Beyond the golden stair

by Bok, Hannes, 1914-1964

  His hair was like sand-blasted silver. Astonishingly fine, it was kept from flamelike floating, as was also his thin beard, by weighting each hair at its tip with a sparkling silver bead. Hibbert wondered quite reasonably how long it took the old man each morning to dress both hair and beard.

  The oldster wore a loose and shapeless coat of rust color, damasked with geometric glyphs. At the newcomers' entrance, he had been fingering a loop of dark beads, perhaps a rosary, fastened to his girdle. Now he dropped it and bent laboriously in the deepest of bows.

  He said without a trace of flame, his lips barely moving: "Greetings, strangers." His voice was old, the husky sigh of winter wind in skeleton trees. T am Patiu:, keeper of this Central Gate. Deign to sit with me and to make yourselves known.''

  He spread out his hands in a gesture of invitation, and as his guests advanced—Burks boldly, Hibbert numbly, Scarlatti and Carlotta none too confidently— he appraised them, but with no spark of recognition firing his all-wise eyes. Yet he was definitely the old man of Hibbert's dream.

  He overheard Carlotta's whisper: 1 tell you, he is too one of them funny faces that looked down at me from the sky, that night I kept you awakel Why don't he show it?"

  The blue-robed beings who, unbeknownst, had evidently accompanied the group of hiunans, now humbly backed out into the blaclaiess, but the tall flame-haired man and woman drifted further forward until they had posted themselves at each side of Patur's bench and were standing each behind one of the cubes.

  The oldster motioned the newcomers down among the cushions. Burks and Hibbert seated themselves,

  but Scarlatti and the woman peered about nervously like wild creatures in a strange cranny before finally, gingerly, they sat.

  Burks had become aware of his bare feet and was examining them. "It wasn't the Foimtain of Youth, that's for sure," he said aside to Hibbert. The scar still shows."

  Patur said dryly: "All of you have questions to ask— your auras are peppered with interrogation points I But let us not waste precious time with random talk, when there is swifter means of satisfying your curios-ity.

  He signalled the flame-tressed woman at his right. She touched the block of red stone and its upper surface swxmg up like a hd. From the opening, she drew forth something which glittered like sunfired dewdrops, its lights translated to brittle tinklings like music rapped on timbrels of glass. It was a large crystal mask wdth a beardlike black handle at its chin. Deferentially, she handed it to Patur.

  Her mate on Patur's left raised the lid of the second cube and took out a bundle of stuflE hke a compact mass of milkweed down, its lustrous white shot with filaments of scarlet. He tossed it in the air. It unfurled and hung before the bench without apparent support, the scarlet threads radiating from its center hke the Hues of a spider's web. It no more obscured Patur than thinning mist.

  The old man caught a dangling twain of the red threads and plugged them into the handle of the mask, no doubt establishing electrical contact. He held the mask that all might see, and asked:

  'Tou know this, and its use?"

  They shook their heads. Hibbert ventured, ''Since it's transparent, it's hardly meant to be worn as a

  disguise." His eyes searched the oldster's for some hint of recognitioii.

  But Patur's smile was impersonal. 'T^o, it is the antithesis of the usual mask which is meant to conceal the wearer s identity—this one reveals identity!''

  They scanned it skeptically. He explained, a trifle wearily, as though he had done the same thing innumerable times earher: ''Your scientists have devices which can chart and measure the electrical impulses of the human brain— ^

  He saw that this was news to them—Scarlatti and Carlotta at least. He said: "They are known as electro-encephalometers, I believe.''

  The giant said: ''Oh." Carlotta nodded emphatically, conceding her inferiority to the polysyllabic word.

  "This device, this mask, merely takes a step farther along that particular path of research. It not only makes a continuous graph of the brain's radiations but reconverts them electronically into the visual images and sounds of the original thoughts and memories, and projects them upon the screen"—he bent his head at the web before them—^"that many may peer simultaneously into the mental processes of one. Here in Khoire we have in storage many miUions of such graphs, fresh as they were at the moment of their recording. Though the minds which made them have passed from Khoire many centuries ago, still we can read them and add to our knowledge."

