The Unreasoning Mask (5 page)

 

 

Thinking thus, he went up the broad stone steps of the hotel, walked across
the big portico, and went through two rooms, each with heavy, thick doors
that shut automatically behind him. These would not open if another person
wished to enter a few seconds after him or if somebody else was already
in one of them. Again, he went through the spore-killing process.

 

 

Passing through a wide oval portal, he entered the lobby. The floor was
of polished chrysanthemum-white and poppy-red stone. Pillars with curved
flutings jetted up into the shadows of the ceiling. Beyond the stone
forest, against the far wall, was the sea-green desk of the clerk. His
name was Biza!a, and he was the only other person visible. Ramstan removed
his mask, but the clerk, recognizing him under it, had Ramstan's keys
ready. He had been notified by a crewmember that Ramstan wanted a room.

 

 

Biza!a smiled, but be managed to convey a shadowy dislike as he handed
the keys to Ramstan.

 

 

The dislike was for the keys, not Ramstan. Until the first space visitors,
the Urzint, had landed, keys were unused on the planet. Biza!a had
to perform a ritual cleansing at the end of each shift because of his
contact with these.

 

 

Ramstan looked around the empty lobby. Most of the chairs were monstrously
huge and sprawling and had some unfunctional grooves in the arms.
Unfunctional for humans, anyway. They had not been built for any beings
now lodged here. Like most of the other furniture and furnishings of the
hotel, they had been constructed for the Urzint. Six of their ships had
used this field for a long time. Then, one day, they had failed to show
up as scheduled, although they had promised that they would be using
the field for millennia to come. Why had they disappeared?

 

 

Ramstan walked up the broad, curving ramp to the third floor -- there were
no elevators -- and quietly unlocked the door to his room. He pushed it
inward swiftly, leaped into the room and looked around quickly. It was
empty and still. The sunlight slanted through the single enormous window
onto the gigantic bed. The bathroom, so large that he would not have
complained if it had been the bedroom, was empty. A movable platform of
glistening yellow hardwood stood before the washbowl, which he used as a
bathtub. There was another platform with steps before the toilet bowl, the
top of which was a contraption of yellow hardwood. The Kalafalans had made
various adjustments for the smaller size of the recent guests. However,
if those for whom this hotel was built should return, they would find
everything ready for them.

 

 

Ramstan set the electronic traps on the suitcase and put it inside the
cavernous closet. After locking its door, he went into the hall and locked
the door to his room. Returning to the lobby, he asked Biza!a if any new
guests had registered in the last twenty-four hours.

 

 

"Six Tenolt."

 

 

"No one else? An Earthwoman, perhaps?"

 

 

"Ah! She did not register, though she had intended to. She inquired
about you, and I said you were in town. She left immediately afterward."

 

 

"For my ship or for town?"

 

 

"She did not say. There is, of course, the possibility that she had a third
destination. Or none at all."

 

 

Biza!a was correct, but Ramstan was nevertheless annoyed. These Kalafalans!
They spent so much time in considering all possible methods and avenues
of action, they seldom accomplished anything. However, as Toyce had
pointed out, they seemed as happy as Terrans or any species they had
met so far. Progress in science and technology was not necessarily the
index of a high civilization.

 

 

Ramstan walked back to his room briskly. His bootstops sounded hollowly
in the vast untenanted lobby, staircase, and corridor. Before arriving at
his room, he spoke into the back of his hand. "Alif Rho Gimel. Come in,
Hermes. Have any strangers contacted you since I last talked to you? Any
other news to report?"

 

 

"Hermes, here. Negative to both inquiries."

 

 

"Anything to report on Dogfaces?"

 

 

"GL reports contact with four where the action is. Negative animus."
(Translation: Our men on ground leave in town contacted four Tenolt,
and they didn't seem unfriendly.)

 

 

"Did Dogfaces inquire about me?"

 

 

"Positive."

 

 

"Were Dogfaces looking for me?"

 

 

"Not specifically, Alif Rho Gimel. They did ask if you were in town."

 

 

"What did GL say?"

