The COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works 1911-1987

by C. L. Moore

  “The next drinks are on me anyway,” grinned Smith. “No I can’t guess. Does it matter?”

  “Oh—curious, that’s all. I’ve seen a member of that race only once before in my life, and I’ll bet you never saw one. And yet it’s an Earth race, perhaps the very oldest. Did you ever hear of the Seles?”

  Smith shook his head silently, his eyes on the little figure below, which was slowly drawing out of sight beneath the overhang of the terrace on which they sat.

  “They live somewhere in the remotest part of Asia, no one knows exactly where. But they’re not Mongolian. It’s a pure race, and one that has no counterpart anywhere in the solar system that I ever heard of. I think even among themselves their origin has been forgotten, though their legends go back so far it makes you dizzy to think of it. They’re queer-looking, all white-haired and fragile as glass. Keep very much to themselves, of course. When one ventures out into the world you can be sure it’s for some tremendously important reason. Wonder why that fellow—oh well, not that it matters. Only seeing him reminded me of the queer story that’s told about them. They have a Secret. No, don’t laugh; it’s supposed to be something very strange and wonderful, which their race-life is dedicated to keeping quiet. I’d give a lot to know what it is, just for curiosity’s sake.”

  “None of your business, my boy,” said Smith sleepily. “Like as not it’s better for you that you don’t know. These secrets have a way of being uncomfortable things to know.”

  “No such luck,” Yarol shrugged. “Let’s have another drink—on you, remember—and forget it.”

  He lifted a finger to summon the hurrying waiter.

  But the summons was never given. For just then, around the corner of the railing which separated the little enclosure of tables from the street running along the edge of the terrace came a flash of red that caught Yarol’s eye abruptly. It was the little white-haired man, hugging his squarish parcel and walking timorously, as if he were not accustomed to thronged streets and terraces a thousand feet high in steel-shimmering air.

  And at the moment Yarol’s eye caught him, something happened. A man in a dirty brown uniform, whose defaced insignia was indecipherable pushed forward and jostled the red-coated stroller roughly. The little man gave a squeak of alarm and clutched frantically at his parcel, but too late. The jostling had knocked it almost out from under his arm, and before he could recover his grip the burly assailant had seized it and shouldered quickly away through the crowd.

  Stark terror was livid on the little man’s face as he stared wildly around. And in the first desperate glance his eyes encountered the two men at the table watching him with absorbing interest. Across the rail his gaze met theirs in a passion of entreaty. There was something about the attitude of them, their worn spaceman’s leather and faces stamped with the indefinable seal of lives lived dangerously, which must have told him in that desperate glimpse that perhaps help lay here. He gripped the rail, white-knuckled, and gasped across it,

  “Follow him! Get it back—reward—oh, hurry!”

  “How much of a reward?” demanded Yarol with sudden purpose in his voice.

  “Anything—your own price—only hurry!”

  The little man’s face was suffusing with anguished scarlet. “I swear it—of course I swear it! But hurry! Hurry, or you’ll—”

  “Do you swear it by—” Yarol hesitated and cast a curiously guilty glance over his shoulder at Smith. Then he rose and leaned across the rail, whispering something in the stranger’s ear. Smith saw a look of intense terror sweep across the flushed face. In its wake the crimson drained slowly away, leaving the man’s moon-white features blank with an emotion to which Smith could put no name. But he nodded frantically. In a voice that had strained itself to a hoarse and gasping whisper he said,

  “Yes, I swear. Now go!”

  With no further words Yarol vaulted the rail and plunged into the crowd in the wake of the vanishing thief. The little man stared after him for an instant, then came slowly around to the gate in the railing and threaded the empty tables to Smith’s. He sank into the chair Yarol had left and buried his silkily silver head in hands that shook.

