C. L. Moore: "The Cold Gray God," "Yvala," and "Lost Paradise"

Weird Tales readers were crazy for C. L. Moore's Northwest Smith.  Of the first five Smith stories, four were voted best in the issue by WT readers, as was the eighth, "Yvala."  (My source: Sam Moskowitz's article "The Most Popular Stories in Weird Tales: 1924 to 1940, with Statistics and Analytical Commentary.")  Let's read the seventh, eighth, and ninth of Moore's Smith tales today and see what all the fuss is about.  (We've already tackled the first six.)  I am reading these stories in my copy of 2002's Black Gods and Scarlet Dreams, published by Gollancz, which means dialogue is in single inverted commas instead of double quotation marks (but I'm still glancing at the old magazines--due diligence!)  

"The Cold Gray God" (1935)

Righa, pole city of Mars, a snow-covered city of thieves!  Northwest Smith is accosted by a woman on the street, a woman whose form is hidden in deep furs.  Though something about her is repulsive to Smith, he follows her to her richly appointed house.  When she removes her coat he sees his hostess is Judai, a spectacularly beautiful Venusian woman, a singer who was famous across the solar system a few years ago, but then disappeared.  Well, the "milk-white" skin, "voluptuously slim" body and "flawlessly lovely" face are unmistakably Judai's, but there is something else about her that seems off--her mannerisms are not that of a Venusian, for example--and while her physical beauty thrills Smith,  something undefinable beneath the surface disturbs, even disgusts, him.

Judai tells Smith that she requires a man of Smith's caliber for a mission, a theft, and she is willing to pay him a princely sum if he can get the job done.  Some guy in Righa has a little ivory box, you see, and Judai needs what is in the box.  Smith agrees to take the job, and, with the help of a friend with influence and connections here in Righa, he quickly gets the box.

Back at Judai's place we learn the real, all too horrible truth!  Millions of years ago, a monstrous gray god whose name cannot be comprehended by sane minds was worshipped by the people of Mars.  This diabolical deity was forced to retreat to its own universe, but it had plans to return to the Red Planet and made extensive preparations to do so.  All Martian houses have particular decorations painted or inscribed on their interior walls, in accordance with inviolable tradition.  It is the nameless alien god who founded those traditions, and those are no mere decorations!  They are words in a long forgotten tongue, magical runes that under the appropriate circumstances can serve as a door to the nameless god's universe!

A messenger from that alien universe is inhabiting poor Judai's body, and has been searching for a body for its nameless gray master to inhabit!  Northwest Smith, a capable man of adventure, has the perfect body to house the monstrous deity!  The creature living within Judai's body hypnotizes Smith and forces Smith's soul out of his body!  The messenger seizes control over Smith's body, and with Smith's own fingers takes from the ivory box a piece of metal in the form of a hieroglyph identical to one of the ubiquitous traditional wall designs.  With this unholy artifact the monster operating Smith's body conducts a ritual in which Judai's body is consumed and the ancient symbols on the wall are activated, opening a door across the dimensions through which comes a sort of smoke or mist which begins infiltrating Smith's body!

Amazingly, Smith's soul ("a bodiless awareness drifting through voids") has not gone far--the disembodied consciousness of Smith is floating about the room, observing the ritual!  Smith realizes the smoke is the ancient alien god, and if it takes over his body it will destroy civilization throughout the solar system.  So Smith fights to return to his body before the nameless alien god can gain mastery over it.  They struggle, and then Smith's local friend bursts in and shoots his ray pistol at the design on the wall, closing the door and saving our universe.

This is a good story, but I have to say that it is basically a reconstruction of elements we have seen in several other Smith stories.  The seductive but repulsive sexy non-Earthborn lady; the god/monster from another dimension; the wall writing that can transport you; the out of body experience; the psychic struggle; the friend who comes just in time to save Smith with a ray pistol. 

It doesn't look like "The Cold Gray God" has ever been anthologized, though of course it has been included in many Moore collections.  

"Yvala" (1936)

Smith and his Venusian buddy Yarol have come upon hard times!  Yarol's holster is empty, and Moore tells us of Smith: "One might have guessed by the shabbiness of his clothing that his pockets were empty, the charge in his ray-gun low."  Moore even tells us Smith tightens his belt a notch, he is getting so thin!

