Collected Short Fiction, page 231
“Of you,” he said, “only the joy of crushing you, with amusing agony. Of the woman—more.”
The glittering, greenish eyes dwelt upon Shiela, indolently, insolently, burning with a singular, passionless avidity. The girl shrank against Kane’s arm, trembling. The rose of shame flooded her fair skin, and then drained away until she was ghostly pale. And her eyes were deep with the purple of terror.
Kane felt his muscles tensing. His gray eyes measured the short distance to the divan, flashed a glance at Vethlo. One instant, to sink his hands into the white, shuddering thickness of Aru’s throat.
“Watch!” the soft voice called to Vethlo.
The thin man’s weary voice spoke to Kane:
“My weapon is less insignificant than its size might lead you to suppose. Its discharge of free electrons could bum you to a cinder, instantly.”
“You should be warned of another thing, also,” said Aru. His fluid tones were limpidly sweet. “My life is guarded by the machine, so that fate will let no man strike at me. And the machine is set, also, so that if any man should strike from an unguarded sector, and harm me—his own doom will immediately find him. Thus, Kane Montel, my life is doubly guarded. And my slayer shall instantly die.”
“Might be worth it,” muttered Kane.
“Allow your weapon to convince this man,” cooed the soft tones, to Vethlo.
VETHLO’S thin hand grew tight on the black sphere. The golden needle, pointed at Kane, glowed. It spurted purple flame. Kane reeled to an avalanche of burning agony. He spun to the floor, paralyzed by the torturing shock, his big muscles knotted with uncontrollable convulsions.
“Good,” gasped Aru, through his laughter.
Kane staggered back to his feet, beside Shiela, his outraged body quivering. His skin smarted cruelly where the force of the weapon had struck; he caught a little odor of burnt flesh.
“I could have used a thousand times more power,” Vethlo informed him.
“Well,” muttered Kane, harshly. He looked grimly at Aru, who was trembling and gasping with amusement. “What do you want?”
Aru controlled his heaving laughter. “You are convinced now,” he asked softly, “of my power? Of your helplessness?”
Kane bit his lip, grimly silent.
“Then,” Aru’s voice caressed him, “I shall tell you of my purpose for the woman. I shall tell you why your flight to the moon was impossible until Shiela Hall was upon the flyer, and then easy.”
Kane and Shiela stood together, staring at him. They were mute, fascinated by the menace of his power and the pitiless beauty of his liquid voice.
“The earth,” he said, “has been a game. Humanity has been a jest of mine. It has amused me long. But one tires of a game. The best jest wearies, if the point is too long delayed. And therefore the jest must reach its end.
“The war whose beginnings my servant has showed you will wreck the toy you call civilization, within this year. The atomic bombs—the gift of your father to the world, Kane Montel—will spread deserts of eternal flame.
“For a whole generation, a few men will linger on, always fleeing before the spreading terror of the dust. Then, when the last man is overtaken by the desert of atomic flame, in his stone hut by the polar sea—the jest will be done.
“The jest on Earth,” he said caressingly.
The pale greenish eyes rested upon Shiela again with a keenness that stripped the garments from her white body. The pink rolls of flesh hid his eyes, and his gross body quivered to gasping laughter.
Kane swung upon him, driven by resistless anger. But Vethlo was waiting, wearily alert, a yard behind Kane. The agonizing prod of his electron-ray stopped him again with its merciless paralysis.
Aru’s laughter ceased, and he said:
“Yet one would grow weary indeed, with no jest at all, and no game to play. And therefore I have devised a new game, more clever than the old. This woman, Shiela Hall, is to play against me. Her beauty is to be the prize. Her hatred of me, her remembered love of you, Kane Montel, will give spirit to her play.
“It will be no brief game. It may last as long as the game of humanity has lasted. For I can give her life as long as mine—however unwilling she may be to accept it. Her beauty I can make eternal—a greater prize to play for.
“Nor will it be a simple game. I have devised intricacies—intricacies as delightful as the death of mankind by your father’s gift, Kane Montel, which he believed to be life and happiness.
