The Best of Leigh Brackett

by Leigh Brackett

  Anyway, the dog was dead, and Bet was all right. In time everybody’s nerves calmed down, and even Bet got tired of talking about it. David had a birthday coming up. Ahrian made great preparations, asking us all incessant questions about how things should be done according to our customs, and adding a few of her own.

  David liked lavishness, so there was another big dinner and a lot of people. Ahrian had gained confidence, and everybody had had time to gossip themselves out about her by now. It was a much more successful occasion than the first. Even some of the women decided not to hate her.

  Marthe and I retired into the library for a little quiet love-making. Between times we discussed getting married. Through the closed doors we heard Ahrian singing for a while, not the longing heartsick things she had sung before, but something gay and wicked. When she stopped, there was only the usual buzz and chatter of people.

  Some time went by, I don’t know how much. Without any warning a terrible racket arose of horses squealing, and of yelling, and I remember thinking that the barns must be on fire.

  I got outside in a hurry. The guests were beginning to pour out onto the veranda and peer curiously into the darkness to see what the trouble was. Among them, I noticed Ahrian with a cloak around her.

  The stables and the big open paddocks are some distance from the house. Halfway there I saw Jamieson, my head groom, running toward me.

  “It’s Miss Bet,” he gasped, white-faced and shaking. “Hurry!”

  I hurried, but there was a cold, sick feeling in me that told me hurrying was no use.

  There was an old brood mare, gentle as a kitten, long past her usefulness and pensioned off. She was Bet’s especial pet, and old Hazel would muster up a stiff-legged canter from wherever she was to come and snuffle over her for sugar-lumps.

  All the big floodlights were on. There was a confusion of men and horses and noise. Old Hazel was pressed up against the paddock fence, her coat dark with sweat, trembling in every muscle. There was blood on her legs. Bet was dead. In her long white party dress and her silver sandals she had come all the way down there and gone into the paddock, and the old mare had trampled her. It didn’t make any sense at all. I kneeled there beside her in the dirt, and the necklace of zircons that Ahrian had given her glittered among the splashes of blood.

  The men had got ropes on the mare now, and she began to thrash and scream like a crazy thing. Somebody handed me a gun, and I used it, all the time knowing that the poor old beast had no more killing in her than Buck had had.

  It made no kind of sense. But Bet was dead.

  It was a fine ending to a gay evening.

  You know how it is with a kid sister. Sometimes she’s a pest, and sometimes she’s ridiculous, and she always talks too much, but even so—And it was such an ugly way to die.

  David was going down and shoot every horse in the place. When I stopped him, he turned on me. There was a bad scene. They were my animals. One had tried, and one had succeeded, and that made me practically a murderer. I let it go, because he was hard hit, and so was I. But from then on there was a wall between me and my brother, and the hate he had against me over Bet’s death seemed to grow day by day. I couldn’t understand why. It seemed almost insane, but whatever shortcomings David had, insanity was not one of them.

  We buried Bet, and no one wept more bitterly than Ahrian. She was David’s loving comforter, and for the first time I was genuinely glad she was there.

  4 Star Dreams

  On the night after the funeral I began to dream.

  At first the dreams were brief and vague. But they got longer and clearer, until my days became nightmares and my nights an unbearable hell. Sleep became a torture. I dreamed of space.

  The McQuarries are spacemen. From old Anson down the sons have flown the ships, and the daughters have married men who could fly ships, and the McQuarrie flag has been carried a long, long way. As far as I know, we never did anything more sinful than to get there first, but the McQuarrie ships have gained and held the richest cream of the trade between the worlds, and now they are breaking the trails between the stars.

  I was a McQuarrie, and the oldest son to boot, and I had to go to space. That was a thing as inevitable as sunrise, and as little questioned. I went.

