John Racham Read online

  And "here" there could be no pretense, for it was just his mind and hers merging intimately. He confessed, Yes. I want it, but somehow . . . not just like this. It's not enough. You are truly a beautiful woman, and desirable, and I'm a man, and subject to instincts which I can't deny. But it isn't enough, just like that. For me there should be something more!

  Then he was aware of her amusement, warm and kind, without mockery. There is your confusion. Let me help. It is such a little thing, after all. Remember what we said. It is my body, and your body. Instruments which serve us, which have needs and appetites if they are to remain healthy and serve us properly. You understand that?

  Of course I do, that's the whole point. This kind of relationship should be something more than just physical. That's the way we humans feel it ought to be. We don't often achieve it, but that's what we strive for and hope for. That's the ideal we aim at. Does that mean anything to you?

  Very much! there was warm tenderness now in her thought. We are not so different, after all. Listen . . . just now, when we saw your friends, when you saw them through my eyes ...I saw into them a little. And I saw into you a great deal, much more than before. And now. I am touching you now, where before I could reach only your memories and effects, because you were asleep. And I am amazed and impressed that your kind have somehow understood, without knowing how, have struggled for something you could not really grasp . . . simply because you cannot, yet, separate the ego-self from everything else. That woman . . . for a moment I knew her, knew that she was thinking of what you call love. That was a word I found in your mind and could not properly understand.

  We've never properly understood it either, but it's not . . . just what we are doing, what our bodies are doing now!

  Again she was amused, but still kind. Of course not. Love is something quite different from the meeting and mating of healthy bodies. It is different. For you, too, it is something more than that, but because you cannot separate the two, you confuse one with the other and try to achieve one by means of the other. And they are quite different. You must accept that for now, until you come to learn it for yourself.

  Completely different?

  As different as a thought is from the object you think of, but related in the same way. Think of a tree, and your thought includes everything that is or can be a tree, and all trees. But a tree is a single thing, which grows and dies, has leaves and trunk and branches and is different from any other tree. Your thought is not a tree; "tree" is different but related. Think of me ...or yourself . . . and your thought is different from the flesh and blood and bones, the face, form and figure of the body. The ego-you is different from the body, but dependent on it, and related to it. The meeting and mating of healthy bodies of polar opposite sex is the origin and source of all living energy, of living creation. Without it there can be no life. But love is something different.

  Can I learn to love you, Azul? And you to love me?

  You are not ready to know the answer to that yet, Stephen. When the time comes, you will know. For now, let us enjoy our pleasures, share our delights, renew our energies, so that we may both become healthy and happy

  and strong. It has taken much of my life force to bring you to this point. Now you must yield it back to me and regain your own!

  He didn't understand her altogether, but enough to know that she seemed to know what she was doing, and why, and that there was nothing wrong. Time ceased to have any meaning for him. Quickly forgotten was his first overwhelming impression of her statuelike imperiousness, her remote perfection. She was as warm and human and demanding as any woman might be, and all the more perfect for that, growing lovelier every moment in his sight And she had humor. She learned to play tricks with his words and ideas, to joke with him and trap him into inconsistencies and contradictions. And to laugh, gloriously, at his confusion, but never with malice.

  She was full of questions, too; keen and shrewd questions sometimes, naive and wondering ones at other times. It was his pleasure, once he had learned how, to let her see through his thinking such of humanity's gifts and accomplishments as he had seen, either in the flesh or in pictures. By the mere touching of hands he could take her through the great galleries and museums and palaces, show her scenery such as she had never seen, and vast cities as he had seen them from the air. And music. Always a lover of great music, he was able to re-create for her and share with her the great masterworks of the past, and she could never have enough of it. When he saw her eyes shine and her whole superb body quiver and -glow rose red to the soaring chords of some mighty orchestra, he was quietly amazed that he had ever thought her stem and white and aloof. She was the most vibrantly alive person he had ever known.

  And he came to know her a little, to ask questions of her about her people, her kind, her life. He learned to look into her mind just a little, to catch just something of the wonder of it as she told him things, carefully so that he could understand. Her people had lived in and with trees ever since anyone could remember. They were many, but they were widely scattered, in isolation, all over the planet They could be in touch with each other at any time, instandy. They were always in touch with the living force of any growing thing, sharing something with it He learned

  84 something of that, how to know a plant, a bush, a tree, and how to persuade it to respond to his wish as far as it had the power. There was wisdom in her beyond all words and that he learned, in part, without words. But there were, too, whole areas of thought in her that he didn't touch and didn't ask about, sensing in some way that they were not for him, that he was not yet ready. And in that there was more than a hint of sadness, of time that had to run out.

  One delight, and a great frustration at the same time, was her power to fly. She took him flying often, with no more effort than the firm touch of her hand in his. He was nervous only the first time, for the first giddy, breathtaking moment that they stood off from the branch outside her door and swooped away through the forest. After that, it was sheer delight to race in the mist, hand in hand, to plunge dizzily deep down into the gloom and then soar up again, up and up until the air was thin and chill and full of a red glow that was the furthest the sun could penetrate. She confessed to him frankly that to share his delight in this was to recapture something for herself, that she had been able to do it so long and had taken it for granted, but now she was learning the thrill of it all over again through him.

