He died--and then awakened in a new body.
He found himself on a world of bizarre
loveliness, a powerful, rich man. He took
pleasure in his turn of good luck ... until
he discovered that his new body was hated
by all on this strange planet, that his
soul was owned by Rann, devil-goddess of
Falga, who was using him for her own gain.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Summer 1946.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The Company dicks were good. They were plenty good. Hugh Starke began
to think maybe this time he wasn't going to get away with it.
His small stringy body hunched over the control bank, nursing the last
ounce of power out of the Kallman. The hot night sky of Venus fled past
the ports in tattered veils of indigo. Starke wasn't sure where he was
any more. Venus was a frontier planet, and still mostly a big X, except
to the Venusians--who weren't sending out any maps. He did know that
he was getting dangerously close to the Mountains of White Cloud. The
backbone of the planet, towering far into the stratosphere, magnetic
trap, with God knew what beyond. Maybe even God wasn't sure.
But it looked like over the mountains or out. Death under the guns of
the Terro-Venus Mines, Incorporated, Special Police, or back to the
Luna cell blocks for life as an habitual felon.
Starke decided he would go over.
Whatever happened, he'd pulled off the biggest lone-wolf caper in
history. The T-V Mines payroll ship, for close to a million credits. He
cuddled the metal strongbox between his feet and grinned. It would be a
long time before anybody equaled that.
His mass indicators began to jitter. Vaguely, a dim purple shadow in
the sky ahead, the Mountains of White Cloud stood like a wall against
him. Starke checked the positions of the pursuing ships. There was no
way through them. He said flatly, "All right, damn you," and sent the
Kallman angling up into the thick blue sky.
He had no very clear memories after that. Crazy magnetic vagaries,
always a hazard on Venus, made his instruments useless. He flew by the
seat of his pants and he got over, and the T-V men didn't. He was free,
with a million credits in his kick.
Far below in the virgin darkness he saw a sullen crimson smear on the
night, as though someone had rubbed it with a bloody thumb. The Kallman
dipped toward it. The control bank flickered with blue flame, the jet
timers blew, and then there was just the screaming of air against the
falling hull.
Hugh Starke sat still and waited....
He knew, before he opened his eyes, that he was dying. He didn't feel
any pain, he didn't feel anything, but he knew just the same. Part of
him was cut loose. He was still there, but not attached any more.
He raised his eyelids. There was a ceiling. It was a long way off. It
was black stone veined with smoky reds and ambers. He had never seen it
before.
His head was tilted toward the right. He let his gaze move down that
way. There were dim tapestries, more of the black stone, and three tall
archways giving onto a balcony. Beyond the balcony was a sky veiled and
clouded with red mist. Under the mist, spreading away from a murky line
of cliffs, was an ocean. It wasn't water and it didn't have any waves
on it, but there was nothing else to call it. It burned, deep down
inside itself, breathing up the red fog. Little angry bursts of flame
coiled up under the flat surface, sending circles of sparks flaring out
like ripples from a dropped stone.
He closed his eyes and frowned and moved his head restively. There was
the texture of fur against his skin. Through the cracks of his eyelids
he saw that he lay on a high bed piled with silks and soft tanned
pelts. His body was covered. He was rather glad he couldn't see it. It
didn't matter because he wouldn't be using it any more anyway, and it
hadn't been such a hell of a body to begin with. But he was used to it,
and he didn't want to see it now, the way he knew it would have to look.
He looked along over the foot of the bed, and he saw the woman.
She sat watching him from a massive carved chair softened with a single
huge white pelt like a drift of snow. She smiled, and let him look. A
pulse began to beat under his jaw, very feebly.
She was tall and sleek and insolently curved. She wore a sort of tabard
of pale grey spider-silk, held to her body by a jeweled girdle, but it
was just a nice piece of ornamentation. Her face was narrow, finely
cut, secret, faintly amused. Her lips, her eyes, and her flowing silken
hair were all the same pale cool shade of aquamarine.
Her skin was white, with no hint of rose. Her shoulders, her forearms,
the long flat curve of her thighs, the pale-green tips of her breasts,
were dusted with tiny particles that glistened like powdered diamond.
She sparkled softly like a fairy thing against the snowy fur, a
creature of foam and moonlight and clear shallow water. Her eyes never
left his, and they were not human, but he knew that they would have
done things to him if he had had any feeling below the neck.
* * * * *
He started to speak. He had no strength to move his tongue. The woman
leaned forward, and as though her movement were a signal four men rose
from the tapestried shadows by the wall. They were like her. Their eyes
were pale and strange like hers.