  Now I dreamed of space. I was caught in it, quite alone, between the blackness and the blaze, with nothing above or below or around me but the cruel bright eyes of far-off suns to note my fall. I fell, through the millions of silent miles, turning over and over, voiceless, helpless, and when I had done falling the stars looked just the same, and it seemed I had not moved. I knew that I was going to fall forever and never be allowed to die, and at the end of forever the stars would not have changed.

  They were ghastly dreams. Opiates only made them worse. I spent whole days riding, until both my horse and I were weary enough to drop, so that I might sleep. It was no good. I tried drinking, and that was no help either.

  There was guilt in those dreams. One part of them recurred over and over—myself, knowing about the unending doom that waited for me out there beyond the sky, and running away from it, running like a hunted hare. Everywhere I turned, there was my father with his arms stretched wide, barring the way. His face was turned from me, and my fear lest he should suddenly see me and know the truth was as great in a different way as my fear of space. So I would creep away, but in the end there was no escape, and I was falling, falling down the timeless universe.

  I didn’t see Marthe. I didn’t have the heart to see anybody. I began to think of death. It seemed preferable to a padded cell.

  David relented enough to be worried. Ahrian hovered over me sweetly. I didn’t tell them anything, of course, except that I was having trouble sleeping.

  Then, curiously enough, Ahrian got mixed up in my nightmares. Not Ahrian herself, but her world, the world of Altair she had left for David.

  That was strange, because she had spoken very little about her world. She had, in fact, refused to talk about it. David had not discussed it either, except from the standpoint of trade. Yet here I was, seeing it in detail, in sudden bright flashes that came without reason in the midst of my horrible plunging through space. I could see every leaf and flower, each single turret of a pale and gleaming city of which I knew the streets as well as I knew my own woods. I saw in detail the quaint shapes of the rooftops with the carving on them, and the wide plain of some feathery grass, the color of blue smoke, that sloped away toward an opalescent sea. I knew the separate colors of the several moons, and the particular perfume that came on the wind at the sinking of Altair.

  This was so extremely odd that I mentioned it to Ahrian, not, of course, telling her that I had had other dreams as well. She gave a little start and said, “How strange!”

  I went on to tell her some of the details, and suddenly she laughed and said, “But it is not so very strange, after all. I have told you all those things.”

  “When?” I said.

  “Some few nights ago. You had had a number of drinks, Rafe, and perhaps you do not remember. I talked to you, thinking that it might help you to sleep, and it was of my own world that I talked.”

  That seemed as good an explanation as any; in fact, the only one. So I let it drop, and after that I dreamed no more of Ahrian’s world.

  I felt wretched about Marthe, but this wasn’t a thing you dragged someone else into, especially someone you cared about. I put her off, and fought, not very gallantly, a fight I knew I was losing. I began to have blank periods during my waking hours. Once I found my horse on the edge of a cliff, with the dirt already sliding from under him. Another time I was looking at the sharp blade of my big pocket knife that had drawn a tentative line of red across my wrist.

  I stopped riding. I stopped driving my car. I locked up all my guns and made Jamieson hide the key. I knew I ought to die, but I wasn’t quite ready, not quite…

  Marthe came one day, unannounced and uninvited. She came into the house and found me, and politely shut the
door in everyone’s face. Then she came and stood in front of me.

  “I want the truth, Rafe. What’s gone wrong?”

  I said something about not having felt well, assured her I was all right, thanked her for coming, and tried to put her out. She wouldn’t be put.

  “Look at me, Rafe. Is it because you don’t love me?” She made me look at her, and presently she smiled and said, “I didn’t think so.”

  I caught hold of her, then. After a while she whispered, “There’s something evil in this house. I felt it when I came in the door. Something wicked!”

  “Nonsense,” I told her.

  She clung to it, though, and cried a little, and swore at me because I had worried her. Then she stepped back and said flatly:

  “You look like the devil. What is it, Rafe?”

  “I don’t quite know.” Suddenly, perhaps because of what she had said, I wanted to be out of that house. Irrational? But I wasn’t being rational then. “Let’s take a walk. Maybe the air will clear my head.”

