CHAPTER II
Tsi
He was alone. He lay on something hard and flat. A dome of crystal arched overhead, not very high, so that he seemed in effect to lie in a box of crystal—a coffin, he thought grimly, and sat up with brittle care. His muscles felt as stiff as if the substance of the iridescent roadway still permeated his flesh.
The dome seemed to have strange properties, for all he saw through it was curiously distorted and colored with such richness it almost hurt the eyes to gaze upon what lay beyond.
He saw columns of golden trees upon which leaves moved and glittered in constantly changing prisms of light. Something like smoke seemed to wreathe slowly among the trees, colored incredibly. Seen through the dome about him the color of the smoke was nameless. No man ever saw that hue before nor gave a name to it.
The slab on which he sat was the iridescent purple of the road. If it had carried him here, he saw no obvious way in which it could have left him lying on the crystal coffin. Yet, clearly, this was the end of the moving roadway and, clearly too, the forces which had welded him to it were gone now.
The unstable atoms created in the grip of that strange force had shaken off their abnormality and reverted to their original form. He was himself again but stiff, dizzy and not sure whether he had dreamed the voices. If he had, it was a nightmare. He shivered a little, remembering the thin, inhuman laughter and its promise of dreadful things.
He got up, very cautiously, looking around. As nearly as he could tell through the distorting crystal there was no one near him. The coffin stood in a grove of the golden trees and, except for the mist and the twinkling leaves, nothing moved. He put out a tentative hand to push the crystal up.
His hand went through it. There was a tinkling like high music, ineffably sweet, and the crystal flew into glittering fragments that fell to the ground in a second rain of sound. The beauty of it for a moment was almost pain. He had never heard such music before. It was almost more beautiful than any human being should be allowed to hear, he thought confusedly. There are sensations so keen they can put too great a strain upon human nerves.
Then he stood there unprotected by the dome and looked around him at the trees and the mist and saw that the dome had made no difference. These incredible colors were no distortions—they were real. He took a tentative step and found the grass underfoot so soft that even through his shoe-soles he could feel its caress.
The very air was exquisitely cool and hushed, like the air of a summer dawn, almost liquid in its translucence. Through it the winking of the prism-leaves was so lovely to look at that he turned his eyes away, unable to endure the sight for more than a moment.
This was hallucination. “I’m still somewhere back there in the snow,” he thought. “Delirium—that’s it. I’m imagining this.” But if it were a dream, then Van Hornung had known it too, and men do not dream identical dreams. The Belgian had warned him.
He shook his shoulders impatiently. Even with all this before him he could not quite bring himself to believe Van Hornung’s story. There was a quality of dream about this landscape, as if all he saw were not in reality what it seemed, as if this grass of ineffable softness were—and he knew it was—only crusted snow, as if those cliffs he could glimpse among the trees were really the bare crags of Peak Seven Hundred, and everything else delirium. He felt uneasily that he was really lying somewhere asleep in the snow, and must wake soon, before he froze.
That high, thin laughter rang suddenly through the air. In spite of himself Miller felt his heart lurch and he whirled to face the sound with a feeling of cold terror congealing him. It was odd how frightening the careless voice had been, talking impersonally of its pleasures.
A little group of men and women was coming toward him through the trees. He could not guess which of them had laughed the familiar laughter. They wore brilliantly colored garments of a subtle cut that hung like a toga or a sari, with a wonderful sophistication of line. The colors were incredible.
Miller blinked dazedly, trying in vain to find names for those shimmering hues that seemed to combine known colors into utterly unknown gradations and to draw from the range of colors above and below the spectrum as we see it.
A women said, “Oh, he’s awake,” and a man laughed pleasantly and said, “Look how surprised he is!” All of them smiled and turned bright, amused faces to Miller.
He said something—he never remembered what—and stopped in sheer shock at the harsh dissonance of his own voice. It was like an ugly discord tearing through smooth, lilting arpeggios of harmony. The faces of the others went blank briefly, as though they had concentrated on something else to avoid hearing the sound. The woman Miller had first noticed lifted her hand.
“Wait,” she said. “Listen to me, for a moment. There is no need to speak—aloud.” A faint distaste was in her tone. Her . . . tone? That could not be right. No voice was ever so sweetly musical, so gently harmonious.
