Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  “You don’t want this war between Apollo and Hecate to come to a climax, do you?”

  “No. It might be disastrous. If things remain as they are, I look forward to a long and pleasant life.” He was quite frank about it.

  “And you don’t believe in the gods. Well, I don’t either. And I’m in a position to know. Still, your long, pleasant life may be very short and disagreeable if Apollo and Hecate meet.”

  He poured himself more wine. “Well?”

  “They can’t meet as we do. Only under certain conditions can they fight at all, and with certain weapons.” I paused, sipping. Phrontis leaned forward, his face eager. I had hooked him but he wasn’t landed yet! I reminded myself—Careful, careful! He’s no fool, this logical priest of Apollo!

  “If those tools could be smashed,” I said, and sipped again.

  “That was my plan,” he told me flatly. “To smash you and Cyane, make you useless to Hecate.”

  I laughed and turned my cup so the golden wine cascaded to the floor.

  “The lives of men! Do you think Hecate can’t find other tools? Lives are easily replaced, but there are weapons that can’t be. The gods are somewhat more than human—they do have great powers. But not without their tools.

  “They could fashion new tools.”

  “No. The Mask was made by Hephaestus, whom Apollo killed. This world would be safer for us both without it.”

  “Yes,” he said, studying the spilled wine. “Yes, perhaps.”

  “Not for me, you’re thinking. Oh yes, my life can be destroyed too. That thought’s in your mind. But what would you have to gain? Look now, Phrontis.” I leaned forward, laying my hand on his shoulder. “We’re men, not half-gods or gods. But we’re clever men. Let these so-called gods fight their battles in their own way, so long as they refrain from dragging us into their squabbles. In my world there is a vast store of knowledge that I could make very useful to you.”

  He nodded thoughtfully. He was not yet convinced.

  “You won’t kill me,” I said with a confidence I was far from feeling. “And later—I’ll be too useful for you to think of it.” I must make him think me pliable, as pliable as the old Jason. Already he believed me a little drunk. I waited patiently.

  After a time he said, “What is the Mask?”

  “I believe it’s an artificial brain, in effect. I have no language to describe it to you in your tongue. In mine, we’d call it something like a radioatomic colloid, perhaps, that once was imprinted with the thought-patterns and the character-matrixes of the original Circe.” I picked up an image from a nearby table, a figure of a centaur, moulded from clay that had been glazed and fire-kilned. I showed Phrontis a fingerprint on it.

  “The mark of the artisan’s finger. Perhaps the sculptor died long ago, but this part of him lives on. Do you understand?”

  “Fingerprints, yes,” he said. “But thoughts! Are thoughts real things?”

  “They are real,” I told him. “They are patterns of energy that can be recorded, as we’ve done in my world. The mind of the first Circe lives in the Mask, which is as I say, a machine. The Circes who worship Hecate are ordinary women. The goddess comes to them only when they wear the Mask.”

  I paused, watching him. Then, “The Fleece,” I said slowly, “is a machine too—no more. If that could be destroyed as well—”

  Phrontis looked up sharply. His eyes were piercing on mine.

  “What do you know about the Fleece?” I shrugged. “A little. Enough.”

  His laugh was faintly ironic. “Much or little, it doesn’t matter now. Do you think we haven’t tried to destroy the Fleece?”

  I WATCHED and waited. After a moment he went on. “We know the Fleece is a danger to Apollo. How? Well, only the gods know how. But many high priests for many generations have sought the secret of destroying it. All of them failed. Which is why it hangs in an inaccessible place, guarded to keep meddlers away! What we can’t destroy, we can at least keep safe.”

  “Perhaps I know how to get rid of it,” I said carelessly. “We’ll discuss that another time. As for the Mask, now—”

  “Oh, the Mask. I read your mind, my friend. You want to be sent to Aeaea to fetch it.”

  I looked as confused as I could. It wasn’t difficult. “No one else could be sure of bringing it back,” I said. He laughed, and I stood up suddenly. “Get it yourself, then I Go to Aeaea, if you dare, and ask Hecate to surrender the Mask to you! Remember this, Phrontis—I’ll work with you, but I’m no tool. I’ve told you one way to get the Mask. Now think of a way yourself, or admit you can’t. And don’t keep me waiting too long!” I stared at him long enough to make my point, then sat down and drank more wine.

