Something fluttered in the hazy air, and went past them on flickering … wings? Yes, wings, on a world where birds or butterflies have never flown. Ryker shielded his gaze from the golden glare of the skies, and peered after the flying thing, hardly daring to believe what he saw.
It was neither bird nor insect, but—a serpent! A slim, graceful, undulant form, rose pink, and flecked with gemlike scales, its wedge-shaped head oddly crested with a fierce violet cockscomb—a serpent in every detail, save that it flew on wings like feathery, transparent sprays of membranous opal.
Someone stumbled into him from behind and he turned to see Doc bent over, fingering the queer bushes, mumbling entrancedly to himself. The old man seemed lost in a dream.
The golden glare from above, which he had glimpsed when the winged serpent fluttered by, caught his wandering attention then, and Ryker looked up.
He could not have said what he thought he might see—a rocky cavern roof far overhead, perhaps—-but whatever he had expected, he didn’t see it. Instead he saw a vast,
fathomless reach of the firmament, filled with pale golden fire and streaked with long thin filaments of—cloud?—oddly pinkish green, at any rate, and curiously regular in shape, with a gelatinous, near-solid look to them. But he was almost beyond wonderment by now, and merely drank in the sky of luminous gold without thinking about it.
At the zenith hung a disk of brilliant white fire. It seemed about the same size as the sun was, seen from the Martian surface, but intolerably more radiant, and lacking the yellowish tinge of the sun he had always known. This new sun was white and fierce, and younger than the sun he knew.
He wandered off into a grove of peculiar trees. They had long, graceful, drooping fronds, like an earthly willow, except that the fronds were each one long feathery leaf, like a palm, but rich metallic indigo. And there was no trunk to these feather trees, the frond sprang from one branch, and the stem of each branch was separate, although they all grew in a clump.
Ryker had never seen or heard of trees like these.
Nor the bushes that grew thick between them, either.
They were a paler shade of blue, and had glossy leaves like enormous ferns. But ferns grown waist high, and from a thick central stem.
He wandered on, and presently he came to the source of the sweet, spicy perfume.
The flowers grew as large as the head of an adult man, and were gauze thin, delicate as tissue. Translucent they were; pale gossamer petals colored the vague, changing hues of opals. And they were as fragile to the touch as they looked. He touched one, rubbed its petals gently between his fingers—and the enormous, frail blossom vanished like a soap-bubble, leaving a sweet-scented residue on his fingers, like a drop of fragrant essence.
But he was beyond marvel now.
At least he thought he was.
He strolled on, drinking in the sweet, moist, warm air, shedding his thermalsuit with an absent gesture, no longer needing it to shield him from the cold, dry bite of the thin Martian air.
For he was no longer on Mars.
He knew this for certain when he came to the pool. A natural pond of water, open to the sky, was unknown on the desert world. Back on the Mars he knew it would have evaporated like a puff of steam, in mere instants of time.
But not here, evidently.
He stared at it, wonderingly.
For here one was: a pool of sweet, cold, fresh water bubbling up from hidden springs. Several of the desert warriors knelt beside the pool, like men in a trance, hardly daring to believe the evidence of their eyes. One gingerly dipped a dusty finger in the limpid water, and sucked it, a dazed expression in his eyes.
One by one the others bent and drank. Never in all their lives had they seen a pool of water before. They hardly knew what to make of it.
Glossy-leafed bushes rustled then, and a sinuous, furry form glided into view and stood watching them from huge, unwinking eyes like luminous amber or topaz. Ryker froze. So did the warriors, none of whom had ever seen such a creature before.
It looked very much like a cat, but it was larger than a cheetah, its slim, graceful body clad in sleek, gleaming fur, coppery red. It had enormous, prick-eyes, fragile, silken and oval, lambent eyes that glowed in its elfin, heart-shaped face. It was impossibly beautiful.
The cat creature paid no particular attention to them, after that first long, enigmatic stare. It stretched indifferently, yawned, revealing a dainty pink tongue, and ambled away to stretch out on the azure moss beneath the nearest tree. It was not only unafraid of them, it didn’t seem to find them particularly interesting.
There sounded a dull plop, and a plump, golden fruit fell to the cushioning moss near the cat creature. The feline yawned again, sniffed the fruit lazily, and began to devour it daintily.
Then a small furry rodentlike animal came wriggling up from the moss to investigate the bits of fruit the cat had let fall.
The newcomer was about the size of a rabbit, with silky fur, pale blue, and pink eyes and white whiskers and a wriggling pink nose. It looked like a fat mouse.
The cat completely ignored it, after one sideways glance. Then it let the rind of the fruit fall to the ground and began lazily to groom its whiskers with one velvet paw. At its feet, utterly fearless, the fat blue rodent began nibbling at the remnants of the fruit. Ryker could hardly believe his eyes.
Beside him Doc appeared, observing this most curiously unfeline behavior. The old man mumbled something under his breath in what sounded like Hebrew.
“Eh?” murmured Ryker.
The old man blinked at him, then grinned, flushing a little.
“Sorry! I will translate.” His eyes grew dreamy. ” ‘And the Lord God planted a garden eastwards in Eden… .’ “
Ryker nodded, his eyes thoughtful. “I know what you mean, Doc. Do you remember the rest of it?”
“Like I know my own hand,” the old man said softly.
“Let me think … yes … ‘And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of the Earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. And God looked upon his handiwork, and saw that it was good.’ “
The words stirred up old, long-forgotten memories within Ryker. He thought of that white frame house, and its little garden, and the small black and white dog, and the smiling woman who had once read to him these same words from an old, old book.
“Eden, eh?” he murmured. “And is there a Serpent in it yet, I wonder?”
Doc looked behind them to where Zarouk was striding about, yelling, rousing his men from their dreams, marshalling them into battle formation.
“Yes, there is,” he whispered somberly. “And, God help us, I think it is you and I, my boy, who have let the Serpent in.”
And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.
17. The Dreaming City
It took a long time and much yelling for Zarouk to bring his men out of their trance and into order. When at last this was done, he led them down the gentle slope and into the strange new world they had found beyond the door.
As for the door itself, they left it open. Indeed, they were not entirely sure how to close it, even with the Keystone. The spangled mist of blue-green motes into which the Martium panel had vaporized remained in its immaterial state, a curtain of metallic haze drawn across the round opening in the rock of the low red cliff. Zarouk guessed it would stay that way until the Keystone returned the vapor to its solid form.