Beyond the golden stair

by Bok, Hannes, 1914-1964

  He said to Mareth: "Don't let us bother you none, baby—Miss—I mean, Mareth. You and the kid here just go right on talking and having fun, and maybe when I'm rested up I'U come back in again."

  He winked broadly, significantly.

  Mareth said to Hibbert: 'Then I shall remain.** And to Scarlatti: "Should you return refreshed, I will be most pleased, for there are so very many things concerning your world of which I would ask youl"

  He winked again shamelessly. "And lots I can teach you, babyl"

  Huge and ridiculous though he was, Hibbert gladly would have strangled him, or at least died in the attempt. Carlotta was similarly murdering the giant in her heart if not in fact. She yanked him toward the inner doorway.

  He waved archly. "Be seeing youl"

  For some reason, Mareth looked long and sad-eyed after him. She sighed. Hibbert strained to overhear whatever the giant and Carlotta might be saying out

  there, expecting the woman to shout tactless recriminations and Scarlatti to answer them with his usual boisterous abuse, but he could catch only indistinguishable whispers: the giant's tone passed swiftly from vehement self-justification to blandishment, persuasion, and finally triiunph. He'd explained something to Carlotta and won her approval. And what was that, if not to take advantage of Mareth's presence as an important step in his plans for the futiu*e, perhaps to hold her as hostage? Possibly he'd simply convinced Carlotta that she had no reason for resentment, that Mareth meant nothing to him—but Hibbert doubted it.

  Mareth said: *Xet me send away my little ones, lest they weary of hearing what already they know."

  As though she had spoken to them, they stopped attending to the voices beyond the doorway, shpped out of their chairs, curtseyed and bowed in farewell, and made for the outer door—Kikoda toddling like an unsteady two-year-old, N'gine with hips swaying as exaggeratedly as those of a portly Moroccan dancer. They left their marks behind them, the wet print of the green woman's body on the upholstery, and the white hairs which indicated that the dwarf was shedding badly and in need of a better brush than his pink tongue.

  Hibbert hated to say it, but he got it out: T[ wish you'd leave too, Mareth."

  "Strange! But a moment ago, you wished me to stay!"

  "I still wish you'd stay, but I don't think it would be safe." He glanced at the inner doorway. Mareth read his thought.

  "You think that the man and woman would attempt harm to me?"

  126 Beyond the Golden Stair

  *Tm sure of it!"

  She smiled and shrugged **Have no fearl I am able well to protect myself."

  Tm not so sure. Do you know anything about guns?" She did not, so he explained them to her. ^'Scarlatti has one, and he's apt to use it.**

  "Let him I I have protection of which he, nor you, cannot dreaml" She was as cahn as though the room were ringed by invisible guardsmen. Well, after some of the things he'd seen here, why not?

  **If you're sure— '' he temporized.

  **Oh, be very surel"

  'Well, then." He folded himself once more on Ac floor at her feet.

  "You are at ease?" she asked. "I have warned you— it is a long tale."

  He mooned up at her. Tf it takes forever, I won't mind."

  She bridled, but with mockery. ^Tou are most— gallanti"

  "Not gallant. Sincere. All my life, Mareth, Tve dreamed of a girl just Uke you." She started an impatient movement, and he checked her: "And of Patur and Kikoda, too. And this place itself. Doesn't that mean something?"

  She looked away from him. "All my Hfe, I too have dreamed, and of one man, and he comes from below. But you are not hel" She almost softly sang it: "He is tall and strong; if he has any weakness at all, it is only for me." He noticed her eyes turning toward, and hastily averting themselves from, his crippled leg. "More he is like that other man— ** And again she looked after Scarlatti.

  He burned with jealousy as abruptly as if he had been a light and its switch suddenly turned on. She

  flinched from him as if he had struck her. *Tou— with your animal passions! Beware they do not possess you and transform you into animal guisel You would—love me I You who must be thrust from Khoire as a child is thrust from the serious business of its elders I You, untutored in our ways and without the Sacred Sign, whose body has yet to assume its true shape—and what fearful one may that be!''

