The Best of Leigh Brackett

by Leigh Brackett

  Matt Harker’s brain lay still in the darkness of his skull, wary, drawn in upon itself. “It belonged to the Swimmers first.”

  “They couldn’t hold it. We can.”

  “Why did you save me, Button? What do you want of me?”

  “There was no danger from you. You were strange. I wanted to play with you.”

  “Do you love me, Button?” His fingers touched a large smooth stone among the fern roots.

  “Love? What is that?”

  “It’s tomorrow and yesterday. It’s hoping and happiness and pain, the complete self because it’s selfless, the chain that binds you to life and makes living it worthwhile. Do you understand?”

  “No. I grow, I take from the soil and the light, I play with the others, with the birds and the wind and the flowers. When the time comes I am ripe with seed, and after that I go to the finish-place and wait. That’s all I understand. That’s all there is.”

  He looked up into her eyes. A shudder crept over him. “You have no soul, Button. That’s the difference between us. You live, but you have no soul.”

  After that it was not so hard to do what he had to do. To do quickly, very quickly, the thing that was his only faint chance of justifying Sim’s death. The thing that Button may have glimpsed in his mind but could not guard against, because there was no understanding in her of the thought of murder.

  4

  The black birds darted at Harker, but the compulsion that sent them flickered out too soon. The ferns and creepers shook, and then were still, and the birds flew heavily away. Matt Harker stood up.

  He thought he might have a little time. The flower-people probably kept in pretty close touch mentally, but perhaps they wouldn’t notice Button’s absence for a while. Perhaps they weren’t prying into his own thoughts, because he was Button’s toy. Perhaps…

  He began to run, toward the cliffs where the finish-place was. He kept as much as possible in the open, away from shrubs. He did not look again, before he left, at what lay by his feet.

  He was close to his destination when he knew that he was spotted. The birds returned, rushing down at him on black whistling wings. He picked up a dead branch to beat them off and it crumbled in his hands. Telekinesis, the power of mind over matter. Harker had read once that if you knew how you could always make your point by thinking the dice into position. He wished he could think himself up a blaster. Curved beaks ripped his arms. He covered his face and grabbed one of the birds by the neck and killed it. The other one screamed and this time Harker wasn’t so lucky. By the time he had killed the second one he’d felt claws in him and his face was laid open along the cheekbones. He began to run again.

  Bushes swayed toward him as he passed. Thorny branches stretched. Creepers rose like snakes from the grass, and every green blade was turned knife-like against his feet. But he had already reached the cliffs and there were open rocky spaces and the undergrowth was thin.

  He knew he was near the finish-place because he could smell it. The gentle withered fragrance of flowers past their prime, and under that a dead, sour decay. He shouted McLaren’s name, sick with dread that there might not be an answer, weak with relief when there was one. He raced over tumbled rocks toward the sound. A small creeper tangled his foot and brought him down. He wrenched it by the roots from its shallow crevice and went on. As he glanced back over his shoulder he saw a thin white veil, a tiny patch in the distant air, drifting toward him.

  He came to the finish-place.

  It was a box canyon, quite deep, with high sheer walls, so that it was almost like a wide well. In the bottom of it bodies were thrown in a dry, spongy heap. Colorless flower-bodies, withered and gray, an incredible compost pile.

  Rory McLaren lay on top of it, apparently unhurt. The two packs were beside him, with the weapons. Strewn over the heap, sitting, lying, moving feebly about, were the ones who waited, as Button had put it, to stop. Here were the aged, the faded and worn out, the imperfect and injured, where their ugliness could not offend. They seemed already dead mentally. They paid no attention to the men, nor to each other. Sheer blind vitality kept them going a little longer, as a geranium will bloom long after its cut stalk is desiccated.

  “Matt,” McLaren said. “Oh, God, Matt, I’m glad to see you!”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Sure. My leg even feels pretty good. Can you get me out?”

  “Throw those packs up here.”

