by Gardner Fox
Carrick drew a deep breath. This was his world, this Slarrn. It was why his body had been created. An eagerness to sink his feet in those moving grasses flooded through his veins.
Mai looked up at him. Her tonguetip came out to moisten her lips. His fingers tightened on her hand encouragingly. The fear in her slanted eyes slowly faded. She smiled tremulously, then nodded.
“Kael, I’m all right. I’m—ready.”
They went like children toward the shimmering curtain, hand in hand. The subsidiundum gateway rose overhead. The hidden motors fueling the gateway hummed far away, gently, in hushed rhythms.
They thrust against the energy motes.
There was nothing there, only colors rippling and dancing all around them as though in welcome. For a moment they could feel the curtain folding them in its embrace, then it opened and they were through.
Their feet walked in high grasses and their eyes went across a rolling meadowland where the great trees loomed in lonely splendor under a blue and cloudless sky. A mighty sun hung low in the heavens, yellow, hot. Far away they could see the sparkle of sunlight on blue waters.
It was a new world, an infant world where man was concerned. For untold eons it had lain here, damp with rain or parched by that brilliant star-sun, waiting for the race of man to come to it. Carrick lifted his head and sniffed at the cool, pure air. He felt as Kinnick must have felt standing on Centauri 2, the first other-system planet ever found by man in his early voyages out among the stars.
This was his world. He had been created for it by Hannes Stryker. Suddenly he understood that he had been a stranger—almost an alien—on the planets owned by man. This was his home, this Slarrn.
He turned to Mai Valoris, swept her into his arms, covered her face with kisses. Yes! Here he was himself, the real Kael Carrick. The blood pounded riotously in his veins. His skin tingled. Exhilaration was his state of mind. He felt curiously light, agile, alert.
“Do you remember the old concept of the first man, the first woman?” he asked. When she nodded, he grinned. “Hello, Eve. I’m Adam.”
Her eyebrows arched. “There was a Lilith too, I recall. If this land has a Lilith, I’ll—” She broke off and stared at him with sudden terror in her eyes. “Kael, do you think—Lilith? Ylth’yl? Could—could there by any connection?”
“You mean, that the people of Dakkan planet—some of them, anyhow—fled away into the stars to escape Ylth’yl? And landed on Earth? That a race memory has been handed down to us, corrupted and changed by time, of some terrible horror from their past?” He pondered, standing there with the breeze blowing his long-uncut hair. “It might be. The archeologists and the anthropologists will have a picnic when we turn them loose on Dakkan and on Slarrn.”
He turned and stared around him. Hannes Stryker had stood here in these grasses. Over yonder, where there was blue water, he had swum with the woman he loved, pretty Palmira. And somewhere further on were the thatched dwellings of her people.
Carrick felt a need to go and see those grass huts, to walk the hardpacked dirt streets where Hannes Stryker had walked. He tugged Mai Valoris by the hand. She came gladly, almost happily.
No one looking at this pristine world could imagine there was any horror in it. It was too lovely, too filled with natural beauty. It banished fears as does daylight the nightmare terrors of the dark hours. She had nothing to fear. Ylth’yl was a bogie summoned up to frighten little children no more. She laughed and the sound of her mirth ran on tripping feet across the grasses and between the trees.
They waded through the shallow waters of a ford, their high leather sandals keeping their feet dry. Carrick looked at the deeper waters and at the branches of a willow brushing the surface with its leaves. Mai thought, he is remembering Hannes Stryker and Palmira. They swam hereabouts, perhaps beneath that very tree and there they may have made love. She almost wanted to cry, and swallowed a lump in her throat.
They found a narrow path and made good time along its length. Carrick seemed troubled, Mai thought, and spoke to him.
He hunkered down, brushed his palm across some weeds newly grown on the path. “This was a well-used thoroughfare when Hannes Stryker was in Slarrn. Weeds grow here now. The people used to travel over it for drinking water. If there are weeds, it means the path has not been used in a long time. Not since Hannes Stryker was killed.”
