The Unreasoning Mask

  "Why didn't you notify me at once?"

  "It didn't seem necessary. No sooner did the Popacapyu land than her ports opened and out came a number of crewpeople. They went immediately to the control tower, and then some went to the hotel and the tavern. That didn't indicate hostile motives, sir. Besides, we have no reason to suspect hostility."

  Was there a questioning tone in Tenno's voice?

  He added, "Sir, more Tenolt have left the ship. They're unarmed -- like the others."

  Ramstan had continued walking. He stopped under a tree on the edge of the field. He could not see his ship, al-Buraq, because she was on a lower-level berth in the center of a great concrete basin. But the upper part of the oyster-shaped Tolt vessel was visible. Most of the ship was concealed by a triple-row of giant, poplarlike trees. Only Kalafalans would plant trees and flowers in the middle of a landing field.

  The ship had to be the Popacapyu, which had been berthed near al-Buraq on the Tolt port on the night that al-Buraq took off so suddenly, uncleared by the Tolt authorities.

  Now that the Popacapyu was here -- and how had the Tenolt found al-Buraq? -- her captain would, sooner or later, be visiting Ramstan. He would ask why the Earthship had made its unauthorized departure. Or would he? He knew why.

  Ramstan started walking again. When he came to the limit of the field, he left the trees to continue southward. After going down the hill far enough so he would not be seen from the Tolt ship, he walked east across the face of the hill. He took a half-hour to circle until he could approach al-Buraq from the east.

  He paused to lean against the slim, corkscrew-shaped flying buttress of a government building to catch his breath and to admire -- for how many times? -- his ship.

  From this side of the field, he could see her upper part. The vessel lay in a depression, the opposite wall of which was deep and vertical. On this side, ramps led up from the craft for the passage of crew and supplies. Many Kalafalans stood along the edges of the depression gazing at al-Buraq. She crouched in her berth, glowing with a bright-red wax and wane, breathing light. A monstrous starfish-form bright as a hot coal just fallen from a fireplace, her five arms sprawled out from the fat central body. She was now in this form so that the loading and unloading of cargo and supplies and the entry and exit of personnel could be expedited. For take-off, she could shift to space-form in two minutes, though she did not have to metamorphose to do so. The five arms, covered with hundreds of thousands of small armor plates, would shrink in length, swell in circumference, draw up, become part of the saucer-shaped body. Or, if she were to travel in the atmosphere, she would become needle-shaped. There was no danger of personnel being crushed in corridors or cabins during the shape-change. The bulkhead sensors detected that which must be uninjured or undamaged. Only if the captain -- or a delegated authority -- overrode the inhibitions with a spoken code could the shape-shifting be harmful to the crew.

  Ramstan crossed the field and gently moved through the hundreds gathered to admire the ship. They smiled and spoke to him in their native tongue or in Urzint. Many reached out to touch him lightly. Their fingers scraped off dust of meteors, powder of comets, light-exudations of stars, and also the texture of all the fleshes of Earth. Or so they claimed.

  Ramstan smiled diplomatically when the fingers touched him. He smiled at a baby held up to him and at a particularly pixyish female. She gestured with one hand, thumb and a finger curved and touching to indicate she'd like to rendezvous with him.

  At that moment he envied those of his crew who would have accepted her invitation. But he had to behave as the representative of the best on Earth. Whether or not he liked it, he was clad in moral armor. It was not that of Kalafala but of Earth. And his own.

  The natives did not understand his behavior. Some of it repelled them, though they had not told him so directly. Despite this, they touched him with wondering, wonder-netting fingers. He might be as cold as interstellar space, but this, too, was thrilling. Cold burned in beauty.

  "Kala!watha! Kala!watha!"

  The murmurs flowed around him. Kala- indicated "person" or "sentient" or "speech." -!watha was as close to "Earth" as their language permitted them to approach. The Terrans could not pronounce at all the buzzing consonant designated by ! in the phonetic transcription used by the Terran linguists.

  Here and there arose murmurs of p + hawaw!sona. Double-mask. Earthpeople here wore masks to strain out the psyche-deligenic spores. Also, no matter how expressive or uninhibited his or her features seemed to the other Terrans, to the Kalafaian the Earthperson was masked with slow-flowing concrete.

  Ramstan stepped past the sign which bore the ideogram warning the natives to go no further. He went down the ramp to the bottom of the depression and up the nine stone steps to the slab on which al-Buraq sprawled. Normally, the stone was gray. Now it seemed to blush lightly. A moment later, it blushed deeply.

  The ship panted red light through the semiopaque hull. The lower part of the disk-shaped body and the five arms bulged out against the slab, like a behemoth pressed down by its own weight.

  Ramstan halted before the two masked marines at the port, gave the password -- though both recognized him, of course -- held out his right hand so one could read through UV glasses the code printed on the palm. He entered the port, air under pressure blowing from it, and went down a short corridor. The bulkhead before him smiled; he stepped through the lips. For about seven seconds, he stood still while supersonic beams disintegrated spores that had been killed in the corridor.

