THE STAR-MASTER-7
948 Words
III“A RAINBOW STORM IS coming,” old Prytan said. “We shall have to wait until it is passed before trying to get to the broken city.”
We were in the depths of an orange-blue forest of giant, spindly vegetation that rose in fantastic shapes from the soft, porous ground five hundred feet or more into the air. Pods and vines hung upon the lacery of trees. There were huge vivid flowers, redolent with a perfume exotic, cloying in the heavy humid air.
Everything, particularly at first, to me was heavy, oppressive. Venus is denser than the Earth, and the gravity is a full third heavier. It made walking, to us Earthmen, a panting labor. I felt that I weighed, not my normal hundred and eighty pounds, but almost two hundred and fifty. For us to run seemed impossible.
I had seen but little of this Forest City. It was a group of perhaps a thousand dwellings, all seemingly built of slabs of the porous forest trees, with walls and roofs of thatch. The houses nestled between the great fantastic trees. Some were like birds’ nests in the branches, with vine-ladders from the ground leading up to them. The colors of the thatch were vivid blue, red and yellow.
It was a fairyland of woodland fantasy, peopled by the humans of this scattered, futile Venus-race. I had seen gaping groups of them as Venta and I pushed through them, heading for old Prytan’s dwelling. Men, women and children crowded the flower-lined, crooked little city streets. They were all gaudily-dressed in toga-like fabrics made from the vivid-colored, dried vegetable fibres. A few of them had fled here from Shan where they had picked up a little English from the Earth-conquerors. But most of them babbled at me in their own weird tongue. They were a gentle people. The lack of struggle, lack of accomplishment for generations now, had stamped them with a futility. Here in the benign climate of Venus they had grown content with simple wants. Love-making, music—that was enough for them. The Midge attended their every want.
Decadence perhaps, but who shall say but what it is to be preferred to the bloody upward struggles of our own Earth’s history? All that too, had been upon Venus. Far ahead of Earth in the life-cycle of its humans, there had been great scientific civilizations here. The science of war had risen into all its ghastly power and then had destroyed itself, with mankind at last coming to realize its tragic futility. There were ruins of great cities here, with the silt of centuries upon them and the forests growing lush amid their wreckage.
“You two Earthmen are not quite like Curtmann and his fellows,” old Prytan said to me. His eyes twinkled beneath his shaggy white brows. His seamed old face wrinkled with a smile.
“No,” I said. “We hope not.”
“But your Earth still struggles, with each man wanting more than his neighbor.”
We were in a room of a huge, crudely-built dwelling of thatch. A thousand Midges had woven it in a day. Venta was here; and draped on the floor at her feet was the graceful, gaudily-clad figure of a young Venusman. His name was Jahnt. He was her cousin, I understood. A handsome fellow with longish, bushy dark hair; an oval face with pointed chin, hawk nose and eyes with an almost Oriental slant. He spoke English as fluently as Venta. I don’t know why I took an instant dislike to him, save that he always seemed to want to be beside Venta.
A rainbow storm was coming. I could see the premonitory signs of it. The room here was lighted with little braziers—seemingly the caged bodies of tiny insects which were luminous as fireflies. Through the oval window-openings the night outside was turgidly dark. But wind now was pattering the trees, and there were distant flares of weird opalescent lightning.
A tenseness was here in this room of old Prytan’s home—and it was everywhere about the little city. Like an aura of terror it seemed to envelope us. All this day that had passed, Midges by hundreds had been flying in from Shan. And now, this evening, the big people themselves had begun coming. Fugitives. Terrified people who had escaped from Shan; rebellious, wanting to do something to rid Venus of these cruel conquerors, coming to Prytan as their leader; helplessly throwing themselves upon him, asking him what they should do. Groups of people milled in the streets, eyed the coming storm. Rebellion against the Earth-conquerors. But it was more than that. Among us all, here in this eerie opalescent room there was the feeling of impending disaster. Curtmann had returned to Shan. In a rage at the loss of Venta, he had learned that the rebellion against him was growing. Would he wait for old Prytan to organize some attack? Certainly I doubted it. And my mind swept back so that again I seemed to hear his grim words: “I shall have to punish that Forest City!”
Was Curtmann planning to strike at us now?
“... but until the storm is over we can do nothing,” old Prytan was saying.
Even then, what could we do? In somber voices that seemed to echo dully through the rustic room and mingled with the weird storm-noises outside, we discussed it. One of the great broken cities of by-gone days was only some ten miles away. In it there was hidden away a cache of ancient weapons of science.
“I have kept them workable,” Prytan said grimly. “And my father before me also attended them. And before him, his father. But never did we really think the horrible time would come when they should be used.”
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