Cycle of Nemesis (9 page)

The odalisque took a half-pace back. Then, with an answering smile, she took the chocolate from Phoebe.

I watched, fascinated by this cultural exchange.

Motioning with her fingers, Phoebe persuaded the girl to bite a piece of chocolate. A strange expression swept across the girl’s full-featured face, then her sudden grimace of pleasure showed us she had got the flavor of the chocolate. She broke pieces off and handed them to her companions.

In a quarter of an hour, with more candy and lots of gesticulations and slow mouthed-out talk, we knew her name was Ishphru, the three young men were respectively, Ezidru, Haburu and Nabuko, and that they had flown from their city of Borsuppak on a picnic. We had to accept that; they obviously were out enjoying themselves, and yet we felt picnic did not quite explain their liveliness once they had overcome their first fears of us, once they realized we meant them no harm.

The brooding looks remained, however; that set square down-drawn look whose very menace could not be dissipated by lively talk, gesticulating hands and the sharing of candy. Something was on these people’s minds and I wanted to know what it was. The language problem would prove insoluble without quick access to a computer; and computers of the type we needed wouldn’t be invented for—for how long? Just how many thou-

sands of years were we back in the past? With an
airplane?

“I suppose we couldn’t be in the future, could we?” demanded Phoebe.

“There’s no reason why not, I guess.”

“Come on, Hall,” said Pomfret in his brusque way. "You’re the expert. There’s a plane and all; and these people-just where are we?”

Before
Br
ennan
could reply a dull murmur that we had heard for some time now and scarcely been conscious of in our vexing interchanges with the strangers grew, bellowed into an earth-shaking roar, funneled a black torrent of air and debris and noise in the mother and father of all twisters.

Out from the lowering clouds it spun. Like a tall and swaying flower of evil it scorched across the face of the land toward us.

In its path trees, shrubs, debris, leaves, everything whirled up, spinning. Clearly caught up and swirling in that blasphemous black blossom we could see the smashed masonry of a fractured city, gleaming white, spitting out like stone shrapnel.

Straight for us sped the twister.

We had no cover.

The roaring and the blackness leaped up io tower over us like a cobra about to strike.

The girl tugged
my arm.
Her
large dark eyes, heavy and slumberous with those long curled lashes, were wide open
in
frenzy; her crimson mouth screamed strange
words, her whole straining attitude compelled me to run with her.

The three young men were trying to make my four companions follow them.

Then Charlie appeared from the plane’s cockpit, standing at the top of the steps like some misshapen mechanical monster from a nightmare.

The four strangers cowered back, the three young men showing by their faces the fear they felt, and the girl Ishphru, by her sudden painful grip on my arm, the fear and the desire to help us dominating her. I felt in the whirling uproar of the approaching twister, in the dark dankness of its shadow, a sudden great affection for these unknown people of an unknown time.

Charlie was enough to frighten the toughest slum cop; yet these four young people with their mystic reserves of strength forced themselves to accept him and continue to try to help us. Clearly, they wanted us to run with them.

“Where to?” screamed Phoebe, white-faced. “There’s no running away from that thing
!
”

“It’ll be right over us in a minute!” shouted Brennan. He made the decision I should have made before. “Grab what you can and run with these people! They live here. They should know the score.”

Charlie had already doped that out and now he flung down our food satchels and the duffle bags we had taken from the wrecked jet. With the girl pulling my arm and her companions helping the others, and with Charlie stomping along in the rear, we ran helter-skelter for the comer of the field.

The darkness swooped above us with a palpable blackness, a sickening and choking sensation, as though the air itself were changed and charged with destruction.

Heads bent low, we ran on, not knowing where we ran or why we ran, but blindly following the urgent promptings of the strangers.

In the comer of the field stood a brown stone marker covered with writing which, even in the short glimpse I had of it, I could see was not the hieroglyphic or hieratic one might have expected in the context. One of the young men pressed a hidden spring and the stone swiveled aside like a solid revolving door. We saw a dark opening revealed beneath.

“A storm cellar 1” gasped Brennan. “Of course. If these people are infested by twisters they will have taken precautions.”

Then we were all bundling down the stone stairs, seeing lights springing up below us into a white pearl glow —electric lights. The last man down returned the stone to its original position and as he did so, looking over his shoulder, I saw the last segment of blue sky vanish into an inferno of rushing blackness. The stone shuddered.

The man said something in his slow voice and I guessed at the content as, automatically, I said, “It must be absolute hell out there now.”

At the bottom of the steps lay a fair-sized chamber hewn from the earth, with a flagged floor and rough wooden walls with a bench. We all sat down. The electric lights, four of them, attracted my attention. They were crude, it is true, with their glass apparently not mass-produced so that each lamp was a subtly different size and shape from its neighbor; they illuminated the storm shelter adequately, though.

Some sense of oppression, of a cowering away down here, filled the chamber with a tendril of the darkness and chaos of the outside world. No one seemed anxious to meet anyone else’s eyes. When I coughed Phoebe and Ishphru started.

