Marion Zimmer Bradley Super Pack

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  Did it matter? Surely, if men could throw a bridge between the planets, they could build a bridge across the greater gap of time that separated them from these who had once lived on Mars. And if any man could do that, Andy admitted ungrudgingly, that man was John Reade. He pulled off his boots, anchored them carefully with his pack, weighted the whole thing down with rock, and crawled into the sack.

  In the comforting warmth, relaxing, a new thought crossed his mind.

  Whatever it was that had happened to him at Xanadu, he wasn’t quite sure. The bump had confused him. But certainly something had happened. He did not seriously consider Reade’s warning. He knew, as Reade could not be expected to know, that he had not suffered from a hallucination; had not been touched by the fringes of insanity. But he had certainly undergone a very strange experience. Whether it

  had been subjective or objective, lie did not know; but he intended to find out.

  How? He tried to remember a little desultory reading he had once done about telepathy. Although he had spoken glibly to Reade about ‘opening his mind,’ he really had not the faintest idea of what he had meant by the phrase. He grinned in the dark.

  “Well, whoever and whatever you are,” he said aloud, “I’m all ready and waiting. If you can figure out a way to communicate with me, come right ahead.”

  And the alien came.

  “I am Kamellin,” it said.

  I am Kamellin..

  That was all Andrew could think. It was all his tortured brain could encompass. His head hurt, and the dragging sense of some actual, tangible force seemed to pull and twist at him. I AM KAMELLIN . . . KAMELLIN . . . KAMELLIN . . . it was like a tide that sucked at him, crowding out his own thoughts, dragging him under and drowning him. Andrew panicked; he fought it, thrashing in sudden frenzy, feeling arms and legs hit the sides of the sleeping-bag, the blankets twisted around him like an enemy’s grappling hands.

  Then the surge relaxed and he lay still, his breath loud in the darkness, and with fumbling fingers untangling the blankets. The sweat of fear was cold on his face, but the panic was gone.

  For the force had not been hostile. It had only been— eager. Pathetically eager; eager as a friendly puppy is eager, as a friendly dog may jump up and knock a man down.

  “Kamellin,” Andrew said the alien word aloud, thinking that the name was not particularly outlandish. He hoped the words would focus his thoughts sufficiently for the alien to understand.

  “Kamellin, come ahead, okay, but this time take it easy,

  take it slow and easy. Understand?” Guardedly, he relaxed, hoping he would be able to take it if some unusual force were thrust at him; He could understand now why men had gone insane. If this—Kamellin—had hit him like that the first time-even now, when he understood and partly expected what was happening, it was an overwhelming flood, flowing through his mind like water running into a bottle. He lay helpless, sweating. The stars were gone, blanked out, and the howling wind was quiet—or was it that he no longer saw or heard? He hung alone in a universe of emptiness, and then, to his disembodied consciousness, came the beginning of— what? Not speech. Not even a mental picture. It was simply contact, and quite indescribable. And it said, approximately;

  Greetings. At last. At last it has happened and we are both sane. I am Kamellin.

  The wind was howling again, the stars a million flame-bright flares in the sky. Huddled in his blankets, Andrew felt the dark intruder in his brain ebb and flow with faint pressure as, their thoughts raced in swift question and answer. He whispered his own question aloud; otherwise Kamellin’s thoughts flowed into his and intermingled with them until he found himself speaking Kamellin’s thoughts.

  “What are you? Was I right, then? Are you Martians discarnate intelligences?”

  Not discarnate, we have always had bodies, or rather— we lived in bodies. But our minds and bodies were wholly separate. Nothing but our will tied them together. When one body died, we simply passed into another newborn body.

  A spasm of claustrophobic terror grabbed at Andrew, and his flesh crawled. “You wanted—”

  Kamellin’s reassurance was immediate;

  I do not want your body. You have, Kamellin fumbled for a concept to express what he meant, you are a mature individual with a personality, a reasoning intelligence of your own. I would have to destroy that before your body could join with me in symbiosis. His thoughts flared indignation; That would not be honorable!

