Where the World is Quiet Part 2

When I regained complete consciousness I was with Lhar.

A coolness as of limpid water moved through my mind, cleansing it, was.h.i.+ng away the horror, soothing and comforting me. I was lying on my back looking up at an arabesque pattern of blue and saffron; gray-silver light filtered through a lacy, filigree. I was still weak but the blind terror no longer gripped me.

I was inside a hut formed by the trunks of one of the banyan-like trees. Slowly, weakly I rose on one elbow. The room was empty except for a curious flower that grew from the dirt floor beside me. I looked at it dazedly.

And so I met Lhar.... She was of purest white, the white of alabaster, but with a texture and warmth that stone does not have. In shape--well, she seemed to be a great flower, an unopened tulip-like blossom five feet or so tall. The petals were closely enfolded, concealing whatever sort of body lay hidden beneath, and at the base was a convoluted pedestal that gave the odd impression of a ruffled, tiny skirt. Even now I cannot describe Lhar coherently. A flower, yes--but very much more than that. Even in that first glimpse I knew that Lhar was more than just a flower....

I was not afraid of her. She had saved me, I knew, and I felt complete trust in her. I lay back as she spoke to me telepathically, her words and thoughts forming within my brain....

"You are well now, though still weak. But it is useless for you to try to escape from this valley. No one can escape. The Other has powers I do not know, and those powers will keep you here."

I said, "You are--?"

A name formed within my mind. "Lhar. I am not of your world."

A shudder shook her. And her distress forced itself on me. I stood up, swaying with weakness. Lhar drew back, moving with a swaying, bobbing gait oddly like a curtsey.

Behind me a clicking sounded. I turned, saw the many-colored sphere force itself through the banyan-trunks. Instinctively my hand went to my gun. But a thought from Lhar halted me.

"It will not harm you. It is my servant." She hesitated, groping for a word. "A machine. A robot. It will not harm you."

I said, "Is it intelligent?"

"Yes. But it is not alive. Our people made it. We have many such machines."

The robot swayed toward me, the rim of cilia flas.h.i.+ng and twisting.

Lhar said, "It speaks thus, without words or thought...." She paused, watching the sphere, and I sensed dejection in her manner.

The robot turned to me. The cilia twisted lightly about my arm, tugging me toward Lhar. I said, "What does it want?"

"It knows that I am dying," Lhar said.

That shocked me. "Dying? No!"

"It is true. Here in this alien world I do not have my usual food. So I will die. To survive I need the blood of mammals. But there are none here save those seven the Other has taken. And I cannot use them for they are now spoiled."

I didn't ask Lhar what sort of mammals she had in her own world.

"That's what the robot wanted when it tried to stop me before, isn't it?"

"He wanted you to help me, yes. But you are weak from the shock you have had. I cannot ask you--"

I said, "How much blood do you need?"

At her answer, I said, "All right. You saved my life; I must do the same for you. I can spare that much blood easily. Go ahead."

She bowed toward me, a fluttering white flame in the dimness of the tree-room. A tendril flicked out from among her petals, wrapped itself about my arm. It felt cool, gentle as a woman's hand. I felt no pain.

"You must rest now," Lhar said. "I will go away but I shall not be long."

The robot clicked and chattered, s.h.i.+fting on its tentacle legs. I watched it, saying, "Lhar, this can't be true. Why am I--believing impossible things?"

"I have given you peace," she told me. "Your mind was dangerously close to madness. I have drugged you a little, physically; so your emotions will not be strong for a while. It was necessary to save your sanity."

It was true that my mind felt--was drugged the word? My thoughts were clear enough, but I felt as if I were submerged in transparent but dark water. There was an odd sense of existing in a dream. I remembered Swinburne's lines:

_Here, where the world is quiet, Here, where all trouble seems Dead winds' and spent waves' riot In doubtful dreams of dreams...._

"What is this place?" I asked.

Lhar bent toward me. "I do not know if I can explain. It is not quite clear to me. The robot knows. He is a reasoning machine. Wait...."

She turned to the sphere. Its cilia fluttered in quick, complicated signals.

Lhar turned back to me. "Do you know much of the nature of Time? That it is curved, moves in a spiral...."

She went on to explain, but much of her explanation I did not understand. Yet I gathered enough to realize that this valley was not of Earth. Or, rather, it was not of the earth I knew.

"You have geological disturbances, I know. The strata are tumbled about, mixed one with another--"

I remembered what Fra Rafael had said about an earthquake, three months before. Lhar nodded toward me.

"But this was a time-slip. The s.p.a.ce-time continuum is also subject to great strains and stresses. It buckled, and strata--Time-sectors--were thrust up to mingle with others. This valley belongs to another age, as do I and the machine, and also--the Other."

She told me what had happened.... There had been no warning. One moment she had been in her own World, her own Time. The next, she was here, with her robot. And with the Other....

"I do not know the origin of the Other. I may have lived in either your future or your past. This valley, with its ruined stone structures, is probably part of your future. I had never heard of such a place before. The Other may be of the future also. Its shape I do not know...."

She told me more, much more. The Other, as she called it--giving the ent.i.ty a thought-form that implied complete alienage--had a strangely chameleon-like method of feeding. It lived on life-force, as well as I could understand, draining the vital powers of a mammal vampirically.

And it a.s.sumed the shape of its prey as it fed. It was not possession, in the strict sense of the word. It was a sort of merging....

Humanity is inclined to invest all things with its own attributes, forgetting that outside the limitations of time and s.p.a.ce and size, familiar laws of nature do not apply.

So, even now I do not know all that lay behind the terror in that Peruvian valley. This much I learned: the Other, like Lhar and her robot, had been cast adrift by a time-slip, and thus marooned here.

There was no way for it to return to its normal Time-sector. It had created the fog-wall to protect itself from the direct rays of the sun, which threatened its existence.

Sitting there in the filigreed, silver twilight beside Lhar, I had a concept of teeming universes of s.p.a.ce-time, of an immense spiral of lives and civilizations, races and cultures, covering an infinite cosmos. And yet--what had happened? Very little, in that inconceivable infinity. A rift in time, a dimensional slip--and a sector of land and three beings on it had been wrenched from their place in time and transported to _our_ time-stratum.

A robot, a flower that was alive and intelligent--and feminine--and the Other....

"The native girls," I said. "What will happen to them?"

"They are no longer alive," Lhar told me. "They still move and breathe, but they are dead, sustained only by the life-force of the Other. I do not think it will harm me. Apparently it prefers other food."

"That's why you've stayed here?" I asked.

The s.h.i.+ning velvety calyx swayed. "I shall die soon. For a little while I thought that I might manage to survive in this alien world, this alien time. Your blood has helped." The cool tentacle withdrew from my arm. "But I lived in a younger time, where s.p.a.ce was filled with--with certain energizing vibratory principles.

"They have faded now almost to nothing, to what you call cosmic rays.