The Very Best of Tad Williams (33 page)

“Excuse me, sir.” The familiar, chill tone brought me up short. It was my nemesis, the purser, his little artificial eyes glowing with
schadenfreude
. “The buffet is for First Class passengers only.”

Faced with this sudden assault on my person, I decided on a dignified retreat. I gave the attractive Miss Du Palp a conspiratorial wink, then took the ham and the Scorpio Sling with me, leaving Budgie and his ladylove to their romantic destiny, into the spokes of which I hoped I had just rammed a jolly large stick.

I may have taken a bit more ham than I should have, to be honest, but I hadn’t had any breakfast owing to my shuttle-impaired stomach works, and my appetite was back. Still, I could barely get the entire ham into the lift down to Third Class, and had to ask an old, limping woman to get out to make room. Such a grumpy look she gave me! I thought these cruises were supposed to make people cheerful.

“You should have seen me, Omnitron,” I told him. “I was nothing short of magnificent. As soon as I mentioned Budgie’s hideous illness, the young lady’s attitude changed like a shot! I’ll wager she can’t wait to be shut of him now.”

“His hideous illness, sir? As far as I know, young Lord Scallop suffers from nothing worse than a mild case of Venusian Drip, which can be easily treated these days with proper medical care...”

“I made it up! That’s the genius part, Omnitron, old bucket. She’ll never go near him now. Ah, I can hear her gnashing her teeth clear down here in the ship’s underbelly...”

“I suspect the sound you hear is me lowering your bed,” Omnitron said, folding down the tiny, handkerchief-sized platform with a squeaking, ratcheting noise like someone deboning a live rabbit.

“As I said, before some metal buffoon short-sheeted my commentary,
‘I can hear her gnashing her teeth
.
’
Young Miss Du Palp is no doubt furious at having sunk her claws into such a sad, doomed specimen of Earth manhood when she thought she’d bagged a prize.”

“You say that as though she is not of Earth herself, sir.”

“I should say not! Not an earthly thing about her, except for her quite astonishing beauty and shapeliness. And her jolly nice legs. I’ve never run across the Du Palp family before, but I must admit they do rather sparkling work in the daughter department, her avaricious man-hunting notwithstanding.”

“Did you say ‘Du Palp,’ sir? As in, the Cunabulum Du Palps?”

“Yes, Omnitron, I think that was her awful old planet, something like that. What of it? You have that cursed expression on your featureless face that I have already come to loathe, and your hydraulic tubes are practically rigid with disapproval.”

“I’m sure you’re mistaken, sir. Perhaps you should climb into bed. I will endeavour to hold it for you while you attempt it. The affair seems a bit...flexible.”

Flexible, hah! “Impossible” is the word Omnitron was too craven to utilize, but I will speak the truth and shame the
Chinless
. After struggling for an hour to make myself comfortable on that slice of Melba toast they called a berth, I decamped to the floor, which although not large enough even for a proper game of blow football, let alone the nocturnal thrashing of a Booster in his prime, was still much more spacious than the Procrustean saltine I’d been given to sleep on. Thus, when somebody knocked at my stateroom door shortly after two in the AM, Earth time, I had only to crawl a few feet to find out who had so cruelly disturbed my slumbers.

“Oh, dear Mr. Booster,” said Krellita Du Palp, “please don’t make me stand in the corridor. Someone might see me!”

“Hmmm? Oh, right. Can’t have that.” Although I couldn’t imagine why. As far as I knew, these cruises were like a Feydeau farce, with various coves and their hard-mouthed molls ducking in and out of each other’s staterooms left and right. Still, perhaps back on Cunabulum they were a modest bunch and didn’t like to be seen dashing about in their—I had to admit—somewhat spectacularly filmy nightwear. “Right ho,” I said when she was inside, which necessitated me speaking almost directly to her forehead, owing to the size of the room. “Now, my dear, what can Wernie do for you? A little counseling, perhaps? Are we having second thoughts about Lord Scallop?”

“Oh, yes, Mr. Booster. Yes, you’ve opened my eyes! You’ve saved me from a hideous sham of a marriage!”

