“What was your price?” asked Lannar bitterly. “What was the price of the human world?”
“To let it be forgotten that my blood is tainted! To be accepted for what I am—a Numi!”
Again his humming bow sent a shaft through the breast of a man who exposed himself to shoot.
Fenn reached up and set the world-globe to whirling.
Arika caught his arm but he flung her hand aside. He went low and fast, belly down, keeping the globe between him and the gallery.
Malech called his name. “Will you die now, Fenn-way? Fenn-way! All that talk about time and the past and how the Citadel belonged to men. Listen to me, man without a memory! Do you know who found the Citadel? Not men, who had lost it! No. The Numi found it. Numi wisdom, Numi science! You were only the little tool in the hands of RhamSin.”
He paused. Fenn had gained the far wall. He crouched behind a pillar, measuring the distance to the next. Malech said, “Don’t bother, Fenn. Come here, where you want to be. I won’t harm you.”
Fenn did not move. Lannar shouted, “Don’t!”
“Why not?” asked Malech. “It’s his only chance. I will have killed him by the third pillar, if he works his way around.”
Under the spinning globe Arika crouched and looked at Fenn with eyes that hurt him, full of fear and sorrow and none of it for herself.
Fenn stepped out from behind the pillar. He began to walk toward the gallery, across the wide still hall. He held his bow slack, the arrow nocked point down. Malech kept back in the angle and the shadows. He did not show himself.
He talked. “You told me once that you wanted to remember. Very well, you shall. Why do you stop, Fenn? Are you afraid to remember?”
Sweat glistened on Fenn’s drawn face, on his naked breast.
The muscles of his arms stood out like ropes.
“Or,” asked Malech softly, “are you afraid to have the others know die truth? They’re watching you, their great god Fennway, who led them to the Citadel. Don’t you want them to know the truth about you, about humanity?”
Fenn started on again. He said. “I am not afraid.” And it was a lie.
“Then I’ll tell you the real story of the finding of the Citadel. You had lost it, you humans, and it would have been lost forever if it had not been for RhamSin. He took a rebel tribesman off the desert—another such as Lannar there, captured in a raid— and used his science on him, so carefully, so patiently, making the little mind of the captive a mirror of the p^st.”
He laughed softly. “Are you faltering again? You don’t like to hear this, do you? You’re so proud of your achievement!”
The bowstring burned Fenn’s fingers. His heart was pounding. Somewhere in him was a sickness that grew and grew. He went on toward the gallery. Malech’s voice continued relentlessly, like the biting of salt in a raw wound.
“Arika knew. She watched. She watched RhamSin blot out the memories of this tribesman’s own life, closing the channels of his own remembrances. That opened the way. RhamSin probed back then into memories that were not the tribesman’s own—the memories of his fathers who had lived before him, ancestral memories, the inherited books of knowledge we do not know we possess but which are there, buried deep in the secret parts of the brain.
“Arika waited. And just before this raw sun-bitten rat of the deserts, under the power of RhamSin’s mind, was about to speak with the voice of his long-dead ancestors, telling the secrets of the Citadel, she stole him away from the temple. And why? You wondered about that, Fenn. I will tell you. So that the Numi powers that she and I possess might gain that secret for ourselves to sell to the highest bidder!”
Fenn had stopped entirely. He stared up at Malech. Malech’s bow was ready with an arrow aimed at his heart and his own arrow was on the string. But Fenn was not concerned with killing in this moment. His mind was lost in a dark turmoil.
It seemed that he could remember dimly the agony of that probing into his mind. RhamSin’s voice, forbidding, commanding, opening hidden doors…
Ancestral memory—the Fenn-way of the past had known that term. There was a word to go with it—hypnosis.
Malech cried, “Look at your hero, you humans! We were only slaves and half-breeds, my sister and I—but he was a tool in our hands! Now tell me who has the best right to the Citadel?” A cold bleak anger took possession of Fenn. It drove away all thought and emotion, all concern with himself. He began to raise his bow.
