The Best of Leigh Brackett

by Leigh Brackett

  “Because I had what I wanted,” I said slowly. “What I’d always wanted and never had a name for. Power and freedom such as no man ever had. I liked having it. When I thought about you and the things we could do together, and the things I could do alone, I’d have led the whole solar system into the Veil, and be hanged to it.”

  I drew a harsh, tight breath and wiped the sweat from my palms.

  “And besides, I didn’t feel human any longer. I wouldn’t hurt them any more than I’d have mistreated a dog when I was still a man. But I didn’t belong to them any more.”

  “Then why is it different now?”

  “I don’t know. It just is. When I think of Virgie going under the crystals, and me walking in the Cloud, it’s too much.”

  “You’ve seen their bodies, afterward,” Shirina said gently. “Not one atom is touched or changed, and they smile. There’s no easier or kinder death in Creation.”

  “I know,” I said. “I know. But Virgie is my own.”

  She’d walk under the X-crystals, smiling, with her red hair dark and shining and her smoke-gray eyes half open and full of dreams. She’d still have the baby in her arms, and Brad would walk beside her. And the X-crystals would pulse and burn with black strange fires, and she would lie down, still smiling, and that would be all.

  All, forever, for Virgie and Brad and the green-eyed Martian baby.

  But the life that had been in their bodies, the force that no man has a name for that makes the breath and blood and heat of living flesh, the ultimate vibration of the human soul—that life-force would rise up from the crystals, up into the chamber of the Cloud. And Shirina, and Shirina’s people, and the four other men like me that weren’t human any longer, would walk in it so that we could live.

  It hadn’t really hit me before. It doesn’t. You think of it at first, but it doesn’t mean anything. There’s no semantic referent for “soul” or “ego” or “life-force.” You don’t see anything, you don’t have any contact with the dead. You don’t even think much of death.

  All you know is you walk into a radiant Cloud, and you feel like a god, and you don’t think of the human side of it because you aren’t human any longer.

  “No wonder they threw you out of your own dimension!” I cried out.

  Shirina sighed. “They called us vampires; parasites—sybaritic monsters who lived only for sensation and pleasure. And they cast us into darkness. Well, perhaps they were right. I don’t know. But we never hurt or frightened anyone, and when I think of the things they did to their own people, in blood and fear and hate, I’m terrified.”

  She rose and came and stood over me, glowing like warm pearl against the space-deep crystal. The tiny tips of diamond fire burned on her antennae, and her eyes were like black stars.

  I put out my hands to her. She took them, and her touch broke down my control. I was crying suddenly, not making any sound.

  “Right or wrong, Stevie, you’re one of us now,” she said gently. “I’m sorry this happened. I would have spared you, if you’d let me put your mind to sleep until it was over. But you’ve got to understand that. You left them, the humans, behind you, and you can never, never go back.”

  After a long time I spoke. “I know, I understand.”

  I felt her sigh and shiver, and then she drew back, still holding my hands.

  “It’s time now, Stevie.”

  I got up, slowly, and then I stopped. Shirina caught her breath suddenly.

  “Steve, my hands! You’re hurting me!”

  I let them go. “Flack,” I said, not talking to anybody. “He knew my weakness. At root and base, no matter how much I talk, I’m going into the Cloud again because I’m afraid. That’s why I’ll always go into the Cloud when it’s time. Because I’ve sinned so deeply I’m afraid to die.”

  “What is sin?” Shirina whispered.

  “God knows. God only knows.”

  I brought her bird-soft body into my arms and kissed her, brushing my lips across the shining down of her cheek to her little crimson mouth. There was the faint, bitter taste of my tears in the kiss, and then I laughed, softly.

  I pulled the chain and locket from around my neck and dropped them on the floor, and we went out together, to the Cloud.

  4 Curtain of Darkness

  We walked through the halls of Astellar, like people in the heart of a many-colored jewel. Halls of amber and amethyst and cinnabar, of dragon-green and gray the color of morning mist, and colors there are no names for in this dimension.

