Doomsday Warrior 02 - Red America (25 page)

With Trickster in the lead the freefighters walked up the steep steps that laddered the slopes of the rock mountain. Hundreds of faces appeared in the square stone windows and doors, taking in the strangers with curiosity. Children ran down the steps, their eyes huge, pupils as big as grapes. Many of them had never seen real daylight, living their lives under the artificial light of the glowing blue stones that seemed to hang from the huge underground cavern’s every square inch. They giggled and touched the party of Americans. Kim delighted in the beautiful young Indian children who gawked at her long blond hair. Both boys and girls wore pigtails, and the girls, most not more than ten, were extremely well developed. Rock suddenly realized he hadn’t seen any old people or crippled or sick people.

“Where are your old people, Trickster?” Rock asked as the party continued to make their way higher and higher up the mountain city.

“The old are sent to the waterfall on the lake, on flaming rafts to join the spirits at the bottom of the bottomless cavern into which the waters fall.”

“They’re killed?” Kim asked horrified.

“They are sent to their creator,” Trickster said simply. Kim squeezed Rock’s hand.

“Oh how awful,” she whispered. Rock was about to say something about cruelty and lack of compassion when Perkins whispered in his ear.

“Don’t criticize, Rock. We don’t know enough about their situation. Besides we’re on their land. We’d better be careful about anything we say for now.” They proceeded up the steps until the top which leveled off to a wide plateau covered with more of the adobe mud and brick buildings—these the largest of all, some nearly a hundred feet high. They entered what was obviously the main building, brightly festooned with Indian markings and totems, through a door nearly three times human height.

“Behold the Temple of the Ginsberg,” Trickster said. “But first let us arrange for your accommodations, man and some chow-chow for some hungry squares.”

Twenty

T
hey entered a large ceremonial hall filled with long oak tables and candelabras hanging from the vaulted ceilings.

“Is this where we meet the Ginsberg?” Perkins asked, excited.

“No fool, be cool,” Trickster snapped back. “We engage in dining, you know, ceasing the gurglings. The Ginsberg holds court tomorrow. Hey man, let’s bring on the eats,” Trickster yelled out, jumping up on top of the table. Within minutes a small parade of maidens in short leather rawhide miniskirts and raccoon skin halters brought out trays of steaming food. Rockson speared a slice off the tray of meat in front of him and sniffed it, then tasted it carefully.

“It’s buffalo, man,” Trickster said, grabbing a whole side of beef with a bone handle and began chewing on it furiously. Flagons of foaming beer were brought out, cold, sparkingly tasty. “To our groovy, crazy new friendcats,” Trickster said, raising his glass. “May we always have far-out times together.”

“Groovy crazy,” Rock said with a broad smile and he, Kim, Perkins, and McCaughlin happily swigged down the delicious brew. They ate and drank with the Indians whooping it up and dancing on the tables from time to time. It was hardly the way they had dinner back in Century City, Rock thought, but it sure as hell was fun. After about an hour, the heads of the freefighters began to spin. Things in the room, the spears on the wall, the large dayglo-painted shields that dotted the walls seemed to tilt at off angles. The singing of the Crazy Alligators and their mad slang seemed more and more hilarious to the freefighters. Kim looked like an angel to Rock and the touch of her hand across the table sent chills up his spine.

“Hey, what’s in this brew?” he asked Trickster, whose face seemed to be melted into rainbow trails. The smile on the chief’s face looked wide as an atomic chasm as he answered.

“Why it’s just good ol’ Mexiquatyl Beer. Hallucinogenic mushroom brew, like we always chug.” Rock looked over at Perkins inquisitively.

“Probably from the peyote family, Rock. Moderate hallucinations. Nontoxic unless you’re stricken with beri-beri. Anybody here got beri-beri?” he asked, falling back in his seat in an explosion of laughter. Two young nubile maidens sat on his lap crushing their firm breasts against him. Rock sighed. He always prided himself on staying off things like this—but at least it wasn’t dangerous. In fact, everyone seemed to be having a good time. He shrugged and decided to go with it.

“What the hell, you only live once, right Kim?” He leaned over and kissed Kim on her bare ivory neck. She beamed and kissed him. The touch of her lips were like ice-fire, so passionate. Rock nearly swooned before he pulled himself away, his manhood suddenly bulging in his fatigues.

