by C. L. Moore
Not very much is really known about the fauna of Venus. Terrestrial exploration has been confined to narrow corridors, and if there are dangerous beasts in the jungles they generally shun the highways and the towns. What may dwell in the seas of Venus is as unknown as the deepest secrets of our own seas. This thing was vast and sluggish, dimly gleaming where light struck it strongest. Rohan measured its bulk as well as he could, considered it with a sort of reckless caution. It was slow. It was probably not hungry, or the Quai outside the gate would not be waiting there. Presumably some kind of summons would come when the Quai was wanted. Or did they operate on some private schedule of their own? At any rate Rohan was a strong swimmer. Also, he had a knife.
He thought, unfastening his shirt, "If I can get up only a load or two of what's down there, it'll be a start. I can hire a ship and come back here with enough artillery to kill the thing and clean out the pool. Maybe I won't even wake it up, if I'm careful."
Then he thought of the d'vahnyan, and glanced again, rapidly and with uneasiness, around the plateau. Had Crazy Joe told three truths and one lie about this place? The pool was blue, as he had said. It held treasure and a monster of some kind. But the greatest treasure, the secret behind the d'vahnyan—where was it? What was it? No, Crazy Joe did not tell lies. Unless it was unwittingly. Could that be it? Some vague fantasy he had dreamed up here, staring into the hypnotic eye of the pool? No, for he did know the secret. He did talk with the d'vahnyan, easily, with strong influence sometimes. Well, never mind. At least, the jewels were here. After that there would be time enough to explore further.
A curious sureness drove him on. The secret was here. He could see no tangible evidence but something deeper than reason told him Crazy Joe had not misled him. In its own time the secret would come to him, as it had come to Crazy Joe.
He stepped out of his trousers, settled the long knife on its thong around his wrist, poised on the pool's brink.
-
HOW SOFT AND SMOOTH the water was. Not like real water. Stroking strongly downward, Rohan marveled at the texture of the blue infinity he sank through. He kept his eyes open, enjoying the deepening blueness, watching for the flashes of color that struck upward like some sunken autumn from the bottom of the well. It was like swimming through blue air toward stars. He felt happy and light. It was strange to think how intimately he shared this water with a monster whose shape and nature he did not know. The water was full of death, but he did not fear it. It was full of life and light too, if a man had the courage to reach for them.
The jewels lay heaped in thick, bright hillocks, unevenly on the sand. It seemed to Rohan that they lay smoothest in a broad path across the pool's center, as if—something—had dragged a wide track across the treasure many times. But the deep waters hid all sign of the dweller here. Perhaps it slept. Perhaps it had withdrawn.
Rohan shook out the strong, light sack he had brought for the treasure. It wrapped itself around his arm, clinging like seaweed. He reached for a heavy, half-submerged outcropping in the sand to hold himself down and found he was gripping a carved figure studded with slippery gems. It served the purpose.
What a lot of the treasure there was, he thought warmly, riffling it over with his free hand. Big rubies like blood-drops, strings of half dissolving pearls, linked diamonds set in imperishable yellow gold, corroded boxes spilling out colored drifts of stones. Little idols with enormous emerald eyes. Ivory furred with the swaying green hair of water-growths. Steel mirrors pitted with corruption that had once given back the yellow-eyed glances of pretty Quai girls, corruption now themselves. Steel daggers dissolving off studded gold hilts. So much of it, too much, richness pressed down and running over.
Happily Rohan brushed the surface, uncovering yet more treasure underneath. Working fast, he sorted out the largest and the best and thrust them into his sack. Great pale-eyed diamonds, globes of preciousness as live as stars, strings of lustrous rainbow color, faceted drops of congealed brightness. It was wonderful. It was Christmas morning. It was Easter, with all the dazzling eggs nested here awaiting him.
His lungs began to burn. He turned over and shot up through paling blueness toward the air, his heavy sack trailing. He began to laugh exultantly just before he broke the surface, and hung sputtering and choking for a while before he emptied his jewels on the bank and dived again.
