Part 1

DIE, SHADOW!

BY ALGIS BUDRYS

He began as a hero. Eons later and a universe away, he became instead a god!

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, May 1963. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

I

_I've come a long, long way to die alone_, David Greaves thought as _Defiance_ tumbled through the misty shroud of Venus, hopelessly torn apart by the explosion in her engines. On the console in front of him, the altimeter was one of the last few meaningful instruments, and it told him there were only a few tortured miles remaining before the ship he had brought this far--had spent his fortune in building when no government would yet consider risking a manned rocket on his flight--would smash down to its doom on a planet no man had ever walked.

Battered and tossed in his seat by the ship's crazy tumbling, Greaves tensed the oak-hard muscles of his arms and thrust himself up to his feet. He wasn't dead yet. He wasn't dead and, if the slim chance paid off, he'd still be present to laugh in the government's face when the first, safe, cautious official venture finally made its way across the emptiness between Earth and the Sun's second planet.

Dragging himself from handhold to handhold, his tendons cracking with the strain, he levered himself toward the Crash Capsule, forced open its hatch and pulled himself through, while the winds of Venus tore at the shattered hull and the scream of _Defiance's_ passage through the murky sky rose to a savage howl.

Outside the cloud-lashed hull there were no stars. Below, no one knew what sort of jungle, or sea, or desert of whipping poison sand might lie in wait. Greaves had not cared when he set out, and did not care now. If men had always waited to be sure, if all the adventurers of mankind had waited until the sign-posts had gone up, the cave bears would still be the dominant form of life on Earth, and races undreamed of might never know such a thing as man to contest their sway over the Universe.

_I'll live to see my share of that_, Greaves thought as he pulled the capsule's hatch shut and dropped into the special padding that, in theory, would cushion much of the impact. _Or else I'll know I tried._ He tripped the lever that would flood the capsule with Doctor Eckstrom's special anesthetic--the experimental compound that might--just barely, might--offer a chance.

* * * * *

As the hiss of the yellow-tinged, acrid gas became louder and louder in his ears, David Greaves thought again of the almost obsessive lengths to which he had gone in making sure that there would be such a thing as the capsule. The entire project--the decision to build the ship, to sacrifice for it the personal fortune he had built up in his meteoric rise from obscurity to being one of the world's most dynamic and certainly youngest industrialists--had been marked by his fanatical persistence and dedication. But that dream had come first, and the fortune second--the sole purpose of his career, from its very beginnings when he was only another engineer test pilot, had simply been to accumulate the means so _Defiance_ could be built. But the ship had been three-quarters complete when he conceived the idea for the capsule. He could not even now remember exactly when or how he had decided that he must have some device aboard that would protect him from a crash and--here was the vital thing he insisted upon--keep him alive, no matter how injured, no matter how long might be necessary, until rescuers could reach him.

For him to even think in terms of rescuers--of depending on others--was totally uncharacteristic. For him to divert a major portion of his dwindling resources from work on the ship itself, and push toward the elaborate design of the capsule, was, in some lights, again uncharacteristically foolish. But he had done it, and now....

... Now the anesthetic created by the man some said was a medical genius and some said was a quack had flooded over him.

He could feel the first effect--the calm, the drowsy peace. By the time the _Defiance_ smashed into the ground--very soon now--his metabolism would have slowed to a carefully metered rate. It would take hours for his heart to beat once. To him it would seem as if each day was only a few minutes. The jagged nerve-flashes of pain would be only a faraway slow tingle; the blink of an eye would encompass hours of actual time, and he would lie here, safe, asleep, until the hatch was opened and he was taken out into the air, where slowly the effects would wear off.

Meanwhile, there was more than enough gas compressed into the capsule's tanks to keep him perfectly relaxed for a hundred years. The valve--a simple device he had sketched out in five minutes, as if the design had been part of his mind for years--would continue to meter out the supply at the optimum rate and pressure.

