The Three Suns of Amara

He tried to hold on to everything at once—the pole, the machete, and the cordage of the raft. He could see the high walls of the valley sliding rapidly by. The air streamed over him. The yellow sky looked down at him blankly. He laughed rather breathlessly, then squirmed around to bring himself onto his hands and knees. He took stock. It was all right. The raft was riding high, buoyantly, straight along the way, and there were no rocks in sight. Satisfied, he settled himself more comfortably, prepared to accept whatever the mystery tour might bring.

After some hours, it had brought stiffness to his joints and very little variety. A fast, but dull trip. The biggest mystery, to his mind, was that he’d seen no signs of life beyond occasional birds. There had been several grassy shelves and banks wide enough to site a village. They were as deserted as the cliff tops. One would have imagined a fresh body of water like this would have some people dwelling alongside it Admittedly, it couldn’t be compared with, say, the Nile, because Amara was far from being a desert and there were plenty of lakes.

Yet, no single hut, nor even a lone being, in perhaps a hundred and fifty miles along a direct line.

He found himself hoping pretty hard that he was heading for Na-Abiza and human company. Right now he felt so isolated that the sight of even Captain Maxton wouldn’t be unwelcome.

How far did this water course run? Should he regain the shore now or ride on for a few more hours? For all he knew, he could be riding to the brink of a waterfall roaring down into some great pit—the kind of surprise Amara liked to provide. He hoped the river wouldn’t do any such foolish thing. From the signs, it was hardly likely. It was losing its impetuosity. At first, he’d been forced to half close his eyes against the air stream. Now it scarcely ruffled his hair. The valley was steadily widening. Its slopes lost height as the water lost speed. Greenness was stealing into the sky as Amara slowly turned this hemisphere towards Blue. There was still more of Yellow than Blue as yet, though, and the green was pale and cold and seemed to Sherret to emphasize his loneliness. All right, he told himself, I’m a gregarious misanthrope. Not temperamentally a polar explorer nor a solitary mountaineer. Nor yet a chronic party- goer. It’s just that I like to have someone around to exchange ideas with. Without some kind of human relationship I begin to feel lost, that nothing’s really real. The only test of one’s actual existence is the response of another mind. Granted, in the ultimate analysis we’re all only dream fragments. All that we see or seem

Is but a dream within a dream.

All the same, the company of the crew of Bagshaw’s Pegasus— he knew many of them —was becoming a need. If he were right about its direction, the river would carry him far faster to them than his feet would. He decided to stick with the raft a few hours longer.

In the event, the few hours became many. The river, which had sprung so eagerly from its unusual source, gradually lost spirit after the valley had dwindled away. Sluggishly, it spread itself thin over flat country and began to sink into the earth. Seeing that the trip was coming to an end, Sherret had been trying to pole the raft to the nearer bank. It was exhausting work. The now muddy river bed clung hard to his pole, which finally stuck and snapped off.

The raft drifted and eventually became bogged down in thick ooze. Sherret tried to make an assessment. It was hard to guess with any exactness how far he had come, especially as he’d dozed a couple of times on the raft. Perhaps some two hundred and fifty miles, all told. Which left something around fifty miles yet to go.

And the initial three miles looked like being the worst, for he was all of that distance from the bank. Three miles of dark, clinging mud. He poked around with the remnant of the broken branch and ascertained that the ooze was on the average knee deep. He ate, rested, then lowered himself gently from the raft. When he moved, it was as though his legs were bound in wet sheets. His speed was perhaps a yard a minute. At that rate it would take eighty-eight hours to reach the bank—he worked it out during one of his frequent rests. He plugged on grimly. As he progressed, the ooze must become shallower and the going firmer and his speed correspondingly faster. So long as he didn’t step in a hole and be smothered to death.

The sky was bottle-green, and darkening.

An eternity later, a wet, slimy creature wriggled on its stomach from the last reaches of the mud swamp and weakly grasped grass tufts rooted in dry earth. It clung to them as though they symbolized everything that was most precious. Which they did—safety, an anchorage, rest.

The creature, which had once been an erect and confident human being, was now witless, drained of thought and almost of life. But it could still feel, though all it felt was pain. Every single leg muscle felt as though its fibers were torn to shreds by the thousands of fights to free the limb from sucking mud.

The mud had claimed boots and socks—and manhood, too. But a creature had survived.

The sky was turning an ominous purple.

In the deepest indigo light which Amara could produce, a man-creature was slumped, half-sitting, against the bole of a solitary fruit tree to which he had dragged himself. The fruit wasn’t the attraction for he was beyond hunger. He was still following a blind instinct to clutch at firm roots.

The mud had caked hard on his face, though he was unaware of it. In his mind, he was still battling against liquid mud. His brain seemed choked with it. His thoughts moved with the greatest difficulty, too weak to link up. Dully, he became aware of a faint and pale oblong somewhere in the near distance. Presently he began to concentrate on it, simply to establish a mental focal point again.

A house? But it seemed so insubstantial. Maybe it was a trick of this dim light, but the oblong looked filmy, semitransparent. A house of glass?

But who could have built a house of glass on Amara, where building was at a primitive level? So far as was known.