Lorelei of the Red Mist - 1

LORELEI OF THE RED MIST
By Leigh Brackett and Ray Bradbury
He died--and then awakened in a new body.
He found himself on a world of bizarre
loveliness, a powerful, rich man. He took
pleasure in his turn of good luck ... until
he discovered that his new body was hated
by all on this strange planet, that his
soul was owned by Rann, devil-goddess of
Falga, who was using him for her own gain.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Summer 1946.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

The Company dicks were good. They were plenty good. Hugh Starke began
to think maybe this time he wasn't going to get away with it.
His small stringy body hunched over the control bank, nursing the last
ounce of power out of the Kallman. The hot night sky of Venus fled past
the ports in tattered veils of indigo. Starke wasn't sure where he was
any more. Venus was a frontier planet, and still mostly a big X, except
to the Venusians--who weren't sending out any maps. He did know that
he was getting dangerously close to the Mountains of White Cloud. The
backbone of the planet, towering far into the stratosphere, magnetic
trap, with God knew what beyond. Maybe even God wasn't sure.
But it looked like over the mountains or out. Death under the guns of
the Terro-Venus Mines, Incorporated, Special Police, or back to the
Luna cell blocks for life as an habitual felon.
Starke decided he would go over.
Whatever happened, he'd pulled off the biggest lone-wolf caper in
history. The T-V Mines payroll ship, for close to a million credits. He
cuddled the metal strongbox between his feet and grinned. It would be a
long time before anybody equaled that.
His mass indicators began to jitter. Vaguely, a dim purple shadow in
the sky ahead, the Mountains of White Cloud stood like a wall against
him. Starke checked the positions of the pursuing ships. There was no
way through them. He said flatly, "All right, damn you," and sent the
Kallman angling up into the thick blue sky.
He had no very clear memories after that. Crazy magnetic vagaries,
always a hazard on Venus, made his instruments useless. He flew by the
seat of his pants and he got over, and the T-V men didn't. He was free,
with a million credits in his kick.
Far below in the virgin darkness he saw a sullen crimson smear on the
night, as though someone had rubbed it with a bloody thumb. The Kallman
dipped toward it. The control bank flickered with blue flame, the jet
timers blew, and then there was just the screaming of air against the
falling hull.
Hugh Starke sat still and waited....
He knew, before he opened his eyes, that he was dying. He didn't feel
any pain, he didn't feel anything, but he knew just the same. Part of
him was cut loose. He was still there, but not attached any more.
He raised his eyelids. There was a ceiling. It was a long way off. It
was black stone veined with smoky reds and ambers. He had never seen it
before.
His head was tilted toward the right. He let his gaze move down that
way. There were dim tapestries, more of the black stone, and three tall
archways giving onto a balcony. Beyond the balcony was a sky veiled and
clouded with red mist. Under the mist, spreading away from a murky line
of cliffs, was an ocean. It wasn't water and it didn't have any waves
on it, but there was nothing else to call it. It burned, deep down
inside itself, breathing up the red fog. Little angry bursts of flame
coiled up under the flat surface, sending circles of sparks flaring out
like ripples from a dropped stone.
He closed his eyes and frowned and moved his head restively. There was
the texture of fur against his skin. Through the cracks of his eyelids
he saw that he lay on a high bed piled with silks and soft tanned
pelts. His body was covered. He was rather glad he couldn't see it. It
didn't matter because he wouldn't be using it any more anyway, and it
hadn't been such a hell of a body to begin with. But he was used to it,
and he didn't want to see it now, the way he knew it would have to look.
He looked along over the foot of the bed, and he saw the woman.
She sat watching him from a massive carved chair softened with a single
huge white pelt like a drift of snow. She smiled, and let him look. A
pulse began to beat under his jaw, very feebly.
She was tall and sleek and insolently curved. She wore a sort of tabard
of pale grey spider-silk, held to her body by a jeweled girdle, but it
was just a nice piece of ornamentation. Her face was narrow, finely
cut, secret, faintly amused. Her lips, her eyes, and her flowing silken
hair were all the same pale cool shade of aquamarine.
