“I do the planning,” Gea said.
“Of course you do,” Aaron said. “But I can be a help. There are things you haven’t learned about us yet. Ways of handling us which will suit your goals.”
“Very well,” Gea said. “You Erthumoi are more stubborn than I believed possible. But if at least one of you will listen, will obey me, then all is not lost.”
“I am that one,” Aaron said. “I greet you, Master.”
Father! The word screamed against Lawrence’s brain, but he couldn’t pronounce it. He watched, sick to his heart, as Aaron groveled in the dirt in front of the flame.
“Send them away,” Aaron said. “And let us begin our plans.”
Lawrence felt himself lifted, borne away. He underwent a moment of vertigo. Then he awoke and found himself back on his ship. It was the original ship that the expedition had brought to Myryx over a year ago. Now, for the first time, he was able to work the controls. He lost no time in removing the ship a safe distance from the planet. Then he got on the communicator fast.
With his communicator set to transmit everything to Lawrence’s ship, Aaron followed the flame deep into the interior of Alien City, to the shrine room he had located below the main level. It was deserted, a long, low-ceilinged place lit by flaming torches set into wall embrasures. The others had left, commanded to do so by Gea. Now Aaron was alone with the flamelike spirit.
The flame, substance of the creature who called himself Gea, was changing now, becoming silvery and waterlike, then changing again to a deep metallic purple red. The shapes and colors flowed ceaselessly, and Aaron didn’t understand what generated its changes. As soon as he thought he could grasp it, it flowed and became something else. Aaron wondered if this might have been the origin of the shape-changer myths that mankind had had for so long. For all he knew, this fiery, slippery creature might have been the original Proteus, old man of the sea and of change.
“Mobility is strength,” Gea said, “and I have many transformations. The others were too timid. They couldn’t stand to look at me and behold man’s next becoming. I could never trust them. You are wise to serve me, Aaron, although for a while I worried about you.”
“Are all of your shapes elemental?” Aaron asked. “Or can you show me one of your human forms?”
“I can take any shape I want,” Gea said. “But why a human one? That is the only time I’m vulnerable.”
Aaron said, “We will want to make statues of your human form so all mankind can see.”
“That’s a good idea,” Gea said. His surfaces flashed and flowed. He was for a moment the source of all light in the room, an explosion of silent color and brilliance. Then the light faded and there stood before Aaron a gigantic man with godlike proportions. He looked to Aaron like a huge Michelangelo sculpture, or perhaps one of the great chryselephantine statues of Zeus.
“This is classic, one of my forms that mankind has always enjoyed,” Gea said. “This was one of those I wore before the cataclysm.”
“What cataclysm was that?” Aaron asked.
“Atlantis,” Gea said. “That was when the Antagonist bound me and sent me out here.”
“Tell me more,” Aaron said.
Gea looked at him suspiciously. “I wonder about you, Aaron. What are you?”
“Your prophet,” Aaron said.
“Are you really? Humans lie so readily.”
“I am, for sure,” Aaron said. “And here is my proof.” He removed the bomb from his pouch. As he had suspected, Gea did nothing to stop him.
Gea merely looked at him. There was sadness in the classical features, the short, heavy beard, the hyacinthine locks. Gea said, “How quickly the cycles turn!”
Aaron said, “Was this how it ended last time?”
“This is always how it ends. Aaron, don’t do it. We can work together, shape the human race into something really noble, something godlike.”
“You poor fool,” Aaron said. “Don’t you realize that the human race doesn’t want and doesn’t need anyone to shape it?”
A silent and rosy glow mounted against the blackness of space. The light spread for a moment, then faded away.
“It’s over,” Lawrence said.
Matthew said, “How long were you under that creature’s power?”
“We succumbed almost from the first,” Lawrence said. “He kept on showing us miracles, strange ways of being, different modalities of consciousness. He never seemed satisfied. The other investigators and I fought him all the way. It took my father to pretend to join with him, and then pull the pin.”
“So that’s what one of the ancient ones looks like,” Matthew said. “It seems hardly possible that that creature was one of the ancient Seventh Race.”
“I doubt very much that he was that,” Lawrence said. “We’ll never know for sure, but my impression is that Gea is of a race of galactic creatures, powerful but not particularly intelligent. Perhaps he’s the last one of his kind. Certainly he’s the only one we’ve seen. I think he takes refuge in deserted cities. Like bats and snakes hide out in caves. He’s a predator, and he’s got a few tricks up his sleeve, but he can be killed.”
“What was all that he was saying about Atlantis?” Matthew asked.
“I don’t know,” Lawrence said. “It seemed to be something about being bound to a spot. Like Prometheus and the rocks of the Caucasus. And his story has aspects of the Christ myth, too. Though in this case he would be Lucifer. There was something devilish about him, wasn’t there?”
“I think so,” Matthew said. “It’s an interesting analogue. I think it’s the first time mankind, or any other species, has encountered anything like this. It argues the possibility that other such creatures might exist in the galaxy. Some of them in deserted cities. Others, who knows where?”
“It’s something to watch out for,” Lawrence said. “But we’ll have to take that up later. Now I have to go.”
