Northwest of Earth

by C. L. Moore

  “Do you know what I think this is?” demanded Smith suddenly, after a few minutes of silent progress over the uneven floor. “An asteroid! That rough wall bulging into the corridor outside was the outer part of it. Remember, the three gods were supposed to have been carried away from the catastrophe on the other world and brought here. Well, I’ll bet that’s how it was managed—a fragment of that planet, enclosing a room, possibly, where the gods’ images stood, was somehow detached from the Lost Planet and hurled across space to Mars. Must have buried itself in the ground here, and the people of this city tunneled in to it and built a temple over the spot. No other way, you see, to account for that protruding wall and the peculiar formation of this rock. It must have come from the lost world—never saw anything like it anywhere, myself.”

  “Sounds logical,” admitted Yarol, swinging his foot to start an eddy of light toward the wall. “And what do you make of this funny light?”

  “Whatever other-dimensional place those gods came from, we can be pretty sure that light plays funny tricks there. It must be nearly material—physical. You saw it in that white thing in the cave, and in the dark that smothered our tubes. It’s as tangible as water, almost. You saw how it flowed out into the passage when the door fell, not as real light does, but in succeeding waves, like heavy gas. Yet I don’t notice any difference in the air. I don’t believe—say! Look at that!”

  He stopped so suddenly that Yarol bumped into him from behind and muttered a mild Venusian oath. Then across Smith’s shoulder he saw it too, and his hand swept downward to his gun. Something like an oddly shaped hole opening onto utter dark had appeared around the curve of the passage. And as they stared, it moved. It was a Something blacker than anything in human experience could ever have been before—as black as the guardian of the cave had been white—so black that the eye refused to compass it save as a negative quality, an emptiness. Smith, remembering the legends of Pharol the No-God of utter nothingness, gripped his gun more firmly and wondered if he stood face to face with one of the elder gods.

  The Thing had shifted its shape, flowing to a stabler outline and standing higher from the floor. Smith felt that it must have form and thickness—at least three dimensions and probably more—but try though he would, his eyes could not discern it save as a flat outline of nothingness against the golden light.

  And as from the white dweller in darkness, so from this black denizen of the light there flowed a force that goaded the brain to madness. Smith felt it battering in blind waves at the foundations of his mind—but he felt more than the reasonless urge in this force assailing him. He sensed a struggle of some sort, as if the black guardian were turning only a part of its attention to him—as if it fought against something unseen and powerful. Feeling this, he began to see signs of that combat in the black outlines of the thing. It rippled and flowed, its shape shifted fluidly, it writhed in protest against something he could not comprehend. Definitely now he felt that it fought a desperate battle with some unseen enemy, and a little shudder crawled down his back as he watched.

  Quite suddenly it dawned upon him what was happening. Slowly, relentlessly, the black nothingness was being drawn down the passage. And it was—it must be—the flow of the golden radiance that drew it, as a fish might be carried forward down a stream. Somehow the opening of the door must have freed the pent-up lake of light, and it was flowing slowly out down the passage as water flows, draining the asteroid, if asteroid it was. He could see now that though they had halted the wake of rippling illumination behind them did not cease. Past them in a bright tide streamed the light. And on that outflowing torrent the black guardian floated, struggling but helpless.

  It was closer now, and the beat of insistent impulses against Smith’s brain was stronger, but he was not greatly alarmed by it. The panic of the thing must be deep, and the waves of force that washed about him were dizzying but not deep-reaching. Because of this increasing dizziness, as the thing approached, he was never sure afterward just what had happened. Rapidly it drew nearer, until he could have put out his hand and touched it—though instinctively he felt that, near as it seemed, it was too far away across dimensional gulfs for him ever to lay hand upon it. The blackness of it, at close range, was stupefying, a blackness that the eye refused to comprehend—that could not be, and was.

