Her finger jabbed at the map. "We are here," she insisted. "And if you
care to search and dig, the city is probably still there, as it was a
million years ago."
"Would there be water in your ruined city?" Newlin asked.
"Who knows? The wells are probably all filled with sand now. Or gone
dry, or become contaminated. There is always much radioactivity near the
ruined cities. They were primary targets when the peoples of Venus
destroyed themselves. Even this desert is mute evidence of the
holocaust; if one needs evidence. My people fled before that madness,
because they anticipated it."
Newlin snorted. The pre-holocaust Venusians were purely legendary. No
written records could exist, amid such conditions as must have followed
the ancient wars. Science knew that at least half a million years had
passed since Venus was a fair green planet peopled with hearty,
beautiful, ease-loving races. Half a million years since the surface
people had even looked upon the sun.
"If you're right about where we are," Newlin growled, "I'm still
interested in that city. We can never make Sansurra with the water we
have. Ruined or not, there may be wells. Is there a chance?"
"Not a good one," Songeen replied. "But better than none."
"Whenever you're ready," Newlin said. "You lead."
Wearily, man and girl struck off across the seas of shifting sand. Great
dunes blocked their way. Some they circled, others must be climbed
laboriously.
* * * * *
From the top of a huge, wind-ribbed billow, Newlin stared at a pale
flickering in the dust ahead. In all other directions stretched endless
humps and hollows. But before him lay a great wind-scoured hollow of
bare rock. Beyond that, crowning a series of low hills, which must have
thrust above water line in this shallow part of the ancient, vanished
sea, were ruins.
Even as ruins, the city was spectacular. Massive columns had eroded
slowly into stone toothpicks. Walls crumbled into formless heaps
resembling the dunes. A few outlines of smoothed blocks and shattered
lintels huddled the ground, half hidden by the encroaching sand. Details
had vanished eons ago, but something still remained to tantalize
imagination. The few buildings that still stood, and the soaring,
fragile towers evidenced an engineering civilization of staggering
proportions. Surface dimensions were still tremendous, and the city
itself must have been of first importance, covering hundreds of square
miles.
"Our city," said Songeen.
Newlin glanced quickly behind. Still distant, but moving very rapidly
was the string of dark objects that could only be sandsleds of the
pursuit. One tiny figure, scarcely visible, was far in advance of the
others. The robot tracker.
He gestured. "They're covering three miles to our one," he told her
grimly. "We'll try to reach the city before they catch up with us.
Perhaps we can hide out among the ruins, and--with luck, booby-trap the
tracker. If there's water, we can hold out for quite a while."
Songeen nodded crisply. Her voice was strained with emotion and fatigue.
"As fugitives my people abandoned this city. Now, as a fugitive, I
return."
Then she was off, running awkwardly, the cumbersome suiting of her
protection armor giving her bounding strides the laughable appearance of
a lumbering teddy-bear.
Descent into the hollow was riding a series of miniature sand
avalanches. Each step buried the foot deep, but the sand gave way and
slipped in loose spills. His boots struck hard on rough, bare rock. He
grunted, fought for balance, then sprawled heavily. She helped him up,
then took off again. Newlin followed.
Over the wind-carved rock, they made good time. Ascent of the long,
jagged slopes to the city was heart-killing work, delicate and
treacherous. The surface was like sponge-glass, brittle and deadly with
knife-edges when broken.
Sheltering from wind-driven sand under the cover of a great monolith,
Newlin and Songeen watched the racing figures of pursuit top the crest
of the opposite ridge and start down. Man and girl were too winded and
weak even to get up. They dared rest only a moment, then plunged on into
the maze of tumbled ruins. Ultimate exertion had taken toll of their
energies and rapidly burned up air reserves. Both were cruelly thirsty.
The heat, even inside their insulated suits, was stifling.
There was no time to take stock of manifold discomforts.
The race was neck and neck. Death sniffed at their heels in the guise of
mechanical trackers. On Venus, life is to the swift and cunning. To
Newlin, life was perilous, but sweet.
Their helmet microphones picked up and amplified a curious droning buzz.
It was the deathsong of the electronic tracker and it seemed closer than
it was.
