by C. L. Moore
Juille spun around. Beyond the broken wall was dimness. Dimness to shoot from—an ambush at last. She reached the opening in three flying strides, a split second before Jair could scramble to his feet. She knew vaguely that he was lunging after her, almost upon her heels, as she vaulted the gap into dimness. But she knew very little else with any degree of clarity for some seconds.
For she landed not upon a level floor, but on a rubbery, cushioned surface that swooped into life as she touched it. Inertia flattened her to the cushions as it rocketed toward the ceiling in a long, smooth glide. Behind her she heard Jair's startled bellow trailing out and away as something unexpected happened to him. For a few moments she could see nothing.
Then violet light dawned slowly about her and she was gliding swiftly down a long mirrored slope between trees like great nodding plumes, white in the purple dimness. The slopes were deep-violet and all the pale trees stood upon their own reflections.
Juille was sitting in a cushioned boat with a harp-shaped prow. And it was sliding faster and faster, down and down, while the plumy trees blurred together and a great crashing chord of music paralleled her flight. Far off through the trees she saw motion—red beard, a streaming cloak. Too dazed to realize what had happened, she was not yet too dazed to recognize Jair, and she sent a random beam screaming at him through the trees. He bellowed a distant, echoing challenge.
By the time its resounding chords had died away a little, and her boat carried her around a wide swinging curve under the trees, she thought she knew what was happening. They had stumbled, somehow, into one of the game rooms of Cyrille. Jair's last lightning bolt must have opened a wall directly above a waiting line of cars, and the two of them were swooping now, very fast, through the opening measures of some one of the elaborate competitive entertainments of Cyrille.
Unexpectedly the familiar despairing wail of a needle beam screamed overhead and spattered blue-violet in the dimness upon an unseen wall behind her. Juille ducked instinctively and heard Jair's diminishing shout as he was carried past along a curve beyond the nodding trees. Obviously he was afraid to use the lightning bolts here. If he wrecked the invisible track, he might come to grief himself before he could escape from his flying boat.
Juille craned about her in the sleepy twilight. The trees nodded with soporific soothing motion; the cushioned boat swept on up a swift incline to the music of an invisible orchestra. Again the screams of a gun beam split the music, searing the cushions before her. Scorched rubber tainted the air. She twisted in time to see the other boat go swooping away through the trees in a long, smooth dive, and hurled a whining beam in pursuit. Jair yelled derisively.
The music swelled and sank. The boats swung gracefully around tree-shadowed curves, under feathery plumes that brushed the cheek. The mirrored slopes reflected everything in violet distances underfoot, like still water. And above and below the music Jair and Juille exchanged random shots that missed in blue-spattering fountains or seared the cushions of one boat or the other, but because of their speed, somehow never quite struck the occupants. Several times severed tree trunks came down in avalanches of white plumes.
But presently the light began to glow with a rosy brightening, and Juille realized that a second phase of the entertainment was about to begin. What it would be she did not know, but since this was very likely a competitive game, it would no doubt involve a clearer light and a more open field for some k Juille of maneuvers in the gliding boats. She imagined the music that kept pace with the speed of her flight had some connection with the harp on the prow of each boat. Was it some sort of musical competition as well? She remembered Egide in the underground arsenal, shouting until the weapons all replied, and for an unexpected moment she was appalled by a melting warmth at the memory. She had an irresistible vision of the young H'vani riding in a boat like this with his yellow hair streaming, leaning forward to strike music from the harp and shouting out the stanzas of some ballad in reply to the distant, shouting song from other boats, and the wild chords of the harps.
She turned her mind grimly away from that, wondering if anyone who had ridden this track before could have imagined the deadly stakes for which she played today. And she knew she dared not play it through. In the light and the open, Jair would have the advantage. Those lightning bolts would probably not miss a third time.
