Image of the Beast and Blown (43 page)

was killing Igescu in his oak-log coffin, she may have just
been trying to drive him away.

It was obvious now that he was supposed to develop
into a Captain. But there were a number of questions to
which he required answers. For one thing, what about
those abandoned cars in front of his house?

Vivienne said, "Several years ago, we had about half
of a grail in our possession. It was the result of several
thousands of years collecting the materials needed to
make the metal. Then the Tocs stole it. We pursued
them and cornered the one with the grail after killing his
two companions. He had run into a railroad yard to get
away from us, and when he saw he could not escape,
he threw the grail into a gondola full of junk. At that
time, we did not know that. Later, we got the informa-
tion from him."

"I can imagine," said Childe, closing his eyes and
shuddering.

"By then, the grail and the junk had gone into a steel
mill furnace. We had to do some very intense detective
work, very expensive, too, and we found that that par-
ticular load had ended up as metal in a certain num-
ber of cars of a certain make and model. So ..."

"But you did not know which cars exactly?" Childe
said. He was beginning to understand.

"Luckily, they were cars which were transported to
this area. We had narrowed the number to about three
hundred. And so we started to steal them and leave
them in front of your house. We were lucky, very lucky.
Three of the cars contained traces of the metal in the
grail. They activated when you went near them, but you
couldn't see that because the paint hid the glow, which
was extremely feeble, anyway.

"We junked the cars and had them melted in a yard
by a man whom we paid well. We
strained out
the grail
metal, as it were, and used the tiny bits as a detector for
those other cars that contained the metal. When one bit
of grail is brought close to the other, both glow. We no
longer had to leave cars in front of your house, because
we knew exactly what group of cars contained the metal.
We had to do some more bribing of authorities to get
the owners' names, and it was impossible to steal all the
cars.

"But we got enough to act as a seed for the growth of
more metal. It is a procedure that is terribly tiring for
the Captain. And it exhausts those who take part in the
ceremony. But it has to be done."

Childe did not completely understand. He asked that
Pao explain everything to him. This took an hour and a
half with several questions still to be asked.

Nor did he accept Pao's word that the Tocs were the
evil ones and the Ogs the good. The Tocs could be evil,
but if they were, they were certainly matched by the Ogs.

However, what the Ogs wanted of him was not some-
thing that he had to refuse for the good of Earth. Far
from it. If he took the Ogs to their home world, he would
be doing his world a vast service. He would never be
rewarded by humans for his heroism. In fact, if he
were to bring his deeds to then attention, he would be
put into an insane asylum.

There were several disturbing things about being a
Captain. One was that he could return to Earth and
there arrange to transport the Tocs to their home planet,
too. If the Ogs could scrap cars and make a grail, the
Tocs could do the same. There were plenty of cars left
for that purpose.

The Ogs must have thought of this possibility. What
did they intend doing about it? He hated to ask them,
because he was afraid of both the truth and the lies.
If they meant to kill him or hold him prisoner on their
world, they would not, of course, tell him so. And if he
asked them about it, they would know that he would
have to be killed or imprisoned. Either way, he would
lose.

"It will be glorious," Vivienne was saying. "When the
Grail is complete, then you, my Captain, can materi-
alize all the Ogs who are wandering the face of this
planet as energy complexes."

Childe was startled, and he had thought he was beyond
being surprised anymore.

"You mean that I am expected to give all your, uh,
dead, new bodies?" he said.

"You will enable them to give themselves their ma-
terial bodies," she said.

"It will be a resurrection day for us," Pao said. His

slanting vulpine eyes glowed. The light from the lamp
was reflected redly in them.

"And just where will this resurrection, or rematerial-
izing, or whatever you call it, take place?" Childe said.

"They will materialize in the barn behind this house,"
Vivienne said. "There is more than enough room, even
with all the goods stacked there."

"Approximately nine hundred of them," Pao said.
'They won't be brought into matter all at once. You can
control that, Captain. Ten or twenty or so at a time, and
these will be conducted out of the place into this house
or into rooms in the barn."

Theologistics of resurrection day, he thought. And am
I really a sort of god?

"Will Lord Byron, my real father, be among them?"
he said.

Pao said, "Oh, no. You forget that …"

He did not want to continue. No wonder. Byron would
be among the Tocs, who would not be materialized. And
Pao must be trying to guess what Childe was contem-
plating. How could he avoid the conclusion that the
Tocs might be the good ones, if his own father was a
Toc?

"Byron was a very talented but a very evil man,"
Pao said slowly. "History does not reveal how evil,
though there are hints. The world never knew the story
behind the story, of course. If it had, it would have ex-
ecuted him. I am sorry to say that about your father, but
it has to be said. Fortunately for you, we saved you from
the Tocs."

The implication was that they had also saved him from
following the evil ways of his father.

"I have a lot of thinking to do," Childe said, "so I'd
like to be alone. What are your plans for me today, if
any?"

Pao spoke in an apologetic tone. "The Tocs will be
gathering for an attack on this house. Time is more
essential than ever because of this. We were hoping that
you would be quite rested by evening and ready for
another Grailing."

"See me after dinner," he said.

Pao bowed and Vivienne started to suck his cock
again, but he stopped her.

"I'll save my power."

Pao looked pleased at this, but the woman frowned
and bit her lip. She turned to go, but Childe said, "One
moment, Vivienne. Last night. You know what hap-
pened? I mean, are you conscious when you, uh, come
apart?"

She said, "I must be dimly conscious. When I came to,
all put together, I remembered vaguely what went on.
It was like a poorly remembered dream."

