The Best of Leigh Brackett

by Leigh Brackett

  Ciaran cried out, “Mouse…!”

  She was there. Her body was there, thin and erect in the crimson tunic. Her black hair was still wild around her small brown face. But Mouse, the Mouse that Ciaran knew, was dead behind her dull black eyes. Ciaran whispered, “Mouse…”

  The slaves flowed in and held the two of them, clogged in a mass of unresponsive bodies.

  “Can’t you free them, Bas?”

  “Not yet. Not now. There isn’t time.”

  “Can’t you do with them what you did with the Kalds?”

  “The androids control their minds through hypnosis. If I fought that control, the struggle would blast their minds to death or idiocy. And there isn’t time…” There was sweat on his smooth young forehead. “I’ve got to get through. I don’t want to kill them…”

  Ciaran looked at Mouse. “No,” he said hoarsely.

  “But I may have to, unless…Wait! I can channel the power of the Stone through my own brain, because there’s an affinity between us. Vibration, cell to cell. The androids won’t have made a definite command against music. Perhaps I can jar their minds open, just enough, so that you can call them with your harp, as you called me.”

  A tremor almost of pain ran through the boy’s body.

  “Lead them away, Ciaran. Lead them as far as you can. Otherwise many of them will die. And hurry!”

  Bas raised the Stone of Destiny in his clasped hands and pressed it to his forehead. And Ciaran took his harp.

  He was looking at Mouse when he set the strings to singing. That was why it wasn’t hard to play as he did. It was something from him to Mouse. A prayer. A promise. His heart held out on a song.

  The music rippled out across the packed mass of humanity. At first they didn’t hear it. Then there was a stirring and a sigh, a dumb, blind reaching. Somewhere the message was getting through the darkness clouding their minds. A message of hope. A memory of red sunlight on green hills, of laughter and home and love.

  Ciaran let the music die to a whisper under his fingers, and the people moved forward, toward him, wanting to hear.

  He began to walk away, slowly, trailing the harp-song over his shoulder—and they followed. Haltingly, in twos and threes, until the whole mass broke and flowed like water in his wake.

  Bas was gone, his slim young body slipping fast through the broken ranks of the crowd.

  Ciaran caught one more glimpse of Mouse before he lost her among the others. She was crying, without knowing or remembering why.

  If Bas died, if Bas was defeated, she would never know nor remember.

  Ciaran led them as far as he could, clear to the wall of the pit. He stopped playing. They stopped, too, standing like cattle, looking at nothing, with eyes turned inward to their clouded dreams.

  Ciaran left them there, running out alone across the empty floor.

  He followed the direction Bas had taken. He ran, fast, but it was like a nightmare where you run and run and never get anywhere. The lights glared down and the metal monster sighed and churned high up over his head, and there was no other sound, no other movement but his own.

  Then, abruptly, the lights went out.

  He stumbled on, hitting brutally against unseen pillars, falling and scrambling in scrap heaps. And after an eternity he saw light again, up ahead.

  The Light he had seen before, here in the pit. The glorious opalescent light that drew a man’s mind and held it fast to be chained.

  Ciaran crept in closer.

  There was a control panel on a stone dais—a meaningless jumbled mass of dials and wires. The androids stood before it. One of them was bent over, its yellowish hands working delicately with the controls. The other stood erect beside it, holding a staff. The metal ball at the top was open, spilling the opalescent blaze into the darkness.

  Ciaran crouched in the shelter of a pillar, shielding his eyes. Even now he wanted to walk into that light and be its slave.

  The android with the staff said harshly, “Can’t you find the wave length? He should have been dead by now.”

  The bending one tensed and then straightened, the burning light sparkling across its metal sheath. Its eyes were black and limitless, like evil itself, and no more human.

  “Yes,” it said. “I have it”

  The light began to burst stronger from the staff, a swirling dangerous fury of it.

  Ciaran was hardly breathing. The light-source, whatever it was, was part of the power of the Stone of Destiny. Wave lengths meant nothing to him, but it seemed the danger was to the Stone—and Bas carried it.

