The City Outside the World

16. Strange Eden

Beyond the door the desert warriors found a weird new world, a world such as they had never envisioned, even in their most phantasmagoric dreams.

It was the air that seemed uncanniest to them, at first.

It was moist and warm, and redolent of growing things, rich with a curious perfumed sweetness, like delectable spices, whose nature they could not identify.

But Ryker could. He leaned against the rock wall and drank the warm, intoxicating fragrance deeply into his lungs. He remembered his boyhood, and his eyes misted … a small, two-story white frame house on the outskirts of Reno, Nevada, with a picket fence and a tall tree in the front yard … a smiling woman in a checkered apron, calling his name in a voice that was scarcely a memory to him any more, and himself answering in a childish treble-… bare legs with scabs on the knees from falling down, and well-worn sneakers … and a small, scruffy, black-and-white dog yapping at his heels as he ran to the house, a dog long forgotten, save in dreams … and, by the door, the small, sturdy figure that had once been himself, pausing before a bush of green, glossy leaves where white blossoms grew, inhaling the sweet, spicy fragrance …

He blinked back sudden tears.

The scent that puzzled the Martians was familiar to him.

It was the scent of flowers.

For a time they stood about, or wandered idly, like men in a daze of dreams.

Everything they saw about them was new and strange and wonderful, and full of beauty.

From the round mouth of the door stretched a thick, dewy sward of strange, soft, cushiony moss, deep metallic indigo starred with minute white flowers. Beyond grew thick, rustling bushes, swaying in the scented breezes. And then a stand of—trees?—something very like them, at any rate. To Ryker’s dazed vision they resembled towering stalks of raw celery , somehow grown to Brob-dingnagian proportions, and fronded with feathery plumes of azure.

Something fluttered in the hazy air, and went past them on flickering … wings? Yes, wings, on a world where birds or butterflies have never flown. Ryker shielded his gaze from the golden glare of the skies, and peered after the flying thing, hardly daring to believe what he saw.

It was neither bird nor insect, but—a serpent! A slim, graceful, undulant form, rose pink, and flecked with gemlike scales, its wedge-shaped head oddly crested with a fierce violet cockscomb—a serpent in every detail, save that it flew on wings like feathery, transparent sprays of membranous opal.

Someone stumbled into him from behind and he turned to see Doc bent over, fingering the queer bushes, mumbling entrancedly to himself. The old man seemed lost in a dream.

The golden glare from above, which he had glimpsed when the winged serpent fluttered by, caught his wandering attention then, and Ryker looked up.

He could not have said what he thought he might see—a rocky cavern roof far overhead, perhaps—-but whatever he had expected, he didn’t see it. Instead he saw a vast,

fathomless reach of the firmament, filled with pale golden fire and streaked with long thin filaments of—cloud?—oddly pinkish green, at any rate, and curiously regular in shape, with a gelatinous, near-solid look to them. But he was almost beyond wonderment by now, and merely drank in the sky of luminous gold without thinking about it.

At the zenith hung a disk of brilliant white fire. It seemed about the same size as the sun was, seen from the Martian surface, but intolerably more radiant, and lacking the yellowish tinge of the sun he had always known. This new sun was white and fierce, and younger than the sun he knew.

He wandered off into a grove of peculiar trees. They had long, graceful, drooping fronds, like an earthly willow, except that the fronds were each one long feathery leaf, like a palm, but rich metallic indigo. And there was no trunk to these feather trees, the frond sprang from one branch, and the stem of each branch was separate, although they all grew in a clump.

Ryker had never seen or heard of trees like these.

Nor the bushes that grew thick between them, either.

They were a paler shade of blue, and had glossy leaves like enormous ferns. But ferns grown waist high, and from a thick central stem.

He wandered on, and presently he came to the source of the sweet, spicy perfume.

The flowers grew as large as the head of an adult man, and were gauze thin, delicate as tissue. Translucent they were; pale gossamer petals colored the vague, changing hues of opals. And they were as fragile to the touch as they looked. He touched one, rubbed its petals gently between his fingers—and the enormous, frail blossom vanished like a soap-bubble, leaving a sweet-scented residue on his fingers, like a drop of fragrant essence.

But he was beyond marvel now.

At least he thought he was.

He strolled on, drinking in the sweet, moist, warm air, shedding his thermalsuit with an absent gesture, no longer needing it to shield him from the cold, dry bite of the thin Martian air.

For he was no longer on Mars.

He knew this for certain when he came to the pool. A natural pond of water, open to the sky, was unknown on the desert world. Back on the Mars he knew it would have evaporated like a puff of steam, in mere instants of time.

But not here, evidently.

He stared at it, wonderingly.

For here one was: a pool of sweet, cold, fresh water bubbling up from hidden springs. Several of the desert warriors knelt beside the pool, like men in a trance, hardly daring to believe the evidence of their eyes. One gingerly dipped a dusty finger in the limpid water, and sucked it, a dazed expression in his eyes.

One by one the others bent and drank. Never in all their lives had they seen a pool of water before. They hardly knew what to make of it.

Glossy-leafed bushes rustled then, and a sinuous, furry form glided into view and stood watching them from huge, unwinking eyes like luminous amber or topaz. Ryker froze. So did the warriors, none of whom had ever seen such a creature before.

It looked very much like a cat, but it was larger than a cheetah, its slim, graceful body clad in sleek, gleaming fur, coppery red. It had enormous, prick-eyes, fragile, silken and oval, lambent eyes that glowed in its elfin, heart-shaped face. It was impossibly beautiful.

The cat creature paid no particular attention to them, after that first long, enigmatic stare. It stretched indifferently, yawned, revealing a dainty pink tongue, and ambled away to stretch out on the azure moss beneath the nearest tree. It was not only unafraid of them, it didn’t seem to find them particularly interesting.

There sounded a dull plop, and a plump, golden fruit fell to the cushioning moss near the cat creature. The feline yawned again, sniffed the fruit lazily, and began to devour it daintily.

Then a small furry rodentlike animal came wriggling up from the moss to investigate the bits of fruit the cat had let fall.

The newcomer was about the size of a rabbit, with silky fur, pale blue, and pink eyes and white whiskers and a wriggling pink nose. It looked like a fat mouse.

