The Power and the Glory by Henry Kuttner - HTML preview

CHAPTER IX
 Fairy Gold

Miller found himself sitting on the broken marble steps with his head in his hands. How long a time had passed he had no idea. Orelle’s touch on his shoulder made him look up at last. She was smiling a little but her eyes were grave.

“Are you all right now?” she asked. “You’re safe. We’re all safe, thanks to you. I’m glad I’ve never known your world if you could understand a thing like that—that madness. But I’m glad you did understand it—for our sakes. You saved us, Miller. You can ask your own reward.”

He looked at her groggily, thinking with incongruous steadiness that he was probably suffering from shock now and not really responsible. But he glanced involuntarily toward the crystal block of the Power.

Orelle’s smile was sad. “Yes,” she said, “we can make you a duplicate if you ask us. But it would be effort wasted in the end.”

He stared at her, not understanding. Then his eyes went beyond her to the shattered wall and the beautiful shining day outside. New senses were burgeoning in him and he could sense in that glittering sunlight colors and sounds and glories beyond anything words could tell.

The air was a tangible thing against his cheek, velvet soft, sweeter than perfume. He was beginning to perceive new shapes moving dimly on the edge of vision, as if there were a whole unknown world just now slowly unveiling before his freshly opened eyes.

Miller laughed suddenly. “I know what you mean,” he said. “I must be stupid, not to have seen it until now. Of course I won’t want a duplicate of the Power. Why should I? I’m not going back to Slade. I’d be crazy if I left a paradise like this. What good would a duplicate do me when I’m staying on here—forever!”

Orelle shook her shining head. Her eyes were very sad. In a gentle voice she began to speak. And Llesi’s voice, gentle too in the dimness of his mind, spoke with her.

Very quietly they told him the truth.

“So you know now it was fairy gold,” the Belgian said, sliding the bottle across the table. “Well, I could not have made you believe. You had to experience it yourself.”

Miller looked at nothing.

Van Hornung glanced toward the fire, shivered and reached out a stubby finger toward the dull cube on the table between them.

“Drink,” he said.

Slowly Miller obeyed. There was a long silence.

Finally Van Hornung said, “It is—still the same up there? The castles and the wonderful people and the—colors? But it would be. The colors—I was an artist once. I think the colors meant most to me. There were so many we do not know.”

“Orelle told me,” Miller said dully. “I wouldn’t believe her. I didn’t want to believe her.”

“There are the legends, Miller,” Van Hornung said. “You and I aren’t the first. We won’t be the last. There have always been stories of humans who visit Paradise for a little while—and leave again. I’m no scientist. I never knew why—”

Miller glanced up. His eyes brightened a little.

“It was an unstable compound,” he said. “There was an atomic change, you see. The Path does that. Your atomic structure shifts to something quite different. When you’re like that you can talk with your mind, without words.”

“I know,” the Belgian said. “I do not talk much any more. It is never the same, after that.”

“Will it ever. . . ?”

Van Hornung said quietly, “We were like gods for a little while. We ate the food of the gods. Can we expect mortal food to please us after that?”

Miller nodded in silence. To go back to his old world, to live his old life would be meaningless now—like going back to blindness after knowing sight in a brighter world than this. He had had a taste of this once, in Orelle’s castle, while they searched him with piercing electronic eyes for the weapon he did not know he carried. That had been an illusion and a foretaste of this death-in-life which he must live now until he died—as the Belgian had been living.

He remembered how the mountain-top world had begun to fade around him, Orelle’s pitying face growing ghostlike, the glass walls of her castle turning to mist and the wonderful nameless colors of her gardens thinning away to nothingness while the snow-covered peaks took shape solidly behind them.

There had been a little time longer, after Brann’s defeat, for him to enjoy the last days of Paradise. He had refused to believe it could end at all. He had shut his mind to the instability of his change, to the fact that he had been himself an isotope created by a temporary radioactive atomic shift so that, when the quantum energy was released, the atomic pattern must revert to its former state. And in one terrible, fading instant the familiar prison of his own senses closed around him once more as the lovely world of Peak Seven Hundred went volatile and vanished.

The last thing to go was the little cube Llesi had made for him with the singing halo of the Power turning in miniature within it. When the waste of glacial ice was all that remained of the invisible castle he went slowly down the mountain again, walking, he knew, through fields of glowing flowers he could never see again. And now it was the ice and snow that seemed illusion—the vanished summer world the only real thing in life.

He kept taking the cube out and looking at it as he descended the lower slopes. After awhile it seemed dimmer than he remembered, the singing fainter. When he reached the valley the glow was gone entirely. The cube was non-radioactive lead, inert and useless. Fairy gold, the legends said, was glittering in your hands when the immortals put it there—but when you looked again it had always turned to leaves and pebbles.

Van Hornung said, “What will you do now?”

Miller shrugged. “Is anything worth doing?”

“Not for me, any longer. After you have seen the colors and used your mind to its fullest, there is nothing worth the effort of doing in this world below. Stay with me if you like. It does not matter.”

Behind Miller the door opened quietly. Slade walked into the room. When he saw Miller his jaw dropped slightly.

“Miller! What’s the matter with you? When did you get in?”

“Just now.”

“Did you get it?”

“Get what?” Miller said dully.

“The energy-source!” Slade thrust his face down to Miller’s, the feral eyes narrowing, the thin lips tight. Seeing him, Miller thought suddenly of Brann. The same irresponsible power, dangerous, hungry, admitting no discipline but its own desires.

He was glad, in a casual way, that Slade could never use the Power. Slade could do harm enough, had done more than harm enough, with only his own driving unscrupulous brain to guide him. Once armed with a thing like the Power. . . .

“I left it where I found it,” Miller said indifferently. “Up on the Peak.”

“How can we get it?” Slade demanded urgently. “An expedition?”

“You can have it for the asking—up there.” A slow idea took shape in Miller’s mind. Sardonically he said, “Look for the red path at the foot of the cliff. Follow it. Go on up and you’ll have no trouble finding your energy-source. That’s all I’m going to say. We’re through, Slade. Get out.”

And he would say no more though it was ten minutes before Slade exhausted his threats and arguments and left. Miller smiled wryly at the Belgian.

“He’ll go. You couldn’t keep him away. And you know what will happen.”

“What happened to us. But—why did you send him?”

Miller stared out the window at the snowy cone of Peak Seven Hundred, white and empty against the sky.

“I hated Slade once,” he said. “That doesn’t matter how. But where men like Slade go there’s cruelty and misery and suffering. I can at least spare a few other men what I’ve gone through from him. He’ll come back—as we are. As for the Power—yes, it’s fairy gold.”

The Belgian said softly, “. . .’amid such greater glories that we are worse than blind.’ ”

Miller nodded. “The Power and the Glory. Some day our race may achieve it. But it has to be earned.”

He reached for the bottle.

END