“Oh! You mean—there aren’t any people left.”
Carrick rose to his feet. “Either Ylth’yl took them or—they fled somewhere else. And I’ve a feeling that no matter where they go on this planet, Ylth’yl can—reach them.”
They went on. It seemed that a shadow had come between the hot sun and her skin. Mai shivered.
As they stood on the crown of a hill, they could look down into a little valley where thatched huts lay scattered as by a windstorm. A few of them had toppled over. Others were crushed flat. Desolation and emptiness was everywhere.
Mai said, “Don’t go down there. I’m afraid.”
“I have to go, Mai. Wait here if you want.”
She would not stay alone. She ran to catch him and walked quickly, daintily at his heels, casting glances back over her shoulder and on either side of the path. The closer she came to the broken kaygan, the heavier weighed her spirits.
Carrick stopped. She glanced at him and caught her breath. His eyes were feverishly bright, staring on nothingness. She shook his arm but at his gesture, waited patiently.
Carrick was listening to a voice.
You have come to the crushed huts, by now. It is a sight geared by hypnosis to trigger my voice in your memory, Kael. By this time you understand a little of what I have sought to do. I have created you to fight with Ylth’yl. No more, no less. I have made you uneasy in your own world, in our world, for this reason, that you might not rest content until you have done what you were made to do.
Forgive me, old friend, for the liberty I have taken. But I know Kael Carrick well enough to understand that had you been given the choice, with a full understanding of what must be done, you yourself would have volunteered your services.
Ylth’yl is no creature out of a nightmare. It is a peculiar type of energy that has learned to feed on the life energies in human beings. My theory is that there were many Ylth’yls once, very long ago, and that they have died out. This Ylth’yl—like the tiger turned man-eater—is an outlaw of its kind.
It is energy. And energy can be exhausted. Always remember this and do not fear it for its alien qualities. I have made you well, Kael Carrick—far better than you can have guessed. Rest now. I will speak with you again.
Carrick shook himself. A part of his mind had opened with the voice in his head. He sensed that he was different, that in this Slarrn world and under the hot yellow sun, a change was coming over the silicate components of his body. He was not as he had been, incomplete and unfinished. Hannes Stryker had made him with a timing device within his cells. In Slarrn, breathing its air and with its sunlight on his flesh, he would come to full flower.
Mai was staring at him with wide eyes. He grinned and saw relief wash across her face. “You looked so strange, standing there,” she told him, moving toward him, lifting his arm and putting it about her waist. “Different. Not the Kael Carrick I’ve known.”
“I am. It’s just that Hannes Stryker was talking to me.” He chuckled at her expression. “A post-hypnotic conversation, if you want to put it that way. While I slept he must have spent hours talking to me, feeding information into my brain, not to be released until I came into Slarrn, so the sight of these huts might trigger it.
“I think that the sight of Ylth’yl back on Dakkan planet subconsciously triggered off some of it. I jumped the gun, so to speak.” He reflected, head lowered. “He could have had no way of knowing he would be murdered—or could he?”
“I—I don’t follow you.”
Kael Carrick knew excitement. “Suppose he had a suspicion that—once he’d revealed his discovery of Slarrn to someone, as
he did to Alton Raymond—he might be killed for his secret. I think he would have hypnotized me then, perhaps even while I slept, and told me what he wanted me to know.”
“The only man he told was Alton Raymond.”
“Yes, I thought of that. It makes sense.”
He brought her with him in among the ruined huts. They crouched down, lifting sections of the kaygans. They found only broken cooking utensils, shattered bits of pottery. Carrick frowned. Anything usable had been taken away.
He stood and looked around him.
Perhaps there were other villages of these primitive people. Learning that this kaygan had been destroyed, they may have come and plundered it. In that case, there would be others living on Slarrn. Ylth’yl would still be here and waiting. His heart picked up its pulsebeat stronger than before.
“We’ll go to find them,” he told Mai.
She followed after him obediently.
