Power from outside himself gathered in Miller’s brain, gathered and spilled over in a wave like molten flame. He felt it gush out toward the platform where Brann sat hidden. But he was blind and deaf with the crushing weight of that suddenly ponderable air.
Even above his own deafness and the shriek of the unnatural wind in the room he heard the scream of riven marble. And the weight upon him lessened a little. He could see again. He could see the great block of stone uprooted with jagged edges from the broken floor at the foot of Brann’s dais.
It seemed to tear itself free, to leap into the air of its own volition—to hurtle toward Brann’s curtains as if Brann’s castle itself had suddenly turned upon him with great jagged stone fangs. In his brain Miller could feel the tremendous, concentrated effort of Llesi’s teleportation, balancing the marble weapon and guiding it on its course.
The weight upon him ceased abruptly. The release was so sudden that the congested blood drained from Miller’s brain and for an instant the great room swam before him. In that moment of faltering the hurtling marble fragment faltered too and Llesi and Miller together struggled with the faintness of Miller’s overtaxed brain.
BRANN seized the opening that brief hesitation gave him. He could not stop the flying weapon but he could block it . . . A broken segment or the marble steps flew up in the path of the oncoming boulder, grated against it, deflected its course.
The two struck together upon the dais steps and thundered down them with a ponderous sort of deliberation, hounding from step to step, their echoes rolling from the high ceiling. They went crashing across the floor, ploughing into the divans where Brann’s court had lain watching this unexpected sight.
The screams of the watchers as the great marble blocks rolled down upon them added a frenzied accompaniment to the echoes of thunder weakened by the stone itself. The room was a tumult of sound re-echoing upon sound.
Miller felt a renewed outpouring of Llesi’s power move in his brain. He saw a gigantic marble pillar across the room stagger suddenly on its base, crack across, lean majestically outward and fall. But it did not strike the floor. Instead it hurtled headlong, jagged end first, toward the dais.
Above it the ceiling budded. There was a terrible shriek of metal upon stone as the vaulted roof gave way. But the falling debris, in turn, did not strike the floor. Deflected in a rain of shattered marble, it moved to intercept the flying pillar. Column and broken stone together crashed to the ground at the very foot of Brann’s dais.
The great hall was full of the shrieks of the scattering court, the cries of men caught beneath the falling ceiling, the uproar of echo upon, echo as Brann’s throne room collapsed in thunderous noise upon its own floor.
When the thunder ceased all who could flee had vanished. Half the ceiling lay in fragments upon the floor and Miller stood dizzily looking up at the dais whose long curtains still billowed in the wind. Brann was silent for a moment as if gathering his resources for another try. And Llesi was whispering,
“My strength is failing, Miller. I can’t keep it up much longer. I’m going to try one last thing. I’ve got to know what it is Brann’s hiding. Help me if you can—and watch!”
For an instant there was silence. Then, from far overhead, a long shudder began and rippled down the length of those vast hanging curtains which shrouded Brann’s dais. Stone groaned deeply upon stone in the ceiling.
From the hidden platform Brann shrieked a soundless, “No!” as the block from which the curtains hung tore itself free of the vault above and came crashing down to rebound from the shattering pavement.
The curtains themselves fell far more slowly. Like smoke they wavered in the air, collapsing softly, deliberately, parting to one side and the other . . .
Miller could see Brann trying to stop that fall. Invisibly the forces of his mind seemed to claw at their drifting lengths. But there was something wrong now in Brann’s mind. Even Miller could sense it.
A dissolution was taking place that the mind felt and shrank from. Something worse than hysteria, more frightening than fear itself. Llesi was suddenly intent and Orelle caught her breath.
Like smoke the last fragments of the curtains parted, lying to left and right along the broken floor, far out, in long swaths of shadow.
On the platform stood Brann . . .
The figure that had terrorized such a multitude for so long stood swaying, clutching a black cloak about it as if to hide the shape of the body beneath. The face was contorted into a terrible grimace of anger and cold grinning hate. But the face itself was one they had all seen before.
