Star of Gypsies (38 page)

You would never suspect, looking at photos of Mentiroso in some travel magazine, that it is one of the most horrible places in the universe. (Perhaps the most horrible, though I think it may be exceeded in that quality by Trinigalee Chase. Since I don't ever want to think about Trinigalee Chase again in any detail, I'm not capable of making the comparison. If you want my advice, stay away from them both. Neither one is any holiday paradise.)

I went to Mentiroso as a slave, but this time, in contrast to my previous two tours of slavery, I had only myself to blame. I wasn't sold there; I sold myself. This was back when I was a free-lance space explorer, a few years before I went to work for Esmeralda's family's kumpania. Just as my grandfather had before me, I had gotten myself overextended financially and went bankrupt. And as my father had done, I saw voluntary slavery as the way out. I was ten thousand cerces in the hole-can you believe that?-and they were about to take my Xamur land away from me to satisfy the debt. Then I found out that there was this deal, a five-year indenture on a place called Mentiroso, that would exactly cover the amount of my losses. I jumped for it.

Maybe I should have done more research first. Mentiroso had been discovered only a little while before and there wasn't much data available on it. Widely traveled though I was, I had never heard of it, and I didn't bother to find out more than whether you could breathe the air and what kind of climate the place has. I didn't stop to wonder why anybody would be willing to pay me that much for a five-year indenture. Served me right.

I had to pick up the relay-sweep for Mentiroso on Clard Msat. When I handed in my ticket to the technician who was setting up the outbound coordinates at the sweep depot he looked at it a long time and said finally, "Mentiroso? You're kidding, aren't you?"

"Not that I know of."

"You really want to go
there
?"

"That's where my job is."

"You must actually be serious. You poor dumb bastard." He shook his head sadly. "He wants to go to Mentiroso. He has a job on Mentiroso. You poor dumb bastard!"

Nobody had ever called me that in my life before. I don't think anyone has since, either. I started to ask him what was so awful about Mentiroso. Too late. He set up the coordinates faster than a ghost can fart and the sweep came and got me instantly. The last thing I saw was the look of pity in his eyes. The next thing I saw, almost at once, was Mentiroso.

The other horror worlds I have visited-Alta Hannalanna, say, or Megalo Kastro-tell you right away what a nasty piece of work they are. You hate them at a single glance. From the air, though, Mentiroso seems acceptable enough. A standard human-type world: blue oceans, green vegetation, brown soil. A bit on the scruffy side, maybe, nothing much in the way of forests or mountain ranges, mostly a great rolling savannah from coast to coast. No apparent signs of higher life. (There's not much there, in fact, beyond some insects and lizards and a few simple unspecialized mammals. There's a good reason for that, too.) Small ice-caps at the poles, temperate climate elsewhere, breathable air maybe a touch too high on nitrogen, but that isn't serious. The weather is on the dry side. It all seems okay.

Then you land, and you plunge into hell.

You start feeling uneasy with your first breath. With your second the uneasiness begins edging into fear. One breath more and the fear turns into blind terror, and from then on it never lets up. You don't know what it is you're afraid of, and you never find out. It comes bubbling up through your entire body, your skin, your toes, your fingertips. Everything you have ever dreaded is boiling in you all at once. Your worst fantasies. The horned creature standing at your bedside in the dark. The little shining insects that march over your flesh when you're ill. The churning of the earth beneath your feet, and the mouth that opens before you. The silken fabric on the coffin lid that presses into your face as you lie there buried alive. The gust of wind that carries invisible needles. The one red eye watching you from the sky. The whispering behind you. The sudden jaws fastening between your legs.

It is a tangible presence, that fear that comes over you on Mentiroso. You feel it wrap around you like an icy sheet. You see it glimmering in the air like a wall of cold light. Your flesh crawls. Your balls try to climb up into your belly. Your teeth itch and tingle as though they're about to fall out all at once.

