He turned to face the Earthman. “You have come with your thundering ships, your machines and your science, giving the lie to our gods, who we thought had created no other men but us. You look upon us as degraded and without knowledge—and yet you too are an ignorant people, not because you have forgotten, but because you have not yet learned. There are many sciences, many kinds of knowledge. There have been races on Mars who could build the canals. There were others who could see without eyes and hear without ears, who could control the elements and cause men to live or die as they willed it, who were so powerful that they were stamped out because men feared them. They are forgotten now, but their blood is in us. And sometimes a child is born—”
Fraser stiffened.
Tor-Esh said quietly, “There was talk among the nomads about a child.”
Nerves, drawing tight in Fraser’s belly. Fear-nerves, and a chill sweat. I never mentioned Bisha. How could he know—
“I’m not interested in folklore. Just tell me—”
“There was a certain evil in the tribe. When the child was taken away, the evil departed. Now it is in your house. It seems that the mother lied. The child is not dead. She is with you.”
“Witchcraft and sorcery,” Fraser snarled. “Curses and cowardice. I thought you knew better, Tor-Esh.” He started for the door. “I was a fool to come here.”
Tor-Esh moved swiftly and placed his hand on the latch that it might not be lifted until he was through.
“We are ignorant folk, but still we do not kill children because we find pleasure in it. As for witchcraft and sorcery—words are words. Only facts have meaning. If you wish to die, that is your affair. But when you are dead the child must come into the town—and that is our affair. I will send word to the nomads. The girl is theirs, and the duty belongs to them; we do not wish it. But until they come I will set a wall around your house. You are likely to die quite soon. There were twenty in her tribe to share the curse, but you are alone, and we can take no chances.”
Seeing, perhaps, the absolute horror in Fraser’s face, Tor-Esh added, “It will be done mercifully. We bear the child no hate.”
He lifted the latch, and Fraser went into the narrow street. He turned toward the desert, and when he had crossed the plowed land he began to run. He ran fast, but a rider passed him, speeding into the desert on the track of the caravan.
Bisha was waiting for him, sleepily anxious. He said, “You know where the food is. Pack as much as you can in the trac-car. Blankets, too. Hurry up, we’re leaving.”
He went into the laboratory. In violent haste, but with the utmost care, he destroyed the work of months, tempted as he did so to forget ethics and scatter his virus cultures broadcast into the town. Evil. Superstition. Legendary warlocks, tales of mighty wizards. He had read some of the old imaginative stories, written before space flight, in which ruthless Earthmen were pictured trampling innocent Mars under their feet. Logic and logistics both had made that impossible, when it came to the unromantic reality, and he was almost sorry. He would have liked to trample some Martians under his feet.
When the laboratory was cleansed, he threw his notes together in a steel box and took them into the dust-tight shed at the back of the Quonset where the trac-car was housed. Bisha, tear-streaked and silent, had been patiently lugging supplies. He checked them rapidly, added a few more, and swung the child up into the cab. She looked at him, and he realized then that she was frightened. “Don’t worry,” he told her. “We’re going to be all right.”
“You’re not taking me back?”
He said savagely, “I’m taking you to the Terran consulate at Karappa, and after that I’m taking you to San Francisco. And nobody had better try to stop me.”
He flung open the shed door and climbed in beside her. The trac-car rolled out clanking across the sand. And already there were lines of torches, streaming out from the town, flung across his way.
He said, “Crouch down on the floor, Bisha, and stay there. You won’t get hurt.”
He poured on the power. The trac-car lurched forward, snorting and raising a great cloud of dust. He headed it straight for the wavering line of torches, ducking his head instinctively so that he was pressed close to the wheel. The cap was metal, and the glass parts of it were theoretically unbreakable, but he could see now in the torchlight the bright metal throwing-sticks of the townsmen, the swift boomerangs that could take off a man’s head as neatly as a knife blade. He ducked.
Something hit the window beside him, starring it with a millions cracks. Other things whacked and rattled viciously against the car. The torches fell away from in front of him, taking with them the dark startled faces of the men who held them. He was through the line. The open desert was before him. Three hundred miles, Karappa, and civilization.
If he could beat the nomads.
He had better beat them. It was his neck as well as Bisha’s. He needed care. He needed it fast, from somebody who did not believe in curses.
Dawn came, cold in a dark sky, veiled in dust. There was no canal between them and Karappa, no town, nothing but the fine dry sand that flowed like water under the wind.
“Look here,” he said to Bisha. “If I should suddenly fall asleep—” He showed her how to stop the trac-car. “At once, Bisha. And stay inside the cab until I wake again.” She nodded, her lips pressed tight with the effort of concentration. He made her do it several times until he was sure she would not forget.
The miles flowed out before and behind, to left and to right, featureless, unbroken. How long would it take a single rider to catch a laden caravan? How long for the desert men on their fleet beasts to find a trail? The sand was soft and the clanking treads sank in it, and no matter how much you wanted to hurry you could go no faster than the desert would let you.
Bisha had been thinking hard. Suddenly she said, “They will follow us.”
She was smart, too smart for her own good. Fraser said, “The nomads? We can beat them. Anyway, they’ll soon give up.”