They slept out on the grasslands when night came. There was a coolness in the air when the sun went down that made them build a fire for warmth and huddle close together.
Carrick woke a little before dawn, every sense alert.
There was danger somewhere close at hand. He knew it with a corner of his newly opened mind, as the rattlesnakes of Earth possess infrared sense organs which can detect the most minute temperature changes in the atmosphere and so warn them of the approach of a warmblooded animal or man. Carrick came to his feet, slowly.
Three men were coming from the west, bent over, crouching behind the high grasses, spears in their hands. They were big, powerful men, wearing fur kaunakes belted about by broad leather straps from which hung scabbards holding long daggers. Conical fur caps rose upwards on their heads. Their black hair hung long and uncut, tumbling about their shoulders.
When they saw Carrick on his feet, they straightened slowly.
“You are our prisoners,” one of them shouted.
Carrick shook his head. “No. We are no one’s prisoners. We come from another universe as friends, to save you from Ylth’yl.”
They looked at one another. On the ground, Mai Valoris was sitting up, staring. Carrick could hear her harsh breathing.
One of the hunters stepped forward. His arm went back and he hurled his spear. It made a living flash of color in the crimson dawn. Mai screamed.
Carrick saw sunlight glinting on the spear as it sped toward him. There was no panic in him for a voice was whispering to his mind, swiftly, with the instantaneous speed of thought.
Your body is not like the bodies of other men. You have strange powers within your cell plasma. Take thought on what you would do—and do it.
The spear was closer, speeding toward him.
Will your body to take action as you might will to lift an arm. There are marvels of electronic power built into your nerves and brain, glands which are not true glands but microelectronic devices which can use your silicate nerves and flesh as conductors, transistors, computers, diodes. You might call this inbuilt mechanism a mechanical psi factor, if you will.
There was no more time for thought.
A foot from Carrick’s chest the spear stopped suddenly as though it had hit a metal wall. There was a sharp clanging and the spear fell to the ground. It lay in the high grasses, the men staring at it with round eyes.
They raised their eyes and stared at Carrick.
“Kallila,” one of them whispered.
It was their word for devil, Carrick realized. Apparently Stryker had taught him enough of the Llynn language to let him understand the natives when he came into contact with them.
“Not kallila, but reath.”
Reath meant he-who-rescues. He hoped these barbarians would believe him. He held up his right hand, palm outward. He said slowly, tongue stumbling over the sounds which he had never heard but which he knew in a hitherto-unused corner of his brain, “I come in peace, to save you from Ylth’yl.”
“None can save us from Ylth’yl,” the biggest man growled.
“I can.” He hoped they would catch the confidence in his voice. He invited them to throw their spears again. “As I stopped one spear, I can stop a hundred. Come, test me.”
The other two spearmen hurled their slim and deadly lengths of wood and steel. Again they hit that unseen barrier, fell to the ground. Carrick stretched out his hand, pointing at them.
The spears dissolved in flares of brilliance.
The three men howled and fled.
Mai was whimpering at his feet, staring upward into his face with disbelieving eyes. “Are you a god?” she breathed.
He ran fingers through his thick hair. “Of course not. I did it—that is, it wasn’t magic or anything like that. I—” How could he explain it? He knew the answer: Stryker had told him long ago, but he had listened with only half a mind, for he had been too intent upon having a body to care how Hannes Stryker was making that body.
“All biological life is electrical in nature,” he said slowly. “The body of man is like an electronic machine, as are the bodies of the animals we know. Bionic biology has been studying the abilities of animals for a long, long time, seeking to transmit their properties into the body of a man. Hannes Stryker perfected the techniques of centuries—and went a step further.
“He built me from scratch, remember. In my body he placed the ability to create a forcefield about myself and the immediate area where I am. A forcefield is nothing more than a field of energy vibrating at such a frequency that nothing material can penetrate it. Apparently I can cause such a vibration with my mind—or with some organ located in the silicate cells of my body.”
