by C. L. Moore
Surprise had lost all power over Alan. Sir Colin's miraculous return from oblivion, was not enough to startle him now. He wrenched away from that urgent grip on his arm, his mind taking up automatically what had been blanked out of it when the Light-Wearer swooped down.
"Evaya—" he said hoarsely, finding his throat raw, as if he had been shouting. Perhaps he had, in the blindness and silence of the Alien's embrace. "Evaya—"
He had seen her last lying on the white ramp in a crumple of gossamer garments and showering hair. She was still there, but on her feet now, and looking down at him still with that face of inhuman ivory, the eyes blank mirrors that reflected only what the Light-Wearer whispered in her brain.
The Light-Wearer! Alan whirled, remembering, not feeling the tug upon his arm as Sir Colin rumbled an urgent warning. He could see the Light-Wearer at the very edge of vision, hovering cloudily down the slope. He did not dare look directly at it. The bewildering thing hurt his very brain as the eyes are hurt by brilliance.
It was the gunfire that had jolted it. He was still half in rapport with the creature from that terrible intimacy of the fingers prying down into his brain. He knew it was hesitating, torn between fear of the crashing thunder again, and that intolerable hunger still driving it on.
He could not bring himself to face it, but he knew when it decided what to do. He looked up at Evaya a moment before her toneless puppet-voice broke the quivering silence. It was the Light-Wearer who spoke, but the people turned to Evaya to hear the words it was putting into her mouth.
"Take them!" cried her voice, with a timbre of inhuman fury in it that was not Evaya's. Her arm came up in a commanding gesture that carried a dreadful hint of hovering robes—as if her possession were so complete that even the garment of the Light-Wearer were subtly visible around her. "Take them!" the inhuman voice thundered from her lips. (How hideous—how unthinkable—that the voice of a being not made of flesh spoke now through these lips of flesh!)
A low murmur of anger rose obediently among the Carcasillians. They rolled forward toward the two men, blind, hypnotic fury on their faces. Beyond them the half-seen figure of the Light-Wearer shimmered like smoke upon the air. Alan could feel its thunder beating out at him.
One moment more, he hesitated. The memory of Flande had come back, and he was searching these blank, threatening faces before him. Was one of them Flande? Or was Flande human at all? Was he watching imperturbably through the showers of his raining tower?
"Damn ye, mon, wake up!" roared Sir Colin in his ear. "Ye aren't worth rescuing! Are ye comin' or aren't ye?"
Alan shook himself awake. "Yes," he said. "I'm coming."
The rising murmur of the Carcasillians sounded louder behind them as they hurried up the ramp. Alan hesitated with a moment's shuddering memory of the funnel of infinite blackness down which the Light-Wearer had come striding. The thought of entering it was worse than the thought of turning to face what lay behind him.
But when he looked, the tunnel was no longer there. The great round disc of the gateway opened now upon a passage of gray stone slanting away into dimness outside the violet daylight of Carcasilla's cavern.
Alan glanced back. Evaya lifted a face rigid as ice to him, a blind stare through which the Light-Wearer looked terribly into his eyes. Sir Colin called, "Hurry, mon!" in a voice that reverberated hollowly from the walls of the low passage outside.
Alan stepped through the gateway and out of Carcasilla.
-
THUNDER bellowed from Sir Colin's gun as Alan cleared the threshold. The noise was deafening; flinders of the stone flew from the corridor's walls as the air reechoed with the sound of the shot. Alan turned in bewilderment, to see the ruddy Scot's face of his companion wrinkling in a satisfied grin. "I thought so," Sir Colin said, lowering his gun. "Look."
A darkness was thickening over the doorway to Carcasilla. The violet light that poured through it dimmed as they watched, and within moments the barrier of darkness had closed over this gateway to shut them out, as the door of light they had first entered had closed to shut them in.
"It hates noise," Sir Colin grunted. "And it's still—maybe not sure of itself. I've had to use my gun on the domned thing before."
