The Best of C.L. Moore & Henry Kuttner

by Henry Kuttner

  “The creature’s made of clay. He must have a flaw somewhere. What is it? You know him.”

  Lilith looked up at him speechless, a great excitement beginning to swell so tremendously in her that her half-formed body could hardly contain it. There was a chance! God himself had put a weapon straight into her hands!

  “Yes, there is a flaw,” she said. “I’ll tell you…if you’ll give me a promise.”

  “All right, I give it,” said Lucifer carelessly. “Tell me.”

  She hesitated, choosing her words. “Your feud isn’t with Adam. He never asked you to worship him. God did that. Your quarrel is with God, not Adam. The Man himself you can’t touch, but God had given him a…a wife,” she choked when she said it. “I think there’s a weakness in her, and through her you could spoil God’s plan. But you must spare the Man—for me.”

  Lucifer whistled soundlessly, lifting his brows. “Oh—?”

  “I saw him first,” said Lilith defensively. “I want him.”

  The serpent looked at her narrowly. “Why? No…never mind. I won’t quarrel with you. I may have an idea to suggest to you later, if a plan of mine works out. You and I together could make quite a thing of hell.”

  Lilith winced a little. She and Adam together had had great prospects, once, too. Perhaps they still had—if God were not listening.

  “You promise not to touch him, then?”

  “Yes, I won’t hurt your precious clod. You’re right—my quarrel’s with God, not that animated lump of clay named Adam. What’s the secret?”

  “Eden,” said Lilith slowly, “is a testing ground. There are flaws in it, there must be, or neither of us would be here. God planted a Tree in the middle of the Garden and forbade anyone to touch it. That’s the test…I think I see it now. It’s a test of obedience. God doesn’t trust man—he made him too strong. The Tree is the knowledge of Good and Evil, and God doesn’t dare let that knowledge exist in the Garden, because he controls Man only by Man’s ignorance of his own power. If either of them eats, then God will have to destroy that one quickly. You tempt the woman to eat, Lucifer, and leave Adam and Eden to me!”

  The serpent eyed her sidelong. He laughed.

  “If either of them fails in this test you’re talking about, then God will know neither can be trusted, won’t he? He’ll know their present form’s imperfect, and he’ll destroy them both and work out some other plan for the world.”

  Lilith drew a deep breath. Excitement was rising like a tide in her, and the wind from nowhere swirled the dark hair in a cloud about her shoulders.

  “Let him try!” she cried exultantly. “I can save Adam. God made a mistake when he put such power in the Garden. He shouldn’t have left it living, half-conscious of itself. He shouldn’t have let Adam know how close he is to the earth he was taken from. Adam and the Garden are one flesh, and the power of God is in them both. God can’t destroy one without the other, and together they are very strong—If they defied God together, and I helped them—”

  Lucifer looked at her, a trace of compassion on his handsome, reptilian face.

  “God defeated me,” he reminded her. “Do you think He couldn’t you?”

  She gave him a proud glance. “I am the Queen of Air and Darkness. I have secrets of my own, and powers not even God can control. If I join them with Adam’s, and the Garden’s…God made the Garden alive and powerful, and Adam is one flesh with it, each incomplete without the other as Man is without woman. Adam has Eve now—but when Eve’s gone he’ll remember Lilith. I’ll see that he remembers! And I’ll see that he understands his danger. With my help, perhaps he can avert it.”

  “If God destroys Eve,” said Lucifer, “he’ll destroy Adam, too. They’re one pattern.”

  “But he may not destroy them at the same time. I’ll gamble on that. I’d kill her myself if I could, but I can’t touch anything in the Garden without its own consent…No, I’ll have to wait until Eve proves to God her unfitness to wear flesh, and while he punishes her I must seize that moment to rouse the Garden. It’s almost aware of itself already. I think I could awaken it—through Adam, perhaps. Adam and Eden are almost one, as Adam and I will be again if we can get rid of Eve. None of us separately has the power to defy God, but Eden and Adam and I together might do it!” She tossed back her head and the wild dark hair swirled like a fog about her. “Eden is an entity of its own—I think I could close a shell of space around us, and there are places in my Darkness where we could hide even from God!”

