The Woman From Altair and Other Stories by Leigh Brackett

Book Details

The Woman From Altair and Other Stories – two classic novelettes of interstellar love and betrayal, and one story about simple betrayal by Leigh Brackett.

The Woman From Altair (1951) – Ahrian was a fragile creature – yet beneath her feminine softness lurked the steel purpose of bitter dedication!
Chapter I – Ahrian
Chapter II – Stranger on Earth
Chapter III – Gifts of Love
Chapter IV – Star Dreams
Chapter V – About Altair
Chapter VI – The Last Magic

The Stellar Legion (1940) – No one had ever escaped from Venus’ dread Stellar Legion. And as Thekla the low-Martian learned, no one had ever betrayed it——and lived

The Last Days of Shandakor (1952) – An Earthman finds love and tragedy in a long-dead city of ancient Mars that denies death. A novelette in six chapters.

Leigh Brackett (1915 – 1978) was an immensely talented writer of science fiction, and is known as the “Queen of Space Opera.” She was also a very talented screenwriter and worked on such films as The Big Sleep (1945), Rio Bravo (1959), The Long Goodbye (1973) and The Empire Strikes Back (1980).

The Woman From Altair and Other Stories has 8 illustrations.

The Woman From Altair and Other Stories is also available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble

Files:

1. Brackett-WomanFromAltair.epub

Excerpt: The Last Days of Shandakor

Chapter I

HE CAME alone into the wineshop, wrapped in a dark red cloak, with the cowl drawn over his head. He stood for a moment by the doorway and one of the slim dark predatory women who live in those places went to him, with a silvery chiming from the little bells that were almost all she wore.

I saw her smile up at him. And then, suddenly, the smile became fixed and something happened to her eyes. She was no longer looking at the cloaked man but through him. In the oddest fashion—it was as though he had become invisible.

She went by him. Whether she passed some word along or not I couldn’t tell but an empty space widened around the stranger. And no one looked at him. They did not avoid looking at him. They simply refused to see him.

He began to walk slowly across the crowded room. He was very tall and he moved with a fluid, powerful grace that was beautiful to watch. People drifted out of his way, not seeming to, but doing it. The air was thick with nameless smells, shrill with the laughter of women.

Two tall barbarians, far gone in wine, were carrying on some intertribal feud and the yelling crowd had made room for them to fight. There was a silver pipe and a drum and a double-banked harp making old wild music. Lithe brown bodies leaped and whirled through the laughter and the shouting and the smoke.

The stranger walked through all this, alone, untouched, unseen. He passed close to where I sat. Perhaps because I, of all the people in that place, not only saw him but stared at him, he gave me a glance of black eyes from under the shadow of his cowl—eyes like blown coals, bright with suffering and rage.

I caught only a glimpse of his muffled face. The merest glimpses—but that was enough. Why did he have to show his face to me in that wine-shop in Barrakesh?

He passed on. There was no space in the shadowy corner where he went but space was made, a circle of it, a moat between the stranger and the crowd. He sat down. I saw him lay a coin on the outer edge of the table. Presently a serving wench came up, picked up the coin and set down a cup of wine. But it was as if she waited on an empty table.

I turned to Kardak, my head drover, a Shunni with massive shoulders and uncut hair braided in an intricate tribal knot. “What’s all that about?” I asked.

Kardak shrugged. “Who knows?” He started to rise. “Come, JonRoss, It is time we got back to the “serai.”

“We’re not leaving for hours yet. And don’t lie to me, I’ve been on Mars a long time. What is that man? Where does he come from?”

Barrakesh is the gateway between north and south. Long ago, when there were oceans in equatorial and southern Mars, when Valkis and Jekkara were proud seats of empire and not thieves’ dens, here on the edge of the northern Drylands the great caravans had come and gone to Barrakesh for a thousand thousand years, it is a place of strangers.

In the time-eaten streets of rock you see tall Keshi hillmen, nomads from the high plains of Upper Shun, lean dark men from the south who barter away the loot of forgotten tombs and temples, cosmopolitan sophisticates up from Kahora and the trade cities, where there are spaceports and all the appurtenances of modern civilization.

The red-cloaked stranger was none of these.

A  GLIMPSE of a face— I am a planetary anthropologist. I was supposed to be charting Martian ethnology and I was doing it on a fellowship grant I had wangled from a Terran university too ignorant to know that the vastness of Martian history makes such a project, hopeless.

I was in Barrakesh, gathering an outfit preparatory to a year’s study of the tribes of Upper Shun. And suddenly there had passed close by me a man with golden skin and un-Martian black eyes and a facial structure that belonged to no race I knew. I have seen the carven faces of fauns that were a little like it.

Eardak said again, “It is time to go, JonRoss!”

I looked at the stranger, drinking his wine in silence and alone. “Very well, I’ll ask him.”

Kardak sighed. “Earthmen,” he said, “are not given much to wisdom.” He turned and left me.

I crossed the room and stood beside the stranger. In the old courteous High Martian they speak in all the Low-Canal towns I asked permission to sit.

Those raging, suffering eyes met mine. There was hatred in them, and scorn, and shame. “What breed of human are you?”

“I am an Earthman.”

He said the name over as though he had heard it before and was trying to remember. “Earthman. Then, it is as the winds have said, blowing across the desert—-that Mars is dead and men from other worlds defile her dust.” He looked out over the wine-shop and all the people who would not admit his presence. “Change,” he whispered. “Death and change and the passing away of things.”

The muscles of his face drew tight. He drank and I could see now that he had been drinking for a long time, for days, perhaps for weeks. There was a quiet madness on him.

“Why do the people shun you?”

“Only a man of Earth would need to ask,” he said and made a sound of laughter, very dry and bitter.

I was thinking, A new race, an unknown race I was thinking of the fame, that sometimes comes to men who discover a new thing, and of a Chair I might sit in at the University if I added one bright unheard-of piece of the shadowy mosaic of Martian history. I had had my share of wine and a bit more. That Chair looked a mile high and made of gold.

The stranger said softly, “I go from place to place in “this wallow of Barrakesh and everywhere it is the same. I have ceased to be.” His white teeth glittered for an instant in the shadow of the cowl. “They were wiser than I, my people. When Shandakor is dead, we are dead also, whether our bodies live or not.”

Excerpt From: Leigh Brackett. “The Woman From Altair and Other Stories.”