  McLaren obeyed. He began to catch Harker’s feverish mood, warned by Harker’s bleeding, ugly face that something nasty was afoot. Harker explained rapidly while he got out one of the ropes and half hauled McLaren out of the pit. The white veil was close now. Very close.

  “Can you walk?” Harker asked.

  McLaren glanced at the fleecy cloud. Harker had told him about it. “I can walk,” he said. “I can run like hell.”

  Harker handed him the rope. “Get around the other side of the canyon. Clear across, see?” He helped McLaren on with his pack. “Stand by with the rope to pull me up. And keep to the bare rocks.”

  McLaren went off. He limped badly, his face twisted with pain. Harker swore. The cloud was so close that now he could see the millions of tiny seeds floating on their silken fibers, thistledown guided by the minds of the flower-people in the valley. He shrugged into his pack straps and began winding bandages and tufts of dead grass around the bone tip of a recovered spear. The edge of the cloud was almost on him when he got a spark into the improvised torch and sprang down onto the heap of dead flower-things in the pit.

  He sank and floundered on the treacherous surface, struggling across it while he applied the torch. The dry, withered substance caught. He raced the flames to the far wall and glanced back. The dying creatures had not stirred, even when the fire engulfed them. Overhead, the edges of the seed-cloud flared and crisped. It moved on blindly over the fire. There was a pale flash of light and the cloud vanished in a puff of smoke.

  “Rory!” Harker yelled. “Rory!”

  For a long minute he stood there, coughing, strangling in thick smoke, feeling the rushing heat crisp his skin. Then, when it was almost too late, McLaren’s sweating face appeared above him and the rope snaked down. Tongues of flame flicked his backside angrily as he ran monkey-fashion up the wall.

  They got away from there, higher on the rocky ground, slashing occasionally with their knives at brush and creepers they could not avoid. McLaren shuddered.

  “It’s impossible,” he said. “How do they do it?”

  “They’re blood cousins. Or should I say sap. Anyhow, I suppose it’s like radio control—a matter of transmitting the right frequencies. Here, take it easy a minute.”

  McLaren sank down gratefully. Blood was seeping through the tight bandages where Harker had incised his wound. Harker looked back into the valley.

  The flower-people were spread out in a long crescent, their bright multicolored heads clear against the green plain. Harker guessed that they would be guarding the pass. He guessed that they had known what was going on in his mind as well as Button had. New form of communism, one mind for all and all for one mind. He could see that even without McLaren’s disability they couldn’t make it to the pass. Not a mouse could have made it.

  He wondered how soon the next seed-cloud would come.

  “What are we going to do, Matt? Is there any way…” McLaren wasn’t thinking about himself. He was looking at the valley like Lucifer yearning at Paradise, and he was thinking of Viki. Not just Viki alone, but Viki as a symbol of thirty-eight hundred wanderers on the face of Venus.

  “I don’t know,” said Harker. “The pass is out, and the caves are out…hey! Remember when we were fighting off those critters by the river and you nearly started a cave-in throwing rocks? There was a fault there, right over the edge of the lake. An earthquake split. If we could get at it from the top and shake it down…”

  It was a minute before McLaren caught on. His eyes widened. “A slide would dam up the lake…”

/>   “If the level rose enough, the Swimmers could get out.” Harker gazed with sultry eyes at the bobbing flower-heads below.

  “But if the valley’s flooded, Matt, and those critters take over, where does that leave our people?”

  “There wouldn’t be too much of a slide, I don’t think. The rock’s solid on both sides of the fault. And anyway, the weight of the water backed up there would push through anything, even a concrete dam, in a couple of weeks.” Harker studied the valley floor intently. “See the way that slopes there? Even if the slide didn’t wash out, a little digging would drain the flood off down the pass. We’d just be making a new river.”

  “Maybe.” McLaren nodded. “I guess so. But that still leaves the Swimmers. I don’t think they’d be any nicer than these babies about giving up their land.” His tone said he would rather fight Button’s people any day.