Her skin was white, with no hint of rose. Her shoulders, her forearms,
the long flat curve of her thighs, the pale-green tips of her breasts,
were dusted with tiny particles that glistened like powdered diamond.
She sparkled softly like a fairy thing against the snowy fur, a
creature of foam and moonlight and clear shallow water. Her eyes never
left his, and they were not human, but he knew that they would have
done things to him if he had had any feeling below the neck.
* * * * *
He started to speak. He had no strength to move his tongue. The woman
leaned forward, and as though her movement were a signal four men rose
from the tapestried shadows by the wall. They were like her. Their eyes
were pale and strange like hers.
She said, in liquid High Venusian, "You're dying, in this body. But
_you_ will not die. You will sleep now, and wake in a strange body,
in a strange place. Don't be afraid. My mind will be with yours, I'll
guide you, don't be afraid. I can't explain now, there isn't time, but
don't be afraid."
He drew back his thin lips baring his teeth in what might have been a
smile. If it was, it was wolfish and bitter, like his face.
The woman's eyes began to pour coolness into his skull. They were
like two little rivers running through the channels of his own eyes,
spreading in silver-green quiet across the tortured surface of his
brain. His brain relaxed. It lay floating on the water, and then the
twin streams became one broad flowing stream, and his mind, or ego, the
thing that was intimately himself, vanished along it.
It took him a long, long time to regain consciousness. He felt as
though he'd been shaken until pieces of him were scattered all over
inside. Also, he had an instinctive premonition that the minute he woke
up he would be sorry he had. He took it easy, putting himself together.
He remembered his name, Hugh Starke. He remembered the mining asteroid
where he was born. He remembered the Luna cell blocks where he had
once come near dying. There wasn't much to choose between them. He
remembered his face decorating half the bulletin boards between Mercury
and The Belt. He remembered hearing about himself over the telecasts,
stuff to frighten babies with, and he thought of himself committing his
first crime--a stunted scrawny kid of eighteen swinging a spanner on a
grown man who was trying to steal his food.
The rest of it came fast, then. The T-V Mines job, the getaway that
didn't get, the Mountains of White Cloud. The crash....
The woman.
That did it. His brain leaped shatteringly. Light, feeling, a naked
sense of reality swept over him. He lay perfectly still with his eyes
shut, and his mind clawed at the picture of the shining woman with
sea-green hair and the sound of her voice saying, _You will not die,
you will wake in a strange body, don't be afraid...._
He was afraid. His skin pricked and ran cold with it. His stomach
knotted with it. His skin, his stomach, and yet somehow they didn't
feel just right, like a new coat that hasn't shaped to you....
He opened his eyes, a cautious crack.
He saw a body sprawled on its side in dirty straw. The body belonged
to him, because he could feel the straw pricking it, and the itch of
little things that crawled and ate and crawled again.
It was a powerful body, rangy and flat-muscled, much bigger than his
old one. It had obviously not been starved the first twenty-some years
of its life. It was stark naked. Weather and violence had written
history on it, wealed white marks on leathery bronze, but nothing
seemed to be missing. There was black hair on its chest and thighs and
forearms, and its hands were lean and sinewy for killing.
It was a human body. That was something. There were so many other
things it might have been that his racial snobbery wouldn't call human.
Like the nameless shimmering creature who smiled with strange pale lips.
Starke shut his eyes again.
He lay, the intangible self that was Hugh Starke, bellied down in the
darkness of the alien shell, quiet, indrawn, waiting. Panic crept up
on its soft black paws. It walked around the crouching ego and sniffed
and patted and nuzzled, whining, and then struck with its raking claws.
After a while it went away, empty.
The lips that were now Starke's lips twitched in a thin, cruel smile.
He had done six months once in the Luna solitary crypts. If a man
could do that, and come out sane and on his two feet, he could stand
anything. Even this.
It came to him then, rather deflatingly, that the woman and her four
companions had probably softened the shock by hypnotic suggestion.
His subconscious understood and accepted the change. It was only his
conscious mind that was superficially scared to death.
