The Wanderer

Chapter Twenty

Paul Hagbolt had grown very tired of his bondage and peculiarly bored with his spread-eagled reflection, and the invisible sun had dried his front completely, when he spotted two cryptic cat faces peering at him from a stretch of flowerbank by the control panel beyond his feet. The one was Miaow's, the other was large as his own. They came floating forward from the gloom, and their bodies after their faces with a sinuous grace that hardly quivered a single pink petal or green spear, until they were barely emerged from the flowers  -  whereupon without further glance, at him they settled themselves in the air facing each other, so that he saw them in profile.
The tiger-being held out Miaow facing her, cradling the little gray cat on one spread paw and slim green secondary forearm  -  Paul realized that the second elbow which had terrified him was simply the normal feline wrist above the elongated palm bones that make a secondary forearm above the paw.
Miaow's fur was now fluffy dry, and she lolled on her back, fantastically at ease, gray tail draped over violet-barred wrist, staring gravely into the great, violet-petalled eyes of her captor  -  or rather, her new friend, to judge from appearances.
They looked remarkably like mother and tiny child.
Paul's feelings about the tiger-being, his very picture of her, underwent rapid changes as he watched her in repose  -  this time he thought of her from the first as "she," an assumption bastioned by the apparent absence of external sex organs, except for two modest, indigo-ruddy nipples high in the green fur of her chest.
For a feline, she was short-bodied, long-legged, long-armed  -  in build more like a cheetah than any other terrestrial cat, though considerably larger: human size. The general proportions, too, were more human than feline  -  he guessed that in gravity she would be at least as much biped as quadruped.
The fur of her throat, chest, underbelly, and the insides of her arms and legs was green, the rest, green barred with violet.
Her head was prick-eared as any cat's, but with a higher and broader forehead, seeming to increase the triangularity of the whole face, which was nevertheless completely feline, even to indigo button-nose and pale whisker hairs. Here the fur was violet except for a green mask across the eyes.
Despite the secondary forearms above them, the slim paws looked quite like hands now  -  three-fingered hands with an opposed thumb. The claws were invisible, presumably retracted and sheathed.
The violet-barred green tail swung gracefully over a half-bent hind leg.
The total effect, he realized suddenly  -  even the tail!  -  was now very close to that of a slim, tall woman dressed in a skintight fur costume for some fantastic cat-ballet. He felt a disturbing pang as he had that thought.
And just at that moment the tiger-being began to speak in English  -  clipped and exotically slurred, yet English nevertheless  -  not directing her speech toward him but to Miaow.
It was all so "impossible" that Paul listened as if in a dream.
"Come, little one," the tiger-being said, poutingly parting only the two central inches of her mulberry lips. "We friends now. No need be shy."
Miaow continued to stare at her gravely, contentedly.
"You me same folk," the tiger-being continued winningly. "You easeful now, I feel. So speak. Ask question."
A pause, with Paul feeling on the verge of understanding the fantastic cross-purposes that had begun to operate. Then the tiger-being said: "You shy one! You want front names? I know yours. Mine?  -  Tigerishka! Name I invent especially for you. You think me terrible tiger, also beautiful toes dancer. Toes dancers call selves, '-enska, -skaya, -ishka.' Tigerishka!"
Then Paul understood. It was the super-error of a super-being. Tigerishka had been reading his thoughts to the point of learning his language in seconds, but all the while attributing those thoughts to her fellow-feline Miaow.
At the same time he realized what the disturbing pang had been: plain male desire for a thrillingly attractive she-being.
Tigerishka must have caught that thought, too, for she waved an indigo-padded finger at Miaow in playful reproof and said: "You have naughty feelings about me, little one. Really, you not big enough  -  and we both girls! Come now, speak...Paul..."
At that moment the presumably horrible truth must have occurred to her, for she slowly turned her head to stare at the real Paul, simultaneously toeing the edge of the floor below her. The next second she had sprung across the cabin and was poised above him, dagger-claws spread, mulberry lips writhed back from inch-and-a-half needle canines in her upper jaw. She still held Miaow, who seemed not greatly startled by the sudden activity.
Beyond her green slope-shoulder were stacked reflections of her back and of Paul's own face grimacing madly.
"You  -  ape!" Tigerishka snarled. She thrust her great-jawed head down so that he winced his eyes three-quarters shut. Then, spacing out the words as one might to a barely literate peasant, she said: "You treat  -  little one  -  like beast  -  like pet?" The horrified contempt in the last word was glacial-volcanic.
All Paul could do in his frantic terror was snatch at something Margo was always saying, and gibber: "No! No! Cats are people!"
