Beyond the Black Enigma

by Gardner Francis Fox

  Craig frowned. There had to be a starting point "The name Toparr—what does it mean?”

  "The made one,” she replied.

  “Wha— what?”

  "In our tongue, 'to' is a man, a thing, a being, something that exists. The word 'parr’ means something that is made. If I crave a wooden spoon with which to eat, it becomes parr. I am not parr. Neither are you. We were not made—that way.”

  Craig grunted. The made one. It was no help, no help at all. He put The Imp between Fiona and himself and lay down beside her. The stream made little burblings as it ran over its bottom stones, a soft and soothing sound that lulled him into dreamless slumber.

  He woke with the first rising of the sun, when the world to the west was red with brightening day. Fiona was already up. He could make her out some distance away, bending above some bushes, crouched to lift something from the ground.

  She came back with her food pouch filled with berries and nuts and something that looked like mushrooms. She stood above him, making a wry face.

  "It isn't much, it's cold, but it will have to do.”

  Craig remembered the egg that the chief of Ordnance had created in Dan Ingalls office. He sat up, leaning forward, concentrating. First the shell, then the white albumen, then the yellow yolk.

  Fiona cried out when she saw the first egg, fell to her knees at the second and began to laugh softly to herself when the third, fourth and fifth appeared. Besides them, Craig fashioned a shallow metal pot.

  He was weak when he was done, and he wasn't even sure that the pot would stand up to fire under it. Well, he would learn soon enough. He took the pot, filled it half full with water, then boiled the eggs over a fire he made with gathered twigs and a flare he carried in his duty-kit.

  When the eggs were done, he whipped them together with the edibles Fiona had gathered, placed them on a flat length of tree-bark and handed it to her. He himself ate from the cooking pot.

  To his surprise, the concoction was tasty. The blandness of which Edmunds had complained was flavored by the berries and the mushrooms. They would eat the nuts on the way.

  They followed the stream, reasoning that it would lead them to a river, and the river to open land away from the forests. It took them more than half the day. The sun was close to setting when they emerged out onto a broad, alluvial plain where the grasses grew to the height of their knees.

  Nowhere was there any sign of life.

  They would have to go on, and on. It was a prospect that wearied Craig, just thinking about it. But it ad to be done. That night he made a steak and it over the flames but it was tasteless. It went own hard, yet it filled their bellies after a fashion.

  In the late afternoon of the fifth day after crossing over from the Now into this Beyond, they saw the city. It was not large, and there were no towers, no spires. It was composed of wide, level buildings with at rooftops, and appeared, from a distance, to be built of great granite blocks. To avoid discovery, they crawled through the tall grasses until it was dark, when they rose to their feet and walked.

  There were no lookouts; Craig had not supposed there would be; for years, the Toparrs had been the only form of life in the Beyond. They would have no reason to suspect they might have visitors.

  They came closer, until now and then they could see people walking through the streets. There were never very many together at one time, three at most, and these were all male Toparrs.

  "Are there no women?” Craig asked softly. "I never saw a female Toparr," Fiona whispered.

  When the streets were empty of life, they moved forward. Now Fiona gave The Imp to Craig, for there would be no time for concentration with the Halo were they discovered. It would be shoot to kill and hope no one else had seen them.

  Luck was with them. They came into the city by way of a hard-packed dirt path and across a flagstoned terrace. Glowing strips of some metallic substance, set into the building walls at a height of ten feet, gave off a soft brightness that illuminated the streets. There was an eerie silence everywhere, as though it were a dead city.

  Craig was vaguely disturbed as he walked the streets until he realized that nowhere did he see a single form of conveyance, no cart, no draught animal, no g-wing or simple wheeled car. Fiona assured him the Toparrs possessed nothing like that, which meant that she had never seen any. The streets were clean, there was little dust, there were no benches, nowhere to sit or rest. It was as if the city were for stark utilitarian purposes only.

