We went up among the ghostly soldiery and the phantom banners. Outside there were darkness and death and the coming of death. Inside there were light and beauty, the last proud blaze of Shandakor under the shadow of its doom. There was an eerie magic in it that had begun to tell on me. I watched Duani. She leaned against the parapet, looking outward. The wind ruffled her silver crest, pressed her garments close against her body. Her eyes were full of moonlight and I could not read them. Then I saw that there were tears.
I put my arm around her shoulders. She was only a child, an alien child, not of my race or breed…
“JonRoss.”
“Yes?”
“There are so many things I will never know.”
It was the first time I had touched her. Those curious curls stirred under my fingers, warm and alive. The tips of her pointed ears were soft as a kitten’s.
“Duani.”
“What?”
“I don’t know…”
I kissed her. She drew back and gave me a startled look from those black brilliant eyes and suddenly I stopped thinking that she was a child and I forgot that she was not human and—I didn’t care.
“Duani, listen. You don’t have to go to the Place of Sleep.”
She looked at me, her cloak spread out upon the night wind, her hands against my chest.
“There’s a whole world out there to live in. And if you aren’t happy there I’ll take you to my world, to Earth. There isn’t any reason why you have to die!”
Still she looked at me and did not speak. In the streets below the silent throngs went by and the towers glowed with many colors. Duani’s gaze moved slowly to the darkness beyond the wall, to the barren valley and the hostile rocks.
“No.”
“Why not? Because of Rhul, because of all this talk of pride and race?”
“Because of truth. Corin learned it.”
I didn’t want to think about Corin. “He was alone. You’re not. You’d never be alone.”
She brought her hands up and laid them on my cheeks very gently. “That green star, that is your world. Suppose it were to vanish and you were the last of all the men of Earth. Suppose you lived with me in Shandakor forever—would you not be alone?” “It wouldn’t matter if I had you.”
She shook her head. “It would matter. And our two races are as far apart as the stars. We would have nothing to share between us.”
Remembering what Rhul had told me I flared up and said some angry things. She let me say them and then she smiled. “It is none of that, JonRoss.” She turned to look out over the city. “This is my place and no other. When it is gone I must be gone too.”
Quite suddenly I hated Shandakor.
I didn’t sleep much after that. Every time Duani left me I was afraid she might never come back. Rhul would tell me nothing and I didn’t dare to question him too much. The hours rushed by like seconds and Duani was happy and I was not. My shackles had magnetic locks. I couldn’t break them and I couldn’t cut the chains.
One evening Duani came to me with something in her face and in the way she moved that told me the truth long before I could make her put it into words. She clung to me, not wanting to talk, but at last she said, “Today there was a casting of lots and the first hundred have gone to the Place of Sleep.”
“It is the beginning, then.”
She nodded. “Every day there will be another hundred until all are gone.”
I couldn’t stand it any longer. I thrust her away and stood up. “You know where the ‘keys’ are. Get these chains off me!”
She shook her head. “Let us not quarrel now, JonRoss. Come. I want to walk in the city.”
We had quarreled more than once, and fiercely. She would not leave Shandakor and I couldn’t take her out by force as long as I was chained. And I was not to be released until everyone but Rhul had entered the Place of Sleep and the last page of that long history had been written.
I walked with her among the dancers and the slaves and the bright-cloaked princes. There were no temples in Shandakor. If they worshipped anything it was beauty and to that their whole city was a shrine. Duani’s eyes were rapt and there was a remoteness on her now.
I held her hand and looked at the towers of turquoise and cinnabar, the pavings of rose quartz and marble, the walls of pink and white and deep red coral, and to me they were hideous. The ghostly crowds, the mockery of life, the phantom splendors of the past were hideous, a drug, a snare.
“The faculty of reason!” I thought and saw no reason in any of it.
I looked up to where the great globe turned and turned against the sky, keeping these mockeries alive. “Have you ever seen the city as it is—without the Shadows?”
