by Tanith Lee
They were crossing water, partly frozen. Ahead stood a low mountain. From its conical exaggerated shape, she took it to be man-made, one of the structured stoneworks that here and there augmented the Earth. Soon they reached a narrow shore, and as the dusk turned gentian, the car began to ascend.
A gentle voice spoke to her from the controls. It seemed that in ten minutes she would have arrived.
—
There was a tall steel gate at which the snow-car was exchanged for a small vehicle that ran on an aerial cable. Forty feet above the ground, Estár looked from the window at the mile of cultivated land below, which was a garden. Before the twilight had quite dispersed, she saw a weather control existed, manipulating the seasons. It was autumn by the gate and yellow leaves dripped from the trees. Later, autumn trembled into summer, and heavy foliage swept against the sides of the car. It was completely dark when the journey ended, but as the car settled on its platform, the mild darkness and wild scents of spring came in through its opening doors.
She left the car and was borne down a moving stair, a metal servant flying leisurely before with her luggage. Through wreaths of pale blossom she saw a building, a square containing a glowing orb of roof, and starred by external illuminators.
She reached the ground. Doors bloomed into light and opened.
A lobby, quite large, a larger room beyond. A room of seductive symmetry—she had expected nothing else. There was no reason why it should not be pleasant, even enough like other rooms she had seen as to appear familiar. Yet, too, there was something indefinably strange, a scent, perhaps, or some strain of subsonic noise. It was welcome, the strangeness. To find no alien thing at once could have disturbed her. And maybe such psychology was understood, and catered to.
A luminous bead came to hover in the air like a tame bird.
“Estár Levina,” it said, and its voice was like that of a beautiful unearthly child. “I will be your guide. A suite has been prepared for you. Any questions you may wish—”
“Yes,” she broke in, affronted by its sweetness, “when shall I meet—with your controller?”
“Whenever you desire, Estár Levina.”
“When I desire? Suppose I have no desire ever to meet— him?”
“If such is to be your need, it will be respected, wherever possible.”
“And eventually it will no longer be possible and I shall be briskly escorted into his presence.”
The bead shimmered in the air.
“There is no coercion. You are forced to do nothing which does not accord with your sense of autonomy.”
“But I’m here against my will,” she said flatly.
The bead shimmered, shimmered.
Presently she let it lead her silently across the symmetrical alien room, and into other symmetrical alien rooms.
—
Because of what the voice-bead had said to her, however, she kept to her allotted apartment, her private garden, for a month.
The suite was beautiful, and furnished with all she might require. She was, she discovered, even permitted access, via her own small console, to the library bank of the house. Anything she could not obtain through her screen, the voice-bead would have brought for her. In her garden, which had been designed in the manner of the Second Renascence, high summer held sway over the slender ten-foot topiary. When darkness fell, alabaster lamps lit themselves softly among the foliage and under the falling tails of water.
She wondered if she was spied on. She acted perversely and theatrically at times in case this might be so. At others she availed herself of much of what the technological dwelling could give her.
Doors whisked open, clothes were constructed and brought, baths run, tapes deposited as though by invisible hands. It was as if she were waited on by phantoms. The science of Earth had never quite achieved this fastidious level, or had not wanted to. The unseen mechanisms and energies in the air would even turn the pages of books for her, if requested.
She sent a letter to her father after two days. If read simply:
I am here and all is well. Even to her the sparseness was disturbing. She added a postscript: Joya must stop crying over me or her baby will be washed away.
She wondered, as her letter was wafted out, if the alien would read it.
On the tenth day, moodily, she summoned from the library literature and spoken theses on the aliens’ culture and their world.
“Curiosity,” she said to the walls, “killed the cat.” She knew already, of course, what they most resembled— some species of huge feline, the hair thick as moss on every inch of them save the lips, the nostrils, the eyes, and the private areas of the body. Though perhaps ashamed of their state, they had never hidden descriptions of themselves, only their actual selves, behind the visors and the draperies.
She noted that while there were many three-dimensional stills of their planet, and their deeds there and elsewhere, no moving videos were available, and this perhaps was universally so.
She looked at thin colossal mountain ranges, tiny figures in the foreground, or sporting activities in a blur of dust—the game clear, the figures less so. Tactfully, no stress was laid even here, in their own habitat, on their unpalatable differences. What Earth would see had been vetted. The sky of their planet was blue, like the sky of Earth. And yet utterly alien in some way that was indecipherable. The shape of the clouds, maybe, the depth of the horizon… Like the impenetrable differences all about her. Not once did she wake from sleep disoriented, thinking herself in her father’s house.
The garden appealed to her, however; she took aesthetic comfort from it. She ate out on a broad white terrace under the leaves and the stars in the hot summer night, dishes floating to her hands, wine and coffees into her goblet, her cup, and a rose-petal paper cigarette into her fingers.
Everywhere secrets, everywhere the concealed facts.