  The android touched the staff. The light died, clipped off as the metal ball closed.

  “If there’s any power left in the Stone,” it whispered, “our power-wave will blast its subatomic reserve—and Bas the Immortal with it!”

  Silence. And then in the pitch darkness a coal began to glow.

  It came closer. It grew brighter, and a smudged reflection behind and above it became the head and shoulders of Bas the Immortal.

  The android whispered, “Stronger! Hurry!”

  A yellowish hand made a quick adjustment. The Stone of Destiny burned brighter. It burst with light. It was like a sunball, stabbing its hot fury into the darkness.

  The android whispered, “More!”

  The Stone filled all the pit with a deadly blaze of glory.

  Bas stopped, looking up at the dais. He grinned. A naked boy, beautiful with youth, his gray eyes veiled and sleepy under dark lashes.

  He threw the Stone of Destiny up on the dais. An idle boy tossing stones at a treetop.

  Light. An explosion of it, without sound, without physical force. Ciaran dropped flat on his face behind the pillar. After a long time he raised his head again. The overhead lights were on, and Bas stood on the dais beside two twisted, shining lumps of man-made soulless men.

  The android flesh had taken the radiation as leather takes heat, warping, twisting, turning black.

  “Poor freaks,” said Bas softly. “They were like me, with no place in the universe that belonged to them. So they dreamed, too—only their dreams were evil.”

  He stooped and picked up something—a dull, dark stone, a thing with no more life nor light than a waterworn pebble.

  He sighed and rolled it once between his palms, and let it drop.

  “If they had had time to learn their new machine a little better, I would never have lived to reach them in time.” He glanced down at Ciaran, standing uncertainly below. “Thanks to you, little man, they didn’t have quite time enough.”

  He gestured to a staff. “Bring it, and I’ll free your Mouse.”

  7

  A long time afterward Mouse and Ciaran and Bas the Immortal stood in the opal-tinted glow of the great room of the crux ansata. Outside the world was normal again, and safe. Bas had left full instructions about controlling and tending the centrifugal power plant.

  The slaves were freed, going home across the Forbidden Plains—forbidden no longer. The Kalds were sleeping, mercifully; the big sleep from which they would never wake. The world was free, for humanity to make or mar on its own responsibility.

  Mouse stood very close to Ciaran, her arm around his waist, his around her shoulders. Crimson rags mingling with yellow; fair shaggy hair mixing with black. Bas smiled at them.

  “Now,” he said, “I can be happy, until the planet itself is dead.”

  “You won’t stay with us? Our gratitude, our love…”

  “Will be gone with the coming generations. No, little man. I built myself a world where I belong—the only world where I can ever belong. And I’ll be happier in it than any of you, because it is my world—free of strife and ugliness and suffering. A beautiful world, for me and Marsali.”

  There was a radiance about him that Ciaran would put into a song some day, only half understanding.

  “I don’t envy you,” whispered Bas, and smiled. Youth smiling in a spring dawn. “Think of us sometimes, and be jealous.”

  He turned and walked
away, going lightly over the wide stone floor and up the steps to the dais. Ciaran struck the harpstrings. He sent the music flooding up against the high vault, filling all the rocky space with a thrumming melody.

  He sang. The tune he had sung for Mouse, on the ridge above the burning sea. A simple tune, about two people in love.

  Bas lay down on the couch of furs and colored silks, soft on the shaft of the stone cross. He looked back at them once, smiling. One slim white arm raised in a brief salute and swept down across the black stone.

  The milky light rose on the platform. It wavered, curdled, and thickened to a wall of warm pearl. Through it, for a moment, they could see him, his dark head pillowed on his forearm, his body sprawled in careless, angular grace. Then there was only the warm, soft shell of light.

  Ciaran’s harp whispered to silence. The tunnel into the pit was sealed. Mouse and Ciaran went out through the golden doors and closed them, very quietly—doors that would never be opened again as long as the world lived.

  Then they came into each other’s arms, and kissed.

