Gateway To Xanadu (41 page)

“I’ve been more than enjoying myself, John,” Val answered, feeding me another salted nut. “The days have been filled with revelation and learning, haven’t they, Jennifer?”

“Oh, yes, uncle Val,” I said, only just able to keep from chewing off his fingers.

“Sweet little Jennifer.” Little laughed, especially at the blush I didn’t have to force much. “I see you’ve finally grown to appreciate your uncle. You’ve learned to obey him very nicely, and you seem much improved.”

“Thank you, Mr. Little,” I managed without choking, looking quickly away from the slave behind Little’s chair. I’d tried to make it easier on myself by avoiding the man’s ridiculous smirk, but looking at the slave was much worse. His beautiful face was expressionless, but his eyes were briefly filled with frustration and hatred and pain and weariness, likely triggered by the way Little was trying to humiliate me. He’d clearly had his own share of humiliation, that slave, and very briefly his mask had slipped.

“I’ve come by to resume my role as adviser, Val,” Little said as a goblet was handed to him and then filled with wine. “You’ll be asked later on this evening if you’d like to continue moving through your zone or go ahead deeper into the Sphere, and the answer you should give is continue on deeper. There’s something in the heart of the Sphere that you just have to see.”

“What’s that?” Val asked, not sounding terribly enthusiastic, reaching around with his own goblet to have it refilled. Doing that he missed the way Little’s slave paled, but I didn’t.

“I couldn’t possibly describe it,” Little answered with a small laugh of amusement, only glancing in my direction. “It is, however, the best the Sphere has to offer, and I promise you you won’t be disappointed.

I haven’t misled you so far, have I?”

“No, that’s true, you haven’t,” Val conceded, letting me drink some wine from his goblet. “What do you say, Jennifer? Should we have a go at it?”

“I’ll go wherever you do, uncle Val,” I gushed, seeing the brief look of questioning in his eyes. “If Mr.

Little says you’ll have fun there, then . . . .

“Then you want to share it with me,” he finished in nauseating tones of fond indulgence, patting my hand. “And of course you will. It sounds fine to me, John. Onward and upward it is.”

“Good,” Little said with a satisfied nod, taking his goblet with him as he stood. “I’ll see you in the morning, then.”

He headed back toward the side of the tent he’d come from with the slave following silently in his shadow, and Val took a handful of the salted nuts and gave them to me.

“Now you feed me, sweetheart,” he said, then switched to the trade language to add, “What do you think?”

“That’s got to be where our target is,” I conceded, putting the first nut into his mouth. “I have the feeling we’re really going to have to watch our steps, though. We know they have something in mind, and this might be what he was after all along.”

“Whatever that comes to,” he agreed, taking a nut and feeding it to me. “Are you sure we have no choice but to walk in like blindfolded innocents? I don’t like the sound of our destination, not if he thinks it’s the best part of the Sphere. ”

“Come up with a workable alternative, and I’ll probably go for it faster than you do,” I said, looking at him as I continued to feed him. “I also have the feeling that fun time is over-for both of us.”

“Only temporarily,” he said around the last mouthful I’d given him, his eyes starting to develop that stubborn look. “We’ll go in there, finish this thing right, then take ourselves back to the Station. Don’t forget you’ve got a lot of getting even left to do. You’re not going to let anything stand in the way of that, are you?”

“No, of course not,” I told him with a small smile, then put the nuts aside and took his arm to rest my head against it. After careful consideration, being able to do that without waiting until we were alone just may have been worth all the rest of the nonsense.

The next day was another day of travel for us, but not like the ones so recently passed. Barely a handful of those who had dined with us chose the trip to the heart of the Sphere, and one or two who had wanted to choose it had been discouraged and touted off onto something else. Val was grim when he told me about that incident, and it didn’t exactly fill me with lighthearted joy either. Only a certain sort of people were being allowed to continue on, and when I looked at our fellow travelers I wondered why Val and I had been given the go-ahead. All the others without exception, male and female alike, had been using slaves during their previous four days, and those -slaves were very obviously the worse for it. I thought about it for a few minutes, trying to fit the puzzle pieces together, and then groaned silently when the light came. Val, to those of the Sphere, was a man who had taken his young niece and had raped her repeatedly, and had also killed a man and shown nothing of upset at the doing. I was just along for the ride, but the Management had obviously decided that Val fit in perfectly, and were more than happy to have him. I noticed how Val had taken to standing practically on top of me right from the outset of the trip, and made sure not to mention my conclusions to him. If I had, I probably would have had him in my lap.

