Alone Against Tomorrow Part 19

I took a step forward, up the ramp, and two things happened, almost simultaneously: I caught a glimpse of myself in the glowing sh.e.l.l of the ship. It was not a pretty picture. My ghoul's mouth, drawn down and to the side like a knife wound. My eye, a mere slit of brightness, the sac so hideous and vein-streaked. I stopped on the ramp, with them directly behind me.

And the second thing happened.

I heard her.

Somewhere...far off...in a bright amber cavern hung down with scintillant stalact.i.tes...swathed in a shimmering aura of goodness and cleanliness and hope...younger than the next instant...radiantly beautiful and calling to me...calling with a voice of music that was the sound of suns flaring and stars twinkling and earth moving and gra.s.s growing and small things being happy...it was she!

I listened there for a moment that spanned forever. My head tilted to the side, I listened, and I knew what she said was truth, so simple and so pure and so real, that I turned and edged past them on the ramp, and returned to h.e.l.l again.

Her voice stopped in the moment of my touching ground.

They stared at me, and for a short time they said nothing. Then one of the men-the short, blond fellow with alert blue eyes and hardly any neck-said, "What's the matter?"

"I'm not going," I said. The girl ran down the ramp to me. "But why?" She almost sounded tearful.

I couldn't tell her, of course. But she was so small, so sweet, and she reminded me of my wife, when I had first met her, so I answered, "I've been here too long; I'm not very nice to look at-"

"Oh-" and she tried to stop me, but it was a sob, so it did not interfere.

"-and you may not understand this but I-I've been well, content here. It's a hard world, and it's dark, but she's up there-" I looked toward the black sky of h.e.l.l, "-and I wouldn't want to go away and leave her alone. Can you understand that?"

They nodded slowly, and one of the men said, "But this is more than just you, Van Horne. This is a discovery that means a great deal to everyone on Earth.

"It's getting worse and worse there every year. With the new antiaging drugs people just aren't dying, and they've still got the Catho-Presbyte Lobby to keep any really effective birth control laws from being enacted. The crowding is terrible; that's one of the chief reasons we're out here, to see how Man can adapt to these worlds. Your discovery can aid us tremendously."

"And you said the Fluhs were gone," the other man said. "Without them, you'll die." I smiled at them; she had said something, something important about the Flubs.

"I can still do some good," I replied quickly. "Send me a few young people. Let them come here, and we'll study together. I can show them what I've found, and they can experiment here. Laboratory conditions could never match what I've found on h.e.l.l."

That seemed to do it. They looked at me sadly, and the girl agreed...the other two matched her agreement in a moment.

"And, and-I couldn't leave her here alone," I said again.

"Goodbye, Tom Van Home," she said, and she pressed my hand between her mittened ones. It was a kiss on the cheek, but her helmet prevented it physically, so she clasped my hand.

Then they started up the ramp.

"What will you do for air, with the Fluhs gone?" one of the men asked, stopping halfway up.

"I'll be all right, I promise you. I'll be here when you return." They looked at me with doubt, but I smiled, and patted my sac, and they looked uncomfortable, and started up the ramp again.

"We'll be back. With others." The girl looked down at me. I waved, and they went inside. Then I loped back to the hutch, and watched them as they shattered the night with their fire and fury. When they were gone, I went outside, and stared up at the dim, so-faraway points of the dead stars.

Where she circled, up there, somewhere.

And I knew I would have something for my noon meal, and all the meals thereafter. She had told me; I suppose I knew it all along, but it hadn't registered, so she had told me: the Fluhs were not dead.

They had merely gone down to replenish their own oxygen supply from the planet itself, from the caves and porous openings where the rock trapped the air. They would be back again, long before I needed them.

The Fluhs would return.

And someday I would find her again, and it would be an unbroken time.

This world I had named, I had not properly named. Not h.e.l.l.

Not h.e.l.l at all.

O Ye of Little Faith

NIVEN FELT for the rock wall behind him. His fingertips grazed the crumbling rocks. The wall curved.

He prayed that it curved. It had to curve, to go around the bowl in which he was trapped, or he was dead.

That simply: he was dead. The centaur advanced another few feet, pawing the red-dust earth with hooves of gold now dulled by a faint dusty crimson patina.

The creature's small gimlet eyes were as red as the ground it stomped. Half-man, half-horse, something out of a child's fable, it stepped carefully toward him, and he had the wildly incongruous thought that the beast's face might have been a double for John Barrymore. Only the little red eyes destroyed the comparison. Red and angry; not merely with volcanic hatred, but with something else...something primeval, something saved from a time before men had walked the Earth, when the centaurs and their fellow-myths had ruled the world.