  Rough, tight arms on living flesh, lips that bruised and breaths that mingled, hot with life. Temper and passion, empty bellies, a harp that sang in crowded market squares, and no roof to fight under but the open sky.

  And Ciaran didn’t envy the dark-haired boy, dreaming on the stone cross.

  The Vanishing Venusians

  1

  The breeze was steady enough, but it was not in a hurry. It filled the lug sail just hard enough to push the dirty weed-grown hull through the water, and no harder. Matt Harker lay alongside the tiller and counted the trickles of sweat crawling over his nakedness, and stared with sullen, opaque eyes into the indigo night. Anger, leashed and impotent, rose in his throat like bitter vomit.

  The sea—Rory McLaren’s Venusian wife called it the Sea of Morning Opals—lay unstirring, black, streaked with phosphorescence. The sky hung low over it, the thick cloud blanket of Venus that had made the Sun a half-remembered legend to the exiles from Earth. Riding lights burned in the blue gloom, strung out in line. Twelve ships, thirty-eight hundred people, going no place, trapped in the interval between birth and death and not knowing what to do about it.

  Matt Harker glanced upward at the sail and then at the stern lantern of the ship ahead. His face, in the dim glow that lights Venus even at night, was a gaunt oblong of shadows and hard bone, seamed and scarred with living, with wanting and not having, with dying and not being dead. He was a lean man, wiry and not tall, with a snake-like surety of motion.

  Somebody came scrambling quietly aft along the deck, avoiding the sleeping bodies crowded everywhere. Harker said, without emotion, “Hi, Rory.”

  Rory McLaren said, “Hi, Matt.” He sat down. He was young, perhaps half Harker’s age. There was still hope in his face, but it was growing tired. He sat for a while without speaking, looking at nothing, and then said, “Honest to God, Matt, how much longer can we last?”

  “What’s the matter, kid? Starting to crack?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. When are we going to stop somewhere?”

  “When we find a place to stop.”

  “Is there a place to stop? Seems like ever since I was born we’ve been hunting. There’s always something wrong. Hostile natives, or fever, or bad soil, always something, and we go on again. It’s not right. It’s not any way to try to live.”

  Harker said, “I told you not to go having kids.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “You start worrying. The lad isn’t even here yet, and already you’re worrying.”

  “Sure I am.” McLaren put his head in his hands suddenly and swore. Harker knew he did that to keep from crying. “I’m worried,” McLaren said, “that maybe the same thing’ll happen to my wife and kid that happened to yours. We got fever aboard.”

  Harker’s eyes were like blown coals for an instant. Then he glanced up at the sail and said, “They’d be better off if it didn’t live.”

  “That’s no kind of a thing to say.”

  “It’s the truth. Like you asked me, when are we going to stop somewhere? Maybe never. You bellyache about it ever since you were born. Well, I’ve been at it longer than that. Before you were born I saw our first settlement burned by the Cloud People, and my mother and father crucified in their own vineyard. I was there when this trek to the Promised Land began, back on Earth, and I’m still waiting for the promise.”

  The sinews in Harker’s face were drawn like knots of wire. His voice had a terrible quietness.

  “Your wife and kid would be better off to die now, while Viki’s still young and has hope, and before the child ever opens its eyes.”

  Sim, the big black man, relieved Harker before dawn. He started singing, softly—something mournful and slow as the breeze, and beautiful. Harker cursed him and went up into the bow to sleep, but the song stayed with him. Oh, I looked over Jordan, and what did I see, comin’ for to carry me home.…

  Harker slept. Presently he began to moan and twitch, and then cry out. People around him woke up. They watched with interest. Harker was a lone wolf awake, ill-tempered and violent. When, at long intervals, he would have one of his spells, no one was anxious to help him out of it. They liked peeping inside of Harker when he wasn’t looking.

  Harker didn’t care. He was playing in the snow again. He was seven years old, and the drifts were high and white, and above them the sky was so blue and clean that he wondered if God mopped it every few days like Mom did the kitchen floor. The sun was shining. It was like a great gold coin, and it made the snow burn like crushed diamonds. He put his arms up to the sun, and the cold air slapped him with clean hands, and he laughed. And then it was all gone…

  “By gawd,” somebody said. “Ain’t them tears on his face?”

