The Tree of Life Revisited
Cathan L. Moore
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2010 Cathan L. Moore
A Norawest Smith story.
A Gender Switch Adventure.
Over time-ruined Illar the searching planes swooped and circled. Norawest Smith, peering up at them with a steel pale stare from the shelter of a half-collapsed temple, thought of vultures wheeling above, carrion. All day long now they had been raking these ruins for her. Presently, she knew, thirst would begin to parch her throat and hunger to gnaw at her. There was neither food nor water in these ancient Martian ruins, and she knew that it could be only a matter of time before the urgencies of her own body would drive her out to signal those wheeling Patrol ships and trade her hard won liberty for food and drink. She crouched lower under the shadow of the temple arch and cursed the accuracy of the Patrol gunner whose flame-blast had caught her dodging ship just at the edge of Illar's ruins.
Presently it occurred to her that in most Martian temples of the ancient days an ornamental well had stood in the outer court for the benefit of wayfarers. Of course all water in it would be a million years dry now, but for lack of anything better to do she rose from her seat at the edge of the collapsed central dome and made her cautious way by still intact corridors toward the front of the temple. She paused in a tangle of wreckage at the courtyard's edge and looked out across the sun-drenched expanse of pavement toward that ornate well that once had served travelers who passed by here in the days when Mars was a green planet.
It was an unusually elaborate well, and amazingly well preserved. Its rim had been inlaid with a mosaic pattern whose symbolism must once have borne deep meaning, and above it in a great fan of time-defying bronze an elaborate grille-work portrayed the inevitable tree-of-life pattern which so often appears in the symbolism of the three worlds. Smith looked at it a bit incredulously from her shelter, it was so miraculouslypreserved amidst all this chaos of broken stone, casting a delicate tracery of shadow on the sunny pavement as perfectly as it must have done a million years ago when dusty travelers paused here to drink. She could picture them filing in at noontime through the great gates that-The vision vanished abruptly as her questing eyes made the circle of the ruined walls. There had been no gate. She could not find a trace of it anywhere around the outer wall of the court. The only entrance here, as nearly as she could tell from the foundations that remained, had been the door in whose ruins she now stood. Queer. This must have been a private court, then, its great grille-crowned well reserved for the use of the priests. Or wait-had there not been a priest-king Illar after whom the city was named? A wizard-king, so legend said, who ruled temple as well as palace with an iron hand. This elaborately patterned well, of material royal enough to withstand the weight of ages, might well have been sacrosanct for the use of that long-dead monarch. It might-Across the sun-bright pavement swept the shadow of a plane. Smith dodged back into deeper hiding while the ship circled Jow over the courtyard. And it was then, as she crouched against a crumbled wall and waited, motionless, for the danger to pass, that she became aware for the first time of a sound that startled her so she could scarcely credit her ears-a recurrent sound, choked and sorrowful-the sound of a man sobbing.
The incongruity of it made her fotgetful for a moment of the peril hovering overhead in the sun-hot outdoors. The dimness of the temple ruins became a living and vital place for that moment, throbbing with the sound of tears. She looked about half in incredulity, wondering if hunger and thirst were playing tricks on her already, or if these broken halls might be haunted by a million-year-old sorrow that wept along the corridors to drive its hearers mad. There were tales of such haunters in some of Mars' older ruins. The hair prickled faintly at the back of her neck ashe laid a hand on the butt of her force-gun and commenced a cautious prowl toward the source of the muffled noise.
Presently she caught a flash of white, luminous in the gloom of these ruined walls, and went forward with soundless steps, eyes narrowed in the effort lo make out what manner of creature this might be that wept alone in time-forgotten niins~ It was a man. Or it had the dim outlines of a man, huddled against an angle of fallen walls and veiled in a fabulous shower of long dark hair. But there was something uncannily ¢dd about him. She could not focus her pale stare upon- him outlines. He was scarcely more than a luminous blot of whiteness in the gloom, shimmering with a look of unreality which the sound of his sobs denied.
Before she could make up her mind just what to do, something must have warned the weeping boy that he was no longer alone, for the sound of his tears checked suddenly and he lifted his head, turning to her a face no more distinguishable than his body's outlines. She made no effort to resolve the blurred features into visibility, for out of that luminous mask burned two eyes that caught her with an almost perceptible impact and gripped them in a stare from which she could not have turned if she would.
They were the most amazing eyes she had ever met, colored like moonstone, milkily translucent, so that they looked almost blind. And that magnetic stare held her motionless.
In the instant that he gripped her with that fixed, moonstone look she felt oddly as if a tangible bond were taut between them.
Then he spoke, andhe wondered if her mind, after all, had begun to give way in the haunted loneliness of dead Illar for though the words he spokelcil upon her ears in a gibbefishof meaningless sounds, yet in her brain a message formed with a clarity that far transcended the halting communication of words. And his milkily colored eyes bored into her with a fierce intensity.
"I'm lost-I'm lost-" wailed the voice in her brain.
A rush of sudden tears brimmed the compelling eyes, veiling their brilliance. And she was free again with that clouding of the moonstone surfaces. His voice wailed, but the words were meaningless and no knowledge formed in her brain to match them. Stiffly be stepped back a pace and looked down at him, a feeling of helpless incredulity rising within her. For she still could not focus directly upon the shining whiteness of him, and nothing save those moonstone eyes were clear to her.
The boy sprang to his feet and rose on tiptoe, gripping her shoulders with urgent hands. Again the blind intensity of his eyes tOok hold of hers, with a force almost as tangible-as the clutch of his hands; again that stream of intelligence poured into her brain, strongly, pleadingly.
