Hold tight to life. Harry had said it, in the last minutes. Harry! He was her hold, because she loved him, because he had kissed her—
His arms were around her, strong and reassuring against evil. Tears misted her eyes so that his face was indistinct. She cried, “I love you, Harry. Kiss me,” and he bent to kiss her on the lips, but gently, as one kisses a child. He said, “I love you too, Leoce. Greater love hath no man.”
She pressed her face against his shoulder, and his hand caressed her shining hair, lightly, tenderly. “My darling, poor darling, can you be brave?”
“Yes,” said Leoce. “I’m brave.”
He said quietly, “We have to go. You know?”
“I know,” answered Leoce in a barely audible voice.
Together they mounted a broad spiraling stair, in a twilight that floated between luminous walls. Harry held her hand in his, all the way, and she was not afraid until they reached a broad landing carpeted in red. Then suddenly fear flooded in on her again, and she snatched her hand away and drew back from him, gasping, “But you—you’re not Harry. You’re one of Them—”
“Look at me,” he commanded in a deep, resonant voice.
She saw what she had not noticed before, that he wore a priestly robe, of purple with a silver cord at the waist. She couldn’t see his face clearly, because it was shadowed by a hood.
The voice from the shadow was stern, unrelenting, inescapable.
“You promised. No one else can do it.”
His hand closed on hers again, in a hurting grip. Leoce felt her knees like water, her whole body weak and will-less, and when he commanded, “Come!” she followed, knowing only that she must be brave.
They emerged into a lofty chamber draped with hangings of red velvet, red-carpeted, into which the daylight filtered through crimson panes. They had stepped out on an elevated dais, and before them loomed an altar that was one huge block of stone like garnet. Beyond it and below, a crowd of people huddled together, their faces looking up worshipful and afraid.
At sight of them, Leoce felt courage flow through her limbs again. Among them, she recognized her father, Ilena Burk, Mrs. Jordan, and other familiar faces, of people she knew at home or in school—and, on the outskirts of the throng, pale and remote, her mother. Now Leoce knew why she had had to come here. They were all fated, doomed to die, afraid; and only she could save them, she who alone had the courage. . . .
She noticed then that Harry Burk was there too, looking up at her standing on the dais, so the priest beside her was not Harry after all, but that no longer mattered. She stepped lithely up onto the stone altar and looked out across the red chamber that was like the inside of a heart, smiled fearlessly down at them all, slim, lovely, without blemish. She wore a single bright garment, the color of flame—or was she naked?—that didn’t matter, either.
They gazed raptly at her. Harry’s eyes gleamed with open admiration. Her father frowned worriedly, gnawing his underlip. Mrs. Jordan’s fat foolish features reflected uncomprehending alarm. Only Ilena turned away, hiding her face in shame. . . . Behind them all, the white ghostly mother nodded solemn approval. Then Leoce knew, finally and certainly, that it was all right.
The purple priest moved nearer, and something glittered in his hand, a sharp knife bright as a mirror. He poised it to strike.
But Leoce snatched it from him and with both hands held it flashing aloft.
She cried to them, “You are all saved, I forgive you!” and swiftly, before she could be afraid, plunged the point into her heart.
The red chamber dimmed before her eyes, the faces swam away. She looked down, and with wild regret and wilder triumph saw the bright sacrificial blood bathing her hands, and knew that she was dying.
Good fishing, brothers. Three!
VIII
Harry Burk kept his head. He was blind, he conjectured, owing to some sort of induced paralysis of the optic nerve or the brain centers governing sight. He couldn’t feel his body, his brain was receiving no messages at all from the outside, all the neural channels were blocked. Plainly, the Fishers began by isolating the prey.
He waited, poised for counterattack, in the lonely darkness, and presently he felt it moving near him, touching him with tenuous palps of sense, probing . . .
