On the Planet of Tasteless Pleasures Page 8

  "The mental disease soon cleared up — and the manufacturers of Clearazits acne medicine grew rich. However, I have determined that by playing a variation of the 'role-playing' game involving a team of cooperating agents in dealing with the convoluted metaphorical highways and byways of the human Over-Gland, the inherent dangers may be overcome."

  "A good chance," said Bgr the Chinger, popping out of the skull of Bruce the satyr. "Gee — at the very least one or two participants may actually get through!"

  "A team. You mean that you two are coming along with me?"

  Dr. Delazny shook his head. "Uhmm, no, we've got to stay back here at Chinger Central and monitor. However, we've assembled a crack group to travel with you, Bill.

  "This game I've called 'Drunkards and Flagons.' You, Bill, have been assigned the role of the 'Drunken Monk.' Bgr, I think it's time that we let Bill keep the full wineskin, don't you?"

  "Gee — sure, you're the doctor."

  The Chinger popped back inside the robot-skull and banged away at the controls, causing the robot to step forward and present Bill with the whole wine-skin. Bill took a grateful drink and then flung the thing over his shoulder. "A team, you say. You wouldn't like to tell me just who else is going?"

  A roar suddenly vibrated the very structure of the room. A seven foot tall, shaggy blond man with a beard strode in, wearing furs, a sword and a cap from which protruded two horns. From one gorilla-sized hand hung a half-full bottle of Jack Spaniels whiskey. "Women! Where are the women you promised me!" he bellowed, sniffing the air as though to ferret out feminine pheromones.

  "Bill, this is Ottar, an ancient Viking we discovered frozen in the Over-Gland. He will portray the Barbarian Hero role in the game." Delazny turned and gently held up a hand. "Plenty of women, Ottar. First, we make a movie, yes?"

  Ottar's eyes glimmered with enthusiasm. Ottar grinned. "Ottar like movies. Ottar movie star!"

  "Huh?" said Bill.

  "Don't ask," said Bgr. There are some things best left unknown. He turned to Ottar in his satyr guise. "Remember Ottar. You find the Fountain of Hormones, and you'll also find your precious, darling Slithy Tove!"

  Ottar grunted and grinned. Drool began to foam from his lips, beaded onto his food-encrusted beard. Bill was also aware of the profound stench the character was also giving off. Where was the "loo stasis" when he needed it?

  "Okay, who else?" Bill asked with a sigh. He had thought about asking Ottar for a drink, but decided against it when he saw that the liquid in the bottle was green with pink foam on it.

  "An old friend, Bill. Proof of the energy-to-matter efficacy of my equipment!" Dr. Delazny stepped over to a wall and pulled open a curtain. A man lay sprawled over a table, a stein of beer in one hand, a cutlass in another. Delazny prodded the man awake.

  "It's Rick!" cried Bill, astonished. "Rick, the Supernal Hero!"

  "Yes, but he'll be playing the role of the Virgin Knight in this particular adventure."

  There were grating sounds as Rick opened his eyes. They were bright red and steaming slightly. He shuddered and clanked them shut, then took long and quavering gulps of beer. This time he opened only one eye a crack and blinked around him. His ruddy gaze fixed on Bill and he said, "Arrrrr. Don't I know you, matey?"

  Bill turned to Dr. Delazny. "And this is going to be the team?" He took a drink and emitted a sound that was somewhere between a sigh and a moan.

  The other members of the motley crew were quickly trotted out for introductions:

  Clitoria, the Amazon warrior.

  Hyperkinetic, the Trickster.

  And finally, Missionary Position, the Cattlelick Priest.

  Ottar made a drunken lunge for Clitoria, but the seven foot tall woman boxed his ears soundly, and knocked him to the floor. "Try that again, you bushy bastard, and I'll stick your whiskey bottle so far up your whatsit that you'll need dynamite to get it out."

  Hyperkinetic was dressed in gay colors and he carried a lute, and had a despicable tendency to sing verses of a long and dull marching song. In a nasal monotone:

  "A questing we will go!

  Summer, fall, or snow!

  The Fountain of Hormones we must find.

  So come on chaps — don't fall behind."

  "Arrrr!" said Captain Rick. "I like this guy! Even though he can't sing and his verse doesn't scan."

  "Fountain of Hormones?" said Bill puzzled.

