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Title: The Golden Road
Date of first publication: 1942
Author: Cyril M. Kornbluth (1923 - 1958) writing as Cecil Corwin
Date first posted: March 7 2013
Date last updated: March 7 2013
Faded Page eBook #20130313

This eBook was produced by: Delphine Lettau, Mary Meehan
& the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net




                        THE GOLDEN ROAD

                     By Cyril M. Kornbluth

                   Albing Publications, 1942

        Copyright renewed by Mrs. C. M. Kornbluth, 1970


    Out of the myth of night and language there come strange tales told
    over wine. There is a man known as The Three-Cornered Scar who
    frequents a village spot famed for its wine and raconteurs, both of
    which are above the average.

    The Three-Cornered Scar favored us by a visit to my table and
    ordering, during the course of his story, five half-bottles of house
    red to my account. The wine is drunk up and the story told.




1


Colt was tired. He was so bone-broke weary that he came near to wishing
he was dead. It would have been easy to die in the snow; heaps in the
way seemed to beg for the print of his body. He skirted crevasses that
were like wide and hungry mouths.

This was Central Asia, High Pamir, a good thousand miles from any
permanent habitation of the human race. The nomadic Kirghiz population
had been drained away to the Eastern front, civil and military
authorities likewise. Colt himself was the tragic, far-strayed end of
the First Kuen-Lung Oil Prospecting Expedition, undertaken by a handful
of American volunteers on behalf of the Chungking government.

Estimating generously, his assets were five more days of scanty eating.
And an eternity of sleep under the glaring stars of the plateau?...

He had struck, somehow, an easier way across the snow-covered, rocky
wastes. There was a route to follow, a winding, mazy route that skirted
the Alai Range's jagged foothills and slipped through Tengis-Bai Pass.
Old memories of maps and trails swirled through Colt's tired head; he
bore north for no better reason than that he could guide himself by
Polaris, low on the horizon. Colt was headed, with a laugh and a curse,
for Bokhara.

Colt marched through the first watch of the night, before the smiting
cold of space descended on this roof of the world; then he would sleep,
twitching with frost. He would wake eight hours later, a stone, a block
of wood, to unkink his wretched muscles, shoulder his pack, and march
under the naked, brassy sun.

The Parsees said that this High Pamir was the cradle of human life, that
from here had sprung the primals who proliferated into white, yellow,
black and brown. To the southwest, at the same thirteen-thousand
elevation, was the Valley of the Oxus, a green ribbon in the steel gray
and bone white of the plateau. To the northeast were the great
peaks--Everest, Kinchinjunga, K-4--that started where other mountains
ended, shooting from seventeen thousand up to unthinkable heights,
sky-piercing.

Night and day scarcely interrupted the flow of his thoughts. His waking
fantasies and his dreams alike were brutish, longing for warmth and
comfort, bespelled remembrance of palmier days. He woke to find an ear
frostbitten, dead, marble white, without sensation, killed by cold.

It came to him slowly, the idea forcing its way through the numbed
machinery of his brain, that he was following a path. This easier way
across the plateau could be nothing but one of the historic caravan
routes. Over this trail had gone a billion feet of beasts and men, and
his own had found their way into the ancient grooves. Colt was content
with that; going by the sun and stars was good, compass better, but best
of all were the ways that men had taken and found well suited.

There were animal droppings before him now and then, once a fragment of
broken crockery. He doubled his pace, from a slow plod to a loping,
long-strided walk that took much of his husbanded wind. Finally he saw
the print in a snowbank that spelled _man_. It was a shod foot's mark,
light and side-stepping. As he watched, a puff of wind drifted it over
with dry, gleaming snow.

Colt found a splash of milk against a rock, then the smell of camel
clinging about a wiry shrub.

He saw them at last, the tail of a great caravan, and fell fainting into
the arms of tall, curious Kirghiz camel drivers.

They carried him in a litter until he awoke and could eat, for nothing
was so important or unexpected that it could be allowed to break the
schedule of the march. Colt opened his eyes to grunts of satisfaction
from his bearers. He accepted the hunks of dried meat and bottle of warm
tea they gave him, trying to catch enough of the language to offer
thanks.

Coming down the line of the caravan was a large Hindu on one of the
small Mongolian ponies. He reined beside Colt and asked in French, "How
are you? They passed me word. Can you march with us?"

"But yes! It's like life out of death to find you people here. What can
I do to help?"

The Hindu dismounted to walk the pony beside him. "Keep up spirits. Our
few Europeans are tired of each other's company. In case of bandit
raiding--highly improbable, of course--you'll fight. I'm Raisuli Batar,
merchant of the Punjab. I'm caravan master, whose word is law. Not that
it's necessary--the boys are well behaved and we have enough food."

"Where are we headed?" asked Colt, gnawing on the hunk of meat.

"We started for Bokhara. Come up the line to meet the better sort with
me. They're agog with excitement, of course, don't dare break line
without my permission, which I don't choose to grant. By way of payload
we have crates of soap on the camels and drums of flavoring essence on
the ponies."

Colt sniffed, finding wintergreen and peppermint on the air. "May you
find a good price," he said respectfully.

Raisuli smiled and the American was pleased. The caravan master was big
and solid, with a grim, handsome face. It was good to please a man like
that, Colt thought.

They quickened their pace, overtaking a hundred plodding bearers and a
herd of sheep. Colt was introduced to a pale, thoughtful man named
McNaughton, a reader in history at the University of Glasgow, who said
he had been doing field work in Asia for three years.

