I Sing the Body Electric (32 page)

And all the while there was a gathering of earthquake in the ground and in the air, which Parkhill chose to ignore.

“You're leaving, of course,” he said, as if nothing were wrong. “I knew you would. Why?”

“Why?” Wilder wheeled like a dragonfly before a trembling of storm wind. Buffeted up, buffeted down, he flung his words at Parkhill, who didn't bother to duck but smiled up and accepted. “Good God, Sam, the place is Hell. The Martians had enough sense to get out. They saw they
had overbuilt themselves. The damn City does everything, which is too much! Sam!”

But at that instant, they both looked round and up. For the sky was shelling over. Great lids were vising in the ceiling. Like an immense flower, the tops of buildings were petalling out to cover themselves. Windows were shutting down. Doors were slamming. A sound of fired cannons echoed through the streets.

The Gate was thundering shut.

The twin jaws of the Gate, shuddering, were in motion.

Wilder cried out, spun round, and dived.

He heard the maid below him. He saw her reach up. Then, swooping, he gathered her in. He kicked the air. The jet lifted them both.

Like a bullet to a target he rammed for the Gate. But an instant before, burdened, he reached it, the Gates banged together. He was barely able to veer course and soar upward along the raw metal as the entire City shook with the roar of the steel.

Parkhill shouted below. And Wilder was flying up, up along the wall, looking this way and that.

Everywhere, the sky was closing in. The petals were coming down, coming down. There was only a last small patch of stone sky to his right. He blasted for that. And kicking, made it through, flying, as the final flange of steel clipped into place, and the City was closed to itself.

He hung for a moment, suspended, and then flew down along the outer wall to the dock where Aaronson stood by the yacht staring at the huge shut Gates.

“Parkhill,” whispered Wilder, looking at the City, the walls, the Gates. “You fool. You damned fool.”

“Fools, all of them,” said Aaronson, and turned away. “Fools. Fools.”

They waited a moment longer and listened to the City, humming, alive, kept to itself, its great mouth filled with a few bits of warmth, a few lost people somewhere hid away in there. The Gates would stay shut now, forever. The City had what it needed to go on a long while.

Wilder looked back at the place, as the yacht took them back out of the mountain and away up the canal.

They passed the poet a mile further on, walking along the rim of the canal. He waved them on. “No. No, thanks. I feel like walking. It's a fine day. Good-bye. Go on.”

The towns lay ahead. Small towns. Small enough to be run by men instead of running them. He heard the brass music. He saw the neon lights at dusk. He made out the junkyards in the fresh night under the stars.

Beyond the towns stood the silver rockets, tall, waiting to be fired off and away toward the wilderness of stars.

“Real,” whispered the rockets, “real stuff. Real travel. Real time. Real space. No gifts. Nothing free. Just a lot of good hard work.”

The yacht touched into its home dock.

“Rockets, by God,” he murmured. “Wait till I get my hands on you.”

He ran away in the night, to do just that.

T
he sundials were tumbled into white pebbles. The birds of the air now flew in ancient skies of rock and sand, buried, their songs stopped. The dead sea bottoms were currented with dust which flooded the land when the wind bade it reenact an old tale of engulfment. The cities were deep laid with granaries of silence, time stored and kept, pools and fountains of quietude and memory.

Mars was dead.

Then, out of the large stillness, from a great distance, there was an insect sound which grew large among the cinnamon hills and moved in the sun-blazed air until the highway trembled and dust was shook whispering down in the old cities.

The sound ceased.

In the shimmering silence of midday, Albert Beck and Leonard Craig sat in an ancient landcar, eyeing a dead city which did not move under their gaze but waited for their shout:

“Hello!”

A crystal tower dropped into soft dusting rain.

“You there!”

And another tumbled down.

And another and another fell as Beck called, summoning them to death. In shattering flights, stone animals with vast granite wings dived to strike the courtyards and fountains. His cry summoned them like living beasts and the beasts gave answer, groaned, cracked, leaned up, tilted over, trembling, hesitant, then split the air and swept down with grimaced mouths and empty eyes, with sharp, eternally hungry teeth suddenly seized out and strewn like shrapnel on the tiles.

Beck waited. No more towers fell.

“It's safe to go in now.”

Craig didn't move. “For the same reason?”

Beck nodded.

“For a damned
bottle!
I don't understand. Why does everyone want it?”

Beck got out of the car. “Those that found it, they never told, they never explained. But—it's old. Old as the desert, as the dead seas—and it might contain anything. That's what the legend says. And because it
could
hold anything—well, that stirs a man's hunger.”

“Yours, not mine,” said Craig. His mouth barely moved; his eyes were half-shut, faintly amused. He stretched lazily. “I'm just along for the ride. Better watching you than sitting in the heat.”

