Legends of Lemuria

Chapter 1: Casper-3

“Buck you til you're raw, Tunsel!” Seamus spat.

Tunsel nodded to Gorcos, who grasped Seamus at nape and waistband, and hurled him in one motion into the smelter chute. The machine chunked and slurped and spun back up.

Done so fast that Casper could only stare.

“Casper, you stand convicted of listening to a fool spout foolery—what the buck are you doing?”

He'd dropped his drawers and was crapping on the ground. His fear sent his excrement shooting out in a stream, and a bluish stone plunked into the puddle. Casper grabbed it and whipped his closed fist toward Tunsel. “Away!”

Tunsel blinked into oblivion.

Casper pointed his fist at Gorcos. “Buck you, too!”

And Gorcos vanished.

Casper looked at his excrement-splattered crystal, then looked around at Tunsel's other henchmen. “What are you still doing here?”

Five fled but one charged Casper.

He pumped his fist and the bucklick popped out of sight.

Casper grinned at the rest of them. “What of the rest of you? What are you waiting for? You're free.”

Kathag stepped out of the ranks. “Five hundred miles of desert between us and the nearest city, and we're supposed to walk? Tunsel was right. You have been listening to foolery.”

Some of the others laughed but edged away from Kathag.

“Of course,” Casper said. He dropped his gaze to the crystal. The capitol city of Nadu came into focus, the lush green valley nestled in the Poothigai Hills a haven for the very wealthy. “Send them all except her,” he told it.

They were gone.

He was alone with his wife. The w***e, he thought.

“What of me?”

“What about you?” And he imagined the bridge on the planet Jaffna.

“I could go with you.” She seemed small and insignificant, as though deflated.

Wrong, Seamus! Casper thought, but he'd decided by now that he didn't want her along. He wished he'd been able to offer Seamus his freedom. “I condemn you to a life sentence of guilt, shame and remorse,” Casper said, closing his hand around the crystal.

And vanished.

* * *

Casper caught a glimpse of greenery then lurched right back to the minebase. What happened? he wondered.

But even Kathag was gone, the minebase looking deserted.

Dr. Dersop emerged from the infirmary, his hands folded across his stomach. “Come over here, boy.”

Casper didn't think of disobeying. He glanced around again before stopping in front of the Doctor.

Dr. Dersop eyed him suspiciously. “I thought you were acting odd during the examination. What's that in your hand, boy?” The hands folded across a tumescent stomach looked incongruous, as though he held his abdomen together.

Casper felt reluctant to open his excrement-slathered hand.

“Kept it in your buckhole, eh? Smart.” The head nodded slowly. “A cherry-sized hexagonal, blue probably, eh?”

Casper nodded and opened his palm. s**t sloughed off the marble as though unable to stick, the ball glowing softly, brightening in time with Casper's heartbeat.

An eyebrow rose, and Dr. Dersop's gaze leaped to Casper's face. Dr. Dersop suddenly looked unwell, sweat breaking out on his cheeks, his skin turning a sickly yellow, his gaze become unfocused, and his throat working as though he struggled not to vomit.

“Are you all right?”

“Nothing an old man can't handle.” Still, the Doctor swayed on his feet, blinking in clear distress.

“You'd better lay down.” Casper took his arm and led him back into the infirmary. He helped him onto the exam table in the back office, the Doctor never removing his intertwined fingers from around his middle.

“You're in pain, and you're sick.”

“Of course I am, boy, of course I am.”

Casper eased him onto his back, noticing how turgid his abdomen was. Then it struck him. “You're dying.”

Dr. Dersop nodded, then grinned. “We are all, but yes, my time is soon. I've been waiting for you.”

“Me?”

Dersop nodded. “Go wash your hands, and I'll tell you.”

At the sink, lathering up, Casper looked over his shoulder.

Dr. Dersop was peering down at his distended abdomen and holding it tightly with his hands, as though to restrain it manually.

Rolling the cherry-sized crystal between his fingers, Casper stepped back to the table.

The glow between Dersop's fingers startled him.

“Let me see.”

His hand trembling, his sweat thickening, the Doctor pulled up his tunic. Instead of a watermelon-sized belly bulging pregnantly, a single fist-sized knot just below the solar plexus strained against the abdominal wall, the blue crystal underneath clearly outlining veins and tissue.

“It's gotten worse just today,” the Doctor said, his voice now a rasp, his breathing rapid and shallow. “Because of you.”

Casper felt the smaller blue crystal in his hand become warm. “Because of this.”

Dersop nodded. “When you sent everyone to Nadu, I felt it like a stab in my gut, and I knew. I had to bring them back, by the way. I didn't want the authorities to become alarmed before we're finished here.”

“Finished doing what?”

Dersop grinned. His distress profound, it looked more like a grimace. “They'll certainly investigate the five deaths and one disappearance, but a mass escape would bring far too much attention to Magasca Prison.”

Casper counted only four deaths: Tunsel and two of his buck-licks, and Seamus. The scream and crunch of rock grinding crushwheels returned vividly and Casper felt sick. He shook it off and looked at Dersop.

And realized.