“But you, Kane Montel, have no further part in the game—save as you may live in the memory of Shiela Hall and make her playing keener. Therefore, if you will now bid her farewell, my servant will conduct you back to your doomed flyer—its name is part of the jest—so that you may attempt to return to the earth.”
“Yes?” rapped Kane, staring at him with a curious fixity. “Yes?”
A dull blankness filled his mind. He was beyond emotion. Fear and horror and despair had been thrust from him by the grim necessity of mental self-preservation. His gray eyes gazed at Aru, with no light in them, and his numbed brain was hardly aware of the thing he was doing.
Vethlo was standing a yard behind him, with the deadly golden needle steady, covering him.
Kane’s foot came up abruptly, kicked straight back at Vethlo’s knee.
He heard the thin man’s mute little cry of unendurable pain. He heard the dropped weapon clatter on the floor, even as he lunged forward toward the inert grossness of the monster on the divan.
The exultation of unexpected victory, for one sweet instant, rang loud in his brain. His fingers were already tensing, to sink into the fat throat of Aru.
But the puffy white hand moved a little on the divan’s ornamental arm. And a sheet of crackling, greenish flame burst upward from a suddenly glowing ring in the floor, surrounding Aru with a shining wall.
Kane’s headlong lunge carried him into that wall—and into an inferno of pain. His body was racked and twisted with the agony of a strange force that seemed to sear every nerve-fiber in his body. His joints cracked. Every muscle jerked into a tortured knot. The breath drove out of him. Fiery darkness blinded him.
He knew, in that instant of ultimate pain, that he had fallen across the abruptly glowing ring, inlaid in the floor, surrounding Aru. Agony completely paralyzed him. He was helpless to move out of the wall of greenish, consuming flame which rose from it.
He knew that the flame was killing him. For one long instant he struggled vainly to roll out of it. Then darkness cut short his agony.
When he came slowly back to awareness, he knew first that the strange fire no longer burned him. And he sensed a curious, silent tension that now filled the huge room.
As his mind rose slowly out of the abyss of pain and oblivion, the tones of a singular voice kept ringing in his memory. It was a woman’s voice, but strong and deep. It rang with a melodious, golden power.
Out of the darkness it had come, urgently commanding:
“Stop the flame. He must not die.”
That unfamiliar voice was like a golden thread that drew him back to life—and to the silent conflict that filled the room.
7. She—from the Shadow
WEARILY, Kane threw himself back upon his haunches and lurched heavily to his feet. He stood swaying, fighting away dizziness and nausea and pain. His skin was blistered, smarting, where the wall of flame had seared it. Every muscle in his big body ached from forced, agonizing contraction. And the fog of blindness still pressed in upon him.
“Stop the flame. He must live.”
That strange voice of living, vibrant gold rang still in his mind. He peered about, drunkenly, trying to see who had spoken.
Dimly, he knew that Shiela was close beside him. He could feel her cool, tender hands against his tortured body, her quick strength aiding his lurching efforts to stand.
“Monty?” her low voice was in his ears, anxious, appealing. “Monty? How are you, Monty?”
“All—all right,” he gasped hoarsely, through the leaden mists of pain. “Who—spoke?”
He was trying to see. Dimly, he could see the blue depths of the curving walls. He made out the brilliant disk, that was the image of the earth, floating above the ring-shaped table. Then his clearing eyes saw Aru, inert on his couch, not laughing now. And he saw the dark, thin form of Vethlo, sprawled moaning on the floor, nursing the knee that Kane had kicked.
His eyes found the white beauty of Shiela’s anxious face, close to him. He smiled at her, feebly.
“Who was it spoke, kid?” he gasped again. “Who stopped—the flame?”
“There, Monty!” The girl spoke in a queer, awed voice. She pointed. “There—I don’t know who—what——”
Kane looked where she pointed. He saw a thing so strange that at first he thought it an aberration of his disturbed vision. For a long moment he stared, until the sharpening detail convinced him that he looked upon reality.