  “Bawling. Bawling like a little kid. Listen at him.”

  “Hey,” said the first one sheepishly. “Reckon we oughta wake him up?”

  “Hell with him, the old sour-puss. Hey, listen to that…!”

  “Dad,” Harker whispered. “Dad, I want to go home.”

  The dawn came like a sifting of fire-opals through the layers of pearl-gray cloud. Harker heard the yelling dimly in his sleep. He felt dull and tired, and his eyelids stuck together. The yelling gradually took shape and became the word “Land!” repeated over and over. Harker kicked himself awake and got up.

  The tideless sea glimmered with opaline colors under the mist. Flocks of little jewel-scaled sea-dragons rose up from the ever-present floating islands of weed, and the weed itself, part of it, writhed and stretched with sentient life.

  Ahead there was a long low hummock of muddy ground fading into tangled swamp. Beyond it, rising sheer into the clouds, was a granite cliff, a sweeping escarpment that stood like a wall against the hopeful gaze of the exiles.

  Harker found Rory McLaren standing beside him, his arm around Viki, his wife. Viki was one of several Venusians who had married into the Earth colony. Her skin was clear white, her hair a glowing silver, her lips vividly red. Her eyes were like the sea, changeable, full of hidden life. Just now they had that special look that the eyes of women get when they’re thinking about creation. Harker looked away.

  McLaren said, “It’s land.”

  Harker said, “It’s mud. It’s swamp. It’s fever. It’s like the rest.”

  Viki said, “Can we stop here, just a little while?”

  Harker shrugged. “That’s up to Gibbons.” He wanted to ask what the hell difference it made where the kid was born, but for once he held his tongue. He turned away. Somewhere in the waist a woman was screaming in delirium. There were three shapes wrapped in ragged blankets and laid on planks by the port scuppers. Harker’s mouth twitched in a crooked smile.

  “We’ll probably stop long enough to bury them,” he said. “Maybe that’ll be time enough.”

  He caught a glimpse of McLaren’s face. The hope in it was not tired any more. It was dead. Dead, like the rest of Venus. />
  Gibbons called the chief men together aboard his ship—the leaders, the fighters and hunters and seamen, the tough leathery men who were the armor around the soft body of the colony. Harker was there, and McLaren. McLaren was young, but up until lately he had had a quality of optimism that cheered his shipmates, a natural leadership.

  Gibbons was an old man. He was the original guiding spirit of the five thousand colonists who had come out from Earth to a new start on a new world. Time and tragedy, disappointment and betrayal had marked him cruelly, but his head was still high. Harker admired his guts while cursing him for an idealistic fool.

  The inevitable discussion started as to whether they should try a permanent settlement on this mud flat or go on wandering over the endless, chartless seas. Harker said impatiently:

  “For cripesake, look at the place. Remember the last time. Remember the time before that, and stop bleating.”

  Sim, the big black, said quietly, “The people are getting awful tired. A man was meant to have roots some place. There’s going to be trouble pretty soon if we don’t find land.”

  Harker said, “You think you can find some, pal, go to it.”

  Gibbons said heavily, “But he’s right. There’s hysteria, fever, dysentery and boredom, and the boredom’s worst of all.”

  McLaren said, “I vote to settle.”

  Harker laughed. He was leaning by the cabin port, looking out at the cliffs. The gray granite looked clean above the swamp. Harker tried to pierce the clouds that hid the top, but couldn’t. His dark eyes narrowed. The heated voices behind him faded into distance. Suddenly he turned and said, “Sir, I’d like permission to see what’s at the top of those cliffs.”

  There was complete silence. Then Gibbons said slowly, “We’ve lost too many men on journeys like that before, only to find the plateau uninhabitable.”

  “There’s always the chance. Our first settlement was in the high plateaus, remember. Clean air, good soil, no fever.”