The Toynbee Convector Part 16

"G.o.d," he said, his breath uneven, "this reminds me of my mother making me say prayers when I was five. I hated it I was embarra.s.sed, I couldn't see G.o.d anywhere, I didn't know who I was supposed to be talking to. It was so terrible, my mother gave up. Years later, I learned to pray, on my own, inside. All right, all right, don't stare at me that way. Here's what I said-"

He got up suddenly, walked to the window and looked out across the city, toward a building, any building that looked like the hospital, and focused his attention there. His voice was almost inaudible. He knew this and stopped, and started over, so she could hear: "I said: please, G.o.d, save her, save my daughter, let her live. If you do, I promise, I swear to give up the dearest thing in my existence. I promise to give up Laura, and never see her again. I promise, G.o.d. Please."

There was a long pause until he repeated the last word, quietly: "Please."

Without moving, she lifted the gla.s.s to her lips and drank the brandy straight down and, eyes shut, shook her head.

"Now, you've really done it," she said.

He turned from the window and started toward her, but stopped. "You believe me, don't you?"

"I wish I didn't, but I do. d.a.m.n!" She hurled the gla.s.s away and watched it roll unbroken along the rug. "You could have promised something else Couldn't you, couldn't you, couldn't you?"

"Promise, what, what?" Not knowing where to go, he prowled the room, not able to look back at her. "What can you promise G.o.d that means anything! Money? My house? My car? Give up my Paris trip? Give up my work? G.o.d knows I love that that! But I don't think G.o.d takes things like that There's only one value, isn't there? For him him? Not things, people, but...love. I thought and thought and I knew I had only one special last rich thing in my life that was of any priceless value that might mean something in an exchange."

"And that thing was me me? she said.

"Yes, dammit. Name me something else. I can't think of anything. You. My love for you has been so big, so all-consuming, so vital to my whole life, I knew it had to be the right gift, the right promise. If I said I'd give you up, G.o.d would have to know what a devastation it would be, what a total loss. Then he'd just have have to give my daughter back! How could he not?" to give my daughter back! How could he not?"

He had stopped in the middle of the living room now. She picked up the fallen gla.s.s, looked at it, and circled him, slowly.

"I've heard and seen everything now," she said.

"Heard and seen what?"

"Men, one way or another, getting out of their affairs."

"Is that what this looks like to you?"

"How else can it look? You've been wanting out for a long time. Now you have your excuse."

He made a mourning sound, then a groan, then a sigh of exasperation.

"An excuse? No. A commitment. What else would you have wanted me to do?"

"Well, certainly not promise G.o.d to give me up!" she cried. "Why me?'

"Don't you know? Haven't you been listening? You're all I had as collateral. I loved you, I love you, I will always love you. And now, though I know I'll bleed for years, I have to hand you over. Who is hurt worse here, me or you? Does it hurt more for you to be left or for me, to leave? Can you really, I mean really, figure that and tell me?"

"No," she said, and her shoulders slumped again. "I'll be all right. Forgive me. It'll just take time. It's only been ten minutes since you came in that door. Christ."

She turned and walked slowly out to the kitchen. He' heard her rummaging in the refrigerator. He went and sat down and held on to the armchair as if it might suddenly hurl him across the room.

She came back in with a bottle of champagne and two gla.s.ses, walking across the floor as if it were land-mined. "What's that?" he asked, as she sat down on the floor.

"What's it look like?" She worked the cork expertly and when it popped and hit the ceiling, she added, "Wei began with this, why not end with it?"

"You're angry at me-"

"Angry, h.e.l.l, I'm mad clean through, and so sad I'd like to go to bed for a month and not get up again, but I will, tomorrow, dammit. Maybe this G.o.dawful champagne will help, lake your gla.s.s."

She poured and they drank and were silent for a long! while. i "So this is the last time well ever see each other;" she said.

"You don't have to put it so bluntly."

