Marion Zimmer Bradley Super Pack

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  Rakhal picked up Rindy and hoisted her to his shoulder. Miellyn dropped the cloak she had draped over the pattern of the Nebran embroideries, and we crowded close together. The street swayed and vanished and I felt the now-familiar dip and swirl of blackness before the world straightened out again. Rindy was whimpering, dabbing smeary fists at her face. “Daddy, my nose is bleeding....”

  Miellyn hastily bent and wiped the blood from the snubby nose. Rakhal gestured impatiently.

  “The workroom. Wreck everything you see. Rindy, if anything starts to come at us, you stop it. Stop it quick. And”—he bent and took the little face between his hands—“chiya, remember they’re not toys, no matter how pretty they are.”

  Her grave gray eyes blinked, and she nodded.

  Rakhal flung open the door of the elves’ workshop with a shout. The ringing of the anvils shattered into a thousand dissonances as I kicked over a workbench and half-finished Toys crashed in confusion to the floor.

  The dwarfs scattered like rabbits before our assault of destruction. I smashed tools, filigree, jewels, stamping everything with my heavy boots. I shattered glass, caught up a hammer and smashed crystals. There was a wild exhilaration to it.

  A tiny doll, proportioned like a woman, dashed toward me, shrilling in a supersonic shriek. I put my foot on her and ground the life out of her, and she screamed like a living woman as she came apart. Her blue eyes rolled from her head and lay on the floor watching me. I crushed the blue jewels under my heel.

  Rakhal swung a tiny hound by the tail. Its head shattered into debris of almost-invisible gears and wheels. I caught up a chair and wrecked a glass cabinet of parts with it, swinging furiously. A berserk madness of smashing and breaking had laid hold on me.

  I was drunk with crushing and shattering and ruining, when I heard Miellyn scream a warning and turned to see Evarin standing in the doorway. His green cat-eyes blazed with rage. Then he raised both hands in a sudden, sardonic gesture, and with a loping, inhuman glide, raced for the transmitter.

  “Rindy,” Rakhal panted, “can you block the transmitter?”

  Instead Rindy shrieked. “We’ve got to get out! The roof is falling down! The house is going to fall down on us! The roof, look at the roof!”

  I looked up, transfixed by horror. I saw a wide rift open, saw the skylight shatter and break, and daylight pouring through the cracking walls, Rakhal snatched Rindy up, protecting her from the falling debris with his head and shoulders. I grabbed Miellyn round the waist and we ran for the rift in the buckling wall.

  We shoved through just before the roof caved in and the walls collapsed, and we found ourselves standing on a bare grassy hillside, looking down in shock and horror as below us, section after section of what had been apparently bare hill and rock caved in and collapsed into dusty rubble.

  Miellyn screamed hoarsely. “Run. Run, hurry!”

  I didn’t understand, but I ran. I ran, my sides aching, blood streaming from the forgotten flesh-wound in my side. Miellyn raced beside me and Rakhal stumbled along, carrying Rindy.

  Then the shock of a great explosion rocked the ground, hurling me down full length, Miellyn falling on top of me. Rakhal went down on his knees. Rindy was crying loudly. When I could see straight again, I looked down at the hillside.

  There was nothing left of Evarin’s hideaway or the Mastershrine of Nebran except a great, gaping hole, still oozing smoke and thick black dust. Miellyn said aloud, dazed, “So that’s what he was going to do!”

  It fitted the peculiar nonhuman logic of the Toymaker. He’d covered the traces.

  “Destroyed!” Rakhal raged. “All destroyed! The workrooms, the science of the Toys, the matter transmitter—the minute we find it, it’s destroyed!” He beat his fists furiously. “Our one chance to learn—“

  ”We were lucky to get out alive,” said Miellyn quietly. “Where on the planet are we, I wonder?”

  I looked down the hillside, and stared in amazement. Spread out on the hillside below us lay the Kharsa, topped by the white skyscraper of the HQ.

  “I’ll be damned,” I said, “right here. We’re home. Rakhal, you can go down and make your peace with the Terrans, and Juli. And you, Miellyn—“ Before the others, I could not say what I was thinking, but I put my hand on her shoulder and kept it there. She smiled, shakily, with a hint of her old mischief. “I can’t go into the Terran Zone looking like this, can I? Give me that comb again. Rakhal, give me your shirtcloak, my robes are torn.”

