One Station of the Way

by Fritz Leiber

  ONE STATION OF THE WAY Fritz Leiber Galaxy, December 1968

  The paired moons Daurya and Sonista were both still high in the night, although they had begun their descent toward the flat western horizon. The stars that showed in the heavens were few and dim, even in the east.

  Suddenly a new one appeared there -- bright, white and dazzling as a cut sunstone.

  The three hominids, heavily robed and cowled against the desert, which thirsted for their moisture, swiftly, dismounted from the high-backed chair-saddles of their cameloids, knelt in the sand, which was cold above, but still hot below, and did the new star reverence, rhythmically swaying forward their planted spears in time with the slow bobbing of their heads.

  The star in the east grew brighter still and began to descend.

  One hominid said, "It is a sign from God. Blessed Wife and Husband are where we thought them."

  Another agreed, "They are there, our Chosen Ones, under the falling star. It is indeed a sign. Those who seek, find -- if they be unwearying of heart, mind and senses."

  Even as they spoke, the star, grown piercingly bright, winked out. It was difficult to tell whether it had been extinguished, or had dropped behind a dune. The latter seemed likely, since there was a pale semicircular glow where the star had been. But then the glow vanished too.

  Springing to his feet, the third hominid said, "Let us be after them, before the fix fades from our minds."

  "Indeed yes," the first seconded as he rose. "We must remember that we have for them . . . our gifts."

  "Let us haste, cousin," the second urged, rising too.

  Faintly revealed by the light of Sonista and Daurya, the three hominids were stranger front side than back. Smiling together as they conferred, they each showed three eyes, one where a nose would be on a Terran face, while their smiling mouths were long, going almost from trumpet ear to trumpet ear.

  They remounted and went down the slope of the dune at a lope which made the sand hiss very faintly under their cameloids' hooves. On the three retinas of each hominid and conjoined in each of their brains, the after-image of the star still burned, a tiny ball blacker than the night.

  Five dunes ahead, Wife stared afright yet paralyzed at the fantastic sight -- fantastic even on that most fantastic world, Finiswar, where except among the most evolved and intelligent types, monsters were the rule and true-breeds the exception.

  Wife could hear Husband's heart thud, although he stood at a short distance from her. Holding her either hand, peeping around her robes, were small replicas of Husband and herself. She could feel their hearts beating, not a-fear, but quietly as when they nursed or slept.

  All four beings were visaged and robed like the three hominids riding the cameloids.

  Wife thought in a tiny active corner of her frozen mind: The little ones do not fear strangeness, at least so long as I hold their hands. They open themselves to all the world. Could that be good? They do not armor themselves against it, as a woman armors herself against all stray and errant seeds and against all lovers save one, after she cuts her middle teeth and they are grown razor sharp.

  But could opening oneself ever be good, except in childhood, when one lives fantasies parent-protected? Love is a tunnel sealed at both ends, the wise say, never the forest and sea and sky.

  What Wife stared at a-quake, though now with growing wonder, were two gigantic serpents, each as thick as Husband but three times as tall in their forward thirds alone that swayed upright like a white and a black tree in the wind. The foremost was pallid as Daurya. The one that lurked behind with his swollen head swaying into view, now to the right of his pale companion, now to the left, was dark as moonless night.

  Or perhaps they were more properly millipeds than serpents, for from each's ventral side, now facing Wife, grew ranks and ranks of stubby-fingered feet, many of the fingers nervously a-writhe. These fingered feet grew thickest under the great serpent heads. This, although Wife could not know it, was so that the two serpents could crawl effectively on a max-grav planet. Here on Finiswar, which was as small as Terra, the head-feet were of little need.

  Behind them, blurred to Wife's three eyes, because their focus was ever on the serpents, stood the slender and strangely finned spoonmetal spire from which two extra-Finiswarians had emerged, and which had burned like an unended candle, its flame blindingly white, as it had descended.

  Now the pallid serpent, its trunk reared up scarce two steps away from Wife, lowered its flat head to inspect her point by point over her cowled head and robed body. He studied her from the black holes in his two great eyes that were like two mollusk-jewels, white as his scales but even more fluoreseently glittering. He traced her form. From time to time he lightly touched her with his ghost-white, narrow, trifid tongue.

  She could hear Husband's heart thunder, though he stood still as stone. The children, however, were merely curious. She knew without looking down that her daughter was stretching a thin arm toward the serpent. While her own heart was thudding, but she no longer knew if it were thudding with fear, even when the shivery, shocking tongue touched her lips.

  She did not know that she was filled with a wild, almost unbearable excitement. It made her wonder. It made her question everything she knew.

  She fought the answers her feelings gave. No! This intimate, gentle, imperious searching never, never, never, could be love, she told herself. Love was a needle in the dark, the one right needle amidst a trillion wrong ones. Love was something the woman controlled and tested at every instant, her senses increasingly alert from periphery to center, her will a trillion times as ready to deal death as to welcome life. Love had nothing to do with this paralyzed submission. Love was not Daurya and Sonista ceaselessly staring at each other as they circled each other for all eternity. Rather, it was the needle-pointed spear which one permitted to strike in the dark.

