The Door Through Space
M >> Marion Zimmer Bradley >> The Door Through Space=THE DOOR THROUGH SPACE=
Marion Zimmer Bradley
ACE BOOKS
A Division of Charter Communications Inc.
1120 Avenue of the Americas
New York, N.Y. 10036
THE DOOR THROUGH SPACE
Copyright (c), 1961, by Ace Books, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
... _across half a Galaxy, the Terran Empire maintains its sovereignty
with the consent of the governed. It is a peaceful reign, held by
compact and not by conquest. Again and again, when rebellion threatens
the Terran Peace, the natives of the rebellious world have turned
against their own people and sided with the men of Terra; not from fear,
but from a sense of dedication._
_There has never been open war. The battle for these worlds is fought in
the minds of a few men who stand between worlds; bound to one world by
interest, loyalties and allegiance; bound to the other by love._
_Such a world is Wolf. Such a man was Race Cargill of the Terran Secret
Service._
* * * * *
RENDEZVOUS ON A LOST WORLD
Copyright (c), 1961, by Ace Books, Inc.
Printed in U.S.A.
* * * * *
=Author's Note:--=
I've always wanted to write. But not until I discovered the old pulp
science-fantasy magazines, at the age of sixteen, did this general
desire become a specific urge to write science-fantasy adventures.
I took a lot of detours on the way. I discovered s-f in its golden age:
the age of Kuttner, C.L. Moore, Leigh Brackett, Ed Hamilton and Jack
Vance. But while I was still collecting rejection slips for my early
efforts, the fashion changed. Adventures on faraway worlds and strange
dimensions went out of fashion, and the new look in
science-fiction--emphasis on the _science_--came in.
So my first stories were straight science-fiction, and I'm not trying to
put down that kind of story. It has its place. By and large, the kind of
science-fiction which makes tomorrow's headlines as near as this
morning's coffee, has enlarged popular awareness of the modern,
miraculous world of science we live in. It has helped generations of
young people feel at ease with a rapidly changing world.
But fashions change, old loves return, and now that Sputniks clutter up
the sky with new and unfamiliar moons, the readers of science-fiction
are willing to wait for tomorrow to read tomorrow's headlines. Once
again, I think, there is a place, a wish, a need and hunger for the
wonder and color of the world way out. The world beyond the stars. The
world we _won't_ live to see. That is why I wrote THE DOOR THROUGH
SPACE.
--MARION ZIMMER BRADLEY
* * * * *
CHAPTER ONE
Beyond the spaceport gates, the men of the Kharsa were hunting down a
thief. I heard the shrill cries, the pad-padding of feet in strides just
a little too long and loping to be human, raising echoes all down the
dark and dusty streets leading up to the main square.
But the square itself lay empty in the crimson noon of Wolf. Overhead
the dim red ember of Phi Coronis, Wolf's old and dying sun, gave out a
pale and heatless light. The pair of Spaceforce guards at the gates,
wearing the black leathers of the Terran Empire, shockers holstered at
their belts, were drowsing under the arched gateway where the
star-and-rocket emblem proclaimed the domain of Terra. One of them, a
snub-nosed youngster only a few weeks out from Earth, cocked an
inquisitive ear at the cries and scuffling feet, then jerked his head at
me.
"Hey, Cargill, you can talk their lingo. What's going on out there?"
I stepped out past the gateway to listen. There was still no one to be
seen in the square. It lay white and windswept, a barricade of
emptiness; to one side the spaceport and the white skyscraper of the
Terran Headquarters, and at the other side, the clutter of low
buildings, the street-shrine, the little spaceport cafe smelling of
coffee and _jaco_, and the dark opening mouths of streets that rambled
down into the Kharsa--the old town, the native quarter. But I was alone
in the square with the shrill cries--closer now, raising echoes from the
enclosing walls--and the loping of many feet down one of the dirty
streets.
Then I saw him running, dodging, a hail of stones flying round his head;
someone or something small and cloaked and agile. Behind him the
still-faceless mob howled and threw stones. I could not yet understand
the cries; but they were out for blood, and I knew it.
I said briefly, "Trouble coming," just before the mob spilled out into
the square. The fleeing dwarf stared about wildly for an instant, his
head jerking from side to side so rapidly that it was impossible to get
even a fleeting impression of his face--human or nonhuman, familiar or
bizarre. Then, like a pellet loosed from its sling, he made straight for
the gateway and safety.
And behind him the loping mob yelled and howled and came pouring over
half the square. Just half. Then by that sudden intuition which
permeates even the most crazed mob with some semblance of reason, they
came to a ragged halt, heads turning from side to side.
