"We must fight them."
I clung to my rationality. "We must not," I said wearily, though I was tempted to agree once again.
"Then what can we do?" the Pukan-Nara asked desperately.
I came to the decision that had always really been there.
"I know what this means to you," I said. "It means the same to me - perhaps even more."
"What are you going to say, Michael Kane?" asked my lovely wife.
"We must evacuate Varnal. We must let the Green Death have her and must flee towards the mountains."
"Never I" cried Damad.
But Carnak put a hand on his son's arm.
"Michael Kane has brought us something more valuable than life or even homeland," he said thoughtfully. "He has brought us responsibility to ourselves - and thus to all men on Vashu. His logic is inescapable, his reasons clear. We must do as he says."
"I will not!" Damad turned to me.
"Michael Kane!" he cried. "You are my brother - I love you as my brother, as a great fighter, a great friend. You cannot mean what you say. Let Varnal be taken over by that rabble - that diseased people! You must be insane!"
"On the contrary," I said quietly. "It is insanity that I fight.
I am striving to remain sane. Let your father tell you - he knows what I mean."
"These are desperate times, Damad," Shizala said. "They are complicated times. Thus it is so much harder to know the right action to take when action is called for. The people of the Green Death, like the people of Cend-Amrid, are insane. To use violence against them would be to encourage a different kind of insanity in ourselves. I think that is what Michael Kane means."
"It is a great deal of what I mean." I nodded. "If we give in to fear now, what will the Karnala become?"
"Fear! But is not flight cowardice?"
"There are varieties of cowardice, my son," said Camak, rising. "I think that flight from Vamal - even though we are strong enough easily to defeat that rabble advancing upon us - is not so great a cowardice. It is a responsibility."
Damad shook his head. "I still do not understand. Surely there is nothing wrong in defending our city against aggression."
"There are different kinds of aggressors," I said. "There were the Blue Giants of the Argzoon who came against Varnal soon after I had arrived on Vashu. These were a folk of comparatively healthy minds. It was a simple thing to fight them off. It was all we could do. But, if violence is used in this case, we lose touch with our whole cause - my whole cause, if you like, though I thought you all shared it. That is to cure the disease at its source; to cure the double disease of body and mind which has infected Cend-Amrid!"
Darnad looked at Hool Haji, who returned his gaze and then looked away. He glanced at his father and his sister. They said nothing.
He looked at me.
"I do not understand you, Michael Kane, but I will try to," he said at length. "I trust you. If we must leave Varnal then we must leave her."
And then Damad could no longer control the tears that began to course down his face.
Chapter Sixteen
THE EXODUS
And that is why I hope you will understand how a great city, healthy and strong, was left bereft of its population.
Warriors, craftsmen, women and children, left Vamal in an orderly procession, bearing their possessions with them, the airships - both of the Sheev pattern and my own design - drifting above them. Some left, like Damad, weeping, others puzzled, some thoughtful, but all knowing in their hearts that it was right.
They left Vamal for a few diseased and deluded souls to make what they wanted of it, or take what they wanted of it.
It was the only thing to do.
I am not normally a thoughtful man, as I have told you, but I try to cling to certain principles, no matter how desperate the situation or terrible the threat. Not through any dogmatism but, if you like, from a fear of fear - fear of the actions one takes from fear, the thoughts one deludes oneself with from fear.
I rode a dahara, side by side with Shizala on my right and Hool Haji on my left. To his left was Camak, Bradhi of the Kanala; to Shizala's right was Darnad, stem-faced and puzzled of eye.
Behind us rode or walked the proud folk of Vamal, the graceful city of the Green Mists falling further and further behind us.
Ahead were bleak mountains which we would make our home until some hope could be found for those smitten by the Green Death.
It was not merely the physical fate of Mars that was at stake as we made our exodus from the city. It was the moral fate -the psychological fate. We left Varnal so that Mars might still remain the planet I loved and Vamal itself might remain the city where I felt most at home.
We fought against fear and against hysteria and against the dreadful, insane violence that these emotions bring.
We did not leave Vamal to set an example to others. We left in order to set an example to ourselves.
All this may sound grandiose. I only ask that you consider what we did and try to understand its objectives.
Our journey to the mountains was a long one, for our pace was set by our slowest citizen.
At last the cold mountains were reached and we found a valley where we could build crude houses for ourselves, since the sides of the valley were thickly wooded.
This done, we set off in our airships to explore the mountains in the hope that we should find the almost legendary physician who was, perhaps, the only man on Mars who could save our world from the Green Death.
It was not I who eventually found Mas Rava, but he who had first named him - Damad.
Damad came back to the camp one night in his airship. He had taken to travelling alone and we sympathized with the necessity he felt for this.
"Michael Kane," he said, entering the cabin where Shizala and I now lived. "I have seen Mas Rava."
"Can he help us?" was my first question.
"I do not know. I did not speak to him, save to ask him his name."
"That is all he told you?"
