Trevor looked at him, and at the other Korins. Something about their
faces and the way they rode along the darkening empty street told him
they too were afraid.
He said, "You, the Korins, the lordly demi-gods who ride about and send
your hawks to hunt and slay--you're more afraid of your master than the
slaves are of you!"
They turned toward him pallid faces that burned with hatred.
He remembered how that other had gripped his brain back in the canyon.
He remembered how it had felt. He understood many things now.
He asked, "How does it feel to be enslaved, Korins? Not just enslaved
in body, but in mind and soul?"
Galt turned like a striking snake. But the blow never fell. The
upraised hand with the heavy whip suddenly checked, and then sank down
again. Only the eyes of the Korin glowed with a baleful helplessness
under the winking sun-stone.
* * * * *
Trevor laughed without humor. "It wants me alive. I guess I'm safe,
then. I guess I could tell you what I think of you. You're still
convicts, aren't you? After three hundred years. No wonder you hate the
slaves."
Not the same convicts, of course. The sun-stones didn't give longevity.
Trevor knew how the Korins propagated, stealing women from among the
slaves, keeping the male children and killing the female. He laughed
again.
"It isn't such a good life after all, is it, being a Korin? Even
hunting and killing can't take the taste out of your mouths. No wonder
you hate the others! They're enslaved, all right, but they're not
_owned_."
They would have liked to kill him but they could not. They were
forbidden. Trevor looked at them, in the last pale flicker of the
afterglow. The jewels and the splendid harness, the bridles of the
beasts heavy with gold, the weapons--they looked foolish now, like the
paper crowns and glass beads that children deck themselves with when
they pretend to be kings. These were not lords and masters. These were
only little men, and slaves. And the sun-stones were a badge of shame.
The cavalcade passed on. Empty streets, empty houses with windows too
high for human eyes to look through and steps too tall for human legs
to climb. Full dark, and the first stunning crash of thunder, the first
blaze of lightning between the cliffs. The mounts were hurrying now,
almost galloping to beat the lightning and the scalding rain.
They were in a great square. Around it was a stiff rectangle of houses,
and these were lighted with torchlight, and in the monstrous doorways
here and there a little figure stood, a Korin, watching.
In the exact center of the square was a flat low structure of stone,
having no windows and but a single door.
They reined the beasts before that lightless entrance. "Get down," said
Galt to Trevor. A livid reddish flaring in the sky showed Trevor the
Korin's face, and it was smiling, as a wolf smiles before the kill.
Then the thunder came, the downpour of rain, and he was thrust bodily
into the doorway.
He stumbled over worn flagging in the utter dark, but the Korins moved
sure-footedly as cats. He knew they had been here many times before,
and he knew that they hated it. He could feel the hate and the fear
bristling out from the bodies that were close to his, smell them in the
close hot air. They didn't want to be here but they had to. They were
bidden.
He would have fallen headforemost down the sudden flight of steps if
someone had not caught his arm. They were huge steps. They were forced
to go down them as small children do, lowering themselves bodily from
tread to tread. A furnace blast of air came up the well, but in spite
of the heat Trevor felt cold. He could feel how the hard stone of the
stairs had been worn into deep hollows by the passing of feet. Whose
feet? And going where?
A sulphurous glow began to creep up through the darkness. They went
down what seemed a very long way. The glow brightened, so that Trevor
could once more make out the faces of the Korins. The heat was
overpowering, but still there was a coldness around Trevor's heart.
The steps ended in a long low hall, so long that the farther end of
it was lost in vaporous shadow. Trevor thought that it must have been
squared out of a natural cavern, for here and there in the rocky floor
small fumaroles burned and bubbled, giving off the murky light and a
reek of brimstone.
Along both sides of the hall were rows of statues seated in stone
chairs.
Trevor stared at them, with the skin crawling up and down his back.
Statues of men and women--or rather, of creatures manlike and
womanlike--sitting solemn and naked, their hands folded in their laps,
their eyes, fashioned of dull, reddish stone, looking straight ahead,
their features even and composed, with a strange sad patience clinging
to the stony furrows around mouth and cheek. Statues that would be
perhaps twenty feet tall if they were standing, carved by a master's
chisel out of a pale substance that looked like alabaster.
