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The Iorrtans came to Tyrr, and with them, the plague.
Linnl’s parents both died of it, but he remained untouched. People said he was lucky to be alive, but he wasn’t so sure.
Even with telepathy, the Resistance never dared fight the invaders directly. “They have bombs that could vaporize this whole planet,” said the spies, “and they’ll use them if they get angry enough.” So, the Resistance’s fighting was subtler: a lone Iorrtan pushed off a cliff, pathogens in an Iorrtic town’s water supply, destruction of an electrical facility. It was like trying to destroy a swarm of wasps by swatting them one by one.
“Why even bother?” Linnl asked Pao, at one time.
“Better to fight back even a little than to lie down for our enemies to trample on,” she said. “Our descendants will know that we never surrendered our world to the Iorrtic beasts.”
Linnl took a deep breath and asked the question no one dared bring up: “What if we have no descendants?”
“Then the gods will know,” Pao said firmly, her black-scarred face set and determination in her golden eyes. It was nighttime, and the blue Old Ones who’d abandoned their people were floating in the sky, but Pao never looked up, so she never saw them.
Their leader, Tylla Vvv, made speeches when morale flagged. “The Iorrtans march to their own ruin, with their wars and destructive weapons. They will devour themselves and their world, with only a little help from us. My dear people, brave warriors of Tyrr, have patience. A brighter future will come.”
But Linnl could think of nothing but the past. In the past, he’d slept on an airy bed of mist instead of the rocky floor of a cave. Everyone had worn soft, colorful silks and silver and gold masks, instead of coarse, drab woolen robes and hoods. Linnl used to swim in the canals when he was hot and sit at his parents’ fire table when he was cold, but now everyone sweated or shivered with almost no relief. And now, nobody painted or sculpted or wrote books; instead, they made new chemicals and fortifications and guns.
Most of all, there were no relatives or friends for him in the Resistance. He was too old to join the children in the nursery and too young to join the spies, fighters, or commanders. So, when not helping to build instruments of war, he wandered the barren mountain paths or lay in a cave, remembering.
Sometimes, he dreamed he was back in his parents’ house, and they sat in the speaking room laughing while his father read Under the Mask aloud—then he would wake up on the hard floor, in the darkness, and with a burst of despair and bitterness, he would remember where he was and why. In other dreams, he would see his parents’ faces as they’d been during the plague: the scaly, black patches spreading on their skin, eating away their cheeks and noses, and he would look down and see his blackened fingers fall off, or look in a mirror and see his face turning black. Then he would wake with his heart pounding and tears running down his cheeks.
Later, he began to think he was seeing his parents when he was awake. At first, they would appear out of the corner of his eye but would vanish if he turned to look at them more closely. But eventually, they remained when he turned to them, and they spoke to him. They started coming to sit by him in the cave, happy and healthy and free of scars, and they had long, loving talks with him, just like before.
However, they always had to leave in the end.
“Oh, please stay with me!” Linnl always begged. “Just this once; I’m so lonely without you.”
“We wish we could, but it’s impossible,” said his mother, shaking her head sadly. “We belong to the other world now, and the gods only let us spend brief moments here.”
Yet even the moments when his parents had to say good-bye were better than the times when they didn’t come at all. Then, he lay sobbing and groaning in the cave, pleading to the gods to let them come. Sometimes, he wandered out of the cave at night and looked up through tearful eyes at the moons and stars and, more often than not, the glowing, heartless Old Ones. He hated them. He hated them for abandoning Tyrr so long ago, for not keeping the Iorrtans away, for not saving his people from the plague, and for looking down on them uselessly while he and the rest of the Resistance fought and struggled and suffered.
“The gods damn you all!” he cried. “Useless do-nothings, traitors to our world! May Iorrtic bombs tear you apart! May you be swallowed by black holes! May the gods blow out your lights forever!”
The Old Ones never answered. The guard on duty took him by the arms and pulled him back into the cave, whispering to him and looking frightened for some reason. Once, when Pao was on guard duty, she said, “The Old Ones won’t listen. They haven’t listened for ten thousand years; why should they start now?”