"Yes. I asked who he was and he replied, 'Mas Rava'."
"Where is he?"
"He is living in a cave many shot is from here. Do you wish me to take you to him?"
"I think so," I replied. "Do you think he has become a complete hermit? Will he be affected by our plight?"
"I cannot tell. In the morning I will take you there."
So, in the morning, we left in Damad's airship to find Mas Rava. Just as I had earlier sought the machines in the hope that they would save us, now I sought a man. Would the man prove more helpful than the machines? I was not sure. Should I have trusted the machines so much? Should I have trusted another man so much? Again I was not sure.
But I went with Damad, navigating the ship amongst the crags, until we came to a place where a natural path climbed a mountain to a cave.
I lowered a ladder on to the wide ledge outside the cave and began to climb down until I stood outside the dark entrance.
Then I walked inside.
A man sat there, his back against the cave wall, one leg crooked and the other straight. He regarded me with humorous and quizzical eyes. He was clean-shaven and quite young looking. The cave was clean and neatly furnished.
He was not my idea of a hermit, nor did his cave resemble a hermit's lair. There was something urbane about the man.
"Mas Rava?" I said.
"The same. Sit down. I had one visitor yesterday, and I was rather rude to him, I'm afraid. He was my first. I am better prepared for my second. What is your name?"
"Michael Kane," I said. "It is a long, complicated story, but I come from the planet Negalu," I told him, using the Martian name for Earth, "and from a time far in your future."
"In that case you are an interesting man for my first real visitor," said Mas Rava.
I sat down beside him.
"Have you come seeking information from me?" was his next question.
"In a way," I said. "But first you had better hear the whole story."
"Make it the whole one," said Mas Rava. "I am not an easy man to bore. Proceed."
I told him everything I have told you, everything I had thought and said, everything that was thought and said to me. It took me several hours, but Mas Rava listened all the time without interrupting.
When I had finished, he nodded.
"You have got yourself and your adopted people into an interesting predicament," he said. "As a physician I am a little rusty, though you were right in one thing. There was a cure for the plague, according to my reading. It was not in the form of a machine - that is where you went wrong - but in the form of a bacteria capable of combating the effects of the Green Death in a mere matter of moments."
"Do you know of any place where I could find a container of this bacteria?" I asked him.
'There are several repositories on Vashu similar to the Yaksha vaults you discovered. It could be in any one of them -though it is likely that something as relatively unimportant to either the Sheev or the Yaksha might easily have been allowed to corrode away."
"So you think there is little chance of finding the antidote?" I asked despairingly.
"Yes, I do," he said. "But you could try."
"And what about you - could you prepare an antidote?"
"In time, I might," he said. "But I do not think I will."
"You would not even attempt it?"
"No."
"Why is that?"
"Because, my friend, I am a convinced fatalist." He laughed. "I am sure that the Green Death will pass and that its passage will leave a mark on Vashu. But I think that mark is necessary to society - particularly a society that knows no deep dangers. It will prevent it stagnating."
"I find your attitude difficult to understand," I said.
"Let me be honest, then, and put it to you in another way. I am a lazy man - indolent. I like to sit in my cave and think. I think, incidentally, on a very high plane. I am also a man who needs little company. I have my fear, too, if you like -but it is a fear of becoming involved with humanity and thus losing myself. I value my individuality. So I rationalize all this and I become a fatalist. I have no concern with the affairs of the inhabitants of this planet, or any other planet. It is planets that interest me - not a planet."
"It would seem to me, Mas Rava," I said quietly, "that you, in your own way, have lost your sense of perspective just as much as the rulers of Cend-Amrid."
He thought over this statement and then looked into my face with a grin.
"You are right," he said.
"Then you will help us?"
“No, Michael Kane, I will not. You have taught me a lesson and it will be of interest to speculate on what you have said. But I will not help you. You see" - he grinned at me again -"what I have just realized, without bitterness or despair, is that I am essentially a stupid man. Perhaps the Green Death will come my way, eh?"
"Perhaps," I said in disappointment. "I am sorry you will not help us, Mas Rava."
"I am sorry, too. But think of this, Michael Kane, if the words of a stupid man mean anything to you ..."
"What is that?"
"The wish is sometimes enough," said Mas Rava. "Keep wishing that you might find the Green Death gone - provided you keep acting as well, even if you do not understand your own actions."
I left the cave.
Patiently, Damad was still there, the rope-ladder still touching the ledge.
With a feeling of puzzled curiosity rather than disappointment, I climbed back into the cabin.
"Will he help us?" Damad asked eagerly.
"No," I told him.
"Why not? He must!"
"He says he will not. All he told me was that a cure for the plague did exist, might possibly exist now - and it is not a machine."
"Then what is it?"
"A container of bacteria," I mused. "Come on, let us return to the camp."
Next day I had made up my mind to return to Vamal and see what had happened to the city.
I took an airship without saying where I was going.