  A whistle sounded; the bulkheads flashed red. He removed his mask, folded it, and stuck it into an inner pocket of his jacket. He went on into a corridor twice as tall as he, round, and curving toward the center mess hall for the third-level crew. The floor was cartilaginous and springy. Round and lozenge-shaped shining plates alternated along both sides of the corridor. Opened or closed irises were spaced at irregular intervals along the corridors. The light was white within the ship; Ramstan moved shadowless. The glow on the circle to his right dulled, then became a mosaic of partial views of operational-important places in the ship. Eight triangles, separated by a thin black line, composed the circle and showed him three slices of the bridge, the chief engineer's post, chief gunnery officer's post, two laboratories, and the chief medical officer's office.

  "Cancel V-1," Ramstan said, and the mosaic died out in a burst of light.

  A whistle shrilled. A lozenge on the right bulkhead showed the face of Lieutenant-Commodore Tenno.

  "No orders now," Ramstan growled. "Cancel A-1."

  Tenno disappeared in a glory of light. That was one of the disadvantages of replacing metal and plastic with protoplasm, cables with nerves, computers with brains. Like a dog wriggling and fawning with frenzied love at her master's return home, al-Buraq was overexcited at seeing him after his long (ten-hour) absence.

  The chief bioengineer, Doctor Indra, was working at the inhibition of al-Buraq. At least, he was thinking about the problem or should be. Ramstan had seen Indra squatting cross-legged on the floor, immobile, even the eyes unblinking, one skinny brown arm extended to the bulkhead and holding a mentoscope against a sensor plate.

  Ramstan left the corridor for an elevator passageway.

  At its end was a port which became a hatch as he neared it. He stepped onto the gray disk which rose up through the hatch, said, "One-three. C-C," and waited. An iris opened in the bulkhead, the disk moved into the iris, carrying him with a motion which he could barely feel. The bulkheads rounded to form a shaft, the disk rose, the flesh-colored bulkheads glowing, and then stopped with a slight chuffing sound. The shaft bent overhead, the bulkhead behind him curving over, the rest of the shaft quickly shaping itself into a corridor.

  Ramstan stepped off the disk, walked three paces to where the shaft curved upward again, and waited. In three seconds, the bulkhead just before him split, and he walked into his quarters. This was a small room which was expanding now that the master was home. It was hemispherical, a
nd the only visible furniture was a table on which stood an electron microscope. The deck was bare except for a prayer rug, three meters square, near a bulkhead by the iris. It was made of woven wool, as required by the al-Khidhr sect, and was dark green except for a red arrowhead design in one corner. This was the kiblah, the symbol which was to be pointed towards Mecca when the worshiper knelt on the rug. Here, of course, there was no means for determining where Mecca was. This made no difference to Ramstan. He had not prayed since his father had died. He did not know why he had not left the rug on Earth, and he had not cared to wonder why. Most of the time he did not even notice it. Now, looking intensely at it, he thought it moved.

  One of the superstitions of the sect was that prayer rugs, if rolled, unrolled themselves just before al-Khidhr, the Green One, appeared. If unrolled, the rug moved its edges to indicate the coming of al-Khidhr.

  Ramstan turned away. He was getting too nervous, he told himself. Next, he'd be hallucinating al-Khidhr himself.

  The bulkheads had been bare and glowing faintly yellow. Now, murals appeared on them, ship's electronic reproductions of paintings by Ramstan. Most were geometrical abstracts, but there was one naturalistic St. George slaying the dragon and another of Aladdin during his first encounter with the djinn of the lamp. These two were his most recent works. It had taken him a long time to overcome his early conditioning against the representation of living things in art.

  Ramstan, though he'd abandoned the faith of his ancestors, still could not eat the flesh of swine, regarded dogs as unclean, and wiped with the left hand after defecating. But he had overcome his conditioning against drinking alcohol.

  He stood before the St. George and dragon, spoke a code phrase, and the bulkhead opened, its central point of distention the dragon's eye. Within was a large globe open at one end. It contained two plastic boxes, one larger than the other. The smaller held top-secret records, little spheres, each set in a hollow. The other -- that held the reason why he had ordered al-Buraq to leave Tolt so quickly and why the Tolt ship was now here.

  He struggled with the desire to open the larger box and look at its contents. He sighed, shuddered slightly, and told the bulkhead to close up. He patted the bulkhead, and it quivered. Al-Buraq was watching him, and she had interpreted the pat as a touch of affection from her master. Somewhere, in the dark chamber in ship where the synthetic brain floated, a complex of neural circuits, unanticipated by the designers, had grown. The "obedience" configuration now had an "affection" annex.

  Ramstan turned away and uttered another code word. A viewplate on the bulkhead across the cabin widened, and it began to run off a film of the cabin since Ramstan had left it. He watched it with his mind on other things: the Tenolt, Branwen Davis, and the bodiless voice in the tavern.

  His indrawn breath was a knife-edge scraped across a whetstone. He cried, "Hold it?"

  The film continued running. He said, "Freeze it!" and the film stopped. In one corner flashed 10:31 ST, the time of the photographing.

  Ramstan groaned, and he said, "Run it back," and then, again, "Freeze it."

