Koontz, Dean - Soft come the Dragons Read online

  "It isn't an affair," I snorted and walked even faster toward the door at the end of the hall, beyond which rested my hovercar.

  He paced me. "Remember, tomorrow starts a four week period of training, exhaustive runs. Mandy. Morain will be out of the schedule for awhile."

  "Yes, coach. I know the rules." I slammed the door as quickly as I opened it. But it only hummed shut softly, and I could feel his grin on my back. Bruce Krison was the ultimate pest—a perfectionist.

  It was raining a misty, cold sort of rain. It nibbled at my bone marrow. The temperature inside the hovercar, a Champion, was a comfortable seventy-four, so I took off my coat, loosened my tie, and settled back in the seat. There was a stiff pain in my neck. I needed relaxation, but there was no place in particular I cared to relax at. The bars would be crowded since the offices closed within the hour, and crowds weren't much to my liking. I thumbed the city-oriented group of maps into the car's "brain" and punched several random coordinates. Closing my heavy eyes, I settled back to rest with the soft moan of rushing wind blowing under the rising craft . . .

  "No" she said. "God, God, no."

  He coughed blood and stared at it lying in a black pool.

  His leg seemed pinned beneath the rubble, but when he looked, it wasn't. It was simply turning slightly blue, streaming blood where he could see the skin through torn trouser leg. Slowly, he became aware of her soft moaning, mixed now and then with a thick, gurgling noise.

  Explosion!

  There were other sounds around him. Now and then a chunk of plaster fell with a crash. The whine of white metal cooling to red was the screeching of wild animals in his brain. Steam hissed. There were other moans in the distance, and the sounds of sirens seeped through the watts of flames.

  "Marie," he whispered, for he was afraid to speak aloud.

  There was an indistinct mumble, a thick gurgle. He forced himself to his knees, and his leg felt better. Only a slight cut, the blue color proving to be concrete dust. The entire scene was out of Dante. The fire watts were high, and the wreckage of the theater was mixed with parts of what he recognized as a cybership. Some Sensitive had been used to his limits and had not been able to center the ship into the landing cushions of the Port two blocks away. He had set her down, rather had crashed her into the theater.

  "Marie," he whispered again, feeling the throb of his heart race almost out of control. Then, dragging himself through the dust-choked ruins, he topped a pile of rubble and saw her. . . .

  Her eyes were gone.

  Her face was blistered and blackened.

  And the black sockets of her eyes bled rust water . . .

  "My God. Kill me. Kill me," she screeched at him.

  "Marie," he whispered.

  "Mercy. Kill me!"

  His stomach fluttered, tumbled. He couldn't! Not kill her! God please strike them both dead!

  He staggered away. He broke into a run. But to the far limit of the fire walls, he could hear her. "Kill me! Jessie, Jessie, please!"

  And the worst of it was, he felt no pain. She suffered, and sitting next to her, he escaped.

  The fire walls danced.

  JESSIE! The scream shook the world, and hands from outside putted him through the fire watts . . .

  I woke to the crash of raindrops against the windscreen, and it was the sound of rocks smashing down a mountainside. I threw up my psychic defenses and dulled my cybernetic tendencies.

  It was an old dream. Five years old. I wiped the sweat from my brow and looked at the unwinding map. It was an old dream, but nevertheless disconcerting.

  Sector three, segment two-ought-two. And while that registered, the car drifted to a halt, was scanned by a private robogateman, and swung again into a tree-lined drive.

  In the right mood, I might have laughed. It was Freudian. Positively Freudian that when I wanted to punch a random set of coordinates, I would select those that brought me here. I didn't laugh, however, my mood bordering on morose.

  She said, "Jessie, come in."

  She was wearing a black mini-suit, and her honey hair spilled like wild, sparkling rivers down her slender shoulders. Her eyes were blue, skylike pieces of crystal.

  "Fine," I said. "I'd like to."

  "Should I send the servants away?" She was wealthy enough to afford human rather than robo servants.

