Chapter IV

They rounded a sharp bend and Barry gasped at the vista before him. The passage opened into a tremendous cavern.

Far below on the bowl-shaped floor sprawled a town composed of cylindrical houses higher than they were wide, scattered in an irregular pattern.

He looked upward for the source of the cold yellow light flooding everything, and a few yards above his head lay a flat silvery plane. Just below it the water glowed, like the phosphorescence that microscopic life forms cause in the tropic seas of Earth--but a thousand times brighter.

The men from Xintel's group had taken no part in her altercation with Komso save to watch in uneasy silence. Now they were scattering downward toward the houses. Nearly all had been joined by waiting women, but Barry saw two women swimming pitifully and dejectedly alone. The battle into which he had been precipitated had not been without its casualties.

He stared about as Xintel led him in a long dive. On the bottom were trees--he had no other name for them--with stiff trunks and snake-like branches supported by air-filled knobs.

Their pale leaves were covered with minute bubbles that gave them a frosty appearance despite the warmth of the water.

There were no streets or paths between the cylindrical houses, but in small areas around the entrances the bright varicolored seaweed-moss had been worn away by Venusian feet.

A few Venusians eyed them in curiosity as they swam downward, but none approached.

They touched bottom beside one of the houses. Xintel pushed aside a curtain covering the circular doorway. Barry saw the house was constructed by training and grafting a number of the large trees until they intertwined. Its foundations were the roots that clung to irregularities in the rocks.

There were no windows, and for a moment after the girl let the curtain fall into place it was pitch black. Then suddenly the circular room was brilliantly lighted.

From the ceiling hung a globe a foot in diameter, the translucent floatation chamber of some subaqueous plant. It was spinning at the end of a twisted cord, the luminous milky fluid it contained stirred by the motion.

Xintel sighed wearily and hung up her crossbow. Then with a graceful leap she vanished through a hatchway in the ceiling.

She returned, floating down with a pair of pronged darts and a small round box with bubbles dribbling upward in a steady stream through the perforated lid. She opened it and, with a fingertip, smeared a dab of vermilion paste on the base of each dart. Then she pushed the missiles base first into her tube-weapons, twisting them until a latch caught.

Her weapons prepared, the girl turned back to the Earthman and made the universal gesture of eating. Barry had no idea how long it had been since he had eaten, and for the first time since the Sigma sickness began he was really hungry. He nodded.

She leaped upward and he followed her to a second windowless room above the first, then up through another hatchway to a third. This was the top of the house, for through an opening in the flat roof he could look up into open water. Several baskets, woven of strips of undersea wood and equipped with close-fitting lids, stood along the wall. In a wooden cage a few dozen strange fish swam sluggishly.

With her bare hands Xintel caught one and pulled it out. She picked up a dagger of the same material as the spears--an unfamiliar substance which Barry had had no chance to examine closely--and jumped to the open roof. She returned a few minutes later with the fish neatly cleaned and divided into halves.

Barry was hungry but Earth habits were still strong. The girl saw his involuntary grimace. She looked hurt. He forced himself to take a bite of the raw fish and to his amazement found it pleasant. Evidently his taste organs had changed with the rest of his body.

From the baskets Xintel took other foods of vegetable origin. Barry ate ravenously.

The cumulative effects of fatigue overwhelmed him even as he finished. He felt a sense of dreamlike unreality and detachment, as though nothing mattered. The girl too appeared tired but he could see she was bursting with curiosity. He appreciated her restraint in not bombarding him with questions. At her gesture he stepped through the hatch and floated down to the middle room.

The light there had gone dim but she gave the globe a deft spin that brightened it again. She motioned to a wide pallet woven of resilient fiber, and he lay down at once. There were no coverings, no need for them in the soothingly warm water.

Despite his tiredness Barry's nerves were still tense and twitching, and he kept hearing soft sounds as the girl moved about the room. After several minutes he opened his eyes again.

Xintel had removed her brief skirt and was wearing only her silvery necklace. She was anointing herself with an oily salve that sent a pleasantly pungent odor through the water, giving special attention to her wrists and ankles where the cords of the norus had chafed them and to the livid bruises that were developing on other portions of her slender body. She paused and smiled at him, not at all embarrassed.

Finally she came toward the pallet and without hesitation lay down beside him. She stretched and moved slightly until she found a comfortable position, and then her breathing took on the slow regularity of sleep while the light dimmed.

For a while Barry remained awake. Half-formed questions spun madly through his mind but when he tried to think rationally his tired brain balked.

* * * * *

He woke and sat up, floated up from the pallet in the unaccustomed support of the black water, settled back slowly while he strove to winnow true memories from the remnants of nightmare. The girl woke and spoke questioningly. It required great concentration on Barry's part to understand and answer, for he had forgotten much of what he had learned from those Mexican laborers.

"Yes, I feel better," he said hesitantly. "But--."

In the blackness their bodies touched accidentally. Her skin was warm and smooth, soft but with the firmness of underlying muscle. After a long moment she drew away.

Barry blinked as she spun the light into brilliance. Her dressing was a simple and brief process, and then she turned to him with an intent look on her face.

"You come here from the Above." It was more statement than question.

Barry nodded.

"But from what yort? And how did your people change to live in the Above?"

"I come from Earth."

"Earth?" she repeated with a puzzled frown. "There is no yort beneath the seas called Earth."

Trying to explain was like describing color to a man born blind. With the surface of Venus she seemed to have a slight familiarity, but she had never glimpsed planets or stars, never seen the sun.

"You are from the World Beyond--and yet you are alive!" she said in awe.

She smiled and seemed relieved when Barry hastily assured her there was nothing supernatural about his place of origin, but she understood only that he was not an undersea dweller by birth. She hurried on to other questions.

