Dark of the Woods

II

During the following two days, Davis's position became even more difficult, for he found that the girl, Leah, was more than a beautiful form and a finely sculptured face. She also possessed a sharp wit and a deep well of inquisitive intelligence that was a delight to feed with more and more knowledge. She had educated herself in the ways and culture of her conquerors, and she could debate cleverly and at length on almost any topic Davis chose. He began to strengthen the emotional interest he held in her instead of whittling at the strands that drew him to her. That first moment he had seen her, he had been spellbound. Now he was enchanted.

At night, lying on the bed that was too large and too soft and too low, he would force himself to remember the punishment for miscegenation. They could insure that he felt no sexual interest in anyone ever again, let alone an alien woman. They could imprison and torture him. They could kill him…

But every morning, when Leah returned, he seemed to forget the vows of the previous night. He could not dismiss her, for he was too fascinated by her. He purposefully acted lost in many cases, only to insure that she would not feel it was time for him to find his own way about.

On the third day of her work as a guide, the bond was struck — at first in his mind alone, later between them and in the open. On the third day, he became a criminal by Alliance law. It started with the rat and culminated in the temple.

The rat…

He asked her, that morning, if there were shelters which the winged people had constructed as proof against the heavy clouds of mustard gas that had been flushed through their cities by the Alliance troops. He knew the stuff rotted rubber and that gas masks would have proven relatively useless after more than two uses.

“There's one half a mile up the lane,” she said. “We can get there in a couple of minutes, except it's mostly demolished.”

“Is there one intact nearby?”

“There aren't any intact anywhere,” she said. “The conquerors found them, one at a time, and destroyed them.”

He had stopped wincing at references to the brutality of the war. She did not make them to embarrass him, but as mere statements of fact. Indeed, he thought she did not even consciously connect the Earthmen civilians who had settled here after the war with the armor-suited power soldiers of the great conflict. “Well, then I guess that has to do.”

He slung his tapewriter over his shoulder, and they walked to enjoy the warmth and the crispness of the morning. On both sides of them, there was an occasional scurry as a woodland animal rushed for a tree or burrow. He remembered having read descriptions of the Demosian city sites immediately after the Alliance troops had landed. They had described the vast numbers of dead birds, and animals that had succumbed to the mustard gas, tens of thousands of them, lying so thickly that they concealed the earth itself for long stretches.

“There's the shelter,” she said. “What is left of it, at least.”

He followed the direction of her slim, tan hand and saw great slabs of concrete thrusting out of the earth, lengths of rusted and twisted steel that punched at the sky as if to rip it open and bring it down. The earth around the debris was charred black and in a few places fused into darkly gleaming glass by the heat of the explosion that had ripped through the underground structure. As they drew closer, he could see pieces of furniture, metal benches, and leather couches all broken, shattered, melted, mashed in among the cross-work of beams and concrete. In the crook of a steel beam, wedged in the tight angle, was a Demosian skull: fragile, tending toward a slight lengthiness, with the oval eye sockets that would accommodate the lovely orbs of a girl like Leah. In a pocket of rubble only a few feet away, as if giving balance to the scene, was a field mouse's nest. The thing hunched in the mass of weeds and grass and string, its two babies in its belly pouch, looking at them with more curiosity than fear. Death and life, side by side.

“You couldn't have had traitors,” he said. “I know that much about the Demosians. They never gave information-even under torture. How did the Alliance know where to drop bombs?”

“They didn't,” she said. “The explosion, you see, came from within the shelter, blasting outward, rather than down and in. The conquerors had a thing we think they called the 'mole.' They dropped them by the hundreds, maybe thousands.”

“Yes,” he said. “I remember now. The things were only as large as a man's arm, packed full of superexplosives. They hit the ground, bored down thirty feet, then leveled out and acted like subterranean submarines, seeking out heat with very sensitive receptors. Drop enough in one area, and sooner or later, one of them is going to hit paydirt. Then it bores through the wall of the shelter and detonates itself,”

The field mouse made a chittering noise at them, but didn't bother running.

Davis clambered into the rubble, stopping here and there to look down the spaces between the fused debris. There was a soft light welling up from somewhere very far below, and it illuminated a ragged but possible sloping corridor. “It looks,” he said, as Leah came to his shoulder and looked downward with him, “as if the generators have never run out.”

“It hasn't been too many years,” she said.