"Please, please take me back! I'm so frightened-I can't find my way-oh, please!"
He blinked down at him, her dazed mind gradually realizing the basic facts of what was happening. Obviously his milky unseeing eyes held a magnetic power that carried his thoughts to her without the need of a common speech. And they were the eyes of a powerful mind, the outlets from which a stream of fierce energy poured into her brim. Yet the words they conveyed were the words of a terrified and helpless boy.
A strong sense of wariness was tisinginhim~as she considered the incongruity of speech and power, both of which were beatin~upon her more urgently with every breath. The mind of a forceful and strong-willed man, carrying the sobs of a
frightened boy. There was no sincerity in it.
"Please, please!" cried his impatience in her brain. "Help me! Guide me back!"
"Back where?" she heard her own voice asking.
"The Tree!" wailed that queer speech in her brain, while gibberish was all her ears heard and the moonstone stare transfixed her silently. "The Tree of Life! Oh, take me back to the shadow of-the Tree!"
A vision of the grille-ornamented well leaped into her memory. It was the only tree symbol she could think of just then. But what possible connection could there be between the well and the lost girl-if he was lost? Another wail in that unknown tongue, another anguished-shake of her shoulders, brought a sudden resolution into her groping mind. There could be no harm in leading his back to the well, to whose grille he must surely be ieferring. And strong curiosity was growing in her mind. Much more than met the eye was concealed in this queer incident. And a wild guess had flashed through her mind that perhaps he might have come from some subterranean world into which the well descended. It would explain his luminous pallor, if not his blurriness; and, too, his eyes did not seem to function in the light. There was a much more incredible explanation of his presence, but she was not to know it for a few minutes yet.
"Come along," she said, taking the clutching hands gently from her shoulders. "I'll lead you to the well."
She sighed in a deep gust of relief and dropped his compel- ling eyes from hers, murmuring in that strange gabbling tongue what must have been thanks. She took his by the hand and turned toward the mined archway of the door.
Against her fingers his flesh was cool and firm. To the touch he was tangible, but even thus near, her eyes refuse4 to focus upon the cloudy opacity of his body, the dark blur of his streaming hair. Nothing but those burning, blinded eyes were strong enough to pierce the veil that parted them.
She stumbled along at her side over the rough floor of the temple, saying nothing more, panting with eagerness to return to his incomprehensible "tree." How much of that eagerness was assumed Smith still could not be quite sure. When they reached the door she halted his for a moment, scanning the sky for dan~er. Apparently the ships had finished with this quarter of the city, for she could see two or three of them half a mile away, hovering low over liar's northern section. She could risk it without much peril. She led the boy cautiously out into the sun-hot court.
She could not have known by sight that they neared the well, but when they were within twenty paces of it he flung up his blurred head suddenly and tugged at her hand. It was he who led her that last stretch which parted the two from the well. In the sun the shadow tracery of the grille's symbolic pattern lay vividly outlined on the ground. The boy gave a little gasp of delight. He dropped her hand and ran forward three short steps, and plunged into the very center of that shadowy pattern on the ground; And what happened then was too incredible to believe.
The pattern ran over him like garment, curving to the curve of his body in the way all shadows do. But as he stood there striped and laced with the darkness of it, there came a queer shifting in the lines of black tracery, a subtle, inexplicable movement to one side. And with that motion he vanished. It was exactly asif that.shifting had moved him out of one world into another. Stupidly Smith stared at the spot from which he had disappeared.
Then several things happened almost simultaneously. The zoom of a plane broke suddenly into the quiet, a black shadow dipped low over the rooftops, and Smith, too late, realized that she stood defenseless in full view of the searchiflg ships. There was only one way out, and that was too fantastic to put faith in, but she had no time to hesitate. With one leap she plunged full into the midst of the shadow of the tree of life. Its tracery flowed round her, molding its pattern to her body. And outside the boundaries everything executed a queer little sidewise dip and slipped in the most extraordinary manner, like an optical illusion, into quite another scene. There was no intervention of blankness. It was as if she looked through the bars of a grille upon a picture which without warning slipped sidewise, while between the bars appeared another scene, a curious, dim landscape, gray as if with the twilight of early evening. The air had an oddly thickened look, through which she saw the quiet trees and the flower spangled grass of the place with a queer, unreal blending, like the landscape in a tapestry, all its outlines blurred.
In the midst of this tapestried twilight the burning whiteness of the boy she had followed blazed like a flame. He had paused a few steps away and stood waiting, apparently quite sure that she would come after. She grinned a little to herself as she realized it, knowing that curiosity must almost certainly have driven her in his wake even if the necessity for shelter had not compelled her following.
She was clearly visible now, in this thickened dimness-visible, and very lovely, and a little unreal. He shone with a burning clarity, the only vivid thing in the whole twilit world. Eyes upon that blazing whiteness, Smith stepped-forward, scarcely realizing that she bad moved.
Slowly she crossed the dark grass toward him. That grass was soft underfoot, and thick with small, low-blooming flowers of a shining pallor. Botticelli painted such spangled swards for the feet of her angels. Upon it the boy's bare feet gleamed whiter than the blossoms. He wore no garment but the royal mantle of his hair, sweeping about his in a cloak of shining darkness that had a queer, unreal tinge of purple in that low light. It brushed his ankles in its fabulous length. From the hood of it he watched Smith coming toward him, a smile on his pale mouth and a light blazing in the deeps of hermoonstone eyes. He was not blind now, nor frightened. He stretched out his hand to her confidently.