"But why have only you of all your people come to the Here?" she asked. "And now--Oh, tell me how!--did you cause the Place Of Change to work again?"

Barry frowned, trying to grasp her meaning. "An accident happened to me out in space that made me different."

"You did not come through the Place Of Change?" She seemed bitterly disappointed. "Then how will you return?"

"I will never see my own people again, I fear," he admitted.

Xintel made a soft sound of sympathy.

"I owe my very life to you, for I would have killed myself rather than bear a child to those norus who captured me. You can stay here in Tana, with me--if Komso does not cause your death."

Barry knew that if he were to survive he must learn the ways of this undersea world. Alone he would soon perish. He had no choice.

"Who is Komso?" he asked.

Xintel spat a few sibilant words that were evident obscenities.

"He is Leader of the Chosen Ones, and he fears you. If the people learn you come from the Above they will grow dissatisfied, for there are some who still remember the ancient promises that we may return."

Barry was silent and thoughtful, considering the implications of the things Xintel had said. The girl watched the Earthman with a calculating look.

"You will help me?" she asked at length.

"Help you?"

"Perhaps together we can succeed where my father failed. Perhaps together we can overthrow Komso and break the hold of the Chosen upon Tana."

Barry thought of the open sea and the savage norus he had battled, and he had gathered the impression that Komso was some sort of priest or witchdoctor who would be an adversary without mercy. All he wanted was peace. But peace, Komso's face had told him, was something he could not have.

"Yes," he said flatly. He had no choice.

The girl laid her hand on his arm, confident and suddenly affectionate.

"Good," she said. "There is nothing we can do now. We must wait for the right time."

* * * * *

There was no night in Tana and the inhabitants slept whenever so inclined, without set intervals. After several sleeping periods Barry lost all sense of time.

Whenever the girl was not attending to the routine tasks of daily life he bombarded her with questions. She asked in turn about Earth and the colony, and at some of his answers stared and giggled as though suspecting him of concocting fantastic lies for her benefit.

At her suggestion he did not wander alone, although most of the Venusians regarded him with suspicious curiosity rather than hostility.

"Trust no one," she warned him. "For the Chosen have spies everywhere. Komso may know or suspect that you come from the Above but the less he knows about you the better."

A small cave branched off from one wall of the great cavern. No houses were placed near its black mouth and the common Venusians gave it a wide berth.

"That is the Temple of the Chosen," Xintel explained. "To approach it means death."

Just outside the forbidden zone several huge baskets had been anchored to receive offerings from each inhabitant. Food, tools, clothing, a fourth of everything produced went to the Chosen and their master.

"What would happen if the people refused to pay tribute?" Barry asked.

"The Chosen have many ways of enforcing their will," the girl replied ominously. "And no scruples."

The thirty Chosen Ones ruled the thousand or so inhabitants of Tana ruthlessly and arrogantly, a government of impulse and whim without fixed laws. The rulers were immune from all work, taking whatever they desired, subject only to Komso's word.

The situation had apparently existed so long it had been accepted as the only possible mode of life, and the submissiveness of the people was shocking to the Earthman. One day he saw a Chosen One approach one of the younger woman and curtly order her to follow him. The woman shrank back, but at a black glare choked off her sobbing and moved docilely away. Her mate, standing nearby, made not the slightest move to interfere.

"He will get her back when the Chosen One tires of her," Xintel told Barry later, her normally soft voice harsh with bitterness. "That is, if the poor creature lives, for the Chosen are often brutal to the women they take. If her mate had so much as opened his mouth he would have incurred the wrath of the Gods Of The Deeps as enforced by the Chosen."

* * * * *

Occasionally Barry found himself wishing for a cigarette. That gave him a wry laugh, but it also impressed upon him the fact that the Venusians had created an underwater civilization without the knowledge of fire. An unintelligent race could never have managed, and he wondered to what stage they might have progressed without the yoke of the Chosen about their necks.

Metal was known in Tana only in the form of a few ornaments of greatest antiquity, about the origin of which it was forbidden by superstition and tradition even to speculate. Almost all were in the hands of the Chosen.

Xintel was one of the few exceptions, and upon examining her treasured silver necklace Barry discovered that each beautifully wrought link had been welded. _Welded._ That implied heat, which definitely did not fit in a subaqueous environment.

He questioned her but she only shook her head. She had no idea of the technique.

"It came through my family from the other life before the Place Of Change," was her only explanation.

The most common substance for tools and weapons was something with the cellular structure of wood but the weight and feel of cast metal. It was slightly malleable and could be sharpened by grinding against abrasive rocks, but it fractured when stressed beyond its elastic limit. It fascinated Barry, not only because of its unfamiliarity but because the Venusians had no tools suitable for working such a hard material.

But Xintel explained. The soft wood of undersea trees was carved to the required shape, and then the implements were taken to the Outside, across the sea bottom to the Cleft Of Hardening. There the wood underwent a change.

She had been returning from the Cleft--the Venusians always managed to visit the Outside in groups despite the Chosen--when Barry saved her from marauding norus.

The norus were outcast savages, hated and feared and despised. They had long since learned the folly of attacking Tana, but whenever possible would ambush anyone venturing into the Outside.

Males they invariably killed for their clothing and weapons, but females the savages preferred to capture alive. The mortality among their own women was frightfully high, particularly during pregnancy and childbirth when they were unable to defend themselves against the monstrous torvaks that scouraged the deeps, so replacement slave-wives were in constant demand.

Tana was not the only undersea city or yort, Barry learned, but the journey across the sea bottom was so perilous that communication was most infrequent and warfare impractical.