  “I hope all your people are as honorable as you are, then. What happened to the other expedition?”

  He felt black anger, sorrow and desolation, breaking like tidal waves in his brain. My people were maddened—I could not hold them back. They were not stable, what you would call, not sane. The time interval had been too long. There was much killing and death which I could not prevent.

  “If I could only find some way to tell Reade—”

  It would be of no use. A time ago, I tried that. I attempted to make contact, easily, with a young mind that was particularly receptive to my thought. He did not go insane, and we, together, tried to tell Captain Kingslander what had happened to the others. But he believed it was more insanity, and when the young man was killed by one of the others, I had to dissipate again. I tried to reach Captain Kingslander himself, but the thought drove him insane—he was already near madness with his own fear.

  Andrew shuddered. “God!” he whispered. “What can we do?”

  1 do not know. I will leave you, if you wish it. Our race is finally dying. In a few mare years we will be gone, and our planet will be safe for you.

  “Kamellin, no!” Andrew’s protest was immediate and genuine. “Maybe, together, we can think of some way to convince them.”

  The alien seemed hesitant now;

  Would you be willing, then, to—share your body for a time? It will not be easy, it is never easy for two personalities to co-inhabit one body. I could not do it without your complete consent. Kamellin seemed to be thinking thoughts which were so alien that Andrew could grasp them only vaguely; only the concept of a meticulous honor remained to color his belief in Kamellin.

  “What happened to your original host-race?”

  He lay shivering beneath his heated blankets as the story unfolded in his mind. Kamellin’s race, he gathered, had been humanoid—as that concept expressed itself, he sensed Kamellin’s amusement; Rather, your race is martianoid! Yes, they had built the city the Earthmen called Xanadu, it was their one technological accomplishment which had been built to withstand time. Built in the hope that one day we might return and reclaim it from the sand again, Kamellin’s soundless voice whispered, The last refuge of our dying race.

  “What did you call the city?”

  Kamellin tried to express the phonetic equivalent and a curious sound formed on Andrew’s lips. He said it aloud, exploringly; “Shein-la Mahari.” His tongue lingered on the liquid syllables. “What does it mean?”

  The city of Mahari—Mahari, the little moon. Andrew found his eyes resting on the satellite Earthmen called Deimos. “Shein-la Mahari,” he repeated. He would never call it Xanadu again.

  Kamellin continued his story.

  The host-race, Andrew gathered, had been long-lived and hardy, though by no means immortal. The minds and bodies—“minds,” he impressed on Andrew, was not exactly the right concept—were actually two separate, wholly individual components. When a body died, the “mind” simply transferred, without any appreciable interval, into a newborn host; memory, although slightly impaired and blurred by such a transition, was largely retained. So that the consciousness of any one individual might extend, though dimly, over an almost incredible period of time.

  The dual civilization had been a simple, highly mentalized one, systems of ethics and philosophy superseding one another in place of the rise and fall of governments. The physical life of the hosts was not highly technological. Xanadu had been almost their only such accomplishment, last desperate expedient of a dying race against the growing
inhospitality of a planet gripped in recurrent, ever-worsening ice ages. They might have survived the ice alone, but a virus struck and decimated the hosts, eliminating most of the food animals as well. The birth-rate sank almost to nothing; many of the freed minds dissipated for lack of a host-body in which to incarnate.

  Kamellin had a hard time explaining the next step. His kind could inhabit the body of anything which “had life, animal or plant. But they were subject to the physical limitations of the hosts. The only animals which ‘survived disease and ice were the sand-mice and the moronic banshees; both so poorly organized, with nervous systems so faulty, that even when vitalized by the intelligence of Kamellin’s race, they were incapable of any development. It was similar, Kamellin explained, to a genius who is imprisoned in the body of a helpless paralytic; his mind undamaged, but his body wholly unable to respond.

  A few of Kamellin’s people tried it anyhow, in desperation. But after a few generations of the animal hosts, they had degenerated terribly, and were in a state of complete nonsanity, unable even to leave the life-form to which they had bound themselves. For all Kamellin knew, some of his people still inhabited the banshees, making transition after transition by the faint, dim flicker of an instinct still alive, but hopelessly buried in generations of non-rational life.

