Hard-Luck Diggings: The Early Jack Vance, Volume One (6 page)

He looked in back of him, and in the blurring of his eyes could not distinguish what he saw. He turned, took a step forward—

He was intruding. He felt the sudden irritated attention of gigantic personalities.

He gazed about the glassy floor, and the faintest of watery gray lights seeping down from above collected in the concavity where he stood. Space was vast, interminable, without perspective.

Kelly saw the beings he had disturbed—felt rather
than saw them: a dozen giant shapes looming above.

One of these shapes formed a thought, and a surge of meaning permeated space, impinged on Kelly’s mind, willy-nilly translating
itself into words:

“What is this thing? From whose world did it come?”

“From mine.” This must be Han. Kelly looked from shape to shape, to determine which the god might be.

“Remove it quickly—” and to Kelly’s mind came a jumble of impressions he had no words to express. “We must deal with the matter of…” Again a quick listing of ideas which refused to translate in Kelly’s mind. He felt Han’s attention focussing
on him. He stood transfixed, waiting for the obliteration he knew to be imminent.

But he held the jewels, and their green glow shone up through his fingers. He cried out, “Wait, I came here for a purpose; I want a planet put back
where it belongs, and I have jewels to pay—”

He felt the baleful pressure of Han’s will on his mind—increasing, increasing; he groaned in helpless anguish.

“Wait,” came a calm thought, transcendently clear and serene.

“I must destroy it,” Han protested. “It is the enemy of my jewel-senders.”

“Wait,” came from yet another of the shades, and Kelly caught a nuance of antagonism to Han. “We must act judicially.”

“Why are you here?” came the query of the Leader.

Kelly said, “The Han priests are murdering people of my race, ever since the planet we live on was moved. It’s not right.”

“Ah!” came a thought like an exclamation from the Antagonist. “Han’s jewel-senders do evil and unnatural deeds.”

“A minor matter, a minor matter,” came
the restless thought of still another shape. “Han must protect his jewel-senders.”

And Kelly caught the implication that the jewel-sending was of cardinal importance; that the jewels were vital to the gods.

The Antagonist chose to make an issue of the matter. “The condition of injustice which Han has effected must be abated.”

The Leader meditated. And now came a sly thought to Kelly, which he sensed had been channelled to his mind alone. It came from the Antagonist.
“Challenge Han to a…” The thought could only be translated as ‘duel’.
“I will aid you. Relax your mind.” Kelly, grasping at any straw, loosened his mental fibers, and
felt something like a damp shadow entering his brain, absorbing, recording…All in an instant. The contact vanished.

Kelly
felt the Leader’s mind wavering over in
favor of Han. He said hurriedly, improvising as best he could: “Leader, in one of the legends of Earth, a man journeyed to the land of the giants. As they came to kill him, he challenged the foremost to a duel with his life at stake.” “
Of three trials
,” came a thought. “Of three trials,” added Kelly. “In the story, the man won and was permitted to return to his native land. After this fashion let
me duel in three trials with Han.”

The surge of thoughts thickened the air—rancorous contempt from Han, sly encouragement from the Antagonist, amusement from the Leader.

“You invoke a barbaric principle,” said the Leader. “But by a simple yet rigorous logic, it is a just device, and shall be honored. You shall duel Han in three trials.”

“Why waste time?” inquired Han. “I can powder him to less than the atoms of
atoms.”

“No,” said the Leader. “The trial may not be on a basis of sheer potential. You and this man are at odds over an issue which has no fundamental right or wrong. It is the welfare of his people opposed
to the welfare of your jewel-senders. Since the issues are equal, there would be no justice in an unequal duel. The trial must be on a basis which will not unwontedly handicap either party.”

“Let a problem be stated,” suggested the Antagonist. “He who first arrives at a solution wins the trial.”

Han was scornfully silent. So the Leader formulated a problem—a terrific statement whose terms were dimensions
and quasi-time and a dozen concepts which Kelly’s brain could in no wise grasp. But the Antagonist intervened.

“That is hardly a fair problem, lying
as it does entirely out of the man’s experience. Let me formulate a problem.” And he stated a situation which at first startled Kelly, and then brought him hope.

