John Racham Page 9

  "They called you Helsee," he said, remembering. "You're some kind of supernatural being. An angel, or a goddess .. . aren't you?"

  "No." She seemed to take his words just as they came

  73 and think them over carefully. The jungle people use that sound to mean my people, we who live in the trees. To them, I suppose we are . . ." she hesitated, selecting her words, "... a kind of supernatural thing. Superhuman. I found that concept in your mind. But I am not that as you mean it The jungle people fear us and reverence us in equal parts. That is understandable. But I am not supernatural, nor a goddess. Helsee is the word for my people. My name is Azul. I am flesh like you."

  "You're talking ... in words, I mean. Not in my head, as you did before." His fear was shriveling now in the face of her obvious efforts to understand him and have him understand her. "You're speaking my language!"

  "Yes. Well enough, I hope, that you can understand me. It was not easy to learn the way. We do not speak as you, with a word-sound for everything. We use shaped sounds, words, to focus on, to point, to identify and to make symbols. Names. But the rest, the emotion and coloring, we do that directly from one to another. It took me a long time to understand that your kind do not use this way of feeling together. Is it true that your kind have no way of sharing feelings at all?"

  "No, that's not quite true. We do have a kind of empathy, sometimes, not very well understood. It's seen in a crowd, in a panic, sometimes in a theater, an emotional rapport. But it comes and goes, and nobody knows a great deal about it. There are some people, there always have been a few, who've claimed to know what other people were feeling. A kind of sympathy. How true that is I don't know. As for me, I've never had anything like that, not until I came here and found that I could . . . feel, along with those you call the jungle people. I've certainly never been able to do it with anybody else. If anything I understand them less than they understand each other. A kind of odd man out."

  "Ah!" she made a fractional nod. "Then it is as I thought You are not like the.other ones. I suspected as much."

  "The others? Good God!" He knew sudden chagrin and shame. "What about the other two? Christine and her father? What about them?"

  "Do not excite yourself too much. They are well now. For a time they had the digestive sickness that you had

  74 but not so severely as you had it, nor did it take them so long to recover. It seems you are different from them in constitution as well as mind."

  "For a time?" he echoed. "And they are all right now?"

  "They are well and fit, quite happy. I have taken care of that. I instructed the jungle people in the proper diet: certain fruits and leaves, and that fermented juice they had given you. And as soon as they were well enough I had them properly paired and involved in the . . . word? You have a word for a group of people who are interrelated? Family?"

  Query stared at her in bewilderment and growing unease. "You had them paired? Involved in the tribe? In God's name, how long have I been here?"

  She frowned now, no more than a small wrinkle of her brow. "That is a very difficult question. We do not have this concept of time as you do, as measurement." She lifted her hands from her knees and put them palm to palm in front of her. "There is now, this moment. There is that moment which is gone," she moved her left hand away to the side, "and all the other moments before that. And the moment which is not yet come, and all the moments yet to come after that," away went her right hand. "But when you say how long, I cannot tell you. As long as my arm or my leg? Or from this hand to the other one?" She spread her arms wide now, then returned them to her knees. "I cannot tell you how long. Enough that they are well and fit, that you are well and fit also, enough that I have had time—that word—to study how you speak. That is how long."

  Query sagged, his mind groping for clues and finding none. "You're sure they are well and healthy?"

  "Quite sure. And now you are distressed enough. You must eat and drink with me, and then we will sleep and gain more strength." She rose from her chair and held out her hand to him. He got up unsteadily and took a step toward her, then another, and it was as if he hadn't moved in months.

  "Of course I'm distressedl" he protested, as she took his fingers. "They must be worried stiff about me. Do they know about me? That I am here with you, I mean?"

  "I cannot reach them as I reach you. They are different

  75

  Come, it doesn't matter so long as they are happy." She led him on unsteady legs out of one chamber and into another, and he had the impression of going around a corner. This was a bigger space, where the walls were a living curtain of flowering shrubs, all quietly glowing and there was a semicircular niche with a ledge and a dark red covering on it, just the right height to sit on. She stretched out comfortably at one extremity of the arc, obviously meaning him to copy her, but he was struck by an anomaly. The red stuff was a soft cushioning layer, as he touched it. Something like that had been on his bed, too, where he had slept.

  "A cushion.Some kind of material. On this planet?"

  "No, not as you think it. Sit and we will discuss it while we eat and drink." He sat, and goggled as the leaves above her rustled and a bulbous fruit-head leaned out and into her hand. She squeezed gently, so that the tip popped open, and drank of the contents. He looked up and ducked as a similar one offered itself to him. There were also pulp fruits and nuts, all tastily edible, even if he did occasionally feel he was eating something alive. "Yours must be a strange world," she suggested, "where half of everything is dead, and you must wrap your bodies in stuff for protection and to keep warm. Dead, here, means that brief moment when anything ceases to grow and thus dissolves back into the whole."

  "Then this stuff," he prodded the cushion, "is alive?"

  "It is all part of my tree. My home."

