Fourth Planet from the Sun, page 6
Firsa Mak spoke briefly with the leader of the caravan. The meeting had obviously been arranged, for led animals were brought. The women mounted easily. Selden’s stomach turned over at the idea of actually riding one of these creatures. Still, at the moment, he was even more afraid of being left behind, so he made no protest when Firsa Mak and Altman heaved him up onto the saddle pad. One of them rode on each side of him, holding a lead rein. The caravan moved on again, northward toward the mountains.
Within an hour Selden was suffering acutely from cold, thirst, and the unaccustomed exercise. By noon, when they halted to rest, he was almost unconscious. Altman and Firsa Mak helped him down and then carried him around into some rocks where they took the gag out of his mouth and gave him water. The sun was high now, piercing the thin atmosphere like a burning lance. It scalded Selden’s cheeks but at least he was warm, or almost warm. He wanted to stay where he was and die.
Altman was quite brutal about it. “You wanted to go to Jekkara,” he said. “Well, you’re going . . . just a little bit earlier than you planned, that’s all. What the hell, boy, did you think it was all like Kahora?”
And he heaved Selden onto his mount again and they went on.
In mid-afternoon the wind got up. It never really seemed to stop blowing, but in a tired sort of way, wandering across the sand, picking up a bit of dust and dropping it again, chafing the upthrust rocks a little deeper, stroking the ripple-patterns into a different design. Now it seemed impatient with everything it had done and determined to wipe it out and start fresh. It gathered itself and rushed screaming across the land, and it seemed to Selden that the whole desert took up and went flying in a red and strangling cloud. The sun went out. He lost sight of Altman and Firsa Mak at either end of his reins. He hung in abject terror to his saddle pad, watching for the small segment of rein he could see to go slack, when he would know that he was irretrievably lost. Then as abruptly as it had risen the wind dropped and the sand resumed its quiet, eternal rolling.
A little while after that, in the long red light from the west, they dipped down to a line of dark water strung glittering through the desolation, banded with strips of green along its sides. There was a smell of wetness and growing things, and an ancient bridge, and beyond the canal was a city, with the barren hills behind it.
Selden knew that he was looking at Jekkara. And he was struck with awe. Even at this late day, few Earthmen had seen it. He stared through the eyeholes of his hood, seeing at first only the larger masses of rose-red rock, and then as the sun sank lower and the shadows shifted, making out the individual shapes of buildings that melted more and more gently into the parent rock the higher they were on the sloping cliffs. At one place he saw the ruins of a great walled castle that he knew had once housed those selfsame Khalide Kings and lord knew how many dynasties before them in the days when this desert was the bottom of a blue sea, and there was a lighthouse still standing above the basin of a dry harbor halfway up the cliffs. He shivered, feeling the enormous weight of a history in which he and his had no part whatever, and it came to him that he had perhaps been just the tiniest bit presumptuous in his desire to teach these people.
That feeling lasted him halfway across the bridge. By that time the western light had gone and the torches were flaring in the streets of Jekkara, shaken by the dry wind from the desert. His focus of interest shifted from the then to the now, and once more he shivered, but for a different reason. The upper town was dead. The lower town was not, and there was a quality to the sight and sound and smell of it that petrified him. Because it was exactly as the early adventurers in their dubious memoirs had described it.
The caravan reached the broad square that fronted the canal, the beasts picking their way protestingly over the sunken, tilted paving stones. People came to meet them. Without his noticing it, Altman and Firsa Mak had maneuvered Selden to the end of the line, and now he found himself being detached and quietly led away up a narrow street between low stone buildings with deep doorways and small windowplaces, all their corners worn round and smooth as streambed rocks by time and the rubbing of countless hands and shoulders. There was something going on in the town, he thought, because he could hear the voices of many people from somewhere beyond, as though they were gathering in a central place. The air smelled of cold and dust, and unfamiliar spices, and less-identifiable things.
Altman and Firsa Mak lifted Selden down and held him until his legs regained some feeling. Firsa Mak kept glancing at the sky. Altman leaned close to Selden and whispered, “Do exactly as we tell you, or you won’t last the night.”
“Nor will we,” muttered Firsa Mak, and he tested Selden’s gag and made sure his cowl was pulled down to hide his face. “It’s almost time.”
They led Selden quickly along another winding street. This one was busy and populous. There were sounds and sweet pungent odors and strange-colored lights, and there were glimpses into wickednesses of such fantastic array and imaginative genius that Selden’s eyes bulged behind his cowl and he remembered his Seminars in Martian Culture with a species of hysteria. Then they came out into a broad square.
It was full of people, cloaked against the night wind and standing quietly, their dark faces still in the shaking light of the torches. They seemed to be watching the sky. Altman and Firsa Mak, with Selden held firmly between them, melted into the edges of the crowd. They waited. From time to time, more people came from the surrounding streets, making no sound except for the soft slurring of sandaled feet and the faint elfin chiming of tiny bells beneath the cloaks of the women. Selden found himself watching the sky, though he did not understand why. The crowd seemed to grow more silent, to hold all breath and stirring, and then suddenly over the eastern roofs came the swift moon Denderon, low and red.
