Message From the Eocene Read online

  Yes, it might have been wiser simply to have surrendered. He knew so little about the Vaeaa that any assumption he made about their goals or motives stood a good chance of being wrong. He seemed to be temporarily safe in the cloud layer, but he thought that if they really wanted to capture him, they could probably do it. Beings who could toss lightning bolts at one wouldn't be permanently baffled by darkness or a cloud layer. But for the present he was still free. He had a little time. It seemed important to make good use of it.

  He looked about him. The cloud layer was excessively damp—water dripped from his face, his arms, his shoulders, his belly, his back—and though some light was still to be found at this depth, the cloud was so dense that if he wanted to see his hand he had to bring it up close before his eyes.

  For a moment his brain revolved impractical expedients. He might try to contact Synon (how?) ... or set a radioactive trap for the Vaeaa ... or destroy the book before they could get hold of it ... No, the ideas were all silly, particularly the last. If the book were destroyed, no one would ever know what it had contained.

  The thing to do—the thing to do was to try to find some safe place to hide the book before he was picked up. In its impervious case it could probably stand a good deal, even an immersion in boiling mud. And later, after he got loose, he could try to retrieve it again.

  He licked his lips. He couldn't see the ground he was standing on, but from the feel of it beneath his feet, it was solid rock. No place here to hide a book. His best bet, he thought, would be at the edge of the cloud layer, where there might still be a little light, a possible hiding place.

  But wouldn't the Vaeaa look for the book in just such spots? They probably would. It was the best he could think of, though. It was difficult to make good decisions when one had little knowledge and few choices.

  He began to descend again, gripping blindly with his toes. It felt odd to be going down without his usual gear. The light fell off with each step he took.

  He had not gone more than a few feet when he saw, below him and a little to the left, a patch of the most intense kingfisher blue.

  Tharg did not call it that, of course. He had never seen a kingfisher, or any other bird. He had seen a color something like this one on pieces of metallic copper, or in the lower part of the sky at sunset. But those colors had been less intense; this blue was so beautiful that he stood looking at it with his mouth open.

  He blinked, and it was still there. Without thinking at all, he started toward it. It looked soft, like velvet. He wanted to touch it, to stroke it with his fingers, to—A pebble, turning and tinkling under his careless foot, saved him. He stopped abruptly, beginning to tremble. Why, what was the matter with him? There was nothing there; it had been a hallucination. But so soon, and at this shallow depth? He had never had a hallucination of color before, nor heard of anyone who had.

  What would the Vaeaa try next? No wonder they had not tried to stop him when he had fled from them. If they could command enticements like this—He must find a hiding place for the book. He must not tell them where he had hidden it, no matter what they did.

  Once more he began to descend. He kept seeing patches of the kingfisher blue. What made it so desirable? It was only a color, and an illusory one at that. But it drew him like a magnet. He had to fight the temptation to run to it.

  At the back of his mind was the fear that the Vaeaa, above the cloud layer, were coldly and objectively watching his every movement, while they skillfully played out their bait of lovely color for him. It might be so. He had no way of knowing. His people couldn't penetrate the cloud layer for more than a few yards with their infrared detectors, but the Vaeaa might be different. He'd have to risk it; there was nothing else he could do.

  The light was getting very bad. He must be almost at the edge of the cloud layer. He was already beginning to feel the depression of spirit that the lightless surface inspired in him. The ground under his feet had a spongy feel. He'd better start looking for a hiding place.

  He bent over—he could see his hands now, except when a trailing wisp of cloud hid them—and began to feel his way. What he was hunting was a warm spot, a gradient that might lead to a hot spring or a sulphur pot. He was still bent over, groping along, when he felt something touch his back.

  His heart missed one of its triple beats. He straightened up, peering anxiously around in the gloom. And another light touch brushed his face.

  What could it be? There was nothing alive anywhere on this raw young world except Tharg's race; their cities were an incredible achievement, soapbubbles blown out over a hostile abyss. Another hallucination? He had never had a hallucination of touch; it must be the Vaeaa again. But this was not like the beautiful patches. What were they trying to do?

  He moved to the right, and the touch on his face came again. It was like being brushed by the finest of threads.

  Back to the left, and again the touch. No matter how he moved, a touch on the face, or sometimes several, followed the movement. He groped with his hands, and could feel nothing. But always there came the touch, as if he had blundered into an ambush of hanging gossamer threads.

  At last he stood still. He thought he understood what it meant; the Vaeaa were pinpointing his movements, and no matter where he went they could follow him.

  He knew an instant of despair: he had failed, they knew where he was, they would take the book. Then as he stood there in the wretched light, he had his first endogenous hallucination.

  He saw himself sitting on the ground, his knees at the level of his ears, bending over something. He couldn't see what it was, and this vexed him. He was curious as to what the phantasm of Tharg was doing. It seemed important to find out.

  His mind cleared; the phantasm vanished abruptly. But now Tharg knew what he had seen himself doing: he had been reading the book.

