Sign of the Labrys Read online

  “No. Her breasts are larger than mine.”

  I wasn’t satisfied, even after all these denials. “Are you a relative of hers, then? You do seem like her, somehow.”

  “She’s an eighteenth cousin of mine, or something. A lot of people in the craft are related by blood. Sometimes it’s pretty remote… Now sit down in the chair. And then I’ll blindfold you.”

  I obeyed. As she tied a square of black silk over my eyes, I realized how disappointed I was. I’d wanted Kyra to be Despoina, even though I realized, when I thought about it, that she was too short to be the woman I had seen among the columns at the bottom of H. But the communication between Despoina and me had been rudely, almost painfully, interrupted when the FBY had burst in, and I would be unsatisfied until it could be renewed once more.

  I heard the spurt of a match. Kyra was holding something under my nose. “Inhale,” she said, “and hold your breath until it gets uncomfortable. This will all be rather pleasant, Sam. You needn’t wince.”

  I drew smoke into my lungs. It smelled a little like resin and a little like camphor, and quite a lot like violets. “What was that?” I asked when I had exhaled.

  “We call it kat. We used to use it a good deal. But it’s hard to get now, when nothing grows normally.”

  “I hear a noise in the hall,” I said after a moment. My heartbeat had speeded up.

  “Pay no attention to it,” Kyra replied absently. “It’s the white rats, on their usual schedule. You can hear them more plainly from this room, that’s all.

  “Now, draw your sight in behind your eyeballs, and look out over the top of your head. Don’t try to see anything, particularly—just look.”

  I attempted to follow these impossible instructions. “I don’t see anything,” I said after a minute. “I don’t see how I could.”

  “Don’t you? Maybe this will help.” She put her thumbs just above my eyes, in the space between the eyeball and the bony arch, and pressed lightly. “Do you see anything now?”

  “Yes.” I was very much excited. “I see—I see your hands, pressing. They’re a dull red. And there’s a sort of streamer of light coming out from them.”

  “Good!” She sounded pleased. “Look at me now, over the top of your head. Do you see anything?”

  “Yes.” I was still excited. “I see you, in a dim red outline, and there’s a bright, bright spot between your eyes. There’s a larger spot, not quite so bright, just under your breasts.”

  “That’s pretty good, for the first time,” Kyra said. She removed the blindfold. “We don’t want you to get overtired. Now we’ll try something else.”

  She covered one of the enameled instrument trays with several layers of paper toweling. She drew a fistful of something from a small cloth bag.

  “When I ask you how many beads there are,” she said, “answer right away. Don’t try to count.” She dropped some translucent turquoise beads on the surface of the tray, and held it out to me. “Now. How many beads are there? Don’t count.”

  This was easy. “Four,” I said.

  She opened her fist and dropped more beads. “Now?”

  “Uh—seven.”

  “Don’t count,” she said severely. “I told you not to. Now?”

  “I can’t—”

  “Yes, you can. How many beads are there?”

  “Thirty-six.”

  “And now?” She added more beads to those in the tray each time she spoke.

  “Seventy-eight.”

  “And now?”

  “I can’t possibly—”

  “Tell me,” she said between her teeth.

  “A hundred and thirteen. No, fourteen.”

  “That’s fine. And now?” She scooped up beads from the paper toweling.

  “Eighty-two.”

  “This time?”

  “Exactly forty.”

  “And now?”

  “You’ve taken them all except one. But somehow, it looks as if there were more.”

  “Umm.” She put the beads back in the bag and put the bag in a drawer. “That’s enough for now. I’ll start getting us some lunch.”

  After we had eaten, Kyra suggested that I lie down on my bed and rest. “I’ll be gone for a while,” she said.

  “Where do you go, Kyra? Every day, or almost every day, you go away about this time.”

  “I have affairs to attend to,” she replied impassively. “If you can sleep for a while, do. It would do you good.” She picked up the athame. “I’m not going far.”

