The Hierophants

Thrilling Wonder Stories Jan 1934

(1934)

Margaret St. Clair

Nais witnesses a miracle on an asteroid, a miracle that is the harbinger of doom!

-

IT WAS an emergency landing. The asteroid was a bubble of lava, honeycombed with passages, as light as pumice, as brittle and dry and dead as the craters of the moon. Somebody had landed on it once before; the nose of a space cruiser, thirty years out of date, projected incuriously from one of the lava caves. “But what if the parts don’t fit?” the girl asked. She was not worried—they had plenty of oxygen and food—only a little tense.

“Some things don’t change,” the man answered abstractedly. “As long as ships fly at all, they’ve got Omega power. And the axis in that hasn’t changed in the last fifty years. You’re sure you understand what you’re to get? I’d go myself, only—” He leaned with all his weight against a wrench.

“Oh, yes.” The girl began hanging tools from the belt of her suit. “The main axis assemblage and the top lateral coils.”

“That’s it. Don’t forget your torch—you may have to burn your way in. Hurry back, kid. I’ll be missing you.” He bent to his work.

Nais nodded. She pulled the visor of her helmet into place. Outside the Lyra, she switched on her suit’s arti-gravs. With Earth’s normal gravity tugging at her heels she walked across the curving surface of the little moon.

The name on the snout of the derelict was Star Rover; its owner must have had a romantic temperament. There was no provision for exterior opening of its ports. Nais, striking arcs for her torch, sighed. She could look forward to a long, slow job burning through the tough metal of the hull. Even thirty years ago metal had been pretty tough. But she had plenty of time (plenty of oxygen, plenty of food) and if her hands had the faintest possible tendency to tremble, why, it was because there was always something disturbing about a derelict.

The oblong she was burning out turned slowly red. It began to bulge from the pressure of air inside. Nais stepped hastily away. Even on the tiniest of asteroids, an asteroid like a lava bubble floating in space, mass remains mass. She had no desire to be hit by a section of beryllium hull.

The oblong of metal came out like the cork from a bottle of champagne. The edges of the aperture it left slowly cooled. When enough heat had been dissipated to make entrance possible, Nais put her hands on the sides and clambered in, her helmet light sending long shafts stabbing into the ship’s dark interior.

-

ABRUPTLY she bit back a cry. A man in a space suit sat in the circle of white light. He was nodding at her. After a moment she smiled shakily. He was dead, of course, had been dead for thirty years. And his nodding was caused by the air’s flowing past him as it went through the opening in the hull.

She went up to him and touched him on the shoulder as he sat at the desk. He floated slowly away from her, his face crumbling as he moved. Repressing a shudder, Nais looked down at what he had been writing when he died.

The earlier pages of the book were a log, a not unmoving chronicle of defective instruments and the bad fortune which had brought the Star Rover by imperceptible stages to the asteroid and the lava cave. He had attempted repairs. There was, he had written, no cause for anxiety—he had plenty of oxygen and food. Then there was a break in the record. A page was left blank. And then at the top of the last page he had written:

The apple tree, the singing, and the gold.

That was all. Nais caught her lower lip between her teeth. She realized incredulously that she was afraid. For a moment the emotion was so strong that her hand jerked on the suit’s radio, her lips parted to call to Anseln for help. Then common sense reasserted itself.

The Star Rover’s owner had died a natural death. (From what? He had written, “Plenty of oxygen, plenty of food.” Why, from a sudden heart attack.) Isolation—the terrible isolation of the black, unanswering void, the isolation the earth-bound could never comprehend, had driven him mad before his death. He had died dreaming of the golden trees of earth. But he was dead, and she, Nais, could not afford the luxury of fear. Plenty of oxygen, plenty of food! But there was always danger, and quite apart from danger, she and Anseln were due in Aphrodition on the 17th. She had a job to do.

She turned up her helmet light. The touch of the tools hanging from her belt reassured her. She found the Omega power unit and got down beside it on her knees. The cover had to come off first, and then there was the complicated job of freeing the main axis assemblage. Most of the bolts were stiff.

Gradually Nais became absorbed in her task. As always when she worked with a ship’s Omega, the marvelous simplicity of the thing’s heart soothed and delighted her. Everything was in good shape. It was a pleasure to handle it. Once when a tendril of her hair caught on her helmet—it must have been a tendril of hair—and sent a sharp pain through the base of her skull, she ignored it. She was almost done with the main axis assemblage now.

She lifted it out, set it carefully on the deck. She began on the top lateral coils. The coils were strong enough, but exceedingly brittle; one had to use great care in handling them. From time to time as she worked, Nais stopped and listened. Once she shook her head for quite two seconds, to clear a noise from it.

She had got the right top coil out and was well along with the left center one when she put down her wrench. For a moment she hesitated. Then she walked slowly toward the stern exit port. Her face was as smooth, as bland, as innocent, as cream… .

