Collected Short Fiction, page 233
“I do love you, Aru,” breathed the golden woman, brokenly; “for you are my only son—the only son of all my race.”
She paused a moment. Her long eyes watched him, glittering with tears.
“But Shiela Hall,” she said, “has shown me how blind is my love for you, how selfish and weak.”
She straightened against her burden of pain.
“I will not allow you to send these lovers bade to Earth, to the dread fate you have pictured. I am going to take them with me, back to my own dwelling.”
Aru’s gross flesh went crimson again with rage.
“You cannot,” he shrilled. “Remember, I am the master. You gave me the machine, and all its power.”
Athonee lifted her slender golden hand, to show the thick white ring, with its tiny knurled studs, and the great, flaming purple jewel set in it.
“You cannot stop us,” she said, “now.”
Aru stared around him, and down at Vethlo’s thin, black-dad form, still helpless on the floor. Under the jeweled crown of pale, fine hair, he shook his big head, in apparent baffled anger. But Kane had seen the fleeting little movement of his hand, on the divan’s arm.
“Not now, perhaps,” he shrilled. “But I can follow. And I will follow, my dear mother. I shall take them back—and mete out what doom I will to them and their race of crawling vermin. And you——”
For a moment he gasped incoherently, speechless with nameless passion.
“And you! I have had enough of you, and enough of your threats, that kept me from working my will upon you, long ago. Your secret power is a lie; I see it now—the machine tells me nothing of it.”
His white, swollen fingers were writhing like thick snakes.
“Yes, my darling mother,” the shrill edge of his voice cut at her, “I shall crush your body with my own hands, as I have long desired to.”
“Come,” Athonee had whispered to Kane and Shiela, while Aru still spoke. “Swiftly, before his slaves are here to stop us.”
She drew them away from the divan, the table. Her long fingers were twisting the little studs upon the ring. The purple stone lit with a new, cold fire, and the magnificent ghost of it abruptly surrounded her, a faceted bulk of purple shadow. She mounted, floated within it, above the floor.
“Leap,” she called.
And her golden arms reached out to Kane and Shiela.
KANE had seen Aru’s covert signal. He was not surprized when the big room under the cone was swiftly thronged with armed men. Attired in gray garments fashioned like the black of Vethlo, they carried pikes and swords and the golden electron needles.
Aru screamed at them shrilly, in a strange tongue. Feet came drumming across the floor.
Kane lifted Shiela into the purple shadow. She floated out of his arms. He leapt upward. The golden hands of Athonee caught him, lifted him. And then he was drifting beside the two women, weightless, in a shining purple mist.
Athonee’s golden fingers were again upon the tiny studs of the ring. The flame burned colder in the jewel’s purple heart. The shining mist grew thicker. The blue walls of the conoid room grew dim. The charging men in gray were blotted out.
Kane drew Shiela behind his body. He shuddered, expecting a pike or a blast of electrons to come probing through the purple haze.
“We are safe—for the time,” Athonee reassured him. “We are no longer in the dwelling of Aru. We have come upon a way where he cannot follow.”
“We are—moving?” demanded Kane, incredulously, for he had felt no sense of movement.
“Not in the way you have known motion,” said Athonee. “But we are now in Ae lonely place where I live.”
She was twisting the studs upon her ring. The purple haze grew thin. The slight lunar gravitation embraced them gradually, drew them slowly down to the floor of a strange room. The shadow about them vanished, and the cold light died in the purple stone.
Kane was staring in mute wonderment at the ring.
Athonee, reading his curiosity, said:
“This is one heirloom I have from the scientists of my lost race. A small thing, it is yet the key to vast energies. It unlocks the way to a space beyond, from whose vantage-point distance is no barrier, but a bridge.
“Upon the way of the ring, the star you name Capella is as near to me as you are. I have stood upon the twilit strangeness of its seventh planet, and in many another far place—that was in the old, lonely days, before the machine was made, when the call of the new and the far came strongly to me.”
