Golden Vanity

by Rachel Pollack

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

Synopsis

Earth was finally entering the galaxy... The 'Allies' had arrived, sweeping down from the stars to offer a jaded Earth the marvels of the cosmos. And Earth had gone crazy. Farmers sat back to wait for Vita Flakes to fall from the sky. New York City drank itself into a permanent starstruck stupor. Blissed-out teenagers wandered into the Great Mexican Defoliation Desert to wait for the New Gods to bear them off to the astral plane... But the 'Allies' weren't in the business of trading something for nothing. This impertinent little marketworld might fetch a nice price on the interstellar auction block... particularly if a runaway wondergirl named Golden Vanity was tossed into the bargain!

Release date: August 29, 2013

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 227

Sample

1

Creaser yawned. He scratched his belly, his cheeks, and his teeth, then glowered around at the dingy cabin of his ship. You would think, he thought, that a Worker important enough to run one-man space missions directly for his chairman deserved a live-zone with a little elegance. His eyes flickered across the bare yellow floor, the “bed” formed from blue Halian jelly, the control bank, grimy from years of sweaty fingers, the tall narrow cabinet jammed with souvenirs and junk from a hundred worlds (and also with a certain platinum box, but it was better not to think about that particular temptation, not with a job ahead), the holo console and the meager pile of tapes—he wished he could stuff it all through the dumphole.

All but the cargo. The huge pilot squinted at the light-density box, sitting in all its impenetrable black glory in the middle of the floor. What was in there, anyway? Jewels? It looked small enough, about four hands square. Nonsense. The chairman owned enough jewels to melt them into a river flooding half of Center. Some sort of documents, maybe, evidence against one of the other companies. Whatever it was, the chairman wanted it enough to smuggle it off Ktaner’s Planet in a very illegal three ship convoy. Creaser and two escorts, a Nirudian, and a Clickie. Creaser didn’t know their names; he didn’t care.

Creaser snickered. Maybe he should open the box and peek inside. Many years ago Creaser had killed a gobble-mouthed Grufan who had laughed a little too loud at the B’Lajjilite’s folds of flesh. When Creaser had rifled the dead Worker’s kit he’d found—and quickly hid—that rarest of contraband, a “light key,” a white disc that could open any LD box. How the Grufan had gotten it Creaser couldn’t imagine, but he’d hid the thing ever since, vaguely hoping it would somehow finance a retirement more endurable than the misery most Workers received when they couldn’t push their ships any longer. He’d never used the key though he’d freighted LD boxes three or four times before. He wouldn’t use it now. Suppose they’d rigged up an alarm or a mind print recorder? A Worker was better off not knowing his chairman’s secrets.

“This filthy hangover’s twisting my head,” he said out loud. Again his mind skittered to the little platinum box and its yellow pills. He belched and pushed himself up from his air couch. Time to work, not play. “I want to sleep,” he bellowed.

He should have told them to find someone else. Sure, and wind up “retired” on Luritti. Burst, if they’d had someone else, they wouldn’t have picked him in the first place. Creaser was a good pilot—for a hack—but he was no Loper. But the chairman wanted his LD box, and he obviously didn’t want to wait—or else he couldn’t wait with the SA hot after his little prize.

Creaser waddled across the cabin to his control seat, feeling his folds of flesh slap against each other as he moved. Creaser’s home planet bore the highest grav level of any humanhome. B’Lajjilites were built wide and low, and when they left home their muscles collapsed into saggy layers unless they worked out constantly—something Creaser had never bothered to do.

The pneumatic chair shuddered as he thudded into it. What time had he told the others to collapse orbit? Oh, right, 333. Symmetry. His black pin eyes peered at the clock face, so dirty he could hardly see it. Only three tenths. Thirty stinking hundredths. Maybe he should get on the ’mitt and order a delay. Uh, uh, the wise smuggler keeps radio silence until after the first jumps. Well, he’d make it. Except for the hangover, he wouldn’t even worry.

If he could keep away from the platinum box.

Creaser grinned as he allowed himself one hungry look at the cabinet that contained his “friend.” The Worker’s Friend, known also as Ktaner’s Ecstasy. Ghost. Angelshit. Little yellow podpills of joy, joy, joy. A wave of pain ignited Creaser’s eyes. Joy? Not the next day. He should have left his friend back on Kap.

Ah, but how could you visit Ktaner’s Planet and not bring away some of that sweet true genuine Ghost? Winds of blackness, what a ghostdance he’d sung the night before (or was it two nights?), stretched out on the floor of his cubicle in the Worker’s Refuge, fingers twitching, eyes rolled back into his skull, while the whole slimy universe flooded his body in orgasmic waves.

And now, if he paid the price—boiling stomach, eyes on fire—well, he’d paid that bill before, and he’d do it again. As soon as he delivered that bursting box to the mighty chairman.

