The Best of C. L. Moore

by C. L. Moore

  There was pain in her voice and in her veiled eyes. And the thought came to him that love was like an infectious germ, spreading pain wherever it rooted itself. Had he brought it to her—infected her, too, with the hopeless passion he knew? For it was wildly hopeless. In a moment or so he must leave this alien place forever, and no power existent could maintain very long the illusory veil through which they knew love.

  Could his own new love for her endure the sight of her real self? And what would happen to this strange flowering of an emotion nameless and unknown to her—her love for him? Could it bear the look of his human shape, unmasked? And yet, he asked himself desperately, could a love as deep and sincere as the love he bore her be so transient a thing that he could not endure the sight of her in another guise? Could— Again that queer flickering flashed over the world. Dixon felt the

  ground underfoot tilt dangerously, and for a moment insane colors stabbed at his eyes and the whole room reeled and staggered. Then it was still again. He had scarcely noticed. He swung her around to face him, gripping her shoulders and staring down compellingly into her eyes.

  “Listen!” he said rapidly, for he knew his time was limited now, perhaps to seconds. “Listen! Have you any idea what you are asking?”

  “Only to go with you,” she said. “To be with you, wherever you are. And if you are indeed IL’s messenger—perhaps a part of his godhead

  —then shall I enter the flame and give myself to IL? In that way can I join you and be one with you?”

  He shook his head. “I am not from IL. I have been sent to destroy him. I’m a man from a world so different from yours that you could never bear to look upon me in my real form. You see me as an illusion, just as I see you. And I must go back to my own world now— alone.”

  Her eyes were dizzy with trying to understand.

  “You are—not from IL? Not as you seem? Another world? Oh, but take me with you! I must go—I must!”

  “But, my dearest, I can’t. Don’t you understand? You couldn’t live an instant in my world—nor I much longer in yours.”

  “Then I will die,” she said calmly. “I will enter the flame and wait for you in death. I will wait forever.”

  “My darling, not even that.” He said it gently. “Not even in death can we be together. For when you die you go back to IL, and I go—I go—back to another god, perhaps. I don’t know. But not to IL.”

  She stood, blank-eyed, in his grasp, trying to force her mind into the incredible belief. When she spoke, the words came slowly, as if her thoughts were speaking aloud.

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “But I know . . . you speak the truth. If I die by the flame—in the only way there is for me to die—we are parted forever. I can’t! I won’t! I will not let you go! Listen to me—” and her voice dropped to a soft whisper—”you say you came to destroy IL? Why?”

  “As the envoy of another god, who would take his place.”

  “I have given my whole life to the worship of IL,” she murmured to herself, very gently. And then, in a stronger voice: “But destroy him, Dixon! There may be a chance that way—there is none now. Oh, I may be a traitor—worse than a traitor. There is no word to describe one who betrays his god into destruction, no word terrible enough. But I would do it—yes, gladly, now. Destroy him, and let me seek another death somewhere, somehow—let me die as you die. Perhaps your god can release me into your sort of death, and I can wait for you there until you come. Oh, Dixon, please!”

  The idea was a staggering one, but for a wild moment Dixon knew hope again. Might it not be that—that— Quite suddenly he understood. He looked down on the loveliness of her with unseeing eyes. In these past few moments of insanity, learning that she loved him, too, enough that she begged death of him if in that way they might be united, in these few moments he came to realize that the flesh meant nothing. It was not her body he loved. And a great relief flooded him, to be sure that—sure that it was not merely infatuation, or desire for the loveliness which did not exist save as a

  mirage before his eyes. No, it was love, truly and completely, despite the shape she wore, despite the nameless sex that was hers. Love for herself—the essential self, however deeply buried beneath whatever terrible guise. And though her very substance was alien to him, and though no creature in all her ancestry had ever known love before, she loved him. Nothing else mattered.

  And then without warning the great dome before him wavered and contorted into impossible angles, like the reflections in a flawed mirror. And Dixon felt the firm curved body in his arms melting fluidly into a different form and texture. It squirmed.

  He stood at the entrance to a mighty room that staggered with frantic color, reeling with eye-stunning angles and incredible planes. And in his arms— He looked down. He clasped a creature at which he could not bear to look directly, a thing whose wild-looped limbs and sinuous body rippled and crawled with the moving tints of madness. It was slippery and horrible to the touch, and from the midst of a shifting, featureless face a great lucid eye stared up at him with desperate horror, as if it was looking upon something so frightful that the very sight was enough to unseat its reason.

  Dixon closed his eyes after that one revolting glimpse, but he had seen in the eye upturned to him enough of dawning comprehension to be sure that it was she whom he held. And he thought that despite the utter strangeness of that one staring eye there was somewhere in the clarity of it, and the steadfastness, a glimmer of the innermost spark which was the being he loved—that spark which had looked from the blue gaze he had seen in its human shape. With that inner spark of life she was the same.

  He tightened his grip upon her—or it—though his flesh crept at the contact and he knew that the feel was as revolting to it as to himself, and looked out over that shallow, color-stained head upon the vast room before him. His eyes throbbed savagely from those fierce colors never meant for human eyes to see. And though the creature in his arms hung acquiescent, he knew the effort it must cost to preserve that calm.

