Sign of the Labrys

by Margaret St. Clair

  I turned my eyeless vision toward the bottom of the pool. Here, underneath the plastic lining, was a broad flat surface, patterned in small black and white squares, like a mosaic. It was difficult to be sure of the color of any individual square; black was white and then white again. But the outlines of the pattern were plain enough—two over-lapping figure eights, set inside a large ellipse.

  It didn’t look much like my idea of a matter transmitter; but the craft, while it gives its lovers much, does not make them electronics experts or give them an intuitive grasp of neo-nuclear physics. But something, at any rate, could be done with the side of the pool.

  “Have you a screwdriver?” I asked Ross.

  “Sure. Never go anywhere without one.” He pulled the tool out of a loop on his coveralls and handed it to me.

  I pried with it in three places along the line where the blue plastic met the raised rock edge. There was no visible crack in the plastic itself, but on the third pry a large section of the plastic came out, leaving the gauges and pump easily accessible.

  “Hmm,” said Ross. He leaned over the side, twiddled with the pump for a moment, and then touched a lever. The level of the water in the pool began to recede.

  “What’s it like under the plastic floor?” he asked me.

  “Can’t you see it?” I replied, surprised.

  “No. I haven’t got that kind of sight.”

  I described it for him. He listened, nodding occasionally, while the water ebbed and the metallic goldfish sank lower and lower in it.

  “It’s a matter transmitter, for sure,” he said when I had finished. “Mono-terminal type. We might try it on Hellman, to be sure it’s still okay. That stuff gets out of fix easy, and it’s been ten years anyhow since it was used.”

  He jumped down into the pool, now completely empty, beside the body of the glittering man. Here, at his ease, he adjusted controls, turned dials, and did some intense, frowning work with a pair of jeweler’s pliers.

  “Doesn’t the plastic lining of the pool have to come out?” Despoina asked, from above him.

  “No. It won’t get transmitted. It’s not really here, you see. That’s why the water could be pumped out through it.”

  He hauled himself back up over the side of the pool. The goldfish had settled down on the plastic along the lines of force from below, where they twitched uneasily.

  “No, it’s not quite right,” Ross said, sighting down at Hellman’s body. He jumped down into the pool again, moved Hellman a couple of inches, and then, came back to where Despoina and I were standing. “The attempt and not the deed Confounds us,” he said. He reached over the edge of the pool and pressed a switch.

  For an instant nothing at all happened. Then Hellman’s body began to rotate.

  He turned slowly at first, and then faster and faster. He shot off sparks of light, he turned like a Catharine wheel, he sent up gushes of splendor like a skyrocket. It was incredible, it dazzled our eyes painfully. Then, with one last great coruscation of fire, he blazed up and was gone. There was a smell like burning resin in the air.

  “Whew!” said Ross. He pulled out a bandana and wiped his face. He reached down and shut off the switch. “Good job we tried it on him first. There’s something wrong with the adjustment. It oughtn’t to do that.”

  I am, as I said, no expert on neo-nuclear physics, but it struck me that the voltage was too great, and I told Ross so. Despoina listened to our technicalities, a faint smile on her lips.

  “The voltage may have something to do with it,” she said after I had talked Ross around to agreeing that the voltage should be reduced. “But bring the goldfish up and put them on the floor beside the pool. They were not in the water merely for ornament.”

  Ross and I obeyed her. There were eighteen of the light, hard objects, and they seemed to be of two sorts—larger ones, with the body bronzy and the gills white; and smaller ones, all of bright metallic gold. Even seen up close, they were convincing imitations of fish.

  Despoina bent over the artificial fish absorbedly. She picked them up one at a time and put them down in a pattern, stopping often to consider. It reminded me of things I had seen Kyra do. At last she sat back on her heels and looked up at us. “That’s about it, I think.”

  I looked at what she had made. It was a pattern almost identical with a certain witches’ mark. “Despoina, were the men who built the transmitter members of the craft?”