“Perhaps we should go somewhere more private,” Kim said, looking shyly down at the floor. Indeed, many of the braves were slipping away with female friends, and McCaughlin and Perkins seemed quite content with the bubbly creatures who nipped at their cheeks and slid their hands down to firmer targets.

“Your guest of honor suite is two flights up those spiral stairs over there,” Trickster piped up. “There’s a Chumec-sized bed. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.” He laughed uproariously. Rock and Kim rose and made their way unsteadily through the raucous throng and to the stairs which were illuminated by the ever present glowing blue rocks. They were slightly dizzy from the ascent as they pushed open a large wooden door. Holding his angel in his arms, Rock whisked her over the threshold to a nicely furnished chamber with a hearth in the center burning merrily up through a raised circular chimney. The bed was at the far end of the room—an impossible walk that seemed like miles under the influence of the drug.

Kim unloosened her dress that the Indian women had given her and was out of it in a whisk. Her nubile, full, alabaster-skinned, angelic body was cast in the cherry orange glow of the fire. She pulled Rock to the bed and fiddled with the zipper encasing his enormous organ. It felt like a steel girder to her fingers. Rock helped her pull down his pants and felt her warm lips engulf his engorged erection. She traveled, it seemed, thousands of miles down around the steel girder to its base. He groaned and they toppled together onto the bed. She released her prize and sidled up his strong muscled body, which seemed like climbing a mountain of flesh. Her long platinum tresses slipped across his lips and then her marshmallow pale softness pressed against his mouth. Their mouths opened and miles of wet tongue rolled out like carpets and entangled in one another. Kim’s moans broke into an angel’s chorus as she pushed Rock over on his back and mounted him the way she had when he took her virginity in the cell at Pavlov City.

HE WAS LOVE SHE WAS LOVE HE WAS LOVE SHE WAS LOVE HE WAS LOVE . . . She was a pulsar of radiant diamonds, a quasar sending its bursts of high energy galaxy-collapsing flashes out to him. He was an approaching universe of ten billion stars swirling around a central mass of pure black gravity, a hyperspace warp of intense sub-neutrono particles coalescing inside her. They collided out there in infinite space and he entered her. She slid down his nether universe pole to the anti-matter center of his being and they were like deity and consort—the Supreme Essence of all matter and thought. The mandala that lies at the center of the oneness of negative and positive, of being and nothing, of man and woman.

Meeting the Ginsberg was a male-only ritual. The Indian beatnicks had never heard of equality of the sexes, and Kim was disappointed that she could not get to see the ruler of the Crazy Alligators. Rock however would don a black robe and get to partake of the Question Session—the most sacred of the Alligator’s many religious practices. Rock was curious about this man and his powers—but he kept thinking about the previous night of lovemaking between himself and Kim, his mind returning to the erotic paradise like a fish to water. He was, he had to admit it—in love. It was a strange emotion, in a way. For Ted Rockson had felt many things in his tough life and had cared for many people. But never had he felt the energy of passionate love course through his veins like a Mack truck out of control. Every time he thought of her his stomach turned to jello. He loved her more than life itself; her face was everywhere he looked. And for the first time in his life Rock felt worried. For her. There were so many things that would gladly kill her, eat her, rape her, destroy her—in the world of America 2089
A.D.
He wanted to protect her, to keep her safe from all harm, yet . . . it was impossible, even for him.

“Hey man, check you out,” Trickster said, approaching Rock who had donned the ceremonial black robes that covered him head to foot. “Look pretty cool Mr. Rock-Around-the-Clock. So you ready for the Ginsberg rap. Everybody’s going to be there. It’s what’s happening.” Trickster himself had put on the black robes, though he still wore his two yard long headdress of feathers and the blue streaks of war paint on his face.

“What makes the man so powerful?” Rock asked as the two men walked to the roof of the main temple up flight after flight of carved stone stairs.

“He
knows
man! That’s what gives him the power,” Trickster answered. “We are allowed to come to him twice a year and ask him about the Truth. Once, years ago when I was a little j.d., one of the monks asked him a question so profound, so brilliant. A question that so expressed the ineffable essencelessness of suchness that the Ginsberg gave a signal and the gongs were rung and the monk who gave the question was accoladed and given the title, Meritorious Thinker.”

“And what did that entitle him to?” Rock asked skeptically.

