Lin Carter - The City Outside the World Read online

  Contents

  I. FLIGHT FROM YEOLARN

  1. The Girl with the Golden Eyes 3

  2. Whispering Shadows 11

  3. Red Thirst 21

  4. Beyond the Dragon Gate 30

  5. The Cliff Dragon 39

  II. THE CARAVAN ROAD

  6. The Oasis Town 49

  7. The Jest of Kiki 56

  8. The Dead City 65

  9. “ZHAGGUA!” 74

  10. The Betrayal 81

  III. THE DOOR TO ZHIAM

  11. The Lost Nation 93

  12. The Keystone 101

  13. Into the Shadowed Land 108

  14. The Sphinx of Mars 115

  15. Black Labyrinth 122

  vii

  IV. OUTSIDE THE WORLD

  16. Strange Eden 131

  17. The Dreaming City 137

  18. The Winged Serpents 146

  19. The Secret of Zhiam 154

  20. The Underground Road 162

  V. AN AGE THAT TIME FORGOT

  21. Sentence of Death 173

  22. Down There 180

  23. The Sacrifice 189

  24. Child-of-Stars 197

  25. When Gods War 205

  I

  Flight from Yeolarn

  1. The Girl with the Golden Eyes

  They were hunting him.

  You can’t stay alive on Mars for very long without developing a sixth sense for such things. And Ryker had stayed alive.

  It was nothing obvious or overt the hunters did which caught his attention. They were too wise in the art of manhunting to blunder or expose themselves; no, it was nothing like that.

  It was a matter of many small, trifling things. The sound of a footstep in an alley he had believed empty. A shadow against the wall, gone when he glanced at it. A tingle at the back of his neck that told him unseen eyes were watching.

  They had been hunting him for a long time, he knew.

  And now they were closing in… .

  Ryker growled a curse under his breath: he had been hunted before, and knew the feeling well. Not that he liked it much.

  The worse thing was not that men were after him. That much he could handle, he thought, balling his heavy hands into scarred fists and hunching his broad shoulders so that the great ropes of muscles stood out on his bronzed bare forearms like cables of woven copper wire. No, being hunted did not worry him.

  The thing was, he didn’t know why.

  Whenever Ryker came in from the Dustlands to the city, he usually holed up in the native quarter across the

  old canal. You could live cheap there, if you could stay alive, and one thing was sure: the CA cops couldn’t find you, even if they tried.

  Cops never go into the Old City of Yeolarn if they can help it. And when they can’t help it, well, they don’t live long once the narrow walls and shadowy alleyways of the ancient town have closed about them, cutting them off from the bright steel-and-plastic sprawl of the New City across the waterway.

  Ryker grinned briefly, baring white teeth in a dark, scarred face. He hated the cops, hated them more than the natives did, he often thought. And that was a lot of hate.

  Yeolarn is built like this: on one side of the canal the old-time astronomers back Earthside had named Hydra-otes, the New City rises, all chrome and neon and multicolored plastic. It is by way of being the capital of Mars; at least that’s where the Colonial Administration has its central offices. In the New City live the men and women from Earth—bankers,clerks, accountants, civil and military personnel, doctors, nurses, bureaucrats. In neat rows of prefab, airsealed bungalows, sanitized and sterilized and pressurized, holding the thin, bitter air and the soft, cold dust of old Mars at arm’s length.

  On the further side of the canal, the Old City rises. It was already old when they laid the cornerstone of Babylon, old when Pharoah’s engineers cleared away the sand to start building the Great Pyramid, old before the ice came down over Europe. When Yeolarn was young the British Isles were still attached to the continent, and our ancestors wore furs, wandered the world-wide forests, had yet to domesticate the dog or invent fire.

