The Valley Where Time Stood Still

by Lin Carter

  But the People required no such instrumentation to locate themselves upon their world. As if by some sixth sense, they have at all times a precise sense of position and distance traveled. Earth scientists who have studied their ability in this regard account it indeed as something in the nature of a sixth sense; to be precise, they believe that the Martian natives have a sensitivity to declinations in the magnetic field of their planet, which nature has denied to her children on Earth.

  They made camp again on the second night after leaving ruined Ygnarh, leg-weary and saddle-chafed and ferociously hungry. It is next to impossible to build a fire on Mars, which is due as much to the absence of wood or brush as to the thinness of the atmosphere, which is so starved of oxygen that it is not easy to keep an open fire burning.

  Earthside tourists or colonists solve this problem by using canned foods whose containers are equipped with a heating element: you crack the seal and wait a few minutes, while the food warms itself to the proper temperature. The natives scorn such things as examples of the devil-magic of the accursed F’yagha. But even they enjoy a hot meal when they can get it, and colonial entrepreneurs have made a fortune selling cheap, durable heating units to the People. These are simply flat-topped, stubby cylinders of a durable alloy which contains a solid-state energy cell or battery and a dial which can be set to different intensities. You can cook a meal atop one of these units, or boil coffee, or cluster around it as you would around a campfire on the plains of Wyoming. The energy cells are charged with energy in its “static” state and you can “store” as much energy in them as you might wish to— enough to cook a hundred meals or a hundred million. With no moving parts, except for the vernier dial, there is nothing to wear out, and the units literally last forever. Or for a human lifetime or two, at least.

  For all his saddle-weariness, M’Cord found it impossible to fall asleep right off, as was usually his way. The nearer they got to their mysterious destination, the jumpier he got, it seemed.

  The others seemed to feel increasingly uneasy, too. Chastar was as nervous and edgy as a cat; and, cat-like, spat and snarled and showed his claws at the slightest provocation. Zerild drew inward and seemed haunted by brooding fears. As for the hunched little renegade priestling, he drew inward as well, hiding his thoughts behind dull opaque eyes and stolidly enduring the curses and occasional blows Chastar dealt him. The two Swedes felt the ominous tension in the atmosphere, too; there were dark circles under their eyes and Nordgren stuttered and stammered and cleared his throat with every word, and he kept tossing and turning all night long.

  Only Thaklar seemed unaffected by the eerie dread that came to grip them all. Whatever he felt he hid behind an imperturbable mask of unshaken calm. He kept to himself, exchanging few words with anyone, and seemed to have no trouble sleeping.

  M’Cord wondered if the Hawk prince knew better than they what lay before them….

  Irritable and edgy, his legs aching from a day in the saddle, the big Earthman finally climbed out of his sac, fastened up the pressure seams on his thermalsuit, and thought to stretch his legs a bit. He moistened his throat from the canteen in his gear and went over to warm his hands before the heat unit. It was then that he noticed another of the party was unable to get to sleep.

  It was Inga. The blond girl sat on the edge of the bowlshaped crater in which they had camped, hugging her knees and staring up wistfully at the stars. The sky was black as India ink, the stars in their countless thousands as huge and brilliant as jewels. Far more stars blaze in the heavens of Mars than were ever seen on Earth, even from the mountaintops or the driest desert. This, he knew, was also caused by the difference in atmospheric density between the two worlds. The Martian air is blurred by no cloudbanks, thickened by no mist of moisture, as are the fair blue skies of the distant Earth.

  She either heard him stirring or glimpsed him moving from the corner of her eye, for she turned her head and watched him without speaking; so he climbed the ridge to where she sat crouched and murmured something about not feeling sleepy.

  “Neither do I, although I’m so tired,” the girl said. She looked up again at the night sky. “So strange,” she said faintly, “to see a sky without a moon.”

  He grunted and sat down near her. “Mars has two of ’em, actually, but you’d never know it for looking. They’re up there somewhere, though. The Martians can see them, even if we can’t.”