Alan did not at once realize the import of the words. He stared at the black circle upon the wall, a closed gate beyond which the Light-Wearer stood alone with Evaya and her people. He knew it did not belong there. The nameless builder of Carcasilla had put up barriers to keep out just such creatures as that. But now the dream-like city belonged to it, and the dream-like people, and Evaya whom he had known so briefly and so well—Evaya, the most dream-enchanted of them all, with her eyes that reflected the Alien thoughts and her body the instrument for Alien commands.
Sir Colin followed his gaze. "It's all right," he said. "The Light-Wearer can't hurt them. You saw that. But it could hurt us. We're lucky to get away so easily. I doubt if I'd have dared tackle that—that thing—if I hadn't seen it driven back by the Terasi's drums."
Alan looked at him, belated amazement welling up now that the crisis was over. The Scotsman had obviously been through strenuous activity since their parting. Scars and bruises showed through his ragged clothing, and there were new lines in his haggard face. But the red beard, unkempt and roughly trimmed, jutted with the same arrogant cocksureness.
"The Terasi drums? Those savages—how did you get away from them? And Karen—she's alive?"
Sir Colin patted the air soothingly with a big hand. "Karen and Mike are both verra much alive, laddie. But we'll talk as we go. And mind you keep a sharp lookout, too. The Way of the Gods isna so safe for men!"
"Way of the Gods?" Alan followed the Scotsman's gesture along the shadowy, ruinous corridor stretching before them. Once it might have been wider and higher, but it could never have been ornate, he thought. Now the broken walls gaped into the darkness here and there, blocking the pavement with fallen stones. "What gods?" he asked. "Why?"
"They call it that—the Terasi, I mean. And the gods were the Light-Wearers, of course. Didn't ye learn anything at all in Carcasilla?"
"I know that much, sure," Alan said, following Sir Colin over the broken stones that heaped the corridor floor. Here in the semi-twilight of ruin, Carcasilla's perfection seemed like a dream already. But it was hard to leave. He looked back over his shoulder at the closed black gateway upon the wall.
"It's the best way, laddie," Sir Colin said gruffly. "Come along. You'll realize that when I tell you what's happened. And keep your eyes open as we go."
"What do you expect?" Alan glanced uneasily about in the dimness.
"Anything at all. This was a—a sort of experimental laboratory for the Light-Wearers, once. The Carcasillians are one result. There were others." He nodded toward a gap in the wall, darkness within it. "Something used to live there, I suppose. And there, and there. Carcasilla's the last perfect experiment, but not all the others died at once."
Nothing moved but the rubble under their feet. But the dark doorways were numerous now, and Alan felt uneasily that things were watching as they stumbled over the stones. "What's happened?" he demanded. "Where's Karen? And Mike?"
"Back in the Terasi cavern, laddie."
"Prisoners?"
Sir Colin laughed. "No. At least—not Terasi prisoners. But I'm thinking we may all be prisoners of the Alien, my boy, and not quite realize it yet ... No, the Terasi aren't quite the savages they look. We found that out. It was our guns that saved us, you see. Not as threats or as weapons, but as a sort of promise instead. A promise of knowledge. They're hungry and thirsty for knowledge, these savages of the tunnels. So at first they kept us alive to learn the secret of the guns—how to make them, where they came from, why they work. They had to teach us their language for that. Ye've been missing a long while, laddie."
"You learned their language?"
"Enough. And now we're allies—against the Alien." He shrugged heavily. "Yes, we have a verra grave task ahead of us, laddie. The rebu
ilding of a world, perhaps. But we'll talk about that later. Here—we can go faster now."
The floor before them was a road of shimmering gray metal. No, two roads, separated by a low curbing. Alan heard a rushing sound and felt wind drying the sweat upon his face.
"The Way of the Gods," Sir Colin rumbled. "Follow me now, laddie. Careful does it."
He stepped over gingerly upon the gray road. Instantly his heavy body rose weightless into the air, drifting forward as if upon the current of a slow stream. Over his shoulder he grinned and then beckoned. "Come!"
Alan braced himself and stepped uncertainly forward. He felt a giddy vertigo that nauseated him briefly. He shot past Sir Colin in the grip of the invisible air-river, and went dizzily along the tunnel, trying to right himself. Over and over, heels over head. Then Sir Colin's hand steadying him.
"Don't struggle. Relax now. There. The current's faster toward the middle."
