The Unreasoning Mask

  No. He felt no guilt. Why should he? He had had an affair with her, as he had with twenty or so of the women of al-Buraq. Then she, like so many others, had accused him of not loving her, of not even thinking of her when they were making love. His mind, she had said, was on something else. What was it? What was he thinking about when he should have been entirely enfolded with her, become one with her? Whatever it was, it offended her and made her feel more like a thing than a human being.

  Ramstan had not been able to explain. But all his affairs ended in this manner, though not all the women seemed to hate him as intensely as Deva did.

  That was the trouble with the sensitivity techniques and raising of consciousness disciplines that were part of the education of all Earthpeople. He sometimes wished that his century had the same casual attitude towards affairs that twentieth-century people were supposed to have had. The trouble with his own time was that love was force-fed to the citizens. Not all gavaged geese kept the food down and grew fat. Some vomited it up.

  Thinking thus, he went up the broad stone steps of the hotel, walked across the big portico, and went through two rooms, each with heavy, thick doors that shut automatically behind him. These would not open if another person wished to enter a few seconds after him or if somebody else was already in one of them. Again, he went through the spore-killing process.

  Passing through a wide oval portal, he entered the lobby. The floor was of polished chrysanthemum-white and poppy-red stone. Pillars with curved flutings jetted up into the shadows of the ceiling. Beyond the stone forest, against the far wall, was the sea-green desk of the clerk. His name was Biza!a, and he was the only other person visible. Ramstan removed his mask, but the clerk, recognizing him under it, had Ramstan's keys ready. He had been notified by a crewmember that Ramstan wanted a room.

  Biza!a smiled, but be managed to convey a shadowy dislike as he handed the keys to Ramstan.

  The dislike was for the keys, not Ramstan. Until the first space visitors, the Urzint, had landed, keys were unused on the planet. Biza!a had to perform a ritual cleansing at the end of each shift because of his contact with these.

  Ramstan looked around the empty lobby. Most of the chairs were monstrously huge and sprawling and had some unfunctional grooves in the arms. Unfunctional for humans, anyway. They had not been built for any beings now lodged here. Like most of the other furniture and furnishings of the hotel, they had been constructed for the Urzint. Six of their ships had used this field for a long time. Then, one day, they had failed to show up as scheduled, although they had promised that they would be using the field for millennia to come. Why had they disappeared?

  Ramstan walked up the broad, curving ramp to the third floor -- there were no elevators -- and quietly unlocked the door to his room. He pushed it inward swiftly, leaped into the room and looked around quickly. It was empty and still. The sunlight slanted through the single enormous window onto the gigantic bed. The bathroom, so large that he would not have complained if it had been the bedroom, was empty. A movable platform of glistening yellow hardwood stood before the washbowl, which he used as a bathtub. There was another platform with steps before the toilet bowl, the top of which was a contraption of yellow hardwood. The Kalafalans had made various adjustments for the smaller size of the recent guests. However, if those for whom this hotel was built should return, they would find everything ready for them.

  Ramstan set the electronic traps on the suitcase and put it inside the cavernous closet. After locking its door, he went into the hall and locked the door to his room. Returning to the lobby, he asked Biza!a if any new guests had registered in the last twenty-four hours.

  "Six Tenolt."

  "No one else? An Earthwoman, perhaps?"

  "Ah! She did not register, though she had intended to. She inquired about you, and I said you were in town. She left immediately afterward."

  "For my ship or for town?"

  "She did not say. There is, of course, the possibility that she had a third destination. Or none at all."

  Biza!a was correct, but Ramstan was nevertheless annoyed. These Kalafalans! They spent so much time in considering all possible methods and avenues of action, they seldom accomplished anything. However, as Toyce had pointed out, they seemed as happy as Terrans or any species they had met so far. Progress in science and technology was not necessarily the index of a high civilization.

  Ramstan walked back to his room briskly. His bootstops sounded hollowly in the vast untenanted lobby, staircase, and corridor. Before arriving at his room, he spoke into the back of his hand. "Alif Rho Gimel. Come in, Hermes. Have any strangers contacted you since I last talked to you? Any other news to report?"

  "Hermes, here. Negative to both inquiries."

  "Anything to report on Dogfaces?"

  "GL reports contact with four where the action is. Negative animus." (Translation: Our men on ground leave in town contacted four Tenolt, and they didn't seem unfriendly.)

  "Did Dogfaces inquire about me?"

  "Positive."

  "Were Dogfaces looking for me?"

  "Not specifically, Alif Rho Gimel. They did ask if you were in town."

  "What did GL say?"

  "They said they didn't know."

  "Alif Rho Gimel out."

