In the Green Star's Glow

11. Karn in Chains

The girl savages, who had found me asleep in the skysled and had made me their captive, had their camp far out on a branch of the mighty tree, where several smaller branchlets diverged from the central bough.

Here leaves sprouted in thick clouds of tissue-of-gold, forming a screen which effectively shielded their settlement from chance scrutiny.

The camp itself was an exceedingly ingenious complex of huts and cabins built on several levels, and connected by aerial walkways and rope-bridges, with porches and verandas roofed by leaf-bearing twigs cunningly bent awry, and all manner of ladders and steps leading from one level to another. All of these structures were built of the same wood as the branches themselves, which served as additional camouflage to conceal the existence of the camp from the eyes of enemies bestial or human.

The wild girls had stripped me to the buff in order to amuse themselves by shaming and humiliating me, but I endured my captivity and their scorn with whatever stoicism I could muster.

Wearying at length of making sport of me, my mistress, the thirteen-year-old hoyden they called Varda, assigned me to menial tasks. I was set to work scrubbing the cook-pots and cleaning the acorn-cup dishes and other kitchen implements, and at mealtimes I brought food to the tables where the girls ate.

As nearly as I could tell there were twenty or more of the Amazon girls in the encampment. As I came to know them better, I decided that Varda’s chief rival for the chieftainship, the girl called Iona, was probably older than the rest, being at most fifteen. I have elsewhere described Iona, but I will reiterate by saying that she was not tall for her age, but more firmly fleshed and a bit more voluptuous of bosom, hips, and thighs than the other, mostly younger, girls of the band. Her skin was the color of old parchment, and she had huge eyes of tawny amber, and floating hair of thistledown-silver. Unlike the littler girls, who scampered about naked except for a bit of hide twisted about their loins, she went decently covered.

Varda, the girl who “owned” me, was about two years her junior, a snub-nosed, wide-mouthed, freckle-faced young tomboy with supple, nimble limbs and a firm if shallow bosom inadequately covered by the tanned hide she wore strapped about her with thongs. Whereas Varda treated me scornfully, brusquely ordering me about and gleefully seizing upon every conceivable excuse to punish me or insult me, Iona bore an ill-concealed hatred of me, seemingly because I was of the male sex, with no other reason ever enunciated. Iona would have killed me had she dared, but Varda and the other girls wished to keep me alive if only as something to bully and mistreat.

The girl savages lived in the most slovenly manner imaginable, rarely washed, argued constantly, and fought incessantly. They slept, for the most part, in hammocks out in the open, but some of the younger children, the nine or ten-year-old girls, shared cabins and slept in nests of furs.

I slept on a rude pallet in a tiny lean-to attached to Varda’s hut, which was larger and more comfortably fitted out with furniture than the rest of the living quarters.

When there was no cooking or washing up to do, I was sent out to gather food. This consisted in the main of nuts, berries, fruit, and a species of immense and edible mushroom which grew on the underside of one of the larger network of branches of the network that comprised the camp area. The Amazon girls usually went out hunting during the day, seeking the tender and enormous grubs, insect larvae, the defenseless and delicious tree-snails, and other easily killed varieties of game with which the upper terraces of the great trees teemed.

When on my expeditions to gather nuts and berries, I wore a choke halter around my neck and was only permitted out in the care of five or six of the little girls, who kept me constantly tethered. They would scamper about, dangling head down from the branch, or, perched in a row, sit kicking their heels, while I climbed gingerly down to the end of the twiglets and slowly, one by one, picked the nuts. These were like walnuts, but of the size of basketballs, and contained several pounds of delectable nutmeat. The berries grew from plant parasites which sprouted from some of the branches, their fruit resembling that of the strawberry.

The naked little imps delighted in shouting abuse at me, and tugged at my leash until they nearly throttled me, while giggling at my discomfort or my nakedness; probably at both. For some reason they took a particularly vicious pleasure in tormenting me. Before long I found out why.

I learned that they had been taken from their homes by a slave raid about nine months ago (insofar as it was possible to compute the passage of time). Their homes had been on the outskirts of one of the treetop cities previously unknown to me, a place called Barganath. The slavers had seized them for training and sale to the brothels of some of the other Laonese cities, and from the jabber I overheard, I got the impression that the girl-children had been abused and molested by their captors. From this mistreatment obviously stemmed their hatred and loathing of males, which was quite understandable, although it did not help me to endure with equanimity the humiliation and punishment I suffered at their hands.