I stepped up on the lower step of the Headquarters building, and looked
them over.
Most of them were _chaks_, the furred man-tall nonhumans of the Kharsa,
and not the better class. Their fur was unkempt, their tails naked with
filth and disease. Their leather aprons hung in tatters. One or two in
the crowd were humans, the dregs of the Kharsa. But the star-and-rocket
emblem blazoned across the spaceport gates sobered even the wildest
blood-lust somewhat; they milled and shifted uneasily in their half of
the square.
For a moment I did not see where their quarry had gone. Then I saw him
crouched, not four feet from me, in a patch of shadow. Simultaneously
the mob saw him, huddled just beyond the gateway, and a howl of
frustration and rage went ringing round the square. Someone threw a
stone. It zipped over my head, narrowly missing me, and landed at the
feet of the black-leathered guard. He jerked his head up and gestured
with the shocker which had suddenly come unholstered.
The gesture should have been enough. On Wolf, Terran law has been
written in blood and fire and exploding atoms; and the line is drawn
firm and clear. The men of Spaceforce do not interfere in the old town,
or in any of the native cities. But when violence steps over the
threshold, passing the blazon of the star and rocket, punishment is
swift and terrible. The threat should have been enough.
Instead a howl of abuse went up from the crowd.
"_Terranan!_"
"Son of the Ape!"
The Spaceforce guards were shoulder to shoulder behind me now. The
snub-nosed kid, looking slightly pale, called out. "Get inside the
gates, Cargill! If I have to shoot--"
The older man motioned him to silence. "Wait. Cargill," he called.
I nodded to show that I heard.
"You talk their lingo. Tell them to haul off! Damned if I want to
shoot!"
I stepped down and walked into the open square, across the crumbled
white stones, toward the ragged mob. Even with two armed Spaceforce men
at my back, it made my skin crawl, but I flung up my empty hand in token
of peace:
"Take your mob out of the square," I shouted in the jargon of the
Kharsa. "This territory is held in compact of peace! Settle your
quarrels elsewhere!"
There was a little stirring in the crowd. The shock of being addressed
in their own tongue, instead of the Terran Standard which the Empire has
forced on Wolf, held them silent for a minute. I had learned that long
ago: that speaking in any of the languages of Wolf would give me a
minute's advantage.
But only a minute. Then one of the mob yelled, "We'll go if you give'm
to us! He's no right to Terran sanctuary!"
I walked over to the huddled dwarf, miserably trying to make himself
smaller against the wall. I nudged him with my foot.
"Get up. Who are you?"
The hood fell away from his face as he twitched to his feet. He was
trembling violently. In the shadow of the hood I saw a furred face, a
quivering velvety muzzle, and great soft golden eyes which held
intelligence and terror.
"What have you done? Can't you talk?"
He held out the tray which he had shielded under his cloak, an ordinary
peddler's tray. "Toys. Sell toys. Children. You got'm?"
I shook my head and pushed the creature away, with only a glance at the
array of delicately crafted manikins, tiny animals, prisms and crystal
whirligigs. "You'd better get out of here. Scram. Down that street." I
pointed.
A voice from the crowd shouted again, and it had a very ugly sound. "He
is a spy of Nebran!"
"_Nebran--_" The dwarfish nonhuman gabbled something then doubled
behind me. I saw him dodge, feint in the direction of the gates, then,
as the crowd surged that way, run for the street-shrine across the
square, slipping from recess to recess of the wall. A hail of stones
went flying in that direction. The little toy-seller dodged into the
street-shrine.
Then there was a hoarse "Ah, aaah!" of terror, and the crowd edged away,
surged backward. The next minute it had begun to melt away, its entity
dissolving into separate creatures, slipping into the side alleys and
the dark streets that disgorged into the square. Within three minutes
the square lay empty again in the pale-crimson noon.
The kid in black leather let his breath go and swore, slipping his
shocker into its holster. He stared and demanded profanely, "Where'd the
little fellow go?"
"Who knows?" the other shrugged. "Probably sneaked into one of the
alleys. Did you see where he went, Cargill?"
I came slowly back to the gateway. To me, it had seemed that he ducked
into the street-shrine and vanished into thin air, but I've lived on
Wolf long enough to know you can't trust your eyes here. I said so, and
the kid swore again, gulping, more upset than he wanted to admit. "Does
this kind of thing happen often?"
"All the time," his companion assured him soberly, with a sidewise wink
at me. I didn't return the wink.
