Emperor of Gondwanaland Read online

  As I ate, I studied the Fanzoy.

  She—I had accepted Merino’s assertion of her sex—sat on the bunk while we picked at our meal. Her supple arms hung lightly, with her hands folded in her lap. Her soft skin, with its nap the color of certain pale-orange roses, was pleasant to look upon. Her unreadable face bore down on Merino continuously. I noticed he could not meet her eyes.

  I asked to send half my meal to Belgrano. Tess passed the plate out the door to another Fanzoy, waiting instantly there.

  Eventually the wine began to tell on Merino. He had drunk an enormous quantity, opening another bottle brought from under the bunk. I was barely on my second glass.

  I thought that now was perhaps the best time to mention the name that had seemed so important to Sanctus Monteagle. Perhaps Merino’s unimprisoned lips would let slip something.

  “Did you have,” I inquired offhandedly, “a crewman by the name of Sadler?”

  Merino shot to his feet, his face livid. “Goddamn you for a sneaking spy! How came you by the name of Sadler?”

  I had expected nothing so fierce. Luckily, I had had the foresight to prepare a story to shield the Sanctus.

  “I glimpsed it on a strewn page from your own miskept log. Why take it so meanly?”

  Merino sat again, passing a trembling hand across his sweaty brow. Tess had never stirred. “Forgive me. It is only that—I thought—No matter. Yes, there was one Sadler aboard. Sadler Merino, my cousin and first mate, whom I mentioned before. A bold and worthy man, better by far than I. But he is no more. Would he had gone overboard with the rest, instead of dying as he did!”

  Merino refilled his glass, which had tipped when he jumped up, adding its yellow river to the mess. I thought he had to forcibly stop his eyes from going to the veiled statue in the corner. Maybe some old touch of religious feeling he sought to deny was upon him.

  Now all meanness, Merino barked an order at the Fanzoy.

  “Tess, you bloody snake! Clear these dishes away!”

  What happened next was uncanny.

  Tess arose and approached Merino. When she was less than half a meter away, the captain began to stand, unwillingly, like an automaton, as if his muscles were under another’s control. When he was upright, his arm swung in a similar fashion. At the end of its arc, it touched the Fanzoy’s cheek.

  He stroked Tess’s face once or twice in a horrible mechanical parody of affection.

  Tess broke the tableau. She gathered the plates and walked away. Merino collapsed sobbing into his seat.

  I averted my face.

  After a time, he ceased weeping. All his hostility had turned now to solicitude. Which emotion was the real one? Or were both?

  “You must return to your ship, to begin ferrying us supplies. Let me escort you to the rail.”

  He stood. Apparently on impulse, he buckled the short scabbard and dagger lying before him onto his belt.

  Tess emerged inescapably to accompany us.

  We left the tenebrous cabin for the brilliant sunlight.

  V. Return to the Melville, and the Unexpected

  To step outdoors was to be reborn.

  Never had I so appreciated the tropic breezes, the balmy light, the spumy air. The dark cabin seemed now like a grave, and I marveled that I had escaped.

  How much more keenly must Merino have felt it, after inhabiting the cabin for a year.

  I could see that in the hours I had been with Merino, our two ships had drifted closer together. Now only seventy meters or so separated the two vessels, one so clean and wholesomely gay, the other unkempt and exhaling an almost visible miasma of doom.

  Merino, Tess, and I walked toward the rail where sturdy old Belgrano kept his post, a bluff watchdog if ever there was one.

  A light pattering behind me caused me to turn.

  Eighty Fanzoii or more—what I took to be the full number aboard—now followed us at a discreet distance. Their buff robes and peachy flesh made them seem like a pale wall mottled with skyrr-lichen which was toppling endlessly toward us. Their inexpressive faces were more alarming at the time than the ugliest masks of human hatred.

  In their midst, through a gap, I thought to glimpse poor Purslen Monteagle, herded like a lone sheep among wolves. His face exhibited an agonized alarm; his mouth worked, yet no sound emerged.

