Beyond the golden stair

by Bok, Hannes, 1914-1964

  Even as the pair before them had gazed with love and desire, so did they. Again Hibbert partook of their overbrimming emotion, but it was of an unfamiliar sort. If love might be set to music, theirs was in a minor key. They slapped their leaves in rhythm and spun, and a languor descended over Hibbert like a curtain of warm drowsy darkness . . . the sound of cool waters trickling • . . sharp druglike scent of spice. •.

  From the niche came alarm. 'The Watchers send wamingl Stop the dancel Sudden storm darkens the world of the Forefathers I Its hghtning and thimder can be felt in Khoire as disruptive energiesr

  The blue-robed people sprang up at the table, seizing their strange forks. So fast were the flower-blurs spinning that they could not stop. In white-heat they swept together and fused.

  Again from the niche came the despairing cry. "There is storm belowl Stop the dancel**

  Then fell a soimd so dreadful that it bowled Hibbert backward, clapping his hands over his ears. It was a cataclysm of soimd that suffocated Carlotta's shriek as she crushed rather than clutched the giant. Burks flashed upon his feet, snatching his guns. Before he could use them there was an explosion of tortured light, writhing flickering and rhythmless. Slowly it waned away.

  The voice in the niche sobbed: "Disease has entered Khoirel Doctors, save themi"

  From what had been a column of white-heat rose a thin waihng. Its radiance was splotched with sickly colors and muddy shadows. It separated into three entities. Mother and father fell and lay quivering as though a gigantic claw had clenched on them and crumpled them, their petals torn and tarnished. The male's form was blackening and bloating. Over the female's body rippled wormUke Ughts.

  One of the blue-clad folk rapped the handle of its many-tined fork on the table. At one side the floor parted and up from it arose what seemed a tremendous tangle of distorting mirrors, weirdly faceted prisms, and looping scaffolds of metalwork. A pair of the blue-robes hurried the male flower to this and swung the great glass planes around him, imprisoning him. The mirrors rotated, sucking Uvid Hghts and squirming shadows from the prisms.

  Hibbert thought of color therapy of his own world and wondered if this might be an extension of it.

  Meanwhile a third blue-robe had picked up the child, the fourth hastening to the mother. It stooped and slowly passed its multipronged fork along her body. The crawling lights swept up into the tines as if magnetized, and the mother fell limp. The blue-robe pointed the fork at her and pressed the handle. With a crackling sound, warm radiance spat from the knobs tipping the fcuies. It flowed over her and seemed to salve her. She lifted up, cured of whatever had stricken her, but still weak, and scarce a shadow of her former self.

  The blue-robe with the child said: There is a periodicity of pulsation in the infant, but it is neither

  that of Khoire nor the world below—instead, a blend. This life can endure in this form in neither worldl We cannot change the pulsations without completely destroying the form and the forces which control it. And to destroy life is against the Ancient Law. He must be sent to the Jungles of MadnessI**

  The flower-woman's horror sympathetically slowed Hibbert's heartbeats. The flower-woman drooped with a soimd of weeping and the scene faded.

  Chapter Seven

  What the Web Told

  They saw now what must have been food factories. From tall towers, dazzling searchlights played down over sweeps of sand, and the particles lifted toward them in swirling clouds. Spinning spidery shapes, which were huge lenses rimmed with angular spokes, flashed in and intercepted the sandclouds, absorbing them. Along the spokes throbbed rainbow radiance.

  Smaller lenses captured some of the colors, filtering the radiance and transferring it to huge begemmed hoops. The screen became a welter of compUcated and active machinery. What interested Hibbert most was that rust-clad things, neither man nor beast, sat among all of it like maintenance-workers, doing nothing more than stare at the machines fixedly as though—^he could not resist the notion—hypnotizing them.

  The viewpoint shifted. What had been sand and then light now fell in great quicksilver drops to a vast pool. Around the pool were Khoireans of all shapes and sizes—Hibbert had but the briefest glimpse of them—and among them Patur's father and mother, on whom the viewpoint was focussed. The mother nursed the infant Patur at her breast, but she and the father dipped cups into the liquid and

  drank, glowing warmly with renewed energy. ''Synthetic food," Burks surmised.