“It’s too late, Fenn,” said Malech, laughing. His own shaft pointed unwaveringly at Fenn’s heart, ready to fly. “Too late— your masters are already here!”
It was true. From the corner of his eye Fenn saw the Numi soldiers coming one by one, swiftly down the narrow stair. Lannar and what men he had left had fallen back. Their arrows killed a few but they could not stop the Numi rush. Their only hope had been to hold the stair and Malech had prevented that.
Malech!
Fenn’s eyes glittered with a hard malevolence. He dropped to one knee to let fly his arrow, knowing that Malech would instantly shoot.
He expected instant death. But in that second a black shaft suddenly stood out from Malech’s breast. The bow of the halfbreed fell from his hands unused. He stood for a moment with the long arrow in him, staring over Fenn’s head with a look of shocked incredulity.
Fenn heard the voice of RhamSin speak to Malech. “The man’s mind can still be useful to me. And your usefulness is done.”
Malech went down on his knees. And Fenn laughed.
Two long strides took him to the ladder. He went up it with a bound and crouched behind the railing. Malech looked at him, still with that hurt unbelief.
He was quite dead. Fenn began to shoot into the ranks of the Numi around the stair.
He shouted, “Lannar! Up here!”
They made a bolt for it, Lannar and his men and Arika. From his vantage point Fenn gave them what cover he could. Lannar, Arika, and three men made it. Lannar and two others were wounded.
They were crowded on the gallery. Fenn shoved the body of Malech down the ladder and there was room enough for them to crouch together behind the railing.
“What use?” asked Lannar grimly. “We have shot away our arrows.”
“Because,” Fenn said with a queer desperate hope in his voice, “there may still be a weapon here! One that I can’t quite remember.”
He was looking down into the hall at the Numi who were gathering there, at the globe of cold light that hung above them.
Cold light? What was it that he could not remember? He looked at the globe and the web of girders close above his head and his brows knit in a cruel effort.
The last of the Numi came down the stairs. RhamSin said, “Will you come down peaceably or must we come up after you?”
“Come if you will,” snarled Lannar. “We still have our swords.”
Fenn turned to Arika. His fingers bit into her flesh. He whispered, “Help me to remember! The Citadel—the guide that took us through—something he said…”
RhamSin’s voice rang in her ears like the voice of doom. “I told you once that I would call you and you would come. I call you now. And I warn you—your usefulness will not save your life if you anger me too far.”
Arika said, “Don’t listen, Fenn! Remember!”
Her eyes burned deep into his. The voice of RhamSin called and Fenn felt a terrible compulsion to obey. But there was an iron fury in him and he would not yield.
The Citadel, the crowd, the guide, talking—Cold light. Radioactive dust suspended in an inert liquid. Deadly compound, harnessed for the peaceful use of man. Bulbs of plastic that screened out harmful rays—absolutely safe—will give light almost forever.—
“Stay here,” said Fenn to the others very softly. “Keep down. Don’t move or lean out to look!”
He leaped up and caught the girder overhead, swinging himself upon it. Balancing precariously on that narrow bridge of steel he began to run.
RhamSin shouted.
Arrows began to fly around Fenn—black arrows with barbed tips. But he was a hard mark to hit, running high among the interlacing shadows of the girders. And he had not far to go.
Below him he could see the Numi, their angry faces looking up, tall proud lords of conquest in a citadel of peace. He flung himself down across the girder. Here were bolted the chains that held the globe of radioactive light.
He took his sword, a good keen blade of tempered Numi steel. With every ounce of strength and madness that was in him he struck downward at a single chain.
It parted, helped by the weight of the massive bracket it upheld. And Fenn found it in his heart to laugh a little bitterly. Even in a citadel of peace the ingenious mind of man could find a means of killing!
