by Gardner Fox
She laughed a little. “Only they didn’t call it that. They had a special name for it. Drahusban, which means in our tongue, supply depot.”
“Supply depot?” he repeated.
Her white hands clapped together. “You’re a military man, Bran Magannon! What’s the one thing that must always slow down an army on the move?”
“Its base of supplies, where it can get the food, the ammunition, the weapons, medical care and other provisions it needs to keep functioning at top level. A slow supply train means a slow army, which in turn usually spells defeat.”
His eyes widened. “Then if the Crenn Lir discovered a portable supply base they could carry always with them—and if that base worked by teleportation as did their tele-doors—then they solved the toughest problem in making war.”
“Such is the well of Molween,” she nodded.
To the Empire worlds, the well of Molween was a myth out of spacelore. It ranked with all the old Earth fables, with the waters of immortality, the lamp that granted wishes, the flying horse, the enchanted sword. Was there more than folklore to this well of Molween, then? As there might be more to the old beliefs that once men had been immortal, that there were weapons that could never be rendered ineffective? There was a school of thought that said myth was no more than an ancestral memory of past reality.
The collective unconscious, one psychologist had named it. Back on Earth in the old days, Troy had been thought to be no more than a legend. Schliemann had dug in Asia Minor and uncovered its actuality. The same with Crete and the minotaur, the flood, the hanging gardens. A man named Jung claimed that the wisdom of all time lay hidden in the human mind.
Might that hidden memory extend even to the eons before man had walked the Earth? If Earth had been a colony of the Crenn Lir at one time, its fable of a wishing well might prove to be more than imaginative invention.
“We knew about the wells,” Peganna was saying, “but we could never find one. When some of those thousand spies came back to me, telling me about Bran the Wanderer and the stories he told of his findings far out in space, I began to put two and two together. Perhaps you had found one of these wells. If you had, our knowledge of the Crenn Lir language might be enough to activate one of them.”
Bran shook his head dubiously. “After so many years—eons, almost—the wells will be dead. Inoperative.”
“Perhaps. And perhaps not. Is it worth a try?”
Bran nodded, staring out across the desert sands. “Yes, of course. If you wish, I’ll take you to the well of Molween.”
She followed his gaze out across the red wastes. “You mean, if the Empire soldiers don’t stop us.”
“We don’t have far to go,” he muttered. “For the most part, we can keep off the desert. We’re in the hills now and the trees will afford good shelter. No, I don’t think Empire will be able to prevent our leaving Makkador.”
Her hand slipped between his fingers, clinging. “Then let us go, Bran. It frightens me, being so close to where men in those white uniforms can seize me.”
“First we eat,” Bran told her, lifting out bread and meat from his food pouch, blessing the foresight that had made him tell the serving woman at the tavern in Makkamar City to fill the leather bag for him.
They sat crosslegged near the cave entrance and munched slowly, wondering when and where they might eat their next meal. From a small flask, Bran poured tart wine. From time to time he glanced out at the empty sky and desert sands, asking himself how close the Empire soldiers might have come in the night.
After a while he took out the Nagalang dice and began to rub them thoughtfully with his thumb.
THREE
THEY WAITED in the lessening shadows while Mizar climbed the distant skies, flooding Makkador with heat. It was a quiet, contemplative moment for them both. Peganna thought of her people waiting patiently on the worn-out planet they had called home for the past seven years, and her heart hungered to give them a pleasant, grassy world heavy with sweet water and hot sunshine. A world that belonged now to the Empire. Bran Magannon was remembering that he was an Earthman, a one-time Fleet Commander sworn to uphold the star cluster of the Empire against all foes. To his world, this woman standing beside him was an enemy, her people a threat to the security of his own.
Bran sighed and tightened the belt of his fur kilt. For the past half hour the sunlight had been moving across the stone floor of the cave entrance until now it almost touched his boot. It was time to leave the cave and venture into the brilliant light of Mizar.
He rose and lifted Peganna from the stone floor. He gathered and folded the blankets, draping them across one shoulder. The pouch at his belt was shrunken in upon itself, and he wondered if this might be symbolic of their chances. Shrugging off a momentary despondency, he caught Peganna by the hand and drew her with him out of the cave.
The skies were empty of Zads, the desert of soldiers.
Bran led the way up a sloping rock to a higher level where dirt lay piled in rock crannies, nourishing the evergreen life of the Makkadoran hills. Pine needles carpeted the rocks and the ground about them, making a cushion for their feet. Sunlight splotched tree boles and underbrush where it filtered through the high branches. It was a silent world through which they walked, hushed but for their own breathing.
When Mizar was overhead, Bran paused and made Peganna sit on a flat rock. “We cross an open space half a mile beyond this point. We’ll have to move fast in case there are Zads out hunting us. Rest a while.”
He stared south and east in the direction from which they had come. The skies were clear. Though he knew and reckoned with the speed of those fleet searching planes, he felt for the first time that they might actually escape the manhunt. Once let them get off Makkador and he would lose the Empire soldiers with ease.