Slowly, inexorably, it grew louder. Sound swelled steadily, and it was a
whiplash to their flagging energies. They fled in panic through the
streets of the dead city.
It was no real refuge to them, but its megalithic precincts gave some
lying illusion of safety. They chose a twisting, tangled route into the
very heart of the ruined city, with the instinct of a hunted animal to
confuse its trail. They doubled back to cross their own trail twice, in
the vain hope of baffling the electronic enemy.
Newlin had been hunted before, on Mars, but by live bloodhounds. Pepper,
oil of mustard, and perfumes had saved him then. But this hound followed
not scent, but something intangible, electrical, and as mysterious as
the soul-aura itself. It sorted two life-complexes from all other
impulses and followed its own prime-directive--hunt down and kill.
The end was inevitable as death.
* * * * *
Newlin laid ambush for the mechanical monster. Crouched in a nest of
rubble, he waited for it, blaster gun ready. Around a corner of
shattered stones, it appeared. It moved like a whipping shadow, like
part of the gathering twilight.
Silent, save for the high, nerve-tearing drone, it came warily across
the courtyard paved with eroded stone. It was low, not animal in
appearance, with the form of a fat, ugly snake. Fading light of the
Venusian day cast a glint of metallic gray from its scaling of
interlocked rings.
Newlin waited for a close shot. How vulnerable was such a soul-less,
mechanical monster to even the shattering-heat-forces of a blaster gun?
Songeen lay quietly beside him, her body quivering as much from strained
muscles as from fear. Behind the face-mask, her thin features were pale,
ghostlike.
With elaborate caution, the tracker circled their hiding place. Its
froglike head, with a ruff of exposed filaments lifted, like an animal
scenting blood. It edged slowly closer, its movement a glide, sinuous,
crafty, with no suggestion of mechanical action.
Newlin pushed the girl's form roughly away, lest her trembling foul his
aim. Sighting, he pressed trigger. Bright flame leaped from the weapon,
crackling.
The beam lashed at the tracker, which stopped suddenly, threw back its
monstrous head, and burst into hideous uproar of sparking, electrical
discharge. Like a live thing, it twitched, jerked, and flung itself in
mad spasms. Convulsions stopped as short-circuits flared in both head
and body. Molten, flowing, its metallic carcass glowed eerily in the
dimness. Dying, it blazed up in a fireworks display spectacular enough
to attract half of Venus to the terrified fugitives.
But the drone continued.
From behind the same corner came a duplicate of the first metal monster.
Another tracker.
Its drone rose into shrill crescendo. Like a dog, it approached the
wreckage of its fellow. And like a dog, it summoned help. Then, without
pausing to examine the mechanical casualty, it turned its electronic
attentions back to the hunted.
Hopelessly, Newlin urged Songeen to her feet. They fled, and the game
began all over again.
* * * * *
It was a madman's dream. Desperate flight, the haunted ruins of an
unknown city, deadly pursuit closing in, slowly, patiently inevitably.
The familiar hare and hounds pattern of nightmare.
They fled through vague, littered streets, treacherous with the rubble
of lost centuries. Buildings were lighter patterns upon the gathering
darkness. Stone flagging underfoot was rough, eroded, rotten.
A pinnacled precipice rose suddenly to bar their way. Immense, sheer,
buttressed by spills of loose rock, it towered above them and lost its
heights in gloom.
Within a massive, deep-carved archway of stone, set an oval of polished
red granite. A doorway, barren of carving save for one, scrawled and
monstrous hieroglyph. Uneasiness stirred in Newlin, for something in his
buried race-memories recalled that symbol with supernal dread. Ice
formed about his spine and melted in trickling terror-drops. Instinct
cringed, but his conscious mind rebelled at even the effort of memory.
Songeen stopped and stared at the hideously marked doorway, as if
tranced.
"I _remember_ this place," she said in swift excitement. "But I had
thought it vanished--eons ago."
Newlin swerved on her angrily. "This is no time for experiments with
your subconscious," he growled, savage with strain.
"It is--sanctuary," she replied softly. "Come!"
Boldly she stood before the oval door. Her finger traced its complex
symbol, and the symbol responded with a glow like moonfire.
Again, as it had been with that oval door in Monta Park, there was
baffling suggestion of unmechanical movement.
