The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Vanishing Venusians, by Leigh Brackett
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Title: The Vanishing Venusians
Author: Leigh Brackett
Release Date: October 21, 2020 [EBook #63516]
Language: English
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The Vanishing Venusians
By LEIGH BRACKETT
For years they had wandered the eternal
seas of Venus, seeking the home that was
their birthright, death walking in their
wake. And now they were making their final
bid--three of them fighting toward the
promised land, battling for a hopeless cause.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Spring 1945.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The breeze was steady enough, but it was not in a hurry. It filled the
lug sail just hard enough to push the dirty weed-grown hull through the
water, and no harder. Matt Harker lay alongside the tiller and counted
the trickles of sweat crawling over his nakedness, and stared with
sullen, opaque eyes into the indigo night. Anger, leashed and impotent,
rose in his throat like bitter vomit.
The sea--Rory McLaren's Venusian wife called it the Sea of Morning
Opals--lay unstirring, black, streaked with phosphorescence. The
sky hung low over it, the thick cloud blanket of Venus that had made
the Sun a half-remembered legend to the exiles from Earth. Riding
lights burned in the blue gloom, strung out in line. Twelve ships,
thirty-eight hundred people, going no place, trapped in the interval
between birth and death and not knowing what to do about it.
Matt Harker glanced upward at the sail and then at the stern lantern
of the ship ahead. His face, in the dim glow that lights Venus even at
night, was a gaunt oblong of shadows and hard bone, seamed and scarred
with living, with wanting and not having, with dying and not being
dead. He was a lean man, wiry and not tall, with a snake-like surety of
motion.
Somebody came scrambling quietly aft along the deck, avoiding the
sleeping bodies crowded everywhere. Harker said, without emotion, "Hi,
Rory."
Rory McLaren said, "Hi, Matt." He sat down. He was young, perhaps half
Harker's age. There was still hope in his face, but it was growing
tired. He sat for a while without speaking, looking at nothing, and
then said, "Honest to God, Matt, how much longer can we last?"
"What's the matter, kid? Starting to crack?"
"I don't know. Maybe. When are we going to stop somewhere?"
"When we find a place to stop."
"Is there a place to stop? Seems like ever since I was born we've been
hunting. There's always something wrong. Hostile natives, or fever, or
bad soil, always something, and we go on again. It's not right. It's
not any way to try to live."
Harker said, "I told you not to go having kids."
"What's that got to do with it?"
"You start worrying. The kid isn't even here yet, and already you're
worrying."
"Sure I am." McLaren put his head in his hands suddenly and swore.
Harker knew he did that to keep from crying. "I'm worried," McLaren
said, "that maybe the same thing'll happen to my wife and kid that
happened to yours. We got fever aboard."
Harker's eyes were like blown coals for an instant. Then he glanced up
at the sail and said, "They'd be better off if it didn't live."
"That's no kind of a thing to say."
"It's the truth. Like you asked me, when are we going to stop
somewhere? Maybe never. You bellyache about it ever since you were
born. Well, I've been at it longer than that. Before you were born I
saw our first settlement burned by the Cloud People, and my mother and
father crucified in their own vineyard. I was there when this trek to
the Promised Land began, back on Earth, and I'm still waiting for the
promise."
The sinews in Harker's face were drawn like knots of wire. His voice
had a terrible quietness.
"Your wife and kid would be better off to die now, while Viki's still
young and has hope, and before the child ever opens its eyes."
* * * * *
Sim, the big black man, relieved Harker before dawn. He started
singing, softly--something mournful and slow as the breeze, and
beautiful. Harker cursed him and went up into the bow to sleep, but the
song stayed with him. _Oh, I looked over Jordan, and what did I see,
comin' for to carry me home...._
Harker slept. Presently he began to moan and twitch, and then cry out.
People around him woke up. They watched with interest. Harker was a
lone wolf awake, ill-tempered and violent. When, at long intervals, he
would have one of his spells, no one was anxious to help him out of it.
They liked peeping inside of Harker when he wasn't looking.
Harker didn't care. He was playing in the snow again. He was seven
years old, and the drifts were high and white, and above them the sky
was so blue and clean that he wondered if God mopped it every few days
like Mom did the kitchen floor. The sun was shining. It was like a
great gold coin, and it made the snow burn like crushed diamonds. He
put his arms up to the sun, and the cold air slapped him with clean
hands, and he laughed. And then it was all gone....
"By gawd," somebody said. "Ain't them tears on his face?"
"Bawling. Bawling like a little kid. Listen at him."
"Hey," said the first one sheepishly. "Reckon we oughta wake him up?"
"Hell with him, the old sour-puss. Hey, listen to that...!"
"Dad," Harker whispered. "Dad, I want to go home."
* * * * *
The dawn came like a sifting of fire-opals through the layers of
pearl-grey cloud. Harker heard the yelling dimly in his sleep. He felt
dull and tired, and his eyelids stuck together. The yelling gradually
took shape and became the word "Land!" repeated over and over. Harker
kicked himself awake and got up.
The tideless sea glimmered with opaline colors under the mist. Flocks
of little jewel-scaled sea-dragons rose up from the ever-present
floating islands of weed, and the weed itself, part of it, writhed and
stretched with sentient life.
Ahead there was a long low hummock of muddy ground fading into tangled
swamp. Beyond it, rising sheer into the clouds, was a granite cliff, a
sweeping escarpment that stood like a wall against the hopeful gaze of
the exiles.
Harker found Rory McLaren standing beside him, his arm around Viki, his
wife. Viki was one of several Venusians who had married into the Earth
colony. Her skin was clear white, her hair a glowing silver, her lips
vividly red. Her eyes were like the sea, changeable, full of hidden
life. Just now they had that special look that the eyes of women get
when they're thinking about creation. Harker looked away.
McLaren said, "It's land."
Harker said, "It's mud. It's swamp. It's fever. It's like the rest."
Viki said, "Can we stop here, just a little while?"
Harker shrugged. "That's up to Gibbons." He wanted to ask what the hell
difference it made where the kid was born, but for once he held his
tongue. He turned away. Somewhere in the waste a woman was screaming in
delirium. There were three shapes wrapped in ragged blankets and laid
on planks by the port scuppers. Harker's mouth twitched in a crooked
smile.
"We'll probably stop long enough to bury them," he said. "Maybe that'll
be time enough."
He caught a glimpse of McLaren's face. The hope in it was not tired any
more. It was dead. Dead, like the rest of Venus.
Gibbons called the chief men together aboard his ship--the leaders,
the fighters and hunters and seamen, the tough leathery men who were
the armor around the soft body of the colony. Harker was there, and
McLaren. McLaren was young, but up until lately he had had a quality of
optimism that cheered his shipmates, a natural leadership.
