"Freeze the drop in the hand,and break the earth with singing.Hail the height of a man,and also the height of a woman."
"Freeze the drop in the hand,and break the earth with singing.Hail the height of a man,and also the height of a woman."
Over the music came a brittle chirping from the trees. Fixed with fear, they watched the temple door as the hymn progressed. Then Snake suddenly stood up straight and grinned.
She scratched her red hair, shifted her weight, and looked at Snake. "I guess they're not coming," she said, sounding almost disappointed. Then she giggled. "Well, I guess we got it."
"Don't move," repeated Hama Incarnate.
"Now look—" began Urson.
"You are perfectly safe," the god continued, "unless you do anything foolish. You have shown great wisdom. Continue to show it. I have a lot to explain to you."
"Like what?" asked Geo.
"I'll start with the lizards," smiled the god.
"The what?" asked Iimmi.
"The singing lizards," said Hama. "You walked through a grove of trees just a few minutes ago. You had just been through a series of happenings that was probably the most frightening in your life. Suddenly you heard a singing in the trees. What was it?"
"I thought it was a bird," Iimmi said.
"But why a bird?" asked the god.
"Because that's what a bird sounds like," stated Urson impatiently. "Who needs an old lizard singing to them on a morning like this?"
"Your second point is much better than your first," said the god. "You do not need a lizard, but you did need a bird. A bird means spring, life, good luck, cheerfulness. You think of a bird singing and you think of thoughts that men have been thinking for thousands upon thousands of years. Poets have written of it in every language, Catullus in Latin, Keats in English, Li Po in Chinese, Darnel X24 in New English. You expected a bird because after what you had been through, you needed to hear a bird. Lizards run from under wet rocks, scurry over gravestones. A lizard is not what you needed."
"So what do lizards have to do with why we're here?" demanded Urson.
"Why are you here?" repeated the god, subtly changing Urson's question. "There are many reasons, I am sure. You tell me some of them."
"You have done wrongs to Argo—at least to Argo of Leptar," Geo explained. "We have come to undo them. You have kidnaped the young Argo, as well as her mother apparently. We have come to take her back. You have misused the jewels. We have come to take the last one from you."
Hama smiled. "Only a poet could see the wisdom in such honesty. I thought I might have to wheedle to get that much out of you."
"I guess it was pretty certain that you knew that much already," Geo said.
"True," answered Hama. Then his tone changed. "Do you know how the jewels work?"
They shook their heads.
"They are basically very simple mechanical contrivances which are difficult in execution, but simple in concept. I will explain. Human thoughts, it was discovered after the Great Fire during the first glorious years of the City of New Hope, did not produce waves similar to radio waves, but the electrical synapse pattern, it was found, can be read by radio waves, in the same way a mine detector reads the existence of metal."
"Radio?" Geo said.
"That's right," Hama said. "Oh, I forgot, you don't know anything about that at all. Well, I can't go through the whole thing now. Suffice it to say that each of the jewels contains a carefully honed crystal which is constantly sending out beams which can read these thought patterns. Also the crystal acts like a magnifying glass or a mirror, and reflects and magnifies the energy from the brain into heat or light or any other kind of electromagnetic radiation—there I go again—so that you can send great bolts of heat with them, as you have seen done.
"But the actual workings of them are not important. And their ability to send heat out is only their secondary power. Their primary importance is that they can be used to penetrate the mind. Now we come to the lizards."
"Wait a minute," Geo said. "Before we get to the lizards. Do you mean go into minds like Snake does?" Suddenly he remembered that the boy was not there.
But the god went on. "Like Snake," he said. "But different. Snake was born with the ability to transmute the brain patterns of his thoughts to others; in that he has a power something like the jewels, but nowhere as strong. But with the jewels, you can jam a person's thoughts...."
"Just go into his mind and stop him from thinking?" asked Iimmi.
"No," said the god. "Conscious thought is too powerful. Otherwise, you would stop thinking every time Snake spoke to you. It works another way. How many reasons does a man have for any single action?"
They looked at him uncomprehendingly.
"Why, for example, does a man pull his hand from a fire?"
"Because it hurts," said Urson. "Why else?"
"Yes, why else?" asked Hama.
"I think I see what you mean," said Iimmi. "He also pulls it out because he knows that outside the fire his hand isn't going to hurt. Like the bird, I mean the lizard. One reason we reacted like we did was because it sounded like a bird. The other reason was because we wanted to hear a bird just then. The man pulls his hand out because the fire hurts, and because he wants it not to hurt."
"In other words," Geo summarized, "there are at least two reasons for everything."
"Exactly," explained Hama. "And notice that one of these reasons is unconscious. But with the jewel, you can jam the unconscious reason; so that if a man has his hand in a fire, you can jam his unconscious reason of wanting it to stop hurting. Completely bewildered, and in no less pain, he will stand there until his wrist is a smoking nub."
Geo reached over and felt his severed arm.
"Dictators during the entire history of this planet have used similar techniques. By not letting the people of their country know what conditions existed outside their boundaries, they could get the people to fight to stay in those conditions. It was the old adage, convince a slave that he's free, and he will fight to maintain his slavery. Why does a poet sing? Because he likes music; and because silence frightens him. Why does a thief steal? To get the goods from his victim; also to prove that his victim cannot get him."
"That's how Argo got Snake back," Geo said to Urson. "I see now. He was just thinking of running away, and she jammed his desire not to get caught; so he had nothing to direct him in which direction to run. So he ran where she told him, straight back to her."
"That's right," Hama said. "But something else was learned when these jewels were invented. Or rather a lesson which history should have taught us thousands of years ago was finally driven home. No man can wield absolute power over other men and still retain his own mind. For no matter how good his intentions are when he takes up the power, his alternate reason is that freedom, the freedom of the people and ultimately his own, terrifies him. Only a man afraid of freedom would want this power, would conceive of wielding it. And that fear of freedom will turn him into a slave of this power. For this reason, the jewels are evil. That is why we have summoned you to steal them from us."