Beck had stumbled upon the old landcar a month back, before Craig had joined him. It was part of the flotsam of the First Industrial Invasion of Mars that had ended when the race moved on toward the stars. He had worked on the motor and run it from city to dead city, through the lands of the idlers and roustabouts, the dreamers and lazers, men caught in the backwash of space, men like himself and Craig who had never wanted to do much of anything and had found Mars a fine place to do it in.

“Five thousand, ten thousand years back the Martians made the Blue Bottle,” said Beck. “Blown from Martian glass—and lost and found and lost and found again and again.”

He stared into the wavering heat shimmer of the dead city. All my life, thought Beck, I've done nothing and nothing inside the nothing. Others, better men, have done big things, gone off to Mercury, or Venus, or out beyond the System. Except me. Not me. But the Blue Bottle can
change
all that.

He turned and walked away from the silent car.

Craig was out and after him, moving easily along. “What is it now, ten years you've hunted? You twitch when you sleep, wake up in fits, sweat through the days. You want the damn bottle
that
bad, and don't know what's in it. You're a fool, Beck.”

“Shut up, shut up,” said Beck, kicking a slide of pebbles out of his way.

They walked together into the ruined city, over a mosaic of cracked tiles shaped into a stone tapestry of fragile Martian creatures, long-dead beasts which appeared and disappeared as a slight breath of wind stirred the silent dust.

“Wait,” said Beck. He cupped his hands to his mouth and gave a great shout. “You there!”

“…there,” said an echo, and towers fell. Fountains and stone pillars folded into themselves. That was the way of these cities. Sometimes towers as beautiful as a symphony would fall at a spoken word. It was like watching a Bach cantata disintegrate before your eyes.

A moment later: bones buried in bones. The dust settled. Two structures remained intact.

Beck stepped forward, nodding to his friend.

They moved in search.

And, searching, Craig paused, a faint smile on his lips. “In that bottle,” he said, “is there a little accordion woman, all folded up like one of those tin cups, or like one of those Japanese flowers you put in water and it opens out?”

“I don't need a woman.”

“Maybe you do. Maybe you never had a
real
woman, a woman who loved you, so, secretly, that's what you hope is in it.” Craig pursed his mouth. “Or maybe, in that bottle, something from your childhood. All in a tiny bundle—a lake, a tree you climbed, green grass, some crayfish. How's
that
sound?”

Beck's eyes focused on a distant point. “Sometimes—that's almost it. The past—Earth. I don't know.”

Craig nodded. “What's in the bottle would depend, maybe, on who's looking. Now, if there was a shot of
whiskey
in it…”

“Keep looking,” said Beck.

There were seven rooms filled with glitter and shine; from floor to tiered ceiling there were casks, crocks, magnums, urns, vases—fashioned of red, pink, yellow, violet, and black glass. Beck shattered them, one by one, to eliminate them, to get them out of the way so he would never have to go through them again.

Beck finished his room, stood ready to invade the next. He was almost afraid to go on. Afraid that
this
time he would find it; that the search would be over and the meaning would go out of his life. Only after he had heard of the Blue Bottle from fire-travelers all the way from Venus to Jupiter, ten years ago, had life begun to take on a purpose. The fever had lit him and he had burned steadily ever since. If he worked it properly, the prospect of finding the bottle might fill his entire life to the brim. Another thirty years, if he was careful and not
too
diligent, of search, never admitting aloud that it wasn't the bottle that counted at all, but the search, the running and the hunting, the dust and the cities and the going-on.

Beck heard a muffled sound. He turned and walked to a window looking out into the courtyard. A small gray sand cycle had purred up almost noiselessly at the end of the street. A plump man with blond hair eased himself off the spring seat and stood looking into the city. Another searcher. Beck sighed. Thousands of them, searching and searching. But there were thousands of brittle cities and towns and villages and it would take a millennium to sift them all.

“How you doing?” Craig appeared in a doorway.

“No luck.” Beck sniffed the air. “Do you smell anything?”

“What?” Craig looked about.

“Smells like—bourbon.”

“Ho!” Craig laughed. “That's
me!
”

“You?”

“I just took a drink. Found it in the other room. Shoved some stuff around, a mess of bottles, like always, and one of them had some bourbon in it, so I had myself a drink.”

Beck was staring at him, beginning to tremble. “What—what would bourbon be doing
here
, in a Martian bottle?” His hands were cold. He took a slow step forward. “Show me!”

“I'm sure that…”

“
Show
me, damn you!”

It was there, in one corner of the room, a container of Martian glass as blue as the sky, the size of a small fruit, light and airy in Beck's hand as he set it down upon a table.

“It's half-full of bourbon,” said Craig.

“I don't see anything inside,” said Beck.

“Then shake it.”

Beck picked it up, gingerly shook it.

“Hear it gurgle?”

“No.”

“I can hear it plain.”

Beck replaced it on the table. Sunlight spearing through a side window struck blue flashes off the slender container. It was the blue of a star held in the hand. It was the blue of a shallow ocean bay at noon. It was the blue of a diamond at morning.

“This is it,” said Beck quietly. “I know it is. We don't have to look anymore. We've found the Blue Bottle.”

