Baby Is Three (36 page)

“Line,” said a low voice.

It was the cowled figure of a Guardian, waiting quietly in the moonlight to unleash hot green death.

“Now I’m going home,” thought Bronze, quite coldly and rationally.

He stayed where he was.

Then he saw the other Guardian, moving as if on a track—slowly, steadily, with no hint of a leg-motion—just an inhuman glide. Snails move like that. Centipedes. The stories of monsters from the other side of the Gateway suddenly flooded into his mind.

Bronze saw something else. If the second Guardian moved farther out, away from the Hall, he, Bronze, would be in a straight line between the two of them—

There was an abrupt, intense feeling in his stomach, as if his dinner rabbit had come to life again and had hopped. He rose to his feet. His mouth was dry.

The second Guardian was now out of sight, still moving toward that point which would bracket Bronze in verdant flame.

“Line,” said the second voice, and then came the first of the two greatest shocks of Bronze’s life.

With a glare of bright white light, a face appeared in midair—twenty feet off the ground—in front of the blank wall of the building.

“Guardian!” sang a deep, organlike voice.

The face was Garth Gesell’s.

“Gesell!” gasped a Guardian. Sobbing, he ran toward the light. The other followed slowly. Bronze could begin to see, in the nimbus of light from the radiant face, Gesell’s whole body. It hung in the air, perhaps a third of the way down the wall, with one arm thrust forward. The other hand seemed to be behind his back.

“Stop!” intoned the voice. “Remove your habits, Guardian, for I have returned!”

The Guardian from the left faltered, stopped. He stripped off his robe and cast it aside. The other followed suit. The two naked figures moved toward the building, like sleepwalkers. And as they did so, the shining face slid slowly and majestically to the ground. The Guardians fell to their knees and bowed to the earth at his feet. The light disappeared.

“Bronze?” Garth spoke quietly, but the syllable snapped Bronze out of his awed reverie. He leapt to his feet and sprinted across the wide court, to receive his second mighty shock.

Garth stood erect against the wall, and Bronze realized the stiffness of utter exhaustion in his stance. “Watch ’em,” Garth whispered, and turned his flashlight on the two reverent figures.

One of them was a girl.

The long-tethered wild horses reared up in Bronze’s brain. There was an explosion of desire that jolted him to the marrow. He bent quickly and took her arm. “Stand up, you.”

She did.

She looked at him from wide, untroubled eyes. She made no attempt to cover herself or to cower. She met his gaze, and simply waited.

There were two kinds of women on Earth—the Escaped, and the Returned. The Escaped had been passed over by the hunting Ffanx—by chance, by luck, by sheer animal cunning on the part of the women or the men who hid them. They had been fair game for the Ffanx while the Ffanx ruled Earth, and they were fair game for any of the hundred-odd men who were left to compete for each of them.

And of the Earth’s few women, perhaps one in a thousand was Returned. Almost invariably the Ffanx had slaughtered the women. But once in a long, long while they let the woman go. Why, no human ever understood. Perhaps it was capriciousness, perhaps it was done for experimentation. But in the rough ethic of a heterogeneous, dark-age society—all that was left of Earth culture after the Ffanx had conquered and then were destroyed in their turn—these women were sacrosanct. They had paid. Their very existence on the planet was a narrative and a dirge; they were the walking sorrow of Earth. And they were not to be touched. It was all that could be done for their loss and their loneliness. They knew it, and they walked without fear.

The wild horses within Bronze settled. They gentled, quieted, as if some firm, known hand had touched their flaring nostrils.

“Sister,” he said, “I’m sorry.”

She barely inclined her head. She turned then to Garth and said in a low voice, “What can we do for the master?”

Garth sighed. “I have come a long way. My friend and I need
rest. Guard as you always have, and in the morning there will be a new day, and nothing will ever be the same again for any of us.”

The girl touched the shoulder of the other Guardian. “Come.”

He rose. He was a slender, dark-browed youth with the wild frightened eyes of a chipmunk. He had white flesh and stick-like arms, and a very great dignity. “Master,” he said to Garth. In his tone was subservience, but an infinitely proud sense of service rather than a humble one. He and the girl went into the building.

