Club Vesta, Level 7, Round 3, Parlor 2, Chapter 5

Yael R.
Dragwyla First North American rights

Email: Polaris93@aol.com 31,083 words
http://polaris93.livejournal.com/
Club Vesta:
A Journey Beyond the Mountains of Madness to
Find a Sea of Stars
(Love-Letter to America)
Level VII: The Violent

Round 3: Violence Against God, Nature, and Art
Parlor 2: Violence Against Nature
Chapter 5: “The Pallas”
“. . . To you, I would have wished your work good cheer.
But that ungrateful, malignant folk who descend

From those brought down from Fiesole long ago,
And who still smack of mountains and rocky ground,
Will make themselves, for good things that you do,

Your enemies – and there is reason in that:
Among the bitter sorb-trees, it seems undue
When the sweet fig in season comes to fruit.

The world’s old saying is that they are blind:
A people greedy, envious, proud – see fit
To cleanse their habits from yourself. You’ll find

Your fortune holds such honor as will induce
One party and the other to contend
In hunger to consume you – then the grass

Will be well kept at a distance from the goat.
Let the Fiesolan beasts go find their mess
By feeding on themselves
CLUB VESTA – Level VII: The Violent – Round 3: Violence Against God, Nature, and Art
Parlor 2: Violence Against Nature – Section 2.3: The Alien Connection – § 2.3.5: Chapter 4: “Raider’s of the Infernal Regions”
By Yael R. Dragwyla
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(If any still should grow on their heap of dung)
In which the sacred seed is living yet
Of Romans who remained when Florence went wrong,

Becoming a nest for the malevolent.” . . .
– Dante Alighieri, The Inferno, Canto XV:54-74