Hugh Starke cursed the woman with great thoroughness, in seven
languages and some odd dialects. He became healthily enraged that any
dame should play around with him like that. Then he thought, What the
hell, I'm alive. And it looks like I got the best of the trade-in!
He opened his eyes again, secretly, on his new world.
* * * * *
He lay at one end of a square stone hall, good sized, with two straight
lines of pillars cut from some dark Venusian wood. There were long
crude benches and tables. Fires had been burning on round brick hearths
spaced between the pillars. They were embers now. The smoke climbed
up, tarnishing the gold and bronze of shields hung on the walls and
pediments, dulling the blades of longswords, the spears, the tapestries
and hides and trophies.
It was very quiet in the hall. Somewhere outside of it there was
fighting going on. Heavy, vicious fighting. The noise of it didn't
touch the silence, except to make it deeper.
There were two men besides Starke in the hall.
They were close to him, on a low dais. One of them sat in a carved high
seat, not moving, his big scarred hands flat on the table in front of
him. The other crouched on the floor by his feet. His head was bent
forward so that his mop of lint-white hair hid his face and the harp
between his thighs. He was a little man, a swamp-edger from his albino
coloring. Starke looked back at the man in the chair.
The man spoke harshly. "Why doesn't she send word?"
The harp gave out a sudden bitter chord. That was all.
Starke hardly noticed. His whole attention was drawn to the speaker.
His heart began to pound. His muscles coiled and lay ready. There was
a bitter taste in his mouth. He recognized it. It was hate.
He had never seen the man before, but his hands twitched with the urge
to kill.
He was big, nearly seven feet, and muscled like a draft horse. But his
body, naked above a gold-bossed leather kilt, was lithe and quick as a
greyhound in spite of its weight. His face was square, strong-boned,
weathered, and still young. It was a face that had laughed a lot once,
and liked wine and pretty girls. It had forgotten those things now,
except maybe the wine. It was drawn and cruel with pain, a look as of
something in a cage. Starke had seen that look before, in the Luna
blocks. There was a thick white scar across the man's forehead. Under
it his blue eyes were sunken and dark behind half-closed lids. The man
was blind.
Outside, in the distance, men screamed and died.
Starke had been increasingly aware of a soreness and stricture around
his neck. He raised a hand, careful not to rustle the straw. His
fingers found a long tangled beard, felt under it, and touched a band
of metal.
Starke's new body wore a collar, like a vicious dog.
There was a chain attached to the collar. Starke couldn't find any
fastening. The business had been welded on for keeps. His body didn't
seem to have liked it much. The neck was galled and chafed.
The blood began to crawl up hot into Starke's head. He'd worn chains
before. He didn't like them. Especially around the neck.
A door opened suddenly at the far end of the hall. Fog and red daylight
spilled in across the black stone floor. A man came in. He was big,
half naked, blond, and bloody. His long blade trailed harshly on the
flags. His chest was laid open to the bone and he held the wound
together with his free hand.
"Word from Beudag," he said. "They've driven us back into the city, but
so far we're holding the Gate."
No one spoke. The little man nodded his white head. The man with the
slashed chest turned and went out again, closing the door.
A peculiar change came over Starke at the mention of the name Beudag.
He had never heard it before, but it hung in his mind like a spear
point, barbed with strange emotion. He couldn't identify the feeling,
but it brushed the blind man aside. The hot simple hatred cooled.
Starke relaxed in a sort of icy quiet, deceptively calm as a sleeping
cobra. He didn't question this. He waited, for Beudag.
The blind man struck his hands down suddenly on the table and stood up.
"Romna," he said, "give me my sword."
The little man looked at him. He had milk-blue eyes and a face like a
friendly bulldog. He said, "Don't be a fool, Faolan."
Faolan said softly, "Damn you. Give me my sword."
Men were dying outside the hall, and not dying silently. Faolan's skin
was greasy with sweat. He made a sudden, darting grab toward Romna.
Romna dodged him. There were tears in his pale eyes. He said brutally,
"You'd only be in the way. Sit down."
