Ray Cummings by Tarrano the Conqueror

Author:Tarrano the Conqueror [Conqueror, Tarrano the]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781717596185
Google: NdHYvAEACAAJ
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2018-05-02T07:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XVII

Violet Beam of Death

We landed on a stage at the summit of one of the nearer hillsides. Our coming—unheralded since we had carried no sending instruments—created a furor. The workers rested to watch us as we disembarked. It was not so different a scene, here on the hill, than might have occurred on Earth. We took a moving platform, down the hill, to the water's edge. A barge was awaiting us—a broad flat vessel with gaudy trappings. A score of attendants lined its sides, each with a pole to thrust it through the shallow water. And on its high-raised stern, beneath a canopy was a couch upon which Tarrano reclined, with us of his party at his feet.

A royal barge, queerly ancient, barbaric—reminding me of the flat, motionless pictures of Earth's early history. Yet it was a symbol here on Venus, not of barbarism, but of decadence.

We started off. I may have given a false idea of the size of the Great City. Its lake, indeed, was fully fifteen miles or more in diameter. Half a million people lived on or close around that placid stretch of water.

The news of Tarrano's arrival had instantly spread. Graceful boats, all propelled by hand, thronged our course. From them, and from every house-window, balcony and roof-top, a waving multitude cheered the coming of the Master. The new Master, to whom so recently they had given their allegiance—the Master who in return was to endow them with life everlasting.

It was a gay, holiday throng—cheering us, tossing flower-petals down upon us as we passed majestically beneath the bridges. Yet among these gaudily dressed women and men with the luster of wealth and ease upon them, others mingled. Others of a lower class, poorly dressed, with the badge of servitude upon them, enthralled in a social peonage which I did not yet understand.

"Slaans," Wolfgar called them. A term half of derision, half contempt. And Wolfgar pointed one out to me. A huge grey, surly-looking fellow passing in a one-man shell or boat of tree-fibre. He gazed up at us as he went by—a furtive glance of cold, sullen fury. Unmistakable. And I saw it again on others of his kind—men, women, even children who gazed at us with big, round eyes. A dumb, sullen resentment, with a smouldering fury beneath it.

During the trip, which may have taken an hour, I remarked something also, which did not at the time seem significant but very soon I was to recall it and understand its import. Argo, of course, was still with us. As we embarked upon the barge, a man evidently an official of the Great City had paid his humble respects to Tarrano and then withdrawn to a further part of the vessel, drawing Argo with him. I saw the two in close conversation. The official evidently was telling Argo something of importance. I could see Argo growing indignant and then his eyes gleaming, a leer upon his cruel lips.

During the trip Tarrano sat calm, half

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