Tyr had never seen such sybaritic luxury as was revealed when he let
the goldthread drapes rustle across the arched doorway behind him.
Strewn cushions, plump and fat, with red-and-white worked in thin
curves across their surfaces; the blue tinted walls that radiated
warmth; the richly toned murals and the hidden lights bespoke limitless
wealth. Low bookcases crammed the walls. Perfume pervaded the cool air.
It was a feminine scent, cloying, lingering.
Katha lifted a scarlet jug and poured cool white liquid into two
crystal hemispheres. One she handed to Tyr, the other she raised in her
white, red-nailed hand.
"To freedom," she laughed softly, and drank.
The white wine was rich and heady, and it warmed his throat going down.
Tyr sipped again, and again. He looked around the room with unveiled
eyes.
This was just one apartment of one girl. She ranked high in the
councils of the _ardth_, but this was a planet far from home. And all
the luxury before him! Why, one of those pillows with the red-and-white
curves would make Fay's eyes bulge in jealousy. And he was pitting
himself against a race that could give a woman this, for herself!
He grimaced. What could one man--even such as Tyr--do against such a
race? He should quit now and enjoy himself with this woman who looked
at him with those steady black eyes. He told himself all that, hating
the truth of it.
A cool hand snuggled into his palm. "Tell me about you," Katha smiled.
"There isn't anything to tell."
"You have strength and incredible speed. But what are your other
powers, Tyr? You are a mutant, a changeling. You know that. But why,
Tyr? Why? Nature doesn't try changes unless she is fitting a being for
something."
Katha was very close to him. She was perfumed and she was womanly, and
Tyr was used to neither. She was as subtle and complex as some rare
drug, where Fay was as transparent, in her childish hungers, as plate
glass.
It may have been the white wine, he thought afterward, but all he saw
now was her red mouth and the mocking amusement swimming in her black
eyes. He kissed her, holding her close in his arms.
"We're straying from the subject," she smiled up at him from his arms.
It was then that the cough sounded, from the golden drapes of the door.
Otho stood smirking in the opening, eyes leering. From head to toe he
glistened in a rainbowed silk that bellied and sank about his form with
a sensitiveness to air currents that made it seem alive.
He had a gun in his hand and it was levelled at Tyr.
"I am sorry to interrupt your--amusements--"
Tyr did not think he moved fast, but he was in front of Otho even as
the eyes of the other were commencing to widen in fright. Tyr hit the
gun upward, slamming it against Otho's sneering mouth where it made a
wide gash. The gun fell to the rug, and Tyr put out his hands and took
hold of the sleazy silk and lifted. Otho dangled a foot off the floor.
"I could break your spine," Tyr whispered.
Otho was white. He dared not speak.
"I could put the fingers of one hand around your fat neck and snap it."
Otho closed his eyes and shuddered.
Tyr dropped him and Otho fell loosely to the floor and rolled over and
came to his hands and knees. The big brown god of the Trylla loomed
vast and massive above his crouching form.
"You do not show respect to your god, Otho," Tyr grinned dangerously.
"Nor to a woman. At least, you might be courteous, if you are not
religious."
Tyr listened to the mumble that came from the man's mouth, watched him
crawl away. He turned to Katha, "That is the governor Mason gave the
Trylla."
Katha let her hip rest against the onyx tabletop as her white fingers
sought for an hydroette. The end came greenly alive at her first intake
of breath. Blowing green smoke from between her red lips she leaned
back and laughed softly.
"You know, you _are_ a god in some ways. Your very bigness, the titanic
strength and speed of you. If you swore allegiance to the _ardth_, you
would rise fast. You would be a space commander in a few years."
"Is that a promotion over being a god?"
"Tyr, listen to me. Be sensible. Use that brain of yours. You have a
brain, and a good one. It is untutored, but it sops up knowledge as a
Venusian sponge does water! I saw your eyes moving in that laboratory
of mine. You deduced the uses of the fluoroscope, the electronic
microscope. You needed only to see them in action--"
She caught her breath. The skin around her lips showed white, as her
mouth tightened. "Perhaps you could even duplicate them, given time
and the materials, just from seeing them. Could you, Tyr?"
Tyr wondered, himself. His mind held a confused jumble of plates
and wires, and remembrances of diagrams he had seen in books in the
Tower. Left alone, he rather imagined he could do what Katha hinted.
Especially if he worked in sunlight. For the sun would open the facets
of his mind, make his brain as keen and alive as his body, give it that
subconscious awareness of knowledge that awed him.
