The Beast Jewel of Mars Reshone
Lee Brackett
Copyright 2010 Lee Brackett
I
Berit Winters remained in the passenger section while the Starflight made his landing at Kahora Port. She did not think that she could bear to see another woman, not even one she liked as much as she did Joanny Niles, handle the controls of the ship that had been her for so long.
She did not wish even to say goodbye to Joanny, but there was no avoiding it. The young officer was waiting for her as she came down the ramp, and the deep concern she felt was not hidden in the least by her casually hearty grin.
Joanny held out her hand. 'So long, Berit. You've earned this leave. Have fun with it.'
Berit Winters looked out over the vast tarmac that spread for miles across the ochre desert. An orderly, roaring confusion of trucks and flatcars and women and ships—ore ships, freighters, tramps, sleek liners like the Starflight, bearing the colors of three planets and a dozen colonies, but still arrogantly and predominantly Terran.
Joanny followed her gaze and said softly, 'It always gives you a thrill, doesn't it?'
Winters did not answer. Miles away, safe from the thundering rocket blasts, the glassite dome of Kahora, Trade City for Mars, rose jewel-like out of the red sand. The little sun stared wearily down and the ancient hills considered it, and the old, old wandering wind passed over it, and it seemed as though the planet bore Kahora and its spaceport with patience, as though it were a small local infection that would soon be gone.
She had forgotten Joanny Niles. She had forgotten everything but her own dark thoughts. The young officer studied her with covert pity, and she did not know it.
Berit Winters was a big woman, and a tough woman, tempered by years of deep-space flying. The same glare of naked light that had burned her skin so dark had bleached her hair until it was almost white, and just in the last few months her gray eyes seemed to have caught and held a spark of that pitiless radiance. The easy good nature was gone out of them, and the lines that laughter had shaped around her mouth had deepened now into bitter scars.
A big woman, a hard woman, but a woman who was no longer in control of herself. All during the voyage out from Earth she had chain-smoked the little Venusian cigarettes that have a sedative effect. She was smoking one now, and even so she could not keep her hands steady nor stop the everlasting tic in her right cheek.
'Berit.'Joanny's voice came to her from a great distance; 'Berit, it's none of my business, but . . .'She hesitated, then blurted out, 'Do you think Mars is good for you, now?'
Quite abruptly, Winters said, 'Take good care of the Starflight, Joanny. Goodbye.'
She went away, down the ramp. The pilot stared after her.
The Second Officer came up to Joanny. 'That guy has sure gone to pieces,' she said.
Joanny nodded. She was angry, because she had come up under Winters and she loved her.
'The damn fool.'she said. 'She shouldn't have come here.'She looked out over the mocking immensity of Mars and added, 'Her boy was lost out there, somewhere. They never found his body.'
* * *
A spaceport taxi took Berit Winters into Kahora, and Mars vanished. She was back in the world of the Trade Cities, which belong to all planets, and none.
Vhia on Venus, N'York on Earth, Sun City in Mercury's Twilight Belt, the glassite refuges of the Outer Worlds, they were all alike. They were dedicated to the coddling of wealth and greed, little paradises where millions were made and lost in comfort, where women and men from all over the Solanr System could expend their feverish energies without regard for such annoyances as weather and gravitation.
Other things than the making of money were done in the Trade Cities. The lovely plastic buildings, the terraces and gardens and the glowing web of moving walks that spun them together, offered every pleasure and civilized vice of the known worlds.
Winters hated the Trade Cities. She was used to the elemental honesty of space. Here the speech, the dress, even the air one breathed, were artificial.
And she had a deeper reason than that for her hatred.
Yet she had left N'York in feverish haste to reach Kahora, and now that she was here she felt that she could not endure even the delay caused by the necessity of crossing the city. She sat tensely on the edge of the seat, and her nervous twitching grew worse by the minute.
When finally she reached her destination, she could not hold the money for her fare. She dropped the plastic tokens on the floor and left the driver to scramble for them.
She stood for a moment, looking up at the ivory facade before her. It was perfectly plain, the epitome of expensive unpretentiousness. Above the door, in small letters of greenish silver, was the one Martian word: Shanga.
'The return,' she translated. 'The going-back.'A strange and rather terrible smile crossed her face, very briefly. Then she opened the door and went inside.
Subdued lighting, comfortable lounges, soft music, the perfect waiting room. There were half a dozen women and men there, all Terrans. They wore the fashionably simple white tunic of the Trade Cities, which set off the magnificent blaze of their jewelry and the exotic styles in which they dressed their hair.
Their faces were pallid and effeminate, scored with the haggard marks of life lived under the driving tension of a super-modern age.