From The Inferno of Dante, a New Verse Translation by Robert Pinsky,
Bilingual Edition (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1994), pp. 152-155
As I pushed my way through the bat-wings into the saloon, I could hear the piano player just
finishing Rose Robertson’s variation of “The Green Hills of Earth,” accompanied by a drunkenly maudlin
chorus from some of the place’s patrons:
“O . . .
I pray for one last landing
On the globe that gave me birth.
Let me rest my eyes
On the fleecy skies
Of the world that gave me birth –
Let me see once more the azure skies
And the cool, green hills of Earth.”*
*From “The Green Hills of Earth,” by Robert A. Heinlein. From Heinlein’s short story, “The Green Hills
of Earth,” copyright 1947 by The Curtis Publishing Company, included in the collection of his
works, The Past Through Tomorrow (New York: Berkley Books, 1967), pp. 363-373.
Somewhat less than wild applause greeted this – probably because the singers accompanying the
piano-player were too drunk to sing “Do, Re, Mi” and get it right, let alone a heart-rending ballad such as
this.
Perhaps aware that she was losing her audience, the piano-player then picked up the pace, swinging
into the sprightly “Me and My Uncle.” Having polished off “The Green Hills of Earth,” the Butchershop
Quetet now accompanied her in an even more energetic and gorier slaughter of the new song with yet
another drunken off-key chorus:
Me an’ my uncle
Went ridin’ down,
To Tharsis Tholus,
Olympus bound . . .
As the song proceeded, I made my way to the bar, where I ordered Scotch on the rocks, mostly as a
prop. Nursing it in a miserly fashion, I sat at the bar, listening as the increasingly rowdy crowd finished
up the song:
Well, my uncle,
God rest his soul,
Taught me good,
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Taught me all I know,
Taught me so well
I got that gold –
And I left his dead ass there
By the side of the road!”*
*”Me and My Uncle,” by John Phillips, copyright 1965. The song has been covered by numerous singers
and groups, most notably Joanie Collins and Bob Weird of the Grateful Dead.
In the relative silence that blessedly followed the song, I sat, taking occasional sips from my drink to
keep up appearances (even if I’d been a terminally brain-dead wino, I’d never drink this stuff if there’d
been any way to avoid it – a cross between Blind Tiger, the bottom of a gym locker, and recycled boar
piss, it could have been used to peel paint at an auto body shop, or as a world-class pesticide for cleaning
all those aliens out of Sigourney Weaver’s underwear in Aliens 3.14159), mulling over our choices from
here. While Lu’ was out checking out the best way out of this dump, I’d better nail down lodgings for
the night and scope out the town for supplies and a source of income.
Yet I wasn’t able to concentrate on matters at hand. Instead, my mind ranged far, into strange, wild
territory, turning up one weird thought after another, like one of the Dryland prospectors here hand-
digging into the hills and accidentally stumbling on one of the ancient, fabulous Living Jewel mines that
legend said waited, just beneath the surface, for anyone lucky (or unlucky, if some of the legends were
correct) to find them. At some point, I began to think about the exploration of space, and it came to me:
Man has conquered Space before. You may be sure of that. Somewhere, long, long before the
Egyptians, the Sumerians, the 14,000-year-old Bell-Beaker culture of the Asian steppes, in that dimness
out of which come echoes of half-mythical names such as Atlantis and Lemuria, somewhere before known
history’s first beginnings there must have been an age when mankind, like us today, built cities of steel to
house its star-roving ships, and knew the names of the planets in their own native tongues – heard Venus’
people call their still-wet, still-clement world “Sha-ardol” in that soft, sweet, slurring speech, and
mimicked the guttural Martian “Lakkdiz,” the name for the Red World, then Blue World, uttered by the
harsh tongues of Mars’ dryland dwellers. Be sure of it. Man has conquered Space before, and out of
that conquest still come faint, faint echoes that run through a universe that has forgotten the very fact of
a civilization which was at least as mighty as our own. There have been too many myths and legends for
us to doubt it. The myth of the Medusa, for one, could never have had its roots in the soil of Earth – that
tale of the snake-haired Gorgon the sight of whom turned the gazer to stone, turned into a monster by
Athena because she committed the colossal hubris of trysting with Poseidon in one of Athena’s own
temples, never originated with any of Earth’s children. And the ancient Greeks who told and re-told her
story down the centuries, embroidering and rationalizing it to fit into their religious story-cycles, must
have remembered, however dimly and half-believing, ancient horrors perpetrated by a weird being from
one of the outlying planets of the Solar System or even of a far-away star their remotest ancestors once
trod . . .
Suddenly, jolted out of my brown study by an unknown stimulus, I sat up and looked around to see
what had alerted me. The saloon was emptier, now, than it had been when I had first come in. The
bartender, a gaunt-faced Martian Drylander who was also the saloon’s owner and who had given it its
name – Lhari’s Better ’Ole – was desultorily polishing the bar with one of his four hands, picking his
nose with a second, his lower pair of arms crossed over his broad, aproned belly as if parked there for the
night. Over in the corner, two prospectors were playing a half-hearted game of Valley of the Kings; the
female prospector, a Terran woman with a hatchet face belied by almond-shaped sloe eyes that could
have stolen the heart of Don Juan himself, had just capped the four-card run laid down by her opponent
with three cards of her own, making it a double-quadruple run worth 22 points. Her opponent, a golden-
haired Cytherian with the obsidian face of a dark angel and the eyes of Hell itself, who probably had a
Winter home with the rest of his people up in the Syrtis Barrens, which they had colonized long eons ago,
when Venus finally entered her runaway greenhouse-warming stage of existence and became
By Yael R. Dragwyla
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uninhabitable for anything higher than inferno bugs and toxic bacteria, threw the rest of his hand down in
disgust. “Shit – this just has not been my day! Think I’ll pack it in for the night . . .”
“Yeah, as usual, it’s about fifteen credits past your bedtime, ain’t it, Lenol?” sneered the woman.
“Oh, fuck you, Jhudi!” the Cytherian snarled, picking up his pack and starting to put it on. “Comin’,
Pete?” he added, talking to his partner, a huge black-and-white tomcat who had been dozing under his
chair all this time.
“In your dreams!” laughed Jhudi, beginning to gather up the cards.
“That’s ‘nightmares,’, dear, ‘nightmares’,” Lenol told her nastily. Then, chirruping to the cat, who
jumped up onto his shoulder in response, he sauntered out the door, saying to his partner, “Tomorrow
we’ll go try that site up by the Dry Wells, what do you say, boy? Even if we don’t find any jewels or
metals or artworks, there are sure to be some canal mice for you . . .”
They exited, the cat purring loudly.
“What the fuck are you staring at, bitch?”
My eyes focused, and I found myself impaled on Jhudi’s hateful dark gaze, which contrasted
unbelievably with her otherwise beautiful eyes.
“Not a thing – dear,” I sneered back. As I did so, very casually I let my hand drift back against my
hip, so that it pulled my jacket away from the holster there, and the Magnum whose handle protruded
from it like the head of a moray eel from its lair.
Her eyes suddenly went huge. Of course she, like her erstwhile opponent, Lenol, as well as everyone
else I had seen so far in town save for the tiny, huge-eyed Drylander children, openly wore weapons. In
her case it was a buck-knife on one hip, a skean dhub whose hilt poked out of her boot-top, and what
looked to be a not-so-hidden hideout gun, a .25 Derringer, in an underarm holster. But compared to what
I was carrying, the gun might as well have been a pea-shooter.
Very carefully, dropping her eyes and never letting them rest on me again, she finished picking up
the cards and put them into a box lying on the table. Then, picking up her own pack and putting it on and
calling to her own partner, a grim, gray-haired little terrier that had been sleeping near the wall next to
her table, she went quickly over to the bar and handed the box of cards to the bartender. “Here, Lhari,
here’re the cards. You can sell ’em to some prospector for a solitaire pack to keep him company when he
gets bored with his left hand.” Throwing a handful of bills and coins onto the battered bar-top, she
added, “And get some new stock – something besides that God-damned gnole-piss you’ve been telling us
is whiskey for the last ten years, okay?”
Muttering to herself as the dog, trotting along at her heels, looked warily all around, checking for
potential trouble, she strode out of the bar and into the roaring night of Lakkdarol.
The saloon was now empty, save for two drunks sleeping it off at a table in the corner, their partners,
a gigantic domestic wolverine and a silver tabby cat, curled up at their feet; an agèd male Cytherian
prostitute dressed in a gold lamé loincloth, tarnished brass rings through the holes in his nipples and long
fishhooks dangling from his earlobes, his still-handsome face just beginning to show the ravages of time,
lying on top of an empty sideboard against another wall, snoring loud enough to wake the dead; the
bartender; and myself. Picking up my pack from the floor between my feet and shrugging it on over my
shoulders, I went over to the bar, where the bartender was still wearily pushing a filthy rag back and forth
across the bar.
“Uh – hello?”
“Yeah, whaddaya want?” snarled the bartender. “Name’s Lhari, by the way.”
“Uh, Lhari, uh, I’m kinda new here. Need a place to sleep. My partner’s out looking for work – my
friend, I mean, she’s human –”
“’Nother Terrie?”
“Yes, she is.”
He grunted noncommittally, still polishing, polishing, his rag sopping wet with the spillage from
drinks. His lower left hand momentarily rose to his mouth, picked at the tarnished silver ring in the hole
punched into the huge fang sticking up from his lower left jaw, drifted back down to rest uneasily again
on top of his lower right hand. I looked him over. His light viridian skin and hazel eyes clearly revealed
the contribution of a few odd ancestors to his otherwise supposedly pure Green ancestry. He might be
sympathetic, or, at least, less inclined to be bigoted toward outlanders like myself than others in this
dump. Since he didn’t seem hostile, taking a chance, I asked, “We’re going to need a place to stay.
Know of one?”
By Yael R. Dragwyla
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Reaching up with his upper right hand, Lhari pushed his glasses up higher on his nose – he gave a
whole new order of meaning to the expression “four eyes” – and stared at me for a moment, as if I were
an apparition of some strange, unknown being that had just dropped in from another dimension. Finally,
sighing, he asked me, “How much you got on you?”
Thinking about the gold and silver bullion, the gems and coins and wads of System Credit bills in my
money-belt, and how little life seemed to be worth here, I dissembled. “I’ve got enough. But I don’t
know this town at all.”
“Hmm . . . new, then. Well, you come to th’ right place, lady. We gotta coupl’a rooms t’ rent
upstairs. Cost ya, but they’re safe and they keep the weather out.”
“‘Safe’?”
“Yeah. Steel shutters over the windows, lock with a steel bolt an’ a padlock, no mirrors, door’s
made of blast-metal, sort of t’ing. Plus, I gotta room just across the hall – an’ I sleep wit’ m’ blaster,
always keep it charged to the max. Anybody try to get in t’ere, t’ey’re toast.” As he spoke, his accent
got broader and broader. Wherever he’d learned his English, it had to’ve been from someone from
Chicago – he sounded like a Drylander clone of Al Capone.
“Sounds all right, but –”
“An’ I throw in breakfast an’ supper for t’e price of t’e room. Whaddaya say?”
“Can I look at the room first?”
“Sure. C’mon.” Throwing the ghastly rag he’d been using on the bar-top into a corner, where an
eight-legged, eight-eyed arroyo-rat that seemed to be the bar’s mascot sniffed at it eagerly and then began
to take bites out of it, Lhari came around the end of the bar, throwing up the horizontal gate that normally
barred access to the area behind the bar to customers, and came through the gap. Gesturing to me to
follow him, he made his waddling way across the room to a crepuscular corner, where I could just make
out narrow, rickety stairs ascending into darkness.
Stopping at the first step to pull a gigantic, standard-issue, Patrol-surplus flashlight out of one of the
vast pockets in his apron and switch it on, he gestured to me to precede him up the stairs, shining the
light on the stairs so that I could see where I was going. Not really happy about going up those fragile
steps, in which good-sized holes gaped on darkness, but desperately needing a bolt-hole for Lu’ and me
to use while we checked out the area and learned the best ways out of here and on our way to the rest of
Club Vesta, I gathered my nerve and began my ascent of the stairs.
Astonishingly, going up those stairs I suffered no mishap worse than a good scare from a flying
bindlestiff “spider,” a Martian version of the hobo spiders of my own home state on Old Earth, whose
bites rapidly necrotized and took forever to heal and often proved fatal to children and old people, and
another from a misstep that put my foot square on a rotten section of a tread, so that I would have pitched
forward on my face, rotten sawdust and splinters flying around my face, save for Lhari’s quick grasp
around my waist.
“Thanks,” I told him, recovering my composure a little.
“Don’ mention it, darlin’,” he told me, a leer in his voice, his grasp around my middle just a little too
tight and too close to my boobs.
Without actually seeming to do it on purpose, I pretended to trip again, giving me an opportunity to
slither out of his grasp. “—No, it’s cool, I’m fine,” I gasped – and took two steps at once, dancing away
from his clutching hands. Between his weight and my maneuvers, I made it up well before he got to the
top himself – and had my gun out, pointed in no particular direction, but an obvious menace should he
choose to push it. “Hey, where you – uh,” he said, staring at the barrel of my Magnum, which only
needed a twitch of my hand to sight directly on his big belly.
“Uh – dark up here, isn’t it? Never can tell what might be up here,” I told him conversationally, not
putting the gun away.
“Uh, yeah, t’at’s true,” he said, pulling out a gigantic handkerchief at least as filthy as the nasty rag
he’d used to wipe the bar-top, using it to dab at the sweat suddenly beading his high, red forehead.
“Well, let’s look at the room, shall we?” I told him lightly.
“Uh – yeah. T’is way . . .”
Looking distinctly shaken, me following at his heels, my gun still drawn and ready, he walked
slowly along the dark hallway, swinging his light back and forth. “Ah! Here ’tis . . .”
Stopping before one of the dozen or so doors lining the hallway, he reached into another pocket with
one of his rear hands and brought out a key-ring. After a bit of fumbling, he found the key that fit the
door’s lock, and, inserting it, turned it and opened the door.
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The door swung back, revealing a room with an open window through which poured radiant torrents
of silver moonlight. Both moons were up and near conjunction, and their ghostly light threw double
shadows that made the room pregnant with dark possibilities.
“Here, let’s turn on t’e light . . .” Entering the doorway and reaching out to his left, he flipped a
switch on the wall of the room.
Brilliant glare flooded the room from naked bulbs in a ceiling fixture.
“Thought you said there were blast-shutters on these rooms.”
“Yeah, t’ey are. T’ey open outward, you winch ’em with the gizmo there on the sill. See?”
From the doorway, I stared at the window, squinting my eyes to see better. Sure enough, there was a
winch-and-pulley affair in the center of the broad sill, which extended well into the room, chains running
in both directions from it outward to the sides, presumably to shutters folded back against the outside
wall of the building.
“Hmm . . . the bed’s sure big enough . . .” Gun still drawn, making sure to keep distance between
myself and the old lecher so that I could see him at all times, I sidled over to the bed, a sort of captain’s
bed with an obesity problem, about 8’ x 7’ in horizontal dimensions, sitting on a pedestal a good foot and
a half high that had deep drawers in it on both sides of the bed. Unexpectedly, the bed was dressed in
immaculate sheets and good, thick, clean, woolen blankets, with huge pillows covered in snowy linen
pillowcases, which, I noticed, startled, had been beautifully hand-embroidered with forget-me-nots and
tea-roses.
I looked up to see Lhari staring at those lovely pillowcases, tears in his old eyes, dabbing at his great,
grizzled walrus mustache with his handkerchief. He was sobbing.
Realizing I was staring at him, he turned away from the bed. Putting away his handkerchief and
stifling his tears as best he could, he said, “They wuz m’ wife’s, y’see. Mhari had a fine hand with a
needle – never saw anything so lovely as th’ stuff she made f’r her hope chest – t’ings as pretty as
anyt’ing t’e Last Queen ever had, I bet you.
“Mhari died last year – Lakkdiz year, I mean, would’a been about a year an’ a half in yer Terran
years. She was all I had in the world – we had kids, but our oldest boy, he got killed during a Patrol raid
on his ship, and his brother, Kalol, he died in a cave-in in the Valley of the Kings, tryin’ t’ work a mine
we all warned him was a death-trap. Our daughter, she’s still alive, married a prospector who was smart
enough to take his winnings an’ set hisself up wit’ an outfitter’s an’ supply store, t’ey’re doin’ real good
for t’emselves over t’ Syrtis East, t’em an’ t’eir kids, but I never see ’em any more. Guess she’s ashamed
’f her ol’ man, can’t say’s I blame her. Still, I’d like t’ see m’ grandkids at least once ’fore I die. I keep
hopin’ . . .
“Ah, well,” he said, sighing heavily. “T’at’s neit’er here n’r t’ere. T’is do for you?”
Looking around at the big bed, so clean and neat, a good-sized dresser and a wardrobe set against
one wall, a thick rug of genuine Martian panther-skin on the floor by the bed, I could only think it was
one hell of a lot better than I’d ever have expected to find anywhere in this Dryland dump. “Sure. – Uh,
is there a john, er, a loo, you know –”
“At t’ end of t’ hall. Can’t miss it. Even got a bathtub an’ real runnin’ water for it – we recycle,” he
said proudly. As well he might – few businesses and fewer homes in this God-forsaken place had ever
been fitted out with the capacity to recycle liquid and solid waste. That this one had spoke well of
Lhari’s business acumen and foresight, which otherwise weren’t much in evidence here. He probably
made far more money as an innkeeper and landlord than he did as a purveyor of fake, toxic booze and
roast sand-crabs dipped in Lowland salt-lick residue masquerading as beer-nuts. “An’ like I said, once
you’re inside here and you pull in t’e shutters an’ lock the door, here, you’re safe from everyt’ing but a
fire. An’ we ain’t had a fire here in the last five years.”
“I’ll take my chances with the fire. Okay, you got a deal. How much for the room?”
“Fifteen credits a night – ¤75.00 a week, if you pay by the week. Or you can have it by the month
for ¤250.00.”
“Done. Here,” I said, dipping into the money-pouch in my belly-bag, where I’d put money for ready
spending, and pulling out several bills. Counting the money out into one of his big hands, being careful
not to touch it in the process, I said, “I’d like to move in tonight. My friend ought to show up soon, and
she’ll need a place as soon as she does.”
“What’s’r name?”
“Lu’. – That is, Luciferia Skua.”
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“Hmpf. Sounds Cytherian t’ me – like a Cytherian who married a Terrie,” he grumped, an ugly note
in his voice.
“No,” I said, recognizing bigotry rearing its ugly head when I heard it, “she’s Terrie all the way
through, just like me.”
“Good. Don’t want no cross-breeds ’r perverts in here. Bad enough t’ have ol’ Two-Whips Kirga
with all his hardware stuck in him out t’here, workin’ m’ bar f’r marks, but at least he’s got t’e sense t’ do
his t’ing behind closed doors, he don’t flaunt his trade on t’e floor where ever’body c’n watch, an’
besides, none o’ his marks stays more’n about twenny minutes, as it is,” he said, chuckling darkly. I
thought of the golden-haired old man collapsed on a table, snoring loudly, his ribs standing out from his
sides like the spines of mountains.
“Well,” he continued, “guess t’at’s it. Sh’ld I send y’r friend up here if she comes along?”
“Yes, please. You can’t miss her – she’s . . . she’s tall, like I am, got blond hair, down to her
shoulders, now, cut straight across, like a helmet.”
“You sure she ain’t Cytherian?”
“Yep. Lotta blond women on Terra, you know.” I thought of cracking a blond joke or two to settle
his nerves, remembered his clutching hand around my waist, thought better of it.
“Mm. Okay, I believe you, what the hey. She wearin’ anything, uh, diff’rent?”
“She’ll be dressed like me – leather pants and jacket, boots, guns.”
“‘Guns.’ Okay,” he grunted, “if I see anyone come in like t’at, I’ll ask her if she’s – whatchoo say
her name was again? Lucifer?”
“Luciferia. Luciferia Skua.”
“Okay. I’ll be sure to send her up here. – You sure she’ll come here? I could send a runner around
to look for her –”
“No problem. We’d already agreed we’d meet here, or else she was to ask here where I’d gone.
Since I’ve already got a room here for us, it’s perfect.”
“You know best. Okay, lady, I gotta get downstairs and close up. You’ll be okay?”
“Sure. – Oh, one last thing –”
“What?”
“If I want to come up here without being seen by anyone in the bar – you know –”
“Yeah, I do. Okay, t’ere’s a back way. You go round the side, there’s a small green door – here’s
t’e key for it . . .” Pulling out his key-ring again, he quickly worked one of the keys off the ring and
tossed it to me. “Thanks.” Catching it, I tucked it into one of my trouser-pockets.
“Okay, you go in t’ere, t’ere’s a stairs comes up here and goes on t’ the top floor, too. Comes out by
the jakes, t’e one down at t’e end of t’e hall on t’is floor.”
“Great!”
“Okay, t’en, if t’ere ain’t not’in else, I’ll get downstairs and lock up.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Good night, t’en . . .”
Flopping one big paw at me in what was meant to be a wave as he exited, he made for the stairs. I
heard his footsteps on the stairs, then scrapes and rustles from the floor below, presumably Lhari tidying
the place up.
Closing the door and shooting the heavy steel bolt home, I went to the window and looked out. The
streets ran silver with moonlight – I’d never before realized that moons that small could cast so much
light. The desiccated night air seemed to shimmer and dance with the light, throwing eerie shadows in all
directions. In the street directly below, a body lay sprawled in the street, probably the unfortunate fall-