  Left alone, I was restless. I tossed about for a while on the bed, and then fell into an unquiet doze. I was awakened by a knock on the door.

  It startled me. Almost before I could lift my sleep-confused head from the pillow, the door opened and a man stuck his head and shoulders inside.

  “Excuse me,” he said when he saw me. “Is Tanith here?”

  “No one’s here except myself,” I answered.

  “Oh.” He shut the door.

  When Kyra returned, a little later, I told her about the caller. “He asked for Tanith,” I finished.

  “Tanith?” Her eyebrows went up. “What did he look like?”

  “Fattish. Middle-aged. I didn’t get much of a look at him. But I think I’d seen him before.”

  “Ah. There are all sorts of people on this level. Some of them have odd sorts of reasons for being here.”

  The matter seemed to be closed. But I noticed that she seemed absent and distracted the rest of the “day.” (I put the word in quotation marks because, of course, there was no alternation of light and darkness on any of the tiers. But it was dark inside our sleeping room when Kyra turned the light out; we stayed awake for sixteen hours or so, and then slept for about eight.)

  We went to bed early, since I was tired. I woke once in the night to hear the peculiar rustle and scratching that meant Sorensen’s production was outside our door. But the door was locked, and I heard Kyra breathing quietly in her bed beside me. We were safe, Kyra and I, from whatever dangers prowled the corridors of level F.

  Next day Kyra went on with my training and strengthening. There was a series of games—plays—seemingly childish and meaningless, that yet felt important and significant.

  For example, once she had me blindfold myself and then edge my way cautiously around the walls of the room, telling me that I was walking a narrow path high on a mountain cliff.

  Abruptly she told me to stop. I obeyed, halting in mid-step. “What would have happened if I hadn’t stopped?” I asked her when she had taken the blindfold off.

  “There was a gap in the path. You would have fallen and been killed.”

  I thought she must be joking, but when I looked at her, her face was perfectly serious.

  We repeated the training gambits of the day before, too. But as soon as we had finished lunch, Kyra had me try something different.

  She gave me a white pill to swallow, explaining that it was a mild anesthetic. “It’s not a hypnotic, or even a sedative,” she said. “I’m not trying to make you go to sleep, but to dull your awareness of sense impressions. Now, lie down on your bed.”

  When I was lying flat, she put a black mask over my eyes. “I don’t want any light at all to get through—it’s not just that I’m trying to keep you from seeing things,” she said.

  “What’s the idea of all this?” I asked.

  “By cutting out all avenues of sense reception, I want to throw you back on yourself. Try not to move about restlessly. Just lie still and let your thoughts come.”

  “What if I go to sleep?” I asked.

  “I don’t think you will, but if you do, it’s all right. I’ll be in the next room, with the door open, in case you get frightened. Is there anything else before I put the ear-stops in?”

  “How long am I to stay like this?”

  “Not more than five or six hours, anyway. I’ll look at you from time to time and see how you’re doing. Okay?”

  I nodded. Gently she inserted the plugs in my ears
.

  Now, being blind and deafened, with one’s sense impressions dulled, is a little like going to sleep in a quiet room. And yet it was thoroughly unlike that. Almost from the moment that Kyra put the plugs in my ears, a series of brilliant pictures began to form behind the lids of my closed eyes.

  They were architectural, primarily—columned galleries, balustrades with carved members, rooms with groined ceilings and coffered walls and sides. All these in brilliant colors, the ceilings picked out in gold and red and green, the columns glowing amber against an intense blue sky.

  The pictures succeeded one another rapidly. They were there a moment, and then they would be gone. Sometimes the same elements would appear in a new combination, as if a kaleidoscope had been shaken, and sometimes the picture would seem entirely new, with nothing in the one before to prepare me for it.

  For a long time I watched them with absorbed interest. I was not restless, I had no desire to move my body about, and I was certainly not asleep. But as the flow of pictures continued without the slightest slowing, it became at first tiresome, then oppressive, and finally frightening.

