Part 1

WORLD OF THE MAD

By Poul Anderson

Langdon had found immortality on the planet Tanith. Naturally he wanted his wife to share it--if he could prevent her from going insane first....

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy February 1951 Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

He walked slowly through the curling purple mists, feeling the ground roll and quiver under his feet, hearing the deep-voiced rumble of shifting strata far underground. There were voices in the fog, singing in high unhuman tones, and no man had ever learned what it was that sang--for could the wind utter sounds so elfishly sweet, almost words that haunted you with half understanding of something you had forgotten and needed desperately to remember?

A face floated through the swirling mist. It was not human, but it was very beautiful, and it was blind. He looked away as it mouthed voiceless murmurs at him.

Somewhere a crystal tree was chiming, a delicate pizzicato of glass-like leaves vibrating against each other. The man listened to it and to the low muttering of the earth, for those at least were real and he was not at all sure whether the other things were there or not.

Even after two hundred years, he wasn't sure.

He went on through the mist. Flowers grew up around him, great fragile laceries of shining crystalline petals that budded and bloomed and died even as he walked by. Some of them reached hungrily for him, but he sidestepped their groping mouths with the unthinking ease of long habit.

Compasses didn't work on Tanith, and only a few men could even operate a radio direction finder, but Langdon knew his way and walked steadily ahead. His sense of direction kept rotating crazily; it insisted he was going the wrong way, no, now the house lay over to the right--no, the left, and a few paces straight up.... But by now he had compensated for that; he didn't need eyes or kinesthetic sense to find his way home.

There was a new singing in the violet air. Langdon checked his stride with a sudden eerie prickling along his spine. The mist eddied about him, thick and blinding, but now the city was growing out of it; he saw the towers and streets and thronging airways come raggedly into being.

Suddenly he stood in the middle of the city. It was complete this time, not the few fragmentary glimpses he ordinarily had. The mist flowed through the ghostly spires and pylons but somehow he could see anyway, the city lay for kilometers around.

* * * * *

It was not a human city. It lay under three hurtling moons, lit only by their brilliant silver. But it lived, it pulsed with life about him; the shining dwellers soared past and seemed to leave a trail of little sparks luminous against the night. They were not men, the old folk of Tanith, but they were beautiful.

There was no sound. Langdon stood in a well of silence while the city lay around him, and he thought that perhaps he was the ghost, alone and excommunicated on a world which lay beyond even the dreams of man.

But that was nonsense, he thought, angry with himself. It was simply that temporal mirages transmitted only light, not sound. He was here, now, alive, and the city was dust these many million years.

Two dwellers flew past him, male and female with arms linked, laughing soundlessly into each other's golden eyes. The male's great glowing wings brushed through Langdon's body. He stood briefly in a shower of whirling light-motes--and they didn't heed him, they didn't know he was there. They were only for each other, those two, and he was a ghost out of an unreal and unthinkably remote future.

The mirage faded. Slowly, in bits and patches, it dissolved back into the purple fog. He was alone again.

He shivered, and hastened his steps homeward.

The mist began to break, raggedly, as he came out of the forest. He went by a lake of life with only a passing glance at the strangeness of the new shapes that seethed and bubbled, rose out of its slime and took shifting form and sank back into chemical disintegration. There was always something new, grotesque and horrible and sometimes eerily lovely, to be seen at such a place, but spontaneous generation was an old story to Langdon by now. And Eileen was waiting.

He came out on the brow of a steep hill that slanted down into the little cuplike valley where he had his dwelling. The hills were blue around it, blue with grass that tomorrow might be gold or green or gray, and the sky was currently blood-red. A grove of feather-like trees hid the house, swaying where there was no wind and murmuring to each other in their own language, and a few winged things hovered darkly overhead. For a moment Langdon paused there, savoring the richness of it. This was _his_ home.

_His_ land. Back on Terra they had forgotten the fullness that came with belonging to the earth, but the men who colonized among the stars remembered. Looking back, Langdon thought that the real instability and alienness was in the Solar System. Men had no roots there, and it was a secret woe in them and made them feverish and restless, eager to taste from all cups but shuddering away from draining any one.

On Tanith, thought Langdon with a quiet sort of exultation, a man drank his cup to the bottom, and there were many cups--or, if only one, it was never the same and could never be emptied.

For a man on Tanith did not grow old.

* * * * *

Suddenly he stiffened, and a psyche-feeder swooped low to absorb his furiously radiated nervous energy. The reaction of it eddied in his mind as a chilling fear. Angrily, without having to think about it, he drove the creature off with a jaggedly pulsed mental vibration and remained standing and listening.

Someone had screamed.