It was Varda who had led their escape. The older girl had taken advantage of a sudden attack by zzumalak on the slavers’ camp. The zzumalak are honeybees, but honeybees grown to the size and proportion of tigers, and every bit as dangerous. While the slavers rallied to fight off the assault by these flying predators, Varda had led the girls to freedom. They had caught one of the slavers off guard, seized his keys, unlocked their cages, and swarmed over the men, pulling them down with nails and teeth and whatever weapons they managed to snatch up. Caught between the attacking zzumalak and the attacking girls, the slavers had died to the last man.

Having cut down to the last man the brutal slavers, and now having won their freedom, the band of girls found themselves hopelessly lost amid the worldwide forest of gigantic trees. They had not the slightest idea in which direction the city of Barganath might lie, nor how distant it might be from the point to which the slaver-caravan had carried them. This was largely because the caravan had traveled mostly by night, and for the beginning of the journey the captive girls had been bound and gagged and blindfolded in the bargain.

On the planet of the Green Star there are no signposts, and very few maps.

Since to find their way back home to Barganath was a hopeless endeavor, the girls simply wandered for a time until they came at last to this twig-ridden part of the branch, where a natural hiding place among the twists and nooks of the branchlets offered a safe haven to them.

And here they stayed.

It had been the quick-witted and aggressive Varda who had first seized upon the moment of the attack of the zzumalak swarm as the most propitious time for their attempted escape. And it had been Varda who had realized and pointed out the many advantages their present campsite offered to them. For these reasons, and because of her natural talent for leadership, the girls had elected the thirteen-year-old as their leader.

This, it seemed, did not sit well with Iona. Since she was older than Varda, she thought the captaincy should have fallen to her. Iona was perfectly happy to let someone else do the dirty work of making plans, giving decisions, and working up the ways in which things were to be done. But she heartily disliked the idea of someone else giving orders to her—especially a younger girl, less mature, less developed, who in her eyes was her inferior.

But the rest of the band were pleased with the way Varda managed things, and disliked Iona, who was always sulking and criticizing and bearing grudges. Besides, Iona bossed and bullied the little girls—that is, whenever Varda or one of the other older girls were not around.

Iona bided her time; she did not seem to have much chance in capturing the leadership of the savage band from her hated rival. She schemed and planned and tried to ingratiate those girls she could not intimidate; and intimidate those who were not amenable to her form of flattery. She watched and listened for any morsel of gossip she could find to use as a weapon against those she could neither browbeat nor cajole.

In particular, she kept her eyes on Varda.

If she could catch Varda in some infraction of the code by which they lived, if she could discover Varda breaking one of her own rules, then Iona thought she would have a potent weapon with which to dislodge her rival from the position of power Iona so dearly coveted.

It made for a lot of tension and mutual dislike and suspicion between the two older girls.

Iona regarded Varda with poorly concealed envy and was always quick to question the wisdom of her decisions, and Varda regarded Iona with amusement and more than a bit of contempt which she did not even try to hide. In a way, the rivalry between these two was like a tug-of-war.

I soon found myself in the most uncomfortable spot imaginable—right in the middle!

12. Beyond the Portal

The mysterious tower that Niamh discovered rose from the branch and soared aloft many stories into the green-gold dimness. It did not resemble any similar structure built by men, or at least none known to the experience of the Princess of Phaolon.

The spire seemed made from some smooth, sleek ceramic, like porcelain, and to have been made all of one piece. At least no joints were discernible to the eye. The graceful, fluid curves of its architecture were as unfamiliar to the girl as was the substance from which it was fashioned. This substance shimmered with changing hues, like some unthinkably enormous opal; dim rose and fiery gold, shot through with glint of copper green and peacock blue, fading at times to nacreous pearl or darkening to wrathful crimson. The shifting hues seemed obedient to some stimulus other than reflective light. The girl was intrigued, puzzled, and fascinated. She was not, to any particular extent, frightened.

The girl approached the curious structure. It gave the impression of extreme age, of unthinkably remote antiquity. It also somehow conveyed to her the feeling that it was unoccupied, and had been unoccupied for a very long time.

Had Niamh seen the Pylon of Sarchimus the Wise, as I had, it is likely that the princess would have recognized the Opal Tower as closely similar in structure, design, and material to that one.

Sarchimus had dwelt in a dead city called Sotaspra, which had formerly been inhabited by the Kaloodha, an all-but extinct race of gaunt, gold-skinned, telepathically gifted Winged Men. They had been the masters of an amazing science, the Kaloodha, but a form of racial madness drove them to suicide. The lust for immortality was the fata morgana which had lured them over the brink of destruction. Today, only Zarqa alone was left of his vanished people. But their enigmatic handiwork could still be found here and there about the Green Star World. Their towers and cities had been built to last, and they had indeed lasted, untouched by time, for countless hundreds of millennia.