There is no escaping it wherever you turn. It pervades the whole planet. No one knows why. The place is haunted. There is a god dwelling there. Not God, but
a
god, and not a friendly one. Perhaps he is Pan, the old Greek goat whose specialty was causing panic. You see it still in his name,
panic
. Panic is what you feel on Mentiroso, hour after hour, a constant unending foreboding. Nothing bad ever actually happens to you. None of your dreads materialize. Yet there is never any surcease. You don't adapt to it; you don't grow numbed. You can't talk yourself out of it by telling yourself that it's a quirk of nature, that it's just something in the air. You simply go on and on, trembling with dread, every minute that you are there. Some minutes are worse than others but none of them is ever good. No wonder that there are no higher life-forms on Mentiroso. Wonderfully versatile though Mother Nature is, even she hasn't managed to evolve a complex organism with a nervous system capable of withstanding a whole lifetime of fear and trembling. The bugs and lizards evidently don't mind.

The worst of it is that the dread that Mentiroso inspires can be bottled and sold at a good price. There's a thriving market for it. I don't know which is worse: that there should be such a place as Mentiroso at all, or that human beings should have found a way to profit from the misery that that doleful planet spawns. I detest both ideas. You may wonder why such things should be. Do I know? Go ask God.

The man who found a way to turn the waking nightmare of Mentiroso into hard cash was named Nikos Hasgard. I grieve to tell you that there was Rom blood in him: he was a poshrat, a halfbreed, his father a Gajo from Sidri Akrak and his mother true Rom of Estrilidis. It was the Rom side of him that made him clever enough to see how to exploit a place like Mentiroso and the Gaje side that gave him the heartlessness to do it.

Hasgard was a small fleshless mean-faced man with eyes like whips and a mouth so tightly clamped that it was just a line beneath his nose.

You disliked him on sight. Not only was he willing to turn a profit on Mentiroso, he didn't seem to be bothered by living there for months at a stretch: that was how mean and tough he was. (Or maybe he was so twisted that he
liked
the things that Mentiroso does to your soul.)

The Hasgard process involves tapping into the neural discharges of human brains that have been exposed for prolonged periods to the anxieties that Mentiroso arouses. You sit there and quiver and cringe and the machine records your whole output of tension and apprehension and trepidation and unrest. It gets pumped into a psychoactive storage battery from which it can be played back at any time.

There are three levels of playback intensity. Level One gives you, so they tell me, a sort of interestingly creepy chill, the kind of thing that reading scary stories late at night will do. It's sheer entertainment, of a type that has always struck me as pretty dumb, but I suppose it's not my business how people choose to amuse themselves. Certainly Level One is harmless.

Level Two is not only harmless but is actually beneficial. What the customer receives at this degree of intensity is a jolt of energizing motivation that hits him the way a spur in the side hits a mule. A shot of Hasgard Two will carry you buoyantly through the most difficult and challenging job on a glorious wave of confidence and strength. It's strictly fight-or-flight stuff, the old primordial adrenalin lift, and there's no drug that compares with it. Sales of Hasgard Two activators must run to a billion cerces a year, maybe more. They say that use of it isn't addictive but I'm told it's very hard to do without the stuff once you begin using it regularly. I've tried it once or twice myself.

As for Hasgard Three, the official position of the Hasgard Corporation is that there's no such thing. That it's just somebody's paranoid fantasy, which has been whispered about so often that it has somehow taken on a kind of reality even though it doesn't exist. It does exist. After I became king I saw the reports on it. What Hasgard Three does is drive people out of their minds. A single dose of third-level Hasgard is the equivalent of five or ten years on Mentiroso rolled up and jammed into your mind in one stupefying cataclysmic rush. Strong people go crazy and weaker ones simply die. Despite vociferous denials by the Hasgard people and stringent efforts by the imperial customs authorities, this stuff somehow does get manufactured and is shipped all over the galaxy for use by criminals intent on torture, extortion, or murder. I include certain governmental agencies in the criminal category.

All three levels of Hasgard activators are produced on Mentiroso in the same way. You take your seat in what they call the synapse pit and the various electrodes and other recording devices are affixed to you. For the next six hours, as wave after wave of that peculiar and overwhelming terror that Mentiroso engenders in the human mind goes sweeping through you, your sensations are drained off and fed into storage units. That's all there is. The work is more difficult than it may sound-it's the psychic equivalent of giving blood, and you do it six hours a day-but you're highly paid for it, as slave labor goes; the living quarters are comfortable and the food isn't bad; during your off hours all manner of recreational opportunities are available to you. The trouble is that you feel so crappy all the time that you have very little interest in recreation. You just want to slog your way through your five-year indenture, collect your accrued salary, and get the hell out. If you leave before the five years are up you don't get paid at all: that's what being a slave means. Nevertheless a lot of Hasgard employees leave before the five years are up. As I recall the figures, one out of five goes insane in a way that makes him no longer useful in the synapse pit. One out of five breaks down and dies under the unending mental stress of life on Mentiroso or the strain of working in the pit, or both. And one out of ten commits suicide.