"What is it?" Alan had fallen into a swimmer's position, head lifted, facing in the direction of the current's flow. Sir Colin drifted beside him. The tunnel walls moved past them with increasing speed, a soft murmuring of air in their ears.
"That gray stuff on the floor must cut off gravitation to some extent. Not too much or we'd smash against the roof. The force is angled forward, so we're carried with it. It's a river, Alan. A river of force. The Light-Wearers used it when they traveled the Way of Gods. It's one of the few things that still works in this god-forsaken place. This, and Carcasilla ...Tell me about it, laddie. What's happened since we left?"
And so Alan told him, drifting along over the gray ribbon of the roadway, through the ruins and darkness of the dead world. It did not take very long. Sir Colin was silent for a while as they floated on along the whispering river of air. Then, "Flande," he murmured. "I had wondered about him. Perhaps some day we'll learn the truth. But for the rest, it fits—yes, it fits verra well! I've learned a good deal since we came here, laddie."
"Tell me."
Sir Colin laughed and flapped his hands helplessly. "All at once? There's a lot to be said. Ye know about the Light-Wearers—how they came and conquered. How they cleared the earth of 'vermin' except for the pets they kept, and the experimental races they bred and interbred. Some of 'em—pretty nasty. And some of 'em still alive, the Terasi tell me, lurking in the caverns, feeding on each other and anything they can catch. I'd never realized how alien the Aliens were until I heard about the things they made out of human flesh in their laboratories here.
"But never mind that now. It's the Terasi ye'll want to know of. Back on their own world, wherever it may ha' been, the Aliens had a slave race. Not human, or even remotely human, but made of flesh like us. Not—well, vortices of living energy, or whatever the Aliens are. The slave race may ha' been the Aliens' hands. I'm theorizing, ye ken, but I've found out enough. And ye have to grant those Aliens were builders!" There was awe in the burring voice. "Anyway, when they came here they tried, I think, to make such a race from men. Parts of the brain they must ha' killed; others I believe they stimulated to make men builders, to be their hands as that other race had been. Only—they guessed wrong about humans. The little seeds of rebellion they thought they'd cut away kept growing back. Ah, those robot-humans built machines the like I never saw before. I'll show ye, later. I dinna know what for, but some day I'll learn. But the robot-humans learned something else, laddie. They discovered they were men!"
"Well?"
Sir Colin sighed gently above the soft sighing of the wind that blew along the Way of the Gods. "The Aliens destroyed them," he said abruptly.
Alan knew a sudden pang of loss, irreparable loss, as though history itself had become a book of blank pages.
"It may be," the Scotsman went on after a moment, "that the Terasi are remnants of that race. Or it may be they're descendants of some other experiments the Aliens made. There's been time enough to spare to let the human race rectify itself again from all the hideous things the Aliens superimposed upon them—if that's what happened. We'll never know, of course.
"The Terasi seem to be the only semblance of an independent human race left here. They're living in the great cave of the machines, where the robot-humans fought their last battles millenniums ago. And they're trying in their clumsy way to learn. Out of sheer thirst for knowledge, because there isn't any hope for the future and they know it well. The Earth's dying and the race of man will have to die, too."
-
HE SIGHED again, heavily, and for a while they drifted in silence along the slow stream. The tunnel walls went past in the dimness, opening enigmatic arches upon caverns where the creatures of the Aliens must have lived out their misshapen lives so long ago.
"About the Light-Wearer—" Alan prompted presently.
"Oh. Well, he knows he's alone now, and he knows he'll have to die, too, if he can't get at us. We were domned lucky back there in the ship, laddie, that he didn't suspect then what had happened. He must ha' wakened and gone in search of the race he led here, and by the time he knew they'd come and ruled and died, we'd escaped. I imagine him going back to the citadel and sending out calls all over the world—and only Evaya answered. He followed us to Carcasilla—remember? He was still unsure then, I think, stunned by the shock of what he'd found here. And afterward, when he knew, he couldn't reach us. You were safe in Carcasilla, and we—well, the Terasi ha' found a way to keep the thing at bay.
