Complete Fiction, page 32
Slowly they let themselves drift down into the city, with Barry’s mind working furiously. He had remained out of water several minutes. He though of the colony, and—until Xintel touched his arm—of Dorothy.
The experience gave a new purpose to his oddly timeless life. After that during each waking period. he swamp up to the cavern roof. Each time, as well as he could judge, he was able to remain out of water a little longer.
At first Xintel scolded him bitterly, as from time immemorial wives have scolded husbands for their own good. Upon the Venusians breathing gaseous oxygen had the same effects as alcohol addiction on Earth. She told him horrible stories of people who had drunkenly wandered into the Outside and fallen afoul of norus or torvaks. She pointed out an oxygen addict who moved jerkily and seemed half insane. Once she even resorted to the ancient feminine weapon of contending amid loud sobs that he no longer loved her or he would instantly cease his debauchery.
But Barry persisted, and after following him and seeing for herself that he did not become intoxicated she finally accepted his habit, along with his periods of silent thoughtfulness, as an inborn peculiarity of her alien mate.
VI
GRADUALLY, so gradually he could not determine when it started, he began to hear a new word whispered around the city.
“Demon!”
“The demons are not all dead!”
“The demons have returned!”
“The demons gather to attack us!”
“Only Komso can save us from the demons!”
“Is he—?”
“Perhaps her father, Soren Who Died Accursed, was a—”
“Have they found—?”
“Will the demons—?”
A shuddering uneasiness spread insidiously among the people, and their attitude changed. Venusian men watched the Earthman with hostile speculation in their eyes and hands close to weapon hilts. Women moved aside as he approached, dragging their children with them.
Although not a single individual mentioned demons to Barry’s face he knew he was somehow concerned.
“Just what are these demons?” he demanded of Xintel.
He expected her to refer to some superstition, but she surprised him with a definite answer.
“They were the last of my race to live in the Above—not devil-spirits or supernatural beings at all. But they were outlaws and killers, and so were not permitted to pass through the Place Of Change. Over this there was great bitterness, and the Last Days were filled with hatred and slaughter that is still remembered. But they are all long since dead.”
“You mean your people came here from the Above deliberately?” Barry asked incredulously. “Why?”
Xintel nodded. “We—my forefathers—were to have come to the Here for a short time only, for sanctuary. But our way back was closed when the Place Of Change was destroyed. And the Chosen, gaining power, saw that misfortunate overtook those who knew the secret of the Place.”
She smiled tremulously. “I hoped that you could lead us back. But you too had lost the way of return.”
“But why? What made your people come to the Here?”
The pain of ancient tragedy was in Xintel’s eyes as she told the story.
“Around us nearly everywhere are creatures, living creatures, small beyond all normal sight,” she explained.
“There.” She pointed to the light. “And another sort live in the paste which produces gas. My people were always clever at making use of them.
“In the Above live many more types of these unseen creatures. My people became too clever—but they were not as clever as they thought.”
She glanced at Barry and spoke with earnest seriousness. “Some of them, incredibly tiny as they are, are deadly. They get inside a person, causing him to sicken and die, killing as surely as a spear-thrust.”
She hesitated as though expecting the Earthman to hoot in derision at such an idea, and continued only when he nodded slowly.
“There were quarrels among factions of my people, breaking out again and again with increasingly vicious fury.
“Ordinary weapons were not enough. With their skill my people took the unseen things—they understood, then, a way to see them—and made them change their natures to become more deadly still.”
Barry shuddered as he guessed the rest. He remembered talk on Earth of developing mutant, hypervirulent strains for bacterial warfare.
“The ancients used the special unseen creatures they had created to fight their battles, and the slaughter was horrible beyond belief. But then the creatures turned against their masters. The other tiny creatures with which the ancient protected themselves failed, became ineffective, and Death walked the entire Above unhindered.”
It hadn’t happened on Earth yet but Barry could picture bacterial warfare out of control, spontaneous mutations loose, and no vaccines or antitoxins to combat them. The warm, eternally moist atmosphere of Venus offered ideal conditions. Perhaps that was why the Colony had found only insects and quasi-reptiles. Infection could have spread from homo Venusians to all related, warmblooded life forms, blasting them into extinction.
“Against that deadly smallness there was no way to fight,” Xintel continued. “And there was but one place to flee. So the Place Of Change was built by the wisest of my race. But by the time it was completed only a few remained to use it.”
BARRY had no doubts who was fomenting talk of the demons. Komso. But if the Venusians had once been air-breathers and had deliberately become water-breathers there was still a chance that somehow he could become completely human again. At least his condition was not completely hopeless.
He could escape. His practice sessions had taught him to remain out of water nearly three hours, as nearly as he could judge, and that should be sufficient to reestablish contact with the Colony. But escaping alone, leaving Xintel behind, was something he knew he could never do.
“How did the Place Of Change work?” he asked. “On what principles? Did your Ancients actually understand how to generate Sigma radiations on the surface of a planet? Or was the change accomplished in other ways?”
