Barrington Bayley - The Zen Gun

The pink stitching wavered leisurely through the air. It entered the window, sparked on the girl’s breasts. First the left breast, then the right breast, then the left breast… prodding at the nipples.

The girl doubled up, her mouth agape in a soundless grimace of agony, clutching at herself, hitting at her breasts as if she could strike off the pain. But she could not strike it off.. Pout kept pointing the gun, directing the stitches with his mind. Left breast, right breast…

His sparse pelt became damp. Unlike other primates, Nascimento’s chimera had both sweat glands and fur.

At last she managed to get her breath long enough to scream, and in a minute other people rushed into the room. Pout slid back down the bank, put away his gun, and began to lope towards the horizon, keeping low and hiding himself behind the tall tufts of coarse grass.

Once he paused. He thought he saw the glimmerings of a falling star in the sky overhead, but then it turned into a white dot which drifted down and finally disappeared.

When he was out of sight of the village he slowed his pace. It was an hour before he returned to his group of followers. Apart from the kosho , who as usual sat cross-legged off by himself, they were gathered round a wood fire.

It was not yet dark, and Pout saw straight away that a stranger sat among his half dozen slaves. He bared his teeth briefly, a reflex of uncertainty, and put his hand to his bib to feel the comforting stock of his gun.

At his approach, they rose. The stranger was staring at him. It was a female, a young woman with a pale, blunt face and black cropped hair. She had a restless, energetic way of moving, a way of looking at one directly, that disconcerted him a little. She wore a form-hugging body garment of sheened black and silver, calf-high black boots, and a wide waist belt that held, among other things, what looked like a scangun. Although bare-headed, she carried a transparent globe helmet in one hand.

“You’re Pout,” she said at once, not waiting for him to speak.

Lacey, the prairie bum who, after the kosho and the boy had been Pout’s first convert, sidled close to Pout and spoke softly in his humble, apologetic way. “She just came in,” he mumbled. “Some kinda shipwreck… dropped outa the sky in an escape capsule. She gave us some grub.” He held out his hand, offering a stick of emergency rations. Pout took it, sniffed, then bit. It was chewy, if not too appetising. He gulped it down, then licked his fingers.

The girl, Hesper Positana, gazed at him with distaste. Her survival egg had come down a couple of miles away. She had been trying to make for what looked like some inhabited structures on a plain to the west, but hadn’t quite made it—the rotors had no power of their own but came down sycamore-seed style, using the early part of the drop to store energy in a flywheel. You were supposed to use this for a few miles of powered flight at a few thousand feet high.

In the end, when she started to lose height, she had spotted the smoke from the campfire. She was almost beginning to wish she hadn’t, because she had landed among a bunch of very odd people. First there was Lacey, some sort of psychological inadequate who she gathered was in the habit of wandering the grasslands that dominated this part of the planet, living off any small animals he could trap. Of the others, four seemed to be brothers who had been thrown out of their community for unspecified crimes, and were now looking for somewhere else to live. Only the boy, Sinbiane, appeared to be normal.

Most peculiar of all was the one who sat by himself in the gathering dark. He was a kosho . Very vaguely, she had heard something about koshos , but had never expected to see one.

Lacey had told her their leader was a chimeric ape called Pout. They had spoken of him with a sort of grumbling admiration, all except Sinbiane, who had said openly to her: “Pout is a bad creature, lady. You should go away. He holds these people under subjection with his gun.”

“I have a gun,” Hesper had said, patting her holster.

“The kosho ’s got lots of guns, though,” one of the brothers had said. “Throw tubes, too.”

Just then Pout himself had turned up, and she couldn’t understand how even these people—like Lacey, the brothers didn’t strike her as being any too bright—could allow themselves to be dominated by him. The chimera stared at her, large eyes blinking.

“You come off a spaceship?”

“Yes.”

“From another world?”

“That’s right.”

The thought excited Pout. She prompted the same feelings in him the girl in the village had. He allowed his eyes to rove over her, and then to fix on her breasts. He imagined the stitches of the zen gun playing with them, her body writhing. His jaw became slack.

Hesper put a hand on her hip, and nodded westward. “There are some big towers or buildings or something in that direction. I’m making for them.”

“Cities. We are going there. You want to join us? First you give me that.” He pointed to the scangun in her belt.

She took a step back. “Oh no you don’t. That’s mine.”

“All right.” Pout gestured to the horizon. “Off you go, then. On your own.”

“Okay I will.” Hesper turned and pushed her way through the group to stalk away from the camp. She kept a wary eye on the chimera, but did not see him give a signal to one of the brothers. Before she had got very far she stopped, gasped, and whirled round, her hand on her empty gun holster.

“How did you do that?” she screeched frustratedly to the brother as he tossed the scangun to a delighted Pout. She hadn’t felt anything. Only when she put her hand on the holster out of concern for what the chimera might do had she discovered the flap was unfastened and the weapon gone.

“It’s our skill, lady. It’s what we do.” The brother, a youth in his early twenties, smiled broadly.

“Pickpockets,” she murmured. She stood nonplussed, while Pout crooned and chuckled over his new acquisition. Though it was but a toy compared with the zen gun, he had always wanted one.

He knew something about how to make it work. A modern scangun fired a needle-beam of coherent light which was refracted through an oscillating prism to scan a six foot by two foot rectangle—or whatever size of target it was set for.

With a scanning density of a thousand lines per inch, the effect was more or less total disintegration. Pout raised the gun and peered at the little screen that displayed whatever the muzzle was pointed at. His thumb moved a grooved wheel by the side of the screen. That was the focusing ring: when the target became unblurred and just filled the screen, you were ready to fire.

He pointed it at a twisted tree that stood on a knoll a little further off. Under his thumb, the tree shrank until its branches just brushed the edges of the screen and the picture became sharp. Pout pressed the firing stud. The brief blue ray was an odd sight: not parallel, like ordinary coherent light, but divergent because of the way it scanned.

The tree erupted momentarily and disappeared in a crackle of smoke and drifting ash.

Pout whooped for joy.

Hesper walked slowly back into the light of the campfire and stood boldly before him. “Are you going to give me my gun back?” she asked wearily.

He eyed her. “Why don’t you stay with us, lady? Travel to the plain cities with us. We’ll be good to you. Lacey knows how to catch animals for food. Do you know how to catch animals? You haven’t got enough eating sticks to last long. Better not to be alone.”

She hesitated, confused. She couldn’t fathom this set-up. But, apart from the half-animal, they seemed harmless—and even Pout hadn’t threatened her.