  The others joined us, coming from the crystal cells where they spent their time. Shirina’s people, velvet-eyed and gentle, with their crowns of fire-tipped antennae. They were like a living rainbow in the jewel-light of the halls.

  Flack and myself and the three others—only five men, in all the time Astellar had been in our dimension, with the kind of minds Shirina’s people wanted—wore our spaceman’s black, walking in our golden auras.

  I saw Flack looking at me, but I didn’t meet his eyes.

  We came, finally, to the place of the Cloud, in the center of Astellar. The plain ebon-colored doors stood open. Beyond them there was a mist like curdled sunshine, motes of pure, bright, gilded radiance, coiling and dancing in a cloud of living light.

  Shirina took my hand. I knew she wanted to keep me from thinking about the place below, where still through hypnotic command the men and women and children from the Queen of Jupiter were walking under the X-crystals to their last long sleep.

  I held her, tightly, and we stepped through into the Cloud.

  The light closed us in. We walked on something that was not rock, nor anything tangible, but a vibration of force from the X-crystals that held us on a tingling, buoyant web. And the golden, living light clung to us, caressing, spilling over the skin in tiny rippling waves of fire.

  I was hungry for it. My body stretched, lifting up. I walked on the vibrant web of power under my feet, my head up, the breath stopped in my throat, every separate atom of my flesh rejuvenated, throbbing and blazing and pulsing with life.

  Life!

  And then it hit me.

  I didn’t want it to. I thought I had it down, down for good where it couldn’t bother me any more. I thought I’d made my peace with whatever soul I’d had, or lost. I didn’t want to think.

  But I did. It struck me, suddenly. Like a meteor crashing a ship in space, like the first naked blaze of the sun when you clear the Darkside peaks of Mercury. Like death, the ultimate, final thing you can’t dodge or get around.

  I knew what that life was and where it came from, and how it had changed me.

  It was Virgie. Virgie with her blasted red hair and her smoke-gray eyes, and Missy’s life in her, and mine. Why did she have to be sent? Why did I have to meet her beside that dead Martian, on the Jekkara Low-Canal?

  But I had met her. And suddenly I knew. I knew!

  I don’t remember what I did. I must have wrenched loose from Shirina’s hand. I felt her startled thought touch my brain, and then it broke away and I was running through the golden Cloud, toward the exit beyond. Running without control, running at top speed.

  I think I tried to scream. I don’t know. I was clean crazy. But I can remember even then that I sensed somebody running beside me, pacing me through the brilliant blindness of the Cloud.

  I plunged out into the hall beyond. It was blue like still deep water, and empty. I ran. I didn’t want to run. Some sane corner of my mind cried out to Shirina for help, but she couldn’t get through the shrieking chaos of the rest of it. I ran.

  And somebody ran behind me. I didn’t turn around. I didn’t care. I hardly knew it. But somebody ran behind me, on long fleet legs.

  Down the blue hall, and into another one that was all flame-color shot with gray, and down that to a curving ramp cut from dark amber that dropped to the level below.

  The level where the X-crystals were.

  I rushed down the amber path, bounding like a stag with the hounds close behind, throug
h a crystal silence that threw the sound of my breathing back at me, harsh and tearing. There was a circular place at the bottom of the ramp where four hallways met, a place jewel-carved in somber, depthless purple.

  I came into it, and from three of the hall mouths men stepped out to meet me. Men with young faces and snow-white hair, and naked bodies burning gold against the purple.

  I stopped in the center of the floor. I heard bare feet racing on the ramp behind me, and I knew without looking who it was.

  Flack. He circled and fixed me with his cold strange eyes, like moonlight in his dark face. Somewhere he had found a blaster.

  He held it on me. Not on my head or heart, but at my middle.

  “I thought you might blow your top, Stevie,” he said. “So we kind of stood by, in case you’d try something.”

  I stood still. I didn’t have any feelings. I was beyond that. I was crazy—clean, stark crazy, thinking of time and the crystals pulsing just beyond my reach.

  “Get out of my way,” I warned him.