  Swiftly, a fresh picture formed.

  Initially it seemed to be a huge blue bubble adrift in the air and pierced by many golden javehns. Huge it certainly was, skyscraper large—but it was no bubble! The spears were innumerable roads, some horizontal like those to which Hibbert was accustomed, but others were diagonal and impossibly steep, and even vertical! Whether flat, slanting, or straight up-and-down, it made no difference to the Khoireans thronging them. As far as each was concerned, his own particular path was level Here and there people vanished from the roads or winked into existence on them as if banished and conjured by a wizard.

  Burks said: "Looks goofy, but it doesn't surprise me. I noticed that something was screwy with the gravity while we were walking back in the darkness. Our feet were going straight ahead, but all the same I could have sworn we were going around comers. And it explains the sudden draughts I felt—if the gravity here is as spotty as it seems, naturally the air would be constantly on the move.'*

  Without warning, the viewpoint drove far ahead into the mighty globe, and through an azure-walled passage to its very heart. Here was a double dome or completely rounded chamber of great size whose walls were completely made of doors. The viewpoint proceeded ghostUke through one of these doors into a blue-walled, wedge-shaped room.

  The impression was that of standing within an empty elongated pyramid lying on one side. In the point of the wedge, Patur's parents stood with their baby. At the blunt base were two ponderous pillared, silken lined—nests, Hibbert supposed. In one of them

  blazed a tremendous—sun? And in the other was a correspondingly vast—moon? Before each of them was a low block of crystal, and from these blocks wires rayed fanwise to the pillars supporting the nests.

  Paturs mother complacently suckled her baby while the father strode to the crystal slab nearest the sun-sphere. He knelt and pressed his forehead on the slab. There was a sensation of telescoped time, then the father arose and returned to his mate, holding the child while she went to the block closest to the moon-nest. Like him, she too knelt and rested her brow on the crystal.

  The man spoke strictly for the edification of Hibbert and his friends.

  *We have surrendered all our lives' memories to the Historians of our species. All that I have thought, felt, and done is stored away now forever in the positively polarized Chronicler, even as the sum of yoiu" experiences now is stored within the negatively polarized one. It remains that Uttle Patur receive his education from the positive Chronicler, since he is male. All the lives of all men of our race to this very instant v^ enter into him.'*

  He took the child to the block nearest the sun-orb and touched its forehead to the crystal. Babylike it wailed, then was still. And if knowledge is indeed power, that was literally how it affected the infant, for Patur became a changeling! He did not gain in size, but the baby form lost its roundness and assumed as aspect of angular, well-muscled maturity. At last the child lifted his head from the stone, a child no longer but a diminutive exact copy of his father—^not only outside but in.

  Hibbert said: "Back home, the mind and body don t develop together. Here it seems that the mind actual-

  ly is the body in miniature, and so the maturity levels are not at odds."

  Now Patm- and his parents were on one of the roads leading from the bubble. The father said, again presumably for the outsiders' information: *'Now it is time for me to loosen my hold on life. I have Hved long, and rest will be welcome.''

  Little Patur spoke up in an echo of his fathers voice, and never
in Hibbert's world were a child's first words so unexpected! ''When you die, that which you were will turn to dust and settle over all Khoire, and from the dust will come ever-new life ... for it will supply sustenance for the Hving ... so that in time, that which once you were will again become a man ... some faroflF future descendant..."

  Tes," the father said. 'Then, as you were, I will be taken to the Chronicler, regaining from it all the racial memories between now and then—so that I shall not have died, only slept."

  Burks interposed: "If that's not immortality, what is?"

  **Well, the same thing happens at home," Scarlatti said. "So you die, so you act like fertilizer, and what do you know, you're part of a tree and a pig and a bird—only you don't know it. Until after a million years you get all put together again, maybe, and you're a man."

  **In either place, then," Hibbert hazarded, "immortality covers the group as a whole, rather than any lone individual."

  Patiu-'s mother whispered: 1 too would rest! In knowing and loving you, I have embraced all happiness. Nothing remains."

