by C. L. Moore
But the time came when she tired of running. She must have come far enough by now that Jair would not be likely to trace her from the office where she had called. As a matter of fact, Cyrille was so large and so intricately honeycombed with rooms that it would be quite possible for them to wander about for hours, or even days, without meeting. And Juille was of no mind for such a flight as that. She had little time to waste. Every moment that passed now carried Cyrille closer to its target.
The Control Room, then, was her real goal. Jair might or might not find her soon, but if she failed to find Egide and the controls and the enigmatic weapon angling downward toward Ericon, it would not matter much what came after. And she might wander for hours through these circling rooms without reaching Egide.
Juille scowled thoughtfully and hefted the bell-muzzled pistol in her hand. There might be one more charge in it, or a limitless number, or none at all. But this was no time for indecision, not when the very minutes of life left to the Imperial City might be ticking off to nothing.
She was standing in a corridor at the moment. After a second's hesitation she pointed the bell toward the light-striped floor and pulled the trigger. The gun shivered. A glow gathered again within the bell mouth, gathered and spun and grew. The tiny sun came whirling from its socket, drifted floorward, struck with the hiss of fire in water. When Juille's sight came back after that golden glare, she saw blued girders again, and again the little storm of dancing colored notes which marked the edges of the gap. They flew up in her face this time as she leaned over the hole, stung her briefly and went out.
Below was a dim-green twilight forest of wavering weeds. Not too far below. Juille took a tight grip on both her guns and jumped. She was in midair before she saw the terrible pale face peering up at her through the reeds, its dark mouth squared in a perfectly silent scream.
It was a madman's face.
Juille's throat closed up and her heart contracted to a cold stop as she met that mindless glare. She was falling as if in a nightmare, with leisurely slowness, through air like green water that darkened as she sank. And the face swam upward toward her among the swaying weeds, its mouth opening and closing with voiceless cries.
The floor was much farther than it had seemed, but her slow fall discounted the height. And the creature came toward her as slowly, undulating with boneless ease among the weeds. Juille sank helpless through wavering green currents, struggling in vain to push against the empty air and lever herself away. The room was a submarine illusion of retarded motion and subdued gravity, and the dweller in it, swimming forward with practiced ease against the leverage of the tangled weeds, had a mad underwater face whose human attributes were curiously overlaid with the attributes of the reptile.
Juille's reason told her that she had stumbled into one of the darker levels of Cyrille, where perversions as exotic as the mind can conceive are bought and practiced to the point of dementia and beyond. This undulating reptilian horror must be one of the hopeless addicts, wealthy enough to indulge his madness even when civilization was crumbling outside the walls of Cyrille.
There was no sound here. Juille's feet came down noiselessly upon the sand, scarcely printing it with her weightless contact. The thing with the mouthing inhuman face came writhing toward her through the blue-green shadows and the swaying of the reeds. She felt her own throat stretching with a scream, but the silence of underwater rippled unbroken around her. For one sickening moment she stood there swaying on tiptoe, scarcely touching the sandy floor, staring at the oncoming madman while her lips opened and closed like his and no sounds came forth. The illusion of fishes in a submarine cavern was complete.
Then she saw a door between two marble pillars that wavered as if behind veils of shifting sea water, and wheeled unsteadily toward it, moving with nightmare slowness over the ripple-patterned sand unmarked by footprints. Behind her the thing came gliding.
As Juille struggled forward she had to force herself against every instinct to draw each breath. The illusion was so perfect that she could not help expecting strangling floods of bitter water to fill her lungs. Her garments wavered up around her and the helmet tugged at its chin strap.
The door was locked. Automatically she burned out the bolt with her palm gun, too sick with utter revulsion to notice, except dimly, that its characteristic thin shriek of riven air was silent here, too. But when the jolt of the gun against her hand responded and the door swung open, reason returned to her. She was armed. She need not fear this hideous writhing thing that swam after her with clutching webby hands outstretched.
She gave one last strong lurch against the weightless gravity of the room and stumbled out into the corridor, where normal gravity for a moment seemed to jerk her down against the floor. Stumbling, she regained her balance and then swung up the gun and sent a thinly screaming bolt back into the green dimness of the submarine room where the creature that mouthed its soundless screams was floating after her. The gun bolt struck him in the chest and its impact sent him wavering backward through the watery air. She saw him double with the strong, convulsive arc of a fighting fish. He began to sink slowly floorward through the reeds, but like the reptile he aped, he was slow to die.
Holding her gun ready for a second shot, Juille backed away. And slowly the madman swam toward her, one clawed hand pressing to his chest where the bolt had gone through. He moved with hideous, inhuman grace until he reached the threshold. Then gravity slammed him flat upon the floor and he lay there gasping and heaving himself up like a fish out of water. The normal pull of Cyrille was more than he could fight against. Juille pressed against the wall and watched him die.
She was badly shaken. Common danger was an old story to her, but the dark, contaminating psychic horrors which she thought she stood among now were a menace she had no armor against. She glanced about the corridor, reluctant to move lest she intrude upon another of the small private hells which, she knew now, fully justified the evil reputation of Cyrille's hidden levels.
