The Jewels of Aptor Part 33

"What do you mean?" asked Geo.

"I just watched ten guys get hacked to pieces all over the sand, remember?"

They walked silently for a time.

"We'll come out at the head of the river. It's a huge marsh that drains off into the main channel," said Argo presently.

Late afternoon darkened quickly.

"I was wondering about something," Geo said, after a little while.

"What?" asked Argo.

"Hama said that once the jewels had been used to control minds, the person who used them was infected--"

"Rather the infection was already there," corrected Argo. "That just brought it out."

"Yes," said Geo. "Anyway, Hama also said that he was infected. When did he have to use the jewels?"

"Lots of times," Argo said. "Too many. The last time was when I was kidnaped. He used the jewel to control pieces of that thing you all killed in the City of New Hope to come and kidnap me and then leave the jewel in Leptar."

"A piece of that monster?" Geo exclaimed. "No wonder it decayed so rapidly when it was killed."

"Huh?" asked Iimmi.

"Argo, I mean your sister, told me they had managed to kill one of the kidnapers, and it melted the moment it died."

"We couldn't control the whole ma.s.s," she explained. "It really doesn't have a mind. But, like everything alive, it has, or had, the double impulse."

"But what did kidnaping you accomplish, anyway?" Iimmi asked.

Argo grinned. "It brought you here. And now you're taking the jewels away."

"Is that all?" asked Iimmi.

"Well," said Argo, "Isn't that enough?" She paused for an instant. "You know I wrote a poem about all this once, the double impulse and everything."

Geo recited:

"_By the dark chamber sits its twin, where the body's floods begin, and the two are twinned again, turning out and turning in._"

"How did you know?" she asked.

"The dark chamber is Hama's temple," Geo said. "Am I right?"

"And it's twin is Argo's," she went on. "They should be twins, really.

And then the twins again are the children. The force of age in each one opposed to the young force. See?"

"I see," Geo smiled. "And the body's floods, turning in and out?"

"That's sort of everything man does, his going and coming, his great ideas, his achievements, his little ideas too. It all comes from the interplay of those four forces."

"Four?" said Urson. "I thought it was just two."

"But it's thousands," Argo explained.

The air was drenching. The leaves had been s.h.i.+ny before. Now they dripped water on the loose ground. Pale light lapsed through the branches, s.h.i.+mmered, reflected from leaf to the wet underside of leaf.

The ground became mud.

Twice they heard a slos.h.i.+ng a few feet away, and then the scuttling of an unseen animal. "I hope I don't step on something that decides to take a chunk out of my foot."

"I'm pretty good at first aid," Argo said. "It's getting chilly," she added.

Just then Geo slipped and sank knee-deep in a muddy pool. Urson raced to the edge of the quicksand bog and grabbed Geo by his good arm. He pulled till Geo emerged, coated to the thigh with gray mud.

"You all right?" Urson asked. "You sure you're all right?"

Geo nodded, rubbing the stump of his arm with his good hand. "I'm all right," he said. The trees had almost completely given out. Geo suddenly saw the whole swamp sinking in front of him. He splashed a step backwards, but Urson caught his shoulder. The swamp wasn't sinking, though. But ripples had begun to appear over the water, spreading, crossing, webbing the whole surface with a net of tiny waves.

Then they began to rise up. Green backs broke the surface, wet and slippery. They were standing now, torrents cascading their green faces, green chests. Three of them, now a fourth. Four more, and then more, and then many more. They stood, now, these naked, green, mottled bodies.

Geo felt a sudden tugging in his head, at his mind. Looking around he saw that the others felt it too.

"Them ..." Urson started.

"They're the ones who carried us ..." Geo began. The tug came again, and they stepped forward.

Iimmi put his hand on his head. "They want us to go with them...." And suddenly they were going forward, slipping into the familiar state of half-consciousness which had come when they had crossed the river, to the City of New Hope, or when they had first fallen into the sea.

Wet hands fell on their bodies as they were guided through the swamp.

They were being carried through deeper water. Now they were walking over dry land where the vegetation was thicker, and slimy boulders caught shards of sunset on their wet flanks, blood leaking on the gray, the wet gray, and the green.

Through a rip in the arras of vegetation, they saw the moon push through the clouds, staining them silver. A rock rose in silhouette against the moon. On the rock a naked man stood, staring at the white disk. White highlighted one side of his body. As they pa.s.sed, he howled (or anyway, opened his mouth and threw his head back. But their ears were full of night and could not hear.) and dropped to all fours. A breeze blew momentarily in the sudden plume of his tail, in the scraggly hair of the under-belly, and light lay white on the points of his ears, his lengthened muzzle, his thinned hind legs. The animal turned its head once, and then scampered down the rock and into the darkness as a curtain of trees swung across the opened sky.

Eyes of flame whipped ahead of them as water swirled their knees once more. Then the water went down and sand washed back under the soles of their feet on the dark beach. The beating of the sea, the rush of the river, and the odor of the wet leaves that fingered their cheeks, prodded their s.h.i.+ns, and slapped against their bellies as they moved forward, all this fell away. Red eyes wavered into flaming tongues, and the tongues showed themselves housed in the mouths of a dozen caves.

Light flickered on the wet rocks and they entered the largest one. Their eyes suddenly focused once more. Foam washed back and forth over the sand floor, and black chains of weeds, caught in crevices on the rock, lengthened over the sand with the inrush of water. Webbed hands released them.

Brown rocks rose around in the firelight. They raised their eyes to where the Old One sat. The long spines were strung with shrunken membrane. His eyes, gray and indistinct, were close to the surface of his broad nostriled face. A film of water trickled over the rock where he sat. Others stood about him, on various levels of the rock.

The tugging left them, and they glanced at one another now. Outside the cave it was raining hard. Geo saw that Argo's hair had wet to dark auburn and hugged her head now, making little streaks down her neck.

Suddenly a voice boomed at them, like an echo, more than the reverberation that the cave would give. "Carriers of the jewels," it began, and suddenly Geo realized that it was the same hollowness that accompanied Snake's soundless messages. "We have brought you here to give a warning. We are the oldest forms of intelligence on this planet,"

continued the Old One from the throne. "We have watched from the delta of the Nile the rise of the pyramids; we have seen the murder of Caesar from the banks of the Tiber. We watched the Spanish Armada destroyed by English, and we followed Man's great metal fish through the ocean before the Great Fire. We have never aligned ourselves with either Argo or Hama, but rise in the s.e.xless swell of the ocean. We can warn you, as we have warned man before. As before, some will listen, some will not. Your minds are your own, now. That I pledge you. Now, I warn you; cast the jewels into the sea.

"Nothing is ever lost in the sea, and when the evil has been washed from them with time and brine, they will be returned to man. For then time and brine will have washed away his imperfections also.

"No living intelligence is free from their infection, nothing with the double impulse of life. But we are old, and can hold them for a million years before we will be so infected as you are. Your young race is too condensed in its living to tolerate such power at its fingers now. Again I say: cast these into the sea.