Afterwards, someone was always with him, not to talk to him or show him sympathy, but to sit in silence, looking bored or anxious. He wanted to say he understood, that this war was making him bored and anxious too, but the words died in his mouth when he caught a glimpse of the guards’ thoughts. They thought he was insane. Even when his parents came to talk to him, and the guards saw his parents too, they believed he was crazy. They didn’t love him; none of his people still living loved him now.
So, he ran away one night. He eluded his guards, and he ran down from the mountains, all the way back to the lowlands, the dead sea bottoms, and the canals. He wandered around on the outskirts of the Iorrtic settlements, letting Iorrtic thoughts wash over him, about relatives still on Iorrt, green fields and woods, cities of silver and white stone and smoke, and new lives beginning on Tyrr. He stared at the lights streaming from the houses—let’s leave the light on so the Johnsons can see our address when they drive in—the children laughing and playing in the twilight—this is so much better than Earth; Mom never let us play outside on Earth ‘cause she said it wasn’t safe—the couples strolling hand-in-hand down the streets—if we get married and have kids here, our kids will be Martians. Isn’t that weird?—and the old people sitting outside and fanning themselves—we’ve got to forget about Rose. She’s not suffering anymore.
These Earthlings thought little of war and mass destruction; if they did, they feared them as much as the Martians did. And they had families whose members were alive and loved one another.
Linnl spent night after night near the Earth settlements, reveling in familial love and social pleasures and peace. He drank in Earthling emotions and thoughts like water. His parents never came to see him now, but it hardly mattered. The Earthlings were alive and always present, not ghosts on brief visits from the other world.
Despite his mind being flooded with Earthling thoughts, Linnl was always careful. He knew the Earthlings, as friendly as they were to each other, would not welcome him, and he hid himself, making sure they never saw him. But one rainy night, he wandered close to a little tin-roofed Earthling house by the Blue—no, now it was the Rockefeller Canal. An old man opened the door and called out to him.
“Tom, if that’s you, if by some chance it is you, Tom, I’ll leave the door unlatched."
When poor Linnl was lost, both the search and the following mourning period were brief. He could not be found anywhere in the mountains, or at the bottom of the cliffs. His insanity must have drawn him to the Iorrtic towns. The Resistance could not risk men’s lives or minds to search for him there.
But Pao and two comrades went searching for him one night. They knew what the Iorrtans had done to the bodies of those dead from the plague. Mad or not, Linnl was one of their people and Pao’s friend. She would not let those monsters desecrate his corpse: shovel it away and burn it like refuse.
The second moon was setting, and the sky was turning gray in the dawn, when they found Linnl by Blue Canal, where it entered an Iorrtic settlement. He had no plague scars, thank the gods, but he had no other marks on his body either. The cause of his death would be a mystery until the doctor could examine him.
Pao wept as they wrapped him in a ragged wool shroud. The tears burned the black scar tissue on her cheeks, but she did not care. And boy, was Mars chilly at night, and he missed Ohio so much. He wished the war would hurry up so he could get away from this crazy planet…
Pao looked up and saw an Iorrtan in a uniform approaching. Rage seemed to rush through her body like a wildfire. “Go!” she screamed. “Go back to your planet, and good riddance!” Her words came out in Iorrtic and she could still understand them, gods help her. “Go blow yourselves up; you’ll be doing us a favor!”
Her companions hushed her, whispering hurriedly, with looks of horror on their faces. “Pao, you fool, you’ll give us away! You’ll bring every Iorrtan on the planet down on our heads!”
But the Terran only ran off, without sounding an alarm. So, they lifted Linnl’s shrouded body to their shoulders and jogged back towards the mountains. No Iorrtans saw them, but the Old Ones did. They floated in the sky and did nothing, as usual. Even when Pao made an obscene gesture and spat at them, they did nothing.
Why would they care that invaders were stealing Tyrr from them? Tyrr was not their world; it hadn’t been their world for ten thousand years.
Blinking back tears of grief and rage, Pao helped her companions bear Linnl’s body up into the mountains.