The stone block did not slide, roll, or swing open. It gave a slight
quiver and dissolved.
Songeen stepped through its aperture and the inner darkness of the
building claimed her. Reluctantly, Newlin followed--caught as much by
curiosity as driven by the yelping spectres of pursuit.
No light entered the building from any source. It was dark as the pits
of Ganymede or the under-surface laboratories of Pluto. It was dense and
tangible as a block of black crystal. Newlin could see nothing, not even
Songeen. And there was an alien _feel_ to the interior.
He was aware that Songeen operated some hidden mechanism, and that the
door, though he could not see it, was replaced.
"Now, for the moment, we are safe," she said slowly. "They cannot enter
here."
Newlin shrugged bitterly. "It's all one. They can't enter and we don't
dare go out. So we stay here and die of thirst. If you were really a
top-rung witch, you'd think of details like air, food and water."
Songeen's laugh was a ripple of eery crystal in the darkness.
"How did you guess I was a witch?" she asked whimsically. "But we need
not die here. Not unless you prefer to die among surroundings familiar
to you. There is another way out. If we dare take it. For me, it will be
simple. For you--"
"Not so simple, eh? You paint an interesting picture. Like one I once
saw on Mars, in the Gneiss Gallery. 'Nocturne--Venusport,' it was
titled. Beautiful. Dark purple background, the city seemed like
fountains of flowering stars. It's not like that, not from the places
I've seen it. Filth and dirt, people dying from poverty, disease or
violence. Just a comparison. How close does your picture match the
reality?"
"Close enough. You're a strange man, full of contradictions. I think
you're only slightly mad. But for anyone, the way I could take you would
be difficult. The pathway leads to my own world. To you--or anyone, not
native--it will seem madness. Something of it you saw in the tower."
Around him in the darkness, he was conscious of her swift movements. She
seemed untroubled by the lack of light. Neither by vision or hearing
could he distinguish anything, but he sensed activity.
Then, suddenly, as if she had uncovered a cache of implements and struck
a fire, radiance spread around her. Its source was not definite, and it
spread slowly, like a stain through water. But something illuminated a
vast, vaulted interior, Gothic in a sense, with a church-like air of
gloom and mystery. It was Gothic, but of spiderweb delicacy, soaring
arches, vague fretted ceilings, walls intricately carved into lacework
of stone. Everywhere were echoes of that same eery symbolism in the door
hieroglyph, and Newlin's folk-memories were oddly disturbed.
* * * * *
He could not place the feeling. Certainly none of the symbols bore even
slight resemblance to any written language known to him.
Something about their intricacy clouded even clear perception, and the
emotional effect was not religious in any sense--it was stark, abysmal
fear, as if the mysteries behind such symbols were too great for
humanity to bear.
Ignoring him, Songeen persisted at her curious tasks. Newlin went and
stood beside her, watching.
With gloved hand, she appeared to be tracing out some maze of deep cut
markings that figured what must have been an altar-fane.
"Do you expect any results from this ritual mumbo-jumbo?" he questioned
irritably.
Songeen looked up, startled. "Not more ritual than any other
mathematics," she chided. "This is no temple, as you seem to imagine. It
is the old quarantine station. I seek a doorway, but not into a hidden
passage. There are other doorways. This one leads between dimensions. My
world exists in a different plane. At least, our pathway to it follows
strange ways, that you could never understand. You are no scientist or
scholar. How could you grasp such unknown and forgotten matters? How
could anyone in your world?"
Newlin stared at her, seeing things he had only guessed before.
"You are--_alien_," he said.
"You can't guess how alien," she answered. "I said I was not of Venusian
stock. My people came from outside. Our world exists in the same plane
as yours, a planet circling one of the nearer stars. This place was
never our home, but we had colonies on Venus, Earth, Mars and one of
Jupiter's moons. Other colonies--like this one--and observatories and
quarantine stations. Our scientific observers and the medical staff
stayed here. They studied and recorded and treated.
"We were not gods nor demons nor anything else supernatural. Just a
people not human, but not too remote from humanity. Just emissaries and
workers, students and doctors. You might call us elder brothers to the
human race. We came not to conquer, enslave and exploit, but to help.
