by Don Wilcox
“Haaaaah-ggg-sss-sss! Haaaaah-gggsss-sss!”
The Queen screamed. Her scream died away like a wail of death. The King tried to cough. He seemed to be choking. Tighter, tighter, the cold pressure, the silken pressure of smooth steely muscles within wet yellow skin.
Now for me the light was fading. The breath was gone. A wild array of color swam before my closed eyes. Yellow—a mad yellow in a vast coil—yellow spinning with designs of brilliant purple—no, green—no, purple again . . .
Fading—fading—sounds—like crushing bones . . .
CHAPTER XII
The Queenly Gift
The moment I began to awaken out of my cruel, painful sleep, I knew that I had changed.
I was still in the cavern, in the third chamber, but no longer on the tiny conical island. I lay along a narrow ledge above a blue pool. The shafts of morning sun through the natural rock windows had shortened their angle, but I knew that hardly an hour had passed.
First I saw Safsaf. He was staggering along almost like a drunken men, but there was a strong light of triumph in his eyes. In his hand was the knife that I had come so near to using on Parroko a few hours before. It was a blood-drenched knife now. Safsaf himself was marked with bloodstains, his scanty clothes were in tatters. It had been an awful fight.
The serpent was a dead thing. He had killed it somehow. He had ripped it through in a dozen places. It lay draped over the little island and over parts of the wall ledge. Many patches of its gray and white entrails were exposed. _ Its huge head, not quite torn away from its body, hung limp and lifeless over a jagged edge of rock. One of its lustrous eyes hung open, the other had been battened shut.
A change had come over me, and my first clear-cut feeling of altered instincts, as groped for consciousness, concerned Safsaf. Grizzled, gaunt man that he was, he was every inch a hero—and he was handsome. And I lay on the shelf watching him walking along the opposite side of the cavern, and I gathered my disarrayed clothing about myself; as neatly as I could, covering my breasts and smoothing the skin anklets that still clung to me.
I adjusted the goatskin mask on my face. I rolled up the cascade of blonde hair that hung over my shoulder, and covered it tightly within the Kisqv headdress. I glanced at myself in the blue water to see whether I looked as much the Kisqv as ever.
The ordeal had cost me much of the stain that had formerly darkened my body. So I made haste to apply the dark slime from rocks to white Spaces.
A shadow moved at one of the natural rock windows. Safsaf, now being helped toward the next room by some of the attendants, turned to see what I also saw—the King crawling out through the rock opening.
The King glanced back to see if anyone was witnessing his escape—for escape it must have been. I never saw such a picture of fear in any man’s countenance. For a moment I was flooded over with the images of my own recent fears, fears that shot through me with all my troubles of playing Kisqv. That terror, awful desire to run away from it all—this was the King’s, now, not mine,
“Lest a Visitor lose his fears to a King.”
The Queen would not go with him. Neither he nor she were likely ever to return to the tribe. For Kisqv magic had struck them cruel blows—perhaps deserved, perhaps not.
It was the swish of water that turned my eyes toward the left. The Queen was crawling in to swim. Half immersed, she tore the last shreds of clothing from her body. She would not care for them now. She would live as a water creature, a sort of mermaid of elongated form. The lower half of her body bore a very close resemblance to that of a large serpent.
She stroked with her arms, gave a spiteful swish of her tail, and swam away into the dark recesses. I caught her one backward look, just before she disappeared, and I thought there was no terror in her face, but rather an accentuated hatred and sullen snake-like expression, as if she were entirely ready to take on the temper of her altered life.
“Lest a serpent Idse his form to a Queenrr—”
When I emerged from the cave, many of the villagers stood back with their customary awe, and I was sure that many of them believed it was my magic which had slashed the life out of the great cavern serpent.
I set them right oh that matter at once.
“Safsaf did it,” I said. “Safsaf is your hero—and mine.” And then I began to talk of the sky serpent I had once mentioned as having not five but fifty-five fangs—for I saw that these superstitious people needed a god of magic. In fact, they might turn upon Safsaf for killing their source. of magic, in spite of his heroism. Yes, and in spite of his fulfillment of the Kisqv’s Death Verse:
“Lest an Innocent lose his fate to a Serpent.”
There it was. Death had been intended for Parroko, the Innocent. But the serpent had got it. It must have been a fate predestined in the order of things—that a Kisqv, empowered by the five-fanged serpent, should predict his own death and that of the source of all Kisqv power. These people must have a new source of power.
But Safsaf silenced me.
“We of the-Hazzwart tribe will not lack for magic,” he said. “The sources will not run out. What you are saying only exposes your ignorance. From the first you have not known what powers lie within the headdress that you wear.”
What a man was this Safsaf. A fine, kingly man with a splendid voice that made one like me feel weak and obedient in his presence. He would undoubtedly be made the ruler, now that the King had run away, a victim of nameless terrors.
“You are not a Hazzwart.” Safsaf approached me, and everyone, gathered here in the clearing, listened to his charges. He was about to touch me. “You are not one of us. I believe you are a white man.”
