by C. L. Moore
"You have never been here before, have you?" said the girl in her clear and voiceless speech. "No one ever comes back, of course ..." She peered up at him. She had a medieval face, with a round, childlike forehead and a soft, small mouth and the great, dark, sidelong eyes, a little sad now. She twirled the flower between her fingers and looked at him. "They never come back," she said again.
"Who?" he asked, his voice sounding strangely loud in this silent world of thoughts. And he was watching the woods restlessly, waiting a repetition of that dangerous flash he had caught a moment ago. "Who never comes back?"
"No one," said the girl. "Not even the Sorceror, any more. I'm glad, anyhow, that you are not old, like him."
"You'll have to tell me about the Sorceror," Argyle said gently. "I don't know anything about this world, you know."
She looked up at him with a puzzled smile.
"It seems strange to hear you say so, when you stand there in the Sorceror's clothing. But I can see that you speak the truth."
Argyle looked down in surprise. He was wearing something unfamiliar, a stiff tunic as fantastic as her gown, heavy with golden embroidery and medieval in cut and richness. Only the pomander remained now to link him with a London that might have been a dream ...
"Others have come in the Sorceror's garments," the girl said, and shrugged a little beneath the golden collar. "Two of them were old, and I did not care when they went away. The young man—well, he went away very quickly, before I could tell him the way back. I was sorry. I thought for a moment when I saw you ... but you are young too, aren't you? Perhaps you'll stay."
"Perhaps," Argyle said. "I'd like to stay ... Why did the young man leave so quickly?"
"He did not wish to die," the girl said, and smiled, twirling the flower. "Death must be a curious thing. Nothing ever dies here except those from outside."
"And what," demanded Argyle, "do they die of?"
"They die of the Snake," the girl told him thoughtfully, and looked down at the yellow flower. "The Sorceror put it here when he built the world. I think he meant it to keep out everyone but himself and me. But now ..." She sighed. "It does seem lonely here sometimes. The world is so small, and no one lives here any more except the Snake and the little creatures and me."
-
"Who was the Sorceror?" Argyle asked, fascinated. The girl put out her hand and took his in her smooth, cool fingers.
"Come up to the castle with me. The Sorceror has forgotten us long ago. He must be dead by now. Or has time gone by outside? There is no time here, you know. He wanted it that way. He dreaded old age ... So here it is always Now. But once you step outside, through the Shaking Land—you forget. It has something to do with time. It was only by accident the Sorceror found the way to come back, and after that—" She glanced up at him again, her small mouth quirking. "Shall I tell you how he found the way back? Not yet, I think. Or perhaps I shall ..." Her smile promised that she would. Her fingers tightened on his.
"What about the Snake?" Argyle asked, his eyes searching the trees.
"Oh, I think it must be asleep now. It would have come for you sooner than this if it knew you were here at all. Perhaps in the castle I can hide you for a while." She said it unconcernedly. Death meant nothing to her, nor the passage of time. And Argyle could do nothing but walk beside her over the flowery grass, the unfamiliar tunic stiff against his knees as he moved.
All this was not a dream. It was vividly real, but he felt no terror yet of the danger he knew must come for him soon. The girl's fingers were warm in his, and her small, sad face enchanted him, smiling up as they walked through the sunny silence toward the castle.
He knew presently what she meant when she said that it must always be. Now in this nameless world. For time had no meaning. They might have been hours approaching the castle gate, or only seconds. The vague, unfocussed thoughts of the little beings who peopled the world drifted idly through the air. Now and then a flash of murderous brilliance slashed across them and was gone. The Snake, perhaps, in its dreams ... But the girl's sidelong eyes were eloquent upon his, and her twining fingers soft, and the sad little face touched his heart with its loneliness and its strangeness.
"Presently you will go," she said, after a while. "And I shall be alone again. If I tell you the secret of the way back—would you come? I should like you to come."
