The Space Opera Novella by Frank Belknap Long

Author:Frank Belknap Long [Long, Frank Belknap]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Space Opera, Adventure, sci-fi, pulp, Galactic Empire
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2017-10-23T04:00:00+00:00

A PLANET NAMED SHAYOL, by Cordwainer Smith

Originally published in Galaxy Science Fiction, October 1961.

CHAPTER I

There was a tremendous difference between the liner and the ferry in Mercer’s treatment. On the liner, the attendants made gibes when they brought him his food.

“Scream good and loud,” said one rat-faced steward, “and then we’ll know it’s you when they broadcast the sounds of punishment on the Emperor’s birthday.”

The other, fat steward ran the tip of his wet red tongue over his thick purple-red lips one time and said, “Stands to reason, man. If you hurt all the time, the whole lot of you would die. Something pretty good must happen, along with the—whatchamacallit. Maybe you turn into a woman. Maybe you turn into two people. Listen, cousin, if it’s real crazy fun, let me know—”

Mercer said nothing. Mercer had enough troubles of his own not to wonder about the daydreams of nasty men.

At the ferry it was different. The biopharmaceutical staff was deft, impersonal, quick in removing his shackles. They took off all his prison clothes and left them on the liner. When he boarded the ferry, naked, they looked him over as if he were a rare plant or a body on the operating table. They were almost kind in the clinical deftness of their touch. They did not treat him as a criminal, but as a specimen.

Men and women, clad in their medical smocks, they looked at him as though he were already dead.

He tried to speak. A man, older and more authoritative than the others, said firmly and clearly, “Do not worry about talking. I will talk to you myself in a very little time. What we are having now are the preliminaries, to determine your physical condition. Turn around, please.”

Mercer turned around. An orderly rubbed his back with a very strong antiseptic.

“This is going to sting,” said one of the technicians, “but it is nothing serious or painful. We are determining the toughness of the different layers of your skin.”

Mercer, annoyed by this impersonal approach, spoke up just as a sharp little sting burned him above the sixth lumbar vertebra. “Don’t you know who I am?”

“Of course we know who you are,” said a woman’s voice. “We have it all in a file in the corner. The chief doctor will talk about your crime later, if you want to talk about it. Keep quiet now. We are making a skin test, and you will feel much better if you do not make us prolong it.”

Honesty forced her to add another sentence: “And we will get better results as well.”

They had lost no time at all in getting to work.

He peered at them sideways to look at them. There was nothing about them to indicate that they were human devils in the ante-chambers of hell itself. Nothing was there to indicate that this was the satellite of Shayol, the final and uttermost place of chastisement and shame. They looked like medical people from his life before he committed the crime without a name.

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