Almost start time. Creaser pushed the food bar for a roll of nip, the bitter brown paste extracted from squat ugly trees on Kap. A couple of rolls would wake him up enough to at least hit the course correctly.

As the crawl engines started with a hiss Creaser could see, through the side viewers, his two escorts move away from him into the dark. One more tenth to collapse orbit and then the first series of jumps. Creaser’s thumb gestured obscenely at the fant wires lying in their case, ready to hook his mind up to the engines of the unknowable ship.

What is non-space? A shortcut? A dash across the hole of the doughnut? A slide between the threads of the fabric? Maybe a glide in the inertialess zone between universes. No one knows. How does a ship jump into the Great Nothing, and how does it emerge again somewhere far away, yet somewhere specifically set by the course channels? Does the ship warp space? Does it destroy space and recreate it somewhere else? Does it simply stop moving relative to the universe, then start again, when the universe has properly turned underneath it? No one knows.

Why can’t it jump infinitely? What ancient decree limits the jump distances and the number of jumps in any series? Any answers remained locked in the ships’ robot builders.

The galactic culture that operated the ship knew only two things about the jumps that made their culture possible. One is that the jumps take no time at all. None. The pilot, or “Worker,” may experience non-space as minutes, hours, even days—the amount of subjective time is apparently unpredictable, though usually short—but the most exact instruments from Kiiuu (a Centerized version of a name that sounds to non-Kiiuuans as a shriek of pain followed by a whistle), that planet where the craft of measurement exceeds all other branches of knowledge, indicates no elapse of time between the ship’s disappearance and appearance.

The second fact known about the ships is the peculiar connection between the jump engines and the Worker’s private thoughts, his fantasies. The engines generate their tremendous energy in the form of waves, and all waves, as Arbolian scientists have demonstrated, form “structures” whose efficiency is determined by their “completeness” or “perfection,” terms derived from Arbol’s aesthetic linkage of art and science.

By themselves, the jump wave structures are incomplete, imperfect. By themselves, the jump engines will not send the ship into and out of non-space but instead will build back upon themselves until they rip apart the ship and the space surrounding it. The engines require, for their completion, a complementary set of wave structures, much less powerful, like the tiny piece needed to complete a huge jigsaw puzzle.

Specifically the engines require structures generated by the human brain indulging itself in private selfish fantasies. Childish fantasies. Daydreams.

To serve his ship a Worker attaches himself to the engines by means of filament wires running from the control panel to a band that fits above the eyes. Then he drifts his mind into a private world of glory dreams and infantile desires. The content doesn’t matter—only the strength. A trained Worker can dissolve the world around him as he slides into his dreams. As long as he can maintain these dreams the ship can jump. If the dreams fail him, or if they turn into chaotic nightmares, then the ship loses control. And explodes.

The theorists (who grudgingly admit they know nothing) argue that the terror-fants fail the ship because they form wave structures essentially different from the balanced structure of desire-fants. The Workers see it in a different way. To them the ship is alive (a conceit possibly engendered by the scientists’ referring to the computer channels as “organic”), and the jump engines form a giant mind, but a mind with no awareness. An idiot. The pilot and his fantasies give the ship its ego.

Together they form a whole person. Just as in a human, when the ego breaks down the mind explodes in chaos, so the ship, without the Worker’s ego, goes crazy. The Workers call the raw chaos produced when the ship explodes by an old Center word for psychotic—a “shrieker.”

Once a shrieker starts only a special ship equipped with dampers can cut down and reverse the chain reactive process of space consuming itself. And those ships require pilots whose fant mechanisms can survive the strain of combat. As any Worker knows, better not to let a shrieker loose at all.

Creaser stuck his thumbs against his eyes and rubbed in slow circles. Though the nip had shaken him awake, it hadn’t helped his stomach any. Well, he thought, if every Worker who swallowed a little ghost the night before could call off his jumps no one would ever travel anywhere. He chuckled and slid back in his seat. A good solid series, and then he and the other two could give themselves a three day rest. Three days. “Enough time to dance a little ghost?” he asked and answered himself, “No. Absolutely not.” Creaser laughed and closed his eyes.

With the expertise of years the Worker let his conscious mind slide into images of desire. Lying in a “pool of cool,” the rich black mud he’d once seen on a faraway resort planet. Perfumed air. Trees dripping with alcoholic melonnuts. Rocks covered with warm moss, undulating into erotic pictures from secret company collections. Beautiful women, catlike, with diamond legs, waited for him under the dark clear light of evening. And beyond them, standing guard against the company that so desperately wanted him to return as their chief pilot, a troop of towering ghosts, rainbow fire fingers waving against the sky, clear high voices shouting tributes to Creaser the Magnificent, savior of the universe.

