The COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works 1911-1987

by C. L. Moore

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  III.

  DROWSILY he lay there, drinking in the diffused light and the sounds and perfumes of the place, feeling remotely the vast throbs of the mighty heart far away in the body of the god. And presently he began to be aware of something more than sensation, perceived or only suspected—something like a presence in the great chamber. Something alive and aware and serene. And yet—no, not entirely serene. A troubled presence. He lay still, feeling that uneasiness fill the room, a questing, an incomprehension—

  Then suddenly in his brain a thought formed from without, wordless and complete.

  "There is another presence here than Ourself."

  "Yes," he said aloud. A shudder went over the room. The walls shook and blurred. The lights dimmed for an instant and the sounds jumbled into more meaningless patterns.

  "Never speak aloud," thundered a command in his brain. "Never in Our presence. What are you? Whence come you? Form your answers mentally. You are the living entity whose nearness became manifest to Us from the outside. Explain your origin. Are you a human creature?"

  "Yes. I—I'm a man. I was shipwrecked on this island, and—and—"

  As he stammered over the attempt to put into words what had happened the voiceless presence cut off his efforts in an interruption that somehow made him realize it had read what he would have said in the instant he groped for expression.

  "Yes," it mused. "Yes, We had almost forgotten that such units as you exist. It has been many long ages since We were disturbed—"

  "But where am I? What—"

  As before, the answer outran the query, so that even before the words had left his thought centers there came a flash through his brain that cut them off in a queer effect of memory. The reply did not come in words that formed in his mind, nor even in a flow of pure knowledge. It was as if he were recalling something long forgotten.

  Pictures went dancing through his mind, vivid as sudden remembrance. He saw business and confusion. He saw a people not unlike his own race absorbed as one man in a race-wide task which gripped the whole purpose and being of every individual in it. They were building something whose purpose he did not at once grasp. He watched them at work while time went flickering by in shutter flashes of light and dark. Deaths and births fluctuated the numbers of those who labored, while drought, flood, famine and eras of plenty passed almost unnoticed over the heads of this people which had dedicated its race life to the completion of the something whose significance was lost upon him.

  He remembered not as one to whom these things had once happened, but as one who watches the memories of another play across the screen of consciousness. Much was Obscure to him, and the only things which had meaning were those which paralleled his own experience. In this fashion he watched take shape under the hands of many generations a building that rose by infinitesimal degrees over centuries of time.

  Gradually he realized that it was the building in which he now was, this living temple. With such painstaking exactitude they built it that generations might go to the angling of a wall or the curve of an artery corridor. They built it in a likeness he could not understand, in the image of some living thing he never quite grasped. It was made without any opening to outside other than those hungry walls, and when it was finished it stood shimmery and unfocusable in the edges of his borrowed remembrance. Even then he could not make out its shape or understand in what likeness it had been formed. And it was empty—a body into which no breath of life had been infused.

  Now out of that memory came beating waves of intensity that deepened and grew in successive tides until the force of it was so powerful that its very strength bore in upon his brain the knowledge of what was happening. This race which had built the temple was turning its collective mind in unbearable intensity upon the kindling of life within. Every mind in the whole great race had concentrated upon that one vast purpose of the people, excluding every other thought, shutting out all physical things, closed from time and space and matter, focusing all its power through one single thought of intense purpose, upon that awakening of life within the temple.

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  AND SO the Dweller was born. Out of the fusion of uncountable minds, out of the sheer intensity of purpose that gripped a race in its relentless concentration, the single mind was born. And it was like no individual mind such as he knew, but an indescribable composite which had a paradoxical individuality, yet knew no singleness. It was "We" thinking as "I." He could get no clearer conception of it than that.

  The memory pictures ceased. Out of the blankness their passing left in his mind a query formed.

  "Do you understand?"

  He realized in it a vast, impersonal aloofness which far transcended anything like contempt. It was the voice of composite billions addressing an infinitesimal unit. He felt no resentment. He was stunned by magnitude.

  Timidly he answered: "I understand. But why? To what end was all this clone? When? By whom?"

  "Too long ago for you to understand, and by a people so long forgotten their names would mean nothing to you. But the purpose was to create. There has never been a perfect world. We propose to make one in which all conditions are designed and centered upon human happiness. No world in the cosmos is suited to that end, and no existent race is capable of dwelling happily under conditions of perfection. But Our race desired happiness so strongly that it undertook the task of creating such a world and such a people. We assumed this form of Self for that end.

  "It is so vast an undertaking that We still grope for the foundations upon which to build. Even We sometimes come near to bafflement. But We shall succeed. In the end We shall succeed. Look!"

  Abruptly a force greater than anything he had encountered before gripped the man. He was flashed aloft with an instantaneity which outran time itself, so that he found himself grasping before the great milky-paned window without any recollection of having risen. The vast lens of the eye rose up before him, its opacity somehow not impeding his vision, for he could see what lay outside more clearly than he had ever seen anything before.