For a moment she was silent, and a shadow was in the depths of her eyes. She wiped it away with a slender hand.
“My dwelling,” she said, with a simple gesture of a slim golden arm. “You are welcome.”
Kane looked away from the jewel, about the room.
Its paneled, many-angled walls were the green of jade. They were translucent, glowing with a deep, soft radiance. The vaulted ceiling was a high, flawless sky of green. The simple, oddly fashioned furnishings were silver and black—couches, small tables, heavy coffers.
On one table was a vase filled with crimson sprays of fern-like leaves. Beyond the wide arches of the unglazed windows lurked the wild darkness of the lunar cavern; black, cragged volcanic rocks, washed with a pallid violet light; dimly lit fields of scarlet, fungoid growth.
“Rest,” said Athonee.
She pointed with a stately dignity to a couch; and Kane and Shiela sank into it, gratefully.
“We are all fatigued,” she said. “I shall bring refreshment, and a lotion to aid the healing of Kane. We shall have need of all our strength and courage, when Aru comes.”
“Then he can follow us—here?” asked Kane, anxiously.
“He can,” said Athonee. “He will. But he and his slaves must trace the labyrinth of the lower caverns. The passages are too small for their ships. They must finish the journey on foot. They cannot arrive for a little time.”
“Have you any weapons?” Kane demanded. “If I hail a gun——”
Athonee shook her white head, slowly.
“None,” she said, “save the secret that is my power over Aru. With that, I could destroy him.” She hesitated, reluctant, doubtful. “Yet, in my heart, I know that the machine has told him truth.
“Aru, for all his monstrous nature, is my son, my only son, and the only son of my dead race. I love him, despite all that he has done. I must forgive his cruel weakness, his mad passion, because I know they came from me. In my heart, I know that I can never destroy him, nor give my power to another.
“But I will show you the secret of Aru’s doom, when we have had refreshment. To prepare it I must leave you, for I dwell alone in this place of exile.”
She glided from the green room.
KANE took Shiela’s hand in his. She relaxed beside him, sighing. Her eyes looked up at him, full of a weary, deathless joy.
“I’m glad you chose as you did, Shiela,” he whispered.
“And I am, too, Monty,” she breathed, “no matter what Aru does.”
He tensed. His gray eyes stared through the green arch of a window, at the cragged black precipices looming above a dusky scarlet slope.
“Aru will do enough,” he muttered, grimly. “Vicious. And powerful. Our hostess won’t do anything. I suppose you can’t blame her, since he’s her son. I’d give a million for a good automatic.” Gray eyes darkened somberly, he shook his head.
“Wouldn’t be any use, though, I suppose. Not against that monster, with his hands on the wheels of destiny. Not against that electron gun.” He bit his lip. “Anyhow, the machine had this all settled, ten thousand years ago.”
He squeezed her hand again.
“Nothing for it but to stick together, kid. See it through, best way we can.” Athonee returned, with a basket. She gave Kane a jar of fragrant ointment, and he went behind a screen to rub it on his seared, painful skin. When he had finished, he found a small table spread with such food as Vethlo had given them upon the ship: small scarlet fruits, brown cakes, purple wine.
ATHONEE served Shiela and Kane, and relaxed upon another couch, opposite. Sipping wine, she looked at them thoughtfully. Presently, in a sober, deliberate tone, she began to speak.
“Before Aru comes,” she said, “I must tell you the story of the machine of destiny, and of the lives bound up with it. A part of it you know already. And I must make the telling brief; for Aru will soon be here, to destroy me, and to drag you away to the cruel doom he plans.” Kane leaned forward anxiously.
“We can’t fight him?” he demanded. “There’s—nothing——”
Athonee shook her snowy head. Her long eyes dwelt somberly upon the two.
“My race is not your race,” she went on, “though we are kindred species, cousins. Your fathers were yet brutes of the forest when my people reached their pinnacle of achievement upon the earth. Your fathers had not even the secret of fire, when my people had fashioned science into a perfect tool, when they had mastered natural forces yet unsuspected by your savants.”
