“And your friend Lukas? And the other girl, here, Light-of-Pearl? Should they die, and Butterfly stay slaughtered — all so you can feed your hunger for revenge?”

  Jami looked numbly onto the floor of the room and saw both Lukas and Pearl, still on their feet and unharmed. But there were rings of swordsmen close around both of them. Mir Akbar was right. If Jami killed al-Birain, he himself would die — as he had been prepared to die when he walked into this room carrying Pearl. But these two he loved would die now with him, once the tribesmen saw their sheik slain. Whatever else happened, none of the three would leave the room alive.

  “What else… ?” he said. But he said it almost more to himself than to Mir Akbar.

  “I can give you back Butterfly, if you spare the sheik,” said Mir Akbar in rapid Gaelic. “I can make sure you all three live. There are matters at work here you don’t understand. Only you, besides myself, could go into the khaniqah and successfully bring out the Flower — this much I learned from my calculations on the letters of your name. But only the sheik could give you reason to go. He must live, though he’ll never become Sharif of Mecca. As for the Flower, she was created for a higher purpose than to further the designs of a Flowery Brotherhood or a desert sheik. She is a tool to bridge the gap between this world and others like it — for that purpose was she designed and made. But I can receive her only as a free gift. You must give her to me.”

  “A gift from me?” Jami stared. “And how can you give me back Butterfly? No one can raise the dead.”

  “Trust me!” said Mir Akbar. He switched suddenly from Gaelic back into Arabic. “May all my knowledge wither and my strength be lost if I can’t give you what I promise. But I tell you there’s more at stake here than you could understand, even if I told you everything. Let al-Birain live and his oath must hold. He struck at you in a moment of madness, but now he is no longer mad. For the sake of his sons, neither he nor they will dare harm you. Take the Flower of Passion, instead, to punish him; and give her to me to pay for the return of Butterfly.”

  Al-Birain’s eyes glittered from Jami to Mir Akbar.

  “All this time!” he said to the sorcerer. “You!”

  “I could neither go nor send anyone into the khaniqah of the Brethren,” retorted Mir Akbar. “The Flower’s destiny is for greater things than to be the toy of a desert king. Take the Flower and go, Jami. For the sake of his honor, he won’t let any of his men stop any of you if you forgive him his breaking of his oath just now.”

  “I’ll forgive him when the damage he did is mended and I see Butterfly alive again.”

  “I’ll go with you then, and you needn’t give the Flower up to me until you have your Butterfly back,” said the sorcerer.

  Jami looked at the barred door and saw Lukas still guarding it. He looked over toward the broken window and saw Light-of-Pearl standing under it. Her eyes were fixed on Mir Akbar in an expression of incredible hope.

  Jami took a deep breath. Without putting the knife away, he looked at Pearl.

  “Come,” he said to her.

  She walked through the naked swords surrounding her, and at a single sharp word from al-Birain, none of them were raised to stop her. Her eyes were clear and her face alive again. When she reached him, she put her arms around his neck and kissed him.

  “Go with Lukas,” he said to her, putting her on her feet. She went to the door. Jami came back and picked up the wrapped and slumbering Flower, still warily holding his knife. But al-Birain made no move to stop him and he turned toward the door, carrying the Flower.

  As he passed Abu-al-Sikeen, however, a dry whisper stopped him.

  “Man,” whispered Abu-al-Sikeen, from the floor, “Don’t leave me so. Have pity. Kill me!”

  Jami looked at Mir Akbar, beside him.

  “Can you cure him, too?”

  “Mend his burns and his back where you broke it, so that he can walk again?” Mir Akbar looked casually down at the desert warrior. “That takes only simple art.”

  “Then that’s another part of the price you pay for the Flower,” Jami said. He looked down at Abu-al-Sikeen. “And the price you pay for having legs once more is that on your own soul you never raise a hand to any belonging to me, again.”

  “I will not. May God reward you,” said Abu-al-Sikeen. “But one day I’ll kill you for shaming my chieftain.”

  “If you can,” said Jami, and went on past him with Mir Akbar, joining Lukas at the door and opening it to pass out of the room and the house.