"It is my turn now to lead you," he smiled. As before, the words were gibberish, but the penetrating stare of those strange white eyes gave them a meaning in the depths of her
brain.
Automatically her hand went out to his. She was a little dazed, and his eyes were very compelling. His fingers twined in her and he set-off over the flowery grass, pulling her beside him. She did not ask where they were going. Lost in the dreamy spell of the still, gray, enchanted place, she felt no need for words. She was beginning to see more clearly in the odd, blurring twilight that ran the outlines of things together in that queer, tapestried manner. And lie puzzled in a futile, muddled way as she went on over what sort of land she had come into. Overhead was darkness, paling into twilight near the ground, so that when she looked up she was staring into bottomless deeps of starless night.
Trees and flowering shrubs and the flower-starred grass stretched emptily about them in the~thick, confusing gloom of the place. She could see only a little distance through that dim air. It was as if they walked a strip of tapestried twilight in some unlighted dream. And the boy, with his lovely, luminous body and richly colored robeof hair was like a man in a tapestry too, unreal and magical.
After a while, when she had become a little adjusted to the queerness of the whole scene, she began to notice furtive movements in the shrubs andd trees they passed. Things flickered too swiftly for her to catch their outlines, but from the tail of her eye she was aware of motion, and somehow of eyes that watched. That sensation was a familiar one to her, and she kept an uneasy gaze on those shiftings in the shrubbery as they went on. Presently she caught a watcher in full view between bush and tree, and saw that it was a woman, a little, furtive, dark-skinned woman who dodged hastily back into cover again before Smith's eyes could do more than take in the fact of her existence.
After that she knew what to expect and could make them out more easily: little, darting people with big eyes that shone with a queer, sorrowful darkness from their small, frightened faces as they scuttled through the bushes, dodging always just out of plain sight among the leaves. She could hear the soft rustle of their passage, and once or twice when they passed near a clump of shrubbery she thought she caught the echo of little whispering calls, gentle as the rustle of leaves and somehow full of a strange warning note so clear that be caught it even amid the murmur of their speech. Warning calls, and little furtive hiders in the leaves, and a landscape of tapestried blurring carpeted with a Botticelli flower-strewn sward. It was all a dream. She felt quite sure of that;
It was a long while before curiosity awakened in her sufficiently to make her break the stillness. But at last she asked dreamily. "Where are we going?"
The boy seemed to understand that without the necessity of the bond his hypnotic eyes made, for he turned and caught her eyes in a white stare and answered.
"To Thaga. Thaga desire you."
"What is Thaga?"
In answer to that he launched without preliminary upon a little singsong monolog of explanation whose stereotyped formula made her faintly uneasy with the thoughts that it must have been made very often to attain the status of a set speech; made to many women, perhaps, whom Thaga had desired. And what became of them afterward? she wondered. But the boy was speaking.
"Many ages ago there dwelt in Illar the great Queen Illar for whom the city was named. She was a magician of mighty power, but not mighty enough to fulfill all her ambitions. So by her arts she called up out of darkness the being known as Thaga, and with her struck a bargain. By that bargain Thaga was to give of her limitless power, serving Illar all the days of Illar's life, and in return the queen was to create a land for Thaga's dwelling-place and people it with slaves and furnish a priest to tend Thaga's needs. This is that land. I am that priest, the latest of a long line of men born to serve Thaga. The tree-people are his-his lesser servants.
"I have spoken softly so that the tree-pebple do not heaf, for to them Thaga is the center and focus of creation, the end and beginmng of all life. But to you I have told the truth. "
"But what does Thaga want of me?"
"It is not for Thaga's servants to question Thaga."
"Then what becomes, afterward, of the women Thaga desires?" she pursued.
"You must ask Thaga that."
"He turned his eyes away as he spoke, snapping the mental bond that had flowed between them with a suddenness that left Smith dizzy. She went on at his side more slowly, pulling back a little on the tug of his fingers. By degrees the sense of dreaminess was fading, and alarm began to stir in the deeps of her mind. After all, there was no reason why she need let this blank-eyed priest lead her up to the very maw of his god. He had lured her into this land by what she knew now to have been a trick; might he not have worse tricks than that in store for her?
She held her, after all, by nothing stronger than the clasp of his fingers, if she could keep her eyes turned from his. Therein lay his real power, but she could fight it if she chose. And she began to hear more clearly than ever the queer note of warning in the rustling whispers of the tree-folk who still fluttered in and out of sight among the leaves. The twilight place had taken on menace and evil.
Suddenly she made up her mind. She stopped, breaking the clasp of the boy's hand.
"I'm not going," she said.
She swung round in a sweep of richly tinted hair, words jetting from his in a gush of incoherence. But she dared not meet his eyes, and they conveyed no meaning to her. Resolutely she turned away, ignoring his voice, and set out to retrace the way they had come. He called after her once, in a high, clear voice that somehow held a note as warning as that in the rustling voices of the tree-people, but she kept on doggedly, not looking back. He laughed then, sweetly and scornfully, a laugh that echoed uneasily in her mind long after the sound of it had died upon the twilight air.
After a while she glanced back over one shoulder, half expecting to see the luminous dazzle of his body still glowing in the dim glade where she had left him; but the blurred tapestry-landscape was quite empty.
