The Cache (26 page)

“What’s that?” replied Mapfarity. “Sea-water?”

The crowd laughed.

“No, it’s not water,” Rastignac said, “as anybody but a lumbering Giant should know. It is a delicious drink that brings a rare ecstasy upon the drinker. I got the formula for it from an old witch who lives on the shores of far off Apfelabvidanahyew. He told me it had been in his family since the coming of Man to L’Bawpfey. He parted with it on condition I make it only for the Kings.”

“Will only Their Majesties get to taste this exquisite drink?” bellowed Mapfarity.

“That depends upon whether it pleases Their Majesties to give some to their subjects to celebrate the result of the elections.”

Archambaud, also planted in the crowd, shrilled, “I suppose if they do, the big-paunched Amphibs and Giants will get twice as much as us Humans. They always do it, it seems.”

There was a mutter from the crowd; approbation from the Amphibs, protest from the others.

“That will make no difference,” said Rastignac, smiling. “The fascinating thing about this is that an Amphib can drink no more than a Human. That may be why the old man who revealed his secret to me called the drink Old Equalizer.”

“Ah, you’re skinless,” scoffed Mapfarity, throwing the most deadly insult known. “I can out-drink, out-eat, and out-swim any Human here. Here, Amphib, give me a bottle, and we’ll see if I’m bragging.”

An Amphib captain pushed himself through the throng, waddling clumsily on his flippers like an upright seal.

“No, you don’t!” he barked. “Those bottles are intended for the Kings. No commander touches them, least of all a Human and a Giant.”

Rastignac mentally hugged himself. He couldn’t have planned a better intervention himself! “Why can’t I?” he replied. “Until I make an official presentation, these bottles are mine, not the Kings’. I’ll do what I want with them.”

“Yeah,” said the Amphibs. “That’s telling him!”

The Amphibs’s big brown eyes narrowed, and his animal-like face wrinkled, but he couldn’t think of a retort. Rastignac at once handed a bottle apiece to each of his comrades. They uncorked and drank and then assumed an ecstatic expression which was a tribute to their acting, for these three bottles held only fruit juice.

“Look here, captain,” said Rastignac, “why don’t you try a swig yourself? Go ahead. There’s plenty. And I’m sure Their Majesties would be pleased to contribute some of it on this joyous occasion. Besides, I can always make more for the Kings.

“As a matter of fact,” he added, winking, “I expect to get a pension from the courts as the Kings’ Old Equalizer-maker.”

The crowd laughed. The Amphib, afraid of losing face, took the bottle—which contained wine rather than fruit juice. After a few long swallows, the Amphib’s eyes became red and a silly grin curved his thin, black-edged lips. Finally, in a thickening voice, he asked for another bottle.

Rastignac, in a sudden burst of generosity, not only gave him one, but began passing out bottles to the many eager reaching hands. Mapfarity and the two egg-thieves helped him. In a short time, the pile of bottles had dwindled to a fourth of its former height. When a mixed group of guards strode up and demanded to know what the commotion was about, Rastignac gave them some of the bottles.

Within a minute, the square had erupted into a fighting mob. Staggering, red-eyed, slur-tongued, their long-repressed hostility against each other released by the liquor which their bodies were unaccustomed to, Human, Ssassaror and Amphib fell to with the utmost will, slashing, slugging, fighting with everything they had.

None of them noticed that every one who had drunk from the bottles had lost his Skin. The Skins had fallen off one by one and lay motionless on the pavement where they were kicked or stepped upon. Not one Skin tried to crawl back to its owner because they were all nerve-numbed by the wine.

Rastignac, seated behind the wheel of the Jeep, began driving as best he could through the battling mob. After frequent stops, he halted before the broad marble steps that ran like a stairway to heaven, up and up before it ended on the Porpoise Porch of the Palace. He and his gang were about to take the two heavy chests off the wagon when they were transfixed by a scene before them.

A score of dead Humans and Amphibs lay on the steps, evidence of the fierce struggle that had taken place between the guards of the two monarchs. Evidently, the King had heard of the riot and hastened outside. There the Amphib-changelings King had apparently realized that the rebellion was way ahead of schedule, but he had attacked the Amphib King anyway.

