Star of Gypsies

The worst of it is that the dread that Mentiroso inspires can be bottled and sold at a good price. There's a thriving market for it. I don't know which is worse: that there should be such a place as Mentiroso at all, or that human beings should have found a way to profit from the misery that that doleful planet spawns. I detest both ideas. You may wonder why such things should be. Do I know? Go ask God.

The man who found a way to turn the waking nightmare of Mentiroso into hard cash was named Nikos Hasgard. I grieve to tell you that there was Rom blood in him: he was a poshrat, a halfbreed, his father a GaJo from Sidri Akrak and his mother true Rom of Estrilidis. It was the Rom side of him that made him clever enough to see how to exploit a place like Mentiroso and the GaJe side that gave him the heartlessness to do it.

Hasgard was a small fleshless mean-faced man with eyes like whips and a mouth so tightly clamped that it was just a line beneath his nose. You disliked him on sight. Not only was he willing to turn a profit on Mentiroso, he didn't seem to be bothered by living there for months at a stretch: that was how mean and tough he was. (Or maybe he was so twisted that he liked the things that Mentiroso does to your soul.)

The Hasgard process involves tapping into the neural discharges of human brains that have been exposed for prolonged periods to the anxieties that Mentiroso arouses. You sit there and quiver and cringe and the machine records your whole output of tension and apprehension and trepidation and unrest. It gets pumped into a psychoactive storage battery from which it can be played back at any time.

There are three levels of playback intensity. Level One gives you, so they tell me, a sort of interestingly creepy chill, the kind of thing that reading scary stories late at night will do. It's sheer entertainment, of a type that has always struck me as pretty dumb, but I suppose it's not my business how people choose to amuse themselves. Certainly Level One is harmless.

Level Two is not only harmless but is actually beneficial. What the customer receives at this degree of intensity is a jolt of energizing motivation that hits him the way a spur in the side hits a mule. A shot of Hasgard Two will carry you buoyantly through the most difficult and challenging job on a glorious wave of confidence and strength. It's strictly fight-or-flight stuff, the old primordial adrenalin lift, and there's no drug that compares with it. Sales of Hasgard Two activators must run to a billion cerces a year, maybe more. They say that use of it isn't addictive but I'm told it's very hard to do without the stuff once you begin using it regularly. I've tried it once or twice myself.

As for Hasgard Three, the official position of the Hasgard Corporation is that there's no such thing. That it's just somebody's paranoid fantasy, which has been whispered about so often that it has somehow taken on a kind of reality even though it doesn't exist. It does exist. After I became king I saw the reports on it. What Hasgard Three does is drive people out of their minds. A single dose of third-level Hasgard is the equivalent of five or ten years on Mentiroso rolled up and jammed into your mind in one stupefying cataclysmic rush. Strong people go crazy and weaker ones simply die. Despite vociferous denials by the Hasgard people and stringent efforts by the imperial customs authorities, this stuff somehow does get manufactured and is shipped all over the galaxy for use by criminals intent on torture, extortion, or murder. I include certain governmental agencies in the criminal category.