It came again, distorted by the wavering air, hardly recognizable to one who had not had time to adjust to Tanith, and it was Eileen's voice. "Joe, Joe, Joe--help--"

He ran, scrambling down the unstable hillside with his mist-wet cloak flapping behind him. A sword-plant slashed at him with its steely leaves. He swerved and went on down into the valley, running, leaping, a bounding black shadow against the burning sky.

Static electricity discharged in crackling blue sheets as he tore through the grove, hissing against his insulating clothes and stinging his face and hands. Something floated through the dark air, long and supple and dripping slime, grimacing at him with its horrible wet mouth. Another illusion or mirage, he thought somewhere in the back of his mind. They no longer bothered him--in fact, he'd have missed them if they never showed up again--but--Eileen--

The cottage nestled under the tall whispering trees, a peak-roofed stone building in the ancient style that Langdon had thought most appropriate to the enchanted planet. There was little of Terra about it after its century and a half of existence; it was covered with fire-vines over which danced the seeming of little flames; luminous flying creatures nestled against the doorway, and he had never found the cause of the dim sweet singing he could always hear around it.

The door stood ajar, and Eileen was sobbing inside. Langdon came in and found her huddled on a couch before the fireplace, trembling so that it seemed her body must be shaken apart, and crying, crying.

He sat down and put his arms about her and let her cry herself out. Then he remained for a while stroking her hair and saying nothing.

She bit her lip to keep it steady. Her voice was like a small child's, high and toneless and frightened. "It bit," she said.

"It was an illusion," he murmured.

"No. It bit at me. And its eyes were dead. It came out of the floor there, and it was all in rags."

"You had an illusion frighten you," he said. "A psyche-feeder flying nearby caught your increased nervous output, drew on it, and that of course frightened you still more ... they're easy to drive away, Eileen. They don't like certain pulse patterns--you just think at them the way I showed you--"

"It was real," she insisted, quietly, with something of a child's puzzlement that anything should have wanted to hurt her. "It was black, but there were grays and browns and red too, and it was ragged."

* * * * *

He went over to the cupboard and got out a darkly glowing bottle and poured two full glasses. "This'll help," he said, trying hard to smile at her. "_Prosit._"

"I shouldn't," said Eileen, still shakily but with some return of saneness. "Junior--"

"Junior won't take harm from a glass of wine," said Langdon. He sat down beside her again and they clinked goblets and drank. The fire wavered ruddily before them, filling the room with warm restless light and with dancing shadows from which Eileen looked away.

"I'll get an electronic range installed soon," said Langdon, trying to fill the silence with trivia. "It can't be convenient for you cooking on an ancient-style stove."

"I thought they didn't work on Tanith--electronics, I mean," she answered with the same effort of ordinariness.

"Not at first, with the different laws prevailing here. In the first few decades, we were forced back to the old chemical techniques like fires. That's one reason so few colonists ever came, or stayed long if they did come. But bit by bit, little by little, we're learning the scientific laws and applying them. They've had all the standard household equipment available here for a century, I guess, but by that time I'd already built this place and liked my own things, fires and stoves and all the rest, too well to change. But now that I've got a wife to do my housekeeping, I ought to provide her with conveniences. In fact, I should have done so right away."

"It isn't that, Joe," she said. "I'd have squawked long ago if those little things made any difference. I like handling things myself rather than turning them over to some robot. It's fun to cook and get wood, but Joe, it's no fun when a thing rises out of the steam and screams at you. It's no fun when electric sparks jump over the house and all of a sudden there's only fear, the whole place is choked with fear--" She shuddered closer against him.

"This planet is haunted," she whispered.

"The laws of nature are a little different," he answered as calmly as he could. "But they are still laws. Tanith seems like a chaos, governed by living spirits and most of them malignant, only because you don't see the regularity. Its pattern is too different from what you're used to. Terra herself must have seemed that way to primitive man, before he discovered order in nature.

"Our scientists here are slowly finding out the answers. Talk to old Chang sometime, he can tell you more about it than I. But I can see the order now, a little of it, and it's a richer and deeper thing than the rest of the universe.

"And you live forever." He gripped her shoulders and looked into her wide eyes. He had to expel the demons of terror from her. A woman five months pregnant couldn't go on this way. He was suddenly shocked by how thin she had grown, and she never stopped shivering under his hands.

"You won't grow old," he said slowly. "We'll be together forever, Eileen. And our children won't die either."

She looked away from him, and sudden bitterness twisted her mouth. "I wonder," she said thinly, "whether immortality is worth having--on this planet."

Suddenly she stiffened, and her lips opened to scream again. Langdon forgot the hurt of her words and looked wildly about the room. But there was only the furniture and the firelight and the weaving shadows. Inside the blood-red windows, the room was sane and real and human.

