Sign of the Labrys

by Margaret St. Clair

  “Kyra said you had been captured by the FBY,” I said at last.

  “Kyra said that at our direction,” she answered. “We wanted you to stay quietly on F while she undertook your training. But you have been slow about remembering. We must hurry. They are enlarging and consolidating their power. There is not much time.”

  “What must we do?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  I considered, half closing my eyes. Her perfume, delicate yet strong, came to me like the breath of an ethereal forest of cedar and sandalwood. “I think—” (It was like trying to read almost illegible writing) “I think we must go down to level H again.

  “Before the FBY shut that level off,” I went on, “they made a cursory examination of what they found there, and brought up all they considered valuable. But the heart of your work—your lab notes and extracts—they left behind, either because they did not find it at all, or because they did not realize its value. We must go after it. I don’t know how I know this, though.”

  “Wicca are people who know things without being told,” she said.

  “How can we get down?” I asked. “Kyra said the level had been closed off, and I think it has. Is there another way down?”

  “You must help with the answer to that.”

  Once more I considered. “We will have to scry to try to find it. That would be easy, if we could call our people together. But for so many people to be able to meet would certainly arouse suspicion. A man and woman could get away with it, I think.”

  “Yes, if a man and a woman are together an onlooker will think their purpose is sexual, provided they are not with each other too long. But we must have Ross to help us. It takes three.”

  “Ross?” I asked.

  “The man who gave you the scourging. He has been taking your place.”

  “Taking my place? I don’t understand.”

  She sighed. “Even now you don’t know who you are. Well, that will come later. Now we must decide where to meet.”

  “On the edge, the east edge, of the old burial ground,” I answered promptly. “Nobody goes there at night. It ought to be safe.”

  Did a shadow pass over her face? But she answered that it was a good idea; she and Ross would meet me about eight, before the moon came up.

  I looked into her greenish eyes, only a little below the level of mine. At this distance the make-up she used to age herself was obvious, and it was odd to see her radiant youth shining through it, like the moon breaking through clouds.

  I touched her hair lightly with the tips of my fingers. “I wish I could see your real hair,” I said. “Not this gray stuff.”

  “Later,” she said, laughing. “You must go now, Sam. Somebody in the warehouse might get suspicious.”

  “All right.” I turned to go.

  At the door of the little office I looked back. She had drawn the illusion of age around her again, as a woman may put a scarf about her shoulders; in any case I wasn’t in love with her. I was still half in love with my half-sister. But as I looked at her bending over some sort of form with a pencil in one hand, I realized that the sense of the future—troubling, ambiguous, dangerous, but mine—the sense of the future had come back to me.

  I wasn’t much use the rest of the day with the bulldozer. Once Jim yelled at me to get the lead out of my tail for Crissake, did I want Halley’s comet to be back before I got that body buried? I kept thinking about Despoina—not as a lover thinks about a woman, but as an explorer speculates about the unknown heart of a continent. One thing I was perfectly sure of: she and I would be able to work together. This, if I had known it, is a matter taken very seriously in witchcraft circles.

  I quit work at the usual time. Back at my pad, I had a shower with lots of soap, and put on all fresh clothes. I thought of eating, but I wasn’t very hungry, and it struck me that if we were going to scry it might be better for me to have a relatively empty stomach.

  I felt that some further preparations might be in order. I hunted through drawers and cupboards until I found, in the kitchen, a ball of white twine. It was so old that its strength was almost gone, but I braided it in three double strands, tying a knot at intervals, and slipped it into my pocket, satisfied. I would have liked to dye it red, but I couldn’t find anything to dye it with.

  I got to the rendezvous early. A row of some sort of monstrous misshapen vegetation—beets, I thought—shut out the sky on two sides of the field, but it lay open to the west, where something of the great light of evening yet lingered. I looked without hindrance into the abyss of air.

  The skies were clearer now than they had been when I was a boy. Then, a pall of smoke from the busy works of men, forges and furnaces, would have lain along the horizon and reached halfway to the zenith. Was it a good thing, after all, that the plagues had come? The world had been veering helplessly toward disaster when the deaths of many had saved us from the death of all.

  Suddenly I was overcome by a passion of homesickness, of longing for the world, not as it had been but as it could be. “I have such a longing for the republic!” the woman named Pilar had cried. And Cromwell, that godly politician, had had engraved on his sword, “For the commonwealth of England.”

  Fine talk, fine words. But the world never had been like that.

  There was a noise behind me, and Despoina and Ross emerged from the shade of the monstrous leaves. Despoina carried a parcel in one hand. She was wearing a voluminous wrap of some thin stuff, with a fold pulled over her head, and if I had not been expecting her I would never have recognized her, for her hair seemed to be dark brown, and she looked to be about thirty. Ross had on mechanics’ coveralls, and there was a smear of grease across his face.

  They kissed me in greeting, he on the cheek, she on the lips. Despoina undid her parcel and showed us what it contained. Now that they were here, I realized how I had missed them, and how lonely for some of my own sort I had been. It was the same sense of identity and inner peace I had experienced with Kyra. We Wicca know how to be happy even in a bad world. But we are not content with a bad world.