out of an altercation that had started as a bar-brawl and had ended in the street with guns or blasters
blazing. Across the street, the gigantic, hunched form of a genetically engineered sand behemoth, one of
the favorite beasts of burden of the prospectors, was drawn up against the rail standing outside another
saloon, this one still well-lit and filled with patrons. As I watched, one of them reeled out through the
batwing doors and, tripping over something, sprawled across the sidewalk. Getting blearily to his or her
feet, whoever it was groped a drunken, reeling way over to the great beast tethered there and, with
surprising agility, managed to climb aboard the thing’s saddle. A curse, a kick, and the beast was moving
slowly away from the rail and up the street.
The saloon the drunk had just exited didn’t stay open long. Now patrons began to spill out into the
streets, some walking, some getting into battery-powered sand-cars and driving off erratically, a few
dragging themselves drunkenly along the sidewalk until they came to the edge, then falling off it onto the
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fine, white, utterly dry sand that covered the ground everywhere here, sad testament to native Martian
attempts to save their world from its ultimate death by loss of all its water and air, compounded by well-
intentioned but horribly misguided attempts by Earth to terraform the Red World. (All that both
Martians and terrestrial engineers had managed to do was turn good Martian barrens soils into a bastard
loess that the wind carried everywhere, poisoning much of what was left of the local wildlife and filling
the last of the canals with mud and silt. All that Mars needed now was a Sphinx – one drowned not by
the waters of an artificial reservoir, as had been the case in 20th-century Egypt on Earth, but rather by dust
– to preside over the death of this once-vibrant, beautiful world. Doubtless, from what I’d seen so far of
this misbegotten planet, one would turn up somewhere, somehow, a brooding undead spirit to haunt the
night and steal the souls and lives of Mars’ various inhabitants.)
As the last patrons of the bar drove or reeled and stumbled their way down the street, a Wan-Wan
Tuu, or Buuuumm, suddenly trotted out of a side alley into the middle of the street, where it began self-
importantly announcing itself by striking itself again and again on the drumhead-tight diaphragm that
formed the top end of its thick, barrel-like body with one of its four huge, clownish fists: buuuummm, the
great tympani membrane vibrated in response to the beating of its fist. In spite of its eerie caricatures of
simian hands with their opposable thumbs, looking so much like those of a Walt Disney funny animal
cartoon character, the headless, eyeless, mouthless, idiot thing would have been way out of its league at a
cretin convention – or in a bin full of turnips that had seen far better days long since, for that matter.
Buuuummmm, buuuummm, it announced to the night again and again, telling anyone within earshot:
Here I am, the great Buuuuummm, look on my works, ye mighty, and despair! Soon, however, its
territorial buuuummms began to weaken, becoming thready and skittery, almost questioning, when no one
responded to it save a disgusted thoat in a stall in a livery stable down the street, which chattered once,
like an angry monkey, then lapsed into silence once more.
Suddenly a drunk, leaning out of a window above the bar, yelled, “Shut the fuck up, asshole!”
I nearly jumped out of my skin when the damned thing boomed right back at him, “Shut the f-u-u-u-
c-k u-u-u-p-p, azz-ho-o-o-o-le!”
An empty bottle of rotgut exploding at its feet and the slam of the shutters of the room from which
the drink had thrown the bottle were all the response this prodigy received. A scurvy old calot with only
one, badly torn ear that had been lying on the stoop of the back entrance to one of the town’s countless
quasi-legitimate businesses gave a desultory bark and started to lumber after the Buuuuummmm,
apparently with the intention of biting it. The Buuuuummmm whirled, silently confronting the calot,
which, flinching away from the faceless thing, finally turned, tail between its legs, and slunk down the
alley, away from the Buuuuummmm.
Once more the Buuuuummmm repeated the drunk’s adjuration, almost tentatively. Then, its posture
redolent of sadness, it ambled slowly back into the alley and was gone. Whatever it had hoped to find in
the street apparently had not materialized. At any rate, it was gone, back to wherever Buuuuummmms go
at such times.
I waited a little longer, wondering what else might appear. There came another round of chattering
cuss-words from either the same thoat that had answered the Buuuuummm’s mating-calls or whatever the
hell they were before, or from one of its fellows in the livery stable. Then, from far out in the desert
beyond the town, there came the hideous, heart-cracking cry of an Ares Aepyornis horribilis, a
terrifyingly intelligent avian predator which, with its enormous crimson eyes and charnel-pit stench,
looked like a cross between a pteranodon with a fifty-foot wing-span and a 6’ yeti with an attitude
problem – in short, like something straight out of Dante’s Inferno. This tyrannobird was commonly
called a Ripper, after Jack the Ripper, and deserved it. Armed with foot-long talons and a three-foot long
beak full of razor-sharp teeth as well as steel-spring muscles, a Ripper would have scared even the most
maniacally angry mother Kodiak bear into fits. On top of everything else, it had a sadistic nature so
viciously inventive that the nastiest fantasies of the Marquis de Sade would have seemed like the
meditations of Saint Theresa of Avila in comparison.
Then, from the same direction as the Ripper’s cry, there came the unmistakable hissssssssssss! of a
fully charged blaster, followed by a series of agonized shrieks. Somebody had just nailed the Ripper –
and good for the somebody.
The somebody must have thought so, too, for, on a rising, expanding note that clove the night like a
search-light, a victory cry rose toward the heavens, joyous, silvery peals, like the Archangel Michael
after triumphing over the hosts of Hell. A Tweel – it had to be. Sprung from the same avioid ancestor
which, hundreds of millions of years ago, had given rise to the lineages from which both the Tweel’s and
By Yael R. Dragwyla
Page 8 of 37
the Ripper’s species had evolved, it was yet as far removed in both spirit and appearance from the Ripper
it had just gunned down as Albert Schweitzer was from a rabid vampire bat.
There was a legend that long, long ago, millennia before humanity even knew that the Earth was
round, let alone just one planet among all those that constituted the Solar System, or that the Sun was just
one among the countless starry hosts that filled a universe at least tens of billions of light-years wide and
as many years old, Tweels had somehow crossed the gulf between Mars and Earth and had fetched up in
Africa, where the Nilotic peoples who would someday create one of the noblest of all Earth’s
civilizations, that of ancient Egypt, had settled. From that ancient contact between the ostrich-like
Martians and terrestrial humanity, so it was said, had come the religious stories of Isis and Djehuti, of the
partnership between a great ancient Nilotic queen and a gigantic, sapient secretary-bird who, together,
founded one of the first of humanity’s great civilizations.
If there was any truth to that legend, however, somehow, between then and the time the first human
beings came to Mars, the Tweels had lost whatever technology they had used to cross the abyss between
Mars and Earth. Though still sentient and sapient, with a rich culture filled with both aesthetic and
spiritual beauty, as philosophically and intellectually glorious as that of classical Greece, technologically
speaking, as the first explorers from Earth found them, they were somewhere between the Paleolithic and
Neolithic, their only metal tools a few precious knives, swords, and daggers with as much spiritual and
religious as practical significance. That the Tweels had once had an incredibly advanced technological
civilization was clear from the great, haunted ruins found scattered across Mars, in which could be found
artifacts and remains of artifacts made from iron and aluminum alloys that rivaled anything which
Earth’s mightiest civilizations had ever produced, whose very existence implied metallurgical and other
extreme high-temperature industrial processes and an elegantly standardized industrial civilization
capable of mass-producing countless numbers of such artifacts and distributing them everywhere across
an entire world. There were also artifacts, and parts of artifacts, incorporating ceramics and other
materials like those used throughout the universe in the manufacture of spaceships as well as undersea
vessels. And there were books – or rather the elusive, tantalizing fragments of books hinting at the lost
history of a great civilization that had existed on Mars even before the planet’s various mammaloid races
had been so much as a gleam in some chittering, horny Martian sand-rat’s beady eyes. Somehow, for
whatever reason, the Tweels had forsaken the stars and even the other planets of the Solar System, had
retreated back to their own world, had given up their high-energy, advanced technology, given up the
computers and superconductor technology and fusion generators that would have made even today’s
terrestrial fusion technology pale in comparison, turning inward, instead, to create one of the most
spiritually powerful cultures in the known universe. It was said that the Tweels were also among the
greatest true wizards of all time, so perhaps they had found a technology of mind and spirit that made
merely physical technology obsolete.
Yet even so, when terrestrial humanity had first come to Mars, the Tweels, who were clearly
delighted to make their acquaintance, giving them every sort of assistance in finding water and food and
even acting to rescue them from danger, apparently without thought of remuneration or favor, had gladly
accepted the many gifts which the grateful Terrans had given them – including high-power blasters and
other high-tech weapons of the sort which a Tweel had, just now, blasted a Ripper into richly deserved
oblivion . . .
Finally, however, it was quiet, argent silence filling the night like floodwaters pregnant with whole
realms of being from some other universe, unknown, unseen, whole ecologies of alien, incomprehensible
terrors. Undressing and turning off the light, I sat on the bed for awhile in the molten silver wash of
moonlight that flooded in through the open shutters, feeling the cool of the night air on my naked skin,
letting Fear and Terror play with my nipples for awhile, a strange tide of mingled unease and erotic
tension slowly rising within me until, unable to hold off that rising tide any longer, I let myself fall back
on the blankets, and began to stroke the hot, moist place between my thighs until at last the tension
crested, peaked, burst in a silver and red explosion that left me oddly drained.
I barely remembered getting up to pull the shutters to and bolt them tightly closed, then crawl
between the sheets, where I fell into a chasm of dream-haunted sleep, replete with strange images that I
couldn’t recall at all the next morning, but which nevertheless dogged me all the next day as I went about
my business.
***
By Yael R. Dragwyla
Page 9 of 37
“Pallas! Ha . . . Pallas!” The wild hysteria of the mob rocketed from wall to wall of Lakkdarol’s
narrow streets, and the storming of heavy boots over the slag-red pavement made an ominous undertone
to that swelling, bestial cry, “Pallas! Pallas!”
Hearing it coming toward where I stood on Deja Thoris Avenue, I stepped into the nearest doorway,
laying a wary hand on the handle of my blaster, my eyes narrowing. I’d bought the damned blaster this
morning in the marketplace, really preferring my own guns, with their dependable bullets that could turn
flesh into meat within instants, but hardly anyone on this world seemed to understand what they were –
or that they could be very, very deadly. So I bought the blaster in a pawnshop – among the few real
businesses in Lakkdarol, pawnshops, whorehouses, and saloons far and away did better than any others –
and went next door to Mary Jane’s Cannabist and Gun Shop, the one with the wooden Rastafarian, foot
on the recumbent, agonized corpus of Harry Anslinger, standing in front of it, to get a holster and several
battery cartridges for a power supply for the thing. I’d then slung it on my hip in a way that displayed it
prominently. Apparently it worked – so far, since then, most of the few men and fewer women who
happened to glance at me since promptly glanced away again, trying to pretend they’d never seen me,
and the rest treated me very politely.
Caution was warranted. No one knew me here – and Wyatt Earp and all his brothers, together with
“Doc” Holliday, “Bat” Masterson, Count Dracula, and Judge Dredd themselves would have found this
hind end of Hell a place to reckon with. So I set my back against the wall, drew my blaster, and waited
as the rising bellow of the mob drew nearer and nearer.
Then before me there flashed a red, running figure, scarlet as a bonfire, dodging like a hunted rock-
kitty from nook to cranny to niche in the narrow street. It was a girl – a girl with café au lait skin,
wearing a single, tattered garment whose fiery scarlet burned the eyes with its brilliance. She ran as if
she were on her last legs – even from here, I could hear her gasping breath. As she came into view, I saw
her hesitate, leaning one hand against the wall for support, her eyes darting around rapidly, questing for
real shelter and safety. She must not have seen me there in the depths of the doorway – as the bay of the
mob grew louder and louder, and the pounding of feet echoed from close to the corner, the girl gave a
despairing little moan and dodged into the recess at my very side.
When she saw me standing there, more than a head taller than she was and dressed head to foot in
brown leather and black wool, hand on my blaster-handle, she heaved an inarticulate sob and collapsed at
my feet, a huddle of burning scarlet and bare, brown limbs.
I hadn’t seen her face, but she was a girl, a lovely girl, and in great danger. I’d never thought of
myself as charitable or chivalrous, but something in her hopeless huddle at my feet touched that latent
chord of sympathy for the underdog that stirs in every American, somehow, even after all my poor,
benighted country had gone through. So, pushing her gently into the corner behind me, I brought up my
blaster just as the first of that roaring, screaming mob burst around the corner into full view.
It was a motley crowd, terrestrials and Martians, a sprinkling of Cytherians from the artificial
swamplands their people had managed to create and maintain back up in the hills above Arcadia Planitia
who had somehow gravitated to Lakkdarol, their dark Gods help them all, and strange, nameless denizens
of unnamed planets – a typical mix here in Lakkdarol. There was even what had to be a Minga Maid
there among them – in spite of her tattered clothing, scraped and bruised features, and expression of
utterly bestial hatred on her face, in bearing and breeding she was clearly one of those legendary women
who, bred for millennia by the Alendar in his great, impregnable fortress in the black swamplands of
New Cytheria, were sometimes sold to royalty, heads of state, and others able and willing to pay the
astronomical prices the Alendar charged for these lovely alien geishas. Somehow, by design or fate or
accident, she had been cast adrift to shift for herself, and had ended up here – and she, too, had joined the
mob in pursuit of the girl, as mindlessly blood-crazed as any of the rest of them. And every member of
that mob, obviously, was thirsting for the blood of the refugee who now huddled, winded and exhausted
and gasping for air, behind me.
When the first of them turned the corner and saw the street empty before them, their pell-mell rush
faltered for a moment. Those in the van began to spread out and search the doorways and both sides of
the street.
My mouth lives its own life, wild and free. It sure as hell wasn’t me who called out to them
sardonically, sounding clear above the clamor and riot of the mob, “Looking for something?”
As one, they turned. For a moment the shouting died as they took in the scene before them – tall
Terrie female in mountain-man’s brown and black, two colors, dark and darker, like the winding ways by
which Lu’ and I had come to this Dryland inferno, save for two gray eyes gone flat with a killer’s
By Yael R. Dragwyla
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resolution in a face carved from the halls of Hekate’s Hell, blaster steady in my hand, the scarlet girl
crouched behind me, panting and gasping and sobbing.
The foremost of the crowd – a burly man of Earth dressed in tattered gray leather from which the
insignia of the System Patrol had been ripped away – stared at me for a moment, a strange incredulity
overspreading the savage exultation of the chase that filled his face with an almost lascivious energy.
Then, bellowing like a bull, “Pallas!”, he lunged forward as, behind him, the mob echoed his cry and
surged after him, braying, “Pallas! Pallas! Pallas!”
Seemingly lounging negligently against the wall as I was, gun-hand draped over my left forearm, I
must have looked incapable of swift action. But as the leader, the ex-Patrolman built like a pit-bull, took
his first forward step, my blaster swept around in a half-circle practiced endlessly with my beloved
revolver, and the dazzle of blue-white coherent energy that leapt from its muzzle charred an arc deep into
the slag paving-stones at my feet. An old gesture, not one of the mob surging toward me misunderstood
it. The ex-Patrolman leading the mob recoiled swiftly against those behind him, and for a moment there
was utter confusion as the irresistible force of those in the rear of the mob met the immovable object
formed by those in the vanguard, the two groups struggling furiously for right-of-way. I smiled grimly as
I watched.
Then the man in the mutilated Patrol uniform, lifting a threatening fist, stepped to the very edge of
the deadline I’d burned in the street, the mob rocking to and fro behind him.
“My, my, are you going to cross that line?” I cooed ominously at him.
“We want the bitch behind you!”
“Come and get her, assholes!” Recklessly, I grinned into the man’s face. Clearly there was danger
there for me in that mob, but my defiance was anything but mere confrontationalism. From all my
experience through the various levels of Club Vesta and the superlative combat-arts training Lu’ and Erik
had given me, I sensed no murder here – not any directed at me, anyway. Not a blaster nor any other
weapon had appeared in any hand in the mob. They desired the girl, all right, desired her with an
inexplicable bloodthirstiness that I was at a total loss to understand; but toward me I sensed no such fury.
A mauling I might expect, but my life was in no danger at all, for otherwise they’d already have had
blasters or guns or knives out and ready.
So I grinned in the leader’s face and leaned back lazily against the wall.
Behind their self-appointed leader the crowd milled impatiently, a swarm of two-legged killer bees
on a Bad Nectar Day waiting for their next assignment, and threatening voices once more began to rise
out of the general babble of the crowd. I heard the girl moaning at my feet.
“So what do you want with her?” I asked the leader.
“She’s . . . she’s a Pallas! A Pallas, you fool! Kick her out of there – we’ll take care of her!”
“Yeah? Well, as it happens, I’m taking care of her,” I drawled.
“She’s a Pallas, dammit! Blast your eyes, woman, we never let those things live! Now kick her on
out here, and we’ll take care of her!”
The repeated label had no meaning at all for me beyond an association with Greek mythology and
the Goddess Pallas Athena – but that couldn’t make sense here, could it? But my own innate pig-
headedness rose defiantly as the mob surged forward, to the very edge of the arc I’d just burned into the
pavement, their clamor growing louder and louder, like surging storm-waves. “Pallas! Kick the damned
thing out here! Give us the Pallas! Pallas!”
Dropping my indolent pose like a cloak, I planted both feet wide, bringing up the blaster so that
while it was pointed at no one in particular, it was a potential threat to everyone in that mob. “Get the
hell away!” I snarled at them. “She’s mine, damn you all! Mine! Get back and stay back, hear?”
I had no real intention of using that blaster. I knew by now that they wouldn’t kill me, not unless I
started the gunplay myself, and I didn’t mean to give my life up for any woman alive – except for Lu’.
But I did expect a severe mauling if I wasn’t able to defend myself, and I braced myself instinctively as
the mob heaved and milled about in the street before me.
To my astonishment, something happened that I didn’t expect at all: at my shouted defiance, the
foremost of the mob – those who had been able to hear me clearly – drew back a little, not in alarm but in
evident surprise. The ex-Patrolman said, “Yours! She’s . . . yours?” in a voice from which
bewilderment and a hint of contempt crowded out the anger.
I spread my booted legs wide before the crouching, sobbing girl and flourished my blaster in a
melodramatic gesture that nevertheless promised death to any who would attack.
“You bet your ass she is!” I yelled. “And I’m keeping her! So stand the hell away!”
By Yael R. Dragwyla
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The man stared at me wordlessly for a moment, horror, disgust, and incredulity inextricably mingled
in an unspeakable marriage on his weather-beaten face. For a moment, the incredulity became dominant
as he spat, “Yours!”
I nodded defiantly.
Suddenly stepping back, unutterable contempt in his very pose, the man turned to the crowd and,
waving an arm, said loudly, “It’s – hers.” At his words the press of the mob melted away, its members
gone silent, and as they stopped and stood back, that look of acid contempt on the Patrolman’s face
spread from face to face in the mob like some air-borne disease.
Spitting on the slag-paved street, the ex-Patrolman indifferently turned his back on me. “Keep her,
then,” he advised briefly over one heavy shoulder. “But don’t let that . . . that thing out again! Not in
this man’s town!”
Stunned, I stared as the suddenly scornful mob broke up, my mind a tornado of confusion. That such
bloodthirsty hostility should vanish between one breath and another like that I just couldn’t believe. And
that mingled contempt and disgust on the faces in that mob baffled me even more. Lakkdarol was
anything but a Puritan town – it didn’t make sense that my claiming the brown girl as my own had caused
that strangely shocked revulsion to spread through that mob. After all, the whorehouses here catered to
even the most remotely conceivable tastes, as long as there was hard cash to pay for it – two nights ago,
I’d seen a dancing-boy offer himself to all takers in Cunner’s Bar, right out there amidst the tables of the
patrons, simultaneously eating out a drunken female prospector and being buggered by an off-duty,
equally plastered Patrolman, while being blown by a boy who looked as if he’d just escaped from a
frathouse party, so stoned on Canal-rim mushrooms that it was a wonder he could even perform fellatio,