Suspended just above die floor was a shape like a tremendous jewel. It was a faceted mass of purple shadow, three yards through. And within that bulk of shining shadow stood—or floated—a woman.
Or was she woman?
Kane shaded his uncertain, aching eyes, peering at her. Surely no woman ever looked so strange as she. Just as surely, none ever looked more womanly.
She was tall and slender and straight. Her skin was golden, not yellow merely, but truly golden, and textured with the glowing, unwrinkled softness of eternal youth. Her hair was the pure white of silver, and abundant, and very long. Bound in scarlet, it hung behind her back.
Her eyes were large, long, somewhat oblique; they were black with the darkness of midnight.
She wore a long, sheer gown of lustrous black, touched here and there with crimson. Molded to the full rounds of her breasts, to the perfect columns of her thighs, it hid no curving beauty of her.
Kane searched her regular, classic features, pointed, elfin face, small, red-lipped mouth, straight nose, with delicately flaring nostrils. Something in them hinted of the immemorial past.
Yet nowhere could he find the key to her strangeness. No, the oddness of golden skin, snowy hair, archaic face—they could not account for it. There was some deeper, more elemental strangeness. Deeper—yet not so deep as her womanhood.
If she had belonged to some elder human species, he thought; human, certainly, but not homo sapiens. . . .
Then she moved. She touched a hot purple orb that clung to one long finger of her left hand—a singular ring. And the purple shadow fell away from her. It dissolved, vanished, like the ghost of a purple jewel.
The woman sank lightly to the floor. She swept toward him, with a walk that was pure, delicious rhythm.
“Kane Montel,” resounded the magic chime of that deeply golden voice that had saved him from the flame, “I cannot heal you now, but my hands can soothe your pain.”
And her hands touched him. They were the, color of pale gold, and slender; the fingers very long. They brushed his cheeks. They moved across his shoulders, down his arms, down his sides to his knees. They left a curious tingling coolness that blotted out the agony of his seared skin.
Kane’s eyes fastened upon her ring. The white band was very thick, with six little knurled studs projecting from it. The huge set was purple, with its own inner fire. Its facets, he saw, were like the facets of the shadow-jewel that had enveloped her.
Was the ring a machine? Had it brought her here?
RELAXATION crept over him in the wake of her easing hands. The wonder left him. He swayed backward a little, his eyes closing for an instant. “Thanks,” he murmured.
“Athonee!”
The name leapt from Aru’s lips with the venomous suddenness of a striking snake.
“Athonee! Leave that carrion. It has played its part in my game. I have done with it. But I shall destroy it as I please, without aid from you, my mother.”
His small eyes stared at her, insolently. A ruddy color was mounting into his gross flesh. Aru had been frightened, Kane realized, by the sudden apparition of this strange woman—by whatever means had brought her within that ghostly jewel-shape.
His blustering courage was just returning.
“By what right, my darling Athonee,” his liquidly soft voice inquired, poisonously caressing, “do you return from the lower caves? Do you forget that I sent you there for ever? Do you forget that I am the master, that the power and the knowledge of the machine are mine?”
“I do not forget,” replied the deep, golden voice, “that I created the machine long before that ill day when my reckless passion brought you into being, my son. I do not forget that I have one secret that gives me power over you, and that it is a secret which the machine can never tell you.”
Aru heaved uneasily upon his divan, “The machine,” he blustered, “gives me all knowledge.”
“Not all,” said Athonee. “For it warned me of this day. And it gave me the secret that is today my strength. And, foreseeing this day, I changed the machine. One sector of knowledge is closed to it, so that it can never reveal to you the secret, nor destroy my secret strength.
“There is one factor in your life, my son, a ruling factor, that the machine can not read to you—and can not change. That key to your doom I have kept to myself, against this fatal day. The cup of your life is in my hands, to spill as I choose.”
Aru was staring at her. His skin had gone a sickly yellow-white. His pale greenish eyes were wide, protruding. His gross mass was trembling again, not with laughter but with fear.
