by C. L. Moore
Malesco.
All of a sudden, I was remembering Uncle Jim's bedtime stories and how striped headdresses had occasionally figured in those tales. Those who wore them bore the rank of—what had it been? Priest. And that meant—
My mind clamped down and rejected such an impossibility. I stood up, took a deep breath and wished I hadn't.
For this was the moment I'd been avoiding—the moment when I couldn't keep moving and would have to start thinking and realizing. I was in another world. (What world? Oh, no! I wasn't quite ready to believe that yet.)
The only other explanation was that I'd gone crazy and was really in a bed in Bellevue with doctors looking at me thoughtfully and remarking, "Obviously a hopeless case. Shall we try shock treatment, or should we experiment with that new method, the one that killed all the Rhesus monkeys?"
Meanwhile at my feet was an unconscious priest and beyond the railing lay the city, no longer rose-red, but darkening into evening. The sun had gone. Night came quickly here. I looked out over the eerily familiar view I'd dreamed of so often as a child.
The sense of wonder hadn't hit me yet. I wasn't even incredulous—yet. Anybody pitched headforemost into Oz or Graustark or any other familiar unreal world and finding it a real place after all would expect to be half-stunned by disbelief. I wasn't. There was no use disbelieving in Malesco—here it was. After a while, I told myself, I'll start being surprised. Then, there wasn't time.
The thing that I wanted to think about most when I got a moment was Uncle Jim. It had been no series of bedtime tales he'd told me then, he knewMalesco. All right—had he been here in person?
Had he just found some way to open the door between the worlds and look through, maybe listen, since he'd learned the language? I wanted time to think about it, but I hadn't any to spare right now. Too much was going on.
One thing was certain: the Malesco that Uncle Jim described to me had been the description of an eyewitness. There was the great flowing dome with its spires of bright water. He hadn't mentioned the patterns of lights visible all over the city after dark, though. Some of them were colored, some of them formed words. I could read Malescan. I knew advertising when I saw it.
This isn't happening, this isn't real, this is a dream I'm having and I'm ten years old again and Uncle Jim made the whole thing up.
The pouch at the priest's belt buzzed. Then it said something in a thin, inquiring voice.
"Falvi! Responde!"
Responde was pronounced the way it was written. I knew what it meant. Falvi I didn't know. It might be a proper noun. It might be the name of my priest. If so, Falvi wasn't going to responde and I guessed what would probably happen.
I thought I might be safer, somehow, out there in the city. Since there were lights, there would be darkness, too.
-
Chapter IV
BECAUSE I was in a hurry, I probably wasn't too logical. I'd wasted time. Since the priest had tried to kill me at sight—or at least to stuff me back where I came from through a hole in space and had not seemed to care much whether I fell to the pavement below in the process—I could probably expect similar treatment from other priests. At any rate it was hardly safe to assume I wouldn't get similar treatment.
I went into the room where the machine was, gazed up stupidly at its enigmatic round flat face and turned away, looking for that black cloak. I shook it out, snapped it around my throat, and discovered there were little magnetic clasps all along the front of it, so that when I pulled it down it fell neatly shut.
Then sudden panic seized me. What was I doing here anyway? What were my chances of finding Lorna in a bedtime-story world which I was probably dreaming up as I went along? The place for me was back in New York, where I came from. I turned rapidly and trotted back to the balcony, the cloak flapping at my heels.
I leaned out over the rail and the emptiness and began to grope in the air. But I didn't feel New York. What a hole in space would feel like was uncertain, of course. Rather like the hole in a doughnut, maybe. I had no real hope that I could get hold of something in my own apartment that was solidly anchored and haul myself home that way. It was too much like trying to lift myself by my bootstraps.
And yet I found myself violently reluctant to leave that balcony and go out in a world I didn't know at all. In a curious sort of way I'd been born into Malesco at this spot and I was too young in Malescan experience to like the prospect of seeking fame and fortune in a world I never made.
I was a stranger and afraid—in a world I never made ...
