by Lin Carter
He tried the stone first horizontal, then with the larger, more rounded end pointing directly up.
A shiver of awe ran through the thronged warriors.
Then they cried out!
The panel melted away into a spangled, glittering mist.
Motes of quivering indigo and emerald dust swirled queerly, revealing a round, circular opening cut into the dry stone.
The motes swam in a weaving, spiral motion, like the Brownian motion of dust suspended in a liquid.
Through the opening in the wall fell a weird golden light.
A wind blew upon their faces, heady, perfumed, and— strangest of all on this desert world—moist!
The Door to Outside was open.
IV
Outside the World
16. Strange Eden
Beyond the door the desert warriors found a weird new world, a world such as they had never envisioned, even in their most phantasmagoric dreams.
It was the air that seemed uncanniest to them, at first.
It was moist and warm, and redolent of growing things, rich with a curious perfumed sweetness, like delectable spices, whose nature they could not identify.
But Ryker could. He leaned against the rock wall and drank the warm, intoxicating fragrance deeply into his lungs. He remembered his boyhood, and his eyes misted … a small, two-story white frame house on the outskirts of Reno, Nevada, with a picket fence and a tall tree in the front yard … a smiling woman in a checkered apron, calling his name in a voice that was scarcely a memory to him any more, and himself answering in a childish treble-… bare legs with scabs on the knees from falling down, and well-worn sneakers … and a small, scruffy, black-and-white dog yapping at his heels as he ran to the house, a dog long forgotten, save in dreams … and, by the door, the small, sturdy figure that had once been himself, pausing before a bush of green, glossy leaves where white blossoms grew, inhaling the sweet, spicy fragrance …
He blinked back sudden tears.
The scent that puzzled the Martians was familiar to him.
It was the scent of flowers.
• • •
For a time they stood about, or wandered idly, like men in a daze of dreams.
Everything they saw about them was new and strange and wonderful, and full of beauty.
From the round mouth of the door stretched a thick, dewy sward of strange, soft, cushiony moss, deep metallic indigo starred with minute white flowers. Beyond grew thick, rustling bushes, swaying in the scented breezes. And then a stand of—trees?—something very like them, at any rate. To Ryker’s dazed vision they resembled towering stalks of raw celery , somehow grown to Brob-dingnagian proportions, and fronded with feathery plumes of azure.
Something fluttered in the hazy air, and went past them on flickering … wings? Yes, wings, on a world where birds or butterflies have never flown. Ryker shielded his gaze from the golden glare of the skies, and peered after the flying thing, hardly daring to believe what he saw.
It was neither bird nor insect, but—a serpent! A slim, graceful, undulant form, rose pink, and flecked with gemlike scales, its wedge-shaped head oddly crested with a fierce violet cockscomb—a serpent in every detail, save that it flew on wings like feathery, transparent sprays of membranous opal.
Someone stumbled into him from behind and he turned to see Doc bent over, fingering the queer bushes, mumbling entrancedly to himself. The old man seemed lost in a dream.
The golden glare from above, which he had glimpsed when the winged serpent fluttered by, caught his wandering attention then, and Ryker looked up.
He could not have said what he thought he might see—a rocky cavern roof far overhead, perhaps—-but whatever he had expected, he didn’t see it. Instead he saw a vast,
fathomless reach of the firmament, filled with pale golden fire and streaked with long thin filaments of—cloud?— oddly pinkish green, at any rate, and curiously regular in shape, with a gelatinous, near-solid look to them. But he was almost beyond wonderment by now, and merely drank in the sky of luminous gold without thinking about it.
At the zenith hung a disk of brilliant white fire. It seemed about the same size as the sun was, seen from the Martian surface, but intolerably more radiant, and lacking the yellowish tinge of the sun he had always known. This new sun was white and fierce, and younger than the sun he knew.
He wandered off into a grove of peculiar trees. They had long, graceful, drooping fronds, like an earthly willow, except that the fronds were each one long feathery leaf, like a palm, but rich metallic indigo. And there was no trunk to these feather trees, the frond sprang from one branch, and the stem of each branch was separate, although they all grew in a clump.
Ryker had never seen or heard of trees like these.
Nor the bushes that grew thick between them, either.
They were a paler shade of blue, and had glossy leaves like enormous ferns. But ferns grown waist high, and from a thick central stem.
He wandered on, and presently he came to the source of the sweet, spicy perfume.
The flowers grew as large as the head of an adult man, and were gauze thin, delicate as tissue. Translucent they were; pale gossamer petals colored the vague, changing hues of opals. And they were as fragile to the touch as they looked. He touched one, rubbed its petals gently between his fingers—and the enormous, frail blossom vanished
like a soap-bubble, leaving a sweet-scented residue on his fingers, like a drop of fragrant essence.
But he was beyond marvel now.
At least he thought he was.
He strolled on, drinking in the sweet, moist, warm air, shedding his thermalsuit with an absent gesture, no longer needing it to shield him from the cold, dry bite of the thin Martian air.
For he was no longer on Mars.