  And still it continued. There was no place for me to go to withdraw from it. Still the staircases rose, the battlements ascended, the great painted gates loomed up. At last, with a tremendous effort, I withdrew my—mind? attention? self?—from the incessant pictures, and let them form themselves. I was no longer there.

  I—or somebody called Sam—was in a sad, dull, dun-colored place, a world of dim light and color, a flat, featureless plain. It was an afterworld. It never changed.

  I was roused by Kyra withdrawing the plugs from my ears. “I’m going to uncover your eyes,” she said into my ear, “but don’t open them immediately. There. Now, how do you feel?”

  I considered. “As if I’d been dead.”

  “And—?”

  “Guilty. In dying, there is always some guilt.”

  “Any horror?” she asked professionally.

  “Yes! Yes!”

  “You may open your eyes now. How do you feel toward me?”

  Emotion welled up in me. “I hate you,” I said.

  She laughed. “Well, that’s only natural. Do you want to get away from me?”

  “No. I want to stay and strangle you.”

  Again she laughed. She sat down beside me on the bed. “You are greatly improved,” she said.

  “Why did you rouse me when you did?” I asked her.

  “When I looked in, just now, tears were flowing down your cheeks.”

  I drew a long, wavering sigh. “How long was I cut off like that?”

  “About four hours. The results would have been even better if I’d been able to put you in a bath of water held just at body temperature. But of course I haven’t the facilities. You may get up now, Sam, but move slowly. You’ll be shaky for a while.”

  I sat up slowly, yawning and rubbing my face. I swung my feet over the side of the bed and stood up. “My sense of time’s confused,” I told her. “It could be either midnight, or a new day.”

  “Yes. Come into my consulting room and I’ll show you something else. You will have to work hard before you can do this.”

  When we were in the room with the padded couch and the autoclave, she said, “I’m not going to blindfold you for this. But turn your eyes toward the corner, away from me, until I tell you you may look.”

  I complied. I heard the rushing noise of the white rats in the corridor. At last, after perhaps five minutes, Kyra’s voice said, “Now you may look.”

  I turned toward the noise. She wasn’t there.

  I hadn’t heard her go toward the door, I hadn’t felt it open. I said, “Where are you?”

  “Right here.” Her voice was perfectly clear, and it came from the same spot where she had been standing when she had had me turn my eyes away.

  “But—I don’t see you.”

  “Look closely.”

  “I—there’s a sort of blur there. But I don’t see you, Kyra. You’re not there at all.”

  “That’s fine. I haven’t done this much recently.” Suddenly she was visible, standing just where the blur had been.

  “What was that?” I asked in amazement.

  “Fith-fath. Shape-shifting. It’s what’s behind the stories about members of the craft being able to cast a sort of glamour over the eyes. It is difficult to do, and exceedingly exhausting for the practitioner.”

  Indeed, she did look exhausted. Her forehead was beaded with sweat, and there were heavy lines of fatigue around her mouth and eyes.

  “You mean you could make yourself invisible by something you did with your mind?”

  “Yes. It is terribly difficult to do, and can only last a little while.”

  “But—how could you have any effect on my eyes?”

  She shrugged. “We don’t know how it works.”

  “Will I be able to do that?”

  “I think so. If you try hard.”

  There was a silence. She had sunk down on the couch, her head drooping. From the hall I heard once more the noise of the white rats.

  “That’s odd,” I said. “The rats are back ahead of schedule. It’s only a little while since I heard them leaving the corridor before.”

  Kyra raised her head and listened. She drew in her breath. “I don’t like this,” she said after a moment. “They’re sensitive to vibration, you know. The last time they were badly off schedule like this was just before the FBY followed you down.”

  13

  The corridor was filled with a glittering, icy fog, through which, at the far end, I dimly saw the squat padded shapes of men moving. They were backing toward us, with big hoses in their hands, and the mouths of the hoses gave out drifts and billows of snow.

  The fog gleamed as if the moon shone on it. Everything was perfectly silent; and it looked as if the air had begun to freeze into big soft flakes that settled slowly to the floor.