“Where, in such a rush?”
“To see Sara. Gea made it impossible for me to talk to her.” He moved toward the door and then stopped. “I only wish my father were here to see this.”
TROJAN HEARSE
THE yeoman entered Commander Darfur’s office, stood to attention, saluted. He had a yellow flimsy in his hand.
“Is that what I think it is?” Commander Malang Darfur asked.
The yeoman hesitated.
“Go ahead and tell me. I know you’ve read it.”
“Evacuation order, sir,” the yeoman said. “Back to Point Brave.” The relief was evident on the yeoman’s face as he handed Darfur the paper.
Commander Darfur read the evacuation order with mixed feelings. On the one hand, he was relieved that his small group of people and their solitary cruiser Cochise were being withdrawn from their lonely duty on Alicia. They were dangerously exposed on this worthless little world of mixed human and alien peoples. Despite the fact that they were technically allies of earth, the Alicians had not been especially friendly to Darfur and his men. Earth was growing unsure of the value of its alliances with the worlds on the periphery of the great struggle.
Darfur was the youngest man in the Point Bravo sector to command a cruiser. He had been merely one more fighter pilot when the war began. The little ships had needed a lot of officers to man them. They were often Earth’s first line of defense. Darfur had gotten his break when he had been on picket duty out past Lohengrin’s Star. After a long and unexciting tour of duty, he had been ready to turn for home when he got a signal on his warning system. He looked down at the controls. Yep, enemy action taking place nearby. He could run home and get reinforcements. Or he could try to do something about it now.
Then a globeship appeared, popping down from FTL space. Almost instinctively, Darfur had put his ship in a position that left the sun of the local system behind him. From here he had a moment to look over the enemy. The mother ship, a huge globe, had released two little fighters, short stubby affairs equipped with plasma torpedoes.
He
knew that the thing for him to do was to cut and run as fast as he could. The enemy fighters, side by side, were coming in fast, the big sphere of the mother ship moving along behind them. From the faint dimming of the stars behind it, Darfur could tell that they were getting up their shields.
Darfur had been a first-class knife fighter on his home in Zylene. Boys there began their lives on the great plain that so resembled the Serengeti Plain of their distant homeland. The two Mtabeles came suddenly out of a thorn thicket. Darfur was alone, with only his knife. He knew that either man was a match for him with their heavier pangas. But some instinct told him that his only safety lay in driving straight ahead.
He pretended to turn and run as they came at him, their dark skins gleaming with red and ocher stripes of war paint. Then, as they came up behind him, he suddenly whirled, and, in movements as choreographed as any ballet sequence, ran between them, ducking low. Their pangas, swung in furious reaction, sliced each other. Before they got over the shock, Darfur was behind them, stabbing with the knife, then taking to his heels as the main Mtabele war band came up.
The feat won him a scholarship at Zylene’s Space Academy. And now, years later, he was ready to try it again.
At full acceleration he swung his little ship, kicking it into a 180-degree turn. The two Gerin were startled to see him coming directly at them. As he started to pass between them, Darfur put the ship into a fishtail maneuver, the bow swinging first right, then left. He let go his plasma torpedoes and kept on going.
The Gerin aboard must have been too full of fighting lust to care that they were in danger of disabling their partners. That was one thing you could count on about the Gerin—they were individualists all the way, even when that way could put their winning chances into peril.
One of the fighters took a hit and blossomed into a brilliant fireball. The second one managed to intercept the oncoming torpedo and to bring its torpedo tubes to bear on Darfur’s ship. Darfur frantically swung his ship again, expecting at any moment to take a torpedo up the spout. But the Gerin ship was hit by wreckage from its partner before it could fire. Darfur’s automatic cameras had caught the whole thing.
The cameras also caught his hasty retreat into FTL space when the globeship released five more fighters. But that was not held against him. He had succeeded against daunting odds. The affair was written up in the squadron newspaper. The CO of his squadron sent in Darfur’s name for a medal. This was turned down—there were a lot of medals given out that month. But he did receive his promotion to commander, and was put in charge of the cruiser Cochise.
Duty had not been dangerous on Alicia, but it had been dull. The planet’s main city of Morgels was a one-horse town with little in the way of entertainment for off-duty personnel. Commander Darfur had counted himself lucky that a circus had come to Alicia recently. Watching the various acts and strolling through the sideshows had given his crew something to do.
Darfur had his doubts about spacekeeping circuses. It was said that circus people weren’t like others. They had special talents. Dealing with them could be tricky.
In such disrepute were they held that some of the countries of Earth barred circus people from landing or performing.
They had caused Darfur no trouble here, however. He had enjoyed their performance himself. Now, however, it was his duty to tell Jon Blake, the circus director, that he and his cruiser were pulling out, and he was prepared to take Blake and his people with him.