He knew this for certain when he came to the pool. A natural pond of water, open to the sky, was unknown on the desert world. Back on the Mars he knew it would have evaporated like a puff of steam, in mere instants of time.
But not here, evidently.
He stared at it, wonderingly.
For here one was: a pool of sweet, cold, fresh water bubbling up from hidden springs. Several of the desert warriors knelt beside the pool, like men in a trance, hardly daring to believe the evidence of their eyes. One gingerly dipped a dusty finger in the limpid water, and sucked it, a dazed expression in his eyes.
One by one the others bent and drank. Never in all their lives had they seen a pool of water before. They hardly knew what to make of it.
Glossy-leafed bushes rustled then, and a sinuous, furry form glided into view and stood watching them from huge, unwinking eyes like luminous amber or topaz. Ryker froze. So did the warriors, none of whom had ever seen such a creature before.
It looked very much like a cat, but it was larger than a cheetah, its slim, graceful body clad in sleek, gleaming fur, coppery red. It had enormous, prick-eyes, fragile, silken and oval, lambent eyes that glowed in its elfin, heart-shaped face. It was impossibly beautiful.
The cat creature paid no particular attention to them, after that first long, enigmatic stare. It stretched indifferently, yawned, revealing a dainty pink tongue, and ambled away to stretch out on the azure moss beneath the nearest tree. It was not only unafraid of them, it didn’t seem to find them particularly interesting.
There sounded a dull plop, and a plump, golden fruit fell to the cushioning moss near the cat creature. The feline yawned again, sniffed the fruit lazily, and began to devour it daintily.
Then a small furry rodentlike animal came wriggling up from the moss to investigate the bits of fruit the cat had let fall.
The newcomer was about the size of a rabbit, with silky fur, pale blue, and pink eyes and white whiskers and a wriggling pink nose. It looked like a fat mouse.
The cat completely ignored it, after one sideways glance. Then it let the rind of the fruit fall to the ground and began lazily to groom its whiskers with one velvet paw. At its feet, utterly fearless, t
he fat blue rodent began nibbling at the remnants of the fruit. Ryker could hardly believe his eyes.
Beside him Doc appeared, observing this most curiously unfeline behavior. The old man mumbled something under his breath in what sounded like Hebrew.
“Eh?” murmured Ryker.
The old man blinked at him, then grinned, flushing a little.
“Sorry! I will translate.” His eyes grew dreamy. ” ‘And the Lord God planted a garden eastwards in Eden… .’ “
Ryker nodded, his eyes thoughtful. “I know what you mean, Doc. Do you remember the rest of it?”
“Like I know my own hand,” the old man said softly.
“Let me think … yes … ‘And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of the Earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. And God looked upon his handiwork, and saw that it was good.’ “
The words stirred up old, long-forgotten memories within Ryker. He thought of that white frame house, and its little garden, and the small black and white dog, and the smiling woman who had once read to him these same words from an old, old book.
‘ ‘Eden, eh?” he murmured. ‘ ‘And is there a Serpent in it yet, I wonder?”
Doc looked behind them to where Zarouk was striding about, yelling, rousing his men from their dreams, marshalling them into battle formation.
“Yes, there is,” he whispered somberly. “And, God help us, I think it is you and I, my boy, who have let the Serpent in.”
And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.
17. The Dreaming City
It took a long time and much yelling for Zarouk to bring his men out of their trance and into order. When at last this was done, he led them down the gentle slope and into the strange new world they had found beyond the door.
As for the door itself, they left it open. Indeed, they were not entirely sure how to close it, even with the Keystone. The spangled mist of blue-green motes into which the Martium panel had vaporized remained in its immaterial state, a curtain of metallic haze drawn across the round opening in the rock of the low red cliff. Zarouk guessed it would stay that way until the Keystone returned the vapor to its solid form.
Ryker figured Zarouk thought it wise to leave the escape route open, in case they needed it. For there was no telling how terribly, and with what unguessable weapons of scientific wizardry, the devil worshippers would be armed.
As they marched down into the vast, dreaming valley which lay open before them under the golden sky, Ryker was not so sure about those weapons. This gentle garden world did indeed seem like a very Eden—where even the lion would lie down with the lamb, and cats did not eat mice, but fed on lush ripe fruit instead.
Did they have war here, too? He found it difficult to imagine. This uncanny Eden seemed gentle, defenseless. He could not believe that men needed weapons here.
Zarouk had brought his weapons with him, of course.
And he would use them.
In the broad valley below they found the City.
It was built upon many waters. Lakes and canals surrounded it, and lush gardens and parks.
But it was walled, as all the Martian cities were, walled with clear, glistening marble, pale golden, and lucent as alabaster.
At the sight of it, Doc stopped short with a gasp. Curious emotion lit his eyes, a dawning comprehension, and a dawning wonderment as if he now envisioned some marvel transcending even those they had already seen.
But when Ryker asked him, he only shook his head.
“Later, later, my boy—when I’m sure,” was all he would say.
In truth, it was very beautiful, the City. It was built according to the immemorial Martian mode, walled courts and dome-roofed houses, slender minarets and long colonnades, with a central square, and a palace that fronted thereupon, and a huge square structure like a temple, too, and the streets radiated out from the central square like the spokes of the wheel.