“You were waiting for me so you could die.”

Dr. Dersop turned his head toward him. The wistful smile said it all. “I'm nearly two hundred years old. I dug this crystal from a shaft near Taen Maddrai, a platinum seam whose ore concentrations sent the sensors into an ecstatic frenzy. When I found the crystal, it burrowed into my abdomen, made me sick for a week.” He lifted himself to an elbow, his face yellow and dripping with sweat. “You won't have a week. The platinum mine is played out, and the empty shafts are bunkers now, secret ones, retreats for our overloads if we revolt. Go there until you recover: Find it first to know its place, and then come back. Quickly, boy, I don't know how much longer I'll last.” He lay back down, gasping.

Casper raised the crystal to his eye. In its facets, he saw the surface of Karata from space, zoomed in on Taen Maddrai, located the network of mineshafts below the surface, followed a branch outward and saw the outfitted bunker at the very end. Impressed by a mere glimpse the palatial accommodations, Casper brought himself back to the exam room with a snap. And looked at Dersop.

The eyelids were lowered at half-mast: the sallow skin sagged off the bones like a loose-fitting tunic. Sweat pooled on the exam table. The breathing was rapid, a shallow stridor, the wheeze a fluid-filled lung. The face twitched involuntarily, as though Dr. Dersop were deep in dream-stage sleep.

“Why didn't you leave when you found the crystal?” Casper asked.

The eyelids opened slightly. “Couldn't. Wouldn't let me.”

He could tell Dersop was fading fast. “Why didn't you help your fellow prisoners at least?” he asked, suddenly angry. Between the crowded towers, the foul sweatshops, and the cruel prisons, Casper felt the injustices like a knife to his gut.

His sister and mother. His father and infant brother. Kathag and Seamus. As surely bound to their fates by the oppression of their society as by their draconian laws and tyrannical leaders, who lived in sated splendor on the backs of the populace.

“I did,” Dr. Dersop said, his voice a whisper. “I kept them healthy.” A small smile crept into his lips.

And stayed there, his face a fixed rictus.

The abdomen burst and splattered the walls with entrails.

Casper wiped the smear clear from his eyes in time to see the fist-sized crystal rocket toward him. It lunged into his gut, and he brought to mind the bunker at Taen Maddrai. He dropped to the floor, but instead of hard, cold tile, he landed on soft, plush carpet and passed out.

* * *

When he awoke, Casper found he'd vomited and voided all over himself. Thankfully he hadn't choked on his own vomit, as some did when they drank too much.

He was a mess.

Even as the smell and feel of feces and emesis struck him, so did another bout of nausea and diarrhea.

Why is everything leaving both ends in a hurry? he wondered, looking for a bathroom.

The inlaid tile and gold-plated mirrors frames seemed too immaculate to use. His being in the room besmirched its sanctity. He found the excretory, a generous porcelain basin whose hand-carved ivory seat declared itself too ostentations for his grimy behind.

The urge struck again, and at least his stream of feces landed where it needed to, his vomit splashing across the floor.

Doubled over the toilet, face to his knees, his fists clenched, runnels of sweat dripping off him, Casper wondered how long this would go on.

The cherry-sized crystal in his hand glowed softly.

He straightened, sitting up to look at his abdomen, afraid that the vision of the other, larger crystal plummeting into his stomach wasn't a nightmare.

The hole was a half-inch across, the crystal surface visible through the contracting wound. He swore he could see it getting smaller, the skin red and inflamed at the very edges, but looking perfectly healthy all around.

He wondered how long he'd been unconscious. He guessed not long.

Of course you feel sick, he told himself, feeling the approach of another bout of expurgation. He wretched and voided, the volume this time significantly less. How long will I have to do this? he wondered, recalling Dersop's saying he'd been sick for a week.

Casper groaned, wondering if he'd survive a week, no food or water and his body emptying itself at this pace.

He shook his head, despairing that he'd not survive, his body likely to succumb to the paroxysms of nausea and diarrhea, if not from dehydration and electrolyte depletion.

Easing back on the toilet seat, he looked again at the wound to his stomach, the crystal embedded just an inch or so below the sternum. In his right hand was the small crystal, which glowed warmly, emitting a comforting blue light.

As did the crystal inside him, outlining veins through the skin.

Brighter than it had been.

He pulled the smaller crystal away, and the glow of both crystals faded. He recalled Dersop's saying that his bulging abdomen had gotten worse because of the smaller crystal. Somehow they're linked, Casper knew.

He brought it closer, and their luminance increased. Slowly he decreased the distance, bringing the cherry-sized crystal closer and closer to the perforation in his skin, the fist-sized crystal growing brighter and getting warmer.

The cherry crystal fit neatly into the depression.

The universe exploded into his brain, and the Milky Way zoomed toward him in a rush, the barred spiral blazing in all its glory, and his vision rushed toward the Crab Nebula on the outer Perseus Arm, the fuscous cloud of a gas giant's remains strewn across several parsecs in its dying explosion, a burst that had been visible from the homeworld of his race, Terra, at a time when his forebears took such events as portents of impending apocalypse, little knowing that future generations would occupy worlds inside the very detritus of that explosion.

