Roughness of sand beneath one of his sides, and the flare of the sun on
the other. His eyes were hot and his lids were orange over them. He
turned over, and reached out to dig his fingers into the sand. Only one
hand closed; then he remembered. Opening his eyes, he rolled to his
knees. The sand grated under his knee caps. Looking out toward the
water, he saw that the sun hung only seeming inches above the horizon.
Then he saw the ship.
From its course, he gathered it was heading toward the estuary of the
river down the beach. He began to run toward where the rocks and
vegetation cut off the end of the beach. The sand under his feet was
cool.
A moment later he saw Iimmi's dark figure come from the jungle. He was
heading for the same place. Geo hailed him, and panting, they joined
each other. Then, together they continued toward the rocks.
As they broke through the first sheet of foliage, they bumped into the
red-haired girl who stood, knuckling her eyes in the shadow of the broad
palm fronds. When she recognized them, she joined them silently. Finally
they reached the outcropping of rock a few hundred feet up the river
bank.
The rain had swelled the river's mouth to tremendous violence. It
vomited surges of brown water into the ocean, frothed against rocks, and
boiled opaquely below them. It was nearly half again as wide as Geo
remembered it.
Although the sky was clear, beyond the brown bile of the river, the sea
snarled viciously and bared white teeth in the sun. It took another
fifteen minutes for the boat to maneuver through the granite spikes
toward the rocky embankment a hundred yards away.
Glancing down into the turbulence, Argo breathed, "Gee." But that was
the only human sound against the water's roaring.
The boat's prow doffed in the swell, and then at last her plank swung
out and bumped unsteadily on the rocky bank. Figures were gathering on
deck.
"Hey," Argo said, pointing toward one. "That's Sis!"
"Where the hell are Snake and Urson?" Iimmi asked.
"That's Snake down there," Geo said. "Look!" He pointed with his nub.
They could see Snake crouched near the gangplank itself. He was behind a
ledge of rock, invisible to the people on the ship, apparently, but
plain to Geo and his companions.
"Watch it," Geo said. "I'm going down there. You stay here." He ducked
off through the vines, keeping in sight of the rocks' edge and the
boiling foam. The ship grew before him, and at last he reached a
sheltered rise, just ten feet above the nest of rock in which the
four-armed boy was crouching.
Geo looked out at the boat. Jordde stood at the head of the gangplank.
The eighteen feet of board was unsteady with the roll of the ship.
Jordde held something like a black whip in his hand, only the end went
to a box-like contraption strapped to his back. With the lash raised, he
stepped onto the shifting plank.
Geo wondered what the whip contrivance was. The answer came with the
hollow sound of Snake's thoughts. _That ... is ... machine ... he ...
use ... to ... cut ... tongue ... with ... only ... on ... whip ...
now ... not ... wire ..._ So Snake knew he was just behind him. As he
was trying to figure exactly the implications of what Snake had said,
suddenly, with the speed of a bird's shadow, Snake leaped from his
hiding place and landed on the shore end of the plank. He recovered from
his crouch, and rushed down the plank toward Jordde, apparently
intending to knock him from the board.
Jordde raised the lash and it fell across the boy's shoulder. It didn't
land hard; it just dropped. But Snake suddenly reeled, and went down on
one knee, grabbing the sides of the plank. Geo was close enough to hear
the boy scream.
"I cut your tongue out once with this thing," Jordde said, matter of
factly. "Now I'm going to cut the rest of you to pieces." He adjusted a
control at his belt and raised the lash again.
Geo leapt for the plank. He faced Jordde over the crouching boy, he
wondered how wise it had been. Then he had to stop wondering and try to
duck the falling lash. He couldn't.
It landed with only the weight of gravity, brushing his cheek, then
dropping across his shoulder and down his back. He screamed; the whole
side of his face seemed seared away, and an inch crevice burned into his
shoulder and back the length it touched him. He bit into white fire,
trying not to leap aside into the foaming chasm between rocks and boat.