Gibbons was an old man. He was the original guiding spirit of the five
thousand colonists who had come out from Earth to a new start on a new
world. Time and tragedy, disappointment and betrayal had marked him
cruelly, but his head was still high. Harker admired his guts while
cursing him for an idealistic fool.
The inevitable discussion started as to whether they should try a
permanent settlement on this mud flat or go on wandering over the
endless, chartless seas. Harker said impatiently:
"For cripesake, look at the place. Remember the last time. Remember the
time before that, and stop bleating."
Sim, the big black, said quietly, "The people are getting awful tired.
A man was meant to have roots some place. There's going to be trouble
pretty soon if we don't find land."
Harker said, "You think you can find some, pal, go to it."
Gibbons said heavily, "But he's right. There's hysteria, fever,
dysentery and boredom, and the boredom's worst of all."
McLaren said, "I vote to settle."
Harker laughed. He was leaning by the cabin port, looking out at the
cliffs. The grey granite looked clean above the swamp. Harker tried
to pierce the clouds that hid the top, but couldn't. His dark eyes
narrowed. The heated voices behind him faded into distance. Suddenly he
turned and said, "Sir, I'd like permission to see what's at the top of
those cliffs."
There was complete silence. Then Gibbons said slowly, "We've lost
too many men on journeys like that before, only to find the plateau
uninhabitable."
"There's always the chance. Our first settlement was in the high
plateaus, remember. Clean air, good soil, no fever."
"I remember," Gibbons said. "I remember." He was silent for a while,
then he gave Harker a shrewd glance. "I know you, Matt. I might as
well give permission."
* * * * *
Harker grinned. "You won't miss me much anyhow. I'm not a good
influence any more." He started for the door. "Give me three weeks.
You'll take that long to careen and scrape the bottoms anyhow. Maybe
I'll come back with something."
McLaren said, "I'm going with you, Matt."
Harker gave him a level-eyed stare. "You better stay with Viki."
"If there's good land up there, and anything happens to you so you
can't come back and tell us...."
"Like not bothering to come back, maybe?"
"I didn't say that. Like we both won't come back. But two is better
than one."
Harker smiled. The smile was enigmatic and not very nice. Gibbons said,
"He's right, Matt." Harker shrugged. Then Sim stood up.
"Two is good," he said, "but three is better." He turned to Gibbons.
"There's nearly five hundred of us, sir. If there's new land up there,
we ought to share the burden of finding it."
Gibbons nodded. Harker said, "You're crazy, Sim. Why you want to do all
that climbing, maybe to no place?"
Sim smiled. His teeth were unbelievably white in the sweat-polished
blackness of his face. "But that's what my people always done, Matt. A
lot of climbing, to no place."
They made their preparations and had a last night's sleep. McLaren said
good-bye to Viki. She didn't cry. She knew why he was going. She kissed
him, and all she said was, "Be careful." All he said was, "I'll be back
before he's born."
They started at dawn, carrying dried fish and sea-berries made into
pemmican, and their long knives and ropes for climbing. They had
long ago run out of ammunition for their few blasters, and they had
no equipment for making more. All were adept at throwing spears, and
carried three short ones barbed with bone across their backs.
It was raining when they crossed the mud flat, wading thigh-deep in
heavy mist. Harker led the way through the belt of swamp. He was
an old hand at it, with an uncanny quickness in spotting vegetation
that was as independently alive and hungry as he was. Venus is one
vast hothouse, and the plants have developed into species as varied
and marvelous as the reptiles or the mammals, crawling out of the
pre-Cambrian seas as primitive flagellates and growing wills of their
own, with appetites and motive power to match. The children of the
colony learned at an early age not to pick flowers. The blossoms too
often bit back.
The swamp was narrow, and they came out of it safely. A great
swamp-dragon, a _leshen_, screamed not far off, but they hunt by night,
and it was too sleepy to chase them. Harker stood finally on firm
ground and studied the cliff.
The rock was roughened by weather, hacked at by ages of erosion,
savaged by earthquake. There were stretches of loose shale and great
slabs that looked as though they would peel off at a touch, but Harker
nodded.
"We can climb it," he said. "Question is, how high is up?"
Sim laughed. "High enough for the Golden City, maybe. Have we all got a
clear conscience? Can't carry no load of sin that far!"
Rory McLaren looked at Harker.
Harker said, "All right, I confess. I don't care if there's land up
there or not. All I wanted was to get the hell out of that damn boat
before I went clean nuts. So now you know."
McLaren nodded. He didn't seem surprised. "Let's climb."
* * * * *
By morning of the second day they were in the clouds. They crawled
upward through opal-tinted steam, half liquid, hot and unbearable. They
crawled for two more days. The first night or two Sim sang during his
watch, while they rested on some ledge. After that he was too tired.
McLaren began to give out, though he wouldn't say so. Matt Harker grew
more taciturn and ill-tempered, if possible, but otherwise there was no
change. The clouds continued to hide the top of the cliff.
During one rest break McLaren said hoarsely, "Don't these cliffs ever
end?" His skin was yellowish, his eyes glazed with fever.
"Maybe," said Harker, "they go right up beyond the sky." The fever was
on him again, too. It lived in the marrow of the exiles, coming out at
intervals to shake and sear them, and then retreating. Sometimes it did
not retreat, and after nine days there was no need.
McLaren said, "You wouldn't care if they did, would you?"
"I didn't ask you to come."
"But you wouldn't care."
"Ah, shut up."
McLaren went for Harker's throat.
Harker hit him, with great care and accuracy. McLaren sagged down and
took his head in his hands and wept. Sim stayed out of it. He shook his
head, and after a while he began to sing to himself, or someone beyond
himself. "Oh, nobody knows the trouble I see...."
Harker pulled himself up. His ears rang and he shivered uncontrollably,
but he could still take some of McLaren's weight on himself. They were
climbing a steep ledge, fairly wide and not difficult.
"Let's get on," said Harker.
About two hundred feet beyond that point the ledge dipped and began
to go down again in a series of broken steps. Overhead the cliff face
bulged outward. Only a fly could have climbed it. They stopped. Harker
cursed with vicious slowness. Sim closed his eyes and smiled. He was a
little crazy with fever himself.
"Golden city's at the top. That's where I'm going."
He started off along the ledge, following its decline toward a jutting
shoulder, around which it vanished. Harker laughed sardonically.
McLaren pulled free of him and went doggedly after Sim. Harker shrugged
and followed.
Around the shoulder the ledge washed out completely.
They stood still. The steaming clouds shut them in before, and behind
was a granite wall hung within thick fleshy creepers. Dead end.
"Well?" said Harker.
McLaren sat down. He didn't cry, or say anything. He just sat. Sim
stood with his arms hanging and his chin on his huge black chest.
