Lin Carter - Down to a Sunless Sea

by Lin Carter

  They had no boats, but something like long fibrous pontoons strapped to their feet, and they moved out to sea by the use of long paddles. Zuarra, to whom the sea was still a fearful and a marvelous thing, decided to stay behind, but watched anxiously as Brant paddled out with the youngsters. He was awkward at maintaining his balance, at which the children hooted and cried, but out of mischief, not from malice.

  And suddenly, a swarm of sea-slugs made the surface of the ocean boil. Merrily boasting, the children snagged these with lassoes fastened on the end of short rods, and scooped the wriggling creatures out of the water, tossing them in rattan baskets they wore strapped to their backs. Brant was nowhere near as agile at this as were the youngsters, who had, of course, been accustomed to this form of sport all their young lives.

  Brant was curious as to how the children knew where the slugs would rise to the surface, and when. He asked Kirin about this, for by this time he had mastered the local language sufficiently to converse in simple words.

  The boy looked puzzled.

  “We do not know when they will come, or where,” the boy said. “We���make���them come.”

  “How do you do that?” demanded Brant.

  Kirin touched his forehead, exactly between and about an inch above his eyes.

  “With the niothya, of course! How else?”

  This word was new to Brant and was not a part of his rudimentary grammar of the tongue of the Sea People. But just about then the fishing got so busy that he decided to explore the matter later, once things had quieted down.

  Once the baskets were full, the fishermen returned to Zhah, and Zuarra was heartily relieved to see that Brant had not been harmed by his dreadful exposure to this strange new element called “water.”

  Later, when Brant told Will Harbin about the enigmatic niothya, the old scientist admitted he had never heard of it.

  “Sounds like telepathy, to me,” he said skeptically. “Another old superstition, long exploded back on Earth. But … well, why not? First alchemy, now mind-reading���or mind-control, or whatever. I’ll have to start believing in necromancy and black magic next, I suppose!”

  As things turned out, that very evening they learned more of this mysterious niothya power. Aulli and Kirin came to inform them that they were all invited to a festival, which Prince Azuri was holding in honor of the visitors.

  “Sounds all right to me,” Brant said amiably. “What sort of a festival is it?” He presumed they had in mind a lot of singing, and dancing, and plenty to eat; but you never could be sure with these lazy, naked people, who entered into amours so casually, and walked away from them at the first signs of boredom.

  They might have meant an orgy, and he didn’t think Harbin would enjoy that sort of thing.

  “Of the niothya,” the children said in chorus, and left the room. Harbin and Brant exchanged a glance of interest.

  “Now perhaps we’ll find out what all this mumbojumbo is about,” declared the scientist.

  That evening they ate in their cubicles, as servants brought succulent dishes on wicker trays to where they all were staying. After the meal, Kirin and Aulli came to fetch them to the festival, and they came to a very large hall which they had not seen before, where rows of benches climbed the walls in tiers, not unlike the bleachers at a sports event.

  Taking the places of honor which had been reserved for them, the travelers glanced about curiously, wondering what was about to happen.

  “Shall we begin the Festival of Dreams now, O Prince?” inquired one personage who seemed to be acting in the capacity of master of ceremonies on this occasion. Prince Azuri, who was cuddling and whispering with a tall, long-legged girl with pointed breasts like ripe pears, and whom

  Brant had been given to understand was the Prince’s latest lover, nodded distractedly.

  With an impressive gesture that seemed to command silence, the master of ceremonies, Hathera, seated himself in the center of the arena on a plump cushion. Kirin, who sat at Brant’s left, slipped his small hand into the Earthsider’s big paw.

  “We must all join hands now,” the boy informed him. His bright eyes were alive with excitement and anticipation. Brant didn’t understand why, but nodded, and took the hand of Zuarra, who sat at his right. After all, when in Rome… .

  Silence fell as the throng ceased whispering and chatting. The quality of the silence was not strained exactly���not one of breathless suspense���but rather calm, placid, serene. Brant wondered to himself if they were supposed to pray.

