Robert Silverberg - The Man In The Maze

“Not as much.” They entered the pod. “Longer, bluer, it was like the sea on a stormy day.” The pod shot off on a bath of quicksilver. She kept far to her side, hunched against the hatch. “And the makeup, too. I’m sorry, Marta. I wish I could like it.”

“I was prettying for your homecoming.”

“Why are you doing that with your lip?”

“What am I doing?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Here we are. The room is booked already?”

“In your name, yes.”

They went in. He put his hand on the registration plate. It flashed green and they headed for the liftshaft. The inn began in the fifth sublevel of the starport and went down for fifty levels; their room was near the bottom. Choice location, he thought. The bridal suite, maybe. They stepped into a room with kaleidoscopic hangings and a wide bed with all accessories. The roomglow was tactfully dim. Muller thought of months of woman cubes and a savage throbbing rose in his groin. He knew he had no need to explain any of that to Marta. She moved past him, into the personal room, and was in there a long while. Muller undressed.

She came out nude. All the tricky makeup was gone, and her hair was blue again.

“Like the sea,” she said. “I’m sorry I couldn’t grow it back in there. The room wasn’t programmed for it.”

“It’s much better now,” he told her.

They were ten meters apart. She stood at an angle to him, and he studied the contours of her frail but tough form, the small up-jutting breasts, the boyish buttocks, the elegant thighs.

“The Hydrans,” he said, “have either five sexes or none, I’m not sure which. That’s a measure of how well I got to know them while I was there. However they do it, I think people have more fun. Why are you standing over there, Marta?”

Silently she came toward him. He put one arm around her shoulders and cupped his other hand over one of her breasts. At other times when he did that he felt the nipple pebble-hard with desire against his hand. Not now. She quivered a little, like a shy mare wanting to bolt. He put his lips to her lips, and they were dry, taut, hostile. When he ran his hand along the fine line of her jaw she seemed to shudder. He drew her down and they sat side by side on the bed. Her hand reached for him, almost unwillingly.

He saw the pain in her eyes.

She rolled away from him, her head snapping back hard onto the pillow, and he watched her face writhe with some barely suppressed agony. Then she took his hands in hers and tugged him toward her. Her knees came up and her thighs opened.

“Take me, Dick,” she said stagily. “Right now!”

“What’s the hurry?”

She tried to force him onto her, into her. He wasn’t having it that way. He pulled free of her and sat up. She was crimson to the shoulders, and tears glistened on her face. He knew as much of the truth now as he needed to know, but he had to ask.

“Tell me what’s wrong, Marta.”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re acting like you’re sick.”

“I think I am.”

“When did you start feeling ill?”

“I—oh, Dick, why all these questions? Please, love, come close.”

“You don’t want me to. Not really. You’re being kind.”

“I’m—trying to make you happy, Dick. It—it hurts so much—so —much.”

“What does?”

She wouldn’t answer. She gestured wantonly and tugged at him again. He sprang from the bed.

“Dick, Dick, I warned you not to go! I said I had some precog.

And that other things could happen to you there besides getting killed.”

“Tell me what hurts you.”

“I can’t. I-don’t know.”

“That’s a lie.”

“When did it start?”

“This morning. When I got up.”

“That’s another lie. I have to have the truth!”

“Make love to me, Dick. I can’t wait much longer. I—”

“You what?”

“Can’t-stand—”

“Can’t stand what?”

“Nothing. Nothing.” She was off the bed too, rubbing against him, a cat in heat, shivering, muscles leaping in her face, eyes wild.

He caught her wrists and ground the bones together.

“Tell me what it is you can’t stand much longer, Marta.”

She gasped. He squeezed harder. She swung back, head lolling, breasts thrust toward the ceiling. Her body was oiled now with sweat. Her nakedness maddened and inflamed him.

“Tell me,” he said. “You can’t stand—”

“—being near you,” she said.

Within the maze the air was somehow warmer and sweeter. The walls must cut off the winds, Rawlins thought. He walked carefully, listening to the voice at his ear.

Turn left… three paces… put your right foot beside the black stripe on the pavement… pivot… turn left… jour paces… ninety-degree turn to the right… immediately make a ninety-degree turn to the right again.

It was like a children’s street game—step on a crack, break your mother’s back. The stakes were higher here, though. He moved cautiously, feeling death nipping at his heels. What sort of people would build a place like this? Ahead an energy flare spurted across the path. The computer called off the timing for him. One, two, three, four, five, GO! Rawlins went.

Safe.

On the far side he halted flatfooted, and looked back. Board-man was keeping pace with him, unslowed by age. Boardman waved and winked. He went through the patterns, too. One, two, three, jour, five, GO! Boardman crossed the place of the energy flare.

“Should we stop here for a while?” Rawlins asked. “Don’t be patronizing to the old man, Ned. Keep moving. I’m not tired yet.”

“We have a tough one up ahead.”

“Let’s take it, then.”

Rawlins could not help looking at the bones. Dry skeletons ages old, and some bodies that were not old at all. Beings of many races had perished here.

What if I die in the next ten minutes?

Bright lights were flashing now, on and off many times a second. Boardman, five meters behind him, became an eerie figure moving in disconnected strides. Rawlins passed his own hand before his face to see the jerky movements. It was as though every other fraction of a second had simply been punched out of his awareness.

The computer told him: Walk ten paces and halt. One. Two. Three. Walk ten paces and halt. One. Two. Three. Walk ten paces and halt. One. Two. Three. Proceed quickly to end of ramp.

Rawlins could not remember what would happen to him if he failed to keep to the proper timing. Here in Zone H the nightmares were so thick that he could not keep them straight in his mind. Was this the place where a ton of stone fell on the unwary? Where the walls came together? Where a cobweb-dainty bridge delivered victims to a lake of fire?

His estimated lifespan at this point was two hundred five years. He wanted to have most of those years. I am too uncomplicated to die yet, Ned Rawlins thought.

He danced to the computer’s tune, past the lake of fire, past the clashing walls.

Something with long teeth perched on the lintel of the door ahead. Carefully Charles Boardman unslung the gun from his backpack and cut in the proximity-responsive target finder. He keyed it for thirty kilograms of mass and downward, at fifty meters. “I’ve got it,” he told Rawlins, and fired.

The energy bolt splashed against the wall. Streaks of shimmering green sprouted along the rich purple. The beast leaped, limbs outstretched in a final agony, and fell. From somewhere came three small scavengers that began to rip it to pieces.

Boardman chuckled. It didn’t take much skill to hunt with proximity-responsives, he had to admit. But it was a long time since he had hunted at all. When he was thirty, he had spent a long week in the Sahara Preserve as the youngest of a party of eight businessmen and government consultants on a hunt. He had done it for the political usefulness of making the trip. He had hated it all: the steaming air in his nostrils, the blaze of the sun, the tawny beasts dead against the sand, the boasting, the wanton slaughter. At thirty one is not very tolerant of the mindless sports of the middle-aged. Yet he had stayed, because he thought it would be useful to him to become friendly with these men. It had been useful. He had never gone hunting again. But this was different, even with proximity-responsives. This was no sport.