  He adjusted the mask to his face. Through it, his voice came clearly as before.

  "I will demonstrate its use, that in all swiftness you learn who I am and what is my background, thereby learning too the kind of plane you have entered—^its customs and its perils."

  He leaned forward. "Observe!"

  To what happened next, the flame-haired folk paid no attention. They stood stony still with their hands again crossed over their breasts, their gaze aloof as though dreaming.

  The web quivered as if something struggling were enmeshed in its strands. The pulsations settled into a regular rhythm, and abruptly the web vanished. With it went all which lay behind it—the old man, his servants, the bench, cubes and black window. Before a wink of darkness or of light could intervene, a miniature landscape replaced them.

  The eyes saw it as three dimensional and solid. It was exquisitely fashioned, a masterpiece of the model-makers' craft, and all of carved and flashing jewels. At every twinkle of its gemmed planes, at every highlight winging from its looping curves, sound arose— arpeggios from harps strung with shafting moonbeams; glissades on spinets of steel; stammering appogiaturic notes of Ching and Sarode; percussional tintamarre like the tinkle of a Javanese gamelan parodied by wands of glass on panes of ice.

  It was as much a landscape of sounds as of sub-stancel

  Principally, it was a honeycomb of amber light, but ragged and weathered—a skeleton of jumbled and phosphorescent bones clothed sparsely with flesh of wanly luminous mist. It stretched in all directions with the suggestion of boundless distance.

  A fungoid bhght seemed to blotch it. Hibbert peered closer and discerned that these stains were struc-tin-es surrounded by gardens of glowing vegetation and linked by paths and stairs. They speckled the floors of the honeycomb's celk, dotted its walls and hung inverted from the ceilingsl

  i

  Among them, incredibly tiny and as incredibly perfect, moved figures both human and animal, but unlike any animals known in Hibbert's world—things like waited frogs grotesquely combined with starfish; ghttering bees which flowed along on snaky tails; cats scaled widi thousands of leaves and antlered with coiling flames whereon trembled blossoms of stars— and these were but three of teeming multitudes.

  Scarlatti said: "Pink elephants and great galloping hoptoads—and we ain't had so much as a shotl"

  With utter disregard for gravity, all the figures walked complacently not only on the horizontal stretches, but up the vertical walls and crawled like flies on the ceilings I

  There was the sensation of forward movement. One of the houses expanded until it filled all the screen. It was reminiscent of the crooked house built by the crooked man who walked a crooked mile, and its designer must have been a madman, for no drunkard could have planned and built it in so compatibly manic a mood.

  As if its many wings were not confusing enough in themselves, jutting from the main structure at crazily unforeseen angles, they were striated and dappled with vivid cinnabar, orange, and violet. As the house came closer and the angle of vision kept changing, the designs merged ephemerally together into new patterns and then blended anew into fresh combinations. There was beauty in those sudden and surprising changes, and a hint of humor, too.

  The windows were as odd as the doors. Some were upright like those to which Hibbert was accustomed; others slanted like the outside entrances to the cellars of old-style houses. He saw some which lay flat underfoot like manholes, and some

  which spread overh
ead hke trapdoors leading to attics.

  Down to one of these doors he traveled as the pictured house drew nearer. He seemed to pass into tlie building and glide along a twisting corridor which swerved and lifted, backtracking on itself—a corridor with walls oddly broken by doors and cubbies in the most unhkely places, including one portal whose two leaves when closed met at right angles, forming a comerl

  To traverse that hall, one must resort to a mountaineers equipment—picks for chopping handholds where the floor buckled in zigzags, ropes for climbing and descending the shafts, and scaling ladders to reach some of the doors.

  Or was Khoire's gravity unlike that of his own sane world? If so, then where really was Khoire? Was it afloat in the sky and held there invisible by the ultra-scientific appliances of its masterminds? Or could it lie within some unknown dimension? Had the shining stair bridged his own universe and an utterly alien one, situated in only God knew what sweeps of time and space?

