Between Worlds Read online

  As usual with the younger generations of a family, the lady occupied an apartment in the apex story of the pyramid, hence I had good opportunity to observe many of the tenants of the building as I passed up the several inclines and along the thrifty roof gardens growing on each terrace.

  I could not believe that the perturbation I noticed on every countenance was due to the fact that I was a stranger. For the household of a Patriarch must of necessity be accustomed to the frequent going and coming of strangers seeking advice of its head.

  It was while I waited in an anteroom of the Lady’s apartment for my guide to make known my presence and the object of my visit that I learned the cause of this general excitement, and became convinced that the report I had received of my hostess’s opinions was no mere idle rumor.

  There came to my ear after a moment excited voices in an inner chamber, a man and woman in heated argument. They were evidently so overwrought that they were heedless of the fact that I could not help but overhear every word.

  “I beg of you, my daughter,” pleaded the man, “do not further disgrace us. All our household is terribly distressed already by this report of your foolish ideas.”

  “You have no right to say I have disgraced you,” objected the woman. “Truth is no disgrace.”

  By this I knew I was an unwilling listener to a dispute between the Lady and her father, the Patriarch. The voice of the Lady was resolute and impassioned, but low-pitched and musical. Prejudiced as I was against the speaker, I could not but be swayed by its charm.

  “See this man, if you must. I can’t prevent it, of course,” continued the Patriarch, “but I plead with you for the last time to give up your horrible notions. Tell him that you were not serious, that you have no such ideas. Truth you call them? They are damnable errors!”

  “Nonsense!” was the retort. “It is time we changed our ideas in Venus. We boast we have no laws, but we are slaves of tyrant custom. I will see this man and tell him the truth as I see it, and tell him to spread it through all Venus. The women will heed me. Some have already done so. I shall lose no chance to spread the truth.”

  “My child, you force me to be sorry that you are a daughter of mine. Wait—”

  He was interrupted by an impatient exclamation. There was a quick, light step. The draperies were thrust aside, and the Lady of the South stood before me.

  Despite the impression her voice had made, I had still expected to see a commanding figure, a stern-faced, wild-eyed creature. On the contrary, I beheld the very incarnation of the voice I had heard. A slight, softly rounded form was revealed beneath a clinging silken robe that draped her to the feet instead of stopping at the knees like the conventional, uniform tunic of both men and women of Venus. Nor was this robe of the regulation white, but shimmered with a blending of soft colors.

  She was a little under the average height. Her hair, a shade darker than the usual flaxen, instead of falling loose to the shoulders; as was customary, had been let grow and had been braided and coiled about her shapely little head.

  The face betrayed not a hint of the sternness I had expected. To this day I have difficulty in recalling its features distinctly. I was conscious then only of a radiant smile that held me fascinated and for the moment bewitched. I could only stare helplessly into her wistful gray eyes, all the brave catechism I had prepared wiped out of my mind.

  I recognized her at once as a new and strange type in Venus, where our women had, as a class, little to distinguish them. In appearance either mentally or physically from the men with whom they had worked side by side during all our history on a basis of perfect equality.

  It was my first experience with a glamorous woman—something which at the time I did not attempt to analyze, but which I realized later was due in a large part to the consciously arranged effect of her unusual method of dress.

  I was scandalized even while I was fascinated. It had never occurred before to the women of Venus that they should make themselves attractive, nor had our men been in the habit of considering such a superficial element in choosing wives. I have, learned that you, of Earth, had deified our planet as the goddess of romantic love between the sexes. But I assure you that you were wide of the actual truth. Such a thing as romantic love had never been dreamed of in Venus until introduced by the First Lady of the South. We knew only the affection developed after marriage, which, with us, was purely an affair of convenience.

  The Lady gracefully dropped on a rug near the one on which I reclined, and waited for me to speak.

  So I pulled myself together and in embarrassed, halting fashion, told her of the report that had reached us in Central Venus and of my desire to learn the real truth from her.

  “I am glad to give it to you,” she responded. “I simply believe that marriage and the rearing of children is woman’s chief work and that she should be left free to do that work. As it is, we must, according to custom, earn our living and leave the care and education of our children to the old people who have retired from other work.”

  “Do you mean that women should do no work except the care of their homes and children?” I asked.

  “I do.”

  “Who then would support these women?” I demanded incredulously.

  “Who indeed but their husbands, the fathers of their children?”

  “Can you imagine any man willing to bear such an unreasonable burden, or any able-bodied woman whose pride would allow her to live in idleness on the proceeds of another’s labor? How do you propose to make men support women?”

  “By not marrying unless we first love the man we marry and he loves us. If a man really, loves a woman and can marry her only on those terms, he will submit:”

  Love before marriage! I had never heard of such a thing. It struck me as a thing improper even to speak of.

  “I know what I am talking of,” he went on, “because I have loved a man myself and I have never been wed. This is why I believe in marriage with those out of one’s clan. Love cannot be controlled. It goes where it will. There should be no marriage without love. So when love comes, marriage should follow, whatever our old custom says. I shall preach this until our women are free. They shall not suffer as I have suffered. I love a man not of my clan. I have asked him to brave custom and marry me, and he has refused. Yet I believe he loves me.”