  Then Zuarra gasped, and stiffened, and Brant’s jaw dropped in amazement. For out of sheer nothingness formless colors appeared. Lambent haloes and streamers and shapeless blurs floated, wound, or drifted. Lilac, pink, cream, orange, lavender, amber, puce, mauve���it was as if the elves had ransacked a rainbow for its loveliness, and were invisibly strewing its luminous treasures on the empty air.

  Brant looked around at the nearer faces; all were rapt, expectant, almost ecstatic. Will Harbin was staring dumbfounded, his jaw slack. Tuan sat stiffly, bristling with stern disapproval at this unnatural sorcery. Brant let his gaze return to the center of the arena, where in mid-air the colors were still forming.

  The luminous hues strengthened, becoming brighter in color and beginning to shape themselves into definite forms. Some were things like blossoms, which reminded Brant of the flowerlike handicrafts which festooned the rafters of the throne room. Others were like lucent bubbles that floated to and fro. One such bubble began to chase the others and they fled from his rush, forming a long train of flying spheres that wound around the pillars which supported the roof, in and out of the rafters, causing the younger children to burst into giggling while the older people watched the lovely game with smiling faces, nodding judiciously, as if applauding an artistic performance of some sort. Which was probably exactly what the Festival of Dreams was, after all.

  The bolder and more aggressive bubble, unable to catch any of the timid, fleeing ones, paused hovering in the middle of the room and began to blow itself bigger and bigger, as it were. The larger it grew in girth, the fainter became its color���which, by the way, was mauve.

  As the tint dimmed, an opalescent display of fleeting shades and admixtures and permutations of color crawled across the surface of the expanding sphere, reminding Brant and Harbin of the wealth of hues sunlight strikes from the oily scum that floats on the surface of water in the gutters of streets.

  Zuarra���and many others, too���gave voice to a gasp as the expanding sphere suddenly exploded in a gush of many-colored sparks that fountained into the air and fell back again in curving, graceful streamers. Hers had been a gasp of alarm, however, while the others had gasped at the beauty of the thing.

  Like a cloud of fireflies, the shower of sparks collected, formed a whirlpool that slowly revolved, a wheeling vortex formed of minute points of pure light that looked like nothing more than models of the galaxy which Brant had seen back in Nebraska as a boy.

  The belt of sparkling light began to revolve faster and faster, sucking up and absorbing all of the other light-shapes in the arena, the floating flowerlike forms, the shapeless blurs, and even the shy bubbles which still lurked or lingered among the rafters of the ceiling.

  Now���rousing a concerted murmur of pleasure from the audience���the vortex came apart in long, meandering streamers composed of particles of light. These wove about the room, forming incredible arabesques of sinuous, interweaving complexities that would defy description. Bands of different colors flickered through the weaving spirals in a sequence that began with deepest crimson, then carmine, brick-red, warm pink and so on throughout the spectrum of the colors visible to the human eye, ending in the deepest of violets.

  At which point the lights winked out and the show, it seemed, was ended. A thunder of delighted applause crashed like surf upon the head of the master of ceremonies, Hathera, who now could be seen as rather the artist who had orchestrated the displ
ay. He bowed deeply, beaming with smiles at the success of his exhibition.

  The crowd rose, broke up in groups, and went into adjoining rooms to sample liqueurs from trays already laid out and awaiting them, to discuss among themselves excitedly the quality of the work they had seen.

  “That was … niothyal” asked Brant in an awed whisper of Kirin.

  “It was niothya,” the boy nodded solemnly.

  25

  The Serpent

  They discussed the marvels they had seen later, once the festivities had concluded. The outlaws regarded the phenomenon from the viewpoint of their superstitions.

  “It was sorcery���black sorcery���and naught else more!” growled Tuan with truculence and aversion. Will Harbin shook his white head.

  “It was a lot more than that,” said the older man. “Telepathic communion? A shared illusion, projected into the minds of those in the audience? That fellow Hathera seemed to be in charge somehow, as if he was sharing telepathically his own imaginings. …”

  “Yeah, but did we see what we thought we saw?” demanded Brant.