"Why not? You already have. Let's not kid around. This is the last five minutes of our lives. When you finish that, I want you out the door. I can't stand having you here. I don't want you to go. I wish I had a prayer, a promise, as strong as yours, that I believed in. I'd cry out to G.o.d with it But I don't have that strength, and no one's dying for me, except you, and you're not really dead, just going. So, don't ever call, don't write, don't come back, don't drop in. I know, I know, that's what you intend, to go, to stay. But you might be tempted. And if you called, I'd have to the all over again. Do I sound mean, do I sound hard? I'm not. I can't handle it any other way. So-"

She lifted her gla.s.s and finished the champagne, then got up and walked to open the door to her apartment and stand by it, waiting.

"So soon?" he said, bleakly.

"Hard to believe it's been five years. But-so soon."

He got up and looked around as if he had left something, and then realized it was really her and came to stand before her, his hands at his sides. He didn't seem to know what to do with his arms or his body.

"Do you forgive me?"

"No, not now. But soon, yes, I must. Either that, or stop going to church. Give me time to really think about your daughter and her dying almost, and yes, I will. It's a terrible week for all of us. Fart of me knows that you are being cut right down the middle. Goodbye." Her mouth whispered, darling darling, but she couldn't say it out loud.

She kissed him once, for a long moment, and when she felt the slight pull of her gravity moving him closer, broke off and stepped away.

He went out the door and halfway down the stairs turned and looked at her and said: "Goodbye."

He turned and went the rest of the way down.

Tears exploded from her eyes. She flung herself forward to seize the top stair rail and stare blindly down. "How dare you!" she shrieked, and stopped. She stared at the empty stairwell, stifling her breath.

The next words fell out of their own accord: "-love your daughter-" And then the rest, which only she could hear: "-more than me?" She backed up, groped round, found herself inside, and slammed the door, hard hard.

Downstairs, he heard. And it was like the sound of the shutting of a tomb.

The Love Affair

All morning long the scent was in the clear air, of cut grain or green gra.s.s or flowers, Sio didn't know which, he couldn't tell. He would walk down the hill from his secret cave and turnabout and raise his fine head and strain his eyes to see, and the breeze blew steadily, raising the tide of sweet odor about him. It was like a spring in autumn. He looked for the dark flowers that cl.u.s.tered under the hard rocks, probing up, but found none. He searched for a sign of gra.s.s, that swift tide that rolled over Mars for a brief week each spring, but the land was bone and pebble and the color of blood.

Sio returned to his cave, frowning. He watched the sky and saw the rockets of the Earthmen blaze down, far away, near the newly building towns. Sometimes, at night, he crept in a quiet, swimming silence down the ca.n.a.ls by boat, lodged the boat in a hidden place, and then swam, with quiet hands and limbs, to the edge of the fresh towns, and there peered out at the hammering, nailing, painting men, at the men shouting late into the night at their labor of constructing a strange thing upon this plan et. He would listen to their odd language and try to understand, and watch the rockets gather up great plumes of beautiful fire and go booming into the stars; an incredible people. And then, alive and undiseased, alone, Sio would return to his cave. Sometimes he walked many miles through the mountains to find others of his own hiding race, a few men, fewer women, to talk to, but now he had a habit of solitude, and lived alone, thinking on the destiny that had finally killed his people. He did not blame the Earthmen; it had been an accidental tiling, the disease that had burned his father and mother in their sleep, and burned the fathers and mothers of great mult.i.tudes of sons.

He sniffed the air again. That strange aroma. That sweet, drifting scent of compounded flowers and green moss. "What is it?" He narrowed his golden eyes in four directions.