It was only now--perhaps a hundred feet from impact, perhaps only a hundred hairs-breadths--that he suddenly saw the flaw in the design.

He struggled to reach the valve, in a useless reflex, for there would have been nothing he could have done, no matter how much time remained. Then he fell back, a twisted grin on his face. _I've come a long, long way to trap myself_, he laughed in his drowsing mind, as the ship crashed, and the capsule, torn from _Defiance's_ side, rebounded like a cannon shell from Heaven upon the outraged soil of Venus, and the overhead clouds sprang into flamed reflection from the blast of _Defiance's_ end.

In the capsule, the valve controlling the flow from the illogically copious supply of anesthetic snapped off cleanly. David Greaves' lungs jolted to the impact as a century's dosage of the high-pressure gas delivered its one giant hammerblow of sleep.... Of sleep like death....

Of sleep so slow, so majestic, that only the eternally ageless body might testify to life. Of sleep without end, without motion, until....

II

The woman--the sensuous ivory-skinned woman with eyes like dark jewels and hair like midnight framing her red-lipped face--kissed him again and then drew back to touch his cheek.

"Wake," she whispered softly. "Wake, sleeper."

David Greaves looked up at her through slowly dawning eyes. The scent of spices was in his nostrils. As the woman's hair brushed his face again, the fragrance increased.

"My name is David Greaves," he said, and looked up at the sky and then around him.

There was now no envelope of cloud to hide the face of this planet from the Sun; no such shroud as had concealed the Venus of his day in dazzling white without and muffled it in somber black within. This sky was ruddy, ruddy with the light of the day's last moments, and the clouds through which the sunset burned were only crayon-strokes of ochre across the orange sky.

He lay in state, facing that sunset, on some sort of black metal couch which supported him on a multitude of sweeping, back-bent arms. Beneath him, a dozen low broad steps of olive-green polished stone led down to a long forum, flagged with the same gold-veined, masterfully fitted paving. Around the court ran a low wall, again of stone; friezed, and burnished to a dull glow. From the wall, tall slim pillars thrust into the air.

And atop each pillar, cast and carved in black metal washed by the lingering light, crouched a monster.

No single artist could have created such a bestiary of gargoyles. Some he could trace in their evolution--the vulpine, the crustacean, the insectile. Fangs and pincers slit the cool, invigorating breeze that flowed over the court. Antennae quivered and hummed in the air, and a myriad legs were poised in tension, forever prepared to leap. Others were beyond any creation he knew of--limbs and wings contorted into shapes that had, undoubtedly, been taken by living things ... in lives unimaginable to any man. And all of them, imaginable or not, faced toward him forever.

At the foot of each pillar, mounted in a cresset on the wall at its base, burned a torch. And so, when night fell, then the shadows of all these monsters would be cast upward onto the stars, and he would lie sleeping in the pooled light of the torches, while all around him these creatures stood watch.

How many nights had he lain here? How many centuries to wash the fog of sleep out of every nook and cranny of his lungs, when each breath might take a thousand years--ten thousand?

* * * * *

But he was not done with studying his surroundings. He had heard sound when he turned his head. Now the sound was a rising murmur as he lifted his shoulders to look down the length of the court of monsters toward the far end. There were people there. They had been seated on stone tiers that rose up toward a colonnaded temple. There he could see an altar through the open sides and, on that altar, a flame that burned bright and unwinking against the outline of the lowering Sun.

The people were rising to their feet. From them came an open-throated murmur that became a cry of savage joy--of unbearable tension finding release.

"Who are they?" he asked the woman as he sat up and felt his body stretch with power cramped too long, as he squared back his shoulders and peered through the twilight in the court of monsters.

"Your worshippers, David Greaves," she said, standing beside him among the many arms of his couch. "The people whose last hope you are." She added softly: "My name, though you did not ask, is Adelie." She paused. "I, too, am one of your worshippers. Wherever there are human beings, throughout the Universe, you are worshipped."