  Moreover, love had to do only with hominids. Or rather it had to do with one chosen hominid only, not with a gigantic serpent weirder than a magnified jungle flower, a jewel-crusted great sea-snake, a rainbow bird whose wings spanned trees. And yet, and yet. . . .

  But, if by some impossibility it should be love, what was the meaning of the pallid lord's dark brother? -- whose ebon head and jet eyes followed closely every movement of the pallid lord's flat face, now dipping in from one side, now from the other, watching every touching though not quite ever close enough to touch with his own black tongue, which was slender, trifid and blurringly a-tremble. Love was for two, not three. Was he the pallid lord's true brother, to be accepted with honor? Or was he to be hated as the pallid lord was to be loved? Or was he in truth only a shadow? More substantial than other shadows, a shadow with depth as well as breadth and height, but still only a shade, an unvarying adjunct of the pallid lord?

  And yet, and yet . . . what else but love could be the excitement turned glory that now filled her, filled her almost to fainting as the serpent's great head paused, so that she felt the tongue's triple trembling through her robe, before the great head lifted back and away.

  The First Mate, for such was the office of the black serpent, murmur-hissed softly, "You spent some appreciative time there, you old lecher! Your spermapositor had its kicks. I believe you do your whole work solely for your enjoyment of these moments."

  "Silence, filth," the Captain replied. "The work must always be done softly, gently and with greatest care, since its object is a mustardseed that eventually will fill all earth and sky."

  "I've guessed it. You're growing sentimental," the First Mate jeered. "Mustardseed! Why, you must be remembering that world -- how many implantings was it back? -- called Terra or Gaea or something like that. One of your more notable failures."

  "One of my notable su
ccesses," the Captain contradicted.

  "I don't see how. As I recall, his people killed him most painfully. And we had later reports of even more disastrous consequences."

  "Exactly! -- they killed him. And by that death he emotionally and mentally fecundated his whole world. You still don't understand my methods. Observation has only made your blind spots blacker. My son died, but his ideas -- the idea of love -- lived on."

  "In utterly distorted forms," the First Mate pronounced, "eventually turning half that race into utter preys, into victims even more cringing than before your 'great work,' the other half into still more merciless hunters. A schizophrenic split in the collective unconscious. At last report, the folk of that planet were being ruled by fear and greed, while the great nations were preparing to destroy each other with chemical, biological and nuclear weapons."

  "True enough. Yet they'd only prepared, not done it," the Captain countered. "For love to win, great risks must be boldly taken. But without love there's no hope at all -- only the unending chase of hunters and preys. Dangerous? Of course love is! Always I start from a point near death, like this desert here, and work toward life. Then -- "

  "Oh, yes, this desert!" the First Mate interrupted sardonically. "That other planet had a desert too. And it had heavily robed featherless bipeds, and cameloid beasts, and a moon. Finiswar here has reminded you of it.

  "Besides that, you have a thing about deserts. They appeal to your asceticism. They fit with your ever more ascetic matings and also to your growing flirtatiousness with death, an aspect of your feelings for which you have a vast blind spot. Incidentally, I believe this desert is different. Most of my computer's probes haven't reported back yet, but I already have an intuition. An intuition that is a warning to you: don't trust the analogy between Terra and Finiswar too far. In fact, don't trust it at all."

  "You and your computer and its probes! Forever seeking to dissect the universe to the last particle. Forever seeking to disprove empathy and similarity and oneness. You'll never find love that way."

  "True, I won't -- because it's not there! There are only vanity and desire. Besides, you have your computer and its probes too, though you pretend they're only a technological trifle. Despite which, they always manage to echo your profound judgments."

  Wife, floating in a sea of glory distantly shored with fear, hearing as if they were wind on sand the hissings and murmurings of Captain and First Mate, now suddenly felt the tentative tiny touch of an alien seed on her poignantly sensitive razor-sharp teeth.

  At first she was only gently startled. The desert was the place of no-seed. There were some seeds everywhere, like spores of plague. Nevertheless, the scarcity of alien seed was why she and Husband had come here.

  Then all at once she realized it must be the seed of the great white snake. It had the same constant vibrancy in its movements, the same gentle imperiousness. She felt it cross and recross her bite, questingly. Then she parted her teeth a little, and it slowly crawled in.

  For a long moment she could have sliced it in two, and her every instinct, almost, was to do so, although her median teeth were chiefly for decapitating seed-depositing organs. But it was a larger seed, bigger than one of her eggs, and she could readily have destroyed it so.

  Yet she did not, for it carried the same glory with it as had the serpent's tongue. The tongue had been glory diffused. This was glory concentrated into a needle.