  “No, almost certainly not. I didn’t arrange the fish in that pattern because I thought they were. But the pattern is a means of manipulating physical reality, and it’s valid with no relation to who uses it. Try transmitting something, Ross, and see if it works.”

  “What?” Ross asked. “It ought to be something about the size and mass of a human body, to be significant. And we’ve already used Hellman up.”

  “Aren’t there any planks inside the store?” Despoina asked. “Some sort of shelving? That might do.”

  Ross and I brought out three six-foot planks and laid them along the bottom of the pool. They did not look at all like a human body, but they might have about the same mass. “But in them nature’s copy’s not eterne,” said Ross, whose mind seemed to be running on Macbeth. “I’ll step down the voltage.” He applied the screwdriver. “That’s the best I can do,” he said finally. “All set? Let’s try it. Now.” Once more he pressed down the switch.

  The planks disappeared. I was looking toward the far end of the pool, and I saw a faint sparking of light at the moment the switch was depressed. But that was all. Except for that, there was no display. The planks had simply disappeared.

  “Seems to be okay,” said Ross. He shut the machinery off. “Well, who’s going first?”

  “I am,” I said. I wasn’t frightened, but my breath was coming a little fast.

  Despoina frowned. “There’s nothing more to be done with the machinery, I suppose,” she said, “but I think there might be something more to be done for Sam and me before Ross tries to transmit us. I mean some sort of pre-processing. The planks seemed to go all right. But a plank’s not a human being. If we could—What’s that noise?”

  Footsteps—hurried, almost running—were coming toward us along the arcade. I whirled toward the sound, my heart in my mouth. That the three of us were together would be immediately suspicious, and on top of that we were patently engaged in some unusual activity. If the approaching person was somebody with FBY connections, we’d be taken off for questioning at once; if it was merely some private person, he was likely enough to report us, if only for the purpose of currying favor with the “new government.”

  The runner came into view. I saw with astonishment that it was Kyra. She was making good speed, for all her high-heeled slippers, and she had a small satchel, like a doctor’s bag, in one hand.

  “Blessed be,” she said breathlessly when she got up to us. Her words were almost tumbling over each other. “I came to help you. You must hurry, Despoina and Sam. The FBY is hunting you.”

  18

  I had a sudden fancy to ask Despoina to let down her hair. I had never seen it in a good light, burning and beautiful, let alone being able to touch and handle it; and if the FBY was going to capture us in the next few minutes, I probably never would have an opportunity to see it. It seemed a pity. But before I could make my request, the two women began to talk hurriedly.

  “How do you know they are hunting us?” Despoina asked. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure,” Kyra answered. “I was on my way from F to help you—I knew you needed me—when I heard voices. This was on the edge of level D. I couldn’t get sight of the speakers, and this in itself made me suspicious, for you know they have some of our techniques, and understand how to foil the seeing.

  “I hid in the lower gallery. I was a long way from them, but the gallery has odd acoustical properties, and I could hear them talking as plainly as if I’d been standing at their sides.

  “They said ‘the man Sewell and his woman’ must have be
en warned, but that they—the FBY—were going to look for them from the other end. They used your name, Despoina. But they pronounced it wrong.”

  While she was talking, Kyra had been opening her little black satchel, getting out two clinical thermometers, and shaking them down. Now she popped a thermometer into my mouth and into Despoina’s.

  “Where had they been looking for us?” Despoina asked in a muffled voice.

  “On F, I think. They seemed to have me and Despoina mixed up, and to think Sam had been staying down there with her. I must just have missed them on my way up from F. From what they said, they didn’t know anything at all about that raid the disposal people made.”

  Kyra took my wrist and began to count my pulse. I said, around the thermometer, “Where are they looking for us now?”

