Alqua Dreams

by Rachel Pollack

Genres: Fantasy; Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure

Synopsis

An Earthman seeking to exploit a rare mineral essential to intersteller flight enters into an alien world--where the inhabitants are dedicated to a religion based on the concept that life is a hallucination--and becomes obsessed with one of the young women

Release date: October 1, 1987

Publisher: Franklin Watts

Print pages: 246

Sample

Jump out of your tomb, Alqua. Fly into the truth. Jump!”

Standing in the outer doorway of his ship, Jaimi Cooper stared down at the small group of Lukai clustered round the foot of the ladder. “Jump, Alqua,” they shouted, laughing. “The smoke will hold you up.” The dozen or so men and women had marked their naked bodies in thick black-and-white paint, some in stripes, some in swirls or large blotches. Only their faces shone: the red skin was painted completely white from the neck up, except for the noses, painted black, and heavy black rings around the eyes and mouth. They look like skulls, the Earthman thought, like corpses eaten up by birds. Great Mother, how can you make a contract with people like that? And in the middle, straight-backed, her mask of bleached bone like a rock amidst the shouting and laughing villagers, stood the Death Woman, dressed, as always, in her stiff shroud. From her waist hung a loose leather or plastic bag hooked onto a hole in the heavy gray material.

“Wake up, Alqua,” someone yelled. “God calls you to breathe in the truth.”

Cooper squared his shoulders. “Here we go,” he said out loud, and walked slowly down the steps. If he just got through this initiation or test or whatever the hell they’d planned, maybe he could start negotiating. At a sign from the Death Woman he removed his boots and then his insulated planet suit, trying not to shiver, and not to grin at the ring of eyes staring at his dark body.

“Canumaira likes you, Coopa,” said a round-bellied woman, her eyes on his half-erect genitals. “He gave your fake body a nice gamla foot to play with.” While a gesture from the Death Woman silenced the laughter, Cooper braced himself for a paint job. To his great relief they set off without it.

The procession traveled through a part of the city the Earthman didn’t know very well, wide streets paved with some green substance nearly as smooth—and as cold to his naked feet—as glass. On either side the buildings rose some nine or ten stories tall, relatively high for the quadrant. Some of them were really just smooth walls, as gray as the sky, without windows or even any doors. They looked to Cooper oddly like the back wall of the Earth Mother convent near the apartment he and his lover Kerin had shared years ago in Houston. He wondered what the Lukai would make of the nuns. In between the blank walls other buildings rose in zigguratlike steps, leading to milky yellowish domes glowing slightly on the top. On some of these buildings, near the bottom, black metal oval plates, shaped vaguely like eyes, stared blindly at the street. They gave off a slight hum as the marchers passed them.

Between the roofs and the clouds glided a “kii” eagle, one of the rare birds to fly high enough to penetrate the nerve screen cutting off the city from the outside wilderness. Cooper and several of the Lukai stopped to watch; a sharp word from the Death Woman hurried them forward.

As they followed the shaman through the twisting streets, the Lukai let their chatter fall into a tense silence. Cooper fixed his mind on passing their tests. He couldn’t guess what ridiculous tribal rites they’d planned, but it could hardly be worse than what Margaret Li had gone through the year before, pegged out under a desert sun, with maniac women pouring garbage on her; and Margaret had gotten her contract for the Company. Once Cooper had “ingratiated” himself, as the textbooks and training manuals put it, it wouldn’t take long for the sense of his offer to penetrate their thickheaded dogmatism. Then a contract, a home, and, with any luck, a promotion.

He jerked back from his thoughts as a large dark bird with a bright purple beak swooped down on them from the gray evening sky, its wings making furious rushing noises as it dove at Cooper’s face. He yelled, covering his head. The Lukai burst out laughing as the apparition flew right through him. Cooper clenched his fists; why hadn’t he noticed the lack of wind? The bird was a hologram projected from the roofs or under the ground. Would he ever get used to them? A grunt from the Death Woman urged them on again.

Their destination proved to be a cellar near the outer edge of the quadrant. As they entered the narrow street, packed with dark half-fallen buildings, Cooper could even see, at the other end, that peculiar haze where the screen separated the city from the outside. Beyond it shimmered the forest, dark and unreal. Ruuli, a slim nervous woman, whispered in Cooper’s ear, “The dancing world.”