  "No. Training begins tomorrow, and I must just as well begin denying myself tonight."

  She curled up on the couch, tucking her legs under her. "You're set on going then?"

  "Yes."

  She was everything the newspapers and magazines and Tri-D tanks said she was. Her breasts were high and firm, her belly flat, her legs long. Goddess legs. And her face fairy tale princess', sugar, and naughty spice. Mandy Morain had been the rage of Modern Hollywood until a year earlier when she startled the filmworld with "I wish solitude to find the man I love."

  She had received four thousand offers overnight.

  She could easily have had many more attractive lovers than Jessie Poul, cybernetist. Much more responding lovers too, lovers without my periodic "trouble."

  I had met her on the set of Languish Queen. They had hired me to cybernet a cave to tell them just when to expect a cave-in. I was to scream a warning three minutes ahead so they could remove MM and the other stars to safe ground. We hit it off immediately. We seemed—almost— to fit like two pieces of a puzzle in our own snug corner of the total picture.

  She leaned over and kissed me. I felt myself, like fireflies, melting into the darkness of her sheltering night "No," I said.

  "No?"

  "Tomorrow is training."

  My eyes seemed to rivet to the leaping flames in the simu-fireplaoe.

  "Tomorrow has not yet come." Her voice was a like a soft summer breeze.

  The flames were orange and red and yellow and tinted with green.

  "Tonight is the threshold to tomorrow." I'm not sure whether I ran out of the house or walked, but when I got home, I let the videophone ring, knowing it was she. With malice aforethought, I drank myself into a fitful sleep. Dreams filled my head, and a face without eyes asked me why do you want to go to the sun? Why to the sun, the sun?

  The following weeks were what Krison had promised-work that would break a bull's back. We ran and reran emergency situations. We tested the ship. I familiarized myself with it, with the feeling of the intricate wiring, the platings, the cyberpickups, the shields. In all the lanes of space, there was no ship so heavily shielded as ours. She would have to withstand more raw radiation than we really had a right to ask of her. Other ships had become death traps in radiation storms of less intensity than the ones we would face. If it had been economically feasible to build all ships as well insulated as she, then our trip would be unnecessary. But the cost was—to make a pun—astronomical. The only other alternative was to study the origin of the solar winds in hopes that we could eventually predict radiation storms in space and detour ships around them. Ours was a history-making ship. She was a good ship. There are good ships and good women.

  "There are good ships and good women," said Malherbe, the captain.

  "I only knew one," I said.

  "One? Why, I've captained a half dozen good ones in the last twenty years."

  "I meant women," I said, putting down the coffee and moving to the window to watch the sunset. It was difficult to imagine soaring toward that lantern, toward the gaseous, nebulous, semiliving creature in the sky. But in a few weeks . . . There were pinks and yellows and soft blues, and a man could lose his thoughts, could hypnotize himself almost like watching a painted spiral on a wheel-spinning and spinning and spinning and . . .

  It happened the next morning at eleven o'clock. Malherbe, First Officer Blanksman, and ship's doctor Amishi were coping with a series of fake emergencies that a group of security men had thought up—most of which could not possibly occur aboard a saucer. A fire had been started in a mock-up of the ship, and the three were to stop it before irreparable damage could be do
ne. Of course it was ridiculous, for the plasterboard of the mock-up burned very much more rapidly than would the special alloy of the real saucer. I stopped a moment to watch the fun and games.

  But Fate was in rare form that morning. The heat—something the security experts had not connected with fire—ignited a stack of boxes behind the "stage." There was a sudden explosion that rocked the mock-up, and the wall of crates came tumbling down over the wooden saucer, burying the crew.

  They said I screamed. I only remember running, tearing at boxes, heaving them out of the way with a furiousness I never knew I possessed. I dragged Amishi out onto the safe floor. He was unconscious but unburned. I remember seeing Malherbe and Blanksman too—all three safe. And the fire crew waving hoses and fog dispensers.

  I don't know why I rushed back in. But they had to drag me out in the end. Whimpering, Malherbe said. Whimpering.

