Fritz Leiber - Horrible Imaginings

For, with smoke and flame squirting through the little round holes, and the whole suitcase jerking and shaking with the recoils, eight slugs drummed out and almost cut Anton Larsen in two.

Two things will last to the end of time, at least for the tribes of Western Man, no matter how far his spaceships rove. They are sorcery and romantic love, which come to much the same thing in the end.

For the more that becomes possible to man, the more wildly he yearns for the impossible, and runs after witches and sorcerers to find it.

While the farther he travels, to the star-ribboned rim of the Milky Way and beyond, the more he falls in love with far-off things and yearns for the most distant and unattainable beloved.

Also, witchcraft and sorcery are games it takes two to play; the witch or sorcerer and his or her client.

The oldest and wealthiest man in the Milky Way and its loveliest girl laughed as they left the gypsy’s tent pitched just outside the jewel-pillared space-field of the most exclusive pleasure planet between the galaxy’s two dizzily-whirling, starry arms. The gypsy’s black cat, gliding past them back into the tent, only smiled cryptically.

A private, eiderdown-surfaced slidewalk, rolled out like the red carpet of ancient cliche, received the begemmed slippers of the honeymooning couple and carried them toward the most diamond-glittering pillar of them all, the private hyperspace yacht Eros of the galactic shipping magnate Piliph Foelitsack and his dazzling young bride Annaoj.

He looked 21 and was 20 times that old. Cosmetic surgery and organ replacements and implanted featherweight power-prosthetics and pacemakers had worked their minor miracles. At any one time there were three physicians in the Eros listening in on the functionings of his body.

She looked and was 17, but the wisdom in her eyes was that of Eve, of Helen of Troy, of Cleopatra, of Forzane. It was also the wisdom of Juliet, of Iseult, of Francesca da Rimini. It was a radiant but not a rational wisdom, and it had a frightening ingredient that had been known to make nurses and lady’s maids and the wives of planetary presidents and systemic emperors shiver alike.

Together now on the whispering white slidewalk, planning their next pleasures, they looked the pinnacle of cosmic romance fulfilled—he dashing and handsome and young, except that there was something just a shade careful about the way he carried himself; she giddy and slim with a mind that was all sentimental or amorous whim, except for that diamond touch of terrifying fixed white light in her most melting or mischievous glance. Despite or perhaps because of those two exceptions, they seemed more akin to the sparkling stars above them than even to the gorgeous pleasure planet around them.

He had been born in a ghetto on Andvari III and had fought his way up the razor-runged ladder of economic power until he owned fleets of hyperspace freighters, a dozen planets, and the governments of ten times that many.

She had been born in a slum on Aphrodite IV, owning only herself. It had taken her six Terran months to bring herself to the attention of Piliph Foelitsack by way of three beauty contests and one bit part in a stereographic all-senses sex-film, and six more months to become his seventeenth wife instead of one more of his countless casual mistresses.

The beepers of social gossip everywhere had hinted discreetly about the infatuation-potential of fringe senile megabillionaires and the coldly murderous greed of teenage starlets. And Annaoj and Piliph Foelitsack had smiled at this gossip, since they knew they loved each other and why: for their matching merciless determination to get what they wanted and keep it, and for the distance that had been between them and was no longer. Of the two, Annaoj’s love was perhaps the greater, accounting for the icy, fanatic glint in her otherwise nymphet’s eyes.

They had laughed on leaving the drab tent of the gypsy fortuneteller, who herself owned a small, beat-up spaceship covered with cabalistic signs, because the last thing she had said to the shipping king, fixing his bright youthful eyes with her bleared ones, had been, “Piliph Foelitsack, you have journeyed far, very far, for such a young man, yet you shall make even longer journeys hereafter. Your past travels will be trifles compared to your travels to come.”

Both Piliph and Annaoj knew that he had been once to the Andromeda Galaxy and twice to both Magellanic Clouds, though they had not told the silly old gypsy so, being despite their iron wills kindly lovers, still enamored of everything in the cosmos by virtue of their mutual love. They also knew that Piliph had determined to restrict his jauntings henceforth to the Milky Way, to keep reasonably close to the greatest geriatric scientists, and they were both reconciled, at least by day, to the fact that despite all his defenses, death would come for him in ten or twenty years.

Yet, although they did not now tell each other so, the gypsy’s words had given a spark of real hope to their silly night-promises under the stars like gems and the galaxies like puffs of powder that: “We will live and love forever.” Their loveliest night had been spent a hundred light-years outside the Milky Way—it was to be Piliph’s last extragalactic venture—where the Eros had emerged briefly from hyperspace and they had lolled and luxuriated for hours under the magnifying crystal skylight of the Master Stateroom, watching only the far-off galaxies, with all of their moiling, toiling home-galaxy out of sight beneath the ship.

But now, as if the cryptic universe had determined to give an instant sardonic rejoinder to the gypsy’s prediction, the eiderdown slidewalk had not murmured them halfway to the Eros when a look of odd surprise came into Piliph’s bright youthful eyes and he clutched at his heart and swayed and would have toppled except that Annaoj caught him in her strong slender arms and held him to her tightly.

Something had happened in the body of Piliph Foelitsack that could not be dealt with by all its pacemakers and its implanted and remotely controlled hormone dispensers, nor by any of the coded orders frantically tapped out by the three physicians monitoring its organs and systems.

It took thirty seconds for the ambulance of the Eros to hurtle out from the yacht on a track paralleling the slidewalk and brake to a bone-jolting silent halt.

During that half minute Annaoj watched the wrinkles come out on her husband’s smooth face, like stars at nightfall in the sky of a planet in a star cluster. She wasted one second on the white-hot impulse to have the gypsy immediately strangled, but she knew that the great aristocrats of the cosmos do not take vengeance on its vermin and that in any event she had far more pressing business with which to occupy herself fully tonight. She clasped the pulseless body a trifle more tightly, feeling the bones and prosthetics through the layer of slack flesh.

In two minutes more, in the surgery of the Eros, Piliph’s body was in a dissipatory neutrino field, which instantly sent all its heat packing off at the speed of light, but in particles billions of times slimmer than the photons of heat, so that the body was supercooled to the temperature of frozen helium without opportunity for a single disruptive crystal to form.

Then without consulting the spacefield dispatching station or any other authority of the pleasure planet, Annaoj ordered the Eros blasted into hyperspace and driven at force speed to the galaxy’s foremost geriatrics clinic on Menkar V, though it lay halfway across the vast Milky Way.

During the anxious, grueling trip, she did only one thing quite out of the ordinary. She had her husband’s supercooled body sprayed with a transparent insulatory film, which would adequately hold its coolth for a matter of days, and placed in the Master Stateroom. Once a week the body was briefly returned to the dissipatory neutrino field, to bring its temperature down again to within a degree of zero Kelvin.