He jerked the headdress off my head, and the waves of yellow hair tumbled down on my shoulders. He started to rip the clothing from my white body. Then he saw that I had become a woman. Everyone stared at me.
“Womanhood—the queenly gift,” I heard Parroko say, “lost to a visitor.”
Safsaf, mumbling his apologies, demanded that a robe be brought for me.
Then, with all the chivalry that any man, savage or otherwise, might offer to a woman, Safsaf made provision for me to be safely conducted to the coast as swiftly as possible.
I sat beside Sandra in the Clipper.
She did not know me. She did not know how I could have been given her husband’s reservation. I did not have the nerve to tell her.
Poor kid, she was terribly broken up over having to go back without her husband. I tried to comfort her. I did comfort her, in a way that no one else could. She was more than amazed, before the journey home was completed, that I had such a perfect understanding of her tragic situation.
More than once I slipped, and she would get that strange glassy look in her eyes, as if my uncanny grip on her innermost thoughts might cause her to lose her mind.
“You do have the recordings safe and sound?” I once said, and then caught myself.
“How could you possibly know that I am bringing recordings?”
My dodges grew weaker and weaker. I feared that by the time we reached the United States she would be ready to banish me from her sight forever, to relieve herself of these baffling pressures.
On the contrary, she forced me to come to her home with her, to help her face her father with all the tragic story of her adventures. It seemed that I filled a psychological niche, she said; that I helped to fill the awful void of having lost one’s husband.
I begged her not to announce her husband as dead.
“Perhaps he is not dead,” she would say. “Perhaps he is worse than dead. If you had seen him, bending his sanity to the ways of savages, falling victim to the mysteries that only primitives understand, you would realize that even if he were alive, he might never break the bonds of that awful mysticism to come back to me as he once was.”
And so she preferred to think of me as dead—and I, frantic within my web of lies and subterfuges, still fought to keep alive some spark of her dying hope.
Two weeks a
fter our return a package arrived from the Hazzwarts. In the crude Hazzwart handwriting that suggested a collaboration between Safsaf and Parroko was a most important message.
“We send to you the Kisqv headdress which you must wear to wish the wish that you are sure to wish.”
To be a man again! Since the creation of Adam, has ever any living human being found more glory in coming to himself than I experienced during the week that I wore the black plumes and wished!
Yes, Sandra and I are living happily ever after, thank you!
WOMAN’S ISLAND
First published in Fantastic Adventures, December 1945
How about a world run by women? Here was an island where that happened—in an unusual way . . .
CHAPTER I
David Silbert had never worked in a factory like this before. The women officials didn’t know he was working here now. He meant to get his fill of these strange sights before anyone but Maddox knew he had come to Woman’s Island.
The machines hummed quietly through the long curved hall of industry. David Silbert tried to imitate the well-disciplined motions of these men at work. Their manner disturbed him. How could they be so machinelike? They never glanced aside, never spoke to each other when they passed.
“And that handsome woman foreman—they, didn’t even notice her,” David Silbert said to himself.
Not that Ae had any interest in women. Personally, he detested all females. His girl friends back home had become the bane of his existence.
A fellow of his handsomeness—square jaw and slender athletic build—had found it possible to fall out of love as fast as he fell in—until he met a certain red-head. However, she had turned the tables on him and fallen out herself, and his tough heart had cracked up like a jig-saw puzzle. Whereupon, he had decided to lose himself in the Pacific. Of all places to arrive, by mere chance—Woman’s Island!
Like the other workers, he wore orange slacks and canvas shoes with silent sponge-rubber holes. Like the others, he was bare to the waist. He wondered if his freshly sunburnt back would be conspicuous. Through the long curved room of men and machines, the naked backs, were evenly tanned.
Sunlamps overhead apparently accounted for this exhibition of healthy color—an individual violet-white lamp showering over each man. But what were those mysterious wheels with the coiled strips of leather that hung directly above each worker?
Twenty feet ahead of him was a slender gray-haired man wearing spectacles. His thin brown arms could barely keep pace with his machine. He would have looked well in an executive’s chair, or on a judge’s bench. But he wasn’t meant for this.
“Something’s wrong here,” Dave said to himself. “That man’s not here from choice. He’s a slave.”
Dave tried to remember what he had read about Woman’s island. Rumors that had floated north to the United States, by way of the South American mainland, had been sketchy and confused. Newspapers would make humorous reference to “her Majesty, the Empress of Woman’s Island; as if she were something legendary.
“A perfect Utopia for women” was the phrase that came to David’s mind:
If, the ocean-going yacht he had picked up at a “bargain price” had been as seaworthy as claimed, he would still be sailing the Pacific on his one-man exploration of the South American coast. And he would never have known about Woman’s Island. Except that, according to reports, it was a little world of its own where woman had come into her rightful glory of dominating man.
But a freakish storm had converted the yacht into a mess of splinters, and David Silbert, lone-wolf adventurer, had been lucky enough to reach this shore in one piece.
Luck had been with him again in his meeting with young Maddox an hour after he had been cast ashore. Young Maddox, not quite twenty-one—four years younger than David, had been a friend in need.