The cat completely ignored it, after one sideways glance. Then it let the rind of the fruit fall to the ground and began lazily to groom its whiskers with one velvet paw. At its feet, utterly fearless, the fat blue rodent began nibbling at the remnants of the fruit. Ryker could hardly believe his eyes.

Beside him Doc appeared, observing this most curiously unfeline behavior. The old man mumbled something under his breath in what sounded like Hebrew.

“Eh?” murmured Ryker.

The old man blinked at him, then grinned, flushing a little.

“Sorry! I will translate.” His eyes grew dreamy. ” ‘And the Lord God planted a garden eastwards in Eden… .’ “

Ryker nodded, his eyes thoughtful. “I know what you mean, Doc. Do you remember the rest of it?”

“Like I know my own hand,” the old man said softly.

“Let me think … yes … ‘And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of the Earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. And God looked upon his handiwork, and saw that it was good.’ “

The words stirred up old, long-forgotten memories within Ryker. He thought of that white frame house, and its little garden, and the small black and white dog, and the smiling woman who had once read to him these same words from an old, old book.

“Eden, eh?” he murmured. “And is there a Serpent in it yet, I wonder?”

Doc looked behind them to where Zarouk was striding about, yelling, rousing his men from their dreams, marshalling them into battle formation.

“Yes, there is,” he whispered somberly. “And, God help us, I think it is you and I, my boy, who have let the Serpent in.”

And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.

17. The Dreaming City

It took a long time and much yelling for Zarouk to bring his men out of their trance and into order. When at last this was done, he led them down the gentle slope and into the strange new world they had found beyond the door.

As for the door itself, they left it open. Indeed, they were not entirely sure how to close it, even with the Keystone. The spangled mist of blue-green motes into which the Martium panel had vaporized remained in its immaterial state, a curtain of metallic haze drawn across the round opening in the rock of the low red cliff. Zarouk guessed it would stay that way until the Keystone returned the vapor to its solid form.

Ryker figured Zarouk thought it wise to leave the escape route open, in case they needed it. For there was no telling how terribly, and with what unguessable weapons of scientific wizardry, the devil worshippers would be armed.

As they marched down into the vast, dreaming valley which lay open before them under the golden sky, Ryker was not so sure about those weapons. This gentle garden world did indeed seem like a very Eden—where even the lion would lie down with the lamb, and cats did not eat mice, but fed on lush ripe fruit instead.

Did they have war here, too? He found it difficult to imagine. This uncanny Eden seemed gentle, defenseless. He could not believe that men needed weapons here.

Zarouk had brought his weapons with him, of course.

And he would use them.

In the broad valley below they found the City.

It was built upon many waters. Lakes and canals surrounded it, and lush gardens and parks.

But it was walled, as all the Martian cities were, walled with clear, glistening marble, pale golden, and lucent as alabaster.

At the sight of it, Doc stopped short with a gasp. Curious emotion lit his eyes, a dawning comprehension, and a dawning wonderment as if he now envisioned some marvel transcending even those they had already seen.

But when Ryker asked him, he only shook his head.

“Later, later, my boy—when I’m sure,” was all he would say.

In truth, it was very beautiful, the City. It was built according to the immemorial Martian mode, walled courts and dome-roofed houses, slender minarets and long colonnades, with a central square, and a palace that fronted thereupon, and a huge square structure like a temple, too, and the streets radiated out from the central square like the spokes of the wheel.

The roofs were red tiled, and the houses had lush gardens, and canals meandered through the City, here and there, arched by little bridges. Men and women poled through those waterways in narrow boats with graceful, upcurved prows, like the gondolas of Venice.

There was only one gate to the City, and it was shut and barred.

But there were no guards before the gate, and no warriors stationed upon the walls. And that was very strange, indeed. Were these people so terribly armed with ancient weapons of science or magic, that they had no need of swords and spears?

Perhaps. The possibility was frightening.

Zarouk made his camp before the entrance of the broad causeway that arched over a lake to end before the gate of the City. His men reared their tents and made their fires and began to scout for food. They found the cat beasts marvelously easy to hunt, and easier yet to slay.

The creatures seemed not to comprehend what was being done to them. They would stand gazing indifferently at the hunters who tried to creep up on them, but they neither tried to dodge or flee when the darts flew or the spears struck.

Ryker saw one beautiful red cat pinned to the moss by spears, but still living. As the hunters came up to cut its throat the beast regarded them with puzzled eyes, stretching out a gentle paw as if to touch them. It just had time to utter one plaintive, questioning mew before they cut its throat.

Ryker found the slaughter of these gentle, fearless, puzzled creatures sickening. That night he and the scientist ate dried meat and bread brought with them from Mars, for to have eaten of the cat creatures, they would have had to be a lot hungrier than they were.

“Oh, we have let the Serpent into Eden all right,” sighed Herzog. “You saw it yourself, my boy. The cats had never been hunted before, no. They didn’t even know what was happening. They—I think they thought maybe the men wanted to—to play. …”

And Ryker felt sicker than before.

He began to wish they had killed him before he had made the replica of the stone seal. But it was too late for recriminations now.

The strange white sun-star of this world sank in a sunset sky the color of tangerine and the long filaments of cloud were painted vermilion and magenta.

Ryker sat on a log before his tent looking at the City.

He hadn’t known what to expect of Zhiam. But a city of devil worshippers had no right to be this serene and cool and beautiful. The ugliness, the perversion of its people, their dedication to evil, should have shown in their handiwork, somehow.

But the City was a dream of fragile beauty, slim towers floating against the dying fires of the sun, domes like ripe fruit or the breasts of women seeming to float like enormous bubbles upon the waters… .

No, there was no evil in the City men called Outside.

But—in its people?

It was hard to hazard a guess. It was the orothodox Martians who called them zhaggua—worshippers of devils. He had yet to hear Valarda’s side of the story.

But then his heart hardened and his face grew grim. Beautiful or not, this was Valarda’s kingdom, and she had lied to him, fooled him, tricked him, cheated him, robbed him, left him to die, bound and helpless, among his enemies.

There was no doubt about that.