He looked at her more closely. There was a lift to one black-winged eyebrow that was less reverent than a god might like, though a man could have no quarrel with it. She stood gracefully on sandaled feet, dressed in a single white garment girdled around her waist by a belt made of the same metal in which the monsters were cast. He saw that the clasp was shaped into a profile of his own face. And he saw from the wear that it showed that it was old--older than she could be, older perhaps than this court. This ... shrine? He wondered how many priestesses had worn that belt.

How many of _his_ priestesses.

He frowned and got down, feeling the touch of the day-warmed stone on his bare feet. He was dressed, he saw, in a black kilt and nothing else. He returned his glance to the worshippers and saw that the men were dressed similarly, and that the women wore flowing, calf-length, translucently light robes like Adelie's.

There was motion at one corner of his eye, and he turned his head sharply to see the arms of the couch sweeping down, folding and bending against its sides. Now he saw that he had been cradled in the arms of a great black metal beast. It crouched atop the dais. Its head was bent supplicatingly, bright oily metal barely visible at the joinings of its mechanical body.

He glanced quickly up at the monsters atop their columns. "Are they all like that?" he asked Adelie.

An old man's gruff voice answered him from the other side of the beast-couch. "They won't spring down to devour you--you needn't be afraid of _that_." Two men came into view, one old, one young and very slim. The old one rapped the couch with his knuckles. "This tended you in your sleep. It is made in the shape of the most ferocious race that ever rivaled Man. It is now extinct--as are all those others up there, for the same reason."

The thin young man--very pale, very long of limb--stretched his broad, tight mouth into a smile that covered half his face without mirth. "_Not_ the most ferocious, Vigil."

"Your kind will learn about that," the old man snapped.

"Not from you and yours," the slim man said lightly.

Greaves turned to Adelie, who waited, poised, while old Vigil and the young man quarreled. "Tell me the situation," Greaves said.

Adelie's lips parted. But the old man interrupted.

"The situation is that you have been awakened needlessly and would best go back to sleep at once. My daughter and these fanatical sheep--" he waved an angry arm at the standing worshippers--"have forced me to permit this. But in fact Humanity neither needs you nor wants you awake."

"Oh, on the contrary," the young man said. "Humanity needs its gods very badly at this hour. But you are only a man, not so?"

Greaves looked from one to the other--the leather-skinned old man with his mop of ringleted white hair, the young one who was human in appearance but somehow claimed some other status. "Who are you two?"

"I am Vigil, your guardian, and this is--"

"I am Mayron of The Shadows," the young man said, and he held himself as carelessly as before, but his face looked directly into Greaves's. "See my eyes."

There was nothing there. Only darkness speckled by pinpoints of light; thick, sooty darkness like oil smoke, and sharp lights that burned through it without illuminating it.

"Mayron that was First of Men," Vigil said bitterly.

"Mayron that is First of Shadows," the empty-skinned thing replied proudly, and began to weep great, black tears that soon emptied it, so that the skin drooped down into a huddle on the pave and a black cloud in the shape of a man stood sparkling in the dusk before Greaves. "Mayron that will again be First of Men, when all men are shadows. Mayron that is already First of many men. And which of us is a god, David Greaves?"

* * * * *

Adelie's face glowed with excitement. Her red lips were parted breathlessly. The crowd on the tiers had loosed a great, wailing moan, which hung over the court of conquered monsters as the first stars became visible on the far horizon.

Greaves took a deep breath. He could feel his body tensing itself, the muscles rippling, as though his hide needed comfort.

"Which of us is a god, man?" Mayron repeated softly, his voice coming from the entire cloud. "What is it you can do against me, you whose entire virtue rests on doing nothing?"

"That would depend on what was expected of me at this moment," Greaves said.

"This moment?" Mayron chuckled. "At _this_ moment, nothing."

"In that case, get out of my court and come back when there's something to do."

Mayron laughed, throwing his head back, the laughter high and insolent. "How like a god! How very like the real thing."