  “Only a camera could give us the answer to that question, Jim,” said Harbin. “But I don’t think so, not at all. The illusions were projected into our minds, and the visual centers of the brain translated them as floating shapes of color.”

  “Looked damned real,” muttered Brant.

  “Remember how we all joined hands?” asked Will Harbin. “Each human body projects a very weak electrical field. And thought itself is electrical in nature, for the brain is, among other things, an electrochemical battery. No, joining hands linked our electrical fields into communion, like they used to do way back in the old days at seances. Hathera then drew upon the communion of minds to conduct a symphony of color-illusions. …”

  They talked about the thing a bit more, but gave it up as just another baffling mystery, one of the many Mars concealed in her ancient heart.

  Garden of Eden, or Fairyland? Brant wondered: maybe a little of both.

  Later on that “night” as they slept, the Serpent at last reared its ugly head.

  Brant was sleeping soundly, with Zuarra clasped naked in his arms, when rudely and suddenly roused. Tuan was looming over him, his expression ominous, his eyes cold and dangerous.

  “What’s up?” growled Brant, coming awake all at once, like a startled jungle thing.

  “Is it you, O Brant, have thieved the f’yagha weapons from me?” demanded the chieftain, fiercely.

  “Which weapons?”

  Tuan, in hissing tones, said that the brace of power guns were missing from his side when he awoke. Brant grinned wolfishly, baring strong white teeth.

  “You mean the pistols you stole from me, back at the camp?” he inquired sardonically. But Tuan was in a vicious temper, and refused to let the sarcastic implications of Brant’s questions faze him in the slightest.

  “The same,” he snarled. Brant shrugged, opening his arms.

  “Look around. See for yourself. I don’t have them���didn’t take them���and there’s nowhere to hide them here.”

  Without another word, Tuan and his men searched the cubicle, and found no sign of the missing weapons.

  “Then who else could have taken them, O Brant, answer that question if you can.”

  Brant considered. As far as he knew, the Sea People of Zhah still had no idea that the weapons the visitors had borne with them were weapons. Will Harbin would hardly have run the risk of stealing the guns back from Tuan without discussing it first with Brant. And Zuarra had slept all night at his side.

  That left only Suoli, who was much too fearful and timid to have risked arousing the ire of the outlaw chief.

  Suoli or … Agila?

  Brant mentioned this to Tumi The other grunted turned, stalked stiff-legged from the cubicle.

  “Let us go and see,” he snapped at Brant over his shoulder.

  They went to the cubiclc where Agila and Suoli had become accustomed to sleeping, and found it empty. Wild rage flared in the hard eyes of Tuan.

  “Tuan should have slain that snake when he had the chance,” he muttered to himself between clenched teeth. Brant was about to propose a search of the palace for the missing pair, when the sounds of a distant commotion came to their ears. Cries of consternation and alarm were clearly audible in this many-roomed palace where the very walls were but flimsy screens of woven rattan.

  “Come on!” Brant said to Tuan, setting off at a run in the direction from which the startled voices had come.

  They pelted along, with Brant and Tuan side by side, and the others hot on their heels, shoving their way through cubicles and suites, rousing bewildered sleepers by their sudden interruption.

  Before more than a few minutes had passed, they burst into one of the apartments of Prince Azuri, and stopped short. For they had found the scene of the commotion, and had burst upon a tableau whose nature froze the blood in Brant’s veins and raised the hackles on his nape.

  “You … damned …fool!” he groaned helplessly. For they were all truly helpless now, and the Serpent had entered into Eden at last. And, which was very much worse, they had brought the Serpent with them, however unknowingly… .

  Sprawled out stark naked in a jumble of soft, small cushions Prince Azuri lay. Blood ran slowly from a ghastly wound on the side of his head. The travelers could not at once tell whether the young monarch of Zhah was dead or merely unconscious. Then they saw he was not breathing.

  The young woman who had been his companion earlier at the Dream Festival now crouched pale and wide-eyed and shivering with fear in the far corner. She seemed merely frightened and shocked, but was unharmed as far as they could tell.