  They went on along the streets and the farther they walked, the more the feeling grew that they were the only living things within it. And then Fiona heard a voice singing. She went rigid with rise.

  "I have never heard a Toparr sing,” she exclaimed excitedly. "I never even heard one speak.”

  Craig recalled the yellow man-thing who had tried to kill Fiona in the ruins of Uphor. The girl was right. The Toparr had communicated with him by some form of mental telepathy. Excitement churned his middle. He knew the tune, the words that were being sung. They were from a chanty that had been young when Mars was being colonized, far centuries back.

  Craig grinned with tight lips, pushing Fiona ahead of him. Those were crewmen of the two fleets, singing that chorus. Past the flat, windowless walls of the low buildings her an, hunting the source of the music. Not this door, no—but the one beyond it, the one with the double bars across them, preventing the doors from being opened outward.

  He and the girl lifted the bars, set them on the street. Then he swung open one door and pushed Fiona inside. The interior looked like the common room of any spaceport tavern. The overhead wooden beams were stained with smoke and the air was heavy with the scent of wine. The heavy, massy wooden furniture had been built to withstand battering and overuse, and the walls were hung solid with torn strips of cloth bearing the insignia of the fighting squadrons. Ah! And the men Surely the men were like a thousand others he had seen on his many assignments.

  Craig grinned, filling his lungs with the odors of spilled wine and thick steaks. Along one wall there was a counter, with three girls behind it—two of them were of the people of Rhydd, he saw-pouring what looked like beer into leather tankards. Two men all in white were cooking on a number of burners inlaid into the wall counter behind them.

  The men nearest the door were the first to notice him, of course. One man who had been playing chess with pieces carved by hand from wood, paused in mid-move, staring. Others turned, swiveling their heads or standing upright. Disbelief, surprise, hope, blossomed in their faces.

  A voice bellowed, "By the gods of Sirian—it's Johnny Craig!”

  A heavyset man whose dirty shirt strained to encase his thick chest and great shoulders came pushing through the others. Craig laughed and shouted, Rolf Olsen You big ape—what are you doing here?

  A hairy hand reached for his, wrung it. "I could ask you the same thing. Where'd you come from Last I heard you were out in the Columbian cluster, fighting the robotians.”

  Commander Craig shrugged, then smiled. An arm was laid on his shoulders and around Fiona's waist, urging them forward between the tables. The girl was giggling, looking around her at the eyes that drank in her curving body. Craig thought that she had never seen so many men gathered into one place in all her years of life.

  "There must be close to a thousand fighting men of the Empire fleet here, Craig said.

  "And a thousand more in another block, a thousand more in the one beyond that,” Olsen grinned, pulling back two chairs, pushing the girl into one, Craig into the other. He sat between them, leaning his heavily muscled arms on the tabletop.

  "Tell me, Johnny. How'd you get here?” It took Craig an hour and a little more to tell the story. They were surrounded with crewmen when he was done, all of them listening, none speaking.

  Olsen said, "You're here too, now. You'll never leave. Those yellow characters won't let you.”

  Craig had laid The Imp across the tabletop. Now he patted its glittering metal barrel. "The Imp will have some
thing to say about that. The Toparrs have no weapon like this.”

  "They have something better. They have a god.”

  "Rhythane?” asked Craig in surprise. The big Swede nodded gloomily. “I know, I know. You've run into star gods before. So've I. None of them were worth their weight in salt. This one is. This god does things for his people.”

  "That can't be true. Does things?" The men around them began to growl their agreement with Olsen. One said, "Every morning the tools we work with are lifeless. Then the priest—a lanth, the Toparrs call him—prays to this Rhythane and—the tools can function.”

  "You say this priest is called a lanth by the Toparrs? I didn't know the Toparrs could speak.”

  "Some of them can. Some of them are quite human.”

  Somebody else said, "The ones they send back into Time can't talk, all they can do is telepath.”

  “Yeah, but the ones who give us our orders—they talk."