Farther on were Lodz and wife, two young Poles from Galicia who were
hoping for government work in Bokhara. The man was quiet, his English
heavily accented. The wife spoke French only, but with the vivid dash of
a Parisienne. Her lips were touched with scarlet; here in the wilderness
of the High Pamir she wore a freshly pressed riding habit. Colt was
enchanted.

Raisuli cast a glance at the sky. "Bedding down," he snapped. "Excuse
me--_c'est l'heure_."

He left Colt with the Poles, mounting his pony again to gallop down the
line barking orders to the various Hindus, Tajiks, Chinese, Abyssinians,
Kirghiz and Kroomen who made up the crew. It took no more than a quarter
hour to bring the unwieldy line to a halt; in another quarter hour a
thousand felt tents were pitched and pegged, fires lighted and animals
staked out.

"He times well, that one," smiled M. Lodz. Colt looked up and saw the
sky already deepening into black. He shuddered a little and drew nearer
to the fire.

"I think," said McNaughton absently, "that I could take a little
refreshment." Lodz looked up from under his brows, then clapped his
hands. A native boy came running.

"Bring food--some of that cold joint, wallah."

"Yes, sahib."

"Such a night this will be, perhaps," said M. Lodz softly, "as it was in
August."

"Just such a night," said McNaughton. "Will you join us, Mr. Colt?"

"Not I," said the American with a sense of guilt. "I was fed when I came
to after fainting. Is it safe--may I look about?"

He got no answer. The boy had returned with a great haunch of meat;
silently the Occidentals gathered about it, taking out knives. Colt
watched in amazement as the dainty Frenchwoman hacked out a great slab
of beef and tore at it, crammed it down her throat. Before it was
swallowed she was cutting away again.

"Ah--I asked if I ought to look about...."

Lodz shot him a sidewise glance, his mouth crammed with meat, his jaws
working busily. Then, as though Colt had never spoken, he returned to
the serious business of feeding, with the same animal quality as his
wife and McNaughton showed.

"I'll look about then," said Colt forlornly. He wandered away from the
fire in the direction of a yellow felt tent. There he was delighted to
catch words of Cantonese.

"Greetings, son of Han," he said to the venerable speaker.

The fine old Mongol head turned; Colt felt himself subjected to a
piercing, kindly scrutiny by two twinkling little black eyes. The ruddy
little mouth smiled. "Sit down, son. It's a long time between new
friends."

Colt squatted by the fire obediently; the venerable one took a long pull
from a bottle of _suntori_, a vile synthetic Japanese whisky. Wiping his
mouth with the back of a wrinkled, yellow hand, he announced, "I'm
Grandfather T'ang. This is my son, T'ang Gaw Yat. If you let him he'll
talk you deaf about the time he was on the long march with the Eighth
Route Army. He claims General Chuh Teh once ate rice with him."

T'ang Gaw Yat smiled obediently and a little tolerantly at his father's
whimsy. He was a fine-looking Chinese, big-headed and straight-faced,
with little wrinkles of laughter playing about his mouth. "What my
father says," he confided, "is strictly true. It was a full thousand
miles from--"

"What did I tell you?" broke in the old man. "The slave is his wife, and
the smartest one of the lot." He indicated a small Chinese woman of the
indeterminate age between twenty and fifty.

She said in English hardly accented, "Hello. You do speak English, don't
you? These barbarians don't know anything but their village jargon and
Canton talk." The smile took the edge from her harsh words.

Colt introduced himself, and answered endless questions on the state of
China, military, political and economic.

"Hold off," ordered the woman at last. "Let him have his turn. Want to
know anything, Mr. Colt?"

"Wouldn't mind knowing how long you've been traveling."

"Stupid question," broke in Grandfather Han. "Just what one expects from
a foreign devil. The splendor of the night closes about him and he
would know how long we've been on the march! Have a drink--a small one."
He passed the bottle; Colt politely refused.

"Then maybe you'd like a little game--" There clicked in his palm two
ivory cubes.

"Please, Father," said T'ang Gaw Yat. "Put those away."

"Pattern of ancient virtue!" sneered the old man. "O you child of
purity!"

"Grandfather is very lucky," said the woman quietly. "He started on the
caravan with nothing but those dice and many years of gambling
experience. He is now one of the richest men on the line of march. He
owns two herds of sheep, a riding camel of his own and the best food
there is to be had."

"And drink," said the son somberly.

"Tell you what," said the old man. "You can have some of my V.S.O.
stock--stuff I won from a Spaniard a month back." He rummaged for a
moment in one of the tent pockets, finally emerged with a slender bottle
which caught the firelight like auriferous quartz. "Danziger
Goldwasser--_le véritable_," he gloated. "But I can't drink the stuff.
Doesn't bite like this Nipponese hellbroth." He upended the bottle of
_suntori_ again; passed the brandy to Colt.

The American took it, studied it curiously against the fire. It was a
thin, amber liquid, at whose bottom settled little flakes. He shook them
up into the neck of the bottle; it was like one of the little globular
paperweights that hold a mimic snowstorm. But instead of snow there were
bits of purest beaten gold to tickle the palate and fancy of the
drinker.

"Thanks," he said inadequately. "Very kind of you."

"Curious, isn't it," said the woman, "how much the caravan life
resembles a village? Though the wealth, of course, is not in land but in
mercantile prospects--" She stopped as Colt caught her eye. Why, he
wondered, had she been rattling on like that?