Startled, the Earthman looked at her, but she’d already turned away, and then the Death Woman was herding them into the slightly arched doorway of a low building. At one time tiles must have decorated the rim of the door; here and there a few remained, too faded for Cooper to make out their design. Curious, the Earthman followed the Lukai inside. He’d never known them to use one of the city buildings before. They entered a dark narrow hallway with scorched walls and a floor covered in pieces of grimy metal and charred plastic. To either side Cooper saw small dark rooms, windowless and empty of anything but rubble. An awful smell, years of damp and mold, blanketed them. The perfect place for a Lukai ceremony, Cooper thought.

From the end of the corridor a dim light flickered. When they reached it the Death Woman half directed, half pushed Cooper inside. The light came from a small circle of upright metal coils in the middle of a faded black slatelike floor. Glowing red, they gave off weak showers of sparks, an incongruous party effect that made Cooper want to laugh. Though the Lukai had carted off the debris and even laid down rugs and mats, they couldn’t banish the damp. The room breathed clamminess. Cooper guessed they didn’t use this place often. The Smoke Ceremony, he gathered, was rare, a special sacrament for poor confused alquas like himself. For all he knew, they might have chosen the place and cleaned it out just that day. It certainly smelled like it.

He gritted his teeth to keep from cringing as he settled his shivering body on a ragged piece of green and red carpet. All around him the usually joking Lukai took their places with hard faces and straight backs; their rimmed eyes stared at Cooper. Beside him Ruuli breathed with a shallowness that made her breasts tremble. Cooper decided he’d better take his eyes off her before he ruined the pious atmosphere with an erection.

Small mirrors, all of them stained and chipped, hung on the walls, held up, Cooper guessed, by the strong glue the Lukai used to hold their shacks together. Despite distortion from the red glow and the sparks, the planet representative managed to compose his face in what he considered a respectful yet determined expression. What a job, he thought, remembering Hlk, where a smile at any time was a serious insult.

For awhile they all just sat there, no one moving. The heat on Cooper’s chest only made his back colder, while the hard floor under his rug made his thighs and buttocks ache. He was just wishing he could wipe away the nervous sweat under his arms when the Death Woman reached into the bag hooked onto her robe and carefully lifted out a thin and gracefully curved ceramic pipe. About fifteen centimeters long with a small narrow bowl growing out of the stem, the pipe glistened in the dim light. Firelike lines of a pale yellow ran all through its deep blue glaze. Incredible, Cooper thought; it would have brought a fortune in the Mombasa Exo-auction, and she keeps it in a filthy bag.

He watched the Death Woman crush some leaves and press them into the bowl. A drug; he should have guessed. “SPP” the planet reps called it, “Standard Primitive Procedure.” Planet training included experiences with so many hallucinogens and other “sacred” drugs from Earth and different worlds that the reps sometimes called themselves the “apothecary squad.” And while the Company’s anthropologists advised the reps to psychically experience whatever their hosts gave them, the ships’ medicomps immunized the reps against any serious poison.

As soon as a curl of smoke rose from the bowl the Death Woman handed the pipe over to Cooper who allowed himself a quick glance inside. A thumb-sized pack of crushed leaves glowed orange in the center of the bowl.

“Breathe, Alqua,” the Death Woman’s soft voice ordered.

Cooper sucked hard at the mouthpiece. Nothing. He checked to make sure it hadn’t gone out, then pulled on it again. Had they given him a dud, he wondered; were they waiting for some reaction? It occured to him that the whole thing might be an elaborate Lukai joke. Before he could think what to do, Ruuli snatched the pipe from his hands and with quick jabs of her little finger loosened the choked pack. He smiled at her, only to have her stare at the heating coils, her lips pressed tightly together.

Now when Cooper sucked hard on the cool mouthpiece his mouth filled with sweet syrupy smoke, warm and thick. He spit it out, coughing, and hoped he hadn’t insulted them. High resin content, he noted; he tried a short puff, found he could keep it down, then a longer draft. He glanced around the circle, saw quick hand signals, like an Earth person’s nod of approval. But when he looked at Ruuli she sat like a bent statue of gloom. The hell with her; he wasn’t here to get laid anyway. The smoke spread out through his blood to his arms and legs.

A pleasant tingling warmed his skin, even drove off some of the damp from his legs and back. His heart picked up speed, and he observed the rushing, slightly panicky effect of adrenalin. He did a quick breathing exercise, and the rushes smoothed out, though his head buzzed and his eyes stung. Now his body really heated up and when he glanced in the mirror he saw himself across the coils and sparks. He grinned. Should he pass the pipe? He sucked in more smoke.

