Collected Fiction, page 758
“You’re safe?” she demanded. “Am I still dreaming. Are you all right? I got you into trouble you didn’t bargain for when I dragged you into my problems, didn’t I? I’m awfully sorry. I—”
“Keep it in English!” Sawyer broke in. “I can’t understand Khom! We’re all in trouble and we’ll have to help each other out.” He touched the soot-stain on her cheek. “What’s been happening to you?”
“The Isier guards came,” she said simply. “We knew they would, of course.
They burned grandfather’s house and we just got away in time. They’re still hunting for me. Probably they’d have found me already if this attack on the city hadn’t started. Were you involved in that? Do tell me what’s been happening to you!”
A CRISP phrase from behind her made Klai turn. The old man was smiling at them, but his blue eyes stayed cool and wary. He stroked the stable cat with unvaried smoothness, but what he said made Klai pull herself together and turn Sawyer to face the old man.
“Zatri is his name,” she said. “He’s my grandfather, and he’s a wonderful man. He says there isn’t much time to waste. I told him about the Firebird and what Nethe said back there on the steps, before the Goddess came. The Firebird’s something we don’t know about, but grandfather thinks it may be very important. He wants to know what’s been happening, but there may not be time for much talk. The Sselli are beginning to swarm up into the city, and we may have fighting in the streets too close for comfort. Grandfather hopes you may have some information we can use.”
“What sort of information?” Sawyer asked.
Klai repeated the question, and the old man’s eyes gleamed as he leaned forward, speaking in urgent syllables.
“For a thousand years.” Klai translated soberly when he finished, “the Isier have enslaved our people. We aren’t allowed freedom of any kind, not even freedom to think or to learn. To the Isier we’re simply animals. Grandfather thinks this may be our chance to put an end to their rule.
“He wants you to know he wouldn’t have risked the lives of his men when they rescued me from the Isier, not even to save his own grandchild, if he hadn’t hoped I’d brought back some sort of information we could use, from wherever I’d been. Well, I didn’t. But he thinks maybe you might.”
“Wait a minute,” Sawyer said. “Tell him I’m with him if he wants to make trouble for the Isier. I got into this in the first place to stop the looting of uranium from Fortuna. I know a lot more about that than I did. I want to get back to Earth and finish my job. I’d like to stay alive, too. I’d just as sorry you did.” He smiled at her. “But I wouldn’t interfere with the Isier now, even if I could. Without them, who’s going to prevent the Sselli from killing us all? Have the Khom any defense against them?” She shook her head, gave him a troubled glance. “From what I hear, not even the Isier can actually destroy them. They seem to be a little—oh, overawed, terrified—by the Isier. But not when they’re in a frenzy, like right now. I don’t know what’s going to happen.”
“I wish I knew a little more about those savages,” Sawyer said. “Surely you’ve developed some way to deal with them, or you’d all be dead.”
“But they’re new!” Klai said. “They only began to trouble us when the Isier Well went dry. We Khom aren’t supposed to know about that, of course, but my grandfather was a Temple slave for a long, long time, and he knows all sorts of secret listening posts in the Temple. We even know why the Isier fear the Sselli.
“Sselli means—well, younger brother, but with a strong sense of hatred and rivalry. The Isier say the Goddess committed some frightful sin in allowing the Well to die. Now the whole race is being punished. The Isier originated down below, in the lower world, the Under-Shell. It’s forbidden land. Nobody ever goes there. But soon after the Well died, lights began to shine down there, and then the Sselli started to wander up the floating islands and make a lot of trouble. They’re invulnerable, like the Isier themselves. The theory is that a new race of potential gods is being reared in the Isier homeland, to take over when they’re strong enough. So naturally, the Isier hate and fear the Sselli.”
“But they don’t look like the Isier,” Sawyer complained. “How could they evolve into—”
“I know,” Klai broke in. “It puzzles the Isier, too. And yet in many ways they are like. Remember this, too. The Firebirds began on Earth when the Sselli began here. And you never see the Firebirds in Khom’ad. They seem to exist only on Earth.”