"To steal them from you?" asked Geo. "Why couldn't you have simply destroyed them when you had them."
"We have already been infected," smiled the god. "We are a small band here on Aptor. To reach the state of organization, to collect the scattered scientific knowledge of the times before the Great Fire, was not easy. Too often the jewels have been used, and abused, and now we cannot destroy it. We would have to destroy ourselves first. We kidnaped Argo and left you the second jewel, hoping that you would come after the third and last one. Now you have come, and now the jewel is being stolen."
"Snake?" asked Geo.
"That's right," replied Hama.
"But I thought he was your spy," Geo said.
"That he is our spy is his unconscious reason for his actions," explained Hama. "He is aware only that he is working against the evil he has seen in Jordde. Spy is too harsh a word for him. Say, rather, little thief. He became a spy for us quite unwittingly when he was on the island as a child with Jordde. I have explained something to you of how the mind works. We have machines that can duplicate what Snake does in a similar way that the jewels work. This is how the blind priestesses contacted Jordde and made him their spy. This is how we reached Snake. But he never saw us, never even really talked to us. It was mainly because of something he saw, something he saw when he first got here."
"Wait a minute," Iimmi said. "Jordde wanted to kill me, and did kill Whitey because of something we might have seen. I bet this was the same thing. Now, what was it?"
Hama smiled. "My telling you would do no good. Perhaps you can find out from Snake, or my daughter, Argo Incarnate."
"But what do we do now?" Geo interrupted. "Take the jewels back to Argo, I mean Argo on the ship? She's already used the jewels to control minds, at least Snake's, so that means she's infected, too."
"Once you guessed the reason for her infection," said Hama. "We have been watching you on our screens since you landed. Do you remember what the reason was?"
"Do you mean her being jealous of her sister?" Geo asked.
"Yes. On one side her motives were truly patriotic for Leptar. On the other hand they were selfish ones of power seeking. But without the selfish ones, she would have never gotten so far as she did. You must bring young Argo back and give the infection a chance to work itself out."
"But what about the jewels?" asked Geo. "All three of them will be together. Isn't that a huge temptation?"
"Someone must meet this temptation, and overcome it," said Hama. "You do not know how much danger they are in while they are here on Aptor. Even if the final danger is only delayed, that delay will make it safer to bring them to Leptar."
Suddenly Hama turned to the screens and pushed a switch to on position. The opaque glass was filled with a picture of the interior of the temple. On the huge statue, a spotlight was following two microscopic figures over the statue's shoulder. They were climbing over the statue's elbow.
Hama increased the size. It was two people, not bugs, climbing down the gigantic sculptured figure. They made their way along the statue's forearm now, to the golden stalks of wheat in the god's black fist. One, and then the other began to shimmy down the stems. They arrived at the base and climbed over the rail. The screen enlarged again.
"It's Snake," said Geo.
"And he's got the jewel," Urson added.
"That's Argo with him," Iimmi put in. "I mean—one of the Argos." They clustered around the screen, watching the congregation give way before the two fearful children. The red-haired girl in the short white tunic was holding onto Snake's shoulder.
Suddenly Hama turned the picture off, and they looked away from the screen now, puzzled. "So you see," said the god, "the jewel has already been stolen. For the sake of Argo, and of Hama, carry the jewels back to Leptar. Young Argo will help you. Though her mother and I are pained to see her go, she is as prepared for the journey as you are, if not more. Will you do it?"
"I will," Iimmi said.
"Me too," said Geo.
"I guess so," Urson said.
"Good," smiled Hama. "Then come with me." He turned from the screen and walked through the door. They followed him down the long stairway, past the stone walls, into the hall, and along the back of the church. He walked slowly, and smiled like a man who had waited long for something finally arrived. They turned out of the temple and descended the bright steps.
"I wonder where the kids are?" Urson asked.
But Hama led them on, across the broad garden to where the great black urns sat in a row close to a wall of shrubbery. A woman—old Argo—suddenly joined them. She had apparently been waiting for them. She gave them a silent smile of recognition, and they continued across the garden path.
Light fell through the shrubbery across her white tunic and Snake's bare back as they crouched over the contraption of coils and metal. She twisted two pieces of wire together in a final connection as Snake placed the jewel on an improvised thermocouple. Then they bent over it and both concentrated their thoughts on the bead. The thermocouple glowed red, and electricity jumped in the copper veins, turning the metal bone into a magnet. The armature tugged once around its pivot, and then tugged around once more. Finally it was whipping around steadily, the brushes on its shaft reversing the magnetic poles with each half circle of the arc. It gained speed until it whirred into an invisible copper haze between them. "Hey," she breathed, "look at it go, will you! Just look at it go." And the young thieves crouched over the humming motor, oblivious to the eyes of the elder gods that smiled at them from the edge of the green shift of shadow and sunlight, by the side of the marble urn.
Under the trees, she raised up on tiptoe and kissed the balding forehead of a tall, dark-robed priest. "Dunderhead," she said, "I think you're cute." Then she blinked very rapidly and knuckled beneath her eye. "Oh," she added, remembering, "I was making yogurt in the biology laboratory yesterday. There's two gallons of it fermenting under the tarantula cage. Remember to take it out. And take care of the hamsters. Please don't forget the hamsters."
Finally, they started once more around the slope of the volcano, and the temple and grove fell black and green away behind them.
"Two days to get to the ship," said Geo, squinting at the pale sky.
"Perhaps we had better put the jewels together," said Urson. "Keep them out of harm's way, since we know their power."
"What do you mean?" Iimmi asked.
Urson took Geo's leather purse from his belt. Then he took the jewel from Geo's neck and dropped it in the purse. Then he held the purse out for Iimmi to do the same.
