The Best of Leigh Brackett

by Leigh Brackett

  “I remember,” Gibbons said. “I remember.” He was silent for a while, then he gave Harker a shrewd glance. “I know you, Matt. I might as well give permission.”

  Harker grinned. “You won’t miss me much anyhow. I’m not a good influence any more.” He started for the door. “Give me three weeks. You’ll take that long to careen and scrape the bottoms anyhow. Maybe I’ll come back with something.”

  McLaren said, “I’m going with you, Matt.”

  Harker gave him a level-eyed stare. “You better stay with Viki.”

  “If there’s good land up there, and anything happens to you so you can’t come back and tell us…”

  “Like not bothering to come back, maybe?”

  “I didn’t say that. Like we both won’t come back. But two is better than one.”

  Harker smiled. The smile was enigmatic and not very nice. Gibbons said, “He’s right, Matt.” Harker shrugged. Then Sim stood up.

  “Two is good,” he said, “but three is better.” He turned to Gibbons. “There’s nearly five hundred of us, sir. If there’s new land up there, we ought to share the burden of finding it.”

  Gibbons nodded. Harker said, “You’re crazy, Sim. Why you want to do all that climbing, maybe to no place?”

  Sim smiled. His teeth were unbelievably white in the sweat-polished blackness of his face. “But that’s what my people always done, Matt. A lot of climbing, to no place.”

  They made their preparations and had a last night’s sleep. McLaren said goodbye to Viki. She didn’t cry. She knew why he was going. She kissed him, and all she said was, “Be careful.” All he said was, “I’ll be back before he’s born.”

  They started at dawn, carrying dried fish and sea-berries made into pemmican, and their long knives and ropes for climbing. They had long ago run out of ammunition for their few blasters, and they had no equipment for making more. All were adept at throwing spears, and carried three short ones barbed with bone across their backs.

  It was raining when they crossed the mud flat, wading thigh-deep in heavy mist. Harker led the way through the belt of swamp. He was an old hand at it, with an uncanny quickness in spotting vegetation that was as independently alive and hungry as he was. Venus is one vast hothouse, and the plants have developed into species as varied and marvelous as the reptiles or the mammals, crawling out of the pre-Cambrian seas as primitive flagellates and growing wills of their own, with appetites and motive power to match. The children of the colony learned at an early age not to pick flowers. The blossoms too often bit back.

  The swamp was narrow, and they came out of it safely. A great swamp-dragon, a leshen, screamed not far off, but they hunt by night, and it was too sleepy to chase them. Harker stood finally on firm ground and studied the cliff.

  The rock was roughened by weather, hacked at by ages of erosion, savaged by earthquake. There were stretches of loose shale and great slabs that looked as though they would peel off at a touch, but Harker nodded.

  “We can climb it,” he said. “Question is, how high is up?”

  Sim laughed. “High enough for the Golden City, maybe. Have we all got a clear conscience? Can’t carry no load of sin that far!”

  Rory McLaren looked at Harker.

  Harker said, “All right, I confess. I don’t care if there’s land up there or not. All I wanted was to get the hell out of that damn boat before I went clean nuts. So now you know.”

  McLaren nodded. He didn’t seem surprised. “Let’s climb.”

  By morning of the second day they were in the clouds. They crawled upward through opal-tinted steam, half liquid, hot and unbearable. They crawled for two more days. The first night or two Sim sang during his watch, while they rested on some ledge. After that he was too tired. McLaren began to give out, though he wouldn’t say so. Matt Harker grew more taciturn and ill-tempered, if possible, but otherwise there was no change. The clouds continued to hide the top of the cliff.

  During one rest break McLaren said hoarsely, “Don’t these cliffs ever end?” His skin was yellowish, his eyes glazed with fever.

  “Maybe,” said Harker, “they go right up beyond the sky.” The fever was on him again, too. It lived in the marrow of the exiles, coming out at intervals to shake and sear them, and then retreating. Sometimes it did not retreat, and after nine days there was no need.

  McLaren said, “You wouldn’t care if they did, would you?”

  “I didn’t ask you to come.”

