The Best of Leigh Brackett

by Leigh Brackett

  I got up. I wanted to get that golden body between my hands and make it scream. And she said in High Martian, “Are you a human? I have never seen one before close to.”

  A man in a dark robe said, “Be still, Duani.” He came and stood before me. He did not seem to be armed but others were and I remembered Corin’s little weapon. I got hold of myself and did none of the things I wanted to do.

  “What are you doing here?” asked the man in the dark robe.

  I told him about myself and Corin, omitting only the fight that he and I had had before he died, and I told him how the hillmen had robbed me.

  “They sent me here,” I finished, “to ask for water.”

  Someone made a harsh humorless sound. The man before me said, “They were in a jesting mood.”

  “Surely you can spare some water and a beast!”

  “Our beasts were slaughtered long ago. And as for water…” He paused, then asked bitterly, “Don’t you understand? We are dying here of thirst!”

  I looked at him and at the she-imp called Duani and the others. “You don’t show any signs of it,” I said.

  “You saw how the human tribes have gathered like wolves upon the hills. What do you think they wait for? A year ago they found and cut the buried aqueduct that brought water into Shandakor from the polar cap. All they needed then was patience. And their time is very near. The store we had in the cisterns is almost gone.”

  A certain anger at their submissiveness made me say, “Why do you stay here and die like mice bottled up in a jar? You could have fought your way out. I’ve seen your weapons.”

  “Our weapons are old and we are very few. And suppose that some of us did survive—tell me again, Earthman, how did Corin fare in the world of men?” He shook his head. “Once we were great and Shandakor was mighty. The human tribes of half a world paid tribute to us. We are only the last poor shadow of our race but we will not beg from men!”

  “Besides,” said Duani softly, “where else could we live but in Shandakor?”

  “What about the others?” I asked. “The silent ones.”

  “They are the past,” said the dark-robed man and his voice rang like a distant flare of trumpets.

  Still I did not understand. I did not understand at all. But before I could ask more questions a man came up and said, “Rhul, he will have to die.”

  The tufted tips of Duani’s ears quivered and her crest of silver curls came almost erect.

  “No, Rhul!” she cried. “At least not right away.”

  There was a clamor from the others, chiefly in a rapid angular speech that must have predated all the syllables of men. And the one who had spoken before to Rhul repeated, “He will have to die! He has no place here. And we can’t spare water.”

  “I’ll share mine with him,” said Duani, “for a while.”

  I didn’t want any favors from her and said so. “I came here after supplies. You haven’t any, so I’ll go away again. It’s as simple as that.” I couldn’t buy from the barbarians, but I might make shift to steal.

  Rhul shook his head. “I’m afraid not. We are only a handful. For years our single defense has been the living ghosts of our past who walk the streets, the shadows who man the walls. The barbarians believe in enchantments. If you were to enter Shandakor and leave it again alive the barbarians would know that the enchantment cannot kill. They would not wait any longer.”

  Angrily, because I was afraid, I said, “I can’t see what difference that would make. You’re going to die in a short while anyway.”

  “But in our own way, Earthman, and in our own time. Perhaps, being human, you can’t understand that. It is a question of pride. The oldest race of Mars will end well, as it began.”

  He turned away with a small nod of the head that said kill him—as easily as that. And I saw the ugly little weapons rise.

  5

  There was a split second then that seemed like a year. I thought of many things but none of them were any good. It was a devil of a place to die without even a human hand to help me under. And then Duani flung her arms around me.

  “You’re all so full of dying and big thoughts!” she yelled at them. “And you’re all paired off or so old you can’t do anything but think! What about me? I don’t have anyone to talk to and I’m sick of wandering alone, thinking how I’m going to die! Let me have him just for a little while? I told you I’d share my water.”

  On Earth a child might talk that way about a stray dog. And it is written in an old Book that a live dog is better than a dead lion. I hoped they would let her keep me.

  They did. Rhul looked at Duani with a sort of weary compassion and lifted his hand. “Wait,” he said to the men with the weapons. “I have thought how this human may be useful to us. We have so little time left now that it is a pity to waste any of it, yet much of it must be used up in tending the machine. He could do that labor—and a man can keep alive on very little water.”

  The others thought that over. Some of them dissented violently, not so much on the grounds of water as that it was unthinkable that a human should intrude on the last days of Shandakor. Corin had said the same thing. But Rhul was an old man. The tufts of his pointed ears were colorless as glass and his face was graven deep with years and wisdom had distilled in him its bitter brew.

  “A human of our own world, yes. But this man is of Earth and the men of Earth will come to be the new rulers of Mars as we were the old. And Mars will love them no better than she did us because they are as alien as we. So it is not unfitting that he should see us out.”

  They had to be content with that. I think they were already so close to the end that they did not really care. By ones and twos they left as though already they had wasted too much time away from the wonders that there were in the streets outside. Some of the men still held the weapons on me and others went and brought precious chains such as the human slaves had worn—shackles, so that I should not escape. They put them on me and Duani laughed.

