by Lin Carter
He looked up at the strange and fascinating “sky,” which was the illusion-barrier when seen from beneath. Imagine a sky like a pool of lucent and pallid green, shot through with weird ripples of luminous gold that tremble continuously in motion; that is the uncanny sky of the Valley.
They approached the ring of trees. They were six or seven deep, and were situated with odd regularity, evenly-spaced, almost as if deliberately planted in that manner. They were curiously different from the trees the adventurers had passed in the forest. For one thing, the knotted and serpentine tangles that made up their trunks were glossy red, rather than glistening black. And for another, they—moved.
The graceful, willow-like branches stirred continuously with a subtle, snaky motion. This caught M’Cord’s attention from the first, once he had limped near enough to see them clearly through dim twilight haze. But what sent a chill of alarm through him was the fact that although the curving, slender branches undulated with a constant, slow, stirring—there was no wind here to cause that movement!
And as soon as they had stepped within the circle of trees, M’Cord became aware of unseen eyes upon them. His companions felt the invisible scrutiny of hidden watchers, too; Thaklar growled and shivered, his furcap rising in hackles, yellow eyes darting intently from side to side. The girl Inga shivered too, and drew closer to the two men, her eyes, enormous in the weary pallor of her face, shadowed with a dim fear to which they could none of them put a name.
It was not so much that the unseen eyes were threatening. They caught the impression of a benign but wary attention; that which observed them did so narrowly, uncertain as to whether they were friend or foe. Was it the trees themselves?
If so, M’Cord felt better once they had passed through the ring of trees and had penetrated into the middle.
And here stood … a garden!
There was no other word to describe it. Flowers grew, pale and delicate and huge, in carefully tended beds; streamlets, clearly artificial, meandered between the blossoming shrubs and poured tinkling over miniature waterfalls. M’Cord noticed that there were no withered flowers, no dead stalks, no fallen petals to mar the silken smoothness of the sapphire moss that grew here thick and soft. It was as if the hands of the invisible gardeners carefully plucked up or unrooted all imperfections, all signs of decay.
“The Gardens of the Ushongti,” Thaklar murmured, half to himself, in wondering tones. “But—where are the Guardians?”
Ushongti.
M’Cord knew what they were: the guardian genii of the old myths. He had seen their fabled likeness carved on marble gates and stone monoliths in the dead cities many.
times before. He recalled their features. Like brooding giants they were, with savage tusks hooked over lipless, gash-like mouths, and immense glaring eyes; he recalled to memory their traditional three-homed brows, which always reminded him of Neptune’s trident, and their elongated ear-lobes. Surely, Thaklar did not expect to meet shadowy giants out of fairy-tales—?
But then, why not? After all, this very garden was something from the ancient myths. And if it was here, then why not the weird ogres as well?
They came upon a still lake or pond, filled with placid cool water—the source which fed the wandering rivulets. And there beside the margin of the pool they came upon an artifact—a statue carved from glittering scarlet stone in the likeness of a huge, fat-bellied lizard, dozing in the sun.
Then it turned its head and looked at them….
Some time later—hours, perhaps, but it was difficult to tell in this dim twilight vale where there were no dawns or dusks, no noons or nightfalls—Nordgren came wandering in. He looked dazed and flushed and feverish; so distracted was he that he barely noticed that his sister was with Thaklar and M’Cord.
He sank down, trembling with excitement or exhaustion, on the soft carpet of blue moss beside them and accepted with absent hands the huge ripe fruits Inga passed to him from the bowl out of which they had lazily been eating. He was talking to himself in some language M’Cord did not recognize—perhaps his native Swedish. He seemed so distracted that he scarcely reacted when the Old One came waddling up to offer them more of the pale, thin, honey-hearted wine they had been drinking.
The huge, depthless purple eyes observed him tranquilly, then turned to M’Cord.
… The others will be here soon, three of them, two males and one female … we are calling them in, as we did this one with the bright hair….
“I know; thanks,” said M’Cord, nodding.
The thin, cool voice that had whispered these words into his mind without need for oral speech ceased. The wise, humorous purple eyes observed Nordgren gently. .. . He seems in a daze, perhaps his mind is injured, or has he a sickness? . ..