Harker said, "See what I meant, about the Promised Land? Venus is a
fixed wheel, and you can't win."
It was then that he noticed the cool air. He had thought it was just
a fever chill, but it lifted his hair, and it had a definite pattern
on his body. It even had a cool, clean smell to it. It was blowing out
through the creepers.
Harker began ripping with his knife. He broke through into a cave
mouth, a jagged rip worn smooth at the bottom by what must once have
been a river.
"That draft is coming from the top of the plateau," Harker said. "Wind
must be blowing up there and pushing it down. There may be a way
through."
McLaren and Sim both showed a slow, terrible growth of hope. The three
of them went without speaking into the tunnel.
II
They made good time. The clean air acted as a tonic, and hope spurred
them on. The tunnel sloped upward rather sharply, and presently Harker
heard water, a low thunderous murmur as of an underground river up
ahead. It was utterly dark, but the smooth channel of stone was easy to
follow.
Sim said, "Isn't that light up ahead?"
"Yeah," said Harker. "Some kind of phosphorescence. I don't like that
river. It may stop us."
They went on in silence. The glow grew stronger, the air more damp.
Patches of phosphorescent lichen appeared on the walls, glimmering with
dim jewel tones like an unhealthy rainbow. The roar of the water was
very loud.
They came upon it suddenly. It flowed across the course of their
tunnel in a broad channel worn deep into the rock, so that its level
had fallen below its old place and left the tunnel dry. It was a
wide river, slow and majestic. Lichen spangled the roof and walls,
reflecting in dull glints of color from the water.
Overhead there was a black chimney going up through the rock, and the
cool draft came from there with almost hurricane force, much of which
was dissipated in the main river tunnel. Harker judged there was a
cliff formation on the surface that siphoned the wind downward. The
chimney was completely inaccessible.
Harker said, "I'll guess we'll have to go upstream, along the side."
The rock was eroded enough to make that possible, showing wide ledges
at different levels.
McLaren said, "What if this river doesn't come from the surface? What
if it starts from an underground source?"
"You stuck your neck out," Harker said. "Come on."
They started. After a while, tumbling like porpoises in the black
water, the golden creatures swam by, and saw the men, and stopped, and
swam back again.
They were not very large, the largest about the size of a
twelve-year-old child. Their bodies were anthropoid, but adapted
to swimming with shimmering webs. They glowed with a golden light,
phosphorescent like the lichen, and their eyes were lidless and black,
like one huge spreading pupil. Their faces were incredible. Harker
could remember, faintly, the golden dandelions that grew on the lawn
in summer. The heads and faces of the swimmers were like that, covered
with streaming petals that seemed to have independent movements, as
though they were sensory organs as well as decoration.
Harker said, "For cripesake, what are they?"
"They look like flowers," McLaren said.
"They look more like fish," the black man said.
Harker laughed. "I'll bet they're both. I'll bet they're plannies that
grew where they had to be amphibious." The colonists had shortened
plant-animal to planimal, and then just planny. "I've seen gimmicks in
the swamps that weren't so far away from these. But jeez, get the eyes
on 'em! They look human."
"The shape's human, too, almost." McLaren shivered. "I wish they
wouldn't look at us that way."
Sim said, "As long as they just look. I'm not gonna worry...."
They didn't. They started to close in below the men, swimming
effortlessly against the current. Some of them began to clamber out
on the low ledge behind them. They were agile and graceful. There
was something unpleasantly child-like about them. There were fifteen
or twenty of them, and they reminded Harker of a gang of mischievous
kids--only the mischief had a queer soulless quality of malevolence.
Harker led the way faster along the ledge. His knife was drawn and he
carried a short spear in his right hand.
The tone of the river changed. The channel broadened, and up ahead
Harker saw that the cavern ended in a vast shadowy place, the water
spreading into a dark lake, spilling slowly out over a low wide lip of
rock. More of the shining child-things were playing there. They joined
their fellows, closing the ring tighter around the three men.
"I don't like this," McLaren said. "If they'd only make a noise!"
They did, suddenly--a shrill tittering like a blasphemy of childish
laughter. Their eyes shone. They rushed in, running wetly along the
ledge, reaching up out of the water to claw at ankles, laughing. Inside
his tough flat belly Harker's guts turned over.
* * * * *
McLaren yelled and kicked. Claws raked his ankle, spiny needle-sharp
things like thorns. Sim ran his spear clean through a golden breast.
There were no bones in it. The body was light and membranous, and the
blood that ran out was sticky and greenish, like sap. Harker kicked
two of the things back in the river, swung his spear like a ball bat
and knocked two more off the ledge--they were unbelievably light--and
shouted,
"Up there, that high ledge. I don't think they can climb that."
He thrust McLaren bodily past him and helped Sim fight a rearguard
action while they all climbed a rotten and difficult transit. McLaren
crouched at the top and hurled chunks of stone at the attackers. There
was a great crack running up and clear across the cavern roof, scar of
some ancient earthquake. Presently a small slide started.
"Okay," Harker panted. "Quit before you bring the roof down. They can't
follow us." The plannies were equipped for swimming, not climbing. They
clawed angrily and slipped back, and then retreated sullenly to the
water. Abruptly they seized the body with Sim's spear through it and
devoured it, quarreling fiercely over it. McLaren leaned over the edge
and was sick.
Harker didn't feel so good himself. He got up and went on. Sim helped
McLaren, whose ankle was bleeding badly.
This higher ledge angled up and around the wall of the great
lake-cavern. It was cooler and drier here, and the lichens thinned out,
and vanished, leaving total darkness. Harker yelled once. From the echo
of his voice the place was enormous.
Down below in the black water golden bodies streaked like comets in
an ebon universe, going somewhere, going fast. Harker felt his way
carefully along. His skin twitched with a nervous impulse of danger, a
sense of something unseen, unnatural, and wicked.
Sim said, "I hear something."
They stopped. The blind air lay heavy with a subtle fragrance, spicy
and pleasant, yet somehow unclean. The water sighed lazily far below.
Somewhere ahead was a smooth rushing noise which Harker guessed was the
river inlet. But none of that was what Sim meant.
He meant the rippling, rustling sound that came from everywhere in
the cavern. The black surface of the lake was dotted now with spots
of burning phosphorescent color, trailing fiery wakes. The spots grew
swiftly, coming nearer, and became carpets of flowers, scarlet and blue
and gold and purple. Floating fields of them, and towed by shining
swimmers.
"My God," said Harker softly. "How big are they?"
"Enough to make three of me." Sim was a big man. "Those little ones
were children, all right. They went and got their papas. Oh, Lord!"
The swimmers were very like the smaller ones that attacked them by
the river, except for their giant size. They were not cumbersome.