  “Come,” said Rhul, “and I will show you the machine.”

  He led me from the room and up a winding stair. There were tall embrasures and looking through them I discovered that we were in the base of the very high tower with the globe. They must have carried me back to it after Duani had chased me with her laughter and her pebbles. I looked out over the glowing streets, so full of splendor and of silence, and asked Rhul why there were no ghosts inside the tower.

  “You have seen the globe with the crystal rods?”

  “Yes.”

  “We are under the shadow of its core. There had to be some retreat for us into reality. Otherwise we would lose the meaning of the dream.”

  The winding stair went up and up. The chain between my ankles clattered musically. Several times I tripped on it and fell.

  “Never mind,” Duani said. “You’ll grow used to it.”

  We came at last into a circular room high in the tower. And I stopped and stared.

  Most of the space in that room was occupied by a web of metal girders that supported a great gleaming shaft. The shaft disappeared upward through the roof. It was not tall but very massive, revolving slowly and quietly. There were traps, presumably for access to the offset shaft and the cogs that turned it. A ladder led to a trap in the roof.

  All the visible metal was sound with only a little surface corrosion. What the alloy was I don’t know and when I asked Rhul he only smiled rather sadly. “Knowledge is found,” he said, “only to be lost again. Even we of Shandakor forget.”

  Every bit of that enormous structure had been shaped and polished and fitted into place by hand. Nearly all the Martian peoples work in metal. They seem to have a genius for it and while they are not and apparently never have been mechanical, as some of our races are on Earth, they find many uses for metal that we have never thought of.

  But this before me was certainly the high point of the metalworkers’ craft. When I saw what was down below, the beautifully simple power plant and the rotary drive set-
up with fewer moving parts than I would have thought possible, I was even more respectful. “How old is it?” I asked and again Rhul shook his head.

  “Several thousand years ago there is a record of the yearly Hosting of the Shadows and it was not the first.” He motioned me to follow him up the ladder, bidding Duani sternly to remain where she was. She came anyway.

  There was a railed platform open to the universe and directly above it swung the mighty globe with its crystal rods that gleamed so strangely. Shandakor lay beneath us, a tapestry of many colors, bright and still, and out along the dark sides of the valley the tribesmen waited for the light to die.

  “When there is no one left to tend the machine it will stop in time and then the men who have hated us so long will take what they want of Shandakor. Only fear has kept them out this long. The riches of half a world flowed through these streets and much of it remained.”

  He looked up at the globe. “Yes,” he said, “we had knowledge. More, I think, than any other race of Mars.”

  “But you wouldn’t share it with the humans.”

  Rhul smiled. “Would you give little children weapons to destroy you? We gave men better ploughshares and brighter ornaments and if they invented a machine we did not take it from them. But we did not tempt and burden them with knowledge that was not their own. They were content to make war with sword and spear and so they had more pleasure and less killing and the world was not torn apart.”

  “And you—how did you make war?”

  “We defended our city. The human tribes had nothing that we coveted, so there was no reason to fight them except in self-defense. When we did we won.” He paused. “The other non-human races were more stupid or less fortunate. They perished long ago.”

  He turned again to his explanations of the machine. “It draws its power directly from the sun. Some of the solar energy is converted and stored within the globe to serve as the light-source. Some is sent down to turn the shaft.”

  “What if it should stop,” Duani said, “while we’re still alive?” She shivered, looking out over the beautiful streets.

  “It won’t—not if the Earthman wishes to live.”

  “What would I have to gain by stopping it?” I demanded.

  “Nothing. And that,” said Rhul, “is why I trust you. As long as the globe turns you are safe from the barbarians. After we are gone you will have the pick of the loot of Shandakor.”

  How I was going to get away with it afterward he did not tell me.

  He motioned me down the ladder again but I asked him, “What is the globe, Rhul? How does it make the—the Shadows?”

  He frowned. “I can only tell you what has become, I’m afraid, mere traditional knowledge. Our wise men studied deeply into the properties of light. They learned that light has a definite effect upon solid matter and they believed, because of that effect, that stone and metal and crystalline things retain a ‘memory’ of all that they have ‘seen.’ Why this should be I do not know.”

  I didn’t try to explain to him the quantum theory and the photoelectric effect nor the various experiments of Einstein and Millikan and the men who followed them. I didn’t know them well enough myself and the old High Martian is deficient in such terminology.

  I only said, “The wise men of my world also know that the impact of light tears away tiny particles from the substance it strikes.”

  I was beginning to get a glimmering of the truth. Light-patterns “cut” in the electrons of metal and stone—sound-patterns cut in unlikely looking mediums of plastic, each needing only the proper “needle” to recreate the recorded melody or the recorded picture.

  “They constructed the globe,” said Rhul. “I do not know how many generations that required nor how many failures they must have had. But they found at last the invisible light that makes the stones give up their memories.”

