Short Fiction - Algis Budrys (chrysanthemum read aloud .TXT) 📗

to divert a major portion of his dwindling resources from work on the ship itself, and push toward the elaborate design of the capsule, was, in some lights, again uncharacteristically foolish. But he had done it, and now.⁠ ⁠…

… Now the anesthetic created by the man some said was a medical genius and some said was a quack had flooded over him.

He could feel the first effect⁠—the calm, the drowsy peace. By the time the Defiance smashed into the ground⁠—very soon now⁠—his metabolism would have slowed to a carefully metered rate. It would take hours for his heart to beat once. To him it would seem as if each day was only a few minutes. The jagged nerve-flashes of pain would be only a faraway slow tingle; the blink of an eye would encompass hours of actual time, and he would lie here, safe, asleep, until the hatch was opened and he was taken out into the air, where slowly the effects would wear off.

Meanwhile, there was more than enough gas compressed into the capsule’s tanks to keep him perfectly relaxed for a hundred years. The valve⁠—a simple device he had sketched out in five minutes, as if the design had been part of his mind for years⁠—would continue to meter out the supply at the optimum rate and pressure.

It was only now⁠—perhaps a hundred feet from impact, perhaps only a hundred hairsbreadths⁠—that he suddenly saw the flaw in the design.

He struggled to reach the valve, in a useless reflex, for there would have been nothing he could have done, no matter how much time remained. Then he fell back, a twisted grin on his face. I’ve come a long, long way to trap myself, he laughed in his drowsing mind, as the ship crashed, and the capsule, torn from Defiance’s side, rebounded like a cannon shell from Heaven upon the outraged soil of Venus, and the overhead clouds sprang into flamed reflection from the blast of Defiance’s end.

In the capsule, the valve controlling the flow from the illogically copious supply of anesthetic snapped off cleanly. David Greaves’ lungs jolted to the impact as a century’s dosage of the high-pressure gas delivered its one giant hammerblow of sleep.⁠ ⁠… Of sleep like death.⁠ ⁠…

Of sleep so slow, so majestic, that only the eternally ageless body might testify to life. Of sleep without end, without motion, until.⁠ ⁠…

II

The woman⁠—the sensuous ivory-skinned woman with eyes like dark jewels and hair like midnight framing her red-lipped face⁠—kissed him again and then drew back to touch his cheek.

“Wake,” she whispered softly. “Wake, sleeper.”

David Greaves looked up at her through slowly dawning eyes. The scent of spices was in his nostrils. As the woman’s hair brushed his face again, the fragrance increased.

“My name is David Greaves,” he said, and looked up at the sky and then around him.

There was now no envelope of cloud to hide the face of this planet from the Sun; no such shroud as had concealed the Venus of his day in dazzling white without and muffled it in somber black within. This sky was ruddy, ruddy with the light of the day’s last moments, and the clouds through which the sunset burned were only crayon-strokes of ochre across the orange sky.

He lay in state, facing that sunset, on some sort of black metal couch which supported him on a multitude of sweeping, back-bent arms. Beneath him, a dozen low broad steps of olive-green polished stone led down to a long forum, flagged with the same gold-veined, masterfully fitted paving. Around the court ran a low wall, again of stone; friezed, and burnished to a dull glow. From the wall, tall slim pillars thrust into the air.

And atop each pillar, cast and carved in black metal washed by the lingering light, crouched a monster.

No single artist could have created such a bestiary of gargoyles. Some he could trace in their evolution⁠—the vulpine, the crustacean, the insectile. Fangs and pincers slit the cool, invigorating breeze that flowed over the court. Antennae quivered and hummed in the air, and a myriad legs were poised in tension, forever prepared to leap. Others were beyond any creation he knew of⁠—limbs and wings contorted into shapes that had, undoubtedly, been taken by living things⁠ ⁠… in lives unimaginable to any man. And all of them, imaginable or not, faced toward him forever.

At the foot of each pillar, mounted in a cresset on the wall at its base, burned a torch. And so, when night fell, then the shadows of all these monsters would be cast upward onto the stars, and he would lie sleeping in the pooled light of the torches, while all around him these creatures stood watch.

How many nights had he lain here? How many centuries to wash the fog of sleep out of every nook and cranny of his lungs, when each breath might take a thousand years⁠—ten thousand?

But he was not done with studying his surroundings. He had heard sound when he turned his head. Now the sound was a rising murmur as he lifted his shoulders to look down the length of the court of monsters toward the far end. There were people there. They had been seated on stone tiers that rose up toward a colonnaded temple. There he could see an altar through the open sides and, on that altar, a flame that burned bright and unwinking against the outline of the lowering Sun.

The people were rising to their feet. From them came an open-throated murmur that became a cry of savage joy⁠—of unbearable tension finding release.

“Who are they?” he asked the woman as he sat up and felt his body stretch with power cramped too long, as he squared back his shoulders and peered through the twilight in the court of monsters.

“Your worshippers, David Greaves,” she said, standing beside him among the many arms of his couch. “The people whose last hope you are.” She added softly: “My name, though you did not ask, is Adelie.”