  My heart went out to the inoffensive man. I almost stopped to demand that Merino extricate him from the tangle of Fanzoii. Yet how could I justly interfere? The Cockerel was Merino’s command, no matter how shabbily he had performed so far. How would I react if he began to give orders aboard my ship? No, I had no say here.

  Perhaps if I had known it was the last time I would see the Sanctus alive, I might have acted differently.

  We reached Belgrano.

  “Anything to report, Master Belgrano?” I queried.

  “Nary a thing, captain,” he replied, looking relieved at my long-delayed reappearance. His face bore an expression that said that if I had asked for his opinion of the Cockerel and her captain, he would be glad to disburden himself of a few choice words.

  “Very good.” I turned to Merino. “Perhaps I can yet persuade you to abandon this mad scheme of continuing to the Nameless Land. You yourself mentioned that you cannot regard the Fanzoii as cargo any longer. Is it that they have expressed a wish to go there?”

  Intense emotions flickered across Merino’s saturnine face. “No, they’re not cargo, and yet—we must go on sailing. It seems it will be forever. If only—but it cannot be. You must help as best you can.”

  His jumbled speech seemed the sign of an increasing tumult in his weary brain. Surely he would die ignobly not long after we parted, by his own hand or by Fate’s.

  “I have tried all I can to make you see sense. Failing that, I cannot deny you any materials I can legitimately spare without endangering my own ship. We will warp our two vessels together, and thus make loading easier. My first gift will be an anchor for your wayward craft.”

  I gripped Belgrano’s shoulder. “Let’s be off.”

  My mate descended first. I had one leg over the rail when Merino shouted.

  “Wait! I must go with you. If only to be off this ship for a minute.”

  I regarded him searchingly from my awkward position, striving to detect any ulterior motive. He continued to beseech me silently. I deemed him truthful at last in wishing only a change of scenery, however small.

  “Follow me, then,” I said.

  Once in the cutter, I looked up.

  Merino descended the rope with weak limbs.

  Tess came after him

  I almost urged Belgrano to pull the cutter away, rather than have the Fanzoy set foot in it. Yet that would have left Merino dangling literally at the end of his rope. I doubted he could make it back up in his ineffectual fashion. Would the Fanzoii on the deck help him? Maybe, and maybe not. I could not leave him in such a strait.

  I let Merino and Tess enter the cutter, despite my irrational loathing of the native.

  “Master Belgrano.” I ordered, “take us back to the Melville.”

  We motored off smoothly.

  I felt my heart lightening as we neared my ship and left Merino’s behind. The glum and high-strung captain of the Cockerel failed to match my spirits however. He seemed abstracted and lost, buried in private speculations.

  We reached the Melville’s port side, whence we had departed hours ago—hours that loomed as years. I grabbed the wet netting lying athwart the hull. I was in good spirits again, my usual self.

  “Come aboard, Captain Merino,” I declaimed, “and let me return your hospitality. Bring Tess too.” (As if they could ever have been separated this side of death!) “I’ll have my mate run a line back to your ship and we’ll begin the warping. You can step back aboard her when we’re done.”

  Merino looked longingly at my vessel, returning the curious gaze of my men gathered at the rail. “I—I can’t,” he said. “I can’t come aboard. Thank you, though. Thank you.”


  This I liked little. Yet who could account for the whims of an unstable mind?

  “In that case, I’ll ascend and toss down the line. Mate Belgrano will stay with you.”

  I wasn’t about to lose my cutter at this stage, if Merino took it in his head to abscond.

  Up the netting I scrambled, and was soon on deck. How welcome it felt! The first thing I noticed was my men’s shocked faces, as when they had first sighted the drifting hulk. Events seemed to be repeating themselves in an endless cycle.

  I looked back to the cutter.

  Merino had come unsteadily to his feet in the rocking dinghy. His dagger was unsheathed and upraised. Belgrano was still rooted to his seat in amazement, but in the process of shifting to stand. Tess was sitting calmly.

  The dagger began its plunge toward the Fanzoy’s breast.

  It was arrested in midair, Merino’s hand caught fast in some invisible grip.

