The Vanishing Venusians
Copyright© 2024 by Leigh Brackett
Chapter 3
It was a long walk to the forest. The top of the plateau seemed to be bowl-shaped, protected by encircling cliffs. Harker, thinking back to that first settlement long ago, decided that this place was infinitely better. It was like the visions he had seen in fever-dreams—the Promised Land. The coolness and cleanness of it were like having weights removed from your lungs and heart and body.
The rejuvenating air didn’t make up for McLaren’s weight, however. Presently Harker said, “Hold it,” and sat down, tumbling McLaren gently onto the grass. The girl stopped. She came back a little way and watched Harker, who was blowing like a spent horse. He grinned up at her.
“I’m shot,” he said. “I’ve been too busy for a man of my age. Can’t you get hold of somebody to help me carry him?”
Again she studied him with puzzled fascination. Night was closing in, a clear indigo, less dark than at sea level. Her eyes had a curious luminosity in the gloom.
“Why do you do that?” she asked.
“Do what?”
“Carry it.”
By “it” Harker guessed she meant McLaren. He was suddenly, coldly conscious of a chasm between them that no amount of explanation could bridge. “He’s my friend. He’s ... I have to.”
She studied his thought and then shook her head. “I don’t understand. It’s spoiled—” her thought-image was a combination of “broken,” “finished,” and “useless”—”Why carry it around?”
“McLaren’s not an ‘it.’ He’s a man like me, my friend. He’s hurt, and I have to help him.”
“I don’t understand.” Her shrug said it was his funeral, also that he was crazy. She started on again, paying no attention to Harker’s call for her to wait. Perforce, Harker picked up McLaren and staggered on again. He wished Sim were here, and immediately wished he hadn’t thought of Sim. He hoped Sim had died quickly before—before what? “Oh God, it’s dark and I’m scared and my belly’s all gone to cold water, and that thing trotting ahead of me through the blue haze... ”
The thing was beautiful, though. Beautifully formed, fascinating, a curved slender gleam of moonlight, a chaliced flower holding the mystic, scented nectar of the unreal, the unknown, the undiscovered. Harker’s blood began, in spite of himself, to throb with a deep excitement.
They came under the fragrant shadows of the trees. The forest was open, with broad mossy rides and clearings. There were flowers underfoot, but no brush, and clumps of ferns. The girl stopped and stretched up her hand. A feathery branch, high out of her reach, bent and brushed her face, and she plucked a great pale blossom and set it in her hair.
She turned and smiled at Harker. He began to tremble, partly with weariness, partly with something else.
“How do you do that?” he asked.
She was puzzled. “The branch, you mean? Oh, that!” She laughed. It was the first sound he had heard her make, and it shot through him like warm silver. “I just think I would like a flower, and it comes.”
Teleportation, telekinetic energy—what did the books call it? Back on Earth they knew something about that, but the colony hadn’t had much time to study even its own meager library. There had been some religious sect that could make roses bend into their hands. Old wisdom, the force behind the Biblical miracles, just the infinite power of thought. Very simple. Yeah. Harker wondered uneasily whether she could work it on him, too. But then, he had a brain of his own. Or did he?
“What’s your name?” he asked.
She gave a clear, trilled sound. Harker tried to whistle it and gave up. Some sort of tone-language, he guessed, without words as he knew them. It sounded as though they—her people, whatever they were—had copied the birds.
“I’ll call you Button,” he said. “Bachelor Button—but you wouldn’t know.”
She picked the image out of his mind and sent it back to him. Blue fringe-topped flowers nodding in his mother’s china bowl. She laughed again and sent her black birds away and led on into the forest, calling out like an oriole. Other voices answered her, and presently, racing the light wind between the trees, her people came.
They were like her. There were males, slender little creatures like young boys, and girls like Button. There were several hundred of them, all naked, all laughing and curious, their lithe pliant bodies flitting moth-fashion through the indigo shadows. They were topped with petals—Harker called them that, though he still wasn’t sure—of all colors from blood-scarlet to pure white.
They trilled back and forth. Apparently Button was telling them all about how she found Harker and McLaren. The whole mob pushed on slowly through the forest and ended finally in a huge clearing where there were only scattered trees. A spring rose and made a little lake, and then a stream that wandered off among the ferns.
More of the little people came, and now he saw the young ones. All sizes, from tiny thin creatures on up, replicas of their elders. There were no old ones. There were none with imperfect or injured bodies. Harker, exhausted and on the thin edge of a fever-bout, was not encouraged.
He set McLaren down by the spring. He drank, gasping like an animal, and bathed his head and shoulders. The forest people stood in a circle, watching. They were silent now. Harker felt coarse and bestial, somehow, as though he had belched loudly in church.
He turned to McLaren. He bathed him, helped him drink, and set about fixing the leg. He needed light, and he needed flame.
There were dry leaves, and mats of dead moss in the rocks around the spring. He gathered a pile of these. The forest people watched. Their silent luminous stare got on Harker’s nerves. His hands were shaking so that he made four tries with his flint and steel before he got a spark.
The tiny flicker made the silent ranks stir sharply. He blew on it. The flames licked up, small and pale at first, then taking hold, growing, crackling. He saw their faces in the springing light, their eyes stretched with terror. A shrill crying broke from them and then they were gone, like rustling leaves before a wind.
Harker drew his knife. The forest was quiet now. Quiet but not at rest. The skin crawled on Harker’s back, over his scalp, drew tight on his cheekbones. He passed the blade through the flame. McLaren looked up at him. Harker said, “It’s okay, Rory,” and hit him carefully on the point of the jaw. McLaren lay still. Harker stretched out the swollen leg and went to work.
It was dawn again. He lay by the spring in the cool grass, the ashes of his fire grey and dead beside the dark stains. He felt rested, relaxed, and the fever seemed to have gone out of him. The air was like wine.
He rolled over on his back. There was a wind blowing. It was a live, strong wind, with a certain smell to it. The trees were rollicking, almost shouting with pleasure. Harker breathed deeply. The smell, the pure clean edge...
Suddenly he realized that the clouds were high, higher than he had ever known them to be. The wind swept them up, and the daylight was bright, so bright that...
Harker sprang up. The blood rushed in him. There was a stinging blur in his eyes. He began to run, toward a tall tree, and he flung himself upward into the branches and climbed, recklessly, into the swaying top.
The bowl of the valley lay below him, green, rich, and lovely. The grey granite cliffs rose around it, grew higher in the direction from which the wind blew. Higher and higher, and beyond them, far beyond, were mountains, flung towering against the sky.
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