"Can you have an orgasm when you're disconnected?"

"Not that I remember. If you were getting revenge,
you got a pale shade of it, just as I probably got a pale
shade of orgasm."

Childe said, "I can understand even the weirdness of
the others, since they are known in folklore and super-
stition. But I have never heard of your type. Was your
kind ever known among humans?"

Vivienne said, "If you're referring to my structure, to
the thing in me, to my discreteness, as I call it, no. I am
unique. And I am recent. I was rematerialized in 1562.
I had died in 1431 A.D., by present reckoning. The thing
in my womb died in 1440 A.D. He was my very good
friend then in our public human life and in our private
Og life."

"That thing was human?"

"Yes. You see, when we succeeded in rematerializing
in 1562, we constructed ourself in our present arrange-
ment. We can do that within certain limits, you know.
We have to conform to biological laws, but if you have
great knowledge you can do things with matter that you
humans would think impossible.

"We had talked about just such a symbiosis as this,
where we could double the intensity of our sexual ac-
tivities. So we materialized with this structure. Only we
made a mistake. I did, rather. I had an idea that if I
could be separated into various parts, and these parts
could also have a sexual life, orgasm, that is, and the
parts could communicate each other's orgasms … well
it didn't work out that way."

Childe wondered if he was being told the truth. It
seemed too fantastic. Would anybody deliberately build
herself like this? Wasn't it more likely that her en-
emies, the Tocs, had caught her as she and the thing

were rematerializing and shaped her like this? He did not
know why they would do it, but it was more probable
that someone would do this to another for a sadistic joke
than that anyone would purposefully do it to herself.

"Both of us had very traumatic experiences in our
fifteenth-century lives," she was saying. "He was hanged
and burned at the same time, and I was burned at the
stake."

"You were a witch?" Childe said. "Then all the
witches burned were not innocent?"

"Oh, no! I wasn't innocent, but I was not a witch in
the sense that my executioners thought. It was the Eng-
lish that burned me, you know."

"No, I didn't know," he said. "Who were you? Any-
body I might know?"

"I think so," she said. "I was Joan of Arc. And the
being in my womb was Gilles de Rais."

39

After the two Ogs had left, Childe lay down on the bed.
Sybil had heard only the last five minutes, so he went
over the entire conversation with her. She said, "I always
thought Joan of Arc was unjustly burned by the English,
that she had been proved innocent of the charge of witch-
craft?"

"She was condemned by the Church, but it was the
Church that later removed the charge and then canonized
her. I think that that happened because she was too big
a hero to the French."

"I don't understand," Sybil said. "What was Vivienne
or Joan, or whatever she was, doing? Why would an Og
try to save France from the English?"

"Maybe for herself. Who knows what she intended
to do after she had saved the nation for the French
ruler? It's possible that she meant to take over from
him or perhaps to control France through him. She may
even have intended to drive the English out and then in-
vade England and bring both nations under one ruler
again. I didn't ask her what she and de Rais meant to do.
But I'll have a chance later on. Just now, I'm too
stunned."

"Who was Gilles de Rais?"

"He was a Grand Marshal of France, one of the best
warriors and generals the French had. He was also sav-
agely sadistic, a psychotic homosexual who abducted,
tortured, mutilated, and sacrificed hundreds of little boys.
Little girls, too, I think. A member of the royalty or the
nobility could get away with a lot in those days, but he
went too far. He was charged with witchcraft, ritual
murder, and a number of other things, including sod-
omy, I think. He was executed and quite properly, too.
Few people have ever been so bestial. He made Jack
the Ripper look like a gentle old fuddyduddy."

Sybil shuddered but did not say anything. He got off
the bed and undressed while she looked wide-eyed at
him.

"Take your clothes off," he said.

"Why?"

"Because I want to make love to you. Is that surpris-
ing?"

"Yes, it is, after last night," she said.

She started to unbutton her blouse and then stopped.

"Aren't you supposed to save yourself for tonight?"

"Here, I'll help you undress," he said.

He began to unbutton her.

"Yes, I am. But what they want and what I want do
not necessarily coincide. Besides, if I'm dry, what can
they do about it?"

"Oh, no! You shouldn't do that!"

"Whose side are you on?"

"Well, yours, of course! But I don't want them to get
mad at you, Herald. Or at me."

"You can always tell them I made you," he said,
grinning. "In more sense than one."

"I really shouldn't," she said, staring at his slightly
swelled cock.

"Go ahead. Touch it."

"I'm not an Og," Sybil replied. "But if you say so."

He stripped her blouse and unhooked her bra and
took it off. She had full well-shaped breasts that had not
yet begun to sag. He kissed the nipples and saw them
swell and then he sucked on both, one after the other.
She stood against him, her back slightly arched, and
moaned. She reached down and tenderly fondled the
shaft of his cock, which was expanding with his kissing
and her caressing. He kissed her breasts all over and
then backed her towards the bed, where he eased her
down. He removed her skirt and her panties, and moved
in between her legs. The thick black fleece of her cunt
was beginning to run; she had always overlubricated. He
licked along the slit, putting the tip of his tongue in be-
tween the lips and running it up and down. Then he
pressed the tip against the clitoris, ran it back and
forth, and inserted two fingers into her slit and moved
them slowly back and forth and then more swiftly. She
came finally with a fierce deep groan and pulled on the
hairs of his head.

After this, he came up from between her legs and slid
on up by her. He pushed her head down towards his penis,
which was sticking up straight and hard and swollen.