"I guess it can't hurt," Iimmi said, dropping his chain into the pouch.
"Here's mine too," Argo said. Urson pulled the purse string closed and tucked the pouch in at his waist.
"Well," said Geo, "I guess we head for the river, so we can get back to your sister and Jordde."
"Jordde?" asked Argo. "Who's he?"
"He's a spy for the blind priestesses. He's also the one who cut Snake's tongue out."
"Cut his—?" Suddenly she stopped. "That's right: four arms, his tongue—I remember now, in the film!"
"In the what?" asked Iimmi. "What do you remember?"
Argo turned to Snake. "I remember where I saw you before!"
"You know Snake?" Urson asked.
"No, I never met him. But about a month ago I saw a movie of what happened. It was horrible what they did to him."
"What's a movie?" asked Iimmi.
"Huh?" said Argo. "Oh, it's sort of like the vision screens, only you can see things that happened in the past. Anyway, Dunderhead showed me this film about a month ago. Then he took me down to the beach and said I should have seen something there, because of what I'd learned."
"See something?" Iimmi almost yelled. "What was it?" He took her shoulder and shook it. "What was it you were supposed to see?"
"Why...?" began the girl, startled.
"Because a friend of mine was murdered and I almost was too because of something we saw on that beach. Only I don't know what it was."
"But ..." began Argo. "But I don't either. I couldn't see it, so Dunderhead took me back to the temple."
"Snake?" Geo asked. "Do you know what they were supposed to see? Or why Argo was taken to see it after she was shown what happened to you?"
The boy shrugged.
Iimmi turned on Snake. "Do you know, or are you just not telling? Come on now. That's the only reason I stuck with this so far, and I want to know what's going on!"
Snake shook his head.
"I want to know why I was nearly killed," shouted the Negro. "You know and I want you to tell me!" Iimmi raised his hand.
Snake screamed. The sound tore over the distended vocal cords. Then he whirled and ran.
Urson caught him and brought the boy crashing down among leaves. "No you don't," the giant growled. "You're not going to get away from me this time. You won't get away from me again."
"Watch it," said Argo. "You're hurting him. Urson, let go!"
"Hey, ease up," said Iimmi. "Snake, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to yell. But I do want you to tell me. Very much."
Urson let the boy up, still mumbling, "Well, he's not going to get away again."
"When did he get away from you the first time?" Geo said, coming over to the boy. "Let him go. Look, Snake, do you know what there was about the beach that was so important?"
Snake nodded.
"Can you tell?"
Now the boy shook his head and glanced at Urson.
"You don't have to be afraid of him," Geo said, puzzled. "Urson won't hurt you."
But Snake shook his head again.
"Well," said Geo, "we can't make you. Let's get going."
"I bet I could make him," the giant mumbled.
"No," said Argo. "I don't think you could. I watched the last time somebody tried. And I don't think you could."
Late morning flopped over hotly in the sky and turned into afternoon. The jungle became damp, and bright insects plunged like tiny knives of blue or scarlet through leaves. Wet foliage brushed against their chests, faces, and shoulders.
"Why would they show you a film of something awful before taking you to the beach." Iimmi asked.
"Maybe it was supposed to have made me more receptive to what we saw," said Argo.
"If horror makes you receptive to what ever it was," said Iimmi, "I should have been about as receptive as possible."
"What do you mean?" asked Geo.
"I just watched ten guys get hacked to pieces all over the sand, remember?"
They walked silently for a time.
"We'll come out at the head of the river. It's a huge marsh that drains off into the main channel," said Argo presently.
Late afternoon darkened quickly.
"I was wondering about something," Geo said, after a little while.
"What?" asked Argo.
"Hama said that once the jewels had been used to control minds, the person who used them was infected—"
"Rather the infection was already there," corrected Argo. "That just brought it out."
"Yes," said Geo. "Anyway, Hama also said that he was infected. When did he have to use the jewels?"
"Lots of times," Argo said. "Too many. The last time was when I was kidnaped. He used the jewel to control pieces of that thing you all killed in the City of New Hope to come and kidnap me and then leave the jewel in Leptar."
"A piece of that monster?" Geo exclaimed. "No wonder it decayed so rapidly when it was killed."
"Huh?" asked Iimmi.
"Argo, I mean your sister, told me they had managed to kill one of the kidnapers, and it melted the moment it died."
"We couldn't control the whole mass," she explained. "It really doesn't have a mind. But, like everything alive, it has, or had, the double impulse."
"But what did kidnaping you accomplish, anyway?" Iimmi asked.
Argo grinned. "It brought you here. And now you're taking the jewels away."
"Is that all?" asked Iimmi.
"Well," said Argo, "Isn't that enough?" She paused for an instant. "You know I wrote a poem about all this once, the double impulse and everything."
Geo recited:
"By the dark chamber sits its twin,where the body's floods begin,and the two are twinned again,turning out and turning in."
"By the dark chamber sits its twin,where the body's floods begin,and the two are twinned again,turning out and turning in."
"How did you know?" she asked.
"The dark chamber is Hama's temple," Geo said. "Am I right?"
"And it's twin is Argo's," she went on. "They should be twins, really. And then the twins again are the children. The force of age in each one opposed to the young force. See?"
"I see," Geo smiled. "And the body's floods, turning in and out?"
"That's sort of everything man does, his going and coming, his great ideas, his achievements, his little ideas too. It all comes from the interplay of those four forces."
"Four?" said Urson. "I thought it was just two."
"But it's thousands," Argo explained.
The air was drenching. The leaves had been shiny before. Now they dripped water on the loose ground. Pale light lapsed through the branches, shimmered, reflected from leaf to the wet underside of leaf. The ground became mud.
Twice they heard a sloshing a few feet away, and then the scuttling of an unseen animal. "I hope I don't step on something that decides to take a chunk out of my foot."