let alone give simultaneous hand-jobs to two more off-duty Patrolman who’d elected to join the party.
Rather than being offended or outraged, the other patrons of the bar just clapped and cheered the orgiasts
on, some crying out, “My turn next!” And according to one of the patrons of the bar, the night before
that there’d been an even wilder show in McDhaniel’s Saloon, not far down the street, involving two
good-sized Alsatians, a donkey, an Algolian pseudo-serpent, two Cytherian women, three Drylander
males, and a hermaphrodite from the cinnabar mines of Mercury, come to Mars to escape the attentions
of its creditors.
No, it wasn’t anything to do with sex, regardless of the genders or species involved. It had to be
something much, much deeper than that. What I had seen in the faces of that mob was instant, reflexive,
gut-level nausea and disgust – they’d have looked far less so if I’d admitted to cannibalism, or a taste for
raw carrion, or necrophilia, or Pharol-worship.
More, the members of the erstwhile mob were moving away from me as quickly as if whatever
unknowing sin I’d committed were contagious. The street, which only moments before had been jammed
wall to wall with milling, shouting, murderous people of all species, genders, and ages, was emptying as
rapidly as it had filed. A sleek Cytherian glanced back over his shoulder as he turned the corner,
sneering, “Pallas!” The word awoke a new line of speculation: “Pallas.” It had to be of Greek origin, as
strange as it was to hear it from the lips of Cytherians, Martian Drylanders, and assorted roughnecks of
all species from every populated world and system in the galaxy – but even stranger was their use of it:
“We never let those things live!” the ex-Patrolman had said. It reminded me of something . . . yes,
something in grandpa’s Bible, which I still carried with me in the bottom of my backpack: “Suffer not a
witch to live.” I grinned to myself at the similarity, then frowned as I remembered that so many seeming
ancestral superstitions had their basis in rock-solid wisdom concerning how to deal with such things as
plague-carriers – and suddenly became aware of the girl I’d just rescued from the wrath of the mob, now
standing at my elbow.
She had risen to her feet without a sound, and soundlessly stood by me, swaying a bit on her feet. I
turned to face her, holstering my blaster as I did so, staring at her in curiosity – then with the utterly frank
openness with which human beings regard that which isn’t wholly human.
For she definitely wasn’t human. I knew it at a glance, though her sweet, brown body was shaped
like a woman’s, and she wore her scarlet garment – I could see it was made of leather – with an ease
which relatively few species manage to attain as far as clothing goes. I knew it from the moment I
looked into her eyes, and a shiver of unease went over me as I met those eyes with my own: they were
frankly green as young grass, with feline slit pupils that pulsed unceasingly, and far down in their depths
there was a dark well of animal wisdom, the look of the beast which sees far more than the sophont ever
can.
By Yael R. Dragwyla
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There was no hair at all on her face, neither brows nor lashes. And I’d have sworn that the tight
scarlet turban bound around her head covered nothing but baldness. On each hand she had but three
fingers and a thumb, and her feet likewise had four digits, all sixteen toes and fingers tipped with round,
retractable claws like those of a cat. Her nose was long and flattened, likewise oddly feline. She ran her
tongue – a thin, pink, flat tongue as feline as her eyes – over startlingly plump human lips and spoke with
difficulty, making it clear that her throat and tongue had never been shaped for human speech: “Not –
afraid now,” she said softly. As she spoke, her little teeth, as white and pointed as a kitten’s, were briefly
revealed as her lips drew back to form the words.
“What on Earth – er, Mars did they want you for?” I asked her, full of curiosity. “What have you
done? Pallas . . . is that your name?”
“I – not talk your – speech,” she said hesitantly.
“Would you try? I’d like to know? Please, why were they chasing you? Will you be safe on the
street now, or should you get inside somewhere? That mob looked absolutely murderous.”
“I – I go with you now,” she said, the words coming out with difficulty.
“So you say,” I told her, grinning. “What are you, anyway? You look rather like a kitten.”
“Pallas,” she told me somberly.
“Where do you live? Are you a Martian?”
“I come from . . . from far – from long ago – far country –”
“Wait!” I told her, laughing. “I think we’re talking past each other. Are you trying to tell me you’re
not a Martian?”
Besides me, she drew herself up very straight, lifting her turbaned head proudly, something queenly
in her pose. “Martian?” she said scornfully. “My people are – are – you have no word. Your speech –
hard for me.”
“Well, what’s yours? Maybe I know it. Try me.”
Lifting her head even more, she met my eyes squarely. In hers there was a subtle amusement.
“Some day,” she told me, “I – I speak to you in – in my own language.” Swiftly, hungrily, her pink
tongue flicked out for a moment over her lips, then was retracted again as she retreated once more into
solemn wariness.
Approaching footsteps on the dusty pavement interrupted my reply. A Dryland Martian came reeling
past, giving off an aroma of blockader Cytherian segir whiskey strong enough to fell a goat at 50 paces.
Suddenly spotting the red of the girl’s tatters, he turned his head sharply. As his segir-steeped brain took
in the fact of her presence next to me, he lurched unsteadily toward the recess in which she and I stood,
all four of his arms windmilling a little to keep his balance, bawling, “Pallas, by Pharol! Pallas!”, and
reached out one clutching hand toward her.
Contemptuously I struck it aside. “Get the fuck out of here, asshole,” I told him.
Drawing back, the drunk stared at us glassy-eyed. “Yours, eh?” he croaked. “Well, well, lady.
You’re welcome to it!” Like the ex-Patrolman before him, he spat on the pavement, a huge gob of
bloody phlegm, and turned away, muttering hideous Drylander curses not quite far enough under his
breath as he did so.
As I watched him shuffle off, a nameless unease began to rise within me.
Turning abruptly to the girl beside me, I told her, “Come on. If this sort of thing is going to happen
everywhere we go, we’d best get inside. Where shall I take you?”
“With . . . you,” she murmured.
I stared down into her flat green eyes. Those ceaselessly pulsing pupils disturbed me, as it was, but
behind the animal shallows of her gaze there seemed to be a shutter – a closed barrier that might at any
moment open to reveal abysses of that dark knowledge I sensed there.
Roughly I told her again, “Well, come on, then,” and stepped down into the street.
She pattered along a pace or two behind me, making no effort to keep up with my much longer
strides. When I began training with Lu’ and Erik, they taught me to walk as softly as a cat, even in boots,
“quiet as a dreaming ninja,” training that only became underscored here in the bowels of Club Vesta.
Even so, the girl at my heels glided along behind me like a shadow over the rough pavement, making so
little sound that in comparison even the lightness of my own footsteps seemed loud in the empty streets.
I chose the less frequented ways of Lakkdarol to make my way back to the room I’d rented for
myself and Lu’. As I did so, I somewhat shamefacedly thanked the Goddesses that it wasn’t very far
away, for the few pedestrians we encountered on the way turned and stared after us with that by-now
familiar mingling of horror and contempt which I was still as far as ever from understanding.
By Yael R. Dragwyla
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There was no one in sight when we finally drew round to the side-entrance to the upper rooms of
Lhari’s Better ’Ole. Slipping up the stairs at my heels, the girl vanished through the door to my room as
soon as I opened it, thankfully unseen by anyone else in the building. Carefully closing and locking the
door, I leaned my shoulders against it and regarded the girl speculatively.
Taking in the room’s sparse contents – bed, dresser, wardrobe, shuttered windows – in a single
glance, the girl accepted its poverty and dismissed it in an eyeblink. Then, crossing to the window and
opening the shutters, she leaned out on the sill for a moment, gazing across the low roof-tops of the town
toward the Martian badlands beyond, all red-and-white slag beneath the late afternoon sun.
“You can stay here,” I told her sharply, “until I leave town. I’m waiting here for a friend of mine to
come back from . . . a business trip. Have you eaten?”
“Yes,” the girl told me quickly. “I shall – need no – food for – a while.”
“Good.” Glancing briefly around the room, I added, “I’ll be in sometime tonight. You can go or
stay, just as you please. Better lock the door behind me – and I wouldn’t let anyone see you from that
window. You can leave it open, if you want to, but at least wait until nightfall before leaning out of it
like that, okay?”
Her answer was a quick downward jerk of her chin.
“All right, I’ll see you later.” With that, I left her. The door closed behind me, and I heard the bolts
slam home. I smiled to myself. I didn’t expect to see her again once I got back.
Going down the steps to the side door again, I went out into the late-slanting, maroon sunset with a
mind so full of other matters that the brown girl receded quickly into the mental background. Worried as
I was about Lu’, where she was now and whether she was all right, and if she would be able to arrange
passage for the two of us to a place that would almost certainly take us to the next stop on The Tour, the
alien girl and her predicament were quickly forgotten. There was nothing there worth stealing, and it
wasn’t likely she’d show herself to anyone else in the building while she stayed there, given what had
happened to her this afternoon. At worst, all that would happen is that she would take off and leave my
door unlocked for whoever might happen along and try it, and I knew I could handle any damned
Drylander burglar or second-story man – and besides, as I said, there was nothing worth stealing in the
room. All my attention now was on the business at hand, taking care of my end of things so that when
Lu’ finally showed up, we would both be ready to be on our way out of this hellhole, to finish The Tour.
***
Like all camp-towns, Lakkdarol roars by night, and it was beginning lustily as I made my way
among the awakening lights toward the center of town. I mingled with the crowds where the lights were
brightest, stopping here and there to try my hand at a floating crap-game here (I won) and a blackjack
game (I lost, but not as much as I’d won at craps). In casinos and bars I wheeled and dealed over glasses
of ruby-red segir and green, smoking fuirl gurgling out of ebon bottles, buying information with some of
the coins from the treasure bequeathed to Lu’ and I by the old Martian on board the spaceship. Because I
was careful to take but a few sips of liquor for every glass drained by those I dealt with, I was able to
strike far better deals than I might otherwise have done, and still make my way home steady on my feet,
my eyes clear and my reflexes unhindered. Even so, once I got back, I spent a good five minutes hunting
through my pockets and pack for the key to my door before remembering I’d left it in the inner lock for
the girl.
I knocked, then. There was no sound of footsteps from within, yet in a few moments the latch
clicked and the door swung open. As I entered, the girl retreated soundlessly before me, taking up what
was clearly her favorite place, at the window, leaning back on the sill, outlined against the star-washed
night beyond. The room itself was in darkness.
Flipping the switch by the door, I leaned back against the panels of the door, steadying myself. The
cool night air had cleared out what little fuzziness was there from the paltry amounts of liquor I’d drunk
to put those I had dealt with at ease. Lounging against the door, I regarded the girl in the sudden glare of
the bulbs, blinking a little as much at the aggressive scarlet of her clothing as at the light.
“So you stayed,” I finally said.
“I – waited,” she answered softly, leaning father back against the sill, clasping the rough wood with
slim, three-fingered hands, pale brown against the darkness.
“Why?”
By Yael R. Dragwyla
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Her only answer was a slow smile. On a human woman, it would have been reply enough –
provocative, daring. On the Pallas, there was something both pitiful and horrible in it – so human an
expression on the face of a half-animal. And yet . . . that sweet brown body, curving so softly under her
tatters of scarlet leather . . . the velvety texture of her brown skin . . . the flash of dazzling white of her
smile . . . I was aware of a profoundly erotic excitement rising within me. After all, time would be
hanging heavy now, until Lu’ came back . . . Speculatively I allowed by eyes to wander over her with a
slow regard that missed nothing. And when I spoke, I was aware that my voice was a little huskier . . .
“Come here,” I told her.
She came forward slowly, on bare clawed feet that made not the slightest sound on the floor, and
stood before me with downcast eyes, mouth trembling in that pitifully pseudo-human smile. I took her
by the shoulders – velvety soft shoulders, with a creamy smoothness that wasn’t the texture of human
flesh. A little tremor went over her, perceptibly, when my hands made contact with her body. I caught
my breath suddenly and dragged her to me . . . sweet, yielding brownness in the circle of my arms . . .
heard my own breath catch and quicken as her velvety arms closed about my neck. And then I was
looking down into her face, which was so very near, and the green animal eyes with their pulsing pupils
met mine, the flicker of something nameless far below their surface. And through the rising clamor of
my blood, even as I stooped to meet her lips with mine, I felt something deep within me shudder away
from her – inexplicably, instinctively, revolted to the core of my being. What it might be, I had no words
at all for it, but the very touch of her was suddenly loathsome, so soft and velvet and inhuman, like some
erotic plush toy come to life, and it might have been the face of some insapient non-human animal that
lifted itself to mine. The dark knowledge looked so hungrily from the darkness of those slit pupils . . .
for a mad instant, I knew that same wild, feverish revulsion I had seen earlier in the faces in that mob –
“Kali!” I gasped, a far more ancient and potent invocation against evil than I had ever realized
before, as I ripped her arms away from my neck and swung her away from me with such force that she
reeled halfway across the room. I fell back against the door, breathing heavily, and stared at her as the
wild revolt slowly died away from my heart, my guts . . .
She had fallen to the floor beneath the window, and as she huddled there against the wall with bent
head I saw, with curiosity, that her turban had slipped – the turban I’d been so sure covered baldness –
and suddenly a lock of bright scarlet hair fell below the binding leather, hair as red as her garment, red as
richly-oxygenated arterial blood, as inhumanly red as her eyes were inhumanly green. I stared, and
shook my head dizzily, and stared again – the thick lock of crimson had moved, squirmed of itself against
her cheek.
At the contact it made with her skin, the girl’s hands flew up and she tucked it away under her turban
with a very human gesture. Then she dropped her head into her hands again. But from the deep shadows
made by her fingers, I knew she was covertly staring up at me.
I drew a deep breath and passed a hand across my forehead. The inexplicable moment had gone as
quickly as it had come – too swiftly for me to understand or analyze it. “No more segir,” I told myself
unsteadily. I’d had at most maybe an ounce and a half – but even that seemed to have been too much.
Had I only imagined that scarlet hair? After all, she was only a pretty brown girl-creature from one of
the many half-human races found on all the worlds where humanity had settled or even merely visited.
Surely no more than that. A pretty little thing, but little more than an animal. . . . I laughed, a little
shakily.
“No more of that,” I said. “Persephone knows I’m no angel, but there’s got to be a limit somewhere.
Crossing to the wardrobe, I found extra sets of linens and blankets. Taking out a pair of blankets, a
pillow, and a set of linens, I tossed them into the far corner of the room. “Here, you can sleep over
there,” I told her.
Without a word she rose from the floor and, going over to the pile of things I’d tossed into the
corner, she began rearranging them, making a bed for herself, the resignation of a wild animal eloquent
in every line of her body. A sudden image rose in my mind of her to circling three or four times on hands
and knees among the bedding material, like a wild dog or wolf, before turning in, but she only slipped
beneath the covers and, within seconds, was fast asleep.
***
I had a strange dream that night. I thought I had awakened to a room full of darkness and moonlight
and moving shadows. Phobos was racing through the sky, and everything on the planet below was
By Yael R. Dragwyla
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imbued with a restless life in the general darkness. And something . . . some nameless, unspeakable,
unthinkable thing was coiled about my throat . . . something like a soft snake, wet and warm. It lay loose
and light about my neck . . . and it was moving gently, very gently, with a soft, caressing pressure that
sent little thrills of delight through every nerve and fiber of my being, a perilous delight beyond any
merely physical ecstasy, deeper than the joys of the psyche, a spiritual pleasure that wove a subtle, iron-
hard cage around my will, enthralling, almost unbearable. The warm softness was caressing the very
roots of my soul, with a terrifying, obscene intimacy. The ecstasy it aroused in me left me almost too
weak to continue breathing, and yet I knew, in a flash of knowledge born of that wonderful, impossible
lucid nightmare, that the soul should not be handled. And with that knowledge horror broke over me,
turning the pleasure into a rapture of revulsion, hateful, loathsome – but still foully, supremely sweet.
I tried to lift my hands to tear the dream-monstrosity away from my throat – tried, but only half-
heartedly. For though my soul was revolted to its very deeps by the obscene fondling the thing subjected
it to, the delight was so great that my hands all but refused the attempt. But when at last I tried to lift my
arms, a cold shock went over me as I found that I couldn’t stir. My body lay stone-still as marble under
the blankets, a living marble shuddering with a dreadful delight through every rigid vein.
The revulsion grew stronger and stronger as I struggled against the paralyzing dream, a struggle of
my spirit against my sluggish body and mesmerized soul. Yet still I struggled on, titanically, until the
moving darkness was streaked with blank blackness that clouded and closed about me until at last it
completely covered me, and I sank back then into the oblivion from which I had been awakened by the
dream.
***
The next morning, when the bring sunlight shining through Mars’ clear, thin air awakened me, I lay
in bed for awhile, trying to remember my dream. The dream had been one of those luminous interludes
that are far more vivid than waking reality, but I couldn’t now quite recall what it had been, only that it
had been sweeter and more horrible than anything I’d ever experienced before, waking or sleeping, and
that if I ever managed to remember any of its details, it would be in quiet moments years from now, as
often occurs with such lucid dreams. I lay puzzling over that for awhile, until a soft sound from the
corner aroused me from my thoughts, and I sat up to see the girl lying in a cat-like coil on her blankets,
watching me with round, grave eyes. I regarded her somewhat ruefully. “Good morning,” I told her.
“I’ve just had the ultimate Dream from Hell. – Hungry?”
Silently she shook her head. I could have sworn there was a covert gleam of weird amusement in
those flat, feline eyes.
I stretched and yawned, chasing the last ragged remnants of the nightmare away from consciousness,
banishing it back to whatever dark depths it had risen from in the first place.
“Whatever am I going to do with you, lady?” I asked her, turning to more immediate matters. “I’m
leaving here in a day or two, with my friend, and we can’t take you with us, you know. Where’d you
come from in the first place, anyway?”
Again the girl shook her head.
“Won’t tell me, hunh? Well, that’s your business. You can stay here until Lu’ comes and I give up
the room. From then on, you’ll have to do your own worrying.”
Swinging my feet over the edge of the bed, I reached for the robe I’d laid over the end of the bed and
put it on. Then I went out into the hallway, to find the communal bathroom.
Fifteen minutes later, after a shower in the Closed Field Recycler , I returned to the room and
began dressing, putting on a clean shirt and pair of jeans and my boots. Then I attended to my weapons,
checking the skean dhub in my boot and the little .38 snubnose hideout gun in its holster inside the back
of my jeans. As I buckled on my belt and made sure my Magnum and the new blaster were secure in
their holsters, I turned to the girl and told her, “There’s food-concentrate in that box on the top of the
chest of drawers. It ought to hold you until I get back. And you’d better lock the door again after I’ve
gone – make sure you shoot the bolts firmly.”
Her wide, unwavering stare was my only answer, and I wasn’t sure she had understood. Even so, the
lock clicked shut after me as before, and I went down the back stairs wearing a grin.
The memory of last night’s fantastic dream had already slipped from my mind, and by the time I had
reached the street, the girl, the dream, and everything that had happened yesterday were blotted out by
the immediate exigencies of the present.
By Yael R. Dragwyla
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Again the intricate business that had brought me here claimed all my attention. I went about it to the
exclusion of all else, from the moment I stepped out into the street until I returned once more at nightfall,
however pointless my ramblings about Lakkdarol might have seemed to an observer. There was things
that had to be done before Lu’ got back if we were to be able to get away from this hellhole and continue
on The Tour with any hope of finally escaping Club Vesta and finding our way back to all we’d left
behind once more. We needed solid information as well as resources, and it was my job to gather the
intelligence while Lu’ took care of the resources.
I must have spent at least two hours idling near Chryses space-port, watching the ships that came and
went, the passengers, the vessels lying in wait, the cargoes – above all, the cargoes. I made the rounds of
the town’s saloons once more, nursing one drink after another, appearing to match, for the sake of
appearances, the appalling capacity of the men and women I talked with for the unspeakably toxic liquors
favored by most of the town’s denizens, murdering many a poor, innocent potted plant with covertly