As the lash rasped over his shoulder, sweat flooded his eyes. His good
arm, which held the edge of the plank, was shaking like a plucked string
on a loose guitar. Snake lunged back against him, almost knocking him
over. When Geo blinked the tears out of his eyes, he saw two bright
welts over Snake's shoulder. He also saw that Jordde had stepped out
upon the plank and was smiling.
When the line fell again, he wasn't sure just what happened. He leaned
in one direction, and suddenly Snake was a dive of legs in the other.
Now Snake was just four sets of fingers on the edge of the plank. Geo
screamed again and shook.
Two sets of fingers disappeared from one side of the board and
reappeared on the other. As Jordde raised the lash a fourth time to rid
the plank of this last one-armed nuisance, the fingers worked rapidly
forward toward Jordde's feet, until suddenly an arm raised from beneath
the plank, grabbed Jordde's foot, and tugged. The lash fell far from Geo
who was still trembling, trying to move backwards off the unsteady
plank, and keep from vomiting at the same time.
Jordde tripped, but turned in time to grab the edge of the ship's gate
and steady himself. At the same time, one leg, and then another, came up
the other side of the plank, and then Snake rolled to a crouching
position on the board's top.
Geo got his feet under him now, and stumbled backwards, off the plank,
and then sat down hard a few feet back on the rocks. He clutched his
good arm across his stomach, and without lowering his eyes, leaned
forward to cool his back.
Jordde, half-seated on the board now, lashed the whip sideways. Snake
leaped a foot from the plank as the line swung beneath his feet. All
four arms went spidering out to regain equilibrium. The whip struck the
side of the boat, left a burn along the hull, and came swinging back
again. Snake leapt once more and made it.
Suddenly there was a shadow over him, and Geo saw Urson stride up to the
end of the plank. His back to Geo, he crouched bear-like at the plank's
head. "All right, now try someone a little bigger than you. Come on,
kid, get off there. I want my turn." Urson's sword was drawn.
Snake turned, grabbed at something on Urson, but the big man knocked him
away as he leapt diagonally onto the shore. Urson laughed over his
shoulder. "You don't want the ones around my neck," he called back.
"Here, keep these for me." He tossed the leather purse from his belt
back to the shore. Snake landed just as Jordde flung the lash out again.
Urson must have caught the line across his chest, because they saw his
back suddenly stiffen. Then he leapt forward and came down with his
sword so hard that had Jordde still been there, his leg would have come
off. Jordde leapt back onto the edge of the ship, and the sword sliced
three inches into the plank. As Urson tried to pull the blade out once
more, Jordde sent his whip singing again. It wrapped Urson's mid-section
like a black serpent, and it didn't come loose.
Urson howled. He flung his sword forward, which probably only by
accident thwunked seventeen inches through Jordde's abdomen. He bent
forward, grabbed the line with both hands, and tugged backwards,
screaming.
Jordde took two steps onto the plank, his mouth open, his eyes closed,
and fell over the side.
Urson heaved backwards, and toppled from the other side. For a moment
they hung with the whip between them over the board. The ship heaved,
rolled to. The plank swiveled, came loose; and with the board on top of
them, they crashed into the water.
Geo and Snake were at the rocks' edge. Iimmi and Argo were coming up
behind them.
Below them, limbs and board bobbed through the foam once. The line had
somehow looped around Urson's neck, and the plank had turned up almost
on end. Then they went under again.
With nothing between it and the rock wall of shore, the boat began to
roll in. With each swell, it came in six feet, and then leaned out
three. Then it came back another six. It took four swells, the time of
four very deep breaths, until the side of the boat was grating up
against the rocks. Geo could hear the plank splintering down in the
water. But the sound of the water blanketed anything else that was
breaking down there.
Geo took two steps backwards, clutched at his stubbed arm, and threw up.
Somebody, the captain, was calling, "Get her away from the rocks. Away
from the rocks, before she goes to pieces!"
Iimmi took Geo's arm. "Come on, boy," he said, and managed to haul him
onto the ship. Argo and Snake leapt on behind them, as the boat
floundered away from the shore.