"I'm pretty good at first aid," Argo said. "It's getting chilly," she added.
Just then Geo slipped and sank knee-deep in a muddy pool. Urson raced to the edge of the quicksand bog and grabbed Geo by his good arm. He pulled till Geo emerged, coated to the thigh with gray mud.
"You all right?" Urson asked. "You sure you're all right?"
Geo nodded, rubbing the stump of his arm with his good hand. "I'm all right," he said. The trees had almost completely given out. Geo suddenly saw the whole swamp sinking in front of him. He splashed a step backwards, but Urson caught his shoulder. The swamp wasn't sinking, though. But ripples had begun to appear over the water, spreading, crossing, webbing the whole surface with a net of tiny waves.
Then they began to rise up. Green backs broke the surface, wet and slippery. They were standing now, torrents cascading their green faces, green chests. Three of them, now a fourth. Four more, and then more, and then many more. They stood, now, these naked, green, mottled bodies.
Geo felt a sudden tugging in his head, at his mind. Looking around he saw that the others felt it too.
"Them ..." Urson started.
"They're the ones who carried us ..." Geo began. The tug came again, and they stepped forward.
Iimmi put his hand on his head. "They want us to go with them...." And suddenly they were going forward, slipping into the familiar state of half-consciousness which had come when they had crossed the river, to the City of New Hope, or when they had first fallen into the sea.
Wet hands fell on their bodies as they were guided through the swamp. They were being carried through deeper water. Now they were walking over dry land where the vegetation was thicker, and slimy boulders caught shards of sunset on their wet flanks, blood leaking on the gray, the wet gray, and the green.
Through a rip in the arras of vegetation, they saw the moon push through the clouds, staining them silver. A rock rose in silhouette against the moon. On the rock a naked man stood, staring at the white disk. White highlighted one side of his body. As they passed, he howled (or anyway, opened his mouth and threw his head back. But their ears were full of night and could not hear.) and dropped to all fours. A breeze blew momentarily in the sudden plume of his tail, in the scraggly hair of the under-belly, and light lay white on the points of his ears, his lengthened muzzle, his thinned hind legs. The animal turned its head once, and then scampered down the rock and into the darkness as a curtain of trees swung across the opened sky.
Eyes of flame whipped ahead of them as water swirled their knees once more. Then the water went down and sand washed back under the soles of their feet on the dark beach. The beating of the sea, the rush of the river, and the odor of the wet leaves that fingered their cheeks, prodded their shins, and slapped against their bellies as they moved forward, all this fell away. Red eyes wavered into flaming tongues, and the tongues showed themselves housed in the mouths of a dozen caves.
Light flickered on the wet rocks and they entered the largest one. Their eyes suddenly focused once more. Foam washed back and forth over the sand floor, and black chains of weeds, caught in crevices on the rock, lengthened over the sand with the inrush of water. Webbed hands released them.
Brown rocks rose around in the firelight. They raised their eyes to where the Old One sat. The long spines were strung with shrunken membrane. His eyes, gray and indistinct, were close to the surface of his broad nostriled face. A film of water trickled over the rock where he sat. Others stood about him, on various levels of the rock.
The tugging left them, and they glanced at one another now. Outside the cave it was raining hard. Geo saw that Argo's hair had wet to dark auburn and hugged her head now, making little streaks down her neck.
Suddenly a voice boomed at them, like an echo, more than the reverberation that the cave would give. "Carriers of the jewels," it began, and suddenly Geo realized that it was the same hollowness that accompanied Snake's soundless messages. "We have brought you here to give a warning. We are the oldest forms of intelligence on this planet," continued the Old One from the throne. "We have watched from the delta of the Nile the rise of the pyramids; we have seen the murder of Caesar from the banks of the Tiber. We watched the Spanish Armada destroyed by English, and we followed Man's great metal fish through the ocean before the Great Fire. We have never aligned ourselves with either Argo or Hama, but rise in the sexless swell of the ocean. We can warn you, as we have warned man before. As before, some will listen, some will not. Your minds are your own, now. That I pledge you. Now, I warn you; cast the jewels into the sea.
"Nothing is ever lost in the sea, and when the evil has been washed from them with time and brine, they will be returned to man. For then time and brine will have washed away his imperfections also.
"No living intelligence is free from their infection, nothing with the double impulse of life. But we are old, and can hold them for a million years before we will be so infected as you are. Your young race is too condensed in its living to tolerate such power at its fingers now. Again I say: cast these into the sea.
"The knowledge which man needs to alleviate hunger and pain from the world of men is contained in two monasteries on this island. Both have the science to put the jewels to use, to the good use which is possible with them. Both have been infected. In Leptar, however, where you carry these jewels, there is no way at all to utilize them for anything but evil. There will only be the temptation to destroy."
"What about me?" Argo suddenly piped up. "I can teach them all sorts of things in Leptar." She took one of Snake's hands. "We used one for our motor."
"You will find something else to make your motor turn," came the voice. "You still have to see something that you have not yet seen?"
"At the beach?" demanded Iimmi.
"Yes," nodded the Old One, with something like a sigh, "at the beach. We have a science that allows us to do things which to you seem impossibilities, as when we carried you in the sea for weeks without your body decaying. We can enter your mind as Snake does. And we can do much else. We have a wisdom which far surpasses even Argo's and Hama's on Aptor. Will you then cast the jewels into the sea and trust them with us?"
Here Urson interrupted. "How can we give you the jewels?" he said. "How can we be sure you're not going to use them against Argo and Hama once you get them. You say nobody is impervious to them. And we've only got your say so on how long it would take you to fall victim. You can already influence minds. That's how you got us here. And according to Hama, that's what corrupts. And you've already done it."
"Besides," Geo said. "There's something else. We've nearly messed this thing up a dozen times trying to figure out motives and counter motives. And it always comes back to the same thing: we've got a job to do, and we ought to do it. We're suppose to return Argo and the jewels to the ship, and that's what we're doing."