“And—and the way you destroyed the s-spears?”
“I did it with anti-matter, which is merely another manifestation of electrical energy. There is an anti-matter universe—men have known about it ever since the middle twentieth century—and Hannes Stryker found a way to reproduce it in my flesh, by a series of interlocking transducing nerve cells. Just as danger signals sensed by your eyes or ears are received by your brain which then sends an electrical impulse to your leg muscles which makes you run from danger, so my unseen glands and organs operate.
“I may be putting it badly—or baldly. I’m not Hannes Stryker. I can only tell you a little of what he told me—and half of that I’ve forgotten.”
He pointed at the sun, low across the horizon. “The sun of this world does something to my cells. I was made for Slarrn, not for our old world. Here I am a god, I suppose—for only a god can fight Ylth’yl and hope to defeat it.”
He put his hand to her elbow and lifted her to her feet. “We’ll go after those three hunters. I want to tell them I have come to help.”
“They’ve run away,” she said, scanning the empty grasslands to the west. Her eyes slid sideways at him. “I suppose you can track them, though?”
He nodded. “I can sense their body heat. It’s—like a wake behind a boat in the sea. You see the wake and you know a boat has passed by. It’s the same way here.”
Mai Valoris was silent. She did not understand but she had seen and so she knew she had to believe. Kael Carrick possessed abilities that made him more than man. Well, Ylth’yl was more than man, too.
They overtook the three hunters in a forest glade. The Llynn stood with their backs to the bole of a great tree, staring with frightened eyes as Carrick walked toward them, hand upraised.
“Peace,” he said softly. “Peace.”
The biggest man licked his lips. “Peace,” he croaked.
When nothing happened to them—when they were not blasted as the spears had been blasted—the hunters relaxed a little. They squatted down at Carrick’s invitation and began to talk.
The village of the chutan Maarl had been emptied by Ylth’yl twenty moons ago. Yes, he and his hunters—the big fur-clad man, and Khyrl, was chutan of his own kaygan—had looted the deserted kaygan. Why not? The people of Maarl would never come back to it. It was better that his people have the cooking pots and garments left behind.
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No, there were still people on this planet. Ylth’yl had not reached the kaygan of Khyrl yet. But it would come any day now. They all expected it. They had become very fatalistic about Ylth’yl. There was nothing any of them could do to avoid it.
“I have come to fight Ylth’yl,” Carrick told them.
Khyrl stared at him dubiously, then shook his head. “No okan can defeat Ylth’yl,” he stated flatly. Since Carrick possessed a body like their own, he, too, was an okan. When Carrick reminded him about the spears, his eyes grew glazed and he admitted that Carrick was such an okan as none of them had ever seen; but still it not possible to destroy Ylth’yl.
Long, long ago, when the okans of Slarrn had been great—they had built the city of Andraar and had been able to fly in the air and along the ground on animals made of metal, hard as this was to believe—they had fought Ylth’yl when he appeared among them. Even those mighty ancestors of theirs, with all their magic and great weapons, had been unable to stop it. What chance had Carrick? No, it was best he save himself if he could and go back to his own world.
He was welcome to come with them to their kaygan, of course. Khyrl grinned and slapped his knee in delight at that thought. With such an okan as Carrick for a friend and ally, his would be the greatest kaygan on all Slarrn. No enemies could fight them with Carrick to destroy their spears. Would Carrick teach Khyrl that trick of stopping a spear in mid-flight before it reached its target?
“I will come,” Carrick said, “not to fight and overcome your enemies, but to protect you all from Ylth’yl.” If I can, he thought, and crossed his fingers.
The entire kaygan turned out to welcome home their chutan. It was a far larger kaygan than Maarl’s had been. The huts here were of stone with reed roofs, and they numbered into the hundreds. The men were tall and powerfully muscled, the women slender and very attractive. Carrick wondered what Palmira had looked like. Their faces showed intelligence of a high order; after all, he reasoned, theirs had been a great civilization before Ylth’yl had destroyed it.