  “I know,” she said dreamily. “What a strange notion … invisible moons!”

  “Oh, they aren’t really invisible,” he scoffed with a grin. “Just don’t reflect enough sunlight for us to be able to see them. The telescope jockeys have a word for what’s wrong with ’em, but I forget—”

  “Albedo?”

  “Yeah, that’s it—I think. Low albedo. The sun’s so far away we don’t get much of its light as it is, and the moons have such a low albedo that what little light they do get they don’t reflect much. Oh, they can be seen, I guess, but you got to know exactly where they are in the sky in order to get a look. And that complicates things even more, because one of ’em, the bigger one, Phobos, moves so fast it goes around the planet three times in a day. The other one, Deimos, hardly seems to move at all; they aren’t either one of ’em very big, you know; a dozen or fifteen miles across, at most.”

  She nodded politely, just as if she hadn’t read the whole explanation in the tourist guides.

  “Everything is so still here,” she said, glancing about. “There’s no wind … no sound at all, hardly. I wonder why the outlaws don’t post a guard at night to keep us from getting away … or from … trying to overpower them while they sleep.”

  M’Cord grinned, teeth startlingly white in his dark-tanned face. “Nowhere for us to go to even if we did get away,” he said. “And, well, when it comes to tryin’ to overpower Chastar and his pals—I guess you never tried to sneak up on a sleeping Martian! Back on Earth, I understand the scientists still haven’t made up their minds whether or not the natives here are descended from catlike ancestors, just as we’re supposed to be descended from ape-like ancestors. They sure look enough like cats, with those green-yellow eyes they have, and that silky fur atop their heads where we got hair, and the way they move, graceful and easy, like dancers. But I could tell the scientists a thing or two: there’s a cat back there in their evolution somewhere, because they sleep with one eye open, or it seems like that, anyway. Ever try to surprise a sleeping cat? Well, you got about that much chance to sneak up on one of the People! Take Chastar down there: right now he’s sound asleep, but if I got within fifteen feet of him, he’d be wide awake—and I’d be starin’ down the muzzle of his gun! Nope; no need to post guards; a Martian has a good one half of him on guard all the time, awake or sleeping! And if you think we ought to have guards posted on account of predators, well, there’s nothin’ up here on top of the Sinus big enough to bother us. Sandcats and such like, they mostly live down in the dustlands or the gorges that cut deep notches along the

  edge of a Sinus; you know, caused by cracks in the crust of Mars when she began drying up. Down there in the gorges is where the predators live, because that’s where the small critters live that they make their meals off of. Besides, Chastar has a ‘buzzer field’ set up around the outside of the camp. A subsonic field, to scare away anything that just might be out and huntin’ … we can’t feel it ’cause we’re inside it. But anything that just might be out there, wandering around and up to no good, will feel it in its bones—and in its teeth, too, just like a king-sized tooth ache….”

  His voice died away; suddenly he felt uncomfortable and even self-conscious. It was quite a speech for a man generally as closemouthed as M’Cord was, and he realized it and shut up.

  But the girl had sensed it, too, and looked over at him with a queer expression. The softness of the starlight blurred the lines of strain and weariness and tension that marred her beauty by day; suddenly he was very conscious of her warmth and nearness. Her face was a pale oval by starli
ght, her calm blue eyes curiously tender, and starlight glimmered in her golden hair, striking little witch-lights among the tendrils of that gold.

  She smiled at him. “My, you’re an odd person, Cn. M’Cord … days go by on end and you hardly speak more than three words …”

  He grunted, and flushed beneath his deep space-ray tan, and was suddenly grateful for the dimness of the un-moonlit night, which hid his blush from the eyes of the Swedish girl. His volubility surprised even himself. But there is something in a man, even a man of few words, like M’Cord, that enjoys opening up on a subject with which he is familiar when his attentive audience is a slim young girl with tender blue eyes and blond curls spilling about her shoulders.