The Opal Tower suggested to Niamh a long-ago abandonment. Not that the sleek, glowing, glassy stone from which the tower was built had suffered from the merciless erosion of the ages. Quite to the contrary, no chip or crack or sign of crumbling could Niamh discern in all the luminous fabric of the shining structure. But an aura of emptiness clung about it like the reek of death and decay, all but palpable.

So, albeit warily, the girl approached the soaring spire.

The ever-changing colors that crawled and swirled across the gliding lines of the tower lent it the illusion of inner life, which formed an uncanny contrast with the air of abandonment and emptiness that pervaded its proximity. The princess noticed that the sleek, soaring curves of the wall were unbroken by any windows. The portal, however, when she came within sight of it, stood open; a tall, narrow, tapering entrance with a broad base and dwindling sides that grew together at the pointed top.

It yawned like an orifice, like a sphincter or a maw. Open, inviting, unguarded.

For a moment, Niamh lingered on the threshold. A momentary qualm possessed the girl, a trepidation that seemed almost to be trying to warn her against making an entry.

She paused, biting her lip in a torment of indecision.

The Opal Tower afforded her a haven of safety against the predators who would prowl hungrily with the coming of night. And the tower, with its air of seeming neglect and abandonment, was apparently tenantless. Should she go in, or should she pass the tower by?

No pampered exquisite, sheltered from harsh reality, unaccustomed to strife for survival, Niamh was a child of her wilderness world of giant trees and incredible monstrosities. Often before this she had fought for her life against huge odds, and during her long wanderings across the face of the Green Star World she had survived perils beyond number. The staunch girl hefted the bow of Zorak, an arrow hocked and at the ready.

What, after all, was there to fear?

So she approached the yawning portal and entered, and vanished from sight in purple gloom.

The tower closed its doorway, as a patient monster closes its jaws upon its unsuspecting prey.

Where the tapering, pointed entry had been was now a smooth, unbroken surface. It swirled with opalescent hues, that surface. Then it flushed crimson, the color of human blood!

Within the portal, Niamh found herself at one end of a long, winding corridor floored with glassy stuff. The walls soared above her, lost in gloom. Veils of purple shadow thickened about her until she could scarcely see her way and was forced to feel along the wall with one hand, step by step.

Suddenly, the gloom became absolute and the cool breeze which blew against her slender back and shoulders ceased abruptly. Niamh whirled, guessing that the portal was now blocked, that the door which led to freedom and the outer world was no longer open.

With amazement she discovered the portal had ceased to exist, and that the hallway ended in a slick, unbroken wall.

Then the floor tilted beneath her, curving downward.

With a sharp cry the girl lost her balance and fell forward. Down the steep, smooth incline she shot as down a greased slide.

Ahead of her lay only darkness.

Then the smooth chute down which she slid ended, and the girl hurtled into emptiness.

A resilient, elastic surface broke her fall, driving the air from her lungs. For long moments, gasping for breath, the princess floundered in the folds of some rubbery, yielding stuff, becoming entangled. Gathering her composure, she lay still, peering around her; but the gloom was unbroken.

With admirable foresight, even while falling, Niamh had retained her grip upon Zorak’s bow. Now she removed the arrow from the weapon and thrust the sharp metal barb into the elastic fabric which had broken her fall. It ripped and tore, and she sawed away at the rubbery stuff until she had made an opening of some size.

Then, removing from her garment a gem-studded brooch, she dropped the bit of jewelry through the opening, listening until she heard the clink of metal against stone. From the swiftness with which the sound had reached her, Niamh guessed that a stone surface lay not very far beneath her present position.

She dropped five or six feet, landing on a floor of smooth, dry stone.

During the next few moments she carefully felt her way about the dungeon cell into which she had fallen. It was a circular chamber, some ten yards from wall to wall, and completely empty save for herself.

The curving wall was unbroken by any door or entrance, at least at ground level. Feeling her way around the pit, she examined the wall from the floor to as high as she could reach, completely circling the room. She could find no means of escape whatsoever.

After a time, she gave up the attempt, and composed herself upon the floor, against one wall.

The chamber in which she found herself imprisoned resembled a wide stone well.

Unless she could somehow manage to climb back into the rubbery membrane which had caught and broken her fall like a net, and then climb back up through the roof into the corridor again, she was hopelessly imprisoned. And to perform such a feat in complete darkness was not only difficult, it was dangerous.

After a time, she slept …

When she awoke she found a dim radiance now illuminated her cell.

It was seemingly sourceless and seemed to radiate from empty air itself, as if luminous atoms of pure light drifted amid the atmospheric vapors.