Craig looked skeptical. “Sure you don't
see
anything in it?”

“Nothing … But—” Beck bent close and peered deeply into the blue universe of glass. “Maybe if I open it up and let it out, whatever it is, I'll know.”

“I put the stopper in tight. Here.” Craig reached out.

“If you gentlemen will excuse me,” said a voice in the door behind them.

The plump man with blond hair walked into their line of vision with a gun. He did not look at their faces, he looked only at the blue glass bottle. He began to smile. “I hate very much to handle guns,” he said, “but it is a matter of necessity, as I simply
must
have that work of art. I suggest that you allow me to take it without trouble.”

Beck was almost pleased. It had a certain beauty of timing, this incident; it was the sort of thing he might have wished for, to have the treasure stolen before it was opened. Now there was the good prospect of a chase, a fight, a series of gains and losses, and, before they were done, perhaps another four or five years spent upon a new search.

“Come along now,” said the stranger. “Give it up.” He raised the gun warningly.

Beck handed him the bottle.

“Amazing. Really amazing,” said the plump man. “I can't believe it was as simple as this, to walk in, hear two men talking, and to have the Blue Bottle simply
handed
to me. Amazing!” And he wandered off down the hall, out into the daylight, chuckling to himself.

Under the cool double moons of Mars the midnight cities were bone and dust. Along the scattered highway the landcar bumped and rattled, past cities where the fountains, the gyrostats, the furniture, the metal-singing books, the paintings lay powdered over with mortar and insect wings. Past cities that were cities no longer, but only things rubbed to a fine silt that flowered senselessly back and forth on the wine winds between one land and another, like the sand in a gigantic hourglass, endlessly pyramiding and repyramiding. Silence opened to let the car pass, and closed swiftly in behind.

Craig said, “We'll never find him. These damned roads. So old. Potholes, lumps, everything wrong. He's got the advantage with the cycle; he can dodge and weave. Damn!”

They swerved abruptly, avoiding a bad stretch. The car moved over the old highway like an eraser, coming upon blind soil, passing over it, dusting it away to reveal the emerald and gold colors of ancient Martian mosaics worked into the road surface.

“Wait,” cried Beck. He throttled the car down. “I saw something back there.”

“Where?”

They drove back a hundred yards.

“There. You see. It's
him
.”

In a ditch by the side of the road the plump man lay folded over his cycle. He did not move. His eyes were wide, and when Beck flashed a torch down, the eyes burned dully.

“Where's the bottle?” asked Craig.

Beck jumped into the ditch and picked up the man's gun. “I don't know. Gone.”

“What killed him?”

“I don't know that either.”

“The cycle looks okay. Not an accident.”

Beck rolled the body over. “No wounds. Looks like he just—stopped, of his own accord.”

“Heart attack, maybe,” said Craig. “Excited over the bottle. He gets down here to hide. Thought he'd be all right, but the attack finished him.”

“That doesn't account for the Blue Bottle.”

“Someone came along. Lord, you know how many searchers there are....”

They scanned the darkness around them. Far off, in the starred blackness, on the blue hills, they saw a dim movement.

“Up there.” Beck pointed. “Three men on foot.”

“They must have…”

“My God, look!”

Below them, in the ditch, the figure of the plump man glowed, began to melt. The eyes took on the aspect of moonstones under a sudden rush of water. The face began to dissolve away into fire. The hair resembled small firecracker strings, lit and sputtering. The body fumed as they watched. The fingers jerked with flame. Then, as if a gigantic hammer had struck a glass statue, the body cracked upward and was gone in a blaze of pink shards, becoming mist as the night breeze carried it across the highway.

“They must have—
done
something to him,” said Craig. “Those three, with a new kind of weapon.”

“But it's happened before,” said Beck. “Men I knew about who had the Blue Bottle. They vanished. And the bottle passed on to others who vanished.” He shook his head. “Looked like a million fireflies when he broke apart....”

“You going after them?”

Beck returned to the car. He judged the desert mounds, the hills of bone-silt and silence. “It'll be a tough job, but I think I can poke the car through after them. I
have
to, now.” He paused, not speaking to Craig. “I think I know what's in the Blue Bottle.... Finally, I realize that what I want most of all is in there. Waiting for me.”

“I'm not going,” said Craig, coming up to the car where Beck sat in the dark, his hands on his knees. “I'm not going out there with you, chasing three armed men. I just want to live, Beck. That bottle means nothing to me. I won't risk my skin for it. But I'll wish you luck.”

“Thanks,” said Beck. And he drove away, into the dunes.

The night was as cool as water coming over the glass hood of the landcar.

Beck throttled hard over dead river washes and spills of chalked pebble, driving between great cliffs. Ribbons of double moonlight painted the bas-reliefs of gods and animals on the cliff sides all yellow gold:
mile-high faces upon which Martian histories were etched and stamped in symbols, incredible faces with open cave eyes and gaping cave mouths.