  Now the alien seed was in the poison passage. But all the poison pores in it remained closed.

  So did the digestive pores. (Some lazy single females lived on seeds and their depositing organs alone, using their facial mouths only to breathe and drink. A female could do that on seed-thick-Finiswar -- that is, anywhere except the mountains and deserts.)

  And now the alien seed, vibrant, insistent, had reached the wall of doors. Wife could feel every movement of its progress, every tiniest touching. It had passed within a membrane's thickness of poisons that could destroy any and all life.

  The dozen doors that led looping back to the chambers beneath the poison pores remained tight shut. The one true door opened.

  Another deadly but unharming passage having been traversed, the doubly alien seed was in Wife's centralmost and most sensitive volume, asceptic save for her waiting egg.

  And her egg which was only partly under her mind's control, did not employ any of the weapons of evasion, defense and counterattack at its disposal, but received the alien seed, which melted the egg's outer skin with the enzymes of a million Terran-type sperm.

  Husband, his heart still racing, whispered, "Why are you smiling?"

  "I smile because we are in a place of no-seed, except yours," she whispered back. "I smile because Daurya and Sonista curtsey around each other charmingly as they set. But chiefly I smile because the serpents spared us, and their star did not burn us down, though we felt its great heat."

  "For those last you should feel relief," he told her coldly. "I asked -- Why are you smiling?"

  She did not answer. She knew that he knew and could not be fooled. It was as certain as the tight, hot clasp of her daughter-duplicate's little hand on hers, as the way Husband- duplicate's hand chilled and almost fell away from her looping fingers. Even the children knew.

  Yes, Husband knew. And he would first punish, then divorce, send her off alone into sterilest and hottest no-seed, try even to take from her daughter-duplicate.

  But even that would be a glory, a glory at least in the end. She would bear a daughter who would have the serpent's love, a daughter who would change all Finiswar, a daughter who would bring love at last to the whole world of hating and excluding and killing. Yes, it would be a great glory.

  The Captain was saying, "It has taken, you can tell. Her smile is like the other's."

  "You are sentimentalizing!" the black First Mate rejoined. "Night, moon or moons, desert, a willing female -- what planet has not these? I tell you plainly, if you keep looking for similarities with Terra, you are in for some nasty shocks -- yes, and deadly danger too."

  "Not so," the Captain contradicted calmly. "Also, the similarities continue, for here -- behold! -- come the Three Kings."

  Slithering down the dune so silently neither Husband nor Wife heard them, came the three robed and cowled hominids. Their richly caparisoned cameloids had been left beyond the top.

  Behind Husband, the first hominid raised his arm, as if in salutation, then drew it back.

  From a small gleaming instrument held in a fingered foot just below the head of the First Mate, who now reared up as steady as an ebony temple column, a brilliant scarlet needle-beam took that hominid in shoulder, chest and throat. And as the second hominid raised his arm, it took him too.

  A brilliant white needle-beam, shooting sideways from a similar instrument the Captain had produced, neatly took off that fingered foot of the First Mate which had held the scarlet-spitting weapon.

  The last hominid raised his arm and hurled. The Captain swayed sideways fast enough to save his life, but not -- entirely -- his skin. The whirring spear transfixed a fold of it, barely penetrating below the scaled epidermis, and dangled from the Captain's neck.

  With another instrument as quickly produced, the First Mate shot down the last of the intruders. Then he gave the whistling hiss that was his laugh.

  The Captain's nearest fingered feet explored the lodgement of the spear and finding it shallow, tore it loose and cast it away on the sand. His fingered feet moved swiftly enough in doing this, but all the rest of him appeared to be shocked numb.

  Wife and Husband had dropped to their knees, while daughter- and son-duplicates were hidden in Wife's robe.

  The First Mate turned off his hateful laugh at last and murmur-hissed as hatefully, "Yes, there is in my mind no doubt but that the Three Wise Men came to Kill Husband and rape Wife. And I fancy that on Finiswar rape is a most curious and prolonged business. You will admit now, will you not, my Captain, that at least in one particular your analogy between Terra and
Finiswar lacked rigor?"

  The Captain still did not move. Then a great shiver traveled down his scales.

  The First Mate laughed again, briefly and sardonically. "Well, your great work is finished, it is not? I mean, on Finiswar, at least. My probes have returned to my computer. So yours have to yours I presume. In any case, I suggest we depart at once, before we meet any shepherds, perchance."

  Now at last the Captain nodded. Once. Dumbly.

  While Husband and Wife continued to kneel and stare, the two great serpents lowered their proud trunks and swiftly crawled on their bellies back to their ship.

  Later, in the control room of Inseminator , they argued the whole matter. Their great looped forms looked at home in the silvery room, their fingered feet fitting themselves to the buttons and control holes of the multiple consoles as occasion required. The argument began with desultory comment, followed by a "report" by the First Mate, delivered coolly but with acid cynicism.