 

 

"They said they didn't know."

 

 

"Alif Rho Gimel out."

 

 

Although it was not suppertime, he took his meal from the suitcase. He had
meant to remove it before setting the traps but had been too occupied with
more important matters. He unset the traps by playing a beam of canceling
frequencies from his pocket pseudo-pen over the case. After taking the
package out, he reset the traps. Cooking the meal took three seconds
after he set the dial on the bottom of the package. He ate without much
appetite. He did not dare to order wine sent up. A little drug in it would
put him out of the way while the Tenolt went through the suitcase. He
did not really believe that they would use poison, since they had the
best of reasons for wanting to keep him alive. At this time, anyway.

 

 

However, there were other forces operating in the shadows, and what their
wants and wishes were he could not know. His death might be one of them.

 

 

He dumped the cups and dishes into the toilet, where they dissolved within
ten seconds. He returned to the chair and moved its huge body on its six
wheels so that he could see the sunset. He sighed with delight at the
beauty. There were magnificent sunsets on Earth, on Tolt, on Raushghol,
but Kalafala's paled them. Dust from volcanoes on the northern and
western fringes of the continent supplied colors, but this alone was
not responsible for the high beauty.

 

 

Golden stars, tiny and bobbing, drifting from west to east, were,
in actuality, far-off boxkite things, dancing lenses for the sun.
A pinkish cloud drifted upward, putting out reddish fingers, greenish
heads, silvery shoulders, orange-and-emerald-green-streaked ragged eyes,
serrated buttons of yellow turquoise, misshapen mouths with carmine lips,
and broken irregular teeth of velvet-black and flamingo-pink.

 

 

Briefly, a comet the color of cigarette smoke formed against a sky banded
with decaying sine waves of pale violet, blood-red, and carrot-yellow.
It rose, head downward, tail spreading out until the colors faded, as if
washed out by God, and the comet had collided with an ephemeral sun of
amethyst-green and both had died.

 

 

Twelve kilometers to the west, millions of varicolored diaphanous-winged
insects were leaving their feeding grounds to fly to the great spindle-shaped
communal nests in which they slept, safe from the crepusculer and nocturnal
birds and flying animals. But the preyers were harrying and eating now.
Although they were not visible at this distance, they were causing the
momentary formations. The beauty of the sunset was a byproduct of hunger,
terror, and death.

 

 

Then the sun slipped its moorings to the horizon; the sky became black.
It was unclouded but starless. Kalafala was on the edge of the universe,
and, when on this side of its sun, the night sky was empty.

 

 

BOOOONG! One hundred thousand bronze gongs struck once to weld into a
single clang. In the yards of the houses on the plateau and in the city
in the valley, Kalafalans hammered the household gongs to announce the
departure of the sun. The single note rose like a bronze bird, the beat
of its wings shaking the hotel and rattling the windows.

 

 

Torches flared in the spaceport town; thousands of torches would be lit
in the unseen city in the valley. A drawn-out, shuddering cry wailed at
the window, and the torches danced toward the temple to the northwest of
the hoteL Ramstan felt a twinge of longing for Earth. The cry reminded
him of the evening call of the muezzins from the loudspeakers in his
level of New Babylon. Though he had peeled off belief in Allah or in
any god as if it were a coat on a hot day, he still responded at times
to the Pavlovian bell: his emotions salivated. A cry like a muezzin's
became an angel's hand squeezing the heart, a piezoelectric flexing.

 

 

There was still light in the upper sky. The field was dark except for
the now-yellow pulsing of al-Buraq and white lights from two open ports
in the Tolt ship. Figures appeared in one, cutting off most of the beam,
and then the Tenolt had become one with the shadows.

 

 

He rose from the chair and walked around in the darkness until his muscles
were no longer stiff. Returning to the chair, he sat for a long time,
his eyes on the dark-and-white vista beyond the window. He shifted uneasily.
He should return to ship, but he was not going to. By staying here, he might
entice those who lusted after the thing in the box in the suitcase to try
to get it now.