  “I think they’re going to try to pick up your trail from the bulldozer crew, Sam. They said something about a ‘trace receptor.’ Then they got too far away for me to hear any more. But there’s no doubt they’re after you with all they’ve got.”

  She plucked the thermometers out of our mouths, read them, and nodded. Then she took Despoina’s pulse. Here, too, the result must have been satisfactory, for she nodded again.

  “Now, listen,” Kyra told us swiftly. “In transmitting anything as complex as a human being, the mental attitude is of the highest importance. A person isn’t like a block of wood that can get scrambled around a bit in transmission and still get there as itself. For a person to get through to the other end satisfactorily, he must keep his mind inside himself, inside his body. Despoina knows what I mean. Sam, do you remember that lesson I gave you with the box?” I nodded. “Yes. I wasn’t very good at it.”

  “You’ve got to be better this time,” Kyra said grimly. “Concentrate! Don’t let anything distract you. Pull your mind inside.”

  She got a bottle from her medicine bag, opened it, and handed us each a capsule. “These will help. They’re a drug psychiatrists used to use to combat depersonalization. Swallow them.”

  Despoina and I obeyed. Kyra looked at me for a moment, frowning. “Sam had better have something else,” she said. “Here.”

  She gave me a tiny blue tablet. It left a haunting bitterness in my gullet. “Now, lie down in the pool on your backs, side by side,” she said. “Ross will want to adjust you. I don’t understand the mechanics of transmission, only the medical conditioning.”

  Despoina and I lay down side by side. I could smell her delicate perfume intermittently. Ross was squinting down at us and telling us to move an inch one way or another. It was a little like being in bed with her, and a little like getting ready to have our picture taken.

  At last Ross had us adjusted to his satisfaction. “May I hold her hand?” I called up to him.

  “Sure. Good idea.” He made a final inspection of the gauges.

  “Remember what I told you!” Kyra called. “It’s im—”

  “Come out with your hands high or we’ll shoot!” a hard authoritative voice shouted. It seemed to be still some distance off.

  The FBY, obviously. Before I could move or try to get up from my place beside Despoina, Ross yelled down at me, “Stay there, Sam! Don’t move! Kyra and I’ll be all right! Don’t move!”

  I saw him press the switch.

  There was a terrible jar, as if the world had ended under me, and then blackness, blackness, nothing at all. Nothing at all.

  In that last moment I had recalled Kyra’s lesson and pulled my mind into myself. It was almost too late. When the blackness began to abate, for a long time “I” wandered.

  I felt no pain, partly because I had no sense of personal identity, and partly because of the very nature of the experience. But there was an aching tedium, like the weary dreams of sickness and fever, a repellent and meaningless monotony of perception, even though it was not an “I” who perceived.

  It was a space, a time of gray flitting shapes, as colorless as granite. They were not shadows, for they were all of one uniform gray, and they were oddly flat, like silhouettes made of paper. I never saw them edge-on, but I was. always aware of their flatness. They moved through me, or I through them, restlessly and tediously.

  I was always alone. I had been holding Despoina’s hand when Ross pressed the switch, but she was not there—nobody was there—in the gray. I had no feeling of having lost her; I was too depersonalized to suffer a sense of loss. There was nothing where I was but the flat implausible shapes and their interminable movement and appearing.

  Despoina, she told me later, had experienced almost exactly the same weary confusion and movement of gray silhouettes as I had. What had happened, I think, was that Kyra had failed to appreciate the extent to which the operation of the transmitter would be affected, with reference to both Despoina and me, by my mental attitude. Kyra had thought I would be the only one affected. Actually, Despoina was as unable as I to help me or herself.

  We might have wandered forever through our separate limbos, through the dreary shapes that interpenetrated us, if it had not been for a lucky accident. (In the craft, we say that luck tends to be deserved.) Or rather, a pair of lucky accidents, since the activities of the man we were later to know as “the fat rat” certainly had something to do with it. But in the main, Despoina and I owed our preservation to the fact that, up on level B where gunfire was going on, a bullet went wild.