He was tall and a boy still, though eighteen summers had lengthened the muscles in his arms and his legs were long from seasons of swimming in the ca.n.a.ls and daring to run, take cover, run again, take swift cover, over the blazing dead sea bottoms or going on the long patrols with silver cages to bring back a.s.sa.s.sin-flowers and fire-lizards to feed them. It seemed that his life had been full of swimming and marching, the things young men do to take their energies and pa.s.sions, until they are married and a woman soon does what mountains and rivers once did. He had carried the pa.s.sion for distance and walking later into young manhood than most, and while many another man had been drifting off down the dying ca.n.a.ls in a slim boat with a woman like a bas-relief across his body, Sio had continued leaping and sporting, much of the time by himself, often speaking alone to himself. The worry of his parents, he had been, and the despair of women who had watched his shadow lengthening handsomely from the hour of his fourteenth birthday, and nodded to each other, watching the calendar for another year and just another year to pa.s.s....

But since the invasion and the disease, he had slowed to stillness. His universe was sunken away by death. The sawed and hammered and freshly painted towns were carriers of disease. The weight of so much dying rested heavily on his dreams. Often he woke weeping and put his hands out on the night air. But his parents were gone and it was time, past time, for one special friend, one touching, one love.

The wind was circling and spreading the bright odor.

Sio took a deeper breath and felt his flesh warm.

And then there was a sound. It was like a small orchestra playing. The music came up through the narrow stone valley to his cave.

A puff of smoke idled into the sky about a half mile away. Below, by the ancient ca.n.a.l, stood a small house that the men of Earth had built for an archaeological crew, a year ago. It had been abandoned and Sio had crept down to peer into the empty rooms several times, not entering, for he was afraid of the black disease that might touch him.

The music was coming from that house.

"An entire orchestra in that small house?" he wondered, and ran silently down the valley in the early afternoon light The house looked empty, despite the music which poured out the open windows. Sio scrambled from rock to rock, taking half an hour to lie within thirty yards of the frightful, dinning house. He lay on his stomach, keeping close to the ca.n.a.l. If anything happened, he could leap into the water and let the current rush him swiftly back into the hills.

The music rose, crashed over the rocks, hummed in the hot air, quivered in his bones. Dust shook from the quaking roof of the house. Paint fell in a soft snowstorm from the peeling wood.

Sio leapt up and dropped back. He could see no orchestra within. Only flowery curtains. The front door stood wide.

The music stopped and started again. The same tune was repeated ten times. And the odor that had lured him down from his stone retreat was thick here, like a clear water moving about his perspiring face.

At last, in a burst of running, he reached the window, looked in.

Upon a low table, a brown machine glistened. In the machine, a silver needle pressed a spinning black disc. The orchestra thundered! Sio stared at the strange device.

The music paused. In that interval of hissing quiet, he heard footsteps. Running, he plunged into the ca.n.a.l.

Falling down under the cool water, he lay at the bottom, holding his breath, waiting. Had it been a trap? Had they lured him down to capture and kill him?

A minute ticked by, bubbles escaped his nostrils. He stirred and rose slowly toward the gla.s.sy wet world above. He was swimming and looking up through the cool green current when he saw her.

Her face was like a white stone above him.

He did not move, nor stir for a moment, but he saw her. He held his breath. He let the current slide him slowly, slowly away, and she was very beautiful, she was from Earth, she had come in a rocket that scorched the land and baked the air, and she was as white as a stone.

The ca.n.a.l water carried him among the hills. He climbed out, dripping.

She was beautiful, he thought. He sat on the ca.n.a.l rim, gasping. His chest was constricted. The blood burned in his face. He looked at his hands. Was the black disease in him? Had looking at her contaminated him?

I should have gone up, he thought, as she bent down, and clasped my hands to her neck. She killed us, she killed us. He saw her white throat, her white shoulders. What a peculiar color, he thought. But, no, he thought, she did not kill us. It was the disease. In so much whiteness, can darkness stay?

"Did she see me?" He stood up, drying in the sun. He put his hand to his chest, his brown, slender hand. He felt his heart beating rapidly. "Oh," he said. "I saw her"

He walked back to the cave, not slowly, not swiftly. The music still crashed from the house below, like a festival all to itself.

