by Fritz Leiber
“Twice we risked all to find another cosmos—cut loose in hyperspace and sailed off blind. But by some twist of hyperspatial gusts we were brought back to this same universe—enchanted thorn-forest around a castle, or tunnel ending by some trick of space inside the same jailyard that it was dug from.
“We are the Vanderdecken Planet of the Cosmos, making our knight’s tour ’round the universe—but always comes the untiring pursuit along the crooked curves of hyperspace.
“We try to keep our standards, but we slacken. We didn’t need to hurt your planet, Paul!—or so I think, I really can’t be sure—I’m but a servant on the Wanderer. But though I can’t be sure, I’ll say this now: I hope before we harm one creature more, we plunge forever into the dark storm. They say the third time you drown—May that be so!”
Her voice changed and she cried out sharply: “Oh, Paul, we’re charging around with all these beautiful dreams and yet all we can do is hurt people. Should you wonder that we’re falling in love with death?”
Tigerishka broke off. After a bit, her voice neutral yet tight, as if she had drawn into herself, she said: “There, I’ve told the monkey everything now. The monkey may feel superior to the cat, if he wishes.”
Very quietly, Paul drew and let out a deep breath. His heart was thudding. At another time he might question Tigerishka’s story and his understanding of it, but now it simply stood there as she had told it, as if the stars beneath him were an emblazoning of it—a diamond script spelling only what she had said.
This fantastic eyrie was so like the viewpoint of dream, so like what is lightly called “the mind’s eye,” that Paul could hardly say whether he were living only in his fancy or in the whole great starry cosmos; for once, imagination and reality were seamlessly mated.
Pushing his shoulders from the great warm window with less effort than a sigh, he looked sideways and down at the fantastic figure beside him, seeming in silhouette more than ever like a slim woman costumed for a cat ballet. Her hind legs were sprawled out, her forepaws folded together-to cushion her chin, so that her head was up and he saw in black outline the snub nose, the height of her forehead and the spearpoints of her ears. Her tail arched off beyond her, where its tip twitched in a slow rhythm against the stars. She looked like a slim black sphinx.
“Tigerishka,” he said softly, “there was once a long-haired monkey who lived hungry and died young. His name was Franz Schubert. He wrote hundreds of monkey songs—pongo ballads and ape laments. One of them was to words written by an altogether forgotten monkey called Schmidt von Lübeck. That monkey song strikes me now as if it had been written for you and your people. At least, it’s named for your planet—Der Wanderer…The Wanderer. I’ll sing it for you…”
He began, “Ich komme von Gebirge her…
“No,” he said, breaking off, “let me put it in my own language and change some of the pictures just a little, to fit better, without changing any of the key lines or the feeling.”
The words and phrases he wanted came effortlessly.
He heard a soft rustling wail, all exactly pitched, in more voices than one, and he realized that Tigerishka was lifting the piano accompaniment from his mind and reproducing it with a lonelier beat than even the piano gets.
After the sixth bar, he came in:
I come here from the stars alone,
The way is twisted, the deeps moan.
I wander on, am seldom gay,
And keep on asking, “What’s the way?”
All space is dark, the suns are cold,
The flowers are pale and life is old.
Talk that’s not noise is getting rare—
I am a stranger everywhere.
Where are you, world that’s all my own?—
Longed for and sought, but never known;
The cosmos that’s as green as hope,
One fiercely flowered, starward slope;
The world where all my friends can walk,
My dead stand up, nor white as chalk,
The universe that talks my talk—
Where are you?
I wander on, am seldom gay,
And keep on asking, “What’s the way?”
A ghostly answer comes from space:
“There where you are not—there’s your place.”