"Tell me," he said. "I promise. I'll come back."
And so she told him. It was very simple. She led him by the hand into the castle hall and through it into a round, paneled room with a desk in its center and a quill pen sitting in a little carved box of sand. There was parchment paper on the desk, and a well of purple ink.
"These are the Sorceror's," said the girl. "But I think he must be dead ... You can only come back if you remember, so you must write down the way and the secret of the pomander, and write down what lies inside the Shaking Land, so you will know your promise again, and remember me ... Sit down and write, John Argyle, and may you never forget as the others did. Please, John Argyle, remember me!"
So he wrote, with that plaintive little voice ringing in his mind. "Please remember me!" Its poignancy disturbed him as he scratched the quill of the long dead Sorceror over the Sorceror's parchment sheets, putting down the girl's beauty and her loneliness so that he could not forget them again, putting down the strange beauty of this world, and the menace of the Snake, so that he would remember that too ...
He covered three sheets with the purple ink, while time stood still in the silence of the enchanted castle. Not until he had nearly finished did an obvious thought occur to him.
"Why should you stay here?" he asked her, striking the quill back into its box of purple-stained sand. "Why not come back with me?"
She shook her gold-crowned head. "Finish," she said. "Fold up the parchment, and put it in the pomander, because that is the only thing you brought here and the only thing you can take away. No, I can't go with you. I belong here. I would die in the Shaking Lands. Nothing can leave this world, and nothing can live here very long except the Snake and me." Her sigh shook the golden collar about her shoulders.
Argyle, crackling the parchment sheets, looked up sharply. He had caught a flashing thought, keener than her own, in the quiet air of the room.
"The Snake?" he said. The girl straightened, her eyes going unfocused and faraway. Then she nodded.
"Soon," she said. "You will come back, though? Presently perhaps it will sleep again, after you have gone. And I shall be lonely. You will not forget?"
"I promise," said Argyle. "I'll come back. But—"
Sharp and keen through the quiet the thought of murder flashed. A bright crimson thought, so that Argyle could almost see the color in the air. It was time to go. Time to go fast! He stuffed the crackling sheets into the pomander.
"Show me the way," he said. And she obeyed, moving swiftly in her stiff golden skirts. Her fingers clung to his almost desperately, and her unhappy little face looked up at his so that she stumbled as she pulled him out of the room and down the hall to the door. And then they were running across the grass, with danger making the air electric behind them from the forest.
The shining flowers flashed past underfoot. The Shaking Lands loomed up dim before them, grey air wavering in a wall beyond the sunshine, and the earth shifting beneath it. The girl pressed his hands hard around the pomander. Tiptoeing, she laid her arms about his neck, brushing his mouth with hers.
"Please come back. Please remember me!"
Beyond her, he caught one bright and terrifying glimpse of a scarlet shape gliding out from among the trees. A shape of dreadful beauty, colored like blood and of so pure and clear a tint that the redness quivered like life itself. He could scarcely take his eyes away from it.
"Run!" called the girl. "And—remember!"
But Argyle was in no hurry to run. He was remembering what she had told him of the Shaking Lands, and the possibility of victory over the Snake suddenly dazzled him. If he could lure it out here
into the dizziness and the dimness of this border limbo, perhaps ...
It came writhing toward him as he stood waiting in the shadow, its crimson like the flow of fresh blood over the green grass. It was beautiful as the Serpent in Eden must have been beautiful, and as dangerous as that first Snake. It lifted its lovely shining head and hissed at him soundlessly, and the murder in its mindless brain shook him so that he turned to run ...
And it followed. Its terrible, singleminded purpose was like lightning in the dim air around him, flashing the voice of its thought into his brain. And that alone was frightening enough, without those great sliding coils following, following as he ran. The unstable earth shook beneath his slipping feet. He clutched the pomander and stumbled on, glancing back now and then to see the scarlet blur following purposefully behind, closer every time he looked.