"The wisdom of the slave is the folly of the master," said Grandfather
T'ang amiably. "He is happy who learns to discount the words of a
woman."

"Suppose," said the woman slowly and quietly, "you learn to mind your
own business, you poisonous old serpent?"

"They can't stand common sense," confided the old man.

Colt felt, painfully, that he had wandered into a family quarrel. He
bolted with a mumbled excuse, hanging onto the bottle of brandy. He
stood for a moment away from the trail and stared down the long line of
fires. There were more than a thousand, snaking nearly out of sight. The
spectacle was restful; the fires were a little blue, being kindled
largely out of night-soil briquettes.

The sky was quite black; something had overcast the deep-ranked stars of
the plateau. No moon shone.

Colt settled against the lee of a rock in a trance. He heard winds and
the hiss of voices, soft in the distance. It was the quiet and
complaining Tajiki dialect. He could hear it and understand it. It was
absurdly simple, he thought abstractedly, to pick out the meanings of
words and phrases.

"Such a night," one was saying, "as in August. You remember?"

"I remember." Then, dark and passionate, "The limping, bloody demon! Let
him come near and I'll tear his vitals!"

"Surely you will not. He is the tearer in his evil work. We are the
torn--"

Colt sat up with a start. What the hell! He couldn't understand Tajiki,
not one little word of it! He had been dreaming, he thought. But it
didn't melt away as a dream should. The memory of the overheard
conversation was as sharp and distinct as it could be, something
concrete and mysterious, like a joke that hadn't been explained to him.

Then there was a sort of heavenly grumbling, like a megatherial word or
more. Colt twisted and stared at the zenith; could see nothing at all.
The rumbling ended. Colt saw black little fingers all down the line rise
and attend, twisting and staring and buzzing to each other.




2


He hurried to the fire of his European friends. They were sprawled on
blankets, their bodies a little swollen from the enormous meal they had
eaten. Colt saw the bare bone of the joint, scraped by knife edges. The
Occidentals were unconcernedly smoking.

"What was that racket?" he asked, feeling a little silly. "What was
it--do you know?"

"Thunder," said McNaughton noncommittally.

"_Oui_," agreed M. Lodz, puffing a long, tip-gilt cigarette. "Did it
frighten you, the thunder?"

Colt pulled himself together. There was something evasive here,
something that sought to elude him. "It was _peculiar_ thunder," he said
with glacial calm. "There was no lightning preceding it."

"The lightning will come soon," said Lodz furtively. "I tell you so you
will not be alarmed."

"You have your lightning after your thunder here? Odd. In my country
it's the other way around." He wasn't going to break--he _wasn't_ going
to swear--

"But how boring," drawled the Pole's wife. "_Never_ a change?"

He _wasn't_ going to break--

Then the peculiar lightning split the skies. Colt shot one staggered,
incredulous glance at it, and was dazzled.

It was a word, perhaps a name, spelled out against the dead-black sky.
He knew it. It was in some damned alphabet or other; fretfully he chided
himself for not remembering which of the twenty-odd he could recognize
it could be.

Colt realized that the Occidentals were staring at him with polite
concern. He noticed a shred of meat between the teeth of Mme. Lodz as
she smiled reassuringly--white, sharp teeth, they were. Colt rubbed his
eyes dazedly. He knew he must be a haggard and unseemly figure to their
cultured gaze--but they hadn't seen the words in the sky--_or had
they_--?

Politely they stared at him, phrases bubbling from their lips:

"So frightfully sorry, old man--"

"Wouldn't upset you for the world--"

"Hate to see you lose your grip--"

Colt shook his head dazedly, as though he felt strands of sticky silk
wind around his face and head. He turned and ran, hearing the voice of
Raisuli Batar call after him, "Don't stray too far--"

He didn't know how long he ran or how far he strayed. Finally he fell
flat, sprawled childishly, feeling sick and confused in his head. He
looked up for a moment to see that the caravan fires were below some
curve of rock or other--at any rate, well out of sight. They were such
little lights, he thought. Good for a few feet of warm glow, then sucked
into the black of High Pamir. They made not even a gleam in the
night-heavy sky.

And there, on the other side of him and the caravan, he saw the tall
figure of another human being. She stood on black rock between two
drifts of snow.

Colt bit out the foil seal of the brandy bottle and pulled the cork with
his fingers. After a warm gulp of the stuff, he rose.

"Have a drink?"

She turned. She was young in her body and face, Mongoloid. Her eyes were
blue-black and shining like metal. Her nose was short, Chinese, yet her
skin was quite white. She did not have the eyefold of the yellow people.

Silently she extended one hand for the bottle, tilted it high. Colt saw
a shudder run through her body as she swallowed and passed him the tall
flask with its gold-flecked liquor.

"You must have been cold."

"By choice. Do you think I'd warm myself at either fire?"

"Either?" he asked.

"There are two caravans. Didn't you know?"

"No. I'm just here--what's the other caravan?"

"Just here, are you? Did you know that you're dead?"

Colt thought the matter over slowly; finally declared, "I guess I did.
And all those others--and you--?"

"All dead. We're the detritus of High Pamir. You'll find, if you look,
men who fell to death from airplanes within the past few years walking
by the side of Neanderthalers who somehow strayed very far from their
tribes and died. The greatest part of the caravans comes, of course,
from older caravans of the living who carried their goods from Asia to
Europe for thousands of years."

