The Collected SF & Fantasy Works. Abraham Merritt
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less than ten seconds, the fruit had rotted away!
“That’s what would have happened to Rador but for you, friend!” he said.
Come now between this and the prelude to the latter half of the drama whose history this narrative is — only scattering and necessarily fragmentary observations.
First — the nature of the ebon opacities, blocking out the spaces between the pavilion-pillars or covering their tops like roofs, These were magnetic fields, light absorbers, negativing the vibrations of radiance; literally screens of electric force which formed as impervious a barrier to light as would have screens of steel.
They instantaneously made night appear in a place where no night was. But they interposed no obstacle to air or to sound. They were extremely simple in their inception — no more miraculous than is glass, which, inversely, admits the vibrations of light, but shuts out those coarser ones we call air — and, partly, those others which produce upon our auditory nerves the effects we call sound.
Briefly their mechanism was this:
(For the same reason that Dr. Goodwin’s exposition of the mechanism of the atomic engines was deleted, his description of the light-destroying screens has been deleted by the Executive Council. — J. B. F., President, I. A. of S.)
There were two favoured classes of the ladala — the soldiers and the dream-makers. The dream-makers were the most astonishing social phenomena, I think, of all. Denied by their circumscribed environment the wider experiences of us of the outer world, the Murians had perfected an amazing system of escape through the imagination.
They were, too, intensely musical. Their favourite instruments were double flutes; immensely complex pipe-organs; harps, great and small. They had another remarkable instrument made up of a double octave of small drums which gave forth percussions remarkably disturbing to the emotional centres.
It was this love of music that gave rise to one of the few truly humorous incidents of our caverned life. Larry came to me — it was just after our fourth sleep, I remember.
“Come on to a concert,” he said.
We skimmed off to one of the bridge garrisons. Rador called the two-score guards to attention; and then, to my utter stupefaction, the whole company, O’Keefe leading them, roared out the anthem, “God Save the King.” They sang — in a closer approach to the English than might have been expected scores of miles below England’s level. “Send him victorious! Happy and glorious!” they bellowed.
He quivered with suppressed mirth at my paralysis of surprise.
“Taught ’em that for Marakinoff’s benefit!” he gasped. “Wait till that Red hears it. He’ll blow up.
“Just wait until you hear Yolara lisp a pretty little thing I taught her,” said Larry as we set back for what we now called home. There was an impish twinkle in his eyes.
And I did hear. For it was not many minutes later that the priestess condescended to command me to come to her with O’Keefe.
“Show Goodwin how much you have learned of our speech, O lady of the lips of honeyed flame!” murmured Larry.
She hesitated; smiled at him, and then from that perfect mouth, out of the exquisite throat, in the voice that was like the chiming of little silver bells, she trilled a melody familiar to me indeed:
“She’s only a bird in a gilded cage,
A bee-yu-tiful sight to see —”
And so on to the bitter end.
“She thinks it’s a love-song,” said Larry when we had left. “It’s only part of a repertoire I’m teaching her. Honestly, Doc, it’s the only way I can keep my mind clear when I’m with her,” he went on earnestly. “She’s a devil-ess from hell — but a wonder. Whenever I find myself going I get her to sing that, or Take Back Your Gold! or some other ancient lay, and I’m back again — pronto — with the right perspective! POP goes all the mystery! ‘Hell!’ I say, ‘she’s only a woman!’”
CHAPTER XVIII
THE AMPHITHEATRE OF JET
For hours the black-haired folk had been streaming across the bridges, flowing along the promenade by scores and by hundreds, drifting down toward the gigantic seven-terraced temple whose interior I had never as yet seen, and from whose towering exterior, indeed, I had always been kept far enough away — unobtrusively, but none the less decisively — to prevent any real observation. The structure, I had estimated, nevertheless, could not reach less than a thousand feet above its silvery base, and the diameter of its circular foundation was about the same.
I wondered what was bringing the ladala into Lora, and where they were vanishing. All of them were flower-crowned with the luminous, lovely blooms — old and young, slender, mocking-eyed girls, dwarfed youths, mothers with their babes, gnomed oldsters — on they poured, silent for the most part and sullen — a sullenness that held acid bitterness even as their subtle, half-sinister, half-gay malice seemed tempered into little keen-edged flames, oddly, menacingly defiant.
There were many of the green-clad soldiers along the way, and the garrison of the only bridge span I could see had certainly been doubled.
Wondering still, I turned from my point of observation and made my way back to our pavilion, hoping that Larry, who had been with Yolara for the past two hours, had returned. Hardly had I reached it before Rador came hurrying up, in his manner a curious exultance mingled with what in anyone else I would have called a decided nervousness.
“Come!” he commanded before I could speak. “The Council has made decision — and Larree is awaiting you.”
“What has been decided?” I panted as we sped along the mosaic path that led to the house of Yolara. “And why is Larry awaiting me?”
And at his answer I felt my heart pause in its beat and through me race a wave of mingled panic and eagerness.
“The Shining One dances!” had answered the green dwarf. “And you are to worship!”
What was this dancing of the Shining One, of which so often he had spoken?
Whatever my forebodings, Larry evidently had none.
“Great stuff!” he cried, when we had met in the great antechamber now empty of the dwarfs. “Hope it will be worth seeing — have to be something damned good, though, to catch me, after what I’ve seen of shows at the front,” he added.
And remembering, with a little shock of apprehension, that he had no knowledge of the Dweller beyond my poor description of it — for there are no words actually to describe what that miracle of interwoven glory and horror was — I wondered what Larry O’Keefe would say and do when he did behold it!
Rador began to show impatience.
“Come!” he urged. “There is much to be done — and the time grows short!”
He led us to a tiny fountain room in whose miniature pool the white waters were concentrated, pearl-like and opalescent in their circling rim.
“Bathe!” he commanded; and set the example by stripping himself and plunging within. Only a minute or two did the green dwarf allow us, and he checked us as we were about to don our clothing.
Then, to my intense embarrassment, without warning, two of the black-haired girls entered, bearing robes of a peculiar dull-blue hue. At our manifest discomfort Rador’s laughter roared out. He took the garments from the pair, motioned them to leave us, and, still laughing, threw one around me. Its texture was soft, but decidedly metallic — like some blue metal spun to the fineness of a spider’s thread. The garment buckled tightly at the throat, was girdled at the waist, and, below this cincture, fell to the floor, its folds being held together by a half-dozen