  Smith regarded him impassively. He was somewhat surprised to see that it was not an old man who sat here opposite him. The mark of no more than middle years lay upon the anxiety-ravaged face, and the hands which were clenched above the bowed head were strong and firm, with a queerly fragile slenderness that somehow did not belie the sense of indwelling strength which he had noticed in his first glance. It was not, thought Smith, an individual slenderness, but, as Yarol had said, a racial trait that made the man look as if a blow would break him into fragments. And the race, had he not known better, he would have sworn dwelt upon some smaller planet than Earth, some world of lesser gravity where such delicate bone-structure as this would have purpose.

  After a while the stranger’s head rose slowly and he stared at Smith with haggard eyes. They were a queer color, those eyes—dark, soft, veiled in a sort of filmed translucency so that they seemed never to dwell directly upon anything. They gave the whole face a look of withdrawn, introspective peace wildly at odds now with the anguish of unrest upon the delicate features of the man.

  He was scrutinizing Smith, the desperation in his eyes robbing the long stare of any impertinence. With averted eyes Smith let him look. Twice he was aware that the other’s lips had parted and his breath caught as if for speech; but he must have seen something in that dark, impassive face across the table, scarred with the tale of many battles, cold-eyed, emotionless, which made him think better of attempting questions. So he sat there silently, hands twisting on the table, naked anguish in his eyes, waiting.

  The minutes went by slowly. It must have been all of a quarter of an hour before Smith heard a step behind him and knew by the light which dazzled across the face of the man opposite that Yarol had returned. The little Venusian pulled up a chair and sank into it silently, grinning and laying on the table a flat, squarish package.

  The stranger pounced upon it with a little, inarticulate cry, running anxious hands over the brown paper in which it was wrapped, testing the brown seals which splotched the side where the edges of the covering came together. Satisfied then, he turned to Yarol. The wild desperation had died upon his face now, magically allowing it to fall into lines of a vast tranquility. Smith thought he had never seen a face so suddenly and serenely at peace. And yet there was in its peacefulness a queer sort of resignation, as if something lay ahead of him which he accepted without a struggle; as if, perhaps, he was prepared to pay whatever tremendous price Yarol asked, and knew it would be high.

  “What is it,” he asked Yarol in a gentle voice, “that you wish as your reward?”

  “Tell me the Secret,” said Yarol boldly. He was grinning as he said it. The rescue of the package had not been a task of any great difficulty for a man of his knowledge and character. How he had accomplished it not even Smith knew—the ways of Venusians are strange—but he had had no doubt that Yarol would succeed. He was not looking now at the Venusian’s fair, cherubic face with its wise black eyes dancing. He was watching the stranger, and he saw no surprise upon the man’s delicate features, only a little flash of quickly darkened brightness behind the veiled eyes, a little spasm of pain and acknowledgment twisting his face for a moment.

  “I might have known that,” he said quietly, in his soft, low voice that held a taint of some alien inflection of speech beneath its careful English. “Have you any conception of what it is you ask?”

  “A little.” Yarol’s voice was sobering under the graveness of the other’s tones. “I—I knew one of your race once—one of the Seles—and learned just enough to make me want very badly the whole Secret.”

  “You learned—a name, too,” said the little man gently. “And I swore by it to give you what you asked. I shall give it to you. But you must understand that I would never have given that oath had even so vital a thing as my own life depended upon it. I, or any of
the Seles, would die before swearing by that name in a cause less great than—than the one for which I swore. By that”—he smiled faintly—“you may guess how precious a thing this package is. Are you sure, are you very sure you wish to know our secret?”

  Smith recognized the stubbornness that was beginning to shadow Yarol’s finely featured face.

  “I am,” said the Venusian firmly. “And you promised it to me in the name of—” he broke off, faintly mouthing syllables he did not utter. The little man smiled at him with a queer hint of pity on his face.

  “You are invoking powers,” he said, “which you very clearly know nothing of. A dangerous thing to do. But—yes, I have sworn, and I will tell you. I must tell you now, even if you did not wish to know; for a promise made in that name must be fulfilled, whatever it cost either promiser or promised. I am sorry—but now you must know.”