  Old—that was Yeolarn. Old beyond our thoughts or dreams. Older by a million years and more than Mohenjo-dara, Ur of the Chaldees, or Jericho. The ages had

  4

  marched over its squat, nine-sided towers and flattened domes and sleek walls of terracotta-colored native marble, smoothing the sharp edges, wearing the newness away. As house or shrine, temple or palace, slumped into decay under the slow march of the millenia, they were tamped down, and new structures were raised above their dead ruins like tombstones. Yeolarn had been built and rebuilt so many times that it was by now a trackless maze of /igzag alleys, a warren of windowless blind walls, a labyrinth in which a man could hide forever.

  When Ryker first stumbled on the fact that he was being watched and followed, he assumed it was the CA cops. It was only a logical assumption, given his record. Gun-running, smuggling, aircar-theft, these were only the more innocuous of the crimes listed in his dossier. So it was natural that his first thought was that the cops were dogging his steps.

  That was his first mistake.

  So he doubled his tracks, left a few scraps of gear and clothing in the cheap dockside room he had rented, and slunk by furtive, secret ways into the Old City.

  That was his second mistake.

  Once he had doubled back and forth through the maze of dark, crooked alleys and put himself beyond the ability of the most sharp-nosed of cops to find, he headed across the city towards the old Bazaar of the Lions, bound for the wineshop of Kammu Jha, his favorite joy-house.

  That was his third mistake, and it was very nearly fatal.

  The public room of the wineshop was long and low ceilinged and roofed with slabs of stone. At one end of the hall gaped the yawning mouth of a huge fireplace, carved out of worn gray stone into the likeness of a dragon’s fanged and grinning jaws. Along one wall ran benches.

  Small tables stood scattered about in helter-skelter fashion. There was no bar: serving boys fetched orders of wine or ale or the Martian equivalent of brandy from kegs hung on the walls of a back room.

  In the stone fireplace, coiled on the flat of the dragon’s granite tongue, danced flame. Flame sprung from no ordinary fuel, for coal and wood were rare and precious beyond the dreams of avarice here on this cooling desert world. No, this flame leaped from a flat metal dish like an ewer. Therein lay pooled the ice-green fluid the Martian people call hiyawa ziu: “mother of fire.” This strange chemical burns like thermite or phosphorus, but slowly, yielding a tremendous store of heat. The People distill it from a porous mineral called ziuaht, “firestone.”

  The room was full of men.

  A score or more crouched on the long benches, or sat, hunched with tension, motionless at the tables. They were natives one and all, with the red-copper hide and oblique amber-green eyes of their kind. Under shaven brows, their faces were lean and hard and wolfish. Rings of tooled bronze or beaten copper clasped throat, wrist, biceps. Kiltlike skirts of faded leather shielded belly and thighs; some of these were worked with tartanlike patterns of cross-hatched lines which were the tribal bearings of their nations. Others, however, wore their leather plain, which denoted them as aoudhha: “the clanless,” men without kin—outlaws, or outcasts, or both.

  They paid no attention to Ryker as he came into the wineshop. That was because their attention was rivetted upon the girl who danced before them in an open space. The girl who coiled and glided like the flame that danced upon the stony dragon’s tongue that was the hearth.

  When Ryker saw her, his attention was seized, too.

  She was naked, excep
t for a single strap of gilded

  leather that hung down before her loins. Her body was slim and lean and tawny, sinuous as a panther’s, and as golden. That rare, pale gold that denotes on Mars the pure breeding of the princely houses of the High Clans.

  Her hair was a banner of black silk, floating on the spicy, hot breath of the fire. Her breasts were shallow, rounded, firm, like lustrous, pale fruit. As she danced, moving her loins and torso alone, her feet all but motionless on the pave, her arms were thrust skyward and slightly back, curved at the wrists, held moveless.

  She danced—if the writhing undulation could be named with so mundane a verb—with her belly and her breasts and her buttocks.

  Ryker sucked in one long breath, and held it until the blood drummed in his temples. His pale and colorless eyes burned coldly from the dark leathern mask of his face. Never had he seen or imagined a dance so rawly savage, yet so exquisitely sensual.

  She danced like ripples of moonfire riding the black waters of the old canals; like pattering leaves driven by a moaning and restless wind aprowl through an abandoned courtyard. Her flesh—crawled. Her bare breasts panted. Her belly and loins swung in a slow, undulating spiral that was naked invitation.

