“Hello, Barlen,” the red-haired man said. “Is this Court?”
“It’s Court, yes. I’m sorry, but the Throne’s waiting.”
“I’ll take him there.”
“Go to the devil, Hardony,” Barlen said. “Run your sneaking spy-system and let me handle these matters.”
Hardony’s hand stopped moving across his hair. “It’s my job too, you know.”
“It’s military tactics, not espionage. Come on, Court.”
From somewhere a woman’s voice spoke angrily.
“Stop quarreling and send Court up here! I want to see him. Barlen! Hardony! Send him alone.”
Both men bowed to the wall high in the wall. Barlen waved Court forward.
“Follow the ramp,” he said, and grinned. “Don’t be nervous. There’s nothing to worry about.”
Court grimaced and turned to the incline. He walked up the spiral slowly, conscious that the two men below were watching him, red-hair and yellow-beard. So the Throne was a woman. More rose-and-pearl hokum. Smiling crookedly, Court touched the white hair at his temples. Well, he was no Prince Charming.
The Crystal door opened. He stepped through into a bubble of darkness.
There were dim lights, but they paled against the spectacle of Valyra spread around and below. This was, he saw, the highest point of the palace on its mountain-top, and it was a room walled and roofed with material as transparent as glass.
Behind him the door clicked shut.
“I don’t know the rules,” Court said. His voice was harsh. “Do I bow, or just fall flat on my face?”
“Your dialect is that of a savage,” a voice answered. “You act like one, too. Perhaps, though I am too critical. You have been asleep for a long time. Wait.”
Slowly a blue glimmer pulsed and grew, faded to pale rose, and spread out into a cool, quiet radiance that filled the room. The city, spread below, lost its colored vividness, and became ghostly, while the chamber became distinct.
It was huge, so great that it was spacious despite the richness of its furnishings. Fragile delicacy of sculptures and curious mobile art-forms contrasted with the massive solidness of heavy tables. Immense carved cabinets, and marble railings could be seen.
Yet the room was a unit. There was no discordant note. Walls and roof were the transparent glass dome. The floor was divided into sectors of shifting tints that faded and wavered and flamed up as Court watched.
Facing him. a few feet, away, was a girl—a very beautiful girl—with red-gold hair and intent blue eyes. She was wearing the briefest of garments. Its dull silver revealed the slim perfection of her body. Except for the richness of her garments, nothing showed her rank.
She settled herself on a divan. Her gaze measured him.
“I’ve seen you asleep,” she said. “That was different. You’re awake now.”
COURT stared at her, a dull irritation rising within him, though he could not have told why. Slowly her red lips curved into a smile of curiously gentle sweetness. The glamour and strangeness were gone. She was only a girl now, human, approachable, not the ruler of an alien civilization.
“My name’s Irelle. I know yours. If you feel able, we’ll talk.” She smiled. “You may sit down, if you wish.”
“Sure.” Court seated himself near her. “Sure, lets talk.”
“How do you feel?”
He hesitated. “Healthy enough. But I’m not comfortable.”
The blue eyes held a touch of pity. “Kassel told me what to expect. You can’t remember much, of course. You went to sleep—oh, long ago—and suddenly you find yourself in a new world. I know, Court. It’s not easy for you.”
Her sympathy loosened his tongue. “No, it’s tough. I’ve read stories about such things, but they were fiction. They couldn’t happen. Only it has happened. All this doesn’t really amaze me. We had science in our day. Anti-gravity’s nothing miraculous. The miracle is that I haven’t changed.”
That was it, he knew. He didn’t fit. He was keyed to a different pitch, the world of 1945. This new era, with its rose-pink cities and social culture of which he knew nothing, made him feel helpless and resentful. Long ago his life had been aimed at the goals and ideals of the Twentieth Century. Now those ideals were gone. They were without purpose or meaning. The foundation like those ancient cities where he had lived, had become dust.
Here was a new and alien structure, a civilization grown from a root he bad never known.
Irelle seemed to understand something of this. “You will change, of course. I’m no psychologist, but I can put myself in your place. You don’t even know what you want now. Isn’t that true?”
