Star of Gypsies

You would never suspect, looking at photos of Mentiroso in some travel magazine, that it is one of the most horrible places in the universe. (Perhaps the most horrible, though I think it may be exceeded in that quality by Trinigalee Chase. Since I don't ever want to think about Trinigalee Chase again in any detail, I'm not capable of making the comparison. If you want my advice, stay away from them both. Neither one is any holiday paradise.)

I went to Mentiroso as a slave, but this time, in contrast to my previous two tours of slavery, I had only myself to blame. I wasn't sold there; I sold myself. This was back when I was a free-lance space explorer, a few years before I went to work for Esmeralda's family's kumpania. Just as my grandfather had before me, I had gotten myself overextended financially and went bankrupt. And as my father had done, I saw voluntary slavery as the way out. I was ten thousand cerces in the hole-can you believe that?-and they were about to take my Xamur land away from me to satisfy the debt. Then I found out that there was this deal, a five-year indenture on a place called Mentiroso, that would exactly cover the amount of my losses. I jumped for it.

Maybe I should have done more research first. Mentiroso had been discovered only a little while before and there wasn't much data available on it. Widely traveled though I was, I had never heard of it, and I didn't bother to find out more than whether you could breathe the air and what kind of climate the place has. I didn't stop to wonder why anybody would be willing to pay me that much for a five-year indenture. Served me right.

I had to pick up the relay-sweep for Mentiroso on Clard Msat. When I handed in my ticket to the technician who was setting up the outbound coordinates at the sweep depot he looked at it a long time and said finally, "Mentiroso? You're kidding, aren't you?"

"Not that I know of."

"You really want to go there?" "That's where my job is."

"You must actually be serious. You poor dumb bastard." He shook his head sadly. "He wants to go to Mentiroso. He has a job on Mentiroso. You poor dumb bastard!"

Nobody had ever called me that in my life before. I don't think anyone has since, either. I started to ask him what was so awful about Mentiroso. Too late. He set up the coordinates faster than a ghost can fart and the sweep came and got me instantly. The last thing I saw was the look of pity in his eyes. The next thing I saw, almost at once, was Mentiroso.

The other horror worlds I have visited-Alta Hannalanna, say, or Megalo Kastro-tell you right away what a nasty piece of work they are. You hate them at a single glance. From the air, though, Mentiroso seems acceptable enough. A standard human-type world: blue oceans, green vegetation, brown soil. A bit on the scruffy side, maybe, nothing much in the way of forests or mountain ranges, mostly a great rolling savannah from coast to coast. No apparent signs of higher life. (There's not much there, in fact, beyond some insects and lizards and a few simple unspecialized mammals. There's a good reason for that, too.) Small ice-caps at the poles, temperate climate elsewhere, breathable air maybe a touch too high on nitrogen, but that isn't serious. The weather is on the dry side. It all seems okay.

Then you land, and you plunge into hell.

You start feeling uneasy with your first breath. With your second the uneasiness begins edging into fear. One breath more and the fear turns into blind terror, and from then on it never lets up. You don't know what it is you're afraid of, and you never find out. It comes bubbling up through your entire body, your skin, your toes, your fingertips. Everything you have ever dreaded is boiling in you all at once. Your worst fantasies. The horned creature standing at your bedside in the dark. The little shining insects that march over your flesh when you're ill. The churning of the earth beneath your feet, and the mouth that opens before you. The silken fabric on the coffin lid that presses into your face as you lie there buried alive. The gust of wind that carries invisible needles. The one red eye watching you from the sky. The whispering behind you. The sudden jaws fastening between your legs.

It is a tangible presence, that fear that comes over you on Mentiroso. You feel it wrap around you like an icy sheet. You see it glimmering in the air like a wall of cold light. Your flesh crawls. Your balls try to climb up into your belly. Your teeth itch and tingle as though they're about to fall out all at once.

There is no escaping it wherever you turn. It pervades the whole planet. No one knows why. The place is haunted. There is a god dwelling there. Not God, but a god, and not a friendly one. Perhaps he is Pan, the old Greek goat whose specialty was causing panic. You see it still in his name, panic. Panic is what you feel on Mentiroso, hour after hour, a constant unending foreboding. Nothing bad ever actually happens to you. None of your dreads materialize. Yet there is never any surcease. You don't adapt to it; you don't grow numbed. You can't talk yourself out of it by telling yourself that it's a quirk of nature, that it's just something in the air. You simply go on and on, trembling with dread, every minute that you are there. Some minutes are worse than others but none of them is ever good. No wonder that there are no higher life-forms on Mentiroso. Wonderfully versatile though Mother Nature is, even she hasn't managed to evolve a complex organism with a nervous system capable of withstanding a whole lifetime of fear and trembling. The bugs and lizards evidently don't mind.