He went on in the midst of a silence so deep it hurt her ears, and in a solitude unhaunted even by the shy presences of the tree-folk: They had vanished with the fire-bright boy, and the whole twilight land was empty save for herself. She plodded on across the dark grass, crushing the upturned flower-faces under her boots and asking herself wearily if she could be mad. There seemed little other explanation for this hushed and tapestried solitude that had swallowed her up. In that thunderous quiet, in that deathly solitude, she went on.
When she had walked for what seemed to her much longer than it should have taken to reach her starting point, and still no sign of an exit appeared,, she began to wonder if there were any way out of the gray land of Thaga. For the first time she realized that she had come through no tangible gateway. She had only stepped out of a shadow, and-now that she thought of it-there were no shadows here. The grayness swallowed everything up, leaving the landscape oddly flat, like a badly drawn picture. She looked about helplessly, quite lQst now and not sure in what direction she should be facing, for there was nothing here by which to know directions. The trees~ and shrubs and the starry grass still stretched about her, uncertainly outhned in that changeless dusk. They seemed to go on
forever.
But she plodded ahead, unwilling to stop because of a queer tension in the air, somehow as if all the blurred trees and shrubs were waiting in breathless anticipation, centering upon her stumbling figure. But all trace of animate life had vanished with the disappearance of the priestess' white glowing figure. Head down, paying little heed to where she was going, she went on over the flowery sward.
An odd sense of voids about her startled Smith at last out of her lethargic plodding. She lifted her head. She stood just at the edge of a line of trees, dim and indistinct in the unchanging twilight. Beyond them she came to herself with a jerk and stared incredulously. Beyond them the grass ran down to nothingness, merging by imperceptible degrees into a streaked and arching void-not the sort of emptiness into which a material body could fall, but a solid nothing, curving up toward the dark zenith as the inside of a sphere curves. No physical Thing could have entered there. It was too utterly void, an inviolable emptiness which no force could invade.
He stared up along the inward arch of that curving, impassable wall. Here, then, was the edge of the queer land Illar had wrested out of space itself. This arch must be the curving of solid space which had been bent awry to enclose the magical land. There was no escape this way. She could not even bring herself to approach any nearer to that streaked and arching blank. She could not have said why, but it woke in her an inner disquiet so strong that after a moment's staring she turned her eyes away.
Presently she shrugged and set off along the inside of the line of trees which parted her from the space-wall. Perhaps there might be a break somewhere. It was a forlorn hope, but the best that offered. Wearily she stumbled on over the flowery grass.
How long she had gone on along that almost imperceptibly curving line of border she could not have said, but after a timeless interval of gray solitude she gradually became aware that a tiny rustling and whispering among the leaves had been growing louder by degrees for some time. She lookee up. In and out among the trees which bordered that solid wall of nothingness little, indistinguishable figures were flitting. The tree-men had, returned. Queerly grateful for their presence, she went on a bit more cheerfully, paying no heed to their timid dartings to and fro, for Smith was wise in the ways of wild life.
Presently, when they saw how little heed she paid them, they began to grow bolder, their whispers louder. And among those rustling voices she thought she was beginning to catch threads of familiarity. Now and again a word reached her ears that she seemed to recognize, lost amidst the gibberish of their speech. She kept her head down and her hands quiet, plodding along with a cunning stillness that began to bear results.
Prom the corner of her eye she could see that a little dark tree-man had darted out from cover and paused midway between bush and tree to inspect the queer, tall stranger.
Nothing happened to this daring venturer, and soon another risked a pause in the open to stare at the quiet walker among the trees. In a little while a small crowd of the tree-people was moving slowly parallel with her course, staring with all the avid curiosity of wild things at Smith's plodding figure. And among them the rustling whispers grew louder.
Presently the ground dipped down into a little hollow ringed with trees. It was a bit darker here than it had been on the higher level, and as she went down the slope of its side she saw that among the underbrush which filled it were cunningly hidden huts twined together out of the living bushes. Obviously the hollow was a tiny village where the tree-folk dwelt.
He was surer of this when they began to grow bolder as she went down into the dimness of the place. The whispers shrilled a little, and the boldest among her watchers ran almost at her elbow, twittering their queer, broken speech in hushed syllables whose familiarity still bothered her with its haunting echo of words she knew. When she had reached the center of the hollow she became aware that the little folk bad spread out in a ring to surround her. Wherever she looked their small, anxious faces and staring eyes confronted her. She grinned to herself and came to a halt, waiting gravely.
None of them seemed quite brave enough to constitute herself spokesman, but among several a hurried whispering broke out in which she caught the words "Thaga" and "danger" and "beware." She recognized the meaning of these words without placing in hIs mind their origins in some tongue she knew. She knit her sun-bleached brows and concentrated harder, striving to wrest from that curious, murmuring whisper some hint of its original root. She had a smattering of more tongues than she could have counted offhand, and it was hard to place these scattered words among any one speech. But the word "Thaga" had a sound like that of the very ancient dryland tongue, which upon Mars is considered at once the oldest and most uncouth of all the planet's languages. And with that clue to guide her she presently began to catch other syllables which were remotely like syllables from the dryland speech. They were almost unrecognizable, far, far more ancient than the ver~dest versions of the tongue she had ever heard repeated, almost primitive in their crudity and simplicity. And for a moment the sheerest awe came over her, as she realized the significance of what she listened to.
The dryland race today is a handful of semi-brutes, degenerate from the ages of past time when they were a mighty people at the apex of an almost forgotten glory. That day is millions of years gone now, too far in the past to have record savein the vaguest folklore. Yet here wasapeople who spoke the rudiments of that race's tongue as it must have been spoken in the race's dim beginnings, perhaps, a million years earlier even than that immemorial time of their triumph. The reeling of millenmums set Smith's mind awhirl with the effort at compassing their span.