  With the nearness of it his brain seemed to leave its moorings and plunge in mad, impossible curves through a suddenly opened space wherein the walls of the passage were shadows dimly seen and his own body no more than a pillar of mist in a howling void. The black thing must have rolled over him in passing, and engulfed him in its reasonless and incredible dark. He never knew. When his plunging brain finally ceased its lunges through the void and returned reluctantly to his body, the horror of nothingness had receded past then down the corridor, still struggling, and the waves of its blinding force weakened with the distance.

  Yarol was leaning against the wall, wide-eyed and gasping. “Did it get you, too?” he managed to articulate after several attempts to control his hurrying breath.

  Smith found his own lungs laboring. He nodded breathless.

  “I wonder,” he said when he had recovered a measure of normality, “if that thing would look as white in the dark as it did dark in the light? I’ll bet it would. And do you suppose it can’t exist outside the light? Reminded me of a jelly-fish caught in a mill-race. Say, if the light’s flowing out that fast, d’you think it may go entirely? We’d better be moving.”

  Under their feet the passage sloped downward still. And when they reached the end of their quest, it came very suddenly. The curve of the passage sharpened to an angle, and round the bend the corridor ended abruptly at the threshold of a great cavity in the heart of the asteroid.

  In the rich golden light it glittered like the center of a many-faceted diamond—that vast crystal room. The light brimmed it from wall to wall, from floor to ceiling. And it was strange that in the mellow flood of radiance the boundaries of the room seemed hard to define—somehow it looked limitless, though the walls were clear to be seen.

  All this, though, they were realizing only subconsciously. Their eyes met the throne in the center of the crystal vault and clung there, fascinated. It was a crystal throne, and it had been fashioned for no human occupant. On this the mighty Three of measureless antiquity had sat. It was not an altar—it was a throne where incarnate godhood reigned once, too long ago for the mind to comprehend. Roughly triform, it glittered under the great arch of the ceiling. There was no knowing from the shape of it now, what form the Three had worn who sat upon it. But the forms must; have been outside modern comprehension—nothing the two explorers had ever seen in all their wanderings could have occupied it.

  Two of the pedestals were empty. Saig and Lsa had vanished as completely as their names from man’s memory. On the third—the center and the highest… Smith’s breath caught in his throat suddenly. Here then, on the great throne before them, lay all that was left of a god—the greatest of antiquity’s deities. This mound of gray dust. The oldest thing upon three worlds—older than the mountains that held it, older than the very old beginnings of the mighty race of man. Great Pharol—dust upon a throne.

  “Say, listen,” broke in Yarol’s matter-of-fact voice. “Why did the image turn to dust when the room and the throne didn’t? The whole room must have come from that crystal temple on the other world. You’d think—”

  “The image must have been very old long before the temple was built,” said Smith softly. He was thinking how dead it looked, lying there in a soft gray mound on a crystal. How dead! how immeasurably old!—yet if the little man spoke truly, life still dwelt in these ashes of forgotten deity. Could he indeed forge from the gray dust a cable that would reach out irresistibly across the gulfs of time and space, into dimensions beyond man’s understanding, and draw back the vanished entity which had once been Great Pharol? Could he? And if he could—suddenly doubt rose up in Smith’s mind. What man, with a god to do his biddi
ng, would stop short of domination over the worlds of space—perhaps of godhood for himself? And if that man were half mad? …

  He followed Yarol across the shining floor in silence. It took them longer to reach the throne than they had expected—there was something deceptive about the crystal of that room, and the clarity of the brimming golden light. The translucent heights of the triumvirate structure that had enthroned gods towered high over their heads. Smith looked upward toward that central pedestal bearing its eon-old burden, wondering what men had stood here before him at the foot of the throne, what men of nameless races and forgotten worlds, worshipping the black divinity that was Pharol. On this crystal floor the feet of—

  A scrambling sound interrupted his wondering. The irreverent Yarol, his eyes on the gray dust above them, was climbing the crystal throne. It was slippery, and never meant for mounting, and his heavy boots slid over the smoothness of it. Smith stood watching with a half-smile. For long ages no living man had dared approach this place save in reverence, on his knees, not venturing so much as to lift his eyes to that holy of holies where sat incarnate godhood. Now—Yarol’s foot slipped on the last step of the ascent and he muttered under his breath, reaching out to clutch the pedestal where Great Pharol, first of the living gods, had ruled a mightier world than any men inhabit now.

