Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  “I’ll come back,” he thought grimly. And then he remembered that if he did come back it meant the end of Carcasilla and Evaya’s death. So he stopped thinking at all, and gave himself up to watching the violet circle of light that was Carcasilla’s open gateway grow larger and larger up the tunnel before them.

  They were stumbling over the broken pavement toward it, beyond the sweep of the air-flow, when Alan was briefly aware of a sudden rocking of the world around him. Values shifted imponderably; he was not himself any more, and these men beside him—these tiny, nameless creatures . . . He must have made some hoarse, inarticulate sound, for Sir Colin’s hands were suddenly heavy on his shoulders.

  “Alan! Laddie! Wake up!”

  Everything turned right side up again with a sickening dizziness. In the dimness Alan blinked at the scientist.

  “You’re all right now, aren’t ye, laddie? Answer me!”

  “Yeah,” Alan muttered, his tongue feeling numb. “It—caught me by surprise. Gone now. I—” He glanced back along the tunnel. Nothing . . . Or was that a flicker of light, far away, almost invisible? Light that was somehow darkness, dark that blazed with supernal brilliance? It was gone as he looked. “I can fight it,” he said. “Don’t worry. We know I can throw it off if you help me. But for God’s sake let’s hurry!”

  And so, with Sir Colin on one side gripping his arm, and Mike on the other breathing heavily and fingering his gun as he shot ugly glances sidewise, Alan came back into Carcasilla.

  The bubble palaces, the flying avenues still hung like colored clouds in the air, but they were empty and silent now. It was strangely like homecoming to Alan Drake. He knew each spiraling ramp so well, each cluster of floating globes. And nostalgia struck him hard with a double impact—once for the lost Evaya with whom he had walked these airy ways, and once for the ruin he must visit upon this lovely city if he succeeded in his mission here.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Food for the Light-Wearer

  DIRECTLY before them loomed the great statue of the Light-Wearer, enigmatic, robed in blinding brilliance. One thing that he saw beyond it brought a cold thrill of foreboding. A soaring crystal bridge that spanned an arch above the statue was shattered halfway across its curve, as though the hammer of Thor had smashed ruthlessly down on Bifrost. Sir Colin’s gunfire! That was it! The bullet or the concussion must have shattered that vibrant arch.

  Silence brimmed Carcasilla like a cup. Before them through the bubble domes the violet fire of the fountain rose in cool brilliance toward the mists of the cavern roof. And under the fountain—power. Power to drive back the Enemy and save the last indomitable remnants of civilized mankind!

  “What’s that over there?” Sir Colin asked in a puzzled voice. “Flande’s tower, but—”

  Alan knew where to look for that pinnacle of running rain poised incredibly on its spiral of stairs like waterfalls. He squinted through the clustering domes.

  The tower was not there. A cone of light flamed in its place. Lambent radiance like moonlight.

  “The gateway when we first entered Carcasilla,” Sir Colin rumbled. “Remember?”

  Alan had a brief, poignant recollection of Evaya’s slim Artemis body silhouetted against the golden disc that had shut out the following Alien.

  “It can’t pass those shields of light,” he said aloud. “Flande’s built himself a barrier somehow, out of the same stuff.”

  Sir Colin jerked his head in agreement. “Guid enough. As long as he’s shut up there he won’t be troubling us. Now the fountain—is this the shortest way, laddie?”

  “That green street, I think, between the purple globes. Here, I’ll show you.”

  They went up the winding avenue in a silence so deep that their footsteps sounded abnormally loud. Instinct made them keep their voices hushed as they wound along through the airy labyrinths aglow with delicate color. And the color, curiously, seemed to vibrate until Alan’s eyes could scarcely make out the way. What he could see looked wrong.

  Mike said, “We’re taking a hell of a long time to get there, seems to me,” and shot a wary glance across his shoulder. All of them had been doing that. Alan muttered some reassurance that did not sound very confident even to himself as he led them up an undulating boulevard through rings of floating spheres. Behind him, formless and intangible, he could feel the shadow of menace shaping itself like fog rolling together.