Yarol has lined them up a meeting with a potential employer here in a spaceport on Mars, and when the guy, a fat Irishman, shows up, it turns out he works for an infamous slave-trading ring, the Willards!  Rumors have been circulating that in the jungles of an unnamed moon of Jupiter lives a bunch of beautiful women.  The Willards want somebody to investigate these rumors to see if there is any foundation to their hopes that this moon offers a lucrative new source of sex slaves, and Smith and Yarol take the job.

A spaceship crewed by three sinister men brings Smith and Yarol to the moon, which is covered in a jungle of lashing and snapping carnivorous plants.  Luckily our heroes find a broad road which the ravenous serpentine vegetation scrupulously avoids.  They follow this road and soon meet a bunch of identical women, women amazingly beautiful--Smith thinks they are redheads with a peachy complexion, while his Venusian pal thinks they have the whitest skin and blackest hair he has ever seen.

These Northwest Smith stories often draw upon Greek mythology, and internally rationalize this inspiration by suggesting that the monsters in Greek literature are the product of fragments of memories of the encounters with aliens of a forgotten spacefaring human civilization that rose and fell before recorded history.  This time around Moore bases the perils that threaten Smith on the sirens and the witch Circe featured in The Odyssey.  Not only were Smith and Yarol initially drawn by the sound of the women's laughter, but when the ladies lead our heroes to a clearing, on its periphery Smith spots mundane animals, like deer and boars, who look at him with sad eyes--they seem to be trying to warn him! 

The women lead Smith and Yarol to a shrine and disappear.  Standing before them now is a woman even more beautiful than were those she tells them were merely her shadows.  The sight of this woman, who calls herself "Yvala," sends Smith into the kind of out of body experience I guess he should be used to having by now, and he must engage in a psychic struggle to maintain his humanity--Yvala is sucking his humanity from him, feeding upon it, reducing him to an animal.  Appropriately enough for an interplanetary criminal, Smith is being reduced to the level of a wolf, his mind filled with memories of devouring raw flesh.

The three men from the Willard ship arrive in the clearing, and Yvala is distracted by the prospect of devouring the humanity of three men, so much so that the psyche of Smith, a man of powerful will, is able to fight its way back to humanity; having thrown off Yvala's power, he can now see Yvala is not the perfect woman, but an alien composed solely of light, "a formless flame" that fashions its appearance from the deepest desires of those who look upon it. 

Yvala devours the humanity of the three slave ship crew members--their bodies collapse and their souls slink off as beasts--and the alien retreats into its self to digest this meal.  Smith wakes up Yarol and the Venusian's soul, visible as the shadowy form of a panther, slinks back from the woods to merge with his body again; it seems Smith's comrade is able to get his humanity back from Yvala because he is very animalistic, has so little humanity that Yvala doesn't notice losing it now that she has the three slavers' humanity.  Our heroes return to the ship.     

"Yvala" starts off promisingly--I like how Smith is totally down and out and in order to make ends meet is willing to commit the moral outrage of becoming a cog in the machine of the slave trade--I guess today we would call him a "human trafficker."  I like that Moore doesn't whitewash the fact that Smith and Yarol are reprobates. I also like the deathworld aspects of the moon.  But with the arrival of Yvala we are confronted with yet another long-winded description of an out of body experience and a psychic struggle.  Moore enjoys writing this stuff, apparently.    

There is an odd element in "Yvala"'s publication history.  Back in September we read a Northwest Smith story Moore co-wrote with Forrest J. Ackerman, and it seems possible that Ackerman also had some input on at least some versions of "Yvala."  Moore is solely credited for the story at Weird Tales and in my Gollamncz Fantasy Masterworks volume, Black Gods and Scarlet Dreams, but in two books edited by Ackerman, Expanded Science Fiction Worlds of Forrest J Ackerman & Friends Plus and Womanthology, Ackerman is listed as a co-author under a transparent pen name.  

Besides in those Ackerman volumes, "Yvala" has not been anthologized.