“At the other end of the Well,” Sawyer said. “Now that’s very interesting. There must be some connection. The three forms of life must be three facets of a single problem. But—”
The belling cry of an Isier from close outside broke sharply into his words.
For an instant the deepest silence dwelt upon the stable, broken only by the crunching of the ponies in their stalls, and from far off a rising noise of battle. The Sselli had not been audible when Sawyer first got here. That must mean they had gained a foothold on the upper world and were carrying the battle straight into the heart of the Isier-ruled city. If the Isier have weapons, he thought grimly, they’d better start limbering them up.
The silence held for half a minute. Then there was a sudden outburst of scuffling, stamping, ringing cries from Isier throats, and above it a fierce, wild scream that Sawyer thought could come from one throat only.
“Nethe!” he said, and whirled toward the door.
Zatri, moving faster than seemed possible, was at his very elbow when he got the door open. The old man snapped an order and someone put out the lamp. Then there was a great surge toward the neck of the alley to see what the trouble was.
Nethe was the trouble. A little way off down the street Sawyer saw her familiar figure, the luminous earrings swinging wildly, struggling between two tall Isier who were carrying her serenely forward down the street toward the Temple. She writhed and fought and spat violent bursts of speech at them. They did not seem to hear. The backward-facing masks of all three turned a blank, uninterested stare at the little knot of humans who watched from the alley.
“She must have followed us after all,” Sawyer said. “Well, that takes care of Nethe. I wonder what the Goddess will do?”
“Force her into the Unsealing ceremony,” Klai said, from a prudent shelter behind him. “And that will be the end of one or the other of them. But whichever wins, the Isier rule will go on the way it always has, unless we find a way to fan this trouble higher. Come back. We’ve got a lot of planning to do.”
“All right,” Sawyer said. “But tell me one thing. What the devil are those masks for?”
A voice from the street corner just beyond their alley said calmly:
“That’s an interesting question, my boy. Look what I’ve brought you.” Sawyer knew that voice. The thick organ-tones could belong to one man only. He turned and said, “Alper!”
The ponderous figure of Alper moved toward them. He was walking effortlessly still, so the power the Firebird gave him had not yet waned, but there was already a suggestion of a drag to his gait, and his heavy figure stooped a little.
In each hand he carried a pale, smiling, blind-eyed Isier mask.
X
ZATRI sat down again upon his hay-bale throne. The watchful Khom lined the walls, patient and alert in the swinging shadows cast by the relit lamp. Alper stood under it, his heavy head sunk a little, his big legs braced, taking in the group with quick, cold, purposeful glances. Outside, in the night, the noises of battle were much louder. The dull booming of the Sselli, the Younger Brothers, echoed down the narrow streets of Khom’ad, and the shouts and screams of their human opponents, and the ringing calls of the Isier. Alper jerked his head toward the noise.
“They’ll have to speed up the Ceremony of the Unsealing,” he said to Sawyer. “I’ve talked to the Goddess. With these”—he shook the two smiling masks—“it was perfectly simple to communicate. Most of the time you and Nethe were having your little consultation on the island, I was relaying the story to the Goddess. Luckily, she couldn’t understand you. You weren’t wearing a mask, and it takes two of them to make the communication work. So I said nothing about the Firebird. She doesn’t know.” He paused, put one of the masks under his arm and slipped the freed hand into his pocket. His thick voice was grim.
“Where is it, Sawyer?” he asked. “What did you do with the Firebird?” Rapidly Sawyer cast back over the immediate past. Whenever he had spoken aloud, so that Alper heard him, he had been denying he had the thing.
“I didn’t do anything with it,” he said. “I left it where it was.”
The slightest possible tremor shivered through his skull from the transceiver. Sawyer felt a sudden blaze of murderous rage ignite in him. He spun toward Alper, making no effort to control the fury, letting it show in his voice and his face.
“Stop that!” he commanded. “You know you can’t force me that way! Once more and I’ll make you kill me!”