And now, somehow, in some inexplicable fashion, Nivena man with no particular talents-had been thrown crosswise and slantwise through universes into a place, a time, a continuum (an Earth?), where the centaur still roamed. Where the centaur could at last have his full revenge on the creatures that had replaced him. It was the day of reckoning for h.o.m.o sapiens.

Niven backed around the bowl, feeling the dirt of the wall crumbling in his fingers as he felt behind him; in his other hand he brandished the rough-wood club he had found underfoot as he ran from the beast. He let it droop in his hand a moment, the weight of it difficult to keep at the ready for very long.

The centaur's face of frenzy glowed with heat. It leaped. Niven swung the club with a bunching of muscles that sent him whirling half-around. The centaur dug its hooves in deeply, and ground to a snorting halt, two feet in front of the flat arc swing of the club. Niven spun around completely, and the club struck the wall, and shattered to splinters.

The centaur's half-growl, half-snort bore traces of triumphant amus.e.m.e.nt as it exploded behind the dark-haired man, and Niven felt young sweat come to his back. The impact of the blow against the wall had sent a tremor through his entire body; his left arm was quite numb. Yet it had saved him. There was an opening in the wall, an opening in the rock-wall of the deep valley bowl, an opening he would not have seen backing around the wan. Now there was a scant hope of staying alive.

As the centaur gathered itself for a leap that would send its gigantic body plunging into Niven, the man slipped sidewise, and was inside the mountain.

He turned then, and ran. Behind him the light from that weird place-vaguely blue and light-mote laden-faded and was abruptly lost as he caromed around a sharp turn in the pa.s.sage. It was dark now, pitch absolute dark, and all Niven could see was the scintillance of tiny sparks behind his eyes. Suddenly he found himself longing to see even that light behind him, that snippet of blue and cadaverous yellow in a sky that had never been roof of any world he had known.

And then he was falling...

Suddenly, and without any sense of having moved, between one step and the next, he plunged over a lip of stone, and was falling. Down and down, tumbling over and over, and the walls of moist slippery stone reeled around him, unseen but cold, as he tried to grab some small hold.

The tips of his fingers skinned away from friction, and the pain was excruciating, for a long moment, but was lost in an instant as the shriek tore from his throat and he plunged, hitting painfully with his shoulders and the back of his neck that threatened to snap his spine, down into a depth of water black and viscous and bottomless that closed over him, filled his mouth with foulness, blind, dragged into the grave-chill body of a moist lover terrible in her possessiveness, jealousy and need.

Vapors of night. Echoes of never. Niven thrashed in a whirlpool vortex of total unawareness.

Memories-released from their crypt beneath his conscious mind-escaped, gibbering, rushed in a horde into his skull. He was back in the old soothsayer's shop. Had it been just a few minutes before finding himself trapped by the centaur? Merely a few minutes when he had stood in the prognosticator's shop in a Tijuana back alley, a tourist with a girl on his arm and a wisecrack on his lips? Had it been only that long ago, a matter of seconds, of a sometime long ago, when darkness had parted and swallowed him-as he was now being swallowed by these stygian waters?

Huaraches, the sign had said, and Serapes.

Berta stared at him across her Tom Collins. He could not look at her. He toyed with the straw in his Cuba libre. He whistled soundlessly, then bit the inside of his lip absently. He looked off across the Avenida Revolu?ion. Tijuana throbbed with an undercurrent of immorality and availability. Anything you might want. A ten-year-old virgin-male or female. Authentic French perfume minus the tariff. Gra.s.s. Hash.

Peyote caps. Bongo drums, hand-carved Don Quixotes, sandals, bullfights, jai-alai, horse races, tote-board betting or off-track betting, your photograph wearing a sombrero sitting astride a weary jacka.s.s. Jacka.s.s on jacka.s.s, a study in dung. Strip shows where the nitty-gritty consists of the pudenum fiat-out on the bar-top for convenient dining. Private shows with big dogs and tiny gentlemen and women with b.r.e.a.s.t.s as big as casaba melons. Divorces, marriages, tuck-and-roll auto seat covers. Or a quick abortion.

It had been lunacy for them to come down here. But they'd had to. Berta had needed the D&C, and now it was over, and she was feeling just fine thank you, just fine. So they had stopped for a drink. She should be resting in a motel halfway between San Diego and Los Angeles, but he knew she wanted to talk.

There was so much to talk about. So now they sat in the street cafe and he could not talk to her. He could not even look at her. He could not explain that he was a man trapped within himself. He knew she was aware of it, but like all women she needed him to come only far enough outside himself to let her share his fear. Just far enough that he could not make it. She needed him to verbalize it, to ask for-if not help, then- companionship through his country of mental terrors. But he could not give her what she wanted. He could not give her himself.