"It isn' flesh, ye ken. Its metabolism isna human at all. It may have no body as we know bodies. So the bullets I fired didn't hurt the creature. No, I think it was the psychic shock of the concussion. It's a highly specialized being in which body had been sacrificed to mind. Perhaps a vortex of pure force. How can we conceive of such a being!" Sir Colin rubbed his forehead wearily, the slight motion rocking him upon the current of air. "Ye recall what happened back there when the devil attacked ye?"
Alan shivered. "It was in my brain—sucking—"
"So I think it's a mental vampire. It lives on life-force—mental energy—and only the energy of intelligent human beings. The Aliens may ha' bred human slaves for that purpose only. And now this last of them's ravenous—starving. And only we and the Terasi are available now. Ye saw how it cast aside the Carcasillians. They're protected, somehow."
"Well, the Light-Wearer came out of his citadel and went hunting. And he found the Terasi. And he came ravening among them as we saw him come into Carcasilla. But the Terasi have a weapon. They have great gongs that make the whole cavern shiver with noise. And noise those Aliens canna stand. Ye remember Carcasilla is a silent city? So they fight him with noise. He's been besieging them a long while now. We dare not leave the city without portable gongs, and even they aren't really powerful enough. The food-caverns—mushrooms and such-like things—are a little way off from the city, and we can't get enough now. He won't let us. We've starving each other out, really." Sir Colin grinned. "But I think the Alien may win."
"So you came after me alone?"
Sir Colin shrugged. "I had my gun. Besides, you saved my life a few billion years ago, in Tunisia, and I wanted to pay the debt. As for why I delayed—I did come once, and couldn't pass the barrier into Carcasilla. This second time I followed the Alien's track."
This was high courage of a sort Alan had seldom encountered, but he said nothing. After a while the Scotsman went on, "I may ha' done ye no favor in bringing ye out of Carcasilla, after all. It looks as if ye're doomed to starve with the Terasi, or die at last as ye so nearly died in Carcasilla to feed the Alien. I dunno, laddie. I think our fortunes lie with the Terasi, but even if we found a way to beat the Alien—what?"
Now the Way of the Gods grew wider, and chasms opened in the floor and cracks ran down the ruined walls. Sir Colin touched Alan's arm, drawing him out of the weightless current toward one of the broad splits running from roof to floor.
"Here's our way. There was a gateway into this cavern, once, but a shrinking old planet like ours has its quakes. That road's closed. Most of these cracks ar
e blind, but some open in. Here."
Alan glanced on along the Way of the Gods still stretching ahead. "Where does it go?"
"Probably to Hell. I've checked it with what charts I could find—not many—and I think it begins under the citadel we saw back on the plain."
The scientist had produced a taper of some fibrous plant, and lit it. "We've got a hard path to follow."
It wound and twisted upward a long, rough way before light showed ahead, a cold, pale radiance outlining the mouth of a crack like lightning against a night sky. Sir Colin put out the torch. Before them, the depthless expanse of a cavern loomed.
Alan thought irresistibly of his first glimpse of Carcasilla. Here was a cavern again, and incredible shapes filled it. By this time those shapes were mighty cylinders and bizarre silhouettes rising like water-carved rocks from the sea. It was a city of—machines?
If these were machines, indeed, then the Alien concept of machinery was as strange as their concept of human houses in Carcasilla. What lay before Alan was too vast, too breathtakingly immense, to be captured in familiar terms. These towers were machines perhaps, but of a size inconceivable! Only Alien-made metal—or was it plastic—could create such masses that would not topple under their own weight. And they were colored gorgeously and senselessly. Deep colors for the most part. Gargantuan shapes of purple and dark wine-red, and leaning towers of obsidian green.
"Aye," breathed Sir Colin at his elbow. "They were technicians!" There was respect in his voice. And Alan remembered that this cavern had seen perhaps the last rebels of earth, robots turned stubbornly human, fighting and falling before their Alien masters in a saga of courage and futility that was lost like the race that had failed. Only their handiwork remained, enigmatic, impossible.
"What are they for?" he asked Sir Colin futilely. "What could they be for?"
"What does it matter now?" the Scotsman said bitterly. "There isn't any power left in the whole domned planet. Come on down. It's not so safe up here."