  "This ... is a tree?" He stared around in sudden enlightenment. "We are inside it. You live in it. Then it wasn't a dream?"

  "It is better to say that I live with my tree. We share. All life is sharing, all part of the same living energy. Your world is very different from mine, but toe are alike in that much. Alike in shape, design and function, in almost eveiything except a few ideas."

  "Not function," he was quick to disagree. "We don't have anything like your mind reading ability. Nor can we fly, or was that a dream I had?"

  "You mean this?" and he choked on a mouthful as she floated up into the air, still easily reclining, to spin lazily and come erect with her feet inches from the floor. Then,

  76 breathtakmgly and beautifully, she floated into a slow dance, swaying and gliding, turning and spinning, and in a moment or two he realized that she was executing all the classical poses of ballet, the points, the jeté, the arabesque, ciseaux, all in mid-air and with smooth grace. Then came some he had never seen, nor could imagine any ballerina achieving . . . and then, with a last dizzying spin, she settled on her seat again with that tiny frown of hers. "This is strange to you? But you had pictures like that in your mind!"

  "Not like that!" he breathed. "Our dancers pretend to float like thistledown, but they are solid and heavy. They can't float."

  "I am flesh," she said, "and solid. Heavy. You can float like that, if you think properly. It is all a matter of thinking the right way. You can leam, if you want to. I will teach you, if you will let me. For now, we have time for a few more questions, and then sleep. Ask me."

  "I could ask a million," he confessed, his mind churning, "but I'm still concerned about my friends. You said paired and involved with the family. At a guess, didn't you mean integrated?" He had that creepy sense of fingers in his mind, and then she nodded. And then, fearfully, he asked, "What do you mean, paired?"

  "Paired? Should I have said mated? Matched together, male and female? The polarization of opposites. For health and happiness! Surely something so fundamental to life must be familiar to you?"

  X

  QUEHY WAS so SHAKEN as to be speechless for a long while. And then, "You mean . . . Christine is livin
g with one of the native men and Evans with one of the women?"

  "Of course!" she looked really puzzled now. "How else could they be brought back to health and how else kept healthy? It is understandable that you have strong feelings about this, because this is the prime force, the fountain of life for all things. But I do not understand why you are

  77 distressed. I repeat, how else can one achieve properly balanced health and happiness? It was necessary, just as it was necessary for us, you and I. How else could I have helped you back into health and strength?"

  He goggled at her again. "You . . . and me? Then that wasn't a dream either? You and me?"

  "Of course not. It was necessary."

  Fragments of his dreams came back to him, and he started to bum and feel uncomfortable. "That was a hell of a thing to do," he blurted, "just . . . just for the good of my health! Just for that!"

  She was still puzzled. "It was not something that I did for you. It was a sharing, a union of energies. There is something I do not understand here. Will you permit me to look into your thoughts?"

  "I can't stop you," he mumbled, and felt really naked, now.

  "You can and do stop me at any time you wish. Did you know that?"

  "But you've been making free with my mind for a long while!"

  "Not like that. Please, allow me to explain. Look, this is my arm, my hand, my leg, my body. You understand? There is also my brain, in here." She touched her head lightly. "And all my memories, values, ideas and concepts . . . is that right? But they are all mine, they are not me. How do I explain that? Do you have a word?" She was leaning forward now, animated, really intense in this search after an idea, and he was thrilled by the sheer force that came across from her. It struck a chord in him in a way no one else had ever done. This was the kind of problem he was always tangling with and never able to work out.

  "I think you mean ego. Personality. Identity. We have lots of words like that, but they aren't very clear. It's difficult to pin a word on to something that we can't identify in any way except to say that it is. It exists, without properties or qualities."

  "Ah!" she said, and smiled; and he saw that her teeth were just as perfect and white as the rest of her. But she wasn't white now. She was all at once intensely alive and a faint rose pink touched her skin from the inside,

  transforming it. The smile was a dazzle, too, making his heart Lift. "Ah!" she said again, "but the I-me ego does have a property. A power. It can choose. I can choose what I do, what I do not do, what I think is good, is bad, is important or never mind, what I want, what I do not want. All those other things are mine, but I choose what I will do with them."

  "That's a good point," he admitted, "but it's not enough. I mean, I might choose to do all sorts of things and not be able to do them!"

  "It is still a choice, but now it becomes a desire and then an act. A striving. You struggle with all your power— or, perhaps, you give up, but it rests on a choice. You see? And nothing else can choose!"

  "That's not right either," he came back at her. "I might choose not to eat and get away with it for a while, but my body will win out in the end, when I get really hungry."

  "That depends," she smiled more radiantly, "how strong you are. If you really want to starve to death, you can do it. But enough of that, we are agreed on this thing, let us call it your word, Ego. You. When you were asleep I looked into your mind. Yes, but only into your memories and your action patterns. Words. Values ... a little. Ideas . . . some of those. But not all. Only those I needed to leam your speech and to make you fit and well, and that part was simpler than I had expected, because you and I are so much alike. And nowhere in those areas was there any barrier to me. Do you understand that? I cannot touch what is closed to me. No one can. It is choice again, you see? If there are things that you choose to keep to yourself, as part of you, then I cannot intrude, nor can anyone else. Just as, if you had not wanted to become well, nothing I did would have been of any use. It is like that!"

