The Best of C.L. Moore & Henry Kuttner

by Henry Kuttner

  Lilith had forgotten to look for God. Sickness of the heart was swelling terribly in her, and for a moment she no longer cared about God, or Eden, or the future. This was not Adam anymore—It would never be Adam again—

  “Listen,” said Eve in a small, intimate voice to Adam. “How quiet it is! Why, it’s the music. The seraphim aren’t singing anymore around the Throne!”

  Lilith glanced up apathetically. That meant, then, that God was coming—But even as she looked up a great golden chorus resounded serenely from high over Eden. Adam tipped his tarnished head to listen.

  “You’re right,” he agreed. “They’ve stopped their song.”

  Lilith did not hear him. That dreadful sickness in her was swelling and changing, and she knew now what it was—hatred. Hatred of Adam and Eve and the thing they had done to her. Hatred of these naked caricatures, who had been the magnificent half-god she had loved and the shape she had put on to delight him. True, they might finish the eating of knowledge and grow perfect again, but it would be a perfection that shut her out. They were one flesh together, and even God had failed her now. Looking down, she loathed them both. Eve’s very existence was an insult to the unflawed perfection which Lilith still wore, and Adam—Adam shivering beneath the Tree with a warped, imperfect knowledge leering in his eyes—

  A sob swelled in her throat. He had been flawless once—she would never forget that. Almost she loved the memory still as it lingered about this shivering human creature beneath the Tree. So long as he was alive she knew now she would never be free of it; this weakness would torment her still for the flesh that had once been Adam. The prospect of an eternity of longing for him, who would never exist again, was suddenly unbearable to her.

  She tipped her head back and looked up through the glory above Eden where golden voices chanted that neither Adam nor Eve would ever hear again.

  “Jehovah!” she sobbed. “Jehovah! Come down and destroy us all! You were right—they are both too flawed to bring anything but misery to all who know them. God, come down and give us peace!”

  Eve squealed in terror at Adam’s side. “Listen!” she cried. “Adam, listen to her!”

  Answering human terror dawned across the pinched features that had once been Adam’s handsome, immortal face. “The Tree of Life!” he shouted. “No one can touch us if we eat that fruit!”

  He whirled to scramble up the slope toward the dark Tree, and Lilith’s heart ached to watch how heavily he moved. Yesterday’s wonderful, easy litheness was gone with his beauty, and his body was a burden to him now.

  But he was not to reach the Tree of Life. For suddenly glory brightened unbearably over the Garden. A silence was in the sky, and the breeze ceased to blow through Eden.

  “Adam,” said a voice in the great silence of the Garden, “hast thou eaten of the Tree?”

  Adam glanced up the slope at Lilith, standing despairingly against the sky. He looked at Eve beside him, a clumsy caricature of the loveliness he had dreamed of. There was bitterness in his voice.

  “The woman thou gavest me—” he began reproachfully, and then hesitated, meeting Eve’s eyes. The old godlike goodness was lost to him now, but he had not fallen low enough yet to let Eve know what he was thinking. He could not say, “The woman Thou gavest me has ruined us both—but I had a woman of my own before her and she never did me any harm.” No, he could not hurt this flesh of his flesh so deeply, but he was human now and he could not let her go unrebuked. He went on sulkily, “—she gave me the apple, and I ate.”

  The Voice said awfully, “Eve—?”

  Perhaps Eve was remembering that other voice, cool and sweet, murmuring, “Eva—” in the cool, green dimness of the Garden, the voice that had whispered secrets she would never share with Adam. Perhaps if he had been beside her now—but he was not, and her resentment bubbled to her lips in speech.

  “The serpent beguiled me,” she told God sullenly, “and I ate.”

  There was silence for a moment in the Garden. Then the Voice said, “Lucifer—” with a sorrow in the sound that had not stirred for the man’s plight, or the woman’s. “Lucifer, my enemy, come forth from the Tree.” There was a divine compassion in the Voice even as It pronounced sentence. “Upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life—”

  Out from beneath the shadow of the Tree a flat and shining length came pouring through the grass. This was the hour for the shedding of beauty: the serpent had lost the fire-bright splendor that had been his while Lucifer dwelt in his flesh, but traces lingered yet in the unearthly fluidness of his motion, in his shining iridescence. He lifted a wedged head toward Eve, flickered his tongue at her once and then dropped back into the grass. Its ripple above him marked his course away. Eve drew one long, sobbing breath for that green twilight hour in the Garden, that Adam would never guess, as she watched him ripple away.

