Can and Can'tankerous (16 page)

“Take your piece of metal and get into the trench.”

Sarna climbed down, and when the Six thing said, “Dig!” she began thrusting the flat-ended shaft of metal into the loose dirt. She dug that way for several minutes, till she felt something solid. Then a clink, and she was told by the Six thing that she had reached the crypt.

“Remove it by hand,” Third said. Sarna got down on her knees and began scrabbling in the dirt. She soon uncovered a dark-metal box, buried in the ground.

“They did not have time to bury him too deeply. They were afraid.”

“Wh-where are the Central men who were here?” Sarna asked.

“Inside,” said the Six thing.

“Inside the invisible walls?”

The Six thing affirmed her thought. “Yes. Forever. They are inside forever, and they will never die.”

“I don’t understand,” Sarna said, lifting the box from its pit. “Are they alive in there? How can they be? Do they have food?”

“No,” the Six thing replied, with vengeance in his voice. “They have nothing inside. Nothing. Bare walls, and no food, little air. Yet they will live forever, trapped inside. They would have kept the Six apart. We have had our revenge. And they are blind.

“Careful there,” the Six thing chided her, and she realized for the first time just how adolescent the thing sounded, how like a juvenile it acted. Was this great gestalt entity as powerful and omnipotent as it made itself sound?

She set the box on level ground, and the Six thing said, “Let me have your mind completely. Stop now. Stop holding back! Let me have your thoughts entirely…ah…yes, that’s it…now don’t be afraid.”

Her mind suddenly went blank. She could see and hear and feel, but nothing was routed through her brain. Then she saw her hands come to rest on the box with the Six thing within, and then they went
through
the metal. Not by opening the lid, or prying off the double locks, but by plunging
into
the metal itself.

The hands came out slowly, and cupped in them was the First of the Six. It was a star.

It glowed with unbearable brilliance in her hands. The First was unlike anything she had ever seen; it was not form or shape or reality, really, but a glowing ball of unnamed substance pulsing in her cupped hands. Pulsing golden, without sound and without heat.

“Brother!” cried the Third, and Sarna screamed as an excruciating pain crushed her skull in a blinding flash, a vise of agony. Then both the Six things were in her hands, the Third in her left, the blazing star of the First in her right, and she was staggering drunkenly as the after-effects of the Third leaving her head stunned her.

She moaned and stumbled, falling against a bit of wall left standing. “Clumsy human, be careful!” the Third castigated her viciously. 

What have I gotten into?
Sarna moaned silently. 

“Now we must find my four other parts,” the Third said; and at that moment the brilliant star waxed brilliant.

“My brother says we mylite now, to the third of my parts, Brother Six himself, the sinews of my self.

“You will carry us, one in each hand, so we do not touch, lest we have another explosion.”

“What is to mylite?” Sarna asked.

“To go, to mylite, you understand, to move through space. Brother First is the legs of the gestalt entity. We will show you. Mylite, First!”

And the night whirled with whiplash scintillation, with complex figurations, with alien sounds as Sarna was lifted screaming from the soil of Mars and thrown into the void.

Thrown and screeching to the night as the First glowed oh so brightly in her hand.

They came to rest in space, near a white dwarf star that burned only slightly less fiercely than the star that was the First in Sarna’s hand.

“Here we will find the Sixth,” the Third caroled, capering about on the palm of Sarna’s hand like a demented toad. The star in her left hand glowed and flickered, glowed and pulsed, glowed and dimmed, then glowed triumphantly.

Spinning in space was the globule of water that was the Sixth. The muscles, the strength of the Six. It was a teardrop, crystal and blue and shining with light from the white dwarf below them. It hung and spun, revolving like a minute satellite, crystalline and watery.

The two in her hands laughed, and then the star that was One flew off her palm and touched the droplet of water. A coruscating rainbow of invisible particles bombarded Sarna, left her breathless, and then passed, whipping out into the Galaxy, to be dispersed to the ends of the Universe. And when the flickering pinwheels that had robbed Sarna of her sight were gone, there were no longer three separate entities, a droplet of water, a star, and a gnarled frog-thing; but one oddly joined ball of matter, gray and black and off-green and rose-tint, all lumped and joined and entangled, as though several small beings were hugged together for warmth; this was the first growing half of the Six.

