Space Is Just a Starry Night Read online

  Around the great oval room long windows seemed to give on to a hot perfumed night, mobile only with the choruses of crickets. There were lush gardens out there, under the multiplicity of stars, the best constellations of ten planets, and beyond the garden, hills, the backs of black lions lying down. Now and then a moth or two fluttered like bright flakes of tissue past the open glass. They never came in. It might distract the customer.

  The roof apparently was also of glass, ribbed into vanes, like the ceiling of a conservatory. You saw the stars through it, and soon a huge white moon would come over, too big to be true.

  There were carpets on the walls. Draperies hung down, plum velvets, transparencies with embroidery and sequins, dividing the room like segments of a dream. Everything bathed in the aromatic smoke of a church of incense candles. The other scent was flowers. They bloomed out of the bodies of marble animals grouped around little oases of water thick with sinuous snakefish. Redblack flowers, albino flowers, flowers stained between red and white and black, gray flowers, fever and blush flowers, bushes of pale, sighing faints.

  The marble stair went up to shadows, reflected in the polished floor. If you looked in the floor at the reflection, presently something moved, upside down, a figure in fluid. Then you looked up again at the stair. And saw Malvanda, out of the shadows, coming down.

  Malvanda was tall and twenty-two years old, slim but not slender, her shoulders wide for elegance, her hips wide as if to balance panniers, her waist to be spanned by a man’s hands, her breasts high and firm and full to fill them, spill them. Malvanda’s skin was as white as the sorrow-flowers, with just that vague, almost-colorless flush at the temples, ear-lobes, hollow of the throat, insteps, wrists…that the sorrow-flowers had at the edges of their petals. She was platinum blonde. Flaxen hair without a trace of gold or yellow, hair white, like moonlight blanching metal. Her eyebrows were just two shades darker, but her lashes were like tarnished brass, and her eyes like untarnished brass. Wolf-color eyes, large; glowing now, fixed on him.

  A small movement of her head shifted the coils of platinum hair away, over her shoulder. The column of her throat went down and down into the crimson dress. The V of the neckline ended just under her breasts. She smiled a little, just a very little. Her lips were a softer crimson than the gown. Rose mouth. She began to come toward him, and her hand stole from her side, moving out to him ahead of her, as if it couldn’t wait to make contact.

  Beldek walked up to her, and, as the smooth hand floated to his arm, guided her fingers away. He ran his own hand in under the heavy silk hair to the base of her skull and touched.

  Switched off, Malvanda stood quite still, her lips slightly parted, her eyes dreaming, brazen, swimming with late afternoon veldt.

  Beldek ran his thumb around her throat and jabbed into the hollow. He pressed the second disc under her right ear and the third under her left index fingernail, deactivating the safety. There had to be a suitably obtuse series of pressures, to avoid random deactivation by a client when caressing her. Beldek knelt at Malvanda’s feet. He raised the hem of her gown and drew one flawless foot onto his knee. He gripped under the instep and drew out the power-booster from the panel.

  Then he got up and went around, undoing the cling-zip on the back of her gown. The keyboard opened where her lower spine should be. He compared it to the box of wires he had brought in, then selecting one of the fine plumbing needles, he began to work on her.

  After four and a half minutes he found the fault that might be responsible for the unfortunate click that had offended the aesthetic values of the Vyrainian. Two levers, the size of whiskers, had unaligned and were rubbing together. Looking through the magnifier, he eased them away and put in a drop of stabilizer. That area of the board could be overheating, causing the levers’ unwanted expansion together. He would need to check it again in a couple of days.

  Having closed the panel and sealed her dress, he replaced the power-booster in her foot. The gauge in her board had showed nearly full, so it was time to empty the sac before reactivating.

  Very gently, Beldek parted her beautiful carmine lips and reached in, past the beautiful teeth, to the narrow tube of throat.

  The sac was not too easy to come at, of course. When Qire took him on, the first two things he had wanted to see were Beldek’s hands. Articulate and long-fingered, they had passed the test.

  Beldek was halfway through disposing of the sac’s contents when he heard a noise behind him.