Sometimes the Masters came with us, since they were interested in our
work.
"Many times, by our guidance, human beings reached high levels of
development in the arts and sciences. We taught them and guided their
stumbling steps, and released to them such knowledge as we dared trust
to them. Time and again, we raised them from the slime, only to have
them fall back. There is fatal disease in the race, a disease of
instability and cruelty and violence. Call it madness--insanity--in the
technical sense. It is pathological, and the disease is common to the
human race, in all its ramifications. The Solar System is mad, and all
who dwell in it are lunatics. Dangerous and homicidal lunatics. Sol's
system is the asylum and pesthouse of our galaxy. We--my people--are its
keepers and doctors.
"We are charged with the care and treatment of an ailing form of life.
Because of our near likeness, in form and thought, it was hoped that we
could understand and help them; in time, perhaps, find a cure. There are
other races inhabiting the galaxy--many of them, civilized, intelligent,
living, and sometimes even of matter similar to ours. Their minds and
bodies are too different. We are nearest, both in form and feeling.
"We have tried, patiently and hopefully. For the most part, it is a long
history of frustration and failure. The corruption is too deep, too
basic. It is part of the life-pattern of the race. Some individuals may
rise above it, but its taint lies dormant even in them. At best, they
are carriers. And there seems little future for such a race.
"Your galactic neighbors have been patient. But now a time of decision
is near. Your ships explore, exploit at will within your system. You
have pushed your limits to the furthest expansion of that system.
Colonized and despoiled. Now, you stand at the expanding horizon of
stellar flight. Other star-systems tempt your imaginations, and
technology batters at the problems involved.
"Your neighbors are watching, and afraid. If your people burst outside
the limits of Sol's system, the contagion of your madness will spread
and engulf the galaxy. At our request, they have given time, granting
extensions freely. For countless centuries we have tried, and our
effort, all our work and thought, has led only to failure. Now, the
others have set a time limit, and the deadline is very close. Very
close. You are all living on borrowed time; and but for our pleadings,
it would be still less.
"The masters often send emissaries to us, as we send ours to the planets
of Sol. They help and advise us--not as superior beings or as gods,
commanding--but as elder brothers, trying to share their wisdom, trying
to help and guide us. They only help and advise, never intervene unless
asked. Their advice is wisdom--sometimes terrible, difficult to
understand, painful to accept. Recently, they brought a message from the
other peoples--a message and ultimatum. And the Masters advised us to
accept failure, to let them destroy humanity as a blot on the galaxy. We
begged one more chance, a last, desperate gamble, probably foredoomed to
failure. But they granted us the painful right of the doctor. We can
operate, but if the patient dies, so do we. That was our choice."
* * * * *
As she talked, Songeen had engaged herself busily with the queerly
formal operations of tracing the intricate diagrams.
"Do you believe me?" she asked, looking up.
"I'm not sure," Newlin replied frankly. "Are these Masters your gods?"
"Not gods. Living, intelligent beings, civilized, but not like us. Not
material. I cannot explain. Even they are but advisers and messengers.
Not all-wise, nor all-powerful. I wish they were; for they are kind."
"You sound like nice people," Newlin admitted. "I wish I could believe
you. Off-hand, I think you're crazy. You say we're all off the beam.
Then you talk like delusions of grandeur, and I have reason to know you
can be homicidal. One of us is nuts. It's a toss-up."
Songeen smiled wearily. "It is possible that I am infected. I am
inoculated against it, but so was Genarion. Will you believe that I
loved him? He was my husband. We were children together, like brother
and sister. Later, we were schooled together, were married, and asked to
be assigned our task together. I did not sentence him, and I would have
died myself first. But he had been here too long. If he had gone back,
the contagion would have gone with him. It was fated. You and I were
mere tools. Weapons."
"I'm sorry, Songeen. I do believe you loved him."
She shook her head in curious ruffle of emotion. "He was not the first.
Many of our kind have renounced their birthright to go among your
people, become like you and share your hideous lives. They are part of
your great religions, part of the legendary history of your races."
