Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  “The people are with us,” Coriole went on, his cold violence making every word crackle. “Clia’s coming was a setback. For a while we hoped we could use her but the priests got there first. They’re terribly cunning. They never miss a bet. And they’d learned their lesson when Jimmerton came through.”

  “What happened?” I asked yet again. “With Lorna—Clia?”

  “I’ll show you,” Coriole said, reaching for another gilt dial below the screen.

  CHAPTER IX

  Clia, the Key

  AGAIN the golden A began to glow slowly before us. The voice chanted again in the same archaic Malescan I couldn’t follow. After a moment or two fog began to roll across the screen and music swelled majestically.

  The music sank and an echoing hum and buzz of voices replaced it. We were looking down a long room, enormous, crowded with men and women, at a high dais at the far end. It was the voices of the people that hummed above the music.

  “That’s the Alchemic Temple,” Coriole said.

  It was a vast room and, curiously, you could see very little of it. The upper walls and all the ceiling were hidden by rolling fog, no doubt accepted by the congregation as a minor miracle though it was obvious that concealed pipes must be puffing it out at intervals. You could even see the disturbances in the clouds now and then where fresh fog came in.

  It gave an air of tremendous mystery to the temple. Through the shifting veils of it you could catch a glimpse of the walls once in awhile and the great colored and gilded images on them. There were stylized animals, lions in red, green and yellow. There were black eagles, red eagles, salamanders in gold, all the planets labeled in luminous characters.

  I had a vague memory of the alchemic symbolisms and knew that these figures represented chemical terms. But to the people they obviously represented only mysterious secrets of the priesthood. The people were watching the dais.

  On the wall at its back there was a vast round window looking out over the city. I saw the great globe of water with the fiery fountains playing around it, the roofs and streets beyond. It was the same view of Malesco I had first glimpsed through the shimmering air in my apartment. I watched with great interest.

  “This is part of the usual Equinoctial Ceremony,” Coriole said, reaching for another egg. “They give us a glimpse of Paradise and a lecture about how to get there. Only this time, something went wrong. Watch.”

  On the dais a great deal of ceremonial arm-waving was going on. Enormous coiled horns were being blown with solemn hootings, priests in brilliant robes did some kind of a trudging little dance before the window and the glass in it began to cloud. Then right down the middle the cloud quivered and opened like a cat’s pupil dilating—and there was New York.

  The horns blatted triumph. The people gave one enormous emotional sigh. The priests sang out all together on a single sustained note and then let it quaver down the scale to silence. We all looked at Paradise.

  This was the real thing. There was no Eiffel Tower or Great Pyramid in this New York. The camera appeared to be moving rapidly up Fifth Avenue from a considerable height. It was a foggy evening in Manhattan and the lights of the city shimmered and twinkled spectacularly.

  On the far side of the Park the diamond-studded apartment house peaks floated on a sea of mist with black tree-tops silhouetted against its base. I felt impressed and strangely homesick. I could see what a conviction of Paradise a sight like that might give people who didn’t know New York.

  The vision floated swiftly away beneath us. Traffic made streaks of bright gold through the fog—sainted priests, no doubt, driving fiery dragons along Fifth Avenue. I could see what they meant.

  “This is only visual, you know,” Coriole was explaining at my elbow, crunching blue eggshell between his teeth as he talked. “They thought it was perfectly safe. They didn’t know about the flaw Jimmerton came through. Look now—they’re going to strike it in a minute. There! You see?”

  New York reeled dizzily sidewise in the temple screen. It was an immensely unsettling feeling. The whole congregation screamed and appeared to stagger. The horns gave a series of disorganized hoots.

  Fifth Avenue soared straightup the sky and turned upside down and the priests in Paradise could be seen calmly driving their dragons across the firmament. Then the whole city blurred like rain on a window and there was an uncanny moment when I could hear Lorna’s voice, very thin and small.