They were magnificent, supple-limbed and light. Their membranes had
spread into great shining wings, each rib tipped with fire. Only the
golden-dandelion heads had changed.
They had shed their petals. Their adult heads were crowned with flat,
coiled growths having the poisonous and filthy beauty of fungus. And
their faces were the faces of men.
For the first time since childhood Harker was cold.
The fields of burning flowers were swirled together at the base of the
cliff. The golden giants cried out suddenly, a sonorous belling note,
and the water was churned to blazing foam as thousands of flower-like
bodies broke away and started up the cliff on suckered, spidery legs.
It didn't look as though it were worth trying, but Harker said, "Let's
get the hell on!" There was a faint light now, from the army below.
He began to run along the ledge, the others close on his heels. The
flower-hounds coursed swiftly upward, and their masters swam easily
below, watching.
The ledge dropped. Harker shot along it like a deer. Beyond the lowest
dip it plunged into the tunnel whence the river came. A short tunnel,
and at the far end....
"Daylight!" Harker shouted. "Daylight!"
McLaren's bleeding leg gave out and he fell.
* * * * *
Harker caught him. They were at the lowest part of the dip. The
flower-beasts were just below, rushing higher. McLaren's foot was
swollen, the calf of his leg discolored. Some swift infection from the
planny's claws. He fought Harker. "Go on," he said. "Go on!"
Harker slapped him hard across the temple. He started on, half carrying
McLaren, but he saw it wasn't going to work. McLaren weighed more than
he did. He thrust McLaren into Sim's powerful arms. The big black
nodded and ran, carrying the half-conscious man like a child. Harker
saw the first of the flower-things flow up onto the ledge in front of
them.
Sim hurdled them. They were not large, and there were only three of
them. They rushed to follow and Harker speared them, slashing and
striking with the sharp bone tip. Behind him the full tide rushed up.
He ran, but they were faster. He drove them back with spear and knife,
and ran again, and turned and fought again, and by the time they had
reached the tunnel Harker was staggering with weariness.
Sim stopped. He said, "There's no way out."
Harker glanced over his shoulder. The river fell sheer down a high face
of rock--too high and with too much force in the water even for the
giant water-plannies to think of attempting. Daylight poured through
overhead, warm and welcoming, and it might as well have been on Mars.
Dead end.
Then Harker saw the little eroded channel twisting up at the side.
Little more than a drain-pipe, and long dry, leading to a passage
beside the top of the falls--a crack barely large enough for a small
man to crawl through. It was a hell of a ragged hope, but....
Harker pointed, between jabs at the swarming flowers. Sim yelled, "You
first." Because Harker was the best climber, he obeyed, helping the
gasping McLaren up behind him. Sim wielded his spear like a lightning
brand, guarding the rear, creeping up inch by inch.
He reached a fairly secure perch, and stopped. His huge chest pumped
like a bellows, his arm rose and fell like a polished bar of ebony.
Harker shouted to him to come on. He and McLaren were almost at the top.
Sim laughed. "How you going to get me through that little bitty hole?"
"Come on, you fool!"
"You better hurry. I'm about finished."
"Sim! Sim, damn you!"
"Crawl out through that hole, runt, and pull that stringbean with you!
I'm a man-sized man, and I got to stay." Then, furiously, "Hurry up or
they'll drag you back before you're through."
He was right. Harker knew he was right. He went to work pushing and
jamming McLaren through the narrow opening. McLaren was groggy and not
much help, but he was thin and small-boned, and he made it. He rolled
out on a slope covered with green grass, the first Harker had seen
since he was a child. He began to struggle after McLaren. He did not
look back at Sim.
The black man was singing, about the glory of the coming of the Lord.
Harker put his head back into the darkness of the creek. "Sim!"
"Yeah?" Faintly, hoarse, echoing.
"There's land here, Sim. Good land."
"Yeah."
"Sim, we'll find a way...."
Sim was singing again. The sound grew fainter, diminishing downward
into distance. The words were lost, but not what lay behind them. Matt
Harker buried his face in the green grass, and Sim's voice went with
him into the dark.
* * * * *
The clouds were turning color with the sinking of the hidden sun. They
hung like a canopy of hot gold washed in blood. It was utterly silent,
except for the birds. Birds. You never heard birds like that down in
the low places. Matt Harker rolled over and sat up slowly. He felt as
though he had been beaten. There was a sickness in him, and a shame,
and the old dark anger lying coiled and deadly above his heart.
Before him lay the long slope of grass to the river, which bent away
to the left out of sight behind a spur of granite. Beyond the slope
was a broad plain and then a forest of gigantic trees. They seemed to
float in the coppery haze, their dark branches outspread like wings and
starred with flowers. The air was cool, with no taint of mud or rot.
The grass was rich, the soil beneath it clean and sweet.
Rory McLaren moaned softly and Harker turned. His leg looked bad. He
was in a sort of stupor, his skin flushed and dry. Harker swore softly,
wondering what he was going to do.
He looked back toward the plain, and he saw the girl.
He didn't know how she got there. Perhaps out of the bushes that grew
in thick clumps on the slope. She could have been there a long time,
watching. She was watching now, standing quite still about forty feet
away. A great scarlet butterfly clung to her shoulder, moving its wings
with lazy delight.
She seemed more like a child than a woman. She was naked, small and
slender and exquisite. Her skin had a faint translucent hint of green
under its whiteness. Her hair, curled short to her head, was deep blue,
and her eyes were blue also, and very strange.
Harker stared at her, and she at him, neither of them moving. A bright
bird swooped down and hovered by her lips for a moment, caressing her
with its beak. She touched it and smiled, but she did not take her eyes
from Harker.
Harker got to his feet, slowly, easily. He said, "Hello."
She did not move, nor make a sound, but quite suddenly a pair of
enormous birds, beaked and clawed like eagles and black as sin, made a
whistling rush down past Harker's head and returned, circling. Harker
sat down again.
The girl's strange eyes moved from him, upward to the crack in the
hillside whence he had come. Her lips didn't move, but her voice--or
something--spoke clearly inside Harker's head.
"You came from--There." _There_ had tremendous feeling in it, and none
of it nice.
Harker said, "Yes. A telepath, huh?"
"But you're not...." A picture of the golden swimmers formed in
Harker's mind. It was recognizable, but hatred and fear had washed out
all the beauty, leaving only horror.
Harker said, "No." He explained about himself and McLaren. He told
about Sim. He knew she was listening carefully to his mind, testing it
for truth. He was not worried about what she would find. "My friend is
hurt," he said. "We need food and shelter."
For some time there was no answer. The girl was looking at Harker
again. His face, the shape and texture of his body, his hair, and
then his eyes. He had never been looked at quite that way before. He
began to grin. A provocative, be-damned-to-you grin that injected a
surprising amount of light and charm into his sardonic personality.