Silence fell between them. Newlin thought of dying Mars, the burnt-out
husk of Venus, the political and economic pesthole of Earth--even the
grim, gray, terrible frontiers on the further planets and moons. His
recollections were a dreadful pageant of spectres, of an ugly,
terror-haunted childhood, of the bleak years of his barren, lonely
wanderings--the memory kitbag of a homeless, and often hunted, spacebum.
"I can believe you," Newlin admitted slowly. "Most of the truly
worthwhile leaders of mankind stand so far above the mob that they seem
cast in a different mold. The real leaders--not politicians, nor
military brass. The thinkers and scientists, even the prophets. Every
great religion sprang from the vision or inspiration of a single leader.
Beyond the chaff, the fragments of his actual thoughts and words--always
sound good. But their followers don't follow them."
Songeen's face twisted in bitter wrath. "How terribly true! Can blind
men follow the sun? They feel its warmth and reach out to it, but they
stumble and fall on their own clay feet. Blind eyes and hands can never
reach the light. Most of our emissaries, of that kind, die horribly, and
their message is distorted to serve the ends of madness and corruption."
"Is there no hope for us?"
She stared at him. The pale glow of her moonbright eyes softened and
intensified.
"One hope, and only in yourselves. We have tried and failed. If you feel
so strongly, why have you done nothing?"
Bitter hatred snagged in Newlin's throat, making his laugh a sound of
horror. "Not me. I can pity the masses of poor and down-trodden, but
only as masses. As abstractions. Individually, I loathe them. Cornered
rats will fight back--but men lick the boots of their tormentors. I
learned only hate and defiance. I'm a cornered rat, not a man."
There was sound now, outside the door they had entered. Low at first, a
mere scrabbling, as if the trackers had located their refuge. In moments
only, there came a heavy pounding, followed by the skirl of atomic
drills. Newlin tensed, his hand itching at the butt of his blaster.
"I'm a rat," he went on. "Cornered, like any other rat. And the terriers
are out there scratching at my hole. If you'll open that non-squeak
door, I'll talk to them. Maybe even kill a few."
"No," said Songeen positively. "No killing."
"But I'm a killer," Newlin insisted. "I've killed men before for a lot
less reason. They're mining the door. How long do you think that will
last against explosives?"
"Not long," the girl admitted. "But long enough. I have the key at last.
Stand back."
* * * * *
Something formless and faintly radiant hovered indescribably in space.
Suspended above the worn flooring, without visible support or tangible
outline--it existed. Something like weird emptiness, a void appearing in
the air itself.
"This is the portal," Songeen told him calmly. "Choose now. I will take
you with me if I can without permission. But do not come with me,
unwarned. There is grave peril, beyond anything I can describe to you.
Beyond your experience or imagination. I will try to get you safely
back, somehow. But I can promise nothing. And if you stay too long,
there is no coming back. You must remain there; even if the terror of
your surroundings kills you."
She stood beside the mysterious doorway, waiting. Newlin made a start to
follow her, then balked.
"Wait!" he ordered roughly, as she was about to lead the way. "I can't
go with you--not like this."
"Afraid?"
"Yes, but not of you or your world. I trust you. But you say everyone
here is crazy. That it's infectious. Won't I carry the contagion into
your world?"
Songeen hesitated. Shadows deepened inside her eyes. "You would, yes.
But you will have contact with no one but me. Perhaps with the
Masters--if I can take you to them. They may help us, but they are
strange, unpredictable. Remember, I promise nothing and you come at your
own risk. But your disease will harm no one--I'm inoculated, and the
Masters are immune. If you overstay the limit and cannot return, you
will be decontaminated just as we must be when we return to our own
people.
"Here, in this room, is the place where the people of our colony on
Venus were decontaminated before they could be allowed to enter the
place of refuge the Masters had prepared for them. It is a cruel and
harrowing experience. I know. There may be a way to get you safely back,
without that. But your mind could never stand the shock. Understand
that, before you choose."
"If it won't harm you, I'll go along," Newlin decided. "Almost any world
would be an improvement on this."
"Don't be too sure," she warned. "At worst, the terror here is familiar.
Come, then. Hold my hand, stay close, and try not to be frightened. It
will be bad enough. And try not to change too much, or I will have
difficulty returning you alive."
The portal swallowed her, and Newlin felt himself drawn into the
force-vortex, still clinging to her hand.