  Flack smiled. There was no humor in it. The three men moved in a little behind him. They looked at Flack and they looked at me, and they didn’t like any of it, but they were afraid.

  Afraid to die, like all of us. Even Flack, who never had a soul.

  Flack acted like someone being patient with a naughty child.

  “Will you come back with us, Stevie, or do I blow your insides out, here and now?” he asked me.

  I looked at his cold, queer eyes. “You’d like that.”

  “Yeah.” He ran the red tip of his tongue over his swollen lips. “Yeah. But I’m letting you choose.”

  “All right,” I said. “All right, I’ll choose.”

  I was crazy. I jumped him.

  I hit him first with my mind. Flack was strong, but I was fifty years older in the Cloud than he was, and Shirina had taught me things. I gathered all the force I had and let him have it, and he had to marshal his own thought-force to fight it off, so that for a second he couldn’t manage the blaster with his conscious mind.

  Instinctive reflex sent a crimson stream of deadly power smoking past me when I dived in low. It seared my skin, but that was all.

  We fell, threshing, on the purple stone. Flack was strong. He was bigger than I, and heavier, and viciously mean. He beat most of the sense out of me, but I had caught his gun wrist and wouldn’t let go. The three others took their golden auras back a little toward the hall mouths, afraid the blaster might let off and hit them.

  They thought Flack could handle me, and they were afraid. So they drew back and used their minds on me, trying to hammer me down.

  I don’t know yet why they couldn’t. I guess it was because of a lot of things, Shirina’s teaching, my greater age, and the fact that I wasn’t thinking consciously of anything. I was just a thing that had started some place and was going through.

  Sometimes I wish they had broken me. Sometimes I wish Flack had burned me down on the purple stone.

  I shook off their thought-blows. I took the pounding of Flack’s big fist and the savaging of his feet and knees, and put all my strength into bending his arm. I yanked it away from me, and up and around where I wanted it.

  I got it there. He made his last play. He broke his heart on it, and it didn’t do him any good. I saw his eyes, stretched wide in his dark face. I can still see them.

  I got my finger past his and pressed the firing stud.

  I got up and walked across the floor, carrying the blaster. The three others spread out, warily, ringing me. Naked men glowing gold against the purple stone, their eyes hard, animal-bright with fear.

  I blasted one through the head just as his muscles tensed for the leap. The others came in, fast. They knocked me down, and time was passing, and the people walking slowly under the crystals with dreams in their eyes.

  I kicked one man under the jaw and broke his neck, and the other tried to take the gun away. I had just come from the Cloud, and he hadn’t. I was strong with the life that pulsed up from the X-crystals. I forced his arms back and pressed the stud again, trying not to see his eyes.

  And these were my friends. Men I drank and laughed with, and went with sometimes to worlds beyond this universe.

  I went on, down a hall the color of a Martian dawn. I was empty. I didn’t feel or think. There was a pain a long way off, and blood in my mouth, but such things didn’t matter.

  I came to the place where the crystals were and stopped.

  A lot of them had walked under the crystals. Almost half of the five hundred families from the Queen of Jupiter. They lay still on the black floor, and there was plenty of room. They didn’t crowd the others coming after them, a slow, quiet stream of human beings with dreams in their eyes.

  The crystals hung in a wide circle, tilting slightly inward. They pulsed with a blackness that was beyond mere dark, a negative thing as blazing and tangible as sunlight. The angle of tilt and the tuning of the facets against one another made the difference in the result, whether projecting the Veil, or motive power, or hypnosis, or serving as a gateway to another time and space.

  Or sucking the power of life from human bodies.

  I could see the pale shimmer of force in the center, a sort of vortex between the limitless, burning, black facets that rose from the quiet bodies to the chamber of the Cloud above.

  I could see the faces of the dead. They were still smiling.

  The controls were on the other side. I ran. I was dead inside, as dead as the corpses on the floor, but I ran. I remember thinking it was funny to run when you were dead. I kept on the outside of the crystals and ran with all my strength to the controls.

