Lin Carter - The City Outside the World (2 page)

Now the serving boys came out from wherever they had been hiding, with ceramic pitchers full of wine. Gradually, the numb trance faded and men began to shuffle, grunt, move again.

Ryker accepted a bowl of sharp red wine and drank it thirstily.

His mind was busy with something that bothered him.

It was the girl, or, rather, her
eyes.

As she had glided past him through the bead curtains, one strand had caught upon the corner of her visor and stripped it from her face. And he had gotten one swift, transient glimpse of her eyes.

They were huge and thick lashed, those eyes, tip-tilted and inexpressibly lovely.

And they were
golden.
Golden as puddles of hot metal poured by the jeweler for the making of a precious brooch.

And that was strange. For the People (as the Martian natives call their race) have, most commonly, eyes of amber, sometimes of liquid brown, and even occasionally of emerald. But never of gold. Or never that Ryker knew or had ever seen.

She could not have been an Earthsider, not with that tawny skin and blacksilk hair and snub-nosed cat's face. Nor a Martian, not with those eyes of molten gold.

Which meant she was of an unknown race. . . .

Or from an unknown world!

2. Whispering Shadows

he had been
on Mars a dozen years, had Ryker, but he was no Colonist.

In the early days, Earthside governments had found few of their people willing to emigrate to the distant, dry, hostile planet. So they had forced emigration by making it legal punishment for certain crimes. In the same manner, and for much the same reason, Britain had once dumped it's unwanted and condemned on the shores of Australia, dooming these unfortunates to a lifetime of penal servitude in a prison the size of a continent, whose walls were oceans, with storms for guards.

What Ryker had done back on Earth to merit deportation does not concern us here. But he had not been a criminal, exactly, unless adherence to unpopular political philosophies be deemed a crime. Once he had been, in his way, something of a patriot. Once he had placed the common good above his own comfort and security. But no longer.

Here, on this ancient desert world, merely to survive is difficult enough. To
live
is something else again. And Ryker had lived, which is to say, he had been made to do things he would not have chosen to do, had conditions been otherwise.

But here, at least, he was free. If Mars, in the beginning, had been a prison, it was a prison without walls, where the condemned could freely come and go as they willed. The only thing they could not do was return to

Earth again. Only the most serious crimes merited real imprisonment. Those who, back on Earth, had been judged homicidal murderers, political assassins, terrorists, or dedicated revolutionaries, were sent here to sweat and scrabble in the barium mines until death released them from their chains.

Men such as Ryker were not thought dangerous enough to be locked away in that living hell. There was no need for Earthmen to toil like animals in the black, bottomless mines. For that, the Colonial Administration had the natives. True, they were human enough, the People— although, perhaps, their remotest racial ancestor, in the dim beginnings of time, had been feline whereas ours was simian. Once they had been a mighty race, the builders of a high civilization, the proud inheritors of a noble tradition of art, literature and philosophy. But that great heritage had dwindled and perished during the early Pleistocene.

Mars was old—
old.
As her green oceans dried and shrank, as her rich atmosphere thinned, as her internal fires cooled, that which had been lush meadow and forest-land once, became dry, powdery desert. No longer could the red world support her teeming life, so that life . . . died.

What was left was in time reduced to savagery, to barbarism. The few remnants of her proud empires inexorably dwindled to ragged, starveling outlaw bands, who huddled for warmth in the ruined shells of what once had been brilliant and populous cities, and thus Mars broke and humbled the last of her children. The People had lost the dice-roll of destiny; and Earthlings had never liked losers. So, while a few scientists studied their dying traditions and strove to rescue from oblivion their half-forgotten sciences, the more brutal—or more practical— of the uninvited visitors from the green world nearer to the

sun regarded them as ignorant savages to be ruthlessly exterminated, cruelly exploited, casually enslaved.

It was an old, old story back on Earth. But history tends to repeat itself, and while glittering socialites in sophisticated capitals glibly murmur of basic rights and freedoms, things are done on far frontiers that would shock them into unbelieving, bewildered horror.

Frontier garrisons are frontier garrisons. Life is hard and survival is chancy. And dead natives tell no tales.

Thus the People, by now, had good reason to hate and distrust the Outworlder colonists and to avoid commerce with them. Luckily, Mars is wide and most of it is uninhabited and hostile wilderness. So, while the Colonists clung together, holding the thin cold air and the dry sterile deserts at bay behind their plastic inflatable domes and pressure pumps, the Martian natives had all their world to roam free, and only a few of the hardiest among the Colonials risked leaving the snug security of their plastic warrens for the hazards which await the unwary beyond lhe half-dozen colonies.

Ryker knew there was no going back, and had determined to survive in any way he could. The air of Mars is thin and starved for oxygen as it is for moisture, but there was a way Earthsider lungs and blood chemistry could be subtly modified to endure it without cumbersome thermal suits and respirators. This method, the Mishubi-Yakamoto regimen, cost money. But with it, Ryker would be free to wander the surface of Mars for as long as he could stay alive.

So he got the money. Never mind how. If, in getting it, he bent a few laws to the breaking point, and filled a fat dossier in the Criminal Files of the Colonial Administration, the getting made him freer than before. The paradox is but one of those Mars affords its visitors.

The People themselves are by way of being rebels against CA law, which makes them outcasts and criminals, fair game for any cop with a grudge. The only
F'yagha
they permit a wary sort of welcome into their towns or encampments are, similarly, criminals and outcasts. Ryker had, early on, won the friendship of the native clans, or as much friendship as any Earthsider can win, which isn't much. Call it toleration if you will, and not friendship. At least he was free to come and go among the People with no questions asked, so long as he kept to himself, left their women alone, kept away from their holy places, and did not meddle in their affairs.

