by Lin Carter
It was rather like that with the Valley. The sweeping vista below looked oddly … unconvincing. Like a painted stage backdrop. The change in perspective, as they came closer to the floor of the Valley, exposed the flaws in what now appeared to be some manner of optical illusion.
They stared at one another in tense silence, a dawning wonder in their eyes.
Then they started down again, with Thaklar and the outlaw chieftain in the lead.
As they came to the bottom of the stair, or what appeared to be the bottom, at any rate, the optical illusion became blatantly obvious. There was no longer any question but that the stony floor of the crater was a false vision of some kind—a trick of light, designed to fool the eyes at a distance. Here, from the bottom landing, a dozen yards above the crater floor, the illusion was exposed as a hazy blur which twisted and distorted the lightwaves. It was like the level and motionless surface of a lake; but a lake of stationary mist.
“Hell!” M’Cord gasped. “It’s a mirage!”
Thaklar did not answer. He was testing the illusory floor of mist with one booted foot while Chastar lingered a bit above him, staring down with wide, incredulous eyes.
The moment Thaklar’s extended leg encountered the blurry surface of the illusion, it went completely opaque.
Then it became perfectly reflective, like an enormous mirror. The travelers stared down at their own inverted images, and at the crazily upside-down reflection of the stairs and the cliff. It looked as if they were dangling over the edge of a monstrous abyss at whose bottom there was only dim purple-black sky, with the first stars glittering beneath them.
The effect was horribly unsettling. Inga stifled a gasp of dread and clutched her brother’s arm for support. Zerild moaned deep in her throat and covered her eyes. Vertigo seized them all—it seemed that to move an inch off the stair would be to fall down into the weirdly inverted sky.
Thaklar withdrew his foot with an air of having answered a question he had been asking himself. And as he did so the illusion changed again, assuming its former aspect—that of the dim, blurred, strangely distorted image of a stony crater floor, barren and lifeless and littered with bits of crumbling stone. Only this time they knew that the image was not real.
“The magic of the Timeless Ones,” Phuun whispered in awed tones.
“Nonsense!” Nordgren snapped nervously. “Some curious effect of nature is at work here. Perhaps the meteorite is still imbedded in the floor of the crater—an aerolith of some unknown mineral whose mass is tremendous, causing a distortion of light. Or perhaps the meteor is radioactive, affecting our eyesight, interfering with the normal transmission of visual images … but, surely, it is nothing supernatural!”
Thaklar turned his gaze upon the outlaw chieftain, who stood as if transfixed with amazement and, perhaps, fear.
‘This is the moment of decision, red wolf,” the princeling said in quiet, measured tones. “You can turn back now and live. Go back to ruined Ygnarh in safety and resume your former manner of life, and all will be well. But to descend further is to go forward into the unknown. The Timeless Ones have placed all of the Valley under interdiction: this barrier of illusion which they left behind to mask the reality of Ophar forever from the knowledge of men tells us that the power of the Timeless Ones, to bless or to curse, to cure or to kill, still lives in this holy place, and is still strong. Turn back, Chastar, and forget your mad dreams—they are blasphemy! No one will call you coward if you turn back now.”
It was the wrong word to apply to Chastar.
He stiffened, glaring. One hand flew to the butt of his energy gun; with the other he gestured curtly to Thaklar to stand aside.
“Chastar fears neither man nor beast—god nor devil! Stand back—I have not come this far only to turn my back on the greatest treasure in the world!”
And with those words he stepped past the place where Thaklar stood, descended to the very bottom of the stair— and sank into the quivering veil of illusion—
And disappeared.
XVII. Beyond The Barrier
There was nothing else to do but follow him. One by one they filed down the narrow stone stair and passed the place where Thaklar stood silent and grim, his eyes somehow pitying—and entered the veil of quivering, mirror-like mist. And one by one they vanished utterly from sight.
M’Cord paused to Thaklar, who smiled briefly at him.