“Well, shucks, ma’am, as our American cousins like to say.” I was feeling quite proud of myself. Useless, Aunt Jabbatha? Wernie Booster, useless? Way-hey! “I’m sorry I have to be the bearer of such terrible tidings, dear lady. I only wanted to spare you any unnecessary heartbreak...”

“Budgie would never survive the rigors of conjugal expression,” she said. “But you, Mr. Booster—you are
perfect!
Healthy as can be, and with a fine appetite!” She leaned closer, which in those intimate confines actually caused her chin to press rather discomfortingly against my Adam’s apple. “Do you care for me, Wernie? Just a little?”

I was nonplussed, as the French say, and my usually considerable aplomb was also slightly undercut by the very thick, musky-sweet scent Krellita was giving off. I could not help thinking of her shapely lower limbs and how much like springtime they had made me feel back on the Lido Deck. “Of course, I find you a very admirable woman,” I began. “Sensible, too, with your unwillingness to yoke yourself to a shambling near-corpse like Cousin Budgie. But that is all I’m prepared to say at present...”

“Kiss me, you romantic fool,” she said, then sort of attached her mouth to mine.

Now, I don’t want you to think your humble narrator is anything less than a man of the world, but I must confess I’d never thought kissing could be quite like that, sort of...probing and...well,
biting
. At one point, as things were getting a bit too hot and heavy for my way of thinking, I actually felt something in my throat that seemed to be her tongue, except it was far too long and sort of scaly. It also seemed to be...jointed? Here, the Booster lexicon falters.

“Say, now,” I squeaked, “what are you doing, Krellita? I mean, Miss Du Palp, of course, since
we hardly know each other
. I mean, my stateroom, middle of the night and all, you hardly dressed...I mean, isn’t this a bit of a rum do?”

She laid a cool finger on my lips. “Oh, Wernie, you silly boy, it’s all right! We’ll be married soon, so there’s nothing wrong with it!”

Even with the scaly, jointish, tonguelike thing no longer lapping at my uvula, I confess I choked and spluttered for a while. Do you remember how I explained that “service” was the second most feared word in the Booster dictionary? Now I can reveal that the arch-curse “married” is the Booster champion of champions, an utterance whose doomful sound turns women into grinning monsters itching to plan things, including the end of a fellow’s freedom.

“M-M-Married?” I finally managed to say. “Hold on, there, dear lady. I think you have the wrong end of the stick...”

“I don’t care,” she said. “I’m sure it’s a lovely stick, anyway. And I know I probably do things a bit differently than you—we’re a bit of a backwater planet in some ways—but you’ll come to relish it.”

“Relish what?” I said, but she had turned away from me, not that she could go very far in that doll’s house of a cabin.

“Don’t look!” she said, and began to undo the straps for her gown. “Turn around! Don’t be so eager, you naughty boy!”

“Eh, um, well, perhaps we should slow down for a moment and take stock of things,” I said. “I mean, you’re a lovely girl and all, but you see, I have a number of irons in the fire just now, and when you don’t attend to them—well, you get frightfully hot irons, for one thing...”

“I knew it would be like this,” she declared with the dreamy sound of a chubby schoolboy regarding a stolen éclair. “Both of us eager, panting for consummation, our breasts heaving with desire...”

“Come now,” I said, and reached out to grasp her shoulder, despite its alarming nakedness, because I was thinking about shaking a little sense into her. “If anybody’s breast is heaving around here, it’s not mine, Miss Du Palp. No, at the moment my breast is heaveless—positively torpid.”

“Don’t look yet, darling,” she said as she shucked off the rest of her outfit. “It’s bad luck for you to see my final form before I’m ready.”

I was just wondering what kind of bridal trousseau a “final form” might be, and how I could escape from a cabin as small as this one without being noticed, when she turned and I saw her final form. It was not quite what I had expected.