He felt his body rock back and forth, even though he knew he sat very still. Mustn’t look drunk, he warned himself. Disrespectful to the dead. He bit his lip to keep from laughing as he raised the pipe again. Ruuli jerked it away from him; a buzz of noise followed her hand as she passed it back to the Death Woman. “I’m sorry,” the Earthman mumbled. “I didn’t mean to hog it.” Be quiet, he told himself. Don’t speak until you’re spoken to. His stomach convulsed in sudden cramps and sweat sprang from his face. Why did he take that last puff? That was why Ruuli pulled it away, she wanted to protect him. He looked around at the Lukai leaning forward, grinning. Poison. They wanted to—He just wanted to help them, why the Mother couldn’t they see that? Death worshippers. Why didn’t he—How could you help people who worshipped death?

The ship. If he could make it back, the medicomp could analyze his blood, prepare an antidote. No—what was he thinking? He already had toxic immunity. Relax. SPP. The drugs never really harmed you. You just had to relax. He’d taken stronger drugs than this one. If he just waited a few hours, maybe a day or even two days, it would wear off. It had to. Or could it dislocate his psyche so far nothing could wrench it back again? Like that woman, Ann Fareih, living on a Company island, surrounded by robots because she couldn’t stand the smell of another human. He tried to think of contracts, negotiations, promotions.

For no reason, he thought of his parents, moving him from commune to commune, passing their time in sentimental rituals. They should come here and try the real thing, he thought, and suddenly sharp hot tears threatened to wash away his face. Breathe, he told himself, relax.

He looked carefully at the others. No one else had smoked, the pipe just lay there in front of the Death Woman, they all just stared at him, like corpses propped up on their rugs and mats. He shook himself. Relax. He could breathe a little easier, he noticed. In fact, the drug was actually starting to wear off even while he waited for the lights, sounds, and other hallucinations that usually followed the rushing period. His hearing had mildly sharpened; he could hear each person’s breathing: Ruuli’s quick and nervous, the Death Woman’s slow and arrogant, like everything else about her. But the panic had gone. Except for the hearing virtually nothing remained of the drug but a shaky feeling and an itch along his arms and legs.

He’d done it. He’d done it. He could hardly believe it was so simple. Good old SPP. He swallowed a laugh. Tomorrow, he thought. Tomorrow he’d begin serious negotiations. Impatiently he waited for the Lukai to signal the ceremony’s end. Would the Death Woman make some ornate speech? The Lukai sat stiff, their eyes fixed on Cooper’s face. Maybe he should say something. But what? Why couldn’t they give him a clue?

The itch spread over his body. Certainly they wouldn’t object if he scratched himself. His right fingernail ran up his left forearm.

The skin came off between his fingers.

Cooper gasped, as if someone had hit him in the stomach. And then a terrible calm turned his head side to side; from the exposed veins and tissues—there was no blood, the veins stayed whole, he could hear the blood flowing through the network—to the bits of skin that still dung to his fingers. His left fingernail slid slowly up the right arm from the wrist to the shoulder. The skin came off in long strips that fell down and covered his feet. He kicked them away, toward the coils. With dreamlike carefulness he started to peel the skin from his legs, then suddenly yanked his hands away.

The ship. Go back and make a report. Too late for immunity. A report. For the other reps. A warning. The Lukai use a body, not a mind drug. The corpse people won’t tolerate anyone who believes in life. But could he find his way back? And would they let him out? The faces blended into a wave of white, spotted with black holes. Cooper stumbled through the doorway into the dark hall, afraid if he moved too fast his insides would spill out between his legs. As he approached the street he heard rain, the interminable Fall rain, and he wondered if the drops would tear open his delicate exposed veins. But when he looked outside he saw that the rain had turned to gray ash. It coated the buildings, the slick street; it was even raining inside, through the rotted walls. Rain coated the laughing Lukai faces. Cooper fell back inside, and tears broke the skin on his face.

But how could he see the Lukai? Had they followed him? Or hadn’t he left the room at all? When he looked around he saw nothing but a red haze. They’re waiting, he thought. Waiting to throw the pieces into the fire. A mirror appeared in front of him. Locked inside the glass his face shone a dull dry white, a face dug up after years in the grave, relieved only by the black hollows of the eyes and mouth. “No,” whispered Cooper, “no, they didn’t paint me. I remember. Mother of Earth, they didn’t paint me.” He shouted, “Death Woman! You murdering bitch. I’ll kill you.”

Laughter, like painted horses on a carousel, wheeled round and round his bleached dry face.

Cooper woke up in his ship, his body laid out on the low bed. His eyes drifted to his arms and saw, of course, the firm brown flesh. “SPP,” he muttered. “Christ” Into his mind came his father’s voice, from the illusion games they played when Cooper was a child. “Got you again, Jaimi.” But when he looked to the side and saw the Death Woman the smile flicked off Cooper’s face.

