Collected fiction, p.736
Collected Fiction, page 736
Behind him, above him, quite clearly in the fog, footsteps sounded.
Rohan pressed flat against the rocks, turning his head sharply. That was impossible.
He told himself that acoustics must be confused in this heavy, blind dimness. He told himself he had imagined the sound. For there could not possibly be footsteps behind him. No one had passed him going up. There was no other way to the top. And he had left nothing alive on the Mountain. Only the moth in the cage and the monster in the pool.
But now the sound of footsteps rang clear again on the rock above, coming nearer. It was no trick of the echoes or the mind. Someone was following him down the steep road. Someone striding firmly on shod feet that struck loud on stone and muffled on lichens.
Suddenly the mist felt cold around him.
The Quai was dead. Surely, surely the Quai was dead. But there had been no other human up there. For a disorienting moment he thought that the man who strode the path so confidently was himself, and he who pressed shivering against the rocks a stranger without a name.
He made himself lean out, peering urgently along the way he had come, cursing the mist and yet grateful to it, for he was not sure he really wanted to see the face of this follower at his heels. How confidently the footsteps rang upon the road. How fast they came.
The mists blew thicker still.
The men below him on the road heard the footfalls now. Metal clinked on stone as someone raised a rifle with awkward haste. A voice hissed angrily. Feet shifted on pebbles. The ambush was ready.
For whom? For what?
Rohan laid a hand on his heavy-laden pocket, lifted his gun tentatively, the beginnings of panic stirring uncontrollably in his mind. In seven-league boots the following footsteps strode down upon him.
At the last moment some quick instinct warned him to clear the path, to get out of the way. He flung himself flat against the high rock wall which was the road’s inner edge.
Out of the mists and past him the d’vahnyan stalked. His black wrappings gleamed. His empty, remote, passionless eyes touched Rohan indifferently and moved away. From very far off the impersonal eyes saw and dismissed him, eyes which held no ego and no consciousness of self.
But Rohan knew the face.
There had been arrogance and pride upon it like his own, the last time he had looked into it. But the man was dead now. He knew that. The man had to be dead, with Rohan’s knife-thrusts in him, at the edge of the pool, and the monster nuzzling its sacrifice. The monster with no mouth . . .
It had received its sacrifice, then. And now a d’vahnyan came striding strongly down from the Mountain, his face stamped into the same imperishable matrix of selfless, dispassionate calm which every d’vahnyan bore.
Stamped—by what?
Rohan leaned, sick and shaking, against the rock, waves of cold revulsion pouring over him, knowing the secret at last. So that was the source of the d’vahnyan. So that was what the monster fed upon. Staring into the lost, ghostly, erased face of the d’vahnyan, he knew why the death-dealers of the Quai are beings beyond life and death.
But the two in ambush just below him did not know. Rohan held his breath, shivering, powerless to intervene in what came next, although he knew to the last spinning whirl of the brain in his skull exactly what would come. He had been through this before.
Below him he heard the whisper of an indrawn breath as the d’vahnyan strode by and was swallowed in cloud. It was the inhalation a man takes when he braces a blaster stock to his hip and holds until the finger finishes tightening on the trigger.
It finished. The sharp, echoing crack of gun-fire exploded stunningly in the fog as Jellaby fired at the half-seen, stalking figure which he disastrously mistook for Rohan—
The fog split and took fire and burned like the blaze of a white-hot sun. The eye and the mind went blind before it.
WHEN ROHAN COULD SEE again, the road was clear before him. Jellaby’s blaster lay abandoned ten feet below. The fog had burned itself away for a broad half-mile around the sun-hot flash of expending energy. And time had burned away, too. How long a time he did not know.
Then scuttling motion, far below him at the foot of the road, told him the answer. Ten minutes? Fifteen? Thirty? Long enough for Jellaby and Forsythe to run blindly almost to the edge of the pale, garrulous forest at the Mountain’s foot.