Darfur was also prepared to cram aboard as many of the Alicians as he could. But so far, from the evasive answers the Alician dignitaries had given him, it looked like they would be content to stay on their home planet and deal with the Gerin as best they could. Probably by joining them, Darfur thought angrily. It was always the same on these little isolated worlds. The inhabitants forgot their ties to the League of Free Planets when any inconvenience was involved. You couldn’t blame those who were outright aliens—the G’tai, for example, and the Neuristii. Even though the League of Free Planets had many alien allies, not all aliens were interested in joining their fortunes with those of the League. Especially now, when it was looking a little dicey for the Terrans. But people of human stock ought to stick to their race. That’s what Darfur thought, and it’s what he expected all right-minded humanoids to think.
Straightening his uniform and setting his cap at a rakish angle, Commander Darfur left his office, waving off the guards who were supposed to accompany him. He walked down the dusty main street to the edge of town. Long before he got there, he could see the big aluminum-colored bulge of the Circus Ship. A few Alicians nodded to him as they passed. Darfur was going to regret giving up this, his first independent command. Soon he would return to the Earth base, and then he would be just one more young commander among many.
The Circus Ship, several hundred yards long, lay in a field just on the outskirts of town. It had been costly in terms of fuel to bring the ship down to planetside rather than leave it in geosynchronous orbit. But once down, the ship served as quarters for the circus acts, and as commissary, and it even had its own built-in theater set up in the big storage areas where cargo had gone, back when the ship was a trader for the OddJohn Corporation.
Darfur went to the Circus Ship, well dressed in his pressed whites and very aware of his dignity. Darfur was almost seven feet tall, skinny, dark-skinned, and dark-eyed, with clean-cut features inherited from his Somali-Arabian ancestors.
There was confusion around the Circus Ship, as always seems to happen at circuses. Darfur pressed his way through the crowd of scruffy, pale-eyed Alician urchins who were trying to sneak in free, like youngsters everywhere. The ticket-taker recognized Darfur and let him through, directing him to the backstage door to find the impresario, Blake.
There seemed to be even more confusion backstage.
Men rushed back and forth carrying cardboard scenery and painted wooden sets. Jugglers practiced their acts one last time; the dancers were warming up. Darfur noted that these circus folk looked thoroughly disreputable and probably deserved the evil reputation that clung to all interstellar circuses. And where in all this was he to find Blake?
“He’s in the animal sector,” a roustabout told him. “One of the elephants has gone spooky.”
Commander Darfur thanked him and walked quickly to the animal sector. But he forgot to duck his head as he passed through the entrance. His cap was knocked off his head by a guywire. He picked it up hurriedly, brushed it off, set it back on his head, and marched stiffly off. He was aware that several of the performers seemed to find that funny.
Some of the people he passed were obviously of human stock, especially the jugglers and acrobats. Some of them derived from a bewildering mixture of alien and human races. Some of them had been mildly gene-teched. Others appeared to be the result of unfortunate mutations. There were startling man-animal combinations. Some of the circus people were feathered and some were furred, some walked on two feet and others on four. And then there were the winged men, the first Darfur had ever seen, though he had heard of them. How had they gotten that way? Implants on earth-type people? Or was there a race of winged humans somewhere out there among the thousand or so worlds that had been contacted since space exploration had begun?
There was sawdust on the floor. It made the footing uncertain for a man in polished military boots.
A sweating groom working with the team of horses used for the big chariot event pointed him in the right direction. He went past a group of Neanderthal-looking jugglers tossing several small balls back and forth, then introducing other objects into their act, objects thrown to them by people outside their circle, until the air around them seemed filled with flying objects—balls, small chairs, combs, pocketbooks, glasses, anything light enough to lift and throw.
Darfur ducked past them and saw, far down one side of the hold, a good-sized gray elephant being backed with difficulty into a cage. The elephant looked ready to turn on the man at any moment. That was Blake. Darfur recog
nized him from their earlier meeting. Blake was not as tall as Darfur but he was burly-chested and muscular. His floating blond hair was held in place by a woven gold circlet, and he was overawing the elephant by sheer force of character. Although the elephant looked as if it wanted to stomp the man, Blake kept steadily advancing on him, a cigar clamped into the side of his mouth, talking steadily and without much inflection:
“Back away there, Daisy, and no sense you keep on glaring at me with those little red eyes of yours, you know I’m the boss and you are going into that pen where we can strap you down and do something about that toothache of yours, and don’t try anything with me ‘cause I’ll hit you right between the eyes.”
Brandishing a light whip, Blake finished backing the elephant into her cage, then turned away as a groom ran forward to secure the door of the cage. Blake noticed Commander Darfur and strolled over to him.
“Is this a social call, Commander?”
“Not in the slightest,” Darfur said. “I’ve come to tell you that I have been ordered to close down the League station on this planet and get my men back to Point Bravo.”
“Well, that’s life in the service,” Blake said. “Here today, gone tomorrow.”
Darfur was annoyed but struggled not to show it. “My departure,” Darfur said evenly, “has been hastened by information that a Gerin fleet is believed to be heading this way. I will be happy to escort your ship back to Point Bravo, where the forces of the League of Free Planets can protect you. “
“Mighty kind of you, sonny,” Blake said. “But we’ve got other plans.”
“Might I ask what they are?”
“It’s none of your business,” Blake said, “but you might as well know I’m taking this ship on to Rhea.”
“Rhea? Next planet out in this system? They’ve just got a few hundred thousand people there.”
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