Cycle of Nemesis (10 page)

Before we retired, each to a separate room and a low comfortable bed with silken sheets, we were each given a flower, a glowing golden eye of beauty. Holding the flowers, we said our good nights. I believe, for myself, that I had no hint of embarrassment, no slightest feeling of ridiculousness. I think, too, that my comrades shared my absor
p
tion with these Flower People and their naive humility and sense of purpose in life.

Just before I slept I walked out for a last look at the scene.

The night glowed with color and life and songs just as we had left it.

Turning to go back to my room I saw Ishphru lying in her cane lounger, her white robe fallen back, her arms and neck bared, reclining like a marble statue from the genius of a Praxiteles. I thought of the Bernini Aphrodite. But Ishphru was no Aphrodite; rather was she Hera, fuller, rounder, slumberous, a Juno in the golden summer of her beauty.

I could see she was not sleeping. Rather she was once more in that strange trance the Flower People could induce, so like and yet so unlike the chemical-mechanical trance of drugs. I felt she was enjoying her journey and I walked softly past her, not wishing to interrupt.

The next morning we breakfasted from fruit and watered wine and crisp rolls heaped with butter as rich and yellow as sunshine. Any feeling I had had the night before of urgency seemed to have slipped away during the night. Pomfret and Lottie looked at each other over their fruit juice, and giggled, and looked away.

“Until we smash through the language barrier we won’t get anywhere,” Brennan said; but he popped a grape into his mouth when he had finished speaking and he didn’t seem bothered about an answer.

Phoebe languidly said, “Y'k
now, Hall, I think it would be lovely to set
tl
e down here. This is the sort of life human beings were meant to live.”

“Amen,” said Pomfret. He was cuddling Lottie now, unashamedly kissing her, both of them laughing and ta
lking soft silliness to each oth
er, unabashed.

I stood up and crossed the breakfast room to look out of the open side—all one wall was window—over the city. Even now, faint but still true, the sound of singing rose into the morning air.

“It all seems very wonderful,” I said. “Almost too good to be true, would you say?”

Phoebe rushed to the defense of the Flower People.

What she said confirmed my belief that she would, really and truly and without hesitation, stay here in preference to a return to the world we had known, a world that lay in the remote future. Her passionate face lifted to mine and the vigor of absolute conviction in her voice showed me how much she had developed from the girl I had met in the picture gallery of Gannets.

Hall Brennan shared some of the responsibility for that, of course, and so did our adventures; but the singing city of the Flower People, Borsuppak, had finally molded her. I knew that I must smash that mold.

That morning we toured the city by daylight. Our host and his three sons attended to the wants of my four compatriots, but Ishphru attached herself to me.

Here, also, was a mold forming that I must smash.

By day the city held as many and varied enchantments as by night. We saw the cascades and the streams and the arcades by brilliant sunshine. Unable to converse with our hosts, we began to develop a sign language which, along with smiles and frowns, rapidly built up into a makeshift communications system. Deliberately I forced myself to think with mechanical orientation and not to allow the medley of flowers and scents and beautiful women to suborn me from the quest—and more than the quest; from our time itself.

Everywhere we were met with smiles and beaming faces as the Flower People of the city welcomed us. Everywhere we met a calm resignation; a gentle acceptance of fate more markedly in evidence when we skirted an area ripped, desecrated and tom.

“A twister went through here, and recently,” Brennan said, and the savage note in his voice chimed at odd variance with the softly lilting voices of the Flower People.

“They seem to have come to terms with the twisters,” observed Phoebe dreamily. “Perhaps they’re like those poor devils of the twentieth century—you know, when they’d first monkeyed around with nuclear weapons.”

“How d’you mean?” asked Brennan, interested in anything Phoebe thought.

“You know-how they lived for a long time in that funny century in fear and dread of someone dropping a hydrogen bomb on them. How it affected everything they touched. How it ruined their art for a time. How some far-seeing people said, ‘Enough!’ and started real life all over again.” She gestured to the ruins. “Maybe

these people handled the problem in a different way—”

“They’ve given in to it!” I said harshly.