  Little Patur asked with startling worldliness: TBut couldn't you mate again?"

  i

  The mother shuddered. '"When I think of Wyssa's child in the Jungles of Madness—no, nol Let me die now and perhaps when I return I will have no fear/'

  And thenceforth Patur appeared alone in the pictures. He visited what must have been a textile factory. It was an endless black-mirror plain whereon the weavers sat in threes, which reminded Hibbert of the Greek Moerae and the Norse Noms. There were flame-tressed folk and imhuman ones, but with each the procedure was the same.

  Two sat at right-angles to each other, crystal masks over their faces and threads of light unravelling from the masks hke silk from spiders' spinnerets, travelling perhaps a hundred yards before snapping short. The thrust of the partner s new-forming thread shoved the growing web sHghtly aside, so that it made room for itself as it grew.

  The third weaver projected little spiuts of light which directed the others' threads over and under each other, producing brocade.

  The masks were connected with cylindrical tanks which suppHed raw-material. When one of the webs was completely woven, it was gathered thistledown light and stuflFed into a vat, emerging a tenth of its former size and weightless as smoke. Few of the fabrics were alike, their tints, textures and patterns obviously related to the types of Khoireans who had created them.

  Next came a group of architect-contractors at work Hibbert first saw them seated in a ring, holding hands and eyes shut as though staging a seance, but it must have been a method for transference of ideas. They dropped hands and took stations on the ground and on high portable platforms. Acid lights burned the barren soil. It smoked, melted, and curled up in mist. From

  the masks worn by the builders streamed wide rays which repelled the mist, forcing it to conform with a predetermined pattern. The irritating hghts were switched oflF and others blazed out. The mist condensed into solid matter and the structure was completed.

  Hibbert saw a sculptor projecting pure esthetic emotion into the mist. The congealed result was attractive, though not unlike abstract carvings of his own world.

  Burks said: *'If any of these gadgets could be adapted for use down below, it would revolutionize industry! Levitation, disintegration, conversion from one material into another at the drop of a hat—it's like the philosopher's stone—"

  "Nahl" Scarlatti said. "It's just propaganda. A lot of trick photography."

  "And I suppose the gimmicks that make all the pictures we seen is just tricks, too?" Carlotta inquired.

  "Huh?" The giant hadn't thought of that. "God's sake, gal, if this stuff is the goods and we can latch onto some, we got the world by the tail!" Then he said: "But if all these things we seen really work, how come the folks back home ain't got wise about them? Maybe what we seen is true and maybe not. If it comes to a pinch, we got guns, ain't we?"

  "I have," Burks said smugly, touching the weapons on the cushions beside him.

  "Some pal you are," Scarlatti grumbled.

  "A better pal than you think," Burks retorted. Tm the brains of this expedition, Frank. It takes brains to know when and when not to shoot."

  "You talk big, for somebody no better than I ami But it's all talk and nothing but—I know you. Give

  you half a chance and youll grab up a sackful of them jewels we seen and snake out of here— ^

  "If that's what youVe been thinking all along, you can stop. From what the pictures have told us, crime's impossible up here. You get a crooked idea and you become a cripplel''

  Scarlatti hooted. ^Tfeah? Then why ain't I looking like a corkscrew?" He flexed his arms and admired his bulging muscles. "That proves these pictures is phonies, so what do we got to worry about?"

  "Your lack of reason, if you want to know. One minute you beheve them, another you don't."

  Hibbert asked Burks: *'You didn't want to discuss crime with me before, but I can't help being curious. You're a—^well, you're a killer. I can understand your wanting to use this place as a hideaway imtil—as you'd probably say—^die heat's oflE below. But it still doesn't change your basic nature. Won t that turn you into the cripple you mentioned?"

  Burks hitched himself forward, vehemently jabbing a forefinger into Hibbert's chest as he cleared each point.

