Swordsmen in the Sky

by Donald A. Wollheim

  Heath said, “Do the high gods stoop to tread on ants and worms? We don’t deserve such honor, she and I. We’re weak and even the Moonfire can’t give us strength.”

  He saw the flicker of thought in Broca’s face and went on. “You’re all-powerful, there’s nothing you can’t do. Why burden yourself with a mate too weak to worship you? Create another Alor, Broca! Create a goddess worthy of you!”

  After a moment Alor said, “Create a woman who can love you, Broca, and let us go.”

  For a time there was silence in the place. The feasters and the dancers and the slaves stood without moving and their eyes glittered in the eerie light. And then Broca nodded.

  “It is well,” he said. “Stand up, Alor.”

  She stood. The look of power came into the face of the tall barbarian, the wild joy of molding heart’s desire out of nothingness. Out of the golden air he shaped another Alor. She was not a woman but a thing of snow and flame and wonder, so that beside her the reality appeared drab and beautiless. She mounted the throne and sat beside her creator and put her hand in his and smiled.

  Broca willed the guardsmen to let Heath free. He went to Alor and Broca said contemptuously, “Get out of my sight.”

  They went together across the crowded place, toward the archway through which Heath had entered. Still there was silence and no one moved.

  As they reached the archway it vanished, becoming solid wall. Behind them Broca laughed and suddenly the company burst also into wild jeering laughter.

  Heath caught Alor tighter by the hand and led her toward another door. It, too, disappeared and the mocking laughter screamed and echoed from the vault.

  Broca shouted, “Did you think that I would let you go—you two who betrayed me when I was a man? Even a god can remember!”

  Heath saw that the guardsmen and the others were closing in, and he saw how their eyes gleamed. He was filled with a black fear and he put Alor behind him.

  Broca cried, “Weakling! Even to save your life, you can’t create!”

  It was true. He dared not. The shadow-people drew in upon him with their soulless eyes and their faces that were mirrors of the urge to kill.

  And then, suddenly, the answer came. Heath’s answer rang back. “I will not create—but I will destroy!”

  Once again he threw the strength of his mind against the Moonfire but this time there was no unhealthy lure to what he did. There was no desire in him but his love for Alor and the need to keep her safe.

  The hands of the shadow-people reached out and dragged him away from Alor. He heard her scream and he knew that if he failed they would both be torn to pieces. He summoned all the force that was in him, all the love.

  He saw the faces of the shadow-people grow distorted and blurred. He felt their grip weaken and suddenly they were only shadows, a dim multitude in a crumbling castle of dreams.

  Broca’s goddess faded with the dragon throne and Broca’s kingly harness was only a web of memories half seen above the plain leather.

  Broca leaped to his feet with a wild, hoarse cry.

  Heath could feel how their two minds locked and swayed on that strange battleground. And as Broca fought to hold his vision, willing the particles of energy into the semblance of matter, so Heath fought to tear them down, to disperse them. For a time the shadows held in that half-world between existence and nothingness.

  Then the walls of the castle wavered and ran like red water and were gone. The goddess Alor, the dancers and the slaves and the chieftains, all were gone, and there were only the golden fog and a tall barbarian, stripped of his dreams, and the man Heath and the woman Alor.

  Heath looked at Broca and said, “I am stronger than you, because I threw away my godhead.”

  Broca panted. “I will build again!”

  Heath said, “Build.”

  And he did, his eyes blazing, his massive body shaken with the force of his will.

  It was all there again, the castle and the multitude of feasters and the jewels.

  Broca screamed to his shadow-people. “Kill!”

  But again, as their hands reached out to destroy, they began to weaken and fade.

  Heath cried, “If you want your kingdom, Broca, let us go!”

  The castle was now no more than a ghostly outline. Broca’s face was beaded with sweat. His hands clawed the air. He swayed with his terrible effort but Heath’s dark eyes were bleak and stern. If he had now the look of a god it was a god as ruthless and unshakeable as fate.

  The vision crumbled and vanished.