jettisoned drinks whenever I could, in order to seem as if I had kept up with them and still not drink
myself into a stupor. I engaged in countless apparently idle conversations with beings of all species and
worlds, frequently in their own languages – I’d discovered a surprising linguistic talent in myself as Lu
and I trekked through the upper realms of Club Vesta, enabling me to learn a tremendous number of
languages, from such relatively familiar ones as German, French, Russian, and Mandarin Chinese to
exotic computer languages used to program the Virtual Eros computers we’d encountered before, the
color-and-scent language employed by the earless, speechless beings from the swamps of Yyrdol V, and
the dance-languages used by the insectile Akraaa of Borus IX
In one place and another, I picked up the gossip of the spaceways, news from dozens of planets
concerning a myriad different events. Wandering along the banks of the Grand Canal, I listened to a
Dryland folk-group mournfully singing “Along the Grand Canal” in High Martian:
As Time and Space come bending back to shape this star-specked scene,
The tranquil tears of tragic joy still spread their silver sheen;
Along the Grand Canal still soar the fragile Towers of Truth;
Their fairy grace defends this place of Beauty, calm and couth. . . .*
In fact, the song, which almost everyone took to be the planetary anthem of Mars the way in which,
nearly a century ago, ignoramuses in my own country had taken “Hava Nagila” to be the Israeli national
anthem, had been written by some blind trombenik of a Terrie who happened to have a talent for music
and a feel for what turned his listeners on. According to legend, the composer, one John “Noisy”
Rhysling, had composed both “Along the Grand Canal” and “The Green Hills of Earth” in response to a
bar-bet in a saloon in Yullig, the camptown city that had grown up near the temples of Illar to take
advantage of the wealthy off-planet tourists who came to see the fabled ghost-town that had once been
the religious as well as the political capital of Mars. As the legends went, Rhysling, a former spaceman
who had become unemployed due to the ghastly accident involving his ship’s reactor that had robbed him
of his sight, was just a ne’er-do-well with a talent, one he used to earn the means to keep himself in food
and lodging and well-lubricated with the vile whiskey he favored, not to mention the favors of the pretty
girls and boys who worked the saloons and bordellos where he played the honky-tonk piano or the
accordion for the coins of prospectors, tourists, off-duty patrolmen and spacers, and anyone else who
drifted in to drink and stayed to listen. Yeah, “Noisy” Rhysling was just a bum and a good-time charlie
with a talent – but it was a talent which had somehow enabled him to tap into the deepest strata of the
soul, not only terrestrial and Martian but indeed, of every living being that could hear his music, or read
it the way that the Ais, the blind saurians of Algol V with their musical language, and the sessile Hooch,
cousins of the Grogg of Reynauld X, who lived in a realm that was more pure mathematics than anything
else, did.
In spite of my cynical appraisal of the composer, I was weeping by the time the little folksong group
had finished. Pulling my wallet out of my pants, I peeled off ¤100 and dropped it into the upturned hat
they had set out to collect contributions from appreciative tourists. Stunned at my unbelievable
generosity – the most anyone else had tossed into the hat had been a half-¤ piece, and there were damned
few of those among all the .01-¢ contributions – the members of the singing-group fell all over
themselves to ask what they could do for me in return. As a result, I got about ten times the intelligence
from them I’d gotten from anyone else in the last several hours, in far less than a tenth the time, all of it
By Yael R. Dragwyla
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solid, a magnificent return on my investment (which, given what Lu’ and I had inherited from the old
Martian as he lay dying on that spaceship, was laughably inconsequential).
*“From ‘Along the Grand Canal,’” by Robert A. Heinlein. From his “The Green Hills of Earth,”
copyright 1947 by The Curtis Publishing Co., included in his The Past Through Tomorrow (New
York: Berkley Books, 1967), p. 366.
Later on, as the westering sun burned its way toward the peaks of Tharsis Montes, clothing the
blasted land in flowing gold and maroon like molten despair, I heard the latest joke about the umpty-
gazillionth Cytherian Emperor-in Exile, Syridol XXIII, the latest reports on the Senisran-Aan-Terran war,
the latest hit song by Rose Robertson, who was adored as “the Georgia Rose” by beings on every
civilized planet – and, in between, learned a great deal about the latest ships in port, the cargoes they
were carrying, the names of their quartermasters and captains, who could be bribed and who would
immediately pull a gun or, later, go to the System Patrol if approached with a bribe. I passed the day
quite profitably, and it wasn’t until late evening, when I turned back to my rented room above Lhari’s
Better ’Ole, that the thought of the brown-skinned girl waiting back there in my room took definite shape
in my mind, though it had been lurking there, formless and submerged, throughout the day.
I had no idea what comprised her usual diet, so I made an eclectic series of purchases in the markets
clustered on the west end of town, a can of Texian roast beef, another of Cytherian faery-salamander
broth, a dozen fresh canal-apples, a gallon of old-fashioned terrestrial French vanilla ice-cream (that one
from an honest-to-Durga Baskin & Robbins there in the touristy part of the marketplace), a bag of
candied Spican violets, and two pounds of that transplanted terrestrial lettuce which, oddly, grows so
vigorously in the fertile soils lining Mars’ canals. I felt that surely she must find something to her liking
among this interplanetary smorgasbord, and, satisfied with my good work during the long day, I hummed
“The Green Hills of Earth” to myself in a surprisingly good alto as I climbed the back stairs to my room.
As before, the door was locked, and I was reduced to kicking its lower panels gently with my boot,
my hands being occupied with the bags and cartons of food I’d purchased earlier. The girl opened the
door with her characteristic noiselessness, and stood there regarding me in the semidarkness as I
stumbled over to the table with my load of food. The room was unlit again.
“Why don’t you turn on the lights?” I snapped irritably after I had barked my shin on the chair next
to the table as I went to set down my burden there.
“Light and – dark – they are alike – to me,” she murmured.
“Cat’s eyes, yes? You certainly look the part! – Here, I’ve brought you some dinner. Take your
choice. How about some roast beef? Or maybe some faery-salamander broth?”
Shaking her head, she backed away a step.
“No,” she told me. “I can not – can not eat your food.”
“Did you have any of the food-concentrate?”
Again a shake of the red-turbaned head.
“Then you haven’t had anything to eat for – why, it must be more than twenty-four hours! You must
be starved!”
“Not hungry,” she insisted.
“What can I get for you to eat, then? There’s time yet if I hurry, the market won’t close for another
hour. You’ve got to eat, child.”
“I shall . . . eat,” she said softly, a slow smile curving her lips. “Before long . . . I shall . . . feed.
Have . . . no worry.” So saying, she turned away and stood at the window again, looking out over the
moonlit landscape as if to end the conversation.
As I opened the can of roast beef, I looked at her, puzzled. There had been such an odd undertone in
that last assurance of hers which, unfathomably, I didn’t like at all. To judge from her appearance, the
girl had teeth and a tongue and, presumably, a digestive system very close to that of a true human being.
It was sheer nonsense for her to pretend that I couldn’t find anything that she could eat. She must have
had some of the food concentrate after all, I decided, prying up the lid of the inner container of the self-
heating can to release the long-sealed savor of the hot meat inside.
By Yael R. Dragwyla
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“Well, if you won’t eat, lady, you won’t,” I told her philosophically as I poured hot broth and diced
beef into the dish-like lid of the can of beef and extracted the complimentary spoon that came with it
from its hiding-place between the inner and outer parts of the can. The girl turned slightly to watch me
as I pulled up the battered old chair to the table and sat down to eat. After a while, the realization that
the girl’s green gaze was fixed unwinkingly upon me made me nervous, so I said, between bites of
creamy canal-apple, “Why don’t you try some of this, dear? It’s good!”
“The food . . . I eat is . . . better,” she said softly in her hesitant murmur. Again I felt rather than
heard a faint, unpleasant undertone in the words. A sudden suspicion struck me as I pondered on her last
remark, born of ancient memories of horror-stories told around campfires in my long-lost girlhood as
well as my beloved collection of books and videocassettes of horror fiction. I swung about in my chair to
stare at her, a tiny, creeping fear unaccountably mounting within me. There had been such a strange aura
to her words – to the words she did not speak – menacing, ominous . . .
Suddenly the girl rose demurely to her feet, wide green eyes with their pulsing pupils unhesitatingly
meeting mine. But her mouth was scarlet, and her teeth were sharp, so sharp . . .
“What food do you eat?” I asked her. Then, after a pause, I added, very softly, “Blood?”
For a moment she shared at me uncomprehendingly. Then, an odd sort of amusement curling her
lips, she said scornfully, “You think me . . . wampyr, eh? Nosferatu? No – I am Pallas!”
There were unmistakable scorn and amusement voice at the mere suggestion – and just as
unmistakably, she knew exactly what I meant, accepted it as a logical suspicion. Vampires! Myths,
legends – but myths which this inhuman, alien being was very familiar with. And by now, I’d seen too
many strange things myself to doubt that the even the wildest legends might have a basis in fact. Beyond
that, there was something so inexpressibly strange about her . . .
I puzzled over it for a while between bites of canal-apple and ice-cream. But though I wanted very
badly to question the girl about a great many things, I refrained, knowing how futile it would be.
I said nothing more until I had finished eating and had cleared away the meal, tossing the empty
containers into a recycle bin kept parked just inside the door for exactly that purpose. Then, leaning back
in my chair, I watched the girl with half-closed eyes. Again I was suddenly very conscious of the soft
curves of her brown body, her velvety skin, the subtle arcs and planes of smooth flesh under her tatters of
scarlet leather. Vampire she just might be, inhuman, alien she certainly was, but still she was desirable
beyond words as she sat submissively beneath my gaze with red-turbaned head bent low, clawed fingers
lying motionless in her lap. And for a while, the two of us sat like that, so very still, the silence
throbbing between us.
She was so very like a human woman, so sweet and submissive and demure, softer than soft fur – if I
could forget those three-fingered hands, tipped with sharp retractile claws, and her pulsing green eyes and
cat-flat nose and low forehead and flattened crown of head, and that deeper strangeness, the hidden
weirdness lurking just beneath the surface . . . (Had I only dreamed of that lock of scarlet hair, moving of
its own accord? Had it been just the relatively small amounts of segir that had awakened that wild
revulsion in me when I’d taken her in my arms? Why had that mob so thirsted for her blood?) Sitting up
a little, I stared at her, and despite the mystery that hung about her like a cloak, and the half-formed
suspicions thronging my mind, I was becoming more and more conscious of how beautifully soft and
curved she was beneath those revealing tatters of clothing, of my mounting pulse, becoming slowly
aware of the kindling of fire deep in my loins . . . soft brown girl-creature with downcast eyes . . . And
then the lids of her eyes lifted, and the green, feline flatness of her gaze met mine, and once more the
same revulsion I’d felt the night before rose up in me, a warning bell clanging as our eyes met. She was
just an unsophisticated animal, after all, too sleek and soft to be entirely human, with that terrible inner
weirdness . . .
Shrugging, I sat up straight. My sins were many, but bestiality wasn’t among the major ones (well,
not counting the gentlemen from Arachnos IV, anyway). I gestured to the girl to take to the bed she’d
made up in the corner, and turned to my own bed.
***
Much later, I awoke from the abyssal depths of dreamless sleep. I came awake suddenly and
completely, with that inner excitement that presages something momentous, waking to impossibly
brilliant moonlight that turned the room so bright that I could see the scarlet of the girl’s rags as she sat
up on the pile of blankets and linens she’d made for her bed. She was awake, sitting with her shoulder
By Yael R. Dragwyla
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half-turned toward me, her head bent, and some warning instinct crawled coldly up my spine as I
watched what she was doing. It was, in fact, a very ordinary thing for a girl to do – any girl, anywhere.
She was unbinding her turban.
I watched, not breathing, presentiments of horror pulsing through my soul. The red folds of her
turban loosened, and I knew now that I hadn’t been dreaming before: again a scarlet lock of hair swung
down against her cheek . . . Or was it hair? Thick as a fat earthworm, as a garter-snake, as a root of a
young tree, it fell plumply against her smooth, smooth cheek, more scarlet than blood, thick as a crawling
worm – and, like a worm, it squirmed and writhed.
Rising on my elbow to get a better look, not even realizing it, I stared in sick, fascinated incredulity
on that – whatever it was. No, I hadn’t been dreaming. Until now, I’d taken it for granted that I’d had
just a little too much segir the previous evening, and that it was that which had made that seeming lock
of hair, freed from under her turban the night before, seem to move. But now I saw clearly, undeniably,
that whatever it really was, it was lengthening, stretching, moving of its own accord. It had to be hair –
yet it crawled: with a sickening life of its own, it lengthened squirmed against her cheek, caressingly,
revoltingly, impossibly. It was wet – wet and round and thick and shining . . . .
Unfastening the last fold of her turban, the girl whipped it off. I’d have gladly turned my eyes away
– and I’d seen a lot of ghastly things before, without flinching, from the gangrenous leg and torso of the
pain-freak dying in ecstasy one Round back to the girl who was burned alive by that mob of
pseudobacchantes in the Round before that – but I couldn’t move a muscle. I could only lie there,
propped up on one elbow, staring at that mass of squirming scarlet – hair, worms, snakes, what were
they? – writhing on her head, against her cheeks and shoulders, in a dreadful parody of ringlets. And all
they time they were lengthening, falling, growing ever longer and thicker before my eyes, down the girl’s
shoulders in a spilling cascade, a mass which even at the beginning could never have been hidden under
the skull-tight turban she’d worn. At that point, I was beyond wondering, but I could still think and use
logic, and I knew that her turban couldn’t have hidden the damned things.
And still those obscene pseudo-locks squirmed and lengthened and fell about her, and she shook
them out in a horrible travesty of a woman shaking out her unbound hair, until the unspeakable tangle
they made, twisting, writhing, revoltingly, obscenely scarlet, an endless mass of crawling horror which,
until now, had somehow, impossibly, been hidden under her tight-bound turban, fell all about her head
and shoulders and upper torso. They were like a nest of enormous, blind, restless scarlet worms, or
perhaps naked entrails endowed with an unnatural vitality, horrible and yet compelling beyond words.
I lay there naked in the shadows, half-covered by blankets and sheet, frozen within and without in a
sick numbness born of unbearable shock and revulsion, the sort of trance that chronically traumatized
children fall into to escape their torment – only unlike them, I couldn’t drop into the safety of
unconsciousness. On the contrary, the sight before me commanded my full conscious awareness with all
the vicious, overwhelming power of Hell itself, imprisoning that consciousness in a body frozen into
tranced immobility like that which takes one over during REM sleep, or that of a jacklighted rabbit.
As she shook out that obscene, unspeakable abomination over her shoulders, her body, now naked
like mine – for, I could see now, she had also cast off her tatters and rags of clothing, revealing her slim,
hard-muscled brown body in all its feminine glory, the vermilion aureoles of her breasts radiant in the
moonlight with a life of their own in spite of the fact that the polarized light of a moon does not reveal
color, only black and white, her naked, hairless delta of Venus plump and full between her legs – it came
to me that she was going to turn in a moment, and that when she did, I would have to meet her eyes. The
thought of that meeting nearly stopped my heart with dread, more so than anything else in this nightmare
– for nightmare it had to be, surely. But I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that I wouldn’t be able to
wrench my eyes away from her – the sight of her held me motionless, and somehow, amidst all the
horror, there was also a certain beauty, a dreadful glamour . . .
And now her head began to turn. The crawling horror that sprang from her head and writhed down
her shoulders and back rippled and squirmed at the motion, writhing thick, wet, shining with slime across
her soft brown shoulders, about which they now fell in obscene cascades that all but hid her body. Her
head was now turning, turning toward me. I lay there, numb. And very slowly I saw the round of her
cheek foreshorten, and her profile came into view, all the scarlet horrors twisting ominously, and then her
profile began to foreshorten in its turn, and her face came slowly around toward me, moonlight shining
brilliantly as day on her pretty girl-face, demure and sweet, framed in a tangled scarlet obscenity that
crawled and writhed and shimmied, silvered highlights dancing over its surface as it moved, in that
impossibly bright moonlight like angel-snakes dancing under the skies of Algol.
By Yael R. Dragwyla
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And then her emerald eyes met mine. I felt a perceptible shock, and a shudder rippled down my
paralyzed spine, leaving an icy numbness in its wake, finally reaching my loins, where it pooled in bright
silver fire, pulsing and pulsing. I felt goose-flesh rising all over m body. But I was scarcely aware of
that numbness and silver shock and the horror of the sight before me, for now her green eyes fastened on
mine in a long, long look that presaged nameless horrors and delights, the voiceless voice of her mind
assailing me with little murmurous promises . . .
For a moment I began to slide down and down into a blind, bottomless abyss of submission – but
then somehow the very sight of that obscenity, of the girl crawling and alive with unnamable horror, her
lovely body still itself in the midst of that mass of crawling evil, was dreadful and wonderful enough to
pull me back up out of that seductive darkness.
As the girl rose slowly to her feet, down about her in a blindingly bloody cascade the squirming
scarlet things growing out of her head cascaded in a glorious, obscenely beautiful living cloak, now
falling all the way to her bare feet, hiding her in a wave of dreadful, wet, writhing life. Putting up her
hands, like a swimmer parting a waterfall, she pushed the masses of things away from her face and body,
tossing them back over her shoulders to reveal her own slender, deliciously curved, utterly feminine
body. An exquisite smile filled her face as, in waves starting from her forehead and rippling down all
about her, the obscene, snaky wetness of her living tresses framed her, against the hideous background of
which her glorious body contrasted in a way that was even more obscene than ugliness ever could have
been. And I knew, then, that I looked upon Medusa.
For a moment, that realization, coming from the depths of history and prehistory, reaching into a
time so far removed that no records of it existed on any world save in legend and myth, shook me out of
my frozen horror – and in that moment, her eyes, smiling, green and poisonous as the glass of craters
created by nuclear blasts, half hooded under her drooping lids, met mine again. Through the twisting
scarlet masses of her living tresses she held out her arms to me. And there was something soul-blastingly
desirable about her, so that all the blood in my body suddenly seemed to surge simultaneously to my head
and pelvis. Throwing back the covers, I rose naked to my feet as if in a dream, as she swayed toward me,
infinitely graceful, infinitely sweet in her cloak of living horror.
Yes, somehow there was beauty in it, the wet scarlet masses writhing all about her, moonlight sliding
and shining along the thick, wet, wormy tresses, losing itself in the heaving scarlet masses only to glint
again, moving in silver waves along the writhing tendrils, a hideous, shuddering beauty more dreadful
than any mere ugliness could ever be.
Again I only half realized this, or less than half, for that insidious murmur was coiling again through
my mind, my soul, promising, caressing, alluring, sweeter than honey, than even the nectar of Kali. And
the green eyes that held mine in their unbreakable grip were clear and burning, like the depths of perfect
emeralds; and behind the pulsing slits of darkness that were their pupils I was staring into a far greater
and more terrible dark that held all things, held the roots of Creation itself prisoner in its awful grip.
Somehow I had known when first I gazed into those flat, animal shallows that behind them lay this – all
the beauty and terror, horror and delight, delirium and wonder of the Multiverse, in that infinite darkness
upon which her eyes opened like windows paned with perfect emeralds.
Her lips moved, and in a low murmur blending indistinguishably with the silent swaying of her body
and the dreadful sway of those scarlet locks, she whispered, softly, passionately, “I shall speak to you
now in my own tongue – oh, belovèd!”
In her living cloak she swayed toward me, her telepathic murmur swelling seductively deep in my
soul, caressing the innermost levels of my brain, the roots of my will, promising, compelling, sweeter
than sweet. My flesh crawled at the horror of her, but it was a revulsion torn from its roots and replanted
in Hell’s own beds, perverted, co-opted by that hideous darkness lying in the abysses behind her eyes,
clasping what it loathed with a fierce joy. My arms slid around her under that sliding cloak, all wet and
warm and hideously alive, and that sweet, velvety body was clinging to mine, her arms locked around my
neck. And with a whisper and a rush that unspeakable horror closed around us both.
In nightmares until I die I will remember the moment when the living tresses of the Pallas first
