Sideslip

by Ted White

  “Let us begin afresh, then. Let’s clear away the misconceptions. I love you, Ronald Archer.”

  We slept together that night.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  I awoke the next morning to a “click” and to sunlight pouring suddenly in through a wall of glass from floor to ceiling and from- wall to wall.

  Sunlight—that looked blue for a moment instead of orange. Then I realized that it was only slightly tinged with blue, but never having seen any other kind of sunlight than the good old home-grown kind, it took my central nervous system by surprise. My central nervous system had been having a workout, the past two weeks.

  “I thought that was a solid wall,” I said, feeling rather more stupid than usual.

  “Opaque polarization,” she answered; “I pushed this button, which changed the polarization by means of an electric charge sent through the material of the windows.” My Suolanian memories twitched and told me that this was indeed true. I felt like giving them and her a formal vote of confidence or thanks.

  Sharna got up and started to dress, completely unconcerned at my presence in the room, paying no attention to the wide expanse of glass overlooking Shalianna the Glorious—and right next to another tall building with a patchwork pattern on it of blank squares and clear windows.

  “Don’t have to worry about peeping Toms, eh?” I asked.

  She laughed. “No nudity taboo, remember?”

  I grunted assent, shrugged, and started to get dressed too. “So what’s on the agenda today?”

  “I arranged it from the Pamorr. First we visit a friend of mine, Kallarnu; he’s high in the Central Control of the Authority. More important than that, he’s also the only member of our party on the Council of Colonial Affairs, while we have a number of other members and sympathizers in the Authority itself.

  “After we see Kallamu, we go with him, I presume, to a meeting of the Council. Then ...”

  “Okay,” I interrupted, “I see you’ve got it all lined up. But just what am I going to be doing while the Great White Father confers with the other Great White Fathers?”

  I felt like a Carib Indian brought back by Columbus to meet the whole goddam Spanish court. What was I doing here?

  “It’s true matters are pretty much out of your hands for the time being—and out of mine too, I’m afraid,” she said soothingly.

  “Yeah. While I’m waiting maybe I can clean up a fortune teaching the natives how to play tiddlywinks. Or something.”

  “Events have been moving along; the Council is going to have to take some action. And if so, you will have contributed to it, even if it’s difficult for you to see now just how.”

  “Well, now, that’s just it—I don't feel like I’ve done anything at all. I’ve been shuttled around from the beginning of—”

  She walked into my arms, tiptoed up, and kissed me warmly. “I’m truly sorry. There will come a time . . . But you have done much already. Come, we will see Kallamu.”

  Shama pushed a button and a portion of the glass wall slid back. Unconcernedly she stepped out—over nothingness, a sheer drop of a thousand feet!

  I choked out a useless cry of warning and started to move toward her—then stopped, feeling like a rube at the county fair who’s just seen a woman sawn in half.

  Sharna stood calmly on what I could now see was a transparent small patio. She did something to a small device at her wrist and gestured at me.

  “Come,” she said. “I have called a flier for us.”

  I stepped through the window, cautiously, shaken in spite of myself at the expanse of airy nothingness in front of me, beside me—and underneath me.

  “Is there a railing to this thing?” I asked. “Or do you just carry powerful ju-ju?”

  “A railing? There is no need for one—watch.”

  Again I felt that twinge of useless fear as she walked straight off the clear glasslike patio. This time I knew there was nothing underneath, for I could see where the “glass” stopped, some three yards out from the building.

  But as her left foot swung over the edge, it stopped in mid-air. She withdrew it, turned to face me, and leaned back, grotesquely propped in mid-air by nothingness.

  She smiled. “A simple forcewall! After all, a railing would interfere with the incredible view. Look!” She turned again and moved her arm in a wide arc, displaying Shalianna.

  Shalianna the Glorious. To the horizon there was nothing but city. With me in it—Columbus’s Carib, on top of the Empire State Building.

  “Hadn’t we better go to wherever the flier is going to meet us?” I said at last.