By this mysterious and sourceless light, Niamh perceived that the rubbery net had been somehow withdrawn, and that the roof of the circular chamber in which she was captive was something like thirty feet above her. The roof was quite beyond her ability to reach, and now she could perceive no means of exit.

After a time, lacking anything to occupy herself with, the girl fell into a fitful doze again.

When she awoke, she found utensils of crockery laid out near where she lay. There was a green jug filled with cold fresh water, a broad and shallow bowl filled with succulent gobbets of meat swimming in a steamy broth which savored of herbs, and a thick ceramic spoon with which to down the stew.

For a moment, she hesitated to partake of the food, since it was possible that a subtle poison or narcotic had been slipped in it. After a moment’s reflection, however, she shrugged aside these fears with a rueful smile.

If her captors wished to kill her, there was no reason for them to supply her with food and drink, she reasoned, and she fell to with a hearty appetite. The stew was delicious, the cold water refreshing. Finishing her meal, the girl set aside the crockery and waited for further developments.

Whatever the reason she had been taken prisoner, at least it was not the intention of her captors to starve her to death, or to drive her mad with thirst.

But they had relieved her of the bow and arrows …

13. The White Chamber

When next she slept, she woke to find the crockery gone from her side. It became evident to Niamh the Fair that there was some secret entrance into the circular cell besides the mysterious one in the roof.

The roof opening was too far above her head for the princess to make her escape by that route; the other entrance, however, probably lay closer to hand. The courageous, resourceful girl resolved upon a plan to discover its secrets.

During this period of wakefulness, Niamh exercised within her cell, as much to relieve the boredom of her imprisonment as to keep her body in a healthy condition. After she had exercised sufficiently, she lay down a little space from the wall and composed herself as if for slumber.

She closed her eyes, turned over a time or two, then gradually permitted her breathing to become slow and tranquil as if she were indeed sound asleep. But she did not permit herself to slumber, merely feigning it in order to ascertain the method by which her unseen captor entered and left her cell.

Time stretched out, unendurably. The complete relaxation of her body, which was comfortably wearied from her exercises, was insidiously conducive to sleep. The girl determinedly forced herself to stay awake by every means she could think of. She recalled to mind her lineage, ancestor by ancestor, in a chain of descent which stretched back into the remotest ages. She recited mentally the favorite ballads and heroic lays she had years ago committed to memory during her childhood tutoring. She conducted imagined conversations with absent friends, mentally picturing their appearance down to the minutest detail of dress.

After an unendurable time, the faintest sound came to her ears.

It was a mere wisp of a sound, a creaking or rasping, as of stone against stone. Lifting her eyelids very slightly, the girl peered through the fringe of her lashes and observed the smooth, unbroken stone of the circular wall.

Where previously it had been smooth and unbroken, now there existed a straight black line, like a hairline crack, which began at a point about three feet up the wall and extended in a regular line to the place where the floor joined with the bottom of the wall. As she watched breathless with excitement, the crack widened and became a square black opening.

Through this opening now extended a withered hand, like the gaunt, fleshless claw of some monstrous birds

The hand withdrew, bearing with it the empty crockery which had contained her meal.

Then the black opening began to close in upon itself, but before it had completely closed, Niamh rolled over and thrust a small object into the narrowing opening. It was a thin but tough leather strap torn from her sandal.

The black line shrank to the merest thread. Then all was still. Niamh lay in the same position, still feigning slumber and attempting to make it seem as if her movement had been nothing more than the sort of random stirring a body makes during sleep.

She felt the pressure of unseen eyes upon her as she lay, eyes closed, breathing in and out with long, shallow breaths.

Then the feeling of being watched terminated, and Niamh felt herself to be alone and unobserved once again.

She sat up quickly and examined the wall, probing with the sensitive tips of her forgers. The sandal strap was indeed wedged into the narrowest of openings, which meant that the secret door lord not entirely returned to its original position.

This, in turn, suggested that whatever the nature of the locking mechanism which held the door firmly shut, the mechanism might not have fully engaged, due to the slight obstruction. She strove against the seemingly solid wall and pushed and probed, but to no avail.

Taking hold of the end of the strap which protruded from the nearly shut door, Niamh delicately exerted pressure, trying not to pull the leather strap from its place but to apply leverage against it, in order to widen the opening.

After a time, the stone door gave a little. Just a little, but enough to spark a flame of hope within the girl’s breast.

She then took out the jeweled brooch which she had recovered from the floor of the cell—the same pin she had let fall from the net in order to ascertain the distance to the ground—and began employing this as a tool.

The brooch was in the form of a flat buckle of gilt metal, with a design set in sparkling crystals. The edge of the brooch, however, was just thin enough to enable her to insert it into the crack.

With both hands Niamh now twisted simultaneously at the brooch while tugging on the strap.