  “Eddie, look at me! Eddie!”

  Then far away I heard my own voice, growling at her. It was a shocking moment of deja vu. Shadows whirled in the screen. It must have been a quick glimpse straight into my apartment and my own past but it happened too fast to mean anything from this angle.

  A scream welled out of the spinning shadows, a scream that began thin and distant and swelled like a siren wailing. It was the same scream I had heard diminishing into nothing from the other side as Lorna fell through the gap between worlds and vanished from Earth.

  THE shadows seethed. Then very clearly I saw Lorna’s face, distorted with terror, spin quite slowly and vanish behind a screen of her swirling hair. There was a high vibrant note like music that made the eardrums ache. Lorna tumbled out of the chaos on the screen and sprawled on the dais face down, her hair fanning across the gilded floor.

  “Look!” Coriole said quickly. “Watch—everything will flicker for a second. There—see that? It’s where the priests cut out a bit from the records. You know why? Can you guess? Because every man and woman in the congregation breathed one word when they saw the figure come through. Jimmerton!” He sighed.

  “I wish they’d tried to arrest her and get rid of her. Things would have been easy for us then. But the Hierarch was too smart for us. That’s the Hierarch, in the gold robes—the fat man. Watch.” A broad, squat figure built like Friar Tuck or Santa Claus without the beard trundled importantly forward and bent above Lorna. Then he turned and raised both arms toward the people. The rising murmur of the congregation had a note of menace in it, I thought, but they quieted to hear what he would say.

  “An angel has come down to us from Paradise,” the Hierarch announced importantly in a voice so amplified that I felt sure he had a mike concealed in his golden bib somehow.

  Lorna lay quiet on the dais. I could see now that she must have struck her head against something when she fell. It wasn’t like Lorna to stay quiet more than fifteen seconds at a time, especially when she had the chance of a lifetime to attract attention from a crowd.

  “The shock of emerging in our troubled and sinful world,” the Hierarch went on with unction, “has proved too great for the delicate nerves of this heavenly being. We must pray that she survives the grossness of our sphere—”

  The picture flickered again. Coriole crunched eggshell and said, “A little more came out there. That was when the congregation began to roar. They remembered what happened to Jimmerton. Probably the Hierarch did have some such thing in mind but he knuckled under fast enough when he heard the people protest. He didn’t dare risk another uprising. Now watch.”

  Without an apparent break, the Hierarch steadied after his flicker.

  “By the Alembic of the Great Alchemist,” he said solemnly, “I swear to you that this angel will be given every care. Look, she begins to stir—” He stood back and Lorna was seen twitching slightly.

  “We will prepare her for her sojourn in this humble sphere of ours and obey her orders in all things,” he went on. “You will be summoned again when she is ready to receive you. And now, my faithful people, let us chant a song of thanksgiving for this visitation from Paradise.”

  Dubiously the people began to sing as the horns started up again.

  “That’s enough of that,” Coriole said, dusting his fingers and flicking off the screen. “Now I’ll show you something really interesting. Watch this.”

  He got up and knelt before the screen, feeling under the ledge that held the dials. His eyes went slightly crossed with concentration. I heard metal squeak fa
intly on metal.

  Then Coriole said, “Ah!” and lifted the whole panel of dials neatly off. Wires strung from its inner face into the intricacies of the mechanisms within. He laid the panel down on the table, keeping the connections taut, and began to fiddle delicately with bare copper wires inside. I cringed a little.

  “This has to be done carefully,” Coriole announced with some importance. “Invisible fires can melt your bones if you touch the wrong plates here. But Falvi showed me how to do it and it isn’t hard. Now I’ve got to twist these threads here to those over there—like this—and the thing’s done. Excellent. Now you’ll see something.”

  Without replacing the panel, he twitched a dial again, and this time the screen lit up abruptly without the golden A, the music and the chanting. There was something very businesslike about it.