  "Yes," said Doctor Delazny. "According to the best of our readings in our computer, the goal of your quest is called 'The Fountain of Hormones.' Exactly what that means or exactly what it is has not yet been determined."

  "But, gee — the name is pretty evocative though," said Bgr through his satyr guise.

  The priest was a red-cheeked, merry-looking fellow, who turned out to be the only volunteer on the Quest.

  "Faith and begorrah!" he said when questioned by Bill on the subject. "And sure, sincerely I believe the lusts of the flesh so personified at the end of this quest are merely pagan heathen, and God willing I should like to bring them to the ways of righteousness."

  "Arrrrr. Me, I don't give a bowb," said Rick. "Except for the fact I got a hot rumor that the Holy Brewery is right by the Fountain. The one that makes Holy Grail Stout. My soul thirsts after righteousness, but so do my taste buds!"

  "Holy Grail Ale!" cried the priest, almost peeing himself with excitement. "Well, I suppose I could use a wee sip of the dark stuff!"

  "Of course you could," said Dr. Delazny, smiling, raising his hand as though to give benediction. "There is treasure for you all. But remember.... the successful completion of this quest may well result in the saving of many lives, both human and Chinger!"

  "Gee — that's great!" said Bgr. But he was the only one apparently who entertained that sentiment. The others had their attention too focused on their own personal gains to care much about the sparing of lives. As for Bill, his hormone and alcohol drenched brain vacillated between lust and booze. A steaming vision of his lost love merged with a full bottle until he couldn't tell the two apart. Which, basically, was fine with him. In his zonked-out state, it did not occur to him that what Dr. Delazny was asking him to do was to help pull the plug on his own lusts. But then, human desire has a way of muddling one's mind, causing one's puny rational abilities to shrivel up and blow away. For if, as the Ancients discovered, meditation places human consciousness in the Eternal Now, then surely lust places the body-mind web in the Eternal Rut. The notion of slaking his desires with Irma's agile help year after year, combined with a lifetime of Manure Technicianship, his own home on a quiet planet, all the alcohol he could drink, and no more Troopers was sufficient to short-circuit the perfidious chemo-behavioral wiring jury-rigged in his nervous system by the Empire, as well as to dampen the notion that this Quest might actually be fraught with horrendous dangers beyond his feeble imagination. Nor did he wonder if the game was worth the candle; he did not consider that Irma's beauty might fade with years. All of his attention, what little was left, was focused on the eternal now. The future would only be more of the same. Most certainly, he never considered that his already overtaxed liver might not be able to handle all the promised alcohol. But most especially, he hadn't the faintest idea that by this late stage of the game, his position in the Starship Troopers was as firmly wedded to his identity as the leather thong was to his neck, and his old Farmboy days were just as dead as the dove.

  No, all these considerations were far beyond Trooper Bill's ken. His heart's desire was for Irma. Doctor Delazny had chosen well, for he had become, by this foggy stage, the archetypical Fool for Love.

  So it was that when Dr. Delazny called this odd troop of travelers to attention, Bill obeyed without question.

  "Right this way, folks," said the good Doctor, gesturing them to follow him. "The Aperture into the Paradigm lies in a room down the hall. We will toss your weapons in after you have stepped through the Portal. We don't want any accidents here, now do we?"

  Bgr the Chinger, in his s
atyr outfit, herded them all toward the indicated room, chuckling enthusiastically and telling them how he intended to spend the peaceful years of his life, following the Armistice that would surely result after this excellent adventure. He would return to his studies, what intellectual joy. He described some of the repulsive alien races he had studied and thought of the slimy joys still untouched, and Bill cringed. Luckily, the lecture on exobiology ceased as they entered a large chamber, chock-a-block with computers and other extravagantly curved and angled machinery. Above it all, a gigantic Van der Graaf generator crackled fat zaps of electricity across its gap, frying the odd mosquito, moth or fly that escaped from the portal that yawned below it.

  "Gulp!" susurrated Bill.

  The others gulped as well. As well they might.

  It was a round doorway, its edges rimmed with blinking red, green and cerulean lights. An occasional claw of energy would paw across the inlaid coppery metal work, or reach out and grab the air of the land beyond.

