Marion Zimmer Bradley Super Pack. Marion Zimmer Bradley
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passed into another newborn body.
A spasm of claustrophobic terror grabbed at Andrew, and his flesh crawled. “You wanted—”
Kamellin’s reassurance was immediate;
I do not want your body. You have, Kamellin fumbled for a concept to express what he meant, you are a mature individual with a personality, a reasoning intelligence of your own. I would have to destroy that before your body could join with me in symbiosis. His thoughts flared indignation; That would not be honorable!
“I hope all your people are as honorable as you are, then. What happened to the other expedition?”
He felt black anger, sorrow and desolation, breaking like tidal waves in his brain. My people were maddened—I could not hold them back. They were not stable, what you would call, not sane. The time interval had been too long. There was much killing and death which I could not prevent.
“If I could only find some way to tell Reade—”
It would be of no use. A time ago, I tried that. I attempted to make contact, easily, with a young mind that was particularly receptive to my thought. He did not go insane, and we, together, tried to tell Captain Kingslander what had happened to the others. But he believed it was more insanity, and when the young man was killed by one of the others, I had to dissipate again. I tried to reach Captain Kingslander himself, but the thought drove him insane—he was already near madness with his own fear.
Andrew shuddered. “God!” he whispered. “What can we do?”
1 do not know. I will leave you, if you wish it. Our race is finally dying. In a few mare years we will be gone, and our planet will be safe for you.
“Kamellin, no!” Andrew’s protest was immediate and genuine. “Maybe, together, we can think of some way to convince them.”
The alien seemed hesitant now;
Would you be willing, then, to—share your body for a time? It will not be easy, it is never easy for two personalities to co-inhabit one body. I could not do it without your complete consent. Kamellin seemed to be thinking thoughts which were so alien that Andrew could grasp them only vaguely; only the concept of a meticulous honor remained to color his belief in Kamellin.
“What happened to your original host-race?”
He lay shivering beneath his heated blankets as the story unfolded in his mind. Kamellin’s race, he gathered, had been humanoid—as that concept expressed itself, he sensed Kamellin’s amusement; Rather, your race is martianoid! Yes, they had built the city the Earthmen called Xanadu, it was their one technological accomplishment which had been built to withstand time. Built in the hope that one day we might return and reclaim it from the sand again, Kamellin’s soundless voice whispered, The last refuge of our dying race.
“What did you call the city?”
Kamellin tried to express the phonetic equivalent and a curious sound formed on Andrew’s lips. He said it aloud, exploringly; “Shein-la Mahari.” His tongue lingered on the liquid syllables. “What does it mean?”
The city of Mahari—Mahari, the little moon. Andrew found his eyes resting on the satellite Earthmen called Deimos. “Shein-la Mahari,” he repeated. He would never call it Xanadu again.
Kamellin continued his story.
The host-race, Andrew gathered, had been long-lived and hardy, though by no means immortal. The minds and bodies—“minds,” he impressed on Andrew, was not exactly the right concept—were actually two separate, wholly individual components. When a body died, the “mind” simply transferred, without any appreciable interval, into a newborn host; memory, although slightly impaired and blurred by such a transition, was largely retained. So that the consciousness of any one individual might extend, though dimly, over an almost incredible period of time.
The dual civilization had been a simple, highly mentalized one, systems of ethics and philosophy superseding one another in place of the rise and fall of governments. The physical life of the hosts was not highly technological. Xanadu had been almost their only such accomplishment, last desperate expedient of a dying race against the growing inhospitality of a planet gripped in recurrent, ever-worsening ice ages. They might have survived the ice alone, but a virus struck and decimated the hosts, eliminating most of the food animals as well. The birth-rate sank almost to nothing; many of the freed minds dissipated for lack of a host-body in which to incarnate.
Kamellin had a hard time explaining the next step. His kind could inhabit the body of anything which “had life, animal or plant. But they were subject to the physical limitations of the hosts. The only animals which ‘survived disease and ice were the sand-mice and the moronic banshees; both so poorly organized, with nervous systems so faulty, that even when vitalized by the intelligence of Kamellin’s race, they were incapable of any development. It was similar, Kamellin explained, to a genius who is imprisoned in the body of a helpless paralytic; his mind undamaged, but his body wholly unable to respond.
A few of Kamellin’s people tried it anyhow, in desperation. But after a few generations of the animal hosts, they had degenerated terribly, and were in a state of complete nonsanity, unable even to leave the life-form to which they had bound themselves. For all Kamellin knew, some of his people still inhabited the banshees, making transition after transition by the faint, dim flicker of an instinct still alive, but hopelessly buried in generations of non-rational life.
The few sane survivors had decided, in the end, to enter the prickle-bushes; spinosa mortis. This was possible, although it, too, had drawbacks; the sacrifice of consciousness was the main factor in life as a plant. In the darkness of the Martian night, Andrew shuddered at Kamellin’s whisper;
Immortality—without hope. An endless, dreamless sleep. We live, somnolent, in the darkness, and the wind, and wait—and forget. We had hoped that some day a new race might evolve on this world. But evolution here reached a dead end with the banshees and sand-mice. They are perfectly adapted to their environment and they have no struggle to survive: hence they need not evolve and change. When the Earthmen came, we had hope. Not that we might take their bodies. Only that we might seek help from them. But we were too eager, and my people drove out— killed—
The flow of thoughts ebbed away into silence.
Andrew spoke at last, gently.
“Stay with me for a while, at least. Maybe we can find a way.”
It won’t be easy, Kamellin warned.
“We’ll try it, anyhow. How long ago—how long have you, well, been a plant?”
I do not know. Many, many generations—there is no consciousness of time. Many seasons. There is much blurring, Let me look at the stars with your eyes.
“Sure,” Andrew consented.
The sudden blackness took him by surprise, sent a spasm of shock and terror through his mind; then sight came back and he found himself sitting upright, staring wide-eyed at the stars, and heard Kamellin’s agonized thoughts;
It has been long—again the desperate, disturbing fumbling for some concept. It has been nine hundred thousand of your years!
Then silence; such abysmal grieved silence that Andrew was almost shamed before the naked grief of this man—he could not think of Kamellin except as a man—mourning for dead world. He lay down, quietly, not wanting to intrude on the sorrow of his curious companion.
Physical exhaustion suddenly overcame him, and he fell asleep.
“Was Mars like this in your day, Kamellin?” Andrew tossed the question cynically into the silence in his brain. Around him a freezing wind shifted and tossed at the crags, assailing the grip of his gauntleted hands on rock. He didn’t expect any answer. The dark intruder had been dormant all day; Andrew, when he woke, had almost dismissed the whole thing as a bizarre fantasy, born of thin air and impending madness.