It was the face of Tsi.
Her eyes were closed. She did not look at them nor speak nor move. And, Miller thought to himself, as Brann perhaps she had never opened her eyes. As Brann perhaps that grimace of chill hale always distorted her features. For it was clear to them all now that Tsi was mad.
“Schizophrenia,” Miller thought automatically. “Split personality.” But there was no answering thought from Llesi or from Orelle. Stunned amazement held them both frozen.
Tsi turned her unseeing eyes to Orelle. In Brann’s thin, cold, high-pitched voice-pattern she said. “Now you know. Now you’ve seen Brann. But before I kill you both, tell me—Orelle, where is Tsi?”
Miller felt a cold shudder ripple over him.
CHAPTER VIII
The Consuming Fire
THE same moment he realized that Orelle and Llesi could not help him against—Brann. Their thoughts came into his mind with a stunned, incredulous tinge of astonishment, a blank bafflement that, strangely, seemed to leave them helpless. And Miller thought he knew why.
Orelle and Llesi and all their race had been conditioned to menial perfection. Never before in their history, he sensed, had there been any case of mental aberration. The race had been Loo perfect for that. And now, faced with the pattern of schizophrenic split-personality. they were utterly unable to comprehend its meaning. It was too alien to them.
Insanity had never before existed in Orelle’s race.
Miller sent a frantic message to Llesi—inchoate confused memory-pictures from his scant knowledge of psycho-therapy. But Llesi did not understand. Instead he suddenly closed his mind. And, beside Miller, Orelle, too, closed her mind against a concept so shocking to this race that worshiped mental perfection that they could not consciously face it.
The blind figure on the dais bent forward. “Orelle . . .” it said.
So Brann did not know that the other half of his mind belonged to Tsi. Naturally! Brann would not know that he was a half, an incomplete split personality. Nor would Tsi know that Brann was part of herself. What curious warp in the inherited genes had brought about this cleavage Miller never knew, but he did not think about that now. He stepped forward.
“Brann!” he called.
“So you are back.” The thought came coldly into his mind. “Well, the machine I tricked you into carrying failed to kill Llesi but I’ll remedy that soon enough. As for you . . .”
Thin mental laughter mocked Miller.
He felt sweat crawling down his forehead. “Wait,” he thought urgently. “I can tell you where Tsi Ls.”
He sensed a hesitancy and then an urgent, Straining question.
“Where? Where is she?”
“You are—”
Miller felt the mind on the dais close swiftly against the thought. Brann would not let himself listen to the truth. He could not. Brann thought. “Well? Answer me?” Troubled, uncomprehending. Orelle and Llesi waited and listened. And suddenly Miller knew the answer. He unbuckled the wrist-watch from his arm. Orelle had returned it to him, the deadly lightning-machine removed. As a timepiece it was useless but habit had made Miller keep the watch.
“Take this,” he said.
Brann—Tsi—waited.
Miller held it up. “It’s not dangerous any more. Can’t you tell that?”
“A trick. You know nothing of what I wish to know. Why should I waste time on any of you?”
<
br /> “If you want to find Tsi,” Miller thought, “you must take this thing. Unless you’re afraid to find her.”
The watch spun from his hand and shot glittering across the room. It was in Brann’s hand.
Miller drew a long breath. “Turn it over. That’s it Hold it up before your face. Yes. Now . . . open your eyes.”
“My eyes will not open.”
“Open them!”
“They have never opened.”
Tension sang through the still air. Miller felt Orelle’s sudden movement toward him. “If you open your eyes you will find Tsi.” That was the gap in the armor. That was the one thing that could pierce Brann’s insane half-mind. The blind white eyelids quivered . . . the long lashes lifted, slowly, slowly . . .
Brann’s eyes looked into the polished steel back of the watch. In that tiny mirror Brann’s eyes looked into Tsi’s!
