A house? But it seemed so insubstantial. Maybe it was a trick of this dim light, but the oblong looked filmy, semitransparent. A house of glass?
But who could have built a house of glass on Amara, where building was at a primitive level? So far as was known. That qualification must always be added; so little of Amara was known.
In a little while, when he had recovered some strength, he would go and investigate the pale shape.
Suddenly, there snapped into being, only a few yards away and plainly solid and real, another fruit tree. He stared at it. It seemed as firmly rooted as the one he reclined against.
Now his curiosity was engaged and his mind began to work of its own volition, albeit slowly. About a foot above his head there jutted a stubby little branch. If he could reach it and pull himself to his feet…
Somehow he did so, through a series of small deliberate movements. He had achieved the status of pithecanthropus erectus, at least, and might yet become a man again. He looked around him slowly—and then clung more tightly to the little branch. For six more fruit trees, all exactly similar, had joined the other one, confronting him in a tight arc.
His brain whirled. Fear stirred in him. He knew he was in serious danger, yet couldn’t define the threat. He had to get away from here. He set his teeth and let go of the branch. He stood freely but swaying. Then two further trees created themselves soundlessly before him. The fruit of all of these trees looked like black plums. In another light they could have been red. For no reason, he felt sure they were poisonous. Beyond the trees the pale oblong glimmered indistinctly. The safety he’d sought so desperately didn’t lie under this tree. But if he could reach the house…
More trees sprang from nowhere, between him and that possible sanctuary. Steadily he was being hemmed in by a small, dense wood.
A vague memory of the fate of Macbeth floated into his mind. When Birnam Wood came to Dunsinane, it brought the prophesied doom with it. He took a shaky pace forward. A tree leapt up in his path. He clung to it—to the seemingly identical branch he had just relinquished. He worked his way around the bole and tried to walk on.
Another tree barred his way and stopped him in his tracks. Beware of that which becomes many.
What was the use of warnings whose meanings you learned only when it was too late?
These trees springing from nowhere had a purpose.
They were deliberately blocking his path to the house. For some reason they didn’t want him to reach it. Okay, he would head away from the house, back along the margin of the swamp. He turned, intending to go that way. Almost as if they’d read his mind, five more trees appeared like a palisade before him.
That made it clear that the trees didn’t wish him to go any place at all. They were trying to draw a magic circle around him.
Wearily, he detached the machete from his belt and swung at the nearest tree. And again. A tiny chip went flying. He had merely nicked the tree. What little energy he had recovered began already to ebb. Felling the tree was far beyond him. The trees were tall and clasped their branches closely to themselves in the manner of a poplar. He thought, so long as I stay close to the boles I’ll always be able to sidle between them, however many trees there get to be, because their branches must keep them a little apart.
He turned again towards the house, intent upon trying his method. Cr-runch. Two further trees arrived, their branches groaning and creaking as they intermeshed. Leaves and broken pieces fell about him.
This seemed to confirm that his thoughts were being read and his every intention consciously frustrated. A weak fury spurred him to try to shoulder his way between these two latest arrivals. It was impossible. The gap was too narrow. He realized that even if he were physically fit, there could be no escape from the trap closing about him.
He lost his head, and made a series of wild dashes in different directions. The air was full of the sound of the cracking, clashing, and breaking of branches. Arms flailing, he rebounded from bole after bole. When one arm was caught between a pair of them snapping into objectivity simultaneously, he cried aloud in fright and despair. If this mad multiplication continued, his lease of life was short; quite soon he would be crushed to death.
Sweating, he wrenched his arm free after a struggle. The effort burned away his last drop of energy. He collapsed from sheer weakness. The side of his head thumped hard against one of a compact circle of trees.
The purple world darkened into night.
CHAPTER THREE
« ^ »
SHERRET didn’t believe in ghosts, but he had to believe in this one because he saw it. He knew it was a ghost because it was as transparent as lace and wore a shroud. Although he lay helpless before it, it didn’t scare him because it was the ghost of a friendly and beautiful woman.