That means you have about a fifty-fifty chance of coming through your five years intact. These facts are not widely known, but they aren't exactly kept secret. In a more humane society, I suppose, the production of Hasgard activators by these methods would be prohibited. But you have to bear in mind that Level One activators are tremendously popular everywhere and that Level Two activators are widely regarded by most planetary governments nowadays as essential productivity-enhancing devices. And Level Three-well, there seems to be a steady demand for Level Three also.

When I took my place in the synapse pit that first day there was a little Rom sitting in the stirrups next to me, a small twitchy man some years younger than I with bright, quick eyes.

"Sarishan, cousin," I greeted him.

"You will love it here," he said. "You will bless the day you came to this delightful world. I am Polarca."

"Yakoub," I said. And I would have told him my family and tribe and planet of birth, but at that moment I trembled with sudden uncontrollable fear and I bent over with my head between my knees, working hard to keep from vomiting in my panic. It was as if some great sleeping beast had turned on its side within the depths of the planet and by its mere mindless movements had sent ripples of terror rumbling through my soul, sensations of malaise far more powerful than anything I had felt up to now. I was bitterly ashamed, to be seen in such a state of fear by another Rom, a man, a man younger than myself.

He touched his hand lightly to my shoulder.

"It happens to everyone," he said. "Just wait, ride it out. It only gets that bad a few times a day."

"What is it?" I asked when I could speak again. "What makes me feel like that? I've been here a day and a half and I haven't felt right for a single minute."

"No," Polarca said. "And you won't feel right again until you leave. Five-year indenture?"

"Yes."

"Same as me, then. Settle in and get used to it if you can. But nobody ever does."

He winced. He doubled over. The terror had him, now.

"Ah," he said, finally. "This world is cursed. This world is fucked. You didn't have any idea, did you?"

"None."

"I did. But I had no choice." He laughed. "Not that anyone ever has any choice. But at least I knew what I was getting into." He showed me how to attach myself to the recording equipment. My hands were shaking so much that he had to force them down on the arm-rests and press hard as he strapped me in. "There. You have to fulfill your quota, you know. You should hook yourself up the moment you come in. There's no use wasting time."

"What causes it, the way I feel here?"

He shrugged. "No one understands it. Some say it's an ionization effect. Some say it's something in the atmosphere. Some even that there are invisible and unmeasurable alien intelligences floating around everywhere here that simply like to give us psychic hotfoots. But all that sounds like vapor and bullshit to me. I think this place is simply the Devil's playground. He comes here for holidays and has a glorious time. It stands to reason that what the Devil loves would make ordinary people feel utterly shitty. And-" He paused. "Oh. Oh, God. Oh, Jesu Cretchuno! Melalo Ana Lilyi!" He doubled over again. I heard him sobbing and retching. After a time he sat up, white-faced, forehead shiny with sweat. His eyes had a haunted look. He managed a grin all the same.

"How much longer do you have to go here?" I asked.

"I've been here three weeks," he said. "Out of five years."

We were the only Rom in the synapse pit and we liked each other at once; and soon we were inseparable day and night. I suppose it was an attraction of opposites. I was big and even-tempered, he was little and volatile. I was Kalderash, he was Lowara. I tended to be hard-working and almost plodding in some ways, Polarca believed in cutting corners wherever he could. But we both knew how to laugh when what we really felt like doing was crying. His laugh was marvelous. If they could bottle Polarca's laugh it would outsell Hasgard Level Two anywhere. I loved him for his laugh alone. And for being Rom in this dreadful place where there were no others of our kind. Not just any sort of Rom, either. We were both of the true blood, which is not only a matter of genetics. You need to know a loyalty to something other than your own skin to be true Rom. Take Shandor. Shandor is a Rom by genetic heritage but I refuse to accept him as being of the true blood even though he is my son. Polarca, now-ah, Polarca is a Rom of the Rom!