The shrill jeering laughter of the Martians fell upon Winters with the sharpness of spears.
He stood there, naked in the sunlight, his head held stubbornly erect, and he did not move. He could not control the trembling of his limbs nor the harshness of his breathing. The sweat ran into his eyes and blinded him, and the fire of Shanga danced on the writhing bodies, and he thought he would go mad with torment, but he stood there and would not move. He thought he was going to die, but he would not move.
And the Martians watched.
Kor Hal said, “Tomorrow, then. Perhaps the next day—but you’ll go, Earthman.”
Winters knew that he would. He could not go through this again. If he were still alive in the garden of Shanga the next time the gong sounded, he would go with his brothers.
The fire of Shanga died at last from the prisms, and the creatures of its making lay still on the ground. The Martians sighed. The first stir of departure ran through them.
Burk Winters cried out, “Wait!”
His voice rang back from the empty upper tiers, and it brought every eye upon him. There was desperation in it, and triumph, and the anger of a man driven beyond the bounds of reason.
“Wait, you men of Mars! You came to see a show. Very well, I’ll give you one. You, Kor Hal! You told me something, down there in Valkis. You told me of the men of Caer Dhu who first made Shanga, and how in one generation they were destroyed by it. One generation.”
He stepped forward, finding release for his tortured nerves in this denunciation.
“We of Earth are a young race. We’re still close to our beginnings, and for that you hate and mock us, calling us apes. Very well. But that youth gives us strength. We go very slowly down the road of Shanga.
“But you of Mars are old. You have followed the circle of time a long way around, and the end is always close to the beginning. In one generation the men of Caer Dhu were gone. Our fibers are iron, but theirs were only straw.
“That’s why no Martian will practice Shanga—why it was forbidden by the City-States. You don’t dare to practice it, because it hurls you headlong down that road—toward your end or your beginning, who knows? But you haven’t the strength to take it, and you’re afraid.”
A jeering, angry howl rose from the crowd.
Kor Hal shouted, “Listen to the ape. Listen to the beast we drove through the streets of Valkis!”
“Yes, listen to him!” Winters cried. “Because the Lady Fand is gone, and only the ape knows where she is!”
That silenced them, and in the quiet Winters laughed.
“Perhaps you don’t believe me. Shall I tell you how I did it?” He told them, and when he was through telling he listened, while they called him a liar, and he jeered in Kor Hal’s face.
“Wait,” he shouted. “Wait, and I’ll bring her to you.”
He turned and went toward the clearing. He went fast, because the beasts were already beginning to stir and rouse from their temporary stupor. He remembered from his own experience with Shanga that before consciousness returned there was a period of delirium, so that even in the Trade City solariums the people were not turned loose until it had passed.
Threading his way between the brutish bodies, leaping over them, avoiding the touch of the scaly things, he came to the clump of flowering shrubs by the lake and crawled in among them.
He had not known. He had guessed from Kor Hal’s statement that the metamorphosis was swift, but he had not known. There were some things that a man could not even guess at.
In spite of himself, he cried out. He did not want to look at the thing that lay there, did not even want to know that such a form of life had existed, or could exist. But he had to look at it. He had to go close to it, so that he might undo the silken bonds that held it to the roots of the shrubs. He had to touch it. He had to lay his hands upon its softness, lift its flaccid weight, hold its slippery squirming against his own body.
It had eyes. That was the worst of it. It had eyes, and it looked at him.
He went away from the thicket, carrying his burden. Back across the clearing, where two great males were already fighting over a she, out into the open space before the royal box, where all could plainly see.
He lifted the thing over his head, high into the sunlight.
“Here!” he shouted. “Don’t you recognize her? Last of the royal house of Valkis—the Lady Fand!”
Around a portion of the wriggling anatomy that might once have been a neck, the collar of golden plaques swung, shining.
For a moment he held her so, while the faces of the Martians stared like the masks of dead men and Kor Hal rose and gripped the edges of the stone. Then he laid his burden down and stepped back from it where it moved horribly across the turf.