Inga answered, in a mild, amused voice, that her brother was often this way. The Old One shrugged philosophically—a gesture startlingly human, M’Cord thought— and began to pour the wine, squatting back on its haunches like a curious idol of red stone—like the statue they had thought it to be at first glimpse.
Odd, thought M’Cord, watching the grave lizard-creature with lazy affection, how close the Martians had come to catching the likeness of the Ushongti in their carvings. The great, solemn, humorous eyes they had transformed into glaring orbs of menace, of course, and they had exaggerated the golden, trilobed crest into fierce horns, but the arms, with their curious, four-fingered paws, they had remembered properly, and the great swelling paunch that made the scarlet lizards look so comical that it was impossible to fear them. Once the conventions were fixed in the canons of art, M’Cord guessed, they tended to be reproduced over and over without change or adaptation for countless ages. And it had been a billion years since any of the Martians had seen an Ushongti, the Old One had gravely informed them.
Nordgren sipped absently at the wine in the stone cup Inga had handed him; gradually his bewildered, unfocused gaze cleared and he began to come out of the dazed stupor. He blinked at them in surprise.
“Citizen? You here … Inga? I wondered what had become of all of you … odd that we all just wandered off, the moment we reached the true Valley beneath the illusion—like we were all drunk, or drugged, or something…
“Yeah. I noticed it, too,” said M’Cord with a lazy yawn.
“A trauma—that’s it—a traumatic shock, the sudden transition to this strange, bewildering place; and the extraordinary amount of oxygen in the air, must have made us exhilarated, heady … bemused …”
He broke off to gape at the Old One, who sat on its haunches, arms folded comfortably across its fat paunch, its short, stubby tail thrust out behind it so that it sat like a kangaroo. After a while Nordgren remembered to close his mouth. He was unstartled by the appearance of the huge, intelligent, lizard-creature, and unafraid of it. Natural telepaths, the scarlet reptiles radiate some of their own placid and unruffled calm, and their warm, gentle benignity, to all receptive minds. After the initial moment of awe and wonder, you accept them for what they are— the ageless and undying Guardians of Ophar, left here by the gods to tend the garden and to watch over all that dwell within the Valley.
Inga was sleeping, pillowed on the flowery moss, her face oddly relaxed, sweet and calm and innocent as the face of the girl-child they had encountered wandering naked in the woods. In slumber the harsh lines of strain and worry were smoothed away from her face.
M’Cord yawned, feeling sleepy himself. He had half unseamed his suit, since it was warm and gentle here. No need to unpack the thermo and put it up; better to just lie back where slumber claimed him, and sleep where he lay.
Nothing could harm him, or- anyone, in this idyllic place, the Old One had told them. So long as they kept the Peace unbroken.
… Your leg has been hurt, terribly, and has mended ill, the calm whisper of the Old One said, deep within his mind; I will tend it for you, as you sleep….
“Yeah, you do that; a little shut-eye, now,” the Earth-man mumbled. Then he stretched out and slept, and i
n his dreams pale-golden children wandered naked and unashamed through a timeless garden where pain and death and terror could never come.
XIX. Unsolved Mysteries
M’Cord never knew just how long he slept—probably for ten hours or more. But when at last he woke it was to find that during the “night” Chastar and Phuun had come wandering in: “Called in,” as the Old One so oddly phrased it.
The outlaw chieftain seemed strangely sober and chastened, and Phuun himself was curiously different—more voluble somehow, and less locked up inside himself. M’Cord had already discovered (without understanding how or why) that there was something in the very air of the timeless Valley that changed people in strange and curious ways. Whether this was due to the humid air, warmer and richer in oxygen, or to some telepathic effect broadcast by the Ushongti—or both—he did not even bother trying to riddle.
Far more surprising than these was the change in his leg.
During the night it had—healed! Completely. The leaden numbness was gone, and the throbbing ache. No longer did he go limping about, dragging the half-useless limb behind him like a dead weight. The tom and atrophied muscles were limber and supple; the leg had mysteriously and miraculously returned to normal.
Even the scar was gone, the long, ragged, horrible scar left in his flesh where the venomous claws of the sandcat had laid him open from hip to knee. It was gone as if it had never really been, and the flesh was whole, the skin unmarked by so much as a scratch.
