Journey to Infinity - [Adventures in Science Fiction 02]

by Edited by Martin Greenburg

  But Ystri was wary. Jamie had an evil reputation among the outlaws and Ystri was not one to risk having this particular quarry turn to face him before his blow drove home. Quanna had to lead the way deeper and deeper into the forest, where the great mangrove roots made paths broad enough so that no reflections showed in the water, before the green moving shadow that was Ystri drew near.

  If Quanna’s heart was beating harder under her emerald robe, no hint of it showed in her face when she decided the time was near to do what must be done.

  “I’ve a surprise for you, Jamie dear,” she said, pausing to face him under a great vaulting arch of green. “Will you wait for me a moment here? I’ll be back in five minutes.” And then, because the danger was near and great just then, she tip-toed and took his dark face between her hands kissed him quickly on the mouth.

  ~ * ~

  Venusians are not demonstrative people. Jamie stared after her as she turned swiftly away, the green robe swirling. Her long, dark look and the unexpected kiss had carried an air of foreboding that made him loosen the gun in his belt and watch the forest around him with vague uneasiness, for no tangible reason. And that result, perhaps, Quanna had foreseen, too, when she kissed him. There are double motives behind most of the things Venusians do.

  Quanna went swiftly, on soundless feet, along a pathway that twisted out of sight. Her green reflection went with her in the water, smooth and stealthy. She was making a circle as directly as possible in these winding ways, and in a few moments she saw ahead of her another green and stealthy figure moving forward from tree to tree. Quanna smiled.

  Jamie had lighted a cigarette. In the glassy stillness the click of his lighter was audible from far away, and the pungency of the smoke spread through the heavy fragrances of the water jungle. She could see his dark head down an aisle of greenness; he had set his back to a tree and was smoking desultorily, flicking ashes into the water and watching the spreading circles that they made.

  Ahead of her the green shadow of Ystri slipped forward with a sudden rush, quick and deadly. A knife caught the light and glinted.

  Quanna covered the distance at a soft-footed run which the moss hushed. Her green cloak unfolded like a hover of wings behind her and the flash from beneath it rose an instant before the glimmer of steel in Ystri’s fist rose.

  There is no sound quite like the solid thud of a dagger driven hilt-deep into flesh, hard, with a full-armed swing. Jamie knew it from all other sounds and had spun with his gun in his hand before Ystri himself knew quite what had happened to him. Ystri must at first have felt only the heaviness of the blow which even from behind was hard enough to knock the breath from his lungs. He gasped once for air, and whirled to face Quanna, open-mouthed.

  His face contorted with fury when he realized what had happened and his second gasp was for the breath to betray her, but she had struck deftly and a gush of bright blood, startlingly bright, smothered the words on his lips.

  There was no need for explanations. Jamie holstered his gun slowly, seeing that he would not need it. Quanna’s expressionless eyes watched Ystri fall, the glare of fury in his eyes to the last as he mouthed futilely against the torrent of blood frothing over the apricot velvet tunic which his green robe fell back to reveal. There were old bloodstains there, too. It was the same tunic he had worn in the cavern. She thought briefly that the blood-letting which her brother had begun two days ago the sister had finished here.

  Jamie was staring at her questioningly over the body. It lay with one arm dragging in the water; Quanna put out her foot and rolled it over without emotion. It slid into the water with scarcely a splash and the mirrory surface closed over the brilliant colors of apricot and green, bright fresh scarlet and the brown of old blood. Above the spreading circles Quanna looked up at Jamie and smiled.

  “I have saved your life, Jamie,” she said.

  He bit his lip. Lives are not saved gratuitously on Venus. It is a matter of investment, done deliberately with a specific price in mind, and among Venusians if the price is refused the life is forfeit, then and there or at any time thereafter, without penalty of a blood-feud from the victim’s relatives. This relentless code is as near, perhaps, as Venusians come to maintaining an abstract ideal about anything at all.

  “I suppose there’s no use asking what’s behind all this,” said Jamie, nodding at the water which had closed over Ystri’s body.

  Quanna lifted a brow. “Oh, that. I saw him — I had a favor to ask of you. Is there a better way to buy it than this?”

  He knew he would never be told any more of the story than that. No use asking. He lifted his shoulders resignedly.

  “You saved my life,” he acknowledged. “What do you want?”

  “To go back to Earth with you,” she told him promptly. “You’ll take me, Jamie?”

  He squinted a curious glance at her. She might have asked for money, weapons, anything but an intangible like this. An intangible he could not give her.

  “Quanna,” he said gently, “don’t you think I’d take you if I could?”

  “You are commander. What can stop you?”

  “Look, dear.” He stepped forward over the bloodstains on the moss and laid his hands on her shoulders. “Earth’s a . . . an armed camp. No one’s safe there now. You never saw cities bombed — you can’t imagine the life you’d have to lead if you came back with me.”

  “I’m not a child, Jamie.” She lifted unfathomable dark eyes to his.