Colt coughed nervously. "Have another drink," he said. "Then let's see
this other caravan. I'm not too well pleased with the one I fell into."

She took his hand and guided him across the snow and black rock to back
within sight of his own caravan. He stared, eager and hungry to see. As
she pointed with one tapering finger it seemed that many things were
clearer than they ever had been before. He saw that the long line of
lights was not his caravan but another in the opposite direction,
paralleling his.

"There you will see _their_ caravan master," she said, putting her face
next to his. He looked and saw a pot-bellied monster whose turban was
half as high as its wearer. Its silhouette, as it passed before a fire,
was indescribably unpleasant.

"Evening prayer," said his guide, with a faint tone of mockery.

He studied them as they arranged flares before a platform flung together
out of planks and trestles; he also saw them assemble a sort of idol,
fitting the various parts together and bolting them securely. When the
thing was perhaps two-thirds assembled he turned away and covered his
face, repelled.

"I won't look at the rest of it now," he said. "Perhaps later, if you
wish me to."

"That's right," she said. "It isn't a thing to look at calmly. But you
will see the rest of it one time or another. This is a very long
caravan."

She looked down and said, "Now they are worshiping."

Colt looked. "Yes," he said flatly. They were worshiping in their own
fashion, dancing and leaping uglily while some dozen of them blew or saw
fantastic discords from musical instruments. Others were arranged in a
choir; as they began to sing Colt felt cold nausea stirring at the pit
of his belly.

Their singing was markedly unpleasant; Colt, who enjoyed the discords of
Ernest Bloch and Jean Sibelius, found them stimulatingly revolting. The
choir droned out a minor melody, varying it again and again with what
Colt construed to be quarter-tones and split-interval harmonies. He
found he was listening intently, nearly fascinated by the ugly sounds.

"Why are they doing it?" he asked at length.

"It is their way," she said with a shrug. "I see you are interested. I,
too, am interested. Perhaps I should not discuss this before you have
had the opportunity of making up your own mind. But as you may guess,
the caravan below us there, where they make the noises, is Bad. It is a
sort of marching gallery of demons and the black in heart. On the other
hand, the caravan with which you found yourself previously is
Good--basically kind and constructive, taking delight in order and
precision."

Colt, half-listening, drew her down beside him on the rock. He uncorked
the bottle. "You must tell me about yourself," he said earnestly. "It is
becoming difficult for me to understand all this. So tell me about
yourself, if you may."

She smiled slowly. "I am half-caste," she said. "The Russian
Revolution--so many attractive and indigent female aristocrats, quite
unable to work with their hands ... many, as you must know, found their
way to Shanghai.

"There was a Chinese merchant and my mother, a princess. Not _eine
Fuerstin_--merely a hanger-on at court. I danced. When I was a small
child already I was dancing. My price was high, very high at one time. I
lost popularity, and with it income and much self-assurance. I was a
very bad woman. Not bad as those people there are bad, but I was very
bad in my own way.

"Somehow I learned mathematics--a British actuary who knew me for a
while let me use his library, and I learned quickly. So I started for
India, where nobody would hire me. I heard that there was a country to
the north that wanted many people who knew building and mathematics and
statistics. Railway took me through the Khaiber and Afghanistan--from
there pony and litter--till I died of exposure seven months ago. That is
why we meet on High Pamir."

"Listen," said Colt. "Listen to that."

It was again the megatherial voices, louder than before. He looked at
the woman and saw that her throat cords were tight as she stared into
the black-velvet heavens.

Colt squinted up between two fingers, snapped shut his eyelids after a
moment of the glaring word across the sky that followed the voices. He
cursed briefly, blinded. Burned into the backs of his eyes were the
familiar characters of the lightning, silent and portentous.

"It doesn't do to stare into it that way," said the woman. "Come with
me." He felt for her hand and let her pull him to his feet. As sight
returned he realized that again they were walking on rock.

"And there's the Good and holy caravan at evening devotions," said the
woman, with the same note of bedrock cynicism in her voice. And they
were. From his coign of vantage Colt could see Raisuli Batar solemnly
prostrating himself before a modestly clad, well-proportioned idol whose
face beamed kindly on the congregation through two blue-enameled eyes.
There was a choir that sang the old German hymn "Ein Feste Burg."

"Shocking," said the woman, "yet strangely moving to the spirit. One
feels a certain longing...."

Bluntly Colt said, "I'd like to join them. You're holding me back, you
know. I wouldn't see you as a comrade again if I sang with them." He
hummed a few bars of the hymn. "On Earth is not His e-qual--"

"Girding their loins for the good fight," said the woman. She chuckled
quietly for a moment. In a ribald tone that seemed barely to conceal
heartbreak, she snapped, "Do you care to fall in with the ranks of the
Almighty? Or may it be with the Lord of Nothing, Old Angra Mainyu of the
sixteen plagues? Pick your sides in the divine sweepstakes! It's for you
they do it and of a great love for the soul in you--

"They want you black and they want you white--

"How in blazes do you know who's right?"

"It _seems_ clear," said Colt doubtfully.

"You think so?" she exploded. "You think so now? Wait and see--with them
tearing at your heart two ways and you sure that it'll never hold out
but it's going to rip in half, and it never doing that but you going on
through the night thirteen thousand meters above the world and never a
soft bed and never a bite of real food and never a moment of closing
your eyes and sleeping in darkness and night--!"