  Although it was not suppertime, he took his meal from the suitcase. He had meant to remove it before setting the traps but had been too occupied with more important matters. He unset the traps by playing a beam of canceling frequencies from his pocket pseudo-pen over the case. After taking the package out, he reset the traps. Cooking the meal took three seconds after he set the dial on the bottom of the package. He ate without much appetite. He did not dare to order wine sent up. A little drug in it would put him out of the way while the Tenolt went through the suitcase. He did not really believe that they would use poison, since they had the best of reasons for wanting to keep him alive. At this time, anyway.

  However, there were other forces operating in the shadows, and what their wants and wishes were he could not know. His death might be one of them.

  He dumped the cups and dishes into the toilet, where they dissolved within ten seconds. He returned to the chair and moved its huge body on its six wheels so that he could see the sunset. He sighed with delight at the beauty. There were magnificent sunsets on Earth, on Tolt, on Raushghol, but Kalafala's paled them. Dust from volcanoes on the northern and western fringes of the continent supplied colors, but this alone was not responsible for the high beauty.

  Golden stars, tiny and bobbing, drifting from west to east, were, in actuality, far-off boxkite things, dancing lenses for the sun. A pinkish cloud drifted upward, putting out reddish fingers, greenish heads, silvery shoulders, orange-and-emerald-green-streaked ragged eyes, serrated buttons of yellow turquoise, misshapen mouths with carmine lips, and broken irregular teeth of velvet-black and flamingo-pink.

  Briefly, a comet the color of cigarette smoke formed against a sky banded with decaying sine waves of pale violet, blood-red, and carrot-yellow. It rose, head downward, tail spreading out until the colors faded, as if washed out by God, and the comet had collided with an ephemeral sun of amethyst-green and both had died.

  Twelve kilometers to the west, millions of varicolored diaphanous-winged insects were leaving their feeding grounds to fly to the great spindle-shaped communal nests in which they slept, safe from the crepusculer and nocturnal birds and flying animals. But the preyers were harrying and eating now. Although they were not visible at this distance, they were causing the momentary formations. The beauty of the sunset was a byproduct of hunger, terror, and death.

  Then the sun slipped its moorings to the horizon; the sky became black. It was unclouded but starless. Kalafala was on the edge of the universe, and, when on this side of its sun, the night sky was empty.

  BOOOONG! One hundred thousand bronze gongs struck once to weld into a single clang. In the yards of the houses on the plateau and in the city in the valley, Kalafalans hammered the hous
ehold gongs to announce the departure of the sun. The single note rose like a bronze bird, the beat of its wings shaking the hotel and rattling the windows.

  Torches flared in the spaceport town; thousands of torches would be lit in the unseen city in the valley. A drawn-out, shuddering cry wailed at the window, and the torches danced toward the temple to the northwest of the hoteL Ramstan felt a twinge of longing for Earth. The cry reminded him of the evening call of the muezzins from the loudspeakers in his level of New Babylon. Though he had peeled off belief in Allah or in any god as if it were a coat on a hot day, he still responded at times to the Pavlovian bell: his emotions salivated. A cry like a muezzin's became an angel's hand squeezing the heart, a piezoelectric flexing.

  There was still light in the upper sky. The field was dark except for the now-yellow pulsing of al-Buraq and white lights from two open ports in the Tolt ship. Figures appeared in one, cutting off most of the beam, and then the Tenolt had become one with the shadows.

  He rose from the chair and walked around in the darkness until his muscles were no longer stiff. Returning to the chair, he sat for a long time, his eyes on the dark-and-white vista beyond the window. He shifted uneasily. He should return to ship, but he was not going to. By staying here, he might entice those who lusted after the thing in the box in the suitcase to try to get it now.

  He waited for an hour and then moved the chair away from the window to the blackness of a wall. He placed two olson beamguns in the grooves on the arm of the chair and sat down. Now and then, he heard little creaks and slitherings he could not identify, but which did not alarm him. The interplay of the pull of the sun and moons, shifting temperatures and humidities, and settling of the ground stretched and squeezed the hotel as if it were an accordion. He ignored the tiny sounds and waited for the click of metal in the lock and the cautious turning of the knob.

  And then, as time and night hobbled by, he had a fantasy. What if the key were inserted, not in the little lock at his waist-level but in the huge lock at the level of his head? What if the ponderous door swung open, and a turret-headed, neckless, bone-ruffed, triangular-bodied and column-legged Urzint was silhouetted by the hall lights? And the ancient guest clomped in with steps as heavy as a rhinoceros's straight to the closet, opened the suitcase, put on the tepee-sized nightgown, and went straight to bed with never a word to its little roommate? What then?

  He was in a dark woods and running desperately, but slowly and heavily, the air thick against him, while a dark, unseen, unnamed thing loped behind him. The thing snuffled. Ramstan tried to howl with terror, but he could force nothing through his throat, which had turned to stone. Then he put his hand in his pocket, and he drew out a small comb. This he threw behind him, knowing that the stiff teeth of the comb would become a thickly tangled forest of trees. His pursuer bellowed with frustration. The crash of its body as it hurled against the great trees and interwoven branches of underbrush was like the toppling of a mountain.