  Presently he nodded. “Very well, go to Aeaea,” he said. “I’ll put a ship at your disposal. Meanwhile, you are my friend and guest. I’d rather be friend than enemy to you, Son of Jason.”

  “You’ll find it more profitable,” I warned him.

  He smiled. “I’d thought of that, of course. Yes, we shall be good friends.”

  He lied very gracefully.

  Panyr was right. I had changed in Apollo’s sanctum. The memories of Jason no longer troubled me. But I had not lost the memories—no, I had found them now. I could draw on them at will. And no longer was I shaken by Jason’s unstable emotions.

  As for the Eye of Apollo—it was indeed a clever gadget!

  Mnemonic probing is nothing new. The being called Apollo, or his priest-scientists, had developed a device highly specialized for psychic probing. Carried too far, it could strip away a man’s memories, leaving him helpless as a child. But I had been stopped in time.

  I had gained from the experience all the value of a complete mental catharsis, the basic principle of psychiatric treatment. It was the narcosynthetic treatment that had started this trouble for me, and it was the equivalent of narcosynthesis, in a totally alien world, that had cured me, but leaving me definitely on the spot in that alien world.

  Many points were not yet clear. By no stretch of the imagination could I logically explain the method by which I had come here. The Argo was dust long ago—or was it, after all? The people of Helios knew it, but as a ghost-ship with a ghostly crew, I could not answer that question, so I put it aside for awhile. There were other questions more immediately urgent and those I could answer. My double mind, the fact that Jason had sometimes held away in the mind of Jay Seward was not inexplicable now, though it involved space-time concepts that were revolutionary enough.

  In effect, I think, it was schizophrenia, though by no means as simple as that. Perhaps the real answer lay in the first Jason’s split personality, whose secondary quality had been—myself, or my counterpart, three thousand years ago. One half of Jason was shifty and facile—the half history remembers. The other was troubled with conscience and the dominant Jason thrust it down out of sight. But there was a clear and definite pattern to that hidden half of his mind, a pattern that recurred three thousand years later in myself.

  For undoubtedly, I thought, I was a lineal descendant of Jason, of Iolcus. It had been almost infinitely diluted by the intervening blood-lines, but the matrix was there and the matrix did recur. Stranger things have happened in the mysterious ways of inheritance. The same face, the same traits, the same mental make-up can duplicate themselves identically in a man’s great-great-great descendants. As mine had duplicated Jason’s submerged half.

  THE genes and chromosomes, after the thousands of years, recreated the other half of Jason’s double mind; a mental matrix through which I slipped back to the unforgotten, the unforgettable memories that science hints lie buried in us all.

  I think Phrontis’ analysis of these two worlds was accurate enough. This one was negative as our familiar one was positive. Our world trends toward a norm.; this one trended away from it. Perhaps the old Greek maps of their known world were more accurate than we think today, though they showed it flat and malformed, surrounded by an Ocean-Stream that poured constantly ov
er the brink into infinity. Perhaps Argo sails an Ocean-Stream like that, inexplicable to human minds. Argo, Argo!

  I put that thought out of my brain firmly. Jason’s emotions no longer swayed me. I had Apollo to deal with. He and Hecate and the fauns and their kind were normal enough on this world, though their counterparts had not survived on ours when the time-stream parted.

  I did not know why Apollo and Hecate warred or why no other gods seemed to matter any longer. Where had they gone, and why? And why did only these two remain behind? Whatever the answers, I felt quite sure this was no idle Olympian squabble such as legends record. They would have perfectly understandable, logical motives, once I discovered what they were.

  Super-powerful, yes—by our standards, but vulnerable to the right weapons. Still, I thought with grim amusement, not even gods like these could survive an atomic bomb!

  I didn’t even have a revolver. I didn’t need one. With the Mask and the Fleece, I’d be ready.

  Panyr’s hoofs clicked softly behind me in the corridor as I stood thinking outside Phrontis’ door. I smelled the musky fragrance of him and heard his breathing at my ear. I looked up. He was grinning.