But one advantage she did have. She had entered the game first. She remembered enough of the contests to know that they usually involved an elaborate crossing and recrossing of paths, woven in and out like a Maypole dance. It was not impossible that Jair's boat, while not following exactly the path of her own, did cross it now and then in her wake. If she could wreck the track—
Leaning over the back of the swiftly gliding boat, she pointed her bell-mouthed gun at the floor and pulled the trigger. While she waited for the whirling sun to form she speculated as to what would happen if she herself were carried over the resulting chasm first.
Something was wrong. The gun was shivering in her hand like some living creature forced beyond its strength. But no glow gathered. Juille shook it in some faint hope of utilizing the last of whatever charge it used. But the shivering itself began to slacken in a moment or two, and then the little weapon from the nameless past lay dead in her hand. She looked at it regretfully. Well, now she would have to take the lightning gun from Jair or give up all hope of reaching the Control Room even in time to take vengeance. After an instant's hesitation she gripped her palm gun tightly and slipped over the side of the boat.
This was a slow place, mounting the rise of a mirrored hill. She skidded a moment or two on the uncertain flooring and then caught herself and watched the boat go sliding on down a slope to waves of diminishing music. Juille dived into the shelter of a great feathery tree that overhung the path. Violet twilight closed about her. She stood in a bower of shivering white plumes, exquisitely delicate, wavering upon the air so that her very breath stirred them into slight motion all around. She could trace the departure of her boat by the quivering plumes in its wake.
The music sank and swelled again. She spent an interminable five minutes thinking she had guessed wrong, and wondering wildly how she could ever hope to escape now, without her bell gun to blast a way through the floor. And then upon a rising tide of music she saw a boat come gliding by, parting the trailing plumes. Jair leaned forward over the prow, his red-brown eyes raking the twilight with quick, comprehensive glances. He was almost machine-like in the cold efficiency that lay like a hard foundation beneath the warmth and the dominant, overwhelming masculinity of him.
But he did not see Juille. This time she was hidden. This time she could not fail.
She raised her gun, took steady aim, and shot him through the stomach.
The beam's high wail still shook the scorched and plumy branches around her as she leaped for the stern of the sliding boat. It was picking up speed again. Jair had doubled forward without a sound, both big hands clutching at the wound. His lightning gun thudded softly to the car's cushioned floor. The air smelled of burned flesh and burned feathers. He did not move as she leaned over the moving side and snatched up the gun. It was all over in the flash of a moment.
Then she dropped off the padded gunwale as the boat gathered more speed. She stood watching it go, sliding faster and faster to the beat of rising music, swooping away over the violent reflections of the floor while the white trees foamed in its wake.
The gun was still warm from Jair's hand. After a moment of quiet staring as the boat and the dying man vanished, Juille drew a long breath and pointing the lightning gun at random, pulled its trigger.
Thunder and lightning—the crash of the bolt against some hidden wall, then booming echoes that rolled and rolled again. Plumed trees convulsed violently away from that path of destruction, delicate fronds tearing free so that the air was filled with a storm of feathery snow. Through their drifting, Juille could see only confusedly what had happened. In the wake of the thunderclap, and tinkling between its
echoes, she heard shattered crystal showering from some ruined wall.
Setting her lips, she turned the gun in the opposite direction and loosed a second bolt. There was a sort of intoxication in the feeling of sheer destruction as she heard the lightning smash and another wall come sliding down in musically tinkling fragments. Echo piled upon echo through the boiling snow of feather fronds. Again and again and again, in diminishing distances, she heard the bolt strike and leap and strike again, wall beyond wall, until it found a gap too wide to bridge. The thunder rolled away and rolled again long after the crashes ceased, and the air was heady with ozone. The whole forest was lashing itself to fragments now, and the storm of feathery snow had become almost too thick to breathe.
Holding her cloak over her face, Juille tilted the gun down and loosed a bolt at the floor some distance ahead. Destruction was her only goal now. Jair had fired recklessly, in the hope of killing her, but he had not shared this utter recklessness of Juille's. She knew she could not find the Control Room except by chance, but the lightning bolts she was loosing must sooner or later crash through the floors into the room where Egide stood waiting by the window that looked down upon Ericon.