  He said as angrily: *1 know youVe as far above me as a goddess! Nevertheless, in my world men have loved goddesses—and goddesses have loved men/'

  She thrust out her hands as though to ward oflE even sight of him. He reached up and caught her wrists. She pulled, but he would not let them go. He asked swiftly: ''Is it my fault that nobody in my world knows about Khoire—or knowing, has told me about it and given me that Sacred Sign? You may be as far above me in evolution as any goddess, yes, but your antipathy is so unreasonable that it levels you to my own plane of humanity. It's no blame of mine that I wasn't bom into Khoire!"

  Her hands relaxed in his grasp, but she said: 'Tfou argue that it is not the dog's error which causes it to be born beast and not man. But shall I mate with a dog?"

  He let her hands fall free. More gently, she asked: ''What point in your loving me, when unmindful of your true guise I cannot know what really you are? For you and your friends—at least until after that Change which you must imdergo—at most I can feel only pity."

  "As long as you feel anything at all, I'm happy. Now that I've found you, Mareth, I can't be banished from Khoire. Change or no, banishment or not, sooner or later I'll come back—and not as any dog, but as good

  as I am now, or betterl Make up your mind—you're going to love mel**

  **You are very positive!" Then another touch of human frailty crept in. "And to how many women of your own world have you said the same?'*

  *Tro none. I was never able to think of any woman except yoiurself, because of my dream—even if I didn't know who you were or where to find you. I didn't come here of my own will—every event in my life forced me up to this place. My stint ia the Army, because it introduced me to the men who betrayed me and threw me into the jail where I met Scarlatti, who dragged me here. Fate—that's what it's been. And if you don't believe it's fate, then why haven't you married? God knows you're desirable enoughl But you've said that love hasn't come to you—"

  *! but meant that thus far I have not loved. There is a friend who has mentioned marriage—a man of Khoire." She fidgeted, eyes downcast. "Dweil," she murmured, as though mention of the name were some support

  "He may have mentioned marriage, but you couldn't accept him because you were waiting for somebody else. Somebody in a dream like my own."

  "But not youl Never youl"

  "No, like Scarlattil" She glared, betrayed, at him. "But not Scarlattil Even though when you first saw him you seemed to hope so. Well, I may not look like him, but how do you know I won't—after the Change.''

  He'd put himself into her hands. Her eyes hardened into the jewels they resembled. "Then let us postpone any further talk of love until after the Change has taken placel Then we shall see what you arel You asked for a story, did you not? Good, I will tell it to you. But better were you to sit there, where you may

  listen in comfort"—she gazed at the chair opposite her, across the room, and her voice crisped in mockery. "As now you are seated, there is no rest for your back. And rather than tire you, I will withdraw."

  He went to the chair. *'That is better,^' she decided. **And now the story—of who once we were, we of Khoire; and why we came here; why still we maintain the gateways to all the interlocked worlds, among which are N^gine's and your own—and who and what N'gine and Kikoda are."

  Chapter Ten

  The Wisdom of Khoire

  Her eyes looked through him and through measureless duration and distance. "Long ago," she began, "and longer than long ago, so far removed in time that the seas and continents of your world were not as now, men built great cities as splendid as any of today—it matter
s not what nor where the world of comparison. Cities of so ancient age that the dust into which they have crumbled has become only the dust of dust.

  "So learned were they that whatever is known in your world at this moment would have been to them but one book in an infinite Hbrary. But knowledge is like fire. Aptly used, it warms and protects. Mishandled by fools, it scorches and slays.

  "And for all their knowledge, those ancient folk were fools. They invented and developed many things to gain bodily comfort, but gave little thought to the growth, training, and welfare of their minds. Though their sciences flowered, their natures remained seedlings—in heart they were petty children a mere step removed from animals, and they quarreled among themselves with as little reason as children ever quarrel. From such lesser strifes grew greater ones. Nations

  were dragged into conflict for no real nor desperate reason/*

  She shuddered.