The roofs were red tiled, and the houses had lush gardens, and canals meandered through the City, here and there, arched by little bridges. Men and women poled through those waterways in narrow boats with graceful, upcurved prows, like the gondolas of Venice.
There was only one gate to the City, and it was shut and barred.
But there were no guards before the gate, and no warriors stationed upon the walls. And that was very strange, indeed. Were these people so terribly armed with ancient
weapons of science or magic, that they had no need of swords and spears?
Perhaps. The possibility was frightening.
Zarouk made his camp before the entrance of the broad causeway that arched over a lake to end before the gate of the City. His men reared their tents and made their fires and began to scout for food. They found the cat beasts marvelously easy to hunt, and easier yet t® slay.
The creatures seemed not to comprehend what was being done to them. They would stand gazing indifferently at the hunters who tried to creep up on them, but they neither tried to dodge or flee when the darts flew or the spears struck.
Ryker saw one beautiful red cat pinned to the moss by spears, but still living. As the hunters came up to cut its throat the beast regarded them with puzzled eyes, stretching out a gentle paw as if to touch them. It just had time to utter one plaintive, questioning mew before they cut its throat.
Ryker found the slaughter of these gentle, fearless, puzzled creatures sickening. That night he and the scientist ate dried meat and bread brought with them from Mars, for to have eaten of the cat creatures, they would have had to be a lot hungrier than they were.
“Oh, we have let the Serpent into Eden all right,” sighed Herzog. “You saw it yourself, my boy. The cats had never been hunted before, no. They didn’t even know what was happening. They—I think they thought maybe the men wanted to—to play. …”
And Ryker felt sicker than before.
He began to wish they had killed him before he had made the replica of the stone seal. But it was too late for recriminations now.
• • •
The strange white sun-star of this world sank in a sunset sky the color of tangerine and the long filaments of cloud were painted vermilion and magenta.
Ryker sat on a log before his tent looking at the City.
He hadn’t known what to expect of Zhiam. But a city of devil worshippers had no right to be this serene and cool and beautiful. The ugliness, the perversion of its people, their dedication to evil, should have shown in their handiwork, somehow.
But the City was a dream of fragile beauty, slim towers floating against the dying fires of the sun, domes like ripe fruit or the breasts of women seeming to float like enormous bubbles upon the waters… .
No, there was no evil in the City men called Outside.
But—in its people?
It was hard to hazard a guess. It was the orothodox Martians who called them zhaggua—worshippers of devils. He had yet to hear Valarda’s side of the story.
But then his heart hardened and his face grew grim. Beautiful or not, this was Valarda’s kingdom, and she had lied to him, fooled him, tricked him, cheated him, robbed him, left him to die, bound and helpless, among his enemies.
There was no doubt about that.
The City knew they were there, but paid no attention. No flags flew, no bugles were blown, no warriors gathered to the defense of Zhiam.
The City dreamed in the dim moonlight, under the glitter of ten thousand stars.
There were fewer stars blazing in this sky of nights than made splendid the nighted skies of Mars. But, like Mars, this planet also had twin moons, one larger than the other.
The moons of Mars, Deimos and Phobos, were too small and too low in albedo to be clearly visible even at night. In fact, they were all but impossible to see with the unaided eye. You had to know exactly where they were in the sk
y to glimpse them at all.
But here the moons, although small, were visible, disks of pallid silver against dark purple velvet.
The desert men ignored the splendor of the skies. They were not made for this warmth and humidity, and the air of this planet was so rich in oxygen, compared to what they had known, that its headiness intoxicated them. They perspired greasily, stripped to mere loincloths, panting breathlessly in what seemed to them an unendurably tropical heat.
To Ryker and his companion, the night was mild and balmy. Both Earthlings had gone through the series of treatments that readjusted their body chemistries to conditions on Mars. But this did not mean they could not readjust to conditions more like those on Earth. Their organic modifications reacted like thermostats to whatever conditions they found themselves in. So they, at least, were comfortable.
Doc seemed utterly fascinated by the spectacle of the skies. The constellations were strange and new to both of them, of course and, although he said nothing, Ryker guessed the scientist was trying to find a signpost in the altered constellations which might indicate their position in the universe.
In this he guessed wrong, as things turned out.
‘ ‘Doc, you aren’t gonna find any stars you recognize,” Ryker argued . ‘ ‘We’re in another dimension, aren’t we?”
The Israeli savant snorted through his nose, rudely.
“My boy, when you don’t know what you’re talking about, then shut up,” he said. “The only dimensions you
got to worry about are length, breadth and thickness.”
“What about the fourth dimension?”
“Duration. And it’s not really a dimension like the others, it’s a condition for existence. To exist at all, a thing has to have length, breadth and thickness—and it has to endure for a measurable unit of time. They been misquoting Einstein for two hundred years, it’s time they stopped. So stop, already!”
Ryker grinned and shut up. Doc could be cantankerous at times, especially when you interrupted him during a bout of cogitation.