So unpredictable, these dead-world Tower Dwellers!
Take old Tydore who placed such an inestimably
valuable gift in the greed-hands of one he hated.
[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.]
The sun was a shrunken red disk against the starfields, a distant
pale luminosity surrendering to the encroachment of the falling night.
Hoarfrost crunched under Marley's feet as he walked by the still black
waters of the canal, and then thin wind whispered over the sand and
across the breasts of the ancient hills. Starlight gleamed in the dark
water as the day faded. Earth hung low in the sky, like an emerald
pendant over the bosom of a sleeping woman.
Marley pulled his silks and furs closer about his shoulders. The air
was sharp and cold. His breath froze wraithlike in the icy evening as
he hurried down the path toward Tydore's tower.
The green planet shone like a beacon in his eyes. Home. The thought
brought impatience and a longing to walk again under a pale sky and a
warm sun. He looked about him with faint distaste. This peace--this
solitude of low red hills and blue-black nights--was alien to Marley.
It was unreal. Mars was a dream. An ancient wasted slumbering dream.
Marley's lips compressed as he thought of Tydore and their last
meeting. It seemed that Tydore laughed at him. Tydore withheld too
much, and there was so little time left. There was an acrid core
of decadence in the old Martian, Marley thought. A consciousness
of too many millenia of civilization and decay. Devious was the
word, perhaps, though it seemed a pallid one for the reality of the
Martian's intricate mind. It was always impossible to know what he was
thinking--how much he knew. About Marley being a spy. About the war on
Earth. In spite of himself, Marley smiled. It sounded so melodramatic
that way, but it was the way it really was. The Martians held the
perfect weapon. Marley needed that weapon, and his nation had put forth
a gigantic effort to get him to Mars so that he might steal it.
Tydore's tower loomed up before him in the fading light, a fey
filligree of minarettes and graceful flying buttresses too delicate
for a grosser world than Mars. The tower's reflection shimmered in the
still dark waters of the canal like an alter ego extending deep into
the liquid depths.
Marley descended the steps of delicately wrought stone that led to the
tower's underground entrance with care, for the drifted ferric sand
made them treacherous. How like the Martians, he thought with some
irritation, to make it necessary to travel down in order to enter a
tower. Everything the long way, the hard and devious way.
The outer doorway was shaped like a fleur-de-lis and it opened from the
top down, sliding into a recess of ancient, oily machinery. It would
be far too simple to make a door that looked and worked like a door.
Everything Marley had seen during his months on Mars served only to
increase his sense of alienage. He had seen only Tydore, of course, of
the living Martians. There were only a handful left and they lived
in their isolated towers along the still canals surrounded by their
tissue-thin manuscripts and ancient, reedlike music spools that filled
the air of their retreats with skeins of weird and enharmonic melody.
The weapon was Tydore's. He had rebuilt it from plans drawn by some
ensorcelled armorer dead over five thousand years. Rebuilt it in the
paradoxical way that Martians seemed to do everything, for if there was
one thing that no Martian needed it was a weapon. No strife had marred
the planet's peace for millenia. But build it he had, and Marley's
hands itched for the sleek deadliness of it--the smooth grained stock,
the oddly wrought, ornate muzzle. There was a vicious, tangy violence
frozen into every line of the weapon. And it was the only hand gun
Marley had ever seen that chained the forces of the atom. With such
weapons an army could be invincible.
* * * * *
Tydore stood to greet him. With the elaborate courtesy of his kind, he
performed the ritual gestures of welcome, his slender, finely veined
hands tracing the ancient symbols in the air.
"The gods of sand and wind have brought you safely to my house, man
of Earth. I give thanks and pray you find peace and wisdom within my
walls."
The old Martian's chanting voice was like the fluting grace of a
Scarlatti choral. It was one with the miniscule paintings that covered
the walls, the finely wrought carvings on the antique flagstones under
his feet. Marley was not at home in the fluid Martian tongue, but the
very sound of the words conjured for him the serried ranks of spectral
generations that had reached their culmination in this one robed
ancient.
And yet, he thought with irritation, Tydore's words mean not at all
what they said. Through the finely polished phrases of welcome ran
a thread of hidden mockery--even hate--for Marley and everything he
represented. Never once had Tydore, by word or deed, indicated that he
felt anything but friendship for his visitor from the silvery ship out
on the desert, and yet there was no mistaking the nuance of contempt.
Tydore despised Marley as an outworld savage. One with the despoilers
of the holy places of Mars.
Not that the Martians had gods. They had lived too long for that, and
their deities existed only in their beautifully turned phrases and
their hyper-cultured ritual. But the first men from Earth had looted
the libraries and shattered the soaring towers. It was a thing no
Martian would ever forget--or forgive. It marked Earthmen for what
they were. In Martian eyes--precocious barbarians. Targets for Martian
subtlety.
"I give thanks for your welcome," Marley said slowly, his tongue clumsy
on the singing syllables.
Tydore inclined his head slightly and indicated that Marley should
follow him up the winding ramp that pierced the core of the tower. Each
time Marley came, the ritual was the same, as unchanging as the still
waters of the dark canals or the frozen loneliness of the red hills
beyond. They would pass the first level, where the old engines supplied
Tydore with what little heat and sustenance he needed. They would go on
to the second level, where the music spools lay in ordered confusion
amid the sonic transcribers that Tydore used to weave the sounds of the
Martian night into atonal poems of melody. And then they would reach
the level of the weapon.
It would still be in its crystal case, guarded by a lock of bronze. A
lock to which there was one key, and that one key on a silver chain
around Tydore's neck. They would pass the weapon by and seek the top
level, a platform shielded against the frigid night by a crystal
canopy. And there they would begin their nightly fencing with words and
ideas under the guise of friendship.
Marley's heart was pounding suddenly as he drew near to the weapon. His
patience was failing him at long last, he knew. He was sick of Mars,
sick of Tydore. Sick of posing as a humble seeker after knowledge. If
he could not trick the Martian into parting with the weapon soon, he
knew that he must chance violence. He had not dared it before, because
he could never be sure that Tydore and his kind were as defenseless as
they seemed. It was paradoxical that they should possess a weapon such
as _the_ weapon and yet be unwilling or unable to use it.
Still it seemed to Marley that such must be the case. He could only
explain it to himself by saying that they had lived too long, amid
too much deviousness and inverted purpose to be quite virile. They
were--the word came readily to mind from the days of his training on
Earth--decadent. And the meek did not inherit the earth or anything
else, he told himself with satisfaction. Only the militant, the
ruthless.
* * * * *
The time had come, Marley thought, for the calculated risk. Direct
action. He could scarcely contain himself as they passed the weapon and
climbed to the top level.
"You seem preoccupied tonight, Marley," Tydore said, pouring two tiny
goblets of wine, "Can it be that you grow tired of Mars?"
Marley sipped the wine thoughtfully. To him it seemed completely
insipid and without flavor. Subtlety again? He doubted it. "I mean to
ask a favor of you, Tydore," he said, "And I but ponder how I should
begin."
"My house is yours," the Martian replied softly, "And all that it
contains."
Marley's eyes narrowed. Did he imagine the accent on the last phrase,
or was it actually there? He decided to be very cautious. "I came here,
as you know," he said, "To learn everything I might about your kind. As
you know, we of Earth are a young race, still much in need of guidance
and knowledge."
"You have learned much," Tydore said.