The City knew they were there, but paid no attention. No flags flew, no bugles were blown, no warriors gathered to the defense of Zhiam.

The City dreamed in the dim moonlight, under the glitter of ten thousand stars.

There were fewer stars blazing in this sky of nights than made splendid the nighted skies of Mars. But, like Mars, this planet also had twin moons, one larger than the other.

The moons of Mars, Deimos and Phobos, were too small and too low in albedo to be clearly visible even at night. In fact, they were all but impossible to see with the unaided eye. You had to know exactly where they were in the sky to glimpse them at all.

But here the moons, although small, were visible, disks of pallid silver against dark purple velvet.

The desert men ignored the splendor of the skies. They were not made for this warmth and humidity, and the air of this planet was so rich in oxygen, compared to what they had known, that its headiness intoxicated them. They perspired greasily, stripped to mere loincloths, panting breathlessly in what seemed to them an unendurably tropical heat.

To Ryker and his companion, the night was mild and balmy. Both Earthlings had gone through the series of treatments that readjusted their body chemistries to conditions on Mars. But this did not mean they could not readjust to conditions more like those on Earth. Their organic modifications reacted like thermostats to whatever conditions they found themselves in. So they, at least, were comfortable.

Doc seemed utterly fascinated by the spectacle of the skies. The constellations were strange and new to both of them, of course and, although he said nothing, Ryker guessed the scientist was trying to find a signpost in the altered constellations which might indicate their position in the universe.

In this he guessed wrong, as things turned out.

“Doc, you aren’t gonna find any stars you recognize,” Ryker argued . “We’re in another dimension, aren’t we?”

The Israeli savant snorted through his nose, rudely.

“My boy, when you don’t know what you’re talking about, then shut up,” he said. “The only dimensions you got to worry about are length, breadth and thickness.”

“What about the fourth dimension?”

“Duration. And it’s not really a dimension like the others, it’s a condition for existence. To exist at all, a thing has to have length, breadth and thickness—and it has to endure for a measurable unit of time. They been misquoting Einstein for two hundred years, it’s time they stopped. So stop, already!”

Ryker grinned and shut up. Doc could be cantankerous at times, especially when you interrupted him during a bout of cogitation.

But he couldn’t help wondering what Doc was cogitating about. He gave it up and turned in to sleep. Doc would tell him when he was ready to, and not one moment before.

The night was so balmy he couldn’t endure the notion of wrapping himself up in the fleece-lined sleeping cloak of orthavva fur, so he simply stretched out on the cool, dewy moss and slept in the raw.

In the morning the assault on Zhiam would begin, he knew.

Despite his thirst for revenge, he wasn’t looking forward to it.

Zarouk was up before dawn, rousting his men from their hot, untidy slumbers—for they had slept in the furs, as they were accustomed to sleeping—and preparing for the assault.

The advance unit marched across the causeway to the closed gate, without being attacked from above. Neither spear nor dart was let fall upon them from above. And the walls indeed seemed unattended.

They marched back, feeling foolish.

Two squads were sent back into the forest to cut down the trees so that Xinga’s team could construct rams and scaling ladders. And all the time the City lay dreaming beneath the radiance of dawn, serene and untroubled, scarcely deigning to notice them.

Before noon, they attacked the walls. The ladders went up and the ram team assaulted the gates of the City. They were of bronze, and rang beneath the beaten blows like a mighty gong.

Strange figures appeared atop the walls, and, at first, Zarouk grinned at the sight of them. It was a relief to be no longer ignored; it had been as if their force was so neglible that the men of the City were indifferent to it. Now, at last, the defenders of Zhiam had come forth.

But they were strange defenders.

Darts glanced off them, tinkling to fragments, without causing them any discomfort. Their bodies were curiously thick and sheathed in some odd crystalline white substance which hid even their faces.

They carried no weapons at all.

Ignoring the rain of darts—ignoring the heavy, metal-shod spears—they confined their activities to throwing the ladders back off the walls, one by one. Men fell, squalling, from the toppling ladders, and the ones who were lucky landed in the moatlike lake before the gate. The unlucky ones fell in the bushes or on the mossy ground, to their considerable detriment. There were broken legs aplenty, and more than a few men fell on their heads.

The ladders were raised again—and again—and again—by the dozens. But the strange armored men threw them down every time. They seemed utterly impervious to the darts, even to the darts tipped with the nerve poison the Martians distill from venom, and the heavy spears ricochetted from their breasts or heads or shoulders without even staggering them.

Zarouk was baffled, and getting angry. He sent a team out armed with lassos made of leather thongs, to capture one of the warriors on the wall.

It was a man-shaped statue of living stone.

The desert men shrank back from the uncanny thing, hissing in superstitious terror. Even Zarouk blanched and recoiled from it, shuddering.

It was rather roughly hewn from some strange, sparkling white stone, hard and crystalline, resembling quartz. Its hands were shaped like crude mittens, and its face was devoid of any features whatsoever, not even eyes.

And it really was entirely made of solid stone.

Yet it lived, and moved.

Ryker stared with fascination as the stone giant writhed slowly, straining against its bonds until they snapped and broke. The places where elbows or knees would have been on something human, the stone seemed to suddenly soften—the joints became viscous—when the limb was about to flex. As soon as the limb had moved, the stone hardened again.

A head and a half taller than the tallest of the warriors, the stone colossus got clumsily to its feet and began ponderously to stride back towards the City.

The men shrank from it fearfully, but it ignored them.

Xinga turned questioning eyes on his master, and hefted a lasso tentatively.

“No, let it go,” muttered Zarouk. “How do you kill a thing that isn’t really alive? Let it go.”

The walking statue crossed the causeway, approaching the gate. Then it began to climb, using the ornate carvings around the gate for stepping-stones. It fell twice and climbed back each time unhurt before it gained the top of the walls again.

Zarouk watched with hating eyes, while the City dreamed on, indifferent to anything he might bring against it.

18. The Winged Serpents

Zarouk was in a furious rage, and Houm carefully avoided his company in so far as he was able. Even Xinga thought it most prudent to busy himself with certain tasks which precluded his personal attendance on his prince.