Afterwards Nais was not quite certain how her initiation began. Was the pain at the base of her skull the beginning, or had that been really nothing but the pull of a wisp of hair? Had it begun when she heard the faint, far-off singing coming through the beryllium walls of the ship? Or had it been earlier, when she stood beside the Star Rover’s owner and felt the awful twinge of fear ? But she had left the Star Rover‘s stern exit and walked out mindlessly into the black.

The asteroid was a bubble of lava, honeycombed with tunnels like a rotten apple with worm tracks, brittle, dry and dead. There was no sense to any of it. But Nais, standing there in the darkness, so deeply meshed in abstraction that she hardly knew who Nais was, saw a golden haze come into being. She saw a miracle. She saw Eden being born.

-

IT WAS born very slowly. Bemused as she was, Nais yet felt that time itself had somehow thickened and become gelatinous, and that she walked forward through this resistant medium toward Eden as if she walked under water through a heavy sea. The uncreated paradise was on the other side of a barrier of hours; and minutes came between the pulsations of her heart.

The tranced, hypnotic calm she had worn at first was deserting her. There were moments, in this slow and tremendous birth from blackness, when blackness seemed to spread over the new earth. Eden hovered tremulously between being and not-being. And Nais strained toward it through glassy gulfs of time, sick with longing and anxiety.

It came at last, soundlessly, like a great thunderclap of light. Eden delivered, Eden triumphant, Eden reborn. There was a brook at Nais’ feet that flowed in a bed paved with emerald grass and tiny flowers. Kneeling, she pulled her helmet’s visor up and stripped off her gloves. She scooped up the water in her hand to drink—she knew with a conviction as strong as instinct that she must drink of it.

It was very cold and burned her hand almost like fire. For an instant she watched its odd, half-alive sparkle in her hand. Then she set her lips to it and drank. She stepped across the brook.

She stood now in a meadow where there were no shadows, where everything seemed to burn in a faint radiance of living gold. The grass under her feet was starred with flowers whose colors were gently luminous. The arch of heaven was a deep, lovely apple-green, and the wind that blew across her cheek and ruffled the hair within her helmet seemed to trail with it light lambent corpuscles of gold.

Ahead of her were the trees. The faint, aureate haze was thicker about them and wound in delicate tendrils around their trunks. They lifted their branches above it in ardor, in challenge, in triumphant life. The leaves that clothed them were flame made gem-like and frozen into the shape of a leaf, ecstasy made green and visible. In the midst of the trees was one tree taller than the others, and this tree, and this tree only, bore fruit.

Nais licked her lips. Desire had dried them and made them parched. She began to run toward the trees as fast as she could, stumbling in her space suit and hating, as she ran, her body for its clumsy humanity. Yet here in Eden even desire and pursuit became richness, almost joy.

The trees were a long way off. Nais had to stop more than once to rest, and these halts increased her feverish impatience. She wanted to run until her heart burst or until she got to the trees. She had forgotten— from the instant the chilling water of the brook touched her lips she had forgotten—Anseln, the ship, everything. There was in her mind awareness of nothing save the supernal Eden in which she stood.

The voices that had been in her ears since —she could not remember—since before, grew louder. She was almost at the edge of the marvelous grove. But even in her wild haste she had realized that the ground over which she ran was not like the soil of Earth— a base, gross element—but ethereal, glorious, mixed with light. And now, almost under the branches of the trees, she halted, knowing that the ground before her was holy, was literally holy ground.

She might be sick with longing, her whole being turned toward the trees as urgently as the compass needle turns to the north, yet she could not, she dared not, go further. She must have a guide. There must be someone to reveal the mysteries to her, a hierophant.

In the J. J. Rikstoff Museum in Aphrodition there is a bas-relief which critics have called the finest work of art ever executed by a humanoid race. It comes from a temple which the Sanders Expedition excavated twenty or thirty years ago, and it enjoys, in a quiet way, a considerable fame. It represents a man and woman in the scanty, handsome costume of Old Venus standing before a blossoming tree. From one of the branches someone—-something (whatever that radiant shape is, it is certainly not human) is handing them a barely ripened fruit.

-

A DARING archeologist has hazarded the guess that the sculpture represents the supreme moment in the long-lasting mystery cult which contented Venusian minds and hearts for so many centuries, but this hypothesis has met with little approval from the academic world. No one has ever conjectured what the dart-shaped object at the lower left of the relief may be. At any rate, there the stone slab stands, whatever it may mean, and people come from all over the system to look at it. Nais might have remembered that stone, had she been capable of remembering anything.

She waited under the trees. And though waiting was painful, she bore it patiently. Overlying her eagerness was the knowledge that waiting was a part of Eden’s law, not to be rebelled against. The golden singing within her brain was growing stronger. She must wait.