The kid wouldn't let it drop. "Where did you learn their lingo, Mr.
Cargill?"
"I've been on Wolf a long time," I said, spun on my heel and walked
toward Headquarters. I tried not to hear, but their voices followed me
anyhow, discreetly lowered, but not lowered enough.
"Kid, don't you know who he is? That's Cargill of the Secret Service!
Six years ago he was the best man in Intelligence, before--" The voice
lowered another decibel, and then there was the kid's voice asking,
shaken, "But what the hell happened to his face?"
I should have been used to it by now. I'd been hearing it, more or less
behind my back, for six years. Well, if my luck held, I'd never hear it
again. I strode up the white steps of the skyscraper, to finish the
arrangements that would take me away from Wolf forever. To the other end
of the Empire, to the other end of the galaxy--anywhere, so long as I
need not wear my past like a medallion around my neck, or blazoned and
branded on what was left of my ruined face.
CHAPTER TWO
The Terran Empire has set its blazon on four hundred planets circling
more than three hundred suns. But no matter what the color of the sun,
the number of moons overhead, or the geography of the planet, once you
step inside a Headquarters building, you are on Earth. And Earth would
be alien to many who called themselves Earthmen, judging by the
strangeness I always felt when I stepped into that marble-and-glass
world inside the skyscraper. I heard the sound of my steps ringing into
thin resonance along the marble corridor, and squinted my eyes,
readjusting them painfully to the cold yellowness of the lights.
The Traffic Division was efficiency made insolent, in glass and chrome
and polished steel, mirrors and windows and looming electronic clerical
machines. Most of one wall was taken up by a TV monitor which gave a
view of the spaceport; a vast open space lighted with blue-white mercury
vapor lamps, and a chained-down skyscraper of a starship, littered over
with swarming ants. The process crew was getting the big ship ready for
skylift tomorrow morning. I gave it a second and then a third look. I'd
be on it when it lifted.
Turning away from the monitored spaceport, I watched myself stride
forward in the mirrored surfaces that were everywhere; a tall man, a
lean man, bleached out by years under a red sun, and deeply scarred on
both cheeks and around the mouth. Even after six years behind a desk, my
neat business clothes--suitable for an Earthman with a desk job--didn't
fit quite right, and I still rose unconsciously on the balls of my feet,
approximating the lean stooping walk of a Dry-towner from the Coronis
plains.
The clerk behind the sign marked TRANSPORTATION was a little rabbit of a
man with a sunlamp tan, barricaded by a small-sized spaceport of desk,
and looking as if he liked being shut up there. He looked up in civil
inquiry.
"Can I do something for you?"
"My name's Cargill. Have you a pass for me?"
He stared. A free pass aboard a starship is rare except for professional
spacemen, which I obviously wasn't. "Let me check my records," he
hedged, and punched scanning buttons on the glassy surface. Shadows came
and went, and I saw myself half-reflected, a tipsy shadow in a flurry of
racing colors. The pattern finally stabilized and the clerk read off
names.
"Brill, Cameron ... ah, yes. Cargill, Race Andrew, Department 38,
transfer transportation. Is that you?"
I admitted it and he started punching more buttons when the sound of the
name made connection in whatever desk-clerks use for a brain. He stopped
with his hand halfway to the button.
"Are you Race Cargill of the Secret Service, sir? _The_ Race Cargill?"
"It's right there," I said, gesturing wearily at the projected pattern
under the glassy surface.
"Why, I thought--I mean, everybody took it for granted--that is, I
heard--"
"You thought Cargill had been killed a long time ago because his name
never turned up in news dispatches any more?" I grinned sourly, seeing
my image dissolve in blurring shadows, and feeling the long-healed scar
on my mouth draw up to make the grin hideous. "I'm Cargill, all right.
I've been up on Floor 38 for six years, holding down a desk any clerk
could handle. You for instance."
He gaped. He was a rabbit of a man who had never stepped out of the safe
familiar boundaries of the Terran Trade City. "You mean _you're_ the man
who went to Charin in disguise, and routed out The Lisse? The man who
scouted the Black Ridge and Shainsa? And you've been working at a desk
upstairs all these years? It's--hard to believe, sir."
My mouth twitched. It had been hard for me to believe while I was doing
it. "The pass?"
"Right away, sir." He punched buttons and a printed chip of plastic
extruded from a slot on the desk top. "Your fingerprint, please?" He
pressed my finger into the still-soft surface of the plastic, indelibly
recording the print; waited a moment for it to harden, then laid the
chip in the slot of a pneumatic tube. I heard it whoosh away.