  The moon was coming up over the glass ceiling, augmenting the candle-and-lamplight. Not that he really needed it to see Chakki, transfixed there, against the curtain with his mouth open and his eyes bulging.

  Before coming in, Beldek always cut off the voyeur-button, both on the console and in the office cubicle. At such times as this, the computer would only release the black lacquer door to Beldek. Somehow, Chakki had found a way either to fool the computer or to force the door.

  “What the Garbundian Hop-Hell are you doing, Beldek?” said Chakki, all agog.

  “Emptying the sac,” said Beldek. “As you saw.”

  “Yeah but —” Chakki burst into a wild laugh. “Holla, man. You’re kinkier than I ever thought.”

  Chakki, unable to spy in the usual way, had obviously badly wanted to see Beldek in operation with Malvanda. Chakki had always, blatantly, imagined Beldek liked to get free what the patrons paid for. If he’d managed an entry one minute earlier, or one minute later, it need not have mattered.

  “Kinkier than you thought? Of course I am, Chakki.” Beldek resettled the sac in Malvanda’s mouth and let it go down the throat. Always an easier maneuver this, than retraction. He keyed on the relays. Malvanda did not move just yet. She took a moment to warm up after de-activation. “I suppose I’ll have to bribe you, now, Chakki. Won’t I?”

  Chakki giggled. He looked nervous. In a second he would start to back away.

  “How about,” said Beldek, “a free ride with Malvanda?” Then he sprinted, faster than any alley cat, straight through the candlelamp moonlight. He caught Chakki like a lover. “How about that?” he asked, and Chakki shivered against him, scared now, but not quite able to make up his mind to run.

  Beldek led him firmly, kindly stroking him a little, to the center of the floor where Malvanda had been left standing.

  As they got near, her eyelids flickered.

  “She’s something,” said Chakki. “Maybe I could come round tonight.”

  “Busy tonight. Do it now. You always wanted to. Have fun.”

  Chakki’s shiver grew up into a shudder; he glanced toward the curtained door. Then Malvanda woke up.

  Beldek moved aside. Malvanda’s hand went to Chakki’s face, sensuous and sure.

  She was taller than Qire’s runner, Beldek’s height. Her mouth parted naturally now, the wonderful strange smile inviting, certain. Just showing the tips of the teeth.

  This time, Beldek would watch.

  Chakki wriggled, still afraid. But the drugs in the candles were affecting him by now, and the water-lily touches, on the neck, the chest, slipping, lingering. He put out one hand, careful, into her neckline, and found a breast. Half-frightened, aroused, wanting approval, he looked at Beldek. “She feels real.”

  “She’s meant to, Chakki.”

  “Hey, I never really saw what you —”

  “That’s okay, Chakki. Enjoy.”

  Malvanda’s strawberry tongue ran over Chakki’s lips. Her left arm held him like a loved child; her right hand moved like a small trusting animal seeking shelter, and discovered it, there in Chakki’s groin, and played and tickled, and burrowed and coiled.

  They were on the couch now. Chakki with his clothes off, handfuls of Malvanda’s gown clenched in his fists, his nose between her breasts, was writhing and squeaking. Malvanda bent her head to do the thing they paid for, the thing Chakki had not paid for — the true thrill, the perverse unique titillation that Malvanda offered. Her platinum hair fell over them, obscuring. But Beldek knew wh
at went on under the wave of hair. Chakki was coming, noisily and completely, the way most of them did.

  Beldek walked quickly across to the couch. He tapped Malvanda on the right shoulder, just once.

  He had had the maintenance of her a long while. He had been able to innovate a little, a very little. Enough. Provision for a Chakki day.

  Chakki was subsiding. Then struggling.

  “Beldek,” he said, “she’s still — ah — Christ — Beldek!” His arms flailed and his legs as, naked and puny, Chakki tried to push Malvanda away. But Malvanda was strong as only a machine could be. She held him down, pinned beneath her, her marmoreal body oblivious of the kicks and scratches that did not even mar its surface as she went on doing what Beldek had just told her to go on doing.

  Ignoring the screams that gradually became more frenzied and hopeless, Beldek walked out of Malvanda’s Mansion.