“If,” she said to the walls, “I am observed, are you enjoying it, O Master?” She liked archaic terms, fashions, music, art, attitudes. They had always solaced her, and sometimes given her weapons against her own culture which she had not seemed to fit. Naturally, inevitably, she did not really feel uneasy here. As she had bitterly foreseen, she was no more un-at-home in the alien’s domicile than in her father’s.
But why was she here? The ultimate secret. Not a slave, not a pet. She was free as air. As presumably all the others were free. And the answers that had come from the lips and styluses of those others had never offered a satisfactory solution. Nor could she uncover the truth, folded in this privacy.
She was growing restless. The fear, the rage, had turned to a fearful angry ache to know—to seek her abductor, confront him, perhaps touch him, talk to him.
Curiosity… If by any chance he did not spy on her, did not nightly read reports on her every action from the machines of the house, why then the Cat might be curious too.
“How patient you’ve been,” she congratulated the walls, on the morning of the last day of the month. “Shall I invite you to my garden? Or shall I meet you in yours?” And then she closed her eyes and merely thought, in concise clipped words within her brain: I will wait for you on the lawn before the house, under all that blossom. At sunset.
And there at sunset she was, dressed in a version of Earth’s fifteenth century, and material developed from Martian dust crystals.
Through the blossoming spring trees the light glittered red upon her dress and on her, and then a shadow came between her and the sun.
She looked up, and an extraordinary sensation filled her eyes, her head, her whole torso. It was not like fear at all, more like some other tremendous emotion. She almost burst into tears.
He was here. He had read her mind. And, since he had been able to do that, it was improbable he had ever merely spied on her at all.
“You admit it,” she said. “Despite your respect for my— my privacy—how funny!—you admit I have none!”
He was taller than she, but not so much taller that she was unprep
ared for it. She herself was tall. He was covered, as the aliens always covered themselves, totally, entirely. A glint of oblique sun slithered on the darkened face-plate through which he saw her, and through which she could not see him at all. The trousers fit close to his body, and the fabric shone somewhat, distorting, so she could be sure of nothing. There was no chink. The garments adhered. Not a centimeter of body surface showed, only its planes, male and well-formed: familiar, alien—like the rooms, the skies of his world. His hands were cased in gauntlets, a foolish, inadvertent complement to her own apparel. The fingers were long. There were six of them. She had seen a score of photographs and threedems of such beings.
But what had happened. That was new.
Then he spoke to her, and she realized with a vague shock that some mechanism was at work to distort even his voice so it should not offend her kind.
“That I read your thoughts was not an infringement of your privacy, Estár Levina. Consider. You intended that they should be read, I admit, my mind is sensitive to another mind which signals to it. You signaled very strongly. Almost, I might say, with a razor’s edge.”
“I,” she said, “am not a telepath.”
“I’m receptive to any such intentional signal. Try to believe me when I tell you I don’t, at this moment, know what you are thinking. Although I could guess.”
His voice had no accent, only the mechanical distortion. And yet it was—charming—in some way that was quite abhuman, quite unacceptable.
—
They walked awhile in the outer garden in the dusk. Illuminators ignited to reveal vines, orchids, trees—all of another planet, mutating gently among the strands of terrestrial vegetation.
Three feet high, a flower like an iris with petals like dark blue flames allowed the moon to climb its stem out of the valley below.
They barely spoke. Now and then she asked a question, and he replied. Then, somewhere among a flood of Earthly sycamores, she suddenly found he was telling her a story, a myth of his own world. She listened, tranced. The weird voice, the twilight, the spring perfume, and the words themselves made a sort of rhapsody. Later that night, alone, she discovered she could not remember the story and was forced to search it out among the intellectual curios of the library bank. Deprived of his voice, the garden and the dusk, it was a very minor thing, common to many cultures, and patently more than one planet. A quest, a series of tasks. It was the multitude of plants which had prompted the story, that and the rising of a particular star.
When they reentered the house, they went into an upper room, where a dinner was served. And where he also ate and drank. The area of the facial mask which corresponded with his lips incredibly somehow was not there as he raised goblet or fork toward them. And then, as he lowered the utensil, it was there once more, solid and unbreachable as ever. Not once, during these dissolves of seemingly impenetrable matter, did she catch a glimpse of what lay beyond. She stared, and her anger rose like oxygen, filling her, fading.
“I apologize for puzzling you,” he said. “The visor is constructed of separable atoms and molecules, a process not yet in use generally on Earth. If this bothers you, I can forgo my meal.”
“It bothers me. Don’t forgo your meal. Why,” she said, “are you able to eat Earth food? Why has this process of separable atoms not been given to Earth?” And, to her astonishment, her own fragile glass dropped from her hand in pieces that never struck the floor.
“Have you been cut?” his distorted voice asked her unemphatically.
Estár beheld she had not.
“I wasn’t,” she said, “holding it tightly enough for that to happen.”
“The house is eager to serve you, unused to you, and so misunderstands at times. You perhaps wanted to crush something?”
“I should like,” she said, “to return to my father’s house.”
