The ecolog, p.8
The Ecolog, page 8
"Yes?" prompted Briggs.
"An invitation to become citizens of Arbre."
"All of us?" said Mike, surprised.
Mano pointed a shaking finger at Garbage. "All but her!"
Briggs answered grimly, "I'm sorry, but we cannot accept any invitations that do not include Miss Garbage. She has become a most valuable member of our crew."
The girl called Garbage stared at Briggs with astonished gratitude.
In the temple Briggs received his first idea of the Ecolog's appearance. A statue of her stood behind an altar laden with offerings of food. As he approached the idol, Briggs walked slowly down the middle aisle of the huge, echoing, cathedrallike building, a puzzled scowl on his homely face, his bushy brows knitted together.
He stopped at the foot of the statue and peered up.
Lieutenant Phillips stood on his right, Garbage on his left, and Sewall the scout slightly ahead of him. The others followed, murmuring.
"Handsome woman, if this statue is a likeness," said the commodore softly. The image was sculpted from white marble, five times taller than a man. The Ecolog was portrayed in the posture of a loving mother, arms outspread to welcome in her children. The design and workmanship were of that masterly quality Briggs had learned to recognize as being at least 100 years old. Where arms, legs or neck emerged from her flowing classical robes, the painter had used great skill to imitate real flesh; it was easy to imagine that a genuine living giantess was standing here, waiting to embrace a multitude.
The only disturbing note was the mask.
The mask was made of polished metal, concealing the face from brows to chin except for the eyeslits. A pair of startlingly realistic blue eyes seemed to peer through, reflecting a beam of sunlight cleverly aimed to illuminate the head of the statue and nothing else. The cheeks of the mask were incised with an elaborate serpentine or perhaps floral pattern, and studded with many-colored, translucent jewels, which could have been intended to represent fruit or, equally well, the glittering eyes of snakes.
Briggs felt oddly ambivalent.
The Ecolog's slender girl-like form attracted him.
Her metal mask repelled him, inspired a trace of irrational, superstitious fear. Yet the mask, too, was beautiful in its way.
He asked Mike, "What's behind that mask, eh?"
Mike shrugged. "Beats me."
Briggs was depressed. The interview with the Lord Mayor had returned his claymore to him and, in a manner of speaking, he had been given the keys to the city, but he had not achieved the precious few minutes of computer time he needed. For that, it seemed, he would have to appeal to management.
Sewall said softly, mockingly, "Those who ask for nothing, get nothing."
Briggs spun around to face him, demanding, "Are you reading my mind?"
"Don't be absurd, Briggs."
"Then what did you mean by that?"
"Only that if you had persisted, our dear Lord Mayor would have allowed you to bring your garbage friend with you when you became a citizen of Arbre."
Briggs answered soberly, "None of us intend to become members of your community."
Sewall's eyebrows raised. "No?"
"No. We have to push on into the mountains as soon as possible."
"I understand," said Sewall. "You must go to the goddess. Only she can answer your prayers."
Briggs said sharply, "Your Ecolog is no goddess."
Sewall smiled like a leering leprechaun. "I know that. You know that. But the people who lay all these offerings before her statue… do they know that? But, very well. I'll take you to the marketplace. You'll need steeds, mountain-climbing equipment…" He had started for one of the side exits.
Following him, the commodore said, "And our stinger pistols."
Sewall answered with mock pity. "I'm so sorry, Mr. Briggs. Those weapons are too advanced to be allowed outside the court of the Ecolog. She will pick them up on her next visit."
"Now see here…" Briggs had his hand on the pommel of his claymore.
"That's right," said the gleeful Sewall. "First kill me, then kill the temple guards, then the entire population of Arbre, if you think you can."
He led them through the exit, saying, with the air of a tourist guide, "We are now entering the famous Hall of Mummies."
Briggs glanced uneasily to his right, then to his left.