  Things happened with baffling speed. Belgrano stood and moved on the Fanzoy. Either unable or unwilling to stop him as she had stopped Merino, she resorted to physical means, striking him an unexpected and massive blow across his thighs from her seated position. He toppled backwards and overboard.

  Merino’s dagger began to reverse its course, heading slowly toward his own heart.

  His face was frozen in a rictus of fear.

  Tess was immobile and dispassionate.

  I glanced frantically around on the deck. The tree-cutting lasers lay where the men had first dropped them upon coming aboard, not stowed because of the strange happenings.

  A slovenly failure I would certainly have upbraided them for. But now—what an unexpected blessing!

  I snatched one up, rested its snout on the rail.

  Before Merino could bury his blade in his own heart, I had driven a beam of light through the Fanzoy’s chest.

  She died soundlessly.

  Merino collapsed over the gunwale, his head dangling just over the waves.

  VI. The Slaughter, and Its Aftermath

  Now the sun was falling in the west, as we fished Belgrano—unhurt—out of the water, and brought him and the unconscious Merino aboard.

  The corpse of Tess we heaved into the uncomplaining water, watching it sink like an unattached anchor out of sight.

  Once we were all aboard the Melville, we turned naturally toward the Cockerel. It had drifted closer to us in the meantime.

  All the Fanzoii were clustered silently at the rail. They still seemed nonthreatening.

  Suddenly a human scream filled the air. I knew it instinctively for the death cry of the Sanctus. A shudder went through my crew.

  The scream served to awaken Merino, who got unsteadily to his feet. He passed a shaky hand across his wracked features, as if brushing unseen cobwebs away. I was at a loss what to do, and awaited Merino’s insights into the situation. Clearly the Fanzoii were murderers and brigands and had to be stopped. But how?

  Merino stumbled to the rail and rested his hands upon it. He looked toward the Cockerel, like Lazarus at his vacated tomb.

  There was a parting of the ranks of the quiet Fanzoii. Two individuals walked forward with the sheeted statue from Merino’s cabin.

  So now they were planning to taunt Merino with sacrilege, I thought.

  Merino blanched as if drained of blood.

  The Fanzoii whisked off the sheet.

  A man—clearly of flesh and blood—was revealed. He began to jig and prance and wave his arms, in a grotesque and obscene parody of a tarantella.

  Merino spoke in a voice empty of all emotion, as if from beyond death. “It is my cousin Sadler. He is no longer truly alive.” He turned imploring eyes on me and his voice rose in a shriek. “My God, sink that ship of devils and end his misery!”

  With that he collapsed onto the deck once more.

  I have said previously that I have always tried to live by a certain code. One tenet of that code was never to attack a helpless foe. For all the grief the Fanzoii had caused, I could not bring myself to fire upon them. What I would have done had they not escalated the battle I do not know. Perhaps tried to capture them unharmed, and so have doomed myself and all those who relied on me.

  As it was, the Cockerel’s laser pistols suddenly appeared in the hands of the Fanzoii.

  One shot the dancing Sadler through the head.

  The rest began firing on us.

  The beams were not meant for such long-range work. Yet one freak shot scorched the hand of Topps, the meekest among us.

  A deep and furious rage came upon me then, and I shouted, “Up with our own lasers, lads, and hole the bastards below the waterline!”

  The men fell to with a will. Four beams—much more powerful than those of the pistols—concentrated on one spot, causing the water to steam and boil.

  Soon the beams ate through the hull. The Cockerel canted thirty degrees and began to sink.

  Fanzoii jumped into the water. Some started to swim our way.

  Then did I violate my own code irreparably. I have never fully trusted myself since.

  With a thickness in my throat I said, “Fire on any who approach—to kill.”

  The men complied.

  When the carnage was over—and there were never any screams or cries, only the hiss of the beams biting—my men and I felt as one, that we would retch and never stop.

  Our only casualties were Belgrano’s bruised limbs and Topps’s burned skin. Both took painkillers and proclaimed themselves well.

  We winched the cutter aboard, and set sail from the tainted bay.