  Broca’s head dropped. He would not look at them from the bitterness of his defeat. “Get out,” he whispered. “Go and let Vakor greet you.”

  Heath said, “It will be a cleaner death than this.”

  Alor took his hand and they walked away together through the golden mist. They turned once to look back and already the castle walls were built again, towering magnificent.

  “He’ll be happy,” Heath said, “until he dies.”

  Alor shuddered. “Let us go.”

  They went together, away from the pulsing heart of the Moonfire, past the slopes of the crater and down the long way to the harbor. Finally they were aboard the Ethne once again.

  As they found their slow way out through the island maze Heath held Alor in his arms. They did not speak. Their lips met often with the poignancy of kisses that will not be for long. The golden mists thinned and the fire faded in their blood and the heady sense of power was gone but they did not know nor care.

  They came at last out of the veil of the Moonfire and saw ahead the green sail of the Lahal, where Vakor waited.

  Alor whispered, “Goodbye, my love, my David!” and left the bitterness of her tears upon his mouth.

  The two ships lay side by side in the still water. Vakor was waiting as Heath and Alor came aboard with the other Children of the Moon beside him. He motioned to the seamen who stood there also and said, “Seize them.”

  But the men were afraid and would not touch them.

  Heath saw their faces and wondered. Then, as he looked at Alor, he realized that she was not as she had been before. There was something clean and shining about her now, a new depth and a new calm strength, and in her eyes a strange new beauty. He knew that he himself had changed. They were no longer gods, he and Alor, but they had bathed in the Moonfire and they would never again be quite the same.

  He met Vakor’s gaze and was not afraid.

  The cruel, wolfish face of the priest lost some of its assurance. A queer look of doubt crossed over it.

  He said, “Where is Broca?”

  “We left him there, building empires in the mist.”

  “At the heart of the Moonfire?”

  “Yes.”

  “You lie!” cried Vakor. “You could not have come back yourselves, from the heart of the sleeping god. No one ever has.” But still the doubt was there.

  Heath shrugged. “It doesn’t really matter,” he said, “whether you believe or not.”

  There was a long, strange silence. Then the four tall priests in their black tunics said to Vakor, “We must believe. Look into their eyes.”

  With a solemn ritual gesture they stepped back and left Vakor alone.

  Vakor whispered, “It can’t be true. The law, the taboo is built on that rock. Men will come out of the fringe as you did, Heath, wrecked and cursed by their blasphemy. But not from the Moonfire itself. Never! That is why the law was made, lest all of Venus die in dreams.”

  Alor said quietly, “All those others wanted power. We wanted only love. We needed nothing else.”

  Again there was silence while Vakor stared at them and struggled with himself. Then, very slowly, he said, “You are beyond my power. The sleeping god received you and has chosen to let you go unscathed. I am only a Child of the Moon. I may not judge.”

  He covered his face and turned away.

  One of the lesser priests spoke to Johor. “Let them be given men for their oars.”

  And Heath
and Alor understood that they were free.

  Weeks later, Heath and Alor stood at dawn on the shore of the Sea of Morning Opals. The breeze was strong off the land. It filled the golden sail of the Ethne, so that she strained at her mooring lines, eager to be free.

  Heath bent and cast them off.

  They stood together silently and watched as the little ship gathered speed, going lightly, sweetly and alone into the glory of the morning. The ivory image that was her figurehead lifted its arms to the dawn and smiled and Heath waited there until the last bright gleam of the sail was lost and with it the last of his old life, his memories and his dreams.

  Alor touched him gently. He turned and took her in his arms, and they walked away under the liha-trees, while the young day brightened in the sky. And they thought how the light of the sun they never saw was more beautiful and full of promise than all the naked wonder of the Moonfire that they had held within their hands.

  A VISION OF VENUS

  by Otis Adelbert Kline

  DR. MORGAN, scientist and psychologist, stared fixedly into the crystal globe before him, as he sat in the study of his strange mountain observatory.

  For many years, he had been communicating with people on Mars and Venus by means of telepathy, and recording these communications.