And he had won, for his guardsmen held the struggling flipper-footed Amphib ruler down while two others bent his head back over a step. The Changeling-King himself, still clad in the coronation robes, was about to draw his long ceremonial knife across the exposed and palpitating throat of the Amphib King.

This in itself was enough to freeze the onlookers. But the sight of Lusine running up the stairway towards the rulers added to their paralysis. She had a knife in her hand and was holding it high as she ran toward her foster-father, the Amphib King.

Mapfarity groaned, but Rastignac said, “It doesn’t matter that she has escaped. We’ll go ahead with our original plan.”

They began unloading the chests while Rastignac kept an eye on Lusine. He saw her run up, stop, say a few words to the Amphib King, then kneel and stab him, burying the knife in his jugular vein. Then, before anybody could stop her, she had applied her mouth to the cut in his neck.

The Human-King kicked her in the ribs and sent her rolling down the steps. Rastignac saw correctly that it was not her murderous deed that caused his reaction. It was because she had dared to commit it without his permission and had also drunk the royal blood first.

He further noted with grim satisfaction that when Lusine recovered from the blow and ran back up to talk to the King, he ignored her. She pointed at the group around the wagon but he dismissed her with a wave of his hand. He was too busy gloating over his vanquished rival lying at his feet.

The plotters hoisted the two chests and staggered up the steps. The King passed them as he went down with no more than a curious glance. Gifts had been coming up those steps all day for the King, so he undoubtedly thought of them only as more gifts. So Rastignac and his men walked past the knives of the guards as if they had nothing to fear.

Lusine stood alone at the top of the steps. She was in a half-crouch, knife ready. “I’ll kill the King, and I’ll drink from his throat!” she cried hoarsly. “No man kicks me except for love. Has he forgotten that I am the foster-daughter of the Amphib King?”

Rastignac felt revulsion but he had learned by now that those who deal in violence and rebellion must march with strange steppers.

“Bear a hand here,” he said, ignoring her threat.

Meekly she grabbed hold of a chest’s corner. To his further questioning, she replied that the Earthman who had landed in the ship was held in a suite of rooms in the west wing. Their trip thereafter was fast and direct. Unopposed, they carted the chests to the huge room where the Master Skin was kept.

There they found ten frantic biotechnicians excitedly trying to determine why the great extraderm—the Master Skin through which all individual Skins were controlled—was not broadcasting properly. They had no way as yet of knowing that it was operating perfectly but that the little Skins upon the Amphibs and their hostage Humans were not shocking them into submission because they were lying in a wine-stupor on the ground. No one had told them that the Skins, which fed off the bloodstream of their hosts, had become anesthetized from the alcohol and failed any longer to react to their Master Skin.

That, of course, applied only to those Skins in the square that were drunk from the wine. Elsewhere all over the kingdom, Amphibs writhed in agony and Ssassarors and Terrans were taking advantage of their helplessness to cut their throats. But not here, where the crux of the matter was.

XII

The Landsmen rushed the techs and pushed them into the great chemical vat in which the twenty-five hundred foot square Master Skin floated. Then they uncrated the lead-leaf-lined bags filled with stolen geese and emptied them into the nutrient fluid. According to Mapfarity’s calculations, the radio-activity from the silicon-carbon geese should kill the big Skin within a few days. When a new one was grown, that, too, would die. Unless the Amphib guessed what was wrong and located the geese on the bottom of the ten-foot deep tank, they would not be able to stop the process. That did not seem likely.

In either case, it was necessary that the Master Skin be put out of temporary commission, at least, so the Amphibs over the Kingdom could have a fighting chance. Mapfarity plunged a hollow harpoon into the isle of floating protoplasm and through a tube connected to that poured into the Skin three gallons of the dream-snake venom. That was enough to knock it out for an hour or two. Meanwhile, if the Amphibs had any sense at all, they’d have rid themselves of their extraderms.

They left the lab and entered the west wing. As they trotted up the long winding corridors Lusine said, “Jean-Jacques, what do you plan on doing now? Will you try to make yourself King of the Terrans and fight us Amphib-changelings ?” When he said nothing, she went on. “Why don’t you kill the Amphib-changeling King and take over here? I could help you do that. You could then have all of L’Bawpfey in your power.”