  “Adam, Eve,” went on the Voice quietly, “the Garden is not for you.” There was a passionless pity in It as the Garden stood still to listen. “I made your flesh too weak, because your godhood was too strong to trust. You are not to blame for that—the fault was Mine. But Adam…Eve…what power did I put in you, that the very elements of fire and darkness find kinship with you? What flaw is in you, that though you are the only two human things alive, yet you cannot keep faith with one another?”

  Adam glanced miserably up toward Lilith standing motionless on the hill’s edge, clothed in the flawless beauty he had dreamed for her and would never see again. Eve’s eyes followed the serpent through the grass that was blurred for her because of the first tears of Eden. Neither of them answered.

  “You are not fit yet to put forth your hand to the Tree of Life, and eat, and live forever,” went on the Voice after a moment.

  “Man…woman…you are not yet fit for perfect knowledge or immortality. You are not yet fit for trust. But for Lilith the tale would have spun itself out here in the walls of Eden, but now you must go beyond temptation and work your own salvation out in the sweat of your brow, in the lands beyond the Garden. Adam, I dare not trust you any longer in your kinship with the earth I shaped you from. Cursed is the ground for your sake. Adam—it shall be one with you no longer. But I promise this…in the end you shall return to it—” The Voice fell silent, and there was far from above the flash of a flaming sword over the gate of Eden.

  In the silence Lilith laughed. It was a clear, ringing sound from the hill’s edge: “Deal with me now,” she said in an empty voice. “I have no desire to exist any longer in a world that has no Adam—destroy me, Jehovah.”

  The Voice said emotionlessly, “You are punished already, by the fruit of what you did.”

  “Punished enough!” wailed Lilith in sudden despair. “Make an end of it, Jehovah!”

  “With man’s end,” said God quietly. “No sooner. You four among you have shattered a plan in Eden that you must shape anew before your travail ends. Let the four of you build a new plan with the elements of your being—Adam is Earth, Lucifer is Fire, Lilith is Air and Darkness, Eve the Mother of All Living, the fertile seas from which all living springs. Earth, Air, Fire and Water—you thought your plan was better than Mine. Work it out for yourselves!”

  “What is our part to be, Lord?” asked Adam in a small, humbled voice.

  “Earth and water,” said the Voice. “The kingdom of earth for you and the woman and your children after you.”

  “I was Adam’s wife before her,” wailed Lilith jealously. “What of me…and mine?”

  The Voice fell silent for a while. Then it said quietly: “Make your own choice, Queen of Air and Darkness.”

  “Let my children and Adam’s haunt hers to their graves, then!” decided Lilith instantly. “Mine are the disinherited—let them take vengeance! Let her and hers beware of my children who wail in the night, and know she deserves their wrath. Let them remind her always that Adam was mine before her!”

  “So be it,” said the Voice. And for an instant there was silence in
Eden while the shadow of times to come brooded inscrutably in the mind of God. Lilith caught flashes of it in the glory so bright over Eden that every grass blade had a splendor which hurt the eyes. She saw man loving his birthplace upon earth with a deep-rooted love that made it as dear as his very flesh to him, so that dimly he might remember the hour when all earth was as close to him as his newly created body. She saw man cleaving to one woman as dear as the flesh of his flesh, yet remembering the unattainable and the lost—Lilith, perfect in Eden. She looked down from the hilltop and met Adam’s eyes, and voicelessly between them a long farewell went flashing.

  No one was watching Eve. She was blinking through tears, remembering a twilight hour and a fire-bright beauty that the dust had quenched a moment ago at God’s command. And then…then there was the faintest rustling in the air around her, and a cool, clear voice was murmuring:

  “Eva—” against her cheek.