When the last line was sung, and Tigerishka had hummed the accompaniment out to its end, she sighed and said softly: “That’s us, all right. He must have had a little cat in him, that Schubert monkey—and that Schmidt monkey, too. You’ve got a little cat in you, Paul…”
He looked for a moment at the slim, star-edged figure beside him and then he reached out a hand that was star-edged, too, and laid it on her shoulder. He sensed no tightening, no anger, under the faintly warm, dry, short soft fur. After a moment, although it was nothing he’d consciously planned—perhaps the fur was giving cues to his fingers—he began to scratch gently the curving margin between shoulder and neck, exactly as he might have done to Miaow.
For a while she did not move, although he thought he felt muscles relaxing under the fur. Then there was the faint murmur of a barely-breathed purr—just a flutter of sound—and she leaned her head against his hand so that her ear brushed his wrist He shifted his kneading toward the back of her neck and she raised her head, rolling it from side to side with a deeper fluttering purr. Then she rolled her body away from him a quarter turn, and for a moment he thought it was to tell him to stop, but quickly discovered it was only that she wanted to be scratched under the chin. And then he felt a silky finger press against the back of his neck and draw smoothly down his body and he realized it was the tip of her tail caressing him.
“Tigerishka?” he murmured.
“Yes, Paul…” she answered faintly. With a tiny dragging of elbow and knee against the warm transparency he drifted against her, and his arms met around her slim, brushy back and, while the tail-tip continued to caress, he felt her velvet pads resting lightly against his spine with only the ghosts of claws at their tips. He heard Miaow mewing plaintively. “She jealous…” Tigerishka breathed with the faintest chuckle as her cheek brushed against his, and he felt her harsh narrow tongue lightly touch his ear and begin to scrub against the back of his neck.
Up to this moment he had done everything quite gravely, as if his every gesture were part of a ritual that he must get just right and never be excited, but now safely welded to this fantastic feline Venus in Furs the excitement did come, and the images began to flood up into his mind, and he let go altogether, though strangely without losing control. For the images came with a queer orderliness, as when his mind had first been riffled through by Tigerishka, but now they came slowly enough so that he could see them all clearly, through and through. They were pictures of men, women, and beasts. They were pictures of erotic love, rape, torture, and death—but he realized that even the deaths and the tortures were only to underline the intensity of the contacts, the exquisite violation of all bodily taboos, the completeness of the togetherness; they were the inward decor for the actions of two bodies. These pictures alternated regularly with mind-filling symbols like elaborate jewels and patterned enamelings, or meaningful shapes in a richly bright kaleidoscope. After a long while the symbols began to dominate the pictures; they began to throb like great drums, to shiver and resound like great cymbals; there was a feeling of the universe around, of darting out toward it in all directions, of outspreading to totality in one great series of building and diminishing surges that went plunging through the stars to velvet darkness.
After a space he came slowly floating up out of the infinite softness of that bottomless black bed, and there were the stars again, and Tigerishka lifted up a little above him so that very faintly, by starlight, he saw the violet of her petaled irises and the bronzy green of her cheeks and her mulberry lips parted, careless that she showed her whitely-glinting fangs, and she recited:
Poor little ape, you’re sick again tonight.
Has the shrill, fretful chatter fev
ered you?
Was it a dream-lion gave you such a fright?
And did the serpent Fear glide from the slough?
You cough, you moan, I hear your small teeth grate.
What are those words you mutter as you toss?
War, torture, guilt, revenge, crime, murder, hate?
I’ll stroke your brow, poor little ape—you’re cross.
Far wiser beasts under far older stars
Have had your sickness, seen their hopes denied,
Sought God, fought Fate, pounded against the bars,
And like you, little ape, they some day died.
The bough swings in the wind, the night is deep.
Look at the stars, poor little ape, and sleep.