The problem was one he had met a year previously at the station. A system to integrate twenty-five different communication bands into one channel was under consideration, and it was necessary to thrust a beam of protons past a bank of twenty-five mutually inter-acting
magnets and hit a pin-point filter at the far end of the case. The solution was simple enough—a statement of the initial vector in terms of a coordinate equation and a voltage potential—yet the solution had occupied the station calculator for
two months. Kelly knew this solution as he knew his own name.

“Hurry!” came the Antagonist’s secret thought.

Kelly blurted out the answer.

There was a wave of astonishment through the group, and he felt their suspicious inspection.

“You are quick indeed,” said the Leader, non-plussed.

“Another problem,” called the Antagonist. Once more he brought a question from Kelly’s experience, this concerning the behavior of positrons in the secondary layer of a star in a cluster of six, all at specified temperatures and masses. And this time Kelly’s mind worked faster. He immediately stated the answer. Still he anticipated Han by mere seconds.

Han protested, “How could this small pink brain move faster than my cosmic consciousness?”

“How is this?” asked the Leader. “How do you calculate so swiftly?”

Kelly fumbled for ideas, finally strung together a lame statement: “I do not calculate. In my brain is a mass of cells whose molecules form themselves into models of the problems. They move in an instant, the problem is solved, and the solution comes to me.”

Anxiously he waited, but the reply seemed to satisfy the group. These creatures—or gods, if such they were—were they so naïve? Only the Antagonist suggested complex motives. Han, Kelly sensed, was old, of great force, of a hard and inflexible nature. The Leader was venerable beyond thought, calm and untroubled as space itself.

“What now?” came from the Antagonist. “Shall there be another problem? Or shall the man be declared the victor?”

Kelly would have been well pleased to let well enough alone, but this evidently did not suit the purposes of the Antagonist; hence his quiet jeer.

“No!” The thoughts of Han roared forth almost like sound. “Because of a ridiculous freak in this creature’s brain, must I admit him my superior? I can fling him through a thousand dimensions with a thought, snap him out of existence, out of memory—”

“Perhaps because you are a god,”
came the Antagonist’s taunt, “and of pure”—another confusing concept, a mixture of energy, divinity, force, intelligence. “The man is but a combination of atoms, and moves through the oxidation of carbon and hydrogen. Perhaps if you were as he, he might face you hand to hand and defeat you.”

A curious tenseness stiffened the mental atmosphere. Han’s thoughts came sluggishly, tinged for the first time with doubt.

“Let that be the third trial,” said the Leader composedly. Han gave a mental shrug. One of the towering shadows shrunk, condensed, swirled to a man-like shape, solidified further, at last stood facing Kelly, a thing like a man, glowing with a green phosphorescence like the heart of the Seven-year Eye.

The Antagonist’s secret thought came to Kelly: “Seize the jewel at the back of the neck.”

Kelly
scanned the slowly advancing figure. It was exactly his height and heft, naked, but radiating an inhuman confidence. The face was blurred, fuzzy, and Kelly could never afterward describe the countenance. He tore his gaze away.

“How do we fight?” he demanded, beads of sweat dripping from his body. “Do we set any rules—or no holds barred?”

“Tooth and nail,” came the calm thoughts of the Leader. “Han now has organic sensibilities like yours. If you kill this body, or render it unconscious, you win. If you lose this trial, then we shall decide.”

“Suppose he kills me?” objected Kelly, but no one seemed to heed his protest.

Han came glaring-eyed at him. Kelly took a step backward, jabbed tentatively with his left fist. Han rushed forward. Kelly punched furiously, kneed the onrushing body, heard it grunt and fall, to leap erect instantly. A tingle of joy ran down Kelly’s spine, and more confidently he stepped forward, lashing out with rights and lefts. Han leapt close and clinched his arms around Kelly’s body. Now he began to squeeze, and Kelly felt a power greater than any man’s in those green-glowing arms.

“The jewel,” came a sly thought. Sparks were exploding in Kelly’s eyes; his ribs creaked. He swung a frenzied hand, clawing at Han’s neck. He felt a hard protuberance, he dug his nails under, tore the jewel free.