  “You vain, stupid female, worrying about a thing like that at a time like this!” Rakhal’s look was like murder. I put my comb in her hand, then suddenly saw something in the symbols across her breasts. Before this I had seen only the conventionalized and intricate glyph of the Toad God. But now—

  I reached out and ripped the cloth away.

  “Cargill!” she protested angrily, crimsoning, covering her bare breasts with both hands. “Is this the place? And before a child, too!”

  I hardly heard. “Look!” I exclaimed. “Rakhal, look at the symbols embroidered into the glyph of the God! You can read the old nonhuman glyphs. You did it in the city of The Lisse. Miellyn said they were the key to the transmitters! I’ll bet the formula is written out there for anyone to read!

  “Anyone, that is, who can read it! I can’t, but I’ll bet the formula equations for the transmitters are carved on every Toad God glyph on Wolf. Rakhal, it makes sense. There are two ways of hiding something. Either keep it locked away, or hide it right out in plain sight. Whoever bothers even to look at a conventionalized Toad God? There are so many billions of them....”

  He bent his head over the embroideries, and when he looked up his face was flushed. “I believe—by the chains of Sharra, I believe you have it, Race! It may take years to work out the glyphs, but I’ll do it, or die trying!” His scarred and hideous face looked almost handsome in exultation, and I grinned at him.

  “If Juli leaves enough of you, once she finds out how you maneuvered her. Look, Rindy’s fallen asleep on the grass there. Poor kid, we’d better get her down to her mother.”

  “Right.” Rakhal thrust the precious embroidery into his shirtcloak, then cradled his sleeping daughter in his arms. I watched him with a curious emotion I could not identify. It seemed to pinpoint some great change, either in Rakhal or myself. It’s not difficult to visualize one’s sister with children, but there was something, some strange incongruity in the sight of Rakhal carrying the little girl, carefully tucking her up in a fold of his cloak to keep the sharp breeze off her face.

  Miellyn was limping in her thin sandals, and she shivered. I asked, “Cold?”

  “No, but—I don’t believe Evarin is dead, I’m afraid he got away.”

  For a minute the thought dimmed the luster of the morning. Then I shrugged. “He’s probably buried in that big hole up there.” But I knew I would never be sure.

  We walked abreast, my arm around the weary, stumbling woman, and Rakhal said softly at last, “Like old times.”

  It wasn’t old times, I knew. He would know it too, once his exultation sobered. I had outgrown my love for intrigue, and I had the feeling this was Rakhal’s last adventure. It was going to take him, as he said, years to work out the equations for the transmitter. And I had a feeling my own solid, ordinary desk was going to look good to me in the morning.

  But I knew now that I’d never run away from Wolf again. It was my own beloved sun that was rising. My sister was waiting for me down below, and I was bringing back her child. My best friend was walking at my side. What more could a man want?

  If the memory of dark, poison-berry eyes was to haunt me in nightmares, they did not come into the waking world. I looked at Miellyn, took her slender unmanacled hand in mine, and smiled as we walked through the gates of the city. Now, after all my years on Wolf, I understood the desire to keep their women under lock and key that was its ancient custom. I vowed to myself as we went that I should waste no time finding a fetter shop and having forged therein t
he perfect steel chains that should bind my love’s wrists to my key forever.

  Black & White

  this has been an old story since Cain killed Abel,” the man said quietly. “Brother against brother, city against city, nation against nation. But at least it will never be old-again.”

  “Never again,” the woman repeated, “at least, not on Earth.”

  “Not on Earth.”

  In the ruin of what had been—when cities still were dignified by names—lower Harlem, a man and a woman were sitting in the only building left intact on The Day. It had once been a beer-hall. The walls were still gaudy with lascivious poses of women that no longer had meaning, and the glass over the bar had been so thoroughly shattered that even now neither the man nor the woman dared cross the floor barefoot; the splintered glass from long-gone bottles was still working in fragments out of the wood floor.

