The COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works 1911-1987

by C. L. Moore

  He smiled at her. "They aren't my people now." Juille looked at him with bewildered eyes. He went on, "I'm through with the H'vani. I couldn't say so before—you'd have thought I was afraid and trying to join the winning side. But you can't think that now."

  Juille struggled for words. "But—why? Why? You organized the attack! You—"

  "Oh, I had a great many plans," he said, smiling rather wryly. "I liked working out ideas and watching them succeed. But lately—I've changed." He looked at her as if uncertain whether to follow that idea any further just now. She was still staring at him in puzzled confusion. He said, "Don't look at me like that. I've been thinking this over for quite a while. It isn't as if I were deserting them when they need me. And I've never had much in common with them. Remember, it took Jair to win their hearts."

  "But you can't change over like that, without any reason," Juille insisted uncomprehendingly. "You don't—"

  "I have my reasons. You're thinking it's a trick, aren't you? Well, it isn't. Why should I trick you now, when it's your side that's losing? When you've got my life there around your neck on a chain?"

  Juille's hand went up automatically to her breast where the lenses hung. She thought she was beginning to understand what Egide meant. Her mind went back over the confusion of disastrous things that had happened so swiftly, and paused at the episode in the forbidden woods of the Ancients, when she had stood in Egide's arms and tentatively made herself a promise. When she had him where she wanted him, she remembered now, she had told herself she might not fear the treacherous weakness of emotion. She had thought then that even love might be safe—later. And it was—later—now.

  Egide was watching her, a smile beginning to quirk his mouth. She watched his face warm and soften, finding that she knew just how each line and plane would alter with the changing mood. He was very attractive when he smiled. The rain had made his yellow curls darken and tighten to almost sculptured flatness, and the rain on his lashes and his beard twinkled as he shook his head, still smiling.

  "You'll never trust me, will you?" he said. "You'll never trust anyone. Even yourself. Least of all yourself—"

  "I might," Juille told him softly, hardly knowing her own voice. Her fingers were on the chain about her neck, and almost unconsciously she found herself pulling out the deadly little ornament that held Egide's life. When she realized what she was doing she glanced down, and then sat perfectly still for a long moment, her eyes growing wider and wider. Very slowly she pulled the chain all the way out of her tunic. The color had drained from her face; and as Egide looked, his own color faded. They sat in silence, looking at the broken chain.

  The lens was gone.

  Juille stared down at the break, too stunned for thought. Somewhere, somehow, in the turmoil of evacuation, she had lost it. Anywhere. In the city. Along the road. In these pathless hills. Somewhere—anywhere. At this moment some curious person might be stooping to pick it up and toy with the black stud. It might lie lost forever, untouched, here in the woods. Or at this moment, or any moment hereafter, Egide might slump over dead in his saddle.

  There were many disastrous implications behind the loss, but her thoughts had room for only one just now. All the emotions that had churned in her mind so long about him—all the distrust, the contempt, the reluctant warmth—suddenly crystallized. Her defenses went down with a rush and she knew that of all things in life, what she wanted least was Egide's death.

  They sat looking at one another in the midst of a tremendous silence. For this small interval, there was nothing at all to stand between them, neither H'vani nor Lyonese, nor could ideals nor mistrust, nor any of the hours of their enmity. During all the time they had known one another, only a few moments had validity. The interval on the cloud beneath the stars; the interval of their dance, the moment of their kiss in the green, forbidden woods. All other meetings had been meetings of strangers, not themselves.

  For Juille it was a moment of almost intolerable poignancy. And perhaps her barriers were down so utterly in this one destroying moment because she knew in her heart that the hours of this surrender were numbered. Traitor she might be to all her Amazon principles—but she could not be traitor long.

  Wordlessly Juille leaned forward and untied the cords that held Egide's hands together. While she touched him, for an instant longer, the stars and the shadows of the wood still hung about them. But before either could speak, or wanted to, the emperor's voice broke in.

  "Juille, I'm going down," he called. "Wait here, child. I'll signal when I want you. The H'vani are catching up with our rear guard."

