“An actor, a beautiful woman who happens to be an actress, a hunter, a poet, a poet’s wife, a rocket captain, a former technician. All aboard!”
On the afterdeck of the huge craft, Aaronson spread forth his maps.
“Ladies, gentlemen,” he said. “This is more than a four-day drinking bout, party, excursion. This is a Search!”
He waited for their faces to light, properly, and for them to glance from his eyes to the charts, and then said:
“We are seeking the fabled lost City of Mars, once called Dia-Sao. The City of Doom, it was called. Something terrible about it. The inhabitants fled as from a plague. The City left empty. Still empty now, centuries later.”
“We,” said Captain Wilder, “have charted, mapped, and cross-indexed every acre of land on Mars in the last fifteen years. You can’t mislay a city the size of the one you speak of.”
“True,” said Aaronson, “you’ve mappeditfrom the sky, from the land. But you havenotcharted it via water! For the canals have been empty until now! So now we shall take the new waters that fill this last canal and go where the boats once went in the olden days, and see the very last new things that need to be seen on Mars.”
The rich man continued: “And somewhere on our traveling, as sure as the breath in our mouths, we shall find the most beautiful, the most fantastic, the most awful city in the history of this old world. And walk in that city—who knows?—find the reason why the Martians ran screaming away from it, as the legend says, ten thousand years ago.”
Silence. Then:
“Bravo! Well done.” The poet shook the old man’s hand.
“And in that city,” said Aikens, the hunter, “mightn’t there be weapons the like of which we’ve never seen?”
“Most likely, sir.”
“Well” The hunter cradled his bolt of lightning. “I was bored of Earth, shot every animal, ran fresh out of beasts, and came here looking for newer, better, more dangerous maneaters of any size or shape. Plus, now, new weapons! What more can one ask? Fine!”
And he dropped his blue-silver lightning bolt over the side. It sank in the clear water, bubbling.
“Let’s get the hell out of here.”
“Let us, indeed,” said Aaronson, “get the good hell out.”
And he pressed the button that launched the yacht.
And the water flowed the yacht away.
And the yacht went in the direction toward which Cara Corelli’s quiet paleness was pointed: beyond.
As the poet opened the first champagne bottle. The cork banged. Only the hunter did not jump.
The yacht sailed steadily through the day into night. They found an ancient ruin and had dinner there and a good wine imported, one hundred million miles from Earth. It was noted that it had traveled well.
With the wine came the poet, and after quite a bit of the poet, came sleep on board the yacht which moved away in search of a City that would not as yet be found.
At three in the morning, restless, unaccustomed to the gravity of a planet pulling at all of his body and not freeing him to dream, Wilder came out on the afterdeck of the yacht and found the actress there.
She was watching the waters slip by in dark revelations and discardments of stars.
He sat beside her and thought a question.
Just as silently, Cara Corelli asked herself the same question, and answered it.
“I am here on Mars because not long ago for the first time in my life, a man told me the truth.”
Perhaps she expected surprise. Wilder said nothing. The boat moved as on a stream of soundless oil.
“I am a beautiful woman. I have been beautiful all of my life. Which means that from the start people lied because they simply wished to be with me. I grew up surrounded by the untruths of men, women, and children who could not risk my displeasure. When beauty pouts, the world trembles.
“Have you ever seen a beautiful woman surrounded by men, seen them nodding, nodding? Heard their laughter? Men will laugh at anything a beautiful woman says. Hate themselves, yes, but they will laugh, say no for yes and yes for no.
“Well, that’s how it was every day of every year for me. A crowd of liars stood between me and anything unpleasant. Their words dressed me in silks.
“But quite suddenly, oh, no more than six weeks ago, this man told me a truth. It was a small thing. I don’t remember now what it was he said. But he didn’t laugh. He didn’t even smile.
“And no sooner was it out and over, the words spoken, that I knew a terrible thing had happened.
“I was growing old.”
The yacht rocked gently on the tide.