"He's right," said Iimmi. "It's the general rule again. Act on the simplest theory that holds all the information."
The Old One sighed again. "Once, fifteen hundred years ago, a man who was to maneuver one of the metal birds walked and pondered by the sea. He had been given a job to do. We tried to warn him, as we tried to warn you. But he jammed his hands into the pockets of his khaki uniform, and uttered to the waves the words you just uttered, and the warning was shut out of his mind. He scrambled up over the dunes on the beach, never taking his hands out of his pockets. The next morning, at five o'clock, when the sun slanted red across the air field, he climbed into his metal bird, took off, flew for some time over the sea, looking down on the water like crinkled foil under the heightening sun, until he reached land again. Then he did his job: he pressed a button which released two shards of fire metal in a housing of cobalt. The land flamed. The sea boiled in the harbors. And two weeks later he was also dead. That which burned your arm away, poet, burned away his whole face, boiled his lungs in his chest and his brain in his skull."
There was a pause. And then, "Yes, we can control minds. We could have relieved the tiredness, immobilized the fear, the terror, immobilized all his unconscious reasons for doing what he did, just as man can now do with the jewels. But had we, we would have also immobilized the—the honor which he clung to. Yes, we can control minds, but we do not." Now the voice swelled. "But never, since that day on the shore before the Great Fire, has the temptation to do so been as great as now." Again the voice returned to normal. "Perhaps," and there was almost humor in it now, "the temptation is too great, even for us. Perhaps we have reached the place where the jewels would push us just across the line where we have never before gone, make us do those things that we have never done. You have heard our warning now. The choice, I swear to you, is yours."
They stood silent in the high cave, the fire on their faces weaving brightness and shadow. Geo turned to look at the rain-blurred darkness outside the cave's entrance.
"Out there is the sea," said the voice again. "Your decision quickly. The tide is coming in...."
It was snatched from their minds before they could articulate it. Two children saw a bright motor turning in the shadow. Geo and Iimmi saw the temples of Argo in Leptar. Then there was something darker. And for a moment, they all saw all the pictures at once.
A wave splashed across the floor, like twisted glass before the rock on which the fire stood. Then it flopped wetly across the burning driftwood which hissed into darkness. Charred sticks turned, glowing in the water, and were extinguished.
Rain was buffeting them; hands held them once more, pulling them into the warm sea, the darkness, and then nothing....
Snake was thinking again, and this time through the captain's eyes.
The cabin door burst open in the rain. Wind whipped her wet veils about her in the door as lightning made them transparent, blackening her body's outline. Jordde rose from his seat. She closed the door on thunder.
"I have received the signal from the sea," she said. "Tomorrow you pilot the ship into the estuary."
The captain's voice: "But Priestess Argo, I cannot take the ship into Aptor. We already have lost ten men; I cannot sacrifice ..."
"And the storm," smiled Jordde. "If it is like this tomorrow, how can I take her through the rocks?"
Her nostrils flared as her lips compressed to a chalky line. She was regarding Jordde.
The captain's thoughts: What is between them, this confused tension. It upsets me deeply, and I am tired.
"You will pilot the boat to shore tomorrow," Argo nearly hissed. "They have returned, with the jewels!"
The captain's thoughts: They speak to each other in a code I don't understand. I am so tired, now. I have to protect my ship, my men, that is my job, my responsibility.
But Argo turned to the captain. "I hired you to obey me. I order you to pilot this ship to Aptor's shore tomorrow morning."
The captain's thoughts; Yes, yes. The fatigue and the unknowing. But I must fulfill, must complete. "Jordde," he began.
"Yes, captain," answered the mate, anticipating. "If the weather is permitting, sir, I will take the ship as close as I can get." He smiled now, a thin curve over his face, and turned toward Argo.
Roughness of sand beneath one of his sides, and the flare of the sun on the other. His eyes were hot and his lids were orange over them. He turned over, and reached out to dig his fingers into the sand. Only one hand closed; then he remembered. Opening his eyes, he rolled to his knees. The sand grated under his knee caps. Looking out toward the water, he saw that the sun hung only seeming inches above the horizon. Then he saw the ship.
From its course, he gathered it was heading toward the estuary of the river down the beach. He began to run toward where the rocks and vegetation cut off the end of the beach. The sand under his feet was cool.
A moment later he saw Iimmi's dark figure come from the jungle. He was heading for the same place. Geo hailed him, and panting, they joined each other. Then, together they continued toward the rocks.
As they broke through the first sheet of foliage, they bumped into the red-haired girl who stood, knuckling her eyes in the shadow of the broad palm fronds. When she recognized them, she joined them silently. Finally they reached the outcropping of rock a few hundred feet up the river bank.
The rain had swelled the river's mouth to tremendous violence. It vomited surges of brown water into the ocean, frothed against rocks, and boiled opaquely below them. It was nearly half again as wide as Geo remembered it.
Although the sky was clear, beyond the brown bile of the river, the sea snarled viciously and bared white teeth in the sun. It took another fifteen minutes for the boat to maneuver through the granite spikes toward the rocky embankment a hundred yards away.
Glancing down into the turbulence, Argo breathed, "Gee." But that was the only human sound against the water's roaring.
The boat's prow doffed in the swell, and then at last her plank swung out and bumped unsteadily on the rocky bank. Figures were gathering on deck.
"Hey," Argo said, pointing toward one. "That's Sis!"
"Where the hell are Snake and Urson?" Iimmi asked.
"That's Snake down there," Geo said. "Look!" He pointed with his nub.
They could see Snake crouched near the gangplank itself. He was behind a ledge of rock, invisible to the people on the ship, apparently, but plain to Geo and his companions.