  They-had been living there for three months—since they had found each other and realized they were the last man and woman in New York—probably, on the North American continent—almost certainly, in the world.

  “All the Adam-and-Eve stories I ever read—” the woman said, with a hard little” laugh. “Never thought I’d end up as the protagonist of one, It’s ludicrous.”

  “Easy now!” The man’s voice was soothing. He caught the edge of hysteria, easier to abort than to stop after it got going. “You’re not.”

  “No,” her voice brooded now; “I’m not.”

  “Kathy,” he said gently, “have you heard the old saying, I wouldn’t marry her if she was the last woman in the world?”

  “Oh, Jeff—”

  “For the love of God!” the man exploded, and stood up, the muscles running in ridges under the dark skin of his jaw. “Kathy, don’t say it! For the love of God! Hand me a mirror, if you can find one in this empty rathole! But don’t say it!”

  Then he spoke with a bitterness so deep that he himself did not recognize it as bitter. “Kathy, I’d leave here ten morrow—except I’d be so lonely I’d shoot myself.”

  “So would I.”

  “But you’ve got to use your head, Kathy. I thought this was permanently settled. I thought our ancestors settled it for us about three hundred years ago. And—we’re both reasonably civilized. It’s a good thing, or I’d—” he broke off unclenched his fists and made himself lounge in a chair again.

  “Is it really such a good thing?” Kathy asked softly. The garish red lights over the bar—somehow unbroken, the power plant out here hadn’t run down yet—gave a lustre to her fair hair as she leaned forward and looked at him. The man saw the play of the red light on her blonde hair—cut short like his—and briefly shut his eyes.

  “AH I know is—we’re both the products of our respective civilizations, Kathy. Good or bad—I don’t know. Who cares? Girl, go to bed! It’s after midnight, and I thought we promised each other we weren’t going to hash this over any more!”

  The girl nodded. “I’m sorry.” She rose, shading her eyes. “Jeff, tomorrow let’s see if we can’t find some other light bulbs somewhere. These red things are going to drive me nuts!”

  He laughed. “Talk about needles and haystacks! New York of the bright lights and I have to look for a light-bulb. Okay, Kathy, I’ll find one if I have to shinny up a light pole.”

  “Good night, Jeff.”

  “Night, Kathy.”

  The man sat quite still until he heard the Yale lock snap shut on the inside of the door; an old sign—this had once been a wellknown night club-said NO STAGS, PLEASE. Jeff slid something out of his pocket and sat looking at it. It was a key, the key that belonged to the Yale lock.

  He opened the street door and went out. The hunks of jammed cars, partially smashed, still blocked the sidewalks, and many of the light-poles were down, but here and there a solitary street lamp would burn until some day the power went off at the central station. One, near the corner, spilled a puddle of brilliance into the shadows of broken concrete and brickwork. Slinking figures a foot long made eerie shadows around the old bones that lay in the street. The man barely glanced their way. Once they had made him so sick that he could not walk in a street where they lay. Now he kicked them carelessly aside. Deconditioning, he thought. Too many of the dead to worry about them.

  Could other taboos go the same way?

  Grass would come back some day and cover the bones. He wouldn’t live to see it. Grass, in Harlem!

  He still held the key in his hand. Did Kathy know he had it? Two weeks ago, she had told him that she had lost it, but since she could lock the door on the inside with a turn of her wrist, he hadn’t worried—until he found the key, the next day, lying almost in plain sight by the bar. Had she lost it—on purpose?

  Jeff scowled. What if she had? They’d have it to live with for the rest of their lives.

  Their children would never know or care. . . .

  “Oh, Jesus,” the man .muttered, and put his face in his hands, almost a childhood reflex. “Oh sweet Jesus . . .”

  The new awareness of Kathy was almost that; a crucifixion. Kathy’s face swam before his eyes. He did not think it was a pretty face. He never had. A fair-haired, blue-eyed woman, an object forbidden, forever taboo, beyond desire. Doubly taboo, doubly beyond desire.

  He scrambled to the summit of a pile of smashed concrete and looked down at the river. The water was clean, now, freed of the dead fish that Had clogged it for a month. The river, like the city, had its own scavengers that ate the corruption away.