And yet she must move. There was no time to waste now. She set her teeth resolutely and leveled her bell-mouthed gun at random toward an angle of the wall and floor. With luck it should open up two avenues of escape, and if one proved untenable, the other might do.
The gun quivered in her hand; its spinning sun gathered and floated free. And she was not sure if her imagination alone made the glow of it look duller than before. Was the precious charge running low? She wondered for one panic-stricken moment if she would have to defend herself now with the little palm gun alone, and then the sun bullet struck with its golden flare and hissing, and she had no more time for wonder.
Low in the wall a broken opening showed when the glare died away. Through it Juille had an incredulous glimpse of a city spread out in sprawling avenues and parks between the ridges of rolling hills. She saw people moving like tiny animated dots through the streets—all of it either in incredibly perfect miniature or incredibly far away. Then a cloud of saffron smoke came rolling through the gap and billowed up into her face. She caught one whiff of its exotic, spicy fragrance and then pulled her short cloak over her face and dived precipitously through the other gap in the flooring, without looking where she dived. For she knew that smoke. She had no desire to go mad in any of the delirious ways its spicy odor offered.
She struck the floor below and rolled for a moment in a bank of pale-pink snow that tingled instead of chilling. More snow drifted from low clouds, blinding her when she looked up. Veils of it, dancing rosily about her, hid the rest of the room. A wind blew, and the veils spun and writhed together in serpentine columns, through which she saw just a glimpse of motion before the wind died again. All the room was pink and dancing with warm snow, and through it a hideous low laughter quietly shook the air.
Juille scrambled to her feet, her heart thudding madly. Snow blinded her, but her ears gave the warning her eyes could not, and she was sure she heard footsteps shuffling nearer through the silence and the blowing veils. The laughter came ag
ain, low, satisfied, evil as she had never imagined laughter could be.
Until she felt the quiver of the bell-mouthed gun in her hand she did not know she had pulled its trigger. There was a paralyzing quality about that voice. The whirling sun drifted from the muzzle, vanished briefly through clouds of pink snow, then struck somewhere invisibly with its hiss and its golden flash. The voice chuckled, fell almost silent, then chuckled again, nearer. And Juille plunged wildly away from it, her feet slipping upon the snow.
Light pouring through a gap in the wall made the dancing flakes glitter with all their rainbow facets. But it was a very thin beam. When Juille had groped her way to the source of it, watching across one shoulder and holding her breath as she listened for the laughter in the snow to follow, she found a breach barely large enough to squirm through. The gun was certainly losing its strength.
It took all Juille's courage to force herself through the gap. Only her glimpse of a calm, sunlit meadow beyond made her try; that and the sound of a low, evil chuckle somewhere beyond the swirling veils. For to squeeze through the wall meant rendering herself helpless during the passage, and what might happen while she struggled there she could not and dared not think aloud.
But, somehow, she made the meadow unharmed. And then stood gripping her two guns and looking back sheepishly at the ragged gap through which pink snow whirled now and again. She heard no further echo of the terrible, soft, satisfied mirth. But her self-confidence was very seriously disturbed now. It annoyed her to find her hands shaking and the thumping of her heart refusing to slow even though she stood alone in an empty, static meadow in some little world whose functions had ceased.
Turning over rather panicky thoughts in her mind, she crossed to a gate at the far side, keeping her attention alert for any following thing from the broken wall. She had hoped to blast her way somehow through to the Control Room and destroy the great searchlight there with the aid of the bell-muzzled gun. But she knew now that would be impossible. Each charge might be the last, and each lessened in effectiveness. She wished passionately for the lightning gun Jair might be carrying. She wished even more passionately for human company, even Jair's. And she began rather shakily to fit the two desires together.
Supposing she lured Jair within range of her palm gun. Could she force him to give up the lightning-caster or to guide her back with him to the Control Room? Certainly she could try. Even if the plan failed, she would be no worse off than now, for at very worst she could surely kill him before he killed her. And incongruously she found herself longing for the presence of his impressive human bulk, the vibration of his voice. Even though he meant to kill her, and she him. He was so reassuringly human, after these horrible inhuman travesties in their madhouses.
So she went out the gate and into a corridor, and she followed the corridor to the office at its end. And closed and locked the door after her, between herself and any sound of laughter that might follow from the room of the pink storming snow.
This office was almost a duplicate of the other. A desk of deep-blue glass this time, and with no dead man behind it. But the wall behind the desk had the same array of communicator panels. She went straight across to it and pressed the universal broadcast button.
"Jair," she said clearly. "Jair, do you hear me? I'm in"—she glanced at the board—"Office No. 20 on the Fifth Level. I'll wait here until you come. Please hurry."
The thought of her own voice echoing among all the corridors and the strange myriad worlds of Cyrille made her shiver a little. Even Egide would hear it, where he worked out Ericon's destruction in the Control Room. And somewhere in the honeycomb of apartments and corridors Jair would hear it, too. He might already be very near. He would put his own interpretation on the appeal, for he must think her unarmed.
