Lin Carter - The City Outside the World (17 page)

It was as if, for some reason, they were forbidden to kill, and could only repulse an attack, not initiate one.

Ryker thought this was very queer.

After an hour or two of this, a few human observers appeared atop the battlements to watch the rams. One of these was a frail old man with a silver furcap, his lean body wrapped in gorgeous brocades. Ryker recognized him as Melandron.

Another was Valarda herself.

She was dressed like an empress, her slim golden body blazing with gems and precious metals, draped in rich fabrics. The black silk of her hair was caught in a net studded with winking purple rubies, and atop her proud head she wore a construction of curving gold loops and arabesques like a crown. From a clip of strange amber gems fixed to the browpiece of this odd-shaped coronet, glossy plumes of pink and peach and pistachio green floated behind her. Her small, firm breasts were cupped in shallow coils of golden wire.

He stared at her hungrily, his eyes slitted and hard and hating. She leaned over the parapet to observe the activity below, then turned her face to make some remark to a smooth-faced young princeling who stood beside her. Evidently, it was a jest, because he laughed and she smiled.

Then she looked down again and across the length of the causeway, and her eyes met those of Ryker.

She knew him in an instant, and her face went pale. Suddenly her great eyes became shadowed, her face drawn and somehow mournful. She said nothing, and made no sign, but looked at him for a long time with an expression on her perfect features that resembled sorrow.

Fat Houm had spied her as well, and sidled up to where Zarouk stood overseeing the toiling of the men at the rams. The greedy merchant whispered in Zarouk's ear and drew his attention to the slim, graceful golden girl on the ramparts.

He barked an order, and his guards lifted to their lips the long black tubes they used with such deadly accuracy as blowguns.

Ryker stepped forward uncertainly, his lips shaping a cry which he never spoke—

The languid handsome youth beside Valarda saw all of this in the same instant. Languidly he raised to his own lips a long, slim-throated horn of glittering gold. A sharp liquid song pierced the air, shrilly calling. A beckoning sound, emphatic as a regal summons, rang forth.

Suddenly the air was filled with winged serpents.

Sleek, jewelled coils drifting and undulating on the air, upheld by the thrumming of those strange wings like fans of thick plumes, they darted about like hummingbirds.

Ryker watched the first of Zarouk's marksmen loose the first of the poisoned darts.

A serpent plucked it from midair!

Then a veritable shower of the slim, deadly needles flew from the mouths of the black tubes. Not so much as one of these reached its mark.

The men lowered their tubes, grimacing lamely.

The golden horn sang forth again, a keen, peremptory command composed of three liquid notes.

The writhing cloud of airborne serpents who floated before Valarda to shield her from the darts, now flung themselves down upon the marksmen.

The men wavered, broke, fled in all directions, pursued by agile and flickering wings.

The serpents caught in their fanged mouths the slim black tubes and bore them away.

Then the aerial swarm turned its attentions upon the ram teams, in instantaneous response to a trilling of the golden horn.

Swarming in midair above the apprehensive warriors,

they darted down to snap fanged jaws before the faces of the fearful warriors, who threw their hands before their eyes to protect them from the darting serpents.

They darted hither and thither—hovered to beat their plumes in the faces of the warriors—arrowed in writhing flights to snatch at their cloaks—buffeting them about the head and neck with beating wings—virtually snapping at their heels like a pack of mongrels.

The men blanched, threw down their rams, and ran for shelter.

The aerial serpents pursued them back to their camp, then rose in a twisting stream of glittering pink-and-azure forms, and floated back to the parapets.

While Ryker and the men near him stared in awe, Valarda laughed, caressing the graceful creatures as if to thank them. They fluttered away behind the walls, vanishing from view, but probably they did not go far and could be summoned again, swiftly and easily.

Then the Stone Giants dropped lines over the lip of the parapet, snagged several of the makeshift rams in the sharp teeth of the hooked grapnels affixed to the ends of the lines, and dragged about half of the beams up to the top of the walls.

The workers growled and grimaced and waved threatening fists, but none of them quite dared risk another attack by the flying snakes to return to the foot of the wall in order to retrieve the rams they had abandoned.

Zarouk vanished into his tent, his brow thunderous.

And it was still stalemate. In fact, now it was even more so.

The human inhabitants of the City lingered for a little while atop the battlements as if waiting for more action to commence. Finally, they drifted off lazily, vanishing from sight.

Valarda was the last to leave, and before she too turned to go she looked again at Ryker. Her face was sad and her eyes seemed eloquent and pleading. Then she sighed, and vanished from his view.

That evening he lay a long time under the misty skies, staring at nothing. His thoughts were disordered, his emotions in turmoil. If Valarda had laughed at him, mocked him, spurned him, he would have been easier in his heart.

But she had not. She had seemed to beg him wordlessly for forgiveness. And that he could not forget.

He had assumed her his enemy, and had hated her, despising himself for the ache of desire he still felt in his loins for the golden girl.

And he had accepted without quarrel or dispute the black and dire assessment of Zarouk upon the folk of Zhiam. The desert prince called them devil worshippers, and so Ryker had thought of them.

But could men who worship evil have raised so lovely a dream city as this?

Could such evil dwell in this Edenic garden world, among such exquisite loveliness?

Could horror find a home here, where even the beasts did not eat of each others' flesh, but fed from ripe fruits, side by side, the lion lying down with the lamb?

Ryker was beginning, however reluctantly, to change his opinion of the Lost Nation. Despite what Zarouk and men like him said of this people, they appeared to be a serene and peaceful race, lovers of beauty, who lived in tranquility, and existed in harmony with this calm and lovely world they had found.