Whether the Imperial City still stood she could not guess. Perhaps not. She did not know how much time had passed since her escape from the first room, or how near Cyrille had been then to the city. At best she might still save it; at worst she would have revenge. For if she missed the Control Room, she must eventually pierce the outer walls of Cyrille and let free the air that kept them both alive. And she would do it if she had to demolish the whole pleasure world, room by room.
A fan of bright sunlight glowed upward through the wrecked floor. Like the pink snow in that room of terrible laughter, the feathery snow of this one turned and twisted like great motes in its beam. Juille skipped back in alarm as the floor before her collapsed with a great sliding crash into the gap. Dust billowed up into the sun rays.
When the sliding had ceased, Juille saw a network of beams that looked fairly steady, and made a precarious descent to the floor below through the choking dust and the swirls of feathers. The air still shook to thunderous echoes and the distant crashes as her lightning bolt went leaping on, far away.
Here was another jumble of ruined rooms opening upon one another, mingling the components of their worlds into one insane potpourri of incongruities. Strong sunlight from a wrecked daisy field stretched fingers of illumination into the fragments of a spring night sparkling with stars. A burst of feather snow from above blew past on some sudden draft and swirled over the daisies and through the broken wall above them into a stretch of desert that lifted blue peaks against the sky miles upon miles away.
Juille looked about upon the chaos she had wrought and laughed aloud with something of a god's intoxication in the sound. She felt like a god indeed, hurling the thunderbolts, wrecking the helpless worlds about her. She drilled a fresh path of destruction through the nearest wall, reeling a little with the concussion of the blow, and then breathed the ozone deeply and felt her head spin with its stimulation.
Through the wrecked wall in the wake of the lightning and thunder a gust of sudden rain came beating, and the sound of distant surf breaking upon rocks, and a swirl of leaves from some exotic purple tree. Juille climbed through the gap and watched her bolt leaping three rooms away across a jungle glade to crash with redoubled violence into a twilight scene where pink boats drifted. Beyond it some scarcely visible new world opened up, a place of darkness and blazing orange suns whirling in a black sky.
-
Something cold lapped about Juille's ankles. She looked down at a stream that appeared to have sprung to sudden existence from empty air between the columns of a golden autumn wood. It gushed harder as she looked, broke away more of the wall upon which the autumn trees were reflected, and became a minor torrent in the course of a few seconds.
Remembering the many water scenes of Cyrille, Juille took alarm. There must be great reservoirs of it somewhere here. She had no wish to release it all at once, to overwhelm her before her work was done. She cast another lightning bolt at the floor in the torrent's path, staggered from the concussions and watched the broadening stream plunge downward in the wake of thunderous echoes to create new havoc beneath.
Then she clambered over ruins and hurled a new bolt before her to blast a path through the worlds. Where was Egide? Which way did the Control Room lie? Echoes piled upon echoes as she blazed her way along. Ozone mingled with the heavy fragrances of tropic flowers and autumn leaves burning, and nameless, unknown odors from the opening rooms.
There was something truly godlike about such destruction as she was wreaking. This was more than human havoc. As she went striding and destroying from room to room she left ruin in her wake that could not have been paralleled since God first created the Galaxy out of similar chaos. All the ingredients of creation were here, tossed together in utter confusion. And if her race was doomed, if it never ruled the stars again, then she was creating here in miniature all the havoc her race would leave behind it when it fell. World by tiny world she returned them to the original melee from which God had assembled them, but there would be no gods to come after her and build them up again.
She was glad that she came upon none of the scenes she might have remembered from her few days here with Egide, in the lost times of peace. Subconsciously she kept watch for that vast central room of the floating platforms and the great tree, where they had met. And once she came to an opening that might once have been that room, and stood on the brink of its great space, looking out. Lightning bolts had been here before her, and nothing coherent remained. The whole enormous space had evidently once been veiled with vast swinging curtains of gossamer, but they were in ribbons now and held startling bits of flotsam in their nets, as if some giant had been seining chaos for the relics of ruined worlds.