The treasure flashed brighter than before. He dug into it, tossing it over and over, filling the sack anew with the power and the glory of a planet. A second time he rose to the surface, emptied his bulging sack, dived.
This time he uncovered a drift of pure crimson drops, like a man unearthing a vein of clear gold in a mountain of crystals and silver. He dug with both hands into the rich heaps, blinking in the clouds of sand his digging had dislodged, reaching for the bigger and brighter jewels which always lay just an arm's length out of his grasp.
A long, slow coil of disturbed sand rose out of the milky distance past his face. The water stirred, deeply and slowly.
Then with great deliberation a grasp like marble closed around his ankle.
-
ROHAN WRITHED OVER in the water convulsively, letting the rubies fly. They sank in a sluggish red rain about him through the blue water, turning over slowly, as he tugged in a moment's almost fatal panic at that relentless coil. It was heavy and hard and cold, like stone. And it was drawing him in ...
It did not seem possible to him that a slow sun was beginning to burn through the clouds of blinding sand which he was raising in his struggles. He thought wildly that the light burned in his own mind, a symbol of shock and fear. But the tentacle drew him downward and inward toward the light, and as it grew and broadened with nearness it was the color of the sun itself, clear, bright white gold, shimmering in the waters that were colored like the blue skies of Earth. Blue skies and sunlight—two things no eye upon Venus had ever seen, except perhaps here.
His lungs burned. His vision blurred with sand and water and terror. He was not aware of himself as a reasoning creature at all in this moment. He was only a wild, struggling thing frantic to escape.
The thong-hung dagger, following his flailing motions faithfully, struck his palm finally and brought reason back. His fingers closed and with his last conscious strength he drove the dagger down hard, into the murk where the sunlight burned, into the heavy coil that was creeping higher around his ankle.
He felt the whole coil flinch. He slashed again. The water churned and the marble grasp slackened a little. Writhing double, blind with light and darkness, he stabbed once more into solid flesh which he could not see, and this time the heavy coil relaxed and slid slowly, slowly away.
Rohan shot up through foaming water, luminous water that boiled with sand and sparkled with broken reflections from that strange sunlight which burned at the bottom of the well. He broke the surface with what seemed his last despairing effort, and hung there clutching the stone rim, his body swinging helplessly in the churning water, wondering how soon the coil would rise again and lay its marble weight around his legs.
A hand seized his wrist. Two hands. Without looking up he made feeble climbing motions against the side of the pool, but it was the strength of the two pulling hands that saved him. He stumbled, gasping and choking, over the edge at last, onto dry pavement, and lay there spent for an unmeasured space of time.
-
WHEN BREATH AND VOLITION came back to him he opened his eyes and saw a pair of white sandal-wrapped feet on a level with his face, a tumbled heap of jewels kicked this way and that between them. Slowly, as exhaustion ebbed a little out of him, he pushed himself up until he was sitting beside the flashing heap of his treasure, looking into the face of the standing man. Imperceptibly he was working the dagger forward around his wrist so that his fingers could close on it.
The Quai was not looking down at him. He knew the arrogant face, but its arrogance was not for him. The Quai's third eyelids were drawn across the round eyes and their gaze was focused remotely be
yond Rohan and downward, into the pool. Automatically Rohan turned to follow that veiled gaze.
He had not imagined the light in the pool. It burned stronger now, very bright, very clear. And the water was troubled from deep underneath. A sudden turbulence rushed up, subsided, rushed higher, spilling blue trickles over the rim. Then a great bubble rose and burst, and just under it the shining light came floating, up, up from the bottom of the well and the center of the world. A cold, still brilliance that dazed the eye.
The Quai spoke in a hushed voice.
"Were you summoned?" he asked Rohan.
"Summoned?" Rohan echoed the question blankly. Then a little of his old confidence came back, and even in the face of this uprising mystery from the pool he found himself laughing. "Summoned? Oh no—I came!"