  Just now, he had established rapport with Lotan, a young plant hunter for the Imperial Government of Olba, the only nation on Venus which had aircraft. He was seeing with Lotan’s eyes, hearing with his ears, precisely as if this earthly scientist were Lotan the Olban. The electrodes of his audio-photo thought recorder were clamped to his temples, and every thought, every sense impression of Lotan’s was, for the time, Dr. Morgan’s.

  Lotan’s little one-man flier was behaving badly. He had just come through a terrific storm in which he had lost his bearings. His navigating instruments were out of commission and his power mechanism was growing weaker. It would be necessary for him to land and make repairs, soon.

  For many months he had sought the kadkor, that rare and valuable food fungus which had once been cultivated in Olba, but had been wiped out by a parasite. His sovereign had offered him the purple of nobility and a thousand kantols of land, if he would but bring him as many kadkor spores as would cover his thumb nail. But so far his quest had been fruitless.

  Far below him the Ropok Ocean stretched its blue-green waters for miles in all directions—a vast expanse of sea and sky that teemed with life of a thousand varieties. There were creatures of striking fantastic beauty and of terrifying ugliness. A number of large, white birds, with red-tipped wings and long, sharply curved beaks, skimmed the water in search of food. Hideous flying reptiles, some with wing-spreads of more than sixty feet, soared quite near the flier, eyeing it curiously as if half minded to attack. They would scan the water until they saw such quarry as suited them, then, folding their webbed wings and dropping head first with terrific speed, would plunge beneath the waves, to emerge with their struggling prey and leisurely flap away.

  The sea itself was even more crowded with life. And mightiest of all its creatures was the great ordzook, so immense that it could easily crush a large battleship with a single crunch of its huge jaws.

  But these sights were no novelty to Lotan, the botanist. What he hoped to see, and that quickly, was land. Failing in this, he knew by the way the power mechanism was acting, that he would soon be compelled to settle to the surface of the Ropok probably to be devoured, ship and all, by some fearful marine monster.

  Presently he caught sight of a tiny islet, and toward this he directed his limping ship with all the force of his will. For his little craft, which looked much like a small metal duck boat with a glass globe over the cockpit, was raised, lowered, or moved in any direction by a mechanism which amplified the power of telekinesis, that mysterious force emanating from the subjective mind, which enables earthly mediums to levitate ponderable objects without physical contact. It had no wings, rudder, propeller or gas chambers, and its only flying equipment, other than this remarkable mechanism, were two fore-and-aft safety parachutes, which would lower it gently in case the telekinetic power failed.

  Normally the little craft could travel at a speed of five hundred miles an hour in the upper atmosphere, but now it glided very slowly, and moreover was settling toward the water alarmingly. Lotan exerted every iota of his mind power, and barely made the sloping, sandy beach when the mechanism failed altogether.

  As he sprang out of his little craft, Lotan’s first care was for his power-mechanism. Fortunately the splicing of a wire which had snapped repaired the damage.

  He looked about him. At his feet the sea was casting up bits of wreckage. It was evident that a ship had gone to pieces on the reef—the work of the recent storm. The body of a drowned sailor came in on a comber. But it did not reach the shore, for a huge pair of jaws emerged from the water, snapped, and it was gone. In the brief interval he recognized the naval uniform of Tyrhana, the most powerful maritime nation of Venus.

  Then his attention was attracted by something else—tracks, freshly made, leading from a large piece of wreckage across the soft sand and into the riotous tangle of vegetation that clothed the interior. They were small—undoubtedly the tracks of a woman or boy.

  Lotan followed, resolved to try to rescue this marooned fellow-being, before taking off.

  He plunged into a jungle that would have appeared grotesque to earthly eyes. The primitive plants of Venus, which bear no fruits, flowers nor seeds, but reproduce solely by subdivision, spores or spawn, assume many strange and unusual forms and colors. Pushing through a fringe of jointed, reed-like growths that rattled like skeletons as he passed, he entered a dense fern-forest. Immense tree-ferns with rough trunks and palm-like leaf crowns, some of which were more than seventy feet in height, towered above many bushy varieties that were gigantic compared to the largest ferns of earthly jungles. Climbing ferns hung everywhere, like lianas. Creeping ferns made bright green patches on the ground. And dwarf, low-growing kinds barely raised their fronds above the violet-colored moss which carpeted the forest floor.