“No. I think only Rhul, who is the oldest, remembers it that way. I think it must have been very lonely. Even then there were less than three thousand of us left.”
It must indeed have been lonely. They must have wanted the Shadows as much to people the empty streets as to fend off the enemies who believed in magic.
I kept looking at the globe. We walked for a long time. And then I said, “I must go back to the tower.”
She smiled at me very tenderly. “Soon you will be free of the tower—and of these.” She touched the chains. “No, don’t be sad, JonRoss. You will remember me and Shandakor as one remembers a dream.” She held up her face, that was so lovely and so unlike the meaty faces of human women, and her eyes were full of somber lights. I kissed her and then I caught her up in my arms and carried her back to the tower.
In that room, where the great shaft turned, I told her, “I have to tend the things below. Go up onto the platform, Duani, where you can see all Shandakor. I’ll be with you soon.”
I don’t know whether she had some hint of what was in my mind or whether it was only the imminence of parting that made her look at me as she did. I thought she was going to speak but she did not, climbing the ladder obediently. I watched her slender golden body vanish upward. Then I went into the chamber below.
There was a heavy metal bar there that was part of a manual control for regulating the rate of turn. I took it off its pin. Then I closed the simple switches on the power plant. I tore out all the leads and smashed the connections with the bar. I did what damage I could to die cogs and the offset shaft. I worked very fast. Then I went up into the main chamber again. The great shaft was still turning but slowly, ever more slowly.
There was a cry from above me and I saw Duani. I sprang up the ladder, thrusting her back onto the platform. The globe moved heavily of its own momentum. Soon it would stop but the white fires still flickered in the crystal rods. I climbed up onto the railing, clinging to a strut. The chains on my wrists and ankles made it hard but I could reach. Duani tried to pull me down. I think she was screaming. I hung on and smashed the crystal rods with the bar, as many as I could.
There was no more motion, no more light. I got down on the platform again and dropped the bar. Duani had forgotten me. She was looking at the city.
The lights of many colors that had burned there were burning still but they were old and dim, cold embers without radiance. The towers of jade and turquoise rose up against the little moons and they were broken and cracked with time and there was no glory in them. They were desolate and very sad. The night lay clotted around their feet. The streets, the plazas and the market-squares were empty, their marble paving blank and bare. The soldiers had gone from the walls of Shandakor, with their banners and their bright mail, and there was no longer any movement anywhere within the gates.
Duani let out one small voiceless cry. And as though in answer to it, suddenly from the darkness of the valley and the slopes beyond there rose a thin fierce howling as of wolves.
“Why?” she whispered. “Why?” She turned to me. Her face was pitiful. I caught her to me.
“I couldn’t let you die! Not for dreams and visions, nothing. Look, Duani. Look at Shandakor.” I wanted to force her to understand. “Shandakor is broken and ugly and fo
rlorn. It is a dead city—but you’re alive. There are many cities but only one life for you.”
Still she looked at me and it was hard to meet her eyes. She said, “We knew all that, JonRoss.”
“Duani, you’re a child, you’ve only a child’s way of thought. Forget the past and think of tomorrow. We can get through the barbarians. Corin did. And after that…”
“And after that you would still be human—and I would not.” From below us in the dim and empty streets there came a sound of lamentation. I tried to hold her but she slipped out from between my hands. “And I am glad that you are human,” she whispered. “You will never understand what you have done.”
And she was gone before I could stop her, down into the tower. I went after her. Down the endless winding stairs with my chains clattering between my feet, out into the streets, the dark and broken and deserted streets of Shandakor. I called her name and her golden body went before me, fleet and slender, distant and more distant. The chains dragged upon my feet and the night took her away from me.
I stopped. The whelming silence rushed smoothly over me and I was bitterly afraid of this dark dead Shandakor that I did not know. I called again to Duani and then I began to search for her in the shattered shadowed streets. I know now how long it must have been before I found her.