  "In learning about you," she said, "I have learned about myself, too, and for that I owe you very much." But he couldn't leam the trick of lifting himself like a feather through the air no matter how he tried. And he did try, as hard as he knew how. But that was a minor flaw among such a wealth of delight, and he didn't complain about it Most of all, and with no reservations at all now, he treasured those moments, and there were very many of them, when the quick flame would rise in her, the blushing color would come to warm and suffuse her loveliness, and instantly light the same eager fire in him. Then her eyes would glow and she would stretch out her arms to take him and hold him close. No words were ever needed now. There was total understanding and sharing between them, a complete sharing of need and surrender, of delight and interplay, stirring and stimulating each other to a pitch of rapture that always seemed too wonderful to be real, but was always even more wonderful with each eager renewal

  85

  Until the time came when her leaping ardor seemed to break every restraint and swept him away into a madness that was beyond anything he had ever imagined, a height that was terrifying and yet wonderful, so that he lost all sense of reality and was reluctant to drift back when at long last the fury was spent in both of them. It was as if some ultimate bond had broken, some new level of understanding had opened up. He lay by her side a long while, just content to be at peace. But there was something he had to say, now, like it or not. "Azul," he whispered, "there's a purpose in all this. A reason. Isn't it time that I knew what it is?"

  "Yes," she sounded sad, "it is time. Now."
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  XI

  HE RAISED HIMSELF on an arm to look down into her lovely face, one finger lightly caressing the chiseled perfection of her shoulder.

  "I think I've known all along that you had some reason for bringing me here other than just simple curiosity. You've never spoken of it, and I haven't asked, because I wanted to go on pretending to myself for a bit more time. You're not just curious about me and my kind, in the general sense. There's more to it than that. What?"

  He knew beyond all doubt that he was touching something cloudy in her mind, a region obscure to him. In everything else he was free to walk in and out of her mind at will. But not this. She smiled up at him, but there was a tinge of regret in her expression, almost a sadness.

  "You are strong now. Strong and clear. Strong enough, and ready, as I knew you would be. Truly, I, too, have been surrendering a little to pretense, to dreams, to happiness for its own sake, and the time for that is over. It is true, Stephen, tiiat I brought you here to study you, originally from sheer curiosity. I have learned much about you and your kind, some good, some bad. Much of what I have learned puzzles me, some delights me."

  "I've had delights, too."

  "I'm glad of that. If I have been able to give you strength, health, some knowledge, a little pleasure, you have given me back much more than I gave you. I needed the strength in you, the truth in you, and that has helped to make me whole again. In that there is a kind of justice."

  "Justice? I don't understand you."

  "You will" She became frighteningly remote and stem now, all without so much as a breath of change in her appearance. "Tell me ... I ask you for the first time . . . about that spot on our planet that you of Earth have made your private place. Tell me about it."

  In that instant Query switched from living in Paradise to being just an ordinary man, a trained man in a military service. Caution bloomed in him.

  "I can't tell you that, Azul. You shouldn't ask."

  "I could compel you."

  "You'd have to, but I don't think you will. I think I've learned to know you that well. If you do compel me, force me to tell the things I have no right to tell, then what happens to the understanding we have, and all the fine talk about you not being able to enter anywhere in my mind that I don't want to admit you?"

  "Tell me, Stephen."

  "I can't. I don't expect you to understand what a military secret is, and Lord knows I've no special reason to support military ethics, but there are men in there. Men, like me. I have to think of them, not just myself."

  "You would consider the many in preference to yourself?"

  "I have to. I don't know why. Part of being human, I suppose. I've no choice, Azul."

  "Nor have I," she said and smiled, again with a touch of sadness, "as you may discover. But now it is time for the Thing. It has been held off too long." She closed her eyes a moment and "went away," to return just as instantíy and mysteriously. "It is time. The family are at feast, just as they were when I first found you."

  "That's something you've never explained."

  "It is part of our function, each one of us Helsee, to watch over a family or, as you call it, a tribe. We watch over, guide and advise and help. And, rarely but very preciously, we sometimes find the newborn that is destined to become one of us."

  "Don't you, the Helsee, have children of your own?"

  "It has happened but very rarely indeed. For us, Stephen, it has to be the perfect matching of minds, and that is so rare as to be almost impossible. You see, it is a question of ego again. The fully developed ego is a unique thing, a complete identity, and thus almost inevitably different from any other." She smiled again, clasped his hand to her breast warmly. "Sharing our bodily delights is good, is re-creating energy and life force. That is within the capacity of any healthy organism. But a complete sharing and polarization of minds is infinitely more wonderful. And rare. You and I could never create a child ... in that much we are forever alien . . . but you have come into my mind and fired it and filled it in a way that I would never have dreamed of . . . but I must say no more of that, for there is a decision to be made that is not for me to prejudge. How I found you? I was watching over my family. I sensed strangers. In a while I grew so curious that I had to look closer. And there you were. It is enough."