  Perhaps because the god does not want his slaves finding out too much about him, from an inadvertent thought? It might be. Therefore, if this were true, Rhythane might know the meaning of fear. Or caution.

  Olsen began to speak. "They haven't treated us badly, but we are slaves. There's no other word for it. They make us work, building them a temple. It's almost done.”

  "A temple? So the Toparrs can worship this Rhythane?”

  "We don't know. We only know what the Toparrs tell us. Oh,” he added, waving a big hand, “once in a while a hunter comes and watches and somebody catches a thought or two. That's how we know about the Time sectors on this world.”

  Craig asked, "The Beyond, where we are, the Now, where the Rhydd live, and the Then, where the spaceships stand?”

  Olsen nodded, turning to take three leather jacks from the crewman who had carried them from the counter. He handed one to Fiona, one to Craig, and lifted his own.

  "A toast to Johnny Craig, boys. If anybody can get us out of here, he can. The only trouble is—he's never been asked to fight a god before.”

  The beer was a little too tart, but it felt good going down, and Craig savored it. Fiona drank, choked, went red. She coughed, bending forward. The Rhydd had made a beer from the grain in their fields, but it was mild and bland compared to this liquid. Craig grinned at her.

  "What about her people?” he asked.

  "They never bring captives here, not right away. Besides, you said most of the men were killed and a lot of the women. They have another city some distance away, where they keep the kids. The women prisoners they parcel out to the other cities.”

  Olsen glanced at Fiona who was gingerly sipping once again. Craig did not have to have it spelled out. The Rhydd women kept the Empire crewmen contented. They were emotional safety valves, the women and the beer.

  Olsen seemed to read his thoughts. "Sure, we tried rebelling. The Toparrs have a milder form of that white ball weapon which they call a tarath. It shoots tiny balls instead of big ones and when they hit—they burn. Not like fire. They don't leave any mark—but they crawl all over your nerves and for a week you're no good for anything. So, to avoid getting nerve-washed again, you do what the Toparrs tell you to do.

  "I'll want to get inside that Temple,” Craig said. “Can do. You'll become one of us. There are so many, they'll never notice one more or less.” Olsen chuckled, “You'll have to get out of those service issues, though. I think we can scrape up some breeches and a shirt, somewhere or other. Mmmmm, and as for the girl, I guess what she's wearing is all right. Most of the Rhydd women keep their clothes. They get pretty worn with washing and such, and when they wear out, the Toparrs give them a cheap cloth to make a new tunic."

  And so it was setup. Craig slept beside Fiona on floor mattresses in an upper floor chamber spacious enough to accommodate five hundred sleepers. His thoughts were chaotic before he fell asleep. This god, this Rhythane: what was it, or he, or she? How could it power the tools the crewmen used? What was the secret behind its godhood? The odd fact was, Rhythane was not only the god of the Toparrs, it was god to the Rhydd, their victims, as well. It just didn't add up.

  In the early morning sunlight, he walked with the other crewmen out of the building and along a street, just one more man in brown breeches and loose woolen shirt, wearing crudely made moccasins. None of the yellow humanoids paid him any heed. He was just another prisoner.

  The temple, he saw as he came closer, was almost complete. It towered above the flat-roofed dwellings of the workers and the Toparrs. It had twin buttresses on either side of the domed entrance, great round heights of hewn stone without windows and with little decoration. It was stark and utilitarian, as was everything in this Beyond. It was as if the Toparrs had no appreciation for the more aesthetic values. He thought how Fiona had called them "the made ones.” If they were androids, they would have no need for Ornament.

  They climbed the few stone steps into the temple in columns of twos. It took a long time, there were many workers from many different dwellings. Craig could understand better, seeing the many slaves, like a cluster of bees entering a hive, how one more crewman would escape detection.

  It was his turn at last to step with Rolf Olsen into the great nave, into the dim, cool interior lighted only by open windows set high in the stone walls. There was a tiled floor before him, of yellow and black squares laid on the diagonal, and in the far end of the temple there was a great towering structure of interlocked metal rods and wires.