Don Merriam had stood on the rim of Earth's Grand Canyon. He had also looked over the edge of the Leibnitz Cleft near the south pole of the moon. But never  -  except when he had driven the Baba Yaga through Luna  -  certainly never from a solid footing, had he peered into anything remotely as deep as the open, mile-wide circular pit that yawned only two dozen paces across the silver pavement from where the Baba Yaga stood with its ladder thrust down between its three legs.
How far did the pit go down? Five miles? Twenty-five? Five hundred? It seemed to maintain its one-mile width indefinitely. The equivalent in emptiness of what the plunging pillar of moon rock was in solidity, it narrowed somewhere far below to a tiny, hazy round that was little more than a point  -  and that narrowing was only the consequence of the laws of perspective and the limitations of his visual powers.
He toyed with the notion that the shaft went straight through the center of the planet to the other side, so that if he leaped off the edge now he would never hit bottom, but only fall four thousand miles or so  -  a weary fall, that, taking twenty hours at least, if terminal velocities in this planet's atmosphere were like those on Earth, almost time enough to die of thirst  -  and then, finally, perhaps after a few reverberations of reversed and re-reversed fall, come to rest in the air at the planet's center and slowly swim to the side of the shaft, just as he'd swum through the air of the Baba Yaga's cabin in free fall.
Of course the air pressure down there, four thousand miles down, would be more than enough to crush him  -  perhaps enough to drive oxygen monatomic!  -  but they would surely have ways of dealing with that, ways of making the air exactly as thin or as thick as they wanted it at every depth.
Already he was doing a great deal of thinking in terms of their powers  -  powers which increased each time he turned his eyes, each time he thought, though he had yet to see a single one of them.
The false memory of his childhood came again, of the pit he'd found that went through the earth behind his family's farm. So now he stared down the shaft hunting for a star, or rather for a hint of the captive antipodean day under its section of vaulted sky-film eight thousand miles down there. But even as he hunted he knew it was a visual impossibility, and in any case it was made quite infeasible by the multitude of lights glowing, flashing, and twinkling from the sides of the shaft at every floor.
For the strangest and most unnatural thing about the shaft was simply that it was unnatural, not something occurring in or driven through solid rock  -  in fact, there was no sign of rock anywhere  -  but floor after floor, tiered endlessly downward, of artificial structure and habitable inner volume. The floors began after a blank hundred feet or so at the top and were never afterwards interrupted.
He could count hundreds of those floors, he was sure, before they began to merge and run together, again due solely to the limitations of his vision. Yet judging by the ones toward the top, they were very tall, spacious floors, suggesting a life of perhaps more than human grandeur and scope, despite the, to him, claustrophobic feel of such a downward infinity of rooms and corridors.
The only comparisons for it that he could dredge from his memory  -  and they were most inadequate comparisons  -  were the inner courts, tiered with balconies, of certain large department stores and office buildings, or perhaps a skylight shaft shooting down through the stacks of some vast unmicro-filmed old library.
Far below now he thought he could see small airships winging across the shaft, and perhaps up and down it, like lazy beetles, and some of those seemed to twinkle too, like the phosphorescent beetles of the tropics.
In his desire to peer deeper into the pit, he leaned out farther over it, gripping tightly with his bare hands the upper of two satin-smooth silver rails that fenced it. Even that simple feature of his surroundings was unnatural and indicative of their powers, for the rails had no supports. They were a pair of mile-wide, thin silver hoops hung two and a little more than three feet above the pit's margin. Or, if there were invisible uprights, he had not yet touched or kicked into them. He could see only a couple of hundred yards of the hoops in either direction; beyond that they vanished like telegraph wires. However, he assumed they went all the way around.
But with so many signs of them down below, and evidences of their workmanship everywhere, their science and technology, so near magic, where were they? Why had he been left alone so long?
He turned his back on the pit and peered all around him uneasily, but nowhere on the silver pavement nor about the smooth, windowless, geometric structures rising from it could he see a living figure, or any figure he judged might be living  -  humanoid, animal, or otherwise.
The two violet-and-yellow, bulge-centered saucers still hung enigmatically a dozen feet above the pavement, just as when he'd last turned his back on them, and the Baba Yaga stood midway between them, exactly as he'd left it. This was what had happened so far: when the voice had called to him in its faintly slurred, oddly thrilling English, he had unsuited obediently, almost eagerly, and quickly climbed down out of the Baba Yaga, but there had been no one there. After waiting for minutes at the foot of the ladder, he had walked over to the pit and been enthralled.
Now he began to wonder if the voice mightn't have been pure illusion. It was unreasonable to think of an alien being able to speak English without any preliminary parleying. Or was it? Their powers...
He took a deep breath. At least the air seemed real enough.
The silence was profound, except that when he held still and relaxed and closed his eyes and let out his breath softly, he thought he could hear the faintest, muted, deep-throated rumbling. The blood of this strange planet, coursing? Or only his own blood? Or the rumbling might come from the pillar of moon rock hurtling into the other pit, no farther beyond the Baba Yaga and the invisibly suspended saucers than he was standing in front of them.