“Damn you!” he said soundlessly, in the language of thought only. “Come out where I can see you, you—”
Startlingly there was light, a dim uneasy light as of a dirty street light burning on a corner in some backwater of one of the old cities on Earth—He was standing on a street corner; vision and feeling were his again, he felt his weight resting on the pavement, smelled the smoky air, saw before him a figure slouching against the wall.
Burk eyed it with loathing. It seemed to be a small man who wore a threadbare coat with over-padded shoulders, and deeply pleated, unpressed trousers, who cringed and returned his gaze with a look of fawning impudence.
“I know you,” Burk rasped. “You’re a Fisher!”
“If you say so,” the creature smirked ingratiatingly. “I’m all kinds of things. What do you want? You want I should get you a girl? Or some joy-dust, maybe? Anything you say—”
“Go to hell!” snapped Burk.
But he was uneasy. The whole scene, unreal as it must be, was in one sense too cursedly real, it was too much a fragment lifted complete out of his own past. Years back he’d visited enough of such cities on Earth, as a vagrant wanderer between ships. He’d walked their grimy streets and smelled their air, savored their stagnation with the superior arrogance of a traveler from far free places, drunk and brawled and whored and gone out on the next ship. . . . He became aware that he was wearing, not the conservative expensive garments of the last years, but a torn leather jacket, a disreputable pair of dungarees, scuffed spaceman’s boots.
To cover his mounting confusion he took a threatening step, fists clenched, toward the fawning apparition under the street light.
It cowered, hiding its face, pleaded, “Don’t hit me, mister, please.” Burk laughed gustily, scornfully, with the release of tension. “No tricks,” he warned. “Remember, I’m onto you.”
“Anything you say,” whimpered the Fisher. It peered slily at him. “But if I’m a Fisher, like you say . . . no, please, don’t hit me! . . . that means I can give you anything. Just think—anything.”
“Go to hell!” said Burk again, and turned on his heel and sauntered away, between the dark masses of buildings looming over the ill-lit street.
Even in illusion, it was good to walk once more like this, as a jaunty carefree sojourner in a strange city whose corners and dark alleys hinted of risks and adventurers, in the surroundings and mood of the past. . . . But he hadn’t forgotten that the past was the past, and the future was different. They couldn’t hypnotize him into forgetting that.
The voice at his elbow wheedled, “Mister, I can get you—”
He wheeled on it angrily. But as he did so the scene changed without a flicker.
It was still night—but a savage night such as Earth had never known. Night on Pluto, where it was always night, where the Sun was a remote gleam in the airless sky, and the icefields of frozen helium glittered dimly, unchanging and unchanged for a billion years in the timelessness of the cold.
He stood watching, as men and machinery labored around the ship. Machines had to be specially designed to work here in the vacuum and the temperatures at which lubricating oils would be solids tougher than steel and metals would flake into gray powder—and men had to be a special kind to venture here, to the outer rim of the System, the edge of the great dark in which the Sun and all its planets dwindled to littlest grains of dust. To the outpost planet, where indeed in terms of measured distance you had taken only the first faltering step outward, but in terms of the energy of escape you were already most of the way to far Centaurus. . . .
Most wonderful was the ship. It towered enormous, ready for take off, its burnished nose pointed outward toward the gulf? beyond. It was the
vessel which would pierce those gulfs for the first time and bring Man, the daring ape, to the realization of his most audacious dream.
Harry Burk watched, and at last he sighed. His eyes smarted with the realization that this too was not real.
“But it can be,” said an insinuating voice beside him.
He was back on the shadowy street, facing the shabby, rakish figure again.
“God damn you,” said Burk.
“Easy, now,” whined the Fisher placatingly. “I’ll make you a proposition.”
Burk growled, “It better be good.”
“You want to get away, don’t you? Get away alone? It won’t be like you’d killed them.”
Burk listened to the wheedling voice and caught his breath in abrupt excitement. It was true, he didn’t know why he hadn’t realized it sooner. If he came through the ordeal alive and sane, but his wife and his mother-in-law didn’t—as almost certainly they wouldn’t—they’d be legally dead, he’d be the heir.