  “Tell us, then,” urged Yarol, leaning forward across the table.

  The little man turned to Smith, his face serene with a peace that vaguely roused unease in the Earthman’s mind.

  “Do you, too, wish to know?” he asked.

  Smith hesitated for an instant, weighing that nameless unease against his own curiosity. Despite himself he felt curiously impelled to know the answer to Yarol’s question, though he sensed more surely as he thought it over a queer, quiet threat behind the little stranger’s calmness. He nodded shortly and scowled at Yarol.

  Without further ado the man crossed his arms on the table over his precious parcel, leaned forward and began to speak in his soft, slow voice. And as he talked, it seemed to Smith that a greater serenity even than before was coming into his eyes, something as vast and calm as death itself. He seemed to be leaving life behind as he spoke, with every word sinking deeper and deeper into a peace that nothing in life could trouble. And Smith knew that the preciously guarded secret must not be thus on the verge of betrayal, and its betrayer so deathly calm, unless a peril as great as death itself lay behind the revelation. He caught his breath to check the disclosures, but a compulsion seemed to be on him now that he could not break. Almost apathetically he listened.

  “You must imagine,” the little man was saying quietly, “the analogy of—well, for example, of a race of people driven by necessity into pitch-black caverns where their children and grandchildren are reared without ever once having seen light or made any use of their eyes. As the generations passed a legend would grow up around the ineffable beauty and mystery of Sight. It would become a religion, perhaps, the tale of a greater glory than words could describe—for how can one describe sight to the blind?—which their forebears had known and which they still possessed the organs for perceiving, if conditions were such as to permit it.

  “Our race has such a legend. There is a faculty—a sense—that we have lost through the countless eons since at our peak and origin we possessed it. With us ‘peak’ and ‘origin’ are synonymous; for, like no other race in existence, our most ancient legends begin in a golden age of the infinitely long past. Beyond that they do not go. We have no stories among us of any crude beginnings, like other races. Our origin is lost to us, though the legends of our people go farther back than I could make you believe. But so far as history tells us, we sprang full-fledged from some remote, unlegended birth into highly civilized, perfectly cultured being. And in that state of perfection we possessed the lost sense which exists only in veiled tradition today.

  “In the wilderness of Tibet the remnants of our once mighty race dwell. Since Earth’s beginnings we have dwelt there, while in the outside world mankind struggled slowly up out of savagery. And by infinite degrees we have declined, until to the majority of us the Secret is lost. Yet our past is too splendid to forget, and we disdain even now to mingle with the young civilizations that have risen. For our glorious Secret is not wholly gone. Our priests know it, and guard it with dreadful magics, and though it is not meet that even the whole of our own race should share the mystery, yet the meanest of us would scorn even so much as the crown of your greatest empire, because we, who inherited the Secret, are so far greater than kings.”

  He paused, and the withdrawn look in his queer, translucent eyes deepened. Yarol said urgently, as if to call him back into the present again.

  “Yes, but what is it? What is the Secret?”

  The soft eyes turned to him compassionately.

  “Yes—you must be told. There is no escape for you now. How you learned that name by which you invoked me I cannot guess, but I know that you did not learn much more, or you would never have used the power of it to ask me this question. It is—unfortunate—for us all that I can answer you—that I am one of the few who know. None but we priests ever venture outside our mountain retreat. So you have asked your question of one of the little number who could answer—and that is a misfortune for you as well as for me.”

  Again he paused, and Smith saw that vast tranquility deepening upon his serene features. So might a man look who gazes, without protest, into the face of death.

  “Go on,” urged Yarol impatiently. “Tell us. Tell us the Secret.”

  “I can’t,” the little man’s white head shook. He smiled faintly. “There are no words. But I will show you. Look.”

  He reached out one fragile hand and tilted the glass that stood at Smith’s elbow so that the red dregs of the segir-whisky spilled in a tiny pool on the table.