"It may be racial memories," he said slowly. "In most men those are
buried too deeply for practical use. But with me it may be different. I
do know that things do not long remain a mystery with me, once I ponder
on them."
Katha walked across the room, staring at the cushions that she kicked
idly aside. Her thin brows were puckered.
"I said you could be a Space Commander, Tyr. You could be more than
that. You could be Presider itself, if--if what I think about you is
true.
"The Trylla think the _ardth_ a heartless crew. Oh, I know. But what
the Trylla, and the other inhabitants of the planets we have taken over
do not know is this: We _ardth_ are facing a fight against extinction.
It won't come for centuries, but it is coming, as surely as you live.
"_The Glows are dying!_
"And when that happens, all our cities and all our spaceships--you
might say our lives as well--will come to a stop. If you--"
* * * * *
Men came through the doorway, and Space Commander Mason was in front
of them. Otho poked his fat and sneering face between two _ardth_ and
laughed at Tyr. The men splayed out and Mason walked toward them, a
grim smile on his lips.
"You've left quite a trail behind you tonight, Tyr," he said. "Those
guards, then Otho. I tried to treat with you as an equal. Your word
means much with the Trylla. But I made a mistake."
Katha ran before the Commander and said swiftly, "Katha reporting on
mutant Tyr of the planet Lyallar. From observations, my conclusions are
that he is an advanced form of life, requiring no food but taking his
energy directly from another source. That his strength is phenomenal.
That his brain is superhuman. That he must be tested further. My
recommendation is--"
Mason put her aside and gestured to his men.
"--that he be shipped to the home planet for study."
Tyr shook his head and said, "No," but he never took his eyes away from
the man with the bald head.
Mason lifted his hand suddenly.
And Tyr moved.
He went fast, so fast that his arms were mere blurs lifting Mason off
his feet and flinging him. He swung up over a table and drove both
heels into a man's chest. He hit another _splat_ on the jaw just as the
man's finger tightened on the trigger and a bolt of fire went toward
the high ceiling. Now their guns were aiming and shooting yellow bolts
at him. He caught three of them on his chest.
Those yellow fires burned momentarily, before his pores could suck
their ravening power into his system. But they filled him with a
wild, savage elation. His throat keened as he charged the men by the
entrance, who knelt and fired as their eyes widened, seeing him come,
growing bigger and bigger before them.
He did not stop. He ran over the men, and left them broken on the floor.
Tyr chuckled grimly, his feet treading a rug. His big right fist held
a solargun that he had wrenched from a falling soldier. A weapon for
the Trylla! His shoulder splintered a door with two hundred pounds of
energy behind it. The lock went through the wood and Tyr was onto the
cobblestones.
The street was dark and empty. He ran with the wind, dodging around
corners and leaping along straight streets. Far behind him there came
shouts and the dull thumping of pounding feet.
The cyclopean walls of Yawarta rose before him. Here and there hung the
great nets of the fishermen, hung out to dry on stout wooden pegs. Up
then he went, his arms lifting his massive body with ease. From bastion
to ledge he went up the wall like a scurrying spider.
Now he stood on the broad top, beneath the stars. He raised an arm and
waved it at the city, and went over the other side.
He ran free, away from Yawarta.
Behind him he could hear the _phffft-phffft_ of the jet planes rising
to pursue him, leaping upwards like hounds from the racing barriers.
Tyr grinned and stretched his long legs out so that the ground sped by
eerily. They could not catch him under the stars, not with this weapon
in his hand.
Wind whistled past his ears. He headed for the silver forests he could
see in the dim distance. He would be under their shelter soon.
Beams of light showered the ground, hunting him. They slid all around,
missing him as he dodged gracefully, swerving from their pale radiance.
Soon he would be beneath those trees. Nothing on all Lyallar could
catch him then.
Tyr swung the solar gun upward, put the cold muzzle to his naked chest,
and pulled the trigger.
* * * * *
Sunlight tinted the bluffs a pale amber, spreading a gossamer gold
across the shelving stone ledges. It made dark shadows undulate in rock
crevices, and sent tiny cascades of brilliant red and yellow from veins
of quartz. The cliffs towered high above a rolling countryside where
hummocks of grass grew in clustered greenness.
Tyr stood erect on the jagged tongue of rock, staring down at a file of
men and women walking across the hills. He was naked but for the white
cloth at his middle into which the butt of the solar gun protruded at a
rakish angle. Towering huge in the morning sun, he looked the god, by
every inch of him, that the Trylla thought him to be.
He grinned and patted the walnut handle of the weapon. That blast of
power had given him needed energy last night, when the sun was on
the other side of the planet. His follicles had drunk it in, and his
strange organs filtered it throughout his body.