The crowd said, “Ah-h-h!” a long musical cry of pure despair that shook Selden’s heart, and in the same moment harpers who had been concealed in the shadow of a timeworn portico struck their double-banked harps and the cry became a chant, half a lament and half a proud statement of undying hate. The crowd began to move, with the harpers leading and other men carrying torches to light the way. And Selden went with them, up into the hills behind Jekkara.
It was a long, cold way under the fleeting light of Denderon. Selden felt the dust of millennia grate and crunch beneath his sandals and the ghosts of cities passed him to the right and left, ruined walls and empty marketplaces and the broken quays where the ships of the Sea-Kings docked. The wild, fierce music of the harps sustained and finally dazed him. The long chanting line of people strung out, moving steadily, and there was something odd about the measured rhythm of their pace. It was like a march to the gallows.
The remnants of the works of man were left behind. The barren hills bulked against the stars, splashed with the feeble moonlight that now seemed to Selden to be inexpressibly evil. He wondered why he was no longer frightened. He thought perhaps he had reached the point of complete emotional exhaustion. At any rate, he saw things clearly but with no personal involvement.
Even when he saw that the harpers and the torchbearers were passing into the mouth of a cavern, he was not afraid.
The cavern was broad enough for the people to continue marching ten abreast. The harps were muffled now, and the chanting took on a deep and hollow tone. Selden felt that he was going downward. A strange and rather terrible eagerness began to stir in him, and this he could not explain at all. The marchers seemed to feel it, too, for the pace quickened just a little to the underlying of the harpstrings. And suddenly the rock walls vanished out of sight and they were in a vast cold space that was completely black beyond the pinprick glaring of the torches.
The chanting ceased. The people filed on both sides into a semicircle and stood still, with the harpers at the center and a little group of people in front of them, somehow alone and separate.
One of these people took off the concealing cloak and Selden saw that it was a woman dressed all in purple. For some obscure reason, he was sure it was Leila, though the woman’s face in the torchlight showed only the smooth gleaming of a silver mask, a very ancient thing with a subtle look of cruel compassion. She took in her hands a pale globed lamp and raised it, and the harpers struck their strings once. The other persons, six in number, laid aside their cloaks. They were three men and three women, all naked and smiling, and now the harps began a tune that was almost merry and the woman in purple swayed her body in time to it. The naked people began to dance, their eyes blank and joyous with some powerful drug, and she led them dancing into the darkness, and as she led them she sang, a long, sweet fluting call.
The harps fell silent. Only the woman’s voice sounded, and her lamp shone like a dim star, far away.
Beyond the lamp, an eye opened and looked and was aware.
Selden saw the people, the priestess and the six dancing ones, limned momentarily against that orb as seven people might be limned against a risen moon. Then something in him gave way and he fell, clutching oblivion to him like a saving armor.
They spent the remainder of that night and the following day in Firsa Mak’s house by the dark canal, and there were sounds of terrible revelry in the streets. Selden sat staring straight ahead, his body shaken by small periodic tremors.
“It isn’t true,” he said, again and again. “It isn’t true.”
“It may not be true,” Altman said, “but it’s a fact. And it’s the facts that kill you. Do you understand now why we brought you?”
“You want me to tell the Bureau about . . . about that”
“The Bureau and anyone that will listen.”
“But why me? Why not somebody really important, like one of the diplomats?”
“We tried that. Remember Loughlin Herbert?”
“But he died of a heart . . . Oh.”
“When Bentham told us about you,” Firsa Mak said, “you seemed young and strong enough to stand the shock. We’ve done all we can now, Selden. For years Altman and I have been trying . . .”
“They won’t listen to us,” Altman said. “They will not listen. And if they keep sending people in, nice well-meaning children and their meddling nannies, not knowing . . . I simply will not be responsible for the consequences.” He looked down at Selden from his gaunt and weathered height.
Firsa Mak said softly, “This is a burden. We have borne it, Selden. We even take pride in bearing it.” He nodded toward the unseen hills. “That has the power of destruction. Jekkara certainly, and Valkis probably, and Barrakesh, and all the people who depend on this canal for their existence. It can destroy. We know. This is a Martian affair, and most of us do not wish to have outsiders brought into it. But Altman is my brother, and I must have some care for his people, and I tell you that the Priestess prefers to choose her offerings from among strangers . . .”
Selden whispered, “How often?”
“Twice a year, when the Mad Moon rises. In between, it sleeps.”
“It sleeps,” said Altman. “But if it should be roused, and frightened, or made angry . . . For God’s sake, Selden, tell them, so that at least they’ll know what they’re getting into.”
Selden said wildly, “How can you live here, with that . . .”
Firsa Mak looked at him, surprised that he should ask. “Why, because we always have.”
Selden stared, and thought, and did not sleep, and once he screamed when Leila came softly into the room.
On the second night they slipped out of Jekkara and went back across the desert to the place of rocks, where the copter was waiting. Only Altman returned with Selden. They sat silently in the cabin, and Selden thought, and from time to time he saw Altman watching him, and already in his eyes there was the understanding of defeat.