  He was fascinated by the way she had come to life, by the tremendous vitality that warmed him, stirred his blood, as if she was reaching out to hold him physically. And yet there was nothing contrived about it. He had the complete conviction that if he had been able to look into her mind, as she could see into his, he would have seen it

  79 all open and free from any kind of pretense. He felt afire and humbled at the same time.

  "All right," he said, nerving himself. "You've persuaded me. Go ahead and look." But her smile went away now, and she was calm again.

  "Not like that. Not in fear and determination. Let me see, but only because I am curious, because I want to help, because I am interested—not because I am persuading you against your will."

  "All right," he whispered. "I trust you."

  Now, like a lamp lighting up, her smile was a radiance. And he felt the delicate touch of feather fingers, a tickle in his mind, and watched her face anxiously, trying to sense her emotions, if any. Her smile faded away slowly into a curiously guarded expression, for all the world as if she was trying to conceal amusement. And then a small frown set two tiny lines between her eyes, and she sighed.

  "You," she said, very softly, "are confused. It is understandable. It can be cleared away. We are even less different than I thought. So very simple. Who would have thought that something so simple could make such a confusion. But never mind, that can wait." She gave him a sudden smile that rocked him with its undertones of mischief and then was serious again. "It is the other two. I may have made a mistake about them. I think not, but there is one way to make sure. I have told you I cannot reach into their minds as I do with you. They are different. Closed up. They are all ego, clutching everything to themselves. But perhaps I can reach them a little through you. Cornel"

  She rose and led him back to the room he had awakened in, over to the bed he had slept on. There was that same resilient red surface here.

  "Lie down!" she ordered gently. "Stretch outl Move further along . . . there!" and as he shifted along she sat, turned, and stretched herself out by his side. He tensed, his heart coming up in his throat as he felt her body warm and silky against his, as she slid her arm under his head. "Hold me," she whispered. "Very close. Tight. Good. Now, shut your eyes and see through mine. You can. Just want tol"

  And, all at once, he could. Blurrily at first, but then

  80 more clear, he seemed to be a bodiless vision, swooping through the dark green gloom at breathtaking speed, suddenly and startlingly to leap into hard focus. And he knew, without knowing how, that he was looking out of the eyes of the head man of the jungle tribe. Only dimly was he aware of Azul's hand finding his and bringing it to her breast, of her warmth pressing close to him. All the rest of his consciousness looked out of those eyes, saw the steep and tortuous gorge that led up to the home site, and surveyed the rest of the party with competent care. There was the sense of partial success, a good hunt, a capture of a brood of little running things, something like pigs. And weary anticipation after a hard effort. Nearly home now. One last look to make sure everyone was present, even though he could sense them all . . . except one. Mark him with care. Turn and stare. And Query gasped mentally, as a cheery, ruddy, grinning face showed up back there.

  Old Evans, beyond doubt, but leaner and fitter than he remembered. Younger, too, by the look And with a stuck carcass slung over a shoulder, and a tube-weapon tucked under his arm. But now, as the head man, he faced forward and tramped the last few yards up to the flat, into that warm and welcome breeze and sight of the pool and the waterfall. Homel And here came the swarm of old men and women, toddlers, young ones, all eager to grab food and cany it off. And there went old Evans, grabbing and hugging a laughing and comely native woman who was obviously glad to see him back. A happy sight Query warmed to it, to the way the others met and embraced. And then he sensed a special warmth as one woman sorted herself out of the rest. Taller than the others, Lithe and lovely as she ran with arms outstretched . . . and Query caugh
t his breath. It was Christine, but this was Christine transformed, lovely and alive as an Amazon, her full-bosomed curves more glorious than ever, as firm and inviting as any young girl's. She would have passed for a delicious eighteen as she ran to hurl herself at the head man and hug him . . . and the instinctive emotional reaction struck through Query like a flame . . . and in that same instant the vision was gone and he was back in his own awareness.

  And aware that he was clutching Azul tightly to him-

  81 self. And that she was responding, hugging him with equal fervor, the same primitive heat coursing through that perfect body of hers, setting fire to it, and sharing that fire with him. Her lips brushed his cheek, her quiet voice whispering.

  "Give me that strength of yours, Stephen Query, and take mine in return, that we may both be renewed and made strong." And then she had captured his mouth, his heart, all his emotions in an embrace that swept him away and shook him, lifted him as never before. But then, somehow, it was as if they both abandoned those interlocked bodies that came together and struck life energy from each other . . . left them somewhere below, exulting, and he and she went away somewhere else, somewhere quiet and immaterial, where it was just her mind and his in close conversation. And that hint of mischief.

  You are confused. Why do you think unfair of me?

  You caught me unaware. I had no real choice!

  Come now, will you pretend that you do not want this? Will you try to pretend that, now? Here?