  She stirred now, put away his arms gently and stood, holding out her hand to him. Again he had that awareness that she had "gone away" just for a moment. And then she smiled. "Come," she said, "it is time. We will go and collect your friends from the feasting."

  She led him away through a door that was curtained with creepers and out on to the broad branch from which they had started out on many a flight. But this was different. All at once he realized just how much of a prisoner he was. The ground was unthinkably far below. He could" never have climbed down there unaided, and even if he could have managed it, where would he run to? With her hand in his he could fly better than any bird, but by himself he was helpless. Trapped. He held her hand tight, felt lightness flow into him, and they lifted away and up. Her face was calm now, indrawn and inscrutable, and once again she was pearly white, all aglow. He felt fear but not from the whirling flight, the swift cleaving of the mist. That was familiar and a delight. The forest slid past They spun high and swooped, arrowing down like striking falcons, deep into the dark steam heat of the jungle, into the coiling, swirling mist, following the invisible thread of her mind.

  And now he could sense it, the many minds in concert, the rhythm of the beat and the chant. And there in a distant glow of rainbow color, a many hued fire, was the steep hillside and the caves, the rippling pool, and the jungle people all gathered in that ritual semicircle, chanting and clapping, bathed in the colorful glow. Query felt a strange pang. How long had it been since he had sat there and been awed by that native miracle? Azul slowed now, and her pearly radiance spread out to wrap both of them in a blaze of cold light.

  "When we go down," she said, "you will call your friends. I still cannot reach into them as I do with you. I can compel them by physical force, but I would rather not do that. You will call them."

  And once again he heard that awed, many throated cry as the damp, warm turf became solid under his feet

  "Hel-seeeeeel Helseeeeeel"

  Azul released his hand, stood a moment, then spread her arms. The adulation ceased at once. The silence was absolute.

  "Call them," she said softly.

  "For what?" he muttered. "What are you going to do to them?"

  "There is to be a judgment. A fair judgment, Stephen. Trust me."

  "That's easy to say, but what's going to happen?" "First I must undo what I have already done." "To them? You've done something to them? You told me ..."

  "That I could not reach them as I do you. That is true. But I was able to cushion things for them a little." "What's that mean?"

  "I was able to cast a blanket over those parts of their minds and memories to do with your kind of civilized life. This to protect them from constant humiliation and strain. To make them happy with their lot."

  "My God, you've made them into animals!"

  "Not so!" she was stern. "My people are not animals. They are simple and unspoiled primitives, yes, but not animals. They have a dignity which your kind lacks. They have a zest for life which your kind seems to lack also."

  Query had to be honest. Thinking back to his own ad-

  89 miration for the happy native peoples he felt a trifle ashamed of his anger. But he couldn't feel happy about any kind of mental tampering. She must have sensed what he thought to a degree.

  "There has been no harm, Stephen. It has been as if their civilized minds were asleep, nothing more than that. Otherwise they could not have integrated happily into the family. But now, when you call them, I will lift the veil from their minds and they will be as they were before. They will be pleased to see you again."

  "Maybe. You still haven't said what it's all for, this judgment."

  "Only for good, Stephen. On
that you must trust me. I cannot tell you more. I have my rules also. Trust me, Stephen!"

  "It doesn't look as if I have any choice!" he sighed, and stood away from her, peering into the gloom, the blue green light that was darker than he had remembered it. But he had developed more senses than just sight, and he was soon able to pick them out.

  "Admiral Evans! Christine! It's me, Stephen Query. Would you come here, please?"

  He watched as Evans gently disengaged himself from the embrace of an awed native woman and came slowly forward, staring. An old man still but not flabby anymore; he was lean and with a spring in his step and a glow of health to his skin. And here came Christine, strikingly tall and rounded against the slighter native women. She, too, was vibrant . with good health and lovelier than he had ever imagined her.

  "Query? Is it you?" The old man stuck out a fist. "By God, it's a pleasure to see you and to hear civilized speech again. Looking fit. We thought you were dead long ago. Dead. Carried off. Eh?"

  "Not dead, sir. Flesh and blood, as you can feeL You're looking well, too. Years younger and fit!"

  "Hah!" the old man grinned, not displeased. "It's a rough life, takes a bit of getting used to, but there wasn't much choice. We had to muck in with the rest. They're a good bunch. Live hard, play hard. It would be damned dull if the people weren't so friendly, eh, Christine?"

  "Hello, StephenI" she said, taking his hand and gripping

  it hard, coming close to smile radiantly at him. "I never thought to see you again. I'm so glad you're all right You look very well!"

  "We were sick, you know, Query. Sick, damned near died, both of us. But these people took care of us, saved our lives. Good people!"

  "I must say you both look very well now. Full of beans!" Query was groping for words, aware of their banality yet shaken by the nearness of Christine, and the tremendous vitality that emanated from her presence. It was a totally different feeling from the fire that Azul stirred in him, but almost as powerful in its way. "This life seems to agree with you," he said.