  It was like peering through a window at a distant portion of landscape. It looked like a proscenium stage of a rococo production of a bad historical tragedy. Crumbling castles tilted in the distance, craggy mountains stuck out willy-nilly beyond. A blasted heath oozed ground fog, ridged with twisted, skeletal branches of trees, with gorse bushes and heather arrayed about simmering bogs like barbed wire about trenches. A chill wind sieved through the hole with faint hints of rotting vegetation and broad elbow-nudges of decomposing corpses.

  Dr. Delazny grinned. "Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble, fellas! Now go find that Fountain of Hormones!"

  From the Drunkards and Flagons came a collective gulp.

  More gulps ensued as they knocked back large quantities of drink to embolden their flagging spirits.

  One by one, they stepped through the portal. Bill's hair frizzed up, standing on end with the energy humming along the portal's periphery. Or was that the pure and simple terror that suddenly gripped his spine with ice-cold hands? His feet squelched into ankle deep muck. The smell grew truly horrendous; it was as though they had just stepped into some dragon's sulfurous lower bowels. When they were all through, Bgr and Dr. Delazny tossed their promised weapons after them.

  Broadswords, daggers. Bows and arrows. Dirks and knives. Slingshots and Boy Scout knives.

  "What the hell is this bowb?" cried out Rick the Supernal Hero, trying in vain to lift a broadsword out of the muck. "I need a blaster!"

  "Afraid that modern technology doesn't work in this particular dimensional grid, Rick," Dr. Delazny shouted through the shrinking portal. "Bye bye now, folks. We'll be monitoring you!"

  "Ixnay, ixnay!" said Rick, slogging forward. "This wasn't the deal!"

  But before he could reach the portal, it clashed shut with a frizzle and a flash and Rick stumbled forward past where it had been, through misty air, tripped, and fell head first into a grayish green puddle.

  Just then a horrendous, semi-human screech seared the atmosphere, like a skeleton's fingernails on a squeaky blackboard.

  "I got idea," said Ottar, picking up the broadsword as though it were merely a particularly long toothpick and glowering about through his bushy eyebrows. "I going to like this place. What I kill first?"

  CHAPTER 11

  BILL CRAPS OUT

  Bill looked up, screamed hysterically, tried to run. There was no escape. The dragon's jaws dropped down neatly over the head and body of Missionary Position, the Cattlelick priest. Teeth clamped shut like a turbo-steam shovel, snapping off the priest's legs at mid-calves. The elongated neck reared up — leaving priestly boots wobbling on the ground — the mouth crunching and smacking.

  Blood squirted out upon the party of adventures like the jet of a sanguine lawn sprinkler just cutting on.

  "Maybe the dragon won't be so hungry now," Rick commented through chattering teeth, as the Supernal Hero cowered behind Clitoria the Amazon.

  "Better yet, maybe a bellyful of religion will poison the monster!" sagely observed Hyperkinetic, who was cowering behind Rick.

  Bill, who in his precautionary, some would say cowardly, turn was hiding behind Hyperkinetic, took the remaining few guzzles of drink from his wineskin and stared back at the creature, who was in the act of swallowing his meal noisily and messily.

  Bill had never seen a bigger dragon in his entire life. This was a true and logical observation since, of course, Bill had never seen a dragon before.

  And this one was a particularly nasty looking mother-bowber. Gigantic bats' wings fanned out from its side, their purplish, veiny membranes tattered at the edges, shot through with holes here and there. Its body was a scaly horror of reptilian revulsion, reddish green and revolting, glistening and raw. From four long, well-muscled limbs scythelike claws protruded, hung with strips of the skins of its victims. But it was the thing's head that was a particular abomination; bug eyes bloodshot and rolling, nostrils scabrous and flaring, great fangs depending from its hideous mouth, above which a thick black mustache-like growth dangled.

  In short it could be said that it looked like the dear departed Deathwish Drang in one of his gentler, kinder moments of recruit destruction.

  "Beast!" cried Clitoria, her broadsword swishing erect before the heinous monster. "Prepare to have thy legs dismembered and jammed piece by bloody piece down thy frightful, stenchy maw!"

  "Javel!" cried Ottar, his own broadsword stabbed up toward the low, rumbling clouds as though questing for the power of the lightning. "And double from me, too!"