  She stared. There was nothing. But—

  “Eva,” said the voice again. “Give me my vengeance too—upon the Man. Pretty Eva, do you hear me? Call your first child Kayn…Eva, will you do as I say? Call him Kayn the Spear of my vengeance, for he shall set murder loose among Adam’s sons. Remember, Eva—”

  And Eve echoed in a small, obedient whisper, “Cain…Cain.”

  No Woman Born

  She had been the loveliest creature whose image ever moved along the airways. John Harris, who was once her manager, remembered doggedly how beautiful she had been as he rose in the silent elevator toward the room where Deirdre sat waiting for him.

  Since the theater fire that had destroyed her a year ago, he had never been quite able to let himself remember her beauty clearly, except when some old poster, half in tatters, flaunted her face at him, or a maudlin memorial program flashed her image unexpectedly across the television screen. But now he had to remember.

  The elevator came to a sighing stop and the door slid open. John Harris hesitated. He knew in his mind that he had to go on, but his reluctant muscles almost refused him. He was thinking helplessly, as he had not allowed himself to think until this moment, of the fabulous grace that had poured through her wonderful dancer’s body, remembering her soft and husky voice with the little burr in it that had fascinated the audiences of the whole world.

  There had never been anyone so beautiful.

  In times before her, other actresses had been lovely and adulated, but never before Deirdre’s day had the entire world been able to take one woman so wholly to its heart. So few outside the capitals had ever seen Bernhardt or the fabulous Jersey Lily. And the beauties of the movie screen had had to limit their audiences to those who could reach the theaters. But Deirdre’s image had once moved glowingly across the television screens of every home in the civilized world. And in many outside the bounds of civilization. Her soft, husky songs had sounded in the depths of jungles, her lovely, languorous body had woven its patterns of rhythm in desert tents and polar huts. The whole world knew every smooth motion of her body and every cadence of her voice, and the way a subtle radiance had seemed to go on behind her features when she smiled.

  And the whole world had mourned her when she died in the theater fire.

  Harris could not quite think of her as other than dead, though he knew what sat waiting him in the room ahead. He kept remembering the old words James Stephens wrote long ago for another Deirdre, also lovely and beloved and unforgotten after two thousand years.

  The time comes when our hearts sink utterly,

  When we remember Deirdre and her tale,

  And that her lips are dust…

  There has been again no woman born

  Who was so beautiful; not one so beautiful

  Of all the women born—

  That wasn’t quite true, of course—there had been one. Or maybe, after all, this Deirdre who died only a year ago had not been beautiful in the sense of perfection. He thought the other one might not have been either, for there are always women with perfection of feature in the world, and they are not the ones that legend remembers. It was the light within, shining through her charming, imperfect features, that had made this Deirdre’s face so lovely. No one else he had ever seen had anything like the magic of the lost Deirdre.

  Let all men go apart and mourn together—

  No man can ever love her. Not a man

  Can dream to be her lover…No man say—

  What could one say to her? There are no words

  That one could say to her.

  No, no words at all. And it was going to be impossible to go through with this. Harris knew it overwhelmingly just as his finger touched the buzzer. But the door opened almost instantly, and then it was too late.

  Maltzer stood just inside, peering out through his heavy spectacles. You could see how tensely he had been waiting. Harris was a little shocked to see that the man was trembling. It was hard to think of the confident and imperturbable Maltzer, whom he had known briefly a year ago, as shaken like this. He wondered if Deirdre herself were as tremulous with sheer nerves—but it was not time yet to let himself think of that.

  “Come in, come in,” Maltzer said irritably. There was no reason for irritation. The year’s work, so much of it in secrecy and solitude, must have tried him physically and mentally to the very breaking point.

  “She all right?” Harris asked inanely, stepping inside.

  “Oh yes…yes, she’s all right.” Maltzer bit his thumbnail and glanced over his shoulder at an inner door, where Harris guessed she would be waiting.

  “No,” Maltzer said, as he took an involuntary step toward it. “We’d better have a talk first. Come over and sit down. Drink?”