  “This,” Coriole told me, “is a secret known only to the priesthood. The usual talking screens show only a selected few pictures the priests prepare. But if you know the secret you can use the same screens to look almost anywhere you like and eavesdrop on anything that happens in the Temple.

  It’s a miracle,” he added wryly, glancing at me. “What would you like to see now?”

  “That machine,” I said promptly. “The thing that opens the gate between the worlds.” I expected to return by it at some very early date if possible, though there seemed no point in discussing that just now. Still, it would be useful to know a little more about this vital link in my plans.

  “How does the thing really work, anyhow?” I inquired.

  CORIOLE gave me one of his pale, oblique glances.

  “I don’t even know how they make the lights go on at night,” he said morosely.

  “Well, let’s have a look at the machine anyhow. Can you show it to me in operation? From behind the scenes, I mean.”

  “Yes, I think so. It’s on record. For some reason they put a sequence on file not long ago. I ran across it just the other day, eavesdropping. A friend of yours is in it incidentally.”

  He grinned at me and worked diligently at the dials.

  Without fanfare a familiar room began to take shape on the screen. The lines for a moment were fuzzy with unfocus, then they steadied and I was looking at a strictly unrehearsed scene in a room I had left a very short while ago.

  There was the wall of instruments that meant nothing to me. There was the curtained corner where I’d hidden from Falvi. The round, blank face of the machine looked emptily into the screen. But this time it was partially obscured.

  The little room was full of people. The illusion was so perfect that Coriole and I seemed to be peering secretly down out of some window in the wall which had escaped my notice when I was there. Gazing down on the blue-striped heads and robed shoulders of the men around the machine, I said, “Just how does this work? I mean—”

  “It’s a spy system. The upper priesthood uses it to check on the junior members and the attendants. You can look into almost any room in the Temple except the Hierarch’s private chambers and the secret rooms. Now and then they make recordings of something they want to study—like this. Watch.”

  He leaned forward a little as a stir of the crowd around the machine heralded something new. Then the heads and shoulders moved aside, leaving a lane, and apparently from directly under us a veiled figure moved. Evidently the hidden lens of the camera was located just over the door.

  Coriole leaned still further forward as if he were trying to see around corners in the reflection itself. I saw the men’s faces turn to the newcomer, anticipation and excitement showing under every striped headdress.

  The veiled woman lifted her arms and put the silvery gauze back from her face. It was a familiar gesture. I knew the way her arms moved and the way her head and neck rose from her shoulders—and I didn’t know them. For there was a studied grace in every line of this figure, a certain theatrical self-assurance that had never existed in the original I remembered so well.

  “Clia,” Coriole said in a flat voice. “I think you know her?”

  I craned as he had. I wanted very much to see more of this foreshortened and half averted face. But all I could glimpse was a flicker of much longer lashes than the original Lorna ever had, a flash of beautiful nose and much improved mouth as for an instant she glanced up at the machine.

  It was Lorna, all right—but not the Lorna I knew. This was the Clia of the cloud picture, with eyes like blue swimming-pools.

  “What makes you think I know her?” I demanded.

  “Clia got a thorough questioning as soon as the priests could give it to her,” Coriole assured me, still trying to catch sight of the averted, fore-shortened face. He did not take his eyes from the screen, but he went on.

  “They had some trouble but eventually they managed to make her understand the language. Falvi told me how.

  Something about abstracting the words she seemed to grasp and working out a sort of basic Malescan for her. They wanted to know how she’d happened to fall through and whether anybody else was likely to come too. That’s when we got a description of you. Wait—”

  He held up one hand for silence. I leaned forward again. The reflected synthetic Lorna in her upward glance had finally realized what this machine was.

  I think the intoxication of all those admiring glances had probably slowed down even farther her naturally slow reactions. But once she grasped what this wall full of gadgets really was she shrank back a little and said distinctly, “Oh no! Let me out of here!”