Tsi’s eyes—wide, horrified—stared into Brann’s!
There was no protection against the mental avalanche that roared out from that rocking, screaming mind—the two minds—in the single body of Tsi. For the first time Brann saw the girl he had searched for since his strange birth. And for the first time Tsi saw her own face twisted, distorted, into the grimace of chilly hatred that was irrevocably stamped on Brann’s features.
But what Miller felt was—pity. It was the basic principle of mental therapy—making the patient face his problem squarely. But no ordinary human schizophrenic had ever thus had the curtains of his brain ripped away with such sudden violence. The normal human brain has automatic safeguards against such intrusion.
Tsi was of another race—a race mentally developed to a tremendously high standard. She had been warped before birth though the madness had remained latent for a long time—but her mind was nevertheless powerful enough to be able to face the shocking incredible truth.
SHE had never been evil, as was Brann—weak, yes, but incapable of that cold cruelty her alter ego loved.
Face to face, for a thunderous, eternity-long instant, the two stood—good and evil mated, monstrously wedded in one body and one brain. The silence roared.
Then the hand that held the mirror dropped. The face of Tsi swung round so that her mad, wild, terrified eyes met Miller’s—and he read destruction there. The double mind looked out of those eyes into his and for an instant it was as if both Tsi and Brann spoke to him—as he had first heard them speaking when he woke in this incredible world.
But then they had not known the truth. It had been a split mind talking to itself, good and evil debating together and not guessing they were housed in a single brain. Now they knew. At some point in the past the evil inherent in Tsi had lost its battle with the good in her—and pulled free of the control of her conscious mind. It had called itself by a new name, given itself a masculine Identity to disguise its origin still further, grown so strong that not even Tsi could control it any longer.
Brann was abhorrent to Tsi. And to Brann the knowledge that Tsi was himself was a thing he could not face. The split mind, rocking on its foundation, reached out into Miller’s mind with a mad destructive violence.
“You brought ruin on me!” cried the double voice. “You wrecked my castle and my life! You must die and all your kind with you!”
The eyes caught Miller’s in a drowning stare. He could not look away, and the eyes were growing larger and larger, engulfing him in darkness and in the darkness the madness of two minds swirled terribly, carrying away his own sanity on those dreadful, reasonless vortices . . .
Miller could no longer see Orelle but he heard her moan, a soft whimper of helpless terror. “I can’t—help you,” she was saying from far away. “I can’t fight the two of them. Llesi—Llesi—where are you?”
For a moment there was no answer. The mad twin-mind buffeted at Miller’s from both sides at once, pulling it asunder, spinning in two opposite directions and straining him apart between them. No single mind could withstand the doubled strength of that split brain dragging him down to madness. . . .
And then, suddenly, he was not fighting alone. Out of the darkness Llesi’s mind came swiftly, intangibly, yet with a strength as if the man himself had set his shoulder against Miller’s, bracing him against the whirlpool whose vortex led down to insanity.
Perhaps no other mind in existence could have stood against the riven mind of Brann-Tsi. But in Miller’s brain to a double mind had been housed—his own and Llesi’s. They had learned to work together. And now they could fight . . .
There was a voiceless scream of fury—Brann’s thin, high, sweet-toned rage. And the buffeting redoubled from two sides at once. But now there were two minds to meet the attack. Miller drew a deep breath and set himself stubbornly against the whirling drag that was pulling him down to darkness. He could feel the strong resistance of Llesi’s mind, fighting beside his own, struggling hard against the double pull.
For a timeless moment the vortex held them both. In that roaring silence, while madness raved about them, neither side seemed able to shake the others. Attacker and attacked stood matched so perfectly that the balance might have held forever with the fury of the split mind screaming its soundless cry in infinity.
Then the scream shivered up to a peak of madness that no sane mind could sustain. And while the vortex still rang with it . . .
The robed figure on the dais moved suddenly. Miller’s blindness lifted again. He could see the dark robe stream back from Tsi’s rainbow garments as she plunged down the steps toward the crystal block, where the halo of the Power turned in its singing silence.