  "Think of it—brother slaying brother, killing the fruit of the womb which bore him, killing thus—himself! From vanity they fought, from unthinking fear and from thirst for revenge, disguising their thoughtless motives by impressive emotional names and declaring solemnly that their deities aided them each against the other; fighting therefore for abstractions, for sheer hollow words—and who but fools will fight at the bidding of the wind!

  *Taugh—in spite of their cleverness they were stupid and shallowl It was well that they warred, whereby their deaths might make room for Hves more worthyl

  "Whole countrysides were reduced to rubble by tremendous explosions; poisoned vapors scattered pestilence and worse yet—sterihty. Where white towers had thrust their spindles through the blue paper of the sky—^where men and women had paced the streets, and were as beautiful even as the folk of Khoire today—^was nothing but mounds of calcined stone, charred vegetation, and slinking things more like maddened beasts than men.

  "Tfet not every last one of them was tainted, no! In their midst were thinkers who knew that the law of living is self-development on every plane, not just the physical alone. Where there is no growth, there must be stagnation, decay, and death. Strong and beautiful bodies those ancients had, but save for the thinkers, their minds had festered.

  "So the thinkers banded together and withdrew from what was left of the once-bright cities and their

  people. Their pilgrimage was haphazard and chequered, cutting through the crossfire of the battlegrounds. Southward to the swamps and barrens they went. The warfare took the lives of many; disease and brutal climate snatched the lives of more. Life was hard for those in the lonely lands, but at least they did not slay each other. Instead, they warred on their environs, on sickness, and on the elements—while away in the north the dying nations still contended for empty glory, the many misled by the few. Dying nations? No, dead ones fighting after death even as the head of a snake still seeks to bite, though it be lopped from its body.

  "The men in the south became so mighty with wisdom that had they wished it—and they could not, for such a wish were no wisdom—they could have returned to the motherlands and made swift end of the degenerate peoples there. But they would not do it, for to slay a brother is evil.

  **They sent priests of peace as missionaries to preach the gospel of brotherhood. But whenever was a reformer welcomed by the oppressor? The priests were slain by the northern madmen. And so they were left to themselves, those insane ones who lived but to kill. Abandoned to slay themselves, even as in Khoire our wicked ones are placed in desolation to slay each other and all of them perish.

  "But they would not stay to themselvesi They had destroyed all that was good in their own domain, and now they hungered after what was good in the southerners'. Out of envy and greed, they marched southward in conquest.

  *'The southerners would not take arms against them, nor would they submit to them. They attempted to

  construct defensive screens against the coming onslaught. They knew, as your scientists know now, that matter is composed of atoms, and that each specific substance is determined according to the grouping of those atoms—even as the selfsame bricks may build palaces, hovels, roads, and reservoirs, all according to the architect's plan.

  "As alchemists they had long achieved what your scientists of the present are just beginning to discern and attempt—the altering of atomic patterns, the transmutation of one substance into another, making emendations in the plan of the Cosmic Architect.

  "'And by so doing, they discovered what is still im-known to your scientists—that one atomic pattern may interlock with another, that what is the nucleus of one may be but part of the shell of another. And that thereby two substances may exist in the same place at the same time, unseen and imsuspected, providing that they are part of a third.

  ^So it was that, having discovered that interlocked atomic patterns produce interlocked levels of substance, they were able to study all those equitant planes and look into the worlds which they occupied. Interlocked worlds I The Cosmic Architect's plans were executed in many dimensions besides those four in which your scientists conduct their fumbling investigations.