Well, the Old One had promised to “mend it” while M’Cord slept; obviously, it had kept that promise!
His leg restored to perfect condition, M’Cord felt euphoric—rejuvenated. He had always driven his body hard, using it, demanding much of it. He had forced it to become the superb, trained, powerful and flexible tool his hard, wandering life required it to be. When the sandcat had crippled him he had felt, twistedly, as if he had betrayed himself somehow. It had aged and soured him; made him bitter; made him feel old and useless. Now all that was changed; and the Valley had worked its first miracle.
But probably not its last, he thought.
Other things had happened during the night while he slept—although “night” was a misnomer in this timeless place where they had ventured outside of time as they knew it, into an enchanted realm where they mo longer experienced the familiar gradations of light and dark they had lived with all their lives. Here there were no mornings, noons, or nightfalls … only a perpetual and changeless dreamlike haze. A jade-and-topaz twilight, never darkening; a garden frozen, as it were, in eternal amber.
One thing that had happened was The Tent.
Nordgren retained much of the puritanical conventionality of his Swedish bourgeois ancestry. To just stretch out on the sapphire moss and slumber among the flowers smacked of lotus-eating to him; proper, civilized men slept in beds, or at least cots—cots, moreover, hidden within the stuffy privacy of tents. So, wakening a little from the dreamy languor of Ophar, he insisted on unpacking a tent from his gear. He and Inga had erected it while the Ushongti squatted, kangaroo-like, scarlet paws folded together over fat paunches, watching with solemn, puzzled purple eyes the incomprehensible behavior of these Outworlders.
The tent would have looked blatantly out-of-place even in the dustlands or the rocky crevices of the Sinus. Here it was like a coarse subway graffito scrawled across a pediment of the Parthenon.
The tent was an expensive Earthsider tourist setup from Abercrombie-Fitch-Bonwits, all vacuumized nine-ply nioflex with pressure-seam flaps and electric heating elements sewn in the inner linings. It was as ugly as a homberg on the Apollo Belvedere, and about as useless as a rain repeller in Death Valley. But the proprieties of urban civilization remained uppermost in Nordgren’s prim and proper world-view—even in Paradise! So therein he and his sister had spent the night, while the others merely dozed on the azure sward wherever sleep had claimed them.
M’Cord shrugged, caring little. He began to take off his’ clothes. The pond was real water, cool and fresh and pure—the rarest luxury conceivable on this desert world; and it had been half a year or more since he had enjoyed anything remotely resembling a genuine, no-foolin’, honest-to-God bath.
To avoid shocking the acute sensibilities of the Swedish scientist, or his sister’s, for that matter, M’Cord bathed as soon as he woke. No one, as yet, was stirring, save for a couple of the fat scarlet Ushongti waddling here and there among the flowers, busy on small, horticultural tasks. Under his tom and travel-stained thermalsuit M’Cord wore a long-sleeved, high-necked blouse of plastic fabric —one of the self-cleaning kind that repel dirt and moisture electrostatically when you plug them in a power cell overnight. That and leggings of the same material, and heavy socks, were all an old Mars hand ever wore under his thermals.
Once soothed and refreshed and tingling from a long, lazy dip and soak in the pool, letting the perfumed air blow against his skin and dry it, he felt a peculiar reluctance to get dressed again. In this summery place, where mosquitos had never evolved and even the roses had no thorns, there was no real need for clothing except for reasons of sexual modesty. Stretched out on the soft, springy moss, he stared at his rumpled and disreputable clothes, which he had stripped off in a heap. The golden, carefree children of the wood had the right idea, he thought; and they seemed as sexually innocent as babies, despite their apparent adolescence.
So, when Nordgren finally emerged from within the pointless nioflex monstrosity in which he had chosen to spend a stifling and airless night, it was to find M’Cord stripped to the buff, except for a pair of extra leggings he had trimmed down into scanty trunks. He had discarded even his boots. The scientist was scandalized, but the idea caught on with the others as soon as they awoke and saw M’Cord in his new get-up.