Their affair had been subject to the traditional rules. A lotta laughs, a lotta pa.s.sion, and then she had gotten pregnant.

And in their mutual concern, something deeper had pa.s.sed between them. There was a chance, for the first time in Niven's life, that he might cleave to someone and find not disillusionment, derangement and disaster, but reality and a little peace.

She had arranged the abortion, he had paid for it, and now they were together here, as she waited for him to speak. Voiceless, imprisoned in his past and his sense of the reality of the world in which he had been forced to live, Niven knew he was letting her slip away.

But could not help himself.

"Jerry." He wanted to pretend she had not spoken, knowing she was trying to help him get started.

But he found himself looking up. She wasn't beautiful, but he liked the face very much. It was a face he could live with. She smiled. "Where are we going, Jerry?"

He knew what he had to answer to please her, to win her, but he said, "I don't know what that means."

"It means: there's nothing artificial or unwanted holding us together any more. Or holding us apart. What do we do now?"

He knew what he had to answer to please her, to win her, but he said, "We do whatever we want to do. Don't push on me too hard."

Her eyes flashed for an instant. "I'm not pushing, Jerry, I'm inquiring. I'm thirty-five and I'm unattached and it's getting frightening going to bed alone without a future. Does that seem rational to you?"

"Rational, but unnecessary. You've got a few good weeks left in you."

"It isn't funny for me, Jerry. I have to know. Have you got room in your world for me?"

He knew what he had to answer to please her, to win her, but he said, "There's barely room enough in my world for me, baby. And if you knew what my world was like you wouldn't want to come into it. You see before you the last of the cynics, the last of the misogynists, the last of the bitter men. I look out on a landscape littered with the refuse of a misspent youth. All my G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses had feet of s.h.i.t, and there they lie, like Etruscan statuary, the noses bashed off. Believe me, Berta, you don't want into my world."

Her face was lined in resignation now. "Unraveling the charming syntax, what you're telling me is: we had a good time and we made a small mistake, but it's corrected now, so get lost."

"No, I'm saying-"

But she was up from the curbside table and stalking across the street. He threw a bill down on the tablecloth and went after her.

She managed to keep ahead of him. Mostly because he wanted to give her time to cool off. As they pa.s.sed a narrow side-alley he pulled abreast of her, and taking her arm gently she allowed him to draw her into its shadowed coolness. " All it takes is believing, Jerry! Is that so much to ask?"

"Believe," he snapped, the instant fury that always lay beneath the surface of his charm boiling up.

"Believe. The same stupid mealy-mouth c.r.a.p they tell the p.e.c.k.e.rwoods in the boondocks. Believe in this, and believe in that, and have faith, and holy holy you'll get your a.s.s saved. Well, I don't believe."

"Then how can any woman believe in you?" It was more than anger that forced the words from him. It was a helplessness that translated itself into cynical ruthlessness. "I'd say that was her problem."

She pulled her arm free and turning without really seeing where she was going, she plunged down the alley. Down a flight of dim steps, and on again, a lower level of the same alley. "Berta!" he called after her.

Huaraches, the sign had said, and Serapes.

A shop in a dingy back alley in a seedy border town more noted for street-corner wh.o.r.es than for wrinkled and leathery tellers-of-the-future who sold Huaraches and Serapes in their spare time. But he had quickly followed her, trying to find a way out of his own inarticulateness, to settle the senseless quarrel they were having and salvage this one good thing from a past filled with broken gla.s.s. He wanted to tell her his need was not a temporary thing, not only a matter of good times, of transitory bodies reaching and never quite finding one another. He wanted to tell her that he had lost all belief in his world, a world that seemed incapable of bringing to him any richness, any meaning, any vitality. But his words-if they came at all-he knew would come with ill-restrained fury, with anger and sharpness, insulting her, forcing her to walk away as she now walked away.

He had followed her, down the alley.

And the old, wizened, papyrus-tough Mexican had limped out of his shop, bent almost double with age, like a blue-belly lizard, all alertness and cunning, and had offered to tell them of the future.

"No thanks," Niven had said, catching up to her at that moment.

But she had tossed her head, defiance, and had entered the shop, leaving him standing in the alley.