  The blinding vibration of color clouded his eyes. They were striding faster now up the undulant street, almost running.

  Vision suddenly cleared before Alan’s eyes. At their feet the city dropped away, spread out below Flande’s tower! He stood with Mike and Sir Colin at the foot of that cone of light which veiled the tower of rain. But he knew he had been leading them straight toward the fountain . . .

  Low laughter shook through their minds. Flande’s laughter. Words were forming there, but before Flande could shape an intelligible thought in their brains, Mike choked on a shout and flung up a pointing arm. Alan turned to look.

  The image of the Light-Wearer still blazed against the opened Gateway. But something was wrong. There were two figures now—and one of them was no statue!

  Blinding in its darkness and its light, tall as the fountain itself—the Alien stood in the threshold of Carcasilla.

  THEN it leaned forward and leaped toward them with gigantic strides. It moved with such dazzling speed that Alan could not even try to focus its inhuman image. A paralysis of terror held them motionless on the platform. Nearer it came, and nearer, covering incredible distances with each soaring stride.

  And then like a shroud dropping noiselessly around them, a dark curtain shut out Carcasilla.

  In the sightless blackness Sir Colin’s voice said levelly, “It’s Flande, I think. He’s saved us—for the moment. Wait.” The scrape of flint-and-wheel sounded, and a wavering point of fire sprang into life on the Terasi device he carried. In its yellow flare they could see what looked like a wall of water rushing soundlessly down just before them—the surface of Flande’s tower. Alan found his voice, surprised that it was steady.

  “That’s it, all right. It can’t get at us now.”

  “You’re sure?” Mike Smith’s voice shook. It was infinitely harder for him to admit defeat than for the others. His tough integrity was crumbling almost before their eyes.

  Alan turned toward the wall of rain, and said, “Flande. Flande!”

  In response a luminous slit began to glow in the wall. The veils of water parted and the cat’s-pupil opening expanded slowly. Light shone out through a swirl of rainbow mists, dissipating the dark in which they stood.

  Then Flande’s face, immense, god-like, hung suspended in the great oval. Through his endless vistas of memory Flande looked out at them again, young-old, immortal, infinitely weary. And yet Alan thought he sensed a change. Beneath that passionless coldness pulsed something new, something vital, like . . . Alan thought: Fear. It’s fear.

  Within their minds Flande’s telepathic voice rustled like leaves in a soft wind.

  “The Light-Wearer cannot break through. You are safe here.”

  “You—saved us?” Alan asked incredulously. “But—”

  Mike broke in. “How the hell did you get us here, anyway?” His voice was belligerent. Flande had humiliated Mike once before, and the memory of it thickened his anger now.

  Flande’s remote, impersonal gaze touched the gunman.

  “Hypnotics, of course, fool.”

  “Of course,” Sir Colin echoed, tilting his head back until the red beard jutted as he looked into Flande’s face searchingly. “The question is—why? Ye weren’t so friendly the last time we met.”

  “It is for me to question—not you,” Flande told him austerely. “Answer this—has the Light-Wearer fed yet?”

  A broad grin cracked Sir Colin’s bearded face.

  “Och, that tears it!” he said. “So that’s why ye saved us, eh? So we wouldn’t be food for the Alien? Yes, I’m beginning to under
stand. The Alien can’t harm the Carcasillians, but he can harm you, or you’d not protect yourself like this. Ye’ve been hiding here.”

  Alan half expected the flaming sword of radiance to flash, but it did not come. Flande looked down in quiet silence. After a long while he said, “All that is true enough. But we are both food for the Light-Wearer, and you will do well to treat me with respect.”

  “Is it still there?”

  Flande paused, his eyes going unfocused with a look of inward searching. Then: “No. It is leaving now. It goes back along the Way. It knows it cannot penetrate this veil . . .”

  HIS voice in their minds trailed off.

  And then he shot a sudden question at them with the impact of a shout: “Why did you come back?”

  “To ask your help,” Sir Colin answered, quickly and smoothly. “To join forces in fighting the Alien.”