  Lucifer narrowed his eyes at her. “It might work,” he nodded slowly. “You’re mad—but it might work, with my help. The woman is beautiful, in her way—” He laughed. “And what a revenge on God!”

  “The woman,” mused Lilith, “is in my body, and I am evil…I think enough evil remains there that Eve will find you—interesting. Good luck, Lucifer!”

  In a hollow, velvety cup in the Garden’s very center the two Trees stood. One at the edge of the clearing was a dark Tree, the leaves folded like a cloak about a pale glow from within where the Fruit of Life hung hidden. But in the center of the hollow the Tree of Knowledge flaunted its scarlet fruit that burned with a flame almost of their own among the green and glossy leaves. Here was the heart of the Garden. Out of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil the beat went pulsing that shook the air of Eden.

  Eve set one small, bare foot upon the downward slope and looked back timidly over her shoulder. The serpent flicked a forked red tongue at her. His voice was cool and clear, and sweet as honey.

  “Eva,” he said softly. “Eva—”

  She smiled and went on, he rippling after her with an unearthly beauty to his gait that is lost forever now. No one knows today how the serpent walked before the Fall. Of all human creatures only Eve knows that, and there were things Eve never told Adam.

  They paused under the shadow of the tree. In long, slow rhythms the air went pulsing past them. Eve’s fair hair stirred a little, so strong was the rhythm here. All the Fruit of the Tree pushed out among the leaves to see her, and the nearer branches bent caressingly toward this woman who was of the flesh of Adam.

  The nearest branch stooped down enticingly. Eve reached for a scarlet apple that dipped into her hand. Almost of itself it snapped free of the twig that held it. Eve stared at the apple in her palm, and her hand began to shake. She drew back against the serpent, a little whimper of terror rising in her throat.

  The serpent dropped a coiled embrace about the lovely, light-clothed pallor of her body and bent his handsome, slanted head to hers, whispering at her ear in a voice so cool and sweet that the terror faded from her face. She smiled a little, and her hand steadied.

  She lifted the Fruit of Knowledge to her lips. There was a hush all through the Garden as she hesitated for a long moment, the red fruit at her red mouth, her teeth denting the scarlet cheek of Knowledge. The last few timeless moments stood still while innocence yet reigned over Eden.

  Then the serpent whispered again, urgently: “Eva—” he said.

  Lilith stood shivering in Adam’s arms.

  “You were mine first,” she was whispering fiercely. “You and I and the Garden—don’t you remember? I was your wife before her, and you belong to me!”

  Adam could see his own arms through the ephemeral stuff of Lilith’s body. He was shaken by the violence in her voice, but his mind was too fogged with the unthinking blank of innocence to understand very clearly. He tried hard.

  The rhythm that pulsed through Eden was curiously uneven now. Lilith knew what it meant, and excitement choked her. She cried more desperately:

  “Adam…Adam! Don’t let anything separate us, you and the Garden and I! You can hold us together if you try! I know you can! You—”

  One great, annihilating throb shook through the air like thunder. The whole Garden reeled with it and every tree in Eden bowed as if before a tremendous wind. Adam looked up, aghast. But Lilith laughed a wild, excited laugh and cried, “This is it! Oh, hurry, Adam, hurry!”
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  She slipped through his arms that were still clasped about her and went fluttering effortlessly off through branches that did not impede her passage, Adam following half stunned with the stunned Garden. All Eden was still reeling from the violence of what had just happened beneath the Tree.

  Lilith watched the sky as she ran. Would a great bolt of lightning come ravening down out of heaven to blast the woman out of being before they reached the Tree? “Wait, wait!” she panted voicelessly to God. “Give me a moment longer—” Would a bolt strike Adam, too, as he slipped through the parting trees beside her? “Hurry!” she gasped again.

  Breathless, they paused at the edge of the hollow where the Tree stood. Looking down, they could see Eve just clear of the shadow of it, the fruit in her hand with one white bite flawing its scarlet cheek. She was staring about the Garden as if she had never seen it before. Where was God? Why had He not blasted her as she stood there?

  Lilith in her first wild glance could not see the serpent except for a glitter of iridescence back in the shadow of the Tree. Even in her terrible excitement she smiled wryly. Lucifer was taking no chances with God.