Zhiam seemed quite adequately defended by the Stone Giants, and any further attempts to storm the walls by ladder appeared hopeless of success. Nevertheless two more such forays were launched during the night, under the cover of darkness.

At four widely separated points about the walls of the City, assault squadrons, muffled in dark robes and careful to avoid excessive noise, stole in secret to the foot of the ramparts and sought to scale the battlements without being discovered.

The night was heavily overcast with clouds, and was probably as dark as ever nights were on this strange world. However, despite the furtive and stealthy nature of the attack, it was a dismal failure.

The Stone Giants, as they had done before, simply threw the ladders down from the walls, and the men who were ascending them fell squalling lustily. Then, gathering up their dead and injured, and retrieving the ladders, they limped away and returned to camp to report to their scowling master.

Evidently, the Stone Giants had senses that could perceive the approach of dangerous enemies even in the moonless, starless gloom. Also, they seemingly patrolled the ramparts by day and by night, which was, thought Ryker, only to be expected. Men fashioned of lifeless stone, who were invulnerable to injury, also should be impervious to weariness or fatigue, and—not actually being living creatures, save in a technical sense—did not ever require sleep.

None of this did anything to improve the ferocious temper of the Desert Hawk.

The following day, Zarouk made a tour of the outer works of the Dreaming City, and rode the circuit of the walls, looking for weaknesses. He was forced to ford the streams and canals, and to ride about the small lake, but otherwise he examined every yard of the perimeter, finding no loopholes in the defenses of Zhiam.

There was only one gate, and it was of solid metal. While it might prove possible to break in through this portal by the employment of rams, that would take considerable time. The City had no other gates, not even a small postern gate.

The stone ramparts completely encircled the metropolis of the Lost Nation, and were of equal height at every point. And during his tour of the defenses, Zarouk counted no fewer than sixty of the Stone Giants maintaining their constant and imperturbable vigilance.

Unless he could manage it so that his warriors attacked the wall at more than sixty points, it did not seem possible for them to successfully assault the barricades. And such was the length of the wall and the size of the City itself, that even were he to mount such an attack, the Stone Giants would still be near enough to the unprotected portions to reach them in time to prevent any of the desert raiders from reaching the crest of the walls.

And, besides, to attempt to attack the ramparts simultaneously in more than sixty places was numerically impossible. Zarouk did not have enough men with him to mount such an attack effectively.

Even it it was possible for him to get a few men atop the wall, they would be useless against the unkillable defenders. None of their weapons could inflict upon the Giants an injury sufficient to disable them.

For that he would need power guns. And Zarouk had no power guns.

It looked like stalemate.

Later that day, Zarouk sent his warriors against the gate in full strength. The trees in the forest did not make the best rams imaginable, but they were all Zarouk had to work with and would have to do. Back on Mars, his raiders would have used stone pillars slung by chains from heavy braces for this purpose. Here it was still probably possible to find such resources in a quarry or outcropping, but he lacked the tools to chip or cut lengths of stone into the proper proportions.

For an hour or two his men toiled away against that portal of solid metal, finding it unyielding. The Stone Giants, or some of them at any rate, gathered atop the wall at the gate to observe the attack, but made no effort to injure the men who toiled below.

This was in itself curious. Surely, they could have striven to discourage the ram teams with spears or darts. Lacking these, they could have emptied cauldrons of boiling water or burning oil upon the men below. But none of these actions were undertaken by the stone colossi, who seemed content merely to observe the labor of the invaders.

It was as if, for some reason, they were forbidden to kill, and could only repulse an attack, not initiate one.

Ryker thought this was very queer.

After an hour or two of this, a few human observers appeared atop the battlements to watch the rams. One of these was a frail old man with a silver furcap, his lean body wrapped in gorgeous brocades. Ryker recognized him as Melandron.

Another was Valarda herself.

She was dressed like an empress, her slim golden body blazing with gems and precious metals, draped in rich fabrics. The black silk of her hair was caught in a net studded with winking purple rubies, and atop her proud head she wore a construction of curving gold loops and arabesques like a crown. From a clip of strange amber gems fixed to the browpiece of this odd-shaped coronet, glossy plumes of pink and peach and pistachio green floated behind her. Her small, firm breasts were cupped in shallow coils of golden wire.

He stared at her hungrily, his eyes slitted and hard and hating. She leaned over the parapet to observe the activity below, then turned her face to make some remark to a smooth-faced young princeling who stood beside her. Evidently, it was a jest, because he laughed and she smiled.

Then she looked down again and across the length of the causeway, and her eyes met those of Ryker.

She knew him in an instant, and her face went pale. Suddenly her great eyes became shadowed, her face drawn and somehow mournful. She said nothing, and made no sign, but looked at him for a long time with an expression on her perfect features that resembled sorrow.

Fat Houm had spied her as well, and sidled up to where Zarouk stood overseeing the toiling of the men at the rams. The greedy merchant whispered in Zarouk’s ear and drew his attention to the slim, graceful golden girl on the ramparts.

He barked an order, and his guards lifted to their lips the long black tubes they used with such deadly accuracy as blowguns.

Ryker stepped forward uncertainly, his lips shaping a cry which he never spoke—

The languid handsome youth beside Valarda saw all of this in the same instant. Languidly he raised to his own lips a long, slim-throated horn of glittering gold. A sharp liquid song pierced the air, shrilly calling. A beckoning sound, emphatic as a regal summons, rang forth.

Suddenly the air was filled with winged serpents.

Sleek, jewelled coils drifting and undulating on the air, upheld by the thrumming of those strange wings like fans of thick plumes, they darted about like hummingbirds.

Ryker watched the first of Zarouk’s marksmen loose the first of the poisoned darts.

A serpent plucked it from midair!

Then a veritable shower of the slim, deadly needles flew from the mouths of the black tubes. Not so much as one of these reached its mark.

The men lowered their tubes, grimacing lamely.

The golden horn sang forth again, a keen, peremptory command composed of three liquid notes.

The writhing cloud of airborne serpents who floated before Valarda to shield her from the darts, now flung themselves down upon the marksmen.

The men wavered, broke, fled in all directions, pursued by agile and flickering wings.

