The chanting ceased. The people filed on both sides into a semicircle and stood still, with the harpers at the center and a little group of people in front of them, somehow alone and separate.
One of these people took off the concealing cloak and Selden saw that it was a woman dressed all in purple. For some obscure reason he was sure it was Leila, though the woman’s face in the torchlight showed only the smooth gleaming of a silver mask, a very ancient thing with a subtle look of cruel compassion. She took in her hands a pale globed lamp and raised it, and the harpers struck their strings once. The other persons, six in number, laid aside their cloaks. They were three men and three women, all naked and smiling, and now the harps began a tune that was almost merry and the woman in purple swayed her body in time to it. The naked people began to dance, their eyes blank and joyous with some powerful drug, and she led them dancing into the darkness, and as she led them she sang, a long sweet fluting call.
The harps fell silent. Only the woman’s voice sounded, and her lamp shone like a dim star, far away.
Beyond the lamp, an eye opened and looked and was aware.
Selden saw the people, the priestess and the six dancing ones, limned momentarily against that orb as seven people might be limned against a risen moon. Then something in him gave way and he fell, clutching oblivion to him like a saving armor.
They spent the remainder of that night and the following day in Firsa Mak’s house by the dark canal, and there were sounds of terrible revelry in the streets. Selden sat staring straight ahead, his body shaken by small periodic tremors.
“It isn’t true,” he said, again and again. “It isn’t true.”
“It may not be true,” Altman said, “but it’s a fact. And it’s the facts that kill you. Do you understand now why we brought you?”
“You want me to tell the Bureau about… about that.”
“The Bureau and anyone that will listen.”
“But why me? Why not somebody really important, like one of the diplomats?”
“We tried that. Remember Loughlin Herbert?”
“But he died of a heart… Oh.”
“When Bentham told us about you,” Firsa Mak said, “you seemed young and strong enough to stand the shock. We’ve done all we can now, Selden. For years Altman and I have been trying…”
“They won’t listen to us,” Altman said. “They will not listen. And if they keep sending people in, nice well-meaning children and their meddling nannies, not knowing… I simply will not be responsible for the consequences.” He looked down at Selden from his gaunt and weathered height.
Firsa Mak said softly, “This is a burden. We have borne it, Selden. We even take pride in bearing it.” He nodded toward the unseen hills. “That has the power of destruction. Jekkara certainly, and Valkis probably, and Barrakesh, and all the people who depend on this canal for their existence. It can destroy. We know. This is a Martian affair and most of us do not wish to have outsiders brought into it. But Altman is my brother and I must have some care for his people, and I tell you that the Priestess prefers to choose her offerings from among strangers…”
Selden whispered, “How often?”
“Twice a year, when the Mad Moon rises. In between, it sleeps.”
“It sleeps,” said Altman. “But if it should be roused, and frightened, or made angry… For God’s sake, Selden, tell them, so that at least they’ll know what they’re getting into.”
Selden said wildly, “How can you live here, with that…”
Firsa Mak looked at him, surprised that he should ask. “Why,” he said, “because we always have.”
Selden stared, and thought, and did not sleep, and once he screamed when Leila came softly into the room.
On the second night they slipped out of Jekkara and went back across the desert to the place of rocks, where the copter was waiting. Only Altman returned with Selden. They sat silently in the cabin, and Selden thought, and from time to time he saw Altman watching him, and already in his eyes there was the understanding of defeat.
The glowing domes of Kahora swam out of the dusk, and Denderon was in the sky.
“You’re not going to tell them,” Altman said.
“I don’t know,” whispered Selden. “I don’t know.”
Altman left him at the landing stage. Selden did not see him again. He took a cab to his hotel and went directly to his room and locked himself in.
The familiar, normal surroundings aided a return to sanity. He was able to marshall his thoughts more calmly.
If he believed that what he had seen was real, he would have to tell about it, even if no one would listen to him. Even if his superiors, his teachers, his sponsors, the men he venerated and whose approval he yearned for, should be shocked, and look at him with scorn, and shake their heads, and forever close their doors to him. Even if he should be condemned to the outer darkness inhabited by people like Altman and Firsa Mak. Even if.
But if he did not believe that it was real, if he believed instead that it was illusion, hallucination induced by drugs and heaven knew what antique Martian chicanery… He had been drugged, that was certain. And Leila had practised some sort of hypnotic technique upon him…
If he did not believe…
Oh God, how wonderful not to believe, to be free again, to be secure in the body of truth!
He thought, in the quiet and comforting confines of his room, and the longer he thought the more positive his thinking became, the more free of subjectivity, the deeper and calmer in understanding. By the morning he was wan and haggard but healed.