“Yes, go on, my brother! I think you and I have little to fear from what hides below. The powers that still guard this Valley will know that we were forced to come here against our will, and seek nothing of the treasure that the outlaws hope to find. You and I, my brother, may live … unchanged.”
M’Cord puzzled over the use of this cryptic word, but there was no time now to linger and ask questions. He was possessed with the same overmastering curiosity as to what lay below the barrier of illusion that had driven the others to dare its mystery.
He descended, step by step. When he touched the shaking mist-mirror a peculiar thrill ran along his nerves. It was like a faint electrical charge—numbing, a slight,
chilling shock. Nothing painful, but more than a bit startling.
The mist came up and drowned him. For a moment he felt himself completely blind; but the smooth stone steps were still there beneath his feet. He felt his way down, step by step, descending into complete darkness.
Out of the darkness, light blossomed.
A dim, dreamy haze of light, soft and faintly golden.
As he descended beneath the barrier, a vision of strange marvels appeared. It was like a bit of stage legerdemain, or one of the miraculous transitions the old-time moviemakers knew how to work. The scene was transformed, instantly and completely, as by some mighty magician.
He stood on a steep slope of rock overgrown with a carpet of soft moss. Sapphire-blue was that moss, and it deepened to metallic indigo and brightened to lucent azure as the shifting light played across it.
A warm, humid gust of air met him, dampening his face and filling his lungs with the perfume of strange, unearthly flowers.
His bootheels slipped in the sapphire moss which carpeted the bottom steps of the stair. He slipped—slid— lost his balance and fell. The thick, rubbery cushion of moss broke his fall, but he slid down the inclined slope until at last he dizzily came to a halt amidst strange flowering bushes of azure foliage that bore long frond-like leaves resembling those of terrene ferns.
He lay there panting for a time while his lungs adjusted to the warm, moist air.
He looked up. Above him, about forty feet over his head, was the sky. But it was not the dull, purplish-black sky of desert Mars, studded with hard, diamond-bright stars. It was a hazy sky of limpid jade-green, shot through with glints and gleams of lucent gold. There were no stars in this strange, new sky, and no sun, either. And the ring-walls that surrounded the crater had also vanished.
He looked down, and for the first time saw the Valley as it really was. He stood at the lip of a vast cup of glimmering blue. Thick woods of gnarled and knotted trees grew near the sides of the cup, thinning out toward its center, some miles from his position. They were unlike any trees he had ever seen or heard described before, their boles built up of tangled, serpentine black lengths, like twisted roots grown thickly together into a column. The black wood glistened wetly with an oily sheen, and the foliage borne up by the writhing branches was like glimmering ribbons, with silver undersides and metallic blue outer surfaces. They wavered in gusts of humid breeze, the ribbony leaves, like the drooping fronds of an Earthly willow tree.
Between the knotted boles dense blue grass grew thickly, starred with tiny, white, seven-petaled flowers, and bespangled with dew. The grasses rustled and a curious, small creature came into view. It was lithe and supple, like a cat, but was nearly the size of a cheetah. It was clothed in short fur, colored coppery-red, with immense, fragile, pricked-up ears and oval eyes enormous and jewel-like in its point-chinned, elfin face. The eyes were glowing amber, misty
brown depths swimming with flecks of gold.
The cat-creature regarded him calmly, without the slightest sign of timidity. Then it turned from him indifferently, stretched with a languid, supple play of muscles, and began to devour a ripe golden fruit that had fallen from the ribbon-leafed tree. M’Cord rubbed his eyes, blinked, and looked about him like a man in a dream. There are no trees on Mars, although deposits of fossilized wood have been unearthed, suggesting the existence of prehistoric woodlands ages ago; and while the canal areas are carpeted with bluish moss, it is thick and rubbery-leafed, bearing little resemblance to this fragile, tender, delicate azure growth.
And the cat-creature was yet another mystery! Why 143
did it not fear him, a stranger, potential danger? Finishing the succulent fruit, the beast cleaned its whiskers and delicate paws with dainty licks of a narrow pink tongue, then rose and lazily glided away into the depths of the woods without so much as a backward glance.
