I was beginning to feel very cold inside my prison. This, too, was not a sensation I could remember feeling—not to this degree. I noted my thoughts were slowing; my mental reactions were becoming as stiff as my limbs. There was an absolute silence here under this weight of stone.
If they were so well informed about our movements and intentions, why was there any need to interrogate me?… It was at this point I noted that my thinking was becoming too inefficient to continue and so I switched it off. Soon afterwards, the great stone slab slid sideways in its grooves and a female entered. She was a slave. The reddish skin colour of this face was paler in her because of her long sojourn within these stone prisons. She was shorter and lighter in build than those great strong specimens, the ruling caste and their guards. But her face had the same brutality and I could see in her dulled brutish eyes that she would kill me at a word. She had brought in some dishes and jugs that contained quite an adequate meal. I told her I was very cold. She stared, and did not seem to hear. She came swiftly to me, her black eyes not on my face but all over me, as if they were curious hands. And then her hands were all over me and I thought she going to take my protective necklace and bracelets. I could see that she was afraid of this exploration of my person, but could not resist it. Her face showed an uneasiness not far off terror, and her eyes kept flickering towards the open doorway. Yet she felt my hair, ran thick fingers up and down my arm, and then bent to peer right into my face, and my eyes: this was the oddest sensation, because it was the colour of my eyes, that fascinated her, the shape of my face, and I might been inanimate for all the interest she had in my intrinsic self, in anything my eyes might have been saying to her.
Then she abruptly stood straight and turned to go out. I said again that I was cold and again she did not respond.
Perhaps she was deaf. Or even dumb.
Although I believed there might be drugs in the food, I did not hesitate to eat and drink, and without any real concern for the results. This was partly because of the frigid slowness of my mental processes, but partly because of what I have already mentioned, my inbuilt unconquerable belief that I was immune. Not eligible for death!
Yet I was certainly able to consider, and even with an appreciation, that I was likely to be murdered in this ugly little city on this inferior little planet. It was a fact that I kept supplying to myself, as something that had to be taken in. But I could not.
Between my functioning being, the familiar mechanisms of Ambien II, senior official of Sirius, member of a race that did not expect to die, except by some quite fortuitous event—such as a meteorite striking a Space Traveller—between that state of consciousness, and the real urgent apprehension of the fact: You may very well be murdered at any moment, there was really no connection. I literally could not “take it in.” I wondered what it would feel like to “take it in” so that my whole organism knew, understood, was prepared. What would it be like to live, as these unfortunates did, not more than four hundred to eight hundred years, depending on their local conditions—no sooner born than ready to die? Did they feel it? Really feel their impermanence? Or was there something in the nature of the conditions of living on this planet that imposed a barrier between fact and its perception?
I pursued these thoughts, or rather, allowed them to float through my mind, or—perhaps even more accurately—observed them take shape and pass, while I ingested foodstuffs that I hoped would soon warm me.
Soon there came in another female. Once again I am faced with that problem of hindsight. The female was Rhodia. To try and put myself back into my state of mind before I knew who she was, without distortion, is not easy.
But I can say accurately that at once I was saying to myself that she did not resemble the slave who had brought the food. She was dressed in the same clothes, long loose dark blue cloth trousers, and a tunic of the same, which was belted with leather, and hung with various keys. She was a wardress or jailor. She was larger in build than the other, and her red or red-brown skin was lightened by lack of sunlight, like the other. But I at once felt at ease in her presence, to the extent that I warning myself: Be careful, it might be a trap. She was not, as I was already seeing, of the same race. Or not of the same sub-race. Same in general style or pattern—skin colour, build, the long hair—she nevertheless had an aliveness that at once set her aside.
She stood immediately in front of me, this handsome, alert female, her large black eyes full on mine. And remained there, as if expecting or requesting an exchange. I did smile at her, even while I was telling myself that it was the oldest trick in the world—the amiable jailor. She had over her arm a length of dark blue woollen cloth, and this she unfolded to display a warm cloak, in which I thankful to muffle myself. Then she grasped me by the arm and assisted me to rise, knowing that I had become stiffened and lumpish. This firm confident touch was quite unlike the avid, brushing touch, like a snake’s tongue, of the other inferior wardress. She walked me, gently enough, to the door, and then assisted me through it. By now my responses were blocked and confused. Everything in me that told me to like this creature was being chided and set aside by me. She felt this, for her hand fell from my elbow and I stumbled on by myself along the low corridors, all straight, all lit by the same regular minor gleams of light at long intervals, all of the same regular blocks of dark stone. Somewhere above me was the sunlight of this region, were the peaks capped with snow. But it was as hard to take in, to really believe that fact, as it was to believe that this woman might easily slide a knife into me.