From far away the girl's voice echoed in his brain, "John Argyle—come back to me! Remember me, John Argyle!"
But it was a very distant voice, more a memory than a thought, and already he could see the gleam of firelight ahead where he had left that room in London a timeless while ago. Smoky memories were curling lazily through his mind—smoky—dissipating ...
-
That was the way it must have ended, though the writing ended sooner. Maybe the Snake died out there in the Shaking Lands, I thought. Maybe the way was open now for him to go back. As he had gone ... For I knew that he had kept his promise at last, that he and the girl were standing, at this very moment perhaps, on the strange green grass among the flowers, with medieval sunlight pouring down around them, and no Snake to spoil their Eden ...
The scream of sirens from outside woke me out of that particular vision. I came back with a jolt into this world again, hearing the wardens' whistles and seeing the light go on outside the windows as New York came back to life.
There was a click from the wall. I jumped. The lights that went on showed me John Argyle, one hand on the switch and a look of stunned disbelief making his face empty.
Looking at him, I knew all in one glance exactly what had happened. I knew, I think, even quicker than he. He was still stupefied by the surprise of it. But as he looked beyond me, I saw understanding dawn upon his face, and before I turned I knew what must hang on the wall behind me. I knew what he was seeing there. A mirror, and his own face. A face that the girl in the magical land had not remembered ...
Yes, he had returned to her. He had kept the promise he made when sorcery opened the way to her in the early days of the war. But that had not been this war. In 1914, too, there had been German bombers over London ... It was thirty years ago that John Argyle found the key to dreams.
So I knew what he had seen in the eyes of the golden girl, the Queen of Hearts with her yellow flower in her hand. Young, in a world made out of a Sorceror's longing for youth, and its key the Golden Apple of Idun that promised youth to the gods. But not to mortals.
I knew she had not known him. The thirty years had been nothing to her in her world of eternal Now. I wondered if the Snake were dead, and the way open for another man—a young man, luckier than Argyle—to find the pomander's secret and step through the Shaking Lands into that tiny world of beauty and loneliness, where a girl in a golden gown would still be waiting for the young John Argyle who never would return.
Argyle turned away from me and the mirror. I heard a thump upon the carpet. The Golden Apple of Idun had fallen from his hand.
The End
ANDROID
Fantasy and Science Fiction - June 1951
with Henry Kuttner
(as by C. H. Liddell)
Your editors have often questioned the standard assumption of science fiction that robots will be android—that is, shaped to imitate as nearly as possible the body design of that featherless biped, man. For the great virtue of the functional design of man's body is that he is a versatile, all-purpose creation; for any given specific purpose for which a robot servant might be constructed, a more suitably functional design could be found. There are exceptions, to be sure; Larry Sternig provides one reason for man-shaped robots in this issue, and Betsy Curtis will reveal a surprising new justification in our next. But by and large (and the latest developments in that current borderland between the most advanced machine and the first true robot bears us out), androids are not fundamentally practical. Are inventors, however, always practical in their inventions? Might not a scientist succumb to the megalomaniacal pleasure of playing God by aping the creation of a human being? And if that android possessed the in-built urge to increase his kind ... Mr. Liddell presents the terrifying consequences (in a disquietingly immediate future) in this novelet—a Hitchcockian melodrama of the uncertain and the unexpected.
—from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, June 1951
BRADLEY LOOKED at the Director's head. His stomach tried to crawl up into his throat. He felt suddenly dizzy. He knew that he was betraying himself, and that would be absolutely fatal.
He reached into his pocket, pulled out a pack of cigarettes and a few coins, and let the coins drop, as though by accident, to the airfoam carpet.
"Oh-oh," he said, and immediately crouched down to recover the money. It's a basic principle of first aid, in cases of shock or faintness, to lower the head, and Bradley was doing just that. The giddiness began to pass as his circulation picked up. In a moment, he knew, he'd have to stand up and face the Director, and by that time he was determined to have his feelings under control. But how the devil could the Director's head be where it was—after last night?