Eileen shrank against him. "It's over there," she gasped. "Over there in that corner, creeping closer--"

Langdon's face grew bleak, and there was a desolation rising in him. Illusions of one sort or another were part of daily life on Tanith, but they had reality in that they were produced by physical processes and more than one person could perceive them. But hallucinations were another story.

He thought back over two hundred years to the first attempts to colonize. Of an initial three hundred or so, over two-thirds had left within the first three years. And many of them had been insane when the ships took them home.

Men came to Tanith and stayed if they could endure it. But if they couldn't, and tried to stay anyway, they soon fled from the unendurable madness of its reality to a safer and more orderly madness of their own.

From what he had heard, few of them were cured again, even back on Terra.

* * * * *

"I've got to see Chang," he said.

The colonists on Tanith tended to live well apart from each other, and unless they owned the new televisors designed especially for the planet their only contact was physical. Once a month or so he would go to the planet's one town for supplies and a mild spree, and somewhat oftener he would spend a while at another house or have guests himself. But most of the time he had been alone.

And as a man grew older, without loss of physical and mental faculties, he found more and more within himself, an unfolding inward richness which none of the short-lived would ever appreciate or even comprehend. He had less need of other men to prop him up. Or perhaps it was simply that the wisdom, the fullness which came with immortality, made a little of the other colonists' company go a long ways.

There was no denying it, Eileen's twenty-three years of life could not compare with Langdon's two hundred or more. She was like a child, thoughtless, mentally and physically timid, ignorant, essentially shallow.

_But I love her. And I can afford to wait. In fifty or a hundred years she'll begin to grow up. In two hundred or so we'll begin to understand each other. As our ages increase, the absolute difference between them will become proportionately insignificant._

_An immortal learns patience. I can wait--and meanwhile I love her very dearly._

"What do you have to see him about?" asked Eileen.

"Us," he answered bluntly. "Our situation. It isn't good."

"No," she whispered.

"Can't you learn that there's nothing to fear on Tanith?" he asked. "Death itself, the greatest dread of all, is gone. We've eliminated all actually dangerous life in the neighborhood of our settlements. There are things that can be annoying--the sword-plants, the psyche-feeders, the static discharges--but it's no trick to learn how to avoid them. Nothing here can hurt you, Eileen."

"I know," she said hopelessly. "But I'm still afraid. Day and night, I'm afraid. There are worse things than death. Joe."

"But afraid of _what_?"

"I don't know. Fear itself, maybe. How do I know something won't suddenly be deadly? But I'm not afraid of death. Even with the baby, I wouldn't be afraid of wild beasts or plague or--anything that I could understand." She shook her shining head, slowly. "That's just it, Joe. I don't understand this planet. Nobody does. You don't.... You admit it yourself."

"Someday I'll know it."

"When? A thousand years from now? A thousand years of horror.... Joe, some of those things are so hideous I think I'll go mad when they appear."

"A deep-sea fish on Terra is hideous."

"Not this way. These things aren't _right_. They can't exist, but still there they are, and I can't forget them, and I never know when they'll appear next or what they'll be this time--" She checked herself, gulping.

"This is a very beautiful world," he said stubbornly. "The colors, the forms, the sounds--"

"None of them are right. Grass may look just as well when it's red or blue or yellow--but it shouldn't be all of them at different times. The sky is wrong, the trees are wrong. Those hideous lakes of life and the things in them, obscene--those voices singing out in the mists, nobody knows what they are--those images of things a hundred million years dead--and the faces, and the whisperings, and there's always something watching and waiting and moving just a little outside the corner of your eye.... Oh, Joe, Joe, this planet is haunted!"

* * * * *

She sobbed in his arms with a rising note of hysteria that she couldn't quite suppress. He looked grimly over her shoulder. A swirling, chiming mist of color formed on one corner of the room, amorphous stirrings within it, a sudden shining birth that laughed and jeered and slipped out through the wall.

He remembered that he had been frightened and repelled when he first came here. But not to this degree, and he soon got over it. Now, even while Eileen wept, he admired the shifting pulse of colors and his heart quickened to the elfin bells. Terran music sounded wrong to him after two hundred years of the sounds of Tanith.

He thought that all those voices and whisperings and singings, sliding up and down an inhuman scale, and the dreams and the visions, had a pattern, an overall immensity which some day he would grasp. And that would be a moment of revelation, he would see and know the wholeness of Tanith and there would be meaning in it. Not the chaotic jumble of random events which made up the rest of the universe--death-doomed universe tumbling blindly toward a wreck of level entropy and ashen suns--but a glimpse of that ultimate purposefulness which some men called God.

Briefly, a temporal mirage showed beyond the window, a fragmentary glimpse of a tower reaching for the sky. And it was no work of man, nor could it ever be, but it was of a heartbreaking loveliness.