  Schedules were reworked, and the launch date was moved back ten days. Everyone was given a thorough psychic probe. The big shots wanted to be sure no traumas from the incident would render us incapable of acting when we reached our target—Old Sol. But they didn't check back any farther than that fire.

  The day after the near disaster, I came across Amishi sitting in the coffee shop. He was composing one of his poems.

  "Let's go

  down foggy paths

  in twisted moonlight

  in purple moon-night

  in some overwhelming

  sort of madness

  taken through open-souled osmosis

  from hatter-mad flowers

  And let's go

  holding hands and laughing

  1 feel your arteries throbbing

  Let's go

  in the cool ice of evening

  through haunted forests

  . where trees bend

  to the white world's end

  craggy and awful

  to snatch away unsuspecting souls

  who think Nature

  is a mother and not a liquidator

  Let's go

  strangers in a strange land

  orphans of the heart

  strangers in a strange land

  now cinders drift apart . . ."

  "I think it fits," Alexander said. He was the young operator of the robomechs that would take care of any repair job I might sense during the flight.

  I nodded agreement.

  "I mean, it is a strange land indeed!"

  Amishi looked at me, half-embarrassed. "I want to thank you for yesterday." His yellow skin seemed to redden slightly.

  "No need for thanks, just part of the job."

  "By the way," Alexander interrupted, "how's the ship feel?"

  "Fine. Fine as a ship could feel. Your robomechs may be useless extra baggage."

  He winced at that, and I was glad I had said it. I didn't like Gingos Alexander.

  "Glad to hear optimism," a booming voice said behind me. I turned to see Bruce Krison smiling like an idiot.

  "You're smiling like an idiot," I told him.

  "Thank you," he smiled. "That's one of the nicer things you've ever said to me."

  "Everything running smoothly?"

  "Yes," I said curtly.

  "What about the incident of the fire."

  It was blunt. Too blunt not to catch me off balance. "Close," I finally said.

  "Too close. And unnecessary."

  "I thought the others were still in the fire."

  He looked at me steadily, and I returned his gaze, afraid to, but afraid not to. He sighed. "Well, there's a phone call for you."

  "A phone call?"

  He winked. "A Miss Morain."

  "Tell her I'm not allowed to talk while in training," I said, straightening my tie and turning to leave.

  She called for the seventh time on Launch Day. But conquest was in my blood, and the great eye of the sun lay ahead.

  I died in less than a fragment of a millisecond.

  I looked out and saw my body strapped in a chair, needles puncturing it, glucose bottles dangling delicately above it like transparent fruit on a metal tree. There were dark circles under my eyes. I looked dead—gray and all And it always seemed, that flash of an instant when I left my body, that Death had freed me.

  Behind my body sat Amishi, in charge of regulating my slowed metabolism—in charge of my life. The lights on his scopes pulsated green and yellow. In the shadows stood the captain, without duties, trying to look like his job really mattered. We all knew that it didn't; he was an ornament, a leftover from the days when men sailed the seas and lower skies.

  I left that scene, slipped into a heavy cable and shot like light wriggling over every coil, around every twist, faster than the biggest roller coaster ever, laughing. Everything proved to be intact, and disengaging myself from the system, I fled back to the contrasting quiet and darkness of the cyberbase in the dome of the saucer where I was to rest and survey with only a skim setup to warn of impending crisis.

  It was the second day out. Six hundred thousand miles gone. It was the second night out in reality. In the darkness of the cyberbase, in the coolness of its crystal body, retiring my mind within my mind, the strange sleep of cybernetic unawareness crept over me, and the time for Daily Rest was at hand.

  "Because it's there," I said. (Man's desire to conquer Nature drives him to all heights and depths, proving his sovereignty, I lied to myself.)

  There was an appreciative ROAR of La-ha-ugh-ha-ter from the press.

  Bacon (of the Times!) waved his hand.

  "Mr. (pig: unspoken") Bacon?"

