Star SHort Novels - [Anthology]

by Edited By Frederik Pohl

  Look yonder: look! There by herself, with a candle on her table, sits the most beautiful woman who ever lived. Her hair is soft sable, long, straight, fine, and thick; her eyes and cheekbones the delicate strong interacting Eurasian arch-sequence. Her nostrils are petal-textured, moving as indetectably as the shift from one aurora-pattern to the next, but sensitively in motion even from her shallow breathing as she sits still, so still . . . and surely she is the saddest woman who ever lived, or a mouth such as hers could not be sleeping so, nor the head turned and held just that way of all ways, nor the shoulders so careless and the hands so forgotten. Is she grieving from loneliness, in the knowledge that never in life can she meet her like? Or has she been hurt by a small someone, and cannot understand?

  I raise a hand, and the Dean-faced obsolescent console drifts to me. “Who is she?”

  “I’ll find out for you in a moment, sir.”

  “No, don’t!” It bursts from me. “Please don’t.” (Now, why not?) “You mustn’t do that.”

  “Very well, sir,” and as if he senses my distress, “really I won’t.”

  “Why is she so sad?” And I don’t know I’ve spoken until he answers: “I think she has been disappointed, sir. She has been sitting there alone for a long while.” He bends a little closer, as if to add a great importance to what he has to say. “I think, sir, that she is very young.”

  And somehow I understand precisely what he means; he means that she is frightened, but will not suggest fear in the burnished security of this moneyed place, of which he is such a piece.

  Fear . . . there are fears and fears, depending upon one’s origins and sense of value. Seimel, who hunts tigers with a spear, faces death without fear, and I know a man who is struck numb at the sound of a key in a Yale lock; who’s to say which terror is great or small, or that it’s a small thing to be a girl who dare not leave a table because she has no money? “Well, let her go. I’ll take her check.”

  “Yes, sir.” His glossy finish emits, like an alpha particle, a brief bright flash of approval. “Shall I take her your card?”

  “Oh God no!” Again the thought of knowing her at all distresses me. “Just say a hippogriff flew by.”

  Unperturbed he says, “Quite, sir,” and, as a good piece of furniture should, rolls silently and unbendingly away on his casters.

  I wait, and I wait; and there coming in is a chinchilla coat which will be flung over a chair somewhere just under a light, and yonder a fat face laughs too loudly; the trombone, part of a chord, still gives me two notes exactly right for a girl’s inexpressible loneliness and my feelings about it, and the man with the shiny-cart moves the heel of a silver spoon deftly through the pure transparent heat springing bluely from the bubbling blood of the jubilee . . . and as if by accident, the fine Dean’s- head bows over the girl’s table and he speaks to her.

  Her face, when she looks up, blinds me for a moment. Or maybe my tears do. She radiates no happiness—some great grief is bred too deeply into this girl’s fine bones—but there is a change which permits hands to be remembered and a mouth to live again. It could have been fear and its removal, an excision which works wonders with dogs and humans, and might, I imagine, even with nations.

  And so she may turn her head away from sorrow, and when she does, the breath catches in my throat; in the nocturnal texture of her hair lies a single streak of silver, a hue of just the deadness, just the distance of a winter moon. No other color could treat with such precision of an inherent sorrow, and no other creature has been so correctly branded as this girl.

  I saw motion pictures of a lily growing; shoot to blossom in a brace of seconds; and as it rose and burst, so she rises and shakes back her hair. I saw a strand of spider web drift by and away, streaming; and so she passes. I saw a bird die in the hollow of my hand, its open crystal eyes unchanging; and so I sit now unchanged, except that something is gone out of me.

  I shall invoke Rogero, and escape from this tomb into terror; I shall not wait for a summons to his world. Better to be falling away through a shining sky with angry wings above me and a sudden quiet below, than to sit here in the meshes of my several madnesses. Insanity is only wisdom of a sort, too deeply driven for the sphincters of the mind to compass; and this is the riddle of the sphinx. Brushless Giles, the ex-painter, is (when you come right down to it) a far wiser person than Swordless Rogero, ex-knight. Put me on a hippogriff without a driver’s license and I won’t sit and bawl “Back, sir!”; I’ll push the buttons and pull the levers and watch what happens until I can back into anybody’s downhill driveway. And if words are the reins, the throttle, and clutch, then words I’ll try, until at last I have a “Gee” for him and a “Haw” for him and above all a big fat “Whoa!” Rogero, now, he’s a fool, and rather healthier than I and therefore more alive; his uncertainties are a little less well-founded in fact than mine. Whoosh! and is that the hot, gentle ignition of brandy over yonder, or the sun passing my feet? Is that polite patter halfhearted applause for the band or is it the wind in the wings of the wheeling beast above me? Catch me, catch me, good knight and I shall die gladly with thee, free of both these insupportable worlds. But I am not falling; I hang here in dusk, supported by a rushing wind, a central point for the looming earth and the hurtling sun as they rotate about me. (And if hanging thou art, why are the crags of Earth larger each time they pass thee?)Aiee, could I but die of foolhardiness, like a Bradamante challenging the powers of evil, and not thus crotch-flung in penance for the silly vapors of my foul mouth, not humiliated and screaming like a whipped serf. (Waiter, bring me an orchestra playing Rampart Street, I have fallen from Grace, who is a hippogriff.)