The tremor ceased. Alper said, “All right, all right. Just a reminder. I know you aren’t lying. I know Nethe searched you once for the Firebird. I know all she told you, and it gave me some interesting ideas. I even traced you here by the transceiver. The strength of the signals was an accurate guide, once I’d escaped from the Goddess. This attack from the savages is going to be very useful to all of us. I got free, Klai got at least a reprieve from capture, and you and I are going to the Temple right away, if the old man will guide us.”
He turned toward Zatri, started to speak, then shrugged and held out one of the masks. Zatri took it gingerly, looking at Alper with a searching gaze. Alper dipped his head a little and clapped the pale, smiling thing over his face. He spoke in a slightly muffled voice.
“I have a plan,” he said, “to save your granddaughter. And incidentally myself, of course. I need your help—”
Zatri held up a hand for patience, hesitated an instant longer, and then fitted his own mask over his face. It was curious to see the two blank, Isier-featured faces confronting each other, Zatri’s blue eyes and Alper’s small, cold grey ones blinking through the great ovals of the masks.
ALPER repeated his proposal, in English. And Zatri, after an odd moment of complete immobility, as if the result of the mask-donning had startled him, appeared to answer in his own language, quite as if Alper’s words had made sense to him. The listening Khom glanced quickly from one to another and began to exchange uneasy murmurs.
“What’s happening?” Sawyer asked Klai.
She gave him a wondering look. “The masks are for communication,” she said. “Among other things I think Nethe learned English through the use of hers. The Isier, among themselves, have some amazing arts and sciences, so abstract it got to be a problem for a musician, say, to communicate his ideas to a chemist or a physicist. Remember, they’ve lived for a thousand years, and they’ve pursued their arts to tremendous heights. They developed this way of exchanging ideas without the need for learning one another’s abstract terms. I wonder how Alper managed to steal them.”
“So do I,” Sawyer said thoughtfully. “I don’t trust Alper very far. Listen—what’s your grandfather saying?”
“He wants to know Alper’s plan. He says he could guide him into the Temple—at any other time. Not now. The Ceremony of the Unsealing may have started already. And the streets aren’t safe any more.”
“I’ll tell you exactly what I plan,” Alper said, muffled inside the mask. Its thin, pale smile gave him an unfortunate look of conspiratorial malice that might or might not be just. “Sawyer knows where the Firebird is. I must have it! Once I get it, I can force Nethe to open the door back to Earth—”
“How can you force her?” Sawyer asked. The mask swung toward him, smiling. Alper’s impatient voice was incongruous behind it.
“You give me the Firebird,” he said, “and I’ll release you from the transceiver. There, isn’t that fair enough? I’ll get to Nethe and put it on her. After that she’ll do as I tell her.”
Sawyer had his private doubts about this, but he did not voice them, for Zatri was demanding explanations. Rapidly Alper gave them. Zatri spoke to Klai, who led Sawyer forward so Zatri could examine the transceiver clamped to the crown of his skull. But when Sawyer tried to speak, Alper brushed him aside impatiently:
“Don’t waste time now. Will you or won’t you? You want to get rid of the transceiver. I’ll take the Firebird back to Earth with us, and after that I won’t need to make trouble at Fortuna. Klai can come too, if she wants. All we have to do is get the Firebird and get to Nethe with the transceiver. She opens the door for the four of us and we go through with the Firebird. All we have to worry about is getting to her before the Ceremony starts.”
Zatri asked a question. Klai did not translate, but Alper shrugged and said, “You can’t. You’ll have to trust me. I—here, wait!”
He pulled the mask from his face and thrust it at Sawyer.
“You put it on. He trusts you. Persuade him, Sawyer. What if the Temple is dangerous? Is it any safer here? Tell him he’s got to get us to Nethe.”