The globe of light fell with the snapping of the chain. Out of the round bracket that swung now by one edge it fell— down, down, to smash upon the metal floor below.
Fenn hugged the girder. There was a crash and a burst of vicious light, a hissing, snarling explosion, and then…
He thought that even Numi did not deserve to die that way, in such corrosive agony of the body, in such shocked terror of the mind.
He waited until the last one had stopped screaming. He did not look again at the seared scored twisted bodies. He worked his way back along the girder and this time he did not run. He was sick and shaken and full of a sense of guilt.
Arika and Lannar helped him back down onto the gallery. They too looked sick and pale from what they had seen on the floor below. “They are all dead,” whispered Arika. “But how—”
Fenn said heavily, “The men of the far past built this Citadel to be a light in the darkness, a light of hope and peace and knowledge. And now war and death have come into it. And my hands are red.” _
“You were forced to do it, Fenn!”
He knew that she was right. And men would be forced to war against the Numi, and the knowledge of the Citadel would free them from that alien yoke. But after that…
He spoke and his whisper was not for those beside him but for men dead twelve hundred years, the men who had bequeathed them this heritage of the ages. “After that,” he whispered, “we will learn to build and not destroy. I will redeem my guilt, men of the past.”
He would not be alone. There was Arika—and Lannar, a desert man like himself.
His own memories, of his life before RhamSin, might never return. But that did not seem to matter now. He could start a new life when before them lay a whole new world.
ALL THE COLORS OF THE RAINBOW
It had rained in the valley, steadily and hard, for thirty-six hours. The ground was saturated. Every fold in the rough flanks of the hills spouted a muddy torrent and the torrents flowed in sheets over the flat country below and poured through raw self-gouged channels into the river. And the river, roused from its normal meek placidity, roared and rolled like a new Mississippi, tearing away its banks, spreading wide and yellow across the fields, into the orchards and over the roads, into the streets of Grand Falls where the people had left their houses and fled to the safety of higher land. Uprooted trees and broken timbers knocked at the walls of the old brick buildings on the main street. In the lobby of the Grand Falls Hotel the brass spittoons floated ever higher, clanging mournfully when they struck their sides together.
High on the ridges that enclosed the valley to the northeast and the southwest, hidden by a careful hand, two small mechanisms hummed quietly, ceaselessly. They were called miniseeders and they were not part of Earth’s native technology. Their charges would run out in a matter of days, but in the meantime they were extremely efficient, hurling a steady stream of charged particles into the sky to seed the clouds moving over the ridges.
In the valley, it continued to rain….
It was his first big job on his own responsibility, with no superior closer than Galactic Center, which was a long way off. He was not at all sure he was going to be able to do it.
He said so to Ruvi, slowing down the cumbersome ground car so she could see what he meant.
“Look at it. How can this mess ever be made into a civilized continent?”
She turned her head in the quick way she had and said, “Scared, Flin?”
“I guess I am.”
He was ashamed to say it, particularly since it was not really the difficulty and importance of the job that daunted him but the planet itself.
He had studied weather-control engineering on his homeworld at Mintaka, which was one of the science’s earliest triumphs, and he had done research and field work on five other worlds, at least two of which were in fairly early stages of control. But he had never been anywhere before that was so totally untouched by galactic civilization.
Peripheral Survey had made contact with these fringe systems only in the last couple of decades and that was far too short a time to make much of an impress on them. Even in the big urban centers an alien like himself could hardly walk down the street yet without attracting an unwelcome amount of attention, not all of it polite. Coming from the Federation worlds with their cosmopolitan populations, Flin found this hard to take.
But Galactic Center was enthusiastic about these fringe worlds because quite a few of them had an amazingly high, if highly uneven, degree of civilization which they had developed literally in their several vacuums. Center was in a rush to send them teachers and technicians and that was why he, far ahead of his due time, had been pitchforked into the position of leading a four-man planning-and-instruction team of weathercontrol experts.
