection. "I will certainly give you that."

"You know what I mean."

I sighed. "Well, it's more a reversal of the usual rather than a feminist's vision," I commented, adding, "Judging, of course, from the very little I've seen."

"You are quite right, Sammy boy. I have no interest in equality or other weakling goals. Often, out in so-called 'normal' society I am treated as a thing, an object, to be ogled at the pleasure of men, fondled at the pleasure of men, and fucked by coarse men who think that it is the primary goal of a woman. I have killed a great many men for such things, which are not trivial to me. I like the look of surprise when they are being particularly
macho,
rough and commanding, as I twist them where they will not twist and watch the life drain away."

Well, I'd been warned she was a psycho in her own right. I wasn't about to get into weighty arguments with her.

"Still, it seems like, well, the few men I've noted here go against any sort of masculine behavior I
thought was built in without seeming effeminate. Are they bred for this or raised that way or what?"

She smiled. "Chemistry, Senor. Simple chemistry. That is all we really are, you know-a collection of chemicals put together in a certain way, activated in the brain by degrees through experience. My specialty is exotic tropical plants. It is amazing what you find in
their
chemistry that will interact with ours. Pain killers, disease-killers, stimulants, depressants, narcotics of all kinds."

"I know. Cocaine, opium, marijuana, and all their relatives and more are from plants," I replied. "Also curare and a thousand other poisons."

"Bah! Amateur night! That is merely what evolution can produce. I have taken it much further, and using the exotic species from hundreds of worlds. I have great greenhouses here, and excellent laboratories as well. The operative drug for the men, for example, took years of work and experimentation, although I was building on existing work in other worlds. It acts only in the males, and in all males. On females it has no effect at all except perhaps as a very mild and harmless steroidal effect in quantity. On the males-it does not attack masculinity. I did not wish that. It alters, very subtly, only those characteristics I find offensive. It suppresses the ego, replaces aggressiveness towards women with an overwhelming urge to please us. They have sufficient strength and courage and aggressiveness to use their greater power and bulk for work, but not at all sexually. Less than two weeks on the compound and the effect is in full force. Within a month they just can't imagine ever feeling any other way."

"I assume, then, that it's addictive."

"To a degree. A synthetic version can be made highly so, but since anything over a certain dosage is simply expelled by the body and since it does not affect women, it is simply added to all food and drink here."

"You mean like in the fruit juice your people gave me?"

She chuckled. "Yes, it was there, but in a very small quantity. It will have no effect unless you stay a while and eat or drink quite a lot. If you notice it at all, it might just make you a little horny, that's all. The initial treatment involves massive doses so it saturates the system, is absorbed into the body, and undertakes the biochemical changes. After that just a small amount will keep it that way forever."

'Thanks," I said sourly. Now I'd be checking myself out in every thought and action and I didn't need that kind of doubt right now. Especially right now. "I doubt if I'm the type of guy who'd fit in around here anyway, with or without."

"Perhaps. We prize the muscle here because we need the boys to do the heavy manual labor, but there are many of them here who are more average looking, kept around because they are cute or have other attractive attributes. We really don't need the boys for anything here except as sexual playthings, but they need us. The poor dears are rather helpless without us."

"Do they mind?" I asked her.

She gave that wicked smile again. "Mind? What difference does that make, poor boy? I mean, do men care if a woman minds their wolf whistles as she walks down the street? Do they care if a woman minds being propositioned by total strangers when she's just shopping or riding on a bus? Do men even consider what it's like for most women to fear walking down a street after dark with a potential rapist in every dark corner, or in every passing car? Why should I care if these boys mind? That's the way things are here."

"I understand the source of your feelings and concede your points, but I doubt if you or most of the women here have the same kinds of fears you talk about. My wife came from one of the roughest city environments I know. She's cautious in the same way I'm cautious, but I think she's too tough to have that kind of unreasoned fear or lack of confidence to deal with a threat."

"How little you know," Mendelez sighed. "Very well, I do not have much time for you and you, I suspect, would rather have done with me and this place as quickly as possible. Stay too long here, dear, and you won't want to ever leave."

That was precisely what was on my mind, speaking of fear. "Do you know much of what I've done so far and what's happened?"