folded me into their embrace. A nauseating, smothering gust enveloped me as the sliding wetness closed
around me, thick, pulsing worms clasping every inch of my naked body, sliding, writhing, their wetness
and warmth striking right through my flesh all the way to my very soul, as if it had stood disembodied,
naked to their embrace. Helpless to move, I felt some of them slide up my anus, others into my womb,
teasing platinum lightning out of my inner flesh, commingled, unspeakable pleasure and pain coiling
through every part of my body, along every square inch of my flesh, inside and out, colors out of space
By Yael R. Dragwyla
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and time pulsing before my eyes as they did so, the tastes and scents of nectar and of sewage married in
some unspeakable Q’aaga pseudo-Durian fruit, of the sweepings of Hell and the gourmet banquets of
Heaven darting over my tongue, odors both foul and sweet, repellant and seductive, filling my nostrils,
choirs of Heaven and Hell filling my ears. Around the nipples of my breast, over my clitoris, back and
forth across my lips, even into my ears, over my eyes, invading and violating me in every possible way,
everywhere across and in my body they writhed and danced, in their wake whole sensory symphonies of
horror, jagged discordancies of the flesh combined into one unbelievable, unspeakable harmony
exploding into my brain, blasting my will into fragments, into nothing, enveloping me in an unbreakable
net braided of cords of Satanic horror interwoven with Empyrean delight.
All this in a graven instant – and after that a tangled flash of conflicting sensations before oblivion
closed over me, for I remembered my dream, and knew it now for nightmare reality. The sliding, gently
moving caresses of those wet, warm worms upon my flesh was ecstasy beyond words, that deeper ecstasy
that strikes beyond the body, beyond the mind, tickling the very roots of soul and spirit with unnatural
delight shot through with unspeakable agony, hellish agony at whose core in turn was pleasure that only
the angels and saved souls of a Muslim paradise might know.
So I stood, rigid as marble, as if carved into stone, like any of Medusa’s victims in the ancient
legends, while the hideous ecstasy, the delightful agony of the Pallas thrilled and shuddered through
every fiber of my being. Through every atom of my body and soul, along every fiber of my being on
every plane, through all that was myself the dreadful ecstasy flowed.
And truly dreadful it was. Even as my body and soul answered to that root-deep pleasure, a foul and
dreadful wooing from which I shuddered away even as I willingly embraced it with all my being, I
recoiled from its hideousness — yet in the innermost depths of my brain and soul some grinning Quisling
shivered with delight. And in the abysses of my soul, below even this, I knew horror and revulsion and
despair beyond telling, while those intimate caresses crawled in the most secret places of my body and
soul, knowing that the soul should not be handled – and shook with that perilous pleasure through it all.
That terrible conflict, that immediate knowledge of good and evil, the mingling of rapture and
revulsion, delight and delirium and despair, all took place within an instant, while those scarlet worms
coiled and crawled all over my body, sending deep, obscene tremors of that infinite pleasure into every
atom of my being. All through it, I remembered that “worm” was an ancient word for unspeakable evil,
for Satan himself, that the thing St. George had been sent to kill was called “wyrm” as often as it was
“dragon.” I knew, then, that beneath sex, below even the lust for power and delight in it, was a drive so
primordial that no language in existence had words for it, so powerful that nothing could stand before it,
not love, not hate, not rage, nothing – and that it was in the coils of that unspeakable drive, mere aspects
of which included the love of evil, the soul of cancer, the carrion delight in rot and foulness of every
kind, the lust to destroy all things for the joy of destruction, masquerading in the glamours of ecstasy and
agony and joy and despair, in which I was caught.
I couldn’t stir at all in that slimy, ecstatic embrace. Weakness flooded me, growing every more
powerful with each succeeding wave of delight and damnation, agony and ecstasy, the traitor in my soul
growing stronger and stronger, banishing the revulsion, thrusting it farther and farther away from
consciousness. And finally something within me gave up the struggle and I sank wholly into a blazing
darkness that held nothing by that devouring, ecstatic agony . . . .
***
As I climbed the stairs to Eshda’s room above Lhari’s saloon, absent-mindedly pulling out my key, I
was more and more concerned (Lu’ told me later). Lhari, the owner of the saloon and the rest of the
building containing the rooms which included the one he told me Eshda had rented from him several
days ago, hadn’t liked me at all, and had surrendered the extra key to me with bad grace. I guess it was
because he thought I might be a Cytherian half-breed – the Martian natives and even half-breeds like
old Lhari have this thing about sex between Cytherians and other species, especially Martians and
terrestrials. With my blond hair and fair skin and blue eyes, I know I could have passed for one. My
darling Erik, in one of his rare poetic moments, one afternoon just after we had made love, told me I had
a look of cherubic innocence which he found delightfully deceptive – after all, he was my teacher in all
the deadly arts of the Ninja, and found that deceptive seeming of innocence and naïveté overlying the
skills he had taught me and what he called, grinning, my “will of plutonium” to be a perfect ninja tool,
deceiving potential opponents and enemies into thinking that I was an easy mark, thereby rendering them
By Yael R. Dragwyla
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utterly vulnerable to whatever I might want to do to them. Erik said I had the face of a fallen angel,
without any of my namesake’s majesty to redeem it, with a blazing sapphire imp grinning in my eyes, a
faint tension in my face waking or sleeping barely hinting at a ruthlessness that would have taken
Genghis Khan aback. Be that as it may, Lhari, with his apparent old-fashioned male chauvinism that
“didn’t take to ladies thinkin’ they’re men,” would have found some excuse to dislike me no matter what.
Even so, in spite of his seeming attitude problem he clearly liked Eshda. Her black hair and
tenebrous seeming had apparently struck some note deep in his soul, possibly reminding him of a long-
gone wife or lover or even daughter, someone he had once loved with all his heart, whose loss had
wounded him to the core of his being. Poor old man – when I had come into his tavern, seeking Eshda
here because we had promised to rendezvous here after I had completed the business of securing
transportation and supplies for us, Lhari, looking up from behind the bar, where he had been conducting
a rambling conversation with one of his customers, and seeing me enter, had immediately dropped the
towel from which he had been mopping up spilled drinks. Without even an apology to the other man, he
had rushed over to meet me. He knew me, he said, from the description Esh’ had given of me. He drew
me over to a table to talk quietly, out of earshot of the others in the place, and told me about renting one
of the upstairs rooms to Esh’ a few days ago. He was worried, he said; he hadn’t seen her since, and
had been on the verge of going up there to check on her, and see whether she was all right, or if she was
even there at all.
So it was the two of us, Lhari and I, now mounted the stairs leading up to the upstairs rooms which
included Eshda’s, me leading, holding the extra key Lhari had given me to use “because I know she don’t
take kindly to some old fart like yours truly bustin’ in there, imposin’ on her privacy.” He said it with
such concern in his voice that I knew he really did care about her, even on such short acquaintance, as if
she were his daughter or niece. I hadn’t the heart to tell him to stay behind. Thus the two of us went up
the stairs and along the hallway leading to her room, past the long rows of doors, shut and silent, coming
at last to her room. I was even more concerned, now, than I had let on to Lhari – Esh’ had promised to
leave a message for me at two other saloons as well as this one well before I got here, yet no one at any
of the three saloons knew anything about it. Something had happened to Eshda, of that I was sure.
Thus musing, I fitted the key into the lock of the door – one that could override any internal bolts,
among other things triggering a magnetic lock that held in place the brackets on the inside of the door
meant to hold a crossbar in place so that if such were in position, it would fall away from the door along
with the brackets – and, turning it, pushed hard on the door.
With a thump, the brackets and the crossbar they held fell away from the inside of the door even as
the heavy deadbolts clicked open. When I pushed on the door, the crossbar slid along the floor without
obstructing, and we entered the room.
In that first moment, as the door opened, I sensed something very wrong. So, doubtless, did Lhari,
for behind me I heard a hiss, a sudden, involuntary gasp of breath. The room was dark, and for a while
we could see nothing. Even so, at the first breath we could smell a strange, nameless odor, half
nauseating, half seductively sweet. Deep stirrings of what had to be an ancestral memory, older than the
dinosaurs, old as the first proto-mammals, woke within me, all my ancestors all the way back to the dawn
of Class Mammalia shouting at me, warning me. Behind me, I heard Lhari, who must have had a very
similar reaction to that weird, half-revolting, half-delightful odor, cursing steadily, as if he already knew
what we’d find. “I knew – I knew I never should’a let her go off alone, should’a checked on her, never
forgive m’sel’ . . .” I heard him mutter.
I laid my hand lightly on the blaster I’d purchased at a local gunsmith’s – mainly for its ability to
impress the natives here, since firearms of the type I was used to seemed to have little meaning for them
until they got shot by one, something I wanted to avoid doing if at all possible – and pushed the door
open wider. In the dimness of the room – the blast-shutters over the windows had been tightly closed, so
that not so much as a glimmer of the daylight that was now drowning in the bloody tides of a Martian
sunset outside could enter, the only light in it coming from the dim hallway outside the room through the
door in which Lhari and I stood – all I could see at first was a curious mound over in a far corner. But
as my eyes grew more accustomed to the dimness, lit only by what little light came in from the hallway
behind us, I saw it more clearly, a mound that seemed to heave and stir within itself, darkness moving on
crepuscular darkness, a mound of what might have been entrails, entrails living and moving, writhing
with noisome vitality.
Suddenly, behind me, curses erupting from his lips, pushing me aside, drawing his own blaster from
beneath the voluminous apron he wore, one of his other hands reaching out to flip on the light-switch
By Yael R. Dragwyla
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next to the door, Lhari cleared the door-sill in one unbelievably swift stride, his obesity and age belied by
the unexpected agility and power of his movements. Slamming the door behind us both, setting his back
against it, blaster in his hand, still cursing, he called out softly, in a voice thick with horror, “Eshda!
Lady!”
The moving mass stirred, shuddered, sank back once more into crawling, writhing pseudo-
quiescence.
“Eshda! Miss Drake?” The Martian’s voice was gentle, insistent, quivering a little with terror and
revulsion.
An impatient ripple went over the whole hideous mass in the corner, which, in the light, looked like a
pile of great scarlet worms. It stirred again, reluctantly, Then, tendril by writhing tendril, it began to
part and fall aside. Slowly, so slowly, the naked, olive-skinned body of a night-haired woman, the flesh
all slimed and shining under the light, appeared beneath it.
“Esh’! Eshda!” I screamed. Waving me to silence with a single imperious gesture, Lhari called
again, “Lady!”
Now, with dream-like slowness, the olive-skinned form beneath the scarlet things moved, and a
woman sat up in the midst of them. Long, long ago, she might have been my Eshda. From head to foot,
every inch of her, even her hair, was slimy from the embrace of the crawling horror all about her. Her
face – her face wore the expression of something inhuman, beyond human – dead-alive, undead, fixed in
the gray stare of a zombie, a look of hideous ecstasy overspreading it that seemed to come from deep
within her, a faint reflection of hell’s own fire from innumerable distances beyond the flesh, beyond even
the soul. And just as there is mystery and magic in moonlight, which is, after all, no more than a
reflection of the everyday sun, so in that gray face turned toward Lhari and me there in the doorway was
a terror unnamable and sweet, a reflection of ecstasy beyond the understanding of any who have known
only earthly ecstasies and delights themselves. And as she sat there, turning her blank, unseeing gaze
toward Lhari and me, the red worms writhed ceaselessly all about her, so gently, with a soft, caressing
motion that never slackened. She was gaunt, almost skeletal, her ribs standing out like washboard slats,
the skin of her face molded tightly to the contours of her skull, wasted beyond even starvation or the
ravages of some hideous cancer. She looked utterly drained, not merely physically depleted, but, far
more terrible, as if something had vampirized her very soul and spirit. I could not believe that anyone
could be in such a state and still be among the living – and yet, somehow, she was. If you can call the
condition of a zombie “life.”
“Eshda! Please, Esh’ – get up! Over here!” I called to her.
“Lady, you gotta get up!” Lhari added desperately, commandingly – and made no move to step away
from the door toward her, putting out an arm to hold me back when I tried to do so.
With that same dreadful slowness, like that of an undead woman rising to her feet, Eshda stood up in
the midst of that nest of slimy scarlet worms. As she swayed there drunkenly on her feet, naked, her flesh
gleaming with slime, two or three of the crimson tendrils writhed up her legs, clear to the knees, and
wound themselves there, supporting her, moving in a ceaseless caress that seemed to give her some
hidden strength. For she said, then, without inflection, “Go away. Go away. Leave me alone.” And her
dead, ecstatic face never changed.
“Lady!” Lhari’s voice was desperate. “Lady, listen! Lady, can’t you hear me?”
“Go away,” that monotonous voice said to us. “Go away. Go away. Go –”
“The hell you say, Esh’!” I cried. “Not unless you come, too. Can’t you hear? Esh’! Esh’ –”
In mid-rant I stopped, that ancestral alarm-bell of genetic memory shivering along my spine, for now
that awful scarlet mass was moving again, violently, rising . . .
Lhari and I shrank back against the door, unconsciously gripping our guns, the names of Gods we
had both forgotten years ago rising unbidden to our lips. I could hear the big man’s teeth chattering,
and he was trembling so hard that the door behind him vibrated – or was that from the tremors sweeping
in waves down my own body? Somehow, don’t ask me how, I knew what would come next, and that
knowledge was even more dreadful than any ignorance could have been. As for Lhari – he was a
Martian, after all, and Mars is old, old. Lhari knew – and his knowledge came from everything he had
learned as a child, plus common knowledge on the street, things almost no terrestrial ever had to learn or
cope with.
Now the writhing scarlet mass rose higher, and the tendrils parted to show a human face – no,
humanoid, not entirely human, with green cat’s eyes shining like emeralds lit from within, almost
overwhelmingly compelling.
By Yael R. Dragwyla
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“Shar!” breathed Lhari, bringing his arm up to cover his face, turning his head away from the sight.
And now I knew why he seemed to loathe the Cytherians so: it was an act, to cover up the fact that he
was a convert to their religion, a believer in their strange dark Gods. For a second, my eyes met those of
the girl-thing in the midst of that scarlet horror. The silver tingling which even an instant of the sight of
that green gaze sent thrilling through me terrified me, and like Lhari, I turned away.
“Eshda!” I cried, my head turned away from the horror engulfing my friend. “Eshda, can’t you hear
me?”
“Go away,” said that zombie wearing the face and body of my Esh’. “Go away, go away.”
Somehow, though I dared not look to see if I was right, I knew that – that – other had parted those
worm-thick tresses, so that she stood there in all the human sweetness of her brown, curvaceous woman’s
body, cloaked in living horror. I felt her eyes upon me, and something was crying insistently in the
depths of my brain to lower the arm shielding my eyes from the sight of her. I was lost – I knew it –
At my side, Lhari was experiencing the same thing, but the horror of it was a thousand times worse
than what I was going through, for he was quite consciously aware of the peril which we were facing,
which had now engulfed Eshda and was reaching out for us, as well. He told me later that that voice
deep in the abysses of his mind was growing, swelling, deafening the voice of his soul with a roaring
command that all but swept him before it, a spiritual riptide that could have drowned Godzilla,
commanding him to lower his arm, turn his head back to meet those green eyes opening on unspeakable,
Stygian darkness, to submit, submit, and a promise, murmurous and sweet and evil beyond any words in
any language he knew, of inconceivable, infinite pleasures to come . . .
But somehow both of us managed to keep our heads, managed to keep from turning to look at the
girl-thing amid the writhing scarlet worms. And then, drawing my blaster, somehow, incredibly, I was
crossing the room with face averted, groping for Eshda’s naked shoulder, while Lhari, behind me, cursed
and prayed to Shar and begged me to come back, for the sake of my very soul. For a moment I fumbled
blindly in emptiness, and then my hand was on her shoulder, gripping her wet, beslimed skin – and as I
did, I felt something loop gently around my ankle. A nauseating shock of necrotic pleasure thrilled my
nerves. Then another coil, and another, wound around my feet.
Setting my teeth, I gripped Esh’s shoulder with all my strength. The feel of her skin was as slimy as
the worms around my ankles, and the contact with her skin sent faint tingle of obscene delight shot
rocketing through me. Suddenly visions arose in my mind of myself naked, embracing Eshda as the
worms enfolded us both, Lhari joining us in an unspeakable orgy, our skin-to-skin contact exponentially
increasing the pleasure given by the worms, so that in our ecstasy we should be as Gods, and it was all I
could do not to drop my blaster, tear off my clothes and join Eshda in the embrace of that thing.
Now the caresses of the worms on my legs were all I could feel, striking through the leather of my
boots and my trousers as if they were so much air. That voice in my brain drowned out all other sounds.
My body obeyed me only with the greatest reluctance, as if I were trying to run the mile on the surface of
Jupiter, or swim through cold molasses. But somehow I managed one tremendous effort, heaving with all
my might, swinging Esh’, stumbling, out of that nest of horror. The tendrils twining about her body
ripped loose with a nasty sucking sound, like some monstrous aborted blow-job, and the whole mass
quivered and reached after her as she sprawled limply on the floor, well beyond their reach, like a
thwarted lover begging the beloved to come back – or frustrated lampreys following escaped prey.
Then I completely forgot Esh’, turning my whole being to the hopeless task of freeing myself. For
only a part of me was fighting, now – only part of me was struggling against those twining obscenities,
the sweet, seductive murmur sounding in the depths of my soul, my body clamoring to surrender.
“Shar! Shar y’danis . . . Shar mor’la-rol –” Behind me I was barely aware of a terrified Lhari
praying to Shar, gasping and only half conscious of it, the prayers of a boy learned long, long ago from
his parents, like him secret coverts to the worship of the Cytherian Gods. I stood with my right-hand
profile toward him, keeping my head turned sharply to my right, away from the sight of the red worms
and the lovely girl-thing in the midst of them, and so, in my peripheral vision, I saw Lhari suddenly,
unexpectedly, turn to face the door, step smartly to his left, almost as if he were jigging, coming to a halt
before the full-length mirror that hung there on the wall. He was drawing his blaster . . .
In the meantime, calling on all the Kami myself, especially Hachiman, God of War, I kicked out
desperately at the red, writhing things all about me, bringing my booted foot down hard on several of
them with a satisfactory squishing sound. The others gave way before me, quivering and curling
themselves out of reach of my boots. Though I knew more were reaching for my throat from behind, at
least I could go on struggling until I was forced to meet those eyes.
By Yael R. Dragwyla
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I stamped and kicked and stamped again, and for one instant I was free of that slimy grip as the
bruised worms curled away from my punishing feet. I took advantage of the moment of freedom to lurch
dizzily away from the things, nauseated to the roots of my soul with revulsion and despair from my battle
with the coiling worms. Then I lifted my eyes – and saw Lhari, his back still to me and the writhing red
worms, staring into the long, cracked mirror there on the wall before him, out of which, next to his own
reflection, peered the reflection of the girl’s cat face with its demure girl-smile, so dreadfully human, so
horribly inhuman, all the red tendrils of the mass from which I had just pulled free reaching after me.
And even as remembrance of stories I had first heard decades ago swept through me, a gasp of relief and
hope momentarily shaking the grip of that thing’s command deep in my brain, I saw Lhari swing his
blaster up over his shoulder, the reflection of its barrel in line with that of the red horror reaching out for
me, and pull the trigger.
The blaster’s collimated, lethal blue-white discharge leaped dazzling across the room, the 100-
kilowatt blaze of the overhead ceiling-light like a candle against an H-bomb blast in comparison. It
speared square into the midst of that squirming, reaching mass at my feet. There was a hiss and a blaze
and a high, thin scream of inhuman malice and despair. Then the blaster cut off as it fell from Lhari’s
nerveless fingers and he fell to the floor in a faint and I ran toward him, crying his name, and Eshda,
from somewhere nearby, began to scream . . .
***
I opened my eyes to Martian sunlight streaming thinly through the open window. I had gone to bed
naked, but now, lying on the bed on top of the covers, I found I was dressed in a long, cotton shift printed
in blue canal-flower forget-me-nots. Something wet and cold was slapping my face, and someone was