  Through the translucency of the eye he gazed out upon gray nothing, a flat plane of blank. Across it passed vague darknesses which took shapes and faded again like the reflections of things to come, the shadows of thoughts moving through the mind of the presence. And something like awe came over him as he realized clearly for the first time the measureless capacity for inclusion which dwelt in this composite mind. With a part of its consciousness it spoke in his brain, conjuring up memories out of its race remembrance. Yet there was an infinitely vaster part that groped through voids in search of perfection, casting shadows upon this grayness he watched. Beyond these, did he not sense a mighty third brooding serenely and alone over serene, eternal thoughts?

  There was a cosmic dizziness in the speculation that made his senses reel. He turned back to the blankness outside, and as he watched it began to take on depth and motion, stirring restlessly within itself. Presently he became aware that something was in the making. The misty stuff rolled up to one side, higher and higher, thickening into a nebulous dark that by degrees became a mist-wreathed mountain, a range of mountains, a long, ragged vista of veiled peaks rising against a background of nothingness.

  High up among its clouds something flashed white. Towers, walls, an unreal city taking shape. Slowly it rose, its outlines shifting and forming again until it stood high and shining, a crown upon the mountain peaks. Clouds rolled over it. Light darted blindingly two or three times through the obscurity.

  When the mist had cleared away the city lay in white ruins all down the purple slopes. The mountains blurred together, paled, thinned. Fog billowed in great soft surges to blot them out again, and gray blankness closed once more over the vanished creation.

  Still the mist surged restlessly, churned by the roving mind of the presence into nebulous shapes that faded half formed. He saw rocky coasts over which broke waves of curling mist; he saw broad plains that arched themselves up and rolled into mount
ains, and melted again to nothingness. Great, blurred shapes blundered through the fog, monsters out of evolution's remotest dawning, and once or twice man forms flashed briefly through the dimness. Great cities took shape and faded again. Rivers rushed soundlessly down fog-wreathed gorges to a misty sea. But the gray swallowed everything up and moved uneasily in the birth of other things.

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  NOR were all the fragmentary creations purely material things. He caught the queerest dim tides of emotion surging through the fog, somehow perceptible to an inner vision which the presence had awakened in him. That vast mind drew waves of violence and of peace through the plasm of worlds in which it experimented, combining emotions in strange patterns to produce reactions upon the mind of the watcher which he could put no name to and had never dreamed could exist.

  He realized that the presence was building up complex structures out of these patterns, just as it had built mountains and cities, and like them, discarded everything in the restless search for that yet hidden goal.

  A sudden flash of color in the ever-changing dimness caught him abruptly out of his groping effort to follow the workings of the compound mind about him. In one bewildered glimpse he saw a girl form glowing through the mist. He caught his breath on a gasp and bent forward eagerly. Her vividness was as stunning as a blow, sharp and vital and alive in the midst of all this shifting nothingness.

  In the instant of her appearance he thought he sensed a sudden tensing in the vast, composite presence that infolded him. Something like an awakened interest, surprised and attentive, centering upon himself. It was no more than a fleeting impression, for his whole mind was intent upon the bright figure of that girl. There was something about her that pulled curiously at his emotions, even in the flashing glimpse which was all he had of her. He knew in that instant only that she was lovely and slim and light-footed, and queerly familiar. But almost as his eyes found her she faded as smoke fades in a breeze, blurred and melted until she was nothing but a brightly colored smudge of drifting vapor around which the dimness closed again.

  Violence flared suddenly within him as the gay mist vanished. Poignant loss, and an ache of longing. A swift urge to follow, somehow; a sharp necessity to look more nearly into the vivid face he had scarcely seen. The desire was a quick flame within him. Its urgency must have touched the great presence, so queerly intent upon what was happening, for a voice said in his brain, "Go, then." And suddenly everything blurred.

  He realized nothing but that. Again the presence moved along those ways which lie outside time, so that without intervening motion he was, in a breathless instant, swallowed up in the mist he had been watching from afar.

  In place of the great chamber's walls, billowing fog rolled up all around him. His feet pressed some unseen sponginess and the queer, empty odor of mist was in his nostrils. Not until long after did it occur to him to wonder if it had been in his material form that he stumbled through the fog.

  Whether or not, sensations were perceptible to him as they were to his own body, and he was aware in a remote, disinterested way of other sensations, too, nameless and new. He did not heed them. He was blinded and lost and a little dazed with the suddenness of transition, but the bright memory of the girl still blazed behind his eyes. He stumbled forward through the grayness in the forlorn hope that he might yet find her.

  The ground gave disconcertingly underfoot. He floundered like a man in deep snow as he groped through the dimness. And then suddenly he caught a whiff of fragrance and saw upon the surging mist ahead a faint stain of color. He plunged forward, holding his breath in the wild hope that he might be about to come upon that vanished loveliness again.

  The colors deepened and ran in shifting patterns over the fog wreaths all about him until he stood embowered in rainbows. And then they began to draw together. Breathless, he watched. The colors cleared and concentrated. The swimming patterns paled. Slowly out of the rose-smudged fog the girl took shape again. The slim curves of her grew clearer and clearer through the veiling mist. She put on reality by degrees until she was standing, vivid and gay and enchanting, before his eager eyes.