Greaves frowned. "If you were a man, once, you might remember how that feels." But the laugh had bothered him.

"Oh, I remember, I remember. And tomorrow we fight, man." Laughing, Mayron bent and picked up the skin he had discarded. He crumpled it by the waist in one fist, and brandished it negligently at the worshippers. They shrank back with a moan of horror as he strode toward the far wall. At the wall, he flipped the white, fluttering thing over, and as a cloud passed through the stone. Perhaps on the other side he put on his human form again. Greaves could not tell. The sun was down, and only a little light glowed on the far horizon. The torches guttered in the court of monsters, and the worshippers were hurrying up the steps, out through the temple and away.

III

Greaves, Adelie and Vigil stood beside the beast-couch. "All right," Greaves said. "Now there are things I want to know, and I want no quarrels, Vigil."

"And by what right do you order me around?" the old man growled. "You may be a god to some, but you are not _my_ god."

"You owe it to me, atheist. If I was awakened today, at this pat moment, I could have been awakened before. I wasn't. You kept me asleep, guardian, when I could have been free as any other man. So you owe me."

The old man grunted. "You're brave with Mayron and brave with me. But all men are brave, each in his own way. We need no gods."

"But you have one."

Adelie touched his arm. "You have lived from the beginning of human history. And you were a great hero. That much the legends tell us. You were braver than any man, and for your bravery, you could not die. While other heros conquered the stars and, in their time, died, you lived on. While enemy after enemy was beaten by Man, and the victorious men died, you lived on. The stars and all worlds became ours. Men loved and begat, and men died, but you lived on. It seemed to us that as long as you lived, all men would have something to remember--how great Man is; what the reward of courage can be. It seemed only fitting that we should bring to you the trophies of our achievements. It seemed only right to believe that you had survived to some purpose--that a day would come when Man would need his greatest hero."

"Precisely," Vigil snorted. "Man worships nothing but himself. You were a convenient symbol. It did no harm. It may have done some good. Of course, the chuckleheads took it all literally. And so--thanks to Man's stupid persistence in breeding idiots as well as men with some brains, you, whoever you are, whatever kind of filibustering bravo you actually were, have become the focus of a cult populated by the credulous, the neurotic and those who profit by them. I hope you are grateful for your legacy!"

Greaves looked up at the stars. There were some constellations that might have been the ones he knew, distorted by his transit to another viewpoint ... or by time. He was no astronomer.

_I've come a long way_, he thought, _and I wonder what the end of it will be._ "Those who profit from the credulous, hmm?" he said to Vigil.

"I am your guardian and I guarded you. As many others have done before me, from various motives. This is not your first court, nor your tenth. The ritual around you is compounded from thousands of years of hogwash, as witness my worshipful daughter who inherits a post from some time when every venturing hero had to have a leman patiently awaiting his return. My duties no doubt were originally medical. But the couch has been attending to that--with some exceptions--for centuries. And you may be assured, Man's history has not been one unbroken triumph, nor his civilization any steady upward climb. But we built while you slumbered. I had thought to prevent your besmirching Man's greatness with your cheap legend."

"Or perhaps he was afraid of the god he denies," Adelie murmured, her eyes glowing warmly.

Greaves looked from her to her father. "So she believes in me and you do not," he said to Vigil. "But it may be you're not entirely sure--and from the looks she gives me, it may be she isn't, either." He grinned crookedly. "Man may have climbed, but I assure you he hasn't changed."

* * * * *

He smiled at the looks on both their faces. Divinity was new to him, but humanity was not. If these two had thought perhaps they had some dull-witted barbarian here--the one for his faith in his faithlessness, the other for her pleasures--it had been time their error was corrected.

"Old man, god or not I have been called out ... whether it pleases you or not. And I won't willingly lay me down to sleep again until _I_ think it's time. So you had better tell me what all this is about, or I will blunder around and perhaps break something you're fond of."

Adelie laughed.