She collapsed, weeping, into his arms.




3


The long, starless night had not lifted. Three times more the voices had
spoken from the heavens and silent lightning scribbled across the sky.
The two in-betweeners had chanted back and forth sacred writings of
Asia, wretchedly seeking for answers:

"I will incline mine ears to a parable. I will open my dark sayings upon
the harp. Wherefore should I fear in the days of evil when the iniquity
of my heels shall compass me about?"

"O maker of the material world, thou holy one! When the good waters
reach the left instep whereon does the Drukh Nasu rush?"

There was an explosion of cynical laughter above them, old and dry.
Grandfather T'ang greeted them, "Be well, Valeska and Colt. And forget
the insteps and the heels of the Upanishad. That is my counsel." He
upended the _suntori_ bottle and flushed his throat with a half-pint of
the stuff.

In reply to Colt's surprised glance she said, "He often visits me. Gaw
is a terrible old man who thinks nothing of lying and being untrue to
himself."

"A little of that would do you no harm, daughter. I belong out here with
you, of course. But out here are no likely candidates for the dice box,
and this ethereal gullet refuses to do without alcohol. Though this
ethereal brain could do with considerably less of the pious nonsense
that invariably accompanies winning at dice."

He painfully squatted by them, keeping a death grip on the quart bottle.
"They're going to be at it again," said the old man. "It's just such a
night as in August. Tooth and nail, hammer and tongs, no holds barred."
He spat on the rock. "Pah! These spectacles disgust a man of my
mentality."

"You see?" asked the woman. "He lies and cheats at dice. Yet often he
sings with the worshipers. And always he says he spits on them in his
mind. He is terrible!"

Colt quoted slowly, "Judge me and my cause against the ungodly nation; O
deliver me from the deceitful and the unjust man."

"Ah?" asked Grandfather T'ang. "Sacred books? Wisdom of the East? I join
your symposium with the following, reverently excerpted from the Shuh
King: 'The soil of the province was whitish and mellow. Its contribution
of revenue was of the highest of the highest class, with some
proportion of the second. Its fields were of the average of the second
class.'" He grinned savagely and drank deeply again.

"You can't be right," said Colt. "You _can't_ be. There's something that
forbids it being right to lie now that you're dead. It doesn't matter
which side you choose--whether it's Raisuli's smiling idol or that thing
the other side of the ridge. But you have to choose."

"I'm different," said T'ang smugly. "I'm different, and I'm drunk two
thirds of the time, so what's the difference if I'm different?" He began
raucously to sing, beating time with the bottle, the one and only
Confucian hymn:

   "_Superiority in a person
     Should better not
     Nor should it worsen._

    _It should consider everything
     From pussycat to honored king._

    _Inferior people
     Need a steeple
     To climb and shout
     Their views about._"

Colt drew a little aside with Valeska. "Should this matter?" he asked.

"He really ought to choose one caravan or another. It's very wrong of
him to pretend to be with one when he's really with neither. Either the
Good or the Bad...." She stared quaintly into Colt's eyes. "Do you think
I'm bad?"

"No," said Colt slowly. "I know you're not. And you aren't good either.
Not by nature, practice or inclination. I'm the same as you. I want to
sing their devil song and a Lutheran hymn at the same time. And it can't
be done."

"And you aren't a liar like that lovable old drunk rolling on the rocks
there," she said with a gesture. "At least you aren't a liar."

"I congratulate myself. I can appreciate it to the full. Have a drink,
Valeska."

"Yes. There is, you know, going to be a holy war. Which side should we
be on?"

"Who knows? Let's take another look at the Bad boys."

There was half a pang of terror in his heart--a formless fear that he
might find Badness less repugnant to him than Goodness. He knew the
feeling: it was the trial of every human soul torn between one thing and
another. Doubt was Hell--worse than Hell--and it had to be resolved,
even at the risk of this magnificent creature by his side.

Silently he passed the bottle as the sky lightened and the silence spoke
out of the heavens.

"As you wish," she said. Colt felt a sort of opening in his mind, as
though unspoken words had passed between them. He had heard her think in
sorrow and fear of losing him.

She led him over a ridge to the long line of fires of the Bad caravan,
fires blue-tipped before the ugly altar. There was a disemboweled
sacrifice in its lap. Colt stared his fill, trying to probe what was in
his own heart. It was neither pleasure nor pain, neither pompous virtue
nor cackling glee in destruction and death. There were techniques of
self-searching now open to him that could never be those of a living
man; he shuddered to think of how he had groped in darkness and
ignorance before his death.

The caravan master, the squat monster in the mighty turban, greeted him
warmly, "We've been watching your progress with considerable interest,
my son. We have felt that you were warming to our ideas. How do you feel
about our community?"

Colt rolled back his consciousness into the dark recesses of his mind,
exploring a new stock of knowledge--things that it seemed he must always
have known, but never recognized till now for what they were.
"Community"--that meant the mutual practice of evil and destruction. One
of the tidbits of wisdom newly in his mind was an awareness that the Bad
worked together, sealed in a union that bore death as its bond. The Good
practiced alone, rising very seldom to a community of any respectable
proportions.

"May I enter the bond tentatively?" he asked.

The master looked pained. "My son of abomination," he said kindly, "I'll
have to ask you to be very careful. The balance is beautifully precise;
it would be a shame to throw them out of kilter. But since you wish to
go ahead, very well. Enter!"

