Terror Out of Space - Leigh Brackett [8]
The golden light changed the city again. Cloud-cuckoo land at sunset—a place where you could set your boots down on a dream.
When he went in through the gates he was awed, but not afraid. And then, while he stood in the square looking up at the great dim buildings, the thought came drifting down to him out of the cloud of little woman-things.
"It was safe. It was happy—before She came."
After a long moment Lundy said, "She?"
"We haven't seen her. But our mates have. She came a little while ago and walked through the streets, and all our mates left us to follow her. They say she's beautiful beyond any of us, and . . ."
"And her eyes are hidden, and they have to see them. They have to look into her eyes or go crazy, so they follow her."
The sad little blue-grey cloud stirred in the dark water. Golden eyes looked down at him.
"How did you know? Do you follow her, too?"
Lundy took a deep, slow breath. The palms of his hands were wet. "Yes. Yes, I followed her, too."
"We feel your thought . . . ." They came down close around him. Their delicate membranes fluttered like fairy wings. Their golden eyes were huge and soft and pleading.
"Can you help us? Can you bring our mates back safe? They've forgotten everything. If The Others should come . . ."
"The Others?"
Lundy's brain was drowned in stark and terrible fear. Pictures came through it. Vague gigantic dreams of nightmare . . .
"They come, riding the currents that go between the hot cracks in the mountains and the cold deeps. They eat. They destroy." The little woman-things were shaken suddenly like leaves in a gust of wind.
"We hide from them in the buildings. We can keep them out, away from our seed and the little new ones. But our mates have forgotten. If The Others come while they follow Her, outside and away from safety, they'll all be killed. We'll be left alone, and there'll be no more seed for us, and no more little new ones."
They pressed in close around him, touching him with their small blue-grey forefins.
"Can you help us? Oh, can you help us?"
Lundy closed his eyes. His mouth twitched and set. When he opened his eyes again they were hard as agates.
"I'll help you," he said, "or die trying."
It was dark in the great square, with only the pale sand-glow seeping through the gates. For a moment the little blue-grey woman-creatures clung around him, not moving, except as the whole mass of them swayed slightly with the slow rhythm of the sea.
Then they burst away from him, outward, in a wild surge of hope—and Lundy stood with his mouth open, staring.
They weren't blue-grey any longer. They glowed suddenly, their wings and their dainty, supple bodies, a warm soft green that had a vibrant pulse of life behind it. And they blossomed.
The long, slender, living petals must have been retracted, like the fronds of a touch-me-not, while they wore the sad blue-grey. Now they broke out like coronals of flame around their small heads.
Blue and scarlet and gold, poppy-red and violet and flame, silver-white and warm pink like a morning cloud, streaming in the black water. Streaming from small green bodies that rolled and rumbled high up against the dark, dreaming buildings like the butterflies that had danced there before the sunlight was lost forever.
Quite suddenly, then, they stopped. They drifted motionless in the water, and their colors dimmed. Lundy said, "Where are they?"
"Deep in the city, beyond our buildings here—in the streets where only the curious young ones ever go. Oh, bring them back! Please bring them back!"
He left them hovering in the great dark square and went on into the city.
He walked down broad paved streets channeled with wheel-ruts and hollowed by generations of sandaled feet. The great water-worn buildings lifted up on either side, lighted by the erratic glare of the distant fissure.
The window-openings, typical of most Venusian architecture, were covered