Vamal looked unchanged - even more beautiful, if anything - and as I landed in the city square there was no smell of death as I had expected, and none of the subtler smell of fear.
I stayed in my cabin, however, for safety's sake, and called out through the empty streets.
In a little while I heard footsteps and a woman with a small child walked round the comer. The woman was an upstanding person and her child looked very healthy.
"Who are you?" I asked in astonishment.
"Who are you is more to the point?" she replied boldly. “What are you doing in Vamal?"
'This is the city where I normally live," I said.
"And this is the city where I normally live, too," she said crisply. "Were you one of those who left?"
"If you mean was I one of the many thousands who left the city when the folk with the Green Death came," I said, "the answer is ‘yes’."
"All that is over now," she said.
"What is over?"
“The Green Death. I had it for a while, you know."
"You mean you have been cured? How? Why?"
"I don't know. It was coming to Varnal that did it. Maybe that's why we came here. I can't remember the journey too clearly."
"You all came to Vamal and it cured you of the plague? What could it be - the water? The air? Something like that? By the Sheev, surely all my questing has not been for nothing. Surely the answer has not lain here all the time I"
"You sound a bit crazy to me," said the woman. "I don't know what it is. I only know I'm cured - and so's everybody else. A lot of them have gone back home, but I stayed on."
"Where do you originally come from?" I asked.
"Cend-Amrid," she said. "I miss it, rather."
I began to laugh uncontrollably.
"Here all the time!"-1 yelled. "Here all the time!"
Chapter Seventeen
TO CEND-AMRID
By a strange twist of fortune, it seemed, we were now able to return to Vamal.
It was a joyful occasion and the journey back was swifter even than the journey away from Vamal.
It was not only, of course, because of this that we felt light-hearted. We had discovered a cure for the plague - or, at least, we had discovered that the plague could be cured.
Once we had settled in Vamal, to the surprise of the few people who had made the city their home, we began to inspect the damage. There was nothing serious save that anything vaguely mechanical had been hurled into the green lake.
This must have been part of the mob's insane urge to destroy anything 'functional’.
Now it struck me that something could have been thrown into the lake that had caused the water to turn into an antidote for the plague.
I tried to think what it might be.
But I could not. Only now can I look back and wonder if that small tube I had carried with me from Bagarad, and which I never found again, had contained the antidote.
I shall never know.
The important thing is that the water of the Lake of the Green Mists was now able to combat the plague, and all we needed to do was to get it into containers and carry it to the victims.
This became our most important task.
We designed tanks to hold the green water and devised a means of attaching them to our airships.
Then we set off towards the central source of the plague -the insane city of Cend-Amrid.
With us we took Ala Mara, whom I had seen little of since she had rescued us, but who had begged to return with us.
A fleet of airships - all that we could muster - began the journey and our hopes were high. We flew away from Varnal with its pennants fluttering bravely from her towers again, towards the horror of the plague.
In the leading airship were myself, Hool Haji and Ala Mara. In the nearest one to us was Damad and his men, and behind us came the airships in charge of Varnala's bravest Pukan-Naras.
At several points we discovered towns and
villages where the plague raged and were able to dispense the small amount of water needed to cure it.
Finding so many places infected, we concentrated first on helping these, and thus it was some time before we sighted Cend-Amrid ahead of us. It was the source of the plague and now, thanks to the green water, it was the last place where the plague flourished.
We came cautiously to the city and hovered above its houses.
Then we drifted until we were over the Central Place, the squat, ugly building where dwelt the Eleven.
Wooden-stepped and walking more stiffly and slower than when I had last observed and fought his kind, a guard appeared on the roof.
With immobile face he looked up.
"Who you? What want?"
"We bring a cure for the Green Death," I told him.
"No cure."
"We have one."
"No cure."
"Tell the Eleven that we bring a cure. Tell the Eleven to come to us."
"I tell."
The man walked stiffly off. It was hard to believe that a human being still lived under the robot-like exterior, but I was sure one could be found.
Soon the Eleven came on to the roof - though I was astonished to count Twelve of them.
Looking closely at their expressionless faces I could see that one of them was Barane Dasa, the man we had met in prison.
"Barane Dasa!” I cried. '"What are you doing back with these people?" He did not reply.
"You," I said pointing. "Barane Dasa! Answer me!"
The blank face remained expressionless. "I One," came the cold voice.
"But you - they judged you insane."
"Mind repaired."
I shuddered to think what that phrase might imply - even crude brain surgery was suggested by the statement 'mind repaired'. "What want Cend-Amrid?" said another of the council.
"We bring a cure for the Green Death."
"No cure."
"But there is one - we have it - we have proved it.”
"Logic prove no cure."
"But I can illustrate the fact that we have a cure," I said desperately.
"No cure."
I rolled down the ladder. I was going to have to talk to these fear-created creatures face to face, hope that a little humanity could be touched in them.
Moorcock, Michael - Michael Kane 03 Page 11