"I can find the point," Faolan said, "to fall on it."
Romna's voice went up to a harsh scream. "Shut up. Shut up and sit
down."
Faolan caught the edge of the table and bent over it. He shivered and
closed his eyes, and the tears ran out hot under the lids. The bard
turned away, and his harp cried out like a woman.
Faolan drew a long sighing breath. He straightened slowly, came round
the carved high seat, and walked steadily toward Starke.
"You're very quiet, Conan," he said. "What's the matter? You ought to
be happy, Conan. You ought to laugh and rattle your chain. You're going
to get what you wanted. Are you sad because you haven't a mind any
more, to understand that with?"
He stopped and felt with one sandaled foot across the straw until he
touched Starke's thigh. Starke lay motionless.
"Conan," said the blind man gently, pressing Starke's belly with his
foot. "Conan the dog, the betrayer, the butcher, the knife in the back.
Remember what you did at Falga, Conan? No, you don't remember now. I've
been a little rough with you, and you don't remember any more. But I
remember, Conan. As long as I live in darkness, I'll remember."
* * * * *
Romna stroked the harp strings and they wept, savage tears for strong
men dead of treachery. Low music, distant but not soft. Faolan began to
tremble, a shallow animal twitching of the muscles. The flesh of his
face was drawn, iron shaping under the hammer. Quite suddenly he went
down on his knees. His hands struck Starke's shoulders, slid inward to
the throat, and locked there.
Outside, the sound of fighting had died away.
Starke moved, very quickly. As though he had seen it and knew it was
there, his hand swept out and gathered in the slack of the heavy chain
and swung it.
It started out to be a killing blow. Starke wanted with all his heart
to beat Faolan's brains out. But at the last second he pulled it,
slapping the big man with exquisite judgment across the back of the
head. Faolan grunted and fell sideways, and by that time Romna had come
up. He had dropped his harp and drawn a knife. His eyes were startled.
Starke sprang up. He backed off, swinging the slack of the chain
warningly. His new body moved magnificently. Outside everything was
fine, but inside his psycho-neural setup had exploded into civil war.
He was furious with himself for not having killed Faolan. He was
furious with himself for losing control enough to want to kill a man
without reason. He hated Faolan. He did not hate Faolan because he
didn't know him well enough. Starke's trained, calculating, unemotional
brain was at grips with a tidal wave of baseless emotion.
He hadn't realized it was baseless until his mental monitor,
conditioned through years of bitter control, had stopped him from
killing. Now he remembered the woman's voice saying, _My mind will be
with yours, I'll guide you...._
Catspaw, huh? Just a hired hand, paid off with a new body in return for
two lives. Yeah, two. This Beudag, whoever he was. Starke knew now what
that cold alien emotion had been leading up to.
"Hold it," said Starke hoarsely. "Hold everything. _Catspaw! You
green-eyed she-devil! You picked the wrong guy this time._"
Just for a fleeting instant he saw her again, leaning forward with her
hair like running water across the soft foam-sparkle of her shoulders.
Her sea-pale eyes were full of mocking laughter, and a direct,
provocative admiration. Starke heard her quite plainly:
"You may not have any choice, Hugh Starke. They know Conan, even if
you don't. Besides, it's of no great importance. The end will be the
same for them--it's just a matter of time. You can save your new body
or not, as you wish." She smiled. "I'd like it if you did. It's a good
body. I knew it, before Conan's mind broke and left it empty."
A sudden thought came to Starke. "My box, the million credits."
"Come and get them." She was gone. Starke's mind was clear, with no
alien will tramping around in it. Faolan crouched on the floor, holding
his head. He said:
"Who spoke?"
Romna the bard stood staring. His lips moved, but no sound came out.
Starke said, "I spoke. Me, Hugh Starke. I'm not Conan, and I never
heard of Falga, and I'll brain the first guy that comes near me."
Faolan stayed motionless, his face blank, his breath sobbing in his
throat. Romna began to curse, very softly, not as though he were
thinking about it. Starke watched them.