He wondered about the ancient natives. Had they simply become extinct, reached a point of declining evolutionary efficiency such as seemed fated for all species and gone into limbo some millions of years previously? Or had they, perhaps, finally seen the allness of the world and gone--elsewhere? Privately, Langdon rather thought it was the latter. _World without end_--

But Eileen was crying in his arms.

He kissed her, and tasted salt on her lips that trembled under his. Poor kid, poor kid, and with a baby on the way....

* * * * *

Something of the magic of their first days together came back to him. It was a disappointment in love which had sent him to Tanith in the first place, and for all his time here he had lived without that sort of affection. The women of the town served the casual needs of sex, which seemed to become less and less frequently manifest as his own undying personality grew in fullness and self-sufficiency, and that was all.

Still, a single man was incomplete. And a year ago one of the few colony ships landed, and Eileen had been aboard, and a forgotten springtime stirred within him.

Now ... well....

She released herself, smiling with unsteady lips. "I'll be all right now, dear," she said. "Let's go."

_I have to talk this matter over privately with Chang. His wife can take care of Eileen. Certainly I can't leave her here alone._

But sooner or later he would have to. It wasn't only that he had to go out and oversee some of the fields on which grew the native plants whose secretions, needed by Terran chemistry, gave them their livelihood. Solitude and long walks through the misty forests and over the whispering hills had become virtual necessities to him. He had to get away and think, the mighty thoughts of an immortal which no Terran could ever comprehend in his pathetic lifetime were being gestated in his brain. Slowly, piece by piece, the coherent philosophy which is necessary for sanity was coalescing within him, and he was gathering into himself the essence of Tanith. Someday, perhaps a thousand years hence, he would know what it was that haunted him now.

He could not suppress a feeling of annoyance, however. Eileen had had over a year to adjust now, and she was getting worse instead of better. A brief sojourn in utter alienness might be merely pleasing and interesting, but over a longer time one either got used to it or--She'd have to learn, have to accept the sanity of Tanith and know it for a deeper and more real one than the sanity of Terra.

Others had done it, why couldn't she?

* * * * *

Chang Simon and his wife lived several hundred kilometers away, an hour's flight by airjet. Their spacious house lay amid lawns and trees sloping down to a broad river; it held a serenity and graciousness which Terra had forgotten. Langdon was always glad to be there, and even Eileen seemed to be soothed. She had screamed once on the flight over, when the sky had suddenly seethed with hell-blue flame, and she was still trembling when they arrived. Their hostess took her off for one of those mysterious private conferences between women which no merely male creature will ever understand, and Langdon and Chang sat out on the veranda and talked.

The Chinese had been in his fifties when he came, one of the first load of colonists, and Tanith could not restore lost youth. But a healthy middle age had its own advantages, it conferred a peace and depth of mind more rapidly than an endlessly young body would permit. In the Solar System, Chang had been a synthesist, taking all knowledge and its correlation as his field of work, and he had come to Tanith in some of Langdon's mood of abandonment--futile to attempt the knowing and understanding of all things, when life had flickered out in a hundred years. But as an immortal synthesist.

The two men sat in the long twilight, saying little at first. It was good just to sit, thought Langdon, to let a glass of wine and a cigar relax tensed muscles while the dusk deepened toward night. At such times he felt more than ever drawn into the secret whole which was Tanith--almost, it seemed, he was on the verge of that revelation, of seeing the manifold aspects of reality gather themselves into one overwhelming entity of which he would be an integral part. The philosophers and mystics of Terra had sought such identification, and the scientists were still striving to build a unified picture of the cosmic whole. Here, in this environment and with all the ages before him, a man had a chance to reach that ancient goal, intellectual understanding and emotional integration--someday, someday.

The twilight was deep and blue and full of flitting ghostly lights. The feathery trees murmured to each other in a language of their own, and down under the long slope of dew-shining grass the river gleamed with shifting phosphorescence. Something was singing in the night, an eerie wavering scale that woke faint longings and dreads in men and set them straining after something they had once known and forgotten.

* * * * *

Overhead the million thronging stars of Galactic center winked and blazed through the flickering aurora. One of the moons rose, trailing golden light through the sky. A wind blew through drifting clouds, and it seemed as if the wind had language too and spoke to the men, if they could but understand it.

Chang said at last, slowly and heavily: "I don't know how she got past the psychologists on Terra."

"Eileen?" asked Langdon unnecessarily.

"Of course." The older man was a shadow in the dusk, but the red tip of his cigar waxed and waned as he drew on it for comfort. "Somebody blundered. Or--wait--perhaps it was only that, while she was fundamentally stable, the otherness of Tanith touched some deep-seated psychological flaw in her, something that would never appear under any other environment."

"I don't quite know the system," said Langdon. "What do they do, back at Sol?"