Mindless panic still controlled them, and they ran like little mannikin figures jerking on strings, seen from far away. They ran from no pursuer, driven by their own blind terror.
For the new-made d’vahnyan, unharmed, another mannikin far off, stalked away into the jungle at an angle divergent from their flight, moving steadily upon his own inhuman business, answering some soundless call which no human ears could hear.
Who could guess what summons a d’vahnyan?
“You ought to know, Red,” a voice said from very near by.
Rohan jumped convulsively, glaring. How could he possibly have missed seeing Crazy Joe?
The familiar figure leaned against a rock in full sight, six steps away on the downward path, arms folded, eyes on Rohan. He was smiling in his bush of beard.
“You were thinking out loud, Red,” he said.
Rohan laughed shakily. His head was still buzzing and there was a misty, dreamlike quality over everything he thought or did. He moved, and his laden pockets jingled faintly. Thought of the jewels brought him back to something nearer sanity, and sudden cunning moved in his mind.
The jewels in the pool were his. He had suffered much for them. He would go on down the Mountain, catch up with Forsythe and Jellaby, kill one of them and travel with the other to safety. After that—time enough to decide. But one thing he must do first. Crazy Joe had talked too much once already about this Mountain and this treasure . . . now it was Rohan’s and nobody else’s. Forsythe and Jellaby knew. They must be silenced, eventually. Crazy Joe had better be silenced, too. Now.
Rohan felt for his gun. The holster was empty. He looked down in sudden panic. Far down the slope pale light glinted on steel. He must have dropped the blaster when the flash of sun-glare stunned them all.
He sighed, met Crazy Joe’s eyes, thought of his knife. Yes, that would do. Crazy Joe never carried a weapon. The knife would do very well.
There was no use talking about this. Crazy Joe was smiling at him, and he smiled back, automatically, and with one smooth motion drew the knife from his belt and stepped forward, his lips still curved in the meaningless smile as he tipped the blade for that fatal spot just inside the collarbone, where life beats so near the surface that one thrust quenches it forever in the briefest count of seconds.
Moving like a man in a dream, he drove the knife straight home.
How strange, he thought remotely, that Crazy Joe made no move to defend himself. How irritating that calm smile was.
A streak of jagged lightning sprang up at the knife-point as it slid across Crazy Joe’s chest. Not biting in, but sliding, and trailing cold fire after it . . .
Stupidly Rohan blinked at the slit shirt-front. And at what he saw beneath the shirt. The tight black wrappings, glittering with curled metallic thread.
From a long way off Crazy Joe said quietly, “This wasn’t my idea, Red. On Venus, when the summons comes, you—”
“Was I—summoned?” Rohan whispered, and hardly heard the answer because of the ringing in his ears.
“I told you about the Mountain, didn’t I? That was the summons, Red. Only the strong men answer. Only the men it can use. Look up, Red.”
ROHAN LOOKED UP. A slow ring of light was dropping gently downward around the Mountain. Light like the sun, white gold, shivering in the dim air. It flickered by Rohan’s face and faded. But another ring came after it, stronger and broader, touching the brain as it passed.
Crazy Joe, still smiling calmly and compassionately, nodded toward the upward road.
“Go on, Red,” he said. “Get it over. There’s work to be done on Venus. I know. I do it too. You were summoned. Go on.”
The third ring of light floated down past Rohan’s face, and his mind reeled in his skull. The fourth ring touched . . .
Suddenly Rohan’s hands rose and clasped tight on top of his head. But under his defending fingers, under the cuirass of his skull, he felt movement. No, not movement—light. Brilliant and clear, white gold like the sun and the short, strong microwaves which the sun and stars send out even through clouds, even to a world that never sees the sun.
Rohan thought quite lucidly for an instant of the sun in a clear blue heaven, warm, shining. Quick nostalgia stirred in him at the memory of a world called Earth, a long way distant, dissolving in space and memory. A world called Earth, where a man named Rohan used to live, a long, long time ago.
A man called—what?