  “I know — I know.” He tried helplessly to make her understand. “But I’m not going home for pleasure, Quanna. I’m going to fight. I think we’ll have to go on fighting there as long as . . . as long as we can. If I took you along, you’d be in constant danger. There’d be forced march after forced march, front-line duty — life under siege at the very best. And at worst — without me, what would become of you?”

  “I’m willing to risk all that, Jamie dear.”

  He let his hands fall. “I can’t, Quanna. Even if I could let you risk it, I’m not free to handicap myself with a woman. I’m going home to fight, my dear. Don’t you understand? Earth is calling us back because of desperate need. I’m a soldier of the Imperial Planet — I have no right to divide my efficiency in half because I’ve a woman to look out for everywhere I go—”

  “But why must you go at all, Jamie?” She said it very gently. “What can one man mean among so many? Why not stay here on Venus, with me?”

  His black brows met above the crooked nose.

  “If I could make you understand that, my dear,” he said wryly, “I wouldn’t half so much mind going.”

  And so it went on, for a long while. To Quanna the words that Jamie used were often as meaningless as the motives behind them. She wondered afterward that she had not used the dagger which tradition gave her the right to use, upon this dark and stubborn Terrestrial who was so intent upon destroying her happiness and his own.

  Long and hotly they debated, standing over the bloodtsain on the moss with the forest glassily quivering all around them. When they turned home at last along the reflecting pathways, Quanna went submissively, her hooded head bent at the angle suitable to a Venusian woman in the presence of her lord, but she had not surrendered.

  She would have to change her plan; that was all. If he could not take her of his free will, then she would force him to it. She would find some lever stronger than the one which had just failed her. For he knew and she knew that she would not take the life she had saved. She had not killed Ystri for that.

  Yes, she would find a lever, and she would have no mercy in her use of it, for it would take some intolerable force indeed to swerve Jamie from his course.

  ~ * ~

  When the blue twilight was deepest over Darva and the Terrestrialized city slept, Quanna went up the winding stair which led to the roof of the commander’s quarters. It was the dark of the cloud-flow, but she carried no light. Artificial lighting is rare on Venus, which never know true darkness on Dayside. Quanna moved u
nerringly through the blue gloom upon the roof.

  She carried a sheaf of slender, hollow rods under her arm, and in one hand a basket of decaying flowers. The heavy, noxiously sweet fragrance of their dissolution is irresistible to several species of Venus’ flying creatures, most of them poisonous.

  Quanna joined her hollow rods together until she had a long, slender pole, about whose upper end she twined garlands of the heavy-smelling, rotting blossoms, working deftly in the near-darkness. Darva was hushes below her. From the mountains behind her to the mountains before blew the fragrances of jungle canyons; and the rumble of rock-slides thundered from far away.

  Darva was built like a medieval fortress, a walled plateau guarded by crenelated mural towers at regular intervals all around the city. The commander’s quarters were built into the upper end of the wall, one with it, so that the roof upon which Quanna stood looked down sheerly over wall and plateau edge, toward the tremendous blue mountains beyond the river. She had taken refuge in a battlement and was waving her long, flower-twined pole in slow circles.

  In an incredibly short time a whir of wings sounded in the deep, blue twilight and a night-flying shape swept out of the dimness toward the pole. Quanna braced herself against the battlement and continued to fish the air streams blowing toward the cliffs. More wings — more swooping, dim shapes out of the twilight as the cruising nocturnal creatures of the mountains began to catch that intoxicating odor on the wind. Presently she was the center of a whirling, dipping swarm of silent things, all making circles around the decayed flowers like moths around a light, all in the uttermost silence except for the beat of wings.

  When she saw what she wanted, she lowered the pole until the flowery tip was within reach, and she put out an intrepid hand into the midst of the hovering creatures and seized a dark, winged horror by the neck. It beat at her furiously with scaled pinions a yard long, and its thick, muscular, serpent body lashed at her face. Composedly — she had handled the winged snakes since childhood — she put down the pole and went deftly to work over the threshing thing whose great blue-scaled wings winnowed the air. The blue, reptilian body wound and rewound about her forearms and venomous hissing punctuated the wing beats. Quanna paid no attention. Deadly poison though the winged snakes are, they can be safely handled by those who know how. This one bore a small, pale brand on its flat head as token that it had been handled before.

  When Quanna tossed it into the air a moment later it shook outraged wings, dived at her once or twice with fierce hissings, and then hurled itself once more into the group still circling about the rotted blossoms on the pole.

  Quanna went forward confidently, hesitated a moment, then reached out to seize another of the circling things out of the flutter and confusion around the flowers. This one she stroked with long, rhythmic motions until its scaled and writhing body quieted in hypnotized inertia and the great wings folded into stillness. She wrapped a scarf around them and then went forward to beat off the rest of the swarm and cover the flowers with her cloak.

  In a few minutes, when the sick-sweet fragrance had dissipated upon the air, the noxious flying coven of poison things began to disband, great, dark shapes sailing and swooping out in widening circles until the blueness of the twilight swallowed them. Quanna smoothed her disheveled hair and began to dismantle her fishing rod.

  She knew that when the light began to broaden again over the mountains the branded flying snake she had released would return to its home in the cliff above the hidden fortress where she had been born. It would not be long before Vastari had the message she had bound beneath its blue-scaled wing.