  “Here it comes now,” Sharna said, pointing up to the roof of our building. A small flier had just appeared over the edge of the roof, and was descending the twenty or so stories to our level.

  “But how do we get to it through the force-field?” I said, realizing at the moment I said it that I should have shut up. Of course there would be some way of getting us to it. One that Shama wouldn’t even think twice about

  I thought twice about it, though searching my new Suolanian memories for relevant information as the flier reached our level.

  Immediately it swerved towards us and came right through the force-field, settling in front of Shama. It was unoccupied. They always were.

  “Forget I asked,” I said to her, my memory having come up with something. “A counter-force-field that nullifies this one with the proper frequency, at the surface of the flier, enabling it to pass through. Right? Gimme my cigar.”

  Kallamu was robed in a garment of electric blue; he was as tall and strong and healthy-looking as the rest of the Angels I’d seen, and my Suolanian knowledge told me they always were. It seemed vaguely unfair.

  “This is Ronald Archer, is it not, Sharnai’dou’sa?” he said in English and Suolinat. It took me a moment to cope with a sentence in both languages. Then the Suolinat came through as “Shama, my magical flower of the morning.” A flash of memory told me this was a traditional, highly poetical compliment-of-greeting.

  I decided that I’d never be able to speak the language like a native after all. Underneath all the fancy collection of knowledge crammed into my skull, it was still the tired old brain of Ron Archer trying to put it all together.

  And obviously I didn’t think like Kallamu. Maybe not even like Shama, who had responded with pleasure to the compliment-of-greeting.

  I answered him in English, not caring to match my dubious ability at dredging up fragments of Suolinat poetry, and banalities were bandied about in two languages.

  I could see that there wasn’t going to be much in the following conversation for me. Under Kallamu’s obvious sympathy for the cause of the people of Earth, there was an undeniable level of personal disinterest in me, and probably for any Earthman not in the abstract. He liked us as a cause—under that, there was the same personal disinterest I’d felt in all the other Angels I’d met so far—except for Shama.

  Kallamu, as a Council member, lived in the building where the Council held its meetings, Sharna had told me. Presently he sat down at a desklike affair with a large blank panel above it; he was trying to contact the other members in the building, while Shama and I sat at the other end of the room waiting for whatever was going to happen next.

  I heard snatches of conversation. Kallamu wasn’t getting his message across, that was obvious, and he was becoming more and more irritated.

  Finally, after only half a dozen or so attempts at contacting various members of the Council, he slammed his fist down heavily on what was apparently the main control button, and the flickering vision-panel blanked out.

  He turned swiftly away from the console towards us, and cursed bitterly and with great artistic skill in Suo-linat. It took something of an effort to keep up with him and follow him.

  “They do not wish to meet today,” he said at last, bitterly, in Suolinat. “They do not, in fact, wish to meet at all this tarhh."

  I dug that one out. Just over two weeks. Wonderful.
/>   Shama was dismayed.

  “Two weeks,” she said, in English, courteously, in case I hadn’t followed, “is too long. They must be—”

  “They are doing it on purpose,” Kallamu said, deliberately returning to Suolinat. “They wish to avoid the whole question. I know them. They expect far too much success for the current plans of our ambitious vice-chairman. Rathan thinks he himself can cow the far-reaching designs of Monsomar. Bah. He takes no consideration of forgotten Kurkenn. But the Council and the Levels think the Phomod is—” He stopped suddenly.

  I had cocked my head to look at him, and now he was staring directly at me.

  “You understand Suolinat, do you,” he said in his language. “Sharna, you did not tell me. A debatable step—”

  “I felt it important for him to be able to communicate once we got here.”

  “Well, perhaps. We do need every advantage. However, I think I do not wish to speak further of the higher problems here and at this time. Besides,” and here he smiled and made a first attempt at genuine courteousness, “our friend certainly cannot glean much information from such a complex subject anyway. We do not wish to bore you, Mr. Archer.”