  The dragon raised its heavy, hairy eyebrows high on its forehead. "Hey guys, have a care with those toothpicks," it said, reaching back and picking up its lit cigar from the hole in the ground where the dragon had carefully placed it, then took a deep puff. "I'm a bleeder." It tapped ash on Clitoria's blade. "Say you'all, did you know that I shot an elephant in my pajamas the other day. What it was doing in my pajamas, I'll never know."

  It burped mightily and its smoky foul breath, redolent of disgusting items best left unmentioned, as well as alcoholic drink, and rump of priest, which can be mentioned, wafted down to the questers.

  Bill realized that he should have seen this thing with the dragon coming. After all, the day's worth of trek across the hellish panorama of this dimensional plane had been unpleasantness piled upon misery, dismay stacked upon dismal disaster.

  First, the questers had discovered that not only was the landscape fraught with odious smells, twisted sights and infernal noise, it also was populated by creatures who made the Chingers on Empire Propaganda posters look like dewy-eyed lambs. Fortunately, Clitoria and Ottar had a way with their broadswords and cut a nasty swath through the fiercely fanged teddy bears and the clawed giant plush animals — but it was only a matter of time before they stumbled across a mythical monster that was their match and more.

  Second, it took only a few hours of slogging through the muddy swamps and nasty moors to discover that all of the staunch band of brothers, and one sister, uniformly loathed and detested one another. Even Rick and Bill — the best of buddies on board the starship named DESIRE — had words with each other, arguing about gagging, or possibly murdering, Hyperkinetic to eliminate his constant balladeering. It appeared that Rick actually enjoyed it and even joined in with a verse or two. Bill, though he'd loved Rick's ballad, found Hyperkinetic's songs ear-gratingly off key and poorly rhymed — i.e. "bowb" and "duck"; "bowb" and "fit"; "bowb" and "mugger."

  Thirdly, their liquor was rapidly running out, and they were all sobering up and realizing that agreeing to this journey across the twisted glandscape of the human psyche had been an incredible mistake of disastrous proportion.

  A gigantic dragon squirming out of its cave and promptly chomping down on one of their members was the last thing their practically destroyed morale needed.

  "Say the secret word and win a hundred dollars," said the dragon, confidently puffing away on its after-dinner cigar.

  "Hack!" said Clitoria, waving her sword.

  "Destroy!" roared
Ottar, his own weapon windmilling above his head.

  "Sorry. Neither of them correct. So how about you Three Morons standing over there with your jaws gaping adenoidally? Any takers?"

  The barbaric duo, swords still awave, roared and were about to charge, but Rick, his eyes suddenly gleaming, a candle almost glimmering above his head (no lightbulbs here — no high technology) caught hold of his belt, dodged the outraged swipes of their swords, and whispered something in their ears. Grumbling, but nodding their heads, they lowered their weapons and stepped back a pace.

  Maybe Rick's clever mind was going to get them out of this jam, thought Bill. He certainly hoped so.

  Hyperkinetic plucked cacophonically upon his lute and lifted his head in song:

  "The supernal Rick said, 'What the bowb.

  Secret word? I'll try my luck!'"

  "Would you be so kind as to please shut up," Bill suggested as he grabbed the man by his throat and throttled out an expiring gurgle.

  "No, Bill, leave him be," said Rick, prying Bill's fingers loose. "He may be off-key — but he's quite right." Rick the Supernal Hero swung around to face the leering, cigar-smoking dragon. "Well then dragon. Arrr! The secret word, then. But if we say this secret word, will you let us pass unmolested?"

  "Sounds fair to me. I've had my dinner." The dragon rubbed his protuberant tummy happily and belched another cloud of smoke.

  "All right then, but dragon — there must be all of several hundred words in your vocabulary! Low odds on picking the right one!"

  "Please!" huffed the dragon. "I know one hundred and thirty-three thousand words at least — and that just in English!" He burped. "That, for an example, was an 'eructation.'"

  "Sounds like an old fashioned belch to me," mumbled Bill. His nerves were getting frayed. And, more important, he was becoming uncomfortably sober.

  "Marvelous," Rick marveled. "Which means that the odds on my choosing the secret one are truly astronomical." Rick paced back and forth, pursing his lips and clearly thinking very hard. Suddenly, his finger smote the air and he spun to face the dragon. "I know. Surely a dragon of your clear intelligence and erudition can construct a riddle around this secret word.... So that we might have some slim chance of getting it right!"