The serpents caught in their fanged mouths the slim black tubes and bore them away.

Then the aerial swarm turned its attentions upon the ram teams, in instantaneous response to a trilling of the golden horn.

Swarming in midair above the apprehensive warriors, they darted down to snap fanged jaws before the faces of the fearful warriors, who threw their hands before their eyes to protect them from the darting serpents.

They darted hither and thither—hovered to beat their plumes in the faces of the warriors—arrowed in writhing flights to snatch at their cloaks—buffeting them about the head and neck with beating wings—virtually snapping at their heels like a pack of mongrels.

The men blanched, threw down their rams, and ran for shelter.

The aerial serpents pursued them back to their camp, then rose in a twisting stream of glittering pink-and-azure forms, and floated back to the parapets.

While Ryker and the men near him stared in awe, Valarda laughed, caressing the graceful creatures as if to thank them. They fluttered away behind the walls, vanishing from view, but probably they did not go far and could be summoned again, swiftly and easily.

Then the Stone Giants dropped lines over the lip of the parapet, snagged several of the makeshift rams in the sharp teeth of the hooked grapnels affixed to the ends of the lines, and dragged about half of the beams up to the top of the walls.

The workers growled and grimaced and waved threatening fists, but none of them quite dared risk another attack by the flying snakes to return to the foot of the wall in order to retrieve the rams they had abandoned.

Zarouk vanished into his tent, his brow thunderous.

And it was still stalemate. In fact, now it was even more so.

The human inhabitants of the City lingered for a little while atop the battlements as if waiting for more action to commence. Finally, they drifted off lazily, vanishing from sight.

Valarda was the last to leave, and before she too turned to go she looked again at Ryker. Her face was sad and her eyes seemed eloquent and pleading. Then she sighed, and vanished from his view.

That evening he lay a long time under the misty skies, staring at nothing. His thoughts were disordered, his emotions in turmoil. If Valarda had laughed at him, mocked him, spurned him, he would have been easier in his heart.

But she had not. She had seemed to beg him wordlessly for forgiveness. And that he could not forget.

He had assumed her his enemy, and had hated her, despising himself for the ache of desire he still felt in his loins for the golden girl.

And he had accepted without quarrel or dispute the black and dire assessment of Zarouk upon the folk of Zhiam. The desert prince called them devil worshippers, and so Ryker had thought of them.

But could men who worship evil have raised so lovely a dream city as this?

Could such evil dwell in this Edenic garden world, among such exquisite loveliness?

Could horror find a home here, where even the beasts did not eat of each others’ flesh, but fed from ripe fruits, side by side, the lion lying down with the lamb?

Ryker was beginning, however reluctantly, to change his opinion of the Lost Nation. Despite what Zarouk and men like him said of this people, they appeared to be a serene and peaceful race, lovers of beauty, who lived in tranquility, and existed in harmony with this calm and lovely world they had found.

It seemed beyond dispute that this was true. The tales he had been told of the despicable zhaggua and their evil ways perhaps were sullied and distorted by the blind

fanaticism of men like the priest Dmu Dran, and by the cunning of such ambitious zealots as Zarouk, and by the greed of such as Houm. And those tales might not be true.

Why had not Valarda unleashed against them the immensely strong Stone Giants, to slay and maim the warriors?

Why had not the warriors of her own people manned the walls, to cut the desert raiders down with spear and dart and missile?

Why had not the winged serpents so much as inflicted a single wound upon the men when they harried them from the gate?

If this world was truly another Eden, then perchance its unknown and nameless god had issued forth a commandment which was to be obeyed by all of the living creatures of this world, including men—a commandment identical to another given voice by yet a different God from the cloud-wrapped heights of Sinai long ago—

Thou shalt not kill.

Ryker felt a cold horror growing in his guts. It was he alone had made it possible for these warriors to invade this gentle, idyllic Eden. He had given them the key to open those gates that should have been guarded by angels with flaming swords.

Oh, God, what had he done?

19. The Secret of Zhiam

Ryker awoke shortly before dawn, disturbed by something entering the tent. He sat up swiftly, reaching about him for a weapon. Then he relaxed, leaning back. By the flickering green nightlight of the small bronze pan of liquid fire he saw that it was the old Israeli scientist.

“You’re still awake, my boy?” asked the old man in his querulous voice. Ryker nodded, then looked closely at him. Herzog seemed like a man walking in his sleep-distracted, bemused, almost ecstatic.

“Are you all right, Doc?” he asked.

The old man looked at him with eyes filled with excitement.

“What’s with me?” he chuckled. “Ah, my boy, you should ask it. I have the proof now, all I need. Wonderful—incredible! You wouldn’t believe it!”

“What wouldn’t I believe?” grinned Ryker. The old man’s enthusiasm could be infectious at times. Ryker didn’t know very much about science, and cared little, but the way the scientist was carrying on was beginning to arouse his curiosity. He seemed to be repressing his emotions with difficulty, trembling with sheer delight.

“I know where we are—that’s all!” Herzog burst out.

Ryker blinked.

“All right, where are we?” he asked, as it was obviously expected of him.

Doc sat down, squatting tailor-fashion or a bit of rug one of the warriors had given them for their tent.

“You were thinking it was another dimension,” the old man began. “And I told you that it wasn’t, because the word doesn’t mean anything, not in that context, anyway—”

“Yeah,” said Ryker flatly. “I remember. Go on.”

“Oh, I guessed it from the very beginning! I had no proof, is all. Theories, sure; hypotheses, plenty. But evidence? Hard facts, data, these were what I needed. You see, a theory is nothing unless it covers the observed phenomena and accounts for all items of data—”

“Will you get to it,” groaned Ryker. “Save the lectures for the classroom, just out with it and let me get back to sleep!”

Doc looked apologetic.