"Not much," she admitted. "I have been a very, very busy woman lately. We are going to close down the Labyrinth, you know, and before that happens I want to make very, very sure that we have everything we can possibly need right here. And I am very close to perfecting a stable viral form of my little formula to insure that the whole world here remains my vision. Too bad, really. I should have loved to have had it ready to spread it to every biochemically compatible world in the region, perhaps even to Company people. That was my pet project. A stable viral-like form of this that is immune to all known immunization
procedures, not detectable by medical scans, and which is spread easier than the common cold. Imagine that male-dominated Company world and race under this sort of influence. The entire power structure would collapse before they realized why -and the women would be so hidebound by that horrid culture that they would be generations learning the ropes and breaking free of their mental chains to pick up the pieces-providing of course they learned how to run all that stuff before it collapsed."

"I think I would prefer that to the risks of this project," I answered honestly. "In a way, it would be a merciful end to that rigid culture and structure."

"Merciful!" She gave a cackling laugh. "I do not want mercy. I want them to
suffer!"

I
decided not to press the point. Instead, I wanted to go through the litany and routine and get the hell out of there as fast as possible, without even doing lunch.

"So, about Pandross ..." I began, and started the drill.

The last thing I needed was my brain chemistry rearranged to remove aggressiveness. Although I abhorred violence and all it represented, there was no question that very soon I would have to kill, and perhaps kill a number of people. I had enough problems with that without adding more.

10.

Solving the Maze

I was never so glad to have my pants back on in my whole life. I had a very strong impression that I might have been the first guy to ever walk back out of there once he got in, and I could tell all the time I was there and talking to Mendelez that she was toying back and forth in her mind with whether or not to keep me as a pet.

She's an out and out psycho, that's for sure, but except for her particular way of working out her crazy vision I really wasn't too certain that she was any more crazy than the rest of them-just more visibly dangerous. Still, of them all, she and Carlos were the only ones who could induce some element of fear in their own comrades, and that said something.

Maria thought Valintina's vision was somewhat amusing, although hardly preferable. It was just that she couldn't see any difference between the Mendelez version of inequality and oppression and any of the other worlds we'd gone to. To her, we were all equally insane.

I sighed, swallowed hard, and checked my resolve. I was still game to go through with it and I still was more than willing to plug Carlos and anybody else who got in my way, so maybe the dose I got wasn't all that much. I couldn't let
myself dwell on it. I
felt
normal and that was what I had to go on. In a way, I wondered if I wasn't just as much a fruitcake as Valintina, considering what odds I was going to face and how improbable it was that I was going to get ten feet without discovery and death.

We proceeded along the normal course to get us back to the office, but we weren't going back there at all. At a particular cube, all sides dark, Maria suddenly gave a signal and we both exited to the left and wound up inside a small, hot building with little or no light. She knew it well, and reached up and switched on a tiny bare bulb, revealing a fairly squalid interior shed.

"Quickly," she said. "Get out of your clothes and into the black ones there." I complied, noting that the new clothing was pretty well Company security standard for inside the Labyrinth itself-the sort of uniform worn, in fact, by both sides. Plain, black denim, with double pockets in the shirt, a black leather belt. The clothes fit, although they had that new or freshly starched feel to them. There was also a pair of tough rubber-soled boots to complete the outfit, although this uniform bore no insignia or badge to show who or what I really was.

She packed the old clothes into a small satchel and we exited back into the Labyrinth as quickly as we could. Anybody using a tracer could still see and track us-now. We continued to walk along, and when we reached the point of the office, the satchel with the irradiated clothing was tossed into the siding, although we ourselves weren't going there. It was done in one neat, fluid motion as we walked, and would show on anybody's tracker scope as a diversion-we hoped.

Not much further down, we had another duck-in, this time to a small clearing in a thick, jungle-like environment. Maria seemed to know what she was doing, going over to the underbrush and then hauling out a large chest wrapped in a tarp. Removing the tarp, she unlocked the chest and opened it.

"The small attaché case contains all the basic tools and instruments for a standard security repair," she told me. "There is not a lot else we could reasonably carry."

I nodded, opened the case, and was reasonably satisfied with the contents. She was right. What I needed was a master computer link and a lab full of stuff, but this was better than nothing.

She then handed me a stock issue energy pistol with long laser sight in a holster on a belt with a full set of energy cubes for reserve. It was the futuristic version of the gunfighter's belt, and I didn't feel comfortable with it, but I had to be prepared to use it if necessary. There was also an extension rope, some small explosive modules, and a veritable
potpourri
of things that might prove useful.