  “You lie,” Flande said in a cold voice. “When you lie, I know it. Furthermore, the Light-Wearer cannot be destroyed. Surely you realize that.”

  “You’re wrong,” Sir Colin flashed back, as though he were correcting a recalcitrant student. “The basic laws of physics and biology must apply to everything on this planet, and life, being. energy, is subject at least to entropy—by which I mean the Alien cannot be invulnerable. It fears sound, anyway.”

  “You hope to conquer it with noise?” Flande’s voice was contemptuous.

  “We’ve held it at bay with noise, at any rate.”

  Flande’s brows lifted. “Indeed? Tell me about it.”

  Sir Colin hesitated. “No harm in that,” he said at last. “If we’re to join forces I suppose ye’ll have to know what’s happened. Here it is.”

  Quickly and concisely he recounted what had been taking place in the cavern of the Terasi. When Sir Colin had finished Flande’s face hung motionless, the lids lowered. Then with surprising suddenness the lids rose and a furious blaze of anger lighted the eyes beneath.

  “So!” Flande’s voice burned in their minds. “You will lie to me, will you? Stupid human fools! Did you think I was not aware that you were heading toward the fountain when you re-entered Carcasilla? All I needed was the knowledge of where you’d been—and now I know. You come from the cavern of the great machines, useless for want of power. You come back to the only source of power left along the Way of the Gods. You even carry a box of lead. Do you think I need ask why?”

  Sir Colin shrugged as the thunderous anger beat away to silence in their brains.

  “So now ye know. What next?”

  Cool detachment dropped once more over Flande’s angry face. The lids drooped.

  “I need not gamble. Here in my tower

  I can wait until the Light-Wearer starves.”

  Alan gave a harsh bark of laughter. “You’ll have a long wait. It’ll reach the Terasi soon, and there are nearly a hundred of them.”

  “No matter. I can sleep. When I waken it will be another century, and the Light-Wearer will be dead.”

  “Maybe,” Alan said. “Maybe not. You won’t be able to get to the fountain. Without that you’ll die.”

  “No, I shall be in catalepsy; my body will need no fuel. By the time I waken only the Carcasillians will be left alive.”

  “Your shield here—won’t that fail if you go into catalepsy?” Sir Colin asked.

  “My shield is the power of the mind,” Flande said, with a touch of pride. “As for you—”

  “Yes, what about us?” Mike Smith’s voice was rough with tension.

  “You must stay too,” Flande went on as if Mike had not spoken. “Stay and die, I suppose. If I let you free, you might find some way to rob the fountain. And certainly you would go to feed the Light-Wearer, and thus postpone still further the hour of my awakening. No, you must stay. But your death will be easy. I shall put my sleep upon you.”

  A ribbon of silver fire flashed out above them. It coiled like a snake, winding into a net of intricate fiery patterns. They glowed on Alan’s retina, burning deeper and deeper, into his very brain. He could not wrench his gaze away.

  Sir Colin whispered hoarsely, “Hypnotism! Dinna look at it, Alan—Mike—” The ribbon of fire coiled on. Mike’s breathing grew thick and choked. There was no other sound. Sir Colin’s hands fell away . . .

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  A God of Flesh

  THERE was nothing in the world but that serpentine silvery ribbon, writhing into shapes of arabesque brilliance. Symbols—words in no known language. Alan could almost read their meaning. But not quite. It was the language of dream.

  Hot agony seared his shoulder. With slow reluctance he retraced the steps back toward consciousness. The burning pain was relentless. It dragged him back. And now he could move again. His gaze jerked downward to the taper lying at his feet, its wick fading into a coal. Its burning had broken the spell.

  When he looked up again the silver ribbon was gone. And except for that dying coal the darkness around him was complete. Flande had closed his door, retreated into the slumber that would last a hundred years.

  He heard hoarse breathing at his feet. He stooped. Mike and Sir Colin lay motionless in the grip of hypnotic sleep that would end only in the deeper sleep of death. He shook them hopelessly.