* * * * *
Transition was mild enough, less shock than he had expected.
A moment of chill detachment, as if something indescribably cold
shattered his body into component atoms and readjusted them to new
patterns. He gasped, his body making the same thermal changes as if he
stood under a cold shower. He shivered.
Then it was like coming out of the blanketing fog of horror into the
sunlight of sanity; like rebirth, painlessly, into an eery
other-dimension.
There was light and sound about him, a stir of cool air. Songeen had
become separated from him in that moment of strange passage. She stood
apart, watching him with laughter in her eyes. Laughter as cool and calm
and soothing as the soft wind that riffled her hair. She had stripped
off the bulky armor, shed her plastic helmet. Now she was all woman
again, and somehow, oddly, a symbol of all women.
Other senses than his five sprang into life within him. Weird
_awareness_ through new perceptions which were nameless to his mind or
to his memory.
At first there was no terror, no surprise. Merely an overwhelming
_difference_.
Overhead was starless night, but not darkness. It was a vaulted,
infinite sky, like an inverted ocean of tinted crystal, transparent, but
softly colored, deepening imperceptibly to a heart of emerald, a-glow
with faintest witchlights. All around him was a maze of shimmering
crystal in odd forms, grotesque, clear but echoing the witchlights of
that haunted sky.
Wind-borne, came the faint, sweet chiming of distinct porcelain bells.
The place was alive with movement, sensed but incompletely seen. Even
the wind flowed in almost visible currents, thickened as if the air had
become dense, molten glass. All forms in the maze of crystal varied
constantly. Light flared and died in odd rhythms, and the almost visible
winds played icy arpeggios upon strings of spun glass, like Aeolian
harps. Showering notes like those of Chinese windbells hung in clusters
in the eddies of great wind rivers, and both sound and light flowed
together and wove strange patterns and infinite variations.
It was not quite pleasant, vaguely nerve-tightening, but highly
stimulating. Sound was muted at first, as was the light. Images blurred
and outlines were unsteady, baffling. Everything fused and flowed
together like half molten shards of broken glass. Wavelengths of
troubled sound formed trembling notes that hung in the air, almost
visible, crystalline and somehow painfully dissonant.
Like Songeen, her world or the pathway to it was strange, alien, but
poignantly beautiful.
It was stranger than he thought.
He realized almost at once that his mind was making adjustments. It was
lying to him, translating unfamiliar concepts into terms known to
memory. It was diluting and enfeebling his sensations. But dread grew in
him.
When his mind tired, stopped lying to him, what would it really be like?
Could he stand the factual perception?
They trod the forest aisles of crystalline forms. There was light, of
odd, gray, glary kind. A twilight, silvery, unreal as the trans-Lunar
dreams of drugged poets. Songeen moved ahead slowly, making no effort to
regain her clasp of his hand. Almost she seemed to avoid him, waiting
until he almost overtook her, then skimming lightly away from him. Her
slim, pale witchery was both taunt and challenge. She appeared to float
rather than walk.
One by one she dropped her clinging robes. She became part of the mad
forest, part of its dreamy gray enchantments.
Light grew steadily, and with it came more color, more magic, and more
confusion of senses. The forest-forms assumed strange geometries. They
stretched about him in endless vistas, blurring and transmuting as he
watched. The dream-like cloudiness was fading from his perceptions. He
caught dreadful hints now and then of new, unheard-of forms and colors,
of unstable geometries as far beyond Einstein's as his were beyond
Euclid's. Nothing was tangible or definite, and perhaps that was the
secret. Nothing ever is. Fear wove a crystalline web about Newlin's
throat, strangling.
He halted and took stock. Ahead, Songeen waited, watching him, her
figure a pale, elfin flame form against the shadowy mass of colored
crystals. It was a forest of gemfires, and she was the purest jewel of
the forest. Naked, alien, but--
* * * * *
Why had he come here? His mind balked at backtracking. There was no
going back. Perhaps he had already come too far. Was Songeen a vampire
luring him into the hideous depths of this unknown place? He had been
here before. It was like that awful illusion in the tower, but muted.
How much did he perceive? How much was sheerest self-deception? Was he
mad in the midst of awful sanity, or sane in the ultimate horror of
lunacy?