  We didn’t go far. The last few weeks had worn me down badly, and every crack and jar I had in my frame was plaguing me. By the time we made it to a grassy knoll well away from the house and sat down, Marthe was looking genuinely frightened.

  I hadn’t meant to tell her anything. I had determined not to tell her. And, of course, I did tell her. I don’t know what she made of it, because it wasn’t very coherent, the dream part, but she got quite white and flung her arms around me.

  “You need a psychiatrist,” she said, “and a good doctor.”

  “I’ve had a doctor. And a psychiatrist isn’t any good unless you’re hiding something from yourself. I’m not.”

  “But there must be some reason for the dreams.”

  “It isn’t any buried guilt. Listen, Marthe, I’ll tell you something, and that will make two people in the world who know it. Maybe you won’t think much of me after you hear it, but I’d have to tell you sometime and it better be now. That time my plane crashed, on the way to the spaceport. I crashed it myself. Deliberately, intentionally crashed it.”

  Her eyes widened. Before she could say anything, I rushed on.

  “I never wanted to go to space. When I was a little kid, and my father would talk to me about it, I didn’t want to go. I liked Earth. I liked dogs and horses and prowling in the woods. Above all, I resented being forced into a set mold that didn’t fit me, just because generations of McQuarries had been poured into that mold. My father and I had some bitter words over that, when I was little.

  “When I got older I still felt that way, but I’d discovered it wasn’t any use to fight. Besides, I liked my father. You know how some men are—pride, family tradition, all that business. Space was his life. It meant more to him to have me be a spaceman than it did to me not to be one. So I went. I didn’t like it. I hated it, as a matter of fact. But I kept my mouth shut. Then, coming back from Mars on that first voyage, we lost a man.

  “He’d gone outside the hull to repair something, and his magnetic grapples didn’t hold, and he drifted off. I saw him through the port, growing smaller and smaller as we left him behind, until he disappeared. You know how fast a spaceship moves at full acceleration? Even by the time we got the boats out it was too late. He’s still there. He’ll always be there.

  “After that, I had a horror of space, the way some people used to have for the sea. It wasn’t that I was afraid of getting killed, it was the emptiness, the dark and the cold and the silence, and the waiting. I hate being cooped in, and the ship was like an iron coffin. I tried to fight it. I made two more voyages, and I was sick for months after the second one. I didn’t tell anybody why. Finally I went up to the Academy to get my ticket, and my father was proud and happy. Blast people’s pride and their ideas that their children have to love just what they do! He gave me a berth on his flagship.

  “I couldn’t tell him the truth, and I couldn’t go. I didn’t have any right to—to ask men to depend on me and then maybe—So I crashed my plane. If I died, I wanted to do it decently and alone. If I didn’t, I figured I’d get smashed up enough so that I couldn’t pass a space-physical, and that would be that, with everybody’s honor still intact. I guess God was on my side. Anyway, I judged the impact just right. After that, David carried the torch, and my father died happy.”

  We didn’t talk for a while. I sat turning round and round on my finger the ring that Ahrian had given me. Presently Marthe said, “That explains it.”

  “What?”

  “The look I saw in your face when David’s ship came in. No regret, no envy. You didn’t want to be where he was. But you were as proud of him as Bet was.”

  “He likes to strut a bit,” I said, “but the son-of-a-gun is just as good as he thinks he is. Maybe better. I’ve talked to his men…Well, what about me?”

  She said some things that did me more good than any psychiatry, and for the first time in weeks I began to think perhaps there was some hope in the world. We made up a little for all the time we had lost, and then Marthe became thoughtful again.

  “Rafe, you started once to say something about Ahrian. Where does she come into this?”

  “Nowhere, really.” I told her about seeming to see Ahrian’s world. “Turned out she’d described it to me, and imagination did the rest.”

  “I wonder.”

  She sat still and intent, and then she questioned me about those particular dreams, what Ahrian had said, what I had said, what I remembered. Finally I demanded to know what she was getting at.

