The Girl in His Mind

      by Robert F. Young

      ©2020 Positronic Publishing

      Cover Photo © Can Stock Photo / gromovataya

      The Girl in His Mind is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, locales or institutions is entirely coincidental.

      All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission except for brief quotations for review purposes only.

      ISBN 13: 978-1-5154-4607-1

      The Girl in His Mind

       Every man’s mind is a universe with countless places in which he can hide—even from himself!

      The dance that the chocoletto girl was performing was an expurgated version of the kylee sex ritual which the Louave maidens of Dubhe 7 practiced on the eve of their betrothal. Expurgated or not, however, it was still on the lascivious side. The G-string that constituted the chocoletto girl’s entire costume put her but one degree above the nakedness which the original dance demanded. Nathan Blake’s voice was slightly thick when he summoned the waiter who was hovering in the shadows at the back of the room. “Is she free?” he asked.

      “I do not know, mensakin. Perhaps.”

      Blake resumed watching. The girl’s movements were a delicate blend of love and lust. Her face accompanied her body, eyes half-lidded one moment to match the languid motion of her limbs, wide and feral the next to match the furious bump and grind of her hips. For a chocoletto she was light-skinned—more bronze, really, than brown. But then, the word “chocoletto,” coined by the early beche-la-mer traders, was misleading, and few of the natives of Dubhe 4's southern-most continent lived up to it completely.

      She was beautiful too. Her high-cheekboned face was striking—the eyes dark-brown and wide-apart, the mouth sensuous, the teeth showing in a vivid white line between the half-parted purple lips. And her body was splendid. Blake had never seen anyone quite like her.

      He beckoned to her when the dance was over and, after slipping into a white thigh-length tunic, she joined him at his table. She ordered Martian wine in a liquid voice, and sipped it with a finesse that belied her cannibalistic forebears. “You wish a night?” she asked.

      Blake nodded. “If you are free.”

      “Three thousand quandoes.”

      He did not haggle, but counted out the amount and handed it to her. She slipped the bills into a thigh sheath-purse, told him her hut number and stood up to leave. “I will meet you there in an hour,” she said.

      *

      Her hut was as good a place to wait for her as any. After buying a bottle of native whiskey at the bar, Blake went out into the Dubhe 4 night and made his way through the labyrinthine alleys of the native sector. In common with all chocoletto huts, Eldoria’s was uncared for on the outside, and gave a false impression of poverty. He expected to find the usual hanger-on waiting in the anteroom, and looked forward to booting him out into the alley. Instead he found a young girl—

      A human girl.

      He paused in the doorway. The girl was sitting cross-legged on a small mat, a book open on her lap. Xenophon’s Anabasis. Her hair made him think of the copper-colored sunrises of Norma 9 and her eyes reminded him of the blue tarns of Fornax 6. “Come in,” she said.

      After closing the door, he sat down opposite her on the guest mat. Behind her, a gaudy arras hid the hut’s other room. “You are here to wait for Eldoria?” she asked.

      Blake nodded. “And you?”

      She laughed. “I am here because I live here,” she said.

      He tried to assimilate the information, but could not. Perceiving his difficulty, the girl went on, “My parents indentured themselves to the Great Starway Cartel and were assigned to the rubber plantations of Dubhe 4. They died of yellow-water dysentery before their indenture ran out, and in accordance with Interstellar Law I was auctioned off along with the rest of their possessions. Eldoria bought me.”

      Five years as a roving psycheye had hardened Blake to commercial colonization practices; nevertheless, he found the present example of man’s inhumanity to man sickening.

      “How old are you?” Blake asked.

      “Fourteen.”

      “And what are you going to be when you grow up?”

      “Probably I shall be a psychiatrist. Eldoria is sending me to the mission school now, and afterward she is going to put me through an institute of higher learning. And when I come of age, she is going to give me my freedom.”

      “I see,” Blake said. He indicated the book on her lap. “Homework?”

      She shook her head. “In addition to my courses at the mission school, I am studying the humanities.”

      “Xenophon,” Blake said. “And I suppose Plato too.”

      “And Homer and Virgil and Aeschylus and Euripides and all the rest of them. When I grow up I shall be a most well-educated person.”

      “I’m sure you will be,” Blake said, looking at the arras.

      “My name is Deirdre.”

      “Nathan,” Blake said. “Nathan Blake.”

      “Eldoria will be arriving soon. I must go and prepare her dais.”

      *

      She got up, parted the arras, and slipped into the next room. Shame flamed in Blake’s cheeks, and for a moment he considered leaving; then he remembered Eldoria’s dance, and he went right on sitting where he was.

      Presently the girl returned, and not long afterward the cloying scent of native incense crept beneath the arras and permeated the anteroom. She sat sideways on the mat this time, and he caught her face in profile. There was a suggestion of saintliness in the line of the nose and chin, a suggestion made all the more poignant by the slender column of the neck. He shifted uncomfortably on the guest mat. She had taken up the Anabasis again, and silence was pounding silent fists upon the walls.

      He was relieved when Eldoria finally arrived. She ushered him into the next room immediately. It was slightly larger than the anteroom, and much more richly appointed. A thick carpet the color of Martian waterways lay upon the floor, contrasting pleasantly with the golden tapestries that adorned all four walls. The sleeping dais was oval and took up nearly half the floor space. It was strewn with scarlet cushions.

      Blake sat down upon it. Nervously he watched Eldoria slip out of her white street robe, his eyes moving back and forth from her smooth dark skin to the arras. The incense thickened around him.

      She noticed the back-and-forth movement of his eyes. “You need not fear the little one,” she said, laying her hand upon his knee. “She will not enter.”

      “It’s not that so much,” Blake said.

      “What?” The warm bronze shoulder was touching his....

      He rose up once in the night, thinking to find his hotel bed. His next awakening was in the grayness of dawn, and he got up and dressed and moved silently to the doorway. The girl slept just without the arras on a thin sleeping-mat, and he had to step over her to gain the anteroom. In sleep, a strand of her copper-colored hair had tumbled down across her forehead and lay like a lovely flower upon the virginal whiteness of her skin. There was something saintly about her quiet face.

      When he reached the alley he began to run, and he did not stop running till the chocoletto sector was far behind him.

      *

      The