The shaking of the stone and the half-felt, half-feared vibrations in the earth around us gradually subsided. Charlie, whose metallic bulk scraped the ceiling, sat a little apart from us and now and then one of the strangers would give him a quick look that refused to stay for too long on his metallic alienness. When at last silence returned it was Charlie who rose first
I viewed the ascent into the world above with little enthusiasm. From the moment we had consciously formulated our plan to re-imprison Khamushkei the Undying he had struck at us as he pleased and when he pleased. And now we must spend valuable time trying to make communication with these people, who, at least, seemed genuinely friendly, and try to obtain from them some form of transport to carry on our crusade.

Then, like a drop of sugar on the tongue, Ishphru in her conversation with her comrades used a word I recognized and that brought my comrades to their feet in excited question.

Ishphru had said: “Khamushkei.”

She had followed the name with a word I guessed meant Undying. There could be no mistake: a nodal point of contact had been made.

When we had restored order among ourselves, Hall Brennan received the elected post of spokesman.

Carefully, he said to Ishphru, “Khamushkei?”

She pointed upward, her dark beautiful face suddenly gr
im
.

“Khamushkei] Khamushkei!”

Brennan nodded. He spoke the hated name again and then contorted his face to indicate that he, too, like all of us, had no use for the Time Beast Ishphru responded at once. She made an unmistakable motion of striking someone with a dagger held the wrong way, her face twisted into a savage mask. She stamped her foot. “Khamushkei!” she said, and followed that with a string of what I could only believe, in that context, must be expletives.

Brennan faced us, his face showing his excitement.

“I believe,” he said in a quick breathy way, “I believe we’re back in the time when there was this earlier world civilization—the one destroyed by Khamushkei
!
”

“That would explain it—” Pomfret said, his red face darker and ruddier than ever.

"But the Time Beast did destroy it!” I pointed out. “And maybe that’s what the twister was all about. If that wasn’t a personification of Khamushkei the Undying himself, then it was sent by him and was designed not only to kill us but to smash this world to smithereens!”

Not understanding our conversation, although reacting with a start each time the name of the Time Beast was mentioned, and no doubt suffering from claustrophobic feelings I ascribed to them as people loving light and air, Ishphru and her three companions began to move about the storm cellar and to begin the ascent up the rocky steps. We stopped talking to look at them and as though awaiting that signal Ezidru leaped up the steps and pressed the hidden spring.

Slowly the great stone began to revolve.

“They were waiting to go out until we’d finished talking,” Phoebe whispered. She looked at the strangers. “How polite can you get?”

Now a ray of sunlight slashed a golden stroke down the steps. The electrics dimmed.

Ishphru cried out joyfully, lifting her arms. She ran up the steps. Caught by a sudden magnetic attraction for her, I followed, seeing her slim legs flashing against the light. We burst out into a drenched and silent world.

She exclaimed in delight and I guessed she was overjoyed at our deliverance. I took her hand and pressed it. She looked at me with those enormous eyes, half minded, I guessed, to pull away and then, as I smiled at her, letting her hand stay between mine.

When we had all collected at the top of the steps with our baggage, Ezidru, who appeared to be the senior man, pointed toward the east. “Borsuppakl” he said.

We began walking through the wet grass. Ahead the clouds were already lifting and the rain had stopped.

There was no sign of our airplane or the orange jeweled insect plane of the strangers; the twister had taken them, shredded them and deposited them somewhere—somewhere else, certainly nowhere around here.

Although the walk was pleasant—I was careful to station myself beside Ishphru—Charlie very quickly carried all of our baggage. His steel and titanium limbs did not feel the fatigue that assailed and defeated human life.

Pomfret began to wheeze and then to complain.

“How much longer is this going on? I mean—where are we going?’'

"To this city of theirs, Borsuppak,” Brennan said curtly.

At the sound of the name the four strangers nodded and urged us on. They acted in the most friendly way.

“Well, I don’t like it,” grumbled good old George.

I didn’t want once again to have to revise my opinion of the man, but Lottie said tartly, “Oh, shut up, do, George
!
Can’t you see that if we had transportation we’d use it! These people, whoever they are, are walking like us, aren’t they?”

Presently a flickering emerald glow chittered out toward us, appearing like a giant dragonfly from a line of trees barring our view of the horizon. The countryside appeared flat, with rolling hills; nowhere, as yet, could we see any mountains.

This new insect-plane landed with a brilliant burst of color and a dying whine from its wings. Ishphru cast me a wonderful smile and we all increased our pace.

Another moment and we were standing in the shadow of the stranger aircraft and staring up at the middle-aged man who regarded us with that familiar down-drawn lowering look the people of this land all seemed to possess.

The intricate maneuvering of the wings of this craft and the complex wing-root junctions occupied me most of the flight. We went up smoothly with a faint vibration and the gentlest of swaying motions that, after flying in a conventional airplane, came as peculiar and restful. Every now and then I flicked a quick look around the horizon and across the ground floating past below. If I expected to be attacked by an utukku I wasn’t going to tell my comrades—at least, not until the last moment. I thought of Brennan’s heli.