She touched the purple-jeweled ring upon her finger, and Kane bent forward in eager wonder.
“This ring is but one marvel they created. Its energy-field taps the cosmic forces of a higher dimension to bend the space in which we dwell. It makes distance but an imaginary concept.”
She looked away from the ring, and a shadow fell upon her pointed, elfin face.
“But for all the wonder of their science and the splendor of their cities, my people never overcame the heritage of the brute. Their united strength was ever sapped by a strain of selfish emotion. And their new machines left them too little work to do, left too much energy to be spent in passion.
“Hatred gripped their civilization. Reason fell before animal selfishness. The tower of their accomplishment was overwhelmed in the red flood of war. And not one of my species, upon all the earth, survived the final war.
“A few of us, however, escaped the holocaust. We fled to the moon upon the power of the ring.”
Her black eyes looked moodily past the two, back into the mists of time.
“Nearly a score of us came here, before the war was ended,” she said, “both men and women. We should have found happiness. We came to carve out a new dwelling-place for our kind. We brought the finest treasures that science had given our race—even the last great discovery, that came in the midst of the final war: the secret of life.
“We might all have lived here upon the moon, happy, secure, eternal. But we brought the curse of our kind to the moon; and after our dwellings were prepared, in these great caverns, our selfish, animal energy ran to mad waste. I need not tell the dreadful story of rivalry, jealousy, hate, murder.”
Dark fires slumbered in her eyes.
“At last,” she said, after a moody silence, “but two men were left—and I. One man was my lover. The other slew him, for jealousy. That man I slew, for revenge. Then I was alone upon the moon, and the last of my race.”
Athonee was silent again for a little time, with pain upon her golden face. Her eyes still gazed into time.
“I was impelled to join my lover in death,” she said slowly, “yet I had the desire to live. And the secret of life that we had brought from the earth made death needless, so I lived. And time passed by; and presently, to fill the emptiness of my life, I took up the science of my lost race, and went forward with it.
“And the day came when I conceived the machine of destiny. At first I saw it only as a means to knowledge, a window to die past and the future, a key to unlock the last hidden secret of the universe. And then I saw the possibility of control.
“The fathers of mankind were yet in the forest, then. They were peering ahead, but still held down by the chains of the brute. I built the machine to free them, and to lead them up the road of civilization that otherwise—so I read from the machine—they could never have found.
“Through the unsensed, universal influence of the machine, I guided your race upward. Step by step, I aided them. I gave them fire, tools, metal, writing, art. I would carry them, I thought, safely beyond the pitfalls of animal selfishness that destroyed my race.
“And thus I brought men to the state that is dimly recalled in your traditions of Atlantis. Upon a continent that has been overwhelmed, I lifted them to almost the level that my own people once reached. And I planned to lead them higher, to the perfection that I had dreamed of, in the ages of my lonely life upon the moon.
“But the weakness of my selfish passion rose again before me, as the machine had warned me that it might.
“Looking upon the earth, upon the race that I had lifted from the brute, I saw a man. I loved him. I consulted the machine, and it foretold all the terror that might be born of our love. And for a time I allowed the man to remain upon the earth.
“But in the end, animal selfishness overcame me. The ring carried me into the chamber where the man lay with a daughter of Earth in his arms. And presently he left her willingly, and came with me. I brought him with me to the moon, and gave to him the eternal youth, which only violence can destroy.
“You have seen that man,” said Athonee. “His name is Vethlo.”
Kane’s mind went back to the thin man in blade, with such a weight of suffering in his age-weary eyes.
“Here upon the moon, in the dwelling where I had been alone and lonely through ages so long, we loved. The machine had told me what our child would be, the hybrid of two races. But passion swept us on, and Aru was born.