Down the hall the doors burst open. The heavy reddish mist coiled in
with the daylight across the flags, and with them a press of bodies hot
from battle, bringing a smell of blood.
Starke felt the heart contract in the hairy breast of the body named
Conan, watching the single figure that led the pack.
Romna called out, "Beudag!"
She was tall. She was built and muscled like a lioness, and she walked
with a flat-hipped arrogance, and her hair was like coiled flame. Her
eyes were blue, hot and bright, as Faolan's might have been once.
She looked like Faolan. She was dressed like him, in a leather kilt
and sandals, her magnificent body bare above the waist. She carried
a longsword slung across her back, the hilt standing above the left
shoulder. She had been using it. Her skin was smeared with blood and
grime. There was a long cut on her thigh and another across her flat
belly, and bitter weariness lay on her like a burden in spite of her
denial of it.
"We've stopped them, Faolan," she said. "They can't breach the Gate,
and we can hold Crom Dhu as long as we have food. And the sea feeds
us." She laughed, but there was a hollow sound to it. "Gods, I'm tired!"
She halted then, below the dais. Her flame-blue gaze swept across
Faolan, across Romna, and rose to meet Hugh Starke's, and stayed there.
The pulse began to beat under Starke's jaw again, and this time his
body was strong, and the pulse was like a drum throbbing.
Romna said, "His mind has come back."
* * * * *
There was a long, hard silence. No one in the hall moved. Then the men
back of Beudag, big brawny kilted warriors, began to close in on the
dais, talking in low snarling undertones that rose toward a mob howl.
Faolan rose up and faced them, and bellowed them to quiet.
"He's mine to take! Let him alone."
Beudag sprang up onto the dais, one beautiful flowing movement. "It
isn't possible," she said. "His mind broke under torture. He's been
a drooling idiot with barely the sense to feed himself. And now,
suddenly, you say he's normal again?"
Starke said, "You know I'm normal. You can see it in my eyes."
"Yes."
He didn't like the way she said that. "Listen, my name is Hugh Starke.
I'm an Earthman. This isn't Conan's brain come back. This is a new
deal. I got shoved into this body. What it did before I got it I don't
know, and I'm not responsible."
Faolan said, "He doesn't remember Falga. He doesn't remember the
longships at the bottom of the sea." Faolan laughed.
Romna said quietly, "He didn't kill you, though. He could have, easily.
Would Conan have spared you?"
Beudag said, "Yes, if he had a better plan. Conan's mind was like a
snake. It crawled in the dark, and you never knew where it was going to
strike."
Starke began to tell them how it happened, the chain swinging idly in
his hand. While he was talking he saw a face reflected in a polished
shield hung on a pillar. Mostly it was just a tangled black mass of
hair, mounted on a frame of long, harsh, jutting bone. The mouth was
sensuous, with a dark sort of laughter on it. The eyes were yellow. The
cruel, brilliant yellow of a killer hawk.
Starke realized with a shock that the face belonged to him.
"A woman with pale green hair," said Beudag softly. "Rann," said
Faolan, and Romna's harp made a sound like a high-priest's curse.
"Her people have that power," Romna said. "They can think a man's soul
into a spider, and step on it."
"They have many powers. Maybe Rann followed Conan's mind, wherever it
went, and told it what to say, and brought it back again."
"Listen," said Starke angrily. "I didn't ask...."
Suddenly, without warning, Romna drew Beudag's sword and threw it at
Starke.
Starke dodged it. He looked at Romna with ugly yellow eyes. "That's
fine. Chain me up so I can't fight and kill me from a distance." He
did not pick up the sword. He'd never used one. The chain felt better,
not being too different from a heavy belt or a length of cable, or the
other chains he'd swung on occasion.
Romna said, "Is that Conan?"
Faolan snarled, "What happened?"
"Romna threw my sword at Conan. He dodged it, and left it on the
ground." Beudag's eyes were narrowed. "Conan could catch a flying sword
by the hilt, and he was the best fighter on the Red Sea, barring you,
Faolan."
"He's trying to trick us. Rann guides him."