There was no color to her cheeks, eyes, or lips, but they conveyed expression clearly enough. The ghost was both concerned and hopeful. Obviously she was concerned about him. What she was hopeful about was less obvious. She had a ghost of a voice—a sweet whisper. She spoke to him and he heard himself answering. But what either of them said, or in what language, he had no idea. It was a murmur of voices heard in the distance in an opium dream. He felt detached from them. Only one thing emerged clearly—her name was Rosala. He was lying relaxed and at peace in a purple twilight.
Then she reached down and laid a finger on his shoulder. He couldn’t feel the touch of it. He seemed unable to make any movement himself. Although he felt as though he were still reclining on his back, his body drifted gently upwards. He was floating on air, her finger still on his shoulder.
So he must be a ghost, too, and this must be the next world. It was strange, but not frightening. Indeed, it became amusing when Rosala began to push him along through the air, still using only the one finger, as though he were some kind of human balloon.
They came to a garden which even in this murky light looked lovely. There were wide lawns, and flowers drained of brightness by the dim illumination, and an ornamental pool which seemed full of black ink. There were many statues at the pool’s edge and spaced about the lawns. It looked odd. Some of them were plainly as substantial as marble, but the rest were as ghostly and tenuous as Rosala herself, and as the pale oblong they were now approaching, which was the side of a many-windowed house.
The main door was large, open, and flanked by a pair of indubitably solid sculptures of naked women, life-size and life-like. As he passed between them, he saw they both had the same face.
It was Rosala’s.
Then he passed into a blinding white light and closed his eyes against the dazzle of it. Almost at once he fell asleep. He dreamed, and the dreams were confusing, but seemed very real while they lasted. Intermittently, there came patches of unconsciousness where there were no dreams.
He was always glad to emerge from them and find Rosala there. She was the one constant in a giddy flux. And so she remained unchanging—until he found he could change her.
Within the house she never wore the robe he’d naively assumed to be a shroud. She was as unadorned as her twin likenesses guarding the door. Her figure was well rounded and pleasing, but rather too full for his taste, like the Velasquez Venus. Watching her, he let his imagination slim her somewhat at the waist and hips. And, lo, she became slimmer before his eyes. This was an exciting discovery, especially as it seemed far more vivid and real than the erotic fantasies of adolescence. But he had disproportioned her. So then he had to reduce her bosom, then fine down her limbs to slim elegance.
Sculpturing in flesh was a fascinating occupation. She didn’t seem to mind it in the least, and was always smiling at him and talking to him. They had long conversations. It was queer, but he was never able to recollect what they were about. Indeed, while they were in progress, he hardly knew what he was saying. He was never conscious of eating or drinking, but he supposed he must be absorbing sustenance for he felt neither hunger nor thirst. Also, he supposed he must now be capable of movement, for he kept f
inding himself in different parts of the house, though he had no memory of having walked to them. He had only a vague conception of the house. He knew it was extensive, and that the biggest room, where they spent most of the time, was a kind of studio. Paintings hung on the walls and stood on easels. There were several large blocks of stone, some partially carved.
Rosala was both painter and sculptress, yet he never saw her handle a brush or chisel.
It was strange that he knew her name, but couldn’t recall his own. He had a suspicion that this was because he hadn’t a full title to a name. He wasn’t a complete personality, only a detached fragment of one. The rest— the bulk—of him was elsewhere. Who, and where, was the real he? It was a puzzle without solution in a timeless, meaningless existence.
Until suddenly, at some dateless point and without the slightest warning, full consciousness struck him. There was a sunburst in his mind. In the strong white light which permeated Rosala’s house all objects at once became hard, brilliant, colorful, as though he were seeing them under the influence of mescalin.
He knew he was Alexander Sherret. He remembered clearly his adventures on the trek to Na-Abiza up to the point where he fell and crashed his head against something hard. After that, things remained hazy.