  “But you wouldn’t care.”

  “Ah, shut up.”

  McLaren went for Harker’s throat.

  Harker hit him, with great care and accuracy. McLaren sagged down and took his head in his hands and wept. Sim stayed out of it. He shook his head, and after a while he began to sing to himself, or someone beyond himself. “Oh, nobody knows the trouble I see…”

  Harker pulled himself up. His ears rang and he shivered uncontrollably, but he could still take some of McLaren’s weight on himself. They were climbing a steep ledge, fairly wide and not difficult.

  “Let’s get on,” said Harker.

  About two hundred feet beyond that point the ledge dipped and began to go down again in a series of broken steps. Overhead the cliff face bulged outward. Only a fly could have climbed it. They stopped. Harker cursed with vicious slowness. Sim closed his eyes and smiled. He was a little crazy with fever himself.

  “Golden City’s at the top. That’s where I’m going.”

  He started off along the ledge, following its decline toward a jutting shoulder, around which it vanished. Harker laughed sardonically. McLaren pulled free of him and went doggedly after Sim. Harker shrugged and followed.

  Around the shoulder the ledge washed out completely.

  They stood still. The steaming clouds shut them in before, and behind was a granite wall hung within thick fleshy creepers. Dead end.

  “Well?” said Harker.

  McLaren sat down. He didn’t cry, or say anything. He just sat. Sim stood with his arms hanging and his chin on his huge black chest. Harker said, “See what I meant, about the Promised Land? Venus is a fixed wheel, and you can’t win.”

  It was then that he noticed the cool air. He had thought it was just a fever chill, but it lifted his hair, and it had a definite pattern on his body. It even had a cool, clean smell to it. It was blowing out through the creepers.

  Harker began ripping with his knife. He broke through into a cave mouth, a jagged rip worn smooth at the bottom by what must once have been a river.

  “That draft is coming from the top of the plateau,” Harker said. “Wind must be blowing up there and pushing it down. There may be a way through.”

  McLaren and Sim both showed a slow, terrible growth of hope. The three of them went without speaking into the tunnel.

  2

  They made good time. The clean air acted as a tonic, and hope spurred them on. The tunnel sloped upward rather sharply, and presently Harker heard water, a low thunderous murmur as of an underground river up ahead. It was utterly dark, but the smooth channel of stone was easy to follow.

  Sim said, “Isn’t that light up ahead?”

  “Yeah,” said Harker. “Some kind of phosphorescence. I don’t like that river. It may stop us.”

  They went on in silence. The glow grew stronger, the air more damp. Patches of phosphorescent lichen appeared on the walls, glimmering with dim jewel tones like an unhealthy rainbow. The roar of the water was very loud.

  They came upon it suddenly. It flowed across the course of their tunnel in a broad channel worn deep into the rock, so that its level had fallen below its old place and left the tunnel dry. It was a wide river, slow and majestic. Lichen spangled the roof and walls, reflecting in dull glints of color from the water.

  Overhead there was a black chimney going up through the rock, and the cool draft came from there with almost hurricane force, much of which was dissipated in the main river tunnel. Harker judged there was a cliff formation on the surface that siphoned the wind d
ownward. The chimney was completely inaccessible.

  Harker said, “I guess we’ll have to go upstream, along the side.” The rock was eroded enough to make that possible, showing wide ledges at different levels.

  McLaren said, “What if this river doesn’t come from the surface? What if it starts from an underground source?”

  “You stuck your neck out,” Harker said. “Come on.”

  They started. After a while, tumbling like porpoises in the black water, the golden creatures swam by, and saw the men, and stopped, and swam back again.

  They were not very large, the largest about the size of a twelve-year-old child. Their bodies were anthropoid, but adapted to swimming with shimmering webs. They glowed with a golden light, phosphorescent like the lichen, and their eyes were lidless and black, like one huge spreading pupil. Their faces were incredible. Harker could remember, faintly, the golden dandelions that grew on the lawn in summer. The heads and faces of the swimmers were like that, covered with streaming petals that seemed to have independent movements, as though they were sensory organs as well as decoration.