  A question of sin? But is there a clean-cut question of sin in these days? Morality used to be a matter of black or white, right or wrong, not all shades of—of brown, he said with his teeth clenched. He fished in his pocket for the key and sent it flying in. a high arch far out over the waters. He didn’t even hear the tiny splash.

  “Well, that’s that,” he said aloud. “Clear cut. Black or white.”

  That was that, even before Kathy and I talked it over that one time. You know that, Father.

  Father, lead us not into temptation . . . Oh my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended thee . . . and I detest all my sins ...

  He put his hands to his temples, feeling the black crisped

  hair there. Who are you trying to kid—Father? He turned and walked back to their home. He spread his blankets, shucked shirt and pants. Under his pillow lay a curious white object Kathy had never seen. It was the one thing he concealed from her since they had come to share joint loneliness. He held it musingly a minute.

  Did it mean anything now? You’ve lost everything else that goes with it.

  Be honest now. Did it ever mean anything? It couldn’t prevent this from happening—this, the end of the world!

  He glanced up at the fragment of unbroken mirror over the bar and in a sudden rage raised his hand to shatter it. It only accentuated the difference between himself and Kathy. Then he stayed his hand. Mirrors meant a lot to a woman.

  His own face looked grimly back at him. Neither handsome nor ugly to his eyes. Just an ordinary, brown-skinned face, the face of a Negro man about thirty years old. He swallowed, then did a curious thing. He raised the white thing in his hand and started to put it around his neck—then crumpled it furiously in his fist. He started to throw it away, then thrust the Roman collar back beneath the pillow. Father Thomas Jefferson Brown, a priest without a parish, glared at his own image, turned suddenly away from the mirror, laughed softly, crawled into his blankets and went to sleep.

  Jeff said, “Maybe it would have been easier on you if you’d been brought up in the south, Kathy. You wouldn’t even have been thinking this way.”

  Kathy smiled and shook her head. “It wouldn’t have changed much. Be honest, Jeff. What you’re really thinking is—the human race isn’t worth much, if it can end this way.”

  He laughed out loud. “At least it’s not worth starting the whole bloody mess all over again,” he said.

  She spoke with a seriousness rare for her. “Did it ever occur to you, Jeff,
that it might have been meant—our finding each other, from such a distance apart?”

  He chuckled grimly. “Like Lot and his daughters, you mean? Frankly, no.”

  She rarely spoke of the thing which was so much in the forefront of their minds that it was almost never on their tongues. But now she said “It’s rather terrible, in a way. It took a cataclysm to make me realize that the problem even existed. If you’d ever asked me, I’d have said that civilization was just a veneer—take a man, and a woman, right out of society, and they’ll revert to primitive man, and primitive woman.”

  Against thy last temptations, O Father ...

  Should I tell her I was a priest? No. She wasn’t a Catholic, she made that clear. And, with all my apologies, dear Lord, I’m not going to fight for one last soul. You made your clean sweep of the fields, and left no gleanings in the corners, and I’m not going to try to convert her. But I’m not going to tell her and let her try to make me override my vows either. A priest forever. If you wanted Adam and Eve, Lord, you should have picked a couple of other people. I don’t mind letting her think it’s because I’m colored and she’s white, but I’m not going to have her call me a fool because with the world ending I count on the next one more than this. Amen.

  After a stretched silence he said “Aren’t you getting tired of canned foods? I am. Let’s take the boat and go across the river. There are plenty of wild rabbits—well shoot a few for supper. It will be a welcome change.”

  The breeze over the lower Hudson blew, with a clean freshness, down from the hills. They were both hardened now to the sight of the ruined city, but Jeff found himself toying, again, with the notion of striking upriver again. The few things they had—lights, a few caches of food and clothing-could be weighed against the immense good of not having to look at the ruins every time they moved.

  Then he laughed, shortly. Only the memory of what the last civilization had done to itself, kept his resolve firm. . . .

  Above the city, grass was beginning to grow down to the water’s edge, and rabbits hopped on the overgrown fields without shyness. “Look how tame they are!” Kathy said in wonder. She had been loading her pistol; now she dropped it back into her windbreaker.