“Amazing … simply amazing.”
He turned. It was Nordgren who had uttered the phrase. The scientist stood some little distance away, half hidden behind dense shrubbery, staring after the cat-creature with a bemused expression on his face.
Noticing M’Cord, he included him in the range of his attention in a vague way.
“You know, some authorities hypothesize a cat-like mammal somewhere back at the beginnings of the evolutionary history of the Martians,” he said, half to himself and half to M’Cord. “The creature has been extinct for a billion years, if ever it truly existed at all; a few fossil bones have been found, and a skull or two, but their evidence is fragmentary and inconclusive … but, if we can believe the testimony of our senses, here we have a living survival of the remotest ancestor of the Martians, lingering here in this strange and wonderful place….” “Where are the others?” M’Cord grunted.
The blond man gestured vaguely. “Here and there … the outlaw captain has gone into the center of the Valley to investigate the cleared area, which seems to display the signs of deliberate cultivation….”
He wandered off, stooping to examine the leaves and flowers of the bushes. M’Cord heard a sound behind him and turned to see Thaklar on the slope, arms folded upon his breast, staring with brooding, hooded eyes across the Valley.
“It is truly Ophar the Holy, even as the legends describe it,” he said in a soft, wondering voice. “Truly is it the lost huatan told of in The Book … and here, indeed, shall we not find the Jhay yam-i-Jaah itself, the Pool of
Eternity, where shimmers the Water of Life?” Catching M’Cord’s eye, he broke off his wondering monologue. “You look upon the sacred place of the People, Out-worlder whom I call my brother. Here it was, a billion years ago, the gods walked among men … among the First-born, whom they raised to manhood out of the red murk of bestiality____”
His voice broke off and he gestured suddenly for silence. A strange, ululating call rang vibrantly through the green-gold dimness, dying in shuddering echoes. It did not sound like the cry of a beast, nor even of a bird, if birds existed in this strange Edenic land. There was a hissing to it, a sibilance, that was curiously alien and menacing.
A peculiar expression stole into the yellow eyes of Thaklar.
“Is it possible? But, after all, why not? … if the Valley is here beyond the Barrier, and the beasts and flowers … then why should not the Guardians truly exist, as well? Come, ’Gort my brother, we must go down into the gardens! Quickly, lest these rash, presumptuous fools intrude upon a mighty mystery and bring doom upon us all!”
Unquestioning, M’Cord joined him. They strode into the strange woods. Dense, blue-green gloom closed about them; dewy grasses rustled underfoot. Gusts of exquisite perfume assailed their nostrils from strange flowers, pallid and luminous as lillies, with immense gossamer petals as frail and delicate as lace. Jeweled eyes peered at them from shadowy boughs; but there was no fear in those eyes, and no alarm, either. They merely observed, tranquil and uncaring.
Thaklar and M’Cord entered a woodland glade. Here a small stream ran, meandering through the grove. Inga knelt on its grassy banks, looking at the reflection of her face in the flowing waters. The eyes she lifted to them
were dreamy and vague; gradually they cleared and she smiled hesitantly.
“Who could ever have guessed this grim, cold world had such a place in it?” she murmured.
Almost as if in answer to her query, there came a liquid, birdlike trill from the depths of the shadowy woods. Thaklar gestured fiercely for silence. The Swedish girl got up and came to stand by them; they stared into the depths of the gloom as if sight alone could penetrate to its uttermost recesses and read its mysteries.
A girl and a boy stepped out of the woods to face them. They were children, perhaps thirteen or fourteen at most. Their slim, ambiguous pale-gold bodies were nude of clothing, or adornment, except that the girl wore huge red flowers, like hibiscus, woven into her long dark hair. The boy was naked but in one slim hand he held a spray of blossoms.
The children stared at them wonderingly, chattering to each other. Then the girl pointed at their garments, which were dusty and travel-stained, and she burst into a liquid trill of laughter, wherein the boy joined his pure tenor to her clear, bell-like soprano.