“Sexless,” said Bronze. It was an identification only, there was no scorn.

Garth said, “I’m tired.”

“You sleep. I’ll watch,” said Bronze.

“You can sleep too,” said Garth. “We’re in, Bronze. Really in.”

“Bronze …”

The big man was on his feet, weapons in hand, before Gesell’s voice had ceased. He cast about the room, saw no immediate menace, and crossed to the bed. “You all right?”

Garth stretched luxuriously. “Never better, though I feel as if my shoulder-joints needed oiling … what’s for breakfast?”

Bronze went to the door and flung it open, filling his mighty lungs to shout. He didn’t. The girl was standing there, waiting.

Garth saw her. “Come in—Good Lord, girl, you must be freezing!”

“I haven’t had your permission …” she said gravely.

“Go dress. And tell the other Guardian to put on some clothes. What’s your name?”

“Viki.”

“What’s his name—that other Guardian?”

“Daw, Master.”

“Good. My name’s not Master. It’s Garth, or Gesell, whichever suits you. This is Bronze. Is there anything to eat?”

“Yes, Garth Gesell.”

Garth pursed his lips. Her intonation of his name was infinitely more adoring, even, than her “Master.” He said, “We’ll be out in a
minute. I want you to eat with us, do you understand? You and the other, both.”

“A great honor, Garth Gesell.” She smiled, and it did wonders for the fine-drawn austerity of her face.

She waited a moment, and when Garth apparently had nothing more to say, she left. She backed to the door.

Breakfast was an acutely uncomfortable affair. They ate at a small square table in the hall under the portrait of the first Gesell. It might have been a picture of Garth five or ten years older. They had always looked alike.

Viki, now dressed in the conventional short flowing tunic fastened only by a wide belt, sat demure and quiet, speaking only when spoken to, and screening her constant gaze at Garth with her long lashes. Daw stared straight ahead out of round, permanently astonished eyes, and tried hard, apparently, to avoid looking directly at Gesell. Bronze grinned broadly at Garth’s discomfiture and ignored the prim looks of the two Guardians.

Garth waited until the meal was finished, and then put his palms down on the table. “We have work to do.”

They turned to him so raptly and obediently that for a moment he lost his train of thought. Bronze looked as if he was about to laugh. Garth shot him a venomous look and said to the Guardians, “But I want you to talk first. I’ve been away a long time. I want the history of this place as you know it, especially where it concerns the Gateway.”

Viki and Daw looked at one another. Garth said, “Come on, come on—”

Daw composed himself, folded his hands on the edge of the table, and cast his eyes down. “In the year of the Ffanx,” he intoned, “on the meadows of Hack and Sack, there appeared a blue light shaped like a great arched doorway, filled with a flickering mist.”

“We trust in Gesell,” muttered Viki.

“And there came from this archway a creature as long as a hand and as heavy as four times its mass in lead castings. It sniffed at the air, and it took up some soil, and it lifted a box which it held to its
head, and it smelled out our women. It called, then; and out of the archway came more of its kind in the hundreds of thousands, wearing strange trappings and bringing machines to work evil. And these were the Ffanx.”

“We trust in Gesell,” murmured the girl.

Garth opened his mouth to speak, and closed it abruptly. He had a quick ear, and he had rapidly caught the cadences of Daw’s voice. No one speaks like that naturally. This wasn’t a report, it was a singsong ritual.

“At first the world wondered, at first the world laughed at the Ffanx. For the Ffanx were so tiny, and their ships were like toys, and they spread over Earth without harming a soul, and submitted to capture and acted like comical dolls. They covered the planet and when they were ready—they struck.”

He put his head down on his folded hands as he spoke the last two words. Viki droned, “We trust in Gesell.”

Daw straightened up and now his voice deepened. His eyes were wide, and fixed on nothing in the room. As he spoke, Garth found himself fascinated by the almost imperceptible motion of Bronze’s shaggy head as it nodded in time to the dactylic beat of Daw’s speech.

“They struck at our women. They found them in homes and in caves and in churches: killed them by millions. Their weapons were hammers of force from the sky, inaudible sounds that drove strong men to kill their own daughters and slaughter themselves. And then the foul Ffanx would sweep in their bodies.