The gray pillar, occupying a full third of his horizon but tapering swiftly almost to a point at the top of the sky, looked at first glance like a solid mountain, except that he knew it was plunging steadily downward at a speed great enough to make its component particles and fragments individually invisible  -  presumably the same ten miles a second at which he'd judged it to be moving above the sky-film that roofed the atmosphere.
As he watched the pillar, he began to see slow changes in its contours  -  bulgings and channelings that formed slowly and held their shape for many seconds and then shifted into other smooth forms. It reminded him of the grotesque bulgings and groovings that a stream from a faucet will hold  -  sometimes so persistently that the shape seems to be one of solid crystal rather than rushing water.
But how could the thing be moving at such a supersonic velocity  -  two seconds from the sky to the floor!  -  through the palpable air  -  the air he knew had to be there because he was breathing it  -  without creating a fierce and tumultuous dust storm of eddies in that air, without a roar like that of a dozen first-stage rockets or a score of Niagaras?
They must, somehow, perhaps using an unheard-of field, have created a wall-less vacuum channel, just as surely as they must have created  -  now he came to think of it  -  similar wall-less tubular vacua for the Baba Yaga and its escorts to travel through after they burst the sky-film...and, even before that, through the thin plasma and micro-meteorites of space.
He continued to stare up the weirdly foreshortened gray pillar. How long could this monstrous transfer go on? How long would the moon last, even as an ellipsoid of pale gravel spreading into a ring, at this rate of depletion? How long would there be any moon-stuff left outside the Wanderer?
From the sector of his brain schooled in engineering and solid geometry sprang almost at once the first-approximation answer, that it would take eight thousand days for one such rock stream, moving ten miles a second, to transport the moon's entire substance. He had seen only a dozen of the rock streams.
But they might speed up the streams, and there might be another set at the Wanderer's south pole, and others being brought into existence. Looking aside from the pillar, he now did see three more in the distance: they looked like great gray waterspouts twisting up toward the sky.
The sky was now all dark blues and greens and browns, slowly swirling in a great edge-blended river, austere and menacing. He looked down toward the paler structures ringing the empty silver pavement except where the pits were; he let his gaze travel around the pillar-broken circle of those smoothly monstrous, multiform, pastel-shaded solidities, and it seemed to him that some of the more distant ones had changed position and shape  -  and in some cases crept closer  -  since he'd last studied them.
The idea of great buildings  -  or whatever they were  -  moving about when there were no other signs of life disturbed him greatly and he turned back to the silver-railed pit behind him to scan its topmost levels, almost desperately, for indications of some smaller-scale activity. He tried to look at the top floors immediately below him, or close to either side, but the silver lip on which he was standing overlapped the pit itself for several yards like a roof and cut off his view. So he peered across at the topmost windows and balconies, and after a while he began to think he could see small figures moving in them, but at a mile or even a half mile it wasn't easy to be sure of that, and anyway his eyes were beginning to swim and prickle. He was wondering whether he dared return to the cabin for the binoculars  -  when a voice, sweet-toned yet commanding, spoke from behind him. "Come!"
Don turned around very slowly. Standing a little taller than himself, not twenty feet away, with the erect grace and pride of a matador, was a lean, silky, red-splotched black biped of shape midway between feline and anthropoid. It looked like a high-foreheaded cheetah a little bigger than a mountain lion and standing as a man stands, or like a slim, black-furred, red-pied tiger wearing a black turban and a narrow red mask  -  the turban being the unfeline frontal and temporal bulge. Its tail rose like a red spear behind its back. Its ears were pointed. Its serene eyes were large, with something flowerlike about the pupils.
Hardly shifting its close-set, narrow feet, yet with movements like those of a dancer, it extended a four-fingered arm in a gesture of invitation, and opened the thin lips in the black lower mask, showing the needle-tips of white fangs, and softly repeated: "Come."
Slowly, as if in a dream, Don moved toward the being. When he had come close, it nodded, and then the section of pavement on which they were both standing  -  a circular silver section about eight feet across  -  began very slowly to sink into the body of the Wanderer. The being moved its extended arm until it rested lightly across Don's shoulders. Don thought of Faust and Mephistopheles descending to Hell. Faust had wanted all knowledge. With his magic mirrors Mephistopheles had given Faust a glimpse of everything. But what magic device can give understanding?
They had sunk barely knee-deep in the pavement when there was a flash in the sky. Suddenly beyond the Baba Yaga there hung a third saucer, and a ship so like the Baba Yaga that Don's throat tightened, and he thought of Dufresne. But then he saw the small differences in structure and the red Soviet star on it.
His view of it was cut off by the silver curve of the pavement as the platform continued to descend.