Geo leaned against the rail. Below him the water turned on itself in the
rocks, thrashed along the river's side, and then, as he raised his eyes,
stretched out along the bright blade of the beach. The long sand that
rimmed the island dropped away from them, a stately and austere arc
gathering in its curve all the sun's glare, and throwing it back on
wave, and on wave. His back hurt, his stomach was shriveled and shaken
like an old man's palsied fist, his arm was gone, and Urson....
And then Argo said, "Look at the beach!"
Geo flung his eyes up and tried in one moment to envelop whatever he
saw, whatever it would be. Beneath the roar was a tide of quiet. The
sand along the naked crescent was dull at depressions, mirror bright at
rises. At the jungle's edge, leaves and fronds sped multi-textured
rippling along the foliage. Each single fragment in that green carpet
hung up in the sun was one leaf, he reflected, with two sides, and an
entire system of skeleton and veins, as his hand and arm had been. And
maybe one day would drop off, too. He looked from rock to rock now. Each
was different, shaped and lined distinctly, but losing detail as the
ship floated out, as the memory of his entire adventure was losing
detail. That one there was like a bull's head half submerged; those two
flat ones together on the sand looked like the stretched wings of
eagles. The waves, measured and magnificent, followed one another onto
the sand, like the varying, never duplicated rhythm of a good poem,
peaceful, ordered, and calm. He tried to pour the chaos of Urson
drowning from his mind onto the water. It flowed into each glass-green
wave's trough in which it rode, suddenly quiet, up to the beach. He
spread the pain in his own body over the web of foam and green
shimmering, and was surprised because it fit easily, hung there well,
quieted, very much quieted. Somewhere at the foot of his brain, an
understanding was beginning to effloresce with the sea's water, under
the sun.
Geo turned away from the rail, and with the wet deck slipping under his
bare feet, he walked toward the forecastle. He released his broken limb,
and his hand hung at his side.
* * * * *
When Snake came down that evening, Geo was lying on his back in the
bunk, following the grain of the wood on the bottom of the bed above
his. He had his good arm behind his neck now. Snake touched his
shoulder.
"What is it?" Geo asked, turning on his side and sitting out from under
the bunk.
Snake held out the leather purse to Geo.
"Huh?" Geo asked. "Didn't you give them to Argo yet?"
Snake nodded.
"Well, why didn't she take them. Look, I don't want to see them again."
Snake pushed the purse toward him again, and added, _Look_ ...
Geo took the purse, opened the draw string, and turned the contents out
in his hand: there were three chains, on each of which was a gold coin
fastened by a hole near the edge. Geo frowned. "How come these are in
here?" he asked. "I thought--where are the jewels?"
_In ... ocean_, Snake said. _Urson ... switched ... them._
"What are you talking about?" demanded Geo. "What is it?"
_Don't ... want ... tell ... you ..._
"I don't care what you want, you little thief." Geo grabbed him by the
shoulder. "Tell me!"
_Know ... from ... back ... with ... blind ... priestesses_, Snake
explained rapidly. _He ... ask ... me ... how ... to ... use ...
jewels.. when ... you ... and ... Iimmi ... exploring ... and ...
after ... that ... no ... listen ... to ... thoughts ... bad ...
thoughts ... bad ..._
"But he--" Geo started. "He saved your life!"
_But ... what ... is ... reason_, Snake said. _At ... end ..._
"You saw his thoughts at the end?" asked Geo. "What did he think?"
_You ... sleep ... please_, Snake said. _Lot ... of ... hate ... lot ...
of ... bad ... hate ..._ There was a pause in the voice in his head ...
_and ... love ..._
Geo began to cry. A bubble of sound in the back of his throat burst, and
he turned onto the pillow and tried to bite through the sound with his
teeth, the tiredness, the fear, for Urson, for his arm, and the change
which hurt. His whole body ached, his back hurt in two sharp lines, and
he couldn't stop crying.
* * * * *
Iimmi, who had now decided to take the bunk above Geo, came back a few
minutes after mess. Geo had just awakened.
Geo laughed. "I found out what it was we saw on the beach that made us
so dangerous."
"How?" asked Iimmi. "When? What was it?"
"Same time you did," Geo said. "I just looked. And then Snake explained
the details of it to me later."