  "Of all those linked worlds existing superimposed, my ancestors the southmen chose this one—chose Khoire. Here, they discerned, the force of thought is so powerful as to control the physical, for thought itself is but one stream of that energy from which all phenomena spring. In Khoire, where its radiation dominates all else, only progress can hold sway. In

  Khoire, the destructive mental image kills its maker before he can loose his hate on his fellow-beings. War is impossible here!

  "So the peaceful southerns, my ancestors, forgot their defensive screens and emigrated to Khoire, leaving the warmakers to destroy themselves, and that was what they almost did. Their bombs—to which yours are but the bursting of bubbles—tipped the world on its axis and precipitated, as it wobbled thousands of years on its orbit, age after age of creeping ice. With all their knowledge, they could not turn back the cold. The ruins of mankind's lost glory were crushed into formless powder, never to be found nor recognized by archaeologists of the future. Those who fled the cold reverted to savagery.

  *We of Khoire gazed down to the savages and pitied them—for were they not still our brothers? We would have brought them to share this haven with us, but because of their mental instability, when the Change overtook them, they became less than human.

  ''So we built the various gates to your world, the world of the Forefathers. We passed the ancient law that henceforth none might ascend to dwell in Khoire unless trained by the wise ones we sent below. And to make doubly certain, the newcomer must carry the Sacred Sign.'*

  But what the Sign was, she did not say.

  Tet entrance is afforded to all who seek it, for we would give warning by example to the unwary and unwise. If any visitor does not possess the requirements for residence here, he must stay until the Change proves his mettle, then return below. Even, John Hibbert, as you must.

  "Sages we have sent your world—prophets and lawgivers still remembered and in some instances still honored among your kind, though perhaps it were

  more apt to call them dishonored, so greatly have you distorted their pronoimcements. For in your world, the body must ever rule the mind—such is its nature. And therefore ever must there be hatred and killing.

  *Tfours is a world of brutes who deem themselves wise in the brute strength of violence! Suicides, proudly pleased with their handiwork as they admire the shining knives they forge for the cutting of their own throatsi MadmenI"

  The blaze of her green eyes scorched him.

  *Tet you would love me—^youl Do you imagine that I would fare below with you, even though the Change not harm you, to a world of insanity and monsters?"

  Hibbert cried: "Now wait a minute! The nature of my world now is what it has always been, even including that remote era when your ancestors were upon it. There were madmen then as there are now, but you ve told me yourself that there were also lovers of peace—and we have them still!"


  The flame in her eyes died to embers. She shuddered a bright httle sigh.

  "^That is true, and it is why we of Khoire have not abandoned you—^not yet. Little remains of kinship between your people and mine, but as long as that little persists—^we will not abandon you."

  **I should think," Hibbert observed with not much thought behind him, "that all your wonderful machines could be adapted for use in my world, and my people frightened into the ways of peace rather than by bloodshed."

  "Of what use?" she asked. "It would come from the outside, not from within. And frightened people are not peaceful people."

  He flashed angrily: "'So you just sit up here in your ivory tower and feel sorry for us! Oh, sure, once in a

  while you steer a Buddha or Confucius into our sinful midst—**

  *We do more than that,** she said. *Were your scientists less preoccupied in shaping the instruments of warfare, and your statesmen less absorbed in outwitting their colleagues, they might guess the existence of Khoire. Throughout all your lands are abundant allusions to iti Abundant but—disguised. Traditions shrouded in mystery and dehberately misnamed for our protection as well as yours, but verities nonetheless, passed down through the generations by those who received and respected the wisdom of Khoire. There are secret societies who treasure these traditions, and it is to them that the Qsin appear— **

  "Qsin?**

  *The Watchers! I am of the Qsin. It is our task to patrol your world. When we see evil, we show ourselves to the worthy and tell them that it exists—but beyond that we may not go. It is their task to uproot that evil, and not by committing equal injustice of violence, but by peaceful means—else we will appear to them no more. We make no effort to solve their problems, lest they grow dependent on us and weak. We appear to them only to guide them toward the furthering of right, helping them to grow."