Miller looked at her. Her face was a small pale triangle, lovely and elfin and strange, with enormous violet eyes and piled masses of hair that seemed to flow in winding strands through one another. Each strand was of a different pastel hue, dusty green or pale amethyst or the yellow of sunshine on a hazy morning. It was so in keeping, somehow, that Miller felt no surprise. That bizarre coiffure fitted perfectly with the woman’s face.
He opened his mouth again, but the woman—it shocked him a little, and he wondered that it did not shock him even more—was suddenly beside him. A split-second before she had been ten feet away.
“You have much to learn,” she said. “First, though—remember not to speak. It isn’t necessary. Simply frame your thoughts. There’s a little trick to it. No—keep your mouth closed. Think. Think your question.”
Her lips had moved slightly, but merely for emphasis. And surely normal vocal cords could not have been capable of that unearthly sweetness and evenness of tone, with its amazing variations and nuances. Miller thought, “Telepathy. It must be telepathy.”
They waited, watching him inquiringly.
The woman said, silently, “Think—to me. Frame the thought more carefully. The concepts must be rounded, complete. Later you may use abstracts but you can’t do that yet. All I can read is a cloudiness. . . .”
Miller thought carefully, word by word, “Is this telepathy?”
“Still cloudiness,” she said. “But it’s clearer now. You were never used to clear thinking. Yes, it is telepathy.”
“But how can I—where am I? What is this place?”
She smiled at him, and laughter moved through the group. “More slowly. Remember, you have just been born.”
“Just—what?”
And thoughts seemed to fly past him like small bright insects, grazing the edges of his consciousness. A half-mocking, friendly thought from one of the men, a casual comment from another.
Brann, Miller thought, remembering. What about Brann? Where is he?
There was dead silence. He had never felt such stillness before. It was of the mind, not physical. But he felt communication, super-sensory, rapid and articulate, between the others. Abruptly the rainbow-haired woman took his arm, while the others began to drift off through the prism-leaves and the golden trees.
She pulled him gently away under the tinkling foliage, through the drifts of colored mists. Brushing violet fog before them with her free hand, she said, “We would rather not mention Brann here, if we can avoid it. To speak of him sometimes—brings him. And Brann is in a dangerous mood today.”
Miller looked at her with a frown of concentration. There was so much to ask. In that strange mental tongue that was already coming more easily to him, he said, “I don’t understand any of this. But I know your voice. Or rather, your—I’m not sure what you’d call it.”
“The mental voice, you mean? Yes, you learn to recognize them. It’s easy to imitate an audible voice but the mental one can’t be imitated. It’s part of the person. So you remember hearing my thoughts before? I thought you were asleep.”
“You’re Tsi.”
“Yes,” she said and pushed aside a tinkling screen of the prisms. Before them stood a low rampart of light—or water. Four feet high, it ran like liquid but it glowed like light. Beyond it was blue sky and a sheer, dizzying drop to meadows hundreds of feet below. The whole scene was almost blindingly vivid, every lovely detail standing out sharp and clear and dazzling.
He said, “I don’t understand. There are legends about people up here, but not about—this. This vividness. Who are you? What is this place?”
Tsi smiled at him. There was warmth and compassion in the smile, and she said gently, “This is what your race had once, and lost. We’re very old, but we’ve kept—” Abruptly she paused, her eyes brightening suddenly with a look of terror.
She said. “Hush!” and in the mental command there was a wave of darkness and silence that seemed to blanket his mind. For no reason his heart began to pound with nervous dread. They stood there motionless for an instant, mind locked with mind in a stillness that was more than absence of sound—it was absence of thought. But through the silence Miller caught just the faintest echo of that thin, tittering laugh he had heard before, instinct with cold, merciless amusement.
The prism leaves sang around them with little musical tinklings. From the sunlit void stretching far below bird-song rippled now and then with a sweetness that was almost painful to hear. Then Tsi’s mind relaxed its grip upon Miller’s and she sighed softly.
“It’s all right now. For a moment I thought Brann . . . but no, he’s gone again.”
“Who is Brann?” Miller demanded.
“The lord of this castle. A very strange creature—very terrible when his whims are thwarted. Brann is—he cares for nothing very much. He lives only for pleasure and, because he’s lived so long and exhausted so many pleasures, the devices he uses now are not very—well, not very pleasant for anyone but Brann. There was a warp in him before his birth, you see. He’s not quite—not quite of our breed.”
“He’s from the outside world? Human?” As he said it Miller knew certainly that the woman before him was not human, not as he understood the term.