  “Go with them,” ordered the voice of al-Birain behind them, sounding strange and old. “No one’s to interfere.”

  One of the guards ran hastily from behind them, passed them up and went ahead crying out al-Birain’s command.

  They came back to Jami’s house, walking with the donkey cart that carried the Flower of Passion in her red bedcover, and the gray cloth of the Veil. When they got to the front gate, a few windows were still alight on the second floor, marking where lamps lit earlier were still burning; but the street was empty of neighbors, except for Ibrahim the blacksmith, who turned out to have been standing guard there against thieves who might have already heard no one was at home.

  Jami thanked the thick-set man; and the blacksmith went off to his own bed. They opened the gate and entered, Jami once more carrying the Flower, for safekeeping.

  They were at the foot of the stairs leading to the front door when Jami noticed that Mir Akbar was not close beside them. He halted with the Flower still in his arms and turned about.

  “Magician?” he said. “Where are you?”

  “Here.” The voice of Mir Akbar came back from the obscurity near the dark back wall of the garden. “Damn this darkness! Come help me, Light-of-Pearl. Where were those rosebushes I looked at yesterday? Which was your friend’s favorite?”

  There was the sound of snapping fingers and a pale blue witch-light appeared, burning from the fingertips of Mir Akbar’s upraised right hand. He was revealed, standing in the midst of the flowerbed.

  Revealed by the blue glow, Light-of-Pearl’s eyes grew hard and she did not move.

  “Go help him, Pearl,” said Jami, “whatever it is.”

  Slowly, she went to the magician and led him to the bush of yellow roses Butterfly had loved.

  “Here they are. But unless you’ve got a good reason — oh!”

  She broke off on an odd note. Jami and Lukas followed her over to see what was going on and found her staring at a huge and perfect rose on a bare stem. Mir Akbar was holding up his witch-light at arm’s length to examine the blossom.

  “What Butterfly could have done with that!” murmured Light-of-Pearl. Her eyes filled with tears. “And she never even saw it!”

  “Ah, the very one,” muttered Mir Akbar, finishing his examination. “A bloom of extraordinary sweetness. Yes, that’s right.” Before any of the others could stop him, he had whisked out a small knife and cut through the stem.

  Light-of-Pearl cried out, but Mir Akbar, carrying the cut flower, was already past them, standing at the foot of the stairs in the light from the windows.

  “Stand back!” he warned them.

  They stopped, only a few steps from him.

  He lifted his hand that had sprouted the witch-light. But now the light was gone and his fingers made a circle in the air as he held his downturned hand at arm’s length over the upright flower in his other hand. From his fingertips, a fine mist seemed to descend, sparkling like silver dust in the faint lamplight spilling into the courtyard. The mist came down, enclosed and hid the rose.

  For a moment it sparkled there, then winked out of existence. Where the rose had been stood Butterfly.

  “Fly!” Jami took one long step forward; but before his foot touched earth, Light-of-Pearl had already streaked to her. Butterfly’s small face blinked dazedly up at Jami out of Light-of-Pearl’s embrace.

  “How did we get here?” she said. “Why is it night? Why are you hugging me so hard. Pearl?”

  Mir Akbar laughed on a high, singing note. He turned and seized the Flower of Passion in Jami’s arms.

  “Just a minute,” said Jami, holding to the sleeping form, before the sorcerer could make off with it, “let’s have an explanation first. Where’s Butterfly been? What happened?”

  “Let go!” snapped Mir Akbar. But Jami held on. “All right, then! Before I let Abu-al-Sikeen and his men inside, I made a simulacrum of Butterfly from the blossom I’d cut the day before — as the Flower of Passion had been made, though it was nowhere near the work of magic art that the Flower is. But this one didn’t need to be. Then, I hid Butterfly herself as a rose among the other roses. You’ve got her back — now let me have my payment and go!”

  Jami released the Flower.

  “All right,” he said. “But I’ll be remembering it was you let the desert men in!”