  “Now what?” he asked.

  I squared my shoulders instinctively. The wine was buzzing faintly in my head, but I knew what I had to do. “The Fleece,” I said.

  Panyr’s gaze was dubious. “Do you know what a dangerous thing that is? Have you seen the Fleece?”

  “I want to. Now.”

  The old faun shrugged. “All right. Come along.”

  Busy priests looked at us curiously as I followed Panyr’s twitching goat-tail and clicking hoofs through the temple. But word must have gone out from Phrontis that I was to be indulged—within limits at least—for no one tried to stop us.

  A great many preparations seemed to be in progress. We left the private quarters and entered again the thronging public rooms, wide and busy as city streets, and I saw worry and strain on every face, dread, perhaps, as the Hour of the Eclipse drew nearer. I had almost forgotten that. Certainly it would have to enter into my plans.

  Twice we saw herds of noisy sheep and cattle being driven into enclosures where attendants with paint-pots gilded their hoofs and horns and hung their necks with wreaths for the sacrifices. The temple was full of the smell of incense being hurried in burning pots through the halls, slaves with armloads of spotless robes, with baskets spilling fresh flowers, with great pots of fragrant oil, all of them jostling one another on their errands and all a little pale and tending to start at sudden noises. Anxious eyes watched the sky from every window as they passed.

  The Hour of the Eclipse was approaching, and no one in Helios seemed very happy about it.

  AFTER a devious journey Panyr led me up a winding stair and paused at last before a shutter in the high blank wall of a corridor far away from the noises of the more frequented chambers. He laid a hand on the shutter and looked at me doubtfully, hesitating.

  “You still don’t trust me,” I said. “Is that it?”

  He met my eyes steadily, and his voice was very serious when he said, “Trust and faith aren’t words to be bandied lightly. I’m old, Jason—very old. I know a trust that fails in one lifetime may, in the end, be well kept. When the acorn falls, it thinks the oak has broken faith. But when an oak forest covers the land—”

  His voice deepened, and I thought I heard in its timbre a primal strength, a vast vitality drawn from the earth itself.

  “Also, I who am half a god, can wait to watch the acorn grow into the forest. I see more than you think. It may be that my plans have nothing to do with yours or it may be otherwise. You die in a few dozen years, but what you do now may change a world five thousand years from now. And I shall see that world, Jason—twin-souled Jason! It may be that I am using you and others as well, to shape a world you will never know.”

  “That may be,” I said. “Until I look on the Fleece—how can I help anyone?”

  He grinned. “All right, you think me garrulous. Perhaps I am. I have all the time in the loom of Clotho so I can afford to spin out my thoughts. But look on the Fleece if you must. And be careful how you stare!” He shrugged and pulled the shutter back.

  Daggers of golden light gushed through the opening, splashed upon the farther wall, filled the hallway with blinding brilliance. Panyr stepped back, shielding his eyes.

  “You look if you like,” he said. “It’s not for me.”

  I couldn’t, at first. My eyes had to adapt to that dazzling light and even then it was only by squinting and shading my face with both hand% that I got a painful glimpse of what lay beyond the shutter.

  There is a garden in the Temple of Helios where the flowers of Apollo burn the eyes that behold them. There is a garden where roses of white fire blaze among leaves of flame, dripping droplets of molten sunlight upon a floor of fire. In the center of that garden stands a tree.

  Legend records that the Golden Fleece hangs on a tree guarded by an unsleeping dragon. How much less than truth was in the legend I could see as my eyes adjusted to that aching glare. It was an allegory, indeed, but the truth was far stranger than the legend.

  I saw the Fleece. It was hard to focus on in all that blaze of shimmering fire, but I could make out the shape of it vaguely, pure gold, burning like the flowers with an unconsuming flame. I could see the ringlets of its pelt, white-hot, delicately curling wires that stirred slightly when the tree stirred.

  There was no python in the garden, no scaled guardian. The tree itself was the dragon.