The aureate haze about the trees began to thicken, to glow more brightly. In its center was what was like a cocoon of ardent, ever more burning filaments. Nais watched, tremulous with expectancy.

The choiring voices soared up and up. The chrysalis of light split soared up and up. Was it one chrysalis or a hundred? There was a dazzle among the trees.

Nais’ hands went up in homage. Out of the valves of light had stepped ... one cannot describe the indescribable. Philologists tell us that the word “angel” meant nothing more originally than messenger.

“Do you come with clean hands?” the voice of the hierophant said within her brain.

“My hands are clean,” Nais answered humbly.

“Are you pure in heart?”

“My heart is pure.”

“What do you most desire?”

“To taste of the fruit.”

“Enter, then,” the hierophant said. “Enter and taste.”

Nais stepped forward. Her heart was like a bell ringing joy, joy, joy, within her breast. As her feet touched the ambrosial soil of the grove she felt a surge of joy through all her limbs. In all her life she had never been alive until now. Glory, glory, glory, glory and joy, sang her heart.

At the foot of the tree the hierophant was waiting for her. Gravely he reached up and plucked from the bough one of the glowing globes. He gave it into Nais’ hand. She raised to her lips the divine fruit ….

*

“Are you all right, darling?” Anseln begged. “Nais, say you’re all right!”

Nais looked at him remotely. She had been plucked back so abruptly from Eden’s deathless world, plucked back through such cold gulfs of distance and time, that she felt herself permeated with a mortal difference. The cabin of the Lyra, the whole world of humanity, seemed dim, wasted and unreal. Perhaps it always would.

Anseln was chafing her hand. “You’re all right, honey, aren’t you? Nais, I can’t stand it if—if I was too late.”

With a great effort Nais. lifted one hand and placed it on her husband’s head. His tense face relaxed a little.

“Baby,” he said almost brokenly. “What would I have done if I’d been too late? You were standing there in the lava cave with that white thing coiled all around you, burning you, sucking the life from you. I had to drive it off with my stun gun. It was a horror. It didn’t want to leave. Nais, how could I let you go into such danger? I’ll never forgive myself.”

“I’m all right,” Nais said. She spoke through lips that hardly seemed to be her own.

“You—you’ve got to be,” Anseln said. “I’m going to hurry with the repairs and get the ship away from here just as fast as I can. Get you to doctors, a hospital. And then I’m coming back here and blast that white thing, that devil, into Hell.”

“No!” Nais said.

When he, after many anxious inquiries had gone back to his work on the main axis assemblage, Nais half-turned on her side so that she lay looking up at the wall. Her thoughts came slowly, and they were long, icy thoughts.

-

THERE had been Eden, and a divine grove, and a hierophant. She had thought she stood in Eden; Anseln had seen her standing wrapped in a strangling coil of fire. Who had been right? “The apple tree, the singing, and the gold,” the Star Rover’s owner had written; he too had seen.

There had been a hierophant. Nais’ mind went back to the bas-relief in the Rikstoff museum. With a stab of conviction she understood.

Once, millennia upon millennia ago, the asteroid had been a holy place. It had been a place of pilgrimage for the Old Venusians. They had gone there in their ships to be initiated, to penetrate the mysteries, to taste of the divine fruit. Men and women and children, they had seen what Nais had seen.

The race had begun to die out. Fewer and fewer ships had visited the holy place. At last they had stopped going altogether and only the hierophants, long-lived, perhaps immortal creatures of pure energy, had remained. And when Terrestrials, who were like the Old Venusians in so many ways, had landed on the asteroid, the hierophants had remained true to their old function. They had recreated for them the miraculous Eden to which they held the key. They had initiated them.

But human minds and bodies were not like those of Old Venus: that race had been not human, but humanoid. What had spelled sweet consummation for it, an experience which had been the crown of life, could be nothing for a Terrestrial but death. To taste the fruit of the tree was to die of it, as the owner of the Star Rover had died. Anseln, by appearing when he had, had saved her life.

He had saved her life. She could go back to Terra now, back to sunny days and laughter and human delights. There was a lifetime to share with Anseln, a home to build, children to give birth to and rear. She would live a long rich human life. And always, whatever happened to her, she would feel empty and cheated. There would always be a corrosive bitterness, an unsatisfied longing, at the core of her. Some part of her would be standing, eternally, with hands outstretched in longing toward the divine tree.

“Almost finished with the repairs!” Anseln called cheerfully from where he was at work. He walked over to where she lay and stood looking solicitously down at her. “Feeling better now, dear?” he asked.

Nais nodded. Dutifully she raised her face for his caress. And as he bent to kiss her, she lowered her eyelids hastily to hide the emptiness in her eyes.

The End

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The Hierophants