After an interminable tune, the crack widened still more.

After what seemed like hours of probing and tugging, the girl succeeded in opening the door until it thrust out about one inch from the wall.

Then, using the full strength of her lithe and supple young body, the princess pulled and pulled upon that obtruding edge until her fingers were raw and throbbing with weariness.

But at last the door stood open, revealing an empty square of blackness; into which she crawled headfirst, without a moment’s hesitation.

Whatever might lie outside was better than the prison within!

The wall of her cell proved to be about a foot thick. Beyond the secret door she found a corridor that led to a stone staircase which curved up to a higher story of the structure, perhaps at ground level, for it was obvious that she had been imprisoned in some basement level.

Niamh ascended the stair and found an open portal carved of sleek, glistening stone like pale marble.

The chamber into which she peered was lighted with the same sourceless glow of mellow luminosity she had first observed in her cell. But this room was walled with jeweled mosaics in peculiar geometric patterns devoid of any meaning to her. Low taborets and cushioned stools were scattered about, and the gleaming ceramic floor underfoot, colored a brilliant shade of peacock blue, was carpeted with thick, luxurious furs of a creamy hue.

Fur-bearing animals were so rare upon the planet of the Green Star as to be virtually unknown, but Niamh entered the room without giving thought to this minor mystery. Where all is unknown, so trivial an enigma is unworthy of notice.

In the opposite wall yawned another doorway, hung with a curtain composed of glassy beads-red, blue, amber yellow-strung on long cords. Through this curtain she could see another room, a larger room, with a domed ceiling. It was filled with complicated apparatus whose purposes were not known to her, yet it was untenanted, so the girl shouldered through the curtain and stepped within.

A sharp medicinal stench bit her nostrils—the piercing odor of disinfectant. She gained the center of the domed chamber, and gazed about her with some perplexity.

The walls were lined with metal cabinets with glass doors and shelves covered with glittering bladed implements that looked like surgical instruments.

Benches of metal and long metal tables covered with gleaming white enamel or porcelain stood here and there about the room. These were covered with a variety of vats and crucibles, glass and ceramic containers of every size and description. Peering within, she discovered that these vessels held colored fluids and powders of various kinds. Many were marked with labels, but these were lettered in characters unknown to her.

Tall lamps of tubular metal were affixed to wall brackets. Some were illuminated by an unknown power-source, and cast beams of vivid hues upon lumps of protoplasm sealed in closed, transparent vessels. Niamh shuddered and turned her eyes away, for the first time beginning to regret her lack of trepidation in venturing so imprudently into the private domain of her unknown captor.

The lumps of wetly glistening tissue were various organs of the bodies of men and beasts.

And they seemed to be alive …

The only exit from the domed room, besides the curtained portal through which she had entered, was a sealed metal door held shut by a system of clamps and levers.

She regarded it dubiously, then attempted to open it. The clamps were not locked, but seemed designed for the purpose of making the inner chamber airtight. She opened the metal door easily and looked within.

A curved wall of spotless white enamel met her eyes. The pungent odor of strong antiseptic assailed her nostrils.

There was nothing in the room but a wax model of a human head fastened in midair to a number of transparent tubes and coppery wires which led to small tanks and engines of curious design.

Puzzled, she entered the inner chamber where the wax modes of a human head hung amid these coiling tubes.

The air was clean and fresh and curiously odorless, behind the sharp stench of antiseptic.

The room was brilliantly lit by a sunlike lamp suspended from above.

There was no sound, save for the gurgle of unknown fluids in the tanks, and the drone which arose from the small engines grouped together on the floor beneath the hanging head.

She examined the model curiously.

It was most artistically made, the wax colored with close resemblance to human flesh, and it resembled the head of a young man of her race with a shaved scalp, closed eyes, and loose mouth hanging wetly open.

This object of art, if that is what it was, seemed to her most ghoulish. After inspecting the thing, she turned away with a small, fastidious shudder.

And blundered into a small metal table on wheels which she had not noticed. She stumbled against it, and some of the surgical instruments arranged upon its glistening white upper surface fell to the floor with a clank which seemed loud in the buzzing, gurgling stillness. She froze.

Then the bodiless head opened its eyes and looked at her.

14. The Sorcerer Quoron

When the bodiless head looked at her, Niamh froze with ghastly horror.

Then she saw that the eyes were wide and unfocused. The gleam of intelligence did not shine in them; they were the blank, unseeing eyes of an idiot-thing.

The loose mouth worked wetly and the head spoke.

“Wa-wa-w-aaah?”

As she stared in horror and revulsion, a dribble of slime drooled from the working lips of the thing as it babbled meaningless noises.

