The sparks, probably, were keyed to the original Flame, kept powered by induction, unless they were each complete in themselves, like a speck of radium. To decelerate would mean that Raft would become the equivalent of a living statue among enemies moving like flashes of lightning.
Anyhow, the amulet was in his sealed pocket, and could not be secured without ruining da Fonseca’s revolver. It was something to be investigated later. There was nothing to do now but play possum, and wait.
SO RAFT waited, while the chill of the river crept stealthily into his flesh, numbing nerves and muscles. He forced himself to wait, unhitching his mind till he seemed to float in a vacuum where neither light nor sound existed, nothing save the slow, jellied motion of the current in the pool. He couldn’t afford to wait for nightfall. It might be several weeks, to his time-sense, before the sun dropped wit of sight.
There were, Raft thought wryly, certain handicaps to a land where metabolism had gone so fantastically haywire.
Anyway, Darum had not caught Parror.
That arrogant individual had taken Craddock to Kharn, which lay at the source of this very river. What lay in the Garden of Kharn, Raft hadn’t the slightest idea. Janissa had feared it. And she wasn’t easily frightened, Raft surmised. His thoughts drifted toward the girl, with her strange, dark-circled eyes and her tiger-striped hair.
For no apparent reason, he thought of Balzac, and the French writer’s story, “A Passion in the Desert.” Then he had the connection: a man’s love for a—had it been a lioness? Or a leopard. Not a jaguar, anyway. There were no jaguars in the Sahara.
Janissa?
Feline she was, but she was human too. Though child of an alien species, she was no beast, no stalking beast of prey.
Raft caught himself.
“Good grief!” he thought. “Am I imagining I’m in love with the girl? I’ve seen her just twice, in the flesh. It’s novelty. I’m attracted by her exotic strangeness. When I get out of here, in five years or so, maybe, I’ll meet a girl from Peoria and marry her.” The very term marriage made him realize the fantasy of the situation. He grinned inwardly.
“Biologically I rather imagine it’s impossible. Besides, such things don’t happen. I certainly wouldn’t want my. wife going out at night to sit on the back fence and howl.”
Nevertheless the thought did not entirely leave him. The union of two races, two species, rather, had never occurred in the history of biology. He broke the problem down into basic equations of genes and chromosomes, and that passed time, but finally made him feel foolish. Eventually he was glad to raise his head warily above water and prepare to emerge.
A long time had passed, and the alarm must long since have died down. No one was visible on any of the castle’s many balconies, nor could the courtyard be seen from here. But if Raft attempted to cross that open plain, he would inevitably be spotted.
He could keep to the river—though its slow, powerful current was a danger. So he set off upstream hugging as closely to the bank as he could, crawling mostly, swimming at times, and keeping the reed always ready. Once, at a suspicious flash of movement, he lay hidden, but he was overly cautious then. By the time he reached the forest, he was freezing cold and bleeding from scraped elbows and wrists.
He hoped the cat people did not trail by scent. It was unlikely. They were a civilized race, and the dulling of certain senses is the price evolution exacts. The lower species, depending on scent and sound, have those faculties highly developed. On the other hand, man’s vision is far more powerful and more easily adjustable than the vision of most beasts.
Darum would not know his destination. The closer he got to Kharn, the safer he would be from pursuit.
A cyclopean tree shut out the turrets of the castle. Raft went on cautiously for perhaps half a mile. Then he opened the sealed pocket, made sure his revolver was dry, and put the dagger into his belt. The amulet he took out for a closer inspection.
It told him nothing. A spark of fire glittered in the depths of a cloudy crystal chip that was in turn set in a thick metallic lozenge, square with rounded corners. The flat gem could, he found on experiment, be revolved like the dial of a safe. He turned it cautiously.
There was no change, except, perhaps, for a freshening of the breeze. How could he test the device?
His watch, of course.
LUCKILY the watch was waterproof. He stared at the dial, noticing that the second hand was moving very slowly. He turned the crystal on the amulet again and the pointer moved faster. Another turn, and it raced.