"When?" Iimmi repeated.
"I just took a nap, and he went through the whole thing with me."
"Then what was it you saw, we saw?"
"Well, first of all; do you remember what Jordde was before he was
shipwrecked on Aptor?"
"Didn't Argo say he was studying to be a priest. Old Argo, I mean."
"Right," said Geo. "Now, do you remember what my theory was about what
we saw?"
"Did you have a theory?" Iimmi asked.
"About horror and pain making you receptive to whatever it was."
"Oh, that," Iimmi said. "I remember. Yes."
"I was also right about that. Now add to all this some theory from
Hama's lecture on the double impulse of life. It wasn't a thing we saw,
it was a situation, or rather an experience we had. Also, it didn't have
to be on the beach. It could have happened anywhere. Man, and his
constantly diametric motivations, is always trying to reconcile
opposites. In fact, you can say that an action _is_ a reconciliation of
the duality of his motivation. Now, take all that we've been through,
the confusion, the pain, the disorder; then reconcile that with the
great order obvious in something like the sea, with its rhythm, its
tides and waves, its overpowering calm, or the ordering of cells in a
leaf, or a constellation of stars. If you can do it, something happens
to you: you grow. You become a bigger person, able to understand, or
reconcile, more."
"All right," said Iimmi.
"And that's what we saw, or the experience we had when we looked at the
beach from the ship this morning; chaos caught in order, the order
defining chaos."
"All right again," Iimmi said. "And I'll even assume that Jordde knew
that the two impulses of this experience were one--something terrible
and confused, like seeing ten men hacked to pieces by vampires, or
seeing a film of a little boy getting his tongue pulled out, or coming
through what we came through since we landed on Aptor; and
two--something calm and ordered, like the beach and the sea. Now, why
would he want to kill someone simply because they might have gone
through what amounts, I guess, to the basic religious experience?"
"You picked just the right word," Geo smiled. "Now, Jordde was a novice
in the not too liberal religion of Argo. Jordde and Snake had been
through nearly as much on Aptor as we had. And they survived. And they
also emerged from that jungle of horror onto that great arcing rhythm of
waves and sand. And they went through just what you and I and Argo went
through. Little Argo, I mean. And it was just at that point when the
blind priestesses of Argo made contact with Jordde. They did so by means
of those vision screens we saw them with, which can receive sound and
pictures from just about any place, but can also project, at least
sound, to just about anywhere too. In other words, right in the middle
of this religious, or mystic, or whatever you want to call it,
experience, a voice materialized out of thin air that claimed to the
voice of The Goddess. Have you any idea what this did to his mind?"
"I imagine it took all the real significance out of the whole thing,"
Iimmi said. "It would for me."
"It did," said Geo. "Jordde wasn't what you'd call stable before that.
If anything, this made him more so. It also stopped his mental
functioning from working in the normal way. And Snake who was reading
his mind at the time, suddenly saw himself watching the terrifying
sealing up process of an active and competent, if not healthy, mind. He
saw it again in Urson. It's apparently a pretty stiff thing to watch.
That's why he stopped reading Urson's thoughts. The idea of stealing the
jewels for himself was slowly eating away Urson's balance, the
understanding, the ability to reconcile disparities, like the incident
with the blue lizard, things like that, all of which were signs we
didn't get. Snake contacted Hama by telepathy, almost accidentally. And
Hama was something to hold onto for the boy."
"Still, why did Jordde want to kill anybody who had experienced this,
voice of God and all?"
"Because Jordde had by now managed to do what a static mind always does.
The situation, the beach, the whole thing suddenly meant for him the
revelation of a concrete God. Now, he knew that Snake had contacted
something also, something which the blind priestesses told him was
thoroughly evil, an enemy, a devil. On the raft, on the boat, he
religiously tried to 'convert' Snake, till at last, in evangelical fury,
he cut the boy's tongue out with the electric generator and the hot wire
which the blind priestesses had given him before he left. Why did he
want to get rid of anybody who had seen his beach, a sacred place to him
by now? One, because the devils were too strong and he didn't want
anybody else possessed by them; Snake had been too much trouble
resisting conversion. And two, because he was jealous that someone else
might have that moment of exaltation and hear the voice of The Goddess
also."