Colt squatted on the ground with numerous others of the Bad people. He
sent out a consoling line of thought to Valeska, who stood somberly by,
fearing to lose her solitary ally. He smiled a little and ran back a
signal of reassurance.

He trembled a little with the effort, then threw back his mind like a
door. The inverging flood of black, glistening stuff gave him a warm
feeling of comradeship with the others; he yielded and allowed himself
to drift with them.

He inspected the attitude of which he was a part, found it consisted of
a series of aesthetic balances among eye, ear, touch, smell and taste.
The viewpoint was multiplex, dirigible, able to rise, enlarge, focus
from infinity to zero, split to examine an object from all vantages.

The viewpoint inspected a rock from about a dozen feet in the air, saw
it as a smoothly prolate spheroid. There was a moment of dwelling on the
seeming fact of its perfection, a painful moment, then the viewpoint
descended slowly and with little waves of pleasure as chips and scars
became apparent in the rock. The viewpoint split, correlated its
observations and registered the fact that the rock was of an eccentric
shape, awkward and unbeautiful.

The viewpoint coalesced again and shrank microscopically, then smaller
still. For an ecstatic moment it perceived a welter of crashing,
blundering molecules, beetling about in blindness.

It shifted again, swiftly, far away to a point in Hong Kong where a lady
was entertaining a gentleman. The viewpoint let the two humans' love,
hate, disgust, affection and lust slide beneath its gaze. There was a
gorgeous magenta jealousy from the man, overlaying the woman's
dull-brown, egg-shaped avarice, both swept away in a rushing tide of
fluxing, thick-textured, ductile, crimson-black passion.

The viewpoint passed somewhere over a battlefield, dwelt lovingly on the
nightmare scene below. There were dim flares of vitality radiating from
every crawling figure below; a massing of infantry was like a beacon.
From the machinery of war there came a steely radiance which waxed as it
discharged its shell or tripped its bomb, then dimmed to a quiet glow of
satisfaction.

A file of tanks crawled over a hill, emitting a purplish radiance which
sent out thin cobwebs of illumination. They swung into battle formation,
crept down the slope at the infantry mass. Behind the infantry antitank
guns were hurrying up--too late. The tanks opened fire, their cobwebs
whitening to a demon's flare of death as soldiers, scurrying for cover,
one by one, keeled over. As they fell there was a brittle little tingle,
the snapping of a thread or wire, and the light of vitality was
extinguished, being replaced by a sallow, corpsey glow.

The viewpoint gorged, gloated, bloated on the scene, then seemed to
swell immeasurably.

Suddenly, after a wringing transition feeling, it was in a mighty hall,
approaching a lightless apse where two little points of radiance
gleamed.

There was music, harmonizing ear, eye, taste, touch and smell in a
twilit blend of sensations. Colt struggled involuntarily, felt himself
bathed in rhythmic complications, subtly off-pleasure, spoiled by the
minute introduction of some unharmonious element. With dismay he felt
there creeping into his own consciousness, his segment of the viewpoint,
a simple little flicker of a theme in C major. He was conscious of a
gnat's wing beat of disapproval in response to his untoward disturbance.
The viewpoint continued its drift toward the darkened apse.

It lovingly picked out the inhabitant of the lightless space and greeted
it, even Colt, even though it was a monster of five legs and incredible
teeth which opened wide. Damnably, irritatingly, the little C-major
motif persisted; he tried to drive it from his mind, then, in a fatal
moment, recognized it as one Oliver's "Flower Song," a sweet little
thing suitable for small hands on the pianoforte.

"--_lilies, roses, flowers of every hue_--"

He couldn't lose it after having recognized it that far; the theme
spread and orchestrated through the viewpoint. The whole polysensual
off-pleasure matrix broke up, tore wide open as it was about to pass
down the gullet of the monster in the apse.

"I'm sorry," he said, rising. "I simply couldn't help--"

"I know," said the caravan master sadly. "I know what it was. But you
wrecked a full communion all the same. Go in torment, my son of
abomination. May your ways be woeful."

Colt thanked him and left with Valeska.

"How was it?" she asked.

"Indescribable," he exploded. "Loathsome--glorious--terrible. I found
myself gloating over--" He went into details.

"So did I," she said absently. "I went through it, too. It has a
gorgeous kick to it, no doubt. But it isn't right for us. Me, I broke up
their communion with a line from Pushkin: _The aged sorcerer in anger
said, This queen is evil from toe to head._ You know it?"

The sound of singing came from over the ridge, blurred by the
megatherial voices. Colt stared abstractedly at the sky as the words
were scribbled again in light.

"Their turn," he said. "The Good boys."




4


They stepped over ridges of snowy rock and stood for a moment surveying
the other caravan. There was a semicircle of faces, gleaming
benevolently in the firelight, handsome smiling faces. They were
singing, under the pleasant aspect of the blue-eyed idol, a lusty slab
from the great Bach's great Mass in B minor. While Valeska smiled a
little cynically, Colt sidestepped into the baritone choir and sounded
back tentatively for the words and music. They came easily; he was
experiencing again, for the first time in many years, the delights of
close harmony that move men to form barbershop quartets and Philharmonic
Societies.

He sang the hearty, solid language, the crashing chords, from his chest,
standing straight, bouncing the tones from his palate like the old
glee-clubber that he was. Beside him he saw Lodz, a beatific smile on
his face, chanting sonorously. Why were so many small men bassos?