  He suddenly felt as shy and awkward as a schoolboy— 114

  and hated himself for feeling that way! He lurched to his feet.

  “Umm. Well; guess it’s time for some shut-eye, anyway. ’Night!” he mumbled, and limped back to his sleeping place, feeling uncomfortable and embarrassed. The girl looked after him with a small, quiet smile of amusement.

  It had been a long time since anything had amused her. All at once she felt young and free and clean and pure again. She enjoyed the feeling, while it lasted.

  XIV. The Broken Land

  Up until this point in their journey, the way had stretched smooth and unencumbered before them. Due to his innate racial sense of direction and positioning, Chastar had unerringly led them across the smooth tableland of ancient rock. The worn disc of silver which bore the Road marked out like a map was consulted only when they had to work their way around a crater or an occasional deep crevasse.

  But with dawn on the third day of the adventure, they rode into rough country. The going became hazardous and difficult and rather complicated; and it got worse the further they went. For here, at some unknown period in the remote past, meteorites had rained down upon the Sinus with unprecedented force and in considerable numbers. The way they followed was riven asunder by crater upon crater, large and small, and the ground underfoot was covered with a loose, treacherous layer of crumbling and powdery rock.

  To further complicate the situation, they had by now reached that portion of the Road where Zerild’s silver map was blank and smooth and unmarked. From this point forward on the journey, only Thaklar could guide them.

  And not one of them but wondered, deep in his heart, if the Hawk princeling could be trusted to guide them correctly to their goal and safely around whatever dangerous places there might be, or what hidden man traps the ancient Martians might have set.

  M’Cord rode in the forefront of the expedition, a little ahead of Inga. Here the path wound through a narrow passage between the ringwalls of two major craters which were positioned close to one another. So he rode forward all alone.

  He was sweating inside the thermalsuit, was M’Cord; and he was very conscious of the pressure of their eyes against his back. The others waited to see whether the ground would open up beneath the pads of his loper and hurl him to a quick death at the bottom of a steep and unseen precipice; or whether he would fall victim to some uncanny enchantment or spell cast ages ago upon this narrow defile that wound between two steep walls of rock.

  He was wondering about it, himself.

  Just how far was Thaklar to be trusted with their lives —with his life? Just how fanatical was the Hawk princeling, and to what extremities would he go to protect the hereditary secret of his House, and to shield The Holy from defilement at the hands of renegades and Outworlders?

  It had been damned shrewd of the outlaw chieftain to order M’Cord forward alone, the Earthman thought grimly. The lives of the two Scandinavians were of no particular value to Thaklar—he neither liked them nor hated them, but remained stolidly indifferent to their fate. But the life of his brother was another matter….

  Or was it?

  M’Cord sweated and cursed to himself, and urged the reluctant slidar forward. Here the walls of ragged rock nearly closed together, and the passage was so narrow that there was only an inch or so of space on either side. If ever there was a perfect place for an ambush or a trap, thought M’Cord, this was it.

  Once through the throat of the passage, the Road widened out a bit and M’Cord relaxed and started breathing once again. He began thinking about just how much Thaklar prized his life as opposed to how much he prized the unbroken secrecy of the sacred Valley of Ophar.

  The water-sharing ritual—actually, too simple to be called a ritual—had been performed between an unconscious man dying of fever and one who pitied him and would not stand idly by and watch him die without striving to aid him. Was it then, M’Cord wondered, a true rite of brotherhood that existed between him and the Hawk prince? He wasn’t sure; the People, he knew, were great experts in their canon law. They argued the finer points and the knottier questions of law and ritual for the sheer fun of it: to them it was an intellectual game, a mental exercise, like chess or mathematics or Bach fugues to Earthmen. And he had no doubt that ample precedents could be quoted by Thaklar to invalidate the rite between himself and M’Cord.