"They'll check your fingerprint against that when you board the ship.
Skylift isn't till dawn, but you can go aboard as soon as the process
crew finishes with her." He glanced at the monitor screen, where the
swarming crew were still doing inexplicable things to the immobile
spacecraft. "It will be another hour or two. Where are you going, Mr.
Cargill?"
"Some planet in the Hyades Cluster. Vainwal, I think, something like
that."
"What's it like there?"
"How should I know?" I'd never been there either. I only knew that
Vainwal had a red sun, and that the Terran Legate could use a trained
Intelligence officer. And _not_ pin him down to a desk.
There was respect, and even envy in the little man's voice. "Could
I--buy you a drink before you go aboard, Mr. Cargill?"
"Thanks, but I have a few loose ends to tie up." I didn't, but I was
damned if I'd spend my last hour on Wolf under the eyes of a deskbound
rabbit who preferred his adventure safely secondhand.
But after I'd left the office and the building, I almost wished I'd
taken him up on it. It would be at least an hour before I could board
the starship, with nothing to do but hash over old memories, better
forgotten.
The sun was lower now. Phi Coronis is a dim star, a dying star, and once
past the crimson zenith of noon, its light slants into a long
pale-reddish twilight. Four of Wolf's five moons were clustered in a
pale bouquet overhead, mingling thin violet moonlight into the crimson
dusk.
The shadows were blue and purple in the empty square as I walked across
the stones and stood looking down one of the side streets.
A few steps, and I was in an untidy slum which might have been on
another world from the neat bright Trade City which lay west of the
spaceport. The Kharsa was alive and reeking with the sounds and smells
of human and half-human life. A naked child, diminutive and
golden-furred, darted between two of the chinked pebble-houses, and
disappeared, spilling fragile laughter like breaking glass.
A little beast, half snake and half cat, crawled across a roof, spread
leathery wings, and flapped to the ground. The sour pungent reek of
incense from the open street-shrine made my nostrils twitch, and a
hulked form inside, not human, cast me a surly green glare as I passed.
I turned, retracing my steps. There was no danger, of course, so close
to the Trade City. Even on such planets as Wolf, Terra's laws are
respected within earshot of their gates. But there had been rioting here
and in Charin during the last month. After the display of mob violence
this afternoon, a lone Terran, unarmed, might turn up as a solitary
corpse flung on the steps of the HQ building.
There had been a time when I had walked alone from Shainsa to the Polar
Colony. I had known how to melt into this kind of night, shabby and
inconspicuous, a worn shirtcloak hunched round my shoulders, weaponless
except for the razor-sharp skean in the clasp of the cloak; walking on
the balls of my feet like a Dry-towner, not looking or sounding or
smelling like an Earthman.
That rabbit in the Traffic office had stirred up things I'd be wiser to
forget. It had been six years; six years of slow death behind a desk,
since the day when Rakhal Sensar had left me a marked man; death-warrant
written on my scarred face anywhere outside the narrow confines of the
Terran law on Wolf.
Rakhal Sensar--my fists clenched with the old impotent hate. _If I could
get my hands on him!_
It had been Rakhal who first led me through the byways of the Kharsa,
teaching me the jargon of a dozen tribes, the chirping call of the
Ya-men, the way of the catmen of the rain-forests, the argot of thieves
markets, the walk and step of the Dry-towners from Shainsa and Daillon
and Ardcarran--the parched cities of dusty, salt stone which spread out
in the bottoms of Wolf's vanished oceans. Rakhal was from Shainsa,
human, tall as an Earthman, weathered by salt and sun, and he had worked
for Terran Intelligence since we were boys. We had traveled all over our
world together, and found it good.
And then, for some reason I had never known, it had come to an end.
Even now I was not wholly sure why he had erupted, that day, into
violence and a final explosion. Then he had disappeared, leaving me a
marked man. And a lonely one: Juli had gone with him.
I strode the streets of the slum unseeing, my thoughts running a
familiar channel. Juli, my kid sister, clinging around Rakhal's neck,
her gray eyes hating me. I had never seen her again.
That had been six years ago. One more adventure had shown me that my
usefulness to the Secret Service was over. Rakhal had vanished, but he
had left me a legacy: my name, written on the sure scrolls of death
anywhere outside the safe boundaries of Terran law. A marked man, I had
gone back to slow stagnation behind a desk. I'd stood it as long as I
could.
When it finally got too bad, Magnusson had been sympathetic. He was the
Chief of Terran Intelligence on Wolf, and I was next in line for his
job, but he understood when I quit. He'd arranged the transfer and the
pass, and I was leaving tonight.