  Harker said, “For cripesake, what are they?”

  “They look like flowers,” McLaren said.

  “They look more like fish,” the black man said.

  Harker laughed. “I’ll bet they’re both. I’ll bet they’re plannies that grew where they had to be amphibious.” The colonists had shortened plant-animal to planimal, and then just planny. “I’ve seen gimmicks in the swamps that weren’t so far away from these. But jeez, get the eyes on ‘em! They look human.”

  “The shape’s human, too, almost.” McLaren shivered. “I wish they wouldn’t look at us that way.”

  Sim said, “As long as they just look. I’m not gonna worry…”

  They didn’t. They started to close in below the men, swimming effortlessly against the current. Some of them began to clamber out on the low ledge behind them. They were agile and graceful. There was something unpleasantly child-like about them. There were fifteen or twenty of them, and they reminded Harker of a gang of mischievous lads—only the mischief had a queer soulless quality of malevolence.

  Harker led the way faster along the ledge. His knife was drawn and he carried a short spear in his right hand.

  The tone of the river changed. The channel broadened, and up ahead Harker saw that the cavern ended in a vast shadowy place, the water spreading into a dark lake, spilling slowly out over a low wide lip of rock. More of the shining child-things were playing there. They joined their fellows, closing the ring tighter around the three men.

  “I don’t like this,” McLaren said. “If they’d only make a noise!”

  They did, suddenly—a shrill tittering like a blasphemy of childish laughter. Their eyes shone. They rushed in, running wetly along the ledge, reaching up out of the water to claw at ankles, laughing. Inside his tough flat belly Harker’s guts turned over.

  McLaren yelled and kicked. Claws raked his ankle, spiny needle-sharp things like thorns. Sim ran his spear clean through a golden breast. There were no bones in it. The body was light and membranous, and the blood that ran out was sticky and greenish, like sap. Harker kicked two of the things back in the river, swung his spear like a ball bat and knocked two more off the ledge—they were unbelievably light—and shouted, “Up there, that high ledge. I don’t think they can climb that.”

  He thrust McLaren bodily past him and helped Sim fight a rearguard action while they all climbed a rotten and difficult transit. McLaren crouched at the top and hurled chunks of stone at the attackers. There was a great crack running up and clear across the cavern roof, scar of some ancient earthquake. Presently a small slide started.

  “Okay,” Harker panted. “Quit before you bring the roof down. They can’t follow us.” The plannies were equipped for swimming, not climbing. They clawed angrily and slipped back, and then retreated sullenly to the water. Abruptly they seized the body with Sim’s spear through it and devoured it, quarreling fiercely over it. McLaren leaned over the edge and was sick.

  Harker didn’t feel so good himself. He got up and went on. Sim helped McLaren, whose ankle was bleeding badly.

  This higher ledge angled up and around the wall of the great lake-cavern. It was cooler and drier here, and the lichens thinned out, and vanished, leaving total darkness. Harker yelled once. From the echo of his voice the place was enormous.

  Down below in the black water golden bodies streaked like comets in an ebon universe, going somewhere, going fast. Harker felt his way carefully along. His skin twitched with a nervous impulse of danger, a sense of something unseen, unnatural, and wicked.

  Sim said, “I hear something.”

  They stopped. The blind air lay heavy with a subtle fragrance, spicy and pleasant, yet somehow unclean. The water sighed lazily far below. Somewhere ahead was a smooth rushing noise which Harker guessed was the river inlet. But none of that was what Sim meant

  He meant the rippling, rustling sound that came from everywhere in the cavern. The black surface of the lake was dotted now with spots of burning phosphorescent color, trailing fiery wakes. The spots grew swiftly, coming nearer, and became carpets of flowers, scarlet and blue and gold and purple. Floating fields of them, and towed by shining swimmers.

  “My God,” said Harker softly. “How big are they?”

  “Enough to make three of me.” Sim was a big man. “Those little ones were children, all right. They went and got their papas. Oh, Lord!”