The two men looked at each other for a measuring moment. Even through the veiling lids Rohan saw the cold arrogance in the Quai's eyes and knew it for a remote echo of his own. But there was a difference ... the Quai had come humbly, acolyte and sacrifice in one. Rohan laughed again and scrambled to his feet. Exhaustion still weighted him, but he could not rest—yet.
What was going to happen next he had no idea. He only knew that he could deal with whatever came.
His discarded clothing lay beside the pool. Shivering a little in the soft, wet wind that breathed across the Mountain, he got quickly into his shirt, pressing the seal-tapes with one rapidly moving hand while with the other he groped for his trousers. The cloth felt clammy against his wet skin.
He was buckling the reassuring weight of the gunbelt around him when the next great bubble burst. Another rose after it. And another. Rohan turned, settling the holster against his thigh. The Quai stood motionless, with the jewels in a glittering tumble around his feet. He too stared down into the pool. The water boiled. The light like the sun rose higher, higher ...
Out of the seething blue waters lifted the monstrous head of the dweller in the well. Slowly, slowly it rose, water streaming from its shoulders, and over its head the flat, unwavering sun burned cold white gold, shimmering, shivering, sending out slow rings of light that eddied and faded, spread and paled to an embracing potency that was felt but not seen. They touched the mind. Delicately they touched the mind ...
What did it look like? Rohan could not be sure, even while he stared. The light dazed him. He only knew the thing was monstrous. Mailed and shining, it drew its magnificent length over the verge of the pool, coil by coil. Before it, stealthy, slow, tentative as the first light of dawn, moved the rings of expanding radiation. The thoughts of Rohan and the Quai moved out from their skulls in measurable waves from each thinking brain, and the radiations from the flat white light met them and moved inward as if on concentric stepping-stones, inexorably toward the center and the source of all thought.
Gently, gently. But the storm was rising.
-
ROHAN SHUT HIS MIND TIGHT, violently rejecting that touch. It drew back slightly, puzzled. Then it came on again and there were no doors of the mind he could close against it.
A great many lightning thoughts rippled one after another through his head. The jewels. First and last and always, the jewels. And how he could hope to get to them, with that monstrous light-crowned thing rising so slowly from the pool. And how, even if he did get them, he could escape. For he felt very sure that the rings of expanding light were quiescent now, barely stirring. There was no way of guessing their full power if the creature were aroused, or how far down the mountain they could spread, burning and sinking, paralyzing the mind.
It was not immortal. He had struck it with his knife and it had let him go. Certainly it was not a normal creature by any Terrestrial judgment, but it was not supernatural, either. He had struck it, and—
The slow, upsurging coils hesitated. Out of the water a slash in the mailed side rose gingerly. The creature paused, swung its magnificently crowned head back to consider this twinge. And Rohan knew his chance ...
The Quai never even heard him coming. Rohan's long knife flashed twice in the quiet air, hard, accurate blows to hasten the sacrifice which this man of Venus had come to offer his god. Rohan knew what he was doing. He knew how to guide the blows.
It takes perhaps three seconds for oblivion to come, when you strike deep at the right spots. In those three seconds the Quai had time for one quick look of blank amazement over his shoulder, and then no more.
Rohan was braced to catch the sagging body before it began to give at the knees. He caught it neatly and strongly over his bent shoulder, letting its weight double across him, and surging forward in the same quick instant that he stooped.
His timing was perfect. When the sun-crowned head of the monster swung round again, the hurled body of the Quai sprawled limply against its gigantic face, hung there for unmoving seconds, and then slid very gently downward to lie flat upon the pavement in the pools of spilled blue water. The pools turned red.
Rohan wasted no glance at what was happening between the sacrifice and the god. He was moving with the rapid, accurate gestures of an automaton, scooping up gems with both hands, dropping them blindly into his pockets. He had hoped to go down from this pool laden heavily, pack and pockets, with treasure. But now he told himself rigidly that he could make these scooping gestures twice more—once more—no more—
Resolutely he poured the last double handful into his pockets and scrambled backward on his knees, ignoring the bruise and scrape of the stones, trying not to look at the monster and its victim as he went.