Court ran his fingers over a cushioned surface that hummed and vibrated under his touch. He drew his hand back quickly, meeting Irelle’s eyes.
“Something like that.”
“And you’re suspicious. There’s so much you don’t comprehend that you resent it. But that isn’t necessary, Court. Especially for you.” She watched him. He could sense the interest in her regard.
“Am I to be put on exhibit? Or do I lecture in some university—if there are universities?” But there must be, he thought, or there would have been no word for it in the language. Still, they might be far different from the old Yale or U.S.C.
Irelle touched a mobile object and watched the plastic curves glide and swing into motion, till it resembled a dizzying waterfall. “This. It’s meaningless till it’s moved. Then it shows its purpose. You, Court—once you begin moving, with a plan—will be like that.”
“What plan?”
“I wish Tor Kassel were here,” she sighed. “He knows far more than I of the mysteries of the mind. Barlen and Hardony are fine strategists, but the subtleties are beyond them. Our aircars couldn’t find your attacker. Barlen’s car was located adrift. Kassel was gone; I suppose they captured him. They want information—”
“Who?”
“Listen,” she said, a new light in her eyes. “This is something you’ll understand easily, I think. You were a soldier, weren’t you?
Well, there are no soldiers now.”
Court looked at her. “There’s no war?”
“Not yet,” Irelle said sombrely. “But it will come soon. When it comes, we’ll be helpless. You saw what their spies can do—the Deccans. They knew, somehow, of your existence, and they wanted to capture or destroy you. Barlen saved you from that. He’ll fight to defend Lyra. But without weapons, he can’t do much. Nor can Hardony, though his espionage corps is well organized.”
“Without weapons?” Court asked. “Why haven’t you any weapons?”
“Kassel could have explained it better,” she said. “Still, I’ll try.” She took a deep breath. “We cannot make weapons, defensive or offensive. I mean we cannot. Our—our minds refuse to conceive of such ideas. We have scientists. One of our technicians discovered anti-gravity years ago. But there is something deep in our minds—our souls—that locks the door of knowledge. We are creative, but we cannot create a weapon.”
“I don’t get the idea,” Court said. “Even I can see how anti-gravity could be turned into a mighty good weapon.”
Irelle’s lips parted as she leaned forward. “You were a soldier, Court. But we are the children of destruction. It is, Kassel said, a hereditary conditioned reflex. Or something that grew from a seed in our minds, long before our history began, when the world ended—after your time, and long, long before mine. There is a legend of a Tree in a Garden, and the fruit of that tree was war.”
Her face darkened.
Court felt a small, horrible chill crawl down his spine. He sensed now, as never before, that a dreadful strangeness lay hidden behind the loveliness of the rose-pearl city. The ominous drumbeat of the past, like iron seas, boomed far underground.
City of enchantment—it was builded on what bloody dust?
“There is a legend,” Irelle said, her voice a whisper. “God placed man in a garden, and said. ‘Of the fruit of that tree you shall not eat.�
�� But man disobeyed. And there was war. Then God said, ‘Lest you perish utterly, I will give you forgetfulness.”
“And He reached into the minds of men, and, where He touched—something died.”
CHAPTER IV
An Offer Is Made
REALIZATION hit him with shocking impact I’m in the future, he thought. It was one word, familiar enough—something he had, until now, taken for granted simply because he had not faced it squarely. He knew the answer now. A remnant of the sheltering blue sea had remained. Lyra, the city Valyra, the aircars, the alien environment, he had accepted, watching the scene from the viewpoint of a spectator.
But now he knew that he wasn’t a spectator. That was the essence of the shock. As long as he remained outside of this fantastic circle of living, he was still safe. It wasn’t quite true. Subconsciously the feeling remained that he could dismiss this new I world by waking up.
Irelle’s dimly-lighted face, human and lovely, was near his own. Behind her, the rippling waterfall of the crystal mobile, had t faded, into a dull glow. Beyond that, the i great sweep of the dome-wall, and the rose-pearl glow of Valyra, where men and women lived, reared families, ate and bathed, shimmered on.
