the wind's twelve quarters (6 page)

So they were happy for the first time in their lives; so happy, in fact, that certain desires always before subjugated to the desire for knowledge, began to awaken. “I don’t suppose,” Barry said one night across the table, “that you ever thought much about marrying?”
 

“Well, no,” his friend answered, doubtfully. “That is, I’m in minor orders... and it seemed irrelevant....” “And expensive. Besides, in my time, no self-respecting woman would want to share my kind of life. American women are so damned poised and efficient and glamorous, terrifying creatures....”
 

“And women here are little and dark, like beetles, with bad teeth,” Lenoir said morosely.
 

They said no more about women that night. But the next night they did; and the next; and on the next, celebrating the successful dissection of the main nervous system of
a pregnant frog, they drank two bottles of Montrachet ’74 and got soused. “Let’s invoke a woman, Jehan,” Barry said in a lascivious bass, grinning like a gargoyle.
 

“What if I raised a devil this time?”
 

“Is there really much difference?”
 

They laughed wildly, and drew a pentagram. “Haere, haere,” Lenoir began; when he got the hiccups, Barry took over. He read the last words. There was a rush of cold, marshy-smelling air, and in the pentagram stood a wild-eyed being with long black hair, stark naked, screaming.
 

“Woman, by God,” said Barry.
 

“Is it?”
 

It was. “Here, take my cloak,” Barry said, for the poor thing now stood gawping and shivering. He put the cloak over her shoulders. Mechanically she pulled it round her, muttering, “Gratias ago, domine.”
 

“Latin!” Lenoir shouted. “A woman speaking Latin?” It took him longer to get over that shock than it did Bota to get over hers. She was, it seemed, a slave in the household of the Sub-Prefect of North Gaul, who lived on the smaller island of the muddy island town called
 

Lutetia. She spoke Latin with a thick Celtic brogue, and did not even know who was emperor in Rome in her day. A real barbarian, Lenoir said with scorn. So she was, an ignorant, taciturn, humble barbarian with tangled hair, white skin, and clear grey eyes. She had been waked from a sound sleep. When they convinced her that she was not dreaming, she evidently assumed that this was some prank of her foreign and all-powerful master the Sub-Prefect, and accepted the situation without further question. “Am I to serve you, my masters?” she inquired timidly but without sullenness, looking from one to the other.
 

“Not me,” Lenoir growled, and added in French to Barry, “Go on; I’ll sleep in the store-room.” He departed.
 

Bota looked up at Barry. No Gauls, and few Romans, were so magnificently tall; no Gauls and no Romans ever spoke so kindly. “Your lamp” (it was a candle, but she had never seen a candle) “is nearly burnt out,” she said. “Shall I blow it out?”
 

For an additional two sols a year the landlord let them use the store-room as a second bedroom, and Lenoir now slept alone again in the main room of the garret. He observed his friend’s idyll with a brooding, unjealous interest. The professor and the slave-girl loved each other with delight and tenderness. Their pleasure overlapped Lenoir in waves of protective joy. Bota had led a brutal life, treated always as a woman but never as a human. In one short week she bloomed, she came alive, evincing beneath her gentle passiveness a cheerful, clever nature. “You’re turning out a regular Parisienne,” he heard Barry accuse her one night (the attic walls were thin). She replied, “If you knew what it is for me not to be always defending myself, always afraid, always alone...”
 

Lenoir sat up on his cot and brooded. About midnight, when all was quiet, he rose and noiselessly prepared the pinches of sulfur and silver, drew the pentagram, opened the book. Very softly he read the spell. His face was apprehensive.
 

In the pentagram appeared a small white dog. It cowered and hung its tail, then came shyly forward, sniffed Lenoir’s hand, looked up at him with liquid eyes and gave a modest, pleading whine. A lost puppy... Lenoir stroked it. It licked his hands and jumped all over him, wild with relief. On its white leather collar was a silver plaque engraved, “Jolie. Dupont, 36 rue de Seine, Paris VIe.”
 

Jolie went to sleep, after gnawing a crust, curled up under Lenoir’s chair. And the alchemist opened the book again and read, still softly, but this time without self-consciousness, without fear, knowing what would happen.
 

Emerging from his store-room-bedroom-honeymoon in the morning, Barry stopped
short in the doorway. Lenoir was sitting up in bed, petting a white puppy, and deep in conversation with the person sitting on the foot of the bed, a tall red-haired woman
dressed in silver. The puppy barked. Lenoir said, “Good morning!” The woman smiled wondrously.
 