Then he seemed to recover himself. With a swollen arm, he heaved himself upright upon the divan.
“My dearest mother,” his liquid voice caressed the golden woman, maliciously sweet, “the key of my fate may be in your hands. But the machine has told me this: you will never destroy me. For you love me, Athonee—the machine told me that.
“Hate and rage and scorn you may mingle with that love. Yet always it will be strong enough to stay your purpose to destroy me.”
His gross bulk quivered again with laughter.
“Perhaps you have power to destroy me, Athonee—though I believe in my heart that your secret is but a clever lie. But an old love makes you helpless. And now again I ask you why you came here. Perhaps you wish to play in this new game of mine?”
The woman Athonee had turned away from Kane and Shiela to face the man upon the divan. She stood very straight. A faint, ruddy glow had come into her golden skin. Her small, red mouth was hard with angry scorn, and her long blade eyes were flashing.
“I have come to stop your cruel game, Aru,” her golden voice pealed out, “or to change the rules of it. I have endured much of you, my son. But this new tiling you call a jest is monstrous cruelty. The mad horror of it is enough to kill my love for you—and with it, you.
“I have come to forbid you to slay Kane Montel. And to forbid you to take this woman, Shiela Hall, for your monstrous game, unwillingly.”
With the barrel of his silver-robed torso propped upright upon the divan, supported by the great soft pillars of his arms, Aru stared a long time at her. His veiled, greenish eyes were contemptuous, mocking. Presently he began to laugh again, so that he gasped and shook.
“You say unwillingly, my mother,” his soft voice inquired, when the tremors of laughter had stopped. “But if Shiela Hall should come to me willingly, to play the game as I choose—what then?”
The golden woman slowly tamed. Her long black eyes rested upon Kane and Shiela. Framed in the snow of her hair, her elfin, pointed face was softened with tenderest pity. A glitter of tears brightened her eyes.
She swung abruptly back to Aru.
“My son,” she said, “if anything will make this woman surrender her lover, and give herself to you, then I will know that my life has failed. I will know that humanity can never rise above the manchine. My greatest hope will be dead.
“Yes, my son, if Shiela Hall abandons her lover, to give herself willingly to you, then I shall return to the lower caverns—for ever. I will give you the secret that is my power over you, and unlock the sector of your fate closed to the machine. I will creep into the crypt that I have made to hold my bones, and die.”
Very tall and very straight she stood, the red-bound silver of her luxuriant hair falling behind the darkness of her gown. The rosy light was higher in the gold of her smooth skin. Her fine shoulders quivered a little with emotion, and her tong black eyes were burning.
“I made the machine when I was alone, when my last fellow-being was dead, here on the moon. I made the machine to lift your kind from the jungles to civilization, Kane Montel, and to guide it past the pitfalls of weakness and passion that destroyed my own kind.
“I failed, in the beginning, to take account of the weakness of my ill-fated kind, in myself. Yet I struggled ever to build finer qualities in the new race. And if I have failed, you must perish, Kane Montel and Shiela Hall, and your kind with you.”
Her eyes swept back to Am.
“Therefore, my son, I submit. You may test this woman as you choose. Arid if her love of this man is a thing so weak that you can break it with the machine, then she and her race are fit only to die. And I will give up my secret and go into my mausoleum.”
8. “You Have Chosen . . . Co!”
ARU stood up.
Watching the gross, quivering bulk of him upon the divan, Kane had thought it hardly possible that he could stand, even against the feeble lunar gravitation. But the mountain of his white flesh held an unsuspected strength. He stood without support upon the great shuddering pillars of his legs. One massive arm pointed at Shiela Hall.
The girl shrank away from him—away from the inordinate grossness of that pointing arm, away from the coldly avid, mocking leer in his small, greenish eyes. Trembling, she drew close to Kane.
Am spoke in venomed tones of honeyed caress.
“Shiela Hall, my darling,” he said softly, “since my mad mother demands it, I will change my plans for finishing the jest of mankind, and for playing my new game with you. And I will offer you a choice.”