  It looked like a surrealist mobile. It stood on a stone base, which was the altar. It shimmered faintly, as though there were several of these abstractions occupying the same space and separated thinly, by micro-fractions of an inch.

  “Their god, Rhythane,” whispered Olsen.

  Craig did not believe him.

  Chapter Six

  There was no life in the metallic structure, no sentience. If it drew its power from some unknown source, and was turned off at the moment, it might look this way, dead and inert. Yet Craig did not feel at ease with this explanation. His intuition, that had seen him in and out of tight spots in the past and which he had come to depend upon, was all at sixes and sevens.

  He shook his head. "That's no god.”

  "The Toparrs think so. They never look directly at it. They tiptoe past it, they seem almost afraid of it.”

  "It's just metal.”

  “Watch when the priest prays to it.” Olsen worked close by the altar, on a patch of flooring that needed tile-work. Craig took his place beside him, with two other men. When they were all in position, a tall gaunt Toparr clad in long, stiff garments, turned to the metallic structure, bowing low before it. The lanth began to speak.

  "God of power, give of that power.

  "Lord of energy, loan us that strength.

  “Master of matter, form that matter for us.

  "Will for us, that we may build.

  “Create for us, that we may serve thee."

  Craig felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. In front of him, in neat little piles, glazed tiles began to take shape. They shimmered, they appeared to float out of nothingness, they firmed into existence.

  It was The Halo on a grand-scale, And yet—it was more than that. For the mental structure was glowing with a pale blue fire, there was something within the wires and the rods, something that pulsed, something that possessed alien, eerie life of a sort. Craig could feel the power there, blazing up higher and higher as the tiles were formed, as the tools were powered where they were needed by the slave workers.

  Rhythane? It might be. Something such as this would appear as a god to a simple people like the Rhydd, as well as to the yellow half-men. To them, this formation of matter out of apparent emptiness would smack of godliness.

  Grudgingly, Craig admitted he might think so too, were it not for The Halo. Edmunds had explained enough of its kinetic power to give him some slight understanding of how it worked. This metallic abstraction was another Halo.

  Ah, but—whose was the finger that operated
it? Slowly the pale blue fire died away, remaining only as tiles and stone blocks and other building materials, and as fuel for the power tools that some of the slave workers used. With the others, Craig bent and began to work. The tiles felt real enough to his hands, and he remembered the eggs he and Fiona had eaten on their way into this city.

  He worked for uncounted hours until the sweat ran down his face, before the Toparrs came and fed him a thick gruel and a weak liquid which Olsen explained was brewed from a certain type of grain. Then he labored on until the patch of floor was covered. Somewhere, a whistle blew.

  Craig asked, "Do they check for anyone remaining behind after the work is done?”

  "They used to. They don't any more, because the ones who tried it were punished in front of everybody else. After seeing what happened to them, nobody felt like risking his neck. Besides, even if you do escape from the city, where could you go?”

  “I don't want to escape.” He wanted to examine that structure up on the altar, wanted to analyze it, see what made it tick. If he could do that, maybe he could smuggle The Imp in here and blast it. But before he went that far, he must know what it was he was destroying.

  The others were forming lines, two by two, as they had entered. The Toparrs were at the entry doors of the temple, casual, not suspicious. The slave workers behaved themselves now, they gave no more trouble. There was no need any longer for close supervision. It was easy for Craig to drop flat behind the altar and lie there motionless. In the gathering shadows he was not likely to be seen unless a Toparr came around behind the polished stonework. He heard the tramping feet, the banging of the doors as they were closed; he watched the dying sunlight move out of the open windows high in the walls and saw darkness come creeping across the floor tiles.

  Now he rose to his feet, moving silently around the altar to study the abstraction from every angle. He put his hand up on one of the metal rods. It felt cool. From this angle, just below the structure, he could see deeper into the depths of that stabile, see between the taut wires to where a strange blue shimmer could be glimpsed.