“Tigerishka,” Paul wondered with a sleepy puzzlement, “I started to write that sonnet years ago, but I could get only three lines. Did you—”
“No,” she said softly, “you finished it by yourself. I found it, lying there in the dark behind your eyes, tossed in a corner. Rest now, Paul. Rest…”
Chapter
Thirty-seven
WHEN THE SAUCER STUDENTS reached the crossroads, the problem of which route to take was solved for Hunter by circumstances. The entry to Mulholland was blocked by three sleekly expensive though much-muddied cars of the fashionable dragon design. Their occupants had got out and were clustered together, probably to argue about which direction to take on Monica Montainway. Though somewhat muddied like their cars, they looked to be sleekly expensive people—probably Malibu folk.
So, to take Mulholland would take time, and Hunter felt that his little two-vehicle cavalcade had none of that to spare, for the pursuit from the Valley and inland 101, after hanging back for some while in an ominous chorus of revvings and honkings, was at last catching up.
Monica Mountainway ran straight here for three quarters of a mile through the blackly burned-over central heights of the Santa Monica mountains. The Corvette and the truck had hardly covered half of the straight when two sports cars, packed to the sides, came around the last turn abreast, and more behind them. Hunter slowed the Corvette a little and waved the truck on. Hixon remembered instructions and roared past him. Hunter got a flash of the men’s grim faces in the back: Fulby, Pop, Doddsy, and Wojtowicz—and McHeath crouching with the one rifle they had left.
The women in the car with Hunter were tensely silent. Ann beside him hugged tight to her mother.
Then he got another flash of faces, this time those of the Malibu folk standing by their expensive cars and looking surprised and rather pained, as if to say, “What bad manners to rush past us without so much as a wave—and in these catastrophic times when togetherness is mandatory!”
Hunter didn’t exactly wish them evil, but he did hope they’d divert and delay a bit the crazy pursuit from the Valley. When he heard brakes behind him and then a shot, he drew back his lips in a grimace that was half satisfaction, half guilt.
Hixon’s truck was disappearing around the first of a series of hairpin turns leading upward, which Hunter remembered from yesterday’s trip. He scowled and squinted ahead, the sinking greenish-white sun in his eyes, and he began to hunt for a certain configuration of road also remembered from yesterday.
He found it at the second of the sharp turns: a clutch of big boulders on the inside of the U-curve. He slammed to a stop just beyond it and jumped out.
“The momentum pistol!” he demanded of Margo, got it, and scrambled up the steep, acidly odorous, blackly burned slope until he was behind the boulders. He pointed the gun at them and fired. For the first two seconds he was afraid they weren’t going to move and the last charge be wasted for nothing, but then they turned over, grating together loudly, went thumping down the slope, and thudded ponderously into the asphaltoid.
He dashed forward after them and peered down through the mounting dust to see if an adjustment shot would be needed, but they blocked the road perfectly.
From above came a faint cheer and looking up be saw the truck moving along a stretch two hairpin turns further on. He ran back to the car. Before he tossed the gray pistol back to Margo, he quickly checked the scale on the grip and saw there was at least a bit of violet still showing. As he drove off he heard brakes squeal again behind them, and angry shouting.
Ann said, “Those people won’t be able to use this road now, will they?”
“Nobody will be able to use it, dear,” Rama Joan told her.
“Or so we hope,” Margo put in a bit sardonically from the back seat. “Was it a good job, Ross?”
“A real bank-to-bank choke-up,” he told her curtly. “Two of the rocks it’ll take a derrick to move.”
Ann persisted: “I meant the nice people we passed standing beside their cars.”
“They had their own road, the one they came on,” Hunter lashed out harshly. “They had their chance to turn around and use it to get away. If they didn’t, well, they were damned rich-bitch fools!”
Ann moved away from him, closer to her mother. He lashed at himself inwardly for taking out his feelings on a child. Doc hadn’t been that way.
“Professor Hunter did absolutely right, Ann,” Wanda put in with a smug positiveness from the other back seat. “A man always has to think first of the women with him and their safety.”
Rama Joan said softly to Ann: “The gods always had problems about how to use their magic weapons, dear. It’s all in the myths.”