Our mode of transportation that day was a train that traveled without rails, each individual traveling on it having his or her own car. Our needs were seen to by another horde of slaves, and the clothing we’d been given was very old-fashioned. The men wore high-collared, uncomfortable-looking shirts with ties under severe, close-cut suits, and the women were given high-necked and long-sleeved dresses that came down to their shoe-tops. Everyone complained about the costumes, but for once our complaints were firmly denied; if we were going where the train was going, that was what we had to wear while we did it. We all grumbled but eventually had to give in, and I privately wondered why our personal luggage had been dragged along with us every step of the way. The only time we’d used our own things since landing had been the brief time after the physicals.

The train ride was, aside from the costumes, physically comfortable, but mentally it couldn’t possibly have been more boring. There was absolutely nothing provided in the way of entertainment or distraction, and even requests for something to read were denied. We could sit in our chairs and stare out the windows or at each other or at the slaves, but if the sparkling conversation lagged there was nothing to bring it back to life. There was no provision for privacy in the car except in the narrow bathroom, so that meant people like Val couldn’t even fill the time with their own entertainment. Despite his twisted sense of humor, my partner had proved himself to be one of those who won’t perform in public unless he’s drugged to the point of not knowing what he’s doing. The slaves in our car kept him firmly in his own seat, which added to his grim, unhappy silence.

The slaves set up a table and served us lunch, and didn’t seem surprised when neither one of us showed much of an appetite. The day had started as pretty as the previous ones had been, but right after lunch it began to gray over. We continued on at a good pace and the overcasting continued as well, but not just with clouds. Thick mist began blanketing the ground we were crossing, and despite the warmth of the car to look outside was to shiver with an inner chill.

When John Little showed up with his slave at his heels, he did not get a warm welcome. Val had been sitting with his arm around me since the lunch things had been cleared away, and nothing I said prompted him to go back to his own seat. There was a look in his eyes that made the slaves walk very softly and stay out of his way as much as possible, but at least he had the sense to swallow it down when Little sat down opposite us.

“If this is your idea of the best there is, John, I’m going back to the zones as soon as this thing stops,” he complained to his good friend. “These clothes are impossible, and I haven’t even been able to relax with Jennifer. And just look at it out there!”

He waved a hand toward the window we sat near, where the ground had disappeared entirely in the mist.

What trees we passed were black, and twisted and unhealthy-looking. Everything out there was gray or black, and the warmth and brightness of the sun seemed never to have touched any of it.

“It is rather depressing the first time you come through it,” Little conceded, gazing out the window with pursed lips and almost total unconcern. “When we get where we’re going you’ll see how appropriate this all is, and we aren’t that far from it now. Trust me, Val, you won’t be disappointed.”

Val grunted with very obvious doubt, but he didn’t pursue his complaints any farther. He could afford to be as skeptical as he liked, but he couldn’t decide firmly against the place and he knew it. Little took his eyes away from the loathsome landscape and stared at me for a while, but I pretended not to notice.

There was something in it worse than what we were riding through, and I really didn’t need that.

We rode on in silence for a while, and then the train began to slow down. The mist was rising even higher now, nearly covering everything inside it, but somewhere in the near distance, dark like everything else, were several unmistakable shapes. Val peered at them through the window, then turned to Little.

“Am I mistaken, or are those ships?- he asked, sounding more than a little puzzled. “Is this the Pleasure Sphere’s way of showing us the exit?”

“Not at all.” Little laughed, barely glancing where Val looked. “That’s the heart’s shuttle port, used by people who want to go directly there and don’t care to waste time coming overland. Some of the regulars also come in their own ships, and bring them down here instead of paying docking fees in the Station.