Vigil swung his arm sharply toward her. "This--this would-be courtesan was once Mayron's great love, when he was First of us all. Because he could find nothing to conquer for her in all the Universe, he began dabbling beyond it for a worthy prize. And he found it. Oh, he found it, didn't he, my child?"

"Be careful, Father," Adelie spat. "The worshippers follow _me_ now that I've wakened him as promised, and you--"

"Quiet," Greaves said mildly. "He was telling me something."

"That I was," Vigil said angrily, while his daughter's look at Greaves was the least sure it had ever been, "and for all the need you have of it, I might as well not. But if I may say it once and get it said, I can then go to my meal and the two of you will be free to amuse yourselves. Mayron discovered the Shadows, when his machines touched some continuum beyond this one, and the Shadows ate him. But like the fox that lost his tail in the trap and then cozened other foxes with the lie that it was better so and fashionable besides, Mayron made a virtue of his slavery. Those who give themselves up to the Shadows never rest and never hunger. They know no barrier. And no love. No true joy. No noble sorrow. An untailed fox is safe from catching by the tail. A Shadow has no spirit, no humanity, no--soul. But there are always dunderheads. Mayron has them, and down in that city of his down there--" the old man waved a hand at the horizon, but all Greaves could see from where he stood were the glowing tops of what he took to be three fitfully active volcanoes--"he has a city full of dunderheaded shadows who go to some temple he has built and enter the Shadow chamber to be changed. The admission is easily gained; the price of freedom from human care is humanity."

"And up here," Greaves said, "other dunderheads come to gain what in exchange for what?"

"Gain at least some sort of affirmation at the cost of remaining men!" the old man growled. "If they are simple, at least they are human! And even an intelligent man can see the value in what is embodied here."

"As witness yourself. Yes."

"_I_ didn't want to wake you! We know enough so you could have been awakened centuries ago. But to what purpose? To turn another hooligan loose to upset civilization, and lose the symbol of that precious thing? When Man himself can rescue himself? But, no, _this_ one, this superstition-ridden tramp I wish I'd strangled in her cradle--_she_ stirred the worshippers up, she arranged the combat between yourself and Mayron, she--"

"When and where?"

"What?"

"This fight Mayron and you have both spoken of."

"Tomorrow at noon. In the city. But there's no need for it. Tomorrow Mayron dies, and the other Shadows die. You can watch or not--as long as you stay out of the way."

Greaves looked at Adelie. "Your daughter, Vigil, does not look much impressed."

"Impressed! Impressed!" The old man was very nearly dancing with rage. "I'll _show_ you! Come with me." Vigil turned without looking back and pattered rapidly down the steps of the dais, his calloused feet slapping indignantly on the time-buffed stones.

Greaves frowned after him. Then he jerked his head to Adelie. "Come on," he said and they, too, walked quickly down the length of the court of the conquered monsters. And for the first time since their creation the pillared gargoyles did not have to bear the sight of Man.

* * * * *

The scent of Adelie's fragrance was in Greaves nostrils again as they followed the old man through the temple, past the altar where the eternal flame burned bright enough to sting. He said nothing to her. She volunteered no words of her own. But she walked close enough to brush his thigh with hers. Greaves smiled appreciatively.

Vigil led them to a small chamber in one wing of the temple. He flung open the door with a clatter of bolts in a concealed lock, and pointed inside. "Look--the two of you. It's not just Mayron who can dabble with machines. For every clever man, there is another just as clever."

A gun of green metal was mounted on a pedestal in the center of the chamber. Slim and graceful as a wading bird with one extended leg, it poised atop its mount and sang quietly of power and intent to kill. The friezed walls of the chamber hummed in harmonic response to the idle melody of the gun. Greaves felt his hackles rising unreasonably, and he very nearly growled with outrage at the sight of it.

"Tomorrow at noon," Vigil said in a high, triumphant voice, "the weapon will be swung to point through that window and down upon Mayron's city. And when it is done, there will not be a single Shadow alive down there."