  The pale moon had begun to climb the sky. Despoina laid her wrap aside. She cast the circle and told us what to do. The rite began.

  I cannot, of course, describe it. It must be remembered also that I was still not fully an initiate. Let it suffice to say that I could see nothing at all. The surface of the stone remained obdurately blank.

  At least I had to confess defeat, I handed it to Ross, and he passed it on to Despoina, saying, “The moon looks down on everything.”

  She took the flat stone rather reluctantly, I thought, and stood for a moment holding it, as if wondering what to do. Then she laid it on the ground and began to undress, still rather hesitantly. It was not modesty, I knew, that made her hesitate, but a fear of attracting the attention of a possible passer-by. She had decided to risk it.

  She tossed her clothing out of the circle, so she could move freely, and then held out her hand to me. I gave her the knotted cord in my pocket. She ran her hands along it, flicking her fingers at each knot. Ross was singing tonelessly, in a thin, quavering voice. She tied the cord around her head and picked up the stone.

  For a while there was silence, except for Ross’s quavered song. She kept breathing on the stone and wiping it off with her hand. The moon was higher now, and the pearly light glimmered along her shoulders and breasts and thighs.

  At last she said, “There’s a mist. I can’t get rid of the mist. I wonder if they… Ross, you must try.”

  “All right.” He stripped off his clothing and motioned to me to do likewise. After all, the risk of attracting undesired attention would not be significantly increased if we all three were naked, and it would make the scrying easier. I felt the cool night air along my skin.

  She advanced toward Ross with a dancing step, moved around him twice “planetarily,” and then gave him the stone. How different this was from how it would have been if all of us could have been together, and how much more diffi
cult! All the same, the force was building up. I could feel it tingle along my forehead and run with a shiver into the spot in the pit of my stomach Kyra had called “the knot of power.”

  Ross began to stammer and jerk. “The—the—Oh, the—the—”

  We seemed upon the edge of revelation. Ross gritted his teeth with a loud noise. Once more he stammered, “The—the—” Then he drew a deep sigh and began to sob as if his heart would break.

  It was painful to hear him. Despoina’s hands were clasped together rigidly under her breasts. There was nothing more to be hoped for. Our power had reached its highest point, and from now would only recede. I stooped for the black-hilted sword, which was lying on the ground in front of my feet, turned it toward me as best I could, and made three deep gashes with the unwieldy thing in the flesh of my chest.

  Power flashed forth from freshly shed blood; the black stream ran down my belly and trickled along my thighs. And in that moment Ross said quite loudly and clearly, “The pool. The pool with the glittering man.”

  He dropped the scrying stone and looked around him blankly. Then his knees buckled and he fell forward on his face.

  Despoina clutched at me. “Get down,” she whispered urgently. “Someone is coming.” She threw herself down full length beside Ross.

  I followed her. We lay tensely quiet. I could feel grains of earth sticking to the blood on my body, and had time to wonder whether anybody who invaded our crude circle would experience any of the odd psychic phenomena that sometimes occur. Then voices were heard along the road.

  “You think that’s the way, then?” somebody said.

  “Absolutely, sir. You see, the first thing to do is to get some means of coercing them. But after that, sir, it will take something more.”

  “What?” said the first speaker keenly.

  “Ah, that’s the difficulty. But I think, sir, I’m on the right track. You see, sir, if they can be turned…”

  The voices died away. We lay in the dirt for a considerable time longer. I was speculating on the fragmentary conversation we had overheard. From the tone of it, and the fact that the speakers had been so easy with each other, I thought they must have been FBY men. The general subject was plain enough. But what had the younger man meant by “if they can be turned”?

  At last Despoina touched my arm. “We can get up now,” she said. “They won’t be back.”

  We all three got to our feet. Ross was yawning and shivering. “Did I say anything?” he asked. “I don’t remember what happened between when you gave me the stone and when I heard voices along the road dying away.”

  “Yes, you said something,” she told him. “You said, ‘The pool. The pool with the glittering man.’”

  “Is that all?” He sounded disappointed.

  We had pulled on our clothes. The rite must have taken longer than I had thought, or we had lain a longer time on the ground, for the moon was now in the western sky. The east was still impenetrably dark, but with the darkness that forebodes dawn.

  “I don’t know what I meant,” Ross continued. “It doesn’t make any sense to me. ‘The pool with the glittering man.’ No, I don’t know what I meant.”

  “I think I do,” I said suddenly. I had been tucking my shirttail into my trousers. The blood was sticky on my chest. “I’ve done a lot of wandering around in the levels, you know. There’s a pool like that high up in the natural caves, on B.”

  Despoina nodded. “We must go there,” she said.

  “Yes.” I looked toward the east. It was very slightly lighter than it had been. Once more I must exchange the sun for the depths where it is always light.

  17

  B is far too close to the surface for the purple fungus to grow there. It was designed as a mass shelter against blast, for the thousands and thousands of city dwellers who weren’t to be permanently domiciled in the deeper levels. It consists of an apparently interminable series of interlacing arched arcades, part natural and part artificial, with shop fronts. The shops have never been occupied. I suppose the idea was that people would while away the time they were in the mass shelter by buying souvenirs to take back to the radioactive surface with them. Perhaps I wrong the designers by imputing to them anything so egg-headed as an idea. They designed as they were told.