  Shining one, can thee not forgive me my temper and my tongue? Is there nothing in thee which recalls the swift romp on Atlantes’ mountain, and thee dancing away from me like a playmate, sharing my joy? That is Rogero, good hippogriff, and not the furious mote who offended thee . . . I’ll beg thee no more, but pray only that thee might escape thy conscience, as I failed to do when I left my sword and my destiny with Bradamante.

  And he comes, he comes, his wings all but folded, back-bent, beating a very buzz to fly downward faster than I can fall. And faster he is; he looms to me, blasts himself to one side so close he tumbles me anew, so that the sun is still above me, but below the mountains turn like clay on a potters wheel. The hippogriffs wings are wide now, and working weightily, and again he grows in mine eye; and now I can hear him; he is screaming, screaming . . . gods! What a terror-struck cry! Then the screaming stops, and his lion’s voice rumbles with laughter—ah, he mocks me, he mocks me, the son of ... of a mighty gryphon and a blooded mare, most beautiful of creatures. There, hippogriff: mock me, it is thy privilege; let me die, it is thy right.

  And again the thunder of his humor; he twists his wings, one up, one down, rolling like a summer swallow; and as I fall to meet him he is on his back like a swimmer, and, blessed angel of a hippogriff, he takes me!

  I hang from his talons like a newt, mine eyes a-pop from the pressure of his holding and the surge of his climb; and climb he must, for he has caught me in a valley, no further aloft than the height of a tall pine tree; the mountains all about are above us. He could not have waited the tenth part of a heartbeat and saved me still. He is confident and beautiful and he has a most cruel sense of humor.

  I am lifted now to his beak; I face his eyes, and from his open maw his laughter rumbles, and I like a captured puppy plead to be set down. And indeed, had I a tail I’d wag for him; I’d whimper if I felt it would reach him.

  He dips his head and turns it, and his beak’s about my waist. Now he lifts me, turns his head back to front, lowers me, twists that my feet may go down and my head up—and I am astride him again, perched on his shoulders a forearm’s span away from the saddle. He nudges me back, and I bump my way to the saddle like a babe on a fence-prop, bottom foremost and clumsy with fright. Not until I am firm in the saddle does he release me; indeed, for a moment it occurs to me that, purely in
jest, he might bite me in twain once I think I am safe. Through my thighs I sense another thunderous chuckle at my expense. I bite my lip and cast mine eyes down, but there is no escaping his mirth.

  Now the mountains are behind. The sea is a haze and the sky sea-colored, and where they meet there is no longer a line; by a twist of my mind I may imagine naught but sky around us in an Earthless universe, and a twist again, and it is the sea all about, up and over, my hippogriff and I the sole population of an empty bubble in a universe of water.

  And it comes to me then, like a sending—words, odd and small; “Gee,” and “Haw,” and “Whoa!” and each carries the nostriled flavor of Giles and the smoke in his mouth. So “Gee!” I murmur—and my hippogriff wheels; “Haw,” say I, and the other way he turns. ... I can ride him, fly him! He is mine, he is mine!

  But mine too is the humiliation, and the lesson of his laughter, cackling like a conscience. Ahead is the sea, across it adventure and freedom. Behind are the hills, and my sword, my duty, my debt, and a weaponless wench. My steed is silent, as if waiting: “So haw then, and let me be damned to my destiny,” I cry, and he swings about to tuck the distant shore under his golden chin; to take me back to my grubby fate. And grubby or not, I preen; I am a knight who will not be swayed nor turned aside; straight to my sword I will fly, to mine honor, to-

  But below, a clot of white on the rock takes mine eye, and “Whoa!” I cry with all my heart; and the hippogriff’s bellow of laughter fairly puts whitecaps on the waves below. And down we drop, and down, the roar and crash of beastly laughter in the van, the flanks, the trailing wind of our descent. There is a peal of it for knights without swords, for true courses set and forsaken; there’s a rumbling gust of it for gratitude confessed but unpaid, and one for the man who would plan an escape for himself if he were on time to rescue a maiden in peril, or who would plant a bluebell for her if he were late, if he happened to pass that way. But the shrillest laughter, the one having the most cold gold eagle in it, was for a knight who claimed to value his sword for the vows it carried.

  I have a moment of shame and one of fury, and then a tortured time of both together. All I need do to cut off this obscene bellowing-—ay, and gain the beast’s respect, I wouldn’t doubt—is to press my heels to his flanks, and straight to Atlantes’ mountain we’d go; to Bradamante; to my sword; to the completion of my promises and the payment of my debts.

  And it is in the muscles of my legs to draw back those heels; it is in my heart to be humble and accept the beast’s deafening censure and cleanse myself; it is, it is, but once again I look below, and am lost; for chained to the rock is a naked woman of such unearthly beauty she can be compared only with the hooded shield I carry . . . with this difference: that whosoever looks upon this shield is blinded, but who looks upon this woman sees so clearly that he cannot live.

