_A Man without a World, this 1,000,000-year-old
Daryesh! Once Lord of a Thousand Suns, now condemned
to rove the spaceways in alien form, searching
for love, for life, for the great lost Vwyrdda._
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories September 1951.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
"Yes, you'll find almost anything man has ever imagined, somewhere out
in the Galaxy," I said. "There are so damned many millions of planets,
and such a fantastic variety of surface conditions and of life
evolving to meet them, and of intelligence and civilization appearing
in that life. Why, I've been on worlds with fire-breathing dragons,
and on worlds where dwarfs fought things that could pass for the
goblins our mothers used to scare us with, and on a planet where a race
of witches lived--telepathic pseudohypnosis, you know--oh, I'll bet
there's not a tall story or fairy tale ever told which doesn't have
some kind of counterpart somewhere in the universe."
Laird nodded. "Uh-huh," he answered, in that oddly slow and soft voice
of his. "I once let a genie out of a bottle."
"Eh? What happened?"
"It killed me."
I opened my mouth to laugh, and then took a second glance at him
and shut it again. He was just too dead-pan serious about it. Not
poker-faced, the way a good actor can be when he's slipping over a tall
one--no, there was a sudden misery behind his eyes, and somehow it was
mixed with the damnedest cold humor.
I didn't know Laird very well. Nobody did. He was out most of the time
on Galactic Survey, prowling a thousand eldritch planets never meant
for human eyes. He came back to the Solar System more rarely and for
briefer visits than anyone else in his job, and had less to say about
what he had found.
A huge man, six-and-a-half feet tall, with dark aquiline features and
curiously brilliant greenish-grey eyes, middle-aged now though it
didn't show except at the temples. He was courteous enough to everyone,
but shortspoken and slow to laugh. Old friends, who had known him
thirty years before when he was the gayest and most reckless officer
in the Solar Navy, thought something during the Revolt had changed him
more than any psychologist would admit was possible. But he had never
said anything about it, merely resigning his commission after the war
and going into Survey.
We were sitting alone in a corner of the lounge. The Lunar branch of
the Explorers' Club maintains its building outside the main dome of
Selene Center, and we were sitting beside one of the great windows,
drinking Centaurian sidecars and swapping the inevitable shop-talk.
Even Laird indulged in that, though I suspected more because of the
information he could get than for any desire of companionship.
Behind us, the long quiet room was almost empty. Before us, the window
opened on the raw magnificence of moonscape, a sweep of crags and
cliffs down the crater wall to the riven black plains, washed in the
eerie blue of Earth's light. Space blazed above us, utter black and a
million sparks of frozen flame.
"Come again?" I said.
* * * * *
He laughed, without much humor. "I might as well tell you," he said.
"You won't believe it, and even if you did it'd make no difference.
Sometimes I tell the story--alcohol makes me feel like it--I start
remembering old times...."
He settled farther back in his chair. "Maybe it wasn't a real genie,"
he went on. "More of a ghost, perhaps. That was a haunted planet. They
were great a million years before man existed on Earth. They spanned
the stars and they knew things the present civilization hasn't even
guessed at. And then they died. Their own weapons swept them away in
one burst of fire, and only broken ruins were left--ruins and desert,
and the ghost who lay waiting in that bottle."
I signalled for another round of drinks, wondering what he meant,
wondering just how sane that big man with the worn rocky face was.
Still--you never know. I've seen things out beyond that veil of stars
which your maddest dreams never hinted at. I've seen men carried home
mumbling and empty-eyed, the hollow cold of space filling their brains
where something had broken the thin taut wall of their reason. They say
spacemen are a credulous breed. Before Heaven, they have to be!
"You don't mean New Egypt?" I asked.
"Stupid name. Just because there are remnants of a great dead culture,
they have to name it after an insignificant valley of ephemeral
peasants. I tell you, the men of Vwyrdda were like gods, and when they
were destroyed whole suns were darkened by the forces they used. Why,
they killed off Earth's dinosaurs in a day, millions of years ago, and
only used one ship to do it."
"How in hell do you know that? I didn't think the archeologists had
deciphered their records."
"They haven't. All our archeologists will ever know is that the
Vwyrddans were a race of remarkably humanoid appearance, with a highly
advanced interstellar culture wiped out about a million Earth-years
ago. Matter of fact, I don't really know that they did it to Earth, but
I do know that they had a regular policy of exterminating the great
reptiles of terrestroid planets with an eye to later colonization,
and I know that they got this far, so I suppose our planet got the
treatment too." Laird accepted his fresh drink and raised the glass to
me. "Thanks. But now do be a good fellow and let me ramble on in my own
way.
"It was--let me see--thirty-three years ago now, when I was a bright
young lieutenant with bright young ideas. The Revolt was in full swing
then, and the Janyards held all that region of space, out Sagittari
way you know. Things looked bad for Sol then--I don't think it's ever
been appreciated how close we were to defeat. They were poised to
drive right through our lines with their battle-fleets, slash past our
frontiers, and hit Earth itself with the rain of hell that had already
sterilized a score of planets. We were fighting on the defensive,
spread over several million cubic light-years, spread horribly thin.
Oh, bad!
"Vwyrdda--New Egypt--had been discovered and some excavation done
shortly before the war began. We knew about as much then as we do now.
Especially, we knew that the so-called Valley of the Gods held more
relics than any other spot on the surface. I'd been quite interested
in the work, visited the planet myself, even worked with the crew that
found and restored that gravitomagnetic generator--the one which taught
us half of what we know now about g-m fields.
"It was my young and fanciful notion that there might be more to be
found, somewhere in that labyrinth--and from study of the reports
I even thought I knew about what and where it would be. One of the
weapons that had novaed suns, a million years ago--
"The planet was far behind the Janyard lines, but militarily valueless.
They wouldn't garrison it, and I was sure that such semi-barbarians
wouldn't have my idea, especially with victory so close. A one-man
sneakboat could get in readily enough--it just isn't possible to
blockade a region of space; too damned inhumanly big. We had nothing to
lose but me, and maybe a lot to gain, so in I went.
"I made the planet without trouble and landed in the Valley of the Gods
and began work. And that's where the fun started."
Laird laughed again, with no more mirth than before.
* * * * *
There was a moon hanging low over the hills, a great scarred shield
thrice the size of Earth's, and its chill white radiance filled the
Valley with colorless light and long shadows. Overhead flamed the
incredible sky of the Sagittarian regions, thousands upon thousands of
great blazing suns swarming in strings and clusters and constellations
strange to human eyes, blinking and glittering in the thin cold air. It
was so bright that Laird could see the fine patterns of his skin, loops
and whorls on the numbed fingers that groped against the pyramid. He
shivered in the wind that streamed past him, blowing dust devils with a
dry whisper, searching under his clothes to sheathe his flesh in cold.
His breath was ghostly white before him, the bitter air felt liquid
when he breathed.
Around him loomed the fragments of what must have been a city, now
reduced to a few columns and crumbling walls held up by the lava which
had flowed. The stones reared high in the unreal moonlight, seeming
almost to move as the shadows and the drifting sand passed them. Ghost
city. Ghost planet. He was the last life that stirred on its bleak
surface.