One of the women brought him a dark box. It sprang open at his touch and a tiny woman—an erotic demon from Arbolian myth—leaped onto Creaser’s belly and slowly worked her way between the folds of flesh.

“Oh, you dark blue lady, In your slimy green fountain, Don’t stick your tu-u-ubes in meeee.” Creaser’s absurd creaking voice boomed back and forth across the cabin as he bounced up and down on his pneumatic seat. Before him, on a tiny table with legs shaped like a woman’s breasts, lay his filigreed platinum box. Creaser really hadn’t meant to swallow any of the precious little pellets; he’d only wanted to look at them, just to pass the time between jump series. But he had to do something, didn’t he? Even when he placed them on his tongue, Creaser had only wanted to roll them back and forth. He would have spit the hard little things back in the box, only the crawl engines had lurched, or he’d hiccuped, something had happened, and before Creaser could grab them the yellow pills had vanished into his vast belly.

Of course, he hadn’t taken so much that he wouldn’t be sober when jump time came. Creaser knew his job; hadn’t the chairman trusted him with his special prize?

Do, do, do, what to do. No sense wasting two sweet days of ghost. Creaser half crawled, half waddled back to his cabinet, where his souvenirs cluttered the floor. He found a spectral jewel he’d once smuggled off Luritti and rolled it down his chest and belly, giggling as it tumbled over the ridges. He dialed his music box to the warbly voice of a Haniaan executioner. He turned it off immediately. What could he do?

Suddenly his droopy eyes focused on a white metal disc resting in a clear plastic case. He grunted, picked up the light key and licked the case, as if his tongue could decide whether to finally use it. His eyes flicked to the LD box. What did the chairman value so highly? Creaser had heard that a plant existed whose leaves would wrap around your sex and squeeze out unimaginable ecstasies.

The chairman wouldn’t miss just one small leaf, would he?

Creaser crawled back across the floor. Gingerly he placed the key on the top of the box, amazed when it didn’t slide off. The several dials spun around, a faint buzz tickled Creaser’s ears, then slowly, the side of the opaque box began to lighten, to dim, to grow translucent, like a cloud burning away in the sun. Creaser stared in slackjawed delight.

He squealed. Something was wrong. In place of a prickly or velvet leaved plant, an animal was staring at him, a small horny-skinned brown lizard with cloudy white eyes, a heavy round belly as if filled with eggs, and a green tongue that flicked back and forth like a horizontal pendulum.

Creaser shuddered. What did the chairman want with this filthy piece of slime? He plucked the key from the top of the box, and the total blackness slid into place.

But not before the lizard tongue darted out at Creaser’s wrist. Horrified, he slapped the skin, then stared at it, licked it. Only the smallest mark showed. A tingle crept up his arm, but that too disappeared after seconds. Creaser threw the light key at the cabinet, then crawled wearily back to his seat, where he sat weeping and cursing the universe. Soon he fell asleep, and when he woke, a short time before the next series, he felt nothing more than a vague queasiness. “Can’t be harmful,” he told himself, “or else the chairman wouldn’t want it.”

Maybe—maybe the venom produced immortal youth! He flicked a switch to change the right viewer into a mirror. Well, he didn’t look younger. Laughing, Creaser waddled back to his chair.

Something was wrong. As soon as he’d taken the first jump, he knew it. Burst, he knew it as soon as he’d hooked up the fant wires, though he’d tried to tell himself it was only another hangover. That numbness in his face and hands, that peculiar blankness of his sense impressions—the room kept flickering, and a constant noise filled his head as if he could hear the background radiation from the Dark. And then came the first jump.

The fants wouldn’t hold, they wouldn’t crystallize right. And the gray nothing beyond the ship, that every pilot learned to live with, pressed on him like an animal trying to break into the ship. “Get away!” he yelped. “Why can’t I concentrate?” As the ship came out of its first jump, Creaser’s breath exploded in relief. His hand reached for the transmitter switch to tell the others to kill the series.

But the company would break him if he arrived late.

As the ship set itself for another jump, the Worker set his mind to resurrect his private universe. If only that roaring in his ears would stop. Or was it laughter? His face burned and froze all at once, the sweat on his hands felt like blood. “Feed your head,” he ordered himself. “Concentrate.”

Earlier the images had shattered. Now they did something worse. Paradise became terror as the air stank of rotted bodies, thousands of them under the ground and pushing towards the black mud which hardened into ice. The diamond legs kicked and slashed his face and chest.

Creaser shouted, stamped both feet on the cabin floor, an old Worker trick to banish a “snake,” a fant that had turned against you. As the ship emerged again, Creaser stared wildly around the cabin. His eyes fell on the light density box. He remembered the milky eyes, the green tongue touching his wrist.

And he remembered something else. A rumor he’d once heard around the company.