That part of him who had had long talks with Rosala was still absent, things in some blind alley of the memory. However, here he stood now in the center of the studio, in slippers and a blue velvety robe with a golden cord gathering in the waist. He felt vitally alive and strong. He walked across the glassy floor, which contained intertwining ribbons of colors, moving slowly like snakes, in its depths, to a wall mirror.
He looked well too, and had grown an impressive, rust-red beard. He fingered it, and touched more tenderly the still sore place above his right ear. A slight lump remained there.
A painting on an easel caught his attention. It sent a small shock of disquiet through him. In purple monochrome it stylistically displayed the pattern of a man trapped, grotesquely twisted and crushed amid a cluster of tall, smooth pillars. Although contorted in pain and fright, the face was recognizably his. The pillars, presumably, were simplified versions of the trees.
As he regarded it, unconsciously he began a new habit —a nervous tugging at his beard.
A pair of ivory-white, perfectly molded arms stole around his shoulders from behind. A honeyed voice whispered in his ear, in Amaran with an attractive, unfamiliar accent,
“Ah, my Ulysses, you said you never wanted to look at it again. But it fascinates you, doesn’t it? Art is stronger than our fears or desires. Didn’t I always tell you that?”
He disengaged himself and turned to look into Rosala’s smiling eyes. They were his favorite shade of blue. She was an ash blonde; he had a weakness for the Scandinavian type.
He said in an undertone, “How could anyone so lovely as you create anything so horrible as that?”
She pouted childishly. “Create? I didn’t create it. An artist only receives and records impressions.”
“Art is selection, Rosala. You could have selected worthier impressions than these. This picture is stark, gloating sadism. You must be a cruel woman.”
She stared at him strangely. “You can believe that?”
“Well, I don’t know. I only know I loathe this painting.”
She took a deep breath. “Very well, you loathe my work,” she said, in a hard voice startling different from her former tone. She thrust past him and punched at the canvas with both fists. There was strength in those slim, smooth arms. They smashed the painting to a torn ruin.
She turned on him with an angrily flushed face.
“Perhaps you—” she began, but quite impulsively he seized her, hugged her, and smothered her with kisses. She didn’t resist. She returned his kisses with passion. He observed, belatedly and with wry amusement, that she was quite naked. From the assured and easy way he fondled her, it was apparent that this embrace had happened many times, that his muscles and nervous system remembered what he did not.
“Ulysses,” she murmured, now tender and full of love.
“Why do you call me Ulysses?”
She stood back, holding him at arm’s length, and looked searchingly at him.
“Darling, you are talking strangely. Something has happened. What is it? Have the bad dreams come back?”
“Bad dreams?”
“That painting which you called sadistic didn’t come from my mind, you know. Nor from reality. It originated in your imagination. But it was our picture—your conception, my execution. Together we were exorcising your bad dreams of the Melas tree. Once expressed externally, in paint, in art, we hoped they would cease to haunt you. You don’t remember that?”
“No, Rosala, I don’t remember. I don’t know what’s been happening to me for some time past—at least, not clearly. You’ll have to help me to fill in the gaps, the blotted out parts. Perhaps I’d better tell you what I can remember.”
She looked at him for a moment, then nodded, and pulled him gently to a nearby couch. They settled among cushions.
She watched him wonderingly while he told of the trek, the events which had led to it, the things seen through a glass darkly since he started wading ashore from the raft.
When he finished, she said, “As for me… It’s strange to have to tell you these things again. I’m Rosala —yes, that’s my real name. When I asked your name, you did not say ‘Sherret’” (she pronounced it “Sherry”) “but ‘Ulysses.’ And at first you called me ‘Circe,’ I don’t know why. But later, ‘Rosala.’
“One day I was walking sadly in my house, knowing that neither it nor I had much longer to live. I was wondering how much time was left to me, whether it would be worth starting another painting. Or if, in fact, I could ever paint again. Then I looked out of the window and saw you being trapped by the Melas tree.