"The hell with Rann!" Starke clashed his chain. "She wants me to kill
the both of you, I still don't know why. All right. I could have killed
Faolan, easy. But I'm not a killer. I never put down anyone except to
save my own neck. So I didn't kill him in spite of Rann. And I don't
want any part of you, or Rann either. All I want is to get the hell out
of here!"
Beudag said, "His accent isn't Conan's. And the look in his eyes is
different, too." Her voice had an odd note in it. Romna glanced at her.
He fingered a few rippling chords on his harp, and said:
"There's one way you could tell for sure."
A sullen flush began to burn on Beudag's cheekbones. Romna slid
unobtrusively out of reach. His eyes danced with malicious laughter.
Beudag smiled, the smile of an angry cat, all teeth and no humor.
Suddenly she walked toward Starke, her head erect, her hands swinging
loose and empty at her sides. Starke tensed warily, but the blood
leaped pleasantly in his borrowed veins.
Beudag kissed him.
Starke dropped the chain. He had something better to do with his hands.
After a while he raised his head for breath, and she stepped back, and
whispered wonderingly,
"It isn't Conan."
* * * * *
The hall had been cleared. Starke had washed and shaved himself. His
new face wasn't bad. Not bad at all. In fact, it was pretty damn good.
And it wasn't known around the System. It was a face that could own a
million credits and no questions asked. It was a face that could have a
lot of fun on a million credits.
All he had to figure out now was a way to save the neck the face was
mounted on, and get his million credits back from that beautiful
she-devil named Rann.
He was still chained, but the straw had been cleaned up and he wore
a leather kilt and a pair of sandals. Faolan sat in his high seat
nursing a flagon of wine. Beudag sprawled wearily on a fur rug beside
him. Romna sat cross-legged, his eyes veiled sleepily, stroking soft
wandering music out of his harp. He looked fey. Starke knew his
swamp-edgers. He wasn't surprised.
"This man is telling the truth," Romna said. "But there's another mind
touching his. Rann's, I think. Don't trust him."
Faolan growled, "I couldn't trust a god in Conan's body."
Starke said, "What's the setup? All the fighting out there, and this
Rann dame trying to plant a killer on the inside. And what happened at
Falga? I never heard of this whole damn ocean, let alone a place called
Falga."
The bard swept his hand across the strings. "I'll tell you, Hugh
Starke. And maybe you won't want to stay in that body any longer."
Starke grinned. He glanced at Beudag. She was watching him with a queer
intensity from under lowered lids. Starke's grin changed. He began
to sweat. Get rid of this body, hell! It was really a body. His own
stringy little carcass had never felt like this.
The bard said, "In the beginning, in the Red Sea, was a race of people
having still their fins and scales. They were amphibious, but after a
while part of this race wanted to remain entirely on land. There was
a quarrel, and a battle, and some of the people left the sea forever.
They settled along the shore. They lost their fins and most of their
scales. They had great mental powers and they loved ruling. They
subjugated the human peoples and kept them almost in slavery. They
hated their brothers who still lived in the sea, and their brothers
hated them.
"After a time a third people came to the Red Sea. They were rovers from
the North. They raided and rieved and wore no man's collar. They made a
settlement on Crom Dhu, the Black Rock, and built longships, and took
toll of the coastal towns.
"But the slave people didn't want to fight against the rovers. They
wanted to fight with them and destroy the sea-folk. The rovers were
human, and blood calls to blood. And the rovers like to rule, too,
and this is a rich country. Also, the time had come in their tribal
development when they were ready to change from nomadic warriors to
builders in their own country.
"So the rovers, and the sea-folk, and the slave-people who are caught
between the two of them, began their struggle for the land."
The bard's fingers thrummed against the strings so that they beat like
angry hearts. Starke saw that Beudag was still watching him, weighing
every change of expression on his face. Romna went on:
"There was a woman named Rann, who had green hair and great beauty, and
ruled the sea-folk. There was a man called Faolan of the Ships, and
his sister Beudag, which means Dagger-in-the-Sheath, and they two ruled