Her voice floated back to him, its sound the chiming crash of
splintering glass.
"Try not to change too much," she warned.
"Change?" Even the word sounded strange to him, as she said it. He felt
a swift surge of anger. There was no change in him--_none_!
The tinkling bell-tones matched the swirl of his emotion and rose to
jangling, tormented heights. It was shrill, maniacal tumult, that ranged
upward and upward into octaves beyond sound. It was a rollicking,
tortured insanity. Windbells chiming, jangled; tinkling, shimmering,
exploding inside his brain. Windbells shattering in a hurricane of sound
and ecstasy.
With his fists, Newlin pounded at his bursting skull. Pain deadened
perception, gave him a moment's relief.
He was not changing, he shouted in loud defense. He was not!
Songeen poised, watching. Her body-outlines swirled and altered in swift
mutations before his eyes. She was not woman now. Not even human. She
danced and flickered and gibbered at him. She was jeweled movement.
Change. She was as crystalline as the forest, as molten emerald as the
sky. Points of fire inside her caught and flared and burned inside his
eyes. She was not Songeen!
Newlin screamed. He looked down at his hands. He screamed again, louder.
His hands were transparent as glass, and as fluid as water. Outlines
wavered, changed.
"Try not to change too much," Songeen pleaded. But her voice joined the
clattering crystalline tumult which raged about him. He was cracking. He
could feel the seams in his mind giving way.
Like a great, floundering beast, he charged toward her. Forms of brittle
crystal shattered at his touch. Shattered into sound and pain. The
forest-forms changed color, echoing his violence. New vortices of
movement converged upon him. Perceptions expanded and radiance showered
about him, through him.
The hovering, dancing crystal notes were now visible. Beads of light,
dripping from a sky of light. They were sound a color, bright, bursting
bubbles of sound. Their rhythmic tempos increased, murmur swelled into
insistent roaring and the jangling of insane dissonance. Vitreous
grotesques shimmered like a forest of aspens quivering in wind and
sunlight. Glassy fragments of splintered sound poured in floods from sky
and ground. Trampled grass gave way under his feet in brittle crunching,
and the brush shivered at his touch, dissolving into chill slivers of
slashing sound.
Blood was dripping. The forest changed color, as if crimson stain spread
through it. Hellish glare was a roaring torrent of musical color. Red
stains spread swiftly, dying the crystal columns, the glassy sward,
seeping into the reeling brain.
There was blood. The taste of it in his mouth, the hot, salt smell, the
sound of its dripping. He swam in seas of ruby light, crashing and
plunging wildly, sinking into its crimson depths. Red light thickened
around him, deepened, smothering.
The darkness was red, fire-shot, roaring....
Then pain and timeless darkness.
Newlin awakened slowly, to ugly tension in his mind. Shadows like
beating wings disturbed his memory.
The churning light and sound were gone. He drifted idly, body and mind
coming softly to rest upon a bank of soft grass.
Someone knelt beside him. Someone cried softly, to the same murmurous
rhythms of the crystalline forest. Without opening his eyes he sensed
this, and knew also that he was still within the eery precincts of the
maze. He opened his eyes, painfully.
This time, there were tears, glistening and falling slowly, glistening
like crystal dewdrops in sunlight, and falling in softly tinkling shower
like spilled jewels.
"Songeen!" he cried.
"Yes," murmured a tympany of glass bells, "I am here."
It was Songeen--almost, again, as he remembered her, almost human. It
was Songeen, small, delicate, unreal, but sweetly feminine--almost
human. It was Songeen, but with something added, changed, oddly blended
into both form and personality.
"I tried to save you," she murmured. "I tried, but could not reach you.
My knowledge is incomplete. I thought you were weak, confused, too
frightened and disturbed to be changed easily. But you were strong, and
your violence was a challenge to it. Only the Masters could understand.
They saved you--not I. They intervened in time."
"The Masters!" Newlin glanced round, quickly, warily. "They are here?"
"Not here--now. But they saved you. I did not know all the dangers.
They--not I--"
"Saved me from what--death?"
"No--worse. And now they say you must go back. At once. The Masters urge
haste."