There was another connotation in the speaking of that tongue by these timid bush-dwellers, too. It must mean that the forgotten wizard queen, Illar, had peopled her sinister, twilight land with the ancestors of today's dryland dwellers. If they shared the same tongue they must share the same lineage. And humanity's remorseless adaptability had done the rest.
It had been no kinder here than in the outside world, where the ancient plainsmen who had roamed. Mars' green prairies had dwindled with their dying plains, degenerating at last into a shrunken, leather-skinned bestiality. For here that same race root had declined into these tiny, slinking creatures with their dusky skins and great, staring eyes and their voices that never rose above a whisper. What tragedies must lie behind that gradual degeneration!
All about her th¢ whispers still ran. She was beginning to suspect thatthrough countless ages of hiding and munnuring those voices must have lost the ability to speak aloud. And she wondered with a little inward chill what terror it was which had transformed a free and fearless people into these tiny wild things whispering in the underbrush.
The little anxious voices had shrilled into vehemence now, all of them chattering together in their queer, soft, rustling whispers. Looking back later upon that timeless space she had passed in the hollow, Smith remembered it as some curious nightstallion-dimness and tapestried blurring, and a hush like death over the whole twilight land, and the timid voices whispering, whispering, eloquent with terror and warning.
He groped back among her memories and brought-forth a phrase or two remembered from long ago, an archaic rendering of the immemorial tongue they spoke. It was the simplest version she could remember of the complex speech now used; but she knew that to them it must sound fantastically strange. Instinctively she whispered as hespoke it, facing like an actor in a play as she mouthed the ancient idiom, -
"I-I cannot understand. Speak-more slowly-"
A torrent of words greeted this rendering of their tongue.
Then there was a great deal of hushing and hissing, and presently two or three between them- began laboriously to recite an involved speech, one syllable at a time. Always two or more shared the task. Never in her converse with them did she address anyone directly. Ages of terror had bred all directness out of them. -
"Thaga," they said. "Thaga, the terrble-That, the omnipotent-Thaga, the unescapable. Beware of Thaga."
For a moment Smith stood quiet, grinning down at them despite herself. There must not be too much of intelligence left among this branch of the race, either, for surely such a warning was superfluous. Yet they had mastered their agonies of timidity to give it. All virtue could not yet have been bred out of them, then. They still had kindness and a sort of desperate courage rooted deep in fear.
"What is Thaga?" she managed to inquire, voicing the archaic syllables uncertainly. And they must have understood the meaning if not the phraseology, for another spate of whispered tumult burst from the clustering tribe. Then, as before, several took up the task of answering.
"Thaga-Thaga, the end and the beginning, the center of creation. When Thaga breathes the world trembles. The earth was made for Thaga's dwelling-place. All things are Thaga's. Oh, beware! Beware"
This much she pieced together out of their diffuse whisperings, catching up the fragments of words she knew and fitting them into the pattern.
"What-what is the danger?" she managed to ask.
"Thaga-hungers. Thaga must be fed. It is we who feed her, but there are times when she desires other food than us. It is then she sends her priest forth to lure-food-in. Oh, beware of Thaga!"
"You mean that the priest brought me in for-food?"
A chorus of grave, murmuring affirmatives.
"Then why did he leave me?"
"There is no escape from Thaga. Thaga is the center of creation. All things are Thaga's. When she calls, you must answer. When she hungers, she will have you. Beware of Thaga!"
Smith considered that for a moment in silence. In the main she felt confident that she had understood their warning correctly, and she had little reason to doubt that they knew whereof they spoke. Thaga might not be the center of the universe; but if they said she could call a victim from anywhere in the land, Smith was not disposed to doubt it. The priestess' willingness to let her leave his unhindered, yes, even his scornful laughter as she looked back, told the same
story. Whatever Thug might be, her power in this land could -not be doubted. She made up her mind suddenly what she must do, and turned to the breathlessly waiting little folk.
"Which way-lies Thaga?" she asked.
A score of dark, thin arms pointed. Smith turned her head speculatively toward the spot they indicated. In this changeless twilight all sense of direction had long since left her, but she marked the line as well as she could by the formation of the trees, then turned to the little people with a ceremonious farewell rising to her lips.
"My-thanks for-" she began, to be interrupted by a chorus of whispering cries of protest. They seemped to sense her intention, and their pleadings were frantic. A panic anxiety for her glowed upon every little terrified face turned up to hers, and their eyes were wide with protest and terror. Helplessly she looked down.
"I-I must go," she tried stumblingly to say. "My Only chance is to take Thaga unawares, before she sends for me."
He could not know if they understood. Their chattering went on undiminished, and they even went so far as to lay tiny hands on her, as if they would prevent her by force from seeking out the terror of their lives.
"No, no, no!" they wailed murmurously. "You do not know what it is you seek! You do not know Thaga! Stay here! Beware of Thaga!"
A little prickling of unease went down Smith's back as she listened. Thaga must be very terrible indeed if-even half this alarm had foundation. And to be quite frank with herself, she would greatly have preferred to remain here in the hidden quiet of the hollow, with its illusion of shelter, for as long as she was allowed to stay. But she was not of the stuff that yields very easily to its own terrors, and hope burned strongly in her still. So she squared her broad shoulders and turned resolutely' in the direction the tree-folk had indicated.