Under his breast-bone was a dry, a painful ache. He knew what it was. He wanted to go home. He wanted to see the cities he had fought to save, and which he had lived too long over to see again. No death could have been completer than this.
But New York was gone. Chicago was gone. Little lakes in Wisconsin, where fish leaped in the sunlight, the white ribbons of highways cleanly revealed in the shafts of “headlights, the movement and turmoil of hotel lobbies—all had vanished. There had been an—amputation. Time had cut cleanly. But men still feel pain in amputated legs.
He thought, I was going back. After the war, I was going back to the States. My family was there, my work, my home—things I worked for and fought for. I needn’t have worked. Or fought. It’s canceled.
Instead had come a new world. And he didn’t give a hoot about it, or about its problems.
Something had died. Well, that was that. “So you’ve told me a legend,” Court said harshly. “What’s the truth?”
Irelle settled back, an odd look of relief in her eyes.
“The truth? We don’t know. Our history goes back to the time when we were nomadic tribes, and all mankind was wandering over the face of the earth, without science, struggling just to keep alive. Before that, there was no history. Men did not think. They were too busy. And before that, the world ended. It was a war, I suppose, but such a war as is inconceivable today. Whole continents were blasted.”
She gestured. On the floor between them a picture came into view—a world-map, spheroid, slowly revolving.
“Do you recognize this, Court?”
But he could trace no familiar contours. The great land-masses of Africa and the Americas, of Eurasia and Australia had vanished. This was a new world.
“We have only the legends now,” she said. “Tales of colossal demons smashing the world with hammers of thunder and fire. In the end, not many men were left alive.”
Even in my day, Court thought, there were hammers of thunder. What war could have ended civilization? The Third World War? or the Fourth or Fifth?
New weapons! Weapons out of hell!
“It was madness,” Irelle said. “It left a few tribes wandering amid ruin that was more than ruin. Nothing survived but life. In that life remained horror and fear. When, after a long time, science began anew, men could not build weapons. They were afraid. Kassel said there was a psychic block in their minds. Men forget what they do not wish to remember. The subconscious is very powerful. So, when people tried to turn their science to weapon-making, their minds would not work in that direction. They could not do it.”
Court nodded. He had seen soldiers, shaken with battle-nerves, totally unable to remember the scenes that had shocked them. It was a protective device created by the mind. In a world almost completely destroyed by unimaginable warfare, it might have become a hereditary partial amnesia. Yes, he could understand more clearly now.
“But if there aren’t any weapons, how do these Deccans manage?”
IRELLE shook her head gently. “They have weapons,” she said. “They were always a warlike race. They have menaced us for many years. Now they plan to attack. We have our own spies, under Hardony. Listen, Court. We are peaceful people, but sometimes wars are necessary.”
“Yes,” Court said. “I know that.”
“We need weapons to protect ourselves. But we cannot conceive of those weapons. We can build them, Kassel said, but our brains cannot originate the ideas. You mentioned a weapon that could be adapted from anti-gravity. Well, never in a thousand years could we plan such a thing practically. We want your help for that.”
“An idea man,” Court said “I’m beginning to get it. But I don’t like it.”
Irelle let out her breath sharply. “I know. You don’t realize the necessity, yet Nevertheless It exists. Please, will you do this? Hold your judgment. Look at our world, and understand it. After a while, I’ll ask you again. There will be no pressure brought to bear on you. All we ask is that you look at the truth with unbiased eyes.”
Court hesitated. “I—I don’t know. I didn’t ask for anything like this.”
She stood up, holding out her hand. Court rose, and the girl led him across the great room to the transparent wall. Below, the city swept down the slope, its winding streets and skyways dissecting the sprawling, glowing masses.
“Valyra is alive,” Irelle said softly. “You’ve been dead, Court. You don’t want to waken, do you?”
It was true. He was thinking longingly of the blue sea that had cradled him for eons.
She half turned. Some indefinable perfume, subtle and sweet as spring, drifted into his nostrils.