  She came out of the bemusing quiet slowly, too distracted to realize how completely now the reins of control had been taken from her hands. The emperor and most of his men were riding down the hillside before the import of his words came to her clearly. She watched them hurrying down, cloaks billowing, and the rain slanting in long gusts between.

  Farther down, half hidden by the hills, she could see that the vanguard of the H'vani was almost upon the last of the escaping Lyonese. There was a turmoil about the length of the shining cannon whose secret the Andareans had betrayed, and Juille knew the new weapon of the Lyonese had taken its first toll among the enemy. There would be more.

  She turned to Egide. He was watching her gravely, hands clasped on his saddlehorn. There seemed very little to say just now. Perhaps the time had not yet come for speech. Juille urged her horse nearer his and they sat side by side, knees touching, and watched the emperor riding down the hill.

  In the valley the two forces had begun their meeting. From here they could see a big figure at the H'vani's front, red beard and red head a beacon for the invaders to follow. Now and again an echo of Jair's tremendous resonant roar floated up to them above the rising clamor of battle, but for the most part, they heard little. The wind was strengthening; it screamed in their ears and carried the shouts of the fighters away up the valley.

  They could see turmoil growing among the H'vani. Far back in the ranks where no men should yet be falling, men fell. The Dunnarian weapon was reaping its first casualties. But Jair's great voice and his irresistible, compelling presence were keeping order among the frightened men.

  And suddenly Juille knew that the Dunnarian weapon must fail. Its intrinsic purpose was the slaughter of the leaders at their peak of importance. And Jair would never die by that weapon. He was immortal, not heir to any weakness of human flesh. So long as he remained on his feet the H'vani would not break even in the face of this mysterious silent death that had begun to strike among them.

  Jair would become a legend. He might even become a god for his awestruck followers. And the last hope of demoralizing the barbarians was gone now. If Juille could have proclaimed Jair's origin before this battle, the H'vani might have been shaken. But now nothing could shake them. Even if they believed her story, the very belief might deify Jair still further.

  A familiar voice at Juille's side echoed the thought.

  "How strange," said the man from Dunnar, "that they found no human creature to personify for them half the courage and warmth and power they see in this man of metal!"

  Something about the pitch of his voice made Juille turn sharply, almost unseating the llar that still clung to her knee. The Envoy was looking down the valley, his strange, narrow-skulled head in outline against the piling storm clouds. The cold wind whipped his cloak backward, but his great translucent eyes did not narrow to the blast. Juille was searching his face with a new fascination. The beaked nose, the controlled, cruel mouth. The air of intolerable elegance and fastidious, aloof poise. Juille swallowed hard. For she had heard his voice before, under strange circumstances. She groped after the memory, almost caught it. That calm, clear, familiar tone, saying—

  Suddenly she knew. She had heard it in the temple of the Ancients.

  He turned his head slowly, and the enormous, clear eyes met hers. He smiled.

  "Yes," he said.

  Afterward, looking back, the interlude s
eemed like a hallucination, an unconvincing stage-set painted upon gauze, drawn briefly between Juille and the woods, while the thunderstorm rolled above them in the purple sky. But in the first moment after she had recognized that voice, realities stood out sharp and clear all around her, intensified because she could not speak or think coherently. Everything else was drowned in the overwhelming knowledge of who this man must be. And that he was no man at all. And what unimaginable shape he must really wear behind that illusion of humanity. And—

  "Yes," said the Envoy, smiling his thin smile across her at Egide. "You, too."

  Juille never knew how long they sat there in silence, while the cold wind whistled about them and in the strange yellow light of storm, the two armies locked in battle down below. She thought she would never speak again. She could not even turn her head to face Egide for comfort in this bleak and overwhelming moment.

  The Envoy said, "Each of you came to us for help. And each of you was answered. But you and your people had gone too far already along the road all humans go. There was still one brief moment when you could have saved yourselves. But your instincts were wrong. That time is gone now.

