Robert Silverberg: The Planet Killers

“I’ll stay here,” Gardner said. “You know this planet better than I do, so it’s easier for you to move around. Take Continent East as your position.”

Smee sighed. “Very well. I’ll be there when the time comes.”

A very special geographical distribution was necessary if the generator were to-produce its desired effect. Lines of force had to be drawn through the planet, pole to pole, hemisphere to hemisphere. The Five would be together only at the very end, after the generators had been activated, when they fled to safety in Gardner’s ship.

Gardner began to regret having decided to meet Smee personally. The plan was so established that there was no real need for the five conspirators to have actual personal contact. When the indicator band would glow on all five’ wrists in all five colors, the time would have come, and each man would know where he was to be and what he was to do.

Gardner looked at the rings under Smee’s deep-set, sad eyes and shivered. Six months of waiting, and Smee was still here; but how much damage had this hellishly prolonged assignment done to his soul?

“I think I’ll be going,” Gardner said. “You woke me up. I haven’t slept in a while. And we’ve covered all the ground we need to cover.”

Smee’s hand shot out and caught Gardner’s wrist with a surprisingly powerful grip.

“Why not wait? I asked you to come here for a specific reason. There’s a floor show starting in ten minutes. You may find it interesting.”

“I’d rather—”

“Please wait,” Smee said strangely. He was half cajoling, half commanding. “The floor show here is quite unique. I… find it healthy to watch it.”

“Healthy?”

“You’ll understand. I’m sure that watching it will benefit you as it does me.”

“What kind of benefit?”

“Remain and watch.”

Gardner shrugged. Smee seemed almost desperately insistent. And he was wide awake now anyway. “All right,” he said. “I’ll stay.”

Leaning back, he took another sip of the khall. He could see how Davis had grown so fond of it. Its taste was insidious, growing in intensity as one kept on drinking it, and it could easily become compulsive. Probably Gardner thought, it even had mild narcotic qualities. All in all, it was a good drink to stay away from, except when being sociable.

A few minutes passed, and then three burly-looking Lurioni appeared and began to clear to one side the tables in the front of the room. At the touch of a button, the streetfront windows were opaqued, to keep outsiders from getting free looks.

“It’s starting,” Smee murmured. “Be prepared for something nasty.”

Gardner waited tensely. A sphincter in the wall just to his right irised open. There was a silent hush in the bar.

A beam of blue light wriggled through the opening in the wall, spun dizzingly across the opposite wall in wild circles, and came to rest finally in sharp focus. A bolt of bright yellow followed, spearing into the blue. The colors twined, moved snakily along the wall, suddenly blanked out.

Then two Lurioni stepped through.

They came to the center of the floor and stood there, bathed in light, unmoving, while from the regular patrons there arose a rhythmic stamping of the feet that was the local variety of applause. Gardner noticed that Smee, too, was pounding the floor.

The Lurioni were a man and a woman wearing only the briefest of loincloths. A harsh red light shot down from the ceiling and illuminated their thin, knobby-jointed bodies. Gardner studied them with interest.

They were particularly lean specimens of their race, thin and bony, extremely tall. The man was near seven feet in height, Gardner estimated, while the woman was at least a six-footer. They stood quite still, moving not a muscle, until the stamping of feet died away.

Then the two in the center of the floor began to dance to the accompaniment of grave music that came piping from a grille set-high on one wall near the ceiling. Their motions were stiff, precise, jerky. Gardner winced a litde at the music; he had a delicate sense of pitch, and the excruciating quarter-tone intervals and the jarring, totally unpredictable discordancies affected him strongly.

The music accelerated, and so did the dancers. The offstage instruments struck a clashing chord so oddly tonal that it seemed wildly misplaced in that symphony of dissonances, and the female dancer went into an awkward pirouette.

She spun for a moment, spidery arms akimbo, one long leg drawn up so her foot touched her other knee. Then, breaking the pose, she fumbled at the belt of her loincloth. Long arms whirled. A knife flashed in the red spotlight, and a red line of blood traced itself down the golden chest of the male dancer.

Gardner caught his breath sharply. “What sort of unholy dance is this?”

Smee smiled mellowly, sitting back with his thumbs hooked into his belt. “Entertainment here runs to the morbid side,” he said. “If we’re lucky, maybe the management was able to afford to hire a kill tonight. There hasn’t been one here in weeks.” Smee took.another drink, grinning complacently.

Gardner felt cold. It seemed to him that Smee relished the weird dance taking place, that he had insisted on Gardner’s seeing it only because he wanted the company of his own kind.

The dance continued, unwinding inexorably. The unseen musicians spun out their mercilessly complicated nonmelodies, and the dancers kept pace with the tempo, moving now at a frenzied pace. Their dark bodies were glistening with sweat.

The male dancer had a knife, too, Gardner saw; it flickered momentarily in the seven-fingered hands as he struck, and a line of blood appeared between the girl’s breasts. Another tonal chord echoed in the rooml the dancers separated, gliding as if on bearings to opposite ends of the area. Polarized there, they spun in tight circles and glided back, coming together again under the red spotlight.

They passed by each other on tiptoe, taking little mincing steps, and the girl’s knife slit the man’s arm from elbow to shoulder. Each of the knife-strokes was precise, delicate, not a crude butcher-swing; Gardner guessed that none of the cuts penetrated very much deeper than the outer layers of the skin.

But even skin cuts are painful, and by now the bodies of both dancers were criscrossed and streaked with slashes. And, as Gardner looked around, he saw the patrons—Lurioni, chiefly, with a thin sprinkling of outworlders—staring eagerly at the pair, waiting eagerly for the climax of the dance.

An invisible drum began beating a numbing tattoo. A flute wailed atonally.

Blood mingled with sweat. The dancers closed, danced lightly apart, rejoined. Each time they passed one another, a cut was inflicted. They seemed to be outdoing each other in the attempt to make the delivery and placing of the wound as artistic as possible. Their faces remained as rigidly emotionless as those of masks in a museum cabinet. Gardner wondered if the dancers saw the knife coming before the moment of pain, and whether the kiss of the blade had any effect at all.

“Don’t they feel the cuts?” he asked.

“Of course not,” Smee said. “It would ruin the dance. They’re doped to the eyebrows and hardly know what’s going on. It’s the customers who feel it vicariously.”

Looking around, Gardner saw that Smee had told the truth. Total empathy had been achieved. The Lurioni patrons sat stiffly, rocking back and forth, grunting a little each time a wound was inflicted, grinning fiercely, swaying and murmuring. They seemed to be participating in some blasphemous rite. Gardner found himself falling into the wild, chaotic rhythm of the music, and nervously checked himself lest some dark impulse take hold of him.