  I started to speak, but he cut me off.

  “Not at all, Mr. Archer. I shall give you the conclusion of what I was going to say, however. That is, that I shall commence work on my fellows of the Council immediately. I think I can bring enough of them around in a day or so at least to call for a brief meeting. They are stubborn—but I am stubborn also.

  “Sharna will be in touch with me at all times, and, I believe, she wishes to keep track of you, so that at the moment that we are able to finally get started in this; we can get together immediately.”

  Shama obtained a larger flier, and told me she was taking me on a trip to the park.

  The “park” turned out to be a continent twice the size of Australia. The entire continent had been landscaped as a vast recreational parkland. Immense forests of strange trees were carefully dotted with pleasure resorts.

  “Must have been some job uprooting all the people who lived here, I imagine,” I reflected as we cruised over it. “Couldn’t do a thing like that on Earth, anyway. Not by ourselves at least.”

  She shook her head sadly. “The entire continent . . . half a billion people ... all slaughtered. The whole continent was stripped down to bedrock. It had been Torla’s penultimate attempt to win the five thousand year war with Thasson.”

  “How could the Thassonians possibly forgive the Tor-lonians for something like that?” I asked, preferring Sharna’s soothing voice in explanation, rather than the jangling headache of digging through my “memory.”

  “It would have been impossible had it not been for 144

  the Oulann, the Ageless Shrine. Perhaps some day I may be able to explain this to you. It is a great and beautiful and terrifying Mystery, a holy thing. . . . Enough of this. I wish to show you more of Taggan.”

  We visited a pleasure resort, and Sharna tried to explain some of the incomprehensible games and pleasures of the infinitely varied galactic civilizations—but little of it made sense to me. I grew irritable.

  Finally we left the resort, long after nightfall, and Sharna flew us to a spot she knew.

  It was a tiny cabinlike affair, perched on a narrow ledge halfway up a bare gigantic mountainside overlooking a dark huge valley. Seven waterfalls plunged down into the narrow stream at the bottom of the chasm.

  It was a magnificent sight. The blaze of starlight, at least three times brighter than on Earth, covered the scene with, I mused wryly, truly an unearthly silvery sheen. The distant noises of the wind in the trees, the splashings of the waterfalls, were disturbingly alien and familiar at the same time.

  ‘There are many spots similar to this in Taggan. But this is the one that I love most.” Sharna stood beside me at the edge of the little path near the cabin.

  “It is almost as beautiful as you are,” I found myself saying, as I put my arm around her shoulder to protect her from the cool breeze that had blown up out of the depths of the chasm.

  She turned to me. “You are a strange man. You shun the beauties of your language and the art it is capable of reflecting, and then . . . something breaks through.” She tiptoed and brushed my lips with hers, then turned back to the vast night scene.

  For some reason I began talking in Suolinat. “I had no wish to be a poet, Sharna. As you say, I could not be one if I wanted to. But . . . sometimes when I am near you, like this, I feel that a poet is the only thing I should have been, to tell you ...” I stopped, wondering where I was finding the phrases, phrases I would hardly have thought of in English, much less in a language I had never heard of until a week ago.

  She took my pause for emotion rather than puzzlement, however, turned to me again, put her arms around me slowly, and kissed me warmly, lovingly.

  “Say no more, no more, hold me, I’m . . . I’m almost . . . frightened!”

  “What of?”

  “It is not . . . We of the Home Worlds ... it is not done, that we should be more than friendly, do more than aid in pity the . . . the . . . oh, it’s wrong, wrong either way, it isn’t permitted, it isn’t done. Not love, only—” She pressed herself to my chest; involuntarily I held her close. “Let us ... let us go inside to talk. It grows cold out here.”

  We went-inside.

  The proportions of the walls to the windows, the placement of the windows, the very width and thickness of the planks, the design of the furniture, all was subtly different, identifiably alien—but somehow familiar, like the sound of the wind in the treetops of the forest and the cascading waterfalls.