“Jumping Jesus,” Barry muttered (in English). Then he said, “Good morning. When are you from?” The effect was Rita Hayworth, sublimated—Hayworth plus the Mona Lisa, perhaps?
 

“From Altair, about seven thousand years from now,” she said, smiling still more wondrously. Her French accent was worse than that of a football-scholarship freshman. “I’m an archaeologist. I was excavating the ruins of Paris III. I’m sorry I speak the language so badly; of course we know it only from inscriptions.”
 

“From Altair? The star? But you’re human—I think—”
 

“Our planet was colonized from Earth about four thousand years ago—that is, three thousand years from now.” She laughed, most wondrously, and glanced at Lenoir. “Jehan explained it all to me, but I still get confused.”
 

“It was a dangerous thing to try it again, Jehan!” Barry accused him. “We’ve been awfully lucky, you know.”
 

“No,” said the Frenchman. “Not lucky.”
 

“But after all it’s black magic you’re playing with— Listen—I don’t know your name, madame.”
 

“Kislk,” she said.
 

“Listen, Kislk,” Barry said without even a stumble, “your science must be fantastically advanced—is there any magic? Does it exist? Can the laws of Nature really be broken, as we seem to be doing?”
 

“I’ve never seen nor heard of an authenticated case of magic.”
 

“Then what goes on?” Barry roared. “Why does that stupid old spell work for Jehan, for us, that one spell, and here, nowhere else, for nobody else, in five—no, eight—no, fifteen thousand years of recorded history? Why? Why? And where did that damn puppy come from?”
 

“The puppy was lost,” Lenoir said, his dark face grave. “Somewhere near this house, on the Ile Saint-Louis.”
 

“And I was sorting potsherds,” Kislk said, also gravely, “in a house-site, Island 2, Pit 4, Section D. A lovely Spring day, and I hated it. Loathed it. The day, the work, the people around me.” Again she looked at the gaunt little alchemist, a long, quiet look. “I tried to explain it to Jehan last night. We have improved the race, you see. We’re all very tall, healthy, and beautiful. No fillings in our teeth. All skulls from Early America have fillings in the teeth.... Some of us are brown, some white, some gold-skinned. But all beautiful, and healthy, and well-adjusted, and aggressive, and successful. Our professions and degree of success are preplanned for us in the State Pre-School Homes. But there’s an occasional genetic flaw. Me, for instance. I was trained as an archaeologist because the Teachers saw that I really didn’t like people, live people. People bored me. All like me on the outside, all alien to me on the inside. When everything’s alike, which place is home?... But now I’ve seen an unhygienic room with insufficient heating. Now I’ve seen a cathedral not in ruins. Now I’ve met a living man who’s shorter than me, with bad teeth and a short temper. Now I’m home, I’m where I can be myself, I’m no longer alone!”
 

“Alone,” Lenoir said gently to Barry. “Loneliness, eh? Loneliness is the spell, loneliness is stronger.... Really it doesn’t seem unnatural.”
 

Bota was peering round the doorway, her face flushed between the black tangles of her hair. She smiled shyly and said a polite Latin good-morning to the newcomer.
 

“Kislk doesn’t know Latin,” Lenoir said with immense satisfaction. “We must teach Bota some French. French is the language of love, anyway, eh? Come along, let’s go
out and buy some bread. I’m hungry.” Kislk hid her silver tunic under the useful and anonymous cloak, while Lenoir pulled on his moth-eaten black gown. Bota combed
her hair, while Barry thoughtfully scratched a louse-bite on his neck. Then they set forth to get breakfast. The alchemist and the interstellar archaeologist went first, speaking French; the Gaulish slave and the professor from Indiana followed, speaking Latin, and holding hands. The narrow streets were crowded, bright with sunshine. Above them Notre Dame reared its two square towers against the sky. Beside them the Seine rippled softly. It was April in Paris, and on the banks of the river the chestnuts were in bloom.
 

"The Masters” was my first published genuine authentic real virgin-wool science fiction story, by which I mean a story in which or to which the existence and the accomplishments of science are, in some way, essential. At least that is what I mean by science fiction on Mondays. On Tuesdays sometimes I mean something else.
 