The Crab Nebula expanded into his vision, the right lower crab arm growing larger, and finally zeroing in on a planet whose middle was a band of desolate desert but whose poles were capped with lush, green, temperate forests. Beneath one stark, baking plateau lay an abandoned mine with one branch of tunnels converted into bunkers, but not just bunkers, palatial suites with all the comforts and luxuries of the privileged people who'd built them, and in one of those bunkers was a man who looked as out of place as these palatial bunkers looked in an abandoned mine.

And Casper snapped back into his body, a curious freedom now infusing him. Not a freedom as though he might go anywhere, although he knew now he could do just that, but another kind of freedom.

A freedom from want. From pain. From distress.

He no longer felt nauseous nor diarrheic.

What happened? he wondered, looking down.

The smaller crystal lay perched in the socket created by the wound where the large crystal had perforated his abdominal wall.

Further, it looked inert, its glow having dissipated. The larger crystal no longer glowed either, but merely sat quiescent, also inert, comfortably ensconced inside him now, exerting no pressure at all on his emptied stomach and bowels.

His soiled clothes half off him, he shed them completely, and stood to look at himself in a gilt-edged mirror.

The thick, compact frame of a body accustomed to hard labor looked like that of a God, but the tousled black hair on the Neanderthal head, with its prognathous jaw and sloped forehead, gave him the aspect of Kubera, once envisioned to be the chief of all evil living in darkness, a hideous dwarf but still one of the eight guardians of the world.

And the center of his abdomen was a small bulge with a milky blue nodule at its center, a second navel.

Under a tunic it won't show, he told himself with a half a hope.

He looked around at the mess he'd created, knowing a similar one awaited him in the next room.

Why don't I feel nauseous anymore? he wondered, Dersop having needed a week to recover.

He didn't have the smaller crystal, Casper thought, deducing that his inserting it had quelled the gastrointestinal distress. He considered removing it to experiment, but rejected the idea. Instead, he set about cleaning up the mess he'd created.

The bathroom was easy, all the surfaces either tile or porcelain, its extravagance impressing him even more as he worked. The blunt fact that elimination had been accorded its own room was as befuddling to him as it was amusing. Elimination had always been a semi-public event, a topic of family concern for one's health and neighbors' derision for the quality, quantity, or odor of one's output. But these people gave it its own room!

The carpeting in the other room was far more problematic, requiring his exploration of the premises to find the appropriate materials. In doing so, he discovered that the other room and its adjoining bathroom were part of a much larger suite with four units attached to a common space that would easily fit thirty convicts.

Who would need so much space? he wondered, the amount as galling as it was ludicrous. He noted as he passed from room to room that he tended to walk along the walls, as though afraid to move into the open areas.

It required conscious thought and effort to overcome that inhibition.

He did the best he could with the emesis and excrement embedded in the carpet. The smell was still pretty rank, but that too would dissipate with time. In a chest of drawers, he found clean clothes of better manufacture than he'd ever seen.

The shower controls baffled him for a few minutes, but soon he was luxuriating under a warm spray. He tried to recall having taken a hot shower. And could not. Cold sponge baths in dirty, scaly water had been the best they could manage in the two-room cube he'd shared with his parents and siblings. Splashed water from a foul-smelling sink was all they'd had on the cell block at Magasca Prison. He was clean to the point of shriveling when he finished his shower.

The clothes were a bit loose but serviceable, particularly since they were far finer in make than anything he'd seen.

And his abdomen didn't look swollen or misshapen at all. Tighter clothes might have emphasized the slight bulge under his solar plexus.

In his search of the premises, he'd gone through the kitchen, seeing a dispensomeal that had far more features than the glop-spewing one he'd shared with Kathag in their conjugal cube. Casper returned to it now with a vague idea of getting food.

But I'm not hungry, he thought, staring at the machine.

It stared back at him, as unblinking as he.

How long he stood there and stared at the dispensomeal, he couldn't have said.

It wasn't a conscious process. For someone who'd experienced privations throughout his life—of food, water, space, clothing, learning, and finally freedom—Casper had built up quite a tolerance for need, especially unmet need. The coping mechanisms that he'd developed to stave off those needs were considerable.

And now that some of those needs appeared to have dissipated entirely, Casper now had to cope with deeply embedded coping mechanisms whose suppression of basal signals like hunger and thirst had so dominated his subconsciousness that, suddenly bereft of those needs, the coping flailed with utter worthlessness and uselessness.

Why aren't I hungry? he finally wondered, having suppressed the feeling for such a long time that its absence left a hollow hole in his soul that he'd forgotten he had.

Freedom from want.

Casper slid down the wall to the floor, eyes on the dispensomeal, wanting to feel hungry, wishing he could feel hungry, desperate to feel hungry.

He dropped his gaze to his abdomen.

Of course, he thought. Even if I tried to eat, I'd just provoke another round of nausea and vomiting, the crystal now occupying the space where his stomach had been. If I don't want to eat, he wondered, what do I want?

Casper looked around the luxurious suite, convinced only that he didn't want to stay here.