"Honey," he said, "you are terrific. Animal, mineral, or vegetable?"
She tipped her small round head in surprise, and asked his own question
right back. Harker laughed. She smiled, her mouth making a small
inviting V, and her eyes had sparkles in them. Harker started toward
her.
Instantly the birds warned him back. The girl laughed, a mischievous
ripple of merriment. "Come," she said, and turned away.
Harker frowned. He leaned over and spoke to McLaren, with peculiar
gentleness. He managed to get the boy erect, and then swung him across
his shoulders, staggering slightly under the weight. McLaren said
distinctly, "I'll be back before he's born."
Harker waited until the girl had started, keeping his distance. The two
black birds followed watchfully. They walked out across the thick grass
of the plain, toward the trees. The sky was now the color of blood.
A light breeze caught the girl's hair and played with it. Matt Harker
saw that the short curled strands were broad and flat, like blue petals.
III
It was a long walk to the forest. The top of the plateau seemed to be
bowl-shaped, protected by encircling cliffs. Harker, thinking back to
that first settlement long ago, decided that this place was infinitely
better. It was like the visions he had seen in fever-dreams--the
Promised Land. The coolness and cleanness of it were like having
weights removed from your lungs and heart and body.
The rejuvenating air didn't make up for McLaren's weight, however.
Presently Harker said, "Hold it," and sat down, tumbling McLaren gently
onto the grass. The girl stopped. She came back a little way and
watched Harker, who was blowing like a spent horse. He grinned up at
her.
"I'm shot," he said. "I've been too busy for a man of my age. Can't you
get hold of somebody to help me carry him?"
Again she studied him with puzzled fascination. Night was closing in,
a clear indigo, less dark than at sea level. Her eyes had a curious
luminosity in the gloom.
"Why do you do that?" she asked.
"Do what?"
"Carry it."
By "it" Harker guessed she meant McLaren. He was suddenly, coldly
conscious of a chasm between them that no amount of explanation could
bridge. "He's my friend. He's ... I have to."
She studied his thought and then shook her head. "I don't understand.
It's spoiled--" her thought-image was a combination of "broken,"
"finished," and "useless"--"Why carry it around?"
"McLaren's not an 'it.' He's a man like me, my friend. He's hurt, and I
have to help him."
"I don't understand." Her shrug said it was his funeral, also that
he was crazy. She started on again, paying no attention to Harker's
call for her to wait. Perforce, Harker picked up McLaren and staggered
on again. He wished Sim were here, and immediately wished he hadn't
thought of Sim. He hoped Sim had died quickly before--before what? "_Oh
God, it's dark and I'm scared and my belly's all gone to cold water,
and that thing trotting ahead of me through the blue haze...._"
The thing was beautiful, though. Beautifully formed, fascinating,
a curved slender gleam of moonlight, a chaliced flower holding the
mystic, scented nectar of the unreal, the unknown, the undiscovered.
Harker's blood began, in spite of himself, to throb with a deep
excitement.
They came under the fragrant shadows of the trees. The forest was open,
with broad mossy rides and clearings. There were flowers underfoot, but
no brush, and clumps of ferns. The girl stopped and stretched up her
hand. A feathery branch, high out of her reach, bent and brushed her
face, and she plucked a great pale blossom and set it in her hair.
She turned and smiled at Harker. He began to tremble, partly with
weariness, partly with something else.
"How do you do that?" he asked.
She was puzzled. "The branch, you mean? Oh, that!" She laughed. It was
the first sound he had heard her make, and it shot through him like
warm silver. "I just think I would like a flower, and it comes."
Teleportation, telekinetic energy--what did the books call it? Back
on Earth they knew something about that, but the colony hadn't had
much time to study even its own meager library. There had been some
religious sect that could make roses bend into their hands. Old wisdom,
the force behind the Biblical miracles, just the infinite power of
thought. Very simple. Yeah. Harker wondered uneasily whether she could
work it on him, too. But then, he had a brain of his own. Or did he?
"What's your name?" he asked.
She gave a clear, trilled sound. Harker tried to whistle it and gave
up. Some sort of tone-language, he guessed, without words as he knew
them. It sounded as though they--her people, whatever they were--had
copied the birds.
"I'll call you Button," he said. "Bachelor Button--but you wouldn't
know."
She picked the image out of his mind and sent it back to him. Blue
fringe-topped flowers nodding in his mother's china bowl. She laughed
again and sent her black birds away and led on into the forest, calling
out like an oriole. Other voices answered her, and presently, racing
the light wind between the trees, her people came.
* * * * *
They were like her. There were males, slender little creatures like
young boys, and girls like Button. There were several hundred of
them, all naked, all laughing and curious, their lithe pliant bodies
flitting moth-fashion through the indigo shadows. They were topped with
petals--Harker called them that, though he still wasn't sure--of all
colors from blood-scarlet to pure white.
They trilled back and forth. Apparently Button was telling them all
about how she found Harker and McLaren. The whole mob pushed on slowly
through the forest and ended finally in a huge clearing where there
were only scattered trees. A spring rose and made a little lake, and
then a stream that wandered off among the ferns.
More of the little people came, and now he saw the young ones. All
sizes, from tiny thin creatures on up, replicas of their elders. There
were no old ones. There were none with imperfect or injured bodies.
Harker, exhausted and on the thin edge of a fever-bout, was not
encouraged.
He set McLaren down by the spring. He drank, gasping like an animal,
and bathed his head and shoulders. The forest people stood in a circle,
watching. They were silent now. Harker felt coarse and bestial,
somehow, as though he had belched loudly in church.
He turned to McLaren. He bathed him, helped him drink, and set about
fixing the leg. He needed light, and he needed flame.
There were dry leaves, and mats of dead moss in the rocks around the
spring. He gathered a pile of these. The forest people watched. Their
silent luminous stare got on Harker's nerves. His hands were shaking so
that he made four tries with his flint and steel before he got a spark.
The tiny flicker made the silent ranks stir sharply. He blew on it. The
flames licked up, small and pale at first, then taking hold, growing,
crackling. He saw their faces in the springing light, their eyes
stretched with terror. A shrill crying broke from them and then they
were gone, like rustling leaves before a wind.
Harker drew his knife. The forest was quiet now. Quiet but not at rest.
The skin crawled on Harker's back, over his scalp, drew tight on his
cheekbones. He passed the blade through the flame. McLaren looked up at
him. Harker said, "It's okay, Rory," and hit him carefully on the point
of the jaw. McLaren lay still. Harker stretched out the swollen leg and
went to work.
* * * * *
It was dawn again. He lay by the spring in the cool grass, the ashes of
his fire grey and dead beside the dark stains. He felt rested, relaxed,
and the fever seemed to have gone out of him. The air was like wine.