  The screen had showed an empty cabin. Then, suddenly, the figure had appeared. It had not entered through the iris; it had just popped out of nowhere like a ghost materialized.

  Its back was to Ramstan, and it was facing the mural of St. George and the dragon. Its head was concealed beneath a green hood, and the body was covered with a green cloak. The back of the hands were very wrinkled and bore huge blue veins and dark liver-spots.

  He groaned again. He had seen such a hood and cloak and such hands once before. A long time ago on Earth.

  At Ramstan's command, the film began running forward again. The figure stood looking at the mural for three minutes, then it turned. Ramstan was looking into a face that he could not see clearly because it was deep within the hood. But he recognized it. It was ancient, ancient, carved with wrinkles, and it could have been the face of a very old man or woman.

  The shadowy eyes seemed to be looking into his.

  Then the person in green vanished.

  Ramstan cried, "Al-Khidhr!"

  ... 3 ...

  Ramstan sat before the table in his quarters. Canceling all shadows except those in his mind, light pulsed faintly from the deck, bulkheads, and overhead. His only communication with the outside was the audio from the first-bridge, and that was one-way.

  On the top of the table was an egg-shaped object below the electron microscope. To the unaided eye, the egg was faintly yellowish-white. It was smooth to the touch. Looking at the screen while he turned the controls, Ramstan felt as if he were in an aircraft descending toward a large albino elephant with a very wrinkled hide.

  The wrinkled blank expanded, carrying the ends of the egg out of sight. Tiny figures appeared, indistinct at first, then, suddenly, sharp. The surface was as crowded with sculpture as an ancient Hindu temple.

  Ramstan moved the controls so that the view swept to the figures at the end to his left. Here, rising up from the surtace of a choppy sea, was a multitude of forms: a twelve-tentacled squid with a bony, serrated fin; a vast fishlike creature behind it, its leviathan mouth filled with curving teeth and open to suck in the desperate mollusk fleeing via the double propulsion of jet and sail; a gigantic amoeba which seemed to pulse, its pseudopods reaching out to encircle and ingest a sharklike creature; the gap of the shark's mouth about to close on a bulbous, fat-lipped fish, the jaws of which were clamped on a bulging-eyed thing, half lobster, half conical shell; the claws of the hybrid opening to release in its death agony an eel-like creature with a cockatoo crest; a school of things like animated flowers fleeing into the shallows; a band of fish with fins that could swim in the sea or pull them along like cripples on the beach sands, two of the crutch-fins lurching across the beach toward low-growing plants.

  Ramstan adjusted the controls again, and the sea surface became translucent. Seemingly far below, though the distance must be an illusion, were many things of many forms that crawled on the muck of the ocean floor, eating the torn parts and the bodies that sifted from the carnage above, eating the carrion and each other, dying, themselves being eaten, while eggs spurted from mothers and fathers, eggs hatched, the young darted out in all directions to escape the eaters, some of whom were their own parents.

  Dimly, through the murk, the outlines of a long-buried city advanced and receded, a shattered ziggurat topped by an altar and a leaning idol, a pillar, a broken arch, an upside down trireme ragged with living valves clinging to its hull, the hint of a huge and fearsome creature with burning eyes quivering in its hollow, the granite head of a massive statue up to its mouth in mud mixed with bones and shells, its long curving nose and fierce eyes stonily proclaiming terror, arrogance, and invincibility to an uncomprehending thing of a hundred skinny legs and a beak like a vulture's.

  Another turn of the controls. Beneath the mud? He could not determine what it was. Something batlike and grinning.

  He turned the controls back and moved the eye past the shore and into the jungle. Here was a strange creature which seemed to stretch for miles, which was, actually, a procession of beasts and birds sequentially advancing, progressing, and retrogressing from the crutch-creature that had achieved a total land life. It was many beings making a single being, flowing out from the other, branching, flowering, sometimes a branch curving back to enter the sea, a many-bodied many-limbed, many-headed flow of flesh.

  Ramstan reached out to turn the egg slightly, stopping his fingertips short of it as if he feared that it might burn him or cling to his flesh and suck him into it. After a few seconds' hesitation, he felt it, and it was, as always, cool and smooth. But he could feel the squirm of life and the suddenness and soddenness of death and the tingling of tiny voltages of tenor and pain and laughter and joy and triumph and despair.

  So he sat, turning the ovoid, adjusting the microscope, tracing the slow spiral of sculpture.

  Here was a city, proud and high-waned, about to be destroyed by barbaria
ns from the mountains, a horde that had wandered for decades over desert and now coveted the milk and honey, the gold and the jewels, the furniture and the trinkets, the women and the herds.

  Here was another city destroyed only by time. The rains had gone, the land had dried, the people had died or gone seeking a place where the soil was wet and black and thick and the skies were wet and cloudy. A jackalish beast crossed the wide street, now covered with sand, where victorious armies had once marched down its length, dragging captives behind chariots piled with loot while the citizens cheered and the band played loud martial music. Now the only sound was that of the wind through empty dusty rooms, the hoot of an owl, the hiss of a serpent. Beyond, the descendants of the refugees pushed their herds across vast steppes, headed toward a distant land of walled cities, many rivers, and easy pickings.