The Valley Where Time Stood Still

by Lin Carter

  Zerild was examining the worn disc of ancient silver.

  “We are almost beyond that place the inscription calls ‘the Broken Land,’ ” she decided. Chastar grunted around a jawful of dried lizard meat.

  “Broken indeed is this land,” he grumbled. “Half a hundred times I thought my boots would slip and that I would lose my footing and roll all the way back down again. A man could die here from a slip of his foot.”

  He squinted up_ at Thaklar, who sat a little apart from the rest of them, munching his meat and staring up the slope. The eyes of the Hawk prince were wide and thoughtful, but his features were inscrutable.

  “Hai, Hawk! I misjudged you—I, Chastar, admit it! Jehu, but I dreamed you would betray us all to our deaths in the Broken Land, once you were become our only guide. Why did you not, eh? Speak! Would you join with us in the treasure? Is that it?”

  Thaklar eyed him with cold eyes, aloof and disdainful, his expression somber.

  “There was no need for me to betray you,” he said at last, “for you will betray yourselves in the end, aye, all of you.”

  Chastar puzzled over this enigmatic prophecy and decided that he didn’t like the sound of it. Snarling an oath, he hitched his gunbelt around so that he could toy with the handle of his black leather whip.

  “Who will betray Chastar?” he demanded. “Not the woman, for she is mine, or will be, and no woman betrays Chastar and lives! As for the aged one, he knows very well the name of his master, and has felt the weight of his hand ere this, eh, snake?” he said with a harsh, ugly laugh. He loved to bait the little renegade priest, who was deathly afraid of him.

  Phuun veiled his eyes and bowed his head obsequiously. Chastar laughed again, this time boastfully.

  “What mean you then by such foolish words?” he demanded.

  Thaklar matched him glare for glare, his face impassive, his temper unruffled.

  “That is for the future to tell,” he said calmly. “But remember this, red wolf! It was written of old of Ophar the Holy, that therein shall be given to each according to his deserving.”

  The simple words were spoken in a calm, uninflected voice. M’Cord wondered, then, why they seemed pregnant with a terrible and overpowering sense of doom and menace.

  III

  THE SEARCH

  FOR

  THE SECRET

  XV. Into The Valley of Mystery

  The brief rest break was soon over. Chastar was eager to reach the top of the crater wall before nightfall. They were all very tired, for it had been a long day and already they had come about seventeen miles. But Chastar would hear no word of rest or delay.

  So they began again. It was not as hard going as before, for here the slope was naked rock alone, with neither rock dust nor loose pebbles to make the footing insecure and dangerous. But it was an almost constant upward climb, and the way grew steeper and steeper with every yard.

  In the brilliant dry clarity of the thin air, from his height, you could see the entirety of the Meridiani Mesa and a dim, blurred glimpse of the dustlands that ringed it on three sides. This must be one of the highest elevations on the planet, thought M’Cord. He was sweating again: whatever the mystery of Ophar was, they were about to get their first glimpse of it.

  Thaklar led them by an almost invisible trail, from outcropping to outcropping. He warned them to place their hands and feet with great care in precisely the positions he

  showed them, for the stony shelves were loose in places and one mistake could be fatal. It was a long way down.

  There was no point in trying to lead the slidars up so steep a slope, and they no longer had need of them. Chastar fumed and cursed, but there was nothing else to do but unload the beasts and turn them loose to find their own way down to the base of the crater wall, to join the pack-beasts. From below, the rising ground level had been so gradual as to be imperceptible, and had he known that the terrain would change in so abrupt and perilous a manner, he would have abandoned all of the beasts below with supplies of food, to await their return. But he had not known, and Thaklar had not seen fit to apprise him; so the lopers were set loose to slide and clatter back down the slope to where their brethren wandered.

  This meant that unless the beasts somehow lingered in the vicinity, they would have to walk back to Ygnarh when the time came to return. There was no help for it, but it enraged Chastar to the point of fury. The Hawk prince made not the slightest response to the storm of curses and imprecations that broke around his head; he merely waited until at last Chastar was silent, his temper spent, and they could continue on the last leg of their journey.