  I saw Virgie. She was way back in the procession, and she was just as I knew she’d be, with Brad beside her and the green-eyed baby still in her arms, asleep.

  Virgie, with her gleaming red hair and Missy’s eyes!

  I grabbed the controls and wrenched them over, and the shimmering vortex disappeared. I spun the great hexagonal wheel and notched it for full-power hypnosis, and ran out onto the floor, among the dead.

  I told the living what to do. I didn’t waken them. They turned and went back the way they came, back toward the Queen of Jupiter, running hard and still smiling, still not afraid.

  I went back to the wheel and turned it again, to a notch marked in their danger-color, and then I followed the last of the humans into the hall. At the doorway I turned and raised my blaster.

  I saw Shirina standing under the radiant blackness of the crystals, halfway around the curving wall.

  I felt her mind touch mine, and then draw back, slowly, the way you take your hand away from someone you loved that has just died. I looked at her eyes. I had to.

  Why did I do what I did? What did I care about red hair and smoke-gray eyes, and the three-hundred-year diluted blood of a girl named Missy? I wasn’t human any longer. What did I care?

  We were apart, Shirina and I. We had gone away from each other and we couldn’t touch, even to say goodbye. I caught a faint echo of her thought.

  “Oh, Stevie, there were still so many things to do!”

  Her great luminous black eyes shining with tears, her jewel-tipped antennae dulled and drooping. And yet I knew what she was going to do.

  I couldn’t see the crystals, suddenly. I couldn’t see anything. I knew there was never going to be anything I wanted to see again. I raised the blaster and fired it full power into one of the hanging crystals, and then I ran.

  I felt the bolt of Shirina’s lethal thought strike my brain, and weaken, and shatter on something in her own mind, at its source. I ran, a dead thing going on leaden feet, in a halo of golden light.

  Behind me the X-crystals, upset by the blaster in their fullest sympathy of power, began to split and crack and tear the world of Astellar to bits.

  I don’t know much about what happened. I ran and ran, on the heels of the humans who still lived, but I was beyond thinking or feeling. I have vague memories of hallways lined with cells of
jewel-toned crystal, halls of amber and amethyst and cinnabar, of dragon-green and gray the color of morning mist, and colors there are no names for in this dimension.

  Hallways that cracked and split behind me, falling in upon themselves, shards of broken rainbows. And above that the scream of power from the X-crystals, wrenching and tearing at Astellar.

  Then something I heard with my mind, and not my ears. Shirina’s people, dying in the wreckage.

  My mind was stunned, but not stunned enough. I could still hear. I can still hear.

  The Queen of Jupiter was safe. The outward-moving vibration hadn’t reached her yet. We got aboard her, and I opened the space doors and blasted her off myself, because the skipper and the first and second officers were asleep for good on Astellar.

  I didn’t watch the death of Astellar. Only after a long time I looked back, and it was gone, and there was only a cloud of bright dust shimmering in the raw sunlight.

  I set the Iron Mike for Space Authority headquarters on Mars and turned on the automatic AC warning beam. Then I left the Queen of Jupiter in the Number 4 lifeboat, B deck.

  That’s where I am now, writing this, somewhere between Mars and the Belt. I didn’t see Virgie before I went. I didn’t see any of them, but especially Virgie. They’ll be awake now. I hope their lives are worth what they cost.

  Astellar is gone. The Veil is gone. You don’t have to be afraid any more. I’m going to put this manuscript in a message rocket and send it on, so you’ll know you don’t have to fear. I don’t know why I care.

  I don’t know why I’m writing this at all, unless—Bosh, I know! Why lie? At this stage of the game, why lie?

  I’m alive now. I’m a young man. But the Cloud that kept me that way is gone, and presently I shall grow old, too old, very quickly, and die. And I’m afraid to die.

  Somewhere in the solar system there must be somebody willing to pray for me. They used to teach me, when I was a kid, that prayer helped. I want somebody to pray for my soul, because I can’t do it for myself.

  If I were glad of what I’ve done, if I had changed, perhaps then I could pray.

  But I’ve gone beyond humanity, and I can’t turn back.