  A lump rose in his throat as he realized the significance of that— such utter faith in him, though he wore a shape terrible enough to bring the fear of madness into that great lucid eye when it rested upon him. But he knew he could not stand there long and retain his own sanity. Already the colors were raving almost audibly through his brain, and the ground heaved underfoot, and he was sure that neither of them could endure much more of this. So he gripped the dreadful

  thing which housed the being he loved, and almost of itself he felt that incredibly alien word rip itself from his lips.

  It was not a word to be set down in any written characters. Its sound to his ears was vague and indeterminate, like a whisper heard over too great distances to have any form. But the moment it left his lips he felt a vast, imponderable shifting in the substance of the temple. And, like a shutter’s closing, the room went black. Dixon gave one involuntary sob of relief as the maniacal colors ceased their assault upon his brain, and he felt the dreadful thing in his arms go rigid in the utter blackness. For a moment everything was still as death.

  And then through the dark around them a tiny shiver ran, the least little stir of motion, the thinnest thread of sound. It pierced Dixon’s very eardrums and shuddered thrillingly along his nerves. And with incredible swiftness that tiny stirring and that infinitesimal sound grew and swelled and ballooned into a maelstrom of rushing tumult, louder and louder, shriller and shriller. Around them in the blackness swooped and stormed the sounds of a mightier conflict than any living man could ever have heard before—a battle of gods, invisible in the blackness of utter void.

  That stunning uproar mounted and intensified until he thought his head would burst with the infinite sound of it, and forces beyond comprehension stormed through the air. The floor seemed to dissolve under him, and space whirled in the dark so that he was conscious of neither up nor down. The air raved and shrieked. Blind and deafened and stunned by the magnitude of the conflict, Dixon hugged his dre
adful burden and waited.

  How long it went on he never knew. He was trying to think as the turmoil raged around his head, trying to guess what would come next; if the light-being in its victory could unite them in any way, in life or in death. He could think of that quite calmly now, death and union. For life without her, he knew unquestioningly, would be a sort of living death, alone and waiting. Living was where she was, and if she were dead, then life lay only in death for him. His head reeled with the wild wonderings and with the noise of battle raving about them both. For eternities, it seemed to him, the whole universe was a maelstrom, insanity shrieked in his ears, and all the powers of darkness swooped and screamed through the void about him. But, after an endless while, very gradually he began to realize that the tumult was abating. The roaring in his ears faded slowly; the wild forces storming through the dark diminished. By infinite degree the uproar died away.

  Presently again the stillness of death descended through the blackness upon the two who waited.

  There was a long interval of silence, nerve-racking, ear-tormenting. And then, at long last, out of that darkness and silence spoke a voice, vast and bodiless and serene. And it was not the voice of the light-being. It spoke audibly in Dixon’s brain, not in words, but in some nameless speech which used instead of syllables some series of thought forms that were intelligible to him.

  “My chosen priestess,” said the voice passionlessly, “so you would have had me destroyed?”

  Dixon felt the convulsive start of the creature in his arms and realized dimly that the same wordless speech, then, was intelligible to them both. He realized that only vaguely, with one corner of his mind, for he was stunned and overwhelmed with the realization that it must be the god IL speaking—that his own sponsor had been overcome.

  “And you, Dixon,” the voice went on evenly, “sent by my enemy to open the way. You are a very alien creature, Dixon. Only by the power I wrested from that being which assaulted me can I perceive you at all, and your mind is a chaos to me. What spell have you cast over my chosen priestess, so that she no longer obeys me?”

  “Have you never heard of love?” demanded Dixon aloud.

  The query faded into the thick darkness without an echo, and a profound stillness followed in its wake. He stood in the blind dark and utter silence, clutching his love, waiting. Out of that quiet the god-voice came at last:

  “Love”—in a musing murmur. “Love—no! there is no such thing in all my universe. What is it?”

  Dixon stood helpless, mutely trying to frame an answer. For who can define love? He groped for the thought forms, and very stumblingly he tried to explain, knowing as he did so that it was as much for the benefit of her he held in his arms as for the god, because, although she loved, she could not know the meaning of love, or what it meant to him. When he had ceased, the silence fell again heavily.

  At last IL said, “So—the reigning principle of your own system and dimension. I understand that much. But there is no such thing here. Why should it concern you? Love is a thing between the two sexes of your own race. This priestess of mine is of another sex than those you understand. There can be no such thing as this love between you.”

  “Yet I saw her first in the form of a woman,” said Dixon. “And I love her.”

  “You love the image.”

  “At first it may be that I did. But now—no; there’s much more of it than that. We may be alien to the very atoms. Our minds may be alien, and all our thoughts, and even our souls. But, after all, alien though we are, that alienage is of superficial things. Stripped down to the barest elemental beginning, we have one kinship—we share life. We are individually alive, animate, free-willed. Somewhere at the very core of our beings is the one vital spark of life, which in the last analysis is self, and with that one spark we love each other.”