“And sometimes they herded them, flashing about in their sleek little airships, smashing the men and propelling the foot-weary women along to great pens in the open. They walled them about with their fences of force and destroyed all attacks from outside, and then at their leisure they killed all our females, this one today and then that one, and two or two thousand tomorrow. And Earth saw its blackest, its sorriest day …

“Earth was united in madness.”

“We trust in Gesell.”

“Gesell was a giant who lived on a hill, a worker of wonders who turned from his works to the solving of problems for Earth. Of all
men on Earth, he alone learned the nature of Ffanx and the land whence they came and the spell he could cast to destroy them. It was he who devised a retreat for the women that not even Ffanx could detect. He set up a Gateway and passed women through it—women with beauty and women with mind, and any and all of the women with child who could come to the Gateway.

“And the Earth had turned savage, and men lost their reason and stormed up the hill of Gesell, and they tried to pass into the gateway and get to the women. With some it was hunger, with some it was cowardice. So Gesell, all unwilling, constructed defenses, appointed the Guardians, gave instructions to kill all who came in attack, be they human or Ffanx.”

“We trust in Gesell.”

“And this is the Word of Gesell:

“ ‘Guard the Gateway with your lives. Make no attempt to open it, or the Ffanx will find it and take the treasure it hides. When the time is right, the women will open the Gateway themselves—or I or another Gesell will open it from this side. But guard it well.’

“That is the Word of Gesell, and the end of his word; and he alone knows if there was to be more; for that was the end of Gesell. The Ffanx came and killed him, but dying, he cast a great spell and they died. They died on two worlds and the menace is done with. And Earth is in darkness and waits for Gesell to return, and the Gateway to open. And meanwhile the Word of Gesell is the hope of the world:

“Guard the Gateway.”

Daw’s voice died away. Bronze sat as if mesmerized. Viki’s lips moved silently in the response.

Garth slapped his hand down suddenly, shockingly. “This is going to hurt,” he gritted. “Daw, where did that—that recitation come from? Where did it start?”

“It’s the Word of Gesell,” said Daw, wonderingly. “Everybody—”

“We repeat it morning and night,” Viki interposed, “to strengthen us in our duty.”

“But whose phrases are they? Who made it up?”

“Garth Gesell,
you
must know … or perhaps you are testing us.”

“Will you answer the question?”

“I learned it from Daw,” said Viki.

“I learned it from Soames, who had it from Elbert and Vesta, who were taught by Gesell himelf.”

Garth closed his eyes. “Elbert … Holy smoke! He was the …” He stopped himself in time. He remembered Elbert—a dreamy scholar with whom his father used to have long and delightful philosophical discussions, and who, at other times, pushed a broom around the laboratories. Garth began to see the growth of this myth, born in the poetic mind of a misfit.

He looked into their rapt faces. “I’m going to tell you the same story that you told me,” he said flatly, “but without the mumbo-jumbo.”

“Gesell was my father. He was a great man and a good one. He was
not
nine feet tall, Bronze. And—” he turned to the Guardians—“he was not a ‘worker’ of spells.

“Now to your legend. ‘The meadows of Hack and Sack’ are swampland just south of what used to be, before the Ffanx came, the greatest city on Earth. The real name is Hackensack. The blue arch wasn’t magic, it was science—it was the same thing as the Gateway itself, though of a slightly different kind.

“The Ffanx were small and heavy because they came from an area where molecular structure is far more compressed than it is here. And they struck at our women for a good reason. It wasn’t viciousness and it wasn’t for sport. It was, to them, a vital necessity. And that necessity made it useless to think of driving them off, defeating them. They had to be
destroyed
, not defeated. I won’t go into the deeper details of inter-dimensional chemistry. But I want you to know exactly what the Ffanx were after—you’ll understand them a lot better.

“There is no great difference, physically, between men and women. I mean, bone structure, metabolism, heart and lung and muscular function are different in quality but not in kind. But there is one thing that women produce that men do not. It’s a complex protein substance called extradiol. One of its parts is called extradiol
beta-prime
, and is the only way in which human extradiol differs from
that of other female animals. With it, they’re women. Without it, they’re nothing … cold, sexless … ruined.