  The swimmers were very like the smaller ones that attacked them by the river, except for their giant size. They were not cumbersome. They were magnificent, supple-limbed and light. Their membranes had spread into great shining wings, each rib tipped with fire. Only the golden dandelion heads had changed.

  They had shed their petals. Their adult heads were crowned with flat, coiled growths having the poisonous and filthy beauty of fungus. And their faces were the faces of men.

  For the first time since childhood Harker was cold.

  The fields of burning flowers were swirled together at the base of the cliff. The golden giants cried out suddenly, a sonorous belling note, and the water was churned to blazing foam as thousands of flower-like bodies broke away and started up the cliff on suckered, spidery legs.

  It didn’t look as though it was worth trying, but Harker said, “Let’s get the hell on!” There was a faint light now, from the army below. He began to run along the ledge, the others close on his heels. The flower-hounds coursed swiftly upward, and their masters swam easily below, watching.

  The ledge dropped. Harker shot along it like a deer. Beyond the lowest dip it plunged into the tunnel whence the river came. A short tunnel, and at the far end…

  “Daylight!” Harker shouted. “Daylight!”

  McLaren’s bleeding leg gave out and he fell.

  Harker caught him. They were at the lowest part of the dip. The flower-beasts were just below, rushing higher. McLaren’s foot was swollen, the calf of his leg discolored. Some swift infection from the planny’s claws. He fought Harker. “Go on,” he said. “Go on!”

  Harker slapped him hard across the temple. He started on, half carrying McLaren, but he saw it wasn’t going to work. McLaren weighed more than he did. He thrust McLaren into Sim’s powerful arms. The big black nodded and ran, carrying the half-conscious man like a child. Harker saw the first of the flower-things flow up onto the ledge in front of them.

  Sim hurdled them. They were not large, and there were only three of them. They rushed to follow and Harker speared them, slashing and striking with the sharp bone tip. Behind him the full tide rushed up. He ran, but they were faster. He drove them back with spear and knife, and ran again, and turned and fought again, and by the time they had reached the tunnel Harker was staggering with weariness.

  Sim stopped. He said, “There’s no way out.”

  Harker glanced over his shoulder. The river fell sheer down a high face of rock—too high and with too much force in the water even for t
he giant water-plannies to think of attempting. Daylight poured through overhead, warm and welcoming, and it might as well have been on Mars.

  Dead end.

  Then Harker saw the little eroded channel twisting up at the side. Little more than a drain-pipe, and long dry, leading to a passage beside the top of the falls—a crack barely large enough for a small man to crawl through. It was a hell of a ragged hope, but…

  Harker pointed, between jabs at the swarming flowers. Sim yelled, “You first.” Because Harker was the best climber, he obeyed, helping the gasping McLaren up behind him. Sim wielded his spear like a lightning brand, guarding the rear, creeping up inch by inch.

  He reached a fairly secure perch, and stopped. His huge chest pumped like a bellows, his arm rose and fell like a polished bar of ebony. Harker shouted to him to come on. He and McLaren were almost at the top.

  Sim laughed. “How you going to get me through that little bitty hole?”

  “Come on, you fool!”

  “You better hurry. I’m about finished.”

  “Sim! Sim, damn you!”

  “Crawl out through that hole, runt, and pull that stringbean with you! I’m a man-sized man, and I got to stay.” Then, furiously, “Hurry up or they’ll drag you back before you’re through.”

  He was right. Harker knew he was right. He went to work pushing and jamming McLaren through the narrow opening. McLaren was groggy and not much help, but he was thin and small-boned, and he made it. He rolled out on a slope covered with green grass, the first Harker had seen since he was a child. He began to struggle after McLaren. He did not look back at Sim.

  The black man was singing, about the glory of the coming of the Lord.

  Harker put his head back into the darkness of the creek. “Sim!”

  “Yeah?” Faintly, hoarse, echoing.

  “There’s land here, Sim. Good land.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Sim, we’ll find a way…”

  Sim was singing again. The sound grew fainter, diminishing downward into distance. The words were lost, but not what lay behind them. Matt Harker buried his face in the green grass, and Sim’s voice went with him into the dark.