“At any time, you may do so.”
“But I want,” she said, “to stay there. I mean that I don’t want to come back here.”
She waited. He would say she had to come back. Thus, she would have forced him to display his true and brutal omnipotence.
He said, “I’m not reading your mind, I assure you of that. But I can sense instantly whenever you lie.”
“Lie? What am I lying about? I said, I want to go home.”
“ ‘Home’ is a word which has no meaning for you, Estár Levina. This is as much your home as the house of your father.”
“This is the house of a beast,” she said, daringly. She was very cold, as if winter had abruptly broken in. “A superior, wondrous monster.” She sounded calm. “Perhaps I could kill it. What would happen then? A vengeance fleet dispatched from your galaxy to destroy the terrestrial solar system?”
“You would be unable to kill me. My skin is very thick and resilient. The same is true of my internal structure. You could, possibly, cause me considerable pain, but not death.”
“No, of course not.” She lowered her eyes from the blank shining mask. Her pulses beat from her skull to her soles. She was ashamed of her ineffectual tantrum. “I’m sorry. Sorry for my bad manners, and equally for my inability to murder you. I think I should go back to my own rooms.”
“But why?” he said. “My impression is that you would prefer to stay here.”
She sat and looked at him hopelessly.
“It’s not,” he said, “that I disallow your camouflage, but the very nature of camouflage is that it should successfully wed you to your surroundings. You are trying to lie to yourself, and not to me. This is the cause of your failure.”
“Why was I brought here?” she said. “Other than to be played with and humiliated.” To her surprise and discomfort, she found she was being humorous, and laughed shortly. He did not join in her laughter, but she sensed from him something that was also humorous, receptive. “Is it an experiment in adaptation; in tolerance?”
“To determine how much proximity a human can tolerate to one of us?”
“Or vice versa.”
“No.”
«Then what?“
There was a pause. Without warning, a torrent of nausea and fear swept over her. Could he read it from her? Her eyes blackened and she put one hand over them. Swiftly, almost choking, she said, “If there is an answer, don’t, please don’t tell me.”
He was silent, and after a few moments she was better. She sipped the cool wine from the new goblet which had swum to her place. Not looking at him at all, she said, “Have I implanted this barrier against knowledge of that type, or have you?”
“Estár,” she heard him say, far away across the few yards of the table, “Estár, your race tends sometimes to demand too little or too much of itself. If there’s an answer to your question, you will find it in your own time. You are afraid of the idea of the answer, not the answer itself. Wait until the fear goes.”
“How can the fear go? You’ve condemned me to it, keeping me here.”
But her words were lies, and now she knew it.
She had spoken more to him in a space of hours than to any of her own kind. She had been relaxed enough in his company almost to allow herself to faint, when, on the two other occasions of her life that she had almost fainted, in company with Levin, or with Lyra, Estár had clung to consciousness in horror, unreasonably terrified to let go.
The alien sat across the table. Not a table knife, not an angle of the room, but was subtly strange in ways she could not place or understand. And he, his ghastly nightmarish ugliness swathed in its disguise…
Again with no warning she began to cry. She wept for three minutes in front of him, dimly conscious of some dispassionate compassion that had nothing to do with involvement. Sobbing, she was aware after all he did not read her thoughts. Even the house did not, though it brought her a foam of tissues. After the three minutes she excused herself and left him. And now he did not detain her.
In her rooms, she found her bed blissfully prepared and lay down on it, letting the mechanisms, visible and invisible, u
ndress her. She woke somewhere in the earliest morning and called the bead like a drop of rain and sent it to fetch the story he had told her.
She resolved she would not go near him again until he summoned her.
A day passed.
A night.
A day.
She thought about him. She wrote a brief essay on how she analyzed him, his physical aura, his few gestures, his inherent hideousness to which she must always be primed, even unknowingly. The distorted voice that nevertheless was so fascinating.
A night.
She could not sleep. He had not summoned her. She walked in her private garden under the stars and found a green rose growing there, softly lighted by a shallow lamp. She gazed on the glow seeping through the tensed and tender petals. She knew herself enveloped in such a glow, a light penetrating her resistance.
“The electric irresistible charisma,” she wrote, “of the thing one has always yearned for. To be known, accepted, and so to be at peace. No longer unique, or shut in, or shut out, or alone.”
A day.
She planned how she might run away. Escaping the garden, stumbling down the mountain, searching through the wilderness for some post of communications or transport The plan became a daydream and he found her.
A night.
A day.
That day, she stopped pretending, and suddenly he was in her garden. She did not know how he had arrived, but she stepped between the topiary and he was there. He extended his hand in a formal greeting; gloved, six-fingered, not remotely unwieldy. She took his hand. They spoke. They talked all that day, and some of the night, and he played her music from his world and she did not understand it, but it touched some chord in her, over and over with all of its own fiery chords.
She had never comprehended what she needed of herself. She told him of things she had forgotten she knew. He taught her a board game from his world, and she taught him a game with dots of colored light from Earth.