  “Has it ever occurred to you, Rafe, that all this trouble has come onto you since Ahrian came? All the tragic things there are no real explanations for—Buck, and the old mare, and Bet going down into the paddock in her white formal, a thing no woman in her right mind would do, and at that hour of the night! And now these nightmares that are driving you to—to—Oh, you didn’t tell me that part of it, but I can see it in your face! It’s all wrong, Rafe. It’s all without reason.”

  “But what on earth could Ahrian have to do with it? That’s just wild talk, Marthe.”

  “Is it? How do we know what the people of her world can do, what powers they may have?”

  “But she loves David! Why would she want to destroy his family?”

  “How do you know she loves him? Did she ever tell you so?”

  “Yes.” Then Ahrian’s words came back to me, and I corrected myself. “No, come to think of it. She only said love was a great force. Hang it all, though, she came with him, didn’t she? All the way to Earth.”

  For some reason, this talk was disturbing me deeply. It oppressed me, in that open empty place, and gave me a sense that someone was listening and that Marthe had better not say any more—for her own sake.

  “That’s all nonsense,” I said roughly. “People can’t send dreams on each other, or make people do things, or—or kill by remote control.”

  “People like us—no. But Ahrian isn’t—people. I’m afraid of her, Rafe. She’s strange, inside. Bet said the same thing.”

  “Woman talk.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe sometimes we’re nearer the truth than men because we aren’t ashamed to rely on the instincts God gave us. She’s evil. She’s filled the house with death.”

  Marthe shivered as though a cold wind had struck her, and suddenly she reached out and tore Ahrian’s ring off my finger and threw it far away into the deep grass.

  “I don’t want anything of her about you. Nothing!”

  Then it was my turn to shiver. Because the minute that ring was gone, so were the oppression and the vague fear, and my screwed-up nerves began to slacken off again.

  Still I would not believe. I knew the power of suggestion, and considering the state I was in, none of my reactions would be worth a plugged nickel anyway.

  “I still say this is all nonsense, Marthe. Ahrian’s never shown the slightest sign of having any special ‘power.’ She’s never been anything but sweet and friendly, and she follows David around like a spani
el. And there just isn’t the shadow of a motive.”

  “I know how we can find out.”

  I stared at her. “How?”

  “Those dreams you had of Ahrian’s world. She couldn’t have described all the details to you, and you couldn’t have imagined all the rest of them exactly right. Someone who had been there would know. If the dreams were wrong, then Ahrian told the truth and they were nothing worse than dreams. But if they were right—all right—then they weren’t dreams but memories from Ahrian’s own mind, mixed in with the awful things she was sending to torture you.”

  I remembered that I hadn’t had a single glimpse of that world since I mentioned it to Ahrian, which seemed an odd coincidence.

  “Even so, how could she know how I felt about space? How could she—Oh, all right. We’ll go ask David.”

  “No, not David! Not anyone who has anything to do with her. Besides, if she has some deep reason to hate David, he wouldn’t be likely to tell us, would he?”

  “So that’s it. Don’t you think maybe your reporter’s mind is running away with you?”

  “I’m trying to save your neck, you stubborn fool!” she snarled, between rage and tears.

  I got up. “Come on, then. There’s Griffith—he’s observer on the Anson McQuarrie, and I know him fairly well.” It occurred to me suddenly that Griffith hadn’t been around since the night of the Anson McQuarrie’s landing, and I wondered why, since he had always been a good friend of David’s. For some reason, that unimportant fact made me as curious as a woman to know why.

  Marthe’s car was in the drive. Ahrian called to us from the terrace, looking very lovely with her filmy skirts blowing around her and her hair full of those incredible purple gleamings in the sunlight. Marthe said she was going to take me for a drive, and Ahrian said it would do me good. They both smiled, and we drove away.

  “Does she always wear that tiara?” asked Marthe.

  “I don’t know. She wears it a lot. Why?”