  The climb continued. Now the slope was extremely steep indeed; the way led up an almost vertical wall of naked stone.

  They took it easy, with frequent pauses to catch their breaths. It was even more difficult than it had seemed from below, the final ascent. It took them more than three hours to make it to the top.

  Here they found a broad open space, as wide as a highway, but littered with enormous boulders as big as aircars. The rock-strata here ran in crazy fluid lines, like solidified molasses. This rock had been molten lava a billion years before; and the impress of the tremendous forces that had shaped it were still clearly visible on this desert world where there was nothing to erode the stone and erase or soften the curvatures into which the molten rock had cooled and hardened.

  They made their way through the litter of boulders. The top of the wall was as smooth and flat as the crest of ancient battlements in some Cyclopean fortress built by prehistoric giants.

  Chastar and Zerild were in the lead. They inched sideways between two huge boulders that stood close together, with only a narrow space between them. Beyond the narrow space they stopped suddenly, as if frozen with shock.

  Zerild drew back with a startled gesture.

  Chastar sucked in his breath sharply; it hissed between his clenched teeth.

  They were standing on the very edge of a precipice. Only two inches beyond their feet the wall fell away in a sheer cliff that dropped hundreds of feet to the floor of the shallow valley below.

  The others joined them; they stood, side by side, on the brink of the abyss and looked down on Ophar.

  “What devil’s trickery is this?” Chastar rasped hoarsely. But no one answered him.

  M’Cord, his bad leg hurting him abominably, was the last to join them at the brink of the valley. He looked down … and found it hard to believe the testimony of his eyes.

  Below them, the floor of the valley lay at a distance of five or six hundred feet straight down. It was shallower by far than he had expected.

  And it was nothing at all like what he had expected.

  The valley floor was partly drowned in inky purple shadows by this hour of the afternoon. And the floor itself was difficult to see clearly; but it stretched away to the other side of the crater wall, a distance of about twenty miles, he estimated. So it was only half as big as Nix Olympica, after all.

  Roughly in the center of the crater, about ten miles from where they stood, a conical center peak rose from the crater floor. It was the impact crater left by a giant meteorite, then, as he had guessed. Only impact craters have that pyramidal-shaped central peak.

  These things he only noticed in passing, as it were. It was the floor of the valley that held his attention, as it held that of Zerild and Phuun and Chastar and his brother. For it was nothing more than a broad and level rock-field littered with crumbled boulders and pocked with innumerable small craterlets.

  It was dead, dry, sterile, lifeless rock—just like the surface of the plateau they had been crossing all these days!

  It was nothing like what he had imagined it would be.

  That made him stop and think. Exactly how had he pictured Ophar? Well, as a valley paradise, he supposed: a beautiful garden. But that was nonsense; there were no gardens on Mars, for the planet was old and dead and barren.

  Why, then, had he pictured it so? Probably because of the parallel between Opha
r and Eden; a garden is a garden, after all.

  But he should have known better.

  So should they all. For it was patently obvious that the others had shared much the same dream as M’Cord. Zerild stared down at the dead, rock-strewn valley with an expression of great surprise and disillusionment. Chastar was in a rage, his mouth working loosely, his body trembling with violent fury. Even Phuun was shocked from his customary torpor: the renegade priest was slack-jawed with a surprise so enormous as to be more properly termed horror.

  “Tricked! I’ve been tricked!” yelped the outlaw. He turned on Zerild and struck her a vicious blow with his open hand, catching her off guard. The blow left vivid red splotches across her cheeks.

  “You devil’s slut! You and your babble of maps and lost marvels! You did this to me—you!”

  Thaklar cleared his throat. Chastar turned; the Hawk prince was pointing at the inner surface of the cliff. They looked—all of them, even Zerild, nursing her stinging face with murder burning in the depths of her green eyes.