For when I found her, she was with the others. The last people of Shandakor, the men and the women, the women first, were walking silently in a long line toward a low flat-roofed building that I knew without telling was the Place of Sleep.
They were going to die and there was no pride in their faces now. There was a sickness in them, a sickness and a hurt in their eyes as they moved heavily forward, not looking, not wanting to look at the sordid ancient streets that I had stripped of glory.
“Duani.’“ I called, and ran forward but she did not turn in her place in the line. And I saw that she was weeping.
Rhul turned toward me, and his look had a weary contempt that was bitterer than a curse. “Of what use, after all, to kill you now?”
“But I did this thing! I did it!”
“You are only human.”
The long line shuffled on and Duani’s little feet were closer to that final doorway. Rhul looked upward at the sky. “There is still time before the sunrise. The women at least will be spared the indignity of spears.”
“Let me go with her!”
I tried to follow her, to take my place in line. And the weapon in Rhul’s hand moved and there was the pain and I lay as Corin had lain while they went silently on into the Place of Sleep.
The barbarians found me when they came, still half doubtful, into the city after dawn. I think they were afraid of me. I think they feared me as a wizard who had somehow destroyed all the folk of Shandakor.
For they broke my chains and healed my wounds and later they even gave me out of the loot of Shandakor the only thing I wanted—a bit of porcelain, shaped like the head of a young girl.
I sit in the Chair that I craved at the University and my name is written on the roll of the discoverers. I am eminent, I am respectable—I, who murdered the glory of a race.
Why didn’t I go after Duani into the Place of Sleep? I could have crawled! I could have dragged myself across those stones. And I wish to God I had. I wish that I had died with Shandakor!
* * * *
Copyright © 1952 by Better Publications, Inc.
ALGIS BUDRYS
(1931–2008)
Better known as an editor and reviewer than for his writing, Budrys nevertheless put together and impressive writing career, particularly for someone who spent most of his life exiled from his homeland. (His father was a Lithuanian diplomat sent to the U.S. with his family when Budrys was five, before the country was overrun in World War II and then occupied by the Soviet Union. For most of his life, Budrys held a captain’s commission in the Free Lithuanian Army.)
Educated at the University of Miami and Columbia University, Budrys sold his first story, “The High Purpose,” to Astounding when he was twenty-one. That same year he started working for such science fiction publishers as Gnome Press and Galaxy Science Fiction, while continuing to write both fiction and nonfiction under a wide range of pseudonyms. Longtime book reviewer for Galaxy, Budrys also served as a book editor for Playboy, a frequent instructor at the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, an organizer and judge for the (somewhat controversial) Writers of the Future awards, and a publicist. (In one publicity stunt, he erected a giant pickle on the proposed site of the Chicago Picasso.)
Budrys became a naturalized American citizen in 1996, but he also lived to see Lithuania freed. Married (since 1954) to Edna F. Duna, he had four sons. He died of metastatic malignant melanoma in 2008.
THE STOKER AND THE STARS
First Published in Astounding Science Fiction, February 1959, by “John A. Sentry”
Know him? Yes, I know him—knew him. That was twenty years ago.
Everybody knows him now. Everybody who passed him on the street knows him. Everybody who went to the same schools, or even to different schools in different towns, knows him now. Ask them. But I knew him. I lived three feet away from him for a month and a half. I shipped with him and called him by his first name.
What was he like? What was he thinking, sitting on the edge of his bunk with his jaw in his palm and his eyes on the stars? What did he think he was after?
Well…Well, I think he— You know, I think I never did know him, after all. Not well. Not as well as some of those people who’re writing the books about him seem to.
I couldn’t really describe him to you. He had a duffelbag in his hand and a packed airsuit on his back. The skin of his face had been dried out by ship’s air, burned by ultraviolet and broiled by infra red. The pupils of his eyes had little cloudy specks in them where the cosmic rays had shot through them. But his eyes were steady and his body was hard. What did he look like? He looked like a man.