  One of the attackers was firing at Kyra, who had taken cover inside the vacant store. He missed, and his bullet went pinging into the plastic side of the pool, a few inches above the tesselations of the scanner. The bullet jarred the whole transmitter, with the result that, for a micro-second or two, it functioned at peak efficiency.

  We, of course, were not aware of this. Ross made this explanation to me much later. What I felt was, through my endless tedium, a sudden, most welcome, accession of identity.

  It was like the full moon breaking through broken clouds. I knew who I was, I knew I had a body, I clutched after it. From being a nothing who perceived without any sense of identity, I became a man who was anxiously, almost feverishly, pulling his mind inside his body so he might have something to perceive with. I drank up the sense of my own identity as a thirsty man drinks water.

  I could feel my body now, and it was wonderful, it was glorious. I seemed to be holding onto something. I fought desperately for awareness of it. And then I realized, in a flood of joy, what it was: I was holding Despoina’s hand.

  That did it. With an almost palpable bump, I was out of the limbo of stone-colored shapes and back in the world of reality.

  I sat up and looked around. Despoina, her knees a little flexed, was lying beside me. I caught a glimpse of tesselations under her that faded as I looked. She sat up too, squeezed my hand, and smiled.

  We were in a tiny, stone-walled room, with an opening in one side. One wall was covered by an enormous photo montage of the moon. The light that came through the window opening looked like daylight. Close beside us on the floor were the three big planks Ross had sent through the transmitter ahead of us.

  “Well, here we are,” I said. My voice sounded remote and weak.

  Despoina nodded. She got to her feet, went over to the opening, and looked through it. Then she came back and sat down beside me on the floor.

  She had said nothing at all; her expression had not changed, and yet I felt a premonition of disaster. Slowly her hand went to her head, and she took off the covering—part turban, part wig—she had used to conceal her hair. It streamed down over her shoulders like molten copper, beautiful and alive. It seemed to fill the small stone room with its light.

  Still she was silent. I had time to notice how the color of her hair made her skin look dazzlingly white. At last she raised her head and looked directly into my eyes.

  I waited for her to speak. “This isn’t level H,” she said at last.

  19

  I had known she was going to say that. I shook my bead to clear it. I still had the sense of sliding, interpenetrating planes of
gray just outside my field of sight. I said, “Where are we, then? On the moon?”

  She laughed. “No, not the moon,” she answered. “It looks like the surface, but—go see for yourself, Sam.”

  I went over to the window. It was a small unglazed opening, like a window in a castle, with a broad stone sill. Through it I saw a landscape on a day of high haze. There was a gently curving road of white gravel in the foreground, with small private houses on either side. Off to the left and further away there was a supermarket with a big parking lot, and what seemed to be a school. In the far distance a line of rolling tree-grown hills shut off the view.

  Something in the scene struck me as unnatural, and after a moment I realized what it was: the trees. We couldn’t be on the surface, then. Was this another vast underground cavern, like level G, so big that it could contain trees and a range of hills?

  This seemed wildly improbable. I looked more closely, squinting out at the view, and suddenly something clicked in my mind. What I was looking at was a miniature landscape, an illusory panorama, most cunningly arranged and contrived.

  There were plenty of clues, once I got onto it. For instance, the supermarket was just a little too big to be at the distance it apparently was, and the grass in front of the houses was too coarse. The absence of any movement in the landscape was another giveaway. But it was an excellent illusion. Much care and attention had been spent on it.

  I told Despoina my discovery, finishing, “I think we’re still underground.”

  She nodded. “I think so too. It feels underground… Are you worried about Kyra and Ross?”

  “Why—yes, I guess I am.”

  “So am I. I can’t pick up their minds. See if you can help.”

  I joined my mind to hers, but without success. Telepathy is always a chancy method of communication, and now there was something blocking it.