Methodically she went on with her labor of hurling the thunderbolts.
Cyrille was builded well. The little worlds collapsed into one another and the walls and floors collapsed, but the small planet itself held surprisingly long. But eventually, as Juille paused to look down a long newly-opened vista—like someone gazing godlike from the shore of the river of time, looking across the eras into many parallel worlds—she saw something amazing happen.
Far away, tiny in the distance at the end of the lightning-riven chain, trees and walls and shattered buildings began with stately precision to collapse. An invisible hand seemed to be sweeping toward her along the newly created corridor of the worlds, crushing them to the floor in leisurely successions. Juille had a moment's insane impression that by the hurling of the thunderbolts she had made herself a god—that the world bowed down before her.
She stood amazed, watching the long sets fold slowly to the ground, nearing and nearing, until—A giant palm smashed her to the floor. She was no god now, but a puppet in the grip of a monstrous gravity that was making the very floor sag beneath her incredible weight.
It passed on and she got up shakily, full of a grim exultance even in the face of this terrible threat. Cyrille was breaking up. The gravity machines had been damaged. And that—she laughed aloud—must mean that one of her random bolts had reached the Control Room at last. From now on, anything might happen. She thought with chilly amusement of Egide's surprise. He must think Jair was being very careless indeed with the Andarean lightning. Perhaps he might come to investigate. Perhaps he might! She warmed at the thought. She had no idea along which of the many corridors that her bolts had opened the Control Room lay, but Egide might follow the path that had broken in its wall and so find her. She began to watch for a human figure among the vistas.
But Cyrille was collapsing faster than she had thought. The faraway, hissing howl of air through punctured space walls had not yet begun to drain the planet of life, but some other force of destruction was loose among the worlds now. She felt the roar before she heard it, a thunderous shaking of the air that swelled and swelled into a stunni
ng juggernaut of sound. The floor tilted, sending her reeling against a wall through whose breach bright-scaled branches hung. They clutched at her feebly, with a malignant reptilian life. But she scarcely noticed. The roaring grew so vast that its own weight seemed to turn Cyrille off balance as it neared. She heard a series of tremendous avalanching crashes beyond the walls.
Then a solid stream of green water burst through the wall she leaned on, and crashed against the opposite barrier, brimming the room waist high in a split second. Juille went whirling helplessly into the vortex boiling at its center. But before she had gulped more than a searing lungful of the water a screaming uproar filled the room as it dropped away again around her. She leaned gasping against the wall while the sudden torrent drained away through a hole in the flooring. The last of it vanished with a gurgling, shrieking scream that sounded nearly human.
Gravity shifted madly while the sound still echoed. Juille found herself shooting up diagonally toward a corner of the ceiling which had suddenly become the floor. An utter hodgepodge of her self-created chaos fell with her. Before she could adjust her balance on the angular floor, it tipped anew and amid floating debris she drifted down again. Far off the roaring of the released torrent diminished among the echoing rooms, but the floor still vibrated from its thunder. Obviously the water supplies had burst their reservoirs at last and were crashing through Cyrille, flattening everything in their path.
If she had created chaos before, there was no word to describe this.
Gravity tilted again, to send her reeling down a steep incline of inter-opening rooms. Warm rain beat in her face, snow stung it. Air currents went screaming by, mingling the odors of a dozen ruined worlds. Then the floor retilted, so that the bottom of the slope she stumbled along was suddenly the top of a high hill, and she went scrambling and spinning away sidewise through a cold ice cavern that opened upon a swamp.
When Juille found herself looking up into Egide's face, she was not at all surprised. Creation had flown apart all around her; nothing would be surprising now. Everything in her brain was as hopelessly confused as the external confusion all about, and with the letting go of gravity, all sense of responsibility seemed to have let go, too. Far away, long ago, she knew she had been desperately worried about something. It was all right now. Nothing mattered. Nothing remained intact to matter. When natural laws suspend and reverse themselves, the mind tends to accept suspension as natural in itself.