He stamped once on the path, feeling rock solid under him, searching for reassurance in an eclipsed universe. There was a bearded face before him. He knew that face. It had always been hauntingly familiar, under the disguising beard, and something more concealing than the beard—a calm and passionless peace. The peace that comes when a strong ego drains out and—something else—flows in. Something else, like light, like blazing gold, like the white flame that was stirring in his brain. This time he knew the erased identity that had dwelt once behind that face.
He said, “You were Barber. You were Barber Jones.”
Crazy Joe smiled and nodded.
Rohan’s hands clasped tighter on his head. He said painfully, “And I—I’m—”
But he could not finish. He was no one. He had no name at all.
“Go on back,” Crazy Joe said from infinite distances. “There’s nothing else left for you now. Nothing at all.”
A ring of clear bright light sank about him, widening and expanding, and the name of Rohan faded, the name of Earth dissolved. Jewels clinked as he turned obediently to face the rising path. Last of all the bright thought of power faded, and the use of treasure.
In the emptiness of his mind he searched remotely for a name that had dissolved irretrievably in the burning of the light of his brain. And after a moment or two he seemed to find it. D—it began with d—
D’vahnyan.
He leaned motionless against a rock for a long time, doing nothing. Once his lip drew back in a fading snarl of defiance. But then he moved, took an unsteady forward step, and then another, back along the way he had come. It was the way he had come all his life, toward this Mountain and this upward path.
Burning with light and color, the jewels dropped from his pockets one by one as he climbed, marking the stumbling stations of his return to the Mountain and the pool and the thing that waited for him.
1951
THE ODYSSEY OF YIGGAR THROLG
Here is what can happen to a perfectly respectable gnome who has the misfortune to come in contact with human beings!
EVERY SO OFTEN—about every seven seconds, say—one of our more hide-bound readers lifts his rubescent proboscis from the volume of Euclid; Einstein, Korzybski or whatever learned authority he is reading and announces with loud and incisive accent that there is no room for fantasy in science fiction. In which, of course, he is stating the most ignoble kind of paradox.
For what is science fiction save the other side of the “if” ? If all molecular movement in a given object were suddenly to go into reverse—if the elevator were to run sideways—if some Susan B. Anthony plague were to wipe out all but one of the males in the world—and so on. No matter how gadget-bound you choose to make your conception of it; science fiction is still fantasy.
All of which is by way of prelude to a story which our more nuclear-minded readers will probably insist has no place in a science fiction magazine. And for all we know they may be perfectly right. But when you read of the ghastly chain of events that befell little Yiggar Throlg—and when you have got your aching stomach muscles back into something approximating their proper place—we have a hunch you’ll agree with us that this is one story we had to run. Incidentally it introduces to our pages a most promising young author whose work we hope soon to serve you again!
—THE EDITOR
CHAPTER I
Why Did It Have to Happen to Met
I’M just an ordinary gnome and why the thing should have happened to me I can’t understand. If I’d been an elemental or a nereid—they’re always getting mixed up in water-magic—it’d be different. But, as I say, I’m a plain, down-to-earth gnome of the Middle Kingdom and I had never really believed in humans.
Of course as a yndling I’d been told all sorts of fantastic folklore by my nurse. You know the sort, of thing, where in offending vampires are captured by a hobhuman and tortured to death with garlic and stakes and so oh. But I’m a materialist. Most gnomes are. We believe in the unalterable laws of physics, such as the First Law—cold iron is poison.
But humans—well! It’s always some other gnome who has known a gnome who’s seen one.
I’ve changed my mind now. That’s why I’m considered a little cracked—me, Yiggar Throlg, whose family have been honest diggers and delvers since back in the days of the Norway burrows and beyond that, I’ve heard, to Yggdrasil.
By Vulcan, I’m no moon-struck werewolf and I know what I saw and what happened to me. Even now. sometimes I dream about that haunted spot, with a living green carpet of grass-hiding the brown earth, and the moonrays shining on—it!