Which meant that his metabolism was correspondingly slower.
Would the amulet also increase the rate of life? If so, that would solve many problems. He could get to Kharn, perhaps, even before Parror arrived there. But he was doomed to disappointment on that score. The amulet could retard metabolism, but it could not increase it beyond the rate prevalent in Paititi.
That meant the spark, undoubtedly, was attuned to the Flame itself, radiating at the same energy-rate, and moving in the same cycle. Well, Raft didn’t want to be handicapped by moving more slowly than the rest of his temporary world, and he adjusted the device till it was as he had found it.
He now put it in the pocket that held the revolver, and went on. He was estimating, as well as he could remember, the velocity of a bullet, and wondering if, under the current conditions, any target he fired at might be able to dodge lead.
He must remember to use the gun at close range, the closer the better!
The use of artillery would be handicapped in Paititi. If a bomb were dropped on Doirada Castle, the cat people would almost have time to dismantle the structure and move it elsewhere before the egg landed. No wonder the species fought with steel, instead of propellents. Only an energy-ray could be truly efficient here.
Which explained, Raft decided, why mental powers were so highly-developed—Janissa’s mirror, Yrann’s hypnotic sphere. Time-lag would be minimized with such devices.
The whole inanimate part of the valley was indeed under a spell, such a one as had protected the Norse god Baldur. There could be few fatalities through accident. Not when stones floated, rivers ran like treacle, and a man fell as slowly as Alice descending the rabbit-hole!
As he went on, he paid more attention to the life around him, the curious creatures that used the gigantic trees as hiding places. In the cool, clear light he could make out new details.
The flower-bright vines, with their dangerous tentacles, slithered swiftly across the bark, There were many of the three-foot alligators, lurking in the pools they themselves seemed to have constructed on the trunks, shells that resembled the cups rubber-workers fasten to the hevea bark as they drain their milky latex.
The ’gators had surprisingly flexible claws. Raft noticed a couple of them constructing their pools, scraping resinous wood from the tree and making it into a kind of cement with a fluid they secreted from salivary glands.
Only the sloths were truly familiar, and they were all the stranger because of the rapidity with which they moved. The true sloth hangs motionless by its claws, as its tongue flashes out to reap a nutritious harvest of insects. Its metabolism is abnormally slow.
But it was not slow here.
As for the inch-long parasites that crept through the sloths’ hair, Raft found those creatures too unpleasantly familiar to be truly interesting. Only their ape-like tails kept them from resembling too closely the species that was not dominant in Paititi, though it might be elsewhere.
Most intriguing were the brown furry mammals in the apartment-house nests. They had sucking-disks on their paws, which were none too efficient, but their elongated snouts ended in tabs of flesh like the extremity of an elephant’s trunk, a finger and thumb, which they used as man might use his hands. Its prehensile delicacy was amazing.
Raft wondered what the interior of the nests was like. He felt that what lay inside might be surprising.
Underfoot was only the moss. There was no underbrush. Those incredible
trees seemed to have sucked all the nutriment out of the ground, leaving so little that only moss could flourish. That gave a logical explanation for the tree-parasites.
Where else could they live, except in a closely integrated society, where hunger made an automatic check-and-balance? Even the trees were part of that inexorable system, for they had drained the earth of life. And in return, they were hosts to other species.
SPECIES had reached dead end in this land. They would never evolve to dominance, as the cat people had evolved, Raft surmised. They had found their balance. And, meanwhile, he had to find Craddock. Keeping a wary eye out for possible pursuit, he followed the river. Never at any time could he see more than a half-mile ahead. The trees made a maze. But the river itself was a guide. Raft plunged on doggedly, until at last exhaustion forced him to rest.
There might be shelter on one of the encrusted tree-trunks, but life was too teeming there. None of the things seemed to venture to the ground, however, and Raft finally lay down on the river bank, in lieu of better shelter. He might be attacked while he slept, but there was no way of guarding against that. He laid the revolver ready and slept, hoping for the best.