The skin and face and legs and complexion I had admired—in fact, pretty much everything that had pleased the Booster eye, and doubtless the Scallop eye before me—now were revealed to be mere window-dressing, on the order of an insect’s chrysalis. (Or is that some kind of fancy American hover car? Let’s say “cocoon” instead.) In any case, the aforementioned lovely skin cracked and peeled away in broad sheets before tumbling to the stateroom floor, discarded like a losing ticket at Epsom Downs, as Krellita Du Palp unveiled her true self in all its...well, dash it, in all its
something
. Something bad, is what I want to say, like a giant sticky spider-centipede sort of thing.

As I stared in dismay, she lifted me up as though I were a kitten— and not one of your manlier kittens either—and flung me to the floor, then stood over me on her jointed legs, dripping long ropy strings of something awful onto my face and chest.

“Oh, Wernie, to think that you, the one to warn me of Budgie’s unfitness, should turn out to be my true love after all!” Krellita’s compound eyes glittered with affection for Yours Truly. I was looking around for a house slipper to hit her with, but since it would have taken a slipper the size of a mail van, my search proved fruitless. “And you, Wernie, healthy, strong you, after I lay my eggs inside you, you’ll provide such fine nourishment for our young when they begin to grow!” A large tubelike object rose from her abdomen, a sort of garden hosepipe made of jointed plates. The hole on the end of it coming toward me was surrounded by spiky, toothy objects that looked meant to do some kind of serious harm, and I was fairly certain that Your Humble Narrator was the intended victim.

“Here now!” I said, indignation struggling with mortal terror. “No ovipositors, please! I’m British!”

“Darling! Love me!” she cried—I think that’s what she said, but her clicking, drooling mouth-parts slightly impaired her speech—and then she clutched me with all her legs. I felt the tube beginning to nudge my stomach like a pickpocket searching for Grandfather’s gold watch.

“Help!” I said, quite loudly. “Help, help, help,
help
, dash it all
, somebody help!”
In fact, I said over and over (and over and over) but nobody came. The clicking and drooling increased in intensity, and the toothy probe nibbled exploringly at my tum-tum. Things looked very bad for Your Humble Etc.

“Yoo hoo!” called a strange voice from the open door of my stateroom.

The most horrible thing I had ever seen was already squatting on top of me, preparing to introduce me to the joys of involuntary fatherhood, but the weird, blobby shape in the doorway was a close second. It was lumpy and misshapen, had glowing red eyes, and was waving its limbs around in a manner only slightly less frenzied than Miss du Palp, who had the advantage of having more of them to wave.

“Hey, sweet-cheeks,” the strange apparition said in a curiously metallic voice. “Why don’t you lose that gink and get with a
real
man?”

“Who are you?” demanded Krellita. While she was distracted, I took the opportunity of buttoning my hired tuxedo over my exposed underpinnings.

“Just the man of your dreams, that’s all.” The thing in the doorway wiggled from side to side like a worm impaled on a dull fishhook. “Healthy, fat, full of protein, and anxious to settle down and raise a whole brood of larvae.”

For a moment, Krellita hesitated, but then she rose off me, the joints of her legs creaking like an ancient dumbwaiter. “You do...smell good,” she said. “Fatty.
Meaty
.”

“Kiss me, you fool,” said the lumpy, red-eyed thing. “We were meant for each other! Leave that pale, scrawny, inbred weasel and come to me, my exoskeletal sweetheart. Let me spirit you away to a place where our love will not be disturbed by search parties or worried relatives—somewhere we can raise our young to crawl proudly toward the future!”

That did it. With a sound that was halfway between the joyous whoop of a Red Indian and the slurping noise of a toothless man finishing his soup, Krellita Du Palp leaped across the room and fastened herself to the stranger, drool flying like confetti. As the two of them fell to the passage floor outside, the door of my stateroom clicked shut and I was alone again.

Nearly half an hour later, somebody knocked on my cabin door. I didn’t answer, since I had folded up the bed and was sharing the alcove in the wall with it, hoping to remain there until the
Chinless
docked, but I heard the door open and close.

“Master Wernie?” someone called.

To my great joy, I recognized the tinny tones. “Omnitron?” I managed to get the bed-cupboard open and tumbled out onto the floor. “What are you doing here? Did you see what happened? That woman was...well, she was a creature, Omnitron! A hideous, man-destroying creature.”