Xintel shook her head. “That knowledge has fallen into the hands of the Chosen and been destroyed. Knowledge, except for themselves, is according to the Chosen against the will of the Gods.”
“Is there nothing left?” Barry insisted, grasping at straws.
“The Place still remains amid the ruins of Last City,” Xintel answered unexpectedly. “But it is wrecked and useless.”
“How do you know?”
Xintel smiled sadly. “I have been there, twice. Soren once took me as a little girl, and once I went alone.”
“But how?”
“Long since have the creatures of deadly smallness exterminated each other. Soren knew, and I know, and Komso knows. But Komso will not tell the people that one can go to the Above for a short time and not die.”
Immediately Barry wanted to see for himself the remains of Last City and particularly the Place Of Change, but the Venusian girl demurred. The trip was perilous, she said, and if they were to leave Tana now, going into the Outside and toward the Above, it would only confirm in the minds of the people that Barry was a demon. Anything that would precipitate open action before they were able to take countermeasures against Komso’s plots would be a fatal mistake.
Reluctantly Barry put the idea aside, but he did not abandon it. Instead he doubled his practice sessions in the oxygen at the top of the cavern, driving himself until his chest burned and throbbed. He was still a member of the Five Ship Plan whose duty was to the colony, and besides he had a frightening surety that without outside help Komso would eventually encompass his death.
ONE day when they were returning from the fields in the far reaches of the cavern they saw a man swimming away from their house. Barry put on an angry burst of speed, but the distance was great and the furtive figure vanished.
Xintel went through the three rooms inch by inch, checking all her possessions—but nothing was missing and nothing seemed to have been disturbed.
“We must have frightened him away before he could steal anything,” Barry commented.
The girl frowned and bit her lip. “No.
I do not think thievery was his object.”
“What then?”
“I—I do not know,” she admitted uneasily.
Komso finally took official cognizance of the talk of demons. He selected ten young men, not of the Chosen, and led them forth to reconnoiter in the Above. The men went heavily armed, but still superstitious dread would have prevented them from venturing to the myth-haunted surface without the high priest’s mystic protection.
Barry grew acutely uneasy when he heard of the expedition. It boded no good for anyone except Komso. Hour after hour the underwater city hummed with speculation. For Barry and Xintel it was a nerve-wracking wait.
Then Komo returned—and with him came only three of the ten.
With lightning rapidity the story spread. There were demons in the Above, and despite Komso’s great powers they had turned overwhelmingly potent weapons against them.
The mates of the slain were loud in their lamentations, and as though following prepared instructions, the Chosen spread the rumor that Barry, and Xintel too, were responsible for the slaughter. Barry was a demon spy, and Xintel had turned against her own people to mate with him.
Barry felt certain the priest had deliberately led his men into disaster for the psychological effect. He had been building hatred, and to one of Komso’s mentality, seven deaths would be a negligible price for this crowning touch.
Drawn together by a spreading terror the people massed near the center of the city, each seeking company to stem their rising panic of helplessness. Their mutterings increased, their mood grew uglier.
But with dramatic suddenness Komso appeared in the doorway of his cave-temple and swam slowly forward. The murmuring died, then broke out again with a questioning undertone. The priest raised his arms so the sacred bracelets of office on his thick wrists flashed in the cold yellow light. Then slowly, deliberately he began to speak.
He expressed regret for the deaths of those who had followed him aloft. He had underestimated the malignancy of the demons, he admitted.
A shocked silence fell over the crowd, broken only by the grief stricken sobs of one of the widows. He glared at the woman, and his eyes made her cower.
The peril was dire, he warned. One demon had already penetrated the sacred boundaries of Tana and others were gathering in the Above. Soon they would descend and overwhelm the city unless the people of Tana followed his leadership unquestioningly.
But the mission had not been in vain. Komso had discovered the demons’ plans—and their vulnerability.
“We killed one demon!” he boasted.
Barry gasped. Komso was too clever to tell an outright lie when there were three surviving witnesses to check his story.
“Kill the demons! Kill all the demons!” A Chosen One began the chant, and it was taken up and echoed by the crowd.
It sounded so absurd that a group of aquatic semi-savages could hope to attack a surface settlement defended by the finest weapons of Earth that Barry almost laughed. But he remembered Xintel’s account of the Venusian downfall, and was not so sure. Komso’s forces would not have to breach the defense perimeter of the colony to achieve their objective. Bacterial warfare ineffective under water, could render the surface uninhabitable again.
And the colony had no inkling of such a threat.
“Damn him,” Barry thought. It was all so stupid and useless.
He fumed while Komso’s words calmed, influenced, and finally controlled with hypnotic completeness the emotions of his listeners.
“The demons shall die!” Kosmo orated. “I, Komso, shall call upon the powers of the Gods Of The Deeps. Beasts of the marshlands shall come at my command, smashing and overturning the houses and forts of the demons in the Above! And then shall the Unseen Death smite them!”
The people roared their approval, and while they were still shouting the priest turned away in abrupt dismissal.
Barry and Xintel looked at each other, their faces white and set, each wondering what they could do.