  He moved a little and felt the light touch once more on his face. Very well. He walked up the slope a little, trying for the best possible combination of light and freedom from cloud. When he was satisfied he had it as good as it could be got, he felt in his shoulder pouch and pulled out the hard little dark-brown ellipse. He hoped he could get it open. Otherwise ...

  He ran his hands questingly over the covering for a moment or two. It was perfectly smooth, perfectly solid, with no hint of a suture anywhere. He tried combinations of pressure. Nothing worked. At last he stopped trying and looked with hopeless longing at it. Would banging it on the ground or stepping on it help? He didn't think it would. His hands were tired from gripping and pressing. Was he just going to stand here with the ellipsoid in his hands until the Vaeaa caught up with him? He imagined so. And they would find ways of opening it.

  Rage swelled in him. Once more he pressed his thumbs down hard on the enclosing case. And this time, whether because his anger had been required or because he had at last touched the proper spot, the shell split silently down its long axis and folded back like the valves of a door.

  The book was inside.

  Tharg's first thought was how pretty it was, his second that the book, freed of its case, seemed bigger than he would have expected. It was bound in some glowing rosy-purple stuff, very soft and agreeable to the fingers, with the title—Tharg supposed it was the title—embossed diagonally across the cover in metallic tyrian purple characters. Tharg couldn't possibly read them, and yet, as he looked at them, he was sure he knew what they meant: Guidebook to the—the Planes was what the characters said. (Not quite Planes; Spaces, or even World, might have been a better translation.)

  The title fired his anticipation. He felt like laughing. He didn't sit down on the ground, as he had seen his phantasm doing, but he opened the book eagerly at what seemed to be the first page.

  It was embossed in glowing golden ink on a silky tawny surface. The characters were beautifully placed on the page, and beautifully proportioned; they were quite unlike those of Tharg's language and yet, as he looked at them, he felt that it was like the title: he could read them well enough.
These flower-like bosses, these complex, beautiful arabesques—he had seen them before, he could read them, it was no harder than deciphering some half-forgotten language. It was something he knew, had always known, was learning, dear and beautiful.

  He felt a marvellous sense of expansion. Sometimes he did not understand a word and had to look back for it, but then it seemed to be glossed for him, in a series of transparencies.

  He reached the bottom of the page. For a moment he wondered whether this might not be another hallucination, for by now he was realizing that the book was being written as he read. Meaning and character came into being under his eyes. No, this was not like the books one read in dreams, where sense evaporated from the page. And only the book seemed marvellous; he was well aware that he was standing on a darkling slope with wisps of mist coming before his eyes, while his body was clammy and cold.

  By the time he had finished the second page, he was shivering with delight. He knew who he was, and he knew what he was reading. The Vaeaa must not get this book.

  -

  Chapter Three

  They had prodded him up to the ridges and chased him for a long time in the light of the tremendous, sky-filling moon. If had been an indolent, almost laughing chase that had ended only when, tired of the sport, they had thrown a net ignominously over his head. Now Tharg stood before them in the early dawn, bound too tightly even to shiver, and the tallest of the Vaeaa held the book disdainfully in his long hands.

  Tharg had tried to hide the book. He had hidden it in a place that ought to have been safe, a radioactive hot spot. He had hoped they would never find it, but they had gone to it directly and surely. He knew now why they had let him enter the cloud layer in the first place. All his movements, from the first moment, had been visible to them, but it had been more sport to let him run.

  The tall one rifled over the pages. When they had taken the book from its hiding place, Tharg had had a faint hope that they would not be able to read it. But it was plain, from the tall one's manner, that he could read it nearly as easily as Tharg had. The book had no discrimination; it would write itself for anyone who chose to read.

  Yes, they could read it. But how different their response to it was from what Tharg's had been! They touched the book with the tips of their fingers, turning the pages with dislike, with contemptuous distaste. Now and again one of them would look at him coolly with pale turquoise eyes.

  Tharg turned his head and looked about him. They were standing on the open deck of some sort of small aircraft, the craft from which they had hunted him last night. It was hovering almost motionless a few feet above the surface of a wide, very gradually sloping plateau dotted with small scoria-cones. The cones were of various sizes, from mere babies to one, at Tharg's left, which could properly be called a crater. It was a hundred feet across. A dense shaft of vapor rose languidly from it.

  The tall Vaeaa pointed out a passage in the book to one of his subordinates. They held a murmured consultation. Tharg felt light-headed. He supposed that his thoracic flora were not in very good shape, and then there had been the long stresses of last night's chase.

  They had begun by prodding him up to the ridges with long lines of sparks, corded fire that had run through the cloud layer to touch him with a tingle and burn. The lines had been white and brilliant, beautiful knotted explosions of light against the darkness, the filmy, thread-like lashes of a many-lashed whip.

  He could have stood the pain, but every touch of the white whip of light left him feeling that a giant was squeezing the blood out of his resisting heart. Two or three touches of the lash, and he was stifling in his own metabolic wastes. In the end, he could stay below and die, or let them prod him up to the ridges and run for it.