“It isn’t that, man,” Trickster said as they continued up the stairs, passing a square window every ten feet or so. “Oh, Rocky boy, I’m disappointed in you. It’s the
Recognition!
—plus of course, the favors of all the temple dancers, raised in the art of erotic reality, trained in the esoteric arts of lovemaking; but of course pure as the driven snow. They train only on phalluses of the golden statues. They were sent to the Meritorious Monk for seven days. He reveled so much that he died. Can you dig it, man?”

They came to the roof and walked outside. Crowds of Crazy Alligators were everywhere, hanging on the edges of wide stone outcrops from the side of the mountain into which the pueblo city was built. All those who dared asked the unaskable along with the several hundred monks who lived austere spiritual lives hidden in small holes in the mountainside were gathered in even rows around the roof. They seated themselves in the back row and watched as the first monks rose to question the Ginsberg. Some hundred and fifty feet away from them, in the mist of incense bowls that always burned around him, sat the Living Master with his purple robes hanging down over the long armrests of his glistening golden throne. On the marble platform around him were sprinkled rose petals—one hundred and eight of them—which was the number of statues along the Great Hall Of Wisdom which ran through the subterranean chambers of the temple.

The first monk prostrated himself before the Ginsberg and asked his question. The echoing acoustics made it possible for everyone present to hear the question and the master’s sacred answer.

“Oh Master, what is the original face before one is born?”

The Ginsberg whisked a flybroom and said bored, “The face of noface.”

“Thank you, Master,” the monk stammered and ran. Another made his way down the red rug that dissected the gathering, shooting out from the bottom of the Ginsberg’s throne all the way across the roof.

“Master, how do you know that you don’t know?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” the Ginsberg snapped back. The next came, a thin pale-faced man who trembled as he spoke.

“W-what is the reason to be a monk?” he asked. The Ginsberg’s eyes were like slits as he replied.

“To become less stupid than you are.” The monk bowed quickly and left. The next monk took his turn and the next. Each time in a bored, exasperated voice the Ginsberg answered.

“Why is he so impatient?” Rock asked Trickster.

“It is very hard to ask the right question. Only if the Ginsberg hears a good question does it amuse him. He has listened to dumb questions all his life. He grants none of his time to teaching anymore unless someone asks him a profound question. No one has for years.”

Finally the line was exhausted and it was Rock’s turn. He slowly walked through the rows of seated men, feeling quite foolish in his long black robe. The Master looked up, one eyebrow raised at the American freefighter, approaching respectfully with palms together but body unbowed. The Ginsberg had heard of these visitors, now was the time to size them up. Their leader came closer—a strongly built man with different colored eyes and a shock of star-white hair down the middle of his scalp. Odd—a mutant perhaps—with psi ability.

“Sooo,” said the Ginsberg, stroking his wispy white beard. “You newcomer, Ted Rock-son. Have you a question?”

“Yes.”

Rock looked him straight in the eyes and asked, “And what pray is that question?”

“What is the question?” The Ginsberg’s face lit up like a strobe light. He jumped up and forward, landing a fist across Rockson’s face that was too swift even for the Doomsday Warrior to block. Rock leaped to his feet from the floor, ready to do battle when he heard the gongs go off. People were cheering him and he was hustled away on the shoulders of the Indians. Flowers were thrown on him as he passed.

“Hey man, how’d you get so hip?” Trickster screamed out, running alongside Rock. “That was far out.”

“It’s easy,” Rock answered. “No tricks, that’s all.”

With Rockson being treated like a royal god for the afternoon, and given the honor of having a private audience with the Ginsberg that evening, Perkins decided to scout around the area and see what other archaeological wonders he could dig up. He walked around the edge of the lake, looking for shards of pottery, artifacts in the sand. No luck at first until after about twenty minutes of searching when his eyes suddenly saw some color in the white sand. There! He reached down and picked up a plastic ashtray, totally eroded on one side by the lapping water. “Alameda Drive Liquor Store” it read on one side. Perkins was elated and stuffed it in his rucksack on his back. He pushed on until he came to a cave which had a trail going into it as if in recent use. He entered and once in about thirty feet was amazed at the change. The rough cave walls suddenly gave way to an absolutely smooth surface. Gold statues lined the walls—divinities set in specially carved niches. He came to a large open chamber filled with rugs and boxes overflowing with jewels, pearled daggers. The archaeologist’s eyes were positively bulging. Never had he seen such a wealth of artifacts in one place. He ran over to one of the treasure troves and began looking through it.