  The trail was plain enough, as the little feet had sunk deeply into the moss and leaf-mould. It led over a fern-clothed rise to lower marshy ground, where fungus growths predominated. There were colossal toadstools, some of which reared their heads more than fifty feet above ground, tremendous morels like titanic spear heads projecting from the earth, squat puff-balls that burst when touched, scattering clouds of tiny black spores, and grotesque funguses shaped like candelabra, corkscrews, organ pipes, stars, fluted funnels and upraised human hands.

  But Lotan gave no heed to these. To him they were quite commonplace.

  As he hurried along the trail, there suddenly came from the tangle ahead a horrible peal of demoniacal laughter. It was quickly echoed by a dozen others coming from various points in the fungoid forest. He dashed forward, gripping his weapons, for he recognized the cry of the hahoe, that terrible carnivore of the Venerian jungles. It had discovered a victim and was summoning its fellows.

  Like all Venerian gentlemen, Lotan wore a tork and scarbo belted to his waist. The tork was a rapid-fire weapon about two feet long, of blued steel. It was shaped much like a carpenter’s level, and fired by means of explosive gas, discharging needle-like glass projectiles filled with a potent poison that would instantly paralyze man or beast. The scarbo was a cutting, thrusting weapon with a blade like that of a scimitar and basket hilt.

  As he abruptly emerged into a little clearing, he saw a slender, golden-haired girl who wore the silver and purple of nobility, clinging to the cap of a tall fungus. Below her, snarling, snapping and leaping upward, were a half dozen hahoes, huge brutes somewhat like hyenas, but twice as large as any hyena that ever walked the earth, and far more hideous. They had no hair, but were covered with rough scales of a black color, and mottled and spots of golden orange. Each beast had three horns, one projecting from either temple and one standing out between the eyes. Two of them were gnawing at t
he stem of the fungus, and had made such headway that it seemed likely to topple at any moment.

  With a reassuring shout to the frightened girl, Lotan whipped out his scarbo, and elevating the muzzle of his tork, pressed the firing button. Horrid death-yells from the hahoes followed the spitting of the tork, as the deadly glass projectiles did their work. In less than a minute four of the brutes lay dead at the foot of the fungus, and the other two had fled.

  But during that time, brief as it was, another flesh-eater of Venus, far more fearful than the hahoes, had seen the girl and marked her for its prey.

  As Lotan looked upward, about to speak to the girl, she screamed in deadly terror, for a man-eating gnarsh had suddenly swooped downward from the clouds. Seizing her in its huge talons, it flapped swiftly away.

  Lotan raised his tork, then lowered it with a cry of despair. For even though he might succeed in killing the flying monster without striking the girl, a fall from that dizzy height would mean sure death for her.

  There was the bare possibility, however, that the gnarsh would not eat her until it reached its eyrie, which would be situated on some inaccessible mountain crag. As there were no mountains on the island, the monster would probably head for the mainland, and he could follow in his flier.

  He accordingly turned, and dashed back to where his airship lay. Leaping into the cabin, he slammed the door. The little craft shot swiftly upward to a height of more than two thousand feet. Already the gnarsh was more than a mile away, flapping swiftly westward with its victim dangling limply.

  Like an avenging arrow, the tiny craft hurtled after the flying monster. As he came up behind it, Lotan drew his scarbo, and opening the cabin door, leaned out.

  Almost before the gnarsh knew of his presence, the botanist had flung an arm around the girl’s slender waist. With two deft slashes of his keen blade, he cut the tendons that controlled the mighty talons. They relaxed, and with a choking cry of relief, he dragged her into the cabin. Turning his craft, he aimed his tork and sent a stream of deadly projectiles into the flying monster. Its membranous wings crumpled, and it fell into the sea.