"In other words," summarized Iimmi, "he thought what happened to him and
Snake was something supernatural, actually connected with the beach
itself, and didn't want it to happen to anybody else."
"That's right," said Geo, lying back in his bunk. "Which is sort of
understandable. They didn't come in contact with any of the technology
of Aptor, and so it might well have seemed that way."
Iimmi leaned back also. "Yeah," he said. "I can see how the same thing
almost--almost might have happened to me. If everything had been the
same."
Geo closed his eyes. Snake came down and took the top bunk; and when he
slept, Snake told him of Urson, of his last thoughts, and surprisingly,
things he mostly knew.
* * * * *
Emerging from the forecastle the next morning, he felt bright sunlight
slice across his face. He had to squint, and when he did so, he saw her
sitting cross-legged on the stretched canvas topping of a suspended
lifeboat.
"Hi, up there," he called.
"Hello," she called down. "How are you feeling?"
Geo shrugged.
Argo slipped her feet over the gunwale and with paper bag in hand,
dropped to the deck. She bobbed up next to his shoulder, grinned, and
said, "Hey, come on back with me. I want to show you something."
"Sure." He followed her.
Suddenly she looked serious. "Your arm is worrying you. Why?"
Geo shrugged. "You don't feel like a whole person. I guess you're not
really a whole person."
"Don't be silly," said Argo. "Besides, maybe Snake will let you have one
of his. How are the medical facilities in Leptar?"
"I don't think they're up to anything like that."
"We did grafting of limbs back in Aptor," Argo said. "A most interesting
way we got around the antibody problem, too. You see--"
"But that was back in Aptor," Geo said. "This is the real world we're
going into now."
"Maybe I can get a doctor from the temple to come over," she shrugged.
"And then, maybe I won't be able to."
"It's a pleasant thought," Geo said.
When they reached the back of the ship, Argo took out a contraption from
the paper bag. "I salvaged this in my tunic. Hope I dried it off well
enough last night."
"It's your motor," Geo said.
"Um-hm," said Argo. She put it on a low set of lockers by the cabin's
back wall.
"How are you going to work it?" he asked. "It's got to have that stuff,
electricity."
"There is more than one way to shoe a centipede," Argo assured him. She
reached behind the locker and pulled up a strange gizmo of glass and
wire. "I got the lens from Sis," she explained. "She's awfully nice,
really. She says I can have my own laboratory all to myself. And I said
she could have all the politics, which I think was wise of me,
considering. Don't you?" She bent over the contraption. "Now, this lens
here focuses the sunlight--isn't it a beautiful day--on these
thermocouples. I got the extra metal from the ship's smith. He's sweet.
Hey, we're going to have to compare poems from now on. I mean I'm sure
you're going to write a whole handful about all of this. I certainly am.
Anyway, you connect it up here."
She fastened two wires to two other wires, adjusted the lens, and the
tips of the thermocouple glowed red. The armature tugged once around its
pivot, and then tugged around once more. Geo glanced up and saw Snake
and Iimmi standing above them, looking over the rail on the cabin's
roof. They grinned at each other, and then Geo looked back at the motor.
It whipped around steadily, gaining speed until it whirred into an
invisible copper haze. "Look at that thing go," breathed Argo. "Will you
just look at that thing go!"
* * * * *
QUEST AMID FUTURITY'S RUINS
What was the strange impetus that drove a group of four widely different
humans to embark on a fear-filled journey across a forbidden sea to a
legendary land?
This was Earth still, but the Earth of a future terribly changed after a
planet-searing disaster, a planet of weird cults, mutated beasts, and
people who were not always entirely human. As for the four who made up
that questing party, they included a woman who was either a goddess, a
witch, or both, a four-armed boy whose humanity was open to question,
and two more men with equally "wild" talents.
The story of their voyage, of the power-wielding "jewels" they sought,
of the atomic and post-atomic terrors they encountered, is a remarkable
science-fiction Odyssey of the days to come.
Turn this book over for second complete novel