What he did upon leaving the joy-house was dangerous, very dangerous. For he was breaking those unwritten laws he had so scrupulously observed all these years.

And the penalty was death.

Keeping well to the shadows, he was following the dancing girl, the old man and the boy.

Why he was doing this he could not have explained even to himself. Call it curiosity, if you like, or a hunch. But outcasts like Ryker do not live very long on Mars unless they develop that sixth or seventh sense that permits them to smell out danger before it strikes, and profit before the money is laid out on the table.

It was that glimpse of the girl's golden eyes, coupled with that half-erased tattoo on the boy's smooth breast that made Ryker's extra sense tingle. For he knew enough of Martian traditions and history to know that in the old time, when the great Martian civilization still basked in its golden twilight and ages before the High Clans and princely bloodlines had mixed and become mongrelized, the lords and nobles of the pure blood had looked forth from

golden eyes such as those which transformed the girl's heart-shaped face into a marvel.

And he had seen that insect sign before.

Once, years before, in the Eastern Dustlands, he had found and rifled an age-old tomb. Time had buried it deep beneath bone-dry, talcum-fine sand; a chance windstorm -rare on the desert world, though not entirely unheard of—had laid bare the black marble door to the hillside tomb.

Within had been few pieces of gold and fewer gems, but many artifacts of interest to the scientists. And in those days, before the police dossier which carried Ryker's name had become quite so fat, he could still come and go in Syrtis Port or Sun Lake City without suspicion or harrassment. So he had sold the tomb artifacts one by one to the historians and the professors interested enough in XT archaeology to ignore the fact that they were purchasing stolen goods. One by one he had sold the little ceramic jars and figurines and symbolic tools and weapons. All but one piece were gone. That one he had kept for himself, for some reason he could not quite put a name to.

Perhaps it was just a whim. Or perhaps he took a fancy to the thing he had found clasped tight to the bony breast of the Martian mummy, folded tight in withered arms. Or maybe he thought of it as a souvenir, or a good-luck piece. Whatever the reason, it had slept above his heart, suspended on a thong around his neck, all these years, in a little leathern bag.

It was a seal of slick, glassy black stone, sleek and glistening as obsidian, but heavier than marble. It was a small thing—the palm of one hand could cover it. Small or not, it was a mystery. For no jeweler or geologist to whom he had given shavings from it could name the dense, ebon

crystal from which it was made. And none of the experts to whom he lent a rubbing copy could read the characters in the unknown and unclassified language which ran around the edge of one side of the seal.

On the reverse of that seal, deeply embossed in high relief, was a figure, a figure like a fantastic, crouching insect—but such an insect as our fields and forests had never housed. Such an insect as Mars itself was never home to, even in its greener ages.

But by the shreds and scraps salvaged from the old traditions and sagas and mythologies he knew that strange, crouching insect. In the nearly forgotten lore of the People the creature was known as
The Pteraton.
The name means "The Guardian of the Gateway"; but it should have been named The Enigma.

Two thousand miles from the dark, narrow alleys of Yeolarn, its huge stony likeness crouched amid the waste, like some gigantic and mythological Sphinx. A full hundred yards it measured from beaked, antenna-crowned face to tapering, cylindrical thorax-tip. And no man— Martian or Earthsider scientist alike—could say who built it, or when, or why. Or what it signified.

The Sphinx of Mars
the Earthside newscasters called it. And like that other vast Enigma that has crouched for ages in the deserts beyond Gizeh, while empires waxed and waned, its mystery has never been solved.

Now why, wondered Ryker to himself, was the likeness of the Stone Enigma he had found graven on a black seal from an ancient tomb, why had it once been tattooed upon the naked breast of a nameless, homeless, clanless guttersnipe of a native Martian boy?

The shadows grew thicker in the maze of alleys that was the Old City.

As the three glided purposefully on before him, Ryker noticed with distress that they were no longer alone in these narrow ways, save for the shadows.

For he heard the faint shuffle of sandal leather in the black, yawning mouths of alleys as they went past them— the scrape of boot soles, the faint tread of furtive footsteps.

Glancing back over his shoulder, he saw a movement among the shadows, as of men gathering for some unknown purpose.

They were silent and grimly purposeful. They kept a good distance between themselves and the three they followed, but they kept up with them. They neither let them get too far ahead, nor too far behind.

And now the dancing girl, the old man and the naked boy could be seen to hesitate at the entrance to alleys, to turn aside, to falter. And it slowly dawned upon Ryker that the three he followed were being . . .
herded.

He looked back over his shoulder at their pursuers. There were very many of them and they were curiously unspeaking.

They looked to him like a mob. And mobs are as unpredictable, as potentially dangerous, as unruly and as given to sudden whims of violence on Mars as back on Earth.

Despite the cold, dry air of the evening, sweat broke out upon Ryker's brow and the skin crawled horribly on the nape of his neck.

He began to wish, and that most fervently, that he had never let that idle curiosity, that vagrant impulse, lead him out of the tavern to follow the girl with the golden eyes and the boy whose breast bore the Mark of Mystery into the furtive, meandering, shadow-steeped back alleys of old Yeolarn.

But he had, and there was no turning back now. He

sensed the mood of the mob behind him. They were after the girl and her companions, not after him. But they would not permit him to escape, either. Whatever lay ahead— towards whatever trap or cul-de-sac they were herding the three fugitives—no witness would be permitted to get away unmolested.

Especially, no
F'yagha
witness.

Ryker growled a bitter curse deep in his throat, and his fingers curled about his gun butt. His hard face grew bleak. His lips thinned, and his cold, pale eyes went hunting restlessly from side to side, for a doorway, an open arcade, a flight of worn steps. But no avenue of escape was left open, he knew within his heart. Silent men stood deep in the shadows, blocking every way out of the maze.