  He scrutinized his companions to ascertain how they were receiving the picture. Burks was completely absorbed but, as usual, inscrutable. Carlotta's elbows were on her knees and her chin on her hands, as though she were ready to fall asleep. The giant was rapt-eyed and gnawing on a hangnail.

  Hibbert turned back to the web. In the crazy corridor, a pair of heavily-swathed figures were whispering together. From the hang of their garments he guessed them to be flame-haired folk like Patur s servants.

  The man said: "Dearest, I do not know what to say. There is only one thing in me—love—and love.** No

  flame accompanied his words, nor hers as she answered:

  "In me also is only love, for if there is fear, it is the product of love. In all of Hfe, I ask nothing now but our union and a child—else how am I to have hved completely a woman? Nevertheless, I am afraid. The risk—"

  "If not now, then later there will still be that same risk.** His voice trembled. He moved as though to embrace her and forced himself to step away from her, **And I am too aHve with love to waitl*'

  "But if our child should be bom—a monsterl How could I endure bearing a plant—a stone—a thing maybe of no definite shape at all, but changing from one to another on impulse! Yet you say we must chance it. You are a man, but the child would come from me— that is the difference."

  "It would be my child, tool Oh, I would kiss you if I dared, but I must not touch you now when my heart is so full. Love me—do not doubt—comel" He started determinedly toward a doorway. She stood with bowed head a long moment, then slowly followed.

  The picture froze, and Hibbert sifted its import. What land of a realm could this be, where prospective parents feared that they might create offspring in the imrelated forms of plant or stone?

  Well, for one thing the atmosphere here was not as in the world below, nor the gravitational influences the same. These in themselves could divert evolution from its wonted track.

  Mutative freaks bearing little similitude to their progenitors had been produced in Hibbert's world by experiments with X rays and other radiations on embryos. Perhaps such affective energies or others still more puissant were common to Khoire.

  And herein might be the explanation of the blue flamingo! The parent birds might have found entrance and egress to and from Khoire, and in this eerie region their genes had been afflicted, their chick thereby hatching as a mutant, blue instead of the natural flamingo-pink. And if it were indeed a mutant, then that might explain also Carlotta's amazing assertion that the bird had talked with her—possibly via thought-transference.

  Hibbert thought back on the conversation of the veiled Khoireans of the picture. Was this a land of fairy tale where one could transform himself into whatever guise he wished?

  He recalled Siegfried and the tamhelm, the cap which could turn its wearer from man to gnat or dragon or complete invisibility! He recalled, too, the Welsh druids with their magic wands which could instantaneously alter their shapes; the caipin dearg, the magic red bonnet which according to Irish folklore disguised its wearer as he willed. And he recalled the Arabian Djinni, masters of transmutation; the psy-chomorphs of the ancient Greeks; the werewolves rumored in Central Europe; the leopard-men of Africa. Science had dismissed all these as being hypnotic trickery or simple hallucinations vastly exaggerated in their passage through the centuries, not magic nor supernatural at aU.

  But now the picture was in motion again. The viewpoint went past the man and woman and emerged into a pallidly glowing, vast-domed chamber Hke the half of a hollowed moon. It was mirror-floored and completely bare. However, in a niche there was a long table, and behind it were sitting four of tlie blue-clad hooded beings.

  Before each of them lay hatchet-sized objects some-

  thing like small pitchforks, but there were many tines graduating in size and coloring, and all tipped with glassy knobs.

  On a throne behind them was a fifth figure, but judging from the way that the blue fabric folded around the form beneath, it was vastly unlike the four who sat at the table. The cloth was almost smooth around the head and heavily wrinkled around what must be the merest wisp of a body.