“The rubble looks fused the whole way down. There shouldn't be any slides. I'm going to try to pry my way in there.”

“It's packed too tightly,” she said, looking over the expanse of mangled construction materials. “You won't find a way.”

“I'll make a way,” he said, grinning. “Proteus!”

The robot floated quickly to his side, main manipulator barrel unstopped, sensors flashing excitedly.

“Gun left.”

Proteus slid a barrel from his smooth, seamless belly, turned left.

“Ground level,” Davis ordered.

The angle of the barrel dropped until it was pointing at the melted beams and concrete hillocks.

“Fire one!”

Proteus shot a small, explosive rocket, large enough to blast a hole through any animal as large as a horse. It struck the ruins five yards away as Davis and Leah stopped behind a slab of concrete. There was an almost instantaneous explosion that shook the entire crust of ruin, and a section of the floor they stood on gave way and crashed down into the open spaces beneath. For a long moment, the sound of things rebounding from the walls and outcroppings of the regions below echoed up to them, a mournful noise. When the quiet returned, Davis ventured forth and carefully inspected the entrance Proteus had made, found that the crust immediately around the hole was still solid and trustworthy.

“I'll try not to be long,” he said.

“I'm going with you,” she protested, pouting her face.

“I've got Proteus. That's one of the burdens as well as blessings of having a robot guardian. He goes with you whether you want him to or not.”

“I'm going with you,” she repeated.

He saw the determination in her face, the tightening of the muscles along her jawline, and he knew there was no sense arguing. “The way's going to be a little tough, and there isn't room to spread your wings and fly if you should fall. But if you're still all that set on going—”

“I am.”

The way was not as rugged as he had thought. His perspective, peering through the jumbled rubble earlier, had made the slanted corridor below look longer than it was. In ten minutes, they were in what had been the bottom floor of the shelter, a three-level affair. Here, the Demosians in hiding from the Alliance gases had not been killed by the force of the explosion itself, but by the firestorm which it had engendered. The bodies of about two hundred winged men and women and children laid about the room, mostly against the walls where they had been caught and suffocated so swiftly that they had not had a chance to move. The suction of the explosion and the intense heat must have snatched the air from their lungs in one instant and replaced it with flames the next. At least, he thought, it had been a swift end. There was nothing now but bones, a few skeletal masts of cartilage that had once been the bearers of membranous wings. And four hundred eye sockets, oval eye sockets, staring accusingly…

Proteus soared the length of the chamber, certain that there must be an adversary in such an uncommon place. When he reached the far corners of the room, forty yards away, the rat overhead screeched its battle cry, spraying spittle down onto Davis's head…

He looked up, saw red eyes as large as quarters.

The rat leaped, striking Leah's shoulder and sinking tiny, razorlike claws through her toga.

To the modern Alliance man, the ability to commit violence, against either another man or an animal, was something distasteful, barbaric, something that only an Alliance soldier had. And since most Alliance soldiers were power soldiers, robotic devices, machines, and cybernetic systems, there were relatively few men capable of violence in the entire system of settled worlds. The Proteus robots had, after all, all but negated the necessity to know how to defend yourself.

This atrophy of the violent ability very nearly meant the winged girl's death, for Davis found himself staring with fascination at the rat which scrabbled at her, tore her toga as it tried to sink claws into her flesh and gain a purchase from which it could bring its wicked, yellowish teeth into play as well. It was as if he were in a dream, moving through syrup or suddenly turned to stone just when it was essential that he act most swiftly. Then, fleeing across the back of his eyes like a specter across a moor was a vision of Leah with her face chewed up, an eye torn loose by the vicious fingers of the ratlike thing. In a moment, the anti-violence tendencies which had been nurtured through his entire life evaporated and were replaced by a manic and uncontrollable rage.

Had he looked over his shoulder, he would have seen that Proteus was rapidly returning to do battle, but he did not even think of that. He reached out and seized the animal by the back of the neck, tore it loose from her. He saw blood on its claws, matted in the thick fur of its paws. Her toga was stained crimson where it had had hold of her. Screaming, not aware that he was and wondering who was making that ungodly noise, he grabbed the head of the rat with his other hand and simultaneously attempted to crush its skull and strangle it.