  A stairway had been cut into the stone cliff, leading down.

  “That is the way down, Chastar,” Thaklar said calmly. Of them all, only the Hawk prince seemed undisturbed by the disillusionment of finding the Valley Where Life Was Bom to be a lifeless and empty place of barren, dead rock.

  “Down! Why should I wish to go down?” snarled the outlaw. “There is dead rock and dust aplenty back the way we came; should I, then, descend into the crater for more of it?”

  “If the Valley is truly a dead place, then why this stair?” Zerild asked wonderingly.

  It struck them, then, the oddness of it.

  With enormous industry and effort—someone—had cut the rocky surface of the sheer precipice into a zigzagging flight of stone steps. Stone steps that led down to—nothing?

  It was not possible. Nor was it believable.

  As if not trusting their eyesight, they turned simultaneously to peer down into the shallow valley once again. But it still looked the same, a sandy rock plain strewn with worn and crumbling boulders, irregularly pockmarked with craterlets of varying size. There was not the slightest trace of vegetation to be seen among the litter of stony fragments, or upon the slopes of the further wall.

  No glint of moisture, no sign of ruins, no evidence that man had ever walked that shard-strewn plain. Only a dreary and desolate valley filled with emptiness.

  Then why had the stair been cut in the wall?

  Chastar spat a curse, but his fury left him. In its place was a hard, cold-eyed determination.

  “Shoulder your gear, all of you,” he commanded. “We are going down!”

  “Into … that?” Nordgren questioned feebly, the level afternoon light glinting off his eyeglasses. “But there is nothing there!”

  “There must be something there, or they would not have cut the steps into the wall so men could reach it,” Chastar said grimly. “I have come too far and endured too much to turn back without seeing for myself exactly what Ophar truly is. Only when I have paced that plain from wall to wall and found nothing, only then will I give up the search and turn back. Shoulder your gear, F’yagh, and begin to climb down. You will lead us, yellow-hair; you and your kinswoman!”

  Nervously, Nordgren peered down at the first step of the stair. It was only a few inches below the brink on which he stood. The stone of the cliff surface had been cut away, and each step projected about two feet from the side of the precipice. It was narrow enough, the stair, but by going slowly and watching your step it should be safe enough to descend. Shrugging, the Swede helped his sister down, cautioned her to be careful and not to look down into the abyss lest she become dizzy.

  Then he stepped down onto the top step, tested it for security, found it strong enough to bear the burden of his weight, and strode down after his sister.

  One by one, they followed him.

  It was not as difficult as it might have been. There were no winds to shake them; no mosses or lichens underfoot to make their bootheels slip; and none of them was bothered by vertigo or a neurotic fear of heights. And the stair was beautifully smooth and straight-cut, with a shallow, easy decline where it could have been steep.

  So they began to make their way down into the Valley.. .

  The Valley Where Time Stood Still.

  The Valley Where Life Was Born.

  And they wondered why this empty and desolate place had ever been thought holy, and why it had been forbidden to men for all these ages….

  XVI. The Descent

  One by one, in single file, they climbed down the ancient stone stair that led to the floor of the crater.

  The steps were cut into the side of the rock cliff in such a manner that they slanted to the south for a distance of about twenty-five yards, then terminated in a squarish stone platform where one might pause and rest a bit, catch one’s breath, before continuing the descent. From the first platform, the stone stair angled back in the opposite direction for another twenty-five yards, and again there was a platform where they could again pause before resuming the descent.

  M’Cord’s leg was aching abominably, but he gritted his teeth and clamped his jaws shut and refused to whimper. Favoring his bum leg as best he could, he limped, in the rear, more slowly than his companions. There was nothing else to do; Chastar was in a frenzy of impatience to see the crater floor for himself, and would brook no delays.

  At the first landing, M’Cord rested and sipped a mouthful of water, taking the opportunity to down a few painkillers. Thereafter he managed to drag himself along from step to step, although rather slowly. But they were all weary and none of them felt like sprinting down the stairway.