He rolled over on his back. There was a wind blowing. It was a live,
strong wind, with a certain smell to it. The trees were rollicking,
almost shouting with pleasure. Harker breathed deeply. The smell, the
pure clean edge....
Suddenly he realized that the clouds were high, higher than he had ever
known them to be. The wind swept them up, and the daylight was bright,
so bright that....
Harker sprang up. The blood rushed in him. There was a stinging blur
in his eyes. He began to run, toward a tall tree, and he flung himself
upward into the branches and climbed, recklessly, into the swaying top.
The bowl of the valley lay below him, green, rich, and lovely. The grey
granite cliffs rose around it, grew higher in the direction from which
the wind blew. Higher and higher, and beyond them, far beyond, were
mountains, flung towering against the sky.
On the mountains, showing through the whipping veils of cloud, there
was snow, white and cold and blindingly pure, and as Harker watched
there was a gleam, so quick and fleeting that he saw it more with his
heart than with his eyes....
Sunlight. Snowfields, and above them, the sun.
After a long time he clambered down again into the silence of the
glade. He stood there, not moving, seeing what he had not had time to
see before.
Rory McLaren was gone. Both packs, with food and climbing ropes and
bandages and flint-and-steel were gone. The short spears were gone.
Feeling on his hip, Harker found nothing but bare flesh. His knife and
even his breech-clout had been taken.
A slender, exquisite body moved forward from the shadows of the trees.
Huge white blossoms gleamed against the curly blue that crowned the
head. Luminous eyes glanced up at Harker, full of mockery and a subtle
animation. Button smiled.
Matt Harker walked toward Button, not hurrying, his hard sinewy face
blank of expression. He tried to keep his mind that way, too. "Where is
the other one; my friend?"
"In the finish-place." She nodded vaguely toward the cliffs near where
Harker and McLaren had escaped from the caves. Her thought-image was
somewhere between rubbish-heap and cemetery, as nearly as Harker could
translate it. It was also completely casual, a little annoyed that time
should be wasted on such trifles.
"Did you ... is he still alive?"
"It was when we put it there. It will be all right, it will just wait
until it--stops. Like all of them."
"Why was he moved? Why did you...."
"It was ugly." Button shrugged. "It was broken, anyway." She stretched
her arms upward and lifted her head to the wind. A shiver of delight
ran through her. She smiled again at Harker, side-long.
He tried to keep his anger hidden. He started walking again, not as
though he had any purpose in mind, bearing toward the cliffs. His
way lay past a bush with yellow flowers and thorny, pliant branches.
Suddenly it writhed and whipped him across the belly. He stopped short
and doubled over, hearing Button's laughter.
When he straightened up she was in front of him. "It's red," she said,
surprised, and laid little pointed fingers on the scratches left by the
thorns. She seemed thrilled and fascinated by the color and feel of his
blood. Her fingers moved, probing the shape of his muscles, the texture
of his skin and the dark hair on his chest. They drew small lines of
fire along his neck, along the ridge of his jaw, touching his features
one by one, his eyelids, his black brows.
"What are you?" whispered her mind to his.
"This." Harker put his arms around her, slowly. Her flesh slid cool and
strange under his hands, sending an indescribable shudder through him,
partly pleasure, partly revulsion. He bent his head. Her eyes deepened,
lakes of blue fire, and then he found her lips. They were cool and
strange like the rest of her, pliant, scented with spice, the same
perfume that came with sudden overpowering sweetness from her curling
petals.
Harker saw movement in the forest aisles, a clustering of bright
flower-heads. Button drew back. She took his hand and led him away, off
toward the river and the quiet ferny places along its banks. Glancing
up, Harker saw that the two black birds were following overhead.
* * * * *
"You are really plants, then? Flowers, like those?" He touched the
white blossoms on her head.
"You are really a beast, then? Like the furry, snarling things that
climb up through the pass sometimes?"
They both laughed. The sky above them was the color of clean fleece.
The warm earth and crushed ferns were sweet beneath them. "What pass?"
asked Harker.
"Over there." She pointed off toward the rim of the valley. "It goes
down to the sea, I think. Long ago we used to go down there but there's
no need, and the beasts make it dangerous."
"Do they," said Harker, and kissed her in the hollow below her chin.
"What happens when the beasts come?"
Button laughed. Before he could stir Harker was trapped fast in a web
of creepers and tough fern, and the black birds were screeching and
clashing their sharp beaks in his face.
"That happens," Button said. She stroked the ferns. "Our cousins
understand us, even better than the birds."
Harker lay sweating, even after he was free again. Finally he said,
"Those creatures in the underground lake. Are they your cousins?"
Button's fear-thought thrust against his mind like hands pushing away.
"No, don't.... Long, long ago the legend is that this valley was a
huge lake, and the Swimmers lived in it. They were a different species
from us, entirely. We came from the high gorges, where there are only
barren cliffs now. This was long ago. As the lake receded, we grew more
numerous and began to come down, and finally there was a battle and we
drove the Swimmers over the falls into the black lake. They have tried
and tried to get out, to get back to the light, but they can't. They
send their thoughts through to us sometimes. They...." She broke off.
"I don't want to talk about them any more."
"How would you fight them if they did get out?" asked Harker easily.
"Just with the birds and the growing things?"
Button was slow in answering. Then she said, "I will show you one
way." She laid her hand across his eyes. For a moment there was only
darkness. Then a picture began to form--people, his own people, seen as
reflections in a dim and distorted mirror but recognizable. They poured
into the valley through a notch in the cliffs, and instantly every
bush and tree and blade of grass was bent against them. They fought,
slashing with their knives, making headway, but slowly. And then,
across the plain, came a sort of fog, a thin drifting curtain of soft
white.
It came closer, moving with force of its own, not heeding the wind.
Harker saw that it was thistledown. Seeds, borne on silky wings. It
settled over the people trapped in the brush. It was endless and
unhurrying, covering them all with a fine fleece. They began to writhe
and cry out with pain, with a terrible fear. They struggled, but they
couldn't get away.
The white down dropped away from them. Their bodies were covered with
countless tiny green shoots, sucking the chemicals from the living
flesh and already beginning to grow.
Button's spoken thought cut across the image. "I have seen your
thoughts, some of them, since the moment you came out of the caves. I
can't understand them, but I can see our plains gashed to the raw earth
and our trees cut down and everything made ugly. If your kind came
here, we would have to go. And the valley belongs to us."
Matt Harker's brain lay still in the darkness of his skull, wary, drawn
in upon itself. "It belonged to the Swimmers first."
"They couldn't hold it. We can."
"Why did you save me, Button? What do you want of me?"