  "Exactly (I) how many (#) days will the trip require????"

  A lady reporter cllted from the rear: "Why do you want to go to the sun? Why to the sun, the sun?"

  "Because it's there" I said/lied into her empty eyes . . .

  Upon waking, I ran routine checks and found everything up to par. I peeked from a well-placed rivet and saw Amishi talking to Malherbe. They appeared to be arguing, but before I could esp out and hear them, they separated. The conversation was over.

  Plasma bottles dangled over my head. A million miles went by,

  The fourth day I slept.

  And Alexander dreamed. I heard about it the next morning. They had a sign placed in front of my body. JESSIE, CONTACT US. WE MUST TALK. SOMETHING HAS COME UP.

  I trickled out of the shielding, through the wires, back into my own head. They put the ship on automatic, taking a risk they never should have—machines being so unreliable—and revived me.

  "Dreams," Malherbe said.

  "So?"

  "We've all had them. Ever since we left earth. Last night, Alexander woke up, and his dream continued. It was standing in his room!"

  I looked at Alexander. "What dream?"

  "It was horrible," he said. Although I figured he had probably been delirious at the time, I could see the way he quivered when he thought of it.

  "That tells me nothing."

  "A—thing, actually. It was gray, large, and spoke with a strange, feminine voice."

  "It spoke?"

  "Yes."

  "What did it say?"

  He squirmed. "Not to the sun, my boy. Not to the sun."

  "That's ridiculous."

  "That's what it said."

  "Have you checked the ship?" I asked.

  "The first thing," Malherbe said. "There's nothing on her that isn't meant to be."

  "The jitters," I said. "Simply a case of the jitters. Why did you call me out of cybernet?"

  "We wanted to see if you had been dreaming too," Malherbe said.

  I looked around and saw the slightest traces of fear on their faces. Fear of the Unknown. You could not fear a star whose heart you were going to approach; it was too vast a thing to fear, so you made up something more human—but not quite—to center your animals passions on. It was that and nothing more. "I have to get back," I snapped. "We have a long way to go, dreams or no dreams."

  In the cyberbase, out of my body again, I thought about i
t. There was something to it. Of couse it had to be psydiological—all of them having the same dream—something basic, something buried in every soul, a racial fear. Interesting.

  On the eighth day, I slept, the world having been created some time earlier.

  The following morning, the eye of the sun was nearly sky-filling, a monster streaking to gobble us up along with Venus and Mercury which lay ahead.

  Venus passed by dreamlike. Gases and clouds and somehow erotic.

  On the eleventh day, I slept, thinking of the sun. Visions of fire balloons danced in my head.

  The next morning, they had a sign in front of my body. Red felt letters on a black background: JESSIE. CONFERENCE. MOST URGENT.

  It was the same as before.

  "Dreams?" I asked.

  "They went too far this time," Malherbe said nervously, and I noticed that he had personified the dreams. "They attacked Alexander. They cornered me, but my screams drove them away."

  "Them?" I asked.

  "Well—IT," Gingos said. His arm was bandaged, and Amishi confirmed the statement that there were eleven stitches required to close the wound.

  "Let's hear it," I said. My body felt weak even though Amishi had been exercising it every day.

  "I woke up, and it was crooning to me. 'Not to the sun, my boy. Not to the sun, the sun.' I told it to get the hell out. It kept coming closer. Big as a robomech, ponderous. It kept chanting too. Then I saw its face—as much as the shadows would permit me to see. Thank God for shadows. There were two gaping craters instead of eyes—no other facial features that I could see. I screamed, and it trundled out before anyone could come—but not before it grabbed me and whispered the chant to my face," He held up his bandaged arm as if that were legal evidence.

  I looked to Malherbe who was nodding his head in agreement.

  "And your story?" I asked.

  "I woke up to Gingos' screams. As I was getting to the doorway, the thing came upon me from the corridor. In the semidarkness, I could make out its shape only as a hulk. It moved toward me, but I started screaming, and it was gone down the companionway. We didn't see it again all night."