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11. Cushion
We were speeding down a broad boulevard, a tropical allee with rows of royal palms: tremendous palm trees each with ten meters of bare trunk topped by a luxuriant green frizz-bop of swordy leaves. The pavement was smooth marble. There was quite a bit of traffic: official vehicles, merchants' vans, tour buses, commuters. But there was no real congestion — everyone drove according to the book. The cars moved like cautious ants, and the pedestrians marched back and forth like windup toys.
Far ahead of us, tiny in the distance, was a cordon of white-uniformed palace guards. Beyond the guards lay bright ornamental gardens leading to the palace itself, a vast, minaretted structure something like the Taj Mahal.
I was in the back seat with Tad Beat. He twitched his head this way and that, keeping a restless eye on things. Harry, in front, lolled drunkenly in his seat, pawing at Sondra's exposed thighs and protesting in slurred tones each time she slapped his hand away. Our Cadillac lurched through the traffic, narrowly missing several collisions.
"He's juiced," Tad said to me, jerking his head toward Harry's slumping shoulders. Tad kept one hand on his hat, holding it tight against the slip-stream of air that whistled through the car's two broken windshields. "That's the cool way to be around the palace. The slugs can't handle juice. You, Joe, you're nowhere. You'll end up dead or a Herberite, I'll tell you now."
Tad's words sent a chill through my veins. With Harry so drunk, what chance did we stand against those guards? If I died here, would I really be dead? This was really just a kind of dream, wasn't it? Yet what if you have a dream so bad that you die of a heart attack during the dream? Perhaps every time someone dies in his sleep of a heart attack, the attack is in fact coupled with a dream of overwhelming power in which the person experiences death in great detail. Who can tell?
The palace guards were only some fifty meters ahead of us now. They could see there was something fishy about us. As we drew closer, they raised their weapons and aimed.
"All right," said Harry in his normal voice. He'd willed himself sober, just like that. He sat up straight and stepped on the gas. "Beam them, Fletch. You can shoot over my shoulder."
I dialed my disintegrator ray to maximum fan and blasted away. I was already a murderer from smashing that supermarket manager's spine-rider. Kill one, kill twenty. Most of the palace guards turned to dust. The survivors took to their heels. I retched up a mouthful of stomach acid. Killing wasn't something I could learn to enjoy.
Harry kept the hammer down, and we smashed through a set of ironwork gates. There were marble stairs up ahead. We took them like we had square wheels. The lovely gardens were all around us, fountains and geometric beds of flowers. Some pretty women with bare backs were lounging on the lawns.
A hot beam of red laser light speared down from one of the palace's slim watchtowers. The beam burned a hole in our Cadillac's hood, and then the engine died.
"I'll handle that," said Harry. He aimed his time-reversing ray gun at the distant laser ca
Our car stumbled up a last marble staircase and coughed to a stop. The four of us jumped out, guns at the ready. We were standing under a huge, pillared portico. Before us was the palace entrance, a Moorish arch with massive bronze doors. The doors were open and unguarded.
I felt weak and sick, but Harry's drunke
Sondra was in high gear. "What's your anti-self going to look like, Harry? Tad and Joe say it's a giant slug. Let's be sure to steal some jewels after we kill it. I guess you know it's already eleven twenty-five? We better hurry. I can't wait for my friend Do
"That big Gary Herber's in the central courtyard," said Tad. "Let's hang real tight."
He went in first, then Harry and Sondra, then me.
Something dropped onto the nape of my neck just as I walked through the door.
Oh, no! The soft moist Herber-slug slid down between my shoulder blades and plugged itself into my nervous system. I felt a wild tingling.
"Duck into the next doorway," said a little voice in my head. The voice of the parasitic glob that had just taken over my will. I struggled to yell to the others, but instead I whipped in through the first doorway we passed.
"Fletch?" called Harry from the hall. "Where'd he go, Sondra? HEY, FLETCHER!"
I was ru
"Be still," said the voice in my head.
I stopped moving and thought a message back: "Who are you?"
"I'm a scion of Gary Herber. Thank you for your body."
"I wasn't really done with it yet." For some reason I was kind of enjoying this. The parasite kept a pleasant tingle going all through my nerves, "You'll have to release me, I'm from another world."
"I know, we want to go there."
"No! You can't! It's —"
"Shhh!"
Footsteps sounded in the courtyard outside. Fat Harry, weird Tad, and sexy Sondra. They'd never find me here. I should have been screaming for help, but instead I felt like giggling. The slug had really taken me over.
"Uh, excuse me, miss, have you seen my friend?" Harry's voice.
The odalisque shifted about, but she didn't answer.
"She won't pick up on you," said Tad. "Herber's dollies don't talk to strangers."
"What would a giant brain want with slave girls?" asked Sondra.
"What Gary wants with women? He milks them, like. GABA fluid from their spines. You dig that plastic coupling down on her back?"
"Oooooo! Awful! Well, read her mind, Harry. You can do telepathy, can't you?"
"Stap my vitals!" exclaimed Tad. "Telepathy!"
"Yeah, I can do it," rumbled Harry, "but that would be too —"
"Harry, in less than half an hour, our magic door out of this place is going to disappear. And now something's happened to Joe. Use your goddamn telepathy or I'll —"
"Oh, all right."
"… cushion…" was all that me and my rider were thinking. A masquerade. We held our joint consciousness in the mind-set of a "… cushion…"
The odalisque must have some kind of block up too. After a minute Harry stopped sca
"Why would he hide?"
"Oh, Fletcher's weird. He's weirder than you realize, Sondra. People always say that I'm crazy, but Fletcher is much worse. He's sneaky about being crazy. The guy needs help, I mean it."
"… cushion…"
"Well, what are we going to do?"
"Let's go ahead and kill that giant brain," urged Tad. "You've got to do that for us before you leave."
"But what about Joe," protested Sondra. "We can't just forget about him."
"… cushion…"
"If he gets stuck here, it's his own damn fault. He's hiding from me, I tell you. He's got a telepathy block up, and this woman has one too. I can't read anyone's mind but yours and Tad's, Sondra."
"Oooooo! What are we thinking, Harry?"
"You don't want to know. Tad, which way is it to the central courtyard? I'll teleport the three of us there. Maybe Gary Herber can tell us where Fletcher is."