  Harker’s mouth twisted in a slow grin. “The Swimmers are water creatures, Rory. Amphibious. Also, they’ve lived underground, in total darkness, for God knows how long. You know what happens to angleworms when you get ‘em out in the light. You know what happens to fungus that grows in the dark.” He ran his fingers over his skin, almost with reverence. “Noticed anything about yourself, Rory? Or have you been too busy.”

  McLaren stared. He rubbed his own skin, and winced, and rubbed again, watching his fingers leave streaks of livid white that faded instantly. “Sunburn,” he said wonderingly. “My God. Sunburn!”

  Harker stood up. “Let’s go take a look.” Down below the flower-heads were agitated. “They don’t like that thought, Rory. Maybe it can be done, and they know it.”

  McLaren rose, leaning on a short spear like a cane. “Matt. They won’t let us get away with it.”

  Harker frowned. “Button said there were other ways beside the seed…” He turned away. “No use standing here worrying about it.”

  They started climbing again, very slowly on account of McLaren. Harker tried to gauge where they were in relation to the cavern beneath. The river made a good guide. The rocks were almost barren of growth here, which was a godsend. He watched, but he couldn’t see anything threatening approaching from the valley. The flower-people were mere dots now, perfectly motionless.

  The rock formation changed abruptly. Ancient quakes had left scars in the shape of twisted strata, great leaning slabs of granite poised like dancers, and cracks that vanished into darkness.

  Harker stopped. “This is it. Listen, Rory. I want you to go off up there, out of the danger area…”

  “Matt, I…”

  “Shut up. One of us has got to be alive to take word back to the ships as soon as he can get through the valley. There’s no great rush and you’ll be able to travel in three-four days. You…”

  “But why me? You’re a better mountain man…”

  “You’re married,” said Harker curtly. “It’ll only take one of us to shove a couple of those big slabs down. They’re practically ready to fall of their own weight. Maybe nothing will happen. Maybe I’ll get out all right. But it’s a little silly if both of us take the risk, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah. But Matt…”

  “Listen, lad.” Harker’s voice was oddly gentle. “I know what I’m doing. Give my regards to Viki and the…”

  He broke off with a sharp cry of pain. Looking down incredulously, he saw his body covered with little tentative flames, feeble, flickering, gone, but leaving their red footprints behind them.

  McLaren had the same thing.

  They stared at each other. A helpless terror took Harker by the throat. Telekinesis again. The flower-people turning his own weapon against them. They had seen fire, and what it did, and they were copying the process in their own minds, concentrating, all of them together, the whole mental force of the colony centered on the two men. He could even understand why they focused on the skin. They had taken the sunburn-thought and applied it literally.

  Fire. Spontaneous combustion. A simple, easy reaction, if you knew the trick. There was something about a burning bush…

  The attack came again, stronger this time. The flower-people were getting the feel of it now. It hurt. Oh God, it hurt. McLaren screamed. His loincloth and bandages began to smoulder.

  What to do, thought Harker, quick, tell me what to do.…

  The flower-people focus on us through our minds, our conscious minds. Maybe they can’t get the subconscious so easily, because the thoughts are not directed, they’re images, symbols, vague things. Maybe if Rory couldn’t think consciously they couldn’t find him…

  Another flare of burning, agonizing pain. In a minute they’ll have the feel of it. They can keep it going…

  Without warning, Harker slugged McLaren heavily on the jaw and dragged him away to where the rock was firm. He did it all with astonishing strength and quickness. There was no need to save himself. He wasn’t going to need himself much longer.

  He went away a hundred feet or so, watching McLaren. A third attack struck him, sickened and dazed him so that he nearly fell. Rory McLaren was not touched.

  Harker smiled. He turned and ran back toward the rotten place in the cliffs. A part of his conscious thought was so strongly formed that his body obeyed it automatically, not stopping even when the flames appeared again and again on his flesh, brightening, growing, strengthening as the thought-energies of Button’s people meshed together. He flung down one teetering giant of stone, and the shock jarred another loose. Harker stumbled on to a third, based on a sliding bed of shale, and thrust with all his strength and beyond it, and it went too, with crashing thunder.