  I got to the pool ahead of the others. When we had parted on the edge of the burial grounds, an hour or two before, I had given them careful directions how to find it. We had decided not to wait for evening to try to discover the way down to H. Time was getting short, and we thought we could all three be absent from our jobs without arousing immediate suspicion. Absenteeism was common enough.

  The pool itself is in one of the peripheral arcades, beside a store window. The designer had taken advantage of the natural drip from the rock roof above to install an ornamental pool, blue-lined, complete with goldfish. The glittering man is inside the pool.

  I stood looking over the edge at him. He lay face down in the water, a heavily built man in a gray business suit, with a briefcase in the water by his side. Goldfish swam over and around him, and brushed against the hard tendrils of his hair.

  The water must have had an extraordinarily high mineral content, for the man in the pool looked as if he had been dipped in sugar candy, the kind with the big hard bright crystals all over it. He was as brilliant as a dime-store diamond. He glittered like an old-fashioned Christmas card.

  I was struck by a haunting familiarity in the outlines of his head and neck. Surely, despite the way the coat of crystals blurred his shape, it seemed that I had seen him somewhere before.

  Overcoming a considerable distaste, I plunged my hands into the cold water and turned him face up. He moved easily, with only a little ripple and splash. His dead, bright face looked into mine.

  I stepped back, wiping my wet hands on my trousers. Know him? Of course I did. He had been televised and photographed a lot when I was a boy. It was Hellman, one of the top weapons experts of pre-plague days. He had come to an unlikely place to die.

  How had he died? I didn’t think it was from plague; he didn’t look like a plague victim, but he might have taken refuge on B from the plague. Probably he had had a heart attack and collapsed into the pool. I remembered having heard somewhere, ten years or so ago, that Hellman had a weak heart.

  At any rate, he had avoided the terrible loneliness of the dead, for the little goldfish swam all about him and kept him company.

  I heard a footfall. Despoina was walking toward me, once more in the guise of a middle-aged woman. She looked more tired than her make-up would warrant, and I realized, not only from my own fatigue, what an exhausting business “magic” is.

  “Here comes Ross,” she said when she had greeted me. “I think he may be going to treat us to a quotation. He has a Shakespearean look on his face.”

  Ross was, indeed, coming toward us from the other direction. “Hail to thee. Thane of Cawdor,” he said as he came up to me. “The earth hath bubbles, as the water has, and these are of them.” He looked down at the pool. “My word, he does glitter,” he observed. “Why, it’s Hellman! I’d know that jutting jaw and heavy jowls anywhere. How did he happen to come here to die?”

  “He must have been trying to get down to H,” Despoina answered. “Perhaps he was trying to get away from the plague, or wanted to set up some sort of government down there. The president died early in the plague. And Hellman was an arrogant man.”

  “Whatever his motive was, here he is,” Ross said. “I don’t see how he expected to get down, though. This seems to be a perfectly ordinary pool.”

  I had been absently watching the movements of the goldfish. There was something oddly regular in the paths their swimming took. One group seemed, as far as I could judge, to mark out a series of figure eights, and another moved around the pool in a large ellipse.

  I bent over and put one hand out directly in the path of an oncoming fish. It did not move aside or try to avoid my fingers. I closed my hand over it, brought my hand up
through the water, and held out my catch on my palm for the other two to look at. All this time there was not a wriggle or a twitch from the fish.

  We exchanged glances. “It’s not alive,” Despoina said. She poked it with one finger. “Metal, or plastic with a metallic coat. What makes it move, then, Sam?”

  I said slowly, “If something is tracing out lines of force on the underside of the pool…”

  Ross’s eyes lit up. “I’ve seen something like that… Wait—yes, I know now. There’s a matter transmitter under the bottom of the pool.”

  “There must be some way of draining out the water,” Despoina said practically. “But before you look for it, Sam, get his briefcase out and put it somewhere safe.”

  “Briefcase? Why?”

  “Don’t you remember his saying, just before the plagues broke out, that he and his staff had developed a portmanteau bomb?”

  “You think he’s got one of them in the briefcase?”

  “Of course. Hellman wouldn’t go anywhere without a sample of the most advanced weaponry. He was like a man in love who always carries something to remind him of his girl.”

  Ross reached down into the water, picked up the briefcase carefully by its handle, and pulled it out. It was coated with the same coruscating crystals that covered Hellman.

  “Come along, fatal instrument,” Ross said to the briefcase. He carried it across to the store front, opened the door, and laid the case down respectfully inside. “I hope nobody bothers it,” he said. “After ten years in the water, it still might be able to sting.”

  Despoina had knelt down beside the pool, her hands over her eyes in the way that was familiar to me from Kyra. “I see something,” she said. “Knobs and gauges. Help me, Sam.”

  I did as she was doing. Immediately the side of the pool, under its skin of plastic, leaped into sight. There were the gauges of which she had spoken, pipes of two sizes, and a tiny pump, nestled into a niche in the rough rock.