There was not much hope for an ambush here. Cyrille was not a world that offered materials for building gun-proof barricades. She pulled a screen patterned in swimming colors across one corner. And somewhere in the honeycomb of apartments and waited behind it, watching the two doorways that opened in the far wall. She had her guns ready. The whole world was silent about her, and the moments dragged interminably.
She heard Jair approaching before he entered the room. He made no attempt to come quietly, and his heavy boots woke echoes along the corridor. Very obviously he thought her unarmed.
He paused in the doorway, big and red-bearded, his red-brown eyes frankly murderous in a cold, dispassionate sort of way as he glared about the room, gun lifted and ready. Juille saw that it was the lightning gun, and her heart jumped. She had to have it. But she saw in her first glance that he had no intention of speaking a single word before he killed her. She might not have been of the same species as he at all, so matter-of-factly did he scan the room for his quarry.
Juille had not expected quite this workmanlike preparedness. She had imagined some interval in which she could address him from behind her shelter and offer a bargain. But she felt that her first word now would serve only as the target for his shot. Still, it had to be done. Perhaps if he knew she was armed—
She said in a clear, firm voice, "I have a gun—"
Jair's lightning thrower leaped up. His fierce eyes raked the room, not quite sure where the voice had come from. He did not believe what she had said, or he did not care. Obviously he hesitated only long enough to know where to fire.
Sighing, Juille fired at him around the edge of the screen, her needle beam making the air shriek as it passed. She had meant to pierce him through the shoulder, but he was inhumanly quick. He must have jumped even before she pressed the stud, because the screaming beam only seared him across the arm and died away in a thin, high wail and a splatter of blue heat against the wall behind him.
Jair laughed, a cold, satisfied sound that partook a little of the terrible laughter in the snow room, and seemed to throw his gun and a thunderbolt at her in one incredibly quick overhand motion. But the shock of his burn must have confused him, spoiling his judgment if not his aim. The bolt went rocketing over Juille's head where she crouched as nearly flat upon the floor as she could in a poise for flight.
The painted screen disintegrated in a rain of colored flinders around her. Those that touched her burned, but she scarcely felt it. Both she and Jair were stunned by the violence of the bolt as it crashed through the wall in a blinding, blue-white glare, leaving behind it a moderate thunderclap and a smell of ozone.
After a second, Juille's mind cleared and she heard Jair's bull-like roar deep in his throat, saw his finger tighten again on the trigger. She faced him over the ruins of the screen, not daring to wait for another shot at him. He was too quick, and a second thunderbolt might strike her squarely.
She was whirling as the room still shook with thunder. Of its own accord her hand closed on a fragment of weighted plastic from the screen and she flung it at Jair, seeing it splinter against his forehead. Then she had spun away toward the shattered wall, moving more quickly than she had ever moved in her life before.
She cleared the wall with one flying leap, grateful in a flash of remembrance to Helia's relentless training over years and years, that had built muscles and reflexes to hair-trigger response. How very strange it was that Helia had trained her thus, so that she might escape the weapon which Helia herself had put into the hands of her enemies.
The thunderbolt had made havoc through a series of rooms before it came to a gap too wide to leap. If Cyrille's materials had not been almost uniformly fireproof, she might never have lived to run even as far as this. But she knew she must dodge behind some other ambush and shoot Jair from behind where he could not be forewarned by the sight of her motion. His reflexes were even quicker than her own. Luckily the bolt had leaped haphazardly, not in one straight path, or Juille's flight must have been halted before she finished her second stride.
Arch upon shattered, tottering arch opened up before her through rooms of sunlit fields whose light spilled over into rooms of twilight. At the far end she could see an angle
of a room full of branches and terrified birds. She ran smoothly, dodging, taking advantage of every broken wall. If Jair was behind her, he came silently. She dared not glance back to see.
When Juille came to the room of branches it seemed to have no floor, only leaves and vines and more branches below at various levels leading down to sunny, bottomless space. But some of the birds lay dead in midair, and she guessed the presence of a glass floor and went skating precariously over nothingness toward the gap in the far wall. Birds beat hysterically about her head, screaming protest and alarm.
In the last room, but one which the bolt had wrecked, she dropped behind a ledge of green ice, on a floor of strange green moss, and waited with steady gun. This time she did not hear Jair coming. He went silently past her a dozen feet away, moving with smooth, deadly speed. Juille took careful aim and her finger tightened upon the stud.
Jair's quickness was inhuman. His senses must have risen to razor-keenness under such stress as this, for something warned him in the instant before Juille fired. Some tension in the air, some awareness of her breathing or sight of the motion she made vaguely reflected in the crystal walls of the room. He flung himself flat upon the moss and the needle beam shrieked over his head and flattened to blue heat in midair upon some invisible wall. He fired from the floor, grinning up at Juille with a singular cold detachment that fascinated her. Then the leaping bolt dazzled her eyes. Fantastic luck was still with her.
Because he fired from such an angle, he missed by a very brief margin. Juille felt the searing heat of its passage and heard it go crashing through walls again, somewhere behind her. The concussion shook them heavily again, and low thunder rolled and echoed through the opened rooms.