Along either side of the dim passageway stood, as if at attention, an honor guard of corpses. They were all, probably thanks to the dry desert air, remarkably well preserved. Only the hard grayness of the skin and the lack of movement betrayed the fact that they were not alive.
Sewall babbled on. "The mummies you see along the wall are of no importance. They're here for decoration, though if you don't find them decorative I'd have to agree with you. They're the unworthy ones, human garbage cast out by the Ecolog."
With a shudder, Briggs had already recognized the bodies when the girl named Garbage rushed to the wall and looked up at one of the silent figures. It was that of a young woman with long, blond hair dressed in a loose-fitting, white tunic.
Garbage said nothing for almost a full minute while Sewall watched her, a sly smirk on his face. At last, her skin pale, eyes wild, she turned and faced him. "It's me!" she screamed. "They're all me!"
It was true. Each and every one of the stiff, dry corpses was, at least at first glance, exactly alike, and all were the image of Garbage—two lines of her macabre duplicates stretching off into the dark distance.
There was a problem.
Commodore Briggs had no money to buy the equipment needed to climb the mountains. During lunch Sewall commiserated with him.
"It's all for the best," said the dark little man soothingly. "Life in Arbre may not be exciting, but it's better than no life at all. Those mountains are dangerous, you know. You could kill yourself trying to—"
Briggs grunted, "I can't stay here." He glanced around. They were sitting in a rather rough and decaying outdoor cafe, dirt-floored, with heavy, crude wooden tables and benches. Shade from the vicious sun was provided by a faded awning overhead. Also, somewhere overhead Briggs knew, was the Corregidor and the crew who depended on him.
Sewall, seated across the table, leaned forward and gestured toward Garbage. "Ah, but you can. Get rid of the girl."
"No."
Sewall shrugged. "All right. Keep her then, if you're willing to argue with the Ecolog about her. But you should realize that the Ecolog seldom loses an argument."
"Before I can argue with her, I have to speak to her."
"That can be arranged."
"When?"
"In a week or a month… she visits Arbre from time to time, but we never know in advance when she's coming."
"I need to speak to her now."
Sewall raised his hands in a gesture of resignation. "You must know that's impossible."
Mike Phillips, seated next to Briggs, put in, "We're not familiar with your customs. We come from… quite a long way."
Sewall's interest perked up. "Oh? Do you come from the city of Droon?"
Mike shook his head. "No."
"Rahoor? Oowak? Wumdum? Wibblewak?"
Mike grinned. "No."
Briggs said, "We come from another planet."
Sewall burst out laughing. "Then you are outlanders indeed!"
Briggs was surprised. "Don't you believe me?"
"What do you take me for? If you come from some distant city that you'd rather not name, I won't press you, but don't tell me any tall tales about other planets. There are no other planets."
Briggs and Mike glanced at each other. Briggs said, "Your ancestors came here from another planet."
"That's a myth. The Ecolog tells us that to impress the superstitious masses, to make herself appear as the creator of our society. No intelligent man still believes those old stories. The human race evolved by a process of natural selection. That's what really happened."
Briggs said softly, "At night, when you look up into the sky, what do you see?"
"The Great Whirlpool."
"Yes. We call it the Milky Way Galaxy. Somewhere out near the end of one of the arms of that galaxy is a sun called Sol."
Sewall gestured toward the sky. "There is only one sun, the one that shines on us now."
Briggs persisted, "Around that sun, Sol, revolves a planet called Earth."
Sewall reached down and picked up a handful of dust from the dirt floor of the cafe. "There is one Earth, and we are on it." He shook the handful of dust under Briggs's nose. "This is Earth. You see?"
There is another Earth, the real Earth."
"Show it to me," the scout demanded.
"You can't see it from here, not even with a telescope."
"A telescope? What's a telescope?"