“Have you forgotten life?” she said—and lifted her face.
He kissed her, hard and savagely at first, with a fierce resentfulness that refused to admit that this was more than a gesture. Yes, he was dead, and dead flesh does not quicken easily.
But he came back to life with Irelle’s lips on his own. Not ah of him, perhaps. Perhaps there was a part of Ethan Court that would never waken, that would always remain in the blue sea of the past.
He drew back at last, shaken. His eyes were hard. “Was that what you wanted?” he asked.
Irelle’s gaze met his steadily.
“I do not give my kisses promiscuously,” she said. “I tried to answer a question for you. Well, is it answered?”
Ethan Court stared at her. For an instant, beneath her softness, her warmth, her radiant beauty, he had detected a hint of steel. Driven to desperation, she could be hard—even ruthless and cruel. But Court was not surprised. She was a queen and queens are usually arrogant. Also, in battle, he had learned to be cruel and ruthless himself.
He looked away. “I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t know.”
“I shall never kiss you again,” she said. “Remember that After all, I am the Throne. When you decide, I will be told. Meanwhile, you are free to do as you like.”
“Suppose I say no?” he said brutally. “And I think I’ll say no? Suppose I won’t show you how to build, weapons? Will you kill me then?”
“If you decide that our position will be desperate.” She glanced out at the rose-pearl city below. “No, you will not be killed. For then I shall know that Kassel never wakened you from your long sleep. I shall know that you are dead, Court. That you died ages ago, in your old forgotten world.”
As Court went out his shoulder brushed the mobile and set it whirling in a blinding cascade of liquid brilliance.
In the days which followed Court tried to adjust himself to this new life. He’d seen fantasy films, in his own area, and he may have expected mile-high machines and sleekly perfected ribbon-roads that carried gleaming robots on their errands. But the truth was somewhat different. It had the difference of reality, which is never perfection.
&n
bsp; There were machines, but they were not a mile high, and sometimes they broke down. Sometimes they smelled of burning plastics and haywire lubrication. Court wasn’t a mechanic or a technician. He saw a great many wheels going around, and he knew that gadgets of such complexity had not existed in his own era. Nevertheless, they did not leave him stunned. They were only gadgets, after all.
THE giant Den Barlen sponsored him, and Court grew to like the brusque, intolerant military leader. Barlen had one thought—unquestioning loyalty. But there were other traits, a deep sentimentality which Court found strange. To Barlen, Lyra was something more than a country. It was a living entity. Tears would stand in his eyes as he told some old folk-story of his ancestors. There was glamour in Lyra, a strange storybook atmosphere which at times puzzled Court Certainly there was much to puzzle him.
It was an agricultural land chiefly, though there were a dozen large cities beside the capital of Valyra. There were factories, and Court inevitably found himself paying attention to such matters as fuel-sources. Atomic power was unknown, rather to his surprise. There were extremely effective liquid and compressed powdered fuels, and something of special interest to Court was the device that powered the anti-gravity.
In the aircars was a type of specialized generator, but the parachute rods held a storage charge—a battery, in effect, though electricity was not involved. The Lyrans were able to compress heavy power-charges in metal mechanisms, the strength limited only by the bulk of the container.
He found himself looking at Lyra with the eye of a strategist.
Lyra was not fortified, and would not be easy to defend. Offense, in the case of Lyra, would be the best defense. An enemy air-fleet, equipped with even Twentieth Century bombs, could reduce the land to ruin in a short time:
Demolition bombs could wreck its factories a ad homes. Fire bombs could scourge its farms and fields. It would be a “milk run”—bombs away, with no opposition.
There were no weapons—none at all. Dozens of times Court saw places ideal for anti-aircraft emplacements, for camouflaged landing fields, for rocket-era dies. But the great factories turned out the artifacts of peace, ploughshares instead of swords. Under other circumstances it would have been close to a Utopian system. No, through Lyra, rustled whispers of threat and danger, of Deccan spies searching for weaknesses, of enemies moving implacably closer.
Collected Fiction Page 457