  The marks where the door had been forced were not bad but quite plain. A paint job would see to it. Chakki would have planned to do that before Qire got back. Now Qire would have to see them.

  Beldek shut the door, and Chakki’s last wailing thinning shrieks were gone.

  Just before suns’ set, Beldek called Qire on the interphone. He broke the news mildly: Qire’s runner had got through the Mansion door when Beldek was in the bathroom. Entering the Mansion to check Malvanda, Beldek found Chakki. He had died of hemorrhage and shock, the way the two others had. There was, obviously, no disclaimer. What did Quire want him to do?”

  He could hear the boss-man sweating all along the cable from Next Valley.

  “You called anyone else, Beldek?”

  “No.”

  “The pol?”

  “Not yet.”

  He listened to Qire bubbling over, over there. The two prior deaths in Qire’s pavilion made things awkward, despite all the cover on the world. This third death, minus cover, could look like shoddy goods. And Chakki was a private matter. Beldek had known what Qire would do.

  “All right. Don’t call ’em. You listening, Beldek?”

  “Oh yes, Mr Qire. Most attentively.”

  “Don’t scad me, Beldek. I’m gonna give you a number. You call that. Someone’ll come see to things. Okay?”

  “Anything you say, Mr Qire.”

  “And keep your mouth shut.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Qire gave him the number, and he used it. The voice at the other end was mechanized. He said to it the brace of phrases Qire had briefed him with; then there were noises and the line went blind.

  The suns were stubbed out, and the wild flame wheels began to turn on the sky of Indian ink, and the colored arsons shot across the arena bowl below, and the carousels practiced their siren-songs and got them perfect.

  Someone came and tried to breach the darkened pavilion.

  Beldek went out and stood on the lawn.

  Two Pheshines stared from their steamy eyes, lashing their tails in the grass.

  “Dena mi ess, condlu ess, sollu ess. Dibbit?”

  Beldek told them, in Phesh, the show was closed. The gentlephesh did dibbit and went off spitting to each other.

  The nondescript carry-van drew up an hour later. Men walked into the kiosk and presently into the Mansion. They walked out with a big plastic bag and took it away.

  Beldek had already cleaned up, before they came. Not much later, Beldek lit the pavilion and opened for business, but no one else stopped by that night.

  Beldek sat up in the tall echoing hills, watching the dawn borning and the Nightfair slink to ground.

  Malvanda, had she been real, would not have been able to do this. Sunlight was anathema to Malvanda’s kind. Sunlight and mirrors and garlic-flowers, and thorns and crucifixes and holy wafers, and running water. It just went to show.

  Beldek leaned back on the still-cool slate, looking down the four-by-five miles of the valley.

  Gorgeous Malvanda, Terran turn-on, Phesh tashsa-mi, Venusian wet dream; Angel of Orgasm, kiss of death. Malvanda, the Beautiful Biting Machine. Malvanda the robot vampire.

  He didn’t know her whole history, how some sick-minded talent had thought her up and put her together. Her place of origin was a mystery. But what she did; he knew that. A connoisseur’s sexual desideratum. The actual bite was controlled to a hair’s breadth by her keyboard. The teeth went in, naturally. She sucked out blood. That’s what they paid for, was it not? Money’s worth. Blood money. Only a little, of course. More would be dangerous. And the teeth left built-in coagulant behind them, zippering up the flesh all nice. Unimpaired, the client staggers forth, only a bit whoozy. A bite whoozy.

  Some of them even came back, days, months, years later, for another turn.

  It was harmless, unless you were sick, had some weakness…

  Or unless Beldek tapped Malvanda’s right shoulder that particular way he had when she was with Chakki. Then another key snapped down its command through her wires and circuits. And Malvanda kept on biting, biting and sucking like a bloody vacuum cleaner. Till all the blood was in Malvanda’s throat sac and spilling over and on the floor and everywhere. But Beldek had cleaned that away and bathed her and changed her gown before Qire’s goon friends arrived with their big plastic bag.

  It had been fairly uncomplex to tidy his mistake, this time. But he must beware of mistakes from now on. Tomorrow, today, Beldek would work something out to make the Mansion door impregnable.