  In other words they had found their needle. What wave-length or combination of wave-lengths in the electromagnetic spectrum flowed out from those crystal rods, there was no way for me to know. But where they probed the walls and the paving blocks of Shandakor they scanned the hidden patterns that were buried in them and brought them forth again in form and color—as the electron needle brings forth whole symphonies from a little ridged disc.

  How they had achieved sequence and selectivity was another matter. Rhul said something about the “memories” having different lengths. Perhaps he meant depth of penetration. The stones of Shandakor were ages old and the outer surfaces would have worn away. The earliest impressions would be gone altogether or at least have become fragmentary and extremely shallow.

  Perhaps the scanning beams could differentiate between the overlapping layers of impressions by that fraction of a micron difference in depth. Photons only penetrate so far into any given substance but if that substance is constantly growing less in thickness the photons would have the effect of going deeper. I imagine the globe was accurate in centuries or numbers of centuries, not in years.

  However it was, the Shadows of a golden past walked the streets of Shandakor and the last men of the race waited quietly for death, remembering their glory.

  Rhul took me below again and showed me what my tasks would be, chiefly involving a queer sort of lubricant and a careful watch over the power leads. I would have to spend most of my time there but not all of it. During the free periods, Duani might take me where she would.

  The old man went away. Duani leaned herself against a girder and studied me with intense interest. “How are you called?” she asked.

  “John Ross.”

  “JonRoss,” she repeated and smiled. She began to walk around me, touching my hair, inspecting my arms and chest, taking a child’s delight in discovering all the differences there were between herself and what we call a human. And that was the beginning of my captivity.

  6

  There were days and nights, scant food and scanter water. There was Duani. And there was Shandakor. I lost my fear. And whether I lived to occupy the Chair or not, this was something to have seen. Duani was my guide. I was tender of my duties because my neck depended on them but there was time to wander in the streets, to watch the crowded pageant that was not and sense the stillness and the desolation that were so cruelly real.

  I began to get the feel of what this alien culture had been like and how it had dominated half a world without the need of conquest.

  In a Hall of Government, built of white marble and decorated with wall friezes of austere magnificence, I watched the careful choosing and the crowning of a king. I saw the places of learning. I saw the young men trained for war as fully as they were instructed in the arts of peace. I saw the pleasure gardens, the theaters, the forums, the sporting fields—and I saw the places of work, where the men and women of Shandakor coaxed beauty from their looms and forges to trade for the things they wanted from the human world.

  The human slaves were brought by their own kind to be sold, and they seemed to be well treated, as one treats a useful animal in which one has invested money. They had their work to do but it was only a small part of the work of the city.

  The things that could be had nowhere else on Mars—the tools, the textiles, the fine work in metal and precious stones, the glass and porcelain—were fashioned by the people of Shandakor and they were proud of their skill. Their scientific knowledge they kept entirely to themselves, except what concerned agriculture or medicine or better ways of building drains and houses.

  They were the lawgivers, the teachers. And the humans took all they would give and hated them for it. How long it had taken these people to attain such a degree of civilization Duani could not tell me. Neither could old Rhul.

  “It is certain that we lived in communities, had a form of civil government, a system of numbers and written speech, before the human tribes. There are traditions of an earlier race than ours, from whom we learned these things. Whether or not this is true I do not know.”

  In its prime Shandakor had been a vast and flourish
ing city with countless thousands of inhabitants. Yet I could see no signs of poverty or crime. I couldn’t even find a prison.

  “Murder was punishable by death,” said Rhul, “but it was most infrequent. Theft was for slaves. We did not stoop to it.” He watched my face, smiling a little acid smile. “That startles you—a great city without suffering or crime or places of punishment.”

  I had to admit that it did. “Elder race or not, how did you manage to do it? I’m a student of cultures, both here and on my own world. I know all the usual patterns of development and I’ve read all the theories about them—but Shandakor doesn’t fit any of them.”

  Rhul’s smile deepened. “You are human,” he said. “Do you wish the truth?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then I will tell you. We developed the faculty of reason.”

  For a moment I thought he was joking. “Come,” I said, “man is a reasoning being—on Earth the only reasoning being.”

  “I do not know of Earth,” he answered courteously. “But on Mars man has always said, I reason, I am above the beasts because I reason.’ And he has been very proud of himself because he could reason. It is the mark of his humanity. Being convinced that reason operates automatically within him he orders his life and his government upon emotion and superstition.

  “He hates and fears and believes, not with reason but because he is told to by other men or by tradition. He does one thing and says another and his reason teaches him no difference between fact and falsehood. His bloodiest wars are fought for the merest whim—and that is why we did not give him weapons. His greatest follies appear to him the highest wisdom, his basest betrayals become noble acts—and that is why we could not teach him justice. We learned to reason. Man only learned to talk.”

  I understood then why the human tribes had hated the men of Shandakor. I said angrily, “Perhaps that is so on Mars. But only reasoning minds can develop great technologies and we humans of Earth have outstripped yours a million times. All right, you know or knew some things we haven’t learned yet, in optics and some branches of electronics and perhaps in metallurgy. But…”