He remembered the vision of the interstellar ship, and the palms of his hands grew moist. Why, when you thought of it, the whole setup—the meteor collision, the ship’s crippled course into the Belt—might almost have been arranged by him purposely; but there could never be any suspicion of that. It was a terrific gamble, of course; but Harry Burk had never yet flinched from taking a chance.
“You can win,” muttered the Fisher beside him. “Put it all on one throw. You can win everything.”
Burk looked contemptuously sidelong at it, a reckless, fighting smile on his lips.
“That’s right,” he said. “One throw. And winner take all!”
They were kneeling in a pool of shadowless light, in the circumambient dark. Burk rattled the dice in his cupped hands, holding his breath. Blood hammered a tocsin in his ears. Dream or waking, it was all one—he’d never lived so fully before, the stakes had never been so high.
With a swift exhalation he cast the dice, watched them spin, flash, come to rest side by side with like feces staring uppermost.
With a rush the darkness seemed to draw in from all sides, till nothing was visible. Nothing in that black void at all—but the dice, and their meaning: Snake eyes.
Brothers, the fourth is ours!
IX
Ilena braced herself and, rigid in the bodiless void, felt the coming of the Fisher, felt it grasp her in its foul embrace. Her whole being shrieked protest at the touch of that foulness, but she held herself from wincing or struggling, with all the force of her will.
It drew back. With a flash of grim triumph that she suppressed instantly and ruthlessly, she sensed that it was baffled by her passive inviolability, her refusal to strike out in any way that it could use against her.
She thought fiercely, “I am I, and nothing can change that!”
But what is “I” ?
I am Ilena, I am the daughter of Loran Jordan, and I am going to be a mother, the mother of a son who will be called Loran. I am anchored in the past and in the future.
But what about the present?
The present is nothing, an illusion glimpsed and gone.
The present was Harry’s kisses, his stormy lovemaking which in its moments threatened to rob her of that integral sense of self that she must keep „ unimpaired. The foul fiend watching, studying her knew that, and it used its fiendish craft to make her relive all those moments, in the blind furious tormented dark, shuddering, gasping, storm-tossed. . . . But she had weathered the storm, fought that battle before, and it could not destroy her so.
It slunk away once more, taking the memory of Harry with it, leaving her shivering, half-stunned, victorious.
I will bear a son, she thought bruisedly, and I will name him Loran.
A dream came upon her unbidden. She sat in a rocking chair, in a room dark with the stealing on of twilight, but a window before her looked out upon light, a bluish light that might have been dusk or dawn. Between her and the light a tall figure stood, looking pensively out the window, silhouetted dark against it; that was her son, grown tall as he must after many years, and the window was the future.
Ilena knew that she was an old woman. When she lifted her hand the movement was feeble, and the skin of her hand was like paper. She called out, a thin wordless cry, and the figure at the window turned, looking down at her.
“No, no!” Ilena gasped weakly. For the face of her son wore the features of Harry, strangely, blasphemously blended with traits of her father as she remembered him. She could not bear that he should have Harry’s mocking eyes, the faint, reckless smile . . . That was monstrous, a violation not to be endured.
“No,” she panted, “you’re not the one . . .”
“Be quiet, rest,” said her son assuredly. “Rest a while, and it will all be over, and everything will belong to me.”
“No!” she shrilled, her voice cracking. “This isn’t the future, it’s only a dream, I won’t stand for it!”
The dream wavered away. There was only chill darkness, and somewhere in its midst Ilena, hugging to herself her hard-won security.
But another vision formed, insidiously luring her into itself with a beckoning of warmth, the warmth of memory.