  “Look,” he said again.

  Smith’s eyes sought the shining redness of the spilled liquid. There was a darkness in it through which pale shadows moved so strangely that he bent closer to see, for nothing near them could possibly have cast such reflections. He was conscious that Yarol too was leaning to look but after that he was conscious of nothing but the red darkness of the pool stirred with pale flickerings, and his eyes were plunging so deeply into its secretness that he could not stir a muscle, and the table and the terrace and the whole great teeming city of steel about him was a mist that faded into oblivion.

  From a great way off he heard that soft, slow voice, full of infinite resignation, infinite calm, and a vast, transcendent pity.

  “Do not struggle,” it said gently. “Surrender your minds to mine and I will show you, poor foolish children, what you ask. I must, by virtue of the name. And it may be that the knowledge you gain will be worth even the price it costs us all—for we three must die when the secret is revealed. You understand that, surely? Our whole race-life, from ages immemorial, is dedicated to the Secret’s keeping, and any outside the circle of our priesthood who learn it must die that the knowledge be not betrayed. And I, who in my foolishness swore by the name, must tell you what you ask, and see that you die before I pay the price of my own weakness—with my own death.

  “Well, this was ordained. Do not struggle against it—it is the pattern into which our lives are woven, and from our births we three moved forward to this moment around a table, together. Now watch, and listen—and learn.

  “In the fourth dimension, which is time, man can travel only with the flow of its stream. In the other three he can move freely at will, but in time he must submit to the forward motion which is all he knows. Incidentally, only this dimension of the four affects him physically. As he moves along the fourth dimension he ages. Now once we knew the secret of moving as freely through time as through space, and in a way that did not affect our bodies any more than the motion of stepping forward or back up or down. That secret involved the use of a special sense which I believe all men possess, though through ages of disuse it has atrophied almost to non-existence. Only among the Seles does even a memory of it exist, and only among our priesthood have we those who possess that ancient sense in its full power.

  “It is not physically that even we can move at will through time. Nor can we in any way affect what has gone before or is to come after, save in the knowledge of past and future which we gain in our journeyings. For our motion in time is confined strictly to what you may call memory. Through that all but lost sense we can look back
into the lives of those who went before, or forward through the still unbodied but definitely existent ‘memories’ of those who come after us. For as I have said, all life is woven into a finished pattern, in which future and past are irrevocably limned.”

  “There is danger, even in this way of traveling. Just what it is no one knows, for none who meet the danger return. Perhaps the voyager chances into the memories of a man dying, and cannot escape. Or perhaps—I do not know. But sometimes the mind does not return—snaps out ...”

  “Though there are no limits to any of these four dimensions so far as mankind is concerned, yet the distance which we may venture along any one of them is limited to the capacity of the mind that journeys. No mind, however powerful, could trace life back to its origin. For that reason we have no knowledge of our own beginnings, before that golden age I spoke of. But we do know that we are exiles from a place too lovely to have lasted, a land more exquisite than anything Earth can show. From a world like a jewel we came, and our cities were so fair that even now children sing songs of Baloise the Beautiful, and ivory-walled Ingala and Nial of the white roofs.”

  “A catastrophe drove us out of that land—a catastrophe that no one understands. Legend says that our gods were angered and forsook us. What actually happened no one seems to know. But we mourn still for the lovely world of Seles where we were born. It was—but look, you shall see.”

  The voice had been a low rising and falling of undernotes upon a sea of darkness; but now Smith, all his consciousness still centered upon the reflecting pool of hypnotic red, was aware of a stirring and subtle motion deep down in its darkness. Things were moving, rising, dizzily so that his head swam and the void trembled about him.

  Out of that shaking darkness a light began to glow. Reality was taking shape about him, a new substance and a new scene, and as the light and the landscape formed out of darkness, so his own mind clothed itself in flesh again, taking on reality by slow degrees.