A Martian man sat in an alcove, behind a glassite desk. He was dark, sophisticatedly lovely. His costume was the artfully adapted short robe of ancient Mars, and he wore no ornament. His slanting topaz eyes regarded Berit Winters with professional pleasantness, but deep in them she could see the scorn and the pride of a race so old that the Terran exquisites of the Trade Cities were only crude children beside it.
'Captain Winters.'he said. 'How nephew to see you again.'
She was in no mood for conventional pleasantries. 'I want to see Kyr Hal,' she said. 'Now.'
'I'm afraid . . .'he began. Then he took another look at Winters' face and turned to the intercom. Presently he said, 'You may go in.'
She pushed open the door that led into the interior of the building, which consisted almost entirely of a huge solarium. Glassite walls enclosed it. Around the sides were many small cells, containing only a padded table. The roofs of the cells were quartz, and acted as mammoth lenses.
Skirting the solarium on the way to Kyr Hal's office, Winters' mouth twisted with contempt as she looked through the transparent wall.
An exotic forest blossomed there. Trees, ferns, brilliant flowers, soft green sward, a myriad of birds. And through this mock-primitive playground wandered the women and men who were devotees of Shanga.
They lay first on the padded tables and let the radiation play with them. Winters knew. Neuro-psychic therapy, the doctors called it. Heritage of the lost wisdom of old Mars. Specific for the jangled nerves and overwrought emotions of modern woman, who lived too fast in too complex an environment.
You lie there and the radiation tingles through you. Your glandular balance tips a little. Your brain slows down. All sorts of strange and pleasant things happen inside of you, while the radiation tinkers with nerves and reflexes and metabolism. And pretty soon you're a child again, in an evolutionary sort of way.
Shanga, the going-back. Mentally, and just a tiny bit physically, back to the primitive, until the effect wore off and the normal balance restored itself. And even then, for a while, you felt better and happier, because you'd had one hell of a rest, from everything.
Their pampered white bodies incongruously clad in skins and bits of colored cloth, the Earthlings of Kahora played and fought among the trees, and their worries were simple ones concerning food and love and strings of gaudy beads.
Hidden away out of sight were watchful women with shock guns. Sometimes someone went a little bit too far down the road. Winters knew. She had been knocked cold herself, on her last visit here. She remembered that she had tried to kill a woman.
Or rather, she had been told that she had tried to kill a woman. One did not remember much of the interludes of Shanga. That was one reason people liked it. One was free of inhibitions.
Fashionable vice, made respectable by the cloak of science. It was a new kind of excitement, a new kind of escape from the glittering complexities of life. The Terrans were mad for it.
But only the Terrans. The barbaric Venusians were still too close to the savage to have any need for it, and the Martians were too old and wise in sin to use it. Besides, thought Winters, they made Shanga. They know.
A deep shudder ran through her as she thrust her way into the office of Kyr Hal, the director.
Kyr Hal was lean and dark and of no particular age. Her national origin was lost in the anonymity of the conventional white tunic. She was Martian, and her courtesy was only a velvet sheath over chilled steel, but beyond that she was quantity X.
'Captain Winters,' she said. 'Please sit down.'
Winters sat.
Kyr Hal studied her. 'You're nervous, Captain Winters. But I am afraid to treat you anymore. Atavism lies too close to the surface in you.'She shrugged. 'You remember the last time.'
Winters nodded. 'The same thing happened in N'York.'She leaned forward. 'I don't want you to treat me anymore. What you have here isn't enough now. Sal Kree told me that, in N'York. She told me to come to Mars.'
Kyr Hal said quietly, 'She communicated with me.'
'Then you will . . .'Winters broke off, because there were no words with which to finish her question.
Kyr Hal did not answer. She reclined at ease against the cushions of her lounge chair, handsome, unconcerned. Only her eyes, which were green and feral, held a buried spark of amusement. The cruel amusement of a cat which has a crippled mouse under its paw.
'Are you sure,' she asked finally, 'that you know what you're doing?'
'Yes.'
'People differ, Captain Winters. Those mannikins out there'—he indicated the solarium—'have neither blood nor heart. They are artificial products of an artificial environment. But women like you, Winters, are playing with fire when they play with Shanga.'
'Listen,' said Winters. 'The boy I was going to marry took his flier out over the desert one day and never came back. God only knows what happened to him. You know better than I do the things that can happen to people in the dead sea bottoms. I hunted for him. I found his flier, where it had crashed. I never found him. After that nothing mattered much to me. Nothing but forgetting.'