She said, in liquid High Venusian, "You're dying, in this body. But
_you_ will not die. You will sleep now, and wake in a strange body,
in a strange place. Don't be afraid. My mind will be with yours, I'll
guide you, don't be afraid. I can't explain now, there isn't time, but
don't be afraid."
He drew back his thin lips baring his teeth in what might have been a
smile. If it was, it was wolfish and bitter, like his face.
The woman's eyes began to pour coolness into his skull. They were
like two little rivers running through the channels of his own eyes,
spreading in silver-green quiet across the tortured surface of his
brain. His brain relaxed. It lay floating on the water, and then the
twin streams became one broad flowing stream, and his mind, or ego, the
thing that was intimately himself, vanished along it.
It took him a long, long time to regain consciousness. He felt as
though he'd been shaken until pieces of him were scattered all over
inside. Also, he had an instinctive premonition that the minute he woke
up he would be sorry he had. He took it easy, putting himself together.
He remembered his name, Hugh Starke. He remembered the mining asteroid
where he was born. He remembered the Luna cell blocks where he had
once come near dying. There wasn't much to choose between them. He
remembered his face decorating half the bulletin boards between Mercury
and The Belt. He remembered hearing about himself over the telecasts,
stuff to frighten babies with, and he thought of himself committing his
first crime--a stunted scrawny kid of eighteen swinging a spanner on a
grown man who was trying to steal his food.
The rest of it came fast, then. The T-V Mines job, the getaway that
didn't get, the Mountains of White Cloud. The crash....
The woman.
That did it. His brain leaped shatteringly. Light, feeling, a naked
sense of reality swept over him. He lay perfectly still with his eyes
shut, and his mind clawed at the picture of the shining woman with
sea-green hair and the sound of her voice saying, _You will not die,
you will wake in a strange body, don't be afraid...._
He was afraid. His skin pricked and ran cold with it. His stomach
knotted with it. His skin, his stomach, and yet somehow they didn't
feel just right, like a new coat that hasn't shaped to you....
He opened his eyes, a cautious crack.
He saw a body sprawled on its side in dirty straw. The body belonged
to him, because he could feel the straw pricking it, and the itch of
little things that crawled and ate and crawled again.
It was a powerful body, rangy and flat-muscled, much bigger than his
old one. It had obviously not been starved the first twenty-some years
of its life. It was stark naked. Weather and violence had written
history on it, wealed white marks on leathery bronze, but nothing
seemed to be missing. There was black hair on its chest and thighs and
forearms, and its hands were lean and sinewy for killing.
It was a human body. That was something. There were so many other
things it might have been that his racial snobbery wouldn't call human.
Like the nameless shimmering creature who smiled with strange pale lips.
Starke shut his eyes again.
He lay, the intangible self that was Hugh Starke, bellied down in the
darkness of the alien shell, quiet, indrawn, waiting. Panic crept up
on its soft black paws. It walked around the crouching ego and sniffed
and patted and nuzzled, whining, and then struck with its raking claws.
After a while it went away, empty.
The lips that were now Starke's lips twitched in a thin, cruel smile.
He had done six months once in the Luna solitary crypts. If a man
could do that, and come out sane and on his two feet, he could stand
anything. Even this.
It came to him then, rather deflatingly, that the woman and her four
companions had probably softened the shock by hypnotic suggestion.
His subconscious understood and accepted the change. It was only his
conscious mind that was superficially scared to death.
Hugh Starke cursed the woman with great thoroughness, in seven
languages and some odd dialects. He became healthily enraged that any
dame should play around with him like that. Then he thought, What the
hell, I'm alive. And it looks like I got the best of the trade-in!
He opened his eyes again, secretly, on his new world.
* * * * *
He lay at one end of a square stone hall, good sized, with two straight
lines of pillars cut from some dark Venusian wood. There were long
crude benches and tables. Fires had been burning on round brick hearths
spaced between the pillars. They were embers now. The smoke climbed
up, tarnishing the gold and bronze of shields hung on the walls and
pediments, dulling the blades of longswords, the spears, the tapestries
and hides and trophies.
It was very quiet in the hall. Somewhere outside of it there was
fighting going on. Heavy, vicious fighting. The noise of it didn't
touch the silence, except to make it deeper.
There were two men besides Starke in the hall.
They were close to him, on a low dais. One of them sat in a carved high
seat, not moving, his big scarred hands flat on the table in front of
him. The other crouched on the floor by his feet. His head was bent
forward so that his mop of lint-white hair hid his face and the harp
between his thighs. He was a little man, a swamp-edger from his albino
coloring. Starke looked back at the man in the chair.