Phoebe swung around. Fierce annoyance sparked. “What do you mean, Bert? You’ve not stopped digging at the Flower People since we arrived! What’s the matter-does their innocence make you uncomfortable? Does it make you feel dirty!”

“Here, calm down, old girl,” said Brennan, taking her elbow.

She shook him off. She had worked up a fine passion.

“I
think
these are the finest people I’ve ever met. I’ll thank you not to try to sully them for me.”

Lottie and Pomfret had wandered over to inspect a curious statue that had been fancifully distorted by the twister. They had their arms around each other and they kept giggling.

“I suppose,” Phoebe demanded scornfully, “you disapprove of Lottie and George?”

“Why nt>, Phoebe. Nor of you and Hall.” They both turned their eyes away as I said this and I chuckled. “You and Hall are okay, fine, wonderful. Have some belief in your own strength, Phoebe: it won’t end with Hall when we leave here.”

“I never expected—” She stopped. Her face reddened. I heard Hall say, “Let’s get after the others, Bert. I wanted to talk to you anyway.”

We walked on. Phoebe composed herself and fob lowed. But the problem remained. I had not smashed it, only given it sustenance on which to feed by opposition.

With this insubstantial and yet heavily felt air of strife hovering over us we were escorted into an arched opening in a hillside leading into caverns gouged from the earth. Here an experience awaited me that turned my thoughts from the petty affairs of a moment ago and made me once again realize the vastness of life.

Every wall and ceiling of the connecting series of chambers had been covered by carved arabesques, rosettes, borders, a whole romantic-rococo of bizarre shapes and decorations. I stood in the center cavern admiring the multitudes of patterns like enormous paper doilies on the ceiling above me, seeing the skill with which each pattern varied subtly from its neighbor and yet remained a balanced component of a greater design. The soft electric illumination threw everything into pearly light and charcoal shadow.

Then Lottie screamed.

Pomfret caught her as she staggered back from the wall.

“A skull!
” she screamed. “They’re bones! Skeletons
!
All bones!”

I looked closely. The patterns were indeed composed of bones, human bones: friezes of skulls, curlicues of finger bones, long graceful borders of femurs and tibiae, rosettes of ribs, petals of pelvic girdles. The care and artistry that had gone into this grotto of necrophilic virtuosity had produced a masterwork of the macabre.

George Pomfret, muttering, “Godawful! Godawful!” assisted the half-fainting Lottie out. Phoebe and Brennan, devoted, peered closer, admiring in loud tones the varied patterns.

I smiled. No matter what happened now, they would remain convinced of their vision.

Through archways of piled skulls whose eyeless sockets beamed down in seeming appreciation of this merry jape I walked through to the far end. Estimation of the numbers of dead bodies involved was impossible. Thousands and thousands of people must have been born, lived and died in Borsuppak and their skeletons brought here for decorative purposes.

“I’ve heard of the Capuchin Friars’ Church and what lies beneath it in Rome,” said Brennan. “But this!”

Slowly-we walked back. Once the building material had been accepted and related to stucco and brick and marble, the grottoes could be seen as fairylands of beauty. I felt sure that the People of the Flowers saw them in that light.

Just as we reached the exit the sky darkened.

“Another twister!” shouted Pomfret, running wildly toward us, dragg
in
g Lottie. She hung back. “You’ve got to take cover!" he shouted at her. “Even if it is in a cave full of skeletons!”

Then, worse than the twister, far, far worse than the necrophilic cavern, the solid ground shook uncontrollably beneath our feet.

Once before
I had been embroiled in the insane cauldron of an earthquake. That had been under the sea and merely because of that was of far greater horror and claustrophobic terror than any upheaval on land. Or so I thought as I helped drag Lottie into the haven of the necropolis.

