by Jack Vance
“That is what I hoped you would say.” Reith looked around the half-circle. “You agree to my conditions?”
“We have not heard them.”
“I want the woman whom you brought down yesterday. If she is dead, I plan to exact a terrible penalty from you. You will long remember me; you will long curse the name Adam Reith.”
The Pnume stood in silence.
“Where is she?” demanded Reith in a rasping voice.
“She is in Foreverness, to be crystallized.”
“Is she alive? Or is she dead?”
“She is not yet dead.”
“Where is she?”
“Across the Field of Monuments, awaiting preparation.”
“You say that she is not yet dead-but is she alive and well?”
“She lives.”
“Then you are fortunate.”
The Pnume surveyed him with incomprehension, and certain of the group gave near-human shrugs.
Reith said: “Bring her here, or let us go to her, whichever is faster.”
“Come.”
They set out across the Field of Monuments: statues or simulacra representing folk of a hundred various races. Reith could not avoid pausing to stare in fascination. “Who or what are all these creatures?”
“Episodes in the life of Tschai, which is to say, our own lives. There: the Shivvan who came to Tschai seven million years ago. This is an early crystal, one of the oldest: the memento of a far time. Beyond: the Gjee, who founded eight empires and were expunged by the Fesa, who in turn fled the light of the red star Hsi. Yonder: others who have dropped by along their way to oblivion.”
Along the avenues the group moved. The monuments were black, fringed with luminous gold and silver: creatures quadruped, triped, biped; with heads, cerebral bags, nerve-nets; with eyes, optical bands, flexible sensors, prisms. Here towered a massive bulk with a heavy cranium; it brandished a seven-foot sword. The creature Reith saw to be a Green Chasch bull. Nearby a Blue Chasch chastened a group of crouching Old Chasch, while three Chaschmen glowered from the side. Beyond were Dirdir and Dirdirmen, attended by two men and two women of a race Reith failed to recognize. To the side a single Wankh, alone and austere, surveyed a gang of toiling men. Beyond these groups, except for a single empty pedestal, the avenue led away, down a black slope to a slow black river, the surface marked by drifting silver swirls. Beside the river stood a cage of silver bars; huddled in the cage was Zap 210. She watched the group approach with an impassive face. She saw Reith; her face crumpled into opposed emotions; grief and joy, relief and dismay. She had been stripped of her surface clothes; she wore only a white shift.
Reith took pains to control his voice; still he spoke thickly. “What have you done to her?”
“She has been treated with Liquid One. It invigorates and tones, and opens the passages for Liquid Two.”
“Bring her forth.”
Zap 210 emerged from the cage. Reith took her hand, stroked her head. “You are safe. We’re going back to the surface.” He stood for a few minutes quietly waiting while she wept in relief and nervous exhaustion on his shoulder.
The Pnume came close. One said: “The return of all charts is demanded.”
Reith managed a thick laugh. “Not yet. I have other demands to make of you-but elsewhere. Let us leave this place. Foreverness oppresses me.”
In a hall of polished gray marble Reith faced the Pnume Elders. “I am a man; I am disturbed to see men of my own kind living the unnatural lives of Pnumekin. You must breed no more human children, and the children now underground must be transferred to the surface and there maintained until they are able to fend for themselves.”
“But this means the end of the Pnumekin!”
“So it does, and why not? Your race is seven million years old or more. Only in the last twenty or thirty thousand years have you had Pnumekin to serve you. Their loss will be no great hardship.”
“If we agree-what of the charts?”
“I will destroy all but a very few copies. None will be delivered to your enemies.”
“This is unsatisfactory! We would then live in constant dread!”
“I can’t worry as to this. I must retain control over you, to guarantee that my demands have been met. In due course I may return all the charts to you-sometime in the future.”
The Pnume muttered disconsolately together a few moments. One said in a flat whisper: “Your demands will be met.”
“In this case, conduct us back to the Sivishe salt flats.”
At sunset the salt flats were quiet. Carina 4269 hung in a smoky haze behind the palisades, glinting upon the Dirdir towers. Reith and Zap 210 approached the old warehouse. From the office came Anacho’s spare form. He stepped forward to meet them. “The sky-car is here. There is nothing to keep us.”
“Let’s hurry then. I can’t believe that we’re free.”
The sky-car lifted from behind the warehouse and swept north. Anacho asked: “Where do we go?”
“To the Kotan steppes, south of where you and I first met.”
All night they flew, over the barren center of Kislovan, then over the First Sea and the Kotan marshlands.
At dawn they drifted over the edge of the Steppes while Reith studied the landscape below. They crossed a forest; Reith pointed to a clearing. “There: where I came down to Tschai. The Emblem camp lay to the east. There, by that grove of feather-bush: there we buried Onmale. Drop down there.”
The sky-car landed. Reith alighted and walked slowly toward the woods. He saw the glint of metal. Traz came forth. He stood quietly as Reith approached. “I knew that you would come.”
Traz had changed. He had become a man: something more than a man. On his shoulder he wore a medallion of metal, stone and wood. Reith said: “You dug up the emblem.”