He shot her a look of contempt and cried, “Lusine, can’t you get it through that thick little head of yours that everything I’ve done has been done so that I can win one goal: reach the Flying Stars ? If I can get the Earth-man to his ship I’ll leave with him and not set foot again for years on this planet. Maybe never again.”

She looked stricken. “But what about the war here?” she asked.

“There are a few men among the Landfolk who are capable of leading in wartime. It will take strong men, and there are very few like me, I admit, but—oh, oh, opposition!” He broke off at sight of the six guards who stood before the Earthman’s suite.

Lusine helped, and within a minute they had slain three and chased away the others. Then they burst through the door—and Rastignac received another shock.

The occupant of the apartment was a tiny and exquisitely formed redhead with large blue eyes and very unmasculine curves!

“I thought you said Earthman?” protested Rastignac to the Giant who came lumbering along behind them.

“Oh, I used that in the generic sense,” Mapfarity replied. “You didn’t expect me to pay any attention to sex, did you? I’m not interested in the gender of you Humans, you know.”

There was no time for reproach. Rastignac tried to explain to the Earthwoman who he was, but she did not understand him. However, she did seem to catch on to what he wanted and seemed reassured by his gestures. She picked up a large book from a table and, hugging it to her small, high, and rounded bosom, went with him out the door.

They raced from the palace and descended onto the square. Here, they found the surviving Amphibs clustered into a solid phalanx and fighting, bloody step by step, towards the street that led to the harbor.

Rastignac’s little group skirted the battle and started down the steep avenue toward the harbor. Halfway down, he glanced back and saw that nobody as yet was paying any attention to them. Nor was there anybody on the street to bother them, though the pavement was strewn with Skins and bodies. Apparently, those who’d lived through the first savage melee had gone to the square.

They ran onto the wharf. The Earthwoman motioned to Rastignac that she knew how to open the spaceship, but the Amphibs didn’t. Moreover, if they did get in, they wouldn’t know how to operate it. She had the directions for so doing in the book hugged so desperately to her chest. Rastignac surmised she hadn’t told the Amphibs about that. Apparently they hadn’t, as yet, tried to torture the information from her.

Therefore, her telling him about the book indicated she trusted him.

Lusine said, “Now what, Jean-Jacques? Are you still going to abandon this planet?”

“Of course,” he snapped.

“Will you take me with you?”

He had spent most of his life under the tutelage of his Skin, which ensured that others would know when he was lying. It did not come easy to hide his true feelings. So a habit of a lifetime won out.

“I will not take you,” he said. “In the first place, though you may have some admirable virtues, I’ve failed to detect one. In the second place, I could not stand your blood-drinking nor your murderous and totally immoral ways.”

“But, Jean-Jacques, I will give them up for you!”

“Can the shark stop eating fish?”

“You would leave Lusine, who loves you as no Earthwoman could, and go with that—that pale little doll I could break with my hands?”

“Be quiet,” he said. “I have dreamed of this moment all my life. Nothing can stop me now.”

They were on the wharf beside the bridge that ran up the smooth side of the starship. The guard was no longer there, though bodies showed that there had been reluctance on the part of some to leave.

They let the Earthwoman precede them up the bridge.

Lusine suddenly ran ahead of him, crying, “If you won’t have me, you won’t have her, either! Nor the stars!”

Her knife sank twice into the Earthwoman’s back. Then, before anybody could reach her, she had leaped off the bridge and into the harbor.

Rastignac knelt beside the Earthwoman. She held out the book to him, then she died. He caught the volume before it struck the wharf.

“My God! My God!” moaned Rastignac, stunned with grief and shock and sorrow. Sorrow for the woman and shock at the loss of the ship and the end of his plans for freedom.

Mapfarity ran up then and took the book from his nerveless hand. “She indicated that this is a manual for running the ship,” he said. “All is not lost.”

“It will be in a language we don’t know,” Rastignac whispered.

Archambaud came running up, shrilled, “The Amphibs have broken through and are coming down the street! Let’s get to our boat before the whole bloodthirsty mob gets here!”