Mike began angrily, "You stupid little…"
Briggs stopped him. "Never mind, Mister Phillips. Our friend says there is no other Earth. Unless we can reach the Ecolog and get her help within the next two days, the energy banks of the Corregidor will be exhausted, and for us, too, there will be no other Earth." He turned to Sewall. "Tell me, sir, if there are no other planets or suns, what is it you see when you look up into the night sky? What is this Great Whirlpool made of?"
The scout's answer had the ring of dogmatic certainty. "Millions of bits of glowing dust."
Sewall paid for the lunch, treating the whole squad and his own men too. It was clear he found his outlander friends amusing enough to be worth it, especially with all those tall tales of another Earth. One does not take madmen seriously, but they can be entertaining.
He glanced at the girl called Garbage. She, like the strangers, did not fit in. But her wrongness was a familiar wrongness and part of a familiar mystery, the mystery of the Ecolog. Sewall felt uneasy when he thought about the Ecolog. Just a woman in a mask! That's what his mind said, or at least the conscious part of his mind. But another, darker portion of his mind was not so sure.
Garbage had not joined much in the men's conversation. The sight of all those duplicates of herself in the Hall of Mummies had roused memories that were almost buried, memories of her childhood among throngs of girls who had looked almost exactly alike. Almost! That was the key word, it now seemed to her. There must be some difference, some reason why some girls ended up in the Hall of Mummies, and others lived on in the castle in the mountains.
She looked around her as she walked through the crowded streets of Arbre and, for the first time, sensed a profound alien quality. These people were as different from her as the animals they rode on and used to pull their wagons. A man was ordering a woman around. Such a thing could never happen at court! And there was a woman with children tugging at her skirts. At court there were no mothers or fathers, only the Ecolog and her court and servants, both male and female. Garbage had only the vaguest idea of what was meant by mother and father, or husband and wife.
The street around her faded from her mind, though almost by instinct she continued to follow in the wake of the gruff old commodore. (The commodore would protect her. She could trust him, if no one else.)
Her consciousness was crowded with visions.
Girls, girls, girls… all ages, but all with the same expressions on their faces, all with the same long, blond hair.
And a balcony that looked out over the desert, a sunlit balcony where the girls played. From this balcony she had felt she could see everything in the universe. She could see, far below, the city of Arbre, for example, though at the time nobody had told her the city's name. She could see people riding on their steeds, small as insects in the distance.
Three times girls had fallen from the balcony.
It was a long, long fall.
The girls had been killed on the rocks far below.
Nobody had made much fuss about it. Nobody had put up better railings, kept better watch over the girls who remained. Nobody had really cared, and the girls had gone on playing as if nothing had happened. Garbage, too, had not paid too much attention to the accidents, but now the memory of the screams of those falling girls echoed in her memory with a fresh horror she had not felt at the time.
The falling girls blended in her mind with the corpses in that awful hall. Could one girl die again and again endlessly, yet still be alive?
She remembered the dirigible drifting overhead to moor atop the silver tower. She remembered the shouts of greeting as the Ecolog descended in an elevator, the crowd of bright-robed witty ladies and gentlemen who gathered around her, chattering, yet never actually touching her.
She remembered looking up into a polished metal mask inset with glowing jewels. Two blue eyes had looked out through slits in the mask; the coldest eyes little Garbage had ever seen. Yet she also remembered gently murmured words, "You're a beautiful thing, beautiful." The Ecolog had such a gentle, weary voice. A woman must grow weary in 300 years.
Garbage remembered the rain on the golden tiles of the dome of the palace. It did not usually rain there on the mountaintop. More often Garbage had looked down on the rainclouds as they surrounded her castle, making it seem like a ship that sailed a soft white sea. Sometimes she'd seen lightning glimmering in the cloudy ocean and birds that swam in it like the fish in her picturebook.
She remembered the men who served her like slaves.