  Down comes my steed and hovers, searching for a foothold on the windswept rock; and finding it, settles in. Before he is fully earth-borne I am away from him and his subsiding chuckles, slipping and scrambling to the seaward slope. Braced against the iron loops to which she is chained, I cower down close to her, cover mine eyes against that blaze, not of light, but of beauty; and when I can, I peer quickly through my fingers and drink the vision in small and frightened sips.

  Her ankles are cruelly bound by a single hoop, hinged, hasped by the double chain which anchored it below. A smaller version of the same device was given each slender wrist, and there she lies, stretched tight against the cold rock, wet with spray, and the wind tugging her hair.

  I touch the shackles, the chains. Anchored as they are, it seems the rock itself would lift from the sea bottom before those loops could be drawn. Turning hopelessly from this examination, I meet her eyes and the impact melts me; I fall to my knees and bow my head.

  “Who art thou?” she whispers into the shouting wind.

  “Rogero, a knight, come to save thee. Who has done this to thee, princess? . . . surely thou art princess . . .?

  “Ay,” she breathes, “Angelica of Cathay, shipwrecked here on the very day the oracle at Ebuda demanded the most beautiful Ebudan maid as a sacrifice to some wrathful god. But since they had me . . .”

  “Ebuda is that village yonder?”

  “Ay.” Ah, but she is weary; her voice may be heard at all only because its sound was so very different; it differed, almost, from sound itself. “But go not to the village, good knight; they are barbarians and would tear thee to pieces rather than replace me here with one of their own. Best go whence thee came, and my blessing goes with thee; but I am doomed.”

  “To die of cold and the pecks of sea eagles? I’ll die here with thee rather!”

  “Nay, it will be quicker than that,” she murmurs. “Knowest the monster Orc?” Her eyes are calm, seaward now. As the wind tumbles her hair, I see that it is mystically marked with a stripe of cold silver; there has never been anything so lovely and far away as that swath of starshine.

  “Orc? Oh, ay; a legend, a tale to frighten children. He is big as an island and has scales of iron and the tusks of a boar. And thou art chained here for Orc? The eagles will have thee before such a fable comes.”

  “But he comes now,” she says calmly; and two things happen to me which will leave their mark for all my days; one, that as she spoke, grave and quite contained, her tears flowed and I knew that I saw a strength here as wondrous as her beauty; but for the tears, she might have been in her garden, half dreaming and at peace, for all her face showed it. And I turn away from her and see the second thing, the monster Orc.

  With a shout I spin to Angelica, take her prisoned hand and on it slip my golden ring. “This will guard thee, Princess!” I cry, and my heart cries with it, only from my shield, and I stumble to the hippogriff.

  He is ready, flexed, spread, trembling to be off; I have but one foot in the stirrup as he launches himself. The monster comes, and we fly out to meet it; and when we have flown what seemed far enough at first, there is yet another mile to go. It looms over us like a thundercloud; it rises higher and higher from the water, and there is more and still more of it, shapeless, immeasurable, and blind.

  Blind! Swordless, lacking pike or halberd, axe or hook, mine only weapon is a giver of blindness; against this, the monster brings the only possible defense; “Blind, it is blind,” I cry, and my mount utters a shriek, part despair, but a fine part challenge, and mounts the sky to get above the creature and be sure.

  And still it rises until we are but a wasp at a bull’s shoulder, until the black rock below is but a steppingstone to this great living hulk.

  And the hippogriff, unbidden, folds his wings and we drop, down and down past the upright acres of filthy, streaming iron. I am past thought, incapable of anything except keeping my saddle in the weightless drop. Even my first long fall from the beast’s back had seemed not so long as this. Then out come the wings, and I groan against the pressure inside my doublet. Down we go still, the hippogriff battling the wind of our fall, and checking us at last.

  We are in a roaring, stinking steam of water and evil fumes, somewhere between Orc’s looming bulk and the black rock. Across, and turn, and back, and turn; steamed and spumed and soaked and splattered with stiff salt slime. And for the second time that day I face death despised by the hippogriff .. .

  I see his face again, I think for the last time. And had I years of life to give for the ability to read those bright implacable eyes, I would do it, and gladly; but I’ve but a few weary minutes. I gaze up hopelessly, and he brings his shining head closer to me, touches my head with a rough gentleness. With his eyes on mine, he makes a single soft sound, and then it is time to turn again. It seems for a moment he cannot and then he does, bravely, and labors back again. Belatedly I see that his wings are wet, and like Pegasus near death in dragon’s blood, he cannot remain aloft much longer. Ah, to know what it was he tried to tell me! Who would know? Giles? Ah, but I hate what I was, and what I am . . .

  Together we scream a challenge,
and the hippogriff finds strength, somehow, to drive up twice, three times the height of a man and, descending, flutter away a great weight of water from his wings. He passes close to the widening mouth, drives down near the hinge of the jaw just as it emerges. What appears at first as a bony projection from the hinge is suddenly a slimy opal, alight and alive—Orc’s eye, set like a whale’s. The hippogriff must have known, he must have known!