The Jewel of Bas
Copyright© 2024 by Leigh Brackett
Chapter 7
A long time afterward Mouse and Ciaran and Bas the Immortal stood in the opal-tinted glow of the great room of the crux ansata. Outside the world was normal again, and safe. Bas had left full instructions about controlling and tending the centrifugal power plant.
The slaves were freed, going home across the Forbidden Plains—forbidden no longer. The Kalds were sleeping, mercifully; the big sleep from which they would never wake. The world was free, for humanity to make or mar on its own responsibility.
Mouse stood very close to Ciaran, her arm around his waist, his around her shoulders. Crimson rags mingling with yellow; fair shaggy hair mixing with black. Bas smiled at them.
“Now,” he said, “I can be happy, until the planet itself is dead.”
“You won’t stay with us? Our gratitude, our love...”
“Will be gone with the coming generations. No, little man. I built myself a world where I belong—the only world where I can ever belong. And I’ll be happier in it than any of you, because it is my world—free of strife and ugliness and suffering. A beautiful world, for me and Marsali.”
There was a radiance about him that Ciaran would put into a song some day, only half understanding.
“I don’t envy you,” whispered Bas, and smiled. Youth smiling in a spring dawn. “Think of us sometimes, and be jealous.”
He turned and walked away, going lightly over the wide stone floor and up the steps to the dais. Ciaran struck the harpstrings. He sent the music flooding up against the high vault, filling all the rocky space with a thrumming melody.