It was a splendid opportunity with splendid possibilities for the future, and the raise in pay had enabled him to take on Ruvi as a permanent mate much sooner than he had hoped. But he hadn’t bargained for the loneliness, the constant uncertainty in relationships, the lack of all the vast solid background he was used to on the Federation worlds.
Ruvi said, “All right then, I’ll admit I’m scared too. And hot. Let’s stop this clumsy thing and get a breath of air. Right over there looks like a good place.”
He eased the car off the narrow road, onto a point of land with a few big stones around the edge to mark the drop-off. Ruvi got out and went to stand by them, looking out over the valley. The breeze pressed her thin yellow tunic against her body and ruffled the soft short silvery mass of curls around her head. Her skin glistened even under this alien sun with the dark lovely green of youth and health. Flin’s heart still turned over in him every time he looked at her. He did not suppose this would last forever but as long as it did it was a beautiful sort of pain.
He made sure he had done the required things to keep the car from bolting away over the cliff and then joined her. The breeze was hot and moisture-laden, full of strange smells. The valley wound away in a series of curves with a glint of water at the bottom. On either side of it the rough ridges rolled and humped, blue in the distance where the heat haze covered them, rank green closer at hand with the shaggy woods that grew wild on them, the trees pushing and crowding for space, choked with undergrowth and strangling vines, absolutely neglected.
“I suppose,” said Ruvi, “they’re full of wild animals, too.” “Nothing very dangerous, I believe.”
Ruvi shivered slightly. “Whenever I get just a little way out of the cities I begin to feel that I’m on a truly savage world. And everything’s wrong. The trees, the flowers, even the grass blades are the wrong shape, and the colors are all wrong, and the sky isn’t at all the way it ought to be.”
She laughed. “Anyone would know this was my first trip away from home.”
Two huge birds came into sight over one of the ridges. They hung in the sky, wheeling in slow circles on still grey-brown wings. Instinctively Flin put his arm around Ruvi, uncertain whether the birds would attack. They did not, drifting on down over the valley where the air currents took them. There was no sign of human habitation and except for the narrow road they might have been in a complete wilderness.
“It is rather beautiful, though,” Ruvi said, “in its own w
ay.” “Yes.”
“I guess that’s the only standard you really should use to judge things, isn’t it? Their own.”
Flin said sourly, “That’s easier to do when you know what ‘their own’ standard is. They seem to have thousands of them here. That’s why Sherbondy keeps telling us to get out and see the country, to learn what his people are really like.” Sherbondy was their contact with the local Government, a big hearty man with an enormous enthusiasm for all the things that were going to be done. “The only trouble with that is that it would take a lifetime to—”
There was a noise like an avalanche behind them. Flin jumped and turned around, but it was only a huge red vehicle roaring by, spouting smoke from a pipe behind the driver’s compartment. The driver noticed them just before the truck passed out of sight and Flin thought the man was going to drive it right into the woods while he was staring.
He sighed. “Let’s go.”
They got back into the car and Flin managed to get it back onto the road and headed in the direction he wanted to go without mishap—always, he felt, a minor triumph. The primitive vehicles that were subject to everybody’s individual whim of operation on these equally primitive road systems still frightened the wits out of him after nearly six months.
It was just as hot as ever. As a gesture of courtesy, and to avoid attracting any more attention than was necessary, he had adopted the local variety of shirt and pants. Most of the men in the various instruction groups did this soon after landing. It didn’t seem to matter what the women of the groups wore as long as certain puritanical taboos were observed. Flin thought the garments abominably uncomfortable and envied Ruvi her relatively cool tunic.
She seemed wilted and subdued, leaning back in the corner of the wide overstuffed seat, her eyes half closed, the graceful tilted contours of her face accentuated by the gleaming of sweat on the delicate ridges.
“I think of home,” she said, “and then I think of the money.”
“It’s something to think of.”
The Halfling and Other Stories Page 13