“The stars,” he blurted. “The constellations were, well, twisted around, maybe, but I could still recognize them. You see, that meant we were still in our galaxy, still in our own immediate stellar neighborhood, in fact. Our system belongs to a—what do you call it in English, outcropping? No—peninsula? Well, whatever. It’s called the Orion Spur, and it sticks out of the Carina-Cygnus Arm of our galactic spiral like …”

Doc broke off, realizing that he was rambling on in the general direction of another digression. He frowned determinedly. “All right, all right! Here’s the gist of it. The constellations were distorted, but not distorted right. I mean, they weren’t angled around as if we were seeing them from a different direction, or anything like that. They looked inside out, and the only way I could explain that was with one single assumption. But it was even more fantastic, the assumption, you see, than the idea that by going through the door we had somehow been transported to another planet somewhere in ‘near space.’ So I looked around, and believe me, I kept my eyes open!”

Ryker opened his mouth, weary of this roundabout way of getting to the point. Doc raised his hand and hastened to it.

“The cats,” he breathed faintly. “There were cats like that back on Mars once, we know, from fossils. In fact, some authorities consider it at least possible that the Martian natives evolved from a common feline ancestry, just like you and I, my boy, evolved from a simian ancestor. But there are no apes on Mars, and nothing like apes, and there never have been.”

He grinned excitedly, his face lighting up with enthusiasm.

“And then, those trees,” he burbled. “Well, there used to be trees of some sort back on Mars, too, and again we know this from the fossil record.”

An uncanny presentiment began to make Ryker’s nape hairs lift, and the skin creep on his forearms.

“Doc, what are you trying to say?” he breathed.

“And the vegetation is all blue! Just like it is on Mars, even today! Oh, biochemists worked out the formula for photosynthesis on Mars way back when. With the kind of sunlight that reaches Mars, blue vegetation canphotosynthesize just as well as green does back where you and I come from. You know? But trees—and those cats—and air this warm and humid, and all the free water in those lakes—Mars hasn’t had any of these things in millions and millions of years! So that was the problem I sort of had to solve. Oh, I knew the answer already, by sheer intuition; but the solution to the problem was even more fantastic than the problem itself, if you know what I mean. But I put the facts together, and they fit—”

“Where—”

“So, where are we, you ask?” The aged scientist beamed upon him fondly. “On Mars, my boy, where else?”

“But—” began Ryker, exasperatedly.

“The important question isn’t really where,” finished Doc. “It’s—when!”

Ryker blinked at him dazedly.

“You mean, when we stepped through the Door to Zhiam, we didn’t travel through space at all, but through—time?”

Herzog nodded affably.

Ryker looked at him, incredulously. But a dawning comprehension filled his mind. Suddenly, all sorts of curious facts and observations, scraps and bits and pieces, began to fall together. And they made a kind of sense.

The peculiar expression on the faces of Valarda and Melandron when they looked for the first time upon the Lost City—that expression of mingled sorrow and horror. The city had been fresh and new when last they had seen it—they or their ancestors, that is—now it was crumbling into ruin.

The unknown language in which they had at times conversed—an obsolete variant of the modern Tongue, elsewhere but in Zhiam forgotten for ages.

The golden eyes of the girl—strange color that has not been seen in the eyes of Martians for many ages.

The very name of the old man, Melandron, like something out of one of the ancient sagas.

It all fit together perfectly. Even the fact that they permitted him to go with them. It was as if they did not share the contemporary Martian prejudice against the Earthsider colonists who had raped, despoiled and seized their world. To them he was only an interesting curiosity. They had not lived through the grim horrors of CA occupation, watching their land taken over by aliens, their men enslaved, their women ravished and cast aside—they had perhaps never even seen an Earthling before.

“How—far—back?” he asked hoarsely.

Doc shrugged carelessly.

“A billion years, maybe. Maybe two billion. Hard to say. The movements of the stars into what we know as the present constellations is a very gradual thing. They all look deformed, out of shape, because they are here and now, I mean moving into the alignments familiar to us. I would say, however—”

But Ryker was no longer listening. His mind echoed and reechoed with that astounding, that enormous, that world-shaking fact.

Two—billion—years!

There was no point in wondering how the Lost Nation had accomplished the miracle. Time travel was an old idea. Back on Earth the science fiction writers had played with it for a couple of centuries. Science seemed to agree that it was an impossibility. Time is simply the measure of change, of entropic decay; any reversal of entropy rate would seem to be purely a contradiction in terms.

But science had to adapt to existing facts, or it was as unreliable as theology. This was ancient Mars, beyond all question. That fierce white sun was the old familiar sun, as it looked aeons earlier in time. Those curious feather trees were known from their fossilized remains. So, too, with the great cats; extinct for many ages, they were considered by some to be the evolutionary ancestor of the Martian natives. Those two moons, just barely visible in the night sky, were Deimos and Phobos, the moons of Mars. The blue moss that covered the soil, the blue vegetation, the strange flowers—blue vegetation still existed on the Mars Ryker knew, but it was scarce and had evolved into simpler, hardier forms over ages of gradual dehydration which had reduced this warm and fertile planet into a dying world of naked rock and bleak dust desert.

It had long been known that the remote ancestors of the Martian people had possessed a highly advanced technology, about which little was known for only a few of their machines or instruments had survived the attrition of time.

Somehow they had found a way to open a portal to the distant past, and into that forgotten age they had fled from the persecution of the fanatical priests, to seek a realm where they could live in peace and worship their strange new god according to their own ways.

No wonder that the Keystone was of such vital importance to them, for locked within its black crystal was the power to trigger the portal, to open or to seal the door. And when the unnamed renegade had fled from their ancient Eden, he had left the door … ajar.

And through it they had feared the descendants of their old persecutors might pour, to exterminate them as once of old they had been faced with extermination.

And the fear had not been groundless. For their enemies had come—and he, Ryker, had shown them the way!

And now Ryker began to understand why Valarda had left him to die atop the desolate plateau.

She had known that Zarouk’s raiders were following at their very heels. And she had the thing she had come into the future to find—the all-important Keystone, which meant life or death for her people in the past.

The decision must have been an agonizing one. She had weighed in the balance the debt she owed the Outworlder for saving her from the mob and for assisting her in her journey home, against the very survival of her nation.

And she had decided that the fate of thousands outweighed one single life,

Ryker wondered if he would have decided it any differently, if he had been in her place, deciding to leave her in order to save his own people.

He hoped he would never have such a terrible decision to make, for he doubted if he could accept the burden of that awful responsibility.