Almost no one who comes here simply visits for a day or two and then leaves. The place has a very special lure, Val, and just about everyone who visits it once comes back at least a second time.”

Val nodded and made an attempt to look interested and anticipatory, not knowing or at least not realizing that Little was talking about a hand-picked, very select few. Of course they came back a second or third or fourth time; if they weren’t the sort to enjoy what went on there, they were unlikely to have been allowed in the first time.

The train kept slowing down, and before very long it came to a complete stop. Those of us who had been cooped up so long with so little to do lost no time heading for the exit, but I noticed that the slaves who had served us hung far back and tried to make themselves invisible, possibly against the off chance that one of us would insist they come along. John Little’s slave was as pale as the mist as he followed along behind John, and he moved with a fatalistic defeat that was painful to see. He didn’t have the option of fading into the woodwork, and looked about as close to tears of terror as it’s possible to get. Little must have brought him along on a whim, or possibly to enjoy his terror, but whichever it was, the slave was caught.

We were helped down the train steps into the mist, and once we all stood in the wet, swirling gray the train moved on, almost silently, disappearing very quickly. It wasn’t night-dark around us, only misty gray, but that misty-gray turned everything unreal and made us feel we were the only people left alive on the whole planet, if not in the entire universe. One of the other guests had brought a female slave along with him, and the girl whimpered and shook with even more terror than Little’s slave. It was fairly obvious the slaves knew something we didn’t-the “we” including everyone but John Little. That gem just stood quietly with a private smile on his narrow face, a smile that broadened when the guest who had brought the female slave knocked her to the ground with a casual backhanded slap to quiet her. We were all too busy looking around at nothing and wondering- what would happen next to be distracted by hysterics.

We stood in the thick, clinging gray for fifteen or twenty minutes, long enough to feel abandoned and forgotten, long enough for our clothes to fill with the dampness and grow heavy and even more uncomfortable. The dress I wore had been confining but warm; it slowly grew to be confining and freezing, and Val wasn’t doing much better. The material of all the clothing seemed designed to attract moisture, and then we were distracted by the exclamation of one of the guests. A small, red light had begun to glow in the mist, and even as we watched it it grew and expanded to the size of a large portal.

Without comment we all began to move toward it, holding the same silence we’d held the entire time we’d stood there. Casual conversation is ordinarily usual among groups doing the same thing, especially small groups; in that group not a single word had been exchanged.

We began to feel the heat as soon as we approached the redness, and by the time we were close enough to see that it really was a portal we were heading for, the heat was enough to make us sweat. The temperature rose higher and higher, forcing us to break into a run, and once we crossed the red-glowing metal threshold, panting and desperate, the torture eased off to the point where it was at least bearable. It was surprising that no one had turned and run the other way instead, considering the possibility that the heat might not have eased off once we were inside, and then I noticed that my automatic assumption was wrong, Although all the guests and the female slave were still with us, the pretty male slave Little had brought was nowhere to be seen.

“Welcome, travelers,” a smoothly amused baritone announced, drawing our attention. “Welcome and welcome again-to the halls of hell.”

The tall, very handsome man with the pointed beard chuckled at the startled reaction his announcement had drawn, but it was nothing we shouldn’t have been expecting. We stood in a cavern of sorts with dark rock all about and the mists still swirling around our ankles .and knees, but the lighting was red and smoldering, and the heat was still above the comfortable mark. The man greeting us was dressed in black slacks, black turtleneck shirt and black loafers, and in intricate silver medallion hung around his neck gleaming redly. He was dark-haired and dark-eyed and seemed completely at home, and when his eyes touched me as he examined each one of us in turn, I made sure to go wide-eyed and clutch fearfully at Val’s arm. Val patted my hand in a preoccupied way and paid no further attention to me, clearly remembering what I’d told him forcefully enough: I was going to have to pretend to be afraid at times in that place, and as long as he didn’t see me getting ready to protect myself with everything I had, he had to remember it was just an act. He had reluctantly agreed to check first before going all protective and making people wonder, but I didn’t know how far I could rely on that agreement. I could just hope it would be far enough.