Part 6 (1/2)
We circled the high wall of white marble keeping some twenty feet away, where the gra.s.s gave knee-high cover we could drop into instantly. We came around to the far side from the cliff, and stopped where a paved highway ran smooth, like pebbled gla.s.s, straight across the valley. I glanced at Carna, she gestured toward the open gate in the wall, and smiled a daring word.
”In...?”
”In!” I answered, and like two kids, hand in hand, we stole through the shadowed gateway, sliding quickly out of the light, standing with our backs to the wall, looking up the long, dim-lit way along which a myriad dark doorways told of life. But it was seemingly deserted. Carna whispered softly:
”When it was ours, the night was gay with life and love, now--_it is death!_”
”Death or taxes, we're going to take a look.”
We stole along the shadowed side of the street, the moon was up, shedding much too bright a light now for comfort. Perhaps a hundred yards along that strange street we went, I letting the Zoorph lead the way, for I had an idea she must know the city and have some plan, or she would not be here. If she meant to use me to escape into my world, I was all for her.
Then, from ahead, came the sound of feet, many of them in unison. We darted into a doorway, crouched behind a bal.u.s.trade. Nearer came the feet, and I peered between the interstices of the screening bal.u.s.trade.
The feet came on; slow, rhythmic, marching without zest or pause or break, perfection without snap. As the first marching figure came into sight in the moonlight, I shuddered to the core with something worse than fear.
For they were men who were no longer men! When Barto and Polter and Noldi had been carried off unconscious, Nokomee had told me:
”They are not my people. They go their way and we go ours. Time has made us a people divided. Time, _and a cruel science_.”
These were the mole-men, the crab-men, the creatures built for specific purposes as tools are built. Each _thing_ bore on his back a bale of goods, or a bar of metal, a burden sizeable enough for two ordinary men.
They were strong, and they were silent and smooth-moving as machines. I realized they _were_ machines--made out of flesh.
”Are these slaves, or what?” I asked Carna.
”These were once the slaves, or workmen of the race of Zervs. They now serve the Schrees, for they are mindless, in a way. They are not important. It is those who guard and guide them I wait to see. I have not yet seen a Schree, but only heard the Zervs describe them.”
The nightmare procession went on for minutes, long minutes that were to me a nightmare. Yet I realized that if I had been raised to the idea of humankind made into machines, it would not be revolting--not after they had been hereditarily moulded for centuries into what they were. Yet what a crime it was, what they might have been if left to develop as nature intended, rather than as man cruelly mal-intended. They must have been once specially selected for strength as well as beauty, for about them was a sad and terrible grace, a remainder of n.o.ble chiseling of brow and nostril, distorted as by a fiend into the horror that it was--these had once been a n.o.ble race!
”Do you feel the terrible horror of this sight?” I asked Carna.
”Always I have felt the horror that was done to them in the past. It is _still_ done to man. Look, there are the three who came with you, and fell into the hands _of the priests_. They are the thing that the Zervs _really fear_, yet they live with it, and have done so for centuries.
They can despise the Schrees, but they are as bad themselves--look!”
I followed with my eye her pointing finger. Yes, that figure _was_ hulking Barto, and I almost yelled ”Jake, snap out of it!” before I remembered my own peril.
Then he came into the full light, and pa.s.sed not twenty feet away. I leaned against the railing of stone, sick as a dog and retching. They had made him over, with some unknown aborted science of an evil world!
Jake was clubfooted, lumbering, with his jaws grown into great jowls of bone, his arms elongated and ending in hooks. Two of the fingers, or the thumb and finger had been enlarged or grafted into a bone-like semblance of a crab's claw. What he was going to be when they got through, I didn't know, but neither did Jake. He didn't know anything! He clumped along, his crossed eyes unmoving, his back bent with a weight heavy for even his broad shoulders--a man no longer, but a mindless zombie. A cross-eyed zombie!
I cursed silently, tearing my hands against the stone as I resisted the impulse to fire and fire again upon those hopping, thin, white things that came after.
”Just _what_ are those hopping things?”
”They are a separate race, who have lived with both Zervs and with Schrees. They are a part of our life. You have dogs, horses, machines.
We have _Jivros_--that is, priests--and we have the workmen we call s.h.i.+nros, and too, we have the Zoorphs!” She laughed a little as I stared at her. ”Do not worry, the Zoorphs are not really so different. But the Schrees and s.h.i.+nros _are_ different.”
”d.a.m.ned, beastly, demoniac life it must be.”
”To you, who expect things to be like your knowledge tells you it must be. To us, it is our way. For a Zerv, or for a Schree, it is a good way.