  Over the limp body of Prince Azuri, Agila crouched, snarling and showing his white teeth, like a wild beast brought to bay by hunting-hounds. In one hand he clenched one of the two power guns.

  From the other hand, looped and trailing chains of jeweled fire flashed and glowed and glimmered. The lean wolf had been in the act of robbing Azuri’s body when he had been interrupted.

  Zuarra clutched Brant’s arm, nodding in the other direction. “Oh, no!” she moaned under her breath. Brant looked in that direction and saw Suoli, shaking with fear or excitement��� perhaps from both���holding the other power gun in trembling fingers.

  Just before Brant and the others had burst upon the scene of the crime, some of the Sea People who dwelt in the palace had come upon it unexpectedly. It was from their throats had come the cries of alarm and shock and consternation which had alerted Brant and Tuan.

  They stood frozen in disbelief, the naked youths and maidens. They seemed not so much angry as appalled, and it occurred to Brant that perhaps never before in their young lives had the Sea People observed a crime of violence. In this peaceful floating paradise, violence and crime, theft and murder, were doubtless completely unknown.

  And Brant groaned a curse under his breath, staring at Agila. This dreamlike fairyland, with its innocent golden children had reminded him of the old story of Eden���of Eden before the Serpent. And now the Serpent was come at last into Eden, and they had brought him in… .

  Agila caught Brant’s attention with a savage gesture.

  “You speak their strange tongue a little, fyagh,” he snarled, his voice shaking as if he was dangerously near to losing his self-control. “Tell them that these things we hold are weapons of great power, weapons that can slay from afar, and of power so great that at will we could bring this city down upon their heads!”

  “Agila, don’t be more of a fool than you already are,” said Brant swiftly. “Put down the guns, you and Suoli and surrender. These are a people given to peaceful way. at very most, they will drive you out of the city. and the two of you can easily fend for yourselves in the fungus forests ol the mainland���”

  The cold, unwinking black eye of his own power gun stabbed in the direction of Brant’s gut. “Do as I say,” hissed Agila, his eyes wild and wary.<
br />
  Tuan caught Brant’s eye. “Do as the dog orders,” whispered the outlaw chief. “Or we are all dead men.”

  Just then a newcomer came pushing through the shock-frozen crowd of the Sea People, and stopped abruptly at the scene before him. Brant recognized the man as Hathera, he who had orchestrated the Dream Festival earlier, and who seemed in a position of some authority in the palace of Zhah.

  Hathera said nothing, not even bothering to inquire what had happened here. He looked sorrowfully at the naked body of his Prince, sprawled in an awkward position like that of a jointed puppet whose strings have suddenly been cut.

  “Aihee!” moaned Hathera in sobbing tones. “Aihee, O my brethren! Behold the young Prince, the beautiful Prince, struck down by the hand of one that was a visitor in his own city and a guest in his own house!” And he swayed, moaning a soft, crooning, wordless song. One by one all of the other Sea People began to sway to the same slow rhythm, joining their voices to his own.

  “Aihee, aihee,” they chanted. And strangely there was no anger in their expressions, only sadness, a deep, heart-aching sadness that touched Brant to his soul.

  “Aihee, my brethren, come … let us join minds in memory of our fallen Prince, Azuri the Beautiful,” moaned Hathera softly, and he closed his eyes as if concentrating, as did all of the Sea People in the room.

  And Brant’s guts went ice-cold, for he knew exactly what was about to happen���

  26

  The Ending

  As the Sea People joined hands in mental communion, their eyes became blank and vacant, their faces smoothed from grimaces of sadness and despair into placid expressionlessness.

  For a long, breathless moment nothing at all happened.

  Then���

  Agila staggered, paled to a greenish, sickly hue, his eyes wide and bright with fear and lack of comprehension.

  The power gun fell from slackening fingers to thud against the floor-mats.

  The thief seemed struggling for breath, face blackening with the effort to suck air into starved lungs. His eyes bulged hideously from their sockets: it was as if bands of iron tightened about his ribs, crushing the breath from him.