  “Think, Jami the Infidel,” said Mir Akbar, looking at him. “How long would your gate have stopped them, that time? It was your own madness against al-Birain that started all this. Would you rather have gone through it without me? Without me you were doomed to destroy yourself and your friends in an effort to destroy him, like some frail craft dashing itself to death upon sea-bound rocks. Think what might have happened, not only to Butterfly, but to Light-of-Pearl, to Lukas, even to your friend the jeweler — as well as yourself, if I’d not been here!”

  He spun on one heel as if to leave. But instead of stopping when he had turned about, he continued to spin, faster and faster until he was a blur in the darkness. Then, suddenly, he, the Flower of Passion, and the Veil were gone together.

  Jami turned to the others. Butterfly and Light-of-Pearl, their arms around each other, were already disappearing through the front door of the living quarters at the top of the stairs. Wordlessly, Jami and Lukas followed them.

  “We won’t sail tonight, that’s clear enough,” said Lukas as they reached the foot of the stairs. “What do you say to my leaving you all to yourselves tonight? Then Shirin and I will stop by tomorrow, after the heat of the midday. We can celebrate together and then proceed to the boat.”

  Jami nodded. They stepped up into the lamp-lit front room together.

  “Yes, that sounds fine,” Jami said; and walked aimlessly across the room, amidst the destroyed shards that were scattered about.

  “I’ll return tomorrow, then,” said Lukas. But he paused, not leaving, but peering across the room into Jami’s face.

  “Why so sour?” he said. “You could frown the moon out of the sky, right now.”

  Jami grunted.

  “It gnaws on me that I let Mir Akbar use me that way.”

  “Use you, brother?” said Lukas. “He only rode the tempest. And, speaking of tempests, do you hear the wind?”

  “No,” said Jami. “I haven’t been list —”

  He broke off. For now that he stopped to hear, there was no sound in the eaves of the house. The wind was gone.

  “Once more it’s passed,” said Lukas. “Perhaps we should thank God for the wisdom to value what we have, and for not charging us over again the cost of our learning its true worth. For otherwise, I tell you, Jami, such learning might cost us dear, a second time. Look at what could so easily have been!”

  He nodded to the platform at the back of the room. Jami, glancing over, saw the place where he had last thought he had seen Butterfly, lying dead. But now there was nothing there on the floor except a wilting rose and a long stem — but that stem and the rose itself had been savagely slashed and scattered by many knives.

  [Originally published in Worlds of Tomorrow, June 1964]

  On Messenger Mountain

  I

  IT WAS RAW, RED WAR FOR ALL OF THEM, FROM THE MOMENT the two ships intercepted each other, one degree off the plane of the ecliptic and three diameters out from the second planet of the star that was down on the charts as K94. K94 was a GO type star; and the yelping battle alarm of the trouble horn tumbled sixteen men to their stations. This was at thirteen hours, twenty-one minutes, four seconds of the ship’s day.

  Square in the scope of the laser screen, before the Survey Team Leader aboard the Harrier, appeared the gray, light-edged silhouette of a ship unknown to the ship’s library. And the automatic reflexes of the computer aboard, that takes no account of men not yet into their vacuum suits, took over. The Harrier disappeared into no-time.

  She came out again at less than a quarter-mile’s distance from the stranger ship and released a five-pound weight at a velocity of five miles a second relative to the velocity of the alien ship. Then she had gone back into no-time again — but not before the alien, with computer-driven reflexes of its own, had rolled like the elongated cylinder it resembled, and laid out a soft green-colored beam of radiation which opened up the Harrier forward like a hot knife through butter left long on the table. Then it too was gone into no-time. The time aboard the Harrier was thirteen hours, twenty-two minutes and eighteen seconds; and on both ships there were dead.

  “There are good people in the human race,” Cal Hartlett had written only two months before, to his uncle on Earth, “who feel that it is not right to attack other intelligent beings without warning — to drop five-pound weights at destructive relative velocities on a strange ship simply because you find it at large in space and do not know the race that built it.

  “What these gentle souls forget is that when two strangers encounter in space, nothing at all is known — and everything must be. The fates of both races may hinge on which one is first to kill the other and study the unknown carcass. Once contact is made, there is no backing out and no time for consideration. For we are not out here by chance, neither are they, and we do not meet by accident.”