"There was no danger from you. You were strange. I wanted to play with
you."
"Do you love me, Button?" His fingers touched a large smooth stone
among the fern roots.
"Love? What is that?"
"It's tomorrow and yesterday. It's hoping and happiness and pain, the
complete self because it's selfless, the chain that binds you to life
and makes living it worth while. Do you understand?"
"No. I grow, I take from the soil and the light, I play with the
others, with the birds and the wind and the flowers. When the time
comes I am ripe with seed, and after that I go to the finish-place and
wait. That's all I understand. That's all there is."
He looked up into her eyes. A shudder crept over him. "You have no
soul, Button. That's the difference between us. You live, but you have
no soul."
After that it was not so hard to do what he had to do. To do quickly,
very quickly, the thing that was his only faint chance of justifying
Sim's death. The thing that Button may have glimpsed in his mind but
could not guard against, because there was no understanding in her of
the thought of murder.
IV
The black birds darted at Harker, but the compulsion that sent them
flickered out too soon. The ferns and creepers shook, and then were
still, and the birds flew heavily away. Matt Harker stood up.
He thought he might have a little time. The flower-people probably
kept in pretty close touch mentally, but perhaps they wouldn't notice
Button's absence for a while. Perhaps they weren't prying into his own
thoughts, because he was Button's toy. Perhaps....
He began to run, toward the cliffs where the finish-place was. He kept
as much as possible in the open, away from shrubs. He did not look
again, before he left, at what lay by his feet.
He was close to his destination when he knew that he was spotted.
The birds returned, rushing down at him on black whistling wings. He
picked up a dead branch to beat them off and it crumbled in his hands.
Telekinesis, the power of mind over matter. Harker had read once that
if you knew how you could always make your point by thinking the dice
into position. He wished he could think himself up a blaster. Curved
beaks ripped his arms. He covered his face and grabbed one of the birds
by the neck and killed it. The other one screamed and this time Harker
wasn't so lucky. By the time he had killed the second one he'd felt
claws in him and his face was laid open along the cheekbones. He began
to run again.
Bushes swayed toward him as he passed. Thorny branches stretched.
Creepers rose like snakes from the grass, and every green blade was
turned knife-like against his feet. But he had already reached the
cliffs and there were open rocky spaces and the undergrowth was thin.
He knew he was near the finish-place because he could smell it. The
gentle withered fragrance of flowers past their prime, and under that
a dead, sour decay. He shouted McLaren's name, sick with dread that
there might not be an answer, weak with relief when there was one. He
raced over tumbled rocks toward the sound. A small creeper tangled his
foot and brought him down. He wrenched it by the roots from its shallow
crevice and went on. As he glanced back over his shoulder he saw a thin
white veil, a tiny patch in the distant air, drifting toward him.
He came to the finish-place.
It was a box canyon, quite deep, with high sheer walls, so that it
was almost like a wide well. In the bottom of it bodies were thrown
in a dry, spongy heap. Colorless flower-bodies, withered and grey, an
incredible compost pile.
Rory McLaren lay on top of it, apparently unhurt. The two packs were
beside him, with the weapons. Strewn over the heap, sitting, lying,
moving feebly about, were the ones who waited, as Button had put it,
to stop. Here were the aged, the faded and worn out, the imperfect and
injured, where their ugliness could not offend. They seemed already
dead mentally. They paid no attention to the men, nor to each other.
Sheer blind vitality kept them going a little longer, as a geranium
will bloom long after its cut stalk is desiccated.
"Matt," McLaren said. "Oh, God, Matt, I'm glad to see you!"
"Are you all right?"
"Sure. My leg even feels pretty good. Can you get me out?"
"Throw those packs up here."
McLaren obeyed. He began to catch Harker's feverish mood, warned by
Harker's bleeding, ugly face that something nasty was afoot. Harker
explained rapidly while he got out one of the ropes and half hauled
McLaren out of the pit. The white veil was close now. Very close.
"Can you walk?" Harker asked.
McLaren glanced at the fleecy cloud. Harker had told him about it. "I
can walk," he said. "I can run like hell."
Harker handed him the rope. "Get around the other side of the canyon.
Clear across, see?" He helped McLaren on with his pack. "Stand by with
the rope to pull me up. And keep to the bare rocks."
McLaren went off. He limped badly, his face twisted with pain. Harker
swore. The cloud was so close that now he could see the millions of
tiny seeds floating on their silken fibres, thistledown guided by the
minds of the flower-people in the valley. He shrugged into his pack
straps and began winding bandages and tufts of dead grass around the
bone tip of a recovered spear. The edge of the cloud was almost on him
when he got a spark into the improvised torch and sprang down onto the
heap of dead flower-things in the pit.
He sank and floundered on the treacherous surface, struggling across
it while he applied the torch. The dry, withered substance caught. He
raced the flames to the far wall and glanced back. The dying creatures
had not stirred, even when the fire engulfed them. Overhead, the edges
of the seed-cloud flared and crisped. It moved on blindly over the
fire. There was a pale flash of light and the cloud vanished in a puff
of smoke.
"Rory!" Harker yelled. "Rory!"
* * * * *
For a long minute he stood there, coughing, strangling in thick smoke,
feeling the rushing heat crisp his skin. Then, when it was almost
too late, McLaren's sweating face appeared above him and the rope
snaked down. Tongues of flame flicked his backside angrily as he ran
monkey-fashion up the wall.
They got away from there, higher on the rocky ground, slashing
occasionally with their knives at brush and creepers they could not
avoid. McLaren shuddered.
"It's impossible," he said. "How do they do it?"
"They're blood cousins. Or should I say sap. Anyhow, I suppose it's
like radio control--a matter of transmitting the right frequencies.
Here, take it easy a minute."
McLaren sank down gratefully. Blood was seeping through the tight
bandages where Harker had incised his wound. Harker looked back into
the valley.
The flower people were spread out in a long crescent, their bright
multi-colored heads clear against the green plain. Harker guessed that
they would be guarding the pass. He guessed that they had known what
was going on in his mind as well as Button had. New form of communism,
one mind for all and all for one mind. He could see that even without
McLaren's disability they couldn't make it to the pass. Not a mouse
could have made it.
He wondered how soon the next seed-cloud would come.
"What are we going to do, Matt? Is there any way...." McLaren wasn't
thinking about himself. He was looking at the valley like Lucifer
yearning at Paradise, and he was thinking of Viki. Not just Viki alone,
but Viki as a symbol of thirty-eight hundred wanderers on the face of
Venus.
"I don't know," said Harker. "The pass is out, and the caves are
out ... hey! Remember when we were fighting off those critters by the
river and you nearly started a cave-in throwing rocks? There was a
fault there, right over the edge of the lake. An earthquake split. If
we could get at it from the top and shake it down...."