A bolt of the mind reached out before her toward the halo—a summoning bolt. One quivering thought shook the air of the room. Death was the thought. Tsi and Brann could not live together in the same brain and face the knowledge of their oneness. There was no choice but death for them now.
The bolt of white lightning blazed up to meet that plunging figure in answer to its summons. Blazed up and swallowed Tsi—and Brann.
There was a shimmer in the air where the body and the twin mind had hovered. And then—nothing . . .
CHAPTER IX
Fairy Gold
MILLER found himself sitting on the broken marble steps with his head in his hands. How long a time had passed he had no idea. Orelle’s touch on his shoulder made him look up at last. She was smiling a little but her eyes were grave.
“Are you all right now?” she asked. “You’re safe. We’re all safe, thanks to you. I’m glad I’ve never known your world if you could understand a thing like that—that madness. But I’m glad you did understand it—for our sakes. You saved us, Miller. You can ask your own reward.”
He looked at her groggily, thinking with incongruous steadiness that he was probably suffering from shock now and not really responsible. But he glanced involuntarily toward the crystal block of the Power.
Orelle’s smile was sad. “Yes,” she said, “we can make you a duplicate if you ask us. But it would be effort wasted in the end.”
He stared at her, not understanding. Then his eyes went beyond her to the shattered wall and the beautiful shining day outside. New senses were burgeoning in him and he could sense in that glittering sunlight colors and sounds and glories beyond anything words could tell.
The air was a tangible thing against his cheek, velvet soft, sweeter than perfume. He was beginning to perceive new shapes moving dimly on the edge of vision, as if there were a whole unknown world just now slowly unveiling before his freshly opened eyes.
Miller laughed suddenly. “I know what you mean.” he said. “I must be stupid, not to have seen it until now. Of course I won’t want a duplicate of the Power. Why should I? I’m not going back to Slade. I’d be crazy if I left a paradise like tills. What good would a duplicate do me when I’m staying on here—forever!”
Orelle shook her shining head. Her eyes were very sad. In a gentle voice she began to speak. And Llesi’s voice, gentle too in the dimness of his mind, spoke with her.
Very quiet
ly they told him the truth.
* * * * *
“So you know now it was fairy gold,” the Belgian said, sliding the bottle across the table. “Well, I could not have made you believe. You had to experience it yourself.”
Miller looked at nothing.
Van Hornung glanced toward the fire, shivered and reached out a stubby finger toward the dull cube on the table between them.
“Drink,” he said.
Slowly Miller obeyed. There was a long silence.
Finally Van Hornung said, “It is—still the same up there? The castles and the wonderful people and the—colors? But it would be. The colors—I was an artist once. I think the colors meant most to me. There were so many we do not know.”
“Orelle told me,” Miller said dully. “I wouldn’t believe her. I didn’t want to believe her.”
“There are the legends, Miller,” Van Hornung said. “You and I aren’t the first. We won’t be the last. There have always been stories of humans who visit Paradise for a little while—and leave again. I’m no scientist I never knew why—”
Miller glanced up. His eyes brightened a little.
“It was an unstable compound,” he said. “There was an atomic change, you see. The Path does that. Your atomic structure shifts to something quite different. When you’re like that you can talk with your mind, without words.”
“I know,” the Belgian said. “I do not talk much any more. It is never the same, after that.”
“Will it ever . . .?”
Van Hornung said quietly, “We were like gods for a little while. We ate the food of the gods. Can we expect mortal food to please us after that?”
Miller nodded in silence. To go back to his old world, to live his old life would be meaningless now—like going back to blindness after knowing sight in a brighter world than this. He had had a taste of this once, in Orelle’s castle, while they searched him with piercing electronic eyes for the weapon he did not know he carried. That had been an illusion and a foretaste of this death-in-life which he must live now until he died—as the Belgian had been living.
Collected Fiction Page 632