  Her tawny limbs had been rubbed with scented oil until they glowed like amber silks. Then a sparkling dust, like that of crushed mirrors, had been sprinkled across her body. Firelight glittered like powdered gems from every sinuous twist and undulation.

  Reluctantly lifting his eyes from the allure of her breasts, Ryker saw that her face was catlike, wide cheeked, elfin, with a small chin and a full-lipped mouth. Her nose was pert, a mere nubbin. Her eyes—

  He frowned, then. For she went masked and he could

  not see her eyes. The visor was of black satin, molded to fit the contours of her face, and it had no eyeholes. Which was strange, he thought, but not very important. With all that sleek, glowing flesh to drink in, he did not have to see her eyes.

  And that was his last mistake.

  She danced to the pittering of drums and the wail of a small pipe. An old, bony man clenched the drums between gaunt knees, where he squatted to one side of the drag-on’s-mouth fireplace. His gnarled, knobbed hands made dry, erratic music.

  The pipe was held by a naked boy of perhaps twelve, who leaned with gamine grace against a pillar. The thin, wailing cry of his pipe was like a lost soul in torment, sobbing from the throat of hell. The shrill, raw pain of the sound, and the sadness in it, raised the nape hairs on Ryker’s neck and made the skin on his bare arms creep.

  And then, suddenly—quite suddenly—the dance was done.

  The girl froze in her last position, then turned and glided away, shrugging through bead curtains that tinkled across a narrow stone doorway. The old man ceased his pattering and climbed stiffly to his feet and hobbled out after the girl. The naked boy took the pipe away from his mouth, grinned impishly, and picked up a copper bowl from a low table and went around the room from man to man.

  The men stood or sat, breathing heavily, still staring with hot eyes at the empty space where the girl had writhed. They barely noticed the boy, merely plucking a coin from their belt pouch as he paused in front of each, clinking his bowl remindingly.

  When the boy stopped in front of Ryker, the Earthman looked him over slowly, with bemused eyes, coming out

  of his trance painfully. As he dropped a coin in the bowl his eyes caught sight of something on the boy’s naked chest. Just above the heart and just below the nipple an emblem had once been tattooed. Efforts had been made to erase that which had been needled there, but the smooth, sleek flesh caught the gleam of the firelight in such a way that Ryker could see marks of the needles, even though the pigment had been erased.

  It was an odd sign, vaguely familiar: a crouching, many-legged creature, vaguely like an insect. And winged, the many wings folded against its slope of thorax and pod. Weird and strange, and curious.

  Mischief gleamed in the boy’s eyes, and a trace of contempt, as he looked at the Earthman and knew him for what he was, a hated F’yagha, an Outworlder. But he did not reject the coin. Turning on his heels, his round little bottom cocked impudently, he swaggered from the room. Shouldering through the tinkling bead curtains, he vanished after the old man and the naked dancer, and was gone.

  Now the serving boys came out from wherever they had been hiding, with ceramic pitchers full of wine. Gradually, the numb trance faded and men began to shuffle, grunt, move again.

  Ryker accepted a bowl of sharp red wine and drank it thirstily.

  His mind was busy with something that bothered him.

  It was the girl, or, rather, her eyes.

  As she had glided past him through the bead curtains, one strand had caught upon the corner of her visor and stripped it from her face. And he had gotten one swift, transient glimpse of her eyes.

  They were huge and thick lashed, those eyes, tip-tilted and inexpressibly lovely.

  And they were golden. Golden as puddles of hot metal poured by the jeweler for the making of a precious brooch.

  And that was strange. For the People (as the Martian natives call their race) have, most commonly, eyes of amber, sometimes of liquid brown, and even occasionally of emerald. But never of gold. Or never that Ryker knew or had ever seen.

  She could not have been an Earthsider, not with that tawny skin and blacksilk hair and snub-nosed cat’s face. Nor a Martian, not with those eyes of molten gold.