But now he understood why she had done it. And he knew the meaning of that stricken, pleading expression in her eyes when she had stared down at him from the parapet yesterday.

He slept no more that night.

Zarouk was up with dawn with a new idea for assaulting the walls of Zhiam.

He sent his men back to the grove to cut down some of the limber boughs of the willowlike trees they had seen when first they had entered this place outside the world.

And he began to construct a row of primitive-looking seige engines.

Ryker thought of them as catapults, until Doc corrected him on his terminology.

“No, no, my boy! Catapult is not the proper word at all. A catapult is like a gigantic bow and arrow. What the Prince seems to be building is the sort of thing the ancient Romans would have called a ballista. During the Middle Ages, they knew them as mangonels. See the cup-shaped basket at the other end? That’s for hurling stones.”

Ryker had to admire the Desert Hawk for his resourcefulness. Armed with these engines, the raiders could keep well back from the walls and hurl heavy boulders at the fortifications. The Stone Giants could not bother them, and here the aerial serpents would be out in the open, exposed to darts and spears and blowguns. It was a clever tactic.

By mid-afternoon the first stony missiles began to thump and bang against the gate, which rang like a huge gong when struck. The branches of the feather trees, when lashed together, had just enough “springiness” to them to bend down over the crossbars, and to flip the heavy rocks when cut free.

Only the occasional stone actually hit the metal gates. Most of the big stones struck the walls, especially the narrow arch above the portal. Before long the marble would crack and begin to crumble. A couple of days under this sort of bombardment, and the desert raiders would be through the walls and into the City.

A ragged cheer went up lustily from half a hundred throats. One of the great stones had struck a bit high, catching the nearest of the Stone Giants squarely in the chest. The white crystalline stuff of the weirdly animated statue had shattered under the impact, spraying fragments everywhere.

One of the Stone Giants was down, at least, and would never rise again. Zarouk showed his sharp white teeth in a grin like a wolfish leer. It was pleasant to discover that the walking stone men could, after all, be destroyed!

Thump—thump—clang—crack!—went the flying boulders as Zarouk kept the wall above the gate under steady bombardment.

It was only a matter of time, Ryker grimly knew.

20. The Underground Road

That evening, after sunset, the encampment of the desert raiders was hit by a surprise attack.

Zarouk planned to keep his men pounding away at the wall with their ballistae throughout the hours of darkness, so as to discourage the dwellers of the City from attempting to effect repairs on the wall.

The folk of the City, however, retaliated in an unsuspected manner.

Suddenly—out of nowhere, it seemed—a large number of the slow, lumbering Stone Giants entered the camp. Impervious to the darts and spears and swords used against them by the startled sentries, they ignored the human warriors and headed straight for the long row of makeshift ballistae.

These they overturned, and began to hammer them apart with balled fists as heavy as stone mauls or hammers.

Zarouk came out of his tent in a fury, thundering commands. He knew very well that it was difficult if not impossible for his warriors to inflict any damage on the animated statues, but they could be immobilized, for a time at least, by lassoes.

The sky was clear and the stars twinkled down, and the larger of the twin moons was faintly visible as a ghostly crescent low on the horizon. Lighting the gloom with torches, he sent his lassomen out to rope the ponderous, slow-moving giants.

Before long they managed to snag two of them and pull them off balance, toppling them to the ground. Then, with five or six men pulling at the other end of the rope, they dragged their captives away from the scene and attempted to tie their arms to their bodies with further ropes or thongs. Some of the men were armed with axes or war hammers, and these strove to smash the Stone Giants as the one atop the walls had been broken asunder when hit by the missile.

The other Stone Giants paid no attention to their captive comrades and patiently continued breaking the ballistae apart into fragments.

Like everyone else in the camp, Ryker and the old Israeli had been aroused from their slumbers by the uproar, and came out of their tent to see what was happening.

But unlike the others, who were too busily engaged in trying to immobilize and break up the stone men to have time for curiosity, Ryker wondered just where the Giants had come from, and how they had gotten out of the City. He knew that Zarouk had posted sentries to keep an eye on the gates of the City, so that his camp would not be taken by surprise in a foray such as this.

The fact that it had been surprised, suggested to Ryker that the Giants had come through the walls by some other entry not as yet discovered.

He imparted this intelligence to the old scientist, who eagerly agreed that it was indeed mysterious. On impulse, the two of them circled the commotion and headed out toward the City, hoping to find out how the Giants had gotten there.

They found the answer to the question with surprising ease, when a portion of the riverbank opened beneath them, quite suddenly, and they fell into a dark, cavernous space.

Ryker staggered to his feet, limping on a lame leg, blood trickling down into his eyes from a cut on his scalp. The leg did not feel like it was broken, and the rest of him, although bruised and shaken up a bit, was not seriously harmed.

Rubbing the blood out of his eyes, he peered around him in the utter blackness, calling Doc’s name in a hoarse voice.

Then he stumbled into something soft and yielding. Dropping to his knees he felt around him with groping hands, encountering the old man’s body.

He lay limp and unmoving, but Ryker could hear him breathing and his searching hands found the flutter of a pulse. He ran his hands gently over the old man’s limbs, finding that when he touched Herzog’s left leg the old man groaned.

A hurt, perhaps broken leg was bad enough. A broken head was worse. And his questing fingers found a lump on the scientist’s head the size of a hen’s egg. But, anyway, Doc was still alive, and that was something to be thankful for.

His eyes were beginning to adjust to the darkness by now, and some faint starlight was filtering through the hole far above his head. By this dim illumination, he searched the pit into which they had fallen, finding a flight of crude stone steps along one wall leading up to the opening above. By this stair, obviously, the Stone Giants had ascended to the mouth of the pit.

Peering up, he could just make out the details. A sort of double trapdoor made of wooden planks and covered with a natural camouflage of soil and moss had protected the secret entry from discovery. He guessed that the trap had been shut but not barred, left sufficiently ajar so that the Giants could pry it open and make their escape by this same route, when their work was accomplished. If it had been barred, the chances were that he and Doc could have walked across it without noticing that it was covering a hollowness in the ground, because from the residue of soil and moss which still clung to the trap, he could see that the camouflage had been nearly two feet thick.