But Tsi shook her head. “Oh, no. He was born here. He’s of our breed. But not of our norm. A little above in many ways, a little below in others. Your race—” there was faint distaste and pity in the thought, but she let it die there, unelaborated.
“You can’t understand yet,” she went on. “Don’t try. You see, you suffered a change when you came. You aren’t quite as you were before. Were you ever able to communicate telepathically?”
“No, of course not. But I don’t feel any different. I—”
“A blind man, given sight, wouldn’t realize it until he opened his eyes. And he might be dazzled at first. You’re at a disadvantage. I think it would be best for you to get away. Look there, across the valley.”
She lifted an arm to point. Far off across the dazzling meadows hills rose, green in the sunlight, shimmering a little in the warm, clear light. On the height of the highest a diamond glitter caught the sun.
“My sister,” Tsi said, “has that palace over there. I think Orelle would take you in, if only to thwart Brann. You aren’t safe here. Fur your sake, it was a pity the port of entry you reached was here in Brann’s castle.”
“There have been others, then?” Miller asked. “A man named Van Hornung—did he come here?”
She shook her head, the rainbow hair catching the sunlight. “Not here. There are many castles in our land and most of them live at peace within and without. But not Brann’s.”
“Then why are you here?” Miller asked bluntly.
She smiled an unhappy smile. “Most of us came because we felt as Brann does—we did not care very much any more. We wanted to follow our pleasures, being tired of other pursuits after so many thousands of years. All except me.”
“Thousands of. . . . What do you mean? Why are you here then?”
Her mouth turned down at the corners in a rueful smile.
“Well—perhaps I too was warped before birth. I can’t leave Brann now. He needs me. That doesn’t matter to you. Brann’s dangerous—his heart is set on—on experiments that will need you to complete. We won’t talk about that.”
Miller said, “I came here for a purpose.”
“I know. I read part of your mind while you lay asleep. You’re hunting for a treasure. We have it. Or perhaps I should say Orelle has it.” The violet eyes darkened. She hesitated.
“Perhaps I’m sending you to Orelle for a purpose,” she said. “You can do me a great service there—and yourself too. That treasure you seek is—should be partly mine. You think of it as a power-source. To me it’s a doorway into something better than any of us knows. . . .
“Our father made it, long ago. Orelle has it now, though by rights she and I should share it. If you find a way to get that treasure, my friend, will you bring it to me?”
Long-grooved habit-patterns in Miller’s mind made him say automatically, “And if I do?”
She smiled. “If you don’t,” she said, “Brann will have you sooner or later. If I can get it I think I can—control Brann. If I can’t—well, you will be the first sufferer. I think you know that. You’ll do well to persuade Orelle if you can. Now—I’ve made a bargain with Brann. Don’t ask me what. You may learn, later.
“Go to Orelle, watch your chance and be wary. If you ask for the treasure you’ll never get near it. Better not to speak of it but wait and watch. No one can read your mind unless you will it, now that you’re learning telepathy, but watch too that you let nothing slip from your thoughts to warn her.”
“You want me to take her hospitality and then rob her?”
Distress showed in Tsi’s face. “Oh, no! I ask only what’s mine, and even that only for long enough to control Brann. Then you may return the treasure to Orelle or strike a bargain with her over it. Five minutes with that in my hands is all I ask! Now here is something I’ve made for you out of your own possession. Hold out your wrist.”
Staring, he obeyed. She unclosed her hand to show him his wristwatch in her palm. Smiling, she buckled the strap around his arm. “It isn’t quite as it was. I changed it. If you need me concentrate on this and speak to me in your mind. I’ll hear.”
There were countless questions still unasked. Miller took a deep breath and began to formulate them in his mind. And then—Tsi vanished! The earth was gone from underfoot and he spun through golden emptiness, dropping, falling. The water-wall hung beneath him. He floated in midair a hundred feet above the crag-bordered stream at the cliffs bottom!
Panic struck him. Then Tsi’s reassuring thought said, “You are safe. This is teleportation.”
He scarcely heard. An age-old instinctive fear chilled his middle. For a million years men have been afraid of falling. He could not now control that fear.
Slowly he began to drop. He lost sight of Tsi and the golden trees and then of the water-wall.
Under him the stream broadened.
He sank down at an angle—and felt solid ground beneath his feet.
There was silence except for the whispering murmur of the stream.