I was nearly back to the spaceport by now, across from the street-shrine
at the edge of the square. It was here that the little toy-seller had
vanished. But it was exactly like a thousand, a hundred thousand other
such street-shrines on Wolf, a smudge of incense reeking and stinking
before the squatting image of Nebran, the Toad God whose face and symbol
are everywhere on Wolf. I stared for a moment at the ugly idol, then
slowly moved away.
The lighted curtains of the spaceport cafe attracted my attention and I
went inside. A few spaceport personnel in storm gear were drinking
coffee at the counter, a pair of furred _chaks_, lounging beneath the
mirrors at the far end, and a trio of Dry-towners, rangy, weathered men
in crimson and blue shirt cloaks, were standing at a wall shelf, eating
Terran food with aloof dignity.
In my business clothes I felt more conspicuous than the _chaks_. What
place had a civilian here, between the uniforms of the spacemen and the
colorful brilliance of the Dry-towners?
A snub-nosed girl with alabaster hair came to take my order. I asked for
_jaco_ and bunlets, and carried the food to a wall shelf near the
Dry-towners. Their dialect fell soft and familiar on my ears. One of
them, without altering the expression on his face or the easy tone of
his voice, began to make elaborate comments on my entrance, my
appearance, my ancestry and probably personal habits, all defined in the
colorfully obscene dialect of Shainsa.
That had happened before. The Wolfan sense of humor is only half-human.
The finest joke is to criticize and insult a stranger, preferably an
Earthman, to his very face, in an unknown language, perfectly deadpan.
In my civilian clothes I was obviously fair game.
A look or gesture of resentment would have lost face and dignity--what
the Dry-towners call their _kihar_--permanently. I leaned over and
remarked in their own dialect that I would, at some future and
unspecified time, appreciate the opportunity to return their
compliments.
By rights they should have laughed, made some barbed remark about my
command of language and crossed their hands in symbol of a jest decently
reversed on themselves. Then we would have bought each other a drink,
and that would be that.
But it didn't happen that way. Not this time. The tallest of the three
whirled, upsetting his drink in the process. I heard its thin shatter
through the squeal of the alabaster-haired girl, as a chair crashed
over. They faced me three abreast, and one of them fumbled in the clasp
of his shirtcloak.
I edged backward, my own hand racing up for a skean I hadn't carried in
six years, and fronted them squarely, hoping I could face down the
prospect of a roughhouse. They wouldn't kill me, this close to the HQ,
but at least I was in for an unpleasant mauling. I couldn't handle three
men; and if nerves were this taut in the Kharsa, I might get knifed.
Quite by accident, of course.
The _chaks_ moaned and gibbered. The Dry-towners glared at me and I
tensed for the moment when their steady stare would explode into
violence.
Then I became aware that they were gazing, not at me, but at something
or someone behind me. The skeans snicked back into the clasps of their
cloaks.
Then they broke rank, turned and ran. They _ran_, blundering into
stools, leaving havoc of upset benches and broken crockery in their
wake. One man barged into the counter, swore and ran on, limping. I let
my breath go. Something had put the fear of God into those brutes, and
it wasn't my own ugly mug. I turned and saw the girl.
She was slight, with waving hair like spun black glass, circled with
faint tracery of stars. A black glass belt bound her narrow waist like
clasped hands, and her robe, stark white, bore an ugly embroidery across
the breasts, the flat sprawl of a conventionalized Toad God, Nebran. Her
features were delicate, chiseled, pale; a Dry-town face, all human, all
woman, but set in an alien and unearthly repose. The great eyes gleamed
red. They were fixed, almost unseeing, but the crimson lips were curved
with inhuman malice.
She stood motionless, looking at me as if wondering why I had not run
with the others. In half a second, the smile flickered off and was
replaced by a startled look of--recognition?
Whoever and whatever she was, she had saved me a mauling. I started to
phrase formal thanks, then broke off in astonishment. The cafe had
emptied and we were entirely alone. Even the _chaks_ had leaped through
an open window--I saw the whisk of a disappearing tail.
We stood frozen, looking at one another while the Toad God sprawled
across her breasts rose and fell for half a dozen breaths.
Then I took one step forward, and she took one step backward, at the
same instant. In one swift movement she was outside in the dark street.
It took me only an instant to get into the street after her, but as I
stepped across the door there was a little stirring in the air, like the
rising of heat waves across the salt flats at noon. Then the
street-shrine was empty, and nowhere was there any sign of the girl. She
had vanished. She simply was not there.