He went to the Bureau and told them that he had been taken ill immediately upon landing, which was why he had not reported. He also told them that he had had urgent word from home and would have to return there at once. They were very sorry to lose him, but most sympathetic, and they booked him onto the first available flight A few scars remained on Selden’s psyche. He could not bear the sound of a harp nor the sight of a woman wearing purple. These phobias he could have put up with, but the nightmares were just too much. Back on Earth, he went at once to his analyst. He was quite honest with him, and the analyst was able to show him exactly what had happened. The whole affair had been a sex fantasy induced by drugs, with the Priestess a mother-image. The Eye which had looked at him then and which still peered unwinking out of his recurring dreams was symbolic of the female generative principle, and the feeling of horror it aroused in him was due to the guilt-complex he had because he was a latent homosexual. Selden was enormously comforted.
The analyst assured him that now that things were healthily out in the open, the secondary effects would fade away. And they might have done so except for the letter.
It arrived just six Martian months after his unfortunate dinner date with Bentham. It was not signed. It said, “Leila waits for you at moonrise.” And it bore the sketch, very accurately and quite unmistakably done, of a single monstrous eye.
The Road to Sinharat
I
THE door was low, deep-sunk into the thickness of the wall. Carey knocked and then he waited, stooped a bit under the lintel-stone, fitting his body to the meagre shadow as though he could really hide it there. A few yards away, beyond cracked and tilted paving-blocks, the Jekkara Low-Canal showed its still black water to the still black sky, and both were full of stars.
Nothing moved along the canal-site. The town was closed tight, and this in itself was so unnatural that it made Carey shiver. He had been here before and he knew how it ought to be. The chief industry of the Low-Canal towns is sinning of one sort of another, and they work at it right around the clock. One might have thought that all the people had gone away, but Carey knew they hadn’t. He knew that he had not taken a single step unwatched. He had not really believed that they would let him come this far, and he wondered why they had not killed him. Perhaps they remembered him.
There was a sound on the other side of the door.
Carey said in the antique High Martian, “Here is one
who claims the guest-right.” In Low Martian, the vernacular that fitted more easily on his tongue, he said, “Let me in, Derech. You owe me blood.”
The door opened narrowly and Carey slid through it, into lamplight and relative warmth. Derech closed the door and barred it, saying, “Damn you, Carey. I knew you were going to turn up here babbling about blood-debts. I swore I wouldn’t let you in.”
He was a Low-Canaller, lean and small and dark and predatory. He wore a red jewel in his left ear-lobe and a totally incongruous but comfortable suit of Terran synthetics, insulated against heat and cold. Carey smiled.
“Sixteen years ago,” he said, “you’d have perished before you’d have worn that.”
“Corruption. Nothing corrupts like comfort, unless it’s kindness.” Derech sighed. “I knew it was a mistake to let you save my neck that time. Sooner or later you’d claim payment. Well, now that I have let you in, you might as well sit down.” He poured wine into a cup of alabaster worn thin as an eggshell and handed it to Carey. They drank, sombrely, in silence. The flickering lamp-light showed the shadows and the deep lines in Carey’s face.
Derech said, “How long since you’ve slept?”
“I can sleep on the way,” said Carey, and Derech looked at him with amber eyes as coldly speculative as a cat’s.
CAREY did not press him. The room was large, richly furnished with the bare, spare, faded richness of a world that had very little left to give in the way of luxury. Some of the things were fairly new, made in the traditional manner by Martian craftsmen. They were almost indistinguishable from the things that had been old when the Reed Kings and the Bee Kings were little boys along the Nile-bank.
“What will happen,” Derech asked, “if they catch you?”
“Oh,” said Carey, “they’ll deport me first. Then the United Worlds Court will try me, and they can’t do anything but find me guilty. They’ll hand me over to Earth for punishment, and there will be further investigations and penalties and fines and I’ll be a thoroughly broken man when they’ve finished, and sorry enough for it. Though I think they’ll be sorrier in the long run.”
“That won’t help matters any,” said Derech.
“No.”
“Why,” asked Derech, “why is it that they will not listen?”
“Because they know that they are right.”
Derech said an evil word.
“But they do. I’ve sabotaged the Rehabilitation Project as much as I possibly could. I’ve rechanneled funds and misdirected orders so they’re almost two years behind schedule. These are the things they’ll try me for. But my real crime is that I have questioned Goodness and the works thereof. Murder they might forgive me, but not that.”
He added wearily, “You’ll have to decide quickly. The UW boys are working closely with the Council of City-States, and Jekkara is no longer untouchable. It’s also the first place they’ll look for me.”
“I wondered if that had occurred to you.” Derech frowned. “That doesn’t bother me. What does bother me is that I know where you want to go. We tried it once, remember? We ran for our lives across that damned desert. Four solid days and nights.” He shivered.
“Send me as far as Barrakesh. I can disappear there, join a southbound caravan. I intend to go alone.”
“If you intend to kill yourself, why not do it here in comfort and among friends? Let me think,” Derech said. “Let me count my years and my treasure and weigh them against a probable yard of sand.”