* * * * *
Newlin tasted bitterness on his lips. "Orders from headquarters. Well,
I've been kicked out of better places--but few more interesting. Too bad
I forgot my brass knuckles."
Physically, he tried to rise. Every bone and muscle ached. But it could
have been worse. He seemed intact. Hints of vagrant color rippled over
his visible skin, but he sensed neither pain nor menace from them.
Songeen bent over him. Her arm supported him in sitting position. It was
unnecessary, but the sensation of contact was pleasant. He yielded to
her ministrations and looked about. It was still the forest,
crystalline, murmurous--but now muted. The same glary, unpleasant light
beat down from the same impossible sky. Storming, eery colors flowed
infinite mutations of form through the crystal spectres of the maze. And
the tinkle of myriad glass wind bells held a maddening overtone.
He had thought, somehow, that it would be different. That it would have
changed, subtly, as had Songeen. But from a brief survey, nothing had
changed. The tumult had faded, become bearable--but identity remained.
Disappointed, he rose slowly, and felt her strong arm clasp about him.
He felt clumsy, off-balance, but not weak. If anything, he was stronger.
Stronger, and more cleanly, clearly alive than he had felt before.
"Come," urged Songeen. "I will take you back to the portal."
"Back--to that?"
Newlin struggled with the futility of words. He was not sure what he
wanted, let alone what he wanted to say. That insinuating crystalline
clatter got inside his brain, scattered thought.
Songeen caught a stirring of rebellion in him and sensed his mental
confusion.
"Don't fear the hunters," she said. "There are other doorways, and you
can issue onto some other planet, if you wish. Try not to think, or even
feel."
Her voice penetrated the uproar of his mind, stilling troubled waters,
blanketing other sounds. For seconds, it seemed to elevate him to some
remote, lofty plane where life was serene, uncomplicated. Detached, he
drifted with his own alien thoughts. Through senses other than visual,
he watched his stumbling progress at her side as the girl threaded a
pathway through the maze. Through senses not normally his own, he was
aware of the utter strangeness behind this forest and its crystalline
mysteries. He recognized the girl as part of the strangeness.
Dimly, he sensed some cosmic reluctance in himself, and was disturbed by
his trend of thought. Faintly, he was aware of bodily movement and the
crowding feel of shadowy aisles about him. But he was more aware of the
girl, of her physical presence, and of the unrest she inspired in him.
Songeen! He had known many women on many, strange worlds. But none like
this, none ever so strange, so wonderful, so terrifying. He had wanted
her, yes. But only for an hour of passion, at first. An hour of the
blinding futility of trying, in her arms, to forget the crowding
ugliness of life. He had not cared if the women he knew had souls, or if
he had. Souls were unfamiliar, vague, and he would not have known one if
he encountered it. Soft, white bodies, glowing like pale witchlights in
the darkness. Yes, he had known many such. He had known many women,
loved none.
Newlin had not spoken, not in words. But Songeen heard, by some subtle
sense that was part of this abnormal forest.
Her laugh was a soft tinkle of breaking glass. She did not speak aloud,
but word-symbols of thought poured from her mind. Newlin was aware of
them, springing suddenly into his own brain, but he knew they came from
her.
"Many women, yes. But none like me. If you loved me, it would not be for
this body. It is not what you think. I hold this substance, this form,
only by power of will. It is mine only for a short while more. My flesh
is not like yours, subject to different laws of form and movement."
* * * * *
Newlin answered her, but now in words. His voice sounded like a note of
strained sanity in such a place of nightmare.
"I never learned love in the sense you mean," he said. "Nor had I
thought of you again, in that way--after Monta Park. You were too alien
for me. I understood that. Too alien for any kind of love I knew. You
were--repulsive."
In silence, then, thoughts blocked out, Songeen guided Newlin. She
seemed aloof, withdrawn. They filed slowly amid towering masses of smoky
crystal. She led, drifting like a smoke wraith, before him. Newlin
picked a cautious pathway over treacherous, unstable footing. He
followed, bemused, and reluctance grew into agony of mind.
What was wrong with him? He grappled with himself, and strains grew into
open rebellion. What did he want?
Near the portal, sensing it or another like it, he balked.
"Songeen!"