Chastar cut down his woolen yiog’a in a skimpy sort of loincloth; but he retained his gunbelt and bandoliers and the ever-present whip that seemed to be a symbol of his masculinity to him. Zerild laughed at M’Cord’s near-nakedness and lazily stripped to the nude for her morning plunge, careless of the men who looked on with frank enjoyment. M’Cord watched her, grinning, beginning to understand how she could goad a man like Thaklar into blind infatuation. She was slim and sinewy as a boy, all tawny gold, all silken seductiveness, without an ounce of fat on her: like a slim, lazy, beautiful pantheress, he thought—and just about as deadly.
After her swim—and he wondered where a Martian dancing girl had ever learned to enjoy that Earthsider sport on this desert world—she exchanged her own travel-stained clothing for a skimpy loincloth and all the jewelry she had. The effect was one of barbaric and tempting nakedness; M’Cord liked looking at her, and she seemed to like being looked at. But Chastar, once his boisterous and bawdy jests died on his lips, sat watching her with sweat on his brow and an ugly, devouring look in his hot, narrowed eyes. There would be trouble with Chastar before long, M’Cord thought wearily.
If so, it had been long deferred.
Breakfast was a simple affair of ripe, delicious fruits, a light and delicate and effervescent wine, like sparkling burgundy or dry champagne, and cakes of a dainty, doughy pastry unfamiliar to all of them. The friendly lizard-folk served them on platters of beautifully carved and polished wood; the effect was almost that of a small. Hawaiian picnic.
Careful to keep his eyes well away from Zerild, who lay with her long, supple legs stretched out, wriggling her small, bare toes languidly while nibbling on a luscious fruit, Nordgren professed a scientific curiosity in Ophar.
“It’s simply incredible, but yesterday I recognized thirteen extinct species, all thriving here although they died out everywhere else on Mars before we were out of the Pleistocene,” he said, watery blue eyes glinting with the scholar’s fervor behind thick lenses. “Those trees, for example; the flowers—we don’t even have fossils of them! But most amazing of all are the Ushongti.. . imagine it, Citizen: two sentient races living here in symbiotic relationship; one distinctly humanoid, the other a hither
to unrecorded species of warm-blooded reptile! No one ever dreamed of anything like this. We have known that the ecology of Mars was dominated by reptiles, with the sur-
viving mammalian species relatively minor; hitherto it was assumed that this was, simply, that the Martian biosphere began to decline sharply in viability during the Martian equivalent of our own Age of Reptiles—that is, few mammals had even begun to evolve by the time the planet started to die, its seas to dry up, its vegetation to wither, its atmosphere to leak into space as the comparatively weak gravitational field was unable to contain it. But—a race of sentient reptiles: Telepathic reptiles! Astonishing.”
He burbled on in his stammering, excited way, really talking more to himself than to M’Cord, who paid scant attention, merely uttering a polite, interrogative grunt from time to time. But this last bit caught M’Cord’s interest
“If that’s so, Doc, how do you explain the Martians themselves? Seems to me a race of humans, whether evolved from cats or not, takes a long time to work itself up the evolutionary ladder.”
Nordgren nodded enthusiastically, lank blond strands of hair flopping untidily over his pale forehead.
“Yes; you have laid your finger on the weak link in the arguments of scientific orthodoxy,” he stuttered eagerly. “To evolve to humanity requires a long history of mammalian ancestry—or it ought to, at any rate. But the* origin of the Martians is a mystery we have yet to solve, and we have few clues to go on. Some authorities suggest a dramatic mutation—a direct leap of a million years of ordinary evolution between two generations, say. There’s something to be said for this, since the thin atmosphere of Mars lets through a lot more hard radiation than does Earth’s, thus vastly increasing the mathematical probabilities of mutation….”
He broke off, his gaze wandering into the illimitable distance of the haze-lit Valley.
“Wouldn’t it be odd,” he whispered, “if the answer we’re looking for turned out to be identical with the secret we came here to find! The natives themselves say their gods molded the First-born out of the stuff-of-beasts … that’s a literal translation of jarad-i-zha … we can dismiss the business about their gods as pure anthropomorphic myth-making… the same, familiar, homocentric world-view that gave rise to Prometheus and Odin and Jehovah and other simplistic demiurge conceptions by primitives. But… somewhere in this Valley, which seems to lie outside of the reach of time to alter and change … we may find the cradle of evolution itself … the secret of life.”