When he awoke, he went on again. Nor had he far to travel now. An hour’s walk, as he estimated time, brought him to a wall which blocked further progress. It was only twenty feet high, dwarfed by the trees, but it was of some age-resistant plastic or alloy, and had eroded scarcely at all.
To left and to right it stretched away and was lost amid the trees. But it was broken at one spot by an archway, through which the river poured. Sediment had built up a narrow ledge bordering the water, a precarious path that led beneath the arch.
Unhesitatingly Raft stepped out on that muddy trail. He could see faint outlines that might have been footprints, and, further along, his suspicion was confirmed when he observed a track that was unmistakably that of Craddock’s heavy boots. He was very nearly at the end of the trail.
Ahead he could make out irregular vegetation darkening that hemispherical opening, blocking his vision. He went on, more carefully now. There were bushes, he noted with surprise.
He began to push through their tangled mass, and abruptly drew back, contact with the things startling him. Their texture had been unlike the rough, bristly texture of plants. They were warm.
They were not plants.
Lacy filigrees, arabesque nets of interwoven mesh, made a curtain on each side of the river. They were grayish-pink, reminding Raft unmistakably of the neutral structure of a living body, networks of nerves, raw and unpleasant. Nor were they rooted like plants.
They quivered, vibrated. They drew back to let him pass.
As he stepped forward, they drew into themselves like contracting anemones touched by an intrusive finger. A dozen grayish, irregular little balls hugged the ground, blending with it in protective camouflage.
Beyond them lay the Garden of Kharn, a sickly, yellowish tangle of vegetation blocking Raft’s view. He could see the guarding wall marching to left and right, curving in to form what must be an enclosure. There were none of the giant trees within the wall, though their columns loomed above and beyond it.
Raft moved on, keeping to the river bank. The bushes were strange to him, though he was no botanist. They seemed a rather impossible hybrid of fungus and true plant. They were fern and mushroom in one.
Oddly he thought of them as vampires, draining life from the very ground.
That forest was not normal—no. The Cyclopean trees outside were friendly by comparison. They, at least, were as immense and aloof as gods.
But these plants, these sickly hybrids, grew with a rank luxuriance that was in itself unhealthy. Movement crawled through the yellow jungle, not the wave-motion of wind, but secretive, stealthy movements which made Raft’s scalp prickle.
Very faintly, scarcely noticeable, he felt a presence in the Garden. And he knew, then, why Janissa had not wanted to speak of Kharn.
For that intangibly sensed presence was not malignant. It was worse. It was cold and distant and alien.
And, intrinsically, it was very evil.
RAFT moved even more cautiously now.
There was menace here, the more ominous because he could not define it. It was a brooding, enigmatic presence which was sensed by the cat-people as well as by himself. This added up to significance.
Felines and simians react in different ways to the same stimulus. Cats are notorious for their acceptance of the supernatural, which meant simply the supernormal, vibrations and radiations too subtle to be sensed fully by mankind. Psychic menaces that would give a man cold chills would rouse a cat to purring ecstasy.
Similarly, cats react violently to a canine menace—a wolf—whereas a man simply reaches for the nearest weapon.
This malignancy, therefore, was a presence alien to both feline and simian.
Perhaps, it was alien chiefly because of the altered evolutionary standard in this hothouse valley of forced growth. There was an odd sort of familiarity about that unseen presence. Raft felt certain that he had encountered something of the sort before, and often. Yet never had his living flesh shrunk from the mere nearness of any creature as it did now. Whatever dwelt in the Garden of Kharn, it was nothing remotely normal or healthy.
He stepped beneath the broad leaves and mushroom-caps of the forest. A sulphurous yellow light filtered through from above, lacking in the cool clarity of the atmosphere outside the Garden.