When they came to the two miles of open rock that lay between the evergreens and the tall pines higher in the hills, he scanned the air again. Peganna watched him, thinking. On this man rested all her hopes, not only for her own happiness but also for the future well-being of the Lyanir. He was no Lyanirn, however, but an Earthman. His loyalties should lie with Empire in any conflict between their races—and their disputation over living room on decent planets might well come down to open war. In fact, it probably would, she thought gloomily. Even supposing that the well of Molween might give her what she needed, she had no guarantee that the Empire would buckle to her demands.
Peganna slipped off her silken chlamys. She could run faster in the wool jersey and short, matching kilt that left her white legs so bare. The chlamys was rolled up and tucked into her belt when Bran swung around to her, nodding. “Run, Peganna. Run fast. I’ll match your pace.”
They almost made the distant trees. They moved swiftly, holding their breaths as long as they could, their shadows keeping pace beside them. It was another shadow—a dark moving blotch that came and went so fast that Bran almost did not see it—which alerted him to danger.
“Fall flat, fall flat,” he cried. When he touched the rock he rolled so that his eyes would be staring upward into the bright blue sky.
He did not see it at first, the Zad was so high. Only a vapor trail betrayed its presence. It was gone even while he looked. No living man could have picked them out on the gray rocks, but the reconnaissance camera would be clicking from the underbelly of the Zad and its high-speed films would catch them as they ran, mirroring forever the fact that they had flung themselves upon the hill stones.
When they processed the films, they would know where they had come, though they would not know why. Bran was thoughtful as he scrambled to his feet. These hills would be swarming with white uniforms in an hour, maybe even less.
By that time he must be at the tele-door and through it with Peganna. Or everything they were fighting for would vanish like smoke in a high wind.
“The Zad’s gone,” he rasped. “Come on!”
She staggered the last few feet and only his arm at her middle kept her upright. From
overhead the tree branches embraced them in dark shadows, hiding them from further discovery. Bran let Peganna lean against a treebole to recover her breath while he told her what he had seen.
“They’ll be here as soon as they’ve seen those films. By then, we’ll be far away.”
“Through the tele-door?”
He nodded. “I’ll have to hide the opening I made when I came through it onto Makkador. Even then I’m not sure they won’t be able to track us. They have marvelous devices for hunting out a man they want, the intelligence services. Odd little gadgets that can follow a scent the way no bloodhound ever could.”
Peganna shivered and, unrolling her white chlamys, thrust her head and arms into its hood and sleeves. Beneath the trees it was cool. Putting back the hood she let that coolness lave her face while she slowly recovered her strength.
“All right,” she told him after a few minutes. “We might as well go on. If there’s any chance at all of losing them, let’s take it.”
They walked between the trees toward a high rounded hill where only sparse vegetation grew. There was a small black circle at the base of the hill. When they came nearer, it became the entrance to a tunnel, with charred splotches at its edges.
“The tele-door is under the hill,” Bran explained. “When I came through it, I found the exit blocked by the accumulated silt of ages. I burned a way out with my a-gun.”
Peganna had become archeologist enough, during the searching of the Crenn Lir worlds, to recognize a tell when she saw it. Usually these tells covered grave sites or cities so ancient they had long since been buried under many feet of loam. The tele-door would be such an artifact, brooding here on Makkador for unremembered centuries as the detritus from space and the drifting dust from its own planet slowly buried it.
Bran was saying, “Many tele-door chambers are hidden underground, beneath tells or simply to protect them from discovery by enemies. This isn’t the first one I’ve had to shoot my way out of.” He reached for her hand to help her scramble up the dirt ziggurat. The black tunnel mouth was perhaps twelve feet above them.
“Long ago there was a staircase of sorts descending from the chamber,” he told her. “This one’s buried under loess, but others on different planets can be seen, and they all seem to conform.”
He had paused to drop the blankets, knotting two ends together to make a drag with which to obliterate their footprints. “To make it a little harder to find us,” he explained.
His palm pushed her into the tunnel while he stood in its mouth and began to claw down dirt to fill the entrance. Over his shoulder he said, “I won’t be able to do more than disguise it a little. Working from inside, I can’t hide the depression it will make. It’ll be spotted easily enough if anyone knows what to look for.”
“And if they find the entrance—and the tele-door?”
Bran shrugged. “Then they’ll come after us.”
He worked swiftly, knowing that time was a changeling ally. His fingers grew grimy but the dirt began filling up the adit, so that soon only a narrow space remained through which the outside light could enter. Within moments this was gone and they were in a darkened tunnel.
“Go on, straight ahead,” called Bran, working with the a-gun now, blasting down the ceiling of the tunnel, filling it with heavy dirtslides. He backed slowly before the flaring blue beam from the handgun. As he had shot his way out of the tunnel chamber, now he pulled it down behind him. The tunnel was filled with the acrid reek of atomic disintegration powder.
When his rump touched the cold bronze of the chamber doors he stepped into a rectangular room, putting his left hand to each door and swinging it shut. He heard the faint click of an automatic lock.
Peganna was staring around the chamber in awe.
“We’ve never found anything so well-preserved,” she breathed.