Colt forgot himself and sang, let his voice swim out into the pool of
sound and melt into harmony; when need was, he sang up, playing off
against M. Lodz's basso and McNaughton's ringing tenor. And then he sang
a sinister quarter-tone. It ended the bar on a gorgeously askew chord
and got him very severely looked at. Raisuli Batar, baton in hand,
frowned. Colt signaled wildly back that he couldn't help it.

It might have been lack of control, but it wasn't. It seemed that
musical virtuosity was a gift to the dead. He had no choice in the
matter--it was his nature that had dictated the quarter-tone. Raisuli
Batar tapped a rock twice with the baton, then swept down, his left hand
signaling volume, cuing in the bassos with his eyes.

The brilliant, crashing unison passage rang out. Damn! As though he had
no control over his own voice, Colt sang not in unison but sharping and
flatting around the line, botching the grand melody completely.

He strode angrily from the semicircle of singers, back to Valeska. She
passed the bottle with a twisted smile on her face.

"You tried to compromise," she said. "It can't be done. They didn't
thank you for Stravinskying their Bach."

"Right," he said. "_But what do we do?_"

"It doesn't seem right," she brooded. "We shouldn't be the only
in-betweeners. Five thousand years--more--they must appear more often.
Then something happens to them. And they go away somewhere."

"Right," crowed Grandfather T'ang, drunker than ever. "Right, m'lass.
And I know what happens to them. And I'll tell you what to do."

"Why?" asked Colt practically.

"Because I'm not as far outside as you think, children. Once I was as
far in-between as you. I had my chance and I missed it--passed it up for
the _suntori_ and the dice games around the fires. Grandfather was a
fool. I can't tell you any more than this: Get into the battle and
observe rather closely. When you discover a very important secret, you
will ascend to the Eighteenth Orbit and dwell forever, dancing and
singing on the rings of Saturn. Or, to discard the gibberish, your
psychic tissues so alter that you recognize a plane of existence more
tenuous than ours; a plane, one suspects, more delectable. The
mythological name for it is Heaven." He hugged his bottle and crooned
affectionately to it:

    "_Superiority in a person
      Should better not
      Nor should it_--"

"_Does_ he know?" asked Colt, looking out into the long night.

"He wasn't lying this time. Shall we do it?"

"We shall. This waiting blasts my ethereal soul."

"You're an impatient cuss," she smiled at him. "You haven't seen me
dance yet. I was a well-paid dancer once. It should be worth your
while."

"Dance, then," he said, settling himself against a rock.

"You make the music. You know how."

He thought for a moment, then uncovered another bit of technique known
to the dead. He began to send out mentally Debussy's _Claire de Lune_.
She heard it, smiled at him as she caught the music, and began to dance.

Her body was not very good; certainly not as good as it had been. But as
he studied the dancing, sometimes with eyes closed so that he could hear
only the rustle of her feet on the snow and sometimes so abstracted that
he could hear only the displacement of air as she moved, Colt was deeply
stirred.

He tuned in on her thoughts, picking out the swiftly running stream, the
skittering little point of consciousness that danced over them.

"Now I am a swan," said her thoughts while she danced to the music. "Now
I am a swan, dying for love of the young prince who has wandered through
the courtyard. And now I am the prince, very pretty and as dumb as a
prince could be. Now I am his father the King, very wrathy and pompous.
And now, and through it all, I was really the great stone gargoyle on
the square top tower who saw all and grinned to himself."

She pirouetted to an end with the music, bowing with a stylized,
satirically cloying grace. He applauded lustily.

"Unless you have other ideas," she said, "I would like to dance again."
Her face was rosy and fresh-looking.

He began to construct music in his mind while she listened in and took
little tentative steps. Colt started with a split-log-drum's beat, pulse
speed, low and penetrating. He built up another rhythm overlaying it, a
little slower, with wood-block timbre. It was louder than the first.
Rapidly he constructed a series of seven polyrhythmic layers, from the
bottom split-log pulse to a small, incessant snare-drum beat.

"I'm an animal now, a small, very arboreal animal. I can prick up my
ears; my toes are opposed, so I can grasp a branch."

He added a bone-xylophone melody, very crude, of only three tones.

"My eyes are both in front of my face. My vision has become
stereoscopic. I can sit up and handle leaves. I can pick insects from
the branches I live in."

Colt augmented the xylophone melody with a loud, crude brass.

Valeska thought, "I'm bigger--my arms are longer. And I often walk
little distances on the ground, on my feet and my arm knuckles."

Colt added a see-sawing, gutty-sounding string timbre, in a melody
opposed to the xylophone and the brass.

"I'm bigger--bigger--too big for trees. And I eat grubs as well as
leaves--and I walk almost straight up--see me walk!"

He watched her swinging along the ground, apish, with the memory of
brachiation stamped in every limb. He modified the bone-xylophone's
timbre to a woody ring, increased the melodic range to a full octave.

With tremendous effort Valeska heaved over an imaginary rock, chipped at
it. "I'm making flint hand-axes. They kill animals bigger than I
am--tigers and bears--see my kitchen heap, high as a mountain, full of
their bones!"

He augmented with a unison choir of woodwinds and a jangling ten-string
harp.

"I eat bread and drink beer and I pray to the Nile--I sing and I dance,
I farm and I bake--see me spin rope! See me paint pictures on plaster!"

A wailing clarinet mourned through the rhythmic sea.

Valeska danced statelily. "Yes--now I'm a man's woman--now I'm on top of
the heap of the ages--now I'm a human--now I'm a woman...."