Galt caught his arm. "Oh, no, you won't run away. You were laughing,
remember? Come on, I want to see you laugh some more."
They forced him along between the rows of statues. Quiet statues, with
a curiously ghostly look of thoughtfulness--of thoughts and feelings
long vanished but once there, different from those of humans, perhaps,
but quite as strong. No two of them were alike, in face or body.
Trevor noted among them things seldom seen in statues, a maimed limb,
a deformity, or a completely nondescript face that would offer neither
beauty nor ugliness for an artist to enlarge upon. Also, they seemed
all to be old, though he could not have said why he thought so.
There were other halls opening off this main one. How far they went
he had no means of guessing, but he could see that in them were other
shadowy rows of seated figures.
Statues. Endless numbers of statues, down here in the darkness
underneath the city....
He stopped, bracing himself against his captors, gripping the hot rock
with his bare feet.
"This is a catacomb," he said. "Those aren't statues, they're bodies,
dead things sitting up."
"Come on," said Galt. "Come on, and laugh!"
They took him, and there were too many to fight. And Trevor knew that
it was not them he had to fight. Something was waiting for him down in
that catacomb. It had had his mind once. It would--
* * * * *
They were approaching the end of the long hall. The sickly light from
the fumaroles showed the last of the lines of seated figures--had
they died there like that, sitting up, or had they been brought here
afterward? The rows on each side ended evenly, the last chairs exactly
opposite each other.
But against the blank end wall was a solitary seat of stone, facing
down the full gloomy length of the hall, and on it sat a manlike shape
of alabaster, very still, the stony hands folded rigidly upon the stony
thighs. A figure no different from the others, except....
Except that the eyes were still alive.
The Korins dropped back a little. All but Galt. He stayed beside
Trevor, his head bent, his mouth sullen and nervous, not looking up
at all. And Trevor stared into the remote and sombre eyes that were
like two pieces of carnelian in that pale alabaster face, and yet were
living, sentient, full of a deep and alien sorrow.
It was very silent in the catacomb. The dreadful eyes studied Trevor,
and for just a moment his hatred was tempered by a strange pity as he
thought what it must be like for the brain, the intelligence behind
those eyes, already entombed, and knowing it.
"_A long living and a long dying. The blessing and the curse of my
people._"
The words were soundless, spoken inside his brain. Trevor started
violently. Almost he turned to flee, remembering the torture of that
moment in the canyon, and then he found that while he had been staring,
a force as gentle and stealthy as the gliding of a shadow had already
invaded him. And he was forbidden.
"At this range I do not need the sun-stones," murmured the silent voice
within him. "Once I did not need them at all. But I am old."
Trevor stared at the stony thing that watched him, and then he thought
of Jen, of Hugh lying dead with a dead hawk in the dust, and the
strangeness left him, and his bitter passion flared again.
"So you hate me as well as fear me, little human? You would destroy
me?" There was a gentle laughter inside Trevor's mind. "I have watched
generations of humans die so swiftly. And yet I am here, as I was
before they came, waiting."
"You won't be here forever," snarled Trevor. "These others like you
died. You will!"
"Yes. But it is a slow dying, little human. Your body chemistry is like
that of the plants, the beasts, based upon carbon. Quick to grow. Quick
to wither away. Ours was of another sort. We were like the mountains,
cousin to them, our body cells built of silicon, even as theirs. And so
our flesh endures until it grows slow and stiff with age. But even then
we must wait long, very long, for death."
Something of the truth of that long waiting came to Trevor, and he felt
a shuddering thankfulness for the frailty of human flesh.
"I am the last," whispered the silent voice. "For a while I had
companionship of minds, but the others are all gone before me, long
ago."
Trevor had a nightmare vision of Mercury, in some incalculable future
eon, a frozen world taking its last plunge into the burned-out sun,
bearing with it these endless rows of alabaster shapes, sitting in
their chairs of stone, upright in the dead blackness underneath the ice.
He fought back to reality, clutching his hatred as a swimmer clings to
a plank, his voice raw with passion and bitterness as he cried out.
"Yes, I'll destroy you if I can! What else could you expect after what
you've done?"
"Oh, no, little human, you will not destroy me. You will help me."