  But she had no time to waste now on Lucifer or on Eve. For some inexplicable reason God was staying His hand, and she must make the most of the respite. For when God was finished with Eve He would turn to Adam, and before that much had to be done. Adam was her business now, and the living Eden, and all eternity waited on what the next few moments held.

  She stood out on the lip of the hollow and a great dark wind from nowhere swelled monstrously about her, tossing out her hair until it was a cloud that shut her from sight. Out of the cloud her voice came rolling in tremendous rhythms paced to the rhythm at which Eden breathed—and Adam.

  “Garden!” she called. “Eden—hear me! I am Lilith, the wife of Adam—”

  She could feel a vast, dim awareness stirring around her. All through Eden the wakening motion ran, drawing closer, welling up deeply from the earth underfoot, monstrously, wonderfully, a world coming alive at her call.

  “Adam!” she cried. “Adam do you hear me? You and Eden are one flesh, and Eve has destroyed you both. She has just brought knowledge into Eden, where God dares not let it exist. God will destroy you all, because of Eve…unless you listen to me—”

  She felt Adam’s attention torn away from Eve and focusing upon herself in fear and wonder. She felt the Garden’s wakening awareness draw around him with growing intensity, until it was as if the earth of Eden and the flesh of Man quickened into one, married by the same need for one another as the thought of parting and destruction shuddered through each.

  Was this what God had planned as an ending for His divine scheme, as it was the beginning of Lilith’s? She had no time to wonder, but the thought crossed her mind awesomely even as she wooed the Garden in a voice as sweet and coaxing as the voice she used to Adam.

  And the whole great Garden shuddered ponderously around her, awareness thrilling down every tendril and branch and blade, pulsing up out of the very hill on which she stood. And all of it was Adam. The Garden heard and hung upon her words, and Adam heard, and they three together were all that existed. Success was in her hands. She could feel it. And then—

  “Adam…Adam!” screamed Eve beneath the Tree.

  Lilith’s sonorous voice paused in its invocation; the Garden hesitated around her.

  “Adam!” cried Eve again, terror flattening all the sweetness out of her voice.

  And behind Lilith, in a drugged voice, Adam said: “Eve—?”

  “God…God, destroy her now!” prayed Lilith soundlessly. And aloud, “Eve has no part in Eden! Don’t listen to her, Adam! She’ll destroy you and the Garden together!”

  “Adam, Adam! Where are you?”

  “Coming—” said Adam, still in that thick, drugged voice.

  Lilith whirled in the mist of her cloudy hair. Where was God! Why had He stayed His hand? Now was the time to strike, if her hope were not to fail. Now, now! Surely the lightning would come ravening down from heaven if she could hold Adam a moment longer—

  “Adam, wait!” she cried desperately. “Adam, you know you love me! If you leave—”

  Her voice faltered as he peered at her as blindly as if he had never seen her before. The haloed light was like fire all around him, and her words had been a drug to him as they had been to the Garden, until the earth that loved and listened to her had been one with his own earth-formed flesh; a moment ago there had been nothing in creation for Adam or for Eden but this one woman speaking out of the dark. But now—

  “Adam!” screamed Eve again in that flat, frightened voice.

  “Don’t listen!” cried Lilith frantically. “She doesn’t belong here! You can’t save her now! God will destroy her, and He’ll destroy you, too, if you leave me! Stay here and let her die! You and I will be alone again, in the Garden…Adam, don’t listen!”

  “I…I have to listen,” he stammered almost stupidly. “Get out of my way, Lilith. Don’t you understand? She’s my own flesh—I have to go.”

  Lilith stared at him dumbly. His own flesh! She had forgotten that. She had leaned too heavily on his oneness with the Garden—she had forgotten he was one with Eve, too. The prospect of defeat was suddenly like lead in her. If God would only strike now—She swayed forward in one last desperate effort to hold him back from Eve while the Garden stirred uneasily around them, frightened with Lilith’s terror, torn with Adam’s distress. She wavered between Adam and the valley as if her ephemeral body could hold him, but he went through her as if through a cloud and stumbled blindly downhill toward the terrified Eve beneath the Tree with the fruit in her hand and a dreadful knowledge on her face.