  At the summit he paused, looking down from an eminence whence no eyes save those of gods had ever looked before. And he frowned in a puzzled way as he looked.

  “Something wrong here, NW,” he said. “Lookup. What’s going on around the ceiling?”

  Smith’s pale gaze rose. For a moment he stared in utter bewilderment. For the third time that day his eyes were beholding something so impossible that they refused to register the fact upon an outraged brain. Something dark and yet not dark was closing down upon them. The roof seemed to lower—and panic stirred within him briefly. The ceiling, coming down to crush them? Some further guardian of the gods descending like a blanket over their heads? What?

  And then understanding broke upon him, and his laugh of sheer relief echoed almost blasphemously in the silence of the place.

  “The light’s running out,” he said. “Like water, just draining away. That’s all.”

  And the incredible thing was true. That shining lake of light which brimmed the crystal hollow was ebbing, pouring through the door, down the passage, out into the upper air, and darkness, literally, was flowing in behind it. And it was flowing fast.

  “Well,” said Yarol, casting an imperturbable glance upward, “we’d better be moving before it all runs out. Hand me up the box, will you?”

  Hesitantly, Smith unslung the little lacquered steel box they had been given. Suppose they brought him back the dust to weld it from—what then? Such limitless power even in the hands of an eminently wise, eminently sane and balanced man would surely be dangerous. And in the hands of the little whispering fanatic—

  Yarol, looking down from his height, met the troubled eyes and was silent for a moment. Then he whistled softly and said, though Smith had not spoken,

  “I never thought of that… D’you suppose it really could be done? Why, the man’s half crazy!”

  “I don’t know,” said Smith. “Maybe he couldn’t—but he told us the way here, didn’t he? He knew this much—I don’t think we’d better risk his not knowing any more. And suppose he did succeed, Yarol—suppose he found some way to bring this—this monster of the dark—through into our dimension—turned it loose on our worlds. Do you think he could hold it? He talked about enslaving a god, but could he? I haven’t much doubt that he knows some way of opening a door between dimensions to admit the thing that used to be Pharol—it can be done. It has been done. But once he gets it opened, can he close it? Could he keep the thing under control? You know he couldn’t! You know it’d break loose, and—well, anything could happen then.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” said Yarol again. “Gods! Suppose—”

  He broke off, staring in fascination at the gray dust that held such terrible potentialities. And there was silence for a while in the crystal place.

  Smith, looking upward at the throne and his friend, saw that the dark was flowing in faster and faster. And the light thinned about them, and long streaks of brilliance wavered out behind him as the light ebbed by a racing torrent.

  “Suppose we don’t take it back, then,” said Yarol suddenly. “Say we couldn’t find the place—or that it was buried under debris or something. Suppose we—gods, but it’s getting dark in here!”

  The line of light was far down the walls now. Above them the black night of the underground brimmed in relentlessly. They watched in half-incredulous wonder as the tidemark of radiance ebbed down and down along the crystal. Now it touched the level of the throne, and Yarol gasped as he was plunged head and shoulders into blackness, starring down as into a sea of light in which his own lower limbs moved shimmeringly, sending long ripples outward as they stirred.

  Very swiftly the tide-race ran. Fascinated, they watched it ebb away, down Yarol’s legs, down beyond him entirely, so that he perched in darkness above the outrunning tide, down the heights of the throne, down to touch Smith’s tall head with blackness. Uncannily he stood in the midst of a receding sea, shoulder-deep—waist-deep—knee-deep…

  The light that so short a time before—for so many countless ages before—had brimmed this chamber lay in a shallow, gleaming sea ankle-deep on the floor. For the first time in eons the throne of the Three stood in darkness.