"Lost Paradise" (1936)

Moore gets me on her side immediately by setting "Lost Paradise" in New York City, my lost paradise!  Smith and Yarol are sitting at a table at a sidewalk cafe, a thousand feet above the street, watching the crowds walk by on all the sky bridges that crisscross the air between the innumerable skyscrapers.  Sounds beautiful!  The crowds are full of people from other planets.  Yarol sees a weird little guy, a skinny shorty with white hair, points him out to Smith.  Yarol tells Smith that this guy is actually from a race of people that originated on Earth, a little known ethnic group from Asia that is not genetically related to other Asians (or as Moore puts it in 1936, "Mongolians.")  This race, the "Seles," is known to have a "Secret" which they keep from outsiders and they are rarely seen outside of their little country, venturing forth only when on some important mission.  This little guy, sure enough, is carrying a package with great care.

(The name of the race immediately gives the game away, which was OK for Weird Tales readers, because the editor's intro to "Lost Paradise" there in Farnsworth Wright's magazine of the bizarre and unusual already gave the game away: "A tremendous story of the Vampire Three that watched over the destiny of the Moon.")

As they watch, the little Sele is robbed of his box.  The Sele spots Smith and Yarol, and, as they are evidently tough customers, what with their "space leathers," he runs to them and asks them to retrieve his box, offering them a huge reward, anything they care to name.  The resourceful Yarol dashes off and soon returns with the box.  The three men sit together, and Yarol names as his reward the Secret.  So the Sele tells him and Smith the Secret: the priests of the Sele can cast their minds back in time and inhabit the minds of people in the past--oh brother, this again!  (If you have been reading MPorcius Fiction Log you know that in the pages of Weird Tales we have already seen many examples of people casting their minds back into the brains of their predecessors so they can experience first hand life in the distant past.  WT writers--and readers I guess--love this idea.)  The Sele doesn't just tell this to Smith and Yarol, he demonstrates it by bringing Smith's mind along for the ride as he casts his mind back, back, back, back a million years, so that they inhabit the mind of a Luna-dwelling man during the pivotal moment of Sele history!

Moore expends a lot of ink on romantic passages describing how beautiful the moon city was and how beautiful the Earth in the sky was back then, a million years ago, and also describing the emotional life of the guy in whose brain Smith and the Sele priest's souls are stowaways.  But I will limit my synopsis here to two salient points about life on our favorite satellite back in its glory days.  Firstly, the Seles a million years ago were sending ships to Earth to colonize the region in our time known as Tibet.  Secondly, the Moon had a breathable atmosphere only thanks to the efforts of three alien gods, the Three Who Are One.  These gods were vampiric, and in return for making life on the Moon possible, they demanded a regular sacrifice.  Periodically they would choose some member of the Sele population and he or she must come to them so they could suck out his or her life force.  Each sacrifice must come willingly; if he or she evinced any reluctance to having his or her life force sucked out, the Three Who Are One would consider this an abrogation of the contract and they would cease maintaining Luna's atmosphere.

You can maybe guess where this is going.  The guy whose skull Smith and the priest are riding around in has been called to be a sacrifice.  He goes, of course, but Smith is scared that if his consciousness is in this Sele's body when he has his life force sucked out that Smith might also die.  The Three Who Are One sense this reluctance, and let the Moon's atmosphere float out into space, killing all life on the Moon.

Smith and the Sele return to their bodies in New York.  The Sele picks up the box and is about to beat Smith with it but Yarol guns the priest down with his ray pistol.  (I guess at some point New York's strict gun control measures were repealed.)  Then Yarol and Smith run for it.  They never learn what is in that box.

In the same way that I liked that Smith was a slaver in "Yvala," I kind of like that here Smith is responsible, or partly responsible, for a negligent genocide--I admire Moore for choosing to write about a criminal and sticking with it, not pulling her punches and making the criminal good on the inside or a victim of society or some wishy washy crap like that, an honorable thief or a Robin Hood type or whatever.  On the other hand, the gushy moon stuff is too long.  One of the recurring issues I have with Moore's Northwest Smith stories is that individual sentences are good but Moore uses two or three good sentences--describing how beautiful a woman or a place is, describing the feeling of having an out of body experience or being enraptured or participating in a psychic struggle--when one good sentence would have been sufficient. 

Acceptable.

John Betancourt and Robert Weinberg included "Lost Paradise" in their 1997 anthology Weird Tales: Seven Decades of Terror.          

**********

Two stories that remind you that beautiful women who want your body are likely to also want your liberty and your humanity, and a third that suggests you shouldn't share your secrets with the criminals you meet on the streets of New York.  We'll be spending time with another famous female SF figure in our next blog post and we'll see if she also has some ancient wisdom to impart to us.