  Cal Hartlett was Leader of the Mapping Section aboard the Harrier, and one of those who lived through that first brush with the enemy. He wrote what he wrote as clearly as if he had been Survey Leader and in command of the ship. At any moment up until the final second when it was too late, Joe Aspinwall, the Survey Leader, could have taken the Harrier into no-time and saved them. He did not; as no commander of a Survey Ship ever has. In theory, they could have escaped.

  In practice, they had no choice.

  When the Harrier ducked back into no-time, aboard her they could hear the slamming of emergency bulkheads. The mapping room, the fore weight-discharge room and the sleeping quarters all crashed shut as the atmosphere of the ship whiffed out into space through the wound the enemy’s beam had made. The men beyond the bulkheads and in the damaged sections would have needed to be in their vacuum suits to survive. There had not been time for that, so those men were dead.

  The Harrier winked back into normal space.

  Her computer had brought her out on the far side of the second planet, which they had not yet surveyed. It was larger than Earth, with somewhat less gravity but a deeper atmospheric envelope. The laser screen picked up the enemy reappearing almost where she had disappeared, near the edge of that atmosphere.

  The Harrier winked back all but alongside the other and laid a second five-pound weight through the center of the cylindrical vessel. The other ship staggered, disappeared into no-time and appeared again far below, some five miles above planetary surface in what seemed a desperation attempt to gain breathing time. The Harrier winked after her — and came out within five hundred yards, square in the path of the green beam which it seemed was waiting for her. It opened up the drive and control rooms aft like a red-hot poker lays open a cardboard box.

  A few miles below, the surface stretched up the peaks of titanic mountains from horizon to horizon.

  “Ram!” yelled the voice of Survey Leader Aspinwall, in warning over the intercom.

  The Harrier flung itself at the enemy. It hit like an elevator falling ten stories to a concrete basement. The cylindrical ship broke in half in midair and bodies erupted from it. Then its broken halves and the ruined Harrier were falling separately to the surface below and there was no more time for anyone to look. The clock stood at thirteen hours, twenty-three minutes and four seconds.

  The power — except from emergency storage units — was all but gone. As Joe punched for a landing the ship fell angling past the side of a mountain that was a monster among giants, and jarred to a stop. Joe keyed the intercom of the control board before him.

  “Report,” he said.

  * * *

  In the Mapping Section Cal Hartlett waited for other voices to speak before him. None came. He thumbed his audio.

  “The whole front part of the ship’s dogged shut, Joe,” he said. “No use waiting for anyone up there. So — this is Number Six reporting. I’m all right.”

  “Number Seven,” said another voice over the intercom. “Maury. O.K.”

  “Number Eight. Sam. O.K.”

  “Number Nine. John. O.K…”

  Reports went on. Numbers Six through Thirteen reported themselves as not even shaken up. From the rest there was no answer.

  In the main Control Section, Joe Aspinwall stared bleakly at his dead control board. Half of his team was dead.

  The time was thirteen hours, thirty minutes, no seconds.

  He shoved that thought from his mind and concentrated on the positive rather than the negative elements of the situation they were in. Cal Hartlett, he thought, was one. Since he could only have eight survivors of his Team, he felt a deep gratitude that Cal should be one of them. He would need Cal in the days to come. And the other survivors of the Team would need him, badly.

  Whether they thought so at this moment or not.

  “All right,” said Joe, when the voices had ended. “We’ll meet outside the main airlock, outside the ship. There’s no power left to unseal those emergency bulkheads. Cal, Doug, Jeff — you’ll probably have to cut your way out through the ship’s side. Everybody into respirators and warmsuits. According to pre-survey” — he glanced at the instruments before him — “there’s oxygen enough in the local atmosphere for the respirators to extract, so you won’t need emergency bottles. But we’re at twenty-seven thousand three hundred above local sea-level. So it’ll probably be cold — even if the atmosphere’s not as thin here as it would be at this altitude on Earth.” He paused. “Everybody got that? Report!”

 

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