"Watch it," Geo said. "I'm going down there. You stay here." He ducked off through the vines, keeping in sight of the rocks' edge and the boiling foam. The ship grew before him, and at last he reached a sheltered rise, just ten feet above the nest of rock in which the four-armed boy was crouching.
Geo looked out at the boat. Jordde stood at the head of the gangplank. The eighteen feet of board was unsteady with the roll of the ship. Jordde held something like a black whip in his hand, only the end went to a box-like contraption strapped to his back. With the lash raised, he stepped onto the shifting plank.
Geo wondered what the whip contrivance was. The answer came with the hollow sound of Snake's thoughts.That ... is ... machine ... he ... use ... to ... cut ... tongue ... with ... only ... on ... whip ... now ... not ... wire ...So Snake knew he was just behind him. As he was trying to figure exactly the implications of what Snake had said, suddenly, with the speed of a bird's shadow, Snake leaped from his hiding place and landed on the shore end of the plank. He recovered from his crouch, and rushed down the plank toward Jordde, apparently intending to knock him from the board.
Jordde raised the lash and it fell across the boy's shoulder. It didn't land hard; it just dropped. But Snake suddenly reeled, and went down on one knee, grabbing the sides of the plank. Geo was close enough to hear the boy scream.
"I cut your tongue out once with this thing," Jordde said, matter of factly. "Now I'm going to cut the rest of you to pieces." He adjusted a control at his belt and raised the lash again.
Geo leapt for the plank. He faced Jordde over the crouching boy, he wondered how wise it had been. Then he had to stop wondering and try to duck the falling lash. He couldn't.
It landed with only the weight of gravity, brushing his cheek, then dropping across his shoulder and down his back. He screamed; the whole side of his face seemed seared away, and an inch crevice burned into his shoulder and back the length it touched him. He bit into white fire, trying not to leap aside into the foaming chasm between rocks and boat. As the lash rasped over his shoulder, sweat flooded his eyes. His good arm, which held the edge of the plank, was shaking like a plucked string on a loose guitar. Snake lunged back against him, almost knocking him over. When Geo blinked the tears out of his eyes, he saw two bright welts over Snake's shoulder. He also saw that Jordde had stepped out upon the plank and was smiling.
When the line fell again, he wasn't sure just what happened. He leaned in one direction, and suddenly Snake was a dive of legs in the other. Now Snake was just four sets of fingers on the edge of the plank. Geo screamed again and shook.
Two sets of fingers disappeared from one side of the board and reappeared on the other. As Jordde raised the lash a fourth time to rid the plank of this last one-armed nuisance, the fingers worked rapidly forward toward Jordde's feet, until suddenly an arm raised from beneath the plank, grabbed Jordde's foot, and tugged. The lash fell far from Geo who was still trembling, trying to move backwards off the unsteady plank, and keep from vomiting at the same time.
Jordde tripped, but turned in time to grab the edge of the ship's gate and steady himself. At the same time, one leg, and then another, came up the other side of the plank, and then Snake rolled to a crouching position on the board's top.
Geo got his feet under him now, and stumbled backwards, off the plank, and then sat down hard a few feet back on the rocks. He clutched his good arm across his stomach, and without lowering his eyes, leaned forward to cool his back.
Jordde, half-seated on the board now, lashed the whip sideways. Snake leaped a foot from the plank as the line swung beneath his feet. All four arms went spidering out to regain equilibrium. The whip struck the side of the boat, left a burn along the hull, and came swinging back again. Snake leapt once more and made it.
Suddenly there was a shadow over him, and Geo saw Urson stride up to the end of the plank. His back to Geo, he crouched bear-like at the plank's head. "All right, now try someone a little bigger than you. Come on, kid, get off there. I want my turn." Urson's sword was drawn.
Snake turned, grabbed at something on Urson, but the big man knocked him away as he leapt diagonally onto the shore. Urson laughed over his shoulder. "You don't want the ones around my neck," he called back. "Here, keep these for me." He tossed the leather purse from his belt back to the shore. Snake landed just as Jordde flung the lash out again. Urson must have caught the line across his chest, because they saw his back suddenly stiffen. Then he leapt forward and came down with his sword so hard that had Jordde still been there, his leg would have come off. Jordde leapt back onto the edge of the ship, and the sword sliced three inches into the plank. As Urson tried to pull the blade out once more, Jordde sent his whip singing again. It wrapped Urson's mid-section like a black serpent, and it didn't come loose.
Urson howled. He flung his sword forward, which probably only by accident thwunked seventeen inches through Jordde's abdomen. He bent forward, grabbed the line with both hands, and tugged backwards, screaming.
Jordde took two steps onto the plank, his mouth open, his eyes closed, and fell over the side.
Urson heaved backwards, and toppled from the other side. For a moment they hung with the whip between them over the board. The ship heaved, rolled to. The plank swiveled, came loose; and with the board on top of them, they crashed into the water.
Geo and Snake were at the rocks' edge. Iimmi and Argo were coming up behind them.
Below them, limbs and board bobbed through the foam once. The line had somehow looped around Urson's neck, and the plank had turned up almost on end. Then they went under again.
With nothing between it and the rock wall of shore, the boat began to roll in. With each swell, it came in six feet, and then leaned out three. Then it came back another six. It took four swells, the time of four very deep breaths, until the side of the boat was grating up against the rocks. Geo could hear the plank splintering down in the water. But the sound of the water blanketed anything else that was breaking down there.
Geo took two steps backwards, clutched at his stubbed arm, and threw up.
Somebody, the captain, was calling, "Get her away from the rocks. Away from the rocks, before she goes to pieces!"
Iimmi took Geo's arm. "Come on, boy," he said, and managed to haul him onto the ship. Argo and Snake leapt on behind them, as the boat floundered away from the shore.