And then sanity came back. He remembered that, last night, the Director couldn't possibly have recognized him through the rubber-plastic false-face he had worn. On the other hand, after last night, the Director of New Products, Inc., should have been incapable of living or breathing, not to speak of using his memory-centers. Bradley had left the man's body in one corner of the room and his head in another.
Man?
With a violent effort he controlled himself. He recaptured the last coin and stood up, his face flushed. "Sorry," he said. "I came in to deliver that report on the induced mutation project, not to act like a horn of plenty." His fascinated stare moved down to the Director's neck and flicked away. The high collar concealed any—any mark. Any mark, such as might have been left by razor-sharp steel shearing through flesh and bone ...
Was there a reason for the high collar? Bradley couldn't be sure. In the fall of 1960, men's fashions had changed considerably from the uncomfortable styles of a few years before, and the Director's flaring half-cape, with its gilt-braided, close-fitting collar, was far from extreme. Bradley owned one like that himself.
Lord, he thought in white panic—can't the—the things even be killed?
Arthur Court, the Director, turned a bland smile on his Chief of Organization. "Hangover?" he asked. "Take an irradiation treatment. Medical's always happy to use their gadgets. Our staff's too healthy to suit them, I think."
He talked!
A mad thought whirled into Bradley's brain: a ringer? Was this really Court sitting behind the desk? But instantly he knew that couldn't be the explanation. It was Court, the same Arthur Court whom Bradley had killed not many hours ago. If you could call it killing, when Court hadn't actually been alive ... at least, not with the same sort of life that activated human beings.
He forced his mind from the danger-level and became the efficient Chief of Organization of the company. "You can't argue with a hangover," he said. "Here're the latest figures—"
"What about that variant factor? I gathered there was something that upset the calculations."
"There was," Bradley said. "But it's a theoretical variable. It doesn't matter a bit in practice, because we're not trying to mutate people. And the sterility rate doesn't vary abnormally with fruit-flies or—or strawberries."
"But it does with people—eh?" Court glanced rapidly through the papers Bradley had given him.
"Uh-huh. We could follow it up, but it would cost mo
ney and wouldn't have any immediately practical results. That's up to you to decide, sir."
"We can predict non-human reactions with reasonable accuracy, though?"
Bradley nodded. "Two per cent factor of error. Close enough for us to mutate potatoes twenty feet long and tasting like roast beef, without any danger of getting them half an inch long instead, and tasting like cyanide."
"Does the curve of variance rise with animals?"
"No. Only people. We can hatch chickens which are all white meat and built cube-shaped for easy carving. And, really, we could mutate people too, if it weren't illegal—but the uncertainty factor steps in there, as I said. Too many people become sterilized instead of having mutated children."
"Um," Court said, and pondered. "Well, forget about the people, then. There's no profit in it. Drop that part of the investigation. Go ahead with the rest. All right?"
"Fine," Bradley agreed. He had expected to be stopped at this point of the inquiry, though, since last night, not by Court. He found he was still holding an unlighted cigarette. He put it in his mouth and went to the side door and opened it. Then he turned.
"That's all?"
He watched Court twist his neck around, and had an insane fear that the man's head might fall off. But it didn't.
"Yes, that's all for now," Court said pleasantly.
Bradley went out, trying to forget the narrow red line he had just seen circling the Director's throat, revealed when the man had turned his head.
The things couldn't be killed by decapitation, then. But they could be destroyed. They could be dissolved with acid, smashed with a hammer, dismantled, burned ...
The trouble was, there was as yet no sure way to recognize the creatures. The sterility curve after exposure to mild radioactivity meant something, but ordinary humans could have become sterilized too—though not usually by such slight dosages of gamma rays. And even then, some people were sterile anyway.