I had made Earth, you know. Everyone shapes a little part of his environment, and his parents and ancestors shaped other parts. Maybe that's why it will take a long time for people to get used to living on Venus or Mars. Anyhow, there was a queer sort of silver-cord feeling that held me to the balcony.
Suddenly I thought with some bitterness of the tales written about just such miracles as the one I was undergoing. Burroughs, in particular, and Haggard. But I wasn't on Barsoom now and I wasn't John Carter. He was made of the stuff of mythical heroes. He was indestructible.
I didn't feel specially heroic, but of course one never knows. And the heroism of one society is the rank cowardice of another. Malescan ethics might differ considerably from terrestrial ones. I didn't really think they would, but you never know.
My trouble was that I could be killed.
I hadn't thought much about such things back home. You don't lean too far out of high windows, you don't step in front of speeding cars and you don't touch hot wires because you've heard of electricity. Okay. In Malesco there was gravity and it seemed the usual kind. I could allow for that. But what about the unknown forces like electricity?
A Malescan in a subway in New York might very well sit on the third rail because it looked innocuous. In Malesco, I might sit on an atomic power plant without recognizing it. The priest's dumbbell-shaped weapons seemed to indicate some non-electrical force activating it, and the machine in the other room might operate on some power I'd never heard of. Luckily I could read Malescan. I decided to keep my eyes open for signs reading CAVE! No, that was Latin—Malescan would be CAVEO.
I wasn't getting very far, leaning over this rail searching the air. The priest might wake up at any moment, and I would have to make up my mind whether to run, hide or throw myself on his mercy, such as it was.
I went back thoughtfully into the room and looked down at him. He was starting to twitch a little. Even in repose his face looked irritable and impulsive. It had better be either run or hide, I told myself. Preferably hide—but where?
There was the alcove with a rack of cloaks and robes behind a curtain. There wasn't any other cover I could think of, and I didn't dare go out into the hall and take a chance on other priests coming at me with dumbbells flashing blue fire.
This was the point at which the heroes of the conventional tales perform some miracle of physical or mental prowess and get the upper hand with the ease of long practice. But it was all new to me. I didn't feel heroic and I had no resources whatever.
In the room where the priest lay I heard a thin voice call, "Falvi!" again. A groan answered it. The prostrate priest moved his hand. I was as good as caught and I knew it. This was the spot where John Carter would have sprung easily to the top of a ten-foot wall that providentially didn't quite reach the ceiling, there to lie hidden while his enemies searched in vain.
In the tales the enemies never looked up, of course. But all the walls here reached to the ceiling, and even if they hadn't I gravely doubted my ability to dart up them like a startled cat. I wasn't as resourceful as Carter. The best thing that occurred to me was to dive into that clothes closet and burrow my way among the robes into the corner. If I squatted down, the black cloak I was wearing would hide my feet.
It wasn't very good. Fortunately for me it didn't have to be. If I wasn't a resourceful hero, neither was my adversary a very resourceful villain. He was just an ordinary guy who'd been knocked out and felt rattled an
d confused when he finally came to.
Between two garments and the edge of the curtain I saw him sit up, groan and put his head in his hands. The voice at his waist said irritably, "Falvi! Responde!"
He shook his head a couple of times, looked dizzily around, and then suddenly muttered something and scrambled to his feet. His face was frightened. It was worse than frightened. For some reason he was on a spot so bad that things couldn't possibly get worse and somehow or other I was responsible.
I knew that. I knew by the way he looked around the room, obviously searching for me. I was very glad I wasn't in plain sight. My refuge seemed pitiably inadequate now, but it was too late to change it. Luckily the priest seemed to be an amateur too at this sort of thing.
He scuttled out on the balcony, and I watched his back as he bent over the edge and peered hopefully downward. Since I wasn't visible, either climbing down the wall or spread out on the pavement below, he came back again and this time his eye caught the half-open door to the hall.