  She was growing excited, and, needless to say, I was becoming greatly embarrassed at this intimate revelation. I hastily cast about in a panic for a change of subject, and recalled the news of Hunter’s proposed expedition.

  Mumbling some awkward words of sympathy for her distress, I added that I, too, had been greatly disturbed by news from a dear friend.

  Then I told her briefly of Hunter’s determination to explore the Circle of Darkness.

  The effect of my words was most astonishing.

  She leaped to her feet, her face torn with frenzied horror.

  “He shall not go! He shall not go! I will stop him! I must not lose him like that! I cannot live without him!”

  She dashed from the room, and I did not see her again.

  Our Hunter, then, was being wooed by this mad lady! But I returned home convinced that it was the embarrassing proposal of the Lady of the South that had much to do with Hunter’s determination to explore unknown seas. And in the popular move to prevent him, I saw evidence that the Lady’s influence over the people was far-reaching.

  TO MY dying breath I shall never forget my sensations as I stood by Hunter’s side on the deck of his great ship and watched the light fade away, perhaps never again to shine for us. Ahead, and ever drawing nearer, was that grim, unknown, nether region of eternal darkness in which, if our purpose held, we were soon to be engulfed.

  Consider what this meant to us who, in all our lives, had never known darkness, excepting when, for amusement or experiment, we had each probably at some time or other covered the windows of a room and enjoyed for a few moments the thrilling novelty of being unable to see.

  To us eternal
light, unvarying even for a moment from one age-end to another, was as much a matter of course as the air we breathed or the moisture it shed upon us, or the genial, unchanging glow of heat that pervaded it. Whence came that mysterious light and heat we knew no more than we understood the source of that inexhaustible stream of air that poured unvaryingly across our land, or of the endless supply of moisture that fed our soil from above. And our scientists, who delved deeply into the mysteries of chemistry and biology, were as much at a loss over these more familiar mysteries as were we of lesser minds.

  And yet, unexplainable as was the presence of light and heat, their absence was still more incomprehensible. Nevertheless, reputable explorers who had ventured to the very margin of the Circle of Darkness had returned with undoubted proof of such lack.

  Within the present age a distant cousin of Hunter’s had sailed his ship so far into the twilight that bordered the Circle of Darkness that his terrified crew had looked ahead into what seemed a jet-black, impenetrable wall scarce a ship’s length in front of them. That it was no solid wall they knew when a great mountain of crystal floated out of the darkness and directly toward them. Only maneuvering the vessel averted wreck. As it was, a jagged corner of the mass grazed their hull, a fragment breaking off and falling on the deck. Those who, gathered curiously about this bit of crystal, laid hands upon it, were seized with sharp pain in the palms.

  When they sought to bring this crystal back as a memento, it shortly turned to a pool of water on the deck—a great marvel to all who saw it, no one having ever witnessed the like before.

  But, stranger yet, the water in a bucket on the deck had turned to this same hard, clear crystal, only to become water again on their return to the warm seas.

  Meantime the air about them had changed to malignant vapor that seemed to cut them to their very bones. Some there were whose ears and fingers were smitten as with a leprosy, swelling and turning white and giving great pain.

  Such evidence as this was in accord with tales told by their earlier explorers. This earlier Hunter had sailed away on a later voyage, and neither ship nor crew had ever again been heard of.

  Now, as I sought to project my imagination and prepare myself in some measure for this unthinkable experience, it balked in the attempt. Of what Hunter’s plan might be for coping with these awful negations of nature, I had as yet no knowledge. Having been away in the south when he planned his expedition, I knew, nothing of its details until my return home just before his departure. He had sent for me, briefly outlined his purpose, and asked me to join him. There had been no time for further details.

  I had agreed to his proposal on the spur of the moment, partly through devotion to him, and partly because, as editor of the Central Chronicle, of Venus, I could not afford to let pass the one great news-event of my lifetime.

  Nevertheless, Hunter had seen to it that any of his company who turned fainthearted when confronted with the grim actuality might have chance to turn back. We were accompanied on the first stage of our trip by a convoy ship on which any of us who chose might return to safety at the last moment. Hunter had expressly stipulated in my case that I should feel no embarrassment in so doing, inasmuch as I had started without full explanation of his plans.

  Now that we were drawing near the point where our convoy would leave us, I had sought out Hunter, to ask him for the further details he had promised.

  “Very well, Scribner,” he said, “if you’ll come down to my cabin I’ll explain why I’m undertaking this thing, and you can decide finally whether you are with me to the finish.”

  Hunter’s cabin had more the appearance of a combination of study and laboratory than the sleeping-room of a ship’s commander: Only his sleeping-pad, now hanging to air by one of the octagonal windows, suggested the room’s latter character. There was a well-filled case of enscrolled tablets, all on scientific subjects, records of former explorations, I noted from the titles. Another case contained a mixed assortment of nautical and chemical instruments. On the walls were numerous maps.