“Oh, there would be more men who would, lying, smile again at what I said. But I saw the years ahead, when Beauty could no longer stomp its small foot, and shake down earthquakes, make cowardice a custom among otherwise good men.
“The man? He took back his truth immediately, when he saw that he had shocked me. But it was too late. I bought a one-way fare to Mars. Aaronson’s invitation, when I arrived, put me on this new journey that will end … who knows where.”
Wilder found that during this last he had reached out and taken her hand.
“No,” she said, withdrawing. “No word. No touch. No pity. No self-pity.” She smiled for the first time. “Isn’t it strange? I always thought, wouldn’t it be nice, someday, to hear the truth, to give up the masquerade? How wrong I was. It’s no fun at all.”
She sat and watched the black waters pour by the boat. When she thought to lookagain,some hours later, the seat beside her was empty. Wilder was gone.
On the second day, letting the new waters take them where they wished to go, they sailed toward a high range of mountains and lunched, on the way, in an old shrine, and had dinner that night in a further ruin. The Lost City was not much talked about. They were sure it would never be found.
But on the third day, without anyone’s saying, they felt the approach of a great Presence.
It was the poet who finally put it in words.
“Is God humming under His breath somewhere?”
“What a fierce scum you are,” said his wife. “Can’t you speak plain English even when you gossip?”
“Dammit, listen!” cried the poet.
So they listened.
“Don’t you feel as if you stood on the threshold of a giant blast-furnace kitchen and inside somewhere, all comfortably warm, vast hands, flour-gloved, smelling of wondrous tripes and miraculous viscera, bloodied and proud of the blood, somewhere God cooks out the dinnertime of Life?
In that cauldron sun, a brew to make the flowering forth of life on Venus, in that vat a stew broth of bones and nervous heart to run in animals on planets ten billion light-years gone.
And isn’t God content at His fabulous workings in the great kitchen Universe, where He has meriu’d out a history of feasts, famines, deaths and reburgeonings for a billion billion years?
And if God be content, would He not hum under His breath? Feel your bones. Aren’t the marrows teeming with that hum? For that matter, God not only hums, He sings in the elements. He dances in molecules. Eternal celebration swarms us. Something is Near. Sh.”
He pressed his fat finger to his pouting lips.
And now all were silent, and Cara Corelli’s paleness searchlighted the darkening waters ahead.
They all felt it. Wilder did. Parkhill did. They smoked to cover it. They put the smokes out. They waited in the dusk.
And the humming grew nearer. And the hunter, smelling it, went to join the silent actress at the bow of the yacht. And the poet sat to write out the words he had spoken.
“Yes,” he said, as the stars came out. “It’s almost upon us. It has.” He took a breath. “Arrived.”
The yacht passed into a tunnel.
The tunnel went under a mountain.
And the City was there.
It was a city within a hollow mountain with its own meadows surrounding it and its own strangely colored and illumined stone sky above it. And it had been lost and remained lost for the simple reason that people had tried flying to discover it or had unraveled roads to find it, when all the while the canals which led to it stood waiting for simple walkers to tread where once waters had tread.
And now the yacht filled with strange people from another planet touched an ancient wharf.
And the City stirred.
In the old days, cities were alive or dead if there were or were not people in them. It was that simple. But in the later days of life on Earth or Mars, cities did not die. They slept. And in their dreamful coggeries and enwheeled slumbers they remembered how once it was or how it might be again.
So as, one by one, the party filed out on the dock, they felt a great personage, the hidden, oiled, the metaled and shining soul of the metropolis slide in a landfall of muted and hidden fireworks toward becoming fully awake.
The weight of the new people on the dock caused a machined exhalation. They felt themselves on a delicate scale. The dock sank a millionth of an inch.
And the City, the cumbrous Sleeping Beauty of a nightmare device, sensed this touch, this kiss, and slept no more.
Thunder.
In a wall a hundred feet high stood a gate seventy feet wide. This gate, in two parts, now rumbled back, to hide within the wall.
Aaronson stepped forward,
Wilder moved to intercept him. Aaronson sighed.
“Captain, no advice, please. No warnings. No patrols going on ahead