* * * *
It was after the war, and we were beaten. There used to be a school of thought among us that deplored our combativeness; before we had ever met any people from off Earth, even, you could hear people saying we were toughest, cruelest life-form in the Universe, unfit to mingle with the gentler wiser races in the stars, and a sure bet to steal their galaxy and corrupt it forever. Where these people got their information, I don’t know.
We were beaten. We moved out beyond Centaurus, and Sirius, and then we met the Jeks, the Nosurwey, the Lud. We tried Terrestrial know-how, we tried Production Miracles, we tried patriotism, we tried damning the torpedoes and full speed ahead…and we were smashed back like mayflies in the wind. We died in droves, and we retreated from the guttering fires of a dozen planets, we dug in, we fought through the last ditch, and we were dying on Earth itself before Baker mutinied, shot Cope, and surrendered the remainder of the human race to the wiser, gentler races in the stars. That way, we lived. That way, we were permitted to carry on our little concerns, and mind our manners. The Jeks and the Lud and the Nosurwey returned to their own affairs, and we knew they would leave us alone so long as we didn’t bother them.
We liked it that way. Understand me—we didn’t accept it, we didn’t knuckle under with waiting murder in our hearts—we liked it. We were grateful just to be left alone again. We were happy we hadn’t been wiped out like the upstarts the rest of the Universe thought us to be. When they let us keep our own solar system and carry on a trickle of trade with the outside, we accepted it for the fantastically generous gift it was. Too many of our best men were dead for us to have any remaining claim on these things in our own right. I know how it was. I was there, twenty years ago. I was a little, pudgy man with short breath and a high-pitched voice. I was a typical Earthman.
* * * *
We were out on a God-forsaken landing field on Mars, MacReidie and I, loading cargo aboard the Serenus. MacReidie was First Officer. I was Second. The stranger came walking up to us.
“Got a job?” he asked, looking at MacReidie.<
br />
Mac looked him over. He saw the same things I’d seen. He shook his head. “Not for you. The only thing we’re short on is stokers.”
You wouldn’t know. There’s no such thing as a stoker any more, with automatic ships. But the stranger knew what Mac meant.
Serenus had what they called an electronic drive. She had to run with an evacuated engine room. The leaking electricity would have broken any stray air down to ozone, which eats metal and rots lungs. So the engine room had the air pumped out of her, and the stokers who tended the dials and set the cathode attitudes had to wear suits, smelling themselves for twelve hours at a time and standing a good chance of cooking where they sat when the drive arced. Serenus was an ugly old tub. At that, we were the better of the two interstellar freighters the human race had left.
“You’re bound over the border, aren’t you?”
MacReidie nodded. “That’s right. But—”
“I’ll stoke.”
MacReidie looked over toward me and frowned. I shrugged my shoulders helplessly. I was a little afraid of the stranger, too.
The trouble was the look of him. It was the look you saw in the bars back on Earth, where the veterans of the war sat and stared down into their glasses, waiting for night to fall so they could go out into the alleys and have drunken fights among themselves. But he had brought that look to Mars, to the landing field, and out here there was something disquieting about it.
He’d caught Mac’s look and turned his head to me. “I’ll stoke,” he repeated.
I didn’t know what to say. MacReidie and I—almost all of the men in the Merchant Marine—hadn’t served in the combat arms. We had freighted supplies, and we had seen ships dying on the runs—we’d had our own brushes with commerce raiders, and we’d known enough men who joined the combat forces. But very few of the men came back, and the war this man had fought hadn’t been the same as ours. He’d commanded a fighting ship, somewhere, and come to grips with things we simply didn’t know about. The mark was on him, but not on us. I couldn’t meet his eyes. “O.K. by me,” I mumbled at last.
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