by Hal Annas
His words came back: “There is no such thing as totally inanimate matter.” She leaped to the table, snapped open the intercom and said, “Officer Acra-non. Miss Du David’s quarters, please. Without delay.”
His features were grave when he appeared in the doorway.
“I must learn,” she said. “Tell me, is my cruiser animate?”
He shook his head, beckoned. She followed him to the engine room. There, against the bulkhead, she saw something like the metal of his garments moving back and forth of its own volition. “It’s changing the molecular arrangement,” he said, then led her on and showed her that the same thing was happening to the light batteries.
He turned and faced her. His features were grave. There was no hint of humor now in the lines about his mouth. “In a few weeks,” he said quietly, “the ship they call a toy will be the most deadly in the armada.”
She had never been more astonished. She wasn’t certain that she wasn’t half asleep and dreaming.
And soon she again experienced a dreamy lassitude. Things near at hand seemed to recede. And again memory, connecting the past with the present, brought her alert. Again she had a surging desire to talk with Acra-non, to learn more.
He explained that everything, however inanimate, evolved toward life and that life was intelligence. “A tree reaches toward the sun. Intelligence, though restricted. Animals feed on its leaves and roots. Intelligence but now high awareness. Humans make calculated use of animals. Awareness. All manifestations of the same thing.
“Do you believe,” he said, “that a new planet can bring forth metal men?”
She didn’t and said so.
“But it can. Many planets have brought forth ships to course the paths of the stars.”
“Oh! Through human agency.”
He nodded. “But the planet, its star, the space about it, they have produced the ships. From lakes and seas they brought life. Intelligence. It evolved higher and built ships. Who was the mother? Who the father?”
She didn’t understand, waited.
“From the planet over eons of time came ships. They can be set on a course which they will alter ten light-years hence to correspond to the migration of stars. They have but a single choice, to follow directions laid down by higher intelligence.
“Man begins his upward climb from the amoeba. He goes in a thousand directions, seemingly has a million choices. But one single law he obeys: evolve. Has he then actually greater choice than the inanimate ship?”
It was becoming difficult, but Aline knew it was leading to a point, and fought off the drowsiness.
“But what does it mean?”
“That intelligence exists in what you call the inanimate. Call it negative intelligence. Your calendar dates from some past moment of time to the present. Assume now a calendar dating from some moment in the future to some negative time in the past. In your positive time life began with flesh. In negative time assume that life began with metal.”
He leaned forward, held an oblong between thumb and forefinger and gave it a flip. It spun end over end through the air, made a circuit of the room, returned and settled on his palm.
She gasped. It had been copperish in color when it started. Now it was as white as the blouse she wore.
“In your negative past are the decayed bones of your ancestors; in your positive future the inanimate substance of metal—”
Her hands clasped tight, her body became tense. “Do you mean that the ore from which metal comes is comparable to the bones of my ancestors?” Her heart beat faster. “Are you saying that some form of animation evolves from the future toward the past, and as it dies leaves what we use—” Her mind was in a whirl. She couldn’t go on.
His nod was hardly noticeable. “But grasp it as two semi-circles. At the upper reaches of one semi-circle is metal, at the other end is man. Both are intelligence, but of opposite polarity. They move toward each other. They are so balanced, each in its orbit, that they pass and go away from each other. They continue into the second semi-circle and again go toward each other. But what happens in that moment when they are passing?”
“You mean, life and the inanimate make a complete cycle in opposite directions?”
“Yes.”
“And at that moment of passing—?”
“There is a union, a mating.”
For a moment it was beyond grasping, then it came clear. “You mean, they change polarity at that point, and—” He nodded.
“. . . each develops a better comprehension of the other.” It was no longer elusive. She understood, but there was one question: “Where are we now in that cycle?”
He was slow about answering. “Everything indicates we are again approaching at a terrific pace.” He tossed the oblong into the air. It divided itself into three parts, again rested on his palm. “But of course Reeal-den knows that some of us are more advanced than others.”
The significance was lost to her for a moment. It seemed to carry a threat. It hadn’t come clear why he and his followers chose to man the cruiser which was shunned by the Novakkans. It wasn’t clear why he had answered the Novakkan call. Nor was there even a glimmer of why he chose to make the ship they called a toy the most deadly in the armada.
As these things ran through her mind a dreamy lassitude stole over her. She fought it, for underneath was tremoring fear. And then she realized that each time it had grown stronger, that she could no longer shock herself alert. There were no more memories bridging time between the past and the present. The present was distant but very real. So was the past. The two differed only through some nebulous thing which she could describe only as awareness of now.
“We approach the Eg System,” he said a few hours later. “There is still fighting on the outer planets which were heavily garrisoned to protect the spaceways. Shall I order the populace of an inner planet to prepare to receive the Crimson Goddess?”
Such a thought had never occurred to her. She had expected to be received as a visitor. Nothing else.
“Communicate with the flagship,” she said. “Moxol must’ve left instructions.”