Then a sound came from behind her. A dry cough!

She spun to see a weird, hunched form in the doorway. It was hideous, and curiously disparate. The head was lean, fine-boned, ascetic—even handsome, in a pure, nobly proportioned way.

But its handsomeness ended at the neck.

The body was that of a twisted dwarf with a hunched shoulder and warped, diminutive legs. Swathed in a loose white gown it was, and the gown bulged peculiarly, and in the most surprising places, as if there were portions of the body beneath that gown that bore little or no semblance to the human body.

The creature in the doorway fixed her with a cold, ironic gaze of appraisal. Niamh was very near swooning—the hanging head was still drooling and babbling in a witless manner behind her—but she drew herself up and regarded the being who could only be her captor with a superb pretense of hauteur.

The cold, ironic eyes moved beyond her to the hanging thing. The slight smile left the thin lips and was replaced by an expression of sadness mingled with a curious contempt.

“You are a most persistent young woman,” observed the dwarf. “I had thought you safely tucked away, but here you are, freely wandering my tower and prying into my most closely guarded secrets. Well, having intruded upon Wa-Wa’s privacy, what do you think of him?”

“Wa-Wa?” she repeated faintly. He nodded at the thing behind her.

“Yes, I call it that partly because I have to call it something, and partly because that is the only sound it seems to know how to make. I have been trying to teach it human speech, but, alas, in that, as in so much else, my artistry falls short of its goal. Well, speak up, girl. What do you think?”

Niamh had recovered some of her self-possession by now. She had nothing to lose from speaking bluntly, so she spoke her mind. It did not seem to her that this hunched, deformed cripple could possibly do her any harm. Her own body was lithe and strong; if it came to a contest, she thought it likely she could turn the tables and make the captor captive.

“I think you should put the pitiful thing out of its misery,” she said coldly. “Why do you permit it to continue in this grisly mockery of life? The humane thing to do—”

Something flared in the cold, cruel eyes of the dwarf.

” ‘Mockery of life,’ indeed! My dear young woman, you are looking upon the noblest miracle of science wrought by human hands on this planet since the dead, forgotten days of the mighty Kaloodha! Do you dare to think the thing is only a semblance of life? Gods of The World Above, woman, I have removed the head from a living body sand kept it alive sand functioning for two years!”

She stared at the cold face of the dwarf, her thoughts unutterable. Now a weird passion flamed in his fathomless gaze and drove vivid color into his sallow cheeks.

“Do you not understand the magnitude of this scientific miracle?” he hissed. “Or are your wits too shallow and mundane to perceive the scope of my discoveries? By a fission so adroit and subtle it were inaccuracy itself to demean it by so crude a term as ‘surgery,’ I have removed a man’s head, sealed the nerve endings, attached the veins and arteries to a sterile pumping system, employed a bellows-like device to replace the lungs, and kept the severed head living and healthy! The hair continues to grow unless shaved… the mouth glands salivate as the nostrils inhale the odor of succulent food… the eyes respond to light, darkness, and motion… the eardrums react to loud sounds… the thing lives, I tell you! Lives!”

The dwarf’s voice rose in a frenzied screech that rang deafeningly through the domed white chamber. The dangling head flinched and began to blubber. Niamh shrank from the dwarf as he limped toward her with a shambling, crablike gait.

Suddenly, the hunched little figure was sinister and even fearsome. His sudden, mercurial transition from cold irony to gibbering fervor took her off-guard.

She perceived that her captor was more dangerous than she had thought at first.

“And its—brain?”

The question fell from her lips in automatic response. It was not a question she had meant to ask, and, looking at the scarlet fury that rose and glared within the dwarf’s maniacal gaze, she faltered, and bit her lip, wishing she had not spoken.

Then the frenzy passed. The hunched figure twitched once. The spasm passed; he drooped his head and was, suddenly, somehow pathetic.

“You are right, of course… the brain is dead, for all the subtlety of my surgical technique,” the dwarf muttered in low tones. “Oh, the sensory nerves respond to stimuli… the motor centers still function as if automatically, but—the mind is dead; quite dead. For all my science, I cannot help it to think, to reason, to communicate. It is the one goal I have yet to achieve, the one barrier yet unconquered. I can keep the head alive, but the brain dies…”

The dwarf pondered with bowed head for a moment, then raised his eyes upon her again.