It wriggled loose and leaped at his chest where it gouged its nails into him, struck upwards toward his neck with its deadly teeth…

He grabbed its head again, pulled it away from him just in time, though it still held onto him with its rear feet, claws dug deeply into his flesh. He wrenched at it, ruthlessly unconcerned about what such an action would do to his chest, ripped it loose, turned, and slammed it into the wall. It screamed, wiggled and kicked to get free again. But he clenched it tightly, ignoring the dozens of scratches it inflicted on his hands. He slammed it again, again, twice more until its back was broken, its spine shattered. Its blood ran down his fingers and dripped onto the floor.

He was no longer screaming, but he found himself mak-ing heavy, rasping breathing sounds as air rushed raggedly in and out of his lungs. And he was whimpering, deep inside, like a child. And he was squeezing the lifeless rat as if he would squash it beyond recognition, would compress its very bones into powder…

He looked up at Leah, who seemed not to notice the slight wound on her own shoulder. She stared wide-eyed at him. He wondered if she realized what had happened, understood the depth of his actions in these last few minutes. He had risked his own life to save hers, had broken the conditioning of his social training and had resorted to violence. He had not even thought to wait for Proteus, to summon the machine to the task, for her life had been too precious to endanger for even the briefest of moments. In that first instant when he had seen her blood, he had ceased to think in terms of “you” and “me” but, instead, in the sense of “us.” Her blood suddenly seemed as valuable as his own, and he had acted swiftly, insanely, without hesitation to protect this new extension of himself. Which meant it was not lust, as he had been working so hard to convince himself.

He dropped the rat.

He tried to say something, anything.

He choked and fell forward into unconsciousness…

Later, when she had finished using his speedheal ointments and bandages on their wounds and they had eaten a light lunch she prepared in the kitchen of the aviary where he was living, she leaned her elbows on the table, smiled at him, and said, “Can we go someplace special now, like I've been wanting? It will make the day seem a little happier after all the ugly things that have happened.”

He did not much feel like pursuing the research plan he had outlined for the day. His nerves still trembled from memory of the rat squirming and screeching within his hands, striking for his throat. And his mind was plagued with the realization that things had gone too far with Leah, entirely too far. They would have to be brought to an end before the silent attachment he felt for her — and, he thought, she felt for him — was brought into the open and made turning back impossible.

“Where do you want to take me?” he asked.

“To the temple,”

“Temple?”

“You'll see.”

And when he got into the grav car to make the drive, she said, “Oh, I so wish you could fly.”

“So do I, Leah,” he said, pulling the car into the drifting leaves that settled from the yellow trees onto the rough, black road. “So do I.”

The car hummed down the tree-shrouded lane.

Proteus sat in back, inches above the seat, bored — if such an emotion were possible for a plasti-plasma robot.

Davis knew the temple when they came in sight of it. Twin hills peaked breastlike against the backdrop of yellow mountains, and each was adorned with a giant structure. On the first hill there was a building composed of nine huge towers all joined in the middle to form a giant central chamber. Great teardrop entry portals split the gray-brown stone here and there. This was the temple. On the other breast, perched like a rakish nipple, lay the Sanctuary, a manmade block of ugly cement. Behind both, creeping close to them, were the terribly dense forests of the yellow mountains, the great, broad-leafed yil trees.

They stopped the car before the temple and waited until it settled onto its rubber rim, then got out.

Above the Sanctuary on the other hill several hundred yards away, half a dozen female angels floated on the breezes of autumn. The cool air carried their tinkling laughter to Davis and Leah: bells, Chinese wind chimes, water trickling into a jug.

One of the angels flew at the thick trees, her wings dazzling with refracted sunlight. She turned fifty yards from the edge of the woods and flew back to the others who giggled and squealed with delight.

Fascinated, Davis stood by Leah, watching them.

Another of the Demosian beauties swept away from the group and moved to within ten feet of the forest, hung there an instant, came back to the others like a triumphant child who has walked a dark alley without collapsing of fright.

The girls cheered.

A third soared to the challenge, crossed over the trees and hovered over them, dipped and swayed just over the tops of the branches and the brilliant yellow leaves. She came back slowly, proudly. As she approached them, the other five cherubs went wild with excited chattering and squeals of laughter.

“What are they doing?” he asked Leah at last, unconsciously taking her tiny hand in one of his giant, callused mitts and effectively swallowing it with his own hard flesh.

“The legends say the woods are haunted. The girls are playing a game that is centuries old: Daring the Demons of the Woods.”

“You believe in spirits?”

“Not really.” She watched the girls a moment. “It just helps to pass the time anymore.”