After a long walk, turning with monotonous regularity at sharp angles from one corridor to another, the lights on the walls suddenly increased, there was softness under my feet—and I saw coloured rugs and carpets, and the walls had hangings on them. Abruptly, we stopped. Apparently facing a blank wall. She pressed down a lever that projected from the wall, and another great slab of stone slid silently back. I was in the entrance to a brightly lit room that had windows in it.
This alone nearly overthrew me—being in ordinary daylight again. Seven tall men, in the black cloaks I had already seen, were seated behind a long wooden table. An eighth stood by a window half turned away, looking out. Again, I have to disentangle what I later learned of the eighth man and what I felt then. Then, I saw at once he was not of the same race as that of Grakconkranpatl, nor of my wardress, who was standing just behind me. He reminded me of those Shammat pirates who had visited me such a very long time ago, the shameless thieving ones. He was, however, taller than they. He was more finely built. His skin was pale brown, as theirs had been. His eyes were quick and brown. His hair was profuse, curly and reddish, worn long on the head, with a neat strong beard. He was the old Shammat type much refined. Compared to the seven, in their heavy black, with their brutish features, their long black eyes that conveyed coldness and deadness as much as they did avidity and lust for power, he seemed infinitely better, even reassuring. And it was as I stood there, my eyes turning for relief to this eighth that I heard a breath from behind me: “Sirius, be careful.” This sound floated into my mind, as if it came from not now and here but from Koshi, or from the spaces between the stars. I could not believe I was hearing it, and even thought I had imagined it… when I slightly turned my head, the woman was a few paces behind, and her face was immobile, even indifferent.
And I was still waiting there, in front of these coldly observant men, all eight of them, now that the one by the window had turned to stare, too. And as yet nothing had been said.
One of the men rose, came over to me, his cold gaze assessing my hair, my skin, my light brittle build, and whipped off the dark cloak, and, gripping my upper arm, pushed me forward closer to the seven so that I stood close against the table they sat along, one, two, three, four, five, six, all so alike, copies of each other, so little variation there was between them. And the seventh stood behind me, and lifted my hair in his large hands, so that he could feel it and show it to the others, and then lifted one of my arms, and then the other—both bare, now that the enveloping cloak lay discarded on the floor. Then he slid the bracelets up down my arms in a way that showed he wanted to take them from me, but, leaving them for the moment, he began to unhook the necklace of Canopean silver. I was surrounded by his cold unpleasant smell and I felt faint, but I said calmly:
“If you take these things from me, it will be the worse for you.”
I saw the eyes of all six of these rulers—priests and tyrants—turn towards the one who lounged still at the window, showing his superiority to them and the scene by his affectation of half-indifference, sometimes watching what went on in the room, sometimes observing some events out of my sight on the central avenue that, presumably, was not now lined with the guards. He now glanced at them, and nodded slightly—such a minimal gesture was this that I could easily have believed it had not occurred, was it not that it had its effect: the hands of the man who stood behind me no longer fumbled at the catch of the necklace.
Was this eighth man, then, the tyrant who called himself the High Priest? How otherwise was he in a position of supereminence?
Under my robe, I could feel the girdle of starstones, which was the third object given me for protection by Canopus, lying tightly around my waist, not a few inches from the one behind me. I was conscious of the smooth clasp of the gold band around my left thigh, which was the fourth of the talismans.
If the priests had not summoned me to take these things, or to interrogate me, why then was I here? The thought strongest in me was that it was the eighth man who had demanded this confrontation. But why?
Again, I was standing there, no one speaking, the eighth man gazing apparently indifferently out of the window, six of them ranged one beside the other opposite me on the other side of the long narrow table, six pairs of black eyes staring at me. I do not remember any other species that has struck me with such unpleasantness as these did: if they had been simple brutes—that is, a species still totally brutish, or one just lifting itself away from brutishness—they would have been more tolerable. But they were a long from running about on four legs or tearing their food with their fangs. It was the end of a line of evolution I was seeing; one that had taken its path into this cruelty and narrow caste interest and was frozen there.
It came into me that there were two different interests at work here: those of the eighth man being different from the seven, but they did not know it.