A shrill cry of utmost pain and horror—and the god-man puffed away into black smoke which babbled in a frenzy back and forth through the darkness. It surged around Kelly, and little tendrils of the smoke seemed to pluck at the jewel clenched in his hand. But they had no great force, and Kelly found he could repel the wisps with the power of his own brain.

He suddenly understood the function of the jewel. It was the focus for the god. It centralized the myriad forces. The jewel gone, the god was a welter of conflicting volitions, vagrant impulses, insubstantial.

Kelly felt the Antagonist’s triumphant thoughts. And he himself felt an elation he had never known before.
The Leader’s cool comment brought him back to himself:

“You seem to have won the contest.” There was a pause. “In the absence of opposition we will render any requests you may make.” There was no concern in his thoughts for the decentralized Han. The black smoke was dissipating, Han was no more than a memory. “Already you have delayed us long. We have the problem of”—the now familiar confusion of ideas, but this time Kelly understood vaguely. It seemed that there was a vortex of universes which possessed consciousness, as mighty or mightier than these gods, which was driving on a course that would be incommoding. There were qualifications, a host of contributory factors.

“Well,” said Kelly, “I’d like you to move the planet I just came from back to its old orbit around Magra Taratempos. If you know what planet and what star I’m talking about.”

“Yes.” The
Leader made a small exertion. “The world you mention moves in its previous orbit.”

“Suppose the Han priests come through the portal and want it moved again?”

“The portal no longer exists. It was held open by Han; when Han dissolved, the portal closed…Is that the total of your desires?”

Kelly’s mind raced, became a turmoil. This was his chance. Wealth, longevity, power, knowledge…Somehow thoughts would not form themselves—and there were curses attached to unnatural gifts—

“I’d like to get back to Bucktown safely…”

Kelly
found himself in the glare of the outer world. He stood on the hill above Bucktown, and he breathed the salt air of the marshes. Above hung a hot white sun—Magra Taratempos.

He became aware of an object clenched in his hand. It was the
jewel he had torn out of Han’s neck. There were two others in his pocket.

Across the city he saw the light-blue and stainless-steel box of the station. What should he tell Herli and Mapes? Would they believe the truth? He looked at the three jewels. Two he could sell for a fortune on Earth. But one shone brilliantly in the bright sunlight and that was for Lynette Mason’s tan and graceful neck.

Afterword to “The Temple of Han”

Talking shop has never appealed much to me, and I have spent most of my career trying to avoid it…

Early in my career I established a set of rather rigid rules as to how fiction should be written, but I find these rules difficult to formalize, or explain, or put into some sort of pattern which might instruct someone else. If I adhere to any fundamental axiom or principle in my writing, perhaps it is my belief that the function of fiction is essentially to amuse or entertain the reader. The mark of good writing, in my opinion, is that the reader is not aware that the story has been written; as he reads, the ideas and images flow into his mind as if he were living them. The utmost accolade a writer can receive is that the reader is incognizant of his presence.

In order to achieve this, the writer must put no obstacles in the reader’s way. Therefore I try avoid words that he must puzzle over, or that he cannot gloss from context; and when I make up names, I shun the use of diacritical marks that he must sound out, thus halting the flow; and in general, I try to keep the sentences metrically pleasing, so that they do not obtrude upon the reader’s mind. The sentences must swing…

Before my first sale: “The World-Thinker”…I wrote an epic novel in the style of E.E. Smith’s cosmic chronicles. My own epic was rejected everywhere. I finally broke it into pieces and salvaged a few episodes for short stories. I think that “The Temple of Han” (originally “The God and Temple Robber”) was one of these altered episodes.

—Jack Vance

The Masquerade on Dicantropus

Two puzzles dominated the life of Jim Root. The first, the pyramid out in the desert, tickled and prodded his curiosity, while the second, the problem of getting along with his wife, kept him keyed to a high pitch of anxiety and apprehension. At the moment the problem had crowded the mystery of the pyramid into a lost alley of his brain.

Eyeing his wife uneasily, Root decided that she was in for another of her fits. The symptoms were familiar—a jerking over of the pages of an old magazine, her tense back and bolt-upright posture, her pointed silence, the compression at the corners of her mouth.