“No, they’ll follow. Not you, but me. And they will kill us both.”
Fraser said, “We’re going to Earth. The men of Mars, and the gods of Mars, can’t reach there.”
“They are very powerful gods—Are you sure?”
“Very sure. You’ll be happy on Earth, Bisha.”
She sat close to him, and after a while she slept. There was a compass on the dash, a necessity in that place of no roads and no landmarks. Fraser kept the needle centered, setting a course as though with a ship. Time and the sand rolled on, and he was tired.
Tired.
You are likely to die quite soon—there were twenty in her tribe to share the curse—
The desert whispered. The sounds of the trac-car were accepted and forgotten by the ear, and beyond them the desert whispered, gliding, sliding, rippling under the wind. Fraser’s vision blurred and wavered. He should not have pushed himself so hard at the work. Tired, no resistance to the sickness. That was why it had been light among the hardy nomads, more serious in him, an alien already worn down by months of confinement and mental strain. That was why.
—twenty in her tribe to share it—but you, alone—
Three hundred miles isn’t so far. Of course you can make it. You’ve made it in an afternoon, on Earth.
This isn’t Earth. And you didn’t make it in a cold creeping desert.
You, alone—
Damn Tor-Esh!
“Bisha, wake up. We need some food. And first off, I need that bottle.”
With a drink and some food inside him he felt better. “We’ll keep on all night. By morning, easy, we’ll be in Karappa. If the nomads are following, they’ll never catch up.”
Mid-afternoon, and he was driving in a daze. He lost track of the compass. When he noticed it again he was miles off his course. He sat for some minutes trying to remember the correct reading, trembling. Bisha watched him.
“Don’t look so frightened,” he said. His voice rose. “I’m all right. I’ll get us there!”
>
She hung her head and looked away from him.
“And don’t cry, damn it! Do you hear? I’ve got enough on my neck without you being doleful.”
“It is because of me,” she said. “You should have believed the words of the Old Men.”
He struck her, the first time he had ever laid his hand on her in anger. “I don’t want any more of that talk. If you haven’t learned better in all this time—”
She retreated to the other side of the seat. He got the trac-car going again, in the right direction, but he did not go far. He had to rest. Just an hour’s sleep would help. He stopped. He looked at Bisha, and like something that had happened years ago he remembered that he had slapped her.
“Poor little Bisha,” he said, “and it isn’t any of it your fault. Will you forgive me?”
She nodded, and he kissed her, and she cried a little, and then he went to sleep, telling her to wake him when the hand on the dashboard clock reached five. It was hard to rouse when the time came, and it was full dark before the trac-car was lurching and bucking its way out of the sand that had drifted around it. Fraser was not refreshed. He felt worse, if anything, sapped and drained, his brain as empty as an upturned bucket.
He drove.
He was off his course again. He must have dozed, and the car had made a circle to the south. He turned angrily to Bisha and said, “Why didn’t you stop the car? I told you—”
In the faint glow from the dashboard he saw her face, turned toward the desert, and he knew the look on it, the withdrawal and the sadness. She did not answer. Fraser swore. Of all the times to pick for a fit of the blues, when he needed her so badly! She had enough to make her moody, but it was getting to be a habit, and she had no right to indulge her emotions now. She had already cost them precious hours, precious miles. He reached out and shook her.
It was like shaking a rag doll. He spoke to her sharply. She seemed not to hear. Finally he stopped the car, furious with her stubbornness, and wrenched her around to face him. For the second time he slapped her.
She did not weep. She only whispered, “I can’t help it. They used to punish me too, but I can’t help it.”
She didn’t seem to care. He couldn’t touch her, couldn’t penetrate. He had never tried to shake her out of those moods before. Now he found that he could not. He let her sink back into the corner, and he looked at her, and a slow corrosive terror began to creep through him because of the times before—the times that she had been like this.
The times immediately preceding the periods of blackness, the abnormal sleep.
A pattern. Every time, the same unvaried pattern.
But it made no sense. It was only coincidence.
Coincidence, three times repeated? And how had Tor-Esh known so certainly that the child was with him?
Three times, the pattern. If it happened a fourth time, it could not be coincidence. If it happened a fourth time, he would know.
Could he afford a fourth time?
Crazy. How could a child’s moods affect a man?
He grabbed her again. A desperation came over him. He treated her roughly, more roughly than he could ever have dreamed of treating a child. And it did no good. She looked at him with remote eyes and bore it without protest, without interest.
Not a mood, then. Something else.
What?
Sometimes a child is born—
Fraser sent the trac-car rushing forward along the beam from its headlights, a bright gash in the immemorial dark.
He was afraid. He was afraid of Bisha. And still he would not believe.
Get to Karappa. There’s help there. Whatever it is there’ll be somebody to know the truth, to do something. Keep awake; don’t let the curtain fall again.
Think. We know it isn’t a curse; that’s out. We know it isn’t a disease. We know it isn’t side-effects; they’d have been observed. Besides, Tor-Esh understood.
What was it he said about old races? What did they teach us about them in the colleges? Too much, and not enough. Too many races, and not enough time.
