The Gifts of Asti | Page 7

panting, his nostril flaps open. It was he who spied the spring
on the mountain side above, a spring of water uncontaminated by the
strange life of the lake. They both dragged themselves there to drink
deeply.
Varta returned to the lake shore reluctantly. Within her heart she
believed that the man they had brought from the ship was truly dead.
Lur might hold out the promise of the flowers, but this was a man and
he had lain in the water for countless ages--
So she went with lagging steps, to find Lur busy. He had solved the
mystery of the space suit and had stripped it from the unknown. Now
his clawed paw rested lightly on the bared chest and he turned to Varta
eagerly.
"There is life--"
Hardly daring to believe that, she dropped down beside Lur and
touched their prize. Lur was right, the flesh was warm and she had
caught the faint rhythm of shallow breath. Half remembering old tales,
she put her hands on the arch of the lower ribs and began to aid that
rhythm. The breaths were deeper--
Then the man half turned, his arm moved. Varta and Lur drew back.
For the first time the girl probed gently the sleeping mind before
her--even as she had read the minds of those few of Memphir who had
ascended to the temple precincts in the last days.
Much of what she read now was confused or so alien to Erb that it had
no meaning for her. But she saw a great city plunged into flaming death
in an instant and felt the horror and remorse of the man at her feet
because of his own part in that act, the horror and remorse which had
led him to open rebellion and so to his imprisonment. There was a last
dark and frightening memory of a door closing on light and hope--
The space man moaned softly and hunched his shoulders as if he
struggled vainly to tear loose from bonds.

"He thinks that he is still prisoner," observed Lur. "For him life begins
at the very point it ended--even as it did for the turbi flowers. See--now
he awakens."
The eyelids rose slowly, as if the man hated to see what he must look
upon. Then, as he sighted Varta and Lur, his eyes went wide. He pulled
himself up and looked dazedly around, striking out wildly with his fists.
Catching sight of the clumsy suit Lur had taken from him he pulled at it,
looking at the two before him as if he feared some attack.
Varta turned to Lur for help. She might read minds and use the
wordless speech of Lur. But his people knew the art of such
communication long before the first priest of Asti had stumbled upon
their secret. Let Lur now quiet this outlander.
Delicately Lur sought a way into the other's mind, twisting down paths
of thought strange to him. Even Varta could not follow the subtile
waves sent forth in the quick examination and reconnoitering, nor
could she understand all of the conversation which resulted. For the
man from the ancient ship answered in speech aloud, sharp harsh
sounds of no meaning. It was only after repeated instruction from Lur
that he began to frame his messages in his mind, clumsily and
disconnectedly.
Pictures of another world, another solar system, began to grow more
clear as the space man became more at home in the new way of
communication. He was one of a race who had come to Erb from
beyond the stars and discovered it a world without human life: So they
had established colonies and built great cities--far different from
Memphir--and had lived in peace for centuries of their own time.
Then on the faraway planet of their birth there had begun a great war, a
war which brought flaming death to all that world. The survivors of a
last battle in outer space had fled to the colonies on Erb. But among
this handful were men driven mad by the death of their world, and
these had blasted the cities of Erb, saying that their kind must be wiped
out.

The man they had rescued had turned against one such maddened
leader and had been imprisoned just before an attack upon the largest of
the colony's cities. After that he remembered nothing.
Varta stopped trying to follow the conversation--Lur was only
explaining now how they had found the space man and brought him out
of the wrecked ship. No human on Erb, this one had said, and yet were
there not her own people, the ones who had built Memphir? And what
of the barbarians, who, ruthless and cruel as they seemed by the
standards of Memphir, were indeed men? Whence