  This throned being spoke in a sigh. 'In the land of the Forefathers, ecHpse begins I No danger is sensedl Let the mating beginl"

  On the screen, the veiled pair who had spoken in the corridor now drifted into the domed room. They bent low to the people within the niche, then ghded to the center of the room, and took places perhaps a dozen yards from each other. They cast oflF their veils and stood naked, their flamelike hair wreathing above them.

  Carlotta gasped, shocked, but nonetheless she continued to watch. Scarlatti chewed more earnestly on his hangnail and involuntarily groaned.

  The nude figures were surely not man and woman, but god and goddessi Beside them the most perfectly formed dwellers of Hibbert's world would have seemed misshapen and gross. Yet it was only as man and woman that they gazed at each other v^th a love and—^yes, lust—that was more than a mere expression on their faces. It was so intense that it seemed to tinge the air between them with a faint glimmer of rose,

  Hibbert, already profoundly stirred by their sheer beauty of form, was touched even more deeply by the power of their emotion, as it they had more than enough passion to spare and some of it was flooding

  over him like a torrent that was ecstasy and that clutched and bruised his heart.

  The man and woman clapped their hands with httle beats of light to establish a rhythm. They began to turn, never moving from the places which they had chosen. Faster they whirled and still faster, until they were flesh-colored blurs—mere pillars of light. The flesh-tint brightened to warm amber. The bliss that gripped Hibbert was almost insupportable—he tasted, scented, felt, saw, and heard he could not have said what—essence of joy, agony of desire. Even had there been words for it, he could not have expressed them. His reason was not functioning—only his senses.

  And now like two planets sharing an orbit, the pillars of light began to circle the room—inhumanly swift as if their time-sense had been accelerated. Their racing made of them one continuous streak of flame, a ring of yellow firel

  Hibbert's breath sobbed out and in. The ring began to contract, always brightening. Now it was brighter and narrower still. It rushed into a column of incandescence—and Hibbert could no longer breathe at all. There was the floating sensation of fainting and an explosive eternal joy . . . how many aeons elapsed he did not know. He became conscious again of his body and of someone sobbing ... it was he who was sobbing ... the tears were hot on his cheeks.

  Burks was white and rigid, Carlotta shuddering with her face hidden in her hands, Scarlatti leaning forward, bared teeth clenched and rings of white around the black spots of his eyes.

  The pillar spliti Like a sun casting off molten matter, it threw tangentially from it two dimming blurs. They spun around it, darkening, with decreasing speed. At last their movement ceased, and Hibbert

  saw man and woman again, but sadly shrunken and wan. One long look they gave ea
ch other, then their gaze went to the glow between them. For a moment they were radiant again with pride and affection, but it was slowly and heavy footed that they crept to the shining thing.

  It was a child! But no fresh-bom baby of Hibbert's world. It was more Hke the precocious Christ-children portrayed by medieval painters in the arms of their madonnas.

  From the niche the voice gusted: 'The eclipse progresses in the world of the Forefathers! No danger is sensed! Let new mating begin!**

  The mother gathered the babe to her breast. The father went to his discarded cloak and threw it around his shoulders. He draped the mother^s mantle gently around her. They gazed at the baby and then at each other, and the sanctity of that look was like a halo around them.

  ''And to think that I was afraid!" the mother marvelled.

  "Patur," the father said. 'We will call him Patur.''

  They bowed to the figures in the niche and left the domed chamber. In the hall they encountered another pair of swathed figures waiting. Joyfully they showed the child.

  ''May yoiu: birthing prove as fortunate, Wyssa!** the mother said.

  They moved down the corridor. The second pair of veiled folk entered the chamber, bent to the people within the niche, and took their stances in the middle of the chamber. They dropped their cloaks.

  Male and female though they were, they were not quite man and woman, only quasihuman. They were primarily—^flowers. And though in cold words they

  might sound grotesque, they were as beautiful for their kind as had been the godhke man and woman.

  Their faces peeped from the great ruflMce frills of their gorgeous petals, but they were noseless, the mouths slim shts, and the huge eyes without whites. Their bodies were slender, green, and spiked with leaves. They stood on serpentine roots.