  I closed the door hastily. Already I was shaking with cold. To Kyra I said, “It’s the FBY. That’s why the rats were off schedule yesterday. They’re filling the level with CO2 snow.”

  “It’s not the FBY,” she answered listlessly. She was leaning against the wall. “They think you’re dead—I made them see you lying on a rock heap in G. This is the disposal people. Jaeger must have told.”

  “Jaeger? Who’s he? But never mind that now, Kyra—we’ve got to get out of here.”

  “Where to?” she said. “There’s no place we can go. G has been closed off, and they’ll have guards stationed at the exits up to E.”

  “Aren’t there any emergency exits?”

  “Yes, several. But they’re all in the corridor. If we go out, the disposal squad will turn the hoses on us.”

  “But—are we just going to stay here and be frozen to death?”

  She raised her head and gave me a vague glance. “What else can we do?” she asked. “There isn’t anything…”

  She had been holding the athame in one hand. Now she raised it to her eyes, looked at it, and let it drop indifferently on the floor.

  I stared at her unbelievingly. This lassitude, this hopeless resignation on the part of one whom I had always seen calm, optimistic, and self-assured, struck me as unnatural and inexplicable. I could hardly grasp it. I realized how much I had come to rely on her.

  “There must be something we can try!” I exclaimed after a second.

  “What?” Her teeth were chattering. And then, not to me, she said, “Why don’t you help us? You called him to you, but I saved his life. Haven’t I been punished enough? Does he have to suffer too?”

  I did not know what she meant, or to whom she was speaking. Indeed, I hardly noticed her words, for an idea had come to me, seemingly from nowhere.

  “Kyra, what about those yeasts and fungus spores you go to take care of in the afternoons? You’ve quite a large collection. Isn’t there something among them that could help us now?”

  She drew in her breath. “Yes,” she said thoughtfully,
“there’s one fungus that thrives at low temperatures. It causes hallucinations that one doesn’t remember afterwards. Perhaps it… But we can’t get through to my shop. The only access is through the corridor.”

  She sank back again against the wall. “We can get through,” I told her confidently. Her hopelessness had ceased to affect me, and I felt ready to smile. “That play with the mirror you showed me yesterday—we can use that to help ourselves.”

  “Yes… I suppose so… Oh, it’s cold in here.” But she got the mirror with its pendant light from the cupboard, and handed it to me.

  I opened the door a crack and peered out. “They’re nearer,” I said. “Two of them are facing our way.”

  I spun the mirror in its frame. The metal was so cold it hurt my hands. “Which way is your shop?” I asked. “We’ll both have to go. Anybody who stays here will be frozen.”

  “Straight down the corridor to the first crossing, then left. After that I’ll guide you.”

  “All right.” The mirror was spinning nicely now. “I’m going to try to project something I think they’ll be interested in,” I told her. “When I open the door, run for it. I’ll stay an instant to be sure the mirror works.”

  I hooked the mirror over the upper edge of the door. It was rotating well, filling the room with flashes of light. The door opened outward, I knew. I hesitated for a moment, remembering what Kyra had taught me. Then I flung the door wide.

  A chilling air rushed in. Kyra, bent over, ran out past me. I saw a dazzle of light and then something floating serenely on the drifting surface of the layer of fog, like a flower.

  There was no noise from the disposal people, but they had stopped dead in their tracks. I knew I had to hurry. I put all my skill into what Kyra had taught me to do.

  The dazzle of light increased, and then began to jet up and break, like a fountain. Atop it, bobbing about like a ball in a stream, I “caused” a life-sized, tenanted, disposal bag.

  It was time. The air was so cold that deep breathing would freeze my lungs. I bent over and ran.

  They didn’t turn the hoses on me. I was almost invisible in the wheel of light the mirror made, and besides, the appearance of the bag had made them nervous and hesitant. I tore down the corridor, turned left, and caught up with Kyra. The odd thing was that, except for us, nobody on level F seemed aware of the incursion of the disposal squads.