  Harker fell. The universe dissolved into shuddering, roaring chaos beyond a bright veil of flame and a smell of burning flesh. By that time there was only one thing clear in Matt Harker’s understanding—the second part of his conscious mind, linked to and even stronger than the first.

  The image he carried with him into death was a tall mountain with snow on its shoulders, blazing in the sun.

  It was night. Rory McLaren lay prone on a jutting shelf above the valley. Below him the valley was lost in indigo shadows, but there was a new sound in it—the swirl of water, angry and swift.

  There was new life in it, too. It rode the crest of the flood waters, burning gold in the blue night, shining giants returning in vengeance to their own place. Great patches of blazing jewel-toned phosphorescence dotted the water—the flower-hounds, turned loose to hunt. And in between them, rolling and leaping in deadly play, the young of the Swimmers went.

  McLaren watched them hunt the forest people. He watched all night, shivering with dread, while the golden titans exacted payment for the ages they had lived in darkness. By dawn it was all over. And then, through the day, he watched the Swimmers die.

  The river, turned back on itself, barred them from the caves. The strong bright light beat down. The Swimmers turned at first to greet it with a pathetic joy. And then they realized…

  McLaren turned away. He waited, resting, until, as Harker had predicted, the block washed away and the backed-up water could flow normally again. The valley was already draining when he found the pass. He looked up at the mountains and breathed the sweet wind, and felt a great shame and humility that he was here to do it.

  He looked back toward the caves where Sim had died, and the cliffs above where he had buried what remained of Matt Harker. It seemed to him that he should say something, but no words came, only that his chest was so full he could hardly breathe. He turned mutely down the rocky pass, toward the Sea of Morning Opals and the thirty-eight hundred wanderers who had found a home.

  The Veil of Astellar

  Foreword

  A little over a year ago, Solar Arbitrary Time, a message rocket dropped into the receiving chute at the Interworld Space Authority headquarters on Mars.

  In it was a manuscript, telling a story so strange and terrible that it was difficult to believe that any sane human being could have been guilty of such crimes.

  However, through a year of careful
investigation, the story has been authenticated beyond doubt, and now the ISA has authorized its release to the public, just exactly as it was taken from the battered rocket.

  The Veil—the light that came from nowhere to swallow ships—has disappeared. Spacemen all over the solar system, tramp traders and captains of luxury liners alike, have welcomed this knowledge as only men can who have lived in constant peril. The Veil is gone, and with it some of the crushing terror of the Alien Beyond.

  We know its full name now—the Veil of Astellar.

  We know the place of its origin; a world outlawed from space and time. We know the reason for its being. Through this story, written in the agony of one man’s soul, we know these things—and we know the manner of the Veil’s destruction.

  1 Corpse at the Canal

  There had been a brawl at Madam Kan’s, on the Jekkara Low-Canal. Some little Martian glory-holer had got too high on thil, and pretty soon the spiked knuckle-dusters they use around there began to flash, and the little Martian had pulled his last feed-valve.

  They threw what was left of him out onto the stones of the embankment almost at my feet. I suppose that was why I stopped—because I had to, or trip over him. And then I stared.

  The thin red sunlight came down out of a clear green sky. Red sand whispered in the desert beyond the city walls, and red-brown water ran slow and sullen in the canal. The Martian lay twisted over on his back, with his torn throat spilling the reddest red of all across the dirty stones.

  He was dead. He had green eyes, wide open, and he was dead.

  I stood by him. I don’t know how long. There wasn’t any time. No sunlight shimmered now, no sense of people passing, no sound—nothing!

  Nothing but his dead face looking up at me; green-eyed, with his lips pulled back off his white teeth.

  I didn’t know him. Alive, he was just another Martian snipe. Dead, he was just meat.