  "Every race has come to this end, since the first men conquered the Galaxy. Each of them sows the seed of its own destruction. Always a few see the way toward salvation, and always the many shout them down. But each race has its chance—"

  He looked down sternly over the struggling masses in the valley. Mists were beginning to drift between them now. The Envoy was a tall silhouette against the purple clouds of the storm. As he spoke again, the thunder rolled in his voice and in the darkening sky.

  "Every nation digs its own grave," he said. "And we are weary of mankind, forever thwarting his highest dreams and trapping himself in the end to a ruin like"—he nodded—"that down there."

  Silence for a long moment, while the noises of battle came up faintly, Jair's great rich, carrying shout above all the rest, bellowed from his throat of brass. Juille sat very still on her horse, glad of the pressure of Egide's warm knee, all thought and speech frozen in her as she saw the Envoy's head turning her way. He looked thoughtfully into her face.

  "You have set in motion already the forces that must destroy the Lyonese. You were the spokesman for your race, chosen fairly, typical of your kind. And of your own free choice you did it. Nothing can change that now." Then the narrow skull turned farther and he looked across her at Egide. His great eyes were the color of the spattering rain, as cool and translucent and inhuman. "You," he went on, "gave your people a man of iron to worship, and nothing you can do now would swerve them from following it. It will lead them to destruction. How very strange—" The Envoy paused a moment and looked at the two with a sort of puzzled wonder. "How very strange you humans are! How unerringly you unleash upon yourselves the instruments of your own destruction. How long ago the two of you here took the turnings that led you to this hilltop, and your people to their ruin down there. Perhaps the turnings were taken long before your births." He smiled impersonally in the vivid yellowish light. "I know they were. Your first forefathers took them, and you had no choice but to follow, being of human flesh." He sighed. "But the end comes just the same. It's very near now.

  "You wonder which will win down there." He glanced toward the struggling armies, almost hidden now in the mist. "Neither."

  "Neither will win," he told them. "Man has run his last course in our Galaxy. There were those before him who ran theirs, too, and failed to profit from it, and died. Now we weary of man. Oh, he may live out his failing days on the other worlds. We plan no pogrom against mankind." His voice quivered for an instant with aloof amusement. "Man himself attends to that. But here on Ericon, our own peculiar world, we are weary of man and we want no more of him."

  He sent one cool downward glance toward the sounds of battle in the fog, the shouts, the muffled roar of guns, the flashes of fire-sword and pistol and artillery. Then he shook his reins gently and his horse turned toward the woods, where rain was beginning to rustle again among the leaves.

  "We have great hopes," he said, "for our new race to come." And he held out his hand.

  Something stirred upon Juille's knee. She looked down dumbly. The llar flashed up at her one fathomless glance, all the sadness and wisdom and benignity of its race luminous in the great grave eyes so startlingly like the Envoy's. Then it flowed down from her lap to the ground with its alarming, boneless ease, and went rippling over the wet grass toward the Envoy.

  Juille looked up. She had no idea why. But she was not surprised to see again the heights of great inward-leaning walls looming dark above the trees. When she lowered her eyes the Envoy and the llar had gone.

  "I suppose we'd better go down now," Juille said, and put out her hand. Egide turned a quiet blue gaze upon her. The faintest flicker of a smile touched his face and his warm, gun-calloused fingers closed about the hand.

  "Yes, I suppose so," he said.

  Juille had an extraordinary conviction of hiatus in her life for the past ten minutes. She knew quite well what had been happening while she sat there stricken voiceless and all but mindless in the presence of the gods. She knew she would never quite forget it—or ever speak of it to Egide. But it seemed singularly unreal. The human mind is not constructed to accept defeat even in the face of finality. She could not now bring hers to accept that memory. What had happened seemed of a different time and texture from the period before or since—an interval of flimsy unreality, a gauze incident, to be dismissed and forgotten.