They could see without eyes and hear without ears, they could control the elements—He tried to remember, and it was a pain and a torment. He looked at the child. Old races. Recessive genes, still cropping out. But what’s the answer? ESP is known among the Martians, but this isn’t ESP. What, then?
A remnant, a scrap of something twisted out of shape and incomplete?
What is she so lonesome for, that she doesn’t know?
The answer came to him suddenly, clear as the ringing of a bell. A page from a forgotten textbook, horded all these years in his subconscious, a casual mention of a people who had tried to sublimate the conditions of a dying world by establishing a kind of mental symbiosis, living in a tight community, sharing each others’ minds and their potentials, and who had succeeded in acquiring by their mass effort such powers of mental control that for several centuries they had ruled this whole quadrant of Mars, leaving behind them a host of legends.
And a child.
A child normal and healthy in every way but one. Her brain was incomplete, designed by a cruel trick of heredity to be one of a community of interdependent minds that no longer existed. Like a battery, it discharged its electrical energy in the normal process of thinking and living, and like a run-down battery it must be charged again from outside, because its own regenerative faculty was lacking. And so it stole from the unsuspecting minds around it, an innocent vampire draining them whenever it felt the need.
It was draining his now. There had been twenty in her tribe, and so none of them had died as yet. But he was alone. And that was why the intervals had shortened, because he could no longer satisfy her need.
And the Martians in their ignorance were right. And he in his wisdom had been wrong.
If he put her out now, and left her in the desert, he would be safe.
He stopped the car and looked at her. She was so little and helpless, and he had come to love her. It wasn’t her fault. Something might still be done for her, a way might be found, and in a city she would not be so deadly.
Could he survive another plunge into the darkness?
He didn’t know. But she had run away once of her own accord, for his sake. He could do no less than try.
He took her into his arms.
The curtain dropped.
Fraser woke slowly, in brazen sunshine and a great silence. As one creeping back from the edge of an abyss he woke, and the car was very still. There was no one in it with him. He called, but there was no answer.
He got out of the car. He walked, calling, and then he saw the tracks. The tracks of the nomads’ beasts, coming toward the car from behind. The small tracks of Bisha’s feet, going back to meet them.
He stopped calling. The sound of his voice was too loud, too terrible. He began to run, back along that trail. It ended in a little huddle of clothing that had no life in it.
She had broken her promise to him. She had disobeyed and left him, asleep and safe, to meet the riders by herself, the riders who were following her, not him.
So small a grave did not take long to dig.
Fraser drove on. There was no more danger now, but he drove fast, seeing the desert in a blur, wanting only Earth—but not a white house there that for him would be forever haunted.
The Last Days of Shandakor
1
HE CAME alone into the wineshop, wrapped in a dark red cloak, with the cowl drawn over his head. He stood for a moment by the doorway and one of the slim dark predatory women who live in those places went to him, with a silvery chiming from the little bells that were almost all she wore.
I saw her smile up at him. And then, suddenly, the smile became fixed and something happened to her eyes. She was no longer looking at the cloaked man but through him. In the oddest fashion—it was as though he had become invisible.
She went by him. Whether she passed some word along or not I couldn’t tell but an empty space widened around the stranger. A
nd no one looked at him. They did not avoid looking at him. They simply refused to see him.
He began to walk slowly across the crowded room. He was very tall and he moved with a fluid, powerful grace that was beautiful to watch. People drifted out of his way, not seeming to, but doing it. The air was thick with nameless smells, shrill with the laughter of women.
Two tall barbarians, far gone in wine, were carrying on some intertribal feud and the yelling crowd had made room for them to fight. There was a silver pipe and a drum and a double-banked harp making old wild music. Lithe brown bodies leaped and whirled through the laughter and the shouting and the smoke.
The stranger walked through all this, alone, untouched, unseen. He passed close to where I sat. Perhaps because I, of all the people in that place, not only saw him but stared at him, he gave me a glance of black eyes from under the shadow of his cowl-eyes like blown coals, bright with suffering and rage.
I caught only a glimpse of his muffled face. The merest glimpse—but that was enough. Why did he have to show his face to me in that wineshop in Barrakesh?
He passed on. There was no space in the shadowy corner where he went but space was made, a circle of it, a moat between the stranger and the crowd. He sat down. I saw him lay a coin on the outer edge of the table. Presently a serving wench came up, picked up the coin and set down a cup of wine. But it was as if she waited on an empty table.
I turned to Kardak, my head drover, a Shunni with massive shoulders and uncut hair braided in an intricate tribal knot. “What’s all that about?” I asked.
Kardak shrugged. “Who knows?” He started to rise. “Come, JonRoss. It is time we got back to the serai.”
“We’re not leaving for hours yet. And don’t lie to me, I’ve been on Mars a long time. What is that man? Where does he come from?”
Barrakesh is the gateway between north and south. Long ago, when there were oceans in equatorial and southern Mars, when Valkis and Jekkara were proud seats of empire and not thieves’ dens, here on the edge of the northern Drylands the great caravans had come and gone to Barrakesh for a thousand thousand years. It is a place of strangers.
The Coming of the Terrans Page 7