  The few sane survivors had decided, in the end, to enter the prickle-bushes; spinosa mortis. This was possible, although it, too, had drawbacks; the sacrifice of consciousness was the main factor in life as a plant. In the darkness of the Martian night, Andrew shuddered at Kamellin’s whisper;

  Immortality—without hope. An endless, dreamless sleep. We live, somnolent, in the darkness, and the wind, and wait—and forget. We had hoped that some day a new race might evolve on this world. But evolution here reached a dead end with the banshees and sand-mice. They are perfectly adapted to their environment and they have no struggle to survive: hence they need not evolve and change. When the Earthmen came, we had hope. Not that we might take their bodies. Only that we might seek help from them. But we were too eager, and my people drove out— killed—

  The flow of thoughts ebbed away into silence.

  Andrew spoke at last, gently.

  “Stay with me for a while, at least. Maybe we can find a way.”

  It won’t be easy, Kamellin warned.

  “We’ll try it, anyhow. How long ago—how long have you, well, been a plant?”

  I do not know. Many, many generations—there is no consciousness of time. Many seasons. There is much blurring, Let me look at the stars with your eyes.

  “Sure,” Andrew consented.

  The sudden blackness took him by surprise, sent a spasm of shock and terror through his mind; then sight came back and he found himself sitting upright, staring wide-eyed at the stars, and heard Kamellin’s agonized thoughts;

  It has been long—again the desperate, disturbing fumbling for some concept. It has been nine hundred thousand of your years!

  Then silence; such abysmal grieved silence that Andrew was almost shamed before the naked grief of this man—he could not think of Kamellin except as a man—mourning for dead world. He lay down, quietly, not wanting to intrude on the sorrow of his curious companion.

  Physical exhaustion suddenly overcame him, and he fell asleep.

  “Was Mars like this in your day, Kamellin?” Andrew tossed the question cynically into the silence in his brain. Around him a freezing wind shifted and tossed at the crags, assailing the grip of his gauntleted hands on rock. He didn’t expect any answer. The dark intruder had been dormant all day; Andrew, when he woke, had almost dismissed the whole thing as a bizarre fantasy, born of thin air and impending madness.

  But now the strange presence, like a whisper in the dark, was with him again.

  Our planet was never hospitable. But why have you never discovered the roadway through the mountains?

  “Give us time,” Andrew said cynically. “We’ve only been on Mars a minute or two by your standards. What roadway?” We cut a roadway through the mountains when we built Shein-la Mahari.

  “What about erosion? Would it still be there?” Kamellin had trouble grasping the concept of erosion. Rain and snow were foreign to his immediate experience. Unless the roadway had been blocked by a sandstorm, it should be there, as in Kamellin’s day.

  Andrew pulled himself to a ledge. He couldn’t climb with Kamellin using part of his mind; the inner voice was distracting. He edged himself backward on a flat slab of rock, unstrapping his pack. The remnant of his morning coffee was hot in his canteen; he drank it while Kamellin’s thoughts flowed through his. Finally he asked, “Where’s this roadway?” Andrew’s head reeled in vertigo. He lay flat on the ledge, dizzily grasping rock, while Kamellin tried to demonstrate his sense of direction. The whirl slowly quieted, but all he could get from the brain-shaking experience was that Kamellin’s race had oriented themselves by at least eleven major compass points in what felt like four dimensions to Andrew’s experience, oriented on fixed stars—his original host-race could see the stars even by daylight.

  “But I can’t, and anyway, the stars have moved.”

  I have thought of that Kamellin answered. But this part: of the mountains is familiar to me. We are not far from the place. I will lead you there.

  “Lead on, MacDufl7.”

  The concept is unfamiliar. Elucidate.

  Andrew chuckled. “I mean, which way do we go from here?”

  The vertigo began to overcome him once more.

  “No, no—not that again!”