  And yet, she thought, if it were true—if she herself had set into motion the juggernaut that would destroy all her hopes—a part of it was still good. Egide's life was forfeit to pure chance now, through her doing alone. But if she had not imperiled it, she might never have valued the life or the man. Meeting that faint softening of a smile that touched his face, she knew he was sharing a thought like hers. Thanks to that one terrible error, they would at least live each measured moment that remained to them with a vividness that should pack a lifetime's awareness into every hour.

  Still clasping hands, they rode down the hill slowly, Mists were thick now, and they could see almost nothing of the turmoil below, but Jair's great brazen voice, rich with the vibrating warmth of his spurious humanity, came rolling up to them in brief snatches. A juggernaut of brass. Egide's juggernaut. Perhaps mankind's last and coldest and most ardently worshiped god.

  In the temple of the Ancients a small figure stood before the high, dark altar like a wall, too high for it to see the gods. It clasped and unclasped the facile, fingery paws, like a sea-anemone's tendrils—so many-fingered, so dexterous, so nervously eager to be about the great task of testing the limits of their skill.

  Its mind was not here in the temple. It was seeing the warm, sand-floored caverns of its people, lit by a garden of colored windows, multi-shaped in the twilight of the cave. It was not alone, though it sat here nervously twisting those eager, impatient fingers. No llar is ever alone. The warm awareness of its unity with its city lies behind that poise and quiet pride. It looks out of the strange round eyes with a wisdom and benignity which is of the race, not the individual. This race alone, of all thinking species, finds deity in itself, in the warm closed circle of its own unity. Once it gains the little foothold it needs on which to found its soaring possibilities, this race alone need not depend upon the gods.

  Serene in its own confidence, in its own warm knowledge of identity with its race, the llar sat clasping and unclasping those eager fingers and listening to the oracle it knew it could not trust.

  The End

  DOORWAY INTO TIME

  Famous Fantastic Mysteries - September 1943

  He came slowly, with long, soft, ponderous strides, along the hallway of his treasure house. The gleanings of many worlds were here around him; he had ransacked space and time for the treasures that filled his palace. The robes that moulded their folds richly against his great rolling limbs as he walked were in themselves as priceless as an
ything within these walls, gossamer fabric pressed into raised designs that had no meaning, this far from the world upon which they had been created, but—in their beauty—universal. But he was himself more beautiful than anything in all that vast collection. He knew it complacently, a warm contented knowledge deep in the center of his brain.

  His motion was beautiful, smooth power pouring along his limbs as he walked, his great bulk ponderous and graceful. The precious robes he wore flowed open over his magnificent body. He ran one sensuous palm down his side, enjoying the texture of that strange, embossed delicacy in a fabric thinner than gauze. His eyes were proud and half shut, flashing many-colored under the heavy lids. The eyes were never twice quite the same color, but all the colors were beautiful.

  He was growing restless again. He knew the feeling well, that familiar quiver of discontent widening and strengthening far back in his mind. It was time to set out once more on the track of something dangerous. In times past, when he had first begun to stock this treasure house, beauty alone had been enough. It was not enough any longer. Danger had to be there too. His tastes were growing capricious and perhaps a little decadent, for he had lived a very long time.

  Yes, there must be a risk attending the capture of his next new treasure. He must seek out great beauty and great danger and subdue the one and win the other, and the thought of it made his eyes change color and the blood beat faster in mighty rhythms through his veins. He smoothed his palm again along the embossed designs of the robe that moulded itself to his body. The great, rolling strides carried him noiselessly over the knife-edged patterns of the floor.

  Nothing in life meant much to him any more except these beautiful things which his own passion for beauty had brought together. And even about these he was growing capricious now. He glanced up at a deep frame set in the wall just at the bend of the corridor, where his appreciative eyes could not fail to strike the objects it enclosed at just the proper angle. Here was a group of three organisms fixed in an arrangement that once had given him intense pleasure. On their own world they might have been living creatures, perhaps even intelligent. He neither knew nor cared. He did not even remember now if there had been eyes upon their world to see, or minds to recognize beauty. He cared only that they had given him acute pleasure whenever he turned this bend of the corridor and saw them frozen into eternal perfection in their frame.