  Nordgren was marveling over the ingenuity of the stonework.

  “A magnificent achievement!” he panted, watery blue eyes peering about through his spectacles. He cleared his throat nervously. “What amazing engineers the ancient Martians must have been—think of the sheer cumulative man-hours of labor spent in hewing such a stair from the solid rock! It’s an extraordinary feat; yet one cannot help wondering for what purpose it was designed. Obviously, there is nothing within the crater that a man would wish to see…

  Thaklar grunted impassively, but a hint of humor glinted in his hawklike eyes. “You trust too much to sight alone, dok-i-tar,” he commented. “There are things that cannot easily be seen, even by one whose eyes are strengthened by bits of glass.”

  Nordgren blinked owlishly.

  “Eh? Well, perhaps so; we shall see. But I cannot help wondering just how these steps were hewn. You will observe there are no marks of chiseling left in the stone: the surface and sides of the steps are smooth and regular as sanded wood. This can, of course, be accomplished even by primitive stonecutters, but only with enormous effort. It puzzles me that they should bother to smooth and polish the stone in such a manner.”

  “Perhaps the stair was not hewn with chisels, but by another means,” Thaklar suggested.

  Nordgren looked at him with bafflement. Then his thin lips quirked with amusement. “Well, actually one does get the impression the stone had been reduced to a fluid condition and cast, somehow, into the desired configuration! But such skill would, of course, have been beyond the powers of a primitive people.”

  Thaklar made no reply. But it was Phuun who answered him; the little renegade priestling seldom spoke, and hardly ever exchanged a word with any of the three Hated Ones. Nevertheless, in this instance he spoke to Nordgren.

  “The People were never primitives,” he whispered hoarsely, the glint of fanaticism in his snakish eyes. “The Timeless Ones, who raised them to manhood from among the squalid brutes, nurtured in their breasts the arts of a high civilization. Who is to say what powers were not possessed by our ancestors, who, in this very place, walked with eternal gods?”

  Nordgren blinked and made a feeble protest, which Phuun ignored. There was no credible answer the scientist could make to the arguments of religious belief, so he wisely kept silent.

&
nbsp; M’Cord had a hunch that they would find other marvels down here somewhere—marvels that would reduce the incredible craftsmanship and engineering of the stone stair to the level of child’s play. But he held his tongue and concentrated on the labor of keeping on his feet and moving down, one step at a time.

  Inga paused to catch her breath, pressing back one errant blond curl with the back of her hand.

  “I should have thought we would be at the bottom of the stair by now,” she said faintly. “It only looked to be five or six hundred feet down.”

  “It’s a good thousand or more, if it’s a foot,” her brother said. “The cliff goes down and down—see?—the foot of the stair still looks as far away as it did from the crest of the crater wall!”

  “But how can that be?” the girl asked bewilderedly.

  Her brother seemed agitated. His eyes gleamed with mounting excitement as he glanced about intently.

  “I don’t know! I don’t understand any of this. There’s some queer distortion of lightwaves here … some queer optical effect I don’t understand. Look at the valley floor— it looks different than it did from above!”

  They followed his pointing hand, all of them. Indeed, a peculiar change had come over the bottom of the crater. By now they had climbed down the zigzagging stair some hundreds of feet. And from this perspective, the floor of the crater looked oddly… wrong.

  M’Cord squinted down, trying to puzzle out what it was about the vista of barren sand and broken stone that had changed as they had descended. Then, with an uncanny thrill of premonition, he grasped what it was about the bottom of the crater that looked different now.

  It was curiously blurred and artificial-looking. It was rather like a skillful painting by one of the extinct impressionist school; seen at a fair distance, the objects depicted by the painter are visible with great clarity of realistic detail. But when you come close to the canvas, the objects within it dissolve into mere meaningless blurs and splotches of raw color. It is the perspective of distance that resolves them into realistic detail.