spooning hot Cytherian frog-broth into my mouth.
“Eshda!” Lu’ was calling from far away.
“Miss Drake! Wake up, wake up!” came the voice of Lhari, from somewhere near Lu’.
“Wh- – what?”
“God damn it, you damned fool – wake up!” Lu’ was yelling.
“’M ’wake,” I managed to mumble. “Wha’s . . . wha’s up?”
Then a cup was thrust against my teeth. “Drink this, Miss Drake,” Lhari was saying. “It’ll be good
f’r you, darlin’. Penicillin f’r the soul, don’t y’ know.”
Obediently I swallowed, and more of the rich frog-broth flowed down my grateful throat, spreading
warmth through my body that gradually awakened me from the icy-cold numbness that had gripped me
until now. There was an undertaste of segir to it; the alcohol seemed to speed the work of the broth,
making it easier for my body to absorb its nourishment, helping a little toward driving out the all-
devouring weakness of which I was slowly becoming aware. Without Lhari’s big hand behind my head,
holding it up, I couldn’t have risen far enough off the pillow to take the broth in without choking. I was
so weak, so very weak . . .
For a few minutes I lay there as the warmth of the segir-laced broth went all through me, memory
sluggishly beginning to return to me. Nightmare memories, sweet and horrible, memories of –
“Kali!” I gasped, and tried unsuccessfully to sit up. Weakness hit me like a blow. For an instant the
room reeled about me as I fell back against Lhari’s supporting hand. The hand supported me while the
room steadied, and after a while I was able to turn a little, so that I could look at Lu’, who stood next to
Lhari, one hand on the blanket next to me, not quite touching me, almost as if she were a little bit afraid
of me.
She was laughing, half-hysterical. “By Persephone,” she gasped, “I’m never gonna let you forget
this, Eshda! Next time you have to drag me out of some mess I’ll say –”
“Let it go,” said Lhari, sounding sad and weary. “She’s all right, that’s the main thing.”
“What – what happened to me?” I asked them timidly. “What’s going on? Where did this
nightgown come from? How –”
“You were – you didn’t have anything on,” Lu’ said, as if she weren’t quite sure where to start.
“Lhari, here, brought something –”
“It was Mhari’s, y’see,” said Lhari, his dark eyes shining with moisture. “My wife’s. I didn’t think
she’d mind, she was so good-hearted, and you needed it. She looked a bit like you, Miss Drake. And
you weren’t too short to wear it – us Martians are taller than you Terries, you know, but Mhari was kinda
short, and I figured this would fit. Hope you don’t mind . . .”
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“No, of . . of course not. But – but what happened?”
“Pallas,” Lhari said. “It was a Pallas. Lady, what in Shar’s name were you doin’ with a thing like
that, hunh?” Gently letting my head back down onto the pillow, he stepped back a bit, still staring down
at me.
“Was that the . . . the girl . . . was it . . .?”
“Didn’t you know?” he asked, astonished. Then, thinking about it, he added, “No, guess you
wouldn’t know, would you? You’re from Old Terra, wouldn’t have had a chance to know, most likely.”
“Please, please, what was she? Where did she go? – And could I have some more of that broth?”
“Sure,” said Lu’. Now she stooped down and, putting a firm, gentle hand under my back, helped me
rise to a sitting position. Then, taking the cup of broth from Lhari, she handed it to me, watching me
carefully as, gratefully, I drank from it.
“Can you hold that cup yourself?” she asked me. “Feel better?”
“Yes . . . I guess so. – Now, could you tell me what the hell that – that thing was?”
Lu’ looked questioningly at Lhari. Self-consciously, Lhari looked away for a moment, then, clearing
his throat, turning back to face me, said, “I’m not sure where I should begin, Miss Drake. It’s – well,
they call them the Pallas –”
“Dear Athena, is there more than one?”
“It’s – I think they’re one of the very oldest intelligent species,” he told me, his voice unexpectedly
taking on the accents of a literate, well-educated, cultured man. In his youth, Lhari must have gone to
one of the great Martian universities, or been apprenticed to a scholar. If so, the fact that he was running
this saloon in this Gods-forsaken camptown at the ass end of nowhere hinted at terrible tragedies in his
life, the destruction of wealth and hope and possibilities, forcing him to take up a saloonkeeper’s life,
adopt the protective coloration of the drifters and grifters and other ne’er-do-wells and desperadoes that
made up the general population of towns like Lakkdarol. I stared at him in wonder as he grimly
continued, “Where they come from, where the Pallas originated, nobody knows. Name sounds Greek,
don’t it? Makes you wonder if they evolved on your world. But wherever they came from, their history
goes back beyond the start of either yours or mine, or even the Cytherians. They’re old, Miss Drake. I
’magine your Terrie dinosaurs and even the Terrie protomammals might’ve known them – there are
records that mention the things from many, many worlds, some going back hundreds of millions of years,
if not by name, then by description. The Pallas have been around as long as any sentient species we
know of has been in existence, and probably long before. When your world was in its Triassic Era, or
maybe even the Permian, the Pallas had been a myth on many worlds since before their histories began.
Their natural histories.”
I stared at him in astonishment. “You sound like a –”
“A paleontologist, maybe? That’s right. That’s what I was – what I trained to be, when I was
young. Only you might say that ‘paleoxenologist’ is closer to it. I was studyin’ ancient civilizations and
where they came from, goin’ back to the Noachian Ages on my world and long before that. There are
myths of them comin’ from the time when the last of the first generation of quasars must’ve been firin’
up, before Sol had even come into existence, when the first galaxies were born. And the Pallas . . . the
Pallas are at least that old. At least.”
“I never heard of them! – Well, there’s Pallas Athena, the ancient Greek Goddess of Wisdom, the
Warrior-Queen Who was the patron of Athens. Is there a connection?”
Lu’ and I both listened attentively as he answered, “There could be. Maybe there is. Not too many
people know about the Pallas, except here on Mars and maybe a few other worlds where the damned
things turn up from time to time, and those who know don’t care to talk about it much –”
“Half this town sure knows! I didn’t know what the hell they were talking about at the time, and I
still don’t understand –”
“Yah, it happens like that, sometimes. The things appear, and the news spreads, and the town gets
together and hunts them down, and after that – well, the story doesn’t get around much. It’s just too – too
damned unbelievable. Nobody wants to believe who hasn’t seen the things with their own eyes.”
“But – my God, Lhari, what the hell was it? Where did it come from? How –”
“Nobody knows just where they originally came from,” he said, his voice once more beginning to
take on the rough-edged accents and colloquialisms of the normal run of drytowners. “Today, it’s kinda
like rats ’r cockroaches or mnirls – they stow away on one ship or another, get off at whatever world the
ship stops at. By now, they’re all over the galaxy, and probably all the way through the Local Group. Or
even more widely distributed. Their home world prob’ly don’t exist any more. According to some
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stories, they came from Venus – I mean, the second planet out from Sol, not New Cytheria. I know the
Cytherians have some horrible legends about them, handed down in our family –” He caught himself,
then, sighing, said, “Maybe you’ve guessed I worship Shar. My whole family did. We were all covert
Sharists, ever since my granddad came back from New Cytheria after he struck it rich in the stock-market
there. Said Shar had helped him pick the winners. All of us have followed the Cytherian Way ever
since, but don’t you ever tell nobody, hear? Anybody in this town finds out, they’ll lynch me for sure.
They tolerate Cytherians, but just let a true, 100% Martian take up with Cytherians or their ways,
hoooooo! Then Judge Lynch steams into town and that’s all she wrote,” he said, grinning oddly. “Or do
I have the right colloquialisms?” he asked, his voice again becoming the cultured voice of a well-
educated scholar and scientist.
“You sound like West Texas,” Lu’ told him, grinning back.
“Is t’at a compliment?”
“No higher praise can I give!”
“Okay,” he said, laughing for a moment. Then, the laughter dying away, he continued, “We’ll
probably never know where the things first came from. Even if we could catch one and interrogate it, it
probably wouldn’t know. We think they have just enough brains to pass for . . . members of a truly
sentient species. They don’t seem to have much in the way of true intelligence – of course, that could be
just a cover, they may be truly civilized, with writing and everything else, have a civilization way out
somewhere in this galaxy or another, and the ones that turn up now and then in our neck of the woods
may be just their castoffs and criminals. You know, the way pirates are, parasitical spin-offs from a real
civilization which don’t want them, sociopaths. But it’s not very likely we’ll find out.
“Even so, do you remember the legend of the Medusa?”
“The Gorgon?” asked Lu’.
“Yah. She was a beautiful woman with snakes for hair, and a gaze that turned men to stone. Pallas
Athena was s’posed to have done that to her as a punishment for havin’ an affair with the God Poseidon
in one of Athena’s own temples. Athena and Poseidon, according to one story-cycle, were old enemies,
and that was sort of an ultimate insult.”
“God, I guess!” laughed Lu’.
“Okay, then, you probably remember that Medusa also gave birth to twins. One of the twins was the
Pegasus, an’ the other was the warrior Chrysaor, both of them springing up, fully grown, from Medusa’s
dead body when Perseus killed her by cuttin’ off her head. Anyway, Athena and Hermes helped Perseus
to kill her by givin’ him a brightly-polished bronze shield wit’ Athena’s aegis on it, a diamond sickle, a
magic wallet to put Medusa’s head in after he cut it off, winged sandals, an’ Hades’ helmet of
invisibility, and tellin’ him how to go about doin’ her in. Athena told him never to look at Medusa
directly, only her reflection in the shield Athena gave Perseus, which he could use to guide his aim when
he went to cut off her head – I remembered that just by accident, ladies, an’ it saved your lives an’ souls,
along wit’ mine. Perseus flew out to the island where the Gorgons were on the winged sandals Hermes
gave him, wearing Hades’ helmet so’s he’d be invisible, and sneaked up on Medusa an’ killed her wit’
the sickle while lookin’ at her reflection in the mirror.
“You wanna know the weirdest part of it all, ladies?” Lhari said, something that wasn’t really a grin
on his broad, sad face.
“What?” Lu’ asked him.
“The device – the thing they call the ‘aegis’ – on Athena’s shield, the one She loaned to Perseus,
was the head of Medusa. You see, originally, Athena – Pallas Athena Medusa – was a Libyan warrior-
queen who was probably named Neith. Her people remembered her much the same way yours
remembered King Arthur, an’ wove legends about her memory, until she took on the stature of a
Goddess, a snake-Goddess Who could work powerful Magicks using snake- and spider-venoms as well as
Tantra.” Now he was fully the scholar, his voice rich and rolling and full of mystery and power. “She
came to be another version of the Great Triple Mother Goddess, with three aspects, Maiden, Matron, and
Crone. Athena was the Matron, Pallas was the Maiden – and Medusa was the Crone. – Mind you, those
names probably were given to Her much, much later. What the name of that early warrior-queen was,
we’ll never know for sure, though, like I said, we think it was Neith. And where the names of Her three
aspects came from, the history of that naming, we aren’t sure at all.
“We think the Minoans, some group of them, adopted Her, forming a cult around Her. Maybe they
named Her with the names that came down to us. There was another Minoan cult devoted to Poseidon,
the God of the Middle Sea, where Greece and Minoa and Crete were located; so early on, Athena –
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Pallas Athena Medusa – and Poseidon hit it off bad. When, eventually, both cults made it to Attic
Greece, maybe 2,500-3,000 Terrie years ago, when the Greeks absorbed them, they added their own
names and wove them into their own story-cycles, and so everything got compounded together, African
legends, Minoan legends, Greek legends. Somewhere in there Medusa, the Goddess’s Crone aspect,
associated with Her sexual powers and Her command of powerful Magickal lore and techniques, became
alienated from the other two aspects, turned into Athena’s rival or enemy instead of Her deepest, most
powerful aspect. Before then, Medusa ruled all the techniques of sex-Magick and the uses of powerful
poisons for medicine and Magick that were part of the original cult. When Medusa got split off from
Athena, Athena’s sexuality and Her Magickal powers mostly went with Medusa. You probably
remember that Athena was a virgin in the Greek myths – well, that isn’t precisely true, because She had a
child who eventually became a great king, named Erikhthoneus, fathered on Her by Hephaestos, the
Forge-God, patron of smiths and alchemists. Erikhthoneus was part man and part serpent, and very wise.
The thing was, though, later the Athenians, who didn’t want to believe that their favorite Goddess would
do anything so impure as have sex with a man, changed the story to say that Hephaestos was chasing
Athena, wanting to have sex with Her, and when He went to grab Her, She tore Herself away just before
He could penetrate Her, so His sperm fell on Her thigh. In disgust, She wiped it off with some wool,
which She threw on the ground near Athens, thus accidentally fertilizing Mother Terra, Who was on a
visit there. Mother Terra didn’t want anything to do with the kid She had by Hephaestos that way,
though, so Athena, or so the Greeks said, adopted the boy – Erikhthoneus – as Her own, raising him
Herself.
“As for the ‘Pallas’ part of it, according to the Greek stories that was Athena’s playmate when She
was young. The two of them were engaged in a friendly combat, and Pallas was accidentally killed. In
honor of Her dead playmate, Athena took her name, Pallas, and set it before Her own – thus, ‘Pallas
Athena.’ You can find most of it in your Hesiod an’ Homer. The thing is, somehow Pallas’ name got
attached to something that looked like Medusa was supposed to. An’ the things we call ‘Pallas’ are
almost nothing more than the sexuality of a Goddess incarnate, walking on two legs, with, apparently, all
the brains of a cat in heat an’ little else. Why they got called ‘Pallas’ rather than, say, “Medusa’ we don’t
know. Maybe ‘Pallas’ comes from a source completely different than the Attic Greeks, an’ it’s all a
coincidence. But remember: as your Carl Jung taught, such ‘coincidences’ are a lot more than just
coincidence. They are the footsteps of Gods, traces of the workings of the Beings that made us all, an’
all the Multiverse, acting from within all things now and forever to work Their Will. So maybe there’s a
clue in there as to the origins of the things.
“Even so, there’s a lot we’ll never know. Wouldn’t the records of that race of – of things be
something to read! Records of other worlds, other ages, maybe of galaxies so far from ours now, after
billions of years of the expansion of the universe, we could never hope to travel there, records of the
beginnings of all the sentient species of our universe! But if such records exist, we’ll probably never find
them, an’ if we did, they’d prob’ly be in a language or languages like nothing we know now – maybe
music, or colors, or face-modalities like those of your Mayans, or even stranger things. And from what
little I know, or anyone else knows about it, they’re all like your legend of the Wanderin’ Jew, just
bobbin’ up here an’ there at long intervals. Where they stay in between times, I’d give my eyes to know
– in fact, that was one of the things that my master – the one who I was studyin’ with back at Syrtis, all
those years ago – was tryin’ to learn, takin’ me an’ his other students with him on digs all over the local
Arm, you know, this part of our home galaxy, chasin’ after legends, diggin’ into ruins so old nobody even
had a clue as to the peoples who built them. Strange how your people call that part of this galaxy the
Perseus Arm – maybe another clue to where the Pallas come from? Anyway, we found a few things,
things that hinted at – well, never mind, there’s worse things even than the Pallas. Anyway, maybe they
do or did have a civilization out there, somewhere, an’ maybe someday, after you an’ I are all long dead,
somebody will finally find their leavings, a library, something that’ll give us some idea of what they
really are and where they really come from and what their true evolutionary history is.
“Even so, that horribly hypnotic power the things have doesn’t really indicate much in the way of
intelligence. It’s just the way they get food, you know – like a frog’s tongue, or a carnivorous flower’s
odor, or one of our desert’s Rainbow Sirens’ color-broadcasts, which they play on their webs to hypnotize
unwary passers-by. Those are physical because those things eat physical food. The Pallas uses a – a
spiritual lure to get spiritual food. I don’t know quite how to put it. But just as something that eats the
bodies of other organisms acquires greater an’ greater power over its prey with every meal it eats, so the
Pallas, stoking itself with the vitality of sentient beings such as you an’ me, increases its power over their
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minds an’ souls an’ wills. You have to understand that we’re talking here about something damned hard
to define, because we have so little experience of it, but that’s the analogy that comes to mind.”
“I think I understand,” Lu’ said softly, her eyes far away. “When those . . . tentacles, whatever they
are, closed around my legs, I – I didn’t want to pull loose. I felt sensations that – that – oh, Persephone, I
feel fouled and filthy to the core of my being by that . . . pleasure, and yet –”
“I know,” I said slowly. The effects of the broth and the segir Lhari had laced it with were
beginning to wear off, and weakness was washing back over me in waves. When I spoke again, I was
half meditating in a low voice, scarcely realizing or caring that Lu’ and Lhari were listening. “I know it
– much, much better than you do – and there’s something so indescribably ghastly that the thing
emanates, something so utterly at odds with anything normal – I can’t find the words to express it. For a
while there, you know, I was a part of it, literally, sharing its thoughts and memories, its emotions and
drives, and – well, it’s over now. I don’t remember it very clearly, but the only part of me left free was
that part of me that was all but insane from the – the obscenity of it all. And yet . . . and yet it was a
pleasure so sweet . . . I think there must be some nucleus of utter evil in me, in everyone, that only needs
the proper . . . opportunity to get complete control. Because even while I was sick all through from the
touch of those – those things, there was something in me that was simply gibbering with delight.
“While I was . . . under its influence, I saw things, knew things, horrible, alien things that are so hard
to remember simply because they’re so unlike everything we know, so that we don’t even have words for
them, words to think about them in . . . I visited unbelievable places, looked backwards through the
memory of that thing, and was one with, and saw – oh, Gods, I wish I could remember!”
“You ought to thank your Gods, your good Gods, that you can’t,” Lhari told me somberly.
His voice roused me from the half-trance I’d fallen into in my reminiscing, and I rose on one elbow,
swaying in my weakness. The room was wavering before me, and I closed my eyes so I wouldn’t have to
see it start spinning again, and asked, “You say they – they don’t turn up again? No way of finding –
another? – And where did that one go?”
Neither of them answered me at first. Lu’ laid her hands on my shoulders, pressing me back down
on the bed, then sat on the bed next to me, like Lhari staring hard at me. I knew that if my face matched
even the ragged shreds of what I’d managed to remember of what I’d just been through, they must have
seen something indefinably strange there that Lu’ had never seen before, that Lhari might have seen only
on one or two others who had gone through what I had: the look of someone who, having never before
encountered a narcotic drug, has just done her first trip on Juno Dreamdust or Cytherian Hellweed.
“Esh’,” Lu’ finally said, her blue eyes fixed on mine like twin lasers, that little grinning devil that often
danced in their depths banished to whatever perdition it came from, “we – I – it’s dead. Lhari killed it.
If he hadn’t . . . if he hadn’t come up here with me, I might’ve . . . It’s gone, okay? Lhari nailed it with
his blaster, and we wrapped it up in a body-bag and buried it in a hole six feet deep in the basement of
this building, and poured quicklime in to make sure it stays dead, and filled the hole with Qwik-Set
Cement™. It’s gone. It’s dead, and it’s not coming back.
“Now, I’ve never asked your word on anything before now, but I’ve – Lhari and I have earned the
right to, now. I’m asking you to promise me something.” Next to her, Lhari stared down at me, his
features reflecting the same intense expression that she wore.
I wasn’t able to meet Lhari’s or her gaze steadily. Irresolution and fear of what that promise might
be filled me. Just for a moment, a wide gray incandescent blankness opened up in me, a searing abyss
filled clear through its galactic depths with every horror and delight that ever was, a pale sea with
unspeakable pleasures sunk beneath it. Then, somehow pulling myself back from the brink, I met Lu’s
eyes squarely, and said, “Okay, what is it? Name it, I’ll promise.”
“That if you ever meet a Pallas again – ever, anywhere – you’ll draw your gun and blow it to hell the
instant you realize what it is. Will you promise me that?”
For long moments I wasn’t able to answer. Lu’s blazing blue eyes, Lhari’s dark, sorrowful ones,
bored relentlessly into mine. I could feel the veins standing out on my forehead. Never in all my adult
years had I ever broken my word. Sure, I’d lied countless times, but always by misdirection or omission,
by evasion and misleading half-truths, never by an outright lie. One’s word is a precious thing, as long as
it is trustworthy. I’d given mine maybe half a dozen times in my adult life, but once I’d given it, I was
incapable of breaking it. Time stretched out, and again the blazing gray seas flooded my mind in a
rising, scalding, tenebrous tide of memories, memories sweet and horrible beyond nightmares, beyond
night-terrors. The stillness stretched out. And out. And out.
Finally the hellish gray tide ebbed away. My eyes met Lu’s and Lhari’s resolutely.
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“I’ll – try,” I said. And my voice wavered and broke, and then the swelling weakness picked me up
and carried me down into the black depths of a healing sleep.
***
“You ladies movin’ on, then?” Lhari was asking Lu’.