All about us the walls of the cavern shook. Dry bones rattled down, many powdering into dust the moment they struck the ground. Skulls rolled underfoot like a game of bowls in he
ll.

Ishphru came running through the dust. Her face showed wild alarm. Others of the Flower People crowded in and among them all the terror of the moment stamped a fear and an awareness of imminent death in shocking contrast to their calm demeanor of moments before.

What the twister had failed to do this elemental bowel-shaking of the earth had brought about instantly.

Portions of the roof crashed down, choking us in dust, and the darkness rose like a pall.

“Well have to get outside and take our chances there!” I yelled at Brennan above the uproar. He nodded, his face grim and purposeful. The dreamy look had been wiped clean away.

We grabbed the girls and hustled them outside. Other people followed us. Just as we cleared the exit it swayed and groaned as stone supports cracked. Then it collapsed inward like a crone’s mouth at death.

Everywhere we looked the city was being ripped apart.

Giant cracks opened in the ground, and men and women, screaming, vanished into the maw of the earth.

Already parts of the city were on fire. The flames glared luridly through the dust and smoke, orange and sullen red. The noise was continuous, a groaning bedlam composed of shrieks and cries, of the clashing of rocks and the tumbling destruction of beautiful buildings.

Ishphru put her hands to her head wildly. Her eyes glared at me. Unable to speak words of comfort, I grasped her body and held her close, pushing her head down into my shoulders. Dust stung my eyes. The ground shivered beneath my feet as though I stood on a patch of quicksand. At any minute I expected the ground to open up and devour us.

“There’s nothing we can do now except wait for it to stop!” yelled Brennan.

Pomfret, with Lottie in a death-grip, staggered close to us. We six had formed a knot of people motionless in the crazed running and rushing of the Flower People. All of Ishphru’s family had disappeared. I could only hope they were safe.

“This is all Khamushkei’s doing!” yelled Pomfret. His teeth shone fiercely in the ruddy light. “If I could get my hands on him, I’d—”

Phoebe cut in. “The city! Borsuppak! It’s being destroyed!”

“I’d like to get a rope,” I said, my mouth close to Brennan’s ear. We kept bashing at our clothes to remove the clinging dust. Already the clothes we wore were gritty and stained.

“Yes!” he shouted back. “But where?”

In the noise and confusion of rushing people and shifting earth it was difficult to think.

“I’ll risk going into a house if you’ll look after Ishphru,” I said.

“All right.”

We tried to tell Ishphru what we meant by signs, but she was too dazed to understand. Gently, I disentangled myself and gave her over to Hall Brennan and Phoebe.

“Look after her,” I said. I made up my mind again that I mustn’t let this complication grow too set and too much taken for granted. She was a lovely girl, but . . .

The nearest house had collapsed in on itself and half of its lower side and second story had slipped away into a chasm. In the rubble I tried to imagine where a rope would be kept. Luckily I stumbled across the remains of what must have been a garden workshop nestled against the outer wall, still standing, and inside I found a coil of rope among the spades and forks and garden implements.

With the rope slung over my left shoulder I picked my way across the rubble, trying to see through the dust and smoke, anxious to get back to the others.

From the chasm at my feet, clearly visible at that short distance, a gigantic form rose. It scrabbled at the dirt and stones of the cleft, dislodging chunks of rock, rising up like a monster of the netherworld let loose.

I stared in horror.

I recognized the thing at once.

The last time I had seen one like it had been in the picture gallery at Gannets, when it had pursued with its slavering jaws and bloodshot eyes the screaming naked form of Lottie.

Those four iron-booted feet with their sharp steely spikes clawed at the lip of the chasm. Grunting like a revving motorbike it climbed up over the edge. Some Flower People running in the opposite direction saw the thing, screamed, fell away in confusion. It saw them. With a single incredible spring it pounced.

By that time I had the Farley Express unlimbered and I put in a blast that shredded the thing’s back. It went mad.