  From here Lilith could see what Adam had not yet. She laughed suddenly, wildly, and cried:

  “Look at her, Adam! Look!” And Adam blinked and looked.

  Eve stood naked beneath the Tree. That burning beauty which had clothed her like a garment was gone with her divine innocence and she was no longer the flawless goddess who had wakened on Adam’s shoulder that morning. She stood shivering a little, looking forlorn and somehow pinched and thin, almost a caricature of the perfect beauty that had gone down the hill with the serpent an hour ago. But she did not know that. She looked up at Adam as he hesitated above her, and smiled uncertainly with a sort of leer in her smile.

  “Oh, there you are,” she said, and even her voice was harsher now. “Everything looked so…so queer, for a minute. Look.” She held up the fruit. “It’s good. Better than anything you ever gave me. Try it.”

  Lilith stared at her from the hilltop with a horror that for a moment blanked out her growing terror because of God’s delay. Was knowledge, then, as ugly as this? Why had it destroyed Eve’s beauty as if it were some evil thing? Perfect knowledge should have increased her strength and loveliness in the instant before God struck her down, if—Suddenly Lilith understood. Perfect knowledge! But Eve had only tasted the fruit, and she had only a warped half-knowledge from that single taste. The beauty of her innocence was lost, but she had not yet gained the beauty of perfect knowledge. Was this why God delayed? So long as her knowledge was imperfect perhaps she was no menace to God’s power in Eden. And yet she had disobeyed, she had proved herself unworthy of the trust of God—Then why did He hesitate? Why had He not blasted her as she stood there with the apple at her lips? A panic was rising in Lilith’s throat. Could it be that He was laughing, even now? Was He giving her the respite she had prayed for, and watching her fail in spite of it?

  “Taste the apple,” said Eve again, holding it out.

  “Adam!” cried Lilith despairingly from the edge of the hill. “Adam, look at me! You loved me first—don’t you remember? Look at me, Adam!”

  And Adam turned to look. The wind, which had clouded her from sight in the darkness of her hair, had calmed. She stood now, luminous on the hilltop, the darkness parted like a river by the whiteness of her shoulders. And she was beautiful with a beauty that no mortal woman will
ever wear again.

  “I was first!” cried Lilith. “You loved me before her—come back to me now, before God strikes you both! Come back, Adam!”

  He stared up at her miserably. He looked back at the flawed, shivering creature at his side, knowledge curiously horrible in her eyes. He stared at Eve, too, a long stare. And then he reached for the apple.

  “Adam—no!” shrieked Lilith. “See what knowledge did to Eve! You’ll be ugly and naked, like her! Don’t taste it, Adam! You don’t know what you’re doing!”

  Over the poised red fruit he looked up at her. The light quivered gloriously all around him. He stood like a god beneath the Tree, radiant, perfect.

  “Yes, I know,” he said, in a clearer voice than she had ever heard him use before.

  “God will destroy you!” wailed Lilith, and rolled her eyes up to look for the falling thunderbolt that might be hurtling downward even now.

  “I know,” said Adam again. And then, after a pause, “You don’t understand, Lilith. Eve is my own flesh, closer than Eden—closer than you. Don’t you remember what God said? Forsaking all others—”

  “Eve!” screamed Lilith hopelessly. “Stop him! Your punishment’s certain—are you going to drag him down, too?”

  Eve looked up, knowledge dark in her blue eyes. She laughed a thin laugh and the last vestige of her beauty went with it.

  “Leave him to you?” she sneered. “Oh no! He and I are one flesh—we’ll go together. Taste the apple, Adam!”

  He turned it obediently in his hand: his teeth crunched through scarlet skin into the sweet white flesh inside. There was a tremendous silence all through the Garden; nothing stirred in Eden while Adam chewed and swallowed the Fruit of Knowledge. And then turned to stare down into Eve’s lifted eyes while awareness of himself as an individual, free-willed being dawned gradually across his awakening mind.

  And then the burning glory that clothed him paled, shimmered, went out along his limbs. He, too, was naked. The queer, pinched look of humanity shivered over that magnificent body, and he was no longer magnificent, no longer Adam.