  Alan straightened in the darkness, facing the unseen wall through which Flande’s passionless face had pronounced doom upon the race of man. If he could waken Flande, perhaps the barrier around the tower might fail. And if the Light-Wearer swooped through to devour them all—well, the Light-Wearer was winning anyhow, and even that was preferable to death without hope.

  How had Evaya summoned Flande, long ago? Alan stepped forward in the darkness, arms outstretched. Three steps, and then the cool surface of the wall met his hands. He pressed. Nothing happened. He shifted his hands and pressed again. Still nothing. Did it work only when Flande willed it? He moved his hands once more.

  A tiny slit of light glowed in the dark, spindle-shaped, expanding like a cat’s pupil. Rainbow mists were curdled beyond it. And beyond them hung the face of Flande, immense, immortal, eyes closed in a slumber like death.

  Alan’s full-lidded eyes had narrowed to shining slits. There might be sorcery inside this tower—but death was coming to meet it.

  He stepped through the colored mists and into Flande’s doorway.

  The great face still hung before him, its eyes asleep. But the force of gravity had shifted strangely. He thought the floor was no longer underfoot, that he was dropping faster and faster toward that silent, enigmatic, gigantic face hanging in the gray air. The mists, he saw without surprise, were gray too now, and thick between him and Flande. And drowsiness was mounting about him as though he breasted a rising tide. The sands of sleep, too light to fall, hung in suspension in Flande’s tower.

  He stood at the threshold of the Face. It loomed like a cliff above him. He struggled forward, heavy-limbed, against the tide of sleep—and stepped through the illusion of the face.

  Beyond it was grayness again, and sleep that beat at him with great, soft, stunning blows—like bludgeons of cloud . . . Another step forward, and another—remembering Evaya—

  There was no face. Perhaps there was no Flande? There was nothing at all but sleep.

  His knee struck something resilient and soft. Moving in a dream, he leaned over, and with an incredible precision that could happen only in dreams, found his hands fitting themselves about a throat.

  The hands tightened.

  VIOLET light pouring down around him wakened Alan from a dream in which he knelt with one knee upon a yielding couch and strangled a being who lay there. The mists of sleep were fading from his brain. He blinked. He stood in a great peaked tent of rain. Its soundless torrents poured down all around him along the walls, translucent, with the violet. day of Carcasilla glowing through.

  Then the barrier was gone!

  He looked down. And he knew it was no dream. This was Flande’s face purpling upon the couch, the same face that had hung in gigantic illusion in the doorw
ay. But a man’s face, a man’s, perfect, deathly white body stretched upon the couch. Flande’s eyes looked up into his, wide, shocked into wakefulness, still veiled a little behind the memories of infinite time. But the layers of withdrawal were fading swiftly now, as ice cracks and melts, and Flande was lost no longer in the memories of his thousand years. It was no god whose throat Alan gripped—but a strangling man.

  Flande’s face was blackening with congested blood, red veins lacing the whites of his starting eyes. He would be dead in another second unless—

  Alan let him drop back on his cushions. Flande lay still for a moment, coughing and choking, pawing his throat with soft, pale hands. He was, Alan saw now, neither Carcasillian nor Terasi. Perhaps his race had died milleniums ago in some little world along the Way of the Gods. His body was symmetrical as a Belvedere—but soft, incredibly soft. Alan thought he knew why. A thousand years of inactivity, of stasis—Flande’s muscles must have changed to water!

  A sound beyond made him turn. The curtains of rain still swayed apart to show Carcasilla through the opening. Sir Colin was clambering in now, a little dizzily. Behind him peered Mike Smith.

  “The Alien?” Alan asked swiftly.

  Sir Colin shook his head. His voice was thick. “I looked. Nothing—yet.”

  Alan told him what had happened, watching his keen little eyes rake the interior of the tower even as he listened. Wakefulness was making his bearded face alert again by the time Alan had finished.

  “So—” murmured Sir Colin, with a sharp glance at the still coughing Flande. “He’s no such a god now, eh? And this place of his empty. I wonder . . .” He moved across a floor like still, depthless water, to examine the farther wall. Mike followed him uneasily.