Without speaking, he began, certainly and accurately, to pack his belongings. He threw pieces of phosphorous chalk, food, and several books into a cloth, and tied them up firmly. He saw that his hands shook. He turned his fingers over, his eyes wide. He stood up hurriedly, the small packet under one arm, and walked out of the cave and started up the canyon, away from the music and the strong perfume.

He did not look back.

The sun was going down the sky now. He felt his shadow move away behind to stay where he should have stayed. It was not good, leaving the cave where he had often lived as a child. In that cave he had found for himself a dozen hobbies, developed a hundred tastes. He had hollowed a kiln in the rode and baked himself fresh cakes each day, of a marvelous texture and variety. He -had raised grain for food in a little mountain field. He had made himself clear, sparkling wines. He had created musical instruments, flutes of silver and thorn-metal, and small harps. He had written songs. He had built small chairs and woven the fabric of his clothing. And he had painted pictures on the cave walls in crimson and cobalt phosphorous, pictures that glowed through the long nights, pictures of great intricacy and beauty. And he had often read a book of poems that he had written when he was fifteen and which, proudly, but calmly, his parents had read aloud to a select few. It had been a good existence, the cave, his small arts.

As the sun was setting, he reached the top of the mountain pa.s.s. The music was gone. The scent was gone. He sighed and sat to rest a moment before going on over the mountains. He shut his eyes.

A white face came down through green water.

He put his fingers to his shut eyes, feeling.

White arms gestured through currents of rus.h.i.+ng tide.

He started up, seized his packet of keepsakes, and was about to hurry off, when the wind s.h.i.+fted. Faintly, faintly, there was the music. The insane, metallic blaring, music, miles away. Faintly, the last fragrance of perfume found its way among the rocks. As the moons were rising. Sio turned and found his way back to the cave.

The cave was cold and alien. He built a fire and ate a small dinner of bread and wild berries from the mossrocks. So soon, after he had left it, the cave had grown cold and hard. His own breathing sounded strangely off the walls.

He extinguished the fire and lay down to sleep. But now there was a dim shaft of light touching the cave wall. He knew that this light had traveled half a mile up from the windows of the house by the ca.n.a.l. He shut his eyes but the light was there. It was either the light or the music or the smell of flowers. He found himself looking or listening or breathing for any one of the incredible three.

At midnight he stood outside his cave.

Like a bright toy, the house lights were yellow in the valley. In one of the windows, it seemed he saw a figure dancing.

"I must go down and kill her," he said. "That is why I came back to the cave. To kill, to bury her." When he was half-asleep, he heard a lost voice say, "You are a great liar." He did not open his eyes.

She lived alone. On the second day, he saw her walking in the foothills. On the third day, she was swimming, swimming for hours, in the ca.n.a.l. On the fourth day and the fifth day, Sio came down nearer and nearer to the house, until, at sunset at the sixth day, with dark closing in, he stood outside the window of the house and watched the woman living there.

She sat at a table upon which stood twenty tiny bra.s.s tubes of red color. She slapped a white, cool-looking cream on her face, making a mask. She wiped it on tissues which she threw in a basket. She tested one tube of color, pressing in on her wide lips, clamping her lips together, wiping it, adding another color, wiping it it off, testing a third, a fifth, a ninth color, touching her cheeks with red, also, tweezing her brows with a silver pincers. Rolling her hair up in incomprehensible devices, she buffed her fingernails while she sang a sweet strange alien song, a song in her own language, a song that must have been very beautiful. She hummed it, tapping her high heels on the hardwood floor. She sang it walking about the room, clothed only in her white body, or lying on the bed in her white flesh, her head down, the yellow hair flaming back to the floor, while she held a fire cylinder to her red, red lips, sucking, eyes closed, to let long slow chutes of smoke slip out her pinched nostrils and lazy mouth into great ghost forms on the air. Sio trembled. The ghosts. The strange ghosts from her mouth. So casually. So easily. Without looking at them, she created them. off, testing a third, a fifth, a ninth color, touching her cheeks with red, also, tweezing her brows with a silver pincers. Rolling her hair up in incomprehensible devices, she buffed her fingernails while she sang a sweet strange alien song, a song in her own language, a song that must have been very beautiful. She hummed it, tapping her high heels on the hardwood floor. She sang it walking about the room, clothed only in her white body, or lying on the bed in her white flesh, her head down, the yellow hair flaming back to the floor, while she held a fire cylinder to her red, red lips, sucking, eyes closed, to let long slow chutes of smoke slip out her pinched nostrils and lazy mouth into great ghost forms on the air. Sio trembled. The ghosts. The strange ghosts from her mouth. So casually. So easily. Without looking at them, she created them.