“But I shall yet succeed! I believe the problem lies in the oxygen content of the blood. Between the moment when the head is detached from the body and the moment when the veins and arteries are connected to my artificial heart device, the circulation of blood within the brain pauses. During that interval the brain receives no fresh oxygen, which would otherwise have continued to be carried in the fresh blood pumped from the body’s heart. The lack of fresh oxygen, although momentary, causes oxygen starvation, and the effect is like that of a stroke.” He meditated for a long moment, lost in the intricacies of the problem, plucking at his lower lip with thumb and forefinger; then he said; “Someday—quite soon, I feel—I shall manage to overcome this last remaining obstacle. And then the world shall resound with praise of the arch-scientist, Quoron.”

“You mean ‘the sorcerer Quoron,’ do you not?” Niamh said cuttingly. “For to keep the poor thing in this ghastly state is black sorcery, not science!”

This time her rash, imprudent words did not sting the little cripple to a flare-up of fury. He merely eyed her incuriously, his mind busy with the problem.

“Enough of this idle converse,” the dwarf said absently. “Take her back to her cell, Number Nine. I have work to do.”

Niamh looked back to the doorway with apprehension.

It was filled now by a huge, lumbering figure, nude, hairless, and immense. Hands the size of a monster’s reached for her.

She screamed.

When she recovered from her swoon, Niamh found herself not back in the dry well with its circular walls, but in a comfortably furnished apartment. She was stretched out on a couch draped with colorful silken scarves, and many small soft plump pillows were beneath her.

She jumped to her feet and stared around wildly, wondering if her experiences were driving her mad.

A harsh, well-remembered voice spoke from a concealed aperture.

“Calm yourself, young woman. You have not become deranged, nor are you suffering from delirium.”

It was the voice of Quoron.

“Where am I, then? I thought you said—”

“I was originally planning to have Number Nine return you to your former place of captivity,” said the sorcerer’s voice, “but it occurred to me that, as you had once managed to escape from your former quarters, it would not be wise on my part to encourage you in further unauthorized explorations. Already, your untimely blundering into the sealed chamber has forced me to completely sterilize the air supply and to cleanse all of the objects and surfaces you might have touched with a potent antiseptic. The head must be kept in a completely sterile environment, under controlled conditions, you see. I believe you will find your new accommodations considerably more luxurious than those you previously enjoyed, when first you intruded upon the hospitality of my sanctum… and also considerably more difficult to escape from.”

“Where are you?” Niamh demanded fiercely.

Quoron chuckled. “Quite safely hidden, and watching your every movement from a place of concealment. But do not worry, my dear; I have no intentions of intruding upon your privacy. I will leave you to your own devices now, but be wary. Do not think to elude my hospitality again. Number Nine will have you under constant surveillance, both by night and by day. He has no interest in women, for he has no mind save my will; therefore you may freely undress and bathe under his scrutiny with no less embarrassment than you would at baring your body under the gaze of a pet beast. For Nine is little more than that. Very little more…”

The harsh, ironic voice faded and Niamh felt herself to be alone. She collapsed back upon the silken couch, despair welling up within her.

She was in the clutches of a madman, and helpless to do anything about it.

15. To Live—Forever!

During her next few days as a prisoner of the sorcerer Quoron in the Opal Tower, Niamh came very close to madness from fear, frustration, and despair.

The apartment in which the dwarf had confined her was in truth comfortable to the point of being luxurious. A warm bath of scented waters was at her disposal, and the apartment contained sanitary facilities superior even to those afforded by her own palace in distant Phaolon. She had a variety of attractive, fresh clothing to wear, and the apartment contained several books and works of art for her amusement.

But a prison is still a prison, no matter if the bars of the cage are made of beautiful gold.

There was no window to the room and the only door, a massive slab of heavy ceramic, was guarded by the unsleeping giant the sorcerer called Number Nine. It was this immense, obscene brute who served her meals, and no matter how intense her appetite night be, the very approach of the monstrosity made her faint with loathing.

Number Nine, she learned from scraps of information gleaned from listening to the rambling discourse of Quoron, was one of a series of surgical experiments—one that had lived.

In an attempt to master the secrets of life and death, and to discover the arcana of Nature herself, Quoron had taken apart human bodies and put them together into new, ghastly hybrids.

Number Nine, for example, had four arms and three legs.

And two heads.

The arms were positioned two to a side, the one above the other. This reorganization of the human body had required the sorcerer to build into the armpit of the first pair sufficient shoulder muscles to render the lower set of arms usable. In the case of the lower left arm, the grafting of a new musculature had been successful. But the lower right arm dangled limply, pale and wizened, its flaccid open-palmed hand slapping Number Nine’s thigh at every step.

The third leg had been built on to an extension of the rear portion of the pelvis, a new hip-socket having been engineered where the coccyx is found on normal bodies. The leg had to be a trifle shorter than the other two, so Quoron had used the right leg of an immature boy for this hind-member.

The body was a walking obscenity. But it was the matter of the twin heads that nauseated the princess the most.