  And then — if Vastari trusted her enough — a certain species of hell would be unleashed upon the citadel which Jamie Douglas still held for Imperial Earth.

  ~ * ~

  When the alarm sirens exploded into sudden brazen wailing over Darva one twilight two days later, Quanna knew that Vastari still trusted her. She stood by Jamie’s mirror, watching him buckle on the cuirass without which no one dared walk the battlements when Venusian spearmen were below, and her dark gaze was somber.

  Jamie, ducking into the breast-armor, was as excited as she could remember seeing him. A Venusian attack was always exciting; the rippling drums and the shrill, high keening of the seven-toned pipes get into the listeners’ blood and quicken the heartbeats in time with that wild, tuneless rhythm. Venusians do not shout in battle. The pipes and drums are the only sounds of attack, clear, inhuman music as if not men but something wild and rhythmic were attacking the city.

  “Damned fools,” declared Jamie, struggling with the straps of his cuirass. “Here, help me, Quanna. Attacking with spears and slings — must be something behind this. Recognize any of ‘em, Quanna? Is Vastari there? Lord, I’d like to see him over a Knute before I go!”

  Her eyes veiled. “You hate him, Jamie?”

  “Hate?” He paused to look at her, smiling a little grimly. “Well, hardly that. He’s a symbol, Quanna — a symbol of barbarism. If I could see him dead before I go, I’d be sure of one enemy less against Venusian civilization. Him and his babble about freedom!” Jamie snorted. “There might be safety a little longer for the people we leave behind if Vastari should die this evening. Well—” He shrugged and swung away. Quanna followed him smoothly, her satin skirts whispering along the floor as she walked.

  They stepped out into the cool evening light, into a subdued, hushed murmur of activity. Except for the shrill, inhuman rhythm of the music outside, even battle, on Venus, was — hushed. And the music was dying now as the attackers went grimly into action.

  Lieutenant Morgan was waiting by the Armory door, a file of armed Earthmen with him. The great, solid block of the Armory, and the lower walls of Darva, were the work of Earthmen’s hands only and their secrets known only to Terrestrials. The Armory — heart and brain of Earth domination — was unlocked only in the presence of the commanding officer, and it was not unlocked with keys. There was no chance that Venusians might gain access to this vital ganglion of defense, or Quanna would not have resorted to this last dangerous expedient of inviting attack that the Armory be opened to her.

  There was no hope even of tricking the guarded combination of the door out of the few officers who knew it, for strictly speaking, it was unknown even to them. The elaborate precautions that guarded that secret were eloquent of its importance. It had been implanted in the subconscious minds of a very few Terrestrials while under the influence of neo-curare.

  Morgan had just finished making a hypodermic injection into the arm of one of his men as Quanna and Jamie came up. Neo-curare, dulling the conscious mind, releasing the subconscious—

  “Ready?” asked Jamie crisply.

  Morgan glanced at his watch. “Ready, sir.” He slid aside a tiny panel in the door, uncovering a dial. The hands of the drugged soldier hid it; his dulled eyes did not change, but his fingers began to move as Morgan said: “Armory combination.” This was the effective lock that guarded Earth weapons, the lock for which no key could be stolen.

  Even if Vastari could have kidnapped one of the key men, neither he nor any Venusian knew the ingredients of the drug or the proper dosage to administer. Yes — an effective lock. But not wholly proof against traitors, Quanna told herself as she watched the weapons being brought out with rapid efficiency.

  One of the Knute vibrators was being taken out of the Armory now. It looked like a thick, closed umbrella. The crew of four — three to operate, one to aim — handled the yard-long device with the carelessness born of long practice. Quanna had watched that practice more than once, from hiding places that only Venusians knew.

  The Knute vibrator was a device attuned to the delicate vibrations of the brain, a wave-thrower that could disrupt the molecules of the mind, causing a mental explosion that resulted in death. Quanna had learned the simple devices that operated it during her first weeks in Darva. More important, she had learned of the safety device, the vitally significant Gilson inert fuse. Eavesdropping in
the violet twilight one evening she had heard Lieutenant Morgan excoriate a crew for testing the vibrator with the inert fuse in place.

  “It’s the difference between bullets and blanks,” his angry voice had floated up to her out of the practice yard. “Once you put the Gilson in, you’ve got dynamite in your hands.” There had been much more, and Quanna remembered it faithfully.

  Without the inert fuse, the Knute vibrator was not deadly. It threw off a vibration that had the same effect as inaudible sound, causing reasonless confusion and terror in its victims. Dangerous wild beasts could be driven off by its use, or killed with the Gilson inert fuse in place.

  Quanna followed the crew that carried a Knute to the wall. They wore the usual outfit of wall defenders, metal cuirasses, helmets, face masks with heavily glassed goggles swinging at their belts.

  “There is dust on your lenses, men,” she said, pointing to the nearest mask.

  The soldiers grinned down at her, a little flattered by the notice that she usually reserved entirely for the commander. Quanna reached for a mask and polished the eyepieces with a corner of the rainbow scarf that veiled her hair.