“Look there, you Martians,” he said. “That is your own beginning.”
In the utter, stricken silence the old woman rose. She stood for a moment, looking down, and it seemed that she was about to speak or cry out, but no sound came. Then she fell, out over the wall and down the sheer drop into the arena. She did not move again.
As though she had led them, the Martians rose with one low terrible cry and followed her. Not to death, as they dropped over the wall, but to vengeance.
Winters ran. He had Jill free in a minute, dragging her away into denser cover. The mouth of the tunnel was not far distant.
The Martians swarmed in upon the clearing, and then the beasts of Shanga saw them. With roars and screams, they surged out to meet their attackers.
Knife and short sword and spiked brass knuckles against fang and claw and the powerful muscles of the brute. The scaly creatures darted here and there, hissing, slashing with their rows of needle-sharp reptilian teeth. Great hands ripped and tore, snapping bones like matchsticks, cracking skulls. And the slim blades flickered in the sunlight, bright tongues speaking death.
Vengeance was done that day in the garden of Shanga. The vengeance of Earth on Mars, and the vengeance of men upon the shame of their heritage.
Winters saw Kor Hal run his sword through the creeping horror that had been Fand, through and through again until all motion stopped. Then he shouted Winters’ name.
Winters went to him.
Neither spoke. There was nothing more to say. Bare-handed, Winters went against the Martian’s sword. With the nightmare carnage of the battle going on around them, they two were alone. They two had a special score to settle.
Winters took one long gash above the heart before he caught Kor Hal’s arm and broke it. The Martian never whimpered. With his left hand he reached for the knife at his girdle, but it never left the sheath. Winters laid Kor Hal backward across his knee and placed one thigh across his loins and an elbow across his throat. After a moment he dropped the broken body and went away, taking the sword.
The guards came running into the arena through the tunnel.
The fight was spreading outward from the lake. Locked in struggling, swaying knots, the beasts of Shanga slew the Martians and were slain. The waters of the lake were stained red, and the corpse of a Martian was being dragged stealthily into it from the mud of the bank. There was something hidden below the surface, something that could no longer fight on land, but only lay quietly in wait, and fed.
Now the guards had come with their long spears, and Winters knew that in the end there would not be one creature left alive in the garden. And it was well.
He took Jill’s hand and led her toward the tunnel, running in the shelter of the trees. The fight was occupying everyone’s attention. The brute males were hard to kill, and they fought for the love of it. The tunnel was empty, the gate open, the guards inside the arena, hard at work. Winters and the girl fled through it, taking cover outside the amphitheater just before another group of guards came down from the palace.
From there, with infinite haste and caution, they made their way down the cliffs through the dead ruins of Valkis, and then out across the desert, skirting the living town by the canal. Kor Hal’s flier
was on the field where Winters remembered it.
He thrust Jill inside, and as he followed her he saw the angry mob start to pour out of Valkis, where word of his crime and his escape had been brought, a little too late.
He took the flier up, setting a course for Kahora. And now that it was all over, he felt a great weariness and an overwhelming desire to forget the very name of Shanga.
But he knew that he could never forget. The golden fire had burned too deep. He knew that he would always be haunted by the beautiful face of Fand as it had looked when he shackled her in the clearing, and by the memory of the high thin screaming as the light poured down from the prisms. Even the psychos could never make him forget.
The governments of Earth and Mars would see to it now that Shanga was stamped out forever. He was glad, and a little proud, because it had been his doing. But even so…
He looked over at Jill. Someday, he prayed, she would be herself again. The taint of Shanga would pass her, and she would once more be the Jill Leland he had given his heart to.
But will it pass entirely? For a moment it seemed that he heard the mocking voice of Fand, speaking in his soul. Will it pass from you, Burk Winters? Can one who has run with the beasts of Shanga ever be the same again?
He did not know. Looking back, he saw the smoke rising from the unholy garden—and he did not know.