All night long had he run, yet he was fresh and strong.
Now he looked across the brown valley, and saw the Trylla walking
across it, beginning the long ascent up the other side. Here and there
he recognized familiar figures. Fay was at the head of the column,
just ahead of young Texel and grim old Gaarn. Tyr scanned the blue sky.
No _ardth_-men there!
He lowered himself over the jagged edge of the bluff. His canny feet,
feeling about like sensitive fingers, found chinks in the weather-worn
rock. He went down foot by foot, yet swiftly.
When he dropped the last twenty feet to the crumbly valley bottom, the
Trylla were only a few miles from him. His straight descent had saved
him hours of travel. He could catch them now in a matter of minutes.
Fay saw him first, turning her golden head almost as if some telepathic
thought commanded her. She cried out, and the slender column wavered
and halted.
Tyr came up to her with outstretched hands and a smile on his lips, but
the smile faded when he saw her eyes.
"Why have you returned?" she asked numbly. "You made your bargains with
the _ardth_, for the girl named Katha. What else did they give you for
Lyallar, besides the girl?"
"For Lyallar? Besides the girl? Are you mad, Fay? And you others--do
you believe what she says? Fay, what--"
Gaarn said sourly, "Deny it, then. Deny that you went alone with this
woman Katha to plot our undoing. Deny that Zarman and others who
trusted you were flogged."
"I plotted no one's undoing. And as for Zarman--"
"He was flogged, wasn't he?" howled Texel, his eyes two abysses of
anguish.
"Flogged before I--"
Texel spat at him, and Tyr quivered and his hands came up. Sadly, he
let them fall again. Force would accomplish nothing. And a god must be
understanding.
"I freed Zarman and the others as they were being taken through the
streets," he said patiently. "As for Katha, she is a biologist of the
_ardth_."
"You were alone with her," Fay muttered sullenly. "Otho saw you kissing
her."
"Otho! So that is where you get your news."
"The talking trees, the silver ones," said Gaarn between toothless
lips. "They pick up subsonic messages. That was how we heard."
"And of course, you believe. It matters not that the _ardth_ appointed
Otho in place of Zarman. Take his word to mine. It was Otho that sent
the messages out, wasn't it?"
"Yes," said a woman.
"Otho wants me as a captive. So do the _ardth_. Otho hopes that you
will turn me in. There will be a reward for me. That is why he sent out
that message. He wants to turn the Trylla against me."
He talked to their eyes that reflected their feelings, fighting to
recapture their trust, "If the _ardth_ kill me, what hope is left to
you? You all say I am a god, your god. Yet you desert me at the first
lies of a renegade!"
The men shuffled their feet. Their faces were haggard, and lined with
bitterness and distrust. In some eyes, Tyr could read real hate.
"Why have you come back?" whispered Fay, staring up at a distant
mountaintop. "To turn us in? To give my back to the floggers? Am I that
valuable to the _ardth_?"
Tyr pleaded, "Should I have returned alone, if my purpose was your
capture? If that were the case, the skies would be alive with aircraft!
I knew you were on your way to the Barrow. I could have made you all
prisoners by now, if such was my intent. Reason it out. Otho tells you
lies to turn you away from the one thing that had any chance of helping
you!"
* * * * *
Like children, their faces grew hopeful, as their minds absorbed his
words. Fay was biting her lip. From under her yellow lashes, her brown
eyes studied him.
"But you kissed this Katha, didn't you? You kissed an _ardth_-woman!
The god of the Trylla would never do that."
Tyr could see her illogical reasoning was swaying the others. They were
hesitant, reproachful.
He said defiantly, "I kissed her, because she was a woman, and lovely.
I--"
Fay turned her back. The others looked from the girl to Tyr and back at
the girl again.
"I am no traitor, because of that kiss. I--"
They were not listening, but following Fay who was walking swiftly
away, and toward the hills in the purple distance. His fingers closed
on empty bitterness as he stood there alone, miserable. His people ...
following a girl toward destruction.
Sorrow gnawed in his heart. This was the fate of a god, then, that his
children should misunderstand him, perhaps even that they should hate
him. Still, he did not blame them. They were so alone, so helpless, and
so afraid.
Watching them move away, Tyr knew they needed him more than ever. They
were leaving the only one who stood any chance of helping them. Without
him, the Trylla were like toys before the hard, sure hands of the
_ardth_.
He touched the handle of the solar gun and let his fingers trail away.
He would have to find the Barrow alone, now.