Flames hissed softly around the coals in the brazier. Outside, the wind got up and started its ancient work, rubbing the house walls with tiny grains of dust, rounding off the corners, hollowing the window places. All over Mars the wind did this, to huts and palaces, to mountains and the small burrow-heaps of animals, laboring patiently toward a city when the whole face of the planet should be one smooth level sea of dust. Only lately new structures of metal and plastic had appeared beside some of the old stone cities. They resisted the wearing sand. They seemed prepared to stay forever. And Carey fancied that he could hear the old wind laughing as it went.
THERE was a scratching against the closed shutter in the back wall, followed by a rapid drumming of fingertips. Derech rose, his face suddenly alert. He rapped twice on the shutter to say that he understood and then turned to Carey. “Finish your wine.”
He took the cup and went into another room with it. Carey stood up. Mingling with the sound of the wind outside, the gentle throb of motors became audible, low in the sky and very near.
Derech returned and gave Carey a shove toward an inner wall. Carey remembered the pivoted stone that was there, and the space behind it. He crawled through the opening. “Don’t sneeze or thrash about,” said Derech. “The stonework is loose, and they’d hear you.”
He swung the stone shut. Carey huddled as comfortably as possible in the uneven hole, worn smooth with the hiding of illegal things for countless generations. Air and a few faint gleams of light seeped through between the stone blocks, which were set without mortar as in most Martian construction. He could even see a thin vertical segment of the room.
When the sharp knock came at the door, he discovered that he could hear quite clearly.
Derech moved across his field of vision. The door opened. A man’s voice demanded entrance in the name of the United Worlds and the Council of Martian City-States.
“Please enter,” said Derech.
Carey saw, more or less fragmentarily, four men. Three were Martians in the undistinguished cosmopolitan garb of the City-States. They were the equivalent of the FBI. The fourth was an Earthman, and Carey smiled to see the measure of his own importance. The spare, blond, good-looking man with the sunburn and the friendly blue eyes might have been an actor, a tennis-player, or a junior executive on holiday. He was Howard Wales, Earth’s best man in Interpol.
Wales let the Martians do the talking, and while they did it he drifted unobtrusively about, peering through doorways, listening, touching, feeling. Carey became fascinated by him, in an unpleasant sort of way. Once he came and stood directly in front of Carey’s crevice in the wall. Carey was afraid to breathe, and he had a dreadful notion that Wales would suddenly turn about and look straight in at him through the crack.
The senior Martian, a middle-aged man with an able look about him, was giving Derech a briefing on the penalties that awaited him if he harbored a fugitive or withheld information. Carey thought that he was being too heavy about it. Even five years ago he would not have dared to show his face in Jekkara. He could picture Derech listening amiably, lounging against something and playing with the jewel in his ear. Finally Derech got bored with it and said without heat,
“Because of our geographical position, we have been exposed to the New Culture.” The capitals were his. “We have made adjustments to it. But this is still Jekkara and you’re here on sufferance, no more. Please don’t forget it.”
Wales spoke, deftly forestalling any comment from the City-Stater. “You’ve been Carey’s friend for many years, haven’t you?”
“We robbed tombs together in the old days.”
“‘Archeological research’ is a nicer term, I should think.”
“My very ancient and perfectly honorable guild never used it. But I’m an honest trader now, and Carey doesn’t come here.”
He might have added a qualifying “often,” but he did not.
The City-Stater said derisively, “He has or will come here now.”
“Why?” asked Derech.
“He needs help. Where else could he go for it?”
“Anywhere. He has many friends. And he knows Mars better than most Martians, probably a damn sight better than you do.”
“But,” said Wales quietly, “outside of the City-States all Earthmen are being hunted down like rabbits, if they’re foolish enough to stay. For Carey’s sake, if you know where he is, tell us. Otherwise he is almost certain to die.”
“He’s a grown man,” Derech said. “He must carry his own load.
”
HE’S carrying too much…” Wales said, and then broke off. There was a sudden gabble of talk, both in the room and outside. Everybody moved toward the door, out of Gary’s vision, except Derech who moved into it, relaxed and languid and infuriatingly self-assured. Carey could not hear the sound that had drawn the others but he judged that another flier was landing. In a few minutes Wales and the others came back, and now there were some new people with them. Carey squirmed and craned, getting closer to the crack, and he saw Alan Woodthorpe, his superior, Administrator of the Rehabilitation Project for Mars, and probably the most influential man on the planet. Carey knew that he must have rushed across a thousand miles of desert from his headquarters at Kahora, just to be here at this moment.
Carey was flattered and deeply moved.
Woodthorpe introduced himself to Derech. He was disarmingly simple and friendly in his approach, a man driven and wearied by many vital matters but never forgetting to be warm, gracious, and human. And the devil of it was that he was exactly what he appeared to be. That was what made dealing with him so impossibly difficult.
Derech said, smiling a little, “Don’t stray away from your guards.”
“Why is it?” Woodthorpe asked. “Why this hostility? If only your people would understand that we’re trying to help them.”
“They understand that perfectly,” Derech said. “What they can’t understand is why, when they have thanked you politely and explained that they neither need nor want your help, you still refuse to leave them alone.”
The Coming of the Terrans Page 13