  The center of the cabin was occupied by an ordinary hemisphere, on its surface a map of the Land of Light which we were leaving. The base of the hemisphere, as usual, shaded off into the black band that represented the Circle of Darkness.

  Such was our conception at that time of the planet on which we lived, we who had no knowledge of other planets than our own, or ever dreamed that they existed beyond the eternal cloud-blanket of our sky.

  You who were born on Earth, our then unknown sister planet, and have all your lives looked out through a clear atmosphere upon the blazing sun of your, days and the moon and stars of your nights, can hardly imagine a world like ours, where there were no days or nights, a world, one-half of which dwelt in eternal light and the other in eternal darkness. And yet your astronomers had discovered that such is the case with us. Venus, unlike your Earth, does not spin about on its axis, giving every part of its surface a constant change from light to darkness and back. It presents, forever, the same face toward the sun.

  Now, had Venus enjoyed a clear atmosphere like that of Earth, we would, like you, have been familiar with other heavenly bodies, and have developed astronomers who would have taught us the truth about our own planet. For we are a race of scientists, many of whom have in certain fields far outstripped those of Earth. But your astronomers, I have learned, have also shown you that Venus has a constantly cloudy atmosphere. Never in the recorded history of Venus has the sun appeared to us through the gray mantle of our heavens, and never up to the time when this tale begins had anyone dreamed of the existence of such a body.

  In view of these handicaps, then, I protest that you of the Earth should have charity for our ignorance. Particularly should this be in view of the fact that but a few ages ago you of one hemisphere of the Earth were as ignorant of the other hemisphere as were we of the Land of Light of the other half of our planet. I have learned of your Columbus, who, like our Hunter, believed in another land beyond the seas, and in the face of a scoffing world wagered his life on his faith.

  But your Columbus had reasons for the faith that was in him, reasons based on scientific facts that are now commonplaces to the veriest child. As Hunter stood over his charts and explained to me his faith, I was forced to confess that he had no shadow of logical evidence, nor to this day have I been able to fathom the basis of his belief. It is still to me little less than intuition.

  LIKE all my fellow-beings in Venus, I believed firmly in the Over Spirit of the Air, Creator of all things, the same, I am convinced, as He Whom you Earth-born call God. But I have always been one of those advanced thinkers who doubted the popular belief that the Over Spirit breathed into the minds of our Patriarchs rare bits of unprovable wisdom that were not granted to the mass of us. Yet, as I look back, I am near to believing that this son of our Chief Patriarch had partaken in a measure of this divine gift.

  To be sure, the truth came to him in a strangely distorted vision, which he unfolded to me, bending over his charts there in the ship’s cabin.

  “This,” said he, placing his hand on the hemisphere, “is our present idea of the universe. I believe we are right as to the shape of our Land of Light. Our mathematicians have proved it is a symmetrically rounded hill like this.

  “But why should we believed this is the only hill rising out of the zone of darkness? I believe the universe is a great sea of air of infinite extent. Only the upper layers of the air have the mysterious properties of light, warmth, and moisture. Hence only those lands which, like ours, rise up as islands above the stratum of darkness enjoy the life-giving properties.

  “But, call it pure theory, mere fantasy, as you will, I Cannot believe that in all limitless space the Over Spirit has created only one little island like ours, and then allowed it to be overpeopled. There must be other lands rising above the darkness and put there for us to find. I believe I am the one appointed to find them.”

  He turned from the model and paced the floor excitedly, carried awa
y by the fervor of his great dream. His tall, powerful frame quivered, and his strong face glowed with intensity.

  “I tell you,” he went on, as though addressing a great multitude, “the time is ripe for change. Our race is rotting with monotony. New worlds must be opened for it to conquer, new difficulties found for it to overcome, new problems presented for it to solve, new customs thrust upon it to waken its sleeping soul.”

  He paused and seemed again to realize my presence. He seized me by the shoulders and searched my face eagerly.

  “Scribner, have you never felt it? Am I the only man in Venus who has sickened of the changeless life we lead?”

  I had till then been a bit bewildered by his tirade. But now as his burning eyes bored into mine, I suddenly felt an answering thrill. There flashed over me new realization of a great void in my life, a void so familiar that it had never before dawned on my consciousness.

  Change! That was the magic word. A word little used among us because the thing for which it stood had no place in our lives. I realized in the same instant what was that haunting, elusive sense of something impending that had caught me as I watched the throng in the marketplace. The same hunger for that change that had burnt into consciousness in Hunter’s vibrant soul and been communicated by him to me was seething in the subconsciousness of the multitude and drawing dangerously near the surface. It needed but a little urge and touch of mass excitement to cause it to break out as a great contagion, mass psychology in explosion. Hence the general tumult at Hunter’s going.

  Hunter, then, sought to avert the cataclysm he had foreseen by providing a safety valve in the form of new worlds to conquer.

  Sharply as I had been struck by the revelation of the changelessness of our world and with hunger for change, it was at the moment mainly an emotional revelation. I had no standard of comparison to give me an intellectual grasp of what I meant by change. But now, after over three of your years on your ever-changing Earth, I can give you, my readers, some conception of the situation.