When they saw that she meant to go, their protests sank to a wail of bitter grieving. With that sound moaning behind her she went up out¢f the hollow, like a woman setting forth to the music of her own dirge. A few of the bravest went with her a little way, flitting through the underbrush and darting from tree-to tree in a timidity so deeply ingrained that even when no immediate peril threatened they dared not go openly through the twilight.
Their presence was comforting to Smith as she went on. A futile desire to help the little terror-ridden tribe was rising in her, a useless gratitude for their warning and their friendliness, their genuine grieving at her departure and their odd, paradoxical bravery even in the midst of hereditary terror.
But she knew that she could donothingforthem, when she was not at all sure she could even save herself. Something of their panic had communicated itself to her, and she advanced witha sinking at the pit of her stomach. Fear of the unknown is so poignant a thing, feeding on its own terror, that she found her hands beginning to shake a little and her throat going dry as she went on.
The rustling and whispering among the bushes dwindled as her followers one by one dropped away, the bravest staying the longest, but even they failing in courage as Smith advanced steadily in that direction from which all their lives they had been taught to turn their faces. Presently she realized that she was alone once more. She went on more quickly, anxious to come face to face with this horror of the twilight and dispel at least the fearfulness of its mystery.
The silence was like death. Not a breeze stirred the leaves, and the only sound was her own breathing, the heavy thud of her own heart. Somehow she felt sure that she was coming nearer to her goal. The hush seemed to confirm it. She loosened the force-gun at her thigh.
In that changeless twilight the ground was sloping down once more into a broader hollow. She descended slowly, every sense alert for danger, not knowing if Thaga was beast or human or elemental, visible or invisible. The trees were beginning to thin. She knew that she bad almost reached her goal.
He paused at the edge of the last line of trees. A clearing spread out before her at the bottom of the hollow, quiet in the dim, translucent air. She could focus directly upon nooutlines anywhere, for the tapestried blurring of the place. But when she saw what stood in the very center of the clearing be stopped dead-still, like one turned-to stone, and a shock of utter cold went chilling through her. Yet she could not have said why...
For in the clearing's center stood the Tree of Life. She had met the symbol too often in patterns and designs not to recognize it, but here that fabulous thing was living, growing, actually springing up from a rooted firmness in the spangled grass as any tree might spring. Yet it could not be real. Its thin brown trunk, of no recognizable substance, smooth and gleaming, mounted in the traditional spiral; its twelve fantastically curving branches arched delicately outward from the central stem. It was bare of leaves. No foliage masked the serpentine brown spiral of the trunk. But at the tip of each symbolic branch flowered a blossom of bloody rose so vivid she could scarcely focus her dazzled eyes upon them.
This tree alone of all objects in the dim land was sharply distinct to the eye-terribly distinct, remorselessly clear. No words can describe the amazing menace that dwelt among its branches. Smith's flesh crept as she stared, yet she could not for all her staring make out why peril was so eloquent there. To all appearances here stood only a fabulous symbol miraculously come to life; yet danger breathed out from it so strongly that Smith felt the hair lifting on her neck as she stared.
It was no ordinary danger. A nameless, choking, paralyzed panic was swelling in her throat as she gazed upon the perilous beauty of the Tree. Somehow the arches and curves of its branches seemed to limn a pattern so dreadful that her heart beat faster as she gazed upon it. But she could not guess why, though somehow the answer was hovering just out of reach of her conscious mind. From that first glimpse of it her instincts shuddered like a shying mare, yet reason still looked in vain for an answer.
Nor was the Tree merely a vegetable growth. It was alive,terribly, ominously alive. She could not have said how she knew that, for it stood motionless in its empty clearing, not a branch trembling, yet in its immobility more awfully vital than any animate thing. The very sight of it woke in Smith an insane urging to flight, to put worlds between herself and this inexplicably dreadful thing.
Crazy impulses stirred in her brain, corn ng to insane birth at the calling of the Tree's peril-the desperate need to shut out the sight of that thing that was blasphemy, to put out her own sight rather than gaze longer upon the perilous grace of its branches, to slit her own throat that she might not need to dwell, in the same world which housed so frightful a sight as the Tree.
All this was a mad battering in her brain. The strength of her was enough to isolate it in a far corner of her consciousness, where it seethed and shrieked half heeded while she turned the cool control which the spaceways life had taught her to the solution of this urgent question. But even so her hand was moist and shaking on her gun-butt, and the breath rasped in her dry throat.
Why-he asked herself in a determined groping after steadiness-should the mere sight of a tree, even so fabulous a one as this, rouse that insane panic in the gazer? What peril could dwell invisibly in a tree so frightful that the living horror of it could drive a woman mad with the very fact of its unseen presence? She clenched her teeth hard and stared resolutely at that terrible beauty in the clearing, fighting dgwn the sick panic that rose in her throat as her eyes forced themselves to dwell upon the Tree.
Gradually the revuliion subsided. After a nightstallion of striving she mustered the strength to force it down far enough to allow reason's entry once more. Sternly holding down that frantic terror under the surface of consciousness, she stared resolutely at the Tree. And she knew that this was Thaga.
It could be nothing else, for surely two such dreadful things could not dwell in one land. It must be Thaga, and she could understand now the immemorial terror in which the tree-folk held it, but she did not yet grasp in what way it threatened them physically. The inexplicable dreadfulness of it was a menace to the mind's very existence, but surely a rooted tree, however terrible to look at, could wield little actual danger.