“Then you fell and lost your senses. So I went out and brought you here. I felt sorry for you. And sorry for the Melas tree, too, because I was depriving it of further companions. Still, it had done very well for itself from you. I was glad of that. The Melas tree and we Petrans have a bond of sympathy, something in common which distinguishes us from all other living creatures on Amara.”
Sherret raised an eyebrow, and she paused.
“However,” she resumed, “Melas trees can live together in a community. The one beyond my garden, by the river, was unfortunate. It was isolated. Now it isn’t any more. It’s become a community because by chance you came. But we Petrans can’t live with each other for long. We have nothing to give one another. We must live alone, and die alone, unless—”
She broke off, and stroked his arm gently. Almost possessively, Sherret thought, with a vague alarm.
“There aren’t many of us. We live near the river. And the Melas trees grow only by the river, too. Most Amarans are afraid to come near us. Lee wasn’t afraid. He was a real man, although sometimes he lost confidence in himself.”
“Lee? Who was Lee?”
“He was the man who lived with me before you came.”
Sherret disengaged his arm and sat up straight. He frowned down at her. Her beautiful white body lay at careless ease upon the bright cushions. Her profile, partly his creation, with its high brow, straight nose, and firm little chin, was upturned as she gazed at the lofty and domed ceiling. Obviously, she was remembering Lee with affection.
Or perhaps with more than affection.
“You were lovers?” Sherret was surprised at the condemnatory note which rang through the last word. He’d never thought of himself as a puritan. Perhaps he had inherited a Calvinistic streak from his Scottish ancestors.
“But of course. I have loved all of the men who have lived with me.”
“Well, I’ll be damned! You promiscuous little baggage!”
Unfortunately, that phrase didn’t translate well into Amaran. The result implied cold, calculating infidelity.
She sat up abruptly and stared at him with wide, horrified eyes.
Then she clawed at his face with both hands. The beard partly saved him but she scored two bad scratches under his eyes. The blood welled and dripped.
He swore, jumping to his feet and flinging her back on the couch. He dabbed at the wounds with the back of one hand.
“You’re a bad-tempered cat, aren’t you? You could make a man’s life a hell, I reckon. Is that why none of your men stayed around here with you? Or did you kill
’em all?”
Her eyes shone like blue fire.
She lifted an arm rigidly and pointed at him. Then it was as though a cannonball had hit him in the chest. He went flying onto his back on the glacial floor and slid for some feet over the slowly writhing shapes beneath it.
He lay still for some moments, whooping for breath. Then he sat up slowly, hands pressed to his sore breastbone. From the couch she regarded him, the fire of hate gone. She looked like a petulant, disappointed child. The strikingly blue eyes looked big and sad.
“You win,” said Sherret with a gasp. “Technical knockout. I didn’t… see it coming.” He managed a grin.
At once she ran over to him, knelt, held his head tightly agtinst her warm body, rocking him gently. The blood from his cheek smeared her breasts. “Sherry, I’m really sorry. Oh, Sherry—”
“Forget it, pet. I said the wrong thing the wrong way.” She said, softly, “Only wicked Petrans live with more than one man at a time. I always had only the one. So I couldn’t be unfaithful.” Between kisses, she went on, “I loved them all… but only some of them loved me. Perhaps none of them did—for they all left me in the end. I think Lee loved me—and will come back to me— when he has proven himself.”
Sherret felt a stab of jealousy about Lee. He stood up, picked her up—she was surprisingly light—and carried her back to the couch.
He. said, “You’re getting me in a whirl. I just don’t understand your way of life. I was angry with you because I love you, and I was jealous of those other men. Now you talk of Lee coming back. Is it him you want—or me?”
She made no answer. Instead, she ripped a piece of cloth from a cushion, licked it wet, and tenderly cleaned up his face. She ignored the daubs on her own flesh. He was amused by her method and touched by her concern. Even though he knew she would have done as much for Lee—and perhaps had done, if they had fought in the same way.
The Three Suns of Amara Page 3