One of the men got up, pushed down a lever that slid stone panels across the windows, extinguishing daylight, and I found myself standing in a beam of brilliant light that fell on me from above. All me was quite black and I stood illuminated. I knew then that this was a rehearsal for some ceremony: they wished to see how I would look to an assembly of, probably, slaves as well as the ruling caste, when I stood before them, bathed in light, in one of the temples, before the priests cut the heart out of my body.
A moment later, the stone window panels had slid open again, the light had been switched off, and I was being wrapped in the heavy cloak by the woman, and then taken back along the passages to my room.
There she left me, without other communication.
I sat alone in the awful silence, and now my mind was full of Nasar. I was reliving my exchanges with him before I left Koshi. So strong was my sense of him when the door slab slid back and the same woman stood there, I was thinking still of Nasar, and it was with difficulty that I forced my mind to take her in. Again I was telling myself that one did not trust jailors, while I was contrasting this simple direct presence with the men I had been taken to stand before. The seven men—yet I was seeing the one at the window as apart from the others and as better than them, even while I remembered the whisper: Sirius, be careful. I looked into this woman’s strong eyes, and she gazed straight back at me.
It was as if my mind was trying to open itself, to take in something… but after a long silence, she put down on the stone bench a bundle, which I saw was bedding, and she said: “Try to sleep.” I believed I heard the word “Sirius,” after that admonition, but she had gone. I lay down on the stone slab wrapped in heavy woven material, and lay awake, very far from sleep.
Now, looking back, I can see very clearly two strands, or factors, in my situation. One was the eighth man, he who reminded me of the Shammat thieves. The other was Rhodia. The bad and the good. The two potentials in my situation. The two currents that are in every situation if one learns to recognise them! Now it is all very clear.
Then I lay and thought of Nasar, and sometimes of Klorathy, and hardly at all of the eighth man.
In what I supposed to be the morning of a new day, the first slave came again with food for me.
I sat wrapped to the chin in all the coverings there were, my hands around a bowl of hot meaty liquid, for warmth. My mind was ringing with Nasar! Nasar!—to the extent that I was beginning to judge myself mad. When the female Rhodia came in swiftly, and stood before me, I stammered out “Nasar” before I could stop myself, and then stared at her, as if expecting her to explain.
She kept her eyes on mine for a long interval, as she had done before, and then said, “You must give me your talismans, Sirius.”
I did not move, and she said: “When they come and ask for them, you will say that you have disintegrated them to keep them out of the wrong hands.”
“I have no such skill,” I said. All this while our eyes were engaged, and my mind felt again as if it tried to enlarge, yet could not.
“No, but there are those who have.”
“And these—criminals know this?”
“They know it.”
As I unwound the thick cloths around me, it was with the strongest of feelings of identity with this woman. The thought that I did wrong to trust her was faint now. I held out my bared arms to her to slip off the bracelets. I slid the band down off my thigh and gave it to her. I stood to unlatch the girdle of stones from my waist. I bent my head so that she could undo the necklace. These articles vanished into the voluminous folds of her clothing.
“And now for a time you will be very weak,” she stated, “You are unarmed against Rohanda. You must guard yourself in every way. It not be for long.”
Not knowing I was going to say this, I said: “This is a very strange place to find you in.”
And she said: “And it is a foolish place to find you in, Sirius.”
I was breathing the name Nasar again, as she reached the doorway, and she turned, swiftly, and said, “Yes.” And was gone.
I could feel the weakness of not being protected. My mind seemed to dim and fade. I sat quietly holding onto what she, or he, had promised, that it would not be long.
Soon two of the black-clothed men, tall knifelike men, came and said: “Give us the things!” They were bending over me, their alien black eyes consuming me, and my senses weakened with the odour of them. I said, as Nasar had told me to say: “I do not have them. I disintegrated them, so that they should not fall into the wrong hands.”
At this their faces distorted, rage convulsed them, and their hands dragged off my coverings and were all over me, finding nothing. They stood up, looking at each other—so alike they were, so dreadfully alike, it was as if individuality had been engineered out of them. Then, without looking at me, they strode out and the stone slab closed the entrance.
Now, feeling my mind’s strength ebb away, I simply held on, held on.
When Rhodia, or Nasar, came in, she had a cup of some drink, which she made me take, and it did restore me a little.
Then she sat by me on the bench, and, rubbing my hands between hers, said: “You will have to do absolutely everything I say. When you find yourself lifted up on the sacrificial place, and a green light shines on you, call out, as if in invocation, ‘Death to the Dead…’ and then fling yourself backwards. You will be caught.” And she was already up and away to the door.
I whispered: “Canopus, why are you doing this?”