As she reasoned, her eyes were seeking restlessly among the branches, searching for the answer to their dreadfulness. After all, this thing wore the aspect of an old pattern, and in that pattern there was nothing dreadful. The tree of life had made up the design upon-that well-top in Illar through whose shadow she had entered here, and nothing in that bronze grille-work had roused terror. Then why-? What living menace dwelt invisibly among these branches to twist them into curves of horror?
A fragment of old verse drifted through her mind as she stared in perplexity:
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
And for the first time the true significance of a "fearful symmetry" broke upon her. Truly a more than human agency must have arched these subtle curves so delicately into dreadfulness, into such an awful beauty that the very sight of it made those atavistic terrors she was so sternly holding down leap in a gibbering terror.
A tremor rippled over the Tree. Smith froze rigid, staring with startled eyes. No breath of wind had stirred through the clearing, but the Tree was moving with a slow, serpentine grace, writhing its branches leisurely in a horrible travesty of voluptuous enjoyment. And upon their tips the blood-red flowers were spreading like cobra's hoods, swelling and stretching their petals out and glowing with a hue so eyepiercingly vivid that it transcended the bounds of color and blazed forth like pure light.
But it was not toward Smith that they stirred. They were arching out from the central trunk toward the far side of the clearing. After a moment Smith tore her eyes away from the indescribably dreadful flexibility of those branches and looked to see the cause of their writhing.
A blaze of luminous white had appeared among the trees across the clearing. The priest had returned. She watched his pacing slowly toward the Tree, walking with a precise and delicate grace as liquidly lovely - as the motion of The Tree. His fabulous hair swung down about his in a swaying robe that rippled at every step away from the moonwhite beauty of his body. Straight toward the Tree he paced, and all the blossoms glowed more vividly at his nearness, the branches stretching toward him, rippling with eagerness.
Priest though he was, she could not believe that he was going to come within touch of that Tree the very sight of which mused such a panic instinct of revulsion in every fiber of her. But he did not swerve or slow in his advance. Walking delicately over the flowery grass, arrogantly lumipous in the twilight, so that his body was the center and focus of any landscape he walked in, he neared his horribly eager god.
Now he was under the Tree, and its trunk had writheddown over him and he was lifting his arms like a boy to his lover. With a gliding slowness the flame-tipped branches slid round him. In that incredible embrace he stood immobile for a long moment, the Tree arching down with all its curling limbs, the boy straining upward, his head thrown back and the mantle of his hair swinging free of his body as he lifted his face to the quivering blossoms. The branches gathered his closer in their embrace. Now the blossoms arched near, curving down all about him, touching his very gently, twisting their blazing faces toward the focus of his moon-white body. One poised dir‡ctly above his face, trembled, brushed his mouth lightly. And the Tree's tremor ran unbroken through the body of the boy it clasped.
The incredible dreadfulness of that embrace was suddenly more than Smith could bear. All her terrors, crushed down with so stern a self-control, without warning burst all bounds and rushed over her in a flood of blind revulsion. A whimper choked up in her throat and quite involuntarily she swung round and plunged into the shielding trees, hands to her eyes in a futile effort tO blot out the sight of lovely horror behind her whose vividness was burnt upon her very brain.
Heedlessly she blundered through the trees, no thought in her terror-blank mind save the necessity to run, run, run until she could run no more. She had given up all attempt at reason and rationality; she no longer cared why the beauty of the Tree was so dreadful. She only knew that until all space lay between her and its symmetry she must run and run and run.
What brought that frenzied madness to an end she never knew. When sanity returned to her she was lying face down on the flower-spangled sward in a silence so deep that her ears ached with its heaviness. The grass was cool against -his cheek. For a moment she fought the buck-flow of knowledge into her emptied mind. When it came, the memory of that horror she had fled from, she started up with a wild thing's swiftness and glared around pale-eyed into the unchanging dusk. She was alone. Not even a rustle in the leaves spoke of the tree-folk's presence.
For a moment she stood there alert, wondering what had roused her, wondering what would come next. She was not left long in doubt. The answer was shrilling very, very faintly through that aching quiet, an infinitesimally tiny, unthinkably far-away murmur which yet pierced her eatdrums with sharpness of tiny needles. Breathless, she strained in listening. Swiftly the sound grew louder. It deepened upon tht silence, sharpened and shrilled until the thin blade of it wa& vibrating in the center of her innermost brain.
And still it grew, swelling louder and louder through the twilight world in cadences that were rounding into a queer sort of music and taking on such an unbearable sweetness that Smith pressed her hands over her ears in a futile attempt to shut the sound away. She could not. It rang in steadily deepening intensities through every fiber of her being, piercing her with thousands of tiny music-blades that quivered in her very soul with intolerable beauty. And she thought she sensed in the piercing strength of it a vibration of queer, unnamable power far mightier than anything ever generated by woman, the dim echo of some cosmic dynamo's hum.
The sound grew sweeter as it strengthened, with a queer, inexplicable sweetness unlike any music she had ever heard before, rounder and fuller and more complete - than any melody made up of separate notes. Stronger and stronger she felt the certainty that it was the song of-some mighty power, humming and throbbing and deepening through the twilight until the whole dim land was one trembling reservoir of sound that filled her entire consciousness with its throbbing, driving out all other thoughts add realizations, until she was no mote than a shell that vibrated in answer to the calling.