“This is no shore for castaways,” Maddox had said, “but I’ll hide you until you can get away.”
Now David was watching the handsome lady as she moved slowly along the rows of machines. What would happen if he were discovered working here? He would be lucky if he got away with this ruse, taking the place of a sick man without reporting to the officials. But Maddox had said it was his only chance to get inside the factory. He wondered—
The lady foreman stopped within a few feet of him. Out of the corner of his eye he could see her gleaming white dress and red sash. She was watching the gray-haired man. He was lagging.
“Why doesn’t the fool speed up, at least until she gets by?” David thought. But here, again, he caught that strange feeling. The gray-haired, worker didn’t appear to know he was being watched.
How could he be so insensitive?
The lady foreman whirled to the row of electric switches on the wall.
Click.
The wheel spun above the worker’s head. A brown leather whip lashed out. The spinning wheel reversed. The whip cracked over the workman’s back.
Zing! Zing!—three, four, five, six—
David’s blood went cold as he counted the strokes. On ten, the workman staggered. Then the handsome lady foreman turned off the switch and sauntered on down the row of machines as if nothing had happened.
The gray-haired workman bowed down to the floor, but only to pick up his spectacles. As mute as a whipped horse, he went back to work. The stripes of red showed in crisscross lines. across his back. The streams of sweat went red as they oozed down.
“Machine driven whips! And he goes right on working. How can a human being take it?” David growled savagely to himself. “And no one even noticed! What kind of men can stand by and not even clench their fists?”
David turned a more attentive hand to his own machine, for the lady foreman was returning. His job was the simple but steady process of operating levers to feed raw material to steel jaws. The foreman was watching Him. He pretended not to notice. And yet he sensed that she was about to speak to him. Was it possible that she knew every face among these three or four thousand workers? Or had his sunburnt back aroused her suspicions?
A telephone rang, and she returned to the wall.
“No, not yet Miss Blanchard.” Her voice was almost masculine. She was a woman of fifty, handsome rather than pretty, David had observed. There was a ruthless strength in her manner—a cool brutality that he now associated with automatic whips. Her gleaming white dress with the blood-red sash became to him a symbol of cruelty glorified.
The message that came through the telephone caused the foreman to glance sharply toward the arched entrance.
“No, they haven’t arrived, Miss Blanchard . . . Very well, I’ll see that they get a good impression. The Empress hasn’t anything to worry about.”
She hung up just as the party of visitors appeared at the main entrance. She surveyed the long hallway to satisfy herself that all the men and machines were operating smoothly. David Silbert breathed with relief. He had been forgotten.
The lady foreman left the party of five women visitors in charge of a young girl attendant and went on about her business.
As the visitors-passed David’s part of the room, he caught a little of their conversation. It was plain that they were citizens of this island empire. They had come here because they deserved to know how the affairs of their kingdom were being run.
Four of the young women sauntered out of view. The fifth paused to ask the attendant a few questions.
Then it was that David Silbert forgot he was supposed to be operating the machine. lie forgot he was a woman-hater. He forgot that every feminine smile in the last two months had repelled him. He stood motionless, gazing at the most attractive girl he had ever seen in his life.
She was a lovely girl of about twenty, wearing a cool tan and white sport suit. She had dark brown hair, a rather high forehead, sensitive coral lips. Her lively dark eyes were keen enough to observe everything about her. She questioned the attendant, a friendly little blonde that she called Jane. “Have you anything new to tell me of these men, Jane? I can
’t see that they ever change.”
“The Empress doesn’t want them to change, you know,” said the attendant, evidently an old friend.
“Somehow I always come away from this place hating myself, Jane.”
“Why, Eudora?”
“I feel so helpless against it all. I’m twenty-one years old, now, Jane. Tonight at the assembly I’ll get to vote for the first time. I’m afraid my Aunt Em isn’t going to be pleased over the way I vote.”
The light of some mysterious purpose shone in Eudora’s eyes. David Silbert’s thoughts were spinning. Here was someone who saw this factory as he saw it. On quick impulse he thought, “I’ve got to know her.”
Then he whistled. “Hello, there.
Could I see you—”
He broke off with a gulp. The look of utter astonishment that struck through Eudora’s lovely face scared him. It scared him and he wasn’t sure why. She was staring, her eyes were wide, puzzled, as if something incredible had happened:
What had he done? He’d spoken out of turn. He’d whistled. A crude thing to do, perhaps. But nothing really shocking. He, if anyone, should be shocked. A hard-hearted woman-hater like him suddenly breaking through two months of resolves! But he couldn’t help it. Here was one girl in a million and he knew it. He had to get acquainted.
But something was terribly wrong. She stood, grasping the arm of her little blonde friend, pointing at him as if he were a freak of nature.
“What—what’s the meaning of that?” she said.
Her attendant friend, equally amazed, groped for an answer. But at this unfortunate moment the lady foreman strode up, as if from nowhere. She touched a switch. The wheel over David’s head spun, the whip lashed down, it caught him with a cutting stroke that ripped over his back like a knife blade.