She remembered her pet, Wunkie. It had had eight legs and three eyes and long, blue fur and had been able to curl up in her lap and go to sleep. Wunkie had been able to speak to her—in English—but had not possessed a very large vocabulary. Sometimes, though, the pet said things that sounded very wise, in a bitter sort of way.
"I am not yours. I belong to myself. If you take good care of me, you'll get real people to take care of."
Once it had said, "You and I are alike in one way; we're both easily replaced."
She remembered a baby who had been slow to learn to walk.
The Ecolog had chopped off its head with a single, quick thwack of her jewel-handled sword. There'd been so much blood. She'd wondered how so much blood could fit in one tiny baby. The men had cleaned up the mess.
Garbage had taken the baby's death as a warning. Garbage could walk and talk, of course. She was very good at the sports the girls participated in each afternoon: good at running, jumping, fencing and playing ball, but she had not been doing well at her lessons and had failed some of the tests her tutors gave her. Like that baby, Garbage was not perfect.
And so she waited, hardly able to sleep at night, always listening for the stealthy tread of slippered feet approaching in the hall outside her bedroom; dreaming—when she did sleep—of that masked woman who would come, sword in hand, clad in rustling folds of blue nylon tricot, to put an end to one more imperfect life.
At last the footsteps came!
Garbage had looked up into that metal mask, into those dark eyeslits, looked up from her bed at that blue-draped woman looming over her in the dim room, had seen the blade slowly rise into striking position.
But then, with the quickness that comes from a thousand mental rehearsals, Garbage had slipped from under the covers and fled.
Oh, how she'd run! Men had sprinted after her, women too. But she'd been swift. A dozen times fingers had reached out to clutch her, had grazed her flesh, but always she'd evaded them, dashed down another dark hallway, up another marble staircase, through another wide doorway. And suddenly, by accident, Garbage had found a doorway and a hall she'd never known existed and had escaped from the fortress.
As she scrambled down the mountainside, they'd still followed, shouting, waving powerful flashlights.
They'd sent a machine after her. This she remembered with particular vividness. The machine, about the size and shape of her pet, had called to her in the voice of Wunkie.
"Help! Please, help me!" the thing had called.
She'd almost been fooled, but at the last possible instant had seen the nebula-light glinting on polished metal. She'd thrown a heavy boulder at it, heard the ringing clank of stone on steel, watched the machine fall and bounce and come apart, finally coming to rest far below at the foot of the cliff. The thing had one leg left that still moved feebly, and the wind brought to her the distant cry, "Help. Please, help me."
She remembered too the airships, smaller versions of the Ecolog's great dirigible. She remembered their egg-shaped gasbags dark against the nebula, their swinging searchlights, the bullets chopping into the hillside centimeters from her head that one time when they'd caught a glimpse of her. And she remembered the cave.
But now a sound brought her abruptly back to the present.
One of the small airships was passing overhead.
Instantly she sprang into a doorway and waited until it had gone.
Then she looked around. Briggs and Phillips were nowhere in sight. She'd assumed that they too would hide from the airship, but of course they hadn't. They had continued on their way, not noticing that Garbage was no longer with them.
She hurried along in the same direction. In a moment I'll catch up. Street merchants, beggars, prostitutes and small children passed her in the street, bumped against her, and several of them turned to look at her with surprise and curiosity.
Something about their interest worried her.
She came to a T-intersection, looked first to the right, then to the left. No sign of the commodore. She hesitated a moment, then picked a direction at random and continued onward. She considered waiting in one spot for Briggs to find her. But she was afraid to stay in one place. People were staring at her; if she didn't keep moving they might do more than stare.
She glanced over her shoulder.
Two grubby children were following her, watching her as if she were some sort of strange animal in a zoo. Why do they stare like that? she wondered. Is it because I look like those mummies?
The thought of the mummies gave her an inspiration.
The temple was a large, impressive building, visible from all over Arbre. If she could go there at least she wouldn't be lost, and she might persuade someone to locate Briggs for her.