But when he stood panting before the gate he glanced back once, for just one quick, curious look, before he flung himself forward into the slow, intricate web that lay between him and freedom. It was for this, chiefly, that the Quai had had to die. The treasure was only part of it. Even if Rohan had had time to load himself with jewels, still a man must die to give him time to negotiate this gate.
He had one backward look only. The monster had halted half in the pool and half out of it. The great crowned head was bent, and light floated very lazily outward in slow, slow rings. The creature seemed to be inspecting the sprawled Quai leisurely. And Rohan saw one thing about it that struck his mind with stunning impact. He could not understand this. It was impossible. He had assumed all this while that sacrifices between Quai and monster would be consummated in the time-honored way—that the god would devour its victim.
But he saw now that the god had no mouth.
-
THE THREADS OF THE gateway shimmered like the intricate armature-wrapping of the d'vahnyan. Outside, in the leaf-thatched hut where the Quai had slept his last sleep in life, the caged moth chirped with plaintive sweetness. There was no other sound on the Mountain but the sigh of the grey wind and the soft chinking of the jewels in their pockets around Rohan's waist.
He went fast, down the steep road. He did not know how soon the rings of light might begin to pulse out and drop down after him, delicately touching the secret chambers of his mind, touching and pulling him back ...
Part of him wanted to be pulled back. For he had accomplished only half his purpose. Or had Crazy Joe lied, after all? He had thought that when he came down this road he would carry a double treasure—jewels and knowledge. Something had gone wrong, somehow, somewhere. Tantalizingly, at the very edge of his mind, wisdom knocked for entry.
The curled threads of the gateway—the curled threads of the d'vahnyan's ominous wrappings. The gate, and the wrappings—each was certainly a sort of unearthly machine. The latter controlled by the waves flowing from the strange, inhuman brain of the d'vahnyan, the former activated and shaped by Rohan's desire to enter, to pass through. Or by the monster.
Twice on Venus Rohan had seen the sun—once in the crowned monster's brilliance, once when he shot the d'vahnyan. Surely the link between the Mountain and the d'vahnyan was a strong one. But it was not clear. He had missed its significance, somehow, somehow ...
There was not time yet to worry about it. He had the jewels. Later, he could come bac
k with weapons and reinforcements and take what he wanted from the pool. If the secret knowledge that could make all d'vahnyan vulnerable was there, and he thought it was, he would take that too, at his leisure. He could manage everything, with what he carried in his pockets.
There was only one last obstacle now. He touched his gun reflectively and watched the road below. Forsythe and Jellaby. They would be waiting for him ... no, for what he carried. To their minds he knew he himself was only a vehicle now, for the delivery of treasure.
Somewhere on the path below they would meet him to dispute the treasure. He grinned, wondering which of them he would shoot first. That it would be Rohan who shot first seemed self-evident to him. And with Jellaby—or Forsythe—out of the way, the balance would shift once more and the survivor's return to civilization would depend solely on Rohan in the long jungle trek ahead. One man alone could not make the trip in safety, It took two at least.
"Forsythe," Rohan thought. "If there's any choice, I'll kill Forsythe."
It was curious in a way how totally he discounted Crazy Joe.
-
WHITE FOG SWAM LAZILY UP to meet him as he descended. Looking out over the immeasurable miles of dissolving jungle, he thought he saw a glitter of light wink once and vanish, very far away. Foggy Morning, Flattery, Swanport, civilization. A long way off.
The fog closed around him. He walked half blinded, in white cloud. Rocks loomed like waiting figures at every bend. After a while he drew his gun and carried it ready, the safety off, knowing that he was coming nearer and nearer to the danger area where almost certain ambush waited him. He went very cautiously now, searching each crevice he passed, all his senses tuned to a singing alertness. And presently, with no surprise, he heard a gentle click of metal on rock a little way ahead in the blankness, and knew that the moment was upon him.