“Yes. It called to me. Wherever I walked upon the steppe I heard voices, all the voices of all the Omnale chieftains, calling to be taken up from the dark. I brought forth the emblem; the voices are now silent.”
“And the ship?”
“It is ready. Four of the technicians are here. One stayed at Sivishe, two lost heart and set off across the steppes for Hedaijha.”
“The sooner we depart the better. When we’re actually out in space I’ll believe that we’ve escaped.”
“We are ready.”
Anacho, Traz and Zap 210 entered the spaceship. Reith took a last look around the sky. He bent, touched the soil of Tschai, crumbled a handful of mold between his fingers. Then he too entered the unlovely hulk. The port was closed and sealed. The generators hummed. The ship lifted toward the sky. The face of Tschai receded; the planet exhibited rotundity, became a graybrown ball, and presently was gone.
END OF THE PLANET OF ADVENTURE OMNIBUS
ebookman V2.0: Endnotes and map added. Italics and Clickable Table of Contents formatted.
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[i] An untranslatable word; roughly: a man who has defied and defiled his emblem, and hence perverted his identity.
[ii] Such elaborations were neither ornament nor functional disguise, but expressed, rather, the Chasch obsession for complication as an end in itself. Even the nomadic Green Chasch shared the trait. Examining their saddlery and weapons, Reith had been struck by a similarity to the metalwork of the ancient Scyths.
[iii] Sandblast: a weapon electrostatically charging and accelerating grains of sand to near-light speed, with consequent gain in mass and inertia. Upon penetrating a target, the energy is yielded in the form of an explosion.
[iv] The Emblems: nomads setting great store by small fetishes of metal, wood, and stone, each with a name, history, and personality. The warrior wearing a particular emblem becomes imbued with its essence, and in effect becomes the emblem. Traz carried Onmale, the paramount emblem of the tribe, and so was the ritual chief.
[v] The Tschai year: approximately seven-fifths the terrestrial year.
[vi] An untranslatable word: the quality a man acquires in greater or lesser extent by the grace of his ev
olutions upon aspects of the “round.” A fragile, almost frivolous, equilibrium between a man and his peers, instantly disturbed by a hint of shame, humiliation, embarrassment.
[vii] A binocular photo-multiplying device, with a variable magnification ratio up to 1000 x 1: one of the articles Reith had salvaged from his survival kit.
[viii] Phung: solitary nocturnal creature indigenous to Tschai.
[ix] An inexact rendering of the word tsau’gsh: more accurately, a band of determined hunters who have claimed the right to prosecute a quest or a task, in order to win status and reputation.
[x] Gray: Loose term for the various peoples hybridized of Dirdirmen, Marshmen, Chaschmen and others, generally stocky and large-headed, often with yellow-gray complexions, occasionally somewhat albinoid.
[xi] Literally: the way of death’s-heads with purple-gleaming eye-sockets.
[xii] Sums expressed in sequins are in terms of the unit value sequin, the “clear.”
[xiii] tsau’gsh: prideful endeavor, unique enterprise, lunge toward glory. An essentially untranslatable concept.
[xiv] Phung: a man-like indigene of Tschai, given to erratic and reckless behavior. Pnume: a diffident, tranquil and secretive folk, similar to the Phung but of lesser stature.
[xv] Pnumekin: men associated with the Pnume over a period of tens of thousands of years, with consequent assimilation of Pnume habits and mental processes. Gzindra: Pnumekin ejected from the underground world, usually for reason of “boisterous behavior”; wanderers of the surface, agents of the Pnume.
[xvi] Scanscope: photo-multiplying binoculars.
[xvii] Secrets: the rough translation of a phrase signifying the body of lore proper and suitable to a particular status. In the context of Pnume society the word secrets conveys more accurate overtones.
[xviii] Again a rude rendering of an untranslatable idea: the title in Tschai terms connotes superlative erudition in combination with high authority and status.
[xix] Ghaun: a wild region exposed to wind and weather. In the special usage of the Pnume: the surface of Tschai, with emphasized connotations of exposure, oppressive emptiness, desolation.
[xx] Ghian: an inhabitant of the ghaun: a surface-dweller.
[xxi] Zuzhma kastchai: the contraction of a phrase: the ancient and secret world-folk derived from dark rock and mother-soil.
[xxii] A somewhat unwieldy translation of the contraction gol’eszitra, from a phrase meaning “supervisory intellect with ears alert for raucous disturbance.”
[xxiii] Shelters: an inexact rendering of a word combining concepts of ageless order, quiet and security, the complexity of a maze. “Identification,” “name,” and “type” in the language of Tschai are the same word.
[xxiv] Later, Reith learned more of the sacred groves, and the Khor inter-social relationships. In the towns and villages, men and women wore identical clothes; sexual activity was regarded as unnatural conduct. Only in the sacred groves, with nudity and the ritual masks to emphasize sexual disparity, did procreation occur. Men and women, in assuming the masks, assumed new personalities; children were regarded not as the issue of specific parents, but as the yield of archetypal Man and Woman.
Table of Contents
CITY OF THE CHASCH
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
SERVANTS OF THE WANKH
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE DIRDIR
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
THE PNUME
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
End of the Planet of Adventure Omnibus