Lin Carter - The City Outside the World Read Free Page A

sign before.
    Once, years before, in the Eastern Dustlands, he had found and rifled an age-old tomb. Time had buried it deep beneath bone-dry, talcum-fine sand; a chance windstorm -rare on the desert world, though not entirely unheard of—had laid bare the black marble door to the hillside tomb.
    Within had been few pieces of gold and fewer gems, but many artifacts of interest to the scientists. And in those days, before the police dossier which carried Ryker's name had become quite so fat, he could still come and go in Syrtis Port or Sun Lake City without suspicion or harrassment. So he had sold the tomb artifacts one by one to the historians and the professors interested enough in XT archaeology to ignore the fact that they were purchasing stolen goods. One by one he had sold the little ceramic jars and figurines and symbolic tools and weapons. All but one piece were gone. That one he had kept for himself, for some reason he could not quite put a name to.
    Perhaps it was just a whim. Or perhaps he took a fancy to the thing he had found clasped tight to the bony breast of the Martian mummy, folded tight in withered arms. Or maybe he thought of it as a souvenir, or a good-luck piece. Whatever the reason, it had slept above his heart, suspended on a thong around his neck, all these years, in a little leathern bag.
    It was a seal of slick, glassy black stone, sleek and glistening as obsidian, but heavier than marble. It was a small thing—the palm of one hand could cover it. Small or not, it was a mystery. For no jeweler or geologist to whom he had given shavings from it could name the dense, ebon
    crystal from which it was made. And none of the experts to whom he lent a rubbing copy could read the characters in the unknown and unclassified language which ran around the edge of one side of the seal.
    On the reverse of that seal, deeply embossed in high relief, was a figure, a figure like a fantastic, crouching insect—but such an insect as our fields and forests had never housed. Such an insect as Mars itself was never home to, even in its greener ages.
    But by the shreds and scraps salvaged from the old traditions and sagas and mythologies he knew that strange, crouching insect. In the nearly forgotten lore of the People the creature was known as The Pteraton. The name means "The Guardian of the Gateway"; but it should have been named The Enigma.
    Two thousand miles from the dark, narrow alleys of Yeolarn, its huge stony likeness crouched amid the waste, like some gigantic and mythological Sphinx. A full hundred yards it measured from beaked, antenna-crowned face to tapering, cylindrical thorax-tip. And no man— Martian or Earthsider scientist alike—could say who built it, or when, or why. Or what it signified.
    The Sphinx of Mars the Earthside newscasters called it. And like that other vast Enigma that has crouched for ages in the deserts beyond Gizeh, while empires waxed and waned, its mystery has never been solved.
    Now why, wondered Ryker to himself, was the likeness of the Stone Enigma he had found graven on a black seal from an ancient tomb, why had it once been tattooed upon the naked breast of a nameless, homeless, clanless guttersnipe of a native Martian boy?
    The shadows grew thicker in the maze of alleys that was the Old City.
    As the three glided purposefully on before him, Ryker noticed with distress that they were no longer alone in these narrow ways, save for the shadows.
    For he heard the faint shuffle of sandal leather in the black, yawning mouths of alleys as they went past them— the scrape of boot soles, the faint tread of furtive footsteps.
    Glancing back over his shoulder, he saw a movement among the shadows, as of men gathering for some unknown purpose.
    They were silent and grimly purposeful. They kept a good distance between themselves and the three they followed, but they kept up with them. They neither let them get too far ahead, nor too far behind.
    And now the dancing girl, the old man and