Her feet, when she arose, exploded on the hardwood floor. Again she sang. She whirled about. She sang to the ceiling. She snapped her fingers. She put her hands out, like birds, flying, and danced alone, her heels cracking the floor, around, around.

The alien song. He wished he could understand. He wished that he had the ability that some of his own people often had, to project the mind, to read* to know, to interpret, instantly; foreign tongues, foreign thoughts. He tried. But there was nothing, she went on singing the beautiful, unknown song, none of which he could understand: "Ain't misbehavin', I'm savin' my love for you..."

He grew feint, watching her Earth body, her Earth beauty, so totally different, something from so many mil lions of miles away. His hands were moist, his eyelids jerked unpleasantly.

A bell rang.

There she was, picking up a strange black instrument, the function of which was not unlike a similar device of Sio's people.

"h.e.l.lo, Janice? G.o.d, it's good to hear from you!" Sio smiled. She was talking to a distant town. Her voice was thrilling to hear. But what were the words?

"G.o.d, Janice, what a h.e.l.l-out-of-the-way place you sent me to. I know, honey, a vacation. But, it's sixty miles from nowhere. All I do is play cards and swim in the d.a.m.ned ca.n.a.l."

The black machine buzzed in reply.

"I can't stand it here, Janice. I know, I know. The churches. It's a d.a.m.n shame they ever came up here. Everything was going so nice. What 1 want to know is when do we open up again?"

Lovely, thought Sio. Gracious. Incredible. He stood in the night beyond her open window, looking at her amazing face and body. And what were they talking about? Art, literature, music, yes, music, for she sang, she sang all of the time. An odd music, but one could not expect to understand the music of another world. Or the customs or the language or the literature. One must judge by instinct alone. The old ideas must be set aside. It was to be admitted that her beauty was not like Martian beauty, the soft slim brown beauty of the dying race. His mother had had golden eyes and slender hips. But here, this one, singing alone in the desert, she was of larger stuffs, large b.r.e.a.s.t.s, large hips, and the legs, yes, of white fire, and the peculiar custom of walking about without clothes, with only those strange knocking slippers on the feet. But all woman of Earth did that, yes? He nodded. You must understand. The women of that far world, naked, yellow-haired, large-bodied, loud-heeled, he could see them. And the magic with the mouth and nostrils. The ghosts, the souls issuing from the lips in smoky patterns. Certainly a magical creature of fire and imagination. She shaped bodies in the air, with her brilliant mind. What else but a mind of clarity and clear genius could drink the gray, cherry red fire, and plume out architectural perfections of intricate and fine beauty from her nostrils. The genius! An artist! A creator! How was it done, how many years might one study to do this? How did one apply one's time? His head whirled with her presence. He felt he must cry out to her, "Teach me!" But he was afraid. He felt like a child.

He saw the forms, the lines, the smoke swirl into infinity. She was here, in the wilderness, to be alone, to create her fantasies in absolute security, unwatched. One did not bother creators, writers, painters. One stood back and kept one's thoughts silent.

What a people! he thought. Are all of the women of that fiery green world like this? Are they fiery ghosts and music? Do they walk blazingly naked in their loud houses?

"I must watch this," he said, half-aloud. "I must study." He felt his hands curl. He wanted to touch. He wanted her to sing for him, to construct the artistic fragments in the air for him, to teach him, to tell him about that far gone world and its books and its fine music....