She ran to a mural that showed an ocean and an odd sailing craft cleaving its green waters. Gently her fingertips reached out to that brightly colored surface that had been created untold centuries before. Her hand hesitated in midair, then fell away. Almost shamefacedly she turned to smile at him.
“I’m afraid to touch it. The slightest contact might turn those paints to powder and obliterate them.” She whispered, “If only I had a camera, to record that scene.”
She found a trace of words painted in a lower corner and bent to study them. “A skiff on the ocean called Palandrus on the planet Keethan, the world where Thruul was born,” she translated.
Straightening, she said, “A skiff, I translated this word, coelzin. Our archeologists have long known what the word meant, though we had no visual image of the boat it represented.”
“This must be a scene out of their, far past,” Bran told her. “I’ve seen other murals on other worlds where their boats were driven by rockets.”
Peganna nodded, turning to study the painting of a vast city in the air above which queer vessels sped like wheeling birds. “Vasthor,” she whispered. “Vasthor, that was the Crenn Lir center of learning and culture. We always thought it a fabled place, but apparently it actually existed. Oh, Bran—if we could find it, uncover just a few of the wonders it’s supposed to have housed!”
He caught her by an arm. “We have no time for that. Maybe someday, but right now we’d better get out of here.”
Bran brought her toward a glistening black oval set flush against the far wall, bordered by an edging of what looked to be dull gold. As they came nearer, Peganna expected to see her reflection; instead there was only a dark emptiness, as though she stared into space itself unrelieved by starlight. It was frightening. She seemed to stand on the edge of a bottomless abyss.
“Step forward,” Bran said.
“Oh, no!”
She drew back against him, trembling. To step forward into that dark nothingness was beyond the power of her muscles. She could not; her legs were quivering and refused to move. She would drop into an abyss without bottom in an endless falling that—Strong arms swung her upward.
Bran held her firmly as he walked lightly and easily through the dimensional blackness of the tele-door. He did not know what the darkness was, though he suspected it was an as yet unknown-to-mankind form of trans-spatial energy. It was everywhere in that black dimensional-continuum and as soon as an animate or inanimate object came within its mutronic flow, he or it was borne elsewhere by its current.
Somehow, the Crenn Lir had discovered that odd type of energy and learned to control it. He himself had been on upward of sixty dead planets which once had formed the star empire of the Crenn Lir, but he always felt that he had only set foot on a small number of their worlds.
He stood an instant in darkness.
Then the blackness formed a roseate oval before him and he stepped through it onto the glassite floor of a chamber he had never seen before. It was a huge room, ornate with many carvings, with several tele-doors set flush to its walls.
He made a mental note of the spatial coordinates so that when he was entering a tele-door with controls—there had been none on Makkador—he would be able to find his way back.
From Makkador, the soldiers of the Empire, if they found the tele-door, would be teleported here. They might remain and hunt for Bran Magannon and Peganna of the Silver Hair, but their quarry would be far away by that time. Bran touched the control discs set into the wall beside a tele-door, working them from memory.
Peganna stood beside him, saying nothing, a little overwhelmed by what she was seeing all around her. This tele-chamber was something of an art gallery as well, filled with statuary graven in stone and worked in metals, in free form concepts of dead thought and imagery that went on living while their creators were less than dust. Beyond the statues were other works of art. Her breath caught at their beauty—murals and hanging pictures which showed a world long since forgotten by the living. And a row of tele-doors with their sidewalls covered with discs and tiny dials were unspoken passwords to what had been the Crenn Lir empire, where other such treas
ures might be found!
If only she could turn her scientists loose in this room!
Perhaps there would be no need to force the Empire into granting them living room. Surely among all the old Crenn Lir worlds, there were some still fit for human habitation! Pleasant worlds with grass and flowing rivers and tossing oceans and burning, healthful sunlight.
Bran said, as if reading her mind, “There are none left. Peganna. Whatever force destroyed one, destroyed them all. It was a great tragedy.”
She glanced at him sideways. “By that you mean you’ve never found any. I can’t believe all of them were made unfit for living purposes.”
He shrugged. “There may be some. If they exist, why haven’t we heard from their peoples?”
“What about Makkador?”
“I don’t believe Makkador was a true Crenn Lir planet. It may have been explored by them, perhaps marked for colonization. But for some reason the Crenn Lir never got around to it. For that matter, what of the world your people live on now?”
“Miranor? It’s a dead planet. Worn out. Bathed as are all the Crenn Lir worlds by some deadly radiation. We have to take medipills two or three times a day to ease its effects on our bodies. Without the pills we’d die out in a few years.”
“As the Crenn Lir died out?” Bran wondered.
Peganna only shook her head and allowed Bran to take her by the hand and lead her into the tele-door. She was no longer afraid. Whatever force had gripped the Wanderer and held him upright would also support her.
There was no sensation within the blackness. It closed about her and cradled her gently, as might a suspension beam. Then the roseate oval was in front of them and with Bran’s palm at her back she moved toward it.
This chamber was small, almost dingy. The almost eternal uthium lights which had made the other chamber gleam with brightness were dull here, almost inert. She supposed the chamber with the statuary had been an important one; this room where she walked now might have been only a mere way-station.