It was sheer luck that I had left it open. He must have jumped to the conclusion that I had fled. Of course he had no way of knowing how long he'd been unconscious. It might have been hours and I might have got clear away a long time ago.
He hurried to the door and I heard him take a few uncertain steps outside. But he came back in a moment and shut the door firmly. By the look on his face I was sure he had ulcers. He was the kind of guy who always does have ulcers.
The little voice at his belt called again and this time he took a thing like a white waffle out of his pouch and did something very odd. He yawned into it. That is, he made the noises a man makes when he's slowly waking out of deep sleep.
I was surprised, but not entirely, by the yawn. A light had gone on beyond his shoulder, out there in the slowly lighting city. Sheer astonishment made me blank to everything but the thing I saw spread across the whole side of a building about a block away.
It was a picture of Lorna's face.
It must have been huge, though from where I crouched I could see it all and it looked small in perspective. The picture was illuminated and was on something like stained glass, though not formalized the way stained glass pictures usually are. I knew it was Lorna's face, but for a long moment I just didn't believe it.
It was Lorna's face, all right, but glamorized as though Arden had collaborated with Rubinstein and then turned it over to a Romney who's become a religious idealist. Just as Romney had on canvas given Lady Hamilton qualities that essentially bird-brained woman never possessed, so this super-electric sign changed Lorna Maxwell into a very beautiful woman with a strangely etherealized appearance.
Over the portrait head was a huge golden a—a rather mystifying letter which I noticed standing alone in gold lights elsewhere here and there through the city. It seemed to mean something. Under Lorna's portrait was the word or name CLIA.
"Falvi!"
I'd almost got used to that thin urgent voice. It was the answering voice that brought my attention back—a drowsy startled murmur, then the falsely brisk tone of a man suddenly awakened.
"In the name of the Phoenix. Falvi to the Hierarch. There is peace in the Earth-Gates watchroom."
"Were you asleep?"
"I—ah—I was contemplating the mysteries."
"You'll have a chance to contemplate the mysteries in solitude when I report this to the Hierarch." There was a pause. Then: "Falvi, if you're sleepy I'll put someone else on. But I'm supposed to be responsible tonight. If there's trouble the Hierarch will devour my—" There followed a word I didn't understand.
"Sorry," Falvi said. "Could you get some other priest to take over? I—I think I'm sick."
"Right away," the thin voice agreed and there was silence, in which I could hear Falvi's hard breathing.
I stood perfectly motionless, waiting. Curiously, though Falvi and his communicant sounded nothing at all like Uncle Jim, I'd had a ghostly feeling that it was Uncle Jim who spoke. For their language was Malescan and it was only in his voice that I had ever heard that tongue spoken before.
Of course I hadn't understood every nuance of meaning. But obvious shades of inflection in the voices made the sense unmistakable. Malescan is a simple language, though until now I had never realized just how simple it really was. I'd never questioned it any more than you question pig-Latin or any childhood memory of a code.
Malescan is pronounced the way it's spelled, or at least the way Uncle Jim spelled it in his notes. And the illuminated signs I'd seen confirmed most of his spelling. Then too it seemed based on Latin and anybody who remembers his high-school Latin can make a good guess at the meanings of any language that stems from it.
Falvi came to the doorway and looked out across the city. He said a low word under his breath. Then I realized that Malescan stems partly from Anglo-Saxon, too!
"Obscenity New York!" Falvi said furiously, and before I could realize the full implications of that reference, he turned back into the room and disappeared. New York—he had said New York.
-
I gazed across the city at the beautiful transfigured face of Lorna Maxwell and longed for the safe familiar environment of Barsoom.
Falvi was speaking again.
"Coriole," he said quietly. "Dom Coriole!"
There was a wild buzzing which ended in a squeaky voice that said "—wanted me to make the robe for her and I'm just too good-natured to say no, but where I'll get time to—"
"Private beam!" Falvi snapped—or perhaps it was "line" or "circuit." I couldn't translate literally. But I got the sense of the words and heard them as colloquial rather than formalized because I was used to thinking colloquially myself.