  Harris nodded, and watched Maltzer’s hands tremble as he tilted the decanter. The man was clearly on the very verge of collapse, and Harris felt a sudden cold uncertainty open up in him in the one place where until now he had been oddly confident.

  “She is all right?” he demanded, taking the glass.

  “Oh yes, she’s perfect. She’s so confident it scares me.” Maltzer gulped his drink and poured another before he sat down.

  “What’s wrong, then?”

  “Nothing, I guess. Or…well, I don’t know. I’m not sure anymore. I’ve worked toward this meeting for nearly a year, but now—well, I’m not sure it’s time yet. I’m just not sure.”

  He stared at Harris, his eyes large and indistinguishable behind the lenses. He was a thin, wire-taut man with all the bone and sinew showing plainly beneath the dark skin of his face. Thinner, now, than he had been a year ago when Harris saw him last.

  “I’ve been too close to her,” he said now. “I have no perspective anymore. All I can see is my own work. And I’m just not sure that’s ready yet for you or anyone to see.”

  “She thinks so?”

  “I never saw a woman so confident.” Maltzer drank, the glass clicking on his teeth. He looked up suddenly through the distorting lenses. “Of course a failure now would mean—well, absolute collapse,” he said.

  Harris nodded. He was thinking of the year of incredibly painstaking work that lay behind this meeting, the immense fund of knowledge, of infinite patience, the secret collaboration of artists, sculptors, designers, scientists, and the genius of Maltzer governing them all as an orchestra conductor governs his players.

  He was thinking too, with a certain unreasoning jealousy, of the strange, cold, passionless intimacy between Maltzer and Deirdre in that year, a closer intimacy than any two humans can ever have shared before. In a sense the Deirdre whom he saw in a few minutes would be Maltzer, just as he thought he detected in Maltzer now and then small mannerisms of inflection and motion that had been Deirdre’s own. There had been between them a sort of unimaginable marriage stranger than anything that could ever have taken place before.

  “—so many complications,” Maltzer was saying in his worried voice with its faintest possible echo of Deirdre’s lovely, cadenced rhythm. (The sweet, soft huskiness he would never hear again.) “There was sh
ock, of course. Terrible shock. And a great fear of fire. We had to conquer that before we could take the first steps. But we did it. When you go in you’ll probably find her sitting before the fire.” He caught the startled question in Harris’ eyes and smiled. “No, she can’t feel the warmth now, of course. But she likes to watch the flames. She’s mastered any abnormal fear of them quite beautifully.”

  “She can—” Harris hesitated. “Her eyesight’s normal now?”

  “Perfect,” Maltzer said. “Perfect vision was fairly simple to provide. After all, that sort of thing has already been worked out, in other connections. I might even say her vision’s a little better than perfect, from our own standpoint.” He shook his head irritably. “I’m not worried about the mechanics of the thing. Luckily they got to her before the brain was touched at all. Shock was the only danger to her sensory centers, and we took care of all that first of all, as soon as communication could be established. Even so, it needed great courage on her part. Great courage.” He was silent for a moment, staring into his empty glass.

  “Harris,” he said suddenly, without looking up, “have I made a mistake? Should we have let her die?”

  Harris shook his head helplessly. It was an unanswerable question. It had tormented the whole world for a year now. There had been hundreds of answers and thousands of words written on the subject. Has anyone the right to preserve a brain alive when its body is destroyed? Even if a new body can be provided, necessarily so very unlike the old?

  “It’s not that she’s—ugly—now,” Maltzer went on hurriedly, as if afraid of an answer. “Metal isn’t ugly. And Deirdre…well, you’ll see. I tell you, I can’t see myself. I know the whole mechanism so well—it’s just mechanics to me. Maybe she’s—grotesque. I don’t know. Often I’ve wished I hadn’t been on the spot, with all my ideas, just when the fire broke out. Or that it could have been anyone but Deirdre. She was so beautiful—Still, if it had been someone else I think the whole thing might have failed completely. It takes more than just an uninjured brain. It takes strength and courage beyond common, and—well, something more. Something—unquenchable. Deirdre has it. She’s still Deirdre. In a way she’s still beautiful. But I’m not sure anybody but myself could see that. And you know what she plans?”