Some science-fiction writers detest science, its spirit, method, and works; others like it. Some are anti-technology, others are technology-worshippers. I seem to be rather bored by complex technology, but fascinated by biology, psychology, and the speculative ends of astronomy and physics, insofar as I can follow them. The figure of the scientist is a quite common one in my stories, and most often a rather lonely one, isolated, an adventurer, out on the edge of things.
 

The theme of this story is one I returned to later, with considerably better equipment. It has a good sentence in it, though: “He had been trying to measure the distance between the earth and God.”
 

In darkness a man stood alone, naked, holding a smoking torch. The reddish glow lit air and ground for only a few feet; beyond that was the darkness, the immeasurable. From moment to moment there was a rush of wind, a half-glimpsed glitter of eyes, a vast mutter
 

ing: “Hold it higher!” The man obeyed, though the torch shook in his shaking hands. He raised it clear above his head, while the darkness rushed and jabbered around him, closing in. The wind blew colder, the red flame guttered. His rigid arms began to quiver, then to jerk a little; his face was oily with sweat; he barely heard the soft, huge jabbering, “Hold it up, up, hold it up....” The current of time had stopped; only the whispering grew and grew till it was a howling, and still, horribly, nothing touched him, nothing came within the circle of light. “Now walk!” the great voice howled. “Walk forward!”
 

The torch above his head, he stepped forward on the ground he could not see. It was not there. With a scream for help, he fell, darkness and thunder about him, the torch he would not let go flaming backward into his eyes.
 

Time... time, and light, and pain, they had all started again. He was crouching in some kind of ditch, on all fours in the mud. His face stung and his eyes, in this bright light, were full of fog. He looked up from his mud-blotched nakedness to a blurred, radiant figure standing above him. Light fell in glory on white hair, the long folds of a white cloak. The eyes gazed at Ganil, the voice spoke to him: “You lie in the Grave. You lie in the Grave of Knowledge. So lie your forefathers forever beneath the ashes of the fires of Hell.” The voice swelled out: “O fallen Man, arise!” Ganil managed to get to his feet. The white figure was pointing: “That is the Light of Human Reason. It guided you to the grave. Drop it.” Ganil realized he was still holding a mud-sodden black stick, the torch; he let it fall. “Now rise,” the white figure cried in a slow exaltation, “rise from darkness and walk in the Light of Common Day!” Hands reached to Ganil, helping and hauling him up. Men knelt offering him basins and sponges, others towelled him, rubbed him down till he stood clean and warm, a grey cloak round his shoulders, amid the chatting and laughter, coming and going, in the bright spacious hall. A bald man clapped his shoulder. “Come on, time for the Oath.”
 

“Did I—did I do all right?”
 

“Fine! Only you held up that damn fool torch so long. Thought you’d keep us growling around in the dark all day. Come on.” They led him over black pavement and under the very lofty, white-beamed ceiling, to a curtain that dropped, pure white, in a few straight folds, thirty feet from roof to floor. “Curtain of Mystery,” somebody
said to Ganil in a matter-of-fact tone. Laughing and talking had died away; they stood all around him, silent. In silence the white curtain parted. Ganil stared foggily at what was revealed; a high altar, a long table, and an old man in white. “Postulant, will you swear our Oath with us?” Somebody nudged Ganil, whispering, “I will.” “I will,” Ganil stuttered.
 

“Swear then, Masters of the Rite!” The old man raised up a shape of silver: an X-cross, supported by an iron shaft. “Under the Cross of the Common Day I swear never to reveal the rites and mysteries of my Lodge——”
 

“Under the Cross... I swear... the rites...” muttered all the men around Ganil, and propelled by another nudge he muttered with them.
 

“To live well, to work well, to think well—” As Ganil finished repeating this a voice whispered in his ear, “Don’t swear.”
 

“To avoid all heresies, to betray all necromancers to the Courts of College, and to obey the High Masters of my Lodge from now forth till my death—” Mutter, mutter. Some seemed to be repeating the long passage, some not; Ganil, confused, muttered a word or two and then stood silent. “And I swear never to teach the Mysteries of Machinery to any gentile. I swear this beneath the Sun.” A grating rumble almost drowned their voices. Slowly, crankily, a section of the roof was swinging back to reveal the yellow-grey, cloud-covered sky of summer. “Behold the Light of Common Day!” the old man in white cried out, triumphant, and Ganil stared up at it. The machinery apparently stuck before the skylight was fully open; there was a loud clanking of gears, then silence. The old man came forward, kissed Ganil on both cheeks, and said, “Welcome, Master Ganil, to the Inner Rite of the Mystery of the