  How intimately the Vaeaa had understood his physiology! And if he had had any temptation to stay below and be a hero, it had disappeared when he'd reflected that the closer he stayed to where he had hidden the book, the more likely they were to find it. So he had come up and run, run for hours, stopping now and then to make a pretense of scrabbling at the rock with his fingers as if in search of a hiding place for the book. It hadn't done any good. They had gone straight to the book when they'd wanted to.

  How much he resented that they had the book! It didn't make any difference what use they might make of it—the fact was that they didn't deserve it. It had been sent to Tharg's people, not to them. They had no right to it. Absentee landlords, indeed, who appeared only when their tenants had something covetable.

  Covetable, but why? Tharg couldn't understand why they should go to so much trouble to obtain possession of something they obviously disliked, he would probably find out what the reason was in due course, if they let him live long enough.

  If they let him live ... It occurred to Tharg that he had been so concerned about what was going to happen to the guidebook that he had done very little worrying about his own fate. The folk tales he had heard about the Vaeaa when he was a boy had stressed that meeting one of them was usually unfortunate, though sometimes they could be generous. But after what they had already put him through, it was hardly reasonable to think they would let him go.

  The murmured conference between the two Vaeaa was growing a little louder. They seemed to be disagreeing over something in the book. The sun rose higher. At last the tall one gave what appeared to be an order. The other touched his forehead, apparently in submission, then turned and went into the aircraft's small cabin.

  He came back carrying a metallic tray. On the surface of the tray were arranged three or four transparent saucers, each holding a handful of capsules of a particular color, and a handled knife with a very slender blade. He stopped in front of the tall Vaeaa, who appeared to think for a moment, then selected a pale green capsule.

  Tharg watched these actions with detachment, since he could see no immediate application to himself in them. But now the tall Vaeaa, carrying the capsule daintily between thumb and forefinger, came over to Tharg. "Swallow this," he said in Tharg's language. They were the first comprehensible words the earthdiver had heard him use.

  Tharg blinked. "No," he said.

  The tall Vaeaa wasted no time on argument. He reached around behind Tharg and hit him a sharp blow on the back of the neck. Tharg's mouth opened involuntarily, and the Vaeaa leader dropped the pill down his throat.

  Time passed. Tharg would have liked to try to vomit the capsule up, but he was tied so tightly he could not even retch. The Vaeaa stood about in relaxed attitudes, watching him with remote eyes.

  Tharg could feel the capsule hot in his belly. They might be trying to kill him, but it was unlikely: poison was a complicated way of disposing of anybody. No, they must be trying to drug him, but he couldn't think why.

  More time passed. The sun was well up now. Tharg felt impatient. Whatever was going to happen, he wished it would get under way. They couldn't have given him a sugar pill, a mere placebo. But the effect was certainly taking a long time to show itself.

  Abruptly, without any warning at all, he pitched headlong up from his bound body and into a spin. No, that wasn't it, he was still inside his body, but—how dizzy he felt! He had fallen into a colored vortex, he was going around like a wheel, he felt that sunrise had begun all over again. It was brighter and more beautiful than it had been the first time. But it was upside down.

  At the height of his rotation, the world steadied. Order came back into it. But it was a different world.

  The cone-dotted landscape, with the smoke lazily curling up from the largest of the cones, had not quite ceased to exist, but it had become transparent, and through it Tharg saw ...

  His new range of perceptions must have been apparent in his bodily attitude. The Vaeaa leader said, in his high-pitched voice, "Tell us what you see."

  He didn't want to speak, but his mouth opened obediently, and he heard himself say, "There is a fountain and a gate. Beside them are two dark trees." (Tharg had never seen a tree. He knew the word only as a literary curiosity. But now he used
it unhesitatingly.)

  "Go through the gate," the high voice told him authoritatively.

  How could he? It was not really a gate—that was only a word—and besides, what had a moment earlier been a gate was now a hill with bright flowers. The colors were intensely vivid.

  "I can't," he said. His body was far away. "It isn't there."

  "Go through," said the voice.

  The gate reappeared, vanished, settled into a grotto cool with water and edged with ferny greenery. It drew him hauntingly. Eagerly he entered it.

  "What do you see?" came the voice.

  "It is another snare," Tharg said. He wished he could bite off his tongue to keep from speaking. "The light is bright. It is rebirth."

  "Of what color?"

  "Let me back! There is too much light."

  "Of what color?" The high voice was inexorable.

  "None that we know."

  "Ah!" The leader made a noise of satisfaction. He said something to the subordinate. "Go on from the fountain," he told Tharg.

  But by now Tharg had reached the end of his tether. He was in too many places at once. The light that beat on him seemed ineffably horrible. "I can't go farther," his thick tongue said. "It doesn't exist yet. Beyond here it isn't created."

  There was a silence. Tharg was trying to get back into his body again.

  "He hasn't created it yet," the tall one said at last. Tharg didn't know what language he was speaking, but he could understand him perfectly. The words seemed to make small vivid pictures in his brain.

  "No," agreed the subordinate. "Shall I give him another dose? Or would it be better to stimulate his inner eye with the knife?"

  Tharg made a choking noise. They looked at him without compassion. "I think he understands," said the leader. "Give him the psylocybate. We must send him further."

  This time a blue bolus was dropped down Tharg's throat.