Sitting on the floor a few feet away, the lukaimi, minus her mask, watched Cooper with a face half worried, half amused. “Stay in your bed now,” she said. Her voice reminded him somehow of his sister, and the sanctimonious way she used to preach to him. “After so long away from the truth, the first time a person returns may take all his strength. Rest, Alqua, and let your mouths feed you.” The woman’s arrogance left Cooper speechless. Not for the first time, he marveled at the primitive’s ease inside the spaceship. The medicomp must have assaulted the unconscious Earthman with all its needles and waldoes—and she just said, “Let your mouths feed you.” Did she ever let anything surprise her? Now she stood, looming bizarre before the rows of instruments. “When the readiness comes to you, Coopa, we will discuss your thoughts.”

Cooper lay motionless, neither jubilant, nor angry, nor confused. So they wanted to talk. He’d “ingratiated” himself after all. Or were they just humoring him for suffering their vicious ceremony? “Please go away,” he said. But when he turned his head the Luki had already gone.

In the ninth month of his twenty-seventh year, Jaimi Diony Cooper came to the country of the dead. He didn’t recognize it. As his ship hissed across the city—its probes tracking life concentrations, its scanners evaluating landing spots—the planet rep looked down and saw just another assignment, he hoped the one that would earn him his breakthrough promotion. For seven years Cooper had worked for the Company, two in training, five in service, visiting planets, making contact with local populations, negotiating contracts. He enjoyed his job. On the whole he enjoyed his assignments.

We don’t, however, exist for enjoyment, or so Jaimi Cooper believed. After seven years his career had gotten stuck at the lowest level. He knew he was suspect in the Company’s eyes, with his sister and then his lover going off planet to live in a Dyson tree. The way things had gone on Earth the last few years even a slight association with “Neo-Pagans,” as the Rejectionists called themselves, was enough to make someone a career risk. The Lukai, with their large deposit of the all-precious rhovium, might give him the chance to prove himself.

The job of planet representative derived from the importance of the “space crystal,” rhovium. Without rhovium, space travel reverted to twentieth-century firecrackers. It therefore followed that once the Company removed a planet’s rhovium (the probes had never found a planet with more than one deposit) the inhabitants could not develop interstellar travel without Earth assistance. And so the Rhovium Regulatory Agency had declared such removal without full knowledge and consent highly illegal. They would always know; the comp probes that darted across the galaxy searching for crystal deposits reported to the RRA simultaneously with the Company.

The probes detected more than the crystal. They also scanned the planet for intelligent life. Very often, no life at all existed, but for some reason no one understood, rhovium appeared to favor organic environments. If life existed then under RRA law the nearest intelligent culture became the rhovium’s official owners. Now and then the Company contested the Agency’s decisions. What constituted intelligence? Neither brain wave activity nor language nor technology had ever found real acceptance among scientists and philosophers. No matter. The RRA ruled and the Company could only send a planet rep.

The reps did two things. First they made sure that the local inhabitants understood the crystal’s value; then they arranged payment. Usually the reps offered technology and trade; sometimes a society chose biomedical advances or abstract knowledge or even poetic and metaphysical insights. Once Cooper had arranged a contract where the owners received for their rhovium a survey of all known species’ views on the ultimate nature of reality. Cooper had hoped he would get his promotion for that one. Unfortunately the RRA had protested the contract, and even though it held in court Cooper knew he was lucky to keep his job.

The planet Keela, as the Lukai apparently called their world, housed, besides various tribal groups, an island culture with a highly sophisticated social system and a low technology, one loosely unified group of nation states on the verge of industrial revolution, and one slave empire with an agrarian economy managed by a cumbersome bureaucracy. With any of these Cooper could easily have arranged a contract. Unfortunately the Lukai had the rhovium.

The small tribe lived in a city, or rather the remains of a city, set within a dense forest in the Northern hemisphere. Whoever had built the city—and Cooper could not imagine that the Lukai had done so—had confined its four quadrants of twisting streets and varied buildings and parks in a circle so perfect Cooper’s instruments could not detect the slightest error of curvature. If the Lukai had laid this city, their culture had fallen beyond imagination.

How the Lukai had gotten here remained as much of a mystery as what had happened to the original inhabitants. Each day they lined up before a row of squat machines in the northwestern quadrant, called “Fall” for its perpetually somber weather. From garishly painted slits in the machines’ otherwise gray faces came packets of food. Square cakes of different colors and textures alternated with green plastic tureens of a jellylike soup.

Other machin. . .