Sawyer looked dubiously at the mask. “The last time I wore something you gave me, I got the transceiver,” he said. “Somehow I don’t like the idea of putting this thing over my face. It might turn toe into a homed toad, for all I know.” Alper snorted with impatience. “It’s Perfectly safe. I wore it, didn’t I? It’s a communication prosthesis. You’ll see—the masks convey form, the way I’ve figured it, plus impinging form to give it meaning. Between the Isier it’s practically telepathy, but between you and the Khom, there wouldn’t be enough memories in common. The masks convey a series of impressions. The human mind’s built like a telegraph type of repeater; it triggers kappa wave relays that create new, sharpened, screened impressions. The brain’s alpha rhythm may be the carrier wave, using its sweep like a scanning process. I don’t know—I’m guessing. But communication’s a cortical process, like sight, dependent on form perception, and if necessary an interpreter, like these masks. Language isn’t the only form of communication, you know. What about animal communication by scent, a chemical sense? The atomic structure of a chemical scent can be rearranged very easily into a hormone structure, which is simply another language of communication within the body itself. You see?”
“No.” Sawyer grinned suddenly. “That’s why I’m convinced, maybe.”
HE DUCKED his head and fitted the mask over his face. It was smooth and cool, and it clung firmly once he had got it seated well back over his ears. He opened his eyes, looked out through the oval holes . . .
And instantly something very strange happened. The stable around him leaped into sharp, glorious vividness. He had not seen such clear colors since he was a child. And odors—the smell of hay was a pungent ecstasy, the oil of the swinging lamp sweeter than any incense he had ever smelled. He felt an extraordinary sense of rightness, of location and position—super-orientation, so to speak. Wave motions? The mask must be a booster too, then, a transformer, heightening the impressions it conveyed to the wearer. Naturally, he thought. The faint kappa waves of the brain, the wave-motions of thought, far beyond sensory perception, would have to be transformed to a higher voltage. No wonder Zatri had started and gone rigid when he put on the mask!
And no wonder the Isier thought themselves gods!
He saw Zatri’s keen blue eyes looking at him through the opposite mask, out of the white, smirking Isier face.
“Do you understand me?” he asked the old man.
Zatri spoke through his mask. The words were Khom. But what Sawyer heard, felt, sensed was quite different. It was like perceiving an instantaneous building up of shades and patterns, light and sound and meaning, form and scent, indescribable things gradually fading off into peripheral distances where—snap—a gap was leaped, a familiar form took shape in emptiness, and gradually clarified, defined, became more understandable as the semantic periphery of form shaped into—communication. Not gradually. Zatri’s echoed words still hung on the air; he had said in perfectly understandable Khom:
“Klai has told me about this man Alper. Do you trust him?”
“Certainly not,” Sawyer said. “The question is, how much choice do we have?” He nodded toward the noise of howling outside. “It isn’t safe anywhere. If the Isier don’t break in on us and arrest Klai, the Sselli may break in and kill us all. You have no weapons against them? No explosives, for instance?” He wondered how clearly the words got through to Zatri, how the mask was translating them into the thought-images of the Khom.
“We have a few hoarded explosives,” Zatri said. “Illegal, of course. What they would do against the Sselli I don’t know. But can you imagine the Isier letting any weapons exist that would harm the Sselli, when they are equally vulnerable? There is one weapon the Isier could use, however, and I think they’ll have to, very soon. But it means danger to the Isier too, so naturally they hesitate. They—” He broke off at the sound of tapping on the door. A Khom put his head in, murmured something and withdrew.
Zatri glanced away and then back to Sawyer.
“The Temple towers are beginning to glow,” he said. “That means the Ceremony is starting. It must mean Nethe has already entered the Hall of the Worlds and will never come out again—as Nethe. The Goddess will kill her or die. If Nethe wins, the Mask and Robe will be sealed on her, and she’ll be the Goddess herself. So you see your friend’s plan is useless. Only as a sacrifice could a human being enter the Hall of the Worlds now.”
He glanced uneasily at Klai. Sawyer glanced too, and was half stunned by the incredible loveliness the mask lent her pretty face. He looked at Alper, and was relieved to notice that the old man’s beauty was not noticeably enhanced. He relayed what Zatri had just said. Alper snorted impatiently.
“Nethe needs the Firebird,” he said. “There must be some way to get within sight of her and hold it up where she can see it. Once that happens, I guarantee she’ll break up any ceremony and jump for the Firebird. Without it she’s bound to lose the contest with the Goddess. Just get me to Nethe, with the Firebird. She’ll do as she’s told. She’ll open the Gateway and we’ll all go through, back to Earth.”