  -

  IV.

  SHE was not a stranger. There was no feature of her he had not known before. For one flashing instant he stared into the blue, bewitching eyes, the familiar face, before she whirled in a cloud of pale hair and vanished in the engulfing mist that closed like water about the whiteness of her.

  "Wait!" he called. "Come back!

  Come back!" But the words rolled back in dim echoes from the muffling fog, and the girl was gone. He plunged after her, stretching out groping hands into emptiness, running uncertainly through the mist, stumbling over the spongy ground. Presently he caught a flash of white in the grayness ahead, and called once more: "Wait! Come back!"

  This time she must have heard him, and to his surprise she paused and hesitated, looking back over her shoulder. Again he called. Slowly she turned and came back through the mist, her head bent and the long hair showering over her shoulders. He saw that by now its pale gold had deepened to a warmer tone, and her eyes were darkening, too. She was unstable as the shifting lands about her. Walking like a white ghost through the mist, she neared him.

  As she came the fog cleared from about her. A dim woodland was rising like smoke columns through the gloom; specter trees bent above her ruddy head. She did not seem to realize their presence. A long shudder of that queer, indescribable emotion which he had sensed as he watched from the window of the eye suddenly shivered through the fog forest. The whole scene rippled like a reflection upon water and his own mind shook and clouded to its passing violence. But the girl came serenely forward, untouched.

  When she paused before him at last her hair had darkened to sheeny blackness and a warm glow of brown was veiling the pallor of her body. Her eyes, brightly dark behind curving lashes, stared through him with unseeing placidity.

  "Look at me," he commanded.

  The black gaze did not flicker. Serenely empty, it swam past him, intent upon nothingness. Her lovely, familiar features were untroubled by any trace of emotion, any faintest hint of a mind behind the bright, dark eyes.

  Impulsively he seized her by the shoulders and stooped his face to the level of hers. Under his hands her flesh was warm and firm and smooth, but there was about it an indescribable feeling of impermanence, as if at any moment that rounded body might melt back into the mist from which it sprang.

  "Look at me," he said again, and concentrated all his will into the determination that she must see him; that intelligence must awaken and sight come into being behind the empty brilliance of her eyes.

  Placidly unseeing, she stared past him into oblivion.

  He set his teeth and gripped her shoulders harder and turned all his will into an infinite resolution that she must see him—she must—his whole being centered upon that necessity, until the blood pounded at his temples with the violence of his concentration and everything dissolved about him save the liquid blankness of the black eyes into which he stared.

  Very slowly, under the almost superhuman centering of his whole mind, a faint flickering awoke in the depths of those serene eyes. Seeing it, a surge of triumph went through him and he bent more intensely than he would have believed possible the whole strength of energy and mind and will upon that awakening. It was a strain that could not be continued long. He concentrated the more fiercely because he knew that, willing her to intelligence with all the power that was in him.

  The stirring flicker quickened in those blank eyes. A little grimace crossed the placidity of her features. Very slowly, by infinitely painful degrees, while his mind strained its utmost and the blood pounded in his ears with the effort of concentration, he evoked awareness in that empty gaze. Conscious life swam up through their depths, intelligence awoke.

  She stared in mesmerized wonder into his own compelling gaze while the knowledge of what living meant bloomed slowly behind her eyes. The wonder grew and grew as she stared. Her mouth
began to quiver. Under his gripping hands he felt her shaking with the amazement of that infinite awakening. And then suddenly a little cry broke from her lips and her hands flew up to hide her face.

  He stepped back, arms falling to his sides, weak and shaken with the relaxation of that tremendous effort. But he had succeeded. The girl stood staring at him, wide-eyed, hands pressed to her suddenly flushed cheeks and a troubled wonder still shining upon her face. And all the old familiarity had redoubled in intensity now that life lighted that sweet brown face. It was more baffling than before, and twice as tantalizing.

  The concentration of her gaze upon him roused something warm and pleasant in his wearied mind. He smiled. Her mouth twitched, curled up experimentally. She was smiling back with her first conscious effort. Triumph surged hotly through him. He had created. He had wakened into being an imitative mind whose first effort was a smile.

  Her eyes slipped from his and wandered about the smoky vistas of that fog forest which stretched about them. It was fading as she turned to look. Mist thickened between the dim trees, veiling the aisles of melting woodland. Clouds swirled forward to blot out the forest. A faint pucker gathered between her brows. When the eyes returned to his they were troubled. After a moment her lips parted and she spoke, uncertainly, hesitatingly, her first words.

  "There is more to the world than this," she stated with a gentle sureness. "I know that. Where is it?"

  He shook his head. There was no answer he could make that would have meaning to her. As he opened his mouth to speak, the mist surged forward about them in an abrupt tide. The sponginess underfoot quivered.

  "Don't be frightened," he said quickly. "A change is coming now. Watch."

  -

  THE yielding ground tilted sharply. Through the fog he heard the girl's gasp. He stumbled an uncertain step or two forward and took her, trembling and afraid, in the bend of his arm, stilling her fright against his shoulder as the ground rose at an angle so steep that he was hard put to maintain his balance.