Ryker knelt to gather the old man up in his arms, thinking to ascend by the stair and get his companion back to camp, when he was forced to alter his plans.

The point of a slim rapier was just barely touching the back of Ryker’s neck.

Moving slow and careful, he turned his head to see the smiling features of the slim, languid young lordling who had stood next to Valarda on the parapet, and who had laughed in answer to her jest.

There were five other men with him. And they all wore swords.

And Ryker’s hands were empty.

For a moment he simply looked at them. There was no way that he could fight them, here in the dark, in these narrow confines, and lacking any weapon save his bare hands and the iron strength of his burly body.

But he was sorely tempted.

He was sick of being a captive. And these lordlings of Zhiam looked to him slim, delicate, almost effeminate. Their half-naked bodies were silky-smooth, soft—-not flabby, but with undeveloped musculature. They looked oddly immature, their smooth cheeks and pointed chins innocent of hair, their bodies slim and effete. Like boys playing soldier, he thought sourly to himself.

He did not like their softness, or the gems that twinkled at earlobe and throat and wrist. Instead of the leather tunics and breeches, or long, burnooselike robes usually worn by the warriors of Mars, these dainty princelings went nearly naked—but then, to be fair, in this humid, nigh-tropical climate, there was no need for the heavier raiment common on the Mars he knew.

They wore jewelled girdles of precious metal slung low about their hips, with silken breechclouts of shimmering fabric, the hues of metallic bronze-green, amber, purple or indigo, wound about their slender loins. Bands of gleaming Martium or red-bronze clasped their slim, boyish arms at the biceps and the wrist. Their legs were naked, their feet shod in supple buskins, laced high over the instep.

Their faces were heart shaped as Valarda’s, with wide cheekbones, pointed chins, and large, slightly slanted eyes lustrously golden as were hers. They wore their fur caps longer than was the custom among the People he knew, silky russet hair caught in openwork helms made of curved pieces of gold or silver, some adorned with jewels and others haughty with nodding plumes. A few wore short, knee-length cloaks of scarlet cloth—crinkly, shiny-surfaced stuff, like taffeta—and obviously for court fashion rather than for warmth.

He didn’t like the looks of them—their soft, underdeveloped bodies, their features so pretty as to verge on girlish beauty, their languid postures, too graceful and affected to be manly. But he had to admit they held their swords expertly enough. They looked as if they knew very well how to use them.

There was no sense in getting himself killed—not here, not like this, like a rat trapped in a black hole in the ground. It would do no good to resist, so he surrendered.

The dainty princeling who had attended Valarda on the parapet murmured some peremptory directive to his retinue. Ryker listened closely this time. Now that he realized the language was an antiquated and obsolete variant of the one universal native language, he thought he could almost catch the sense of what was said.

The pronunciation of the words was oddly different from the Tongue he knew, of course. The phrasing of the remark the princeling drawled to his companions was stilted, archaic and formal, the consonants were spoken with more crispness and sharpness than in the dialect of the Tongue familiar to him, the vowels were rounder and more fully enunciated, rather than being slurred and almost elided, as in the modern forms of speech spoken on the desert world, and some of the verbs were unrecognizable.

But he could catch enough of what the aristocratic personage said to his followers to make out its import.

He said, “Bind this one, and construct a litter for the old man. We shall escort them into Zhiam, since that seems to be their goal. The Priestess will no doubt desire to have words with this ruffian in particular.”

So he was a prisoner again!

By now, Ryker was almost getting used to it.

They lashed his wrists behind his back with silken cords which looked flimsy enough, but proved to be surprisingly strong when Ryker surreptitiously tested his strength against them.

It was singularly humiliating to stand there and let these pretty boys tie him up. He towered head and shoulders above most of them, and his arms were bigger around and more heavily muscled than were their thighs. He could have picked them up and tossed them about like dolls, but he bent his head and grimly submitted to being bound.

The Martians took up the limp body of Doc Herzog and bore it along with them on a makeshift litter fashioned from two slim spears, lashed together with strips torn from one of the crimson cloaks. They treated the injured man gently enough, Ryker saw.

Then, prodded on by their leader, who seemed to be named Lord Thoh, the Zhiamese let Ryker precede them into the tunnel.

It was black as pitch inside, of course, but the flooring was dry and smooth underfoot, and Ryker cautiously felt his way, wary of stumbling over some unseen obstacle in the dark.

The tunnel slanted downwards for a time on a shallow decline, then ran straight for a certain ways, and finally rose to the surface again on a gentle upwards slant.

It had been tunnelled beneath the very bed of the river, he realized, and it was obvious that it was not a recent excavation. Heavy beams of dark azure wood supported the roof at intervals, and crossbraces prevented the earthen walls from crumbling in. The beams were not freshly cut, but old; here and there, they were slick with patches of mold and lichen.

His burly form towering above the slim Zhiamese, Ryker went down into the darkness, feeling rather like Hercules descending into Hades to claim his bride from the King of Shadows. The classical parallel was neat and fitting, but made him feel uncomfortable. One thrust of those slim rapiers, and he would be going down into the Kingdom of Shadows sure enough.

What purpose this underground road had been built to serve, Ryker could not even guess. But he reflected that any city worth its salt has more than one way in—or out.

When they ascended again to the surface of the planet, it was by a stone stair similar to that Ryker had seen at the other end of the subterranean passage. This one gave forth into the interior of a large stone building whose shadowy heights and echoing recesses were brilliantly illuminated by lamps of crystal and some silvery metal. He could have sworn the method of illumination used was fluorescent lighting, but there was no way of telling without examining one of the glowing spheres at close hand.

Here Lord Thoh reported his small triumph to an officer who treated him with the utmost deference, glancing curiously at the tall, rugged Earthling and the unconscious scientist. This officer was manlier and more strongly built than the little party of courtiers, although still an unusually short and slightly built warrior by modern standards. He wore a short tunic of glassy green stuff, covered with shiny scales like some sort of armor, and his helm was of red copper.

Ryker was put into a narrow cell with a barred door and his wrists were cut free.

Then the Zhiamese warriors went away, bearing the unconscious body of the old scientist with them, and Ryker was left alone with his thoughts.