  Then again, just how important was it to Thaklar to preserve the secret of the Valley Beyond Time? Surely he put the value of the secret above his own life. Would he not put it above M’Cord’s, even though he accounted the Earthman his brother?

  M’Cord shrugged, consigned all such nagging questions to hell, and put the matter out of his mind.

  There was no point in trying to figure out what Thaklar thought.

  And he had enough to worry about, as things were.

  The country was rising now; they were winding up an unmarked trail that led to the crest of a slope. This steep rise must have been the ringwall thrown up by a gigantic meteor ages before. Hurtling out of the depths of space a billion years ago or more the meteor had struck in the exact mathematical center of the Sinus. The atmosphere had been many times richer in oxygen then, and the heat of the meteor, hurtling down through the envelope of air at thirty-five thousand miles per hour, had ignited the air. The surface of the peninsula had turned to molten slag; the impact crater could well be many miles across. M’Cord knew enough about elementary physics to know that a meteorite only ten feet in diameter can strike the planetary surface with the force and fury of the hell bombs that vaporized both Nagasaki and Hiroshima long before his grandfather had been born.

  The meteor that made the Ophar crater might have been no bigger than that.

  They had traversed the length of the Sabaeus Sinus by now, and had reached the exact center of the Meridiani, a great, squarish mesa that grew like a knob at the end of the peninsula. They were just a couple of degrees south of the Martian equator now, and exactly on the prime meridian.

  What they might find here, no one knew; no one could even predict. Only the Timeless Ones, as the Martians termed their ancient gods, could say.

  Climbing the slope of the outer wall of the crater grew increasingly more difficult as it grew ever steeper. They had been forced to leave the pack-beasts below, but remained in the saddle, since slidars trained for riding can climb as well as a man and are as sure-footed as any mountain goat. And it would have been grueling and perhaps impossible for them to have attempted to scale to the summit afoot. Especially for M’Cord; not that Chastar cared about M’Cord, of course.

  The pack-beasts had been unburdened and turned loose to wander where they wished. Chastar grumbled at the necessity, but there was really nothing else to be done.

  The footing became dreadfully insecure. For here, on the sides of the vast cone of the crater, meteorites of smaller size had peppered the crater walls with pockmarks. Craterlet was superimposed upon craterlet, and, beneath the cosmic bombardment, the naked rock had been reduced to gravel, which the ages had pulverized still more. The powdery stone grit, intermixed with pebbles, made the worst conceivable footing for the lopers.

  Eventually, finding themselves sliding back three yards for every yard they gained, they dismounted on Chastar’s order and went forwa
rd one by one on foot, leading the slidars by their reins. They inched their way up by walking sideways, gaining a better purchase in this manner, since the human foot is longer than it is wide.

  Thaklar guided them with minute care. Many times he bid them pause while he pondered his memory for landmarks. Leg-weary and tight with tension of unseen dangers he sensed but could not see, M’Cord wondered how any landmark could survive a couple of million years unaltered. Evidently they had, for although Thaklar had to stop and cudgel his memory and search with his eyes, he nonetheless guided them forward without error or turning back to trace another path. Either the landmarks had not eroded out of all recognition in all these aeons on a weatherless planet, or maybe it was the work of the gods that had somehow preserved them intact. M’Cord neither knew nor cared. He wished it were over, and that he could rest his leg.

  The crater wall continued to rise beneath them. They were far above the surface of the Sinus now, and could look back for scores of miles in the clear, dry air. The crater must have been as high as Fujiyama, M’Cord thought wearily; and he wondered as to its breadth. He wondered if it were not wider even than the monster the Earth scientists had marveled at in the days before Christoffsen had made the first landing—the incredible supercrater the old NASA scientists had named Nix Olympica.

  On a broad shelf of rock they rested and broke the midday fast. They were bone-weary and gasping for breath, even Chastar and Zerild. The atmosphere of Mars is thin enough on the dead sea bottoms; on the mountainous heights it is virtually nonexistent.