  Presently, the thing was breathing raspingly behind him. He reached into his pocket and drew out a small mirror and threw that behind him. There was another bellow of frustration and rage and a splash as of the toppling of the face of a glacier into the sea. Ramstan drove on against the heavy air. He was on a flat plain, hard dirt with no vegetation, and the air was becoming even grayer. Then there was the slap of wet paws on the plain, and the breathing was once more behind him. Ramstan pulled from his pocket his third and last gift -- from whom? -- a whetstone, and he threw this behind him. Though he did not look back, he knew that this had turned into a high mountain range. The thing's bellow reached him as a faint sound, but he heard its claws digging into the stone slopes and its labored breathings as it pulled itself up and up. And then, as he sped on, he heard its howl of triumph as it topped the highest peak and began to slide down the other side.

  Moaning, sweating, Ramstan awoke. Near the door, against the wall, a wavering figure stood. It was in a dark robe, its face shrouded by a hood. The face was as pale as moonlight and gave the impression of being that of a very old man or woman. It was either human or remarkably humanoid.

  Ramstan blinked, and the figure shimmered and then was gone.

  It was the glowing tag-end of his dream, appearing just as he awoke, and he had seen it as an afterimage. Al-Khidhr, the Green Man? It had been pointing at the lock. He rose, and, automatically picking up an olson from a chair arm, walked swiftly toward the door. He saw the ghostly tube projecting through the keyhole, stopped breathing, turned, and ran to the window. He started to turn its lock, which kept the two sections tight against the outside air, when be remembered the mask. Still not breathing, he groped around in the seat of the chair until he found it and then put it on. Only then did he swing the two sections of the window open, and, leaning far out, breathed deeply.

  When his lungs were full, he ran back to the tube. The slight hissing from the open end of the tube had told him it was not an olson but a gas-expeller. It would not do to fuse the tube-end with a blast from the olson. The gas might be explosive.

  Ramstan went back to the window and leaned out of it backwards, his eyes on the tube. Presently, the tube was withdrawn. There was a series of clickings as a tool was worked on the lock. He crouched behind the chair. As the door started to swing open, he put his back against the wall, drew up one leg, and shoved the gigantic chair with it. The chair sped toward the doorway on its six wheels, making only a slight squeaking. The door swung open. The chair rammed into the figure momentarily silhouetted in the light. The figure crumbled and went over backward under the impact of the chair.

  Ramstan had run, crouching, a few feet behind and to one side of the chair, his olson ready. He stuck his head out of the doorway, ready to yank it back. But he saw nothing threatening in the hall. An arm with a human hand extended along the floor from behind the massive bulk of the chair.

  Ramstan duckwalked around the side of the chair, moving quietly. The man on the floor might have an olson in his hidden hand. But that, too, was open and still, and he was looking into the red-streaked and glazed eyes of Benagur.

  ... 5 ...

  Benagur's head was massive. His hair was as black and as coarse as a bear's and fell past his shoulders. His beard was long and square-cut. His face looked like the half-mad, half-divine face of a stone-winged bull-man in front of an ancient Assyrian temple.

  Benagur groaned and rolled over on his right side. The back of his head was bloodied. On the floor by the chair, attached to a plastic cylinder, was the tube which had been shoved through the massive keyhole.

  Ramstan helped the commodore to his feet, but released him when he growled, "I'm O.K."

  Ramstan shoved the chair back into the room and turned the lights on. Benagur staggered in and sat down on an inflatable chair. Ramstan brought in the tube and cylinder and locked the door. "What happened, Benagur?"

  "When I came down the hall I saw two cloaked, masked, and gloved persons at your door. They looked up and saw me . . .'

  "You didn't shout?"

  "Yes. Didn't you hear me?"

  "No. The wails and the door are too thick."

  "The two ran away down the hall from me. One dropped the cylinder or whatever it was. They didn't run exactly as humans do . . ."

  "Tenolt?"

  "I don't know. I started to push on the door, and that's the last I remember until I woke up on the floor. My head hurts."

  "There must have been a third. Maybe he was behind the door of the room across the hall. He stepped out and hit you on the back of your head. You regained some consciousness, got to your feet, and then I came through with the chair. It knocked you down again."

  Ramstan remembered that he had left the window open. Swearing, he shut it. His own mask was still on, but Benagur had breathed in the spores. He would begin to feel the effect of the psychedelics in about three to four hours. It would be eight to ten days before his body would get rid of them.

  Ramstan shut the door to stop the flow of breeze-b
orne spores from entering the corridor.