Read Ebook: Die Shadow! by Budrys Algis Finlay Virgil Illustrator

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Ebook has 134 lines and 9975 words, and 3 pages

DIE, SHADOW!

BY ALGIS BUDRYS

He began as a hero. Eons later and a universe away, he became instead a god!

Battered and tossed in his seat by the ship's crazy tumbling, Greaves tensed the oak-hard muscles of his arms and thrust himself up to his feet. He wasn't dead yet. He wasn't dead and, if the slim chance paid off, he'd still be present to laugh in the government's face when the first, safe, cautious official venture finally made its way across the emptiness between Earth and the Sun's second planet.

Outside the cloud-lashed hull there were no stars. Below, no one knew what sort of jungle, or sea, or desert of whipping poison sand might lie in wait. Greaves had not cared when he set out, and did not care now. If men had always waited to be sure, if all the adventurers of mankind had waited until the sign-posts had gone up, the cave bears would still be the dominant form of life on Earth, and races undreamed of might never know such a thing as man to contest their sway over the Universe.

For him to even think in terms of rescuers--of depending on others--was totally uncharacteristic. For him 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.

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 hairs-breadths--that he suddenly saw the flaw in the design.

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....

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." She paused. "I, too, am one of your worshippers. Wherever there are human beings, throughout the Universe, you are worshipped."

He looked at her more closely. There was a lift to one black-winged eyebrow that was less reverent than a god might like, though a man could have no quarrel with it. She stood gracefully on sandaled feet, dressed in a single white garment girdled around her waist by a belt made of the same metal in which the monsters were cast. He saw that the clasp was shaped into a profile of his own face. And he saw from the wear that it showed that it was old--older than she could be, older perhaps than this court. This ... shrine? He wondered how many priestesses had worn that belt.

He frowned and got down, feeling the touch of the day-warmed stone on his bare feet. He was dressed, he saw, in a black kilt and nothing else. He returned his glance to the worshippers and saw that the men were dressed similarly, and that the women wore flowing, calf-length, translucently light robes like Adelie's.

There was motion at one corner of his eye, and he turned his head sharply to see the arms of the couch sweeping down, folding and bending against its sides. Now he saw that he had been cradled in the arms of a great black metal beast. It crouched atop the dais. Its head was bent supplicatingly, bright oily metal barely visible at the joinings of its mechanical body.

He glanced quickly up at the monsters atop their columns. "Are they all like that?" he asked Adelie.

"Your kind will learn about that," the old man snapped.

"Not from you and yours," the slim man said lightly.

Greaves turned to Adelie, who waited, poised, while old Vigil and the young man quarreled. "Tell me the situation," Greaves said.

Adelie's lips parted. But the old man interrupted.

"The situation is that you have been awakened needlessly and would best go back to sleep at once. My daughter and these fanatical sheep--" he waved an angry arm at the standing worshippers--"have forced me to permit this. But in fact Humanity neither needs you nor wants you awake."

"Oh, on the contrary," the young man said. "Humanity needs its gods very badly at this hour. But you are only a man, not so?"

Greaves looked from one to the other--the leather-skinned old man with his mop of ringleted white hair, the young one who was human in appearance but somehow claimed some other status. "Who are you two?"

"I am Vigil, your guardian, and this is--"

"I am Mayron of The Shadows," the young man said, and he held himself as carelessly as before, but his face looked directly into Greaves's. "See my eyes."

There was nothing there. Only darkness speckled by pinpoints of light; thick, sooty darkness like oil smoke, and sharp lights that burned through it without illuminating it.

"Mayron that was First of Men," Vigil said bitterly.

"Mayron that is First of Shadows," the empty-skinned thing replied proudly, and began to weep great, black tears that soon emptied it, so that the skin drooped down into a huddle on the pave and a black cloud in the shape of a man stood sparkling in the dusk before Greaves. "Mayron that will again be First of Men, when all men are shadows. Mayron that is already First of many men. And which of us is a god, David Greaves?"

Adelie's face glowed with excitement. Her red lips were parted breathlessly. The crowd on the tiers had loosed a great, wailing moan, which hung over the court of conquered monsters as the first stars became visible on the far horizon.

Greaves took a deep breath. He could feel his body tensing itself, the muscles rippling, as though his hide needed comfort.

"Which of us is a god, man?" Mayron repeated softly, his voice coming from the entire cloud. "What is it you can do against me, you whose entire virtue rests on doing nothing?"

"That would depend on what was expected of me at this moment," Greaves said.

"In that case, get out of my court and come back when there's something to do."

Mayron laughed, throwing his head back, the laughter high and insolent. "How like a god! How very like the real thing."

Greaves frowned. "If you were a man, once, you might remember how that feels." But the laugh had bothered him.

"Oh, I remember, I remember. And tomorrow we fight, man." Laughing, Mayron bent and picked up the skin he had discarded. He crumpled it by the waist in one fist, and brandished it negligently at the worshippers. They shrank back with a moan of horror as he strode toward the far wall. At the wall, he flipped the white, fluttering thing over, and as a cloud passed through the stone. Perhaps on the other side he put on his human form again. Greaves could not tell. The sun was down, and only a little light glowed on the far horizon. The torches guttered in the court of monsters, and the worshippers were hurrying up the steps, out through the temple and away.

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