The Embrace of the Four-Armed Houri

by Danielle L. Parker

part 3 of 4

The lumens were first quality. Blunt let his last handful of luminous blue stones slide from his palm with an impatient nod.

“They’re good,” he said curtly. “I’ll write the draft for twelve thousand five hundred EMU. Agreed?”

And that was that. Moments later, with his small but precious cargo stowed, his ramp retracted, and the over-powered engines of his small shuttle shaking to life, Blunt sat frowning in front of his console. He tapped his long fingers on the arm of his captain’s chair in a staccato rhythm. His business was done. He was free to go — if he wanted to.

Every spacer had this nightmare. Roger Dahlstrom, one of the oldest and most experienced traders on the Rim, had been summarily decapitated on some backwater world, all because he had shown the sole of his boot to the local ruler by thoughtlessly crossing his long legs. Too late, the captain learned the punishment for the dread insult he had unwittingly delivered.

Sten Kowalski, a hulking Pole who had once bested a seven-foot, gorilla-strong Denobian in a legendary bar fight, had come out the loser in another such incident. He had solicited what he took for a sweet-faced girl. The girl had been a priest and a eunuch. For his blasphemy, the mighty Pole died with his heart in the small hands of his would-be love object.

Then there was Red Irish, who sneered at the rat-like entrée of an Asp’s dinner in Cameltown, and died, seconds later, with a venomous claw dug deep into his throat.

The Rim was the edge of the universe. The shadows of both distant Earth and Asp, her rival, fell across it, but the rule of law was uncertain. Humans changed out of recognition, warped by the influence of foreign soils and eager merging of sperm and cultures with a thousand unnamed species.

So what business of his was it if the inhabitants of another two-bit Rim world appeased the local volcano every year by dropping a maiden down its throat?

No doubt he was already too late. For one night, he and she had done what men and women had done together through the centuries. He had made no promises. He scarcely knew her name. But, by heaven, it was enough...

Blunt flew for the mountain.

The great cone stood dominant, a living Everest shaped by fire and ash. Its febrile heart lit the smoke-blackened sky. It spewed forth incandescent guts in a ceaseless rain of molten cinders. Lightning stuttered through its endless cloud. It stank of poison and the brimstone heart of hell. It was a mighty pustule on the skin of the world, an inflamed boil that could never be appeased or salved, even by the death of a woman.

Blunt’s fist knotted around his joystick. “Screw you,” he whispered. “I’ll leave all of you in ashes, if you’ve killed her.”

She had cried, when he rested panting beside her, wordless in the aftermath of his first shuddering release. But it had not been for the pain of her lost maidenhead. He knew now why she had wept. Tomorrow is my wedding day.

The shuttle was not meant to hover. The engines that rocketed it out of a gas giant’s heavy gravity were not easily throttled. The captain reined back his shuddering vessel like a bridled horse, letting the flat belly of the craft act as his airbrake. He made several dangerous passes, whistling at nearly sonic speed over the hellish landscape of mud pools and boiling geysers before he found the trail.

Upward it wound, for miles and miles. Perhaps he was not too late, for surely, human feet trudging hour after hour through that grim landscape could have but reached the foot of the monster by now. Perhaps it's not too late. Blunt’s lips split in a savage grin. Perhaps the vulcan would get another tidbit, this time. He would feed it the first man who opposed him. Down the fiery throat he would throw them, one after another, those yellow-robed fiends, and to hell with them all.

He lost the trail then. He had to make three passes, holding the bucking, protesting shuttle with an iron grip, before he finally saw the dark entrance that swallowed the path. Merely a jutting ledge, a short lip that — if a man were fool enough, and lucky enough, and most of all, nervy enough — could serve as a landing spot for a shuttle that could later launch into the air, like an eagle falling closed-wing from a cloud...

If he missed by even a foot, either landing or taking off, it would be the end of the short and, so far, less than illustrious career of James Sherman Blunt. Blunt’s lips thinned.

His fingers could have threaded the fine eye of a needle until the instant the brakes held his screaming craft. Afterwards, when he craned his neck to look over the nose of his shuttle into the void that fell away far below, his hands could not have held the contents of a mug of coffee steady on his knee, they shook so much.

When he climbed out and saw the rim of his outside tire squeezed over the edge of the abyss, Blunt cursed furiously for some minutes, in defiance of the death that stared him yet eyeball to eyeball and until his legs, which quivered finely under him, allowed him to walk.

Wide, shallow steps, cut into glassy black obsidian, led him onward. A cable handrail was strung on each side.

He had no need for light, for he saw a glow far ahead of him, and the glow was red. He heard noise, like a giant watery pot set a-boil. As he descended, the hissing sound grew louder and louder, and the baleful light brighter and hotter.

He descended one hundred fifty-two steps before he saw the glaring sea of fire.

No ships sailed those sluggish waves. Some waves dropped back with a wet, kissing plop. Others expired with a brief fart of foul-smelling gas; others, more vigorous, burst like bombs and cast brimstone to illuminate the distant reaches of the mountain’s heart. The molten sea sighed, and breathed, and hissed, and grumbled, and shrieked like ten thousand exploding firecrackers.

An impossible jetty thrust far out over the restless red. Blunt saw sulfur yellow robes clustered at its foot. And someone, one lone, small figure, walked the impossible bridge, walking steadily out over the molten sea, streaming flames from the black hair that blew in the brimstone wind, feathered with flickering light from her burning sleeves...

Jim Blunt shouted but could not hear his own cry. He ran and felt the furnace through the soles of his boots, and cinders smolder on his skin.

But now she stood at the end of the bridge, and she was aflame, head to foot. And the sea changed.

A whirlpool began. The circle of lava was barely noticed at first, and suddenly, it was vast. A tornado of hot air formed, and became a tornado of lava. Wind howled in a rising siren, until Blunt put up his hands to shield his ears and screamed protest; but still he could not hear himself.

The light of the molten tornado burned fiercer and fiercer, until he fell to his knees and tore off his hat to cover his eyes. Behind squeezed lids, actinic lightning dug into his brain. He could keep none of it out, none of it, not the sound, nor the light. He knew no more.

Proceed to part 4...