  The deepest silence fell again when he had ended—a silence of the innermost brain.

  Out of it at last IL said, “And you, my priestess? What do you say? Do you love him?”

  Dixon felt the shape in his arms shudder uncontrollably. She—he could not think of her as “it”—stood in the very presence of her god, heard him address her in the black blindness of his presence, and the awe and terror of it was almost enough to shake her brain. But after a moment she answered in a small, faltering murmur, the very ghost of a reply, and in some curious mode of speech which was neither vocal nor entirely thought transfer. “I—I do not know that word, 0 mighty IL. I know only that there is no living for me outside his presence. I would have betrayed your godhead to free me, so that I might die in his way of death, and meet him again beyond—if there can be any beyond for us. I would do all this again without any hesitation if the choice was given me. If this is what you call love—yes; I love him.”

  “He is,” said IL, “a creature of another race and world and dimension. You have seen his real form, and you know.”

  “I do not understand that,” said the priestess in a surer voice. “I know nothing except that I cannot—will not live without him. It is not his body I . . . love, nor do I know what it is which commands me so. I know only that I do love him.”

  “And I you,” said Dixon. It was a very strange sensation to be addressing her thus, from brain to brain. “The sight of you was dreadful to me, and I know how I must have looked to you. But the shock of that sight has taught me something. I know now. The shape you wear and the shape you seemed to wear before I saw you in reality are both illusions, both no more than garments which clothe that. . . that living, vital entity which is yourself—the real you. And your body does not matter to me now, for I know that it is no more than a mirage.”

  “Yes,” she murmured. “Yes, I understand. You are right. The bodies do not matter now. It goes so much deeper than that.”

  “And what,” broke in the voice of IL, “is your solution of this problem?”

  It was Dixon who broke the silence that fell in mute answer to the query. “There can be no such thing as union for us anywhere in life. In death, perhaps—but I do not know. Do you?”

  “No,” said IL surprisingly.

  “You—you do not? You—a god?”

  “No. I have taken these beings who worship me back into the flame. The energy which was theirs in life supports me—but something escapes. I do not know what. Something too intangible even for me to guess at. No—I am a god, and I do not know what comes after death.”

  Dixon pondered that for a long while. There was an implication in it somewhere which gave him hope, but his brain was so dazed he could not grasp it. At last the light broke, and he said joyfully, “Then

  —why, then you cannot keep us apart! We can die and be free.”

  “Yes. I have no hold over you. Even if I would wreak vengeance upon you for your part in my betrayal, I could not. For death will release you into—I do not know what. But it will be release.”

  Dixon swallowed hard. Half-doubts and hesitations crowded his mind, but he heard his own voice saying steadily, “Will you do that for us—release us?”

  In the silence as he waited for an answer he was trying to realize that he stood on the threshold of death; trying to understand, his mind probing ahead eagerly for the answer which might lie beyond. And in the timeless moment he waited he was very sure, for whatever lay ahead could not be extinction and surely not separation. This was the beginning; surely it could not end so soon, unfulfilled, all the questions unanswered.

  No; this love which linked them, two beings so alien, could not flicker out with their lives. It was too great—too splendid, far too strong. He was no longer uncertain, no longer afraid, and hope began to torment him exquisitely. What lay beyond? What vast existences? What starry adventures, together? Almost impatiently he poised on the brink of death.

  Through this IL’s voice spoke with a vast, passionless calm. “Die then,” said IL.

  For an instant the darkness lay unbroken about them. Then a little flicker ran indescribably through it. The air shook for a bre
athless moment.

  And IL was alone.

  * * *

  Tryst in Time

  Eric Rosner at twenty had worked his way round the world on cattle boats, killed his first man in a street brawl in Shanghai, escaped a firing squad by a hairbreadth, stowed away on a pole-bound exploring ship.

  At twenty-five he had lost himself in Siberian wilderness, led a troupe of Tatar bandits, commanded a Chinese regiment, fought in a hundred battles, impartially on either side.

  At thirty there was not a continent nor a capital that had not known him, not a jungle nor a desert nor a mountain range that had not left scars upon his great Viking body. Tiger claws and the Russian knout, Chinese bullets and the knives of savage black warriors in African forests had written their tales of a full and perilous life upon him. At thirty he looked backward upon such a gorgeous, brawling, color-splashed career as few men of sixty can boast. But at thirty he was not content.

  Life had been full for him, and yet as the years passed he was becoming increasingly aware of a need for something which those years were empty of. What it was he did not know. He was not even consciously aware of missing anything, but as time went on he turned more and more to a search for something new—anything new. Perhaps it was his subconscious hunting blindly for what life had lacked.

  There was so very little that Eric Rosen had not done in his thirty riotous years that the search for newness rapidly became almost feverish, and almost in vain. Riches he had known, and poverty, much pleasure and much pain, and the extremes of human experience were old tales to him. Ennui replaced the zest for living that had sent him so gayly through the exultant years of his youth. And for a man like Eric Rosner ennui was like a little death.

  Perhaps, in part, all this was because he had missed love. No girl of all the girls that had kissed him and adored him and wept when he