Geo leaned against the rail. Below him the water turned on itself in the rocks, thrashed along the river's side, and then, as he raised his eyes, stretched out along the bright blade of the beach. The long sand that rimmed the island dropped away from them, a stately and austere arc gathering in its curve all the sun's glare, and throwing it back on wave, and on wave. His back hurt, his stomach was shriveled and shaken like an old man's palsied fist, his arm was gone, and Urson....
And then Argo said, "Look at the beach!"
Geo flung his eyes up and tried in one moment to envelop whatever he saw, whatever it would be. Beneath the roar was a tide of quiet. The sand along the naked crescent was dull at depressions, mirror bright at rises. At the jungle's edge, leaves and fronds sped multi-textured rippling along the foliage. Each single fragment in that green carpet hung up in the sun was one leaf, he reflected, with two sides, and an entire system of skeleton and veins, as his hand and arm had been. And maybe one day would drop off, too. He looked from rock to rock now. Each was different, shaped and lined distinctly, but losing detail as the ship floated out, as the memory of his entire adventure was losing detail. That one there was like a bull's head half submerged; those two flat ones together on the sand looked like the stretched wings of eagles. The waves, measured and magnificent, followed one another onto the sand, like the varying, never duplicated rhythm of a good poem, peaceful, ordered, and calm. He tried to pour the chaos of Urson drowning from his mind onto the water. It flowed into each glass-green wave's trough in which it rode, suddenly quiet, up to the beach. He spread the pain in his own body over the web of foam and green shimmering, and was surprised because it fit easily, hung there well, quieted, very much quieted. Somewhere at the foot of his brain, an understanding was beginning to effloresce with the sea's water, under the sun.
Geo turned away from the rail, and with the wet deck slipping under his bare feet, he walked toward the forecastle. He released his broken limb, and his hand hung at his side.
When Snake came down that evening, Geo was lying on his back in the bunk, following the grain of the wood on the bottom of the bed above his. He had his good arm behind his neck now. Snake touched his shoulder.
"What is it?" Geo asked, turning on his side and sitting out from under the bunk.
Snake held out the leather purse to Geo.
"Huh?" Geo asked. "Didn't you give them to Argo yet?"
Snake nodded.
"Well, why didn't she take them. Look, I don't want to see them again."
Snake pushed the purse toward him again, and added,Look...
Geo took the purse, opened the draw string, and turned the contents out in his hand: there were three chains, on each of which was a gold coin fastened by a hole near the edge. Geo frowned. "How come these are in here?" he asked. "I thought—where are the jewels?"
In ... ocean, Snake said.Urson ... switched ... them.
"What are you talking about?" demanded Geo. "What is it?"
Don't ... want ... tell ... you ...
"I don't care what you want, you little thief." Geo grabbed him by the shoulder. "Tell me!"
Know ... from ... back ... with ... blind ... priestesses, Snake explained rapidly.He ... ask ... me ... how ... to ... use ... jewels.. when ... you ... and ... Iimmi ... exploring ... and ... after ... that ... no ... listen ... to ... thoughts ... bad ... thoughts ... bad ...
"But he—" Geo started. "He saved your life!"
But ... what ... is ... reason, Snake said.At ... end ...
"You saw his thoughts at the end?" asked Geo. "What did he think?"
You ... sleep ... please, Snake said.Lot ... of ... hate ... lot ... of ... bad ... hate ...There was a pause in the voice in his head ...and ... love ...
Geo began to cry. A bubble of sound in the back of his throat burst, and he turned onto the pillow and tried to bite through the sound with his teeth, the tiredness, the fear, for Urson, for his arm, and the change which hurt. His whole body ached, his back hurt in two sharp lines, and he couldn't stop crying.
Iimmi, who had now decided to take the bunk above Geo, came back a few minutes after mess. Geo had just awakened.
Geo laughed. "I found out what it was we saw on the beach that made us so dangerous."
"How?" asked Iimmi. "When? What was it?"
"Same time you did," Geo said. "I just looked. And then Snake explained the details of it to me later."
"When?" Iimmi repeated.
"I just took a nap, and he went through the whole thing with me."
"Then what was it you saw, we saw?"
"Well, first of all; do you remember what Jordde was before he was shipwrecked on Aptor?"
"Didn't Argo say he was studying to be a priest. Old Argo, I mean."
"Right," said Geo. "Now, do you remember what my theory was about what we saw?"
"Did you have a theory?" Iimmi asked.
"About horror and pain making you receptive to whatever it was."
"Oh, that," Iimmi said. "I remember. Yes."
"I was also right about that. Now add to all this some theory from Hama's lecture on the double impulse of life. It wasn't a thing we saw, it was a situation, or rather an experience we had. Also, it didn't have to be on the beach. It could have happened anywhere. Man, and his constantly diametric motivations, is always trying to reconcile opposites. In fact, you can say that an actionisa reconciliation of the duality of his motivation. Now, take all that we've been through, the confusion, the pain, the disorder; then reconcile that with the great order obvious in something like the sea, with its rhythm, its tides and waves, its overpowering calm, or the ordering of cells in a leaf, or a constellation of stars. If you can do it, something happens to you: you grow. You become a bigger person, able to understand, or reconcile, more."
"All right," said Iimmi.
"And that's what we saw, or the experience we had when we looked at the beach from the ship this morning; chaos caught in order, the order defining chaos."
"All right again," Iimmi said. "And I'll even assume that Jordde knew that the two impulses of this experience were one—something terrible and confused, like seeing ten men hacked to pieces by vampires, or seeing a film of a little boy getting his tongue pulled out, or coming through what we came through since we landed on Aptor; and two—something calm and ordered, like the beach and the sea. Now, why would he want to kill someone simply because they might have gone through what amounts, I guess, to the basic religious experience?"