  "Look, my friend—it was dovra below that I was the cripple. I was shoved into it. Up here, it's different. If decency and respectabihty pay off, I'm for them. Not because I beheve ia heavenly rewards for being good—even if I did, I'd hardly be hypocrite enough to take the straight-and-narrow on that accoimt. And I've been too bright to do it from a sense of duty, because duty's been responsible for more heU-raising, from witch-burnings to race-pogroms, than goodi But Iffe below is fang and claw, and decency and respectability are just pipe-dreams of people who don't have the guts to use fangs and claws. I'm not against

  living the good life—it's been box oflBce too long not to have something worthwhile in it. But it doesn't exist back home."

  "You said iti" Carlotta remarked with feeling. Burks rewarded her with a sweeping bow.

  "Therefore," he went on to Hibbert, "when the forces up here exert themselves on us, and our bodies match our minds, I'll stay exactly as I am. You'll probably wind up with wings and a harp. Frank"— he twinkled at the giant—"will become a gorilla, and the girl friend an echo or his shadow."

  Carlotta snapped, "Shut upl The movies are starting again/'

  Either she was genuinely interested in them at last, which Hibbert doubted, or she was trying to silence Burks.

  The web disclosed Patur back within the blue bubble wherein Khoire's records were kept, and learning of other Hfe-forms by visiting their various historians. He laid his head on the crystal blocks before the nested orbs of many chambers, and as their knowledge poured into him, something of its characteristics took possession of his physical form.

  Here again was the mind dominating the material, with Patur partaking of and to an extent retaining the stigma of flower, insect and beast. When at last he left the Chroniclers a mature man, he was something more than mere man. Hibbert made a note to study the real Patur carefully, once the pictures ceased, to see if that distinction persisted.

  Carlotta said: "I don't get it. Why do they have bugs and plants at all here? Why don't they turn into people?"

  "Like some people of our own world," Hibbert

  replied sententiously, **they have no conception of life above their own level."

  "Seems to me/' Burks observed bitterly, "that it's the other way around down home. Our people may have himian bodies, but they behave like animals and vegetables.'* Carlotta resentfully demanded in what way. **Well, we call grafters jackals, and we talk of catty women, loan sharks, poor fish, timid mice, snakes in the grass, harpies, dragons, crabs, and wolves. Hell, we even laugh like hyenas and jackassesi No wonder it's fang and claw!"

  Hibbert said: *WeVe seen Khoireans eating, working, maki
ng love, learning, and, by inference, dying. But is that all?''

  'What else is there?"

  The web went blank for a short space. Through it, they could discern Patur and his attendants. The oldster was solemn-faced and somewhat uneasy. Then slowly, almost unwillingly, the screen darkened and became one of the boundless black-mirror floors, ringed with concentric circles like moon-fired ripples frozen over a fathomless lake.

  With a jar of sinprise, Hibbert perceived that the rings were actually thousands of white-swathed Khoireans, human and non-human, all standing proudly tall and reaching upward—it could only have been in prayer, and not entreaty but praise.

  Up from them whispered the faintest of melodies, little by increasing httle—stately yet joyous, a contrapuntal fusion of clear sustained note and trill, of winging treble and reverberant bass, of mellow human timbres and exotic unfamiliar sonorities for which Hibbert could discover no similes.

  In a gentle tide, it welled barely audible from the

  screen, eddying around the four who sat watching and bouying them on its current. Something in Hibbert's secret self responded to it with a glad relief as of long-awaited homecoming. And while the song was of sound, it was also of light, of dehcate prismatic lambencies according to the varying voices and combining into unwavering whiteness.

  *The picture's fadingi" Scarlatti complained.

  **! can still see something,'' Carlotta said, *T>ut I don't know what."

  The jubilant chanting and the throbbing brilliance grew stronger, lifting high in frosty fretworks and in slender columns that branched and interlaced with every modulation. Here was a veritable hving cathedral, of profound emotion translated into tone and radiance, vaster far than all the fanes of Hibbert's world put together, not crystallized in cold masonry but consistently evolving.

  Hibbert would have pledged his life away to be able to join in the chanting, to add something of himself to that mounting majesty. His throat ached from restraining the cry which he dared not utter lest it be out of tune.