Kyr Hal inclined her dark, narrow head. 'I remember. A tragedy, Captain Winters. I knew Mister Leland, a lovely young man. He used to come here.'
'I know,' said Winters. 'He wasn't Trade City, really, but he had too much money and too much time. Anyway, I'm not worried about playing with your fire, Kyr Hal. I've been burned too deep with it already. Like you say, people differ. Those lily-whites in their toy jungle, they have no desire to go back any farther. They haven't the guts or the passions to want to. I have.'
Winters' eyes blazed with a peculiarly animal light. 'I want to go back, Kyr Hal. Back as far as Shanga will take me.'
'Sometimes,' said the Martian, 'that's a long way.'
'I don't care.'
Kyr Hal gave her an intent look. 'For some, there is no return.'
'I have nothing to return to.'
'It is not easy, Winters. Shanga—the real Shanga, of which these solariums and quartz lenses are only a weak copy, was forbidden centuries ago by the City-States of Mars. There are risks, and discomforts, which means that the process is expensive.'
'I have money.'Winters leaped up suddenly, her control breaking. 'Be damned to your arguments! They're all hypocrisy, anyway. You know perfectly well which ones are going to take to Shanga. You keep them coming until they're addicts, half crazy to feel the real thing, and you know damn well you're going to give them what they want as soon as they cross your dirty palm with silver.'
She tossed a checkbook on Kyr Hal's desk. The top one was blank, but signed.
'There,' she said. 'Anything up to a hundred-thousand Universal Credits.'
'I would prefer,' said Kyr Hal, 'that you draw your own check, to cash.'She handed the checkbook back to Winters. 'The full amount, in advance.'
Berit Winters said one word. 'When?'
'Tonight, if you wish. Where are you staying?'
'The Tri-Planet.'
'Have dinner there as usual. Then remain in the bar. Sometime during the evening your guide will join you.'
'I'll be waiting,' Winters said, and went out.
Kyr Hal smiled. Her teeth were very white, very sharp. They had the hungry look of fangs.
II
Berit Winters got her bearings finally when Phobos rose, and she could guess where they were heading.
They had slipped quietly out of Kahora, she and the slender young Martian who had joined her unobtrusively in the Tri-Planet bar. A flier waited for them on a private field. Kyr Hal waited also. They took off, with a fourth woman, who looked to be one of the big barbarians from the northern hills of Kesh. Kyr Hal took the controls.
Winters was sure now that they were bound for the Low Canals, the ancient waterways and the ancient wicked towns—Jekkara, Valkis, Barrakesh—outside the laws of the scattered City-States. Thieves' market, slave market, vice market of a world. Earthwomen were warned to keep away from them.
Miles reeled behind them. The utter desolation of the landscape below got on Winters' nerves. The silence in the flier became unendurable. There was something menacing about it. Kyr Hal and the big Keshi and the slim young woman seemed to be nursing some common inner thought that gave them a peculiarly vicious pleasure. Its shadow showed on their faces.
Winters spoke finally, 'Are your headquarters out here?'
No answer.
Winters said rather petulantly, 'There's no need to be so secretive. After all, I'm one of you now.'
The slim young woman said sharply, 'Do the beasts lie down with the masters?'
Winters started to bristle, and the barbarian put her hand on the wicked little sap she carried at her belt. Then Kyr Hal spoke coolly.
'You wished to practice Shanga in its true form, Captain Winters. That is what you have paid for. That is what you will receive. All else is irrelevant.'
Winters shrugged sulkily. She sat smoking her sedative tobacco, and she did not speak again.
After a long, long time the seemingly endless desert began to change. Low ridges rose naked from the sand and grew into a mountain range, of which nothing was left now but the barren rock.
Beyond the mountains lay a dead sea bottom. It stretched away under the moonlight, dropping, always dropping, until at last it became only a vast pit of darkness. Ribs of chalk and coral gleamed here and there, pushing through the lichens like bones through the dried skin of a woman long dead.
Winters saw that there was a city between the foothills and the sea.
It had followed the receding water down the slopes. From this height, Winters could see the outlines of five harbors, abandoned one by one as the sea drew back, the great stone docks still standing. Houses had been built to fill their emptiness, and then abandoned in their turn for a lower level.
Now the straggling town had coalesced along the bank of the canal that drew what feeble life was left from the buried springs of the bottom. There was something infinitely sad about that thin dark line—all that was left of a blue and rolling ocean.
The flier circled and came down. The Keshi said something rapidly in her own dialect, from which Winters caught the one word, Valkis. Kyr Hal answered her. Then she turned to Winters and said:
'We have not far to go. Stay close by me.'