  I saw the sluggish writhing of its boughs, gold-scaled, flexible, sliding over one another in an endless, sleepless stirring. There were no leaves, but every limb was tipped with a flat triangular head that watched unwinkingly in the glare of the burning garden.

  I fell back into the comparative dimness of the passage, hands to my eyes. Panyr laughed. “Go in and take it if you like,” he said ironically. “But don’t ask me to gather up your ashes for Circe. Not even a half-god could walk in that garden now. Do you still want the Fleece?”

  “Later,” I said, wiping the moisture that welled to my smarting eyes. “Later, not yet.” Panyr laughed, and to stop the derision I said, “I mean it. I know how to get the Fleece when I need it, and when the right time comes I’ll take it. Meanwhile the Mask of Circe will have to come to Helios. Phrontis is sending a ship for me to get it. Will you go, or shall I?”

  Panyr reached out and slid the shutter closed. In the dimness it seemed to me his yellow eyes were faintly luminous as they searched mine. A vague uncertainty sounded in his voice when he answered me.

  “Perhaps you know your own plans. Perhaps you don’t. Only a fool would go to Aeaea to rob Hecate of Circe’s mask. Do you think you won’t be torn apart by Circe’s beasts and half-beasts before you’ve passed the beach?”

  “I wasn’t last time.”

  “True,” he said, studying me. “Well, no weapons must be carried onto the sacred soil of Aeaea. If you go armed, you won’t have a chance. And a sword wouldn’t help you against the beasts anyway. It’s not my game. Play it yourself and pray for success.”

  I nodded. “Before the eclipse,” I told him, “you’ll see the Mask in Helios.” Privately I could only hope that was the truth.

  CHAPTER XI

  Aid from Hecate

  GENTLY the golden boat grated its keel on Aeaea’s sand. Oarsmen in golden garments leaped out to drag it up the beach and I stepped for the second time down upon the pale, cool strand of Circe’s isle.

  Fog hung here, as always, veiling the cypresses. I could hear the dripping of moisture among the trees. I thought eyes were watching me there, but I saw no sign of motion. My heart beat a little unevenly as I plowed my way up through the loose sand. Behind me the men from Helios watched in silence. I could expect no help from them. Aeaea was forbidden territory to Apollo’s devotees, and they had a healthy respect for the arts of the Enchantress.

  I entered the cypress woods alone.

&n
bsp; A voice shouted from far away as my foot touched the edge of the mossy grass where the beach ended. It was a hollow, echoing voice, as if the trees themselves were speaking.

  “He comes—he co-o-o-mes,” the voice cried distantly. And a shivering stirred the trees around me and ran outward until the cypresses moved as if in a strong wind. But there was no wind, and the mist still hung heavy around me, hiding whatever lay beyond.

  The crying of the hollow voice went on, but there were other voices in answer before I had gone a dozen steps. Wordless shouts, in voices that sounded half bestial and half human. And I was aware of the deep drumming, more felt than heard, that means hoofs approaching at a gallop. I went grimly on toward the center of the island where I knew the temple stood.

  The hoofbeats thundered nearer and nearer. In the fog the sound was confusing, disoriented. I could not tell if it came from one side, or from all sides. There were rustlings in the underbrush beneath the higher soughing of the trees in that wind I could not feel. Then I stopped short and my flesh crawled with sudden horror at the sound of a high, flat, laughing scream almost at my side. It might have been cat or human, or both. It might have been sobbing or laughter, or both. It set my teeth on edge as I stared around in the dimness.

  And then thundering hoofbeats were upon me and the world turned upside down. I gasped and floundered suddenly in midair, catching my breath against the rush of air as I was swept sidewise through space, strong arms spinning me effortlessly aloft, strong hoofbeats pounding rhythmically beneath me as the forest rushed past.

  Laughter, cold and inhuman, sounded in my ear. With a violent wrench I got my head around to see what it was that held me. I was looking into a man’s face, into flat-pupiled yellow-brown eyes with that same indefinable touch of the beast in them that dwelt in Panyr’s. The man spun me away from him again, laughing his cold, whinnying laughter, and I knew incredulously that this was no human. From the waist up he was man; from the waist down he was horse. With a shudder I remembered the wild savagery of the centaur tribes.