The ball rolled toward her in the vacuum of space.

She stood there, hung there, poised there, on nothing but the thoughts of the half-Six, waiting for the being to do with her what it would.

“Now I have my mind, my legs, and my sinews.” The creature spoke in one voice that was the voice of the first Six thing plus other strange tones. “We must find my three brothers and merge them to whole—then we will be ready to…”—it hesitated, as though one segment of its self was warning the other not to say something—“…to return Mars to the Terrans.”

Fear clawed softly at her, and passed as the half-Six whirled her through space and space and space to another part of the Galaxy. “We have been widely separated by the vagaries of Time and Chance and Man,” said the half-Six as they spun unhampered through space. “We have been apart, kept apart by a million races and a million light-years. Can you understand what unfulfillment has eaten at my parts? Can you know, Earthwoman?”

Sarna sensed the longing and the hunger devouring the creature.

The half-Six laughed, and the sound roared and returned to its home in the throat of the half-Six. “You think you know. Multiply your pretty Terran sorrow by a billion times, and
feel
!”

The half-Six allowed a segment of its thoughts to reach Sarna…just a minute fraction of what it felt…and the impact of it struck her with triphammer force, blacked out her senses, as she lay in the mind-power of the half-Six, spinning toward some unknown destination in time or space.

When she awoke, cold and shivering, her mind ripped by the power-blast of emotion, she knew the depredations she had endured as a prostitute were as nothing to what she had glimpsed in the mind of the half-Six. She had seen a loneliness and a misery unbelievably sharp and tragic. And she had glimpsed something else; a strange strain that ran through the intellect of this creature, that made her fearful and wary. She had learned something that chilled her to the heart.

What it was she had seen in that strange otherworldly mind, she could not even put into words for herself.

For if it were true, then all this—everything—was sham, and waste, and futility. And worse.

“We are here!” the half-Six gloated vaporously, as the hadj, the journey, the mylite ceased and they whipped through the cloud vapor around a small planet at the ridge of the Galaxy. In a moment they were down, and Sarna felt herself released from the power of the half-Six.

They were on a jungle world, all colored riot of odd trees and vaguely troubling cyclopean shapes and forms that pained, even as they were imagined. Across the sky, long green trailers that might have been vines had they not been so thick and so high barred the view to the cloud covering. The ground itself was thick and soft and leathery.

From the steaming jungle came the raucous cry of an animal with two heads. From beyond the sound came the moan and scream and dying wail of a bird-thing whose neck was being broken by another strange predator.

“Here lie brothers Two and Four” said the half-Six.

“You will find them,” said the creature. Sarna jerked rigidly, and her mouth went dry. Her body ached, and her shoulder where the radiation was spreading was a pulsing horror of pain, now that her thoughts were her own again. She was frightened by her past, and frightened by this creature that used her, and frightened by the weird and angry things she had seen in the past week.

Her brain felt clouded, fogged, tight as a drumhead as though it were about to burst.

“I—I’m very tired…” she said, and felt a blow of such force, such anger, that she was stunned momentarily. The half-Six screamed its rage.

“You will do as I say! Am I not turning Mars back to you Earthmen to rule as you wish? I am good and benevolent! Why do you defy me?”

Like a child stamping its foot
, Sarna thought, remembering a particular child, a particular man, a particular time in Venezuela in a town without a name, and a life that was too foggy for clarity and happiness.

“I—I’m s-sorry,” Sarna hurriedly placated the half-Six. “I’ll find them, only tell me how.”

“We know where they are, but there are things it is best for us not to do, until we are One and Six. Our brothers lie hiding—as we have been hiding for three hundred thousand… Two of us lie in a swamp near here. We will go there. I will take you…

“And we are here.” And they were there. At the edge of the limpid, phosphorescent swamp, fringed with feverishly undulating plants. A long-nosed elephantlike animal shoved its trunk into the scummy swamp, and they heard a great sucking sound as the beast drank up the filthy water.