Mars Minus Bisha
IT WAS close on midnight. Both moons were out of the sky, and there was only blackness below and the mighty blaze of stars above, and between them the old wind dragging its feet in the dust. The Quonset stood by itself, a half mile or so from the canal bank and the town that was on it. Fraser looked at it, thinking what an alien intrusion both it and he were in this place, and wondering if he could stick out the four and a half months still required of him.
The town slept. There was no help for him there. An official order had been given, and so he was tolerated. But he was not welcome. Except in the big trading cities, Earthmen were unwelcome almost anywhere on Mars. It was a lonesome deal.
Fraser began to walk again. He walked a lot at night. The days were ugly and depressing and he spent them inside, working. But the nights were glorious. Not even the driest desert of Earth could produce a sky like this, where the thin air hardly dimmed the luster of the stars. It was the one thing he would miss when he went home.
He walked, dressed warmly against the bitter chill. He brooded, and he watched the stars. He thought about his diminishing whiskey supply and the one hundred and forty-six centuries of written history gone into the dust that blew and tortured his sinuses, and after a while he saw the shadow, the dark shape that moved against the wind, silent, purposeful, and swift.
Out of the northern desert someone was riding.
For the space of three heartbeats Fraser stood rigid and frozen, squinting through the darkness and the starshine at that moving shape. Then he turned and ran for the Quonset. He was not allowed to possess a weapon, and if some of the fanatic northern tribesmen had decided to come and cleanse their desert of his defiling presence, there was little he could do but bar the door and pray.
He did not go inside, just yet. It was unwise to show fear until you had to. He stood by the open door, outside the stream of light that poured from it. He waited, tensed for that final leap.
There was only a single rider, mounted on one of the big scaly beasts the Martian nomads use as the Earthly desert-folk use camels. Fraser relaxed a little, but not too much. One man with a spear could be enough. The stranger came slowly into the light, wrapped and muffled against the night, curbing with a strong hand the uneasy hissings and shyings of the beast at the unfamiliar smells that came to it from the Quonset. Fraser leaned forward, and suddenly the weakness of relief came over him. The rider was a woman, and she carried before her on the saddle pad a child, almost hidden in the folds of her cloak.
Fraser gave her the courteous Martian greeting. She looked down at him, tall and fierce-eyed, hating and yet somehow desperate, and presently she said, “You are the Earthman, the doctor.”
“Yes.”
The child slept, its head lolled back against the woman’s body. There was something unnatural in the way it slept, undisturbed by the light or the voices. Fraser said gently, “I am here only to help.”
The woman’s arm tightened around the child. She looked at Fraser, and then in through the open door at the unfamiliar alien things that were there. Her face, made grim and hard by hunger and long marches, and far too proud for weeping, crumpled suddenly toward tears. She lifted the bridle chain and swung the beast around, but before he had gone his own length she curbed him again. When she had turned once more toward Fraser she was calm as stone.
“My child is—ill,” she said, very quietly, hesitating over that one word.
Fraser held up his arms. “I’ll see what I can do.”
The child—a girl, Fraser saw now, perhaps seven years old—did not stir even when she was lifted down from the saddle pad. Fraser started to carry her inside, saying over his shoulder to the woman, “I’ll need to ask some questions. You can watch while I examine—”
A wild harsh cry and a thunder of padded hooves drowned out his words. He whirled around, and then he ran a little way, shouting, with the child in his arms, but it was no use. The woman was bent low in the saddle, urging the beast on with that frantic cry, digging in the spurs, and in a minute she was gone, back into the desert and the night. Fraser stood staring after her, openmouthed, and swearing, and looking helplessly at the girl. There was an ominous finality about the way the woman had left. Why? Even if the child was dying, wouldn’t a mother wait to know? Even if the sickness was contagious, would she ride the Lord knew how many miles across the desert with her, and then run?