Before it could reverse its savage jump I centered up the gun and blew the thing’s backbone out through its stomach.

I wasn’t sick. I felt terrible; but life under tire sea inures a man to unpleasant sights.

The Flower People, screaming and pushing at one another to get out of the way, scampered like disturbed mice into the dust and smoke.

As fast as was possible through the chaos I blundered back to the spot outside the collapsed necropolis. How these people regarded the death that comes to everybody must have been a fascinating subject for academic study; right now I had the unwanted opportunity to study it at first hand.

Brennan spotted me and roared out through the din.

Waving reassuringly I joined them. Ishphru gave me a weak smile. We stood for a moment in an eddy of the smoke and dust with the screams and shrieks of dying people reaching us through the smash of a collapsing city. Anything I could do to make her believe this was going to come out right I would obviously do; but I felt strongly that this was the end of the city.

The earth tremors persisted. Shock succeeded shock in a never-ending giddiness that sickened. This was no normal earthquake. This could only be the work of Khamushkei the Undying.

I told Brennan that danger threatened us from the rents in the earth. I tried not to be too specific. If that had been the only iron-booted monster then there was no need to alarm my comrades further. But they must be warned. Here once again I faced an old dilemma: how much to tell the patient.

The question was solved for me—in the worst way possible.

“Look!” screamed Lottie, cowering back against Pomfret. He swung around and the Farley Express appeared in his hand with a speed that told me he had already drawn it.

The iron-booted thing struggled up out of a cleft. Its fangs showed white slivers from which red runnels of fire or blood splintered. Its iron boots rang against the stone, loud above the surrounding din.

“What on Earth—” gasped Pomfret.

“Don’t waste time, George
!
” I shouted. “They’re deadly!”

But Brennan had already blasted his Creighton Eighty and the thing’s head vanished in a gout of flame and blood.

Phoebe shouted something and I grasped her arm, dragging her around to face me. I bent to her ear.

“Remember Lottie!” I yelled. “She doesn’t know!”

Dust and cinders settled on our heads in a fresh wave of smoke billowing over us. Phoebe nodded to show she understood. Sparks and gushes of fire sprang up from a cleft in the ground. White-hot magma oozed over the lip and began to trickle down toward us.

“Let’s move away.” I pulled Ishphru. She clung to me, shaking, her red bps open, her face ghastly.

Around us now a city was dying.

And with it died a people.

We moved away from that smoking cleft, not running wildly, not racing away as though the fiends of hell slavered at our heels—as, in a very real sense, they did —but cautiously, staying together, watching for the slightest cracking of the earth’s surface. Through the smoke and dust and flame we crept away, keeping in the open and avoiding houses and buildings, which continued to fall and bum.

The rope tied us all together. Brennan, as was his elected right, took the lead. I took the rear, with Ishphru immediately ahead of me. But she clung to me and we struggled along over the ruins side by side, the rope slack between us.

How Ishph
ru
found her way through the collapsed ruins and disintegrating buildings amazed me; yet she held on and, eventually taking over the lead from Brennan, led us through the dissolving metropolis to the place where her home had once stood. We could find no sign at all of her family.

The confusi
on clamored on around us, a caco
phonous blasphemy of sound.

“They’re not here,” Brennan said at last.

“We’ve never met her mother,” I said, holding Ishphru tightly around the waist as smoke belched over us. “Her father and brothers stand the same chance as anyone else.”

“I vote,” said Pomfret, pantomiming his words for Ishphru’s sake, “that we get out of the city. One of these damn buildings is going to fall on our heads before much longer.”

“You’re right, George,” Brennan said.

In the clash and challenge of the earthquake all our old comradeship had returned, strengthened now by a greater understanding of one another.

Ishphru shook her head. She struggled against my arm. Like a gentleman—like a fool—I let her go.

My eyes streamed with smoke-started tears; red-rimmed, they stung and bit. Everyone else’s face showed the same painful signs.