It was a minute before McLaren caught on. His eyes widened. "A slide
would dam up the lake...."
"If the level rose enough, the Swimmers could get out." Harker gazed
with sultry eyes at the bobbing flower heads below.
"But if the valley's flooded, Matt, and those critters take over, where
does that leave our people?"
"There wouldn't be too much of a slide, I don't think. The rock's
solid on both sides of the fault. And anyway, the weight of the water
backed up there would push through anything, even a concrete dam, in a
couple of weeks." Harker studied the valley floor intently. "See the
way that slopes there? Even if the slide didn't wash out, a little
digging would drain the flood off down the pass. We'd just be making a
new river."
"Maybe." McLaren nodded. "I guess so. But that still leaves the
Swimmers. I don't think they'd be any nicer than these babies about
giving up their land." His tone said he would rather fight Button's
people any day.
Harker's mouth twisted in a slow grin. "The Swimmers are water
creatures, Rory. Amphibious. Also, they've lived underground, in total
darkness, for God knows how long. You know what happens to angleworms
when you get 'em out in the light. You know what happens to fungus
that grows in the dark." He ran his fingers over his skin, almost with
reverence. "Noticed anything about yourself, Rory? Or have you been too
busy."
McLaren stared. He rubbed his own skin, and winced, and rubbed again,
watching his fingers leave streaks of livid white that faded instantly.
"Sunburn," he said wonderingly. "My God. Sunburn!"
Harker stood up. "Let's go take a look." Down below the flower heads
were agitated "They don't like that thought, Rory. Maybe it can be
done, and they know it."
McLaren rose, leaning on a short spear like a cane. "Matt. They won't
let us get away with it."
Harker frowned. "Button said there were other ways beside the seed...."
He turned away. "No use standing here worrying about it."
* * * * *
They started climbing again, very slowly on account of McLaren. Harker
tried to gauge where they were in relation to the cavern beneath.
The river made a good guide. The rocks were almost barren of growth
here, which was a godsend. He watched, but he couldn't see anything
threatening approaching from the valley. The flower people were mere
dots now, perfectly motionless.
The rock formation changed abruptly. Ancient quakes had left scars in
the shape of twisted strata, great leaning slabs of granite poised
like dancers, and cracks that vanished into darkness.
Harker stopped. "This is it. Listen, Rory. I want you to go off up
there, out of the danger area...."
"Matt, I...."
"Shut up. One of us has got to be alive to take word back to the ships
as soon as he can get through the valley. There's no great rush and
you'll be able to travel in three-four days. You...."
"But why me? You're a better mountain man...."
"You're married," said Harker curtly. "It'll only take one of us to
shove a couple of those big slabs down. They're practically ready to
fall of their own weight. Maybe nothing will happen. Maybe I'll get out
all right. But it's a little silly if both of us take the risk, isn't
it?"
"Yeah. But Matt...."
"Listen, kid." Harker's voice was oddly gentle. "I know what I'm doing.
Give my regards to Viki and the...."
He broke off with a sharp cry of pain. Looking down incredulously, he
saw his body covered with little tentative flames, feeble, flickering,
gone, but leaving their red footprints behind them.
McLaren had the same thing.
They stared at each other. A helpless terror took Harker by the throat.
Telekinesis again. The flower people turning his own weapon against
them. They had seen fire, and what it did, and they were copying the
process in their own minds, concentrating, all of them together, the
whole mental force of the colony centered on the two men. He could
even understand why they focused on the skin. They had taken the
sunburn-thought and applied it literally.
Fire. Spontaneous combustion. A simple, easy reaction, if you knew the
trick. There was something about a burning bush....
The attack came again, stronger this time. The flower people were
getting the feel of it now. It hurt. Oh God, it hurt. McLaren screamed.
His loincloth and bandages began to smoulder.
_What to do, thought Harker, quick, tell me what to do...._
The flower people focus on us through our minds, our conscious minds.
Maybe they can't get the subconscious so easily, because the thoughts
are not directed, they're images, symbols, vague things. Maybe if Rory
couldn't think consciously they couldn't find him....
Another flare of burning, agonizing pain. In a minute they'll have the
feel of it. They can keep it going....
Without warning, Harker slugged McLaren heavily on the jaw and dragged
him away to where the rock was firm. He did it all with astonishing
strength and quickness. There was no need to save himself. He wasn't
going to need himself much longer.
He went away a hundred feet or so, watching McLaren. A third attack
struck him, sickened and dazed him so that he nearly fell. Rory McLaren
was not touched.
Harker smiled. He turned and ran back toward the rotten place in
the cliffs. A part of his conscious thought was so strongly formed
that his body obeyed it automatically, not stopping even when the
flames appeared again and again on his flesh, brightening, growing,
strengthening as the thought-energies of Button's people meshed
together. He flung down one teetering giant of stone, and the shock
jarred another loose. Harker stumbled on to a third, based on a sliding
bed of shale, and thrust with all his strength and beyond it, and it
went too, with crashing thunder.
Harker fell. The universe dissolved into shuddering, roaring chaos
beyond a bright veil of flame and a smell of burning flesh. By that
time there was only one thing clear in Matt Harker's understanding--the
second part of his conscious mind, linked to and even stronger than the
first.
The image he carried with him into death was a tall mountain with snow
on its shoulders, blazing in the sun.
* * * * *
It was night. Rory McLaren lay prone on a jutting shelf above the
valley. Below him the valley was lost in indigo shadows, but there was
a new sound in it--the swirl of water, angry and swift. There was new
life in it, too. It rode the crest of the flood waters, burning gold
in the blue night, shining giants returning in vengeance to their own
place. Great patches of blazing jewel-toned phosphorescence dotted the
water--the flower-hounds, turned loose to hunt. And in between them,
rolling and leaping in deadly play, the young of the Swimmers went.
McLaren watched them hunt the forest people. He watched all night,
shivering with dread, while the golden titans exacted payment for the
ages they had lived in darkness. By dawn it was all over. And then,
through the day, he watched the Swimmers die.
The river, turned back on itself, barred them from the caves. The
strong bright light beat down. The Swimmers turned at first to greet it
with a pathetic joy. And then they realized....
McLaren turned away. He waited, resting, until, as Harker had
predicted, the block washed away and the backed-up water could flow
normally again. The valley was already draining when he found the pass.
He looked up at the mountains and breathed the sweet wind, and felt a
great shame and humility that he was here to do it.
He looked back toward the caves where Sim had died, and the cliffs
above where he had buried what remained of Matt Harker. It seemed
to him that he should say something, but no words came, only that
his chest was so full he could hardly breathe. He turned mutely down
the rocky pass, toward the Sea of Morning Opals and the thirty-eight
hundred wanderers who had found a home.
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