There were no answers to those questions. Fraser gave up and went into the Quonset, kicking the door shut behind him. Passing through his combination living quarters and office, he went into the tiny infirmary which adjoined his equally small but well-equipped lab. Neither office nor infirmary had had many customers. The Martians preferred their own methods, their own healers. Fraser was not supposed, anyway, to be the local G.P. The Medical Foundation grant and the order of the Martian authorities permitting him to be here both stated that he was engaged in research on certain viruses. Non-cooperation of the populace had not made his work any easier.
He became suddenly hopeful about the child.
Some two hours later he put her, still sleeping, into the neat white bed and sat down in the room outside, where he could watch her through the open door. He had a drink, and then another, and lighted a cigarette with hands that had trouble putting flame and tip together.
She was sound as a dollar. Thin, a bit undersized and undernourished like most Martian youngsters, but healthy. There was nothing whatever the matter with her, except that someone had thoroughly drugged her.
Fraser rose and flung open the outer door. He went out, staring with a kind of desperation into the north, straining his ears for a sound of hooves. Dawn was not far off. The wind was rising, thickening the lower air with dust, dimming the stars. Out on the desert nothing moved, nor was there any sound.
For the rest of that night and most of the morning that came after it, Fraser sat unmoving by the child’s bed, waiting for her to wake.
She did it quietly. One moment her face was as it had been, remote and secret, and in the next she had opened her eyes. Her small body stirred and stretched, she yawned, and then she looked at Fraser, very solemnly but without surprise. He smiled and said, “Hello.”
She sat up, a dark and shaggy-haired young person, with eyes the color of topaz, and the customary look of premature age and wisdom that the children of Mars share with the children of the Earthly East. She asked hesitantly, “My Mother—?”
“She had to go away for a while,” Fraser said, and added with false assurance, “but she’ll be back soon.” He was comforting himself as much as the child.
She took even that shre
d of hope from him. “No,” she said. “She will not come back.” She laid her head between her knees and began to cry, not making any fuss about it. Fraser put his arm around her.
“Here,” he said. “Here now, don’t do that. Of course she’ll come back for you; she’s your mother.”
“She can’t.”
“But why? Why did she bring you here? You’re not sick; you don’t need a doctor.”
The child said simply, “They were going to kill me.”
Fraser was silent for a long time. Then he said, “What?”
The thin shoulders quivered under his arm. “They said I made the sickness that was in our tribe. The Old Men came, all together, and they told my father and mother I had to be killed. The Old Men are very powerful in magic, but they said they could not make me clean.” She broke off, choking over a sob. “My mother said it was her right to do the thing, and she took me way off into the desert. She cried. She never did that before. I was frightened, and then she told me she wasn’t going to hurt me, she was going to take me where I would be safe. She gave me some bitter water to drink, and told me not to be afraid. She talked to me until I went to sleep.”
She looked up at Fraser, a frightened and bewildered little girl, and yet with a dignity about her, too.
“My mother said our gods have cursed me, and I would never be safe with my own people any more. But she said Earthmen have different gods, who wouldn’t know me. She said you wouldn’t kill me. Is that true?”
Fraser said something under his breath, and then he told her, “Yes. That’s true. Your mother is a wise woman. She brought you to the right place.” His face had become perfectly white. He stepped back from the bed and asked, “What’s your name?”
“Bisha.”
“Are you hungry, Bisha?”
She hesitated, still gulping down sobs. “I don’t know.”
“You think about it. Your clothes are there—put them on. I’ll fix some breakfast.”
He went out into the next room, sick and shaking with rage such as he had never experienced before. Superstition, ignorance, the pious cruelty of the savage. Get an epidemic going and when the magic of the Old Man fails, find a scapegoat. Call a child accursed, and send its own mother to slaughter it. Mentally, Fraser bowed to the fierce-eyed woman who had been too tough for those cowardly old men. Poor devil, only the certainty of death could have made her abandon her child to an Earthman—a creature alien and unknown, but having different gods—
The Coming of the Terrans Page 5