Soon the cruiser began dropping toward the third planet. As the planet came closer, she saw that half of it was in glacial darkness. The other was lighted in both hemispheres, in one rosy twilight, in the other yellow daylight.
She was fascinated. Here her father had loved her mother and out of that love she had been born.
She turned to the visicom. On it a huge star burned brightly. It was SYZ. And remote beyond it and to the left another. This last was Sol.
She wondered what was happening out there. She wondered if Chris Darby was grimly defending Delos against raiders, She wondered if her mother was standing before her accusers on Earth and answering to the charge of treason.
Blinking to clear her eyes, she turned to the table, snapped open the intercom. “Search the planet for a snow mesa,” she ordered. “The planet beneath us.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
AS the cruiser dropped toward the misty gray darkness of the mesa she had an uneasy sense of danger. It reminded her of how she felt when she carried the keys down the stone steps to the prisoners on Unor.
Acra-non draped a long metallic-looking cape, about her as the airlock opened. The cape was light as tissue, but the moment she stepped out into the snow it pressed warmly against her body and limbs and vibrated slightly.
Acra-non moved ahead toward a black tunnel-like passage. The other Denovians, seven of them, followed in her footsteps. And as she moved she remembered the tales heard from her mother.
It seemed that Acra-non knew what to do but was waiting for her to tell him. The thought stirred a sense of dread. Only the knowledge that her mother had been here, and that the answer to the mystery of her father might be found here, gave her the will to go on.
At the end of the passage Acra-non halted, arms upraised, his garments glowing faintly. How she knew was not precisely clear, but it came with memory of her experience in the
tower. And the moment she uttered, “The crimson beam on your right and the three invisible beams on your left,” he broke them, as if he had known all along.
And as she stepped through the opening into the purple light of the undermountain chambers she had the eerie feeling that she had been here before.
On along dimly lighted corridors they went until they came back to a blank wall. It was all quite clear, her own mother’s words. A cycle would have to pass before they could continue. The panels in the wall opened by rays from the yellow star and the red dwarf.
But Acra-non hesitated not at all. He broke invisible beams, turned back to her. And then, as she waited, a panel slid back, another, and a third.
All doubt vanished from her mind. She was expected. Her mother had made it clear about the three panels. They could be opened from the other side. So Acra-Non had, after all, ordered some one to prepare to receive her.
Acra-non stood aside, waited for her to precede him.
Terror came then, a sense of dread she hadn’t known before. She turned back in the direction from which she had come. The eight Denovians stood there in a semi-circle, blocking any possible escape.
Concealing her fear, she again faced the opening, and something seemed to draw her forward. She passed through vast, richly furnished, rose-lighted chambers and entered a marble hall as big as the court of Castle du David.
Faint murmurings caused her to halt. They came from every side, grew in volume and became a chant: “Reeal-den . . . Reeal-den . . . welcome—welcome . . . to Denovo—to Denovo.
As she stood in amazement men and women entered the hall from four sides. The men were all dressed in metallic-looking jackets and trousers, but the women wore filmy garments of every shape and design, and as they moved the colors of the garments changed, running the spectrum.
Something about it caused her knees to tremble.
The men resembled Acra-non and his followers, with individual characteristics. The hair of some was almost as white as a Novakkan’s. Still others had hair with a metallic sheen. Their features were strong, intelligent, and there was a determined set to their chins.
Most of the women were tall, pale, delicate of features, with platinum blonde hair and eyelashes. Their foreheads were high, with an almost imperceptible slant;
their bodies and limbs were shapely, well developed, almost athletic in their curvy slenderness.
The chanting went on. They gathered around her in a circle and a faint mist came from above, changing colors as it descended, bringing an aroma of sweet scented herbs and flowers, intoxicating in its fragrance.
Tremors still ran through her, but now they were overlain with a glowing sense of well being, a sense of withdrawing from harsh reality into a place of comfort and delight.
Memories of the armada and her flight from patrol ships were remote; the killing in process on the nearby planets seemed far away indeed. It was as if Rahn Buskner had never sent out the call, as if Novakkans were still scattered impotently about the galaxy.
Something impelled her to respond, something beyond her, something that seemed to come from an existence outside her body. It was not on an intellectual plane; it was sheer desire to give pleasure, to give back the tremoring ectasy in her being so that she might experience it to the full. It swept away all resistance, became an uncontrollable urge.
In rhythm with the chanting, she slipped out of the long cape and then her own clothes. The platinum—haired women parted with wisps of their own filmy garments and placed them about her.
The volume of the chanting grew and even the walls seemed to take it up and carry it on in perfect harmony. It filled the big hall, seemed to flow through the flesh, to demand response, to move limbs and bodies in keeping with its time.
As she had danced on the lawns du David as a child, she danced now, her motions not of her willing, but as cellular response to sounds, mood and the pleasure of her senses.