“We’ve . . . got to. I’ve got to find my husband, and Esh’, here, has people who must be worried
about her,” she said, dissembling a bit. Of everyone I’d known in the world back there, before we’d first
entered Club Vesta, she and Erik were the only “people” I gave a diddly damn about any more.
“Well,” Lhari said sadly, back to his endless polishing of the bar-top with one of his filthy, filthy
rags, “if you ever come back this way again, be sure to stop in an’ say hello to old Lhari, would you?”
“Lhari,” I said, suddenly reluctant to leave this man, our new friend, who had saved Lu’s and my life
and, very likely, our souls in the bargain, who had revealed himself to be far more than the aging lecher
I’d first thought him to be, scholar and scientist and traveler and erstwhile family man with a long, tragic
history cloaked in the obscurity of the years behind him, “why don’t you come with us?”
Raising his head with a jerk, he stared at me sharply, his mustaches bristling. Then, finally sure I
wasn’t making a cruel joke at his expense, he said, “Naw, naw, I gotta stay here, maybe one of the kids’ll
need me or somethin’.” His hands circled, circled, circled the bar-top which, however long he worked at
polishing it, always stayed noisomely grungy.
“Lhari, may I ask you something personal?” Lu’ interjected.
“I – okay,” he said, smiling a little, “sure. Why not? What do you want to know?”
“How did you come to be way out here, anyway? You were once a scientist, weren’t you? Maybe a
famous man. You must’ve had the world by the tail – rich family, tremendous intelligence, all sorts of
opportunities. What happened?”
“Oh,” he said thoughtfully, never pausing in his polishing, “it’s a long story. I can’t tell you much of
it, but . . . well, you see, as I said, my family from Granddad onward worshipped Shar an’ the other
Cytherian Gods. Some of us even worshipped Pharol, you know, the one Whose worship has been
banished all over most of the galaxy and in some of the galaxies beyond. But we kept it secret, for good
reason, because we knew we’d all be lynched if we told anybody. Except for a couple of crazy cousins
who worshipped Pharol – who we got permanently committed to the Tholus mental hospital, so nobody
ever took them seriously and they couldn’t hurt nobody – we never hurt anyone, never did any harm. But
my people, Martians, you know, just like everybody else, we have our bigotries, and religious bigotry, as
you prob’ly know, is the worst kind, started more wars and worse wars than just about anything else in
the universe, even economic factors.
“Well, when I had just taken my last degree from Syrtis, what you’d call a Doctorate, Doctor of
Xenopaleontology, we finally got found out. I lived with my folks – I wasn’t married then – on our
estate near the university. It was so beautiful there – the chartreuse of the Mist-Trees that lined the
campus under those violet and lavender skies, the great fountains in the public square, the great Syrtis
Zoo that had natural environments even for Dream-Beasts and Rippers as well as for the banths and so on
(visitors walked through a whole network of transparent sealed tunnels so they could view the animals
without being hurt by or hurting them), the canals running silver beneath the moons . . .
“Anyway, one of my cousins was stupid enough to get himself talked into lettin’ one of his drinkin’
buddies come with all of us to an invocation of Shar, like your world’s Holy Communion. Turns out that
his drinkin’ buddy was a member of the System Patrol, workin’ undercover. Why Edhi was dumbshit –
pardon me, stupid enough to tell the guy about our religion in the first place, I have no idea. Maybe it
was because Edhi was, like, gay, an’ so was the kark, the undercover Patrol agent, he’d gotten involved
with, an’ Edhi never was one for keepin’ secrets in bed, maybe that was how it happened.
“So the Patrol came for us all two days later. I killed three of them, shot them down with a high-
power, 2,000 kWh Jhaeger-Rhemington military blaster I’d gotten on the black market the year before so
I could practice target-shooting with it, trying to protect my mom and dad and kid sister and give them
time to get away. They actually made it into a secret passageway that had been built when the place was
new, a thousand years ago, when we went through one of our feudal periods, during a time of
depopulation and general banditry and like that. There was a maze inside the walls – our place was
actually a renovated castle, a fort made comfortable for us to live in, but a fort nonetheless – and the only
way you could find your way through was if you knew it beforehand. Otherwise you’d hit the traps,
everything from weighted blades to Arcturan glass-spiders, horribly venomous little bastards, which
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would be released when you intercepted a low-level laser beam just a little ways off the floor, running
past it. With three of the Patrol down and the rest not quite up to the room I was in, I had a little time to
get away myself. I figured Mom and Dad and Lhaura would get away safely, so my responsibility at that
point was to save my own, er, butt. So I ducked into another entrance into the maze, closed the door
behind me – it fitted into the wall so perfectly you couldn’t see it at all, could hardly even feel it if you
ran your fingers over the join – and took off through the maze, hoping to catch up with my family.
“Well, I got to one of the exits – there were dozens, actually, spotted all around the grounds of the
estate, some of them even coming out miles away, in the town of Syrtis or on the campus grounds – and
came up behind the physics building, on the university campus. There was a sort of monument there
made of the remnants of some of the machines which the octopoid Glnarths (one of our ancient races we
don’t brag about much) had used to travel around Mars and, legend has it, Old Terra on their various
attempts at imperialistic conquest. The Glnarths are long-since extinct – they died off as the result of a
plague of microbes indigenous to one of the species they tried to conquer, goes to show you how little it
takes to bring down even the mightiest civilizations and races – and all that’s left of them now are some
o’ those ‘walkers’ of theirs and some o’ their spaceships that were accidentally preserved in a hangar way
out in the desert that was covered up for ages by the desert sands. The University had set up what was
left of a couple of those ‘walkers’ on a low, wide pedestal in the square behind the physics building as
some sort of cautionary exhibit – your poet Shelly would have loved it, same flavor as his poem
‘Ozymandias.’ Anyway, the pedestal, which was about four feet high, was hollow; I came up inside it.
I’d stashed some food and other supplies there, back behind the maintenance beings’ tools an’ stuff they
kept in there. I don’t know what I’d have done without them – for the next few weeks, they kept me
alive and decently covered, and provided the first aid supplies that kept me from dying of blood-
poisonin’ or somethin’ when I got some dirty cuts then.
“Well, after I eased myself outta the door in the back of the pedestal late that night, I went to ground
in the old steam-tunnels under the university, where students like myself always loved to go when we
wanted privacy, like for love-affairs, knockin’ back a few segir-an’-Bhudweiser boilermakers, smokin’
Pavonis Red primo, or just to eat our lunch in private, where it was quiet and nobody would bother us. I
hid there for about a fortnight, sleepin’ on mattresses students had brought down there to make things
comfortable, sneakin’ out at night in disguise to try to get word about my family, eavesdroppin’ on
conversations around town.
“When I finally found out what had happened to them, it was too late. The Patrol never did catch
them – but they happened to come up in downtown Syrtis, right in the middle of Bogomir Plaza, early in
the afternoon, an’ the word had already spread, so when someone spotted ’em and recognized ’em, the
hue an’ cry went up immediately, and they were all caught by a mob about two minutes later. It
would’ve been far better if the Patrol had caught them – as it turned out, I heard later from a friend I
knew I could trust, even then, the Patrol really only wanted to call us all in and question us, keep us in
jail for a few nights, for our protection against the mob that would inevitably have come after us, then let
us go (always supposin’ we weren’t into Pharol-worship or somethin’ like that, which, for very good
reasons, is a crime almost all places, everywhere in the galaxy). The Patrol are assholes, like all cops –
’scuse my Jovian! – but they’re reasonable, uh, so-an’-sos. They just wanted to put a lid on the riot they
knew would likely develop over us, keep it from happening, an’ defuse it afterward, because they didn’t
want to have to deal with the sort of riot this kind of thing has caused from time to time here, an’ who
can blame ’em? Like I said, religious wars – an’ riots – are the worst kind.
“But that kark, the undercover agent, wasn’t a reasonable man. He was a bigot of the worst kind, the
sort that is thirsty for blood and just needs an excuse to go for it. He’d already spread the word himself
all over town about us, and when my mom and dad and sis’ come up out of a hole in the plaza in the
center of town, wasn’t anyone in the area who didn’t know who they were or what they were wanted for.
And . . . and within an hour or two, all three were dead,” he said, his voice breaking, tears standing in his
eyes.
“What – what happened to them, Lhari?” Lu’ asked him softly.
“They . . . they burned ’em alive,” he told her baldly, his voice stumbling on sobs. “The Jeddak of
the city leading the pack, they chained ’em right up to ol’ Bogomir’s statue, there, sprayed ’em with
gasoline an’ kerosene an’ anything else they could find that would burn, an’, an’, an’ – oh, Shar, no,
please . . .”
The rag he’d been pushing back and forth along the bar top now dropping from his hand, forgotten,
he suddenly collapsed over the bar, sobbing, Lu’ and I looking on helplessly, not knowing what to do or
By Yael R. Dragwyla
Page 32 of 37
say. Finally, timidly, I stepped up next to him, put an arm around his shoulders, and said, “Lhari, oh,
Lhari, go ahead, cry, it’s all right . . .”
It was only noon, and the saloon wouldn’t be open for business for hours yet. Knowing it was our
last day there in the room above the saloon, Lhari had invited both of us to have a good home-cooked
meal down there in the saloon, so he’d have a chance to tell us goodbye properly. He’d cooked up a feast
of Cerian yar-egg omelet, waffles cooked Terran-style and dripping with real Vermont maple syrup and
Sirian mer-goat butter, gallons of his good black coffee made from his private stash of (shhh!) contraband
real Jamaica Blue Mountain beans, berintha sausage imported from Titan, a pitcher of ice-cold, fresh-
squeezed roange-juice from fruit from the great under-glass orchards of Luna, and even, just for fun,
several fortune-cookies, courtesy of Johnnie Chang’s Import Emporium. All three of us had taken our
breakfast from plates set out on the bar, sitting on stools, Lu’ and I nearly swooning at the superb taste of
the food and coffee, Lhari delighted to play host. He’d finally decided we were more or less honorary
daughters, filling the hole in his heart left with the deaths and desertions of his wife and children and the
long-lost relatives we were only just now hearing about, and wouldn’t hear of our leaving without giving
us some sort of appropriate send-off. This breakfast was just right, no one around to bother us, the late-
summer sunlight spilling in through the saloon windows bright and clean, banishing the last remnants of
nightmare from the horror I’d only barely survived, thanks to Lhari.
And now we were leaving, and with us would go all he had to call family. “Lhari, Lhari – please
come with us! We’ll . . . we’ll miss you,” I told him.
Raising his head to look at me, his eyes red with weeping, he said, still choking on sobs, “Eshda,
dear, I’m an old man, I’d just get in the way. An’, an’ my kids are still around here . . . somewhere.
They might need me. An’, an’ I got to run this saloon – for a lot of people here, it’s all they got to call
home, you know?”
I didn’t know what to say. Then Lu’ interjected, “Er, how did you come here, though?”
His tears drying, his sobs having died away, he looked at her and smiled. “Well, you know, I just
had to put as much distance as I could between here and there. I got out of town fast as I could, changed
my name, dyed my hair, you know, and started lookin’ for a way to make my livin’ without anyone
knowin’ who I’d been before. Never went back. Never dared to. I’d had it all – and had to abandon
everything I had, the future I’d looked forward to. Didn’t dare try to continue m’ studies, or somebody
might have pegged me as a fugitive, for what I’d been. All I have left from my . . . earlier life is my
library, upstairs, in those rooms I use at the back of this building – that, and a few artifacts from this
planet an’ that, that anybody might be able to pick up in the flea markets, or buy off spacemen. Nothin’
else. Nothin’ incriminatin’.
“Well, once I’d gotten away from Syrtis, I did a bit of everything, tried carpentry, did some vere-
punchin’, out on the plains of Hellas Planitia, did some work on tramp cargo-barges on the canals,
collected the bounty on some dream-beasts that had somehow sprung up at the edges of some of the small
towns hereabouts in spite of everything that’s been done to exterminate the bastardly things – anything
goin’ to keep body an’ soul together, not darin’ to trade on m’ education for fear somebody’d make me
an’ turn me into the Patrol. Finally made my way here to Lakkdarol. There was an old man runnin’ this
very saloon, ol’ man Laaterigh, he an’ his family owned this building, ran the saloon and rented out the
upstairs rooms. – I said ‘family,’ I meant his daughter, Mhari, because by that time, Lhuci, his old lady,
Mhari’s mom, had long since gone to her reward (which was probably in Zandru’s coldest hells, f’m
everything I ever heard from anybody about the bitch, but that’s beside the point), one of his boys had
gone off to join the Patrol an’ had got hisself killed during a raid on the Syrtis Red Diamond Mines by a
couple of Terries, another had gone prospecting up by Olympus an’ never came back, and all he had left
was his daughter, Mhari.
“Mhari was a lovely little thing, the sweetest girl I’ve ever known, a heart of pure gold, she could
never turn away anyone. Right off, first day I come in here to get a drink and somethin’ to eat, she liked
me, an’ told her daddy so. The old man could never deny Mhari nothin’, loved her as much as I did,
ended up hirin’ me on as his assistant. Me an’ Mhari got married the followin’ Summer. Old man retired
two years later, we took care of him right up until he died, in the room next to ours right upstairs here in
this building. He’d willed the place to me an’ Mhari, and so we ran it after that. When the kids came
along, we’d thought of leavin’ it to them, but they all went away, didn’t want nothin’ to do with this
town. Can’t say as I blame ‘em, either, this place is the ass-end of Hell, only reason I’ve stayed on all
these years, I guess, is that this is where Mhari lived all her life, an’ where she died, and leavin’ it would
be like leavin’ her.
By Yael R. Dragwyla
Page 33 of 37
“So I guess I’ll stay, but . . .”
“But what?”
“Well, if I change my mind, maybe I’ll come lookin’ for the two of you, what do you say? Would
you mind an old man traipsin’ around with you? Eshda, you’re so like Mhari in some ways it makes my
heart break to look at you. An’ you, Lu’, you look like – well, let’s just say that Edhi wasn’t the only one
in our family to walk on the wild side. I mean, I been a family man an’ all that, I love the ladies, but
once, years ago, there was a Cytherian boy name of Derrol, an’, an’, well, you remind me an awful lot of
him, that’s all.”
“Lhari, we’d love to have you!” Lu’ told him. “I just wish you’d come with us now. Leaving you
here alone, in this Goddess-forsaken town . . . I worry about you, I really do.”
“Oh, I’ll be fine,” he said, grinning. “Don’t you worry about ol’ Lhari, I’ve survived things that
would’ve done in a Spican elephlynx! – And maybe, maybe someday I will come follow you. Where are
you going now?”
“There’s a place not far outside of town known as the entrance to the Lost Ryllian Mine, know it?”
“Yes, I do. Not many who go there – it’s said to be haunted, but that’s not it, it’s just that the place
is a hazard, whatchacallit, a dangerous nuisance. Sink-holes all over it, the ground is rotten, and the only
living things that lair up there are all poisonous as hell or like to bite you just look at ’em.”
“Okay, about two yards due east of the sign there, the one that warns everybody about entering there,
there’re two posts set about two feet apart. We’re going to walk up to those posts, give a signal, then
walk on through, and . . . well, we’ll come out someplace else.”
“What?!”
“Ever hear of a cosmic wormhole?” Lu’s asked him.
“Sh- er, sure, who hasn’t? They’re the basis of interstellar travel. Ships make ’em artificially, but
there’s lots of natural ones.”
“Okay, the same principle used for interstellar travel can open up a sort of gateway between worlds.
Slightly different application.”
“I’ve heard of that. But nobody uses ’em, except for a few experiments here and there. They’re
dangerous. You don’t know where you’re gonna come out, you could come out in the middle of a star or
somethin’. Almost impossible to control.”
“Well, apparently someone’s learned how to control it, at least to some extent,” Lu’ told him.
“There are several prospectors here who’ve used that one to go to someplace very like Terra and come
back with all sorts of things, gold, tin, platinum, even uranium.”
“Shin, Shar, an’ Mholi! And it’s dependable, they say?”
“Apparently. It can be . . . aimed, I guess is the word, toward certain types of environments, stable
within certain broad parameters. You know, certain temperature ranges, certain types of atmosphere, like
that. Using it – well, it’s a gamble, but the prospectors came back. Some of them, anyway. And it
seems to lead where we want to go.”
“Where do you want to go, then?”
“I – home, I guess. We’re an awful long way from home. It may take us back.”
“That’s . . . an awful risk you’re takin’. What if it ain’t home? What if you end up someplace a lot
farther away an’ a lot worse than this place?”
“We’ll . . . have to take that chance. You see . . . we got . . lost from . . . our home. My husband is
back there. I’ll never see him again unless . . . unless we take that chance. We could take a liner to
Terra, but . . . but it might not be our Earth, our Terra. I’m not sure how to explain it . . .”
“I know about parallel universes,” he said, shrugging. “Had friends in the physics department at
Syrtis U. We used to have royrull-sessions, way into the night, have a few brewskis an’ maybe smoke
some Olympus prime bud and kick all sorts of weird things around. In fact, they’d actually experimented
with contacting other universes, other world-lines. Managed to get back some good data, anyway.
They’re real. – But how do you know that the Terra on the other side of that . . . gateway is your Terra?”
“We . . . we don’t. If it isn’t, though, it may well lead to a way to get to our Earth. Our Terra. It’s a
long story, but I’m satisfied it’s worth all the risks.”
Turning to me, Lhari asked me somberly, “An’ you, Eshda, dear, what do you want to do?”
“I – I want to go where Lu’ goes,” I told him in a low voice.
“I – I see. . . . I understand. It’s kinda like my Derrol, ain’t it?” he said, smiling sadly. “I would
have gone anyplace that boy asked me to, jumped into the throat of the hottest volcanoes on Io for him,
By Yael R. Dragwyla
Page 34 of 37
just to be with him. I’d be with him now, but he went and got himself killed in a race the year before,
before my family . . . well, anyway, I understand.
“—Okay, then, you’ll want to be on your way now. Do you have transportation out there? I’ve got a
truck –”
“One of the things I did before I caught up with Esh’, here,” Lu’ told him, “was secure some
transportation. I’ve got two Mars-adapted Terran mules over in the livery stable. But – well, we can’t
take them with us where we’re going, I think. Lhari, would you have any use for two mules?”
“Sure!” he laughed. “If nothin’ else, I c’n always sell ’em – but Terrie mules are champions at hard
work, an’ there are things I could use ’em for around here from time to time. Sure, I’d be glad to take
’em after you – after you leave. – Tell you what? Why don’t I just take you two an’ your gear out there
in the truck, an’ you transfer title to the mules to me here, before you leave? It rides real smooth – a two-
year old Airway™, the pneumatics are almost like they was the day I bought her brand-new. No hazards
with rock-snakes or anything else.”
“Well . . . what do you think, Esh’?”
“Me? Sure, why not? Sounds good to me!”
“Great! Okay, ladies, get your gear an’ we’ll saddle up for the Lost Ryllian Mine! Maybe we’ll find
the ghost of ol’ man Fharris out there, an’ ask him where he buried his treasure an’ where the real mine
entrances are!” he said, laughing.
Quickly, the three of us cleared off the breakfast things and took them back to the kitchen. Lu’ and I
offered to wash them for Lhari, but he just waved his hands and said, “Naw, that’s my job, let’s leave
‘em for when I get back, an’ get on out to the Lost Ryllian.”
An hour later, standing next to the sign that warned, “DANGER! SINKHOLES – ROCKSNAKES –
PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK! THE PATROL WILL NOT GUARANTEE ANYONE’S SAFETY
BEYOND THIS POINT!”, Lu’ and I were saying to Lhari, “Sure you won’t come with us?”
“Ladies, I wish I could, I really do. But – isn’t there a Terrie poet, somebody named Fhrost or
somethin’, who said, ‘—But I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep . . . / And miles to
go before I sleep’? That’s me – I still got a few promises to keep.
“Okay, you girls be good now, an’ don’t you dare get mixed up again with anything like the Pallas,
or I’ll, I’ll –”
Sudden tears pouring from his eyes, Lhari came close and chastely kissed first me, then Lu’ on the
cheek. Then, whipping around and running as if from the devil himself, his sobs loud in the desert
silence, he ran pell-mell for his truck. Yanking open the front door and throwing himself into the driver’s
seat without a backward glance, he slammed the truck into gear and then shot off across the desert,
clouds of powdery white dust rising in his wake.
I looked at Lu’. Tears were running down her cheeks, like the ones flooding mine. “Oh, Esh’, I feel
so bad, leaving him here . . .”
“Lu’, he’s got things to do here, just like he said.”
“Maybe, maybe . . . God, that’s one person here I do hope we see again.”
“Me too. I liked him. I thought at first he was nothing but a fat old lech. I guess you just don’t
know until you’ve heard somebody’s story, do you?”
“Or stood shoulder-to-shoulder with him at the OK Corral. Man, oh, man, could that man shoot!”
Coming from Luciferia, who had taken awards all over the world for marksmanship even before she ever
met Erik, that was high praise indeed.
“Well, Lu’ darlin’, we’d best get on with it . . . Is that it, over there? Those two posts just east of
us?” I pointed.
“That’s it. C’mon.”
Slowly, not saying anything, each of us keeping our thoughts to ourselves, we walked toward the
posts, the bone-dry white dust rising in puffs about our boots as we walked along. Not far to one side, I
heard an ominous rustling sound, signaling the diving of a rocksnake into its tunnel. All around us we
could hear the strange, high buzzing of Martian sand-“crickets,” which weren’t really crickets at all, but
rather an indigenous arachnoid beastie which had somehow evolved a sexual signaling strategy very like
that of terrestrial crickets and katydids. Far off in the distance a banth gave a terrifying roar; the roar
was followed by a high squeal of agony – apparently the banth had been in pursuit of prey and, having
found something, had sunk the rows of long, needle-like fangs filling its long, long jaw into that
something. The scream was followed by a chorus of baying cries – a pack of feral calots following the
banth, hoping to scavenge whatever remained of its meal after it was done feeding on or playing with its
By Yael R. Dragwyla
Page 35 of 37
prey. (At one point during our stay here, I had toyed with the idea of going on a banth-hunt, see if I
could bag one – one of the few wild species on Mars that clearly wasn’t endangered (apparently the
devastation of the planet had killed off most of its competitors and rivals, but not enough of its prey to
make a real difference for it), it might have made an interesting trophy: almost hairless, with only a
large, bristly mane about its thick neck, it had a long, lithe body equipped with ten sturdy legs. Its paws
were all equipped with wicked retractable keratinoid scimitars, and its enormous mouth, which extended
far back of its tiny ears, was big enough to hold half the body of a grown man. It had a brain about the
size of a gooseberry, but was still smart enough to present a serious challenge to any would-be hunter.
Lu’ had finally dissuaded me from the idea – “Esh’, you’re the one who always used to lecture the rest of
us on not killing anything unnecessarily, and I can’t see anyone ever getting hungry enough to eat the
likes of that! And that ratty bald hide – honey, if you wore a coat or a pair of shoes made out of that,
you’d be laughed out of every bar on Mars!” Conceding that a banth-hunt would be a waste of
ammunition and far more trouble than it was worse, I finally gave up on the idea.)
When we got up to the posts, Lu’ said, ‘Wait here.” While I stood by, she walked up to the post on
the left, and, reaching down to its base, twiddled something there. Then she walked in front of the posts,
keeping herself between them and me, and twiddled something at the base of the other one. Suddenly,
between the posts, instead of the bare, flat Martian barrens that stretched away and away to the East, a
scene of heartbreaking loveliness appeared: lush, rolling green hills rising to purple mountains far in the
distance, and above them all a glorious blue sky filled with puffy white cumuli, Sol’s yellow light over
all. If it was any place other place than Earth, beautiful, beloved, lost Earth, it was one hell of a good
imitation. It looked the way California’s Central Valley must have looked in springtime or early summer
before the first European settlers got there, or parts of Washington State ditto. Wherever it was, it was
beautiful. I was tempted to fall on my face and kiss the ground.
“Lu’!”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. – Okay, we’re about ready. Is your pack trimmed? Everything in good
order?”
“Yep.”
“Okay, come on over here, take my hand –” She extended hers, and I took it quickly, squeezing it
gently as I did so.
“Now, on the count of three, we step through the posts, got it? One, two three –”
Moments later, we were standing in the midst of those green fields, still moist with morning dew,
clover and grasses nodding away in a gentle breeze. The scents of pollen and grass filled the air. Off in
the far distance a bird arrowed its way in a long dive toward the ground, perhaps a hawk or an eagle after
prey. After the dry, dusty barrens of Mars, it was paradise.
I looked back at the two posts that had served as our gateway to this place. Between them I could
see only the barren badlands of the Martian Dryland plains. I blinked – and then even that narrow slice
of Mars was gone, winked out as if it had never been, replaced by the same moist green fields that
stretched endlessly away everywhere else.
“Oh, Lu’ –”
“Uh, oh . . .”
“What? – Oh, shit!”
And moments later, we were surrounded by the horsemen who had come galloping up even as we
had stepped through the posts and into this world, wherever it was. All of them carried spears – and
every one of them was pointed straight at us.
“Lu’?”
“What?”
“I think we’re in deep shit . . .”
One of the horseman, who was dressed in clothing of a much finer cut, with far more decorations,
with the others, probably their leader, barked out something in a language that sounded vaguely like
Australian English, assuming there’d been millennia to drift so far away from the English we knew.
“What’s he saying, Eshda? Can you make it out? It sounds familiar, but I don’t know the
language.”
“It’s . . . it’s English, Lu’. It’s just –”
The leader of the horseman barked out a string of what sounded like curses. Then he snapped, “C’m
wid uz,” shaking his spear emphatically to make the point.
“He’s . . . he’s telling us to come with him.”
By Yael R. Dragwyla
Page 36 of 37
Even if we’d drawn our guns, there was no way we could have shot them all – there were about
twenty of them – before having to reload, and by then we’d have been dead from several spear-thrusts.
We had no choice.
Turning to face the leader squarely, I said, “We . . . come,” and put up my hands to signal what I
meant.
Staring hard at us for a moment, finally the leader nodded. Turning in his saddle, he issued a string
of commands to his men, two of whom began to dismount from their horses. Then, turning back to us,
with a string of gestures to underscore what he meant, he told us to take off our packs and relinquish any
weapons we might have.
There was nothing to do but go along with it for now. Soon, Lu’ and I, divested of our weapons –
the man who was entrusted with them was turning them over and over, intrigued, trying to puzzle out the
mechanisms – and our packs, were mounted on the two horses that had been made available to us, our
hands tied behind our backs. Fortunately, the saddles were equipped with stirrups, and with any luck
neither of us would fall off. Even so, it was a most awkward position.
When I tried to call out something to Lu’, a spear-point thrust about a millimeter from my nose made
it very clear that I was to shut up and keep shut. And so, not able even to communicate, Lu’ and I were
soon on our way to a place called Kine Gather, where someone called Rod-Master Kamin would decide
our fate. Just why we had been detained, and what charges would be pressed against us, was still a
complete mystery. Undoubtedly, however, we would, unhappily, find out what they were very soon.
By Yael R. Dragwyla
Page 37 of 37

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Level VII: The Violent

“. . . To you, I would have wished your work good cheer.

But that ungrateful, malignant folk who descend

Will make themselves, for good things that you do,

When the sweet fig in season comes to fruit.

To cleanse their habits from yourself. You’ll find

In hunger to consume you – then the grass

Of Romans who remained when Florence went wrong,

– Dante Alighieri, The Inferno, Canto XV:54-74

“You ladies movin’ on, then?” Lhari was asking Lu’.

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