“Then how did something like this get started?”

Her hand was a hot ball of flesh in his fist.

“The woods are a great danger, for one thing.”

“Why?”

“We cannot fly in there. The trees are so thick that their branches restrict flight. If we should be chased by a wolf or some other fierce creature of the mountains, we wouldn't have a chance. We're too delicate for running much of a distance. Flight is our only escape", and the trees would deny us that. So we stay out of the woods. Time, then, builds up legends of demons. We are as superstitious a people, in some ways, as you men of Earth.”

Davis smiled. “Fascinating! It has to go into the book.”

They watched the game.

“Will I be in your book?” she asked at last.

“But of course! I think you'll even be the heroine.”

She laughed and wiggled her hand in his.

He drew her closer, not taking time to think that the gesture was exactly the one he should be avoiding at all costs. “Shall we look at the temple?”

“Yes!” she said enthusiastically. “You'll want that in your book too.”

They entered at the base of one of the immense towers and walked through stone corridors into the huge central chamber where the nine towers met. The bare floor, cobbled in crimson and pitch, stretched some hundred feet to a granite slab framed by stone candlesticks as tall as a tall man. Behind this altar was an enormous face which composed an entire wall of the church, stretching 120 feet overhead, 90 feet from ear to ear. The vacant black eyes were 30 feet across, 16 feet high. The nose was an elongated boulder punctuated by nostrils that were really caverns almost large enough to drive a grav car into. The full-lipped mouth was carved in loving detail, the broad teeth showing grayly in a benevolent smile.

“What is it?” he asked.

“The Face of God,” she said. “Come on. Let's go inside.”

“Inside?”

“Come on.”

She tugged at his hand, drew him toward the Face of God. At the chin, they stopped while she tugged at a granite mole and swung a stone door outward. Behind, there were steps chiseled from the rock: broad, rugged platforms that led upwards into darkness. They climbed them, moving from the gray light that flushed through the open door into a dense blackness, then into another area of soft illumination that filtered down from above. Eventually, they came out of the gloomy stairwell into a passageway wide enough for three men to walk abreast. Ahead lay circles of brighter light in the grayness. When they got to these, he found they were the result of light passing through the giant eyes. They were directly behind the godly orbs, looking out and down on an empty temple.

“Isn't it wonderful?” she asked.

He nodded, truly struck with the beauty of the place. “What is the passage for?”

“The bishop would sit up here on holy days that demanded his presence.”

“Tell me about this god,” he said, running his hands along the rims of the eyes. “What was believed of him?”

She abruptly pulled away from him and turned to look stiffly out over the empty pews.

“What's the matter?”

“Nothing.”

“Something's the matter. Have I violated a taboo?”

“No. Of course not.”

“What, then?”

“He was the god—” Her voice broke into a miserable gasping. She silenced herself, tried to collect her wits. “I should not have brought you here.”

“Why?”

“He—”

Then he knew; much as men are visited by great revelations in biblical stories, he was touched by the understanding of what she was trying to say but could not. He grasped her and held her against his chest, held her tightly and closely. She cried on his shoulder while he stroked the mane of her hair. “He was the god—” Davis began, trying to say it for her. His own voice broke and refused to speak the rest of it.

She sank to her knees, and he knelt with her. On the floor, together, they cradled each other.

He found his voice again where it cowered in his throat. “He was the god of fertility, wasn't he? The god of the future.”

Exterminated…

She nodded her head against his chest.

“Don't cry,” he said, knowing the foolishness of the statement. Her people were dead, the last of her kind were dying. Why the hell shouldn't she cry?

Damn the Alliance! Damn the Supremacy of Man! Damn them to hell!

His curses were like a litany on his tongue, spurting between his tears and echoing about the stone corridor within the head of God. He held her, rocked with her. He lifted her face and kissed her nose. It was tiny and warm against his lips. He kissed her cheeks, neck, hair, lips… And she kissed back, with enthusiasm. He felt her tongue against his, her tears mingled with his.

And the corridors of God's mind knew love…

They told him Demos was a place without danger. Yet there had been the spiderbats when he had landed. The bird diving at the windscreen of the grav car on the way up from the port… the rat in the demolished gas shelter… And now the love he had for this alien woman. Yes, that was the most dangerous thing of all. And though Proteus floated only a short distance down the ancient passageway, this was the one danger the machine's powers could not protect him from…