  Even so, Beldek didn’t really mind too much. It had been a bonus, all that blood. Better than just the contents of the sac, which Chakki had, unfortunately for Chakki, seen Beldek drinking earlier.

  Beldek sunned himself on the hills for several hours. He never browned in sunshine, but he liked it, it was good for him. His hair, the tone of Malvanda’s eyes, gleamed and began playfully to curl.

  When he strolled back through the valley, the Fair was in its somnolent jackal-and-bone midday phase. Qire’s buggy was at the entry to the pavilion. Qire was inside, in the Mansion, pawing Malvanda over, and the furnishings, making sure everything had been left as the customers would wish to find it.

  Beldek followed him in.

  “I should throw you out on your butt,” said Qire.

  “Throw me out,” said Beldek. “I’ll have some interesting stories to tell.”

  Qire glared.

  “Don’t think you can make anything outa what happened. It was your, for Christ’s sake, negligence.”

  They both knew Qire would never fire him. Beldek was too handy at the job. And knew too much. And would be too difficult to dispose of.

  Presently they went into the office, and Qire handed Beldek a sheaf of large notes. “Any noise,” said Qire, “something might happen you might not be happy about. And fix that damn door. She seems okay. She damaged at all?”

  “No. Still what your pamphlets say. The Night-Blooming Bella Donna of Eternal Gothic Fantasy.”

  When Qire had gone, Beldek listened to symphonies on music crystals in the office.

  It had always rather fascinated him, the way in which vampires, a myth no one any longer believed, had become inextricably and dependently connected with sex. Actually, vampirism had nothing to do with sex. Beldek could have told them that. Just as it had nothing to do with sunlight or mirrors or crosses. It was simply and solely (though not soully) about basic nourishment.

  Later, he set the program for the night. He had a premonition there would be a lot of custom. Somehow, without anyone knowing about it in any logical way, some enticing whiff of velvet morbidity would be blowing around the pavilion, luring them in like flies. The sac would have to be emptied many times tonight, in Beldek’s own special way, which was not the way in which the instruction manual advocated.

  Just before it got dark and he lit up the lights to match the exploding ignition of the Fair, Beldek looked in on Malvanda. She had been returned to her shadowy alcove above the marble stair and was waiting there for the first client to come in and gaspingly watch her descend. Beldek climbed the steps, and
brushed her platinum hair and refilled the perfumery glands behind her ears.

  He cared nothing for the sentient races that were his prey. But for the beautiful biting machine, he felt a certain malign affection. Why not? After a century or so of insecure, monotonous, and frequently inadequate hit-and-miss hunting, which left little space for other pursuits, the Nightfair had provided Beldek the softest option on twenty worlds. Now Malvanda saw to everything. She paid his bills. She kept him fed.

  Moon Wolf

  The carrier rose into the clear sky of dusk. Below, the shadowy trees whispered on the darkening hills. Above, the white moon waited.

  “You for Crisium Base?” said Edwards. “Me too. Guess we’ll ride out together.”

  Bayley nodded. She looked away from the see-through, where the earth had already shrunk aside and the night of space begun, littered with its incendiaries.

  “Been some funny stories,” said Edwards.

  “Ha, ha.”

  “No, I mean weird-funny.”

  “So I heard.”

  “What do you think?”

  She shrugged. “I think people on the bases get bored sometimes. Or primally scared. All that white naked desert. The black sky with the Earth hanging in it.”

  “Come on. After all this time?”

  “Why else do we go?” she said.

  Edwards, sitting now across from her, narrowed his eyes along the length of the otherwise empty carrier.

  “You always were fanciful, Chrissie.”

  Bayley smiled.

  He said, “OK, but you are.”

  Bayley said, “Never go to a horror movie, Al?”

  “So what?”

  “We sometimes like to get frightened. Don’t you remember when you were a kid, staying behind in the park after the gates shut, in the wild bits where the lights don’t shine —”

  “Lots of times. But I had several good reasons. They were usually blonde.”

  “Fine. But what I mean is the darkness, what might be in the dark. That electric, almost drunken terror — either you know what I mean or you don’t.”