 

 

He waited for an hour and then moved the chair away from the window to
the blackness of a wall. He placed two olson beamguns in the grooves on
the arm of the chair and sat down. Now and then, he heard little creaks
and slitherings he could not identify, but which did not alarm him. The
interplay of the pull of the sun and moons, shifting temperatures and
humidities, and settling of the ground stretched and squeezed the hotel
as if it were an accordion. He ignored the tiny sounds and waited for
the click of metal in the lock and the cautious turning of the knob.

 

 

And then, as time and night hobbled by, he had a fantasy. What if the
key were inserted, not in the little lock at his waist-level but in the
huge lock at the level of his head? What if the ponderous door swung
open, and a turret-headed, neckless, bone-ruffed, triangular-bodied and
column-legged Urzint was silhouetted by the hall lights? And the ancient
guest clomped in with steps as heavy as a rhinoceros's straight to the
closet, opened the suitcase, put on the tepee-sized nightgown, and went
straight to bed with never a word to its little roommate? What then?

 

 

He was in a dark woods and running desperately, but slowly and heavily,
the air thick against him, while a dark, unseen, unnamed thing loped
behind him. The thing snuffled. Ramstan tried to howl with terror,
but he could force nothing through his throat, which had turned to
stone. Then he put his hand in his pocket, and he drew out a small
comb. This he threw behind him, knowing that the stiff teeth of the comb
would become a thickly tangled forest of trees. His pursuer bellowed with
frustration. The crash of its body as it hurled against the great trees
and interwoven branches of underbrush was like the toppling of a mountain.

 

 

Presently, the thing was breathing raspingly behind him. He reached into
his pocket and drew out a small mirror and threw that behind him. There
was another bellow of frustration and rage and a splash as of the toppling
of the face of a glacier into the sea. Ramstan drove on against the heavy
air. He was on a flat plain, hard dirt with no vegetation, and the air
was becoming even grayer. Then there was the slap of wet paws on the
plain, and the breathing was once more behind him. Ramstan pulled from
his pocket his third and last gift -- from whom? -- a whetstone, and he
threw this behind him. Though he did not look back, he knew that this
had turned into a high mountain range. The thing's bellow reached him
as a faint sound, but he heard its claws digging into the stone slopes
and its labored breathings as it pulled itself up and up. And then,
as he sped on, he heard its howl of triumph as it topped the highest
peak and began to slide down the other side.

 

 

Moaning, sweating, Ramstan awoke. Near the door, against the wall,
a wavering figure stood. It was in a dark robe, its face shrouded by
a hood. The face was as pale as moonlight and gave the impression of
being that of a very old man or woman. It was either human or remarkably
humanoid.

 

 

Ramstan blinked, and the figure shimmered and then was gone.

 

 

It was the glowing tag-end of his dream, appearing just as he awoke, and
he had seen it as an afterimage. Al-Khidhr, the Green Man? It had been
pointing at the lock. He rose, and, automatically picking up an olson
from a chair arm, walked swiftly toward the door. He saw the ghostly tube
projecting through the keyhole, stopped breathing, turned, and ran to the
window. He started to turn its lock, which kept the two sections tight
against the outside air, when be remembered the mask. Still not breathing,
he groped around in the seat of the chair until he found it and then put
it on. Only then did he swing the two sections of the window open, and,
leaning far out, breathed deeply.

 

 

When his lungs were full, he ran back to the tube. The slight hissing
from the open end of the tube had told him it was not an olson but a
gas-expeller. It would not do to fuse the tube-end with a blast from
the olson. The gas might be explosive.

 

 

Ramstan went back to the window and leaned out of it backwards, his eyes on
the tube. Presently, the tube was withdrawn. There was a series of clickings
as a tool was worked on the lock. He crouched behind the chair. As the door
started to swing open, he put his back against the wall, drew up one leg,
and shoved the gigantic chair with it. The chair sped toward the doorway
on its six wheels, making only a slight squeaking. The door swung open.
The chair rammed into the figure momentarily silhouetted in the light.
The figure crumbled and went over backward under the impact of the chair.