  If any Fanzoii escaped to Encantada Island and there prospered, I cannot say. I have never been back after that fateful voyage.

  Night fell. Merino regained consciousness in my cabin, on the bunk where we had laid him. After he took a meager meal, he remained seated at my table, myself opposite him, in a reprise with variations of our earlier encounter.

  How different those two sessions seemed at that moment! My bright and well-appointed quarters contrasted immensely with that dank and unhealthy cave of his that now lay beneath the waves. Security and goodwill flourished here, in place of danger and suspicion. Yet a whiff of the Cockerel’s malaise lingered, seemingly immune to being exorcised.

  Merino sat with a gray blanket wrapped around his hunched shoulders. He sipped now and again at a small tumbler of medicinal brandy. He had not spoken during his meal, and I had not forced him.

  Now, however, without prompting, he began to tell me the true story of his voyage, holding my eyes with his own tormented ones.

  “There was no storm,” he commenced. “Or rather, there was a storm, but it came later, after the real damage had already been done.

  “We sailed from Saint Ursula as I told you: ten men, the Sanctus, and myself, with the Fanzoii as our cargo, our goal the Nameless Land, where we indeed hoped to plant a colony. Was there ever a more misguided venture, with a less capable fool in charge?

  “I was truly ill-fit for the rigors of months at sea. At home I had whatever I fancied. At sea I was cast back on my own resources. They proved limited indeed. Books held no interest for me, nor did the petty details of managing the ship and crew. I began to chafe under the dull monotony of the trip. The sameness of the food, the company, the sights.

  “One daily sight was that of the Fanzoii taking their exercise on deck. Sadler had advised me to let them rot in the hold, but I contended that they were our charges, and could hardly function as colonists if mistreated. So we let them come up five at a time under guard, to take light and air.

  “After a while, I began to notice one Fanzoy in particular. You will hardly need to be told that it was Tess. She seemed more vibrant than rest, almost human. And then there was her sinuous way of carrying herself, which gradually grew more and more attractive to me.”

  Here Merino coughed, sipped his brandy, and resumed speaking.

  “I have always been a womanizer, I fear. It was so easy to indulge, in my privileged position. There were always women—of
my own class or lower—who were willing to satisfy my lusts.

  “On the voyage, there were none. And it was maddening.

  “I resisted the evil urge to sleep with the Fanzoy Tess as long as I could. Perhaps you, or another strong soul, would never have succumbed. I can only recount what I did—did deliberately, but with no foreknowledge of the consequences, I swear.

  “One night I had my men act as bawds and fetch the Fanzoy to my cabin. They obeyed, but eyed me with disgust. They left us alone.

  “Not to mince words, I took the alien carnally, upon the very bunk she sat on so mockingly while you were there.

  “She did not resist at all.

  “It was like yet unlike sex with a human woman. I will say no more than that. What is crucial is what happened after.

  “I found myself bonded psychically to the Fanzoy.”

  Merino assumed a contemplative air for a second, as if he had long considered this part of his gruesome experiences in a detached way, insofar as it applied to his whole culture.

  “We know so little about them, having ignored them all these centuries of our uneasy coexistence. Apparently, from what I later learned, the Fanzoii—highly telepathic among themselves—mate but once, and for life, forging a special mental link between couples.

  “Among Fanzoii, the bond is a two-way union between equals.

  “Between a human and a Fanzoy, it is a chain binding slave and master.

  “I was now subject to Tess’s compulsions. Although I could fight them for a time, I always caved in. She proved that during the first night. Also, a vague conceptual link sprang up between us. Tess could easily project her thoughts to me, but had trouble reading mine.

  “I was forced to keep Tess in my cabin all the next day. The men spoke of it behind my back, uneasy and afraid. When the next night came, Tess had me free all her comrades from belowdecks, promising that my men would not be hurt.

  “But there was instant carnage. The Fanzoii broke open the armory and lasered all my men, save for Sadler and the Sanctus, who hid in the galley.

  “One man—I know not who—had the presence of mind before being hunted down to wreck the solarcells and command many of the robots to hurl themselves overboard.