Niven had followed her, hoping she would turn in an instant, and come out again, and he would find the words. But she had gone deeper into the musky dimness of the shop, and the old prognosticator had begun casting the runes, had begun mixing the herbs and bits of offal and vileness he averred were necessary for truth and brightness in the visions. A bit of wild dog hair. A strip of flesh from the instep of a drowned child. Three drops of menstrual blood from a Macedonian wh.o.r.e. The circular sucker from the underside of a polyp's tentacle. A conch sh.e.l.l that made...sounds. Other things. Unspeakable, nameless, foul-smelling, terrible.

And then, strangely, he had said he would not tell the future of Berta...but of Niven.

There in the fetid closeness of a shop whose dimensions were lost in dusk, the old Mexican said Niven was a man without belief, without faith, without trust, and so was d.a.m.ned; a man doomed and forsaken. He said all the dark and tongueless things Niven had never been able to say of himself. And Niven, in fury, in frenzy brought on by a hurricane of truth, smashed the old man, swung across the little round table with all the strength in his big body, clubbed the old man, and in the same movement swept the strange mixed ingredients from the filthy table, as Berta screamed-from someplace far away.

And in that instant, a silent explosion. A force and impact that had hurled him out of himself. In that timeless, breathless instant Niven had been there/not-there. He had somehow inexplicably been moved elsewhere. In a bowl, in a valley, in a land, in a time or place or somewhere facing a centaur. A creature of mythology, a creature from the past of man's fables.

Huaraches, the sign had said, and Serapes.

Facing a live centaur just a moment ago. Facing the creature that had left the world before there had been a name to fit the man that Niven had become. A G.o.d without worshippers, this centaur. In a world that did not believe, facing a man who did not believe.

And in that instant-like the previous instant of truth-Niven was all the men who had forsaken their G.o.ds. Who had allowed the world to tell them they were alone; and believed it. Now he had to face one of the lost G.o.ds. A G.o.d who now sought revenge on the race of Men who had devised machines that would banish them from the real world.

Down and down and down into the waters of nowhere Niven plunged, all thoughts simply one thought, all memories crashing and jarring, all merged and melded and impinging upon a dense tapestry of seaweed images.

His breath seemed to clog in his throat. His stomach bulged with the amount of water he had swallowed, with the pressure on his temples, with the blackness that deluged him behind his eyes. Niven felt memory depart and consciousness at once returning-and leaving. He was coming back from the past to awareness, only to let it slip away finally as he drowned.

He made feeble swimming motions, overhand movements of arms that had sensation only by recall, not by his own volition. He moved erratically in the water, as thick as gelatin, and his movement toward the bottomless bottom was arrested. He moved upward through the water now, and saw a dim light, far ahead and above him.

An eternity. There. Toward it he struggled, and when he thought it was ended, he reached a ledge.

He pulled himself toward it, and the dark water seeped through him until he was limp and dying. Then his head broke water. He was in an underground cavern. He spewed out mouthfuls of warm, evil-tasting water.

For a very long time he lay half on the ledge, half in the water, till someone came and pulled him up. Niven lay there on his stomach, learning to live again, while the one who had saved him stood silently waiting. Niven tried to get to his feet, and he was helped. He could not see who the man was, though he could feel a long robe in the dimness, and there was a light, a sort of corona that seemed to come dimly from the man. Then together, with the man supporting him, Niven went away from there, and they climbed for a long while between walls of stone, to the world that was outside.

He stood in the light, and was tired and sad and blinded by things he did not believe. Then the man left him, and as he walked slowly away, Niven recognized the beard and the infinitely sad eyes and the way he was dressed, and even the light.

And Jesus left him, with a sad smile, and Niven stood alone, for another time that was long, and empty.

Once, late that night, he thought he heard the bull-ram horn of Odin, ringing across this dim, shadowed land, but he could not be sure. And once he heard a sound of something pa.s.sing, and when he opened his eyes to look it was a cat-headed woman, and he thought Bast, and she slipped smoothly away into the darkness without saying a word to him. And toward morning there was a light in the sky that seemed to be a burning chariot, Phaethon the charioteer, Helios' burning chariot, but that was probably the effects of the drowning, the hunger, the sorrow. He could not be certain.

So he wandered. And time pa.s.sed without ever moving, in the land without a name; and his name was Niven, but it was no more important a name than Apollo or Vishnu or Baal, for it was not a name men believed in; it was only the name of a man who had not believed. And if G.o.ds cannot be called back, when their names have been known, then how can a man whose name was never known be called back.

For him, his G.o.d had been Berta, but he had not given her an opportunity to believe in him. He had prevented her from having faith in him, and so there were no believers for a man named Niven, as there were no true believers for Serapis or Perseus or Mummu.

Very late the next night, Niven realized he would always, always live in this terrible Coventry where old G.o.ds went to die; G.o.ds who would never speak to him; and with no hope of return.