They jutted out from a thickly wattled common neck at sharp angles, and one was a woman’s head, and the other was a man’s.

Quoron referred to this choice, as one of his “little pleasantries.”

Both heads were slack-jawed and blank-eyed, and the twin brains were little more than idiots. But the lumbering brute was completely under the control of its master and had utterly no will of its own. Quoron demonstrated this fact one evening by commanding Nine to hold its fingers in a candle-flame until the skin shriveled and popped and crackled like the skin of a sausage on a spit.

Nine whimpered and whined, but did not remove its hand from the white-hot flame until Quoron bade it do so.

That night the dreams of Niamh were horrible …

The sorcerer seldom visited the princess, although he very frequently conversed with his lovely young captive from a place concealed in the walls of the apartment.

These conversations were more in the order of rambling monologues than true conversations, although Niamh at times sought to draw the maniacal dwarf out with questions. Her theory here was, obviously, the more you know about your captor, the more potentially useful information you have at your disposal.

Quoron did not mind being questioned. He loved to talk about his plans for the future, and an intelligent audience was better than a drooling head or a witless, shambling giant.

In this manner Niamh found out the purpose of Quoron’s experiments.

They could be summed up in one word; immortality.

The madman could not have enjoyed much of life, confined to a warped and hideous, dwarfed and crippled body. But, it would seem, even life at such a price is more sweetly to be savored than the absence of life.

Quoron had fallen into the same intellectual trap which had already, ages before his time, destroyed the race whose scientific marvels and accomplishments he admired so much-the Kaloodha, the extinct Winged Men who had built the Opal Tower a million years before.

The same madness infected him which had also driven insane the beautiful black supermen of the Flying Cities which drifted high above the treetops amid the eternal cloud-veil that shields this planet from the piercing emerald rays of its primary.

The lust to live—forever.

It was the mad ambition of Quoron to find a way to render a human being perpetually invulnerable to the effects of time and change and age.

First he had sought the secret within the body itself, thinking that some gland or organ or nerve center, under the appropriate drugs or stimuli, might immortalize the body and enable it to repair or to replace worn-out tissues. These experiments had led to the creation of such monstrosities as Number Nine.

Failing to find the secret of eternal life in that avenue of research, Quoron had next turned to the preservation of the only essential part of a human body—the brain.

His experiments in this direction had, thus far, resulted in failure.

The bodiless head in the white chamber—the mindless idiot-thing he called, contemptuously, by the name of Wa-Wa—was the only brain he had thus far managed to keep alive for any significant length of time, after removing it from its body.

The brain lived, but the mind was dead.

The problem of continuing the supply of fresh oxygen to the vital brain centers during the difficult process of decapitation was his present area of research.

Quoron now felt that the answer lay in attaching the veins and arteries to the system of valves and pumps he called his artificial heart before the cranium was severed from the torso.

That way the fatal interval would be overcome, during which the mind centers died of oxygen-starvation.

Quoron now felt he was approaching his ultimate goal.

Niamh had never dared inquire of the dwarf his ultimate purpose in holding her captive in the Opal Tower.

She was afraid to, for she feared the worst.

Instead she questioned Quoron as to how he intended to preserve his own life by this method, once he had mastered the technique. After all, one can scarcely decapitate oneself.

He replied that he had foreseen that eventuality. Number Nine would perform the entire operation.

Niamh was incredulous. “That clumsy monstrosity? You would entrust so delicate an operation to—to—?”

“To Number Nine?” He chuckled. “Of course! To whom else could I possibly entrust so excessively difficult a task? The twin brains of Number Nine have been sponged clean of every thought and memory; they are like tablets of fresh clay, ready to be written upon. Once the techniques are perfected, Nine will be schooled with exquisite thoroughness in every step and detail of the process. Why do you think I gave the brute four hands? So that it can perform the operation with twice the speed and twice the care of an ordinary person.”

Quoron smiled thinly.

“You need not fear for me, my dear. Nine retains no memory, its dual brain is completely blank. It functions only in obedience to my will, and remembers nothing from one day to another.”

But Niamh was not so certain of this.

Sometimes, during the early evening when the candles where lit, as the brute was serving her supper, she observed a strange thing happen.

As the three functional hands were laying the table with deft, mechanical precision, the eyes of the twin heads would stray.

The wavering flame of the candles would catch those dull, mindless eyes. The flames that were identical with the candle-flame in which Quoron had once commanded his pet monster to hold its hands until the skin and flesh of the fingers of that hand crisped and fried.

Was it the flicker of fear Niamh thought she glimpsed in those four dull eyes?

Or was it the memory of pain?

Or was it—just possibly—anger?