  Then I will have to take over all your senses—

  Andrew’s mental recoil was as instinctive as survival. The terror of that moment last night, when Kamellin forced him into nothingness, was still too vivid. “No! I suppose you could take over forcibly, you did once, but not without half killing me! Because this time I’d fight—I’d fight you like hell!”

  Kamellin’s .rage was a palpable pain in his mind. Have you no honor of your own, fool from a mad world? How could I lie to you when my mind is part of your own? Wander as you please, I do not suffer and I am not impatient. I thought that you were weary of these rocky paths, no more!

  Andrew felt bitterly ashamed. “Kamellin—I’m sorry.”

  Silence, a trace of alien anger remaining.

  Andrew suddenly laughed aloud. Alien or human, there were correspondences; Kamellin was sulking. “For goodness sake,” he said aloud, “if we’re going to share one body, let’s not quarrel. I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings; this is all new to me. But you don’t have to sit in the corner and turn up your nose, either!”

  The situation suddenly struck him as too ridiculous to take seriously; he laughed aloud, and like a slow, pleasant ripple, he felt Kamellin’s slow amusement strike through his own.

  Forgive me if I offended. I am accustomed to doing as I please in a body I inhabit. 1 am here at your sufferance, and I offer apologies.

  Andrew laughed again, in a curious doubled amusement, somehow eager to make amends. “Okay, Kamellin, take over. You know where I want to go—if you can get us there faster, hop to it.”

  But for the rest of his life he remembered the next hour with terror. His only memory was of swaying darkness and dizziness, feeling his legs take steps he had not ordered, feeling his hands slide on rock and being unable to clutch and save himself, walking blind and deaf and a prisoner in his own skull; and ready to go mad with the horror of it. Curiously enough, the saving thought had been; Kamellin’s able to stand it. He isn’t going to hurt us.

  When sight and sense and hearing came back, and full orientation with it, he found himself at the mouth of a long, low canyon which stretched away for about twelve miles, perfectly straight. It was narrow, less than fifteen feet wide. On either side, high dizzy cliffs were cut sharply away; he marvelled at the technology that had built this turnpike road.

  The entrances were narrow, concealed between rock, and deeply drifted with sand; the hardest part had been descending, and later asc
ending, the steep, worn-away steps that led down into the floor of the canyon. He had struggled and cursed his way down the two-foot steps, wishing that the old Martians had had shorter legs; but once down, he had walked the whole length in less than two hours—travelling a distance, which Reade had covered in three weary days of rock-climbing.

  And beside the steps was a ramp down which vehicles could be driven; had it been less covered with sand, Andrew could have slid down!

  When he finally came to the end of the canyon road, the nearly-impassible double ridge of mountains lay behind him. From there it was a simple matter to strike due west and intersect the road from Mount Denver to the spaceport. There he camped overnight, awaiting the mailcar. He was awake with the first faint light, and lost no time in gulping a quick breakfast and strapping on his pack; for the mail-cars were rocket-driven (in the thin air of Mars, this was practical) and travelled at terrific velocities along the sandy barren flats; he’d have to be alert to flag it down.

  He saw it long before it reached him, a tiny cloud of dust; he hauled off his jacket and, shivering in the freezing air, flagged furiously. The speck grew immensely, roared, braked to a stop; the driver thrust out a head that was only two goggled eyes over a heavy dustkerchief.

  “Need a ride?”

  Protocol on Mars demanded immediate identification.

  “Andrew Slayton—I’m with the Geographic Society—Reade’s outfit back in the mountains at Xanadu. Going back to Mount Denver for the rest of the expedition.”

  The driver gestured. “Climb on and hang on. I’ve heard about that gang. Reade’s Folly, huh?”

  “That’s what they call it.” He settled himself on the seatless floor—like all Martian vehicles, the rocket-car was a bare chassis without doors, seats or sidebars, stripped ,to lower freight costs—and gripped the rail. The driver looked down at him, curiously;

  “I heard about that place Xanadu. Jinxed, they say. You must be the first man since old Torchevsky, to go there and get back safe. Reade’s men all right?”