A number of years back, a certain team of biological engineers on Ktaner’s Planet had developed something, a parasite, a plant or an animal that could act directly on the fant centers in the brain, numbing or destroying them so that an infected Worker couldn’t form his fants properly. To prevent this ultimate weapon from ripping apart the companies, the Space Authority had seized the parasites and destroyed the research. Supposedly.

What better prize could the chairman receive than a fant destroyer heavy with eggs?

Creaser had no more time to think of rumors. The ship was about to jump again and he needed a new fantasy. Something peaceful, simple, like the early ones years ago in Worker school. His mind constructed a long room safely underground, the floor soft like the skin of a woman’s belly. Around him lay golden plants, their leaves spotted with pods of crystal clear ghost, a purer form that would lift his body from this filthy universe into a bliss sweeter than death. No, not death. Don’t think of death.

Too late. This fant too had snaked on him. Creaser screamed and thought he heard an answering scream from outside the ship, a scream of laughter. Or the shriek of a maniac.

A jump course can end two ways. Either it runs through its schedule, in which case the jump engines shut themselves off automatically, or else the pilot can override and order a stop. If he does this he must shut off the engines manually or else the engines will continue to build power until. … until burst point.

To override, Creaser had to fight the training and experience of years. The company didn’t like overrides; it inevitably treated the best of excuses as unacceptable. And Creaser had a special reason for not stopping the series. What excuse could he offer that wouldn’t tell the company he’d opened the LD box?

His arms jerked wildly and he missed the switch twice before he jabbed it down. Alert the others, he ordered himself, but when he switched on the ’mitt all he could say was “Cancel … can’t … had to cancel,” before he fell back in his chair, the folds of his body slapping each other as he trembled in fear.

A coldness settled on him as he looked through the viewers for his companion ships. He thought of the green venom dissolving his fortress of fat as it marched towards the brain. Almost clinically he recalled the lectures years ago. “Ego collapse,” they called it. His mind was wearing thin, like a paper shield battered by wind.

And then Creaser saw. A light flickered from his instrument panel. He grunted in dull horror. He’d forgotten to shut off the jump engines. Without his fants to guide that great beast. …

Creaser tried to move his fingers. Useless. They ran like melted ice into his chair arms. Sweat leaked into his mouth; it tasted like blood.

If the ships had been designed right, the jump override would have automatically cut off the engines. If the companies or the SA could have designed the ships themselves they certainly would have made that a feature. The ship design, however, lay beyond their control, buried in history and the non-communicable minds of robots.

In the other two ships the confused pilots held position, waiting for some further word from their leader as to why he’d ordered a stop. If either of them guessed the truth he didn’t tell the other. Who wanted to be the first to run? Suddenly the pilots hunched up in pain as a telepathic sending flooded their minds. A body, indescribably fat—ripped apart—strange noises—a lizard gnawing on decayed flesh—yellow filth oozing through the spaceship walls.

The moment passed, leaving only a vast sense of horror. A broadcast. The techs had told them how the mind broadcasts under one condition, extreme ego stress. A broadcast meant a breakdown. And with the pilot being a shrieker anything could happen to the ship.

Inescapable death fascinates. Despite their rush to get away, both pilots were watching when Creaser’s ship blew. They saw flashes of light, like popping light bulbs. The flashes froze into balls of golden light while their own ships appeared to slow down. The lights congealed, became a spiral glow of fire with long whip-like tentacles that reached out to pluck the ships.

One got caught, one escaped. Crawl speed is the same for everyone and the Clickie was closer. The one who got away, the Nuridian, saw the spiral light spit angry flashes as the tentacle caught the other ship like a lizard tongue catching a fly. While the ship crawled to safety the pilot looked back to see the thing called “shrieker” grow larger and larger as it devoured first the other ship and then space itself. Stunned, she began the slow fearful journey back to Center.

2

Throughout the big ornate room robot puppets adorned the hours with repetitious actions. In a corner, puppet milk boys dressed in untanned roke leather squeezed the teats of miniature “cows,” those odd chunky animals from the newly discovered humanhome, Earth. Suspended from the ceiling a puppet acrobat did constant somersaults and twists on his nearly invisible softwire trapeze; in the room’s center, surrounded by a miniscule forest of living trees five centimeters high, a four armed puppet version of Lukmii, the legendary Arbolian mountain climber, scaled an exact model of Mt. Drusso, the highest mountain in the explored galaxy. Every time little Lukmii gained the summit, he leaped to the floor and started over again.

This was the chairman’s playroom, and the chairman liked movement, noise, action, more and more of it as he himself slowed down with age. The very carpets rippled in time to the faint music exuded by the trembling walls. The HgH(grunt)urian carpet weavers had woven the dark threads into an archaic battle scene in such a way that the floor ripples sent the warriors constantly crashing again. . .