There was a pause during which Falvi's gaze moved uneasily about the room. I shrank back shyly among the cloaks. Then an oily giggle sounded.
"I am in spasms," said a thin voice. "Yes, positively in spasms. Purdelor has told me the funniest quip I've heard in years. I nearly split myself laughing. I laughed till I cried. Do you remember Dom Pheres? He always insisted—"
"Coriole, listen! This is Falvi. Somebody else has come through."
"—insisted that his name ought to be pronounced Peres—don't interrupt, I must tell you this."
Falvi was trying to mention somebody named or called the Hierarch.
"Be quiet," Coriole said with thin cheerfulness. "Insisted that his name ought to be pronounced Peres—you have that? So Morander, one evening over dinner, said, 'If you please, Dom Peres, will you hand me the paselae?' Paselae! Oh, ha, ha, ha, ha!" There were wild giggles.
"Damnatio!" Falvi said, presumably seeing no more point to the joke than I did. I felt a twinge of sympathy for the harassed priest. What Coriole needed was an appreciative studio audience, I thought. But I was underestimating the man.
Falvi said with furious patience, "I was guarding the Earth-Gates tonight and another one came through—a man, this time—and he knocked me out and got away. Ha, ha."
Coriole's chuckles died.
"Well," he said, "I suppose you were playing with the Earth-Gates—"
"I never touched them."
"Lie to the Hierarch if you like but don't try it with me, Falvi. What was the man like, eh?"
It was a curious sensation to me, cowering in the clothes closet, hearing myself accurately described. I had a momentary sense of having been discovered, as though the shadows had been driven away by a bright light. I stared at Lorna's face beyond Falvi and the balcony. That steadied me.
Very often in Malesco I needed that steadiness. I kept finding myself inclined to slip over into an odd state in which everything seemed quite unreal and it was difficult for me to move or even think.
A touch of that helpless passivity gripped me now, and for a second Falvi seemed unimportant and unreal. The fact that he was announcing his decision to find and kill me had an abstruse interest, no more than that.
"If you harm him I'll break your neck," Coriole said. "You hear me?"
"All right, I won'
t touch him," Falvi said in an unconvincing tone. "If any of the other priests have found him he may be dead already. I don't know."
"He sounds like the man you say Clia described. Well, meet me at the Baths immediately."
"But this is the night the—"
"Bless me, this is the night I thought I was on horseback," Coriole said and chuckled again. A humorist, part of my mind said. The other part was considering Lorna's face a block away and the name CLIA under it. So I sounded like the man Clia described, did I? That meant Clia was Lorna, a deduction which required little brilliance on my part.
"It's nothing to joke about," Falvi said. "The Hierarch won't believe I didn't touch the Earth-Gates."
"Naturally he won't," Coriole said. "He knows you're a liar. Meet me at the Baths immediately. Hurry along. This man who came through may be exactly what we need. If you harm him I'll be inclined to wash my hands of you."
"Listen, if he's wandering through the Temple in the clothes he had on he'll be stopped before—"
"There's been no alarm yet, has there? Come along. Leave the thinking to me. I'm qualified for it. And don't try to act on your own. You're not indispensable."
"Perhaps you're not either."
At this Coriole burst into wild thin giggles, sounding rather like a disembodied goblin, and gasped, "Saturn mend you, indeed! It would be less trouble to make a new one. Oh, hurry along. When I explain you'll see why we need this man alive. Less trouble to make—" The giggling died.
"Damned comedian," Falvi said under his breath, then, louder, "Your jokes smell. You're a fool, Coriole. Nobody thinks you're funny. And if I find that man I'll kill him so fast he won't even notice. Maybe it doesn't matter to you whether or not I get in trouble but—"
His words became mutters. I gathered that the "walkie-talkie" had been turned off before Falvi began his diatribe. This seemed to indicate that Falvi was both sensible and cautious.
Then a door slammed and it was time for me to decide what to do next.