A hundred thoughts flashed through Barry’s mind at once, dominated by the knowledge it was his duty to warn the colony. He had become a freak through accident, but he was still an Earthman. But to make his warning really valuable he must know more of Komso’s methods. He thought momentarily of invading the cave-temple to steal information or even assassinate the priest, but discarded the notion. Komso would be expecting such an attempt and have his Chosen Ones waiting.
VII
THEY were still discussing the situation hours later when Xintel suddenly raised her hand for silence. A puzzled frown appeared on her face and she dropped to the lower room. Barry, watching her peer around the door curtain, saw her body grow tense. He listened, and his ears caught a confused sound of voices.
“What is it?” he demanded.
“Men are coming this way, and they are led by Sanlan, the brother of that Czerki.”
“Komso’s work?”
“Naturally.”
Barry reached for a spear. “They won’t touch you as long as I’m alive,” he promised.
The sounds outside grew louder.
Go in through the door,” he heard a voice command. “Chase the demon and his woman upward and out. Lart and I will attend to them.”
Xintel leaped to the upper room and began tossing down baskets.
“Block the hatchway,” she directed. “We will hold the middle room.”
Quickly Barry piled them across the opening, thrusting extra spears through the wovenwork and into the material of the floor. It was a flimsy barricade but better than nothing.
Xintel loaded her crossbow. Barry stood beside her with a spear ready.
“Now!” the voice outside boomed.
Men poured into the lower room, shouting to keep up their courage. Xintel, her face pale, squinted along her crossbow and thumbed the trigger. A man screamed. A spear thwacked upward into the baskets as the girl put her strength against her weapon’s reloading ratchet.
“Can you hold them off a minute?” Barry whispered.
She nodded, and he leaped to the upper room. One basket remained, and he found that by standing on it his head was just below the roof’s lower surface. With his knife he began cutting into the matted fibers of the roof. He was nearly through when a whisper from above made him pause.
“Psst! Lart, be very sure your thrust misses.”
That was Sanlan, Barry guessed.
The other Venusian growled under his breath.
“Komso will have your skin if you disobey,” Sanlan warned.
“But why?”
Sanlan chuckled. “Have you no faith?”
Barry resumed cutting, puzzled and suspicious, opening a hole just large enough to admit his head. He had guessed his position well, for Sanlan and Lart were standing with their backs toward him while they watched the hatchway.
The Earthman withdrew silently, taking no chances that Sanlan’s talk had been a trick to draw him out.
Xintel glanced up as he dropped to the middle room. A confused discussion was in progress below, for no man wanted to be the first to rush the barricade.
“Give me both your tube-weapons,” Barry demanded.
She turned her hips, allowing him to take them from her belt without putting down her crossbow or relaxing her vigilance.
“Come at once when you hear me call,” he directed. “We can’t hold out forever. It’s run or die.”
“Run? Where?”
“Outside. It is our only chance.”
He leaped to the upper room again.
A tube gun in each hand, he thrust his wrists through the hole he had cut. Sanlan and Lart were still waiting.
“Perhaps you should have others break through the walls,” Lart suggested impatiently.
Sanlan shook his head. “There is plenty of time.”
But Sanlan’s own time ran out just then as Barry triggered the weapon in his left hand. He died instantly.
Lart whirled. Barry fired the other tube. Lart screamed and doubled over in agony.
“Xintel!” Barry called.
She came up with a rush.
Lart was still alive, and he screamed as they emerged onto the roof. Answering yells came from below.
“Let’s go!” Barry barked as attackers began to swarm out of the house.
They swam desperately, side by side. The members of the mob trailed after them, but although they split the water with bloodthirsty yells they were reluctant in their efforts to close with the fugitives. Xintel had taught them respect during the battle inside the house, and Barry was a dread demon.
Barry broke his stroke to point. A large crowd had gathered around the mouth of the tunnel.
“Women there too,” Xintel panted.
As they drew nearer he could see she was right. Women and unarmed men predominated in the group around the portal. They made no hostile moves, but nevertheless Barry drew his knife.
And then, off to one side, he saw the unmistakable figure of the priest.
Komso watched their headlong flight with a thin smirk of satisfaction, and as they drew near he pointed one arm at them in a ritualistic gesture and began a resonant chant. A deadly hush fell over the watchers.
“Accursed be ye!” Komso intoned. “Manifestations of evil who presume to flaunt those the Gods have appointed to rule, be ye accursed by the Gods Of The Deeps!
“Gods Of The Deeps, heed thy servant! Send thou thy creatures that they may feed, that they may rend the flesh and grind the bones and destroy utterly those whom I have cursed in thy mighty names!”
BARRY felt a crawling prickle of fear along his spine at the confidence of Komso’s manner. Xintel’s face twisted in terror as she remembered how that selfsame curse had brought death to her father. The Earthman felt an almost overwhelming urge to swerve aside, to swing in a suicidal dive upon the priest and his Chosen guards. But remembrance of his duties to the colony and to Xintel overcame blind fury.