  Not until the last dregs of illumination were snaking along a black floor in rivulets that ran swiftly, like fiery snakes, toward the door, did the two men awake from their wonder. The last of the radiance that must have been lighted on a lost world millions of years ago, perhaps by the hands of the first gods—ebbed doorward. Smith drew a deep breath and turned in the blackness toward the spot where the throne must be standing in the first dark it had known for countless ages. Those snakes of light along the floor did not seem to give out any radiance—the place was blacker than any night above ground. Yarol’s light-tube suddenly stabbed downward, and Yarol’s voice said from the dark,

  “Whew! Should have bottled some of that to take home. Well, what d’you say, NW? Do we leave with the dust or without it?”

  “Without it,” said Smith slowly. “I’m sure of that much, anyhow. But we can’t leave it here. The man would simply send others, you know. With blasting material, maybe, if we said the place was buried. But he’d get it.”

  Yarol’s beam shifted, a white blade in the dark, to the gray, enigmatic mound beside him. In the glare of the Tomlinson tube it lay inscrutably, just as it had lain for all the eons since the god forsook it—waiting, perhaps, for this moment. And Yarol drew his gun.

  “Don’t know what that image was made of,” he said, “but rock or metal or anything else will melt into nothing in the full-power heat of a gun.”

  And in a listening silence he flicked the catch. Blue-white and singing, the flame leaped irresistibly from is muzzle—struck full in an intolerable violence of heat upon that gray mound which had been a god. Rocks would have melted under the blast. Rocket-tube steel would have glowed molten. Nothing that the hands of man can fashion could have resisted the heat-blast of a ray-gun at full strength. But in its full blue glare the mound of dust lay motionless.

  Above the hissing of the flame Smith heard Yarol’s muttered “Shar!” of amazement. The gun muzzle thrust closer into the gray heap, until the crystal began to glow in the reflected heat and blue sparks spattered through the darkness. And very slowly the edges of the mound began to turn red and sullen. The redness spread. A little blue flame licked up; another.

  Yarol flipped off the gun-catch and sat watching as the dust began to blaze. Presently, as the brilliance of it grew stronger, he slid down from his pedestal and made his precarious way along the slippery crystal to the floor. Smith scarcely realized that he had come. His eyes were riveted on the clear, burning flame that was once
a god. It burned with a fierce, pale light flickering with nameless evanescent colors—the dust that had been Pharol of the utter darkness burning slowly away in a flame of utter light.

  And as the minutes passed and the flame grew stronger, the reflections of it began to dance eerily in the crystal walls and ceiling, sending long wavers downward until the floor was carpeted with dazzles of flame. An odor of unnamable things very faintly spread upon the air—smoke of dead gods… It went to Smith’s head dizzily, and the reflections wavered and ran together until he seemed to be suspended in a space while all about him pictures of flame went writhing through the dark—pictures of flame—nebulous, unreal pictures waving across the walls and vanishing—flashing by uncertainly overhead, running under his feet, circling him round from wall to wall in reeling patterns, as if reflections made eons ago on another world and buried deep in the crystal were waking to life at the magic touch of the burning god.

  With the smoke eddying dizzily in his nostrils he watched—and all about him, overhead, underfoot, the strange, wild pictures ran blurrily through the crystal and vanished. He thought he saw mighty landscapes ringed by such mountains as none of today’s world know… he thought he saw a whiter sun than has shone for eons, lighting a land where rivers thundered between green banks… thought he saw many moons parading across a purple night wherein shone constellations that haunted him with familiarity in the midst of their strangeness… saw a green star where red Mars should be, and a far pin-prick of white where the green point that is Earth hangs. Cities reeled past across the crystal darkness in shapes stranger than any that history records. Peaks and spires and angled domes towered high and shining under the hot white sun—strange ships riding the airways… He saw battles—weapons that have no names today blasting the tall towers into ruins, wiping great smears of blood across the crystal—saw triumphant marches where creatures that might have been the forerunners of men paraded in a blaze of color through shining streets… strange, sinuous creatures, half seen, that were men, yet not men… Nebulously the history of a dead and forgotten world flared by him in the dark.