Brennan began to lead off, turning with a wry smile as he realized he had no idea of the quickest way out of the falling city into the countryside.

“Ishphru will have to lead us,” I said. She stood there, within reach of my hand, her bosom heaving and ashes falling on her ripped gown, her hair loose and straggling, waving like the unbound hair of women beneath the sea.

Then she ran away.

We all shouted and began to scramble over the ruins after her. Seeing was difficult; sweat and soot and dust mingled into a thick and clinging paste on my face, I fell on rubble as the rope tautened about my waist.

I knew Ishphru was making a last desperate attempt to find her family, yet she must have known as we all knew that they had the same chances we did and that our best opportunity for survival was to leave the city— that they had probably already left. Yet she scrambled wildly among tile ruins, scrabbling her way up the littered hillside toward the place where her house had stood.

With fingers stiff and unresponsive I tore at the knot to untie the rope.

Looking up, I heard a terrible scream, saw Ishphru balanced on a precariously balanced stone column. The ground opened at her feet. Smoke and flame gushed up.

Then the rope was free and I was bounding up the slope, slipping and sliding, falling, but going on and up in a cascade of loose slats and bricks and stones and earth.

Unlike a panic-stricken fool, I didn’t shout after her: she would not have heard in the hellish din and I needed all my breath for running. Smoke billowed down. I caught a glimpse of a shadow-shape; then an iron-booted monster plunged down the hill. There was absolutely no sign of Ishphru. I tried to keep my balance. Tottering and overbalancing, I was borne away by the flood of debris brought down by the monster. Like a helpless chip in an avalanche I went tumbling down the slope.

Brennan caught me; he pulled me upright. Above our heads the iron boots rang against rock, audible like tiny gongs through the uproar. Pomfret let loose a blast from his Farley and the beast sloughed away.

“Ishphru!” I yelled.

“She’s gone, man!” Brennan yelled back. He shook me. “She’s gone
!
”

“And here come more of those beasts.” Pomfret leveled his gun. Lottie stood at his side and Phoebe, whose face looked like a spotted jug where she had dabbed the soot away, stood defiantly beside Brennan. For the first time in many years I felt, suddenly and crushingly, alone.

The driving urgency of the next few moments left me no time to brood over the loss of Ishphru. I blamed myself even though I understood that she would have gone in spite of anything I might have done or said. But more feral monsters slithered and leaped down the slope toward us and my mind switched, in agony and remorse, to the deadly predicament of the moment.

Our guns took a toll, but the monsters continued to pour out of the ground. Through choking smoke we pulled back, wary lest we should be too late to hear the clatter of iron boots from the dust. We kept together as the ground shook. Buildings continued to fall, although the deep rumble of their collapse sounded at wider and wider intervals. Of Borsuppak, little remained standing.

“The fire’s our biggest danger
!
” yelled Brennan.

“The fire!” I roared back, determined not to think of the Junoesque girl forever lost to me. “You mean fires!”

All about us now the air and smoke shook and quivered as superheated gusts of air sucked fiery gales across the devastated city. It became difficult to breathe, more even than before when only dust and smoke choked our lungs; now we felt the searing breath of hell itself scorch across our shrinking bodies.

And Ishphru was gone. Nothing—now—could alter that.

Back through the smoke we staggered, flames licking at us, our arms over our heads in futile protection, our feet slipping and sliding on the loose rubble of a city.

Through the smoke an ungainly figure loomed and my gun switched up, my finger trembling on the trigger. Then a remembered mechanical cheerful voice called: “Don’t shoot! It’s me—Charlie!”

We crowded up to the robot, a great burst of comradeship toward the mechanical man a reaction against the unknown horrors about us.

“Charlie! Where have you been?”

“I have been searching the city for you—this is not a happy place. We should leave—immediately!”

I wanted to laugh insanely at that I grabbed Brennan’s shoulder.

“We’ve got to go eastward!” I yelled in his ear, howling like an insane wolf against the fury of the fire.