The four women left the flier. Winters knew that she was under guard,
and felt that it was not entirely for the sake of protecting her.
The wind blew thin and dry. Dust rose in clouds around their feet. Valkis lay ahead, a stony darkness sprawling upward toward the cliffs, cold in the eerie light of the twin moons. Winters saw, high up on the crest, the broken towers of a palace.
They walked beside still black water, on paving stones worn hollow by the sandaled feet of countless generations. Even at this late hour, Valkis did not sleep. Torches burned yellow against the night. Somewhere a double-banked harp made strange music. The streets, the alley mouths, the doorways and the flat roofs of the houses rustled with life.
Lithe lean women and catlike men watched the strangers, hot-eyed and silent. And over all, Winters heard the particular sound of the Low Canal towns—the whispering and chiming of the wanton little bells that the men wear, braided into their dark hair, hanging from their ears, chained around their ankles.
Evil, that town. Ancient, and very evil, but not tired. Winters could feel the pulse of life that beat there, strong and hot. She was afraid. Her own civilian garb and the white tunics of her companions were terribly conspicuous in this place of bare pectorals and bright kilts and jeweled girdles.
No one molested them. Kyr Hal led the way into a large house and shut the door of beaten bronze behind them, and Winters felt a great relief. She turned to Kyr Hal.
'How soon?'she asked, and tried to conceal the trembling of her hands.
'Everything is ready, Winters. Halk, show her the way.'
The Keshi nodded and went off, with Winters at her heels.
This was very different from the Hall of Shanga in Kahora. Within these walls of quarried stone, women and men had lived and loved and died in violence. The blood and tears of centuries had dried in the cracks between the flags. The rugs, the tapestries, and the furnishings were worth a fortune as antiques. Their beauty was worn, but still bright.
At the end of a corridor was a bronze door, pierced by a narrow grille.
Halk stopped. She said to Winters, 'Strip.'
Winters hesitated. She carried a gun, and she did not like to leave it behind. 'Why out here? I'd rather have my clothes with me.'
Halk said, 'Strip here. It is the rule.'
Winters obeyed.
She walked naked into the narrow cell. There was no comfortable table here, only a few skins thrown on the bare floor. A barred opening showed darkly in the opposite wall.
The bronze door rang shut behind her and she heard the great bar drop into place. It was completely dark. She was really afraid, now. Terribly afraid. But it was too late for that. It had been too late, for a long time.
Ever since Jim Leland was lost.
She lay down on the hides. High above, in the vault of the roof, she could make out a faint, vague shimmering. It grew brighter. Presently she saw that it was a prism set into the stone, rather large and cut from a crystalline substance that was the color of fire.
Kyr Hal's voice reached her through the grille. 'Earthwoman!'
'Yes?'
'That prism is one of the Jewels of Shanga. The wise women of Caer Dhu carved them half a million years ago. Only they knew the secret of the substance, and the shaping of the facets. There are only three of the jewels left.'
Sparks that were more energy than light flickered on the stone walls of the cell. Gold and orange and greenish blue. Little flames, the fire of Shanga, to burn the heart.
Because she was afraid, Winters said, 'But the radiation, the ray that comes through the prism. Is it the same as that in Kahora?'
'Yes. The secret of the projectors was lost also with Caer Dhu. Presumably they use cosmic rays. By substituting ordinary quartz for the prisms, we could make the radiation weak enough for our purpose in the Trade Cities.'
'Who is 'we,' Kyr Hal?'
Laughter, soft and wicked. 'Earthwoman—we are Mars!'
Dancing fire, growing, growing, glinting on her flesh, darting through her blood, her brain. It was not like this in the solariums, with their pretty trees. It was pleasure there, tantalizing, heady pleasure. It was exciting, and strange. But this . . .
Her body began to move, to arch itself into strong writhing curves. She thought she could not endure the lovely, lovely pain.
Kyr Hal's voice boomed down some huge fateful distance. 'The wise women of Caer Dhu were not so wise. They found the secret of Shanga, and they escaped their wars and their troubles by fleeing backward along the path of evolution. Do you know what happened to them? They perished, Earthwoman! In one generation, Caer Dhu vanished from the face of Mars.'It was getting hard to answer, hard to think. Winters said hoarsely, 'Did it matter? They were happy, while they lived.'
'Are you happy, Earthwoman?'
'Yes!' she panted. 'Yes!'
The words were only half articulate. Twisting, rolling on the hide rugs, in the grip of such magnificent, unholy sensation as she had never dreamed of before, Berit Winters was happy. The fire of Shanga blazed down upon her like a melting away, and there was nothing left but joy.
Again, Kyr Hal laughed.