“Down there,” said the half-Six, “lie two more sections of my self. The eyes and the nerves of my whole One lie here. Without legs and mind, they could not escape.

“Get them, and be careful neither Brother touches.”

Sarna stood poised on the lip of the solid ground that verged on swamp, and her body would not obey her. She could not bring herself to leap into the filthy, sucking mire of the alien swamp.

She suddenly wanted to die and escape all this.

“Leap!” the half-Six demanded. She could not.

The half-Six obliged her by blasting her mind with a belt of ferocious thought-power. Sarna slipped, with a sharp, high scream, over the edge, and went headfirst into the muck below.

Chapter Five

Somehow she could see and breathe, and move without difficulty through the cloying, stinking muck of the swamp. Somehow, she was light and slipped effortlessly through the murk.

A razor-beaked
thing
passed her, swiftly, hungrily.

A huge, whalelike beast lay pulsing on the floor of the swamp with its tendrils swaying like water plant fronds. Even as she passed it, the whalelike creature’s mouth opened, and she saw a huge, crimson-glowing cavity, and the ivory structure of a rib cage.

She shuddered and moved on.

Where was she going?

You are going to the pit in the swamp
, a voice from nowhere said in her head. The half-Six was with her in thought, if not in form.

“Where is this pit?” she asked the swampness about her.

GO!
the voice directed. Her feet, within the breather suit, turned to the left.

She walked for a long time and, finally, saw an immense shadow on the floor of the swamp, perfectly round and black as the flesh of the swamp creature. She walked to the edge, and from the pit she heard the piteous mewling of something below. “I won’t go down there!” She trembled at the edge. Then the force of the half-Six mind struck her and she was falling, tumbling, spinning into the blackness of the pit. Her mind played her strangely at that delirious moment, for as she fell, she remembered the first time, and the first place, when her life had been planned for her, and the face; and the face of the man was oddly the face of Third with its frog-mouth, and she screamed shrilly, for her mind was snapping and she knew it. What new horrors this creature had in waiting she could not even suspect, for it seemed that with each added segment of the gestalt, the Six grew more frenzied, more vicious, more unpleasant. And more powerful.

Then she was down, sinking thigh-deep in swirling ebony muck that rose up about her like a cape of velvet. She stood quite still for a moment, letting the sediment slowly swirl down to rest. She felt the weird tingle of expectancy all through her body—aching and flaming from the wounds she had received, both mental and physical—and found she was wishing for the release of death again.

She waited in the womb of the swamp.

For what she did not know.

Then she saw them swimming toward her.

Fantastically, unbelievably, they were the last things she would have imagined. The first was a human being, as normal as herself; a man, with gray hair and wide blue eyes, and a strong, handsome body. He was clothed in an abbreviated breechclout affair, with a leather strap that came around his waist and over his shoulder. Another, around his head, like a thick circlet. Swimming beside the man was what looked like a cloud of syrupy, milky effluvium. Sarna wildly conceived of it as spittle, with more body. It flowed along beside the man, and as the two neared Sarna, she involuntarily brought up her hands to protect herself.

The man halted, backstroked, and stood down in the black muck.

“I am Two, the eyes,” the man said, his body-form shifting as though seen through a film.

The milky substance kept moving, flowing, surrounding her. Before she could fully shift her attention from the man to the translucent ooze, it had overwhelmed her. Her body tingled, then smarted, then prickled, then burned fiercely. In her brain she heard the now-maniacal laughter of the half-Six above the pit.
She has met the nerves
, Four, it gloated, and rolled in on itself with vast amusement.

Four enclosed her, and choked her and burned her, and then all three of them were rising. She fainted at some point along the way…and did not regain consciousness until they were out of the pit and up from the bottom of the swamp.

When she looked again, she was on dry land, and the man and the white, milky substance had joined the ball that was half-Six. It was a larger ball now—bigger than her body, but smaller than the individual man that had been Two.