Her father, Loran Jordan, stood warming his hands before the great fireplace in the old house on Earth. He had come back from one of his trips to Mars, and he had been talking, as he sometimes did while Ilena’s mother only seemed to listen, of his business, the complex web of wealth and power he was spinning out among the planets that Ilena had seen shining like stars in the sky at night. As always, when he talked like that, he seemed to grow; he became something more than a smallish man with graying temples—a giant, one of the great.
And Ilena was very young, pigtailed, unnoticed. She sat on the floor in one corner of the living room, playing with the boy doll that she had named Mr. Jordan.
She sat Mr. Jordan up against the wall and prodded him in the chest with her forefinger. “You better behave yourself,” she told him. “Sit up straight, don’t fidget, don’t interrupt. You watch out, I’ll tell your father when he comes home. And you better quit making people cry, and going away when I want you to stay. . . .”
A great shadow fell over her playing. Her father stood above her, gigantic; he said:
“Here, ’Lena baby, come over and sit by your mother. I don’t see you very often. . . . And you might as well listen; you’re never too young to learn, they say.”
He picked up the doll Mr. Jordan and set him out of Ilena’s reach, on the mantelpiece. “Come on, now.”
She wanted to come and she didn’t want, and between wanting and not-wanting she began to cry, but quietly, inside, so that her father wouldn’t notice.
She might have cried, “No, I won’t, I hate you!” But if she’d done that . . . maybe he would have killed her, maybe he would have gone away and never come back any more.
Meekly she got up off the floor and followed her father.
“No!” screamed Ilena in the blackness. “It’s a lie, it wasn’t like that all—”
Her words fell without echo into the darkness; nothing was left there to give back an echo. Slowly, she realized that the enemy had gone away for good, and she was alone. Alone, herself, inviolable; past, present, and future were melted and gone, and she had won the fight. . . .
The darkness, impenetrable, enveloped her. In the darkness, Ilena, inalterable, Ilena who had only wanted to be left alone.
The fishing is indeed good, brothers. We have taken five.
But this time there must be no mistake. We must have them all, or it is fruitless; so much we have learned from failure.
Cast your nets once again, brothers. The sixth is yet to be taken.
X
Darkness was nothing strange. There had never been anything else, in all the time that had been.
But in this—there was something new, not to be accepted. Emptiness, the feel of space and cold, in place of cozy warmth and unfailing nourishment. . . .
It was very
primitive. Mouth, nose, eyes, ears were as yet barest rudiments. Its brain was a blob of scarcely differentiated ectoderm, its limbs were undeveloped flukes. It had a tail. It still possessed (though it was shortly to lose) the gill arches of the primordial vertebrate.
No past, no experience, no memories save of its own slow growing, in its warm secret place, dark and fluid as the dark world of the abyssal fishes. It did not know that some day it would be born.
But it was life, already human life, and it meant to live. Unconditionally.
The stealthy approach of the intruder meant no life ever, meant return to the nothingness from which it was so recently come. . . .
So much it felt, though it knew nothing of death and nothing whatsoever of defeat. Knowing nothing, knowing only the law of the life unfolding within it, at the first touch of the thief it lashed back with a blind direct fury compared to which the vitality, the ferocity of the tiger or the killer shark would seem the timid hesitation of cowed and beaten things.
The Fishers drew away abashed. Their experience with the others, the complicated defeated minds that were willing, eager to accept delusion, had not prepared them for this.
Cautiously, the Fishers returned to the assault—and found no hold for their grappling, no flaw of regret or unattainable longing, only, confronting them like a wall, that monstrous formless will to live. Will inchoate, without knowledge of what it desired—unconditional, not to be cheated or cunningly denied.
In the darkness, the ghosts of life a billion years dead wrestled with the unborn—and failed. They left their mark on it, but not as they had wished. For, whereas in the normal course the first overt experience of any human life is an outrage and a defeat, the birth of a being who strenuously resents being born, pattern for all later defeats—here, now, was one whose first memory of conflict would be a memory of victory.
Back, brothers, back! This one has broken all our nets.
Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 71