The ground underfoot was spongy, a moist, slippery muck into which his sandals sank mushily, with an unpleasant sucking sound. It was not silent here. There were furtive, quick movements all about him, hidden in that yellow jungle.
He was an intruder and felt it. A fleshy stem bent slowly toward him, sticky juice exuding from its surface. The sweetish odor of the liquor was sickening. Raft stepped away, and the branch rose slowly toward the perpendicular, as though it was dragging itself painfully upright against the fetters of gravity.
Yes, the forest was conscious of him. But there were no cannibal trees here, no gigantic Venus fly-traps that could swallow him whole. There was something horrible about the straining, awkward motion of those heavy leaves and stems.
The place was alive with insects. The forest crawled with them, flies, moths, butterflies, a myriad varieties crept and buzzed and fed on the ichor the trees sweated.
Some of the fungi had hollow caps like huge bowls, and the stench that rose from those liquid-filled basins was overpowering. Yet it was not entirely unpleasant.
Attar of roses is sickening in quantity, but the merest suggestion of attar has the opposite effect. Had the forest not sweated their perfume till the very air was saturated with it, Raft might not have objected. As it was, his clothes were moist and stinking with the stuff before he had traveled more than a few yards.
The trail of Parror and Craddock was well marked. There were other tracks in the soil, ambiguous prints Raft did not recognize. But he ignored these to follow his quarry. Parror had headed directly toward the center of the Garden.
One of the pink webwork creatures crept slowly into view. A filament of raw nerves, it crawled up the stem of a fungus and pulled itself into the liquid-filled cap. It immersed itself, floating motionless, its tendrils spreading out like the hair of a drowned woman.
A little creature, plated like an armadillo, rolled into view. Raft watched it warily. All over the armored body sharp spines stuck out.
It rolled toward Raft, but he avoided it easily. The spines looked dangerous. They might be toxic. Luckily the creature could not move fast.
It rolled into the jungle and was gone.
Raft went on. He saw another of the armored animals, but it was licking the stem of a fern-mushroom, and did not notice him. Then a clearing opened ahead, and it was—carpeted.
That was Raft’s first impression. Patterns of flowers, arabesque and exotic, blazed with a riot of color within a circular expanse twenty feet in diameter. But they were not flowers. A queer, smooth glaz
e seemed to overlie that expanse—and it was a carpet, after all. The meaningless, twisting pattern was the first touch of vivid color he had seen in the saffron forest.
Raft stood scowling, sensing more strongly now that dim pulse of a living presence in the Garden.
Slowly there crept into his mind the thought of a voice—whispering.
CHAPTER XI
Creeping Menace
IT CAME so slowly, so imperceptibly, that eerie voice, that Raft could not tell when it took form and shape in his brain. Yet it was not exactly a voice nor a thought. Rather, it was something akin to each, but with a difference. Communication is aimed at what psychologists call empathy—the transference of the senses from one mind to another, so that perfect understanding may be approached. It is rapport, never complete, always groping—
Till now.
Because the Intruder understood Raft. With its ancient wisdom it knew the very structure of his soul. Like ivy sliding through crevices in a wall, the thing permeated Raft, as though he stood bathed in a light that flowed into his body. As though he were a living sponge through which tidewater stole. The slow tide mounted.
The heavy scent of the forest was not so unpleasant now. Raft could sort out the component elements which made up the perfume, the sharp, pungent fluid that the armadillo-creatures liked, the warm, oily, sweet ichor that fed the nerve-things. Other juices, musk-heavy, eucalyptus-keen, salty and sour and pungent were present. It was oddly fascinating, this business of analyzing the odors and recognizing each one.
For they were, in essence, food-odors. Not human food. But nevertheless those smells stimulated the purely physical part of Raft and, through that, struck deep into his mind.
Feeding was an integral part of the lifecycle, the purpose for which all things were created. Dulled senses could not appreciate the pure ecstasy of absorbing nourishment. Only specialized beings could understand the delight which went through every cell of the body.
Collected Fiction Page 496