They stared back at the naked children, so innocent and unashamed, as if unaware of any reason to cover themselves. They were slim and graceful and diminutive, the boy with the sleek, short furcap of a Martian male, the girl with a long cataract of silken black hair that fell to her small, rounded bottom. Their faces were laughing and elfin, with huge eyes, slightly slanted, amber-golden.
Thaklar addressed them in the Tongue, spoken universally across the face of Mars. The children listened, tilting their heads at the sound of speech, but made no answer.
“Why … they twitter and chirp like—like birds,” Inga said slowly. “It’s like they had never heard of language, and only use their voices to sing and chatter with….”
The girl’s eyes widened as the green-gold light glimmered in Inga’s blond hair. Her soft, full, rosy lips pouted into a wondering expression and she uttered a single-toned, bell-like note. Then she glided forward and extended one slim, golden arm to touch the older girl’s bright hair with a delicate caress. Inga sought to speak to the child, but she paid utterly no attention to her words, absorbed in the shining locks of blond curls.
The boy’s attention wandered. He curled up on the grass by the edge of the stream, plunged long, slim arms up to his breast in the gurgling water, and began to pick the huge, blue, lotus-like water flowers, whose stems he wove into a circle about his narrow waist so that the wet flowers drooped across his slender thighs. He giggled and shivered at the cold wetness of the flowers, then rose lithely and began dancing idly about the glade, the flowery wreath swinging about his naked loins.
“They look like teen-agers,” M’Cord muttered in a low voice, “but they have the minds of little children…. ”
Now the girl’s attention wandered from Inga’s hair. Like a slim gold sprite from some ancient fresco, she glided to the edge of the wood and vanished therein without a backward glance, as indifferent and uncurious as had been the cat-creature M’Cord had seen earlier.
The naked boy, suddenly bored with his loincloth of water flowers, ripped them away from his middle and let them fall to the blue sward. A moment later his slim nude form glimmered from sight as he wandered off into the depths of the forest in a different direction from that which the girl-child had taken.
M’Cord shivered. Such childishness and innocence were unnatural and vaguely sinister. Those eyes of luminous amber had been bright but soulless: it was as if there was little mind behind them. They were—vacant.
He felt suddenly cold. If this was Eden, why should he all at once feel—afraid?
XVIII. The Gardens of The Ushongti
An hour or so later they came out of the woods and into the central plains of Ophar.
The woods shaded by imperceptible
degrees into the mossy meadows. Slowly, as they came through them, glades became more frequently interspersed with clumps of the curious serpentine trees with the blue-and-silver ribbony leaves. Then small clumps of trees broke apart the stretches of mossy glade. Finally, only lonely groves of six or seven trees stood here and there to mar the smooth, meadowlike appearance of the verdant plain.
They had wandered some six or seven miles into the center of Ophar by this time, M’Cord guessed vaguely. Where the rest of their party had strayed, he had no idea.
Ahead of them, across the meadow in the distance toward the center of the Valley, stood a ring of trees. For lack of anything else to make their goal, they set out for the trees.
M’Cord’s leg still felt numb and dead, but it no longer ached. Indeed, he felt fresh and vigorous in a way he had not experienced for a long time. The air of the Valley was richer in oxygen and denser in moisture than the air anywhere else on the planet; that alone, perhaps, could account for his delicious feeling of well-being.
The depth of the Valley was beyond guessing; a thousand feet below the rim of the crater, perhaps two thousand, perhaps half a mile or more. There was no way of telling, but they had been traveling downhill, or down a very gentle inclined slope, for a very long while. It was obvious that the denser, richer air at this depth was the result of the vegetation. On Mars, it seemed, as back on Earth, vegetation exuded pure oxygen: the effect was like that in a pine forest, where the air seems purer and fresher than elsewhere. It seems that way because it is that way; there is perceptibly more pure oxygen in a pine forest than elsewhere. And, if the illusion-barrier was a natural thing, caused by something like an inversion-effect, doubtless that would tend to trap the moist, heavier air within the depths of the Valley.