The glowing domes of Kahora swam out of the dusk, and Denderon was in the sky.
“You’re not going to tell them,” Altman said.
“I don’t know,” whispered Selden. “I don’t know.”
Altman left him at the landing stage. Selden did not see him again. He took a cab to his hotel and went directly to his room and locked himself in.
The familiar, normal surroundings aided a return to sanity. He was able to marshall his thoughts more calmly.
If he believed that what he had seen was real, he would have to tell about it, even if no one would listen to him. Even if his superiors, his teachers, his sponsors, the men he venerated and whose approval he yearned for, should be shocked, and look at him with scorn, and shake their heads, and forever close their doors to him. Even if he should be condemned to the outer darkness inhabited by people like Altman and Firsa Mak. Even if.
But if he did not believe that it was real, if he believed instead that it was illusion, hallucination induced by drugs and heaven knew what antique Martian chicanery . . . He had been drugged, that was certain. And Leila had practiced some sort of hypnotic technique upon him . . .
If he did not believe . . .
Oh God, how wonderful not to believe, to be free again, to be secure in the body of truth!
He thought, in the quiet and comforting confines of his room, and the longer he thought, the more positive his thinking became, the more free of subjectivity, the deeper and calmer in understanding. By the morning he was wan and haggard but healed.
He went to the Bureau and told them that he had been taken ill immediately upon landing, which was why he had not reported. He also told them that he had had urgent word from home and would have to return there at once. They were very sorry to lose him, but most sympathetic, and they booked him onto the first available flight.
A few scars remained on Selden’s psyche. He could not bear the sound of a harp nor the sight of a woman wearing purple. These phobias he could have put up with, but the nightmares were just too much. Back on Earth, he went at once to his analyst. He was quite honest with him, and the analyst was able to show him exactly what had happened. The whole affair had been a sex fantasy induced by drugs, with the Priestess as mother-image. The Eye which had looked at him then and which still peered unwinking out of his recurring dreams was symbolic of the female generative principle, and the feeling of horror it aroused in him was due to the guilt complex he had because he was a latent homosexual. Selden was enormously comforted.
The analyst assured him that now that things were healthily out in the open, the secondary effects would fade away. And they might have done so, except for the letter.
It arrived just six Martian months after his unfortunate dinner date with Bentham. It was not signed. It said, “Leila waits for you at moonrise.” And it bore the sketch, very accurately and quite unmistakably done, of a single monstrous eye.
A Rose for Ecclesiastes
Roger Zelazny
Thus, not only do the observations we have scanned lead us to the conclusion that Mars at this moment is inhabited, but they land us at the further one that these denizens are of an order whose acquaintance was worth making. . . . A sadder interest attaches to such existence: that it is, cosmically speaking, soon to pass away. To our eventual descendants life on Mars will no longer be something to scan and interpret. It will have lapsed beyond the hope of study or recall.
So wrote Percival Lowell in 1908, and thus did generations of writers follow in the conceit that if there is life on Mars, it must be that of a dying civilization, one whose once-great canals have all dried up. This conceit was as prevalent in its day as the current Hollywood notion that if we encounter aliens, they will be humans in makeup and prosthetics.
But with Mariner 4 due to fly past Mars in 1965, Roger Zelazny knew that the traditional planetary romance would soon be supplanted by updates in scientific knowledge, so he spun out two stories that served as capstones on the genre. Here you have the first of them, from 1963; the other, “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth,” was set on Venus and was published in 1965. These two stories helped establish Roger Zelazny as one of the preeminent writers of his generation, a position he held until his untimely death from cancer in 1995. Among his many other works are Lord of Light, Jack of Shadows, Damnation Alley, and the classic fantasy novels in the “Amber” series, starting with Nine Princes in Amber.
I
I was busy translating one of my Madrigals Macabre into Martian on the morning I was found acceptable. The intercom had buzzed briefly, and I dropped my pencil and flipped on the toggle in a single motion.
“Mister G,” piped Morton’s youthful contralto, “the old man says I should ‘get hold of that damned conceited rhymer’ right away, and send him to his cabin.—Since there’s only one damned conceited rhymer . . .”
“Let not ambition mock thy useful toil.” I cut him off.
So, the Martians had finally made up their minds! I knocked an inch and a half of ash from a smoldering butt, and took my first drag since I had lit it. The entire month’s anticipation tried hard to crowd itself into the moment, but could not quite make it. I was frightened to walk those forty feet and hear Emory say the words I already knew he would say; and that feeling elbowed the other one into the background.
So I finished the stanza I was translating before I got up.
It took only a moment to reach Emory’s door. I knocked twice and opened it, just as he growled, “Come in.”
“You wanted to see me?” I sat down quickly to save him the trouble of offering me a seat.
“That was fast. What did you do, run?”
I regarded his paternal discontent:
Little fatty flecks beneath pale eyes, thinning hair, and an Irish nose; a voice a decibel louder than anyone else’s . . .