* * * * *
Two days later, Tyr parted the green fronds of a mountain bush and
looked at the gleaming whiteness of the Barrow. It was a low rounded
dome, lying across the hard whitish rocks of a strange mountain peak.
From where he stood, he could make out arches receding back in under
the dome, many of them. The arches were so many that each looked like a
reflection of the others.
The Barrow, he thought with dull triumph. It was camouflaged perfectly.
That roundness gave no glint to a watcher in the sky. Its lowness cast
no shadow. Its whiteness blended with the dazzling brilliance of the
white mountain rocks. No wonder it had stood years without detection.
Even looking for it as he was, Tyr almost missed it. Only the arches,
seen at a certain angle, betrayed its existence.
He loped toward it, breaking into the open. Only when he was near the
arches did he see the woman on the ground to one side, kneeling. Before
her a man lay on his back.
Tyr went forward on the tips of his toes, as silent as a breeze moving
across rock.
The girl knelt beside the man, was moving her hands over him swiftly,
competently. Then she leaned back on her haunches and shook her dark
head. The black blouse and white slacks looked familiar. When he saw
her face as she raised it, he knew.
"Katha," he said.
The girl whirled, reaching for a gun at her hip. But when she saw him
fully she gave a low cry and scrambled to her feet. "Tyr, Tyr! Oh, I'm
so glad I've found you!" And was running to him.
He tried to be curt, but it was useless. There was too much joy shining
out of those black eyes, too much laughter and delight. And she was so
feminine! He put out his hands and held her arms, making her stay a
little away from him. Tyr wondered if she heard the wild pounding of
his heart.
"Why?" he asked. "Why are you here? Why did you come searching for me?"
Laughter was like musical hoarseness in her throat. With head flung
back so that she could hold him with her eyes, she said, "Because Space
Commander Mason ordered that you be shot on sight. Because you are a
doomed man. And because--I think you may yet save the Trylla."
"You are _ardth_!"
"It makes no difference. What are you, for that matter?"
"I--I don't know."
He did not know. Always that uncertainty tugged at the core of him.
Unknowingness within him, like an emptiness. Who are you, Tyr? What are
you? And mad laughter answered, "You do not know. You will never know
what you are. A god? Ho! Not you, not Tyr."
She saw the blankness in his eyes, and the misery. Her voice was soft,
tender. "Tyr, can't you see? You are--Tyr."
He shook his head, heart dull within his chest.
She cried between a laugh and a sob, "But you are the first, Tyr,
the first of your kind! I can tell you that. You are a biochemical
newcomer."
"What does that mean?"
"I don't know. No one knows. _You_ have to prove it to yourself first.
_You_ have to learn about you, and then others will know. Who can best
understand a new thing but the thing itself! Explore yourself, Tyr--and
know!"
Katha hooked a finger in the black braid of her belt and made traceries
in the sand with the toe of her sandal. "I had to come and find you.
I could not let you die. Besides, there is something in what you do.
If the Trylla could be made friendly to the _ardth_ they would help
us. Perhaps they could find the way to keep the Glows from dying. The
_ardth_ need help. You might be the agent to bring _ardth_ and Trylla
together."
From the depths of his bitterness, Tyr laughed harshly.
"I am but one against the _ardth_. I have no allies. Even the Trylla
turn their faces from me. The only thing that keeps me going is the
thought that a god must protect his people. Even if they hate him."
"Then think of the rewards that the Trylla may reap, if you unite them
with the _ardth_ in friendship. The _ardth_ are not only conquerors,
but colonizers as well. In the far-flung span of cities that spread
from the home planets fanwise beyond even Fornax, there are many
marvels.
"You have never been to Zafega on Fomalhaut-2. You have not beheld the
creata-screens, where your dreams become reality, where the deeps of
the subconscious are caught in graphs and translated into pictures.
That is incredible beauty, and horror in one! No one is ever the same,
having beheld his dreams in a waking moment.
"Then there are the historays that recapture the past, making a living,
breathing thing of it. You could see the history of all Lyallar, Tyr,
from its primordial beginnings until the--"
Tyr whispered roughly, "That sight would make me realize even more
bitterly what it means to be a Tryllan--and alive--these days."
Katha turned her back to him, looking across the rock and sand to a
distant fringe of silver trees. Tyr bit his lip, staring at her shapely
shoulders. Fool! To alienate the one person on all the planet who cared
whether--
An old face lying on the ground, his eyes saw. Gaunt brown cheeks, and
sparse grey hair on a round skull. Harl. The ancient one with a brain
filled with the magic of war and the knowledge of sciences lost to all
the Trylla, other than himself. Harl was dead.