Then Boisuppak drifted into view beyond a low ridge of tree-covered hills.

“By all that’s holy!” said Brennan. “I didn’t expect anything like that!”

Truth to tell, I’d been expecting an ocher colored walled city of flat-topped windowless buildings with ziggurats here and there and guard towers and massive gates. That would have fitted the pattern of cities that would be built here in the future.

The city toward which we now slanted had no tough defensive walls around it. It possessed a multitude of open spaces, of parks and lawns and gay flower beds.

Houses had been sculpted into the slope of hills, so that a whole windowed wall leaned from a slope of greenery. Lightness, delicacy and grace suffused the city with color and gaiety.

We all stared, entranced.

“It’s beautiful!" said Phoebe, the sunshine on her face lighting her in an aureole of reciprocal beauty. She had never looked more lovely than at that moment. I recalled our first meeting, so short a time ago, and my judgment of her as a young, not overly beautiful, healthy, attractive girl who fitted her background just right—now she was adapting to another background and, in part, she could thank Hall Brennan for the improvement.

Ishphru saw my eyes on Phoebe and she smiled. I nodded and smiled back and then, gently and with a careful discrimination, slid my eyes at Brennan. Ishphru laughed and nodded delightedly.

The insect plane slanted down toward the city.

We landed in a plaza of warm red brick and cool yellow marble where purple and gold flowers nodded heavily from trellises, where long-tailed firebirds of orange and emerald and blue screamed and rustled their feathers, and from which the odors of flowers reached out a rich fragrance.

Led by the aviator we walked slowly through the city, continually delighted by what we saw, every fresh vista and view a charm. We were conducted into a newly-painted house with a green slanting roof over which the plumes of trees swayed and dappled the sunshine into a restful shade.

Here we settled in for the day, it seemed to me, not anxious to get on, for serving girls, who laughed and giggled and slid sloe eyes at us, provided us with soft towels and bowls of clear water. We were given a fine feast, sitting at a table in a flower-decked arbor and eating and drinking food and wines that Pomfret, for one, pronounced as good as any he had ever tasted.

Ishphru and her friends joined us with the aviator who had found us and in the course of the next hour or so we discovered that the four were brothers and sister, that the flier was their father, and that they apparently lived an idyllic life, for the idea of work aroused in them an infectious laughter we found difficult to resist.

Ishphru, in a Junoesque pose, reached out to pluck a flower from the arbor. Smiling with her dark eyes she cradled the flower in her palms where its warm yellow reflected like a magic lamp.

She motioned to the flower, and then to herself, then to her brothers and father. Then she swung one rounded arm to encompass the city. She spoke a few words, low and musically.

Phoebe said, “I think she means these people are called the Flower People. That’s their name.”

We confirmed that and went on trying to find out just where the Time Beast had flung us in the long panorama of Time.

With the coming of night immense cool lamps of pearly radiance lighted up over our heads and with a slithery rustle plaited screens dropped over the arbor openings so that we sat around the table as though suspended in a globe of light. Stretching out in the comfortable cane chairs with plump cushions to soften the angular parts, we drank excellent wine and tried to fathom out not only when in time we were but what we could do.

Later on the Flower People stretched out in cane loungers and, with their eyes focused on the warmth of flowers above their heads, seemed to go off into deep trance. They were not asleep. A word, a movement, would waken them so that they would turn lazily toward us, smile, and bestow a benediction in their glances, and then return to that withdrawal from the life around them.

“It’s as though they’re drugged,” whispered Phoebe.

Of us all she had best picked up the nuances from these people. She stared on them now with a great affection and longing in her face.

Suddenly the sound of chanting, deep and sonorous, filled the arbor: many voices uplifted in joyous singing came to us through the night.

Haburu rose from his lounger and crossed to the plaited screens, lifting them so that we could all look out into the placid night. Out there myriads of colored torches wound in splendid procession around the bases of the hills, through the gardens and groves, winding like living, pulsing rivers of light. The gay songs poured through the scented night.

Called from their self-induced trances, the Flower People rose and led us out and down flower-strewn pathways to join the laughing, singing processions of people walking unhurriedly through the night. We found flowers garlanding our necks. Torches lighted the scene, flashing from laughing eyes and mouths, reflecting from simple jewelry. Exotic scents wafted sweetness everywhere. Hand in hand we strolled among the bejeweled brilliances of a fairy city.

I don’t know how long the throngs of people surged and eddied and laughed and sang, drifting through the soft night from pools of radiance to broad swathes of light, down tiers of stairs and along terraces, past vast urns of flowers and beneath the overflowing abundance of trees. With a charming smile all of a piece with the courteous way of life of these Flower People, our host indicated that perhaps we were tired and would wish to rest. Reluctantly, for the night’s swaying promise held our interest and admiration, we agreed. Walking back to the house through the perfumes and the radiance and the songs, we felt that this way of life was indeed, the only true way.