“I knew all the sorrow and the pain that he could bring to us, and to his father’s race upon the earth. And because of that, I prepared the thing that now gives me power over him. But Aru was the crown of my selfish love, and I could not bring myself to stop his evil course.
“ARU sought power as he grew up. He plotted to seize the machine, to make his father a slave, to exile me here—he wished to destroy me, but fear of my secret restrained him.
“All the selfish passion, the animal stain, of both races, seemed distilled into Aru. He was a creature of pure, malignant hate. From the beginning he knew that he was a monster, like no being that ever lived or ever would live. He knew that he must dwell for ever alone, and that he could never beget his kind.
“His loneliness, his monstrosity, fitted him with bitterness for all others. He hated his father. He hated me for giving him birth. He hated all men, because they were unlike him.
“Therefore he plotted to humble me and his father, and to degrade and destroy humanity. I knew of his plot. But I loved him; I pitied him in his monstrosity and his pain. I could not move to stop him. And Vethlo had ever feared him.
“So he took the machine, and made his father a slave, and sent me here.
“And that is all—save that I will shew you my secret.”
Athonee rose. With majesty in the sweep of her walk, she crossed the room, and knelt to open a long coffer. Her slender golden hands laid back soft wrappings. They lifted a tall, frail urn.
Slowly, handling the urn with utmost care, Athonee brought it back and set it upon the low table.
Kane and Shiela cried out together at its beauty, at its slender grace. It was of some milk-white, opalescent crystal, inlaid delicately with black and with scarlet.
“I fashioned this urn,” said Athonee. “And I wove its life into the life of my son, upon the loom of fate. The breaking of the urn will start the machine of destiny, and the machine will forge a sword of fate to destroy my son.
“And when that was done, I dosed a sector of life to the machine, so that it can never reveal this fact to another, and so that it can never cut the thread between the urn and my son.
“Many times, as Aru humiliated me and degraded his father, and destroyed the civilization that I had been building so long, as he overwhelmed the fair continent that you know as Atlantis, and played at his cruel jests—many times I have been moved to hurl down the urn upon the floor.
“And yet I cannot,” her voice choked; “I cannot destroy my son.”
And she set the urn farther back upon the table, as if to shield it from any accidental mishap.
Then her small, pointed face went rigid with surprize. Her red mouth opened to a tiny circle. For a moment she inclined her snowy head, listening. In the distance, Kane heard the rattle of a dislodged pebble, the clatter of metal, the tramp of many feet.
Consternation mounted to Athonee’s face.
“Aru!” she whispered, voiceless with dread. “Already he comes, with his slaves—to destroy me, and to drag you away to the fate he plans.”
10. “My Son . . . Destroy Me!”
KANE’S gray eyes fell speculatively upon the slender beauty of the crystal urn. Was it possible that the life of the jesting master of destiny was bound up with this delicate perfection in white and black and scarlet, so that the end of the one would doom the other?
His mind put aside the strangeness of it, to accept the fact. For it was no stranger, after all, than the machine of destiny, and the wonders he had seen within the machine.
His gray eyes narrowed a little, suddenly. His lean chin set and his big body abruptly tensed.
Athonee’s quick glance read his thought.
“Kane Montel,” she swiftly warned him, “do not touch the urn. You could not break it. Attempting to harm it, you could only destroy your own life. When I fashioned the urn, fearing that it might be shattered by another, accidentally or maliciously, I safeguarded it with the machine of destiny.
“You should know, too, that the life of my son is guarded by the machine; and that whosoever slays Aru shall immediately be stricken down.”
Kane sank back wearily upon the couch, beside Shiela. His lean face was haggard with baffled desperation.
“Nothing,” he muttered bitterly. “Nothing we can do. Everywhere we turn the thing was all settled, ages ago, on that accursed machine.”
The swift tramp of feet was louder, now. Kane heard low, quick voices, ringing through the green arches of the unglazed windows. Athonee rose. She faced the broad doorway, looking out upon twilit scarlet garden and soaring volcanic cliffs.