“Get out of here, anyhow!” he screamed back. “I don’t care which way we go!”

The tornadoes that had stricken the Flower People, the earthquake that had thrown down their city, all the horror they were now suffering derived from Khamushkei the Undying.

I dragged Brennan in the direction I thought was east. A flat area extended there, smoke-filled but, blessedly, for the moment empty of the lurid gleam of fire.

Pomfret followed us, coughing, pulling Lottie.

“We’ve got to go east!” I shouted.

“Just get me outta here!” Phoebe clung to Brennan. We all looked like half-naked, begrimed imps of hell. Tears cut swathes down our filthy cheeks, streaming freely from our red inflamed eyes.

With a stubborn belief that if we moved eastward we would pose a threat to Khamushkei and force him to time-jump us again, I bellowed and pushed and forced my four comrades on. I felt a cringing desire to drop, shut my eyes and rest, but I knew we must go on. To remain here, city or no city, in this time, would be to be defeated utterly.

Ahead shadows moved.

“Oh, no
!
More of the things!”

In a fiery eddy of the smoke ahead we could clearly see four of the nameless iron-booted monstrosities clanking toward us. Their eyes shone with reflected fire glow. Pomfret took out the left hand one, his blast shredding gray fur and smoking iron-boots into slag. Brennan shot the right hand one, his Creighton Eighty exploding a shell accurately on the thing’s sagging body. About to let fly at the right hand of the two center ones, I halted a fraction of a second, puzzled by a curving violet line like the shell of a bubble that sprang into existence. The violet sphere appeared to envelope us. Then my finger pressed the trigger and the third monster sloughed away. Pomfret took the last. We could have pity for these misshape
n
things, feel sorry that we had to shoot them, but not even a cretin would believe they were advancing with the object of shaking hands. We had to protect ourselves. The guilt lay with Khamushkei the Undying.

“What is it?” shouted Phoebe.

The heat of the city-wide fire that a moment before had been burning in on us with such fury vanished and we stood insubstantially on a shimmering, wavering violet bubble-shell.

A single distorted moment of vertigo, of movement, of molecule reorientation, and the violet bubble vanished and we stood amazed on a cold and shining, vast steel floor. Above our heads reared a metal ceiling—a metal sky!—so far away the ribbings which spanned fifty feet at their bases seemed like spider-silk. The air chilled with a spiced-wine sweetness, almost sour, bracing as ozone. All along the wall before us—metal wall, vast, high, broad—a towering tier of steps rose into a metal curtain. That curtain hung solidly down, preventing any view of what lay beyond. We felt like ants in the bottom of a bath. Noises spurted and echoed and died in the vastness.

“Where the hell are we?” said Brennan. He revolved slowly, his gun pointing, boxing the compass with an unbelieving expression on his face. We all looked around, quite at a loss to understand where we were.

“Isn’t it funny!” giggled Lottie. She put her hand to her mouth, her eyes large and open with shock.

“Shut up, you silly idiot!” Brennan blazed. He stared about him, trying to see all directions at once.

“Here, Hall!” said Pomfret “That’s no way—”

“She wants to keep silent. Who knows what can happen next—” Brennan had been badly shaken by this experience.

Phoebe put a hand on his arm and pressed it, smiling up at him.

I began to walk slowly toward the nearest wall where the buttresses reached the steel floor like giant squared-off trees. Statues had been carved in a thrice-life-size frieze. There, plainly visible in the all-pervading source-less light, were lamassu, utukku, gods and beasts and men, carved in grotesque blasphemous attitudes.

Charlie’s ugly face, even more battered by falling rocks from the vanished city of Borsuppak, rotated slowly. He sized up the giant cavern, or hangar, or room, checking with patient mechanical skills.

“Well, Charlie?” Pomfret asked, as though his butler had just walked in with a card on a silver tray.

“Not good, boss.” Charlie’s sensors worked overtime.