As for Karn’s mysterious savior, he was a cold, aloof, impersonal man who had not as yet divulged his reason for rescuing the wild boy from the scorpion monster. His name was Sarchimus, and in this chronicle I have referred to him as a “magician,” for want of a more fitting term. Sarchimus the Wise was he called, and in this Scarlet Pylon he dwelt alone, insofar as I had learned as yet. There were others like Sarchimus, who lived here and there in various portions of the Dead City, but it was to be some time before I encountered any of them.
Sarchimus was silent and inscrutable; he lived apart and busied himself in curious studies whereof I knew but little, for I seldom saw him. Although he was solicitous to me while my wound knit and my body healed and I recovered my strength and health, he was neither my friend nor my master. The mystery of Sarchimus was one I had yet to solve.
And so this first peculiarity of my new embodied state was that I now possessed the living memories of another; I shared his memories only, and not his being or his sense of identity, for that had fled into the Unknown with his immortal spirit. The other peculiarity of which I have spoken is the strangeness of my new body, which was that of an immature boy. For I had been a full-grown man in my former life on the planet Earth far away, and to find myself a boy again was weird and unsettling, and it took me a considerable time to adjust to my new condition.
My own boyhood on Earth had been cruelly curtailed, for since I was a child of six I had been crippled with polio and had not taken a single step without mechanical aids. So now, to the strangeness of my new immaturity, was added the strangeness of dwelling within a strong and athletic body. A body that yearned to run and climb and play with the reckless abandon of a healthy boy—a body that chafed at restraints and conditions and ill health. It was all rather like a strange dream.
To be a boy again—and a healthy one, at that—was a dream that many men have had. The actuality of the dream was, oddly enough, uncomfortable. For one thing, although my spirit was that of a man, my emotions and my self-control were immature and tentative. On those rare occasions when I saw my keeper, or owner, or whatever he was, I suffered from the awkward, blushing selfconsciousness of a tongue-tied boy. Far from being able to deal with him on a man to man basis, I felt very much in awe of his superior wisdom and mysterious accomplishments, and knew myself to be his junior and not at all his equal. But these emotions and feelings were those of the boy Karn, not those of the man-spirit which now inhabited his body; it was, however, to be quite some time before I became—myself—and accepted my new life as Karn the Hunter.
The Pylon of Sarchimus was large and capacious. The magician or savant, or whatever I should call him, dwelt in his own private apartments into which I was forbidden to enter, and thus I saw very little of him, once my wound was healed and my health restored. He was a cryptic man, my “master,” and left me to my own devices most of the time. He seemed to care nothing for my company and generally ignored my very presence, and certainly demanded nothing from me in the way of service—at first, anyway.
I cared little, and did not bother to puzzle into his mysteries. It was enough to me during this period that he neither abused nor mistreated me in any way, which was a lucky thing. For I had not yet managed to fully master the savage instincts of Karn the Hunter; and Karn was, by ancestry and birth and self-training, a savage warrior and a killer.
Sarchimus, as I say, left me to my own devices, and sometimes I did not even glimpse him from a distance for days on end. His enigma was insoluble. When I had lain weak and helpless, he had tended me with the gentle solicitude of a kindly nurse; once my wound was healed and I was able to be up and around on my own, he left me to myself very largely, never required my presence, and hardly ever talked to me.
We ate apart and lived apart, my master and I. The mysterious people who had built this city had mastered the strange secrets of an alien science. I will have more to say on this subject later, but for the moment let me remark that one of their most remarkable scientific attainments was in the preservation of food. They had known a technique for instantly preserving food and it was upon these supplies of perfectly preserved nutriment that my master and I subsisted. Each apartment in the Scarlet Pylon contained a certain niche in one wall, protected by a panel. When this panel was opened, a switch caused a variety of foods encased in transparent cubes to revolve past the eye of the beholder in a recess. Roast meats and stews and all manner of vegetables and fruits, pastries and deserts, and a considerable variety of unfamiliar beverages, were on display in this manner, all in a condition of perfect preservation. Having chosen the repast you desired, pressure on a certain switch caused the transparent cube containing the food of your choice to be detached from the continuous sequence of stacked cubes. The cubes themselves were easily unsealed and when this was done the food or drink you had chosen was before you—steaming hot or cool and frosted, ready to be devoured. The supplies of these preserved foods set aside by the Ancients, as I soon came to think of them, seemed virtually infinite in variety and number. Thus, although I suffered something from loneliness, I would never go hungry for as long as I remained a guest—or a prisoner—in the Scarlet Pylon of Sarchimus the Wise.
Part 2
THE BOOK OF SARCHIMUS THE WISE
Chapter 6
THE SCARLET PYLON
To the eyes of the boy Karn, all of his surroundings were mysteries and he regarded his new mode of life, with its many remarkable conveniences, with superstitious awe. This seemed only natural, for the savage boy had lived alone in the wild under the most primitive circumstances and had never known anything remotely like city life before.
I, however, as an Earthman from Twentieth Century America, could realize the remarkable and sophisticated scientific accomplishments which had been attained by the mysterious folk who had built this city. And I was busily putting two and two together.
The man who had saved Karn the Hunter from the fangs of the deadly phuol was a seeker after wisdom, a quester of lost secrets. He seemed a youngish man, as far as I could tell, for his features were unwrinkled and his brow smooth—but, as I have elsewhere remarked, it is oddly difficult to ascertain with any particular degree of certainty the age of any of the inhabitants of this World of the Green Star. This is due, I think, largely to the curious fact that the Laonese seldom think of time as we Americans think of it, and hardly mark its passage. We Americans, you know, are extraordinarily conscious of the passing of time; we cut it up into hours and minutes and seconds, and wear small but very complicated machines on our wrists so that we may be almost constantly aware of the flow of these time-divisions, which are purely imaginary and invented by ourselves.
We also have the odd custom of marking time into larger and yet larger divisions—days and nights, weeks and months, years and decades and generations and centuries and ages and have devised all manner of methods by which to observe the passage of the “moment called now” through these ever-widening divisions. Calendars, almanacs, and history books are only a few of our inventions designed for this purpose. But the Laonese know little of this curious custom of hours; they hardly even think in terms of decades, much less of years, and hence it is remarkably difficult to ascertain the ages of any of them. For they themselves cannot easily tell how old they are—it is a question they never ask, and something they seem never to think about, or very rarely.
Thus, although I possessed the full memories of Karn the Hunter, I cannot really say with any exactitude just how old he was when first I entered his untenanted flesh. From the looks of his body, I could have guessed him to be an adolescent. A boy of sixteen, perhaps, or seventeen—long-legged and a bit scrawny, ribs showing through his bare bronzed hide, with awkward hands and feet. Seventeen was the mental estimate I formed of his—of my age.