  “What did she say?” Coriole demanded with interest.

  I told him. He nodded, still watching. He had not taken his eyes from the screen since the graceful figure veiled in silvery gauze appeared on it. Now there was a small turmoil around Lorna, many voices murmured reassurance and they coaxed her forward a little farther. “What’s going on here?” I demanded. “Wait,” was all Coriole would say. So I waited. We watched the rest of the little recorded scene play itself out. There wasn’t much. Lorna was objecting violently to the machine and I caught a distinct echo in her new melodious voice of the old raucousness as her temper mounted.

  The priests soothed her in vain. The picture ran on for a minute or two and then Lorna whirled with a wide out-swing of her veils and stalked from the room, passing directly under our observation post so that we had one brief glimpse of her transfigured face.

  She had turned info the Beautiful Princess, all right, I thought morosely. Every detail was there as nearly as I could tell from glimpses. The limpid eyes, the lovely features, the melodious voice only a little marred by the old harsh tinny quality when she was angry.

  SO, in spite of myself I was acquiring the attributes of the hero of romance. Here I was in search of the lovely heroine. I couldn’t go back without her. And the organization of rebels was ready and waiting for me to join them so I could overthrow the government, release the princess and return home in triumph.

  It made me feel very uneasy.

  Coriole sighed as Lorna flounced off the screen and the picture faded.

  “Exactly what was happening there?” I demanded. “Why were they trying to—”

  “Suppose you answer, a few questions for a change,” my cousin interrupted. “What do you know about Clia? What are your relations with her? She seems to have come through the Earth-Gates from your living quarters. Is she your wife by any chance?”

  “God forbid,” I said.

  He grinned a little, not much. “Good. I see what you mean. She’s a fool, of course. Nobody could mistake that. But they’ve made the most of her. Falvi tells me she was a very ordinary looking woman when she came through. They gave her some of their miraculous treatments and made a beauty of her and they did a fine job.

  “You saw how those priests reacted? Falvi says they studied the problem very carefully and chose exactly the features and attitudes that would be most appealing to the average man. A sort of visual semantics, Falvi says. And they called her Clia because—” He paused and chuckled.

 
“This shows you how clever they were. They went through the records of recent deaths in the country and located a deceased woman who’d had a facial likeness to the new angel. Then they idealized and beautified her into the sort of being you’d expect from Paradise.

  “And they spread the word that the deceased Clia had led a life of such extreme virtue she’d gone straight into Paradise, bypassing various incarnations and the final incarnation of priesthood on the way. They announced that Paradise had arranged for the transfigured Clia to come back and tell her story as an inspiration to the rest of humanity.”

  He was smiling but it seemed to me that his gaze still lingered on the blank screen as if it searched in retrospect for the beautiful face which the priesthood’s “visual semantics” had assembled so deftly. Apparently their cleverness had paid off all too well.

  I had an idea that a good many Malescans were about half in love with their angelic Clia or the idealization that had been handed to them under that name. I grinned to myself. They ought to know the real Lorna. That would cure anybody of romantic ideas about Clia.

  Coriole twisted a dial idly and a pale uncertain image of a hospital ward flickered before us. He twisted again and the ward dissolved into a room seething with dim translucent children, whose voices came to us in a sort of shrill whispering yammer tuned down almost to silence.

  It occurred to me that if the priesthood maintained hospitals and kindergartens it might not be wholly without regard for the welfare of the people, selfish though the regard probably was.

  I thought in a vague way that before I threw in with Coriole’s side the least I could do was try to get some unbiased slant on the opposition, too. Naturally Coriole was painting his side white and the other side black. If I’d met the priesthood first no doubt I’d have heard an entirely different story with all the values reversed.

  Then I remembered it was the priesthood I’d met first with lamentable results. Falvi’s desire to wipe me out had been purely personal, of course, to cover his own illegal tampering with the machine. Dio, on the other hand, had seemed rather interesting.