"You picked just the right word," Geo smiled. "Now, Jordde was a novice in the not too liberal religion of Argo. Jordde and Snake had been through nearly as much on Aptor as we had. And they survived. And they also emerged from that jungle of horror onto that great arcing rhythm of waves and sand. And they went through just what you and I and Argo went through. Little Argo, I mean. And it was just at that point when the blind priestesses of Argo made contact with Jordde. They did so by means of those vision screens we saw them with, which can receive sound and pictures from just about any place, but can also project, at least sound, to just about anywhere too. In other words, right in the middle of this religious, or mystic, or whatever you want to call it, experience, a voice materialized out of thin air that claimed to the voice of The Goddess. Have you any idea what this did to his mind?"
"I imagine it took all the real significance out of the whole thing," Iimmi said. "It would for me."
"It did," said Geo. "Jordde wasn't what you'd call stable before that. If anything, this made him more so. It also stopped his mental functioning from working in the normal way. And Snake who was reading his mind at the time, suddenly saw himself watching the terrifying sealing up process of an active and competent, if not healthy, mind. He saw it again in Urson. It's apparently a pretty stiff thing to watch. That's why he stopped reading Urson's thoughts. The idea of stealing the jewels for himself was slowly eating away Urson's balance, the understanding, the ability to reconcile disparities, like the incident with the blue lizard, things like that, all of which were signs we didn't get. Snake contacted Hama by telepathy, almost accidentally. And Hama was something to hold onto for the boy."
"Still, why did Jordde want to kill anybody who had experienced this, voice of God and all?"
"Because Jordde had by now managed to do what a static mind always does. The situation, the beach, the whole thing suddenly meant for him the revelation of a concrete God. Now, he knew that Snake had contacted something also, something which the blind priestesses told him was thoroughly evil, an enemy, a devil. On the raft, on the boat, he religiously tried to 'convert' Snake, till at last, in evangelical fury, he cut the boy's tongue out with the electric generator and the hot wire which the blind priestesses had given him before he left. Why did he want to get rid of anybody who had seen his beach, a sacred place to him by now? One, because the devils were too strong and he didn't want anybody else possessed by them; Snake had been too much trouble resisting conversion. And two, because he was jealous that someone else might have that moment of exaltation and hear the voice of The Goddess also."
"In other words," summarized Iimmi, "he thought what happened to him and Snake was something supernatural, actually connected with the beach itself, and didn't want it to happen to anybody else."
"That's right," said Geo, lying back in his bunk. "Which is sort of understandable. They didn't come in contact with any of the technology of Aptor, and so it might well have seemed that way."
Iimmi leaned back also. "Yeah," he said. "I can see how the same thing almost—almost might have happened to me. If everything had been the same."
Geo closed his eyes. Snake came down and took the top bunk; and when he slept, Snake told him of Urson, of his last thoughts, and surprisingly, things he mostly knew.
Emerging from the forecastle the next morning, he felt bright sunlight slice across his face. He had to squint, and when he did so, he saw her sitting cross-legged on the stretched canvas topping of a suspended lifeboat.
"Hi, up there," he called.
"Hello," she called down. "How are you feeling?"
Geo shrugged.
Argo slipped her feet over the gunwale and with paper bag in hand, dropped to the deck. She bobbed up next to his shoulder, grinned, and said, "Hey, come on back with me. I want to show you something."
"Sure." He followed her.
Suddenly she looked serious. "Your arm is worrying you. Why?"
Geo shrugged. "You don't feel like a whole person. I guess you're not really a whole person."
"Don't be silly," said Argo. "Besides, maybe Snake will let you have one of his. How are the medical facilities in Leptar?"
"I don't think they're up to anything like that."
"We did grafting of limbs back in Aptor," Argo said. "A most interesting way we got around the antibody problem, too. You see—"
"But that was back in Aptor," Geo said. "This is the real world we're going into now."
"Maybe I can get a doctor from the temple to come over," she shrugged. "And then, maybe I won't be able to."
"It's a pleasant thought," Geo said.
When they reached the back of the ship, Argo took out a contraption from the paper bag. "I salvaged this in my tunic. Hope I dried it off well enough last night."
"It's your motor," Geo said.
"Um-hm," said Argo. She put it on a low set of lockers by the cabin's back wall.
"How are you going to work it?" he asked. "It's got to have that stuff, electricity."
"There is more than one way to shoe a centipede," Argo assured him. She reached behind the locker and pulled up a strange gizmo of glass and wire. "I got the lens from Sis," she explained. "She's awfully nice, really. She says I can have my own laboratory all to myself. And I said she could have all the politics, which I think was wise of me, considering. Don't you?" She bent over the contraption. "Now, this lens here focuses the sunlight—isn't it a beautiful day—on these thermocouples. I got the extra metal from the ship's smith. He's sweet. Hey, we're going to have to compare poems from now on. I mean I'm sure you're going to write a whole handful about all of this. I certainly am. Anyway, you connect it up here."
She fastened two wires to two other wires, adjusted the lens, and the tips of the thermocouple glowed red. The armature tugged once around its pivot, and then tugged around once more. Geo glanced up and saw Snake and Iimmi standing above them, looking over the rail on the cabin's roof. They grinned at each other, and then Geo looked back at the motor. It whipped around steadily, gaining speed until it whirred into an invisible copper haze. "Look at that thing go," breathed Argo. "Will you just look at that thing go!"
QUEST AMID FUTURITY'S RUINS
What was the strange impetus that drove a group of four widely different humans to embark on a fear-filled journey across a forbidden sea to a legendary land?
This was Earth still, but the Earth of a future terribly changed after a planet-searing disaster, a planet of weird cults, mutated beasts, and people who were not always entirely human. As for the four who made up that questing party, they included a woman who was either a goddess, a witch, or both, a four-armed boy whose humanity was open to question, and two more men with equally "wild" talents.
The story of their voyage, of the power-wielding "jewels" they sought, of the atomic and post-atomic terrors they encountered, is a remarkable science-fiction Odyssey of the days to come.
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