It seemed beyond dispute that this was true. The tales he had been told of the despicable
zhaggua
and their evil ways perhaps were sullied and distorted by the blind

fanaticism of men like the priest Dmu Dran, and by the cunning of such ambitious zealots as Zarouk, and by the greed of such as Houm. And those tales might not be true.

Why had not Valarda unleashed against them the immensely strong Stone Giants, to slay and maim the warriors?

Why had not the warriors of her own people manned the walls, to cut the desert raiders down with spear and dart and missile?

Why had not the winged serpents so much as inflicted a single wound upon the men when they harried them from the gate?

If this world was truly another Eden, then perchance its unknown and nameless god had issued forth a commandment which was to be obeyed by all of the living creatures of this world, including men—a commandment identical to another given voice by yet a different God from the cloud-wrapped heights of Sinai long ago—

Thou shalt not kill.

Ryker felt a cold horror growing in his guts. It was he alone had made it possible for these warriors to invade this gentle, idyllic Eden. He had given them the key to open those gates that should have been guarded by angels with flaming swords.

Oh, God,
what had he done?

19. The Secret of Zhiam

Ryker awoke shortly
before dawn, disturbed by something entering the tent. He sat up swiftly, reaching about him for a weapon. Then he relaxed, leaning back. By the flickering green nightlight of the small bronze pan of liquid fire he saw that it was the old Israeli scientist.

"You're still awake, my boy?" asked the old man in his querulous voice. Ryker nodded, then looked closely at him. Herzog seemed like a man walking in his sleep-distracted, bemused, almost ecstatic.

"Are you all right, Doc?" he asked.

The old man looked at him with eyes filled with excitement.

"What's with me?" he chuckled. "Ah, my boy, you should ask it. I have the proof now, all I need. Wonderful—incredible! You wouldn't believe it!"

"What wouldn't I believe?" grinned Ryker. The old man's enthusiasm could be infectious at times. Ryker didn't know very much about science, and cared little, but the way the scientist was carrying on was beginning to arouse his curiosity. He seemed to be repressing his emotions with difficulty, trembling with sheer delight.

"I know where we are
—that's all!" Herzog burst out.

Ryker blinked.

"All right, where
are
we?" he asked, as it was obviously expected of him.

Doc sat down, squatting tailor-fashion or a bit of rug one of the warriors had given them for their tent.

"You were thinking it was another dimension," the old man began. "And I told you that it wasn't, because the word doesn't
mean
anything, not in that context, anyway—"

"Yeah," said Ryker flatly. "I remember. Go on."

"Oh, I guessed it from the very beginning! I had no proof, is all. Theories, sure; hypotheses, plenty. But
evidence?
Hard facts, data, these were what I needed. You see, a theory is nothing unless it covers the observed phenomena and accounts for all items of data—"

" Will
you get to it," groaned Ryker. "Save the lectures for the classroom, just out with it and let me get back to sleep!"

Doc looked apologetic.

"The stars," he blurted. "The constellations were, well, twisted around, maybe, but I could still recognize them. You see, that meant we were still in our galaxy, still in our own immediate stellar neighborhood, in fact. Our system belongs to a—what do you call it in English, outcropping? No—peninsula? Well, whatever. It's called the Orion Spur, and it sticks out of the Carina-Cygnus Arm of our galactic spiral like ..."

Doc broke off, realizing that he was rambling on in the general direction of another digression. He frowned determinedly. "All right, all right! Here's the gist of it. The constellations were distorted, but not distorted
right.
I mean, they weren't angled around as if we were seeing them from a different direction, or anything like that. They looked inside out, and the only way I could explain
that
was with one single assumption. But it was even more fantastic, the assumption, you see, than the idea that by going through the door we had somehow been transported to another planet somewhere in 'near space.' So I looked around, and believe me, I kept my eyes open!"

Ryker opened his mouth, weary of this roundabout way of getting to the point. Doc raised his hand and hastened to it.

"The cats," he breathed faintly. "There were cats like that back on Mars once, we know, from fossils. In fact, some authorities consider it at least possible that the Martian natives evolved from a common feline ancestry, just like you and I, my boy, evolved from a
simian
ancestor. But there are no apes on Mars, and nothing like apes, and there never have been."

He grinned excitedly, his face lighting up with enthusiasm.

"And then, those
trees,"
he burbled. "Well, there used to be trees of some sort back on Mars, too, and again we know this from the fossil record."

An uncanny presentiment began to make Ryker's nape hairs lift, and the skin creep on his forearms.

"Doc, what are you trying to say?" he breathed.

"And the vegetation is all
blue!
Just like it is on Mars, even today! Oh, biochemists worked out the formula for photosynthesis on Mars way back when. With the kind of sunlight that reaches Mars, blue vegetation canphotosyn-thesize just as well as green does back where you and I come from. You know? But trees—and those cats—and air this warm and humid, and all the free water in those lakes—Mars hasn't had any of these things in millions and millions of years! So that was the problem I sort of had to solve. Oh, I knew the answer already, by sheer intuition; but the solution to the problem was even more fantastic than the problem itself, if you know what I mean. But I put the facts together, and they
fit—"

"Where—"

"So, where are we, you ask?" The aged scientist

beamed upon him fondly. "On Mars, my boy, where else?"

"But—" began Ryker, exasperatedly.

"The important question isn't really
where,"
finished Doc. "It's
—when!"