The mist continued coming down in its rainbow of colors. The wisps of garments the women had draped about her seemed to come alive, to caress her flesh, to flare and flash, to respond to the mood, to send out waves of colorful joy.
Her heart beat faster; her breathing became deep. Her body glowed and a faint moisture appeared on her skin.
Then she realized that she couldn’t stop dancing, that something was carrying her along on a lifting rolling, rising wave that would not cease.
At first she had no fear. It had sunk beneath the outer glow, the intoxication of the moment, but then it had returned and with it all the terror she had felt when she faced the open panels.
The atmosphere, the walls, the ceiling, the very earth itself, seemed to be alive. In harmony unending, they carried her on, swept her along in a frenzy of syncopated motion, primal in its abandon. And she could not stop.
Every element and energy in the universe had motion. And she expressed it at its elemental level. And she could not stop.
Through the misty fog of colors and incense, the pulsing of the atmosphere and her garments, the wild motions of the strange people around her, her mind clutched at the inner warning that she must break the rhythm, must distort the harmony that made her one with her surroundings, but she could not stop.
The cosmos, it seemed, might fade away. All sense of separate kinship with creatures of her mold might slip back into the primary from which, long ago, it emerged to create species. She might in truth become a spark of elemental energy, a single pulsing heart, of which all things were made, if she did not stop.
These wild thoughts tore at her feverish mind and body, but in no way abated that which had gone beyond her control.
She lost all reckoning of time. Her body moved as a puppet, the strings drawn by timeless law that had neither beginning nor end. She sank deeper into the fog, and her laboring heart and tortured fibres carried her on against her will until total exhaustion came.
The walls receded, advanced; the ceiling rose and fell. The air around her throbbed, and lilting waves of sound pounded her flesh. She sank into shadowy darkness.
And then she began to be awake.
Around her was shadowy twilight, on every side people such as she had seen in the marble hall. She was lying on an expanse of something of cushiony softness.
Acra-non came and stood beside her On his features was a look of ineffable sadness. “When the Goddess is ready,” he said, “I shall be her escort. She need not be afraid.”
But she was afraid. She grasped that something more terrifying than her uncontrollable dance was in store for her.
The women bathed her, brought her food and drink as she had never tasted, and clothed her in rich garments and jewels. Then she was led to the corridor where the men waited.
They formed a procession on either side of her, regal in its splendor, and to the slow beat of music marched into the hall.
It was already jammed to overflowing. She had never seen so many rich jewels, so many varied and colorful costumes. They reminded her of the wealth of spoils when Rahn Buskner and Moxol returned from a raid. But Castle du David was far away, and even thoughts of it were receding.
A broad lane opened for her and her escort. Flower petals fell as she advanced. A sparkling mist, as of points of light, filled the atmosphere.
Into her view appeared what seemed to be a statue of platinum and bronze. Its workmanship was so fine that she paused, caught her breath, stared in hypnotic fascination.
It was the figure of a man of godlike beauty and proportions. It was a trifle over six feet in height, broad, muscular, and out of its eyes shone a light of unrivaled confidence. She had never seen more intelligent looking features.
As she advanced she saw that it was clothed simply in unornamented golden jacket and trousers. A golden blade hung at its side. In the center of its forehead, hardly noticeable, was a single large ruby. Its hair was as auburn as her own.
She thought that, it breathed.
She paused at the foot of the three steps leading up to it,
but Acra-non urged her on, and, holding her breath, she mounted and stood on its left.
Then she was certain she could feel an almost imperceptible warmth from it.
The music ceased. The vast hall was silent. It seemed that not even a breath was drawn. Flower petals had ceased to fall, but the faintly sparkling mist remained, lending an aura of enchantment to the scene before her.
Something touched her arm, sent a tingling through her, and out of the corner of an eye she saw the godlike figure smiling at her, bidding her to be seated.
The touch was firm, muscular, warm, but she couldn’t escape the sense of metal. The voice was deep, rich, confident. It welcomed her and again bade her be seated.
Awe in her features, she lowered herself, tried to relax. A firm hand took hers and held it, and she saw that the creature was again facing the assemblage, making a gesture.
The silence was broken. Lilting music sounded softly. Men and women before her joined hands, moved in ceremonial patterns. The whole vast hall came alive with movement, and her sense of awe increased.
The ceremony continued. At some point in it she became aware of the hand that held hers. In its unconscious strength it had closed tighter, taken a grip on her as though it would let nothing part them.
She stirred uneasily, moved her fingers, tried to release her hand. It was as though she strained against metal.
Attracted by her movement, the man turned to her, looked down at her hand. He released it, then gently placed his arm about her. And even in its lightest touch it was compelling. It sent a tingling through her, made her want to press closer. She fought it.
A chanting began, and now it called, “Lon-den and Reeal-den, the new people, the new race . . .”
CHAPTER NINE
AS she was carried from the hall on the shoulders of men, Aline grasped that the ceremonies had in some way joined her to the godlike creature. He had spoken only briefly. His voice was deep, rich, strong.