It must be dreadful to be a human.
Well, I suppose I should start at the beginning. I’d got lost in the burrows. King Breggir was yelling for more rubies and I was behind in my quota. The bag over ray shoulder was almost empty and I didn’t dare check in without at least a pound of gems.
Breggir was paving Red Street. He’s an unreasonable gnome anyway, to my mind, and there wasn’t any reason at all why the job should have to be finished in a week. But there it was: If I came back without my quota I’d be turned into a toad for seven hours. If I could have seen the future I’d have welcomed such a punishment rather than get tangled up with the supernatural.
The higher tunnels are seldom visited, you know, and some say they weren’t built by gnomes. And that, I believe now, is true. I must have traveled a long way, searching vainly for rubies, when I came without any warning whatsoever upon the inexplicable.
The ground under my feet changed to a hard smooth substance like whitish gritty rock, and I found myself in a small tunnel, not much larger than my body. I’m an ordinary-sized gnome but presently I had to squeeze my way forward. I simply couldn’t turn back in that narrow space. And at last I found my way blocked by a grating which for a moment I thought was cold iron. Luckily it wasn’t, so I wrenched it away and stuck my head out.
There was a park-like expanse all around me, with the moon shining down and trees casting their long shadows. I could hear water rippling far away, and smell it. All at once I felt a hot shudder pass down my spine. Something was—wrong.
THERE are times, they say, when the Veil wears thin and we can see what lies, beyond. This was such a time, I know now. For there was something in the park that should not have been there—something alive and very dreadful. I could sense it.
What I had taken to be a distorted tree near by suddenly stirred. Its shadow swayed on the grass. The moon washed it in white light. And I saw that it was a Horror.
I couldn’t move. I was paralyzed. The creature wasn’t ten feet away. It looked perfectly tangible and three-dimensional, not unlike a satyr though the legs were straight and it wore clothing.
My reactions were surprising even to me. I didn’t faint. I was too scared.
I just remained where I was, with my head sticking up out of the hole where the grating had been, and the—being—watched me. The tableau might have lasted for hours for all I know. It was broken when the human—for it was a human—lifted an arm and beckoned to me without making a sound.
Every muscle in my body shrieked protest but I couldn’t disobey. I crawled out on the grass and stood there shivering, with the feeling of a hot wind blowing on my face. I faced worse than death, I knew—and then, all of a sudden, I remembered I was Yiggar Throlg, a gnome of the Middle Kingdom.
Bravado, perhaps, but I squared my shoulders and looked at-the human unflinchingly. I hope it isn’t vanity that makes me believe I cut a good figure. I’m two feet tall in my sandals and thirty inches wide and my eyes, which look like-brown eggs, did not fall or waver.
The human took something—a bottle—out of the folds of his garments. With deliberate, menacing slowness he uncapped it.
“All right,” he said. “Get back in.”
There was liquid in the bottle, swishing back and forth, and a strong alcoholic odor tainted the air like mead when they feast in Valhalla. But the flagon’s innocent appearance didn’t fool me. I knew about the djinns and how Suleiman had enslaved them. If I obeyed the bottle would be capped and flung into the ocean.
“I—I won’t!” I managed to get out through chattering teeth.
“You came out of this bottle,” the human told me. “Now, by heaven, get back in!”
“I didn’t come out of it—” Imagine! I was arguing with a human!
The creature made an impatient sound that was almost gnomish. “Don’t give me that,” he snapped, swaying lightly. “They all come out of bottles-snakes and mice and sea-serpents. Now—”
“I’m certainly not a sea-serpent,” I said, “and as for snakes and mice there aren’t any such things.”
He smiled, very horribly, but didn’t answer. I felt sure that he believed in snakes and mice and might even have seen them. “Anyway;” I said, plucking up a bit of courage, “I’m not going into that bottle—please?”
He drank out of it and considered me thoughtfully. “Who are you?”
I told him. He shook his head. “No. I mean what are you?”