  Which meant she was of an unknown race… .

  Or from an unknown world!

  2. Whispering Shadows

  he had been on Mars a dozen years, had Ryker, but he was no Colonist.

  In the early days, Earthside governments had found few of their people willing to emigrate to the distant, dry, hostile planet. So they had forced emigration by making it legal punishment for certain crimes. In the same manner, and for much the same reason, Britain had once dumped it’s unwanted and condemned on the shores of Australia, dooming these unfortunates to a lifetime of penal servitude in a prison the size of a continent, whose walls were oceans, with storms for guards.

  What Ryker had done back on Earth to merit deportation does not concern us here. But he had not been a criminal, exactly, unless adherence to unpopular political philosophies be deemed a crime. Once he had been, in his way, something of a patriot. Once he had placed the common good above his own comfort and security. But no longer.

  Here, on this ancient desert world, merely to survive is difficult enough. To live is something else again. And Ryker had lived, which is to say, he had been made to do things he would not have chosen to do, had conditions been otherwise.

  But here, at least, he was free. If Mars, in the beginning, had been a prison, it was a prison without walls, where the condemned could freely come and go as they willed. The only thing they could not do was return to

  Earth again. Only the most serious crimes merited real imprisonment. Those who, back on Earth, had been judged homicidal murderers, political assassins, terrorists, or dedicated revolutionaries, were sent here to sweat and scrabble in the barium mines until death released them from their chains.

  Men such as Ryker were not thought dangerous enough to be locked away in that living hell. There was no need for Earthmen to toil like animals in the black, bottomless mines. For that, the Colonial Administration had the natives. True, they were human enough, the People— although, perhaps, their remotest racial ancestor, in the dim beginnings of time, had been feline whereas ours was simian. Once they had been a mighty race, the builders of a high civilization, the proud inheritors of a noble tradition of art, literature and philosophy. But that great heritage had dwindled and perished during the early Pleistocene.

  Mars was old—old. As her green oceans dried and shrank, as her rich atmosphere thinned, as her internal fires cooled, that which had been lush meadow and forest-land once, became dry, powdery desert. No longer could the red world support her teeming life, so that life … died.

  W
hat was left was in time reduced to savagery, to barbarism. The few remnants of her proud empires inexorably dwindled to ragged, starveling outlaw bands, who huddled for warmth in the ruined shells of what once had been brilliant and populous cities, and thus Mars broke and humbled the last of her children. The People had lost the dice-roll of destiny; and Earthlings had never liked losers. So, while a few scientists studied their dying traditions and strove to rescue from oblivion their half-forgotten sciences, the more brutal—or more practical— of the uninvited visitors from the green world nearer to the

  sun regarded them as ignorant savages to be ruthlessly exterminated, cruelly exploited, casually enslaved.

  It was an old, old story back on Earth. But history tends to repeat itself, and while glittering socialites in sophisticated capitals glibly murmur of basic rights and freedoms, things are done on far frontiers that would shock them into unbelieving, bewildered horror.

  Frontier garrisons are frontier garrisons. Life is hard and survival is chancy. And dead natives tell no tales.

  Thus the People, by now, had good reason to hate and distrust the Outworlder colonists and to avoid commerce with them. Luckily, Mars is wide and most of it is uninhabited and hostile wilderness. So, while the Colonists clung together, holding the thin cold air and the dry sterile deserts at bay behind their plastic inflatable domes and pressure pumps, the Martian natives had all their world to roam free, and only a few of the hardiest among the Colonials risked leaving the snug security of their plastic warrens for the hazards which await the unwary beyond lhe half-dozen colonies.

  Ryker knew there was no going back, and had determined to survive in any way he could. The air of Mars is thin and starved for oxygen as it is for moisture, but there was a way Earthsider lungs and blood chemistry could be subtly modified to endure it without cumbersome thermal suits and respirators. This method, the Mishubi-Yakamoto regimen, cost money. But with it, Ryker would be free to wander the surface of Mars for as long as he could stay alive.