Colt stopped short the whole accumulation of percussion, melody and
harmony in a score of timbres, cutting in precisely a single blues piano
that carried in its minor, sobbing-sad left hand all the sorrow of ages;
in the serpentine-stabbing chords splashed gold by the right sang the
triumph of man in his glory of metal and stone.

Valeska danced, sending out no words of what the dance was, for it was
she, what she dreamed, what she had been, and what she was to be. The
dance and the music were Valeska, and they ended when she was in Colt's
arms. The brandy bottle dropped from his grip and smashed on the rock.

Their long, wordless communion was broken by a disjointed yell from the
two sides of the ridge as fighting forces streamed to battle. From the
Bad caravan came the yell, "Kill and maim! Destroy! Destroy!" And the
Good caravan cried, "In the name of the right! For sanctity and peace on
Earth! Defend the right!"

Colt and Valeska found themselves torn apart in the rush to attack,
swept into the thick of the fighting. The thundering voices from above,
and the lightning, were almost continuous. The blinding radiance rather
than the night hampered the fighting.

They were battling with queer, outlandish things--frying pans, camp
stools, table forks. One embattled defender of the right had picked up a
piteously bleating kid and was laying about him with it, holding its
tiny hooves in a bunch.

Colt saw skulls crack, but nobody gave way or even fell. The dead were
immortal. Then what in blazes was this all about? There was something
excruciatingly wrong somewhere, and he couldn't fathom what it was.

He saw the righteous and amiable Raisuli Batar clubbing away with a
table leg; minutes later he saw the fiendish and amiable chief of the
Bad men swinging about him with another.

Vaguely sensing that he ought perhaps to be on the side of the right, he
picked up a kettle by the handle and looked about for someone to bean
with it. He saw a face that might be that of a fiend strayed from Hell,
eyes rolling hideously, teeth locked and grinding with rage as its owner
carved away at a small-sized somebody with a broken-bladed axe.

He was on the verge of cracking the fiend out of Hell when it considered
itself finished with its victim, temporarily at least, and turned to
Colt. "Hello, there," snapped the fiend. "Show some life, will you?"

Colt started as he saw that the fiend was Lodz, one of the Good men.
Bewildered, he strayed off, nearly being gouged in the face by
Grandfather T'ang, who was happily swinging away with a jagged hunk of
_suntori_ bottle, not bothering to discriminate.

But how _did_ one discriminate? It came over him very suddenly that one
didn't and couldn't. The caravaneers were attacking each other. At that
moment there came through a mental call from Valeska, who had just made
the same discovery on her own. They joined and mounted a table,
inspecting the sea of struggling human beings.

"It's all in the way you look at them," said Valeska softly.

Colt nodded. "There was only one caravan," he said in somber tones.

He experimented silently a bit, discovering that by a twiddle of the
eyes he could convert Raisuli Batar into the Bad caravan leader, turban
and all. And the same went for the Bad idol--a reverse twiddle converted
it into the smiling, blue-eyed guardian of the Good caravan. It was like
the optical illusion of the three shaded cubes that point one way or the
other, depending on how you decide to see them.

"That was what Grandfather T'ang meant," said the woman. Her eyes
drifted to the old man. He had just drained another bottle; with a
businesslike swing against a rock he shattered the bottom into a
splendid cutting tool and set to work again.

"There's no logic to it," Colt said forlornly. "None at all." Valeska
smiled happily and hugged him.

Colt felt his cheek laid open.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Bon soir. Guten Tag. Buon giorno. Buenos dias. Bon soir. Guten Tag.
Buon--"

"You can stop that," said Colt, struggling to his feet. He cracked his
head against a strut, hung on dazedly. "Where's--"

He inspected the two men standing before him with healthy grins. They
wore the Red Army uniform under half-buttoned flying suits. The strut
that had got in his way belonged to a big, black helicopter; amidships
was blazoned the crimson star of the Soviet Union.

"You're well and all that, I fawncy?" asked one of the flyers. "We
spotted you and landed--bunged up your cheek a bit--Volanov heah _would_
try to overshoot."

"I'm fine," said Colt, feeling his bandage. "Why'n hell can't you
Russians learn to speak American?"

The two soldiers exchanged smiles and glances. They obviously
considered Colt too quaint for words. "Pile in, old chap. We can take
you as far as Bokhara--we fuel at Samarkand. I--ah--suppose you have
papers?"

Colt leaned against the strut and wearily shoved over his credentials.
Everything would be all right. Chungking was in solid with the Reds at
the moment. Everything would be all right.

"I fawncy," said Volanov, making conversation while his partner handled
the helicopter vanes, "youah glad to see the lawst of all that."

Colt looked down, remembered, and wept.

       *       *       *       *       *

"I find," I said as dryly as possible, "a certain familiarity--a
nostalgic ring, as it were--toward the end of your tale." I was just
drunk enough to get fancy with The Three-Cornered Scar.

"You do?" he asked. He leaned forward across the table. "_You do?_"

"I've read widely in such matters," I hastily assured him, pouring
another glass of red wine.

He grinned glumly, sipping. "If I hadn't left half my spirit with
Valeska that night I was dead," he remarked conversationally, "I'd smash
your face in."

"That may be," I assented gracefully.

But I should say that he drank less like half a spirit than half a
dozen.


[The end of _The Golden Road_ by Cyril M. Kornbluth]