Hunter, his smarting eyes fixed on the snakelike road, wanted to tell them both to shut up, but he managed not to.
It was a good twenty minutes before they caught up with the truck. Hixon had stopped just short of another side road.
“It says, ‘To Vandenberg’,” he called down, pointing ahead to a sign, as the Corvette drew up beside him. “I figure it leads more direct to Vandenberg through the hills. Since I guess we’re going, there, to find this Opperly and all, I think we ought to take it. Save us those miles along the coast highway.”
Hunter stood up in the seat. The side road looked all right, the first short stretch of it, asphaltoid like the one they were on. He thought for a couple of seconds.
In the pause, a profound sound, soft as a sigh, passed overhead traveling from the southeast. None of the saucer students had the dictionary that would translate it into the vanishing three and a half hours ago of the Isthmus of Rivas, Don Guillermo Walker, and José and Miguel Araiza.
Hunter shook his head and said loudly: “No, well keep on Monica Mountainway. We were over it yesterday and we know it’s O.K.—no falls or anything. A new road’s an unknown quantity.”
“Yeah?” Hixon commented. “I see you finally took my advice about using the gravity gun to block off those nuts.”
“Yes, I did,” was all Hunter could think of to say, and he didn’t say it pleasantly.
“Then there’s the tide, as Doddsy’s reminded me,” Hixon went on. “Along the Coast Highway we’ve got to worry about that”
“If we get there before sunset it’ll be O.K. Low tide’s at five P.M.,” Hunter told him. “That is, if the tides are sticking anywhere near their old rhythm, which they were doing yesterday.”
“Yeah—if,” Hixon said.
“Anywhere we reach the coast we’ll have the tides to contend with,” Hunter retorted. His nerves were snapping. “Come on, let’s get going,” he ordered. “I’ll take the lead from here.”
He sat down and drove off along Monica Mountainway. After a bit Margo said reassuringly: “Hixon’s following you.”
“He’d damn well better!” Hunter told her.
FOR FORTY HOURS the Wanderer had been raising higher and higher tides, not only in Earth’s crust and seas, but also in her atmosphere—a tide four times greater than the daily heat-tide caused by the sun warming the air. Also, the volcanoes and evaporation from the greatly widened tidal zone had been making their unprecedented contributions to tomorrow’s weather. Vortexes were forming in the disturbed air. Storms were brewing. In the Caribbean, up across the Ce
lebes, Sulu, and South China Seas, and in a dozen other critical areas, the wind was rising as it had never risen on Earth before.
The “Prince Charles” was boldly atom-steaming southeast by the port of Cayenne. Darkly silhouetted against the wild sunset, Cape d’Orange told the great ship it was passing the mouth of the Oyapock River and nearing that of the Amazon. Captain Sithwise sent messages to the four insurgent captains imploring them to head out into the South Atlantic, away from all land. The messages were sneered at.
In one of the areas yet unruffled by the Wanderer winds, Wolf Loner scanned through the graying overcast for Race Point, or Cape Ann, or even for the one-four-three I L-O-V-E Y-O-U wink of the Minot’s Ledge Light, or the sober six-second double flash of the Graves Light in Boston’s Outer Harbor. He knew he should be nearing the end of his voyage, but he had noticed some garbage and odd wreckage floating past the “Endurance” and he hadn’t calculated he was that close to Boston. However, there was nothing to do but keep watch and sail on.
BARBARA KATZ took the small telescope and climbed on top of the stalled Rolls to scan around over the low tops of the mangrove forest stretching out to either side of the narrow, tide-littered road. There was only the yellow afterglow of the sunset left to see by, reflected from the clouds rapidly moving in on a chilly southeast wind. The weather had changed completely in the last twenty minutes.
Hester stuck her head out of the back and whispered up loudly: “Stop pounding around up there, Miss Barbara. You ’sturb what little power of life Mr. K got left.”