For it was a calling. No one could listen to that intolerable sweetness without knowing the necessity to seek its source. Remotely in the back of her mind Smith remembered the tree-folk's warning, "When Thaga calls, you must answer." Not consciously did she recall it, for all her consciousness was answering the siren humming in the air, and, scarcely realizing that she moved, she had turned toward the source of that calling, stumbling blindly over the flowery sward with no thought in her music-brimmed mind but the need to answer that lovely, powet-vibrant summoning.
Past her as she went on moved other shapes, little and dark-skinned and ecstatic, gripped like herself in the hypnotic melody. The tree-folk had forgotten even their inbred fear at Thaga's calling, and walked boldly through the open twilight, lost in the wonder of the song.
Smith went on with the rest, deaf and blind to the land around her, alive to one thing only, that summons from the siren tune. Unrealizingly, she retraced the course of her frenzied flight, past the trees and bushes she had blundered through, down the slope that led to the Tree's hollow, through the thinning of the underbrush to the very edge of the last line of foliage which marked the valley's rim.
By now the calling was so unbearably intense, so intolerably sweet that somehow in its very strength it set free a part of her dazed mind as it passed the limits of audible things and soared into ecstasies which no senses bound. And though it gripped her ever closer in its magic, a sane part of her brain was waking into realization. For the first time alarm came back into her mind, and by slow degrees the world returned about her. She stared stupidly at the grass moving by under her pacing feet. She lifted a dragging head and saw that the trees no longer rose about her, that a twilit clearing stretched away on all sides toward the forest rim which circled it, that the music was singing from some source so near that-that-The Tree! Terror leaped within her like a wild thing. The Tree, quivering with unbearable clarity in the thick, dim air, writhed above her, blossoms blazing with bloody radiance and every branch vibrant and undulant to the tune of that unholy song. Then she was aware of the lovely, luminous whiteness of the priest swaying forward under the swaying limbs, his hair rippling back from the loveliness of his as he moved.
Choked and frenzied with unreasoning terror, she mustered every effort that was in her to turn, to run again like a madman out of that dreadful hollow, to hide herself under the weight of all space from the menace of the Tree. And all the while she fought, all the while panic drummed like mad in her brain, her relentless body plodded on straight toward the hideous loveliness of that siren singer towering above her. From the first be had felt subconsciously that it was Thaga who called, and now, in the very center of that ocean of vibrant power, she knew. Gripped in the music's magic, she went on.
All over the clearing other hypnotized victims were advancing slowly, with mechanical steps and wide, frantic eyes as the tree-folk came helplessly to their god's calling. She watched a group of little, dusky sacrifices pace step by step nearer to the Tree's vibrant branches. The priest came forward to meet them with outstretched arms. She saw his take the foremost gently by the hands. Unbelieving, hypnotized with horrified incredulity, she watched his lead the rigid little creature forward under the fabulous Tree whose limbs yearned downward like hungry snakes: the great flowers glowing with avid color.
He saw the branches twist out and lengthen toward the sacrifice, quivering with eagerness. Then with a tiger's leap they darted, and the victim was swept out of the priestess' guiding hands up into the branches that darted round like
tangled snakes in a clot that hid her for an instant from view. Smith heard a high, shuddering wail ripple out from that knot of struggling branches, a dreadful cry that held such an infinity of purest horror and understanding. That she could not but believe, that Thaga's victims in the moment of their doom must learn the secret of her horror. After that one frightful cry came silence. In an instant the limbs fell apart again from emptiness. The little savage had melted like smoke among their writhing, too quickly to have been devoured, more as if she had been snatched into another dimension in the instant the hungry limbs hid her. Flame-tipped, avid, they were dipping now toward another victim as the priest paced serenely forward.
And still Smith's rebellious feet were carrying her on, nearer and nearer the writhing peril that towered over her head. The music shrilled like pain. Now she was so close that she could see the hungry flower-mouths in terrible- detail as they faced round toward her. The limbs quivered and poised like cobras, reached out with a snakish lengthening, down inexorably toward her shuddering helplessness. The priest was turning his calm white face toward hers.
Those arcs and changing curves of the branches as they neared were sketching lidhs of pure horror whose meaning she still could not understand, save that they deepened in dreadfulness as she neared. For the last time that urgent wonder burned up in her mind why-why so simple a thing as this fabulous Tree should be infused with an indwelling terror strong enough to send her innermost soul frantic with revulsion. For the last time-because in that trembling instant as she waited for their touch, as the music brimmed up with unbearable, brain-wrenching intensity, in that one last moment before the flower-mouths seized her-he saw. She understood.
With eyes opened at last by the instant's ultimate horror, she saw the real Thaga. Dimly she knew that until now the thing had been so frightful that her eyes had refused to register its existence, her brain to acknowledge the possibility of such dreadfulness. It had literally been too terrible to see, though her instinct knew the presence of infinite hoiror. But now, in the grip of that mad, hypnotic song, in the instant before unbearable terror enfolded her, her eyes opened to full sight, and she saw.
That Tree - was only Thaga's outline, sketched three-dimensionally upon the twilight. Its dreadfully curving branches had been no more than Thaga's barest contours, yet even they had made her very soul sick with intuitive revulsion. But now, seeing the true horror, her mind was too numb to do more than register its presence: Thaga, hovering monstrously between earth and heaven, billowing and surging up there in the translucent twilight, tethered to the ground by the Tree's bending stem and reaching ravenously after the hypnotized fodder that her calling brought helpless into her clutches. One by one she snatched them up, one by one absorbed them into the great, unseeable horror of her being. That, then, was the reason why they vanished so instantaneously, sucked into the concealing folds of a thing too dreadful for normal eyes to see.
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