  It was no great riddle. We were in what was, despite the subtle alien factors, a simple cabin in the woods. The logic of such a situation called for the similarities to outnumber the differences. I thought of a cabin in the Maine woods my father had rented for a number of years, when I was a boy. Not much difference when you got down to essentials. Stone fireplace, with kindling stacked nearby. Simple table, roughly constructed chairs, several bunks. A metallic sink with water faucets, the most overt concession to civilization.

  The differences? The faucets were at the end of a single pipe hanging straight down from the roof over the sink, splitting into a “Y” just over the sink itself. The faucets were simple movable knobs. How the one source provided both hot and cold water, I never found out.

  The bunks were a bit odd, too. They weren’t doubles, yet the structures extended a good five feet off the floor. One pulled out a set of steps (hollow, for storage) from underneath, in order to climb up.

  The wood for the fireplace was of a strange texture. It was light, almost as light as balsa, yet it was tough—impossibly tough for such a light organic substance.

  “Does this stuff really burn?” I asked Shama.

  “Yes, and perhaps you’d better start a fire. I forgot to mention it, but the nights get very cold here.” As she said it I realized that even inside the cabin it had gotten

  quite chilly. “It’s designed to get cold at night on Taggar, of course,” she went on. “It makes the cabins much more warm and friendly if one has to get a good blaze started in order to be comfortable.”

  I grinned. “They don’t miss a trick, eh? Sorta wish you hadn’t told me. I was beginning to think I was back in Maine.”

  Presently the fire was blazing nicely, the strangely textured wood giving off an aroma reminiscent of cedar and pine and ginger.

  “Let’s forget for a while that we’re part of some historic struggle, Ronald Archer,” Sharna said, putting her hands up on my shoulders and standing very close to me. “Let us forget Thasson and Torla, and Earth.”

  “Let us only remeihber ourselves,” I said in Suolinat.

  “Yes, yes . . She kissed me again and sighed.

  The fire in the fireplace of strange stone crackled and hissed and popped in alien and familiar silence while we stood there by it, holding each other tightly and kissing deeply.

&
nbsp; “The beds are tall, Ronald Archer,” Sharna murmured at last. “But they are very wide, sir, very wide indeed. ...”

  Once more I drank in the sight of her magnificent body as she removed her clothes with her graceful carelessness. Naked she leaned over and drew out the short sturdy steps to the bed while I removed my own clothes.

  And presently it was all like before, but warmer, richer, deeper, as we strove together, our bodies long since no longer alien to each other, while the fire crackled lower and lower in the sensual silence of whispers and moans of delight. . . .

  The next two days we spent almost idyllically in the great forests of Taggar. Actually, we spent most of our time hiking beneath the giant trees which grew almost to our doorstep. These trees grew larger than the California redwoods, and their wood was as hard as teak. They looked peculiar because of the knees they had, like cypress knees: buttresses which angled far up their trunks. These knees extended out from the main trunk as much as twelve feet at their base, and you could easily contrive a shelter between two of them. Once, Shama told me, people had.

  It was rough country in that area, full of rocky up-thrustings, sudden chasms into which streams fell spectacularly, giant roots twisting suddenly out into view— a land out of mythology.

  “You can’t tell me this was all planned,” I said, once, when we broke into a clearing and the warm rays of the sun cut cleanly across the shadows.

  “No,” Shama replied, somber for a moment. “This area marks the ruins of a great city. We are standing on its twisted skeleton.”

  I looked for signs of man-made things after that, but saw none.

  On noon of the second day, Shama said, “Let’s visit another place I love,” and we took the flier up, over the towering treetops, for an area which contrasted remarkably from the air.

  With a geometric suddenness, the violent wilderness of the forest gave way to the neat patterns of a vast landscaped garden.

  We set down upon a thick and manicured turf, and found ourselves surrounded by low hedgerows. We walked hand in hand down green aisles, through flower gardens, under arbors, and past a gently tinkling brook. And not once did we see another person.